Julian Dorey Podcast - 😱 [VIDEO] - SHOCKING Debate W/ CIA Spy Leaves Me Speechless • Andrew Bustamante • 107

Episode Date: July 7, 2022

(***TIMESTAMPS in description below) ~ Andrew Bustamante is a former CIA Undercover Spy & Air Force Nuclear Operator. From 2007 to 2014, Bustamante and his wife, Jihi (also a CIA Agent) lived abroad as undercover agents for the US Government. While he cannot reveal his precise locations during his time as a spy, Andy operated primarily out of Asia –– and completed missions on 6 of the 7 continents over the course of his career. As a result of his actions in the line of duty, Bustamante is forever very unwelcome in many countries around the world. Guy’s life is a movie and his hair is also real. You can check out Andy’s Podcast, Everyday Espionage, here: https://open.spotify.com/show/2YUT5vQAGdxdsFZDq2830q  ***TIMESTAMPS*** 0:00 - Intro; Andy addresses all the people who don’t believe he was in the CIA; Ex-CIA Agent Publishing process; Andy discusses who the US is arming Ukraine and how they’re doing it; Update on status of the Russian invasion; Andy’s Myers-Briggs pattern and worldview 29:37 - Mossad learns from the past; Andy defends the CIA’s Enhanced Interrogation Techniques; Andy discusses which CIA methods constituted t0rture; Andy’s belief in spying to protect lives…at all costs 43:23 - Julian debates Andy’s stances on government and spying; Andy tells a story about being pulled over by a cop for no reason (and defends the cop); Why powerful people don’t believe in blackmail 1:02:31 - Andy explains “ownership” and its concept within America’s history; Sepp 11 changed everything; Andy pushes back against a common perspective in America; 1:30:51 - Andy gives an update on the Russian Debt Default (that he correctly predicted would happen in our last podcast); The Russian Oil Situation; Andy explains how the Biden Administration is fighting inflation via the War in Ukraine; CBDC’s discussion; Julian wonders if Andy’s arguments are contradictory   1:51:15 - ***Andy explains why he believes the US “needs a common enemy”; Julian argues that this belief is a key indicator of military industrial complex (using Iraq as an example); Andy explains Khaliji culture; Who comes after Putin? 2:05:53 - Are China and Russia friends?; Iran and China’s proxy war history explained; Andy lays out China’s “buying power”  strategy; Andy tells a funny story about an encounter with a Congresswoman; Andy discusses Jose Rodriguez destroying Enhanced Interrogation Tapes 2:32:20 - How much are news cycles shaped by intelligence and foreign governments?; Predicting people’s belief based upon variables; Andy discusses the Elon Musk Situation; Peter Thiel 2:51:10 - What is Peter Thiel doing at Palantir; Andy explains how intel dossiers work; Andy describes the massively growing Private Intelligence Service Sector (and why the gov is hiring them left and right); The dangers of private intelligence 3:17:02 - How much tax-payer money is funding US private intelligence in Ukraine?; The Blackwater screwup; Andy next predictions on Russia... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

I'm not talking about you. I mean anybody out there who wants to criticize how operations are executed. You're never going to get taken seriously by an operator. When you say, oh, you shouldn't have done that. Oh, it turned out to not be effective. Oh, the court system came back and said that we shouldn't have been spying on our own people. You know what? I'm glad that the court system did that. Because if I was the person who had to independently make that call, the NSA would still be spying on people. What's cooking, everybody? I am joined in the bunker today by Mr. Andrew Bustamante.

Once again, he is back for round two after a very successful first round episode in April. I got to tell you guys This one got pretty nutty. It did not disappoint. There was a lot of healthy debate last time Obviously, I wanted to get andy's full story sit back let you get to know him I think we were successful with that This one we got to talk about a lot of issues and have a back and forth and some good arguments This guy is very very smart He is on the ball and very sharp as well as far as understanding things that are going on and having a wide

breadth of knowledge i would hope so he was in the cia if he ever left but i think that you guys are going to enjoy this one i really do i'm pretty excited about this one so if you're on youtube right now please hit that subscribe button hit that like button on the video always, we'd love to see you guys share the episodes with friends and get active down in the comments section as well. That's huge. To everyone who is on Apple and Spotify right now, thank you for checking out the show over there. If you haven't already, be sure to be following on either one of those platforms

and leave a five-star review if you have a second. Everyone has been doing that. Thank you. That's a huge, huge help. And I look forward to seeing you guys again for future episodes. That said, you know what it is. I'm Julian Dory, and this is Trendifier. You're giving opinions and calling them facts. You feel me? Everyone understands this, but few seem to do it. If you don't like the status quo, start asking questions. Agent Kaepernick, welcome back.

The whole internet thinks you're Colin Kaepernick. It's hilarious. We'll roll with it. I almost put it in a video too, but it didn't make stylistic sense it's like 80 pounds too light at least man yeah how tall are you too five at 5 11. yeah he's like six five yeah it's a massive man yeah if you stood up they wouldn't think that but it was funny because they're like that's what he's been up to he's been in the CIA this whole time the whole time and he's gotten uglier I wonder if he'll come back i know some teens were some teens

were trying him out so maybe he was retiring from the service but anyway i'm glad to have you back up here and i got that right this time i always say down here yeah all the florida people but your last episode man i gotta tell you you are like the most loved hated spy on the internet it's it's a good thing to be hated sometimes man because all the happy people just ride quietly on the heels of all the loud angry people that's 100 i couldn't have said that better myself i might use that but there's a lot of people out there who and it blows my mind like even when presented with facts they're like this guy's not a spy he didn't really work at the cia i'm like guys it's a federal crime to impersonate a CIA officer

He's been impersonating a CIA officer then for like the last four years in every level of media So it must be a fraud and they're like, yeah, and I definitely didn't work there So what do you say to people who are like, oh I didn't work at the CIA I mean, there's nothing you can do to convince them. I've got all sorts of proof. That's what I'm saying I've got all kind of proof. I've got documents from cia i've got email history from cia like i got tons of proof i've got i've got awards from cia it's just there's some people you can't convince man and you know what it is there's there's a legit cognitive uh like safety net in the human brain that makes it so when you're faced with information that you disagree with, you just don't accept it.

You don't let it in anymore. That's kind of what happens to people between the age of 13 and 21. You actually start to create that mental divide that makes it so you can block out information just because you disagree with it. Yeah. I mean, to me, there's a massive movement of distrust across institutions. Yeah. massive movement of distrust across institutions. And the CIA, due to some of its not great history as well, is at the middle of a lot of theories, some that certainly have credence to them that we can talk about,

others that it's like, okay, that might be a stretch. And I think there's just people who need to discover meaning and stuff, so the way they get the meaning is they're like, fuck the CIA. Yeah. You know, it's one of those things. If you're going to have a secret organization those things if you're gonna have a secret organization that means you're telling the whole world you're you're keeping secrets you got to be ready to be on the target for that right like no one's gonna be no one's gonna come up and high

five you and say yeah please keep keep hiding things from me that's not how people talk instead they they don't they don't like it now what about like what's the attitude towards all the different people there you go thank you sir all the different people at cia who do like a lot of public facing stuff because there's you know there's all kinds of agents online who have done video interviews whether it be on podcasts or something else just like this and so i'll tell people i'm like just go to your search history or go to the search bar on youtube you'll see there's a lot of people like this yeah like how does the cia feel about that you know it's interesting so i've been on a i've been working on a book project for about the last six months and it's got me in close contact with cia all the

time and i just got off a call no, two weeks ago where I had this exact conversation with the person in charge of reviewing my content for my book. And in that conversation, she was telling me about how hard it is to work with people who are writing books because CIA doesn't really have any say in what we write. They can just make suggestions. And yeah. And she was like, the only thing that CIA can do is say, don't talk about this because it's classified. And then we're not allowed to talk about that. Do they do that for a lot of stuff though? They don't do that for a lot of stuff.

When, if you've ever read like a CIA memoir, if you've ever read a book that a CIA officer has written, you'll see these areas where there's black marks that are redactions, where they cross out certain words, certain phrases. It's not that much. That's all CIA can do. And then on top of that, they just come in and make suggestions. So it was the most, it was a mind boggling conversation because I'm sitting here writing a book, trying really hard to make it inside the realm. So CIA doesn't shut me down or take my money or put me in jail. Right. And then here I am on the phone with the person I'm trying to satisfy who's this little old lady? Probably wearing tennis shoes and a freaking sweater who's just reading the memoir right reading the manuscript and she's like yeah

We really don't have any say about what you can and can't do we just make suggestions and then it all hit me like a ton of bricks because I was like of course you don't make You can't tell me what to do freedom of speech we're still living in the united states that exists for cia officers that exists for cia officers and everybody else we are protected from the government acting out against us except in the area where we spread or where we uh where we violate confidentiality or classified information you can say anything you want to say the government can't come after you unless there's a plausible reason through the through the eyes of the law could you

see why some people might be really skeptical about that answer though yeah but those people are idiots so i'm not really i don't really care the thing i'm even a little skeptical for not necessarily for you like you are a spy you might have done some wild shit. But I'm saying, like, people who found themselves in the middle of, like, some of the wildest shit. Whether it went, something that went bad or something that was, the rest of the world couldn't know about or something like that. And then there's weird people who turn up dead. That has happened. It has. All sorts of stuff has happened, right?

But you've got to look at it through the context of history. You've got to look at it through the context of history you got to look at it through the lens of the times to take something outside of when it was historically relevant it's like reading the bible outside of context or just opening a random novel and reading the third sentence on the 15th page it doesn't mean it doesn't mean anything to take it outside of historical context there was a time when we were in a war on drugs. There was a time when we were giving the Mujahideen weapons. Yeah. And then there was a time when the same Taliban,

who had grown out of the Mujahideen, were using those weapons against us. Yes. It's easy to look back with hindsight and say, oh, that was a dumb thing to do. Through the lens of the time, we were trying to contain growing Russian expansion. And it was easier for us to give weapons to the mujahideen so they could fight the russians for us what are we doing in ukraine oh yeah oh what the exact same thing we were doing in afghanistan dude

we're giving weapons to a corrupt government military to contain russian aggression it's the exact same thing we did with the mujahideen okay let's this is a good place to like literally go into that because in the last podcast we did there were a few things you said that were pretty wild one of them will get to the russian debt which great call on that but i get so frustrated by this whole war in russia because in our society of like p brains everything is a or b yeah right and nothing's like that in the world it's all complex and so instantly within three days of this goddamn invasion you had the people who suddenly were apparently from ukraine they're not right in america putting flags in their bio then you had people suddenly like well ukraine's

all bad so putin might be doing something like okay here neither of which i view is true i think a lot of things are true at the same time i think putin is a very bad guy who's done a lot of bad things and is doing something overly aggressive i also think that foreign policy of other governments was careless with him and i also think that the guy zelensky you know he comes from the entertainment world you know he and he went into a government that's been corrupt for a long time so he's he seems like a pretty brave guy when you look at all the he's done and how hard he's working on the front lines for his people but what that doesn't mean is that he's not still surrounded by all those goddamn people right and as i assume this is exactly what you're talking about we are literally arming through their government not like necessarily

like rogue forces or something fighting on the fronts it's the actual government it's everything man this is this is the the truth of ukraine is not what you're going to see in the headlines it it's in the news but it's not in the headline to read to find out what's really happening in ukraine you got to go four five six paragraphs into a story you got to read the thing that makes it to the bottom paragraph and then you've got to find out where that applies in other areas so for example are there rogue forces in ukraine absolutely there are rogue forces in ukraine there are former u.s military members who have gone completely against international laws to go into ukraine i saw that there's a guy on msnbc doing it or some shit that is dude it's laughable right in one hand it's laughable yeah

in the other hand that could be taken a thousand different terrible ways what happens if a russian soldier kills a u.s citizen on ukrainian soil what happens if that becomes public what if that's a video that somehow makes it some somewhere right, for propaganda reasons? What does that mean? Does that mean that the outrage in the United States is going to give the president the grounds that he needs to put boots on the ground in Ukraine? Who knows? It's the same part, it's the same problem with nuclear conflict. Everybody's afraid that Putin's going to launch a nuke. Putin's not going to launch a nuclear. There's no nuclear weapon coming out of Russia going to the United States. Not going to happen.

But what happens if there's a briefcase nuke that comes from Belarus and lands itself in Poland? Now what's going to happen? Wait, Belarus is allied with Putin, though. Correct. But it's not Russia. And

Poland's not Ukraine. Ah. But it is NATO. So that's, by extension, just me looking from the outside as a bystander here, that would have the same connotation to me. So what does the president do? Does he send U.S. troops to fight in Russia? Does he send U.S.

nuclear warheads into Russia? Or does he just bomb Belarus? What does he do? Well, you said last time we had a nice back and forth about that. You were talking about how you're not so sure we would bomb back. Correct. We would go in. We'd have to do something. But my point

is, when you're talking about... The difference between this conversation and our last conversation is that this conflict is still going. And where the world used to say, they're like, oh, Ukraine's going to win, Ukraine's winning, look, they're turning the tides, they're beating these Russian idiots back, Russia has taken tons of territory. Right?

They have taken strategically dominant positions in the South. They've secured positions in the East. The Ukrainian military is starting to have to evacuate from certain areas. And this is all amidst massive weaponry that's been sent there. U.S. howitzers have been sent there.

Tons of drones have been sent there. Well, guess what? The drones are being shot down by anti-aircraft. The howitzers are being blown up by rocket fire. And now rockets are reaching into Kiev at the same time as the G7 summit meeting. And they also have that southern city now too, right? On the Black Sea. So they're still working their way towards Odessa.

That's going to be their kind of final location. But they've secured Maurypol. They've secured everything across to, I mean mean basically outside of Odessa it's it's a strategically they're doing exactly what you would learn in any American war college we're recording this a week before the episode is going to come out or like six days or five either way it's about a week so I'm going to put a map in the corner and the map may be updated if there's an update to it that we don't know about right now Yeah either way I want to make sure people have that because the one the didn't ask and look and Lahansk regions are the ones that have always been under fire since 2014

We talked about that last time so that my understanding is that he's just Expanded some of his holdings in whatever those regions the East isn't the important part The East is the part that that makes the news because journalists are dumbasses why because there's no strategic value in the east the strategic value the way that putin wins the way that russia wins ukraine is in the south it's through the it's through this the the black sea the black sea is where resources come in and come out right you know what happens you know what happens if you cut off trade to a country you cut off supply you cut off uh you resources end there there's a naval blockade there right now so it's essentially the same thing as

having troops on the ground if wheat can't get out russia controls the wheat if trade can't get in you can starve the ukrainian troops out you can you can limit what monetary, weaponry, economic assistance, you can starve your opponent out. Right now, the only way in and out of Ukraine is through roadways that are in the mountains and old defunct railways. That's why Russia knows to just keep the pressure on, slow, steady pressure. Well, what about the arming that you talk about like arming the government and everyone saw we wrote what was a 13 billion dollar check to ukraine like stroke of a pen can't pay for meals in this country but we do that right away neither here nor there either way what is what does that look like on the ground and this is something that i knew a lot less about

i did recently read about something i don't know if you would know about this, but to tie it in, like we – when Syria was going down in like 2013, the CIA actually was training – I don't know if you want to call it militia. But they were basically arming and training rebels in Turkey as well as on a base in Jordan. So I imagine we were getting a lot of tax dollars going to that and this is just a made the ukraine one now it's just a way bigger operation is that like the same kind of program now and it's the cia doing a lot of this or who directly is in charge so there there's a pool of money that goes into any of these efforts and then from that pool of money multiple organizations can can pull funds from, multiple organizations can, can pull funds from it, right? So CIA can pull funds from it. DOD organizations, special operations forces,

they can all pull funds to, to subsidize operations. So just like you were talking about Syria, now the same training happens. They pull Ukrainian troops out of Ukraine into Poland, where they put them through sniper school, where they put them through advanced human, human trade craft, where human uh human tradecraft where they put them through how to fly a drone how to crash a drone whatever it is but you still bring them out of Ukraine train them in Poland send them back in pull them out of Ukraine put them in Romania send them back in who's training them it's everybody it's any it's the pool of money all those different ones it's whoever's available at the time to train them right maybe the better question is like are there specific are there specific people those different departments in the government that you

mentioned at the front there are there specific people whose literal job is to do just this kind of thing around the world oh yeah absolutely so the green berets are the Army's guerrilla training force they that's their job their job is to go in find guerrilla forces train guerrilla training force. That's their job. Their job is to go in, find guerrilla forces, train guerrilla forces to execute their own independent guerrilla operations under command of a U.S. military officer. CIA does the same thing through their special activities division, through their covert action wing.

They have a ground branch inside their special activities division whose job is basically to do the same thing the green berets do only to do it more discreetly under the guise of presidential deniability green berets can't they don't have plausible deniability through the president they're right cia does exactly so do you have would someone like you have been doing something like that not that you did but i'm saying like a covert spy in Turkey, in that case, from the Syria example I gave. Could they have been someone running that base?

Correct. It wouldn't necessarily be someone running a base. It would be the trainer on the ground because the person running the base has to have a reason for being in that country. When you're living and operating undercover, you have to have a reason to be transient that country. When you're living and operating undercover, you have to have a reason to be transient, moving from place to place, right? So you don't want a permanent long-term residence in one place or else you become a target. It's much easier to be transient.

So most cover legends are built to be transient. And you also had a background though, like on your end of Air Force. Correct. And then there's other people in the cia who have background in army marines whatever the people who just come in like let's say yeah they would never do this kind of thing they would never do that kind of thing because the training cost is too rich right like if you bring in joe nobody and they've got no background in ground in infantry with the army right or they have no no background

in special operations it's it's take you're going to have to add on all the training time to get them up to speed in special operations you're going to deploy them so they get real world experience in special operations combat then you're going to have to teach them how to train other people in the skills that they've already mastered and then you'll deploy them that that training time is too much it's much more efficient from a government point of view to simply reach into the green berets, tap someone on the shoulder and say, come work for us. Yeah. I see a lot of guys now, and you can look at them online, like retired guys. Some of them have channels. There's one dude, I think his name is Sean Ryan. He has a channel

called Vigilance Elite. And I think i could be getting mixed up so sorry if i am but i think he's the guy who trained uh what's his name keanu reeves to do the john wick thing like to make it more believable but apparently his background and i haven't heard him specifically speak about this but his background was maybe like army ranger something like that and then he rolls right into it cia turned cia operative or something so when you got plucked from the peace corps if you have not gotten an eight sleep pod pro cover yet what are you doing it is an absolute game changer for your sleep the eight sleep pod pro cover comes in queen or king sizes it goes right on top of your current mattress and it is wired directly into eight sleep's proprietary app that measures

your sleep science and all of what are called your sleep stages throughout the night so that you get the deepest best sleep possible as i like to say you'll sleep six hours and feel like you slept eight so if you use that link in my description along with the code trendifier at checkout that's t-r-e-n-d-i-f-i-e-r you will get 150 off your own eight sleep pod pro cover today you will get better sleep have more energy and have a better life so check it out once again that's trendifier t-r-e-n-d-i-f-i-e-r make sure you use that code at checkout and you will get 150 off you're gonna love it They sent you over into a, for you, a nine-month camp because you were in the Air Force. You had some experience, but you still had a lot of training.

It sounds like when I hear from guys like this, it literally is just like tapping on the shoulder. Congratulations, here's a business card. You're in the CIA now. Yeah, it's not quite that dramatic, right? So first of all, it's not as cut and dry as movie. It's not as cut and dry as dumb shits need it to be and the world is full of dumb shits right so if if you think of yourself and through the lens of

government government has to have accountability they have to be able to track everything they have to be able to build everything they have to be able to demonstrate transparency to the senate uh committee on intelligence so there has to be a record of accountability. So what that looks like... Allegedly. Allegedly. So what that looks like is when someone gets plucked out of the military to come into CIA,

it's called a co-opty, right? They're co-opted to come in. They still retain all of their military rank and status, but now they're just assigned to a cia mission or operation so do they work for the cia or are they on loan exactly they're on loan and this is what you have to be really for all the people out there think i'm not a real cia officer right it's half the internet apparently yeah and i mean i just think of one out of every two people that you've met how many of them impress you right so i don't care if half the internet thinks i'm a phony but

the thing you got to actually watch out for is all the people who say they worked for CIA. Is that accurate? If they were on loan from DOD to CIA, they did in fact work for CIA, but they were not CIA officers. They were not CIA trained. It can make it appear that way, you're saying. Yeah. You know what happens if you need a drone operator for a special mission? You go to Las Vegas. You find any one of a thousand commercial drone operators. You tap them on the shoulder.

You put five of them through an interview process. The number one guy who performs the best. You make them sign a secrecy agreement. And then they go fly drones for CIA. That was a story that blew up recently about a dude, a dude who did exactly that and then started having like mental, mental health issues. He started feeling down about the fact that he killed so many people when he was just a drone operator flying for,

maybe that was for the army. It was a big story just a few months ago. Yeah. A dude who came out and was like, I have such a guilty conscience now because I flew all those, theaper drones that killed all these people in afghanistan i was like what you're an intense guy i see i can see that especially if it's what you say where they just go and pluck somebody who's working at a different desk they're not cia they're not they don't have all the different mental personality traits that you talked about on previous podcasts with Danny.

Like, they don't, they're not someone that the CIA was like, like you. Like, they picked him out of a bucket. Like, oh, he's perfect. Yeah, we like what he's about. They do all, what's the thing, the Breyers Squibb or whatever? Oh, yeah, the Myers Briggs. I fucked that one up. But the Myers Briggs, like, they get the 16, they know they're two that they want. Like, this drone operator could have been, like, E double something fucking. Yeah, yeah, the Myers-Briggs. I fucked that one up. But the Myers-Briggs, like they get the 16, they know they're two that they want.

Like this drone operator could have been like E double something fucking, right? And like it's not what they want. And then suddenly he's doing jobs where as a human being, like something you should understand from, I mean, I'm a normal guy. I sit in here and do a podcast. The idea of like killing a bunch of people in drones, I understand you are removed from it. It's almost sadistically like a video game in a way and actually depending on the context it can be necessary depending on what the actual hit is and who you're going after but like that's heavy like those drone operators who took out a wedding by accident because oh the intelligence was bad

you know i get that i that that's a heavy thing to hold on your conscience and all they did is they showed up to work in las vegas and at 11 and 15 on a tuesday the president ordered a hit and hit it and now you gotta live with the fact you took down 100 of them so like i know that you're trained to not like you have a very i mean you talked about a lot last time but like you have a very this or that view of the world there's no all good and there could be some all bad so let's figure out how to get as much good as we can and that has a cost to it but like the average person in this case some drone operator somewhere he doesn't think like that yeah and that's an that's a a casualty right it's a it's a anticipated it's a calculatable loss you gotta you hope that

people do the right thing you hope that people can bear through i mean you hope that whenever you bring somebody out because you need them now you don't have the time to put them through all the cognitive training that you put a field officer through you don't have the time to vet them as heavily as you would personality wise mental health wise you don't have the chance to put them through counseling after the event like they do with us you don't have the time to vet them as heavily as you would personality wise, mental health wise. You don't have the chance to put them through counseling after the event like they do with us. You don't have that opportunity. You need them to get out of their seat in Tahoe and get into a seat in some covert base somewhere and fly a Reaper and drop a bomb. And then they need to go back and they're, they're on loan for 30 days, right? Who knows? Or, or six months or whatever it might be, whatever the situation is, it's worth the risk. Like this is when you think like the government, it's one person's mental health and they've signed an NDA. They'll go to jail if they

disclose secrets. So really what is there to lose? Right? You know who, this is the important thing. If you don't trust the government then when the government taps you on the shoulder and says we need you you need to flip them off and say fuck no because the government will not take care of you the government is there to take care of the government that's why we vote and elect the people into office that we vote for because we want the government to represent us which means we want the government this is why you make people's heads explode because you just said like a lot of things there that are also in multiple different on different contexts in multiple different

directions like in some ways people could be like wow that's like a really tough guy way to look at it relax and then in other ways you're also saying like don't trust the government like it's not there for you but you worked in the government and you like cia overall and you appreciate what it does in the world you see how there's like a lot of good contradictions there nothing is all good and i don't think anything is all bad yeah right like this is the thing if you want to talk objective reality if you want to talk about your feelings and your pambi mambi needs you're talking to the wrong guy right you can down down thumb me whatever you want to do you're talking to the wrong person if you want to talk about feelings if you want to talk about objective outcomes let's have a conversation right everything that happens every reaction

happens because of an action every action then happens because of someone else's reaction it's a cycle yes this is how things work. This is how evolution happens. It's how we grow. Politics. You learn not to touch a stove by touching a freaking stove. Yeah. Right? That's just how it works.

It's part of the human experience. Whether you're religious and you think that it's part of a fallen world, or whether you're evolutionary and you think that it's because we learn from our mistakes, whatever your reason is, you've got to look at everything through a holistic lens from beginning to end. Right now, we're just in the middle of a story. Everybody's always in the middle of a story. The only moment of the story that matters is literally this exact moment. What happens in the past led you here. What you choose to do today leads you to where you're going You don't hate camp

There's actually no value in worrying about the future because you can't change it And there's actually no value in mourning for the past because you can't change that even but you can learn from it Learning is the thing that you do right now The lesson you choose to take away may not be the same lesson to somebody else But don't you think that morning is also in some depends on the context? It can absolutely be a way of learning like i think of you look at massad who's widely viewed as one of the greatest intelligence agencies in the world that agency for all the right and wrong that may exist today when it was built it was built after an entire ethnicity was was almost massacred

and they you know the people who built it they were in it or they lost family members in it or both. And so they built it out of remembering what happened, right? So like even when they did like a symbolic mission, which was a brilliant mission where they got, what the hell was the guy's name in 1960? Eichmann. And they got Adolf Eichmann out of South America. Like that had a whole nother symbolism to it because it's like we will never forget that you know what I mean so I don't you talk to an Israeli they'll tell you it's to make sure that nothing ever happens again like

that they won't they won't say it's because of remembrance they'll say it's in prevention and if you want to call them one of the greatest intelligence organizations alive I wouldn't disagree with you but let's also talk about their tactics yeah let's talk about call them one of the greatest intelligence organizations alive? I wouldn't disagree with you. But let's also talk about their tactics. Yeah, let's talk about their tactics. Torture is one of their tactics. Assassination is one of their tactics. Vengeance is one of their tactics. Coercion is one of their tactics.

These are words that make us cringe. We put people in jail for doing these things. We claim that our government is corrupt when the people who are accused of doing these things then wash out in federal court and actually the court case comes out and says that they aren't guilty or aren't responsible of it. Right? That's what happened all over with most of the torture cases in the United States. The ruling that came out of the final court is that they couldn't be held accountable for their actions that they carried out. Except John Kiriakou who was the guy who said this was bullshit in the CIA and then after. And why did he go to jail? He went to jail because he was the fall guy. He disclosed classified information. He didn't do so at all intentionally and it was arguable whether or not he disclosed classified information. That's the law, man. Why is it that

the whole world is, why is it that the United States is hunting down uh i just lost his name the guy who leaked on nsa spying on snowden why is the yeah because he broke a law the court can come out and yeah it's a separate conversation i think kiriakou saying kiriakou and we've talked about snowden a little bit we can talk about that later too but like kiriaku who was on danny's podcast which was did you hear that podcast you need to listen yeah i'll listen to it it's incredible but like he did a minimal amount of stuff and he was also he did not do anything intentionally and there's there's a good argument to say when you look at the case that they went and made a political attack five years later because they like reclassified and i'm stretching some words here but they like said oh well that could have been classified so we'll try you on this and to be clear he was a guy he

was they called him the human rights guy at the cia which was not a compliment to him because he wouldn't he wanted nothing to do with the enhanced interrogation and this was this was a tough spy i mean this guy was undercover in greece for a lot of years he took down he was he was the guy who ran point on abu zubaydah capture like this guy did some serious shit he was high up but he that was his line and so then afterward he gets in trouble because he he actually i don't know if you saw the full context but like he got in trouble for defending the cia on it even though he disagreed with it he was being loyal to the cia and then afterwards after they threw him under the bus was like well i thought it was bullshit

all along which he's on and i was on record he did think it was bullshit he wasn't he wasn't passed in the hands in the enhanced interrogation stuff like whatever license they would give behind the scenes right so like i look at this and I'm like, again, Snowden is separate. This is the kind of situation where those people, like that example you're giving of like, well, then they go to court and nothing happens. Well, the people who were on the opposite end,

something does. And it's almost like the government's saying, we're going to do that and you're going to like it. I mean, if you want to trust the government, you're already barking up the wrong tree, right? Government's there to protect itself. And you're right. The whole torture argument and what was happening through enhanced interrogation, through the lens of the time, I was just talking about it, man, I was on a bridge looking at downtown Manhattan not four hours ago, right where the Twin Towers used to stand.

If you remember what America felt like, what people felt like after that event, is it really such a surprise that we were willing to take people who were known terrorists, cover their face in a towel, and pour water on them? Nobody was surprised by that. How much did it do, though? Arguably, so depending on how you look at it, there are actual physical intelligence reports, official reports, that are contradictory. That say it worked. It worked to help provide information. official reports that are contradictory that say it worked it didn't it worked to help provide information and there were other ones that say that the

information alone gained from it was not sufficient to come to a meaningful conclusion and that was just before your time that was just before my time 2005 two years before I came in was when all that stuff started to get covered up and and burned and buried up right so this is another situation where i try to look at things from 30 000 feet in the air whether or not i succeed is up to other people to decide but i do think in the world we should lead by example even if you lose no well then what do you i think there are certain things though that you can't necessarily do that and i reckon people don't want to accept that i will

accept that torture based on what i have read which who knows i'll put my hands up on that who the fuck knows right i read a lot of things who Who knows? But based on what I've read, it did not yield the results that are expected because people want to comply after a while. And they comply with information that sometimes there could be some truth in it. But other times there's not. And a guy you at least know of a little bit and have some connection to like Ali Soufan Mm-hmm, you know, he was arguably at the time in the Middle East I think Jim Di Iorio would definitely say this like he was he was the guy for At the FBI with interrogations and he was one of the FBI agents that people at the CIA would actually respect

Right is obviously there's a lot of tension there. Yeah, but like he was so against it because he got a lot of information building rapport right now he was a muslim guy he spoke arabic all that helped but like he looked at what would happen in the torture and he's like wait this is crazy because this is not what america's about and we're not getting good information and then you look at like the guy dr james mitchell who was hired along with i forget the other dude's name but they were paid and someone please fact check this because I'm talking right now so I'm not fact checking it but it was like maybe 80 million dollars or something over four years on a government contract taxpayer money

to do this enhanced interrogation that again arguably didn't yield results and it had a stopping point so like we did lose the one guy where they left him and he died on a floor from hypothermia which was like a whole scandal that no one went to jail for but like that was the worst thing that ever happened the thing that these terrorists knew is that we even if we let it happen because we were willing to cross the line because of 9-11 they knew we had a stopping point ksm used to sit there with his fucking fingers while he's getting waterboarded and count five four three two one because he knew they had to stop he'd fucking laugh so like you know it's still torture it's not good and like the waterboarding is the one they point to like oh it's not the worst thing ever but there were other things that happened it's like

are we really going to be about that if it's not working and like when you talk about these other governments you said this last time when you talk about these other governments, you said this last time, when you talk about other governments, you know, putting people in a box where they can't stand and things like that, like we don't do stuff like that. I'm grateful for that.

But like, where is the line if it's not even going to be far enough to be able to yield the results? So listen to what you're saying, right? So what you're saying is that torture was ineffective. You're saying torture was ineffective and it was also morally wrong it was yes it was okay so then because the terrorists knew that there was a stop

they knew there was a stopping point so if the terrorists know if your enemy knows that there's a stopping point does it really matter if the stopping point is after pain or before pain no no so there's no strategic advantage in not trying with pain because they already know that there's a stopping point every every enemy out there what what the what most americans don't know is they don't know what it's like to sit across from a foreigner and have the foreigner laugh at them because our government is in control of us right everywhere else in the world they can break rules everywhere else in the world there's a level a level of wealth a level of of family name a level of success where you're above the

law in the united states we we like to say that some people are above the law but they're not they still have to go to court they still have to have a good attorney they still have to follow inside the process there's a lot of people who never go to court. There may be because they settle outside of court. Because at the end of the day... Dick Cheney never went to court. At the end of the day, what ends up happening is there are plenty of people who are happy to take money in exchange for process. Yeah, Halliburton.

But my point is, my point is when you don't even try, you're guaranteed to lose. So if KSM's sitting there counting down 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, that means the torture is not effective on him. If the torture is not effective on him, if it's not causing panic, if it's not causing fear, if it's not causing pain, is it even torture?

How do you define torture? These are questions people don't like to explore, man, because it's so much easier to put into a simple box. Let's take one of the enhanced interrogation techniques, the abdominal slap. They slap somebody across the stomach with the back of their hand. You know where else they do that? In SEER training. There isn't a SEER. SEER training?

SEER. Survival Escape Resistance Education. Survival Escape Resistance Education. Okay. And SEER training. Every military officer goes through SEER training, whether they're a pilot or whether they're a munitions person, whether they're a special operations person on the front line, they get that done to them. That's where enhanced interrogation came from that's one of them it came out of seer school so that means you're willing to let this happen to american citizens going through training to prepare them for what they will encounter if they are ever actually captured in combat who sign up and can get it to stop by quitting you have to remember that those are two things they can do okay where is the terrorist he's a prisoner he's a prisoner because he's a combatant yes so what what what now now you know what do you want to where where do you want he's a combatant. Yes. So what what what? Now now, you know, what do you want to where where do you want to treat a combatant like an equal and where do you? Want to treat them like a freaking threat? That's my question this these are questions. Nobody will ask about that's a fair question

It's a very fair question. Like there's there was a documentary in 2015. That's excellent They did a great job the guys you ever seen the documentary September 11, 2001? The two French guys who were on the ground that day by accident and got all – oh, my God. You definitely have seen it in passing. Yeah. Those two guys, ironically, did a documentary on the CIA in 2015, and they had every single living former CIA chief, including temporary chief, like when someone got fired or something. And they interviewed all of them and talked about all the torture, like where the CIA stood, all that stuff.

And one question, which is a ridiculous question, but it's not impossible. That's fair, is after like a lot of the guys, know there was some mixed bags some guys were like i don't think we did anything wrong other guys were like we should have never done that but they brought up the scenario where there's a nuclear bomb in new york city it's going off in three hours you know for a fact you don't know where it is but there's one man in the world who does and you have him sitting in the chair right here there's no one who wouldn't torture that guy and i agree because you got nothing to lose like it's a heavy thing but like yeah i mean you're gonna do whatever the fuck you gotta do to get that information so when it's something extreme like that i feel you where it gets to the gray area that you're talking about

is then you say well these are enemy combatants they could be plotting any attack anywhere, anytime right now. I've lived that. You have not lived that. When you say you live that. When you are sitting across from somebody you know has secrets about how they're planning to hurt Americans, you know what you see? When you look in the eyes of a terrorist, you see them hurting your family. That's what you see. You don't see them hurting no-name, overweight, four-tooth person from who knows what bumfuck country in the United States. That's not who you see. You see them holding the hair, the ponytail of your daughter.

You see them holding a gun to your mother's face. That's what you see, man. When you sit across from scum of the universe, when you're the person that has to look at them when you sit across from a child molester the pictures that you envision on their laptop are the pictures of your niece not your niece just standing there naked your niece being violated dude these these are the images that drive us every day to wake up and do it again and shut something else down and stop these people where they are. That's what you see. So I can't take anybody seriously who wants to sit back behind a computer on a Google search and try to condemn how we go about executing the most important, most dangerous, most

self-sacrificing work. Because at the end of a career, at the end of a 20-year career, guess what those guys don't get to do, man? There's no reformatting the hard drive in your brain. Right. So I don't, do you have a, I love that we live in a country where you're allowed to sit there and have a right to say that torture is wrong. Well, this is why you sit here.

Yeah. This is why we do this. I love that we live in that country. But if you think that you're ever going to get taken seriously sitting across from an operator, I'm not talking about you. I mean, anybody out there who wants to criticize how operations are executed, you're never going to get taken seriously by an operator. When you say, oh, you shouldn't have done that. Oh, it turned out to not be effective. Oh, we, the court system came back and said that we shouldn't have been spying on our own people.

You know what? I'm glad that the court system did that. Because if I was the person who had to independently make that call, the NSA would still be spying on people. Because that's how important it is to me to protect the people I swore to protect. But again, that does...

Now, you're speaking at that from a perspective of being a part of it. Right. Okay. That's my voice, man. I don't have the voice outside. Cool. Let's pretend you were still there saying that because that's what you believed while you were there and things like that.

You're the same guy that does say you shouldn't trust – that's your fault for trusting the government to do right by you. But could you see how I'm taking that as like, well, you're trusting them to do right by us by saying like, yeah, come on. Like you said last time, like, you know, come on, look at my porn searches. Look at my internet history. Look at what I like to do with my wife. You know, like look at all that. And so valiant of you to say that, to walk the talk. But like people go, fuck that. Like I understand the slippery slope.

And you also kind of support it with your other opinion where you're like, don't trust the government. Right. So we have a right to privacy. Absolutely. Because that's granted to us by the government that we put in place. But you would still be doing the NSA stuff that Snowden exposed. Because I don't think that's a violation of privacy. How is that not a violation of privacy. How is that not a violation

of privacy? They could look at anything. They can look at anything, but they can't act on anything. What they can act on is what shows criminal intent, criminal activity. Right? Let me give you an example. When I was 17 years old, I was a brown kid that grew up right outside of Amish

country Pennsylvania. This was what? 97, 1997. And I remember driving around in my 1980 Ford Mustang LX, which was a trashy car. It was a car that my dad bought my mom. My mom didn't want it. She didn't want it so bad that she gave it to me, right?

So I remember driving around in this car, brown kid, Pennsylvania, 17 years old did you have the hair no no i had i had a short cropped yeah my dad was former army right everyone thought you were a homeless guy at first but i got pulled over got pulled over by a white cop for no reason following the speed limit 17 years old most of us i i was too afraid to do anything at 17 in a car that was outside of whatever, right? In Pennsylvania, too, where my parents were going to take away the car. Anyway, so following the speed limit, following all the traffic laws, cop pulled me over.

Hello, officer. Whatever, right? Why did I get pulled over? Or do you know why you were pulled over? No, I don't know why I was pulled over. He's like, it's a routine check. I just want to see if you have uh insurance driver's license please now most people out there of non-caucasian descent are going to think that that was racial profiling because that kind of stuff happens guess what he

found my license was valid i'm a penn driver Pennsylvania resident US citizen My car had proper license It had registration It had insurance Everything checked out So what did he do? Sent me on my way You're saying he didn't give you a reason though, right?

Did I hear that? It was a routine check Police have the right to do routine checks For any number of reasons But my point is Was that an invasion of my privacy? Was that racial profiling? Was that a violation of my basic human rights?

I don't care. Because that time, he found me. I had nothing to hide. Some other time, he might find somebody that has something to hide. Hey guys, if you're enjoying this episode, would you please share it on social media and with your friends? I've mentioned in some previous episodes that I'm going to start having a clear ask on sharing the show around to spread the word. I know I've mentioned it throughout the intros in the past, but I've never been like laser focused on one thing. That's on me. So I've always believed the best way to grow this show is by spreading the word.

And now I'm just going to be asking a little more directly to do that. So once again, if this episode is one that you are having a good time listening to, would really appreciate it if it was also the first one you shared around. Thanks. Right? I am not going to get wrapped up about privacy laws when the law of the land is what protects what can and can't be prosecuted against me. If you've got a thing for midget porn,

and if you're double dipping on your company budget, right, nobody cares. Nobody cares. Let them find it. I want them to find it because the guy who's right next door and the apartment next door, that dude might actually be actively being converted to ISIS because of his web searches.

I care much more about giving them that information than them finding out that I like to watch midget porn. Now, let's use that example. Let's say a guy who watches midget porn is like, I guess that's a weird fetish. No disrespect to midgets. Or the people who like it. Right.

He just likes that. But otherwise, good guy. One day, 10 years from now, he runs to be president. Okay. You're telling me that every person who's had access to that at these agencies, no one's going to do something with that. You trust people more than I do. No, I don't trust people.

I think that if it's really 10 years later, that information has been buried under hundreds of gigabytes of other information. They can find that in two seconds. Maybe they could. Someone's got to do the effort to do that, right? Nope. It's a search. Everybody's got skeletons in their closet.

Are you worried about the government violating your privacy or everyday people violating your privacy? Both. Easy. Both. Yeah. Well, a guy like me is not, right? But if I'm someone who has aspirations to – Something to hide. Yeah. If I'm like a CEO of a public company or something and I have something that I'm like, I like midget porn.

And I'm like, well, I really don't want people to know that. That would be really weird, right? Like, yeah. Yeah, I would have something to hide in that case. So I try to put myself in that person's shoes. And I just said, like, public company guy, what about the guy who's running for office somewhere? I don't even like politicians. But I'm saying, like, now you can buy off politicians by saying, oh, yeah, remember that, your midget porn days? You're going to do this bill now. You're going to sign that one, or we're putting this fucker out there.

That's not how they buy it. So I understand how media would make you think that's not how they buy it so i understand how i understand how media would make you think that's how it works there's no leverage in telling people that you're going to go public with their fetish for midget porn that's there's no leverage how there's no how's there no leverage on that because americans are have a short memory people have a short memory and there's nothing illegal about what you like or don't like how many people have you heard about who had prostitutes how many people have you heard about who were abusive people who have actually done actually legal things and then they get past it and people get past it everybody gets past it but

they don't think that in the moment the fear is in anticipation and you get power in that there's no leverage you're wrong man you're wrong because because the people who are in power these are power struggles if you've never been in a power struggle, you don't understand how power struggles actually work. You threaten me with going public about my midget porn. I'm also in a position of power. So when I look, there's a concept called real risk and perceived risk, right? The perceived risk is you're going to go coerce me with this super secret embarrassing fact, and the whole world's going to turn against me. And then everybody's going to hate me, and I'm going to be ostracized, and I'm so afraid of that perceived risk.

People in real power broker situations don't worry about perceived risk. We worry about real risk. So what's the real risk? You're going to go live with this information. It's going to be embarrassing. It's going to go viral for a week, 7 days, 10 days, 15 days. It's going to get a bunch of clicks. It's going to make a it's going to go viral for a week seven days ten days 15 days it's going to get a bunch of clicks it's going to make a bunch of people money on ads and then something else is going to pop up because it's not illegal i'm not going to jail i haven't

violated anybody's trust in my public office or my ceo ship i'll write a formal response what did john cena do pretty sure john cena apologized in mandarin yeah that was a bad look but perceived risk right real risk his real risk the reason he did that was because there was real risk of his movie not being aired in china money right so he doesn't have any problem looking like a like he's kowtowing to the chinese by apologizing in mandarin so a real a real power broker is going to look at that and be like everybody's going to forget about that in 10 days so what do i care go ahead you i told you before like coercion is the weakest form of leverage on people this is exactly why because actual powerful people can't be intimidated by coercion people with no power we're the ones

that are afraid we're the people with no are constantly afraid. What if you find out that I drink six beers a night? What if my wife finds out that I secretly whatever? People with no power are constantly afraid of losing the small modicum of power that they think they have. People with real power, we're not afraid. But you're assuming that people have no shame. Even very powerful

people most of them have shame a guy who didn't have shame exhibit a class one whatever was donald trump you know when i knew donald trump was going to win that election in 2016 i knew it on the sunday after the grabbing by the pussy tape because he says grabbing by the pussy on tape you know i think people who listen to it without a political lens were like well that was really dirty but still we're like all right president you can't you can't you know fuck we can't do this right fucking sunday the second presidential debate an hour before he goes i'm at a press conference these are all the people who bill clinton has raped he's raped all of them and bill clinton's gonna be sitting right across from him on national tv two seconds later and i'm like holy shit the next day he goes on the trail he's in pennsylvania or some

shit and they had a there was a documentary called the circus that was filming during that whole time on showtime so each week they would put out an episode of all the shit on the road from the last week and so they were interviewing people outside this rally like after he talked and you see trump up there talking talking about ben roethlisberger and how he likes to pull his drives and he's behind trees and shit who by the way was accused of rape one time right like total bad optics but these people are getting interviewed like this guy doesn't give a fuck man i don't care because he's shameless he was shameless enough that like when he said the mccain thing one thing that unfortunately he was right about i'm embarrassed that he was right about this

but when he said the mccain thing on stage all his people said all right we gotta write up an apology we gotta clean this up and he's like apologize we die which is very sad that that's true but like that was the thing he's like now you just gotta own it i don't know why i said it but we're owning it which is not a good thing to reward but like the shamelessness yes over that kind of guy it would take a lot to have power over him like stormy daniels he didn't give a fuck about that he's like yeah fuck they're whatever you know like end of story how many people are really like that though the people in power are really like that not a lot i disagree you don't have dude i spend my days around people who have who are ultra high

net worth individuals they understand what real power is right a big part of why they're so reclusive is because it's so easy for people with no power to pick these these pansy little distracting stupid time-consuming energy-sucking arguments over not real power so for that reason they just avoid people, right? That's what ultra high net worth, that's what your CEOs do, your founders do. That's what your politicians don't have that opportunity because they're publicly elected, right? So what they end up having to do is they learn at the heel or they learn to the left and right of other politicians. That's why the parties are so powerful. The Democratic Party, the Republican Party are powerful because, not just because of that, but because when you become a freshman

in the party, when you come in as a congressperson or senator at the beginning of your career, somebody takes you under their wing and they're like, let me show you how this works. Now that you're a somebody, here's what you can expect. Letters complaining about this, threats from the past, ex-girlfriends are going to come out of the woodwork, ex-boyfriends are going to come out of the woodwork, whatever-boyfriends are going to come out of the woodwork, whatever, whatever, whatever. That mistake that you made here, that mistake, and they're all going to threaten you.

And what you need to do is tell them directly, I appreciate that that happened. I can apologize to you. I can do whatever. Tell me what it takes to make it right, but I'm not going to be coerced by your threat. Your threat is inappropriate, and your threat will not be welcome here. And you know

what most people do when they think they have leverage and they find out that they don't, they back off. It has nothing to do with being shameless. It's about actual leverage. When you have actual leverage, things move, man. When you have actual leverage, courts take away passports. You end up in jail. When you have actual leverage, boards vote you out of their company, right? There's all sorts of ways that real leverage can work. But when people don't have real leverage, you got to consider perceived risk or real risk. This is what powerful people are trained to do either directly, like we're trained directly, or they're trained and mentored through the groups that they're part of. It's why my like, real masterminds, not like your Instagram masterminds, but real masterminds,

where, where groups of people who run multimillion dollar companies naturally come together, and they naturally work together, and they share business, and they develop ideas, and they make joint ventures. Those masterminds, people are mentoring each other just as much as they're sharing business this is something that 99 of people will never understand because they think that they think that there's some kind of moral order to things you know where morality comes from it comes from above. Roe versus Wade was just overturned. Because all of law is up to the Supreme Court to interpret as they see fit. So even the law is not rock solid. It can be open to interpretation.

Human beings. Go to a church. The Bible is open to interpretation. You don't like what your pastor says? You don't like what your preacher says? Go to a different church clearly you don't like what your pastor says you don't like what your preacher says go to a different church you don't like what any of them say don't even go to church read your bible and it's going to be your own right islam hindu or uh uh yeah hindi whatever it might be the the it's all open to interpretation because that's what people want if power is the way that you describe it though why did a guy like jeffrey epstein exist and have so much of it a lot of that was money a lot of that was influence a lot of that was connections

but you just said that the same people who because he he didn't discriminate he was a cross-culture right like everyone in everyone in different places, different political affiliations. He had everybody. Right, because they're all powerful. They're all powerful, but they're not supposed to care. By the logic you're giving me, Jeffrey Epstein should walk up to him with a video of them fucking a 16-year-old girl. And they go, I'm sorry that happened. Do with it what you will.

It doesn't mean anything to me. What's the difference there? Real risk. That was breaking a law okay so back to the midget porn example then what about when people are doing stuff where they could be accused of breaking a law if there if there's evidence that someone is breaking the law that's when you start to see attorneys get involved and you start to see settlement out of court. That's when there's real traction. And that's what, honestly, frankly speaking, if we want to be honest, if you're thinking, if you're, if you're, if you're out

there and you're listening to this and you're thinking about, oh, I want to, I want to shut this thing down. I want to do the right thing. You're also honestly thinking, maybe I'll make a buck out of this. Like maybe maybe if I if I go live with this This might be like I could sue and then there'll be a settlement and then i'll get like a hundred million dollars out of this Thing you're not actually thinking about justifying the law. Would you be willing to pass up your hundred million dollars? Just so that the law sees its way through the guy goes to jail and you go back to your thirty five thousand dollar a year job No, that's why so many people settle out of court.

Let's not forget all those people who settled out with Michael Jackson. Right? All those parents who settled with Michael Jackson. Maybe there was child molestation. Maybe there wasn't. I don't know that there's anybody out there who's ever landed for sure on one side or the other. There are, but okay but what we see there is at least if you just look at the if you look at the metrics if you look at the performance there's plenty of people out

there who are willing to settle rather than pursue a lawsuit that might win or might lose or whatever else that's not that's not people who are morally driven that's people who are driven by motivators and then it's that's what makes it hard to decide on some things too not necessarily that example but where people do settle it's like well did that really happen or did were they just looking for a payday because this person's in power or did the person in power threaten them behind the scenes and it's like it's like kanye like i guess we'll never know right but like you don't because the process is set up that way like deshaun watson just settled 20 of his 24 cases they're gonna be confidential out of court right after all the salacious details

were starting to pile on again it's like i guess we'll have to see on the last four but like you know i kind of think at this point he's pretty fucking guilty. But I guess we'll never know. I would hope that if you believe in the United States where you're innocent until proven guilty, that you would actually say, I guess he's kind of innocent. Right? This is, don't we love, don't we love how Americans. I defended him for a while. Don't we love how Americans love to pick and choose what elements of American culture and American values they choose to enforce and when? How so?

Because we love to think people are guilty, even though there's no proof that they're guilty. We just think that they're guilty. We love to condemn things that in hindsight we find out about, whether it's torture after 9-11 or whether it's arming the Mujahideen in whatever that was. 1987, 88. Yeah. Right. People love to look back in hindsight, but then we don't like to admit when we just forget stuff, right? Like 2000, like 9-11 happened. You know, there are still people to this day who think that there was no second plane. Oh, dude, listen. Short, short memories, man. Listen.

Short memories. And when you add a healthy dose of conspiracy on top of that, add skepticism, add the internet, which has, I mean, anything you want to find out there is out there, right? So add just the cacophony of information and what you have is this perfect stew to just distract and uh and dumb down the population people don't like to remember that our population people like to remember that america was founded on owners that's what america that's what our country came from owners whaters. What do you mean by that? So whether you look at it through the eyes of the founding fathers or you look at it through

the eyes of the pilgrims, the people who came had a vested stake in the land itself. If you didn't have a vested stake in the land, you didn't have a say in what happened in the land. Well, now we live in a world where you don't have to have a vested stake in anything, but you still get a say does that make sense can you explain that another way yeah so i might be over i'm probably overthinking that so let's just go just basic founding father stuff right you'll hear over and over again that that america was founded on white landowning slave-owning men right okay is that true yes yeah that's true but at the time it wasn't like it was written out you only have a vote if

you're a white male who has slaves and that's it right it was really about if you own land and it just happened to be that the only people who could own land were men and the only men that could own vast estates had to have slaves to manage the estates because of the way that that it was all managed at the time i'm not such an objective way of looking at not saying any of it's good or bad but that's the way it was built at the time that's the foundation of where our country came from see i'll say and there's one I'll say that's bad. But the reason... That's bad. You know what, so then was it better to be under a monarchy and have no land at all?

Which bad do you want to pursue, brother? Because that's the question they have to ask themselves. I agree with your overarching question of like, not question, but idea that there was a bad with both however like with the benefit of hindsight hindsight and basic humanity like yeah slavery was was worse i i think like if if your battle was over paying taxes to the monarchy, which is very bad as far as they were taking advantage of everyone there. Yeah, I'm glad we fought that battle and won. What I'm not glad about is that they struck down – or was it from the declaration or the constitution? I think maybe there was something with both. struck down the opportunity to be like well now that we have the land let's get rid of this

unbelievably inhumane practice based on the color of people's skin and instead said we'll worry about that later and then there was a whole fucking war 80 years later thank god by the way you know to end that but like you're looking at it like well it had to be one or the other i'm saying no no they had a chance to do the good on the second part and they didn't. And I will judge them for that. Now, am I one of these people who's like, well, take down all the statutes of George Washington? No, no. I understand that human beings are to this day, incredibly flawed and like make abnormally bad mistakes, right? And it's hard to quantify that with the benefit of hindsight in the future. I understand that.

But like I can also look at the symbolism of good. Whereas a guy like Christopher Columbus, that is when people talk about that one, that's harder to do, right? Like that guy was a scumbag. George Washington had some good qualities to him. You know what I mean? So like I'm not there but i i do want to look at it like okay well let's look at the set of decisions they had and the information they had at the time and let's also then try to compare that to sets of information and therefore decisions

that we have today on totally different things and try to figure out if the same cognitive biases is that a word biases okay that caused those things to happen in the revolutionary war that led to this good but that very bad how do we make it so that we can get both good or like mostly good here so you can't because it's already happened not that not that i'm saying i'm saying the modern day thing when we're facing current decisions that we're at the – I'm not saying what they are. I'm saying like pick a decision we're at the precipice of right now. How do we judge it in a psychological way where we say, okay, they psychologically in the Revolutionary War looked at it like X and Y happened. We don't want Y. We want Z because Z is no slavery in this world of this new thing. So if you, it's, nobody has this opportunity, right? And this is part of the challenge with the unknown. There's always the unknown in the future.

And we always have to measure against the unknown. Yes. But what you do have is probabilities. Yes. So one of the questions that our forefathers had to ask themselves at the time was, if we eradicate slavery then we are essentially eradicating 80 of our agricultural output which is the only thing that we have to

fund a revolutionary war so is it worth it to to change a system that we have no alternative for because we can't pay people but after the war after the war they had to rebuild a country man and you know do you know how we made it after the revolutionary war we made it on bonds that foreign governments gave us france floated us after the war and what did they float us in exchange for agricultural output see you're so objective because you're also a brown guy too which makes this incredibly objective like this is not if you were a white dude you'd be canceled right now but like you're not so like i guess you can you can look at it this way so i'm let's take it so i'm not african-american and i'm not going to pretend to be but you know what i am i am mexican i am mexican aren't you native american i'm native

american too i'm three quarters mexican and i'm one quarter not nick native american right if you drive through california right now it's illegal aliens picking strawberries you know taking care of oranges sitting on street corners getting picked up to do drywall jobs right it is an absolute abuse of mexicans mexican immigrants in the united states here illegally it's happening right i don't think there's anything wrong with that they're getting a better life here it's worth it to them to be picking strawberries in california being paid under the table than it is to go back to mexico and try to hash it out there this is it's human condition even though people want to say it's they need a livable wage and they need to be this

and they need to be that. My grandmother got here illegally. I would have never been a United, an American citizen had there been laws that prevented my generations, two generations ago from coming into the United States. I am an American citizen because my mother had me inside the United States. She was even in the military when she had me to kind of go ahead and make sure, like, let's make, let's really make sure this kid is safe. Wow. But this is the thing, like, let's talk, let's call it what it actually is.

Maybe one day all those Mexican immigrants and those migrant workers will have a vote and maybe they'll all have the ability to stay in the United States and they won't get kicked out. Maybe that'll happen. Maybe it won't. But the reality is that right now they have a life that they can support. They have family back in Mexico sometimes that they can support because they have a better life here than there. And once again, you're looking at it as a net good for them. A net good for them and that's good for them and a net good for us because guess what none of us want to do none of us want to pay more for the same

strawberries you know what would happen if we started having to pay more for the same strawberries we'd stop buying strawberries and then the strawberry farms would fall apart and they'd stop growing strawberries they'd start growing something that's more profitable the whole ecosystem starts to fall apart we we evolve and nobody ever said evolution happens quickly. We evolve slowly. So freaking own the fact that evolution happens slowly. Woke culture is a perfect example of evolution happening too fast. How so?

Because people hate it. Yeah. People hate it. If you know what nobody hated? I hate it. You know what nobody hated? I love this. You know what nobody hated? Nobody hated the rise of African-American comedians in the 70s and 80s. Nobody hated that.

Everybody loved it. I can think of a few people that probably did. I'm sure there are a few outliers that probably did. But by and large, blockbuster movies, Whoopi Goldberg, oh man i'm eddie murphy right these folks found a way to bridge they found a way to evolve professional lead roles even when the whole world was still anti was still like openly racist yeah they found a way to bridge the gap through a slow evolution that paved the way for what ultimately became an african-american president united states a long slow evolution would i have loved to have seen civil rights happen overnight sure who wouldn't but if it

happens too fast there's resistance just like we were talking about earlier with the folks who who already believe that cia is all bad like you're never going to convince them that cia is good in one fell swoop well they look they think there's so much on the bone here so there's there's going to be some things you talk there already have been things you talk about that like we just don't touch so tell us in the comments what those are and we'll talk about them at some point but like there is such a historical cut off with 9 11. that changed everything across culture and we didn't think of it that way at the time we knew it changed history we knew it changed the way we looked at the rest of the world and stuff like that but it affected because of the

timing of it it affected everything that's happening now heavily because people then needed reasons to explain all the bad that came after that and they also during this time that happens in 01 right at the height of the tech bubble when web one was like maturing getting rid of all the you know the wasted heavy heaviness of people with pets.com and shit like that and letting the companies like amazon and apple survive and then build into web 2 which also birthed social media and things like that and now we're coming on web 2 web 3 whatever that whole thing is so like we're 20 years later and and now people have grown up during that time with an internet that creates community on different levels social

media obviously being the biggest boom of all of them and so people's ideas are now influenced by artificial intelligence that matches them up with other people who have ideas that float along that way and when you put those ideas together they start to strengthen into even bigger ideas and bigger and bigger and bigger and pretty soon it's like the earth is flat so whose responsibility is that i'm not saying it's anyone's responsibility i'm saying that's why when we look at this we now have that combined with an economic crisis of society where the wealth gap has gone like this like a v since the since at least the mid late 1980s and it was only increased throughout the financial crisis and things like that that during the, since at least the mid late 1980s. And it was only increased throughout the financial crisis and things like that,

that during the second half of this, where the financial crisis happened and stuff, you had people looking for answers on the internet. And when they look for answers, they're looking for answers in the meaning behind why they are where they are, because they've decided a lot of people, not everyone.

I'm just saying like the average person is pissed off. It says the CIA did nine 11 and all this all this shit right they're looking at it like there must be a boogeyman behind this because my life sucks and it's never going to get better and so therefore someone did it to me and i'm at least going to die knowing who did it and they convinced themselves boom it was the cia yeah your life sucks and it's your fault that's the truth of it your life sucks and it's your fault. That's the truth of it. Your life sucks and it's your fault. How so? Because what ends up happening is you have to own your own decision. You have to do it. Let's take a look at the, let's not even look at history. Let's look at right now. Right now there's a massive, we're on the brink of recession, massive financial crisis, right? Right now. People who watch the stock market, they want to know when's it going to turn around.

The reason the stock market isn't turning around is because the people that have the most money aren't investing in the stock market right now. They're not buying. They need to buy in order to drive the stock market up. They're not buying. They're building cash. They're holding their resources.

Exactly. Right? The people who are going to be successful all they need to do is follow the other people who are already successful if you just do what rich people do guess what's going to happen you're going to become rich you know what makes the stock market trend right now all the hopefuls out there who are like oh you know what man bitcoin is so cheap it's going gonna turn around. I got to invest in Bitcoin not gonna happen, buddy because when you buy 0.02 Bitcoin

That doesn't change the market when somebody else comes in and buys 550 Bitcoin that makes the market change if you don't have the deep pockets You can't make an impact takes money to make money the same thing happened in 2008 the financial crisis happened and the people who had money acted responsibly with their money the people who had no idea how to act responsibly with their money not all of them but they had enough left over no man they'd made responsible decisions with their money from there you know responsible people didn't take subprime loans. Responsible people, people who knew who had money were buying things in cash. And then when everything crashed, they bought more. There's a reason that there's a reason that the what the in the wealth divide has increased. And it's because the people who have financial education, double down on their

financial education. And the people who don't have financial education, don't fucking go out and get financial education. They go to the internet and they find someone to blame all day long i'm going to tell you this you are the master of your own destiny you want to blame someone else that's cool you're going to go to your grave broke as a joke blaming everybody else your legacy is literally going to be that you die and about five days later you're forgotten that's it that's how it's going to work. When you externalize everything, that's what's going to happen. When you are successful, successful people don't externalize.

Successful people own it. My mistake, my bad, my fault. Call it shameless, call it whatever you want to call it. That's the decisions that they make. I have money. I'm not going to put it in the market right now. I'm going to watch and see what the market does.

I want to see the market go all the way to the bottom and then i want to see no one ever times it perfect and then i want to see somebody else i want to see somebody else move it and then i'm going to jump on top of the move right i'm not i sold my house the peak of the market my house is sold i have no home i have no house i rent an apartment do i pay too much for the rent absolutely i do because i'm financially educated enough to know that I'm not gonna buy a house That's overpriced. I'd rather spend $35,000 a year paying rent. That's too much rent then put myself in debt $450,000 for a house that is only gonna appreciate one to two percent for the next ten years

There's also people who are molded by the environment that they that they come from You're not gonna like my answer to that either i'm not gonna like your answer but give it because you can change your environment yeah you mentioned that the same the same the same answers that you're looking for on the internet they're the real answer is there but the real answer is hard to face right here's the truth soda's bad for you water is good for you how many people have you heard say i don't like the taste of water i've got to put flavor all day you and i do but there's plenty of people out there i can't drink water it's got no flavor i need to put flavor in the water i need i need some chemical whatever that garbage is that you put like and you turn your water red

and make it a little bit sweet that's the thing that's there's people that there's droplets that add vitamins and garbage to your water my point is The stuff that's good for you. Guess what? It's going to be bland. It's going to be boring. It's going to be slow The stuff that's bad for you. It's going to be exciting. It's going to be easy. It's going to be fast That's basic marketing. That's how you sell anybody anything That's how it works. So if you want to be sold Go out there and buy. The economy needs you. The economy needs people who don't have money to buy on credit cards, to put them in debt so that they can then, if they have financial education,

they'll go find a debt consolidation company that will make money off of consolidating your debt and getting you out of debt. But there's also people among the example I give who it's not just about money to them, even though that's a big part. And it is, I did say, like, obviously the wealth gap is a huge part of this distress that's happening where then people take it out against a boogeyman and choose an institution or whatever it is they choose. But there are also a lot of people who in trying to define that meaning of life as to why we're here view it as a moral responsibility to expose that so that future generations then have a better opportunity than they did so they're not thinking about it like

and i genuinely think there are i'm not saying everyone's like that there's a lot of people aren't like that at all but there there is a subset of people out there who are like i want to fix this because i'm not motivated by money i wish the wealth gap wasn't like it was but fuck me whatever i missed it okay i want to be able to say like okay this is who did that this is who did this we got justice for that and now the next generation has a better system because in america we're always looking to improve the next generation does not have a better system because the system is always where people get confused the system is derived by the government the government controls the system and it's always in the best interest of what the government's ambitions and survivability

are then you've got social systems Social systems can be influenced by individuals using social pressures, right? They're two separate things. In order for the government to make a change based on social pressure, it has to be massive social pressure, which is extremely hard to pull off. It's even harder as in modern day, because where everybody wants to say the internet helps give you a voice, the internet also drowns out your voice right can you elaborate on that so i know what you mean yeah so if you wanted to cause like a massive movement if you want so civil rights was a massive movement yeah right that was a movement that was actually strong enough to change government policy that's a successful example there's not many of those that is a a positive example of success even though i will go on to

say even after civil rights there's 10 more years of significant racism after the policies changed. Oh, easily. Right? Absolutely. So that happened because it was really hard to cause a movement. It was really hard to start a movement. And as that movement gained momentum organically, because it was really important to people, and there weren't 500 other movements going on. Now, there's like 500 movements going on.

You can go on the internet, you can just look up whatever, current movements, right, in the world or current movements in the United States, current movements in Oklahoma City and you're going to find all sorts of stuff. You're going to find stuff about homeschool movements. You're going to find stuff about homeschool movements. You're going to find stuff about, uh, about gay marriage movements. You're going to find stuff about, uh, women emancipated

from, you know, uh, abusive relationship movements. And you're going to find, you're going to find movements for entrepreneurs specializing in whatever the resale of tennis shoes, whatever, you're going to find a thousand movements because the one movement that matters, if there's one out there right now, it's being buried under all the others. There's... It's hard for a movement to gain momentum when there's 10,000 movements. It's like, if you've ever gone to a shallow beach, there's waves...

Shallow beach? A shallow beach. If you've ever gone to a shallow beach, a shallow beach is a beach that's long, and the sand gradually declines. So all the... There's thousands of waves but the waves are all this big and they're going in all these different directions because it just rolls over the top of the beach where if you go to a beach that has a a deep beach where the sand just drops off

there's these huge waves that crash right so it's the what's the point the point is that right now we live on a shallow beach there's lots of waves that are this tall crashing into each other, and you can't surf any of those waves. You can't boogie board on those waves. Those waves, you can't do anything on those waves except look at them and say, look at all the waves. So you're saying like internet culture allows us to have so much connectivity that there's too many shallow waves,

and it drowns out all the noise, it cancels it out. Cancels out all the important stuff too. And that's what everybody can use against us. Because again, if you learn from what successful people do, then you understand successful people let the noise cancel out. That's why there's, when you have power and somebody wants to be like, I'm going to share the midget porn stuff about you.

You're like, that's a shallow wave. Shallow wave, ocean of waves, go for it. Right? How right how long it's not gonna take long before some celebrity slaps another celebrity and then you're not gonna care about my midget porn habit anymore it's not gonna take long before somebody else does whatever it might be elon musk is gonna lay people off that's gonna take headlines someone's gonna say something on twitter that's gonna take headlines like it takes four days before the headlines are taken over by something else. Well, we did that with a war. We even said this last, you were here in April and the war was like nine, 10 weeks old, something like that in Ukraine. And you even said it, you're like, it feels like it was decades ago based on how the internet

acts and the media acts because, because things move so quickly. People have already forgotten there's a war in Ukraine. And that's what I'm saying. Like, this is my problem with internet culture we want want one we want the next thing all the time what do they say what's the meme like the current thing or whatever which actually has some truth to it because there is always like a current thing that's going on but it's like it's also symbolic of the fact that we're going to get really worked up over something while people can make content and monetize it for a week right and then

we're gonna forget about it because you know what the content's less monetizable so those same creators are creating something about something else and creators aren't the problem because i mean creators are just a crowd driving them well it's just part of the ecosystem yeah right creators might make a few cents for every thousand views. What drives it is the companies that have the ability to monetize hundreds of thousands, hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue, capitalizing on a current trend. They have the power and the money to keep a trend active,

to keep a trend rolling, right? Your creators are just reacting to whatever the current trend is. But they do also listen and i'm not saying it works like this perfectly because it does not we know these companies like control stuff but like they're also listening to like engagement and watch time so people for example get sick of the war in ukraine like i had david satter in here three weeks after the invasion two weeks two weeks after the invasion right I got the episode out right away. Danny had him in a week after me or something like that. And we both, if I may say, had phenomenal episodes with him. That guy, for people that don't know, he was episode 92 here. He was on Danny's Concrete podcast as well. the only reporter from the west that putin has ever banned from russia in post-soviet russia he's at the middle of the story he's friends with all the guys putin's killed and everything and yet his episodes did fine but they weren't like that should have exploded if i had had it

a week before you know why because two three weeks in people are like oh it's old news and and there were enough people who were like i want to tune out from that that like it gets ignored yeah and i look at that and like I want to tune out from that, that like, it gets ignored. And I look at that and like, I could look at it from like a selfish like podcast perspective and be like, damn, I wish that blew up more. Or I could look at it more logically and say like, damn, that's really a problem about society. The fact that there's all this shit going on and you have an expert in here who's been there for 50 fucking years in Russia covering this shit. You know, the guy who blew the whistle on Putin 25 years in russia covering this shit you know the guy who blew the whistle on putin 25 years ago and no one wants to listen up i got a problem with that so i would actually go a step further and say that the the logic there is actually saying to yourself

well if people aren't watching this what are they watching and how do i create more of that i'm sorry man yeah like there's yes talking about what people don't do is worthless. Bitching about what people do do is also worthless. Predicting what people will do is priceless. And that's the difference between successful people and mediocre people. Successful people are never invested in feeling bad about the way people are reacting. Instead, they're like, how do I make something productive for myself out of this?

Let's do that. People are going to do what people are going to do. The masses are going to do what the masses are going to do. The one thing that's been consistent from the beginning of our country is that the masses are ignorant. It's always been true. Guess guess what it will always be true it's one of those euphemisms that's accurate it's group think it's it's a mix of group think it's a mix of cognitive bias it's a mix of of uh of life need

like the reason the reason masses are ignorant isn't because they're dumb the reason the masses are ignorant isn't isn't because they choose to be ignorant the reason the masses are ignorant isn't because they're dumb. The reason the masses are ignorant isn't because they choose to be ignorant. The reason the masses are ignorant is because just to survive, they have to dedicate the majority of their time to the basic acts of survival. Right? Let's just look financially. Let's just talk about a simple financial model. You're saying the things that are important to them. The things that are important to survival.

Yes. Like if I'm a coal miner and they're taking away coal. I have a job. I can't feed my family. Correct. Right. But more than that, guess what a coal miner has to do all day long? Mine coal.

Yeah. Right. Successful people sit in an office where they have a telephone, they have a secretary, they have the internet. Coal miners doesn't have any of that. Yeah. Right. So literally the coal miner spends eight hours a day mining the wealthy person spends eight hours a day connected right so

simple financial example here okay let's just say that for anybody in the in the united states it costs twenty thousand dollars a year just to survive if you're going to buy bread milk fuel you're going to pay rent right you're gonna buy bread milk fuel it you're gonna pay rent right you're gonna whatever let's just say it costs twenty thousand dollars for anybody to survive in a year the person who makes twenty five thousand dollars a year how much money they have to spend on the things they want five thousand dollars yeah because the other twenty thousand dollars goes into basic needs what about the person who makes $100,000 a year? How much money do they have to spend on the things that they want?

More. $80,000. Because they have all their basic needs met. And they have this gigantic chunk of money that they can spend on doing whatever they want to do. Now, as a result of that, the person with $5,000 extra spends all $5,000 of that dollars. Spends it on their kids, spends it on their truck, spends it on their family, on a vacation. The person who has $80,000 extra actually has a hard time spending $80,000. So they put $20,000 into a bank account that yields 7% at the end of the year.

Well, I don't think anyone's doing that. But they put it into a stock market account, something like that. I see what you're saying but one one year later the person who makes twenty thousand dollars a year was right back after two years they have five thousand dollars disposable income the person who was making a hundred thousand dollars a year two years later has eighty thousand dollars plus twenty thousand dollars plus whatever the percentage is that compounded of the previous twenty thousand dollars and you can see how this just like that's that's the income divide that you're talking about it's basic economics it's basic math but either way the two people you just pointed out like within the masses they're still a part of the masses by and large but the but the person who's the

most ignorant is the person who has to struggle to make that $20,000. Okay. Or that $25,000. I'll even – I don't even have to agree, but I'll say fair, right? There's still a part of the masses that are driven by the cliques and everything and the human fucking weaknesses of instant gratification that we have in modern-day society, which includes you and me to some extent, right? We're all susceptible to it and the overall mass is like the mean of the mass pushes the noise all around something new all the time so i'm going beyond your i'm not even disagreeing with what you just said i'm going beyond that and i'm saying like

where we started this podcast talking about ukraine it is now the beginning of july right and we are sitting here was it four and a half months into a war something like that and yet it's decades ago and there's you mentioned like there's land changes happening right now there's russia getting places in the south obviously the east you said not to worry about but still like there's still all kinds of movement there's battles going on and yet people are kind of numb to it and they're also numb to the fact that like the russian debt now has defaulted and what kind of downstream effects that could have which i mentioned this at the beginning but like you called that last time and i'm going to explain this so wrong so i want you to explain it again but but can you refresh people on? What the Russian debt situation is and why what happened on June 27th and why that matters? Yeah, so

so when when the United States and NATO put Sanctions on Russia what they essentially did was they locked up Russia's ability to use their own foreign reserves. So foreign currency reserves to pay off Russian debt. They locked it up because Russia had diversified their accounts into multiple different types of currency. So Russia had whatever it is, $500 billion or something ridiculous. They had it in currencies that were U.S. held, that were Euro held, that were Ruble held. And they basically put locks on the doors and said, you can't get in here, Russia. And then the sanctions locked up anything that was in

dollars or euros. So then all that left Russia was rubles. Well, Russia was prepared for something like that because that's something known as economic warfare. Russia was prepared for that. So they had all these rubles in reserve, more than enough to pay off their debts. Now, what ended up happening was months kind of went by and Russia wanted to pay off their debts. Now, what ended up happening was months kind of went by and Russia wanted to pay off their debts, but the only way they could pay off their debts was through an intermediary that had to accept the rubles and then transfer the rubles into foreign accounts

to pay off the debts that were required. But the sanctions that the West put on Russia made it so that the interlocutor couldn't actually transact those debts in rubles, which means Russia has the money to pay off their debts. But it's an administrative sanction that prevents the debtors themselves from getting access to the money that Russia wants to pay them. Fast forward to yesterday, and now Russia defaults on their debt. That was a few days ago. The problem is, they didn't actually default on their debt because they don't have the reserves. They default on their debt because the sanctions block their ability to give the money to the debtors.

In that situation, that is not a true defunct. That's not a true default on debt. But what is – for people out there who aren't financial people too because a happened, therefore it's like if you and me don't make a credit that it's took, it's because the foreign country has mismanaged its funds. And as a result, the loaners, the people who hold the loans, they either call in the loan so they can take their money back or they can take a portion of their money back, or they stop investing in the foreign country because they want to secure what money they have. That's in a normal situation because normally the money is mismanaged. That's not what's going to happen here. And this is the thing that kills me about how we're operating sanctions. If let's just use a simple, simple example, you and me, if you take,

if you have a thousand dollar credit card and you try to pay off that thousand dollar credit card at the end of the month, and you try to take a thousand dollars from your bank account and pay it to MasterCard so you can pay off the credit card. That's how you would pay off your credit card. And then MasterCard is happy. You get good credit, you keep your card, they might even expand your limit, right? If you don't have money to pay off MasterCard, then they're unhappy because you don't have any money to pay off your debt. So they cancel your card, they put, they hit

you with a higher fee, and you're stuck. That's how it works when you default on a loan. If you're a country in this case. If you're a country, if you're an individual. Now imagine instead you have a thousand dollars in your bank account. And they're not taking it. And the bank, because of some administrative rule, won't let you pay MasterCard the thousand dollars. And it's your money. And it's your money, right? Normally MasterCard is going to look at this and they're not going to blame you they're going to blame the bank they're actually going to go take the bank to court and be like hey the individual gave me authorization to this thousand dollars i want a thousand dollars right this is how it works the press what what the administration what politics and press want

you to think is that somehow russia is going to start having debtors cancel, like stop investing in Russia. They can't do that. Let's say, let's say you own stock in some Russian company. Now you didn't get your dividend because Russia went default. Russia has the money in Ruples, but the U S government won't let you accept Ruples. Now, are you going to just cancel your investment? Are you just going to say goodbye to all 50 million of your invested dollars because a sanction right now prevents russian from paying you no no because you know they've got the money they've managed it well the reason i can't get paid right now is because of who the united states that's who's blocking my payment right now you also can't regain your money back because if you if you try to call in the loan and you try to strip back what you are owed, you can't do it because the only thing you can strip back is rubles.

But the government won't let you take rubles. So you're stuck. So investors are stuck both ways. They can't take their money out and they know that the money was never mismanaged so they don't want to cancel the investment. So it's just a long pause while russia knows so now russia just got a payday because russia was thinking well we have to pay 400 billion dollars or 400 billion euros now we get to keep it but they didn't because it's in foreign reserves so they don't even have it's in rubles their foreign reserves have already been out of pocket they haven't been able to touch their dollars or the euros for like four months

they were going to pay it off in rubles you You know how they're selling oil right now to India, who's an American ally? In rubles, right? Do you know how they're trading with China, who's defending them in the UN? With rubles, right? Because the sanctions aren't working. So now what ends up happening is Russia, Russia's ruble is the strongest it's been against the u.s dollar in i think two decades right now now you and i had talked about this so i just followed all that and that was a great explanation in my opinion but maybe the best way for some people right now who are thinking like okay but what is this how does this go what is the next steps here now because now they have defaulted but you're also pointing out that like well they've been trading with china they did you say they were trading with india too right so they're still

trading their currency and they could have paid this but they didn't so technically their credit is going to be affected internationally by the countries who are sanctioning them it sounds like correct but not the countries they're trading with correct so now what so the the sad truth here is that essentially the sanctions just subsidized russia's ongoing ability to wage war in Ukraine. Think about that. How so, though? Because the ruble buys more than it ever bought before, and they just got a 4 billion ruble payday. Or a 400 billion ruble payday.

They were supposed to pay off their debts. Now they don't have to pay off their debts. Right, you were saying that. So they keep all that money. And the currency is stronger than it's ever been. So what are we suffering from in the United States? Inflation. Our dollar buys less.

What's happening in Russia? The opposite. Their ruble buys more. How does that work? Now we're, because I never worked in currencies, by the way. Like when I was on Wall Street, I didn't look at any of that shit. I looked at it, but like, Japanese to me. um how does that work now we're but because i never worked in currencies by the way like when i was on wall street like i didn't look at any of that i looked at it but like japanese to me yeah how does that work i understand the inflation here i've been looking at that for a long time right

that's a separate story that had nothing to do with obviously it's been affected by the war in in ukraine but this was happening before that too for a long time so like why is it now deflationary for russia if their currency is also not being accepted in other places because my mind goes to like venezuela who had hyperinflation because they had all the sanctions imposed upon them now they were much smaller i'll give them that like, what's the logic here? So, what you have is you have a stronger ruble than you did in the past. Strong currency means it can buy more with less currency. But why? That's what I don't...

Because they have... So, Russia has resources for trade. And, with the conflict going on, they have buyers for their goods. And they don't have to worry about diversifying any money into dollars or euros because sanctions won't allow them to do that. So the more rubles they make, the more rubles they can spend, and they always have customers that will trade in rubles. But if they're making rubles, that is, and all countries make more currency, which is a problem. They're not making rubles out of thin air. They're just, they're buying, they're trading oil for rubles.

That's all currency, that's all a purchase is. A purchase is an exchange of your currency for my good. Yes. So countries around the world carry Russian rubles. So now Russia, everywhere. Yes. So when Russia sells oil to India, they're trading oil in exchange for the rubles that India's had in their foreign reserves.

When China buys something, they're buying it in rubles they have in their foreign reserves. You see what I'm saying? Yes. So there's no new currency being printed. Well, what actually... If anything, the currency is in demand because it's the only way that you can buy Russian goods. And as a result of the demand, it's the only way that you can buy Russian goods and as a result of the demand it Increases the value of the ruble you just brought up another great point though in there. That is very relevant to

Forget them. Yes, probably the ruble, but I'm thinking of the overall economy and that is There is still Russian oil pouring into all these countries. I think including Germany. Am I right about that? Oh, there's natural gas, correct? Right. Okay. Because they have like a pipeline or some shit. I don't know much about that. So look that up. But all this stuff, like there was a video last week of Biden and Macron. Did you see this? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Where Macron, they're like, they just got caught on camera and he's like, we need you to produce some more oil. That was an Italian accent on a French guy. Sorry. But either way, like a European, you get the point.

And it's like, because I'm guessing they're turning away what they can of Russian oil, which is hurting all of them, but they still are forced to actually rely on it in their country. So these sanctions are kind of backfiring because now Russia can set to the prices that oil is. So, yes, you're right. I think the more interesting consideration here, right, it's easy to look at, oh, Europe needs to distance itself from Russian oil and Russian natural gas, Russian energy. Europe needs to distance itself, but it's stuck in a position where it needs more than can be produced by its other allies. So as a result, it has to use some Russian energy. But thank goodness this conflict is happening in the summer and not in the winter. Because in the winter, they absolutely need Russian energy to keep people from freezing to death.

At the beginning, it was still in the winter, but... Not really. It was like spring, right? It was the end of February. So a lot of Europe had a couple months, but here's the really here's the really fucked up part man. All right The US is driving Sanctions against Russia. They're encouraging. They're leading Biden likes to talk about how the US and NATO are aligned side by side and we're like leading this leading the world in a fight against authoritarianism or autocracy, right?

What happens when Europe can't get its energy resources from Russia, which is the cheapest provider for Europe? They need it from somewhere else. So where do they look? To us. We have a financial benefit in sanctioning Russia because now it forces Europe to go to the only other diversified natural gas provider, which is us. So now we're making Europe buy a premium product from us because we have sanctioned

against them getting the cheaper product. And then, and then where's Ukraine getting its weapons from us? Let's go back to that. Are those going to be free? That's the lend-lease act the lend-lease act makes it so that we can lease them to Ukraine we're gonna lease an ak-47 and we're gonna lease howitzers we're gonna lease drones and guess what happens when that bill comes due Ukraine is now indebted to the United States haven't they already been indebted to us since like the beginning of their country because we took advantage of the Soviet Union collapsing that's how it works man nobody wants to talk about the conversation that we're not doing anything free in ukraine there's no moral compass that's driving us to protect ukraine we have a national security interest in combating russia through a proxy that's ukraine

we have a financial benefit in forcing other countries to indebt themselves to us for energy and weapons by supporting this conflict in ukraine like Biden and the Biden administration, they are doing some very wise financial things. Because how are we going to fight inflation in the future? You can't just shred dollar bills. The way that we combat inflation is we basically keep the currency set, but we increase the amount of people who have to have U.S. dollars. They have to have those dollars if they're going to pay back U.S. debt. That increases demand artificially. For the U.S. dollar, the increased demand increases the value decreases inflation but you raised the fear on this last time that was important where it's like well what if we're showing all the power we

have over one country in this case russia to say like oh look at us trying to cut you off now as you pointed out it seems to be backfiring in a way but you were saying what about all these other countries like oh shit well if it didn't backfire they'd have been fucked i don't want to take that risk so i'm going to take my money out of usd exactly so is it all worth it if that ends up being something that is legitimately possible because by the way we're at the precipice of a point where like digital currencies are becoming a thing digital currencies are dying right now not no no blockchain is central we'll get to that i want to hear your thoughts on that central bank we know why they're dying at the moment because it's in a bear market because there's attacks on it and the

attacks a lot of it are coming from beyond the the the realms of government buildings around the world because they're terrified of it and they want central bank digital that's true that is so we are at the precipice of them all these governments at the same time trying to be like are we going to do the same currency altogether which means now if the u.s loses its leverage with the dollar as you pointed out where it's like they could say oh well we definitely want to diversify even if we don't have the CBDCs figured out yet. We want to diversify away another country. We want to diversify away from the United States because God forbid we ever did something they didn't like. Look what they did to Russia.

And it's still hypocritical. All these countries are following along with it. But I see what you're saying because we're the big dog. Everyone is always trying to attack the big dog when they lose use for them like you're also now saying though that what biden's doing is smart to combat inflation so i'm saying it seems to fly a little bit in the face of each other unless one is just like it's a risk we're taking in order for him to get that the reason the market is is freezing right now the reason the market's all jacked up right now is because nobody knows how this is going to end it hasn't the future hasn't been written yet right if we if somehow sure about that

if somehow something happens and things can change in overnight in a conflict right if somehow something happens where russia's obliterated or russia stops and retracts who knows right the so the fall of the so Soviet Union was completely unexpected. It happened overnight. The Berlin Wall came down overnight. I remember watching it. 15% of the population caused it. That's it.

Because there was a movement. You could have a movement back then, right? Exactly. So my point is that it could happen overnight. So it's a very low probability that Russia will lose this conflict and Ukraine will win it. But if that low probability plays out, then everybody's going to back the United States.

The United States make the right call. United States dollar is going to grow. Ukraine is going to be indebted to the U.S. They'll pay that debt off by seizing things from Russia. NATO is going to start going to Ukraine for all their energy resources. Because guess where all Russian oil comes to? The primary place where Russian oil comes to a head, comes to a convergence in the pipelines, is in Ukraine.

So if Russia loses this conflict and Ukraine remains independent outside of Russia control, they will control the bottleneck of the pipelines carrying Russian oil. You know what, though? I don't want to lose this. Everybody wins there. I don't want to lose this, though.

There's 45 million people, to say nothing of some of the Russian people, too, obviously, who are caught in the middle of this and don't know what's going on. though there's 45 million people to say nothing like some of the russian people too obviously we're like caught in the middle of this and don't know what's going on but like there's 45 million people in ukraine too it is there this again this is where the nuance comes in is there a corrupt element of their government sure they're a post soviet country like there's all kinds of bullshit that happens over there we know this but like you have all these citizens who are in the middle of this where another nation is now invading them and shelling them with bombs and shit and killing kids and the united states is funding these weapons and training which i want to come back to and actually get more information on that but it's at the at the end of the day it's

like everything else in the world it's all just coming back to money true the whole thing's coming back to money so how did thing's coming back to money so how did they how did they close it out just a few minutes ago dude we were talking about there's three ways to look at the world right you can either be outraged that what you thought would work didn't work or you can be disappointed that people just aren't getting smarter or you can leverage the fact that well what what can I do right now to take advantage of this opportunity? The point that you can, what you just said to everybody listening is it all comes down to money. This is the point where everybody listening right now gets to make a choice. You get to choose right now. Will you bitch about what's already happened? Will you

be disappointed about what's happening now? Or will you take this lesson on and realize every conflict every did hiring decision every ad every application on your phone every video that you watch everything that you stream it all boils down to money so if you want to change your legacy if you want to do something different in the future if you want to change your family name from being a poverty stricken family name to being a wealthy family name, this is the first step. Realize the truth of the fact, which is everything comes down to money. Money drives it all because all money is is the physical representation of scarcity, a scarcity of resources.

Before money, it was eggs or it was firewood or it was water. It will always be something in a poke up post-apocalyptic world we're gonna argue we're gonna fight over during covid the currency was freaking n92 masks right yeah remember that garbage yeah and 95 masks there's always a current currency there's always something that represents scarcity there's always something that drives behavior it's it's money it's trade it's always something that drives behavior. It's money. It's trade. It's commerce.

I agree. At the ground level where you just put that, 100%, and yeah, some people aren't going to accept that. Now at the high level of nations, though, people are too stupid in groups, not individuals, in groups to accept that. You and I were talking about this downstairs before the podcast but like even in america where right now if politics are all shit we still have the best steaming pile of shit on stop on top of the steaming pile of shit right you do have two parties and what do the two parties want you said it yourself they want the other to not exist yeah so hypothetically if you didn't have one offset in the other oh boy the parties this is what's interesting the parties absolutely want each other to exist here's here's

what america's missing right now but the people don't the people right yeah the parties need the other one to exist because as long as the other one exists there's a common enemy to rally behind or rally against you have to have an enemy if you don't have an enemy people get lost and they wander right if you look at sheep and a, the only reason the sheep stay close to the shepherd is because they're afraid of the wolves. If sheep aren't being killed by wolves, if you actually had two, three generations of sheep where they had forgotten that there was any kind of threat out there, they wouldn't follow the shepherd. They wouldn't listen. They just wander. Yeah.

Yeah. Agreed. Right? So what we have in the United States, the reason that we are struggling so much right now, the reason that we're letting ourselves get distracted by the great resignation and whether or not there's enough representation in TV shows, the reason people are writing hate mail

about the new Buzz Lightyear movie, having a scene that suggests homosexuality, all this, the reason any of this matters is because we don't have a common enemy in the United States right now. In the United States. Yeah, we don't, as a is because we don't have a common enemy in the United States right now. In the United States? Yeah. We don't, as a country, we don't have a common enemy.

We don't. For a few weeks, Russia was a common enemy, but it was against Ukraine, which really wasn't us. And then over time, people realized what's happening over there doesn't impact me. We don't have a common enemy. We don't have... Are you saying we need one? We need one. If we had a common enemy, everything would change. That's what happened after 9 need one if we had a common enemy everything would change

That's what happened after 9-11. There was a common enemy Okay, but do you see that's what happened after 2008 there was a common enemy You know what? A lot of people are saying at home right now, and I can't blame them I don't care if it's the biggest conspiracy theorist in the world right um and I'm let's not even talk about them Let's talk about the reasonable people listening right now. They're going XCIA agent will right away. They're going, ex-CIA agent. Well, right away they go, well, that doesn't exist. No one's in it.

We can talk about that. No one's an ex-CIA. I don't know. I don't know. You look at the guy, you make a judgment. I'm not making a judgment. But I'm saying like you're ex-CIA. You worked in the government.

You worked in the system that recognizes there's bad out in the world. And you are just sitting there saying we need an enemy. The words, we need an enemy. I'm not putting words in your mouth yep right when you look at things like the military industrial complex and things about the laws of even like the laws of power with people and human beings having to constantly have a battle to fight right that's why peacetime creates wartime this is where people go why are we not evolving past this why can't we just be like no we don't need that now let me be clear by the way i am not an isolationist i recognize that war happens and you can't just be like well

man we don't want to do any wars like we're not going to do that that that world don't exist right you want to you want to say that world exists have fun smoking your sativa i'll smoke it with you and then go fucking watch the war happen yeah yeah however the whole like well let's go into iraq because he's got wmds that is where i go whoa baby we created an enemy right there iraq had nothing to do with 9-11 i'll still argue to just we could talk about afghanistan another time or whatever i'll still argue to this day that after 9-11 absolutely had to go into afghanistan the taliban was there they were harboring bin laden and all these people the conspiracy theorist won't tell you that but i'll tell you that like like they were but then we're like no we're gonna go to iraq we're gonna give no bid contracts to

halliburton where the fucking vice president happened to be the fucking CEO like five years ago. And people go, oh, you created – Saddam Hussein, bad guy. I'm not – I don't want to be misheard. Very bad guy. But, like, you created an enemy where we didn't need to have one. And so now you're saying that. So do you understand why people would judge that when they hear that? Yeah, so what I'm saying is not exactly what you're saying that. So do you understand why subdivide and they subdivide again and they start, they, they argue about whatever. They argue everything from buy local to, you know, you're a bad person if you hang this sign and you don't hang that sign or whatever it might be. They, they find

reasons to subdivide. The only way that we all ditch all these subdivisions is when we unify behind one large enemy. What happened in Iraq, you can't look at what happened in 2008 in Iraq without looking at what happened in Gulf War I in Iraq. We had a chance to take out Saddam Hussein in Gulf War I. And we didn't. And we didn't. Yeah.

Right? That was a practical decision. Anybody who's engaged with Khaliji culture at any point, the Gulf Muslim countries, if you've ever done anything in those countries and you understand, they're authoritarian countries. They need a strong tribal leader. Why?

Because without that, their whole system fails. It all falls apart. That's like somebody coming... But why don't they change the system? If somebody can't... Dude, that question is so big, it kind of... It almost... It reeks of like cultural lack of knowledge oh completely by the way completely that's why i asked the question all right complete because guess what you know who's never been to iraq me you know who's never been to saudi arabia me you know you know who's never been anywhere in fucking Africa or wherever the Middle East is as far as like where Asia touches Africa that whole region me gotcha

So I'm asking you this because there's a lot of people out there who are like me and haven't been there So fill us in culturally so if you consider the average Let's consider the typical 1950s era American family. All right, so we're going back to 1950s Eric Who was the head of household? The dad. The dad. Who, what was the mother's role?

Cook the food. Right? Yeah. And look good for the husband. And what was the kid's role? Chill. Be seen and not heard. Yeah, okay. Right?

And do what your parents say. So if you were to go to 1950s era American, typical American household, and you were to take the husband and father out, never to come back again, what would happen to that family?

The mother wouldn't have any idea how to do anything. She'd have no idea how to pay bills. She'd have no idea how to... She wouldn't be allowed leadership. She wouldn't be able to go get a job because in 1950s America, they couldn't, right? The whole thing would fall apart. The whole nuclear family would fall apart.

Kaleji culture is a tribal version of the night collegiate is your there's different types of of arabic cultures when it has when arab oil comes from or when arab wealth comes from oil those are called collegiate countries right you're you're bahrain you're you you're emirate you're emirates you're saudi arabia you're uh you're kuwait you're iraq all of those countries are collegiate tons of money tied up in oil heavily heavily tribal when a tribal so the tribes the family names tribes are defined by family names each family name essentially represents a patriarch a second in command or the kids saddam hussein was the patriarch of the entire country he was the he was essentially the father in their eyes culturally he was the father of the whole thing if we were to have taken him out in 1991 the whole thing would have fallen apart the whole the whole thing would

have gone just belly up we needed their oil we needed some kind of predictability opec wanted us to make sure that we kept things in in normal working order like it wasn't an option so obvious question to follow this up and again saddam hussein bad guy well aware all right bad dude living in hell right now god bless right same mistake in 2003 no because then we created sectarian violence we took all the sunnis and we said oh remember who's the one guy who's like ladies and gentlemen we got him that guy the fucking diplomat who ran who ran iraq for like 10 minutes or like felt like a decade and he made all these he's like if you're a sunni you are no longer allowed in government yeah that's not gonna piss off all the sunnis to fight against the shiites so we we took away the patriarch to you i'm just using your example here because you have a point by the way and i might

agree with your point in 91. I've never really thought about it, but that might be a good point. What changed, though, so that in 2003 we had to do that again? Because we made our – Saddam Hussein was regaining power again. He was recollecting – He never lost it, though. He never lost it, but he was gaining that independence again. He was no longer under the american thumb and so it there was an opportunity for us to to bolt on

a conflict and there's also economies of scale we're already deploying forces to those regions we might as well just go ahead and clean this up it's like when you go to the dentist because you have a cavity and the dentist is like you know your teeth are kind of yellow too and you're like oh i'm getting the cavity filled go ahead and whiten my. It's like when you go to the dentist because you have a cavity, and the dentist is like, you know, your teeth are kind of yellow too. And you're like, oh, I'm getting the cavity filled. Go ahead and whiten my teeth. Right. You're like, oh, we're already going all the way over there to fight in Afghanistan. We can just kind of clean this thing up real quick. You know what?

Here's a question I've never asked. I've never searched this on Google. I've never looked at this part of history. So this is a huge blind spot. We have the Gulf War in 91, right? 90, 91. Okay. Operation Iraqi Freedoms, 2003.

Okay. What was the U.S. and Saddam relationship in 1995? That's a good question. I don't know that there was much of a U.S.-Saddam relationship as much as there was a U.S and uh middle eastern relationship there was an oil relationship like did they ever get dinner maybe i don't know that's a great question that is a google worthy question i don't know this is my next rabbit hole i i don't know but that's that's a good point because obviously he never changed he was the same motherfucker but like what what

gets you to that point because they took this night like you said, and I agree with that point. They're like, well, we're already over there. Let's go in there. Yeah. To me, it's all money. So you got it. You know, Dick Cheney had pictures of George Bush in compromising positions. There's no way anyone else would have had that kind of power in that White House or stayed two terms.

But like he's like, oh, oh fuck we can give a no bid to halliburton let's go into iraq you know who the fuck cares about them that's all it seems because to me like saddam was bad in 91 he was bad in 2003 nothing changed like i'm gonna have to go look at it but nothing changed in between i know his sons were i've looked at them before his sons were psychopaths right like i think they they had the biggest when we went into iraq i read this the other day when we went into iraq they pulled off the biggest bank heist in world history they went to like the downtown bank in baghdad with like a truck and they withdrew a billion dollars like this is the world we were dealing with and it never changed and yet somehow we were like well bin laden hit our buildings we're gonna go after saddam so let's take it and apply it to right now

right what happens in russia if putin is unseated the guy who runs the fsb i forget his name allegedly that will be the guy put in charge which is your point that he's not great we have no idea we have no idea what will happen will it actually will it will it follow the rule of order and fall to whoever the next is in the chain of command or will somebody else creep up we don't have any idea what's going to happen the constitution will have to change but that doesn't seem is russia going to follow its constitution yeah it doesn't seem hard and even, so what happens if whoever takes over? Let's not even say the worst, the nightmare scenario is somebody replaces Putin who's worse than Putin.

That's the nightmare scenario. Anybody who's ever tried to neutralize a terrorist cell knows that that's a question you have to ask. If we kill the cell leader, who takes over? It's a terrifying question to ask. Because what if the next person's crazier? What if the next person's worse? Or smarter.

Right, or smarter, right? Or more politically savvy, who knows what. But the better question, the bigger question mark on the world, what if the person's actually totally incompetent? Is the world ready for Russia to become completely dependent on foreign aid? Is the world ready for the Russian Soviet states to become even more poverty stricken? Is Europe ready to divert all that money, all that effort, all that time, all the social welfare, all the resources into holding up, propping a completely failed Russian state? I think the answer is no.

And these are the questions that we have to make. These are the answers that you have to come to, the questions that we have to make. These are the answers that you have to come to, the questions that you have to ask, and the decisions that you have to make are about what is the real outcome that we want here? Do we really want Putin out of power and somebody worse in power? Do we want to run the risk of somebody

who's an absolute incompetent taking power and then the whole state fails? What is it that we want do we want to claim that there's something wrong with you know taking the sovereignty of a country away like russia's trying to do in ukraine only to then invade russia and take their sovereignty away what what is the what is the end game here what is the long play when you're when you have a strong man leader like Putin, that, that decision lies on one person's shoulders. He doesn't have to convince anybody. He just goes. But when you're a democracy or when you're an alliance like NATO, everybody has a voice. And that's why you start to

see Boris Johnson doesn't always agree with Mark, with Macron and Macron's losing popularity in France. And Boris Johnson just barely survived the vote of no confidence in the UK Biden's at an all-time like historical low for all presidents at this point in time in terms of approval ratings if you look at the western world we suck right now and our own populations are telling us that Macron lost the the dominant seat in his in France Boris Johnson barely survived a vote of no confidence but they also haven't had good like that's the other thing like the alternatives like macron was running against marine le pen again like they're getting the worst alternatives biden beat donald trump the biden i keep trying to explain this to people like i'm very confident

in this so i the word explain is strong so let me back off that i keep trying to explain this to people. Like, I'm very confident in this. So the word explain is strong. So let me back off that. I keep trying to attempt to convince some people who look at this ballot and go, Biden got 81 million votes. I'm like, no, no, no. It's not Biden who got them. The ballot said Trump and not Trump. Yeah. Not Trump got 81 million votes.

God damn right he did. And like you look at this and you go, look at all these other countries as well and the options that they're putting on the table. So like, does Macron, does he seem great? I guess not. But does Johnson seem great? I guess not. But like, what else are they putting? So the point is they hate everybody. And my point is that we're so wrapped up looking at our own dirty laundry

that we're ignoring the fact that Putin is just the neighbor looking through the front living room window, looking at us, looking at our dirty laundry. Confused. Because we don't know how to wash our laundry. And then what Putin's doing is he's then clicking on a little radio and talking to his friend Xi Jinping over in China. And he's then clicking on a little radio and talking to his friend xi jinping over in china he's like oh my gosh are they friends these guys are so

fucked up right now are they friends what what does it look like to you are they friends they signed an alliance together two months before russia invaded but then after they invaded and and and then china publicly said that uh that we did not know there was going to be an invasion and then progra and then ex immediately went to the u.n and prevented the u.n from blocking any uh putting any pressure keeping russia out of a conversation with the u.s i'll buy i wanted you to explain it but i've seen like i think anything that came out of china this is just my opinion and i'm going to agree with you on this i think anything that came out of China, this is just my opinion, and I'm going to agree with you on this. I think anything that came out of China that was net negative Russia was a planned PR stunt. I think they stayed net neutral until the West forgot about Ukraine.

And now they're sweeping back in and they're doing their thing. And what are they doing? So they're an outlet for rubles. They're a source of trade. So they're doing, they still have commerce going back and forth with Russia Are they buying a lot of oil from Russia? They because they still have energy needs and now they can get cheaper oil from Russia than they can anywhere else Cuz and I don't want to make this too complicated because I do like this

vein get into China with some of this like what their play is because when you talk like if we're gonna go with your route of like a common enemy and whatever Russia's got a lot of reasons for that for sure i pay close attention to them but like you did say something in the last podcast that rings in my head because god damn is it true when you look at world history and i never thought of it this simply but you said gdp is the only thing that matters and china's gdp is the one that like matters to look at so china's a key player but China will be the unifying enemy against the United States they will be they're not there yet we're gonna talk about that I just want to make

sure we cover this before we get all the way there you were you were you started this whole thing with the Iraq and Russia comparison which in some ways is absolutely fair for like considerations of what are the true motives behind going in there? What do we cause upon their people and their leadership? And you were talking about like the power vacuum that could happen as a result. Like we took out Saddam. What happened? What will happen if we take out Putin? The only thing is like Iraq had I think like 25 million people in the country at the time of invasion in 2003.

Russia had 145 million or 150 million people, and it's not as – Russia is not as big as people think. Like it has the GDP of Italy, but like it's still towards the top ranks of the world. So it's up there, and I i think that the putting the two of them together if we're going to compare those two invasions strictly by demographics and gdp they are different okay so if we're looking at this through the lens of like russia's bigger and more important how can we say that i want to say this right because i don't want to be misheard i don't want to i don't want people thinking like they're gonna miss hear you. Anyways, they're gonna miss hear me Anyways, but how do we how do we put that in a way where people can't say?

Well exactly what I just did like the context like we're comparing apples to apples But here's what's here's the difference the difference is that between 2003 and 2023 2022 doesn't get right right the difference is in those 20 years we learned we learned did we it it was a direct invasion by u.s forces into iraq yes direct invasion what's happening in russia is a proxy war with ukraine as a cutout if if russia falls because ukraine defeats russia that's not a direct invasion by the United States if Russia falls because internal oligarchs and political ramifications basically melt down the the

The the autocracy of it all or the authoritarian rule of it all that's not on us right from from the optics of history It was an internal revolution that tore down Russia not a foreign invasion That's where we learned our lesson and who did we learn that lesson from my friend? We learned that lesson from watching China and from watching Iran wage proxy wars to gain national National interest for the last ten years can you elaborate on that for people who are confused right now yeah so so iran has been actively uh in conflict in uh in the middle east in africa through their proxy hezbollah hezbollah is funded by iran so instead

of the iranian military going and doing things they just pay money pay money to an extremist group called Hezbollah. And Hezbollah goes and does whatever they're going to do. And it just happens that Hezbollah's activities advance Iranian national interests. The Chinese have been doing the same thing, only they do it through funding infrastructure and development projects in poor third world countries where they can basically get those third world countries to then put pressure on each other they've been really active in africa so can you explain how this happens so a a proxy is basically a cutout yes so if china wants uh if china wants uh kampala uganda to comply with some chinese policy they can either force uganda to comply or they can fund malicious activity out of a place like congo to put pressure on uganda with the intent being that eventually uganda is going to is going to cave to the same policy that china wants

that's called a proxy conflict. Syria is a proxy conflict. U.S. wants to weaken Russia. Bookmark that. We'll come back to that. Russia wants to weaken the U.S., so they fight in Syria. It's a civil war in Syria that nobody seems to remember is still happening, because we're all worried about Ukraine. Oh, I do.

I pay attention to Syria. Close. So this is the future of conflict. The pay attention to Syria. Close. then Ukraine. It was the old guard. It didn't want to do proxy conflict because it had an economically compelling reason to snatch land and then bring that land back into the fold to increase the gross domestic product, to increase the economic output of Russia. So that's why they needed land. The rest of us don't need land. We need influence. So we gain influence through proxy fights because then we get to maintain deniability and distance as a country. China gets to maintain deniability. The United States gets to maintain deniability, distance.

We're not invading a sovereign country. They're figuring their stuff out. We're siding with freedom. Right? That's what it is. The other way that I think would be valuable to explain though like you you just went through the actual creating conflict part of that but at the start of it you mentioned something really important that i don't know enough about and i think a lot of people it's not really reported

on and stuff but you talked about like infrastructure and the influence there so my friend kevin gallagher has been on this podcast looks at this all the time and he's like he's been pounding the table for some years now like china has bought up all these ports all these different basic infrastructure projects so like like- Water, energy, roadways, highways, mineral deposits, mining operations, all over the third world. Do they call it, maybe I'm misremembering this, but they call it like the Silk Road Initiative? The BRI, the Belt and Road Initiative.

That's it, the Belt and Road Initiative. So when they do this, my understanding, and I might be wrong about this, is that they'll often put countries in a position to be in debt to them that they know they can't repay which will cost china on like some currency matters and financial matters obviously but it makes those countries beholden to them so because they're they're buying they're working public deals that involve the governments there they then can tap on these governments in the future say like it's like it's like a loan shark we uh we need you to

do this now exactly and they're buying influence in south america europe africa south asia everywhere right that's exactly right so uh it's really easy because if you watch how the money flows, China goes to a third world country that already has a corrupt leader. They say, hey, corrupt leader, you want to stay in power. We're going to help you stay in power by bringing you clean water, renewable energy, and new highways. You can go tell the people that this was your idea. We're going to bring in Chinese workers. We're going to build the whole thing out. And in exchange, you're going to give us 99 year lease or 999 year lease so that we can always have employees there. And we'll always

be there to maintain and manage this resource so that the whole time you're in power, you always look good because you're the leader that brought clean water and cheap power and new highways to your people. And then of course, in a corrupt third world country, they're going to say, well, you're going to bring me all this stuff. I'm going to look good to my people. What do I have to give you? And China's going to say, you don't have to give us anything. We'll even pay you a rent to stay on that property so that you have currency coming in. All we need you to do is let us have access to this location. We get priority for whenever we ship things in, whenever we ship things out. And we want you to know that we're building a long-term relationship with your

country because we believe that you'll be a future leader of whatever, Africa, Latin America, East Asia, whatever it might be. Those corrupt leaders are all day long. They're going to say, yes, you're giving me money. You're giving me something. You're giving me personally money. You're giving me the leverage over my people to show that I shouldn't be unseated, whether democratically or through some sort of coup or whatever else, right?

You're giving me power because what my people want in a third world country is clean water energy basic stuff basic stuff right and they can just do that over they can carbon copy that all around the world and all these countries where we can't do it it was at the g7 summit that just happened we can't do it or we won't we can't here's why at the g7 meeting that just happened the g7 summit that just it's still actively rolling right now it'd be over by the time this goes live at that summit the western the g7 partners the g7 allies all agreed they were going to create their own infrastructure project to compete against the bri now here's the problem in the west will you if our government invests money in a third world country, it can't be corrupt.

There's anti-corruption laws. We can't invest in a corrupt government. We can't strike the same deals China can strike. And even worse, we have to make sure that the investment yields a positive ROI. If it doesn't yield a positive ROI, we can't secure funding year after year to keep paying for that that uh event or we can't keep paying for that initiative china doesn't have any of those restrictions they don't need an roi they don't have to worry about corruption or or intense corruption or lack of corruption they don't have any of those limitations all of our western countries have those limitations by our

own embedded set of laws goes back to the same argument you were saying would like torture right and then and then you also have to Have all seven members of the g7 agree if six agree. It's not seven They're trying to raise six hundred billion US dollars. I think right now trying to raise it China just pulls a trigger and it's there So if you put yourself Let me just think of it like a normal person if somebody knocks on your door tomorrow and says i'm gonna put solar panels on your roof i'm gonna make your energy cheaper i'm gonna make i'm gonna give you uh an automatic beer dispenser in your living room that i pay for

and and you just tell me what beer you want and it's gonna be there right and all i ask is that when i come after friday some fridays after work i might come over and get a beer on my way home. You cool with that? Yeah, dude, come on over any Friday you want, right? In the meantime, you're throwing keg parties all the time because your friends are coming up from down the street. Everybody thinks you're the coolest guy in town and it doesn't cost you a dime. People are going to sign up for that all day long, especially places that are hurting for resources. We can't compete directly with that. We can try.

And then even worse, the official spokesperson for the Chinese, uh, for the Chinese foreign ministry of foreign services. Yeah. Ministry of foreign services. That person came out and said, we applaud the West for taking an initiative and finally getting involved in third world infrastructure projects, which they give a flying fuck about but but internationally china just said we've been doing this for 20 years good job the west for finally coming up and recognizing chinese leadership and they don't give a fuck about any of it just like they don't give a fuck about human

remember the we don't we don't either what do you mean we don't either do you think we care about third world development no do you think do you think the china the u.s government doesn't oh right i know i was going to talk about the next thing i'll agree with that i'm saying the second thing i was going to say you remember the video this was maybe two years ago now but at the china got a seat on the human rights Council. Oh my gosh, I remember that. At the UN. You remember the diplomat, whoever the fuck he was? He comes out and he gives like a 10 bullet point list of advice he has for the United States to properly address human rights and racial issues. Shit. And it's like, they know we're so stupid stupid i'm not just talking about the u.s like the world is so

stupid that we'll listen to this and a few people retweet it and be like yeah man sounds right they've got a they've got a really good point there number when they have literal concentration camps in their country of their own people they're called re-education camps but yes yeah and it's like this is this is where the argument comes in so let me start with the naive me on this you'll love this i look at the rush i look i look at the russia thing that happens and the naive me the little julian the little kid julian goes oh my god this is the best opportunity ever you have a far right-wing government in russia their neighbor is a far left-wing government in china china is going is a far left-wing government in China.

China is going to have some sort of alliance with them in this whole Ukraine thing. And we're going to be able to say, look, you see why fascism and communism are both bad. Look, and everyone will learn a lesson. And then the adult Julian comes in and goes, no, we're too dumb to do that. No one's going to learn that lesson. And instead, what to continue to happen because it's already been happening is governments like that right left same shit they're going to use and i'm going to go by the way this goes right to your torture argument i'm arguing for you you can take me in context to argue for you in this case and i'm not arguing for you as i didn't earlier but i'm saying like you could use my words against me here but they're going to use our focus on freedoms and democracy

and rights and human rights and issues and arguing for this and that and this political issue and that political issue and inject that they will inject the vibes into us through the internet. Like they'll play right into that with their hacking into culture and conversation just like they did over the past decade. And in reality, in their country, if anyone did this shit, they'll fucking kill them. But here they can say, oh, like this is the shitty part about having a totalitarian regime as bad as it is and as they all end up ending in The process they can end Democracies because they can use the powers of democracy against themselves to turn it around like a goddamn weapon at someone's head So what you're talking about right now is covert influence and the way the covert influence works is like this, right?

People think that covert influence happens when somebody creates a cause out of thin air That's not how it works covert influence happens when you go into an area that already has two conflicting causes and then what you do is you actively fund or support both sides of the conflict and then the conflict it gets the conflict sparks a fire that gets hotter and larger and people fight more and more and more. And all of a sudden the, the outcome doesn't have to be anything predictable. The outcome just has to be predictable chaos. That's how covert influence happens. So what you're saying is exactly right. If China wants to run a covert influence campaign against the U S it just finds two, it finds an issue that's already causing a divide inside the United States. It creates fake accounts that support both sides.

It offers funding covertly to both sides. And then it lets the conflict rage. Meanwhile, back in its own country, when it has dissidents against its own government, it squeezes them, makes them disappear, keeps everything quiet, washes over it with a message that says, hey, we're still unified. And by the way, look at what's happening in the United States as they burn each other

to the ground. That's covert influence. To your point, that's using democratic values against you. I absolutely believe that in the United States, democracy is the best solution. Representative democracy has served us well. It's going to have to continue to evolve. Career politicians, they don't do us well. People who can run without term limits in Congress,

that doesn't serve us well. Presidentially appointed justices, that does not do us well. Do you see this changing? It has to change if we are going to continue to evolve and remain the world's greatest superpower but the people who make the laws are they going to put terms on themselves projections right now projections right now are that china will become the global superpower economically by the end of 2025 yeah that's why they have the plan

china 2025 so we i think it's a 2040 plan i think they have one called i know they have one called china 2025 too they may have a 2040 so so all of that to say we're at that place now where if we don't evolve we're going to get outpaced well we're fucked because all the people in congress are incentivized against enacting legislation to put things like term limits in which also then directly affects the other stuff you were talking about like lobbyist money influence all that stuff because if you don't have the same people to buy off you're dealing with new people so when I was getting

when I was getting my master's degree at University of South Florida we had the congressional representative to Hillsborough County come in and speak to our class she was a woman I forget her name right now. When was this? Uh, 2018. So this is post CIA, post CIA.

I was getting my masters. You know, she's full of shit. So she comes in and she's speaking to our economic class about whatever and about the future of Hillsborough County and what do you, yeah, yeah. She's the congressperson.

And then she's like, I really want to make sure that I represent everyone's voice here and and if you've ever been in graduate school graduate school is basically still undergrad because 90 of the people in there are just undergrads who didn't know what they were going to do next i'm a 40 year old guy in my graduate students in my graduate studies class right x spy killer so i'm sitting back there and she's like i want you guys just raise your hands and tell me what do you want me to take with me back to the hill so that i can better represent you what are the what are the issues that you most want to see changed in your country and you know

she's there's 40 people in my class three people raise their hand one woman raises her hand and she's got something about you know about, about human rights and about, you know, recognizing whatever social justice stuff. Right. Another lady raises her hand and because the ladies, the women in the class were the only ones that said anything. The dudes just sat there like, I'm getting credit for just sitting here doing nothing. So I raise my hand. I love how you say like human rights. Like rolling your eyes.

So then she sees me and she's like what would you like me to take back to the hill i was like i'd really like you to go back and champion term limits for congress people and she just looked at me and she was like well you know that that's not something that i would want to do oh she said that oh yeah she was like it what i want to serve the people of hillsborough county for as long as they'll have me there she said that and She was like, I want to serve the people of Hillsborough County for as long as they'll have me there. She said that? And I was like, but I'm the constituent, and I would like you to go back and champion for term limits on Congress people. And then she just got this awkward smile, and I loved my economics teacher.

My economics teacher, Dr. Harris, Dr. Rebecca Harris, if she's out there. She's the bomb teacher. And she just sat there and looked at me, and she had a big smile on her face because she knew that I was the class irritant. Were you out at this point? Yeah. CIA? Yep. Yeah, yeah. And she just smiled and she was like, I knew that you were going to be the one that asked the asinine question that made it so the congresswoman will never

come back to my class again. With her big smile, it was perfect. I almost have to respect the fact that she had the balls to say that to you. She said the quiet part out loud. Exactly right that's exactly right and we've talked about this before what did biden do when he was in poland and he said we cannot allow putin to remain in power he said the quiet part out loud politicians are just like people they're people they're everyday people what do you mean that he was saying his true agenda out loud but that was just a popular thing to say then he'd invaded Ukraine and he's like we can't let Putin say

That's what everyone was saying. So so then do you also remember about two weeks after that when the director or that when the Secretary of Defense on a another stand I think also in Poland it may have been in Poland may have been in Germany Said something about how? We really want to support Ukraine because we want to see Russia weakened. What's happening in this conflict is we're not really good at proxy war yet. China's good at proxy war, Iran's good at proxy war, we're not good at it yet.

So sometimes we forget that sometimes politicians forget that there's conversations that you need to have behind closed doors that should never reach the public ear. They don't think like that. They absolutely think like that. Let's go right back to our conversation about torture at CIA. Have you seen the cable traffic that was released about that? Cable traffic. Cable traffic is what we call official documentation inside CIA.

Official documentation inside CIA had write-ups. Non-redacted. Non-redacted. Freedom of Information Act, right? Pulled them out, pulled them to the public eye during the investigation

where we actually had written correspondence from Jose Rodriguez to his secretary, Gina Haspel, saying... She was his secretary? She was his saying she was his secretary she was his secretary come on she was his number two in command right his executive officer i think we call it oh my god right saying it's too perfect if the world sees these videos it's going to be really hard for us

to walk this back so what we need to do guys is destroy all these videos and then you've got official correspondence from gina haspel going back to rodriguez saying i agree with you sir we'll make sure that these things are immediately destroyed and then a follow-up receipt that says these things have been immediately destroyed everything's good to go now that is because at least at cia low-level government employees we were were... And granted, they were pretty high at the time. Director CTC, XOCTC, Counterterrorism Center, CTC. They recognize that there are certain things that the public should never find out about.

And they wrote it down in official correspondence saying the public should never find out about this. There's even formal correspondence from the legal team at Counterterrorism Center saying, we have read the correspondence between Gina Haspel and Jose Rodriguez, and we also agree that there is no reason legal team at counterterrorism center saying we have read the correspondence between gina haspel and jose rodriguez and we also agree that there is no reason the public should ever have to see why people have a problem with that if people have a problem with that these are these are

this is correspondence that's made available to the public right now what the hell do you have a problem with it's made public right now but're saying, but what it was secret at the time, it's public right now. Sure. But what the public thinks about the stuff that they then covered up is that, oh, it must have been really bad. They must have committed a lot of fucking crimes. And they're on some of it. They're not wrong.

So that I'm just, I'm looking at it. I'm looking at it from the Joe Blow seat. Right. Right. Like, and I'm Joe Blow, by the way. And that's okay. There's a reason that Joe Blow is entrusted with National Security Secrets. You sure about that?

Jim DiIorio didn't, no, don't make any sense. Jim DiIorio is not Joe Blow. I've met the guy too. I know, I was saying, I made a joke, it didn't come across. But yeah, but what I'm saying saying is what we're seeing is that jose rodriguez and gina hasmell who went on to become director of ncs and director of cia yeah these two individuals were able to demonstrate their efficiency at keeping secrets and hiding things from the public that would ultimately do damage to the reputation of CIA. Joe Biden and Secretary of Defense, is it Aaron?

It's Lloyd Austin. Lloyd Austin. Thank you. Get Jim talking about Lloyd Austin. That's a great conversation. These two individuals, they accidentally said what they should have said behind closed doors, they said it in public. And then immediately after the PR engine of the administration came out and they were like, oh, for sure Joe Biden didn't say anything about regime change. For sure Mr. Secretary didn't say anything about weakening Russia. Like this is all over again.

It's just like we were talking before. This is the Obama-Romney debates happening all over again. Obama tells Romney, you said this last week. Romney says, no, I didn't. Essentially you have the Secretary of Defense saying, we want to see Ukraine weaken Russia. We think it's a good thing. I didn't say that and then you have the PR person saying he didn't say that Meanwhile

Little waves my friend. These are little waves on a shallow beach because everybody knows in about four days It's gonna roll over no one's gonna no one's gonna remember this anymore Anybody who takes us to Google right now? You're gonna find five or seven articles in a in a period of three days and then that's it and then it wasn't newsworthy anymore how much of this kind of thing though like the news cycle better stated the reactions and speed and shifts of the news cycle is shaped by foreign governments. Not as much as you would think. Here's what's nice about the news cycle, right? The news cycle is extremely predictable because the news has to sell.

They have to sell. If they don't sell, they die. So they have to talk about whatever people want to hear about. People never want to hear a good news story. That's not what makes them click. No. Tragedy porn. People want to hear a good news story. That's not what makes them click now tragedy porn people want to hear about whatever said

So if you have a hundred if you have a hundred good things and three bad things Then the news is gonna talk all day long about the three bad things And then if the three bad if one of the three bad things gets better Then the news is gonna say guys we got to find something bad We got to find it quick and they're gonna go dig in and they they're going to be looking under stuff and they're going to find something they can explode into a bigger deal than it really is like oh i think that there was recently a recall on kellogg's cheerios whatever right or general mills cheerios in this city and then they're going to have some headline that says massive recall of america's favorite cereal and now all of a sudden we're going to eat that up.

So that's foreign countries. They don't even have to mess around. They don't have to make crap up. All they have to do is just like we talked about with covert influence, they just keep feeding the existing divide because it's going to continue to create more bad news that the news cycle is going to stick onto because they want to sell more news there's nothing i don't believe in in a uh a conspiratorial liberal media that doesn't exist what do you mean by that media is just media everybody out there who's like oh media is all liberal and you know it's been corrupted by people at the deep state and whatever else all these crazy conspiracies that are out there they're over they're over giving too much credit to the media well now you have the internet too and you have a lot of right-wing media you have a you know i'm saying like i i'll agree with you in the sense

that there's there's a bias there's there's no matter where it is there's always a bias but the bias isn't there because the media sources are trying to push an agenda. The bias is there because the media sources want to feed information to the audience that's already there. So you think it's no agenda? There's no agenda. Right? If I sell guns and ammo, do I wanna... do I wanna put my ad on conservative media or on liberal media?

I wanna put my ad on conservative media. Sure. Why do I wanna put it there? Because it's a bunch of put my ad on conservative media. Why do I want to put it there? Because it's a bunch of people who believe in conservative values. So if I'm a news editor and I want a story to run that's got four ads in it, right?

I want to make sure that story that runs is served to the audience that already is interested in it. So it turns into this, you're feeding people the thing that they want. Right. Over and over again, which eradicates the incentive for giving them an opposing point of view. If you gave them an opposing point of view, you run the risk that they're not going to

read it. They're not going to see the ads. You're not going to get the CPM. You're not going to be able to close. You're not going to get the ad account back for the next issue or the next edition or the next month, whatever it might be. So to keep business alive media lost its way when there was a law there was a law that was that they let expire in like the 1970s it was that required during the reagan during the reagan administration that required

fair and unbiased news yep right that expired and and from there was born the inner the um talk talk show media right so once that happened everything transformed the fairness doctrine the fairness doctrine yep so once that happened you didn't have any incentive anymore for news sources to be fair and unbiased instead the incentive was to be more biased and more unfair, so that they could really entrench the audience, so they could have the massive, like, the most reliable, largest audience pool possible. And it marries people to ideas. It just... it cements the ideas they already have.

Yes. And it creates new ones, but yes. It creates new ones in a way where they have the news media believes there's a high probability someone will already believe in the thing because they're believing in something else. If someone believes in gay marriage, you can kind of also imagine that they probably also believe in protecting the environment. And you can kind of also believe that they probably, they probably also want to see equal pay with women and men. And so whenever you want to write a story about any of those topics, you feed it to a specific audience that you already know has a higher probability of potentially being interested in that subject. I think we've gotten more because of mass media and the internet. I think we've gotten more predictable with that stuff whereas i think 15 years ago you could be very likely to find someone who was like hardcore

pro-second amendment also happen to be hardcore gay marriage hardcore school choice but also have it to be hardcore green energy today like i'm a weirdo with some stuff because not necessarily those exact examples i gave but like i have some weird like yeah i'm here i'm here i'm here but there aren't a lot of people like that like the data says you're you're like a big second amendment guy you think climate change is a hoax i'm maybe that's a little far but like you see what i'm saying like it's exactly like you put it you can say if this then that then that then that then that and something's happened there where i think it is not just even the mainstream media but like the algorithmic media coming at people it says wait i think this i'm well these are the

people who support the one two or three three things i care about so i need to get behind everything they they think. Right. The algorithm does that because the algorithm wants to serve ads. Yes. Right? There are absolutely people out there who have independent, strong values in both conservative and liberal camps. There are people out there all over the place that are like that. Just as proof of concept uh once you cross

i think it's 280 000 a year once you cross 280 000 a year most people become pretty staunchly liberal once you cross a net worth of two million dollars a year or more they switch back to being conservative the fuck i never heard that before, so I because what so because when people there's a There's a guilt that comes with wealth So when people become wealthy they feel like they don't deserve the wealth wealthy, but not powerful wealthy, but not powerful They feel like they don't deserve the wealth so then they're like well I've got to start giving back the whole idea of giving back is flawed at its core empirically the evidence shows you cross a certain number a certain wealth threshold and then you start feeling like you have to give back and you do that by by supporting social welfare by doing

all this other stuff it's also proven that you're so busy when you make that much money you're so busy that you don't want to pick the charities that you donate to instead you just want to pay more money to the government so the government can fix it for you. So you have no problem being taxed at 32% or whatever it is right now for people who make that much money, right? You just feel guilty about being wealthy. But then what happens at two?

Once you cross $2 million net worth, now you actually, those are people who have the skill in being able to create wealth from an idea. You can't be an employee and make two million dollars net worth you can be an employee and make three hundred thousand dollars you can be a doctor for a hospital you can you know there's also you can be an attorney for a practice just to defend you there's exceptions to this you're saying like in general yeah in general like empirically the numbers will show this out if you if you look at if you look at at the divide between political leanings and income,

you'll see it play out right there. People under 50K, I think it's under 50 or 60K, almost majoritively Republican. Majoritively. And then from 60 to like 110 or something like that, then you have a liberal swing. And then from 110 to 250 or 280 you have a conservative swing and then they cross 280 they go back and forth based on their wealth it's because

people are all fucked up about money yeah right and it's because what is every little kid taught every little kid whose parents don't have money every little kid's taught money isn't everything money isn't everything you don't need money to be happy and then money to be happy. And then what happens when those people get money? What happens when they do everything else that mom and dad tell them to do? They go to college, they get a good job, they work hard, all of a sudden they have money. They don't know what the shit to do with it.

Or they take on debt that they can't pay and they don't have any money. Or they, yeah, they have net worth because they have debt. Yeah. Yeah, but once you get to two million, now you have people, net worth two million, these are people who know how to make money from ideas.

They wake up one day, they're like, I'm going to do this thing. I'm going to sell it here, market it this way. I'm going to have my attorneys look at it this way, yada, yada, yada, and then it's going to turn into money. They know how to make money, so then now they want to build legacies that will outlive them. That's why when you get to people who are worth hundreds of millions of dollars, when you get to those people who are worth billions of dollars, that the reason they seem like they don't care what anybody thinks is because they don't care what anybody thinks. They have so much confidence in their ability to take a concept,

like pluck it out of thin air, and turn it into limitless money. Because they've already done it once. They can do it again. So they don't, in that case, you're saying they're more likely to be conservative because they don't want a government involved in their ability to do that they they but what about also convalence they no longer fall under the conservative or liberal agendas at all now they just want their own agenda so they can buy off whatever's convenient whatever's going to work for them i agree with that yeah they have so much money and power that they realize it's like i mean look at look at elon musk right now the dude has so much money what do you think of that so much power he's basically able to swing entire markets for himself yeah what do you think of him purchasing a public square uh i mean i think so elon musk's moves over the last

six months from the potential hostile takeover of twitter to firing people from tesla like i mean all the stuff that must does i i feel like it's representative, it's reflective of a pioneer who has more money than anybody ever thought a single person could have. More value. More wealth. Because he doesn't have it in dollars and cents in the bank. He has it wrapped up in three different companies.

He has done things that so many people thought were impossible. He's done them. So he just doesn't. Now he's just the only high, the only rush that exists for Elon Musk is doing more things that people think are impossible. Right? Having the power to basically send a tweet and watch the world burn. It's not his world, right? His world is like whatever he values in his head head which is really hard to conceptualize what's

an elon musk's head if i could conceptualize if i could think like elon musk i'd be wealthy i'm still studying trying to figure out how to be that crazy right right so there's no you can't make sense of that kind of thing his wealth is tied to the fact that he can make sense of what you're thinking he can predict what you're going buy he can predict that people are gonna buy a fifty thousand dollar electric car that isn't even in production yet that's three years behind schedule and they'll still buy it he also does have to rely on public things though too like you know he's got spacex right it's all government contracts you know so like even a guy that powerful who's doing some wild shit right now, we'll see how it pans out. I think some of the way he's done it's imperfect, but I understand exactly what he's trying to do.

And so the motivations I would like to agree with. I think they're really good. But you still have someone who has to play the game. Even at that level of power, he's the richest man on paper. I do like to remind people that a lot of it's in in stock more than most other very rich people at his similar level and obviously we don't know how rich everyone in saudi is so that's a whole nother thing but like and the uae but either way like he's very very rich he's very very powerful And yet he still has to answer to bigger bodies. He's not totally alone. Like he tries to act that way and fuck if I respect it, but like government says, Elon, we don't like this. Your contract is going to get pulled. He's got a problem. He knows the government can't say that.

Why not? What's their other option? Jeff Bezos. Does he have a rocket that can launch into space? Yes. I didn't knowos does he have a rocket that can launch into space yes i didn't know jeff i believe that could launch into space i believe so i might be wrong about that so but he could get one he can get one you don't think jeff can get one so here's the thing so jeff got biceps the guy was a nerd tenure jeff will get what he wants, man. So if I can make a book recommendation. Please.

Peter Thiel, who was one of Elon Musk's partners. Zero to one. If you read one chapter of Zero to One, read the one chapter that has to do with real life monopolies, and you understand exactly what made every one of those guys wealthy. That's what Elon Musk is. He's in the market of build a Monopoly take it for everything it's worth because he knows monopolies are actually legal in

the United States when you are the first to bring something to market yes so that's what he did space I struggle with that a lot first I don't struggle with that at all that's what makes America amazing man could you imagine if we actually prevented people from creating innovation that was disruptive if we if we argued that it was so unfair to the existing status quo you basically have soviet russia i want to give people context just so they can follow what we're saying and appreciate this you're referring to the specific point in there where peter teal makes the argument using the korean restaurants in los angeles saying like if there's seven korean restaurants in los angeles why the

would i want to open the eighth i'm gonna compete on price and like the latest deal or whatever location right and in reality i'm not competing on something that's new i'm going into a red ocean an ocean filled with blood not a blue ocean that's wide open and no one's been in it so the end argument is that monopolies are good. And monopolies are legal because they incentivize people to create new innovations. The whole reason we have patents, patents are just a legalization of monopoly. If I invent something new, I can file a patent that protects you from even copying my thing for the next 10 years. That's a guaranteed legally approved monopoly. But let's play this out.

The long-term monopoly. That's what happens when the patent expires. That's when drugs go generic. I'm sorry. I should have said that different. Before that, assume the patent never expires for a second, which isn't real. But just like, look at Standard Oil. Standard Oil grew so fucking big that they didn't even have like, I don't think they had like a lot of patents.

It was just they controlled. He was so big he vertically integrated. He bought everything. Rockefeller integrated, right? And so then the government, and I'll actually agree with this, like the buck has to stop somewhere. You can say out of the same mouth like, ooh, governments are usually like overall groupthink incompetent type bodies, but would you rather it stop with them or the free market corporations who, if they get a pure monopoly like that, can leave everyone behind and tell them to go fuck themselves and you have no vote in the matter? I'll take that because like when they antitrusted the fuck out of Standard Oil, it gave us all these different companies that are – they're oligarchs let's call it what it is like it's it's not a hell of a lot better but it's better it's it's not one it's multiple right like i'll take that i think that's a good deal

so i think standard oil was taken apart in the 1930s something like that right i'll look it up so 90 something years ago if you fast forward to like it was a very different world back then again you got to take it in context of time because technology wasn't advancing so quickly you could disrupt an entire industry and i'm pretty sure that the reason that rockefeller got taken apart was because he started to run roughshod over the government where again just like we have said before the government's job is to is to protect itself not its people but itself to protect the long-term rule of the government 1911 by the way so a long time ago right 110 years ago 111 years ago but uh so now that we

have disruptive technology that can basically be evolved in hours or weeks or days it's a different world now and in order to continue to the government wants to protect itself doesn't want to protect you and me it wants to protect itself and its own long-term ability to remain in power in its own country so for them it's beneficial to incentivize patents because guess who can always afford the newest technology the government yes but if the technology goes unfettered if it's uncontrolled if there's if you take off the governor then eventually the the company themselves could actually tell the government what to do so the government doesn't want that so they put a patent

on after a certain or they they let the patent expire after a certain period of time so it's not like it's not like the government put a blocked monopolies in standard oil to do the right thing for the people it blocked the monopoly to protect itself agreed a thousand percent i'm and i actually i don't human nature says that's not going to change right because if p if human beings are involved in a place where they have to exist and subsist right which involves power structures they're gonna same reason why congresswoman looks at you and says i'm not gonna go back with term limits i want to get that benefit for i want to rip i love that i want to represent the people of

hillsborough county forever for as long as they'll have as long as they'll have oh that's the best such a good part i might put that on a fucking t-shirt but either way like you look at something like that it is the same thing in the government and they may accidentally get something right in the long term like i argue with standard oil my question is now like that was one right and there were other monopolies too i could look at carnegie stuff like that plenty plenty there were plenty but now there's a lot because of technology and the global reach and the size of global population to say nothing of domestic population. So what point do we have to ask, did we already or are we going to cross the chasm to where all these monopolies already own everything?

So the government is already doing what they want. Like, let me use your Peter Thiel example. I don't have a problem with peter teal i've never looked into him deeply enough i read his book very interesting smart guy whatever agreed with him that the what what gawker did to him was insane i kind of thought that was funny what he did back to them but like peter teal runs palantir you know they're they are and i don't know nearly enough about palantir so i'm not going to get on a soapbox about it. But they run spying intelligence, and their chief client is the CIA to go right at your body share. So they're basically working on facial recognition stuff, mass data stuff, all the stuff that people are afraid of that you're less afraid of because of the seat you sat in and

the privilege to sit in to see like okay this is how it's really used but naturally people who didn't get to sit there have to question just like i do like well is everyone a nice guy like andrew bustamante or is there a john brennan working there too you know what i mean yeah so then you see a private citizen like peter teal's talking about, yay, monopolies, and he's running all these. And he's also – in this case, he happens to be a conservative guy, and I could pick out the same people on the left doing their leftward causes. So he's funding conservative causes. He's got Blake Masters, his buddy who I believe co-wrote Zero to One with him, running for Senate in Arizona right now. Like he's stepped back from his VCs.

That's my understanding i don't know how true that is but apparently he stepped back a little bit because now he's more focused on funding political causes and at the same time he's contracted by a put what are to be a political government organizations so when people see things like this they go well does billionaire peter teal have the power does billionaire elon mus have the power? Or does the government have the power? Or is it both? And who has more? These are valid questions to the average citizen. and oranges how so because to assume that elon musk or peter thiel has a vested interest in in the outcome of the united states is is limited thinking they have a vested interest in the policy of the united states that impact their business but that's that's basically where it ends right they're not they're not public servants they're not trying to serve the public they're trying to

serve a customer base and their customer happens to be the US government in many ways. So they're just serving a customer to the highest of their capability and then maximizing their revenue off of the one customer that can afford what they're doing. I would also highlight, I can't confirm whether or not Palantir is being used by CIA. That is information that I have been restricted from commenting on. Oh, wow. But what I can say is that Palantir's reviews in open source private intelligence, people hate Palantir. It doesn't work well. Why?

Because it's automated data analysis. You can't create... They have yet to create a tool that can think as uh that can make analysis synthesize with such disparate disconnected information they can't make a computer do it as well as a human being can do it can you explain because again like i'm speaking as i said out front there i know the broad levels of palantir i've not sat here and read the book on Palantir, gone deep for two days on the internet looking through Palantir. It's on my list. Can you explain generally what they do?

So in the intelligence world, to build an intelligence dossier on a target or on a leader of a foreign country or on a terrorist organization or on a cell, whatever it might be, to build a dossier on something, it usually requires multiple disciplines. It requires an imagery discipline. It requires a signals discipline. So imagery is pictures, satellite pictures. Signals is everything from like telephone connections

to radio broadcasts to anything that connects the communication piece, right? It requires a human networking discipline, and then it requires a predictive discipline. Predictive meaning, now that we know all these other things, what can we deduce will happen next? So essentially, there's four disciplines

that are required in any kind of intelligence dossier, whether you're talking about private intelligence or national security intelligence. The way that it's traditionally been handled is by is by stove pipes of human beings who are specially who specialize in that specific discipline so imagery analysis goes to imit analysts signals analysis goes to sigint analysts human network analysis goes to humans analysts right and then the predictive piece goes to analysts or predictive analysts, quantitative analysts. Palantir was an effort to take all four disciplines, put them into one tool, and then automate

the tool. Because what you can never count on is an IMMINT specialist from the National Geospatial Institute or the National Geospatial Agency, NGA. You can never count on them to communicate with a CIA person and an FBI person and a SIGINT NSA person at the same time, right? You can't guarantee that cooperation. It's got to be sent in official traffic or it's got to be sent through email or whatever

else. So you got all these organizations, private and public public that have to communicate human being to human being and human beings miscommunicate emails are skipped we we we make assumptions whatever else so palantir's original idea was hey we're going to build something it's going to be awesome we're going to automate it it's totally secure because you'll be able to plug it directly into secure data sources we'll pull the data sources run automatic intelligence through it or whatever, and come up with conclusions. Right? That's how it was sold to Boeing and Booz Allen and everybody out there who touches it.

So they started on the private side before public. So they started on the private side supporting public. Right? Oh, right, because they're all booze out in all those places can you actually good spot to also bring this in because you and i spoke off camera last time about this and then after we were done but we didn't talk about it in the actual episode this whole concept of private versus government intelligence so obviously of the cia the nsa stuff like that but what you

had explained to me that i was like very surprised about is how heavily our executive branch is relying on directly contracting abuz alan or other places to go basically do like i don't want to call it something it's not but like mercenary spy work right rather than you know calling up the director of intelligence and being like uh send a guy to syria right they're calling up booze allen and paying them why is this how does it work how prevalent is it like this is a good spot to bring it in so so you're the the question on the table is what is private intelligence and how does it differ from public intelligence yes right so public intelligence is what everybody knows as just like you said right public intelligence is cia and nsa and dod and dia and

all the all the different things that end in agency right that's all your public sector intelligence then you've got private intelligence. Private intelligence was something that really took off after 2001 because when the Twin Towers went down, there was the 9-11 Commission came out and basically lambasted the intelligence infrastructure and said, you guys are still living in the Stone Age. You're still worried about the great Russia threat. a threat and because you were so worried and so archaic in your approach to intelligence you let al-qaeda go from basically unknown anything to to an attack inside the united states killing thousands of people right this has to change you need you know we're we're mandating these 10 reforms that must immediately happen one of those reforms was this massive scaling of the intelligence infrastructure and this massive scaling of sharing sharing intelligence across organizations the United or the

National security the government had no way of evolving fast enough to do that So instead they turned to the private sector and they said hey, how did they have no way of evolving? Because that's like telling the DMV that in the next 10 days They have to completely revolutionize the way that they do something the dmv that in the next 10 days they have to completely revolutionize the way that they do something the government doesn't move that fast man they can't move that fast even at that but you and i've talked so i i understand this already but for people out there even at that level like comparing the dmv to the cia. They're both government organizations. Government is plagued at all levels

by all the same things. Bureaucracy, chain of accountability, authorities. There's limitations that just slow everything down. Power struggles, all that.

Fife-doms. Yeah. Who's up for promotion, who's not up for promotion. I mean, government, if you've been a teacher in a county school, public school, you know exactly what it's like to work at CIA. I mean, government, if you've been a teacher in a, in a county school, public school, you know exactly what it's like to work at CIA. If you're a, if you know what it's

like to, you know, be a, a low level, you know, whatever in the courthouse, you know exactly what it's like to work on Capitol Hill. We're all plagued by the same stuff. Private industry moves at the speed of business. If there's money to be made, everybody gets on the boat. Everybody paddles because everybody wins, right? If my company doubles their revenue, I'm going to get a sweet bonus this year. So I want my company to grow as fast as it can, whether I'm the owner or whether I'm the lowest executive assistant, everybody wins, right? So when 9-11 happened, we got lambasted by the 9-11 report.

They said, you guys need to massively overhaul how you do everything. The CIA, the FBI, the entire intelligence community looked at itself and they said, we don't know how to do that. We've been doing the same thing for 70 years. How are we going to change all of this in two years

or whatever the 9-11 commission gave us so what they did is they turned to the private sector and they said hey raytheon booze allen northrop grumman you guys all run management consulting elements can you please management consult us to how we can make these massive changes but that's not spying the story's not done yet. So then these for-profit companies said, sure, we'll management consult you a solution. And then they came back and they were like,

here's our expert suggestion. Our expert suggestion is that you systematically improve yourself over the next five years. And in the interim, hire private people to come in and rapidly expand their knowledge set and capabilities. And grant certain approvals so that we can send you, or so that a private company can send you a solution that gets their interim security clearance in five days.

Because we know that you can't give an interim security clearance to a federal employee for six months. So that way you'll be able to bring in a bunch of... Oh, they use the system against that way you'll be able to bring in a bunch of... Oh, they use the system against them. You'll be able to bring in a bunch of people very quickly and meet the requirement of the 9-11 Commission and build a whole new level of knowledge management while simultaneously being able to rebuild your internal system and structure. And the government was like, that seems like a great idea.

Where would we get these experts? Well, it just so happens that we at Booz Allen just created a brand new wing that specializes in national security. So then Booz Allen did it, and Raytheon did it, and Northrop Grumman did it, and a company named Kaki did it. And then after those four companies exploded in the Beltway, if you've driven through the Beltway, I think it's 275 around Washington, D.C., the giant buildings that you see, they have these names on the side. And then smaller companies started growing. Lados came in. Mantec came in.

Company after company after company. And they all just became contractors. Did they literally just go? So when they created these wings you're talking about, did they then literally go to like CIA and NSA and be like, hey, Tom, I see you've been working there for 15 years. You're not making a lot of money. You want to come do the same thing over here for a million dollars?

Yep, that's essentially what they did. Oh, my God. And then what ended up happening was it seemed like a really good idea. 2001, 2002, 2003. Always seems that way. But then fast forward 2015, 2016. Now all of a sudden you're like, wait a second. We've been paying Joe to become the expert in

bahrain for the last 12 years but he doesn't belong to us he belongs to lados so then lados comes in like hey guys time to negotiate the next contract oh my god joe joe's been getting paid you know joe's getting paid 160 000 a year lados is getting paid $160,000 a year. Latos is getting paid $500,000 a year for Joe. And then they're going to say, you know what? It's really time that we rotate Joe into some other office. How do you guys feel about that? CIA would be like, we can't do anything without Joe. We need him.

Oh, well then his price just went up to $750,000. And that's taxpayer money. Oh my God. Yeah, man. This is how it works. This is how it works this is how it works and the reason that the that originally the reason that the government could sign it off in 2002 2003 panic was panic and because they thought it was only going to be five years if you hire a contractor for five years

for a hundred thousand dollars a year you're only out five hundred thousand dollars if you bring on a new employee it's two million dollars training, and then you have to give them all of their retirement benefits and everything else. It never ends in five years. So what happened in 2016? President Trump took over the office. President Trump and CIA

immediately had animosity. Trump is no stranger of going to private business, and he's watched. He's watched private intelligence take over downtown Washington, D.C. So he was basically, he's watched private intelligence take over downtown Washington, DC. So he was basically, he looked to CI and said, Hey guys, you know, you work for the executive. I hold your purse strings. If you don't want to do what I asked you to do, I'm just going

to take your funding and I'm going to drop it into these two other private intelligence organizations that will do what I asked them to do. Now, I am a former intelligence professional. I absolutely loved what Trump did in those first few years, not for the right reasons, but because he demonstrated that private intelligence, a field that I still work in,

can do as good a job at scale, at speed, at half the cost. That benefits American taxpayers. Because you cut out all the government bullshit all the bureaucracy all the fiefdoms all the fighting it becomes about the bottom line right that's that's that's why to this day private intelligence is still raging in america people are it's it's set to grow 50 there's like 255 billion dollars in earmarked funds going to private intelligence firms for the next 10 years when the president gets his daily briefing today what percentage of that is the result of private intelligence versus public intelligence so this

this is fascinating right so i'm just guessing right you can't hold me to this you can try to hold me to this whatever it's a guess question so the president, whatever. It's a guess question. So the president is going to get a PDB. That PDB is going to be drafted by an analyst who's in charge of the PDB, who's a CIA staff officer. That CIA staff officer is going to prepare that PDB based off of a series of intelligence reports that will have all been approved and signed off by a senior manager at CIA. Probably 70% of those senior managers are staff CIA. 30% of those senior managers are going to be contractors who are in a position where they've been granted authority by CIA to act as a senior manager level. That's not where the magic happens though, because the magic happens at the analyst level the 40 analysts

or whatever who actually had to go through the process of creating the analysis that was then approved by the senior managers probably 50 or more of them are private contractors hired and specializing in their area so they're writing the core thing that simply gets edited and approved edited and approved and then briefed to the president it doesn't really matter who creates it what matters is whether or not the intelligence is factual and the president can make a good decision that's how we justify it you know in our world sure but to your point what we've basically done is we have prevented federal jobs from being made because every one of those contractors could be a federal employee who specializes in their job and is a public servant working for about

a third of the cost at at most yeah at least right create working for at least a third of the cost but from the government's point of view they know that by going to the public sector arguably they can get better talent. Because if they don't like the talent, they can flush it and get a new person in. So they know they can get better talent, but then they also know that they're creating more economic benefit because they're paying more money. The more money that goes into the country, the higher the GDP, the higher the GDP, the stronger the economy. What about clearance, though? Because here's another thing.

All right, now, in a perfect scenario, when you hire Booz Hamilton and you use their wing, it's comprised of five former CIA, whatever the project is. That's exactly what it is. Five former CIA agents who are all good people, who all didn't bitch and complain because they couldn't do whatever the fuck they want at cia right how many times do you hire someone where you have multiple different former agencies or even people who never worked there some of them right i don't give a fuck about that don't give a shit about the constitution don't have any allegiance toward intelligence could be by the way because they're not brought up at this point because they're post that career or we're never in it they're not brought up through the rigorous checking of all intelligence to make sure that they're on the up and up potentially

someone from the outside looking at it could say well what if they're compromised being paid by someone not even a foreign government someone with a foreign interest someone some rich guy with a foreign interest someone in someone in russia someone in china someone in israel someone in pakistan wherever how do we know that they're working for team usa versus team dolore yeah if you look at justice.com records right now you'll see that that is exactly our vulnerability about 80 of espionage cases that have been found to be hostile controlled by a foreign intelligence service, they're almost all private contractors working inside DIA, NSA, or CIA. How many of those are there? How many

contractors? Yeah. Tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands. There's lots of private contractors. And only 0.001% of them are compromised to a foreign government that we know of. That we know of. Right. But the point is, and again, another plug for Trump. If you remember, Donald Trump in 2018 made a hard push that if you left federal service, he wanted to strip you of your clearance and did not want to let you go back into federal private intelligence. But that would undercut private intelligence, right? Which is what he wanted. That would undercut former career government employees leaving their career their in their federal career to go into

a private career he wanted to incentivize federal employees to stay in federal service by taking away the incentive for them to go private meanwhile he could keep but he was fighting with the ci he was fighting with cia but it was that was just cia he wasn't fighting with dia or nsa or ng but cia is the granddaddy of them all cia is the central yes hub that doesn't i mean everybody has their own direct line it's the brain let's be honest it is the brain but my point is just he's president trump called out accurately the abuse of the system you can basically be a mediocre employee at cia or nsa or anywhere else for 25 years have your TS SCI cat 6 cat 12 whatever else clearance leave five days later through a rotating

door come back in and you left making a hundred and twenty thousand dollars and you walk back in making two hundred and sixty thousand dollars and even worse when you come in they're not paying you for your skill they're paying you for the network you have of decision makers that are still on the inside so now it's not like it's not a former high stakes high power analyst who was super awesome at knowing what was going on in Yugoslavia instead it's John who's friends with Bill Jake and Buster and he's going to bring a new business because they're all going to make these deals and we're gonna have five new contracts in each of those divisions

That was an abuse of the system that abuse is still happening. There's always an and I'm a realist There's always gonna be some level of abuse what I'm most concerned about is when the abuse Not even like the dollars and cents, right? Like not even how people use it to their financial benefit at the cost of the taxpayer, though that's an issue, right? It's not like I don't care about that. But I'm saying like when it compromises what we're trying to do because people either A,

think they know better or B, have an ulterior motive. And like you telling me that like a lot of those cases at the Justice Department are coming from there doesn't make me feel a lot better about that you know it shouldn't make you feel better man the the reason did you want to do that by the way did i want to do what did you want to go in the private no i i'm in i'm on the private intelligence side on your own it's different on my own yeah so as soon as i left cia i mean within the first week of my wife and i putting our resignation because my wife's also a former CIA, within a week of us putting in our resignation,

we had three people reaching out to us to be like, hey, why don't you come work for us? Right? Come work for us in private intelligence. We wanted to get out of Washington, DC. They knew you existed though, because you were a covert spy. So when you leave and you fill out your resignation paperwork, the office that handles resignations, guess who works that desk?

So when we... Back door to the back door to the back door. So when we left, they were like, you know, do you want to do this? And we were like, if you want to give us a chance to do this somewhere else, we'll think about it. Oh, no, your value to us is if you come right back to CIA. We'd like to take you out of CIA and put you into DIA we'd like to take you out of cia and put you into nsa same shit different

day and we were like no we're we are leaving to get away from here get out of intel and raise a family so they were not interested in us doing that so we left now since then excuse me so since then we started our own company. And as in our own company, now we have high net worth and ultra high net worth people who find our company. And they have Intel related problems for their company. So, for example. Yeah. Yeah. They'll have a company that creates technology and they're like, who's going to steal our technology?

We can train them and teach them. Oh, well, your biggest threats are whatever they might be. Top two threats out there, France and China. And most people are surprised to hear that. So now we can expand. Here's why. Here's what those approaches look like. Here's how they hack into your systems. Here's how they buddy up with your people. Here's the threats, and here's how you fight that and beat that, right? That's the private intelligence that we're in now. You are working in the private sector. Correct. The people, people just to be clear for people listening the people we've been talking about are the people who are working in the international public sector like you're protecting companies against some foreign international property theft yeah you're not protecting a country against that

correct whereas these other people they're working as if you know they're working next to staff employees exactly yeah so to your clearance question right? When CIA needs to give you a clearance, when DOD needs to give you a clearance, if you're looking for a secret clearance, it can be relatively quick. There's something called an interim secret clearance that happens in like five or seven days. And it's there so that you can keep working

while they finish the processing of your secret clearance. But a TS clearance takes much longer. Eight months, six months, nine months, right? When a private contractor hires somebody, the private contractor basically says, we're giving them our stamp of approval while we pay for and run their top secret clearance. They can work for you now.

And if they violate something, we've got a promise or a guarantee that says that we'll pay you a penalty for if they are not responsible with the information right it's called a performance guarantee so now from the in the world of intelligence they're like wait so we're gonna get a resource in five days that we can treat like they have a top-secret clearance because normally it takes us six months and your corporate corporations out there like yeah you can use them like they have a top secret clearance and if they fuck up we'll pay the cost for their fuck up and then they know just like

insurance companies know of the hundred people that they place that way one of them's gonna fuck up they'll pay one $350,000 fine and replace the person and they'll be fine. But the other 10 people are out there generating $600,000 or $400,000 each per year in income for the company. So when you talk, you mentioned earlier the torture cases, right?

And you talked about how, was it Messer? What were the names? Mitchell? Dr. Mitchell and some fucking dude. Westerman or Westman or something like that. Anyways. So their company made $86 million.

Whatever. It was a lot. Yeah. This is how it happens. They have 10 staffers all specializing in one thing. And they were like psychologists too or some shit. They weren't even like. All being paid whatever it is, $400,000, $500,000 a year as a company resource.

And then boom, that's how you end up having an 11 million dollar a year contract for five or six years turns into 80 million dollars 66 million dollars or whatever you know how the math goes so all right so here's a question then what about the current situation in ukraine like you've been talking about on and off this whole time about like the arms deals and training people and like that so when we write and i think it was 40 billion i think i said 13 earlier it was a lot of money i think it was 40 billion that we wrote in aid to ukraine when biden signs that bill how much of that money is going to paying guys on the ground who are private intelligence versus our actual like we were talking about earlier the actual employees at the cia who are trained for this type of situation yeah so i think you you may have accidentally opened a can of worms there that you didn't want to open

Yeah, right. So get Ukraine was a incredibly corrupt country before they were invaded. So what kind of country are they after they were invaded? Why were they corrupt? They're they're basically a they operate off of a soviet model right so which is uh everybody skims off the top everybody pays bribes to get promoted it's not meritorious it's based on who you know family names uh other countries paying for influence oh yeah all that kind of like it's that's what it is right if you want to be friends with the the governor some sub-district, you just have to pay him a big enough bribe. That's how the world works. That's how Ukraine worked before the war.

That's how Ukraine works after the war, man. So when we send $10 billion to Ukraine, $2 billion comes right off the top. And it's just going to be spread out among all the generals and among all the families of the ruling elite and whoever else is doing anything. That's not going to the people, right? Not if it's coming in as cash. If it's coming in as food, the best food gets skimmed off the top. If it's coming in as weapons, some weapons will go to the front line. Other weapons will be reserved for black market sales, right?

That is the reality of how it works the second thing that's happening is that because supplies are coming in and being split off for corrupt reasons then that's increasing the price because because supplies are coming in and being split off for corruption reasons that's increasing the price of what products are still left. So if you bring in ten med kits, you bring in ten med kits, each med kit would normally be worth $10. Five of those med kits get taken away and resold on the black market,

or sent to special family members or whatever else. Now there's only five actual med kits on the market. And those five med kits are no longer worth $10, they're worth $35, right? So now, that's the second thing that happens. Only after you take off the money that's lost to corruption, just going straight into people's pockets, and then you take out the money that's going into materials that are also split off for corrupt purposes, then what you have left is what actually goes into service, whether that's funding Ukraine's ability to buy weapons from France or buy weapons from NATO countries,

or whether that's what goes into subsidizing food costs to feed soldiers or clothing or ammunition or whatever else. That's how all that works from there. So we know that right out of the gates. When it comes to doing business in corrupt countries, we have no problem giving money to corrupt countries. What we can't do is do legitimate business with corrupt countries we have no problem giving money to corrupt countries what we can't do is do legitimate business with corrupt countries because we know that they're corrupt and we can't use the corruption to benefit us that's the anti-corruption law and then on top of that though to go back to the original point that i got you off to ask about the corruption there like we're also

when we fund private intelligence a it technically costs more even if more happens like we talked about. But B, what types of responsibilities do they have? Because I feel like based on the timelines you gave, this was not the world in 2001. Correct. And Afghanistan. This is a whole new ballgame. Correct. So now what you would have is you can't mobilize national security to drop everything they're working on, fly to Poland, set up a training base, fly to Romania, set up a training base, fly to Lithuania, set up a training base, outfit the whole thing with logistics, get all the servers and hardware and everything in there, get it all spun up, get it secured. You can't.

There aren't enough federal employees will do that That all goes to private intelligence So private intelligence gets a phone call and then they're the ones that can spin up everything get out there create the training bases create The relationships get everything on the ground get it all set up staff it with analysts staff it with security professional staff it with IT people Right. They're the ones that can make all the purchasing orders to put the computers in place to put the chairs in place to put Whatever else might be in place, right? They're the ones that can make all the purchasing orders to put the computers in place, to put the chairs in place, to put whatever else might be in place, right? They're the ones that can get the weapons. They're the ones that can get the camouflage. They're the ones that can, you know, buy the munitions. And then you bring in your special operators to come in and actually teach the people. Oftentimes what you'll actually have also is the first round of instructors

will be former government employees who are now private contractors who get called in first. Do you remember when Blackwater went south? I know what you're talking about. That was all private... I don't know a fuckton about it, though. So that was all... Blackwater was a bunch of former Intel

and Tier 1 operators who were the first kind of Echelon of operational private intelligence they were mercenary private intelligence effectively that's not that one guy right it is Eric Prince Eric Prince I think it's Eric Prince yeah but the Eddie Gallagher case that guy was active military he wasn't Blackwater right I don't remember I don't know that I'll have to check that yeah yeah. Go ahead, though. But yeah, so that was a proof of concept. So basically what ended up happening was

the Blackwater outfit could operate faster, cheaper, and do things that were... Savage. That were... That if a federal special operations team were to do that, it would have to go through legal review before they were executed. So because they were a private intelligence or a private merce a private contracting

pmc private military contractor they didn't have to go through legal review paid foreign criminals that's the that's the short version of saying it they weren't criminals because they chose to do something they were given a order to do something by an intelligence or military staff member, and then they were paid to do it, and then they went and did it. So did they have a moral compass? Arguably no. Did it turn out to be something that was unjust? According to the law, the lawyer teams that were intentionally avoided by the federal government at the time, that in hindsight, yes, it was. But the fact that the PMC itself was held accountable for it, that's the part that's kind of fucked up.

Because they offered a service, they were told, execute the service, they were paid to execute the service, and then in hindsight, the person paying them found out that what they asked for was illegal. So it's a little bit of blaming placing the blame in the wrong place i'm gonna do a deep dive on that and we're gonna have to bookmark that and we'll come back to discuss that i think episode when you're here pmc stuff is super fascinating man because it's it's the future in a lot of ways it's really efficient and foreign countries are doing it and it's just there's so much that you can get done so fast in a world that moves now at the

speed of digital technology right in that connectivity and another thing we're not gonna get to today is Syria which is a topic I'm pretty passionate about that I'd love to talk with you about for a long time yeah and I'm trying to get in I haven't reached out yet but the guy Joby Warwick who wrote he just wrote an unbelievable book on that called – I think it's called Red Line about that whole thing. Like that's history that we – it's recent history that like in America, like we don't know. Like that shit just got ignored. Like what happened with Obama taking it to Congress, which was the right thing to do by the way as opposed to dropping the bombs himself.

But then was it right not to do by the way as opposed to drop the bombs himself but then was it right not to do it you know that whole thing but i want to get him in because that guy also wrote the pulitzer prize winner about isis the whole black flags book oh interesting fucking amazing writer but that whole thing's a whole separate issue that also involves a lot of intelligence stuff specifically like cia involvement not necessarily in a bad way like in plenty of ways that are like trying to stop the whole situation so we could talk about that next time but before you go now that you've made one right call spot on on here about the russian debt i think i made more than one man oh oh yeah no i'm saying about this specific about the ukraine russia whole war going on before next time now

that that's happened you talked a little bit about what that means and the fact that the sanctions are backfiring we already covered that but like what's the next big thing you're looking for to see how it cracks in that war to to then figure out where this is going so i'm looking for russia to close the rest of the southern boundary I'm looking for them Dessa and yep. I'm looking for them to connect themselves from their current strong suit, which is Just south of Mikhail I have where they are now I'm looking for them to close the rest of the border all the way over to Moldova Once they have control of the full southern coastline and they have their Black Sea fleet in place,

now they can control every natural resource that's inside Ukraine without having control of Kiev. They can control all the wheat, all the gold, all the coal, and that's what they want from the country anyways. They control the money. They control that, which forces Europe, if Europe wants access

to those natural resources, they have to release sanctions off of Russia. If Ukraine wants to feed its own people, it has to cave to Russian demand. And then if the United... Yeah.

That's the strategic move for Russia. They've already got control of the East. What's your timeline on this? If it happened. Timelines are tough now because... So Russia moves so slowly now because they made so many mistakes early on moving too fast. At the pace that they're moving now,

I would probably give them... I would give them... What is four months? 16 weeks? I would give them 16 weeks. Within 16 weeks to close it all off because for them they know that they want to have everything align right when it starts to get cold in europe because then europe's going to be like do we side with the united states which by

the way is getting ready for an election in four months. Do we want to side with the United States right when the United States is going to basically trounce all over the Senate and House? I'm absolutely expecting a red takeover in the midterm elections. You sure about that now? That's what I'm expecting now. Especially with recession?

Absolutely. They're trying to blow it. Holy shit. They can try, man. But the thing is midterm midterm elections are a passion a passion-based election yeah you're not gonna have a bunch of people who i would be surprised if people came out of the woodwork to vote in the midterm like they did uh like they do every four years three months ago i would have said absolutely now i'm not making a prediction i have no fucking idea it's just like this whole

all this recent stuff it's like if you want to shoot yourself in the foot they're trying but i don't know memories are short man four months is a long way away that's true five months yeah so you're looking at 16 weeks to see about the south coast so we're gonna bookmark that because the last one was spot the fuck on so we'll see if you nail that one and finally are you actively in the cia right now can you look in that camera right there and tell people that you're not? I am not actively in the CIA. I am actively in conversations with the CIA where they are asking me to talk less outside to people. So if you think I'm still actively CIA, you can take it up with your local CIA representative.

Who doesn't exist. I don't know if I buy that answer. I really don't this is one little conspiracy theory that i'm like maybe maybe no one ever really leaves the cia maybe maybe now they just get paid in private intelligence and really they're holding the business card you ever seen that meme like on tiktok where they're like holding the money out back like baby i'll take i want it all i gotta show you that one you're a little behind on internet i'm absolutely

behind on Yeah, when it comes to memes on TikTok. That's I'm not there. I had the best meme of you. I really want to put it up because it's hilarious. It's at your expense. But you didn't know the Jordan meme. So it made it not funny. But like the mic, I'll put the Jordan meme in the corner so people can see but the Michael Jordan meme, where he's staring like it at blank face like in grayscale and like a headshot and it says fuck them kids in the middle. I had one where it's staring like at blank face like in grayscale and like a headshot and it says fuck them kids in the middle i had one where it's like you on your thumbnail but instead it says fuck your freedom and it has cia at the bottom it's fucking incredible it's incredible it's at your expense but it's it's it's very very funny and i think it'll endear you to all the

people who don't like you because then they're gonna watch you i i saw the meme it's pretty bad it's very well crafted and since i don't know what the hell it means anyways for sure you can go live with it man for all you know what you'll be my intelligence guy i'll be your meme guy it's a good trade it's a great trade all right it's a great trade all right well andy good follow-up really enjoyed this man we'll do it again at some point and i'm looking forward to some good debates coming up on some different podcasts with you and some other people yeah happy to do it man it'll be good stuff thank you sir see you brother all right i'll see you soon everybody else you know what it is give it a thought get back to me peace