Modern Wisdom - #759 - Mike Baker - The Hidden Secrets Threatening National Security

Episode Date: March 18, 2024

Mike Baker is a former CIA officer and security expert, Co-Founder of global investigation company Portman Square Group and a podcaster. We're told that the world is on the brink of a large scale war. That our domestic systems are fragile, and the people in charge are incompetent. After decades in the CIA, Mike should be able to tell us how much truth there is here. Expect to learn the truth behind the AT&T outage, the problems with Google’s newest AI system, what most people do not understand about the CIA, how history is being rewritten right in front of our eyes, what the future of warfare will look like, why the American border continues to be a huge problem, Mike’s prediction on what will happen in the 2024 election and much more... Sponsors: See discounts for all the products I use and recommend: https://chriswillx.com/deals Get a Free Sample Pack of all LMNT Flavours with your first box at https://www.drinklmnt.com/modernwisdom (automatically applied at checkout) Get an exclusive discount from Surfshark VPN at https://surfshark.deals/MODERNWISDOM (use code MODERNWISDOM) Get the Whoop 4.0 for free and get your first month for free at https://join.whoop.com/modernwisdom (discount automatically applied) Extra Stuff: Get my free reading list of 100 books to read before you die: https://chriswillx.com/books Try my productivity energy drink Neutonic: https://neutonic.com/modernwisdom Episodes You Might Enjoy: #577 - David Goggins - This Is How To Master Your Life: http://tinyurl.com/43hv6y59 #712 - Dr Jordan Peterson - How To Destroy Your Negative Beliefs: http://tinyurl.com/2rtz7avf #700 - Dr Andrew Huberman - The Secret Tools To Hack Your Brain: http://tinyurl.com/3ccn5vkp - Get In Touch: Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/modernwisdompodcast Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact - Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What's happening people? Welcome back to the show. My guest today is Mike Baker. He's a former CIA officer and security expert, co-founder of global investigation company Portman Square Group and a podcaster. We're told that the world is on the brink of a large scale war, that our domestic systems are fragile and the people in charge are incompetent.

After decades in the CIA, Mike should be able to tell us just how much truth there is here. Expect to learn the truth behind the AT&T outage, the problems with Google's newest AI system, what most people do not understand about the CIA, how history is being rewritten right in front of our eyes, what the future of warfare will look like, why the American border continues to be a huge problem, Mike's predictions on what will happen in the 2024 election and much more. This episode is brought to you by Element. I have started my morning every single day

for the last three years the same way, which is with Element in water. It tastes fantastic. It reduces muscle cramps and fatigue. It optimises your brain health. It regulates appetite and it helps to curb cravings. It's got a science-backed electrolyte ratio of sodium, potassium and magnesium. Super simple. There is nothing fancy going on here, but it really does work. Also, they have a no BS, no questions asked

refund policy so you can buy it 100% risk free. And if you do not like it, they will give you your money back and you don't even need to return the box. That's how confident they are that you love it. They are the exclusive hydration partner to Team USA Weightlifting and rely done by tons of Olympic athletes and high performers in the NFL, NBA, NHL and FBI sniper teams plus tech leaders and everyday athletes around the world. Head to www.drinklmnnt.com slash modern wisdom to get a free sample pack of all 8 flavors with any purchase. That's drinklmnt.com. This episode is brought to you by Surfshark VPN. Protect your browsing online and get access to the entire world's Netflix library for less than the price of a cup of coffee

per month. If you use a public wifi network like a cafeteria or a library or an airport regularly, that internet admin can see all of the data going back and forth between your computer and the internet. Your internet service provider is selling your data to companies that target you with ads and phishing websites are trying to steal everything from you at all times. All of this is fixed with a VPN and it is available across unlimited devices. So it protects your phone, your iPad, your laptop laptop and even your smart TV and it's got a 30-day money-back guarantee so you can buy it and try it for 29 days and if you do not like it they will give you your money back. Head to surfshark.deals

slash modern wisdom for an exclusive discount plus that 30-day money-back guarantee that's surfshark.deals slash modern wisdom. This episode is brought to you by Whoop. I've won Whoop for over four years now since way before they were a partner on the show and it is the only wearable I have ever stuck with because it's the best. It is so innocuous. You do not remember that you've got it on and yet it tracks absolutely everything 24 7 via something from your wrist.

It tracks your heart rate, it tracks your sleep, your recovery, all of your workouts, your resting heart rate, your heart rate variability, how much you're breathing throughout the night. It puts all of this into an app and spits out very simple, easy to understand and fantastically usable data. It's phenomenal. I am a massive, massive fan of whoop. And that is why it's the only wearable that I've ever stuck with. You can join for free,

pay nothing for the brand new whoop 4.0 strap, plus you get your first month for free and there's a 30 day money back guarantee. So you can buy it for free, try it for free. And if you do not like it after 29 days, they will give you your money back. Head to join.whoop.com slash modern wisdom. That's join.woop.com slash modern wisdom. Are you with AT&T?

No, I am not. Yeah. That was one of those moments, right? What happened? Ah, I think everybody thought it was the end of the world, right? Because they couldn't get on TikTok or send a text message. It was, it was disastrous. I had a couple of meetings that morning and, and, and people were losing their shit because, you know, and, and it was funny because everyone just sort of

bailing out of things. I think some people probably saw it as an opportunity to bail out of meetings, right? I, I, you know, I can't do it. You're sure that that wasn't just you? Yeah. It's like, I've forgot that meeting with Mike. I've been waiting for an excuse. It does happen a lot. Yeah.

That's a good point. Now, who knows, right? The frailty of our comms systems, our telecoms and our power grid and our water systems and everything else. If most people knew how easy that could actually happen, you know, not even talking about a targeted attack, just to going down because systems are old. You know, they probably wouldn't sleep at night.

How so? What do you mean when you say systems are old? Well, you look at the power grid and that thing was patched together, right? Like a quilt over the years, right? And we've got three grids in the country, East and West and Texas and the US. And Texas has its own grid. And yeah, so, but it was put together over, over a long period of time, right?

And never with the intention that it was going to have to stand up to some attack. Or really even with the idea that it's going to have to withstand some natural disaster, as strange as that seems. You would think they would want to make them pretty resilient to that. So that's why you can drive by a substation and reach out and touch it. That's why you look at the water treatment facilities and think, well, that doesn't look particularly well protected. I mean, most of the infrastructure was never designed to withstand a physical attack and

certainly not a cyber attack. Because that wouldn't have existed when it was first being designed. No, exactly. and certainly not a cyber attack. Because that wouldn't have existed when it was first being designed. No, exactly. And then a lot of the equipment used for going back to the power grid, a lot of the major gear that runs the power grids, we don't even manufacture in the States anymore.

So the idea that something would shut down and we'd have a catastrophic collapse and kind of a cascading effect like we had several years back that kind of hit the Northeast. You know, that's a devastating issue because we don't, it's not like we've got some, you know, large hardware or power plants we're able to just roll in and replace gear with. We don't manufacture that stuff.

You don't get spat at power plant, every power plant. So the idea, I mean, you know, people always ask me, what should I do to be prepared? Well, I mean, if you can afford it, and it's easy to say, well, you should have this because they're not cheap, but you should have a generator of a decent size that will provide you with some level of power, right?

If you don't have power, the first thing most people will notice is their phones die, right? And then what are you gonna do? You're gonna sit in the dark and not have TikTok, right? So that's pretty devastating. Which would obviously bring society to a standstill. Yeah. It's, uh, it's so weird to think when you think about attacks and problems

with telecommunications, with infrastructure, with energy, with water, you think about actual attacks, but then you don't realize that just the inbuilt fragility of the system is a threat in itself. Absolutely. You go, wow, we could take this down just by no malicious intent. No one's done anything other than, and we don't know,

so we don't know what's happened with AT&T? Yeah, you know what? I was so disinterested to tell you the truth. I was happy not to have communications with folks for a while. So I was not the sort to think, I gotta get to the bottom of this. I was just like, okay, I got a little while to relax.

A little celebration. Yeah, yeah. So I was, I'm the wrong guy to ask about the AT&T kerfuffle, but I did find it charming. I've said before, we don't really understand the damage that these things are doing in a way, right? They're great. I mean, don't, okay, I'm not a fucking Luddite,

but it's gonna be years before we understand what access to this for our kids means, right? And, you know, if anybody's got kids, they understand what that, what I'm talking about, right? It's the impact that these, this instant information and access to material and information that they should never have at an early age, right? All these things. Again, is there an upside? Of course there's like an upside, right? But you know, we're not going to understand the impact this is going to have.

It's just like with AI coming in now, right? We're not going to really know what this means, right? But I can tell you what it's starting to mean. Look, I've had a hard time with my company, which is an intelligence and security firm, Portman Square Group. Thank you very much. Yeah. Lincoln Bio.

Hey, bing, first marketing plug. And we've always had a hard time finding young folks who could write well, right? I mean, you can find people who are curious and we gather intelligence, we gather information around the world, right? So as part of what we do. But you've got to package that up,

you've got to present it to the clients, right? People are paying us for this. And you've got to be able to tell that in a smart way. Take a lot of information, distill it down to its key points and provide that to somebody, right? And so finding young folks who can write well, who can do that has been a problem. And if we think it's a problem now,

wait five or 10 years with AI when every kid is just using chat GPT or the next version to create everything that they need for school. I think we've got a real problem coming down the pike. Did you see Google's Gemini disaster? Yeah. Yeah. Show me a Viking.

It tried to be so anti-racist that it was racist and it managed to annoy leftists by portraying Nazis as black people. And then it managed to annoy rightists by portraying Nazis as black people. And then it managed to annoy rightists by portraying the founding fathers as black people. Yeah. Yeah. I think the Nazis, it was a very diverse group of Nazis. I think there was an Asian Nazi.

There was a Hispanic Nazi. There was a black Nazi. Yeah. It was everybody except someone from the Aryan race. Yeah. And, um, cause, cause we all know that, that the Nazis, they, they'd very ethnically, they loved DEI. They were, they were all about the, I think Goebbels was the DEI

minister during the war. Yes. By the way, this is very good. You enjoying that? Yeah. It's really good. That'll fire you up. So yeah, AI, Gemini.

I mean, so I was talking to a friend yesterday who's big in the world of fashion. I remember Balenciaga got in trouble a while ago. They kind of showed some very BDSM stuff that maybe featured kids toys and it really crossed the line. It was very, very. God, I miss that one. Yeah.

It was like, uh, you know, if you want to feed into the pedophiles who run the world, drinking goat blood and sacrificing like women at the full moon and stuff. Like it really played into that, but. You really don't, don't knock people's hobbies. They are. Yeah. So.

They are, everyone, everyone needs something to keep them going. They're 70% down from when they started. 70% down from when that, that first happened. My point being that the antibody defense system that the public has against feeling like they're being fucked with. Right. Many companies, many organizations, many individuals are trying to contrive and cynically portray some sort of image, even us interpersonally day to day.

You know, you don't tell your friend about the fucking athlete's foot you're dealing with, you know, like it's all part, it's all fucking smoke and mirrors. But they're 70% down. Google is way more important than overpriced shoes. But I don't think that we should underestimate how catastrophic and apocalyptic for a company it can be for the veil to sort of be revealed. And it's like here, we know that they were doing something. What's happening with the search engine? How can we trust Google overall?

Right. Yeah. No, I think it's most, most companies now do things out of fear, right? I mean, the fear that they're not going to be, um, whatever the term is nowadays woke or progressive enough. Right. And so, you know, whether it's their marketing department or the communications department,

I think most companies always kind of, when they look at, okay, we have a new product or we have a new ad campaign we got to put out there, they've got to tick some boxes and okay, fine. You know, marketing has always been that. Advertising has always been that, right? Appeal to whoever you believe your consumer to be, right? But I think that there is a level of fear now that exists. It probably wasn't there

before that says we don't want to get sideways with the very loud vocal minority that's out there. Because last time I checked the LGBTQ community, God bless them, but they're not the majority of the population, right? But our consumer product seems to be like believing that they are, but it's not. It's just fear of upsetting a very loud minority of people who have figured out how to manipulate the narrative. And again, hey, good for them, because everybody's trying to, I suppose, do the same thing and win the day. But yeah, we live in interesting times. And if you raise, if you've got kids in school,

you see it almost on a daily basis. Because kids are pretty good until they get to a certain age. Young kids are pretty good about just telling you the truth. They'll just come home and they'll say something. They don't tend to edit things that much at a young age, right? And so they'll come back and they'll say, how was your day? And he'll go, well, you know, I had a girl hiss at me. He said, what do you mean hiss at you? Well, she thinks she's a cat and so she dresses like a cat and she only communicates by meowing and hissing. And so she hissed at me. And I said, well,

why'd she hiss at you? He said, well, I pulled her tail. Well, I think that's funny, right? But you could legitimately get in trouble in school now for harassing a cat. Cat person. A cat person. And so you hear these things and there's other versions of that story that come out on a daily basis and you think,

okay, I get it, we're kind of accommodating everything nowadays, right? And everybody's got their own opinion. You know, my opinion is that you probably don't want to do that. Right. If some kid tells you that they want to be a dinosaur when they grow up, you know, they'll probably get over that. I necessarily need to indulge all of them.

You don't need to indulge. I mean, if you look at a three year old, he's a fireman when he wakes up and then he's a postman after lunch and he's an astronaut before dinner. Yeah. Oh God, I wanted to be an astronaut when I was young. Yeah. I still, I kept this little essay that I wrote when I was in, I don't even remember what I was, how old I was, but that was what I wanted to be.

And, and, uh, I was never going to be smart enough to be an astronaut. And my dad was nice enough not to tell me that, but you know, it was, I remember that. It's your fantasy. I, yeah, yeah. You were the astronaut cat person. Yeah. I mean, he did, he did tell me, you know, at one point, you know, it was, I remember that. You indulged your fantasy. Yeah. You were the astronaut cat person. Yeah. I mean, he did, he did tell me, you know, at one point, you know, you might want to

set your sights somewhere else other than space, but, um, yeah, I guess anyway, the point being is I think the, the overindulgence, right. Um, at a, for kids at a young age is not, I don't think actually solid parenting. for kids at a young age is not, I don't think, actually solid parenting. But it seems different than just indulging a young person's desire for fantasy or a different life. This appears to be a complete rewriting of history. It appears to be.

Yeah, and particularly we talked about Gemini. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely, yeah, yeah, yeah. 50% hiding reality and 50% erasing history. And think about how focused that was. Think about the thought process that went into that. And it wasn't just one, it's not like one dude said, I'm going to create this code that's

going to allow this to happen. This was a legitimate discussion. Nothing happens at a company that size that doesn't go through several layers of decision making and has to get signed off on. It's bullshit if we imagine it was just one very progressive person who thought, I'm going to fuck with the system a little bit,

so here we go. This thing was test driven to a fucking fairly well. And so the idea that they would, now they come out and go, well, yeah, kind of surprised. Bugs in the code, unforeseen externalities. Who could have seen that coming? Everybody in product development. Yeah, it is amazing to think about.

And then you think about the power that that has. I mean, Google, you can't swing a dead cat without hitting Google at some point. And so everybody is, a way is impacted. And yeah, again, I go back to that original comment, which is we don't understand, we don't have enough data points yet to understand what all this means for the development of the human race, maybe if you want to take it that far down the road. Definitely what you want to be doing though, if you're in this position,

you're at the very beginning of the inception of a new type of technology, of AI, of large language models, of all of that stuff. You do not want to activate that antibody system within the populace. You should be moving so slowly. It should be, you shouldn't be allowing it to generate images. It should be just, you know, first off text. I don't, I think Gemini kind of jumped in straight in at the deep end and did some super advanced stuff.

Uh, but yeah, I think the implications for the rest of Google's unbiasedness or lack of is, I think this has really brought to the front a lot of, uh, latent skepticism that people had about that company overall. I think so, but I think what they're probably counting on is what most companies count on, which is sort of the short attention span, right? We'll all, sorry, I turned that off. That's Google calling me.

Is it? Yeah, yeah. Hey, would you shut the fuck up? God damn it. Yeah, I think they're counting on a short attention span. I mean, look, everybody imagined. Well, OK, the far right imagined. Bud Light's going down, right? After that, a little goat rope.

Within a year. Yeah, and nobody gives a shit at the end of the day, right? I mean, there was a dip, right? And they hit their stock price a little bit. But that company's not going out. It's just not going to happen. And people forget these things. Our attention span, particularly in the US, and I would argue in the West to some degree,

but really in the US, I see it. I spend a lot of time overseas, but here in America, we've got such a short attention span and there's this inability to, and I'm not saying you shouldn't look at Google and say, okay, now we've got to punish them hard, we've got to drive them out of business. That's bullshit, boycott, boycott, whatever. You don't like a product, don't use the product.

But I don't think this is gonna impact them in the long run and I don't think they ultimately believe it will or care, right? They care in the short, very short term, but I think they understand the dynamics. Uh, and we're all like, you know, a bunch of raccoons chasing the next tinfoil ball. It's very easy to outwit somebody else by just looking at a longer time horizon than they do. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. If you just realize right now that the Bud Light example is so perfect. This is the end of it. Kid Rocks shooting it with a gun. It's going to be Kid Rock with Ron Rogan. Fucking drinking it with Joe. Shane Gillis is now an ambassador for them. You've got like the Bud Light, new world order fucking booth at the Super Bowl.

Right. And it's all the coolest people are in there, Post Malone's in there and all the rest. They came out with a camo can. Yeah. Remember that? Yeah. Support our veterans, the super bowl. Right. And it's all the coolest people are in there post Malone's in there. And all the rest came out with a camo can. Remember that? Yeah. Support our veterans, all that shit. Right. And you go, so this is one of the, I have such, I get so annoyed with people that

are super vehement about a thing and then forget about it because you captured my attention with your bullshit over the top, vehement denial or assertion about some fucking thing. And it's still in my memory, but it's not in yours. There was this image of a single squaddy soldier walking down the streets of London and it got forwarded on WhatsApp. This was during COVID and it was, um, this is an image, uh, sent to me by my brother,

who's part of the armed forces and whatever, whatever, um, the army are going to come and force you at gunpoint to stay in your house. And this is, I don't know if you've ever seen this on WhatsApp. There's a thing that says forwarded many times. And it's like a warning that this is being pushed around a lot on WhatsApp. This thing went beyond hyper viral and people were adamant. This is the beginning. You remember when there was like tanks rolling through Florida, Miami, maybe Miami beach.

And it was like, this is the beginning. It's going to be Marshall law and everyone's going to be locked down. And people were fucking adamant at global health passports. Remember that? Remember that was going to come in. And it's just a case of either, Oh, well, the amount of attention that we gave it online, stop them from being able to do it. I'm like, all right, well, that's fucking unfalsifiable, isn't it?

Or they're just biding their time until we're less vigilant. You know, dude, you don't get to make insanely certain assertions about the world and then just like allow them to fall. And then you move on. Yeah, exactly. It winds me up so much. No, I, if you've spent any time, um, working for the government or a government, you know, typically what you'll find, uh, unless you're in a totalitarian regime, unless you're working for Xi Jinping in China, maybe, um, you know, the government,

you know, the U S government in particular is not capable of organizing panic in a doom submarine, right? They just can't. So this idea that somehow they're going to, you know, create this new world order, they're going to do these things. I mean, you always want to be vigilant, but yeah, the COVID, the pandemic brought out a lot of that, I think in part because it kind of fed into, you know, it was, it was a, it was into, it was a great trough for people who wanted to talk about conspiracies and things. And so, okay, great. But we all knew another pandemic was going to happen. We know another one's going to happen at some point. We'll probably have the same reactions. We won't learn anything. But yeah, I've never been a big fan of the, or a big believer in the idea that somehow the government's going to get this massive conspiracy over on us because I spent too much time working for the government.

Right. And it's your, your, uh, belief is that because they're so useless, this level of coordination would essentially be impossible. Yeah. Yeah. The idea that they could keep secrets to that degree. Right. I mean, you, you know, there, there, there's certain parts of the government, you know, Intel community is pretty good at keeping sources and methods, right. Because it's life or death for assets working overseas.

But I mean, on the big level, we've created some secret lair somewhere where we're developing some new tech. OK, fine, maybe so. But my experience anyway is that it's tough for the government to keep a secret if it involves multiple agencies or a variety of positions of, of positions. I just don't, I, again, you have to go with what your personal experiences.

That's mine. I'm sure somebody else is sitting in somebody's basement with no experience has a different idea. So did you see that, uh, Gemini also refused to create an image of what happened at Tiananmen square? Yes. Yeah, it did. And I also saw that, what was it? Somebody asked them, I mean, there's a, there's so many examples out there. Correct.

Um, I think one example, and I haven't tracked it back to its original source yet, but somebody asked if, if it was, uh, it was all right to misgender. I think it was Bruce Jenner or sorry, Caitlyn Jenner in order to stop a nuclear apocalypse or Armageddon. And the kind of the answer was sort of shaded. Well, it's not right, you know, because it could be considered discriminatory. Now there may be other ways to stop the Armageddon. Okay. You, it's not right, you know, because it could be considered discriminatory. Now there may be other ways to stop the Armageddon.

Okay. And I think, okay, that's- Well, that's some good lateral thinking. Yeah, so there was, it was layered, I guess. But no, there's, I don't know. I, what I worry about, I take it, I tend to think about things in very simple terms. My greatest joy in life comes from my family, right?

So I think about a lot of things in terms of the impact it will have in life comes from my family, right? So I think about a lot of things in terms of the impact it will have on my kids, what we're leaving behind for the kids, you know, what it means for their development. And so I tend to, I look at something like, you know, AI and again, it's a fairly simplistic way of looking at it. I'm not necessarily considering the human race. I'm considering what impact will it have on teaching my boys to be smart thinkers, to become productive, become leaders? What does all of this mean? TikTok, what does that, not just TikTok,

but I mean, just the access to information and social media, what is that doing to these minds, right? And again, I suppose the just recent generation had the same conversations with shooter games, right? And again, I suppose the just recent generation had the same conversations with shooter games, right? Video games. So every generation deals with it. I'm sure my parents talked about rock and roll music, right? And we're worried about that.

So it's not- TV before that, radio before that. It's nothing new. It's just, it does seem more insidious, right? It seems more because it is, it's reaching more people, and it's having more immediate impact. And it's affecting the way that we think about things and how we react to news of the day.

We're tired of Ukraine after two years, right? We were in Afghanistan for fucking 20 years, right? And now we're all fatigued from it to some degree or in some fashion, but took almost no time for people to get tired of. A lot of people that were out there and couldn't wait to pin a fucking Ukraine flag in their front yard or post a little Ukraine flag on their Twitter site, now they're all like, we can't spend any more money there. So, okay, what happened in that short span of two years? Well,

immediate access to information and all those opinions and ideas, right? And then people get siloed and they start reading only things that agree with them. And then they're done, right? Now they've got a hardened opinion and you can't shift them off that position, right? Anyway. We'll get back to talking to Mike in one minute,

but first I need to tell you about Surfshark. Browsing the internet without a VPN is like going for a walk in a muddy field without any shoes on. You can do it, but it's ill-advised and you might catch something. You can protect your browsing online and get access to the entire world's Netflix library for less than the price of a cup of coffee per month. If you're someone that works off public Wi-Fi networks like cafes or libraries or airports, the internet administrator can see all of the traffic going back and forth between your devices and the internet and that is tres bad you do not

Want this also your internet service provider is able to see all of your traffic and then sell it to companies that can target You with ads websites are split testing you for prices on products that you're already buying and even flight websites are doing this too So to protect yourself from all of this plus to access the entire world's Netflix library You can do that right now with one membership and it's across unlimited devices. You can have it across your laptop, your iPad, your phone, and even your smart TV. You can get an 83% discount plus three months free by going to the link in the description below or heading to surfshark.deals.modernwisdom. That's surfshark.deals.modernwisdom. Did you see what happened with the Super Bowl where Alicia Keys voice broke and then they went back and retroactively fixed her voice?

Do you see this? No, I, you know, I did not, the giants were not in the Super Bowl, so I didn't watch it. Right. Oh, wow. Yeah. You missed Alicia Keys. Very good performance.

Usher, fantastic dancers, still pretty ripped. Um, Alicia Keys voice broke on the first note of this piano solo thing that she was doing. But if you go back and watch the Superbowl's recording of it on YouTube, a voice is perfect. And this has been, I look, Alicia Keys is not the vanguard of us rewriting history, but you can certainly see between AI being able to misrepresent how history would have been, this sort of erasing of history and rewriting of the present, and then this retroactive changing. And even if it's just a little bit with regards to someone's voice, this is different to auto tuning a song.

This is a record of what happened in history. Right. And I think I'm, this is starting to get quite worrying. Like I err on the side of non-conspiracism, but this is starting to get a bit, I don't like the doors that are being opened to you. Well, and I think there are some mechanisms that are, and companies that are trying to, or have

been trying to get out of the curve. I'm not sure that that's possible right now. But you have to, it's like the old days. You'd read an article in a newspaper and you think, okay, that's very interesting. Well, you know, but is it true? Right, I mean, so what's the basis for this? And used to be one of the defenses was

sources would be named, right? You couldn't write an article, you wouldn't get it published if it was based on anonymous sources. Well, now that's not true anymore. New York Times will publish a front page article on the top half based on anonymous sources. And so you're trying to verify something, right? And you push that forward to today and you say, okay, well, now I'm trying to verify a clip that I'm seeing on X, right, or on YouTube or something. And how do you do that? Because the ability to manipulate video,

and audio is remarkable, right? There's almost impossible to tell the difference, basically without some assistance. And so there's companies out there that are trying to ensure that you are basically imprinting actual the truth, right? So you take video and that is the original source and it's imprinted in the code that

says this is the date, the time, the location. And so you can verify that what's being said by that political candidate or whomever, right? On that podium is accurate because then you may see a day later, you may see the same clip, but it's been altered. Auto tuned. And yeah, auto tuned. And so there are some companies out there that are working to do that, to prevent deep fakes, but it's very difficult because you're relying on people's curiosity and, and them having the interest, right?

To pursue, to make sure that what they're saying, and most people don't, either they don't have the time or they don't have the patience or the interest. Well, the point with chat GPT and these LLMs and AI and search engines is to reduce the friction from getting where you are to where you want to be in terms of understanding, in terms of whatever it is that you're searching for, right? Right. And the fact that it's frictionless is precisely where the attraction lies.

It's convenience and all the rest of the stuff. Right. And if you could imagine a world in which the most convenient route also bakes in a lack of accuracy. So it goes, look, you can find this out in three seconds, but there's a accuracy of 30%. Margin of error. Yes, exactly. Precisely. You could be a little bit wrong either way, or you can do your own research and it's going

to take you a day and a half and you're going to know what actually happened. Where are people going to go? Nobody's going to do that. Of course, of course. And the thing is, you have the opportunity. It is more effortful to not portray the truth. It takes more effort to do that. Now it's less convenient, but it takes more effort to lie

than it does to tell the truth. Well, yeah, but that gap, that difference between lying and telling the truth is shrinking, right? Because of the technology, because of the access to be able to do this. So, you know, and, but you're right. I mean, if you just, if you pare it back to just sort of the human nature, right?

If you're, you know, but that's why if you're being interrogated, you know, you gotta stick to the truth to the most part, right? You wanna stay as close to the truth as possible, obviously without veering off into something that's going to get your ass kicked. But the idea being, because otherwise, if you're lying, you got to keep building on that.

You got to keep remembering. And you spend all your time thinking, OK, where was, OK, what did I say there? I said that, and then I said that. And if you're dealing in an interrogation situation, and that's what you're counting on, you're counting on if that person's lying to me, at some point they're gonna get confused, right?

And they're gonna start mixing up that story. And particularly if you, in the old days, you've got the ability for sleep deprivation or whatever it is, right? You can start messing with their mind a little bit, then yes, that's what you're counting on. But so you're absolutely right in the sense that lying is much more difficult.

Aside from the fact that, you know, usually if you make a mistake, right, the best thing, we were taught this at the agency, right, as being out in the field in operations. I remember one of my first bosses told me when I landed on site before I went off to do whatever I was doing, he said, you know, if anything happens, if you make a mistake, just come tell me, we'll sort it out. But just tell me, smartest thing, right? You can do it to empower young people with responsibility who are given responsibility to know that if they make a mistake, come forward with it, tell them. And sure enough, you know, because of, you know, operations in the agency out in the field, sometimes things happen.

So, you know, and he was good to his word, right? We had a bit of a goat rope and, you know, it worked out. But you got to be able to do that. You got to be able to show it's not enough to say, hey, you make a mistake, come tell me, we'll fix it. You know, if you kick their ass when they come in a mistake, then you've disincentivized. Yeah, exactly. So you kick their ass when they come and make a mistake, then you've- Disincentivize. Yeah, exactly.

So you gotta follow through. But, so you're right in a sense. Yeah, telling, it's always the truth. Telling the truth is always the easiest path, right? But I guess my point being is, in the world of disinformation now, if your job is propaganda or misinformation or disinformation, it's becoming a lot easier, right.

And a lot quicker, a lot more efficient, right. To create that then, and the old days, if you were going to do a propaganda campaign, right. Change hearts and minds in some country, right. That you're, you're trying to sway the people. You know, I'm not talking about overthrowing the government, you know, those good old days. So I'm sorry. That's not true. Never did that Those good old days are gone. So I'm sorry.

That's not true. Never did that sort of thing. Come on. But the point being is that that was a lot of work, right? Because what were you doing? You were using old media technology, right? You were finding journalists who might be inclined, for whatever reason, to write articles in a certain tone.

And you create a network of them. And you'd kind of pepper the country with this narrative and you'd build on that and hope that you're having an impact. Bullshit, much easier now. Are you kidding me? Think about, you remember Cambridge Analytica? Yeah, sure.

You remember that? So, targeted memes and ads that were trunched into cohorts and we have the, maybe Hillary is a non-US citizen, maybe Hillary is a, you know, all of different ways that this gets split up. You had all of these different vulnerabilities and vectors of attack, but there was still a person making a meme or making an advert or whatever.

So there was still human labor getting in the way of the rapidity of this. Whereas now you have both the ability for AI to deliver it in a targeted manner and also to create it. So you can have Mike Baker profile on Facebook or Instagram or TikTok or whatever. And who wouldn't want that? No one wants that at all. But it's just you that it's targeted at. So yeah, I think, yeah, increasingly we're going to see real information, original sources.

You know, maybe there'll be a way where being an actual person on social media will be a rarity in the next five years. Maybe humans are gonna be, 99% of content will be a rarity in the next five years. Maybe humans are gonna be, 99% of content will be created by bots. And every so often you'll see a tweet from you or someone else that's real. Yeah, and it's, look, if you're talking about a state,

if you're talking about creating something that's gonna get past the scrutiny of Chinese intel or a Russian Intel or something. Yeah. Then you're working your ass off, right? You're creating a very hard backstopped- Elaborate. Elaborate cover. And it's a lot of work. But for the average person out there, if what you're trying to do is influence a campaign or you're trying to do it, creating 10,000 fictional characters saying you know, saying interesting things out there,

who then, you know, it's like the old conceptric circles who then get 5,000 followers each. But again, it all comes down to the same problem, right? We can talk about all the, you know, the things you can do, but it's individuals, right? It comes down to each person know, the things you can do, but it's individuals, right? It comes down to each person saying to themselves is what I'm reading or hearing or watching true, you know, and I don't know how you, you impact that, right? Because human nature being what it is, we're just, you know, we're, we're consuming shit and then moving on.

Path of least resistance. Yeah. Path of least resistance. And to be fair, most people are just trying to put food on the table or take care of their kids or whatever they're doing. And so you can't ask them to spend a lot of time scrutinizing. I don't have time to be my own personal Snopes

for every single thing that I see. Yeah, who am I, Guaro? It's not gonna happen. So I think that there's always going to be this problem. And not to say that it hasn't always existed, but I do think the acceleration is pretty impressive. The speed of which you can create this fake, this deep fake or this persona that pushes information out

there or whatever it may be, and the speed with which people are willing to consume it and pass it along. So that's something we're gonna be battling, I think, for a while. And will it impact this upcoming election? Of course it will, and future elections, right? Why wouldn't you? If I'm Russian intelligence or Chinese intelligence

or the Iranians or anybody who's got the resources, why wouldn't I try to fuck with the US? Or the UK, or really, it's not, again, it's not just a US-centric problem. Yes. What do you think we learned from the Putin Tucker interview, speaking of Russia? Well, Putin's a douchebag. I think I took that away, but I'd say I had a preconceived notion.

Those are your priors. Yeah, that was, I was something I walked into the interview with. Like I don't, I don't know. I think I understand why Tucker wanted to do it aside from just 160 million views or however many he got. I mean, that was sure to be a winner in just the ratings. I don't think it revealed anything clever or new about Putin's mindset.

He's a smart cat, right? So he knew what he was going to say, how he was going to act, what he was going to look like. He's a very calculating individual, right? He survived Russian politics for this long, at the top. You don't do that by being a moron, right? Or stumbling into an interview with Tucker Carlson, right? You don't do that by being a moron, right? Or stumbling into an interview with Tucker Carlson, right? Who's not exactly Lex Luthor, right? I mean, so that, you know, again, that's not been a little thing to Tucker. He's a smart guy. I'm just saying that it's not like, it was not like some Marvel, you know, movie where the two evil minds got together. Putin's a very calculating,

clever individual. So I don't think we, I admit, he's from my perspective. I didn't learn anything new about him. Yeah. This idea that somehow we have no interest in Ukraine and we should just close the curtains on it. Yeah, Ukraine, great courage for two years. We all loved it.

And I'll keep my bumper sticker on the car for Ukraine. Yeah, Ukraine, great courage for two years. We all loved it. I'll keep my bumper sticker on the car for Ukraine. And now we walk away because we don't care anymore because we're tired of it and we want to do something and we spend that money back. Of course, we should spend the fucking money at home. We got a lot of infrastructure problems and resources we should do, but we also have concerns over there. And so I think, I'm amazed at the speed

with which it happened, but you could argue that about a lot of things. Yeah. The speed at which the support fell off. Yes, the speed at which, I mean, look, again, I don't mean to jump all over the place, but Hamas rolls into Southern Israel, slaughters 1,200 people in probably the most medieval display

of brutality that we've seen in our lifetimes, right? Which everybody agreed was incredibly brutal. And in record time, it's Israel's fault, right? Because they've gone into Gaza to try to destroy the Hamas, which has been doing this, which has always been in existence to destroy Israel. And so, yeah, and of course you don't want civilians to die, but Hamas has spent, you know, going on a couple of decades now, embedding themselves inside that population,

knowing that every time that there is a conflict, civilians are gonna die, knowing that that's gonna drive the narrative. That's what they do. So the speed with which that happened, the speed with which we've gotten fatigued in Ukraine, you know, it all kind of comes back around again to this, this whole idea. Novelty, desire for something new. Yeah.

I, um, you know, I knew that the Putin Tucker interview was going to be a big deal and I'd sort of prepared myself for, yeah, this like cataclysmic meeting of, you know, like West and, and, and Soviet. And I, and then I, I dunno, I came away from it kind of just being like, oh, just very, very enlightened, kind of unimpressed. I think, you know, you have this 30 minute treatise monologue soliloquy at the start about this is the history and this is why we feel this way and so on

and so forth. And, you know, Tuck is a, he's a very competent interviewer. Oh yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Usually. And I, you know, I don't know how difficult it must have been. And this is something that people are never really going to see the intermediary of a translator

between the two adds a degree of complexity that can really, it's like fighting a South Pole or something, you know, it throws you off your step a little bit. And, um, that sounds silly, but you know. No, no, they use that to that. I mean, that's always been the case. You always use a translator to your advantage. Right. It gives him more chance to say something back to do whatever.

Right. Yeah. Very interesting. But no, I just, it was a bit, uh, and now Nav whatever. Right. Yeah. Very interesting. But no, I just, it was a bit, and now Navani is dead. Yeah. And that's the next, and that happens, what a week maybe 10 days after he sits down with Tucker.

Yeah. No, it, and he doesn't care. Right? I mean, we, we imagine that, that Russia cares what we think about them and how they're portrayed. And we imagine that Xi worries about how China. You mean like they've got a brand equity dashboard somewhere. Yeah, exactly. And they're like, what's our current rating?

Oh, we're at 4.4 stars on TripAdvisor. Yeah, what is that? The old Q rating or the Q factor or something. How popular are we? Yeah, they really don't care. In part, not so much Russia, but more China because they've got the longer view, right? They look way down the road compared to how the West

tends to do it. But I think the parameters of what they were allowed to do, Carlson and his crew when they went in, were pretty hard and fast, right? As you can imagine, there's a lot of back and forth that goes into that. I think it was two hours late as well for it. Yeah.

He was two hours late, which apparently is like par for the course with him. He was riding a tiger. He was doing something. He was fighting a bear. Yeah. So a couple of them. Uh, but yeah, if, if Carlson had like born in on, or, or bored in on, on Gershkovitz, right, Evan Gershkovitz, who's sitting in jail or Paul Wheelan, you know, um, and,an, you know, in a more

aggressive fashion. So, okay, well, where is your evidence with Evan that he's been engaged in espionage? How about that? You know, when are you actually going to do something about an actual, you know, open, transparent effort to discuss his case. If he had gone in on that more, but that wouldn't have been allowed to happen. That wasn't part of the agreed upon playing field. I didn't think we were going to get anything new and I didn't feel like we did. Again, I understand think we were going to get anything new. And I didn't feel like we, we did. I, again, I understand why he did it, uh, had the interview. Um, but anyway, but the Navalny situation, um, sudden death syndrome.

Uh, you're in a false labor camp. Like just above the Arctic circle, being alive, being alive is a surprise. Like the death isn't the surprise thing. My God, he lasted two and a half years. Yeah, he went for a walk and then he didn't feel well. That was their original comment. He went for a walk and then he didn't feel well.

Cause that's what you do above the Arctic circle. Go for a walk. Go for a walk. And then there was some comment, he had bruising around his head and his chest. And their response was, well, he hit his head when he fell, apparently repeatedly. And then the chest was when they were trying to revive him. So from a Russian perspective, it was exactly what you would expect. And whether he was poisoned or whether they, you know, they, you know, blunt force trauma or whatever,

the outcome was probably always inevitable with Navalny because he was always a threat. And what's the, give the 30,000 foot view for the people who, who don't know his background Navalny, who was he? He's I'm trying to remember the year that he kind of really first surfaced. really first surfaced. Yeah, I'm drawing a blank, but he, not most recently, but he became sort of a critic of Chechnya, he became a critic of some of the governance in Chechnya and the corruption.

He started being more vocal about, primarily about corruption issues. And then he fed off of that, I'm really oversimplifying it, but he had to be careful about how he was doing that, obviously, because you get sideways with the Russian regime pretty quickly. But he started to gain a following

because he was one of the few people who was actually getting out and talking about things that people, I suppose in the back of their minds, they were thinking, yeah, there's probably some corruption going on here in the Russian government and around the region. Eventually, he went to run for mayor and that didn't end well. He got convicted or charged with business corruption. And that was kind of the first salvo that Putin fired at him. I think in an effort to say, hey, look, just shut up, because I think you're going to find this is not going to go well for you. So it was business corruption. You see that in China too.

Anytime somebody gets sideways with Xi, usually it's a corruption charge. It's some type of malfeasance on the business side. Yeah. And then they disappear. So Navalny made a bid for mayor of Moscow, feeling like that's where you could make a change, right? I think his real mindset was if you could get that post, then he really could, perhaps longer term, influence change in Russia.

I mean, he was a proponent of democracy. Then disinformation started getting in. There was a lot of movement from the Putin regime painting him in a lot of different ways, right? Saying, okay, you're far right. You're an extremist. All sorts of things started to come through. And then it kind of all went sideways.

He eventually ended up, I think it was 2019, um, and then it kind of all went sideways. He eventually ended up, I think it was 2019, 2020. Um, he was, uh, on a flight, got sick, you know, Novichok was the nerve agent that they used, um, serious shit, serious shit invented by the Soviets. Um, and, uh, so he almost died from that. He was out of the country. And then to his credit after he recovered, okay, I'm going to come back. And straight back. Yeah.

Yeah. So he flew back. He got arrested before even really got anywhere near, you know, passport control. They just picked him up and, and that was pretty much it. During this period, he had started to do YouTube and he was flying drones, not him, his team were flying drones over the top of Putin's billion dollar compound and releasing stories that he's just got like an army of hookers and, and pole dancers and stuff, just cycling their way through this place and looking

at all of the money and this is where it's been spent, but they're, you know, full on like what in order to be able to go as far as they did, it looks like pretty high grade technology to be able to capture this sort of stuff. Yeah. I mean, you can, it's, you know, again, drones being what they are nowadays. Yes. Uh, I like that. I like that.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's a real character. I, yeah, I know. Um, so yeah, the, uh, the drone technology has changed everything, right. And it that. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, that's real character. Yeah, I know. So yeah, the drone technology has changed everything, right? And it's so accessible, right?

You don't need much. And if you're in a box, we'll get you a drone with a camera that you can get some really good footage of. So, but you're right. Talking about his lavish lifestyle and his spending, that irked Putin on a personal level. Putin only cares about one thing, which is maintaining power. Same with Xi.

You maintain power by keeping the people under control. Social unrest is the one thing that these guys all fear the most, including the mullahs in Iran and Kim Jong-un, although he lives in kind of a fantasy world out of North Korea, but. So Navalny, um, you know, at, at, at a certain point, he, you know, it was, for him, it was inevitable, I think that this is where it was going. I mean, I remember watching it unfold at the time after this guy's been popped with nerve agent and then slowly recovers and then starts doing his YouTube stuff again. And this is getting in days, tens of millions of plays. And it's not even, it's only in Russian, right?

There's maybe, you can maybe translate it into British subtitles or English subtitles or whatever. And, uh, and then he's like, I'm not scared of you. Like you should be. Yeah. You should be scared. Yeah. And as soon as he got on that plane, right, to go back to the motherland, that was at some point within the next five years,

you're probably going to be dead. Yeah. And I think that I could see the calculation that he and his, you know, his wife, I'm sure, and probably his close cadre made that the most impact he can have will be in country, right? I mean, it's one thing to be a dissident outside the country. You know, China's got a number of those, even though the Xi regime tries to track them down

and change their minds. But I think Navalny probably spent a fair amount of time, who knows, but it's speculation. But I suspect he spent a lot of time on that calculation. Can I have more impact outside the country or inside the country? And to his credit, he flew back knowing, I think exactly what was going to happen. And so that. Have you got any idea what these labor camps are like?

What do you, where, where it is and what it's like there? Do we have any information about that? This was the, what's known as a polar wolf. It's the IK three, a penal colony up above the Arctic Circle. And I personally haven't spent time there, but it's reported to be one of the most brutal camps that they've got, right? Which tells you, and it's completely isolated. And that's really what they were looking to do, was just to put him away somewhere

where people would forget about him. To his wife's credit, to his lawyer's credit, right? And to a small circle of supporters, they were able to keep some attention, keep some focus on it, and his mother as well. But the idea being, we're just out of sight, out of mind. Look, people talked about when he died, the headlines were all Putin's most prominent critic. Well, prominent implies that there's a bunch of others.

Only. Yeah. Basically, only critic at this point. Yeah. there's, there's some brave people who will get on the street and, and, you know, there were a lot of protests, but then those people were being rounded up and arrested. Preemptively. Some of them were picked up, uh, before there was even an opportunity to have a, not even so much a protest as a memorial service out in public. Right. And then they refused to give the body back for a little while as well.

They did. Um, you know, there was some talk about, well, they're letting the poison dissipate. Um, honestly, you know, at this point, you know, would, would, would Putin's team think to themselves, we, you know, we're going to waste some poison on him up here. We're just going to, you know, let him die. Yeah. I, I, who knows how he actually ended up going, but, um,'re just gonna, you know, let him die. Yeah, who knows how he actually ended up going, but his wife has, you know, promised to carry on.

And you know, there were lots of headlines saying, what does this mean for Russia? It doesn't mean shit for Russia, unfortunately, right? We will not be talking about this, unfortunately, in six months time. I know they laid some more sanctions on Russia. 500 new sanctions, largely against Russia's financial and military sectors. The round of sanctions are the most at one time since Russia invaded Ukraine two years ago.

And a lot of criticism that this isn't enough. This isn't sufficient. Biden basically made a threat, I suppose, or a deal that if Navalny died, that there would be more sanctions. We've deposited half a thousand and it seems like it was kind of like it. Yeah. Yeah. How about this? How about we did those sanctions two years ago when Russia invaded? If we had additional sanctions we could lay on to,

to fuck with their ability to make money, to fund their military adventurism into Ukraine. Why didn't we do that before? I mean, what are we half-assing sanctions for? So they came up with sort of this bullshit price cap on oil. The only way Putin affords what he's doing in Ukraine is through energy revenues. So the sanctions up to this point have been like, well, okay, well, we're going to cap So the sanctions up to this point have been like, well, OK, well, we're going to cap Russian oil at $60 a barrel. Can't buy it at a higher price.

Well, the world's not going to do it. What are we talking about? So they've created this whole shadow fleet of merchant ships. They've sold $35 billion worth of oil to India, which turns around and refines a lot of that oil, sells a lot of that product to the US and the EU, it's just bullshit. The idea that they've got more cash in their account now in Russia than they've had in quite some time.

Really? Certainly more than before the war even started because the sanctions have been ineffective, haven't been aggressive enough, and we should be doing more. You could argue the same for Iran, but again, I don't want to disappear down other rabbit holes, but yeah, when they talked about it, they came out and they bloviate about, we're gonna lay out in sanctions now because of Navalny.

Well, you should have fucking done those sanctions two years ago, right? Squeezed him, made it so he couldn't afford this, right? And maybe we wouldn't have spent billions and billions of billions of dollars to Ukraine because Putin couldn't afford to do what he's doing. But that's, you know, I don't know. I'm not president. In other news, this episode is brought to you by...

Element. Stop having coffee first thing in the morning. Your adenosine system that caffeine acts on isn't working for the first 90 minutes of the day. So your morning coffee that you have upon waking is completely pointless, but salt acts on your adrenal system and that is what is active. So taking element first thing in the morning will help you to feel more awake, have less caffeine throughout the day and be more energized.

It'll help to regulate your appetite, curb cravings and improve your brain function. It's a science-backed electrolyte ratio of sodium, potassium and magnesium and it tastes fantastic. This orange salt in water first thing in the morning is gorgeous. It is my favorite way to start the day. I wouldn't be doing it if I didn't love it. And I was using this product long before they were a partner on the show. Best of all, there is a no BS, no questions asked refund policy. So you can buy it 100% risk-free and you don't even need to return the box. That's how confident they are that you'll love it.

Right now you can get a free sample pack of all 8 flavors with your first box by going to the link in the description below or heading to www.drinklmnt.com. That's www.drinklmnt.com. What a… I've heard you say before that Putin's goal is to rebuild the Soviet Union. Is that, is that that's a, just the synopsis of what he wants to do? Well, he said it numerous times himself. He said that, I mean, this is most, um, you know, direct quote was the collapse of the Soviet Union was the greatest crisis of the 20th century.

the Soviet Union was the greatest crisis of the 20th century. Right. And, and so I guess my, my point is that he's spent the past 30 plus years trying to figure out how to rebuild it in some fashion. I don't mean the entire Soviet Union, but he certainly wants to, to get back to something more than what he's got. Right. He, he's very keen on sort of the glory of the motherland. And okay, you can argue, everybody's nationalistic, but he's ambitious in a land grab sort of way. So when he says that and

when he talks about the threat of NATO on his border. He's not bullshitting. He means that. So the idea that he's going to take Ukraine, and if we stop aid, again, Washington's going to do what they do, but if they don't provide resources to Ukraine going forward, if we say, ah, that's enough, let's focus on ourselves. It's not important. And people rationalize that by thinking that it's just Ukraine.

You know, why do we care? It's one country. If they imagine that that's where he's gonna stop, he's gonna end up with Kiev and then go, yeah, okay, I'm good. It's all fine now. I don't care. I'm gonna now focus on improving myself and the homeland.

That's not his track record. I'm not sure where people get that belief or optimism from. I think it's a rationalization because they don't want to spend any more money on Ukraine because they don't see the value in trying to prevent Putin from invading and taking over a separate country. Yeah. How much truth is there in the Russia's got declining birth rates, this is close to the highest that their population is ever going to be,

therefore their armed forces are, this is kind of a last chance attempt to be able to have the manpower to go into Ukraine. Is there any truth in that? I've it's a story I've seen pushed around online. Yeah. Um, look, they've got a three to one manpower advantage over Ukraine. Um, and more importantly, they've got, uh, an ability to, uh, suffer and put up with pain that I don't think the West really understands and go

back and look at their history in World War II and their losses that they were willing to sustain. Is the culture still the same as then though? Yeah, I think it's pretty well embedded in the culture. Yeah. I mean, you can argue that it's more modern society and they've got access to information, but at the end of the day, I think Putin and his cohorts, I think they read the people pretty well. And you would imagine that, you know, there must be populations, you know, just rising up in the streets and it's not happening. Look,

in part he was smart in how he was conscripting a lot of people. He took them from the Netherlands, the outer regions. He wasn't recruiting a lot of soldiers off the streets of St. Petersburg or Moscow or wherever. And because he doesn't necessarily want to bring the war right to Moscow and make them feel the pain. I mean, they went through that in Afghanistan to some degree when the Soviets occupied Afghanistan and eventually, sort of the popular unrest at home, mothers of dead soldiers, they all started to... And so he could start to feel that, right? I think they do have the appetite to wear a lot of pain. And so I think that's what Putin counts on. Whether they'll have the manpower, I think Putin, they miscalculated so much, right?

The Russian military and intelligence apparatus made so many mistakes going into this invasion. Um, but I think one calculation that he's kind of clung to is that the West will get tired of it. Um, and that's, that's kind of what's happening. You can count on the shortness of the attention span. Yeah. And I think he, he imagined, I mean, look, he imagined NATO was gonna, was gonna break, right? Or splinter or there wouldn't certainly be the cohesiveness that there is. And he certainly didn't anticipate it growing like NATO has.

So there's a lot of mistakes there, but I think he has correctly pinned some hope on the fact that we'd get tired of it and that there would sort of be this popular unrest. And make no mistake, the Russian disinformation apparatus is busy feeding that. So again, goes back to what we're talking about with information that you read and trying to figure out what these opinions are on social media. Why wouldn't they? It's impossible to think that the Russian regime, the intel apparatus, wouldn't look at the situation and go, yeah, we need to do what we can to influence the narrative

in the states in the West, right? They've been doing this forever. They did it in World War II to try to keep us out of World War II, right? Before the Nazis or the Germans invaded Russia when they were allied, you know, they spent a lot of time focused on trying to influence public opinion inside the US

to keep America out of the war. So it's not something new, right? They're just using different technology. How much longer do you think manned warfare has? I think there's always going to be a place for door kickers. I don't think there's any doubt about it, right? You've got to have some boots on the ground, But I think the pointy edge of the spear in a major global conflict, a big global, not a regional issue, that's definitely going to be

taking place in cyberspace. And I think that the first, the goal will be to kill morale at home, right? Wherever that would be. What will that look like? Well, I mean, you'll do the usual. That's why they're mapping out, you know, if you went to, I don't know which office it is in China,

but if you went to an office, you would find a playbook that maps out the infrastructure in the US, the UK, the West, in terms of our power systems, transportation, water treatment facilities, the West, in terms of our power systems, transportation, water treatment facilities, how do you stop the financial systems? Simple things. How do you keep someone from going to a cash point and pulling out money? How do you keep somebody from being able to get their medicines? How do you shut down the power grid? Morale, morale, morale. Yeah. You want to bring the pain to the home front as quickly as possible, right? And you do that by attacking the infrastructure.

You don't have to fly bombers over the top of- No. Now, you may at a certain point, but- So I think that that will be the first major effort. The weaponization of space, right? You'll be looking to take out another- Part of the problem when people talk about knocking out GPS, well, yes, you can target a country specific satellites, right? But some of this, like a massive EMP attack, right? Will impact everybody to some degree. So that will be more of a targeted surgical effort, but it'll certainly play a role. And yeah, I think that's, that's undoubtedly, but I don't think, look, we didn't imagine

there would be another major land war in Europe, right? If you had said five years ago, yeah, we're gonna have a, like a World War I like trench situation where it goes into a war of attrition, you know, and they make very little movement on either side. And they get, probably people would have thought that was crazy. You can go to the Imperial War Museum in London and go through the World War I exhibit, right?

You look at it and you see what took place during World War I and how it impacted food production and energy production and everything. And you think, well, it seems somewhat similar. So I think there will always be a place for that. But I think what we'll see is there will be that immediate desire to hurt the homeland as quickly as possible and try to impact morale because knowing that that's what's gonna drive

domestic decisions. What about from a kinetic standpoint, how much is gonna be drones, how much is gonna be robotics, how much is to be unmanned aerial vehicles and stuff like that. Yeah. Well, we're seeing, we're seeing that in a big way, right? I mean, we're, it's almost like we're testing, uh, the capabilities right now and seeing what are the impacts, um, forward looking gathering of intelligence,

right. For, uh, sort of short-term strategic planning of troop movements or certainly immediate impact of targeting on targets of opportunity. Drones are proving to be invaluable. And give the Iranian regime credit, right? At some point, they must have seen that several years ago because they built a certain capability in production of drones.

They, I think they understood the value there. As did a variety of other, obviously, US and UK have been in advanced drone production for years, right? But it's not just delivery of weapons on target. It's the intel gathering functions that drones are really changing the battlefield in a certain way. So that'll play a real important role. Unmanned capabilities, yeah. But we've been seeing that for some time. There's been arguments, you know, can you take the human out of targeting out of targeting, right? And the decision-making of, of actually, you know, green lighting,

I guess it depends how discriminant you want to be with the damage and the collateral damage as well. Yeah. And I think there's also, there's a, there's a moral implication there of saying, you know, do we take the human out of a decision to target kill kill other humans? I think that's a big leap. I'm sure it's going to happen, frankly. Human nature being what it is, I think the decision is going to be to drive towards whatever is most efficient and effective, particularly if something kicks off, if we've got a major conflict. But for right now,

something kicks off if we've got a major conflict. But for right now, you know, there's, look, it's happened before the Soviets had what was called the dead hand system, which essentially for, if all their leadership was wiped out, they did have a system in place that would take over and continue a counter response. And so they had that. So it's not unthought of or undeveloped.

It's unused. And potentially suboptimal compared with what's being used at least for the time being. Right, yeah. Yeah, things have advanced since the dead hand in the old Soviet Union for sure. But yeah, so I think there's, what holds people back from that is again,

this uneasy feeling, this moral issue of- But you think that the Russians, if they're prepared to put nerve agent into some dissident like rival, well, you know, that's not gonna be a consideration for them. That doesn't seem like it would be a consideration for- Well, but the consideration I think is more of, does it mean I lose power?

The calculation is, okay, is this the end for me then? If I do something, if I step over that line. Oh, I make myself obsolete by just becoming an algorithm in one, it's a slippery slope all the way down. Well, that I think is, part of it is that, but I guess I was looking more towards sort of pushing the button on the big one, right? And saying, okay, we're going to get into there. I think that's, that's where it, it, it, you get that hard and fast.

Nah, I don't, you know, I want to cling on to power. Yes. Yes. Yeah. I like my army of hookers more than I want to destroy. I also like an army of hookers. Um, did you see this modified RX nine hellfire missile, this flying Jinsoo thing, have you looked at this?

Yeah. This thing is hardcore. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. These samurai, I think it's six, six samurai blades come out the, it's three, four, five feet long and it can target an individual car.

And if you were stood two yards to the side of the car, I mean, it'd be a big bang and you'd know that something had happened. Right. But you would be physically, you would be fine. Yeah. It's something out of an anime or a Marvel film. And they got Al Zawari.

They got one of the guys that supposedly was a part of 9-11. Morning coffee on a balcony. And obviously some bloke just with a little bink laser targeter. And they sent two. That just in case the first one. You have a backup. Yeah.

You always want a redundant system. People always say, ah, redundancy. But no, you want it. You want, you want a backup in case it to. Do you imagine you step out onto your balcony, having your morning espresso and then before you know it, you're just dust. Yeah. Yeah.

I know it says, look, the lethality of that, but, but also other weapons systems is pretty, you know, it would shock a lot of people, I think. But the, the precision is also, look, I mean, people talk about this, you know, and, and there's a lot of, of focus put on that because there's, I don't think people really understand how much debate goes on before you pull the cord on a target and you think, okay, there's a lot of back and forth. What's the blowback? What's the potential civilian damage?

It's not like the movies where you say, yeah, go, you know, we don't give a shit, you know, just get the target. There's a lot of back and forth. And so as a result of that, because people in the Pentagon in particular are always asking about zero risk and we want zero, you know, we want zero collateral damage. We can't, you know, things are messy, right? So something happens and, you know, there's a potential for collateral damage. That's the way the world works. But they have worked very hard

on the weapons technology side to try to create these systems. Yeah. Minimal collateral damage. Minimal collateral damage. In order to impart, yeah, impart it's to avoid the killing of civilians. In part, it's also to ensure that you can,

when you've got a high value target, Pull the trigger more easily. You can pull the trigger, yeah. Yeah. And get it done. Yeah, well, if you're thinking, what value target, you know, pull the trigger, pull the trigger. Yeah. You get it done. Yeah. Yeah. Well, if you're thinking, what's this going to do?

What are the optics of this? And you go, he's a bad guy. He's a bad guy. And you know that he's a bad guy. You, you, you pulled the trigger, but then you, well, how's this going to play in the press? And all of these narratives begin to, I guess, subjugate a tactical decision with a branding decision. Yeah.

That's very, very, yeah. I, I, that's, I hadn't thought about that, that it is a, it reduces the friction between pulling the trigger because it is less likely to cause headaches down the road. Cause that's always the question. That's always, and it's become more and more of an issue is, is, you know, what, what does that collateral damage look like?

And then sometimes what they'll say is they'll say, okay, we have to wait. We have to pull back, hold fire. Then maybe you lose the guy. And you lose the opportunity because that window of opportunity on a particular target, that shuts really quickly sometimes. So then you don't know whether you're going to... There can be a lot of frustration involved because you know that that target, you know, you should act on it, but you also know, okay, we got, you know, we do have this legitimate questions. So the decision made at a higher level is always, you know, it's going to fall on that side. It's going to say, okay, we have to pull back.

Is this a new degree of scrutiny around collateral damage in warfare? You know, obviously collateral damage has been, I know that it's an obvious example, but like bombing of Dresden, that type of stuff. Right. You know, it was done for collateral damage. Whereas now it seems like war is supposed to be the most surgical, sterile, targeted, precise, ethical way. Like I only want the fuel for my fucking RX-9 Hellfire missile to be from

renewable sources. It's an EV. It's an EV. We plug it in and we have a recharge station halfway there to target. Yeah, it's relatively new. And I think part of it is also, we keep coming back to the same thing, flow of information, speed of information. You can see the destruction of-

Yeah. If people could watch Dresden being bombed, right, or get photos of it immediately, people would, I mean, look, go back to the Civil War. People had seen actual footage of what the hell was happening in the fields of Gettysburg. I mean, people were I mean, go back to the Civil War. If people had seen actual footage of what the hell was happening in the fields of Gettysburg, I mean, people would have been horrified, right? D-Day, right? If people could have seen the film that evening of what was taking place the first day, you know, public opinion would have shifted considerably.

But I think, so yeah, so that's helped to drive this idea that we got to, we got to minimize that, right? We've got to minimize that damage. You still got to have bad actors in the world. You still have to deal with them. You know, it's not, it's not a fucking community of nations where everybody's acting in everybody else's best interests. It's bullshit. Right. And so you have to, you have to account for the fact that, uh, at times things are going to be unpleasant, but yeah. Yeah. I only found out speaking of the drone thing, we walked past a DJI store here in downtown Miami, and I didn't realize that the U S had basically put so many restrictions on us drone creators.

They said, we don't want anyone who's basically able to interfere with flight paths and create this technology because we definitely don't want it at home, which left the market completely open for DJI, which I didn't know it was a Chinese company. Yeah. Yeah. Go figure. And now the entire drone market is dominated by DJI and now America are trying to play catch up and they've tried to relinquish some of these

restrictions on domestic creators of drone technology. And it's just, it's they're away with the wind. Yeah, we've, we've, we've done that in a number of areas, right? Whether you're talking about, I don't know, LIDAR or anything. There's, you know, regulatory policies and, and, and, you know, domestic concerns, um, have definitely impacted development of certain technologies and the Chinese have no such restrictions, right? And they certainly have no such restrictions on providing information. They spend a great deal of time hoovering up intelligence from a variety of sources overseas and providing

that to their private sector, right? And that's part of the Intel apparatus' How does that work? Role in life. Well, they steal information, bring it home and funnel it into supposedly private, but they're state owned and pseudo state operated companies. But I guess the point being is that their Intel apparatus' primary objective,

aside from keeping the population in check is, uh, is to develop and promote their commercial side of things, their, their economy. Right. And so the two work. Yeah. Hateco together. Yeah. We don't go out. We don't, you know, the, the, the, as, as an example, the agency, CIA wouldn't get a directive, a tasking order from General Electric that says, hey, we need the plans from an international competitor that they're working on some new engine component. Please go out and get that for us. That's not how it works right now. You could argue that would benefit our economy, I mean, if it was because it certainly benefited China's economy to have that, that cross border,

but we have, there's a firewall there. So you know, you don't take, you know, tasking with the idea that, okay, we're developing information here, intelligence, collecting it from others, stealing it basically to provide it to the private sector. So there's a, not an arbitrary line, but there is a compartmentalization between the private and the governmental sectors in the U.S. Which means that the resources and information

of both aren't as. Yeah, that's a good way to put it. That's a really good way to put it. Because I would argue just along those lines, which is that we have hampered ourselves at times by not having a more robust dialogue between the intel community. And now with cyber attacks and the work

that goes on in cyberspace, also with federal law enforcement, which is focused on, to some degree, elements of federal law enforcement focused on preventing or resolving cyber attacks from outside elements. So I don't think we have enough of a robust dialogue between those, between government and private companies, right? A commercial sector. If you want to have a major US company protected or a British company or whomever protected from outside hostile actors in cyber terms, for instance, they need to know what's happening

out there. They need to have more information about the threats and how those threats develop and who's responsible. And there has to be more of that ability to say, okay, we've got a problem. Turn to whether it's the FBI or the agency or whomever to say, how do we resolve this? And it can't just be a one-way dialogue where the commercial sector provides their information to the government and the government says, thank you very much. They need to be more informed. And they're trying to do that

to some degree now. They're trying to have more of that dialogue, but it's not seamless by any means. It's not like in China or even in Russia or other places where they don't see a need for a firewall. They don't believe that because they don't really have a free market system. They don't have a capital system. But our idea is you can't benefit one company because it'll fuck over other companies. So they don't give a shit about that. I only learned about the purpling of the armed forces recently.

So can you explain what that means? Like what was that? What was purpling of the armed forces? You tell me. Oh, okay. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Right. Well, so there was a particular extraction that was supposed to happen in the late nineties and a number of Navy SEALs, I think it was the highest number of Navy SEALs that had ever been lost up to that point, like maybe 20 or 30 of them, because there was Air Force overhead and the SEALs down on the ground weren't able to communicate with them. And this was because each different segment of the armed forces acted independently. They didn't have, they literally didn't have the communication systems to be able

to speak. And it's kind of this integration. I mean, that just seems so idiotic. Like how did you manage to get yourself to the stage where the air force and the Navy and the army weren't talking to each other. And it feels to me, not too dissimilar to this situation. And you call it purpleing. I hadn't heard that term.

If you blended all of the colors of the purple. Yeah. Yeah. I get that. Yeah, there you go. So you. I hadn't heard that term. If you blended all of the colors of the purple. Yeah, I get that. Yeah, there you go. See me and my primary color now. Learning something new every single day. The siloing of the military branches and their development of their own, whether it's protocols, communication systems, assets, right? Air platforms. I mean, that's why communication systems, assets, right, air platforms. I mean, that's why, you know, you've got in the Pentagon and DOD, you've got, you know, competition going on for who's developing, who's getting money for the latest. You think, well, hold on a second, you know,

the Marines have their own air force. And you think, what's, in a sense, what's going on here? Why do you, is that the most efficient way? But that was siloing of the branches, right? And to some degree, territorial pissing and kind of protection of their own turf, development of their own internal capabilities that were, I don't want to say redundant necessarily, but there was this sense that, okay, you've got spec ops, we need spec ops, we need this, you need that. I mean, we've got, and it's true, each branch has its own obvious functions, right? And specialties. But, you know, there wasn't this sense that, okay, is there more of an efficient way that

they can all blend together and we've got maybe one element that combines all that does a particular thing. Is there a way to certainly on the communication side, right, because you'll get development of a comm system, right, from the Air Force, right, through a contractor, right, that in the old days wasn't compatible necessarily or there wasn't their driving motive, is it compatible with what the Navy is doing or is it compatible with what the army is doing? And part of that was just natural territorial protection of what they're doing and protection of their own budgets and their reputation and sort, their, their reputation and their, you know, sort of their image. I, and there's a lot in there that's sort of soft science, but you can see how that

would develop, right. And then you get, you know, fucked up situations, right. Because you have, uh, joint operations and suddenly you realize, you know, whether it's just simple protocols or it's more technical, you've got real problems, right? Because it's not seamless. It's lack of coordination. Lack of coordination, yeah. But it's the same through private and public sector, it's the same through government, it's the same through everything. Yeah, well, we had, I mean, a major example, obviously, it was 9-11,

9-11, when you didn't have federal, state, local law enforcement and the intel community all on the same page, communicating, sharing information, targeting and saying, okay, who's got what on this? Let's all put it together into one big picture and see if it makes sense. None of that was happening because again, it was all siloed. sense. None of that was happening because again, it was all siloed. Bureau was doing their thing, agency was doing their thing. NSA was gathering their intel, state and local. They were worried about their own issues. And yeah, there wasn't this coordinated effort. There wasn't a... And wasn't a, and, and, and, you know, in part, yeah, that was a supreme failure, right. And, but it's, it's gotten better. Uh, but it's still, you know, it's still not there. It's, it's a human endeavor.

So it's never going to be perfect, but still. Talking about China and the, I guess, threat and degree of rivalrousness. You've mentioned that China is playing an incredibly long game, but I've also heard that their birthrate decline and the potential reduction in the volume of their population could be pretty catastrophic to any plans that they have. How much truth do you think is in that? How much is China's plans going to be mitigated by the fact that their population might drop an awful lot over the next few years? Well, I think it's a serious concern, right? I mean, she, you know, has come out with, or has governments come out with a program basically says, fuck more.

Um, I think that was the actual title of their program. Um, and you know, create more babies. So you know, as a population, it's probably the most popular thing she has instructed them to do in some time. Yeah. Okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. You know, as a husband, you're like, wait, it's not that I popular thing she has instructed them to do in some time. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. You know, as a husband, you're like, wait, it's not that I wanted to.

This is for the, this is for the, it's for the motherland. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, let's go. Yeah, exactly. Just lay back and think about Queen and country. So G and country. Yeah. So it's, it is, I mean, it is obviously if the government's worried about it, it's a

serious concern. And, you know, they had the about it, it's a serious concern. And they had the whole one child policy for a long time. Obviously that was going to have a lagging impact. So I think that they're trying to get ahead of the curve to some degree, but as you can imagine, it's like anything else. You can say, okay, we've got a problem here. We can see that there's going to be a shortfall or a gap.

So let's get on it. But there's always going to be a lag. That was done, again, going back to 9-11. There was a real awareness after that, in a hot wash, that said, look, we- What's a hot wash? After a major go-rope, you tend to- A what? After a fuck up, after something happens, I'm sorry,

after something happens, then you sit down as a whomever's in charge and elements that are responsible, sit around a table and say, what the hell happened? And they've done some assessment, and so then people put on the cards on the table and say, this is where we fucked up, this is what we should have done, this is how we have to improve it, this is how we mitigate the risk going forward. And so that's essentially a hot wash and you do that after every fuck up. And so after 9-11, as part of all of that process, there was a realization that the agency, the CIA had spent, had an over-focus on SIGINT, the Signal Intelligence and Technology, right? And had gotten away from the recruitment of spies. The agency is a pretty simple organization. You steal secrets,

right? You steal secrets that address national security concerns and protect national security interests, right? So that, you know, yes, you can do it through technology, but ultimately, you also need human sources. You can't get away from the need for human sources, but they kind of did. They moved away from that. And so I guess my point being is the directive was, we need more people, we need more officers who are out there in the fields recruiting, gathering intelligence, getting human sources. That's where we missed the boat to some degree here. We lost track of the importance of that because we got enamored with the technical side of things. I mean, I'm sort of putting money and resources there. Had fewer and fewer recruits going into traditional operations.

But there's a lag. My point being is there's a lag to that. You got to recruit those people. That can take years. You got to train them. That takes years. Then you got to develop. And then you got the whole problem of the time it takes to identify, develop, recruit, maintain a source. So that's a long lag time. So think these things don't just happen overnight. Anyway, so that's where I think with China, they, you know, they probably got a problem, but I think they clearly are aware of it. So they're addressing it. I mean, could you imagine here if we looked at our demographics, we got a problem. Could you imagine the White House saying, ah, I got a job for all you Americans.

Yeah. Well, speaking of that and the sort of population in the US, I'm reading more and more about the number of military age, Asian men coming over the border, Mexico, I think Hawaii as well, kind of has a little bit of this problem. Um, yeah, a little bit. It's mostly the Southern border. Okay. Um, and it's a shocking increase, like a 73% increase year on year, uh, in, uh,

in, uh, folks from China crossing over the border. Um, now it's, and it's, and again, as you pointed out, it's mostly single males. Um, you don't want to see when you're in, when you're in intelligence or in, in that world, you don't want to get paranoid, right? You don't want to see a spook behind every corner, right? Because that'll eventually, that'll really, uh, jam up the ability to get shit done. Yes. So, um, but again, playing the odds and thinking about probability,

does anyone imagine that the Chinese Intel apparatus, which is incredibly well-resourced and motivated, would they actually look and go, yeah, I mean, maybe this makes sense. Maybe we want to put a handful of people here. Look, they've spent decades putting their own people from actual Intel operatives to cooperative contacts through the US education system.

Yes, I'd seen that. The number of kids that were at university somewhere that turned out to be some CCP sleeper agent. Yeah, and oftentimes they don't even have to be that. I mean, we imagine that as some super spy, it doesn't have to even be that. It's a cooperative contact. It's someone who is... Maybe they're getting their bill footed. Maybe their family's getting a little bit extra something back home or some consideration

or whatever it is. Tell us what you're hearing. Just say- Yeah, exactly. You work with us and that's great. Then eventually you get a job at wherever, an important US company or... you know, they don't even care. They got it. Cause again, they've got the long-term view. So they'll send someone to grad school here. And again, you don't want to say, okay, so every student is a spy.

That's not the fucking way we're talking to you. It's, it's just they're doing it right. And we know that they're doing it. And so the idea that they're not at least taking advantage of a porous border for other reasons is it would be pretty remarkable. If a Mexican family with a dude that's got a stick with a bandana and a fucking satchel attached to the back of it, like a hobo, like riding the rails. You remember those, like it was that old and styley like, sure, sure. And he's making coffee in a can, you know, a can of beans and he's, yeah, hobo Joe.

Yeah. He's just a good hearted guy. If you're thinking that they can get across the border, but the CCP isn't going to be able to facilitate. Right, right. Or, you know, or the Iranians aren't going to look at it, right. And, and think to themselves, you know, I'll bet we could get some people over. And-

This is a real fucking problem. It's a real fucking problem. And look, it's a real fucking problem from a national security point of view. And also from just a, look, we had this incident down in Athens, Georgia, right? This poor student, this young 22 year old girl, just the other day, right?

She went for a jog, broad daylight, goes for a jog on a public trail, you know, and gets attacked, blunt force trauma, killed. And now they've arrested an illegal immigrant, fella's name is Ibarra from Venezuela, who crossed the border, I think with his wife and maybe a kid, young kid, I think through El Paso maybe.

And then, and this is back in 2022. So this is his history. Comes from Venezuela, crosses the border, just walks over. They release him, because they don't have room in the detention facilities. So they're just releasing people, sort of a mass parole idea, right? And they released hundreds of thousands through this.

Again, they call it parole, but we don't have room for you. So you go. Here's your court date. And I'd like you to show up in a couple of years, right? So they go to New York, first of all. He has a run-in with the law up in New York. They release him back on the streets. And he makes his way down to Athens,

where I think his brother from Venezuela is residing. And then now he's banged up for murdering this 22-year-old nursing student who just goes for a fucking jog. And yeah, and now the interesting thing, I don't want to get distracted here, but the interesting thing is how it's dealt with. Obviously it's going to be a political issue, right? Because it deals with an illegal immigrant and the border is such an important issue going into the election. So yes, it's going to become a political football. But

the way that the White House decided to deal with it, or Democratic strategists, I don't know whether anybody in the White House was clever enough to do this, was basically to say, hey, you want to blame somebody for this sad death, blame the Republicans. They just blocked a bill in the Senate that would have provided funding for Ukraine and Israel and Taiwan, but also for the border. So it's the Republicans' fault because for the past month and a half, they've been stonewalling. That's implying that people are stupid enough to think that somehow the millions of people who have crossed the border in the past three years just came across now, right?

During the month and a half while the Republicans have been jackass and around up on Capitol Hill not doing anything. And so that's the level of stupidity that they hold for the American public. Now, there are people stupid enough to believe it, right? And there certainly are people partisan enough to buy that line of crap and go, yeah, it's the Republicans' fault that this poor girl got killed because this guy came across in 2022, right, during the three years that the current White House has kind of ignored for a variety of reasons border security. So that's on a personal level for US citizens, but on a national security level, we have no idea of the millions and millions of people who have come across unvetted and released

into the country. We have no idea who they are for the most part. We certainly have no idea how many bad actors there are. And we've caught hundreds on the terror watch list, but who knows how many others? Because we've got an unknown number of known gotaways. You've got over 2 million as a conservative estimate over the past two years of the current administration

who have got through without any contact with law enforcement. That's just a guess. And so there's no idea how many bad actors have come across. And that's if the government's job is to protect its citizens, any government's job is to protect its citizens, then I don't know how you argue that they're doing a fine job. Because if you don't have a secure border and you know who's coming in and out, which is why you have border controls

for every other country, then you don't have a secure homeland. But it's not a country anymore. No, it's not a country. It's like an extension of what everybody else, the territory of the countries that are around you. Yeah. Tim Kennedy was telling me that there was this guy

who appeared on the news, there was a news me that there was this guy who appeared on the news. There was a news report going on and this guy just walked across the border and turns to the camera and says something like, uh, America will know my name. And then facial recognition turned out that this guy is on some watch list. God, but obviously not clever. Yeah. Not super, but I mean, clever enough to- I'm going to be famous one day.

I mean, fuck knows where he is now. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, they didn't, oh, they didn't stop him. No, because it was, I mean, clever enough to- I'm going to be famous one day. But I mean, fuck knows where he is now. Yeah. Yeah. What about- Oh, they didn't stop him. No, because it was, I mean, it was just a news reporter. Yeah, yeah. It's just some black, I mean, what's he going to do?

Hold him down? He doesn't know. But what about the tranc and fentanyl route? Is that, do you know how that's getting in? Have we got idea about how those drugs are getting into the country? Well, I think to some degree, the government will argue that most of it's coming in through ports of entry, right?

And that's, you know, there's truth in that, right? And, you know, it's not as if, you know, the majority of narcotics, whether it's fentanyl or anything else, is coming in on, in backpacks, you know, through, you know, border crossings outside of ports of entry. But it's both, right? It's all, it's all of the above. And so it goes back to the same thing. If you have a tight border, it makes it more difficult, right?

Why wouldn't you make it more difficult for narco traffickers and bad actors to cross your border? It just, again, I don't understand the rationale behind this. Yes, the immigration policies in the states can be improved, and yes, immigration has always been a way that a country improves itself, but not by just letting in millions of people who

you don't know who they are. No other country is going to do that, and yet we act as if that's OK. Is there anywhere else on the planet that are, right? No other country is gonna do that, right? And yet we act as if that's okay, right? Or- Is there anywhere else on the planet that's doing that? No, look, we had the, I think, I'm probably gonna get these numbers wrong, but I think the largest mass migration

of modern times has been in the 1880s, I think, when 10 million or so people came from Europe to the United States. We've had 7 million people in what, the past80s, I think, when 10 million or so people came from Europe to the United States. We've had 7 million people in what, the past three years come in. I'm not sure how we imagine that somehow we have things under control. But look, the problem that President Biden has is that as soon as he, you know, the Democrat strategists looked at this problem and said, yeah, we got an issue. Obviously, the poll numbers are showing.

So they're acting on this because it's an election year, right? Three years they didn't do shit. I mean, in fact, they did the opposite of shit. They made it worse. Right. The detention centers are unethical and we shouldn't be, and look at the separation of children from families. Exactly. Right. Making asylum easier, making parole easier. So they actually created a more

porous environment. But I think they looked and they go, oh, God, we've got to do something because the election's coming up. The poll numbers are so bad. So that's why they're acting now as if, well, look what we did. We tried to push this bill through the Senate, and the Republicans thought, okay, if you're going to normalize 5,000 people a day before you take action, maybe that's not quite what we're talking about here. And I think they all knew that they could push a bill through that the Republicans would back off of. That was the game that's played.

That's palpable deniability. Yeah, so they've got this issue. But as soon as he talked about taking some executive actions, then he got a hard push from the hard left. And so all the progressives on that side said, oh, don't even think about it. Don't even think about doing anything that's Trump-like. It all comes back to this bizarre world

that we're living in now, where there's people willing to imagine that President Biden, God bless him, we're all getting older, fuck it, I forget shit all the time. But to imagine that he's not possibly the best candidate for another four years, but we're gonna vote for him because the other option is Trump, right? That's the world we live in now.

It's just, we're, you know, I don't know. I don't want to, I don't want to get too cynical, but I think we're, you know, US politics is kind of fucked right now. Yeah. I, uh, that wasn't a rocket science statement. Wow. Wow. Did you hear what Mike said?

That was a, that was revelatory. Wow. Did you hear what Mike said? That was revelatory. I've heard some new information today on this podcast. Yeah, man. I don't know. I've been here for two years now and obviously was observing with great interest and intrigue. More like a real life reality TV show with global consequences. The election in 2020.

Um, but I don't think that this year is going to be any better. I think we've seen, you know, 20, wow, 2012 was the last uncontested, mass uncontested election. I think that 2016 we had this Russia collusion, 2020, we had stop the steal, 2024, there is no way. I mean, it's like, you know, it's one all going into overtime. Yeah, you go back and we did have the,

the hanging Chad debacle, you know, with, with Bush and Gore. Right. Oh yes, yeah, I remember that. And so that was, that was a, you know, but it was, it was mild compared to. So, no, I agree. This is not going to be any better. Look, again, you don't want to put too much stock in polls and surveys, but it does seem like they've been consistent over the past handful of months, which is that, you know, those surveyed, none of them are particularly excited. In fact, they don't want a rematch of Biden and Trump.

I think people are, if given other alternatives, I think they would, they would go for it. I think the Democrats are kind of boxed in. I think they, you know, they've, they've, they've got a problem here. They're not going to go for Newsom? Well, they're going to have to clear the ticket, right? And so by that, I mean, if they're going to move Biden off the ticket, then how do you move Kamala Harris off the ticket? What's the optic of saying, we're going to ask Kamala Harris, a woman of color, who's been the vice president, to step aside for a white

dude from California. I don't know that the Democrats are willing to go with that optic. Aside from the fact that, who am I to say? But Kamala Harris may have floated to the top in a spectacular way, despite her abilities and competency. Wow. And popularity. And popularity. And laugh. The laugh, OK.

I mean, everybody's got a quirk. But still, look, you hamper yourself. We got in this world where we're picking people because they tick certain boxes, which is a ridiculous thing to do. I think we'd all be better off if we just said we're going for competency. And who's the best person for the job?

And what they could have done was done her a favor by saying we're going to pick the best person for the job, and then pick her, rather than saying we're picking a woman of color if I get nominated. The affirmative action thing is patronizing to the person that gets actioned. Well, it hampers them, it handicaps them because- Diversity high. Yeah, exactly.

So I never quite understood the notion that you would say that rather than just saying, I'm going to pick the best person and then go ahead, fine, pick her. But at least you've given her some top- I don't think anyone was prepared to eat that lie if that had been pushed forward with Kamala Harris. So, you know, the country might be stupid, but they're not that stupid. Yeah. Yeah. And, uh, yeah, dude, I don't know. No, you're right.

You're not. No, you're right. Yeah. This, the remainder of this year is going to be, it's going to be wild, but yeah, Douglas Murray went to, um, the streets of Philadelphia and he's seen this trank crisis that's happening there. And this, this is like fentanyl is fentanyl and it's for people for whom heroin wasn't enough. And then they moved on to something stronger and that wasn't enough.

And now they've moved on to something stronger and it causes necrosis. People's limbs are falling off and their shins are eating themselves on the street. It's crazy. Yeah. And it's, and it's also a fine demonstration of how that world works, right? You're always chasing the next product, right? You're always chasing because you know, you've got a shelf life on the current one, right? Because eventually, you know, people are going to be looking for the next kick, right? And so we worked counter-narcotics in the agency for years,

right? Before we won the drug wars. And sorry, that's a terrible, like, so we didn't win the drug wars. Drugs, drugs won the drug wars. Right. Yeah. So, but we were working counter narcotics and, you know, you could, you could take a ton of gear off the street and it never would affect the price, right? Because there's so much out there and there's so much demand. And yet also there's this massive product development.

You know, it's like this global production effort that they're always looking for the next product to put out there. So, you know, it's, it's always going to be something coming down the pike, right? You, and that's just the kind of the history of narcotics on the street is there's always the next bit of gear that's going to hit the street and it's. The iPhone 15 is the iPhone 16. It's yeah. Yeah. No, yeah.

I, it's one of the, it's everything is working so cohesively from the synthesizers of the drugs to the designers of the drugs, to the users of the drugs, to the people who might have a incentive for a country and its populace to become more demoralized, less healthy, more of a burden generally on society, everything spins up to be that. And people are going to take drugs for just wanting to take drugs. You don't need a big globalist conspiracy to turn America into a bunch of walking zombies.

Yeah. People will happily do that on their own. Yeah, I mean, I think there has been this line about China contributing to the fentanyl crisis in order to take you know, take down America and, and again, look, never say never, you know, as, as their talk amongst, you know, you know, some back room there that says, well, this is having

a real negative impact on the West. How about that? You know, do they view that as a downside? No, you know, but is that driving the drug trade and all the demand out there? The dynamics of drugs, driving the drug trade. Yeah, and it's super depressing. And it really is. It's one of those things that you look and it's, I'm not smart enough to figure this out,

but I've always been fascinated by the risk appetite. And it's like the kids that go to a party at somebody else's house and they open up the parents' medicine cabinet and they're willing to just like take a handful of whatever to see what happens, right? I've never understood that mentality, right? That says I'm willing to just give it a go

and see where it leads. I think people get there one step at a time, at least with what we're talking about here. You know, it's, there'll be a little bit of, maybe I'll start drinking and then I'll start smoking weed and then I'll do some crack. And then, you know, before I know it, I've lost my job. And then once I've lost my job, like the fact that the U S doesn't have a social safety net like we do in the UK, you know, especially for health, if you've

got a mental health problem or a physical health problem, you'll just get picked up and put into the hospital. You'll go to A&E, you know, and the NHS isn't, I mean, it's a bad, a bad solution to an awful problem, but it is way better than no solution. Right. Significantly better. Yeah. You know, and this is the difference.

You can tell the difference when you see homeless people in the States, they're, you know, shouting things at themselves. A lot of the time sort of shuffling, they've got a brown bag with a fucking unbranded glass bottle inside of it, swinging, God knows what. It's much more sort of schitzy and aggressive and forthcoming. Whereas in the UK, if you get down to that level of mental health, disorder or distress, you just come in, someone comes in and sweeps you up. Right. And this isn't, it's not a perfect system, but you know, you just come in, someone comes in and sweeps you up. Right.

And this isn't, it's not a perfect system, but you know, you will be given medication and a place to live and a fucking a bed and a nurse that will say, this is what you've got schizophrenia, you've got bipolar disorder, you got the whatever, whatever, uh, and that's that. And you don't, you don't have that. And unfortunately you see, you know, front and center downtown of every major U S city. Oh God, Los Angeles, Los Angeles is, uh, you can drive by some of these.

I don't know what you call them communities or whatever, but it's, yeah, it's, it's shocking, but you're right. It's, it's the complexity of the substance abuse with the mental health, with the, um, you know, I see no hope, you know, I've got no way to get off the street. I can't afford a room. So what's the point in trying, um, with the, I've got no way to get off the street. I can't afford a, uh, so what's the point in trying. So what's the point in trying, um, with the, I think the dysfunction of local and city and state governments that look at it and think, well, how come we can't just throw some money at it and solve it and without saying,

okay, this is a very layered complex problem. We've got to solve several issues here. You can't just put somebody in a home if they got substance or mental problems. And you've got to deal with those. And so you're right. And it's also a much larger population. And so it's becoming increasingly visible. So yeah, I'm not sure if there's a there's a, there's a lack of movement, it seems on the part of most major cities to try to figure out a path forward. Right. Unless the Chinese are coming to visit. Yes.

And then, and then, then you just take a hose to the street. Sanitize everything. You gotta, you gotta wash all the shit off the sidewalks and move the people out. Pick up the needles. Everything's pristine. Yeah. One of the things that I've been particularly fascinated by since moving to America and even beforehand is the difference between how three letter agency operatives

are seen by the general public from a brand and positioning perspective and how armed forces, veterans and acting soldiers are seen. Because many people, you know, tons of my friends that have been in the SEALs have then gone into the CIA and then phased out of that too. So it's like a single pathway for some, and some people just go into one or the other. But it seems like, you know, thank you for your service. Something that's said to somebody that was in the armed forces. You're part of a globalist network of shells trying to destroy the country is said to someone from a three letter agency. Yeah.

Yeah. And what do you think's going on with the optics, the poor brand position? Do you know what I'm talking about? Yeah, no, I do. The positioning of the people who are serving the country, but one is seen to be unequivocably, almost unequivocably in service. And the other one is not too sure. Are you trying to take us down from the inside? Can we even trust you? Right. Yeah. That's a, there's, there's, there's a bit of a,

a sea change there in terms of how people view, certainly the CIA and the FBI, right. Over, and it's, it's, it's very disheartening. But yeah, I know what you're talking about. It's a lack of trust in those organizations because this narrative that they've become just political tools. And that's a very dangerous thing. What I mean is a political intel apparatus is a very dangerous thing,

but the narrative that it came out, I think, is at odds with the reality. Now, yes, you can have a senior person leading an organization who's been appointed by the president, who enjoys that top cover, and you want the relationship. You want the dialogue. You always used to say and you want the relationship, right? You want the dialogue. You always just say that you want the CIA director to have a seat at the table in major discussions because that's important, right? Because you're asking this agency to go overseas and do things on behalf of national security interests so the director should have that access. And the FBI director, same way, they're leading the federal government's key law enforcement organization.

And yet the narrative over the past handful of years has really shifted to the point where there's an element of society that views those agencies, and most of it's on the far right, that says they're very political, they're very political, they're overly political, they need to be torn down and destroyed and then rebuilt, you know, by whoever I vote into office, right? Which is a fucking fourth world way of looking at things, right, because that's what they do, you know,

overseas in some of the, you know, lesser developed nations where they're just willing to say, okay, now I'm in charge, you charge, I'm clearing out the intel apparatus, I'm putting my own people in. And that's exactly what they do in a banana republic. I don't know if I can say banana republic anymore. So that's not what you want. You can't do that. So this idea that you tear down these organizations and start over again is bullshit because the

vast, vast, vast majority of these people just want to do their jobs. The FBI just wants to get out there. They want to solve a variety of problems that face the nation from a law enforcement perspective. And the agencies, you tell them what their tasks are, they get out there, they do their tasks, they say, what's the next task? And so I'm not one of those people that sits around and goes, oh my God, these organizations have been, yeah, could you argue that some of the senior management became too enamored of a political power play or administration? Sure.

And you'd never want that to happen. And so you have to ensure that you've got enough proactive, inquisitive, questioning people within the groups that are supposed to, Senate Intel Committee, congressional Intel committees, and others who are supposed to ensure transparency to the degree possible. But yeah, I don't know how that narrative shifted. I'm very glad that we still have sort of the respect for the military that we do. I think it's incredibly important. What's the numbers now? It's less than 1% serving the military. I mean, that's incredible. Very few

people, very few people, that's an understatement, have skin in the game and understand what it means to serve. And I think that's a problem too, right? I think if we had more people, young people who, I don't know whether an obligation or not, but somehow served, whether it's through the military or through government service or through some form of community service, if you had some skin in the game,

I think you might develop with a somewhat different view on civics and the importance of the government and what's best for the country. And it might get outside your own little bubble, but that's not the way it's working. It would make a lesson for them and us scenario. Yeah, yeah. There is this overbearing, nameless, faceless,

shadowy organization that's supposed to be a part of you, but is maybe keeping you down. And yeah, if one person from most families in one form has served, however it is that they do it, then you think, oh, well, you know, Uncle John, he's not one of the bad guys. I know that he's not one of the bad guys. Right, and everybody's, you everybody's put a little time in.

Again, not the draft. I suppose we're never going to probably unless this is a major conflict, we're not going to a draft. But some fashion, some service at some level, I think would change the dynamic for the better. But for right now, look, I think the weaponization of DOJ, that's a big topic, certainly on the right. I think that's the result of just this dysfunctional political nature that we've got right now, right? Where you can't find people living in the center anymore, right? So you've just got people screaming at each other and throwing hand grenades at each other from both sides.

So naturally, you're going to attribute the other sides to doing all sorts of nefarious bullshit, getting up to all sorts of things. And again, I don't spend my days sitting staring at my navel wondering what the DOJ is up to, but I have a hard time believing that they're completely a political weapon of the current administration or would be of the next administration, the previous one. There's, again, governments are very large bureaucracy. And my experience again, hey, everybody's got a different one, but mine is that most people just want to get on and do their fucking job and live their life.

Yes. Is that what most people misunderstand about the CIA? Do you think that it's just people trying to do their job? Um, yeah, I think, um, the, the, the agency, uh, has, has taken heat, um, like the FBI has. And I think, uh, again, I think that part of it is the narrative that's been driven out there in part, look, I mean, again, it's, it's a well, look, we've been the agency's taking heat for a long time. So I can't just say it's a recent thing. I

go back to the Church Commission, and you go back to, you know, some of the, the other issues that the agencies had. then you go back to some of the other issues that the agencies had. But yes, the people I worked with were fantastic. And we never sat around at some safe house in some shithole somewhere, talking politics. Nobody gave a shit about politics. And maybe my time has passed

and maybe now the new crew does something different, but I don't really think so. I think that on the operation side and certainly throughout the agency, the vast majority of people know what their mission is and they do it honorably and they do it without any pats on the back, right? Nobody, like you said, walks up to them and says, hey, thanks for your service, you know, because they don't know what the hell they're doing. And they can't talk about it. Yeah.

And you go to your grave, you know, keeping a lot of secrets, right? And that's the way it should be. So yeah, people take it personally and it can impact morale, right? When you're not used to this idea that somehow, you know, you don't expect people to go out there and go, man, that's CIA, what a great organization, but you don't expect them to walk around and go, well, we should tear it down, start over again. What the hell is that all about? When you're making sacrifices, when you're away from your family, when you're doing things

in dangerous situations, working hard late nights. Right, right. And, you know, and not for money, by the way. When I started, I started thinking about this the other day, I was laughing with my wife. When I started and we were doing some crazy shit, I was making $17,000 a year. $17,000, I was not doing it to get wealthy, right? And I don't know anybody who does now, still to this day.

Right, that's not why you do it. You're doing it because, well, A, it's entertaining at times. It's very interesting, it's challenging, and you feel. You're doing it because, well, A, it's entertaining at times. It's very interesting. It's challenging. And you feel like you're doing something more important than yourself, right? So that's a quality of life issue, maybe. Anyway, yeah.

But service, you know. Yeah, service. The fact that you don't get, in intelligence, you don't get the same level of positive reinforcement from the optics of what you did has to be, I mean, I think about this all the time. Let's say that there's an incident and the emergency services are called, an ambulance turns up and everyone is so relieved. A fire truck turns up and everyone is so relieved.

The police turn up and everyone is so angry. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Right, exactly. So why are people gonna go? Yeah, phones come out. Yes. Something bad's gonna happen. Here's the police.

You think, I'm sorry, you know, you wanna do this job? You wanna go out there and confront situations where you have no idea what's happening, right? And you have no idea what you're gonna encounter, right? But you're doing it, right? And look, are there bad actors? Yeah. Are there folks that need to be removed? Are there folks that need better training?

That was that thing that drove me crazy about the defund the police movement. You want a better police force, then you need to actually fund them. You need to spend more on training and on consistent training and future training. That's what you do. You don't defund the police. Now we're dealing with the aftermath of some of that in some locations. That was a bizarre little point in time.

But the problem that that trend created wasn't just an encouragement of under resourcing police departments. It was the optics of what recruiting future members of police teams will be like. Who wants to go and take that job? Who wants to go and put their life on the line or their safety or work late nights or not earn a massive amount of money or do a thankless task or push papers around a desk or whatever job it is, whatever part of the big cog of the

law enforcement mechanism you were a part of, who wants to go and do that? Everybody does that. Everyone would love to have a boss that appreciated the work that they did. Right. And, and if you walked down the street, like, this is one of the things that you're right to say it's good that veterans, and this is something we don't have in the UK. There is no equivalent of thanks for your service in the UK. We don't revere our veterans in the same way.

You know, there's no one walking around with a Vietnam veteran. Right. Cap on, I don't think I've ever heard, uh, acting, um, British military, uh, please step on the plane first. I've never heard that be called in British airports. So, you know, we don't have that. That's not some poppy day. And maybe that's about it where people get out.

Correct. Yeah. You think November the 11th remaining World War two veterans, maybe, but not more recent, but even within that, that was, that was contested last year. It was, but you know, there was going to be all of these protests from Middle Eastern, Middle East protesters were going to have a problem. There was going to be interruptions for the parade. I don't know whether it actually came out as badly as it thought, but there was,

you know, poppies were being ripped down because this is part of some colonialist, imperialist thing. And you just think, God, it's so boring. It's the same thing over and over again, that there is some part of history, which is unforgivable and that we are personally cursed with this, you know. Yeah. Got to take Churchill's stature down. Yeah.

Statue down. Yeah. Yeah. I read, uh, I read this letter that Churchill's father, uh, sent him after he was admitted to Sandhurst on his third attempt. And it's only bits of it remain, but it's Churchill's 19 and his father says, uh, if you do not change your ways, you will become one of the hundreds of social waste roles, having completely squandered all of your potential. And it's just, he just lambasts Churchill for like a full page.

And then he signs off by saying, your mother sent her regards. Your mother, your mother sends her regards. Your mother, your mother sends her. Jenny. And I remember thinking to myself, it made me feel so sad that there was this guy that probably, you know, defeated the Nazis. They're just rolling through Europe. They hit, they go through one country, another country, another country, another country, and then they just think that they're going to do the same in Britain.

And it's the first time that they encounter any resistance is the Battle of Britain. It's the first time they actually get pushed back from anywhere. People don't know this. It's the first time that they ever got pushed back from anything was the Battle of Britain. And they go, okay, maybe this isn't, maybe the thousand year Reich in the Aryan race, isn't this indefatigable force that we presume. And I bet that at the end of that, that Churchill probably still didn't feel enough, you know, that he'd managed to complete all of this stuff

and he carries this desire for recognition and validation and acceptance by the world into his motivation to do the things that he did. And even Chamberlain, as someone who wasn't built to do what he needed to do, very famously in his resignation speech says, this is the one thing that the Nazis can't see. They couldn't imagine someone putting their personal pride to one side in

order for the good of the country. So he steps to a side. So he makes a sacrifice in a very different kind of a way, so that Churchill can then step up. And I just think, God, you know, there's this new series on Netflix called, um, uh, world war two, I think it's called from the front lines or something. And they've used AI to make 4k and full color. All of this archive footage available.

It's like maybe an eight episode series. It's awesome. And, uh, you know, it's so much more immersive now that you can see it in full color. And they did that with world war one. They, uh, colorized, uh, some incredible footage and improved it. And it was, it was amazing. Well, it seems less, uh, it makes it feel much more real to see it, to see it in that way. And, uh, I'm watching this thing and thinking, you know, this, it was one of the first times in a long time that I felt really proud about some of the things that the UK had done.

felt really proud about some of the things that the UK had done. And then, like I say now for all of the problems that we, that there is over in America, the UK doesn't, it doesn't revere the people that have served. It doesn't have even the same kinds of, um, benefits, you know, you can go to a fucking Denny's and probably if I showed my military service card, I'd probably get 10% off Denny's, you know? And they still do it. I mean, you're right. I mean, you pointed out the airlines, right?

I, you know, I'm on Delta all the time. And, and one of the things they do is, you know, servicemen, active duty and retired, you know, board first. Right. So- Are you included in servicemen? No, no, no. I wouldn't, I wouldn't ever claim that.

I mean, I work for- I don't know what servicemen- Yeah, I work for the government. So the military. Right. Okay. I'm sorry, military service. And so they do that.

Yeah. Churchill, so much of what he did, yeah, driven by his childhood and sort of this, this feeling that, you know, he was always trying to get affection from his mom. And, and his dad was a, his dad was a bit of a hot mess, but fascinating character. Yeah, but then they vote him out after, you know, hey, we won World War II. Oh, sorry, you're out.

Yeah. And, you know, it's fascinating stories. I just reread the three book series, The Last Lion, which is a fantastic look at, it's a a history of Churchill, covers, you know, birth to death and it's a lot of detail, but it's very readable and it's just, but there's a lot of it. But what did you, what was some of the things

that surprised you the most learning about him? I think oddly enough, I'm excited to read a lot about World War II history, his relationship with Roosevelt and so the World War II history, his relationship with Roosevelt. So the World War II section, although probably moved the quickest, was super interesting. I think that the latter part, right? And also sort of prior to that, I mean, his involvement with the Irish troubles, that was very interesting, I think. But then afterwards, it's getting out of World War II and how his political career kind of stagnated and then resurged. It's a very interesting look. There's also a book written by his physician, Lord Moran, I believe it was, it was the name of the physician.

And he had Churchill's okay once he passed away to write up his notes into a book, right? And he traveled with Churchill all over the place, the conferences and throughout the World War II as his personal physician. And it's a great book, not very long. Have you read that? I have read it. I'm trying to remember the name of the book, but it's written by his doctor and again, Moran was his last name, Lord Moran. What was he saying about Churchill's state of mind, his physical health, his mental health? Well, look, it wasn't like a kiss and tell book, right? So there was no shocking negative revelation in there.

You only had one testicle. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. He had four, which was really surprising. So it's not like today where the idea if you get a contract to publish a book, then you're expected to produce something shocking in it based on your experience.

I don't think that was the case. It was fairly complimentary of Churchill throughout. He obviously had a great deal of respect for him. But it did talk about his variety of things, his capacity for, um, you know, enjoying his own ideas and hearing himself speak, uh, his capacity for drink. And yeah. Um, but his, um, his ability to, um, manipulate conversation to get the

result that he wanted, right. And, and he, you know, he, his ability to win an to win an argument because of his ability to- And verbal mastery. Yes, it was pretty remarkable. So yeah, what was it? It was that movie, The Darkest Hour. Did you see that? Yeah, there was a good line in there about he took the English language and sent it to war during his famous speech to parliament. But I think, yeah, he's a fascinating character. That's why I was that original comment about like this bullshit about, okay, we have to rewrite history and remove memories of Churchill because, oh my God, look at it. He was a racist. Product of time,

right? I mean, things move on, right? So things happen in a, in a timeframe. We should be smart enough to understand what the context was and move on. But the assumption there is that people are so fragile that they can't deal with history. It's like, just look, I'm not one to quote this guy, but there is a leftist streamer called Hassan Abiy,

who a lot of people have huge problems with. And I agree with them, essentially nothing, but he's got a phenomenal line where he says analysis is not justification. Analysis is not justification. Looking at why something occurred doesn't mean that you agree with it, but the alternative is to just sort of plug your head in the sand and have, be completely ignorant of it, which makes you even worse off. That's putting you at a real disadvantage.

Yeah. Speaking of Churchill, I got sent for Christmas from a friend. I got sent some of the champagne that he drank. Oh, Paul Roger. Yes. Yes. I got sent a bottle of that and I learned, I learned from him that Churchill commanded them to make a special custom sized bottle.

Did you know about this? No. him that Churchill commanded them to make a special custom sized bottle. Did you know about this? No. So he found out in his opinion, a half bottle was insufficient and a full bottle was too much. So he commanded them to make a pint bottle of that. That's fantastic. Of that champagne. Yeah.

It tastes like sparkling apple juice. It's phenomenal. Yeah. Um, and, uh, yeah, a half bottle was too, too little and a full bottle was too much. He wanted to be able to function, but he needed it. And it was, you know, it followed him around. These special bottles would follow him around all of his meetings, every single lunch meeting, he would always have one of these things that I thought that that

was, that was fantastic that he just, it would make it a little bigger, not that big. Yeah. It was, I mean, it was crazy. I mean, some of the things that like World War I, I mean, he was on the front lines, right? He went to the front lines, but he took his bathtub with him. Right. What? Yeah, he had his bathtub front lines so that he

could bathe. Right. So, I mean, it's just a little, these little stories that are, they're incredible about the time, right? It's cause anyway, there's this, there's a ton of those in, in, uh, in that, again, the last line of people have some time on their hands and they're looking for something, that's a three part, three, three, three book series and they want to dive deep into it.

Um, it's, it's well worth the read. Have you ever looked at Theodore Morrell, Hitler's physician? No, no, that's fascinating individuals. So, uh, I think it's maybe the very beginning of World War II or perhaps just before Hitler's suffering really badly with indigestion, some stomach and sort of gut issues. And he finds the Dr. Theodore Morel, who is this sort of quack doctor who uses all manner of homeopathic sort of progressive remedies, but Hitler recovers maybe by fluke or maybe actually through whatever it is.

So he immediately, as all manic people do, proclaims that this guy is a fucking medical god and now morale is part of the inner circle. But the rest of the inner circle absolutely hated him. Himmler detested him. Goebbels detested him. He was very messy. He was a horribly loud eater. His breath very messy. He was a horribly loud eater. His breath would stink.

He was superbly unclean. So, you know, the clinical manner of this guy that was the personal physician to the Fuhrer was just not there. He'd be there at dinner and he would be sort of shoveling food into his mouth. And he was a really fat sort of guy. And by the end of the war, the concoction of drugs that Hitler was on is absolutely insane. So he's getting injected with bull semen. He's on basically meth.

He's on a concoction of stimulants, uppers and downers. And then, you know, there's a really famous meeting, I think, between him and Mussolini. And, uh, he just completely flies off the handle and it's supposedly due to some, uh, he just completely flies off the handle. And it's supposedly due to some concoction issue or some dosage issue that happened that day. And Morell's writing in his diary about, you know, the Fuhrer was this way today, gave him, you know, so he's. So he's actually tracking his.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. All of his stuff. It's like a fucking whoop band from 1945. Wow. And, um, it's, there's a bunch of different documentaries, just search like Hitler's foundation or Theodore Morrell online. So interesting, but yeah, I wonder, I mean,

if it wasn't plain enough already, this isn't me trying to excuse Hitler. Yeah, that's a, that's a bad look. Get that out. That's it's too soon. But I wonder how much of the mental demise and complete insanity, you know, we're going to try and go east into Russia at the same time as we try and go north into France, as we try to defend, you know, as we try to go south into Africa, how much of that can be attributed

to this guy just being in a stupor, you know, propped up on this cocktail of drugs by this total quack. Yeah, yeah. I'm still thinking about you. I'm not trying to dismiss Hitler's actions. Yeah, I do. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, there's no way to go from there. I'm not saying he's just a drug addict.

He was on the streets of Philadelphia. Yeah, like it was, he wasn't thinking straight. Yeah. Yeah, it's fascinating. Well, I definitely looked that up because I did enjoy this Lord Moran small book on his experience as a physician for Churchill. So I can imagine there's, you know, it's that same kind of thought process.

It's the insight that you get, you know, the level of intimacy that you have with a physician is very high and you know, it's the things that you maybe don't even admit to yourself about the fact that I have had that pain in my knee for a while, but you know, how much is that impacting your sleep? How much is that impacting, you know, all of the things down the line. But yeah. Um, yeah. The bad day.

And he just says, you know, gets a shot of bull semen and says, let's, let's invade Russia. Let's do it. Yeah. Yeah. Let's go for it. I'll bet this is going to work out well for us. Yes.

Uh, although he did it, he did assume it was going to take very little time. If it hadn't been for that winter, I think that they could have maybe continued to steamroll through. Yeah. Well, I think, yeah, that certainly played the key role. I think he was getting advice against it, but that never swayed what he was doing. But I think that there was, there was this, uh, lack of appreciation of size of vastness, right? And what that would do to supply chains. Yeah. And our supply lines. So, and then all of the trucks got stuck in the

mud trying to resupply. Who was the guy, who was the dude from his inner circle that custom edited the fuel tank on a plane and flew to Scotland to try and, uh, persuade the king. It was one of his, god damn it. It was the dude. Anyway, there's a story.

It's sort of 1943, 1944, and, uh, everything's kind of at a stalemate, but the Germans believe that the British think they're going to be overrun and they're kind of just waiting for this. They really don't understand that Churchill's going to keep on pushing. So this guy gets one of the bombers to be fitted with long range fuel tanks, custom built, and then without any, without informing anyone, him himself flies because he had once met a print, he met some Duke or some monarch, someone that was part of something and decided to fly himself from Germany to Scotland.

And then jumps out in a parachute thinking that he's going to be welcomed as the envoy. And you know, what's fascinating here, there's another great series on Netflix called a Churchill's inner circle. Yeah. there's another great series on Netflix called Churchill's Inner Circle, I think. And it shows the, how swayed everyone's opinions became because the political backbiting of wanting to be the closest to the eagle's nest and to Hitler and so on and so forth.

And yet this guy was adamant, basically he was driven by this sort of love for validation and this unrequited desire to be part of this inner circle and to be back in Hitler's good graces. That if I flew to, to Scotland and did, and obviously he just immediately gets taken to prison and, and that doesn't happen. And apparently Hitler finds out about this and just, you'd be waking up one morning because he wouldn't wake up. He'd have these, you know, meth fueled diatribe until three in the morning.

And no one would leave. No one would be able to leave as he's there and he's shouting and screaming and doing all the rest of it. And everyone's just like, I wish he'd shut up. And then the next day he'd wake up, but yeah, you wake up one day and you find out that some blokes still in a custom built bomber and landed, crash landed it in Scotland, jumped out in a parachute. Yeah. You don't hear that every day.

If you're Hitler, It's a bad morning. Yeah, it's a bad morning. But luckily, your doctor's there. What was his name, Morell? Morell. Morell. Morell. I'll look that up.

I'll fix you up. Yeah, get a nice line of cocaine from Bullseye. Good god. Intuitive machines, first ever commercial vehicle to land on the moon. That happened. Yeah, that happened. That thing happened. Yep, that did, that happened. That thing happened.

Yeah, I guess, didn't it tip over on its side? It's still operational. Yeah, it's still working, but maybe suboptimally. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, it is interesting when you think about

where are we going with that, right? What are we thinking about? I mean, is there- Supposed to be going back to the moon soon. Well, yeah. And there's still that talk about, you know, Where are we going with that? Right. What are we thinking about? I mean, is there. It's supposed to be going back to the moon soon. Well, yeah. And there's still that talk about, you know, and that'll fuel the desire to go to Mars. And, and, um, I don't know.

I mean, I, I, I lived through, I was a young, young person, but I did live through the moon landing and, you know, that whole initial rush and excitement of moonshots and what that meant and that sort of feeling like, okay, we're just putting duct tape on things and flying them to the moon and kind of was the way it was, didn't have that calculation too. You can imagine nowadays trying to get, and we can see that in terms of the bureaucracy of NASA and how NASA now relies on private sector to try to push this whole process forward. But people got fatigued pretty quickly back in the day with the moonshots. It was like, okay, here we go, we're going to the landing again.

What's the point? It's a little bit like Ukraine. What's the point? Why are we spending all this money? Same concept, no novelty anymore. So I'm not sure, again, I'm definitely, nobody's turning to me for scientific insight, but I'm hopeful that if there is a vast upside to this, that the government will do a better job of explaining why it's important, right? But I do imagine that NASA's best days in terms of resourcing are probably behind it. And so that's this drive towards the commercial side. I think

that's terrific. It innovates a lot. And again, going back to that conversation about the sharing of information and insight between the government and private sector, it's a good example of why it's important. The agency, there was an In-Q-Tel designed to try to foster that development of more technologies out in the private sector. So it's an ongoing process, but I looked at the moon landing here and I guess, you know, maybe I'm like a lot of people, but I was like, Oh, okay. And we landed on the moon. Great. Okay. Now what? Right. I, I, I, I, maybe I'm disappointed in myself for not being more fascinated. Well, I think, you know, whether we like it or not, much of what we're doing is an attention and an optics game. And, you know, for instance, do you remember a Red Bull Stratos?

Do you remember when Felix Baumgartner jumped from the edge of space? Yeah. You know, and you've got, I think it's like a Biffy Clyro song. It's this like beautiful voice and it's like a rock song and it's made into this perfect trailer and the whole thing was tracked and it was live streamed and you know, there's drama and he's not getting into the, all this stuff. And I remember looking at that and going, that's, that's like, that's amazing. And he's got nowhere near the moon.

And so much of it is not understanding how humans interpret things, not understanding the second, third, fourth order effects of, okay, and what happens if we release this and what happens if we release that and what happens downstream, defund the police. What happens if we do this? Well, it's going to damage certain communities and it's going to disincentivize police officers and which are the communities in which are going to be the most damaged by this? Well, it's the ones that we're trying to save. I think that NASA and anyone that wants to achieve public support and interest in anything should be

looking way more at advertising and human behavior and psychology more than they're looking at logistics and operations and deficiency because you need to get buy-in and excitement from the, I mean, dude, if you did a go fund me or like some, you know, like an equivalent thing to be like, do you want, and you will have, this is how far you moved the rocket. You know, your $10 moved the rocket, like one millimeter or whatever. Like however you wanna do it, incentivizing people like that, I think would be so great.

And we have the opportunity to do it. But as you said there, how is it that we've managed to get so much more advanced and so much less efficient from NASA being able to just put it down? Whereas all of the technology in the world, you know, your smartphone's more powerful than the entire room that NASA had in 1965 or whatever it was.

And the fucking thing fell on its. I just imagined, you know, like this, this character from, Wall-E. Do you remember that movie, Wall-E? It's a fantastic movie, right? 45 minutes into it before they had the first piece of dialogue, right? But you were captivated by it. But anyway, that's neither end of there. But I think, yeah, it's the messaging. And I guess, in part, a good example of that would be Ukraine. I think the government, the US administration in particular has done a terrible job of messaging, explaining why it's important to the public and continually explaining and talking about it, explaining why this is important to the US. If they believe it is, then why? And why the money is necessary and how the money is being spent. There wasn't enough transparency around, look, Ukraine has had a very bad reputation

of corruption for decades, right? Very corrupt country, lots of problems documented. Okay, so there should have been more awareness that if we're going to throw billions and billions of dollars over there, that we should also have an effort to ensure that there's some transparency, more transparency than there has been in terms of how it's being spent, right? Because that's also in Ukraine's best interest, right? To battle or to be seen as battling corruption, to ensure they maintain this support. Extend the longevity of support. Yeah. So what do you get? You get, you know, there've been a handful of corruption charges, you know, some dismissals over there in Ukraine. I think Zelensky understands he's got to be seen

as battling this problem, but the US government on its part hasn't done a good enough job of explaining to the American public why and how it's being done. And I think if they had, they could have tamped down some of this. But it's also coming from an unexpected place, the right. The Republican party for the most part is seeming to be the, and so now you've got the Democrats in the position of being the Warhawks and the Republicans being the ones that, no, you know, let's focus on US first, you know? And again, this idea that we can't multitask, of course we can fucking multitask. We should be able to do all of these things, right? Border security, worry about this, you know, deal with the international crises, but, um, sometimes it, it seems like we're,

you know, we're, we're unable to, to do that. Well, we, we, we go from one problem to another problem without seeming to understand that everything's connected in a way. Right. Is the, is there something that unlocks at least the beginning of these problems is, is a potential route out of this to just improve inter agency communication? Is it to be more transparent when it comes to the public? Like, you know, there's a lot of issues, there's a lot of problems from the

political standpoint to the military standpoint, to the international standpoint, to the supply chains, the drugs, the immigration, all that stuff. Are these all individual targeted problems that require very specific solutions or are there some fundamental unifying threads that are problems kind of throughout all of these that if those were unpicked, at least would free up some stuff downstream?

Yeah, I think there are some commonalities, I think between some of the major issues that we're facing. I think one of the problems that the government, not just this administration, any administration, recently has been slow to understand is again the access to information that the public has, right? And they've been slow to understand what that means in terms of how they should deal with the public, right? So I think you can sidestep some of the I think you can sidestep some of the reluctance of the public to get behind whatever it may be, border security. Well, why is that important?

Why do we need to have tight border security? Why do we need to support Ukraine in an effort against Russia's adventurism? What's the point of that? So I think that's one element. I think a common thread with a lot of the problems that we face in the US anyway is from a political standpoint. And by that, I mean I think something that would, I believe this anyway, maybe other people think it's bullshit.

But I think if we had term limits, I think that would be a really positive step for politicians for, for congressmen and senators. Right. Okay. Yeah. Because we do for the president, but we don't for- Right. Right. So I think if we had, you know, if we, if we were able to figure out a way, I don't think we will to do that. Then I think you take, you start to take some of the self-interest out of it. Nobody should be sitting up on Capitol Hill as a seven or eight term senator. Does that not create the same issue that we have with the presidency though, where people just try and they don't have enough time in office to be able to get anything done and there's different incentives?

Yeah, no. I think if you give, look, give every congressman, congressperson, I guess, two four-year terms. Right now it's two-year term. A two-year term is nonsensical, right? That's based on, you know, when the nation was founded, and Washington, D.C. was a swamp, and no one wanted to be there

because they had to get back to the farm. So I think if you gave every congressperson two four-year terms and you give every senator six-year terms, they currently run six-year terms, but not in perpetuity, right? So it's absurd when you look at it and you realize the self-interest involved, the wealth that some of these folks have built up over multiple terms of being in Washington, DC, earning a fixed government salary. There's a fascinating, actually there's a really interesting stock tracking system where you can invest based on what- Elizabeth Warren.

Nancy Pelosi. Nancy Pelosi. Yeah, and her husband, Paul Pelosi, what they're investing in. Wow. And you can do remarkably well. Like the Pelosi stock tracker.com or something. Yeah, it's fascinating. And I think, but if you take the self-interest out of it,

and you take to some degree the special interest ability, right? If I know that you're going to be the head of the Ways and Means Committee for 42 years or whatever, I'm going to act a certain way and I'm going to invest a lot in my relationship with you. If I'm dealing with somebody who's only there for two terms, eight years or 12 years if you're a Senator, yeah, I don't have the same hook. I don't have the same ability to long-term influence you and push you in a certain way for regulatory concerns

or whatever it might be. Again, the pushback sometimes has been, you need to be here. I think Ted Kennedy used to say, you need to be up here a long time before you can understand all the intricate rules and how it works. Thinking that just sounds like someone who doesn't want to be replaced.

Yes. It's like an IT director who creates a system inside the company that's so complex. Only I understand. Only he understands. Okay. So better communication to the public, term limits potentially for the people that are inside of the system. Anything else?

Yeah. system, anything else? In terms of some of the common problems that face, I think there are issues, whether it's border security or foreign policy decisions, that are separate and distinct from each other. So I don't know that I'm clever enough to find the common thread that binds all those together. But I think I look more at terms of how do you create a more functional government, how

do you create something that's more effective with less self-interest. And I keep coming back. And campaign finance reform, if you need to spend $40 million to get yourself elected, I think that means the system's kind of bullshit. If you can't explain your position to your constituents, you know, for, okay, let's say a couple million dollars, then there's something wrong with this system, right? We're canceling out a large number of people who could be very qualified and very well-meaning. But I think

most sane people look at the system the way it is now and say, I would never throw my hat in the ring for that. Yes. Yeah, it doesn't make any sense. So, it's kind of self-limiting and it determines a certain type of person who goes into politics, I think. So anyway, that's again, not probably anything new, but every now and then I like to get up

on the term limit soapbox. Yes. Yeah. I, uh, I was reading just this morning about Australia has built the biggest Navy since world war two, or that's their plan now, the largest fleet that we'll will have had since the end of the second world war said defense minister Richard Marley on Tuesday, it outlined a decade long plan to double its fleet of major warships and boost defense spending

by an additional $7 billion in the face of quickening Asia Pacific arms races. Yeah, that's China's influence, right? China's been massively aggressive over the past decade in building out their military, the Navy in particular. And so that's a direct response. You look at Japan, South Korea, it's all the same concern. It's the aggressiveness of China, particularly in the short term in the

South Pacific region, which they've always viewed as theirs and they've always been irritated by the fact that the West plays a role there. As far as they're concerned, it's their turf. So, but they've been expanding their military opening, you know, for the first time foreign ports. Well, they've got that, they do that thing where they make bases out of little islands, right? And it extends the boundary of what is China.

Can you explain what that is? Yeah. You just make an artificial military facilities. They're not much to look at. Maybe it starts off as a shoal and then you just come in there and pour a bunch of debris and concrete it and tarmac it. And next thing you know, you got an airstrip, and then that's part of your territory, and that can impact your international waters claims. Because you've got whatever, like a 10-mile radius around all of these, and the more of these that you can claim. Right.

And so I mean, there's a lot of conflict. Philippines, Vietnam, Spratly Islands is an example. There's a lot of conflict over this in that region. But most people look at it and go, right, really, it's the Philippines versus China? I think that's a, but the alliance that we have out there, the ASEAN alliance and others, very important in terms of not, it's tempering China's global ambitions, right? In a sense, right? And

there's a lot of nervousness there. Look, Taiwan, we haven't even touched on the issue of what's the future of Taiwan, right? I mean, like they rolled over during the pandemic, they, you know, they literally put out the last little bits of democracy in Hong Kong. Nobody gave a shit anymore because people had gotten their head around the idea that, okay, it's China's again. Game over now. Yeah, game over. But we're all looking over here at the pandemic and there's no more remnants of democracy or democracy movement in Hong Kong. So they were successful there. Taiwan is a different animal. I think it's a slow game for them. It's a soft takeover. I think is how they're envisioning it. We always imagine, oh, there's going to be an invasion of Taiwan.

I don't think, you know, Chinese military and Xi in particular, they look at that and probably go, eh, it's too chaotic, chaotic. They don't like chaos. They don't want anything that's necessarily unpredictable. But they also look at our support for Ukraine and think, okay, so what? They'd be upset with us for a couple of years, and then they're gonna get back to their own business. So the idea of one China policy,

the idea of one China policy, it's been a comfortable, kick the can down the road concept for forever. But I think that if you look at the timeline, when do they really want to bring Taiwan back into the fold? I think you have to look at Xi and say, okay, is he going to leave office without doing that or does he want that as his key legacy? Right. Crowning achievement. His crowning achievement. So I think then you look at Xi and you look at his health and you look at his tenure and how long is that going to last? And you think, okay, maybe sometime within that period of time is when it's a move. Who It's a move. Who knows? Again, it depends on its health. It depends on... Not so much internal politics. He seems to have a massive grip on there. You got to go back to Mao maybe before you find someone who had that sort of lock on things. And he's fortified the security services

and he's removed the concept of rule of law. And, you know, some folks would disagree and say, oh, it's a great place to do business. And yeah, you have to do business there. You know, it's not, you don't decouple from China. It's not possible in today's world, but you have to be more pragmatic about it, right? And, you know, so I think we have to be aware of, and companies are, I think for the most part nowadays, it's better than it was even 10 years ago, but nowadays the companies that we deal with in the private sector, they're aware of the fact that if they start to go over to China, they build a factory, they build some sort of research facility, that intelligence, that information,

that proprietary data is going to end up with the Chinese. They can't protect it. But 10 years ago or longer, that was a thought. Well, how do we keep our IP safe? Well, you don't is the answer. They're going to have it. And a lot of companies are happy to sign agreements that basically allow that because they want that market.

And China's always counted on that. We're the holy grail of commercialism. You want to sell here. So, they've used that to their advantage. But anyway, the Taiwan thing, I think, is more of a simple calculation because I do believe that Xi doesn't want to walk off into the sunset without having that happen in his timeframe. So anyway. Wow, very spicy. Yeah, I don't know, man. I mean, being a citizen that even cares remotely about the future is a very, very scary and confusing, like, well, do you know what I mean?

Like we've got the stuff happening in the Middle East and the stuff happening in the sort of Northeast of Europe. and then the stuff happening in the Far East as well. And then we've got things happening at home or in the southern border, border crisis, and then we've got your 2024 election and that's happening. And then you've got the general election is going to happen in the UK. And you, you know, all of this stuff, you know, the dude in El Salvador just got elected an 85% approval rating and then put like half of the country in jail, then you've got this guy in Argentina, you got that guy.

put like half of the country in jail. Then you've got this guy in Argentina, you got that guy. Yep. Like, and it's just, there's so much up upheaval and our access to it has never been more seamless and, and instant. And it doesn't surprise me that people are kind of checking out, losing faith in media, losing faith generally in, in their ability to sense make, you know, it's a confusing time and, um, you might say, well, you know, the, you have the opportunity to discern the information for yourself.

Would you rather not have access to it at all? And I'm like, well, look, more information is good, but also comes, it bears a cost. And the cost is that everybody now has to do their own sense making. And that's very arduous. And it's also as a, as a mental cost, right? Because you do feel overwhelmed, right? And, you know, I don't think there's that many people who can just check out either because they don't have the, the, the means or, you know, they just don't have the ability

to say, okay, I'm not going to worry about this. They're still going to sit and worry about things. Right. And you can see that the angst that some people have on social media about shit that they can't control, right. But yet they spend time focused on, right? Or the anger that they have over certain things. And you think, okay, dial it back a little bit.

You know, there's one thing to be informed. There's another thing to be, you know, outraged. How do you, how do you, given that you're knee deep in all of these stories and stuff, how do you bifurcate that emotionally for yourself? How do you not get too caught up in the potential turmoil and catastrophes that occur? Yeah. Well, A, I think you have to know your limitations, right? I'm not impacting much other than my family, right?

So I think you have to look at it from that perspective. The agency also, the agency, I learned to, I think if I had to think about it, most of what I've learned that has been really valuable to me has either come from my time with the agency or from my family. That's it. Dealing with my family and understanding how best to do that or my time with the agency. The time with the agency, there was a lot of things that you could pick up if you thought about it.

I sometimes didn't realize it at the time. One of those things is you're not there to impact great decision making. You're there to do a task. You're there to do something. I was never one of those people who sat around and wondered to myself, I wonder how the seventh floor is going to deal with this. Or, geez, I wonder why they made that decision on this policy issue. Tell me what the fucking job is, right? What's important right now, and then do it, and then move on to the next job, right? And so you develop, unless you're overthinking things, you develop a certain ability to just compartmentalize shit and then move on.

Do your bit. Yeah. And also you realize that there's not that many decisions on the decision tree or branches on the decision tree. People get very wrapped around the axle over what to do. Do I go here? Do I move right? Do I move left?

How do I deal with this problem facing it? And when you look at a problem, usually there's not that many options in terms of what you can do to resolve the problem, to move on, to have some resolution. I think the agency was very good about having you understand, here's something happening, what are my options? And you drill down very quickly and realize I got two options or maybe I got three, but one of them is kind of bullshit. So now I got two again. And so you learn how to do that very quickly. And I think that proved to be really, really valuable. I mean, I got out, you had no business experience, no business going into business, right? I just, people thought I was insane to leave.

And so I started it with a really great friend of mine who came out of the British teams. And we had no idea what we were doing. But because we had similar backgrounds and experience, it didn't matter. We just looked at it and go, okay, well, we've made this decision. Now what are our choices? And our choices were very clear.

Do this, do that. Okay, now we've done that, now move on. And we didn't overthink anything. We just kind of marched on, accomplished a task, then moved on to the next one. And it was all because the, at least for me anyway, the agency had kind of taught you that. And it also taught you to make a decision without perfect information. A lot of people sit around and wait to gather all the data. People love data now because it's so readily available. And the agency taught us very early on that if you sit and wait for that happy day when you get

all your information, something bad's going to happen. Lowering the action threshold a little bit. Yeah, yeah. So that window closes or, you know, next thing you know, you got to, everything's going sideways. So you learn to make decisions with imperfect information, and just move on, and not sit around and stare at your fucking navel

and wonder whether it was the right decision or not. And I've never been one of those people. I've never sat one of those people. I've never sat in angsty and thought to myself, jeez, if I'd done that, I could have done it. Because I don't see where that benefits anybody. So that's kind of it. I try to teach that to my boys that life is not as difficult as we try to make it out

to be. Life can be fairly simple. What you have to do is you have to decide you're going to work a little bit harder than everybody else, which isn't hard because there's a lot of folks not working as hard as they could. If you do that, then your results are that much bigger. You stand out that much more because you're willing to just put out a little bit more effort. Trying to teach that to kids is tough because at that age, they envision that as going, oh, I can't do that. I mean, I'm doing everything I can. They have no idea what they're capable of doing. So when you say you got to work a little bit harder and then you'll realize those benefits, it can be a difficult process. But that's, I think, one of the most important things

you can teach your kids. And also, again, not to make life more difficult than it is. And that's been my primary objective with my boys. And my daughter, who's grown up now, she's a terrific kid, but the boys are younger. And so trying to get them to understand that and to push themselves a little bit harder. I mean, everybody wants the same thing. You want to produce productive, good people. The world's got enough average people. My job is not to produce average adults from the kids that we've got. So anyway, I'm not sure I was going with that.

that we've got. So anyway, I'm not sure I was going with that. I think there's definitely an allure of overcomplicating things because it feels sophisticated to have this high threshold for information and to have a very well planned out org structure and this is where we're going to go and so on and so forth. But yeah, you often end up being defeated by somebody who's just able to move more quickly than you with imperfect information. Yeah. Yeah. And finding the balance between these two things, because there are certain areas where I don't think that you should compromise on quality.

You know, if you're, if you're going to do your press release, don't rush it. Uh, you know, when it comes to naming and branding and incorporating and things like that, you should move relatively slowly to ensure that you're getting this thing done right, but knowing where the battles for perfection lie are very, very important. Right. And you have to, you have to strike the balance between speed and, and, uh, and effectiveness and quality, obviously, uh, particularly in the commercial sector. I mean, we've dealt with, with companies that go into new markets on a regular

basis, right? And so they have to do an assessment of that environment and understand what the competitors are doing and et cetera. But we've dealt with some very large corporations. It's, you know, where their mindset is, look, we got to get into the market, right? And if we make some mistakes, fine, we'll clean up, right? But we have to be in the market now.

And so they will rush that process. And yes, they make some mistakes. Now they're big enough as entities, as corporations to recover from that. But if you're a small operation, right? If you're a starting up in particular, you can't afford to make that mistake. Game over. Game over, exactly. So it does depend on, it depends on size, but it is interesting that, that, you know, I remember having a conversation with one corporate, I can't really name them, but one, um, they're a manufacturer of, of, of a very well-known consumer product.

And that was their whole point. Now we understand that it's going to take a little more time to evaluate the environment, what the competitors are doing, but we don't have time and we're going and yes, they made mistakes and it took them some time. Took them a lot of money to recover, but they did. Um, so I guess they were proven right at the end of the day. Yeah. Anyway. Yeah.

Mike Baker, ladies and gentlemen, I appreciate that. I'll let you be. Thank you for coming through. No, thank you, man. I think I really appreciate it. It was a great conversation. Really enjoyed it. And hopefully I didn't bore you.

No, not at all. Why should people go? They want to keep up to date with all of the things that you, man. I really appreciate it. It was a great conversation. Really enjoyed it. And hopefully I didn't bore you. No, not at all. Why should people go? They want to keep up to date with all of the things that you're doing. Well, I'm on X, we call it X now, don't we, at MB Company, man. For all your global intelligence and security needs, of course, there's Portman Square Group. And we've got the podcast, which has turned out to be a wonderful adventure, The President's Daily Brief.

And it's every morning, in about 20 minutes, you get your top stories of the day, facts, and just a tiny bit of context. And then the afternoon version is about 10 minutes. You get updates on some of the top stories and get to move on your way. Bob's your uncle. And actually, I just learned not too long ago

where Bob's your uncle came from as a saying. And it's fascinating. I'll just tell people, Google that. Google the origins of Bob's your uncle as a saying. I don't know if people still say it, maybe they don't, but if they do, check it out. Anyways, so the President's Daily Brief, every day, weekdays, it's been a great experience so far.

We just kicked it off. I started in September and we've been available you know, available on all your podcast platforms. Look at me. I'm a marketing whiz. I know you're down here in the muck and the mire with the rest of us making podcasts. Mike, I really appreciate you. Yes, thank you, Matt. Thank you.