PBD Podcast - Nuclear Weapons Expert Dr. Peter Pry | PBD Podcast | EP 155

Episode Date: May 11, 2022

In this intense episode, Patrick Bet-David is joined by Adam Sosnick and Dr. Peter Pry to discuss the possibility of world war, possible nuclear threats, the Ukraine conflict and more. TOPICS 0:00 -... Start  8:30 - Is America as paranoid today as they used to be?   15:00 - When was the last time America was 'paranoid?'  18:30 - How much of the paranoid stems from borders  22:00 - Who do the people trust the least?  33:00 - America's filtering system  39:00 - Americans born here are the most anti-american  44:00 - Ukraine/Russia - what don’t we know  1:10:00 - Best defense right now  1:15:00 - What should we be doing?  1:21:00 - World War 4 - China/Russia  1:26:00 - what is the biggest threat? Nuclear/EMP/Cyber  1:31:00 - how tough to build an emp  1:39:00 - Nuclear shelter  1:44:00 - How does the average American protect against nuclear weapons Dr. Pry is the Executive Director of Task Force on National and Homeland Security, a Congressional Advisory Board dedicated to achieving protection of the United States from electromagnetic pulse (EMP), cyber-attack, mass destruction terrorism and other threats to civilian critical infrastructures on an accelerated basis.  Dr. Pry is also the Director of the United States Nuclear Strategy Forum, a Congressional Advisory Board dedicated to developing policies to counter Weapons of Mass Destruction.  In 2015, Dr. Pry testified in Denver on Colorado’s first attempt to pass EMP/GMD legislation. Get Dr. Pry's book 'Blackout Warfare" here: https://amzn.to/3FAUBck Get Dr. Pry's book 'Blackout Wars': https://amzn.to/3L1I0zI Get Dr. Pry's book "The Power and the Light": https://amzn.to/3wcuX9k Get Dr. Pry's book "Will America Be Protected?: https://amzn.to/3ysczw6 Text: PODCAST to 310.340.1132 to get added to the distribution list Adam “Sos” Sosnick has lived a true rags to riches story. He hasn’t always been an authority on money. Connect with him on his weekly SOSCAST here: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLw4s_zB_R7I0VW88nOW4PJkyREjT7rJic Patrick Bet-David is the founder and CEO of Valuetainment Media. He is the author of the #1 Wall Street Journal bestseller Your Next Five Moves (Simon & Schuster) and a father of 2 boys and 2 girls. He currently resides in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida.   To reach the Valuetainment team you can email: booking@valuetainment.com --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/pbdpodcast/support

Transcript
Discussion (0)
Starting point is 00:00:00 I'll add to your mind. Here's the debate. You're upset. They're saying we believe you. This is it. Since the night, I thought that. Come on. BEEP.
Starting point is 00:00:11 BEEP. BEEP. BEEP. BEEP. BEEP. All right. This is episode number 155 with Dr. Peter Pry. If you do not know who Dr. Peter Pry is,
Starting point is 00:00:27 let me formally introduce him to you. Number one, he is a world's leading expert on WMDs, weapons of mass destruction and EMPs, which we'll get into EMPs later on today. We have a lot of questions on EMPs. Executive Director of the Task Force on National and Homeland Security, a Congressional Advisory Board dedicated to achieving protection of the United States
Starting point is 00:00:48 from electromagnetic pulse, EMPs, cybertax mass destruction, terrorism, and other threats to critical civilian infrastructure on an accelerated basis, was former intelligence officer with the CIA responsible for analyzing, ready, Soviet and Russian nuclear strategy, operational plans, military doctrine, threats, perceptions, and developing US paradamps for strategic warning,
Starting point is 00:01:12 that's from 85 to 96, has written multiple books, his latest book, Black Out Warfare, attacking the US electric power grid, a revolution in military affairs just came out last year. BBC took one of his books, Soviet War scare, in turn into a documentary. National Geographic took another one of his book, Electric Armageddon, and it became a TV documentary,
Starting point is 00:01:33 and he holds a certification in nuclear weapons design. That is our guest today, Dr. Peter Pry. Thank you so much for making the time for being on the podcast. Well, thank you so much for having me. Yes, it's a, you know, folks, this is going to be a very much of a, this is such a serious podcast today that I think I have to manage expectations with you up front.
Starting point is 00:01:56 My colleague, your Adam, never wears glasses. Yeah. The topic is so serious that he had to put on glasses today because he had to at least look like he knows what he's talking about in this topic. So that was his positioning he took. But get a fake it to you, make it. Okay. If you want to compete, throw your glasses on.
Starting point is 00:02:13 But look, there's a lot of stuff going on today. Here's here's some, I mean, I got a lot of questions. I just kept writing questions down. Why is Russia acting weak with Ukraine? Misconceptions about nuclear wars and EMPs. The mindset of a Russian, how different it is than an American, the Eastern versus the Western. Who's more paranoid and prepared is it us?
Starting point is 00:02:33 Is it Russia? Is it China? Why are we willing to entertain a war with Russia over Ukraine? Can an old nuclear weapon break down? A lot of our nuclear weapons are 30 plus years old. Can that break down? It's a lack of car.
Starting point is 00:02:44 Is it something that can work even 10, 20, 30 years from now? Or do we have to update them? Super EMP weapons. What's the best defense against nuclear weapons and EMPs? Anyways, there's a lot of different things I want to cover with you here today on the podcast. But I'll just open it up to you. I gave the intro. If you don't mind sharing with the audience a little bit more about your background, so they will know what things you've worked on and it will get into specific topics.
Starting point is 00:03:06 Sure, I was the Chief of Staff of the Congressional EMP Commission for 17 years and that commission was headed by the world's actual foremost expert, I'd like to make a Paul Stockter William Graham, who my privilege to work for him as the chief of staff. He was President Reagan, science advisor. He ran NASA. He's the free world's Albert Einstein of EMP. And when I was an elementary school, he was a young defense scientist who was on the defense science team that discovered the EP phenomena during the 1962 Starfish Prime
Starting point is 00:03:45 High Altitude Nuclear Test. I worked on the House Armed Services Committee professional staff with a very wide portfolio nuclear weapons electromagnetic pulse, but also NATO enlargement. I ended up going to most of the countries that were former Warsaw Pat countries that wanted to come into NATO, and I advised Congress against expanding NATO eastward precisely because I thought it would result in a new Cold War with Russia that we didn't want, and that we would be unable to defend these countries because we can't project power that far, and it's right in Russia's backyard, and they can project project power that far. And it's right in Russia's backyard,
Starting point is 00:04:25 and they can project the power more over. It would provoke Russia lead them to rely even more heavily on nuclear weapons to deal with the emerging threat of an Eastward expanding NATO. You mentioned my CIA background. So that I worked also before I joined the CIA, I was an analyst in the, in the, what used to be called, it doesn't exist anymore, but it was called the US Arms Control and
Starting point is 00:04:57 Disarmament Agency. And so I had a, I was a verification analyst responsible for looking at are the Soviets complying with the arms control treaties? And that gave me great insight into how the arms control system works. You know, and they weren't, they were violating all the treaties practically. But within the arms control association, it gave me insight, you know, the State department and People in the West were very very reluctant to ever admit that any treaty was being violated. So in order to
Starting point is 00:05:33 in order to acquire the enough data, you know to say that yeah, the Soviets are violating the treaty it would often take years and years and that being noncompliance before we would withdraw from the treaty, it would often take years and years, and that'd be a non-compliance before we withdraw from the treaty. But my background, as my professional background has been in nuclear weapons and strategy or national security issues all my life, I guess I should mention my, it goes even back before I was born. You mentioned you were a refugee from Iran. My own parents were grandparents.
Starting point is 00:06:11 We're refugees from communism. They fought on the side of the whites and lost to the Reds during the revolution and they came over here in the 1920s. And there had been a strong vein of anti-communism. I was raised with that, both my family, my father, my uncles fought in World War II, and we were always more or less lectured that you can lose freedom in a single generation,
Starting point is 00:06:37 and that someday the bad guys, the fascists or the communists are gonna come for us. So we need to be prepared, we need to be strong, and we need to defend this country. And that was trimmed under my head when I was a kid. I was studying military history when I was a teenager. My first book, I think that set me on the path. I read when I was 13 years old,
Starting point is 00:07:00 was Herman Kahn's on Thumannuclear War. And I said, that's what I want to do. 13 years old. Yeah, because those are, I learned from military history that the military technologies that are most decisive in every period, whether it was Alexander the Great Cerissa, which is a longer spear than anybody else had during those classical periods or whether it was the, you know, the organization of the Roman legions, you know, that used catapults and had better organization than other armies. The technology tends to be decisive in future wars. And nuclear weapons are where the decisive weapon of our era and still are.
Starting point is 00:07:40 And so I thought, well, if I can be at a common expert in this and help protect freedom, protect the free world, protect the United States by making my contribution that way, that's what I'm going to do. And I tried to join, I tried to follow in the footprint, print somebody, my father, and wanted to join, go to the Vietnam War, you know, but I was rejected, you know, because my eyesight back then was so bad, I've had lase extents, but I was legally blind, you know, at the time, and nobody would take me. And so I said, well, maybe I can get into the CIA, and the rest is the story of the rest of my professional life flows from that.
Starting point is 00:08:25 What a career. Thank you for your service. We also learned that the CIA is not too concerned about eyesight. I don't know that before, but I was good enough to learn about that. But going through this, so you set a lot of different things. So this has been ingrained. It's in your DNA. You've been wired.
Starting point is 00:08:40 You felt the fear and the angst communism angst, communism creates, control creates, losing your freedom creates. Do you think America is as paranoid today? You know how they say only the paranoid survive? Do you think America is as paranoid today as they used to be years ago, where they treated enemies in a different way? Are we a little bit more cocky, loose, arrogant,
Starting point is 00:09:07 and a little bit too much of, let's share all our secrets with the world and everything we're doing. And you think we're still in that paranoid mind where we're worried about the enemy like before? Are we a little bit more looser today? I don't think the United States has ever been paranoid. I think a great, and that, frankly, is perhaps one of the things that threatens our very existence.
Starting point is 00:09:33 And I think the thing that makes the world so dangerous is between the free world and the totalitarian dictatorships that we face today, there's a broad gulf, not just in terms of freedom, but in terms of strategic culture. Countries like Russia, North Korea, Iran, China, there's strategic cultures that are paranoid, genuinely paranoid, so that they see threats that don't even exist. And so they're willing to overreact and over-prepare and strike out against threats that are fantasies in their minds, which is the opposite. Our civilization is what I would call
Starting point is 00:10:19 this functionally optimistic. You know, we think that everybody loves us or we want the rest of the world to love us. We think that the rest of the world understands that we're not the aggressors. We don't do Pearl Harbors. You know, we, this flows from the nature of the civilizations. I should provide some clarification. Why is it that these totalitarian states and military dictatorships think this way and
Starting point is 00:10:43 have these perceptions. That's because internally, the political power comes out of the barrel of a gun for them. Most of their leaders have murdered their way to the top. They have constitutions and laws that are fake, that are just intended to increase the totalitarian power of the state over their people. It's, they don't, the way they operate internally is not through negotiation and compromise and contracts and the rule of law. They operate the way criminal gangs operate. And in the end, you know, it's the survival of the fittest.
Starting point is 00:11:25 It might make right. There's the, it's a zero-sum game. It's not a win-win kind of an outcome. There's the living and the dead. And that's how it operates within places like Russia, China, North Korea, and Iran. And so they project their experience and the domestic hells that they've created onto the world stage. They figure everybody else is like that. That's how the world operates.
Starting point is 00:11:51 For us, it's just the opposite. Our domestic society believes in win-win outcomes. We try to negotiate differences. We try to, we have contracts and the rule of law. We believe in fair play. And we think the rest of the world is like that. And this is manifest, for example, in the numerous arms control treaties
Starting point is 00:12:15 that we signed with the Soviet Union now, Russia over the years. And we never seem to learn. They violate every one of them. And we never seem to learn that for violate every one of them and we never seem to learn that for them these contracts are not binding. You know that they're willing to cheat on them because they don't believe in something. We have, I guess, a manifestation of this thing is in our view and in our culture, in our civilizational culture, we believe in this thing called peace, for example.
Starting point is 00:12:46 There's a condition of peace, and then there's war. Whereas for these other civilizations, there is only war. There's war within the society to stay in power. You're constantly at war with the other side, even though we call it peace. It's really from their perspective, the early moves in the chess game, you're moving the pawns during the period of peace, but you're really a war. And you're getting ready for the war that's going to come.
Starting point is 00:13:14 And this makes us extremely vulnerable, that is why we are constantly taken by surprise in the wars that we end up engaging in, because we fail to understand that other civilization. One of my jobs at the CIA when I worked there was to understand the threat perceptions of the other side. What is their military doctrine? How do they think we could get into a nuclear war? How do they think? That's not an easy thing to do.
Starting point is 00:13:40 It's one of the hardest things to do to stand outside of your civilization and try to put yourself in the mind of your adversary. And we don't do that well. And so you've got the worst possible combination here when it comes to the plash of civilizations, you know, totalitarian civilization that's extremely paranoid, cease threats everywhere, is ready to strike out. And extremely naive, dysfunctionally optimistic thinking that we can solve any problem, that nobody sees us as a threat, and that actions that we take will not be perceived as existential threats to our adversaries, that they understand we're not going to attack them.
Starting point is 00:14:26 It's the deadliest combination you can have for getting into a world war. You know, you said a lot there and I want to unpack a lot of the things you talk about. To me, that's the mindset and the world of business. It's the different mindset between a founder who builds a business versus an executive that comes in for a job. The founder is always wartime and sometimes it becomes problematic when it's not wartime. It's peacetime, but you're always paranoid. The executives are like, oh, we got plenty of money in the bank.
Starting point is 00:14:51 We can spend the money. Sometimes in America, presidents come up thinking, we have so much money in the back. We can spend it. It's not a big deal. We're already powerful. We can do this. They're not as paranoid as they want used to be. My father says, never is a very powerful word.
Starting point is 00:15:05 You said we've never been paranoid. Are you saying never as in 1776 or never as in 40 years, 60 years, 80 years, 100 years? Well, I'm speaking relative terms compared to the North Koreans and the Chinese and the Russians and our contemporary adversaries. I don't think we've ever been as paranoid as they, and including founding fathers. Oh, including founding fathers. If we understand, maybe we're using the word paranoid in different ways. I mean, a paranoid paranoia is a dysfunctional
Starting point is 00:15:37 psychological condition. Got it. That means that you live in a fantasy world where you imagine that you are surrounded by threats. Some of them may be real, but many of them are not. And I think I don't think that describes America in any phase of its history. If anything, we have been a nation of optimists throughout the founding fathers. Take them as an example. You know, they had, I would describe them as very optimistic people because they believed
Starting point is 00:16:09 that God intended men to be free, which I think is true. They believed in the ability of human beings to use rationalism, to govern themselves, which is why we had the American Revolution. The whole reason for the American Revolution, it was a gamble on human optimism. On the ability of human beings to be free, that you didn't need to have a monarchy, basically a tyranny, in order to have a good society,
Starting point is 00:16:46 in order to keep order and society that people were capable. And a very decentralized way, because the founder's vision of what America should be, is very different from what it is today, but they had this vision of a federalism with a small F, where people would be governing themselves and their hamlets and their villages, and that's where most governance would take place. And then at the level of the states, okay, that would be the next level, and the least amount of power was supposed to be in the federal government in Washington. This is a revolution in the way men were supposed to be governed.
Starting point is 00:17:24 You know, not a top-down system where a king is deciding everything for you and it's implemented on ministers and you peasants are just supposed to obey. You know, what an optimistic vision of human nature and of how to build a good society. And throughout our history, we have believed in that. Look at our trust in bringing immigrants into this country you know even though you know there were lots of prejudices and biases we had this faith in the ability of human beings to use rationalism and to enjoy freedom so that we would bring in the Catholics, immigrants of different races and that we could put them all together in this mix, you
Starting point is 00:18:07 know, and it would all work. In America, it would make America not only, it would make it a better place and in even free or a more prosperous place. And they were right. You know, they were right for any way for a long time. You know, the system seems to be breaking down today, but that's not because the founders were wrong about the fundamentals, it's because we have forgotten the fundamentals. Question about the, Pat brought up the topic of only the paranoid survive, and essentially
Starting point is 00:18:35 the debate that you guys are having right now is the optimism versus paranoia. How much of the paranoia that the North Koreans, the Russians, the Iranians, Chinese have stems from borders versus United States. I mean, we're very lucky. I mean, our founding fathers and our fathers before them had to sail across the Mayflower, and we know the whole story, just to get to a place where they could have their religious freedoms and free from persecution and they found this essentially Utopian society where basically you didn't have to worry about getting attacked on mass scale I mean I get it Native Americans and we can kind of have all that but when you're looking at China or Russia's borders They they border China Russia the east end Borders Iran China North Korea. I mean we don't have to bus out of map right now
Starting point is 00:19:24 But how much of that paranoia is just naturally built in that you mentioned versus the utopian optimism that stems here in America just comes from our simple borders. No, I think you're absolutely right. I mean, another way of putting it is their histories, the different histories that we have, as you point out, ours is a incredibly benign and relatively bloodless history. I mean, the only major war we fought on this soil was the American Civil War, 750,000 dead.
Starting point is 00:19:58 And that was more than a century ago, okay? All that time since our wars have been fought over overseas and even in the great wars, World War I and World War II are casualties compared to the casualties that everybody else suffered, we're relatively light. You know, 300,000 dead in World War II versus you take the Soviet Union lost 30 million dead in the very place where the Ukraine wars happening now. They're called the bloodlands for that reason, 30 million dead. And China lost tens of millions in the World War II.
Starting point is 00:20:36 The Korea's lost millions of people. This is in the 20th century. It's not a long time ago. They're losing tens of thousands of people now. And if you look back across the history of those areas, where these states are, they are red with blood and they're constant wars. Just a few we take Russia beginning in the medieval period
Starting point is 00:20:59 that invasions by the Mongols, invaded by the Swedish Empire, invaded by Napoleon, invasions by the Mongols invaded by the Swedish Empire invaded by Napoleon, you know, World War 1 and then of course the Nazis in World War 2 invaded again and an extremely bloody history and for them, you know, what I, they're, they're, you know, their paranoia is understandable because of their history. It flows from their history. We shouldn't think of them as irrational, but they're differently rational because of their history. And that rationality is so different from ours because their historical experience
Starting point is 00:21:41 is so different from ours that they don't think like us, and it is not easy to anticipate, and have a meeting of minds and all the rest. That's where the highlight is that we think a little bit differently because they're naturally paranoid, whereas we're naturally optimistic. Let me ask both of you guys this question. Let me ask both of you guys this question is who do they not trust more? The people, right? Do the Russians trust their government more than they trust America? Does America trust our government more than we trust the enemy, the people? When I'm going with this is, like you said,
Starting point is 00:22:25 when America was first founded, it was about the federalism with the lower case F. Well, you said a small F, right? Okay. Which means we made the decisions for our lives and to each a zone, go find a way to make money. We're not gonna get in your way. We didn't really have that much taxes back then.
Starting point is 00:22:39 It was, you know, survival of the fittest, go be industrious, create an economy, create a small business, build something for your family, hear some land, XYZ. Today, the government is massive. So today, you know, I can speak for myself and some of the friends that I speak to, it seems like some people are more paranoid and who they don't trust sometimes today is the US government with their decision-making process.
Starting point is 00:23:03 So there's an element of paranoia today because America's not what America was founded on. It's a different America today than what it was before. And this is left and right. They both like a big government. They both like control. They both want fuel. They can make the right decision for us where based on what you're saying, the founding fathers more, hey, I think you can reason and your ability to reason.
Starting point is 00:23:23 We trust you. Go figure out a way to win for your family And we're gonna leave it up to you. So Paranoia to me is also different for different positions like as a general the military I would hope our general is somewhat paranoid for the frontline guys I would hope they're a little bit paranoid for folks who are working in your world I hope you go to sleep at night to try and think what Putin's next 15 moves are, because if you're not, I'm deeply concerned.
Starting point is 00:23:49 So the part I think about paranoid is more proper preparation prevents poor performance, we're overly prepared against the enemy. Do you think the concept of paranoia's changed today with the people of America towards the government versus the enemy, or do you think the concept of paranoia's change today with the people of America towards the government versus the enemy? Or do you think, yeah, we should still go back to being more optimistic because future does look bright.
Starting point is 00:24:12 Everything's gonna eventually work itself out. Okay. Maybe we should use the word suspicious, you know, for some of these things. This idea of paranoia or suspicion of the government, I think part of the problem in our society is that we're less suspicious or less paranoid many of us than we should be. One of the principles of the founders, one of the consensus views that existed, and this is right in the, you know, in the federalist papers and all the rest is, is the American
Starting point is 00:24:54 people were expected to be suspicious of government. That was part, and that was one of the things that made the American character different. We believed in rugged individualism and self-sufficiency. We were supposed to be a nation of farmers and small shopkeepers. They understood the principle. As Thomas Jefferson said, that government governs best, which governs the least. The behind that principle is the understanding that the increase of government power inevitably erodes your freedom. You cannot have stronger and stronger government and be free, you know, because you're giving government more and more control over yourself.
Starting point is 00:25:36 And therefore, the founders expected Americans to be extremely suspicious of government. And indeed, and those days before television and radio, one of the entertainments people had was politics. People would get together in bars and taverns. They would listen to political speeches for hours. They were much more engaged, I think, than Americans are today. We think of ourselves as more informed and more sophisticated.
Starting point is 00:26:01 They were very sophisticated and well-read those early Americans and and that's one of the reasons why they you know they they they were suspicious of the growth of government at any level you know whether it was at the village level or at the state level and especially at the federal level. And indeed, the Federalist papers, famous papers written by Madison and Monroe, and Alexander Hamilton, were written to try to convince, in the aftermath of the American Revolution, you know, where we had just thrown off a monarch, they were written to try to convince the States, you need to come together, a federal government and we'll have a centralized
Starting point is 00:26:45 government in Washington to manage relations between the states and to defend the country and to manage foreign policy. But don't worry, this government in Washington isn't going to become another tyranny. Because the states didn't believe that. There were a lot of people called the anti-federalists who didn't want that. They just wanted a revolution to get out from under monarchy. So, the whole debate over the Constitution and the Federalist papers showed how suspicious people were of the growth of government. And that basically, that limited government,
Starting point is 00:27:18 produced the America that we enjoyed today up until, I guess, until the progressive era started changing things. You mentioned about taxes, for example, low taxes. People didn't have to pay income taxes. It was unconstitutional to pay income taxes until the progressives changed that, I think, in 1910 or 1913. Oh, three. And they amended the Constitution. And that opened the floodgates because one of the things the founders, the reason it
Starting point is 00:27:43 was unconstitutional is they understood that if you gave government access to people's income and you could tax them, I think the phrase was government will eat out the substance of the people. And basically, that's what has happened and led to the explosive growth of government. Today people, unfortunately, I think, are much more trusting of government than they were throughout most of this country's history. Now, there are exceptions, of course, people who are conservatives, who understand the history of this country and the principles on which
Starting point is 00:28:21 has founded tend to be suspicious of government and increasingly so because of the greatly expanded power of government. But there is also half of America's family, the Democrat Party, people who actually want to have socialism, really communism is what it is. They call it socialism and democratic socialism to dress it up but it really comes down to to uh... full-blown communism in terms of what the way they're behaving and and and what they're after and these people actually think government is the answer to all problems uh... and and they uh...
Starting point is 00:28:59 they want the government to take care of them uh... they want the government to save them from climate change, from institutional racism, from all of these fantasy threats that the government tells them are real, and is the reason we should give more power to government to save them and protect them and to protect them also from people who disagree with them. Because if you disagree with them, the idea of being able to have a civilized debate and argument, rationalism requires you to respect other people's point of view
Starting point is 00:29:35 and concede that they may be sincere and not evil and that you need to have a conversation with them and convince them to your point of view. That is being rapidly lost in our society by the other side, which has all the earmarks of becoming an effect and a totalitarian movement within our country and threatens, and not just threatens, but frankly, I think we've already lost. I don't think we're a constitutional republic today. I think we're in a soft, we're in the faces of a soft tyranny.
Starting point is 00:30:06 And why do I say that? You know, because I think for some years we've, we, we haven't been a constitutional republic. The first year of the Trump administration, not President Trump's fault, but the Democrat party's fault when they brought the, the, the, the false charges and tried to impeach the president, you know, for being a, you know, for being a mentoring candidate, all of which has been proven to be false that he was an agent of Russia and repeatedly abused the intelligence agencies to try to basically have
Starting point is 00:30:38 a coup d'etat against a legitimately elected American president. The point is that both political parties, they have a true constitutional republic, have got to respect the constitution and the rule of law, and recognize the legitimacy of the political power of the other side when elections fairly, okay? And that didn't happen right from the beginning of the Trump administration. So you don't really have a, we haven't really lived in a true constitutional republic, but we've been undergoing as a civil war,
Starting point is 00:31:11 you know, between a nascent totalitarian movement on one side and the people who still believe in the constitution on the other side. And we're trying to, I hope that we can get back to becoming a constitutional republic again, but there are very profound problems in our civilizational culture and our politics and all the rest that have resulted in this. And it's not going to be easy to overcome.
Starting point is 00:31:39 We may go the way of most free systems. I mean, history is not populated mostly by free systems. I mean history is not populated mostly by free systems, mostly they are tyrannies and military dictatorships and authoritarian type systems because freedom is hard. It's hard to be a free people. You have to be actively engaged, you have to be the kind of American the founders had in mind. You know, someone who was going to be always suspicious of government, always jealous of his ability to manage himself. It was a point of pride among Americans, for example, throughout most of her history not to take charity. The idea of taking a handout from your neighbor would
Starting point is 00:32:14 be disgraceful. It was considered a sign of manhood and if good citizenship that you should be able to take care of yourself in your own family You know and if you couldn't that was that was a source of shame and and and that is that very healthy instinct You know has gone away To an attitude that people feel the government owes them a living, you know But these are we that that's a topic we could go on on all afternoon. But yeah, I think we're in great trouble that way. Oh, on the other side, where the Russians are concerned, for example, if we're talking about that, I mean Putin is more popular right now.
Starting point is 00:32:59 I mean, it's probably more popular than he's ever been, you know, despite the Ukraine. Amongst his own people. Yeah, among his own. Can we stay on this topic? Have one other question before we go into put. Now I want to get your respect on what's going on and put in versus what we see on media. So just a curiosity.
Starting point is 00:33:15 If America is building the country that it's building, the founding fathers and they're going through what they're going through, you know, I applied for a job when I was 21 years old when I got out of the military and I'm dating a girl who's working on Morgan Stanley Dean with her. I don't know nothing about securities, stocks, bonds, mutual funds, nothing. I'm a 1.8 GPA kid, I'm a hammer mechanic,
Starting point is 00:33:36 this girl's like, listen, you got to get into financial services. I sent my resume to everybody. I have no clue who Goldman Sachs is at the time. I sent my resume. Do you realize? I wanted to see the reaction of the people who saw my resume to everybody. I have no clue who Golden Sacks is at the time. I sent my resume. Do you realize I wanted to see the reaction of the people who saw my resume? My resume showed Hagen does. Bob's big boy, Burger King, military,
Starting point is 00:33:54 and ballet total fitness. I wish I would pay money to see the reaction of the hiring managers that says, what the hell is this guy thinking about sending a degree, you know, a resume like this to us? But I was oblivious. Goldman would never hire somebody like me. My pedigree, my background who I was.
Starting point is 00:34:10 So Goldman had high standards. Don't you think a country who offers as much as we do our filtering system of who we must keep a higher standard to, you know, what people have to do to earn certain things versus trying to please everybody. Yeah, I don't know if I can explain this properly. Look, I'm a byproduct of immigration that ended up being here. And when we came here, we didn't have a lot to offer.
Starting point is 00:34:36 I'm thankful for it. Now, coming from that point of view, all I'm saying is, if we are from the mindset of, here's everything America offers. What do you bring into the table? So for me, I want to pay my debt off by serving your country. And I want to pay my debt off to you for America giving me the opportunity by paying a lot of taxes, creating jobs, and not having to rely on the government so taxpayers don't
Starting point is 00:35:02 have to help my family out. And I'm just gonna be a citizen that gives back to this country. What happened to the, what do you bring to the table? What happened to, what do you bring to America? What happened to, what do you offer us instead of, let's just take everybody. It's like tomorrow Goldman Sachs announces and says, look, we're offering jobs to everybody. We don't care if you got anything, we don't care if you got a background, we don't care if you got anything. If you've
Starting point is 00:35:27 never had a job before, we're hiring. That would be ludicrous for Goldman Sachs to announce something like that. If America was supposed to be that country, why do we drop our standards and turn it instead of keeping high standards for people, we're almost begging people to say, it's okay, don't worry about it. Let us take care of you. Oh, it's okay don't worry about it let us take care of you oh it's okay not what are you gonna do for us when did that shift take place well uh... i understand i mean this is outside the it immigration policy is not my area of expertise but i'm familiar with some of it but it happened in i think in the in the sixties uh... you know when uh...
Starting point is 00:36:02 they decided to uh... you know when uh... they decided to uh... broad and immigration so that we'd start bringing a lot more people from uh... you know from the third world but i mean i think the real motives behind it uh... you were even at the beginning uh... you know a calculation by the democrat party that they were going to be the political beneficiaries of greatly expanded immigration.
Starting point is 00:36:30 There were standards, there were efforts to protect the border, obviously, even recently as Bill Clinton was concerned about protecting the borders. But we've very quickly had political power taken over in the Democrat Party by radicals, part of this radical ideology that dominates the Democrat Party today as a belief in globalism. You know, they think, and the seeds of globalism, you know, didn't start with Joe Biden or in recent times, but the concept of globalism really goes, has a long history, but really concept of globalism and internationalism, you know, at least as far back as the aftermath of World War II. But before that, that's why the United Nations was established. That's why we have
Starting point is 00:37:20 World Court, you know, that's why we established NATO and then the European Union came along. In academia, the concept of the nation state got a bad reputation as a consequence of World War I and World War II. Oh, nationalism and patriotism, these things result in wars. We need to create a global citizen, people who identify with a one-world order, you know, and go beyond the nation's state. And the League of Nations was an early attempt to do that. The United Nations was an attempt to do that.
Starting point is 00:37:56 They would never, the elites, and the globalist elites who believed in this philosophy, never explained that as the reason to the American people because that would be extremely unpopular. Americans throughout most of our history have been patriotic and don't think nationalism is evil. And it isn't. But we fought a lot of wars in the name of globalism. But we haven't been explained to us that way. That's why the United States has been all over the Middle East engaged in wars. It's very hard to find an American national interest. That is justified, for example, by the Afghanistan war, where we've had people there for a long
Starting point is 00:38:40 time. So part of this is an attempt to, it's not just the idea of having no standards to let people in, but it's an attempt to erase national boundaries and to eliminate the nation's state as the organizing principle for the world order. And that's why the Biden administration, you know, basically does not protect our border. And talk about standards, we have like no standards. I mean, and the border is wide open. You know, so that's where we are.
Starting point is 00:39:18 But I agree with you, certainly. And throughout most of our immigration history, until recent days, I mean, even including up until the Clinton administration, I mean, even including up until the Clinton administration, we were supposed to have standards and we were supposed to be bringing in people who would make a net contribution to the society,
Starting point is 00:39:32 and immigration policy was supposed to advance the interests of the American people who are living here and help make all of our lives better. I was under that impression. So let's talk about Russia under you. If I may, because as you're saying this, I'm thinking there's nobody more nationalistic that has American pride as this immigrant right here, right?
Starting point is 00:39:54 Born in Iran made in America. And I found that seems to be true with most immigrants. They're lucky to be here. They're happy to be here. Like one of the conversations you have with immigrants is you have no idea what it's like over there in Cuba in Venezuela, in North Korea with our friend, Yomi Park.
Starting point is 00:40:11 I mean, we've interviewed these people. You have no idea what's going on over there. So you're talking about the immigration policies. It seems to me that it's the Americans who are born here that are the ones who are little anti-American, if you will, the far left of the Democratic Party, they're the ones in my estimation, they're the ones basically saying,
Starting point is 00:40:35 oh, like, we're the bad people, we're the bad guys. They're kind of been indoctrinated or ingrained to this school of thought, where the immigrants are like, dude, you have no idea what it's like out there. Could you speak to that a little bit? What are your thoughts on naturally born American citizens being a little more anti-American than even the immigrants you're referring to?
Starting point is 00:40:53 Probably a lot more anti-American than the immigrants that we're referring to. Those people who have experienced living in authoritarian or totalitarian regimes, you know, of course, really appreciate this country. They've had in their own lives the experience of what the alternative is. or totalitarian regimes. Of course, really appreciate this country. They've had in their own lives the experience of what the alternative is. Whereas Americans, especially American college students, tend to come from very comfortable
Starting point is 00:41:14 middle class. They've never had to live under a totalitarian regime or in a third-terrain regime. Don't appreciate this country and our educational system, you know, from the high school level all the way up, you know, has become a big brainwashing machine for leftist views, which includes anti-Americanism. I remember when I was in graduate school,
Starting point is 00:41:42 I mean, and this was back in the 1980s. You know, I had the experience, I mean, anti-Americanism was basically being taught back then, even then. And what year was it? Oh, this was a 1983, some time, the early 1980s. You're saying anti-Americanism was taught
Starting point is 00:42:01 in universities at this point? Oh yeah, yeah. I mean, there were some conservative professors at that point, but the general attitude was, well, to give you an example, required reading in one of our courses, his history as literature, you know, was Elchridge Cleaver's Solon Ice, okay? Cleaver was a Black Panther, you know, violent activist, anti-American, who wanted to overthrow the government of the United States and establish, you know, a Black nation, a separate black nation, in the old Confederacy, okay?
Starting point is 00:42:46 And his soul on ice book is a diatribe against the racist evil America. And I remember challenging the professor who was teaching that book, because this was, you know, Elchard Cleaver's view who was trying to introduce us. And I said, you know, how come we're not reading, how come we're not reading, how we're not re, come, we're not reading so long fire, you know, because cleaver, you know, after,
Starting point is 00:43:13 I think he shot a cop or something like that or committed some crime, in Russia, Cuba, you know, you know, I don't think we went to China, but basically authoritarian and authoritarian regimes. And then he went to the US Embassy and begged to come back to the United States and went to complain. And even if he had his spent serve served jail time okay uh... and when he got off the plane he kissed the tarmac kissed the this literally kissed the ground of the united states became a christian
Starting point is 00:43:53 uh... you know uh... and eventually ran as a republican member of congress in los angeles uh... you know lost his his soul on ice you know is a warning that people who used to believe as he did that america is the greatest country on earth, that we should all be grateful here, and they did not teach that. Okay. What did he profess? He didn't even know the book existed. Okay. You know, but how did you know it existed? I can't remember how I know it existed. This guy was reading nuclear physicist books at age 13. Yeah, but there's a
Starting point is 00:44:24 lot of books out there for him to know it like is you know just curious. I read a lot of books. Yeah, I was very obvious. I went out when I was young and but but that if any and I'll bet you that Solon ice is still required reading but they don't require them. They don't even tell them about the existence of the other book Solon Fire. You know where Ilter's Cheat Cleaver had the experience of what it was like to live outside of America and change his mind and just completely reversed course.
Starting point is 00:44:51 Yeah, I just pulled it up right now. What a perspective that you have with that. But let's continue. Let's go into some of these topics. Sure, your expertise. So if the average person turns on the TV and wants to know more about what's going on with Ukraine and Russia. They would probably say Zelensky is a hero.
Starting point is 00:45:08 They would consider him Churchill. Putin is the next Hitler. They would say Putin is sick. He's weak. Ukraine is beating and winning the war. America is doing a great job given all this support to Ukraine and getting involved. It's a great job we're doing taking care of these guys. Everybody wants to go have a meeting with Zelensky.
Starting point is 00:45:33 Just a couple days ago, Jill Biden was in Ukraine having a private meeting with Zelensky's wife, first lady. And Trudeau was just there from Canada spending some time with Zelensky. It is becoming a, and the world is getting behind Zelensky. Now, as a person that's extremely paranoid, and let's add a new word to my vocabulary suspicious, right? I'm sitting there now wondering, is there something I don't know?
Starting point is 00:46:00 That was one of the reasons why we wanted to bring you here, because I want to see maybe you got a different perspective that we don't see. When you one of the reasons why we wanted to bring you here, because I want to see maybe you got a different perspective that we don't see. When you see what the news is saying, when you see what's going on, do you see Putin getting weaker? Do you see him sitting there? Do you see saying he's doing exactly what he was expecting
Starting point is 00:46:20 in America to get into this, to use this as an excuse to create a war against US and American people are not thinking the negative side effects of what could happen with this the next three, six, 12, 24 months. I don't know. What is your perspective? How do you view what's going on versus the rest of the world? Okay.
Starting point is 00:46:35 Well, first I do think Zelensky is a Churchill-like character because his job is supposed to be to convince other countries to come to the defense of Ukraine Even if it's not in their interests. I mean, that's what Churchill did with the United States in World War two And that's what Zelensky is doing now. He's supposed to be doing that. So that doesn't make him an evil person Putin may well be Hitler, okay? But but you have to but you have to Putin may be able to well be Stalin all right But you have to, but you have to Putin may be able to well be Stalin, all right? But during World War II we made common cause with Stalin against the
Starting point is 00:47:13 guns, the common threat which was Nazi Germany. And in my view of the West seems to have completely forgotten about strategic big picture here. And the big strategic big picture is that we face the free countries face the greatest threat to our security to our existence that we have ever faced in the alliance that exists between Russia and China and their client states North Korea and Iran in international terrorism, all of whom are part of a new block. You know, they haven't formalized it with a treaty for all of them, although there are treaties between Russia and China. And the West has been so slow to wake up to this reality.
Starting point is 00:47:54 You know, only now, I've been saying for many years that Russia and China are de facto allies. And it should, seems to me, it should have been obvious should have been obvious to anyone who had been following the history of the relations between Russia and China. China's superpower capabilities are built on Russian technology. There are new missiles, advanced aircraft, there their ships and everything You know Russia basically helped build China into the great military threat that it is today It's likewise with North Korea, you know Has it's amazing to me that Washington never seemed to be
Starting point is 00:48:39 As surprised as it should be that North Korea, you know could go so rapidly to acquire atomic weapons, then the hydrogen bomb. Last December, it displays the world's largest mobile ICBM that people think is going to carry merves now, which is called multiple independently targeted rancher vehicles. So one missile can send many independent. How could North Korea do that all by itself? Well, it hasn Korea do that all by itself? Well, it hasn't done it all by itself. Its missile technology has been provided to it by Russia and China. They want North Korea to become a nuclear threat to the United States so that they can fight
Starting point is 00:49:16 a proxy nuclear war against us if they have to to drive us out of the Pacific by raising the risks of providing our alliance guarantees to our allies in the Pacific. So to change our strategic calculus, to say, well, you know, if we defend South Korea, we might get a nuclear war with North Korea. Is it worth the candle? If we defend Japan, is it worth the candle to risk Los Angeles on a nuclear war with North Korea?
Starting point is 00:49:43 Likewise, with Iran, the Iranian nuclear program. Those are Russian nuclear reactors that were built for them. The Russians are building more nuclear reactors. North Koreans' missiles are usually based on North Korean technology. Their best medium-range missile, the Shahab III, is really a souped-up version of North Korea's no-donk. And there are North Korean scientists and technicians. And Russian and Chinese scientists, they're the technicians in Iran, helping them develop
Starting point is 00:50:10 their nuclear missile programs. So they have been a clandestine block, okay? Now finally, Washington sees that all Russia and China really are allies. They've been hoping that that hasn't been true for many years years right up until the Ukrainian crisis but they are allies and are job number one for us you know is is to be prepared to defeat this block this the teletarian power block that is coming you know they are a bigger threat to us by far than Nazi Germany and the Imperial Japan were in World War II. You know, because they can destroy our homeland now.
Starting point is 00:50:49 Did you just say they're bigger threat? Oh, yes. Because if Nazi and Germany was in World War II, the Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan combined and fascist Italy combined because the telekorean powers of that day could not reach across the oceans. They couldn't project power across the oceans. Now they can, they could destroy our society in 30 minutes. And all their, even their allies.
Starting point is 00:51:10 And we should, by the way, when a country gets nuclear missiles, you really need to think of them as a superpower. You know, we like to think of superpowers as, you know, meeting an economic definition. When it comes to life and death, what matters is, can that country destroy you? And can they do it quickly? North Korea could destroy us and it could do it quickly. That makes them a superpower, even though the rest of their economy and no other respect are they a superpower, but it doesn't matter. When it comes to life and death, they are a superpower. In Iran, I believe, is already a a superpower i think that we've it's another topic
Starting point is 00:51:45 i just published a uh... a report today as matter of fact it was uh... you know carried in uh... in israel called ron e-m-p-threat where i make the case that a ron has already got nuclear weapons that they've had them for some time i'm not the only one who believes that you know there's a uh...
Starting point is 00:52:03 uh... you know a very credible minority view in the American strategic community that never gets heard, okay, that says, hey, Iran has already got the bomb. But this is the most formidable combination we've ever faced in our history, and I don't think we can beat it. You know, if we have to end up having a
Starting point is 00:52:20 protracted new Cold War against this combination, we're gonna lose. And if it goes into a hot war we're going to lose even worse all right so our job number one you know is to split the Russian Chinese alliance that's our best hope for prevailing in the new cold war that is our highest priority to split that alliance and uh uh and i i think it's possible to do it because I think Putin and Russia has been discontented with that alliance. I think they understand Russia is smart enough to see that China in the long run, after they defeat us, there's going to be a World War IV between the totalitarian powers. And I think Russia realizes because of the, they built up China to be such a strong power.
Starting point is 00:53:11 And they have a billion people that wrote China and the long run as a bigger threat to Russia than the West is. And the, the, I also think Russia is kind of disappointed in its relationship with China. China is obviously on their side now and they're getting benefits from China now, but the relative benefits that have come from this relationship have much more favored China than Russia in terms of economic benefits in terms of technology transfer in terms of geostrategic influence. I think Putin was waiting for Trump to hit the reset button.
Starting point is 00:53:47 And it was General Flynn's plan as National Security Advisor, even wrote a book about it to say, you know, what we've got to do is hit the reset button with Russia to split the Russian Chinese alliance. And Putin was just waiting for that to happen. But the Democrat party made it impossible to happen because of these false charges that Trump was Putin's puppet. So he never got a chance to hit the reset button. And the Democrat party has gone on with this mantra about Russia, Russia, Russia being evil and now over the Ukraine war.
Starting point is 00:54:21 He's a war criminal, so how could we make common cause with them and all of that and the focus is on defeating Russia and the Ukraine war and we're not going to be able to defeat Russia and the Ukraine war. I mean there's just so much to talk about here because if Russia has to they will resort to nuclear weapons, chemical and biological weapons. They've cheated on the chemical and biological weapons treaties. They have very sophisticated, offensive chemical and biological weapons. They've cheated on all the arms control treaties. And yes, I'm star a state department. I think they've cheated on the new start treaty too. It's the last treaty that they're supposed to be obeying, okay, which is it controls the strategic warheads that can reach us. You know, I think they probably have cheated on
Starting point is 00:55:03 new start as well, and they have a huge advantage there. We know they've got a 10-to-1 advantage, at least, in tactical nuclear weapons. They probably have a 2-to-1 advantage in strategic nuclear weapons, and they have the world's most advanced, passive, and active strategic defenses. You know, there are thousands of shelters shelters and bunkers hundreds of deep underground facilities for the Russian political military leadership. They can they can protect the top 300,000 political military leaders in Russia in deep underground facilities that are under hundreds of
Starting point is 00:55:36 meters of granite that are impervious to nuclear attack. That's where Putin was. I think it was on february 27th when he put his forces on nuclear alert uh... there are thousands probably ten to some thousands of shelters for the general population uh... back in twenty sixteen rush ahead a civil defense exercise that mobilized forty million people to practice a nuclear protecting their population against a nuclear war
Starting point is 00:56:02 the subways in their major cities have blast or so people can go down into subways and be protected. We have nothing like that. We have nothing. You know, we have no civil defense, serious civil defense program in this country. We have our whole national missile defense comprises 64 ground-based interceptors based in Alaska and northern California. And they're designed not to intercept Russian or Chinese ICBMs. They're meant to deal with low technology ICBMs that we thought would come out of North Korea or Iran. And we've been fooled because there are North Korean ICBMs are actually much more sophisticated because they're based on Russian and Chinese technology.
Starting point is 00:56:41 I mean, think about this, where North Korea is concerned. There's only three countries in the world that have mobile ICBMs. You know how complicated a mobile ICBM is? I mean, that's basically Cape Canaveral on wheels to be able to carry a intercontinental ballistic missile and have all the targeting and command control assets in a truck to launch that ICBM.
Starting point is 00:57:01 Very sophisticated thing. There's only three countries in the world that have mobile ICBMs. Russia, China, North Korea. We don't have mobile ICBMs, you know, but North Korea does. What does that tell you? In terms of, you know, who helped them get where they are. And so we've only got those 64 GBI's. They've got 10,000 anti-missile and anti-aircraft, 10,000 nuclear and conventional capable, you know, a very dense national missile defense surrounding Russia, you know, you know, to shoot down our warheads, to shoot down our bombers, to shoot down our cruise missiles. So they are much better prepared and all their nuclear forces, 90%
Starting point is 00:57:47 of them are modern and high-tech and advanced. They have weapons systems that we don't even have in our arsenal, like super EMP weapons and weapons that are specialized for X-ray effects and neutrons, ultra-low yield nuclear weapons that could, you know, be just five, have very low yield enough to take out a bridge or enough to take out the Pentagon and not break the windows of neighboring buildings. Very high yield weapons, like the Poseidon, that could have a weapon that could have a yield that is as high as 200 megatons, you know, which is something like 20,000 times the power of the Hiroshima bomb.
Starting point is 00:58:26 We don't have weapons like that in our infantry. In fact, Joe Biden is retiring nuclear weapons for some of our best nuclear weapons. He's canceled the silicon N, which is a nuclear armed cruise missile that was desperately needed to restore the balance of our tactical nuclear weapons was concerned. We have almost no tactical nuclear weapons. And the Silicon Man is gone. He took that out of his budget. And he's retired to B-83, which was our best, it was the last megaton class nuclear weapon
Starting point is 00:58:56 we had in Earthenforthory, 1.2 megatons. It's the only nuclear weapon we have that has a chance of generating a shock wave that's powerful enough to perhaps damage some of those deep underground facilities where the bad guys in North Korea and China and Russia can hide. And it's gone. So he's taken that away. So we're building down while the others are building up.
Starting point is 00:59:22 But this lengthy, disquysition on uh... the nuclear balance is a reason why we should not get involved in the grain war uh... you know i i think we should be pulling back not uh... not not going forward because we cannot win a nuclear war with russia you know uh... you know and and and and if we if what we're hearing on and is true the narrative that's coming across on the TV and the Russia is really on the ropes and the Putin is crazy and, and, and, and,
Starting point is 00:59:52 and, and he may fall from power, then we're very close to the nuclear brink closer than we were there in the Cuban Missile Crisis. And our policies are creating a situation where we will get into a nuclear war and lose it. I know because you've been reading my stuff that I'm not convinced that that is the reality. This is what we're being told, but I'm not convinced that that's the reality. There are other realities, not all of them mutually exclusive.
Starting point is 01:00:27 May I continue? Please. For one thing, John Bolton wrote a pretty good article for Gates Stone recently that's a good corrective to a lot of the nonsense we hear. And why do I say that a lot of what we're hearing on the news is nonsense? Because almost everything we know about what's going on in the Ukraine war is coming from the Ukrainians, you know, and from the Biden administration, but mostly
Starting point is 01:00:55 from the Ukrainians. And the Ukrainian government has an interest in convincing the West that they're winning and that the Russians are on the ropes and it'll be really easy to defeat the Russians in Ukraine if we'll just come in, okay? And so naturally everything they tell us is designed to convince us that that is true. And the Biden administration has an equal political interest in convincing that is true because they want the Russians to look as bad as possible in Ukraine so that the narrative will not be that Biden basically experienced a defeat and humiliation even greater than Afghanistan when he drew the red line over Ukraine for Russia and Russia just rolled its tanks across it.
Starting point is 01:01:40 He basically put America and the West's NATO's credibility on the line in Ukraine and blew it. You know, all those decades of trying to build up NATO's credibility and U.S. credibility decades of it, among successive presidents, was all thrown away by Joe Biden when he promised, when he warned Putin not to invade Ukraine and he did it anyway. Biden doesn't want the conversation to be about that because this is a humiliation and a foreign policy disaster that is 10,000 of times worse than Afghanistan. And so let the conversation be about how the Russians are losing so badly and the
Starting point is 01:02:17 worst the Russians look the better that is for Biden. So I'm not sure we can trust what we're seeing. You know, the fog of war is always very thick in wars. I'd remind the American people of two wars, the war in Vietnam, were right up until 1968. Most Americans were convinced we were winning the war. We were going to win the war until the North Vietnam launched the 1968 Tete Offensive. All these promises from General Westmoreland that we had killed all of the Viet Cong turned out to be untrue and that our intelligence was all wrong about how close we were to victory. It was just a year ago that we've had the debacle in Afghanistan,
Starting point is 01:03:07 where we did have boots on the ground for many, many years. We weren't relying on the Ukrainians, we were relying on our own intelligence agencies and our own best experts in the Defense Department to give us the assessment that don't worry about Afghanistan, we can have an honorable withdrawal and we can have a government that will at least temporarily be friendly to the United States and
Starting point is 01:03:30 Moderate and its views and all of that turned out to be false, you know our assessment of the Assessment of the reality on the ground in Afghanistan turned out to be completely false so We don't have a good record long long term or short term in terms of making accurate assessments about what's happening on the ground. It could be that our whole assessment of what Putin's objectives were and Ukraine may be wrong. We've assumed because we are the West and we believe in fighting quick wars. We don't like portrayal war at all. We want them to be quick and surgical. That's how we fight
Starting point is 01:04:12 war. Because Ukraine isn't going that way, we may say, this is just a disaster for Putin. Maybe not. The Russian way of war can be that way. For example, it was Bolton correctly points out. Putin may have thought that invading Ukraine would go the way it did when he took Crimea, which was basically a blitzkrieg type thing, and he took it quickly and bloodlessly. But there's another model to look at on the ground that was happening in Ukraine and Eastern Ukraine. There'd been this long, bloody war of attrition going on in Donetsk and Lahansk, Eastern Ukraine for eight years, you know. And that's another Russian we have
Starting point is 01:04:51 war. And in fact, most of Russian military history, you know, is not quick, clean, decisive victories. Mostly it's against the Mongols, against the Swedes, against Napoleon, World War I and World War II, it's a grinding bloody, you use mass and attrition to just eventually wear your enemy down, and that's how you win wars. And they're ruthless and they're fought like a vegetarian inhumane power, not the way democracies do, where we're very humane in terms of where we try to be, you know, in terms of the way we wage our wars. And that's, and it may have been Putin's intention all along. And I'm not saying he didn't suffer, set and all the rest, certainly there has been that.
Starting point is 01:05:48 But maybe Ukraine's chief objective wasn't the liberation of Ukraine and the takeover of Ukraine. That's one of his objectives, surely. But another, it may be that having the war is one of his objectives. Military dictatorships having the war with who? With us? With anyone.
Starting point is 01:06:07 But with, well, let's start with Ukraine. Just having a war is a good thing from the point of view of a military dictatorship and an authoritarian state. Because it rallies the people behind you. Show strength. It shows strength to your population. It rallies the people behind you.
Starting point is 01:06:23 You know, the Russian people are being being told this isn't just a war against ukrainian Nazis but it's against NATO when the United States NATO in the United States are attacking us through Ukraine so if you're concerned about your political power i mean Putin is obviously has short up his base by having this war by rallying the public behind him at a time when he was you know suffering economically because of sanctions and stuff like that.
Starting point is 01:06:46 It's driven up the price of oil, which is a natural gas, which is great for Russia. You know, it's arm sales or another great source of Russian income, you know, and, uh, but isn't it also tearing apart the Russian economy? They can't all be just be good things from this war. We constantly see the bad things that are happening to the Russian economy. They can't all be just be good things from this war. Constantly see the bad things that are happening to the Russian economy. The rubble has crumbled. The oligarchs are fleeing from the country. They have no money or access to the money. They've shut down the payment system, what's the payment system called? The Swift payment. So it's not like all these
Starting point is 01:07:18 good things are happening because of this war. I'm not saying it's all good. Sure, there are some negative things, but spoken like a man of the West to put economics, which is all the way we calculate. What is the cost? Is the standard of living going down to us? That's what matters most, but to a Russian, the people in the streets, the people who support Putin, what matters is survival. You know, it is within the living memory of many Russians, and they learn in their schools
Starting point is 01:07:53 that they lost 30 million dead. That's just the dead. Those aren't the casualties, you know, from World War II. For them, the idea of survival and not being taken by surprise and not having another destruction of their country is far outweighs what the oligarchs may be suffering in terms of their lifestyles being set back. The other thing is that war, the chaos of war, just comforts the West. And we don't, because we don't like it, and it makes us insecure, especially if you
Starting point is 01:08:28 end up with a protracted war, and Bolton, and his article in Gatesstone, talks about a 30 to 100 year war to take over Ukraine. 30 to 100 year war to take over Ukraine. Yes, that's the, in the title of his Gates stone article. Maybe he doesn't mean that literally, but I can imagine it. There have been such wars in history, the 30 years war, the 100 years war over France. Nations, which we, you know, we think World War 2 is a long war, but if you look at how long wars have lasted in some places, they go on for years and years, decades even.
Starting point is 01:09:05 The recent war between Azerbaijan and Armenia that was settled in favor of Azerbaijan went on for 30 years. They're going to their caravac war, okay? This is not untipical. It's unusual for our experience. The benefit of a long war from the point of view of the bad guys is that we always want peace, this thing we call peace. And so after a while, we will end up coming to the table to say, how can we resolve this?
Starting point is 01:09:34 And then the benefits will flow as they have done in the past. So that's one possibility maybe uh... you know maybe putons calculation what is to have a protracted period of war just the way he did in eastern Ukraine for eight years i mean he could have resolved that uh... he had in fact the uh... uh... the uh... european union uh... and uh... and muggle met with putin to try to resolve the east european that that war that was going on for eight years okay
Starting point is 01:10:04 so he sort of Europe, that war that was going on for eight years, okay? So he sort of experienced that even that little war going on in Eastern Ukraine managed to get the discomforted NATO enough that it got us to a negotiating table to talk about resolving it, but he had no intentions of resolving it, you know? Maybe this is just the long, protracted, grinding war that he had going on in eastern krain writ large doctor pric question question for you sure what what is the best defense right now i know you said hey let's uh... we have to figure out a way to split some of those relationships and rush out we gotta get stronger can get these two powerhouses
Starting point is 01:10:41 you know you nightingas of china and russia and and Iran are in the same team, we're screwed. I mean, what can you do if you got those three guys that are in the same team? Russia, China just signed a 30 year contract with Iran for what, $400 billion. So Iran is now linked with China and China and Russia are neighbors. If they kind of team up and say,
Starting point is 01:10:59 hey, look, America's the top enemy. You hate them, we hate them. Let's figure out a way to kind of weaken them. This is a great opportunity for us to do so aside from trying to split up. What else is the best defense? We can defense We can play Can I just walk through two other possible scenarios in terms of what might be going on in Ukraine and then I'll answer that question You know another scenario here. I'll try to do it quickly You know is I think of the Spanish Civil War scenario.
Starting point is 01:11:25 You know, if Putin aspires to global domination, you know, which I think he may, you may want to test his weapons, his tactics and blood, his troops. The way Hitler did during World War II during the Spanish Civil War, before the Blitzkrieg was unleashed on the West. They tested it out, tested out the troops, the generals, in the Spanish Civil War. That way you can find out who are the good generals, who are the bad generals, put the best people in charge, which tactics work, which don't, how can we improve weapons and things like that. So Ukraine could be a big laboratory experiment you know for this sort of thing and last is the the battle of australitz scenario the uh...
Starting point is 01:12:08 the uh... Napoleon's greatest victory in not 1805 which is much studied in the Russian general staff it should be studied in all academies uh... you know in 1805 uh... and i don't say this is likely it it's just a possibility. All right. You know, Napoleon faced the combined armies of the greatest land powers of Europe in 1805. He had marched his army from Paris all the way into Central Europe by forced marches.
Starting point is 01:12:40 And they were still afraid to attack him, the combined powers of Russia, Austria, and Prussia, because Napoleon had such a reputation as a great general. But he had a plan to defeat all of these guys, even though he was greatly outnumbered, but he just needed to convince them to attack him, you know, to walk into his trap. And so he did this by having defectors go over to the Russians and the Austrians and say, oh, the French army is really demoralized. We were overextended. We're so far from Paris, we're exhausted from these long marches. He had whole regiments run away from the Russians and the field to convince them that the French army all they had to do was attack to defeat him. Russians in the field to convince them that the French army all they had to do was attack to defeat him.
Starting point is 01:13:25 He deliberately took the weakest part, the worst part of the battlefield, okay? So they had the high ground, you know? So everything looked perfect for defeating Napoleon, okay? And then they attacked and he dropped the hammer on them. The battle ended with this humiliating thing with the Russian army had a retreat out onto a frozen lake, which he broke up with his cannon and hundreds of them drowned. But that's a textbook Napoleon's greatest victory, the Battle of Austria, which was based on convincing.
Starting point is 01:13:55 The other side that you were weak, that you were on the verge of defeat, all you have to do is come in and attack me and you'll win. And that could be happening in Ukraine. I mean, so many of these things that are done wrong, I mean, so many fundamentals that the Russians appear to have done wrong, it makes me suspicious that maybe it's deliberate to convince us that, oh, these guys are so incompetent. You know, let's just jump in there the way Lindsey Graham wants us to. You know, we could find ourselves if we were to do something
Starting point is 01:14:26 like that and we get more deeply involved in the Ukraine war, that's right at the edge of our ability to project power. We'll have a do some problem getting our guys out if we're wrong about that calculation. We're not going to be able to get them out. And maybe the big plan for the general staff is to use uh... the ukraine is the bloodlands again what a great place for tactical nuclear weapons to use that ten to one advantage in tactical nuclear weapons and suddenly go nuclear with this war and and make ukraine war could be the final solution for russia of the problem of
Starting point is 01:14:59 NATO and the united states you know by using their tactical at nuclear advantage to obliterate us in Ukraine. Anyway, those are other possibilities that I beg our policymakers to think about before we weigh more deeply into the Ukraine war, to your question, what should we be doing? Well, what I think we should be doing is, again, going back to the big picture, we should be trying to split the Russian Chinese alliance, okay? So we don't have to contend with this war in black. And what we should be trying to split the Russian Chinese alliance. Okay, so we don't have to contend with this war in black. And what we should do is I think we should be raising the readiness level of our strategic nuclear forces. Right now Biden has basically broken precedent back on, I think it
Starting point is 01:15:39 was February 27th that Putin put his forces on high alert. His nuclear forces have been high alert. They've been ready for a nuclear war. They've been ready for nuclear war they've been threatening nuclear war every every day and we haven't responded you know in the past when the Russians did something like that we would raise the defcon level that's the readiness level the lowest level is five you know that uh... and and our forces are at a red in this five right now that makes us vulnerable to a nuclear pearl harbor. The bombers are not, you know, could be destroyed on their bases.
Starting point is 01:16:09 The most of our ballistic missile submarines are still in port. They could be destroyed in their bases with just two warheads. You know, the ICBMs are the only thing that would be ready. We've only got 400 ICBM warheads, you know, against the enormous target set in Russia. And they've got hypersonic weapons that could perhaps, you know, destroy those ICBM warheads, you know, against the enormous target set in Russia, and they've got hypersonic weapons that could perhaps, you know, destroy those ICBMs before they could launch. So, you know, what we should do is raise the DEF CON level at least to DEF CON3,
Starting point is 01:16:36 so that our forces are at a more survivable posture, so that the Russians would be less capable of doing a nuclear pearl harbor, and then immediately communicate to Moscow that, look at, we're raising our forces to defcon3 because you guys increase the alert of your forces, and you have left us no choice. We don't plan to attack you.
Starting point is 01:16:55 This isn't a plan for a surprise nuclear attack. We want peace. So let's both sides lower the readiness of our nuclear forces back to a normal level and while we're doing that Let's have an immediate ceasefire in Ukraine and let's go to the negotiating table and and negotiate a piece Based on the peace treaty that you offered that you Moscow offered to NATO and the United States Before you invaded Ukraine that peace treaty the Biden administration didn't even seriously try to negotiate it. There were many points of that treaty that should have been acceptable to
Starting point is 01:17:29 us, not least, not having Ukraine in NATO and promising not to expand NATO further east. It's even more in our interest than its Russia's interest to not expand NATO even further than the East. So there are many points in that treaty that should be acceptable to us. The point of this process is that this could be a golden opportunity to turn lemons and eliminate and to hit the reset button with Russia. Do you think he would entertain that? I think he would because in the long run, because first I don't think Putin is crazy, I don't think he's in a sick bed. I think that Putin had wanted to realign himself with the West during the Trump administration. I think that he sees China as the bigger long-term threat to us than the West. I think that if he could return to normalcy,
Starting point is 01:18:17 his certainly his oligarchs would like it, as uh... you know so i think that there is a a significant possibility you know that uh... that we could use this uh... and the most important thing immediate thing from my point of view is that the one vital national interest we have in the crane war is to stop it because of the nuclear escalatory possibilities this idea that we can control our involvement in Ukraine
Starting point is 01:18:45 and that nothing is gonna go wrong, that things are not gonna go off the tracks and turn into a nuclear war by accident or miscalculation, is really unwise, frankly, a historical. I mean, just think of how World War I started, you know, a single bullet fired by a Serbian terrorist in the chest of a arch-duke blew up into a nuclear war, very, excuse me, into World War I very quickly, you know, that killed millions of people.
Starting point is 01:19:15 Ukraine is far more important strategically than Serbia was and the possibilities for escalation they were enormous. We need to get out of this situation, desperately, to avoid these escalatory possibilities. So there are two huge U.S. national security interests that would be solved here. Terminating the Ukraine wars, the escalatory possibilities are ended, and splitting the Russian Chinese alliance so that we have some kind of a chance to win the new Cold War against China. I think Putin could be persuaded to become a neutral, at least a neutral, but maybe even a strategic partner through the process of negotiating and resolving our conflicting security
Starting point is 01:20:01 views. I don't think you're going to be able to, I think it's too much to hope that Russia is going to be contained forever, and they're not going to want to have their empire back. You know, that's what Bolton was talking about, about the 30-100-year war. I think Bolton is right. I think the Russian people, not just Putin, they want their empire back, they want great Russia back, and they are going to fight for 30-100 years, diplomatically and milit are gonna fight for 30 to 100 years Diplomatically and militarily if necessary to do that. Do we have the political will to oppose that for 30 to one? I don't think so. We don't even have the political will to defeat the Taliban.
Starting point is 01:20:36 So let's be realistic about our foreign policy. We're not the global, you know, we're not we're not able to control the whole world Oh, and we're not responsible to control the whole world, and we're not responsible for controlling the whole world. We're chiefly responsible to the American people, to protecting our lives, protecting this country, and protecting our civilization. And this is, as I can see it, is the quickest way and safest way to end the Ukraine war and to position ourselves to win the new Cold War by achieving the most important objective right now, which we should be to split the Russia-China alliance.
Starting point is 01:21:14 You said something that got me thinking. So in your eyes, if you said World War 4 for Russia is going to be against China, many World War III is going to be us, right? So if let's just say Russia does choose to attack Ukraine, US gets involved and Russia says screw this. I'm second-tired of the way US Biden administration is handling it. I'm attacking US as well, done, but I'm going to take a different angle. If he does, and let's just say he succeeds, let's go to the succeeding part. He succeeds, and it's a debacle here, you know, you use the word. It's a mess over here
Starting point is 01:21:49 in U.S. Then, whether he likes it or not, he has to face off the last bully that's going to be stronger than him because he's getting stronger every year, which is China. So it would be a very bad move on his end to do anything to U.S. because he's going to need U.S. long-term to protect them in case something happens with China. Because China's the guy that's standing alone by themselves, buying up all these small different places, they're buying the cobalt in Africa, their strategy with Iran, with oil. The way they're taking it is a very different strategy on how China's taking it. Would you say the same thing?
Starting point is 01:22:28 Would you agree with that? That Russia needs America to make sure long-term they're protected from China? The Russians are chess players, and I think that that analysis is possibly the way the Russians are thinking about this. It's even possible that one of the reasons we haven't been attacked yet is precisely because of that, that they need us in the long run, looking toward World War four.
Starting point is 01:22:55 But I wouldn't count on that forbearance forever, okay? There's gonna come a point where our involvement in Ukraine, if we decide to go the other way and become more deeply involved, you know, kill more Russian generals, kill more Russians on the ground, try to for try to defeat Putin in Ukraine. There's going to come another place where he says, well, I've got to be concerned with my immediate survival, you know, and there's no hope of negotiating with the West. But let me say this and conclude another thought on this about the negotiating the peace
Starting point is 01:23:34 with Putin through Ukraine. What if Russia decides not to negotiate with us? Okay. That's the other thing. I mean, one of the hardest things in managing foreign policy and defense policy is situational awareness. What is our situation, V of Russia? You know, is it possible to play ball with them the way we did with Stalin and World War two? And if and and and and we will tell us so much if we try to negotiate with Putin on the basis of his own peace treaty.
Starting point is 01:24:06 And then he says, no deal. I don't, you know, this treaty that I'm not even going to negotiate you with that treaty because I'm in Ukraine now. That's going to tell us a lot about what this war in Ukraine is really about for Putin. It will tell us, I believe, that Putin is Stalin and Z is Hitler in 1939 and Ukraine is Poland. Z meaning G. Yeah, the dictator of China. And Ukraine is Poland all over again. And that this is all part of a plot by these guys, okay? That they're unify behind closed. Yeah, exactly. And that they're not worried about losing in Ukraine
Starting point is 01:24:48 and that this is the big move, okay? That this is the big move. This is 1939 all over again. Are they important for us to know that? That's a very good point you just made. So are they maybe waiting for, you know, for US to make the move for them to say, we didn't, you know, for US to make the move for them to say, we didn't, you know, we reacted to your behavior.
Starting point is 01:25:07 You did this and then we had to go and protect ourselves because you got involved in something when we told you, stay out of this. So are there almost waiting for US to be aggressive? That could be the case, they could be wanting the US to come into Ukraine, you know, as I said before, the Austro-Litz scenario provoked us to intervene. A lot of the things, the atrocities, for example, almost seem calculated to inflame Western
Starting point is 01:25:34 opinion so that we'll just, on impulse, send our forces in there so that they'll be destroyed. I would also point out, too, by the way, I mean, it really isn't pointed out, you know, when you look at the balance of power here, you know, Russia is fighting the Ukraine war with one hand behind its back, you know, I mean, they've only got 200,000 troops in Ukraine. They've got a two million man army. They've got 20,000 tanks. They only have, you know, four, four thousand tanks or so. The air force has hardly played that significant role. The air force has really held back. It's really, it's either incredibly gross in competence, which is what we're being told, or something else is going on here
Starting point is 01:26:15 in terms of holding back all this power. And I think it's time for us to be less dysfunctionally optimistic and a little more paranoid before we go forward and think about if we're wrong again here the way we were in Afghanistan and the way we were in Vietnam what's the worst that could happen and the worst could have happened is the destruction of the West if we play this thing all wrong. Well let's transition into that and I don't want to take that
Starting point is 01:26:41 chance especially you know we need time yeah, let's transition into that because I want to go into that, which is, you know, most the average person is like, oh my god, I don't want a nuclear war. What if there's a nuclear war? What happens? How bad is it? How, you know, ugly is it going to get if there's somebody that does something like that, like, trumming it back in the days when we respond it back to Pearl Harbor, all this other stuff.
Starting point is 01:27:03 Okay. Fine. back in the days when we respond back to Pearl Harbor, all this other stuff. Okay, fine. For you, what concerns you more? Nuclear war, cyber warfare, biochemical warfare, or a super EMP type of attack that, you know, I read this somewhere that says experts say our power grid can be destroyed and when that happens, 7 to 90% of U.S. population will die within the first year. Which of those four concerns you the most? Well, I put super EMP and cyber together. You know, my book, Blackout Warfare, I described this revolutionary new way of warfare that is in military doctrines of Russia, China, and North Korean Iran, and they are
Starting point is 01:27:46 prepared to execute this, where the focus of the attack is national electric grids, okay, because we are an electronic civilization. And everything, all of our life-sustaining critical infrastructures, communications, transportation, even food and water, depend upon electricity, and the military, the ability to project power and operate your military forces and command and control, all depends upon electricity. So the theory of this is that if you can take out the electric grids with EMP attacks and cyber warfare and special forces sabotage small numbers of guys going
Starting point is 01:28:26 in and shooting up transformers and stuff. You know, you'll cause a nationwide blackout and that will bring the other side to its knees and you'll basically win a war and very quickly, potentially at the speed of light, you know, because of the way EMP and cyber work. And not, and because it's, even a so-called nuclear EMP attack is not, I hear a Shima or a Nagasaki typuce of an atomic bomb. It's not considered nuclear war in Russian
Starting point is 01:28:58 or Chinese, North Korean doctrines considered part of cyber warfare or electronic warfare and rightly so because of the way the physics work. You detonate a weapon at very high altitude, 300, 400 kilometers. It's so high that if you were standing on the ground directly beneath the explosion, you wouldn't even hear it. I mean, it's 300, 400 kilometers over your head going off in the vacuum of space, there wouldn't even be a noise, all right?
Starting point is 01:29:22 The blast wouldn't reach you. There'd be no thermal or radioactive effects that would reach you. The only thing that would come down would be the electromagnetic pulse, which is harmless to people. It passes harmless to your body like a radio wave, but it will destroy electronics. Cars won't work, you won't have any water because the electric grid would collapse and requires mills and volts to get water, food would start spoiling. You know, there's only enough food to feed people at three days in local grocery stores. And in the whole of the United States, we only have enough food to supply people for 30 days, 330 million people, for 30 days at normal consumption rates.
Starting point is 01:29:58 And it would begin to spoil immediately. And it couldn't be transported to market because the inter interstate highways would be jammed transportation systems wouldn't work but can a kid in effect it's a way of subtracting from modern electronic civilization you know the technologies that make life possible today and uh... a president faced with that you know wouldn't be able to operate his forces you might not even be able to retaliate with a super EMP weapon because it would fry the electronics and command and control systems and the missiles and the bombers. And faced with, do I go and fight a losing war in Ukraine or do I mobilize what is left
Starting point is 01:30:39 of the defense department to try to restore the electric grid to save millions of American lives before people start starving to death and society collapses. Obviously, that latter choice, and that's part of their calculation. And we're even closer to that. I'm most concerned about that scenario, because before Russia goes nuclear in terms of the classical nuclear war, where they would blow up ICBMs in their silos or a TAC bomber bases with nuclear weapons or even do tactical nuclear strikes in Ukraine. I think it's more likely that they would use what I call a blackout war because this is, it would kill very few people initially.
Starting point is 01:31:20 It's what's called gray zone aggression, you know, it, it, it, it, it's a non-traditional way of warfare, but we really have no way of responding to. And it could be very quick and very decisive and to solve the problem without having to go to a large-scale nuclear exchange. So I think, you know, we're even closer to that than we are to a nuclear war. And I think it very likely that they would exercise that option before they went before they went nuclear. How tough is it to build an AMP?
Starting point is 01:31:54 Any nuclear weapon that will generate an electromagnetic pulse, but there are also non-nuclear AMP weapons that would be part of this scenario. The US Air Force has one called Champ. It's basically a cruise missile and it carries a non-nuclear EMP weapons that would be part of the scenario. The US Air Force has one called Champ. It's basically a cruise missile and it carries a non-nuclear EMP generator. And it doesn't generate a field as big as a nuclear weapon. I mean, a single nuclear weapon is really all you'd need to take out the whole US electric grid that needed a very high altitude. But with a couple of dozen, maybe 20 of these cruise missiles or drones carrying
Starting point is 01:32:27 non-nuclear electromagnetic pulse generators, they would follow the power lines. And it would take hours instead of a second, but they could achieve the same thing. And black out the power grid. Countries like Iran and even terrorist groups are capable of Harnessing non-nuclear EMP weapons and using them in this way. They have the sophistication to do that So it's not hard at all as a matter of fact If you had the money you can actually buy EMP devices not intended to be used as weapons But they could be could be used as weapon. There's a device called the EMP suitcase that looks just like a suitcase. It's designed to be operated and carried by one man. It puts out a hundred thousand volts, a hundred thousand volts per meter. Over a short distance, a hundred yards. That right there? Yes, that's it. How much does something like that go for?
Starting point is 01:33:18 I think 50,000. Okay. It's not a lot of money. Not for a terrorist group or a nation state, but if you had a terrorist or a criminal or disgruntled individual, got one of those things and he put in the trunk of his car and he drove up to an extra high voltage power substation. I mean, you see these when you drive down the highway all the time. You know, we've arrived at a place technologically where a single individual could topple the pillars, technological pillars of civilization for an entire metropolitan area Like Miami or New York or Boston just by himself just with that and if you had it just with that Yeah, and if you had a team of guys running around the country you could black out the home national electric grid
Starting point is 01:33:57 Just just with these devices. How come it's not happened yet? well It has happened in Chechnya and other players Hasn't happened in this country. I'll give them time. I don't know why it hasn't happened yet. We've been lucky. The great German statesman Otto von Bismarck once said, God looks after fool, drunkards,
Starting point is 01:34:23 little children in the United States of America. Maybe that's why it hasn't happened. But has anyone been caught attempting to do something of this capacity? We haven't caught somebody with the RF briefcase yet, but we have caught, you know, actually I haven't caught the person, but there was a drone in Pennsylvania, somebody flew a drone now, you know, you know, that tried to make a different kind of an attack against the power line. I'm not sure I want to get into all the technical details. There wasn't an incident a few not too long ago that happened in Canada where a disgruntled individual used,
Starting point is 01:35:02 it wasn't a radio frequency weapon, but it was a different technology, even simpler, that enabled him to black out temporarily the hydro-cobec grid in Canada, put millions of people into the dark. You know, they did correct it after a day, but one guy did that. And so there have been attacks on electric grids here in North America. There were attacks in the electric grid in Mexico by the back in 2013. Yeah. The Knights Templars, they're a drug cartel. They used explosives and small arms to attack, to black out the electric
Starting point is 01:35:41 grid in a province of Mexico. They put about a half million people into dark so that they could go into the towns and villages and publicly execute people who were opposed to the drug trade, the village elders and leaders who were opposed to the drug trade. So if Neanderthals, like the night's Templars, have figured out that the electric grid is a keystone, cytol vulnerability, just think what Al-Qaeda or ISIS or North Korea and these much more sophisticated actors could do. We're very lucky. I mean, I was kind of surprised when ISIS was on the ropes that they didn't just pay
Starting point is 01:36:15 the Nights Templars to come across the border. I mean, you know, and say, hey, go to the United States, which you guys did in Mexico. We've been, I think the reason we haven't, it hasn't happened yet is because we've been lucky. These guys are from Michoacán, they're Michoacán and I'm at least go. That was the province that they know a lot of people from Michoacán and I'll ask you, we got to keep an eye on them. Yeah. Good friends, by the way, going back to this, so you know what I would do if I was at
Starting point is 01:36:38 the U.S. government, I would buy that company who sells those suitcases, everybody that buys it, they would be on alert. That's exactly what I would buy that company who sells those suitcases Everybody that buys it they would be on alert. That's exactly what I would do Yeah, there's no way in the world. I'm gonna let that stay Without I'd overpay to find out who the hell is doing this. I'd go into partnership and figure out I have a CIA guy well have working for that company that point out so I don't get sued Okay, but that has legitimate peaceful purposes. They don't intend to be used as a weapon. Oh, I'm not worried about. There's guns that are intended to peaceful purposes.
Starting point is 01:37:10 I know, and the wrong guy's hand. That's the one thing. Exactly. It's potentially a weapon of mass. How do you use that for peaceful purposes? Yeah, and you don't even need a license to buy it, unlike a gun. You need a license to buy a gun,
Starting point is 01:37:22 but you can buy that without a license. How is that used for peaceful purposes, though? Well, you know, if you're designing an airport, for example, okay, and you want to know how far away do I have to put the runway so that the radars don't fry the electronics and airplanes when they're landing? You can use a device like that to simulate the pulse that's coming off the radar, to see how far things have to be spaced, or if you're laying out, if you've got a factory, and it's got a lot of heavy electronic equipment, drill presses, metal bending equipment, stuff that uses a lot of electricity, they
Starting point is 01:37:53 put out powerful electromagnetic transients. And this kind of equipment is spaced too closely together. They can fry each other and commit fatricide, okay? So you need to know how far apart do I how thick does the sheeling have to be, and that's what it's intended to be used for, to help you, you don't wanna have to move the equipment in and learn by experience, how far apart should I have put the drill presses and things like that.
Starting point is 01:38:18 That's what it's intended for. So it does have a legitimate purpose, but perhaps it you know, the, but perhaps it should be licensed, then we should have better control. And yeah, and perhaps no, and just anybody shouldn't be able to purchase. And we're not the only ones. I mean, this is a US company. There's a German company that sells, sells they saying, I'm sure terrorists already have them. And terrorists have used them. And Chetzniy, you them why hasn't it happened here?
Starting point is 01:38:45 The Chechen terrorists figured out how to use them against the Russians and in Chechnya, they used to kill the electronics so they could go in and kill everybody in a military base. Let me ask you a question earlier, you were talking about nuclear shelters. So I pulled up a couple numbers here. Israel has nuclear shelters.
Starting point is 01:39:02 I think Sweden has like 63,000 or something nuclear shelters. A lot of different countries have nuclear shelters. So if we, whether that is something we have or not, it's definitely not talked about openly amongst people. Do we have nuclear shelters in cities and communities where if something were to happen, here's what we have? Feebo would probably say we do, okay? communities where if something were to happen, here's what we have? FEMA would probably say we do, okay, but there's an enormous difference between what we've,
Starting point is 01:39:34 what FEMA did, you know, back when we had a significant civil defense program, you've probably seen those civil defense signs, you know, the radioactive symbol. sometimes you'll be in the basement of a library or something like that that's what our shelter is you know uh... those are the kinds of shelters they've got in russia okay these are uh... you know these are not serious shelters that are designed to to to survive uh... you know a nuclear war.
Starting point is 01:40:05 They will provide you, it's better than nothing. I mean, it's better to be in the shelter of a library, okay, if a nuclear blast happens, or if there's radioactive fallout coming down so you don't get directly exposed to it. But we don't have anything like what the Russians have got, in the intelligence community, they're called deep underground shelters or dogs.
Starting point is 01:40:27 All right. I'm talking about, you know, some of the more famous ones are check off and Shoropovah because Vinsky Mountain, Yamantown Mountain. These are shelters that are hundreds of meters deep and solid granite. They're in purveys to nuclear attack. Is that a form of a shelter right there? Is that a nuclear shelter? Well, that's a, I think that's a missile silo.
Starting point is 01:40:50 Do you know what these shelters look like? Like, does this look, this is a Moscow nuclear shelter right here? Is this kind of what it looks like? It's hard for me to see you over there. I don't have my, I just be curious. I be curious to know what these nuclear shelters look like. Yeah, that's the one I was looking at right there. I don't have my a just be curious. I'd be curious you know what these nuclear shelters look like. That's the one I was looking out right there. I think that's a Russia ready for
Starting point is 01:41:10 Doomsday. It's deeply buried. That's a I think that's a missile silo. I mean that looks like the head works for a missile silo but that could be that could be the head works to one of their one of their shelters but that that looks like the a missile silo to me. So FEMA would say we have nuclear shelters? They probably would because they're optimists and they always put the best possible spin on thing, but we don't. Even for our political military leadership, the most famous shelter in the Americas, Cheyenne Mountain,
Starting point is 01:41:46 Nored, the Nored Alternate Headquarters, okay. This was built in the, designed in the 40, late 40s and early 50s, and it was designed to survive an atomic attack. Where's that? It's in Cheyenne Mountain. Is that Wyoming? Yeah. Near Peterson Air Force Base.
Starting point is 01:42:05 No, the state as well as I do. I think it's in Colorado. But I'm not solely sure that it's in the state, but it's very close to Peterson Air Force Base, which is NORAD headquarters and Space Command headquarters. And Cheyenne Mountain is located near there. It used to be, it's now the alternate headquarters. And yeah, and it's inside of a mountain and the buildings are on springs to survive a shock wave. And that's the best hardest facility we have.
Starting point is 01:42:35 That facility will not survive an attack from a hydrogen bomb. It'll survive an atomic bomb, but it's not hard enough for an atomic bomb, a hydrogen bomb. Their shelters will survive attacks probably even by our most powerful weapon, which is the WASD-83. Some of these shelters are, we call them shelters, but Yamantown Mountain, for example, and we still don't know the purpose. Maybe it's for these oligarchs who are fleeing to the Ural Mountains. But the Yamaha Mountain Facility is like an underground city that can survive a nuclear attack.
Starting point is 01:43:11 Is this a nuclear shelter? This is an article Guardian did saying how the USS prepared for nuclear armageddon in this picture. Their time out this was something they started working on since the Truman days. I don't know that looks like uh... i know that some millionaires have purchased old atlas siloes and uh... that looks like one of those uh... you know uh... you know what and this atlas was hard to survive an attack and uh... but
Starting point is 01:43:41 uh... yet that probably is a uh... Somebody's personal fallout shelter from a converted Atlas side. How do we play defense against this? Like, say the millionaires or whoever, but okay, so nuclear war happens. I mean, these shelters are not gonna fit 330 million people. So it's not like these shelters,
Starting point is 01:44:00 how are you gonna manage shelters of something where to happen? And even an individual family, okay, with food shortages or any of that stuff. You know, you got people that own a lot of weapons themselves, a lot of ammo, a lot of guns, just in case something were to happen. How does the average family,
Starting point is 01:44:16 as well as the US government, proactively play defense in case something were to happen? Okay. Ah, Let me, one of the things we should have done was listen to Ronald Reagan and deployed the Strategic Defense Initiative, which was, you know, and that's one of the things we still could do as as a government uh... you know the strategic defense initiative was designed to render nuclear missiles obsolete by a step deploying high-tech space-based defenses that could shoot them down before they could
Starting point is 01:44:55 reach us you know the best solution uh... the the best defense against the nuclear war is to not get hit in the first place by shooting down the missiles before they reach our territory. And that's what Reagan had planned to do. And you know, history goes through cycles where technology will sometimes favor the defense. And those tend to be more stable, safer times.
Starting point is 01:45:19 Because if you're the defender, you have to worry less about getting attacked because the technology favors a defensive posture. Other times in hip military history, the technology favors the aggressor. It offends favors offensive operations. That was like World War II, you know, when the introduction of tanks and combination with air power and mobile infantry gave the advantage to aggressors and to people who conducted offensive operations.
Starting point is 01:45:50 And those are more dangerous, less stable times, because he who strikes first tends to win. We are living in the most dangerous and least stable times, because the invention of nuclear weapons made it with missile technology enables you to destroy another country's retaliatory capabilities in 30 minutes or less. And now, and it's getting worse and worse, the technologies are getting better and better at being able to destroy retaliatory capabilities. With cyber attack, with EMP attack, you can do it at the speed of light. And so the truism that he who strikes first wins is becoming more and more true.
Starting point is 01:46:32 To the point that the temptation to do nuclear pearl harbor on us may become irresistible. And we do not do nuclear pearl harbors. Our nuclear strategy is not based on striking first. It's based on striking second and deterrence, and that puts us in an increasingly vulnerable and dangerous position. But we could reverse this potentially. And that was the vision that Reagan had. Wasn't just his idea that there was a brilliant scientist Robert Jostro who wrote a book called How to Make Nuclear Weapons obsolete. and it was the inspiration for this to
Starting point is 01:47:06 deploy space-based missile shield that would be able to intercept these missiles. Edward Teller, the great, the guy who invented the hydrogen bomb, was all for this. He was working on, there were a number of technologies that were very promising that SDI had, and we should bring back the Strategic Defense Initiative. One of these technologies was called brilliant pebbles, and it was ready to be deployed by under the Clinton administration. But the Clinton administration, for ideological reasons, believed in mutual shared destruction, thought the ABM treaty was the cornerstone of strategic stability, and the left has always hated ballistic missile defense.
Starting point is 01:47:45 It's funny, you know, they hate nuclear weapons, but they hate ballistic missile defense too. And so they're against both us having nuclear weapons or us having ballistic missile. Do they publicly hate it, but privately love it? Or is it just they hated period? They hate it period for ideological reasons, especially if it's in the possession
Starting point is 01:48:04 of the United States States they hate it. They don't seem to have V that much bothered by Russian or Chinese nuclear weapons or their defenses. They don't complain about that, but whenever we try to improve our nuclear weapons or improve our defenses, the left screams bloody murder over it. And it's happening at the Biden administration now. I mean, I just explained how some of our most important nuclear systems have been canceled by President Biden, you know, that we really need.
Starting point is 01:48:29 Even though we're under this great threat from Russia, what a time to be canceling our nuclear strength. But we could deploy brilliant pebbles probably in five years for 20 billion, and it would completely change. It has the potential of completely reversing this situation so that we would then have the advantage as the defender. The best scenario would be to start a defensive strategic arms race with our adversaries. Because I wouldn't care if they were deploying brilliant pebbles and strategic defense initiatives
Starting point is 01:49:04 of their own, because if you're in a defensive arms race, that makes the situation more and more stable. And both all sides start to feel more and more secure because they're better and better defended against a first strike. So there is a technological way out, and that's one way out. But if I could speak to a larger issue, you know, because I, you know, I don't want to come across here as if technology is the only card we have to play. We have a bigger, potentially a more important card to play, you know, as a way we should be thinking about waging the new Cold War is the way we won the old Cold War. We have for all their military power and nuclear power and specialized weapons like EMP and
Starting point is 01:49:55 all the rest, we have an enormous advantage. I hope we can hold onto it in the free world. And that is, you know, I believe our systems, that believe in have a truer understanding of human nature and of how to organize the good society, our belief in freedom is one of, is a great advantage that we have over them. Our systems are the vision, and unfortunately we're moving away from that. So, maintaining free elections in this country, discourse, rationalism, being the way we
Starting point is 01:50:38 were, for example, under the Reagan administration, right? You know, when you could have conversations and and and rationally solve problems, we need to get back to being that way. The further away we move toward authoritarian type type, we become as vulnerable as they are to this. And this gives us staying power. The fact that our understanding that our society is truer to human nature, is gives us greater stain power. So our objective should be to split the Russian Chinese alliance in the new Cold War, to try to contain China, to avoid getting in a nuclear, any kind of a war,
Starting point is 01:51:19 to get it, avoid any kind of a major war with these powers as long as we can to avoid that because that's a game that they are more likely to win than we are. They're better prepared for it. That's what their whole societies are geared toward. They exist for warfare. The Soviet Union was the most formidable military tyranny that ever existed in history, okay? But it was based on lies and these other systems are based on lies.
Starting point is 01:51:53 They're based on a fundamental misunderstanding of human nature of what makes the good society. And these internal contradictions, if you can avoid fighting them long enough, they will destroy themselves and self-destruct If you can avoid fighting them long enough, they will destroy themselves and self-destruct. If you can just avoid getting in a conflict with them long enough and contain them for long enough. That was the strategy that worked in the Cold War. It was based on an article called the ex article that was written anonymously by a guy who we later was discovered to be George Kennan, a State Department, brilliant man, who said this is how we need to deal with the Soviet Union and the long run. You know, they will fall over their own internal contradictions.
Starting point is 01:52:33 They are so paranoid. They're gonna spend themselves to death with their defense budgets. So just try to keep the peace and and contain these guys long enough and they'll the self-destruct and will win. And that's how we won the Cold War. And without it becoming a world war, which is a miracle in history because normally when you have superpowers confronting each other, you know, whether it's the Persian Empire and Alexander's Macedonia or the Carthaginians and the Romans, you know, these things usually end badly.
Starting point is 01:53:06 They usually end with a huge, a world war in effect to resolve the dispute. But here's what I'd like to do. Here's what I'd like to do. I think I can listen to you for four hours and I'm getting smarter. And I think people feel the same way as well. And I don't think two hours was enough.
Starting point is 01:53:25 And folks, if you feel, I'm looking at the commentary, if you feel the same way as I feel, give it a thumbs up, subscribe. And order his book, we're gonna put the link below to his latest book, Black Out Warfare, attacking the US electric power grid, a revolution in military affairs. Tidal, let's put that in the comments section
Starting point is 01:53:44 in the chat box. Would you be open to a round two? I don't think this was a long, I think we need to do a round two if you're okay with that. I would love to do another one because some of the stuff you're going into, I think you know how I almost processed the information you're sharing?
Starting point is 01:54:02 We've a lot of different types of guests. You know, billion guests, you know, billionaires, mobsters, CIA, FBI, military, athletes, comedians, UFC fighters, you name them, we've had a lot of different types of guests that we've had, that we've interviewed. And some of the information is kind of like, oh, it's very motivational, oh, that's very entertaining, I was insightful, oh, I never knew that's kind of how that's kind of cool, and I was great. I have to feel motivated, I never knew that's kind of how that's kind of cool. And I was great. I have to motivate, I feel like I can go out
Starting point is 01:54:27 in my dreams, become a reality. But I think this is very, very super necessary information for every parent, every citizen, every person that has big plans in their lives with their wives, with their kids, with their husbands, with their families. I think they need to be educated on the information you're sharing,
Starting point is 01:54:46 and you're bringing it from an angle of extreme reason and rational, and an element of being suspicious and paranoid, which I think it's very healthy. So if you're open to it, I'd love to do around two with you, and I'm not talking a long time from now. I'd like to do around two with you sooner rather than later if you're okay with that.
Starting point is 01:55:04 Oh, certainly. I'm, you know, a place that you're willing to put up with me. I can live up to you for hours, but I'm not kidding with you. Sure, I'd be glad to come back. I think this is really important. And I thank you for the opportunity to share my point of view, which is a distinct minority at this time. I mean, almost all the voices on both sides of the political aisle are calling for let's get more deeply involved in that war with Ukraine. Let's focus on defeating
Starting point is 01:55:33 Russia and Ukraine. And I think that that is a self-destructive strategy and people have lost sight of the big picture in terms of how we should be protecting America's national interests at this crucial hour. Well, we're going to follow up with you for the next one. Dr. Peter Pry, folks, if you just got in, go to the beginning, watch the whole thing, and stay tuned based on the reaction I'm getting from you guys. Expect us to do part two. You're very soon.
Starting point is 01:55:59 Share this with your loved ones, family, friends. I think everybody needs to hear this perspective that we're not getting from mainstream media. I think we're back at it again Thursday. Do we have podcasts Thursday? I'm not telling you. I'm not saying. Oh, Thursday is a big round table libertarian debate with Spike Cohen, with Dave Smith,
Starting point is 01:56:16 which him and Joe Georgians and had an issue. She didn't have good words to say about her. Jessica Vaughn and we're having Larry Sharp who's running for the libertarian governor in New Yorkork i can't wait to talk to you to these guys the last one wasn't to to pretty was tough this next one here that they're coming to prove me wrong that that's the right thing so we'll see you as on Thursday yes
Starting point is 01:56:36 will see us on Thursday take care bye bye bye bye you

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