Shaun Newman Podcast - #778 - Derek Gilbert
Episode Date: January 14, 2025Derek Gilbert is an American author, host, and speaker, notably for his contributions to Christian media and his exploration of alternative history. He started his first podcast in 2005 and spent 25 y...ears in broadcasting before this, working at radio stations in cities including Philadelphia, Saint Louis, and Chicago. Cornerstone Forum ‘25 https://www.showpass.com/cornerstone25/ Contribute to the new SNP Studio E-transfer here: shaunnewmanpodcast@gmail.com Get your voice heard: Text Shaun 587-217-8500 Substack:https://open.substack.com/pub/shaunnewmanpodcast Silver Gold Bull Links: Website: https://silvergoldbull.ca/ Email: SNP@silvergoldbull.com Text Grahame: (587) 441-9100
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All right.
Let's get on the tale of the tape.
He's an American author and podcast host.
who started back in 2005.
I'm talking about Derek Gilbert.
So buckle up, here we go.
Welcome to the Sean Newman podcast today.
I'm joined by Derek Gilbert.
Sir, thanks for hopping back on.
I appreciate it.
Always enjoy talking with you, Sean.
Well, the first time, the only time you've been on this side, was episode 701.
So if people are scrambling and going, who is this guy?
And you want to go back and listen to your early podcasting story, circa 2005,
and figuring out the ins and outs of how that worked.
Go back to episode 701 before you proceed any further.
If you want to sit and have a chat with me and Derek about 2025,
and who knows where we go, then carry on, folks.
But appreciate you giving me some time and hopping back on.
I, you know, the thing that jumped out to me when you talk about it's 20 years this year of podcasting, correct?
Yeah.
Like, okay, that's like, think about that, folks.
That's a lot of years.
And I mean that with the utmost respect.
It's just most people don't stick around any field for that long, you know, like they
bounce from here to there.
And I go 20 years of podcasting talking about things, staring at problems, talking about them,
seeing the trends and everything.
Like, I bet you Derek has some interesting insights or at least perspective on the year to come
and where we've come from.
So I was just like, let's just start 2025.
In the early days of it, you got Trump getting inaugurated.
inaugurated here on January 20th.
Sitting where I sit in Canada,
you know, we got a, we got a prime minister
who intends to resign,
but it's set in motion, you know,
an election coming sooner than later.
What do you see
in 2025?
There are a lot of things moving pieces.
It looks to us, and I say
us, because Sharon is the smarter half
of the
next time, Sharon, you're coming on, yes.
Yeah, she just goes to bed really early
is the only problem.
So, which means, by the way, if you see our dogs run in and out of the room, it's because they're basically fending for themselves during the time that we're talking here this afternoon.
So we may get some dog wrestling in the background.
We've been looking at things since March of 2025.
I mean, we were early enough in the game that that was back when Apple was still begging people.
Hey, submit your podcast so we can put some things in our iTunes store.
And this was back when they called it the podcast because the iPod was still a thing.
So we've been doing this a while, but we're news junkies.
And so this is something that comes kind of naturally to do it.
We'd be doing this anyway, even if we were just sharing our opinions with, you know,
megaphones from our back deck.
But when we're looking at 2025, we see a lot of things that are coalescing.
And Sharon said back in 2020 during the presidential campaign here in the states that
she felt Joe Biden was perhaps being put into office.
I'll just leave it at that to get the United States embroiled in World War III
and then hand that off to somebody else who then have to clean up that mess.
Given that he just today, as we're recording this, shoveled another half billion dollars
of military aid to Ukraine out the door on his way out of.
of the White House. I'm thinking that she may have been right about this for the last four years,
that Joe Biden's term was intended to get the United States embroiled in some things
that will be very difficult to extricate from. War is a racket. The famed Marine Corps General
Smedley Butler wrote that back 100 years ago after having led Marines into action in, and I'm not
sure where it was in the Caribbean, but he come to realize that he was working on behalf or
fighting on behalf of oligarchs rather than the American people. That's what's going on
in Ukraine. We are involved in that proxy war between NATO and Russia in all but name. And the
Russians have said so. We have given Ukraine permission to use our long-range attack-em's missiles,
just as the Brits have done with their storm shadow missiles. The French have done it with their
long-range missiles to launch deep into Russia and Russia said look if you do this you are an active
participant in this war where does this lead thankfully Russia has not chosen to launch
presumably the hypersonic missiles that they demonstrated at that one strike in western
Ukraine on Western capitals like Berlin Paris or London and maybe there's some
back channel communication taking place between Trump and
to say just hold on a few more weeks i i hope cooler heads prevail because i don't see anyone
really coming out of this ahead other than those who are selling the weapons to the militaries
that are being flung back and forth so will 2025 be the end of the war between ukraine and
russia i i certainly hope so for the if for the people of ukraine if for nothing else i mean
biden and his handlers have been trying to get the ukrainians to lower the conscription age
from 25 to 18.
I mean, in Ukraine, you can only be conscripted into the army if you're 25 or older.
It's because they want to have enough young men to create new Ukrainians.
You know, you can't make new Ukrainians if you're sending all your young men off to war.
So they've resisted this call to this point.
But I think this is just really chilling when you think about it.
It appears as though the Western world, led by the United States, is willing to fight Russia
to the last Ukrainian.
We're willing to keep this, this belligerent attitude towards Russia as long as the Ukrainians
are willing to put up with it.
And I hope that in 2025, that comes to an end.
But while this is going on there, you've got the Middle East, which is still unsettled,
to say the least.
The fall of Bashar al-Assad in December was kind of unexpected, but I think it wasn't really
for the intelligence communities, the intelligence professionals
who have been watching things closely there.
The so-called land bridge between Iran and Lebanon,
the Shia crescent that Russia had been cultivating
for a long, long time, decades,
to connect Iran through Iraq and Syria
to the majority Shia population of Lebanon
was very nearly complete,
despite the fact that there are still American boots on the ground
in Iraq and in Syria.
The Iranians were transporting weapons on a regular basis through Syria and into Lebanon.
The Israelis were trying to stop that by hitting some of the border crossings,
but suddenly in December, this Sunni rebel group swept down from the northwestern province of Idlib and took Damascus.
So now you've got Syria chopped up into four major zones.
You've got the small al-Ollawite enclave along the Mediterranean.
The Alawites are an offshoot of Shia Islam.
Syria is majority Sunni, but it's been ruled by Assad, who was an al-Alawite, the Assad family for decades.
So the Sunnis now control the center of the country, including Damascus, the capital.
You've got the Kurds who are Sunni Muslims, but they are ethnically distinct from Arabs and Turks and Persians, and none of them like each other, which is a whole other dynamic.
And then in the South, you've got the Druze.
And the Druze are another offshoot of Shia Islam,
although they don't identify as Muslim.
They've got a very secretive religion.
They venerate Moses' father-in-law, Jethro, as a prophet.
But they've been loyal citizens of whatever country they happen to be a part of.
Well, the Druze are split between Syria, Israel, and Lebanon,
and the Druze have made it clear that they would just as soon be assimilated
into an expanded Israeli state.
six Druze villages along the border with the Golan Heights.
They've asked to be annexed by Israel.
And then in Sueda province, which is the very southernmost part of Syria,
the Druze there have asked the Israelis to extend their borders and assimilate them.
Well, okay, except that they'd have to also then get through a big Sunni enclave in the southern part of Syria.
So that is an issue that's got to be resolved.
It's just the Drews don't want to live.
under Sharia law.
And even though the Sunni rebels who've taken over Damascus
are now wearing business suits instead of fatigues,
they're still wanting to oppose Sharia
on anyone who's not a Sunni Muslim.
Then the eastern part of the country,
controlled by the Kurds, everything east of the Euphrates
is basically Kurdish.
So how is this going to affect things?
Well, when you go back to 2011, and again,
this is where our long stretch of podcasting is handy.
I remember when the Sunni civil,
or when this Syrian civil war broke out in 2011,
it was for control.
That's the puppy, Glory, she's challenging the older one, Grace.
When,
if you go back to 701, folks, the same thing happened.
Yeah, yeah, it's, uh, hi, glory.
Yeah, hi Grace.
Okay, down.
Thank you.
We referred to Syria back then,
and there were others who did as well as Pipelinistan,
because this appears to be flaring up again.
Now that the Sunnis are in control of the central part of the country,
and the government of Qatar has said,
well, we'll kick in some cash to help increase the salaries
of the civil workers and the government employees in Syria
trying to buy some favor there.
Why would they do that?
Because there's a lot of natural gas on both sides of the Persian Gulf.
On the west side, you've got Qatar and Saudi Arabia,
and they would like to ship this natural gas via pipelines to Europe by way of Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and Syria, and then through Turkey.
Also Sunni Muslim.
And then on to Europe.
The east side of the Persian Gulf is Iran.
Iran would like to send its natural gas to Europe by way of Iraq, which is majority Shia like Iran, through Syria, and then via tanker from Syria directly to Europe, cutting Turkey out of the equate.
and of course cutting cutter and Saudi Arabia out of it.
So this is what's been going on since 2011.
The fight, the civil war there, is for control of Syria,
which is the key component in these two competing pipeline plans.
So, you know, just as the war in Iraq going back to, you know, the first Gulf War,
it's all about the oil.
Well, in this case, it's all about the gas.
And some oil because the main Syrian oil fields
are in the eastern part of the country under the control of the Kurds.
under the control of the Kurds.
While this is going on, United States military
this past week, even though the Pentagon denies it,
has just started building a new military base
near the city of Kobani, which is a Kurdish city
right on the border between Syria and Turkey.
Now the Turks, they don't like the Kurds at all.
And Turkey's president Erdogan has said
that he doesn't want a future Syria
to have any Kurds in it at all.
Again, remember, everything in Syria, east of the Euphrates, is under control of Kurdish-backed groups.
There are a lot of Kurds in northern Iraq.
Southeastern Turkey is mainly Kurdish.
A lot of Kurds in northwestern Iran, too.
When the Brits and the French divided up Mesopotamia after World War I, they left the 20 million Kurds out of the equation.
They were the largest ethnic group on Earth, and they are still to this day.
The largest ethnic group on Earth without its own country.
the Kurds split between four nations and none of those four nations particularly like the Kurds
why is that uh i just think the westerners the brits and the French were like you know okay let's
draw lines on a map where are the oil fields because even going back to 1917 that was beginning
to become a calculation so when you're looking at how things play out in the middle
the largest ethnic group on the planet.
Hasn't nobody been able to unite the Kurds and be like, we want our own?
Well, yeah, you've got the PKK, the Kurdistan Workers Party in Turkey,
which has been designated a terrorist organization by the United States Department of State.
So the U.S. government and the Turkish government considers those Kurds terrorists.
but when you cross the border into Syria, the YPG, they're fine.
They're our allies.
They fight alongside the U.S. soldiers that are on the ground in Syria.
There's something magical about that border between Syria and Turkey that cleanses the YPG
of all the sins that have been ascribed to the PKK.
I'm not an expert on Kurdish relations, and there are political factions within the
Kurds just as there are within every organization.
What's their history, Derek?
Do you know where they stem from, if you would?
Like, where do the Kurds come from?
Like, what's their ancestry?
Well, there are those who believe, because they seem to originate in northwestern Iran,
and that seems to be the region that was dominated in, say, in the days of Nebuchadnezzar,
the Medes.
So when you talk about the Medo-Persian Empire, which was created by Cyrus the Great,
in the 6th century BC, when Cyrus, because up to that point, the Meads had dominated the Persians,
when Cyrus came to power as the king of the Persians, I'm not going to pronounce it right,
the Ackmianid Empire, he's the one who founded the Ackmianid dynasty.
He overthrew the Meads as their overlords and then inherited all of the territory that they
controlled, which at that point was everything from northwestern Iran to,
northern Iraq over into what is most of now Turkey today.
That was all part of the Median empire.
I think there are those who believe that the Kurds are descended from the Medes.
It just seems, I don't know, doesn't it seem strange that the largest ethnic group on the planet is all.
Came out of, came out of world.
And I like to, and I like to think, oh, it has to do only with oil fields.
But I'm like, that's making it almost too simple.
And at times, simple explanations like are the answer.
But when it comes to the Brits and the Americans and on and on and on,
there's lots of times and they don't want certain things to be ever put back together.
And you think if they're the largest, like if they're the largest ethnic group without a country,
it just seems odd.
That seems like something to stare at and go, why is that?
Yeah.
And that's a really good question.
Because right now, today it's estimated that there are between 30 and 45 million Kurds.
again divided between Turkey, Syria, Iraq, and Iran,
and they just kind of straddle those borders there.
And why they don't have their own country?
I don't know.
I mean, it could go back 100 years to maybe not having a seat at the table
when things were being negotiated after World War I.
It was possible the Kurds didn't want to collaborate with the Brits
and trying to overthrow the Ottoman Empire during World War I.
The Arabs were...
I mean, the whole point of the movie, Lawrence of Arabia,
was that the Brits managed to talk the Arabs
into going to war against the Turks
to basically attack the southern flank
of the Axis powers in World War I,
because the Ottomans were allied with Austria, Hungary,
and Germany in World War I.
So that created problems, diverted resources
that the Ottomans could have been using
to help the Germans and the Austrians
fight against the Italians and the French
and the Brits and eventually the Americans.
The Kurds, I don't know.
I haven't done enough study as to what happened 100 years ago,
but when those lines got drawn on the map,
the Kurds were just left out.
And those lines are really arbitrary anyway,
because the Arabs are just as tribal as the ancient Israelites were.
And there are factions within the Arabs between various tribes,
not to mention religions.
You've got some of their Shia, the majority are Sunni,
but then various tribes don't like each other.
and the idea going back to George W. Bush, who said, who promised, he ran on a promise of not
nation building. And then, of course, he broke that promise as soon as, you know, like the day after
9-11. And we went into Afghanistan and went into Iraq in 2003. And we've been there ever since,
trying to build a nation. The idea that we could ever oppose a Western style representative
republic or democracy on a tribal people like the Arabs,
was just foolish.
And either the people who made those decisions
were just ignorant of Middle Eastern history and culture,
or they just knew going in, it wasn't gonna work,
but didn't care because they were doing this
for control of the oil resources.
When you look at Donald Trump, what do you see?
I'm curious, you know, he's been obviously president
from 2016, 2020, and then as you've alluded to,
maybe some tomfoolery happens in 2020 and you get Biden but now you now you got
Donald Trump elected to be inaugurated on January 20th where do you sit on
Donald Trump you know and and and in the last little bit talking about taking
over Canada talking about taking over Greenland has a sun fly to Greenland like what
is going on going to Gulf Mexico going to be Gulf of America you know and
and on and on Trump, you know, in comes the years of Donald Trump.
A friend of ours in 2016 said the day after the election, well, we don't know if Trump's
going to be a good president, but at least it'll be hilarious.
And I think that holds true again in 2024, 2025.
I think as a businessman, he says things that throw people off balance as a negotiating tactic.
Because if you got him on the back foot, when you sit down and
negotiate you've already you've all you've almost already won whatever you're trying to negotiate I don't
honestly think Trump wants Canada as the 51st American state now I think if we could take Alberta and the
oil resources there we'd be happy to do it but we'd like to trade you California Oregon and
Washington in exchange I say that as a conservative from the Midwest I there are a lot of good people
out on the West Coast that we know so I'm just joking but I think Trump is likewise
joking. We're going to impose a 25% tariff on Canada. Okay. I don't think he's really going to do it,
but I think it puts Canadian politicians on, you know, like, whoa, because there's a lot of
stuff that we import from Canada, energy products, steel. I know there's some steel and steel pipe
that we bring in from Canada. And I'm sure those industries would like to not have to pay that
25% tariff. I don't think it'll come to that, but I think that's an opening salvo in what will
become a negotiation over whatever Trump wants to get out of Canada. Likewise, with Mexico,
I think he's just trying to put the Mexican government on a back foot and try to get better
cooperation with the government of Mexico over stemming the flood of migrants. By some accounts,
we've seen as many as 11 million undocumented migrants cross our border since Joe Biden took office.
And many of these people are not from Central or South America.
They're from Africa.
They're from the Middle East.
They're from China.
And that by any stretch, any description, is an invasion.
So if he's going to get cooperation from Mexico, he comes in talking tough and then backs up.
Now, when it comes to Greenland, we've got to.
had a very important military base there. Denmark has allowed Greenland to essentially self-govern
I think 50,000 people on Greenland, but Greenland's got a lot of oil and by some accounts there
are a lot of rare earth metals. In fact, the second largest deposits of rare earth metals,
which are key to running all of these electronics that we use to communicate like the way
we are right now to those controlled by China between China proper and Chinese mines in in Africa.
So yeah, if the United States could cut a favorable deal at the very least with the government
of Denmark for access to those, not to mention the fact we've got a very important air base there
in Greenland and also radar installations for early warnings about missiles coming over the North Pole.
Again, I think Trump is saying things that are outweigh,
just to throw people off their game and then he's going to negotiate for the best possible deal.
Will he succeed as president? I don't know. I think one of the things that caught him by surprise was the depth of the deep state when he had his first time.
But he's had four years now to think about what happened and what he might do differently this time around and also to vet potential allies and members of his
his cabinet and his staff this time around.
I read a book over the summer,
which was really eye-opening.
It's called The Secret War Against the Jews.
It's eye-opening for a couple of reasons.
One is because you realize when you read that book
and the authors, one was a former prosecutor
for the Department of Justice here in the United States
who was tasked with tracking down Nazis
who'd escape justice at Nuremberg,
who had found refuge here in the United States.
Another was an investigative journalist from Australia,
and they spent several years digging through files
at the Department of Justice,
but also talking to retired members
of various intelligence agencies in the US, the UK,
France, Germany, and Israel,
and found that, contrary to what many people believe
that the Israeli lobby really controls
the United States government,
It's the other way around.
The government of Israel is really beholden and has to walk very carefully because its survival
depends on maintaining a good relationship with the United States of America.
And this really does come down to oil.
Going back to 1930 when they began to find oil in Bahrain and then Kuwait and then Saudi Arabia,
suddenly there was a lot of money to be made making deals with the Arabs.
The Israelis, no oil.
So who cares about the Zionists?
Who cares about the Jews?
But the other very interesting detail, the takeaway from that book is how little control
presidents of the United States have over the governments that they lead?
Because you find out when you're reading that book that,
Presidents like Roosevelt and Truman, who were positively, were favorably disposed to the aspirations of the Zionists, were being circumvented.
They were being undercut by members of their intelligence agencies who were working on behalf of Standard Oil of New Jersey and Texaco and Exxon and Mobile.
because there was in fact to the point that standard of New Jersey
actually blackmail the United States government during World War II
you're investigating us for selling oil to Germany through Spain
if you continue this line of investigation might interrupt the flow of oil from
Arabia to the United States this was during the middle of World War II so Roosevelt
headed back down Jimmy Carter who just passed he was just laid to rest today as
we're recording this here, the 38th President of the United States, his legacy is basically
brokering a peace between Anwar Sadat of Egypt and Manachem Begin of Israel. But Carter was rather naive,
and his intelligence agencies basically didn't tell him what they didn't want him to know.
So the question is then, does Trump have a better handle on what his intelligence agencies
are doing? Chuck Schumer warned about this back four years ago. Trump made some comment and
Schumer said, irritating the intelligence agencies is a bad idea because they've got, how do you put it?
He messed up the metaphor, but he said seven ways to Sunday they can blank you over. And I think
that's absolutely true. I think there are factions within any government that are operating.
and doing things that the head of state doesn't necessarily know about.
So will Trump be a successful president in his second term?
I don't know because I don't know how deep the deep state goes.
I'm not an expert on what happens behind the scenes with the intelligence communities
or what levers of power they can bring to bear against Trump if he tries to do something that
they don't want.
You said something there that caught my ear.
And you said that it's not Israel that controls.
the United States. It's the United States that controls Israel. One of the big things going around
right now is that Israel, well, basically controls the United States. Yep. That it is that dual citizens
that government officials have, forgive me if I'm getting this wrong in any shape or form, Derek,
but like A PAC members that are basically assigned to them and that, you know, Israel's the one pulling the strings.
What do you when you but you just said the complete opposite of that.
Yeah.
So expand on that thought for me.
Again, it comes down to the oil.
Who's got the money?
Who can make money in the Middle East and what do they do to make that money?
Israel's got a tech sector that is very robust.
And I think that Saudi Arabia's crown prince, Muhammad bin Salman,
see some benefit to working with Israel.
Israel because Israel and Iran are certainly enemies and the Sunnis and the Shias hate each other
even more than they hate Jews, Hindus, and Christians.
So for MBS, Israel is the enemy of my enemy, who that therefore makes my friend.
But when it comes right down to the coin of the realm, as much as the environmentalists would
like to change it, the fact remains that oil is still the coin of the realm.
And the Arabs have the oil, Qatar, UAE, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia,
and the Jews do not.
So that is just a simple fact.
And I think that the spinning of the relationship
between APAC and the United States government
to portray the United States government
as beholden to the Jews.
is just a fundamental misreading of the true situation on the ground in Israel.
The Israelis understand that without the United States, they would be dead.
And so the United States is a lot more clout with Israel than the other way around.
That's, that's, I find that, well, I mean, just once again, your perspective, I find that interesting,
because the going, and once again, I go, is it the going trend, or is it just what is being
fed on Twitter and I you know once again I'm a but the thing I'm picking up and seeing is the idea
that Israel is the the I don't know the controlling force of the world power and that Mossad has
been a part of a lot of different things from possibly Epstein Island to I mean I don't know how far
you want to go back but definitely had their their intelligence agency involved in a lot and that
you know, they've compromised a lot of American politicians.
I guess that's the way my brain perceives what's being put out there.
And that's not necessarily wrong.
One of the things that you come away from the secret war against the Jews,
and the authors John Loftus and Mark Arons,
who've done some just fabulous research in that book,
published in 1994.
It was actually a New York Times bestseller back then,
but it's kind of dropped off the radar because it presents
a contrary narrative to what what most people want to believe.
Yeah, David Ben-Gurion back in 1947, when the United Nations was getting ready to vote
for to approve something that had been promised to the Zionists for 30 years since 1917
with the Balfour Declaration.
But that was also encoded into the League of Nations Charter in 1920.
So, I mean, people will point to the Balfour Declaration.
and say, well, because this was given to Lord Rothschild in England, because he was a leader of the Jewish community there.
Therefore, the Rothschild and the Rothschild banking were the ones who put this all together.
No, really, when you look at the fortunes of the Rothschild banking, they're still rich, there's no question there.
But they're not even, they're small potatoes when it comes to the international bankers.
and they did not do well between world war one and world war two because uh again the the money to be
made was was by cutting deals with the arabs so ben-gurion essentially had to use information
collected from jewish intelligence officers working for uh uk intelligence for american intelligence
even german intelligence and go to um uh go to Stalin and say look we know who your agents are in
this new CIA that the United States has,
we'll keep quiet about it if you will get the Soviet block
to vote in favor, in favor of creating
an independent Jewish state in Palestine.
And so Stalin bit his lip because he hated the Jews.
And he did.
And then they had to go to Nelson Rockefeller,
who was later the governor of New York State
and the vice president of the United States.
Say, Mr. Rockefeller, we know you were doing business
with Hitler's Germany during World War
two and we'll keep quiet about it if you will get all your business contacts in central and south
america and remember that's where a lot of the uh uh germans who escaped during the rat lines wound up
in argentina and brazil uh if you'll get them to change their votes in the u.n we'll keep quiet
about what you did during world war two and again Nelson rockefeller wound up a heartbeat away from
becoming president of the united states and so he did david ben gurion had to blanche and
blackmail the U.S., or at least elements within it, and the Soviet Union to create the Jewish state in 1947 by a UN vote.
But again, remember that world consensus after World War I was that that should happen.
It's just that the U.K. and the United States started backing away from those promises in the 30s after oil was discovered under the sands of Arabia.
Yeah.
That's interesting to me.
I don't know what I think of world consensus anymore.
To be honest, I'm like, world consensus.
I'm like, what is that?
What does that even mean anymore?
Yeah.
You know, like world consensus.
You think of the world consensus from a few years ago, and I would disagree vehemently with
it.
And yet that was world consensus.
And if you were to write the history books here in 20 years or 50 years or 100
years to say the world consensus was 19 or sorry 19 2020 was just a horrific year it's just a
horrific year the world had never seen it before I can just see how they're going to write it
and I could I could vomit on those pages I I just disagree vehemently with it that the point
the point though is that contrary to popular opinion that the Zionists went into Palestine
and forcibly violently took the land away from peace loving Arabs is
is a twisting of what actually happened.
They worked through negotiations, at least until 1947,
when it became clear that that wasn't going to work anymore.
They saw what kind of justice they were going to get after the Nuremberg trials,
which were basically show trials.
Yes.
And so they said, okay, well, we got to go the other way.
And they went through the blackmail route to Stalin and Rockefeller
to get the votes they needed for the UN to vote for this new state.
But again, it's been that way since 1947.
Again, I encourage people to read the book,
The Secret War Against the Jews.
If you think I'm just making things up
to rationalize or justify a pro-Jewish, pro-Israeli worldview,
I am not.
I mean, I wear a tinfoil hat on the weekends
so that you don't have to.
And this is a view that I have come to
after 20 years of researching and looking
and disbelieving the official narrative.
So I...
Well, that's why I have you on, though.
I find it...
I enjoyed our first chat,
and the thing about what you've done
and what you've been put through
and going on the app
and all the different things.
Once again, I push people to go back
and listen to 701,
because then they can hear all about it, right?
It's like, I sit there and you've said something
that contradicts what I'm hearing
in different...
circles. And so I'm like, that's fascinating because this isn't coming from, or at least I don't
think it is, Derek, coming from like, you know, a quick off the hip, no, I'm pro this, pro that.
It's like, well, no, you've been, you've been staring at this part of the world and geopolitics
and news for the last 20 years. It's like, it's very interesting because if I ask you other
questions about different parts that, that I enjoy talking with you about, you've got a vast
knowledge from a, from a guy who's read a lot, talked to a lot of different people.
And so it's just different. And I find different very interesting because the, the, the, the,
circles that, well, there's two circles. There's, there's obviously pro-Israel. And then
there's pro-Palestine or pro-hamas, pro, and the, the, the, the two arguments, and I'm
probably getting this wrong. But certainly, you know, the pro-Israel is, is basically,
what you just said and then the pro-Palestine is like listen they just killed like 15,000
people what are we talking about here it's genocide and this needs to stop and so they paint a picture
of like how the israelis are controlling the united states of america among others and i might point
out if they blackmailed if they were that good at blackmailing the soviet union
Stalin and the US back then.
They've only gotten better at it, I might add.
Because if that's what they were founded on, you don't get founded on that and then not
continue on with that being as successful as it is.
Regardless, it's an interesting point because those are the two sides of this coin.
And for a long time, I don't talk about it because I'm like, I don't even know what I get
to add to this.
I'm not there.
I have no idea what to say, except it's starting to the protests are bleeding out into all
the world, right?
Canada, we see all these protests.
And it's, it's, I don't even know.
I think war in general is bad.
Killing people in general is bad.
Agreed.
Agreed.
And I just don't know, you know, like this Israel conflict is,
I don't even know the word to associate to it.
Other than what you said, it just, I'm like, huh.
It is a civilizational clash.
And people who think that this began in 1947 or with the Zionist,
the world Zionist Congress's first meeting in 1898 really need to go back a lot further to
632 a.D. with the death of Muhammad and his successors then choosing to export its religion at the
point of a sword over the next century or so 636 AD when his successor led the forces of Islam to
victory over the the remnant of the Eastern Roman Empire the Byzantine
Empire at the Battle of Yarmouk, which then led to the fall of Jerusalem, the fall of Antioch, the fall of Aleppo.
The reason the Western world is called the West is because that's all that was left of
Christendom after the first century of Islam.
They conquered all of these ancient lands that had been, well, that had been Christian
basically for centuries by the time of Islam's rise in the 7th century.
all of uh north africa all of the levant all of most of antitolia i mean they were at the gates
of constantinople in the seventh century uh they crossed the uh the straits of gibraltar and they
conquered spain in the eighth century they were defeated the only reason they didn't overrun all
of france was that charles martel king of the franks defeated them at the battle of tours in
seven thirty six ad so within a hundred years they had overrun everything that had been christian pretty
much from what is now Israel to the English channeled practically. This is a civilizational struggle
and people who look at the, say, the modern Islamic State or al-Qaeda or the Taliban and say,
well, they're aberrations. That's not Islam. There are a lot of peace-loving Muslims. I get that.
But when you go back to the fundamentals of that religion, it is a violent religion that is
expanded by conquest for the last 1,400 years.
And it is in the mindset of the religion and of Arabs in particular that once they controlled
a land, which again, they had control over the Holy Land, except for the brief century or two
when the Crusaders had conquered it in the 11th and 12th centuries AD, they had controlled
what is now Israel for the better part of 1,200 years.
And so in their minds, it belongs to them.
them. What I think is ironic about the Spanish government last year, recognizing an independent
Palestinian state. I mean, for one thing, it's hilarious that the diplomats that they've sent
as envoys to the Palestinian government don't want to live in Ramallah because it's not safe
and the internet's really bad. But secondly, that the Spanish don't know their own history
because the Spanish for 700 years were under Muslim control. It was not a pleasant.
time for the Christians of Spain when they were under the control and governance of Muslims.
And to the Muslim mind, you know, that still belongs to them.
They're going to take it back someday.
I'm not exaggerating this.
If you read legitimate, let's say, objective history of Islam, this is what the religion is about.
I would recommend the book Sword and Simitar by Raymond Ibrahim, which goes into this.
And because he's Egyptian by ethnicity and can read and speak Arabic, he goes into original source material from Muslim historians who are writing about their battles with Christian armies at the time, which a lot of Christian historians don't have access to or don't bother to translate because it's difficult work.
And so, but you get the sense coming away from the words of the Muslim historians writing about these battles themselves, that this is a holy calling.
And here we are in the 21st century.
And this is what's behind the conflict between Israel and the Palestinian Arabs.
This is what's behind the conflict between groups like the Islamic State, al-Qaeda, the Taliban,
and groups that they come into contact with,
not just Christians or Jews, but also Hindus and Buddhists.
So this is a very old conflict that is still raging around the world.
In fact, I wrote a book about this back in 2018, Bad Moon Rising.
And I don't think it'll be resolved until the day that Jesus returns
at the head of the heavenly host.
Hmm.
You know, when you look at North America,
Bring it back a little closer to home.
And you see that, you know, like how strong the United States has been for, you know, 100 years.
And, you know, you go some of these ideas that have like snuck into our culture and like they're just like they make zero sense.
You know, you talk about how culture wars and tries to take over land and everything else.
like almost psychological, this sciop or whatever word you want to associate with it.
Have you done, have you looked into or or I guess maybe just your thoughts on it, like how it's
slowly seeped into American culture, certainly Canadian culture, you know, like with not only
socialism, but just like I'm like just crazy ideas of, you know, I guess in the extreme sense,
like men being girls or boys being girls or boys being girls.
girls, girls being boys, and just like this, like, how did we ever get here?
And yet this doesn't seem like it's by chance.
No, and, you know, I think it's funny because I hear myself saying things like what we're discussing today.
And I think back 40 years when I came home from college after spending, you know, four years at a liberal arts college in downstate Illinois,
I spent a semester studying in Chicago on an off-year-old.
campus study program where we were exposed to a lot of ideas by urban, you know,
organizers, civic organizers who were very liberal, far left. And I'd bring these
ideas home to my mom and dad and my, you know, my dad would say, you've been brainwashed.
And I was, you know, angry because I thought, you know, age of 21, no, I'm, I'm smart. I'm an
independent thinker. I know what I think. And, and now here I am just turned 63. And I look
back and it's like, yeah, dad was right.
Um, he was talking about the dangers of communism when I was in college, you know,
just out of college 40 years ago.
And I thought, you know, dad, the wall is down in, in, in, in Berlin, the Soviet Union has
collapsed.
Communism is so, you know, last decade.
But it really isn't.
And these are the ideas that are behind some of these crazy things that, uh, have
manifested over the last few years.
Critical theory, which is, uh,
fundamentally Marxist.
It's behind what we in the US have really been sensitive to
over the last few years, critical race theory,
but that's just a subset of critical theory.
Marxist thought posits that there are always
oppressors and the oppressed.
So all political struggle is an ongoing battle
between those who have power
and those who are being abused by those who are in power.
And there are various ways that this manifest.
We're seeing it manifest as a struggle between those with less melanin and those with more melanin.
And the less melanin you have, the more likely you are to be an oppressor.
We see it in sexual gender identity.
If you are heteronormative, you're an oppressor.
If you're one of the less typical expressions of gender,
you are of the oppressed class but but here's the thing whenever the oppressors throw off the
oppressed when the the uh the working class throws off the uh the those with the money um they become
the new oppressor and then you've got a new oppressed class that has to rise up and throw them
up it is fundamentally chaotic and marks whether he realized it or not was being used
used by forces he probably didn't understand.
And I'm talking spiritual forces now.
He was openly, as Lieutenant Colonel Robert McGinnis wrote in a book a couple of years ago,
he was a Satanist.
He was literally in league with the devil.
And I don't just say that because, you know, I happen to believe capitalism is the best
economic system that's been developed.
Yes, there are problems with capitalism because there are those who try to, you know, take shortcuts.
and use it by breaking a law or whatever to oppress others but that problem is still
exists when you whether it's a communist system socialist system whatever the problem is not the
system the problem is that we humans by default tend to look out for ourselves at the expense of all
others so that is what is fundamentally behind some of these crazy ideas this idea that i'm a
and therefore I need to rebel against your authority.
It is fundamentally Marxist and at the end of the day, Marxism is just chaos.
I got to ask, you know, in all your years of podcasting, have you ever heard of a guy
named Zachary King?
I'm going to throw this out there again and just see if it sticks.
No.
Interesting.
When you say Marx was a Satanist, is this something that you picked up on early on in the 20 years
of starting to talk to people?
Or is this something that's become more and more evident?
Because it just feels like that's becoming a growing revelation of like,
there's some people out there that are on the dark side of this
that are really in the dark side.
No, I defer to Colonel McGinnis in his research.
His book, Give Me Liberty, Not Marxism.
And he went deep into it.
And so I was not aware of that.
I knew that Marxist at the very least was an atheist,
but Colonel McGinnis showed in his book that,
no, he was openly Marxist.
Now, I know there are some, and this is really ironic,
who believed that Marx, because he was Jewish,
is part of this international Jewish conspiracy
to control the world.
But Marx wrote in the 1860s
when Jews in Europe were being oppressed,
there were laws that were restricting what they could do,
how they, where they could work.
They were really getting hammered in Russia.
A lot of Russian Jews fled the country,
especially after the assassination of Tsar Alexander II,
because one of the women involved in that plot
had some Jewish ancestry.
So they blamed it all on the Jews,
and then Russia passed some laws that were intended
to make Jews emigrate or starve.
So that's why you got a lot of Jews emigrating
to the US and the UK.
in the latter part of the 19th century and to what became Israel, the land of Palestine at the time.
But Marx wrote that Jews who were protesting and wanting emancipation,
you know, they wanted to be free to live and work wherever they would.
Marx wrote that the God of the Jew is money.
I'm paraphrasing because I don't have the quote in front of me,
but that the emancipation of the Jew is the emancipation of the world from Jews.
basically wanted Jews wiped out.
So if Marx was a Jew and he was part
of the international Jewish conspiracy,
he hit it really, really well.
But again, the book,
Give Me Liberty, not Marxism.
Colonel McGinnis goes into Marx's true spiritual beliefs
pretty deeply.
And Bob is a really good researcher.
When you look at, I don't know,
multiple things heading our way in 2025,
what do you think sticks out
as like things people should pay attention to.
Central bank digital currency.
You think that's coming back around?
There are two, the two big economic blocks on planet Earth, the G7 and Bricks,
are both launching pilot programs for central bank digital currencies in 2025.
The G7 plan involves 40 of the world's top commercial banks.
This is being led by the Bank for International Settlements, which helps reconcile transactions, basically facilitates international trade.
Central banks that are part of this include the Bank of France, which represents the euro system, the Bank of Japan, Bank of Korea, Bank of Mexico, Swiss National Bank, the Bank of England, and the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.
Now, even though the Fed chair, Jerome Powell says, we're not anywhere near putting together a central bank digital currency.
the New York branch of the Fed is taking part in this G7 program.
Now the BRICS nations are also setting up a pilot program.
That's Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa,
plus Iran, United Arab Emirates, and possibly Saudi Arabia.
They've been invited and they've kind of put their application on hold for now.
But between India and China, you've got, what, about 3.5 billion people out of the 8,
on planet earth and between Russia, Iran, the UAE,
and especially if Saudi Arabia joins in,
you've got something like 40% of the world's
hydrocarbon reserves.
So this is not small, in terms of what they call
purchasing power parity, how far the money will go.
The G7 is now smaller than the BRICS nations.
The BRICS have more buying power as a group than the G7,
which is the U.S., UK, France, Germany, Italy, Japan,
and there's one other that I'm leaving Canada, probably.
Isn't that part of Canada? Canada's forgotten.
America's 51st state, sorry.
Yeah, that's right.
So between the BRICS nations launching this program in 2025
and the G7 launching a pilot program in 2025,
I think you've got two major,
organizations there, the bankers who want to make this happen. And the reason I think this is important
is because unlike, say, Bitcoin, which is a decentralized digital currency, you've got all of
these computers all around the world, not under the control of any one government or corporation
or CEO, reconciling the transactions. And because of this, you more or less have financial
privacy when you use Bitcoin to do something, a central bank digital currency by definition
runs through a central bank. So if the Federal Reserve Bank or the Bank of Canada were to
launch a digital currency, it would have a record of every financial transaction using that
digital currency. So say if we've got a digital dollar here in the United States and I wanted
to go to the grocery store and buy ice cream, it's like, well, it could be programmed to
connect it to say a China like social credit score yes your medical records indicate that
your cholesterol is too high mr. Gilbert so you can no longer buy ice cream until you
bring your cholesterol back down below 200 we see that you're trying to buy some
religious propaganda you know a Bible or whatever this is a hate speech under the
you know blah blah blah regulation of 2025 and so therefore we will not you cannot
purchase this using a digital dollar or it could be geo fenced so that your digital dollar
could not be used outside of the boundaries of your 15-minute city into which they would like to
herd all of us as a resident in rural Missouri our neighbors are mainly cattle and coyotes out here
I really don't want to move into a 15-minute city I like living out here in the middle of no place
So what you're saying is in 2025, you think, you know, or not think, you're noticing that the CBDC conversation isn't dying down.
It's only picking up steam.
The fact that G7 and the BRICS nations are both going to do their own little pilot projects of it, it could be just not a blip on the radar, folks.
I don't mean that is in like nothing big comes of it.
It's actually quite a big thing what you're talking about.
But in 2025, they could run a pilot project and then it could ramp up 2026 or 2027 as they iron the king's out.
Because they're signaling which direction they're heading.
Yes?
Yeah, that's what I'm seeing.
Now, again, Powell, the Federal Reserve chair, said we're not close to doing it.
Donald Trump has said that as long as he's president, he would never allow the creation of a central bank digital currency.
The House of Representatives here last year passed a bill barring the Fed from creating a digital dollar.
but you know Trump won't be president forever contrary to what they might think on MSNBC
that's they may give us a four-year window where we don't have to worry about it but I think
ultimately we're so used to using digital currency as it is I mean we use our credit cards
our debit cards and again Bitcoin is becoming more and more acceptable again the
fundamental difference between Bitcoin and a CBDC is that Bitcoin is decentralized
and a CBDC central is right there in the name.
So, yeah, it would be a government-controlled way.
And at the end of the day, the biggest thing probably is lack of financial privacy.
The government would know every single single thing that you bought using a digital currency.
Anything else in 2025 do you think is worthwhile of paying attention to?
You mentioned a multitude of things there, the CBDC thing,
The fact they're doing pilot projects on it should concern everybody,
even though, you know, you bring up Donald Trump and everything.
You just said, you go, yeah, so it's four years.
And once upon a time, I'm four years, that's forever.
Nothing's ever coming of it.
Now I'm like, no, I mean, like four years is going to go by, like, you know,
honestly faster than we think.
And it's something to pay attention to.
That's a long-range worry or something to keep an eye on.
Is there something more near term where you're like, you might want to watch this?
You know, they are pushing a whole bunch of diseases and trying to stir that back up again.
I don't know if you have that in any of your thoughts.
Yeah, that's something that Sharon has been watching for a long time when I first met her
because she's got a degree in molecular biology.
And she is the smartest person I know.
She's been tracking emerging diseases for decades.
In fact, on our program, which we put on hiatus a couple of years,
years ago we used to do a weekly program called sigh Friday and in January of 2020 we
were talking about COVID-19 long before I mean it didn't even have a name at that point we
were still calling it the Wuhan flu she noticed last year a story that really I think flew
under the radar of most observers and this was the amendments to the international health
regulations the international health regulations is
an international treaty I think all but five nations on earth have signed onto it
including US UK Canada were all parties to this treaty that the World Health
Organization uses to go govern its responses to public health emergencies well
these regulations were were amended last year and the way the amendments were
worded essentially lays the groundwork for the world world health organization
excuse me, I've been doing a lot of talking on camera today, the World Health Organization to become a global government.
Because it allows the WHO to dictate to the signatories to this international health regulations treaty,
how to respond to a public health emergency of international concern or a P-Hike, P-HIC.
But then they go on to define even things like,
misinformation disinformation and malinformation as a public health concern referred to as an
infodemic so if something were to come around again like we saw five years ago
we could conceivably see or four years ago we could conceivably see the World
Health Organization step forward and say you can't say this about that because
this is misinformation this is mal
information and dictate to a member government you need to go after Sean Newman because he said
this thing about this response to the public health emergency that is dangerous he's contributing
to an infodemic this the question is whether governments would allow the WHO to dictate to it
just because it's in writing doesn't mean the governments if the WHO comes in and says
hey um united states you've got too many batches of this vaccine we want to send a bunch of these to
sub-saharan africa um will the u s say yeah fine that's okay we'll we'll sacrifice some of our
people so that you can save some people on another continent or will uh would donald trump
don't he would like to pull out of the world health organization uh will he do it i don't know
this may be another one of his opening moves to negotiate a better deal but
But I think this is a question that will be probably answered in 2025 because, yes, there have been concerns about the avian flu out there.
Sharon, in fact, wrote a novel 20 years ago about a weaponized form of avian flu.
The novel, the Armageddon strain, beautiful title.
Will it become the next COVID-19?
Don't know.
Don't know.
We've only had one death to avian flu here in the United States.
and that was a person in Louisiana was like 65 and had underlying health problems.
So it is not there yet.
There was a disease that popped up in Congo before the holidays that the Africa Center for Disease Control was calling disease X,
which was the term used for one of those tabletop exercises where they were game to response to a pandemic at Johns Hopkins University prior to COVID-19.
So using the term, disease X, I think, was rather inflammatory and intentionally so to try to get people afraid.
Disease X is here.
There is no actual disease X.
That's a hypothetical disease that may emerge and become the next pandemic.
But when that arrives, the World Health Organization is going to try to flex its muscle and tell global governments, UK, France, Russia, China, here's what you're going to have to do.
Will they go along with it?
I don't know.
I kind of doubt it, but it is something to keep an eye on.
I have a hard time where we sit right now,
how close we are to just coming out of all the mandates,
all the lockdowns, everything.
I don't, I just have a hard time believing the population, right?
Like, I get when a government comes down hard on people, right?
But like here in North America, I just think there would be a revolt.
I can't imagine.
Americans doing that.
I can't see it.
And honestly, I know Canadians are built as this peaceful nation, but we're getting pretty
unruly here over the last five years.
And if Justin Trudeau doesn't get out of the way, like, I don't know what would become
in Canada.
So like, to me, I just have the evening flu.
I have a hard time with that one.
I have a hard time.
And maybe it's because it's too close to home with the COVID thing and everything
they went there and did and locking down and everything else.
I'm like, I have hard time with that.
There's other things like the CBDC thing.
I'm like, oh, that's, that's a trend.
Even if it's a decade off, that's a trend we're heading closer to, not further away.
We're not going to go away from using debit cards and credit cards and online sales and everything,
unless something cataclysmic happens.
We're going to be going more and more into technology.
AI isn't disappearing.
It's growing, you know, like it's constantly evolving and shifting.
And, you know, like, I was listening to Rogan the other day.
and he's talking about how, you know, Chad GPT tried rewriting itself so it could save a copy of itself before it got a race for the new update.
And I'm like, what?
Like, is that, is that where we're heading?
We're going to head right into Terminator.
Like, we're on that trajectory, whether it's 100 years out or 500 or 20 years, you know?
It's those trends make sense to me.
When you talk avian flu, I have a real hard time swall in it, probably because of where we just came out of.
You may be right.
But my eyes are opened every time I go back to visit our daughter in St. Louis.
And St. Louis is not one of the trendiest cities in America.
She lives in a very hip area of the city, a recently gentrified area, kind of close into downtown.
Here in the Ozarks, we're, the joke is, you know, welcome to the Ozarks, set your watch back three years.
We are very conservative here.
and in fact we live in a county where the Democratic Party doesn't even bother to put up candidates for most of the county offices because there's no point there's no point but when I go up to St. Louis to visit our daughter it's it's really eye-opening you know say in 2022 when we in the Ozarks had basically dropped all of the the lockdowns and the restrictions on restaurants and everything by pretty much the spring of the fall of the fall of the fall of the lockdowns.
of 21 at the latest. I'd go up to St. Louis and still, you know, I wanted to go to a local
coffee shop and get coffee. It's like, oh, I left my mask at the hotel. I've got to go back to the
hotel to get my mask so I can even go in this store, still seeing people driving around St. Louis,
you know, in their cars alone with their masks on. So I think that that kind of attitude is
much more prevalent on the coasts than in even in the trendiest areas here in the center of the
country so you may see more of a fracturing of the conservative parts of
Canada and the United States from the the the coastal elites as it were here in
the US you got the Boston to Washington Corridor and on the West Coast you've got
you know LA San Francisco and you know Oregon and Washington at least the
parts along the coast that are very very liberal and if you look at a map of the
way on a county by county basis the way things
shook out in the last presidential election a vast swath of you know
can's predominantly conservative voters in most of the rest of the country with the
exception of urban centers like Chicago Milwaukee Minneapolis and so on so
will I think this is a longer-term trend this is not something that's going to
happen in 2025 but I see long-term a real difficulty for this
country sticking together even by the end of this century and i i don't know if the same is true in
canada i remember having conversations 30 years ago when i was selling steel pipe to guys up there at
fort mcmurray um that uh there were it was very clear to me and around calgary there were very
strong opinions about uh what was coming out of ottawa and uh how you know alberta
the opinions have only gotten stronger yeah would
just as soon go their own way. So I'm only kind of half joking when President Trump says, you know,
Canada would be our 51st day. It's like, well, maybe parts of Canada would happily join the U.S.,
but only if we trade the West Coast. So I don't know. I don't know. I don't know when you get
so people who are so firmly entrenched in some of these worldviews that if you're a Trump voter,
or if you're a voter for, say, the Conservative Party in Canada, you are.
are so far right that people have a right to hit you, you know, because your political views
are not fit for public consumption anymore. How do you coexist with somebody like that?
What are you, if you were, you know, we've talked about a plethora of things, right, from all
over the, you know, from the Middle East to, you know, well, I mean, people have been listening.
If you were looking at the next year and going, but here's what I'm pulling.
positive on. There's something good going to happen this year. What do you, what trend or what thought,
or is it Trump coming in or is it a changing of the guard in politics or in media or or just,
you know, I'm curious. Once again, I think about it and I go 20 years, 20 years is a long time to
stare at the trends and start to see like how long it takes for things to shift and and then maybe
to get caught off guard and be like, oh man, I did not see that like we were talking about
but how quickly certain things happen.
When you look at 2025,
is there anything you're like,
I think people should pay attention to this
because there's a possibility of whatever,
just the positive instead of the dark side of the world.
Yeah, and that's, I think, a good question
because it's very easy to get caught in sort of a doom-scrolling loop
on social media and just look at all of these things
and just assume that the sky is going to fall in.
I don't think the end is just yet.
The trends we're seeing towards more conservative populist political parties and candidates
in the Western world, I think is a good thing.
In Europe, we're seeing it in, you know, France, Germany, the alternative for Deutschland,
the AFD party is rising in the polls.
We're seeing Reform UK with Nigel Farage at the head.
I know I mispronounced his name.
Farage, Farage, I guess.
12 years of French between high school and college and that's you know that's the best you got
yeah but reform UK is is doing well in the polls there because people have realized that
secure starmer and his labor government are just an absolute disaster but you know um rishi sunak and
the tories weren't any better so we're seeing a trend back towards sanity and more conservative
values and i think people are saying look we are
and tired of having to apologize for everything
that our ancestors built.
They weren't perfect, they were flawed,
they did things that we have learned from and moved on from.
But this direction that you want us to go is just a bridge too far.
Men are men, women are women, and yes,
we need to recognize the differences
and celebrate those differences.
I think there are some good things coming from this as we return to some more sensible outcome-based policies rather than policies that are put in place to give us a sense of self-satisfaction.
We're seeing, sadly, how some of that is playing out in California, where we want to protect the environment by not clear-cutting, by not removing dead brush and removing dead trees from the first.
forests.
This is exactly what happened to Jasper last year with the fire that almost knocked out
Jasper, Alberta.
And the further we dug into it, you realized that it was basically that we weren't taking
care of the forest.
We weren't managing the forest and a ton of deadfall over a period of time.
And when it went, it went.
Went like, yeah.
And so they've had a very dry summer and fall season in California, which California's
had on repeated cycles for literally centuries. The fact is that California has had much bigger
wildfires before white settlers moved in and started building massive cities across the
landscape there. So it is something that could have been planned for, but in the interest of
pretending to care about the environment, we're actually destroying the environment. So hopefully going
forward the the policies will be more based on outcome rather than you know patting ourselves on the
back look aren't we great we've saved the snail dart or whatever we're we yeah i pray for the
farmers there i pray that they will allow the farmers to start watering their crops again pray that
they will have the sense to start building the reservoirs to hold the snow melt and when they do get
those spring rains to have that water available later in the year when it's near
needed like now.
So I think there's some good things that are coming there.
And I think the way the Middle East is, has been reshaped.
There is an opportunity there for some peace anyway.
I think there's been some encouraging signs, the Abraham Accords that were put forward
by under the first Trump administration.
Again, even if it's just marriages of convenience where the Saudis want to make nice with the Israelis
to give them some some additional.
leverage against the the Iranians there's some indication that the the Persians the
Iranian people are ready to throw off the theocracy that they've been living under
since 1979 and that would be a good thing because that is a very ancient and proud
people with a lot of natural resources there they could be doing a lot better
economically if they weren't organizing their their country on the basis
of a very restrictive and dictatorial religion.
So I think there's some good things coming.
We're seeing a swing back towards conservative values,
and I don't say that just because of a preference for those as I get older.
I just see that people who tend to be conservative in their worldview look more at...
I think a lot of people are just...
It's a swing back to common sense.
Common sense, absolutely. Yep.
Well, Derek, appreciate you giving me some time today.
It's me today that has a time.
constraint and I'm looking at the clock and I got I got to go I got to go pick kids up and I
that normally doesn't happen on on and and uh Derek was kind enough to hop on a touch early so
that we can squeeze this in but appreciate you coming on all the best in 2025 and um well
we'll we'll look forward to uh watch what you guys do next on your side all the best and
thanks for giving me some time today you bet honored to do it and uh anytime
