Shaun Newman Podcast - #947 - Martin Sieff

Episode Date: November 6, 2025

Martin Sieff is a Belfast-born Anglo-Irish-Jewish journalist, historian, and author renowned for his extensive international reporting career spanning over four decades. A graduate of Oxford University with BA and MA degrees in Modern History and postgraduate studies on the Middle East at the London School of Economics, Sieff began his journalism in the early 1980s covering the Northern Ireland conflict for the Belfast Telegraph and News-Letter, later reporting from more than 70 countries and a dozen wars, including hotspots in Israel, the West Bank, Bosnia, Indonesia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, and the Baltic states. He served as Chief Foreign Correspondent for The Washington Times (1994–1999), then rose to Managing Editor for International Affairs, Chief News Analyst, Defense Industry Editor, and Chief Political Correspondent at United Press International (1999–2009), earning three Pulitzer Prize nominations for international reporting and leading UPI's coverage of the 2000, 2004, and 2008 U.S. presidential elections. He is the author of seven books, including the bestselling The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Middle East, Shifting Superpowers, Cycles of Change, and Gathering Storm (2015), which explore Middle Eastern geopolitics, U.S.-China-India relations, and recurring cycles in American history. Tickets to Cornerstone Forum 26’: https://www.showpass.com/cornerstone26/Tickets to the Mashspiel:https://www.showpass.com/mashspiel/Silver Gold Bull Links:Website: https://silvergoldbull.ca/Email: [e-mail] Grahame: [phone]Bow Valley Credit UnionBitcoin: www.bowvalleycu.com/en/personal/investing-wealth/bitcoin-gatewayEmail: [e-mail] Use the code “SNP” on all ordersProphet River Links:Website: store.prophetriver.com/Email: [e-mail] your voice heard: Text Shaun 587-217-8500

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tale of the tape. Today's guest spent 40 plus years as a journalist reporting from over 70 countries and a dozen wars. He served as chief foreign correspondent for the Washington Times. I'm talking about Martin Seif. So buckle up. Here we go. Welcome to the Sean Newman podcast. Today I'm joined by Martin Seif. Marty, thanks for hopping on. My great pleasure, Sean. Now, it's your first time on the podcast.

So if you wouldn't mind, maybe just a little bit of your background. It's quite extensive, but wherever you want to take us, just so the audience knows who they're listening to. Sure. I'm from the very, very lower middle class of the streets of Belfast, which I was raised. And thanks to the enterprise of my dad. I was propelled into a wonderful school in Belfast, far beyond our socioeconomic background at the time, very modest background.

And my school then propelled me into Oxford University. I took two degrees in modern history at Oxford University. And then did graduate work in Middle East studies, which took me around Israel, Palestine, Egypt, primarily in my late 20s, but only then I found my real calling, which is the news business. So I spent five years in different newspapers in Belfast, and that led me to stringing for a then new and disreputable outfit, because it was a new conservative newspaper in Washington, D.C., the Washington Times. And they could get

no one respectable or experienced at first to work for them in Washington. And I very much wanted to come to America, and I've already been over in the East Coast, loved it, had a girlfriend, over there and the irony is when I came over I got involved with someone else at the married her stayed put but I was in Washington journalism for 36 years first of all 13 years with the Washington Times as their Eastern European and Soviet first editor and chief analyst then as chief news analyst and managing editor at United Press International and finally well not finally after that I spent as we discussed three years in Kazakhstan helping set up I don't even know if it's still running now it may not be or under different names an

English language energy newswire or news service covering energy developments in the Caspian Basin which is of course now ranking along with Alberta as one of the great energy growth areas of the world so especially at my more advanced stage by that point That was a very interesting thing. Then I came back to Washington, D.C. and to Bethesda and spent another 10 years working for European news agencies as an analyst on Washington. I became a Trump expert because I'd actually predicted Trump's victory in 2016 when nobody else had, which is a story in itself.

And I've got seven books published so far, two more completed that I'm looking for publishers for. And as we discussed, my next project, I hope, is going to be the, the book is going to be called an energy map of the world in the year 2050, which of course is very relevant to the policies and prosperity of the state of Alberta, which given half a chance should have a very prosperous quarter century, if I am right. Well, before we get to energy, you talk about being a correspondent on Russia or Soviet Russia. did you see did you see where we're at here in 2025 happening the way it's played out here through through Biden and now Trump you know as as forgive me maybe I'm reading not uh maybe you could clarify I guess like how much time have you spent around Russia or Soviet Union or both um like did your um did your reporting your journal take you there or that area a lot?

A very great deal, absolutely. I came on board the Washington Times in beginning of 1986, January, 1986. And I'm now also writing my memoirs. And there's a bit of analysis in them, but mainly they're strong gossip and the kind of tall but true, true stories that in the news business you tend to come across or live yourselves. as I was privileged to do. And within two weeks of me coming on board of the Washington Times, they'd given me the Crown Jules. They put me in charge of directing and building from scratch their coverage of the Soviet Union.

And a month after they gave me that job, the 27th Party Congress of the Soviet Communist Party, CPSU, began in Moscow, and Mikhail Gorbachev ended 33 years of stagnation since the death of Joseph Stalin and learning. of the policies of Glasnos and Perestroika, of openness and restructuring. And everything changed. And I was there at the very beginning of it. I have three Pulitzer Prize nominations for international reporting. The first two of them were, I got, or rewarded me by for covering the collapse of communism, first in Eastern Europe and the following year in the

Soviet Union itself. I was never officially based in the Soviet Union, but I was often over there for one to three months at a time, traveled extensively over the Earth, travel the length of Trans-Siberian Railway, among other things. And I covered the disintegration of the Glasnoss process because Gorbachev didn't have a clue, and which led directly to disintegration, of course, of the Soviet Union. And then I covered the dark years under Yeltsin when the country was pillaged by its own oligarchs and Western capitalist skis. which couldn't look for even to the end of their own noses participated in it.

So they turned an inherently strongly pro and Western and pro-America at marrying Russian people as they had been under Gorbachev into a very ultimately, it took a long time, but ultimately into a very suspicious Russian people which underlines what we see today. So I didn't predict boldly in advance in every detail or detail. I didn't have a crystal ball what was to come. But I was following it and monitoring it at every stage and seeing it steadily getting worse. And of course, one of the biggest lies and myths about Russia is that they were happy and democratic under Yeltsin, which was the darkest era they had suffered since Stalin, not because Jeltsin was a Stalin, but because he was

a drunk and corrupt incompetent and at least 20 million people, Russian estimates were much higher, died simply, especially the old and the very young, of hardship because not a single state salary was paid for most of those seven or eight years. And the reason Vladimir Putin is fundamentally secure, despite all the lies thrown out about him, and he's not a Democrat, he's not a liberal, he's not a peacnick. A lot of idiocy has talked about this. Of course he isn't. He's a very dangerous man if you cross him. But there is a social contract he has with the Russian people because he raised the Russian people to the highest standard of living consistently over the past 25 years that they have ever enjoyed. And this is never

mentioned or acknowledged in the West and it is crucial to dealing with Russia. Okay, you rattled off a lot there. That's my problem. I mean, it really is my problem. No, no, no. So I want to go back a little bit. Sure. You mentioned you were there essentially at the late 80s and for a whole chunk of time after that. Yes. You said something along, you said something along the lines of the disintegration of the, and I want to say it was something like the Glasno process, but I probably butchered that word. No, you're fine, absolutely. Yes. What, what is that? What do you mean, but what is that? Mikhail Gorbachev thought he could preserve the Soviet Union and renew it by liberalizing it with a small ale, by removing the secret police, by removing censorship,

removing any even background aspect of terror which was a lot less under brashnev and crushchev than had ever been under the monstrous stab but of course it was still lured and you felt it i was first there after brasiannev died under his successor chernenka way back in 1983 and you felt the oppression you could cut it with a knife same in what do you when you say you felt it would uh could you paint me a picture you're you're right around the train like what was it that you felt or saw oh you felt there was secret about this. You were in a totalitarian state and you could not go anywhere and everything you said was watched closely and monitored and you knew it. And Russian people could not talk

freely to visiting Americans or Germans or Brits or anyone else because the security organs were watching them. All the cliches which it's now fashionable to sneer about about Soviet and communist tyranny were literally true. You cannot have a Soviet system, whether it's in Russia or China under Mao, which is much more open now, of course, too. Another story. Or in the North Korea where it's still as bad as you can possibly imagine. You cannot have communism anywhere without total repression completely. There's a wonderful German movie called The Lives of Others about how the Stasi, the East German Secret Police, basically watched everyone and basically half the people you knew were informers.

were informers and you often even to do the kind of thing you and I are doing now if they would have let it we would have had to be informers ourselves all the every priest in the orthodox church until the end of communism was also an officer of the KGB you could not be a priest without being an officer in the secret police that's how deep it went so then if you look over the past 20 some years no it's closing in on 30 years I guess sure closing in on 30 years since the Soviet Union fell, right? I'm doing my math here. I don't know why this is stumping me this morning.

I can do it because it's in the marrow of my bones. I was covering it when it happened. 1990, 1991, by 35 years. I mean, I'm old. And it's still nearly half my lifetime. So one of the things that is, I've been very interested in. You know, as I do this show more and more, it's like how long, does it take for a group of people, the culture, to want something different. And so you get out

of Soviet Russia and you bring in a guy that's going to bring in the little L. And I'm sure that sounded great. We're going to get rid of this secret police. Things are going to be better. We're going to talk to one another. It's going to be great. So they let the, and forgive me, because you'll know this way better than I well. So then they let the Americans in and they start pulfering all the countryside of the resources and they go, wait, wait, but now we get to talk about this and we're not going to talk about that. Maybe you can walk me through the, I don't know, the first 10 to 15 years of getting away from the Soviet Union, the KGB, all the organs staring at everything, everybody being an informant. There had to have been a little bit of a grace period or a time where it almost

felt like it was getting better. But then you started staring at the problems again. No, it never got better. That's the thing. Under Yeltsin, it was a catastrophe from the word go and it kept crashing. I've lectured a lot over the past 25 years around the US. I've been on lecture circuits for, not for the army, but for, I'm too much of a heretic on tactics for them, but for the US Navy and the US Air Force. And often there are senior officers in the audience. And one line I always brought up that I found stopped people in their tracks. I would throw them a question, do you know what the Great Depression in the United States, in Canada too, of course, smelled like. Think about that. Everybody knows what it sounds like because there's this fabulous music and we still listen to it. Everybody know

what it looked like because there were so many fabulous Hollywood gangster movies, you know, or classics like The Grapes of Roth by John Ford that were made even in the 1930s and about it. Since then, we've created, we all know what it looked like, what it sounded like. What did it smell like? And then I say, I know, I can tell you. It must have smelled exactly the same way. The Soviet Union cities, including Moscow, smelled in the 1990s. And apologies for the more sensitive members of your audience here.

It smelled like piss. It smelled like urine. Urine saturated everything because everybody peed in public. Because every public laboratory and even bathrooms in outside luxury hotels where they were still passable, but outside that, every public bathroom was indescribably filthy and people were exhausted and starving and demoralized and in deep depression, literally psychological as well as economic. And so they peed everywhere. So wherever you went, everything smelled of urine. It saturated everything.

And that is the way the Great Depression in the United States must have felt like to. When I was younger, you know, even 25 years, 20, 25 years ago, there were still a surprising number of people who were very old in America, of course, who came across who lived through this. And I would ask them, because I was black from trips to Moscow. What did it smell like? And yeah, they said, yes, that's the way exactly it smelled. And that's saturated every time. saturated everything. There was corruption and incompetence from the beginning in Yeltsin.

The worst elements in the Communist Party took over and the gangsters took over. So it wasn't just the West raping them, their own underworld raped them. And of course they had eager supporters in the name of democracy and free markets, of course, because one thing, when we do neo-imperialism, we always God help us. have to feel moral and upright about it. It's the same as with the massacre of the Ukrainian people when they're being manipulated by deep state elements in Britain and the United States today. It's not bad enough that we send 1.7 million to 1.8 million Ukrainians to their deaths. We have to do it with the big lie that we're being as heroic as Winston Churchill was in the 1930s,

just as he stood up to Hitler, who are standing up to Vladimir Putin. And but people die as a result of this. Millions of people die as a result of this. Even now, I am losing and I lose no sleepover and I'm proud of it. I am losing and turning my back on close friends over the past 30 and 40 years of my life who call me a Russian shill or I'm too much of a champion of Trump because I'm champion can mean democracy too much. He's destroying democracy.

He's worse than than Stalin and Hitler combined. Nonsense like that. And I'm also clashing with people who worship President Trump wildly, which you should not do, because that is what you do with people like Stalin and Hitler and what have you. You have to be able to stand back. I mean, one has to have a new one's view towards President Putin. He has raised the standard of living of the Russian people

to a greater level than ever before. In the past, he has shown no interest in trying to conquer or subvert all of Western Europe, which he easily has the resources to do. But he's not a man precisely for those reasons. He is not a man to underestimate or to take lightly. And this is where my Northern Irish background kicks back in. And that is, I spent six years in Delfast newsrooms. And there wasn't an eminent figure.

I was at the bottom of the heap. I was a copy desk editor. And later on slightly higher, I was a desk editor, handling the copy of outstanding and very courageous reporters investigating the terrorist underground movements and they weren't in underground, they were very overt in North Nouns at the time. And one thing we all knew and learned and practiced was when you are up against people who are murderers and torturers and they have power and the law cannot touch them because the law has broken down, be polite to them. Don't make needless enemies of them. You don't want to be in their pocket.

you don't want to be close to them, but you smile and you try and keep your integrity and you try and keep above all else your distance. But if you have to deal with them, you deal with them as honestly as you can and with respect. And that's what we have to do with Russia and China, because these are thermonuclear powers. They aren't Hitler, they aren't Stalin, they aren't Mao. But they have much more power than Mao or Stalin ever had in their dreams because they have thermon nuclear weapons and the delivery systems to carry them. So I advocate careful and respectful coexistence. Doesn't mean you give away the farm and give everything away or trust widely. But this fake macho posturing, especially under Biden and the Democrats, and this English love of fake moral

superiority, they pillage the world, including Canada, for hundreds of years. Pillage the world. I mean, I'm Irish, right? They pillage the world. But they're so moral and liberal and they love to wag the little finger with you and me, don't they? And how horrible it is that the Prime Minister of Alberta presumes to treat energy superpowers like Russia and China with respect. How dare he? To use the, there's a great Lebanese, I'm sure you're very familiar with them, a great Lebanese analyst who lives most of his life in New York, Nassim Nicholas Taleb.

And he wrote a book called Skin in the Game. And he makes the point that if you don't have skin in the game, if you're, what's the word? You know, if you aren't directly involved, don't have interest, the safety of your own life or your family's life and your prosperity, or you're not risking your own fortune or your own well-being committed to a political or economic idea. Why should anyone listen to you? Why should they listen to you?

And that's the point about all the talking heads, talking in Washington and London and propelling us into thermonuclear confrontation with Russia. They think they don't have skin in the game. Actually, they do, because they will be annihilated like the rest of us with thermonuclear destruction. Where you are in Alberta is an ideal place to be. If you can get me out there, even as a visiting lecturer, do so.

so because I'd love to get, at my advanced state, I'd love to get, if not myself, at least my kids and my wife, out there for an extended period of time. It would be nice because every major civilization city in North America and Western Europe will be under threat of literal destruction if it comes to thermonuclear war with Russia. And we have broken every sober guarantee, and I was there when they were all made. I covered them for the Washington Times as their State Department correspondent and that the Soviet and Eastern Affairs editor and chief analysts before that, for 13 years of the Washington Times, every commitment we made and promised that we would never try to disassemble Russia, that we would

never bring any former Warsaw Pact nation into NATO, has been ignored. The two presidents who made those pledges did not break them. I think they were largely sincere in making them. That was President Ronald Reagan and President George Herbert Walker Bush. And at first, President Bill Clinton felt very strongly the same way. But the world changed. And they listened to people who had a racist hatred of Russia like poison, including two very powerful figures in America. It was a big new Brzynski, who was the chief guru on foreign policy of the Democratic

Party for 50 years till he died. And the other was his own chosen. figure to become Secretary of State. And that was Madeline Albright. And between the two of them, they molded Hillary Clinton, who shared these views, and Barack Obama, who knew nothing about foreign policy, but had been recommended to David Rockefeller as a future president of the United States when he was still studying at Columbia University. He only took a single course in international affairs at Columbia. But who was his teacher? Who was his lecturer?

Professor Brzynski, who I knew very well, and I had a very ironical relationship with speak, because in my first seven years in Washington, he loved me, because I was more forthright and outspoken that the Soviet Union was going to collapse, which is what he wanted to hear, and which no one else was saying in the media at the time. There were experts saying it, and I was propelled by my own brilliant editor-in-chief at the time, Arnold de Borgrath, to those people, and that's how I learned it. And that's how I learned it. And then I went there and saw what was happening for myself with my own eyes. And by the way, that's crucial too to being a reporter, to go to places and see what's actually

happening with your own eyes and to register. And nobody seems to be doing this anymore. And it's very, except for a few people who are still there. My friend John Helmer, remarkable man, actually worked for Jimmy Carter back in the 1970s. We would have been political arch opponents then. But his work from Moscow over the past 20, 25 years has been outstanding. He's honest and he's brave. And just listening to him will give you a corrective.

Or listening to from the other side of the fence to Colonel Douglas McGregor. Extraordinary man. He's actually the American de Gaulle, like de Gaul, a brilliant leader in battle in 1991. And like de Gaul became one of the leading theoreticians of new revolutionary ways of waging conventional war. in major books that he wrote, DeGald did this in the 1920s and 1930s, and Colonel McGregor has been doing it for the past 20 years. And he has been warning all along

that we were sending the Ukrainian people to their doom, to their slaughter, propelling them into a war against Russia, they didn't have a chance of winning and that the Russians regarded as essential and existential for their survival. Before I go back to Russia, because I got a couple more on there. Oh, sure.

You're spurn up. But you hit on a thought that I've been thinking a lot about. I've been doing this podcast now for a little over six years. Now, certainly on these topics, everybody knows who's been following along. It's been about four since 2021. The podcast really shifted its direction and trying to understand different things in the world. But you said journalists aren't traveling to the places because you need to go see and experience and talk to the people. I've been thinking a lot about this.

I have people come on, no different than yourself. tell me things and I walk away and go but how can I totally believe everything Martin said and it goes for every guest that comes on here Martin it's not just you I go the only way to truly know

is to go see it is to actually go to these places and talk to the people and start to see with your own eyes what's actually happening because what newspapers or podcasters or anything you built this realm

without actually ever stepping foot on the soil, interacting with the people. And so then if all you do is read paper, oh, it's really bad over there. It's really bad. Yeah, it's really bad. But you actually don't know. I mean, you kind of do, but you don't. You're absolutely right.

I was at a conference in 2014 in Moscow for U.S. Russian bridge building at the time. And it was organized by a friend of mine who died just earlier this year. A wonderful man, man of the greatest stature, legendary figure himself, the late professor Edward Luzanski, who had been a Soviet nuclear physicist and had then been persecuted by the KGB because like Sacherov, who he had studied under and they were close friends, he became a true believer in democracy and the evils of the communist system. So he was kicked out and Republican presidents and vice presidents loved him. Dick Cheney, who just died today, had become a very sinister figure. But Ed had more memories of him because Cheney had brought him in. And when Cheney was Secretary

of Defense already, under the first Bush administration, the older President Bush, he had Ed in to actually, again, he wanted to hear what life was like at first hand, not just reading about it in books. And of course, when you read books, and I've read my share, and you go there, And you find two things. You find, oh, all these books are written by assholes who don't know the, excuse me, the F-U-C-K, what they're talking about, right? But then you also find, my God, X, Y, and Z got it completely right. Russians love George Orwell.

And they ask, they used to ask, certainly, maybe he's more out of fashion now, because Russia, even under Putin, is much more open than it ever was under the communists, which again, you never hear. But in the communist era, especially and after it, in the generational change and the openness that followed, people would always say rhetorically, and in conversation it came up again and again, how George Orwell was an Englishman in a relatively free country, he always was able to say what he wanted, and he was very much anti-imperialist in this time, too. He loathed the British Empire because he'd served it.

He found it vile, which is never discussed today, but he found it vile. But Orwell, in 1984, an animal farm, completely recreated every totalitarian state, what they're like, the corruption, the misery, the despair, the fear, the knowledge that every move you make, every twitch of your fingernail is being closely watched. I mentioned Professor Luzanski before, who became a dissident against American fascism and American totalitarianism long before he died. A decade before he died back in 2014, or thereabouts. Yeah, 2014.

It was June 2014, I even remember that. I dropped by his apartment where he had a reasonable and brilliant wife, Tatiana, a remarkable lady herself, were living at the time. The kids had grown, so they were, you know, in a, what's some. the word, you know, after the kids have going, you downsize for comfort. And they were living in this very pleasant department near the Van Ness Metro in Washington, D.C. And we were having a morning coffee. And Eddie said to me something that I don't really know in them for decades at that point. We'd been on the Washington Times at the same time. And he said to me, Marty,

The Americans are turning their own country into the Soviet Union, and they don't even realize they're doing it. And that was one of the scariest things I have ever heard in my life. I felt, as they say metaphorically, the prickles on my spine rise. Because I know an Eddie for 30 years almost at that point. And I revered him. You still do. And it just, you know, sometimes somebody will say something, just a phrase, you know this. It'll hit you in the solar plexus or bong, right, at your third eye, the glum, and you know, it's like it's not physical.

It's only psychological, it's mental, but the idea, the shock, the realization stops you cold in your tracks. And that's what that did when he said that, because it has been going in that direction ever since. There is more independence of thought, not in the televised media. The Russian government takes very care to monitor that, regulated very carefully. But even there, you know, there's still the internet and there's still some dissidents. But if you look at the print newspapers that openly operate in Moscow, in Russian as well as in English, There's much more criticism of policies in Ukraine and of Putin than there ever was of Biden's ghastly policies here in America. Under President Trump, of course, it's the opposite. There

have been efforts by the so-called mainstream media, as you well know, to delegitimize President Trump since 2016. And by that point, I was also already at technical retirement age. I was over 65, and I'd been to the news business for nearly 30 years at that point when Trump took office, right? 30 years in fact. And I still couldn't believe what I was seeing. I kept thinking, this cannot be happening in America. It cannot be happening in Britain. In Britain you still have, you know, 8, 9, 10 newspapers operating left, right, pro-labour, pro-conservatives, that and the other, but on the fundamental issues that Trump is evil and must be gotten rid of, or that Putin is worse than Hitler, or that we are justified in going

after Ukraine and recolonizing it and re-inslating it the way we did to China, which is literally what they're trying to do. What they did to China in 1840 for 100 years, they are trying to Ukraine for the next 100 years. Britain has actually signed a literal 100-year treaty with Ukraine, which the Ukrainians have leaked, of course, and it includes secret protocols under which Britain will be given full control of customs, excise, and over-taxation collection in Ukraine. What happens to Ukrainian sovereignty after that? What happens to Ukrainian freedom? What happens to Ukrainian prosperity? It'll be what if it never happens and it won't happen. It's mission impossible. It's a delusional dream by the British deep state and government

and the city of London. Delusional dream, it cannot happen. It will not be allowed to happen by the Russians or the Chinese or even the Germans and the democratic Western Europeans in their own way because something they have not out of idealism but their own interests and Britain doesn't have the clout to impose this kind of slavery on Ukraine the way they did on the Chinese people for a hundred years and i'm beginning to learn you have your own stories to tell in canada it was done the british way much more discreetly the people who suffered were primarily not white people coming in because what's the population of canada today 40 million 40 million yep and you know 30 40 years ago we only have that Canada is huge so uh you know for

Right immigrants coming in, I think by and large it was much better in Canada than it was for the first generation of any immigrant group, whoever came into the United States because the population pressure and competition for resources, so much less. But if you look at, as you know, the very dark stories that have emerged about the persecution and sexual exploitation and pillaging of lands of the first nation peoples of North America, of course. Canada especially, it's shocking. And as you know, there are still scandals about this coming out on a regular basis. And our mutual friend Matt Ehren, and his amazing wife, Cynthia Chung, as we both know, have been doing heroic work over the years in helping get those stories out to the public as they ought to be. But this is what the British deep, not the British people, which is different, but the British deep state has in mind for Ukraine. And they've already been explicit about it.

A hundred year treaty? What does that mean? It means exploitation. It means empire. It means colonialism. It doesn't mean protection and respect. It took Canada 150 years under the British Empire from the seven years war up to the 1920s to win effective independent status by the early 1920s.

And look at the number of dead Canadians who died on Vimy Ridge and on the Western Front because of the bundles of the British Empire before that. Sorry, go ahead. I've been, I've been toying with this question because I get told I'm too much of an optimist and it's not the way the world works. And I look at this guy and you, Marty, and you've been all over the world covering all the different tyrannical regimes is kind of what I hear. and I don't mean to, you know, silo you off, but you've stared at a lot of different governments and how they work. And like, it's not that I'm an eternal optimist that, you know,

I think there's this utopian world where we all just get along to get along. But at the same token, you mentioned a word earlier with Russia just wanting to co-exist. I think that's how it was said, but just basically, or maybe that the U.S. should just allow, like we could just coexist. Is that an impossible thought? Like, can we just coexist? Like Russia? Because when I look at Russia, if I'm wrong on this, please point out something different.

You got, you got Stalin and the Soviet Russia, they go through, Soviet Union. You go through like these atrocious years. I don't think any listener can go, oh, no, Soviet Union wasn't that bad. It's like, no, it was pretty bad. Yeah. And then you get to the fall of the Soviet Union and you get Yeltsin. And you're saying Yeltsin was body. far as bad as any of the dark years of stalling.

You're talking about it being, it's smelling like urine everywhere you went. It's just the spare, they're impoverished. It's just everything. And it gives rise then to Putin. Putin walks in and he go, is he a good man? No, he's a pretty dangerous man. He's done some things. But what do he do for the Russian people who he served?

He brought them out of the gutter. And so when you're sitting here on this side, I go, okay, you can love or hate Putin. But the people that live there, you're telling me, he's given them a better life. And any leader that gives people a better life, all of a sudden, they're going to follow that guy a lot farther than a guy who's taking everything they have and they can't put food on the table. And kids are dying. The elderly are dying. Everybody you're dying, everybody's dying. Life sucks.

Everywhere you go, it stinks on and on and on. The things go. So it gives me a good mindset of like, okay, you can sit and hate put and all you want. the Russian people by and large can remember a dark time under Yeltsin. And they're going to be sharing those stories for years to come because they're still alive. So that's what's motivating your enemy right now. Right in the West, we have this enemy. It's Putin.

It's Russia. We got to get rid of them. And I'm like, well, is there this? I'm not like this crazy optimist guy where we're all going to hold hands and walk around. But coexist sounds pretty nice right now. When you're talking about going to nuclear war or whatever this war looks like, I'm like, why would we do that? Why can't we just coexist? Putin isn't, as far as I know, isn't landing on Canadian soil and trying to round up every Ukrainian to send him back there.

He doesn't, like, I haven't seen that. But this co-exist thing, to me, it's like, can we get there? Like, is that even possible? It should be. We've had it before. We should have it again. I know personally people, bless them when they're still around in their 70s, their 80s, one very eminent name comes to mind.

And that is Raymond McGovern, who is now in his 80s veteran CIA analyst outstanding. He personally briefed at least four Republican presidents on Russia. And they were specifically Richard Nixon, he goes all the way back to that, and then also Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan, and the elder and vastly superior of the two Bushes, though very dangerous and formidable man himself, not to be taken lightly, which people do, George Herbert, Walker, Bush. He briefed them all. And he has been for at least the last 25 years an outspoken critic, one of the leading critics of our insane policies towards Russia. And he is a successful profit, and there are many others like him. They predicted what was going to happen.

You are not preventing a new Cold War, you will not succeed in breaking up Russia, all you will succeed in doing is radicalizing Russia and entire generation of Russian people against the West. I had a friend, I'd known from my Middle East years, many years ago. I won't mention him by name, he may take a legal action against me, but I broke off with him after nearly half a century, because in a chat group we were both involved with, and he isn't in the United States, he was originally Canadian, God help us, but he hasn't been back in Canada in decades. And he insisted in giving his solution for the world crisis. Assassinate President Trump, God forbid, and assassinate President Putin, God forbid.

And I say God forbid in Putin's case, because whoever took over in such a case would be much more likely to press the thermonuclear button even than Putin would. And I think Putin is perfectly capable of doing it. He is. I was given, this is more than 30 years ago, I mean, I'd be on other side of the fence from the NAA, but I was given access back into the early 1990s into the British intelligence services assessment, psychological assessment of Boris Yeltson when he took office. And it was a very frightening assessment. The assessment, the assessment was, yes, he is pro-Western, yes, he wants detente, yes, he is liberalizing the economy as we want them to. Yes, he is in favor of democracy, at least in the abstract. He wasn't

in reality. He sent tanks to shell the parliamentary building. The White Houses of the House was then held in Moscow, looking out over the Moscow River, when Parliament was still in session. That's how much of a Democrat he turned out to be. Bill Clinton and his people openly boasted in the Time magazine. cover stories on this, that they fixed this 1996 election, they manipulated it so that Yelsohn would win when most of the Russian people already loathed and hated him. We were manipulating so-called free democratic elections in Moscow, in Russia, in all of Russia, before we ever were doing it to ourselves in the United States. That's horrific. But the psychological assessment

that the Brits came up with, I was told, in 1991, I was briefed, was that with all the good things we see about Yeltsin, he's a very dangerous man. He's an alcoholic, even by Russian standards. He's often out of control because of his booze. I covered him both in Russia, but also when he came around America before he became president of Russia. In I think it was sometime at late 1988 or the summer of 1980s fall of 1989 you can look it up he goes around the united states and wherever he went sometimes he even missed appointments of major speeches because he was too drunk but not just on vodka he discovered jack daniels whiskey which was the great passionate love of the rest of boris nikolayevich helsson's life discovering jack daniels borben do you see that in any of the

assessments of him. But the British assessment of him was this. He's so uncontrollable and volatile and drunk in public that he's a much more dangerous threat than anyone since Khrushchev to actually press the thermal nuclear button. Now Putin up to now has been much less of a threat in that fundamental area, but could he press the button and has he already approved a surprise preemptive strike on us? He may have done. If he hasn't done, he could easily do so. Because not just him, but the entire Russian establishment feels we have pushed them into an existential corner.

And no wonder, we have people like Senator Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut. How can the idiots in Connecticut keep re-electing this dangerous psychopath who openly boasts, boasts that we are draining a Russian people dry of blood of the young people? And that's why we have to keep feeding the Ukrainians weapons. the Ukrainians are killing Russians for us. We didn't have that kind of talk. I'm old not to remember. I lived through the entire Cold War.

We never dared to talk that way about the Soviet Union, and even they never turned to talk about us in the United States and Canada that way, ever through the Cold War, ever. And here is a United States Senator openly in public boasting up, and he's not alone. You hear it from so many of them, and all these wonderful thoughtful thinking, thank people. No. You are sending 300 million Americans and 330 million Americans and 40 million

Canadians overwhelming to their deaths. That's what these evil, incompetent clowns are doing. I'm sorry. Again, I wandered off in my own tangents from what you were asking, but hopefully it's relevant. I'm, I'm, you know, like there's a, the, the saying, you know, the saying, you you know, strong men create good times, good times, create weak men, weak men create hard times. And I just, you know, I wonder if we're just, you know, how old are you then today, Marty? 75, three quarters of the century. Okay. So in your 75 years, does that saying hold way, you know, does it carry water?

Like, it's 100% true. So then are we just, are we just at the time of weak men and we're going into hard times here? Yes. And there's an irony to this. I think our strong people are already here, and you're one of them. And your wonderful Prime Minister in Alberta, she's another of them. Yes, Premier, Premier. Premier, thank you.

Very good point. But nearly 40 years ago, my editor-in-chief, Arnaud de Borgrath saw me hiking down the road from the bus into the I think you want to bust up to go back downtown. The Washington Times building in those days was way in the outskirts of Washington. I was already in his good books. He knew who I was. So he stops his chauffeur-driven stretch limo, very stretched, stretch limo. Arna was very much into conspicuous consumption lesson.

And I'm riding with the great man. I'm riding with my top boss, the editor-in-chief in the Washington Times. So I'm eager to, I'm young and I'm eager to impress. This is nearly 40 years ago. And I come up with what I think is a wonderful question for Arno. It's exactly what you just said, Sean. Why don't we produce great men anymore to lead us with wisdom? You know, we had Harry Truman, we had Eisenhower.

And actually there are negatives to be said truly about them, especially Eisenhower. There was a fraud from beginning to end. Or Henry Kissinger, who had more than a whiff of sulfuric darkness around him. And I was privileged to be a lunch and dinner guest with him over the years many times. And Henry was great company, a wonderful dinner companion, amazing wit, kept all his genius and brilliance even to the age of a hundred. None of this was written for him. He was, it was exemplary, he was extraordinary. And of course there was the darkness too,

but the brilliance and the vision and the competence were always the So I said to Arnold Borgraft nearly 40 years ago, why aren't we producing people like this anymore? I thought it was a profound question. He floored me with his answer, Sean. Oh, we're still producing the Marty. They're all over the place. They're all over America.

It's just here, and then he gave the punchline, the killer punch. It's just with our political system being so screwed up. And all the corrupt interests around the people who know what to do and would do it are never given a chance. to do it. They're kept away from par and they're never elected to Congress either. And that stopped me in my tracks and I was too young to fully appreciate what he was saying. And now, even now, I get more understanding of what he said then than I dreamed of even over the years since because it's this. You look at an idiotic, contemptible, ludicrous, pathetic, childish, pretentious, piece of shit like the West Wing, which the British public in their wisdom booted

the greatest television series of all time, better than Dickens, better than anything William Shakespeare or George Bernard Shaw ever wrote, better than anything. That's what they think. Oh wow, it gives us a look into the appearance of what's really going on in the White House. And you have a president, it played very well by Martin Sheehan, who is idealistic, who is decent, who never rapes interns the way Bill Clinton. And many of us. other American presidents did before and after him since. You know, the Secret Service didn't expect to like Barack Obama. They didn't go for his policies. They didn't go for his liberalism. And he's

intellectually, he's not one of the guys. He was very sleutie and very quiet and shine reserve. But they came to their own surprise by and large. I was told by our White House correspondence of UPI to respect and admire him, even when they didn't vote for him or like him. But they respected him. Why? For two reasons. First, he had a warm family life with Michelle on his daughters and he genuinely doted on his daughters. They weren't just photographic opportunities for him. First point. And secondly, he was meticulous as George Bush Jr. was not about paying many visits to American soldiers who had their limbs blown off in George W. Bush's endless, needless wars. Obama was meticulous in honoring the dead and showing compassion and tribute to the living,

who'd survived the needless wars that he did not end and did not dare to end but had not initiated at least. You have to talk to people who are actually have skin in the game, who have been on the spot, who have dealt with people. I mean, how do I know Madeline Albright was not the great genius that she had to be as the first lady secretary of state, a nation of out of control feminism? You can have wonderful ladies like your Premier, not Prime Minister Premier, in Alberta, or Mrs. Margaret Thatcher, who was the most important and successful British

Prime Minister in the 80 years since the end of World War II, lover or loather. But you can also have idiots, idiot and competence taking over, and Madeline Allbright was one of those. Hillary Clinton told to another more sinister and more competent category, but maybe that's a story for another time. But how do I know this about Madeline Allbright? I traveled with her with the US Press Corps. I once almost accidentally vomited over her when she came over, you know, to work the Washington Times as was making a point to me just at the time. And I'd had a night at a party in Moscow the night before drinking quite literally limitless shots of vodka, but doing it the way the sensible Russians do it with lots of food, so you absorb

it when you're going on to you at least semi-conscious and it doesn't put you into the emergency ward, as has happened to me on other occasions. So, but I was in a tipsy still in a delicate state. And the sight of Mrs. Albright bending over me to make a point for the readers of the Washington Times was so ludicrous and appalling and idiotic that I nearly vomited over her. I nearly lost it, literally. And I kept thinking, what you said before, Sean, you've been all these wonderful places, You've covered all these wonderful stories, you've had all these wonderful scoops.

But nobody will remember any of that. If you lose control of what's in your throat, you're only going to be remembered as the poor schnook who vomited over the first lady secretary of state of the United States. As you can see, I survived just, I managed to hold it in. But sometimes the line in, you know, in the US Navy and aircraft carriers in World War II, Senior officers said the line between being a hero and being a despised schnuck and failure because of what you do or don't do or order or don't order. In battle, it can be as little as a couple of seconds or 12 seconds. Because you only have that amount of time to make a snap call and you can't know whether you're right or wrong.

A lot of it is either pure instinct or the grace of God. God. And if you don't have the grace of God, look, I'm writing my memoirs at the moment. And I'm starting them not with, you know, my life, which I've been in interesting places before I came to Washington. But when I came to Washington, when I was catapulted into all of this. And the first point I make is Napoleon was right and Margaret Thatcher was right. They both trusted in their luck. If I can tell one Thatcher and Russia-related story here, I was asked, I'd only been on the Washington Times two or three months before. But then I was on nothing at the very bottom of the Belfast press. I wasn't a star of the Irish press. I was doing a most obscure, dredged stuff possible,

and I had dear friends who gave me work I liked doing. But it was very obscure. You know, I got it just because they were my friends. And all of a sudden, here I am at the apex of Washington journalism. And my editor-in-chief asks me to brief Margaret Thatcher's private security advisor on Gorbachev. Now, I never met Gorbachev at this point. I've done my due diligence. I've done my homework on them, as I know you always do, as you even did on me.

And I've been covering him closely for just two or three months, but I had been covering him closely, very closely. So I said to this man, I can release his name now. He's dead, unfortunately, a number of years. He was a very controversial, but to me a very good man with a very good friend. And a brilliant man, his name was David Hart, H-A-R-T. And I said to him, he asks, can he The great question, can we do business with him with Gorbachev. And I said, well, they've not even given me the money to fly to Moscow yet. In fact, the Russians wouldn't let anyone from the Washington Times in then or for another couple of years.

Later it changed completely. But I looked at them closely and I talked to the best Sovietologists in Washington, America, who were the best in the world in those days. And I said, yes, I can give you an assessment. You can do business with him. He's sincere. He's not a fake Stalin. He really wants to reform the system.

But understand this. You can do business with him. But he isn't going to be here for that long. I was already saying that. Because he's hapless. He's unlucky. I don't know how else to describe it, I said. And all of a sudden, he seized on this.

Oh, he said, unlucky is he? She'll want to know that. She's very lucky. And she knows it and she trusts her luck. Now in all the mountains of books and articles and commentaries I have seen on Margaret Thatcher and you have seen your shirt too. I know. I've never seen that, have you?

Anyone saying, oh, she's lucky you know and she knows she's lucky and she trusts her luck. That's supposed to be beneath the dignity of a great statesman. You know, we're told great statesmen are chess players. Pretentious bags of shit like Big Bergenzky do play chess and take it seriously. So that the Soviet leaders, which is why there is no Soviet Union anymore, because if you look at the great grandmasters in chess, they're all lunatics. None of them have marriages, few of them have kids, none of them have drinking buddies. None of them will have a night out, just, you know, having a hand, playing a friendly hand

of poker, finding out who the person who is at the table. because there's always a Rube Goldberg type character there, the rest of us know in fleece. I mean, I was never a great poker player. I wish I was. I loved to boast about it. But, I mean, if I survived into the middle of the game and got out with very modest losses below 100 bucks, I felt it was a successful evening, you know, that kind of thing. But you know who the schnooks are. And the great American leaders, there's a major book to be written in this in political science, poker and the rise of the United States, starting with Hamilton Fish and Abraham Lincoln and

going through Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower, and Kennedy, of course, the great American presidents were all great poker players. So was Nixon. So was Nixon. I don't know for sure about Ronald Reagan. I think he would have probably cleaned the house on every occasion because he looked so innocent, an R.G. Whiz. And so he was always underestimated. Just as President Trump has always underestimated, because his bluster and bluff in public. This is a man who inherited hundreds of millions of dollars,

turned it into fortunes worth billions of dollars, declared bankruptcy on at least three occasions, and came back successfully from every one of them, and won outright victory in a system biased against him as president of the United States, two occasions. Now he's very old now, 78, 79. No doubt he's not as it's based anymore. But again, as with Putin, as with Harry Truman, don't underestimate them.

If I may, you know, a story about Truman that was told by one of his first directors of Central Intelligence and heads of the CIA at Rolosco, Hillen Cotter, I think it was. and who was not an uncritical admirer of Truman, to put it nighly. And he's talking with about some other critics of Truman who are calling Truman a hick, an idiot, a simplistic Midwestern foolless, that and the other. What did Admiral Hillen Cotter, who had served under him say, look, on the one hand, this is a man who went bankrupt nearly 30 years ago as a haberdasher, as a sales, a a seller of hats. He ran a hat store in Kansas City with his partner, right? And they went

bankrupt after a few months. Because he didn't know how to position a hat attractively in a window. He couldn't even do that. And then he delivers the punchline. But it's a mistake to underestimate him. Here is President Trump who can act like an utter buffoon in public and does, repeat, repeatedly, repeatedly, and can do some appalling things too. He does a U-turn on the Alaska summit with Putin within 48 hours of it, of coming out of it. But look at what he has achieved also in his life. And you have all these writers in the big, great New York Times lecturing him, oh, he declared bankruptcy two or three times.

How can a man who declared bankruptcy become president of the United States? In 2016, I was telling every American and every European analysts who would listen to me, which was not many, but there were a few, so I made a living from it. What I said to them was, but the United States government has been bankrupt already for 50 years since Lyndon Johnson and the Vietnam War? Isn't that exactly therefore what we need? A president who has experience of bankruptcy and knows how to handle it and liquidate it and come back from it?

That's exactly what we need, you damn ignorant fools. And look at the New York Times. They had the richest news market in the world. And unlike you who have kept your head above water in a much smaller pond, but you know how to swim, Sean. They went out of money. They were owned by the Ox family for 150 years, but who owes them today? And you talked to any liberal Democrat in New York City or Washington, D.C., and they were all piss ignorant of this, and they want to remember it. It is the Mexican government that owns the New York Times. To be precise, it is the man who owns the Mexican government. It is Carlos Sim, the great third world, a smartphone type hyper tycoon, who was worth

at least three or four billion dollars and probably much, much more than that. And he actually got most of his money, honestly, and well, he raised the standard of living of farmers and agrarian people throughout the developing world. Because only when smartphones came along, could any little local hick farmer from Oklahoma to Saskatchewan to central Brazil to India and China, dial his cell phone or her cell phone and see what the market rates were in Shanghai and Sao Paulo, in New York, in Toronto, in Montreal. And we have been in the world, thank God, for 25 and 30 years. where thanks to Carlos Slim, that information has been, crucial economic information has been democratized for billions of people.

But he owns the New York Times. The Ox do not, Salzburgers do not own the New York Times. The Jews no longer own the New York Times. They work for it. Being liberal New York Jews, they're so stupid they don't even realize who they really work for. I realize it. I come from Ireland, which is a tiny country, and I grew up there.

And I didn't just come from Ireland. I grew up in a corner of Ireland. Maybe it's like Alberta, is Alberta the same as living in Ontario or even Quebec? Of course it isn't. You know that, but does anyone south of the border know that? I assume, from what I've seen people in Toronto and Montreal have, and Quebec City and Ottawa have much higher IQs that we have in the great metropolitan, sophisticated intellectual centers of the East Coast here in the United States,

Not that we set the bar high, as you know, we set the bar very low. But you have to understand this difference. I mean, for you, it's second nature. You grew up in it. So did I. The huge advantage we both have, as another friend of mine, you may be familiar with him, Pelle Neroff Taylor, he and I just, incidentally, if I can pitch it here, we've just launched our own modest podcast, the Pele and Martin show. So we're up to five episodes now. We have a quite, a few years to go to match your stellar record, but we'll try. And anytime you want to be our

guest, you know, you could not be more welcome. But Pelle made the point in the last one we did. He's from Sweden. I'm from Northern Ireland. And I was always looking at Washington and American journalism as an outsider. And he was always an outsider and made to remember it, of course, in London journalism. And you see where all the blind spots are. And it's enormous. Nobody in America takes Canada seriously, but you shouldn't feel bad up there or in Alberta, because nobody in America to this day takes all of Latin America seriously. After I had put in five years covering the collapse of communism and the Soviet Union of the Washington Times, the papers editor said, and I got my two, my first two, Pulitzer

Prize nominations, I would later get a third. They said, write your own ticket, Marty. What would you like to do next? I had no hesitation. I wanted to visit Buenos Aires. I wanted to see the great archaeological sites and culture of Mexico. I adore Mexican cuisine. I wanted to visit Tijuanau

up in the Andes, the great Inca cities. So I said, I want to cover Latin America. We didn't have the second main newspaper based in Washington, D.C., we had no Latin American coverage at that point. They didn't occur. So they said, sure. And I realized soon I'd been too clever by half. Bucks myself into a corner because nobody in my paper or in Washington was interested in Latin America. I kept coming up with these stories, both, you know, solid day-to-day stuff and sometimes better stuff. And nobody was interested. Nobody was interested in the change of government or major issues in Brazil, 200 million people or Argentina, the great industrial nation of the southern hemisphere. Nobody was interested.

Or how well Chileus was doing in its democracy after the nightmare years under Pinochet, which of course were imposed on it by Nixon and Kissinger. Another story. And there was no money for travel for me to go there. They sent me all around the Middle East, all around Europe, all around Eurasia and the Soviet Union. I'd had a... And Russia, I'd had a ball. But there was no money for Latin America because it wasn't regarded as important enough. So eventually in my foreign editor at the day, Mark Lerner bless him. That was, thank God, going strong. Now, he significantly, he had the good sense to retire to the Philippines.

But Mark told the editors, it wasn't quite true the way he said it, but he knew this was the way to sell it to them. Marty is adrift after all the stuff he had this piece in Europe. Let's move him to the State Department. And I had another, thanks to Mark, I had another stellar seven-year run covering U.S. foreign policy. And of course, U.S. Russian policy primarily at the State Department from 1992 to 1999 when I moved over to UPI. But first of all, as you know, none of us are God. None of us are always right and always wise. Whenever you find somebody who's that way, who thinks they are, you know, say, thank you but no and don't buy the Brooklyn Bridge from them.

They're assholes every time. There is one idiot I know. in Moscow, an American in Moscow. And he's totally in the hardline Russian camp. He's American. And he regard the driving force of his life is he regards himself as the greatest American foreign policy genius in history. And Kissinger was a joke. Now Kissinger had very dark sides to him and inflicted endless suffering on great nations like Bangladesh and Congo, Zaire, Philippines.

The list, if not endless, is very, very long. Very dark things in Kissinger. But from an American perspective, an American interest, he knew how to play the Soviet Union, he knew how to play China, and he wasn't obsessed with hating the Chinese or hating the Russians the way Przinski was and others. And both the Russians and the Chinese respected Kissinger to the day he died. Kissinger was a major force for preventing World War.

And one of the reasons we're in more danger of world war is although Henry made it to 100, and Biden and his people were so incompetent that they had to ask Henry to go to Beijing to negotiate and easing a financial Chinese pressure on the US, asking a hundred-year-old man to fly halfway around the world because your entire administration in Washington is too incompetent and ignorant and stupid and fearful to do it. Think about that. Nobody ever asked the key. Again, I'm a son of Belfast city. And I'm sure you were born in Alberta. I was born in a small, well, grew up in Saskatchewan. But I mean, where I sit is right on the border.

So it's kind of a funny place. But that's the point. You're a westerner. Yes. You understand this. Plains speaking and common sense. It's not the way you're supposed to be in London or Washington or I suppose these days in Ottawa either.

Right? But it's the way the world ought to be even when it isn't. And when the world always goes off track from the assholes, you're the people they call on. And sometimes they're even desperate enough to call on the likes of me to set them right. And then they'll send us back to Alberta and Saskatchewan or Northern Ireland or central New Jersey, which are much better places to be anyway, but there you are. Exactly. We're from places that are outsider places, where we haven't been taught to totally lie. Well, if we see things with our own eyes,

we don't come up with fancy intellectual excuses for them. We see the way they really are. You're sitting on the greatest energy bonanza in the Western Hemisphere, and you have a Premier who understands this. You have leadership, I think like President Nazarbayev was when I covered him and when I even worked for him indirectly in Kazakhstan. This was a man who started life as a Communist Party chief, though already the Communist Party was, it was still communist and it was still totalitarian, but it was corrupt, but it was a lot softer than it had been under Stalin. And he made

the transition into the wider world. And in Kazakhstan has never been a democracy in the Western sense of the word, but it's not been a totalitarian hellhole either. And Nazarbayev throughout his long, enormously long presidency, did what Putin has done in Russia. And what Khrushchev did in the Soviet Union after Stalin, and Brezhnev tried to do as well. He raised the standard of living of ordinary people dramatically, just as every Chinese leader since Deng Xiaoping has done that. And that has been the source of their mandate from heaven, of their own John Locke's social contract with their people. Just as Premier Smith has been doing that for you folks in Alberta. It is primary politics.

Kuh Bono, as the Romans rightly said, who benefits? If your own people don't benefit, you have a problem. You're either going to be out of office or you have to turn to the secret police. And as even we found in the Soviet Union, even the secret police can only hold down the lid for so long. even the secret police i i'm like okay so you got you got you got a quarters or three quarters of a century of staring at different things and my my short short time in media journalism i have none of these fantasies of mainstream being anything but liars and not telling the truth i have i just i listen you on i'm like man you you you you

It feels like you worked in a time of where you went to Russia and you went and saw it. You came back in your reporter on it. And then you went back over. And was there things they wanted you to say? I'm sure there was. And they pushed on you and all the things. Where I sit now, I feel like, you know, how many people listen to this show trust anything any media organization is saying? I know.

It's a very low number. It is a strange world now of where the New York Times. Fox, CNN, CBC, BBC, just take all the majors. And everybody takes everything with a grain of salt now, like a big giant grain because they're like, they can't seem to get anything right. They can't seem to do any journalism to paint a full story. It's just like they're trying to paint this narrative

and they're sticking to it. And if you contradict it, it's gone. And in your time, Marty, like, was that always the case or has it changed? It's changed for the worst, but it was already getting that way in my time. Very, very significantly shown. I mean, again, I come from Northern Ireland. I come from North Belfast, not prosperous, respectable South Belfast. My wife claims the wrong side of the tracks in working class Industrial New Jersey.

And as a result, she understood the wisdom of not what the super wealthy for the past 40 years, prosperous, liberal, well-meaning, but now naive, Bruce Springsteen says today. But what he was singing, 40 and 45 and even 50 years ago, you know, they've closing down the factory on the railroad tracks, 50 jobs are gone boys. I'm paraphrasing here, but apologies to the boss. 50 jobs are gone boys and they're not coming back. That was my life experience growing up. in Belfast. So I go to Oxford and I have all these intellectually brilliant people who are

intellectually much brighter than I am because as a result they see the world there's, they can make up their own fantasies of either liberal democracy or Trotsky theory or its all theory, it's all hotter. And they will never see what's in front of their eyes. They didn't come from the industrial north of England boundaries, the few people who got in there who did, where my friends and still are to this day, whatever the political views are, because they saw what was happening in front of their eyes. When I was a boy, my father, who wasn't in the ship, a shipyard worker, he was a piano tuner. He rose to hire things in life against all odds, but he always existentially saw him. So he was a piano tuner, which he was on a radio mechanic.

And on Sunday mornings, partly because we could afford to do it, because there was no cost involved, My special treat would usually be as a little boy, and my dad would drive me to the Harland and Wolf's shipyard, which was still one of the biggest shipyards on Earth at that time, and see what they were building. Aircraft carriers, luxury liners, oil tankers, they were still building things. And a few years later, within 10 years, it was all gone. And 20,000 well-paying industrial working-class jobs had gone with it. and within five years of all that collapsing, you had civil war in Northern Ireland.

And you never hear the economic substructure mentioning. It was free market economics. It's free market economics. Wait, I want to hold here for a second. Sure. They take away all the jobs, right? You're talking about well-paying jobs and everything, and then civil war falling right after it.

I'm curious because there's been a lot of talk about civil war. and England being at the center point of that, although other places as well. Do you think that's possible? Well, I mean, not possible, because obviously it's possible, but like, do you think civil war in different places is more like red alert, like it is coming

because they can't change course fast enough? Or is nothing that imminent? It's imminent. It may not happen. I pray it will not happen. One thing you find with dramatic profits in the media, they either lie and are totally false. In Britain, the two great cases of this in my time were Enoch Powell and Nigel Farage. You know, just leave the European Union and you will prosper mightily.

Go into that on another occasion if you like. It was a lie, of course. They might have done a bit better, but they didn't even do that. He doesn't have a clue. and he's going to become Prime Minister of Britain, and he's going to fail catastrophically. I do predict that right now. Based on the polls, I mean, you know, those are my crystal balls. In America, I look at John Zogby's polls for the last 25 years,

and I've known him a little. I knew his brother James, a Middle East activist and analyst, both of them, fine men and brilliant men, and most important of all, fearless men, and honest men. You can disagree with them as much as you like, and I often have, but their data is always impeccable. Here we are a deeply divided country. If God forbid, the assassination attempt on President Trump

before he won the election had succeeded in Butler, Pennsylvania, before the election. I think it was July of 2024. We could have had civil war right then. We could have. It could still come. It could flare from the right. It could flare from the left.

left. I've written books on this. I'll pitch one of them here for your viewers. Please pick it up yourself and recommend it. I need a sale. And I need a publisher for my new edition. I had to publish it myself in Kindle and I need to get it out in a published version. 140 American and British publishers turned it down. Cycles of change. Published in 2015. I'd actually had the idea of 15 years before. I had not even, they weren't the evil, but the most stupid and incompetent editors at major media outlets

who kept me churning, making it longer and longer and then got fired themselves. Another story. But cycles of change analyzes the history of the United States of America as seven distinct periods when the politics, economics, sociology,

and most of all the philosophy and the weight, not just leaders, but ordinary people, think in America, there has not been one single America, there have been seven Americas. There has, and I list them now, there's been the America of Thomas Jefferson, opening the front of the borders and of states rights. There has been a much more aggressive era of Andrew Jackson, which led to the civil war, which was basically stealing the entire continent from the Mexicans and enslaving the Indians and imposing native peoples and imposing

ethnic cleansing on them. That was the second America. Then you had the post-Lincoln America, industrial America, when America along with Germany is the new super-part, two giant superpowers of industry and power and concentration of capitalist wealth. Then you have kinder, gentr of capitalism, and it isn't really, but it claims to be, the progressive era from Theodore Roosevelt through the Great Depression, Hoover. And that's a very, very, dangerous America because it's full of well-meaning idiots who think that the American solutions can be imposed on the rest of the world and happiness will immediately follow. Woodrow Wilson didn't happen that way.

It was a catastrophe for Europe when America imposed its wisdom on Europe after World War 1 rather than the other way around. But then you have what I would regard as the best of the eras, Franklin Roosevelt's era, the New Deal era, Social Democratic America, from 1932 to 193, Plenty of things go wrong. They fight the Cold War. The CIA becomes an evil and dangerous state within a state. President Kennedy is assassinated at an event, which is really a coup of the greatest significance and darkness. You could say, and then you have what Nixon failed to achieve, but Reagan did. You have America as the hyperpower winning the Cold War and again doing what it did so disastrously in 1919, will be. Woodrow Wilson imposing its own simplistic ideas of democracy and capitalism and business and free markets on the rest of the world and making things worse rather than better,

all the while being convinced they're making things better. And that era is running out of steam now and is also the era of free market open border economics, which is not sustainable in the long run. The way I, and you must have scores of thousands of business schools across the United States of America. And I'm sure it's the same in Canada. On our side of the border, every one of those business schools teaches the wisdom of Adam Smith and David Ricardo. And that government must never be involved in the free market, which is a straight lie. Because even when it does not involve it, there are probably de facto invoked in not protecting its own national interests when other countries do.

Right? But above all else, you don't have tariff protections, you don't have control over what you sell to the world, or more importantly, what you import from the world. And everyone who tries to follow the national interest. The first great champions of this in the Western Hemisphere was Abraham Lincoln and his successors. And Britain only goes back, abandons, becomes the most prosperous trade. power in human history around the whole world for 200 years from 1650 to 1850 because of the Navigation Acts and other legislation passed by Oliver Cromwell and maintained by very sensible oligarchs with their own vested interests after that. And on the basis of this strength, they become the most advanced industrial power in the world and the wealthiest financial

power in the world, just as America became after them and just as China has become today. Notice, I don't say as China is becoming. China already is. Therefore, it makes enormous sense, even in the interests of the province of Alberta, to have as close and warm ties with China and to have as much Chinese protective influence in Alberta as you can possibly get in both Edmonton and Calgary.

Because that may be of crucial, importance in preventing future governments in Ottawa from trying to take advantage of or dismantle your own interests and power structure in Alberta in Calgary and Edmonton. If I was going to have a thought set here today, Alberta getting closer ties with China was not on my bingo card. Wasn't on mine either, but it led me there and it's led you there too. This is not a bad thing. It is not a bad thing.

The Chinese are very interested in the long term, just as the British were before them. The Chinese have institutes studying the culture of Iceland. They have language and culture experts on Iceland. Why? How many people live in Iceland? But Iceland is strategic. But only if you're interested in strategically controlling the north of the country. Atlantic Ocean. But you have the United States and you have Europe and you have that matter, you have the Russian Navy. The Chinese I'm going to take over the North Atlantic Ocean today

or tomorrow or at the beginning of 2026. Of course they're not. But how far ahead are they looking? How far ahead do we need to look? And when you're from small countries, tiny countries, like Northern Ireland or the Republic of Ireland or the province of Alberta or for that matter, the great state of New Jersey. We're about to elect our own governor tomorrow. I know who I'm voting for, but since I think the other person is much more likely

to either win or steal the election, I'd better not say it publicly even to you. But exactly. But again, I come from Northern Ireland. There's an old joke. I don't, hopefully you're immune to it in Canada, but it certainly applies the last now in America. Why is there so much religion in Northern Ireland? Why are we all so devoutly Protestant and Catholic?

Why do we take our religion so much seriously than people in England do or in big American cities do? Very simple reason. We know as a matter of record in fact that every five years, the dead rise from the graves and vote. Elections are fixed every five years. You know, all these people who died in the previous five years, their votes are still recorded. In American cities, we're just across the state line from Pennsylvania. Pennsylvania has a very, typically an American state, has a hugely conservative countryside and deeply democratic and liberal, inner cities, especially in for the

Philadelphia. But in an inner city, as I saw even when the election results were coming in from honest elections in Britain and Ireland when I was a boy, the returns come when they're counted. Usually they should come first from the inner cities and then later from the countryside, because it takes longer to bring in and correlate even in these electronic days the rural vote. But that never happens anymore in American elections. It's always the big city. LA and New York and Philadelphia, very much Philadelphia, and Baltimore in Weraland, who are the last to return the results. Why is that?

Because only after the rural results are in, do the big party bosses, especially the Democratic party bosses and the big cities know how many votes they need to manufacture to plausibly win the election? Simple. And of course you have Republican states where it can go in the other direction because everybody does it. Marty, you're almost positioning. I don't know if I'm catching this the right way. I think you probably are. Go on.

Well, you're positioning the United States as the most corrupt, right? You're talking about your elections. And certainly, you know, I got to, I understand. But then what you were saying before that was that China has this vision. looking out 100 years. So why are they starting to study these places? Well, because they have a plan. They have a billion people. They have all these things they're going to start to exert their influence on. And so they want to understand these cultures and places so that they can best use them, work with them. I don't know the word. And if you go back to what the British used to do,

they were roughly the same way. Now, it's brutal. It comes down. down to it, you know, like you've rattled off all the bad things. And yet China looks to be doing the same thing. So why is it painted in such a different light if it's the same tactic the British empire used? Oh, Freud tells us that whenever someone is guilty of not just obviously monstrous crimes like murder or rape or incest or even stealing up doing a Bernie made of and stealing the savings of millions of people, making them vanish. But whenever people, and we've all seen, and clearly you must have too, when you see cruelty in individual families, husbands or wives being cruel to each other, or together being cruel to their children or children being cruel

to their parents, anything, right? What does the guilty party always do? Dr. Freud told us this 120, 130 years ago. They put the blame on the innocent party. They can't face their own guilt. They have to feel they are so noble. At the very same, I did a podcast for our, a seminar online for our mutual friend Matt Ehreth and his partner, wife Cynthia Chung, also in Canada, of course. You see, with all the problems you have up there from Montreal to Alberta, you folks are so, you know, so far, thank God, shining lights of freedom of expression and hope you are. And what Freud tells us, today it's called gaslighting. He called it projection.

And that's what the British Empire always did. We're doing it again in Ukraine today. All those of us who want to end the hideous slaughter of the poor Ukrainian people, 1.8 million dead minimums so far and the idea that they had a happy democracy under Zelensky when in fact it's a criminal state in which human trafficking and child trafficking and enslavement and drug trafficking spreading around the world and money laundering is carried out with total impunity and the total support of the West. It also helps to have supranational outfits like the European Union and NATO or other ones covering your back because even now it's easier to hold individual governments accountable.

You at least have been spurred from Mrs. Freeland, the granddaughter of a genuine Nazi war criminal who visited Auschwitz, becoming your prime minister. At least for now, she may get there yet. She may get there yet. I'm Irish. What does that mean, apart from playing poker? It means we don't suffer under the delusion that the future is going to be automatically better or automatically rational, which the English blitz. and like the Germans of people of today are much more sensible, I think, very much more sensible. But the English people of today are like the Germans war up to Hitler and made them vulnerable

to Hitler. It's the delusion of Emmanuel Kant. It's the delusion that the world needs to be tidy and rational and pure and neat and that there's only ever upward and onward progress. When I was even at school, before I even went to university, I was taught by my teachers. And they were good British imperial patriots. They went now to brainwash me. They believed it totally themselves. And I believed it with them. We all believed it together.

That the course of human history was a rise towards democratic liberal perfection, which Britain in the 1950s and 60s had finally reached. And all the rest of the world had to do was look at how perfect and virtuous and beautiful we were in Britain. Even more dangerously, the East Coast liberal establishment had that view in America. That's why they bombed the entirety out of Vietnam and Cambodia and Laos, especially Cambodia, of course, because they were saving them. They felt morally justified in doing it. That's the problem. My first real encounter with history, apart from the rioting on my street of my native Belfast, which came first, of course,

was when I was a 19-year-old student, Grant knew in Oxford University and everybody made fun of my thick Irish accent. It was much more like that than those days than it is today. You must understand since my dog was a Clark man. It became a little bit more American-ized and soothing. Maybe you would say Canadian-eyized or Kanuk-Eyes, what your correct term is since then. But I was shocked and horrified and idealist and

to occur about what was clearly happening to the per Ebo peoples in the secessionist state of Biafra in Nigeria. And it wasn't hard to learn, because there was an open dissident British press even in those days, that British government and financial policies and interests and oil interests were at the heart of it all. And then I'm at Oxford and the Foreign Secretary of the day, a Britain Secretary of the day, a British Secretary of State. Michael Stewart's totally forgotten individual today and he should not be. He should have been hanged as a war criminal just the way Gurring would have been if he had committed suicide. There's this great new movie coming out called Nuremberg. We're not going to see a movie called Biafra or London about the trial of Harold Wilson and his foreign secretary for totally supporting

the genocidal extermination of the evil people and three million of them died, a million of them children starved to death as direct British policies. It's monstrous. And I asked the foreign secretary directly responsible at age 19 for it changed my life, not just the way I looked at things, but without realizing it of course, it put me on the record of the British security services as a dangerous subversive. Now, I never wanted to join the secret British security or be a spy or a counter spy or whatever. So you could say in a way, it didn't really change my life. But I was clearly marked by them at that, at that point, even at age 19. But I asked him, Mr. Stewart, why are you doing this? And I was expecting him to scream abuse at me and be a Nazi

and be a bully, a thug, you know? And he floored me. He wasn't like that at all, not at all, Sean. He was sweet. He was understanding. He was compassionate, he was nice, and it wasn't an act. Oh, Mr. Sif, he said. It's been such an agonizing policy. I knew sleep at night over it, but it is the only moral thing we can do. If we do not do it all the borders of Africa, we set a precedent for all the independent state borders of Africa to go,

and there will be far worse bloodshed and suffering if we do that than if we support the integrity of the Nigerian state. No, of course, he was an ignorant full of himself with a asshole. It wasn't true, but he wanted it to be true. He wanted it to be true. But I was expecting to meet Heinrich Himmler. I was expecting to meet an NKVD executioner. Sure, I killed 10,000 people, but bullets in the back of their heads, you know,

and I'm proud of it. It was for communism, it was for a better world. You know, what the F are you going to say, do about it, right? He wasn't like that at all. He was a meek, mild-mannered, uh, imagined he was Christian. He wasn't, of course, he was killing a mid three million Christians, but he imagined he was Christian and he imagined he was progressive and above all else he knew he was moral. And all the assholes in London, you find them in Israel too, not just a, uh, or they can, they often can, Israeli liberals will condemn that in Yahoo quite correctly.

for what he's done in Gaza. But they won't say a word about what NATO and Britain are doing to send the Ukrainian people to their deaths by giving them all these weapons that they don't know how to use and it won't work anyway. And all they're doing is cynically sending them to their debts. According to Colonel Douglas McGregor, one of our most brilliant military analysts here,

the death ratio is one Ukrainian soldier, no, sorry, 17 Ukrainian soldiers to one Russian who has been killed. Now, that's not a good deal. It's certainly not a good deal for the poor Ukrainians. History would tell us that it used to be 20 Russians for every dead German or roughly. It was opposite. I mean, is all exactly. And that's the anti-Russian stereotype you still see.

There are actually first class historical videos I've seen. And there are wonderful professors of history like Professor Robert Ketano or Satano Sicilian American names, so I apologize for mispronoun. C-I-T-I-N-O, who, one of the great historians of the Eastern Front of World War II, who point out that far from being thuggish incompetence, which is the big lie the Nazi generals, who we loved and embraced when we were building NATO in the West, the lie that we swallowed from them, the Nazis lost the war. For all the dead Russians they'd slaughtered, most of them who are helpless, defenseless civilians anyway. There is no German militarism anymore. There hasn't been in 80 years. Why? Because all the

German militarists were killed. They were slaughtered. You talked before, and it's a recurrent theme with you, and with me, of course, the reporters who had skin in the game, who had been there, had seen with their own eyes. The New York Times was still a great newspaper through World War II. Their main military correspondent was a man called Harrison Salsbury, who was so good that he predicted the split between the Soviet Union and Communists China 10 years before it happened and at least 12 years before the CIA woke up to it. And all you had to do was read him in the New York Times. That's how good the New York Times in those days was and how good Harrison Salisbury was. Harrison Salisbury said, I saw German militarism die. It did not die because of the superiority of Western ideas and democracy.

It did not die because the Russians sacrificed 100 million men for every one day German or ridiculous talk like that. It died because the Russians were better soldiers and had far better generals and ran their war vastly superiorly, not just to Hitler, but to all the German generals who tried to blame it on Hitler afterwards were equally culpable. and then he delivers the punchline which every sweet meek, mild, liberal, American and British Kumbaya worshipper hates. German militarism died with a tommy gun burst in the belly of every single German soldier. That wasn't a macho thug off the streets of my native Belfast talking. It wasn't an unsophisticated cowboy from Alberta or Saskatchewan like you talking. It was the chief foreign correspondent of the Washington, New York Times,

when that still counted for something when he was talking. And why was he talking that way? Because like you said, Sean, he'd seen it with his own eyes. If I come all the way back, China, they're looking out, I think we can safely assume 100 years, right? I think that that is that is one of the things that China does very differently than then let's say Canada or or somebody with especially with short voting cycles right and they have a vision of where the world is heading they're studying all these different things they're starting to influence they're starting to do a

bunch of different things on the way they want change to happen you see that as being good it's superior to the way we are not Yes, I do see it as being good. Now, it's not totally always good. Our line, which in the 1980s and 90s when I was new in American Young, and the world seemed to be going that way was, our way is superior to their way because they're locked into five-year plans and 10-year plans, like the communist slub, and the Chinese still do.

All their Politburo is trained as engineers. There's a great Canadian Chinese scholar I've recently been reading. He's been around a wonderful man, clearly. Daniel Yang, Wang, W-A-N-G, Dan Wang. And he's written a new book called Breakthrough, right? Which in the globalist way of things, a very good friend of mind in the Middle East of all places, recommend it to me first, and I wouldn't have known about it otherwise. And he believes that America is a lawyer-obsessed society,

and the lawyers have choked all chance for change and growth and quick adaptability in society. Whereas China, he says, is what America was 100 and 150 years ago. It is an engineer's society. They do what we did up to 1970. They build things. They build roads. They build airports. They build dams.

They build electrical generating power. They develop fusion systems that actually work. They do more renewable technology than anybody else in the world. They are practical. And he makes the point, there are some advantages to a loyally society too, but there are huge disadvantages. And he makes a key point. An engineer society raises the standard of living of everybody, because they bring

electrification and television and broadband communication, such as you flourish on, even to Northern Ireland and Alberta and Saskatchewan. They help, ultimately they raise up everybody. Under the New Deal, they finally electrified rural America. Could have been done 40 years before with the technology that was available, but the big city interests were, business interests weren't interested. So it had to wait for the new deal. But it was done.

And America never looked back. Never looked back. Right? But a loyally society ultimately only protects the wealthy and the rich. because they can hire far more lawyers and better lawyers to jam up the process. And this happens. And another key factor is something, as you know,

our dear friend Matt Erwin is very into, and I think your excellent premier and your provincial government rightly have to desperately fight too. And that is the ghastly, fairy tale myth of environmentalism, which is used to smother and destroy all independent, economic growth and prosperity. Oil is essential, as I said before, not just for cheap energy to heat your homes or par your cars and your pickup trucks.

Oil is essential for the food you eat because all the food you eat is growing even in Canada and certainly in the United States. It is not grown sweetly and organically. It cannot be. To feed seven billion human beings that. than one billion human beings eight 200 years ago, which is dramatically the case, you need fertilizer and you need artificial fertilizer because the natural fertilizer from bird droppings in guano down the length of Chile was used up 120 years ago, and everybody expected Malthusian

famine then. And what prevented it? Two German chemists. Carl Bosch, the great engineer and the genius research chemists, and they were a partnership. They worked incredibly well together, Fritz Haber, who both won the Nobel Prize for chemistry for the first time ever being able to pull nitrogen from the atmosphere and converted by chemical proceeds into nitrate fertilizer. And since 80% of our atmosphere is nitrogen, that means it is limitless in realistic terms. We are not turning out of nitrogen, but we need oil for the huge inputs of oil for the Haber-Bosch process. And if it broke down tomorrow, three quarters of maybe 80% of the people in China and India,

and much of the rest of the world would starve of the 7 billion to 8 billion, I think it's nearly 8 billion now human beings alive in this world, five and a half billion of them at least live and have a hope of love, life and of decent life because of two obscure German chemists who lived 120 years ago, the Haber-Busch process. But what this means is that Alberta's oil is never going to go out of fashion, even if we could have solar power magnificently on demand tomorrow. And it's destroying the economies of California and Australia, as you know as we speak. You know this. You're a leading expert on this in the media. And you know how

few people in the media, even on our side of the fence, know anything about this whatsoever. Nothing about it whatsoever. Australia and California going bankrupt with soaring energy costs. That's like communism starving all those poor people in Ukraine to death in what was then and should be again a bread basket of the world. The bread basket of the world. Whatever else you say against Perron and its fascists in Argentina, and I would say a lot against them. But at least the Argentinian people never starved when Peron and his successors were in par. They weren't that stupid, but the communists were in Ukraine. And all these liberal idealistic environmental green governments are in both Australia.

and most of all, as you know, in California. How long before California comes pleading to Alberta? Oh, bail us out, please. Well, that's if the Canadian liberal government allows it, because the Canadian liberal government is trying to move us away from oil. Exactly. Exactly. And Mrs. Freeland may be gone for the moment, but the liberalism and the greenism and the idiocy are still there.

Look, in two world wars, the British naval blockade in World War I, revolution after World War I, hundreds of thousands of tons of British bombs dropped on the rur in World War II. Germany occupied by the Soviets from the East and by the US and Britain from the West and they all failed to destroy the great industries of the rour that had been built in the 1840s and 50s. Who destroyed them? You just gave us the answer. The green liberals of Berlin and Brussels destroyed them. Mrs. Merkel destroyed them to appraise all these green environmental policies, the collapse of American prosperity, the plunging of hundreds of millions of Americans into economic misery really gets worse from Bill Clinton and the ghastly little Bush,

George Bush Jr., George W. Bush, when they let China into the World Trade Organization. And this is not an anti-Chinese rants. The Chinese rightly follow, morally followed their own national interests and the interests of their people first. China could have risen to all the prosperity it has, and the Americans didn't have to cut their own throats to do it. But they did it because they worshipped the false gods of free trade, Adam Smith and David Ricardo, which is taught in all their business schools, with no rejoinder or criticism permitted or allowed,

as you know. And also because of the environmental crap. And when does the environmental crap take over American policy and start choking the American economy and strangling it to death? Why, under that great conservative, patriotic, rich. M. Nixon, who was a totally piss ignorant asshole when it came to anything about industry or business or economics whatsoever. But of course, it's a classic example of the Kruger Dunning effect. He thought he was a genius. Whenever you come across people who think there are geniuses, hell no. Look, I've had one or two people who don't know me, who said, oh, the

way you talk, you're a genius. God forbid, you know, whether you cross yourself, Catholic or Orthodox, either way. No, and I don't want to be, because they're all assholes. They were all assholes. What I would like to be is a kid off the streets of Belfast, who saw what was in front of his eyes and had enough wit to listen to people who know what they were talking about.

I have more to learn from you than you have from me because you've been covering these issues for so long and so well. And I hope you'll have me back, not just to rant and rave, which you'd let me do, but to listen to you. Well, I tell you what, you and Pelly, you invite me on. I'll come and talk some things, Canada, with you too. Do you have Pelley's email?

I do. Well, there we are. I'll get the circular email going right away. He loved it. I mean, one thing I learned from the neoconservatives in Washington, whom I have loathes despised for 40 years and more, one of my great career mistakes was never taking them seriously. I never thought people who were such simplistic idiots could end up rising to such

power in the world. But they always have, they're like the Freemasons. They always scratch each other's backs. And we're the good guys. We need to scratch each other's backs too and appear in each other's shows, you know? That's the lesson, the one good lesson I think I took from the neocones, help your friends and always call out for them to help you. Because that's all I ever did. They didn't have any arguments. They didn't have any facts. They didn't have any integrity. They're not lovable. They're not honest. appreciate you coming on the show and uh well lots of thoughts there in uh and an irishman's brand absolutely what what can i i become more green the older i get what can i say and look with your name

obviously you're one too shone one sorry one you're irish no definitely not wow well with your name you obviously have parents who love not the irish what can i say Well, thanks again, Martin, for coming on and sharing some thoughts. Thank you, my friend.