The Connect- with Johnny Mitchell - "It's About To Get Worse"- CIA Agent Andrew Bustamante Explains Why It's Time To Leave America

Episode Date: September 29, 2025

Former CIA officer Andrew Bustamante returns for an unfiltered deep dive into the realities of power, propaganda, and politics in America and beyond. From why Joe Rogan won’t have him on, to the CIA’s controversial role in heroin distribution during the War on Terror, this conversation pulls back the curtain on government accountability, shadow operations, and the blurred line between freedom and control. We also cover the assassination of Charlie Kirk, media manipulation, the rise of conspiracy culture, and how global players like Israel, China, and Russia influence U.S. policy. Andrew shares why he’s leaving the United States for the sake of his children’s future and breaks down how cancel culture, polarization, and fear are eroding real democratic freedoms. If you want to understand how empires fall from within, the mechanics of information warfare, and the uncomfortable truths behind America’s foreign and domestic policies, this episode is a must-watch. Go Support Andy! IG: https://www.instagram.com/everydayspy Book: https://shadowcellbook.com/ Website: https://everydayspy.com/ This Episode Is #Sponsored By The Following: BRUNT Workwear! $10 Off at BRUNT with code [INSERT CODE] at https://www.bruntworkwear.com/MITCHELL #bruntpod HIMS! To get simple, online access to personalized, affordable care for ED, Hair Loss, Weight Loss, and more, visit https://www.hims.com/connect BetterHelp! As the largest online therapy provider in the world, BetterHelp can provide access to mental health professionals with a diverse variety of expertise. Our listeners get 10% off their first month at https://www.betterhelp.com/connet Join The Patreon For Bonus Content! https://www.patreon.com/theconnectshow 00:00 Intro & Preview of Key Topics 01:43 CIA Guest & Joe Rogan Controversy 05:37 Inside CIA Culture & Public Perceptions 08:41 Legal Limits & CIA Operations 13:08 CIA's Involvement in Heroin Trade 21:02 America's Changing Democracy & Voter Apathy 22:49 This Episode Is Sponsored By BRUNT Workwear! 24:47 Charlie Kirk Killing & Free Speech Implications 31:12 Conspiracy Thinking & Information Warfare 38:48 Who Commits Political Violence & Social Change 43:14 Today's Sponsors! 47:02 American Freedoms & Erosion of Rights 53:54 Government Trust, Rights & Cultural Division 01:00:42 Why Leave America? Cultural & Economic Reasons 01:11:29 Debating Who Should Have the Right to Vote 01:22:45 Geopolitics: Europe, US, BRICS, & Declining Influence 01:34:03 Israel, Gaza and Shifting Middle East Power 01:45:27 Global Hegemonies: China, Russia & Economic Realignment 01:53:05 US Decline, Venezuela Parallels, and Future Risks 02:00:08 US Exodus: Why Americans Are Leaving 02:13:21 Will the US Break Up? History and Future Stability 02:17:46 Israel–Palestine, Regional Influence & Economic Futures 02:22:44 CIA Memoir 'Shadow Cell' & Insider Insights 02:27:44 Outro & Moving Abroad Plans Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Monopoly is a trademark of Hasbro. Hasbro is not a sponsor of this promotion. Over these next two presidential cycles in the United States, we're going to see what comes next. They're forgetting that one cycle before Mussolini, one cycle before Hitler, was the person who enabled the worst leader of the time to be elected. Donald Trump is not the worst leader that America is going to see. Now you understand why I'm leaving the United States.

This week, Andrew Bustamante is back in studio. You know Andy by now. He's the former CIA spy and viral YouTube creator who's predicting that the situation in the United States is going to continue to get worse in the coming years. He talks about the Charlie Kirk assassination and what that means for free speech in America, how the government has lost control of the situation in Ukraine, Israel and Gaza, and how China and the Bricks nations have already started to wield more power over the global south than the United States. Most ominously, he explains how the American dollar is headed for a free fall

and predicts a sovereign debt crisis that will further exacerbate political violence, an expansion of the police state, and an enormous exodus of American refugees fleeing to other parts of the world. He also lays out a plan for how ordinary Americans can shield themselves from the coming chaos and escape the United States. Check out Andy's best-selling new book, Shadow Cell, about his days working undercover missions in the War on Tear, available wherever you get books. And for a fascinating bonus chat with him,

head over to the Patreon. Patreon.com slash the Connect Show. This is one of the most important, alarming conversations I've had in a very long time. Andrew Bustamante right here on The Connect with Johnny Mitchell. Thank you, dude. Thank you for being here. I know you came down to do Rogan. You were knocking on his door and he did not let you in. Not quite, but close, yeah.

We had to start with the clickbait right away. I, you have been black, blacklisted or you've been turned down. Rogan's people explicitly got back to your people and said, yeah, we're not interested in having you want. And because he has Mike Baker, a CIA agent on every month, nobody likes this guy. If you go read the comments on his episode, they're like, this guy's a plant. This guy's no good. This guy's. Sounds like my plan. Yeah, sounds like my feeds. Of course. Of course. Yeah. I guess you can't expect any comments to be good. But

why do you think? think that is because you're a you have deep deep personal experience in the CIA you're extremely knowledgeable you're you have proprietary information that I think most people in the CIA never have access to you worked in the field so what's up with that you know I don't know the answer I the best I can do is guess I'm not really like it's not like I'm losing sleep that I don't get to meet Joe Rogan in a studio but I will say that it's it's it's It's interesting to me that we would be actively turned down. I think that's what's interesting to me.

I've been with some really fantastic hosts. I've had fantastic reviews about what it's like to interview me, to talk to me, to work with me in the studio. To kick it with you, your good hang? I mean, people, that's the feedback I get. And I know people have actively promoted me to the Joe Rogan podcast, or the Joe Rogan show or the Joe Rogan experience. but for whatever reason

the invite hasn't come, won't come, may never come. It's not something like, it's not something that bothers me, but I understand why people are curious about it. Well, because we want a CIA's, the CIA agent's perspective, and this guy, Mike Baker, he's a politician. He specializes in non-answers.

I mean, I can sympathize with Mike for sure because it's tough to know what you can and can't say. it's also really hard to know that what you can and can't say essentially boils down to some bureaucrats somewhere who makes the claim that you overstepped your briefing. So I get it. I mean, it's, I can't, I can't fault Mike Baker for what he professionally does to maintain his commitment to national security. I also can't fault him for what he does to, to promote his efforts as a, as a private intelligence specialist, right? You can't, you can't fault a guy for doing what he has to do to

stay out of jail. Andy, talk shit, man. Talk shit. What the fuck is that? That was a political answer, dude. That is a political answer because, because here's, here's the truth of it, man. The truth of it is just like me, Mike is also facing the reality that every year you're out of the agency is one year that you've lost access. I've been out since 2014. That's a long fucking time. It's been 11 years that I've been out. Yeah. The agency changes. The agency changes with every new president, right? Every new director. So to make the claim that we have any kind of proprietary information, that's still

relevant is a very hard claim to defend because that place changes so fast. So while people watch me and they like me and they like hearing what I have to say, or while people watch me and they hate me and they hate hearing what I have to say, it's irrelevant to me because my goal is to just try to share some sort of insight into what it's like to be CIA, active CIA, former CIA, whatever you want to know. And Mike has a different goal in mind, but we both know that the unspoken truth is that we're not fucking relevant anymore, that the people out there doing the job, the people out there putting their life on the line, those are the people we need to respect.

But you can't talk to them because they're doing the job undercover. I think what I'm insinuating and what I hear a lot of people insinuating is that the CIA is using guys like Mike Baker, who are supposedly retired, but are actually spokespeople and propagandists who put out either misinformation, they deflect. Is that possible? Do they do that? Would they have a guy like Mike Baker actually, you know, intentionally pushing him to get on a platform like Rogan to put out what they want the world to hear?

No. So you're overestimating. There's a few things that are wrong with that train of thought. And I understand that people, especially people who have an inherent distrust for the federal government, they can build a case for why CIA would use people as their propagandist, spokespeople, you know, plants. But the two big things to understand are first, CIA has to follow the law. They have to follow the law inside the United States.

Outside of the United States, we have a presidential authority that allows us to break international law in defense of national security. But inside the United States, everything we do has to fall under the law. or we are held responsible under the judicial branch. CIA is an executive branch organization. That's in theory. That's it, right? No, that's not fucking theory.

That's documented law. Right. But you're still depending, because it's a shadow organization, you're still depending on CIA to turn themselves in when there is rule breaking. If you're asking the CIA to police themselves. It's not a shadow organization. It's another misconception, right? CIA, we build shadow operations.

We don't create a shadow organization inside the United States. What CIA does is overseen by a whole fucking slew of attorneys. People don't realize that. CIA has a whole slew of attorneys whose job it is to find a loophole somewhere in the law that lets us do what we need to do, but we are still accountable to the law. That's how Snowden whistleblowing blew back on us. That's how, you know, anytime you have found. CIA doing something that was illegal, it's because the loophole that some attorney found didn't

hold up in a court of law in the judicial branch. So we know that we're held accountable to the law inside the United States as it pertains to American citizens until those American citizens take an action that puts them into a different authority, which is why when some fucking American becomes an ISIS plant, we can bomb the shit out of that guy. But until they're actually committing an act of terrorist against the homeland, they're still protected by America. American law. Can you think of an instance in recent history where the CIA has has broken the law? Like, you know, the way the FBI, you know, consistently throughout the years has, you know, spied on its own citizens, probably was behind the killing of Malcolm X, you know, obviously had

something to do with MLK getting touched. We know these. These are documented now. Can you think of an instance, and I'm not even asking you to like theorize about what happened with JFK. Just put that aside. Can you think of an instance where the CIA did break the law domestically and was held accountable or at least like is pivoted due to public pressure? It's a it's a good question. It's a good question. Because what about what about the Snowden leaks? Like what about the domestic spying? Is that you know, again, you guys are going to think of something more potter more more modern, more current even than snowed. Even than that? Yeah. So I'm thinking, I'm thinking, I'm trying to think, because the challenge there is twofold. One, it has to be a point where they broke the law and were

held accountable. And then the second point is that it also has to be public knowledge. Because I can't, I can't voice anything that's, I can't divulge anything that's classified. Right. So where it's public knowledge. I am almost certain, I'm almost certain that during the war on terror from 2001 to 2021, if you want to consider that war closed, I'm almost certain that CIA was playing a role in the distribution of heroin that we knew was supporting terrorist operations. I want to say that there was an activity where we were supporting operations related to the movement of heroin, that we thought we were safe to support, but turns out we were not safe to support.

I feel like that happened, but I don't know where that exists. Andrew, that's a scoop. Now we're getting juicy. I don't think that's a scoop, man. I'm pretty sure that's public knowledge too. Well, we've, you know, the CIA supported Thai and Cambodian heroin kingpins

during Vietnam, of course, because they were the funding, you know, anti-Viakong, activities, right? We've supported criminal groups in the past, but can you go into that further? Who, I assume these are the, the warlords that were helping us fight the Taliban? Close. So, so, and I'm pretty sure that State Department was wrapped up in this because of USAID as well. I think that's a big part of what made USAID get shut down, exactly what we're talking about. So during the war on terror, one of the efforts to grow influence among, the indigenous non-Taliban Afghan farmers

was to try to motivate them to grow something other than heroin. But the problem was that heroin was a money-making cash crop course. So how are you going to get a farmer to turn his 100 acres into corn instead of heroin? Because if he grows heroin, it's going to go to the Taliban. It's going to be used to fund Taliban operations. So USAID, with the support of Department of State, with the support of overlays that come from black budgets, they go in and start working with the heroin farmers

to try to start convincing them to grow something else. Soybean, corn, you name it, right? Whatever the fuck beats, whatever will grow, and then we will subsidize the difference between what they grow and heroin. So if they can sell the heroin for $100 an acre and they can only sell the beats for $20 an acre, USAID comes in and they have a government,

authority to pay the difference. Here's 80 bucks. Here's 80 bucks for your beets. Over market value just to make sure you don't grow heroin. How is that illegal? The problem is... And domestic. The problem is we paid for it.

But they, the farmers, only dedicated 80% of their field to beets. The 20% that they hid from us, they still dedicated to heroin. They didn't stop growing potty. So now what are we actually subsidizing? Heroin. And where does that heroin go? Into the Taliban's pocket, which then funds operations against the United States. Straight into my penis.

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In store or online Spirits not sold in Virginia and North Carolina Drink responsibly Must be 21 That is an uncomfortable way To take some heroin You really need a high Holy fuck do you need a high for that

You give up the toes You give up the arms You go straight for the penis You're not gonna use that penis After you pump that heroin into that thing Yeah someone's like dude You got plenty of veins in your arm What are you doing?

Start with the forearms. Why are you going straight to the dick? Right to the dick. Man. Yeah, okay. So that counts as domestic sudderfuge because it's used with taxpayer money.

And that's the kind of stuff that gets really tricky, right? Because it takes a lot of people. It takes three different organizations, Department of State, USAID, CIA, all federal organizations to cooperate together on an operation to change hearts and minds.

minds. Well, then when we execute the operation, there's all sorts of people on the ground who saw the flaws, right? They're, they're, one of the, one of the massive flaws, guess who enforced the farmer's, uh, commitment to planting? An Afghan, we had to hire an Afghan, uh, an Afghani, consultant to actually go to the farms to then verify the claims of the Afghani farmer. So now you've got an Afghani consultant that's being paid US dollars to go to an Afghani farm to validate that that farm is 100% being dedicated to beats, not heroin. Meanwhile, your USAID rep is sitting in some hotel and whatever in the green zone, protected on all sides, trusting that whatever email he gets back from the Afghani rep is accurate about what the

Afghani rep did and what the Afghani farmer is doing. How easy is it to just the Afghani farmer pays the Afghani rep? The Afghani rep is paid by the Taliban. Who fucking knows? You're cutting us out so far. And yet we're still pumping hundreds of millions of dollars into those operations. And that was obviously kept from the American people as best that they could. Yeah.

And until it became public knowledge. And that's just one of many examples of where USAD operations were deemed by Doge and others to be wasteful and potentially illegal. But that's blowback. You know, it becomes illegal, but it's blowback. It's the unintended consequences of meddling in cultures that we don't understand. and and things like that. That is different than, you know, the Mossad, you know, potentially being behind the Charlie Kirk hit,

which we're going to talk about in a sec, you know, putting, I've heard now that Trump, this is breaking from Max Blumenthal who runs the gray zone. It's a fantastic channel. And he's, he's got insiders of the White House saying, Trump is scared. Like he is nervous because the, you, you know,

Assad is Israel has their hooks so deep into the White House. I've heard that they're putting, what are those things that are supposed to pick up electronic signals? They're, uh, starts with an S, not sonic. This is what if I had a producer,

he'd be looking it up. Um, I mean, they're, their, their spying capabilities, they're, their murderous tendencies.

Culturally, they're just about killing much more than the CIA. Um, and, you know, to me, that's like gangster. What you're talking about with blowback has happened with American meddling, you know, since, you know, the end of World War II. Ever since we were interfering with banana

farmers. Right. Exactly. While he looks that up, can you tell me real quick? Because I've heard that the heroin production in Afghanistan under the Taliban has, has literally virtually been eliminated now. So that contradicts but I hear two opposing viewpoints right when they were fighting they needed money and therefore they were extorting heroin farmers

and making them grow it you know what I mean things like that but now that they're in power they've eliminated heroin I've heard that the Northern Alliance in the first Afghan invasion in the early 2000s the warlords they were actually the ones

that were moving heroin so what is the status of that now now that the Taliban fully controls is the body politic of Afghanistan. I don't know in large part because the Taliban is the body politics. So we don't know what's really happening in Afghanistan. I would be surprised if there was no heroin production in Afghanistan because heroin grows so well there. And there were so many people growing it. And it's such a profitable crop.

And then on top of that, you've got huge foreign investment going into Afghanistan now that the United States is gone. So China's investing in Afghanistan. Russia's investing in Afghanistan. Like all of your developing third world bad guys all see Afghanistan as a new opportunity for economic growth. And the Taliban, what's wild is that, you know, Russia invaded Afghanistan. That's how the whole thing jumped off in the 70s. And now they're buddying up to the Taliban. Well, that's how things change.

Don't forget, China helped us in World War II. Yeah. And now they're like enemy number one. Right. Right. So the world changes. And people need to understand the world changes. world changes quickly. We used to be fighting in Ukraine. We used to be supporting Ukraine to defend

democracy. Now we don't really care about Ukraine and we don't really care about whether or not they have a democracy there. Even though at the time, the mainstream message was, hey, you got you got to fight for democracy in Ukraine. And the demonstrable data showed that Ukraine wasn't a democracy. Now we're kind of like, now we're publicly saying, hey, Ukraine's not really a democracy anyways. Half of the country belongs to Russia. Yeah. Culturally. So we might as well let Russia keep that half of the country. Like, think about how that's just a few years that we've completely changed our message. And look, we don't care that we're not fighting for democracy. This is the cynic in me, but it's rational. I mean, we're barely a democracy. Most people don't, Israel,

you think that's a democracy? I mean, people don't want what their government is doing. And when the majority does not want what an elective government is doing, that ceases to be a democracy. So let's take a pause here, right? Because because, because, It's one thing to distrust your government. It's one thing to criticize your government. And our government for at least the last four presidential cycles has duly earned its criticism. But we can't say it's just the government's fault because democracy hinges on the individual exercising their democratic rights to vote. But they are though.

They are fucking not. They are fucking not. Don't fucking lie to me and you know it's true. You can look up any statistics on voter turnout and you know for a fact. Americans are not exercising their right to vote. They're not exercising their responsibility to be informed with the vote that they used. You're talking about the best voter turnout in recent history was 66%. I think one time for a president one year. That's fair, but they elected, you're right, people should vote more, but they elected Donald Trump, right? That's a presidential vote.

That's a presidential vote. By the time you're voting for the president, you've lost the game. It's voting for your congressman. It's voting for your congressman. It's voting for your local representative. And that voter turnout is closer to 17%. Unbelievable. One out of less than one out of every five registered voters get out of their ass, get off their ass out of their seat to go actually vote for the person who's going to represent them. And then once that person goes to Capitol Hill, that's the person who's supposed to live in the legislative branch, which is a check and balance over the executive branch. So if you're putting a dipshit into your congressional seat, what the fuck do you expect them to do when they get?

What happens on Capitol Hill, the reason we're in the shithole that we're in, for anybody who wants to bitch about our country, and rightfully we should be bitching about our country. It's our fault. We put a dipshit in Congress and that dipshit in Congress gave more power to the executive, and now the executive can look at Congress and be like, fuck you guys. Yeah, but the pushback to that is they only give you choices of dipshits, right? Like, look at Kamala or Trump.

That's a presidential dipshit. We're talking about congressional dipshitship. But, you know, even they are the system of, the system is set up to be corrupt. It's probably has something to do with our, what do you call it, the campaign financing. But still, if people come out and vote and now, and they expect Trump to, like when I had you on last year, we all, we predicted the war in Ukraine would be settled, some kind of long term or at least some kind of real lasting agreement in Israel. would have happened. None of that's happening. That's what you, you know, the Maga First movement, even hardcore Trumpers are furious at him. He's bloated. Now he passed a three and a half trillion dollar, you know, new package to make the government even bigger where he's supposed to be slashing. So that's,

that's kind of what I mean by elected representatives ignoring, ignoring the, the polls, what people want. And it's not just happening in America. It's happening in Europe. It's happening in Israel. So that's what I just, I just don't think, that's all that to say, democracy is not the reason that we go to war, in my opinion. I would agree. Democracy is not the reason we go to war. But to say that we are not a democracy, that's where I kind of, that's where I want to make sure that we clarify.

We are absolutely a democracy. I have, I have a father-in-law. who I disagree with 99% of the time. For anybody out there as a father-in-law, who they agree with, I kind of would love to meet you. I only date chicks with dead dads. It's a good strategy.

It's a good strategy. But they knew their fathers because I'm trying not to be toxic anymore. So I'm trying to date women who had fathers. You're trying not to be toxic. Yeah, I try because I used to just love chicks that had daddy issues, bad relationships with their daddies. But now I want you to have a relationship with your dad, but he's dead. You had one.

You had a great one, but he's gone. That's like toxic with. a lowercase T. That's toxic with a different spelling. It's like T-O-C-Y. Exactly. Exactly. You guys, I'm obsessed with Brunt workwear. This is the Brunt work boot. Let me tell you something. The most comfortable boot, maybe the most comfortable piece of footwear in general that I've ever put on. They're comfortable right out of the box. No long painful break-ins like all those other brands. Because remember, that's what you used to have to choose when you try to decide between work boots. Durability or comfort. Brunt solved all that. And they're not just comfortable. They're

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Is that a sensor? It's essentially, it picks up a, it's super high level spyware that Max Blumenthal said that the Mossad has set up around Washington, D.C. to basically allow, and people in the comments jump in, and they're, and they're, It's essentially to track, you know, our elected representatives. By communication. Oh, my God. It gives me the chills. So let's talk about it.

What does the Charlie Kirk, I'm going to call it a killing because he's not a politician, right? That's an assassination. I'm going to call it a murder. He's a private citizen. But first of all, what does this mean to you? How significant is this in the history of America? and what what does this mean to you? What does this mark?

What does this signal a further decline in the empire? And is there something more sinister behind it? Like, yeah, I'm with you. So, so the, there's a lot to unpack. I know, because it's like four questions, right? So let me say, let me say this first. The Charlie Cook, the Charlie Kirk killing is significant now. it's not going to withstand the test of history.

If you recall in December, there was another major killing. You probably can't recall, but we all thought that that was also going to withstand the test of history. Brian Thompson for United Health. Right. Who was killed by Luigi Mangione. Right. We all thought that was going to be significant. We all thought that the first assassination attempt on Donald Trump was going to be something that history remembered forever.

People were already forgotten about that, right? Can you even remember the name of the fucking five-head kid that? that tried to kill him, it's really tough. We Harvey Oswald. No. So what we're finding is that we get spun up because headlines start talking a lot about something. And then conspiracies pop off. That's kind of what you're specializing in right now is all these popping off conspiracies, right?

But they don't withstand the test of time because they eventually get over, get trumped by something else in the world that becomes our new big buzz. The trend that we're seeing here is twofold. There's the trend of information where people are consuming so much information that if it's not immediately interesting, they forget about it. And they don't forget about it temporarily. They forget about it long term. And then it becomes one of those, oh, yeah, that did happen. Oh, yeah, I do remember that. Right. Half the people fucking watching this right now are like, oh, yeah, that did happen. They don't, it's not top of mind anymore. And even as you watch somebody else get killed on camera, you're forgetting how many other people just in the last 12 months. were either attacked or killed. Political people, too. We're talking about, like, a state representative in Minnesota. Right. We're talking about a state representative in Pennsylvania

whose house was lit on fire. Right. This is not ancient history. This isn't even two years old. This is within the last 12 months. People are like, oh, yeah, that did happen. Right. The pace of information, CIA teaches that in information warfare,

when you're intentionally trying to use information, you have to worry about volume and pace, volume and pace. Volume is how much information comes out in a period of time. Pace is the pace at which volume is released over time. So if you increase the pace of information, you can overwhelm whatever information you want to hide. You can also use volume to overwhelm what information you want to hide. That's when you're trying to shape information warfare. We live in a world where technology has made it and human consumption has made it. You don't even need to, use those tools anymore because user generated content has increased both the volume and the pace

of information to such a point that if you want to shape a message, it can be shaped without any effort at all. That's what you're seeing with Israel. That's what you're seeing with Charlie Kirk. That's what you're seeing all over the world is even as countries want to shape a narrative, they're realizing, shit, dude, we can just kind of sit on our thumbs, save a couple of bucks, because the pace of information is so fast that we're going to be talking about, you know, the Kardashians or or some pop music artist that's on trial in just a few weeks. So let's just leave this alone. The difference, I think, with Charlie Kirk, and I'm not justifying it. I'm not saying that his killing was more, his life was more valuable. I'm certainly not saying that. I'm actually going the opposite way. People have gotten mad because I've said, hey, like, let's calm down here. They're using this, especially, you know, the executive. branch and the far right, the right. They're using this way more than that woman who got killed in Minnesota, the Congresswoman who got killed. That's an assassination. They're using Charlie

Kirk's killing to now crack down on dissent in a big way, much more than they've already postured to do. I don't disagree with that because the motive is still outstanding. So in this, we're in a period of time right now where there's not enough information about the killing. to determine whether or not it was politically motivated or what the motives were of the shooter himself. And now that we are also having reports that the shooter's not cooperating, it kind of creates even more room for conspiracy. There's a very simple anatomy to a conspiracy that explains why conspiracies take off. If you care to talk about that, we can. But most people who live in the conspiracy space don't really care about the anatomy because they already know how a conspiracy work.

so they're happy to just escalate conspiracy theories. Charlie Kirk, I'm going to challenge, was an assassination. Because to meet the definition of assassination, it has to have political outcomes that are the intent behind the killing. This individual, from what we know so far, had political outcomes in mind when he chose his target. What was the outcome? Either the reduction of effort,

to increase conservatism among youth and or related to some sort of message that Charlie Kirk himself was propoding, whether it was LGBTQ stuff or whether it was, you know, marriage stuff or whatever else it might have been. He wanted Charlie Kirk specifically to be silenced. That's what we have based on current information that is all, you know, coming from interviews with parents and interviews with family. That's all we know so far. So our assessment at this point doesn't rule out the idea that this is an assassination. And until we have motives and until we have an explanation, we can't rule out one thing in favor of something else. So it's safe to call it a killing. It's also arguably safe based on information to call it an assassination. Or it's, right, his political,

the political outcome could be, as I said, reduction of civil liberties, National Guard, on streets in all of these Democrat-led cities weird because the killing happened in Utah. That is also political outcome. Just like the 9-11 attacks, their political outcome was to you know, create the Patriot Act.

And now we have the Patriot Act too. And it's just cut after cut after cut. I mean, I don't know if bin Laden was that let's be honest, man. Future thinking. But I think he probably knew that that fear would help cripple the empire internally much more than it would from attacks from a foreign

enemy because it has it's we're the empire empires implode internally not especially ours we're not going to get attacked no terrorist or assassination is going to cripple us we will do that to ourselves and you keep you keep referring to us as an empire which is wrong multiple of your arguments are based on flawed points which explains to me more why your conclusions are so incredibly flawed as well. We're not an empire. I know you can call us an empire. And I know you can accuse us of being an empire, but we simply don't fit the definition of an empire.

We fit the definition of a hegemon. That's not a fucking empire. So change your vocabulary and use the right word. No, we're not splitting hairs. We're absolutely not splitting hairs. We're splitting your nice hairs, dude. Not splitting hairs, dude. This is the problem with the.

messaging that we have all over the fucking world, right? Right now in this conversation, you and I are not helping to clarify the confusion that people watching are suffering from. Right now, we are exacerbating it because we are saying that even choosing the right word is splitting hairs. That is not fucking splitting hairs. That is exactly what effective communication is using the right word at the right time with the right definition so that people understand what the fuck is going on, so that when they look something up online and they look up the definition of empire. And they're like, wait a second. An empire has to tax the territories that it owns, that it has taken through war. The United States doesn't tax foreign places that it is taken by war.

The United States forces a different kind of economic base, exactly, but it's not empirical. It's not an empire. That's why we're happy to let places come and go. It's also what makes us susceptible to what's happening in the Middle East with Israel right now. Cool. Hegemon is good. I'm good with Hedgemon. That's just one example, man. That's one example when you argue about, you know, we're not a democracy. That's just another example. When you talk about assassination, that's another example.

So I'm saying, I'm happy to have this conversation with you, but you're going to hear me harping on the terminology that you use all day long. Because if we're trying to help the fucking person who's watching this right now, we need to give them better vocabulary and a clear understanding of the problems that persist. We can't feed them something that just gets them all riled up. And if that makes people disagree with me, that's fine. I think my audience is beyond helping at this point. I think we're just kind of trying to entertain them and get them through their shift in the warehouse.

How sad is that? How sad is that, man? Look, well, you're the only person that they watch that's not a drug dealer. So that's why we love having you in. So, but, but I guess my point was like, let's entertain them through their warehouse conversation. That is a political. I'm just saying that could be a political outcome and, you know, the Charlie Kirk killing, right? It's to, just like 9-11, it's to use, give politicians the fear and the fear-mongering that they need to encroach on our freedoms.

So, you know, if you go watch, and I'm not the conspiracy guy, go watch Candace Owens, go watch Max Blummering, go watch Max Blumman. They and they're not even saying conclusively. They're not saying that for sure this is Mossad, right? But just go watch them in real time because they're very, very connected journalists now, I would say. And Israel, Netanyahu, Bill Ackman, the Mossad, very unhappy with Charlie Kirk because of his very, very recent about face when it comes to what's happening in Gaza. for since since it happened, since October 7th, he's followed, he's towed the line. There's no starving. There's no starvation going on in Gaza.

There's no this. There's no that. And then just about a month ago, he comes on and says, oh, no, actually, yeah, what that is ethnic cleansing, what they're doing. And he's, he is the mouthpiece. He's one of the few Republican right-leaning mouthpieces that speaks to young people, because young people don't believe anything that the boomers and the mainstream media says. So you could see.

why the propaganda machine that is Zionism and that is Israel needs a guy like Charlie Kirk. So what he did that about face and he turned down a huge, huge sum of money very recently from Netanyahu himself, I don't put at bass these guys at all. I mean, they specialize in wetwork. Like the CIA looks like the real good guys compared to this government. So that's that's simply what I'm floating to you. This is fun. Do you want a Zinn?

Come on, dude. So let's let's, uh, let's break this down. Okay. Do you think it's possible? That's what we want to know. Yeah. So what you're getting at now, what it sounds like this conversation that will get clipped up into a thousand pieces later on.

This is just an entertaining conversation. So let's talk about the, the what ifs. Right. And if you want to talk about the what ifs, I'm telling you right now, the what ifs get really fucking scary, really fucking fast. And whether or not Massad was involved in the Charlie Kirk killings, which I don't see any evidence to support, right? Whether or not they were involved in that killing is, in my mind, irrelevant. It's irrelevant because let's take a look at what's happening in the trend of high profile shootings and assassination attempts inside the United States.

Do you have any idea? So FBI just released a research paper. do you know where the majority of of um lethal killing comes from in the united states what demographic what age what gender etc um just any kind of lethal violence so it's not just like slapping somebody in the face i'm talking about a violent act that results in the death of a human being yes yes black men between the ages of you know i don't know 18 to 34 So we're guessing. So the answer is no, you don't know.

FBI's findings has determined. Take that part out. FBI findings have determined that men under the age of 30 who are unemployed and intelligent lead to the majority of killings in the United States. Can we look that up though? But it is violent crime. I mean, that is. I don't give a shit about violent crime.

Lethal killing is my question. I see. Now, now taking that metric, let's look back. The person who killed Charlie Kirk. is a person who was in the 99th percentile in standardized testing and was under 30 and carried out the killing of a high-ranking political profile figure. The person who killed Brian Thompson, CEO United Healthcare, was under 30, scored in the 99th percentile in standardized testing, a different standardized testing in the United States.

One was ACT, one was SAT. 99th fucking percentile. That means they are in the top 1% of performing academic students. Yeah, but Andrew, those aren't, those don't represent the majority of just murder that homicides that happen in the U.S. No, the majority of homicides that happen in the United States are men under 30 years old who are also intelligent. These are examples of that.

Why am I saying that? I'm saying that because when you look at the person who tried to kill Donald Trump, the same thing, under 30, unemployed, and highly intelligent. what I'm saying is that the shape of the threat that we have come to be haunted by in our dreams has changed. When I was a kid in the 80s and 90s, we were all afraid of the inner city hoodlum, who had no dad and had no job and was part of a gang. That's what we were afraid of in the 80s. And in the 90s, we were afraid of the faceless middle-aged domestic terrorist who was going to blow us up when we weren't predicting it. And then in the early 2000s, we start changing the face of that threat again.

And now we're afraid of, of, yeah, of Mujahideen, people and turbans and bombers who are going to drop a bomb at a Boston marathon, right? And now we're seeing the face change again. I say this because we like to oversimplify and say, oh, it's just like you did, 18 to 35 year old African American or black men in inner cities. That is not the actual empirical evidence. The actual empirical evidence is that the fucking kid. in the house next door who's smart and doing well in school who everybody likes is really fucking dangerous and how do we deal with that how do we create a law enforcement protective system in the United States that deals with that you want to start talking about how scary the future the

United States is we need to start there because what are what policies are we willing to put in place to protect us from our neighbor and when we put those policies in place how do we feel about those increase the way the ways that those will encroach on our freedoms like like privacy and individuality and libertarianism how are we going to handle that i what you just said right there couldn't agree more and charlie kirk's whole point was that people getting killed does not give the government an excuse i mean it does but it shouldn't give them an excuse freedom is more important i think i think that's what we i honestly think that's what we pay for is some risk what we paid for. What we pay for for our freedoms. The price that we give up is as a measure of total

safety. I don't want to live in El Salvador. I don't want to live in Malaysia. I don't want to live in China. I would rather risk getting shot seriously. So maybe you live in a. So here's here's the, the truth is we're not as free as we think we are. Freedom in the United States is a, it's a buzzword. It's not real. That's why you have to define freedom. What freedom do you think you actually have in the United States? What freedom does the average American actually have? You don't have the freedom you think you have. You have the freedom to own guns.

You have the freedom to peacefully protest. You have the freedom of assembly. You have the right to free speech, which is to me the most important one. That's why it's number one. I've had erectile dysfunction all my life. It's probably because of my height. Probably because of the fact that I am repulsed by women and I'm closeted, but whatever it is, when I need my medication, when I got to get a big

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He can't, unbelievable. He's on his phone. He could be Googling. It's just, it's fucking crazy. It's, you know, do it on the computer so you look like. like you're working, dude. You look like you're on Twitch right now. It's fucking crazy. So here's what's crazy. These kids. Every one of the rights, the rights, because you just listed off rights, not freedoms, every one of the rights that you just listed off. Do you know where a right comes from?

God. No. That's what they say. That's not what they say. Your rights come from the, the Declaration of Independence, as well as the amendments that were passed to you by who? by the government. All of your rights are actually given to you by the government, which is why your rights can be taken away. When you go behind bars, they take your rights away.

When you sign up for the military, they take your rights away. When you break a law, they take your rights away. Not everybody has the right to bear arms. Plenty of people can't buy arms. You have to have a background check and plenty of people don't pass that background check. You don't have the right to free speech. You have the right to free speech up to a certain point

where you might cross a line and become illegal in the speech that you're speaking. And free speech only really relates to your opinion about the government. It has nothing to do with your opinion about another civilian. That is legally protected as fighting words or words that can be seen as aggressive. So whether you say shit about the government, the government may or may not come back on you, but you definitely don't have a freedom of speech to talk shit about another company, which is why they can sue you for what you say, and it's called slander.

Right. They can sue you, of course, but do you see the problem with saying, yeah, you know, you have a right, you have a right to free speech up to a certain point. So the government now wants to keep moving that goalposts. It's always been that way. No, but they're making it more and more narrow, dude. Look at him. I agree. I don't disagree. Look what they're doing in Britain. Dude, they're arresting people for speaking out against Israel. This conversation started with you saying we have certain freedoms. I am telling you, we don't have those freedoms. You have now just confirmed that even the things that we have that are rights are still not actual freedoms.

I'm saying this because we need to understand. We are not a free country. We have freedoms granted to us by the federal government if and when we follow the norms and the rules that were dictated to us by the federal government. But the problem was saying dictated is because we are supposed to be, and this country was founded... the government was founded by the people as a representative, as a representation of the will of the people. Who were the people? Who were the people that they were founded on?

People from England that brought the theories of land-owning wealthy men. Of course. I know that is important. But that's important. That's important because we were not founded by the people. We were founded by white land-owning, which means stakeholders in the future of the country. That's what our whole government was built on. But it was based off theories from the Enlightenment from England that said, man, mankind does have these rights that are given to them by birth. Now, of course, is this all, is it all manmade? Yes, of course, that theory.

But that's how cultures change. That's how people advance. Benjamin Franklin. You thought this was your run club era. Turns out it was more of a thinking about run club era. The good news? Someone's marathon training is about to. Start. Sell your workout gear on Deepop. Just snap a few photos and we'll take care of the rest.

They get their race day fit and you get a payout for trying. Someone on Deepop wants what you've got. Start selling now. Dpop, where taste recognizes taste. He advised. Pussy Pussy hound. When he advised. Sorry. Okay. It's important. I'm sure that this is important. It's important. Benjamin Franklin, when he advised the Constitution, the constitutional Congress, when he advised the Continental Congress, he advised them to make sure that they made permanent the freedoms that Americans would enjoy. But when the articles were actually written, they didn't grant us those freedoms. Benjamin Franklin specifically said to include a right to privacy, but the actual founding fathers chose to leave that out,

intentionally leave that out, and make it up to the interpretation of judges case by case. The reason I say that is because we need to understand as Americans what we're actually fighting for and what we're actually, and how the propaganda machine inside the United States works. The propaganda machine inside the United States says, we are free, we have liberty, we are the freest country in the world.

To certain extent, empirically, we are the freest country in the world. But just like you're saying, all of those freedoms are controlled by the machinations of our government. Three branches of government, which, by the way, Donald Trump has systematically made

each of those branches of government allies in his campaign. Right? So now, do we really have three checks and balances? Or do we have three branches of government that all basically fall under the executive branch? Right. This is the stuff that scares me.

I could care less about whether Massad is going to start taking out a political influencers like you and me. Shouldn't you care about that, why would we care? That a foreign government has got their hooks into our government and our... That's not what I'm saying. I'm saying, do I care that Mossad, you're accusing Mossad of being part of the Charlie Kirk assassination?

That's different than whether or not Israel has its claws inside the United States. Israel is just one of many countries that has its tentacles deep inside the United States. You want to start listing those off. China has their tentacles way up our ass right now. I know, but not. They don't have the influence over our government like A-PAC and like Israel. Okay.

Okay. I would disagree with that because- John, stop making me look racist and tell me the black guys commit the most murder. What the fuck are you doing over there? All you have to look up is violent crime. Who, which demographic perpetrates the most homicides, dude? Violent crime and homicide. It's crazy. What are we getting jam?

Like what, like, like, I was looking for Google's down. Yeah. Yeah. So, so just when you're doing your Boolean search, look for, uh, do 50% of, do 50% of violent crime come from men under 30? If you look that up. I agree, but you will find, you will find the rest of the. I totally agree with you on that. I've just, I believe if you're going to look at the demographic by race, I can leave

race out, but I believe that it's unfortunately you know, American-born blacks. But anyways, what? This is, this is a huge part of the problem, right? Because we

America has this desire to believe that that's true. Because of what we saw that haunted us in the 80s with gang activity. It has changed. It has changed. It has changed. And this is what black people around the country are trying to get us to understand

that the threat has changed. You can't just claim that it's a racial divide between violent crime and nonviolent crime. It has to do with poverty. It has to do with opportunity. It has to do with employment. And that happens to white people and Mexicans and women and all sorts of, it's a racially diverse group

of criminal offenders. And we cannot reject the fact. that the people who are killing CEOs and influencers are white men under 30 who are intelligent. We have to adapt to that threat. We can't keep trying to say that black kids 19 years old are the problem. We have to say, hey, you know what? How do we defend ourselves against white, smart kids who are 28 years old? Well, dude, Timothy McVeigh, I've always-middle-aged fucking crazy bomber.

Almost every school shooting. The school shooting, yeah, fantastic example. Recent school shootings in the last year. almost predominantly executed by white men under the age of 30. We need to understand this and shape that. And I say that because, again, messages are important. I understand that we're just trying to entertain people in a

whatever warehouse. But the truth is, take that shit home and share it with your friends. Well, that's what I want to ascertain because I totally agree with you. When you look at acts of terrorism, right, the biggest threats are not from, you know, name your Middle Eastern terrorist group. the biggest threats to Americans when it comes to acts of terrorism like the Oklahoma City bombing, if you want to call Charlie an assassination and active terror, whatever, we've been knowing that that's white dudes, you know. I was just saying just as the numbers of violent crime,

I do, I stand by that. You got anything for me? That's, but lethal killing? I was talking about homicides. Lethal killings. Wow, dude. Props, props, props. Not props to me, props to FBI. Props to FBI and props to every fucking black person out there who's been trying to get us to understand the simple fact that we still don't accept. So props to you. No, I'm glad. I feel like it's a commercial.

Props to you, black guy who's been trying to tell us that we need to worry about white people because I'm sorry, as a brown guy, I'm sorry that the fucking white people aren't listening to us. Oh, dude. Well, I'm glad I'm wrong. So don't worry. When you see a black kid walking down the street in a white wife beater, assume he's violent. Instead, look at the fucking smart kid who's wearing a Star Trek shirt and be like, does that guy have a gun? Exactly. But I know, I totally agree. But dog, but look what the government is

doing. They're saying, they're sending troops to Chicago. They're sending them to, they are the ones, and maybe I'm falling victim to this propaganda too. They're the ones that are saying, we have to send troops to New York City, even though it's been safer than it's ever been. We have to go to the south side of Chicago. Like, that's my fear with a killing like what happened with Charlie Kirk is that they use it to crack down, to send troops to places that are already suffering, that they're going to crack down a political dissent, et cetera. So, so actually, actually, you're kind of backing up my point about, you're backing on my point is that they're going to use this to further encroach on our rights. The rights that were granted to us by

them anyways. Not them. They just got into power. Oh, the government is the government. Yeah. The government is not based on who's in the office. You think, you think Donald Trump is any different than Barack Obama? And I hope the Obamas are listening. They're not that different. They're not that different. They're not that different. Are there differences? Yeah, but are they significantly different? Fuck, no. How do you know why Donald Trump does what he does? Because a precedent was set by who? Barack Obama. Executive orders set that, go back to Bush. I would blame it on. I would go all the way blame on anybody you want, but Barack Obama empirically signed the most

executive orders of any president up to that term. And ever since then, that has become the new norm. The new norm is fuck Congress, we're going to sign a bunch of executive orders. Barack Obama with Obamacare also set the precedent for forcing major legislative changes during a short period of time where you control both

the halves of the Congress. That became the norm after that. So there have always been political meddlers. Yeah. And they've always followed a general left and right boundary until over time between Congress giving more power to the executive and the executive exercising the powers that Congress has given, they have opened up the floodgates to what the president can do now. So all of our bitching about Donald Trump. And I'm not saying I'm a fan of Donald Trump one way or the other. I'm saying Donald Trump is exercising the rights

that the American people have given him through their acts inside Congress. And if that doesn't sound entertaining enough, that's fine because what it means is that we will continue to see. even after Donald Trump. Swings. Major swings. And encroachment into our daily lives and the freedoms that we believe we have. So is that why you have plans to get out? That's a huge part of why I am leaving the country.

But why specifically? What what freedoms and cultural devolutions? And yeah, yeah, give us like a real like a, a, body of reasons that you're just like, fuck this. I don't want to be part of this right now. So there's a, I want to make sure that I speak for myself, right? I'm not saying fuck this. I don't want to be part of this. I'm saying, no, but you are though. You're leaving the country. That is not what I'm saying. What I'm saying is I have two children. And those two children are my top priority. And what I want for my children is not going to exist in the United States for them

for the next 10 to 15 years. Okay. So then what are those? Perfect. So I want my children to grow up in an environment where they're allowed to exercise their opinion, their disagreements in a place where it's safe to offer disagreement without social ostracization or violence. In the United States, they're not going to get that. Here in the United States, if you live in a liberal city and you have a conservative opinion, you can't say your conservative opinion out loud or else you face social ostracization or ostracization, whatever the right word is there. Auster, ostracism. Austracism. Thank you, sir. You learned something in prison. That's awesome. So we got my GED in there. We don't focus on that, right? My children won't be able to exercise their right to an opinion

because they will be socially marginalized at best, at worst, they will be targeted. And everybody is seeing that because that's why you have conversation topics that you only talk about with your conservative friends and other conversations that you only talk about with your liberal friends. Yeah, yeah. Be fair there. Be fair there. You, because you, you, because you have conversation. you went, you, you dog whistle a little of the right, but let's talk about all the cancel culture that's going on. I don't, I'm not dog whistling any side. I'm saying it's happening on both sides.

Okay, good. Right? As long as you can acknowledge that. Oh, for sure. Everybody's a hypocrite in the, in the mainstream media and in the larger government. Fuck the mainstream media. A larger government. I'm talking about our daily lives, man.

Our daily lives. I'm not afraid of the government. I'm not afraid of the mainstream media. The reason that I'm looking. towards a very dystopian, near-term future for us is because of the average person. Because of the average person who believes something that is openly wrong or they accept a norm of behavior that is openly anti-freedom, anti-American, because that is just what is culturally acceptable now. And whether that's left-leaning or right-leaning, when you don't let people exercise their own contradictory

opinion, when you don't call out conspiracy as conspiracy, when you don't stand on something that's fact-based because you're afraid of violence or marginalization, that's a problem, especially in a free country where we're supposed to be able to voice our differences peacefully. So this is a free country? This is supposed to be a free country. Okay. This is supposed to be a free country. Good. So we're getting somewhere. So you do believe in the freedoms of this country. I do believe in the freedom and you believe that they're being eroded. Absolutely. I've already said that. I've already said that several times. And the freedoms that we believe we have aren't what we think they actually are. I've also said that.

So I want to make sure that you understand this. We think that we have this broad body of freedoms in the United States. That is a lie. That is something that we have been conditioned to believe from the time that we were in grade school. A big part of why the public school system exists is to indoctrinate us to believe things that simply aren't true. But have we had those in the past? Maybe. Maybe we had those.

a big part, I mean, frankly speaking, it's going to piss a lot of people off. A big part of why we don't have the freedoms that we think we have is because when we were founded, it was supposed to be a very small group of people who had the power to change the policy of a very large country. And as we've extended that to include younger generations, to include ethnic diversity, to include gender diversity. As we've expanded the people who have a say in the policy of the country, we've eroded the original intent. The original intent of our founding fathers was that you had to be invested in the success of the country in order to have a say in where the country went. That's why you had to be land owning. You couldn't be an own, you couldn't be a employee. You couldn't be a spouse. You couldn't be a

slave. You couldn't be anything other than the land owner to have a say. We have changed that. So now you can be anything inside these countries, this border, and have a say, even if you don't want to be here, even if you don't have a business here, even if you don't have a house here, whether you're 18 with no responsibilities, or whether you're 45 with three kids that you're trying to get through college, you have an equal vote. That's not right. That's not what our founding fathers intended. And that's a big part of why we're so fucked for the near future. So you think we'll get back to that and you'll come back when the only landowning people can vote? No. I mean, I think if you want to know what revolution I think needs to happen in the United States, that's the

revolution needs to happen. We need to have... Only landowning people can vote. Only people who have some kind of vested interest in the country should vote. I absolutely think that we would be better off then. So a working class person that can't buy a house because, you know, fiat currency has made the afford to... Go ahead and give us all the conspiracy reasons for why somebody can't have it. That's not a conspiracy at all. So, so... If you don't own a business, if you don't own land... How is somebody supposed to operate a business without employees? People do it all the time. What do you, you started a business with no employees? I got this fucking judge rule over here.

How long ago? A couple months. And how long have you had a business? Three years, but I have other employees. What did you do for those years? I have other employees. Where are your employees? They're remote, but they're in the United States.

They're American citizens. Are they employees or are they 1099 contractors running their own business? One of them's an employee. Look at that. So what I'm getting at is you have to have a vested interest in the success of the United States because you have investments, because you have a business, because you have a home. That's closer to what our forefathers wanted.

And I get that that's going to piss a lot of people off. But think about all the people that have shaped our politics. And they have not contributed anything to the success of the country, nor will they ever contribute anything. They just get radicalized once every four years to go out and pass a vote. That's basically a popularity contest in high school. Yeah, but that's also if you track the radicalization, the swings that have been happening since the end of World War II.

And then especially after Nixon removed our money from the gold standard, you can time it. It happens in, it's happened in Europe. It's happened, happens in broken countries like Venezuela. That is used. Chaos is created because people feel like they have no future because their money is being robbed from them. Your private property is your money.

And when the government comes and prints more of the money that you own that you have to, it's mandated that you have to use. you're taking that person's property. And that is what, that is the, the lynch pin to how they're able to manipulate each side every four years. That's not,

that's not economically correct. Talk to an Austrian, talk to an Austrian economist, dude. Yeah. So, so what, here's what the Austrian economist would say, to your argument right there. When you own property and the country,

money is property is what they would tell you. Okay, money is property. Yeah. So everybody has, money, but it's worth shit and they can't afford anything. So why do they not get to vote and have a say in the democracy? Because they're not the people that can actually shape the future of a country. Having money doesn't mean that you're going to spend that money in even in the country where you are. There are plenty of people who have U.S. dollars and spend their U.S. dollars all over the place.

Yeah, but that's if you want to say, okay, people that are, I'm totally cool saying only citizens get to vote. I'm totally cool with that. That's the problem because you're born, citizen. So two people who don't contribute dick all to anything, two people who don't even responsibly want to have a kid can create a kid who's an American citizen. So now you essentially have three people who, after the age of the youngest one being 18, those three people will be able to vote for the rest of their lives and change the direction of the country. Sure, but that's all, and that can be worked out. That's what countries are trying to work out. How can you work that out?

Well, you got to maybe you can make it so that they all have to meet a certain minimum criteria before they get the right to vote. Yeah, they all have to contribute in some meaningful way. Sure. Like owning a business or being investors

or having property. So a family from Michigan, a white family, because this is, Republicans love hearing this kind of shit. But I mean, even,

you know, even Republicans would think this is fucking bad shit crazy because I don't think I bet more people are watching this and thinking it makes sense.

So people, people thinking it's bad shit crazy. People, people, a family from Flint, Michigan, who's, family goes back generations, American citizens, right? Black or white.

They worked in factories. They worked for GM. They're maybe they're, they've got middle class aspirations, but they're working class, lower middle class people, right? They, they just work.

They pay taxes. They love God. Blah, bally blah. You know, they're not on drugs, but they don't own a business. They have, they have money, right?

Maybe, maybe they own their home, whatever. or they're renting and they're trying to move up. A family that's trying to do the right thing, Americans. Yep. But they don't own a business and they don't yet own their house. They don't have the right to- I can almost guarantee you the person that you just defined has a 401K.

Okay, so that's- And they're invested in the American stock market. Okay, okay, but that's different, though. That's not fucking different. You said property and own a business. No, and I said four times. Play this back for this asshole whenever you get a chance. I said four times.

Don't call my producer an asshole. No, I'm pulling your host of asses. We all know he's an asshole. You're the dick wadi hired three months ago. I know. I know who the asshole is. Okay. But I'm saying.

So you think a 401k would... Absolutely. Because they're invested in the future of the American people. Okay. Well, you... I needed you to clarify. That's fine. I'll clarify all day long.

You have to demonstrate. I would argue that if we want the country we really all want, you need to be an American citizen, yes. You need to be a legal age. Yes. And you need to be actively invested in the... long-term success of our country by being an investor, by being a property owner, by being a business owner. Because if you are putting your money into any of those three things, you will succeed as

the country succeeds. If you are too young or not wealthy enough or don't have a professional career so you don't have a 401k, I don't think you should have a vote. I don't think you should have a vote because you don't have a vested interest in the long-term success of our country yet. And if you really do care about our country, guess what you're going to do? You're going to work your ass off to find a way to invest or to find a property that you can buy or to build a business, a business for everybody in the fucking country. An LLC is $125 away. And if you don't have $125, I can promise you that there's some friend or family member who when you say you want to start a business so that you can earn the right to vote, they will, they will, they will lend you or give you

that gift. But all the people who don't want to take that step don't get the right. But that kind of cultural and business and financial awareness is intentionally not taught in schools. Correct. It comes from the top, dude. I'm not disagree with it. It comes from the conditioning that we have built over time because for a long time all the United States wanted was factory workers that were ignorant and didn't really have an opinion. That's what we wanted for a long time. And it's backfiring now in the age of information.

And what I would argue is the age of intelligence moving forward. Look, I don't think my producer should be able to vote. I don't think he does. Even better. Even better. Okay. It's starting to make sense now, huh? Now also it doesn't sound so bad shit crazy.

I mean, it's, uh, the thing that the three generation American should absolutely have the right to vote. And they believe they should and they have worked their ass off to, to care about this country. That's why I've been here for three generations. But again, it's going to be abused. The problem is it's going to be abused by, the powers that be. The reason we're in this mess is because of boomers. It's because of old people.

It's because young people don't vote. Wrong. Wrong. No. It's not our boomers. Our boomers aren't the ones that are swaying to vote. No, dude, the vote is being swayed by young, not inconsistent voters that come out only once every four years because they've been they've been activated through propaganda and promises. That's who's actually shaping the people who make the policy. It's not the boomers. So people have to vote locally, I agree with you. Like, that's make change where you're at. I'm not arguing that you change must come from within. I'm like a libertarian.

I think like you change yourself first. It's the best way that you can affect. We all do it, right? But I'm just talking about on a macro level in our country, the problems have been building since the 70s with the chasm of wealth. Yep. And you saw. I agree with that.

Go back to Rome, dude. As soon as the emperors started making war that they couldn't afford, they started their denari was pure gold and they started diluting it. Right? They started diluting the weight because they wanted to stretch the money. And you could, bro, you can mark it. That was the beginning of the end and it imploded. And that's, you know, it's what Bitcoiners will tell you.

That's what even people like Ray Dalio will tell you. It starts from the largesse that is made possible by fiat currency, by people like the Fed, like by central banks and shit. Okay. So. So, yeah, start your business. Yeah, take responsibility. Nobody's, I'm not, I'm, I'm with you there.

I think we agree on most things. I think we do too. It's just that you have a very funny way of, oh, yeah. Reaching a logical conclusion. Okay. So then let's talk about, I mean, I don't even know what the point is to talk about it anymore, but Gaza. So we were wrong. When you came in last year, we made the prediction that there would be some kind of, some kind of long term ceasefire. I would love to play that clip back, actually. So, so we have no playback capabilities. His name is John. His name is not something Wad. I don't even know what it was. He called him a cum water, a dickwater. Fuck face.

Fuck, he can call him whatever you want. But his name is John. Yeah, his name is his allegedly his name's John, but the streets know him is that retardant. So John play this clip back because I, I am willing to say that we probably didn't actually predict that these things would happen. We probably said something like the best chances of them happening are under Trump.

And I still agree that the best chance of them happening are under Trump. The thing that's interesting to me, though, is what we're, we're seeing in the Trump presidency and what explains Russia and Netanyahu, Putin and Netanyahu, not responding the way that Donald Trump promised they would respond. What we're seeing is that these two statesmen understand that Donald Trump is not a statesman, that he is a businessman. And statesmen have no problem changing their mind, changing their face, leveraging immediate changes in geopolitics to their favor, where Donald Trump is a businessman. And he's like, no, we're going to make, people are going to make the decision that makes the

most financial sense. That's not how statesmen think. If that's how statesmen think, we wouldn't be 119% outside of our debt to income ratio. It's 125. We wouldn't be there if we were actual business people that made logical financial decisions. So when Donald Trump is like, this war in Ukraine doesn't make financial sense for anybody, and the war in Gaza doesn't make financial sense for anybody. And, oh, by the way, on top of it all, it's making a huge political headwind

that makes future business very difficult. That's thinking like a businessman. Putin and Netanyahu are thinking differently. Netanyahu's trying to keep his ass out of jail because once the war in Israel stops, Netanyahu has to go to trial for the allegations of corruption and everything else. And what he's hoping for is that a hawkish conservative government

is going to look at him and say, yes, he committed those crimes, but look what else he did to secure the homeland. and that's going to reduce or totally eradicate his sentence at all. Putin, on the other hand, is saying, you know what? We, Russia is benefiting economically from this war, and the country of Russia geographically must consume the natural resources of the states around it in order to maintain its own manufacturing.

That's how it was the USSR was built. Putin understands that. So for any country that he can't have an active controlling effort in, he for sure needs to prevent NATO from taking that country away. So NATO encroaching through Ukraine is a very real argument. Anybody who says it's not real is lying. It is a very real argument. And now that he's fought for so long and he's gained such solid ground in the east like he has,

it doesn't make any sense for him to just say, we're done. It doesn't. It makes more sense. He has as geopolitics go, he has the advantage in pushing forward. And they both know that if they make Donald Trump, Trump look bad to his own voter base, they maintain even more power because at any time they could change their mind and give Donald Trump a win. Once you give Donald Trump a win, he stops working with you. Look at what happened to Doge and look at what happened to Elon Musk. When Elon Musk was helping

Donald Trump, they were best friends. But when Elon Musk said, hey, Donald, now you owe me something, Donald was like, I don't know, you're a dick. And they had a huge falling out. But why? People understand this. I totally agree. Trump just wants a win. He's all about optics and marketing. But what, why does why does Russia stopping the war? By the way, they want to stop. They're just nobody's negotiating with them. They have very real security concerns. NATO cannot, Ukraine cannot be part of NATO.

And by the way, we're taking the Russian, the ethnically Russian regions to the east. And Trump now wants to put, he's like, I'm going to unilaterally, I want the whole world to put sanctions on Putin. This is like two weeks after he meets with the guy. right in Alaska so that's all not going to work but what what does Putin capitulating to Trump and giving him a victory why why would that help Putin it would help Donald Trump it would help Donald Trump and Putin knows that once he gives that away the leverage is gone as long as he doesn't give it away there's still leverage for example if Putin wants Donald Trump on the phone he can just basically say I want a phone call with Donald Trump and he'll get it

right now but as soon as there's peace between Russian and Ukraine when he says when he calls the White House he's like I want to call with Donald Trump now the secretary is going to be like, oh, Mr. Trump's busy. You can't help us right now. This is a really important part of geopolitics. Sometimes you press the threat just to make sure that you have primacy in the negotiation, right? This is why the United States gets involved in the region all over the world, because we want privacy. We want people to pick up the phone when we call them.

This is also why during our 20-year war on terror, China got so heavily focused on the manufacturing and distribution of electronics. Because China understands that when you control the tech, everybody wants to talk to you. So while the United States was putting trillions of dollars into a war on terror, China was putting trillions of dollars into stealing and cloning technology from the West

and offering it at a cheaper price on a Chinese server network to the rest of the world. So now countries that never had a choice and who would always pick up the call for the United States now have a choice, and sometimes they don't pick up the call for the United States. And that's our problem with Panama. and with most of South America and Africa,

they won't answer our call anymore because their server farms, their cellular networks, their internet is being supported by China. Yeah. So that's the phone call they're going to answer. That's how the parody of China and U.S. influence shrinks. Because if it's business 101, man,

you love your plumber when he's the only fucking plumber, but as soon as a new plumber pops up, you're like, oh, I wonder if that new plumber would be more responsible. or be cheaper or smell better when they show up. Yeah, that's great. That's called free market capitalism. Correct.

It should lower the price for everybody. And that's one of the big lies that we've been told our whole life. The United States does not believe in free market capitalism. Yeah, it's fucked up. It believes in monopolism. And that is what we built. That's called being a cartel. That's run by violence.

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And the new convenient pump makes cleaning even easier so you can spend less time tackling dishes and more time together. Shop now at palmolive.com. Coming out of World War II. For sure, for sure. So I think it looks like Putin is going to just, he's going to move into Kiev. He's going to cross the river. It makes total sense. If I was in Putin's shoes, it makes total sense.

Why would you, you have all the cards? All the cards. And nobody, Western Europe, Europe is not listening. They're run by the same, you know, globalists. I hate using that works. It like lumps me in with Alex Jones. But whatever, these are people that are living in the 1990s. and Trump is he thinks he can like pick up the phone and make everybody do what he's doing and it's

just it just it's like inertia objects in motion tend to stay in motion unless there's a greater force acting on it correct what you see is you see Putin holding his ground against Donald Trump's pressure which then empowers Netanyahu to hold his ground against Donald Trump's pressure and now you've got two world leaders who are like who everybody's looking at saying these guys don't have to capitulate to Donald Trump. And then that turns in the German chancellor saying, I don't have to capitulate. And the French president saying,

I don't have to capitulate. And it goes on, just like you said, it's inertia. The movement against American influence is increasing because countries realize, I don't have to do what the United States tells me to do. I don't have to do what Donald Trump threatens me to do. I can do something else. Now, in some places, it's not working out so well.

France is a perfect example. France, one of the largest economies in Europe. Paris is on fire. fire, even as we speak. They're on their fourth prime minister because when their prime minister tried to say to the country, hey, everybody, we have a fiscal debt issue, 114% are we have 125% GDP to debt ratio. They had 114% GDP to debt ratio. They were in a way better position than us, but a bad enough position that the prime minister called an emergency meeting of parliament to say, hey, Parliament, we're in debt too much.

We should cut our budget and start implementing fiscal measures to get ourselves back on track. Any American citizens ever balance the checkbook. This is like you saying, we need to buy a little bit less Starbucks this month so that we can get our finances back on track. You know what happened? Parliament voted no confidence in the prime minister. They booted the prime minister out, leaving the president to choose a new prime minister. and when the president chose a new prime minister, that new prime minister was much more decisive in his activity,

and he just cut the budget without asking parliament, which then made the people in France loot and raid and start burning cars in the streets in Paris. You want to talk about where the United States is heading? Take the temperature of Europe, because the United States follows Europe. We struggle back and forth because we have this four-year policy, this four-year presidency term, right?

But by and large, we follow Europe. We came from European beginnings. We came, our law and our structure is based on European law and European structure. Right. We follow Europe. When we have liberal presidents in office, what do they all try to do?

They all try to bring us in line with what Europe is doing, environmentally, economically, socially, social welfare-wise. We're always following in a trend where Europe is leading. Well, Europe right now is dissolving their parliaments, resetting their governments.

And I'm not just talking about France. It's happened in Portugal. It's happened in, there's another country that melted down recently, and I'm losing it right now. But multiple countries in Europe are resetting their parliament. They're saying we have a broken system. Our parliamentarians, the equivalent of our congresspeople, our congressional house, these people who are supposed to represent the people are not representing the people. So we're going to flush them out and let the people vote on all new leadership.

Right. So you're saying that the United States is going to follow really the chaos that many of these European countries are in. I think at best. At best, the United States is going to follow that chaos. At worst. At worst, we're going to keep the same thing. And we're going to keep seeing divisive politics. We're going to keep seeing an income gap that increases.

And eventually we will turn into the modern day Venezuela. Whether that happens to us as fast as it happened in Venezuela, what happened in Venezuela? what happened in Venezuela, for those of you who don't know, Venezuela was rich and thriving economically in the 1980s, one of the best places to be in the world, right? It was a democracy. Bad bitches. They were in a beautiful place.

Yeah. Great hips, right? Oh, man. Venezuela was the place to be in the 1980s. But they started implementing fiscal policy that made the wealthy, very wealthy, and the poor, very poor. Yeah, leftism under Hugo Chavez. And every, no, not yet, before Chavez.

In the 90s? Before Chavez, before Chavez, they started implementing this fiscal policy. But what happened? Every Venezuelan had equal right to vote. So as the poor got bigger and the wealthy got smaller, when they went to the polls, they legally voted in Hugo Chavez.

Because Chavez was pandering to the poor masses. And as soon as Chavez was in power, he nationalized all the wealth, which took away money from the wealthy. He started to distribute eggs and milk to the very poor, and they kept voting for him. And now the Venezuela we know today actually formed in less than 15 years from the 1980s when Venezuela was thriving to the early 2000s when it was a complete and total shit show collapse. I mean, it has oil, wealth, it has natural beauty, it has tons of resources that and the whole country collapsed, the whole democracy collapsed because the poor got too big and they had equal vote with the rich.

That is exactly what is shaping up in the United States right now. And if we see a drop in the interest rates from the Fed in September. They're going to go negative interest rates. That's Donald Trump's plan is to have negative interest rates. If that happens, we are 100% on the same trajectory as Venezuela because the wealth will get the wealthy will get wealthier. With inflation and with interest rate cuts, the wealthy get wealthier. But that's not poor people's fault. No, it's not poor people.

I'm not saying it is. But the poor people that eight years from now, 12 years from now, 20 years from now, when they vote the equivalent of Hugo Chavez in because he promises to take the wealth away from the wealthy and distribute it to the poor, which many are already asked. That's what the extreme left wants right now. Yeah. Well, I think, but again, that's just a response to the extreme right. It gets worse. We hope. We hope that's the response and not just their own natural logic. And people would argue that the extreme right is just responding to the extreme left and not just operating on their own true beliefs. Right. But that's exactly the further left and crazy we get creates this insane fascist reaction on the right, which then four years creates an even bigger swing to the left.

And again, I think that all comes back to governments being allowed to print money. But this is, I basically asked about Putin and Netanyahu to say that it looks like the world's getting carved up. the hegemons are going to divide, we're dividing the world up between three hegemons. Is that fair to say? No. Like Russia is going to take, Russia will be the major hegemon in Europe.

Nope. It's an oversimplification. So in reality, what's happening right now, geopolitically, has been happening for about the last five years. It really started under Biden with the outcome of COVID-19. Okay.

Right. The COVID crisis, which it used to be that if you just said that on a podcast, you would be demonetized and shut down. speaking of American freedoms. So what happened during COVID is that the world started to break into two halves, a Western unified power base

and an Eastern unified power base. And I say that because it kind of falls across you know, east-west boundaries, but more it's an ideological base. Western powers believe in an ideology. So to be part of the Western team, you have to share a democratic ideology. To be part of the Eastern team, you have to share an economic practicality.

So a common economic pragmatism versus a common ideological democratic idea. That's what started to form in COVID. And you had countries that were like, oh, we absolutely need to do what's best for all the people. And we need to crack down and we need to shut, you know, shut down businesses and we need to handle this terrible pandemic. But then you had other countries that were like, well, we can't shut down. And it's not really practical to interrupt our entire economic success for what looks

scientifically to be based in people who are highly susceptible to the disease. So we're going to have a less severe response than the Western powers. So as that played out through 2019 and 2020, 2020, 2021, after the pandemic passed, you started to see a continuation of choosing whether you want to be ideologically aligned or economically aligned. That came with the rise of the BRICs powers. So, 2023, 2024 were some of the biggest years for the BRICS. The BRICS is an economic block. B-R-I-C-S. That stands for Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa. Well, now that BRICS team is 13 countries strong, all wealthy developing countries. And there's 40 countries, sorry, there's 40 countries that are like jockeying to get in

and more and more people are adding it. And they're dumping the U.S. dollar. They're buying gold. They might. And that's what the bricks, and now you're starting to see the real divide. The Western powers want the U.S. dollar. The Eastern powers pragmatically want freedom from the U.S. dollar. And they don't have to agree on ideology. You want to be authoritarian? I want to be democratic. I want to be a warlord. I want to be a fascist. They don't care. All they care about is, will we still do business with low tariffs? Will you still accept payment in three different currencies, including, you know, the euro and the run- and the yen. It's very pragmatic. That has only grown. So this pragmatic block of power only grows while the Western democratic ideals continue to melt down. US is losing influence.

Europe is imploding in terms of its own democratic governments. And that's driving more and more of those 40 countries to say, fuck the, fuck the Western ideology process. Let's follow the pragmatic economic process because that's much more predictable and much much much more stable then who's the US going to vote into office next right so that's the real divide 100% so how does that look just say 10 years from now five five to 10 years from now how geographically does that look who are the powers that are influencing the most power hegemonic power over which region and now you now you understand why I'm leaving the United States for 10 to 15 years okay right

Because what's going to happen is over these next two presidential cycles in the United States, we're going to see what comes next. Every time someone tries to compare Donald Trump to the big evil people of the world, the Mussolini's or the Hitler's or whatever else they want to compare him to, right? They're forgetting that one cycle before Mussolini, one cycle before Hitler was the person who enabled the worst leader of the time to be elected. Donald Trump is not the worst leader that America is going to see. He is one leader who is going to our response to Donald Trump is going to lay the foundation

for the real villain to come yet. The real tyrant. And whether that person is one cycle away or two cycles away is up to us. But if anybody's afraid of Donald Trump, they're silly. They're ignorant to be afraid of Donald Trump. Donald Trump can't make the changes

he wants to make in his four-year term. Even if he does claim some kind of emergency power where he gets a third term in office, eight years is not enough time to implement all the changes that we need to take place to truly destroy our country. But whoever comes after him,

whether they are an extreme right pro-Trumpian or whether they are an extreme left response to Donald Trump, you can already see how damaging that next person is going to be unless we're careful about it. Right. So how does that set up? I think Europe is going to split down the middle.

I think some countries in Europe are going to remain pro-Western. The United Kingdom, who's not part of the EU, is going to stay pro-American. America, you're going to see countries like Spain and Portugal, Greece, Croatia, Turkey. You're going to see them move to the other side because they don't want to deal with the ideological force. They want to deal with things that are more independent and fiscally sound.

You're already seeing policy going that way. Spain, as an example, has refused to pay the 5% required mandated amount on national defense that NATO has levied on them. They're the only country to say it. And the president came out and said, we're not going to do it. NATO's like, what do you mean you're not going to do it? We all agree to do it. And Spain's like, I've got better ways to spend my money than on the national defense of NATO. And Spain during World War II was a neutral country.

So who, what, what, so they move closer to bricks? So they move closer to bricks. So and Russia. Saudi Arabia, UAE, moving that direction. I wouldn't be surprised if Israel moves. Israel is going to be very smart and play both sides like they do right now. Israel's incredibly cunning as a government. I want to make sure people understand this.

Israel is a government. It is not Jewish people. It is a government. There are Jews who are also Israelis, but there are also Jews who are not Israeli at all. So when we get the terms mixed up, and we call Jews Israelis and Israelis Jews and an attack on Israel is an attack on Jews,

that is ignorantly and patently false. Well, yeah, that's what they want you. That's the only narrative that they have left. It's the same argument with Palestinians and Hamas or Palestinians and terrorists. They are completely different things. There are two different sides of Hamas. There's a militant wing that 12 countries,

only 12 countries, identify as a terrorist group. And then there's a political body that was voted into power that the whole world sees, with the exception of the United States, as a valid political organization. And that's just Hamas. And not all Palestinians fall under Hamas.

Plenty of them fall under the Palestinian authority. And we know that Netanyahu was reaching deep in his pockets for years to prop Hamas up. So don't let anybody tell you differently. That's a fact. And you probably knew that October 7th was coming. So let's turn, that's fascinating about Europe, about those kind of southern European, probably Italy too. Yeah, I mean, you know what I mean? Countries are going to start to make decisions based off of their financial well-being because the United States is not making decisions based off of our financial well-being right now. So, so but with Bricks, who is, is Russia

obviously like have the most influence China over bricks. China has the most influence over bricks. China is the largest economic power in the bricks right now. China, so it's this, the key to everything is to look at logistical supply chains

and technology export. Those are the only two things you need to focus on. If you look at who controls logistical movements, China. COVID-19, for anybody who was paying attention, showed us that the whole world, of commerce transitioned through China. Everything.

Everything was either shipped by China, made in China, touched in China. It moved through China. It moved on a Chinese ship. It did something, right? China was the hub of all of the world's commerce. And for the national security people who saw that, they were like, holy shit. We didn't even see this. If not for COVID-19, we would have missed the fact that China spent 20 years strategically

becoming the hub of all international trade. Right. The second thing is that for those 20 years that they were building that, they were also building, like we talked about, their export of technology, their export of electric vehicles. Guess who's the biggest EV manufacturer in Europe? 1000%. They- South America.

We were just in Colombia and Mexico. It's all Chinese-made affordable EVs. Yep, exactly right. Crazy right. Exactly right. So they were creating their EV market. They were creating their telecommunications market. They were advancing their chip manufacturing capabilities.

They were advancing AI. They have been light years ahead of us, building drones. They just finished this port in Lima, Peru. I don't know if they finished it, but maybe it's under construction. They might have finished it. Like, it's going to make Lima, Peru look like a place, like a spot. The Chinese did that, dude. And they didn't do that for free.

They did that with agreements for long-term leases on the property and the ability to double-use that location for their own national security purposes. It's a genius move. that they copied from us coming out of World War II. Okay. So even though Russia is on the world stage as like, I guess, the military might of bricks and of these practical economic, national sovereign actors, it's China that's running the whole shebang. It's China that's running the whole shebang.

And that's super important to understand because to your point about Russia being the military lead, Russia is just the one actively using their military technology. just like the United States is testing our new tech through the Ukrainians, China's testing its new tech through the Russians. So now the United States doesn't have to be in a war and neither is China. But both of their weapons technology get tested in the battlefield. North Korea gets to test its troops. Why do you think North Korea is sending troops to Russia?

Because they care about Russia? No. They want their troops to have real battlefield experience for the day that their troops are needed to fight South Koreans. Right? Nobody understands that conflict around the world is a practice. It's a stage where you can exercise your strategies, your tools, your tactics, your movements without actually going to war yourself. That's why the United States is always meddling in international affairs, always kicking up Hornets Nest, it's always getting criticized, because for us, it's worth it.

We need our Navy SEALs. We need our Delta operators. We need our special forces to always be sharp. So we're going to send them to do all the fights. We're going to send our bombers to go bomb targets to get practice. It's also a lot of money. Don't forget about the money. There can be a lot of money.

There's a lot of money. There's a lot of money in the military industrial complex is not as big as it used to be, but there's a lot of, there's a lot of palms getting greased in our Congress by, you know, Lockheed Martin. Oh, yeah. Moneywell, all that. So fascinating. Israel and, and, you know, the larger Palestine.

I'm going to make some assumptions here. to get to my question. I think Israel's brand is dead. It's fried. It's cooked. I think that they will probably, they'll take it as far as they can in Gaza. But long term,

I think economically and certainly, politically, they're isolated. They're kind of finished. There's this fast. I follow this guy. He's fascinating. He's a left-wing guy. but he's based in the Middle East,

and he says that it's actually Saudi Arabia that's going to come in and act kind of like how China acts with their investments and all these other, like, global South countries. It's Saudi Arabia that's going to come in and basically economically just absorb that whole region, and that's what's going to lead to, like, peace eventually. Like, where do you see Israel fitting into this bricks versus the United States, you know,

battle for hegemonic power. Israel is going to play both sides. So first of all, to your point about the Israeli brand being fried, not even close. Because what people don't understand is that every action Israel has taken from the moment that the tide kind of turned against them in fighting Hamas, Once they cross the 35-ish thousand dead Gazans mark, and they're in the 60s, I think now. And by the way, by the way, that doesn't count the people under the rubble.

That does not count the people under the rubble. So my point is just after they reached about that 35,000 dead mark, which was six months into the conflict, the actions that they started taking from that point forward, they knew were actions that were building international favor in their interest. No, hatred, enmity. They're just, the UN just condemned them. The average dumbass who watches news. No, I'm talking about... Nobody cares about what the dumbass thinks. Nobody in geopolitics cares about what the average American

or the average demonstrating Britain or what they... No, but that's people all over the world that are protesting. Nobody cares. Nobody cares about what they care about. Protesters don't matter. All right. What matters is the governments. We've covered this. We've covered this all day.

On a government level. Governments understand that Israel is doing everybody a favor. When Israel attacked and degraded Iran, it helped everybody who counted. It helped America. It helped Saudi Arabia. It helped Qatar. It helped Bahrain. It helped UAE.

It helped everybody, governmentally speaking, when they degraded Iran. It helped everybody when they neutralized Hezbollah. It helped everybody when they neutralized Hamas. It helped everybody when they attack the Houthis. So Israel gets to keep doing shit that other people like. governments like, even though the protesters don't like it. Israel made a mistake when they started going into Syria because the government, the powers that be didn't want Israel and Syria. Saudi Arabia didn't want that, UAE didn't want that, America didn't want that. So they overstepped their boundaries

and they had to correct themselves. So they did us all a favor and they attacked Iran. They did the same thing with Qatar. Nobody talks about this. When they attacked Qatar, they made everybody happy. Qatar is the country that is the financial, the finance hub of extremism worldwide. Yes, they also have the largest military base in the center of Centcom. Right. But they are a fucking dirty, tricky country. And they support terrorism by having loose financial laws that fund terrorism. And they are also the home of Al Jazeera, which is the single largest reaching news source in the world that is actually favorably predisposed to his, Islamic extremism.

Saudi Arabia, UAE, the United States, we all hate what Qatar does in the region. So when Israel bombed Qatar, it made everybody happy again. So Israel's winning back favor on a political level. On a nation state level. With Muslim leaders in that region. Right. And they also, and Netanyahu's a fucking real, he's a brilliant statesman because he understands that to win favor in backroom.

conversations. You have to take the bullets and the fire and the fury from everybody else. He was on a podcast recently with Triggerometry. Fantastic podcast. Yeah, good guys over at Triggerometry. Great guys. No, fuck those guys. Those guys are solid, smart, brilliant dudes. But when they challenged Netanyahu on why he was doing what he did, Netanyahu told the whole world. He's like, Israel's protecting all of you. You can criticize Israel as much as you want, but they are protecting everybody. But he's attacking everybody too. He's not attacking everybody. He's attacking strategically the people who are already threats to the West and to the region of of and that's so but what will if Hamas gets taken out it seems like Hamas will never get taken out

that's a that's a that's an empty right no no I agree because if Hamas it's like denihan who doesn't like he doesn't want Hamas taken out he can't have Thomas taking out because then he's like he's standing with no cards to hold it's the same way as the prime minister of new zealand during covid remember that lady yeah remember that lady that everybody thought was so impressive during COVID. Now we can't remember her fucking name. She was like, we're going to eradicate COVID in New Zealand. And that was her big promise.

And for like four months, she was top of the headlines and everybody was like, we need to be like her. And then what happened? She lost. She failed to eradicate COVID-19 in New Zealand. So she became a complete forget-me-not. So are you telling me that's what's going to happen with Netanyahu? Netanyahu is never going to eradicate Hamas. He's making a promise. He knows he can't back.

Okay, but what is the long-term future of that. Who do they go with? I've already said this. They're going to play both sides. Both the east and the west, Israel's going to continue to play both sides. Netanyahu is hoping that by the time the conflict ends, the conservative base inside Israel is going to be lenient on him when he goes to trial for his corruption charges and the other charges that are actively facing him. The only reason he hasn't gone to trial is because they're in a war zone right now. It's an emergency state. Correct. As soon as the conflict ends,

he has to face trial. And he is hoping, and the conservative foundation, the conservative group that backs him has probably already made promises to him, just like the United States has made promises to fucking Zelensky that they will protect him

because of the advancement that he's made in protecting the region. Your point about Israeli brand being dead, the whole world will forget, just like the whole world always forgets, within about nine months to a year, about what happened in Israel, because they're going to be focused on whatever comes next,

whether that's the building of a Palestinian state, whether that's something else with the Palestinians, as much as it might frustrate us all to hear it, especially inside the United States and most of Europe, no one's going to remember. So that's kind of a, well, you kind of made like a hopeful take there.

You think there will be a resolution. You don't think they're going to kill two million or drive two million Palestinians. Saudi Arabia won't let it happen. The largest sponsor for Palestinian independence of Saudi Arabia. Right. And so you think they're not just playing politics when they say that peace can't exist until there's a solution, a Palestinian, some kind of Palestinian state. Peace can't exist doesn't mean, doesn't mean bombs keep blowing up. Peace hasn't existed in the Middle East for centuries, right? So it doesn't always mean that there has to be bombs going off. There has. There's not been peace. There's never been more war than when Israel moved in there. I'll tell you that much. That's a fact. Okay. But, okay. But so you're saying,

there will be some kind of resolution whatever happens with Netanyahu aside you're saying there will be some kind of resolution in the next five years to the Palestinian question I'm not saying that what I'm saying is that the next 10 to 15 years

worldwide are going to be very tumultuous we get that I'm just trying to figure out and it's the same thing it's the same thing is like the big what do they go with like who controls that region what am I not explaining man you're saying they're going with both sides going with both sides so I'm saying but who economically. Saudi Arabia.

Saudi Arabia. There we go. Saudi Arabia is this. They are already the center of the whole fucking region. Okay. Right? There's nothing new there. Everybody kowtows to Saudi Arabia with one exception, Iran. The whole conflict in the Middle East, if you erase the rest of the world and you just focus on the Middle East, what you're actually looking at is a, is a boxing match between Iran and Saudi Arabia. Everybody else is just exacerbating one side or the other's support. And the big problem is, Saudi Arabia has the most oil wealth, but Iran has the most agricultural wealth.

So everybody in the Middle East needs Iran to be the agricultural hotbed feeding everybody. And Iran knows that. And Saudi Arabia understands that they have the most oil wealth, which is what the whole world needs. But they still need food from Iran. So because Saudi Arabia is cozying up to bricks and sounds like they might eat. I don't know that they need to be a part of bricks, but maybe we'll become a member state of bricks and Saudi Arabia has the most influence over the region.

It sounds like it's more likely that Palestine, Israel, that greater area will fall under the influence of bricks more than it will the United States. Saudi Arabia plays both sides too. It's really hard for Americans to understand how Middle Eastern culture works. It's an incredibly complicated, very, sophisticated, deceitful culture.

Right? Because if you think about how Bedouins survived, prior to the 1950s, all of the Middle East was a barren wasteland of Bedouins. They didn't have natural resources. They didn't have industry. They literally were just struggling to survive every day. It's easy to like just nod your head and say, oh, that's interesting. 1957, I think it was, was when the, was when the, was when the, was when the,

British found oil in Saudi Arabia. That's not that long ago. And they started signing deals with the families that owned the most tribal land to start drilling for oil. And then they started paying those families for the oil that they were drilling. Now, it was just like what happened in the United States with the Native Americans. They didn't pay them very much. But the money that started coming in completely revolutionized the Middle East.

Totally. So that means from 1957 till today, which is less than 100 years. 1957 to today is one generation of people. There are still people walking through the streets in Saudi Arabia and UAE that were kids when oil was discovered in their country. In their lifetime, they have gone from living in tents

riding camels drinking camel milk to riding on trains and airplanes that have their country blazed across the side of it, right? Pooping on hot chicks. You heard that? It's a huge evolution. I mean, if I was a rich Emirati, I would probably be tempted to put.

poop on somebody too. Look, I'm willing to be pooped on. I can be bought. So if you're watching this, like let's talk numbers, dude. Somebody, please somebody. Zach Waxenberg at three arts. That's my manager. Somebody shit on Johnny. That would be awesome. Zach's going to call me and be like, dude, are you crazy? What are you doing, man? I don't want to be shit on. That is not a paycheck I would take, but, but I'm happy to watch you. Depends with the diet, I guess. I would rather have it. Is it solid? Is it running? I think it's logged up. I think I'd rather have it. logged up. It's easy. That's just a, you get a, you get some tongs from the grill and just flick it off of me. Um, so, okay, so it sounds like that is the most, but either way, the U.S. influence is

going to be diminished. The U.S. influence is already diminished. The fact that you see Netanyahu opposing what Donald Trump says publicly, it's already diminished, right? And we just need to understand that that is the current state. That's the inertia that's Saudi Arabia and Israel have always played both sides of the equation. They have always been. American allies in name only, but always executed their own independent operations, which is why you had Biden calling the prince of Saudi Arabia a pariah.

And yet we still sell them weapons. The relationship is very, very complicated, but the thing to understand is the Middle East is always playing both sides because geographically it's in their best interest. And everybody in the world knows that the United States is really fucking far away, except for South America and Central America.

for everybody else. They're like, you know, United States talks a lot, but they're pretty far away. And if we now have alternatives for financing and technology with China, why do we have to cooperate with the United States at all? So that brings me to South America, the Americas. That logically to me is if we can't dominate anywhere else in the world, we're going to dominate in the Americas. And you see it happening with Venezuela. I mean, it looks like they're trying to pull a man Noriega on Nicholas Maduro. Do you have any thoughts about that and about, yeah, where will we dominate? Where is Daredevil? I'm right here.

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This should be tons of fun. Marvel television's Daredevil, Born Again, now streaming only on Disney Plus. The United States isn't a tough pickle because we know our financial and diplomatic influences decreasing everywhere. So we have to find a way to maintain legitimacy, power, influence through what tools we have at our disposal,

which are really just military and the largest wealth in the world. Never underestimate how wealthy the United States is. Even the guy who thinks that he's broke, you know, working in 95 jobs. He's doing better than most people. By a lot, by a factor of 10, right? So that buying power is huge for everybody else in the world. So what we're seeing with South America and Latin America is that they, they're within our sphere of economic influence to the point where we can motivate

and incentivize them through things like that. tariffs, trade deals, et cetera, to kowtow to our political demands. We were talking about how the Western powers are ideological powers. So we're trying to count out, we're trying to get them to bend to our ideological will. Right. After decades where they came second or third on our list, or third or fourth on our list, right? Because what do we care about?

When have we ever cared about Panama? When have we ever cared about Ecuador? When have we ever cared about Venezuela? Right? They don't- Only when they don't do what we want. Bingo. So now that the whole world is not doing what we want, I think you're right.

You're seeing that the United States is saying, well, we need to X, we need to demonstrate our power, at least in the Western Hemisphere. Yeah. And even better in the northern and southern side of the Western Hemisphere. Right. So to Canada, just as much as to Mexico, just as much as to Venezuela, right? But, and, and we're seeing that with these unprecedented attacks on drug boats. Yeah. Alleged drug boats.

I just want to point that alleged drug boats. What is the legality of that? It's tricky. It's, I'm pretty sure it's illegal. I'm pretty sure it's illegal. But then again, so was our bombing of Iran.

That was illegal. So is the invasion of Ukraine. That was illegal. So is the killing of Gaza. I mean, there's so much, what's happening is we're becoming indoctrinated. We're becoming less sensitive,

desensitized to illegal acts of violence all over the world. And even here at home. Do you think, it's tricky because, Maduro, I think he took power. I think he rigged his first election back in like 2016, but I think his most recent election, he actually won fair and square.

That's funny, because most of the people that I talked to, it's the other way around. That the first one was fair, and the second one was rigged. Interesting. That's how most people in my like Intel circles believe that that's more likely the case. Regardless, regime change anywhere is very difficult to pull off.

Even in Venezuela. you don't know who's going to come next. You don't know who's going to come next. And Venezuela is still a country where all those poor masses have an equal vote. So if you truly want a democratic vote, you're not going to like who they pick. They also have big oil contracts now. It's, they have big export contracts with Russia, with Iran, with India, with India, with China. All those are BRICS countries. I know. I know. I mean, I just, there, There's no good solution and there's no good clean answer. That's why the United States is lined up for 10 to 15 years of pain.

And in those 10 to 15 years, we will decide whether or not we end our pain or we guarantee more pain. How do we end our pain? With some kind of drastic change to policy, that is going to make a lot of people uncomfortable or fentanyl. Maybe that is the policy, mandatory fentanyl. That will definitely make people not care about what's happening. Okay. What? There's no way around this, dude.

This is what people don't understand. There is no way around the fact that we have to make a drastic change to the way that we govern ourselves or else we are going to keep getting worse. We're going to keep killing our middle class. We're going to keep creating an income divide. We're going to keep electing populist leaders. Full to personality. There's no escaping this. We've, we have created the precedent.

We have created the momentum in this direction. So unless we, the people, make some kind of drastic change it's going to keep going in that direction. What other freedom? You know, we spoke about like the freedom to express an opinion, right? Is the reason for your,

you want to take your children out of the United States. What are some of the other things that need to change? Some of the other freedoms, whether they're cultural or political, that you think your family can enjoy better elsewhere? What are the, some of the other things? So I want to clarify, again, it's not that I'm afraid of the government encroaching on the rights of my children or myself or my family.

It's because of the culture, the culture, the average everyday person is starting to accept the normalization of these extreme political beliefs, which leaves people either very vocal or very quiet. Isolated. Yeah. And I don't want my children to think that that is what America is. I want my children to understand America is far more special than even the average American understands. But the only way to give them that perspective is to get them out of here. Anybody who's traveled outside of the United States, you being one of them, you have seen how the world works.

And you have seen what it is about the United States that makes us so special. Turn on your sink and you can drink the water that comes out of your sink. You can't do that in most of the world. You can go to a restaurant and expect the food to be clean. You can't expect that in most of the world. Right? Only in your first world Western ideological countries. Do they even have the systems in place to make sure that food and water are clean or available to people, right? The United States is an extremely special place.

That's why I served in uniform. That's why I served at CIA. It's why we did what we did in our book Shadow Cell. It's because we believe in the United States. But what the United States is choosing to do to itself right now is not what so many veterans is not what so many of us fought for five years ago. 10 years ago, 25 years ago, it's not what the boomers fought for either. The United States is going through its adolescence. We are forgetting how young we are as a country compared to everybody else, right?

There were kingdoms in France. There was an empire in Turkey long before there was a constitution of the United States, right? So we have to evolve. Our civil war was so recent that it's laughable to all the other countries who have had civil wars. Yeah. Right? My grandpa met people that fought in the civil war. How crazy is that? And that's how, that's how recent this stuff was, right? So the United States is going through its adolescence to decide what we really want to be. Don't forget the United States is a giant experiment. This whole idea of representative democracy is a giant experiment. So while the United

States figures that out, I have to take the very real responsibility of being a father first. I'm not a patriot first. I'm not a businessman first. I'm not even a husband first. Anybody who's a parent knows that this is the reality. When your kids are under the age of 18, you don't get to be any of those things first. You have to be a father first.

You have to protect your children, feed your children, educate your children, care for your children. I believe I can do all of those things and equip my children to be more successful as global citizens if I take them out of the United States for the period of time that the United States decides what it wants to be. But is it like racism? No.

Is it? United States is not a racist country. Is it education then? Nope. So then what do you not like about you live a great life? It has nothing to do with not liking the United States. That's my whole point. The United States is in, it's going to go through some very difficult times.

Very simple understanding, right? I can see that you're confused. Here's a very simple example. If I build my, if I continue, my life. I live a great life, just like you said. We've got a multi-million dollar business. We've got a huge media footprint. Like life is grand, right? I'm traveling all over the world all time. It's great. I'm not bitching about my life. If the United States goes where I think it's going to go, we're going to see in continued inflation of the U.S. dollar, which means every U.S. dollar that we have

is going to comparatively decrease in value against foreign currency. Now, what happens if I take my family and we live in Europe, anywhere in Europe. Let's just throw out a country, Greece, right? We live in Greece. We convert our U.S. dollars, which are constantly inflating, we convert our U.S. dollars into euros, which is a very stable currency. In the same period of time, in five years' worth of time,

the amount of U.S. dollars goes down because the value of those U.S. dollars goes down because inflation is going up. The euro is stable. So every time I convert those dollars to euros, my euros stay stable. So you get wealthier. I get wealthier when I come back to the United States because now my euros are worth $4 each.

Right. Right. So, and I get to do that at the same time that I show my children what life is like outside of the United States, that I teach them a second or a third language that we live on the, on beautiful white coastal beaches outside of anybody's conflict zone because no one's going to drop bombs on Greece anytime soon. No one's going to invade Greece anytime soon, right? Greece has its own issues if you're Greek.

But if you're an American citizen living abroad, life is even grander than if you're an American citizen in the United States. That's what I want my children to understand. That's what CIA taught me. It's so much more convenient to be an American outside of the United States than to be an American inside of the United States. Doesn't mean I'm going to renounce my citizenship. I'm going to keep being an American taxpayer.

I'm going to keep being an American voter. I'm going to keep being an American apostle. because I love the fucking United States. I'm just saying that what we're doing to ourselves as individuals inside the United States is not what was intended for us. For me, it was actually when I got back from South America last week and I saw that Charlie Kirk had been killed, it made me incredibly. And then I saw, you know, the responses from both sides. I can't explain it. It's not something tangible.

it's a I feel stressed out I feel sad I feel depressed I feel helpless and I know things are just going to keep getting worse yeah that's kind of what makes me it's not tangible you know what I mean it's like it makes me want to move to Uruguay it makes me want to move to a non-conflicted like I want to get my head clear like the stress that the vibration noise yeah the noise and the stress and the and the low vibrational of this culture is degrading to the mind, to the body, to the soul. That's the, I don't know. Is this making any sense? It makes total sense.

I mean, in your own words, it makes total sense. And that's what we're all feeling. So I know that we're talking about me. And I don't really think that I'm a interesting person to talk about. If you look at the actual metrics, here's one for you, John. Take a look at how many Americans. Mike, please. Oh, excuse me.

Yeah, I'm talking away from the mic. How many Americans, or what is the trend in Americans leaving, wealthy Americans leaving the United States? What is the trend in wealthy Americans leaving the United States? What is the trend in golden visas for American citizens? Because what you're going to find, and we'll let John do his 25 minutes from now, I'll have an answer. But what you're going to find is that people of wealth, people who have money, people who have investments, people who have responsibilities, have dependents, are finding their way, abroad. They are doing it to diversify their risk because staying in the United States is increasing your risk. Even if you have money, keeping your money in the United States is increasing

risk. So they're diversifying it in foreign stock markets and foreign property and foreign businesses. Not because they don't believe in the United States, but because it's wise to diversify risk because it's very unpredictable here right now. So I might be the one talking about it on air, but there are tens of thousands of people who are not talking about it, who have net worths of 2 to 200 million who are all investing abroad. And it's not even just the millionaires, it's remote workers. True. You know, that's why they hate them in Mexico City because these fucking gringoes move there.

And, you know, they're just kind of shitheads. They don't speak the language. They're fucking annoying, you know, and they drive the price of rent up. So there's problems with Americans going abroad too. But it's, yeah, it's the foreign worker. It's the person that works for Google in L.A. That makes $150,000 a year. Doesn't have to go into the office.

150 in L.A. ain't shit. Right. But in, yeah, in... When they go to Idaho or when they go to South America. South America, yeah. You can work and live in Medellin. Right? So, okay.

It just makes sense. And it just makes sense for the people who have the opportunity to do that. So then the only people who are really looking at it is saying, why would you do that are all the people who don't have the opportunity? to do that. Right.

And who are either jealous or recognize that they have not invested in themselves to the point where they can make that jump yet. Here's one of the things that's fascinating. Only 20, of all the people in the United States eligible for a passport, only 25% have a passport. So only one out of every four people eligible for a passport actually has a passport, which means they can't leave the country.

Everybody's eligible. Every citizen is above 18. Over 18, yep. Is eligible for passport. So people just, I think it's increasing, but you're right. Americans basically don't go anywhere. Of the 25% of people that have a passport, only 25% use their passport to go further than Canada or Mexico. Right.

So you're talking about 7% of all American citizens eligible for a passport actually have it and have used it to go further than Canada or Mexico. So you're not talking about a large population that is even capable of leaving the United States, let alone getting a visa to be. a digital nomad or getting a visa. Dude, if you start a business, if you are an entrepreneur, if you have an LLC, any country in the world will let you get a long-term visa to stay in their country because what they don't have in their country are people who know how to start a business. Entrepreneurs can shape the whole world. You can write your own ticket.

And an LLC is $135 away. And even though they protest in a lot of these cities against like over tourism and stuff like that they still, the governments want Americans. They want that money because, you know, you spend money there. They want your U.S. dollars. Especially in Greece. It props up, you know, they need something. They got to do something over there. And there's in Europe, Europe again. Portugal is a big one. You can't, you can't say that any place is better than the United States, but you also can't say that any place is worse than the United States. Every place is going through its own transition. The question becomes, what place in the world has the best

advantages for you and for your family. For many people, that is the United States. If you, if you own an American business that serves your local community, like if you're a landscaper, you're a landscaper in Colorado Springs. All of your clients live in Colorado Springs. All of your employees may be foreign or not foreign workers. Who cares? But everything is tied to the U.S. dollar. Everything is in the United States. It doesn't make any sense for you to try to leave. You could start a new landscaping business in Tulum. But what? Why? If you're in the United States and your business is in the United States, as the dollar inflates, your business continues to grow because that's the magic behind inflation. That's what the average person doesn't understand. When interest rates drop and stock market rises and property prices rise, if you have money in investments or if you have money in property, all that money increases. Even though the per dollar... It's a transfer to the top wealthiest... And that's why wealthy people stay wealthy.

Because inflation doesn't bother them. The value per dollar might go down, but the number of total dollars always goes up. And that makes a very good headline for politicians to say the stock market is on the rise. Property values are on the rise. They don't have to say property values are on the rise, but each dollar has lost 10% of its value. And it's just getting harder. Even for people that own landscaping businesses, you know, they got to make a lot more money to cover to cover inflation, you know, cover the rising cost of living.

Do you feel like in a certain way, leaving America, you're part of the problem? Because the talent that you have, the value that you bring, the tax money, I know you're going to pay taxes, you say, I get it. But when talent, this is what happens when countries in decline. Talent leaves. So aren't you part of the, do you feel conflicted about it? that at all? I'm pretty sure if we take a look at your comments right now. I'm not part of the talent.

You are, dude. Come on. We all know it. No, you're, you're, you're, we need entrepreneurs like you. We, so it's almost speeding up. It's speeding up the problem. It's a, it's a valid point. And this is, this is what all people need to understand. Like if you love America, stay and like fight for it. Yeah, is the argument. How many people have stayed in relationships because they love the other person more than that person love them? Right? Yeah. We have to,

we have, damn, that's profound. We have to keep that in mind. We have to keep that in mind. The federal government, the government is not there to take care of the people. The government is there to take care of the government.

The relationship between the government and the people is that the people get the benefits of the government if they follow the laws and pay taxes. The government gets the benefits of the people, if the government incentivizes the people to, stay. The reason the United States exists is because other governments around the world couldn't incentivize their people to stay. So their people left and came here. Our government needs a reminder that its job is to incentivize us to stay because we can leave too. Right? You're not getting enough for your money. So why would I invest my money, my time, my family here? Totally. When I could

take them somewhere else. It's maybe I'm wrong. Maybe I take them to whatever, Greece, Croatia, Georgia, maybe I take them somewhere else, and it's a massive fucking mistake. Well, guess what we're going to do? We're going to pick ourselves up by our bootstraps and come right back home again and then try it again here. Right. But that failure is on us. Right. We need to understand, everybody needs to understand that the reason wealthy people are leaving, the reason that people are diversifying their investments outside of U.S. currency and outside of U.S. property is because the government is not incentivizing those people to stay. Totally. You know who does a really good job of that, unfortunately, are the Arab states. Those governments really, they act as literally like

we're at your service. Like it's you're at a hotel. Absolutely. And they're really like incentivizing people. And you're absolutely right. It's like it's a relationship. I'm not getting enough reciprocity out of this relationship. That makes sense, dude. That makes sense. But you're not going anywhere to fail though. Well, the goal is never to fail. Yeah. Right. The goal for us is partly to, to focus on the family, which means I get to kind of leave this world behind, right? Change my appearance, stop appearing

all over the world or stop traveling so much. Yeah, man, and just be with my kids, especially when my kids hit their teenage years. And when they really need that mentorship from dad, right? That's the job. That's what I got to do. Do you see, so something is radically needs to be altered in the way that the government is organized, set up, run its relationship to its citizens.

Do you see a world where the United States breaks up into like four countries? No, I don't see that happening because strategically the government understands and all of the states understand, state governments understand too. We need to be one unified country. That's what made the Civil War worth it. The Civil War, we're only paying lip service to what the Civil War. was really about. It wasn't about slavery. It wasn't about abuses among races. It was because the government of the United States understood that states needed to reach from coast to coast. That's what we needed. It wasn't even about states' rights. It was about we needed to unify consistently because as a one single country, we would always be safer than if we were north and south or east and west or something else. Right now, the United States only has two borders that it has to worry about.

Mexico and Canada. If put us, replace us with something like Israel. Replace us with something like Jordan. Replace us with something like Russia. You have multiple countries at your borders all the time. You're always at risk. Somebody somewhere for some reason could invade, sneak a bomb across, steal, who knows what. So we needed one unified country from coast to coast because that gave us the

oceans as our buffer zone. So but the matter how much we want to leave the I hear that. I mean it's it's when you go look at like what president Tyler and I think it was Tyler or Polk he's the one that's like we got to invade Mexico we got to take California because we need that Pacific route we need the the protection of the Pacific Ocean but also access to the the Orient that the Chinese and Asian markets for trade but the reason the South wanted to split up is because we were like we don't want to be surrounded by slave states. So that's the reason they wanted to break up. So it was it was about keeping the union together, but we can't have this slavery thing anymore. It's the question of the south wanted slavery. I know. And we did not want to be surrounded. They wanted to keep pressing slavery

further and further west. And if you listen to what Lincoln said, we're going to be surrounded pretty soon. We're going to be free states surrounded by slave states. And people didn't want it. And when they they, they, it made sense. to people. It was a practical reason. Both North and South wanted one unified country from coast to coast. But it couldn't be. One wanted agriculture base. One wanted industrial base. And that's where the slave argument came from. Correct. For sure. And it's the reason that there has to be a resolution to the Palestinians, the Gazans. For Israel, they have a different calculation. Because here's the major difference is that Palestinians have been marginalized for so long. They have no economy.

Israel is the only economy. So when you look at the, when you look at North and South United States, there was an agricultural economy in the South. Sure. And there was an industrial economy in the north. So both parties had something to offer. Both sides had a way of generating their own,

their own currency, their own value. Palestine has no way of generating its own value. Well, they're also kept, you know, Gaza was basically a slave camp, more or less. Yeah. Regardless of why, that's the major difference. between the outcome of the United States Civil War

and what we're seeing in Israel. I guess I mean like for Saudi Arabia, if we're going to assume that they're going to be the dominant hegemon, they're like, we will work with you Israel, but this has to be resolved. Just like, hey, slave states, we'll bring you, we don't want to kick you out of the union. We want us to be unified,

but the question of slavery has to be resolved. Yeah, the way that, the way that Israel and Palestine resolve their issues is going to come from a mix of external countries pressuring them and somebody creating a viable economy for the Palestinians. Even better if they can create

a viable economy for the Palestinians that Israel is dependent on. Because if Israel needs the Palestinian economy, then they are now in a relationship that is beneficial to both. For sure. For sure. What could that be? What could they...

It could be agriculture. It could be education. They've got that... They've got the port. It could be anything. It could be travel. It could be logistic. It could be hospitality.

It could be anything, but the problem is that Palestine has been victimized for so long. Right. Like, they don't have, I'm sure they have entrepreneurs, but those entrepreneurs haven't been taught how to scale a business, how to make a professional industry, right? They only know how to survive. And they've never been given land. They've never been given space. They've never been given the opportunity to be able to even explore safely within

their own culture, how to build an economy. So we really will need something like Bahrain, U.S. and Saudi Arabia to protect a Palestinian state from Israel while they also invest in the development of the Palestinian state to the place where it can stand on its own. And my understanding, my belief is that that is exactly what Saudi Arabia wants because when Saudi Arabia does that, they also have another pro-Sunni state. For sure, ally against Iran. I'm just disappointed that it couldn't be the United States. You know what I mean? Like I guess I sort of in the back of my mind, I mean, you know, I studied the history of interventions by the U.S. and all the unjust wars.

But, you know, yeah, it's just too bad that it's not going to be us. The United States doesn't broker peace. If you look at our history, you'll see we don't broker peace. We get involved. We try to help. But peace isn't really in our best interest. And what's in our best interest is for all the world to constantly be fighting itself. So that we can just be stashing away our money.

We can be developing new weapons that we sell to all those warring countries. we can create intelligence that we sell to those countries. Like, we want to be the big kid on the playground that sits on a chair while all the other kids are wrestling. That's our strategy. Yep. And now we're just fighting ourselves, it seems like. Exactly. Now we're like we have a weird sort of dual personality as we sit on our little throne.

Wow. Yeah. Yeah. And you're absolutely right. At all, I think it's going to accelerate, like, really fast, the decline of the dollar. I mean, you see it. It's coming. Like the way that they're going to drop interest rates, it's,

going to accelerate the madness. We'll see. I mean, I'm hopeful that, I'm hopeful that it won't happen. When I see what happened in France, man, and I guarantee, I know most people aren't paying attention to this, but I was paying very close attention. And I was so hopeful that the French people would do the right thing, right? That their prime minister would bring it to their attention and say, hey, we are way too deep in debt.

We need to save money. We need to stop spending on, it wasn't even, it was 50, I think it was $50 billion. which is a lot of money to you and me, but to the largest economy in Europe, it's not that much. $50 billion over something like three years, right? We need to stop spending money on Starbucks. It's basically what he was saying.

And instead of people doing the right thing and tightening the belt and tying their shoelaces and saying, okay, let's do this, arguably forcing a small recession on their own economy. That's not what they did. Instead, they thought it was better to oust him and riot. But we're no better.

We won't accept austerity. That's my fear. That is my fear. We're not going to accept austerity. The responsible thing for us to do as a country is the responsible thing that we would do as individuals. If we had too much debt on our credit card to pay for, we would stop having Starbucks. Or if we were so deep in debt, we would declare bankruptcy. But eventually we would do something that was fiscally responsible because we know we've got to have money if we're going to survive.

But politics, politics, especially in democracy. politics is becoming populist. So I want to know, tell us about your book. Like why you've just, you've blown up on the internet, you've got everyday spies thriving. But so why write a book that's hard and barely makes any money? Yeah, it's funny.

We actually wrote this book in 2020. My wife and I together. Okay. We wrote the book in 2020. It's been tied up. The publication was blocked by CIA for three years. Why? Because CIA in 2021 declared everything in this book classified.

They said that the concept was classified, the characters, the stories, everything was still an active part of intelligence operations. And they're right, it is active intelligence operations. This book is the most current modern espionage memoir ever written, and it made everybody uncomfortable when we wrote it. The reason that we wrote it was because in 2019, Donald Trump was pushing ad, like, adamantly for more transparency in government. And our book is about an operation against one of the largest adversaries in the world against the United States. And it's a true look at how espionage actually works, how it's a team sport, how it takes

multiple types of talent. My wife and I are in the book, but we're by no means the heroes of the book, right? The heroes are the real men and women who are still doing operations today against the largest adversaries to the United States. So it was important to us to tell that story, to let the world know that what you see in the movies and what you see on TV and what you hear in podcasts about how you can't trust CIA, how that's, that might be one narrative, but that's only because you haven't heard the real way it works. So then if this is like a pro-CIA kind of, you know, piece of literature, why did they want to block it? Because it's very, very sensitive. It may be telling a good news story, but that doesn't make it pro-CIA.

The way that we built the shadow cell operation was by modeling CIA intelligence operations off of terrorist networks. And they did not want us talking about that. I see. The primary reason that we were given permission to build a terrorist cell inside of CIA was because CIA had been penetrated by a mole. And CIA has never acknowledged to the public that they had a penetration by a mole. So are we going to find out who that mole was?

That's fire. So you find out the story of how the terrorist cell process was built. You find out the story of the story of the mole. And then you find out how the mole ended and as a as a tiny spoiler the success of our shadow cell operation is what led to the 2016 restructuring of CIA altogether now all of CIA has been restructured into a group of cells and those cells carry out operations around the world. So it's kind of decentralized? It is more decentralized now than before because CIA realized the risk that it was that was being presented to it by the constant. moles that were being fed to the CIA from Russia, China, North Korea, Iran, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Israel. I get so many headaches every month. It could be chronic migraine, 15 or more headache days a month, each lasting four hours or more. Botoxia autobachilininin A prevents headaches and adults

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or call 1-800-44 Botox to learn more. So that's fascinating. It's going the way. It's like how drug cartels are now. It's all been decentralized into small little nodes, if you will, bands of people. That's why we titled the book, The New Spy War. Americans don't understand that the Cold War style of spying is dead and gone.

we like what you see in movies now where there's still some almighty langly you know central hub that's not the way it works anymore now the 20 years of war that we spent and for all the military veterans out there who lost friends in the war like i did their their lives were not spent in vain even though we abandoned afghanistan the veterans that died fighting the war on terror they were the reason that we learned how terrorist networks worked they were the reason that we were able to understand and replicate the strengths of terrorism and use it to defend the homeland and take the fight to the enemy. So I don't want anyone, anyone who knows the pain of our withdrawal from Afghanistan understands the disappointment. And you start to feel like

our friends died for no reason. One of the huge reasons my wife and I wanted this book and why we fought CIA for three years to get it published was because we wanted to make sure people understood. We learned from those lives. CIA adapted a whole new methodology, and now we are still the strongest intelligence service in the world because of those lives. Even more than Mossad. Massad is just more risk-tolerant than CIA.

Right. It seems like you guys are certainly more moral. Which is, that's saying something, isn't it? Oh, shit, dude. I never thought I would say that in my life, dude. Wow. That's fascinating. Okay, so where can, by the way, what's your relationship with like the CIA? Do you have any relationship with the CIA anymore? So we've never really had a- Like the suits?

We've never had a professional relationship with CIA. We have an obligation under our secrecy agreement that we must coordinate and publish. We must coordinate anything we intend to publish through them for approval. So that's why we took the book to them, why we got it approved before we wrote the manuscript, and then when we wrote the manuscript and sent it to them,

and we got their rejection, we tried for three years to work with them. We tried to say, hey, tell us what's classified and we'll remove it. And they wouldn't work with us. So after three years, we actually executed our right to free speech, hired an attorney, and took the opportunity to CIA. And we basically threatened them with a First Amendment lawsuit. Because my wife and I are professionals.

We know that what's in this book is not, it doesn't exist on a classified document somewhere. So if we were to sue CIA on a First Amendment right, it would fall to the judicial branch. it would become major news, and CIA would be forced to prove that the information in here exists on a classified document, which it doesn't. So they knew they would lose that lawsuit. So they just went, they washed their hands of it. They said, go, go for it. They said, we now approve. Okay. Where can they get the book? What's the easiest way to get the book? Amazon, obviously. Amazon is obviously the easiest place to get it. The audio book is already a multi-week bestseller. Awesome. The hardcover book is already a multi-week bestseller. So you'll find it on

Amazon. You'll find it anywhere books are sold. It's all over the world right now. It was a mainstream publisher. It's a pretty big deal and we're very proud of it. Dude, that's awesome. That's awesome. You got a publishing deal. My guy. I got a self-publish my own trash fucking drug novels that I write. I wrote a book over the pandemic just kind of like based on my life. But it was it was really dirty and really just, fun. Yeah, it was fun. It was fun. Maybe I should republish my book. Days of the Trap.

Okay, Andy, God damn it, that's how you podcast. I had such a great time. Can we do a book? Can we switch over to the Patreon? Just do a little more chat. We got time. Let's jump it. Yes. Are you still plugging Everyday Spy? Absolutely. Okay. By the way, can we get a timeline?

Well, when you're bouncing? Yeah. So my wife and I have been spending the last nine months. traveling the world and scoping out different options for where we might go. And you said that last year. And for the next year, we've got, we were still planning on it. So we're going to spend a total of like two years scouting different locations. But 2017, spring of 2027 is our jumping,

is our jumping schedule. Okay. I wanted to jump in 2026. Yeah. But my wife is more powerful than I. So as 2025 came to an end, she was like, I don't think we're going to be ready by 26.

I see. He moved it one year to 27. originally we were planning 2030 but as we've watched what happened to the United States fuck no we've shortened our timeline dog I might meet you somewhere because I'm seriously

a good place to be I'm telling you after being down there I'm like there's just a big wide world out there and it's pretty great it's pretty great it's pretty great okay Andrew Bustamante the one and only go get shadow cell right now we're going to link in the description

we're going to be pushing it to be clips all over the place I can't wait to read it and then head over to Patreon. Patreon.com slash the Connect show. Thank you, my man. Yes, sir. Did you know if your windows are bare, indoor temperatures can go up 20 degrees?

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