The Joe Rogan Experience - #1793 - Mike Baker

Episode Date: March 19, 2022

Mike Baker is a former CIA covert operations officer and current CEO of Portman Square Group, a global intelligence firm. He's also the host of "Black Files Declassified" on Discovery+ and the Science Channel.

Joe Rogan Podcast, check it out! The Joe Rogan Experience. Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night! All day! Mike Baker. Are we fucked? Mr. Rogan, we are fucked. This is not good, right?

This is not good. How much fun is this? Every time we get together, there's some bullshit happening. Every time, the world is somewhat falling apart. Yeah, yeah. Well, it's good for business. I didn't mean that, actually. That's going to sound wrong.

No, no. That's what people expect me to say, I think. Yeah, yeah. I think nobody really expected the potential for thermonuclear war right after two years of a pandemic. I don't think anybody actually saw that coming. Yeah, there was no break for the weary. Yeah, exactly. It comes out of it. I did have a thought, which was I talked to my daughter the other day.

She's just turned 28. And I thought after I hung up, she was talking about it. And she was kind of basically saying, what the fuck? Right. She was talking about it and she was kind of basically saying, what the fuck? Right. And so people that age, if you think about those, the folks in that age group, she was born, you know, she was old enough to understand 9-11. Right. In a sense, from a child's perspective. And then through the Iraq or the Iraq, Afghanistan, you know, bullshit that that whole time with the war on terrorism, a couple of recessions and global pandemic. A couple of recessions, global pandemic, now approaching Cold War 2.0, getting close to thermonuclear war. Not that we are.

And the disastrous pullout of Afghanistan. And Afghanistan, inflation possibly leading to recession. $7 a gallon gas in California. People of that age, not able to save money for for house. They must just be thinking what the fuck yeah Where's our you know big build-up? Where's our like the 50s or the the 80s? You know it just seems so supremely incompetent Everything seems like whoever the grown-ups are that are running the show have fucked up so many different things Yeah, yeah Yeah, there's a lot of there's a lot done back there is this that statement the Putin thing scares the shit out of me

though because he's a you know when it comes to warlords he's a legitimate warlord yeah who is in charge of I didn't know that they had more nukes than us I mean I guess it's kind of a moot point, right? Because everybody's got enough to kill everybody. How many times over? Isn't it something crazy, like 10 times over? Yeah, they did the math and it was in double digits. It's not good. It's not good, but it's, look, if you step back, everybody's thinking, okay, how did this, you know, how did this fucked up situation happen? Well, it's not good, but it's, look, if you step back, everybody's thinking, okay, how did this, you know, how did this fucked up situation happen? Well, it's been building, obviously, right?

I mean, how much news coverage did we have of, well, they're adding more troops to the border with Ukraine. I wonder what they're doing. It could be military exercises. So there was a tremendous amount of speculation leading up to what the fuck is going on, which in a sense points to how lacking the intelligence is on Putin, on plans and intentions, right? And that's a heavy lift, right, to come up with that sort of intel, because ideally you're going to want a human source. You know, you can get SIGINT, you can get whatever, you can gather intelligence from a variety of sources,

but you really want human access, people who can tell you, you know what, I had a meeting with him, and boy, I tell you what, he was pissed off, or this is what he said, or this is how he looked. Without that, without knowing what plans and intentions are, or being able to gather intel on, say, the command staff, everybody was kind of speculating. Will he, won't he? What's he going to do well stepping back if you look at what he's done he's been pretty damn consistent right over the years and so i guess you know in a part a lot of it was optimistic thinking okay he's he just wants the eastern part of the country he's just going to go in there and take that because you know maybe he's he's already got it he's declared those two republics legit. Maybe that's all he wants. He's already taken Crimea. And so I think

that was optimistic thinking, hoping that, you know, the guy's not going to lose his shit and go all the way through the country. Well, that's what he's done. And in part, because again, if you look at what he did in Chechnya, if you look at what he did helping Assad in Syria, if you look at what he did annexing Crimea, if you look at Georgia, Abkhazia, south of Sessia, every step of the way, he's been following in his mind this stated desire that he's made very public over the years to rebuild his sphere of influence. So in part, you could argue, we kind of miss the obvious. We didn't see the obvious in front of us because we were all kind of hoping and mirroring our values onto Putin, who doesn't deserve to have our values mirrored onto him, because we're thinking maybe he just wants a little bit. Maybe he's just trying to make a point. Maybe he just wants them to sign a charter saying they won't be part of NATO. be part of NATO. So anyway, my point being twofold, I guess. We missed the boat on that. We missed it in part because we're always trying to be optimistic and trying to think, okay, well,

maybe they think like we do. Maybe there's a rational process there. And then part of it is intel was lacking. And when it comes to intel, when you're talking about in-person intel, how difficult is that to get on a guy like Putin? It's really tough. I mean, you know, look, it's a very heavy lift. The higher they go up the food chain, because the smaller your pool of potential access points are, right? So, you know, you've got some mid-level person floating around, you know, a government office somewhere in some target country. And, you know, maybe you've got lots of options. Okay, who do they socialize with? Right? Who can I get access to? Who might, you know, be next to them? You know, do they have a driver? Can I recruit the driver? There's things like that, right? Sometimes it's very simple. But Putin's had an increasingly small circle

of close advisors and the people that he counts on and trusts. And part of that may be the fact that that was accelerated through the two-year pandemic, where he decidedly was shutting himself off because he was paranoid, like a lot of people were, about COVID. Do you remember when there was a guy who suicide drove into Putin's car and Putin wasn't in it? Yeah. When was that? That was was a few years back. Yeah, some guy There was oncoming traffic and he timed it right when there must have been someone communicating with him letting him know where Putin's car is But Putin wasn't even in it Yeah, and turned right into oncoming traffic and used his car as a weapon and killed the both of them Yeah, I think killed the both of them.

Yeah. I think killed the both of them. Yeah. We'll get you to look up when that was. You've seen the video, though, right? Yeah. It was a while back, though. It was-

Four or five years, maybe? But he's- People have been talking about, is he losing his shit? Is he going crazy? I don't think it's any of that, right? Well, he gets on a table when he negotiates and talks to people. He's like 40 feet away. Yeah. Yeah. And so he, but he, and that assessment was, was clear during the course of the pandemic. He was, he was isolating himself. He was being, you know, very, very cautious, but I mean, and so maybe that had something to do with it, but he, anyway, point being is, is it's tough to,

when you've got a small potential well of targets you can go after when you're talking about recruiting somebody who's got access to a high priority target, that's probably one of the heaviest lifts we've got. How do you get, like, how does someone get access to like a driver? Do you use a girl? Is that the best way to do it? No, not really. I mean, you know what, it's, because what you're looking to do, this, not really. I mean, you know what? Because what you're looking to do, this is not to fall into like, you know. Spy talk.

Spy talk and recruitment 101. But the movies and beach books and everything will have you believe that, you know, the best way to hook somebody to recruit somebody is, you know, blackmail or a honey trap or something. Right. Usually you're working on something else. You're not necessarily working on the ideology, but you don't want to start from a negative basis, right? Because even in normal terms, in the best of circumstances, when somebody's recruited to spy on their country, to spy on their organization, whatever it may be, a clock starts ticking because you know, because things start to decay, right? The person starts to decay. It's very wearing on a human, right? And for a variety

of reasons. And so you know that window is going to close at some point. It may not end well. So you're trying to optimize that. And if you start from a negative perspective, right? If you've got someone cooperating with you because they're blackmailing, they're under the gun here and they hate you and they hate what they're doing, that's not what you're looking for. You're looking for a more, and it sounds weird, but you're looking for a more positive approach. So how do you do that? How would you get a driver to be your buddy? Well, there's a recruitment process, a cycle that you go through, but I hope everyone's taking notes. But you, first of all, you got to know what information you're looking for, right? And so

that task can get set, you know, outside the building. If you're talking about the agency or really any intel service, theoretically, the administration of power is setting priority tasking. So they send over this and they say, hey, we need this. This is a priority target for us, this information. So you look around and you go, okay, well, who's got access to the information? All right. You build up that world. Then you figure out who might be accessible, right? Because maybe you're interested in a target here, but he never leaves that country. It's a denied area. And so then you find out who's got access to the information, who might be accessible, why might they be minded to talk to you? Can you create a scenario where you can get next to them? And then you're looking for points of leverage, right? You're really

looking, and that doesn't necessarily mean you're looking to find a negative, right? You're looking for something that drives them. Are their kids the most important thing to them? Do they have a kid who needs medical attention? Do they have a kid who they desperately want to send away to college, but they don't have the money? So you're looking for something like that that may, again, it sounds strange because you're talking about recruiting somebody for espionage, but it's a positive rather than a negative. And that creates then a longer shelf life in a sense for that asset, if that makes sense. It does make sense, but I would imagine that when you're dealing with someone like, say, Kim Jong-un or Putin or some dictator,

they have to be prepared for things like this, right? So they probably are very cautious on who gets into their inner circle. Yeah, and that's a counterintelligence issue, right? So every government out there, they're worried about that very thing, right? And so, I mean, look, Putin, he was a KGB officer for 15 years, right? Yeah. Now, interestingly, going back to Putin, he served in East Germany, I think, for about half a dozen years. Never really had any exposure to the West. So that's also something, when you're talking about trying to assess his mindset, understand where he's coming from,

part of it is, look, if he had been exposed to the West in a much bigger way, maybe he served in New York, or he served in wherever, London, someplace where he had more exposure. But you look at that guy and you go, he doesn't really understand how we think. And so that's an important thing. You got to tick that box and put that in there when you're doing an assessment of his personality and trying to, because that's part of understanding why he's doing what he's doing. You don't think he understands how we think? In what way? wherever, you know, Shenzhen or Shanghai or Beijing, and you're there for a few years, you're going to understand the culture, the mindset much better than, you know, somebody who's never lived there and is, you know, just, you know, sitting in Washington in a think tank

talking about what the Chinese regime may do next. So it's that immersion, it's that exposure, it's dealing with those people. It's the contact that you have. Look, I'm old enough that I remember when the wall started to fall, when the Soviet Union was collapsing. From our perspective, right, as a government, as an intel service, we saw that as an opportunity. There's chaos there, right? And what did you have? You had intel officers like Putin, KGB, GRU officers who saw their world collapsing around them because at the time before the Soviet Union collapsed, they were living the good life. Right. They were the elite in a sense. They were they were pampered. Their kids were going to get the best education. They were set for life. Their kids were set for life. All of a sudden, the Soviet Union starts going to shit. Right. And you could see it.

And, you know, so what did we do? Well, we were out there busy, right, working over whatever targets we might have access to, trying to see if maybe they think, you know, maybe there's another option here. Maybe there's an alternative. Maybe I can, you know, save myself, my family, you know, perhaps put aside some money by working for the other side. And that's a natural thing to do, right? Every service is going to do that if there's chaos on the other side. So I remember you could see the confusion and the humiliation, right, and the fear in some of these guys as this was happening. And so Putin went through that same process. Again, it's one of those things that you do. You put all that together to try to create this profile of this individual, right? Because I'm not buying the talk when people get on TV and go, oh, he's going crazy. He's losing his mind. I'm not buying that. There's a reason why he's driving the way he is. And again,

he's being somewhat consistent. He's never given a shit about civilian casualties. Never bothered him before. I mean, that situation in Chechnya when they went in there, right? And I mean, that was, yeah, I have to argue, the other side was different as well. Some of the Chechen separatists were in some of the shit that they were pulling. But at the same time, he didn't care whether he was killing civilians or, you know, separatists and, you know, members of their militia and military. So I don't know. I think it's it's one of those things where I think with with Putin, we've got to we got to be really pragmatic here. We got to understand. I don't think he's he's not crazy. He's not going to say, OK, I'm in a corner.

I'm going to I'm going to push the button and fire off a couple of tactical nukes, right? I think what he's gotten to the point is, you guys have disrespected me. This is how he thinks, right? You've disrespected me. Fuck you all. I told you I want my sphere of influence, and I don't care whether I have to break it. I'm going to have it. When you say sphere of influence, do you mean he wants to reclaim what is the former Soviet Union? Yeah, he said that. He said publicly in the past. He called the collapse of the Soviet Union the greatest tragedy of the 20th century. And he's serious about that. He means that.

So he's not fucking around. And again, if we look at it, he's being consistent, right? He's being consistent over the years. He's a dictator. He's a despot. He's looking increasingly more like he's isolating himself, which that's a danger in a sense to all those people around him, right? He's already cut loose some of his inner circle just over the past couple of weeks, right? Has he?

Yeah, he's gotten rid of his, well, he put under house arrest a couple of his FSB senior command. Why did he do that? The domestic service, because the intel was so bad. Because going in- Oh, because of Ukraine? Yeah, because of Ukraine. Yeah, sorry. Yeah, because of Ukraine. So they went in and the assumption was, and now again, this is where our intel is lacking. Was he given bad intel or was he given intel and he just chose to ignore it? But it appears as if what he believed and what

the top military commanders, some of whom have also been let go or possibly reassigned, I don't think that's a good thing in Russia, is that they were going to get in there. Maybe within 48 hours, they were going to have control of Kyiv. They would be welcomed by the population in Ukraine and they would be able to establish a puppet regime, a new government. I mean, they moved the previous president that was Russian backed. They moved him from Russia to Minsk in preparation, it appeared, to move him down to take over the government, which is in a sense, batshit crazy because he was kicked out during the last revolution by the people. That was 2014? Yeah, that was that Orange Revolution that they had.

Yeah, we were blissfully unaware of that in the West because we didn't think it affected us. I mean, you ask the average American citizen about the Ukraine revolution in 2014, like, what are you talking about? What are you talking about? We just found out recently that a comedian is running the country, which is hilarious. Yeah. Everything is short-term here in the U.S. And that's also including with our politicians, right?

And they want a simple story. So everything's coalesced around this simple narrative about, you know, and we have to be, I don't know, we have to be very careful about certain things the emotions are running high we hear oh Russian moral troop morale is bad you know they're we're hearing that from our media and we know that our media is not exactly accurate

they love a good story they don't just love a good story they love a narrative and they're willing to ignore facts to push that narrative that's what scares me what scares me is I mean I think there are objective journalists that work for The Washington Post and The New York Times, and there's real solid journalists out there. But I don't necessarily know if you're getting all the information.

I think it's safe to say that there's some fuckery afoot. I mean, The Nework times just now is admitting that the hunter biden laptop is real and you know we remember from the debates with trump bringing it up to biden and biden saying it's bullshit and he's it's a lie yeah a flat out lie everybody knew it was a lie the new New York Post had that story that was banned from Twitter, which was just outright crazy. That one of the oldest newspapers in the country. Yeah, and I don't think anybody's going to go back and apologize to them. No, no one's apologizing.

But there's a dynamic here that, I mean, I love this topic in a sense, not so much because of, you know, whatever the fuck Hunter was up to, I love this topic in a sense, not so much because of whatever the fuck Hunter was up to, but in part because now when you look at the liberal Dems and the progressives, it doesn't matter to them. If you read some of the narrative that is out there now, the social media in the past day or so, ever since the New York Times came out with this, they're just dismissive of it. they're just dismissive of it. Yeah. And they don't care or they're willing to overlook it, which is the same thing they accuse the right of doing. Both sides, we've talked about this before, but both sides are just so fucked up.

Both sides are so fucking crazy. God. They're both so crazy. Which does leave you with the question of, well, where do we go with that? But the Russia-Ukraine situation has created an interesting dynamic in D.C. where you've got sort of this weird bipartisan support for, you know, let's give them the MiGs. Let's push back. From what I understand, there was an American billionaire, some guy who actually has a MiG.

He's an astronaut. And see if you can find the story and he was like the MiGs are technologically inferior to what Russia currently has and if we sent MiGs over there they would just get shot down it would be a massive moral victory for Russia. Yeah. Is that true? It depends on the training right because so much of this depends on the the capabilities of the pilots, the ground crew and how well maintained theaintained the platforms are. But just from a technical perspective, yes, it's true. Here's this guy.

American who owns a MiG-29 isn't sure the fighter jets would help Ukraine much. A billionaire astronaut who helped train U.S. fighter pilots loves his high-performance Soviet jet but thinks it's no match for Russia's newer planes. First of all, that's when you know you're a baller, when you got your own fucking fighter jet. Yeah, right. A Russian fighter jet. I'm just going to fly to the Hamptons because I'm a billionaire. Did you ever see Operation Odessa? It's a documentary.

No, I don't think so. It's a fucking hilarious documentary. It's about these guys that are smuggling cocaine into America and they buy a submarine from the former Soviet Union. And while they're buying a submarine, the guy asks them if they want nukes to go with the submarine. Just an aside. Operational deaths is outstanding. I tell you what, we could get into a whole different rabbit hole there talking about the gray arms market

because it is a, we worked the gray arms market for a while. It is a fascinating place. I can't recommend this documentary enough. It's fucking amazing. And it's so amazing

that while you're watching, you're like, what? That's fantastic. This is real? It's really funny. It's just, it's really good.

It's also really scary because it's true. Well, yeah. If you think about it, but see, that's something else. Well, there's really good. It's also really scary because it's true. Well, yeah. If you think about it. But see, that's something else. Well, there's a lot there. No, I flew in a MiG, a MiG-15, which was built in, shit, they were built in 1954. Really?

Yeah. And MiGs, I mean, MiGs changed the world, right, in terms of aviation, right? We had never seen that design. We didn't think the Soviets could build that, right, when it came out. I know some of this shit because we do a whole thing on it in Black Falster Classified, which the second season just started last week. That's on Discovery, right? It's on Discovery, yeah. Science Channel, Discovery Plus.

It's on Discovery, yeah. Science Channel, Discovery Plus. But when the MiGs showed up over the skies of Korea during the Korean conflict, we had no idea what the hell we were doing. And so it literally changed. We actually had some prop fighters still up in the air flying from World War II. Propeller fighters in the 50s? Yes, we were still fighting. That's where we were at that point. So the MiG shows up, I guess the point being is that for a long time it was, and one of the things they were able to do was produce them rapidly. It's basically a couple of tiny wings and a big rocket. And the funny thing is there's no safety protocols. I mean, it's not like they were concerned about their pilots. And so there's no ejection seats. In fact, when we strapped in and were taxiing, I was talking to the pilot, and he says, yeah. He says, okay, so if things go sideways here and we're up there, what you have to do is you have to use both hands to pull your canopy back. It's a mechanical canopy.

You have to pull it back. He says it's tight, so you have to force this thing back. You have to undo your seat harness, you know, and don't get fucked up and undo your parachute, which you're sitting on. And then he's got to get that thing over, right? He's got to turn it over so you can tumble out. Oh, my God.

That was the safety briefing. I mean, no, it was more than that, but that's how you get out. And hope you don't get burned alive by the jet engine. Basically, yeah. Or that you can come out because there's no space in there. So you're going to be stuck anyway no matter how successfully you're rolling that thing. If you don't turn it upside down, you can't get out.

Yeah, no, you're not going to get out. I mean, because think about that thing, how fast it moves. You're going to be trying to climb out of that canopy. So it was one of those things where I thought to myself, if something had gone wrong, basically my insurance policy would have been not valid. Who has the most advanced fighter jets today? People are going to say, well, of course you're going to say it's the U.S. I think they, in terms of technology, it's moving very quickly because what's developing fast is material science, right? And so material science has been developing because the holy grail of all of this is speed, right?

And speed can defeat a lot of things, including air defense systems. systems. So, I would argue from everything I've seen in the US, I mean, China is right there in part because they're very good at stealing whatever we're developing. I had to get that in. But in terms of development of new materials, that's going to allow for that breakthrough eventually, probably not in our lifetime, but of manned hypersonic flight, which is going to be insane. It's going to be crazy. How does China steal technology like that? Do they find someone who's working on the technology and bribe them? Yes. They go through a variety of ways. So one way that seems very unobtrusive and logical is they have people out attending all the various academic events, conferences, and so they do that. They'll hoover up whatever they can in that regard. That's very low key,

right? And that's always done. And oftentimes it's done in cooperation with U.S. academic institutions, right? They love that cooperation. They also love the money that comes into their institutions here in the U.S. from China. One way they do it is they put students here, right? And, you know, people are going to say, oh, my God, that sounds xenophobic or whatever. No, but a portion of students, you know, come to the states, are cooperative assets or working on behalf of, because sometimes, you know, that's just what they're going to have to do. Well, if they want to go back to China, right?

Right. That is the deal. Right. And so they work and they, I mean, I mean, you can have someone show up here, go to undergrad, go to grad, end up working in Raytheon or wherever over a period of 30, 40 years, right? Essentially as an asset of Chinese intel, gathering information all along the way, of Chinese intel gathering information all along the way, answering specific questions. Sometimes it's straight up appealing to the homeland basically. And they're very successful at targeting people who could be second, third generation even,

China, Chinese. And that's an appeal that they'll work on constantly because they believe it works and at times it has worked. They're very adept at just identifying potential targets who may eventually be in a position of access, and they're willing over years and years to work on that. We have a much shorter timeframe, right? So we look at an asset in a very short period of time. of timeframe, right? So we look at an asset in a very short period of time. And in part, I don't know what it is, but it's the nature of kind of our intel collection operations, right?

We send people overseas to work and maybe they're going to be someplace for two or three years. And so they know if I'm going to get promoted, I got to recruit. I got to get some recruits. I got to do that. So there's this, whereas sometimes China is much more patient in that regard, right? They don't think about it that way. They're not going to base it on, okay, did you get two recruits? They're going to base it on, did you develop somebody? Did you push them a little further down the path? That's a good thing if you did, because maybe that path is going to take another five years, six, 10 years, 20 years. They don't care. They're willing to invest the time where sometimes we get very impatient because in part, I don't know why, we're Americans, we have a short attention span. So I don't mean that in a glib way,

but there is that decided difference between the services. Do we do the same thing? Do we have people over in Chinese universities that are working with the United States government? Can you say that? No, we would never do that, Joe. Well, no, we would never do that, Joe. Come on. What the fuck?

Although, now that you say it out loud, it sounds like a good idea. I think you have to, right? I mean, if this is the game you're playing, if the game you're playing is uh everybody's cheating you kind of mean it's it seems like it's part of the strategy that you have to employ if you want to be successful yeah yeah i would say it's it's it's much more difficult for us we have an open society right they don't right so if you think about it, our ability to have to have, say, a student, if we're going to go that route, you know, apply to a university in China. That's a that's a much more rigorous process. Right. Because they start from the perspective of there's something wrong here. Why is this person applying to our

university? So immediately they're flagged as a potential counterintelligence issue. Whereas we have, I don't even know at this point, maybe 300,000 more Chinese students here in various academic institutions going to school, probably more than that. And how many are monitored? Like when you have 300,000, do we have enough federal agents to go, hey hey let's make sure this guy isn't stealing information and sending it back to the ccp no but every day literally every day the fbi as an example is opening up a new case on on a chinese uh intelligence issue every day every day every day so they're stretched thin on a lot of fronts um including you know

terrorism fronts international international, domestic. But the Chinese issue and counterintelligence, every single day they're opening up a new case, at least one. I was having a conversation with a friend of mine about this. I was saying, you know, what's kind of fucked is that what we do in America is every four years we have an election where it's a popularity contest for the most important job in the country. election where it's a popularity contest for the most important job in the country. And so if you got the most important job in the country, every four years, someone's new at it. It's crazy. Imagine if you had to do any other job, whether it's brain surgery or whatever the fuck it is, building cars, and you've never done it before. I mean, that's literally everyone, you only get to do it twice, you get eight years max, right?

Yeah, yeah. That's a good thing. I guess it is a good thing. I guess it's a good thing. But when you look at what they're able to do in China, and this is not me advocating for totalitarian control by the government. But what I'm saying is, it is a massive advantage that they have in that they don't have that restriction. They get to be really good at their job, and they understand it deeply. So one of the things that the tinfoil hat brigade likes to talk about is the deep state, right?

They always like to talk about the deep state. Right. And what I was saying is what if we didn't have a deep state? Do you know how fucked we would be if we didn't have career politicians and career intelligence agencies and people who are there for long periods of time that actually do understand it? Yeah. If the person, I mean. Every time? Yeah.

Listen, I've disrespected Joe Biden enough. I don't think I should do it anymore. Because I think I've said enough about him. You're going to stop on my show. We're going to stop. Being mentally incompetent. I mean, he's just compromised. He's an old guy. We know, we know, right? Everyone knows. The guy's falling apart. But imagine if he really was the only say in how things run and how things go. If he really was like a dictator, we would be beyond fucked. Yeah. Luckily we got the 81 year old Nancy Pelosi to back him up.

Oh, it's so important. She's falling apart harder than him. Wow. Yeah. It's, I don't know if that's true. It's close, but it's, it's, it's, it's a massive disadvantage, isn't it though? I'm not, this is not me saying this, like advocating for any different system. Right. What I'm saying is that if you just look at the structure of our Government the way we do elect a new leader every four years every four years

Someone is new they start from scratch Which is crazy yeah, I think what what's what saves the system is what you've pointed out Which is you've got career personnel, right? And they really do run the country, basically. They have to. The folks that are there, the civil service group, the folks who, now, if government gets too large, which you could argue it already has, then you got a problem. You got entrenched, you know, folks who, you know, maybe, I don't know. So I'm a little conflicted on that, but certainly for the

intel service, right? And I know people are going to say, well, fuck that. It's not apolitical. But you know what? You can only speak from your experience. Mine was that the agency is essentially apolitical. You know, occasionally you get someone like, you know, John Brennan, who, you know, has a very close relationship with the president. He's been dinged for it in terms of, you know, he got all political, just like the FBI, you know, has obviously taken heat in the past. But you want those institutions to be, OK, let's say as apolitical as possible and not rotating out. And I've been to countries where there's a change in government, there's a wholesale change in the intel service.

Not good. No, it's not good. They're completely beholden to whoever's in charge. You don't want that. But, you know, we've talked about it before. You know, I'm a huge believer in term limits, right? And it's never going to happen, but I'm a big believer in it. And it's just that you look at the current leadership. I don't know. I mean, how do you look at Schumer, at Mitch McConnell, at Pelosi, at President Biden, and you think, we got octogenarians running our country, and I don't understand. We got 330 million people in there.

How do we not get a better slate of candidates repeatedly, since it is an every four-year process? Or, good God, Congress, it's every two years. Look at some of the people we got in Congress now. It's fucked up. Well, it seems like a lot of our best and brightest don't want that gig. I think that's exactly it. I mean, who wants to put themselves through that? Yeah. Who wants to put themselves through that? And then on top of that,

who wants to deal with all of the infighting and all the politics that are involved once you get into a position? What scares me is the idea that intelligence agencies would side with one party or one candidate or the other and not side with the greater good of the United States. Because then there could be a situation where information is withheld or information is not necessarily distributed evenly to Republicans or Democrats, depending upon what the party favors or what the agency favors. That sounds crazy to me. Yeah, no, you cannot have that.

The intel community has got to be apolitical. And you've got to work at it, right? I mean, because you've got to be very careful. And now, look, the director is appointed, right? So – and then approved through Congress. And, you know, so you have to – there's a process in place. You've got to be able to evaluate and look at people and make a decision, okay? Are they – you know.

But for the most part, again, I would say, I would argue, and people would expect that, but I would argue that for the most part, the agency has done a good job of being apolitical through the years. Now, that doesn't mean mistakes haven't been made through the years. That's not what I'm saying. I'm saying that they've done a good job of, for the most part, being apolitical. And I'm basing that on seeing other intel services around the country around the world and knowing how fucked up they can be So we're not the worst. We're not

That's a resounding but here's a question when a guy like Trump gets in the office and then like openly disparages intelligence agencies and openly Disparages that whether it's the FBI or the CIA or whoever he's in some sort of a personal feud with that seems very dangerous well it's dangerous to I suppose if you if you think if if all you're thinking about is okay morale right I mean this is work on a few levels so yeah sure there was and there was a lot of talk during Trump's time in office, you know, that morale was sinking at the agency because he was kicking them in the ass on occasion.

Right. Well, honestly, the agency has taken a beating over the years from a variety of administrations. And all I can again speak to is my experience, which spanned a handful of administrations you know from a from a collection point of view from just getting the job done you know you don't give a shit just tell us what the tasking is right and we'll go out and do it you know the and and the idea was always the director was your top cover the director served as a liaison between the the white house and kind of you know protected, protected the agency, right, from, you know, all the machinations or the back and forth. Now, once you collect that intel, right, if you're out in the field and you pull an intel and you throw it into the mix, right, you send it

back or whatever, and once it leaves that building and it gets into that washing machine of Washington where there's lots of different, you know, people editing and looking at it before it ends up in, you know, in some briefing somewhere in the National Security machine of Washington where there's lots of different people editing and looking at it before it ends up in some briefing somewhere in the National Security Council, yeah, there's an editing process that goes on there. That's where a lot of the spin, a lot of the agenda can be built in. How does that work? Well, I mean, you've got a lot of hands touching. Well, intelligence is one thing, right?

You find somebody out in the field, and they said, yeah, this is what Putin Putin means because I was sitting in a meeting with him and two of the command staff, and this is what he said. Okay, great. That's raw intelligence, right? So you report that back, word for word. You don't put your spin on it, right, as a person that's collecting. And that goes back, but now that's going to get looked at by the guys writing the reports up and doing the analysis and assessment of this, they're putting it together with other intel, maybe they're collecting from other sources, right? And then you've got, so the more hands that are touching that, you know, once it gets back to Washington, the more potential for editing, right? And for analysis and opinion,

you know, might get in there. That's just a natural thing, right? That's going to happen. But it's the raw intelligence that really matters. And sometimes I feel like we should have a more direct line from the actual raw intelligence, if you can protect sources and methods, direct to the end user, you know, to try to keep that editing process to a minimum. Otherwise, you're playing a game of telephone too, right?

It's not so much telephone where, you know, you get the, I guess we used to say Chinese whispers. Chinese whispers? We can't say that anymore, can we? You're older than me. Yeah, we used to say that. I never heard that. Really? You never heard that?

Maybe it's an intelligence thing. Could be. Could be. But anyway, the idea being it's like that party game where you whisper something to someone, they whisper it along to someone. It's like that party game where you whisper something to someone, they whisper it along to someone. It's not quite like that because it's more like it gets blended in. And then that blending process with other sources of information and then just the natural inclination of people who are writing up reports or passing it from one office to another to say, well, I think this is kind of what it means, or this is the most important part here. And so shit can move around. It's like editing a newspaper article, right? The

more hands get on it, the stranger it's going to look. It doesn't necessarily mean that the facts are wrong. Maybe just the context or the priority part of this is missing or different. So I know I'm probably being nuanced there. No, it's important to be nuanced, I guess, because someone like me doesn't really understand how the process works. And I think most people don't. Most people, you know, they just know that we find out certain things about a certain terrorist cell or, you know, what have you, has happened in other parts of the world.

And we really don't know the process of how the intelligence gets to the people that make the decisions. I think what would surprise people too is how imperfect that intelligence can be sometimes. And that's one of the again, every time I say something positive about the agency

I get a couple thousand notes going, don't read that shit. I don't. Although I will say this much Okay, I'm gonna I'm gonna veer completely in a different direction now that you said this one of my boys I got three boys right and so scooter sluggo and Muggsy I always talk about and Scooter the the the oldest one came to me. He says I found this funny fucking threat in some You know read it or something like that

where there's this whole bunch talking about the boys and what their names are oh boy and so i actually wrote down some of them um and they're just speculation and people are saying no that's not their names so i think fake names well well that's what they're saying i mean they're just speculation, and people are saying, no, that's not their names. Oh, they have fake names. Well, that's what they're saying. So instead of Scooter, Sluggo, and Mugsy, I've got Scooter, Bozo, and Fucko. That wasn't it. Somebody thought it was Pooper, Bunghole, and Skidmark. That's not it.

Scooter, Bam Bam, and Fuckknuckle. Definitely not it. Tweaker, Barfo, and Butzo. You are wasting time repeating the things that someone in a cubicle who was bored either fine no I know probably on Adderall my boys like this and the last one the youngest one Muggsy he likes he's adopted the new name McFuckstick because he thinks that's funnier than anything except for fuck knuckle he thought that was funny those are both pretty funny yeah so anyway I don't read them except for that one when my boy brought it to me and

said you got to read this yeah don't read them except for that one when my boy brought it to me and said, you got to read this. Yeah. Don't read the comments. Oh, no. That's my number one piece of advice for everybody. Do you get comments? I'm sure I do. I'm sure there's a few out there.

You can't. You'll go crazy. It's the only way to stay sane. And the more controversy that comes my way, the more I'm solidified in my position. Let me ask you this. Do your kids read the comments? My kids are very healthy. They know what's going on. They understand that their dad has a very weird job, but they know me. I have a very good relationship with them. I communicate with them.

So when wild shit happens, I have to sit down with them and have a conversation with them, but they don't get concerned. They're reasonably adjusted to this very strange position that I'm in. So they don't dive in on their own into comments and read about, okay, that's very healthy. They don't. I've educated them to that. It's, you know, we live in a strange time of information and the ability to communicate, and I think there's a lot good in that. But you have to navigate it correctly.

It's like there's a certain amount of freedom in our ability to communicate and our ability to express ourselves. And I think that's ultimately good. I am of the opinion that people should be able to express themselves. But you've got to realize, like, if you gave me a Twitter account when I was 15 years old and you let me tweet at Mike Baker I'm gonna say some fucking horrible shit to you dude

if I was a 15 year old kid and they let them have their fucking phones in class right so if the teacher's not paying attention and I'm bored out of my mind cause I don't give a shit about math and I'm sitting there in my class I'm gonna just tweet at Mike Baker and if Mike Baker bites

and people do bite, what did you say, you son of a bitch? And then you got fun. You got fun on your hands. You're tweeting at people. You got something on the line. You got a trout on the line right there. Yeah, well people love to just make up a completely

fake story and see if that makes it into the news. There's been a whole thing where 100 people at least have texted me and sent me emails and contacted friends because they heard Trump was coming on my podcast. And the source of it is a fake Trump account on Twitter. Oh, God. It's Trump's face and it's a fake account that said, I'm going on the Joe. It's Trump's face, and it's a fake account. It said, I'm going on the Joe Rogan podcast soon. And I think it came out of the fact

that Trump was on the Nelk Boys podcast, and then YouTube removed that podcast. They pulled the podcast, which is, you know, that's one of the craziest things you could do, because then everyone's going to talk about how YouTube removed that podcast. You can't even have Trump talk. Right, right. Former president of the United States, you can't let him talk.

Somebody did send me, apparently not, but somebody did send me a note saying that he was going to be on your show. Yeah, it's crazy. And I thought, I'm not really sure if that's the case. It's not the case. And I thought, I'm not really sure if that's the case. It's not the case. Yeah, I know. I'll send you the, look, I have decided that I am very apolitical when it comes to the future and like in political candidates. I don't want to have that kind of an influence. And I don't want to, I don't want to don't want to be someone who can watch and observe.

I don't want to be someone who's actually affecting this. There's a certain amount I'm affecting no matter what I do. I'm trying to find this fucking Trump thing. Do you know where it is, Jamie? Yeah, I got it. Yeah, so it's a fake tweet. Here it is. This is the fake tweet.

Okay, Donald Trump is scheduled to go on Joe Rogan podcast. Who said this? Well, he got it from somewhere else, though. He got it from this fake one that I got. This was the first one that I saw. It has 115,000 likes on it. Yeah. I got the original one.

Now, hold on a second here. I'll text it to you. This is the original one. You see, 115,000 likes. Okay. This is the one that somebody sent me. Yeah. This is not real.

I don't know who this person is. But who is this person? It's a fake Barron Trump account. He's got a mustache. Barron Trump has a mustache. You don't think that's really him? It could be. It'd be very clever.

But they also put their Gmail address there. Yeah. Well, send that guy a lot of dick pics because he's just making shit up so i sent i sent jamie the original one and this is the original one that got sent out and you know look this got put up because the other one though to the normies and the casuals this got put up first the other one was put up three hours before this one oh really okay other trump account started tweeting it to give it more of a validity because it looked like a Trump account was tweeting it. Well, yeah, you're right.

That only has 11,000 likes. It was 1230. Another one was like 930. Yeah, you know, as a – I've decided – like what I'm actually interested in is talking to people. I'm not nearly as interested in affecting things. And unfortunately, there's so many fucking people paying attention i'm doing it the same way i've always done it but now there's more people paying attention well i'll be honest with you i never thought you were trying to affect anything i

always thought you you're what you were doing was having people on asking them questions having them talk asking more questions i mean that always seemed and so regardless of where they are on whatever spectrum you're talking about, it seems like a pretty straightforward formula. Yeah, but it doesn't matter to people because of the numbers, the sheer numbers of people that are paying attention. And also, it's independent. The fact that it's this big,

and this is the fucking skeleton crew, and millions of people are paying attention. It's a good crew. It's a skeleton crew, but it's a good crew. And millions of people are paying attention. It's a good crew. It's a skeleton crew, but it's a good crew. Solid crew. Jamie's the best. But it's just the idea that one person can have that much influence is disturbing to a lot of folks who would like these giant corporations that are controlled by the pharmaceutical companies

and whoever the fuck else is paying their advertising to decide what can and can't be talked about and not be said or not discussed and what's misinformation and what's real information. Well, you know what it is? We are living soft lives now. Yeah. And this is one of my favorite topics. And so we all have the time on our hands to be offended by everything where before we were out there trying to collect some food and some clean water. I'm not saying we were trying to do that 10 years ago,

but we've gotten to the point now where we can all be just offended as fuck over anything. There was a free speech conversation, debate held at Yale. Just may have been this past week. And it was interrupted by a large protest from a bunch of the law students there who objected to the fact that there was a free speech debate. That is fucking madness.

It's fucking madness. And it's dangerous. And these fucking kids, they don't realize how goddamn dangerous it is. When you stifle debate, then who decides what can and can't be talked about? It's not going to be you. I've got news for you. And these woke kids who think because they scream the loudest and they pull fire alarms and they stop discussions and they stifle debates, they think that they have more control than they really do. But what they do do in that is they set a precedent.

And that precedent is you can stifle information that makes you uncomfortable you can stifle discussions where people have points of view that you don't agree with and you think you're right so you think you should be able to stop those points of view that is not the way to do it it's just not it's never been the way to do it. It's a dangerous precedent to set because then when more power is acquired by whoever, whether it's social media companies or the government or whoever the fuck it is, they get to establish a narrative. And that narrative might not be honest. And that's a real problem.

And the only way to find out what's real and what's not real is to let people talk. You know, I had on Daryl Davis. I don't know if you know who he is, but he's a musician who personally himself has taken more than 200 Klansmen and neo-Nazis and got them to completely abandon their ideology and hand him their robes. He's this really interesting guy because he's a brilliant musician. But through his music and doing these concerts and shows he's done, he ran into a Klansman back in the day and had a conversation with this guy. And he's black. And the guy was like, I've never talked to a black guy. I day and had a conversation with this guy, and he's black. And the guy was like, I've never talked to a black guy. I've never had a drink with a black guy before.

He's like, what? He goes, yeah, I'm in the Klan. He thought the guy was joking. He goes, the guy shows him his Klan ID card. Wait, I'm sorry. I guess they have ID cards. There's ID cards? I guess.

That's fantastic. I guess. Who knew? I guess they don't trust that you're really in the Klan. Until you see what the ID card and the decoder ring. This is Daryl. That's Daryl there. He was on last week, and he was on with Bill Ottman, who is the CEO of Minds.

And Minds is a decentralized social media company that does not believe in censorship. They stop threats and doxing and things along those lines, but they believe that the only way to really sort out what's right and what's wrong is to let people communicate. And Daryl has the fucking patience of a saint. I mean, the man is a saint. What he's done is extraordinary. He's affected people personally through his own intelligence and his own ability to stay calm and communicate with people who have ridiculous ideas and give them better. And through these conversations, he's got them to change their minds. Well, and then think about the multiplying effect of that, right?

Maybe people say, well, a couple hundred people, but all the people those folks know then, right? They can impact their families, their behavior, their actions, and impact their friends. Then come on here and then establish that and have these conversations on here, which reach millions and millions of people, and they hear about it. And then they find out these conversations that this guy's had with these people, and it makes them think. You can't just stifle communication and think that there's dangerous thoughts out there and we have to stop them. The ACLU used to fight for the right, Jewish lawyers used to fight for the rights of

Nazis to express themselves. The most abhorrent people in society fight for their right to express themselves because the opposite of that is more dangerous. Stifling speech is more dangerous. Yeah, well, I'm not sure how we walk the dog back from where we are right now. I did see an article, I don't remember where the hell it was, and it was just the other day, that was written, I think it was an op-ed piece,

that basically argued that part of the problem, it started out by saying, why are our young folks so susceptible to disinformation? Well, the problem was what they were saying was they're susceptible to disinformation from one side, right? So imagine, it was written by a progressive author. And as it turns out, their argument was, we spent too much time on STEM,

on science and technology, English, math, and not enough on philosophy and critical thinking and teaching kids that so that we should be teaching more of that. And the problem with STEM is that it teaches finite answers or definitive answers and doesn't teach critical thinking. I read the whole thing and I- Well, it's critical theory, not critical thinking. Yeah. Because critical thinking allows you to look at all sorts of different subjects and different facts and what are the variables and what are the influences and what's going on here. Yeah.

It lets you just try to look at things critically. But critical theory, a lot of it is like progressive ideology. They have a dogma and when you have a dogma it's not much different than religion in a lot of ways where you you don't want anybody to have an opposing perspective that challenges the dogma and that's not good if you're if you're fucking if your ideology doesn't stand up to scrutiny it's not a good ideology and the only way to find that out is to apply it to scrutiny or apply scrutiny to it or just test it that was the idea right yeah yeah i mean that's that's the whole concept and that's why i mean science that was always an

interesting debate during the past couple of years no the whole point of science is to to constantly question it right and to test your theories and to say and but anytime you'd say anything during the course of the the past two years it was like well you gotta you know i gotta fucking believe the science yeah well that doesn't mean you just during the course of the past two years, it was like, well, you've got to fucking believe the science. Well, that doesn't mean you just take the word of somebody in a public health position. That means you listen to it, take it on board, and then compare it and test it and ask other questions, right? But you're right. I mean, we've gotten to this point where it became a religion almost. Well, John Abramson is a guy that I had on the podcast that really opened my eyes to

how these things work in terms of pharmaceutical companies. And one of the things that he said is that when studies are done, that the people, the scientists that are conducting the studies do not have access to the raw data. They have access to the interpretation of the data that's provided to them by the pharmaceutical companies. You know what that sounds like? Intel collection. Well, it sounds- The whole process. It sounds- Well, also, the thing, the difference is, Intel, they're not personally making billions of dollars off of that information. And then they don't also do something that winds up being incorrect and costs the lives of tens of thousands of Americans by hiding information and lying.

I mean, unless you want to talk about weapons of mass destruction and things along those lines, because that is- Well, there's that. There's a little bit of that. Okay. Well, Pfizer came out and said, you know, I think maybe we need a fourth booster. That's Moderna. Was it Moderna that came out or said, you know, I think maybe we need a fourth booster. That's Moderna. Was it Moderna that came out or was it Pfizer? Moderna's trying to get, they're trying to get FDA, maybe Pfizer's done it as well.

But Moderna, you know, Pfizer, you're right. I think Pfizer came out first. Pfizer did do it too. And said, and then, because I remember their stock, I took a look at their stock to see what it was doing shortly after that statement. And it went up. Right. It's both of them. Yeah.

So they both have done it. So they seek authorization for boosters for older Americans. Well, look, if the fucking data is real, but you've got to have access to the real data. I mean, if the data shows that another booster for older Americans

is beneficial, then yeah, they should have access to it. But what Abramson is saying, you don't get access to the raw data. You get access to the pharmaceutical company's interpretation of the data. And they oftentimes skew that in a way that would be more profitable for them. And so he talked about, there's a product that was on the market called Vioxx. And I have a friend who took this stuff and had a stroke because of it. This stuff they knew was going to cause all sorts of cardiovascular issues with people and

blood clots and the like. What was it designed to do? It's an anti-inflammation drug that wasn't any better than non-steroidal anti-inflammatories like Advil and ibuprofen. And Abramson was part of the team that was prosecuting this. And it was part of the team that was in court about this. And they showed that they knew that this was going to cause these events. And somewhere in the neighborhood of 50,000 to 60,000 Americans died because of their interpretation of what this stuff was Versus the reality of what the stuff was and one of them was a buddy of mine Who got a fucking stroke because he had knee problems. Well anything about the pharmaceutical industry they go out

I mean, there's a told that the whole chain of then the sales reps going out to the doctors, you know I'm introducing these new you know Therapeutics and saying here, this is a great opportunity. And, yeah, I don't profess to understand that world. Well, my wife's mom's a nurse, and so I found out about this years ago where she was explaining how the doctors would, the pharmaceutical reps, rather, would take the doctors and the nurses out for these expensive dinners. And they're not allowed to bribe you, but they get real close. So it's like what you were talking about with what you do to an asset. That's how they treat it. And I'm sure there are

some bribes being, I'm not naive, but for the most part, the way they do it is they sweet talk. And I have a friend who's a good friend who actually owns a pharmacy. And he explained to me that before that, he was a pharmaceutical representative. And he used to do that. And he was told, listen, I want you to know their fucking kids' names. You're going to show up at the baseball games. You're going to cheer them on. You're going to give them gifts. You're going to do whatever the fuck you can do to get close to these people so that when something comes up and maybe they could

prescribe your drug, they'll be more inclined to do that. And that is the way you sell more drugs. It's a product. Yeah, it's a product. It's like you're pushing tin or anything else. You're selling Corvettes. Yeah. You're developing relationships.

It's a fucking great car, Mike. You look good in that car. That car looks good on you. Not as good as my 1965 MGB looks. That fucking car is great. I know. You were making fun of it the last time I was here. It's a piece of shit.

It's got 100 horsepower. Oh, my God. It's a great car. Does it even have 100? It's got like 72. A fucking goddamn American Corvette. How dare you compare the two? Oh, I'm not comparing the two.

You're a British guy. I keep forgetting. You're not really American. Oh, God. I don't say that out loud. You weren't born here, right? No. No, I was born over just outside of London.

The original spot. The mother country. God bless the queen. The only way we find out all these things, whether it's information about pharmaceutical drug companies or information about the influence of foreign bodies on students. You have to fucking talk about things. You have to have open communication. And the only way you find out if someone's full of shit or if someone's lying or someone's withholding information is to let people talk and let people sort things through. The truth is messy. There's a lot going on in the world. And you can't stifle information and debate it's not healthy for

anybody and you can't do it just because you think your side is correct it's not good it's not it's not what's amazing about a free society and you can't decide that there's certain ugly aspects of this society that you think should be suppressed because when you do that then people are going to decide your aspect of society is ugly. Your perspective is ugly. If we get a fucking hardcore Putin-type leader running this country and they start cracking down on legitimate journalists that are exposing corruption, then you get into dangerous circumstances. And this is the problem that I had with, like, the New York Post article on the Hunter Biden laptop being suppressed. It's not that I'm a Trump supporter.

I didn't vote for him. I didn't vote for any Republican ever in my life. But you're looking at something that's real information, and you're hiding it from people because you don't like the result that you think is going to come out of that information. That's not how we're supposed to be doing things. Well, I think that's – and it's all part and parcel. I think it's why there's so much dissatisfaction.

You know, there's so much distrust because I think people are starting to realize, right, regardless, again, where they are on the spectrum. Both sides have an equal ability to think. I don't think I'm seeing or hearing or being told accurate information here. And and you're right i mean putin look shit if you you know you talk about um you know biden and and uh his age or you talk about any you know any presidential term and the fact that we roll it over you look at the opposite side of it putin got into into power in 99 right so yeltsin's crazy yeah yeltsin nominated or made him acting president in 99. So 23 fucking years of running that country. Yeah.

Well, he took a break in 08. He was the prime minister. Not really a break. And for four years. And now he's been in office running that country, literally, since 99. And they've changed the rules of the game. 99. And they've changed the rules of the game.

He actually, if his health stays and he's whatever, 69, 70, 69, he can be in office until 2036. Well, he has access to the cutting edge technology and science and medical advances. That guy can be healthy as fuck for a long time. We live in a different world now. And I can say this from personal experience, being a 54-year-old guy. When I was a kid, 54-year-old men were dead. Yeah. You don't look a day over 53. Thank you.

I appreciate that. You're welcome. But what you can do with your body is so different. If you have access to hyperbaric chambers and human growth hormone and testosterone replacement and NMN and NAD and all these different things that lengthen telomeres and improve your biological age. I mean, there's a whole science behind this now. What's the lifespan now in America, U.S. male? Well, it still sucks because we drink too much and we smoke too much as i put down and uh we eat garbage food and you know the there's a vast majority of

us are sedentary and uh are overweight we've talked about this on the podcast ad nauseum but it was this it's a real problem the metabolic health of the average American is piss poor. And it's because most people, first of all, they're stressed out. They work too much. They don't have a lot of time. And they also haven't made it a priority to take care of their physical health. But if you were a guy like Putin and you had boundless resources, I mean, by all accounts, that guy is worth an astounding amount of money. I mean, by all accounts, that guy is worth an astounding amount of money.

Possibly the wealthiest Russian alive, possibly, even more so than some of his buddies who have spent a number of years now making him the richest person. I was going to talk to you about that. So what is this whole deal with the oligarchs? And what do you think is the strategy behind that? Because all these guys are like trying to hide their yachts and some of them have had their yachts taken away from them first of all where those yachts go and who gets access to them now right how does that happen we uh i yeah my business there were a handful of times in the over the past years where we were asked to go after and seize a an asset like a yacht and it's it's good fun but it's uh we don't get to keep them unfortunately

does uh you know auction them off yeah i mean whoever it depends on why it's being seized if it's being seized you know for failure to pay then you know it goes back to whoever's you know holding the note but uh but like now when they're they're seizing yachts yeah the government you know like france was involved in picking up a couple just recently. Somebody party on them now? Yeah. I'm thinking Macron is on board one of those yachts having a time of his life. But this is, I mean, you touched on a really important part of what the hell is happening right now is because one of the reasons Putin just made these comments the other day, right? He came out and he talked about, you know, the people that aren't real Russians, they're scum, they're traitors.

What really set him off, because sometimes it's a little simpler than we imagine, kind of going back to what we talked about before, we kind of overlook the obvious in terms of why he acts the way he does. Part of this is, when he came into power, nobody really gave him any, you know, thought, right? And he'd been like a deputy mayor in Leningrad. And he showed up, he proved himself fairly capable, got himself tight with Yeltsin, was appointed as head of the FSB, you know, the old KGB, the domestic service. And... FSB is the new version of the KGB? Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so they, he sort of found himself in this position of rising to the top. And one of the first things he did, which surprised a lot of people, was he reigned in the oligarchs, supposedly, right? He called them all together and he says, you know, fuck you. He took over media companies. He understood the importance of shutting down, you know, media that was possibly in opposition to him as he grew in strength. he grew in strength, reigned them in. And, you know, there's really been, other than Khodorkovsky, there's been really nobody that's gotten out of line over all these years. Now,

one of the things the oligarchs did in exchange was, you know, help essentially hide, manage money on his behalf. And now what's happened recently since the Ukrainian invasion, invasion of Ukraine, is that some of these guys, Mikhail Friedman, Avin, who else, Abramovich, they've come out and they haven't criticized Putin directly, but they've criticized the war, said, no, we shouldn't be doing this. We got to stop this. You know, we got to stop the bloodshed, stop this. We shouldn't be doing this we got to stop this you know we got to stop the bloodshed stop this we shouldn't be fighting the ukrainians that as an example it really sets putin off right because he's like fuck you i made you in his mind he made them right in their minds they're thinking no fuck not we you know fuck knuckle to use a name they uh they made him or they made him the wealthiest guy right and so there's this there's this other element and again you're always trying to piece

together why the fuck what's because you're trying to again beaver down into say okay what are his plans and intentions what what's he going to do next to know that you gotta you gotta get inside his head and so part of this is understanding why he's doing things and why he's thinking so anyway then he comes out and he says, fuck you and your villas. I don't mind you having villas. Well, of course not, because he's got some really nice places spread around. Doesn't he have some gigantic billion-dollar castle that he's sort of denied owning, but they do believe that he has it? Oh, yeah.

There was some newspaper report on it. It's this massive compound. His assets are remarkable, right? And a lot of them are are very well, very well hidden in part because he's used these smart guys who spend a lot of time hiding their own money, right? And so anyway, this point is Putin just kind of went off. So that's what he's going off about. He's going off about these oligarchs. In part.

And he's also had some of the military command come out and express concern. There's some anecdotal evidence. It's, again, Intel, solid Intel. It's not as good as we'd like, but there's anecdotal evidence that there's, you know, an increasing amount of discomfort within the russian population right he's creating this this situation where you know he's isolating the country right and he's really putting them um as sort of the you know he's almost creating a situation and this is i'm going off on a bit of a tangent here with china where china is going to start looking at russia the same way they look at north k, which is, oh, for fuck's sake, we got to take care of these people now, right? We're going to be the ones supplying. Now, China looks at this and goes, yeah, fine. And for the time being,

well, it looks like they look at Russia like it's a Costco now. We can get oil and gas on the cheap because the price is discounted now because there's not a lot of buyers or there's fewer buyers, prices discounted now because there's not a lot of buyers or there's fewer buyers, agricultural products, minerals. So China's looking at it like a place where they can go. They don't look at Russia as an equal, right? They don't look and think, oh, we got to, you know, we got to rise to the top. And one of the things we have to do is get past Russia. They've already done that, right? But I think Putin is, he's strategically overreached here and he also doesn't understand how that relationship works. Right. He's imagining somehow that he's on par with China and that they're going to have this relationship. China is she is only going to work with Russia and maintain relatively close ties for as long as it's in China's interest.

That's it. You don't think Putin knows this? for as long as it's in China's interest. That's it. You don't think Putin knows this? He seems to have been mistaken on a number of things when it comes to assessment of the situation with Ukraine. So you've got to wonder, how good is the information reaching him? How isolated is he? And so this understanding of the relationship between he and Xi, I think Xi's looking at this and going,

this is a great opportunity for us right now. Now, if it gets uglier in Ukraine, if things really, really get ugly, then I think you're going to see some daylight between Xi's going to look and go, okay, politically, economically, it's now in our interests to create some space there. They're not going to change their situation with Russia because we threaten them with sanctions. Threatening – there's this whole thing that the Biden administration is doing right now where they're talking about, well, we've threatened them with secondary sanctions if they supply military hardware to Russia. I think that's a complete misread of how you should be dealing with Xi and the regime right now. You don't threaten them publicly. Maybe you talk to them privately in conversation. But don't blast it all over the airwaves that this is what we're doing. I think they're right now. You don't threaten them publicly. Maybe you talk to them privately in conversation,

but don't blast it all over the airwaves that this is what we're doing. I think they're doing it, I don't know why, maybe just to look tough. Do you think that that is, what's that a function of? Like who's pulling those strings? Is that the intelligence agencies? Is that Biden's administration themselves? Like who's making those decisions? Well, the Intel services job

would be to be providing as good Intel, as well-sourced Intel as possible on what the Chinese regime's thinking, right? And then they would use that, the administration would factor that in when they're thinking about a strategy and how to deal with Xi. So who ultimately would make those decisions though? So if the intel agencies provide-

The White House would make that decision. The White House. The White House would make the decision, and then it would be typically, I mean, when we're talking about China, you would see it mostly through Anthony Blinken and the State Department, right? But, you know, Blinken's getting out there and publicly berating China and threatening sanctions. Again, I'm not saying we don't talk to them privately and explain how, you know, our view is and what we want them to understand from our perspective.

You do that. You'd be very clear with the Chinese. But you can't have Biden do that, right? Well, he's starting to do it. But, yeah, the problem with President Biden is, you know, I don't know that when he says something, it never really seems to be said with much conviction. Right. And so and his actions in the past. if we're talking just about Putin here, Putin knows Biden's team, you know, to some degree, because he's seen Biden, he's seen some of these cats on Biden's team during the Obama administration, right? And so if you think about when Putin's been really aggressive, it was during the Obama administration and now, right? So he knows, he feels he knows what he's dealing with. And you have to assume the Chinese do the same assessment. But I guess my point being

is Xi is doing a daily risk gain calculation in terms of their relationship with Russia. And they're saying, okay, is it still in our best interest? And as soon as it's not from Xi's perspective in China's self-interest to maintain, you know, sort of this notion of closer ties with Russia, then he'll back off. And, you know, again, I think he views it right now as an opportunity. And always, if it's an opportunity to kind of poke at us, he'll take it. I have this screenshot that someone sent me of uh the way the the people on the left were talking about about uh the ukraine uh situation before the war i'm gonna send this to you jamie sorry um but this is this is one of the things that's so weird is that they were very disparaging of ukraine and they were talking about the massive corruption of ukraine and how horrible it was over there and now all of a sudden they're looking at

it like they're heroes yeah i mean that's the same the same exact people yeah which is this is what's confusing this is how the west West was covering Ukraine before the war. It's welcome to Ukraine, the most corrupt nation in Europe. That's Vox. A new Europe. Ukrainian president rule becomes increasingly corrupt and authoritarian. Ukrainian president Zelensky deepens alliance with the far right. And this is one of the things that we're hearing from people on both sides,

that they have a Nazi problem over there, that there's a lot of Nazis involved in Ukraine. And there was something that I saw on Facebook where Facebook allowed... No, I don't know who the... This is what's so confusing about what they call the fog of war. It's not necessarily really the fog of war. It's the fog of the distribution of information is that we're supposed to just completely take a hard right turn or a veer away, a hard angle away from the narrative that was being pushed just a couple of years ago. And we're supposed to ignore all this stuff now.

And I don't know what's right and what's wrong because there was just something about Facebook allowing likes. Yeah, Facebook allows war posts urging violence against Russian invaders. Like, what? Yeah, I know. I know. I saw that. What the fuck is that?

Yeah. What is that? I mean, both things can be true, right? Right. You know, the Ukrainians had a serious, significant corruption problem over the years. They got a really interesting history. People should spend time reading the history of Ukraine and understanding what the troubles have been just recently even with corruption, trying to get that under control. And it can also be true that, all right,

in terms of... Even so. Yeah, even so, what Putin's done is reprehensible and needs to be properly dealt with. So you're kind of, it's a good example of working in the real world, right? I mean, the Saudi relationship is a good example also, right? I was going to bring that up next. U.S. activity with the Saudis. Or another good example is the fact that we're working with Putin's government in our ongoing negotiations with Iran, because the current administration, the Biden administration, is so keen to rejuvenate that 2015 Iran deal.

And so we're actually, while we're doing all this, while we're calling him a war criminal, and we're providing, you know, we just provide another aid package full of AT-4s and javelins and stingers and helmets. Helmets are always a good thing. We're also working with them to try to negotiate this deal. So we're using what we refer to now as a war criminal as our liaison with the Iranians to try to strike a deal with the Iranians or to get them back on board and into this deal. And people look at that and rightly so are thinking, what the fuck? But it's how it's always worked, right? You know, it's a very pragmatic approach, I suppose, in one sense. And, you know, you can't say, okay, I'm going to be the leader of the free

world and only do things by emotion, only do things if they're morally the high ground, right? I'm never going to deal with people who are- Reprehensible. Reprehensible at times, yeah. One of the things that's happening now is because of social media and because there's so much access to information is that all this stuff is brutally transparent. That, like, the United States is contacting Saudi Arabia and trying to broker some sort of a deal. Now we're hearing that Saudi Arabia is considering using the Chinese currency instead of American dollars for their oil, which scares the shit out of people. And the fact that, I mean, I don't know if it's true, but that Saudi Arabia is not taking Biden's calls. No, that was one of those things that flew out there.

Is that what it was? Yeah, I don't think there's any basis to that. There was some talk about, oh my God, the UAE and Saudis are saying, we're not taking your calls anymore. Yeah, I saw it because there was a Trevor Noah sketch or a little monologue thing where he was saying that this would never happen if Trump was the president. They would take his calls. Like, you can't just not take his calls.

I know. Who's there? It's President Biden. I'm busy. Yeah, yeah. can't just not take his calls i know who's there it's president biden i'm busy yeah yeah but this idea that all of a sudden now we want to do a deal with saudi arabia and saudi arabia is like you know what how about fuck you we're going to do a deal with china and that this is well you're pointing to it i mean that's a god there's so many things that are you know going out of the world

that are they're all fucking connected because the world is much smaller than it ever used to be. But the Saudis have been working with the Chinese. The Chinese regime has been providing the Saudis with missile technology assistance and developing their capabilities. And they've been increasing their economic cooperation. At the same time, and this is another example of this, you know, what the fuck people are, you know, it seems like a strange board game. The Chinese are also increasing significantly their economic cooperation with Iran, right? So from Chinese perspective, hey, and from the regime, from Xi's perspective, that makes perfect sense. It's in China's self-interest, right? Yay yay we're selling you know missile technology and

we're we're getting a better toehold into uh into saudis and capitalizing on chaos capitalizing on chaos and at the same time we're dealing with the iranians uh they don't see any conflict there because again it's all in their self-interest it's a very simple calculation from their perspective when it's not they won't do it. When it is, they'll do it. And so this is, you know, but there's so much to unpack there because they're selling technology to the Saudis that they originally got from the Russians, right? So the weapons technology transfer over the years has always been essentially from Russia to China, right? Now China, they advance the ball, right? So they're better at it than the Russians are, you know, because they do what they always do. They take

all, they suck up all that information and all that research and development, and then they just expand it. And they got far more resource than Russians. So now they're much better. Now Russia turns to China and says, we could sure use some assistance, right? There's a lot of shit going on out there just beyond the sort of the horrible conflict that's taking place in the Ukraine right now. There's all these things taking place on the world stage. Look at India. India is, you know, India and China have refused to say anything bad about the invasion, right? They're not calling it a war. They're not calling it an invasion by Putin. They're not calling it anything war. They're not calling it an invasion by Putin.

They're not calling it anything. They're just trying to stay well out of it. And India's got a long relationship, obviously, in history with Russia. But, you know, we imagine somehow that, okay, these sanctions are going to destroy Russia. And over a long period of time, the sanctions we put in place

are going to really cripple that economy. And it's going to hurt the Russian people a great deal. But India and China look at it and go, gives us an opportunity. You think India is going to stop supporting? Most of the Indian population, you know, strongly supports Putin and Russia because they've had this relationship. And Russia has provided India with all sorts of military technology and capability. And so it's, I guess, and also India looks at it and goes, hey, now we get oil and gas at a discount. Keep buying it. Why is our gas so high? Because one of the things that I was seeing was that Putin was mocking the idea that the gas prices in America have anything to do with the crisis in Ukraine.

And he was saying that the United States only gets 3% of its oil from Russia. And the idea that we're responsible, he was saying Russia, that this was responsible for the increase in the price of gas and the destabilization of inflation. It's nonsense. Well, it's, I mean- Is that true? In part, no. I mean, recent price increases or fluctuation in both the price of oil and what you're paying

at the pump, you can attribute to sort of the chaos and the instability that took place once the invasion started, right? Once it became clear that this was about to kick off and ever since. But how does that raise prices? How does that work? Well, it's a world market, right? And so traders are out there. They're looking at everything that goes on in the world.

So China, as an example, look, they've locked down, right? They're starting to open up Shenzhen a little bit, but they got millions of people now under new lockdowns because of COVID. And they got that, it's the Omicron, Omicron, Omicron. And so that can impact because now suddenly what happens, that people are looking at the Chinese economy is going to slow down. And in fact, it has. They came out and said you know our numbers our expected growth is it's actually going to be slower than it's been in in decades or so i think they'll look at that and go okay that's got to be factored into how we're going to price uh you know crude and or petroleum products

and so or they look at um Iran deal and the Iran negotiations. And they think, oh, you know, price came down below $100 a barrel in part because there was like, it looked like people were making noises like we're going to get a deal with Iran. That was going to open up the spigot. And so we're going to be able to replace the amount of oil that's going to be missing from the market because of the sanctions on Russia. So the traders are, you know, globally look at everything that's taking place in the world. And. So the traders globally look at everything that's taking place in the world, and they set the prices, right? And it's not the oil companies thinking,

here, we're going to set the price of crude. That's why it's such a fallacy when somebody in Washington, D.C. comes out and goes, they're profiteering. Now, I'm not naive. Could profiteering maybe be taking place, you know, in the oil business and elsewhere? Well, sure, there's a possibility. And you always, you know, you want to be aware of it and be focused on that.

But that's not how prices get set. And so it's one of those simplistic ideas. You know, we're going to stick it to the man. It's got to be the oil company's fault that I'm paying seven, eight, nine dollars a gallon now. And, you know, so but the gas was going up, you know, ever since Biden came into office. I think, again, I hate to disappear on rabbit holes, but ever since President Biden came into office, their initial plan was to end the fossil fuel business. And they were very clear about that, right? They made it very known. We're going to wrap up our dependence on fossil fuels.

Is that physically possible? Not in any short or midterm. No, it's not. And so, not unless you want to... Well, no, it's not. We can't replace it. What are we going to replace it with at this stage? We don't have... People think, well, solar and wind. Yeah. No. The capacity is not there yet. When they say that, so it's also not just that. It's stopping production and stopping pumping of American oil, right? Well, what that does is –

Stopping fracking or at least minimizing it. Well, yeah. I mean they layer it on regulatory concerns onto the industry after they got in office, right? Because what does that do? That tells oil companies out there, we don't have a future in five- or ten-year investments, right? If you're going to kill this industry, what's our incentive to invest a lot of money? Look, they're talking about ExxonMobil. Oh, ExxonMobil made like $23

billion in profit in 2021. Well, you know what they lost in 2020? They lost about $22.3 billion. That was their loss. So they've got to invest in the future. I'm not here to show for oil companies, but I'm just saying this is how it works. And so if they're told there's no future in long-term investment, well, guess what? Okay, they're going to start shutting production down. They're not going to invest in new opportunities. And so yeah, that's going to have an impact. And I think what the Biden administration did that was incorrect was not the simple thought that energy in today's world equals national security. It is a top national security priority, right? There's no doubt about it. And so therefore, if you think energy is a critical national security concern in this world, therefore,

it's not unreasonable to think we should do everything possible to achieve or get as close as possible to achieve energy independence. That should be our plan. You can still, at the same fucking time, you can invest in alternative forms of energy. You can do both at the same time. But there seems to be this thought with some folks that, no, no, you can't do that. You got to throw all in on alternative energy sources and just, and fuck the fossil fuels. Well, you can do both. And eventually, yeah, hopefully one day we get there to, yay, green energy. But it's not going to happen probably in our lifetimes.

It's a long process. So how much have we decreased our reliance on energy that the United States produces? I don't know. reliance on energy that the United States produces? Yeah, I don't know. I don't know the exact numbers. But look, we've been pulling in on a daily basis from Russia, as an example, 670,000 barrels a day, right? I mean, if you think about, you know, our concern is how do we make that up? Could we make that up by not having put our boot on the neck of the energy business here? Again, not saying we shouldn't be pursuing other... Good God. I mean, I keep going back to the... We can multitask. We have that ability. In fact, oil companies spend a great deal of money researching alternative fuels because it's a capitalist motive. They understand

that if they can get there, they're going to make money, right? And so it's like battery development. Whoever develops the next best, smallest battery is going to win. So it shouldn't be that hard to assume, but the problem is we send people to Washington who then just throw shit on the wall, right? Because it seems like a popular thing to say, right? And so the next thing you know, we're talking about, yeah, let's do a windfall tax. Maybe what, and now there's some talk about, we should, you know, price cap, you know?

Oh, how about we cap the price of gas so that we're going to set price controls and so you can't charge any more than this. And we tried that, right? And the problem is some of these people that are up in Washington, D.C. aren't old enough to remember, but in the 70s, they had price controls on gas, which we also had long lines for gas and we had all sorts of problems in terms of gas. And the resulting, it didn't do any good in terms of lowering prices long term. And then they finally released that and they finally said, okay, take all the price controls off and prices started to come down because, again, it's a supply demand.

It's a marketplace. And so, again, it doesn't mean you're against eventually figuring out how to get rid of fossil fuels. I think everybody who's reasonable can say, yeah, that's a good worthy goal. It's how you do it so that you don't fuck over your own country. So what are the factors? Like one of them was the Keystone Pipeline, right? Well, yeah. There's some argument over that because- The worry is the environment. That was one of the things that when the Biden administration came in, a lot of people that are environmentally conscious were very happy because they were

talking about the Green New Deal. They were talking about doing things for the environment, preparing for the future of this country, for the future of the children, and not leaving a poisoned, polluted world because a bunch of people were greedy. But what you're saying is that, correct me if I'm wrong, it's much more complicated than that, in that our reliance on oil is kind of absolute. We have a certain amount of reliance on oil. You can't just erase that immediately. And natural gas. I mean, people, you know, imagine they're going to plug their electric car in.

You've got to get that electricity from somewhere right now. Right. And, I mean, you know. What about nuclear? Well, that also, you know, What about nuclear? Well, and that also, you know, causes some heads to explode, right? Because they, you know, God forbid we should think about nuclear energy. We're much more capable now than we were 20 years ago of producing safe systems, you know, to produce nuclear energy. But that's, again, very emotive, right? It's a super emotive

subject. And so, okay, I get it. But we should be looking at all these things. We can have this sort of balanced energy approach with a goal eventually of getting rid of fossil fuels. You can do that. But it's sort of that all or nothing simplistic mentality that seems to be in a lot of other areas not just not just energy but anyway it's it's it is interesting but i i think um we look at you look at uh what europe did and europe's reliance on russia for energy and if you don't think that putin knew what he was doing in terms of driving this European dependence on Russian oil and gas, he knew exactly what he was doing. He's considered energy as a weapon for a long time at this point.

And so what's he doing? He's being called a war criminal by countries that are in a position where they don't have an option. They got to keep paying him. They got to keep putting money in his coffers. If oil is up where it is now, it's over $100 a barrel again. It was up to, what, $139 at one point. He can afford this military adventurism. He can afford to do what he's doing.

afford to do what he's doing. When oil is down at 30, 35 bucks a barrel, he can't, because of his dependence on oil and gas, petroleum products as a revenue. When it's like that, you know, so in our minds, we should have been thinking, okay, again, from a geopolitical standpoint, what do we have to do to ensure our national security, the security of our allies, everything else? That's a part of it. That's a factor that we should be thinking about. But man, we didn't. So fuck it. When I'm looking at this, I'm going, how does this guy get out of this? Like, if he really did make a massive miscalculation, he thought that Ukraine would fall quickly. And, you know, there's talk of, I don't know how many Russian troops have been killed, but, you know. That's a good point.

We talk about intel and sort of lack of intel. Intel estimates are, you know, anywhere from a couple thousand to 10,000, right? Which that gap, anytime you look at a gap like that in Intel assessments, whether it's that or whether it's how far are the Iranians away from breakout in terms of creating a weapon, and it says, well, a month away or 12 months away. What that tells you is that your Intel sources, really solid Intel are lacking and you need to tighten that up. But so, you know, Russian troops killed, you know, some estimates are hovering around 7,000 or so, but you got to take that with a grain of salt because the intel is not really there. That's a lot though. It's a lot. It's more than, yeah, it's, I mean, think about it. He committed about 200,000 troops to this invasion. And if he's lost 7 to 10,000 already, including a handful of top commanders, right? So he's had generals killed in the field, right? I mean, that's an astounding thing if you think just about that alone. He said, I think, at this point, four commanding officers, general staff, killed in the field. And what that would imply is that they're putting themselves into positions where they can get whacked out in the field because things aren't working properly. Things aren't working properly. They shouldn't be out at the front of some convoy where some sniper is going to be able to take them out. They should have much better command and control systems in place. Communication should be better. But clearly, they've had all sorts of problems here. And that's just one, again, one of aren't willing to be straight with Putin because way off, right? Which is astounding because

you think about the ability for the Russians, the intel service and the military to have assets or information on, you know, what's going on in the Ukraine. I mean, the long history, the ties between the two and their ability to place assets in there over the years and to understand, you know, what's going on. And you would have assumed that they would have had recon in Ukraine, you know, for months leading up to this, telling them about defensive strategies, about, you know, the buildup in the Ukraine. What are they going to be facing? What's it going to look like? strategies about, you know, the buildup in the Ukraine. What are they going to be facing? What's it going to look like? And so, yeah, I think it's, I think he's, he was given bad intel or he ignored it. I suspect it was more along the lines of given bad intel in part because I think he's distrustful, perhaps. He doesn't, you know, he's not, I don't know. It's, again, it's speculation because, you know,

the only person that really knows what Putin's thinking is Putin. So when you see these videos, and I've seen quite a few of them, it's hard to know what's real because there was one video that was being touted as evidence that turned out to be footage from a video game. Do you see that? There was like some dogfight scenario that turned out to actually be footage from a video game. Do you see that? There was like some dogfight scenario that turned out to actually be footage from a video game. Yeah. And this is a problem with the world we're living in today, right?

There's so much chaos in terms of like accurate information. But there's these videos of Russian convoys and there's these essentially they're using guerrilla tactics. and there's these essentially they're using guerrilla tactics or hiding behind buildings and shooting these grenade launchers and missiles at these tanks as they roll by and blowing them up and killing these Russians. Is all that stuff real? Yeah, that's real. One of the things that has emerged from this, if you're just looking at the battle spaces, you know, tanks may not be a thing anymore, right? Tanks were critical. You know, in World War I, they showed up. And, you know, thank you, Winston Churchill, for, you know, pushing that along. But now, you know, with the available,

you know, systems that are in place, and we've been providing the javelins. Javelin is probably the most effective anti-tank weapon out there at this stage anyway. And it's proven it's mobile, right? It's guided. It's extremely effective. And so that has definitely changed the calculation, right? And I don't think they were anticipating that. They probably weren't anticipating, although they should have, how could they not anticipate the effectiveness of the stingers, right? They faced that in Afghanistan, right? That's what one of the key elements that got them out of Afghanistan was, you know, the ability for the Mushadin to shoot their, you know, platforms out of the sky. And so they certainly should have understood what that meant. But you're right also in the sense that you got to be

really careful with the information that's coming out. And people should always say, okay, let me just understand what this source is that I'm looking at. I'm looking at this video, or I'm hearing this report. Is it accurate? Where's it coming from? And that can be tough, right? Trying to trace it back to, is it legitimate source. But, yeah, it's a bizarre world. I mean, we kind of went through watching war on TV, right, during the Iraq 2003 and on, and even before then, the first Gulf War. So we kind of got used to it a little bit, but this is really playing out in social media. It's really playing out, and it creates emotions.

And so people start, and to go to your point, we were covering it two years ago, or Ukraine was covering it in an entirely different way. But now because of the way that people get their information, the speed, and that creates this emotion. And so it's a strange fucking world. What do you think Putin thought was going to happen? I mean, when you're driving these tanks down many, many miles on a straight road where everybody knows where they're coming from, everybody knows where they're going.

Right. Why did he think that that would just be a way to, or why do these generals or whoever's in charge of making these military plans, why did they think that that was a viable option to just drive these convoys of military vehicles and personnel carriers? And fuel tanks or tankers. And yeah, well, I'm sure that's the same question Putin probably asked his generals before he let them go. Is he letting them go or is he putting them in the same place where they put Jack Ma for a few months? Yeah, yeah, exactly. I think he's putting someone under house arrest. It's a very good question.

The Russian military was supposedly going through a professionalism or, sorry, sort of this upgrade over the past decade and a half or so. It doesn't appear to have worked very well. He's got a lot of apparent issues with the training, certainly experience. They got a lot of young people who got into the military. They haven't been in combat. They certainly haven't been in urban combat, which is the most fucked up situation. And so he's dealing with a lot of issues. But you're right. You would have imagined that the planning, and I think that's one of the reasons why you're starting to see, again, if we can believe a lot of the anecdotal evidence, why you're seeing this starting to bubble up a little bit through the command structure and through the elite, and we have to hope that continues because ultimately, you know, what's going to get them to back off is, you know, unless there's some miraculous peace deal because he finally says, fuck it, we're not going to win, is sort of the Russian population, the elites, and the military command basically finally just saying enough's enough. This is too fucked up. We can't back this horse anymore. And maybe we get there.

Probably not going to get there anytime soon. But it's one of the things we should be doing is just driving information into the Russian population, giving them the visuals, not propaganda. All we got to do is show them what's happening, right? What do they have access to now? State-run media. Yeah, state-run media. They shut down really access to everything else. I mean, so they're getting... And a decent population of Russia, the older population, certainly, they seem perfectly content with watching state-run media. And so it's a younger part of the population that you have to hope, you know, continues. And look, it's supposedly they've arrested up to 15,000 protesters. Right.

And, you know, God bless those folks. Did you see that video of this woman who is standing in the middle of the square and she holds up this small sign and then immediately the cops grab her and shove her into a van? Yeah, there's a number of incidents like that. It's remarkable in terms of the speed with which they show up on scene and they know they're going to get arrested. But that's what Putin, just like with Xi, what's Xi most worried about? He's worried about public unrest. He's worried about that's what Putin, just like with Xi. What's Xi most worried about? He's worried about public unrest. Right. He's worried about that massive population, you know, thinking, oh, fuck this.

And so that's, you know, and look, with Putin, he wants everyone to believe that, you know we were enticing Ukraine into democracy. Bullshit. The only thing that was a threat was a threat directly to Putin's power. That's all it was, was having a successful democracy in Ukraine and incrementally, slowly getting past the corruption issues and becoming more and more of a successful democracy. gradually getting past the corruption issues and becoming more and more of a successful democracy, that poses a threat to Putin's control, his own control in the situation. And he doesn't, that's, you know, so when he talks about a sphere of influence, it's in part, you know, yes, in his mind, he's thinking about the Soviet Union and I'm keeping NATO at bay. But really what he's thinking about is I don't want fucking successful democracies on my on my western flank. Is it that but is it also that if Ukraine joins NATO, then NATO can park their weapons in Ukraine? Well, that's this is the bizarre part, too, is like nobody was going to invite Ukraine to join NATO. It wasn't. No, it wasn't that that. And so which is why it's an easy ask. Right. Which is why Zelensky's now said, well, you know, we just have to realize that we're, you know, the door's not open to join NATO. I mean, that wasn't going to happen anyway, right?

It wasn't? No, no. Because that's all we keep hearing. Yeah, but underneath the whatever public discourse may have been taking place and the idea that Ukraine was becoming more of a democracy and, you know, they were tamping down to corruption and maybe eventually they get the – NATO countries, being very pragmatic, were looking at it and going, yeah, Ukraine is different. Ukraine is different than Poland. Ukraine is different than the Czech Republic on that border because of the history of Ukraine with Russia. And so there's a tacit

understanding that that's not going to end well. You know, we don't want to put Ukraine in a position to bring them into NATO. So again, you know, who am I? I'm not running the world, but I would argue that that wasn't going to happen. And, you know, but, you know, again, I think with Putin, it was simply this presents a challenge to my authority. And fuck it. I want to be president until 2036. So you think it's just entirely because if Ukraine succeeds as a democracy and if it becomes less and less corrupt and the democracy becomes more and more established, that that somehow or another could trickle into Russia? becomes more and more established that that somehow or another could trickle into Russia. Yeah. And there was also little to zero chance that we were going to place, you know, key strategic weaponry inside Ukraine. Now, that idea is also because people look at it from a certain perspective, which is, yeah, that might be a bridge too far.

In the previous world, before this invasion, they would have looked at that as that's too escalatory. That's taking things a bridge too far. So we want to maintain a balance. We understand that would send Putin over. So we're not going to do that either. So I think there was this pragmatic understanding of where Ukraine was going to be. They were perfectly happy to keep pushing them and trying to get them to be more and more aligned with the West. But I think there would have never been that moment where they said, okay, and now you can join NATO.

And guess what? Here's some missile systems that we're going to place in that we know, for a fact, will be a provocation to Putin. Why do that? So one of the things that I read recently was that Putin had established a certain amount of parameters that need to be in place for them to pull out of Ukraine. One of them was that they agreed to not join NATO. That was something that had been expressed. Do you think that's because now that he's invaded Ukraine that the NATO countries might look at it as an opportunity to try to have Ukraine join NATO now

and that's where this narrative is coming from? No, I think it's just he wants it in writing. He wants it in writing. For whatever that's worth, I guess, nowadays. But I think he wants it. Because, look, it's in their constitution, you know, about the opportunity to join NATO. He wants that removed, and he wants it clear in any potential agreement that they're not going to. I think that's the easiest ask that you can put on the table for Zelensky, right? The hard one is the demilitarization of Ukraine, right?

The hard one is the demilitarization of Ukraine, right? Yeah. And I think that can be met by agreeing not to deploy certain weapon systems into Ukraine, right? It's not going to mean that dismantling of Ukrainian army. I don't think that they would ever get to that point. I don't think that's going to be possible as an agreement. So there's a way this could work, but both sides are going to have to give up something, right? There's no way otherwise we're going to get any sort of ceasefire and peace deal here. And the idea should be we're looking to deescalate, right? Nobody wants, as people always say now, nobody wants a shooting war with Russia, right? That makes perfect sense. But I think we have to be realistic about this. And so as distasteful as it is, Zelensky is going to have to give up certain things. Putin's certainly going to have to be willing to figure out, okay, I got to figure out how to draw a line here and then get out. But that's a big lift now because he's upset a lot of people. He's created these sanctions. It's not like we can just lift all these sanctions as soon as they come

to the table with a ceasefire, right? And so there's going to be a period of time where Russia is going to basically be a pariah out there in the global community. And we got to be careful in how, and pragmatic in how we deal with Putin in that regard. Because, again, we got to think about what's in our best national security interest, what's in the best national security interest of Europe. And there's always a tendency, sort of like the Versailles Treaty, to really fuck over the offending party. And I think the reality is we're going to have to be saying, okay, well, it doesn't seem right, but okay, Putin officially gets Crimea and maybe officially gets, you know, the Donbass region. You know, he's had troops and proxy troops in there for a long time now. So is he going to give up Crimea? No. You know, so Zelensky's going

to, they're going to have to recognize that as part of Russian territory, probably. That's going to be part of the deal. It's going to be distasteful, but they got to figure out a way to unwind this. Otherwise, I think Putin's attitude is going to be, I don't give a fuck anymore. I'm just going to break it. I don't care if we end up with a broken Ukraine. I've proven a point. We don't want him to get to that point. Now, the motivation of the Russian troops, that point. Now, the motivation of the Russian troops, like it's one of the things that's so it's got to be very strange for them is that just a few decades ago, Ukraine was a part of the Soviet Union. And now they're going to war with an urban area where it used to be their countrymen. So when they see the losses, we don't know what the losses are, the Russian army,

but how do they boost their morale? How do they get them excited about it? Because it seems like if we were going to go to war with Canada, right? And we decided we're going to invade Toronto. We should invade Montreal first. It's a much nicer city. I like both places. They're both nice. I shouldn't say anything about that. I'm a big fan of both places. Maybe that's bad because Montreal was never a part of America. Maybe if we

invaded fucking Alaska. Whatever. You know what I mean? Something along those lines. Something crazy where they're, just a few decades ago, were our countrymen. Right. That's got to be a very strange ask for these Russian soldiers. And there's a lot of stories that have come out about, you know, statements from some of the captured Russian soldiers talking about how they didn't even realize they were doing anything other than a training exercise, a long-term training exercise on the border.

And then, you And then the tanks start rolling in. So yeah, again, it's one of those things in terms of intel. How bad is the morale? Well, we don't really know. We have to piece together everything we can and make a determination about that. There's a lot of talk right now because it's a good narrative to say that the Russian military is collapsing because these soldiers, they're young, they're disheartened, they're walking away. But that may be true. But it doesn't take into account what they're still willing to do, right? And what they're willing to put up with, and what the command staff is willing to do and instruct them to do. So, you know, everything has to be taken with a bit of a grain of salt. But yeah, it's,

look, you look at the history of these two countries. I mean, go back to, who is it? Abramovich, you know, Roman Abramovich, who owns Chelsea Football Club. He's handed over control of it now because I think he reads some of the writing on the wall in terms of his assets. But I think his parents, if I'm not mistaken, I think Abramovich's parents still live in Ukraine. Jeez. Right. So he comes out and says, this is not a good's parents still live in Ukraine. Jeez. Right. So he comes out and says, this is not a good idea, we shouldn't be doing this.

He's talking from a very personal place. Putin looks at that and goes, fuck you, buddy. So you can see why there'd be anger there. And also, so it is. It's fascinating. It's always more complex than what we hear. It's always more complex than the headlines or the stories. And it's always more complex than what than what we hear it's always more complex than the the headlines or the stories um and uh it's all this interconnectivity and and and the reason

why the country's the reason why people are doing what they're doing i just it's fascinating shit it is fascinating shit but like one of the things that uh fascinates me about the oligarchs is why are they going after those guys? Are they going after those guys because they have influence over Putin and that the more those guys get their money taken away and their assets taken away and get their bank accounts seized, that this will somehow or another make these incredibly wealthy people less supportive of Putin? Yeah. Because he needs them in order to, is that what's going on? Well, it's the idea being is that they, you know, the more uncomfortable they are, the

more it hurts them, the more likely they are to pressure, you know, Putin into changing his strategy, his thought process, coming to the table, doing some sort of ceasefire. So I think that that is a big part of it, right? Did they have influence over him at all? Well, there are indications that it's less than it certainly was, right? And it's decreasing the more that they come out and say something, not again, negative directly against Putin, but against this invasion. So you'd have to argue that Putin at a certain point is gonna think, yeah, fuck you, I don't mind the sanctions on you.

Look, financial sanctions have never really worked on Putin anyway. So it's one of the few things we can actually do. It's the leverage that we've got. And so I think it's important to do it. And a lot of corporations have been taking it upon themselves to pull out or to not do business. You know, the oil companies are saying, fuck it.

We're not. They pulled out before, you know, the White House, you know, took any action. So it all it has a cumulative effect, but not in the short term. Right. This this is going to this is a process. And so it's dissatisfying to a lot of people who say we should be doing more. Right. And, you know, there is a fair amount of aid being provided to them. But in typical Washington fashion, everybody focuses in on the MiGs. You know, it becomes the narrative, becomes a story. If we could just get them the MiGs, we'd solve this problem.

Well, I hear people talking about a no-fly zone, that we need to enforce a no-fly zone. And then I've heard other people going, you don't know what you're asking for because you're literally asking to enforce that, which means if America enforces a no-fly zone, that means America is going to shoot down jets that violate the no-fly zone. That's war. Right. And I'm on board with that. It's one of those, even doing it for humanitarian corridors, right? People imagine somehow that it's a tidy process, and it's not. I mean, you pointed out it's a major goat rope, right, if we do something along those lines. And the chance for direct conflict is massively increased. And even if it's just, you know, it doesn't matter whether it's NATO or whether it's us, we're all in the same, you know, shitstorm then at that point, theoretically,

right? And maybe Putin, one of his calculations is, I don't know, you know what, you know, is NATO really going to push? You know, it's 30 countries. I think one of the things he was looking to do was try to identify if there are any cracks in NATO as well. So, you know, they're staring at everything that NATO and the US does and saying, you know, where's the weakness here? Do we have some weak links? Do we we have some countries and there are a handful of countries now calling uh for uh a no fly zone from nato right i think lithuania yeah the baltic states basically because why they feel they feel the most threatened yeah basically and so yeah i i think it's you talk about what's a bridge too far i think that's a bridge too far.

I think we do not want to engage in that game because that I don't think ends particularly well. No. Yeah. No, that sounds terrifying. Well, that's one of the crazy things about mutually assured destruction, right? That all war is sort of like a slap fight. You know what i mean like you don't you don't necessarily throw leg kicks and head kicks and and pick each other up and dump each other on your head yeah you're agreeing to just slap for a little bit yeah yeah yeah and

then at some point somebody gets really pissed off and then yeah and then it all falls to shit tighten up a fist and the next thing you know it's not take downs and yeah yeah i mean it seems like with mutually assured destruction because of the nuclear power it's it yeah it seems like how do you negotiate your way around that how do you get out of that while you're actually killing people because they're actually shooting missiles into apartment buildings we're seeing the destruction. We're seeing the real consequences of war. I mean, I watched a video, it was horrible, of these, it looked like old ladies, like a housecoat that were outside this apartment building that were blown apart.

And these people were screaming and crying and the dust was in the air and they'd just been hit by missiles. They've literally rebelized Mariupol, right, which is strategically as important from the Russian military's perspective. Right. And it's we have these you hear the politicians talking. Well, is it a war crime? I don't know. Is it a war crime? We're going to have to, you know, gather evidence're going to have to take it to the international court and we're going to have to decide when everybody can see it, like you just said. Everybody can see it now. It's a cell phone video. They don't rely on news reports anymore. People who pull out their phones are filming this stuff. Right. And so it's

clear that they're engaged in war crimes, right? So that's another part that you have to put into the mix when you're trying to determine what Putin's plans and intentions are, right? He's gone this far, right? And he's gone that far before. Look, he helped Assad in Syria. They didn't have a problem with chemical weapons at that point. Didn't bother him. And so, yeah, you have to –

and again, it all gets thrown in the mix when you're trying to think about what the hell is his mindset? What is he going to do next? What is he thinking? And so if you look at that and you go, okay, he's clearly doing the same thing he's engaged in in the past, right? And Chechnya is another good example, but it doesn't – so we sometimes process things the way that we do, right? We process things through our lens and as, you know, okay, here in America, it's Americans and through our values and, you know, and people

always say, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But we do, right? I mean, we try to, you know, okay, this and we mirror those values in on whoever our opponent is. And we can't do that with Putin. We can't do it with Xi. We have to be, you know, we have to be smarter than that. We can't do it with Xi. We have to be smarter than that. But anyway, yeah, I'm not particularly optimistic that Putin's going to look at all this and go, okay, I'm going to back off. I do worry that what his thought is at this stage of the game is I've gone this far. It doesn't mean he's going to use tactical nukes or he's going to, you know, thermobaric weapons or, you know, which, again, he's used. And, you know, I don't think he's going to have

a serious problem with that. But there's talk about chemical weapons and, you know, at what point, you know, do we, if he goes that far, I mean, imagine him using chemical weapons on the people of Kyiv because he just can't break that nut. What are we going to do? Does he think NATO at that point is going to step in? Well, are you going to get 30 countries all in agreement to use military force at that point in defense of people who aren't in a NATO country? So again, that's why I think one of Putin's efforts here has been to try to identify weaknesses within that alliance and see if he can play on that as well.

Do you think that time is on his side or against him in that regard? It depends on the Russian people. I hate to say it, but I think this is my opinion. I hate to say it, but I think this is my opinion. Time is, from just a crushing the country and breaking it militarily, time is on his side. If we kind of have drawn the line where we're willing to provide assistance and we say, okay, this is it, we'll continue to provide aid packages of some military assistance and maybe we'll ratchet up. There's not much else we could do on the sanctions side, but we'll ratchet up some more sanctions. I think time is on his side if he just,

all he wants to do is break the fucker, right? But he knows, look, the Ukrainian people have overthrown, what, two Russian-backed governments already. He knows a long-term occupation isn't in the cards, right? And he's also destroying a lot of the infrastructure that he would need to have a successful long-term occupation. And so that can't be an upside from his perspective. He's got to figure, okay, I put a puppet regime in, I've done that before, and it hasn't worked, right? And it's certainly not going to work now because now I've got a nation that hates me a lot more than they did a month ago. And so then, you know, what is he looking to accomplish?

And that's, again, I'm just raising the question. I don't have an answer, but that's the big question. What the hell is his endgame? I was reading this thing where they were making an assessment of what would be required to occupy ukraine and they said it would be a minimum of 500 000 russians i think more than that it's it's a big ass place and and then they would have to run everything yeah they would have to take over the government they would have to take over the utilities they would have to take over the utilities. They would have to take over the grid, the internet. was going to happen. Again, I think the assessments were so far off base, but they honestly believed they were going to get much more support from the Ukrainian people than they imagined.

They thought the Ukrainian people were going to support a military invasion. Yeah. I think that was an assessment. I mean, again, in part because they thought, well, they'll be far more docile than they are because there is some history there, obviously, and there's a lot of mix, right? A lot of family with family in Russia, a lot of Russians with family in Ukraine. And I think they just imagined somehow that it was going to blend. And that's just a failure of intelligence gathering and understanding, you know, risk versus gain. And I think, so that was a real problem. And they assumed that, you know, okay, we'll be into Kiev.

We'll get rid of Zelensky. We'll have a puppet regime in place probably within the first week. And Bob's your uncle. No one's going to do anything about it because nobody did anything about Crimea. Nobody did anything about Georgia. The world pretty much left him alone in Chechnya. So, you know, they were basing it to some degree on past actions. Why do you think it's so different? Why do you think they were so successful in Crimea,

in Chechnya, in Georgia? Like, why did that happen so easily? Because Crimea is, it's very important in access for oil and natural gas? Yeah, Black Sea port. Yeah. Yeah. You know, it's a, it's a, it's a great question. You know, to be honest, I don't, I don't have a real good answer for what, what has changed. What was the, the difference in part? It was the size of the operation, right? They're calling it a military operation. I can't believe I just said operation the size of the the invasion. And I think there was a sense with Zelensky that, look, it wasn't going to happen because there wasn't a Russian backed sort of puppet regime or a regime in place that was supportive of Russia. a regime in place that was supportive of Russia. And so that had a lot to do with it as well. The current government under Zelensky is not inclined and hasn't been inclined, and they don't view themselves as controlled by the Russians. In fact, Zelensky was put in place because for the very reason that they were going to advance the ball with the West and create more of a relationship there. That's what the people wanted. That's why they threw out the last president, because they didn't like the fact that they were getting closer

and closer to Russia. And the last president was, you said they were waiting to reinstate this guy? Well, that was a possibility because there was intel that he'd moved to Minsk, right? So he was going to be sitting in Belarus waiting. And then once they got to Kiev, they just, you know, he shows up. And somehow, you know, if that was the case and that was who they were going to pick, I mean, it's it does seem insane that you're going to install the previous guy who was thrown out. But, you know, again, if you think that their assessments were so bad, maybe that was the case. So in 2014, how what went down? Like what was the rebellion? It literally was a massive uprising from people. It started as street protests over a handful of things, corruption, ties to Russia, increasing ties to Russia, efforts by that regime at the time to back away from the West. And, you know, it was kind of a remarkable series of events, but it was a popular uprising, which is remarkable in a sense. And that's what, you know, that's what you would like to think possibly could happen in Russia, where people are saying, you know what,

we don't want to return to the bread lines here. You know, we don't want to be isolated like this. We went through that long enough. You know, we didn't think that's the way Russia was going. But Ukraine didn't have an established ruler like Putin, who's been in there since 99. Like, how would anyone, outside of an assassination, how would anyone take over? I mean, so he must be terrified of assassinations or extremely paranoid at this point. Putin.

Yeah. Because he's done it. Yeah. There's, oh, he's done a, yeah, again, yeah, you think about it. Allegedly. I think Sergei Skripal, I think Lev Fidenko, I think Navalny, I think about it. Allegedly. I think Sergey Skripal. I think Litvinenko. I think Navalny.

I think they'd all think it's more than alleged. But yeah, he's never had a problem with reaching out and terminating political opponents wherever they happen to be. Right. And the favorite method has always been poison. And so polonium-210 with Litvinenko. And so I think, yeah, I think he's increasingly isolated, which causes problems for us because you do have to then figure out,

okay, what information is he getting? How good is the information he's getting? And is he making decisions based on sound intelligence and information? Is he getting somewhat paranoid? And there's been some reporting that he's fired a lot of his staff and brought in- Who the fuck does he bring in?

He brings in other people. I have no idea. His cousins. It's his kids. I mean, that's what Trump did, right? Yeah. His kids work for him. Did Trump have food tasters? I don't know kids work for him. Did Trump have food tasters?

I don't know. Maybe he did. Does Putin have food tasters? Supposedly, according to some reports. He's got people tasting his food now before he eats it. So that kind of gives you an indication. But you look at this rally he just held. It was the largest football stadium they've got.

And you look at it, and if you didn't know better, it's an old Soviet-style rally, or it looks like sort of something North Korea would put on. I haven't seen it. Yeah, they've got— Can you pull that up? The stadium's just full of people. Supposedly, it's a pro-war protest, you know, because those are really popular. You know, let's have a big rally to celebrate the war. And so he's got this stadium filled, and they're all waving flags, and he's out there talking, and it's crazy.

Is there a video of this, Jamie? Oh, my God. Look how many people there are. Yeah. So these people are all waving Russian. Is it possible that there's that much support for the war over there? I think people that, yeah, I think there is support for it from folks who, you know, are staring at state-run TV or older folks who, you know, appreciate the fact that, you know. What is this?

It says Russian state TV cuts away from Putin at pro-Russia rally. Russian President Vladimir Putin spoke to defend what he called the special operation in Ukraine. So happening at the beginning of the operation. So he's. I mean, it's crazy. And this took place, I think it was close to or on the eight-year anniversary of the annexation of Crimea. But look, I mean, but this does look, it looks exactly like what you would expect Soviet propaganda to look like. Or again, something coming out with Kim Jong-un in North Korea.

Exactly. And, you know, bring out the bands. Maybe Pussy Riot will play. What is this guy saying? Maybe they won't. Oh, boy. So it's very bizarre. It's a very bizarre thing to see.

And it tells you, in a sense, again, putting all these little things into a bucket to try to assess his mindset. It tells you, why did he feel the need to do this? Well, you know. and how many of these people are actually out there to support it how many you know were instructed in their apartment block you know what you're going to show up at the stadium we're going to have a rally we expect you to be there yeah like what do you yeah what do you say when they say that well they already know i mean most people there because you know word does get around i think they're aware that thousands of protesters have been arrested and aren't doing well just yet. But I think they understand that. So that was inside. So is this picture of the stadium, the outside?

Is that a bunch of people that are trying to get in? Yeah, I think those are just people who have gathered or have been invited to also attend. It says they cut away from him mid-sentence. And they went to some nationalistic songs. Right. That's got to be disrespectful, though, isn't it? To cut away from his speech? Yeah.

I don't know what the production values are on state TV anymore. I don't know. It may not be quite as good as the NCAAs or something like that. I think it's probably lacking. But it's just a bizarre indication of the situation over there right now. And you would, again, but it's hard to read, right? We'd like to imagine, because we imagine what we would do, we'd like to imagine or would hopefully do, we imagine that the Russian people will get out there and say no this isn't right But they there's a lack of information

So I think we need to one of the things that we should be doing Hopefully we are is trying to pump accurate information into the Russian population Remember, you might not have access to this there might not be even understanding what's going on right the world There's a there's a lot of folks in this again It's you know stories of you know You talk to people in the Ukraine and they've got relatives in Russia, and the relatives in Russia are going, well, we're just, we're trying to beat back the neo-Nazis who were killing Russians in the eastern part of the country. And you think, oh, okay, is that,

that's your story? And that, but that's what's being fed on national TV, or state-run TV. And so, in the old Cold War days, we had Voice of America, right? I think we need sort of a Voice of America on steroids delivered very quickly so that we're getting accurate information so that they can kind of see what... Again, we don't need to do propaganda. All you got to do is show what the fuck's happening and what they're doing and at least give them that opportunity to see what is going on. Easier said than done, but it's an important part of this exercise. It's a traditional covert action campaign, just like we tried to do in the Cold War, to let them know what the hell is happening in the rest of the world.

How do they get that? I mean, if the Internet is down and all they have access to is state-run television, they've got to be suspicious if the Internet is down and all they have access to is state-run television, they've got to be suspicious if the internet is down, right? I mean, that's one of the things that I've heard from friends that are Russian, is that Russians don't trust anything the politicians say or anything the news media says anyway. They have a dismissal of anything that's like the standard narrative that they're worried about happening in America. It's one of the things that people say when they talk about the misinformation that like when CNN lies about stuff and when they withhold information, they worry that we're going to eventually develop this

same sort of nonchalant attitude about our mainstream media. Right. Right. I think it's already happening. We talked about that. I think it's, yeah, and that's the danger. And then you have the media here saying, well, it doesn't make sense. Why do they distrust us? Why isn't it? And in part, it's because every outlet now spends more time on opinion pieces and opinion journalism than just reporting the facts, right? Right. Just, you know, someone should dump some money into a network that does nothing but like the old CNN. They're doing that, supposedly. That's what the new, yeah, CNN got bought out. And so the new owners of CNN apparently want to reestablish objective journalism on CNN, which is wise because first of all, there's a market for it. Yeah, exactly. Second of all, the people that they have giving out opinions, they wouldn't survive if they were on their own.

If they were independent, imagine if Brian Stelter had a podcast. How many fucking people would listen to that thing? You know what I'm saying? Yeah. It's like this is exactly the problem. It's like the people that you can get to do that job are not the people that people want to listen to. Right. And that would be a great thing if that's the case and CNN is actually able to do that. I mean, you remember when they spent a lot of money on field

bureaus and that you knew that, okay, I'm going to turn on CNN because I'm going to get the news. This was a long time ago, it seems, but that's what you did. And I agree with that. I think there's a market for it. I think people, if you just tell them what the fuck's going on and you don't try to tell them how to think about it, it's not a bad thing. Exactly. People have a hunger for that and that's one of the reasons why independent news is thriving now and they're trying to stifle that. And it's one of the things that people have a problem with also with social media is that independent news sources are being stifled while these corporate news sources are being promoted. Yeah. And it's-

I mean, I get calls from various outlets, network outlets, and they'll say, hey, can you do, could you come on like Wednesday or whatever time? And for some of them, yeah, fine. Okay. You want to talk about X, but there are a number of them that will say, okay, so what, you know, what are your thoughts on this? You know, can we get your talking points on this? Because we're going to have, you know, somebody from, you know, another, whatever your opinion is, we're going to have somebody from the other side. And you're going to yell at each other for five minutes. Yeah. We're going to yell. Yeah. I don't have an opinion. I'm just going to say what

seems to be the situation on, you know, on the ground or whatever it is. And how about that? And so there's a number of times now where you just have to say, no, I can't do it. I'm not available because it's not advancing the ball. And it's kind of, in fact, it's feeding the beast here, right? It's just like, all I'm going to do is sit there and listen to somebody yell at me, and then I'm supposed to yell at them, and nobody learns anything. Well, here we are. We're two hours plus into this, and there's been no commercials, right? So we're just talking.

And when you realize that when you're going on one of these other shows, they're so handicapped by the format that they exist in where they have an hour to do the show and in between segments you're going to have you're going to have to pause your commercial you have to interrupt the conversation you have to come back and pick up and usually you've got a whole new subject when you come back yeah so you get a cursory examination of each individual topic and it's all based on having people argue so you got three heads you know there's the yeah sometimes more that. I love when they have the Brady Bunch thing where they got like four or five or six people up there and you each get 10 seconds. Whose idea is that? It's so stupid, especially when you're dealing with something that's as complex as any sort of international action like what we're handling now.

Yeah. Well, if you're talking about, I mean, Syria was a good example. They did a lot during when ISIS was raging and rampaging. And so they say, okay, we've got about three and a half minutes. Okay, so you've got about three and a half minutes to talk about a very complex situation. And then you figure you've really only got about a minute and 20 seconds because you know the anchor is going to, their question is going to last a minute. Yeah. is going to last a minute. Yeah. Right? It's never just, well, why is that? Or what happened there?

Or what's next? Or who is responsible? Or there's never like a short one-sentence question. I feel like there's going to come a time in the future where those shows just don't exist anymore because they're so limited in the way they can cover complex subjects. And if people want to get information, I mean, if you want to get sound bites, that's one thing.

But sound bites, I think they're just so inadequate when it comes to something complex. Well, it works in part because, I mean, again, this is not rocket science, but I think it works in part because people love to have their opinions affirmed or reaffirmed. And so if I can tune into a station and I know, I think a certain way, I don't really want to know what the fuck's going on.

I just want someone to tell me I'm right. So that's where, and again, it doesn't matter whether you're right or left. The left will say, oh, that's Fox. And Fox would say, well, that's MSNBC. And in reality, it's both sides. It's part of its human nature. But if you had that outlet that just said, hi, here's what's going on right now. Here's the footage. Here's what's happening. And then, yeah, I don't need to dive into, well, okay, well, you tell me how I'm

supposed to think about that or have six people come on in different boxes on the screen and kind of yell at each other for 20 seconds each and then I'm supposed to make sense of it No wonder we're kind of fucked and there's this short attention span and you try to talk to you try to talk to kids I mean I try to talk to the boys all the time about what's going on now as an example in Russia and because I want them to Understand right and I just want them to understand how complex things are, you know And and and not to just go to school and they'll hear some kid parrot something that their parents said, and they'll come back and they'll repeat it. And I'll say, well, why do you think that is? You know? And so, I don't know. I worry that, I mean, again, here I go again. I'm going to talk

about one of my kids. My daughter, when she was in university, she got out of university and we were talking about it shortly after graduation. And one of the things she talked about was, you know, I spent like, you know, four years, thank God it was only four years, four years, not really saying anything in classes where there would be, you know, conversation because she's, she's sort of a centrist, right? So she's not hard left. And I mean, she's nicely balanced, right? I mean, I think she's turned out to be a real smart person. But she just wouldn't open her mouth in conversations in the classroom, because if she had a dissenting opinion, she didn't want to get into it, right? And so she just never argued. And she said that was not

uncommon. People would just, if somebody was really strong about something or felt really strong about something, fine, just let them go. Right. And don't debate it. That's a, you know, people talk about it. And so I'm not raising anything new, but, you know, it hits home when it's your kid and you've spent all that money on their university education. Well, I think that's a giant chunk of our country when it comes to ideology. Most people are in the center. I had a conversation with someone the other day

and she was like, I would be down with Republicans if they would just drop all the gay shit. She was like, all that gay stuff, like leave those fucking gay people alone. Like this is, it's one of the dumbest aspects of hardcore conservatives. Yeah, absolutely. That they deny gay rights. And I go, I think you're probably not alone. I think there's

probably a lot of people to fill that way. There's a lot of people that are in the center on whether it's from left wing issues or right wing issues. You know, with left wing issues, maybe it's trans women in sports, or maybe it's gender confirmation. It's like this don't say gay thing in Florida. When I heard that, I was like, what? What are they saying? You can't say gay? Is that really what's going on? It turns out that's not what it is. It's not what it is at all. What it is is ages, it's first through third grade, they're saying you're not supposed to talk about sexual orientation gender orientation or sexual proclivity or or you know what what you're interested in they said you should just teach math and science and history to little kids yeah just let the toddlers be toddlers

and then they can you can then you can start ramping up your instruction you know and and people are opposed to that. But it's like, listen, your teachers are not supposed to be the people that explain gender to a fucking seven-year-old. Yeah. It's just, who are these teachers? And how do you, do you know what their perspective is? Are they intelligent about it? Are they trying to indoctrinate the child to any particular point of view, whether it's pro-transgender or anti-transgender or anti-gay or pro-gay?

They shouldn't have any say at all when you're talking to a seven-year-old kid. I mean, I feel like that is the job of the parents. That's the job. I mean- And you hope the parents are doing it. When kids get older and they develop feelings for either the same sex or opposite sex or they feel like they're in the wrong body, then these conversations should be had by qualified people that can discuss this from a nuanced perspective and understand what the psychology of a young person who's trying to figure out who they are in the world is. But the idea that this is a don't say gay because you're saying that ages first grade to third grade that you shouldn't be bringing up these subjects to them. I think a lot of people are saying, no, I just don't want you grooming my kids for whatever your ideology is,

whether it's a right-wing ideology or a left-wing ideology. I want you to teach them fucking science. There's a responsibility here. Just teach the kids the coursework that we, as parents, I think that's what you expected. I think one of the things the pandemic did was it kind of showed, because you had to homeschool all of a sudden. We had a nation full of homeschoolers working with their schools, local schools. Then they started to realize, wait a minute, their assignment is what? They got to do what?

And so I think it did raise this awareness level. I mean, I agree. Look, one of the funny things about conservatives I've always found is that they talk about freedom and small government. A lot of times, government just got to get out of the way. And then at the same time they want to like you know uh orchestrate what goes on in the bedroom and you think how about you just stay out of all that shit stay out all the social shit everybody just do that right direct democrats republicans stay out all that bullshit as a government just focus on the things you're supposed to focus on

national security infrastructure uh treaties with foreign countries uh you know try not to to fuck things up but otherwise stay out yeah i it's it's always one of those things where i can see why it drives the left crazy with with you know republicans where they just can't help themselves they keep diving back into abortion they keep diving back into the you know the the gender the gay issue whatever it is. I just think, no, how about you just stay out of the kitchen and focus on the big things? Look, it's hard enough to learn history. It's hard enough.

Hard enough to learn grammar and the proper use of contractions. Like, Jesus Christ. Proper. Proper use of contractions. No, it's true. That's a tough one. All this is like you're teaching fucking seven-year- Christ. Proper. You know what I'm saying? Proper use of contractions. No, it's true. That's a tough one. All this is like you're teaching fucking seven-year-olds. Yeah.

Like, all that stuff is hard enough. But first of all, it's not your business to indoctrinate a child into your ideology. And I think there's many teachers that feel like that is their business and that part of their job is not just to teach a child about important things, about science and math, but they feel like it's to prepare a child for what they think is a better world, whether it's a more conservative world or it's a more progressive world. And I think there's a lot of people that have a real issue with that. Well, there's a difference between teaching a kid how to think and, and what to think. Right.

And so I think that's, you know, there is that divide and, and, you know, we've over the years, you know, we've,

we've, we've had some outstanding teachers for our kids. And then every now and then you'll get a teacher who seems like they're just kind of, they're not focused. Right. And they're just, and it's more about, I'm going to teach your kid what to think as opposed to how to think.

Right, right, right. So it's a, yeah, it's interesting, but I don't know. Again, you raise all these issues and then you think, well, how do we walk it back? How do we change that? And, you know, that's always where you kind of run up against, you know, you've got to get smarter people in office. And, you know, it's a problem. NATO, the U.S., maybe we're suffering as a result of not consistently sending our best and brightest into leadership positions. They don't want the gig. They don't want the gig.

They don't want the gig. You see the way people get attacked and brutalized on the campaign trail. It's like, Jesus Christ, who wants to subject themselves to that? Not only that, but there's also such a disingenuous quality to it, to the very people that are attacking you and calling you the worst piece of shit that's ever lived. Then they'll join up with you and be your vice president and go, hey, it was just politics. It's just politics.

Well, what the fuck is politics? Are you guys liars? Sorry about that time I called you a racist. I'm happy to accept the offer to be the vice president. Sorry I said you were a rapist. I didn't really mean it. I just wanted to fuck you over because I wanted to be the president. So now I got second position. I'm willing to support you. I mean, it's like madness. And also it kills people's trust in what these people have to say, because I can't believe you now because you already admitted that you lie.

Yeah. And I think that's a big problem that the president's having right now is sort of the credibility issue. And I mean, who knows where it's going to go? I'm not I'm you know, I don't want to dive into politics necessarily. But you look at the midterms coming up and you look at the presidential election in 2024. And, you know, nothing. I'm not particularly optimistic, regardless of where it goes, how it turns out, right? Because we've got the same cast of characters for the most part, and we just keep shuffling them around until they get old enough to pass away. There's a few bright lights, not much. A lot of it is business as usual. And I think a lot of these people that have great ideas, once they get into the system, they get compromised.

A lot of these people that have great ideas, once they get into the system, they get compromised. And then they realize once they're in the system, like, oh, my God, what a fucking mess this is. Well, think about being a congressperson, right? It's a member of Congress every two years, right? So you get in, and six months into it, you're being asked to raise money for some of your fellow congressmen, congresswomen, congresspeople. And then you've got to worry about your own coffers to get yourself re-elected every two fucking years but it's a it's a constant cycle it never never really it's not like you wait two years and then you start up again you're doing it all the time you're always raising money and it just seems like a shit job and uh and and so anyway some people enjoy it they seem to love it whether yeah and you do get a lot of people who like i was head of the young

democrats club or i was head of the Young Republicans Club, and now I'm going to be a state legislator. And then I'm going to run for Congress. And it becomes this career thing that goes on, which, again, coming back to term limits. But then it comes back to what you said, which is, well, if you keep rotating this, and you've only got people in office for a certain period of time, yeah, it's fascinating. Yeah, but then what's the alternative to that? Someone like Nancy Pelosi? Well, Putin. Yeah. You get a Putin in there and he'll be in office for, I can't do the math on that, but if he's in office till 2036, say. He's never getting out, right? I mean, he doesn't have to leave. Not unless he's driven out.

Does he have elections, allegedly? No, not, well, well they did they changed it from four-year terms to six-year terms and then and now it's written basically so that he can he literally can stay until 20 i think it's 2036 so that's uh again new math but it's i should have spent more time on stem 14 years 14 years another 14 years 75 no 73 years old. He's 69? Yeah, 69. Jesus Christ. What the hell is that? That's 83.

And that will have meant 37 years running that country. So he's 69 now. So if he's 83, he'll be just older than Biden. Okay, that's a good point. I hadn't thought about it that way. Just older. I mean, because Biden's like 80, right? Isn't he 80?

I don't think he's 80 yet. Whatever he is. Yeah. I mean, it's not a good, it's not good. Yeah. It's a, it's, it's, it's, it's a, uh, yeah, it's a, it's an old late seventies. He's not going to just release the power. Right. So how does this end? Well, how does this like Russia thing end? Well, is there a way that it ends well? Well, the way that it ends well is if both sides give up enough, right? And Putin, now think about this, Putin then has to essentially retreat, move all his personnel, all that hardware, out of the country. You got to think about what a process that is,

right? And what that's going to look like and what Putin imagines that to look like. So he's going to have to gain some real concessions here from Zelensky in order to, in his mind, I suspect, justify that withdrawal. But I don't think, again, of course, always be wrong, but I don't think that he sees a long-term occupation of Ukraine as an endgame here, because it just appears that he's just hell-bent on busting it. And maybe he thinks at that point, if he breaks the will so badly that he'll walk away and just leave a broken country on his western flank, which is better than a successful democracy getting closer and closer to the west. I don't know. It seems bizarre. He's lost the game already, right? He's turned that country completely against him.

I mean, it wasn't necessarily pro-Russian before. It's definitely not now. So what the fuck has he gained? Isn't that what really scares people, though, is that he could be desperate? Well, yeah, and there is that talk that says, well, if he feels backed into a corner, then he'll launch the tactical nukes or he'll use chemical weapons, and then the question becomes, what do we do? What do they do? Let's imagine he launches a nuke and kills 100,000 people. Flattens the city.

Yeah. Then you say to yourself, okay, what are we going to do in response? What are we going to do? Take troops, go into that country and fight on the ground against, or we're going to launch our own nu in response and then we haven't been attacked Jesus I mean look the response time nowadays I mean in the old days it was I don't say it was easier, but it was in a sense the attack time Calculation was a lot different in the old days the cold the Cold War beginning of the Cold War whatever a

Soviet bomber takes you know five hours to get into, you know, position for U.S. airspace. And that's five hours. And then with missile technology, it eventually made its way down to about 15 minutes less with a sub-launched missile. missile. And so suddenly your attack time to consider a response, a retaliatory response, was down to minutes rather than hours and hours. And now with the development of hypersonics, you're talking about no time whatsoever. You're talking about weapons that can completely evade current existing air defense systems. So mutual assured destruction was in part based on this idea of a retaliatory response, right? So I can go in and I'll have time to respond to your attack. Now, it changes the calculus because now- It's like a sucker punch.

Yeah. Yeah, exactly. And so now maybe there's not enough time for it. So it takes that off the table, which is a frightening thought, which is why, you know, the development of hypersonics is so important. And we talked about that before, but it is, it's part of the new theater of war. And that also includes everything, including cyberspace. And Russia has not really, Putin has not launched the sort of cyber attacks I think that people were imagining would take place, right? And there was some talk here in the States saying, oh, my God, we got to be – well, we do have to be prepared. But there was this thought process that he was going to attack the US in a sort of significant way through cyberspace. But that is a definite scenario that can't be ignored at all, right? And we still haven't done enough to protect our systems, you know, both commercial and government, and then also, you know, space and the weaponization of space. So all these new theaters of war, but part of it is also

the removal of that mutually assured destruction doctrine, right? And the idea that, I mean, look at the Soviet thinking, right? The Soviet thinking back in the 80s, late 70s, 80s, they established a weapon system that didn't need any humans to launch the nuclear missiles because they thought to themselves, all right, response time is getting to be a problem. What if we lose all our leadership? So they developed a weapons system that if the Soviet leadership is wiped out, the system will essentially go out there, look for that leadership. If it's not there, it will on its own send signals to launch the remaining available surviving missiles that are out there. And so it was called the dead hand system, perimeter or whatever. And so it was called the dead hand system, perimeter or whatever. And so that's but again, that's another important thing to think about when you're talking about Putin's mindset and where he comes from and sort of the development of military strategy and how you act. administration, rightly so, is so concerned about escalating to a point where we're getting dangerously close to something that we thought was pretty much off the table for all these decades, right? Nuclear war, you know? And so it's, you know, it's rightly so. You have to be careful.

Again, you know, people are quick to criticize whatever administration's in power, but I think you have to, you know, it has to be more of a conversation than that. You can't just say, I disagree with them because they're in the other party or whatever And the question is if someone's willing to kill a few thousand people I mean how many people have died in Ukraine how many civilians have died so far do well an estimate of that? It's in the I think they were they were looking at in terms of the soldiers military losses for the Ukraine side it was in the 1500 range or thereabouts. And civilians, I think we're talking in the, it's hard to get an accurate estimate, but I think

UN was placing it around close to a thousand, just under a thousand. So a couple thousand people dead. Yeah. How do you, I mean- Not to mention his own personnel. If he decides that a tactical nuke, one individual tactical nuke to send a message kills 100,000 people, if they've already killed a few thousand people and he's lost a few thousand people and he thinks a way to stop the bleeding and keep this from escalating to a point where he loses 100,000 troops is to just drop a nuke.

And then we have to figure out what happens next. Like imagine a world in 2022, which is so nuts to think that a nuclear bomb could be detonated by a superpower like Russia just to say, hey, I'll do this. And what do we then negotiate? What do they do? Well, again, that's the unknown, right? It's like cyber warfare. We don't know because it's unknown, right? We always had a strategy for nuclear warfare. We always thought we did, right? Because we always kind of placed it on, okay, rational actors out there, right? I mean, there's always the outlier. Okay, what if rogue state gets it or a terrorist group gets one? But we always had it in the back of our minds that it was rational actors. And so, therefore, this is how it won't play out because people will be rational.

Yeah. And now we're faced with this question again. And the question is, you know, if that happens, if he fires a tactical nuke because he's decided, again, he's just going to break it, he's having a hard time encircling Kiev, he's not making the headway he wants to, he feels as if he either wins or he's out of power and he does this, it's the unknown. What are we going to do? Do we think that... It's like with China. If China goes after Taiwan, says, we're taking Taiwan, do we think that the US is going to get into a shooting match with China to save Taiwan? I'm not in charge, but I suspect there's going to

be a lot of debate about that. And by the time we finish that debate in our democracy, maybe it's too late. So I don't know. I mean, I don't mean to bum you out. Oh, too late. Hey, I'm just here to... Jamie's got that... You know what?

If we want to have a happy ending, then we've got that 30-second trailer for Black Files Declassified on Discovery. Maybe we should end with that because I'm so bummed out right now. Don't be bummed out. I'm not bummed out about your show, but I'm terrified that this is a real scenario. When you're talking about these supersonic weapons that go faster than the speed of sound,

that we really don't have any time to retaliate, they'll hit us before we even realize it, especially if it's coming from like a submarine, right? Yeah. Can they shoot something subsonic from a – supersonic rather from a submarine? Yeah, there's been all sorts of developments in terms of – because you want to be able to – hypersonics, you want to be able to use a variety of platforms. Now, the thing about it is the thing with submarine-launched attacks was it got you closer, right? It got you closer to the target. it got you closer, right?

It got you closer to the target. With hypersonics, it doesn't really matter because of the speed with which they're moving and the ability to evade air defense systems because they're moving in an unpredictable pattern. Ballistic missiles kind of go up, they come down, you can plot the trajectory, and you know how to intercept. Hypersonics don't move that way. They don't move at those predictable speeds.

So that's where the attack, again, the attack time is completely, reaction is completely recalculated. And that's where the problem is. And again, we've talked about it before, but that's why it's so important, I think, for people to pay attention to, you know, who's doing what? Where are these developments coming from? Where are people spending their money on weapon systems? Why is that important? Where are people spending their money on weapons systems? Why is that important? Why is weaponization of space important?

Why is cyber warfare? What are the rules in cyber warfare? We don't have any because it's unknown turf, and we don't know how bad it could get, how quickly it could go south. And so people are very reluctant to talk about major cyber warfare scenarios. Yeah, it's terrifying. The destruction of the grid's terrifying. The idea that, you know, that it's not that hard to take out our entire power grid. Not at all. Not at all. It's, no, and that, those grids are being tested all the time, right? And, you know, okay, fine. People say, well, we do the same thing. Well, yeah, we do.

We're plotting and planning. We're testing, in nations that don't have our interests at heart. But China, Russia, Iran, any nation that's got the ability, they every day are testing our systems. And they've been drawing up maps and understanding the weaknesses and the access points. And they've been doing it for years. And they've got playbooks in place already. So if it were to head south that way and suddenly we're in this goat rope, then they just turn to their playbook, they open up the page one and they've already got it mapped out because that's what they've been doing. They've been testing our systems for a

long time. And yeah, our power grid goes down and it shuts everything down, fuel transport, access to cash, food, healthcare. I's a, yeah, I mean, you can imagine the mess. I mean, people are inconvenienced when, you know, a winter storm causes a power outage for two days, right? And it's like, oh my God, are we going to survive? So, anyhow. There's an article I read yesterday about Oliver Stone sitting down with Putin and watching Dr. Strangelove. And it's all about, I mean, I don't think Putin had ever seen the film, and that film is all about a bunch of generals who think it's a good idea, and they talk about it in these very preposterous ways of starting these nuclear bombs. Whoa, what's that?

Is that it? It's a video of them watching it. Oh, let's see that. Oh, excellent. So this is, and by the way, Oliver Stone, when he was on, was saying that this, when he was telling us, he was saying that this film, Dr. Strangelove, was based on real live conversations, exaggerated,

but real live conversations that generals had had during the Cold War about launching a first strike nuclear attack on China or Russia because they're worried about them eventually doing it to us. And Putin says it indeed makes us think, despite the fact that everything you see on screen is make believe, he foresaw some issues even from a technical point of view. I mean, things that make me think about real threats that exist. This is Putin watching Dr. Strangelove talking to Oliver Stone about this satirical movie from, I suppose, like 1960-something, right? Yeah, I know. It's all slim pickings riding the bomb down. Yeah. At the end. No, and yeah, it is. It was based on, there were, I mean, the conversations that took place seem surreal when they start talking about accepted casualty numbers during the Cold War. When they're talking about, you know, if you have to launch a

retaliatory strike, okay, what, you know, what are acceptable casualty numbers? What are anticipated casualty numbers? What does the president do in times, I mean, they have presidential executive action documents that were created in case of an attack, right? And what the authorities that would be given to the president to make, you know, unique individual decisions, right, in a situation like that. It's a remarkable period of time. And now, bizarrely, you know, we seem to be back in the Cold War. But this was inconceivable just six months ago. Yeah. No, it was certainly in people's minds, right? I mean, you know, we were worried about a mask. I have a fucking mask. And, you know, the pandemic, everybody was just tired of it. And

everybody anticipated, I'm going on spring break. It it's going to be great now we're going to get out of this thing and and now you got to deal with this so i don't even think this is going to be a wake-up call if we get through this my fear is that people will just move on to the next thing to be outraged about i'm really i'm really concerned because I feel like unless things physically change with our society and our life, unless there's some sort of physical action like a 9-11. One thing after 9-11 is the amount of people that drove around with American flags in their car was insane. There was a feeling of patriotism. You felt united.

There was less road rage. People were kinder. It was different. It was like we felt like we were all in it together. And we don't feel like that right now. Now we're separated by ideology and left versus right and blue versus red and who controls this and the midterms are coming up. We have to drop some restrictions or people are going to vote the wrong way and all this craziness that has us divided. Well, because it's not – I mean it was obviously on a home turf, right?

So 9-11 happened and it was against us, right? And so that allowed us to come together because, okay, now what? We got this shared enemy. We've got this common point that we can... And so you're right. It was remarkable. But with this, with what's happening, yeah, I mean, look, this is a serious threat to our national security and to the safety and security of us and our allies. To life on earth. Yeah, exactly. And so, but we don't feel it quite that way, right? And so it's not that same thing.

We can't compare the two, I guess, but we should be smart enough. And that's why for a brief moment, it was like, oh, we're all Americans. We all have to support the government and make sure that we're doing the right thing in terms of Russia and Ukraine. And that only lasted for a couple of days. And then it's all like, ah, Biden screwed up or they're not doing their part. So the Republican, they talked a good game up in Washington, DC for a couple of days about how, well, we are all coming together and this is something that we all have to be worried about. It's national security. And then they couldn't help themselves. And so now we're back to partisan politics over something as important as what we're currently facing.

For whatever reason, human beings have, we don't have an ability to think things are real if they're not affecting us right now. We think that we know that they're a real threat and we'll argue about it on Twitter, but it doesn't change. It's not like, it's not like a near death experience. It's not like something that really makes you reassess how you behave and how you think and life in general. And I mean, okay, part of it is, I was going to say part of it is, is understandable in the sense that, you know that everybody's putting food on the table. They're worried about their kids. They're worried about getting to work in the morning or finding a job or whatever.

And so unless it's a direct attack on the home front, it really needs to be that. It needs to be a punch in the face that you actually feel as opposed to something like this, which for a lot of folks I think seems like a theoretical exercise. You hear a lot of people saying, well, why should we be concerned? Why are we getting wrapped into this? And rightly so. Again, we don't want nuclear war with Russia Ukraine. And then he decides, OK, well, maybe Moldova is next because I'm kind of pissed off about Moldova. And, you know, they're making noises now about possibly and he's already got a sort of a Russian backed part of Moldova. Right. So you could see him securing Ukraine and then looking at Moldova and saying, well, half the population's already in my camp. I'll get that. Then I'll expand my sphere of influence. I know, right? That's why.

Mike, tell us about your show. Well, here it is. Look at this. Tell people when it is. Wednesdays. Wednesdays, 9 p.m. Science Channel and it's on Discovery+. Black Files Declassified, it's season two.

We traveled all over the fucking place, and we got some great stories, a lot of good investigations. We could spend a whole hour talking about MKUltra again that we looked at. I did an interview with, I might have mentioned this to you the last time, I did an interview with, I might have mentioned this to you the last time, but with a woman whose sister was one of the subjects up in Canada of a doctor who was being funded through MKUltra. And what she went through completely broke her as a person, ruined the family. time, never got over it. This poor woman was in an institution being essentially experimented on by what was essentially supposedly Canada's leading psychiatrist. And some of their funding was coming from the MKUltra project all those years ago. And sitting down with this woman, who is this lady's younger sister, and she's now obviously much older and it was just it was just heartbreaking because it really brought it home right it was i mean sometimes you

can look at these things and they go wow that's fucked up and but to see a person but to see yeah it was crazy all right mike uh we'll we'll end the show with this thank you very much uh thank you mb company man on twitter and what are you. You're on the Instagram, right? I guess I am on the Instagram. I don't really know. I don't use Instagram much. But yeah, MB Company Man on Twitter. And yeah, I appreciate you. I appreciate you coming down here, man.

I really do. I do as well. Thank you. Bye, everybody. Why was our government investigating the paranormal? That information is still all classified to this day. Whatever was being done was done for mind control. You fully immerse yourself in the enemy.

This was by far the most terrifying experience of my life. It's a Banner syndrome. There might be something right here. It seems like an effort to keep the public in the dark. That's exactly how psychological operations work. Hello? I wouldn't call this a treatment. This is a woman. I would call it torture.

The Soviet Union created a doomsday system. These systems are always learning, they're always developing. Is that an existential threat to mankind? The Navy's already looking at how to use aerial drones to attack an objective. Whoever can master those techniques will rule the world. Thank you.