The Joe Rogan Experience - #1923 - Mike Baker

Episode Date: January 11, 2023

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, and author of the new book "Company Rules, Or Everything I Know About Business I Learned from the CIA," available exclusively from Scribd.com on January 18.  https://try.scribd.com/baker/

The Joe Rogan Experience. Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day. Speak up for horseshit, Jamie. You're just going to let them ban bullshit? That could be a problem for bullshit. Some bullshit's fun. I think you abdicated your responsibility. Some bullshit's fun and should just be, that's the bullshit you like.

Yes, some bullshit is fun. Like wrestling or whatever. Yes. But wrestling doesn't cost people billions and billions of dollars when it doesn't go right. Well. Do you think that fucking guy who crashed FTX, the Binance guy, do you think he had any idea that he was going to crash his business too?

Oh. Like collateral damage? Yeah, I mean, they're going under. He's lost like $15 billion over the last few days. I would say no, he didn't see it coming. But fucking duh. Fucking duh.

You basically showed everybody how vulnerable this money on a hard drive is. This like weird. I'm mining. I'm mining for coin. Are you? You're mining. No, no, no. I'm just kidding.

Wonderful idea. I know. It's so profitable to mine. It was either that or cobalt. And crypto seemed easier. So Jamie, you were saying that people were mad. First of all, they were mad at Peter Zion. Mostly that.

Yeah, for saying what seems to be the case is that a lot of crypto was just horseshit. The one comment he made that I think I would go against, too, is that it has no intrinsic value. Because it seems that a lot of things have no intrinsic value. Right. Well, it doesn't have a value unless we agree it has a value. You can buy a lot of stuff with credit. I mean, Antonopoulos, doesn't he buy everything? Like, pays his rent, everything with Bitcoin?

Tons of stuff you could do with it. Tons of stuff going on with it. It has uses. I don't know if they're all the uses everyone thought they'd be by now or what's going on with it because there's obviously a lot of confusion. But then people were mad at you. Well, just because he had to leave. We had a flight to catch.

So they were mad that you didn't grill him. Right. So just let him stand up for bullshit. Let him speak on whatever. No, I thought they were mad because you invented crypto. I didn't know. I wasn't sure where this was going. Imagine if that was Satoshi.

That'll come out later. He's the main guy. All this time. All this time he's been hiding in plain sight. That's a whole other fun story, too, that we'll never know, I don't think. It's kind of funny, right? It's like him and Banksy. They're like the best escape artists ever.

And we've never seen them together. It's like Ringo Starr and Yasser Arafat. You never saw them photograph together. I think they look different. I think that's just one of them fun things to say before the internet came around. Look how old you are. Ringo Starr, Yasser Arafat. Everybody's like, what the fuck is he saying?

Who is Yasser Arafat? Yasser Arafat. That guy's dead. Oh, he is dead. He's been dead and continues to be dead. Ringo's still alive, though, right? Yes. He's like the last of the Beatles that's still alive other than Paul McCartney, right?

Just the two of them. George Harrison and, God bless him, John Lennon. Oh, well, that is pretty fucking close. See? What am I talking about? Look at that. That's not bad. I was not making that shit up.

Put him in the hat. Yeah. Yeah. Damn. And never, ever, that's a side-by-side comparing two photos, but they were never photographed in the same room. We still, to this day, don't know. Imagine if you were a rock star, but you were also a dictator.

I mean, has any dictator ever tried to become a – like if anybody could pull that off, maybe the Sultan of Brunei. Or a terrorist, right? Right. That's a great cover to travel around the world as a rock star. And also be a terrorist? Yeah. Or a spy. Has there ever – is that a movie?

Or a spy. Is that a movie? There was, about, what's his name? The catcher. Not Yogi Berra, the baseball guy. Who traveled as a spy. I'm thinking of that movie that was based around the guy from the, no, no, no, no, no, no, the spy. The guy from the gong show.

Oh, yeah, Chuck Berry. Chuck Berry. Remember? Yeah, Chuck Berry or Chuck Berris? Chuck Berris. Berris, right. Berris is the musician. Remember? Chuck Berry or Chuck Barris? Chuck Barris. Barris, right. Barry is the musician. Barris is the guy from the gong show. There was that movie.

They did not look alike. Confessions of a Dangerous Mind. Yeah, that was a fun movie, man. It was a good movie. Who played Chuck Barris? I forget. He was great. I'm old enough to remember the gong show.

Oh, he was so fun. Yeah. When someone's having fun, when someone has like a perpetual smile, it's just an enjoyable thing to watch. Sam Rockwell. Sam Rockwell's fucking great. That guy's great. But that show, you know, it was like watching a Dean Martin concert.

Every time you tuned in the gong show, you just knew Chuck was half of the bag, right? Yeah. He was having a fantastic time. Jamie Farr was going to be one of the panelists. Yep. Yeah. Yeah. Jamie Farr used to be one of the panelists. Yeah. Jamie Farr used to be my neighbor. No. Yeah.

My actual neighbor. Lived right next door to me. Super nice guy. Yeah. He's a fucking weirded me out. Besides MASH and the gong show, I can't name one thing that Jamie Farr was in. I don't think he did anything else. He just played golf.

Yeah. I think he made his money off of MASH he did anything else. He just played golf. Yeah. I think he made his money off of MASH and the Gong Show and just played golf. Cannonball run. Was he in that? Yeah, both of them. Wait a minute. Hmm. Interesting.

What's this here? I mean, it's got his... The poster comes up when I Google his name. So that's what it means. Well, happy new year. Happy new year. Yeah. So I was reading Fox News today because my friend Sean told me they were going to get rid of the IRS. I was like, what?

No. What is happening? No. He's like, yeah, they're trying to get rid of the IRS. I'm like, what? So I go to Fox News, and they were saying that they're trying to overhaul the tax system and make it a consumption-based tax. The answer to the squad on the right side is, what do they call themselves, the Patriot 20 or some shit?

Oh, the Freedom Forum. I think it's the Freedom Caucus or the Freedom Forum or something like that. It's got to involve freedom of some sort. Of course. You've got to choose one from column A, and then you've got to go like a caucus or forum. Patriot Act. Yeah. No, they're not getting rid of the IRS all those all those folks

Who might have gotten excited about that? It's never gonna happen. They've they've moved to defund you know that 87,000 agents yeah, that seemed like a problem that hiring 87,000 new people I don't understand. I you know I have an accountant that handles all my shit I don't understand. You know, I have an accountant that handles all my shit. I don't pay attention to that stuff. But what I do know is that there was a lot of people saying that they weren't going to go after corporations with that. They're going to go after like, you know, middle class people the popular narrative was, we're going to hire 87,000 more. Now, look, does the IRS, do they need to update their computer systems, right? Well, yeah, sure. Yeah, it's the government, right? Every computer system in the government needs to be updated to protect from cybersecurity problems.

But do they need 87,000 more agents? No, but the narrative was from the Biden administration was, you know, we're going to go after the ultra wealthy. Fucking no. You know what? That's not what they're doing. They've got 87,000 agents. Think about how many additional personnel that is in each state, right, in each region for the IRS. They're not going to be occupied with wealthy people all over the place.

Now, a wealthy audit can be complex, but they're coming after small, medium-sized businesses. And that's how they imagined the amount of money they were going to have on this land grab to help fund other things that they're doing, whether it's climate change or other policies that they want to push forward. Great. But the problem is Congress now under Republican control, sure, they can say, nah, we're going to stop that in its tracks, only until they march it across to the Senate, and the Senate says, fuck you, no. So we're still going to have 87,000 new agents. That's not going to change. Yeah, that's not, you can't get that through Senate. And even if they did, you know, the president would probably veto it. So we're looking, we're staring down a barrel in a couple of years of that sort of

activity where Congress will vote to do something. It'll be stopped in the Senate or it'll be, you know, vetoed by the president's desk and fun. Yeah, it'll be fun. It's going to be a great time. Lots of horse shit and fun. What did you think about Biden getting busted with classified documents? Kind of hilarious. It is one of those funny moments, right? You know, regardless of, A, I don't think they're going to, they're not going to knock down the doors at the University of Pennsylvania where they found these things, right? At some think tank that they'd set up. And so that's not going to happen. But it is kind of fun to look at and think, oh, really?

But the truth is it happens with every administration. Document control isn't that difficult. You should be able to know which documents are secret. Put them in a box over here, top secret over here, and then special code word. Put them over here. And you account for all those documents. That's the way that you do it but it seems like every administration has this problem what do they do it the think tanks oh well there's a lot of

ruminating and it's nearly ten documents almost ten it's seven yeah one was incomplete one they hadn't finished yet. What does that mean? Nearly 10. Nearly 10. Oh. If you say nearly a million, I'll go, wow, that's pretty impressive. You say nearly 10. I'm like, can you count? Tell me the number, you fuckheads.

It was the Penn-Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement. So what happens there? What happens in one of these things, Tanks? Is it just a way where people get money? Yes. Yes. People – She said yes so quick.

Yeah, that's it. That's it. People get grants or they get a position there. They get the chair to sit for a year and study some particular esoteric aspect of whatever the hell it may be, global engagement. How much money goes there? Some of these get a great deal of funding. Actually, that's an interesting point because sometimes the funding comes from unusual sources like perhaps the Chinese.

Really? Yeah. That might be the soonest I've ever brought up China. Really? One of our conversations. So the Chinese might be funding a think tank that has classified documents in it? Oh, sure. Yeah.

I mean, again, I don't know. You don't know. I don't know yet. But it's not outside the realm of possibility. It's not outside the realm of possibility. And, you know, it'd be interesting to know who or where funding has come from for the Penn Biden Center. Maybe you're talking about that.

Ah. Oh. $54 million in Chinese gifts. Gifts. Donated to UPenn, home of the Biden Center. What the fuck, man? $54 million in gifts. It's just like, you know, yo-yos and shit, Xboxes, beer koozies.

What the fuck are they giving them? Raked in a total of $54.6 million from 2014 through 2019. Wow. So $10 million a year in donations. Anonymous gifts, $23 million from China. Oh, anonymous. $23 million in anonymous gifts. That to me is more interesting than the fact that he had almost 10 documents there. Because, again, every administration does it.

It would have been amazing if Biden hadn't had classified documents sitting somewhere. President Obama had the same issue at every administration. sitting somewhere. President Obama had the same issue at every administration, just because, again, it's this goat rope upon exiting and then before the new administration comes in, right? It's just like this fun house of activity, trying to box up all your shit. And so that in itself is not a surprise. It's a surprise that with Trump, they decided to use a sledgehammer to go into Mar-a-Lago. But that's not going to happen with Biden. And it is, you know, it's an interesting comparison.

But the Republicans thought it was an aha moment. I don't think they're going to get anywhere with that because I don't think people genuinely care. But there's nearly 10 documents. There's almost 10. And that one that's not completed yet, I think it's just missing the pictures. Everything's been written in. What's crazy is that the documents being there are the big story, not that China gave them 50 plus million dollars. That should be more of a story.

That's a big goddamn story. And that seems to be par for the course, right? Well, yeah, whether it's the Clinton Foundation or initiative or whether it's any – really, pick any think tank. That would be a really interesting study by some intrepid, curious journalist who wanted to dig into the – say the top 12 think tanks in America and where does the money come from. And then compare that to what policies are they pushing out the door. Who are they trying to influence? Because every one of these has some agenda or some point of view. Think tank sounds good. I'd love to be a part of a think tank.

Doesn't that sound good? What do you do? Work for a think tank. You must be smart as fuck. I was going to say, it makes you sound intelligent. It makes you sound like you're getting shit done. I'm working for a think tank. Yeah. You know what I'm doing?

I'm putting out a policy paper. Oh. You know what I'm doing? I'm putting out a policy paper. Oh. Ooh. Well. Well, now. So this Biden-Penn think tank, what did they promote? Let's see if we can find out what $54 million from China gets you. Yeah, maybe we can find one paper that they wrote.

Yeah. That would be good. Huawei ain't so bad. That's the name of the title. That's the title of the paper. That's my Huawei. Yeah. Well, it's great.

I was just reading about Huawei that even despite the U.S. sanctions, despite the fact that Google won't let them use the Google Android system or the Google Play Store, they're still killing it. They still have an enormous market share, which leads me to believe that if this didn't happen, they'd probably be the number one in the world. Yeah, I think so. I mean, well, yeah, it's... Apple's got a nice walled garden thing going on, where it's like a buddy of mine, my friend Tony, just switched over to Apple's. i love when i get those new blue texts from people i'm like ha ha you went

over to the dark side you fuck he was one of the last holdouts of the green bubble but it's they they're so good at keeping you in there because your photos all go to the iphone and you know yeah i use notes you know like for, it's like the best thing. But I also use Evernote and you can switch Evernote in between platforms. But it's so easy to keep people because there's so many benefits to iMessage. There's so many benefits to AirDrop. And we're all fairly simple, right? Once you get into a habit, you don't want to change.

It's like saying, okay, we're going to upend our computer systems at the company and go with a new product. Yeah. No, we're not. No. We really want to. So with the phones, I mean, shit, we got for Christmas, we got the two youngest ones, Muggsy and Sluggo. We got iPhones for them. What if you got them Android phones?

Would they freak out? Would they get mad at you? Yeah, they probably would have thrown them at us, you know, and just walked out. What the fuck is this piece of shit? mad at you? Yeah, they probably would have thrown him at us. You know, just walked out. What the fuck is this piece of shit? You know. If you had an Android phone, like we have today, if you had one of those things

10 years ago, you were a goddamn wizard. Yeah. If you had a Samsung Galaxy phone 10 years ago, like they have today, it would be the greatest thing ever. Yeah. But in 10 years... No, it didn't take long, and honestly, you know, everything moves at this breakneck speed and technology, obviously.

But, you know, we debated for a while about the youngest one getting him a phone, right? But now he's old enough, right? He's 11 and he's going to sports activities and practice and everything. So from a security perspective, you have to do it. Right. But the problem is locking these things down, right? And trying to keep them from seeing shit. You can't.

You can't. You can't. They're going to see shit. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I'm amazed at the shit that I see just on Instagram. You know, just on Instagram, I see people getting murdered every day. Every day.

I see shootouts every day. I see executions every day. I see shootouts every day. I see executions every day. I see people that get torn apart by animals every day. Man, you've got a hell of an Instagram thing going on there. It's a wild, my Explore page is a fucking mess. It really is. It's horrendous. I have problems.

Yeah, but with kids trying to, I mean, it's like the whole TikTok debate, trying to say, okay, we're going to shut down TikTok in the US, or we're going to somehow try to enact regulations to keep kids from accessing porn online, right? And just think, okay, yeah, in theory, that's great. Shit, if you can figure it out, but it's just not going to happen, right? Because no matter what you do, once that kid leaves your house and all that technology is still out there, right? Somebody's circumventing it, right? Somebody's figured out some way. And most of these kids, it's incredible how smart these kids are nowadays.

They're wizards. Yeah. Well, they just banned TikTok in India, which I thought was really fascinating. I'm like, wow, India is more on the ball than America. Yeah. Well, they may – I forget what their version of TikTok is, but that might be also sort of a nationalistic play. There may be a business element to that as well where they're looking to drive more of their consumers.

It's massive, obviously, a massive market. So they may be looking to drive more of their consumers to their version, right? It's like China. China has got its own version. Bike dance. Yeah. What is it called? their consumers to their version, right? It's like China. China's got its own version. Byte dance, whatever it's called. And, you know, so I don't know that the Indian government was just being, you know, thoughtful about its younger folks. Let's see what it says. It says they actually banned it in summer 2020

with 59 other apps originally. And this is what happened after that. I was reading that right now to see if I could get you. Oh, I thought it was really recent. Well, no. So this article is from like today or whatever. Why India banned TikTok and what the US can learn from it as pressure mounts for Biden to follow suit.

Pressure. Oof. I haven't even seen any of this pressure. So like in 2020, they originally did it. It says, after a geopolitical dispute with China, India banned the app entirely, citing a law that allows the government to block websites and apps in the interest of the country's sovereignty and integrity. All right. Yeah. It didn't stop the short form video content.

The content was just going elsewhere. It just moved, yeah. Yeah. Well, it goes to Snapchat, Instagram Reels, and YouTube Shorts, which would be fine. But at least, you know, Instagram is controlled by Meta, which is a United States company, and, you know, so is YouTube. Just the creepy thing is the data and their policy. Right. When you agree to sign up for TikTok and you read the use policy.

Like, whoa. Which nobody does. You did that. You read that. And it's like, people say, what the fuck? It actually says that? And I'm sure you drove a lot of people to that user agreement. It's probably the first time anybody's ever read a user agreement, right?

I couldn't fucking believe it when I was reading it. I was like, is this – wait a minute. They have access to other computers that aren't even on TikTok? They can share with government? Yeah. Right? And that is the thing. Look, people say, well, fuck, Google, all sorts of platforms gather all sorts of information unless you opt out.

And even when you opt out, there's still accessible information there. But the big point here is it's a Chinese state-sponsored entity, right? And if the government wants something, that company is going to provide it. And the idea that the U.S. reps would say, no, it's not the case, is just horseshit. There would never be a moment where a Chinese company would refuse to share data with the Chinese regime. It's not going to happen. And so, you know, believe what you want, you know, but if you actually think that there's a firewall there,

then, you know, it's incredibly ignorant or naive or both or whatever. I think most people aren't even aware of the fact that the Chinese government completely controls all business. You really can't have a major corporation without some sort of interaction with the Chinese government completely controls all business. You really can't have a major corporation without some sort of interaction with the Chinese government. Yeah. And that's, yeah, there's a couple of the truths there. There's no rule of law, really, to speak of in China.

There's no recourse for companies outside of China that are operating there. And anything you take there, I'll give you an example. Actually, this is very interesting. Well, maybe it's not interesting to everybody. But the end of this past year, so I think it was mid-November or so, the Department of Justice released some information about a – it had been a fairly longstanding case that the FBI had been involved in and DOJ and others. About a Chinese intelligence officer. and others, about a Chinese intelligence officer. Now, the interesting thing about this case was this individual, Yang Zhengzhu, was the first Chinese intelligence officer to be extradited

to the US. And the story behind this guy is fascinating. He was a fairly senior, he's like a deputy director within the Ministry of State Security there in China. So a career intelligence officer. And he'd had about 20 years of experience. He started 10 years ago or so targeting specifically U.S. aviation companies, both on the private and the defense side in government. And he went after, it's just one example of, and he was now sentenced to 20 years in prison just at the end of the past year. So as an example, if you look at what he did, it's a perfect case study of how the Chinese intelligence works to gather up information right to steal excuse me economic intelligence so hold on I

remember that clip where Marco Rubio reached for his water I don't remember that clip I don't follow CNN or C-SPAN like you follow like i follow the ufc i love yeah that's right somebody reached for the water oh that's fantastic i know i know what are you doing oh i'm here he goes yeah there you go the world is a better place when america is the strongest nation on earth but we can't remain powerful if we don't have an economy that can afford it in the short time that i've been here in washington nothing has frustrated me more than false choices like the one the president laid out tonight the choice isn't just between whoever told them you should do that don't do first of all

drink out of a goddamn man-sized bottle of water what's up with that little ass side it's like somebody took off an airplane. Yeah, that's ridiculous. So, oh, there you go. A little kid's little kindergarten table. And that's all that people talked about after this rebuttal. Of course. We're petty.

I know. But anyway, so he targets U.S. aviation interests. And as an example, he was using everything. He was using aliases. He was using cover businesses. He was using cover businesses. He was targeting universities. He started looking at identifying targets within U.S. aviation. And as an example, found a guy in GE Aviation.

And what he would do is he would just say, look, can you come to China and make a presentation at the university about something completely innocuous, right? It's not classified by any means or whatever. But, oh, you know, you're so important and you're so smart. We'd love you to come over and present to our university. We'll pay your travel and a stipend. So they do that. So he starts doing this around 2013. Around 2017, they get this one GE aviation employee to travel to China and give a presentation.

And by this time, luckily, the FBI had tweaked on this guy and figured out there was something wrong with him. So in cooperation with the company, the FBI started posing as him, right? Because Jude's not having face-to-face meetings with this guy. He's doing this all online. So they start posing as this guy. After a year of just sort of random, non-threatening contact with this aviation employee, he starts asking him for specific details, right, of their engine technology. GE's got some incredible engine technology. And so the guy with the cooperation of the FBI sends a document. And on the document, at part of it, it just says, you're not allowed to disclose this outside company, it's proprietary data. What does that do? Well, the reason why they released that is because they

wanted to set the hook on this guy, on this Chinese intel officer. And so he gets this and he goes, ah, it's working. And he thinks, I got this guy now. I've tasked him with something that's actually interesting and important. He knows he's breaking a rule. He's given me this document. So now he accelerates the tasking a little bit. And he gets the guy to say, look, how about during one of your trips over to Europe, you know, we meet. So this is where Joumet made his mistake. He goes

to Belgium and gets arrested there, right? And it took a while, but he was finally extradited to the U.S. and finally charged. But he was doing other things. He was handling, he was the handler for a kid working as a student, came over here as a student visa in Chicago, gave him targets, said here are some individuals, again within aviation industry. So I want you to start looking at them. And maybe some of them are interesting and we might want to start developing some of these targets. Running this kid, you know, who's living and working and studying in Chicago. And the targets were all of Chinese or Taiwanese descent, which is typical, right? They kind of hone in on that, you know.

And so eventually that kid got wrapped up. Once we started to figure out what was going on with Zhu, then obviously started to unravel his network. But this kid was also doing the same thing, was targeting under the direction of Zhu and the Chinese intel. Other things he did, I can't, again, I know I disappeared down a rabbit hole here, but to the point we made earlier in terms of operating in China, he was also targeting other countries. So he went after a French aviation company that had a

facility in China. What does that mean? Well, that means that every employee, every local employee is probably going to respond. If Zhu knocks on the door and says, I need your assistance, you're going to have to be my asset. They're probably going to say yes If Xi knocks on the door and says, I need your assistance, you're going to have to be my asset, they're probably going to say yes, right? Because they're operating there in China. Now they're working for a foreign company. Does that really matter when the Chinese regime knocks on your door? So they did. And what they did was with the cooperation of this internal asset,

they were able to place malware on a visiting Frenchman's computer with the hope of taking it back to France and then, you know, affecting their entire system. So anyway, long story short, I guess the point of that exercise is the aggressiveness, right? The ability, you think about the years that they spend going after targets. And yet we want to believe somehow TikTok, you know, that they're not going to touch that. Well, it's a lot of data there, but we're not going to go after TikTok data. What kind of data do you think they're really accumulating? The thing that's disturbed me is that this discussion that they're getting biometric data, they're getting facial recognition data and

fingerprint data from both, you know, fingerprint readers from Android phones and biometric facial data from iPhone, the face opening thing. What are they doing with all that shit? Well, some of it isn't of much use to them in the present time, right? But they don't care. So their ability, because of their resources and their motivation, is to just hoover up everything. And maybe there's no use for that biometric data right now, but maybe there will be. So maybe they're collecting all of this and they're thinking, okay, at some point we're going to develop a technology whereby we can use this for a reason. Maybe we can remotely, using facial recognition, unlock access. Who knows?

Just coming up with that. But the point at 30,000 feet is they don't really care. They hoover it all up. And then they look at it at some point, they say, okay, well, this can be used by Huawei, or this could be used over here, or MSS or the state security service could use this. They'll figure out a use for it, and if it doesn't have a use, fine. It doesn't matter, right? They put it in a box and marked maybe, you know, check back later, and maybe they will have a use for it. It sounds like it's one of the – we tend to not think in those terms.

Everything we do tends to be targeted, right? So we'll say, oh, this is our requirement. Let's go do that. All right, so we'll say, oh, this is our requirement. Let's go do that. You know, the Chinese are – they're looking 30 years, 40 years, 50 years down the road. And so, you know, they've got a different approach to information collection, which is why a lot of companies get caught unawares because they think I'm not doing shit. You know, I'm just making a widget. Right.

Why would they be interested in me? So, you know, whatever. But, you know, I realize people are saying, oh, God, he's fucking banging on about China again. But, you know, if you think about it, we're all occupied with Russia and Ukraine right now. But China's the bigger issue, right, in the long term. And we just need to be able to multitask. And yeah, we got to worry about Russia-Ukraine conflict. And does that get out of control? Or just, you know, where is it going? I guess that's a bigger question.

Where do you think it's going? Yeah. I don't think anybody's got a plan in Washington right now. Or NATO. I don't think anybody knows. I think they're all being basically reactive as opposed to, you know, what's the end game here? What is the final way that we wrap this up? And, I mean, look, we've spent, the U.S. has spent, I don't know, as of the end of 2022,

and that's almost a full year because it started in February. So almost in a full year, the U.S. spent about $50 billion in assistance. And about half of that is military aid, right, in a variety of forms, right? The high-mortar systems all the way to protective body armor. So it's all over the map in training. If you compare that, $50 billion in aid to, and so what's that, about $25 billion in military aid. If you compare that to previous year or the year before, we were probably spending, on the Ukraine, we were probably spending $250, $270 million in military assistance.

That's it, right? So that ramp up is incredible. And then that doesn't include what the EU's put into it, what the UK's put into it and everything else. So how do you back out of that? Right. How do you say, OK, we're now we're putting a Patriot missile battery in there. And, you know, France and we have agreed, I think we're looking towards, you know, more advanced armored technology. We're going to give them tanks that they've been hankering for. Hankering? I said hankering. And so that might be a Ukrainian word. I don't know. I have no idea where it's going to wrap up. Putin's not going to give up Crimea. So what does that mean? Well,

you've got to create some middle ground then where it's not going to be a complete victory for the Ukraine. And that's going to make a lot of people unhappy who are just standing around waving Ukraine flags. Right. And so where do you go from there? I don't know. Hopefully there's some serious negotiations happening off the radar screen, but there doesn't seem to be a lot of evidence to that effect. And Putin doesn't seem to show any interest in it. And he's been able so far to tamp down on the dissidents at home. And really, much like with China, the only thing Putin would really fear is losing power. And he loses power if he loses the population.

And so far, that really hasn't happened. There's been protests. People unhappy with the – sorry, that was my – I think that's your phone. That was my sports alert yeah exactly whenever there's something big happening in the world of sports and so anyway to answer your question in a

very lengthy rambling way who knows where it goes but it would be nice if we had more open discussion about it at least in Washington and open with our NATO allies about what's going to happen. We can't keep up, I don't think, the same pace of support. It seems unreasonable to think that we can, but- Has there been any discussion as to how long we do this for?

to like how long we do this for? Not really. I think there's a general sense, because everybody's got ADD, there's a general sense of fatigue to some degree in some circles. But saying you want to know where it's going isn't saying that you're in support of Putin, and that's part of the problem. In today's world, if you say, well, so where is this all going? People say, well, fuck you. You're a Putin puppet. Well, no, fuck you. I just want to know what's happening. So. Yeah, it's weird like that, isn't it? I mean, it's so strange that

you're either with them or against them and you can't just be going, what are we doing? What is it not working? Lift the top. Lift the top. Do you not know how to work a cigar lighter? Did they teach you that in the CIA? It's technical nowadays. It's not really. It's really fucking easy. I look like a fucking monkey fucking a football here with your lighter. Do you know how to do it?

No. Lift the top. I'm trying to lift the top, but it's like a... Give me that fucking thing. Oh, no. I'm going to figure this out. You're not going to figure it out. I'm going to spend the next two hours trying to figure this out. I think you're on the wrong side. Yeah, oh fuck's sake Jesus Christ

There you go. Look at that. I'm trying to open the bottom Calibri's not paying any attention And besides effect I use a Zippo Oh remember the Zippos or the ones leave that nice smell Yes, yeah, lean smell and I got and I got a couple of Bic lighters, too And you know the nice thing about them? I don't have to fuck with the top. That's true. But anyway, that was mildly embarrassing, but I'm too old to be embarrassed about anything anymore.

So, I mean, worst case scenario is this breaks out in a nuclear war. The top lifts up. Yeah. That's the worst case scenario, right? Yeah. If you look at, I mean, maybe this is a good time to say, okay, 2023, here we are. What should we pay attention to? What are we going to look at? With Russia-Ukraine, you're right.

If suddenly Russia decides, I'm going with an unconventional weapon, right? I'm going with an unconventional weapon, right? It's time to break out the nuke, and let's see what that does to the community of nations. So there's that potential in terms of how does this escalate. Something happens in terms of NATO, and it drags NATO into it. That's a way this thing escalates. A cybersecurity attack in the region maybe maybe initially targeted at uh at ukraine but then it somehow it you know goes off into uh into nato allies creates a major issue shuts down power systems in poland and surrounding region so there's ways that

this thing could could uh escalate get a little bit out of control. Maybe, as we talked about, maybe there's increasing protest movement in Russia, maybe, and that threatens Putin's regime and that makes him decide to do something a little bit more drastic. What is the general consensus from the Russian people? They have a lockdown on the media in Russia, right? And even on the internet, right? Yeah, they do. And they've been very successful. And it's not like the old days. And during the Cold War,

you could put a complete blanket over it, right? And that was it. There was no way for them to get news. They're not completely shut off, right? So they know what the hell's going on. Russian people, the population in general, they're very switched on, they suffer well and what that's part of the problem they suffer well but my friends from Russia have always told me that nobody believes the media that you know

it's kind of like a nod and a wink as to what what the media tells you and the people kind of know that they bullshit you right there's a much more open the the reaction to the media is much more open. And in the United States, like if you're one of those people that listens to MSNBC, you're all in. You're all in with Rachel Maddow. She's gone now, right? Whoever the fuck is over there now. You're all in with those people.

If you're on Fox News, you're all in with those people. Right, right. Now, the Russian general population always had kind of a dry, very sarcastic sense of humor towards information in general, right, and what they're being told by the authorities, and that includes the media. So, you know, he can't control the population the way they used to, but they still – you know, it's still a dictatorship. And so he's still got significant state control, and the state media is very good as is the security apparatus at controlling the message. So they're very good at that. And so that's kind of balanced against and they're constantly in this battle against increasing technology and its ability to spread information that's outside the bubble. information that's outside the bubble. And so, yeah, I mean, there's dissent. There's a feeling of dissatisfaction. But, you know, Putin's been, he's been very good in the past at finding the bogeyman, right? Whenever he's threatened of pointing to some outside force, you know, usually us, and saying, look what they're doing to us, and kind of rallying the troops, getting everyone to, yeah, you know, the motherland.

So, you know, I wouldn't, it's like hoping that the mullahs, it's like hoping the Iranian regime topples under the weight of this current protest. I wouldn't, you know, hold out a lot of hope. I wouldn't put a lot of money on it. The Iranian regime, what they're doing scares the shit out of me yeah it's really scary they just tortured and murdered a karate champion and for protesting and yeah rappers disappeared now i mean they really don't care they've they've killed depends on the estimates you read but you know 450 500 people on the street during protests much less all the people who have just disappeared, and they're sitting held in prison somewhere. But everyone over here is so distracted by Ukraine and Russia that we rarely talk about Iran.

Well, yeah, that's a great point. We're very sort of singular in our attention, right? And so it's like, again, we can't multitask. So we should be worried about Iran. I mean, really, where are the big flashpoints? Russia, Ukraine, obviously, is one. Iran. Because what's going to happen if Iran – here's a thought.

If you think about the breakout potential for Iran to develop a nuke, a weapon, some estimates now are about a week, one week, right, to develop enough enriched uranium. You've got to enrich it. A week from right now? Yeah. They're basically saying, look, if they make that decision, they need, what, 25 kilograms of enriched uranium at like 90%. That's weapons grade. So they could do that within a week is a number of estimates, legitimate estimates.

That's for one. And, okay, so is there value in that? Well, from their perspective, perhaps. They could do three weapons in maybe a month's time. So that breakout that we used to talk about in terms of year, years, at least many months now is shrunk. And so the idea is, as a flashpoint, people say, well, why should we still be worried about Iran? Well, because there's a high likelihood that if the Israelis get the sense that that's where they're heading, then they may take action, kinetic action to stop it. They've done it in Iraq.

They did it in Syria, gone after these capabilities. And that could obviously cause a flash there that spreads out of control and draws us into it. So there's reasons why because people – sometimes people say, why do I care about Taiwan? Why do I care about Iran? It's because of the potential for a problem that we can't get our hands around and we can't control. And so with Iran, it largely comes down to this issue of what is their breakout. Now, aside from just enriching uranium, they got to come up with the weaponization of it all, right? And that could take longer. That could take months and months, right? But, you know, it's a heavy lift

to figure out what their plans and intentions are. So, and, you know, we kind of backed out of this Biden administration was clear that they wanted to get back into the nuke agreement from 2015. It was like, yeah, we got to do everything we can. And so they started those talks when they got in, and now they've kind of shut them down, basically, because the Iranians made some demands that weren't realistic. And also, yeah, the protests, right? And also, they're selling fucking weapons to Russia, right? So Russia's turned to Iran and North Korea to resupply their hardware and get gear that they can't get, drones in particular from Iran. So do we really want to be talking a nuke deal with Iran at this moment? Probably not, whether it's pragmatic or not, but certainly from a political perspective,

I don't think the Biden administration wants that heat. So there's a lot of shit happening that's very interesting. We haven't even touched on Harry and Meghan yet. God. That's the big distraction. That's the big distraction right there. There's a war room apparently in England where they're trying to figure out what to do. Oh, really?

I heard they... Did you hear about that? No. Yes. There's a war room. I think I do now. The royals. The royals.

The royals. The royals. They're about to go to war. Well, the wanker is, you know, he's put out this book, Spare, or whatever it's called. Yeah, I guess everybody falls down one side or the other. Do you support Harry and Meghan? Do you not? You know, here it is.

Royals set up a war room to discuss Prince Harry's memoir. A war room. I do like that. Yeah, what? A fucking war room? Full disclosure, I do think Harry's a wanker. Well, he seems to be. And it seems like that lady is a temptress.

She's a siren. She's lured him into the rocks. I haven't heard that term in a while. She's a siren. She's lured him into the rocks. I haven't heard that term in a long time. She's a harlot almost. A harlot's bad, right? She's just powerful. Actually, that's a good point. Harlot and temptress.

Yeah, I think harlots are. Comparing melons to apples. The definition of a harlot is a prostitute. Yeah, that's a whole word. I take that back. It's a her. It's a her. It's a her. Yeah yeah i don't think she's that no which she no wasn't there some speculation that she was on epstein's yacht at one point in time there was like photos with her and prince andrew way back

in the day when she was like in her early 20s wow uh no i haven't heard that one. That's no no That whole fucking thing dad thing. But yeah, I the war room. I guess it makes sense Look, these people are in a you know under a microscope and you know they got to figure out what their messaging is from moment to moment with him and You know, they probably don't like the idea. This is all playing out in public and but he's just kind of fucking lost a plot Right now he's come out He's I mean the book is like he's talking about his dick and he's talking about, you know, Is he really?

Afghans that he killed while he was there on duty. And, you know, there's actually something funny. Somebody sent me, I don't know if it's true because I haven't had time to look into it, but somebody sent me that some Taliban commander is now trolling Harry over his talk about the Afghans that he killed. And I got to look it up.

What has he said about the Afghans he killed? This is why he was a pilot? Yeah, this is why he was over there on duty. I don't know to what degree. Again, full disclosure, haven't read the book. Taliban leader responds to Prince Harry's reported claim in spare that he killed 25 fighters in Afghanistan. I mean, who does that? Who talks? I mean, again. Very strange. It's very strange. But it's also very

strange that he was, I mean, essentially infiltrated by a very ambitious actress. You know, I mean, she used to be on Deal or No Deal. Was he infiltrated? She was one of the Deal or No Deal ladies. Is that technically the way it works? Is he infiltrated? I think so. Or was she infiltrated? Well, it depends on who's getting pegged.

Yeah. It depends on the methods. And now we've, and now. Yeah. Yeah, look, she was on Deal or No Deal. Yeah, that's right. Yeah, with the briefcases. She didn't like being objectified on Deal.

Did you think it was an executive position, ma'am? Yeah. You're one of the hot ladies holding up a suitcase. For fucking, I mean, it's a game show. How are you objectified? I forgot about that show. That's literally the show. Wow.

Yeah. Well, you don't get this sort of analysis just anywhere on the Harry and Meghan situation. Nobody's talked about Peggan before as far as it goes. Well, that's just pure speculation. I put it out there. I think it's important to note that it's important to know and I apologize yeah, I apologize for that speculation It's just a joke, but but I mean who again Why why did it well I know why he felt the need to talk about some of this shit in this book is because otherwise No one's paying him money for this right right? Disclose some wild shit. Yeah, I want to sell a book yeah,. And if you want to talk about killing 25 bad guys.

It's not going to set well with the people that he was serving with. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's, that's, yeah. Anyway. I guess, you know what? Is it unusual that they let a prince fight in active combat?

Yeah. I mean, you know, it is and it isn't. It used to be more common because there used to be more conflict and it was a British empire and, you know, off you'd go. And they wanted to tick that box, right? They wanted to get that so they could wear the ribbons and, you know. And, you know, there was a sense of, you know, if we're going to be in charge, we need to show that we've actually taken

part in these campaigns. And so, no, look, God bless him for serving. I think it's great. I just, you know, I think that part of it, you know, you can't deny it. Fine, great. I think that is, that's admirable. It's just everything else. It's just kind of, you know, bizarre.

And I admit to being a bit of a royalist. I still have my british citizenship and you know one day we'll retire to a small cotswolds village and solve murders for a living um you know that'll be my job with a pipe with a pipe sitting in your study yes people will knock on the door i'll bring me a new case you know daniel in those Knives Out movies? Yeah, I think. Or maybe like Poirot. I'm thinking more. Who? Yeah.

Hercule Poirot. Who the fuck's that? A Belgian detective. Do you know who that is? Boy, that's obscure. You're in Marco Rubio drinking water territory now. There's only like

three famous Belgians. And Poirot is definitely one of them. He was a fictitious character of Agatha Christie's. The only Belgian that I'm aware of is the giantirot is definitely one of them. He was a fictitious character of Agatha Christie's. The only Belgian that I'm aware of is the giant lady who's the minister of health. Do you know about her? Yeah.

But she almost never comes up in the list of famous Belgians. Well, she should. Yeah. That lady's enormous. He's a fictional character. He's a fictional Belgian detective created by British writer Agatha Christie. Oh, I didn't know about that. One of Christie's most famous and long-running characters, appearing in 33 novels, 2 plays, and more than 50 short stories.

Yeah. Between 1920 and 1975. How old are you? Oh, well, I was born in 1915, so this was right in my sweet spot. But that character, David Suchet, he played the character Poirot for like 25 years on TV. Really? Do you know about this? No.

I've heard of some of these stories, but I've never watched them. Like Murder on the Orient Express, Death on the Nile. I've heard of that. Yeah, there you go. Okay. Yeah. No, it's, you know, anyway. But yes, that will be one day when people say whatever happened to Baker, he'll be living

in a small cottage in a small English countryside village. How much time do you think you got left? Oh, God god do you really want to do that do you ever think about that i mean do you do the math and you think what do you got yeah yeah i think you really do when you have kids i think you know i just think it's a smart thing to do anyway just to like think about if you enjoy what you're doing i just hope i live long enough to figure out your fucking lighter but i think it's um I do think about it. And I think about it because I got young kids now. And, you know, I want to live, you know, I want every fucking year I can get.

And I know some people say, well, I don't want to go when I'm 80. That's fine. And I think, no, I want to squeeze every bit of life out of this thing. And, but I do. I do the math all the time. When I'm however old, my youngest kid will be this old and you know well you have adult children too i do i have a daughter you've got like two sort of two groups i do yeah two groups not at the same time right legitimately got divorced and you know

yeah they remarried so it's not two families uh which would be much more interesting i suppose in the end of the day to talk about but uh yeah my daughter's almost 30 talk about stress those people how do they do that yeah i don't think they realize they're doing it until they're doing it and then they're just like ah yeah life is complicated enough i'm always amazed at like because i have had a handful of friends who have been what's the word i'm looking for fidelity is a problem for them and so they they have this they and they usually they have stressful jobs and then this this whole other thing where they're balancing their wife and they're balancing you know two or three additional relationships i'm thinking how the fuck do you have time or energy or the ability

not to you know you, you just, fuck. I don't know how people compartmentalize. I think it's just a distraction. I think the people that do that, they generally are very stressed out, overworked. They usually work insane long hours and they make poor choices because they're just looking for constant distractions. And also they're probably excitement junkies. They're probably not getting enough through their work or their work grinds on them and they need something to jazz things up. Yeah.

Yeah. It's like when I talk to people, they say, all right, I'm going to take up skydiving. And I'm thinking, is somebody paying you to jump out of that plane? Because unless you're getting paid for it, I'm just like, I don't know. It was fun, but it's time to move on. I'm not interested in that. Yeah. I'm not interested in things that can accidentally kill you that give you just a quick little jolt of adrenaline.

Yeah. No, it is true. But I take your point. Yeah, I guess part of it is that. And, you know, it's just you just look at it and you go. I knew one guy in particular years ago who just had this juggling act going on constantly. And I'm just thinking, what the fuck, dude? It's an addiction.

It's an addiction like gambling, like anything else. They get addicted to the thrill of pulling it off. Yeah. Yeah. Life's too short. You just keep it uncomplicated. It'll 100% interfere with whatever you're really trying to do. Whatever your actual work is, it'll 100% interfere with that and fuck it up.

I always tell people that concentrate on stupid shit. Like if you concentrate on people that get mad at you on social media and stuff like that. You only have a hundred. Let's say if your mind, let's call it units. You have a hundred units of information, of bandwidth that you can utilize. of information, of bandwidth that you can utilize. Anytime you allocate any of those units to other things, now you have less units for the things that you care about.

Yeah, yeah. I've apparently given away most of my bandwidth to lyrics from early 80s alternative rock songs. No, that's just data. That's just data. It's still taking up space. It's in there, but it's not, I mean, I've got a lot of that. I've got a lot of stupid information floating around my head

for sure, you know. Obscure Jiu-Jitsu fighter records bouncing around in my head. But I think that, you know, so many people don't think about their mind as like, if it was your money. If you had a certain amount of money and this is all the money

you're ever going to have like how much money are you going to donate to stupid shit how much money you're going to allocate to dumb things that don't help you at all yeah only only ruin your life yeah i i guess there is there's a sense of um you know for my i think the way I think about it is I just want to have an uncomplicated life. I've been very fortunate from work. I've certainly been very fortunate in relationship. I mean I'm married to the greatest person on the planet. And I just want an uncomplicated – that's what I want. I just want that uncomplicated life where I don't have to –

Yeah, but you used to work for the intelligence agencies. You used to work for the CIA. How the fuck is that uncomplicated, that's what I want. I just want that uncomplicated life. Yeah, but you used to work for the intelligence agencies. You used to work for the CIA. How the fuck is that uncomplicated? It's one of the most complicated things a person could ever be involved in. International relations and cyber espionage. That was done by the smart people. Yeah, but still, you're aware of it all. You have to process all that.

You're aware of it, but I think if you, I mean, it was kind of like looking at that world also. I was always amazed at some of the people, and again, I had a great time. It was a great organization. I loved the work, respected my colleagues. Why'd you get out? Because my daughter was getting older, and I needed to be home. Because I was, at that point, it was just me and her. And it was time to figure something else out. And so, yeah, but I just think there was something about that job and the operations side that I found just very easy, right, to compartmentalize. Some people

found it very difficult in the terms of the sort of like, I don't know whether they were thinking of moral quandary in terms of what we were doing. And I don't know if this is, you know, I just never thought, you know, just tell me what the objective is. Right. Give that information to me. Yeah. Let's point ourselves in the right direction and just do it. Now let's move on to the next task. So I tend to be very simplistic when it comes to that. And I think that helped with the business.

that. And I think that helped with the business. I never sat around staring at my fucking navel, wondering where I fit in, in terms of the big machine of the intelligence community. Well, that makes for a good company man. Yeah, I think so. A good operative. Yeah. I think if you just simplify things down that way, and no one ever accused me of being a really big, deep thinker, right? So I'm good with that. But as a matter of fact, this leads us into a very interesting subject, which is- How the CIA killed Kennedy?

No, I'm about to spend 10 seconds promoting a book that's about to be released. Oh. Oh, I know. I know this is shameful, but I thought I'm going to get it in here and then get out of it and we can go back to more interesting things But on the on the 18th of January Scribd Scribd is gonna be releasing a book called company rules It's my first venture into books. It's an audiobook and so it's an easy listen But the idea is it has nothing to do with the agency right as I read it read it? I did. I never read it. That's good.

Yeah. That's good. Yeah. I used a fake voice. I sounded like Gru from Despicable Me. I just used that voice for the fuck of it. And so it has nothing to do with the agency. It's about business life, right? But what happened was I got out.

People were like, why are you leaving? And what the hell are you going to do? And as it turns out, over the years, it occurred to me that a lot of what I was doing in business were just some ideas that I had kind of settled with me from the agency days. So that's where the company rules comes up. But frankly, there's no book of company rules. Look at that.

Company rules. New from Mike Baker. So what's in there? So there's just, you know, there's basically nine rules. I couldn't come up with a tenth. I wasn't smart enough to come up with a tenth. So there's in there? So there's just, you know, there's basically nine rules. I couldn't come up with a tenth. I wasn't smart enough to come up with a tenth. So there's nine basic rules. Everything you start out from, you know, define your mission, right?

That's pretty much the first one. It's kind of like what we talked about. So in business, you know, it's not just saying, okay, our mission is make money, right? So you've got to define your mission. Then you've got to clarify. You've got to explain it to your personnel. I'm a big believer in once you do that, hire smart people, get the hell out of the way. And that's worked out very well.

But there's other principles in there. How do you make a decision with imperfect information? That's one thing that the agency, you're not really realizing it at the time, but you realize when you're in there and then you leave that, you know what? The agency is very good at is teaching people to just get off the X, make a decision. What do you mean by how do you make a decision with imperfect information? Give me an example. Yeah. If you wait around, like if you've, if you wait around for all the data to come in about before, let's stake with business, before an investment, right? Somebody else is going to come in and take that opportunity, right? You've got to be able to say, it's not like the movies. It's not like a Tom Clancy movie where

you've got all the fucking details that you want before you go in on the target. You're not looking through walls and you don't have an asset sitting in there telling you exactly where the target's going to be. You don't know if there's 12 people over there and there's one person at the door. That never happens. You never know everything. And if you wait for everything to show up, it's never going to happen. But if you wait, then something bad's going to happen. And it's the same in business, which is basically, so these ideas that I eventually, and again, anybody who worked for the agency, I'm sure they got their own ideas. They're going to look and go, well, those aren't my ideas or my principles or my rules. I have these. But these are the ones that I took away and I used them to build a business. And so all the examples are basically business oriented,

right? And so, you know, this is not a book about my time in the CIA. And, you know, I don't think I'd ever write one of those because there's enough of that out there. And I don't think anybody needs more of that. But I just found this was interesting because nobody really expected me to be able to build a business and keep it breathing for as long as I have because I really had no business experience. And part of it is there's an element of luck. I never worked in an operation where there wasn't some element of luck. And it's been the same with business just in terms of good fortune or whatever you want to call it. So anyway, there's these principles.

And it comes out on the 18th and Scribd is the Netflix of books, as they say. What made you decide to call it. So anyway, there's these principles, and it comes out on the 18th and scribbed as the Netflix of books, as they say. What made you decide to do this? I had thought about it and talked about it years ago. Years ago. And then, like everything else, you know, you set the idea aside because you get wrapped up in everything else that's going on, and I never did. And then finally, I work with a great guy

Kenny Slotnick over at AGI Entertainment and he's worked with me for years on TV shit and other things and he's always been a great friend but he finally said you know you told me about that idea that one time I mentioned it to script and they were very interested you know and again it's an easy thing it's the sort of thing you can you can dial up as an audio book. You can listen to it on a two-hour road trip and Bob's your uncle. And if you take away one idea, I think that's a great thing, right? I mean because there's a lot of shit out there where you don't really learn anything. I'm just hoping people take away one thing and they're good. So did you write it because you feel like you have some unique insight or did you write it just purely as a financial venture?

Oh, no. No no this is not no there's no you know there's no real in the scheme of things it took me a lot longer all right it's not long it's like uh 15 000 words but that was like fucking pulling teeth right to get to 15 000 words and for me anyway i'm sure that no other people look and go that's like an opening sentence. And no. So from a financial point of view, no, I didn't do it that way. I did it because I genuinely am still surprised that I've been able to keep a business moving. And I've got some of the people that have worked with me have been with me now for 17 years. And they've had kids and they've raised their families with the company and they've

done. And, you know, that's probably more rewarding than anything else I've done in a sense, aside from my family. And so I guess I just wanted to put it on paper. And then there's also that idea that this sounds stupid, but it's the same reason I like to do TV shows like the Black Files Declassified series. It's because at some point, my kids can sit down when they're older and they can watch it or they can read this or listen to it, and they got something. Anyway, that's it. Man's search for meaning. Man's search.

It never ends. It never ends. Anyway, that's, yeah, now I've gotten that out of the way. They sent to Jamie a 60-second audio excerpt. I said, no, I'm not going to sit here and listen to myself read. Oh, we should definitely listen to you read. No, we don't want to do that. What is it about?

No, it's about, it's sort of the, no, we don't want to do that. It's the opening. Okay. It would just be weird to sit here and listen. I would like to get weird. It'd be like, say, when we watch one of your interviews on the screen, and we're sitting here watching, and you're watching yourself talk, you know, so. I'm used to that. Yeah.

I'm used to that kind of weird, though. Yeah. I like how you're squirming, though, a little bit. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It was an interesting experience, but anyway, it's been a good one. And hopefully people find something entertaining in it. I think the thing that people are weirded

out by when it comes to intelligence agencies in this day and age, that they kind of act autonomously. They kind of act outside of what we think of as the government. We think of the government as being a bunch of people that get elected, and those people do the rule of the people, but the people that are in the intelligence agencies, they're there forever. And that's the term, the deep state, that everybody's so concerned with. That's a common phrase that's been brought up over the last decade or so, where people are very concerned about the deep state. There's a government that has its own rules and its own ability to enact things that are outside of elected officials and the will of the people. Yeah. And I can see why people think that way. Yeah, and I can see why people think that way.

Having been behind the curtain for all that time, I guess there's two parts to this. One is never say never, right? I mean, you never want to discount the idea that the intel community or law enforcement or whoever could, you know, essentially develop a mind of its own, work separate from whatever government administration the people think they've elected into office. So never say that couldn't happen because you always want to be wary of that. I've spent enough time overseas in places where that happens. And worse than that is where a dictator comes in, he goes out, wholesale cleaning, and then the new guy brings in all his people, right? And they're just basically doing the will. Now, in a way, that's more transparent, right? Because you know what you're getting, right? You're getting that guy's intel service or that guy's law enforcement. But having worked behind the curtain, at least the

time that I was there, the agency was uniquely apolitical, right? All the people that I traveled around the world with, the people that I met, worked with in various parts, we never talked about politics. It was just not, it was not an issue. We never- Do you think that changed during Trump? I think it was probably even before Trump. I think it's just been a process where, I think it was probably even before Trump. I think it's just been a process where – and I have no idea why. Maybe in part because – no, I don't know. I was going to say because it's become a little more transitory.

In the old days – I don't know what the old days are, you know, through the Cold War and whatever, 70s and early 80s, people would join. And the idea was I'm here for good. I'm going to retire. And now it's somewhat of a stepping stone to other things. And so people move through these organizations on their way to somewhere else. And maybe that creates, you know, some of this. But I don't want to say it couldn't happen. I just want to say, yeah, it's something you have to be always aware of. I think that there have been individuals in various offices who got too close or too comfortable with political access.

Like with the CIA, you always want your director to have a good line of communication with the president. It used to be more important when the agency – when the director had a seat at the table, right? Now they're pushed below the DNI. So the DNI is the guy that talks and the agency director doesn't have the same access that they used to have. When did that change? After 9-11. When they recreated the homeland security became the buzzword and how do we reorganize? Because clearly it was it was a fucking knee-jerk reaction to 9-11 was the idea was oh something happened we fucked up so now let's reorganize the entire thing right and so they tossed a baby out of the 30th floor and

and uh uh wasn't an actual baby people are gonna be like making notes you you know. They get it. Find the baby. Baby with the bathwater. Find the baby. And so then they created this DNI position and they kind of- What does DNI stand for? Director of National Intelligence. And so then they subjugated the CIA director below that. But the point being is you want that access. Well, you know, if it gets too cozy or if the person in charge, whether it's the agency or the FBI or whoever, becomes too much of a political animal, now you got a problem, right? And that's when

bad things can happen. But the career people that I dealt with, that I met with over the years, and the people that I still know, the career people, they, you know, for the most part, they just want to do the job, right? And I know people are going to say, well, of course, that's what you're going to say. And I say that all the time. But fuck it. It's what I saw. I'm not blowing smoke up anybody's ass. When you see shit like Tucker Carlson on Fox News saying that the CIA killed Kennedy, what do you think of that? How did he phrase it?

Never say never. Someone he knew. So they talked to someone who knew. I have the quote here. Because they have withheld some of the files on the Kennedy assassination. I mean, why would they do that? Carlson, tonight, so not long after Jack Ruby shot Lee Harvey Oswald on camera in the basement of Dallas police headquarters, a lot of Americans started to have some questions about the Kennedy assassination. ON CAMERA IN THE BASEMENT OF DALLAS POLICE HEADQUARTERS, A LOT OF AMERICANS STARTED TO HAVE SOME QUESTIONS ABOUT THE

KENNEDY ASSASSINATION. IT WAS, YOU'D HAVE TO ADMIT, A PRETTY EXTRAORDINARY SEQUENCE OF EVENTS. A LONE GUNMAN MURDERS THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES AND THEN LESS THAN 48 HOURS LATER, THAT LONE GUNMAN IS

HIMSELF MURDERED BY ANOTHER LONE GUNMAN. WHAT ARE THE ODDS OF THAT? IT'S ONE THING IF YOU GET STRUCK BY LIGHTNING, RARE BUT POSSIBLE. BUT IF EVERY MEMBER OF YOUR FAMILY ALSO GETS STRUCK BY

LIGHTNING ALL ON DIFFERENT DAYS, YOU MIGHT BEGIN TO SUSPECT THESE ARE NOT ENTIRELY NATURAL EVENTS. BUT, OH, REPLIED THE U.S. GOVERNMENT, THEY ARE. THIS BIZARRE CHAIN OF KILLINGS WAS ALL ENTIRELY NATURAL.

SO LESS THAN A YEAR AFTER THE JFK ASSASSINATION, THE JOHNSON WHITE HOUSE RELEASED SOMETHING CALLED THE WARREN COMMISSION REPAR. THEY WERE NOT CONSIDERED CONSIDERED INCORRUPT. IT WASN'T ENTIRELY NATURAL. LESS THAN A YEAR AFTER THE JFK ASSASSINATION, THE JOHNSON WHITE HOUSE RELEASED SOMETHING CALLED THE WARREN COMMISSION REPORT.

THE REPORT CONCLUDED THAT WHILE THEIR MOTIVES REMAINED UNCLEAR, BOTH LEE OSWALD AND JACK RUBY HAD ACTED ALONE. NO ONE HELPED THEM. THERE WAS NO CONSPIRACY OF ANY KIND. CASE CLOSED.

TIME TO MOVE ON. MANY AMERICANS DID MOVE ON. AT the time, they had no idea how shoddy and corrupt the Warren Commission was. It would be nearly 50 years before the CIA admitted under duress that, in fact, it had withheld information from investigators about its relationship with Lee Harvey Oswald. But even then, at the time, before that was known, the government's PEOPLE STARTED ASKING OBVIOUS QUESTIONS ABOUT IT. IT WAS AT THAT POINT, AS AMERICANS STARTED TO DOUBT THE OFFICIAL STORY, THAT THE TERM CONSPIRACY THEORY ENTERED OUR LEXICON. AS PROFESSOR LANSDA HAVEN SMITH POINTS OUT IN HIS BOOK ON THE SUBJECT, THE TERM CONSPIRACY THEORY DID NOT EXIST AS A PHRASE IN EVERYDAY AMERICAN CONVERSATION BEFORE 1964.

IN 1964, THE YEAR Warren Commission issued its report, the New York Times published five stories in which conspiracy theory appeared. Now today, of course, the term conspiracy theory appears in pretty much every New York Times story about American politics. It's wielded, now as then, as a weapon against anyone who asks questions

the government doesn't feel like answering. But despite 60 years of name-calling, those questions have not disappeared. In fact, they have multiplied with time. And here's one of them. In April of 1964, a psychiatrist called Louis Joylin West visited Jack Ruby in his isolation cell in a Dallas jail. M.K. Ultra. According to West's written assessment, he found that Jack Ruby was, quote, technically insane and in need of immediate psychiatric hospitalization. THE FAMILY WAS IN THE HOSPITAL. THE FAMILY WAS IN THE HOSPITAL. THE FAMILY WAS IN THE HOSPITAL. THE FAMILY WAS IN THE HOSPITAL. THE FAMILY WAS IN THE HOSPITAL.

THE FAMILY WAS IN THE HOSPITAL. THE FAMILY WAS IN THE HOSPITAL. THE FAMILY WAS IN THE HOSPITAL. THE FAMILY WAS IN THE HOSPITAL. THE FAMILY WAS IN THE HOSPITAL. THE FAMILY WAS IN THE HOSPITAL. THE FAMILY WAS IN THE HOSPITAL. THE FAMILY WAS IN THE HOSPITAL.

THE FAMILY WAS IN THE HOSPITAL. THE FAMILY WAS IN THE HOSPITAL. THE FAMILY WAS IN THE HOSPITAL. THE FAMILY WAS IN THE HOSPITAL. THE FAMILY WAS IN THE HOSPITAL. THE FAMILY WAS IN THE HOSPITAL. THE FAMILY WAS IN THE HOSPITAL. THE FAMILY WAS IN THE HOSPITAL.

THE FAMILY WAS IN THE HOSPITAL. THE FAMILY WAS IN THE HOSPITAL. THE FAMILY WAS IN THE HOSPITAL. THE FAMILY WAS IN THE HOSPITAL. THE FAMILY WAS IN THE HOSPITAL. THE FAMILY WAS IN THE HOSPITALMEA WAS A PART OF THE INVESTIGATION. THE CRIMEA WAS A PART OF THE INVESTIGATION. THE CRIMEA WAS A PART OF THE INVESTIGATION. WHAT WEST DID NOT SAY WAS HE WAS WORKING FOR THE CIA AT THE TIME.

HE WAS A CONTRACT PSYCHIATRIST FOR THE SPY AGENCY. HE WAS AN EXPERT ON MIND CONTROL AND A PROMINENT PLAYER IN THE NOW INFAMOUS MK ULTRA PROGRAM IN WHICH THE CIA GAVE POWERFUL PSYCHIATRIC DRUGS TO AMERICANS WITHOUT THEIR KNOWLEDGE. SO OF ALL THE PSYCHIATRISTS IN FINDING OUT. IN FACT, THE NEW YORK TIMES IN

AN EXTENSIVE 1999 OBITUARY OF WEST NEVER MENTIONED THE FACT THAT HE HAD WORKED FOR THE CIA, MUCH LESS HIS TIME IN JACK RUBY'S CELL, WHICH SEEMS RELEVANT. SO YOU CAN SEE WHY NON-CRAZY PEOPLE WOULD WONDER ABOUT WHAT

REALLY HAPPENED. AND OF COURSE, MANY HAVE WONDERED. BUT THE MEDIA DID NOT SEEM INTERESTED IN FINDING OUT. THE PRESIDENT'S CELL PHONE. THE PRESIDENT'S CELL PHONE. THE PRESIDENT'S CELL PHONE. THE PRESIDENT'S CELL PHONE. THE PRESIDENT'S CELL PHONE. THE PRESIDENT'S CELL PHONE. THE PRESIDENT'S CELL PHONE. THE PRESIDENT'S CELL PHONE.

THE PRESIDENT'S CELL PHONE. THE PRESIDENT'S CELL PHONE. THE PRESIDENT'S CELL PHONE. THE PRESIDENT'S CELL PHONE. THE PRESIDENT'S CELL PHONE. THE PRESIDENT'S CELL PHONE. THE PRESIDENT'S CELL PHONE. THE PRESIDENT'S CELL PHONE.

THE PRESIDENT'S CELL PHONE. THE PRESIDENT'S CELL PHONE. THE PRESIDENT'S CELL PHONE. THE PRESIDENT'S CELL PHONE. THE PRESIDENT'S CELL PHONE. THE PRESIDENT'S CELL PHONE. THE PRESIDENT'S CELL PHONE. THE PRESIDENT'S CELL PHONE. THE PRESIDENT'S CELL PHONE. THE PRESIDENT'S CELL PHONE. THE PRESIDENT'S CELL PHY. THE CRIME IS A CONSPIRACY. THE CRIME IS A CONSPIRACY. THE CRIME IS A CONSPIRACY.

THE CRIME IS A CONSPIRACY. THE CRIME IS A CONSPIRACY. THE CRIME IS A CONSPIRACY. THE CRIME IS A CONSPIRACY. THE CRIME IS A CONSPIRACY. THE CRIME IS A CONSPIRACY. THE CRIME IS A CONSPIRACY. THE CRIME IS A CONSPIRACY.

THE CRIME IS A CONSPIRACY. THE CRIME IS A CONSPIRACY. THE CRIME IS A CONSPIRACY. THE CRIME IS A CONSPIRACY. THE CRIME IS A CONSPIRACY. THE CRIME IS A CONSPIRACY. THE CRIME IS A CONSPIRACY. THE CRIME IS A CONSPIRACY.

THE CRIME IS A CONSPIRACY. THE CRIME IS A CONSPIRACY. THE CRIME IS A CONSPIRACY. THE CRIME IS A CONSPIRACY. THE CRIME IS A CONSPIRACY. THE CRIME IS A CONSPIRACY. THE CRIME IS A CONSPIRACY. THE CRIME IS A A CRIME. IT IS A CRIME. AND IT HAS BEEN A CRIME FOR THIS MANY YEARS? NOT THAT WE'RE AWARE OF. AND IT IS ILLEGAL. IN 1992, CONGRESS PASSED THE

PRESIDENT JOHN F. KENNEDY ASSASSINATION RECORDS COLLECTION ACT. THAT ACT MANDATED FULL DISCLOSURE OF ALL DOCUMENTS BY 2017. 54 YEARS AFTER JFK WAS KILLED. THE LAST ADMINISTRATION PROMISED TO COMPLY FUL IS IN THE LAW.

THE PRESIDENT PROMISED TO COMPLY FULLY WITH THAT LAW. BUT UNDER INTENSE PRESSURE FROM CIA DIRECTOR MIKE POMPEO WITHHELD IN THE END THOUSANDS OF PAGES OF CIA DOCUMENTS. TODAY, THIS AFTERNOON, THE BIDEN ADMINISTRATION DID EXACTLY THE

SAME THING. THAT WOULD BE THOUSANDS OF PAGES OF DOCUMENTS AFTER NEARLY 60 YEARS. AFTER THE DEATH OF EVERY SINGLE PERSON INVOLVED. after the death of every single person involved. But we still can't see them. Clearly, it's not to protect any person. They're all dead. It's to protect an institution.

But why? Well, today we decided to find out. We spoke to someone who had access to these still-hidden CIA documents, a person who was deeply familiar with what they contained. We asked this person directly, did the CIA have a hand in the murder of John F. Kennedy, THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES, THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES, A PERSON WHO IS DEEPLY FAMILIAR WITH WHAT THEY CONTAIN. WE ASKED THIS PERSON DIRECTLY,

DID THE CIA HAVE A HAND IN THE MURDER OF JOHN F. KENNEDY, AN AMERICAN PRESIDENT? AND HERE'S THE REPLY WE RECEIVED VERBATIM. QUOTE, THE ANSWER IS YES. I BELIEVE THEY WERE INVOLVED. IT'S A WHOLE DIFFERENT COUNTRY

FROM WHAT WE THOUGHT IT WAS. IT'S ALL FAKE. IT'S HARD TO IMAGINE A MORE JARRING RESPONSE THAN THAT. AGAIN, THIS IS NOT A, QUOTE, CONSPIRACY THEORIST THAT WE SPOKE TO. NOT EVEN CLOSE. THIS IS SOMEONE WITH DIRECT KNOWLEDGE OF THE INFORMATION

THAT ONCE AGAIN IS BEING WITHHELD FROM THE AMERICAN PUBLIC. AND THE ANSWER WE RECEIVED WAS UNEQUIVOCAL. YES, THE CIA WAS INVOLVED IN THE ASSASSINATION OF THE PRESIDENT.

NOW, SOME PEOPLE WILL NOT BE SURPRISED TO HEAR THAT THEY SUSPECTED IT ALL. I THINK I'D LIKE TO KNOW WHO THIS SOURCE IS. involved in the assassination of the president. Now, some people will not be surprised to hear that they suspected it all. I'd like to know who this source is. I mean, when you say, I believe, right, and supposedly he's got access to the documents. His comment is, I believe, that might be a tell. He talks about, you know, it was all fake. Sounds a little bit like a conspiracy theorist, even though Tucker says he's not one. So, you know, without knowing who this source is and why he's got access to this and how they managed to find him, I'm skeptical about everything anyway. Doesn't mean that there couldn't be some connection. Right. Again, never say never. I don't know. But look, Oswald, you know, there was,

when you say, well, why would the agency not want papers released? You know, my mind immediately goes to, well, maybe because there's something related to Oswald's dealings with the Russians, right? I mean, Oswald lived in St. Pete. He traveled down at one point down to Mexico to meet with the Russians. He was desperate to try to prove his worth to the Russians, right? And that was part of his motivation, part of what he was doing. So I don't know. I'm just saying I tend not to be the sort of person that would watch that and go, oh, my God, it's true. My thought is, well, who the fuck is the source?

Right. is, well, who the fuck is the source? Right. And so unless the guy is willing to out himself, and at this stage, given what Tucker said, hey, everybody's dead, fine, come forward. If you've got information like that, then maybe it's incumbent upon you to come out and talk about it, right? And if that's the case and it turns out to be true, then, yeah, fuck. Yeah, I thought it was weird that he put that on television and just said a source who had direct information.

Direct access to these documents. Still has a deep knowledge of what's in there. All right. It's a little bit. It's a little weird. It's a little weird. He's given this source incredible credibility, and then there's nothing there, right? It's I believe that this is what happened. Okay. Well, theoretically, you've got access to

the documents. So how about you give us something more than that? So I, you know, again, I look at it with a, you know, take it with a grain of salt, but I understand why. Look, I've told you this before. I tend to be more inclined to think that there was a, you know, there was a conspiracy around Martin Luther King than there was around Kennedy. Yeah, you've talked about that. Go into that. Because when you were investigating that, it seemed like, was the gentleman who killed Martin Luther King again? What's his name again?

Oh, fuck, I'm drawing a complete blank now. It's a product of age. It's why I can't open your fucking cigar lighter. Too many words. Too many words. So many words. So many names stuck in your head. Yeah.

I've even sat down with the guy's brother. I almost want to say John Wilkes-Barre. James Earl Ray. James Earl Ray. That's right. Yeah. I sat down with his brother. God, I can't believe it.

See, this is what happens when advancing age. You sat down with his brother? Yeah. And talked to him. What does his brother think say his brother's convinced that he was he was set up um and set up but he did pull the trigger did pull the trigger yeah yeah there's there's two things there it's like okay did he kill him well yeah you know did he pull the trigger yes but you know my feeling with with with with him is is that it't add up. What he was before and then what he was leading up to the assassination of Martin Luther King and then what he was shortly thereafter making his way to Europe. a failed petty criminal. He couldn't even be a petty criminal successfully, right? He was in and out of prison. He just, it was nothing going on for him. And his ability then to turn himself

into an apparently more successful individual, right? Leading up to that, going off the grid, he disappeared for a period of time. And then he ends up in Europe where he's arrested afterwards. The guy was never on a plane. Now he's flying to Europe. He never had any money to speak of. He's buying a car in cash. I mean there's things that seem very odd, and not to mention just the general atmosphere, mood, context of the time. No, I have no idea what, you know, what organizations

might be involved. But I'm more inclined to think that to me is something where I think there was a lot more to the story. I'm not saying again, I'm not saying that there wasn't more to the Kennedy assassination. I think it'd be great to find out, you know, the whole story. But, you know, you compare the two and I for some reason I just find that the King issue more disconcerting what was the official story about his motivation to kill Martin Luther King jr. just it's just a racist that's it yeah basically there was no do and then that was highly motivated racist highly motivated racist who you know decided somehow he was going to, you know, engage in this activity.

Look, you know, there was plenty of information about where King was at the time, right? He was on the news. I mean, shit, the evening news before the day he was killed showed him standing outside at the Lorraine Motel, outside his room on the balcony. killed showed him standing outside at the Lorraine Motel, outside his room on the balcony. So, you know, he had, if you just look at that and say, okay, well, he had information, he had access, he had the ability to gather that information. Just like Oswald did with Kennedy, right? And, you know, Oswald, you know, again, his connection to the Russians, the Soviets at the time, you know, again, his connection to the Russians, the Soviets at the time, very interesting. But, you know, I'm not the sort of person to say absolutely not, right, that there was some involvement. I'm just saying, I, you know, haven't seen the credible sourcing yet. And that to me,

with what Tucker did is, you know, you can't say I've got a credible source. It'd be like if I wrote an intel report. You know, I told the agency I'm working on something, you know, back in the old days. And right down, I got this great source. He's got access to this, you know, the foreign ministry of this country. And then I give him shit. You know, there's no insight, right? No name. I just say, he believes that this is what they're going to do. Well, the response would be from just an operational perspective. Why does he believe it? Who told him? What would be the motivation that the CIA would have to kill Kennedy?

I mean part of it was supposedly that Kennedy was interested in disbanding the CIA, right? Yeah. Again, that – and that had happened – if you think about it, recent terms, right? The CIA was – or OSS was disbanded at the end of World War II, right? So there was precedent for it. The CIA was – or OSS was disbanded at the end of World War II, right? So there was precedent for it. It's not unusual that there's that talk in Washington on occasion. I mean, shit, after the fall of the Soviet Union, there were very credible people in Washington, D.C. talking about getting rid of the CIA because we got a peace dividend now.

We don't have to worry about the Soviet Union anymore. Do we really need this? And these were credible people inside of the politics and the government. So that cycle seems to... Every now and then, there's this regularity of the agency. Let's put it up on a pedestal and fire a rocket at it. What's important about keeping the CIA around? What's important about keeping the CIA around? Well, it's not a benign world, right? There is nothing benign about the way this world works.

And we'd love to think it's a community of nations, but it's not, right? So if we want to fly blind without any insight into what countries that are hostile to our interests, and there are a number of them, are doing, then I guess, yeah, you could get rid of the agency. The agency's primary function is information, is intelligence, right? And you gather that intelligence to understand the plans and intentions of others, right? And whether it's the Russians or North Koreans, the Iranians, Chinese, whatever. And they are incredibly aggressive at doing it. So we could be very self-righteous and pat ourselves on the back and say, hey, fuck it, let's disband the CIA. Why do we need it? It doesn't sound like it's a very good activity. And I think we'd feel better about ourselves if we did. Nobody else is going to do that. It's not like this. Again, the Chinese aren't going to say,

oh, you're right. Obama had an agreement with Xi back in the day to cease and desist on the shenanigans, economic espionage and cyber shenanigans. And of course, they didn't. In fact, they're more aggressive now and more of a sophisticated manner than they were even a few years ago. So I guess it comes down to protecting our own national security interests. And if people don't give a shit about that, then fine, have an open discussion about it. But I guarantee you we'll get hosed nine ways to Sunday if we do that because you've got to have insight. It's how you develop your longer-term strategies, and it's how you inform the administration, whichever administration, as to where the next threats are coming from. Hopefully, you're anticipating those threats and you're not reacting.

So, yeah, but again, it's that sort of thing. Look, obviously, I've got a particular point of view. People expect that. But again, it's that sort of thing. Look, obviously I've got a particular point of view. Right. People expect that. But I'm just here to tell you it's not that sort of world where we can say let's shut it down and I'll bet things will work out fine. There's a lot of actors out there who would like to fuck us over. So that's just – I don't know what't, I don't know whether eloquent way to say it. I should have used that line in the book. What we're worried about with other countries

is them infiltrating our education system, infiltrating businesses, sabotaging us with some long plan. Do you think that United States intelligence agencies utilize the same sort of strategy with other countries? Sure. Yeah? Yeah, and we better hope we're better at it, right? We better hope we're the best there is at it, right? So the answer is, yeah, there's nothing new under the sun when it comes to gathering information.

It's not like, you know, yes, technology changes that, how you can, you know, signals intercepts and all the things that you can do in cyberspace. But ultimately, what are they looking to do? What's Chinese intel apparatus looking to do? Well, they're looking to provide any information to the Chinese regime that will allow them to get to and firmly sit atop the food chain, right? The global ladder of success. And at the same time, they're looking to, as part of that, they're looking to hoover up this information that will help their companies succeed, right? In a shorter fashion, bypass all that heavy cost of research and development and just go straight to the product or whatever it may be. They're looking to, look, they dominate. I mean, I don't know how many different ways we can go into this.

They dominate the world's global supply of rare earth minerals, right? Now, that's not the same as, you know, most people have no, I mean, rare earth minerals are not like cobalt or lithium or copper or whatever sits in you. But they dominate that too, right? Well, they have been busy, yeah, trying to snap up as much of that as possible. If you look at cobalt, I mean, the vast majority of cobalt is mined in Congo. You look at copper, it's where Chile, China, Peru. Lithium is wherever, Australia, I think, China, Peru. Lithium is wherever. Australia, I think.

China. But the rare earth minerals, and rare earth minerals are found in everything from smartphones to aerospace industry, guidance systems for missiles. That's a good one. Electronics, medicine. You pick anything. Nuclear power. So what minerals are you discussing? Are you talking about rare earth minerals?

Yeah. I'm not smart enough to tell you, but I know that there's a list of rare earth minerals that are almost unpronounceable as far as I'm concerned. But they are, you know, there's only a certain quantity. But they are, you know, there's only a certain quantity. And if you look at where those exist, right, vast majority exists in China. And they're mining actively. They're mining all of that because, again, these particular minerals are used in a variety of products that are critical both to security purposes and defense purposes and also just success. But that's separate from people sometimes talk about like, well, we want to go electric, we want to build more batteries. And

the minerals that are used in batteries are not the same thing. We're not talking about rare earth minerals there. We're talking about nickel and other things there. But anyway, the point being is that whether it's the Chinese, whether it's the Russians, whether it's the Iranians, whether it's North Koreans, you know, or look south of our border, right? Latin America has gone through a sea change recently. And, you know, Lula being back in Brazil is just one example of the number of governments who have gone from right or right-ish to left or social Democrat. And so they may not have our best interest at heart either. And so anyway, I'm not a buyer of the idea that we can be altruistic and just shut down our efforts to keep ourselves as informed as possible about where the next threat comes from.

We have to be able to do that. And so when people say, well, you know, we can't criticize China for doing this because we do it too. Yeah, you're right. Fucking A. Relatively speaking, they put in the same amount of resources and money or more than we do in these endeavors? I would argue they put in more resource. That's different from defense spending. But when you talk about intelligence operations, I mean, again, just you look at that. Huawei, I mean, we've talked about Huaweiawei before and um there was a case and towards the end of this past year also again you know where where we've uh picked up two chinese intel agents who were busy uh trying to bribe what they thought was an asset who could give them information about the government's position prosecution of huawei uh it turns out out it was an informant working for the FBI,

thank goodness. But, you know, they were just, they were, these guys simply working to find assets who could tell them, what is the US government, what's the DOJ doing to prosecute Huawei? I mean, that's, again, now, do you think we can operate in China in the same way? Well, no, it's a much more restrictive environment. So we have to be more clever, more creative in the way that we gather information about China's intel and plans and intentions than they do. Isn't there also a difference in the way they've infiltrated the universities and the education system in the United States versus what we have over there? Yeah. Yeah. The university system here is a really good trolling ground for them. And it's been that way for decades. And look, there's

this case that I mentioned where they just sentenced this fellow we extradited. He was using the university system, going out and finding both private sector employees and also people in academics, right, who were engaged in business related to aviation or whatever, to entice them. And again, it tends to follow a pattern, right? If you're a Chinese American or a Taiwanese American and you're approached by someone who spends time buttering you up and telling you how smart you are and we sure could use you to come over to China to give a presentation, time buttering you up and telling you how smart you are and we sure could use you to come over to China to give a presentation. You might want to think about that. There's a reason for it. And yet, they're very good at what they do. Look, this guy, Zhu, when he would take somebody over

or he would have somebody come over to give a presentation, the Ministry of State Security, under the guise of academics or whatever would take these people out to dinner. Meanwhile, they'd bang up his hotel room, copy his laptop, do everything that you would imagine they would do. That's what they do. And again, I know people are going to disagree with this and they're always going to argue about this, and maybe that's because I'm simple. I never viewed there as a moral equivalency between their operations and our operations. We have firewalls. We have limits.

We have things that we can't do, right? And they don't. If it works, it works, right? And if they think it's got potential to work as an operation, then they'll do it. Same with the Russians and others. I think the real fear over here is the only way we can compete with them is to do what they do with our people. Yeah. I mean, you could argue that one of the things that we do is try to harden our defenses, right?

Part of that is making people aware of it. And, you know, the FBI, you know, they've been taking a kick in the ass for a while now because of, you know, the potential for playing politics. But the Bureau has done, you know, some things really very well. One of them is in this counterintelligence area, right? They spend a lot of time talking or trying to talk to private sector companies about how do you improve your security posture against these threats. And, you know, that was not something they did before. So it's a relatively new initiative. They go out and they talk and they try to share best practices.

It's not necessarily a two-way conversation, right? It's not like the company is getting inside information from the Bureau about investigations or whatever, but they're trying. And the reason for that is the same reason why you, you know, from a technical perspective, you harden your IT systems. It's because you got to arm everybody. You got to – I mean our critical infrastructure is owned in the U.S. 80 percent by private companies, 80 percent, right? So we can talk about trying to improve our security posture because our infrastructure, again, that's it, right? You talk about these things like I said. Where's the potential for conflict in 2023 russia ukraine china well an attack on u.s infrastructure that's right up there at the very top and so you know you have to

do what you can but when 80 of the critical infrastructure is owned by private companies you have to work with the private companies you have to go out and create a dialogue create an awareness and that's always been a problem in the past so they're trying to do that a dialogue, create an awareness, and that's always been a problem in the past. So they're trying to do that. And then yes, we try to be better at collecting information on what the hostile nation states are doing against us. But that's where I draw a line. I'm always willing to say, okay, maybe there was something there.

Maybe I haven't seen evidence to say absolutely not. So maybe there was a conspiracy. Maybe all those things. That's fine. But I always draw a line at saying, fuck you. We need the intel community. We need them to be apolitical. It should always be the case. But we need them to be out there and aggressive and proactive in defending national security interests.

And, you know, I'm not going to shift off that line. Well, one of the things that a lot of people get scared of when it comes to overstepping boundaries is some of the shit that we hear, like with the FBI, like the governor of Michigan thing. Oh, yeah. Where there was 14 people involved and 12 of them involved in this kidnapping plot.

12 of them were FBI informants. That seems kind of crazy. Yeah, entrapment, that's a different fucking bucket there. Is that just a function of them trying to get something done? And you give people autonomy, you let them make their own decisions, and then they do something that a lot of people would feel like is entrapment. And these guys who got arrested who were doing long bids, one of them was saying that it was all just fantasy, he's an idiot,

he wasn't really interested in it at all, but they organized it, they instigated it, they designed it. Kept calling about it. Yeah. Yeah. but they organized it, they instigated it, they designed it. Kept calling about it. Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, I mean, I think the way that you avoid problems typically is by having your frontline managers, right, being very experienced in asking questions and stress testing every potential operation and activity or investigation. and asking questions and stress testing every potential operation and activity or investigation. And, you know, I can't speak to that one because I wasn't in the Bureau and don't know. But, you know, I do know that if you don't have management at pretty much every level of the organization, whatever organization it is, that stress tests these things and says, okay, why do you think this? Why is that important? Who told you this?

What is the purpose? Then, yeah, it's got the potential to spin out of control. And part of it then becomes, okay, you've got some smart prosecuting attorney out there and thinks this is going to be great, right? This is a high profile. Look at that. And so then they run with it. And every investigation needs to be built on a very sound foundation. If you start an investigation with an idea like, I bet these guys might be interested in it, you've got to

have evidence at the very bottom. Otherwise, it's just sitting on this pile of sand. So I think that's sometimes where these things go awry because there's such a desire to develop that opportunity or that case that people forget to say, well, how did this even get started? What was the first piece of evidence? What was the first thread? Let's go back to that and look. Right. Was it the idea of the two people that are being prosecuted or was it the idea of the 12 people that instigated it? Yeah. I mean, you can argue about it. It's no different. It's whether it's that sort of thing or whether it's going back to Sam

Bankman Freed. If somebody early on had just said, let's go back and do due diligence from the ground up, right? For all your information and security needs, Portman Square Group, that's pretty good. We have people that do nothing but fraud investigations and due diligence. And I will say, maybe once or twice, but over years now, going on a couple of decades, there have never done a major fraud investigation where the due diligence on that entity or people or opportunity was done properly at the beginning. It just doesn't happen. If you do the due diligence properly at the beginning and then occasionally you revisit that because people change and you're always going back and looking at the current status of events and the company's structure and abilities and it's what they say they do what they do. If you do that due diligence at the outset, you don't end up with a Bernie Madoff or a Sam Bankman Freed.

But all these frauds at this level, particularly those, it's driven by – I don't want to necessarily say greed, but the fear of missing the boat, right? So it gets to a certain point, a little momentum, and nobody asks the questions. Nobody would go back and says, well, wait a minute, let's go back to the beginning. Why is this successful? Who is this person? What does this company do? Are all they doing is just wash trades? What are they doing? How is the success built at the very beginning? But people don't do that because they get excited. And again, there's this fear that I'm going to miss the boat. And so the next thing you know, you've got Shaq and all these other people out there promoting it.

And then people say, well, if they're promoting it, it's good. That's all the due diligence I need. Tom Brady says it's good. Let's go. That is a problem. Yeah. And I should point out that I have passed up on doing things like that. Things with crypto, things with NFTs.

Right away, I was like, uh-uh. I don't believe in it. I think there's a lot of potential for horseshit here. And when it comes to something like FTX, you're dealing with crypto, right? Which is relatively unregulated, right? At least to a certain extent. How would one even investigate that? And if you got to the point where it got to like FTX, where, I mean, it looks so legit, right? They put their name on arenas. They had the FTX Arena in Miami.

They have huge superstars doing ads for them. There's billions and billions of dollars in assets. And then you have this origin story of this genius wizard kid who figures all this out. And, I mean, it should have raised some red flags and they found out they were just doing amphetamines and fucking each other in an apartment in the Bahamas. What are the odds that that's 100% legit?

I'm surprised. They're in this polyamorous love fest in a $40 million penthouse apartment. That's not a fucking word we heard 15, 20 years ago. Polyamorous. Where did that come from? Just like somebody came up with it. But yeah, look.

How would one even like once, okay, let's say once that ball's rolling, you got all these investors, you got all this money rolling in, and here's a major point here. They were the number two contributor to the Democratic Party, which is an enormous amount of money.

And there was this one conspiracy theory. What was it on Michael Savage's webpage? There was this one conspiracy theory that the United States government donates money to Ukraine. Ukraine buys stake in FTX. FTX donates money to the Democratic Party, and that there's this direct chain. Now, he removed that, right? It's a conspiracy theory, unsubstantiated conspiracy theory. But when you've got that kind of money moving around, like billions went to Alameda Research Group, and they don't understand.

And he was saying, I have no knowledge of this. And you you got money That's just flying all over the place and billions are missing right? Where's it going? And how would one even step in and Sort of try to get an assessment of that and in doing so Would you fuck up the whole thing and would all those people lose out on billions of dollars of legitimate money that they've invested millions and millions of creditors right well if it's built on sand they're going to lose anyway at some point so you know it's always better to expose and create transparency i would argue and when you're talking about something like this a couple of things first

of all if if a company that you're looking at investing in suddenly names an arena, gets a corporate jet, buys a yacht, has associated real estate offshore, whatever it is, you might want to look at this thing. Now, how do you do that? I don't want to oversimplify it because a lot of folks in my industry and information and security industry will try to make things sound very complicated. It's not. You ask questions, right? You start by saying, I want to know who these people are, right? You start investigating the people, the company structure. You start looking at how do these companies relate to each other?

I mean, what do the trades look like? What are they holding? What are the assets that they're holding? And what names? What are the entities? What associated entities are there? What are their activities? It wouldn't have taken much to figure out that Sam Bankman Freed was basically just banging colleagues

and doing whatever drugs they were doing. I don't even know what drugs. A lot of amphetamines apparently. A lot of amphetamines. That's what the lady, Caroline Ellison. Got to keep awake, I guess, if you're doing that much banging. I guess. Yeah.

So it's the due diligence part. Due diligence part, again, I don't want to oversimplify this, but I think I am because it's the easiest thing you can do to avoid getting wrapped up into a fraud or investing in something that goes south. So how does one do this and where does one start? So like when FTX, say if you're an outsider and FTX has emerged. How long has FTX even been around? Shit, when did he start? In 2019. Yeah, 2019. That's it?

Yeah. That's wild. Yeah. He hadn't been around long. And they don't even have Bitcoin, right? They weren't even, is that correct, Jamie? Without speaking from 100% knowledge, I believe this was all about trading some coin they made and share like a stock. It was like almost equivalent to a stock.

Yeah. He basically made his money on what they call wash trades in part, right? Which all that means is if you look at a transaction, the buyer and seller are the same person. That's a problem, right? Now, the reason why it's not a problem in crypto is because it's unregulated. You can't do a wash trade in the financial industry. I've been able to do that in, what would that be, in 80 some odd years. Wasn't part of the problem that he was calling for some sort of regulation and that's where Binance had an issue with it? Am I wrong about that, Jamie? You're a crypto guy.

Help us out here. A lot of this was saying his donations were to help get influence in regulations and anything that was going to be happening with Congress and crypto because it's obviously on its way. Right. So he wanted to have a stake in that. Exactly. So he wanted to accumulate an enormous amount of money,

an enormous amount of influence, and protect his money. Right. He's looking for plans and intentions of Capitol Hill, basically. I mean, from an intel perspective, he's looking to see where are they going to go with this so that I can either somehow block that effort or create an effort that's more advantageous to him. And it seems like it was effective, at least in its intention, because like Maxine Waters is like, well, he doesn't really want to come in and testify.

Sam's a good guy. The White House brought him in to talk about the pandemic apparently. What? This is general information. They're asking about crypto. If you can fucking ask someone about the pandemic, would it be that guy on the right? I mean, I would love to see a conversation

between the guy on the left, Biden, and the guy on the right. The guy on the left is making up words. The guy on the right is on amphetamines. Come on, man. Come on, man. Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre conceded that four meetings may have also covered general information about crypto. Between senior Biden officials were about the pandemic.

Like what could that fucking young kid doing speed fucking his neighbors? Well, look, here's the thing. A, nobody in the White House really understands crypto to begin with, right? Seems like very few people understand crypto, really. But just in terms of looking at this guy's situation, it's like with Bernie Madoff. If you had gone and if someone had taken a time early days

with Madoff, said, I'm going to go visit some basics. I'm going to go look where his accountant sits. Oh, really? He's sitting in a fucking

small office in a strip mall? And yet this guy's supposed to be king of the world at this point? Well, how about these guys? You know what they were using? QuickBooks. Oh, yeah.

Yeah, yeah. They were using QuickBooks. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. They were using QuickBooks, the shit that, like, a guy uses if he has a fucking small bookstore. Yeah. They were using that. You just, I mean, you compile information, and maybe one or two pieces of it, like, okay, you look at the guy and you go,

this guy doesn't look like a rocket scientist, and, you know, his lifestyle, you look at lifestyle issues, maybe they're bizarre, but you compile as much information about the entire apparatus as possible. And I would argue that anybody in their right mind, if they had taken the time to do significant due diligence, would have stepped back and said, oh no, not doing this guy. I don't care how many celebrities he's got put in there. And he was going after celebrities for a reason, just like your over an arena or you're right because it gives you fucking credibility the same

reason why he's donating so much money yes and and you know the donations anybody who thinks he wasn't doing that to exert leverage or to gather information you know uh again naive ignorant you know whatever well his mother was a big time Democratic operative too, right? Yeah. So that was probably part of his connection. Yeah. It's just, it's a shame because, you know, a lot of people were hurt, you know, whether they claw that money back or not. Millions of people. Yeah. And, you know, some of the, some of the folks in the Democratic party are saying, well, we're going to give some money back, but how it's going to be. Yeah, exactly. Where's the money? Where's it coming from? If the money's all nonsense, which is what a lot

of crypto is, once it collapses, it's nonsense. There's no legitimate assets, right? Right. And then you have to also ask yourself, and I think there's some coverage. I think there's going to be more talking about the nature of trading. Again, wash trades are illegal in the financial industry for a reason, right? Explain wash trades again. What's the way to... It's like, okay, it's like with my book. You might have heard about my book, Company Rules. I heard about it, yeah. It's being released on the 18th of January on Scribd. How does this have to do with anything? Or is this just-

I'm going to tell you. I'm going to tell you. If I really was desperate and I said, I really want my book to become a bestseller, well, one of the things I could do is I could set up a bunch of fake accounts on Amazon or wherever. And then I could put money into all those different accounts. And then I could start buying up my book. I know someone who did that. You did. It's in a sense, that's a wash rate.

Is that illegal? You're on both sides. It's in a sense, that's a wash rate. Is that illegal? You're on both sides, right? It's illegal in the financial industry. But so you remember crypto is, what is this? It's not a currency. It's a piece of property. So they haven't decided.

They're still trying to figure it out, right? Which again, I would argue is one of the reasons why SBF know, SBF was putting money into politics. You know, if you can get ahead of the game, I'll tell you as an example, there's a reason why I'm telling the story. Early days of Iraq, I'm talking like 2003, 2004, 2005, my company had, you know, a lot of people there because we were supporting security operations for a lot of the infrastructure companies, you know? And so they people there because we were supporting security operations for a lot of the infrastructure companies, you know, and so they're out there trying to rebuild parts of the country. They're doing things. Well, they've got to have security and they've got to have people handling a variety of problems for them. So we had gotten out there very early. We were out there in early

2003, right at the very beginning. And it didn't take long. At first, there were several months where it was relatively peaceful. Shit started to hit the fan out there in about September of 2003. Really started going south and it started getting violent. And it was 2004, 2005, the security business in Iraq just ballooned. Suddenly, you couldn't swing at that cat without hitting another security company. They just popped up out of nowhere. You'd be out there and say, who are you guys with? And they'd say some company you'd never heard of and just put together because people saw opportunity. I'm going to get some government contracts. I'm going to work for these companies. I'm going to do this. And they were pulling people who had no business being out in a hostile environment

and providing security. So then they started having problems. There were all sorts of issues. Well, we started thinking, okay, this has got to get regulated, right? State Department and Pentagon, they're going to come in and they're going to say, no, we've got to regulate the private security industry that's operating out here. We know we need it, but it's just unregulated. So we're going to do... So as part of that, once we realized that was going to happen, we got together with some of the more reputable security firms that were operating. They said, let's form an association so that we can get ahead of the curve. Right. And we can help define what the regulations are for these security companies that are out there operating. It's in our best interest. Right. And I would argue it's no different than what SBF was doing, you know, kind of spreading the cash around so that he could understand where the regulations were going to come from and he could get ahead of the curve.

And so, hey, from an intel perspective, bravo. That's the right intuition. But again – But he didn't recognize his vulnerabilities. Didn't recognize his vulnerabilities because he believed his own bullshit. And he's not a rocket scientist unlike people thought. Well, also, he's on amphetamines. Yeah.

Which leads people to make rash, impulsive decisions and, you know, you get hyper-confident. Yeah. Yeah. So I think he's, you know, it's, the amazing thing is, if you've been involved in fraud investigations for as long as we have, there was no surprise at the point where it happened. Now, you know, it would have been, I guess, man, I'm probably the wrong person

to talk about this because I've never been a real believer in crypto, right? In part because it's, as you can see from the fucking cigar lighter, I'm a fairly simple person, right? So the likelihood that I'm going to understand crypto like Jamie does is zero. Even Jamie barely understands it. I don't want to claim that I understand it fully. I get what people are saying, but I

don't. I'm still watching. Yeah. Jamie vests a little and watches from afar. But what the allure of it is is decentralized currency. So you don't have to rely on the Federal Reserve and interest rates getting jack to flourish and you give the people power to trade and invest and then you get to this point. But what they were dealing with, this is where it gets really weird, right? They were dealing with not just crypto but also with tokens. Now, what are the – that's where it all went south, right? Is that Binance guy – Yeah, even I was looking. There's a story now about Tom Brady's involvement

because you asked me about that the other day. It says that he was a celebrity endorser. And he was given, I don't know if he put money in and an exchange was given back 110,000 shares or tokens. And those are now devalued to zero or I don't know. I don't know what they're worth. And isn't that, that was a strategy of the Binance guy to tank it, right? Like he decided to unload all of his tokens, right?

Because he had an interest in FTX. He unloaded all of his tokens. They didn't really have the capital to cover that. And then everybody went, oh, my God, it's a fucking Ponzi scheme. And then like Madoff after 2008 when people wanted to withdraw their money. Right. You can't. You can't.

People are calling. Right. They're saying, okay, that's it. And then you say, okay, now you got to use other funds to pay that off. And the next thing you know, you're in a hole you can't get out of. Is the allure that the people that got in early. Go ahead. Go ahead.

Put it up. Ad blocker popped up. Oh. Is the allure that the people that did get in early and did invest and then pulled their money out, they did make money. So some people made enormous profits and there was a financial institute. I'll say Binance is bleeding assets, 12 billion gone in less than 60 days. Well, duh, buddy.

Yeah. I don't know why he didn't see this coming while he tanks FTX and he doesn't realize that people are going to look at the whole industry and go, holy shit, this is all nuts. The outflow of cash from Binance is worse than the CEO Changpeng Zhao indicated last month, and it's become considerably more severe since then, a Forbes analysis shows. analysis shows. Binance, the world's largest cryptocurrency exchange, is struggling to hold on to assets. In the wake of the collapse of rival FTX, investors have been pulling their crypto in recent weeks. And despite the assurance from CEO Shang-Peng Zhao that the situation is stabilized, outflows are accelerating. Customers withdrew a net $360 million on Friday, according to, I mean, rightfully so. Right. According to data from crypto data firm, imagine being a crypto data firm.

Jesus Christ. December 13th, Nansen, a separate crypto data firm, broke the news that Binance had lost $3 billion of assets over the previous week. Representing 4% of the firm's total at the time, which is pretty wild, they don't have that much money, Forbes' investigation revealed that, in fact, Binance lost 15% of its assets since Twitter posting by Zhao, widely known as CZ, on the same day he downplayed the Nansen report withdrawals. Still nearly a quarter of Binance assets left the exchange in less than two months. Forbes reached out to Binance seeking comments for this story, but did not receive a response

by publication time. So they're just hemorrhaging money. Yeah. I mean, first of all- And confidence. I'm glad they went with CZ because I was enjoying listening to you pronounce it. It was a rough one. Yeah, that's a tough one.

That's a tough one. They also use a similar thing as FTX. They have a coin called the Binance coin, BNB, and another one which is based off the U.S. dollar. And those have also lost a bunch of value. What does that mean, though? And you have to think about the value, too, in terms of what is actual value, right? Because Forbes also, and they're not the only ones, but there's been some study about what's the level of trade going on in that business that is, again, going back to the same phrase, wash trades. So basically just meaningless trades, right? The whole purpose of doing the wash trades is to up the volume of trading, right? Which your hope is that will generate an increase in value, right? So a lot

of what SBF was doing, as an example, was just selling low and, or sorry, selling and then buying or buying and then selling at a little bit of a higher price. Sorry, I got that mixed back. So he was doing this just to jack up his own assets, the assets of the company. And if you think about, I mean, if Forbes is anywhere near correct and some of the other estimates are anywhere near correct and 50% of all the activity in crypto trade is basically just that, right? Again, buyer and seller on the same or on both sides of the transaction.

That's what they're saying. And again, what do I know? I'm the wrong person talking about this. I'm just, I'm talking about it from perspective of someone who's been involved in fraud investigations for a long time. And I guess I go back to the same story, which is, God, just, you know, a little bit of due diligence can save people a lot of heartache and loss. And we see that no matter how big, Fortune 50 companies, you know, large investment firms, large banking institutions, sometimes they just don't do it. They don't do the due diligence because, hey, look, 20 years ago, I worked with this guy. He was at wherever, some other institution. He's

a great guy. Let's just, for whatever reason, due diligence costs almost in scheme of things compared to a fraud investigation, costs almost nothing. And everybody can do it. It's not just like you have to go out to a company, you don't have to be a big firm or a consulting firm, whatever, to do it. People can do their own due diligence because there's so much information online nowadays. But at some point, you also want to dig a little bit deeper. You probably want to go out and actually talk to people, find out what their experience is. We've seen deals overseas where people have invested in large companies and have just gotten massive holes shot in their books because they failed to just do the simple things. Go out there and actually investigate the business and see whether the books they're seeing are the actual books. So it's, you know, I can't say it often

enough. You know, two things people can do to protect their businesses. One is do proper due diligence ahead of a key hire, an investment, any sort of venture. And then the other is buy a cross-cut shredder. Don't put information in the bins and companies like mine pick it up. So these companies that – these places like Binance and FTX, what's the future of those things? I mean at one point in time, just very recently, they were enormous power structures. They had incredible resources. And now it's kind of evaporated, or at least the confidence in it is rapidly evaporating. So what's the future of these things?

Well, I think they missed the boat in a way, right? Decentralized is not the same as unregulated, right? And I think the reluctance, anytime you talked about regulation over the past couple of years, right? People would just like, you know, whether they were libertarians or crypto enthusiasts or whatever, go, no. Right. They don't want to get the government involved. They don't want the government. But there's certain reasons to have some regulation, right? And this is a good example of how you can prevent, you know, not all the time.

Some people, you know, occasionally there's going to be someone who's actually really sophisticated and smart, and they're going to sneak through. But some regulation, you know, is, you know, by definition is not a bad thing, right? Just by saying the word, it doesn't mean that you're saying, you know, I want to turn it over to the government, leave the government in charge of it all. No, but you're looking to try to create an environment

that protects investors. But in the Bernie Madoff situation, he was regulated. Yeah. And he's an example of someone who was very well motivated to do what he was doing, was sufficiently experienced and credible enough that, again, he got through because the same thing that we talked about you know just a failure to do due diligence and greed because people were making enormous profits the return on their investment was very high and people even in the early days of bernie maynough were calling bullshit they were saying that this doesn't seem to make sense there were people out there who were kind of screaming into the wind talking about it.

And there were people that were doing this about FTX as well, right? Yeah, less so, because they would get drowned out by the no regulation, bullshit, you don't understand crypto. People that were calling bullshit on SBF, I think, were doing it in part just because of appearance, right, and sort of lack of understanding. The lack of information, the lack of transparency should be another indicator, just like buying a corporate jet. I'd love to name an arena after Portman Square Group, but I don't think that's going to happen. But if you had an enormous corporation like Staples Center, isn't there like a value in naming an arena after your company?

Yeah, that's different than a small crypto exchange. Is it small if it's worth billions and billions of dollars? I mean, it doesn't seem that small. I don't know if it's – I mean, again, it's relative value. Is it really worth billions and billions of dollars or is it? Well, obviously not. You'll find out now. But I mean, if you think about the fact that they were that profitable inside of three years, if they really did start in 2019, by 2022, the fucking end of the year, the house of cards had already fallen down.

Yeah. And it's given like whatever, 30 million to democratic causes. The number two donor next to George Soros, which is fucking terrifying. That guy, how old is George Soros? It's a good question. Yeah. He's like a vampire. I had a conversation with the governor of Texas about him, about with Greg Abbott, where

he was explaining to me what George Soros does. And it's fucking terrifying that he donates money to a very progressive, very leftist, Donates money to a very progressive, very leftist, whether it's a DA or whatever politician, and then funds someone who's even further left than them to go against them and just keeps moving it along. So he's playing like a global game and that he enjoys doing it. Yeah, he enjoys doing it. But it is it's telling. Right. He understood early on where you wanted to seize power, right? And that's – you know, we sometimes think, oh, I'm going to – you know, a senator is – that's the pinnacle of success.

Well, it's not really. You know, it's the DAs and it's the state-level politicians. Right. That's where real change occurs and where things can happen. And before you know it, it's like, what the fuck? Or real corrosion. Or real corrosion. That's what's scary is it seems like he funds corrosion.

It's like he wants these cities to fall apart. He wants crime to flourish. It's almost like he's an evil person in a Batman movie. You know what I'm saying? Well, I mean, He made his real fortune by almost busting the Bank of England. He's not... This guy is not

out there for truth and justice. And he's got to be deep into his 80s. He's 92. 92! What keeps that guy fucking motivated? Do we have a picture of him? A recent picture of him? He got married in 2013. Nice.

She is in love with him. Nice. Yes. Look at her, slim and young and full of vigor. Wow. Wow. Do you think he drinks her blood to stay young? Is that what's going on here?

I don't think he's staying young. If he doesn't, it's not working. It's not working at all. That's kind of wild. She's cute. Wow. not working. It's not working at all. It's kind of wild. She's cute. Married for third time. Look at him. Man.

But just what a wild thing to do with your money. I mean, it kind of makes sense. He fires back. He back, what does it say? Which one are you looking at? Reid Hoffman, George Soros' back media firm to combat disinformation. Oh. Oh, good firm to combat disinformation. Oh, combat that disinformation. These stories could be from any time of the year.

Billionaire-backed new media firm to combat disinformation. What disinformation, sir? How much money did he put in? Here's good. Why it matters. Good Information, Inc. That's the name of the company. Aims to fund and scale businesses

that cut through echo chambers with fact-based information. As a part of its mission, it plans to invest in local news companies. There you go. Oh my god. If you can influence on the local level. Look at this. The fucking...

The company's called Acronym. How hilarious is that? Isn't that hilarious? Former Democratic strategist who previously ran a Look at this. The company's called Acronym. How hilarious is that? Acronym for acronym? Isn't that hilarious? Former Democratic strategist who previously ran a progressive nonprofit called Acronym. Acronym invested in for-profit companies that built media and technology solutions for progressive causes. It ran one of the largest digital campaigns to defeat President Trump in the 2020 election totaling 100 million dollars one of the companies has invested in called shadow made headlines last year for

contributing to the delayed reporting of the iowa caucus results wow it's all very weird it's like i mean this guy's obviously been involved in politics at a very high level for decades and decades. And it seems like it's like his fun little game he plays. If you had all that money, though, wouldn't you do something about the bags under your eyes? I mean, there was a lot of... He can get that lady with the bags under his eyes? Why does he give a fuck? Yeah, I guess that's a good point.

I mean, you would think that if you had that much money, you're 92 years old, you just want to go fly fishing and sit on the deck and drink coffee and talk to your grandchildren and just enjoy your life. But he apparently does not want to do that. He likes being the puppet master. That's what's wild. He likes pulling strings and he likes having that influence and that impact. And I guess, you know, what the hell. But he's uniquely public about it. That's what's fascinating.

What the hell? But he's uniquely public about it. That's what's fascinating. It's like this is all known information. Right. That this guy is involved in all these different things that he has his hands in. Yeah. And you could argue that.

I mean, at least there's some transparency there as opposed to dark money going into campaigns and other things. But it is. I'm 92. I had no idea he was 92. Good God. You've got to wonder, what's his end game? Like, when does he wrap this fucking project up? Well, I think it is an indication, though.

It is smart. And I think, I don't know that it's going to change anything. I don't know where I'm going with this. But I think there was an awareness over the past couple of years, maybe because of the pandemic and people, like, sitting at home and reading more news and watching what's happening in their local community because they're not traveling, of the importance of knowing who your city council is or knowing who your, you know, state congressman is or, you know, whatever, the head of the PTA, whatever it might be, and being aware of the importance of that because we all, again, we were so focused and people almost, you know, okay, fine, maybe I'll go out and vote for a U.S. congressman or a senator, aware of of the importance of that because we all again we were so focused and people almost you know okay fine maybe i'll go out and vote for a u.s congressman or a senator but i'm not

going to you know take the time to go out for local elections and honestly god you know if you want to bitch and moan then you know your obligation on the other side of that is you got to take part well i don't think people realize the implications that it had on their actual lives, what politicians, what rules they could and couldn't enact until the pandemic, until they shut down businesses, shut down restaurants, mandated certain things, mandated vaccines for children in schools. When you saw politicians doing things like that, that's when people started freaking out. Like, Jesus, I didn't know you guys had that kind of fucking power. Yeah. Yeah. No, I think that's, I think that's when people started freaking out. Like, Jesus, I didn't know you guys had that kind of fucking power. Yeah, yeah.

No, I think that's where we learned a shit ton about schooling, right? Yeah. As an example, right? Yes. I know that's kind of one of those conversations that's been taking place for quite a bit, and it's nothing new, but, I mean, just from a personal perspective, you know, we started looking at, you know, not just the curriculum, but just the quality of the education itself, right?

Yeah. And the process that's involved. And, you know, one thing we found out— Well, I got to sit in—go ahead. Oh, I was going to say, our kids, you know, not our kids, but we as parents, we're not well-suited to homeschooling. That was just never going to happen. You've got to be really motivated and really organized to homeschool correctly.

You've got to know math. Yeah. I don't fucking know math. Even my 11-year-old at the time, he was, what, 9 and 10 years old? And he knew. After the first couple of efforts getting me to help him with his math, I'm like, you gotta ask your mom.

I became basically, what did I do? I was like the PE instructor and the lunch lady. That was my two jobs. I sat in my daughter's room while she was on Zoom classes once, and I was like, oh, my God. This is so fucking boring, and this teacher is so unmotivated. And this was a private school. This is something we're paying for. I was like, this is a fucking travesty because these kids are just getting beaten down by boredom.

And when they finally can shut their laptop, they're like, fuck. And then they can't even go outside, and they can't meet with their friends i was like this is a goddamn disaster yeah we were lucky in that i mean because of where we were yeah i mean god i don't know how we would have done it if we've been living in an apartment in new york city or something right when everyone's scared to go outside and shit yeah but at least our kids could you know they go outside and they go up in the foothills and they could mountain bike. So we were fortunate in that regard, but it was just a shit show. We finally put the two youngest into private school. We moved them out of the public schools because it just wasn't happening.

And so we put them in a local Catholic school. My wife is Catholic. I'm not. And so we put them in there. And it was helpful in the sense that they were open, right? But both of them, by the time they got in there, right, they had no grounding in Catholic church or, you know, mass, and they did a regular mass every Tuesday. And I don't know if I told this story or not, but the middle boy sluggo uh who's who's incredibly funny but he would go into mass and they were standing and they were sitting and they were standing and

they were sitting it goes on for an hour right and they have this priest who's great guy but it would just he just keep banging on holy shit so anyway one day one day he legitimately i think it was every tuesday was the mass he legitimately just went over. His legs locked up. He passed out. So next thing you know, they're calling us. They get him away. He'd take him to the nurse's office and call us and say, well, you got to come pick him up because he's fainted. And so we can't keep him in school for the day. You got to come get him.

I'm thinking, okay. Next Tuesday comes around. I get a call. He faints again. It's a good move. Oh, fuck Tuesday comes around. I get a call. He faints again. It's a good move. Oh, fuck. Third Tuesday. Little son of a bitch faints again.

And I go in. I say, do you think maybe he's faking it? And my boy Sluggo was standing next to me. And it was like clearly I broke the guy code. Because he's looking at me like, you've got to be shitting me. You're going to call me out on this? And one of the ladies was like, oh, no. that would no it's it's like it's legitimate and okay anyway so he he became known as the as the mass fainter and uh eventually once once the

schools opened up again we pulled him out of school it was a great school but we pulled about put him back in public school where they knew most of their friends and everything were there and something but it was it was a it was an awareness almost immediately that we were not suited to homeschooling because we're fucking busy anyway right and that's great if you got nothing to do other than homeschool your kid but imagine if you're like a single mom oh yeah or a single dad and you have to do this shit and imagine you're supposed to be working too. And on top of that, you can't afford a laptop. Or you don't have Wi-Fi. People in certain sectors just got fucked over. And people talk about the kids dropping out of school, disappearing, in part because they were going to private schools.

But I think a lot of kids just of a certain category is probably just like, fuck it, I don't need to go to school. Well, it certainly opened people's eyes to the importance of like, who is, who are your local politicians? Who are, who is the mayor? Who is the governor? Who's doing, who's enacting rules? Because the rules were different all over the country. I mean, I remember when they opened up things in Texas, people were freaking out, everyone's going to die and nothing happened. When did you move to Texas? May. Well, I started looking in May of 2020.

I started looking early because I just had this feeling. I was like, I don't like where this is going. These motherfuckers said two weeks to flatten the curve. And it just seems like they're enjoying putting the lockdown on people. And once people have power over telling people what they can and can't do, and then they also, if they choose to turn it around and open things up, now they're responsible for whatever decisions they make. So they're going to hedge their bets and they're going to be cautious, even if it greatly financially hurts the people that they're ruling and governing.

It means you've got to put your head above the wall and make a decision, and now you're a target if you made the wrong decision, which is why a lot of shit never ever gets done, because nobody wants to take the risk of making a decision one way or the other. Right, so it's more that than a conspiracy. I didn't buy that it was a conspiracy. There's a lot of people that thought

it was a conspiracy to crush America, and I'm like it's just natural human nature. In the beginning, it was a normal. Like there's a lot of people that thought there was a conspiracy to crush America. And I'm like, it's just natural human nature. And once people, in the beginning, it was a normal inclination to shut things down. Everybody felt that was the right thing to do, flatten the curve and all that jazz and stop the spread. Everybody was freaked out because it was scary because it was a new thing. And so it made sense. But then once it stopped making sense and we got more data on it, like I have a friend, a good friend who's a doctor, and his initial concern was seriously cautious. And then as he started looking at the data, he goes, my understanding of this is it's about twice as bad as the flu. He goes, this reaction that we're having, the way we're treating this is absolutely wrong.

And he did it like sort of an about face with confronted with new information. It became a, yeah, it became a bit of a religion, right? In a way, right? It was a little bit of a, of a, of a cult following as to how righteous can I be? I'm going to be the most righteous, right? I'm going to follow it to a T rather than saying, look, I'm going to look at, you know, it's science theoretically is you stress test everything, right? You question everything and you always look for alternative answers and theories and, and you, you, you test everything, right? You question everything, and you always look for alternative answers and theories, and you test them, right? That's what you're supposed to do.

And I think it became one of those things where much like when you question, okay, what are we doing in Ukraine? What's the end game? Suddenly it's, ah, you're a fucking Russian puppet. Well, no, I'm just asking you, what's the end game? And so- You have to be able to ask that

when you're dealing with something that's that enormous, but we're, we're, we're moving into a, a, a world where, um, yeah, it's, it's, it's, it's strange. You can't, you can't ask the obvious questions, right? It's again, it's like with SBF, you ask questions, Hey, you know, why, why are you investing? Uh, you know, you obviously don't understand crypto or, you know, Tom Brady did. So I'm doing it. It's just it's a it's a strange environment that we live in. It makes it more difficult, I think, now for people to at a time when information's at your fingertips, it makes it more difficult for people to ask logical questions. Right. Because they're afraid of getting kicked in the ass, you know, by someone who views you as a threat to their particular belief. So that's a big problem with social media. right? There's so many people with opinions now. And

then if you're cautious and, you know, especially during the pandemic, it's way less pushback. And if you're one of those people that's like, you know what, I think we're doing this the wrong way and I think we need to open up. People were freaking the fuck out. Yeah. We had an interesting debate in Idaho and it worked out. We were in a good position, like I said. I think we were very fortunate to be out there and go through the whole process at that point. But I don't know. I have a feeling that we're not, you know, people are already talking about, well, what's the next pandemic and what's that going to look like? And I don't know that we are very good as a society of learning lessons. So the next pandemic, and there'll be

another one, right? I mean, it's not- There always have been. There always have been. And so wherever that one comes from, I don't know that we're going to look back, right? And think, okay, it's like with Afghanistan, right? If I can spend all that time chasing the Soviets out of Afghanistan, we knew If I can spend all that time chasing the Soviets out of Afghanistan, we knew what they went through. We saw the papers from the Kremlin. We knew what the Soviet leadership had been trying to do and how difficult it had been in all those various areas, right? And then what do you do? Shortly thereafter, we're in there for 20 years going through the same problems. So I don't know that we're going to, it's a weird example,

but I don't know that we're going to next pandemic look and say, okay, let's review again how we reacted to the COVID. Okay, what should we do differently? I think there's going to be a lot of people that are going to be very reluctant to take the same advice from the same people. I think from the same people, but people tend to, maybe this is very cynical, but people like to take instruction, right? They like people in leadership. Well, particularly if it's more dangerous. Yeah. If another pandemic rolls around and the new disease is more dangerous.

Yeah, yeah. With more fear and more anxiety. Because there's a bunch of people that just have a certain level of anxiety anyway. Yeah, boy, that's a true. You know? And then when something major comes along that really rocks them and scares the shit out of them, it's amazing how quickly they comply. Well, some people were very comfortable there. Right?

I mean, some people found that whole isolation thing to be very comforting in an odd way. And, you know, they were reluctant to give up on it. Some people haven't. Some people still don't want to go to an office. Yeah, I get that. I'm paying rent on places that, on places that are maybe 20% occupied. Because everybody wants to work remotely. People love working remotely.

Do you think that there is productive working remotely, or is it based on the individual? Are some people more productive as remote workers, and some people just need to be in an office environment in order to get things done? Yeah, I think it's a combination of the person and their abilities, right? workers and some people just need to be in an office environment in order to get things done? Yeah, I think it's a combination of the person and their abilities, right? And their discipline. And I think it's also the structure of the company they work for, right? Certain companies, I think, do very well in having their people remote. Others don't. And I think some people individually respond very well to it and others, it's a disaster and your productivity drops significantly. So, but I think there's, you know, look, we're a consulting firm. So, you know, my argument's always, it's better to have everybody together, right? You got to kind of bounce ideas off of each other,

talk, help, collaborate. It's better when you're in the room. Yeah. You got to be in the room. And so we're doing what a lot of people are doing. We're trying to say, okay, how about three days in, two days out? But I know major companies, Fortune 100, Fortune 50 companies that are having a hard time getting pushback when they say, how about three days in and two days home? Employees are saying, no, two days in and three days home. Isn't that wild? Yeah. Yeah. It's really wild

because this is a completely new thing. I mean, I get their perspective that they don't want to commute and you don't want to deal with all the office bullshit and you want to be able to work with your pajamas on. Which is nice. But it's amazing how quickly things change, how that becomes the norm. Yeah. I think what's going to change that, what's going to, is just sort of the state of the economy, right? The employment picture is changing. And I don't think, I mean, whereas a year and a half ago, individuals had a lot more leverage, right? They said, look, I, you know, hey, here are my demands, put up with them or I'll go somewhere else. Well, now people are getting laid off, right? I said, look, I, you know, hey, here are my demands. Put up with them or I'll go somewhere else.

Well, now people are getting laid off, right? And the employment isn't what it was. The market's not the way it is, right? It's more of a, you know, whatever you call it, a buyer-seller market. I don't even know from an employer standpoint. And, you know, I think that's going to be the thing that changes people.

And they're going to realize, yeah, I better get my ass back in the office. And maybe I don't have all that leverage that I thought I did before. But it's not – we're not there yet, right? You're still – we're still dealing with it. But, I mean, it's – I get it, right? I mean, everybody wants a quality of life, right? And if you don't have to spend all your time on a commute, I mean, fuck it. That's why we moved to Idaho.

I was spending three hours a day commuting from the place we lived before went out there. It was in Fairfield County in Connecticut, New Canaan. Ugh. Yeah, I know. Tony, right? Very posh. It is posh, but Jesus Christ, that commute is rough. It's rough. You jump on the Metro North. There's so many fucking people on those

clogged highways. Well, I never drove. I took the Metro North, which, by the way, had the last... So it took an hour and a half there and back? An hour and a half there and back. By the time you actually walked into where our offices were at the time, it was Times Square. But the Metro North rail had the last bar car in America. So at least at the end of the day, you go in, you meet your friends, you'd sit, you'd have a couple of drinks. What time was it open?

Oh, shit. It was, I mean, I think it was like, don't hold me to this, but maybe 4 o'clock they'd open the bar. 4 p.m. they'd open the bar? Oh, yeah. Yeah, so if you showed up at 6.30 and you were stressed or 7 o'clock, you'd jump on the 705s, you'd get back to New Canaan. You could knock back three gin and tonics. Yeah, scotch. Yes.

You'd get home. I was always amazed. There it is. Yeah, look at that. Yeah. So these people are just drinking on their way home yeah look at that yeah so these people just drinking on their way home look at that son of a bitch but in the previous picture the guy in the fleece smiling in the background he's hammered right yeah just like look at that mob side yeah but still

yeah it's a rough way to live three days or three hours rather at 24 just spent commuting look at everybody's cheers you're gonna find me in one of those photos at some point. Bet it created a lot of alcoholics. Well, you know, you'd see some guys that could knock back four or five drinks in the course

of the train trip. And then they'd walk out, go to their, get their car and drive home. You'd think, really? I was always amazed that New Canaan Police

didn't have a permanent setup out there outside the train station. But it was, you know, it was nice and we got a lot of business done there. And anyway, so, but the point being But it was, you know, it was nice, and we got a lot of business done there. And anyway, so but the point being is it was three hours every day, right?

So we moved to Idaho, and I cut my commute down to about five minutes at best, right? Even when there's traffic. And that's a quality of life. So I get it when I hear it from folks that work for us. That makes sense. But there has to be a balance because if you go too far one way, you're not making the revenue to pay their salaries and they're out of a job. Well, it goes back to what we were talking about before. Like what do you really want to do with your life?

What do you really want to do with your time? And how much time do you really have left? And I think so many people are a product of momentum. They're caught up in whatever they're doing and they just keep doing it. And then they don't like it, but this is what they're doing. And they don't really have the time. And that's one of the things that the pandemic did afford a lot of people. It afforded people the time to reassess and reevaluate what they're doing with their life. A lot of people changed occupations. A lot of people reluctantly did because their businesses went under. A lot of people, they had a chance to say, hey, you know what I realized?

I've been putting all this money and time into this company, and now this company doesn't even fucking exist anymore. And the rug was pulled out from under me. What do I really want to do, and how do I pursue that? Yeah, and I think that's a natural reaction. Yeah, I mean, we ran flat. No earnings, right? But we didn't during that whole pandemic, but we didn't let anybody off, right? I mean, I could have made money if I'd laid people off, but I don't think that's the right,

it's not like I'm running a commune or anything, but I don't think that's the right way to live, right? So we just kept everybody on and just dealt with the fact that there was nothing going down to the bottom line. Fine. I mean, what do I care at the end of the day? These people are feeding their families and yada, yada, yada. I sound like fucking Mother Teresa. Anyway. No, you sound like you're a good boss.

Yeah. So it worked out from our perspective. We kept everybody on, and we were fortunate in that regard. But I think everybody's trying to assess. We're a small business, but even the biggest companies that we deal with, some of the largest in the world, they're spending an incredible amount of time trying to sort this out, trying to figure out how do we motivate this new mindset within the workforce, right? And it's a generational thing, right? Because the older personnel, like, I'm back

in the office, you know, and it's, for the most part, And for the most part, it's not completely true, but for the most part, it's the younger staff. And there's also a problem with entitlement. There's a lot of younger people that have been sort of given this philosophy and this mindset that you're entitled to a certain amount of compensation. You're entitled to work. You're entitled to benefit. you're entitled to benefit, you're entitled to all this. It's not necessarily that you're providing a service for this company and this company benefits from having you in there.

You're entitled to things without any consideration whatsoever as to how this affects the bottom line of this company that you work for. They're not thinking long term or in terms of a group. They're thinking of themselves. Yeah. And this is people have been sort of programmed to think that way now. Right. And I think I think that's true.

But I think also one thing I've realized recently, maybe because it's this weird world that we came out of the pandemic and this new idea amongst the workforce to some degree, is we need to be more transparent about the business, right? They can't be expected to understand the strains and stresses of running a business if they don't understand some of the basics, right? And so sharing sort of top line financials, explaining, you know, look, this is what we need to break even every month, right? This is what we're making. Here, look at this. It's up and down, you know? And so, you know, we're not like this cash cow that every time you turn around and ask for a pay rise, we're going to be able to give it to you. You know, maybe we find other ways of doing it. We, you know, we came up with a, admittedly, stolen idea from a company that we work for as a client, or they're a client, and they do a mandatory rest and recovery break, right? Like

a week off, in addition to all the other time off. They say, you got to put your phones away. We're not going to contact you. You get this extra week. And you know what? And so we've implemented that in a way to try to find other, when we don't have the cash at the bottom line, to keep people incentivized, right? But you're constantly looking for those things. And then sometimes it's a little discouraging because you don't get the feeling that anybody, not anybody, but some folks don't appreciate it. Right. I want some more.

And then they expect that time off. And why do I work – you know, in Europe, they get months off. They get months off. Oh, my God. Yeah. Well, I think about it. I mean, you know, maternity leave now is basically, you know, we do three months. And I had a question about paternity leave.

And not that long ago, but I was like, paternity leave? It took me a second to realize you're talking about, okay, take time off as the father. Yes. Yeah. Isn't that wild? That, to me, is wild. It's very wild. I know a guy who works for a company.

They get a lot of time off paternity leave, and they're also required to give that person a raise if other people within his group get a raise as well. So if you get, and I'm talking a long time, I don't want to say the number because I'm not sure, but it's more than six months. Holy shit. Yes. So what happens? So you get all this time off. Now, what if you take all this time off and you knock your wife up again? Well, then- Which may well happen. Which may well happen. Which may well happen. During the course of six months. Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, if you're fortunate. I think it's more than six months. I think it's something like 18 months. I'll tell you the honest truth is. Paid. I don't see how. I mean, my reaction was paternity leave.

I mean, unless you're a dude with like fucking milk producing breasts, that baby doesn't want anything to do with you. Right? You got no purpose in life being at home. You're probably just going to irritate your wife. Well, you're supposed to be there helping. You're supposed to help. How many, okay.

How many husbands are going to be like, honey, I'm going to get, here's what I'm going to do to that. I'm going to vacuum the house. I'm going to fold the laundry. I'm going to make dinner. Well, my favorite was when Pete Buttigieg took paternity leave.

Him and his husband took paternity leave. Like, okay. Didn't one of them have fake breasts? Yeah, look at this. I'm doing 18-month maternity leave, and this is why it's awesome. So grateful that Canada now offers 18-month maternity leave option. Would you take a longer mat to leave if you could make it work? So this is the thing.

Like, now you have a baby, and the company is just paying for you to live, which, I mean, maternity is different. What I was talking about is paternity. Yeah, paternity. That's actually what I thought I clicked on. There's one that says they have a 12 to 18 month paternal leave. Paternal. Yeah.

Parental. Okay, so now they're referring to it as like parental leave. But paternity is the father. Yeah. And that's where it gets bonkers. Yeah. I don't, I mean, again, we'll probably end up doing like, okay, you can take, fuck, you know, a couple of weeks or whatever.

I mean, again, I'm not buying the idea that you're going to be at home, you know, running the household while your wife, you know, relaxes and recovers and enjoys the baby. Maybe I'm wrong about this. Well, listen, a couple of weeks or even a month, whatever it is, whatever reasonable number sounds right, but when you get to 18 months paternity leave, if that is really happening, that seems fucking insane. And it also seems like if someone was like the type of person

that likes to game a system, like you just keep knocking up your wife and you just keep getting free money. In a year and a half, like she's – that's irish twins right yeah in a year and a half she's six months pregnant with the next one and then you know so you go back to work for three months is that what you do u.s is the only country with papa new guinea that doesn't have federally mandated maternity leave well papa new gu Guinea also has cannibalism. Well, yes, that's what I thought. No federally mandated policy to give mothers paid time off.

Well, I certainly think that mothers should get paid time off. U.S. is one of only 15 that does not offer paternity leave. Of the top 41 richest countries. I mean, companies do. So what they're saying here is federal law. So federal law is not in tune with this to offer it. I'm sure they will. And they're, by signing a measure that grants federal employees 12 weeks of paid parental leave. Look, again, we're doing, what, three months maternity leave. I'm sure we'll end up settling on something for paternity leave. for paternity leave. I remember, you know, our UK employees would get, God, I think it was like eight months, I mean, off. And you had to hold their job, you know, which was great because our employees were terrific and we wanted to have them back, but you had to hold their position open.

And, you know, it's when you're a small company, that's, you know, that's a stress, right? Especially if you're barely getting by. Yeah. So it's tricky. I just remember when my kids were babies, I really served no purpose, right? I mean, it was not like the baby actually would wake up and say, where's dad, right? I mean, it was fun. Don't get me wrong.

And they were great little kids, right? They want their mom. They want their mom, yeah. And they were great little kids, right? They want their mom. They want their mom, yeah. But the idea is that you're supposed to help the mom and that the company is supposed to be able to sustain this. And thank God I did.

I was quite the helper. I'm a very tidy person. I bet you are. Yeah, I am. I'm a very tidy person. I know it doesn't look like that when I leave here. There's like cigar ash everywhere. Well, it's like everybody else when they leave here.

It's normal. You know what I thought about? This is going to sound stupid, but I forget what triggered it. Something you said just a short while ago. I was thinking about, oh, I know what it was. You were talking about your place in life and all that. And I was thinking, I think one of the things that I've failed on with the kids is, it's going to sound odd, is church, is religion. And I, you know, I'm not agnostic. I'm not an atheist by any means. You know, I think there's

something higher up there. I don't, I don't, I don't mean that I failed to take the kids to a certain organized church every Sunday, but we don't really done that, right? I talk about that with my wife. And, you know, now that our kids are older, it's like every other family. When you say, come on, kids, we're going to go to church on Sunday, they're like, seriously? You know, I got practice, or I got to do this,

or I got to do that, or I'm on my switch, or whatever. But I feel like I may have dropped the ball in giving them a sense of something bigger, right? And I don't, again, I don't know whether that's, you know, it doesn't matter whether you're Church of England or Catholic or whatever, Presbyterian. I'm just thinking, and it's interesting. And I don't know why I was focused on that. I've been thinking about that for a while, and I've been, you know, looking at my kids and thinking, did I really, did I screw up?

a while and I've been, you know, looking at my kids and thinking, did I really, did I screw up? Because I tend to be somewhat, not cynical, but my problem with organized religion is that idea that, you know, a particular religion has a lock on the truth, right? And that's always kind of bothered me, right? And I think a lot of religions do a lot of good, they try, and I think it's important for people to think about something bigger, right? And whatever that thing may be, God bless them, go with whatever. But I think because I'd always had this thing about, necessarily about organized religion, that I may have gone too far in the other direction

and just not worried about it. And now as my kids are getting older, I'm thinking, you know, maybe I fucked up and should have given them at least the chance to think about it, right? I think there's a benefit to structure. There's a benefit to that kind of structure. And there's a benefit to having like what I would call a moral scaffolding.

And, you know, this sense of a higher purpose, whether or not you believe all of it. There's something to it. And it's always existed in human civilization. It's always existed in human civilization it's always existed in cultures it's a way that people keep people together and give people a sense of purpose i mean some of the most disciplined people that i know are very religious it's really fascinating particularly fighters like a lot of the islamic fighters out of dagestan they're some of the most dominant fighters and some of the most religious fighters. So devout. Because they don't have the distractions that a lot of the hedonists do.

Yeah. You know, they're not party. Like the guys at Khabib Nurmagomedov's camp are some of the most dominant fighters. They wear their hair all exactly the same way. They practice. All they care about is like family, religion, training. They don't chase girls. They don't drink.

They're just training constantly, like insanely dedicated to their craft. And they're the most dominant. Is there an element there where they don't have – it's also because they're coming out of something where they don't have much perhaps? Sure. And so that drives them. But even when they do have much, like, Khabib is very wealthy. Yeah. And he drives a Toyota truck.

I mean, he lives in the same house. I mean, it's like he's very devout in his beliefs and the way he's raising other fighters. And now he just got out. I think he's decided to retire completely from mixed martial arts coaching and everything. Very religious. And there's something to that. I mean, some people say, I don't want that in my life. I don't want

that kind of control over me. And I get it. I get that too. But I also think there is some sort of a benefit to having structure. And there's a benefit to having purpose. And there's a benefit to having rituals and things that everyone does together. There's like a bonding that comes with that, that it can't be denied. And I know that some people say, well, no, religion is a tool of control and religion is a tool. It's also self-control. There's a lot of discipline and a lot of structure that benefits people. Yeah. I think it's, I think for me, part is also just the idea that it, you know,

hopefully it drives you to think, right, about some of those issues and some of the bigger picture concerns. We went to a local, what is it, United Methodist Church the other day on Sunday, just my wife and I

because we couldn't get the kids to un-ass the sofa. And so we went, and they actually, they had a little, the guy, nice guy, Dwayne, had a sermon about the Bible and sort of the way that it's viewed and how it's used in various ways in terms of interpretation. But they did say one thing, which was the whole point of the Bible is it's ambiguous. It's diverse. It's a collection of books, essentially, over a long period of time. And it's not intended to be like a manual. And so that was the first time I'd really heard that about the Bible, where it's not an instruction manual or a how-to manual.

It's more of a way to pursue, in a sense, don't ask, what does it mean? Just kind of ask, what am I looking for? And I think that question about what am I looking for, I think for kids, maybe because to your point about community, maybe there's some value there. But, you know, so and I guess never say never. The kids can always end up being interested in religion, you know, for whatever reason down the road. I just I think my own personal concerns of organized religion kind of shut that door when they were early on. And for some reason lately I've been thinking about that and thinking, you know, eh, what do I know?

People are like, what the fuck? He's having an existential crisis in the middle of the show. Well, I think everybody has existential crises from time to time, and if not, you're probably not really analyzing things deeply. Yeah. Yeah, that's a nice way to put it. And on that note. Yeah.

Oh, God. All right, Mike Baker. Hey, what time is it? Oh, it's good to see you, my friend. Look at that. So your book is available. The audio book is available right now, Company Rules, or Everything I Know About Business I Learned from the CIA. I know.

And again, it's not an agency book. It's a book about business. And you can read it free for 60 days. You can read it free for 60 days. Jamie, do you have that link that we could throw up there that people could go to? Oh, look at that. You can read it. Try.

Try.scribd.com slash baker. Yeah, try.scribd.com slash baker. You get 60 days free. And scribd is spelled S-C-R-I-B-D. Exactly. And you'll get steak knives and a set of soft luggage and a timeshare. All right, Mike Baker. Thank you, Mr. Rogan. Good to see you, my friend. Good to see you, man. Take it easy. Bye, everybody.