The Joe Rogan Experience - #2021 - Mike Baker

Episode Date: August 16, 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 "Company Rules, Or Everything I Know About Business I Learned from the CIA." Look for "The President's Daily Brief" podcast he's hosting startring on September 5. www.portmansquaregroup.com

The Joe Rogan Experience. Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day. That's a funny cigar. It's not bad, right? It's really nice. Foundation Cigars, shout out to them. What's up, Mike Baker? How are you? I'm doing well, thank you.

What do you got in those pieces of paper to scare the shit out of me with? Yeah, you know what? I got notes. I got? Yeah, you know what? I got notes because you know why because I'm always being accused of Wandering and not being as organized as I should be that's just this podcast does that to people? Yeah, maybe so, but I said to myself fuck it. I'm gonna I'm gonna write some things down Okay, because there's so much has happened since the last time we sat down. Yeah, and so I made a list I'm gonna run through that if you don't mind, okay Since last show see I even had lined it because so much has happened since the last time we sat down. Yeah. And so I made a list. I'm going to run through that if you don't mind.

Okay. Since last show. See, I even headlined it. Chinese spy balloon. Failed mutiny in Russia. Four indictments of Trump. No, last night was the fourth. Bank account records showing the Biden family took over $20 million. Pee Wee Herman died.

I'm glad you got that in your notes. I got that. I actually, yeah, it's right there. And it's right before the two-year anniversary of the Afghan withdrawal. I probably should have put that above Pee Wee Herman. Why did you put Pee Wee Herman in there? You know what?

Because when I found out that Paul Rubens died, I was sad. I mean, it was like, I'm old enough. I actually went to a show that Paul did when he was kind of working out his peewee character, right? Oh, really? And it was fantastic. When was this?

It was a great show. This was, oh, fuck, it was years ago. So it would have been before I, it was probably like 80, shit, 82, 83, 81, somewhere in that time frame, right? It was a long time ago. It was at Georgetown University in D.C. And it was a great show.

Anyway, point blank. And I always thought he didn't get enough credit for Pee Wee's Playhouse. And I know, people are like, what the fuck is he talking about? But he was really, he was a good guy. He kind of got off the rails a little bit for a period of time. He was wanking in a porn theater.

Yeah, but isn't that what they do in those things? Especially a gay porn theater? I guess, yeah. It's got to sound weird, right, to kids, though? Yeah. Like, porn theater? What? I know.

Yeah. They used to have to go to places. You had to? I don't know if you had to have to go to places. You had to? I don't know if you had to. Back when he was doing it, I don't think there was a law, but I think back when he was doing it, VHS tapes were out. I think DVDs were out back then, too, because this was like, I want to say he got busted in like 90-something.

Yeah, it was easily 91. 91, okay, yeah. So definitely VHS tapes were out. That was back when you had to go through the curtains. Or laser discs or something. 90 something? Yeah, it was easily 91. So definitely VHS tapes. That was back when you had to go through the curtains. Or laser discs or something. These kids today, I don't know, jack shit. They're getting their porn off of a phone. Well, that's just it.

They don't have an appreciation for how hard you had to work back in the 70s and 80s. I mean, it got easier by the time the 1990s were around, but you had to go on like a quest or something. Yeah, you had to be shamed. Yeah. What is it that you seek? Simple facts of what happened Friday night in Rubin's hometown of

Sarasota, Florida, familiar by now. According to the county sheriff's office, three detectives They said it! Three guys! They catch people jerking off at the XXX South Trail Cinema to watch the audience that was watching a triple bill of Catalina 5-0 Tiger Shark, Nurse Nancy, and Turn Up the Heat. After the sting operation had hauled in three men on charges of violating Florida State Statute 800.03, exposure of sexual organs. Detective William Walters allegedly saw a man masturbate, in quotes.

That's how the rap sheet spells it. Spells it wrong. Instead of er, it says e. In the darkened theater at 8.25pm and again at 8.35pm. Twice. Caught him twice. Yeah. The first sighting wasn't enough. He had to go back to get a second. Meanwhile, the guy's got amazing recovery powers.

8.25pm, he blasts off and then he's back at it at 8.35. That's a fucking stud right there. Yeah, and that was before Viagra. Place under, I don't know if that's true. When did Viagra come around? Placed under arrest upon leaving the theater, the alleged offender quietly told the detectives his famous pseudonym, and according to the the police made a novel peewee-esque attempt at a buy-off he offered to perform at a children's benefit for the sheriff's office if the charges

were dropped a department spokesperson said that the deputies did not feel the time they had enough probable cause to charge rubens with attempted bribery well is that bribery really when you're saying you're gonna perform at an event isn't it money only itbery, really, when you're saying you're going to perform at an event? Isn't it money, only bribery? No, you're bartering. Anything? Like if someone says, I'll suck your cock. That's bribery.

A local reporter recognized Rubin's name on the arrest sheet the next day. Within hours, the scandal machinery was roaring at full throttle. Oh, boy. Yeah. Yeah. But then, you know what he did? Okay, so Yeah. Yeah. But then he, you know what he did?

Okay, so everybody makes mistakes. But then he recovered and, you know, he went on to... It's a fairly harmless crime. First of all,

if you're in a porn theater, I think you should assume that those dudes with raincoats on are beaten off. Yeah. You know, I mean, just, you're wearing

rubber gloves in there and, like, those things are disgusting. And to be fair... If people don't recognize... know, I mean, just you're wearing rubber gloves in there. And like, those things are disgusting. And to be fair. People don't recognize, like, I never went into one of those. So I'm just on anecdotes. But I would imagine like porn theaters are fucking gross. You'd have to think so, right? I mean, a regular theater is bad enough.

Your feet stick to the floor. And that's just from the Pepsi. Yeah. Yeah. Porn theater. I got to tell floor. And that's just from the Pepsi. Yeah. Yeah. The Porn Theater. I gotta tell you, and honestly, Nurse Nancy

was an underrated film, I think. So, there was that. So that's Paul Rubens. That's Pee Wee Herman. He died. I just made a note

because I thought... My friend Phil Hartman worked with him. That's how he kind of got his start in show business on Pee Wee's Playhouse. I didn't know that. Yeah, he was on Pee Wee's Playhouse. He was one of the writers foree-Wee's Playhouse. That's interesting. I didn't know that. Yeah, he was on Pee-Wee's Playhouse.

He was one of the writers for Pee-Wee's Playhouse. Oh, damn. Yeah, he always spoke very highly of Pee-Wee. Yeah. Oh. Yeah. I fucking loved that show when I was a kid. Yeah.

It was hilarious. And Pee-Wee's Big Adventure is a fucking amazing movie. Exactly. And that was, when did that come out? That was, I want to say 80. Yeah, 89 I must say. Yeah. Yeah.

While I was dating this girl, I remember specifically the girl that I was dating at the time, that I was dating like right around, I was graduating high school, because we were crying laughing. It was so funny. Like back then, it was so unique. Don't forget to tell them Large Marge sent you. Fun fucking movie. Yeah, I remember I took a date to Pee-wee's show, his comedy show. I mean, the place was rolling, right?

He really was. It was an interesting cat, but anyway. I like that I'm seeing that side of you, Mike Baker. Yeah. The Pee-wee Herman figure. Pee-wee Herman. I still have a pair of his, this is going to sound weird, signed big underpants. I kept them all these years because they're so fucking funny.

And yeah, I'll give them to one of my boys. I'm not sure which one. Maybe put it in a museum somewhere. Probably worth a lot of money one day. I don't even know where we go from Pee Wee Herman. We go from that to whatever notes you got. Oh, yeah. Anything else crazy?

Yeah, well, we're going to unfreeze a lot of money for the Iran prisoner swap. That's another story. But we could start with the Chinese spy balloon since I started there first. So what is your take on the Chinese spy balloon? They said that Trump, that there was a bunch of those that were happening while Trump was in office, but they didn't tell him about it

because they were worried he was going to shoot him down, which I thought was fucking amazing. You know what? I'm not going to, at this stage of the game, I'm not going to say anything that doesn't sound plausible. Everything sounds plausible nowadays. So the Chinese regime continues, just like with the fucking Wuhan lab.

The Chinese regime continues to just say it was a weather balloon, right? It got blown off course. It was a weather balloon. Well, A, it didn't get blown off course. It had a massive array of propellers. It had a rudder. It had solar panels to keep those propellers churning. They knew exactly what they were doing the way they were going um and you know it shows up over whatever

alaska on the end of january whenever and uh proceeds to travel across the country in a path that is clearly designed to you know collect intelligence from sensitive facilities. It flies over Montana. What's in Montana? A lot, but there's Malmstrom Air Force Base, and that's part of where we put our land-based nukes. What part of Montana is that in? The northern part.

Close to Canada? Yeah. Well, a little further south than Canada, but it's like the top quarter, I guess. I think that's right. And it is 150 or so silo-based nukes there. There it is. There it is. So that's the base?

Yeah. And so it was flying over that flying over flying over malmstrom um and so they were aware of it the air force base was aware of it um they by the time yeah and look it's not as if we're not you know uh taking measures or countermeasures to prevent uh surveillance because the chinese have spy satellites, very technical, very, very advanced. So we know how to protect communications. We know how to protect. And we also know what's available. Right. So satellite imagery is going to give you a fair amount of information anyway. So the question is, OK, well, why the hell was this thing, which was as tall as the Statue of Liberty? Why was it floating around up there with an array of antennas obviously there to collect? But it went over there.

It went over Omaha or near Omaha where we've got U.S. Strategic Command and OFAT Air Force Base. And, you know, the U.S. government, the military was like, well, we don't believe after the fact, after we shot it down, they're like, we don't believe that it was collecting, you know, and we took measures to prevent it from collecting. And not only that, we didn't shoot it down at the beginning because we were monitoring its capabilities and learning from that. Now, part of that is true, right? If you've got a target, you identify a target, unlike with law enforcement in the intelligence world, you let that run, right? Because you want to learn everything you can about that target. You know, who's there to support it? What does, you know, what's that look like? How do they know that? Can they figure out what it's transmitting? Can they tune into it? Yes, most of it's signals, intelligence, and capabilities. It's not really imagery that you're getting from it, although that's part of it.

But, you know, so I have no doubt that, you know, because everyone was saying, well, why don't we just shoot the fucker down when it showed up over Alaska on the 28th of January? And when we became aware of it initially and, you know, because we live in this highly partisan world, everybody was saying, well, because Biden's inept and they didn't know what they were doing and they let it float all the way across the states. So you can't discount the argument that says, well, part of it is we let it go because we were gathering intelligence ourselves from their capabilities. It's always interesting to know. It's just like when we – here I go disappearing down a rabbit hole. When we lost that platform, that air asset during the Abbottabad raid, right, and we had to leave it behind. And they destroyed, you know, to the degree they could, everything that was in it of interest. But the platform itself was of interest, right?

It was because the two things that are important nowadays are stealth and speed. You know, there was a stealth design involved there. And there's also material science that's interesting. So left it behind after they bagged bin Laden, literally. And then three days later, the Pakistanis had invited the Chinese to come in. And they were swarming all over that helicopter right gathering intelligence so you always if you have the opportunity to observe a target I guess like I said you know then you do and you can gain intelligence from so I'm not one of those people who said I should

have shot it down immediately because I don't know what they were getting from it but I do know that the purpose of the balloon was to gather intelligence uh on, on our sensitive facilities to some degree. So anyway, and then they sent all the remains after they recovered them off the coast of South Carolina to wherever Quantico. And that was kind of the last we ever heard of it, right? Because we've all got attention deficit disorder. Nobody wants to, you know, think, okay, what did we learn? Can we do a hot wash on it and figure out? And to what degree can you tell the public what the hell was going on right because honestly i you know i don't know that we ever would have learned about it if it hadn't been so large and you know members of the public hadn't seen it or spotted it so what else too was it hovering around it it went to

it cut a path through a couple of other bases minot and and I forget where else it was to the south of there. But the fact that it hovered over a period of time, over Malmstrom, right, is really all you need to know, right? Because if it's a weather balloon, you know, so it doesn't, I guess one point being, we never really pushed the Chinese regime under Xi for anything. We haven't forced the hand on the pandemic and we're going to have another pandemic. So it'd be nice to know what the fuck actually happened, not to disappear to another. Why do you think we're going to have another pandemic? Everybody keeps saying that. Yeah. Well, because-

It's very disconcerting. We haven't had one in 100 years not a legitimate one well you know you know um not to uh toot my own horn which i guess you know that would be an interesting thing if you could do that but um i it was a few years back when we were talking and i said you know we'll have the next big thing will be a pandemic right and someone had pointed that out to me. I'd forgotten about it, but they sent it to me. And so my point back then and the point now is that it's just it's bound to happen. Right. We're an increasingly shrinking globe. There's more people. We're in contact. We're, you know, with everything that goes on. Right. Whether it's in a naturalbased or just what we're doing in biotech and pharma, it's bound to happen.

And so I guess you'd think that if we were serious-minded, we would demand answers, and we wouldn't just allow the Xi regime to just shrug it off constantly. You know that there would be a massive debrief on this whole situation if it happened in the US or the UK or you know started in Australia wherever right the rest of the world wouldn't let it go but there's just something there's something about it we just we never push the Chinese regime to the degree that we need to to get an answer and and it's in so the

point being it's the same with the damn balloon is it because we don't think we'll ever get an answer and it's kind of a waste of time? Because it's not like they're transparent. That's part of it. Yeah. Yeah. I think that's it. They would just not tell us the truth. Yeah.

I think that's part of it. It's like doing business in China. If you're investing in a pseudo state-owned enterprise or whatever, you always know there's going to be three or four or five sets of books, right? They're just very good at obfuscating. And they also think they don't need to answer. We don't care. They don't care.

And Xi believes that they are still on, despite some problems in their economy, they're still on the slow march to the top of the food chain. So he certainly doesn't care. Anyway. Do you think anything would be different if someone else was in office? No, I don't think so. I don't think so. I'm not going to say that. I'm not going to say if we got, you know, if Trump or, you know, a Republican was in office that we'd get a different result. I don't think so. We've had sort of an unsatisfactory relationship

related to China for decades. We just – we haven't – no administration has really pushed back appropriately against their theft of economic intelligence or research and development. So all those things keep happening and we never make the effort, right? I mean look at – some of the things they're doing now. I've gotten bizarrely focused on the issue of – we've talked about this before, critical minerals, right? I mean, look at some of the things they're doing now. I've gotten bizarrely focused on the issue of, we've talked about this before, critical minerals, right? Because one of the things that I find really interesting is this push towards net zero, you know, carbon production and getting rid of fossil fuels, stopping fossil fuels. fossil fuels. Well, you can't stop fossil fuels and regulate mining out of existence at the same time. You've got to do one or the other to fuel production, to fuel manufacturing, to heat people's

homes, to produce whatever you're going to produce. And so if we want to get rid of fossil fuels, by definition, you have to increase mining of critical minerals. There's just no way around it. If you do both, which the Biden administration is basically trying to do, I think they're placating their base by, yeah, we're going to get rid of fossil fuels. And they're also making decisions that are over-regulating the permitting process for mining. And we have a lot of critical minerals available in this country, right? We've got lithium, phosphate, which should be on the critical minerals list. We've got all these things that we need if we're going to continue to march away from fossil fuels. But the current administration just keeps under this theory of keep it in the ground, right? And that's a big push by environmentalists, right?

Keep it all in the ground, right? Lock it up. But how do they, the only way to do that is to keep allowing what's essentially slave labor to extract cobalt and things from the Congo. Right. And you've talked about this and absolutely. Siddharth Kara's book is insane. Yeah.

And the videos that he got when he was, you know, he risked his life to get footage of this stuff in the Congo. Right. It's horrendous. And anybody thinks that in any way that that's a good solution to our problems is fucking insane. But that's where this is going. If if the U.S. continues and this is where I'll bring China in. And by the way, China, they own or operate. I think it's like 15 of the 19 cobalt mines in in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. So it doesn't matter whether they're leading the way in China controls 30 of the 50 critical minerals.

Anyway, they produce more than anybody else. They certainly control the refining process controls 30 of the 50 critical minerals anyway. They produce more than anybody else. They certainly control the refining process for most of the critical minerals. But it doesn't matter whether they're mining it in their own country. They've also been busy locking up opportunities elsewhere, right, to control these things. And so, you know, there's very little pushback. But if you look at one case, because we've talked about cobalt, we've talked about lithium, which is here we could be mining, but the government's shutting down opportunities to do that, either by declaring things off-limits in terms of the land area or just making the permitting process so damn difficult. so damn difficult. But, you know, phosphate, I mentioned that as an example, I got disappeared down some rabbit hole looking at all of this. It's not on the critical minerals list, right? And there's 50 critical minerals. Now, phosphate, along with two other things, nitrogen and potassium, are the key nutrients that you use for fertilizers, right, to feed the world,

not just the U.S., right? You can't do mass farming, right? And everybody wants to grow local, but the reality is it's a lot of people, right? And if you want, you know, the least privileged people around the globe to eat, you got to do large-scale farming. You can't do that without phosphate, right? And so China is the number one producer of phosphate in the world. And I think Russia is fourth. And they produce like five times more combined, five times more than we do in the U.S. And yet there is significant pushback here in the U.S., in part because it fits a Chinese narrative. And the Chinese have decided, the regime has, again, not the people, the Chinese regime has decided that one of the best ways to get what

they want in terms of U.S. behavior is not to try to influence, you know, the White House, but it's to reach out to local and state officials. So here's where I'm going with this. When you look at decisions made at state level or local level, the Chinese regime and the ODNI, the Director of National Intelligence, released a report and they talked about this. They said that the Chinese are doubling down on their efforts to exert influence through a variety of means, exert influence through a variety of means, environmental groups, encouraging litigation against mining operations or whatever it may be, social influencers to try to get a message out that influences local and state regulators to do things such as saying, no, got to keep it in the

ground. No, we don't want phosphate mining as an example. And that serves the purpose. Whether an environmental group or whether a group that's out there that focuses on these things and files lawsuits constantly for environmental purposes. And then, by the way, those lawyers, you know, usually recoup their funds from, you know, what is called the Endangered Species Act that allows them to get their money back. So you think, oh, wow, these lawyers are fighting and it's pro bono. No, it's not. They're getting paid. So, but they're doing it, whether they do it knowingly or whether they do it unwittingly, it still serves the purpose of the Chinese regime, which is looking to say, keep it in the ground because we want to control all of this. And again, whether it's cobalt, whether it's lithium, whether it's phosphate, whatever it may be, it's a fascinating thing. But the point being that we can't pursue a green future and at the same time overregulate the mining process. And it just doesn't work.

work? China has so much influence on America. It's crazy how different the playing field is between what we're allowed to do. Americans can't own businesses in China. They can't own land in China. They can't buy property. But China can do all those things here. And they can influence our universities. They bring their students over here their students siphon up data and information and oftentimes get caught I mean, it's it's kind of possibly yeah, yeah, they get caught Yeah, yeah, there's been quite a few of those cases there have been but but you think about that's that's the tip of the iceberg Right. That's that's a that's a small number that Because it's it's it's an incredibly heavy left right a counterintelligence operation is is really tough and so i look at that and i think yeah thank god we caught that person but then you think how many more they're out there right so that's the thing it's like how

many of them are just more careful yeah yeah it's um it is interesting in a way we used to talk about during when you know when we were on the war on terror right and everybody's forgotten's forgotten about that, you know, for the most part, although we probably should talk on the back burner. Yeah, it's and it's it's bubbling away in Afghanistan, which we should also talk about. But but we used to talk about war on terror and how the terrorists were using our open society against us. Right. Right. And, you know, the Chinese regime does the same thing, right? They understand and they look at how we operate and they say, okay, where's the weaknesses, right? Where are the leverage points that we can use to turn that against them?

And, you know, we, this idea, I mean, look, China produces more carbon than all the developed nations combined. Which is very important to talk about when people are talking about going green. Because the amount of impact that would happen even if the United States went to zero, went to zero carbon output, you're not going to put a dent in what's happening to the world. Because most of it is coming from China and India. India, right. That's most of it. So all this shit about don't eat meat because we're going to save the world, you're not saving jack shit.

I don't understand where that message is coming from or why there's not a nuanced perspective where people are taking into account all these other variables. Well, in part, again— It doesn't fit the narrative. it doesn't fit the narrative, but also there is this effort. Look, I mean, we talked, you know, there's you remember the what was that called? Internet Research Agency. Right. And so the potential for influence on the elections back in the day, which wasn't that long ago. And the Chinese regime actually does it better than the Russians.

Right. They've got more resources. They've got a much longer view. Frankly, they're more sophisticated. Right. And so sometimes you look at things and you think, well, that doesn't make any sense. Why, you know, why are we, you know, acting in this way? And then you think, well, because you've got like a local or grassroots community activist group, right? And they're not Chinese spies. They're not working. But the Chinese regime identifies them and says, you know what, if we can influence them,

it's just pure, you know, propaganda or covert action campaign. If I can influence that activist group to go out and tell those, whomever, the city officials or the county commissioners or whatever, that this is bad, right? And this is, we need to stop this, right? We shouldn't be mining for lithium in Nevada or wherever. We shouldn't be pursuing, you know, logical steps to get, you know, control over the critical mineral supply chain issue, right? Why wouldn't you do that, right? It's smart activity on the part of the Chinese regime and the intel service there. So that part of it, to me, makes sense. The problem we have is that there's a lack of awareness, right? Now, there was a, again, it shows you I've been spending too

much time reading on this shit, but I'm fascinated by this idea that we're trying to do two things that are completely opposed to each other. Stop fossil fuels and also keep critical minerals in the ground that we're going to need to pursue green energy. That part is amazing, but I did actually write down... But that is part of the problem with green energy, is that it's not really green, because you do have to mine. And when you do mine, there is consequences. There's consequences. But as you pointed out, out I mean look we we mine cleaner and safer than anybody else and that's why there was a I'm gonna actually read a quote this shows you look see how I feel like I'm maturing. I've got organized Mike I know I know like this see I know there have been times when you've been staring at me thinking

Where the fuck is he talking about her? He's is he going is he taking a nap? So they had a hearing in Arizona not too long ago about critical minerals, the issue of critical minerals actions by the Biden administration hurt America's economy, threaten our national security and push mineral production abroad, where environmental and labor standards pale in comparison with our own. with our own, right? And that's absolutely correct. And again, all you have to do is look at what goes on in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. It's insane, but I don't see that we're going to walk that back, right? Because there's just, there's too much pushback. And no matter what mineral you're talking about, I don't see that necessarily changing unless you get maybe a change in administration, and then you get the effort to deregulate and then you speed up permitting. But at some point, we're going to be screwed. China recently put the brakes on exporting a couple of minerals that are critical to producing mineral systems and solar panels.

And they've done that in the past, right? And that should be a clear signal to us that we we got to change our thought process on all of this. But I'm not confident that will happen. Anyway. Yeah, I'm not confident either, because it seems like that narrative is just in the American public. You know, the mining is bad. We need to go green. But they don't see the inconsistencies of taking those two positions at the same time. Well, the Republicans have never done a particularly good job of messaging, right? And they need to get better at it. And I think they will. There's a few bills passed around, apparently, that may help the situation. But for now, I guess, you know, with China's kind of significant control over the minerals as it stands, we don't have any option other than to deal with them, right? And so no wonder we sometimes don't push back. And I guess that's where I was coming back around. You said,

why don't we push back? We don't have that much leverage right now so i think that's part of the answer well there's also we need a push for nuclear we're yeah legitimate new nuclear power plants in this country which is it's so hard for people to wrap their heads around because of three mile island and fukushima but that is the safest cleanest electricity that we can generate in this country well you would think that that would be a logical it's not a big leap right but you're right that you get people are so emotive right yeah and they stole you can say three mile island and that everybody knows right i mean and most people can't retain a lot of information about historical facts. Chernobyl, Fukushima. Chernobyl, yeah.

Yeah. And so, and we've gotten better at safety systems and redundancies, right? So, absolutely. But, you know, people talk about, well, we've got to expand nuclear energy. Well, you look at the deaths from from nuclear they're so small just in comparison to the chronic illness that comes from coal i mean we watched this documentary on this uh one town was it is it indian indiana jamie that one town yeah where there's multiple coal plants near the area and these people have like a fine dusting of particulate in their cars every day. So they're breathing this air that has this coal particulate.

And there's a host of chronic illnesses that are coming with this. So many people have respiratory conditions. Yeah, but – and we have been – we've been busy trying to shut down use of coal and fine. But you've got to replace it with something that's pragmatic. Right now, solar and wind isn't going to cut it. It seems people exaggerate about the efficiency and efficacy of solar and wind. They really do love to sort of exaggerate how effective it is and also how much energy it takes to generate a windmill, just to build one and maintain it.

Right. And also, what going green is going to mean to the grid system, right? And the demand for electricity. Right. All the cars. Yes. That was a thing in California. They said by 2035, we're not going to sell any internal combustion engines.

Also, don't charge your car because it's hot out. What the fuck? Everybody, stay home california yeah oh god it is the test case for stupidity yeah well you know who knows maybe uh the current governor is gonna you know throw his hat in the ring i think he is you think so yeah i think i mean i'm a armchair uh conspiracy theorist but uh I had to guess, I would say that all this stuff that's coming out slowly but surely about Biden is on purpose. And they want to get rid of him. I think he wants to run again, and I don't think the Democrats think that he could win.

I think they're right, and I think they're going to slowly but surely expose more of these very clear pieces of evidence of corruption yeah yeah the 20 million dollars is fucking bananas the fact that this isn't all over the new york times and the washington post and mainstream news that they're not blaring it from the rooftops because you know they would be if it was trump oh absolutely or really any you any, it wouldn't matter, Trump or whomever would be on the GOP side. No, look, I've got a, I've got a intelligence and investigations firm. You may have heard of them. I do. Portman Square Group, for all your information and security needs. You've changed the name a couple of times, huh?

Just avoiding bill collectors. You changed the name a couple of times, huh? Just avoiding bill collectors. Yeah, but I've got investigators, great people. The most rewarding thing about building a business is just the wonderful people that you eventually get to work with, and they raise families, and they stick with you. And so I've got some investigators that I guess the point is they could have wrapped this puppy up some time ago, right? It's an asset tracing exercise is what they're engaged in. And, you know, maybe they'll stay focused, maybe they'll keep going. But when you've got an asset tracing exercise,

you've got a myriad of single purpose companies set up up you know around there first of all when you look at a case and you say we've got 20 plus single-purpose companies set up here for pass-through of funds that's yeah what we would call a clue about money laundering right that's that's why you do that right hold to hide beneficial ownership to hide the flow of funds and transactions that are involved to obfuscate and make it difficult for the obvious because their feeling is most people will maybe dig once or twice, but then they'll get bored and they'll move on. Let's make this as complicated as possible. And so you start to see there's always fraud indicators. You start to see certain things in an investigation.

And the great thing about asset tracing also is that there are records, right? And that's what they're finding out now. And I'm glad because whether it's Biden, whether it's Trump, it wouldn't matter. If you've got an asshole who's in office and is engaged in pay for play, right? And there's no way, frankly, that this president didn't know that he was being used as the dog in the dog and pony show, right? And so they've got these records available to them. And with the power of the government, their ability to subpoena and do all these things that they can do, they will have the case figured out at some point. The problem with Washington is, do they have the grit to stick with it, right? And then the next question is, does anything happen as a result?

But it is, in my mind anyway, for what that's worth, there's no doubt. This is money laundering. And it's pathetic, as you pointed out, that there's so little interest from a completely incurious, well, not incurious, but just a completely partisan, significant majority of the media. They don't, it's not that they don't care. It's that they do care. And they're taking every effort. And they're now having to contort themselves into certain ways, because it's getting more and more difficult to provide top cover for the Biden administration. But they've been trying. And, you know, they're just

at some point, maybe the dam breaks and there's so much paper evidence that they can't ignore it anymore. But you would have thought that some enterprising young journalists who understand the importance of objectivity, whether it's a Democrat or Republican, would have gotten off their ass and really pursued this story. Because it's a Pulitzer Prize winning story at the end of the day. Yeah, but the question is, what kind of pushback did they get in pursuing that story? How dangerous is it for them to pursue that story? Because it seems like it would be fairly dangerous. I mean, you're talking about extraordinary amounts of money.

And this is just what's been uncovered, right? Right. So we've only gone back to what, like 2013 or 14 or something like that? Yeah, back to the VP days. Right. Yeah, yeah. So what about before that? Like when did this start?

Did this only start when he was VP? Did he get his son involved to give him some sort of a meaningful business? It seems like he was the bag man, right? And that's another part of this story that's fascinating. It's not like he was producing anything. It's not like Hunter Biden was producing something. He was producing some good videos. Yeah.

Made some great photos. He seems like the kind of guy that you would expect to be involved in that kind of behavior. Yeah. I mean, he's a wild boy. And he's also the sort of guy that you would identify immediately. If you were on the Chinese side of things, as an example, whatever, $8 million, whatever, he's the target. That's the guy.

Look at that. That's your weak link next to, with the greatest access possible, to the second most powerful person, theoretically, in the country. That's a fantastic target, right? There's all sorts of weaknesses there that you can play off of. And for them, $20 million over a few years? That's a fucking minor drop in the bucket. It's literally nothing. And it's a great payday for them.

It's literally nothing. And and that that's it's a great payday for them. And whether it president and then after that and was he aware did he know that hunter was out there doing all these things and using access and at first it was like i had no idea it wasn't talking and then suddenly it's like well you know i was on some phone calls but it wasn't important and now the media's got to spin that narrative. Well, he wasn't talking about anything of substance. Well, there's a new photo that just got released of him on a plane to Ukraine in 2015. Yeah. So I think this is to my point that I think they're slowly releasing this stuff because they plan on getting rid of him. Yeah. Well, if they do, then what happens to Kamala Harris?

She's gone. Yeah? Yeah. Yeah. There's no way. You can't keep her. She's got the lowest approval rating of any vice president ever.

Including Dan Quayle. Oh, God. There's a cultural force. I forgot about that guy. Oh, yeah. He was, what they used to, comics used to joke that that guy was assassination insurance. Nobody wants to kill the president and have that fucking

guy take over i forgot about that but no but you're right and i think if yeah they can't yeah they can't move kamala harris out as long as biden's the candidate right because that they wouldn't weather that optic um but if he has to step aside then obviously it's a brand new ticket it's a brand new day and they'll come up with something. So, you know, I I guess the question is, do they firmly believe that Biden can't win again if it's Trump or whomever? The only way Biden's going to win again is never Trump. These never Trump people. Yeah, there are people that will vote for a fucking box of hammers before they would vote for Trump. a fucking box of hammers before they would vote for Trump. And that's a real segment of our population.

I don't know what percentage is, but it's probably fairly high. They have enough trust in the Democratic establishment that they think that the Democrats would figure out a way to run the country better, even with a puppet, than they would with Donald Trump in office. Yeah. Well, and I think there's also the independents. Don't forget, you know, independents are sort of the moderates that, you know, previously had voted for Trump and then got tired of the chaos and then in the last election said, no, I'm not going to do that again.

I don't think they walk it back and say, yeah, actually give me, you know, because I don't people, again, very emotive. So. Well, there's also this the indictments. Now, what is your take on this Georgia thing? Because the Georgia thing is interesting because I was just watching this video today that was detailing what they were claiming was evidence of fraud in the Georgia election. in the Georgia election. And there's apparently some videos of people moving boxes around and doing some things that seem a little, at least on the surface, suspicious without an adequate explanation.

Yeah. I think they don't care whether they win or not. And I think they brought a fairly massive racketeering or RICO charge at the top of this sort of a criminal conspiracy. Yeah. But it involves Trump plus 18 others. And I think they can't be stupid. So they probably understand that it falls apart in appeal. Right. And I don't think that's going to hold up. But I don't think they care because last night, I mean, again, that shows you how bizarre this is. They held a press conference. They rushed this thing through. First of all, here's an interesting fact. First of all, the indictment showed up on the county Web site in the afternoon before the grand jury had voted and before they had come across with what the charges would be.

And before they had come across with what the charges would be. And so all of a sudden that comes across on the public domain. And I think it was I think it was Reuters that snapped it and kind of ran with it as a story. But then it was taken down off the county's Web site. And they were asked about it later on. And they said I was fictitious or some bullshit. So you wonder, OK, how did that get leaked? Because then those charges that showed up earlier in the day matched what ended up being voted on by the grand jury. So that's a little odd. And it's, as far as I can remember, I think it's illegal to leak that sort of information,

right, ahead of time. But also, how would they know? How would they know how the grand jury was going to decide at the end of the day what indictments to throw out there or to put out there in this charge? So that's something that probably should be looked at, but in today's world may not. But I think really she was pushing last night at whatever, 11.30, 12 o'clock at night. Who holds a press conference at this point at that time of night? But she was saying she wants it out there to start this trial in six months.

And so six months from now is, whatever, February. So right in the middle of all the caucuses and all the campaigning that goes on. And whether it's that one or whether it's the one from D.C. or it doesn't matter. They just they're they're creating a very lasting narrative that's going to go through the election season. And I think that's really what they want. And whether any of this actually holds, I don't think they give a rat's ass. You know, some people do. If this was happening in the other direction. Oh. And by the way, if Trump was in office and Biden was running against him. And this evidence was available, this evidence of

all the corruption with his son. I mean, that's far clearer. This is like real clear stuff. Well, but they always come back with, well, look, it was, you know, the Trump kids were working and doing business. And, you know, they had a business, business right they were real estate developers there's there's tangible activity there now um you know it i that's that's part of the problem that's how it gets muddied is is that people you know in the media or people who are supportive of an administration will say yeah but everybody does it everybody's engaged in pay for play everybody's engaged in influence peddling. And there's some truth in that.

But not everybody's engaged in money laundering. That might be worth some investigation. But again, I don't think that the point of this exercise on the part of the various DAs, and that's another thing. The DA down in Georgia, that's an elected position. And she's running for office again. And she's campaigning based on getting Trump. And she's raising money off of, this is what I'm going to do.

I'm going to get Trump. That seems a little odd, too. I don't know. It's no surprise that people are losing confidence in the government. Have you looked at any of the evidence of election manipulation? Some, but I'll be honest with you, I haven't disappeared fully down that rabbit hole yet. I don't, you know, I'm... Seems like it'd really suck in. Yeah, I think it would. And there's, you know, there's a lot of communities. The I think it would. And there's a lot of communities.

The times that I have looked, there's a lot of shit out there. And trying to decipher what is just crazy-ass bullshit from what is legitimate and deserves investigation, right? I'll be honest with you. I run out of time and i'm just like i'm sorry i gotta go you know watch one of the kids games um so which by the way one of my kids the middle boy sluggo is uh heading to florida to go to boarding school at the end of the month oh boy yeah he's gonna go play basketball at imG, which is an amazing academy, amazing place. Is that going to be hard for you, have him go to boarding school?

Eh, we couldn't wait to get him out of the house. No, he's a great kid. All the boys are fantastic. But he's very focused. He's very competitive. This is all he wants to do. And he's been down there before, and they do a great job academically and sports-wise. It's very much a sports-focused program.

Does he want to play professionally? Yeah, I guess any kid that is serious about what they do at the time. How tall is he? Oh, he's about three foot two. He's a white kid from Idaho. I think he's got a big future. He's a white kid from Idaho. I think he's got a big future. He's growing. He's making his way towards, you know, he's just turned, just turned, whatever, 14.

And he's making his way towards six foot. And he'll get as tall as he needs to be for a point guard. But he's a focused kid. People are doing all kinds of shit to their kids now. They're juicing them up with human growth hormone to get them to grow. It's crazy. And they're reclassing them three or four times, right? Having them repeat grades. He's played some kids that are, you know, honest to God,

they show up with a baby. Well, it's a fucking business. I mean, if your kid can become a legit professional athlete, I mean, there is extraordinary amounts of money in that if your kid can become a legit professional athlete, I mean, there is extraordinary amounts of money in that. Yeah. If the kid's good. Yeah. You know, again, it's, you know, for us, you look at that and he's very realistic. He understands that, you know, and, and, but he loves the game. He's super into sort of the, the, you know, the intricacies of it, right? And he's, he's a selfless kid.

He's all about getting the ball passed properly, getting the assist, right? He's not a selfish player, but he's also realistic about the tiny, tiny statistics in terms of who gets to even play D3 or D2 ball, right? And then certainly going on to professional sports. But it teaches a lot of other things, right? And so boarding school for the right kid can be a great experience.

It can be a terrible experience for the wrong kid. But for the right kid, it can be a great experience. It teaches them independence and discipline and motivation and the value of hard work and just not taking shit for granted, right? How often are you going to see him? Probably quite frequently because, you know, he's young, so we'll be down there as often as possible. But at the same time, you want to let him run, right? You've got to give him room.

And we've never been those sort of parents for any of the kids where we sit on the sidelines and watch their practices. That drives me fucking crazy. You know, when you've got parents that are in every practice, sitting in their lawn chair just, you know, watching. And you think, just let the kids do well or not. Yeah. But, yeah.

So I think he's, again, he's very independent, and I think he'll be just fine but I forget how I jumped onto that boarding school yeah anyway but it was a bit of a it was a struggle to get to the point where we thought okay let's do it

right the other two boys were like nah get him out of the house it'll be fine it'll be fine the youngest one was like do I get his room and all his stuff um but yeah anyway and the oldest one was just out at the naval academy um there's there's a fantastic place god he was out there for a visit and and uh had a chance to play some lacrosse and and uh you know whether he applies or not, again, it's the experience of seeing what's out there and what's possible. And, you know, if you leave all the doors open for the kids and you try to get them to understand the importance of not shutting doors by stupid behavior or poor academics or whatever it is, it's all you can do as a parent. And then at some point they run and they do their thing.

But, you know, from our perspective, you you've got to keep every door open for the kids so they don't get there and think, oh, God, I should not have done that because now I can't go there or I can't do this. So we'll see. But it was a great experience. Yeah. Yeah. Anyway.

So how we went from election meddling. No, we went from Pee We herman yeah to election meddling yeah to uh to my kids um yeah i guess you know what because i've got my list i'm gonna stick with my fucking list um yeah there was one other thing i wanted to mention about how fascinating the um the the our relationship with china is and that is is also since the last time we met, the Chinese, a Chinese company, pseudo-independent supposedly, but there's very few of those, right? They've all got some level of state sponsorship or cooperation. They bought like 300 and some odd acres near Grand Forks.

near Grand Forks. And there's a Grand Forks Air Force Base, which is home to whatever, the 319th Fighter Wing or Air Wing. And one of the things that the base does is it oversees in part the satellite systems that we run, overseas surveillance drone operations to some degree. And so it's a very sensitive base. So I'll be damned if this Chinese group didn't buy up hundreds of acres of land

about 12 miles from this base. And they worked with the local officials, the local folks there, to say we want to build a milling plant, a corn milling plant. The company was a food company. And it's going to be great. It's going to give you like 200 local jobs. Let's build it. And so the local officials were like, yeah, that sounds like a great idea. Well, it ran through the investment, CFIUS, the investment operation that looks at foreign investment to make sure that it's above board and kosher. And CFIUS said, we don't have any opinion. It's not

really our domain. We don't see anything wrong with this. So we can't cancel the potential purchase. And the Air Force had another thought. And they said, screw it. No, this is a threat to national security. You can't allow this to happen. You can't allow them to build this plant. And so I'll be damned, in one of those rare moments of common sense, they shut it down. They said, you can't do this. And then that became a bit of an issue, and then started to see in Congress, you started to see all this talk about, well, oh, my God,

the Chinese are buying up farmland all across America. So is Bill Gates, right? So is Bill Gates, yeah, Bill Gates and the Chinese. Now, the largest, to be fair, the largest landowners in terms of a foreign country is Canada. So Canada owns by far the most U.S. farmland. But it was nice to see that there was some reaction, some common sense here, and that they don't do that. And that's happening. It's increasing so I think the bright spot here is that people are becoming more aware of

The problem and that not every time is nefarious not every time, you know, I'm not saying that you know It's not always gonna be nefarious, but you should at least be smart enough to look and see it's like when we talk about You know Chinese equipment being put on Regional telecoms all over the world or the country. Yeah. Yeah little things like that We should probably pay attention to. I was watching this video where this guy was talking about these Chinese devices like a Roomba. Like it was one of those type of deals. It was like one of those robots that runs around your house and vacuums things.

Yeah, we got two of them. And he said that it connects to a Chinese server. And it says when the thing is loading up, it's connecting to this Chinese server and that it connects to your network. And this Chinese server has potentially has access to your network and could choose to shut your network off, siphon information, do anything it wants. It's like the Internet of Things, right? and information, do anything it wants. It's like the internet of things, right? So these things are connected via your network and connected to all the devices that are on your network. So if your cell phone's on it, Wi-Fi, whatever. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. And that's been going on for some time, right? I mean, that's been the capabilities, the ability to gather intelligence from seemingly innocuous things, your fridge that talks to you or whatever.

Certainly, obviously, and you've talked about this a lot, the cell phones and how hard you have to work to turn off applications that will do that. And most people just don't have the patience, right? You've got to really dig, right? If you want to prevent your 80-inch TV in your home from being switched on remotely as a monitor, what's going on in your home, you've got to really dig through the layers on that TV to get to the point where you can switch that off, right?

And I mean, who's got the time nowadays? And does that even work? Yeah, it doesn't even work. And does it even work? Robot vacuums can be used by hackers to spy on conversations, Singapore researchers say. LiDAR phone attack can take advantage of the device's built-in sensor to gather potentially sensitive data. NUS computer scientists discovered to prevent misused team-advised owners not to connect the robot vacuums to the internet.

Wow. Yeah. Yeah. Jesus Christ. use team advised owners not to connect the robot vacuums to the internet wow yeah yeah jesus christ could use a spy on private conversations university said on monday the method called lidar phone repurposes the lidar sensors that a robot vacuum cleaner normally uses for navigating around a home into laser-based microphone to eavesdrop on private conversations Oh terrific yeah yeah pretty wild and I read something about the use of Wi-Fi to see things in a home and that there's the ability that Wi-Fi has to gather 3d images yeah which is fucking crazy yes I did a couple of yeah scientists now use Wi-Fi see through people's walls what the fuck Carnegie Mellon University can map human bodies through walls using Wi-Fi signals and get super creepy but

I've read that you can do that with Ethernet cables Ethernet cables yeah they can at least use it to hear yeah anything that emanates anything I mean this is the ability to and it yeah it does start to look like a Tom Clancy movie where remember they used to in the old days you see this movie they could like use and they could identify the people moving through the building right that was all bullshit back in the day I mean that was imagined right right people were thinking like wouldn't that be great? And it is great, right?

If you roll up on a target site now and you're wearing the old, you know, highly advanced super soldier Google glasses, right? And you're getting all that data fed into you, right? And you're getting heat signatures and you're, you know, I got four people on the other side of this structure. I mean, that's fantastic intelligence. Or you can, you know, again, you know, the battlefield has changed completely now. I mean, the drone capability and be able to look downfield and know what you've got. Yeah. To be able to reach out and touch a target without getting your guys in harm's way.

I mean, it's an amazing world, but it's also pretty, what's the word? I don't want to say frightening necessarily, but it's alarming, right, for just the average citizen in terms of, again, information that's being gathered on you. And I think most people just at this stage of the game, certainly I think maybe younger folks just don't care. Yeah, they're on TikTok. Yeah. Certainly, I think maybe younger folks just don't care. Yeah, they're on TikTok. I was talking to my friend Cam's son, and I was like, you know that thing's fucking siphoning date off because he's on TikTok. He's like, I don't care. It's fun.

I'm like, okay. Well, I guess he's just a 24-year-old kid. He's got nothing to worry about. Yeah, yeah. Well, that's why I stopped doing my TikTok dances because I used to post all the time. You were very good. I think you should bring him back. I was doing whatever the Flossie and the Rumba,

or I don't even know what the dances are anymore. But anyway, today, this is, look at me segueing. Today is the two-year anniversary of the Afghan withdrawal. And I was, I forget how I got started on that one, but I was looking at total costs of what we spent so far in Ukraine. And not only is it a two-year anniversary of the withdrawal from Afghanistan, but other comparisons we've spent in Ukraine since whenever January 2022. So, you know, a little over a year, obviously, a year and a half.

We've dropped about upwards north of $80 billion there, right? More than that, in all honesty, because I don't think we actually know what the full number is. I don't think the State Department knows. I don't think the Pentagon actually knows. They certainly don't know necessarily what all the money is going to. But we've dropped $80 billion, say. Let's call it that. Let's call it that.

From 2001 to 2020 in Afghanistan, we spent about $73, $74 billion. So think about that. Wow. Almost 20 years in Afghanistan, we spent about $73 billion. About a year and a half in Ukraine, we've spent $80 billion plus. I'm not saying that we shouldn't be doing it or that we you know we we should you know not be supporting the ukrainian uh military i'm just saying it's a fascinating fact as far as i'm concerned it just shows the level of support you know ukraine is is is uh at the top of our um obviously we have we don't give that much money to anybody by far, right?

And the last time a European was country, it was at the top of the aid list was the Marshall Plan, maybe, the Truman administration. So it's pretty significant. But the Afghanistan thing, two years after the withdrawal, we've spent since then, since the withdrawal, we've spent or the U.S. government's allocated about $8 billion. Now, the interesting point there is who's been in control there in Afghanistan since, you know, the withdrawal? It's the Taliban. So we have allocated $8 billion to various humanitarian groups, charities into Afghanistan and no real controls over whether the vast majority of that money or half of that money or whatever is going to the Taliban. Really? Yeah.

And you can guarantee that it's being siphoned off. How does that work? Well, I'm glad you asked that. It wasn't that long ago there was a, because there is an inspector general. They call him the special inspector general for Afghanistan reconstruction, SIGAR. for Afghanistan Reconstruction, CIGAR. And he testified before Congress, I think much earlier this year, it might have been the January, February timeframe, about Afghanistan. And he said, I cannot sit here and tell the committee or the american taxpayer that we are not funding the taliban through this money that is being allocated for afghanistan whoa okay unfortunately as i sit here today i cannot assure this committee that the american taxpayer or the american taxpayer that

we are not currently funding the Taliban. He continued, nor can I assure you that the Taliban are not diverting the money we are sending to the intended recipients, which are the poor Afghan people. Wow. Yeah. So think about that. 20 years in Afghanistan, we leave in a fucking mess of a withdrawal, right? Which never should have taken place the way it did. And we've still got, there's maybe 150, 155,000 special immigrant visa applicants trapped in Afghanistan waiting to get out. We have no idea how many of our former Afghan allies, right, whomever it may be, are still there trapped, trying to get out.

And how many have been killed? And how many have been, exactly, how many have been killed. And in the meantime, now, again, you know, the idea at the top level, you know, the theory, we want to help the Afghan people. We can't just abandon all those poor people. So we're going to use the money to give it to humanitarian groups and they're going to try to feed them and everything and yet there's no control over this this fucking thing and and so that's that's a problem that again should be talked about but we don't you know we get lost in these in these issues of the day that that aren't you know really impactful i guess at the end of the day maybe they're impactful to people's individual lives.

I get it. Whatever. What the hell? But it is stunning that then the inspector general will come out and say he can't get sufficient information from State Department and from USAID that's responsible in part for allocating these funds. And in pure, typical Washington, D.C. bullshit, the reason is because the State Department says, well, you know, we withdrew from Afghanistan, so therefore the inspector general, you know,

doesn't have the same job. We're not reconstructing Afghanistan anymore, so we don't have to respond to his request for information. So, which is, you know just it's like this bizarre but we're going to continue to give money out and meanwhile the taliban's just shitting all over the people right um if you forget about women's rights anymore they've shut down secondary schools they've shut down there's certainly no universities they've done they they've they've restricted them basically to women and girls sitting at home. Very restricted movement outside.

They have to be fully covered, obviously. Recently, they just shut down all beauty salons, right, which was one of the few places women could work and only women could go into. Women can't go into parks, right? women could go into. Women can't go into parks, right? It's insane when you think about it that way and you think about, but we're giving them money, again, not for a bad reason, right? I mean, we want to help the people that are suffering most. But we have no control. Right. What happens to that money? How could that money possibly get to the Taliban? Like, what's going on? Well, it has to go through humanitarian groups, NGOs, charities. And at some point, the idea is it's either funds or goods, right, that have to be in the country,

that have to get to the country to be dispersed. And the Taliban controls everything, right? Now, by the way, we also allocated a handful of billions of dollars to recapitalize the central bank there in Afghanistan. Well, that would seem to be, maybe I'm wrong, but that would seem to be basically putting money directly into the hands of the Taliban. And so it's a problem. They they're looking into it but uh i mean there's there's so many weird if you if you spend too much time looking at the way the government sometimes operates and going switching back to ukraine and saying okay um as an example one of the things we're not doing is we're not fully sanctioning Russian oil. Because why? It's a political reason. We don't want the Russian oil taken off the market and driving gas prices up, which is bad for

politics, right? So meanwhile, one of the few real, you know, significant sources of revenue for the Russians is oil. That allows them to keep going. So we're spending, what, $80 billion on Ukraine. At the same time, we're not doing everything we can to shut down the ability of the Russian government to make money by sanctioning the oil the way we should. And therefore, they continue marching on. It's, I don't know, I just find it find it all you know going back to that original thought you know it's like we're gonna stop fossil fuels but we're also gonna keep all the minerals in the ground how about that but the Russia thing seems to be the Russia Ukraine thing thing seems to be even crazier than the Afghanistan

thing in terms of long-term cost and in terms of not having any solution of how this could ever possibly end. Yeah, no, I 100% I agree with that. It's we don't have a we don't have a whatever they want to call it an exit ramp up endgame. There is talk about a peace settlement, primarily from Zelensky, right? He's been he's been making a real effort. He's been going out and trying to garner support from a variety of countries for the Ukraine government's peace plan, which basically calls for return of all their lands, including Crimea, and obviously the exit of all Russian forces. And so he's out there talking and saying this is what needs to happen. We need to gather international support for this peace plan if it's talking and saying, this is what needs to happen. We need to gather international support for this peace plan if it's going to work, which is not incorrect, right? Meanwhile, you know, the Chinese are trying to, you know, play top dog in the world stage by

proposing their own peace plan. You know, Saudis are making an effort. So, but there is no exit strategy really to speak of. But hasn't Zelensky openly stated that he wants Putin to step down? Well, yeah, I mean, he's expressed that desire, but you also think about they've declared him a war criminal. So what's Putin's, you know, what's Putin's motivation for stopping if he reaches a peace settlement and then is basically that's it. OK, we're done. There's peace. We've given back all the land and I'm a war criminal. And now at some point, if I step outside the country, I'll be arrested. I mean, that's that that's a thought process. So I don't think unless Zelensky budges a little bit, right, which, you know, again, from an emotive standpoint, why should he?

Right. But unless he budges to some degree, I don't see that they're going to get a settlement where the two sides agree, because Putin, I don't I don't still I've said this before but I don't imagine the the Russian government giving back Crimea, right? It's right. It's you know, too important from their perspective from a military perspective and when they take over Crimea Was it wasn't that 14 2014 I think Maybe maybe eight maybe 2014. I don't know. It's it's ancient history now and nobody cared back then right really really There was there were some angry memos written. Obama talked about it at the time and said, but nobody did anything. Just like when the troops moved into eastern Ukraine, nobody really cared. Nobody did anything. Nobody was out there planting flags in their gardens and saying, we stand with Ukraine. And in fact, Ukraine was viewed as a highly corrupt place, you know, where, you know, a Ukrainian energy company would hire the son of the vice president. Yeah. Oh, but at the same time, you can't, you know, we can't allow Putin's adventurism, right, to stand. You've got to. So I do believe we have to support. And without our support, without our

NATO allies' support and others, they wouldn't have been able to accomplish what they've done, right? And now whether they can make the counteroffensive a significant victory or not still remains to be seen because the Russians, you know, they used the opportunity during the lull to really dig in, right? They've created almost their own Maginot Line, although it's more effective than the old Maginot Line. So they've created that along their perimeter. And it's been a real tough slog. You know, the Ukrainian counteroffensive has gone much slower than people thought. And everybody was all very emotive. Oh, it's going to be a counteroffensive. They're going to sweep through. It's going to be done here soon. And I don't think people still have their heads around the fact that this is – there's no exit out there, right, yet. So what are we going to do? Are we going to continue to just allocate every couple of months? We say, well, we'll put another $800 million in there.

16s, Abrams tanks, Patriot missile system, I mean, HIMARS. We're doing everything possible, intelligence support, satellite support. And again, rightly so. Putin needs to be driven out of there if possible. But at the same time, they need a logical thought process about how you have a settlement if there's going to be one. What are your feelings about NATO's encroaching on Russian territory, like getting closer and closer? Like the treaty at the end of the Soviet Union stated that NATO would not move any closer to Russia, but yet they have. And yet they have. Yeah. And it's had just the opposite effect, right? I mean, what Putin did, because he's, you know, I think he imagined and he had bad intel, but he imagined that this incursion, this invasion was going to show the cracks in NATO, right? And it had the opposite. It grew NATO. And so, look, he legitimately believes, you have to understand the motivations of whoever's on the other side of the table. And with Putin, he legitimately believed that, you know, the collapse reinforces his mindset, which is in his mind. I don't think he's you know, I don't think he's making this up in his mind.

He believes, you know, this is an attack on the motherland. Now, it's bullshit. It's not. But that's how he pitches it. And that's how he tries to keep the population behind him by saying this is this is the West against us. And there's no argument for that. You don't think that with NATO encroaching? keep the population behind him by saying, this is the West against us. There's no argument for that, you don't think, with NATO encroaching? Well, I think every country has got the right to take actions to protect their own national security. Right. Like if Russia started moving military bases into Mexico, which is kind of similar to what NATO has has done oh the cuban missile crisis i mean that

was the same concept there was no difference right so yes i mean that's and so we you have to be pragmatic about the world that you live in and you have to understand and that requires good intelligence you have to understand the plans and intentions and motivations of whoever, again, is on the other side of the table or whatever dictator or whatever leader you're dealing with. And I think that is it helpful in reaching a peace settlement? All your goal is, and maybe we need to say that, okay, is the U.S. goal to drive Russia completely out and reclaim all the lands that they had taken since 2000? Then fine. That's our stated goal, and we just keep doing everything possible to make that happen short of boots on the ground. But it would seem to me that our goal should also be, instead of that, maybe we find a way to end the war. Typically, you get into a war and you want to end it.

You don't want it to go on for 20 years. Unless you are supplying weapons and making billions of dollars. Then you might want to keep it going for a little while. There is that and look but look you get two bites of the apple you get to supply all the weaponry and then you get the reconstruction

and I'll tell you right now there is an undercurrent in Washington D.C. amongst contractors that are just they're just super gleeful that's the wrong word. But they're enthusiastic and anticipatory, I don't know if that's a word,

about this potential. And I saw this back during the Iraq days, right? When we went in to reconstruct Iraq, right? Which went on for several years, produced massive amounts of fraud, created all sorts of bullshit 8a companies right everybody suddenly everybody was looking for women owned or uh native american owned or eskimo owned companies that they could set up so that would allow them to get those

government contracts to go in and do some piece of reconstruction whether they had experience to do it or not and there was God, the amount of energy that was involved in DC at the time of companies just shooting up out of nowhere, right? I remember people walking through the door. We had an office in DC for the business and people walking through the door with, you know, looking for security, right? And saying, well, we're going to start this company. We're going to go out there. And I was like, well, how much experience do you have? We don't have any. You know, they didn't care. So I sense that same level of excitement in the idea of the Ukraine reconstruction, because that's going to be a talk about the next sinkhole of, again, you got to support them, right? So maybe I'm using the wrong terminology, but the next black hole of cost of money spent will be on the reconstruction effort. And if we think that it's currently expensive, wait till that hits, right? That's going to make this $80 billion so

far look like nothing, I think. That's just my opinion. But so I don't know. There's no, you know, you keep talking, I keep talking in circles about this because I don't see any way out of it, right? It's both sides are not going to budge, at least in the short term, midterm, on what they want. Are you concerned at all about the possible use of nukes? No, I don't think so. I don't think, I mean, you know, Medvedev has thrown that out every now and then, right? He's kind of alluded to it. Nothing's off the table. But Putin's still a rational player, right? He may seem like he's irrational at times or, you know, this was an incredibly stupid move.

But I don't think he's off the rails. He understands that can't be on the table as an option. So I'm not really worried about that. I'm more worried about the long, slow slog that we find. Nobody ever anticipated we'd be in Afghanistan for 20 years. And look at this. I mean, it's a perfect case study of you probably should have an end in mind, right? Otherwise, it just keeps going because in part, because some people unfortunately do benefit from it some you

know major players out there who who benefit from that sort of thing and you know other people trying to do the right thing for sure of course but i you would think that afghanistan you would have a a perfect case study but we didn't have a case study we sorry i take that back we had a case study in what the soviets did in afghanistan and we we didn't learn shit from that right when we went in we ended up making the same mistakes you know make the same hubris look there were years where we knew um during that 20 years that there were immense weaknesses and corruption inside the government the Afghan government and the military we knew for years that the the Afghan military was problematic right and so this idea that we were surprised or

shocked that they fell apart in in a matter of hours basically as the withdrawal was taking place is It's just bullshit. We just ignored it. We didn't want to hear it. We didn't want to tell the truth about it. And so if we had been truthful, you know, we would have said, no, this isn't going to work, you know. And, you know, by the way, we never, you know, look, that withdrawal was a disaster. We gave up Bagram Air Base. What the fuck are we doing? If we're going to withdraw and pull everybody out and get all our allies and contacts and people that supported us for all those years out, we had the perfect resource to do that. And we didn't. They shut it down and then they used Hamid Karzai Airport. And that was just from a simple security process. I mean, we do security assessments on large, you know, facilities and

it's not rocket science, right? You see the same things over and over again in terms of, you know, how you protect your assets and how you protect your people and how you move things. That's a part of a logistical exercise. And they just fucking ignored it. And they ended up using this airport. People died as a result, didn't have to. They should never have. And yet, you know, and then they come out with a bullshit assessment earlier this year, the White House does, and basically blames the Trump administration for, you know, cutting a deal with the Taliban with a timeline that had conditions which the Taliban never met and which we didn't have to stick with, frankly. And yet, you know, we thought politically the optic would be and which we didn't have to stick with, frankly. And yet, you know, we thought politically the optic would be bad if we didn't. And so they decided to withdraw and they did it in a disgustingly, you know, insecure fashion. And, you know, they blame

that. They blame the intel community. And yes, you know, the way that we characterized the ability of the Afghan military and government to hold together was abysmal. So that was a serious mistake. But the steps that were then taken in terms of leading up to that and the speed with which they tried to do it was, you know, that's on them. So anyway, that's a cheery little conversation. Yeah. Yeah. That doesn't sound fun. It doesn't sound like there's a good solution here.

Well, no. And then so we got that. You know, I have no idea where with Ukraine, because sure, there's diplomatic efforts underway that we don't see that aren't on the radar. Right. So aside from Zelensky trying to garner support for his deal, you know, obviously we've got the U.S. is doing other things. But the public wouldn't know it and I think the government and the military government in particular the White House needs to be better at explaining things right what's going on and why we're doing this right because you don't want aid military aid in particular to dry up to the Ukrainian government but you know if they don't do a better job of explaining why we're

spending this money people are going to get fed up or they're going to start questioning, is this really something that we should be worried about? Right. And it's tough when you've got problems at home. It's tough to get people to focus on something as large as – you don't want the recreation of the Soviet Union because then that might encourage China and Taiwan and then – anyway. Yeah. Are you concerned about that? About Taiwan? Yeah. Yes, is the answer. Because I think Xi looks at what's happening in Ukraine and he probably

thinks, all right, that's Russia, you know, small GDP equal to a European country, small European country. He looks at China and says, OK, is the West really going to, you know, go into a proxy war over Taiwan? And I think their calculation is probably no. So I think from their perspective, it's a matter of time. So I think from their perspective, it's a matter of time. And they're probably as important to do during his time right i don't think he's going to want to leave that on the table and not have that as part of his legacy right so i think the timeline has been accelerated and it may well be that the timeline is essentially how long does Xi view himself in power. So I think that's a problem.

But, you know, do we honestly believe that we're going to put boots on the ground in Taiwan to fight the Chinese regime? I don't think so. So what does that mean, right? Do we just – it's a problem, you know. What does that mean? Do we just – it's a problem. But I don't know that we're overly focused right now. We tend to do one thing at a time as a government.

Right now the thing is Ukraine. What is the difference between the way that Taiwan operates their government and the way China would operate it if they took over? Well, part of it's access, right? And given Taiwan's importance in sort of in the tech sector, you know, their chip manufacturing and that would create potentially another real bind in the supply chain system, right, for future use, right? You have to think about down the road. If we got into a major conflict with China at some point, what are they going to do? They're going to stop anything they can, right, that would help us, right? So their ability to restrict the importation of chips necessary for much of our economy now in terms of running. That's sort of a key point.

That's more of a practical economic issue, right? Then you've got the issue of, well, look, it's a democracy, right? Are we just going to let another democracy get rolled by the communist government? That sounds like an old 1960s Cold War theory. But, yeah, the reality is our values and what we think important say one thing. The realities of how that would play out say something else. So, again, it's hard to marry those up. how far would we go down the road to protect Taiwan and so maybe what that means is you know down the road we need to be better at you know manufacturing on our own we

got to bring things back which is part of what's all that talk about on shoring and bringing manufacturing back that's that's part of Underlying that is our concern over national security issues. Should they get control of more commodities or whatever you want to refer to it. Well, that was one of the more shocking things about the pandemic was when you realize how dependent we are on China for medicine, for chips, for so many different things that they produce that we don't produce over here. And like, how did we allow that to happen? And did we just allow that to happen because there's higher profit margins and we put the entire country at risk because of that?

I think it was, yeah, we got addicted to cheap stuff, right? Both, you know, cheap, cheap stuff and and you know high-tech cheap stuff so listen to me well that's a smart fellow there and so I think that was part of it was was it just it at the time it made sense right and we didn't imagine at the time look we had we had the opening of our relationship with China and it was gonna be a new day right we? We went through that with the Cold War, right? And we finished the Cold War. The wall fell, and suddenly we're all like, oh, there's got to be a peace dividend here, right?

We keep repeating the same mistakes. We came out of World War II as an example. This may not be the best example, but we came out of World War II. At the time, we had the Office of Strategic Services, which was the predecessor to the CIA. So World War II ends, and like the next day, you know, Truman says, thanks very much. You know, now close the doors on the OSS, right? Sent Bill Donovan home. Don't let the screen door hit your ass on the way out. And they shut it down because they imagined that's it well you know why do we possibly need this organization that's you know out there doing special operations and gathering

intelligence and you know we won and so they stopped it and then the you know the Soviets went on the march and suddenly they were like okay fuck it maybe we need it so they started the CIA and that's that's the that's the lesson that should have been learned from there was you're always going to need an intel apparatus that helps support national security concerns. So there was that. Then we had the opening of a relationship again with China. And I think there was this imagining that suddenly things were different, right? We were going to grow.

And that really – the entire interconnectedness of our economies just blew up at that point. It really expanded. And so we maybe didn't see exactly what their plans and intentions and motivations were. And we always mirror our values, right? So we imagine everybody's marching towards democracy, and that's not how it works. So I think that's in part how we ended up in this situation. But now, again, there's more effort and more understanding, I think, to go ahead and onshore and be more concerned about the supply chain. And you're right.

The pandemic pointed that out pretty clearly. And I think maybe that helped accelerate the process, but it's going to take years. Look, it takes years just to do the simple things, right? We talked about the mining issue and critical minerals and the things that we need to lessen our dependence on China's control over critical minerals, you're talking about six, eight, nine, ten years, right, to get a mine open in the U.S., right? So, you know, you think down the road, we better, you know, I guess my point is we better accelerate our ability to do this, right, just to be pragmatic. Maybe, hopefully one day we're all holding hands and everybody's singing kumbaya and, you know, unicorns are flying on our ass. But I think it's probably not going to happen. So we just need to be a little more aware.

Yeah. Yeah. I sound very cynical. Well, with good reason. Yeah. It seems like a good time to be a little bit cynical. Yeah. Yeah, I suppose.

I mean, yeah. I remember my wife told me yesterday when I was leaving, she says, try to be more positive, more optimistic. Yeah, she says, I worry you always sound like you're really negative and you're always, yeah. Well, you're just informed. Yeah, yeah. I think that's the problem.

Yeah, I think I's the problem. Yeah. I think I've spent enough time. I've gotten very cynical about the way that countries interact with each other and our ability to be realistic about that rather than just design strategies based on what we'd hope for or what we feel like would be good to happen. Right. So maybe that's part of it yeah what's your take on all this UAP disclosure shit I'm shocked that you would ask that yeah that was that was a that was a fascinating hearing that was a fascinating here yeah and was it shocking at all to you? No, no.

I loved listening, but I can't say that anything came out of it, even with Dave Grush's testimony. I mean, he'd kind of come out there before, but I think a couple of things. before, but I think a couple of things. I think it's excellent that we're actually having these hearings and that there's a subcommittee and that they're actually looking at this issue, because I think the more transparency, the problem the government's had in the past is not being transparent enough. And so I think that was great. I think David Fravor, I've had a chance to sit with him in the past. What was your impression? I think he's very credible. I think he's very credible.

I was talking with Jamie earlier. You don't get to that point, right? You're not a commanding officer on a carrier. He was on the Nimitz at the time in 2004. You don't get to that point by being irrational or hallucinating up in the air or, you know, just being whimsical. And the same with the other fellow, Ryan Graves, the other pilot. He was flying Hornets out of Virginia Beach about 10 years later when he reported on some of these incidents. So that, to me, is very credible. And I have not seen anything from the Pentagon or from the government that, as an example, explains Fravor's encounter.

And also, I mean, look, he had a wingman. Her name was Alex Dietrich. She was a lieutenant commander at the time. She observed the same thing. And they have radar lock, right, down on the carrier. she observed the same thing. And they have radar lock, right, down on the carrier. They knew what they were,

there wasn't just one person looking up in the sky and saying, oh, I see a light, you know, or I see something, right? This was a very legit sighting. And there's no, there's been no explanation as to what it is. So it is a legitimate UAP, a Unidentified, you know, Anomalous, or Anomaly, youomaly Phenomena.

And so I think that's one thing. I find David Fravor extremely credible. I've never met Ryan Graves, but again, given his experience and given the fact that he wasn't the only person seeing this right uh off of uh virginia beach back in 2014 and with ryan graves when they upgraded their sensors they upgraded the capabilities of these jets that's when they started seeing all these things and he said it was shocking yeah that they were encountering them all the time yeah and some of those fine you can you, whatever they may be, they're just, you know, you've got a more sophisticated system on board.

You're just seeing things out there that you wouldn't have picked up before. Okay. And so some of those things then become maybe sightings that then are explained, right? What is it? Is it a balloon? Is it a drone? Whatever it may be. But, you know, when you get an experienced pilot flying by and saying, hey, I saw something, it was a cube inside a sphere.

Well, okay, well, let's at least log it, record it without any criticism or pushbackback right have a way to investigate and that's been their problem and that's what they talked about during the hearing also again they've talked about this before but if you if you stigmatize uh you know the the pilots that are seeing these things then yeah of course you want to get and what did what did the graves say he said like five percent get reported, right? So, and that's because nobody wants to, you know, get back on deck or land and say, yeah, I saw something. Yeah.

I saw a UAP or I saw a UFO back in the day. So you have to make the system more accessible, right, for the sightings. And then you have to have a way for national security purposes to investigate them. What do you think these things are? I don't know. of saying that we're doing this because if you have something out there that you observe that you can't identify propulsion or any sort of, you know, known to us systems, then yeah, that's a problem. So, A, is it a hostile element? Is there, first of all, is it just something that, you know, is showing up on the radar and it's a natural phenomenon, it's a whatever, parallax or whatever they call it, then fine. Or is it something from a foreign government, new technology being developed, propulsion systems, material science, whatever it may be.

And they are working on these things all the time, right? Hypersonics is the perfect example. The Chinese and the Russians are, frankly, still ahead of us in hypersonics capabilities because they've invested longer and more effort into developing hypersonics systems. So you have to figure out, is it a hostile foreign government doing this? And then the other part is, all right, well, is it non, whatever Dave Grush says, And then the other part is, all right, well, is it non, whatever Dave Gresh says, non-human or is it a, you know, legitimately from not from Earth? That can't be taken off the table, right? I mean, look, it's, you know, we've said this before.

I'm not smart enough to know what I don't know, right? I mean, well, maybe I am. But we've explored such a tiny, tiny part of space, right, that it would be ridiculous for us to think that we don't, you know, that we can write it off, right? That it's not there, right? No idea, right? But I do know that you can't discount anything because, again, going back to the reason why you do it, it's in our national security interest to figure out what the hell it might be. And at some point, if you end up, if you start with, like right now, the new office, the new office is whatever it's called, typical government, the all-domain anomaly resolution office, right? That's what they came up with. Hilarious.

At the Pentagon, yeah. So this guy or this person, Dr. Kirkpatrick, runs it, I think. He's the director. And they've said they've got, what, upwards of 800 cases that they're investigating. Jeez. Yeah. And it's growing. I mean, you know, some reports say it's growing by like 100, 150 cases a month, right, in terms of sightings. They then get logged in, and now they've got to investigate. Well, that's a smart thing, right? They do that. And maybe you take off 90% of them or even more, but you end up with this short list of things, perhaps like the Tic Tac

in 2004 with David Fravor, where you just don't have an explanation. Okay, fine. Then, you know, but be more transparent about it, right? And Ryan Graves said something interesting during the hearings. And he said that if the general public or if Congress could see the sensor and video data that he's seen, then it would change the national conversation. That's a really interesting statement from an experienced former pilot, from an F-18 pilot. So that deserves more scrutiny. And that also means, well, maybe the government should release a few more, you know, videos that they may have. Maybe they should release some of that because they haven't released radar data. They haven't really been open about that. And so, you know, there's still information or data points on the Tic Tac, for instance, that hasn't been released.

It's considered still classified. Well, you know what what the fuck, you know, tell us why not? I mean, what is it? I mean if you if you honestly haven't figured out whether it's Foreign technology or not Then maybe you should put it out there and maybe the the the commercial sector will help you in that investigation Right, because what would be the motivation to not be transparent about it? And is there any possibility that any of this stuff is ours? Like the Tic Tac? Is it possible that there's some black ops thing going on

where they've developed some advanced system of propulsion that is completely independent from burning fossil fuels and shooting them out the back to propel something to go forward? Yeah um yes is the answer i think there is that possibility um and one thing that dave grush said look i don't know i don't know about his his comments about because he was speaking from look i haven't seen any of this you know i've gotten it from interviewing you know dozens of witnesses this is you know what know. This is what I believe now. But one thing that he did say was that he believes and he's seen, he says, evidence that the government

is misappropriating funds in order to prevent government oversight of certain programs. Now, is that true? I don't know. But is it a practice that has occurred in the past where they will bury a program inside another budget? And the answer is yes, they've done that repeatedly for secrecy reasons. And as a matter of fact, that was the premise for America's favorite show, Black Files Declassified. That is America's favorite show. It is America. Yes. I think you're the host of it. I was. As America's TV sweetheart for a while. And so the premise of that show was follow the money. Right. And it's a great premise. right? I mean, look, because at some

point, just like with the Biden administration situation, and they're looking at their bank records, there will be a trail somewhere. That money has to eventually show up somewhere. And usually it's a line item that's not easily explained, usually in some mundane terms, whatever it might be. So Graves is absolutely correct in the sense that that's something worth looking at, right? And if there are programs like that, then the reason is, okay, we're keeping it secret because we don't want the Chinese regime to know, we don't want the Russians to know. And so, you know, again, having come from where I come from, I get it, sources and methods, There are reasons for secrets at times.

But if that's not the case, then I see no reason not to be more open and transparent about some of the other information that they may have and the sightings they have. You know, I know Graves was talking about they've got biologics and, you know, those things. Did Graves say that? I know that. Oh, not Graves. No, no, Grush grush said that yeah i'm sorry yeah not yeah that was not grush said there's frozen bodies yeah yeah and that there's a crash retrieval program crash retrieval that was a big one that caused a big stir he'd been running for decades he said i think i think he said that uh he said that the government in his his opinion, based on his interviews as he was working, I think, with the National Reconnaissance Office and he was tasked with going around and identifying the programs that were related to UAPs, he said that the U.S. government was likely aware of non-human activities since like the 1930s. Now, what I would say is based on my years of experience with the government,

it's really hard for them to keep a secret, right? And that's a monumental secret. And at some point, you know, it's human activity and human nature. Someone's going to open up their pie hole. Wasn't that what Bob Lazar did? Yeah. Yeah. And now when you pay attention to some of the video footage that has been released about these unidentified objects, and when you listen to what Bob Lazar said about how these things operate, it mimics that. Not only that, like the way he described the propulsion method.

Whoa. That's a good save. Yeah, thank you very much. Set the whole studio on fire. It mimics what he said. He also talked about that there was some possibility that there was this crash retrieval program is what he was working on,

but he said there was some talk about biological entities. Yeah, yeah. And there's mixed feelings about how reliable Bob Lazar is, was. I mean, sorry. But, and it's not a new assertion, right? I mean, there's been talk about this before.

But that's my point about secrecy. Yeah. And I think, but if that's, I guess, yeah, my point on that is, not only that people can't keep their pilots shut, but there would have been more detailed information. Something would have come out. Again, that's my own feeling. I just have a hard time believing the government is that good at keeping a secret, right? Sometimes it just seems like they can't organize panic in a doomed submarine. So I think that that's, from my perspective, that's a question

mark, right? Could they keep this secret that they've got frozen bodies of aliens sitting somewhere? Wouldn't you imagine though, that if there was something like that, that the level of attention to detail to protect secrecy would be significantly ramped up. This wouldn't be something as simple as developing a new fighter jet where, you know, you have these, you know, you essentially have these corporations that are, that design these vehicles for the U.S. government. You have defense contractors. And one of the assertions was that these are the people that have access to these things because they're trying to back engineer it. And if you were going to back engineer it, you would do so under the guise of someone who makes those things. It's not like the government themselves are the engineers and the people that are involved.

It's people that work for the government and often defense contractors. Well, yeah, contractors, government entities, agencies. I mean, look, you know, the CIA was responsible for locating the ground where Area 51 sits, right, all those years ago. So they would have a role to play. You're right. The commercial world would have a role to play. The subcon, or the defense contractors. Others, I'm sure.

I mean, so, it becomes a growing circle of people who would be involved in an effort like that. But it'd be a fun secret to keep.

It'd be a hell of a secret to keep. That would be a fun one. Yeah. If you're working on something like that. Oh, yeah. Boy,

could I tell you some shit. You go home, you know, kids say, what'd you do today dad and you're like uh i touched metal that's from another planet i dissected an alien um 3d printed model designed to house three foot tall creatures from another galaxy but it's but i think there's look i we do also tend to imagine, look, we can only, like when we look at, or when Fravor, it was interesting, Fravor looks at the Tic Tac, right?

And, you know, in detrigging, they're looking at this and they're trying to interpret it based on what we know right now, right? So our technological limitations, right, kind of define how we imagine things could go, right? But, you know, we only know physics in the way that we know it, right? Kind of define how we imagine things could go, right? But, you know, we only know physics in the way that we know it, right? So it is interesting to think about how we put it, which is how you ended up with little green men, right? Well, if they're aliens, they probably look like us, sort of, but let's make them a little different, you know, let's make them three foot tall. But who knows what the hell it looks like out there, right? And it's just – but I guess, you know, again, we've explored so little of space, right? I mean we still don't know what's, you know, in all the oceans, right?

We're still surprised when we find something in the oceans. Well, that's what's fascinating also about these stories is that there seems to be these vehicles that can travel into the water as well. Yeah. And this has been documented by video as well. Yeah, and that's what they first noticed, right? I mean, with the Tic Tac was they noticed a disturbance in the water, right? The water was roiling, and they said the weather was perfect, right? There were no white caps.

There was nothing. There was just this one area of disturbance. And that was the first thing they noticed. And then they saw the whatever it was. But again, I go back to like, okay, I'm buying what Fravor's selling. It's just that then we don't have what's at the end of that dotted line. We don't know what it is, but I'm glad that we're exploring it in a more serious way now. I'm glad that the Pentagon, and maybe it happens incrementally, but at least they've come out now. They said, okay, we have AATIP or whatever it was, the Advanced Aeronautical Threat Identification Program, which supposedly shut down in 2012 or so.

Yeah, 2012, I think it was. Of course, they didn't shut it down, right? They just put it into a different program because the threat was still there, right? There's still concern over, okay, what is flying over particularly sensitive facilities, right? There was that swarming, right? The swarm that went around the, the uh what uss omaha right the ones that look like pyramids yeah yeah and so there were like nine of them yeah or i think at a maximum there were nine of them and um you know they still haven't figured

out what what the hell that is but did those things exhibit in any sort of capabilities that are beyond our imagination um i don't think they operated in insane... Movement, not necessarily. They disappeared in a way that couldn't be explained, right? And a couple of them appeared to just go into the water, to your point about, you know, there's been those incidents. Transmedium devices. So, you know, and they did have radar imagery on these items,

but, you know, and I think... radar imagery on these items. So anyway, what they might be, again, nothing was solved as a result of the hearing, obviously. And I think people were excited and they're always excited when there's going to be something like this in the previous hearing and this know this this world this uap world starts talking and but you know every hearing ends up the same way in a sense because we don't get a resolution which then leads to more suspicion that the government's hiding something which has always been the case right for decades now that's that's where it tends to end up well the government's hiding something they're just not telling us there is the possibility that they just don't fucking know. Right.

And rather than holding on to evidence and trying to keep it a secret, which, again, it's tough. But do you think that if it's ours, like say the Tic Tac is ours, is it possible that the government could create some advanced propulsion system and do so in complete secrecy as well? Well, that's what? That's 19 years ago? Yes. And 19 years, we hold on to that sort of capability and technology and for whatever reason don't deploy it.

Right. And for whatever reason, don't deploy it. Right. Yeah, look, I mean, as an aside, the CIA, we've got a – there's a – it used to be called science and technology, right? It's where they create all the gear, all the amazing things. The science and technology directorate at the agency over the years has developed incredible things, right? Responsible for the U-2, responsible for satellite capabilities, battery technology, right? All the things that they've done over the years. And oftentimes, they'd create just sort of gadgetry, right? And I don't want to simplify it

and minimize it, but it's important stuff, but, you know, for lack of a better word. And oftentimes, there was a concern. We don't want to release this. We don't want to put it out in the field to be used because we don't want it to fall into the wrong hands. And then they realize that we've got this capability. So it's much like we talked about before. If you get a target in your sights, maybe you want to watch that target for a period of time to understand what it's capable of doing, what it's doing. You don't want to just let out, you know, okay, we're going to. So, yeah, is it possible we developed a new propulsion system and, you know, we're just playing a game where we're saying, okay, we're still working on hypersonics, you know, and air breathing engines and we're trying to see what we can do here.

And, you know, and meanwhile, we've got this in our back pocket, right, waiting for someday. It's a possibility. In my mind, I think, hey, if that's the case, good on them for being smart enough to be that clever and also to be able to keep a secret. Is that more plausible than it coming from another planet, in your opinion? Or another dimension or whatever the explanation is? You know what? That's a great question. You should have your own podcast.

Yeah. You know what? That's a great question. You should have your own podcast. Yeah, you know what? Is it more plausible? What I'm saying is it's so revolutionary. If they do have this thing that has the ability to go from 50,000 feet above sea level to 50 feet in a second, something that defies our current understanding of at least assuming there's a biological entity inside that thing. Let's assume there is. You know, one of the examinations of the video footage that they got from the jets, they said the way that thing took off, any biological being would be turned into Jell-O. You would be pink mist. Just a G-force.

It's not the speed. It's the acceleration or the stopping that kills you. Yeah. Yeah. So I think, yeah, I would assume it's unmanned if that's the case. Well, there's no windows in that thing. Right. It was completely. So I guess the answer to your question is I don't know.

It seems a long time. Is it more plausible than being from outside this world? Yeah. It's a good question because I don't want to deny the fact that, I mean, I think it's incredible hubris to say that there's nothing else out there. Of course. I don't want to lock myself into that corner of the room. But at the same time, that would represent a massive leap in material science, as at least we're aware of it. Right. And, oh, look, I have a call. And it's Paul Rubens calling me from beyond.

So, too soon. Yeah, it's a great question. I don't know. I mean, it speaks to, again, one of my points that I owe because I'm so cynical. I just have a hard time believing that the U.S. government could keep secrets like that for that period of time. I just have a really hard time believing that. Right. That period of time, right?

I just have a really hard time believing that. Right. So what would have to take place in order for the government to develop something? Developing something that's so superior to what we understand in terms of what's possible with propulsion systems. How would they fund that? How would they hide that? How would they get the scientists involved and the engineers? What would they have to do in order to develop something like this? Well, it would be similar. I mean, there's nothing new under the sun when it comes to a program,

right? So inside the government and military, you develop a program, you come up with an idea, okay, this is what we want to do. I think this is possible, or we're going to work to make this happen. And there has been some discussion of magnetic propulsion systems. Yes. And gravity propulsion systems, something that defies what we understand is possible today. Way back in the 60s, they were talking about this. Yeah. And more recently, too. I mean, there's been some, you know, although theoretically they looked at it in the recent past and said it's not worth pursuing. But to your question, the program concept would be the same. You have that and then you say, okay, now we got to allocate a budget to it,? We've got to do that. Obviously, it's so sensitive. It'd have to be an enormous budget. It'd have to be an enormous budget. But the known U.S. defense budget now roughly is $800 billion a year or so, a little over probably, give or take.

So you could siphon some of that off to some program or move it to a program? You would put it as a line item in some other innocuous program. And then that, again, that has happened when we're talking about developing something as, you know, sort of not, say, pedestrian, but as straightforward as like surveillance aircraft, right? Then we would, you put that money somewhere else. You develop the program. You get the team that's going to be working on it, whether it's at Skunk Works or somewhere. But you sometimes have to turn to the same usual suspects, which is why I bring up Skunk Works. And you have to do these because at the end of the day, there's not that many material scientists with that capability, a level of intelligence and experience.

And so then you go from there and you work like hell to keep it secret, which, again, if they've done that, I consider that to be a great win because right now we're still trying to play a little bit of catch-up on hypersonics. And that's the next theater, right? I mean, aside from, you know, cyber warfare and warfare in space, you know, and space has already been weaponized, hypersonics is it, right? And so, you know, we're already seeing deployment of hypersonics. And look, to be fair, okay, you know, ballistic missiles, you know, it's all, you know, the difference between a hypersonic, and look, to be fair, okay, you know, ballistic missiles, you know, it's all, you know, the difference between a hypersonic and a ballistic missile is the maneuverability,

right, which creates at the speed, it creates this, you keep shortening the gap for response time, right? So if you fire an ICBM, you know what the trajectory is, You know, a hypersonic glide vehicle, you don't know. It comes at you so fast, and it comes from different directions, and you can't predict. So it defeats air defense systems, which is why it's so important. But we're still playing catch-up there. Is this what we're saying publicly, that we're playing catch-up? And is it possible that we aren't playing catch-up? It's possible, sure.

And again, I would hope so. That'd be great if that's the case. Would it be possible that they would keep that a secret? Sure. I mean, if I was in charge of that program, yeah, I would say, why would we give up our capabilities? So, yes, to go back to your original, if they develop this alternative propulsion system, and part of this is the material science, right?

Because you're punching through the air, you know, at such a speed that it's changing everything, right? It's changing the dynamics of flight. And it is a massive hurdle to overcome, but that's what everybody's working on. massive uh hurdle to overcome and but that's what everybody's working on so you know were they capable of working on this and they developed something like that or were testing it back 19 years ago when fravor saw whatever he saw yeah it's a it's a great sort of theoretical exercise to think about that um and because the reason why i say this is i don't know why i have these instincts but because you know i'm a UFO nut, right? Clearly.

I've not heard that. Fucking look around. Nobody says that. They should. I'm on board. Yeah. But I feel like it's bullshit. I don't feel like it's real.

And I don't know why I feel like it's fake. I wonder. What do you mean by that? What's fake? All the grush stuff. All the disclosure stuff. All the biological entities, the recovered vehicles, the recovery program, the back engineering program. There's something about it to me that just seems like bullshit. And I don't know why I have this overwhelming instinct that's bullshit.

So do you think Grush is like part of the. I don't think he's I think he's probably What they would call a useful idiot. I mean, this is a guess Yeah, I mean, I'm not discouraged disparaging him in any way and I'm if he's telling the truth I'm very happy that he came forward. I think what he did is very courageous but I'm saying that if I wanted to release some bullshit and I wanted to Put out a fake narrative to obscure something that we're working on. That's how I would do it.

I would get some information to a guy and encourage him to leak it and then encourage him to have these hearings and talk about all this stuff and put all this weirdness out there where it kind of confuses the narrative, like what is real and what's not real. Just something about it to me, and this is again, but here's part of my feeling on it too. If disclosure was real, if we really are visited and we have been being visited since the beginning of time, wouldn't that, maybe my feeling is that that would seem so alien that that would seem fake anyway. Because I always felt like if there was a moment of disclosure,

if there was a moment where the president got on television and gave a press conference and said, we are not alone, and we know this for a fact now, and this is what we and this is our concern this what we have to worry about in terms of national security in terms of whether or not they're malevolent i feel like that by itself would be so alien even if it was true that it would seem fake and so that's my conflict my conflict is i'm wondering does it seem like bullshit to me because if it is real it would be so bizarre that it would necessarily seem like bullshit. Or is it just too tidy for me?

Does it just not seem right? Because it just doesn't. It just doesn't seem right. And this is, again, I'm not calling anyone a liar. It just seems like bullshit. And I don't know why. Yeah, I think part of it is we're kind of conditioned to assume that the government hides information from us. Right. Oftentimes not for any necessary national security reasons. Just because it's such a large operation and they just – it can sometimes seem very whimsical or capricious why they don't provide some level of disclosure about things.

But I think with Grush, I think – here's my take on it. I think he believes what he's saying, right? I think he has gone out there. I think I'm legit. Like he was a, whatever, a 14-year veteran of military and National Reconnaissance Office. And I think he went out

and he talked to enough people and he believes it. I don't think he's out there like spinning a yarn and is worried that now he's gotten over his skis and he's said you know too many things and now he's but um i i don't i don't know i don't i don't feel like it's tidy and maybe the difference between us is i i spent I spent a lot of time with the government. And the government sometimes can be really, really dysfunctional. And I just – it goes back to keeping a secret. The idea that they could have this – what essentially is a covert action campaign to spread disinformation about what they actually know, right, when the easier thing to do is just to have the program – again, it's the U.S. government's development of technology, right, and we're doing this, to have the program and just keep your yap shut about it, not go for a disinformation campaign, not try to muddy the

waters by doing this, because in a sense, you're just creating more conversation around it. You're creating, you know, now there's a little bit of a, you know, movement within Congress to say, we have to do this. Now we have to. So they're going to look perhaps for a misappropriation of funds, right? Because they're not going to pursue like the UAP issue necessarily, right? But they might be interested in pursuing misappropriation of funds. So if you're running a program, if it didn't... Again, going back to the idea that it's a US government thing, if you're running a program, that's the last thing you want to do is because you're doing this program to avoid government oversight, you're not going to create this alternative narrative that could generate the sort of publicity or the conversation, particularly up on Capitol Hill,

that causes them to then start looking and saying, well, where is money being spent? Right. Right? Because there is a trail there, and that could cause a problem. So, yeah. So what are your instincts when you look at it? If I'm looking and I'm saying something's wrong, it seems like bullshit, what are your instincts? Yeah, I think I would like to – I don't think we're going to get there. My instinct is to say how do we solve this or how do we come to some sort of logical resolution? As opposed to saying, what is it right off the bat? My instinct is to say, all right, if the all-domain anomalous or anomaly resolution office has 800 cases, then tell us what those 800 cases are. Let's work our way through them or have a little bit more transparency about working through those cases.

Again, you'll probably whittle them down, right, to, I mean, we were doing black files and we were going around talking to people about, you know, various sightings and things. You're basically just crossing things off going, okay, that was this, that was this, that was this, you know, you find some pretty mundane answers, you know, but you whittle it down to maybe one or two things that you can't explain and then you can investigate those and say, okay, all right, let's dig further on these. But right now it's just like all over the map and they've got so many cases and they just kind of lump it all together. Are they doing that to obfuscate and create, you know, this this think I'm not willing to shut the door on saying that those handful of those few sightings where we do have technical data, we've got video, we've got radar lock, we've got gun camera footage, whatever it may be, that can't be explained. I'm not willing to close the door on saying, well, it's, you know, because who knows? Maybe China's doing the same thing. You know, oh, we're, you know, you know, is it because who knows, maybe China's

doing the same thing, you know, oh, we're leading the hypersonic race right now. Great. But they've got another program, you know, and they were responsible for the TIC-TAC, right? So we have to pursue it. And if that leads us to the doorstep that says, oh, that's a U.S. government program, and they've developed the technology. Okay, you know, fine. But, you know, I realized that, you know, I just, I realize that I just – I'm not willing to close the door on saying it could be something else. It could be otherworldly, right? Because I just don't know.

It could be. It could be. I just don't know. There is that problem of the infinite nature of space, which seems to actually be getting bigger. Yeah, there was a good way of putting it that my wife, who's a hell of a lot smarter than I am um tried to explain it to me and i kept looking out like this and but she had heard of she had heard a program at one point where the the person explained it like okay imagine how vast the ocean is right and you know how you you we've explored

the ocean but then you look at space and how immense it is, right? Compared to the ocean, right? Right. The amount that we've explored in space, right, is equivalent to like a wine glass full of ocean water, right? So you take a wine glass full of ocean water, you look at it and you go, eh, there's nothing there, right? You know, there's all those life forms, there's all those fish in the sea. It's kind of like that. And then, you know, you think about space and you think about what we know and what we don't know. And how we imagine, like our limited capacity to imagine what life outside of Earth could look like. Right.

So it, yeah. But when you hear talk of like crashed retrieval programs. Yeah. That keeps taking me back to this whole idea of if there was a crash retrieval and reverse engineering program like David Gresh talked about and had been in existence for decades, somebody would have fucking opened their yap and talked about it. Other than Bob Lazar. Other than Bob Lazar. And they would have had some better specifics, right?

I mean, that's always the thing that it's, it's where it falls down. Well, I haven't seen it, but I talked to somebody who knows that it exists. Right. And I think maybe it's because we're human.

We're programmed to actually want physical evidence. Yeah. Right. We want to actually see it before we believe it. Um, but you know, that, that really hasn't happened yet.

What's one of the things that's fascinating is the narrative has shifted so wildly from it's completely preposterous to credible people like David Fravor and Ryan Graves and all these different people that are talking about multiple sightings, things that completely defy our understanding of what a vehicle is capable of doing. Hovering completely motionless in 120 knot winds. The whole, you know, whatever that thing is, the cube inside a sphere that they keep seeing over and over again. Right. Almost hit one of the aircraft. Yeah. What the fuck is that? Yeah. And then they land. So I think, you know, one of the good developments out of all of this, and one of the things that may eventually lead to transparency, right, because it will, it will provide an avenue for these sightings,

whether it's commercial or military pilots, as an example, to report it, right, and to be more, and for the government to take, perhaps, you know, again, it depends on whether it's a big conspiracy or not, to, to investigate in a more logical manner and in a more detailed manner. So I think just, again, the sheer act that we're talking about it, which then takes me back to the idea that, you know, if you're running a secret program, you don't want people talking about it. So you're not going to muddy the waters with a false narrative if you don't have to. Right.

You know, if your concern is that someone's getting close to the truth and you got to do, okay, then maybe so. But, you know do you think it's also possible that there are patriots that do think that the american public deserves to know about this information and they have been sitting on it for a long time um the people like david grush and all these various people that are coming out and more apparently are wanting to come out. Yeah.

Well, interesting thing with Grush is, look, he said so during the hearing, right? He said, I can't talk about that. I could talk about it in a skiff, right? Yes. In a sensitive and secure environment. All right. Well, if I'm, you know, one of the people on that subcommittee, I'm going to say, you know what, to my staff, schedule, you, schedule a SCIF meeting with Grush.

Get him in here and let's have him talk classified shit. Right. So that would be the next logical step in all of this, right? Have they done that yet? I don't know. I mean, it's, you know. When he said, I could talk to you about it in a SCIF, have people taken him up on that?

Well, you'd have to ask him. No, I wouldn't. Right. And they wouldn't tell anybody. and they wouldn't tell anybody. And they wouldn't tell him. And therein lies part of the problem because if he sits there and – but if he sits in the skiff and continues to kind of say, well, okay, you guys aren't clear to hear this and I can't – all right, then you've got to start questioning what he's actually got or what he knows for sure

rather than just having this this You know witness interviews and sort of secondhand information, but I am much more I guess the point is I'm much more interested in the direct sightings than Witness interviews right and the thing about him is he's not really a witness Where he hasn't had any personal encounters with anything right? It's not personal encounter with a craft. He hasn't seen any personal encounters with anything. He hasn't had a personal encounter with a craft. He hasn't seen a retrieved craft. He hasn't seen the biological entities.

These are all just programs that he's been made aware of that he felt like people needed to know about. Yeah. That's the narrative. And again, not to disparage anybody, right? If in fact somebody leaked his medical records, which it looks like did happen, then that's pretty bullshit. Somebody needs to figure out what the hell is happening here. Let's see this.

The information from Grush, who said he was unable to discuss specifics on what he told the Pentagon's watchdog arm, lawmakers want to sit down with a former official in a sensitive compartmented information facility, a SCIF, to get additional information from him. The group has been blocked, however, by officials that have informed them that Grush doesn't currently have security clearance to discuss the issues in a SCIF, according to Burchett. We think that we'll get there eventually. It's just frustrating. I'm ready to go, and the American public are ready to go, he said. Luna argued that the skiff with Grush could help lawmakers better understand the type of legislation they need to write regarding UAPs. She said she supports legislation that would declassify information on the phenomenon. So there seems to be some

issue of secrecy and what's possible to discuss or what's legal to discuss. Well, but yeah, look, the government casts a very wide net when you're talking about of secrecy and what's possible to discuss or what's legal to discuss. Well, but yeah, look, the government casts a very wide net when you're talking about classified information, right? The government has over classified information for decades and decades, right? And you've got secret, top secret, code word, you know, and they tend to just hoover everything up and classify it. And then it takes fucking forever, right, to go through that process of declassification because nobody wants to put their neck out at that point and say, yeah, let's declassify this once it's in that pot. So but the question is, great.

You know, you're saying, you know, you can talk about it in a skiff. Well, damn it. Then that's the next. That's what the subcommittee should be doing. That's their job. Right. If they're curious. Right.

And if they're sincere about trying to get to the bottom of this and that's theoretically their job, then they should. Because, again, going back to the main thing and people can say, well, why are you wasting your time on this? But you can always circle back to the top line, which is it's for national security purposes. We want to know what the hell's going on. Right. And, you know, so, yeah, we'll see. I guess that's the question that should be thrown at Grush or should be thrown at the subcommittee members. I'm also shocked at how few people care.

I feel like people are so overloaded with information today because of social media and because of the news cycle. with information today because of social media and because of the news cycle you're just people are so overloaded with information that this barely registered on people other than UFO nuts yeah yeah I mean there was a there was a surprising amount I thought anyway of sort of mainstream media coverage it wasn't particularly deep right it just kind of covered okay I was a hearing and I think they did it because I like it's UFOs or UAPs, right? And so, you know, they knew they'd get some clicks on it if they were putting it online or whatever. And they didn't pursue it, you know, like has there been any –

I haven't seen any stories that talked about the follow-up with Grush. There were a couple of stories talking about, you know, the fact that perhaps his medical records were leaked. And the medical records showed what? That he had some sort of a psychiatric condition? That he had an event or something like that? PTSD. I think some suicidal depression issues.

Standard stuff with military veterans. Yeah. Yeah. He had done his time in Afghanistan. And so that means nothing except for the fact that it shouldn't be out there. Right. Those records should be damn well private. Well, not only that, isn't that what we want?

Why don't you shut your little dinger off there, fella? Is that me going off? That's you. Yeah, that's why your phone rang, too. What the hell? Yeah. Got to learn how to use that little switch on the side. Thank you for my IT lesson.

Isn't that what you want from, I mean, that's the whole purpose of providing these services for veterans, that when they do have suicidal thoughts and they are struggling with PTSD, that they get help. I mean, the idea that they're shaming him and saying that his report is not credible because of this seems ridiculous. It's totally bullshit. Yeah. And he said, he's come out since and said, look, I did seek help. I'm in a better place. And he was happy that people were talking about it. They should be talking about it.

Look, we lose a shocking number of veterans to suicide, right? And it's disgusting that the government doesn't work harder at this, right? And spend more effort, you know? I know a couple of people who do amazingly good work at the VA in terms of counselors, right? They're not managers, they're not executives. They work with the veterans every day, right? And it's incredible what they do. But overall, as a government, our assistance, right, to veterans, I mean, look at the number of homeless. It's pathetic. And so when he talks about it, it's good that he's talking about it, right? I think that transparency helps, and he clearly views it that way, too. And he said, look, I don't have

any problem with discussing it, but we should be concerned by the fact that somehow his medical records were put out there. And then some people will look at that and go, well, is that the government's effort to discredit him? Or is that somebody's effort to discredit him? I don't know why anybody else would. Why would you do that? Why would you put them out there? So I feel for the guy in that sense. I just can't evaluate or assess the veracity of what he's saying.

Right. So particularly the sort of the biologics thing that we're holding on to dead aliens. Yeah. I'm not sure about that part. You know, that's the old story, the old legend about Nixon. Nixon and Jackie Gleason. Do you know that story? No.

Do you know that story? No. I'm glad you were able to bring Nixon into this conversation. Yeah. Nixon apparently was drinking buddies with Jackie Gleason. Do you know that story? No. Do you know that story? No, I'm glad you were able to bring Nixon into this conversation. Yeah, Nixon apparently was drinking buddies with Jackie Gleason, and they were tying one on, and Nixon was like, you want to see some fucking shit? Apparently they jumped in Air Force One. He took him to a base, and the legend goes that they showed him this retrieved UFO,

and they showed him alien bodies. And the legend also goes that Jackie Gleason became a UFO nut after that. And one of the things that points to that is he actually had a home built in New York state that was in the shape of a UFO. And there's a, I mean, you could see the home. Yeah, it's like this circular flying disc looking home that he had built in New York State. But supposedly he had it built. This is the house. Supposedly he had this thing built because it was a representation of what he had seen. Good God.

Yeah, pretty wild shit. Well, yeah, it's Westchester County, so someone will pay $12 million for it. Yeah, I wish it was for sale. Oh, God. I don't want to live there, but. Well, it's listed. See, there's that little thing that said it was listed for $12 million.

The CIA snatched it up. Oh, yeah. We got to get that under control. We got to shut this up right now. Yeah, Norton. I used to love that show. It's a great great legend i don't know if it's true there's been some dispute of whether or not it's true because what the source was his ex-wife is that what it was is that what it was jamie yeah they looked up i remember i just looked this up the other day they looked up that that source and it was like from an interview that

was in a magazine an esquire maybe Esquire can't be found anywhere. But that's possible with today. The disappearing Esquire? Talking about an Esquire from 1970-whatever. Yeah. Yeah, I had no idea. Did you ever see that? It was not that long ago, the Elvis and Nixon movie.

No. Did you ever see that? Elvis and Nixon movie? Yeah, I forget what it was called. It might have the Elvis and Nixon movie. No. Did you ever see that? Elvis and Nixon movie? Yeah, I forget what it was called. It might have just been called Nixon and Elvis or something. But it was a great movie. It's a great watch. It's worth watching.

It was a short, relatively short movie. It wasn't a documentary. It was a movie. And it was fantastic. But I can't remember the name of it. Well, we have that photo of Elvis. Look at that. Oh, okay.

That's it, yeah. It's Kevin Spacey. Ah! Yeah, and it'll be like old times. You'll be able to go and watch Kevin Spacey back before he got, you know. Come on, man. Who's the dude that played Elvis? It looks like Johnny Knoxville.

I don't know the actor's name off the top of my head. Hold on. Is it Michael Shannon? Is that it? Yeah, I think so. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Wow. No, it was... He's not quite handsome enough to play Elvis. I didn't realize that. Colin Hanks was in that. Johnny Knoxville was in the movie. Yeah. So that's a crap movie.

Yeah. That movie sounds like it was lacking in a casting budget. You should watch it, though. Come on, man. It had its moments. It was actually very funny. Kevin Spacey as Nixon. Yeah, boy, that guy disappeared off the map, didn't he?

Kevin Spacey? He was just exonerated. Yeah. It was some of those charges. But it seems like there was a lot of Dick Grabbin' going on. A lot of Dick Grabbin', but he was also right in the firelight. He was at that perfect moment of the storm. Remember that whole Me Too thing? He does have a reputation for dick grabber though yeah yeah well well i i don't

know about that but he he played a good nixon he was a damn fine nixon he played a good president too yeah that fucking oh yeah the netflix show what was it called house of cards yeah fucking great show that was good he's He played such a good creep. Although they kind of jumped the shark when he started like, it was a threesome with a Secret Service officer. Yeah. Remember when they went to that far? Yeah.

Okay, it's time to switch and find a new series to watch. But, yeah, anyway. Hey, do you mind if I promote something? Sure. Promote something. We've been doing this a while. I have agreed to take over a podcast. Really?

Take over a podcast? And here it is. What is this? Here it is. This is your podcast? It's coming up September 5th. Now, this is something that someone else started and you're taking over? Yeah.

Yeah. Let's see if we can make this play. What if you had your own spy? Would you use them to keep tabs on the most important events happening around the world? Update you on exactly what you needed to know each morning so you could be smarter, more prepared, ahead of the curve. Meet CIA veteran Mike Baker. Every day he'll be your personal intelligence officer,

delivering insights and analysis once reserved for the President of the United States. The President's Daily Brief with Mike Baker. Get briefed. Stay ahead. Your briefings begin on September 5th. Damn right. Who put this together? First TV. So it's available on all podcast platforms, including Spotify.

Is it video as well? No, it's just going to be an audio. We may go to video at some point, but it's 20 minutes a day. Oh, okay. It starts on the 5th of September, every morning at 6 a.m., about 20 minutes. And all we're going to do, the reason I love this project is because, like with the President's Daily Brief, right? It drops in the Oval Office every morning. It's very, as his name implies, it's very brief, covers the top issues around the globe and provides a bit of context.

And then that's it. And that's all the president gets, right? Just every morning to kind of get that, okay, here are the things going on that I need to pay attention to. That's the stuff that they said that Trump wouldn't read unless his name was in it. Yeah. So they would inject his name into stuff to get him to pay attention. Yeah, basically. Yeah.

You always get these different takes from the president, from every administration as to how they receive these things. But the idea is, yeah, 6 a.m. every morning, September 5th, President's Daily Brief, all podcast platforms, including Spotify. with President's Daily Brief, all podcast platforms, including Spotify. And the idea is we're just going to cover the top stories or concerns of the day, provide a little analysis, context. I'm not going to tell people how to think about it, right? There's enough folks out there, all the pundits doing that. And then wrap it up, get on.

And then it allows people, but every day. So I'm really excited about it. It starts out as, you know, it'll be an audio cast. Who knows where it'll go from there. But it took a brief hiatus, went off the air back in, I think, in February, and I agreed to start hosting it. That's great. It should be fun.

Yeah, I mean, again, it's informative. It's not opinion-driven. Have you spoken to any presidents? I have, yes. Who have you spoken to? Bill Clinton Uh, I have, yes. Uh, Bill Clinton, Bill Clinton. I will, and I will say this. Um, I was at a, an event. Um, I forget where it was. It wasn't here. It wasn't in Austin. It might've been in little rock. It was a large gathering and it was a dinner. And, um, at the end of it, uh, it, and also George Bush was there, too. Had a brief chance to talk with him. But with Bill Clinton, the striking thing was he came through the room and I was just standing started talking to me about something that we had done when I was with the agency and he was president, an operation that we had done. And, you know, I don't think he knew I was going to be there or anything, but he stood there and started talking about this operation in real detail.

I mean, no sources or methods or things, but the recall was surprising. I mean, no sources and methods or things, but the recall was surprising, and he was adding context about why they had made some decisions from the White House that they did about what we were doing. And he kind of stood there. He had his hands on my arm. He was just really focused on talking to the point where the Secret Service at a certain point were kind of like getting antsy and saying, can we move on? Can we leave? But he kept talking and I was, I always thought that the, you know, Clinton was, he's smart, right? And politics aside, right? He's a smart guy, but he had this ability to zero in on people, right? And the thing that he had as a politician was not only could he make you feel like you were the only person in the room,

thing that he had as a politician was not only could he make you feel like you were the only person in the room but he he had this recall the ability to talk about things in detail that um you know left you realizing okay he was a smart dude he was you know he's a bit of a wanderer right and you know and he had his own issues but uh well that's the case with a lot of smart dudes yeah there's a motivation for their success and a lot of times it's women yeah power and women right i mean that has traditionally been the motivation of leaders yeah burlesconi sorry okay maybe that's a different one um but uh yeah i so that was that was a that was a striking conversation uh that i thought um and uh i've actually got a photo of that was someone snapped a photo he was talking and he was just kind of really focused.

And I, and I was like, what the hell are we talking about this for? But I realized he was basically kind of bringing it back around to why they did something from the white house. And he wanted to discuss it with you. Yeah. And I thought, okay, that's, you know, that, that was, that was after he was out of office. Uh, yes. Yeah.

Out of office. Yeah. I would love to talk to a president about what that experience, I mean, it's my main, if I had a question for Trump, that's one of the big ones. Like, what is it like when you get in there?

Like, what's the difference between perception and reality? What is the difference between your ideas of what it's like when you get into the Oval Office, what it's like when you get debriefed? Because pretty much every politician has these plans. They all have these things that they say they're going to do. And then they get into office and very little of it happens. Yeah.

Like, why is that and what is it like? I think they're fighting against the machine, first of all. like? I think they're fighting against the machine, first of all. And, you know, maybe they show up and they imagine, I mean, that, you know, they're going to accomplish whatever it is going to be that they're going to accomplish. But then I think the realities of Washington, D.C. set in. And I think that it's tougher now than it used to be. I mean, I think you, not to romanticize the past, but I think it used to be easier to get people I think you, you, and not to romanticize the past, but I think it used to be easier to get people into a room from, you know, both sides of the aisle and hammer out, you know, a platform or an idea or a bill or whatever it may be. And I think that's much

more difficult now for people to do because it's so damn partisan. But, um, yeah, it is, it's, it's a, you know, we had the good fortune of being in the White House a few times. And it's – I can't imagine that it's not this overwhelming feeling when you go – if you're just elected, right, and you walk into the Oval Office, this overwhelming feeling of responsibility. overwhelming feeling of responsibility, you know, and even for somebody like Trump, you know, who probably, you know, I mean, you know, he probably sat down and thought, of course I'm here, you know, and why wouldn't I be here? But, and then, you know, your number one job is essentially to take a lot of shit that's happening, distill it down to, you know, its key points and delegate, right? Because there is such a machine around you, right, that tries to plan every moment of your day, I think. And it is, you know, it's not unlike

being a CEO of a Fortune 50 company, you know, where you've got a lot of plates spinning and you can't focus on all of them. So, which is part of the, you know, look at me, part of the president's daily brief, the purpose of that that goes into the Oval Office is to try to keep a focus on sort of the national security issues that are at the top of the hit parade in very short order, right? Because no matter how interested the president is, and look, Bush is an example, used to go through those things with a fine tooth comb and ask question after question after question. Right. Clearly, I don't think that was Trump style. I don't know what Biden does. Right. In terms of that. But, you know, every president's a little bit different in how they receive information and process it and then prioritize in their mind what's important, but behind you is a machine that, regardless of what you're thinking, is prioritizing concerns of the day, national security issues and military concerns and the economy and all the rest of it.

So at the end of the day, maybe we put too much... We imagine the president's got more ability, right, to do things or to change things or to shape things than they actually do. So, again, not in any way to minimize the importance or the stress of that job. Right. Well, the stress of the job is unprecedented. Yeah. You watch the way it ages people. Except him. Except Trump.

That motherfucker just... Like a duck to water. So what do you think? Is he getting the nomination? Is he going to be the guy? Yeah, I think he is. Yeah. I was wrong before when we talked about this a while back.

I don't think they can stop him. Yeah. I think the people that want Trump in office, they view the hypocrisy of this administration, the corruption, the open borders, the economy collapsing, the open checkbook to Ukraine. They view all this shit. They view all the clamping down on internal combustion engines, the green shit, what they think that is going to kill the economy and centralize money into a few very powerful hands. Yeah. They don't buy it at all. And they think that he's their only solution.

Does anybody from the GOP side, any of the candidates have a chance to take the nomination instead of Trump? I don't think so. Yeah. I mean, I agree. I don't see who it would be. I don't see unless something horrible happens to him. That Vivek guy is very interesting. Yeah.

He's very rational and very smart. He does seem to talk directly about the issues. Yes. Unlike some of the folks who are speaking more aspirational and talking about direction of the country, he does seem to focus more on these are the things we need to do specifically he's also clearly very very intelligent like superior intelligence like when when you hear him discuss nuanced issues he also has very good emotional intelligence because i've seen him not just challenged but disparaged on radio shows and podcasts and he handles things very very well and that discussion with him was what got Don Lemon removed from CNN, because Don Lemon and him went at it. I think he's,

but he's very young, too. Would people want a 37-year-old guy running the entire country, even if it's a truly exceptional mind and truly exceptional person, which I think he is? Well, this may be the cycle, right? Meaning sort of this Biden. I mean, if Biden ends up, do you think that's the second part of the question? Do you think Biden's going to be the guy? I don't think so. No. I think it's probably going to be fucking Mr. California. Really? Yeah. I think it's probably going to be Gavin Newsom. I think they're probably going to try to whitewash all the failures of California and all the disastrous policies and just view him as the most presidential of the leftist progressive candidates. And keep Kamala Harris as the VP?

No way. No. Not a chance in hell. I think she steps down. I think if I had to guess, something comes up. Yeah. Yeah. She doesn't want to do it anymore. He has a better choice. They find her another position. You know, she decides that she would better serve somewhere else, something. I just don't imagine that they wouldn't see her as a massive liability. Oh, I think they do. I mean, I think that, but as long as Biden's the candidate.

Right. She's the VP on the ticket. Unless something horrible happens with her. Some sort of scandal or some sort of thing or, you know, look, they removed Andrew Cuomo when just a couple of months before he was the darling of the Democratic Party. Yeah. They decided that he was too much of a liability. And so they they went after him. Yeah.

of a liability. And so they went after him. Yeah. But I'm not sure how. I don't know that the party's got what it takes to come out without an incident, right? Without something. And yeah, you hate to say anything about anybody's health, but without something on a health perspective happening with Biden. Well, the health perspective has already happened. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's super clear at this point. I mean, people are giving me shit about saying it in 2020. It's super clear that he's got, like, real mental problems. Like, whatever they are,

whether it's dementia, which is pure old age, whatever it is. Like, there's... He's got... I mean, when he closes his eyes, that's when everybody goes into a panic. He's like...

Oh, I know. But look at what we've got. We've got. We've got him doing that. And then he whispers. The part with his presentation that always drives me crazy is when he whispers, Get vaccinated. It's Bidenomics.

It's working. And you think, okay, stop doing that. Well, he's just a goof. He's always been a goofy guy. But you've got that. You've got Mitch McConnell kind of fading out. Falling apart. Almost having a mini stroke during his speech that one time in front of the press and then you're so old yeah have you seen feinstein is still there yeah feinstein is still there she's handed over

control she's you know like said my daughter has control of my you know business and everything and conservatorship or whatever but i'm staying here until 2025. It's nuts. Yeah. It's nuts. And yeah, it's just such a fucking strange time. It's so strange. So maybe somebody like Vivek says, I'm going to sit this one out. I mean, that would be the, to me, that would be the smart thing. If you've got aspirations and you've got the ability, but you're young, you think, maybe I'll just let the whole system reboot right now because this Biden-Trump thing is just so bizarre.

Well, Trump could choose him as a VP, and I think he would be a formidable VP. Maybe I'll just let the whole system reboot right now because this Biden-Trump thing is just so bizarre. Well, Trump could choose him as a VP, and I think he would be a formidable VP. If Trump runs with him as a VP, I think that's a massive asset. I really do. Yeah. I think because that guy, you could see him in four years being the president. He's so rational and intelligent. When I listen to him talk, I'm like, that's what I want from a president.

I want a level-headed, super intelligent, rational person who has had a massive amount of success in the real world, who decides to enter into politics because he thinks that he can serve in a meaningful way. And he thinks that he can impart change in a meaningful way. At least that's what I'm getting from him in my most rose-colored glasses view of the world. But does that, I don't know if that's what the voters want, right? Because he would balance out what people don't like about Trump with this bombastic personality. But also like, you got to give credit to the guy because that bombastic personality really did expose the deep state.

It really did expose all this corruption and the fucking Russia collusion, the fact that the media was completely on board with that, that there's been no apologies, that this was all bullshit. There's so much of that that he exposed because of the fact that he fights tooth, claw, and nail. Tooth claw nail the fact the fact that he won't back down and then he gets it any you know Literally goes after the intelligence community, which is you know obviously from your perspective is a terrible idea Well, no, it's not a terrible idea if you're going after for you know for For certain individuals politicizing the because that can never happen That's a death knell for any intelligence organization as far as I'm which an or a federal law enforcement organization like the bureau Right you so you should always you should always be on the lookout for that for any intelligence organization as far as I'm concerned, or a federal law enforcement organization like the Bureau. So you should always be on the lookout for that.

I have no problems with that at all. But my point is always, at least with the organization that I know, it's not the body of the organization, right? You get individuals who become enamored of their access or the power or the closeness to the policies or they let their personal agenda take over. That's a real danger, and you can never let that happen. And so- That's what I think people need to understand when they talk disparagingly about the intelligence community. And that my opinion, my personal opinion is that most of these people are patriots. And that there are people that get into positions of power

in every single organization, no matter what it is, where they abuse that power. And those people become corrupt. And this has happened in every business. I'm sure every branch of government. I'm sure it happens everywhere. But it doesn't mean that the intelligence communities are unnecessary. That would be like saying, okay, the CEO of a company has got a certain political agenda, like with BlackRock.

I mean, maybe the head of it is enamored with whatever it was, equity and- Inclusion. Inclusion. Governance. I can't inclusion, governance, and governance. And so the whole organization is bad, right? Well, okay, probably not everybody there thinks that way, right? But, you know, all it takes is a handful at the top level on the seventh floor, wherever the organization is, and that's a problem. So you defeat that in part by having a very proactive, curious government, right, with the proper committees and the intel committees that are up on Capitol Hill, as an example,

that ask all those important questions and that demand answers and that aren't so hyper-partisan that they refuse to pursue the obvious, right? And, you know, look, the lack of self-awareness is shocking. When you get people like Adam Schiff and Jamie Raskin, you know, saying things like, well, this look at the Biden finances is, you know, it's bullshit. It's purely political. And Raskin and Schiff and others spent years, right, getting in front of the cameras and just spewing bullshit about the Russian collusion story. And yet the fact that they don't see it because they're so partisan and they don't understand. Look, the important thing here is it doesn't matter if you're a Republican or Democrat.

Everybody should be subject to the same concerns and behavior and scrutiny. But it's not going to happen. I don't know how you walk it back. I don't know how we get back to some level of normal. Right. And I don't think we're going to see that during the course of this election cycle. This is going to be a this is going to be a shit show. Yeah. So it's going to be a shit show, especially with the indictments. Yeah. Oh, yeah. And I don't think there's any more coming down the pike. So I think these four are it. But, you know, that D.C. indictment is that's definitely a political document. Right. I haven't had a chance to go through the Georgia indictment in full. But the race that they all have. Right. And trying to get these things out there in the

time frame that they are, you know, would seem to get these things out there in the timeframe that they are, you know, would seem to indicate that they've got a political motivation here. Make this last through the election cycle, you know, screw over to the degree they can what they view as the top challenger and let it go. And they don't seem to care about the public's perception of how that looks. Right. And that's a dangerous precedent to set, because if that happens, what's to stop some authoritarian Republican from utilizing the same methods to go after people in your group once the precedent's been set?

Yeah. No, there's nothing. And then you get into banana republic territory. But again, I think, you know, yeah, I would be hard pressed to imagine Biden's going to end up, uh, going all the way through the whole process, you know, securing all the delegates, you know, running, winning. I mean, I just, I don't think they want him to, I really don't think they want him to, but they've got another option is Michelle Obama that keeps getting bandied around. I'm not sure if she even wants to have anything to do with that. I, you know, she's in one of those positions, right? It's like Oprah Winfrey. People say, well, Oprah Winfrey should run. The fuck she should.

Yeah. I mean, well, I know. But what I mean is when they say that, you think, well, she enjoys this position of being loved by lots of people. And so Michelle Obama, she's in sort of that sweet spot, right? Everyone's like, oh my God, it's Michelle Obama. As soon as you put yourself in that arena. Right. Then the hate comes at you. Yeah, shit comes at you fast. And you don't need it.

No. I mean, they've made enough money. Yeah. How are they all doing that? How are all these people making this money? Crazy, Mike. It's crazy. I don't know.

I don't get it either. It seems weird on a $400,000 a year salary. Yeah. You're worth hundreds of millions. Or you look at the senators. Yeah. How's that working? How is that crazy with the fucking just the insider trading?

How is that still legal? Well, and what is it? A senator's salary is in like the, I think the low $200,000 or something like that. Maybe. I forget. But yeah, my experience has been you don't become a multimillionaire you know doing that unless you've got you're really sad shenanigans picking stocks right I'm sitting in a committee and I hear somebody talk about a new

program that's gonna be developed to develop a new type of propulsion system right yeah that's right that's how it goes hey, I want you to have this, man. This is the easiest, simplest lighter you'll ever find. It's a Zippo. Thank you. It's a CIA lighter. It's a CIA lighter. Good, I could bring this around my paranoid friends that already think that I'm a CIA operative.

And there's not a transmitter in that. I don't want you to think that this- I'm going to give that to Eddie Bravo. He'll fucking bury it in the ground. Yeah, there's no transmitter in that light, man. Mike, thank you very much. I appreciate you. Let's do it again in a few months, and hopefully the world's not glowing.

I hope so, man. And tell us more about your podcast, and I'm sure it's going great. Oh, yeah. President's Daily Brief, September 5th, starts on all podcast platforms, including Spotify. Beautiful. Listen for it. Good luck with that. Thank you, man.

Thank you. Appreciate you very much. Thank you, Joe. Bye, man. Thank you. Appreciate you very much. Thank you, Joe. Bye, everybody.