The Pomp Podcast - #1115 Mike Shelby | This Interview Will Scare You

Episode Date: November 3, 2022

Mike Shelby is the Founder & CEO of Forward Observer, a modern age Intel service. In this conversation, we discuss many geopolitical situations including China & Taiwan, the Russia & Ukraine conflict, the threat of nuclear war, and domestic issues across the United States. This episode provides an inside look into all of the major conflicts around the world and will give you a framework on how you can prepare yourself at home with the proper knowledge. ======================= With a Messari Pro subscription, you gain access to exclusive industry-leading long-form daily research reports, daily crypto news & insights in your inbox, advanced asset screeners, curated sets of charts and metrics and so much more. Try Messari Pro today! Get up to 25% off their Messari Pro membership by visiting www.messari.io/pro and entering promo code "POMP" at checkout. ======================= Valour (formerly DeFi Technologies) represents what’s next in the digital economy -- providing simplified, trusted access to crypto, decentralized finance and Web 3.0 investment opportunities. Institutions and investors can gain diversified, secure, compliant, and easily tradable access to a diversified set of industry-leading equity products and protocols, through a single stock purchase on a regulated exchange. Currently listed on U.S. (OTC: DEFTF) and Canadian (NEO:DEFI) exchanges. For more information or to subscribe to receive company updates and financial information, visit our website at valour.com ======================= The Pod Pro Cover by Eight Sleep is the most advanced solution on the market for thermoregulation. It pairs dynamic cooling and heating with biometric tracking. Even better? Eight Sleep recently launched the next generation of the Pod. The new Pod 3 enables more accurate sleep and health tracking with double the amount of sensors, delivering you the best sleep experience on Earth. Go to eightsleep.com/pomp ======================= Exodus is leading the world out of the traditional financial system by building beautiful and user-friendly blockchain products. With its focus on design and user experience, Exodus has become one of the most popular and loved cryptocurrency apps. It’s supported on both desktop and mobile, allowing you to sync your wallet across multiple devices so you can have access to your funds anywhere. You can instantly exchange around 100 different cryptocurrencies straight from your wallet. Interactive charts let you view an asset’s price history and your portfolio’s performance over time. And maybe the best part, Exodus is integrated with the Trezor hardware wallet - making advanced security easy for everyone. Visit exodus.com/pomp for your free download or search Exodus on the App Store or Playstore. ======================= Compass Mining is the world's first online marketplace for bitcoin mining hardware and hosting. Compass was founded with the goal of making it easy for everyone to mine bitcoin. Visit https://compassmining.io/ to start mining bitcoin today! =======================

What's up, everyone? This is Anthony Pompliano. Most of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast, simply the best podcast out there. Now let's kick this thing off. Mike Shelby is the founder and CEO of Forward Observer, a modern age Intel service that gives people the information they need and ability to act on it in real time for current events around the world. In this conversation, we talk about all sorts of different things, including the China-Taiwan issues, the Russia-Ukraine conflict, domestic issues around the United States, and many other topics that many of you will be thinking about, learning about, and constantly trying to war game out in your minds on a daily basis. I really enjoyed this

conversation with Mike. I hope you guys enjoyed it as well. After you listen to this episode, get on Twitter, let us know what you think. What'd you like? What did you not like? What do you agree with? And what do you disagree with? We really enjoy the feedback and the conversation after each one of these episodes. All right, let's get in this conversation with Mike. I hope you guys enjoy this one. Anthony Pompliano runs Pomp Investments. All views of him and the guests on his podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Pomp Investments. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp or his guests as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his

personal opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only. All right, guys. Bang, bang. I've got mike here with me i'm very excited about this because you operate in a world that i think most people don't understand but uh is incredibly important uh but it's all based on your background uh you were in intel in the military you spent some time as a contractor walk us through kind of what were you doing in the military and then we can talk about how you're now using this in the civilian world to keep people informed well i i enlisted in 2004 i was a 96 bravo intel analyst and you know the the military career i actually i didn't really uh like it i guess but i love to be on deployments you know you do your job like you wake up you have a mission you have

stuff to do you know we always say intelligence drives the fight and i'm you know i'm not trying to you know play this up right i mean most of the time i was sitting at a computer but people have to make decisions you know commanders they and and teams they have to go to x place they have to know what to expect once they get there and somebody has to provide them with that intelligence and so it really is a a critical part of of war fighting and so you know i i really did enjoy the intelligence side you know you get to you know experience things that that not many other people do you get to watch you know things on tv and say oh that that's not right you know You know, that's the U.S. spin on what actually happened, you know.

And so I tell you, I I really just I fell in love with the job. And yeah. And then I got into contracting after that. I did two deployments, went to Afghanistan in 06, 07, Iraq, 08, 09. And then as a contractor, went back to Afghanistan for 2010 and 2011. And, you know, I just, I really enjoyed, I really enjoyed that as a career. One of the things, as you're talking, that it immediately goes back to is, like, you wake up every day, shave your face, put on the same uniform, you know where to go, you know where to be, you don't got to make very many decisions, and, like, life's pretty easy. That's right. People who've never experienced it, they're like, that sounds fucking crazy.

These two guys are idiots, right? But like there is this clarity that comes from being in an environment where you don't really think for yourself sometimes, right? Now, yeah, out on the battlefield or whatever, or in your case, a lot of times writing reports, like you're having to synthesize information. But there is something different about that experience that I think it's hard for people to understand until they go and do it. When you were doing the Intel work, talk a little bit about the training that you get before you actually go out and get deployed and things like that. Uh, cause I think most people are like, Oh, Intel, like, is that like, you know, Jack Bauer? Is that like, uh, uh, some kind of field agent who's, you know, hanging people up and like doing all kinds of crazy stuff? Uh, what, what is the training like? And then what does that actually mean?

You know, kind of day to day when you're out, uh, in a deployment. Yeah. You know, big army stuff, big army Intel is, is like big army, anything, you know, um, you know, but there is a part of the army that, you know, it's not James Bond, but you know, it gets, uh, a little bit into the gray, gray zone or you know gray area but yeah the train up you know on the on the big army side it is you you do your your train up it's like you zero your rifle you go to the range you get you know you qualify with it with an m249 or you know whatever you do rollover training you know it's probably a lot like just for everyone who's getting ready to deploy and then but on the intel side there is you know how well do you know the area as as soon as possible you know figure out

where you're going, what unit you're placing, get in touch with them, start getting a lay of the land, because it's very important as, especially as an analyst, you have to understand the baseline of where you're going so that you can determine what is off baseline. And so having a head start on where you're going, learning the local tribes, the local power players, the Taliban, Nakshabandi, whatever groups are active in the area. During that train up, the more you know about about those groups and what they've been doing the better off you'll be because you know once you're once the unit you're replacing rips out like there goes 11 or 12 months worth of knowledge and it just literally disappears and so you know and then all of a sudden it's it's

a commander asking you you've been there for 30 days expecting an answer like you've been there for 12 months one of uh from my experience uh some some something that someone said to me early on was they said the first two weeks in the last two weeks those were the most dangerous ones and i was like why and they were like look man you you think that these people aren't paying attention you think these people aren't uh actively thinking all day long how do we kill these motherfuckers right but like they are sitting there all day long that's all they're thinking about and when they see that truck drive by they're like i've never seen that truck with that number on it before it's a new unit these dudes don't know what they're doing yet they

don't know where they are they don't know who we are like and it's sure enough like the intensity of attacks in the beginning in the end seemed kind of crazy and you never really know why right Some of it's the changeover stuff. Some of it's maybe you're just on your game, you know, kind of in the middle of deployment. But I remember also the entire intel that we would receive, there was a change in quality,

you know, right around when you would do kind of left seat, right seat stuff. And it's just fascinating now in hindsight, kind of a little bit older, you get more context. You start to understand why this stuff happens, but like that happened how many times when units were changing out, you know, throughout a 20 year war

in two different countries, like thousands of times, right? And so literally somebody having to get up to speed on a brand new area in a matter of days, if not weeks, just happened over and over and over again. Yeah. And, you know, Intel is just like any other MOS. Like they're the guys, these guys are going to excel. These guys, fairly average. These guys should probably be like, you know, refueling trucks.

And nothing against, you know, the fuel guys, because that's all very important too, you know. No, no, we can give them shit. Yeah. No, it's just like, you know, you stick an 11 Bravo in the arms room. Of course. You know, because he doesn't need to be out with everyone else. So in intel, it's the exact same thing. You know, you have the same challenges as everybody else.

Just, you know, typically, you know, nobody's shooting at you. So you talked about, like, establish a baseline and then recognize when something's off baseline. I'm assuming that this is both in the military and the contracting work and then what you're doing today, kind of in the civilian world and keeping people informed on various threats and kind of regions of the world. How do you tell something's off baseline? Like maybe just when you go and you look at a situation, how do you establish a baseline and how do you know, oh, that's an outlier? That's something that I should pay more attention to. Well, the first thing is you have to establish a subject matter expertise on your topic. So, you know, I'm knowledgeable about China and I can sit here and talk a lot about China and Taiwan, but I'm not an expert in the Chinese military.

I'm not a PLA guy. And so what you often kind of see on social media, you know, especially it's the Dunning-Kruger, right? You read the Wikipedia page and you're, you know, here's my, here's my 26, you know, tweet thread on, on the Chinese PLA, you know. So the first thing in establishing a baseline is you just have to have vast amounts of knowledge and information about what's going on. If you can, there's a couple of ways you can do this. Number one, you can use an indicator system where, you know, we see the PLA moving tanks around. OK, well, that's happened every day for the past the past six months. OK, that's very in baseline. And then all of a sudden there's double the number of tanks or in addition to tanks.

Now it's command and control vehicles or it's air defense or, you know, something that. Well, we didn't see that last week and now we're seeing it now. So identifying those indicators is kind of the first step there. And, you know, and then beyond that, the knowledge that you accrue just reading through the news every day, you know, I guess it's kind of the same thing you say, you know, these these politicians or these Chinese officials weren't talking like this last last month. Now, now they are. And what's caused that change? Yeah. I know you're not an expert on China, but I think everyone who hears China now wants to know, are they going to take Taiwan? When? Why? How? How do you all just kind of wrap your heads around a geopolitical situation that not only is rooted in the current day in kind of what I would consider more military warfare and strategy and things like that. There's also a commercial kind of threat standpoint, obviously, with the chips and kind of Taiwan being so important to kind of the global infrastructure in that regard. But there's also a historical component to this.

You know, how did Taiwan get to the point where it is today and what is kind of the expectation over time? Like, how do you all break down a situation like that? Well, first, yeah, subject matter expertise. and you you look at you never as an analyst you never want to say well china's going to do x and they're going to do it on on x day being an analyst on stuff something like this is one reason why it's very difficult is because they may not have decided exactly what they're going to do yet and so you're being asked hey what is china going to do how are they going to do this and if they haven't decided well it's it's an impossible task you know yeah however you know you look at

at what China has said in the past. And China said, well, we don't want to fight a war. I think that's true. I don't think they want to fight a conventional war because it's not just going to be against the United States. It's going to be against Australia or Japan and other countries are probably going to get involved at that point. And really at that point, we're looking at World War III anyway. They want to avoid that unless they're maybe 100% sure that they can win. I don't think they're there. So we have this thing called the gray zone and it exists under below the threshold of conventional war. And so, you know, this is like using China's doing this a lot with their the maritime militia. They have a bunch of fishing boats that are armed and they act as like a quasi, you know, they call it the maritime militia, quasi Chinese PLA Navy.

But but they're just out there trawling, you know, trying to catch fish. So, you know, our China analyst, Max, has talked about this quite a bit. We really think China does well in the gray zone. They really excel in the gray zone. So probably the most likely course of action at this point, it doesn't mean it's 100 percent, but most likely course of action is stay in the gray zone. Why risk fighting a conventional war when you can just surround Taiwan and embargo it and you're not dropping bombs on Taiwan?

You're not threatening to nuke Taipei, but you're also being highly coercive. You're just – you have not triggered war yet. And so if there's some sort of embargo, blockade, whatever kind of the various tactics are, the idea would be that you almost have implicit control. You are driving the situation. You're coercing kind of what plays out, but you yet haven't stepped over the line to a point where the United States or other countries may say, hey, that's an act of war. and now we're going to come, you know, toe to toe with you. And so by doing that, that's kind of this gray zone you're talking about where you have immense impact on the situation,

but you're very careful as to where the line is. You never kind of step over. Is that like a fair way to kind of think about it? Yeah, absolutely. You know, it's like using, you know, like let's just look at maybe a domestic scenario, right? Okay, I shoot you with the paintball, right? Is that going to cause you to use your firearm against me? maybe not and it's a legal gray area you're probably going to prison you know that's kind

of a gray zone tactic you know it's where you are still taking steps to achieve your will you're disrupting the enemy you're deterring you know their their vast military might in terms of the united states just the massive amount of firepower that could be over there yeah you're still carrying out your objectives you're just not triggering war you're not causing other guy to pull the trigger yet if china and the united states went toe-to-toe uh i understand i i actually agree with you that it's unlikely uh that either country wants that now whether it happens we'll see but uh if we got to that point is there a clear uh consensus whether it's in the intel community uh or just kind of in private conversations as to who would win that

well i think it's greatly contested so a lot of it depends on one thing our our china analyst max talks about is the tyranny of distance we do not have enough assets in there if china goes 100 full tilt high intensity conventional war invasion of taiwan we do not have enough assets in the region to stop them and so this is a case where china over the course of several days can be can start there an amphibious assault against taiwan so a it's going to be very difficult for the United States to, to win that war just because it's going to take us so long to get over there. How, how long is this like a two week period or is this like two, two, three months? Like easy four to six weeks to get, well, okay. So we have, I mean, we have a couple of

carrier strike groups in the region, but, and I'm not a Navy guy, but I would, you know, I'd expect easy four to six weeks to start, start putting stuff over there. You know, we've been doing a lot of kind of pre-positioned stock programs over there. We rebased some bombers to Australia. We're striking up some deal with the Philippines. I imagine we're going to start storing munitions over there. But, you know, I forgot who said this, but I think it was some Air Force general over there in Indo-Pacific Command. He said they have something like 10 days worth of munitions in in a full-on fight against china they have 10 days worth of munitions so we better win it in 10 days that's why that's why i have very significant doubt that we can actually

win that war short of full-scale mobilization put everybody in theater and throw everything you have at the chinese what i find um intellectually interesting about kind of the the war gaming of this the the kind of hypothetical situations um you know and and people have heard me talk about this before but like it's not to minimize uh the obvious loss of life and kind of all the seriousness of war um but this is not an exercise of uh where the united states has been highly successful recently this is not hey call cl team six and let's send a couple guys over and like do their thing and they come back we talk about it on national television like we win right this is very much uh if there is a uh direct combat type engagement uh the united states is gonna have to

bring jets bombs strikers you know i mean just everything we got and um we haven't fought a war like that in a long time and what i think ends up being interesting is it's also not on land right now yes could we get it to land could we kind of go play that game of course uh but what we're talking about here you're talking about you know a maritime militia or it's about navy we're talking about all these different things that uh add a degree of complexity which it is unclear to me as a civilian who doesn't spend all day thinking about this stuff and reading it uh how good are we right in in that uh environment so how do you think about like forget what china would do just like the united states readiness and its ability to uh if it had everything in place just fight

in the sea against you know any enemy so the first thing i think about uh about a war over there is logistics you know we got to get troops over there we got to get equipment we get spare parts, food, water, ammo, all that stuff. Uh, China does not have a highly capable blue water Navy. They're trying to, I mean, they're in the process of developing that. So, uh, you know, the first thing is how, uh, how difficult will it be for us to have like an Iraq style logistics train, but to the Indo-Pacific. Now, some of that stuff will be coming from our, our allies in the region. We go back to like 10 days worth of munitions. You know, how, how many weeks is it going to take for us to get more stuff over there and you know the thing is it's not just getting

more stuff over there we've been supplying ukraine with so many munitions now and i can't confirm that this is true but you know i'm sure people have seen it around like we have army units right now and marine units saying hey we're running out of high mars we don't even have high mars to train the new guys who are just getting to their first station and so you know i i really do question is this this is probably going to take like years for us to replenish all the munitions that we've already sent to ukraine so that's the second thing i think about i i do wonder um again it's very easy to talk about russia ukraine as a conflict and a contained conflict in the sense of it you know two countries are going at it um and the united states obviously has a vested

interest in in uh um trying to uh participate there's plenty of people who think that we shouldn't be participating in any form or fashion but uh we're at least sending aid at the moment There was confirmation recently that there are troops on the ground, what they're doing, highly controversial, debatable, the whole thing. But it sounds like so far there has been no confirmation that U.S. troops are actually engaged in direct combat on the ground with Russian troops or whatever. With that said, it's very easy to talk about China and Taiwan and the direct conflict there in a self-contained kind of environment. But what you're really highlighting is like, no, man, this is a global game. right and uh you know imagine the world where uh russia and ukraine is just the warm-up to china taiwan and to your point we've depleted resources we've depleted the will of the american

citizens of our politicians of military leadership uh to engage now in a dual front you know battle where uh on the outside of either one of those you would say hey this is really important and you put them both together it's like shit this gets kind of crazy and so um do you think that this is top of mind for people right now, like the political leaders, the folks who kind of read the intel that you guys put out on a daily basis, or is this something that you all are sitting there looking at it more from like a military strategy standpoint? You're like, yeah, I'm sure the military leaders are thinking about it, but everyone else pretty much is, you know, not even aware or thinking that this is an important kind of component to consider. Well, from the Eastern

perspective, the Russian and Chinese perspective, I think the Russians look at Ukraine as the first step in a strategic war against the United States. China looks at Taiwan probably as, you know, if they lose, then this may be the end of the quote-unquote Chinese century. But for the Chinese, they look at this and they say this is a stepping stone to replacing U.S. global hegemony. And they're right now doing this economically and trying to do it financially. I don't think they want to do it militarily, but one way or the other, they're going to take Taiwan or they're going to lose a billion people trying to do it. So from the Eastern perspective, yeah, this is about the next century.

This is which sphere is going to own, you know, kind of have global dominance. For the United States, you read the latest national security strategy and the latest national defense strategy, and they're well aware. I mean, they outline it. They say this decade is going to be decisive. It is going to determine. What happens this decade is going to determine the new rules-based international order. I think they're acutely aware of it.

And I think they're way behind the curve, though. When you think about the military conflict, it's easy to say, hey, I get it. Cool. We don't line up soldiers in a line in a field anymore and kind of fire. But the direct combat, I think people can wrap their heads around. You mentioned financial and economic war and kind of, again, this ability to drastically kind of influence the direction of things without actually stepping over that line. What do you all pay the most attention to or most worried about in terms of the other types of maybe in the most easy way to describe it, competition, in the most kind of direct and abrasive way, the actual conflict that is happening, you know, that isn't military but is more economic?

Yeah, I think competition is a diplomatic term. I think the United States and China and the East in general, I think they are going to be locked in an economic and financial death match. When Biden signed the CHIPS Act and we undercut Chinese chips production, that's escalatory. That's very significant. And we're still looking at how is China going to retaliate. I don't think – she just came – Chinese President Xi Jinping came out some time ago and apparently wrote a letter to some Chinese interest groups in the United States saying, we don't want a confrontation we don't want to escalate and that's what they say but uh you know back in beijing that's not at all what they're doing chinese foreign minister wang yi has even

come out on numerous times this year and said asia's time in global governance has come like we're going to replace the united states we're going to topple the unipolar world we're going to cement china as a driver of of as a matter of fact they have this thing called the global development initiative or the global security initiative. We see China establishing BRICS and the BRICS Plus, which is fairly new. You know, Argentina, Saudi Arabia, several other countries. Actually, I think we're up to 19 countries now that have said that they plan to apply or are very interested in joining BRICS Plus. And so economically, or I guess I should say monetarily, China does not want to, I don't think they want to replace the U.S. dollar as

the world reserve i don't think why not uh because their capital markets and credit markets are not large enough to do it the no one uh no one in brazil wants to accept the yuan right now or but what they can do is is use is use bricks and bricks plus to undermine the u.s dollar for probably 20 to 40 percent of global trade and i think uh i think the chinese would be very happy to do that because if Brazil and India are no longer using the dollar as the standard of trade, then, I mean, that greatly diminishes U.S. power and influence abroad. And so, yeah, I think China is not in a position to do that. And undermining the dollar is gray zone warfare. I mean, it is monetary and economic warfare. They're going to potentially cause a massive monetary crisis

if they do start going down this road. And more and more countries start saying, um yeah we're not going to use the dollar we'll do bilateral currency trade we'll just if we have a trade if our trade is even then we're basically we're just swapping each other's currencies and as long as those currencies remain stable we don't have to use the dollar well that's a lot of international demand being just disappearing that's exactly what the chinese want uh when you talk about currencies obviously everybody who watches this says oh bitcoin's a solution right yeah um and uh and i'll kind of give some context here one of the ideas that i've had which i don't necessarily uh think is uh is right or see a clear path as to why it's wrong but i think it's

interesting um i've always thought that uh the single best place to be is to be the owner of the global reserve currency right as we've seen for you know centuries now uh but if you are not the owner of the global reserve currency the second best place to be is to be using a currency along with everyone else that no one controls right and so kind of this idea of okay i want the global reserve currency if i can't have it then no one should have it and then we should go use something that's decentralized or whatever uh i like bitcoin right i got a ton of bias when it comes to that that story sounds awesome uh how do you see bitcoin cryptocurrency stable coins like all these different technologies that are kind of related uh um in some form or fashion and kind of

coming from one industry playing into these geopolitical uh games especially like economic and monetary warfare where okay if we can take away u.s dollar demand like that helps us push for this kind of 100-year plan that we have. I do watch the Federal Reserve with great interest where it concerns central bank digital currencies. I know they, like every week, their Fed bank presidents are coming out saying, hey, we have to have more regulation.

We've got to have congressional action. I think they understand that stable coins are going to play a much larger role in the U.S. and international economies. And this is not an area where they can lose control i mean you just if you're the fed you cannot lose a monopoly over the u.s dollar or the use of of dollar denominated trade um i you know i don't know i know there's a lot of a lot of stable like very serious stable currencies and the people developing those are developing

our stable coins sorry developing those to replace the u.s dollar and i'll tell you i'm just not sure how the Fed is going to be able to co-opt that. I'm not an FX guy. I'm not a big monetary academic. But I do wonder if those stable coins are backed one-to-one to the dollar, maybe that alone is good for the Fed because it just creates additional demand,

even though China is trying to actively sap demand for the dollar in international trade. Yeah, it's something I've paid attention to for five years now. Um, I can remember 2018, 2019, literally going on national television and talking about this idea of, Hey, uh, if the United States wants to remain a leader and have the global reserve currency, uh, there are a ton of risks and a ton of reasons why I actually don't think central bank digital currencies are good.

One of the pro arguments would be that it's all about accessibility. And so if you're in Venezuela and your local currency fails, uh, and you say, well, shit, that's not good. So I want dollars. I can't get dollars cause it's dangerous. It's difficult. It costs a lot, you know, whatever the reason is. And if I try to flee something that's physical,

like gold or whatever, that's also dangerous. Let me get on the internet. What can I use there? It's actually not, in many cases, Bitcoin, right? It's volatile. They don't understand it. There's always things. They can get access to a digital dollar,

to your point, it's backed one-on-one to the dollar. That's damn well just as good as having a dollar, right? In that scenario. But if there is no digital dollar that's super popular, especially one that is backed by and kind of put into the market by the Federal Reserve, but there so happens to be a Chinese currency, Well, shit, I may become a fan of that because it provides me stability and the ability to use it in a digital environment and kind of all these things.

And so I've always thought that the digital currencies, especially the central bank digital currencies, yeah, there's who's faster, who's cheaper to use, all that stuff. But there's just a pure accessibility play and kind of competition because ultimately there are people around the world where their currency fails them and they're looking for an alternative. And some of them will turn to Bitcoin and decentralized or private currencies or whatever. some of them are going to turn to central bank digital currencies uh and kind of whoever's got the most you know kind of uh or the furthest so far whoever's got the most accessibility has a significant advantage in my opinion you know i i look at this as another avenue for gray zone warfare you know i i think probably the fed right now is intentionally trying to crush all other competitor currencies you know like like the yuan renminbi and um to been pretty

damn successful at that. They have been. They absolutely have been. And so, you know, if you're if you're trying to you obviously do not like this. I am quite concerned about how China is going to retaliate. You know, China, they're not doing well. I mean, they're really kind of on the ropes economically. This, you know, this thing like, oh, we're going to be happy with five percent, you know, GDP growth. OK, you know, whatever you have to tell Financial Times, you know, to but, you know, they've had massive investor outflows, a lot of money leaving that country, a lot of concern about how about Western sanctions, how, you know, if China is going to get the Russia treatment over Taiwan. And so I don't know how successful China is actually going to be when

when they're making China's in a position where they have to grow the BRICS plus because a lot of these other countries are going to start turning on on Chinese commerce. And the more the world bifurcates and, you know, Peter Zion talks about deglobalization, that's a real threat to china and so i look at that and uh just what's i think what's going to end up happening is you know we're going to go right back we're already probably already are right back into the cold cold war and uh and these spheres probably going to be attacking each other's currencies just because they can get away with it no that's that's not going to trigger world war three this episode is brought to you by masari your days of spending hours scouring the internet

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information or to subscribe to receive company updates and financial information, visit their website at valor.com. That's V-A-L-O-U-R.com. Vladimir Putin, president of Russia, has been quite lucid in his commentary about the U.S. economy, about the U.S. addiction to social media and printing money. I mean, just there's line after line after line in many of his recent speeches where you listen to it and you say, listen, I get it. People are super pissed and rightfully so that he invaded Ukraine and kind of all these things that they're quite upset about. But if you can separate out the man from the comments, the comments seem like something we should be paying attention to. And it fits very similarly in line with, I think, what you're

talking about from China's perspective. Obviously, I don't see a lot of people lining up to go get the ruble right um and there hadn't been nearly as much investment in that country as there had been in china and kind of they're coming at it from a different perspective um but he talks about a multi-polar world and that's like the the phrase he continuously uses over and over and over again is that ultimately the goal it's not actually even to crush the united states have the united states suffer in some you know immense way it's like hey look if we can just pull ourselves up to be equivalent to the united states they've got kind of one you know side of the world we got the other side and that alone would be victory. Is that kind of the way you look at it? Or is that

maybe being too innocent and naive in terms of their intentions and what they also might think is possible? It's probably a first step. But there are other steps. I really do. I think Putin wants to see the United States suffer. He looks at the fall, the collapse of the Soviet Union as a humiliating event. And, you know, this is something he says in his speeches. One of the You know, he gave a speech last month and he said, you know, the real travesty of the last century is that when the when the Soviet Union fell, there was no counterweight. There was no counterbalance to world power. And he has to provide that balance. I think Ukraine is a first step towards that. We see Russia and China expanding and deepening their alliance. That is part of of that. I don't think I don't think China is going to be happy with just a multipolar world there.

their resource starved. They've got a billion people. They need components and materials. They really don't, I mean, there's no, virtually no domestic, I mean, there's some oil, but not a lot. They're a net importer of food and fuel. And so I don't think this is simply, I don't think the United States is going to be happy with that outcome. And I don't think China or Russia are going to be happy with outcome. So I think we're probably in a position where one side wins out right over the other it's a pyrrhic victory and we just both destroy each other um or maybe you know i'd say maybe some some third party that's relatively unscathed kind of becomes the next global superpower so but to answer the question i i don't see china being happy with that definitely

not russia putin's invasion of ukraine um how do you evaluate it obviously uh it's been condemned by pretty much every country in the West for the most part. They don't buy the story of the denazification of Ukraine. They obviously believe there's a threat for a nuclear war and I think it's pretty well covered and kind of documented in terms of both the Western point of view of the action, the actual invasion itself,

a little bit of a celebration in that they weren't necessarily able to overrun the country and maybe the way that the West would like to think that they thought they could do um and now you got kind of a western force that continues to supply aid and weaponry and kind of all this stuff locked up uh you know with the uh country of russia how do you look at it like like what are the main takeaways for people and then are there things that maybe that the west has been told or the media has covered that might not either be true or maybe we shouldn't put as much weight on as they already have i think the west did

overestimate Russian capabilities. A guy I went to college with is still in the army and, you know, he was telling me about how they're running all these drills to learn how to deal with Russian artillery on the battlefield. And, you know, at that time, this was a few years ago, Russian artillery outranged what we had. And so I do think there was, and a few other guys led me to believe that, you know, there was the expectation that Russia was, the bear was back, you know, so to speak. I think the Russians have probably underperformed their expectations in Ukraine when Putin came out and fired a bunch of generals. That's a pretty sure sign that they were not doing well or they're not doing, meeting his standard. And I think that's probably the biggest indicator

that Putin has been disappointed in Ukraine. So you think that the United States, we overestimated what they were capable of doing, which I guess if you miss, like that's probably the better direction to miss in uh and at the same time that we're overestimating their capabilities uh russian forces are underperforming putin's expectations and kind of desires and so you get kind of this i don't want to call it a stalemate because it feels like they're still uh pretty heavy direct fighting um but it does feel like it's now gone from like defend ukraine to like there is war and you know i don't know the future but it almost feels like hey if you woke up 10 years from now And they were still fighting each other. Iraq, Afghanistan, right? Like kind of just, hey, they're just locked into this kind of drawn out or now that doesn't seem to have an end because they don't they won't come to the table with each other.

There's a lot of people who believe they shouldn't come to the table with each other. And so how do you kind of say, OK, where are we now? And like, where is this going? well it's going nowhere good and you know you saw last month that the democratic progressive or progressive democratic caucus come out and they they accidentally sent that letter to biden that said hey go talk to the russians you know stop the war uh yeah the war has to be stopped i think we are getting close much closer to the nuclear threshold and when zielinski and the ukrainians say, oh, we're going to go into Crimea, we're going to go and we're going to retake Donbass. That is right into that Russian doctrine says, hey, there's like three, three cases where we would use nuclear weapons and a violation of Russian territorial integrity is one of them.

And so this probably is the case where if the Ukrainians do pose a significant threat to Crimea, and uh then yeah i think i mean china would be well within their doctrine to use nuclear nuclear weapons so i think actually this is the case where like the war really needs to be stopped otherwise i we try really hard at forward observer not to be like alarmist and hair on fire but max and i are both very concerned that the use of a tactical nuclear weapon in ukraine to stop a a ukrainian offensive um could could well i mean that that could become the first of several first of many okay so uh there's a lot of people who um there's some details in here that i don't think that they're quite aware of um crimea and donbass i think is an interesting area i'm not an expert

uh i don't know if you consider yourself an expert or maybe i've seen it on the map okay all right you've seen on the map uh russia took it and uh from their view my understanding is they believe that that is russian territory that was outside of the russian borders and now they took it back it's theirs case closed and they don't really want to talk about anything else other than that's ours uh ukraine feels like hey you invaded crimea and donbass and you stole that from us and uh you know we may not come back right away but we're gonna get our fucking country back right we're gonna get our land back um russia invades ukraine uh and the ukrainians part of this surprise i think to many people in the west and frankly even ukrainians that i know people in eastern europe right that

I've talked to are like, damn, the Ukrainians have held their own, right? They've been able to put up a fight in a way that whether it's the Russians screwing up or the Ukrainians just outperforming expectations, they have been able to hold the Russians off. But what you just described is not defensive. Now what the conversation has shifted to, and Zelensky has publicly said, I think, on multiple occasions, is that the Ukrainians believe that once they basically push back the the russians they then will go past what has been the quote-unquote board and i put that in air quotes because debated um of russia and ukraine and they are going to take back crimea uh crimea and donbass now there are a lot of people in this entire region been fighting each other for a long

time right and uh i don't think it's fair uh and frankly it'd be arrogant and ignorant i think for americans to sit here and say we know exactly who's what and where they is and who owns what and the whole thing there's a lot of shit that we will never understand frankly because i don't speak Russian right and so you just get through all the complexity all the caveats but your point is that if Ukraine does breach that line and say hey we are coming for Crimea we are coming for Donbass and we are going to take them and the Russians believe that it is possible that's where you think that the nuclear weapon could be used yes well it's not a prediction but I

will just say you think it's pressure would be would be well within their doctrine of of use okay now yeah crimea has been a part of russia uh since i mean since the american revolution and yeah you're absolutely right we really do a a disservice to this conflict by trying to view everything through american lenses it's not it is rarely the case where things are just as cut and dry as good guy and bad guy hey you know what what if they're both bad guys i mean let's just be honest here you know especially or to that point war happens and in war there's a lot of nasty shit that happens sure right on both sides and so to uh uh from my view to slap our moral frameworks onto this uh is to essentially raise our hands and say we don't understand war

right to some degree yeah yeah absolutely the yeah war is more than just the application of violence, especially among the people involved. I mean, there's a lot of psychology and information operations, you know, involve the mental, the mental space. So yeah, I think, you know, Putin has talked about doing this. I mean, Donetsk, you know, Donetsk way back in the, you know, mid, mid 2010s, Donetsk and Luhansk, there are ethnic Russians in that part of the country. And I'm not going to sit here and say that their elections and referendums were free and they said, oh, yeah, hey, let's go join the Russian Federation. Undoubtedly, a lot of them want that exactly. But I think this is a case where, you know, where Putin says, look, there

are ethnic Russians there and we are going to go back and reclaim territory from the Russian Federation that should have never been given to Ukraine, never given away. And so, you know, that's where they are. I'm a realist. And I say, there's not a perfect world. You really cannot have your cake and eat it too. The best thing that could possibly happen, I think, for the world is for Crimea and the Donbass regions to be in the Russian Federation and end the war. Because otherwise, Zelensky, look, Zelensky wants this thing to go nuclear. He wants NATO to get involved. Zelensky will start World War III to save Ukraine. And I'm just, I'm not in that position to support that. So it's very interesting because, uh, Zelensky, um, I remember reading, I don't know,

whenever he got elected a couple of years ago, uh, I believe Trump got elected and then Zelensky got elected shortly thereafter in a year or two, whatever. Um, I just read a headline, comedian gets elected. Right. And I was like, Oh, like got a TV star. Right. Then we got a comedian. Like, is this going to be a thing? And that was basically my only exposure whatsoever to uh to slinsky um and then when the war started i saw him on television i said damn that guy seems pretty inspirational you could see how a country would rally around this individual right and a friend said to me he goes don't forget he's an actor right and and so uh by the way so are many politicians in the united states whether they get paid for it or not right they put on the face and

then they go and they're media trained they've got great communication skills like all the things you need to be a politician and be successful. Um, and then it started to get kind of crazy in my opinion, because you had, uh, the Russians doing things that you'd wake up every morning and be like, that's crazy. Right. And like, that's bad. And then you would hear language from American politicians, from Zelensky and other people around the world. Like this isn't just, you know, Russia, Ukraine, and the United States, this is NATO. This is other countries, whatever. And you just started saying like, holy shit, does anybody actually want it to end? right and i think your point about like if zielinski and again it's if right if zielinski's

strategy is to basically keep ratcheting this up until nato steps in and says we will protect you we promise you uh we have your back i mean it seems pretty clear that russia would then say fucking send the nukes right and at that point if nato's involved like that just doesn't seem like a good place i i don't know i'm very confused in terms of like how the war game plays out if we get to a point where zolinski is super offensive and the russians actually use a nuke kind of what happens after that yeah that's a good question i think the u.s defense establishment i think a lot of them do want to get more involved i would bet dollars of donuts that nato has troops in ukraine i mean there are soft dudes out there you know whacking russians for sure

you know there's some of them who don't even have uniforms on i've seen them on instagram right those are the unsanctioned ones yeah they're in like ukrainian uniforms i should yeah be more clear uh but so you know if you're poland if you're the baltics um you you probably don't want the war to end you you want to see it keep going and western sanctions try to bleed russia dry putin came out i think in like september or maybe october came out and said yeah the russian economy has we're going to have challenges we have to actually pivot the economy away from oil and gas and he said we have to start developing new industries and so you know i i think putin understands this is going to be like a long-term strategic battle if you're if you're poland in

the baltics you don't want to be next i mean if you're lithuania and estonia have ethnically russian populations in the eastern parts of those countries they don't want to be dumbass i completely completely understand that and so from their perspective from nato's perspective you say well if you if you if you give russia this cookie they're going to try to take the whole cake and uh you know which i i think there's probably some truth to the argument so this is a very complex issue it's not just like hey um you know russia bad nato good honestly yeah so i i don't even think nato's the good guy anymore but you don't think nato's the good guy anymore nato nato all these nato leaders they're they're all globalists and you know you look at a lot of

these european leaders they're all wef people world economic forum the superstars or the young wefers or whatever they're called you know and i you know i'm i'm an anti-globalist i don't i don't want to see that and by supporting nato that's exactly what you're supporting now and i you know just personally i try not to interject my my personal beliefs into this but um yeah i don't think nato's the good guy anymore i think nato is is defending and advancing globalism and when they do that uh i think their argument would be and uh i always try to think kind of like what's the pro and con argument right the argument would be like well we were we were lured into it right we we were somebody else instigated and we're just kind of finishing the fight um do you think that has

weight or or kind of holds water or do you think that uh that sounds good and you know as a sound bite but uh may not be as as uh obvious maybe when you actually do the analysis nato exists as a defender of more rules-based international order and so you know nato they can say yeah we're yeah we were uh i don't think they could say like we're we're lured lured into supporting Ukraine. But you didn't, you didn't ask this question, but I would just tack on, you know, we've seen South Korea and Japan get involved in NATO. NATO, they've been sending officials to Japan and NATO working on military interoperability. The NATO summit in June, they came out and said, hey, we're going to start taking an increased focus in the Indo-Pacific

theater because China is a direct threat now to NATO or something like that. China is a competitor or something like that. And this is global NATO. I just ask, if NATO is not going to stick to the North Atlantic and now they're going to shift into global NATO, like what's step three? And I don't, you know, I don't want to get close to step three. Yeah.

The last thing I want to talk about, Russia, Ukraine, nuclear weapons of any degree, I think, scare the shit out of people, right? Some cases rightfully so, and some of it's just ignorance they don't understand. on kind of the first part of this like tactically they just shoot one right do they uh is it like a hey let's cover the whole country like how do you think um uh do they actually go just after crimea in the donbass region like like i guess if you had to say like okay cool we get to the point where they're like yes this is the line you breached the line we are going to use these weapons what does that look like from a tactical standpoint well conventional deployment yeah they

they could put on a rocket or you know or a plane drop a bomb or something like that i think a very russian thing to do and by the way the ukrainians and russians have been both accusing each other of getting ready to deploy a dirty bomb and so a very russian thing to do would be to deploy a dirty bomb and blame it on the ukrainians explain what a dirty bomb is oh just a radiological device where you know it's not actually a nuclear weapon but it's an it's an explosive with uh with nuclear chemicals in there and you just and you get all the radiological elements dispersed and it's not like a big atomic bomb but like it kills people and not only kills people that area has to be uninhabited you cannot live there anymore and i think the strategy would be deploy

one and say all right yeah ukraine you want to you want to keep talking you want to keep coming into crimea telling us how you're going to come into crimea that's fine we'll set another one off So I would hope it's I hope it's zero. But after that, I hope it's it's one and done. But this is how you know, this is kind of a it's very escalatory. But this is this may be how Russia tries to break Ukraine. When that occurs, what do you think the response is like the tactical component of sure they could drop a bomb or rocket, whatever. I think actually, if I asked the average person on the street in America, they'd say that's how it's going to happen. right like they're gonna shoot a rocket over and and we've got some defense or we're gonna do

something or whatever i have no clue uh but let's say that there is some escalatory uh uh kind of dirty bomb nuclear weapon whatever used by russia what is the reaction from nato in the u.s is that fuck it game on we're bringing every you know all hell and fury with us and like we're gonna just take down uh putin and russia and just not even in the donbass crimea region but like now we're coming after the whole country or do you think it's more measured than that maybe it depends on delivery you know i said rocket but they could put on like a short-range ballistic missile or something like that that's the same thing to the people in the street so um the u.s you know you have like general petraeus come out and say we're we're gonna wipe the russians out out of ukraine

we're gonna hit every single russian military facility in ukraine if russia does go nuclear And I don't know if Petraeus is the talking head for the White House or if he's – or if that's more like his opinion and kind of bravado. I don't know that the – I don't know that the U.S. military, frankly, other than maybe an aerial campaign, I just – honestly, I keep going back to the nuclear thing. If they wanted to start this no-fly zone over Ukraine, which by the way I still think is potentially an option here. So that may be one U.S. or potential course of action is to establish a no-fly zone and say, well, if it's violated, then you're going to have to literally fight everybody now. So it probably depends on delivery and maybe where it is, too. I mean, if it's in, like, some industrial facility, maybe, you know, I mean, that's bad. It's not as bad as setting one off in downtown Kiev.

So maybe it depends. I don't have any insight into, you know, what the four stars at the Pentagon are thinking. But my bet would be the, the, the worst, the scenario, probably the higher, the greater the U S response would be. Yeah. One of the things that, um, fascinates me after having, you know, been in a war zone is, uh, there's the war you see, and then there's the war that you don't see and the war that you don't see. Um, uh, and I've talked about it before with other guests, uh, in some ways, almost crazier, right. Uh, and people would expect it to be, okay, there's a lot of stuff that's happening you know uh in the cover of dark or the tactics or whatever

but this specific scenario to me seems the perfect setup because you do have some pretty immense threats the u.s is uh i guess i'm a technicality not involved uh but it's i'd be shocked if we weren't very well aware of as much as possible um and uh in a position to step in if needed. And so, uh, if that is the case, my guess is that the Russians know that and the Ukrainians know that. Uh, and so does NATO. And you get into this almost like there's a, uh, a kind of in front of the curtain behind the curtain and what's going on behind the curtain, um, feels more like chess and what's going on in front of the curtain feels more like checkers of just like, you know, Hey, okay, I move here. What are you going to do? Right. And, and, uh, at the same time,

people are behind the curtain and, you know, uh, they're, they're waiting to see what the, what everyone else on the chessboard does before they go ahead and they make their decisions? Yeah, this is bigger than Ukraine. I mean, for Putin, Ukraine is probably a first step. And for the United States, I think, honestly, I just I think they want to regime change Putin. And so if the United States, the West is successful in defeating the Russians in Ukraine and turning Crimea and Donbass back into kind of disputed territory like 2017, I think they'll go after Putin. What does that look like?

I mean, that's the chess. You know, they try to do it through sanctions, going after the oligarchs and getting the oligarchs to turn on Putin. It didn't work. I'm actually shocked as to how little it seems to have impacted a whole bunch of things. But it's like you see the sanctions. They're pissed, right? Obviously, they're trying to distance themselves. I mean, you know, all the things you would expect from like an individual incentive mechanism.

But unless you guys have some information or done some work that I'm unaware of, it doesn't seem like it really had that much of an impact within the country of Russia. Maybe there was some uprising, but nothing that really seems material. I think when you're in a position where you lose your yacht or you lose your life, things get a lot simpler decision-wise. And so, yeah, you do – you look at the individual oligarchs who were sanctioned and, yeah, they lost a lot of money. I don't I don't see how they can think like maybe they'll ever get that back and so I also I don't know you know we what I mean we'd have to sit down and kind of you know think think this through but there are undoubtedly ways in which the United States and the in the West could turn the heat up on on Putin as for how how they regime change him I don't know I I really honestly

well i let me say this i'm not going to answer that right now and not because i haven't don't have inside information but i tell you i really want to give you like well thought out answers and i clearly have not thought this through but there are ways yeah when um when we think about the united states fight abroad what's um what's fascinating to me and uh uh i think i said on an interview or something i said you know we're sending billions of dollars to many other conflicts around the world not just the russia ukraine situation uh but then you look and you know jackson mississippi they don't have clean water or uh flint michigan and some of these other things um forget this exact moment in time forget these exact conflicts just from an intel

perspective how does the united states think about when to help abroad versus when to help domestically and i know you guys have done a lot of work on some domestic stuff as well but like what does that framework look like and does it change and i think that's like a really key piece of this is like, does it change with administrations? Does it change with various threats or is there a pretty rigid, Hey, these people are focused on domestic. These people are focused internationally. Well, there are different organizations you're, you're dealing with in different objectives. I don't, I don't even know the calculus on, on how the U S government decides to help domestically, but yeah, it is, it's a shame. It's a shame that we see so much

going to ukraine while there are veterans who are still trying to get access to the va and they're still homeless you know americans and kids who are not eating in this country i'm not saying those things are necessarily the government's job i'm just saying it's it's interesting where we send our money yeah there's a lot of problems in the world in general but also a lot of problems here uh domestically as well um some of the i think when i first started coming across some of your work, uh, 2020, uh, uh, you guys seem to become very popular in a lot of circles, uh, because you were, uh, tracking a lot of the domestic activities, um, political extremism, uh, a lot of the, uh, um, everything from, uh, protests to riots, to violence, to threats kind

of just, it seemed like you were trying to build the board game, right. And you were trying to understand it. Uh, and I think what I and many other people appreciated, uh, who followed you and twitter and stuff like this is it seemed like there was we are not on any one side we are trying to understand what's happening here and almost have kind of taken a step to the sideline and we're watching the field right and to talk a little bit about uh kind of through 2020 into 2021 what you guys were seeing kind of what was that like in terms of trying to actually get that information and and ensure accuracy i think to some degree in a time where there's a lot of movement and kind of things changing on a day-to-day basis this this goes back to 2016 and

one of the reasons why i started ford observer is because there's a lot i mean there's just a lot of institutional money a lot of focus on tracking far right groups and they really gloss over far left groups and i'm not talking about your you know run-of-the-mill bernie bros i'm saying these there are a lot of actual revolutionaries out there and so you know even when you look at the the quote-unquote anti-fascist movement you know they're they're they won't be happy if trump's gone right it'll be on to the next domino on to the next thing people who are not fascists and not i don't even think trump was a fascist and why is that because they're revolutionaries they want to they want to topple the capitalist system and in many cases they're

you know also various flavors of anarchists and they want to talk they want to live in a state free society. So hang on. If you're the U.S. government here, how should you know, how are you not giving more, you know, more due diligence to these groups? Because you read their the zines and the pamphlets and the flyers and stuff they pass out and you read their blogs and see what they're posting on social media. They they're not talking about, hey, guys, let's go organize a protest. I mean, they do that, too. They're I mean, they're sharing like Carlos Marighella and all these leftist insurgent literature and you know the uh manuals about how these communist insurgents and revolutionaries carried out their own their own revolutions abroad and so this is not just

like a run-of-the-mill protest group so so when we look at that we go to direct sources i mean we just we go read what they say watch the videos do all those things this episode is brought to you by ftx us they're the safe regulated way to buy and sell bitcoin and other digital assets trade crypto with up to 85% lower fees than the top competitors. There are no fixed minimums, no ACH transaction fees, and no withdrawal fees. Download the FTX app today and use referral code POMP to earn free crypto on every trade over $10.

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When I hear you say that, what I take away from it is you got extremism on the right. You got extremism on the left. And maybe the common perspective or shared dream, the U.S. government does not look the way it is, does not have the power it has, all this stuff, where they drastically diverge is what happens next? Kind of what does that world look like, whether it is kind of more right-leaning and kind of all the things that generally get assigned to that group versus a left-leaning world that is stateless or kind of less of the U.S. government? Is that fair that there is commonality of like destruction of the system, but really the divergence is maybe on the tactics in which to do it, but then also on like what the system looks like on the other side of that event? Yes. I mean, there are some commonalities. I would say the biggest divergence, especially in how the U.S. government looks at these groups, is there are a lot of people in institutions, left-wing institutions in the United States, and I would include the U.S. government in there. as they look at the extreme left and they say, yeah, that's not a great look, but they're useful.

And I think, I mean, near as I can tell, that's probably the number one reason why those far left groups don't get the same look as the far right groups. And, you know, also too, the right in general is just much better armed. The U.S. government is not in a position where they can allow those groups to organize and coordinate. Do you think that when you say they're useful what does that mean i think ideal ideologically they're useful in you know try in 2016 you know trying to beat back on trumpism trying to you know beat back on you know it's always amazing the the anti-fascist groups antifa they they never go after like the hardcore skinheads and big biker gangs who will like literally kill them you know they go

after you know the the more milquetoast right-wing groups you know out in the street but who's i don't know who's the bigger fascist maybe the the white what supremacist or white nationalist skinhead biker gang or the kids out in the street so you think that it's almost like uh i don't know biological like human nature shit where it's like who's the who's the fucking alpha on the street when you know there's no police there's no anything and so like pick on what is perceived as the weaker group and so that's where like the focus goes i don't think it's necessarily well i mean you know you look at at those groups and they are much weaker compared to like you know a white nationalist biker gang like you know the one percenter clubs or whatever um i i they one of

the things that the these left-wing people chain is whose streets our streets whose streets our And so they, you know, these groups see themselves as, well, we cannot allow them to proselytize to talk about their, you know, their issues and grievances. You can't allow them to hold a demonstration on the street. You have to go out and counter it. And, you know, maybe it's the case that, you know, it's not those biker gangs who are out there demonstrating. But, yeah, you know, I think this is really a case of, you know, the younger right wing activist groups are out there and they have to be countered because you cannot allow them to grow. but you know i'd even say a lot of those groups i mean they're just they're like milk toast right wing they're not what's that milk toast yeah you know i never heard that before i mean they're

like conservative plus you know they're they just they a lot of they're the watered down version yeah i don't even want to say they're the watered down version i mean there there is a fascist movement in this country it's so small most of them you know tell me more about that because because i think and and you know already i can see people are freaking out they're like holy shit what are you guys talking about whatever right but but i think what's fascinating about your perspective is your is you don't come at this from what i can tell uh one side is good the other side is bad right someone how we're talking about russia ukraine like look this shit's messy and there's a lot of different groups and they're all got their own fucking

angles and and frankly some of the perception of what those groups stand for may not actually be what they stand for if you go and you look at the source materials and and so you all spend your time trying to figure that out right which i appreciate because it's uh frankly more educated than most people here talk about it but when you say um let's maybe just go kind of group by group You said there is a fascist movement in the country. What does that look like? How do you guys evaluate how big it is, how serious it is, what the threat is? Just kind of walk me through that.

Well, when the mainstream talks about fascists, what they're really talking about is those on the right who want to use government in the same way that the left wing wants to use the government. Okay. Okay, the same way they want to weaponize government against – which is exactly what the – I mean I think there's probably some element of both Democrats and Republicans doing this. but you look at conservatism and they say no that we we don't need to use government power it's a dangerous weapon you know it's a cudgel we don't want to use it and then you see democrats and i'm not trying to be partisan this is just my observation and democrats get in there and they do weaponize they weaponize the irs against the tea party they weaponize dhs they weaponize all these groups like how many just as an example how many murders do you think are attributed to

white supremacists per year in the united states just ballpark it oh man um i'd say less than a thousand maybe less than 200 something like that like i'm assuming it's a small number yeah sure yeah according even to the most liberal sources like 30 about 30 a year okay so the domestic violent extremism is about diminishing 30 murder now of course there's there's other forms of murders bad right yeah but but just murders in general about 30 a year you know more people will die due to gang crime in chicago in one month or in one year then you get white supremacist murders in 10 years so you know again this is just like misplaced priorities and i do wonder a lot why is the emphasis so why is this so great an emphasis on a movement that's so small

Okay. Do you have a theory as to what that is? Well, yeah. Yeah, that sounds like yes. Yeah, so I do see many Democrats publicly eschew violence, but I think they enjoy seeing people in 2016 through 2020, I think they enjoyed seeing Trump supporters get beaten and get death threats and have various forms of protests, getting fired, economic dislocation. Like they really wanted to punish Trump supporters. And it just so happened that you have the these left wing groups do that. And so I think it's a case of, yeah, violence bad. But but don't stop. So when you point that out, that is what I would call the the pro right critical view of the left. Right. It's kind of the way to look at it. If we then turn and flip that the other way and we say, OK,

what is like the uh pro-left critical of the right view uh is you said already hey there is this fascist group it's small but but it exists are there other things that you think uh have some kind of um seriousness or accuracy to them from that uh angle of critique yeah i would even say like your your average american you know fascist has nothing on 1930s absolutely nothing but i do think the moot it's small but it is growing and i think they're trying to be proactive they being the kind of fascist yeah like the left the anti-fascist are trying to be proactive and they say well one is one too many because if they're if if you let one go then there's going to be two and if there's two then there's ten if there's ten there's a thousand and uh but i would

just say on the other hand if you look at the the common gripes that the the actual complaints among these right-wing groups. It is because the country is changing so fast. They're very uncomfortable with the rate at which society is changing. And, you know, you look at Biden even, and, you know, he said, you know, I'm going to bring two groups together. And what did he do? I mean, he turned around and just is very, very divisive. And I look at the things that the government is doing. So I'll give you an example, right? Biden could come out and he could say to conservatives. I understand your complaints about border security. And if Biden replaced Mallorca, cause he's obviously not interested in doing it. If Biden replaced him with someone who

could seal up the border as well as it was from 2016 to 2020, that would go a long way in bridging the gap and turning down the temperature on a lot of anti-government extremism or protests or sentiment. But we don't see government doing that. We see government doing the opposite, the absolute opposite of that going after border patrol agents who are trying to secure the border and so i look at it as a way it's like a self-licking ice cream cone i mean you just get this thing spinning and uh you know government does does things to to make more people angry more people anger they say okay well we have to we have to organize and then you have the other side saying well look these people are organizing now and uh the process could be stopped i think

But I don't think either side would be happy with where we're going to go if it doesn't stop. Are you familiar with the Mike Glover situation? Have you seen this? Somewhat, yes. Okay. I'm not, but I saw him post online. And my takeaway, which hopefully you can correct me if I'm wrong on this, was he's an organization very focused on veterans and this stuff. At some point, there was a very small number, I think single-digit number of people who kind of lost their way, right?

It sounded like, frankly, they went crazy and they started taking their view of what the organization should be to the extreme. And again, just like classic radicalization, extremism, like all this stuff. And we've seen that like psychologists have studied this for centuries, right, and decades and understand that like you can have a group that is net good and majority of people are good and there's radicalization and like that isn't necessarily the entire group, but still it's a problem, right? um and so what i think i understood from what he was saying is like hey there was these people and like once we identified that this was it we kicked him out we were super cooperative and like that's not what we're about and then it feels like uh he then said hey but our organization has now been uh identified as one of these extremism groups and kind of all this stuff and in that scenario again i'm not an expert on it but it highlighted to me the complexity of this

where you could have a group and a leadership team that says, hey, we want to go do good things and kind of support of all these causes, which I think most Americans are like, hey, we should take care of veterans. We should like do these things. There's a radicalization within the group, which we see on both sides, right?

But there's radicalization within the group. The organization tries to do what they perceive to be the right thing. It seems like most people from the outside are like, yeah, that was the right thing, was to kind of separate yourself from the radicalization. But then you also ask yourself, like, what should the government do?

And like, you get into this like weird game where it's like, it's very unclear what is the right answer as to how the various market participants in that scenario should act. Is that one example of many on both sides of the aisle that you see kind of as you guys do your work in terms of like, again, you said you can't label good and bad in geopolitical conflict.

Is it possible to label good and bad in the domestic issues as well? Well, yeah, I mean, you... And you're free to tell me that I'm an absolute idiot and got the whole situation wrong with Glover. No, no, no. You can, I mean, labeling good and bad is easy. It just depends on your perspective.

I just want to say, you know, let's consider the alternative that both are bad in many instances. Which is not a story that you hear in the mainstream media many times, right? Good and bad is the divisive thing that can allow you to have people pick sides and argue and all this stuff.

But like both are bad, you know, that seems a little bit, uh, turning the temperature down a little bit actually by saying no, both sides are bad. Yeah. Well, yeah, it's really tough when, yeah, it's really tough when the, both sides are, the sides that are capable of stopping it are both bad and don't want it to stop. I would say, you know, for the Glover thing, you know, I'm not, I don't know exactly, but yeah, I think your, your understanding is, I think it's probably accurate. But the problem is if you go back to the radical parts of that group who may be misconstrued, they thought American contingency was something that it was not. It's not a vehicle for violent revolution or anything like that.

But I would go back and really try to understand the concerns and what is driving the radicalism among those people. The first step in solving the problem is understanding it. Unfortunately, there's just a lot of journalists are lazy and they'll say, oh, yeah, my buddy over at whatever, he said, oh, this group was fascist. So, yeah, OK, I'm going to call this group fascist. And you actually go back and you look at some of these groups and they're not really a spaz. You may not like what they espouse, but they're legitimately not fascist groups. And so, you know, I would try to understand the problem and in many cases what the federal government is doing. Like, okay, the whole Epstein-Maxwell thing, right? Okay, why do we not know? I mean, why is the government not going after those people?

But they will go after a PTA. The FBI will go conduct surveillance on a PTA group because some parents are angry at what their children are learning in school. You know, so if we want to turn down – Which sounds crazy, but like that is an actual real example. Oh, absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, and it's just like there were some anti-abortion activists, like 70-year-old people. And this one woman, she she sat down in front of a front door of an abortion clinic.

And so that's a federal crime. And now she was arrested. And I think 11 people are actually being charged now by the federal government for obstruction of something, some law that was passed in the 90s. And I'm not saying she will get this, but she's facing 10 years in federal prison. You know, how how is she facing 10 years and someone who burnt down a building in Minneapolis? Not how are they going after thousands of hours of tape and man hours? and millions, multi-millions of dollars to drag down somebody who is standing outside the Capitol on January 6th, 2021. And they're not going after the same people who burnt down buildings and

literally murdered people during the summer of 2020. It's the misapplication of justice. It's really selective application of justice that makes people angry. So, and I see, I think on both sides the the belief that uh the other side is uh not getting enough attention and the whole thing but one of the things uh that you're highlighting here so let's take um january 6th and let's take summer of 2020 uh minneapolis i think is the one that i personally remember watching and being like oh shit shit just got ratcheted it up right and and uh my recollection of the events which somebody will correct me if i'm wrong uh there was uh protests and seemed relatively peaceful and kind of all this stuff during the day at least the the coverage of it was uh this is no

different than protests that were happening all over the country and in many cities and then at one point i don't know if i frankly just went and ate dinner or something and came back or what but all of a sudden it was like there's a police station on fire and uh that's when it was like oh shit this now is a different level and and who knows who did it why they did it like any of this was unclear at the moment it was just like that isn't the situation and then i think there was a in tennessee somebody tried to set like a courtroom on fire and it started to just kind of spread us like hey this got ratcheted up so we take these two events the left attacks the right on january 6 and says uh uh insurrection and there's the photos and january

6 committee all that kind of stuff the right attacks left and says yeah but there is a police station on fire and kind of all this stuff. When we look at these, what you're essentially arguing is like, they're taking different approaches. They have different views of the world, but both sides are actually unhappy in those scenarios. And they believe the system is not working for them. They believe that the, uh, the government is not serving what their need is, which is not the story that I hear publicly or see in the media. It's, you know, one side's good, one side's bad, the whole thing. But like, actually, if you kind of just everyone take a deep breath for a second and say, Hey, both of these sides are saying this is not working for them. What is the

release valve? What is, what is the like kind of escape hatch or is there not one? Is it just literally this keeps getting ratcheted up and you have two sides that are just more and more divisive. And then we get, you know, some sort of bad situation that, you know, is even worse than things that we've seen in the past. Or is there a release valve where to your point, you know, is it the president, uh, whoever the next president is or the current one who can kind of provide uh this escape route is there other things that can happen like what is that release valve because it doesn't feel like that's obvious today this is i mean we are locked in a spiral right now because you have these far left groups they have they've been kind of you know mostly dormant

since uh since you know probably february 2021 or so um we're probably in a position where if if Republicans do end up taking the House and the Senate, I think a lot of those groups will probably reignite. Getting closer to 2024, that becomes, I mean, it's a certainty they will. And so really the next two years, I think, are going to be very difficult. And the right will look at that and say, oh, look, they're organizing again. The communists are back at it. Like now we have to organize. And the far left will say, oh, look, the far right's organizing now. Like we have to really get on the ball. And, you know, it's that self-licking ice cream cone problem. That's what we're locked in. The best we can hope for, I don't think this

is going to happen, but the best we can hope for is that in 2024, there is a candidate who wins outright with minimal accusations of voter fraud, maximum trust in the outcome that yes, this was a free and fair election. The problem is we have not had one of those in some time. And I think this is probably the case where the longer you go without a legitimate, all around legitimate victor uh the more likely it becomes that you still want the best case scenario is that yeah someone gets elected and everyone accepts it i don't think that's going to happen so this is interesting because when you say it hasn't happened in a long time um my mind immediately jumped whether good or bad uh right or wrong uh chad right in florida and

like for those that are too young to understand like literally go watch documentaries or or watch the news segments or whatever like literally they were arguing over like did the paper get punched or not and like pretty fucking crazy stuff to determine who ultimately became president united states right right um and so like that is very different than uh the accusations and kind of both sides of the uh 2016 uh uh situation but like that still was a uh contentious multi-day affair that like people kind of forgot about or were too young that that uh may be paying attention Now, Barack Obama doesn't seem like there was as much contention. Maybe you disagree, but that seems like maybe one election where it was like, OK, he wins.

Transition, from my recollection, wasn't anything that necessarily sticks out of issue. You get Trump, who I don't think most people said, oh, you know, the election was rigged or anything like that. but it was uh definitely uh once i was very happy once i was not very happy and so kind of uh in some way that's almost like what politics have been for a long time but it felt like it was ratcheted up for a whole bunch of reasons 2020 happens now it's the accusations of actually rigging and all the stuff right now in brazil right uh which i'm not an expert i don't think you are either um there's an election and i've already seen people saying it's real it's not real like it almost feels like okay now there is a playbook that has been established that when an

election occurs we're gonna just see these accusations over and over and over again that scares the shit out of me yeah right because that feels like uh damn the united states was above this right like to some degree like this is what you see in developing nations and in areas where like there's a politician a politician and a warlord and like maybe the warlord just now i'm the president yeah what how do you evaluate this like how do you think about it yeah it's tough so you know if we go back to 2016 and and after that election you have i don't know 25 30 i don't know the exact number but somewhere around there maybe a third maybe more of the country saying trump's illegitimate the russians got him elected okay and then 2020 you say well

you've got the the overnight hey it's 3 a.m and all of a sudden you get this massive dump of votes for biden and in a few in a handful of key states and it tips them over the top and uh now you know a third of the, I don't, again, I don't know the exact numbers, but let's just call it a third of the country says Biden's illegitimate. Well, you know, I look at 2024 and I say, well, we've seen some violence from the right. We've seen capability. We've seen the right organizing. We've seen violence from the left. They've been organizing. Is 2024 going to be the trigger that sets off increased violence? And, you know, that's one of my concerns is, you know, you get into a situation where like you have an Argentina scenario, like kind of a dirty civil war where

one side or the other gets elected and they say, oh, the left are doing this or the right are doing this. Like we have to go after them. They're terrorists. They're domestic insurgents. They're all the things that, you know, the conservatives have been called, Trump supporters have been called. And, you know, and then and there is some legitimate organized political violence, not just not just opportunistic violence, but like team deathmatch, you know, like, hey, we're a group. we're going to go out and conduct political violence, which is the, you know, really one of the worst, worst case scenarios. You're saying that, uh, that is a possibility or that's happened in the United States. I think that is a possibility so far. We've made, I think it's mainly been kind

of ad hoc opportunistic violence, like mob violence, for instance. Is it bad? I almost call that a stupidity, right? Like, like there's people who, um, mob mentality happens, they're out, they're doing stuff, whatever. And like opportunistically something, a situation shows itself and somebody is either too emotional too stupid too whatever and like something occurs and all hell breaks loose right but what you're talking about is i don't know uh uh much more organized than that and much more intentional like we are going to go affect change in a way with violence yep effects based yep i think that's that's the worst case scenario that can if if the 2024 election the contested election accusations is a trigger for that type of

violence. And yeah, we've seen like Proud Boys and Antifa get into it. And I, I would not call that organized political violence. Um, you know, this is, this would be more of like, uh, you know, a group of people going out and saying, Hey, this is it. We're, we're going to kick off the civil war. And, and that's, this is something that if it were to get going, just very, you know, decentralized distributed groups saying, okay, well they're doing it over there. I guess it's our turnover over here now um you know that scares the shit out it's bad i mean it could be very very bad it's not it could be very very bad it could be so bad that the government may not in fact be able to stop it and this the situation you would run into is the government actually making matters

worse i'm not sure that that's something that you can just let die out but um it's also very tricky i mean you saw in iraq and afghanistan too i mean one slight misstep you know you're going to make some other people angry and and you you're going to trigger another round over here sons of iraq i mean exactly i i um i've told the story before to people uh i don't know if i ever talked on the podcast um and again my memory over a decade ago so uh uh we'll fuck things up so no one hold against me um but basically the united states was uh engaged in combat in iraq uh we pretty handily took the country uh from the invasion perspective and then we went to nation building mode. Uh, and we had a hard time, uh, and it was pretty obvious fairly early. We're not built to do

this. Um, and, uh, the United States was susceptible to kind of the insurgent attacks. Uh, and one of the turning points, uh, or at least in, in kind of a momentum shift was going to a young military men in Iraq and saying, uh, this is your fucking country. Right. And like, you need to have national pride and you need to stand up because we can't do it right and and uh in some way um it's crazy to hear united states military saying hey we can't do this right uh but they essentially uh armed trained and then helped to staff uh what essentially checkpoints right i mean i remember we'd go do night route clearance and we'd drive by then you know like we'd give them shit because they sleep in and stuff right but like they were out there and uh and they had their weapons and um they knew

they knew it better than we did right talk about intel like right these you've been here for 18 20 25 30 years like you understand who's a good guy who's a bad guy who should be in your town who should not be in your town and it changed the battlefield now people argue how effective was it how long did it last whatever but like that was a form of what we're talking about uh where there was ultimately yes it was a u.s led effort but there was a group of nationals in iraq who military age who basically got together and said we got to put an end to some of the shit i don't think the united states it's very unclear to me that that would be a good situation nor uh it would be allowed i mean just like there's so much different we are not in an active combat

zone right you know like we live in a country that i like to think is uh is safe and people can speak their mind and do all these things you're talking about a world that is very different than you know the world maybe that i want to live in and it appears that we live in at the moment without a trigger to head somewhere else yeah you know that kind of the ironic thing is yeah sons of iraq was a was petraeus's answer to and and other people uh their answer to al-qaeda in iraq you know you had the whole political party forming in anbar province you know before it became sons of iraq proper but that didn't stop the killing you know they yeah they went out and you know grabbed a bunch of al-qaeda in iraq guys and shot them dead in the street and called us

Hey, by the way, you can pick this guy up. Like he's gone now. But yeah, I mean, it didn't, it didn't. That guy on your playing cards. Yeah, that's right. Yeah. Right. For those that don't know, go, the United States literally had 52 deck playing cards

with faces of Iraqis on it, which, you know, tells you exactly what the mission was. Yeah. Yeah. And so, you know, that was a, I mean, that was a roughly organic movement, at least at the very beginning, the Sahawal Iraq movement. And but yeah, you know, the thing was, OK, you have a bunch of these Sunni fighters and, you know, middle age or military age males. Yeah, let's let's form up into a militia so they can they can protect their. Oh, yeah. So I yeah.

So let's let's form a bunch of these middle age or military age males up and put them into a militia and they can go protect their country. Well, it didn't stop ethnic violence. I mean it didn't – Did it inflame it? Did it make it worse? Or was it just kind of the baseline is the baseline and the players are different? Yeah, in some areas, yeah, because these were Sunnis and Maliki, Shia, was president. And at the same time, Maliki was trying to sideline Sunnis in the Iraq army.

And so this – and we see the same thing in Afghanistan. Oh, you go help this tribe. Well, guess what? this tribe has been an enemy of this other tribe for a thousand years. And now this other tribe thinks you're against them. And so they're going to start attacking you now. I don't know that there is a way to win, but, but you, you bring up, you know, good point. Sons of Iraq was meant to stabilize Iraq.

And it, it did it mostly, it did, especially in Anbar province. But, but when you, you know, one of the things you really did was enable militias to go after Shias, you know, in some instances. This episode is brought to you by Exodus. is accessing web3 across multiple networks just got a hell of a lot easier exodus is one of the most popular crypto wallets for mobile and desktop and they just added chrome and brave web browsers to the lineup the new exodus web3 wallet is a multi-chain browser extension that lets you

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All you need to do to start mining your own Bitcoin is go to compassmining.io today. Again, if you want to get into Bitcoin mining, go check out compassmining.io today. This idea of a release valve. You mentioned 2024, whichever side wins, they win emphatically, right? It is clear to everyone, hey, that is the winner.

And there's acceptance of that winner. When that occurs, and I'm saying when because I'm hoping that happens, what is kind of the second and third order effects? Do we – is it possible to wind back the clock, kind of go back to pre all of the pressure that's built up and all of the just – I'm going to call it nonsense because frankly I think there's a lot of people in the country who are just like, look, I don't want to live in a world like this. Um, but is it possible to return or is there now, uh, kind of this idea of like you advanced so far and like, that's the new battleground or that's kind of the new boundary. I think the real problem is social cohesion. Okay. Explain that.

Well, I'm social cohesion. I mean, people, people getting along, they have shared values, shared language, shared culture, uh, shared, you know, outlook. and unfortunately you know you go back and you read uh sir john glubb's fate of empires and he talks about empires follow a specific cycle and he says last about 250 years you know roughly 10 generations and it starts with the outbreak of an empire you have a new leader or new idea and uh and it and it catches on like you win a big victory over someone you take their land And OK, now you start your empire and you get into the age of pioneers and they're, you know, they're settling and expanding the empire.

And then you have the age of commerce. Well, guess what? More commercial interest you have, the more military you need to protect it. And so you start military expansion. And then later on in the cycle, you get to the age of intellect. And the people who are living then are so far removed from the initial spark that's actually birthed that empire. They're so far removed, they don't get it. They don't share those values anymore. They don't share the same outlook. And, you know, Glubb talks about all the factors at play. And, you know, he said the Assyrian Empire lasted for about 247 years, roughly. British Empire, 250 years. Pax Romana lasted 270 years. So we're all, you know, according to him, we're about in a 250 year ballpark.

And one of the things that happens at the end of empire is you lose social cohesion, which is exactly what's happening in the United States. And at first I said, well, this is a single source information. Let me go look. And there are other researchers, someone complete – and I don't remember his name and I probably can't even pronounce it if I could remember it. But he calculated up his own like 30-some-odd empires and he found this like 260, 270 years, which is very darn close to Glubb's 250 years. So I actually think there's quite a bit of – the math is right at least. Yeah. What's interesting is there's a number of generations there, right? And, uh, um, uh, one of the things that, uh, in the investment world or in the finance

world, uh, there, there's, um, uh, paraphrase of it, but, uh, basically, you know, the first generation makes the money. Second generation does a pretty good job of holding onto it by the third generation is gone. Right. You know, and, and, and, uh, uh, this is obviously expanded in the 250, you know, year range, but like sure damn sounds pretty similar, right. Of, uh, kind of, there's people who create a, uh, uh, empire or, uh, uh, a country.

um there's people who kind of take care of it and then there's people who who fuck it up essentially right um and you know i think we hope that doesn't happen uh but let's say that let's play this out right and say okay that that's where we're headed what do you do do you just hey where's the next empire going to be built and let me go you know where it's prosperous and safe and and kind of on the rise and it's the equivalent of uh somebody who's worked at a big tech company for you know 10 years saying fuck it i'm going to a startup that's the next great tech company uh or do you stay and try to change it? Like what happens? Yeah. So Peter Turchin has a, he's a, or was a professor and he studied the rise and fall of states. And one of the things he says is, if I

recall correctly, two things end up happening is, is a civilization or an empire is either conquered by a neighboring empire or it falls from within and, and it's brought down internally. And it is at some point replaced by something else. So, you know, you look at the British empire, I mean, the United Kingdom, Britain still exists as a country. It's just no longer an empire. And maybe this is what happens to the United States is I think, I think there are probably several things that could happen, but you know, maybe it's just the United States doesn't go away. It doesn't cease to exist. Like we just don't have a carrier strike group station in Japan anymore. and and and the dollar is no longer the the world reserve currency and you know in terms of what can

you do you have to get to a state that i think is fiscally responsible and a state with a leadership that is going to look out for for its its residents a state that has good industry you produce something you make something you export something of value and i think that's probably the best place you can be in because the the political establishment you have at the governor and the state legislature may well be the one that you keep that becomes your new government i'm just saying you know falling into logical conclusions here uh get you got to get to a good state now yeah if you think that's going to happen how do you learn so much about this stuff like what you guys do at uh uh the business you essentially look around the world and you try

to come up with intel quality or what i call like military quality intel uh and my oh yeah i don't know the military i said that i knew i was gonna get them that's a very low bar yeah that's a very low bar all right explain uh my joke that many of you may have missed their military grade intel yeah uh explain well you know it's just like i had a meeting with someone the other day and and i was explaining what they do and they're like oh you're like your military grade so like anything military grade is is made by the lowest bidder it is not the quality you think it is so yeah military grade and plus there's the joke you know about yeah whatever the joke is about mi there's many of them yeah the military folks will get that one um but you guys obviously you

take a lot of the stuff that you uh learned military and implemented their uh contractor work now you're doing it in the private sector uh but the folks who are consuming this are uh everyone from who's just interested in events around the world trying to learn and educate themselves to professionals who are making decisions, whether they're corporations, investment firms, whatever. How do you kind of like go through the event? So maybe a great way to think about this is like you wake up in the morning, what do you check? Are you checking the news? Are you checking internal proprietary dashboards? Are you just jumping on Twitter like the rest of us where you're taking a shit and you're like, you know, what are people tweeting

about? What is the kind of the first couple of things that you do in the morning from a professional kind of intel standpoint yeah you know we we spend a lot of money on on access to information various databases and so yeah you know i wake up i'm i'm sitting on my computer 5 30 most most mornings really checking what happened overnight making sure china hasn't you know nuked taiwan or whatever uh you know just looking at what really what happened overnight checking you know kind of the first thing domestically off the press is what's what's domestic media reporting and um you know i have my feed set up and keywords and topics that i'm looking at and so you know yeah i mean from from the get-go we just we catch up on what happened

overnight and then we kind of add it to to our expectations and you know a lot like financial people do you know you wake up and you check asian markets twitter how important is it for uh for the intel world well for the intel world is i mean it's very important you're i mean they're citizen journalists they're apparent you know basically i mean they can if something's happening in in japan or in egypt a lot of the times yeah you might learn about it first on twitter before you know and and you know you've even seen you know print media and other people cite twitter sources like oh we saw this on twitter and so my favorite is when it's like a pseudonymous account and they're like fuck it they don't know who it is they just say like you know the cat right or

whatever yeah yeah yeah so yeah twitter makes you know twitter in a lot of cases is the first place where you'll find is and and i would say even more importantly that than that twitter's where you'll find alternative source sources of information and even if it's you know and it's not the the journalistic narrative or the the state-backed narrative that you're reading in some newspaper somewhere, you know, it's someone that said, oh, yeah, I was there. This is this is actually what happened or this is my perspective or here's the non-state sanctioned version of what happened. We've talked a lot about geopolitics, about domestic issues, kind of, you know, social, all these different things. It's not all you all do. Right. So there's things like

fuel shortages and other components. Talk a little bit about that part of the work and like, why is that important and kind of what are the decisions people are making once they actually are able to kind of get their hands on this type of reporting so you know we i mean we exist to produce early warning a lot you know a lot of a lot of times the information's there and just only a few people have put it together a hedge fund has put it together and they're acting on it they're not telling anybody because they want the advantage so we try to act as like kind of a hedge fund with the quality of information that we can source. And then, you know, we draw logical conclusions. And really our goal is to do that before it hits the news, right? I mean, you can

read it in our report. I mean, and this is, it happens very frequently. You read in our report that goes out every morning at 8 a.m. Central Time, and you hear about it on the news a day or two from now. And so our whole goal is to say, hey, this is happening, or this is going to happen, or there's a good chance this will happen over the next X number of days. And then, yeah, people can act on it, and they can make decisions based off of that. I mean, really, that's what any good intelligence does. I'm fascinated by the privatization of various things in the defense industry. I think probably the most famous initial one was Blackwater

and kind of the contractors and all of that. You have examples on the technology side and kind of aspiration to be the next great prime in a company like Anduril and a lot of the great work that they're doing there. Is it possible to privatize the Intel work? And is there a world where the private sources end up maybe not being in competition with the military sources, but private sources are relied on by military leaders? Absolutely.

Look at Maxar Technologies and what they're doing right now in Ukraine. It's a private company. Explain a little bit more about that. Yeah, I mean, Maxar, I mean, they take satellite imagery. So they're an imagery intelligence firm. And, you know, they're providing that to the Ukrainian government. And you have the Ukrainian MOD making decisions based off of those satellites. So yes, we are probably getting, I mean, just like Blackwater and the other places where military action has been outsourced, that probably is the future of intelligence. uh there's a lot of in you know in the in the military and the government there's a lot of institutional inertia and bureaucracy and some of those things will have some of those state sanctioned things will probably have to continue to be carried out by military or or civilian groups but the use of contractors has proliferated even for intelligence gathering and that probably

is the future um contractors for intelligence gathering net positive net negative what have you what's kind of your evaluation of it so far i you know i would say net positive i mean like i look at um i spent my last tour to afghanistan was 18 months i was doing roughly a similar job that i would have done as as a sergeant as an e5 but i was getting paid a lot more to do it i also didn't have um i mean there's no morning morning formation and you know i don't have I don't have you know a section sergeant or NCO you know double you know double checking up on me and so you know I think there's less kind of less red red tape as a contractor that's why I really enjoyed being a contractor it's like wake up go do your job and and just do it to the best of your

ability now not everyone did that but I think a lot of the it's tough to say I just they threw so much money at getting contractors and i think a lot of that money was wasted i would say net positive because you um you you get people who have experience who want to be over there doing the job just not in the military anymore because there's just so much bs in the military it um if i remember the numbers correctly uh if you were combat engineer infantryman etc in 2008 2009 in iraq uh with hazard pay and kind of all the different you know uh ancillary payments i think you probably made i don't know probably somewhere 70k something like that 65 70 whatever the number was it was below the 87 000 threshold that uh basically uh you weren't taxed um and i remember

on the way out of iraq we went to kuwait for two weeks um or 10 days whatever it was and uh essentially like a job fair right uh set up there and it was all the contracting companies and it was like listen you turn your ass right back you know you go home but like basically go right back to the country do exactly what you were just doing sometimes even a less dangerous job uh will pay you ninety thousand dollars for a six-month contract if you don't go home in those six months we'll pay you 10k so it's 100k total you stay for a year and don't go home it's 200k right and a lot of guys is like well fuck i was just willing to do it for way less money right and a lot more bureaucracy and usually i was actually putting more danger right why would i

not go back. And it always, you know, it's just like, look, what is the value, right? If you think from a business mindset, like what is the value of the person in that country doing something, private sector had a lot more value assigned to it than the kind of defense industry or the military. And so it's just, it's fascinating how you can use money and what they're willing to pay as a proxy for a lot of other things. Yeah. Unfortunately, you know, I think a lot of That's probably waste, fraud and abuse, you know, you know, going to big defense contractors. And, you know, we you're getting paid 200K. What are they making? Yeah, they're making weight. So, yeah. So, you know, I'm just saying, you know, I'm speaking from my position in my role, what I was doing as a contractor in Afghanistan.

However, yeah, it's it's a different time. You and I both learned a lot since we enlisted. And, you know, when I enlisted, I was super gung ho. And I get over there and I start realizing, like, this is not this is not what the average, you know, flag waving, you know, American thinks it is, which is, you know, very unfortunate. But, you know, to your point, yeah, contracting, you get a lot higher tier. You're not just taking volunteers off the street. You know, it's like if you come to work for our company, you know, a company like Blackwater, some of the other kind of top tier firms like you, you're going to be worth your salt. We're not just going to hire anybody just because they show up and fill out an application. war's fucking nasty business man right it's a money maker yeah yeah well it's a business but

it's also just a nasty situation where i think um one of the things that has really bothered me frankly is uh there's been a lot of critiques of the navy seal training right and um i've actually never said the story before but uh on the way to iraq we went to fort polk in louisiana about the absolute shittiest place in the world because it was the middle of the summer and the fucking insects and mosquitoes. It was horrible. I hated it. And I remember we were doing

these training exercises in preparation and on one of them basically they were like, alright, y'all are going to go up here and you're going to pull security. Whatever, you go up there, pull security. It was around like a fake village that they had built or whatever.

And next thing I know, I see some dudes who just look cool. come out of the woods right and they're fucking doing their thing whatever and and uh they're pretty quick and then everyone's all right let's get out of here and we go back to where we're staying and you know there's a bunch of guys here just like what the fuck was that right so they started asking around whatever it was navy seals uh who supposedly uh they did an exercise where they dropped off in the ocean they swim they got to fucking you know navigate their way or whatever and that was kind of the conclusion of it and so uh whatever i'm fine we're there and uh and

these dudes are staying in a uh in a barracks that is you know within eyesight i'm fucking exhausted so is every other guy i'm with they're talking about what are they gonna go eat whatever and we see these seals and they're now working out and these dudes are pulling tires and do i mean just a whole thing like literally out of a movie right right and i remember sitting there staring at i'm just being like i'm so glad those motherfuckers are on our side right like and that was the only experience i had seen the training and like all the stuff and everything but there's not very many people who would have done that because my understanding what they had just done was grueling already and then they still hey i gotta get my workout in and it feels like there's

a disconnect between the public conversation and then when you see the reality and it's like by the way some of those guys just do the math like they didn't come home right they they even though all the preparation still wasn't enough and so i think that uh to your point about social cohesion there's also like an education and information standpoint the more people can understand about some of the stuff they realize it's not necessarily good and bad it's not necessarily you know clean cut hey i want this streamed on national television or written in the new york times because it's nasty yeah yeah it's very unfortunate that um yeah i think there is i'm going to tread lightly here because i'm i'm not one of those dudes you know obviously

yeah but yeah you know i think there is um like when that when that seal uh murdered one of the green berets and uh i forget where where it was um you know there's a lot of i think there are things that that happen that you know people call it toxic and and uh you know just from reading the news you you can get that but those you know those guys i think most of them are are like top tier quality the best dudes you could possibly want on your team and it's very and again i don't have a dog in this fight but um unfortunately when you see the politic politicization of training like non um non-soft dudes making decisions for how those guys are going to go through their own pipeline and go through their own selection progress process like don't mess with that

let them run that shit because they've got to deploy with those people right they have to choose who they want you know to join their brotherhood and so i think that's a travesty what's happening right now is people is are civilians people who really are no probably have no business making those types of decisions making those types of decisions saying well we're going to cut this this phase and we're going to allow this to happen over here and it's what do you optimize it for right like you know look i meet a lot of founders a lot of people who want to work at various companies i even talk to you know other investors whatever i always like to ask what do you optimize it for and some people what they optimize it for today may not be what it is tomorrow or whatever

i think most of those processes they're not perfect they'd be first to say that most of the training processes most of the selection processes etc is they are optimizing for the best absolute war fighters we can put on the battlefield so we can be successful right and that's how they were designed and that's how they've been run and again they fuck up they make mistakes whatever they go too far what all that stuff is true but that is what they're optimizing for it does seem to your point there's a lot of people now who you know they have interest whether it's intellectual interest or or some other interest that they're trying to figure out how they can, you know, uh, kind of metal in this. That's not what they're optimizing

for. They're optimizing for other things. And again, maybe they're right. Maybe they're not whatever, but that is a shift in, in the target, right? That's a shift in what we're optimizing for. And like, we should be aware of that. We should understand that the goal is now shifting and we should have a conversation around, is that a better goal to go after? Or actually, are we losing kind of sight of what these people are going to have to go do? And I don't have the answers. Right. And I don't, I don't think you claim to have the answers either, but you can see it happen. And it's kind of crazy to watch in real time. Yeah. I'm afraid this is maybe one of those, you know, end of empire indicators where, you know, we're, we're no longer optimizing for

lethality, you know, like the, the Mattis school of, should we do this with the military? Does it help us kill more people faster? If it does, yeah, let's look at it. If it doesn't, then no, let's not do that. And yeah, just, you know, the things you've canceled, canceled. Yeah, I know. Yeah. Right. The military killing people like that is, that is not good. Right. Well, you know, you just, the Marine, you know, the Marines have that new ad campaign out now. Right. And it's not the pink haired, you know, person joining the Marine Corps. It's like Marines going out and conducting operations and killing people, you know, and I mean, not literally in the ad, but that's a very that's a very important shift from what we saw just a few years ago where you know

it's like a softer softer gentler marine corps the the uh the pendulum swings i think in both directions as we've seen right um and it does feel uh that it has swung um but i also think there's recruiting issues that they're having like there's a whole bunch of stuff that goes into it um i'll leave you with this i think you'll appreciate it uh um a friend of mine was saying what do you think about all the the russia ukraine stuff or whatever and uh i just said to myself i said i wonder let me go google this and i went i googled something i came back to him i said hey man there's a lot of people advocate for world war three military's paying fifty thousand dollars signing bonus for somebody to sign up if they're so interested in it right yeah they pay they pay

you to sign up right i don't see a line out the door they're paying 50k because they can't get a lot of people to sign up and so i think that you know again i just like looking at the market and if they're having to pay these huge signing bonuses it means that they can't get enough people to sign up they can't get enough people to sign up but there's a hell of a lot of people on twitter talking about you know i think in the last four year four or five years i'm pretty sure that world war three has trended on twitter at least three times there was the iran situation the north korea situation and then the ukraine situation so that's just a crazy world right and again maybe that's just what's always happened and now it's just on social media or whatever but

they're paying that much and there's a lot of people talking about it it just seems like there's a disconnect yeah there's a very big disconnect and i'm afraid that that politicians are going to want to fight the next world war which may be a world war and they're like empire indicate empire ending implications if we lose let's hope that doesn't happen yeah where uh where can we send people to find you on the internet uh or sign up for uh for all the great work you guys do yeah well thanks yeah i appreciate the opportunity it's been a great discussion you You can, our website, you can find us at forwardobserver.com. And we do a daily YouTube live stream for about 15 minutes every morning, talk about

global issues. That's just the Forward Observer channel over on YouTube. And I'm on Twitter and Instagram and a bunch of other places under Grayzone Warlord. It's gray with an A. Grayzone Warlord. What a great name. All right. Thank you so much.

I appreciate it. We definitely will do this again. All right. Yeah. Thank you. Thanks so much for listening to today's episode. I really hope you enjoyed this one. Make sure you're subscribed on Apple, Spotify, or your favorite podcast player.

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