In this episode, we talk about the eclipse, the hippies in Idaho, and the governor of Connecticut trying to make money off of the one percenters. We also talk about how much money you should get if you don t have a job, and why you should have a basic income. Also, we have a new segment called "What's the worst thing you can do with money you don't have?" and we discuss how you can make money if you have no money, but don't try to get a job in order to pay for it, because you're not going to get any money from it, and you're going to be poor if you do have any money at all, and that's not even close to as bad as you think it is! We also have a special guest on the show this week, who happens to be our good friend Mike Baker, who is blind and can't see the sun, but he's not too blind to see the eclipse anyway, so that's a good thing, right? And we also have our thoughts on what's going on in Washington, D.C. and what the hell is going on at the White House and why they should do about it. And finally, we discuss the future of the economy in Connecticut, and how the governor's plan to make more money, and what it means for you, the people that live in the worst part of the country, Connecticut. and the people who work in the most expensive part of town in the best parts of the worst parts of town, Greenwich, Connecticut, New York City, NY, and Boston, MA, and much more. We hope you enjoy the episode, and we hope you have a great rest of the week, and enjoy the rest of your week! Enjoy! -The Crew -Jon Sorrentino Jon and Matt Mike Baker Don t forget to subscribe to our new podcast, and don't forget to leave us a review and tell us what you think of our podcast, because we'll be listening to it in next week's episode, because it's the best thing you've listened to in the past week! -Jon and Matt are back next week, so don't miss it! Jon & Matt will be back in the next episode of the podcast, so stay tuned next week. Jon talks about the solar eclipse, so be sure to check it out! Tim talks about that!
00:00:18.000Well, I'm telling you, that's probably, again, it's an indication that they don't have a lot of discipline in that communications department of the White House.
00:01:11.000I was up there in the mountains over the past few days, and it was just hippies coming in from left and right, and the entire state just overrun with hippies.
00:01:21.000I mean, they're parking in people's ranches.
00:01:24.000They're just driving up on fields that have just been planted.
00:01:40.000I think a lot of intellectual curiosity is great, and a lot of hippie values are great, but then you go too far into the hippie retard gene pool, and you get these dopey hippies that are hippies that, you know, they're the worst kind of hippies.
00:01:53.000The hippies that don't really want to do any work, but they want universal basic income.
00:01:58.000They want all these, hey man, these one percenters, they have plenty of money, so the new one should have to work ever.
00:02:06.000They just passed a tax up in Seattle that's probably going to get struck down, but it basically was up in Seattle.
00:02:13.000They've decided that they're going to go against the state charter, which says you can't have a tax, an income tax, and they've gone ahead and done it for the, I think it's for the top...
00:02:35.000Well, what's interesting is that's the whole reason why a lot of companies like Amazon and Microsoft, that's the reason why they've located to Seattle, you fucking dummies.
00:02:43.000And they're going to pull out, and then you wouldn't have any jobs, and then you'd be poor.
00:03:37.000General Electric, the entire operation with General Electric said, went to the state and said, I know people are thinking, why are we talking about this?
00:03:43.000But they went to the state house and they said, you can't keep doing this.
00:03:47.000You can't keep jacking it up on us to pay for everything.
00:03:50.000We're happy to pay, and we are, paying our fair share.
00:04:35.000My friend Brian Callen said it best once, and it stuck with me forever.
00:04:38.000He said, you know what you want to be?
00:04:40.000You want to be to the point where you don't have to worry about your bills, and you can go to a restaurant and not worry about what you order.
00:04:46.000He goes, everything other than that is bullshit.
00:04:48.000And that's a good point, I guess, because you take that stress out of your life, and then, well, I guess you're going to...
00:05:24.000I think there is such a thing as a bosun's mate.
00:05:26.000There's always this ebb and flow, right?
00:05:29.000I mean, the people that have accumulated too much wealth, especially when it comes to hedge fund people and finance people, it's like, what are you actually doing?
00:05:38.000And you're using that money to influence policy, and that policy allows you to extract more money from the system, and it gets real slippery because occasionally you guys fuck up and it crashes the whole economy.
00:05:50.000But when you're talking about someone who's developed a legitimate product, they sell it and they're successful, they work hard, they've made something, They're building a business.
00:06:20.000There's this couple that I'm friends with, and their sons surf, and they live in Malibu.
00:06:25.000They have a house in Malibu, and they were surfing in the water in front of this house.
00:06:28.000This guy comes out and yells and screams at him, you know, get the fuck off the beach, because, you know, he has this $10 million house right there on the beach.
00:06:35.000And they're like, what are you talking about?
00:06:37.000Like, we live right over there, you piece of shit.
00:06:38.000And like, not only that, anybody can be on this beach.
00:07:46.000If you get to that point where you can entertain the idea of maybe I'll put 10% down and then I'll take the rest in a mortgage, then yeah, you've probably got too much money.
00:07:56.000It reminds me of that scene in The Big Lebowski when you meet the other Lebowski and he's in the wheelchair and his wife's offering to suck dudes dicks for a thousand bucks.
00:08:04.000You know, it's like, that's the kind of shit that happens.
00:08:06.000You get a trophy wife, you buy yourself a mansion, and your days are just filled with stress.
00:09:16.000But I've just now emptied The freezer of salmon and halibut and rockfish from the last trip.
00:09:22.000So it's time to stock up again, but it's just a great time of year.
00:09:25.000Isn't that a great thing to have fish that you caught in your freezer that you can go back to that you know was only like an hour old by the time you threw it on the ice?
00:10:11.000Yeah, there's definitely some issues with polar bears in areas that have less ice.
00:10:15.000But apparently the polar bear population, this is something that I read about Canada, at least in Canada, the polar bear population is higher than it's been in years.
00:10:25.000There's not a shortage of polar bears, but if you go over there to...
00:10:29.000Like, they have hunts for polar bears.
00:10:31.000Like, they pay people to take them on polar bear hunts, but then you can't bring the polar bear back to the United States.
00:11:20.000I mean, there's definitely polar bear problems higher north, right, in the ice caps.
00:11:24.000I mean, I've seen some issues where they're talking about polar bears starving up there and the lack of ice contributing to starvation deaths.
00:14:18.000There's an area that we've shown this video before of this enormous grizzly that gets right next to this guy who's sitting there photographing these bears eating fish out of the river.
00:14:30.000And the bear literally couldn't give a fuck about him.
00:14:33.000Just looks at him and just sort of wanders off.
00:14:35.000And there's actually a statistic that no one has ever died in this area.
00:14:39.000No person's ever been attacked or killed in this one area just because it's just overrun with salmon.
00:14:44.000They're so preoccupied this time of year.
00:14:46.000But it's also, you know, you talk about how things change around the planet and the salmon runs are, you know, really being impacted right now by a variety of reasons.
00:15:18.000I mean, and Al Gore had already predicted in that movie, An Inconvenient Truth, that we were gonna be covered in water in 2014. Wasn't it 2014 they were predicting that the ocean levels were going to rise to the point where we're going to have to start evacuating some of the coastal cities?
00:16:11.000And they were talking about climate change, and Tucker Carlson said, I'm willing to absolutely believe that people have an impact on climate change.
00:16:21.000He goes, but can you tell me how much?
00:16:24.000And then Bill Nye kind of got flustered, and he got a little confrontational, a little defensive.
00:16:32.000It was really kind of interesting, because Tucker kept pestering on him.
00:16:35.000We're talking about science, so I would like you to tell me, how much of an impact have people had?
00:17:27.000Clearly, they don't have anybody who has to approve his content.
00:17:30.000But that just shows you where his mind's at, that he's willing to say yes to that.
00:17:34.000That's someone who wants to acquiesce with no uncertain terms to the left.
00:17:39.000Meanwhile, he had a television show out years ago where he was describing gender, and he was basically saying there's two genders, and it's about X and Y chromosome.
00:17:51.000I mean, which is what everybody's been told in science and biology class.
00:17:54.000Then he has this show just a few years later, where now the tide has turned politically, where this is such a weird subject about gender and sexual identity and gender identity.
00:18:05.000And so he's got these songs about, you know, like, what?
00:18:09.000That lady singing that song, like, hey, this is fucking terrible!
00:18:13.000Like, all you're doing is just, like, the same thing as President Trump staring at the sun.
00:18:17.000All you're doing is setting yourself up for ruthless criticism that's going to diminish any potential legitimate point that you actually have.
00:18:25.000But, I will say this, I don't think he really got pilloried for it, right?
00:18:33.000Yeah, I think some people made fun of him, but I think Bill Nye, for the most part, he knows that's a very comfortable place for him to do, or for a lot of people.
00:18:40.000If they say, look, I just want to get the adulation of the left, of the far left.
00:18:49.000But you see people that kind of shift their position and are happy to be there because they know they're going to be coddled.
00:18:55.000And so I get why he does it because it's a base of it's an audience that he knows is going to stick with him as long as he says the right things.
00:19:09.000I think he does give a shit about science, but I think he gives a shit more about people liking him and fitting in with this crowd of people.
00:19:16.000There's a weird thing that's going on in science, and there's nothing...
00:19:24.000I'm not a science criticizer, but there's a weird thing about people that are a part of science, where their own egos and their own need for Positive affirmation sort of supersede any critical thinking.
00:19:36.000So there's certain subjects that cannot be discussed.
00:19:39.000There's certain things that, like, they're almost like, it's almost like science religion.
00:19:44.000You know, so there's certain subjects that aren't even open to scrutiny.
00:19:49.000Well, I think that's right, and I think part of it is also we have gotten to a point where you can't And I don't know how you walk it back, but you can't have conflicting ideas in the same statement or the same sentence.
00:20:03.000And things conflict all the time, right?
00:20:05.000And you can have truths that collide with each other and don't necessarily make sense.
00:20:12.000But it seems as if now everything has to be in absolutes, and whether it's climate change.
00:20:17.000So you can't say, you know, if you just have this...
00:20:21.000Middle-of-the-road discussion where you say, well, look, of course, humans, I'm sure, have some impact.
00:20:47.000I'm not one to beat on the young kids or the generation of whatever we want to call them nowadays, because I know a lot of good kids that are out there that are working hard or they're in the military, and it's a fantastic group of folks.
00:20:59.000So I think we're just fine in that regard.
00:21:01.000But there does seem to be something about each successive generation, and we've gotten now to a point where people have a hard time processing this dissenting opinion idea.
00:21:10.000And that starts to shut down Debate and it starts to shut down the the idea that you can have a discussion about science where you have You know these conflicting ideas and how do you how do you resolve them?
00:21:21.000That used to be the whole concept about science is that test theories and come up with what works and Anyway, I think it's because we're attaching egos and personalities and virtue signaling to to the actual hard data itself But here's here's the thing that we should all be concerned with Pollution.
00:21:37.000We should all be concerned with human waste.
00:21:39.000We should all be concerned with the damage that we're doing to our water, the damage that we're doing to the environment.
00:21:46.000There's a host of different things that human beings are involved in that are creating irreparable harm to the environment.
00:21:53.000We should absolutely be concerned with that.
00:21:54.000But what's weird is that you hardly ever hear about that.
00:21:57.000You hardly ever hear about doing something to curb the plastic in the ocean, doing something to eliminate some of the sewage waste that goes into the ocean.
00:22:07.000There's a ton of different things that we're doing that are huge issues.
00:22:10.000But instead, you hear about climate change, and it becomes this ideological left versus right battle, which is very weird to me.
00:22:17.000And I understand that climate change is a real issue, and if the ocean water continues to rise, coastal cities really are fucked, and if the temperature does rise, we really might have to migrate to better climates.
00:22:31.000There's a lot of other shit going on that seems to get ignored during this process.
00:22:35.000Well, interestingly, I'm old enough to remember when plastics...
00:24:24.000I mean, and all that goes back to William Randolph Hearst conning people into making it illegal so he didn't have to switch over his paper mills from wood.
00:24:40.000Him and Harry Anslinger, and what they did is they organized an actual campaign against hemp as a commodity by demonizing this thing that they called marijuana, which wasn't even the name of cannabis at the time.
00:24:57.000Marijuana was a name for a wild Mexican tobacco.
00:25:00.000They applied that name to cannabis to say that there's this new drug that's making Mexicans and blacks rape white women.
00:25:07.000You know, he was a piece of shit, that William Randolph Hearst.
00:25:10.000And he printed all these articles in his papers, and they made Reefer Madness and all that stuff, all those movies that they made back in the day.
00:26:12.000So I started watching it, and the dude next to me in the seat, next to me, kind of starts, you can tell when someone's watching your screen, right?
00:26:59.000Try to convince you they know what they're talking about.
00:27:02.000So, speaking of Citizen Kane and Orson Welles and conspiracies, last night I re-watched the episode of Geraldo Rivera's Good Night, America, when they introduced the Zapruder, because you know Dick Gregory just died?
00:27:17.000They introduced this Zapruder film to the American public 13 years or 12 years, 12 years after Kennedy's assassination.
00:27:24.000And then I went and read that paper, the articles that was printed a couple of weeks ago that you even tweeted about it, about the CIA questioning the official story of the JFK assassination.
00:27:36.000Yeah, that was interesting, wasn't it?
00:27:38.000As a CIA guy, what do you think about that?
00:27:41.000Well, first of all, that Zapruder film, that's the most watched piece of film in history of film.
00:27:47.000But, yeah, it was interesting that the, you know, as typical with a lot of these things, the headline doesn't necessarily actually match once you get into the body of the story, but the idea being that the agency...
00:28:02.000had some concerns over the idea that perhaps Cuba was behind the assassination, or the Russians to some degree, or working more likely in a combination of the two.
00:28:19.000Do I think that he could have taken that shot?
00:28:47.000You know, his motivations and any potential support that he may have gotten during the course of that.
00:28:54.000And, you know, I think that he, in his mind, he genuinely felt that this was going to get him into the revolution, right?
00:29:02.000That this was going to...he had had a very unhappy experience in Russia when he was over there living, came back, saw what was happening in Cuba, desperately wanted to be part of that, I took an unexplained trip down to Mexico, which could well have been in an effort to find somebody who could support his desire to take some sort of action,
00:29:25.000whether he had formed in his mind that's what he was going to do at the time or not.
00:29:29.000So, you know, is there still a possibility that the Cubans, which the intel service there, would have had the file on him?
00:29:37.000I mean, he was a very, very well-known quantity, obviously, by that time for the Russians.
00:29:41.000The Russians were solely responsible for training up the Cuban intel service.
00:29:45.000So there's a massive file on him, and they knew, you know, who they were dealing with.
00:30:05.000And I'm not a conspiracy guy, but I think there's enough there that says, you know, yes, it's kind of like what we're talking about with climate change.
00:30:15.000I believe this, but this also could be true.
00:30:17.000So I think he could have taken that shot, for sure, and succeeded.
00:30:23.000I think it's also possible that he may have had the encouragement of, in particular, the Cuban intel service through the Russians.
00:30:32.000Because at that time, in particular, the Cubans didn't do anything without the Russians' support, blessings, and direction.
00:31:25.000But here's the thing about the Lee Harvey Oswald assassination.
00:31:29.000You know, a lot of people think that there was people in the grassy knoll and that they shot at the president and there was more than one shooter.
00:33:19.000We looked at what the train yard engineer reported seeing with a sort of a puff of smoke that he thought he saw over by the fence line.
00:33:30.000And we looked and we thought, yeah, you could, you know, from that position, they opened that place up and we were able to go back up there and you could see it.
00:33:35.000We ran a couple of tests and fired off a few shots and that's always fun.
00:33:39.000If you want to have a good time, take a rifle to Dealey Plaza and fire off a few shots without the tourists knowing what the hell is happening.
00:33:45.000And the Dallas police, by the way, were tremendous during the course of that.
00:34:17.000He's significantly on that side to the point where he's leaning always towards a conspiracy.
00:34:24.000What you want to do is you want to do every investigation.
00:34:26.000This company that I've got, we do a lot of investigations.
00:34:30.000You've got to build, just like with a homicide case or anything else, you've got to build it on stable ground, right?
00:34:35.000So you have to start from, you know, the very basics.
00:34:39.000Because if you start building ideas and investigative inquiries on something that's not sturdy underneath it, you know, not based on evidence and fact, then you got a problem.
00:34:49.000The whole thing becomes suspect and usually comes toppling down.
00:34:52.000So, you know, you got to keep an open mind about all these things.
00:35:47.000My biggest reason for believing D.B. Cooper died and his chute is hanging up a tree, and that's a vast wilderness up there, is that people can't help themselves.
00:35:58.000At some point, people talk, or somebody talks, somebody associated with it, or somebody nearby, or somebody involved, or somebody on their deathbed, or somebody says something they shouldn't have.
00:36:06.000It's, you know, the idea that they've maintained this sort of secret over a period of time, I find hard to believe.
00:37:42.000Would they have actually, no play on what's intended, but would they have pulled the trigger on an operation trying to push him into doing an act like this?
00:38:14.000And again, the Russians, it shouldn't be any surprise to anybody when you talk about what they did during this election.
00:38:18.000I mean, they've been doing this forever.
00:38:19.000You go back to the 1940s, and the Russians were spending a lot of time and effort and money here in the States trying to keep us out of the war back before...
00:38:28.000Hitler invaded Russia when they were allied with the Nazis still.
00:39:28.000And the convenience of finding it on Connelly's gurney when they roll him into the hospital, oh look guys, we found the bullet and it's perfect.
00:39:36.000I don't buy That for a fucking second.
00:39:38.000And the problem is there's more metal fragments in Connelly's body than we're missing from the bullet itself.
00:39:44.000I think that bullet itself, look at that bullet.
00:40:22.000I mean, so I... I don't buy that bullet.
00:40:24.000When you have a conversation about this and it is somebody who has no shooting experience or, you know, it's just, you think, alright, that's fine.
00:40:32.000I understand why you're fascinated by it, but when you do your research, you know, it's like with news.
00:42:41.000So that was the thought process behind it.
00:42:44.000But the Zapruder film was the one that got people weirded out by it.
00:42:48.000But I'll tell you what, man, I've watched that film a bunch of times.
00:42:51.000And one of the things that don't jive is if he did get hit from the front, you know, his head goes back to the left, why is the blood spray out forward?
00:42:59.000See, it's weird the way the impact of the blood is.
00:43:03.000It's like the blood sprays forward and then his head goes back into the left.
00:43:07.000It could have possibly been that he was hit from the front and the back at the same time.
00:43:20.000If the grassy knoll was, in fact, a second side for a shooter, then...
00:43:27.000By the time it hits that corner and starts its path, just before the shots were fired from the book depository in Oswald, if you're going with that, if you had another shooter up on the grass, you know, you're basically looking right at the front of the vehicle.
00:43:47.000And because of the way that it's positioned and the knolls kind of turned, and then it's just that It's just that there's not a lot of concealment up there.
00:43:59.000And they had the fence, the picket fence.
00:44:01.000It's not the original one that's there anymore, but it's basically in line with it.
00:44:05.000And there's plenty of pictures of the previous fence that was up there at the time.
00:44:11.000And you did have the train yard engineer report sometime after the fact that he saw a puff of smoke, that he wasn't quite sure what that was all about, and he'd seen a couple of people back there.
00:44:24.000So, that's an interesting thread to pull on, right?
00:44:28.000And I think that it's been researched ad nauseum.
00:44:32.000It doesn't mean you couldn't still find something.
00:44:35.000It also doesn't mean anybody's going to really find a conclusion after the fact.
00:44:49.000When someone gets shot, especially when the president gets shot, you'll have five different stories from five different people and gunshots heard from the moon.
00:44:57.000Nobody knows what the fuck's happened.
00:44:58.000Well, you get that just from a robbery.
00:45:13.000And you've got to, you know, you've got to take them and then you've got to, you know, match it up with other information you can pull together forensically.
00:45:28.000Initially, it was because the Bureau was saying, okay, we're closing this case.
00:45:31.000And then there's some talk now over the past day and a half, two days, that they might have found something up in the wilderness that might be a piece of the chute that he had.
00:45:49.000The thing about, I mean, it could be, but the thing about something that's that long ago, we have to realize how many people die in the woods every year.
00:47:24.000And, you know, there was some talk, well, you know, because some of his money was found, you know, after the fact, stacked in a little...
00:47:32.000Part of the river that seemed unusual, right?
00:47:35.000It seemed like it would have had to make a pretty amazing journey from the wilderness down through the stream system out to the river and then be found on this sandbar.
00:47:45.000And it was all stacked one on top of the other.
00:47:51.000And so there was some thought that, you know, how did that get there?
00:47:55.000Did it naturally just float down there and end up on this sandbar and covered in sand and eventually was found by some kid that was on a picnic?
00:52:02.000Don't imagine that it could actually get better in that regard.
00:52:04.000We could be even more dysfunctional from a political point of view.
00:52:08.000Well, what's weird is I was watching this interview today where this guy, this fucking pencil-necked dork, was supporting Antifa violence and saying that the only way to fight against fascism is violence.
00:54:00.000That's, again, this idea that you should be able to argue both, right?
00:54:05.000No, you can't respond with violence, and yes, you guys, you shouldn't be here.
00:54:11.000If you're going to hold those views, it's abhorrent.
00:54:15.000You are protected by the First Amendment, and so that's fine.
00:54:19.000It doesn't mean we have to like it or in any way condone it.
00:54:24.000But you've got to know, okay, those sort of fringe ideas are going to exist.
00:54:28.000And I agree, the best way to resolve it is peaceful demonstrations, massive peaceful demonstrations, to show, you know, sort of the weight of where the good thoughts are.
00:54:43.000Ensure that, you know, work through the political system, as dysfunctional as it may be.
00:54:47.000But anyway, Just encouraging people to violently attack people that have differing ideas than them that aren't being violent is never the answer.
00:55:52.000You know, my dad didn't fly in World War II, you know, so that somehow you could have a resurgent, not that there is, I think it's a small group, just like it's a small group on the left that wants a violent solution to this, or, you know, honestly believes that, you know, violence against police is somehow the answer,
00:58:26.000And so, but he had that ability, right?
00:58:28.000Now, again, I wasn't a fan necessarily, but I, you know, again, You just want, whichever administration's in charge, you want it to work.
00:58:35.000You want for the country to move forward.
00:58:38.000So you met him, and it's true what people used to say about him, which is that he made you feel like he was talking right to you, and nothing else was important.
00:58:46.000He wasn't one of those guys that looks over their shoulder thinking, is there somebody else I should be talking to over there?
00:59:29.000I know people go, oh my God, I couldn't stand his policies.
00:59:31.000But, you know, sometimes it comes down to a personal thing and you think, yeah, you know, maybe the guy's got some, you may not like his principles, but he sticks with them, right?
00:59:44.000There was one time where the Supreme Court had a ruling that he didn't like, and there was a speech where he gave, and I've seen it quoted in print, and then someone showed a video of it.
00:59:54.000But he was essentially saying, well, we have to uphold the decision of the court.
00:59:58.000I'm not happy with it, but this is the way our system works.
01:00:34.000And yet, you know, yes, there's lots of things you can change, and that's a good thing.
01:00:37.000There should be some change in that government, but the way that the place works in Washington, but the communications there, the lack of discipline.
01:00:45.000I mean, for crying out loud, they just put in place the new communications director at the White House, 28 years old.
01:00:51.000She's 28 years old, never done this sort of thing before, and she's the new communications director.
01:00:55.000She replaced Scaramucci after his 10-day reign.
01:01:24.000You see the messaging get out, and he gets ahead of the message, or they need to play catch-up then, and people like Mattis and John Kelly now and Pompeo and others are trying to race to...
01:02:07.000But as a guy who's been in the intelligence community for so many years, and you're stepping back, and there was also a real issue with him being at odds with the intelligence community and diminishing the intelligence community.
01:02:19.000Yeah, that was a strange or sort of an interesting narrative.
01:02:26.000I mean, the people, in the sense that the people at the agency, you know, at the end of the day, they just take whoever's in charge, they take their marching orders from.
01:02:34.000It's not, and I know people don't believe it because, you know, everybody likes the feature films and everything, but it's a pretty apolitical organization.
01:02:41.000Whoever's in the administration, they're going to prioritize their national security concerns.
01:02:45.000Your tasking comes out of that, and then you just march on and do your job.
01:02:50.000And yes, the director is in a pointed position, And, you know, John Brennan was certainly much more political in the previous administration than previous directors have been.
01:02:59.000But, and the operational level, you know, down at the street level, people just get on with it.
01:03:04.000You know, they're human, so of course, you know, they may have their own personal preference, but I'd spent a long time there and behind the curtain and...
01:03:11.000You know, they just tick on and do whatever.
01:03:14.000You know, there were people that weren't happy with Obama, there were people that weren't happy with Bush, there were people not happy with Trump.
01:03:18.000Just tell us what the priorities are, tell us what the tasking is, and we'll get on with it, you know, and go out there and do the collection operations we're supposed to do.
01:03:27.000It just seems like there's no one person that's ever going to be able to fill that position.
01:03:33.000It seems like that position also gets bigger and bigger, like the responsibilities get bigger and bigger.
01:03:39.000It seems to me that at this point in our history, the history of our society, we kind of have to look at that position and wonder whether or not it's even logical to give so much power to one person.
01:04:36.000Nor could they have seen people wanting to stay in Washington for 36 years or 42 years and become career politicians.
01:04:42.000They were all just interested in doing their duty and serving the way they were supposed to or they felt obligated to and then getting the hell out, right?
01:04:49.000Getting back to the farm or whatever their job was because nobody wanted to stay in Washington for any longer than they needed to.
01:05:01.000It means amendments to the Constitution as we've done in the past.
01:05:06.000Think about how crazy it is that someone forms a new country and then 400 plus years later it is the Preeminent superpower in the world by far.
01:05:19.000You got these countries that have been around for thousands and thousands of years.
01:05:22.000Like imagine a group of freaks and misfits that branch off from America, get in a boat and float over to Costa Rica or wherever and take it over.
01:05:36.000And then again, going back to what we talked about towards the beginning was cobbling it together, understanding that we needed to get our hands on everything west of the Mississippi.
01:05:44.000Now, clearly there were some issues there, but, you know, it's sort of that vision that says we're going all the way to the coast.
01:05:56.000But It'll be interesting to see, obviously, this is probably the stupidest statement people will hear all day, is where we're going to be in, say, another 200 years.
01:06:06.000Because I've got a theory that says where every generation is making it easier for their kids, and eventually you hit a point of diminishing returns and everybody's just a big pussy.
01:06:30.000I wonder how much there are parts of the world where obviously things are way more difficult than they are here, and maybe we're losing some sort of a competitive edge because we've made our lives so easy.
01:06:42.000Haven't replaced the convenience of civilization with something that tempers our human instincts, like some difficult tasks, rite of passage for young men, you know, something that develops character.
01:06:56.000Instead, we're making safe spaces and making words violence and, you know, making it...
01:07:45.000But he plays other sports, too, so there's sort of a well-roundedness there.
01:07:48.000But we came off the field one day, and we were walking along, and all the parents were kind of marching off, and the game was over, and And he says, how'd I do?
01:07:58.000And I said, well, you know, you could have done better.
01:08:01.000I said, I just get the impression you didn't try as hard as you could.
01:08:52.000And the only way you are going to get better at accomplishing things is to be 100% honest about the amount of effort you put in and what the actual result of that effort is.
01:09:03.000Whether it's a failure or a success, that does not define you.
01:09:08.000That defines your participation in this particular activity.
01:09:12.000You are an individual that will hopefully learn from all of your endeavors.
01:09:17.000But you're never gonna learn shit if you lie to yourself.
01:09:21.000You're never gonna learn shit if somebody makes this, nobody scores a point, and there are no winners, and there are no losers, and everybody's amazing.
01:09:47.000And if you're competing with that person in any form of life, and they're not burdened down by the bullshit That we give so many kids today, they're going to have a massive advantage.
01:09:58.000And this idea that this kid who's been coddled and treated like he's always going to be a winner, that somehow or another they're going to be happier is fucking crazy.
01:10:21.000The dads, or sometimes the moms, that stand on the sideline and berate their kid because the kid's jeopardizing his scholarship to some D1 school.
01:11:10.000And I didn't say it quite this way, but my point was you don't deserve to be on the top team because you're not working as hard as those kids that are working hard and that's their thing.
01:11:20.000They wanted to be there and so they put in the effort.
01:11:23.000You are happy playing and you could be there, but you're not doing it yet.
01:11:29.000And so therefore, A, don't get down on yourself, but B, certainly don't get down on anybody else because they put out the effort and they accomplished something that you didn't.
01:11:56.000I have a daughter that's in college, and she talks about her classmates and others.
01:12:02.000You know, sort of the conversations they have in class and the discussions and what passes as debate nowadays, which is not much.
01:12:09.000The idea of the old debate where you can voice your opinions and they can be different than somebody else's and you can, you know, hash it out and you can have a winner and a loser, but that's fine.
01:12:17.000You go away and you come back the next day and you have another rousing debate in that class.
01:12:23.000You know, it seems like anyway, because everybody's so afraid of saying something that might be offensive, or not offensive, but just might be upsetting.
01:13:18.000And so when you're going through the training, the point of it is to get them to that point, they realize that, okay, you know, it's not the end of the world.
01:13:26.000I know that at some point I'm going to end up talking, right?
01:13:30.000I'm going to have to do that because I can't.
01:13:32.000Otherwise, I'm either dead or I'm completely broken.
01:13:34.000And the idea is if you do that, and then the rest of the training and beyond that, you're building them back up because they understand that.
01:13:40.000Now, if, God forbid, something should happen, they get picked up and there's actually an interrogation going on, in the back of their mind, they understand that.
01:13:47.000And they're able to process it so that if they do get to that point where now, okay, I'm going to have to talk.
01:13:53.000I'm going to have to come up with something.
01:14:45.000And that's part of the training, too, is understanding what different groups, what different places could mean, what that interrogation could look like, how bad it could get.
01:14:56.000Part of it is understanding what it is that's okay to give up.
01:14:59.000What are you going to say that's not going to put anything in jeopardy, anybody's lives or any operations or anything in jeopardy?
01:15:05.000Part of it is, you know, then you've got to understand, you've got to stay close to the truth, right?
01:15:12.000Where you start getting people out on interrogations is where they can't remember what they've said.
01:15:17.000The closer you are to the truth, the easier it is to remember what you've said.
01:15:21.000And these things, I mean, if it's a bad situation and you're in there day in and day out, You know, and your sleep deprivation and they're, you know, knocking you around and there's no food and it's...
01:15:32.000You're gonna have a hard time keeping track of even the basic things.
01:15:36.000So, you know, you're trying to keep it as close to the truth as possible and as minimal as possible, you know, in terms of damage.
01:15:42.000You go in, you know, and typically you've thought through all of this.
01:15:47.000You do your homework ahead of time and God forbid something should happen and, you know, usually it won't.
01:15:51.000But anyway, point being is that You know, the idea is in the training portion of it, you want people to understand that, you know, everybody's got a breaking point, right?
01:16:00.000And that's just, that's the way it works.
01:16:03.000And some it's, you know, it's here, some it's further down the road, but everybody's going to break.
01:16:08.000And you don't want that to devastate the person if it should happen, you know, knock on wood.
01:16:18.000I mean, it's an interesting topic because, I mean, understanding that there's going to be severe penalties and that there's going to be repercussions and that, you know, this is a bad situation you're in.
01:16:32.000And understanding that going in is going to help you a lot more than if you go in there from, you know, a soft, padded world where you don't think there's going to be any adversity whatsoever.
01:16:45.000You know, just to finish that thought, is that the interesting thing about people talked about the interrogation program that we had, obviously, right?
01:16:55.000And, you know, the left did a very fine job of grabbing the moral high ground and saying either you're talking to people or it's all torture.
01:17:03.000But the point being is that even if you don't ever intend to use any enhanced interrogation techniques, You don't want to tell the enemy that.
01:17:15.000Because once you tell them that you're constrained by the army field manual, as an example, that's all you can do.
01:17:43.000Because once you know, once you don't have that unknown, if you're not sitting in some squat box and the temperature's up and you haven't eaten and you're thinking, what the hell are they going to do to me next?
01:18:07.000They're just asking questions, and you can hold out for a much longer period of time.
01:18:12.000And yeah, maybe there'll be some clever person working in the interrogation facility, and they'll develop a personal relationship over a period of time.
01:18:31.000So when you're in a situation where you have to extract information in a very short period of time because it's critical, because lives are at stake.
01:19:05.000Yeah, it just became such an emotive issue.
01:19:09.000But it's an enormously labor-intensive process, even in those cases where you think, okay, we've just picked up a high-value target, and we feel that they've got operational information that we really need to know related to whatever.
01:19:25.000It's not as if you don't go in there and start beating them over the head with a two-by-four.
01:22:31.000And what you're left with is this over-serotonin, over-dopamine state where you just love everything and everybody.
01:22:39.000If you could give that to enemy combatants, I guarantee you, if you could talk to them, you would get shit out of them that they would never want to discuss.
01:23:30.000The reason why they don't think it would work is because they haven't done it.
01:23:33.000If you get anybody in the Bureau or anybody in the CIA or wherever who has done ecstasy, they would listen to this and they would not want to say they've done it, so it would be a real issue.
01:23:42.000But I'm telling you, you give people two tabs of ecstasy and then start asking them questions.
01:23:47.000Plus, also, it would have been a much happier facility.
01:23:53.000I remember the first time, well, I only did ecstasy once, but the next day I did it, I was in a coffee shop trying to read a boxing magazine.
01:24:47.000So what you do is, while you're tripping, you're supposed to double down on 5-HTP, and it helps you as you come off of it, your serotonin jumps back up.
01:25:04.000Most people just buy a couple of tabs at the club and, you know, call it good.
01:25:07.000Well, if you're really smart, you actually take L-tryptophan and 5-HTP, because L-tryptophan converts to 5-HTP, and you should also take adaptogens, like some B vitamins and different things as well.
01:25:18.000L-tryptophan, is that what's in turkey?
01:27:37.000And it kind of works both ways, right?
01:27:40.000It works in the sense that the tweets and the bizarre statements and the things are exhausting.
01:27:45.000And then on the other side, the people that want to make all of that stuff the death of the republic every day, it's the death of the republic.
01:28:18.000Well, I think we could have we could see the market, you know, kind of stall at this point.
01:28:24.000I mean, I think people have been amazed at how the market was resilient and not just resilient, but, you know, blasting upwards and showing apparently no concern for You know, how disheveled the administration has been over the first several months.
01:28:37.000Hasn't the market been on a steady increase since 2007 or so?
01:29:49.000That's an operation we could work on, you know, because that's not targeting detainees and then we don't have all those regulations we've got to worry about.
01:31:12.000And besides, when the season arrives, I put on my handmade New York Giants sweater from my daughter, and I don't take it off until after the Christmas season.
01:32:11.000I'm hoping to make it a good long ways.
01:32:14.000You know, I've also seen folks deal with the problem of, you know, onset dementia and Alzheimer's problems that creates horrible things.
01:32:24.000I told my kids that, well, I haven't told them, but I told the oldest one, I said, just wheel dad out to the back and you guys all take turns shooting at me and, you know.
01:33:17.000They'd pull their camper or their Volkswagen, Vanagon, right out in the middle of a planted field, a freshly planted field, because not everything is fenced and gated out there, right?
01:36:46.000Weapon it shoots him repeatedly and it's just it's all there on kids.
01:36:50.000It's it's a it's a perfect example of how Difficult that job can be right and it's astounding so I don't know whether that video is available Yeah, it is available.
01:37:00.000Yeah, there's there's a bunch of those I mean I've seen one of them where a guy pulls over this one Man and the guy was a Vietnam vet gets out of his car He's got a rifle.
01:37:10.000He's yelling at him get back in the car put the rifle down put the gun down and the guy starts shooting him and And he's, you know, shooting multiple rounds into the guy's car, and the guy starts screaming, then he goes around by the passenger side and kills him.
01:38:02.000It's a difficult job, and it's a dangerous job.
01:38:05.000And those two statements can coexist, right?
01:38:09.000And so you can support the police, and you can also support efforts to stop police brutality wherever it takes place, and ensure that it doesn't.
01:38:33.000But it's a really convenient thing for people to say, fuck the police, because you don't get a lot of pushback, especially when something happens.
01:39:00.000And, you know, spent a long time overseas in some pretty difficult environments, and you see sort of the worst nature of people, or, you know, and...
01:39:38.000You're doing something wrong, he's pulling you over, and you gotta comply and be polite and call him sir, and try to diffuse a certain situation and be as friendly and as polite as possible.
01:40:05.000Nobody's ever, I mean, you just gotta, you gotta be concise and smart about that.
01:40:11.000And I tell my kids, and I try to demonstrate by, like when I stopped, you know, and the sheriff came up and, you know, my kids were in the car and I was polite and I was saying, he got to the window and I said, I don't have any excuse.
01:40:47.000But we can also acknowledge the fact that the police have a damn difficult job.
01:40:51.000Yeah, and it doesn't mean that there aren't horrible mistakes and horrible cops and people that are under pressure that do terrible things.
01:40:57.000There's some videos of people that comply and still get shot.
01:41:03.000They make mistakes or they have the wrong mindset or they're not trained properly.
01:41:07.000Or they're all PTSD'd out and they're just not designed for that job in the first place.
01:41:12.000I mean, it's very difficult to tell who's going to crack under pressure, the pressure of the day-to-day situation that a lot of cops find themselves in.
01:41:19.000Yeah, but the idea that you're right, the idea that you'd remove law enforcement and somehow we're all going to live in a peaceful community.
01:41:44.000Make Martin Luther King Jr. statues everywhere.
01:41:48.000You know, we were talking before the podcast started about what could possibly go wrong in Afghanistan and that Trump was going to make some sort of an announcement.
01:42:01.000And you were talking about the idea of privatizing.
01:42:05.000The military over there and bringing in contractors.
01:42:10.000Talking about it from the point of view that I don't agree with the idea.
01:42:50.000And so that's an important effort because, you know, they need the same level of security that a forward operating base or a military base or facility would need, you know, but the military is not going to allocate resources for private companies.
01:43:02.000So a lot of what the private contractors were doing was that.
01:43:04.000And then also private contractors, you know, Getting contracts to provide additional security support or logistical support to the military, to military facilities, where they can't afford to allocate resources to perimeter security to the degree that they would like,
01:43:21.000so private contractors come in and help with that, or providing support in the movement of dignitaries or whatever it may be.
01:43:28.000Point being is, we were out there for quite some time in Iraq doing that.
01:43:32.000And we were there at the beginning of sort of this private contractor thing, right?
01:43:36.000And people started becoming aware of it.
01:43:38.000And we started working with groups, including Eric Prince's group.
01:43:43.000We didn't work directly with him, but what I mean is that the various groups that were out there doing these contracts and this work, you know, realizing they needed to start to form an association or start to get some sort of, you know, grip on How this thing would look, right?
01:43:55.000So that there was some consistency amongst training and what were the regulations for, you know, the various companies for, you know, weapons and everything else.
01:44:03.000It's complicated, but, you know, long story short is, you know, we had upwards of 400 people, I guess, out there at a point providing security and intelligence support.
01:44:14.000And now what's happening with Afghanistan is...
01:44:18.000That one of the options that's been being considered is handing over—we've got about 8,400 troops out there right now doing mostly training missions, training operations, and support for the Afghan troops.
01:44:31.000So the idea was, well, let's let the private contractor take that over.
01:44:35.000Let's move that out and let's not have the brave men and women of the U.S. military engaged in Afghanistan ad nauseum.
01:44:43.000And this idea is being pushed to some degree by Eric Prince.
01:44:46.000And he's said things like, well, if you want to keep having this conversation, you want to have the conversation 10 years from now, fine, let the military keep doing it.
01:46:09.000I guess the overlying, the 30,000-foot view that I've got is that if it's important enough for us to be there, then that's a military function.
01:46:20.000Then we have to commit in a way that, you know, we're not right now.
01:46:24.000We've been in this sort of stalemate situation right over there, and now we're somewhat surprised or people are surprised that the Taliban is resurgent.
01:46:33.000Well, where the hell did they think they were going to go?
01:46:36.000The Taliban don't have any place to go.
01:46:51.000But they don't understand what the hell we've been trying to sell them for all these years.
01:46:54.000So this doesn't diminish all the pain and sacrifice and suffering of all the people that have been out there and the lives that we've lost.
01:47:54.000I don't care whether we improve the literacy rate of the Afghan people by another percentage point or if we build another road.
01:48:00.000I don't think that's in our national security interests.
01:48:02.000And so I think we need to be a little bit more clear about why we're there or what we're hoping to accomplish at some point.
01:48:07.000We wanted to be there so that they wouldn't use it as a playground for terrorists to then develop and plot and plan and attack the West again.
01:48:15.000So maybe the thing that we should have done was go in there, kick the shit out of them like we did in Tora Bora and elsewhere, explain to the remnants of the government, if you allow that to happen again, we're going to come back and we're going to do this again.
01:49:25.000Now here's the thing about when it comes to operations over there and what the objectives are.
01:49:30.000One of the things that I've been hearing from people that are in the military that I know is they say they are happy that Trump is supporting them and that Trump Trump is kind of essentially giving the reins to the military, saying, look, this is what you guys do.
01:49:46.000And there seemed to be one of the few groups that is fairly universally happy with his decisions in that regard and with the people that he's appointed.
01:49:55.000I think if you feel like you've got top cover, you know, then, you know, and that was one of the problems.
01:50:00.000I mean, people talked about the, and we talked about it briefly, about the idea of the, you know, sort of the narrative of sort of a battle between Trump and the intel community.
01:50:08.000Well, the intel community had a problem with the previous administration because they kept shifting the goalposts.
01:50:13.000They were going to criminally prosecute people in the agency for engaging in that interrogation program and rendition program that had been approved by the previous administration.
01:50:25.000So the fact that the military and to some degree others and certainly law enforcement feel as if they've got this top cover from the current administration, that is a good thing.
01:50:34.000And if you're willing to not politicize, All of this and make every decision related to national security based on how you think it's going to move the polls, then that's also a good thing.
01:50:47.000As long as you're getting good, solid advice and you're consistent in your decision-making process, all those things are good.
01:50:55.000I don't know enough about Trump to know how he...
01:51:33.000Well, some of those troops are going to have to be involved in security operations of the trainers.
01:51:39.000Some of those troops are going to have to be involved in, you know, logistical support, intel collection support.
01:51:43.000So, you know, will it make us more effective in defeating in the short term some of the pushback from the Taliban and identifying and taking out more ISIS? Well, sure.
01:53:30.000I watched Qaddafi's death again recently.
01:53:34.000Watched the whole capture of him and the whole thing.
01:53:37.000It was just fascinating to watch this brutal, evil, murderous dictator all of a sudden get caught by these common people, these rebels, you know, like, you know, outside of his palace and freaking out and his hair's all fucked up.
01:53:53.000But the weird thing is, he was our guy.
01:53:59.000He had gotten on board for the most part on sort of a counterterrorism program to provide assistance or at least support or at least not impede.
01:54:08.000I'm not saying he was a complete son of a bitch, but it's interesting, isn't it, the dynamics involved.
01:54:15.000And so we decided it was better to support the French and Italians and topple him.
01:54:22.000I mean, but that's always the case, you know?
01:54:23.000Isn't it always the case, too, that we have these dictators, we prop them up, and then after a while, we'll go, Jesus, this fucking guy, we gotta get him out of there.
01:54:44.000I mean, you know, but, you know, hey, how did it...
01:54:47.000How did his presence when they were at odds with Iran, you know, how did that help our overall sense of strategic, you know, foreign policy?
01:54:59.000So things happen and you don't, you know, you don't get to pick and choose sometimes.
01:55:03.000I guess maybe you do, but then it'd be kind of a strange world.
01:55:07.000But you got to deal with sometimes with the people that are out there and, you know, So it's, I don't know, 4,000 more troops in Afghanistan, is that going to somehow solve a problem?
01:55:21.000It's going to, I suspect, kick the can down the road again.
01:56:01.000I'm not saying it's an easy, by any means, A, it's above my pay grade, but B, I think ISIS creates a different situation there.
01:56:13.000If we hadn't seen ISIS develop and start to impact to some degree things that are going on in Afghanistan, then I think we could be better off just saying, okay, we're going to figure out a way to work with the Taliban.
01:56:26.000I mean, the Taliban, I think at this stage of the game, could be contained within Afghanistan without allowing their place to be.
01:57:04.000So, you know, maybe the answer is just find that point on the curve where you can support an existing government that you can hold your nose and live with.
01:57:14.000It's, you know, corrupt and, you know, but at least they're Working in the counterterrorism realm, you know, and they're supporting those sort of interests from our perspective.
01:57:26.000And yet, you know, I don't think we're ever going to get to that point where we see a stable, self-supporting, you know, pseudo-democratic nation exist there.
01:57:35.000I just don't think it's going to happen.
01:57:36.000So that's a hugely unsatisfying answer.
01:57:41.000But, you know, maybe it's like pollution.
01:57:43.000You do little things, you know, and hope that it helps.
01:57:46.000And maybe that's what we're doing here.
01:57:48.000You know, if you just start from the point of view of saying, we're going to create a bulwark of democracy, you're overwhelmed.
01:58:04.000And quite frankly, that's typically what happens, you know, and particularly with ISIS, you know, in a presence that they would see that and they would see an opportunity.
01:58:11.000Now, you know, they're at odds with the Taliban and the Taliban is pretty brutal.
01:58:21.000But it certainly complicates the situation.
01:58:25.000Especially if we just decide to somehow or another support ISIS. No, that's never gonna happen.
01:58:31.000I mean, excuse me, support the Taliban in their battle against ISIS. I could see elements of the Taliban saying, look, we just want to fucking self-govern, right?
01:58:44.000Could you ever imagine a scenario where the United States would support the Taliban because they were at war with ISIS? Like the Taliban could soften their stance on some things, would reach some sort of common ground?
01:58:54.000Well, look, we're kind of on the same side with Iran against ISIS, right?
01:58:59.000We're not supporting Iran, but in a way we are in the sense that we're We're trying to kill the same people.
01:59:38.000So there's going to be a lot of opposition to this regardless.
01:59:41.000If there's a clear, defined mission with an endgame, fine.
01:59:45.000I just haven't heard, I don't know what that is.
01:59:47.000And maybe they've said it, I just haven't seen it.
01:59:50.000Well, it seems like the only way we're ever gonna get peace and harmony in the world is if there's no fifth world, fourth world, third world, or second world.
02:01:25.000I would wonder what would have to take place for this to be a worldwide thing, where the rest of the world sort of rises up to an adequate level of civilization and we no longer engage in the potential global war that we're all looking at right now.
02:01:41.000We're really looking at the possibility with Russia and with North Korea and all these different players.
02:01:47.000There could be some sort of a twisted World War III going on.
02:02:15.000Yeah, as with the U.S. and Germany, could we see a way that the U.S. and Iran, for example, could find common ground, and suddenly, 40 years from now, be at peace, and not only at peace, but supporting each other's economy, and, you know, have that sort of interaction, and...
02:04:02.000Something that we didn't quite see coming.
02:04:03.000A mutation of a disease or something that...
02:04:07.000Because I do believe in the idea that, you know, nature takes care of its own eventually, you know, just like a deer herd or whatever, and eventually the overpopulation issue becomes a concern, and that's how the earth tends to reset itself.
02:05:10.000No, it's not his theory, but he is very well educated and very well thought out in regards to his choice of suits and a man wearing a well-tailored suit.
02:05:22.000Damn, he's not still married to Madonna.
02:05:31.000I remember Madonna, as soon as she started seeing Guy Ritchie, I was living in England at the time, and she just suddenly, out of nowhere, had a British accent.
02:08:04.000She decided to give up the civil rights activist thing.
02:08:07.000Mmm, yeah silly goose, but it was great when she had like a fro like look at her over there with that Yeah, full white family orange spray tan from Lincoln County, Montana little Ruth Ann's girl But she feels like she identifies with black people more she likes the culture more and You know there's always been people that like the culture more and talk was sure like they're a part of the culture Well,
02:09:58.000When we went into Iraq in 2003, early 2003. People started looking at the business opportunities of Iraq, right?
02:10:08.000I remember there was that whole idea, excuse me, that there was going to be all sorts of business opening up in Iraq because I don't know what they were thinking.
02:10:19.000So then it became people looking for contracts, government contracts, commercial sector contracts to do business in Iraq.
02:10:26.000And so the idea was suddenly there was a mad rush.
02:10:39.000So the idea was if you had an Inuit Indian, Eskimo, who was supposedly in charge of your business, that gave you extra points when you were weighed in the bid for a contract that you were going for.
02:10:51.000So there became this cottage industry, much like the casino business, of trying to find tribes that you can represent in order for them then to open up, and you're creating essentially a tribe to have a casino.
02:11:04.000Because it gives them certain advantages.
02:11:06.000So it's an interesting world we live in.
02:11:09.000Well, the Native American casino business is very weird in that regard.
02:11:13.000And also that a lot of people in these areas, because they're a certain percentage, and I think it's as little as 1 16th Native American, you can get a check.
02:11:22.000So if the casino is raking in the cash, the people that are a part of that tribe all get free money.
02:11:29.000So these casinos are just generating like...
02:12:10.000Well, Native American reservations are very strange when you think about, like, how long ago it was that these tribespeople were, you know, roaming the earth in nomadic fashion and living the life they did before the Europeans came, and that now they've become this segmented part of our population that's sort of a part of America,
02:12:29.000but has their own kind of, like, nation inside of a nation.
02:12:56.000For moose, so like they drive at night with 4x4s, the moose see the spotlight, they freeze, they blow them away with high-powered rifles, and they can kill them as many as they want all year round.
02:15:41.000And I'm like, listen, I know it doesn't seem right, but the feral cat population is just run out of control.
02:15:48.000Like, we did a podcast once, we pulled up the feral cat population in America and what it does, that they kill billions of birds and rodents in America.
02:16:33.000He's got a little bit of chipmunk in his tooth.
02:16:36.000Yeah, but the feral cats, yeah, in the ranches, I mean, you'd be out repairing fences or something, and, you know, you'd just kind of get off, or they'd spook the horses, or you'd put your hand down to pick something up, and they'd just come out of nowhere, and they're just, you know, they're bastards.
02:17:49.000And it's, you know, it's hard to explain.
02:17:52.000I mean, people, I was up in Yellowstone, and once again, I'm always amazed at how, People interact with wildlife when they're not used to it.
02:18:01.000Yellowstone is probably the best place to see that happen.
02:18:04.000Because there's so many tourists during the busy time of year.
02:18:08.000And there's no regard for the fact that it's a wild animal.
02:18:53.000And we were there, and at one point, it was getting to be twilight, and I came around a corner, and I was with a couple of the rangers and...
02:19:10.000It was stopped on the side of the road, and there were half a dozen people out of this minivan, and they were all kind of fussing about, you know, and just a little bit in the field there on the side.
02:20:20.000They were amazed that the rangers wouldn't do something like, I guess, catch the calf, put it in the back of the truck, and drive it to the herd.
02:21:46.000And they weave in the history and the time of the administration and how they were declaring parks and what they were doing and how they tried to tackle this fire and what that meant for future conservation.
02:22:30.000Well, you know, out in the middle of nowhere, you try to space out these...
02:22:35.000Outposts, these little points on the top of the mountains where you can identify smoke and try to catch it.
02:22:41.000You know, like if you've got an electrical storm, boom, then all of a sudden you see some smoke and you realize you probably got a start of a fire.
02:22:47.000You want to get on it as quick as possible.
02:22:49.000So then nowadays you'll call on the smoke jumpers and they'll go in and that's an insane job to try to contain it, put it out.
02:23:01.000It depends, I'm sure, on the weather forecast as well.
02:23:03.000Weather forecast and the part of the You know, it was politics and it was, I mean, back then in Roosevelt's time, it was all the timber barons, right?
02:23:11.000And the mining barons and the railroad barons.
02:23:14.000And, you know, they weren't interested in Roosevelt's idea of claiming land for the public.
02:23:22.000And so, you know, it was, I mean, it's a fascinating, it's a fascinating read.
02:23:26.000And again, sort of go back to that same thing that we talked about before, how did this nation get cobbled together and how did it end up looking the way it looked?
02:23:37.000We should be so thankful because of that vision.
02:23:40.000We have this incredible national park system and all this public land.
02:23:44.000I talked to a wildlife biologist who said that that's one of the reasons why we have all these issues with like bark beetles and all these different dead tree issues that when we get a forest fire today, it's like so out of control because we don't allow these burns to take place,
02:25:11.000If you had, like, two weeks, you know, take the kids and drive them somewhere, I would just point the car towards Utah, Idaho, you know, Montana, Wyoming, and just, you know, just head up there, and then just see what you can see.
02:25:24.000You know, you got plenty of opportunity, a tremendous number of excellent parks, and, you know, show the kids something different.
02:25:31.000Yeah, just let them understand these vast, vast swaths of land that are just open wilderness.
02:26:12.000They never, like, have to think of something to do.
02:26:15.000They can always just look at their phone or look at the TV. And it never activates that part of their brain where they're searching and thinking.
02:26:47.000I mean, God, you know, just the ability for kids to meet up at a playground and say, okay, we're going to, you know, maybe it happens and I'm making too much of this.
02:26:56.000We can't have that because Bobby keeps getting picked last and it's terrible for his self-esteem.
02:27:00.000Meanwhile, Bobby's going to become a software coder that makes the AI that runs the world.
02:29:15.000Because if you're in a situation where you're like an old broad who's got a lot of money and you want some young fuckboy and he wants a car, it's a good move.
02:30:05.000And she would take notes and then, you know, do the letter or whatever that you'd put on paper and you'd post it in the mail and that's how you got business done.
02:31:48.000Because, you know, we all used to dress like that.
02:31:50.000I don't know if you can zoom in on that, but that was actually, we would get that after we completed training, they would actually give us an outfit like that.
02:33:34.000I just feel like we've been in a holding pattern for years now when it comes to Afghanistan without really knowing where we're going or where we want to be when we get to the end of that road.
02:33:52.000And I worry that, well, maybe 4,000 troops is not exactly doing it to win.
02:33:56.000It's doing what they feel they can get away with.
02:34:00.000And I don't know where that gets us at the end of the day.
02:34:04.000This whole Trump thing is getting weirder and weirder with every day.
02:34:08.000So to even predict where we could be six months from now, forget about four years from now, or three and a half years from now, I think that when you look at some of the stuff that he does, you really have to wonder about his mental health.
02:34:19.000And I don't say that like, you know, there's a lot of people that are saying that, I think, because they would like to think that he's mentally incompetent and it would be convenient for their argument.
02:34:29.000But when I read that, I don't know what agency it was, was trying to get the IP addresses of people that visited an anti-Trump website.
02:35:15.000Because as soon as people lose confidence, and that's one of the biggest issues with Trump as a president.
02:35:19.000If people lose confidence in the institution, like one of the things that was very disturbing to a lot of people was that when he had those Russians over and he was explaining how ISIS is thinking about using laptops as bombs, and they're like, Jesus fucking Christ, this is top secret shit.
02:35:34.000You're not supposed to say that, because then this could potentially...
02:35:39.000Compromise people that are embedded in ISIS, that are distributing this information, like you have a bunch of people, you're giving up this information, there's a trickle-down effect, and it also diminishes the potential for people to trust the office, trust the person running it.
02:35:55.000You see that, I mean, the previous administration had problems where they, sort of in their desire to rush to the podium to declare a victory in something.
02:36:27.000The place for that is in the committees and up on Capitol Hill where you're supposed to have an engaged We're good to go.
02:36:54.000There's a fairly well-worn path between Langley, as an example, and Capitol Hill for the briefings telling people, this is what's going on, this is what's happening.
02:37:02.000And then, you know, the general unwritten understanding is, you know, they're going to be assholes if it becomes politically expedient to do so.
02:37:10.000They'll disavow that they knew about it.
02:37:12.000They'll demand, you know, so it's a game that gets played sometimes.
02:37:16.000But, yeah, I think that It's hard to say.
02:37:23.000I've got friends who are very hard left, and they're convinced that Trump's on his way out in the not-too-distant future.
02:37:32.000I think that's a lot of wishful thinking, but I don't think he's going to make it four years.
02:37:44.000He's also a guy, though, that wants love and respect and wants to be a winner.
02:37:50.000Like, everything he does, like, in regards to, you know, business, decisions, I mean, he'll tank something personally himself to declare a victory, right?
02:38:01.000And you gotta wonder whether or not he would put someone in position, you know, to say, like, the fake news is so out to get him that what we've done is we've created a structure that's the best people for the job, and then I'm going to concentrate on business and helping them from the outside.
02:38:15.000I mean, you could escape and have some sort of escape route.
02:38:50.000It's always been kind of a family business, right?
02:38:53.000So the chaos that's around that shouldn't be a surprise.
02:38:58.000What is a surprise is that You know, he wasn't, you know, he wasn't sharp enough, I don't know what it is, to understand the importance of inserting the discipline in there.
02:39:08.000And at least, if nothing else, being consistent and disciplined with the messaging that comes out.
02:39:43.000I understand people are excited to have a genuine person who's not a politician in there, and there's some benefit to shaking the system up, for sure.
02:41:50.000I mean, what's the worst case scenario that has to happen where we can survive as a country but still...
02:42:00.000That war thing, the North Korea thing is kind of frustrating in a sense, right?
02:42:07.000Because nobody should be out there thinking that, and I'm sure very few do, that somehow we got to that point with North Korea because President Trump is president.
02:42:19.000We got to this point with North Korea because we kicked the can down the road for two and a half decades of failed foreign policy with North Korea, and in part with China.
02:42:29.000And so they've been very clear about what they wanted to do, and now they've gotten to that point.
02:42:35.000Where they've created the weapons program and the ballistic missile program that they want or that they are close to having.
02:42:41.000And, you know, when you get to that point, you naturally lose some of your options, you know?
02:43:38.000We haven't gotten access still to some facilities that we would need to see.
02:43:43.000We signed off with the previous administration, signed off on a study or an assessment, basically just to get the deal done, because the Iranians insisted that that investigation into their capabilities at one of their military sites come to a close.
02:43:59.000It wasn't like we suddenly got answers and we were satisfied that there was no, and we just, okay, that was part of the deal, so we'll end that investigation.
02:44:08.000So Trump could, to my point being, Trump could just be sitting in that seat when North Korea gets where they are, when Iran possibly, you know, because that could happen sooner rather than later.
02:44:18.000And then, yeah, then you'd like to think that the person in that position Would be rational.
02:44:25.000I read an article today that's saying that him saying all that crazy shit about fire and fury that the world has ever seen might have actually been what he needed to say when you're dealing with someone like North Korea.
02:44:38.000I mean, it was obviously an opinion piece.
02:44:41.000But the argument was that when you're dealing with someone that's as fucked up as Kim Jong-un, you're probably better off having someone as crazy as Trump as president who's gonna say some ridiculous shit like that.
02:44:54.000So this guy goes, alright, this guy's just as nuts as me.
02:44:58.000Frankly, those messages, those things that he said, were probably more important in terms of how China received them than how North Korea received them.
02:45:07.000And honestly, 20 plus years of measured diplomatic language and restrained talk didn't really do anything.
02:45:21.000Yeah, maybe a different approach in a measured fashion.
02:45:25.000But the problem is, because of their perceived chaos, nobody has the confidence to believe that he's doing it in a disciplined, reasoned way.
02:45:34.000So they don't look at it and go, yeah, he's saying that's a message he's sending.
02:45:37.000They just look at it and go, he's just blasting off another tweet.
02:46:19.000I mean, I can see where people, and I've heard that from Trump supporters, you know, where they talk about how everything's measured, everything in his own way is actually disciplined, because I've said numerous times that I think they lack discipline, and they say, no, no,
02:46:34.000no, no, actually, this is all part of the plan.
02:46:37.000And I'm thinking, hmm, it doesn't look like it's part of the plan, because you've got other people that are in those senior positions that seem to be scrambling to catch up to the plan.
02:46:49.000It was part of a conversation amongst the cabinet.
02:46:53.000Anyway, missiles aren't going to be flying between us and North Korea.
02:47:00.000I think China may actually see, at this stage of the game, They may see that they need to affect a different mindset for North Korea, and they may be doing that.
02:47:12.000And part of it may be, again, not necessarily because it was a reasoned, thought-out plan, but Trump's comments about the trade imbalance with China.
02:47:19.000And if the Chinese legitimately thought that we were going to put that under the microscope and maybe attack them on the trade imbalance in a serious way, then maybe they look at that and go, okay, if we can get them to back off...
02:47:31.000Then, yes, we're willing to extend ourselves and actually listen to the sanctions and take part in the sanctions and, you know, exert some additional pressure on North Korea that maybe they weren't in the past, because China always acts in its own best interest.
02:47:47.000And maybe, so maybe that's, you know...
02:47:50.000Anyway, in the meantime, it seems to have resolved itself to some degree, but I do worry that...
02:47:54.000You know, once again, we're just kicking it down the road.
02:47:57.000You know, I mean, until there's something, some sea change where, you know, maybe somehow we can affect a unified, you know, Korea with China's assistance.
02:48:06.000It's going to have to be with their assistance and blessing, obviously, or something along those lines to get actual deterrence, you know, off the table and more of a removal of the nuclear threat.
02:48:18.000We're just going to be doing this same conversation in another couple of years when they rattle the cage again and we have to figure out how to resolve it.
02:48:25.000And the further you go down the road and the better their capabilities get, the fewer options you have.