In this episode of the WDFA Radio Show, I sit down with my good friend Mike Baker to talk about a variety of topics. We talk about the upcoming Stanley Cup Finals between the Stanley Cup Champion Golden State Warriors and the Los Angeles Lakers. We also talk about some of the crazier things going on in the world of sports, including wolves, rattlesnakes, and other things that have nothing to do with sports. We also get into a little bit of politics and some other stuff. I hope you enjoy this episode and stay tuned for the rest of the show! -Mike Baker -Drew Brees -Joe Maddix -Brett Favre -Jared Leto -Tristan Turgeon -Kobe Bryant -Justin Bieber -Landon Cassady -Zach Gooding -Patrick Beverley -Jack Burton -Nick Blevins -Shawn Mendles -Rory Fallow -PJ Nowell -Chad Ochs -Jake Tkachuk -Curtis Axelrod -Sebastian Bachman -Brad Little -Nate Ratechuck -John Ruzicka -Willie Gonzales -David Dobrik -Cole Haan -Mitch Albom -Hannah Mertz & more! , I talk about his new book Mike Baker and much more. . I also talks about his upcoming trip to Boise, Idaho - - and much, much more! -and we talk about how he's going to be at the Century Link Center in Boise -and much more!! Thank you for listening to Mike Baker's podcast, Mike Baker, I really really really enjoyed this episode! - Mike Baker is a great guy. - Thank you Mike Baker - and I really appreciate you, I appreciate you for being a good friend of mine - and you're a good dude! - and he's a great dude too! - Thanks Mike Baker and I'm glad you're listening to this podcast! Love ya Mike Baker & I'm so much Mike Baker :) . . -Avery (and you'll have a great day! Thank ya, Mike's Back with me, Mike, too, too! Thanks, Mike & AJB :) -Josie
00:00:20.000I was just listening to a podcast where these guys were talking about wolves and about how they were hiking and they found four dead mature bull elk inside of like a couple mile stretch.
00:00:34.000That had been torn apart by wolves and they started to freak out.
00:00:39.000Well, I mean, two things we got this time of year.
00:00:41.000We got a lot of wolves and we got a lot of rattlesnakes.
00:00:43.000The rattlesnakes are starting to, you know, pop up and make their appearance.
00:01:18.000Idaho's an interesting place because it's a part-time legislature, which is the way I think all states should operate, which means everybody goes home to their jobs.
00:01:28.000Well, if you look at the top of the state, the governor, Butch Otter, great guy, Brad Little, lieutenant governor, terrific guy.
00:02:45.000Oh, by the way, before I I need to say your biggest supporter, your biggest fan probably in the entire UK is a young fellow named Jack Burton.
00:04:01.000Well, I mean, people are losing their minds right now over the past 24 hours because of Iran, right?
00:04:06.000And so what you're hearing is you're hearing a lot of the critics of the current president, and apparently there are some, that are saying, oh, he's inching us closer to a military conflict with Iran.
00:04:18.000Well, these are the same brainiacs that said he was inching us closer to a war with North Korea, and everybody was completely wrong on that.
00:04:25.000I'm not saying that Rouhani and the others in the Iranian regime might not decide to become more bellicose, I think they're looking at it wrong.
00:04:34.000I mean, this idea that – because there's a couple of parts.
00:04:37.000Part one is that they're saying, oh, look, he doesn't have a plan B, implying that it's either this deal, which even our European allies say is inadequate, right, or it's a military conflict.
00:04:48.000And that's kind of what the previous president was all about.
00:04:51.000We either get this deal or we're having a military conflict.
00:04:53.000Well, no, there's other things in the works.
00:04:55.000There's other options in that decision tree.
00:04:59.000And so I think that's a false premise.
00:05:02.000And the other thing when they talk about it over the past 24 hours anyway is that, well, look at this.
00:05:07.000This is going to make it harder to get a deal with Kim Jong-un from North Korea because he's going to think that we don't support our deals.
00:05:16.000I think that Kim Jong-un is going to look at this and think – Okay, they're not going to put up with an inadequate deal, right?
00:05:22.000So he's going to look at it and say, well, yeah, because nobody disagrees with the Iranian deal.
00:05:27.000They want to talk about how, look, the Iranians are complying with it.
00:05:32.000Well, the Iranians are complying with what they agreed to allow in the deal, which is none of their military sites.
00:05:39.000The number of times inspectors have actually gotten on and inspected a military site, including Parchin, the most important military facility in Iran, since that deal was signed in 2015, was zero.
00:05:51.000Haven't been there because the Iranians didn't agree to allow any of those sites in this deal.
00:05:58.000So that's like saying, That's like saying if you're a serial killer, you'll allow the police to come in and search your home, but you can't go in the basement.
00:06:07.000Not that all serial killers put their bodies in the basement, but I suspect that's the case.
00:06:12.000So anyway, it's an interesting thing, and I guess I wanted to throw that out there right off the bat because I think Iran right now is consuming so much of the oxygen for people out there.
00:06:20.000So people thinking that the reason why we're backing out of the deal is because the president's being unreasonable and we're forcing one.
00:06:27.000You're just saying it's a shit deal, period.
00:06:30.000Yeah, I think the idea that we have to stay in it because it's better than the alternative when the alternative, you know, being war.
00:06:41.000I don't think that doesn't make any sense to me.
00:06:44.000But I think that the fact that the UK, the French, the Germans have all agreed publicly that it's an inadequate deal and needs to be fixed, that tells you something.
00:06:53.000But it also tells you that they have real strong financial incentives for continuing to do business in Iran.
00:06:59.000And as do Russia and China, frankly, the other signatories.
00:07:04.000So, you know, and also, here's the other part.
00:07:06.000I mean, Trump, you know, what is it now?
00:07:08.000We're 16 or 17 months into Trump's administration.
00:07:11.000So it's not like he got into the White House and the next day, you know, he canned the deal.
00:07:16.000He's been talking, but nobody listens to anything.
00:07:18.000I'm not a supporter of Trump, necessarily.
00:07:20.000I mean, I want the government to work.
00:07:21.000So it's not that I'm supporting Trump.
00:07:23.000I want the government to work, just like the previous administration.
00:07:25.000I wasn't a supporter of Obama, but, hey, I want it to work.
00:07:30.000And so he went out there and there was some talk about, look, let's see if we can find some way to get rid of the sunset clause, some way to rein in their ballistic missile development program, some way, although it's not going to happen, to rein in all the...
00:07:46.000You know, the shenanigans, if you want to call it that, that they're engaged in the Middle East.
00:08:55.000It seems like a great thing, but honestly, God, the only thing I've used it so far is to glance at the time and then to check my heart rate.
00:09:01.000All the other crap on there, and everything happens on it.
00:09:04.000So if I'm using my phone for directions, I get directions on my watch.
00:09:07.000I mean, it's a little bit overwhelming, so I'm going to go back to a normal watch, I think.
00:09:12.000And if my heart gives out, it gives out.
00:10:07.000I never questioned anything, which is an interesting point.
00:10:10.000I don't want to roam all over this place, but...
00:10:14.000Today was confirmation hearings for Gina Haspel.
00:10:18.000And I'll caveat this by saying I'm a big supporter of hers.
00:10:21.000I think she's an outstanding choice for this.
00:10:23.000And she's the new head of the CIA. Right.
00:10:25.000The new director-designate for the CIA. And so today she went up on Capitol Hill, had open and then subsequently closed-door session with the senators.
00:10:38.000And some of the senators, the reason I bring this up is because a handful of the senators were asking her and seemed focused on saying, well, how about this rendition program, the rendition and interrogation program?
00:10:54.000You know, morally, you know, did you have any quandaries?
00:10:57.000You know, we know that the agency was doing what was allowed within the Department of Justice because the Office of Legal Counsel was directing that from the Department of Justice for that program all those years ago.
00:11:10.000But at the time, they didn't want to necessarily talk about that because I don't think they wanted to highlight the fact that the DOJ had said this is, you know, what is able to be done.
00:11:20.000So instead, they focused on how did you feel?
00:11:23.000And I guess the reason I bring it up is because when I was in the outfit, I'm not a deep thinker, right?
00:11:29.000So I never stood around and thought to myself, how do I feel about this on any given moment, right?
00:11:33.000No matter what we were doing, it never occurred to me to sit there and question it, you know, as long as we knew what we were doing was proper and legal and was pursuit of, you know, tasking from national security concerns.
00:11:45.000Then, yeah, and I don't think you want your military or your intel service, I don't think you want everybody out there at the pointy edge of the spear, you know, saying, well, I'm going to do things based on how I feel about it in the moment.
00:11:56.000And it just seemed like a strange line of questioning.
00:11:59.000That is a strange line of questioning.
00:12:26.000Most people, you know, young people don't even know what it feels like, right?
00:12:29.000I mean, you know, and other people have forgotten or they're just tired of it all and they don't want to think about it.
00:12:34.000But in the wake of 9-11, there was a feeling, there was a sense, right, that it was going to happen again.
00:12:41.000And there certainly was evidence and there was a very large effort here to try to ensure that we protected American lives.
00:12:51.000So the DOJ was issuing very clear guidance on what could and could not be done for the rendition and interrogation program.
00:12:59.000And that guidance was then provided to the general counsel, the agency.
00:13:03.000That was then disseminated to personnel out in the field.
00:13:06.000And tell people, so if they're just listening to this for the first time, what you used to do for the CIA so they understand that you're coming from a position of – you actually understand this stuff.
00:13:14.000Yeah, I was in the operations directorate.
00:13:17.000So the agency is made up of, essentially, they change the name sometimes, but four directorates.
00:13:22.000So you have operations, you have intelligence, which is all the smart people, the reports or officers, or sorry, the analysts.
00:13:28.000You have science and technology, which is where they develop all the amazing gear that comes out of the agency, a lot of which then ends up in the commercial sector.
00:13:35.000So if anybody's walking around with a defibrillator, that battery technology came out of S&T research, drones, satellite technology.
00:13:44.000The U-2 stealth program, U-2, you know, plane was developed out of and run out of the agency.
00:13:49.000So incredible things would come out of there.
00:15:03.000Anyway, I think there's a danger to that line of questioning where they kept talking about how did you feel about it.
00:15:11.000They're mixing this, and I'm not eloquent enough to explain it, but I found it fascinating that that was a question they wanted to focus on.
00:15:19.000I think there's a real danger to people or for people that don't have any experience in actual war or really understand combat or really understand What can happen and what can go wrong in talking about it with the same sort of language that you would use to describe office politics?
00:15:55.000I mean, look, there was actually this – some people were entertaining the idea that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed would come out and talk – To the senators, you know, as they're going through this confirmation process about what?
00:16:38.000So anyway, she should, again, she should be confirmed.
00:16:42.000The whole rendition interrogation program was reviewed ad nauseum, thousands of pages written.
00:16:48.000And interestingly enough, a lot of the people up there on the Hill right now in this confirmation process, the senators, who are saying that they need to know more are the same ones who were there before.
00:16:57.000So theoretically, either they didn't read all the material that was given to them about this, or they've forgotten it, or they're, you know, or in reality, this is more about Trump than it is about her, which...
00:17:07.000I don't want to be shocking anyone by saying that perhaps there's political grandstanding going on.
00:17:23.000Look, seven operational tours, several management positions, and I guess at the end of the day, it comes down to I would rather have somebody Who's gone through that experience.
00:17:50.000Do you think it's that or do you think it's maybe more time since 9-11?
00:17:54.000You know, obviously, Obama came into office, it was not that long after 9-11.
00:18:00.000There was still, you know, seven years later, still thoughts in people's mind about it.
00:18:04.000Well, interesting enough, I mean, that was in 2013 when he was confirmed.
00:18:07.000But in 2009, He was – they wanted to confirm or they wanted to bring him up as the appointee for the director of the CIA. Again, it would have been President Obama's first term, but they decided not to because they – for the reason that they thought, well, maybe it's too close to after the – and they didn't want to go through the heartburn of having this process.
00:18:24.000So instead, they brought him into the White House.
00:18:26.000He became assistant to the president and deputy national security dude for counterterrorism.
00:18:31.000And then four years later, they brought him in as a – they confirmed him as the director for the CIA. So – I guess – and he has now come out in support of Gina Haspel, the new director-designate.
00:18:43.000So I think she will get there, as she should.
00:18:54.000And she's been very clear about that, including today during the hearing.
00:18:57.000So hopefully it will get done because it would be nice to think the senators would do their job and choose somebody who's appropriate for the job.
00:19:06.000Well, it's strange who gets to choose and who doesn't get to choose who runs an organization like the CIA and whether or not they have an actual understanding of what goes on behind the scenes.
00:19:19.000Yeah, that's a really good point because some of the questions today from some of the senators made you believe that perhaps they don't really.
00:19:27.000You know, look, they all sit on the committees.
00:19:29.000They theoretically are privy to all this information.
00:19:31.000There is a very well-worn path that goes from Langley where the agency headquarters is based up to Capitol Hill from briefers going back and forth and back and forth and discussing programs and that, you know, they're classified material, but these people, the Gang of Eight, the people that are the minority majority leaders,
00:19:48.000the heads of the committees, The intel committees, they're all privy to this information.
00:19:52.000And they were all privy to the information about the rendition program and the interrogation program.
00:21:32.000The reason why they're raising the alarm with Huawei and ZTE is because of the voracious appetite of the Chinese government and their commercial sector for information.
00:21:49.000It's a little bit like, you know, shutting the door after the horse is headed down the hill because we're late to the game.
00:21:56.000They've been doing this for years and years and years.
00:21:58.000They've been, oddly enough, you know, a lot of our military gear have parts in it manufactured in China, right?
00:22:04.000And so, you know, we should have been raising the concern about this and talking with China and trying to come to terms with this issue years ago.
00:22:14.000I mean, we're trying to have that conversation with them now.
00:22:17.000And up on Capitol Hill, you know, the Congress is trying to enact legislation, kind of like this Huawei thing.
00:22:24.000They're doing it in a clumsy fashion, but the overriding principle is correct in that China made some decisions years ago that they were going to become a major power in the world.
00:22:58.000They built up their manufacturing base and created this amazing result.
00:23:03.000China decided we're going to skip the R&D for the most part, and all of that entails the cost and time involved, and they're very adept at it.
00:23:13.000They throw an enormous amount of resource out there into hoovering up everything, not just from us, but from everybody.
00:23:19.000And using that to advance their goals.
00:23:22.000They have no firewall between their intel service, the PLA, military intelligence and others, and their commercial sector.
00:23:30.000So not only are they there to protect national security, they're there to promote the commercial side of China.
00:23:40.000And so that's why they're talking about Huawei, because of the potential for them to use their reach to further their desire for information, whatever it may be.
00:23:51.000They'll hoover it up and then decide whether it's useful or not.
00:23:54.000But they have the resource to do that as opposed to, you know, a smaller country that maybe doesn't have the resource and is much more targeted and focused.
00:24:01.000On their intel collection or their efforts to gather information.
00:24:05.000So that's sort of a, you know, that was a wordy explanation.
00:24:11.000And when I read it, I read a bunch of tech articles where people were questioning whether or not it's even possible for Huawei to be using those phones to spy on people.
00:24:21.000But then there were some other articles where Huawei was being charged with, what was it again that they were using?
00:24:27.000They were selling illegal technology to Iran?
00:25:56.000Knows that that's the case because, I mean, and to be fair, back in the old days, again, we had compasses and maps.
00:26:02.000But even when we started developing new technology and gear, quite frankly, if you've got to go out and do anything, the first thing you do is throw everything away that's got a battery in it.
00:27:24.000So the tech people that are skeptical, what they're saying is that if Huawei really did have something in their phones that allowed them to spy on people, you'd be able to find it.
00:27:43.000Here's what I would say about that, is that I'm sure there's obviously a lot of very smart tech guys within diligence for all your information and security needs.
00:27:56.000But when you're talking about the Chinese state and the resources and capabilities that that entails, yes, if you're saying that NSA could possibly detect this, but if you're talking about just dispersing kit out into the marketplace, And the way that that thing gets spread and disseminated and inserted into companies and then potentially allows points of access into these businesses.
00:28:52.000Everybody, to the degree that – They have the resources and the motivation and they consider it an issue related to national security, whatever it might be.
00:29:05.000But yeah, the Huawei thing and the ZTE, again, I think the rollout of that concern and the rollout of sort of trying to provide guidance has been a little clumsy.
00:29:15.000So, one thing that was speculation was that people didn't have to worry about the phones, but what essentially they're trying to do is cripple the company financially and not allow them to get a foothold in America, because they're the third largest cell phone manufacturer in the world.
00:29:34.000They're number three, but in America, no one knows who they are.
00:29:37.000And so the idea is, what they're trying to do is make sure that the Chinese government It doesn't get a foothold in this country where those companies, or Huawei, the company Huawei, becomes a popular brand for people to buy.
00:29:50.000And that would allow them, even if they didn't have any spy device on this phone, it would allow them to get other devices into people's homes that could potentially spy on them.
00:29:59.000And then more importantly, get into companies and spy on the companies.
00:30:03.000And this is one of the pieces of speculation that I read about was that they had certain servers That we're sending an exorbitant amount of information out, and they were trying to figure out what was going on with them, and that there was like an excessive amount of information, data,
00:30:19.000that was leaving the servers versus coming in, and they're like, this really seems like some fucked up shit's going on with this.
00:30:26.000Huawei, first of all, Huawei's already present here in the country.
00:30:30.000They manufacture a lot of things besides phones, and so they've already got a pretty big footprint in this country, and with our allies as well.
00:30:37.000So, I think it's smart to consider the nature of a particular regime or government when you're talking about the potential for their products to enter into the commercial sector where They may have access because if they've shown a pattern of activity for acquiring intellectual property,
00:31:06.000which is again a very delicate way to put it, then I don't think it's a stretch to say we should be concerned by their efforts to put communications gear, even if it seems pedestrian at the outset.
00:31:22.000I'm not sure that I'm buying the idea that it's some nefarious plan to shut out Huawei so that they don't get a foothold in the phone business.
00:31:32.000And I say that because I've been, you know, 30 years, I've been You know, dealing with the Chinese in terms of their efforts to acquire information, both in the government and the commercial side of things.
00:31:44.000So I come at it from a very cynical point of view, much like I do with the Iranian issue and the likelihood that they have not been living up to, you know, their part of the bargain.
00:31:57.000And people will say, well, again, I go back to the same thing.
00:31:59.000Well, we've been inspecting and they've been complying with all of that.
00:32:03.000You know, this limited amount of inspection that we have to their civilian sites.
00:32:07.000It's not a secret, you know, at this point.
00:32:11.000It shouldn't be a secret that, again, we have no access to their military facilities.
00:32:14.000So I tend to look at things in that view, and I... If I see a pattern of activity, I'm very reluctant to think they're somehow going to stop that pattern of activity for whatever reason.
00:32:28.000The problem with all of this, North Korea, Iran, Syrian chemical weapons, the problem with all of that, I realize I'm kind of jumping around.
00:32:51.000So unless we can lock that down with the North Koreans, then a deal with them or a deal with the Iranians or a deal with the Syrians over their chemical weapons efforts, it's not worth anything.
00:33:06.000And for whatever reason, the previous administration was keen to get this deal done, and they were willing to set aside this issue of all the military sites, set aside the issue of ballistic missiles.
00:33:17.000And by the way, the deal that the president has just scuttled...
00:33:21.000Did nothing to impact or affect or tamp down or moderate their behavior.
00:33:29.000They've got more influence in the Middle East than they've had ever before.
00:33:32.000They're engaged in more activity related to, you know, the countries in the Middle East against our interests than they have been in decades.
00:33:43.000So that all by itself should tell us, well, I'm not saying that they're using all the money we gave them to support actions against our interests by Hezbollah or by the Revolutionary Guard or others, but they are.
00:33:58.000And so, again, I don't have a lot of angst over the idea that we step away from the deal for a period of time.
00:34:05.000Maybe we can come up with something better.
00:34:28.000They literally said, I forget which senator it was, asked Gina Haspel about Huawei and ZTE. And I don't know where they were going with it, but then it devolved into just trying to get us all those Senate confirmation questions due.
00:34:42.000It just The senator's saying, well, I just want a yes or no answer.
00:34:45.000Like, wait a minute, why don't you want some detail?
00:34:48.000So they say, yes or no, would you buy Huawei?
00:34:50.000And Gina Haspel was like, well, no, I wouldn't buy a Huawei phone.
00:35:13.000Well, you know what, it becomes a bit of a sideshow, and it's a format as well.
00:35:16.000Any confirmation hearing is, you know, five minutes for each senator, and you can't, you know, they spend three minutes making a statement, you know, that they can then, you know, send back in sound clips to their constituents.
00:35:27.000Maybe they get a question in, and it kind of goes from there.
00:35:32.000You don't really learn much, which is fine.
00:35:34.000They learn a lot in the closed-door sessions, and we rely on the senators to make decisions when it's classified information on behalf of the people they represent.
00:36:29.000I mean, listen to conversations I have when people want to talk about something other than Joe Rogan, I get the impression that they're paying attention to what's happening out there.
00:37:05.000I guess if you said what's the biggest concern from a security perspective to the country, it would be the same thing it's been last year and the year before and for a number of years, which is the frailty of our infrastructure and its susceptibility to either cyber attack or physical attack.
00:38:25.000So we're kind of like dismissing the whole activity.
00:38:27.000I guess my point is, yeah, I get what you're saying.
00:38:30.000I'm not saying it from a self-righteous point that the Chinese are very good at acquiring intellectual property, or I'm not saying it from a self-righteous point that the Russians have been meddling in our elections.
00:38:41.000You better hope we do it very, very well.
00:38:43.000That's my argument for people that are super progressive and really liberal when it comes to these conversations.
00:38:48.000I always say, alright, if the world is the way it's described, if China really is constantly meddling, if Russia is really actively trying to sabotage our elections, if Iran is really doing what they're – what should we do?
00:39:07.000You don't think that we should be involved in meddling?
00:39:09.000You don't think you should be involved in manipulating or monitoring or making sure that our interests are safe or that we're not going to get attacked?
00:39:16.000The idea that we're never going to get attacked again or no one's going to get attacked, that doesn't even...
00:39:20.000When you look at human history, that is completely preposterous.
00:39:24.000The idea that all attacks and all war is going to somehow or another stop because you eat vegan, that's fucking crazy!
00:39:31.000I mean, that's a crazy way to look at the world, and that leaves you incredibly vulnerable to attack.
00:40:10.000Protect the American interests and national security.
00:40:13.000And if you don't feel good about it, then leave and go do something else.
00:40:17.000But this idea that somehow we're all going to – could you imagine a combat gate out there and half of them decide, well, I don't really feel good about this particular action.
00:40:32.000Hey, it would be great if we all could – Be bad at people.
00:40:35.000But isn't it, again, we're talking, and this is coming from a person that hasn't experienced combat, but we're talking about a bunch of people that really don't understand and really haven't seen the things that you've seen or seen the things that the military's seen, and they're talking about the world in this sort of idealized,
00:40:52.000rose-colored glasses view of things that's not accurate.
00:40:57.000And so their version of what America should do is based on...
00:41:03.000It's based on ignorance and this idea that we don't need intelligence, we don't need a military, we don't need a presence in all these other countries.
00:41:21.000I think that there is an element out there that says, if we just take Iran as an example, you know, I've spoken with people who honestly seem to believe that In part because the previous administration – I mean, now former Secretary Kerry is out there publicly and President Obama is out there publicly.
00:41:37.000They're all saying, well, but the Iranians have been complying.
00:41:40.000So it's – they're implying that it's our fault.
00:41:42.000It's our fault for backing out of this.
00:41:44.000It's our fault that somehow that the Iranians have been cheating on the missile sanctions.
00:41:48.000Look, the UN even agreed in – At the end of 2014, just in October of that year, the Iranians had been busting agreements related to their ballistic missiles and their development.
00:42:02.000And we signed that agreement a few months later, three months later.
00:42:48.000Well, people are always going to have an idealized version of the world, especially when they don't experience it themselves.
00:42:53.000But I think that, for the most part, when people think of intelligence communities, if they think about the CIA or the FBI, generally, for whatever reason, in America, you get a negative response.
00:43:05.000People don't think about it in terms of something that's necessary and beneficial and really a cornerstone of the protection of the people in this country.
00:43:19.000You could go back to World War II, the end of World War II. OSS, which was the founding organization that then became later on the CIA, amazing people involved in OSS. And basically, what they did during the war was incredible.
00:43:39.000And while Bill Donovan was the head of OSS, So imagine all these dedicated people dropping in behind enemy lines, both in the European and Japanese theater, and engaged in all this activity for the years that it took to win that war.
00:44:20.000They didn't need the intel service because we won the war and things are gonna be looking pretty good.
00:44:24.000Well, about a year later, you know, they got the band back together because what was happening, the Soviets were running, you know, all over the place and it was the Cold War and the Soviets had no intention of being benign and living in a community of nations.
00:44:40.000And so suddenly they got the band back and said, okay, so that's when the CIA was created in 1947. At the end of the Cold War, not that long ago, although it seems like ancient history now, there were a lot of serious people in Washington, D.C. when the wall fell who basically said,
00:45:37.000I've talked to so many people that have been overseas and been to these places of conflict, and they come out with a dark view of what is possible if you're in the wrong place on the planet.
00:45:49.000Yeah, what people can do to each other is a...
00:46:00.000There would be value if somehow we could enact some program where everybody had to spend a couple of years in service of some sort, military service or overseas service.
00:46:09.000I know we had the Peace Corps and all of that, but high school kids say, well, I went to Bermuda and I built a house for a week, so I got my international experience.
00:46:19.000It's better than nothing, but I think something that would mean people would have a little more skin in the game, but you're right.
00:46:24.000You go to some of these places, fourth and fifth world countries, and And you do realize, and people roll their eyes, but, damn it, this is the best country in the world.
00:46:34.000And I say that repeatedly, and I believe it firmly.
00:46:42.000Sometimes it takes a little bit longer.
00:46:44.000No matter what administration is there, we try to do the right thing.
00:46:48.000And so when people talk about us just stepping off and not worrying about our place in the world, You know, someone's going to try to take that position on the ladder, and it's not going to be as benign as we tend to be.
00:47:21.000And, you know, sometimes, again, it's a human endeavor, so it's not going to work all the time.
00:47:25.000Don't you think the people are more open to this idea that it's necessary now because of the Russian situation and because of understanding the amount of power that Putin wields and the way he has just really ultimate control over that part of the world?
00:49:09.000He's an old-school KGB. Very easy cat to understand.
00:49:13.000And we've always kind of acted like...
00:49:15.000We don't get it, or somehow he's going to change his stripes.
00:49:18.000He's never going to change his stripes.
00:49:19.000And he's going to always act in what he believes to be the best interest of what he would like to believe is still the former Soviet Union.
00:49:26.000Yeah, and Garry Kasparov was talking about him, and he's a vocal critic of Putin, and he was saying that if you look into all the different companies that they've confiscated and acquired, this is what they do.
00:49:41.000If they have a political enemy, They essentially just take over their company and charge them with some sort of a crime and throw them in jail.
00:50:45.000Xi has spent the past few years locking that down, building up the security apparatus, kind of stepping on this idea that somehow there's a rule of law.
00:50:55.000He's now built back up this Cult of personality that we haven't really seen since, you know, Deng Xiaoping or certainly Mao and he's there for good.
00:51:05.000And so that gives them a strategic advantage, right?
00:51:08.000Because they can look at problems in the long haul whereas here we're looking at it in an election cycle.
00:51:13.000So when we've got a major issue to deal with with China, Xi's not looking at it and thinking, okay, well, I've got to sort this out in the next short period of time.
00:51:21.000He's looking at it and thinking, Trump's got maybe two years left.
00:51:31.000And there's going to be a transitionary time in between the two candidates or the two presidents where things get real sloppy and they might be able to slip in something.
00:52:23.000Our officers will get out there and they'll think okay we got to make some recruitments you know and I got maybe Two years here on the ground.
00:52:30.000It's that sort of deployment or that sort of tour.
00:52:33.000And it's not that 30-year commitment because if I'm the officer, I'm getting promoted based on how many recruitments I get.
00:52:42.000I'm not getting necessarily promoted based on how well I handle assets that have already been promoted.
00:52:47.000And that was the plot of that young American, the Americans show, right?
00:52:52.000The show about Russian spies that pretended to be just normal American citizens, moved in, did the whole thing, talked with a normal accent.
00:53:02.000That came out of that New Jersey incident with Anna Chapman.
00:53:06.000And those individuals were just basically there to exist, right?
00:53:10.000Their whole point of being was just to see whether they bump into somebody of interest.
00:53:13.000And they weren't going to be responsible for then developing that potential target.
00:53:16.000That would be somebody else's responsibility.
00:53:18.000And that person who had the responsibility to develop that target, it wouldn't be their responsibility to maybe task them or make some sort of light pitch.
00:53:25.000That would be somebody else's responsibility.
00:53:27.000So there's people up that food chain that take on more and more responsibility if they happen to find a target of interest.
00:53:33.000And that's just the resources devoted to one part of the country.
00:53:36.000So it's a cautious, well-thought-out, long-term plan.
00:54:38.000So anyway, this individual worked for the agency for a period of time and then left and then set up shop overseas and then his actions became suspect.
00:54:53.000And so that's when we ended up getting them.
00:54:58.000And when you catch somebody who's been engaged in that, first thought is, you know, thank God we caught them.
00:55:04.000And the second is, how does someone do that?
00:55:08.000Now, I say that, again, not to be self-righteous, because we're always out there looking for targets to recruit, to turn on their country.
00:55:16.000If we could find ourselves an Iranian scientist, it's not like we would be coy and say, well, we don't want to put them under that stress of recruiting them.
00:55:22.000Of course we do for national security interests.
00:55:24.000But I mean just from a psychological perspective, you think about that.
00:55:28.000Well, our idea is that we're doing that stuff for good and that they're doing that stuff for bad, which is very convenient that we think that way.
00:55:47.000I never had any problem determining the good people from the bad people.
00:55:52.000You know, and that's like, today, one of the senators in the confirmation here, I'm sorry to keep going back to the CIA director-designated confirmation hearings up on the Hill, but One of the senators, it almost sounded like he was trying to make some moral equivalency between terrorists and agency officers who were doing what they were allowed to do underneath the laws of that time and the DOJ,
00:56:15.000Department of Justice regulations and legal readings.
00:56:20.000And his point was, well, if you waterboarded somebody, well, then what happens if one of your people got picked up by terrorists and they were waterboarded?
00:56:29.000Would you think that that was justified?
00:56:33.000It's a very odd construct for a question.
00:56:36.000And, you know, I mean, frankly, if ISIS or Al-Qaeda or Boko Haram picked up one of our people and all they did was waterboard them, you know, that would be a happy day, right?
00:56:45.000Because they don't operate under any laws, which is what Gina Haspel said.
00:57:14.000And they're also trying to frame a narrative instead of trying to understand the situation objectively.
00:57:20.000Instead of really asking someone who was there, asking a bunch of people who were there, getting a sense of what was the climate, what was going on, what actually happened.
00:57:55.000Nobody's even trying to get up and go into the middle ground.
00:57:57.000And so nobody's having those conversations, like you said, where they even make a lame attempt to try to understand what the other perspective might be.
01:00:02.000It was tough regarding his family, but I think he probably regrets not going in the last time.
01:00:06.000And I think we're going to see him throw his hat in the ring because he's going to look around and he's going to think, what am I up against?
01:00:11.000I'm up against Harris and Booker and, you know, who else?
01:02:02.000And yet because of the self-inflicted wounds that they constantly have coming out of that White House, because of his tweeting for the most part, people aren't focusing on – look, we should all be able to agree.
01:02:13.000Democrats and Republicans should be able to agree that if you can get your way to peace on the Korean Peninsula, that's pretty damn good.
01:02:36.000But we can't – But it's the way they got there that freaks people out.
01:02:39.000Him saying his nuclear button's bigger than the other guys and – It's like, but I gotta tell you, I was really happy watching the video of Kim Jong-un shaking hands with the president of South Korea and the meeting and the DMZ. I was happy.
01:02:57.000Like, that made me think, they're both smiling.
01:03:00.000I know Kim Jong-un's a fucking murderer and he killed his own uncle and his nephews and all these different people that he thought might go against him, but seeing him Shake hands with the President of South Korea made me think like, wow, they might settle this.
01:03:16.000I mean, look, that's the very first time His granddad, Kim Il-sung, and then his dad, Kim Jong-il, neither of them ever stepped foot on the southern side of that DMZ, on the southern side of Peace Village.
01:04:17.000Rebounding, that guy could, man, that guy could rebound.
01:04:20.000And if you talk to people that know him, that were partying with him, that guy would be up all night drinking and partying and then show up and play fucking phenomenal the next day on zero sleep.
01:04:33.000Yeah, Billy Corgan was friends with Rodman, and Billy Corgan from the Smashing Pumpkins on the podcast was talking about how they were mad at him because Rodman was taking Billy Corgan partying and then showing up the next day with zero sleep and playing, and they were blaming Billy Corgan.
01:04:49.000He's like, motherfucker, I went to sleep.
01:09:01.000So it says someone was shooting ground squirrels.
01:09:04.000They saw a badger carrying what they thought was a squirrel.
01:09:06.000They shot it and it was actually carrying a baby.
01:09:10.000So they took this baby badger, and now they're raising it.
01:09:13.000And he's raising this baby badger, and he says that you can, given the option of fight or flight, they'll often fight, but if they're bottle-fed, handled constantly, and extremely well-socialized, they can be kept in captivity easily and make fun pets.
01:09:36.000This has nothing to do with a badger, although we're still talking about small animals.
01:09:40.000Somebody sent me a clip of an incident where a police officer was driving down the road, and he stopped traffic on both sides because a groundhog was trying to come across the street.
01:13:26.000There's a video, a hilarious video of this deer that's so fucked up from the rut that this guy walks up to it and taps it on the head with an arrow.
01:13:37.000Every deer hunter in the country was like, where the fuck was this deer when I was hunting?
01:13:42.000Because most of the time, if deer even catches wind that you're 200 yards away, they fucking bound out of there like the hills are on fire.
01:14:53.000That's what happens when dudes get boners.
01:14:55.000Yeah, that's how guys get their kidneys stolen from Russian, you know, those gals that take your kidney, you wake up in a bathtub full of ice.
01:16:09.000And she's a great kid, but she always says, you know, Dad, could you just not maybe bash them as often as you do if I'm flying back over there to work?
01:16:26.000Although I will say, I was giving a speech one time about national security issues, and I got off on the subject of the intellectual property theft.
01:16:34.000It's perpetrated by a lot of different countries.
01:16:38.000And so I'm talking about the Chinese and their tendency to do this.
01:16:43.000And I look down there, I see a guy that I know who's with one of the companies that brought me in for this speech, and he's got this funny look on his face, like, oh my god, I can't believe you're talking about this.
01:16:52.000And he kind of, like, motions over there, and they're in, like, the third row of this area.
01:16:57.000It's this contingent of Chinese business folks sitting there, and they just look, and I've just been spending 10 minutes just railing and talking about, you know, how awful they can be sometimes in this whole, although good.
01:17:08.000I praise them because they're good at it.
01:19:09.000The fact that he met with, as you pointed out, President Moon from South Korea, a very good sign.
01:19:14.000The Chinese have, they sent their foreign minister over to Pyongyang a couple weeks ago.
01:19:20.000First time the foreign minister's been over there in maybe 11 years, 12 years.
01:19:24.000So they understand the importance of this.
01:19:26.000And I think everybody's The dynamic has shifted because I think we've kicked the can down the road for so long that they're basically at the point where their programs are close to being fully developed.
01:19:39.000And I think that the Chinese understand that that means that all those other options perhaps of kicking the can down the road, Aren't on the decision tree anymore.
01:19:47.000And so, you know, they don't want chaos on the peninsula.
01:20:46.000And they've talked about this in terms of just a simple – not simple, but the idea that the population in terms of its physical stature compared to the South Koreans is – they're shorter.
01:20:59.000I think also I think they've realized that there's only so much they can do going forward to lock the place down.
01:21:07.000And technology at some point, even though it's North Korea and there's not a lot there, There's enough, and I think there's a sense that they – how long can they control the population the way they have?
01:21:17.000So again, he's not – Kim is not suicidal.
01:21:22.000When you think about every country acts in its own best interest or every leader acts in their own best interest, that's his thought process.
01:22:20.000But, you know, who knows where the Iranians are going to go with what they're doing.
01:22:22.000And people right now listening are probably thinking, okay, I'm tired of listening about the Iranians.
01:22:26.000Well, that seems to be something you're really concerned about.
01:22:29.000Well, I think only because, you know, if it's not handled properly and there's a lot of moving parts, meaning our allies, meaning the wild card of what Rouhani and the regime is going to do.
01:22:39.000But look, make no mistake, there's no – this idea that somehow this was a moderate Iranian regime.
01:22:45.000All you got to do is look at what they're engaged in doing in the Lebanon, in Yemen, in a proxy war with the Saudis and others, in Iraq and Syria, in the work that they're doing.
01:22:55.000And all the soldiers, U.S. soldiers that they killed in Iraq, you know, through the provision of weapons, the training that they gave to the Iraqis that were fighting against us.
01:23:19.000The people themselves – we keep hoping one day – I mean you go all the way back to the fall of the Shah and people hoping that the people will rise up and overthrow the clerics.
01:23:29.000Do you think it's the same attitude that causes people to be apologists, like the same attitude that's causing people to ask – Yeah,
01:23:52.000It's a desire to, again, sort of think well.
01:23:58.000That part of it I don't really understand, again, because you would think that you would base that on people's performance, and all you've got to do is look at past performance of the clerics and the regime they're in Iran that runs things.
01:24:07.000And I don't know how you come away from it thinking, well, they're being actually pretty moderate.
01:24:43.000Mossad had an operation that they engaged in.
01:24:46.000There was a warehouse in Tehran where the Iranian regime, rather than destroy all their research and all the work they were doing on nuclear weapons up until that time, during that time, they stored it.
01:25:02.000And so they put it in a warehouse facility.
01:25:07.000Mossad and some other liaison service found out the location, and then they mounted an operation, which is very labor-intensive.
01:25:18.000You've got to do a lot of surveillance.
01:25:19.000You've got to recruit assets who can provide you with key information about this.
01:25:22.000And then eventually they hoiked out a bunch of these documents, 50,000 pages of documents and almost 200 CDs.
01:25:32.000That information covers 1999 to 2003 and one of the things that it shows definitively is that one of the things the Iranians were doing were they were designing and looking to build a minimum of five nuclear warheads, right, for their ballistic missiles that they're also developing and building.
01:25:49.000Which puts a nail on that whole idea that it was nothing but a peaceful program.
01:25:53.000But people looking at it, they're apologists, and they're saying, ah, it's old history, it's old news.
01:26:37.000Now you got something and now I'll back off and say, okay, maybe that's a good deal actually.
01:26:42.000Give us access to all those sites and let us go in and look around.
01:26:47.000The IAEA, which is the international organization for inspection of these nuclear sites, they spent 12 years trying to figure out what the hell was going on at Parchin, which is a military site near Tehran, and never, never were able to get the access they needed,
01:27:04.000never were able to solve the question.
01:27:06.000And they went on and on with that investigation.
01:27:09.000As a result of the drive by the administration to get a deal signed, Part of the conditions from the Iranian regime was that they stop this investigation, just draw a line under it.
01:27:41.000Well, this was two years, as former Secretary Kerry would like to say, you know, it was two years of diplomatic work and hard negotiations.
01:27:51.000So, you know, we worked reportedly in concert with the Brits and the French and the Germans and the Russians and the Chinese, although it was mostly, you know, from our side.
01:28:32.000But don't couch it as something that's not.
01:28:35.000And, you know, if the Brits and the French and the Germans are now willing to say it's an inadequate deal, but we still want to stay in, you know, that should tell people something.
01:28:47.000And, you know, but anyway, that's not where we're at.
01:28:51.000We're at everybody stands around screaming at the sky because they're upset about one side or the other.
01:30:22.000And, you know, Ben raised his hand during the question period and said, so what would you do differently because Idaho was ranked 43rd in education.
01:30:32.000And I know he said this because this guy then called me later and he says, your kid asked this question.
01:30:37.000First of all, I was like, hey, come on.
01:30:43.000But the point being is my wife, the world's greatest person, is in politics and focused in strategy and campaign problems and all sorts of things.
01:31:32.000And so then you get what we get, which is people reading crap on Twitter and thinking that it's always true, or that's how they form their opinion, or it's all this or it's all that.
01:32:01.000There's a shocking lack of adversity that a lot of people have to go through in this life.
01:32:10.000And if you go through too much soft living, you start to develop these lazy habits and this distorted perception of reality and a lack of understanding of what really hard work is and how difficult it is to get by in this life if you don't live in this cushy place that we live in.
01:32:30.000Did you work, when you were a kid, did you work summer jobs?
01:34:26.000And the mom was upset, and so she went and complained.
01:34:29.000And so the school decision was that everybody who tried out gets to be on the squad.
01:34:36.000Yeah, you can imagine what that looks like.
01:34:40.000Well, you've got to teach kids the opposite.
01:34:44.000That if you didn't do good enough, you need to figure out what you did wrong and go back and improve and work on it.
01:34:50.000And then if you do get in next year, you'll get an amazing feeling of accomplishment rather than an amazing feeling of entitlement that you belong in everything you try out for.
01:35:11.000The idea that, you know, you've got to – I mean, it's like my two older boys are – you know, people are going, oh, Mike's now talking about his kids all the time.
01:35:21.000My two older boys have gotten to the point now where the sports thing, they play, and if they don't play well, they sit.
01:35:28.000Because earlier than that, everybody plays.
01:35:33.000And that's a good thing that little kids are learning how to play the game and where to stand and all the rest of it.
01:35:37.000So, but then they get to a certain point, it becomes merit-based, or it should, anyway, which is how it works in Idaho, basically, at least with the teams that we're associated with, is that if you don't play that well, then maybe you don't make the team, and if you make the team and you're not playing as well as the other kids and you're sitting on the bench, and so,
01:35:53.000you know, my kids, you know, when it first started happening, you know, they were just, they were complaining, you know, like, ah, you know, screw it, I'm not getting any playing time, and I'm thinking, well, okay, what's the next part of that thought process that you need to work your way through?
01:36:05.000If you're not getting enough playing time, it's because you're not, what, playing as well as you should be compared to the other kids.
01:36:28.000They're making it too difficult for the children, and they're not having a good time, and it should be about companionship, and it shouldn't be about competition.
01:36:36.000Well, you're setting your kid up for failure, because it can be about both.
01:36:40.000It can be about companionship, but also about competition.
01:36:59.000If you don't have that nature, if you don't have that competitive side of you, okay, fine.
01:37:05.000But then don't go through the rest of life thinking, well, just because life is a competition, which may upset you when you find that out, that you don't get special dispensation just because you're not a competitive person.
01:38:04.000And to be fair, Muggsy, the youngest one, got called in for...
01:38:08.000He got called in for using the word douchebag one time, but a funnier one was when he and two of his buddies, who shall not be named, were out in the playground not too long ago.
01:38:20.000And they were sitting down and they were playing some game, right?
01:38:22.000And it was recess and all the kids, all the different grades are out there running around.
01:38:26.000And everybody knows my little kid, you know, Muggsy.
01:38:53.000Well, a couple of the older kids walk by and they hear these three kids, six years old, yelling this word and laughing uproariously because they think it's the funniest fucking thing they've ever heard.
01:39:03.000And so they get called into the principal.
01:39:34.000And I look at him and I said, no, I don't need to know.
01:39:37.000And I look out of the corner of my eye, I see his two older brothers, like, around the corner, just waiting, because they know he's going to get his ass kicked, right, for this.
01:39:43.000And they're just like, they can't wait.
01:39:45.000And so I said, no, I don't need to know what it is, just don't do it again.
01:41:49.000But that's part of the problem, is that they're going to, it seems so attractive, you know, to do, because they're not supposed to do it, and when no one's around, like, you know what I heard?
01:41:57.000I found a new word that starts with a C. Yeah.
01:42:12.000In part because we didn't have the internet and all that crap.
01:42:14.000And so I think it took a little bit longer to learn.
01:42:19.000I don't think I really rolled out douchebag until I was probably 12, maybe 13. Well, we were talking yesterday about access to the internet where kids see so much more and hear so much more today.
01:42:32.000Especially like violent images and their access to terrible things.
01:42:37.000There's just so much that if you leave a kid alone with a computer or a phone that's online...
01:42:43.000They're just going to find out everything about the world way before their little brains are ready.
01:43:37.000And you can't tell me that there's not some correlation between access to all that imaging and violent images and everything else and some of the problems that we have in the world today when we ask, how does that kid, how does he go so far off the rails that he steals a gun or takes a gun out of the house and shoots up a place?
01:44:12.000You're not going to change the world that we live in by limiting the access these kids have to these things, but it is strange how much access we have to disturbing images, violence, violent videos.
01:44:26.000Your brain knows that that's out there and that there's just so many more examples of it to watch.
01:44:32.000If you were 12 years old or whatever in the old days, Yeah.
01:44:36.000And maybe you found out where your dad stored the Playboys.
01:45:23.000You're right, you can't protect him, but you've got to do your best.
01:45:26.000Well, the world's changing, but it's changing faster than we realize.
01:45:31.000That we're aware of in regard to the impact that it has on kids.
01:45:35.000I just think it's changing for the people that are adults, like, wow, the world's changing.
01:45:39.000Yeah, it's changing for that four-year-old that's growing up in that world right now, and they're going to have, the moment they get online, it's going to go from, I'm just a little kid, live my little kid, that's my mommy, that's my daddy, to woof!
01:46:27.000That's about 12, 13 years age difference, right?
01:46:30.000And so I feel like there's a social thing there where you can study this as a case study.
01:46:36.000What my daughter went through growing up and accessed information.
01:46:39.000Which was uniquely different than now, even though she started, there was really no internet or anything, but then it exploded by the time she was essentially a tween, I guess.
01:46:49.000Or the difference between you and I, who grew up with nothing.
01:46:53.000No internet, and then it became the internet when we're fully formed and as an adult.
01:46:58.000And then you got a chance to see it, and even then screwed it up and made mistakes and got online and got viruses on your computer and saw some stuff you really didn't want to see.
01:47:48.000Yeah, like Bill Blumenwright, who's the owner of the Wilbur Theatre in Boston, who was owner of the Comedy Connection back then, always jokes around about it.
01:47:58.000He was like, you got a lot of work because you were the only comedian with a cell phone.
01:48:01.000So he can call me up and say, hey, this guy just got a flat tire on his way to New Hampshire.
01:49:18.000Before the cell phone technology hit, and this is the early days of being with the agency, when you were overseas, if you were in an urban setting, you spent half your time looking for operating payphones, right?
01:49:29.000In some third or fourth world country, you're trying to find a payphone that actually works because you've got to make some sort of call related to whatever operation you're engaged in.
01:49:38.000And, you know, the kids today in the agency don't understand that, you know, because they've all got great technology and mobile communications.
01:49:46.000But, yeah, in the old days, it didn't work that way.
01:49:51.000Most people don't even know what a phone booth is.
01:50:04.000But today you say, fought in a phone booth, and people go, why not just say they could have fought on a fucking, you know, something else that doesn't exist anymore.
01:50:23.000You could probably find one occasionally that's got a phone in it, but it wasn't that long ago, I remember, they actually had functioning phones in those things.
01:51:07.000And I remember we got an answering machine where you could call it, and then when the dial tone went on, you would punch in a code, and you could listen to your messages, and you weren't even home!
01:54:05.000And that would have been, you know, what's that?
01:54:06.000That would have been like 15 years after this happened, or 14 years after they invented it in St. Louis.
01:54:14.000But yeah, I remember when they, you know, the mobile phone then was that big case, you know, that we carry around, and you have to get out of your car, set it out on your car, and then they started getting there.
01:54:22.000Yeah, a big fucking thing you throw over your shoulder, a big handle.
01:54:26.000I got a big box at home full of all the old phones that I've had over the years.
01:54:31.000And it's like if I could ever get myself organized, I would turn it into some sort of wall art installation.
01:54:37.000Because it's cell phones through the years.
01:54:39.000At least covering the past three decades.
02:00:49.000I won't say anything to anybody, including the director-designate.
02:00:54.000I'm trying to tell all these folks to make mushrooms legal.
02:00:57.000It's not hurting anybody, and it's giving a lot of folks some real good ideas.
02:01:01.000Oh, hey, before I forget, and I probably should have told you this offline, but Newt Gingrich thinks it would be excellent to sit down and talk to you.
02:02:58.000I can see the trout breaking the surface.
02:03:01.000And during the summer, you just go out there, and in the high season, when you're not fishing, you just float around, do a little water skiing if you want to, but mostly just kind of hang out.
02:05:00.000Well, you know how you have a tree, lots of snow falling, you know, you got powder, and so what'll happen sometimes is you get the appearance of solid snow, but around the tree, the base of the tree, you'll get these little caves, almost.
02:05:12.000There's nothing around the bottom of the tree, so...
02:05:14.000The tendency is for the snow, if you get too close to the tree well, you'll collapse into it.
02:05:18.000And then you're at the bottom of this hole, right?
02:05:33.000I fell into this thing, and that's the time when I thought to myself, after about 35 minutes of trying to haul my ass out of there, I thought, I could actually die here, but the snow was falling lightly, you know, and there was still a little bit of sun coming through, and it was a beautiful thing.
02:05:47.000And I literally thought, I had to lay down for a minute to catch my breath and think, I've got to give this another try.
02:13:16.000And sometimes you have to remember, you have to stop and I mean, like, you want to fly fishing sometimes.
02:13:21.000You get caught up and all of a sudden you have to stop and you step back and you kind of look around and you think, oh, yeah, this makes sense.
02:13:29.000I've done fishing a few times recently with my kids, but it's ocean fishing where you're out there trolling, you know, you're in a boat and you're pulling the line.
02:15:09.000And if it's not over that, it's a little bit over that, then you've got to toss it back in because they're still in prime fucking time and they produce more babies.
02:16:11.000But if they're bigger than that, they probably have to let them go.
02:16:13.000I mean, if you get a fish like that, you're eating that thing for a year.
02:16:16.000See, what happens is, no, but if you catch one that, say, is about, I don't know, eight inches smaller than that, then you've got to toss it back in.
02:18:42.000It was a purchase treaty by the Senate on October 20th of 1803, doubled the size of the United States, and opened up the continent to its westward expansion.
02:18:59.000Well, one of the things that we saw when we were in Montana for the first time on the Missouri was you saw these homesteads where people tried to make it out there.
02:19:08.000And they realized you can't grow anything out there because, you know, that mud is just...
02:19:20.000And people tried forever because they just thought, let me just find some ground, and all you have to do is live there for a certain amount of time, then it would be yours.
02:19:28.000But there's these really old, broken-down houses from, you know, the 1800s, 1700s, whenever people were out there, and you could still go there and touch the wood.
02:19:55.000Yeah, and just, you know, they don't often look happy, but it's, you know, they were living a hard life, and they're making their way across the country, and sometimes you imagine they're just thinking, uh...
02:20:59.000But it talks about, I mean, it covers the whole thing, but it covers Davy Crockett, Daniel Boone, all the characters that you remember hearing about, but it goes into real historical detail about it, and it's fascinating when you look at how this place was cobbled together.
02:21:12.000If you think about just a couple hundred years' time in relation to the rest of the world, a couple hundred years, things didn't change that much at all.
02:24:26.000Anyway, yeah, but yeah, if you're doing it for real and you think about the amount of calories you burn and what you need to replace, you know, and then you realize that's what it was all about.
02:24:35.000People spent every damn waking hour collecting food and water to keep themselves going.
02:24:42.000That was it until, you know, whenever.
02:24:45.000Well, you realize that when you go on hunting trips, like if you had to just hunt for survival, a hunting trip, you could easily go five, six days and not even see an animal.
02:25:06.000And those people did that with muskets and bows and arrows and tried to make it across the country without any idea what the fuck was in front of them.
02:25:14.000I mean, Lewis and Clark burned, or Powell going down to Colorado.
02:25:18.000The amount of food they needed to consume as an expedition was astounding.
02:25:52.000So that's, you know, but the interesting thing is if you live in a place like, if you live out west, you're surrounded by this all the time.
02:29:32.000I mean, I had no idea when we moved there, but we had a nice little property, and we had a big pond out there, and a little stream running through.
02:29:38.000It was very picturesque, but it was also just covered in ticks.
02:31:18.000Yeah, well, the interaction between the two of them, the way Dr. Rhonda Patrick talked about it, I could get a hold of her and try to get her to do it again and explain it to me.
02:31:27.000But it's the interaction between saturated fats and carbohydrates.
02:31:31.000It's not saturated fats on themselves, on their own.
02:31:34.000Saturated fat like red meat and organ meat in particular, extremely healthy for you.
02:33:39.000Cholesterol is the building block for hormones.
02:33:42.000We get lied to from the beginning of time when it comes to...
02:33:46.000Well, first of all, there's a lack of understanding, and then there's also these studies that come out that are fucking funded by the sugar industry.
02:34:37.000That's how it's supposed to be consumed.
02:34:39.000The real issue comes when you take that sugar out of that fruit, You know, whether it's high fructose corn syrup or whatever the fuck else you're getting sugar from, and then consume that sugar.
02:34:49.000Because then it's sugar free of all the natural things that contain it.
02:35:11.000But it is interesting in the sense that, you know, from an economic standpoint, right?
02:35:16.000Eating healthy, there's a, you know, you're advantaged if you're, you know, middle class or upper class, right?
02:35:25.000If you're, if you don't have the financial wherewithal, I think that's, I don't know, maybe I'm just blowing smoke around, but I think that there is something to be said for that.
02:35:35.000I mean, because if you're going and you're thinking, I'm going to eat organic, I'm going to eat all this.
02:35:40.000And so you think, okay, well, so you've got a group of people that are disadvantaged in the nutrition side of things because they end up defaulting to the processed foods or the fast foods.
02:35:51.000But I'm happy to hear about the red meat.
02:35:53.000Now, you know, I'm going to walk out of here.
02:35:54.000I'm going to say, I can eat a steak whenever I want, and then I'm going to get bit by this tick.
02:37:31.000Give you a real understanding of the actual science behind...
02:37:35.000Food versus the misconceptions and versus the misinformation because there's so much of it out there and then there's so much you know we've talked about this before this is probably a good thing to talk about this now and I need to know what's true and what's not true remember we talked about how the guy who started the Atkins diet died and he was 258 pounds and all that well apparently when he fell and hit his head He had serious problems in the hospital and gained somewhere
02:38:06.000around 50 pounds while he was in the hospital.
02:38:38.000Well, most people think he died falling and hitting his head, which is true, but the vegan propaganda was that he actually died of a heart attack and that he was 258 pounds when he died, so his diet didn't work.
02:38:53.000But they're saying that, no, when he was checked into the hospital after he hit his head, he was only 195 pounds.
02:38:58.000So all this weight gain that they're attributing to his diet, they're being disingenuous and untruthful.
02:39:05.000The first thing you do when you check into a hospital is you gotta check yourself out as quickly as possible.
02:39:10.000Well, this guy, I mean, when he checked into the hospital, he was fucked.
02:39:14.000Apparently, I mean, he fell and cracked his head open on the ice.
02:39:17.000And, you know, it wasn't a good scene.
02:39:20.000And he was an older gentleman when it happened.
02:39:28.000So somebody sent me something yesterday about it so that whatever his heart disease was, it was not from hardening of the arteries, from cholesterol, from eating all that food.
02:39:41.000It's so hard to understand what's right and what's wrong, too, because people get so ideological about it, especially vegans.
02:39:48.000And even some meat-eaters get ideological about it.
02:39:52.000People aren't looking at the real relationship between food and health.
02:39:56.000I've got a few people in my family who are...
02:40:23.000He tried it for quite a while, and he did it the right way, and he just got ill from it.
02:40:26.000Yeah, you know, I'm a big fan of moderation.
02:40:29.000You know, just moderation and everything, right?
02:40:30.000I mean, that seems to be a reasonable attitude, I think, in terms of when it comes to your diet, right?
02:40:38.000I try not to overthink anything in life, and we just...
02:40:45.000We're in that point in society where maybe because things are easy, and we have made it easy because of technology and everything else, that we're able to just analyze everything to a fucking fairly well, right?
02:40:56.000So I'm just thinking maybe it's not that complicated, you know?
02:41:01.000You know, you work out, you burn more than you take in, you know, you try to eat healthy, you stick to the basics, you know, grains and fruits and vegetables and meat and fish.
02:41:08.000Even grains are fucking terrible for you, man.
02:41:34.000We used to, there were times when, if we were traveling or whatever, and you were sitting in some safe house somewhere, And just waiting for something to happen or just happened to be holed up for whatever reason.