In this episode, Mike Baker talks about the recent execution of Iranian military general Soleimani, and why he thinks it was the right thing to do. He also talks about why he doesn't think Iran should be allowed to have any influence within the United States, and what it means for the future of the Middle East and Iran's relations with the rest of the world. Mike also discusses the Iran-UAE relationship, and his thoughts on the recent events surrounding the death of Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali al-Sadr, and the impact it had on the situation in Iraq and Iran s relations with other countries. And, as always, there's a little Q&A at the end of the episode. Enjoy, and spread the word to your friends and family about this podcast! If you like what you hear, please HIT SUBSCRIBE and also, share it on your social media and tell a friend about what you think of it! Tweet me and let us know what you thought of this episode! Timestamps: 5:00 - What do you think about it? 6:30 - Is this a good or bad idea? 7:15 - Is Iran the new Iran? 8:20 - Is it bad? 9:40 - How bad is Iran's relationship with the US? 10:00 11:00 | Iran s relationship with other nations? 14:15 | What does Iran do with Iraq? 15:20 | What are we should do? 16: What do we need to do in the future? 17: Is this guy a monster? 18:30 | Is Iran a bad guy? 19:40 | What do they want to do to us better? 21:15 22:40 27:30 26:10 | How bad does Iran have a strong influence in Iraq? ? 29:00 // 32:30 // 33:10 35:10 - How good is this guy do we want a strong country? 36:20 37:40 // 35:00 + 36: Is he a good man? 39:30 Is this man a bad enough? 40:40 + 40:30 + 35:35 45:00 & 45,000? 41:40 & 45? 47:00+ +46?
00:01:47.000And we're talking about the second most – structure-wise, the second most important person within the Iranian regime next to the Ayatollah.
00:01:56.000But the idea that somehow we took out a foreign leader or a military general like he was some sort of Eisenhower is insane.
00:02:07.000He was the head terrorist for a state that is the number one sponsor of terrorism around the world.
00:02:13.000And so, but he's been on target lists for a long time.
00:02:19.000You go back to, I think, 2008, there was an operation to take out a guy named Mugnia, who himself was also a bloodthirsty psychopath, and he was running Hezbollah operations.
00:02:33.000So the Israelis had been tracking him, as had we.
00:02:38.000And at one point, they had an opportunity to take out Mugnya and also Soleimani.
00:02:44.000And they backed off at the time, essentially because the U.S. wouldn't get behind the idea that we're going to take out Soleimani.
00:02:51.000At that point, that was a step too far.
00:02:59.000I mean, I don't even know where to start with...
00:03:01.000The amount of blood that he's responsible for.
00:03:05.000People talk about again, okay, he authorized operations and activities in Iraq against U.S. soldiers and against Iraqi soldiers and Iraqi civilians.
00:03:12.000But it goes back to the beginning of that.
00:03:15.000I mean, you could go back to 2003. And Soleimani was the architect.
00:03:22.000He dreamt up this idea as the U.S. was going into Iraq that What he did was insane.
00:03:31.000He basically authorized – I mean he's in charge, right?
00:03:34.000So he authorizes the release of a bunch of Sunnis that they've been holding on to, Iran being Shiite, arch rivals being the Sunnis essentially, and the Saudis are their arch enemy, a Sunni nation.
00:03:48.000But he released all these Sunni extremists that Iran had been holding on to essentially ever since we had gone into Afghanistan right after 9-11.
00:03:56.000And he released them into Iraq, including a guy named Zarqawi, who became the head of al-Qaeda in Iraq.
00:04:02.000And within a few months of getting out to Iraq, the Sunnis, basically under Soleimani's tutelage...
00:04:12.000He had a series of bombings and started bombing everything from Shiite mosques to UN facilities, a Jordanian embassy, a variety of targets, killing thousands of Shiites.
00:04:44.000He doesn't want the U.S. in there building a strong, stable Iraq.
00:04:48.000I mean, you go back to the Iran-Iraq war where Soleimani started his military career.
00:04:53.000And, you know, he's not – there's no way – he's a true believer.
00:04:56.000There's no way he's ever going to let Iraq become stable again.
00:04:59.000And he's insane enough that he kills thousands of Shiite, his own people, right, in order to push the Shiite population in Iraq to Iran, right?
00:05:26.000And so he was always very unusually capable at walking a fine line between his own Shiite beliefs, population and everything and at times being able to be sort of a puppet master for Sunni extremists when it suited his cause.
00:07:05.000I saw that, and I talked to a handful of people who kind of leaned in that direction.
00:07:12.000And also, you get the same thing with Soleimani.
00:07:14.000Now, Soleimani, I can understand, he's wrapped in the cloak of a military uniform and, you know, people saw him sitting next to the Ayatollah.
00:07:45.000With Soleimani, we're talking about, again, Iraqis, Yemenis, Syrians, his own people.
00:07:55.000I mean, you know, they talk about maybe some 1,500 or so protesters, you know, being killed in Iran in the past few months as a result of the protests against the Iranian regime, primarily because of corruption, you know, the fact that they've driven that economy into a toilet at the expense of the Iranian people,
00:09:15.000I don't necessarily care for the individual.
00:09:18.000But that doesn't mean I can't like policies.
00:09:20.000And whether you're talking about what's going on with Iran, whether you're talking about the way that we've been dealing with China lately, other issues.
00:09:42.000And I just didn't know that Trump could make the call.
00:09:45.000Like, he could be the guy that goes, take him out.
00:09:48.000I thought that was like, there was probably a panel of military leaders and like really important people that understand the ramifications, not a fucking game show host.
00:09:57.000Yeah, like in America's Got Talent or something, but it's just four people sitting there hitting a buzzer.
00:10:02.000I felt like it would be like something that they would discuss, not that Trump would be like, yeah, option three.
00:10:08.000Well, but they talk about it, and there is a great deal of conversation that goes on, not necessarily with the president.
00:10:13.000I have no idea how he processes his information, but there's a great deal of conversation and discussion that goes on in the Pentagon within the intel community and National Security Council.
00:10:24.000What happens once they lay out these options in front of the president?
00:10:33.000And President Obama had that authority.
00:10:34.000President Obama took out, remember, U.S. citizens who were overseas in the Middle East.
00:10:41.000And there was a hue and cry over sort of the legality of it.
00:10:46.000But you didn't see a lot of people saying, you know, and in part, okay, I admit, because it wasn't, again, this, you know, Soleimani's wrapped in the cloak of his military uniform.
00:10:55.000Well, it's also, people are very concerned about this possibility of us going to war with Iran, and they think that this might have, like, started that off.
00:11:17.000And I think they looked at the idea of a military conflict, a direct military conflict with the U.S. And this is not to say that their proxies won't strike out at some place around the world at some point.
00:11:57.000Look, if we got in a military conflict, that was just the idea that somehow we were going to get in World War III. It would be over in an evening.
00:12:03.000Literally, it would be over in one night.
00:12:05.000We have the ability to take out their entire energy infrastructure, their missile bases, their key military facilities, And I don't want to oversimplify this, but after that first night's activity, that's it.
00:12:58.000I was like, okay, so it seems like this is almost like they're making a signal like they're attacking, but they're not really doing anything.
00:13:06.000Yeah, I think there was an optic to it.
00:13:08.000I think you're right, absolutely, that they felt like they had to do something.
00:13:11.000The Ayatollahs got a, I don't know whether you call it, saving face or not, but...
00:13:49.000I mean, we shot down an Iranian passenger jet years and years ago, right?
00:13:52.000The Russians shot down, they still won't admit to it, but they shot down a passenger jet over Ukraine just a handful of years ago, which they still won't admit to.
00:14:04.000It's human error, and it's human error in a conflict zone, in a situation where there's a lot of moving parts.
00:14:11.000And it's never going to be a zero-risk game.
00:14:13.000So if the Iranians had done this, as tragic as it is, and come out and said, oh my god, we did this.
00:15:34.000They mistook it for either an incoming missile or a hostile aircraft coming in for a bombing run after they launched their ballistic missile strike.
00:15:45.000So nobody is saying it was done on purpose.
00:15:48.000But it's – Again, it's indicative of the Revolutionary Guard force and the regime itself that they spent several days denying it and saying it was mechanical failure and pressuring the Ukrainians to come out and say it was mechanical failure,
00:16:06.000which they then reversed course on that once it became obvious.
00:16:13.000But now the protests out in the streets of Iran, which are a continuation of the past several months, which were targeted at a corrupt regime, have picked up strength in light of that because the people are just – we're tired of this.
00:17:30.000Soleimani spent billions of Iranian dollars or money that they couldn't afford to and that should have been spent on its population arming, training, equipping and dealing with the Syrian war and keeping his pal Assad in power.
00:17:54.000So Iran and Syria are tied together, but is Syria in a position to somehow rise up and engage?
00:18:02.000This is not going to be – this wouldn't have been a conflict as we imagine it, right?
00:18:08.000It wouldn't be a conflict of occupying space and ground and all the rest of it.
00:18:59.000I hope we've averted sort of further military conflict.
00:19:04.000I think, again, I think the Iranian regime understands that it's a new day, perhaps, that they'll come to the table eventually.
00:19:11.000That's what this whole maximum pressure campaign is about.
00:19:14.000Is to, again, create sufficient economic pressure, ensure that they understand the idea of deterrence, which I think they do after this strike on Soleimani.
00:19:28.000This wasn't just like something that just – they thought of after an American contractor was killed.
00:19:33.000The Iranian regime had been ratcheting up their aggressiveness and their attacks and their various operations on that region for quite a while.
00:19:41.000And we had been talking to them about it or getting the signal to them that you've got to stop this.
00:19:46.000And back in December, they were told, if you continue this path, we are going to take serious action.
00:20:30.000You know, Iran's always been a tough target for us, just like North Korea is a tough target.
00:20:35.000And so we rely heavily on our liaison partners.
00:20:39.000And But oftentimes, no matter how good your signals intelligence is, right, no matter how good you are at gathering SIGINT or photo interpretation of overhead imagery, it's still, to this day,
00:20:54.000no matter how good technology gets, you can't beat having an asset, having a human who's sitting in a meeting somewhere, and then for whatever their motivation is, whatever their reason for doing it, they're cooperating with you or our liaison partners, and they're saying, well, here's what happens.
00:21:08.000Or here's how that person looked, right?
00:21:11.000I mean, maybe you get signals intelligence because you're picking up, you know, communications.
00:21:16.000You got something on a piece of paper and you're reading a transcript of a meeting.
00:21:20.000But if you've got somebody who's in that meeting and who can tell you what people looked like or what the actual atmosphere was or the mood or the way that, I mean, that's invaluable.
00:21:40.000I mean that's why this whole nuclear weapons program with Iran has always been so difficult.
00:21:46.000I mean you talk to people and they go, well, they've got about a – They've got about a 12-month breakout time before they'd have a nuclear weapon.
00:21:53.000And then other people say, well, I think they've got about a three-month breakout time.
00:21:56.000Well, when you're talking about how long it's going to take them to have a nuclear weapon, you'd like to get those parameters a little closer together, right, so that you're not having a complete guess.
00:22:06.000And we spend a lot of time working on that.
00:22:11.000But I would say that we have tremendous allies in that region and – I know that people – it's fashionable nowadays to say, well, the Trump administration, we've been pushing away our allies and they don't want to work with us.
00:23:36.000And you could argue that most of the problems they deal with out of this White House are self-inflicted wounds because there's a lack of discipline.
00:23:43.000It'd be nice if the president was more buttoned up.
00:23:45.000Of course, that's not going to be the way it works.
00:23:47.000I think, I don't know why I know, but he firmly believes, I think, that this is why he got elected.
00:24:02.000They're tired of these people that sound like politicians.
00:24:04.000You know, you hear, you know, pick a person, Elizabeth Warren, you hear them talk, and you feel the bullshit coming out of their mouth while they're talking.
00:24:46.000No, I think the consistency – I think you're right.
00:24:49.000There is an element of – look, I am tired of the bullshit.
00:24:52.000I mean I see what you're saying, but I guess what I think then is – I mean what are the chances that you get to – well, we're in 2020. Look at that.
00:25:00.000But we get down to November to the election, and people are just exhausted by it.
00:25:06.000Are they going to get to this point in November and get ready to vote and think, I can't take another four years of it even though it's entertaining?
00:25:16.000And if things are going well economically, and if it turns out that this thing with Iran doesn't turn into anything disastrous by the time November rolls around, I think he's going to win in a landslide.
00:26:40.000Anybody that wants to be president, you wouldn't want to be president.
00:26:44.000Well, I mean, I think if you look at who they've got on the other side, I mean, I thought for a while that maybe the Republicans are going to primary Trump.
00:26:54.000And then I realized that's a crazy ass idea.
00:29:11.000You know, the old school pellet guns and BB guns, the Crossmans, things like that, you know, that are plastic for the most part and everything.
00:29:24.000He's actually, I suspect he's a better shot than Cheney, as it turns out.
00:29:28.000And he's got his hunting certificate and he's been through that education program and, you know, he's in the scouts and so we go out shooting every now and then.
00:29:38.000But it took him almost no time at all, right, in terms of practice to develop.
00:29:44.000I'm boasting about my 12-year-old's target shooting ability.
00:29:48.000I realize that's not why most viewers tune in.
00:30:08.000I think it's going to be a landslide unless there's some – if the market tanks for whatever reason because there's some international crisis somewhere and it sends things down through the floor, maybe.
00:30:20.000But if the economy stays the way it is and the Dems seem to wander into their primary season as unorganized as they seem to be, yeah, I could see him winning again big.
00:30:33.000Well, I think people want to look at him as being all bad.
00:30:37.000But if what he's done and the moves that he's made are great for the economy, and things appear to be very good, right?
00:31:01.000Yeah, I mean, they want the economy to be the way it is, but they want Bernie Sanders' economic policies.
00:31:07.000You know, it's interesting because I think that someone who supports big business the way Trump does, he encourages people to move business forward.
00:31:17.000I mean, it encourages the market, encourages people to spend money.
00:31:31.000I don't know what the correct way to do this is, but even though I'm not a Trump fan, there are definite benefits to the way he has been running the country.
00:31:43.000When you talk about some of the basic metrics, you look at the unemployment rate.
00:31:49.000I just finished a conversation the other day.
00:31:53.000Idaho, not to bring in Idaho, but Idaho's got the second strongest state economy in the nation.
00:31:58.000The unemployment rate is almost negligible.
00:32:01.000It's crazy how strong it is at this point.
00:32:04.000Because there's solid people up there.
00:34:25.000I think Bernie Sanders has some interesting thoughts, and talking to him in person, in real life, I like him a lot.
00:34:30.000He's not like what he comes off in those goddamn debates, because those debates are ridiculous.
00:34:36.000You get five people in front of the camera, you ask them a question, they have 30 seconds to answer it, everybody else is jumping in and yelling things out, they're all trying to get a sound bite.
00:35:57.000So the moderator last night during this debate asked Bernie Sanders, let me just be clear, she said, are you saying that you've never said this to Elizabeth Warren?
00:36:11.000Very next words out of the moderator's mouth was she turned to Elizabeth Warren and said, so, Senator Warren, when Bernie said to you that he never, or no, when Bernie said to you that a woman couldn't be president, how did you feel?
00:37:01.000All he wants to do is play basketball.
00:37:02.000That's all he wants to do with his life.
00:37:03.000He knows he's going to get recruited by Duke.
00:37:06.000He knows he's going to end up in the NBA. But we're sitting there and it was really kind of sweet because he's got all this hard side to him and I'm just playing ball.
00:37:13.000And then he says, well, yeah, let's watch a Disney movie.
00:37:16.000So we kind of dialed up Disney Plus because we're sheep and we bought the Disney Plus thing.
00:37:35.000We're watching it, and we get to that part where they're singing that song, and the Lost Boys are tied up with Wendy and Michael and all of that, and the chief comes in, and he wants to find Tiger Lily, the princess, because Hook is...
00:37:47.000The viewers are like, what the hell's going on here?
00:37:49.000So anyway, I'm sitting there, and even Sluggo looks at me, and he goes, wow, this is kind of racist.
00:38:46.000I've listened to on tape, this is like the fourth or fifth one that I've listened to on Native Americans over the last couple of months, but this is the best one.
00:38:56.000This is the best one because, not that the other ones weren't great, they were great, but what's interesting about this is the actual words of a man who lived that life.
00:39:04.000It's not just a historical book about the time and describes the events of the time.
00:39:10.000This is a guy describing what he saw And he was talking in particular about war, about the way it was when they killed Custer.
00:39:27.000It's crazy to think that it happened just a short time ago.
00:39:30.000And it's also crazy to think that if no one came to America, like if the world just stayed in Europe and Asia and the way it had been before Columbus and before the pilgrims and all that shit, these people would probably still be living like that because that's not that long ago.
00:39:51.000I mean, where else do we have – I'm probably going to make a botch of this point, but yeah, warring tribal cultures in the Middle East, right?
00:39:59.000I mean, it's a difficult environment, right, in which to say, okay, we're going to have some sort of federal system.
00:40:51.000We haven't, we just, to this day, we don't do a very good job at all.
00:40:55.000And the reservation systems, not all of them, of course, it's like every, you know, not every urban center is, you know, crime rate.
00:41:02.000I mean, that's ridiculous, but I'm just saying in general.
00:41:04.000Some of the most difficult places I've ever seen have been right here on our borders, right, on Indian reservations, and good God.
00:41:11.000Yeah, I want to get someone to come in here who's a Native American, who's a historian, who really understands the history of the I just had a sort of a peripheral understanding of it up until about five or six months ago.
00:41:26.000I really, you know, I had seen movies and I had read books and I'd kind of understood, but I didn't really, really get into it until I started reading these books and it's just...
00:41:37.000It's just incredible to think that there was millions and millions of tribes or millions and millions of members of different tribes living in this country, like basically like Stone Age people, just 150 years ago.
00:41:51.000And oftentimes, you know, in constant conflict with each other.
00:42:07.000Well, as soon as we figured out repeating guns, as soon as they figured out revolvers with more than one bullet, because they were fighting the Comanches originally, they were fighting them with muskets.
00:42:17.000And the Comanches could shoot like six arrows in ten seconds.
00:42:20.000So they would just lighten these fucking soldiers up because they couldn't reload.
00:42:24.000So they'd wait for the initial volley and then they'd charge in.
00:43:07.000No, it is absolutely – it's a fascinating history.
00:43:10.000I've spent more time reading sort of the military aspects of the Indian Wars, right, from the U.S. military side of things.
00:43:17.000And occasionally a book will stray into sort of, okay, well, let's look from a perspective of whichever tribe they were in battle with, but not usually very good.
00:43:28.000So I'll pick up this book because it – It's an amazing history, and you're right, it's not that long ago.
00:43:34.000There's another great book, well, there's quite a few of them, Blood and Thunder.
00:44:03.000But they had a handful of episodes about Kit Carson, but they kind of went through – they picked out some of the – sort of the individuals you would imagine, right?
00:44:12.000I mean Daniel Boone and some of the other characters as the frontier.
00:44:15.000I think Men Who Built a Frontier, I think is what it was called.
00:44:17.000It was a follow-on to that series that they did.
00:44:19.000But the men who built America, okay, which seems misogynistic, but … Trevor Burrus, Jr.: The women probably helped.
00:44:27.000They – behind every great titan of industry, there was a woman and several of his mistresses.
00:44:34.000But I think that this thing about building the frontiers was interesting.
00:44:39.000They tried – Yeah, I think most of us are pretty ignorant to what goes on on the reservations today.
00:45:50.000I will say this much in terms of just the way they've laid the museum out, right?
00:45:54.000But it's just absolutely full to the ceiling of incredible stories and artifacts and history bits.
00:46:02.000It's definitely worth people going to D.C. If they're saying, okay, I'm going to go to the Smithsonian, they should put that one on the list because it's really fascinating.
00:46:41.000Because, you know, people talk about this current administration as not having any strategy.
00:46:46.000And sometimes it does seem, frankly, that way.
00:46:49.000But I was thinking the other day that it is – there is actually an interesting split in terms of how they're dealing with China.
00:46:57.000So on the one hand, we've got this softening of the trade war.
00:47:01.000They're going to – as a result of signing what they signed today with China as sort of a first-stage trade agreement, it mostly involves increased purchases by China of U.S. goods.
00:47:11.000There's some talk about them scaling back their theft of intellectual property.
00:48:00.000Congress is trying to push through something that's going to make it even more difficult for US companies to do business with them overseas.
00:48:22.000You're still stealing our shit and Huawei is still a national security threat.
00:48:27.000So we're still going to focus on this.
00:48:30.000And, you know, this is not saying I'm singing praises of this current administration.
00:48:33.000I'm just saying that any administration should be able to operate on different levels, right, when it comes to the same – but we don't – we haven't seemed to do that.
00:48:41.000Well, okay, we're – in the past, If they just gave some indication that they were going to play ball with us, we'd ease up on the sanctions even though they hadn't done anything about their pursuit of terrorism and other things that they were doing because we felt like in Washington I think sometimes DC is like,
00:48:58.000oh, you can't do two things at one time that seem to be conflicting.
00:49:01.000Well, the real world says I think that you can't.
00:50:36.000It's good that we're trying to rebalance the trade environment.
00:50:38.000That we're calling out Huawei, that we're talking to our allies about not doing business with them because all they really want is they want an access point, right?
00:50:46.000So if they do business with the UK, suddenly in this seamless world of communications, now they've got an entry point into the US. So we're working to try to get our allies to stay on board with us about that.
00:51:01.000But yeah, the Chinese, they subsidize Huawei, and the government does in a big way.
00:52:32.000Once a year they bang out a new phone.
00:52:34.000Huawei's cranking these fucking bad boys out every couple of months and every couple months they have a giant leap in improvement.
00:52:40.000More megapixels, better night vision, more storage, more battery life, more this more that, higher pixel density in the screens.
00:52:48.000So their phones literally are the top of the food chain phones.
00:52:51.000It's really kind of fascinating because a lot of American phones, like look at that bad boy, P40 design gets leaked, showing triple Leica camera.
00:52:59.000Yeah, so they're using these fucking incredible cameras.
00:53:34.000I'm actually, you know, I got a contract with Huawei, so that's why I keep banging on it.
00:53:39.000The Google thing really fucked them up, because before that, a lot of the tech guys in America were buying them from Amazon or buying them from websites and then just putting their SIM cards in it and using it, even though AT&T won't sell them and Verizon won't sell them.
00:53:52.000But now that won't even work anymore, because now you don't have access to the Google Play Store.
00:53:56.000If they could figure out a way to sweet-talk their way back to the Google Play Store, they would be the biggest fucking cell phone company in the world.
00:54:02.000They offered developer $26 million to build apps for his flagship phones after being banned from using Google's App Store.
00:54:09.000Yeah, but the thing is, like, building the apps is not good enough.
00:54:12.000You have to have apps that everybody's using.
00:54:14.000If you make your own Instagram, nobody gives a fuck.
01:01:47.000I read some study somewhere and I've put it out of my mind, but I do remember there was an aspect of it that did say, what do women see as an attractive element of a man?
01:01:56.000And to this day, it's still the ability to provide.
01:02:41.000The whole idea is this platform because these companies can argue all they want to that they're independent from the Chinese authorities.
01:02:48.000But ultimately, if the Chinese authorities knock on their door and say, we would like access to your database because we want to hoover up all the information about every U.S. military person that's stationed wherever, they're going to do it.
01:03:00.000They're trying to get one of the top TikTok executives in here.
01:04:07.000I was going to say, I drive Sluggo to his basketball practices, and occasionally there's two or three other knuckleheads in the car, and that's all they're doing is they're comparing TikTok videos.
01:05:09.000That's when we really get to see the fruits of our labor.
01:05:13.000How fucked up have we turned this culture?
01:05:15.000Well, let's check out the ten-year-olds.
01:05:17.000Let's see how ridiculous these kids are.
01:05:20.000Not to disappear down a rabbit hole, but I agree.
01:05:23.000I think we have no idea what technology How it's going to impact in the long run.
01:05:30.000We don't have enough of a test case yet.
01:05:33.000And I can look at my kids and just within my little microcosm of my three little dudes, sort of their attention span and their ability to...
01:05:45.000You can see it impact the way that they study, the way that they learn, the way – and I don't think we're – again, I'm not a Luddite, but I don't know that we're doing ourselves any favors, right?
01:05:54.000I don't think we're doing ourselves favors either, and I don't think there's any way of pulling back from it.
01:06:00.000You could tell your kids to pull back.
01:06:02.000You could maybe get your friends' kids to pull back.
01:06:04.000But culturally, no one's pulling back from this stuff.
01:06:07.000They're getting more and more immersed in their phones, more and more immersed in apps and internet.
01:07:00.000How many times have you sat in a restaurant and everybody at the table staring at their phone?
01:07:04.000I got on the car rental bus today and I dropped my bag on the thing and I stood there and I looked down at the bus and everybody was staring at their phone.
01:07:56.000Well, you know, we had this shooting down in Pensacola.
01:07:59.000And so it was a Saudi soldier who was down there for flight instruction and killed three people in the classroom there, finally taken out by deputies because we don't allow our soldiers to carry weapons on the base.
01:08:16.000And anyway, point being is that when this happened, He had two phones, Apple.
01:08:24.000I think one was a 5, one was a 7. And so the FBI got the phones.
01:08:30.000They went to Apple, but asked for assistance with the first one.
01:08:35.000I don't know which phone they were asking for.
01:08:37.000And Apple claims that, yeah, we provided assistance.
01:08:40.000We gave them access to iCloud data backup and some transactional records and what they were asking for.
01:08:47.000And then they went to Apple, I think, just a week ago or so with a request for assistance with a second one.
01:08:55.000And they subpoenaed Apple a couple days later and said, you know, we need assistance in getting into these phones.
01:08:59.000It's still the same problem that they had, you know, three or four years ago.
01:09:11.000Government had to go to, as it turns out, to an Israeli forensics group.
01:09:16.000Spent a lot of money to get cracked into these phones.
01:09:19.000Anyway, so Bill Barr, the Attorney General, came out just yesterday, past couple of days, and he's been lambasting Apple, saying, you know, you're hampering this investigation.
01:09:27.000You're not helping us in terms of dealing with this terrorist incident.
01:09:30.000And Apple's saying, you know, what the fuck?
01:09:33.000So we're back in that same thing that we were in four years ago, where you got this battle over access and pushing an investigation forward and a concern over privacy.
01:09:43.000What do they want that Apple's not willing to provide?
01:10:08.000It says, we have always maintained there's no such thing as a backdoor just for the good guys.
01:10:13.000Backdoors can be exploited by those who threaten our national security and the data security of our customers, Apple added.
01:10:19.000Today, law enforcement has access to more data than ever before in history, so Americans do not have to choose between weakening encryption and solving investigations.
01:10:28.000We feel strongly encryption is vital to protecting our country and our users' data.
01:10:34.000Yeah, but I don't understand, like, what are they looking for that they won't let these guys find?
01:10:38.000It's one thing that, like, back doors, but I'm not talking about a back door.
01:10:41.000I'm talking about, like, there should be a way that they can get into the phone, right?
01:10:45.000There should be a way that you can, not just the iCloud backup, but you could open up the phone And do it with, like, Apple should have some skeleton key or something like that.
01:10:56.000Well, that's what they're saying they're not going to provide.
01:10:59.000They're not going to provide a software solution to allow them access to get into these phones.
01:11:03.000But what else could he have on his phone if it's iCloud backed up?
01:11:06.000Like, an iCloud backup is essentially your phone, but it's in the cloud.
01:11:10.000Right, but you can also turn that off.
01:11:15.000I don't know the details of that, but I would suspect so.
01:11:18.000But there's other data that you can access from that phone that would be relevant to this.
01:11:22.000In this situation, I tend to side with Apple.
01:11:27.000I understand the Attorney General, his responsibility is whatever, protecting American citizens.
01:11:31.000So okay, he's going to have this position.
01:11:34.000But Apple is basically saying, look, we're not going to break the terms of our contract with all the people that have iPhones where we're providing them with privacy.
01:11:44.000And they're also, I think, saying to some degree, look, yeah, we understand that criminals can use encryption, right?
01:12:10.000I also kind of side with Apple at this point because, frankly, I think technology has kind of made some of these arguments moot, meaning that there are ways to get into these phones now.
01:12:19.000So the bureau or the government doesn't have to just go to Apple and say, please let us in.
01:12:26.000There was boxes that the police were buying that would allow you to hack in the phones, right?
01:12:43.000But then the problem is bad guys can buy them.
01:12:45.000So they can get a hold of your phone, steal your phone from you, and then open it up and then use your phone to text people or get weird with you.
01:12:52.000Yeah, and so then what are you saying?
01:12:53.000Are you saying, okay, well, a company that's got that access point, like the Israeli company or several others out there...
01:13:00.000Grayshift and a few others that provide this.
01:13:02.000So then you're relying on them to control who they're selling to.
01:13:06.000And some of these companies sell only to the government and to whoever is DEA or – and so I guess the point being is that I don't think the old arguments of even a few years ago that says we can't get in so we need Apple's assistance, I think that's kind of going by the wayside.
01:13:21.000And, you know, the government does have the ability to get in there at this point.
01:13:24.000So I'm not quite sure why they're picking a fight.
01:13:27.000Again, I don't know all the details, but I don't know why they're picking a fight.
01:13:30.000Is it possible that they can't get in the phone?
01:13:45.000They don't want to hand over that ability or that software because, again, it's a commercial issue, right, for them.
01:13:50.000Right, but shouldn't it be possible if they don't want to hand over that software that they could just open it for the government and the government doesn't have to get the software?
01:13:59.000Yeah, the government's made that argument to them before for whatever reason because I think in part it's the optic that says, okay, well, apparently Apple's willing to do this.
01:14:08.000I think they just want to hold the line and say absolutely not because I think they're – You know, they're looking at this from, again, from almost a pure commercial perspective.
01:14:16.000I kind of understand that, but then I kind of say, this guy's a fucking terrorist and a mass shooter.
01:15:01.000There's hacking solutions that are legitimately available through forensics groups that have been developing these things that can assist the government to do this.
01:16:13.000That's all you do all day long is watch one person.
01:16:16.000But then there's the thing about them collecting data, like the NSA collecting data and collecting all your phone calls, collecting all your text messages.
01:16:24.000You know what's a bigger threat is Amazon or Google.
01:16:40.000So it's got a camera and the whole idea was, well, we'll do this so that we can figure out what you're watching and what you think of it.
01:16:46.000So not only is it watching, but it could listen.
01:16:48.000So it's the commercial side that's collecting information, not necessarily for nefarious purposes, they're collecting it for marketing purposes and to make more money, which is what they're in business to do.
01:16:59.000But they're the ones that are hoovering up data, right?
01:17:02.000That then leaks out because somebody hacks, grabs all that information, and then they use it for something nefarious.
01:17:07.000Well, I get nervous when I hear about companies like Facebook that are thinking about starting their own cryptocurrency.
01:24:02.000It's almost celebrating the idea that the system is broke.
01:24:06.000We're just gonna fucking shoot everybody who's rich and light everything on fire and let these fucking mentally ill people not take their medication and just run things.
01:25:53.000Yeah, he's like a guy who was dying, had a blood disease, and he goes, like, one last thing to figure it out, and I guess the bats helped him.
01:26:29.000I'm sitting outside on the porch one day.
01:26:31.000Again, sorry about this, but I'm sitting out on the porch and I look up and it's the sun setting.
01:26:36.000And this thing flies out from the top of the roof.
01:26:39.000We've got this four-story brick place and out comes this thing.
01:26:42.000And then another one, then another one.
01:26:44.000We've got bats flying out because it's getting dark and they're coming out of our attic.
01:26:48.000So I'm thinking, you've got to be kidding me.
01:26:49.000So, we went to a wildlife specialist who came over, and he kind of staked out the place a couple of nights, figured out what the story was with him, and we eventually got rid of the bats.
01:27:04.000You didn't hire a wildlife specialist?
01:29:50.000You remember, as a kid, though, the rabies thing was always, you don't want to get rabies because you've got to go in for these series of shots in your stomach.
01:31:58.000They would go, we're not going any further!
01:32:01.000I think it would be interesting if you had an agenda, like if you were going to go to Grand Canyon, then you were going to go to Zion National Park, you had a bunch of different things to do, and you had months of time, and you could make your way across the country, but just the drive for fucking five days straight across the country,
01:33:12.000Well, if you're watching screens, too, that's not good for a kid to be watching screens eight hours a day, all day, just driving across the country while they're playing with their iPads.
01:36:26.000Well, it probably makes sense because I don't know that he's the sharpest tool in the box, and he's probably thinking we can make a lot more money.
01:36:34.000But they're not supposed to make any money off of being a member of the royal family, and yet they've trademarked, apparently, their brand, Duke and Duchess of Sussex.
01:36:44.000They're not allowed to make any money off of the royal family.
01:36:47.000So they're given allotments, allowances, living expenses.
01:36:58.000They can do whatever the fuck they want, but it would have been nice if they told their grandmother so that she didn't have to find out about it on the news.
01:37:21.000So she found out on TV, but they want to be financially independent.
01:37:27.000They trademarked Duke and Duchess of Sussex in a variety of different ways, apparently, and she's going to go back to doing whatever she did.
01:37:35.000It's that little American hussies he's hooked up with.
01:37:39.000She's come to turn him into a Kardashian.
01:37:43.000That's exactly what's going to happen.
01:37:44.000Yeah, well listen, they're already so popular, all they need to do is start endorsing fucking makeup lines and sneakers and watches and shit.
01:37:51.000Next thing you know, Jed's a millionaire.
01:37:53.000Yeah, well she's got a massive following on Instagram, which I suspect she wants to start to monetize that thing.
01:37:59.000Well, how much do you think they make?
01:39:48.000But imagine being a poor person and you find out that the queen, who literally does nothing, is making a hundred million dollars in a year.
01:41:08.000They just give them money for free to be a royal.
01:41:12.000And the British taxpayers are saying, like, what the fuck?
01:41:13.000We're going to keep subsidizing them, and they're going to go to Canada, and we're going to keep paying them, and they're going to live part-time here, and they're not going to do any of the representational work or whatever.
01:42:15.000And you know me, I'm not a conspiracy guy, right?
01:42:18.000I don't disappear down to rabbit holes very often, but no, I don't think there's any way in hell he killed himself.
01:42:21.000Michael Shermer, who's the head of Skeptics Magazine, who doesn't believe anything...
01:42:27.000Found out that the tapes were missing and that the fucking, the cameras didn't work and that the tapes were deleted from the first, accidentally deleted from the first time he attempted suicide.
01:42:37.000And Shermer's like, oh, this is a conspiracy.
01:42:39.000Like, it was enough evidence that one of the biggest skeptic, a professional skeptic, professional, he doesn't believe anything.
01:44:35.000You would have thought that Epstein would have said to himself, I'm going to get killed here if I'm not careful.
01:44:41.000Well, he probably didn't think it was ever going to get to the point where they were actually jailing him.
01:44:46.000Remember he had that deal where he was on work release so he could just do whatever he wanted and fuck off for 16 hours a day and then he had to check into the jail at night.
01:45:43.000She must have some fucking kill switch where if the shit goes down, all the Clinton tapes come piling out onto the fucking floor of Glenn Greenwald's house.
01:46:12.000It was about CIA operatives and the murder.
01:46:13.000So the idea was that what they said, what people believe, and there's many different versions of what people believe, but look how many pictures she posed for it.
01:46:22.000But what many people believe was that...
01:46:25.000What he was doing was compromising a lot of these wealthy, powerful people by getting videotapes of them hooking up with young girls, including Prince Andrew, right?
01:48:22.000I'd say from an Intel services perspective, I mean, one thing I will say is the U.S., and people are never going to believe this because I'm saying it.
01:48:35.000We don't do that sort of thing because that sort of leverage, it's always going to head south on you.
01:48:41.000And so we don't try to coerce somebody in sort of a relationship that then we can take advantage of.
01:48:50.000And yet other services do, Russians being one of them, they do that all the time.
01:48:56.000Israelis, yeah, they've had some very successful efforts to do that.
01:49:00.000And if you get somebody in that position, It doesn't matter how they're compromising themselves, whether you're putting themselves in with like an Epstein situation where suddenly you've got video of them with an underage person, or whether they've provided a document that they shouldn't provide.
01:49:46.000You can start reeling the hook in because now you know that not only did they do something that provided you with a document, even if it was an unclassified document.
01:49:53.000If I go to somebody, if I'm developing a relationship with somebody, some target overseas or whatever, and I'm thinking – All right.
01:51:34.000Then you ratchet it up slowly, you know, bit by bit if you've got the time frame to do it.
01:51:38.000Maybe sometimes, you know, you've got to shorten time frame because there's a requirement to get something and you've got to accelerate the whole process.
01:51:44.000Anyway, so the point being is it's all leverageable.
01:51:47.000And Epstein was obviously getting leverage on all these different people for whatever his purpose was.
01:52:23.000Like, I've tried to figure out the angle, but I mean, I get the idea of you would have leverage over these people, you'd have them in compromising situations, and then they would do things for you.
01:52:37.000Providing him with access, maybe he liked being close to, you know, the seat of power, or maybe, you know, he liked being close to what he thought was, like, a royal family member, you know, maybe...
01:53:17.000When something happens, even something as ridiculous as the Epstein case, where it's so obvious that he was murdered, and then Michael Baden goes on 60 Minutes and says, this is...
01:53:26.000I'm consistent with someone who is strangled.
01:53:27.000I've never, in all my years of seeing people hanged.
01:53:30.000I've never seen them with these kind of fractures.
01:53:31.000These fractures are indicative of strangulation.
01:53:34.000And that is one serious-minded dude, too, right?
01:54:35.000Well, I tell you what, if this new series I'm doing gets picked up for a second season, I'm going to recommend to the producers they put the Epstein case on there.
01:54:43.000Even though it's not quite in line with what we do.
01:57:21.000And that's where the war in space is going, basically, is into hypersonic, mostly unmanned.
01:57:30.000There's some effort to try to figure out, can we create a manned vehicle?
01:57:35.000It's really problematic because you think about traveling that fast and you think about what that means for punching through the air and the heat and the materials that are needed.
01:57:44.000But as far as unmanned glide vehicles or whatever, I mean, that's where a tremendous amount of resources are being put right now by the Russians, the Chinese, the U.S. But it's pretty frightening because we don't have any way to defend against it.
01:58:01.000Like the one fellow mentioned in that clip is that if you think about a sort of a ballistic missile, it's got a trajectory, right?
01:58:10.000It goes up and it comes down, just like the Cold War days.
01:58:13.000We had all the defenses set up to intercept Russian missiles coming towards us.
01:58:18.000Well, we knew what the path was going to be.
01:58:20.000And so we were able to deploy a defense system against this.
01:58:23.000The idea with hypersonic weapons is you have no idea, right?
01:58:27.000You've got almost no warning and you can't – you have no idea what that trajectory is for those weapons.
01:58:33.000It's going so fast and it's adjustable, right?
01:58:36.000So it's not just depending on – a missile, ballistic missile goes up and it's going to come down and you know exactly what that path is going to look like.
01:58:41.000So they can adjust it like they can slow it down?
01:59:26.000What started this thing off was the idea that, well, what if you just – literally just did follow the money and try to figure out from the money trails how they were developing these projects and could you identify the various projects that these pots of money go to?
01:59:40.000It turned out to be really – it's very interesting.
01:59:42.000I'm subjective of course but it's pretty good and it's – we don't have a specific air date yet.
01:59:50.000They're being very mum about it but it will be on Sunday nights.
01:59:54.000Coming to a science channel near you soon.
01:59:56.000So with these hypersonic missiles, they can, like, you can't judge from the path that it's gone so far where it's going.
02:00:09.000Yeah, the idea being is it's not following a It's not following a known trajectory.
02:00:13.000It's not following a ballistic trajectory.
02:00:16.000The effort to try to develop manned hypersonic flight has got a really fascinating history, and particularly here in the US. But we're not there.
02:00:34.000It may not happen in our lifetimes just because of the difficulties.
02:00:38.000I mean I interviewed some terrific people during the course of that, which is the best part of this.
02:00:43.000Sirius being, from my perspective, you travel around, you see all these interesting things, you talk to these fantastic folks, right?
02:00:48.000I mean, some incredible people, a former pilot for the old Blackbird program, right?
02:00:53.000This guy, you know, strap into this thing and get up to altitude, you know, on the edge of the atmosphere, doing these overflights of Russia and, you know, gathering or wherever and gathering intelligence.
02:01:09.000And just the dangers involved in these aircraft, these experimental aircraft that were being designed and the whole goal being eventually trying to work your way towards this hypersonic manned flight.
02:01:46.000The first person, like the first person who goes up in one of those things.
02:01:50.000Forget about all the testing and all the structural rigidity documents and all the data and everything that's showing you this is absolutely safe.
02:02:13.000This guy's – the story of this guy testing experimental aircraft to try to get to that point and some of the things that he did and it's astounding.
02:02:23.000You look at him and you think you're not normal and I talked to his wife and she said, yeah, it's interesting.
02:02:30.000She's been married to him forever but she says one of the interesting things you learn about being married to somebody like this.
02:02:34.000A test pilot or somebody else in a position like that is, you know, they don't process things the same way.
02:02:40.000They don't necessarily have a lot of empathy because they're just focused on this thing, right?
02:02:44.000And they're not necessarily thinking, well, I don't want to go up there and die because I'd be leaving my family behind and all, you know.
02:02:59.000The New York Times had articles about it.
02:03:02.000Air Force test pilots have come out talking about encountering flying saucers or unidentified flying objects, particularly Commander Fravor who had that tip-tack thing.
02:03:31.000I tend to be very cynical about everything.
02:03:33.000But after talking to some of these folks, including Fravor and a handful of others, who were both pilots and also were involved in the AATIP program for the U.S. government, for the military, There's things out there that we haven't been able to identify.
02:03:52.000I'm not jumping on the alien train necessarily, but what I'm saying is that there are things that extremely experienced pilots, military pilots with significant amounts of experience couldn't figure out,
02:04:20.000But what I do know is that the US government took it seriously enough that they developed their own internal program within the Pentagon to try to sort out the wheat from the chaff, right, and say, okay, what do we actually have to worry about in part because it's a national security issue, right?
02:04:35.000If there is an aircraft or if there's something up there that a pilot – a military pilot sees, for instance, that can't identify – All right.
02:04:44.000We have an obligation to figure out what that is because if it's a hostile foreign government's efforts to develop craft that we don't know about or propulsion systems we don't know about, then yes, we should be working on that issue.
02:04:56.000The problem has always been that once you talk about that, then people immediately go, oh, aliens, huh?
02:05:02.000Area 51. And it kind of gets dismissed.
02:05:33.000When a guy like Fravor, that's the thing.
02:05:36.000When someone who's that rock solid comes out and tells the story, and he's not deviating from his story, he's not a guy who's trying to make money, he doesn't have a history of telling fantastic stories.
02:05:47.000And he knew what it meant when he was going to come forward and talk about this.
02:05:49.000And you've got the gun cameras, and you've got the radar operators who also saw the same thing.
02:05:54.000They saw it, and they said it was actively jamming their radar.
02:05:58.000And then the way it moved from 60,000 feet down to 200 feet in less than a second.
02:06:03.000And no signs of any propulsion system.
02:06:06.000No, there's several things about that that...
02:06:09.000Yeah, it'll leave you scratching your head.
02:06:10.000Again, I'm not making a case one way or the other.
02:06:14.000The point of this is to, again, is to kind of use the money trail as a way to get inside some of these programs and then to the degree that you can talk about things that are declassified.
02:06:28.000You know, not necessarily trying to make a case.
02:06:31.000We're not trying to say it is this or it is that, you know, but I think we're presenting a lot of interesting information that, you know, again, with this situation with Fravor as an example, you know, you come away from it and you think, okay, I'm not dismissing anything at this point.
02:06:44.000Just, you know, it would be, I think, foolish to or...
02:07:09.000That was on a floor we weren't allowed to go onto at the headquarters.
02:07:12.000It seems like if we had to admit it was real, if it was something that was real, and we were being contacted on a regular basis, or at least a semi-regular basis, that would change the way everybody feels about everything.
02:07:45.000I mean, think if that did come out, which is part of the allure, right, is the idea that the government's been keeping this from us for all these years.
02:07:53.000And you think about what that would mean.
02:07:56.000Not just obviously, oh my god, really, there's something going on out there.
02:07:58.000But then sort of that breakdown in trust.
02:08:01.000Not that it's not happening already in terms of the government and its ability to...
02:08:07.000I mean, look, Area 51. Area 51 was scouted out for use as an experimental, you know, test site for aircraft.
02:08:20.000Well, then you get all these experimental aircraft being developed out there and flown some successfully, some not.
02:08:25.000And, you know, locals, you know, see this shit, you know, locals being a fairly good-sized region because of the distance on these.
02:08:34.000And, you know, it's understandable how you start getting some of these stories.
02:08:40.000But, you know, having said that, you know, I sat down with Fravor, right?
02:08:46.000We talked about this a lot for this one episode, and I talked to several others.
02:08:53.000Yeah, again, I come away and I'm not sure what to think, but again, I'm not closing the book on anything at this point.
02:08:59.000See, the way I looked at it is if these were unique expeditions from another planet, or whatever it is, that comes here, some alien spacecraft, all they'd have to do is come here once.
02:09:31.000Well, I was just thinking that if they were going to come down here and examine us, I mean, they could just do it a couple of times, and people have these stories, and everybody else dismisses it, like, where are they?
02:09:59.000They're not going to look at us and say we want to steal their technology.
02:10:01.000It's the most fascinating thing to me.
02:10:03.000Out of all the weird what-ifs and who could do this and how could that be true, the alien one is the most fascinating.
02:10:10.000Because if that was real, and if we somehow or another one day get some undeniable proof, like the Fravor film, the film footage, the gunner footage, the radar footage, that's pretty goddamn compelling.
02:10:23.000But man, if there was something like off the charts...
02:10:25.000Well, and that's the problem always, and people will point to that and say, you know, even the gun camera footage is, you know, look at this.
02:10:46.000But yeah, the hypersonics is the – of all the episodes we did, I think the hypersonics is the one that's – It really makes you stand up and think this is pretty fucked up if we get beat to this.
02:11:00.000You don't want to be in an arms race, but you essentially are.
02:11:59.000Look, if you go to Washington, the interesting thing about threats, if you look and say, okay, what are the top threats in the face of the U.S.? The top three have never really changed in decades, right?
02:12:11.000And then what fills out the top two after – if you go for the top five, critical infrastructure here in the U.S., which is actually probably at the top.
02:12:19.000I mean if you say to people in D.C. what worries you the most, they'll say attacks on our critical infrastructure.
02:12:25.000But Russia, China, Iran, they may switch places occasionally, but they're always up there in that top five.
02:12:33.000But it's – so China is always going to be an issue and they've been very aggressive both in terms of acquiring information, economic espionage, their military build out and their desire to kind of take back the Pacific from us.
02:12:51.000And so yeah, it's our primary competitor.
02:12:57.000And the narrative about Russia collusion has captured the imagination for three years now and still seems to hold some interest for some Dems in Washington DC no matter what happens.
02:13:08.000But – and then Iran kind of plays that role because of its nuclear pursuits.
02:13:14.000North Korea is up there to some degree but kind of bounces in and out of the top.
02:13:32.000I mean, the hope is always that if we're about to nuke ourselves into another dimension, that the aliens will come down and go hit dummies.
02:14:48.000I remember sitting in the theater when that movie came out, watching it, and when it popped out of that guy's chest, the entire theater jumped.
02:14:58.000It's hard because you watch that movie today and you're watching it having seen all the other movies that it's affected and all the other science fiction genre movies and special effects movies, but that movie was special.
02:15:12.000In 1979 when that movie came out, that was a special movie.
02:15:16.000That was a fucking horrifically scary movie and it was realistic.
02:16:16.000I find it hard to believe it would be such a secret.
02:16:19.000But, you know, and also knowing the U.S. government, look, I mean, you know, it's harder to find out from the network when they're going to start this show than getting secrets out of Washington, D.C., right?
02:16:30.000So I'm thinking, you know, we would have known for now if it had happened.
02:16:35.000But I do believe there's other secrets.
02:16:46.000But I'm also fascinated to think that if they did know that something was here, that they would visit it occasionally, drop in on it occasionally for a scientific expedition to see what the fuck we're up to.
02:17:06.000We don't get disgusted when we go visit baboons.
02:17:10.000When we study baboons, scientists return.
02:17:13.000Robert Sapolsky, he spent many years going back and forth to Africa studying baboons.
02:17:18.000And baboons are boring as fuck compared to people.
02:17:22.000If you weren't a person, if you weren't a person, if you were from some enlightened race a million years advanced from us, you would be so fascinated to come by and look at people.
02:17:32.000Yeah, although they probably look at us like we're a bunch of shit-flinging monkeys, so I think you're probably right.
02:17:37.000I mean, if we had a time machine, tell me it wouldn't be amazing if there was a time machine but it could only go back 500,000 years ago to the beginning of man.
02:17:45.000Like the early, you know, whatever ancient hominid that was that was alive back then.
02:17:51.000God damn, that would be fascinating to be a fly on the wall and watch these primitive humanoids try to figure out fire and try to figure out hunting and become what we are today.
02:18:17.000I mean, if there's higher life forms out there, and you'd have to assume they are higher life forms if they're traveling these distances, and again, looking at the issues of propulsion systems for hypersonic flight, etc., Would they look at this bunch of folks down here and think,
02:19:44.000Unless you're involved in criminal activity or terrorism, They honestly don't have any interest, but they also don't have the resources and the time available.
02:19:52.000Commercial side of things, though, is different because it drives what they're all about, which is making money.
02:19:57.000Especially when you sign those terms of agreements, the terms of use agreements.
02:20:33.000New law passed in California this year.
02:20:35.000California's Consumer Privacy Act allows anyone who resides in a state to access and obtain copies of the data that companies store on them and the right to delete that data and opt out of companies selling or monetizing their data.
02:21:06.000Just too many people found out about it.
02:21:08.000My worry is more of social media companies now than anything, even in a lot of ways more than the government spying on us.
02:21:18.000I worry about the power that something like Facebook has.
02:21:22.000The insane amount of influence that they have on people and how through the use of their algorithms they actually instigate arguments and try to get people – because that's how people respond and that's what makes people want to click on things and that's what generates revenue.
02:21:35.000So their algorithms encourage – the idea is that they encourage outrage, but they don't really.
02:22:03.000It's based entirely on what your needs are or what your interests are.
02:22:06.000But so many people are interested in things that outrage them that it becomes a very profitable thing for them when their algorithm shows these people what they want.
02:22:20.000It's not like the algorithm is some nefarious algorithm that's designed to instigate strife.
02:22:25.000No, it's taking advantage of human nature to some degree, but it's also, I mean, you've raised a really important point because coming up on this election, people are talking about, oh my god, they're going to hack in, they're going to influence the vote.
02:22:36.000Part of the danger is in the social engineering, and it's very clever.
02:22:41.000So if you look at something that just happened, this actually is really interesting, and it's still being investigated, but A report came out from a group, Area 1, which is looking at hackers and looking at cybersecurity issues.
02:23:04.000It's not a particularly well-known group.
02:23:05.000It's not like Kaspersky or some of these others that are out there.
02:23:08.000But they just came out with a report a couple days ago basically saying that the Russians, a Russian entity, likely the former GRU, the military intelligence group of the Russian intelligence service, hacked into Burisma.
02:23:23.000Now, Burisma is that company in the Ukraine that Hunter Biden was sat on the board of, right?
02:23:28.000And now you think, oh, Russians hacked into it.
02:23:32.000And so what happens almost immediately when this report comes out saying a Russian intel operation hacked into Burisma recently as it was sort of becoming an issue and Trump was banging on about it and Hunter Biden and there was talk about holding up Ukrainian aid if you don't investigate the Biden situation.
02:23:54.000So you'd look at this, and if you just looked at it on a very simple level, you go, wow.
02:23:58.000And I've already seen some of that narrative saying, well, look, the Russians are working on behalf of Trump again.
02:24:05.000They're hacking into Burisma, and that's what he was complaining about.
02:24:10.000If you step back and you think about what are the Russians trying to do with all of their hacking efforts, all their social media engineering, they're trying to create dissent.
02:24:21.000Now you're ramping up this story again.
02:24:25.000To what degree Area 1's story or report is correct, I mean there's some discussion as to whether it's accurate or not, but to that degree that you have to look at everything now with a very skeptical eye and you have to say, okay, what is the purpose of it?
02:25:00.000It's like after Soleimani was smoked, almost immediately after, social media posts sort of pro – Very subtly, but pro-Iranian regime, pro-Suleimani, again,
02:25:16.000very subtle, but in that vein, they spiked over the course of the next 48 hours.
02:25:21.000Massive numbers compared to what had been in the past of sympathetic enough to turn people's thoughts, right?
02:25:29.000To get that narrative going of like, well, oh my god, they assassinated a foreign leader, right?
02:25:33.000That's all they're looking to do is create that.
02:25:35.000And the Iranian cybersecurity force is increasingly sophisticated.
02:25:39.000Ten years ago, they probably wouldn't have been able to orchestrate sort of that sort of social media work.
02:25:45.000I guess my point being is that we look at things very simplistically, right?
02:25:49.000We look at – because we tend to look at it through this political spectrum saying I'm right, I'm left, whatever.
02:25:53.000But you have to step back and think what are they doing?
02:26:27.000Next thing you know, it's got 10,000 likes and people are talking about it like it's correct.
02:26:32.000Yeah, that's a real problem with today's social media, is that these agencies, like the Internet Research Agency in Russia did before the 2016 election, they really can stir up dissent.
02:26:44.000With these thousands and thousands of social media accounts that they have, and they can get people thinking in a certain way.
02:26:52.000They can get people to argue things in a certain way.
02:26:54.000And you hear those talking points at these bots and these companies that are designed just to stir people up.
02:27:02.000You see those talking points repeated.
02:27:06.000And look, the Russians have been doing this.
02:27:08.000You know, years and years ago, decades ago, they were buying off journalists to write favorable articles or articles that they wanted to get the narrative out there for, right?
02:27:16.000So they would pay off journalists, whether it was overseas or here, wherever it may be.
02:28:15.000It's any nation that's got the resource or the ability and somewhat motivation and sees it in their own best interest, they're going to be engaged in this.
02:28:25.000So I have a cyber unit that's doing this sort of thing.
02:28:28.000So I don't know where it's going to go, but you worry about sort of the impact that it has.
02:28:53.000We're not going to rely on the internet.
02:28:55.000You know what they're doing in Iowa for the caucuses?
02:28:57.000It's all going to be internet-based voting reporting for the caucuses in Iowa.
02:29:04.000But again, you think that whether it's independent hackers or state-sponsored from China, Russia, wherever, of course they're targeting this.
02:29:12.000And they're putting a great deal of resource into it.
02:29:14.000And they've already probably mapped out the infrastructure.
02:29:20.000If you're targeting a terrorist organization and you start having success picking up comms and communications and gathering signals intelligence on them, first thing they do is throw their phones away and go back to the old system of, look, I'm going to handwrite some message.