In this episode of the Joe Rogan Experience, Joe and Mike Baker discuss the latest in the war on the flu, including Joe Biden getting a booster, and why he might have been exposed to it. They also talk about the border situation, and whether or not Kamala Harris is a good or bad thing, and what it means for the future of the border security situation. Also, they talk about Joe's new book, and how much he's getting paid for it, and if it's really as bad as he says it is. And, of course, there's a special guest on the pod this week, Joe's good friend and former co-worker, Chris Wallace. You won't want to miss it! Subscribe to the full show on Apple Podcasts and leave us your thoughts and reactions in the comments section below. Thanks for listening and share the podcast with your friends and family! Timestamps: 1:00:00 - What's going on in your life? 2:30 - Who's running the show? 3:15 - What are we supposed to do next? 4:20 - What s going on with the border? 5:00 6:40 - What do you think of the new border security plan? 7:30 8:15 9:20 What's the best way to deal with it? 11:00 | What are you would you like to see? 12:30 | What s your thoughts? 13:40 15: What s the worst thing you veep? 16: Is it a good thing? 17:40 | How do you want to know what s going to do? 18: What's your favorite thing to do with your kids sis? 19:20 | How many people are you're going to get a shot? 21:50 | Is it better than that? 22:00 / 22:10 | What is your favorite part of the job? 26:00 // 22:50 27: How do I feel about the situation? 25: What would you want me to do in Mexico? 24:00 + 27: What do I think of it? / 27: Does it feel like? 28:00 & 29: What is my favorite part? 35:00/30 32:30 / 35:40 / 36:00 Is it possible?
00:01:52.000There's so many things that are fucked up about this, but people have forgotten that every year, maybe you go out and you get your flu shot.
00:01:59.000It didn't mean you weren't going to come down with the flu that season.
00:02:02.000It just would be maybe a little bit better, right?
00:05:10.000But now you can pass through any country and then get to America and claim asylum, even though you've been going through a variety of other countries to get here.
00:05:19.000So I'm not sure how the definition changed at some point.
00:05:21.000But no, I think to get back to the original point, I think VP Harris, she's done a fine job with the border.
00:05:29.000What the fuck is going on where he was saying that they're going to punish the guys who are on horses because they're strapping these Haitian immigrants?
00:06:58.000I just can't imagine that they don't matter when you're the actual president.
00:07:01.000It's one thing if you're CNN and you're just full of shit, but this is just the president of the United States saying that someone would be held accountable for strapping these people.
00:07:21.000Based on that, because the optic in their mind, again, it's not the reality.
00:07:26.000It's the narrative now that they can glom onto.
00:07:31.000They can now make decisions such as taking away one of the most effective tools with the border patrol in that part of the country is the horse.
00:07:41.000And now they're going to take it away.
00:07:44.000So you've got Jen Psaki up in Washington, D.C. Proclaiming these things as if she's been an equestrian all her life and she understands exactly what she's talking about.
00:08:26.000Split reins is that instead of a loop that goes from one side of the horse's mouth to the other, there's two Two separate strings or pieces of leather or whatever it is?
00:08:34.000Yeah, the reins are split, exactly what it says.
00:08:38.000And so that's – again, I keep going back to that one point, which is it doesn't really matter what the facts are anymore.
00:08:48.000As an example, today was—now I'm kind of bouncing around a little bit—but today was hearings up on the Hill.
00:08:54.000The Senate Armed Services Committee was holding hearings.
00:08:59.000They had Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin.
00:09:00.000They had CENTCOM Commander General McKenzie, great guy.
00:09:05.000They had the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Milley.
00:09:10.000So they all, to the last one, said, yes, we were advising the president that, you know, our advice is to maintain a small troop presence, minimum of 2,500 troops,
00:09:29.000And our belief was not that it would collapse as quickly as it did, but that it would collapse if you took those advisers, those troops out, that it would collapse maybe by fall, this fall.
00:09:40.000And yet you've got the president saying, I don't recall being told any of that.
00:09:54.000How about saying, what do you mean you don't recall?
00:09:56.000This is one of the most important decisions you've made or will be making.
00:09:59.000And you don't recall whether your senior top military advisors were telling you that in their advice, keep the troops in there for a period of time.
00:10:10.000And there's really no serious pushback.
00:10:12.000This whole hearing, if anybody wants to know what Washington, D.C. is like and how that city runs, I'd recommend maybe on Thursday watching some more of these hearings on the Afghanistan process because it's just...
00:10:28.000You've got the senators on the Armed Services Committee who have been there, who have been privy to all sorts of intelligence over the past few years, right?
00:10:35.000Now, sitting in a hearing to understand what happened, what went wrong with the Afghan withdrawal, and they're all acting as if, you know, they could be surprised by this.
00:10:45.000When these politicians have been sitting up for Capitol Hill, being briefed on this shit, having the opportunity to ask questions, doing all the things they should be doing, but now because it's all theater, now they get to sit in a hearing in front of some of the senior military commanders and act as if they're a little bit surprised by all of this.
00:11:56.000But that one man has the ability to make these economic decisions, right?
00:12:00.000These decisions about healthcare, these decisions about taxes, these decisions about the military, these decisions about the future of the troops.
00:12:11.000I mean, there's even this discussion that they're throwing around about making it so troops that won't get vaccinated, they get dishonorably discharged.
00:12:26.000I don't even know if they can do that, but there was a soldier, and she had made a video, and she is releasing this video explaining what's happening, that they're going to get discharged if they refuse to get vaccinated.
00:12:41.000I can't believe they would dishonorably discharge them.
00:12:43.000That would be a real fucking shock if that's what they were doing.
00:12:48.000It might have been exaggerated in an article for the headline, but I think that they're planning on doing something along those lines.
00:12:56.000Well, look, I think it does surprise people sometimes when they see the extent, and if they were watching these hearings and understanding The information flow about Afghanistan.
00:13:09.000Look, there was a lot of talk, right, in the aftermath of this withdrawal clown show, that, you know, what happened?
00:13:18.000How did we miss certain pieces of intelligence?
00:13:20.000And there's a lot to figure out there, but the idea that That the president would sit there in his office with all these senior advisors around, and they would say, sir, here are your options, because that's always basically what they're doing.
00:13:35.000And theoretically, they are supposed to be strong enough to argue their point as strongly as possible, right?
00:13:52.000And now Millie, McKenzie, others, they all said that Biden listened very, you know, seriously to them.
00:13:58.000But there was a political decision here, right?
00:14:01.000That political decision was, we're getting the hell out.
00:14:04.000Now, the interesting thing is, is that Biden, he kind of wants to have it both ways, right?
00:14:12.000He wants to take credit for being brave and saying we're getting the hell out, right?
00:14:17.000But then he also wants to blame the previous administration for the reason why he had to be getting the hell out.
00:14:23.000So he wants to blame the Doha agreement that Trump signed in February of 2020. And what was that?
00:14:28.000Well, that was when the Trump administration made a deal with the Taliban in February of 2020, and basically it had conditions within that.
00:14:39.000And General Milley and McKenzie talked about those conditions, I think, today in their hearings, actually.
00:14:44.000There were seven conditions placed on the Taliban.
00:14:54.000Now, the administration, the previous administration, people don't want to hear this shit, right?
00:14:58.000Because they're so entrenched in their own camp, right?
00:15:00.000So people who are on the hard left, they're not going to want to hear the fact that the Doha agreement was based on conditions, right?
00:15:08.000But the most senior military commanders today reaffirmed that, yes, there were seven conditions for that agreement to follow through, for us to follow through.
00:15:17.000We had eight conditions for the U.S. And now, during the course of the discussions and the negotiations, and this whole agreement was based on a power sharing.
00:15:25.000The idea was, we want to create an opportunity for the Taliban and the Afghan government.
00:15:30.000We want them all to come together and create a power sharing agreement.
00:15:41.000And you could also argue, and again, because people are so entrenched, no one's going to give any credit to whether they want to give credit to Biden or they want to give credit to Trump or any Republican president or Democrat president.
00:15:53.000The Trump administration did kind of broker the hard, heavy lift of saying, we're getting the hell out.
00:16:02.000There had been talk around the edges in previous administrations about how long would it be there, right?
00:16:06.000But the German administration did finally actually say, fuck it, let's get a negotiation, let's go and let's set a time to get the fuck out after 20 years.
00:16:17.000They set the table for that, you know, hardline withdrawal.
00:16:21.000But the Taliban never met those conditions.
00:16:24.000The only thing they did was not attack U.S. troops directly.
00:16:27.000But as Milley and Mackenzie said today, they never met any of the other conditions.
00:16:33.000So it had been explained to the Taliban that if that was the case and you don't meet these conditions, we're not going to leave in May.
00:16:40.000We're going to just keep pushing the withdrawal date further to the right.
00:16:44.000So why was the decision made to withdraw then?
00:16:47.000Well, look, in part, I think, because I think everybody got behind the idea that we can't stay there forever because I think everybody understood that it just wasn't happening.
00:17:00.000They weren't buying what we were selling.
00:17:03.000And you don't want to be completely fatalistic all the time, but with Afghanistan, it's not a bad frame of reference to remember all the other times that things like this have failed.
00:17:13.000And so the idea that somehow we were going to build a stable pseudo-democratic government in Afghanistan was always flawed, and there was never really any evidence to show that that was going to happen.
00:17:26.000And it was propped up, and I think nobody really wanted to tell the truth in positions of leadership, whether it was military or government or intel community.
00:17:37.000And so I think there was general agreement that, yeah, we got to get the fuck out.
00:17:44.000And then it came down to, well, how do we do that?
00:17:46.000And we faced some of the same problems that the old Soviets faced getting the hell out of Afghanistan.
00:17:51.000But I think with this case, part of it was We had pulled advisers off the Afghan units, you know, two, three years ago, right?
00:18:05.000So the withdrawal process had been going on for a number of years, you know, over the past decade or so, you know, in a sense, right?
00:18:13.000We'd been drawing back, pulling out some resource, pulling out troops, lowering the troop numbers, putting more responsibility on contractors.
00:18:22.000Once you take the advisors out of the Afghan units, in a sense, you don't have really eyes and ears inside the Afghan military.
00:18:30.000So you can have President Ghani or some bullshit Afghan commander just telling you whatever you want to hear, but you didn't have a lot of folks...
00:18:40.000At ground level, working with the troops saying, all right, this shit's not going to hold, right?
00:18:47.000Particularly after the Doha agreement, right?
00:18:49.000Once I think that the Doha agreement was made, I think the writing's on the wall and even the Afghan military could see it, right?
00:18:56.000And they could read it and they could say, okay, this shit's not going to happen.
00:19:01.000We're not going to keep getting money.
00:19:02.000We're not going to keep getting advisors.
00:19:03.000And we're not going to get the air support that is really the only thing that keeps us in power.
00:19:11.000So, you know, at some point over a period of a few years, we were degrading our own ability to actually understand just how bad it was getting, right?
00:19:21.000And so then it became a logistical exercise.
00:19:27.000You got to move personnel and you got to move material out of the country.
00:19:31.000And that's where you could argue it all kind of went sideways.
00:20:36.000But here's the thing, the interesting point that came out from General Milley and General McKenzie during these hearings is that they claim, they're stating, and I have no reason not to believe them, they're stating that the general consensus by the fall of 2020, right?
00:20:51.000Was that without the troops in there, once you take the U.S. troops out and the money, then the government's going to collapse probably by fall of this year.
00:21:07.000Now, in a classic piece of Washington speak, I think it was the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in answering a question said, no, we never saw any assessment that said that the government would collapse in 11 days.
00:21:38.000And look, the intel community, we've been talking about that for years.
00:21:43.000All you had to do was study the Soviet papers during their time, their occupation in Afghanistan, to understand how we were likely going to replay that scenario.
00:21:55.000So, you know, you could argue that what should have happened was years ago, we should have looked around and thought, this is a bullshit exercise, right?
00:22:06.000Doesn't mean that, you know, and I think the military today The senior commanders today and during this week, I think you'll see them make a huge effort to say, first and foremost, the veterans and everyone who fought there and all the hardship,
00:24:39.000Actually, there's a really good quote down here.
00:24:40.000When an individual declines to take a mandatory vaccine, they will be given an opportunity to talk to both their medical providers as well as their own chain of command.
00:24:48.000Yeah, you know how excited they're going to be to go and talk to their own chain of command so that they can fully understand the decision they are making.
00:25:53.000And the idea, and there's been a lot of talk about why did we close Bagram?
00:25:57.000Why did they close the air base before they'd finish this whole process, right?
00:26:01.000So I guess one of the things is this is very layered.
00:26:05.000And again, as with just about everything else that goes on in the world today, because everybody's got attention deficit disorder, Nobody takes the time to look at all the various layers, right?
00:26:19.000So this fell down, as you said before, it fell into teams, right?
00:26:22.000So you're either pro-Biden or you're not, right?
00:26:26.000You're either pro-vaccine or you're not.
00:26:30.000There's all sorts of ground in between those two positions.
00:26:34.000And so I think with Bagram, the idea was In a sense, that wasn't there necessarily because it's some Pagram Air Base is like 30 miles away from the US Embassy in Kabul.
00:26:49.000And so would that have been an effective departure point, you know, for all the people we were looking to move out during the withdrawal?
00:27:07.000And by the way, if we're going to keep Bagram open, we needed, you know, upwards of five or 6,000 troops to secure it.
00:27:14.000But it all comes back to this idea that, you know, the agreement with the Taliban, because both sides are using it In sort of an effort to cover their own ass.
00:27:25.000So the Democrats are using it because, well, we were boxed in.
00:27:39.000And the Republicans are using it by saying there were conditions built into the agreement.
00:27:43.000And you didn't have to honor the agreement.
00:27:47.000Now, that would have meant we would have had to probably put more troops in, you know, to secure the people that we already had there, the advisors that were there.
00:28:03.000It was the process of how you executed that.
00:28:05.000And Bagram was kind of a central point in that because if you could maintain air cover for the Afghan military, right, during the point when you're withdrawing, You can prevent the Taliban from doing what they did, which was that immediate overrun of the country.
00:28:20.000They couldn't do it with our air support, without our air support, I mean.
00:28:25.000So the questions that someone would have on the outside is, when this happened, did this strengthen the Taliban?
00:28:32.000And did it strengthen not just their military position because they have all these new weapons and everything, but did it also strengthen morale because they now force the Americans out and beat them and then punished all of the allies that worked with the Americans,
00:28:47.000which is devastating because you got to think now people are going to be way more reluctant to cooperate with Americans and help them.
00:28:56.000In a similar situation, because we kind of abandoned all those people that were translators, all those people that – there was a lot that got left behind, right?
00:29:08.000Yeah, they're claiming – I think they're – look, what's happening is they're trying to say, look, the withdrawal process was a huge success.
00:29:37.000I think it's really hard to define this as a success, but, you know, in their position, they got to spin it the best they can.
00:29:43.000But if you think about, you know, what you were just saying, in a small sense, it's tough enough.
00:29:50.000If I'm in Afghanistan, and I'm trying to develop sources inside the country while I'm there that can tell me about Taliban movement, right?
00:30:02.000So I'm trying to convince some tribal elder somewhere, for whatever reason.
00:30:07.000Maybe his kid was killed by the Taliban.
00:30:09.000Maybe the Taliban took his underage daughter into marriage.
00:30:16.000Maybe They denied him medical care, whatever.
00:30:20.000It doesn't matter whether it's this case or whether you're recruiting anybody.
00:30:23.000You're always looking for a point of weakness, right, in a sense.
00:30:25.000That sounds wrong, but you're looking for leverage.
00:30:28.000And so I'm trying to convince this person to work with me and provide me with intelligence.
00:30:36.000That's counter to his best interest in a sense, right?
00:30:39.000Because he's probably going to think, okay, well, if I get found out, I'm getting whacked.
00:31:05.000I'm jumping all over the fucking place.
00:31:07.000This feeds into this talk now that's become the favorite phrase in Washington of over-the-horizon capability, which means conducting operations from a distance because you don't have resources within that area of operations.
00:31:23.000So you're over the horizon, but you're going to dip in occasionally whenever you need to and carry out some type of operation.
00:31:34.000And so, yeah, to answer your question, it makes it very, very difficult.
00:33:13.000Anyway, yeah, it's just nobody spoke the truth in Washington about the situation in Afghanistan because nobody wanted to hear it, right?
00:33:26.000And they felt that it wasn't politically a good move.
00:33:28.000And so nobody wanted to stand up because they're all so fucking worried about their jobs and say, this is my opinion, so what it's worth, and say the tough things about the situation there.
00:33:42.000Either because they felt like if I say something negative about what we're doing in Afghanistan, it's disrespecting the troops, which it's not, or I'll probably get drummed out of my nice political position.
00:33:57.000And when you watch hearings that take place in Washington, D.C., the whole thing is about just finding somebody to blame other than your own self or your party.
00:34:06.000And it seems like no one's going to get blamed.
00:35:07.000It was before I think before the inauguration, we were probably in the 5,000 to 4,000 range.
00:35:14.000We had probably 3,000 or so paramilitary troops there from the agency.
00:35:20.000We probably had, I don't know how many contractors, you know, a few thousand more contractors.
00:35:24.000So it was a significant – at that point, it was a significant presence, but it was a significant drawdown from even a couple of years ago, right?
00:35:32.000So again, the drawdown had been happening, right?
00:35:38.000And so you had the retrograde of the military operation, and then you had This evacuation, right?
00:35:46.000Or this withdrawal of all the, you know, diplomatic personnel, other Americans there, the SIVs, all of those people.
00:35:55.000And that you could consider as sort of a separate operation.
00:35:58.000And that's the withdrawal part of the whole thing that took place that seemed so chaotic and was, right?
00:36:05.000But the military also Look, the military is very good at planning a variety of scenarios.
00:36:10.000So it's not like they didn't think, there's a chance this whole thing goes to shit.
00:36:53.000It's down to political maneuvering in Washington and just a desire to get the hell out and maybe ignoring assessments.
00:36:59.000Because whether you're saying your assessment is, as General McKenzie and General Milley are saying, is that, you know, by the end of 2020, they were basically saying, advising the president and his team that things could fall to shit in a matter of months,
00:37:28.000And I'm not quite sure, you know, why, but I don't suspect we're ever going to get full transparency on this because, again, it's not the way Washington works.
00:37:37.000Do you get concerned when you see all this sort of woke ideology making its way into the military?
00:38:05.000Look, somebody decided that the right messaging for trying to improve recruitment ability for the agency, and mind you, the agency isn't lacking in candidates, right?
00:38:18.000We have a lot of people applying for the agency.
00:38:23.000But at some point, someone thought the right message was to just go all out on the...
00:38:28.000Whatever you want to call it, the woke issue and the inclusion.
00:38:31.000And so they had an individual who basically spent her time talking.
00:38:37.000While she said she didn't want to be identified in such a manner or in such a manner that she then proceeded to identify herself in these various categories.
00:38:47.000I just think somebody should have test marketed that message inside the agency first before they decided to run with it because they took a lot of heat and people just thought it was ridiculous.
00:39:02.000From an operational perspective, you know, set aside all the woke issues and the desire to be inclusive and everything, just from an operational perspective, you know, you want an intel service that is remarkably diverse because you're operating all over the world.
00:39:16.000And you don't want everybody to have the same mindset and the same ideas and sitting around a table dealing with a potential problem because they're all going to throw the same idea at it, right?
00:39:25.000So you want a variety of personalities and backgrounds and everything, but I just think that they, you know, They could have test-marketed that one a little better.
00:39:32.000Well, it's not just about the agency, too.
00:40:13.000Celebrate all of our differences, and we should have people that feel comfortable in all walks of life, whether it's gay, straight, bi, trans, black, white, Mexican, Asian.
00:40:26.000Everyone should be included, and it should be a meritocracy based on your performance, and you should look at all these factors.
00:40:34.000That make this United States a wonderful place with all these different kinds of human beings and we should celebrate that.
00:40:42.000It's highlighting that to the point of that being the primary concern.
00:40:47.000The primary concern being inclusiveness and diversity and highlighting these various minority groups.
00:40:56.000Highlighting them to the point where you're thinking about that more than you're thinking about anything else.
00:41:01.000Operational effectiveness or capability, experience, actual qualities.
00:41:06.000And you're seeing that in corporations are running into this problem where they have to have a certain amount of people, regardless of their qualifications, that fit these certain criterias.
00:41:16.000And people are going, well, this is not good for our overall bottom line.
00:41:20.000This is not good for the machine that we're running.
00:41:23.000What you're doing is you're doing something that's good for your optics, but you could perhaps...
00:41:28.000Hire someone who is lesser qualified but has these very specific characteristics that you think will appeal to the woke crowd.
00:41:38.000The problem with that is the woke crowd is never satisfied.
00:41:42.000They will keep pushing left to the end of time.
00:41:44.000Until we're in a communist shithole, they're not going to stop.
00:41:50.000I think some people miss that sometimes.
00:41:52.000You're never, ever, ever, no matter who you are and what your thought process is and what you believe, you're never going to be righteous enough for the mob.
00:42:32.000It's a weird one because it's sort of embedded itself in our universities and then now it's made its way into corporations.
00:42:38.000And when I see it in the military, I get very fucking concerned.
00:42:41.000Because my concern is, how do we know that this shit isn't manipulated and put into there by foreign governments, by foreign intelligence agencies?
00:42:52.000I'm sure you've seen that video from...
00:42:54.000Did you ever see the video from the KGB? There was a guy from the KGB in the 1980s that was talking about the plan to destroy America.
00:43:54.000There is nothing to do with espionage.
00:43:56.000I know that espionage intelligence gathering looks more romantic.
00:43:59.000It sells more deodorants through the advertising probably.
00:44:03.000That's why Hollywood producers are so crazy about James Bond type thrillers.
00:44:10.000But in reality, the main emphasis of the KGB is not in the area of intelligence at all.
00:44:17.000According to my opinion, and opinion of many defectors of my caliber, only about 15% of time, money and manpower is spent on espionage as such.
00:44:32.000Which we call either ideological subversion or active measures in the language of the KGB or psychological warfare.
00:44:42.000What it basically means is to change the perception of reality of every American to such an extent that despite of the abundance of information no one is able to come to sensible conclusions In the interest of defending themselves,
00:45:00.000their families, their community and their country.
00:45:04.000It's a great brainwashing process which goes very slow and is divided into four basic stages.
00:45:20.000Because this is the minimum number of years which requires to educate one generation of students.
00:45:28.000In the country of your enemy, exposed to the ideology of the enemy.
00:45:34.000In other words, Marxism-Leninism ideology is being pumped into the soft heads of at least three generations of American students, without being challenged or counterbalanced by the basic values of Americanism, American patriotism.
00:45:51.000Most of the people who graduated in the 60s, Drop-outs or half-baked intellectuals are now occupying the positions of power in the government, civil service, business, mass media, educational system.
00:46:15.000Even if you expose them to authentic information, even if you prove that white is white and black is black, you still cannot change the basic perception and the logic of behavior.
00:46:28.000In other words, these people, the process of demoralization is complete and irreversible.
00:46:35.000To get rid society of these people, you need another 20 or 15 years to educate a new generation of patriotically minded and common sense people who would be acting in In the interest of the United States society.
00:46:56.000And yet these people who've been programmed and as you say in place and who are favorable to an opening with the Soviet concept these are the very people who would be marked for extermination in this country?
00:47:08.000Simply because the psychological shock when they will see in future what the beautiful society of equality and social justice means in practice Obviously they will revolt.
00:47:22.000They will be very unhappy, frustrated people.
00:47:26.000And the Marxist-Leninist regime does not tolerate these people.
00:47:32.000Obviously they will join the links of dissenters, dissidents.
00:47:37.000Unlike in present United States, there will be no place for dissent in future Marxist-Leninist America.
00:47:44.000Here you can get popular like Daniel Ellsberg and filthy rich like Jane Fonda for being dissident, for criticizing your Pentagon.
00:47:55.000In future, these people will be simply...
00:49:33.000You know, I was watching this video on my favorite Twitter channel, Libs of TikTok, because it is insane, some of these fucking kids that are coming up through these universities that are saying these buzzwords and talking points as if they make sense,
00:49:48.000and they're talking about the destruction of the American civilization, like the destruction of the American country, that it needs to happen in order for people to be fair and free.
00:50:03.000It's like you have these shallow-minded, very narrow perspectives of what they would like to accomplish with no view whatsoever of what the future looks like.
00:50:12.000Whereas this guy, this KGB defector, is talking about this very long game that the KGB was playing with the United States.
00:50:22.000And they don't, you know, they're not the only ones, right?
00:50:25.000The Chinese intel services is actually much more patient than the Russians even.
00:50:31.000But what he's talking about, what Besminov's talking about in terms of active measures, you know, we might call, in the U.S., we might call covert action campaign.
00:50:42.000Now, he's low-balling the amount of resource they spend on actual intel operations and other things, but he's making a very important point, which is from their perspective, you get more bang for your buck from the active measures campaigns.
00:50:57.000And we've been doing, look, every intel service that's worth its weight Is, in a sense, doing the same thing.
00:51:06.000You could argue that- How do we do it?
00:51:07.000Well, you could argue that Voice of America is an example.
00:51:15.000I mean, it's our movies, it's our blue jeans, it's our rock albums that destroyed the Soviet Union.
00:51:25.000But we've- Look, what he's saying there all those years ago, all you have to do is look at the way that the misinformation campaigns have been going, that the Russians have been working on during the past six years,
00:51:42.000Where, in part, one of the things they're doing is...
00:51:46.000To your earlier point, they're using sort of our woke culture, and they're turning it into a wedge.
00:51:54.000And so they understand that if you can create chaos or ratchet up the pressure, whether it's racism or sort of the divide between the right and the left, Whatever it may be, that's their advantage.
00:52:09.000They start out by saying, how do we influence public opinion?
00:52:12.000And just like a marketing firm, they do all of the things that you would think.
00:52:17.000They study, they do all the analysis of how do you shift an audience Even five or six degrees to one side or the other of an argument, right?
00:52:27.000And then you multiply that, unlike a marketing campaign, which is looking to get returns for its shareholders over the course of the next year or the next couple of quarters because they want to sell more coke or whatever they're doing.
00:52:38.000You know, as you pointed out, they're talking about 20 years, 30 years, 40 years, right?
00:52:42.000So that, in part, makes it even more effective.
00:53:27.000And again, it's not just the Russians, the Chinese are engaged in the same game, right?
00:53:31.000They understand if you can create dissent within the US and everything that was being done in the last election was designed to create distrust of the election system, whether it's from the right or the left, right?
00:53:44.000Ultimately, do they give a fuck who wins?
00:53:47.000They just want to create the chaos and the distrust of the system.
00:53:51.000And that is Important from their endgame.
00:53:55.000That's what they're really striving for.
00:53:58.000Again, we don't see it because it's staring us in the face, and we can't get our noses out of our phones, and we believe whatever's put in front of us, and everybody gets further and further siloed into their own opinion, and then you got nothing.
00:54:13.000It's also there's so much emphasis put on boogeymen, right?
00:54:22.000Like the Clinton-Russia collusion story, right?
00:54:26.000I don't know if you've been paying attention to Russell Brand.
00:54:29.000Russell Brand, this is a crazy thing, because Russell Brand, who I love dearly, I think he's awesome, but he was this comedic actor and stand-up comedian, and now he's become one of the most trusted journalists in some weird way.
00:54:45.000Like, he's a guy, like, when he talks about stuff, he's got his notes, he's very informed, and he's discussing, like, what Clinton was saying that Trump was doing, they were actually doing.
00:54:58.000They were actually colluding with Russia.
00:56:46.000No, but the Bezmanov thing, I'm glad you pulled that up because that is something that people should watch and take away something from because it does talk about the idea of manipulation.
00:56:59.000But again, what's going to happen is People who have a certain mindset are going to look at that and go, oh, that's bullshit, right?
00:57:06.000I mean, if they're on the hard left or they believe that Marxism is the way to go, you're not going to ever change their mind.
00:57:12.000Just like somebody on the hard, hard right is not going to change their mind.
00:57:16.000So once again, you're left with a dwindling center.
00:57:20.000But speaking of weapons technology, the U.S. just tested a hypersonic weapon.
00:57:28.000And that's something to keep an eye on when people are thinking, where's all the money going?
00:57:34.000I mean, it's really the top priority for the U.S. It's a top priority for Russia.
00:58:08.000Whoever develops this capability first on the planet basically has defeated all air defense systems, which in the past were always designed for ballistic missiles.
00:58:20.000And so it moves at such a rate that you've removed the reaction time.
00:58:26.000And it also can move in such an unpredictable fashion.
00:58:29.000A ballistic missile goes up and it comes down and it's all in a certain pattern.
00:58:44.000And so basically, that's why hypersonic weapons and the ability to counter them is really the top technology priority for the U.S. And it's where a lot of – we'll talk about where money goes.
00:58:57.000And because the Russians and the Chinese are – Busy, busy, busy trying to develop this, because whoever does it again, it renders existing air defense systems useless.
00:59:13.000Because I think there's some shit going down.
00:59:16.000There is some shit going down, and it's actually really interesting.
00:59:18.000And this would be a perfect time for me to plug the second season of my Science Channel Discovery Network series, Black Files Declassified.
00:59:27.000Science Channel, Black Files, declassified, hosted by Mike Baker.
01:01:01.000They're all, what they're doing at that point is, they're programmed, they're computer controlled, they're all going to a designated altitude, and then they'll take off and they can fly in whatever pattern you end up putting them into.
01:02:42.000But if you're in Serbia or you're in Kabul or you're in Mogadishu or whatever, And you've got boots on the ground, but limited boots on the ground.
01:02:51.000The ability to throw out a drone swarm to do the recon of a facility, and depending on what those capabilities are and whether they've got FLIR or whatever they may be operating on to gather intelligence about what's ahead,
01:03:07.000I mean, it gives you a tremendous advantage just from the recon, the surveillance point of view, much less that, not even talking about the weaponized.
01:03:15.000They're very small, so what's the range on these things and what powers them?
01:03:42.000Right now, you're not talking about a drone produced by Northrop or Boeing that's going to be up in the air for three days.
01:03:51.000You're talking about something that's going downrange maybe a couple of miles, right, and is up and active for maybe on a battery charge, maybe Anywhere to 20 minutes, 30 minutes.
01:04:05.000But think about that Queen Bee up there.
01:05:05.000We're already up there worried about how do you take out the satellites or how do you approach a satellite covertly to maybe gather intel from a Chinese satellite that's up there or the Chinese going after one of our satellites.
01:05:23.000So yes, everything that goes on is in a sense based on the competition.
01:05:30.000I'm not letting you off the hook with UFOs, but I want to get to this.
01:05:33.000While we're talking about China and artificial intelligence, Sagar from Breaking Points put up a video recently where he was talking about there was an AI company that sold 50% or 51% to China.
01:05:54.000And China immediately repurposed the entire company and sort of kicked them out and renamed it.
01:06:03.000It's calling something different, and they have no recourse.
01:06:05.000And they now hold all of the artificial intelligence that this company had.
01:06:10.000This company thought they were going to work with them and make a bunch of money, and China just sort of took it over.
01:06:16.000Because they had like a 51% control of it.
01:06:19.000And now they're fucked because they changed the name of it.
01:06:22.000They're calling it Chinese technology.
01:06:24.000Sager did a way better job of explaining it than I can.
01:06:28.000But that's what's happened to a variety of companies that always seem to think that they could do business with the Chinese regime and come out on top.
01:06:37.000They think of all these billions of dollars they're going to make from this deal, and they start thinking about ski chalets and driving a Ferrari.
01:06:44.000And the next thing you know, they're, you know...
01:06:47.000And so whether it's a pharmaceutical company thinking they're going to go over and somehow protect their R&D, but build a facility over there, or it's a software company that loses all their coding, it's always the same result.
01:07:02.000It's amazing that they don't know that, or that they're willing to listen to what the Chinese are selling.
01:07:25.000And it happens a lot more often and in some very pedestrian companies and sectors, but it's just emblematic of the Chinese understand and have understood for generations the lure of their market to the West,
01:08:18.000Alright Sagar, what are you looking at?
01:08:19.000Well, some of you may recall that in the video announcing Crystal and I were going independent, I mentioned one of the reasons we wanted to do so was so we didn't just have to chase views, but so we could focus on more substantive issues that belie the news cycle and our economy.
01:08:33.000I specifically pointed to semiconductors.
01:08:36.000As you all know, one of my personal obsessions.
01:08:39.000Because they are the electronic backbone of the new economy.
01:08:42.000He who controls semiconductors controls the future.
01:08:45.000Not quite true yet, but it will be in my opinion.
01:08:48.000And that's what I want to take you on a tour of today.
01:08:51.000One of the most brazen views yet into the corporate battles of the future and a development which has immense implications for the future.
01:08:58.000They're calling it the semiconductor heist of the century.
01:09:26.000Now, as we have learned with the car shortage, the PS5 shortage, and more, the entire U.S. economy can grind to a halt without these things.
01:09:34.000Now, prior to 2016, ARM was a British-controlled company, but corporations are going to corporation.
01:09:40.000And in 2016, it was acquired by a Japanese firm, SoftBank.
01:09:45.000You probably know SoftBank from their storied roles in the drama behind WeWork and Uber, pouring Saudi cash into the startups to create the veneer of success, and eventually having the bottom fell out of both.
01:09:56.000Now, SoftBank's plan to make ARM even more money is the same thing that they did with Uber.
01:10:02.000They wanted them to enter the Chinese market.
01:10:04.000So in their infinite wisdom, they created a joint venture.
01:10:44.000The details are crazy and they highlight exactly why letting our most valuable technology go to China in the first place and why business entanglements there are untenable in the long run.
01:10:54.000In 2020, ARM and a bunch of investors found that the head of their China operation was using his control of the company to attract investments to his other firm.
01:11:04.000So, by a vote of 7 to 1, at the board level, they decided to boot him.
01:11:38.000Now they say they are China's largest CPU IP supplier.
01:11:41.000That is now independently operated as a Chinese-owned company.
01:11:45.000Now critically, the technology that they preview and claim is their own, but really is just the IP and resources of its old company, is now being used to deploy billions of cameras across China to fulfill their dream of a fully integrated technological surveillance state.
01:12:02.000Social credit score is everywhere, everywhere you go is tracked, your travel is restricted, and the The state knows everything about everyone, all the way down to the DNA level.
01:12:45.000And although the thing that he showed there, which was the one in five North American companies, claimed that they had IP stolen the past year, is so fucking low.
01:12:57.000And it said like seven out of 23 companies, I think it just said, further down that point said, seven out of 23 companies said they'd had IEP stolen over the past decade.
01:13:44.000I just, I don't know what it is about this lack of desire to call them out for what they do.
01:13:50.000And part of it is, I get it, if you're running a business, and you've got facilities over there, you've got personnel, you've got investment over there, okay, fine, I get it, I get why you're being somewhat cautious.
01:14:00.000But the reality is that Until we start really being serious with them, and even then, I'm going to stop right there because nothing's going to change their behavior.
01:14:22.000So how do they allow them to do business like this?
01:14:26.000How is there no sort of oversight, such a critical aspect of technology, right?
01:14:34.000These semiconductors, this is a huge issue.
01:14:36.000And for the Chinese to have control of this intellectual property that was developed over here, simply because somebody underestimated their ability to commit fuckery.
01:15:09.000I know that's a lot of money, but it's not a lot of money.
01:15:12.000If you're talking about the whole world and control of the semiconductor market and the control that they're going to be able to have using their surveillance state and their social credit score and how that's going to impact China.
01:16:06.000When you're talking about looking at a potential investment, Or personnel there, whatever it may be, you've got to just keep digging because the first batch of information you see is usually not correct or it's obfuscated or there's a second set of books somewhere or a third set of books.
01:16:23.000And, you know, people are keen to get an investment done, right?
01:16:28.000Usually when you're talking about an investment, the overall goal is to make it happen.
01:16:32.000It's not to find a reason to shelve it, right?
01:16:37.000That part of it makes sense I guess in a way.
01:16:41.000It doesn't make sense in a way, but the way that China can do this and the way that China can take over a business simply by investing in it and pretending to be in partnership with them, but then everything they do is connected completely to the Chinese Communist Party,
01:17:31.000You never have complete control in a commercial sense.
01:17:34.000So at some point, the Chinese state is always going to have the ability to override any business decision that's being made.
01:17:42.000But to some degree, you have different levels of interest, again, based on what that interest, particularly technology, AI, anything in engineering that's going to be of more interest than sort of straight up manufacturing.
01:17:57.000It seems to me, and this is a horrible thing to say, but there's an advantage that they have that's almost unstoppable in being connected to the government that we just simply don't have, and they can take advantage of the fact that people are greedy, right?
01:18:11.000And that people do look at this and go, hey, this is a great score for us here.
01:18:16.000We're going to make 500 and whatever million dollars.
01:18:20.000Like, wouldn't it be, this is where it's going to sound fucked up, wouldn't it be advantageous for us to have a similar relationship with corporations when these corporations want to make deals with other countries?
01:18:34.000Again, I'm not advocating that the government get involved in corporations, but what I'm saying is they're at a huge disadvantage if the Chinese Communist Party is always involved in deals and in all the corporations and they're inexorably connected to these corporations.
01:18:50.000If we're not, and you let some knuckleheads who are thinking about getting that house in Tahoe, and they are thinking about getting a private jet, and they're thinking about all that money and not the ramifications on the global market, the ramifications on the surveillance state,
01:19:37.000I mean, look, you can go to other countries, France or wherever you may go, and you could argue that because the government Views part of their responsibility as bolstering their commercial sector, right?
01:19:51.000And, you know, okay, you can argue, you know, the U.S., everybody wants, every country wants their commercial, you know, industries to do well.
01:20:00.000France or a variety of other countries around the globe, they have sort of a much more connected line between government, intel services, other parts of their government to promote and protect and help bolster their commercial businesses,
01:20:20.000So you get an Airbus situation like in France.
01:20:23.000And that is not necessarily uncommon, right?
01:20:27.000Here in the U.S., We have a firewall built up, right?
01:20:32.000So that the idea is we don't want to help a particular company because that would screw the sort of idea of free markets, right?
01:20:41.000So you don't want to – if you gather intel, that could benefit a company in a particular sector.
01:20:49.000Well, you don't provide that to the company because that gives them an advantage over other businesses, and that's counter to the idea of a free market system.
01:20:56.000And I know people listening to God, oh, that's bullshit.
01:21:00.000But it's the way it actually works, right?
01:21:03.000And it's very frustrating to some folks in the intel community and within the government that we always are at a disadvantage oftentimes in doing business, in pitching for business overseas, whether it's licensing, whether it's in the energy business, whatever it may be.
01:21:20.000And China being the primary example of a place where you walk in and you should understand immediately that you're at a disadvantage when you're dealing with the Chinese system, the Chinese regime.
01:21:34.000It's just the way they put it together and their theft of intellectual property, their economic espionage, everything is designed to get them to the top of the food chain.
01:21:46.000That's their rightful place as far as the regime is concerned.
01:22:01.000And you're right to be worried because, you know, we're not talking about something.
01:22:04.000People imagine that because the previous administration under Trump, because they banged on about China, you know, over the past four years, that somehow it's a new problem.
01:22:28.000We talked about it more during the previous administration and in more realistic terms in terms of the Chinese looking to hose us in a variety of markets and places and ways that they were doing it and highlighting the idea of theft of intellectual property.
01:23:53.000Well, never say never, but at least for the time being, it really runs counter.
01:24:00.000Again, you can only base it on what you've seen in your own experiences.
01:24:05.000And when I talk about this firewall that exists between the government and the commercial sector in terms of promoting and helping and advising and providing support, It exists,
01:25:21.000So Portman Square Group is a business that's been doing this for a long time.
01:25:25.000I changed the name some time ago when I bought the company back from the previous investors.
01:25:30.000And we work with a lot of companies that have very good, very capable in-house resources to gather information related to...
01:25:42.000You know, risk and operational awareness on the ground and maybe they're going to build a new facility somewhere.
01:25:49.000So they spend a lot of time trying to get that right and trying to understand.
01:25:53.000But I will say this also, when they've got a potential investment coming, right, or the opportunity to get into a market or whatever.
01:26:00.000The tendency, again, is always to make it happen, right?
01:26:04.000It's not a happy day when you present information that says, this is a bad investment, you shouldn't do this, or this is shaky, or here's the problems you're going to deal with, because there's a lot of people who are invested in making something happen and growing the business or doing something.
01:26:19.000You know, occasionally, you know, the companies that do really well overseas are the ones that approach it very pragmatically and say, yeah, you know, if this looks bad, then we're going to pivot.
01:26:30.000We're going to find something else that looks better.
01:26:46.000The social credit score thing freaks me the fuck out because I see vaccine passports and these type of deals as being a step towards this idea.
01:26:58.000The idea that you have to keep something, whether it's an app on your phone, that you need at all times.
01:27:06.000And there was a discussion recently that was in Yahoo News, I believe I saw it, Where they were talking about how your browsing history may affect your credit.
01:27:19.000That your credit is not just going to be, have you paid your bills?
01:27:42.000But let's read this because it's kind of fucking crazy.
01:27:48.000Lenders could soon be using data from your browsing, search, and purchase history, your digital footprint, to create a more accurate credit score, according to the International Monetary Fund researchers.
01:28:01.000The working paper shows that combining your credit score and your digital footprint further improves loan default predictions.
01:28:22.000To ponder such futuristic notions, a 2018 study from the Frankfurt School of Finance and Management also looked at lenders using personal online data in tandem with traditional data from credit bureaus.
01:28:34.000So what does your online behavior really say about you?
01:28:37.000Their findings show that digital footprint allows some unscorable customers to gain access to credit.
01:28:44.000Oh, you can have access to credit while customers with a low to medium credit score can either gain or lose access to credit depending upon their digital footprint.
01:30:02.000It takes whatever, like four seconds, whatever, for it to come up and say approved.
01:30:07.000In that four seconds, There is hundreds of points of information being reviewed instantaneously about whether this is a potential fraud transaction or not.
01:30:21.000So it's already happening and they're looking at the algorithms that are used are all based on, in a sense, and it's artificial intelligence to some degree, on machine learning of Transactional awareness of where this card was before over the past six months and how many times it's been used and what type of purchases it's been made.
01:30:46.000So you think about all that information already out there, already being used, and A, it's...
01:30:54.000It's a little bit scary from the sense of hacking and the ability to access millions and millions of people's information because now it's all being held in a variety of silos.
01:31:06.000But then you also think about it being used, again, advancing it one or two steps and using it for this type of purpose.
01:31:25.000Or part of it is, you know, I've got my details out there on so many different shopping sites, and it doesn't matter.
01:31:32.000So they're all so used to it, all been so conditioned to it, that I don't know that a lot of people are going to be scared by the next step.
01:31:39.000I don't think they're going to be scared by this at all.
01:31:41.000Again, like I said, as long as it allows you to get access to more credit.
01:31:45.000Which, generally speaking, if they could just give you a little more credit and have access to your browsing history, you're going to do it.
01:32:08.000If they find out you're going to get $200,000 in a loan or $100,000 in a loan, depending upon whether or not you allow us to have access to your browsing history, how many people are going to say yes?
01:32:22.000They're probably going to try to clean up their fucking computer.
01:32:24.000They're going to be unsophisticated, take all the porn down.
01:32:27.000They're going to go, Mike, you look at eight hours of porn a day.
01:32:34.000It's like there's so many people that are going to be willing to give up that data.
01:32:38.000The same way, one of the things that I heard argued about Facebook, which is really fascinating, they were saying that Facebook treats you like you're a customer, but in fact you're the product.
01:32:48.000And you are providing them with data that they then sell.
01:32:53.000And there's a big difference between you being a customer and being a product because you're treated like you're a customer, but you're actually a product.
01:33:03.000And we've all just sort of accepted that and we've given up this data.
01:33:07.000So we've given up this commodity that we didn't even know was valuable at the time and now it's become literally one of the most valuable things in the world.
01:33:17.000You have these companies like Google and Facebook that have enormous amounts of money entirely based on the fact that they have access to your data.
01:33:27.000Well, and also, you've got a lot of companies out there that, for whatever reason, can't get investment, can't get credit, can't get, you know, and so, you know, are they going to say, no, I'm not going to give up what they already assume they're doing anyway,
01:34:15.000Or somehow they can write off the security risks or the concerns that might be there or the privacy rights that, you know, frankly, most people have assumed have long gone.
01:34:25.000So, you know, again, I think, you know, from my perspective, I've never, because I spent so much time within the government, I've never been one who's worried about, you know, big government collecting huge amounts of data on me, right?
01:34:39.000I mean, for the most part, they can't organize panic in a doomed submarine.
01:34:44.000And I think that it's the Googles and it's the Amazons and it's the others who have been busy for years and years just figuring out how do we make money off of you.
01:35:09.000Funded by the government, like NASA is, they're able to do incredible things, and they have kind of like free reign to figure out the right ways to do things, and they have enormous resources because of all the money involved.
01:35:22.000I think, yeah, having, you know, because I'm so shameless about this, but having now almost got to the finish of filming the second season for that Black Files Declassified, one of the things that we do is we do look a lot at the The intersection of government and the commercial sector in terms of development of whether it's technologies for weapons development or whatever it may be.
01:35:46.000And there is an enormously healthy, robust partnership between the government and a variety of sectors out there, in part because I think there is this understanding That at some point,
01:36:06.000you've got to take this idea and it's got to be germinated in the commercial side.
01:36:09.000That's where it's really going to come to fruition, right?
01:36:13.000In certain parts of like DARPA and some parts of the government, you've got incredibly smart people.
01:36:17.000But ultimately, you've got to get it into the commercial side to get it developed.
01:36:21.000It's like that hypersonic weapon that was built by Raytheon, right?
01:36:24.000And DARPA came out with the announcement and DARPA is heavily involved.
01:36:28.000But it's the Raytheon engineers, and they're not doing it because they're mostly worried about who's going to be at the top of the food chain.
01:36:36.000They're doing it because there's a revenue stream that they understand is very, very important for their next 10 or 20 years of growth.
01:36:53.000When you see all of these announcements, I'm sure you know more than I do, and I'm not asking you to say things you're not supposed to say, but when you see these announcements, like when the Pentagon talks openly about UFOs,
01:37:09.000When you see it in the New York Times, that 2017 article where they're talking to people, like highly respected people, like Commander David Fravor and all these people that have had these encounters with unexplainable technology.
01:37:23.000When you see this being discussed, Do you think that some of this is just obfuscating?
01:37:32.000Some of this is just like covering up for the fact that we have some super advanced technology that we're not letting be public?
01:37:44.000And you can say, oh, well, we don't even know what's going on.
01:37:48.000I don't believe, whenever I see these public announcements about technology that we don't understand, that is coming from alien worlds, that, to me, I always go, why would they tell us that?
01:38:03.000What is the reason for all of this transparency all of a sudden?
01:38:09.000Like, and how much of this is bullshit?
01:38:11.000How much of this is just covering up that there's some insane technology that they have a handle on?
01:38:17.000And this brings me to this What is that?
01:38:22.000Was it a CIA document, the UFO document?
01:38:26.000Do you know what I'm discussing, Jamie?
01:38:28.000Where they were talking about the technology and there was some sort of a patent on the same type of technology that is potentially being utilized by these unexplainable crafts, where they're using some sort of a magnetic-based propulsion system.
01:38:45.000What is behind the U.S. Navy's UFO fusion energy patent?
01:39:08.000They filed a patent for this plasma-controlled fusion device in 2019. And it says it's either a giant breakthrough or mad science.
01:39:16.000According to the patent application, the miniature device could contain and sustain fusion reactions capable of generating power in the gigawatt, one billion watts to terawatt, one trillion watts range or more.
01:39:29.000A large coal plant or a mid-sized nuclear power reactor, by comparison, produces energy in the one to two gigawatt range.
01:39:40.000So you're talking about something that can produce the amount of power that a fucking coal plant or a mid-sized nuclear power reactor can make.
01:39:53.000Now, the interesting thing about this is, and we actually featured this in an episode of Black Files Declassified, second season coming in the new year.
01:40:02.000And Dr. Peiss, the government did investigate his ideas, his patents.
01:40:11.000From what we've seen of the paperwork that's been released and declassified, you could draw the conclusion, although it's not complete, that there was nothing to it after they examined his theories,
01:40:27.000his ideas about how to generate this level of energy in a small contained device.
01:40:31.000And they came out and said, we don't think there's anything there.
01:40:35.000It appears as if at that point, funding for research into what he had proposed stopped.
01:40:44.000Yeah, but one thing that we seem to be learning is that it's a rare day when funding is allocated to something and then stopped, right?
01:40:59.000Usually that money then is shifted or the program morphs or the idea or the theory or the testing moves into some other area.
01:41:10.000So what we're looking at now is, did they come up and say, okay, we don't think this works?
01:41:16.000Or did they essentially wrap that up because it became known and then morph it into a different essentially black file or black budget or whatever you want to call it and continue looking into this type of energy production,
01:41:33.000But if you follow the trail of available paperwork and the people that we've talked to, you get to a point where they say, no, there was nothing there.
01:41:47.000And my experience has always been that nobody then says, okay, you can have your money back, right?
01:41:54.000Or they're looking to, like with some of our past stealth aircraft, they just shut it down, but they move the whole thing into something completely different, right?
01:42:05.000So that it's now classified and hidden.
01:42:45.000And they're saying that this is no bigger than the size of an SUV that could potentially have the same amount of power as a nuclear reactor, which is just fucking insane.
01:42:56.000Because a lot of the sightings, one of the things about some of the more interesting sightings over the past, particularly over military facilities or by, whether it's Fravor or other military aviators, is, again, the lack of propulsion,
01:43:16.000There was nothing to indicate how this thing would be moving.
01:43:19.000And so that becomes a big part of the question.
01:43:21.000But to go back to your original question...
01:43:25.000It is one of the most fascinating parts about this right now is why the Pentagon decided to sort of set the table with opening up about AATIP, as an example, and saying, okay, we're going to talk about this.
01:43:41.000Look, they had the advanced, what it was, Aerospace Weapons Systems Application Programs, right, which kind of preceded AATIP. And the idea, I think, that the military...
01:43:53.000At some point recently, they decided it's better for us to talk about this in a sort of operationally logical fashion.
01:44:02.000So I think they approached it from saying, well, look, of course we have an office like AATIP, right?
01:44:08.000You know, Lou Elizondo and a bunch of others have already been talking about it.
01:44:12.000So it came out, and I think the military thought probably the best way for us to explain it It's just simply by saying, well, of course we're going to be looking at unidentified or aerial phenomena that we can't explain.
01:44:23.000That's a national security issue and it is.
01:44:26.000So you have an office that would go out there and if you spot something, you know, particularly if it's an aerosensitive facility, then yeah, of course you want to know what the fuck it is, right?
01:44:34.000So you get a sighting and, you know, Is it a way for them to set the table so that it just kind of shuts everybody up and they go, okay, I get it.
01:44:43.000Thank you for talking to us about it, right?
01:44:45.000Or is it a way for them to say, here's a logical explanation.
01:44:50.000Now we don't have to talk about the technologies that we've been developing or where that others have been developing.
01:45:54.000But, you know, typically any of these programs is pretty close hold, you know, whether it's coming out of the Skunk Works or whether it's wherever it may be.
01:46:01.000You're not talking about a lot of people, but it's an engineering exercise.
01:46:06.000So you're talking about a range of backgrounds and experiences and people.
01:46:22.000This is going to sound strange, but if we were holding aliens at Area 51, as an example, I firmly believe there's no way we could have kept that secret for any period of time.
01:46:46.000In a shorter period of time, I'm talking going back decades and decades, so ever since Area 51 became ground zero for some of the thoughts and ideas about aliens.
01:46:57.000But in recent terms, if you're talking about the past handful of years and you're developing new technologies, new propulsion system, whatever it may be, do I think that the government can keep that secret over a relatively short period of time?
01:47:20.000The document also shows that a team of at least 10 technicians and engineers were assigned to design and test an experimental demonstrator and that testing was being conducted as recently as September of 2019. So this is my question.
01:47:36.000When you have these unexplained things like what Commander David Fravor sees off the coast of San Diego, what is the potential that that is the United States government testing some of this insane technology that they're trying to keep under wraps?
01:47:53.000And then when they release some sort of a statement like this, What would be the purpose of even releasing this statement?
01:48:02.000Well, I think there were so many questions, and it had gotten out there and had been in the press and had been enough stories about it that I think, in part, I don't want to say damage control, but I think they were just trying to get ahead of it a little bit.
01:48:11.000So they say, we tried, but it wasn't successful, so we abandoned the program.
01:48:17.000But then this article highlights exactly what you said, that they probably moved it to another agency, which means it's probably continuing this cycle of development.
01:48:26.000There is no way they stop researching or working in a sort of a feverish pace to develop this type of technology, this ability.
01:48:47.000To develop new propulsion systems, new material science issues related to hypersonics.
01:48:51.000And, you know, can you get a manned hypersonic aircraft?
01:48:54.000You know, probably not in our lifetime, frankly, because of the speed we're talking about and the impact on the materials that we've got.
01:49:03.000There's no way that we're not—just because they shelve one file, one research project, doesn't mean they're not moving into something else, or they're not taking an aspect of it and saying, okay, this could work.
01:49:17.000And so, yes, could what flavor have seen been something that we were testing and developing?
01:49:23.000Part of me says, well, look, if that's the case, they wouldn't have been doing sorties close enough.
01:49:30.000They would have found a more remote location.
01:49:32.000Unless they wanted it to be discovered.
01:49:35.000Yeah, and there is some of that that's out there in terms of what do we release to the outside world, meaning countries that are not aligned with our interests.
01:49:57.000The Fravor thing, we've talked about it before, we keep coming back, and it is really, you know, one of the few sightings that you look at and you go, I don't know, this thing, you know, there's not an explanation for it yet.
01:50:44.000Not only that, if it's an individual occurrence, if it's one thing that occurs in one place, how do you know whether or not this happened?
01:50:52.000Just because it's not repeating all over the country like, you know, the sighting of bald eagles or something.
01:50:56.000Just because it's not something that you can go out and absolutely prove to be true, like when something happens, a unique occurrence.
01:51:03.000It's very difficult to say whether a unique occurrence actually took place unless there's real evidence, and there's video of this fucking thing.
01:51:12.000And we know from other materials from OSAP and also from the successor operation, the AATIP office within the Pentagon, And again, that's the point.
01:51:27.000They talk about, well, ATIP, we stopped that a few years back.
01:51:51.000And again, one of the more interesting things about the sightings is that they're over a number of times over sensitive facilities, sensitive installations.
01:51:59.000And so that leads you to wonder, okay, are they...
01:52:04.000Is that because they're home-based there, whatever the technology is, whatever platform we're testing, whatever it may be?
01:52:10.000Or is that because it's from a different nation that's out there trying to figure out?
01:52:29.000Except for entertainment value, there's nothing to see here.
01:52:31.000Maybe they're worried that we're going to do something really fucked up.
01:52:35.000I mean, when you have countries that have so many nuclear weapons that we could kill everyone on the planet multiple times over and literally turn this whole thing into a glowing ball...
01:52:46.000Maybe if I was from another planet, I'd be like, let's just keep a close eye on these crazy fucks.
01:52:52.000We have basically these creatures that are going from tribal warfare to nuclear technology to fusion reactors that are the size of an SUV capable of producing gigawatts.
01:53:23.000If you think about that condensed period of time going from, eh, I think we can get this thing made out of paper and twigs to fly, and then we're landing on the fucking moon.
01:53:33.000The technology involved in that is nothing compared to this little thing that you've got sitting in front of you that sits in your pocket.
01:53:38.000So they went from a whole room full of gigantic supercomputers in the 1960s to something that's way more powerful that just sits in your pocket that now the new one has a terabyte of storage.
01:53:52.000Yeah, my 10-year-old boy, Muggsy, picks up and it's like a part of his body.
01:54:52.000To me, it's like, I could buy it on surface level, which I love to do, and say, oh my god, the government's coming clear because they want us to know, because they can't stop this, and this is such a big issue.
01:55:02.000But one of the more confusing things about it, and one thing that kind of confirmed my suspicions about this time that we're living in, where there's this overwhelming amount of information that something just gets lost in the news cycle, and then a new thing comes out, and you just forget,
01:55:20.000That they release this information and no one seems to give a shit.
01:55:24.000I mean, obviously it came out in the middle of the pandemic, so everybody's kind of fucked anyway.
01:55:28.000But it seems to me that they would not have any real motivation to tell us the truth about this stuff.
01:55:38.000So when they're talking about this stuff, I'm always wondering if they're preparing us for the implementation of some technology that they've been developing that they can now say they don't have control over and they could use it to their advantage.
01:55:51.000The fact that we might be willing to believe that it is from another world or another dimension because they've already said, well, there are real things that are out there that we can't explain.
01:56:03.000I mean, I think one part of this is just the The pace of development—we talked about it a little bit just now—but the pace of development within weapons technology and artificial intelligence, right?
01:56:17.000That's a whole separate— You know, issue in terms of, you know, like you said before, right?
01:56:26.000If aliens fly by and they look and they go, well, these guys are pretty fucked up and they're capable of blowing this whole planet up here in short order.
01:56:32.000If you layer on top of that our old traditional nuclear systems, I don't know where I'm going with this, but, and then you put onto that sort of the ability to remove the human from the equation, right?
01:56:43.000So that your defense systems aren't For whatever reason, aren't attached to a human, right?
01:56:52.000With that old dead hand project that they had.
01:56:56.000You know, and the idea, now the US says, nah, we're never going to go that route.
01:57:01.000You know, we're never going to, you know, make our security systems based on no human involvement.
01:57:10.000But, again, not sure where I was going with that other than I find it fascinating that we seem to think that's a remote possibility and the idea that technology might outpace our ability to control it, you know, is interesting.
01:57:23.000Not saying that robots are going to take over.
01:57:25.000But artificial intelligence could one day become sentient.
01:57:28.000I mean, that's the real concern that people like Elon have.
01:58:10.000There's so many things you can't predict when it comes to innovation and technology and the expansion of these ideas that branch off into these sort of unpredictable ways when the new piece of technology, whether it's this space-time manipulation thing that they're talking about or anything that gets...
01:58:30.000Designed that no one saw coming and is a complete game-changer like the internet has been If that happens with artificial intelligence and they can one day develop something some something ex machina like or even weirder something that's like literally controlling society like artificial intelligence Well,
01:58:49.000and again, if you think about the intersection of how these things develop...
01:59:13.000You put artificial intelligence in there and then going to something like this hypersonic weapons development where you've reduced the reaction time almost down to zero, right?
01:59:24.000You've got people who say, well, never take the human out of it.
01:59:26.000And then you've got this worry about, well, but we're reducing the reaction time.
01:59:29.000Beyond the point where humans can react, so maybe we've got to have this artificial intelligence capability to drive most of the reaction time.
01:59:36.000So you can see how this whole thing could compress into a real shit show.
01:59:40.000Especially if you're dealing with companies that have been compromised by the Chinese Communist Party, which we know that was the deal with Huawei, which we've talked about many times before.
01:59:51.000They had installed these sort of third-party systems where third-party access was available to routers and a lot of their technology, and it's one of the reasons why they stopped allowing Huawei to sell their phones in the United States.
02:00:08.000I mean, again, you're putting a backdoor access point into whatever it is that you're selling.
02:00:13.000So if that happens with artificial intelligence that actually is controlling our defense systems, and then there's hypersonic weapons that these artificial intelligence programs are supposed to be able to detect, but they've been compromised because we bought Chinese technology.
02:00:52.000Who knows where it's going, but it is silly to say that if you just think about where this all goes as it expands, as this technology expands, it doesn't necessarily go to a place where it's controllable.
02:01:04.000And if we decide that the only way to have this stuff really truly be competitive with the rest of the world is to give it a certain amount of autonomy and allow it to make decisions, then we're really fucked.
02:02:27.000It's not because I'm engaged in national security issues anymore.
02:02:31.000It's in part my concern over security is because I got kids, right?
02:02:35.000So I'm just worried about it as a parent.
02:02:40.000Part of the driver for why I'm always kind of focused on data protection or protecting yourself or your identity, whatever it may be, is just because it's apparent, right?
02:03:39.000When I see that released like that, you know, those kind of—I'm like, who's benefiting from releasing this that they were thinking about whacking Julian Assange?
02:03:50.000Yeah, I think elements of the story, we're talking about a story that was on, I think Yahoo News actually broke it, but it's only been in the past day and a half or two days or whatever.
02:04:04.000The idea was that during the previous administration or the Trump administration, particularly because Mike Pompeo, who at this particular point in time was the CIA director, was so incensed over WikiLeaks releasing some of the Vault 7 information about CIA hacking.
02:04:23.000And a lot of other people in the agency were also likewise very upset about it.
02:04:28.000According to the story, anyway, there was talk within the Trump administration over, you know, can we kidnap Assange, who, I mean, at the time, he'd been in the Ecuadorian embassy, you know, taking refuge there in London for,
02:04:54.000And we don't hire a lot of them because they stand out at the agency.
02:04:58.000So he's there, and the idea was that there was conversations, discussions, and some planning scenarios developed about how can we kidnap Assange.
02:05:09.000And then according to the story, there's also some talk about, well, could we assassinate him?
02:05:16.000If anybody had walked in, if I had been in a position of responsibility at the agency, and someone had walked in and said, yeah, we need to draw up some scenarios for the White House over how we can either kidnap and or assassinate Assange, I would say, get the fuck out of my office.
02:05:58.000But at the same time, that doesn't give you justification to say you're going to go into a sovereign nation's embassy in another sovereign nation in the UK and render a...
02:06:20.000Because if Snowden released something that showed that the NSA was involved in something that's unconstitutional and completely illegal, doesn't he have a certain amount of responsibility as a patriot to release that information to the general public and allow them to see that the government,
02:06:37.000which is really just a bunch of people, Is doing something that is completely illegal and monitoring people in a way that they had no idea was taking place.
02:06:47.000Meaning that they were all of their phone calls, all their emails, everything was being stored and it could potentially be leveraged against them if they were inconvenient.
02:07:02.000I can't, from my position, get myself there to say that it was a patriotic act.
02:07:10.000What I think would have been the right approach was for him to go.
02:07:14.000And I know that people say, it couldn't have happened.
02:07:16.000I think releasing that information within the intel committees, figuring out a way to get that information through a whistleblower chain, Pushing it and doing everything possible to do that and getting it out.
02:07:48.000I understand what you're saying because of your position and that you worked for the agency for so long, but you're not dealing with the CIA at this point, right?
02:07:55.000You're dealing with the NSA. It's a different organization, but they were doing something that is completely illegal.
02:08:41.000He's being held based on like a 2000...
02:08:45.0002012 warrant in the UK. And I think that, and this is, again, this is part of the problem.
02:08:53.000I mean, this story that came out about, you know, about Pompeo pushing for options in terms of could we kidnap him, could we, you know, whatever.
02:09:03.000Look, the U.S. Department of Justice has been working on trying to figure out how do we get him extradited back to the states.
02:10:58.000It needed to be brought to light, but I just think it should have been brought in a different fashion.
02:11:01.000But the thing is, there's no repercussions.
02:11:03.000What Manning did was theft of documents.
02:11:05.000What Assange did, and the way that the agency was viewing Assange, in a sense, was that he was not facilitating, but being like an arm of or being used by,
02:11:22.000to some degree, as an example, Russian intel services to do harm to the US. You could argue the But the story itself is insane.
02:11:38.000And again, I go back to the same thing.
02:11:41.000How logical, reasonable people could sit around...
02:11:44.000I get it that they were pissed off about in the aftermath of the Vault 7 information disclosures and the embarrassment that that caused and just the trouble that it caused and the release of that sensitive information.
02:11:57.000But that doesn't then mean you should sit and have operational meetings.
02:12:15.000By continuing to imprison him, and by not releasing him, and by not dropping this case, and even if this discussion was true about killing him, is it to send a message to other people?
02:12:31.000Yeah, I think the idea was, at some point, again, part of this, I think, needs to be explored further.
02:12:39.000Hopefully, other outlets will pick up the Yahoo News story.
02:12:42.000I think it deserves more investigation.
02:12:45.000But part of it is, at a certain point, moving from the Obama administration to...
02:12:54.000Because you have to remember all the various parts here.
02:12:57.000You had the Democratic email releases in 2016. And that was viewed as a Russian operation.
02:13:41.000It caused further distrust in the system, caused further splintering of our population.
02:13:47.000So it was very effective if you think about how much we've been divided since 2016. Yeah, and again, when you showed that great clip of Yuri talking about this and you're realizing it was...
02:14:00.000Whatever, 40 years ago, they're still doing it, and they're still finding it to be successful.
02:14:08.000And they're finding the technology that exists out there, these phones that we just talked about, and the social media outlets, they're finding all of that to help.
02:14:17.000In the old days, if you wanted to do a covert action campaign, you'd go to hire some journalists, right?
02:14:22.000Develop a network of newspaper journalists, right?
02:14:25.000Find people that could plant articles that you would, you know, skew it a certain way to influence the population in that country, you know, so that they would say, oh, yeah, you know what?
02:15:26.000And there's usually some sort of a generic photo that identifies them in their Twitter profile.
02:15:31.000And you're like, wow, knowing what I know about the Internet Research Agency and knowing that there's probably multiple different similar organizations in a lot of these other countries that oppose us.
02:15:44.000Like, how many of these fucking things are out there?
02:15:46.000Because they know that there's hundreds of thousands of fake accounts that are being utilized by foreign governments.
02:15:53.000It's nothing more than a marketing campaign.
02:15:56.000I want the population to drink more Pepsi.
02:16:01.000I'm going to figure out how to make that happen.
02:16:37.000How many times do you search for something?
02:16:39.000I search for something on my phone, and then I spend two days getting unsolicited pop-ups saying, oh, by the way, we got another, whatever, MGB for sale over here.
02:17:19.000They know what you're looking for, but the idea that the Russians would look at our society today and go, yeah, it's so easy to divide and conquer, and that's what they're doing.
02:17:32.000Whether they're playing black against white, they're playing rich against poor, it doesn't matter what the subject is.
02:17:37.000They know it doesn't take much to increase that chaos.
02:17:42.000And ultimately, to some degree, that's all they want to do.
02:17:45.000And we got lost in the idea that it was because they wanted Trump to win or they wanted Clinton to win or they wanted whatever.
02:18:29.000It's like planning for the withdrawal from Afghanistan.
02:18:32.000You've got to figure out what's the worst-case scenario, and you've got to create something around it.
02:18:36.000I'm not saying that it happened, but it's one of those things where you've got to go, okay, This is something that you can't completely ignore the possibility of it.
02:18:44.000One of the things we covered on my sci-fi show way back in the day was this idea of a bioweapon, about using some sort of a manipulated virus that gets out into the general population and wrecks havoc.
02:18:59.000Obviously this one was worldwide, but it's not like it was targeted in one specific area, but in getting something that does go worldwide, Look at the amount, the authoritarian response just in Australia.
02:19:14.000Australia has turned into a fucking prison colony.
02:19:18.000And then here's one where the Second Amendment advocates step up and say, hey, this is why we have the Second Amendment.
02:19:27.000The Second Amendment is supposed to apply to protection of yourself and a well-armed militia.
02:19:32.000It has nothing to do with some guy being able to have 150 fucking ARs in his bedroom, and this is crazy, and it's overreach, or it's being abused, rather.
02:19:48.000The general population, there's a few people that have rifles for hunting, but there's nothing like we have here in America, and they are being overrun.
02:19:58.000Cops are pulling people over for simply being outside their homes, and they're throwing them to the ground like thugs.
02:20:04.000You're seeing these protests where they're literally pepper spraying old ladies in the face.
02:20:10.000It's crazy how much they've been divided.
02:20:12.000And what scares the shit out of me is I've got to think that any foreign entity, any foreign government that sees what's possible in Australia would like to see that happen in America.
02:22:09.000But so much of what's happened over the past few years has been insane because it's just automatically, if it emanated from the previous administration, it was bullshit, whether it was or not.
02:22:18.000Some of it was bullshit, but whether it was or not, it didn't matter.
02:23:03.000And, you know, I've never seen anything as an assessment that tells you less, right?
02:23:09.000But at least they're honest because they come out and go, well, you know, it's still inconclusive as to whether it originated in the lab because that Chinese won't cooperate, right?
02:23:18.000And our intel is so poor there, you know, we just don't have the sources.
02:23:20.000And you're talking about a very heavy lift in terms of getting intel We're good to go.
02:23:40.000But isn't it so interesting how the division in this country is so clear between left and right that left is defending Fauci and they're essentially ignoring all this information that he and the NIH funded that EcoHealth Alliance,
02:24:01.000which in turn funded what Rand Paul and many others believe you could describe as gain-of-function research.
02:24:10.000They even refer to it in the same way in emails that were released, and Fauci lied in front of Congress when he was being questioned about this.
02:24:22.000I think, again, it's all based on where you sit and try.
02:24:27.000But if you try to assess this thing objectively, if you can, if it's possible to take the politics out of it, and you simply just look at what facts have been established, then You can certainly make the argument that Fauci lied about the extent to which he was aware of what was going on and then the extent to which there was an effort to try to cover for the Wuhan lab and create a different narrative over this.
02:24:56.000So it's bullshit at this stage of the game that people still look at this and go, you know, I don't know.
02:25:02.000It could have been still natural causes and maybe didn't come out of the lab.
02:25:06.000And that's That defies logic if you just simply look at pattern of behavior and evidence that exists currently, right?
02:25:14.000Much less what hopefully will come out from better intel sources.
02:25:17.000And then new evidence about the three people that worked at the lab that turned out to be sick with illnesses that resemble 100% COVID-19 infection.
02:25:34.000Going back full circle to what we started talking about, which was the Afghanistan withdrawal, if you were to read the transcripts from the first part of the hearings with the Armed Services Committee and the Chairman Reed,
02:25:51.000Democrat Senator, he has the right to make the opening statement.
02:26:13.000He doesn't start this hearing, this investigative hearing, by saying, we brought these experts who spent each four decades in the military and were intimately involved in what was going on in Afghanistan.
02:26:25.000We brought them here to hear from them.
02:26:26.000He starts it out by framing the way that he would like this to go.
02:26:31.000It fucking works there in Washington, right?
02:26:34.000Because we allow these people to stay in office forever, right?
02:26:37.000Nobody wants to make a brave decision because they're all worried about getting elected again.
02:27:26.000So it's too difficult to get, like, a definitive statement or a definitive— Like timeline of exactly what happened and how it happened and this is the cause.
02:27:34.000Unless you can get your hands on one of the researchers that was inside the lab and is somehow willing to provide you with that intel.
02:27:43.000I mean that's an enormous lift, right?
02:27:45.000It's like trying to get intel on the Iranian nuclear program or anything else.
02:27:48.000I mean there's certain targets that have always been difficult and in part it's because you have a small pool of people who have access to information that you need to know or you want to know.
02:27:58.000And then you have very limited ability to get to those people.
02:28:02.000So again, they scrubbed whatever information may be available from open source.
02:28:15.000And so I have a feeling that we're never going to get to the bottom of it necessarily, again, unless we get really lucky with a particular intel source.
02:28:22.000But there's no upside for the Chinese to say, ah, you know what, now let's be open and transparent.
02:28:29.000It seems like the pandemic was particularly effective at dividing Americans.
02:28:33.000And obviously, what's happening in Australia and France and quite a few other places where there are these massive protests, but you don't see the same in Russia and you don't see the same in China.
02:28:49.000I mean, it seems like Whatever strategy they have, if there really is some sort of a government-funded strategy to try to increase the division amongst the left and the right and just people in general in America and distrust in the system,
02:29:06.000this pandemic has turbocharged it for America, but maybe not so much for our enemies.
02:29:45.000But I think with the US, I just think that they look at it and, yes, it's just another, I guess, to carry on from the point before about the active measures and the idea of driving wedges in.
02:30:01.000If I was sitting in the Russia desk for active measures at the FSB and I was sitting there and I thought to myself, now what can we do?
02:31:19.000I mean, to me, that part of it, and yet, you know, people are out there yielding their self-righteous swords of justice, you know, talking about, you know, you've got to get vaccinated and...
02:31:33.000That's one of the real problems with social media, right?
02:31:36.000Is that this self-righteous, virtue-signaling sort of behavior is encouraged.
02:31:43.000It's encouraged because people pile on, you get reinforcement, you know, like, yeah, I'm People reinforce your decision to post something aggressive.
02:32:58.000But the only way it works is if then you can say, okay, and you've got an impartial media that is out there saying, well, that's an interesting story, so I'll pursue that.
02:33:08.000You have completely biased media, either for the left or for the right, and so much so that they're ignoring stories and even censoring them.
02:33:17.000Stories that turn out to be accurate, like the lab leak hypothesis, right?
02:33:21.000For the longest time, if you tried to put that on Facebook, they would ban it and they would ban you.
02:33:25.000Now, it's widely accepted that that's the primary theory.
02:33:30.000But nobody goes back and lets those people back on and says, sorry, we fucked you.
02:34:04.000They suppressed their own personal, and that at some point went away, and now, like everything else, we're conditioned, and we don't think it odd that you can open an entire New York Times article with nothing but anonymous sources, right?
02:34:21.000But I don't think, you know, you can't walk that dog back.
02:34:24.000But again, going back to this idea of influencing the public, you know, whether you're trying to get them to buy cigarettes or whether you're the Russians and you're trying to create more dissension, you know, the only defense really comes down to the individual and each person taking a little bit of fucking responsibility and saying,
02:35:26.000Whether it's by design, which obviously we think it is a little bit, but also just through human nature.
02:35:32.000Whenever you're in a time of great stress, like now, people, they find comfort in groups, and they also like to gang up on people that don't agree with their ideology.
02:35:44.000And my concern is, what you're saying about curating your own information, I've been telling people to try to do that as much as possible, I try to do that as much as possible, but I don't think the majority of people are on board with that.
02:35:56.000I think the majority of people, they will go to MSNBC, they will get the news that aligns with their ideology, they'll go to Fox, they'll get the news that aligns with their ideology, and then they'll point fingers at the other side of the fence and go, these motherfuckers are ruining America.
02:36:23.000I don't know why, but it was so partisan.
02:36:27.000So the left was busy trying to figure out how to blame the previous administration, and the right was simply banging on...
02:36:34.000The Republican senators were simply banging on about, we left people behind, and nobody...
02:36:42.000Was taking the opportunity of having, you know, these senior commanders in front of them, you know, to ask impartial objective questions and actually try to get...
02:36:50.000They were all trying to make their own fucking point, which is always going to happen, which, again, I don't know why I was surprised, but it's inevitable.
02:36:58.000And every issue, you know, including the pandemic, is framed in that way.
02:37:32.000It's a part of our DNA. It's so difficult for people to abandon those ideas and to reach across the aisle with earnestness and try to be kind to the other side and have a balanced, civilized conversation.
02:37:55.000What's encouraged is people with radical ideas that attack the other side, that attack the opposing ideology, and then a bunch of people get on board with it and start retweeting it, and then the other side gets even more furious and people dig their heels in the sand.
02:38:12.000Well, once you get this involved, right?
02:38:17.000Then that's when, you know, everything goes sideways and you've got another but a goat rope because that's when you get that piling on effect, right?
02:38:26.000And then people can, oh my God, look, I got my own community here and I just got 50 more likes for my fucking post and I don't know what the fuck I'm talking about, but I'm going to lambast whoever this person is and that person may not even be a person.
02:38:39.000And so it all comes back to- Right, that's part of the problem.
02:38:42.000And so anyway, for what it's worth, read multiple sources of information and investigate what the fuck you're reading.
02:39:12.000Yeah, I don't think—unless the internet shuts down and we all get back to some sort of other type of community-based communication, I don't think it's going to become less—it's not going to become less divisive.
02:40:30.000Yeah, and that's where, I know I bang on about this every now and then when we're talking, but that's why I keep going on about fucking term limits.
02:40:37.000I looked at that, I watched some of that, and I watched some hearings the other day on a different subject, and I look at these people, and I realize that these guys have been up on there doing these political jobs as senators or congresspeople, and they've been there for 35 or 40 years.
02:40:52.000And you think, you know, what the fuck are we doing now?
02:40:54.000And they're not that impressive as people anyway.
02:40:57.000And they've got a certain character flow anyway because they went into politics.
02:41:07.000That was a theoretical concept of throwing out a third or fourth party.
02:41:11.000But I think that would be very helpful in...
02:41:16.000In not healing, but in mitigating some of the problems from the device?
02:41:21.000I just think that the powers that be will do everything they can to keep that from happening, especially a third party that doesn't have all the trappings that the first two parties do, like the deeply entwined roots of the Democratic and the Republican parties.
02:41:38.000The Democrats, they're not giving up what they have.
02:41:42.000And anybody that comes along that's reasonable, that's a third party.
02:41:45.000You know, Brett Weinstein had an idea for, he called it Unity 2020, and he was going to reach across the aisle and say, like, take a qualified candidate from the left and a qualified candidate from the right and bring them together as a third alternative.
02:41:59.000But popular figures like Dan Crenshaw and Tulsi Gabbard, those were the two most likely candidates they were talking about.
02:42:16.000They confirmed their initial suspicions, they said, and wouldn't reinstate the thing.
02:42:22.000But their position was they were so worried that Trump was going to win.
02:42:28.000And that all resources that could perhaps take votes away from the Democrats and Joe Biden needed to be stopped.
02:42:38.000And so this idea could potentially take people that would have voted for Biden because they were opposed to Trump, and now instead they're going to vote for Tulsi Gabbard and Dan Crenshaw.
02:42:47.000This is going to fuck things up for the Democrats.
02:42:49.000Which, I mean, they always make that argument, whether it's Ralph Nader or Ross Perot or whomever.
02:44:25.000Well, this is a story that came out, was that some of the stuff that he's done is going to be marketed now as having hung in the White House.
02:44:52.000Some of it's really interesting, don't get me wrong, but there's a lot of it, like we were talking about this couple that's getting divorced in Manhattan, real estate developer, is worth hundreds of millions of dollars, and he has a $600 million art collection.
02:45:06.000So we put up this one painting that's worth somewhere between $40 and $60 million, and it looks like dog shit.
02:45:19.000I'm old enough that I was in when they opened the Sydney Opera House, because I was living in Australia.
02:45:22.000I remember we took a trip over to Sydney to see the Opera House, and we were walking through, and I was just a little kid, and we walked through, and there's a big Jackson Pollock there.
02:45:32.000And I looked at the Jackson Pollock, and I looked at my dad, and the tour guide was standing there, and I said, I could do that shit.
02:47:43.000Yeah, there's a push by, I forget who it is in the House Ethics Committee, that says, look, we need to know who's buying his art so that it's not just a bunch of Chinese dealers looking to gain some influence.
02:47:53.000Yeah, but the gallery in Soho says it will not disclose the identity of buyers or details of the sales.
02:49:26.000They touted him as a guest, and then somewhere along the line, I reached out back, and I said, yeah, let's try to get him on, and then they passed.
02:49:34.000So they might have just thrown a bunch of shit out there in terms of, like, invitations, and then they said, oh, Brogan's probably going to...