Joe and Mike talk about monkeypox, why Nancy Pelosi should be fired, and why China is trying to kill people in Taiwan. Also, they talk about the fact that they can't have sex unless they're having unprotected sex with a lot of other people. And they also talk about why they don't want to have sex with other people if they're not having sex with them, because why not? Joe and Mike also discuss why they think it's a good idea to have unprotected sex at a rave and why it's not a bad idea if you don't have much unprotected gay sex. And then they talk a little bit about China and why they should be worried about it, because they're trying to get people killed in Taiwan and it's going to happen. Joe also talks about why he thinks it's better than chickenpox and why he doesn't think it should be called chickenpox anymore. Also, he talks about the new name for the disease. Monkeypox. Mike talks about how he thinks the name should be changed to something less offensive to gay people, like "Monkeypox." And we talk about how to deal with a woman who wants to have a threesome with a bunch of other women and doesn't have a guy's tits. All that and more on this episode of the Joe Rogan Experience! Subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts! Subscribe on iTunes Learn more about your ad choices. Rate, review and subscribe to the pod cast. The opinions expressed in this episode are our ad choices are our own, not sponsored by Paypal. We do not endorse, review, review or review our products, and we are not affiliated with any other affiliate links, we do not own any other services. We are a proud to promote this podcast, so please tell us what you're listening to this podcast is your ad-free version of this podcast. Thank you for supporting us, rating and reviewing our podcast or reviewing our music is your rating and review is appreciated and reviewing it is your feedback is also appreciated and we post it on Instafilites, too, so we can help us out there is more than that helps us out in the next week and we get more of this in the podcast is more reviews and other places we can reach more people can reach us out more reviews, more of your thoughts and reviews are more helpful than that, and more reviews are appreciated and more like that.
00:00:44.000And it also can be avoided if you don't have a lot of unprotected gay sex.
00:00:48.000Yeah, unfortunately, I said the other, what, a month ago, I made the mistake of saying, yeah, just don't have a lot of unprotected, random sex at a rave, or don't fuck monkeys.
00:01:00.000And apparently people took offense at that.
00:01:50.000It is interesting that one of the primary concerns right now is, aside obviously from dealing with the actual issue, is that we've got to change the name.
00:01:59.000And I honestly, God couldn't figure out why that would be offensive to anybody but monkeys.
00:03:48.000I mean from her office and from other places, we don't know who really started talking about this because there have been a number of delegations obviously going back and forth.
00:04:01.000But it really doesn't matter who would leak it because – As soon as Pelosi's staff decided they're going to start talking to their Taiwanese counterparts about arranging a trip like this, from that very first conversation, Chinese intel already knows about it,
00:04:20.000But anyway, so whether the Chinese regime decided to leak it and make a big issue of it because they're getting very shirty about Taiwan at this point, it's anybody's guess.
00:06:24.000Is that- It's because Taiwan, while an independent nation, right, except from China's perspective, nothing happens on that island without the Chinese regime knowing about it,
00:06:41.000whether it's the Ministry of State Security or whether it's the PLA's intel operations.
00:06:54.000We can talk about what they're doing lately and the rest of the world.
00:06:59.000But the amount of resource that the Chinese machine puts into, not just under Xi but previously, puts into monitoring and understanding What's happening in Taiwan, and importantly, what the U.S. is doing in relation to Taiwan,
00:07:48.000So as their military has been growing, so has their sort of willingness to be aggressive about it and to put themselves out there, which didn't used to be the case, in part because I don't think they felt emboldened enough yet due to the strength of their navy in particular.
00:08:02.000They've got the largest navy in the world.
00:08:04.000So, you know, they're not just doing it to do it.
00:08:30.000Is there one perspective where some advisers are saying we have to let it happen to avoid the inevitable mass bloodshed because it's going to happen no matter what?
00:08:42.000And then the other perspective is if we let them do that, We're sending the worst message possible, so we need to defeat this at all costs.
00:08:50.000Yeah, that's very eloquent, actually, that you've defined the two tracks, right?
00:08:59.000Although you could argue, and this is what China's been watching also, is what's been happening in Russia and Ukraine.
00:09:07.000So the idea that we've drawn a red line, we're not putting boots on the ground, but we're going to do everything up to that to help support the Ukraine in their efforts against Russia.
00:09:19.000China looks at that and they think, okay, is that where this would go?
00:09:23.000Once we send our Navy across the strait there and start dropping troops on the island, You know, where is the U.S. in all of this?
00:09:34.000And they have to base their strategy, their forward planning on sort of the knowns, right?
00:09:43.000And one of the knowns is how we're dealing with Ukraine.
00:09:45.000We do not want to get into a shooting war with Russia.
00:09:47.000Well, China's going to have to look at that and go, well, we assume they definitely don't want to get into a shooting war with us, right?
00:09:55.000Then they just – that's how they start to calculate what that strategy looks like and what the potential then risks and damage could be from being sanctioned further in certain areas, in having arms resupplied to Taiwan during the course of an invasion essentially.
00:10:14.000So there's a lot that goes into it but – I mean, look, it's interesting because we miscalculated the Russia situation, right?
00:10:22.000We figured out that Russia was building up to an invasion, but just about everybody said, yeah, it'll take them three or four days, and they'll roll into Kiev, and it'll be over.
00:10:32.000So now we have to worry about how good are our estimates of, you know, the Chinese PLA, the People's Liberation Army, and their capabilities, and the Navy, and how...
00:10:59.000It's very disturbing when you're sitting here, you feel helpless, you read the news, and you're trying to pay attention to what's going on, and you're like, Jesus, how does this end well?
00:11:12.000Well, look, we thought – because, again, we didn't have – going back to using Russia as a case study, you know, and obviously that war is going on and it's horrific and, you know, there's a lot of tragedy there.
00:11:24.000But using it as a case study for what could happen in China and the potential there – We didn't get Putin's plans and intentions right at all.
00:11:34.000Once this thing dragged on beyond what he expected, then there was a lot of speculation.
00:11:39.000Okay, maybe this is a negotiated settlement.
00:11:58.000So they're in it apparently to win but what does that mean?
00:12:05.000Are they just – are they going to be happy securing that eastern side of the country in the south and does that mean they want to take Odessa – I mean further beyond into Odessa and – Again, nobody really knows.
00:12:19.000And we could talk about how, you know, what does that mean?
00:12:23.000Was it just because we were focused elsewhere, spending 20-plus years on the Middle East, counterterrorism?
00:12:30.000And so does that mean that we were unable to, because we didn't have the resources focused on the area, to assess what was going to happen with a land war in Europe?
00:12:39.000And so what does that mean in terms of our ability to assess what the Chinese regime is going to do and what their military capabilities are?
00:12:47.000It is a big concern, but how it ends, again, that's all speculation, but it's going to be messy either way.
00:12:55.000Now, what do you make of the people that say that this is provoked by NATO constantly pushing the boundaries and pushing weapons up to the border of Russia?
00:13:29.000So he's cementing himself as being there forever.
00:13:31.000But we've always, I guess my point is, we've never really been good at just saying, okay, that's what they're saying, so maybe we should factor that into our analysis as to what could happen.
00:13:40.000And Putin was clear for all these years, saying, you know, I want to rebuild the Soviet Union in some fashion, right?
00:13:47.000And the collapse of the Soviet Union, including losing Ukraine.
00:14:01.000And they became independent in 91. Got out from the Soviet Union.
00:14:09.000So Putin's been very upfront about how he wants to rebuild the Soviet Union in some capacity.
00:14:14.000So yes, I get the argument that says if we've been pushing NATO for years, right, and trying to strengthen NATO and trying to get them to pay their fair share and trying to do all these things to bolster NATO, particularly along the border with Russia,
00:14:30.000he's going to look at that as an existential threat in a way, right?
00:14:37.000We've paid more attention to that, but I think that's a little bit too late for Putin, but I think what we should do is use that again and look at what she's been saying, and look at what they say during their congresses, look at their five-year plans,
00:14:56.000Being a little bit more aware that he probably means what he says.
00:15:00.000So when they talk about Taiwan, they mean that.
00:15:02.000When they talk about getting to the top of the food chain in a variety of areas, whether it's pharmaceuticals, technology, telecommunications, shipping, oil and gas, that's what they're going to do, which is why they've been so intent over the years to hoover up or steal every bit of intellectual property and intelligence that they can.
00:15:25.000Because that's how they're meeting those goals.
00:15:29.000There's also some talk about them buying U.S. farmland.
00:15:33.000Someone just brought this up to me the other day.
00:15:35.000They just bought an enormous farm somewhere in the middle of America, and their number one priority is feeding China.
00:15:53.000The Bureau had a great report not that long ago.
00:15:59.000It was a culmination of years of investigation.
00:16:02.000And One of the interesting things that they were doing was looking at the financial side of things.
00:16:09.000Rather than kind of thinking of individual counterintelligence operations, they started looking at Chinese companies, whether they were state-owned or whether they were just, you know, Theoretically private, but they had two or three cutouts between them and the state.
00:16:24.000And they were looking at their deals and they're saying, well, why would they do this?
00:16:28.000And if it's a private company that's out there to make money and to become successful or be successful, to grow, why would they be making deals that seem not profitable?
00:16:43.000And so Aside from just acquiring assets, and China's over the years has acquired a massive amount of property and other assets here in the U.S. and around the world, is the idea that it's a very clever part of their investigation from a bureau perspective is to say,
00:17:03.000all right, let's look at a Chinese company like ZTE or Huawei.
00:17:09.000And let's try to understand why would they possibly be giving away their products basically at dirt cheap prices?
00:17:17.000Why would they be interested in acquiring land in a particular area?
00:17:21.000Why would they want to work with a particular regional telecoms provider here in the U.S.? And when you do that, their activity becomes pretty clear.
00:17:32.000Even to people who are skeptics, it becomes pretty obvious that, I mean, look, just Huawei alone Over the years, I mean, going back to 2000 and before that, Huawei as a telecoms company started in 87,
00:17:48.000and they're now the largest producer of telecoms gear in the world.
00:17:54.000They do the antennas, they do the routers, they do the servers.
00:17:58.000You look at a cell tower now, anywhere in the Midwest or out west, anywhere, and it's likely got Huawei or ZTE or other Chinese components on that cell tower.
00:18:10.000And one of the reports that the Bureau came out with after a lengthy investigation is fascinating.
00:18:19.000I'm pretty sure you've seen this report.
00:18:26.000It goes up Wyoming, Colorado, that area along the border of Nebraska.
00:18:33.000They did a deal with a regional telecoms provider out there, Vero, I think it was.
00:18:39.000And they now have their – over the years, they've put their equipment, Huawei has – Onto these cell towers that go up and down this corridor.
00:18:49.000Well, the other thing that's up and down this corridor are a variety of military bases and an enormous number of ICBM sites are a nuke program, right?
00:19:02.000So the idea that China was just, you know, willingly giving it vastly discounted prices I think we're good to go.
00:19:29.000And how smart they are at long-term targeting and understanding, I want to know about this, that's where the information is, I'm going to get access to it, and I don't care whether it takes me 10, 20, 30 years.
00:19:41.000So we're having this conversation, and you're explaining this to me.
00:19:44.000I would imagine that if I was a person in a position of power in government, I would want to stop this from happening.
00:19:58.000It's been a thing for a handful of years.
00:20:02.000When you think about it, if you think about Huawei's been doing this for...
00:20:05.000I mean, look, we can talk about what they did up in Canada, too, to one of the world's biggest companies up in Canada in telecoms roughly the same time.
00:20:17.000A couple of years ago, we're in 2022 now.
00:20:20.000So a couple of years ago, when they released this information, when they finished their investigation, and they looked and they said, this is bullshit, right?
00:20:28.000Because one of the things about this equipment that's sitting on these cell towers is people will say, well, who cares?
00:20:36.000I don't care if the Chinese regime listens into my mobile phone.
00:20:39.000Well, the PLA's third department and their First Technical Reconnaissance Bureau and other parts of the Chinese machine that hoovers up all this information that's related to our national security interests.
00:20:51.000They're not just going after commercial cell phone signals.
00:20:56.000This part of this investigation was to break down this equipment and try to understand, okay, wait a minute, could this be going after the DOD spectrum, the bandwidth that the military would use?
00:21:44.000But once the investigation came out, then people did start to pay attention.
00:21:49.000But this is how slow the US government can be.
00:21:56.000In 2019 and 2020, basically what happened was, to oversimplify this, was once it became clear what was going on and what the Chinese regime was doing, using Chinese telecoms providers to do this.
00:22:13.000The U.S. government said, okay, that's it.
00:22:15.000We've got to take all this gear off these cell towers.
00:22:17.000These are regional providers in these areas because what the Chinese were very smart about was looking at our military bases, seeing how many of them were out in the rural parts of America, identifying who the regional providers are and saying, we can sell you this gear for nothing.
00:22:46.000So anyway, the US government said, you got to take all this gear off.
00:22:49.000You've got to remove all this shit, and we're going to have to replace it with trusted gear.
00:22:53.000And by the way, Huawei is on a trade list, as is ZTE and others at this point.
00:23:00.000So we can't, going forward, companies aren't using their gear, but you've got all this stuff sitting up there anyway, right?
00:23:08.000And every time you need to do an update, One of the weaknesses on some of this gear is you've got to basically hit it with new software, with an update.
00:23:17.000And anytime you do that, that's a pathway perhaps for them to do something else.
00:23:22.000And so they said, take all this gear off.
00:23:24.000We're going to allocate, as US government, we're going to allocate just shy of $2 billion to do this.
00:23:35.000This was 2020. Two years later, none of the gears been moved because all the companies, they said, okay, shit, we'll make a list of all the stuff that's got to come off of there.
00:23:46.000And you're talking about You know, 20-some-odd thousand pieces of equipment that need to be pulled off of cell towers that, you know, are compromising or potentially compromising U.S. national interests.
00:23:58.000And they said, well, we can't do this for $1.9 billion.
00:24:03.000It's going to cost us twice that at least, which means it'll cost us probably three times that.
00:24:31.000The Commerce Department started an investigation in 2021. They still haven't finished it about the same issue.
00:24:37.000So I don't want to sound cynical, But, A, I'm very happy that the Bureau, through some very good investigative efforts, has highlighted this, and it's important to be talking about this.
00:24:51.000Thank God we're getting better at talking about it.
00:26:19.000I know I sound like I'm rambling, but you can go back 10 years ago and in one estimate, a legit estimate of the cost to us, right, from economic espionage and the theft of intellectual property by not just China,
00:26:36.000but Russia, Iran, North Korea, any bad actor, the theft, the cost of that in one year, at that time, 10 years ago, was $500 billion.
00:26:47.000In terms of blueprints and technical information.
00:26:50.000And then you factor in lost jobs, right?
00:26:54.000Because when they're stealing information to advance themselves, what they're also doing is kicking us in the ass and we're losing jobs, right?
00:27:03.000And we're losing and companies are shutting down or not making money.
00:27:38.000At a certain point, they just couldn't compete, because all the information about their plans and intentions for business operations, for bids, for everything, were now in the hands of Chinese state-owned or favored companies.
00:27:57.000They infiltrated a lot of basically malware that they laid onto their systems internally.
00:28:03.000They also had some old-school kind of help, right?
00:28:07.000There's a lot of layers to espionage, right?
00:28:09.000There's a lot of layers, particularly economic espionage.
00:28:11.000So we all like to think about the cybers part of it now, and that's true.
00:28:16.000But You know, Chinese in particular also rely on human intelligence, right?
00:28:21.000So co-opties or recruits that they can get.
00:28:23.000And they had a number of very highly regarded and thought of engineers and developers and innovators and working within Nortel who were from China.
00:28:38.000And that's a prime target for Chinese intel, right?
00:29:15.000So I guess the point to the story there is it's been going on a long damn time.
00:29:21.000And we tend to think of it as like just something when, I mean the previous administration, Trump administration, you know, they talked a lot about China, China, China.
00:29:31.000The more we talk about this, it's not going to change their behavior, but if nothing else, maybe it makes businesses, companies more aware.
00:29:38.000I think one thing that needs to happen is that The government has to do a better job of explaining the case because, again, I've seen this for years now where people just kind of go, yeah, okay, fine.
00:29:52.000You're talking about Chinese espionage and they're stealing our information.
00:29:56.000They don't really know what it means necessarily or they just don't imagine it's that big a deal.
00:30:04.000And I guess maybe that's part of the biggest problem is because of what it is, because you gather some of this, you can't talk about sources and methods.
00:30:11.000You don't just throw everything out there on the table and say, look, here's the evidence that Huawei or the third department of the PLA or whoever is doing all this activity.
00:30:50.000The Bureau's getting better at it, but I think we need to be more transparent in explaining how we know some of these things, to the degree that we can, and there will be limitations, but we don't do enough of it.
00:31:02.000But the more we talk about it, again, it's not going to change the Chinese regime's behavior, because this is how they envisioned, and it's worked so far, getting to the top of the food chain.
00:32:41.000I think it was called Ibon or something.
00:32:44.000On the face of it, it was just a company that Worked in the entertainment, not the entertainment, in the hospitality business, right?
00:32:54.000And you think, well, why would they hack into a business that does hospitality work and hotel chains?
00:33:00.000Well, because what do you have at hotel chains?
00:33:03.000You have conferences and you have, you know, gatherings of business people and everything.
00:33:07.000And so what they were doing was they figured out how to get through IBON and then get into the communications of you're sitting in a conference room, right?
00:33:16.000You're listening to some speaker up there talk about Whatever it is, laser technology, it doesn't really matter.
00:33:25.000And you're bored, so you say, well, shit, I forgot to call Bob.
00:33:31.000Well, they had managed to figure out if we get into IBON and we get into the way that they had connected with the various hospitality groups to help handle communications, right, for, you know, conferences and events, so they could pick up all that email traffic.
00:33:46.000So next thing you know, you got, you know, somebody emailing their boss back home talking about something proprietary.
00:33:54.000And It sounds odd, but it's very effective.
00:33:57.000So I guess my point being is whether it's that, whether it's going after a pigment formula for creating a new type of pigment at DuPont, they don't care.
00:34:08.000They'll just go after this stuff and then they'll feed it to their businesses.
00:34:28.000All our telecoms gear has been checked out by the FCC. If the Chinese regime goes to Huawei and says, we want your cooperation on something, they'll provide that cooperation.
00:34:48.000I remember when the Huawei stuff was going on, there were some tech sites that were very dubious about it, and they were saying that Trump is overstepping, and this is a terrible idea, there's nothing wrong with Huawei.
00:35:00.000And I remember reading this, and they're coming from a tech perspective.
00:35:03.000They're just saying, like, this is innovative gear, and they make great stuff.
00:35:08.000But it's bizarre that they don't get informed before they make these articles, because these articles can shift public opinion, particularly amongst people who follow that stuff.
00:35:18.000They would say, well, this is an overstep.
00:35:52.000And so I don't understand, I mean, I guess, but, you know, I just think, fuck off with that xenophobic argument because it's not...
00:36:00.000I do see that when they say it's overreaching, I think that goes back to this idea that we're not being transparent enough about explaining how we know some of this.
00:36:10.000And that's why I keep saying, to the degree possible, I think that would solve part of this issue and get more companies on side.
00:36:15.000The Bureau's gotten a lot better and other parts of the government have gotten a lot better at going out to businesses and saying, these are the problems.
00:36:21.000This is what you may be seeing in the future.
00:36:23.000This is what they're trying to accomplish.
00:36:27.000But a lot of these companies are either just too focused on shareholder reports and they've got a good internal security system, they think.
00:36:38.000Or they look at it and they say, I don't want to really go out there and report that we've been hit by a...
00:36:47.000You know, a ransomware or whatever, because what's that going to do to the bottom line or the stock value?
00:36:53.000So a lot of companies, it's like crime.
00:37:44.000Send a co-opty or, you know, some asset out to a field in Nebraska to dig up some modified seeds to send back to China so they can take a look at what's going on.
00:37:56.000Their efforts are, you know, from an intelligence perspective, you got to admire them in a way.
00:38:05.000It's kind of fascinating because the disturbing conclusion that one can make is that the only way for us to be able to compete with the Chinese in the way they do it is if we do it that way.
00:38:24.000Smart CIA. Looks like a monkey fucking a football over here.
00:38:29.000But it's this thing where they have a complete integration between their businesses and their government.
00:38:37.000So their government would never allow them, if we sent American gear over there that hoovers up all their intellectual data, they would never allow that.
00:39:31.000I mean, you look at China and something simple such as electric vehicles.
00:39:39.000By the way, I walked into a rental car place the other day, a couple weeks ago, and the guy said, I just rented some bog-standard sedan, because I was only there for like two days.
00:39:50.000The guy says, Hey, I can give you a deal on a Tesla.
00:39:54.000Well, I've never driven a Tesla before.
00:41:19.000And my takeaway, long story short, I've already made it long, but my takeaway from driving the Tesla for two days was I think if you're a technology person, I think it's great.
00:41:41.000And so, I'm not saying I'm against electric vehicles, but...
00:41:45.000Oh, I know where I was going with this.
00:41:47.000But the Chinese, when you think about it, they control 85%, 90% of the processing of minerals that go into an electric vehicle battery.
00:41:59.000And so when you think about that, it's not that they have all those within China, but they control the processing of it because they're smart and because they looked at this years ago and because part of their five-year plan at a certain point was we're going to advance the ball in green technology.
00:42:15.000That means we're going to lock this down and we're also going to steal information related to this, but we're going to do everything we can to get ourselves further up that chain.
00:42:24.000So whether you're talking about lithium or cobalt or copper or whatever, In that battery, you know, we are way behind the curve.
00:42:49.000I like it because it shows, again, it shows The targeting aspects of intelligence and the thought process that goes into gathering information, developing a strategy, working towards it, prioritizing your collection, all these things.
00:43:02.000But, yeah, anyway, I wasn't, I'm not saying I wasn't a fan of Tesla.
00:43:07.000I like, you know, Musk and the company and all that, but I just, I like to hear a noise when I'm driving.
00:46:43.000That car is supposed to be incredible to drive because it has, like, Porsche dynamics in terms of, like, steering and handling and everything like that.
00:47:25.000Well, that's why I say, again, I guess, I'm too far down the road to appreciate the technology behind it.
00:47:33.000But I am fascinated by the composition of the battery.
00:47:37.000What that means in the future, if what we're trying to do is transition to all electric vehicles, where these minerals are located around the world, what that looks like in terms of who controls that process, but also just the simple stuff of, like, you know, I know we're talking about this for environmental reasons,
00:47:55.000If what we're going to do is control more of this here in the U.S., I don't think a lot of people are going to get behind the idea of like, okay, let's do more mining in the U.S. Right.
00:48:16.000You got, I forget, I remember one time that cobalt in a battery, in an EV battery, there's a few kilograms of it.
00:48:23.000And there's more cobalt in the Republic of Congo, Democratic Republic of Congo, than anywhere else in the world.
00:48:33.000So if, and again, China controls a lot of the processing, you know, 80 plus percent of this.
00:48:39.000So if what we're saying is, okay, we want to do more cobalt mining, as just an example, in the US. There's a lot of cobalt in Idaho, believe it or not, which I don't know if you know this, but I'm in Idaho now.
00:48:51.000And most of that's on state forest land.
00:49:08.000I do think there's a lot of people out there who think that the energy for an electric vehicle comes from the battery itself, as opposed to maybe you've got to charge that son of a bitch up.
00:49:38.000Let's make a greener, cleaner world, but let's do everything all at the same time.
00:49:43.000But it seems like it's greener in terms of people's impressions of what's going on because you're not getting the exhaust fumes.
00:49:51.000But it's not necessarily greener net for the world when you think about the environmental impact and exactly what's involved in taking the stuff out of the ground and also how you're powering it.
00:50:06.000When we think about who leads the world in sort of the cleanest form of oil and gas exploration and drilling, for example, and we say, okay, well, we want to get away from oil and gas here and fossil fuels here in the US,
00:50:21.000so we're going to start making it more difficult to pursue that.
00:50:28.000But we're okay with the idea that other nations aren't going to change their habits and their practices, which are not as environmentally friendly.
00:50:36.000And so, I mean, there's a lot of layers to this.
00:51:13.000And if you think about the amount of cars in this country alone that are actually electric vehicles with low emissions that are powered by coal plants, Which is kind of fucking wild.
00:51:26.000Because that's a real thing in many parts of this country.
00:51:29.000Yeah, I don't know where people think that...
00:51:31.000I mean, again, I'm not saying everybody thinks this way, but I think there are a lot of people that just somehow imagine that battery is just self-charging.
00:51:39.000Well, I think a lot of people just like the idea of doing the right thing from their perspective.
00:52:12.000I've heard that there's potential technologies that can extract carbon from the air and that some people are looking at carbon as a potential resource, that you could actually extract the carbon from the air and that carbon could be valuable.
00:52:47.000I mean, again, I'll wrap up the, you know, it's the Bash China Hour, but I do think that when we're talking about where we're five to ten years from now, and, you know,
00:53:03.000the U.S. government just passed this Chips and Science Act because we're aware of the fact that we don't produce enough semiconductors, enough chips here in the States.
00:53:12.000Most of it being done over in Taiwan, right?
00:53:14.000I mean, 90%, basically, of the sophisticated semiconductor product is produced in Taiwan.
00:53:25.000Pass the Chips and Science Act, invest some more money in doing that here.
00:53:31.000I just don't know that we're going to be able to do anything about the minerals required for the EV part because I just don't see, once people realize that it means you're going to start digging up more earth in these not good-looking mining operations.
00:53:47.000I don't know that they're going to be on board with that.
00:53:49.000So I'm not sure where that goes in terms of U.S. independence in that industry.
00:53:56.000But there's a lot of things we, you know, fine, let's invest in.
00:54:00.000But I just think that that idea that somehow we're going to shut down fossil fuels in the very near short term in favor of this, no.
00:54:09.000How about we continue with the fossil fuels that we have?
00:54:42.000But it's just what you're talking about is not clean at all.
00:54:48.000And we're talking about doing this for every car in the country?
00:54:52.000And I don't even believe we even have enough minerals to power X amount of hundreds of millions of cars.
00:55:00.000No, I don't know what the mineral reserves are now around the world.
00:55:06.000You know, in terms of rare earth minerals, China's hit the jackpot, right, in terms of just where they're located.
00:55:11.000So they've got, when it's rare earth minerals, but I mean, you know, you can't, you don't put cobalt and lithium and copper in that category.
00:55:18.000But again, they've got the hands on the processing.
00:55:25.000I just think that whether we're talking about their efforts to gather intelligence, whether we're talking about their buildup of their military, whether we're talking about sort of their focus, I just think that there needs to be more of an awareness of...
00:55:43.000Where we are in relation to China and what that's going to look like in 5, 10, 15 years.
00:55:49.000And I don't know that we've, you know, bang on about something else that's interesting.
00:55:53.000We spent so much time focused on the Middle East and counterterrorism that I think we legitimately degraded our ability to worry about other parts of the world and Russia and China being the two key ones.
00:56:08.000So I think we're trying to recalibrate, but that takes time.
00:56:12.000When you're talking about retooling your intelligence community to now move away from this idea that, you know, it's all counterterrorism all the time and, you know, we got to get back to the kind of the old school intel concerns.
00:56:45.000It's going to be interesting where we go, but circling back, I mean, you look at Russia, and I don't know where that mess is going to end up, but I think we better be paying real close attention to what it means for our abilities to better assess What's going to happen with China,
00:57:49.000They're still pretty interested in, can we turn Afghanistan into a training ground again for our interests to attack the US and its allies?
00:57:59.000Yes, extremists are still very interested in doing that.
00:58:01.000So we have to stay focused in that arena, but we can't afford to put so much of our resource in that area.
00:58:09.000We've got to understand where our primary concerns are.
00:58:13.000And certainly at the top of that list, look, it hasn't changed in Years, right?
00:58:18.000I mean, you ask, you know, somebody in Washington DC within the military or intel community over all these years, what are your top concerns?
00:58:25.000And it's always going to be China, Russia, Iran, North Korea.
00:59:07.000And then, like I said, you need the analysts who are capable and experienced enough to put together something that makes sense and allows the U.S. then to forward plan.
00:59:17.000But I guarantee you, you know, it's an accelerated timeline on Taiwan And we better understand what that means.
00:59:25.000And I don't know that we're paying a lot of attention right now.
01:00:07.000It's an inevitable conflict that I don't know that we've really thought through because we don't understand how the Chinese military is capable of integrating all their various elements.
01:00:18.000China hasn't been at war for a long time in real terms.
01:00:22.000We saw Russia engage in Afghanistan a couple decades ago, whatever.
01:00:29.000We had a sense of what that was going to look like.
01:00:32.000We still got it wrong, the assessment.
01:00:52.000Part of the problem we have or had and still have is, you know, Putin's increasingly small circle of key advisors, right?
01:01:02.000And so understanding who he's paying attention to and what he's...
01:01:08.000The advice that he's being given and how that then, you know, formulates his actions.
01:01:13.000And so I think we had a real problem in assessing his plans and intentions, his motivations.
01:01:18.000And that's always a tough lift from Intel perspective, right?
01:01:22.000Unless you've got an asset who's right next to him, you know, a key advisor, or you're just, you know, tapping into his internal communications.
01:01:30.000So that was one of the things we got wrong.
01:01:32.000And then we got, we didn't assess really very well Look, they got everything wrong.
01:01:40.000They couldn't figure out their supply lines, right?
01:01:51.000It's even a harder lift to assess China's capabilities right now because, again, in part they haven't been at war for a long time and there's more to it, right?
01:02:05.000How are they going to integrate all their various military elements?
01:02:08.000How are they going to use cyber, you know, for this effort if they move on Taiwan?
01:02:14.000And, you know, I don't want to say we're unprepared because we're not.
01:02:17.000We always game these things out and we've got lots of scenarios.
01:02:20.000But I will say that there's kind of a rush on to make sure that we're up to speed.
01:02:27.000Because again, we had our resources focused elsewhere.
01:02:32.000Again, to your most important question, which is how does it all end?
01:03:14.000There's a lot of questions here as to what could happen.
01:03:17.000And look, the Chinese, they're doing the same thing on their side of the table.
01:03:20.000They're trying to figure out, what are we going to do?
01:03:23.000That whole Make America First thing received a lot of pushback from people, particularly on the left, because they looked at it in terms of that's a nationalistic, xenophobic, problematic perspective.
01:03:36.000I think a lot of people's eyes got woken up, a lot of people's eyes got opened up during the pandemic when we realized how much what we need just in terms of medication and electronics and chips, how much of it was being produced overseas and how little of what we make here is required.
01:03:56.000I mean, we don't make enough here to run the country.
01:03:59.000We don't have the manufacturing capabilities that we would need to be completely independent.
01:04:19.000There's so many areas we should be investing money into instead of $80 billion into the IRS. I just pulled that one out of my ass, but I thought I was thinking about money that the US government invests and I just remembered that they're pumping $80 billion into the IRS. God.
01:04:56.000They have fudged a little here and there, and they're going to bring those folks down.
01:05:01.000And it's interesting because when they first rolled this out, much like a lot of things that the current administration does, and again, they've done some good things.
01:05:25.000So when they rolled out the fact that there was $80 billion in there to pump into the IRS, and there's 87,000 new agents, They had really no message, right?
01:05:37.000And so immediately people were just losing their shit.
01:05:41.000And then because the Democrats, when that happens, they are very good at then circling the wagons and coming up with a narrative, right?
01:05:49.000And disseminating that out and making sure that everybody pushes that same talking point.
01:05:53.000And then they stick to that talking point.
01:05:55.000So the talking point then became, after a few days of terrible optics on this, was, well...
01:06:01.000The IRS has been underfunded for, you know, years, decades.
01:06:05.000And because of that, we haven't been able to go after the billionaires because we haven't been able to hire all those, you know, really clever agents who can do those sophisticated investigations of the billionaires.
01:06:18.000And so this is all about refunding the IRS because it's been underfunded.
01:06:23.000We're going to improve the technology and we're going to be able to go after those billionaires finally because we'll have enough people.
01:07:06.000That's their argument is basically there's so much money sloshing around out there that the wealthy people haven't been paying their taxes and they've been cheating and hiding it that we need all these new agents because that's where the money is.
01:07:42.000Look, I mean, corporations, people say, well, look, the oil and gas company, this one paid no taxes.
01:07:47.000Well, the previous year, they suffered a $35 billion loss because they were exploring and reinvesting money into the company or whatever.
01:07:56.000It's more complicated than just saying people aren't paying their fair share, but look, are people with a lot of money willing to spend some of that on accountants to make sure that they don't pay any more tax than absolutely necessary?
01:08:21.000So are they going to go after people that have overseas accounts that are illegal?
01:08:27.000How are they going to get all that money?
01:08:29.000Well, and I'm sure that that'll be a part of it, yeah.
01:08:32.000If I'm housing money offshore and I'm not doing it in a way that's allowed, then those investigations can be very complicated.
01:08:42.000And so, you know, asset tracing in general is a difficult process.
01:08:48.000And when you're talking about someone with, you know, a couple billion dollars and several dozen entities spread around the world, Then, yes, it can be a complicated process, and I have no doubt that you need auditors who are, you know, financially savvy and sophisticated enough to do that.
01:09:06.000I always thought the IRS had those people because that's what they were doing, right?
01:09:16.000Theoretically, you're filing your forms.
01:09:18.000You're doing the thing you're supposed to do.
01:09:26.000I guess what I would say is instead of hiring 87,000 new agents, spending $80 billion on this process, Maybe they could have simplified the tax code and come up with something better.
01:09:40.000I'm not clever enough to figure out what that would be, but maybe that was an option that they could have thought of.
01:09:56.000And then that helps to lead to today's environment where a lot of people are jealous or envious or can't stand the fact that someone's got a lot of money.
01:10:03.000I mean, Well, they feel like the system's rigged.
01:10:06.000They don't feel like the person has a lot of money because they had an amazing product, and even though they paid their fair share, they did something that's extraordinary, so they receive extraordinary compensation.
01:10:17.000That's not the narrative that people hear.
01:10:20.000You know, the narrative that people hear is, you know, you work your ass off, you work your tail to the bone, you can barely make ends meet, and the reason for that is someone's out there stealing more than they deserve.
01:10:41.000That's what scares me is that there's so many people in this country that if they said, we are going to just redistribute wealth in this country in a way that makes it equal for everyone, so there's no way that anyone is poor in this country.
01:10:57.000We're just going to take the money from other people.
01:11:04.000If we said that, if they said that and they made it some sort of a way, if they framed it in a way that's going to change the country and make it a better place, the thing that they don't understand is these greedy fucks that are out there They're sucking up all that money.
01:11:19.000They're sucking up all that money because that's what they signed up for.
01:11:23.000And in the process of doing that, that's how amazing things get made.
01:11:27.000Because these people that are these greedy fucks, they are willing to work 16-hour days and put together these companies that achieve extraordinary amounts of money.
01:11:40.000They achieve extraordinary amounts of success.
01:11:42.000And they employ people, and they create spin-off companies, and they create inventions and patents.
01:11:50.000So, yeah, I've always been a firm believer, and maybe part of it's naive, because, yes, there are some people out there screwing the system, and there are some people that are undeserving of the massive wealth that they have because it kind of fell in their lap or whatever.
01:12:59.000Because to back up and start again is far more difficult than to choose a correct path in the first place.
01:13:06.000And there's so many people in this country that feel entitled, and they feel like the government owes them something, and they don't understand where resources are coming from.
01:13:13.000They don't understand, like, this whole capitalism game that we're in.
01:13:16.000They just think that it's rigged because they don't have it.
01:13:19.000And it's almost always particularly people that are at the beginning of this journey, right?
01:13:23.000You're starting off, you make $50,000 a year, and you find out someone's worth $50 billion, and you're like, well, that can't be fair.
01:13:30.000But fair is not really what it's about.
01:13:32.000You're playing a game, and you can choose to play the game as a waiter, where you have a very limited amount of money that you're ever going to make.
01:13:39.000You have good days and bad days, but this is the cap.
01:13:43.000Or you can choose the CEO route, where you can have a company, and you will get bonuses, and they will be disgustingly extraordinary.
01:15:25.000And I knew working for the government, I always knew what I was going to make, no matter how well I was doing.
01:15:30.000And so, you know, I do personally kind of take exception sometimes when people, you know, piss on, you know, people who are doing well, because I don't sometimes think they see the amount of work that, particularly small, you know, medium-sized companies, what people put into that,
01:16:54.000Jamie, there was a graphic, and I saw it at one point, that showed what I was talking about with Huawei, with the I-25 corridor, and it showed where the regional telecoms provider is located that they've cornered the market on,
01:17:11.000this Chinese company has, and where our ICBM sites are.
01:17:45.000If you just think that there was some randomness to the fact that, you know, this Chinese company was busy working with Vial to establish this.
01:18:00.000Yeah, of particular concern was Huawei routinely selling cheap equipment to rural providers in cases that appeared to be unprofitable for Huawei, but which placed its equipment near military assets.
01:18:16.000So there you- But I mean, is there a way to circumvent this or to prevent this without the military and the United States government being completely integrated with companies?
01:18:46.000The strengths and weaknesses is sort of this firewall between the U.S. government, military, and the way that we support private business, right?
01:18:57.000And by that, I mean the Chinese regime or Russia, even France, a lot of countries in the EU even— Their remit for the Intel operations there in that country is to help support their private sector, right?
01:19:12.000So intelligence that's collected can be disseminated to those companies, sometimes favored companies within that country to help their development, their growth, securing additional, you know, contracts, beating foreign competition, whatever it is.
01:19:31.000It says, well, we don't want to do that because favoring one company over another is going to screw up the idea of the free markets and capitalism and all the rest of it.
01:19:44.000Well, in part, we get around it by bringing...
01:19:48.000Our capabilities, you know, up to speed, doing more on our own, rehousing a lot of the manufacturing back here in the U.S. And so these are the things that we've talked about and that, you know, this administration, previous administrations have tried to do, but it's difficult, right?
01:21:30.000If we hadn't layered on additional regulation as soon as Biden came in and he was very clear about going to war with the fossil fuel industry, you know what?
01:21:56.000These companies, they don't make investments based on the next six months, right?
01:22:02.000They make investments on a fairly long timeline.
01:22:06.000So, when Biden, during his campaign a couple of years ago, talked about he's putting an end to the fossil fuel industry, they pay attention, and that kind of directs where they're going.
01:22:18.000And by the way, I'm not lobbying for the oil and gas industry, but I am lobbying for the idea that you can do all of these various energy initiatives at the same time.
01:22:31.000They invest a shit ton of money in new technologies, in clean energy.
01:22:36.000You look at a company like BP and they're out there saying we're going to make the non-carbon part of our operations our primary revenue earner in the next whatever, 10, 15 years.
01:22:49.000So they're putting a lot of money into it because they realize that's a market.
01:22:52.000They're doing it for capitalistic reasons because they want to make money down the road.
01:22:55.000But I guess my point is they're investing in it.
01:23:01.000Is part of the problem this political narrative that if you want votes from people on the left, you have to say you're green, you support clean energy, and that the climate crisis is going to kill us all?
01:23:39.000And he went over long-term graphs that show that what we're looking at is...
01:23:46.000Our lifetime, the lifetime of the people before us, and this measurable increase in climate change.
01:23:52.000And he's like, but if you go a thousand years, which is really what you're supposed to do when you're looking at the world, because there's been these ups and downs that have always existed, and they're very similar.
01:24:04.000Although we are having an impact with our carbon footprint, no doubt, but these changes, in terms of the temperature of the earth, They've always existed.
01:24:15.000The Sahara Desert used to be vast green.
01:24:19.000I mean, it would be a fucking tropical jungle 15,000 years ago or whatever it was.
01:24:24.000And these things are just an inevitable part of the cycle of Earth.
01:24:29.000We can't ignore the fact that human beings are impacting climate in a negative way with our carbon footprint and with our particulates that we pump into the air.
01:24:38.000That, in places like, what was it that we looked at?
01:25:11.000And to do nuclear-powered plants that are far more sophisticated than the ones in Fukushima with only one step-removed backup plan, that if that fails, they're fucked, which is what they are.
01:25:24.000But you're talking about old technology and that nuclear in general, if it's engineered correctly to modern standards, is the best version of clean energy that we're capable of producing.
01:25:53.000But yeah, I mean, look, we've been making progress.
01:25:55.000Think about what London looked like in, you know, pre-World War II with the coal, you know, that was burning and the fact that, you know, they literally...
01:26:01.000You know, you couldn't see, you know, 10 feet in front of you because the air was so bad.
01:26:06.000China, to this day, still has this problem.
01:26:08.000You go to some of these cities in China and, I mean, nobody's building coal factory or coal plants faster than China, right?
01:26:14.000Again, not to get back on this, but, you know, when you talk about the world and where the world's going and you talk about climate change and you talk about, you know, environmental concerns, yeah, I mean, The reality is we can do these things.
01:26:31.000I agree that there's no doubt we contribute to the problem.
01:26:36.000I think it's a little presumptuous to say that we're going to cool the earth in 30 years or whatever.
01:26:42.000I mean, we're going to stop this climate change from happening.
01:26:44.000Okay, but it doesn't mean you shouldn't make...
01:26:47.000Good faith efforts in areas that you can from a technology perspective.
01:26:51.000But I think if China, if India aren't going to make any meaningful changes, and they're not, then overall, we just have to be pragmatic about what it means in terms of We're going to do our part,
01:27:08.000and that's great, and we always do, but we also have to be realistic and understand what that means in terms of our national security interests.
01:27:15.000And isn't also part of the problem is that these discussions, like what we're having right now, we're an hour and a half, 20 minutes into this conversation.
01:27:23.000These are long, drawn-out discussions where there's a lot of nuance to it.
01:27:29.000But politically, when people are getting elected, When they're discussing these things in terms of trying to run for office and trying to push a narrative that people are going to accept and be enthusiastic about for voting, these things don't get discussed in this way.
01:27:45.000So most people don't hear these conversations unless they're listening to podcasts or unless they're listening to some long YouTube dissertation on it.
01:27:54.000So most people, they just have this narrative in their head.
01:27:58.000I've talked to so many people, particularly on the left, That are, you know, climate change is going to kill my children.
01:28:31.000I mean, everyone's got like a shallow sort of level of knowledge about a lot of things, and a lot of that knowledge comes from social media.
01:28:48.000When there's an issue, when Pelosi goes to Taiwan, suddenly I had no idea we had so many experts on Taiwan and the politics of Taiwan and what that meant.
01:29:32.000I don't know how we get to a good spot when...
01:29:38.000When you're right, when both sides, you know, when the Republicans or the Democrats, when the right, when the left, when they talk in these sort of very narrow terms, when they can motivate their base through just a very thin layer of information,
01:29:57.000when they just throw a narrative out there and people say, yeah, that's it.
01:30:05.000So I don't know how you get away from that.
01:30:07.000Because that would imply that you'd need to change somehow, you know, human nature.
01:30:13.000And human nature right now is just, you know, I look at, shit, you look at kids nowadays, and including my kids, and, you know, you try to engage them in a conversation about something of substance.
01:30:27.000You just see it's hard for them to sit still long enough to really go through it because they're so used to just changing topics or changing...
01:31:41.000I'll talk like Dick Van Dyke from Mary Poppins.
01:31:44.000So I rented this little cottage in this tiny little village, and I thought, you know, we'll take the boys for hikes in the countryside, and we'll tour around.
01:31:54.000We'll look at some castles and some sites and everything.
01:31:58.000Now, mind you, all three of them liked the outdoors, and so the hikes were great.
01:32:55.000And after they looked at the sort of the Egyptian antiquities, the mummies and some of the, you know, medieval swords and things, I think that was pretty much all they were done.
01:33:06.000By the way, you go in to look at the Mona Lisa and the Louvre.
01:33:10.000I don't know if you've ever been there.
01:34:24.000So we're walking along, and Em and I are up ahead, and we're talking to Scooter, and the two younger ones, Sluggo and Muxy, are back behind us.
01:34:32.000They're dragging their asses a little bit, right?
01:37:32.000The idea that they've accumulated the kind of wealth they've accumulated, and then they've set up this thing called the Vatican, which is essentially a country, Yeah.
01:37:42.000Inside of a city that's a hundred plus, it's like a hundred plus acres.
01:38:15.000Yeah, not only that, like the people that have been the Pope, that are the head of this, have actually moved people from other organizations where they were accused of molesting children to new places where unsuspecting kids, like Ratzinger,
01:38:32.000That fucking guy took one particular priest that was accused of molesting children and moved him to a new place where he molested 100 deaf kids.
01:39:14.000They found out how much wealth they had acquired and what they're doing with it.
01:39:19.000It's pretty stunning that it's just sort of legacied in.
01:39:23.000Well, I guess it's like everything else, right?
01:39:25.000It's very layered, so you have the people who are a part of the religion who are disgusted by that, and then you've got people who somehow are able to kind of look the other way and find an accommodation with it in the sense of,
01:39:41.000okay, well, I'm still a devout Catholic, and despite all the flaws in the structure of this operation, Yeah, I don't get it.
01:39:51.000Most people that are Catholic are good people, and they subscribe to the best aspects of the religion.
01:39:58.000Be a good person, follow the good book, and go to church because it's a great structure for ethics and morals, and then they hear about the stuff that they don't want to hear about.
01:40:12.000That's one area we haven't, at the end of the day, not that this is apropos of absolutely anything, but And I'm sure everybody was curious about my religious beliefs.
01:40:21.000But I do feel like I kind of dropped the ball on providing some kind of religious platform for the kids.
01:40:32.000And I don't know what that would have been.
01:40:35.000But I do think that there's, in a sense, it's nice to have something bigger than yourself, whatever that is, right?
01:40:40.000And the community that that used to provide.
01:40:42.000And I think part of the problem in today's world, I think, is people don't have enough community, whether it's their neighborhood, their church, whatever it is.
01:40:50.000But having said that, Sunday would roll around and I'd be like, yeah, I'd go mow the lawn or something.
01:40:57.000And it never became a part of what we do.
01:41:00.000I think it's historical in terms of human beings.
01:41:04.000Human beings have always had some sort of a structure of belief system that they subscribe to.
01:41:10.000This has always been the case with tribes, with large communities of people.
01:41:16.000There's always a belief system that they use that's beneficial to the greater good of the community.
01:42:10.000But just in terms of, like, a moral scaffolding and just in terms of having some sort of structure, a way that people genuinely agree will be better for everybody.
01:42:22.000That's one of the good things that a church provides, if it's a good church and it's a good religion.
01:42:56.000The problem I always had with organized religion was when a religion would say, and we have a lock on it.
01:43:03.000I don't think that's actually how it works.
01:43:08.000I don't know if one religion has a lock on the truth.
01:43:12.000Well, I think we have religions in this country.
01:43:15.000We have religions for secular people, and that's like, I mean, Marc Andreessen had a very good rant about what woke is.
01:43:23.000That woke is these people that believe in the progressive movement, they treat it as a religion.
01:43:29.000There's excommunication, there's punishment, there's rules that you can't question, there's things and guidelines that must be followed or you'll be punished.
01:43:44.000Yeah, you could argue climate change is a religion.
01:44:23.000Well, I mean, clearly because we ended up with more conservative judges on there than not.
01:44:28.000I think they were just trying to return the issue to the states.
01:44:33.000I don't know how you have—and I'm in a state, Idaho, where the state legislature was going to put some crazy ass rules in place.
01:44:47.000I don't know whether it was a trigger law or not, but basically saying almost no cases could be considered allowable for abortion.
01:44:56.000I just, again, I'm sort of that mindset that says, you know, reasonable people could have come up with a reasonable solution, which said, you know, do you want to abort it at, you know, nine months in one day?
01:45:36.000For a while, I always thought I was reading the tea leaves pretty well in terms of any administration and where things were going from a policy perspective.
01:45:51.000It's also in terms of people that were on the fence that were, you know, kind of like leaning Republican because of the way the country's going economically and all the different things that have been put in place by this administration that people disagreed with that they think is damaging to the economy and damaging to the overall quality of life.
01:46:10.000And so they were like on the fence and then that comes along and we go, oh, well, this comes with that shit.
01:46:56.000And there's also talk about going after contraception.
01:47:00.000There's people that want to take it to the next level, which is really wild in terms of preventing pregnancy, preventing pregnancy with the Plan B pill, preventing pregnancy even with condoms.
01:47:13.000There's people out there that you get far enough out.
01:48:14.000Because the actual data, I think the actual, like, when you look at the gigabytes and terabytes of data that's just porn, that's on the internet, I think it's...
01:51:56.000Yeah, that's a crazy thought because if you say, okay, if you're in a state that wants to essentially ban all abortions, and then they also want to ban contraception, okay,
01:52:41.000Again, I don't think maybe I'm romanticizing some past era.
01:52:46.000I guess I am because maybe there was never a time when reasonable people found common ground and you could compromise and And find policies and create legislation that, you know, could take the best from both sides and there you go.
01:53:00.000So maybe that actually never happened.
01:53:03.000You know, it's a little bit like the idea you think about, we're going to have the family over for Thanksgiving and everyone's going to get along and it's going to look like a Norman Rockwell painting and it doesn't happen.
01:53:13.000You know, everyone's pissing and moaning and arguing with each other.
01:53:15.000So, I think, but the older you get maybe, you know, the more you think, well, back in the day we used to compromise.
01:53:20.000You know, Ronald Reagan and Tip O'Neill would sit in the back room and, you know, have a drink and get some good piece of legislation done.
01:54:07.000Why would you think he wouldn't run again?
01:54:08.000Because I was being optimistic and thinking that we'd move on and we'd find different candidates.
01:54:18.000I guess because I was a fucking idiot.
01:54:21.000There's a large swath of this country that thinks the election was stolen, which people need to understand, that has always been the way a large swath of Americans, both on the left and the right, have felt about elections.
01:54:35.000There was a documentary on HBO. God, what was it called?
01:54:41.000I forget, but it was all about voting machines and how hackable voting machines were.
01:54:46.000This is the Diebold machines that disproportionately contributed to the Republican Party, this company, this corporation that did this, and they made these machines.
01:54:55.000Hacking Democracy was the name of the documentary.
01:54:57.000And they proved in this documentary that they can affect these machines with third party input.
01:55:02.000So it wasn't just a matter of one person voting, the other person collecting it, that a third person could come in and manipulate the numbers, and that they had access to these machines in that way, that these machines were actually set up for third party input.
01:55:14.000And this is terrifying to me because they said, oh my god, the Republicans are going to steal the election.
01:55:19.000And that was the thought process behind it.
01:55:22.000And now it's, oh my god, the Democrats have stolen the election.
01:55:25.000They felt like John Kerry got robbed when he ran against George Bush.
01:55:33.000There's always been this section of the country that's very dangerous.
01:55:39.000It's dangerous, A, if it's accurate, right?
01:55:41.000But it's also dangerous if it's a narrative.
01:55:44.000If people don't believe that we live in a democracy, so when someone does win, even if they win legitimately, which, you know, would be great.
01:56:08.000Trump, because of his demeanor, the way that he interacts with people, and his social media usage, we'd never really seen that before.
01:56:16.000Also, the way he's ramped up dumb people.
01:56:19.000The really dumb people that all they do is just fucking rah-rah, and they don't look at this in terms of what kind of an impact does this have?
01:56:29.000You can't just think of your side, and I want our side to win, because it's supposed to be one side.
01:56:35.000It's supposed to be the United States of America.
01:56:41.000We're all bound together, and we do get together in times of great conflict, like post 9-11.
01:56:48.000I would say that 9-11 was a horrible thing, but one thing that came out of it that I found inspiring was how many American flags were on people's cars immediately afterwards.
01:56:58.000It's like people on the right and on the left, it was like one of the rare times in the world where people joined together in this country and said, hey, we are faced with a threat from outside and we need to all...
01:58:30.000If you lose your faith in the systems, right, whether it's law enforcement or it's justice or whatever in the country, just like with the political system, it is a very dangerous thing.
01:58:42.000And you can always argue that, okay, you know, Are they having problems?
01:59:26.000It's not just something I've read, and I'm not going to try to figure out who actually posted that or who put it down.
01:59:31.000So – and Russia is a great example of that.
01:59:34.000Russia does that better than China even.
01:59:36.000China is engaged in it and China is working hard to influence US public opinion about policies that relate to China or what they view as things of – in their interest.
01:59:47.000But Russia at the end of the day is – they're at the top of the heap of – State-sponsored operations trying to influence what's going on here in the U.S. And it's effective.
02:00:00.000And it's interesting because Elon Musk is a fairly polarizing character as well, and his desire to figure out how many bots there are on Twitter before he purchases it We're good to go.
02:00:46.000Yeah, and they are very sophisticated.
02:00:50.000And whether they're trying to foment racism, oh, it's a fundamentally racist country, so let's work on that.
02:00:59.000If you're listing out things as a foreign nation that doesn't have our best interests at heart, if you're Russia, you're saying, here's what I want to do, yeah, you're going to look to create dissatisfaction Within the country for a variety of things.
02:01:15.000Your way of life, the quality of your life, the belief in the justice system, whatever it might be.
02:01:21.000Oh, yeah, the political system's screwed because it's all rigged.
02:01:30.000We talked about it, you know, coming out of 2016 and, you know, over the past handful of years.
02:01:36.000But again, it's not a substantive discussion, right?
02:01:41.000And shit that gets investigated, people, you know, they'll get all up in arms on Capitol Hill and politicians will insist on an investigation.
02:01:48.000But, you know, Washington, D.C. is, yeah, it's a place where investigations go to die.
02:02:28.000The departure from the White House was fairly chaotic, as you can imagine.
02:02:32.000That's just the nature of what they were doing.
02:02:34.000There wasn't the level of organization.
02:02:38.000It wasn't a very buttoned-up administration, in part because they had a lot of churn in personnel and all this.
02:02:47.000You can argue that every administration has some back and forth with the National Archives over what is and isn't presidential record, what they can keep as their own personal material and what has to be held by the government.
02:03:00.000Well, I mean, if they consider it personal correspondence or they consider it information that Is not classified and is just material that one day can end up in a presidential library or they can use to write a book when they finish up and they want to make a few hundred million dollars on a book,
02:04:02.000I don't know because I don't know what the specific documents were that they really had a Jones about.
02:04:08.000They had been negotiating this for some time, right?
02:04:10.000They'd been talking to them and going back and forth and they discussed what they had and how is it stored and all the rest of it.
02:04:16.000And they'd gotten 15 or so boxes earlier.
02:04:21.000Why they didn't just do that all in one effort and say, okay, we have more documents.
02:04:26.000Maybe it was taking the archives a while to understand what was and wasn't in the materials that were returned.
02:04:32.000Do you have suspicions that it was a political maneuver?
02:04:38.000That the design was to cast more bad light on Trump and eliminate him from the 2024 elections or try to figure out a way to diminish his appeal?
02:04:50.000Yeah, I mean, I think there's politics in the sense that a lot of folks up on Capitol Hill who took delight in it and found it to be a really good piece of entertainment.
02:05:03.000But if you say politics from the FBI's perspective, from the Department of Justice's perspective, I mean, I know a number of guys that work for the Bureau, and I know them to be really solid people.
02:05:26.000I don't know anybody senior in the DOJ or at the Bureau, so I don't know...
02:05:32.000How politicized they are and whether that played into it or not.
02:05:36.000But, you know, people that are actually engaged in the search, you know, that show up at Mar-a-Lago, they're doing their job, right?
02:05:46.000And they've been told this is what we have to do.
02:05:48.000You know, I think that it was such an extraordinary step and so unprecedented Maybe I'll be proven wrong once they release the affidavit and we all find out what was sitting there.
02:06:03.000But I can't hope but think that they had a reason why they said, no, we can't just keep dragging along here because we're not getting the responses we need.
02:06:12.000We need to knock on the door and say, look, we've got to...
02:06:16.000I do suspect that they could have approached it differently and not had the presence they had and everything, but who knows?
02:06:25.000Again, this is the problem we live in in this world today.
02:06:30.000Immediately after that took place, there were people on the left and people on the right who were absolutely sure they had exactly the information to make a decision about what this meant and why it was done or why it shouldn't have been done.
02:06:57.000Everybody wants an answer immediately.
02:06:58.000Well, it's an investigation and things take time.
02:07:01.000You know, all I can say is the folks I know at the Bureau are really quality people.
02:07:06.000But do people at the top of an organization Are they more politicized?
02:07:11.000Well, sure, there's a tendency for that to happen, right?
02:07:13.000Because that's, you know, they've been around a long time, they're at that position because, you know, they work closely with, you know, politicos or whatever, but, I don't know, it doesn't really answer your question.
02:07:24.000I've just spent a lot of time talking in circles, but...
02:07:26.000It's so confusing for someone like me that's like going, well, what's going on here?
02:07:33.000Or is this like clearly an example of him doing something that is 100% forbidden, but he feels like he can do it because he's Donald Trump and he feels like the rules don't apply to him?
02:07:43.000I mean, that's what the fear is, right?
02:08:36.000Based on what has been reported so far, but again, without the affidavit, without the specific details, who knows?
02:08:42.000But if there's documentation that's not cataloged and marked as declassified, again, it has to show that.
02:08:50.000If you've got a document that's top secret, code word, and you look at it and it's marked top secret, code word, then You know, you have to assume it's still classified, right?
02:09:03.000And there's a mere fact of him saying, oh, no, you know, last year I declassified that.
02:09:10.000You can't, you know, he has to follow protocol.
02:09:13.000And that's where I think he slips up is he doesn't necessarily believe that applies to him or he's just not, you know, it's just not the nature of...
02:09:26.000Yeah, he is, and also to have information not released.
02:09:32.000I think part of this problem, again, it kind of goes back to what we were talking about before with the transparency of the U.S. government.
02:09:40.000When they talked about this in this little conference room in DOJ, wherever they talked about it, and they said, we're thinking about conducting a raid, and the Bureau doesn't like to use the word raid, or DOJ doesn't like to use the word raid, but when they said, we're talking about doing a raid on the home of the former president,
02:10:00.000They probably should, once again, from a messaging perspective, step back and thought to themselves, okay, what does that mean?
02:10:09.000Not that they have to, but they should have known what a firestorm it was going to create.
02:10:14.000And so they should have had that completely buttoned up and ready to go the moment they were going to do it and be as transparent within the limitations of what they can do, of what they were doing and why they were doing it.
02:10:28.000Because if they don't, they create all that open space, right?
02:10:31.000And that's where everyone jumps in and starts declaring what exactly happened without knowing what the fuck happened.
02:10:37.000And then you get all this misinformation and disinformation and it's another fucking goat rope.
02:10:42.000So it's a process that I think the Attorney General probably should have handled better because he had to authorize it.
02:12:12.000So for someone like me who's on the outside just trying to pay attention to as little as I can and still talk about it, it's very confusing.
02:12:37.000I think he's gotten to this point where, you know, we're only two years in and he's already completely fallen apart where he can't form sentences anymore.
02:12:46.000I can't imagine they're gonna look at him as a viable candidate in 2024. I mean, a large percentage of the Democrats don't want him to run.
02:12:54.000Yeah, that seems to be the case for sure.
02:12:56.000And no one's excited about Kamala Harris.
02:12:58.000They got that lady tucked away somewhere.
02:13:40.000And you're just going to get a host of characters coming in because I don't think they're going to say, fine, we'll clear the decks for Harris.
02:14:07.000Well, plus you also get the primaries, and they vote for the hard edge.
02:14:12.000So you get that person who says, I'm all for clean energy, climate change is the number one problem, vote for me.
02:14:20.000And then you get the people on the far right that say, I'm all about banning abortion and contraception and porn.
02:14:25.000And so the hard right, maybe the conservatives on the hard right vote for them.
02:14:30.000And that's what happens in the primaries.
02:14:32.000Yeah, unfortunately, because you get the registered people that are voting.
02:14:35.000You get that self-selection that just fucks us over.
02:14:39.000You know what we haven't talked about is the fact that the Russians and the Ukrainians are lobbing missiles at each other near the Zaporizhia nuclear power plant.
02:17:02.000I've got an ungodly amount on their research and also efforts to, once again, steal information.
02:17:07.000We've been developing, we've been working hard to do that.
02:17:10.000But other areas, you know, you talk about quantum computing.
02:17:15.000That's an area where we've got to get ahead of the game.
02:17:19.000Whoever, Russia, China, the U.S., yeah, Russia, China, the U.S., it's always the top three, are feverishly working to develop quantum computing.
02:17:31.000And that's great, and everybody thinks, okay, yay, we'll get to that point.
02:17:36.000And that just means when you're there, the speed, the capabilities of quantum computers surpass sort of the classical computing thing.
02:17:47.000The problem there is, and it's great for the future of, yeah.
02:17:53.000AI and a variety of, you know, science is terrific.
02:17:58.000But what it also means is you can defeat, in a very simple way, and I'm going to oversimplify this, but quantum computing, once it's developed sufficiently, once you're post-quantum, then you can defeat the cryptography that's on sort of the classical computer systems,
02:18:16.000That handle The cryptography that's basically protecting our national security communications, our military communications, the financial transactions on the internet, right, that we all rely on.
02:18:31.000So part of it is, yeah, it's great for future development of science and technology, but there's this real concern over, you know, if, again, a nation that doesn't have our best interests at heart develop this and get kind of in the lead on this.
02:18:45.000Then, suddenly, they can defeat the cryptographic capabilities of our communications systems.
02:18:56.000So, I guess what I'm saying is there's some areas that we need to be focused on putting more money into.
02:19:02.000And so, every time I read that we're putting $80 billion in the IRS or $370 billion into subsidies for green energy, Just wondering, okay, I understand why it's appealing to some people, but maybe it's not in our best interest.
02:19:18.000And this quantum computer thing, we have those though, right?
02:19:25.000We, Japan, Germany, a variety of places, again, Russia, China, we've been developing and working on quantum computing, but You know, it's not where it needs to be yet, right?
02:19:40.000So it's still in the development stages, right?
02:19:44.000It's still in sort of the nascent stages of where it's going to go.
02:19:48.000And so if you think about it, we could be, I think they were talking about like 2030 or so, right?
02:19:55.000It would be sort of that moment in time when we're at whatever they call it.
02:19:59.000I'm obviously not a tech guy, but quantum supremacy or something.
02:20:08.000The US government is actually focused on this.
02:20:09.000They're trying to say, okay, we need to improve all our systems so that they are capable of defeating what that means down the road at that point.
02:20:21.000So I guess what I'm saying in not a very eloquent way is there are a lot of areas for concern that the US government needs to be focused on.
02:20:33.000And I just hope that, you know, this administration and the next one, whoever they are, maybe, understand.
02:20:41.000It just seems our timelines are accelerated, right, for concerns that we...
02:20:48.000We maybe had no vision on, even five or ten years ago.
02:20:54.000And the world, it strikes me, it's a little bit more of a dangerous place right now.
02:21:01.000And so I think we need to kind of get back to it.
02:21:05.000I agree with what you said before, which is every time you talk about U.S. first or Patriotism.
02:21:39.000And with the widespread distribution of quantum computing, what does that look like in 10 years, 15, 20 years?
02:21:46.000If cryptography no longer exists, if there's no Passwords don't mean anything anymore and all intellectual property is available to anybody and everyone.
02:22:10.000But I'm confused about the future of that, too.
02:22:14.000I mean, this whole idea of decentralized currency was very attractive to people.
02:22:19.000But now the government is talking about a centralized digital currency that they control.
02:22:24.000And what comes with that, of course, is some sort of social policy that regulates and distributes what access you have to it based on your social credit score.
02:22:42.000Yeah, that's what a nation like China is focused on.
02:22:50.000I would have assumed that once they start talking about government regulation of cryptocurrency, that the whole shift, everybody's focus would go elsewhere, right?
02:23:02.000Because it completely takes away the attractiveness of that space.
02:23:42.000When things get weird, people want to dump it.
02:23:45.000They get panicky, and there's long-haul investors in crypto that say there's ups and downs, and this is just part of the process.
02:23:54.000But a lot of people say, no, they're hamstringing cryptocurrencies, and they know what they're doing.
02:23:58.000And they're doing it because it is a threat.
02:24:01.000Because if the government no longer controls currency, if currency is decentralized, and there's a finite amount of Bitcoin, and it's valuable at this level, and people can use it to buy goods and services, The government no longer controls it.
02:24:17.000I think it's—you know, the big government concern has been, for all this time, has been that it's, you know, used by criminal elements, right?
02:24:27.000And, you know, there was—yes, that was true to some degree.
02:24:32.000But it seems like the horse has left the barn, so it's more of a—you know, it's gained more traction than, you know— I would have thought.
02:24:42.000But then again, I look down and I think, fine, I should have bought Walmart.
02:24:50.000I think that with the currency the way it is, Look, China has been looking to supplant the dollar or to replace the dollar as the global currency.
02:25:05.000They've had that argument for a long time.
02:25:07.000I don't think the dollar is going anywhere, but I do think that the more that the government looks to control Alternative currencies, the less attractive those currencies become,
02:25:23.000and the more likely it is that the focus shifts elsewhere, and there becomes then another attractive investment at the nascent level at the beginning.
02:25:45.000I mean, how much of an increase of climate change do you really need to get the massive jump in heart attacks that people have experienced?
02:25:53.000I mean, it was a cover of ABC. There was an ABC article about it that was trying to connect it, and it was met with almost universal disdain.
02:26:03.000People are like, what the fuck are you talking about?
02:26:14.000Half the time, I think—and that's the problem with media nowadays.
02:26:19.000I mean, look, you look at most sites that are supposedly media, news-focused, and it just seems like it's just a slew of shit that's there just to get your clicks and your likes and to bait you into clicking on it.
02:26:36.000And most of the shit that's out there is just that, right?
02:26:39.000I mean, there's very few solid news sources anymore.
02:26:42.000Well, the good thing about that is that independent news sources are rising because of that, because people have lost all faith and trust.
02:26:49.000And, I mean, you're seeing the impact on CNN. I mean, they fired everybody now.
02:26:53.000They fired Stelter, supposedly Don Lemon and Jim Acosta are on the chopping block as well, and they're trying to make it an objective source of journalism now.
02:27:01.000The fucking cover of CNN had a positive story on me the other day.
02:27:55.000I think in part I didn't realize what an effort had been underway for years by that segment of society to influence state houses in anticipation of one day having the Supreme Court return the question to the states.
02:28:14.000So that was a massively coordinated and funded effort To try to get to that point.
02:28:22.000And that completely happened, at least for me, off the radar.
02:28:25.000Do you think that's a political decision or is that a position based on their religious ideology, that life truly does begin at the point of conception that they're doing something that's ultimately just?
02:29:08.000But that requires, I think, for it to happen, that requires, again, reasonable people making reasonable policies that people can live under.
02:29:17.000That doesn't seem to happen because one side wants it all their way and one side wants it their way and everybody's throwing hand grenades at each other.
02:31:37.000Well, that's—see, again, you get into that part, and then you could actually see a point where the Republicans don't actually take the House in November.
02:31:46.000If they just keep—if there's enough of that going on, because you have all the independents, you have all the—like you pointed out, the people that— They're inclined to vote Republican because they like policies that are there.
02:31:56.000But then they see this and they think, just stay the fuck out of my kitchen.
02:35:29.000I mean, look, if the fight is taken to Russia, right, inside Russia, and they've had a number of incidents already, right?
02:35:38.000And there have been a number of incidents in Crimea.
02:35:43.000And before this, I guarantee you, before February, whenever they started the invasion, February 24th, Putin, you know, probably imagined that would never happen.
02:35:52.000He imagined he was going to be in Kiev in five days.
02:35:56.000So, I think the more that may happen, if the Ukrainian military decides, look, what we've got to do is use these drones capabilities that we have and, you know, some of the other weapons we've got to start launching attacks.
02:36:07.000And the U.S. has been trying to, you know, trying to manage that ever since we got involved in this, right?
02:36:13.000And by saying, you know, these can't be used, you know, to launch attacks inside of Russia.
02:36:18.000Because they don't want that to expand, and that could be one of those things that could then set him off.
02:36:23.000So something like this, this assassination, whether she was the intended target or it was going to be her dad, that's the sort of thing that escalates, right?
02:36:35.000And it removes the ability, if there was one, to have any sort of negotiated settlement.
02:36:41.000But look, we're $10 billion in terms of aid that we've dropped on to Ukraine, really legitimately since Biden's been in office.
02:36:56.000They just approved a $775 million additional assistance package, mostly munitions and hardware.
02:37:04.000And that's the 18th or 19th package of aid that we've put into Ukraine since this started.
02:37:20.000The Congress or the Senate approved a $40 billion aid package in May, so they haven't gotten anywhere near contributing all that to it yet.
02:37:30.000But you have to ask yourself, where is this going?
02:37:42.000Well, if we didn't do anything, if we hadn't been providing all this, There's no way the Ukrainians could still be in the fight.
02:37:48.000I mean, no matter how strong their will is, and everybody respects the fact that they've had this enormous courage and will for this battle, but the reality is they need the hardware.
02:38:11.000Today is like 180th day, 181st day of the invasion.
02:38:16.000And Well, sort of the figures are hard to pin down because both sides are, you know, in the business of not giving that information out and they're also in the business of exaggerating how much the other side has suffered.
02:38:31.000You know, estimates are, you know, maybe the Russians have lost 15,000 to 18,000 and the Ukrainians are probably somewhere, you know, around that, again, if you figure 100. So it'd be 18,000 if they're losing 100 a day.
02:38:46.000So you've got this going on and you've got the US and NATO just pushing more weapons and money in there and there doesn't seem to be an end in sight.
02:38:57.000Russia doesn't seem inclined and they've said they won't negotiate.
02:39:01.000Zelensky doesn't seem inclined to push for a negotiated settlement.
02:39:07.000So, you know, I don't know where that goes.
02:40:57.000Probably not, because the Russians aren't willing, and probably Zelensky feels, at least at this point, that he's got a lot of runway left in terms of getting aid and assistance from NATO and from the U.S. They're,
02:41:15.000you know, but at a certain point, it starts looking like World War I, right?
02:41:18.000Little tiny, tiny incremental steps, you know, on the battlefield and very little being done and, you know, potential for famine, even though they've released some of the grain shipments.
02:41:49.000But then you're standing there and you're reading all this about a land war in Europe, right?
02:41:54.000And lack of progress and people being killed and famine being created because there was no agriculture going on and no ability to move food and grain.
02:42:43.000Technology being what it is, the potential for major problems.
02:42:48.000Yeah, so, but again, I guess I think it's down to, maybe it's the same theme, transparency on the part of the US government.
02:42:55.000We have to do a better job of explaining maybe what our point to this exercise is, rather than just, the immediate effect was this mode of, yeah, I stand with Ukraine, right?
02:43:15.000So I guess my point in talking about the numbers, the sheer amount of money, and it's not just the money, it's just what are we trying to accomplish here, and that's part of the problem.
02:43:27.000I will say Putin completely miscalculated, because I think part of his issue was he wanted to show cracks in NATO, and obviously he didn't do that.
02:43:35.000Now we've expanded NATO as a result of his actions, so he got just the wrong result there.
02:43:43.000There's also a problem in getting to the Russian people themselves because the propaganda that they receive is so thorough and their access to the information is so limited in terms of the Russian propaganda.
02:43:55.000I've talked to people who have relatives in Russia and they think that the Ukrainians are a bunch of Nazis and that we have to go over there to liberate them.
02:44:04.000That's the propaganda that the surface readers of Russia are getting.
02:46:26.000I was hoping you had clear, concise solutions that the powers that be would listen to and go, hey, that Mike Baker guy, he's on to something.
02:47:06.000I'm just saying let's have a discussion about it, you know, openly that talks about what our national interests are there and what we're trying to accomplish.
02:47:16.000And, you know, much like with Afghanistan, even with Iraq and, you know, going all the way back to Vietnam and others.
02:47:39.000Does that mean we become under the control of another empire?
02:47:43.000Does it mean we're under the whim of China and all our ideas about freedom and what we hold dear about the United States are gone forever?
02:47:51.000And that this experiment in self-government ultimately proved to be a failure.
02:47:55.000It lasted a few hundred years, but was overcome by all the powers that be, all the things that we've talked about so far, and the fact that the very foundation that It was established under is not taken seriously or not thought of as so significant and important,
02:48:17.000whether it's freedom of speech, whether it's, you know, the Bill of Rights, the Constitution, all these things that people want to change and erode and shift based on their own political ideology.
02:48:27.000They don't understand that this is immensely important.
02:48:34.000If China exists right now, if we live at the same time that an entire country of over a billion people is controlled by a totalitarian dictatorship, which is essentially what the CCP is.
02:48:48.000I mean, they have ultimate control over what's expressed.
02:49:06.000Well, there's a lot of people that talk about how, you know, but they've always been, you know, a segment of society that's talked about how democracy is failing and capitalism is a failing system.
02:51:22.000Maybe we don't have enough people invested in the game.
02:51:25.000Maybe we need mandatory service for folks coming out of high school.
02:51:32.000Maybe you could defer that for after college, but maybe everybody needs to put some skin in the game, a couple of years of community service or military time.
02:51:39.000Yeah, that's what a lot of people thought, that one of the things that separates us from countries like Israel, beside the fact they're in constant actual military conflict with their neighbor.
02:51:48.000Is that they have this sort of mandatory military service, sort of like South Korea does.
02:51:54.000We don't want that in this country because we want people to have the ability to choose whatever they want.
02:51:58.000But I think because people don't exactly understand the consequences of not looking at ourselves as a sovereign state, not looking at ourselves as a community of people that are all banded together,
02:52:14.000that we do have this sort of Ignorant denial of our role in the world or of not just our role in the world of the world in general how the other players in this game look at us right and I think also an understanding of how The country works,
02:52:49.000You had to know, you had a government course, right?
02:52:51.000You had to know how things were supposedly working.
02:52:54.000And I think that's an element of that, too.
02:52:57.000We need to Maybe we need to spend a little less time on people's feelings and following their passions in schooling and just get back to some basics.
02:53:07.000Do the things that will help kids advance, but give them a framework of understanding as to how things work.
02:53:21.000I mean, teach some things that really, I don't know, prepare the kids.
02:53:25.000I don't know where I was going with that other than I see a list of courses, potential courses, that, you know, particularly my oldest boy can take in high school, now that he's in high school.
02:53:37.000And I go, well, you know, I mean, how about...
02:54:13.000Yeah, I think it's to become a functioning part of society.
02:54:16.000I think it's to allow you to be a provider, to, you know, take care of yourself, to be a responsible citizen.
02:54:23.000And, yeah, but now it does seem a lot of it's for, you know, sort of just self-realization and following passion and doing all these things that, you know, anyway, I disappeared down in some educational discussion rabbit hole,
02:54:41.000but Are you concerned at all about the integration of technology into human beings?
02:54:47.000One of the things that's coming up now that a lot of people are discussing are these technologies that are rising right now.
02:54:56.000There's Neuralink and there's a few other ones and Elon Musk is actually just invested in some competitor to Neuralink.
02:55:03.000They're all working towards this integration of technology and human beings.
02:55:08.000But when we're talking about the problems with technology and the problems with the fact that a lot of our technology is compromised, and that if we do that to human bodies, if we really do all connect to the internet via some sort of cyborg device,
02:55:27.000What's to stop that from being compromised?
02:55:31.000That's an extension of where we are right now.
02:55:58.000It doesn't necessarily worry me from...
02:56:00.000I know there's discussions about the morality issues of linking machine and human and all that, but I do think from a security perspective, like you pointed out, I think there's some concern there.
02:56:19.000Research and development being what it is, I've been super impressed with what I've seen, anyway, from what some of the research labs are doing in this field.
02:56:35.000It is a It's an amazing area, but what they're not doing, because they're scientists, they're engineers, they're not counterintelligence concerns.
02:56:45.000So you don't have that follow-on part that says, well, what does that mean?
02:56:49.000And the ethicists are out there looking at the morality issues.
02:56:53.000But I don't know that from a CI perspective that anybody's been out there staring at this and wondering, well, if China is controlling communications, telecoms from their position right now,
02:57:11.000Once this goes further, what does that enable them to do?
02:57:54.000But we just need to be aware that they don't and what that means and why they are so focused on this.
02:58:01.000I mean, again, they're focused on artificial intelligences, similar to their focus on other, you know, key technologies that they want to control.
02:58:10.000So, yeah, we just, again, it's one of those things where you don't want to sit around and You know, see some sort of conspiracy or a security threat behind every corner.
02:58:24.000That one seems like it's not a corner.
02:58:27.000It's like a giant gate that's right in front of our face.
02:58:30.000I mean, if we all do integrate, and you're talking about quantum computers and their ability to eliminate all of the safety nets of cryptography, what's to stop that from happening with human beings?
02:59:00.000A pharmaceutical company, you know, all they want to do is have a free flow of information, right, to share that information within, you know, the scientific community to get where they want to go, right?
02:59:13.000And, you know, then you've got somebody typically in a pharma company that's the chief of security.
02:59:26.000We've spent billions of dollars on it, developing it.
02:59:28.000You know, you can't just take your laptop home or take it to, you know, on a trip to Europe with you and assume that all that information on there is secured.
02:59:37.000So you're butting up heads all the time against free flow of information and security.
02:59:44.000And you're always trying to find sort of that fine point on the line that gives you maximum access to information for the people that are innovating and then locking it down to the point that you can on the security side.
03:00:19.000You know, and going back to that same dead horse that I've been kicking, the, you know, the Chinese Intel, you know, whichever department it is there that may be out there looking around, they understand that and they've been working the academic community, you know, for decades, you know,
03:00:34.000and because they understand they play on that, right?
03:00:39.000They don't think from a security perspective.
03:00:40.000So I don't want to say they're easy pickings, but they've worked the academic environment very hard over the years in terms of getting access to information.
03:00:55.000Maybe it could be something as simple as identifying, look, I'm interested in material science.
03:01:01.000So I see at a university here in the U.S., maybe I identify a professor who's doing some particularly interesting research.
03:01:10.000Maybe I develop a scenario where he's approached by someone, it seems very innocuous, and they're just looking to get a Some insight into a paper that he's written or whatever.
03:01:21.000So he provides, you know, some material.
03:01:23.000It's not classified, but he provides that material.
03:02:18.000It doesn't sound as high tech as getting online and hacking into Raytheon or whomever, but it's part of the tools that you've got in your kit bag, and so it's an important part, and it's worked very well for them over the years.
03:02:36.000But again, what's been happening, we've been trying to be more proactive, or the Bureau in particular has, and other members of the community and the intelligence community going out to institutions and saying, these are the problems you could be facing, right?
03:02:50.000These are the things you should be aware of.
03:02:53.000You know, if you're approached in this fashion, it would be great if you wouldn't mind telling us, right?
03:02:59.000So, you know, it's, again, I seem like I've spent a lot of time banging on this subject.
03:03:19.000I mean, 2015, I think it was, Xi and Obama had this meeting, and...
03:03:25.000There was this big fanfare about China agreed not to engage in cyber espionage or cyber shenanigans of any sort, not to engage in economic espionage.
03:03:35.000And they touted it, and the media was like, wow, look at this.
03:05:32.000But if you think about what the past few years have looked like, you know, people have been just kicked in the ass constantly, whether it's the pandemic or it's the Russia-Ukraine battle, whether it's, you know, increased tensions with China, whether it's, you know, a recession.
03:05:44.000I don't know if it's a recession or not, but if it's a recession, Yeah.
03:07:46.000I enjoy the fact that it works, that the people can come out, have a good time, forget about their problems for a little while, all laugh together, and all laugh together as a group.
03:07:56.000It's very, you know, that's a cliche that laughter is healing, but it really is.
03:08:48.000They're terrified of being attacked and canceled and this and that.
03:08:52.000And also these people have these jobs that are dependent upon, you know, providing the studios with these films that don't get attacked so that they can profit off of them.
03:09:25.000You know, we accept fiction in all sorts of forms of media, whether it's literature or film, where something happens that's horrible and we don't think that it's a real thing that's taking place.
03:09:37.000But when someone says something on stage, even if it's satire, even if it's like there's certain subjects that they think you're not supposed to cover.
03:09:45.000There's things you're not supposed to say regardless of whether or not they make people laugh.
03:09:50.000And that's where the rubber hits the road with stand-up.
03:09:56.000In that sense, stand-up is very exciting right now because people are very happy that there is still an outlet where people can just say funny things just to make people laugh.
03:10:23.000It takes a long time to develop the skills to be able to do that.
03:10:26.000It takes a long time to gather up an audience that accepts you and knows that that's what you do and wants to come see you.
03:10:33.000And I feel very, very fortunate that I have that.
03:10:37.000Well, you got the fucking audience, that's for sure.
03:10:39.000So I keep doing it, and there's a lot of us.
03:10:41.000That's why building a club out here, that's why there's a big movement of comics that recognize the significance of this art form, and it's kind of under attack.
03:10:53.000But under attack is a weird way to say it.
03:10:54.000It's under criticism, but everything's under criticism.
03:10:56.000There's more of an ability to criticize now than ever before.
03:11:12.000Because we've gotten to that point where you can't just...
03:11:16.000I mean, I've got friends that are all over the political spectrum, and we have some of the greatest conversations, and we're completely on opposite sides of things, right?
03:11:42.000Most people, the vast majority of us are good people, but we're so divided and scared, and we look at each other with differing opinions as being the enemy, and I think that's crazy.
03:11:52.000Differing opinions are something to be considered and put into your own value system and try to decide, is this person right?
03:12:41.000And if you're not uncomfortable sometimes with things that you're watching or you're reading, then you're part of the problem as far as I'm concerned.
03:12:56.000You want to be sort of that—I feel like I'm part of a community because now I belong to this group that all feel strongly about something, right?
03:13:05.000It's like knowing what the enemy thinks, too.
03:13:07.000You should get out and understand what the other side is saying and what they think.
03:13:10.000Because maybe it'll make your argument for your own perspective a little bit better, right?
03:13:14.000Because now you understand what the other side's thinking.
03:13:16.000If you don't, you're just going to sound like a douche nozzle.
03:13:33.000Well, you know, sometimes when confronted with problems, people find solutions.
03:13:37.000Maybe that's the silver lining of all this, is that people are going to be forced to look at these problems that we've created for ourselves and realize that maybe some of us are on the wrong path.
03:13:47.000And maybe this attitude that we have, this polarized attitude, is ultimately bad for everybody.
03:13:53.000Bad for your children, my children, the world in general and that we all need to like try to understand each other a little bit better and find out why we have these rigid belief systems and also recognize that there's a problem with human nature that we have these These tribal identities that we attach ourselves to.
03:14:15.000And that many of us, we just have adopted these predetermined patterns of behavior that aren't necessarily beneficial to either or.
03:14:24.000So you're saying people might become more self-aware?
03:15:06.000I think if that were to happen, if people were to step back a little bit and think about what they're saying, if they would be just, again, a little more self-aware, but I do think it also requires some change in the narrative from on high,
03:15:24.000It requires some change in the narrative from...
03:15:27.000The politicians, that's where I'm really cynical.
03:15:30.000I don't see that because there's too much self-interest, right?
03:15:33.000But if everybody just would chill the fuck out a little bit and just realize that words aren't violence, differing opinions aren't violent, It doesn't hurt to hear a different opinion.
03:16:52.000Discovery, of course, merged with Warner, and so now it's Warner Discovery, and anytime something like that happens, they then spend the next six to eight months waiting for the dust to settle before they move on and do anything.
03:17:05.000But they've been terrific about the show, and so we're hoping to get started again in the fall.
03:17:11.000There's no shortage of subjects for you to cover.
03:17:23.000Do you ever have any thought that these things are drones?
03:17:27.000That they're either something that the United States has developed or other countries have developed and it's some sort of a black, declassified, black file?
03:17:38.000I... What we've seen so far, and we've done some episodes on ATIP, on the Advanced Threat Program, on UAPs, the Pentagon's effort to try to catalog these things.
03:17:53.000Most of them come down to fairly logical explanations, but there have been some cases, and they just, you know, they produced this report the Pentagon did last year, which was a little bit unsatisfying for most people who were hoping to see a little bit more detail.
03:18:12.000I'm not sure why they thought that would happen, but, you know, I think that I don't deny that there's other stuff out there.
03:18:30.000But most of the things we've looked at, you can argue, have been Project Aurora or some other classified program around some type of air platform.
03:19:49.000When people say, what do you believe and what do you don't believe, that's one of those things that I think is, for me, is one of the really big mysteries, right?
03:19:58.000That's the one that I would point to of all the various sightings that have been out there, the Phoenix Lights and everything else, I think can be explained logically.
03:20:07.000And then the other thing, and this is going to sound like I've taken a complete left turn, but if we're talking about things in this world, would be the Martin Luther King assassination.
03:20:38.000But those are the two things, I think, that, to me, really stand out in all the various investigations we've done over the handful of years we've been doing it.
03:20:48.000Anyway, but thanks for asking about the show.