Mike Baker is a former CIA operative who served as the Director of Operations for the Joint Improving American Intelligence Agency (JAX) and now works as a consultant for the Republican National Committee (RNC) and the presidential campaign of Donald Trump. In this episode, Mike talks about how he got into politics, why he thinks Trump should be the next president, and why he doesn t think Hillary Clinton is going to win the 2020 election. He also talks about why he didn t vote for Hillary Clinton in 2016, and what it means to be a conservative in the current political climate. Mike also gives us his thoughts on the current state of politics in America, and explains why Bernie Sanders is a bad idea and why Hillary Clinton should win the primary. And, of course, we talk about how much money it takes to run for president and why it s a terrible idea. If you don t like politics, you'll love this episode. It's a must-listen! And if you don't like politics then you'll definitely like this episode! Enjoy, enjoy, and tweet us what you thought of it! Timestamps: 5:00 - What's your favorite part about this episode? 6:30 - What do you think of Trump? 7:20 - How much money does it take to run a presidential campaign? 8:15 - Who's better than Hillary Clinton? 9:40 - Who do you need to be president? 10: Is Bernie Sanders a bad guy? 11:00- Is Hillary going to be the most authentic? 12: Is Hillary running for president a good thing? 15:00: Is she a good person? 16:00 17:10 - Who should I vote for her in 2020? 18:10 19:10 Is Bernie a good guy or not? 21:40 22:30 23: Is Donald Trump better than Bernie a better person than Hillary? 26:30 Is Bernie an asshole? 27:00 Is Hillary better than I should be a better candidate than I don t I think I should I be running for President? 29:15 32:00 | Is Bernie just an old man? 35:30 | Is Hillary a better guy than I m not a bad person than I think she s just a little bit more? 36:40 | I m just kidding?
00:00:34.000We were talking before the show started about the current cover of The Economist that has Donald Trump dressed up like his Uncle Sam, and it just says, really?
00:00:42.000It's perfect, you know, and it's what you want to say to everybody who has jumped that chasm, right?
00:01:08.000Everybody wants to be entertained to some degree.
00:01:09.000But how do you get to the point from saying it's entertaining to leader of the free world?
00:01:13.000And that's the part that I can't understand when I talk to people who are absolutely supporting him.
00:01:20.000Well, you as a man who's been deep in the world of security or CIA operative, you've got the inside scoop with how this machine runs to a certain extent.
00:01:31.000Don't you think that at this point, it's so complicated that almost no one wants to be president?
00:01:40.000It's not a job that people are scrambling to get anymore.
00:01:56.000You think about the kid who wants to become president of the Young Republicans Club, right, in middle school.
00:02:02.000And then, you know, all through his life, that's all he wants.
00:02:04.000He wants to be an elected official somewhere.
00:02:06.000So he goes maybe to the town council, and his big goal is to become a congressman.
00:02:10.000And God forbid, then he gets that, and he goes on.
00:02:12.000There's a certain personality type, right, that's way up its own ass that allows you to think that, yes, I should be president of the United States.
00:02:21.000I look in the mirror every morning and I think, yes, I should lead the free world.
00:02:24.000So right there, I think you've got a flaw in all the people who are pursuing elected office.
00:02:29.000But then you've got the money that's behind it.
00:03:02.000If you took an iron, an ironed Idaho flat, and then you did that with all the other states, the only other state that would be bigger would be Alaska.
00:03:15.000But the point being, I suppose, before we moved out there, I was on the East Coast, and my wife is involved in politics to some degree, but we spent some time in Connecticut.
00:04:42.000I mean, my problem with Hillary is it's purely an operational one.
00:04:45.000I know that if I had handled Even in a conservative way, if you look at what she did with the email server and her colleagues or cohorts did, and you say, okay, in a conservative way, I'm looking at how bad it was.
00:05:24.000He hands over some information to his mistress, who had a security clearance, and he gets a couple years probation, a large fine, has to plead guilty.
00:05:34.000She literally hands it over to the Chinese, the Russians, and any other state and non-state sponsored hacker out there.
00:05:42.000Explain what she did for people who don't know.
00:05:45.000For whatever her motivation, she initially said it was simply a matter of ease, After saying that she didn't really know because it wasn't her gig, she set up a private email server in her bathroom.
00:06:42.000She's saying, well, I never saw that it was classified, and yet it's either classified or it's not, and you know it.
00:06:49.000And when you sign on to be, whether it's a senior official at her level or some moak that's walking around just carrying papers at the agency, whatever it may be, You sign agreements that you will protect classified information and it doesn't say it has to be marked classified.
00:07:07.000It says that you are aware because you go through a briefing about what is and what isn't And how you look at a piece of information to determine.
00:07:33.000It's an egregious mishandling of classified information that anybody else would be punished for.
00:07:39.000And it's, you know, I don't think it's going to happen.
00:07:40.000I think the Bureau is engaged in a couple of different investigations.
00:07:44.000I think they have all the information they would need to put the ordinary person, you know, or move for an indictment.
00:07:49.000I just don't think the DOJ is going to do it.
00:07:51.000So what is their motivation to ignore it?
00:07:55.000Well, I think it's a political top cover.
00:07:57.000Because there's only one other person running for the Democratic Party.
00:08:06.000And I mean, again, it's sort of, you know, the left makes fun of the Republicans, as they should, because look what we've got as our frontrunner.
00:08:13.000But, you know, they make fun of the idea that, you know, the Republicans are all upset because they're anointed one, whether it's Rubio or whomever.
00:08:22.000It's the same way on the other side, right?
00:08:24.000I mean, you know, there's a lot of people, you know, with their knickers in a twist on the left, upset that perhaps their anointed one isn't going to get in.
00:08:32.000If Huma Abedin or one of her cohorts who was involved in this, who also were being looked at in a very, very serious way, if one of them gets banged up for this, then I don't know how it doesn't spread to her.
00:08:45.000And, you know, I understand shit rolls downhill, but...
00:08:48.000Anyway, so that seems like the only way it wouldn't is the whole thing that we're talking about her in the first place that she's just so deeply entrenched in the system She's so political and she's washed so many hands and you know They're all tied in together and this is the fabric that's sort of keeping her afloat right now her whole Sort of,
00:09:08.000you know, political operating mechanism.
00:09:12.000I mean, she's just so deeply entwined in the Washington system.
00:09:16.000And that seems to be what's keeping her from...
00:09:19.000I mean, if this was going on, and somehow or another this was someone like Trump, someone who's an outsider, Jesus Christ, they would chase him down.
00:10:28.000So that's an argument for other people.
00:10:30.000But the people that feel like we got screwed in 2008 with...
00:10:35.000The whole bailout and the banks and all the craziness with the economic collapse.
00:10:41.000They feel like at least some guy's coming along that's addressing that and he's the only one.
00:10:44.000So that's what people are gravitating towards.
00:10:46.000And there's a lot of social stuff like his gravitating towards the Black Lives Matter movement and wanting to make medical marijuana legal and all that stuff.
00:10:55.000That I understand too, but there's not one person that stands out where I go, there's my guy!
00:11:03.000Yeah, I mean, if you could take Bernie, because I think one of the things people like about Sanders is he's been consistent over the years, right?
00:12:20.000I don't know how much he's going to tax people.
00:12:23.000I've tried to pay attention to how the—I mean, essentially what he wants to do is anyone who makes more than a certain amount, he wants to impose a very large tax above that certain amount.
00:12:32.000You know, figure out whatever that number is, whether it's $10 million a year or whatever the hell it is.
00:12:36.000Anything over that, he's just going to tax the fuck out of it.
00:12:40.000But the problem is that's not going to pay for everything he needs.
00:12:43.000That tax is going to roll down to the middle class and the lower middle class.
00:12:47.000And that's sort of the elephant in the room that nobody wants to talk about.
00:12:50.000I mean, Hillary's been talking about it a little bit.
00:12:54.000And the Republicans haven't been talking about it because I don't think they view him as anybody that they're going to be facing in the general election.
00:13:00.000You know, taxing that 1%, the 2%, the 3%, whatever it is, you know, you could raise those taxes up to 99%.
00:13:07.000You're not going to pay for free healthcare and education for this country.
00:13:10.000Well, not only that, everybody's always complaining about the government.
00:13:31.000And then the same incompetent fucks that are handling the IRS and all the other shit, those are the people that are going to be handling this money.
00:13:38.000And what do you think they're going to do?
00:13:52.000When 2008 hit, when the economy really went in the shitter, you know, growth in terms of employment, you know where it happened most in this country was in Washington, D.C. I mean, you saw the growth of government as...
00:14:03.000The economy was absolutely heading south.
00:14:06.000And that's just – that's the way it works.
00:14:08.000There's certain things about big government that hold true whether it's here or outside this country.
00:14:14.000But anyway, so I look at Bernie and I think, yeah, I get it.
00:14:18.000I like the fact that he's been consistent.
00:14:29.000And you think about poor, what's his name, Scott Kelly, the astronaut, he's coming down after, you know, he's out of a long sleep up in the space station.
00:14:35.000I hope to hell that they haven't told him shit about what's happening.
00:14:37.000Because how funny would it be for him to land, and Trump is the leading candidate, and nobody's said anything to him yet.
00:14:44.000And he just comes home, turns on the TV, it's Super Tuesday, Trump's won everywhere, and he's going to be, I mean, he's dealing with gravitation and all the rest of it, so I guess this isn't his biggest deal.
00:14:52.000Don't they get, like, internet up there?
00:15:08.000I would love to think that he doesn't know, and he'd be the one person who'd get gobsmacked when he shows up here and finds out what's going on.
00:15:22.000Tossed up in this email exchange thing.
00:15:24.000If she gets in trouble for this, and it's Bernie, that's it, on the Democratic side.
00:15:31.000And on the Republican side, it's essentially down to...
00:15:34.000I mean, Cruz seems like he's fallen out of it.
00:15:36.000It's Marco Rubio and Donald Trump, and Rubio is a distant second.
00:15:40.000And people are so excited about Trump, because he talks shit, he's bold and brash, he insults people, and he's got his own money.
00:15:48.000He says a bunch of crazy shit like there's a great picture of him where it's it's a photoshopped picture of Somebody made a picture of him and he's got a gun And he's pointing it out the window of a car and it says get in pussy.
00:16:01.000We're gonna make America great again But it just seems like there's so many goofy white guys who are ready and psyched to have Trump as president, like some insulting reality star kind of a president.
00:17:15.000We have more crisis around the world right now, more hotspots, more potential very, very serious conflicts going on.
00:17:24.000And now is the time you would think, whether it comes from the left or the right, that you want really clear-minded, strategic, smart, pragmatic, reasoned leadership.
00:18:08.000But the fact that we've been having a conversation about it, where we're talking about whether a guy like Trump is suited to be president, is astounding.
00:18:33.000He hasn't quite wrapped his head around that one yet.
00:18:36.000He's got some wacky ideas, like he's got a great picture of himself, a painting that he had done at his home, where it's him and Jesus is behind him, and Jesus has his hands on his shoulders.
00:19:50.000And we've gotten to that point where there's so many problems with our system.
00:19:54.000But one of the problems is I think that...
00:19:56.000People are hell-bent on finding the candidate that they agree with everything on or that agrees with them on everything.
00:20:03.000And I've got – my three little boys are, what, eight, six, and four, and they know they're not going to get everything they want, right?
00:20:09.000But they also know that if they work it enough, they'll get some of what they want, and then they're going to be happy enough, and they'll go off, and the day continues.
00:20:22.000In politics, and so you're getting, everybody's splintering off.
00:20:26.000And so, you know, the worry, obviously, and it's not an epiphany, people are talking about it all the time on the Republican side, it's just, you know, people are throwing these verbal hand grenades out, and there's no way to repair the damage once there is some nominee, if there is a nominee.
00:20:39.000Well, Christie's trying to do that now.
00:20:41.000Chris Christie's now friends with Donald Trump.
00:20:46.000Newt Gingrich is reportedly talking to Donald Trump.
00:20:49.000This sounds wrong, but how do you get to the point where you can set aside all your concerns and agree to step forward and say that he's the guy?
00:22:27.000The guy was comfortable in his own skin.
00:22:29.000But I think that everything's gotten sliced and diced, and Which is by itself also very divisive.
00:22:37.000So the more that you do that, the more you take the country and say, well, we're going to slice this up into various demographics and sectors and groups and opinions, and we're going to go after this one.
00:22:46.000Well, by definition, you're going to end up pitting groups against each other.
00:22:58.000I'm not going to throw all that on the current administration.
00:23:01.000I think they've been more divisive than they have been unifying.
00:23:04.000You know, overall, as a country, and part of it may be the speed of information and all the rest of this shit, but it just seems like we're getting to the point where I think we're going to have to get rid of the two-party system.
00:23:16.000We'll keep the two-party system, but we're going to have to have a third, maybe a fourth.
00:23:19.000There's going to have to be more potential opportunities for people because that's what they're demanding.
00:23:40.000I mean, when something happens and something goes wrong, like someone said to me something about drones.
00:23:45.000They were talking about drones, and Obama has blood on his hands.
00:23:48.000I'm like, do you really Do you think he's in charge of all that?
00:23:50.000Do you really think there's any way this guy could be on top of the economy, could be on top of international trade, could be on top of international relations, and he's also piloting drones?
00:24:33.000People, you know, and again, I understand, you know, people think that the, you know, the agencies out there, you know, looking to create a one world government to screw everybody over, but...
00:24:55.000I mean, there are so many, and maybe, because we talk about checks and balances, and we talk about the intel committees, and sort of that nature, but maybe what really keeps us safe from the one-world government is the fact that there's so much territorial pissing that goes on between the different agencies.
00:25:09.000But the point being is that once you get that target package, you've got to go get approval.
00:25:14.000And the approval's not housed in the agency.
00:25:19.000Final decision-making's over at the White House.
00:25:21.000And it's basically a legal perspective.
00:25:25.000And so once that's done, then yeah, sure, you can fire a rocket up their ass if they're still where they are and you can get the decision made quick enough.
00:26:02.000I mean, if you just define a base as U.S. permanent or semi-permanent presence, yeah, it's a lot.
00:26:08.000And not just that, but, I mean, every other operation that goes on, every other activity that goes on, that's why...
00:26:17.000But I will say that's why you want at the top, while we still have a president, that's why you want someone who's very reasoned and clear-eyed, not thin-skinned.
00:27:00.000Maybe that would cause a scramble for top people.
00:27:02.000I don't know what all that would mean.
00:27:06.000Let's just say it's a very disappointing political season.
00:27:09.000My big fear is that we're going to have artificial intelligence and that one day artificial intelligence is going to govern world policy and world issues.
00:27:52.000That you could punch this in somehow or another to some sort of artificial intelligence, and it will dish out some sort of a decision based upon the rules of engagement, based upon the agreed-upon parameters that we have set.
00:28:07.000Yeah, I mean, we're kind of marching in.
00:28:09.000I know that we'll get to that point, but we certainly war game scenarios out where you're running a large number of potential possibilities.
00:28:51.000But you look at Benghazi and you think, here's the part I don't understand about that, not that you asked, but All they had to do during the course of that attack, and they had no idea how long that attack was going to go on for, all they had to do was put the birds up with the guys in them and head towards Benghazi.
00:29:23.000But the idea that they could all be sitting around in the war room Watching this and not have that, you know, pop in their heads because three to four weeks down the road was a national election, and all they could imagine was there was going to be some goat rope, and they couldn't get to the point where they thought there'd be zero risk.
00:29:41.000All those guys on the ground wanted was to know that the cavalry had been called.
00:29:45.000They didn't expect to be saved, but they thought that help would be on its way because that's what you do.
00:29:49.000And it's one of those strange – so when you talk about scenarios and war gaming and potential political blowback and all that, it's a fascinating world where you sit in a war room and all these different sides are being debated.
00:30:02.000My perspective on Benghazi is I just don't understand why they didn't just try.
00:30:06.000That's all they had to do and it would have been a story.
00:30:09.000So you really think it was because of the election?
00:30:10.000I think there were more political operatives in that room than tactical operators.
00:30:16.000And I think that somebody got jammed up who wanted to spin them up and send them.
00:30:23.000And I think that it was probably because – and again, I understand.
00:31:11.000And for that reason that you said, there is this understanding that you will make the effort, you'll try.
00:31:18.000And nobody out there on that pointy edge of the spear expects that they'll be saved, but they do expect that someone's going to call the cavalry and try.
00:31:26.000Well, the idea that you're left to be hung out to dry with an...
00:31:35.000That's why it's so disturbing to people.
00:31:37.000It's like if this was a political decision, it's like to try to minimize blowback because of election coming up, so let's just not do anything.
00:31:44.000If that was the decision, well, that's contrary to the whole purpose of having military in the first place.
00:31:49.000If there's a fucking attack, you're supposed to send in the troops.
00:31:55.000And particularly to make sure that that fucking never happens again.
00:31:58.000Because if you know that every time there's an election coming up and, well, they're not going to do shit because there's an election coming up in two weeks, now we can go in again.
00:32:13.000I just, in looking at it, all the various scenarios and knowing what resources were available and knowing What the guys expected on the ground, I just don't get it.
00:32:21.000And, you know, for a group, meaning the administration that's supposed to be so clever and politically savvy, it just didn't make any sense.
00:32:29.000And now they've been having to suffer with it ever since.
00:32:31.000And aside from the fact that they just didn't fucking make the effort to try to save these people.
00:32:35.000And again, not that they would have, but how do you not try?
00:32:41.000I don't understand whenever they're making decisions based on whether or not there's an election coming up, and you would do something differently if there was, and people's lives could be lost because an election's coming up, versus how you would behave it was first term,
00:32:59.000Well, there's a risk aversion that takes hold.
00:33:03.000And we got to a point, and it's not just a recent thing, it's not just this administration, you know, to be fair, But there's this understanding or this belief somehow that we can get to a zero risk on a military operation or an intelligence operation and, you know, so show me that we won't have casualties.
00:33:22.000You want to try to minimize that risk for sure.
00:33:25.000When your decision making gets to that point and you start then, it starts feeding down through the ranks and you start getting mid-level managers rising up who believe that a good watch is when nothing happens on their watch, you've got a real problem.
00:34:09.000You step back for a little while, and it just piles up more.
00:34:12.000If you retire, the new guy comes in, and you look at the new guy doing it, and the same shit's happening, and it doesn't seem like anybody put a dent in anything.
00:34:21.000And it continues to go on, like the Middle East.
00:34:24.000At one point in time, I mean, how- Well, I don't know what you're getting at there.
00:34:58.000We spent a lot of time trying to get the Soviets out of Afghanistan during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan.
00:35:02.000And the Soviets spent a lot of time trying to get themselves out of there.
00:35:05.000About four years into their occupation there, they realized, and we know this because we've seen the Kremlin papers and we've had access to a lot of their thinking at that time.
00:35:16.000They, after about year four, they said, this is fucked up.
00:37:41.000But we have this This mentality that we're going to do it better this time.
00:37:46.000So you look at ISIS, you know, for example.
00:37:53.000I mean, who couldn't have guessed if we completely walk out?
00:37:55.000You can debate all sorts of things about Iraq, but who couldn't have seen if you walk out of that place, it was going to devolve into chaos.
00:38:02.000You know, if you leave a vacuum, it's not good.
00:38:30.000I remember when McCain was debating Obama.
00:38:33.000When they were running for president and Obama was talking about going to Afghanistan and I remember this is a very sobering moment where McCain said, what are you talking about going to Afghanistan?
00:40:22.000Right now, we're still talking as if somehow we're going to find a federal government.
00:40:26.000And that's what's going to help us because then one of the generals just came out yesterday or today or whatever, and he said, well, I don't think the Libyans are going to be able to take care of ISIS themselves because ISIS now got a very strong hold in Libya.
00:41:06.000Just trying to nation build and seeing these people that, first of all, you're dealing with completely different cultures, completely different cultures, completely different educations, people who are so backwards, so far gone,
00:41:22.000that taking a 45-year-old man who's so fucked up and crazy and religious and trying to convert him to the ways of the West...
00:41:30.000Like these fucking people that executed that kid the other day in the middle of Iraq for playing music because he was playing Western music.
00:41:39.000We can't process it, but we have never been able to.
00:41:41.000You talk about the Viet Cong and we used to go in and we thought we were helping a village and going to an inoculated village and the Viet Cong had to come in there and kill them because they'd had contact with us.
00:41:50.000One of the first people that we hired some time ago for my company, Diligence, for all your information and security needs.
00:42:02.000One of the first guys we hired was a Russian, came out of their GRU. And right after we'd gone in for the Tora Bora operation, he came to me.
00:42:13.000And he had been a tank driver out in Afghanistan during the occupation for the Russians.
00:42:19.000And he came and you could just see the intensity on his face.
00:42:44.000And if I had been smart, I would have dragged him back to the States...
00:42:48.000I've taken them into the Pentagon and had them say that every hour on the hour, you know, until somebody figured out what the hell we should have been doing.
00:43:03.000And sometimes you need somebody who's in charge.
00:43:05.000You need a leader at the top of this food chain around the world.
00:43:08.000Because if you don't have one, you get what we get now.
00:43:10.000I would argue that part of the problem we have is the administration, for whatever their motivation, whatever their reasons, and again, you know, fine.
00:44:14.000You've got some fucked up parts of the world.
00:44:16.000And the more I talk to people that have been to those fucked up parts of the world, the more that picture is starting to be clear and clear.
00:44:24.000The more I talk to guys like Jocko Willink, who've been over there, SEALs, people that have served over there, you get this picture of this place that's not America.
00:44:33.000And you get a lot of people that are talking about the rest of the world as if we're talking about America, like bad spots in America.
00:44:42.000Well, let's just fucking fixing Chicago is a goddamn cakewalk compared to fixing Kabul or fixing any of these spots in the world, like Syria.
00:44:49.000Yeah, and by the way, we could be at the top of the global food chain and still fix Chicago.
00:46:10.000Well, you actually have a qualified opinion, and that's the difference between your opinion and someone who's going, the United States, man, we need to stay out of other countries, man.
00:46:20.000I think we need to pay attention to what's going on outside of the United States for sure.
00:46:25.000I just don't know what you could possibly do to sort of smooth over the Middle East and bring them up to date.
00:46:32.000I just don't know how you could, how do you bring ISIS up to date?
00:46:36.000How do you say, hey guys, you really, you can't execute 15-year-old kids for listening to rap music.
00:46:43.000You can't, it's not an organization that we're going to be able to deal with in a manner that would make us all feel happy because we talked them down from, you know, from the ledge and they're not going to commit violence anymore.
00:47:06.000And you manage it in part by not allowing The extremists to have their own fucking territory.
00:47:13.000Because that caliphate that they've been jonesing for all this time, that's one of the reasons why they've been having so much success in recruiting forward fighters.
00:47:22.000There's been a shitload of people going into that place.
00:47:24.000And they do it because, hey, look, we finally got our own turf.
00:47:30.000It's now much more problematic because we sat on the sidelines for some time and the Russians are in there and nobody wants to get into a shooting match with the Russians at this stage of the game.
00:49:48.000But have we had other guys that were, you know, despots or not so much despots as just really unsavory people that in an ideal world you wouldn't want to associate with.
00:50:00.000But the real world doesn't work that way.
00:50:02.000There are some fucked up people out there.
00:50:04.000And the fact of the matter is sometimes you got to deal with the person that's there.
00:51:08.000Again, how does it happen that this country, this fantastic country, and again, I spent most of my life overseas, I can go to the deepest, darkest shithole somewhere out there, middle of nowhere, and someone will say, If I go to America, I can work this hard and I can do really well.
00:51:25.000I just have to, you know, if I can get to America, they still, people out there in the middle of nowhere still believe the American dream.
00:51:32.000And yet you worry about it because I think we seem to be giving up on it here if this is the best we've got.
00:51:38.000If we're willing to follow this guy, you know, down the tunnel, I don't know where we're heading, but it's not good.
00:51:46.000And I also worry about – part of it with Bernie Sanders, going back to him, is I think sometimes the young people who support him, part of it is sort of being disheartened.
00:51:57.000Since 2008, they don't see themselves as being part of the American dream.
00:52:00.000And if you don't imagine yourself working hard and becoming wealthy, then you don't give a shit whether tax rates go up to 85 percent or not.
00:52:06.000It doesn't matter to you because it's not going to be you.
00:52:10.000Well, it's just so confusing to people that no one can get it right.
00:52:14.000I mean, everybody had these hopes and dreams for Obama, and he was going to get an office.
00:52:19.000I remember this lady that was, when Obama got elected, she was so happy, and she was saying, I'm so happy because now I know that if my mortgage needs to be paid, he's going to help me.
00:52:36.000Like moment where I realized like wow these people don't really understand how complex this entire system is and you're dealing with a guy who's stepping into the office right when all these banks are failing.
00:52:48.000Right when all this this collapse is happening and people think that all of a sudden this guy's gonna come in and he's gonna have a completely different set of priorities and he's going to find all these people.
00:53:23.000You would think that over a period of time then, what we'd really want now is somebody, and again, I don't know where you find them, but somebody with that combination of experience and character and a proven ability, a track record, to work both sides, right?
00:53:36.000To say, look, we're going to be able to negotiate, we're going to compromise, we're going to find, you know, it's not rocket fucking science.
00:53:43.000To work out some of these problems, right?
00:53:45.000But the more problems we get and the more negative we get about them, it seems insurmountable.
00:53:50.000But we should be able to find somebody in this massive country of ours who, you know, can propose some clear-eyed ideas.
00:54:02.000Taking a guy who, this is an analogy that makes sense to me, taking a guy who's never fought before, and then make him run for the UFC, and now you're gonna fight in the UFC. Well, what's your fucking experience fighting?
00:56:42.000Monopoly's decided they're going to, I don't know whether for all their board games or not, but Monopoly's going to take away the paper money and give you a bank card.
00:56:51.000I couldn't believe it when I saw Hasbro, which owns Monopoly.
00:56:54.000They said, well, we're going to use a bank card from now on.
00:56:56.000So all those kids out there, because I don't know, maybe they don't want them to learn how to count paper money because maybe it's unseemly.
00:57:01.000I'm reading something into it that's not there, obviously.
00:58:59.000And now a lot of those people, they look and they don't believe because they've been told they're victims and the system's rigged and they're getting fucked every day.
00:59:06.000They don't believe they can be part of the system.
00:59:08.000So sure, they look at Bernie and they think, yeah, that's about right.
01:00:47.000I mean, getting tapped out in jujitsu.
01:00:49.000There are guys that have tapped me out that are literally, like, when I'm tired, I will think about them tapping me out and I will push further.
01:00:58.000That is the only thing that motivates you is that feeling.
01:01:01.000It's one of the only things that's really a powerful motivating factor that everyone can relate to is that feeling of defeat.
01:01:07.000That horrible feeling where you go, you know what?
01:01:53.000Yeah, well, the idea of being a progressive is a great idea.
01:01:56.000You know, you want everybody to, like, be equal and you want equality as far as the law and how people are treated and how you address people.
01:02:05.000And no one starts out in a worse spot.
01:02:15.000It's good for you, it's good for me, as long as you're competing fairly, it generates, that competition generates a lot of good things.
01:02:24.000First of all, it generates ambition, it generates success.
01:02:28.000If you overcome these obstacles that are created by competition, you understand what needs to be done in order to achieve things.
01:02:38.000If you're going to go through life and you're never going to have any obstacles, you're never going to have any character testing moments, you're not even going to know what you're capable of.
01:03:03.000But you just, like you said, it made you work harder, it made you push harder, and you realized, it's like, you know what, it's like interrogation training.
01:03:12.000I don't know why this is popping in my head, but it's interrogation training, the whole point of interrogation training is to break you down so that you realize you've got a point where it's just going to happen.
01:03:21.000So in interrogation training, is it training you to be able to deal with being interrogated?
01:03:35.000But the idea being is that when you're in interrogation training, the idea is you have to understand that at some point, No matter who you are, it's going to fall apart.
01:03:45.000And then what you need is you need to be able to pull yourself back together again.
01:03:48.000So the idea of interrogation training in part is to show you that, A, you can go farther than you thought you could, but also at some point you're just going to say, fuck it.
01:03:57.000I mean, because, you know, depending on where you're at, You know, you're going to break.
01:04:57.000Because they're fucking competing against each other.
01:04:59.000Chevy is competing against this company, they're competing against Ford, and they're all trying to make a car that goes zero to 60 in a half a second.
01:05:06.000And every fucking year they get closer to that.
01:05:08.000I mean, there's one reason for that, and it's because there's other cars out there that are doing a better job.
01:05:15.000Their skid pad numbers are getting higher, their quarter-mile numbers are getting lower, they're getting faster, they handle better, they're getting safer.
01:05:22.000They're doing this because of competition, and that's the only thing that fuels innovation.
01:05:27.000Competition fuels innovation and this desire that everybody has to, I want to get the newest, greatest shit.
01:06:49.000Like, your parents and your friends are gonna love you no matter what.
01:06:54.000You know, Randy Couture said this to me once.
01:06:56.000We were talking about fighters and how he talks to fighters that he's training.
01:06:59.000And he said, the most important thing is you can't be afraid to lose.
01:07:04.000It's going to happen At one point in time, if you keep fighting, everybody loses.
01:07:08.000But you have to think to yourself, what is important in life?
01:07:12.000Your family loving you, your friends loving you, they're still going to love you.
01:07:17.000All those pieces are going to be in place if you lose.
01:07:20.000Accept that and then go out there and do your best.
01:07:22.000And as long as you've done your best, You can keep your chin up and you can understand that whatever failure that you've experienced there, whatever mistake, this is like a mathematical problem.
01:07:42.000But if you don't get hit with that counter right, you never know.
01:07:44.000If you go through life just throwing a one-two and winning every time, you think you've got the perfect game plan, then you teach that to someone else, and that person realizes, well, no, this game plan's no good.
01:09:18.000If you're a parent and you're living your life through your kids' sporting exploits, go fucking do something else.
01:09:24.000Encourage them and give them what they need to succeed.
01:09:27.000But don't value yourself through what your kids are doing in sports.
01:09:32.000And there's so many parents out there that do that.
01:09:33.000I coached For a while, my daughter, who's now in college, she played a lot of softball, and so I was coaching at one point before she got to the point where I had nothing to offer, and so they had to actually get coaches who knew what they were doing.
01:09:47.000But I remember at one point, there was this one dad who was just a complete douche, and he was always a douche, and he'd just show up, and he'd berate his kid, and his kid was fantastic, and she was wonderful.
01:09:57.000And one time, she actually walked up to me, and you could tell she wanted to cry, but she didn't.
01:10:03.000She was a great kid, and she apologized for her dad's behavior in the dugout because the dad was leaning over the fence and screaming.
01:12:38.000Again, it's interesting because that and Wyoming and Montana, that whole part of the country, it's still a little bit different.
01:12:50.000The urban centers are all starting to kind of unify and become a little bit similar.
01:12:54.000I think when people have to deal with nature, when they're dealing with winter and storms and just the reality of being in nature, it humbles you and it also hardens you a little bit to the realities of changing climates and the realities of just wildlife and all the dangers and all the wonderful things that come from nature.
01:13:25.000I mean, not far being, you know, a handful of hours drive.
01:13:28.000And you go up to a place, and if people haven't, if they're listening, haven't been to Yellowstone, good God, you know, do yourself a favor and go there.
01:15:15.000Yellowstone's done a wonderful job of bringing back a number of things.
01:15:19.000And there's a fairly active wolf population up there.
01:15:22.000The bears are looking great, the grizzlies and everything.
01:15:24.000But the point being is that if you grow up out there, I think, or if you spend a lot of time out there, you understand that, yeah, Life isn't fair, right?
01:15:34.000And if we just keep telling our kids that life is fair and everybody gets to be equal and That's not the way it works.
01:15:40.000And even in the human species, it's not the way it works.
01:15:43.000Like you said, somebody's always going to be harder, tougher, smarter, more intense, and that's a good thing.
01:16:13.000We value intelligence and a sense of humor and someone who's interesting and fascinating to talk to.
01:16:21.000There's so many things that people value out of a human being that being the best at one thing that you compete in is not the only thing in life.
01:16:29.000And this is a real problem with athletes once they retire because all of their sense of self-worth A lot of times is wrapped up in competition.
01:16:38.000And they have been obsessed with greatness.
01:16:41.000And then afterwards, they feel this hollow, sad life.
01:18:27.000It's like the the idea of danger and reward of consequence these are these are all They're so intense to someone who's been involved in like really heavy competition I see with fighters all the time this very reluctant Decision that they have they're very reluctant to step away from the game when they've been knocked out a bunch of times and they start to lose their chin and they start to experience some cognitive issues and And it's so hard for them and they need
01:18:57.000someone to step in and grab them and go listen to me man if you don't get out now It's gonna get real ugly in the next couple years and you could you could reach a point where you're never gonna bounce back You get a few more knockouts three four more knockouts and you might be fucked for the rest of your life And we see it now with a lot of NFL players.
01:19:16.000We've definitely seen it with a lot of fighters I mean Jesus look at the greatest of all time the greatest boxer of all time Is a physical wreck.
01:19:24.000Muhammad Ali is in the worst shape of Like literally any public figure that has ever been so graceful and beautiful in his movements and the way he talked and so charismatic and now you look at him and he cannot talk at all.
01:19:54.000A lot of parents now are just refusing to have their kid play football.
01:19:58.000Well, I have friends that, you know, they'll let their kids fight.
01:20:02.000They'll let their kids fight, but they won't let their kids get involved in football because they're like, look, if you fight and you get really good, it's you and one guy.
01:20:10.000And you might get hit, and you're probably going to get hit, but if you do your diligence and you work on your technique and you understand footwork and you understand the rules of engagement, And you understand, like, correct strategy as far as movement and do all your work in the gym and understand how to...
01:20:45.000I mean, the difference between him and a guy who decides to bite down at his mouthpiece and just slug it out and to see who's the last man standing, there's a giant difference in his strategy and the consequences of his strategy versus a guy who just likes to put on a show for the fans.
01:21:01.000That guy's going to be in a fucking wheelchair when he's older.
01:21:05.000Well, just the other day, I had a deal with Slugger, the middle boy, who said, you know, because he's been jonesing to play football.
01:21:11.000And so then he found out that the only league available was flag football.
01:21:15.000And he looked at me, he's not that age, he's almost seven.
01:21:38.000But it was because there was no jujitsu when I was a kid.
01:21:41.000But if I had a child that was interested in competing, I would get them involved in jujitsu because you might get your arm broken, but guess what?
01:21:49.000They'll fucking put you in a cast, you'll heal up, you'll learn to tap next time.
01:22:00.000I took karate when I was 14, but I really got serious when I was 15. I took a little kung fu when I was younger than that, but I didn't get serious until I was a sophomore, right before freshman to sophomore.
01:22:17.000So, 14 to 15. During that time, was there some reason why you got interested?
01:22:21.000Well, I've been interested because I was small and I didn't want to get picked on.
01:22:30.000I went to a Red Sox game at Fenway Park.
01:22:32.000I was walking home, and as I was walking home, me and a buddy of mine were going to the T, the public transport.
01:22:39.000There was a giant line because it was the baseball game we had let out.
01:22:42.000So we were walked by this Taekwondo school, and I walked upstairs.
01:22:47.000And it was this long staircase up to the Jae-Hun Kim Taekwondo Institute.
01:22:52.000And as I was walking up, just by luck, there was a guy named John Lee, who was the national Taekwondo champion, national light heavyweight champion, and he was training for the World Cup.
01:23:02.000And he was in just peak training for the World Cup.
01:23:06.000And as I got up to the top of the stairs, I heard this sound, this whomp!
01:24:54.000I mean, you could add all this meaning to it and you might be right or you might just be guessing.
01:25:00.000But to me, it was a gigantic moment and decision in my life to go up those stairs and to see that guy doing that changed my whole life because that became my life.
01:25:11.000And from 15 to 21, that's what I did every day of my life.
01:25:41.000But if you can find that thing like you did, That sparks something and the kid realizes, you know, I could become really good at this and I enjoy it and it sets me apart.
01:26:03.000You know, I walked up there and I was like, Holy shit, I was surrounded by black belts who were kicking people's heads off and I was like, this is insane!
01:26:11.000It was just, to me, it was so terrifying, but it was also, in a good way, it was very much like a cult.
01:26:18.000Because, in a good way, they didn't take advantage of you, but you had to bow, you had to say, yes sir, there was some intense discipline, and you got to see some intense consequences to fucking up.
01:26:31.000Because I got to see a lot of guys get knocked out.
01:26:34.000I saw a lot of guys get knocked out in tournaments, I saw guys get knocked out in practice.
01:26:42.000The belt system, I think, in martial arts is very important for kids because, like, you start out as a white belt and you get that blue belt.
01:26:56.000And he told me he was the happiest he's ever been in his life.
01:26:58.000More important than anything other than, like, the birth of his child.
01:27:02.000It was like, to him, it was like, I fucking did it.
01:27:04.000And here's a guy who, like, used to be a heroin addict, smoked cigarettes, just drinking all the time, had a terrible lifestyle.
01:27:12.000His wife, who's obsessed with jujitsu, got him to take a jujitsu class, and then all of a sudden, for whatever reason, that switch goes on.
01:27:50.000And I've got, again, the middle boy who's six right now, he's that kid who likes to know what the parameters are and likes to know That there's a system in place, right?
01:28:26.000But I can't recommend that enough for kids, for young boys especially, because it takes away this fear of engaging with other kids.
01:28:35.000It takes away this fear of getting your ass kicked, a fear of the unknown.
01:28:38.000If you don't know how to fight, you wind up getting involved in fights accidentally because you posture, you stick your fucking chest up, and you don't know.
01:28:48.000The consequences are so alien to you that you wind up talking too loud or trying to bluff someone and you can fuck up and run into the wrong dude.
01:28:59.000In a way, it's like concealed carry permits.
01:29:02.000If you don't know what the hell you're doing and if you don't have the discipline and if you're not constantly training, Yeah, there's a serious potential for fuck-up.
01:29:11.000There's a serious potential for fuck-up, and that's my own issue, my personal issue, with all these fucking states that are open-carry states, where you don't even have to have any training.
01:29:23.000I think, first of all, I'm a big supporter of the Second Amendment, I have guns, so let me get that out of the way.
01:29:28.000But I think you should learn how to fucking use a gun before you should get one.
01:29:33.000How come I can get a car, I have to go through all this shit, I have to learn how to drive, I have to fill out forms, I have to learn the rules?
01:29:46.000The training aspect of it is, anybody who's serious about weapons, anybody who's dealt with them, anybody who's had to carry them for a livelihood, you gain a real appreciation for how quickly things head south.
01:30:22.000I'm about to speculate, so I probably shouldn't.
01:30:24.000But There's a decent percentage of people who go out, they buy it, and then they put it in a lockbox, hopefully they put it in a lockbox, and then that's it.
01:30:33.000Maybe sometime they're going to need it and they don't know what the fuck they're doing.
01:30:37.000So it's the training and you just have to be constant repetition, constant repetition, because if you do need to use it, everything else shuts down.
01:30:45.000All your little controls go away depending on your big muscle mass and repetition and muscle memory.
01:30:54.000If you haven't been practicing, you're fucked.
01:30:56.000You might as well turn it on yourself.
01:31:21.000No one's trying to take away your guns.
01:31:22.000But I think the idea of firearms, owning a firearm, being a right, I think it should be a privilege.
01:31:31.000And I think much like driving a car is a privilege.
01:31:33.000I don't think you should keep anyone from doing it just arbitrarily, but I think you should prove that you know what the fuck you're doing before you put other people in danger.
01:31:45.000You've never gotten on a lake, and you've got some drunk asshole who's never gotten behind the wheel of a boat before, and all of a sudden he's doing 30 down the lake, and you think, what the fuck?
01:31:52.000Some rich dickhead who buys a fucking one of those cigarette boats.
01:33:25.000And the other thing is, I've never woken up in the morning and thought to myself, good God, I've got to get myself another.45, or I've got to get myself another AR-15.
01:33:37.000And I've got teams in my company that do nothing but due diligence on people, right?
01:33:41.000And now it's not for purposes of a weapons permit, but...
01:33:45.000I know how difficult that process is, even for relatively straightforward due diligence.
01:33:50.000And so the idea that I have no problems with expanded background checks, and I know a lot of people right now are screaming and saying, how did you do that?
01:34:01.000But again, I'm a huge supporter of the Second Amendment.
01:34:03.000I'm an NRA member, all the rest of that shit, and God bless it, but at the same time, We have to be able to find those ideas, those answers, or at least talk about them without immediately starting to pull the pins on the grenades and throwing them at each other.
01:34:19.000And that's, you know, going back to the earlier conversation about politics and everything else, it's, you know, probably no other, well, there's other emotive issues, but certainly with the Second Amendment, you know, the idea that you're going to spend a little bit more time on a background check, you know, if you've got to rush into the store and buy your handgun and get out of there as quick as possible,
01:35:32.000So shouldn't you have to have all these Shouldn't you have to have an understanding of how to use a safety?
01:35:39.000And then the variations in training for classroom work for concealed carry permits.
01:35:46.000You know, you got great training programs, and then you got less than great, significantly less than great.
01:35:52.000And you're talking about carrying a weapon out in public, and that is an enormous responsibility.
01:35:58.000And I think it's important, you know, and I think it's...
01:36:03.000It falls in line with what we're talking about.
01:36:06.000But how do you get to that point if as soon as you raise that issue, again, people start throwing hand grenades at you and you think, well, wait a minute.
01:36:28.000Instead of saying at the early outset, what would have been wrong with saying, let's do pre-existing conditions, let's keep kids on their health plans for their parents a little bit longer, and then let's try to figure out where else we can make improvements.
01:36:42.000I think one of the things about owning a gun, and this is very important to anybody that has a gun, you should want to be educated in proper firearm safety.
01:36:52.000If you have a gun, you should want this.
01:36:54.000So training shouldn't be something that you would fight.
01:36:58.000It should be something that everybody would embrace.
01:37:01.000If you have a gun, you understand the dangers and the consequences of having a gun.
01:37:05.000You also understand that you need someone to show you how to do it right.
01:37:09.000If you don't have anybody who puts it in your head, you know, always have your finger off the trigger.
01:37:28.000If you live out West, and again, I mean, because down South, you could argue the same thing about hunting culture and everything else, but there's a certain appreciation for both the use of weapons and the responsibility involved, because there are so many people out there that hunt.
01:37:44.000And there are so many, I mean, I would suspect that, I mean, everybody I know that owns a weapon goes to the range, or they're out I mean,
01:38:32.000I mean, depending on who you're talking to in law enforcement, there's a lot of folks in law enforcement that look at it and go, yeah, I mean, it's not what they would prefer.
01:38:43.000It's not up to them to make that call, but at the same time, I look at it, and I think if there's one issue that probably summarizes The sort of the emotive nature of politics nowadays,
01:39:11.000You know, and so you do think, okay, well, how do we?
01:39:14.000Because the default position for the administration is always, you know, it's always, you know, blowing it up, right?
01:39:20.000And so, you know, they misplay it as well, right?
01:39:24.000I think if there was more compromise, more discussion in the center where they could have this quietly outside of the, you know, the realm of media, but they just seem to be unable to do it.
01:39:33.000So every time there's an incident, the first thing you see is somebody from the administration up behind the podium Making statements and talking about gun control, and that fuels the other side.
01:39:43.000That fuels the side where they think they're just trying to take away all our weapons, because they see this.
01:39:48.000And there's nothing reasoned going on in here.
01:39:51.000There's no reasonable consideration of the pros and cons of this issue.
01:40:05.000You got all on one side, you got all on the other, and the reality is, you know what, we could have found a solution here somewhere if we'd been...
01:41:35.000And this was well before they had to go to get a court order, well before it became public knowledge.
01:41:40.000They actually went and had numerous quiet conversations with Apple, and they went to Apple and they literally said, you can take the phone, keep it on your campus, keep it in your facility, put it in your lab.
01:41:52.000All we're asking is for you to create a systems information file that you can force on that phone, that one phone, And pull the text, which then allows you to brute force the password, right?
01:42:04.000And get the texts off of there, get the data off of there that exists.
01:42:08.000And then you can destroy the SIF, the systems information file.
01:42:34.000They haven't been helpful, and there's an ongoing dialogue, and so it's disingenuous to say that Apple is now the bulwark for privacy, because they have been helpful in the past, and they will continue to be helpful, I suppose, in their own way.
01:42:48.000But for this particular phone, for this one time, where they could have held onto the phone, created that SIF, destroyed the SIF, at that moment that they've pulled the text off, say, that's it, that's done.
01:42:58.000So now what Tim Cook is saying is, not that it's creating a backdoor.
01:43:04.000But the precedent was already that if the Bureau goes through the process that Congress has set and then goes through that process and gets a court order— And the court then looks at it and says, yes, you've got probable cause.
01:44:10.000But, you know, to say that – because now you've got all three branches of government have said, yeah, we think that really we could use this information off of this phone.
01:44:18.000But I've heard everybody say, well, why don't they just do the rest of the investigation?
01:44:22.000Well, of course they've fucking done the rest of the investigation.
01:44:24.000They've done all the other investigative steps.
01:44:27.000In a situation like this, you just want them to do 80% of the investigation, and you know that you've got material on here which may lead to operational activity in finding other people who were involved or finding people overseas who were somehow assisting or whatever it may be.
01:44:44.000If you're saying, well, just, no, you know what, for the sake of this...
01:47:39.000What the judge essentially was saying in that case, and it involved a narco-trafficking investigation that was going on, And by the way, this isn't just for terrorism.
01:47:49.000Imagine what if this was for pedophilia.
01:47:54.000No, we don't want to catch those fucking douchebags that are involved in that because privacy?
01:48:00.000You know, I understand the privacy aspect, but each case has to be looked at on its merits.
01:48:05.000And if you say through the courts and through the Congress that these are the hoops that the Bureau has to jump through, and they jump through those hoops then...
01:48:17.000But anyway, the point being is that the one in New York, the judge essentially was saying, well, look, you want the courts to make a decision on this for something that Congress should really make a decision on this.
01:48:26.000And so, in a way, his decision was a pushback against the concept that the...
01:48:31.000The Bureau was basing this on, which is a very old law.
01:48:34.000And so the judge is saying, look, relying on a law that's a couple hundred years old or whatever, maybe instead we should be having this looked at through the legislature.
01:48:44.000And so there was an interesting sort of legality to his response to this.
01:48:59.000There are times when, from an operational perspective, you might want to move a little bit quicker than asking Congress to take up an issue and debate it and then maybe eventually come up.
01:49:10.000So maybe occasionally you're going to have moments like the San Bernardino shooting where you've got a phone in your hand and all you're asking Apple to do is take possession of it.
01:50:07.000And then they look at this saying, well, this is the slippery slope.
01:50:10.000Again, this is the thing that if the government has access to your phone, but we're talking about a fucking mass murderer and a guy who's already dead and we have one phone.
01:50:53.000Okay, what happens if you know Big Brother?
01:50:55.000But there are times when operational concerns probably override at least...
01:51:02.000An element of this where a reason that people can exist in the middle and say, yeah, on this occasion, because you've gone through all these orders, and because we've set up this protection now, meaning Apple holds on to it and everything, But, you know, that's not the way it works.
01:51:17.000And so, therefore, Apple comes out and says, and then the misinformation, ah, they're trying to create a backdoor to all our Apple devices.
01:51:23.000By the way, what do you think Apple does with their devices that they sell in China?
01:51:26.000You think the Chinese government would allow Apple – someone ought to talk about this in the media.
01:51:31.000Do you think the Chinese government would allow Apple to sell devices that they can't get into?
01:52:00.000There was this gigantic issue they were having.
01:52:02.000Then on top of that, Google Was having to deal with the fact that China was kind of ripping off their system and creating their own version of it.
01:52:11.000China is the largest state sponsor of economic espionage and cyber crime, cyber hacking in the world.
01:52:20.000They openly support counterfeit shit to the point where there's entire stores that have Apple logos, they sell Apple products, and none of it is legit.
01:53:39.000Everybody acts in their own best interest.
01:53:41.000But the Chinese have, I don't know, four dozen-plus academic institutions that are funded by the Chinese military, the PLA, that have responsibility for...
01:53:53.000We've got economic espionage, developing new means of basically stealing shit.
01:53:58.000They've got a couple dozen, at least, information warfare units that we've identified run by the PLA that are specifically designed to hoover up intellectual property and research and development and all the rest of that.
01:54:16.000So the idea, yes, the idea that we would do business there and believe somehow that the authorities there in China aren't going to have our shit.
01:54:25.000They're not going to have whatever it may be.
01:54:27.000A pharmaceutical company that sets up a facility out there isn't going to lose their R&D. Of course they are.
01:54:32.000Anybody in a serious manner who's doing business out in China knows as soon as you set foot in there and you establish yourself, you know, manufacturing or just sales, whatever it may be, Your information becomes their information.
01:54:54.000Maybe he's going to bring it back to the States.
01:54:55.000Well, I have a friend who works for the Bureau, and he was explaining to me How Chinese espionage works in the United States and how they catch people that a guy will come over here and live a completely normal life and won't look like there's anything going on with him whatsoever.
01:55:10.000Family guy, no weapons, no crime, no nothing.
01:55:15.000Befriend someone who works in some sort of an intellectual capacity, whether it's for some sort of a corporation that makes computers or something that works for the United States government in rocketry or whatever.
01:55:27.000They befriend that guy and then slowly...
01:55:33.000I know people that can pay you a lot of money for some of the information that you have.
01:55:39.000And by the way, this information is out there anyway.
01:56:00.000Well, the Chinese authorities want them to get another job.
01:56:02.000And eventually they end up at Northrop Grumman or they end up at Lockheed or they end up – it doesn't matter, DuPont, Dow, wherever it is.
01:56:53.000Because she, by doing this, and this sort of is in a roundabout way, we're bringing it all back, puts it in perspective why it's so dangerous that she had this unprotected email problem.
01:57:03.000Because by copy and pasting classified information or deciding through her own decision-making process or the people that were with her, what's okay to copy and paste and what's not okay to copy and paste, and not whether or not you go by the established protocols of top secret or not top secret or clearance or whatever clearance level you have.
01:57:31.000They'll take the daily dribble that goes on through her email just to gain a better understanding as to what makes a person tick or who are the people around her.
01:57:41.000They're looking for potential targets.
01:58:13.000But if you've been involved in this and you understand how aggressive it is out there, again, not just the Chinese, the Russians, everybody's at it.
01:58:25.000We need to understand that it was a serious problem.
01:59:05.000This brings us back to this whole Edward Snowden thing.
01:59:08.000What's your position on this, on that guy, and what he did in sort of exposing the fact that the NSA was involved in this wide-scale, this gigantic...
01:59:20.000Sort of information gathering process.
01:59:23.000The hoovering up of a metadata program that's gathering this stuff up.
01:59:27.000Well, first of all, again, I think everybody should have spent a little more time understanding what the actual technical aspects of it were.
01:59:33.000Well, his description of it, though, was problematic.
01:59:35.000He was saying the people that worked with him were accessing the emails of ex-girlfriends.
01:59:42.000Do I believe that maybe that might have happened?
02:00:16.000And, you know, again, it's all based on what your experiences are.
02:00:20.000And I get the fact that people, you know, consider him a hero or a whistleblower or whatever they want to call it.
02:00:26.000You know, he signed paperwork that said he was going to protect national security interests, that he was going to properly protect the information that he was given responsibility for seeing.
02:00:41.000And he also, despite what people may want to believe, He caused a lot of damage, a tremendous amount of damage in terms of information that was released about the way that we do things here, sources and methods that were of extreme interest to not just a terrorist organization,
02:01:00.000but extreme interest to Russian interests, extreme interest to Iranians.
02:01:05.000That's weird that he's in Russia right now.
02:02:00.000I'm not – unsympathetic doesn't sound right.
02:02:02.000I understand I appreciate the importance of finding the proper place on the pendulum, but I have probably an overriding appreciation for security because of what I did.
02:02:11.000And I understand that other people have an overriding appreciation for privacy because they didn't have the same experiences or they've had different experiences.
02:02:21.000And all I'm saying is I look at it from my perspective.
02:02:25.000I don't look at him as a hero or whistleblower in any way.
02:02:30.000I signed the same agreements, and I'm expected to live up to those just like anybody else who does.
02:02:38.000He found a way that he thought was appropriate to make his point.
02:02:42.000I have no idea what goes on in his head.
02:02:47.000I just would have thought it would have been nice if, I don't know, we made the point in a way that also protected our national security interests a little bit better.
02:02:56.000How could that be done, though, without exposing what he...
02:03:47.000Maybe he's like the Lex Luthor of IT. I don't think so.
02:03:52.000But as an example, the surveillance program supposedly that we had against European leaders.
02:04:00.000Remember the outreach with Angela Merkel and the fact that we're listening in on some of her conversations, the ones that we would have access to.
02:04:13.000They're listening on the conversations of their allies.
02:04:15.000And I mean, the French, the former head of the DGSC, the French Intel Service, turned to the head of France at one point when the head of France was, you know, sacre bleu and how could we be doing this?
02:04:24.000And, you know, and the former head of the Intel Service looked at a French guy and said, are you fucking kidding me?
02:04:43.000Yeah, I mean, the hand-wringing and all the, oh, I can't believe that our Americans would be, allies would be doing this.
02:04:48.000So they kind of assumed I guarantee you what was going on in the back rooms was the intel service directors were all, you know, sitting down and I would hope to think that our director was looking at them and saying, what the fuck?
02:05:00.000You know, and they were probably having a, you know, having a drink and saying, yeah, okay, we get it.
02:05:23.000You know, people should be shocked that one nation is acting in its own self-interest and listening to other nations.
02:05:30.000Again, same theory with economic espionage.
02:05:32.000We better hope we're playing offense and defense in the way the world actually works.
02:05:36.000It'd be great if we all held hands and, you know, winged monkeys on unicorns, flew out our asses, and we could all sing songs together, but it's not how the world works.
02:05:47.000That's me disappearing down a rabbit hole.
02:05:49.000But this rabbit hole is kind of important to talk about because you actually have some pretty deep knowledge about this rabbit hole.
02:05:56.000And this is some of the things that get speculated left and right and back and forth, and either you take one side or the other, and everybody argues about it.
02:06:03.000I mean, no one wants the government to have unchecked access to your emails, your phone calls.
02:06:24.000It's every nation acts in its own best interest.
02:06:28.000Sometimes it seems like the U.S. is the only one that apologizes for it.
02:06:31.000But if you did nothing else other than approach foreign policy from the perspective that every nation acts in its own best interest, we wouldn't get caught short as many times as we do.
02:07:34.000We always seem to feel like that's unusual.
02:07:36.000I mean, I remember times when we'd be engaged in some counterinsurgency operation overseas.
02:07:45.000We'd dress them up and we'd give them money and party hats and we'd train them.
02:07:49.000And then they'd go out, meaning the foreign service, you know, the foreign military, and they wouldn't act like we would, right?
02:07:55.000There would be problems or there'd be human rights abuses or whatever.
02:08:00.000And, you know, the Senate, you know, the Intel Committee would say, I can't believe this.
02:08:04.000How come they're not, you know, well, because they're a fucking different culture, just like you talked about earlier with the Middle East.
02:08:09.000They're You can dress them up and give them money and training, and they're always going to act differently.
02:08:27.000So is this a part of the problem with people getting access to information on how the world works?
02:08:32.000As time goes on, that information becomes more and more accessible and people get more and more upset about things that essentially have always been like this.
02:10:16.000Well, it seems incredibly confusing, and I don't think anybody's ever offered up a reasonable scenario where you could take places that are like the Middle East and straighten it out.
02:10:25.000No one's offered some sort of a step or a program where you can say, well, here's where they are now.
02:10:52.000There's no total freedom, but it's also because of the way the world is.
02:10:57.000Yeah, I'm here to tell you, again, I've been to a lot of places, and we won the lottery.
02:11:05.000And I realize everybody's coming from different positions and places in life, and it's pretty fucked up for a lot of people here sometimes.
02:11:14.000But this is a good place to be overall, and there still is the potential, even though it may seem far off sometimes for some people, but there's still the potential.
02:11:24.000If you work hard, you can do really well in this country.
02:11:28.000And even those times when, I don't know, maybe I'm just kidding myself.
02:11:32.000Maybe I'd like to continue believing that and maybe, who knows, maybe it's not true.
02:11:36.000I got young kids, so I'm going to continue to believe it's true.
02:11:39.000I think it's true for the most part, but I think it's complicated.
02:11:43.000And I also think this is a very unusual place.
02:11:45.000This country is only a couple hundred years old, and that's weird.
02:11:48.000It's weird to believe that we really essentially found it in 1776. I mean, 200 plus years is not long at all.
02:12:41.000I'm just saying that when you do find that point and Congress enacts the law and the courts go with it and say yes, when you do that, and you're jumping through the hoops that have been put in place, and you've got to—theoretically, again, you would always like to think that we have committees up on the Hill that are inquisitive and aggressive in their questioning and are paying attention— But when all that is done,
02:13:08.000then you'd like to think if you have an operational concern and you go through those hoops that, yeah, you'd be able to get the job done.
02:13:14.000Kind of bringing it back to the Apple thing, I guess.
02:13:16.000So I think kind of in a lot of ways, we're talking about a lot of similarities.
02:13:21.000That we have, on one hand, we have the ideal utopia, we have the shining light of honor and dignity, and then you have the dire consequences of the worst-case scenario, right?
02:13:43.000One thing you learn in the agency is that there's nothing black and white about the world.
02:13:49.000And you learn, the CIA is very good at teaching you how to sort of exist in the gray areas and understand that you're never going to get all the information that you want.
02:13:58.000You know, it's not like the beach books or the feature films where they get all the details and, okay, now it's time to go.
02:14:05.000You know, I remember most of the stuff that I was doing, most of the operations, you know, in the back of mind, you're thinking, boy, I hope this doesn't get fucked up, you know, because if you wait for all the information, you know, before you do something, something bad's going to happen.
02:14:20.000You've got to get off the X at a certain point, and usually that's before you have that full comfort.
02:14:26.000So they teach you very well how to do that, how to do risk versus gain calculations and how to figure out, okay, this is what we're going to have to do.
02:14:33.000But you've got to make a decision at some point.
02:14:35.000The world would like it to be, again, sort of a zero risk.
02:14:38.000That's why we always talk about counterterrorism.
02:14:40.000They say, well, when are we going to get this over with?
02:14:49.000It's going to have to come down to something pretty fucking astronomical to have no more violence, no more crime, no more espionage, no more hate.
02:16:36.000Part of it, I think, the biggest problem now is the speed of information, right?
02:16:40.000So everybody's a fucking journalist on Twitter.
02:16:44.000Everybody's a judge and jury through the speed of information.
02:16:47.000Nobody bothers to check facts anymore.
02:16:50.000Everybody's racing to get ahead of the news cycle, which exists in minutes now instead of hours.
02:16:54.000I mean, remember, it used to be, what, you know, like the 5 o'clock news, the 11 o'clock news?
02:16:58.000All day long, journalists had time to check their facts and their stories and their sources because they just had that one newscast or two newscasts in the evening.
02:17:05.000And now, you know, let's fucking throw it out there and hope that, you know, we don't get it wrong.
02:17:10.000So I think that weighs on anybody who's in politics.
02:17:14.000Maybe it serves a good purpose as well.
02:17:29.000That's a 20 year difference in less than 8 years.
02:17:33.0002009 to 2006, January 2016. Yeah, if we could throw up like a seven-year split on Trump now and see what Trump will look like after seven years in office.
02:17:42.000He's going to look like Jabba the Hutt.
02:18:21.000But he's a smart son of a bitch and he was fortunate in a lot of ways and he governed well and he understood the importance of compromise and negotiation.
02:18:31.000And that was still at a time when you could do that, I think.
02:18:33.000I don't know whether it's still possible.
02:18:35.000I mean look at some of the shit that comes out of the Capitol Hill where – You know, I mean, Scalia is barely dead.
02:18:43.000People are saying, we're not going to listen to anybody who gets proposed to, you know, come in here and replace him.
02:18:47.000And you think, well, you probably could have held off on that statement for a little while.
02:18:51.000Well, Democrats were so excited to get a liberal in there.
02:19:25.000The guy's only three or four years older than me.
02:19:27.000It's got to be a good feeling, too, with that last day.
02:19:30.000I mean, I know there's obviously a lot of sadness and there's a lot of worry about, well, how am I going to be remembered?
02:19:34.000But that last fucking day when you finally get to hand over the keys, get the hell out of there and go have a few pops and not have to worry about waking up in the middle of the night because some disaster is going on.
02:19:45.000So the consequences of all that knowledge that have been weighing on his head, all these pieces that are in play, where are they going to wind up?
02:20:48.000I think there's certain things you do and you don't do, and whether it's him or whether it's any other president, I think there's something to be said for maintaining the dignity of an office.
02:21:13.000What a sign of the times that is, though, seeing him there with that magic wand with a fucking phone.
02:21:18.000Well, did you see him before when he was peering around the corner with his sunglasses pretending to be James Bond?
02:21:22.000You know what, also, I bet he has this iPhone 6 and not the 6 Plus, because they, well, we don't want you to look excessive, Mr. President.
02:26:30.000Well, you remember that point in time, it was a very sad point in time, when all of a sudden you realized that the Trans Am, the Camaro, the Mustang, they all started to look just the same.
02:30:42.000It was little plastic handles that the kids could hold onto as you drove down the road at the highway doing 70 miles an hour after having a couple of martinis at the old club.
02:31:03.000My dad had a Chevy that had the rear-facing wagon seat, and me and my brother would fight over it.
02:31:10.000And we literally would go to the officer's club.
02:31:12.000My dad would have a few drinks, and then he'd pile all the kids back in the Chevy wagon and barrel down the highway as we're all flying back and forth over the seats arguing with each other and fighting about who gets the rear-facing seat.
02:31:23.000And there was not a fucking seat belt to be had.
02:31:25.000Well, you remember those Toyota Land Cruisers that had the seats that faced each other?
02:31:51.000I remember it was an option on a, because I got a Land Rover one time and it was probably, okay, to be fair, it was more than 10 years, it was probably 15 years ago.
02:31:59.000But I remember that was an option to get was the back seats.
02:32:03.000And I thought, at what point am I ever going to use these?
02:32:05.000Yeah, maybe the FJ40, but that was way more than 10 years ago.
02:32:10.000See, the FZJ80 was a classic Land Rover, and now it's like, I think they stopped making that in 97 or 98, and that's a classic one because it has a solid front and rear axle, and those motherfuckers can drive over everything.
02:32:27.000They just, you know, to this day, people refurbish them.
02:32:30.000Land cruisers are a great vehicle, too.
02:32:32.000We used to put those things through all sorts of shit overseas.
02:33:33.000And we got lucky because he was looking to move.
02:33:34.000He was looking to get on the move again.
02:33:36.000I think he probably sensed, in part because he'd had some problems with one of the One of the facilitators that he had, and he was looking actually to replace one of his people that actually dealt with him, sort of his liaison guy between the Pakistanis and Al Qaeda and him.
02:33:52.000And so, you know, if we'd held off or if we hadn't found him and then only had a month to plan, you know, it could have gone completely the other way.
02:34:02.000We could have shown up and it would have been an empty place.
02:34:05.000Because he was actively looking to move to a different location.
02:34:09.000Well it's kind of funny that the way they had to do it was do it in the middle of the night, land helicopters, one of them crashed, break in, and then shoot them that way.
02:34:19.000But really they knew where the house was.
02:34:37.000There were, I don't know, seven or eight plus guards, but the women and children were there.
02:34:42.000And the decision was made, no, we can't do that.
02:34:44.000We can't fire a rocket down there because we don't want to take out all those people.
02:34:48.000That's an indication, you know, again, people are going to say, well, fuck you, you just want to go after the oil, but, you know, trying to do the right thing.
02:34:58.000Designing an insanely complex operation like that.
02:35:01.000Just to save those people that were with him, essentially.
02:37:14.000But it's interesting that they've released these documents at this point in time.
02:37:18.000And it's fascinating to see kind of inside his mind a little bit more and understand to what degree he did or didn't have sort of operational understanding of what al-Qaeda was doing at the time.
02:37:30.000Yeah, so anyway, for those of you that are looking for something to read...
02:37:34.000Zero Dark Thirty, that movie, how accurate was that movie?
02:38:14.000If you showed what actually happened, the audience would kill themselves out of boredom because you'd be watching eight years worth of surveillance and eight years worth of struggling to understand what one credit card receipt meant in Relation to something that was happening over across the other side of the world.
02:38:34.000And then up on the hill in Capitol Hill, they get confused and they don't realize that maybe it's a movie.
02:38:41.000I don't know if you remember that kerfuffle they had after they released it where they called them back and said, well, maybe over the interrogation program, maybe you didn't tell us everything.
02:38:51.000And you think, well, no, they just made a fucking movie.
02:38:53.000And there were people that were upset with Zero Dark Thirty because they thought it put too much importance on interrogation, and there were people that thought it didn't put enough importance, and I'm thinking, it's a fucking movie.
02:39:06.000You're not watching a documentary, but anyway.
02:39:09.000Well, there's a movie that they made, I don't know if you saw it, the Foxcatcher movie that's based on Mark and David Schultz, the wrestlers.
02:39:19.000That movie is just filled with bullshit.
02:39:22.000And it's a real problem for Mark Schultz, who was an Olympic gold medalist, one of the best wrestlers the United States has ever produced.
02:39:33.000His brother got shot by that crazy DuPont fuck, but Mark's alive.
02:39:37.000And they changed all sorts of shit in that movie that doesn't make any sense.
02:39:41.000Historical shit about his career as a wrestler, his career as a UFC fighter.
02:39:46.000They even changed the time where the UFC was invented.
02:39:51.000They made the UFC, they made him watch the UFC like...
02:39:55.000Almost like six or seven years I think before it ever really existed and then on top of it the guy he watched fight was a historical character Big Daddy Goodrich Gary Goodrich was one of the original pioneers of MMA and he in the movie is watching Gary Goodrich fight Paul Herrera when in reality he fought Gary Goodrich in his first UFC fight Also,
02:40:21.000in the movie, Mark Schultz isn't fighting in the UFC in his first fight.
02:40:25.000He's fighting in some small organization and it's like kind of sad and he's fighting a white Russian dude.
02:40:32.000He fought a black guy named Gary Goodrich.
02:40:37.000It's like it's historical fact in the world of mixed martial arts that Mark Schultz was like one of the greatest talents from wrestling to ever compete in MMA. And Gary Goodrich was a real pioneer, a guy who was very dangerous, and Mark took him down at will,
02:40:53.000and it was kind of crazy to watch how good of a wrestler he was.
02:40:57.000Well, in the movie, they bullshitted their way through all that.
02:41:18.000But he went on this rampage about it on Twitter, and then someone compiled a website where they talked about all the things that they got wrong in that movie and all the stuff they made up in that movie to make it More interesting.
02:41:33.000Anytime anybody releases a story, or anybody signs over something, or anybody picks up a book and says, I'm going to make a movie out of this, and that's it.
02:41:44.000It's like saying, how does raw intelligence get out of the field and then suddenly become something that's not?
02:41:48.000Well, it gets into this editing process, and you've got a bunch of people taking a whack at it over at the National Security Council, and eventually, they've got a spin on it.
02:45:35.000They get this joker mouth because they're pulling your face and in pulling your face they do something crazy where they're stretching your mouth.
02:45:45.000They tighten the vagina and they enlarge the mouth.
02:45:49.000Nothing wrong with tightening the vagina.
02:46:12.000I wanted to ask you one question before we get out, because I think we're closing in on the three-hour mark.
02:46:16.000The interrogation school that you were talking about, like, what do they do to you when you're in an interrogation school to try to get you to understand what it's like to break?
02:46:47.000Anyway, the point being is, yes, that enhanced interrogation techniques including sleep deprivation, which is probably, at the end of the day, sleep deprivation, white noise, stress positions...
02:47:02.000An interrogation facility is a very finely controlled, very labor-intensive place.
02:48:18.000And so they remember that in 1902 they stole a pen and now they feel bad about it so they're going to, you know, and so the physiology of it is starting to react.
02:48:28.000And that allows for the operator to go, well, there's something strange about that question.
02:48:32.000They reacted a little bit differently.
02:48:34.000They're breathing, you know, whatever it may be, the sweat.
02:49:25.000Then they go back in for another session.
02:49:27.000They got to remember what they said before.
02:49:28.000Now if they say another lie, now they got to remember those two things.
02:49:30.000And it's pretty soon after three or four interviews, they're trying to remember this string of lies where what you really want to do is you want to try to keep it as close as possible to, you know, whatever the truth may be so that you don't have to spend all your time struggling to remember what was the hell I said last time.
02:49:46.000So like if you lied to someone that you're interrogating, that's what you're saying?
02:49:56.000So anyway, I don't know where I'm going with that other than to say that it's...
02:49:59.000And whether it's military, whether it's my old outfit or whomever, it's an important part of training because, you know, again, you have to understand what's possible now.
02:50:57.000Most of the time, all the information we got, basically, if people took the time to go through DOJ memos and look at the actual information...
02:51:04.000Most of what we did was based on conversing, based on knowing who you're talking to, doing your homework, figuring out how the pieces fit together, and talking to people.
02:51:14.000But those people don't have much incentive to talk sometimes if they know that, well, you can't do shit to them anyway.
02:51:42.000It's like all the other discussions we've been having in terms of...
02:51:46.000You know, people base this on their experiences, and so there's people that you're never going to shift off this position, you're never going to shift off of this other position.
02:51:52.000It was all torture, or it's not, and there's some things that exist between talking to a detainee and what is torture.
02:51:59.000The United States is knowable when we don't torture people.
02:52:01.000Yeah, well, yeah, I want them to think that we do.
02:52:05.000I don't want to, but I want them to not know what's in the kit bag.
02:52:43.000And yeah, okay, it's not supposed to be nice, and it's not pleasant.
02:52:47.000And we can argue, and obviously people do.
02:52:50.000Torture is wrong, and we shouldn't do it, but do I think that there were some things like a sleep deprivation or stress positions or noise?
02:53:25.000You shouldn't be torturing, but at the same time, we shouldn't also be telling the hostiles what we can and can't do.
02:53:30.000Alright, you say you shouldn't be torturing, but what if you have someone who knows that a 9-11 is about to take place and you've got to get information out of them?
02:53:38.000What other ways are there if you have a small window of time?
02:55:00.000Again, it's labor intensive because you've got to keep checking on them, making sure they're awake.
02:55:03.000But you do that in a controlled environment.
02:55:05.000We're not talking about five days of this.
02:55:09.000And again, if people took the time to understand or read, they would realize there were a lot of doctors, psychiatrists involved that were saying, yeah, you can or you can't do this.
02:55:17.000It wasn't, you know, again, I get conflicted because I understand why people are so emotive about it, and I get that.
02:55:30.000You know, you have to look at what you can and can't do, and you have to be very, very critical about that, and you have to be very careful.
02:55:37.000But I guess I keep coming back to the same thing, is we've kind of given up to Ghost.
02:55:40.000You know, from now on, going forward, everybody out there knows what we can and can't do.
02:55:45.000And so whether we were going to do it or not, which we weren't in terms of the torture side of things, they didn't know that.
02:55:51.000And so you could speed the process up of getting them to comply to some degree, because they didn't know what was coming down the pike.
02:55:57.000And you keep them on the back foot, and you keep them guessing.
02:56:00.000And that's your advantage in a situation like that.
02:56:05.000But yeah, again, I keep going back to the same thing.
02:56:33.000It's not supposed to be a pleasant situation.
02:56:35.000And so people say, well, I can't believe you would put somebody in a stress position, or you would make them uncomfortable, or you would keep them awake for 36 hours.
02:57:01.000But to just say, we're taking all these other things out of the kit bag, whether we're ever going to use them or not, and here's all we can do.
02:57:09.000You're pretty much guaranteed that there's a lot of people out there who are walking around in Syria and Iraq for ISIS carrying a field manual in their back pocket who know exactly what we can do and we can't do now.
02:57:20.000But isn't there ways we circumvent that by not doing it on American soil?
02:57:59.000And you could argue that the, depending on how you want to frame it, if you want to say it was all torture, fine, then the torture or the enhanced techniques, whatever, for the most part took place overseas in facilities that, you know, we were running that were temporary or our host countries were running.
02:58:15.000And that's where I would much rather have, we treat people a lot better than some of our allies do, frankly, and particularly a lot of our Middle Eastern allies.
02:59:17.000Did we do a lot of good by removing a lot of these people and some of the key players off the battlefield and out of the operational system within Al-Qaeda and some of their supporting elements?
03:01:06.000You don't hear us talking about catching a lot of people anymore.
03:01:09.000And part of the reason why is because you'd rather just paint that target and blow the fuck out of them than risk your career Picking up somebody and then getting accused of mishandling a detainee or all the crap that can happen because suddenly they've decided a program for capturing somebody and bringing them back to Guantanamo or wherever is not possible.
03:01:33.000So what you've found over the years, recent past, is it's a lot easier to just smoke them than to pick them up.
03:02:01.000Everybody was getting their ass kicked for being involved in an approved program, whether it was rendition or an interrogation program or whatever part of that or periphery.
03:02:16.000People look at the drone program and think, wow, that's really expanded under Obama.
03:02:19.000Well, no shit, because just take him out.
03:03:34.000What if they come up with a way one day to actually...
03:03:37.000I mean, I know that they have something called FMRI, functional magnetic resonance imagery, I think it's called, where they've used it, I believe, in India.
03:03:47.000It was a real problematic case because they convicted someone for murder because they had functional knowledge of the crime.
03:03:57.000I talked to this neuroscientist who was kind of an expert in fMRI, and she said there's a huge problem with that and that would never fly in the United States because functional knowledge of the crime could have been established through her interrogation process,
03:04:14.000through questioning, through asking her about the case.
03:04:18.000She could have functional knowledge of the crime scene.
03:04:20.000So, like, proving it through an fMRI, she's like, it doesn't work.
03:04:25.000So what they're convicting someone on is something that would never fly in America.
03:05:10.000I really appreciate your candor and your openness and exploring some uncomfortable and difficult subjects and giving us some inside information that It's very difficult for people to get any other way.
03:05:22.000Unless they're talking to a guy like you.
03:05:24.000A lot of it is speculation and bullshit and posturing and reading websites that might be completely inaccurate.