Making Sense - Sam Harris - January 17, 2021


#231 — Crossing the Abyss

Topics
Al-Qaeda evolution and extremism
Hosted by
Sam Harris
Mentioned
Donald Trump Chris Fussell Joe Biden Stanley McChrystal Bin Laden Zarqawi Stan Parler Nancy Pelosi Timothy McVeigh Mike Pence Ted Cruz Latinos Antifa Nasser Messi Nixon Venn
#230 — An Insurrection of Lies #232 — Inequality and Revolution

Episode Stats


Length

1 hour and 14 minutes

Words per minute

158.5

Word count

11,772

Sentence count

459

Harmful content

Misogyny

6

sentences flagged

Toxicity

54

sentences flagged

Hate speech

38

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

In the wake of the anti-Trump protest at the Capitol, many have suggested that the lack of police presence would have been much different if it were a Black Lives Matter protest. I m here to clear that up, and to point out that there was no evidence of racism at the scene of the protest, and that any lack of support from the police was not a reflection of white supremacy. This was a pro-Trump, pro-Donald Trump, anti-Antifa riot, and the cops were there to protect the president, not to respond to an Antifa riot. So why did the cops respond the way they did? And why did they not respond differently if it was a white supremacist riot? And what was the difference between what happened at the protest and what would have happened in the case of a black rioting Antifa protest? I try to answer those questions, and suggest that there is no evidence to suggest that racism was a factor in the police response to the situation at all, and no evidence that it was related to race or was actually a problem with white supremacy or white privilege. racism was a symptom of white supremacy, not a problem at all. I also suggest that the fact that there were no white supremacists in the crowd is not evidence of racism, but rather that the rioters were part of a larger problem, and not part of the larger problem of white supremacist ideology, rather than being part of it of the broader problem and not the problem being that we need to deal with or in the first place a white supremacy . The problem is that we are dealing with, not racism, not racism? race is white Supremacy as a symptom not , , not ? but blackness being , and what we we need to address Blackness , right? , as a problem . . . and ... What does that mean, ? What does this mean, and what does it mean how does it mean? What mean, really mean and what do we need who mean in relation to to that are we in this right & (and

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 Welcome to the Making Sense Podcast.
00:00:23.300 This is Sam Harris.
00:00:24.420 Okay, just a brief housekeeping to tie up some loose ends from the last podcast.
00:00:33.340 I got a fair amount of pushback, which to my eye rests on a misunderstanding.
00:00:39.960 I'm slightly embarrassed that I didn't see the grounds for this misunderstanding when
00:00:44.480 I recorded the last podcast, but it really does seem like a misunderstanding, so let me
00:00:49.760 clear this up.
00:00:50.740 And I've gotten a fair amount of grief for my claim that the police response at the
00:00:57.340 Capitol would not have been much different had that been a BLM protest that became a
00:01:04.660 siege.
00:01:06.200 I was pushing back against the claim that the behavior of the cops at the Capitol was a sign
00:01:12.220 of white supremacy, white privilege, you know, the general racializing of the interpretation
00:01:17.960 of the failure to protect the Capitol, which was happening everywhere and, you know, from
00:01:24.080 Biden on down.
00:01:25.840 And I stand by everything I said there, but I didn't recognize that this concept of police
00:01:31.600 response was open to two meanings.
00:01:36.300 And many people took it to mean something that I would call police presence.
00:01:43.340 Rather than the behavior of the cops who were actually there, many people allege that there
00:01:49.900 simply would have been more cops there had this been a BLM protest, and that the fact
00:01:55.000 that there weren't is a sign of racism.
00:01:58.820 Racism because they were assuming that white people would be well-behaved, and they would 0.99
00:02:05.260 have assumed that black people would have gone mad and attacked the Capitol. 0.96
00:02:11.180 That's a very different claim. 0.94
00:02:13.120 It's not one I was responding to in the last podcast.
00:02:15.800 I think a racial interpretation of that assumption is also unfounded, but I don't think the assumption
00:02:22.980 itself is obviously wrong.
00:02:25.080 So let me just clarify that.
00:02:27.260 I think it's quite possible that many people would have assumed that a pro-Trump rally would
00:02:34.720 also be by default pro-police.
00:02:38.340 That would not have been a crazy assumption, given all that has preceded us.
00:02:43.980 So therefore, the idea that maybe they don't need a massive show of force from the cops to
00:02:51.340 prevent an insurrection, because these people are generally pro-cop, maybe that factored into
00:02:58.540 the decision-making around how many cops should be there in the first place.
00:03:02.820 That seems entirely plausible to me.
00:03:05.300 Again, I don't know what's true there, and I don't know that there aren't other more
00:03:10.360 nefarious reasons why there was such a weak police presence there.
00:03:15.120 Again, it could have been something that Trump ordered.
00:03:19.100 We will find out if there's any true conspiracy there, or if it's just negligence, or negligence
00:03:25.700 based on bad assumptions.
00:03:28.040 I do touch upon this topic in today's podcast with my guests.
00:03:31.900 But there's no necessary racist implication from that difference in assumption.
00:03:38.660 And you can see that if you just imagine what the cops would have assumed of an Antifa protest.
00:03:46.200 Had there been the biggest Antifa rally in human history, massing at the Capitol, what would
00:03:52.360 have been the posture of the cops?
00:03:54.440 Well, I would bet, more or less everything, that it would have been every bit as risk-averse
00:04:01.180 as it would be in the case of a BLM protest.
00:04:04.920 Which is to say that the obvious animosity of Antifa to law enforcement would have dictated
00:04:13.000 exactly what people are claiming would have happened in the case of a BLM protest.
00:04:18.540 And this strips away the variable of race almost perfectly.
00:04:22.620 Antifa certainly seems to be an almost entirely white phenomenon.
00:04:28.340 So anyway, that's a counterfactual we just have to imagine.
00:04:32.120 But I think viewing any part of this failure at the Capitol in terms of race is just deeply
00:04:40.020 unhelpful, in addition to very likely mistaken.
00:04:44.600 And this would not change if we found, as we almost certainly would if we went looking,
00:04:50.600 that some of the cops or some of the decision makers are avowed racists and Trump supporters,
00:04:58.780 none of that changes the general picture of what happened here.
00:05:02.540 In the same way that finding a few Antifa goons among the insurrectionists will not change 1.00
00:05:08.940 our basic understanding of what happened there.
00:05:11.880 This was a pro-Trump insurrection, even if you can find some anti-Trump, far-left, BLM-loving people in the crowd. 0.60
00:05:24.380 So I hope that is clear.
00:05:27.720 This is not at all to suggest that we don't have a problem with white supremacy and a larger movement here.
00:05:36.140 We obviously do.
00:05:38.120 And 100% of those people, for all intents and purposes, are part of the MAGA cult that we now need to deal with.
00:05:45.980 So I am not saying that racism isn't a variable, generally speaking.
00:05:51.080 But to view what happened at the Capitol specifically, the level of force that was marshaled and used or not used
00:05:59.280 by the people who were there, this notion that, again, seems to have been endorsed by more or less everyone on the left,
00:06:08.820 from Biden on down, that what we saw at the Capitol was proof positive of white supremacy.
00:06:17.720 The fact that the insurrection wasn't put down better than it was, was a symptom of racism.
00:06:23.420 That there is just no way to look at this where that conclusion seems reasonable, from my point of view.
00:06:31.400 And as I said last time, even if reasonable, I would argue it's the wrong point to be making now.
00:06:37.920 And everything else that is racializing this moment is also the wrong thing to be doing now.
00:06:43.900 The fact that Joe Biden just announced that his COVID relief package would be targeted to non-white people
00:06:53.220 suffering the economic effects of the pandemic.
00:06:56.900 Many of you have probably seen that video.
00:06:59.720 He stepped before the cameras and said that this aid would preferentially go to people of color, Latinos.
00:07:08.080 He threw Asians in there as though Asian Americans were an especially beleaguered bunch.
00:07:12.920 Even though, in the aggregate, they're doing better than anyone. 1.00
00:07:17.200 This was an act of breathtaking political stupidity. 1.00
00:07:21.900 Given the political needs of the moment. 1.00
00:07:25.060 Given the need to figure out how to build a bridge right of center.
00:07:31.840 At a minimum, given the need not to confirm the paranoia of everyone right of center.
00:07:38.580 That there's a tsunami of wokeness now breaking over all of society. 0.94
00:07:43.640 And the future for people who want to get beyond racializing every question in American life 0.99
00:07:50.940 will be one of re-education by pink-haired lesbians. 1.00
00:07:55.660 There is a culture war that needs to be won here. 0.99
00:07:59.020 And racializing everything isn't the way to win it.
00:08:02.220 And I defy anyone to justify a skin color preference in the doling out of COVID aid
00:08:12.300 when the only ethical basis really is economic need.
00:08:19.220 And if you don't think there are white people who suffered the utter destruction of their economic lives 0.57
00:08:24.960 during the pandemic, you're living in some kind of malignant fantasy world.
00:08:29.420 Again, it's the own goals that we should find absolutely unacceptable.
00:08:35.680 And judging from how this went off on social media,
00:08:39.320 this was a Lionel Messi style bicycle kick into the wrong goal.
00:08:45.220 It's just incredible.
00:08:46.760 Why do it?
00:08:48.580 And finally, I want to further contextualize my support for the Twitter ban of Trump,
00:08:54.640 about which I have absolutely no misgivings.
00:08:57.480 There's nothing that has happened in recent days that has given me cause to rethink that.
00:09:03.480 But obviously, the banning on social media has preceded apace.
00:09:07.460 There are many, many accounts that have been purged.
00:09:12.500 And there was the seemingly coordinated dismantling of the Parler app.
00:09:19.340 Parler as a social media, or was a social media platform, favored largely by conservatives,
00:09:26.860 and no doubt some conservative lunatics.
00:09:30.600 Let me just say that all of those further iterations of deplatforming seem far more complicated to me
00:09:38.000 and merit serious debate about the role that social media companies play in our lives
00:09:44.000 and the power of these platforms.
00:09:47.200 And in the case of Parler, it's not just social media companies.
00:09:50.260 Here we have the very infrastructure of the Internet,
00:09:53.440 in particular Amazon's cloud services,
00:09:56.340 deciding to disgorge a whole platform
00:10:00.920 and a business that was probably valued at a billion dollars at that point
00:10:05.800 from the Internet itself.
00:10:07.840 This is a kind of digital exile,
00:10:11.100 which may or may not have been warranted.
00:10:14.380 A surprising number of erstwhile libertarians
00:10:17.000 seem very comfortable with the idea that private corporations
00:10:20.940 should be forced to keep people on their servers
00:10:23.960 so as to not show any political bias
00:10:27.580 and be forced to provide tools for people
00:10:30.000 who are avidly spreading misinformation
00:10:32.800 that is fragmenting our society.
00:10:35.680 This kind of thing has to be argued for.
00:10:38.540 And there's no straightforward move to make from the First Amendment
00:10:41.480 to enforcing the behavior of people who run these businesses.
00:10:48.500 This is just to say that my mind is really not made up on many of the specifics there.
00:10:53.160 I think it's going to be a fascinating and consequential debate to have.
00:10:57.440 But as to whether or not the various digital platforms
00:11:00.160 are justified in trying to contain the damage
00:11:04.100 that Trump may yet attempt to do
00:11:06.240 by essentially regurgitating him and his digital life into the abyss,
00:11:13.020 given what's at stake here
00:11:14.620 and given what a bad actor he has been,
00:11:17.380 that just seems to me to be a very easy call.
00:11:20.520 And it's not made more difficult
00:11:22.040 by the apparent inconsistency
00:11:25.740 of not being able to close all the other accounts
00:11:28.460 that arguably should be closed
00:11:30.980 at the same moment,
00:11:32.840 whether it's the Chinese Communist Party
00:11:34.580 or any other malicious source of misinformation.
00:11:39.540 There's an enormous mess to clean up,
00:11:41.600 but Trump was an all-too-identifiable piece of that.
00:11:45.080 So, in any case, those are my two cents.
00:11:48.280 As I said, there's much more to talk about,
00:11:50.300 generally, about the power of big tech.
00:11:52.980 And I'm sure I'll pull together
00:11:54.960 several conversations on that topic in the future.
00:12:00.020 Okay.
00:12:01.320 Well, today I'm speaking with General Stanley McChrystal
00:12:03.960 and his colleague Chris Fussell,
00:12:07.060 both of whom have been on the podcast before.
00:12:09.860 We spoke last year,
00:12:11.320 just as the pandemic was beginning to get rolling.
00:12:13.920 And what a quaint conversation that was
00:12:16.980 in light of all that's since happened.
00:12:19.660 General McChrystal is a retired U.S. Army four-star general
00:12:22.980 who served more than 34 years in the military.
00:12:26.300 And he was the commander of all American
00:12:28.100 and coalition forces in Afghanistan.
00:12:30.480 That was his last assignment.
00:12:32.920 He's written several books,
00:12:34.700 including a memoir titled My Share of the Task,
00:12:37.680 which was a New York Times bestseller.
00:12:39.720 And he's a senior fellow at Yale University's
00:12:42.020 Jackson Institute for Global Affairs.
00:12:44.720 He's also the founder of the McChrystal Group.
00:12:47.640 And his partner, Chris Fussell, also teaches at Yale.
00:12:51.140 And he and General McChrystal wrote
00:12:52.840 Team of Teams, New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World,
00:12:56.800 which was also a New York Times bestseller.
00:12:59.500 Chris was a commissioned naval officer
00:13:01.300 and he spent 15 years in the Navy SEALs
00:13:03.580 at various points around the globe.
00:13:05.860 And he served as an aide-de-camp to General McChrystal.
00:13:09.540 And Chris is also on the board of directors of the Navy SEAL Foundation.
00:13:13.160 And he's a lifetime member of the Council on Foreign Relations.
00:13:17.200 And both of these guys have a podcast they do together
00:13:19.860 called No Turning Back.
00:13:22.140 And that should be available wherever you get your podcasts.
00:13:25.020 And given the gravity of today's topic,
00:13:29.360 this podcast is yet another episode that is not paywalled.
00:13:33.540 It's a PSA of sorts.
00:13:35.200 But if you want to support the podcast
00:13:37.280 and you want to get full episodes in general,
00:13:40.780 you can do that by subscribing at samharris.org.
00:13:44.200 And as always, if you can't afford it,
00:13:46.340 you can request a free account through the website.
00:13:50.060 And now, without further delay,
00:13:51.600 I bring you General Stanley McChrystal and Chris Fussell.
00:13:55.040 I am here with General Stanley McChrystal and Chris Fussell.
00:14:05.420 Gentlemen, thanks for joining me again.
00:14:07.800 Thanks, Sam.
00:14:08.200 Thanks for having us.
00:14:09.720 We were on the podcast nearly, I guess it's 10 months ago.
00:14:16.600 We were about a month into the pandemic.
00:14:20.160 So this was the beginning of April.
00:14:23.160 And I remember being quite sheepish,
00:14:27.220 even asking you guys about the possibility of civil unrest.
00:14:31.440 I think I framed it as something that we would have a responsibility
00:14:35.140 to at least touch on, given your expertise.
00:14:38.780 But I think I hasten to say something like,
00:14:42.300 obviously, I don't expect this.
00:14:44.600 We don't want to be scaremongering, right?
00:14:47.180 And I look back on that conversation, and I think,
00:14:50.760 oh, how naive I was.
00:14:54.520 It's hard for me to even reclaim that view of the world,
00:14:58.780 given all that's happened in the intervening months.
00:15:02.280 So I don't think we need to focus on it.
00:15:05.720 It just perhaps will be relevant to some part of the conversation
00:15:08.700 to acknowledge how much social unrest
00:15:12.260 and occurred over the summer around the Black Lives Matter protests,
00:15:17.560 many of which devolved into riots,
00:15:19.820 all of the craziness in Seattle and Portland,
00:15:22.760 all of the very weird political responses to that,
00:15:27.460 especially on the left,
00:15:28.780 the calls to defund the police as though that's what we needed at that moment.
00:15:33.520 All of that is just the context in which I want to talk to you about
00:15:36.540 what has now happened in Trumpistan
00:15:39.600 and what happened at the Capitol last week
00:15:42.980 and the prospects that we may be facing
00:15:45.300 some kind of insurgency in our society coming from the right.
00:15:51.720 So I guess let's just start with last week.
00:15:55.840 What were you guys thinking
00:15:57.400 when you saw what was unfolding at the Capitol on the 6th?
00:16:02.820 Yes, Sam, thanks.
00:16:04.040 I'll start by what I was thinking about
00:16:06.580 was an experience from my youth.
00:16:08.640 I grew up most of my school years in Arlington, Virginia,
00:16:12.100 right across the street from the Capitol.
00:16:14.700 And from Stonewall Jackson Elementary School, where I went,
00:16:18.580 a short walk away was an area now called Ballston,
00:16:22.200 which is a built-up shopping center.
00:16:24.280 But back in the mid-1960s,
00:16:26.880 it was also the location of the headquarters
00:16:28.660 of the American Nazi Party.
00:16:30.180 And you could walk to a white frame house
00:16:34.160 that had a porch on the front
00:16:35.720 and you could stand in front of it
00:16:37.940 and you could see a large painted sign
00:16:40.160 that was about 20 feet across that said,
00:16:42.560 white men fight, smash the Black Revolution. 0.86
00:16:46.800 And then periodically, a young man would walk out,
00:16:50.120 you know, early 20s,
00:16:51.660 wearing a brown stormtrooper uniform
00:16:55.180 with a swastika armband.
00:16:57.160 And I remember watching that.
00:17:00.640 And then as what I saw last week,
00:17:02.840 as I saw some of the activities around the Capitol,
00:17:07.200 I thought about,
00:17:08.500 we have a history in the United States
00:17:10.660 of extreme thinking.
00:17:13.880 And you remember in 1965,
00:17:16.060 you could have an American Nazi party,
00:17:17.480 but you certainly would not have seen that in Germany.
00:17:20.040 It was outlawed
00:17:21.020 because they'd had a bad experience with it.
00:17:23.560 And so as I watched what happened around the Capitol,
00:17:26.360 I thought about the danger of very radical thinking
00:17:31.100 and people who become energized
00:17:33.900 and in some ways consumed by very extreme ideas.
00:17:39.580 And so I started to think of,
00:17:41.460 you know, what's happened?
00:17:42.900 Why has it happened?
00:17:45.000 You know, what's going to happen next
00:17:46.780 and what we could do about it?
00:17:49.020 For me, it was a reflection on,
00:17:51.360 you know, experiences in the counterterrorism world
00:17:54.960 dealing with threats like Al-Qaeda, et cetera.
00:17:58.480 And it took me a while post 9-11,
00:18:03.100 being on the battlefield, et cetera,
00:18:04.160 to really dive in and say,
00:18:05.940 this isn't just,
00:18:07.100 this didn't start yesterday.
00:18:08.260 There's a decades long history to Stan's point
00:18:11.000 on to how these movements get to the point
00:18:13.900 where they've turned into something
00:18:15.260 that is extremely violent and dangerous.
00:18:17.840 And you've lost a lot of your other levers
00:18:19.740 by the time it crosses that threshold.
00:18:22.500 And so what I spent time doing then
00:18:26.600 was diving in and studying that history.
00:18:29.520 And what I saw when I was watching on the news,
00:18:32.460 et cetera, like the rest of us,
00:18:33.880 what I was seeing was we are danger close to that edge,
00:18:37.860 at which point the measures and responses
00:18:40.880 are going to reach a threshold
00:18:42.760 that we're going to be very uncomfortable with
00:18:45.240 as a free society.
00:18:46.400 And we have to work really hard
00:18:48.860 over the next six to 12 months
00:18:51.320 to pull it back from that brink.
00:18:54.520 Yeah, I want to talk about the underlying problem
00:18:56.960 of what people believe is true
00:18:59.560 about the nature of the world
00:19:01.260 and how unreachable certain people seem to be
00:19:04.820 at the moment by dialogue.
00:19:07.540 But let's just focus on
00:19:10.080 what actually happened at the Capitol
00:19:11.680 and everything that is still mysterious about that.
00:19:16.220 I mean, I think many people marveled at the fact
00:19:19.000 that there was such an inadequate police presence
00:19:21.640 and they're looking for reasons why that is so.
00:19:24.200 And some are conspiratorial
00:19:27.620 and seemingly fairly sinister.
00:19:29.940 Some are just, can be ascribed to bad assumptions
00:19:34.240 or bad luck.
00:19:36.500 I'm wondering what you think about,
00:19:38.320 let's just take that single variable
00:19:39.880 of why there was such an inadequate staffing
00:19:43.580 and just why there was a basic assumption
00:19:46.840 that more security wasn't required
00:19:50.320 given all that had preceded that day.
00:19:54.220 If you remember in the 9-11 commission report,
00:19:57.600 probably the most memorable line is they say
00:20:00.300 that it was a failure of imagination
00:20:02.460 of intelligence people
00:20:04.720 to imagine that an organization like Al-Qaeda
00:20:07.660 could do a plot, an operation
00:20:11.980 as detailed and as ambitious
00:20:14.120 as a 9-11 assault was.
00:20:16.300 I would say that if we spend a lot of time
00:20:19.040 worrying why there weren't enough Capitol police
00:20:21.780 or enough barricades around the Capitol,
00:20:24.500 we run the risk of missing the forest for the trees.
00:20:27.580 The thing that was difficult
00:20:29.420 for most Americans to imagine
00:20:31.120 is you would assemble thousands of people,
00:20:35.400 many of whom were very radicalized
00:20:37.720 in the nation's Capitol,
00:20:40.140 have the President of the United States
00:20:42.180 address them and invite and encourage them
00:20:45.200 to walk down and confront Congress
00:20:48.860 where it works.
00:20:50.460 I think it was difficult for most of us
00:20:53.400 to imagine that occurring.
00:20:54.720 And I don't think we could possibly imagine
00:20:58.200 that they would then try to break into the Capitol.
00:21:01.040 And so I think we need to,
00:21:04.140 we as a people and a government
00:21:05.500 need to avoid the temptation
00:21:06.900 to immerse in a lot of the details,
00:21:10.080 step back, blur our eyes a bit,
00:21:12.140 and say, now, wait a minute,
00:21:13.540 this is the big problem.
00:21:16.360 The fact that this could even
00:21:18.420 frame up as a potential situation.
00:21:21.100 Yeah, and watching the,
00:21:25.480 Stan and I spoke with us,
00:21:26.700 spoke with us during the day and afterwards,
00:21:29.740 and, you know, trained individuals,
00:21:31.840 trained units are less frightening
00:21:36.020 in many ways than a mob.
00:21:37.800 And that's what we saw.
00:21:38.580 A mob mentality is completely out of control, right?
00:21:41.820 It takes on a life of its own.
00:21:42.960 And that's what we,
00:21:43.840 that's what I witnessed that day,
00:21:46.280 coupled with lack of creative thinking,
00:21:48.140 why would you assume this would happen, et cetera.
00:21:50.060 And so as soon as they breached the front walls
00:21:52.740 and came in mass,
00:21:54.600 then it was,
00:21:56.080 the outcomes were completely unpredictable.
00:21:58.300 There's no way that that Capitol Police Force
00:22:00.860 could have reacted in a way to hold that back.
00:22:03.420 It was determined to get in, into the building.
00:22:05.880 Now, hindsight being 20-20, of course,
00:22:07.900 but we all remember the days
00:22:09.080 where we flew around the country,
00:22:11.780 around the world in aircraft
00:22:13.920 with an easily open and closed cockpit door, right?
00:22:17.660 And that would seem ridiculous in today's environment.
00:22:20.720 So that was a blink moment.
00:22:22.260 Well, we'll never look at those things the same.
00:22:26.220 Yeah, well, so one thing that's been said a lot
00:22:30.000 in response to this question
00:22:31.280 is that this is a sign of racism in our society
00:22:37.060 and white privilege and white supremacy.
00:22:39.740 The full allegation being that
00:22:42.240 had this been a Black Lives Matter protest,
00:22:45.540 there would have been much more
00:22:46.820 of a police presence there.
00:22:49.500 And this is often combined with a distinct claim,
00:22:55.360 which is that,
00:22:57.040 and one I addressed previously on a podcast,
00:22:59.420 that police presence aside,
00:23:01.560 the police would have behaved themselves differently 0.99
00:23:03.940 had this been a black or largely black mob 0.98
00:23:07.800 assailing the Capitol, 0.98
00:23:09.460 which is to say more people would have been killed,
00:23:11.400 more people would have been beaten up
00:23:13.660 and bloodied and certainly arrested at the end of it.
00:23:16.980 And I think that the first assumption
00:23:19.320 may have some truth to it,
00:23:23.100 but I think in both cases,
00:23:26.500 bringing race into this question
00:23:27.980 is profoundly unhelpful
00:23:30.240 and almost certainly misleading.
00:23:32.140 And I just want to just bounce my thinking off of you guys,
00:23:34.500 not to take the conversation far in this direction,
00:23:36.200 but I think this is a truly toxic way of framing
00:23:39.560 what happened at the Capitol
00:23:40.720 and it is making the people still in Trump's base
00:23:46.160 harder to reach
00:23:48.160 because, again, this is basically saying
00:23:51.140 that all of you are in the Ku Klux Klan 0.74
00:23:53.020 who have in any way supported this president.
00:23:56.520 And so on the first point,
00:23:57.840 the question of police presence,
00:23:59.380 the fact that there simply weren't more cops
00:24:01.720 called in advance,
00:24:03.640 I think it's easy to see,
00:24:05.660 and again, there could be many other explanations for this
00:24:08.920 and some of them could be totally nefarious, right?
00:24:10.880 I mean, it could be that Trump decided
00:24:12.280 he wanted to leave the Capitol unprotected.
00:24:14.680 You know, this is the kind of thing
00:24:15.860 people are thinking now,
00:24:16.800 but leaving all of that aside
00:24:18.460 and leaving aside the prospect
00:24:20.560 that we may discover
00:24:21.680 that some of the people in the police force
00:24:23.840 at the Capitol
00:24:24.500 were actually, you know,
00:24:25.680 quite sympathetic to the mob
00:24:27.060 and let them in
00:24:28.040 without, with just a wave and a nod
00:24:29.780 and some video suggests
00:24:31.680 that that was going on.
00:24:33.480 Leaving that aside,
00:24:34.240 just the question of
00:24:35.000 could it have been
00:24:36.020 that there was an assumption
00:24:37.020 on the part of people
00:24:38.340 who were deciding
00:24:39.140 to staff the Capitol
00:24:40.880 that a pro-Trump rally
00:24:43.640 would essentially be,
00:24:45.640 by default,
00:24:46.420 be pro-cop?
00:24:48.460 You know, these are people
00:24:49.160 who have been supporting
00:24:50.920 law enforcement by and large
00:24:52.800 and this can be obviously
00:24:55.200 contrasted with a
00:24:57.060 BLM rally
00:24:58.620 where, you know,
00:25:00.040 much of the animus
00:25:01.640 is explicitly directed
00:25:02.920 against law enforcement.
00:25:04.860 The reason why I would,
00:25:05.660 I think you can strip race 0.98
00:25:06.980 as a variable
00:25:07.620 completely out of that
00:25:09.000 problem is
00:25:10.560 that whatever assumption
00:25:12.840 would be made
00:25:13.540 about a BLM rally
00:25:14.980 would have been made
00:25:16.460 perhaps in triplicate
00:25:18.140 against an Antifa rally
00:25:19.760 and Antifa, you know,
00:25:20.920 is certainly mostly
00:25:21.960 a white organization, right?
00:25:23.680 So it's like the variable here
00:25:25.060 is the attitude
00:25:26.240 toward law enforcement,
00:25:27.580 not the color of people's skin
00:25:28.900 or at least that
00:25:29.520 that would be my claim.
00:25:31.360 But I'm wondering
00:25:31.980 if you think that
00:25:32.700 played a role here.
00:25:35.460 Just a few reactions.
00:25:37.620 One, on the,
00:25:39.500 I mean,
00:25:39.700 I'm not an expert
00:25:41.040 in this space at all,
00:25:42.360 right?
00:25:43.220 But there is
00:25:44.880 an equity discussion
00:25:46.340 that will be had
00:25:46.860 on the backside of this
00:25:47.640 and I've had that
00:25:48.160 like yourself
00:25:49.160 a few times
00:25:49.800 over the last week
00:25:50.660 with different friends.
00:25:52.560 but I've always reacted
00:25:55.200 to it as like
00:25:55.800 there's a conversation
00:25:57.440 to be had there
00:25:58.140 but if two helicopters
00:26:00.520 go down on the battlefield
00:26:01.600 you don't walk
00:26:02.380 into the general
00:26:02.980 and say
00:26:03.520 I don't think
00:26:04.440 they had enough seatbelts
00:26:05.220 on the first helicopter,
00:26:06.120 right?
00:26:06.820 Get,
00:26:07.260 solve the problem
00:26:08.040 that's in front of you
00:26:08.880 and we'll solve
00:26:09.960 the bigger issues
00:26:10.680 behind that
00:26:11.160 on the backside
00:26:12.020 but the,
00:26:13.020 you know,
00:26:13.300 the house is on fire.
00:26:14.600 Let's,
00:26:14.880 let's,
00:26:15.400 let's save
00:26:16.300 the other discussions
00:26:17.180 for further down the road
00:26:19.240 which are
00:26:19.680 important ones to have.
00:26:21.200 I think
00:26:22.120 there's one variable
00:26:23.620 that isn't good
00:26:24.080 including this,
00:26:24.860 these conversations
00:26:25.700 which is
00:26:26.760 the,
00:26:27.580 an exposure bias
00:26:28.920 for,
00:26:29.420 from the Capitol Police,
00:26:30.700 right?
00:26:30.920 I,
00:26:31.980 up until six months ago
00:26:33.080 lived a mile from
00:26:34.120 the,
00:26:35.040 the front of the Capitol
00:26:36.020 building
00:26:36.400 and every
00:26:38.040 other day
00:26:39.440 there's some sort
00:26:40.980 of protests
00:26:41.680 surrounding the Capitol,
00:26:42.700 Supreme Court,
00:26:43.320 et cetera.
00:26:43.880 That's the,
00:26:44.620 the world that those
00:26:45.600 officers live in
00:26:46.460 day after day
00:26:47.260 and if,
00:26:48.840 if that was your exposure
00:26:50.020 and,
00:26:50.760 none of them
00:26:52.060 in your eight years
00:26:52.880 of working in the
00:26:53.500 Capitol Police
00:26:54.180 had ever
00:26:54.940 stepped through
00:26:56.060 even a simple
00:26:57.520 metal barrier.
00:26:58.580 You can understand,
00:26:59.540 I imagine in the
00:27:00.100 planning rooms
00:27:00.740 they're thinking,
00:27:01.600 okay,
00:27:01.800 it's going to be
00:27:02.220 a bigger crowd,
00:27:03.500 here's how we,
00:27:04.120 we respond to those.
00:27:05.800 Not saying it's right
00:27:06.940 but you get normal,
00:27:08.220 routinized into
00:27:09.040 how these
00:27:09.860 crowds react
00:27:11.080 and certainly
00:27:12.340 there was a moment
00:27:13.000 when they all realized
00:27:13.740 they got it
00:27:14.180 completely wrong
00:27:14.980 but I,
00:27:15.740 I would assume
00:27:16.640 there wasn't a
00:27:17.200 calculated discussion
00:27:18.380 in a planning
00:27:19.500 at the rank
00:27:20.720 and file level
00:27:21.480 about this group
00:27:22.940 versus this group.
00:27:25.620 Sam,
00:27:26.260 I think that
00:27:26.800 the bigger question
00:27:28.320 that Chris
00:27:30.200 hinted at there
00:27:30.840 was this is a group
00:27:33.080 that wouldn't be
00:27:33.900 expected to cross
00:27:35.500 a police line,
00:27:36.800 wouldn't be expected
00:27:37.780 to get violent
00:27:38.800 against people
00:27:39.980 that they've got
00:27:41.400 a lot of connections
00:27:42.220 to and wouldn't be
00:27:43.840 expected to storm
00:27:44.900 the Capitol
00:27:45.420 and yet they did.
00:27:47.840 A largely white 0.83
00:27:48.960 crowd of people
00:27:50.300 that the policemen
00:27:51.340 who've been
00:27:51.800 interviewed
00:27:52.940 have described
00:27:53.680 as true believers.
00:27:55.200 One used the term
00:27:56.060 rabid dog,
00:27:57.740 people who have 0.99
00:27:58.320 become so
00:27:59.500 fervent
00:28:00.820 in their outrage
00:28:02.460 and their sense
00:28:03.500 of
00:28:04.180 loss
00:28:05.880 that they have
00:28:07.340 got to take
00:28:08.100 an action
00:28:08.740 that theoretically
00:28:09.620 would be very
00:28:10.520 counter to a
00:28:11.560 law and order
00:28:12.180 attitude
00:28:13.360 in their part
00:28:14.500 of society.
00:28:15.320 So to me,
00:28:16.800 what is causing
00:28:18.000 this part
00:28:18.980 of largely
00:28:20.080 white population
00:28:21.040 to get to this
00:28:22.900 point and to take
00:28:23.860 these kinds of actions?
00:28:25.860 Yeah, I want to get
00:28:26.560 into the ideas here
00:28:28.160 but I just have
00:28:29.720 another question
00:28:31.520 about what was
00:28:33.060 happening at the
00:28:34.060 Capitol because I
00:28:35.180 think, first of all,
00:28:36.620 the video is so
00:28:37.660 varied but in
00:28:39.300 aggregate it is
00:28:40.880 kind of mystifying
00:28:41.840 and I'm left with
00:28:43.220 the feeling
00:28:44.420 that it is
00:28:45.040 something close
00:28:45.940 to a miracle
00:28:46.580 that more people
00:28:47.480 weren't killed.
00:28:48.880 What's surprising
00:28:49.440 to me is not
00:28:50.040 that five people
00:28:50.700 died but that
00:28:51.720 50 or more
00:28:53.020 didn't die
00:28:53.980 because, I guess
00:28:55.680 I just want to ask
00:28:56.160 you about the
00:28:56.520 rules of engagement
00:28:57.440 in a situation
00:28:58.340 like that.
00:28:59.280 Granted, the crowd
00:29:01.180 was so varied
00:29:02.060 that I could imagine
00:29:02.940 that the experience
00:29:04.040 of some cops
00:29:05.420 in various parts
00:29:06.700 of this siege
00:29:08.180 was quite unlike
00:29:09.720 the experience
00:29:10.240 of other cops.
00:29:10.940 I mean, they're
00:29:11.380 being confronted
00:29:12.020 with a weird
00:29:12.680 group of people
00:29:13.420 who are not
00:29:14.840 really looking
00:29:15.460 like combatants.
00:29:16.460 I mean, they're
00:29:16.780 dressed in weird
00:29:17.820 costumes, some
00:29:18.640 of them are
00:29:19.020 surprisingly old.
00:29:20.660 You know, you
00:29:21.560 have some footage
00:29:22.680 of a cop taking
00:29:23.420 selfies with one
00:29:24.740 group and that is
00:29:25.940 quite unlike imagery
00:29:28.220 of cops being
00:29:29.540 beaten over the
00:29:30.560 head with American 0.76
00:29:32.080 flags and being 0.96
00:29:33.040 crushed in doorways
00:29:34.160 and just kind of
00:29:35.320 the surging violence
00:29:36.620 that we see in
00:29:37.260 other videos.
00:29:37.760 But I guess my
00:29:38.940 question was,
00:29:40.620 once the Capitol
00:29:41.680 was breached,
00:29:42.960 once people were
00:29:44.420 breaking down doors
00:29:46.180 and climbing through
00:29:47.740 windows and the
00:29:49.760 cops were the only
00:29:50.580 thing standing
00:29:51.400 between them and
00:29:53.040 our nation's
00:29:55.680 leaders, and you
00:29:57.620 have some people
00:29:58.980 calling for the
00:30:00.100 deaths of Mike 0.87
00:30:01.920 Pence and Nancy
00:30:02.860 Pelosi, I'm just
00:30:04.560 amazed that there
00:30:06.020 weren't scenes where
00:30:06.980 every single person
00:30:08.140 who came through a
00:30:08.960 door got shot.
00:30:10.320 From the cop's
00:30:11.260 point of view, I
00:30:12.460 mean, I can see
00:30:13.200 that there's an
00:30:14.160 element of self
00:30:14.740 preservation here
00:30:15.480 because if you
00:30:15.900 start shooting 0.70
00:30:16.360 people and you 0.99
00:30:17.540 don't have enough
00:30:18.000 ammunition to 0.51
00:30:18.680 shoot everybody, 0.99
00:30:19.400 well, then 1.00
00:30:19.640 eventually you're 1.00
00:30:20.280 going to be killed 1.00
00:30:20.940 by a mob.
00:30:22.380 But to not have
00:30:23.880 shot people at
00:30:25.240 that point, I
00:30:25.980 mean, at some
00:30:26.740 point in the
00:30:27.300 inner sanctum of
00:30:28.060 that building, to
00:30:28.740 not have really
00:30:29.360 just said this is
00:30:30.600 actually war, is
00:30:33.340 to have placed the
00:30:35.840 safety of our
00:30:37.380 congressmen and
00:30:38.560 women in the 0.77
00:30:39.760 hands of a mob
00:30:40.740 that had just
00:30:41.400 shown a
00:30:41.760 willingness to
00:30:42.760 overwhelm police
00:30:44.220 officers and risk
00:30:45.080 their lives in the
00:30:45.780 process, that just
00:30:47.100 seems totally
00:30:47.560 untenable to me.
00:30:48.580 So I guess I'm
00:30:49.200 just, you know, it's
00:30:49.760 a very long way of
00:30:50.620 asking, are you
00:30:51.960 surprised from a
00:30:53.820 just a use of
00:30:55.180 force perspective
00:30:56.020 that more people
00:30:57.140 weren't killed by
00:30:58.460 cops?
00:30:59.840 I'm really not,
00:31:01.180 Sam, and it's
00:31:02.880 because, you
00:31:04.720 know, if I
00:31:04.940 learned anything
00:31:05.500 from my years
00:31:06.980 in the SEAL
00:31:07.320 teams, the
00:31:08.340 exposure that
00:31:09.740 even an
00:31:10.900 extremely well
00:31:11.840 trained individual
00:31:13.360 needs to that
00:31:14.920 level of violence
00:31:15.960 and uncertainty, to
00:31:17.300 be able to think
00:31:17.980 really clearly in
00:31:19.080 the moment is, it's
00:31:20.960 difficult, right?
00:31:22.520 And I think the
00:31:24.000 situation probably
00:31:24.860 changed on them so
00:31:26.060 quickly that they
00:31:28.600 were overwhelmed,
00:31:29.860 surrounded, and
00:31:30.720 from what I've
00:31:31.620 heard some of the
00:31:32.040 interviews after the
00:31:33.000 fact, made, several
00:31:34.680 made the right
00:31:35.160 decision, realizing
00:31:35.820 if I draw my
00:31:36.500 weapon right now, I 1.00
00:31:37.480 will shoot eight 1.00
00:31:38.780 people, and then 1.00
00:31:39.680 I'll lose my
00:31:40.140 firearm, I will 0.83
00:31:40.960 certainly die, and 0.99
00:31:41.740 then they'll be 0.99
00:31:42.140 armed, and they'll
00:31:42.620 have my other two
00:31:43.460 magazines, and now
00:31:45.460 I've armed the
00:31:46.380 masses.
00:31:47.360 So I think the
00:31:48.620 clearest heads were
00:31:49.280 trying to de-escalate,
00:31:50.680 which is extremely
00:31:51.300 difficult to do in a
00:31:52.980 mob.
00:31:54.060 And we run the
00:31:55.400 risk of sort of a
00:31:56.880 Hollywood image of
00:31:57.760 what it looks like,
00:31:58.600 you know, the
00:31:59.300 barrel-chested guy 0.73
00:32:00.920 with a gun who can
00:32:01.840 take on the big
00:32:02.500 crowd, but if they
00:32:05.480 hadn't been exposed
00:32:06.240 to that before, and
00:32:07.560 what happens to, and
00:32:08.640 there's countless
00:32:09.640 studies out there
00:32:10.380 about this, an
00:32:11.660 individual's white
00:32:12.680 space shrinks down to
00:32:14.200 survival in the
00:32:15.100 moment.
00:32:16.400 Now, compared to the
00:32:17.820 forces that Stan led,
00:32:19.840 I was part of, there
00:32:21.760 were operators that
00:32:22.540 had been in violent
00:32:23.540 situations hundreds of
00:32:24.980 times.
00:32:25.580 You know, I knew an
00:32:26.540 operator who pulled a
00:32:27.800 pin on a grenade in
00:32:28.680 the middle of a gun
00:32:29.520 fight, realized there
00:32:30.880 was a child in the
00:32:31.580 room, repinned the
00:32:33.220 grenade while getting
00:32:34.600 shot at.
00:32:35.340 Like, that's super
00:32:36.940 human mental behavior,
00:32:38.760 right?
00:32:39.000 And we assume and
00:32:40.500 expect that of a D.C.
00:32:41.740 police officer who's
00:32:43.300 suddenly surrounded by
00:32:44.220 400 people who's,
00:32:46.060 they're trying to crush
00:32:46.900 him to death, right?
00:32:47.680 So I didn't see
00:32:49.100 anything in there that
00:32:49.920 I thought was completely
00:32:51.140 irrational behavior.
00:32:52.520 There will be, I think,
00:32:53.740 unfortunately, probably
00:32:54.560 some sympathetic
00:32:55.280 findings that people
00:32:56.900 were more on the side
00:32:58.740 of the protesters than
00:32:59.680 they, than they, than
00:33:00.880 on the side of the
00:33:01.560 members of Congress,
00:33:02.640 which will be terrible.
00:33:03.880 But to the person, I
00:33:05.340 understood the responses
00:33:06.920 that I was seeing for
00:33:07.660 the most part.
00:33:09.040 Yeah, Sam, I would add
00:33:09.980 there, I think Chris
00:33:11.000 nailed it.
00:33:12.100 I believe that had the
00:33:13.600 Capitol Police been
00:33:15.240 told to expect
00:33:16.460 violence, had they been
00:33:18.140 depicted as the 300
00:33:19.580 Spartans holding the line
00:33:21.020 against thousands of
00:33:22.220 Persians, that they 1.00
00:33:23.420 would have been much
00:33:24.100 more mentally focused
00:33:25.900 on responding probably
00:33:27.960 with lethal force.
00:33:29.500 But as Chris described,
00:33:30.740 they didn't expect this
00:33:32.120 crowd to do that kind
00:33:34.400 of activity at the
00:33:35.620 Capitol.
00:33:36.140 And so I think as it
00:33:36.980 came, and then they
00:33:38.000 were largely atomized,
00:33:40.100 you know, in many cases
00:33:41.060 police were in very
00:33:42.020 small groups, and it
00:33:43.420 was more difficult to
00:33:44.440 feel like you were part
00:33:45.900 of a cohesive
00:33:46.460 organization that could
00:33:48.060 effectively truly resist.
00:33:50.880 Yeah, so let's talk
00:33:52.440 about some of the
00:33:53.420 underlying causes of
00:33:54.940 this, which really, to
00:33:56.580 my mind, rests on this
00:33:58.520 seething cauldron of
00:34:01.160 ideas, most of which
00:34:03.780 are almost certainly
00:34:05.100 false and should be
00:34:06.420 easily judged false, and
00:34:07.840 yet we're dealing with
00:34:09.440 people who seem to have
00:34:11.120 kicked themselves loose
00:34:12.680 of the earth and are
00:34:14.720 now apparently unreachable
00:34:16.840 by argument.
00:34:17.580 I mean, we have a
00:34:18.160 personality cult around
00:34:20.180 Trump that seems to be
00:34:22.160 wrapped in uncountable
00:34:24.360 layers of conspiracy
00:34:25.820 theories and lies.
00:34:28.200 We have QAnon, which
00:34:30.460 is, you know, the kind
00:34:31.780 of crazy crystalline core
00:34:33.460 of this movement, and
00:34:35.620 you know, that has points
00:34:37.160 of contact with a much
00:34:38.520 older phenomenon of white
00:34:40.000 nationalism and Christian
00:34:41.540 identity, and we have a
00:34:43.540 kind of quasi-religious
00:34:45.520 commitment to the idea
00:34:48.260 that, you know, in the
00:34:50.300 proximate case, the election
00:34:52.280 of Joe Biden is a total
00:34:53.760 fraud, right?
00:34:54.640 We have this election
00:34:55.420 fraud fraud being
00:34:57.360 perpetrated by the
00:34:58.740 president and by his
00:35:00.080 enablers and by some
00:35:01.840 prominent people in
00:35:02.680 Congress, and so we have
00:35:04.160 people who are absolutely
00:35:05.440 sure that their country
00:35:07.460 has been stolen from them,
00:35:09.000 and that this is all now
00:35:11.820 just American history has
00:35:13.120 become a dangerous farce,
00:35:15.500 and there's no, there's no
00:35:17.780 institution that can be
00:35:18.940 trusted, right, except for
00:35:20.320 the personality of Trump
00:35:23.340 on some level, and then
00:35:25.180 just this tissue of
00:35:26.640 conspiracy theories that
00:35:28.060 spread over social media,
00:35:30.080 and now which, you know,
00:35:31.060 every effort to contain
00:35:32.580 this misinformation is seen
00:35:35.340 as, you know, yet another
00:35:37.340 sinister sign of global
00:35:40.080 control, right, by our
00:35:43.060 overlords in Silicon Valley, 0.99
00:35:44.740 or by a cult of crazy 0.99
00:35:47.180 liberal cannibals who 1.00
00:35:48.980 are molesting children. 0.99
00:35:50.920 Really, the sky's the
00:35:51.900 limit in terms of what
00:35:52.760 you can believe,
00:35:53.620 apparently.
00:35:54.920 So, I want to talk
00:35:56.920 about this general
00:35:57.640 phenomenon and what you
00:35:58.620 think we can do about it,
00:35:59.500 but I'm especially
00:36:00.460 concerned about some
00:36:02.580 reports we hear that
00:36:03.900 there are, for instance,
00:36:06.620 QAnon sympathizers, or,
00:36:09.060 you know, true blue
00:36:09.920 cultists in our nation's
00:36:12.440 military and in law
00:36:14.100 enforcement.
00:36:14.700 I mean, like, the ideas
00:36:16.000 are, you know, the call is
00:36:18.180 potentially coming from
00:36:19.340 within the House at
00:36:21.380 certain of these moments.
00:36:22.560 What do you think about
00:36:23.780 this, and how do we begin
00:36:26.660 to talk our way out of
00:36:28.420 this?
00:36:29.620 Great.
00:36:31.080 Chris and I had a
00:36:31.940 conversation before the
00:36:33.600 podcast, and one of the
00:36:36.320 things that he pointed out
00:36:37.840 that I thought was a great
00:36:38.900 analogy was, this isn't a
00:36:40.480 brain aneurysm.
00:36:41.460 This isn't a condition that
00:36:43.060 just suddenly appeared in
00:36:44.460 U.S. society.
00:36:46.080 In reality, this is a
00:36:48.000 lifestyle health problem
00:36:49.900 that we've had over time
00:36:51.500 that began decades ago.
00:36:54.280 And as we talked, there's
00:36:56.040 a history of periods of
00:36:57.680 extreme feminism in the 1.00
00:36:59.180 United States, such as the
00:37:00.900 rise of the Ku Klux Klan 0.83
00:37:02.080 in the 1920s, which a lot of
00:37:03.700 people don't realize.
00:37:05.680 But I would say that the
00:37:07.360 hardest part of this really
00:37:08.460 probably goes back to the
00:37:09.640 1950s.
00:37:11.120 We came out of the Second
00:37:12.120 World War, and we were in
00:37:13.320 the early stages of the Cold
00:37:14.560 War, and suddenly white men, 0.92
00:37:17.320 which were the predominant
00:37:18.400 demographic there at the
00:37:19.780 Capitol, white men started 0.97
00:37:21.460 losing ground.
00:37:22.580 They started losing their
00:37:23.660 privilege position.
00:37:25.920 And what that meant was they
00:37:27.300 lost some of it to the equal
00:37:29.260 rights movement for gender, for
00:37:31.160 women. 0.81
00:37:31.900 They lost some of it to the
00:37:33.900 civil rights movement.
00:37:34.700 They lost some of it to the
00:37:36.800 globalization of the economy.
00:37:38.360 So the relatively and maybe
00:37:40.420 undeserved privileged position
00:37:42.020 that a white worker had for
00:37:43.760 generations was suddenly under
00:37:45.800 threat.
00:37:46.160 And that caused great
00:37:47.020 frustration.
00:37:48.360 That caused a sense of loss.
00:37:50.740 And we've seen that for several
00:37:52.400 decades now.
00:37:53.440 It was also matched by fear.
00:37:56.060 Fear that they would be
00:37:57.860 displaced in society, in fact, be in
00:38:00.380 a position of the oppressed, vice 0.60
00:38:02.040 the oppressor, you know, such
00:38:04.540 as they had seen minorities
00:38:05.740 before.
00:38:07.000 And so when you put together
00:38:08.340 frustration and fear, you get
00:38:10.640 the combination of desperation, or
00:38:12.700 you get the output of
00:38:13.580 desperation.
00:38:15.020 And so suddenly they become
00:38:16.640 fertile ground for accepting
00:38:18.480 things that they want to
00:38:20.680 believe.
00:38:21.200 They want to believe that all of
00:38:23.380 this is the result of a
00:38:24.740 conspiracy.
00:38:25.800 They want to believe that there
00:38:28.380 are evil people doing the
00:38:30.360 business to them.
00:38:31.060 And they want to believe that
00:38:32.240 there are relatively simple
00:38:33.800 fixes to it, like a
00:38:35.860 demagogic leader who comes
00:38:38.340 and is able to say, I will give
00:38:40.840 you the solution to your
00:38:41.820 problem.
00:38:42.280 We'll build a wall.
00:38:43.040 We'll do various things.
00:38:44.680 And so what we've seen now, I
00:38:46.760 think, is a fairly evolved
00:38:48.820 radicalization of part of our
00:38:51.280 population.
00:38:51.940 And it's accelerated by things
00:38:54.080 like social media, the ability
00:38:55.840 to communicate so quickly, and
00:38:57.780 the ability to limit what you
00:39:00.280 hear of information sources to
00:39:02.380 those which you already agree
00:39:03.680 with.
00:39:04.040 And as you become more
00:39:05.300 radicalized, what we see is
00:39:06.900 you become more and more of a
00:39:11.000 tendency to listen to those
00:39:12.240 things, which makes you, it's a
00:39:13.940 self-reinforcing loop.
00:39:15.800 So I think what we've got now is a
00:39:17.540 significant part of our society
00:39:19.360 that believes what they believe,
00:39:21.620 and they believe it fervently.
00:39:23.020 And they believe it to the point
00:39:24.800 where they are willing to do
00:39:26.560 violence.
00:39:27.120 If we go back to the Turner
00:39:29.000 Diaries from the 1970s, which
00:39:31.480 Timothy McVeigh had a copy with
00:39:33.080 him when he, in Oklahoma City,
00:39:35.060 what we see is it's not new, but
00:39:38.060 it's been evolving in American
00:39:39.360 society.
00:39:39.960 And I think we've now got a much
00:39:41.700 worse physical condition in our
00:39:44.080 society than we have yet
00:39:46.080 admitted.
00:39:47.440 Sam, I'll just build on that by
00:39:49.240 analogizing to our, as our
00:39:53.180 understanding of Al-Qaeda deepened
00:39:55.040 and other extremist movements, we
00:39:57.240 started to look at it through sort
00:39:59.400 of a Venn diagram.
00:40:01.200 Imagine, you know, three circles on
00:40:02.900 a page.
00:40:04.100 The biggest circle, if they're
00:40:05.880 moving, say, left or right, the
00:40:07.320 biggest circle being those that
00:40:09.220 sort of can be broadly
00:40:11.240 empathetic.
00:40:11.920 I don't agree with their actions, 0.99
00:40:13.360 but I get it.
00:40:13.960 I understand.
00:40:14.820 I know why they're angry.
00:40:16.180 The middle circle being those that
00:40:17.860 are willing to donate to the
00:40:20.180 cause, somehow support it.
00:40:21.960 And oftentimes through, you know, a 0.50
00:40:23.940 third cutout charity, et cetera, but
00:40:25.640 they kind of know where it'll end
00:40:27.780 up.
00:40:28.320 And then for the final circle being
00:40:30.480 those that are willing to take
00:40:31.640 action.
00:40:32.320 And it goes, you know, big, medium,
00:40:34.620 very small.
00:40:36.180 And I would, for most of the fight
00:40:38.080 against Al-Qaeda and others, the
00:40:39.900 overlap between those three circles
00:40:41.520 was very much on the fringe, right?
00:40:43.080 Just a small overlap between broad
00:40:44.820 empathy and support.
00:40:47.040 And then very few of those
00:40:48.380 supporters actually willing to take
00:40:49.700 action.
00:40:50.980 What is scary now, and I think
00:40:52.900 social media has a huge negative
00:40:55.960 role in this, and they need to come
00:40:57.900 to account for that and talk about
00:41:01.260 how they're going to change and work
00:41:03.280 on the algorithms that drive those
00:41:04.720 circles together.
00:41:06.320 And the scene on the Capitol was a
00:41:08.480 physical manifestation of those three
00:41:11.040 circles overlapping.
00:41:12.760 You have the extremist action arm in
00:41:16.060 the mix with, you know, an elder
00:41:18.620 couple that drove from the middle of
00:41:20.560 the country because they thought they
00:41:22.020 were being told this was an important
00:41:24.000 action for them to take as good
00:41:25.160 Americans.
00:41:26.100 And that's a frightening place to be.
00:41:27.580 When those three overlap, you have a
00:41:29.440 much deeper problem on your hands than
00:41:31.060 you thought you did.
00:41:32.800 So what do you think we should do now?
00:41:36.060 I guess let's, before we jump into
00:41:38.280 that, let's talk about the challenge, the
00:41:40.620 immediate challenge that's before us, which
00:41:42.420 is securing the inauguration and, you
00:41:45.600 know, finally accomplishing a peaceful
00:41:47.660 or semi-peaceful transfer of power.
00:41:50.780 What are your expectations for the next
00:41:52.860 few days?
00:41:54.220 We're recording this on the Friday before
00:41:56.800 the inauguration.
00:41:58.160 We will release this almost certainly a
00:42:01.540 day or two before the inauguration, so
00:42:03.640 many people will be hearing us before the
00:42:07.160 final shoe has dropped and just simply
00:42:10.520 hoping that the inauguration is brought
00:42:14.560 off without anything terrible happening.
00:42:17.800 What are you guys thinking about and
00:42:20.100 expecting at this point?
00:42:22.500 Yeah, Sam, from experience, I would tell
00:42:24.120 you we need to lock it down.
00:42:26.580 We need to prevent violence and we need
00:42:28.780 to make it obvious to everybody that
00:42:30.700 there is not an opportunity for violence
00:42:32.880 and those who try to do it will be dealt
00:42:34.560 with, maybe with deadly force immediately.
00:42:37.980 We have to do that because my experience
00:42:39.960 back from Afghanistan, interestingly, taught
00:42:42.580 us that when there is violence in an
00:42:44.880 area, whether coalition forces caused it
00:42:48.680 or whether Taliban forces caused it, it
00:42:51.480 created more violence after it.
00:42:53.620 It created an atmosphere where it just
00:42:56.560 became easier for people to be violent.
00:42:59.880 And so in the near term, what we've got to
00:43:02.000 do is absolutely lock it down.
00:43:03.900 We've got to go after the perpetrators from
00:43:05.660 the last event.
00:43:06.460 We've got to make it clear.
00:43:07.540 Now, that's not a long-term solution.
00:43:10.540 That doesn't solve the problem of
00:43:12.220 radicalization.
00:43:14.140 But what you can't do is let the idea that
00:43:17.920 this is a, you know, a riot after a soccer
00:43:21.120 match that can go on with junk patrons doing
00:43:23.520 it.
00:43:23.960 You just can't let that keep going.
00:43:26.420 So what do you do with the unhappy
00:43:29.640 juxtaposition between our current security
00:43:33.460 concerns and the, again, it has a kind of a
00:43:37.840 quasi-religious status in our society, the
00:43:40.120 primacy of the Second Amendment such that in
00:43:42.960 many places, I'm not sure where D.C.
00:43:45.520 falls here.
00:43:46.020 I would imagine the laws are stricter.
00:43:47.500 But as you know, there are threats or at
00:43:50.820 least concerns around, you know, all 50 state
00:43:54.120 capitals as well in the coming days.
00:43:57.000 Many of these are states where, you know, open
00:43:59.880 carry is legal.
00:44:01.140 I mean, it's legal to walk down the sidewalk
00:44:03.600 with your AR-15, you know, proudly displayed.
00:44:07.220 The dysfunction of this seems fairly unignorable
00:44:11.780 given our current situation.
00:44:14.520 How do you view the gun rights issue and, you
00:44:18.800 know, gun safety issue in the current climate?
00:44:23.000 Well, to what we were talking about earlier,
00:44:25.760 there's a, we want to prevent the point of
00:44:29.660 no return here, right?
00:44:30.800 And I say that from experience.
00:44:32.660 It's the reason that a lot of military leaders
00:44:35.060 that I've known and respect when they go into
00:44:36.680 senior positions as civilians are the doves 0.60
00:44:41.440 because they know, look, at a certain point,
00:44:43.840 this is going to get out of control.
00:44:45.460 And if you send in those that are designed to
00:44:49.140 enact violence, it's going to get violent.
00:44:51.240 And so let's expend all means before we get there.
00:44:53.900 I don't think we're at that point yet,
00:44:55.440 but we are dangerously close.
00:44:58.520 And so to Stan's point, I think the immediate action
00:45:00.820 is to make it obvious and uncomfortable
00:45:04.180 for those that would want to show up armed.
00:45:06.700 Obviously, you can't do that in Washington, D.C.,
00:45:09.400 but in other states, if they feel that threat,
00:45:11.660 they have to make it a physical presence
00:45:14.000 obvious enough immediately to say,
00:45:17.000 this is going to be bad.
00:45:18.480 If you try to go down that road, it's going to be bad.
00:45:22.320 But that's only one of multiple levers
00:45:25.540 that have to be pulled.
00:45:26.840 I think the move that the big social media platforms,
00:45:30.320 AWS, have made to push folks off of those platforms 0.99
00:45:35.060 is the right one.
00:45:36.240 I think they have to start diving into their algorithms,
00:45:39.300 as I mentioned earlier,
00:45:40.340 to really stop aiding the coupling of these networks.
00:45:44.500 And in some ways, that is a digital manifestation
00:45:50.100 of that, make it physically difficult, right?
00:45:52.920 One of the things we had in combat zones
00:45:56.420 like Iraq and Afghanistan,
00:45:57.800 we referred to as T-walls.
00:45:59.260 You may recognize them from pictures of battlefields
00:46:02.800 and combat zones in urban areas.
00:46:05.540 And it's just, imagine a big concrete slab
00:46:08.500 that looks like an upside down T.
00:46:10.100 So we call them T-walls.
00:46:11.660 They're about six feet wide, 15 feet high.
00:46:14.500 And if there were two parts of the neighborhood
00:46:15.880 that were just going to kill each other, 0.51
00:46:17.280 no matter what, all rationality had left the scene,
00:46:21.500 you just ran a T-wall down the middle.
00:46:22.960 And you said, now it's physically difficult
00:46:25.180 for you two sides of the city to interact with each other.
00:46:28.200 That's not respectful of your civil rights.
00:46:30.420 That's not respectful of your freedom of maneuver.
00:46:33.100 That is simply there to prevent you from killing each other
00:46:36.080 because we think you're completely irrational at this point.
00:46:38.520 And we have to do that in the cyberspace now.
00:46:41.020 Separate these groups out,
00:46:42.080 make it really hard for them to connect and grow.
00:46:44.500 That will push the smarter, more sophisticated ones
00:46:47.420 into deeper encrypted platforms, et cetera,
00:46:50.140 as we're already seeing.
00:46:51.380 But that's a much harder task
00:46:53.340 than following someone on Twitter
00:46:55.580 or in a larger sort of public forum.
00:46:58.560 And so that is one step of many
00:47:00.440 that have to take place in the cyber world.
00:47:02.780 We have to do that in the physical world as well.
00:47:05.280 And the next 15 days, let's say, is critical to that.
00:47:09.320 Tamp it down aggressively, locally, nationally, et cetera.
00:47:13.320 Because if we tip that next wire
00:47:15.840 and we see suicide bombers, et cetera,
00:47:20.780 the escalation of things we saw in the battlefield
00:47:23.320 that we thought were unlikely,
00:47:25.580 then the levers you have to pull
00:47:28.000 get even more draconian.
00:47:29.920 And we don't want to see that.
00:47:30.740 The problem I'm perceiving here, though,
00:47:34.900 is that we have a kind of positive feedback loop,
00:47:37.800 otherwise known as a self-fulfilling prophecy,
00:47:41.660 which you could see in miniature
00:47:44.340 with something like the Branch Davidians
00:47:47.300 and the siege at Waco.
00:47:49.040 So you have a group of people
00:47:50.300 who are paranoid that the government
00:47:53.040 will one day come in and subjugate them
00:47:55.700 and, in particular, seize their guns.
00:47:59.840 And so they begin buying guns and ammo with abandon
00:48:03.200 so as to prepare for that eventuality.
00:48:06.340 And their very preparations put them
00:48:09.020 on the radar of the ATF and the FBI.
00:48:12.480 And so the feds do come knocking
00:48:15.200 out of concern that we have a crazy, radicalized cult
00:48:18.820 and a compound filled with children
00:48:21.080 arming itself.
00:48:23.120 And that very intrusion is viewed in,
00:48:28.720 is no surprise, in the most sinister way
00:48:30.800 as a perfect confirmation of prophecy.
00:48:33.900 And it's just, then it's spiraled out of control from there.
00:48:38.100 And so everything you're proving
00:48:40.060 that we have begun to do,
00:48:42.560 you know, kicking people off of social media
00:48:44.380 and trying to make it more difficult
00:48:47.000 for those platforms to be a medium of radicalization,
00:48:52.080 that is being viewed as not only an expression
00:48:56.540 of hostility to their cherished beliefs,
00:48:59.420 which it is,
00:49:00.460 but precisely the kind of Orwellian overreach
00:49:05.000 that their paranoia is the antidote for.
00:49:08.580 It's a confirmation of a worldview that we're seeing.
00:49:11.680 And it's so hard for people to parse this moment
00:49:15.260 that people who are miles away from this ideology,
00:49:21.200 but who just have, you know,
00:49:22.860 kind of basic, you know, libertarian attachments, right?
00:49:26.080 You know, Silicon Valley billionaires are worried
00:49:28.700 about the fact that Trump was kicked off Twitter,
00:49:31.620 setting a bad precedent for free speech, right?
00:49:33.880 That our free speech, you know,
00:49:36.080 the First Amendment has essentially been privatized,
00:49:38.500 given just the overwhelming importance
00:49:40.740 of having a digital town square where you can speak.
00:49:44.420 And if you start getting kicked off all the platforms,
00:49:47.100 what does it even mean to say
00:49:48.400 that we have a First Amendment?
00:49:49.500 So there literally are billionaires
00:49:52.020 who think we have already massively overreached
00:49:56.280 in kicking Trump off Twitter
00:49:58.480 and finding all the QAnon accounts
00:50:01.140 and closing those down as well.
00:50:03.300 And so it's, there's a war of ideas here
00:50:06.100 that has to be won.
00:50:07.200 And it's, I mean, we're still, you know,
00:50:09.780 cleaning up the crime scene at the Capitol.
00:50:12.160 And we're all, to my eye,
00:50:13.840 we're already losing this war of ideas.
00:50:16.200 Yes, Sam.
00:50:17.060 The reason this is so hard for security forces
00:50:21.060 or the government as we'll cause it
00:50:22.880 is because the aim of insurgents
00:50:25.720 or opposition or terrorist forces
00:50:27.680 is to get the government to overreact.
00:50:30.800 It's to get the government to come in
00:50:33.140 and do things that upset the population,
00:50:35.140 which then drives people toward the insurgents.
00:50:38.820 If we go back to April, 1775,
00:50:41.260 colonists gathered munitions west of Boston.
00:50:45.300 The British probably with an abundance of caution 0.98
00:50:49.000 wanted to go seize those munitions.
00:50:51.480 And of course it produced Lexington and Concord
00:50:53.540 with a lot of blood spilled
00:50:55.180 and a hardening of positions on both sides.
00:50:58.100 And it caused a tremendous number of people
00:51:00.420 to join the revolutionary cause.
00:51:03.020 You can't say that the British were completely wrong.
00:51:05.620 They were trying to prevent
00:51:06.920 the use of those munitions,
00:51:08.700 but their actions do that.
00:51:10.860 And this gets to the point of
00:51:12.780 what needs to be done now
00:51:14.780 has to be done with a very deft hand.
00:51:17.420 And that's what we found in Afghanistan and Iraq,
00:51:19.680 because many of the things you may do,
00:51:21.820 which makes sense from a very simplistic standpoint,
00:51:24.520 to go get the bad guy or blow this up
00:51:27.180 or to close this road,
00:51:28.820 actually make the disease work.
00:51:31.260 And so it's gotta be done
00:51:32.560 as part of a holistic campaign,
00:51:34.600 but you do have to stop the violence.
00:51:37.460 If you don't stop the violence,
00:51:39.380 the fire grows and it becomes uncontrollable.
00:51:43.240 So you've gotta simultaneously stop the violence,
00:51:46.000 but you've also gotta go after things
00:51:48.220 like the information sources.
00:51:49.840 You've gotta provide a counter narrative
00:51:51.960 that is in fact compelling.
00:51:54.280 You've gotta convince the average person
00:51:56.500 that it is in their interest
00:51:58.340 that peace and law and order be reestablished.
00:52:02.500 But it isn't easy.
00:52:03.860 There isn't a single solution that works here,
00:52:06.880 no silver bullet.
00:52:08.400 So let's again,
00:52:09.180 let's move from the Capitol outward.
00:52:11.920 What should be done on the basis of,
00:52:15.020 you know, now the hours of footage
00:52:16.980 we have of that crime?
00:52:19.500 Just how aggressively should people be prosecuted?
00:52:24.080 What's the scope for, you know,
00:52:26.340 forgiving more or less everyone
00:52:28.440 who wasn't, you know,
00:52:30.620 caught walking out with a lectern
00:52:32.560 or some other trophy
00:52:34.420 and saying,
00:52:35.600 okay, all of you seething multitudes, 1.00
00:52:37.920 get a mulligan here.
00:52:39.440 We're just going to prosecute,
00:52:41.420 you know, 75 people or whatever it is.
00:52:44.320 Just how would you deal
00:52:45.840 with the aftermath of that specific event?
00:52:48.020 Yeah, I think it has to be
00:52:51.900 aggressive across the board.
00:52:54.360 But I would expand my view on that to say,
00:52:57.040 as should video of rioting in Seattle
00:53:00.900 or pick your city.
00:53:02.380 Like if you, there are laws,
00:53:04.740 laws are laws.
00:53:05.760 And if you cross that,
00:53:06.720 you should be held accountable for it.
00:53:08.420 And so I don't isolate that just to the Capitol.
00:53:10.480 This is an extreme and front of mind case,
00:53:13.020 but that we need to send the message right now
00:53:17.360 that it won't be tolerated
00:53:20.020 regardless of political spectrum,
00:53:23.480 regardless of race, et cetera.
00:53:25.400 If you are willing to be in that extreme
00:53:27.580 action-oriented edge of the bell curve,
00:53:31.180 you will be held to account for it.
00:53:33.460 That is the foundation of a nation
00:53:35.480 based on law and order.
00:53:36.480 Well, then what do you do with the messaging
00:53:39.600 that really is the underlying cause
00:53:42.760 of that radicalization?
00:53:44.660 I mean, it seems to me inescapable
00:53:47.220 that the claim in defiance of every procedure
00:53:52.700 used to validate it,
00:53:55.360 that the election was a fraud,
00:53:57.780 that we've had that Trump won in a landslide.
00:54:00.520 And yet, by virtue of incentives
00:54:04.160 that simply do not exist,
00:54:06.060 we had largely Republican election officials
00:54:09.980 and secretaries of state
00:54:11.620 and governors and judges
00:54:13.600 collaborate with the Democrats
00:54:16.260 to steal this election for Biden.
00:54:19.460 And a Supreme Court,
00:54:21.080 the character of which has been largely determined
00:54:23.280 by Trump himself,
00:54:25.020 didn't help for their own diabolical reasons.
00:54:28.360 All of this is a vast conspiracy
00:54:30.400 and this messaging has come
00:54:33.840 from, you know, explicitly and implicitly
00:54:37.140 from literally hundreds of congressmen.
00:54:41.180 Some congressmen and women
00:54:42.820 whose own election was won
00:54:45.380 on the very ballots
00:54:46.780 they're claiming were fraudulent, right?
00:54:49.500 I mean, it's like this is,
00:54:50.800 it's a patently insane position
00:54:53.260 to be arguing from
00:54:54.280 if you're a member of Congress.
00:54:56.340 And yet we still have people like Ted Cruz
00:54:58.640 who have tied themselves
00:55:00.600 to the mast of this sinking ship
00:55:02.720 and seem to be content
00:55:05.340 to disappear beneath the waves
00:55:07.460 with their last words
00:55:09.200 being that this election was stolen, right?
00:55:11.360 So, like, clearly there's responsibility there.
00:55:14.580 What do we do in the face of that?
00:55:16.100 It's an interesting problem
00:55:18.680 because we've never really held people
00:55:21.180 to account for lying
00:55:22.760 unless it was under oath for a legal issue.
00:55:26.500 And we've certainly not prosecuted people 1.00
00:55:28.480 for stupidity 1.00
00:55:29.540 or the presidents would be even more full. 1.00
00:55:32.540 So this is a unique period
00:55:34.420 where I think we have got to hold people
00:55:37.140 to account for their responsibility
00:55:38.920 as elected officials.
00:55:41.320 You'd like the election electoral process to do that
00:55:44.780 but the nature of gerrymandering
00:55:46.280 and different areas
00:55:47.700 doesn't make that possible.
00:55:49.900 But I think that that may be
00:55:52.020 the most difficult task
00:55:53.560 we have to undertake here.
00:55:55.180 How do we make it absolutely unacceptable
00:55:58.020 to do something
00:55:59.760 that is so cravenly opportunistic
00:56:02.740 and incorrect
00:56:03.980 and let people get away with that?
00:56:06.920 But I want to pass it to Chris
00:56:08.000 because there's an interesting longer-term thought on this.
00:56:12.240 Yeah, I think education of the population,
00:56:16.400 I mean, that sounds sort of Pollyannish, right?
00:56:18.680 But it has to be a deliberate effort moving forward.
00:56:22.280 You're never going to debunk the,
00:56:24.360 you know, if I have a cosmic view,
00:56:27.200 return to the golden era,
00:56:29.560 I'm at that 1% left or right on the bell curve,
00:56:32.500 you're not going to change my mind, right?
00:56:34.400 I'm hardwired to think like that.
00:56:37.420 When I think about us
00:56:39.500 deepening our understanding of Al-Qaeda
00:56:41.560 as an extremist network
00:56:43.060 that was expanding very quickly,
00:56:45.040 there was the temptation out of the gates
00:56:46.880 to Stan's earlier point to say,
00:56:48.560 this is a brain aneurysm
00:56:50.540 and we need to cut it out.
00:56:51.660 And it took us a long time to recognize,
00:56:53.780 no, this is diabetes
00:56:55.360 and it's been going on for decades.
00:56:57.720 And we're just the latest chapter in the evolution.
00:57:00.840 And there is that golden era
00:57:03.160 extremist inside their network,
00:57:05.460 but it's much bigger than that, right?
00:57:07.320 And so we had to study and understand
00:57:09.860 so that we could de-radicalize folks
00:57:11.840 that had gotten pulled into that,
00:57:13.440 but have an appreciation for where it started from.
00:57:16.280 And so with Al-Qaeda, 0.83
00:57:18.640 you had to go all the way back to
00:57:20.140 the post-colonial era
00:57:22.200 and the rise of Pan-Arabism
00:57:24.180 and the failure of Pan-Arabism.
00:57:26.140 And under the very draconian rule
00:57:29.160 of Nasser in Egypt,
00:57:31.140 the radicalization of the Muslim Brotherhood
00:57:33.460 and Zalihiri, who goes on to be the thought leader
00:57:35.520 in Al-Qaeda, Bin Laden,
00:57:37.320 they fight the Soviets.
00:57:39.180 On the backside of that,
00:57:40.540 Al-Qaeda is created as a rational, 0.99
00:57:43.340 I would have disagreed with it,
00:57:44.440 but a rational argument saying,
00:57:46.200 we need a global army
00:57:48.620 that can defend Muslim populations
00:57:51.660 wherever they may be.
00:57:52.760 And then the Gulf War happens 0.71
00:57:54.380 and they're not invited to the fight.
00:57:55.760 The US is.
00:57:56.800 And now we're in Saudi Arabia.
00:57:58.460 And his cause becomes,
00:58:00.940 we need to get the far invader
00:58:02.820 out of the Holy Land.
00:58:04.300 It's a rational argument.
00:58:06.440 But somehow,
00:58:07.860 in a matter of then 10 or 15 years,
00:58:10.900 a series of events take place
00:58:12.500 and Al-Qaeda turns into a death cult, right?
00:58:15.480 Zarqawi and other young leaders come in
00:58:17.600 and say,
00:58:18.620 like what you've done here,
00:58:20.440 9-11 was a great way to demonstrate 1.00
00:58:22.780 to how many people we can kill
00:58:25.000 around the world for this cause. 0.98
00:58:26.780 And you know what I'm going to do?
00:58:28.520 I'm going to start a civil war in Iraq 1.00
00:58:30.180 between Sunni and Shia 0.96
00:58:31.540 using the most barbaric violence 0.91
00:58:35.060 we can come up with.
00:58:36.140 And I think it's going to attract
00:58:37.320 like-minded sociopaths to this fight.
00:58:39.560 But that was when we showed up
00:58:41.760 and we wanted to see 0.81
00:58:43.120 this acute group of psychopaths.
00:58:46.760 And it took me personally
00:58:47.980 a while to recognize,
00:58:48.940 wait a second,
00:58:49.920 they are the last chapter
00:58:52.000 in a 60-year history.
00:58:54.100 And so if we don't understand
00:58:55.100 and appreciate that,
00:58:55.820 how can we possibly
00:58:56.860 de-radicalize the fringe
00:58:58.920 of that hardcore inner cell?
00:59:01.840 And we have to take
00:59:02.940 the same approach here.
00:59:03.760 We have to go back
00:59:04.320 in our own history
00:59:05.120 and say,
00:59:05.880 look, this is,
00:59:06.780 there's a hundred,
00:59:08.000 two hundred years of history
00:59:08.960 as to why
00:59:09.640 this group is willing,
00:59:11.520 this, you know,
00:59:12.180 middle circle
00:59:13.140 is willing to show up
00:59:14.360 and actually be part
00:59:15.180 of the action.
00:59:16.220 How do we keep them
00:59:17.080 from getting radicalized
00:59:18.480 and becoming the next
00:59:19.900 real violent threat
00:59:21.400 who's willing to put
00:59:22.540 their own life on the line?
00:59:23.560 I'm wondering,
00:59:25.060 do you think there's
00:59:26.020 anything Trump
00:59:26.800 could say
00:59:27.900 that could close
00:59:29.220 Pandora's box here?
00:59:30.980 I mean,
00:59:31.180 I'm not suggesting
00:59:32.500 that there's any chance
00:59:33.340 he would say it,
00:59:34.160 but if he got a
00:59:34.920 proper firmware
00:59:36.460 update to his brain
00:59:38.080 and had a full
00:59:40.300 mea culpa here
00:59:41.500 where he said,
00:59:42.360 listen, guys,
00:59:43.000 you know,
00:59:43.200 I'm a reality TV show star
00:59:45.160 and I'm, you know,
00:59:45.800 a bit of a con man
00:59:46.680 and I've been lying 0.89
00:59:47.880 all my life
00:59:48.540 and I'm sorry to say
00:59:49.440 I've been lying
00:59:50.360 about election fraud too.
00:59:52.320 And there really is,
00:59:53.120 you know,
00:59:53.420 there's every sign
00:59:54.600 that Joe Biden
00:59:55.220 really did win.
00:59:56.080 I mean,
00:59:56.200 I got the second most votes
00:59:57.840 in American history.
00:59:58.740 There's no doubt about that.
00:59:59.640 I am great,
01:00:00.300 but the truth is
01:00:01.480 I've just,
01:00:02.020 I fought long and hard
01:00:03.720 for this
01:00:04.240 and I probably fought
01:00:05.260 a little too long
01:00:06.120 and I wish Joe Biden well
01:00:08.080 and all of this QAnon stuff.
01:00:10.200 I'm not the guy
01:00:10.880 who's going to save you 0.99
01:00:12.360 from the pedophile cannibals 0.98
01:00:14.520 because as far as I know, 0.98
01:00:15.680 there are no pedophile cannibals 0.97
01:00:17.020 and I'm just going to go 0.99
01:00:18.100 play golf
01:00:18.800 and I'm sorry
01:00:19.480 I made such a mess here
01:00:20.900 at the end.
01:00:21.760 Some four-hour version of that
01:00:24.080 with appropriate weeping
01:00:26.100 and, you know,
01:00:27.160 the prospect
01:00:27.800 that he might commit seppuku
01:00:29.860 at some point along the way,
01:00:31.940 would that do any good
01:00:33.140 or would that all
01:00:34.100 just be wrapped up
01:00:36.080 in yet another layer
01:00:37.020 of conspiracy
01:00:37.740 where obviously
01:00:38.920 the lizard people
01:00:39.880 got to our dear president
01:00:41.380 and now we have to fight
01:00:42.380 all the harder?
01:00:43.320 Sam,
01:00:43.880 I have a feeling
01:00:44.340 you must have been
01:00:44.920 drinking early today
01:00:45.920 to even entertain that thought.
01:00:48.480 Here's what I think.
01:00:49.540 I don't think
01:00:50.020 it would make
01:00:50.460 one bit of difference.
01:00:52.520 I think Donald Trump 0.99
01:00:53.680 is an obese 0.98
01:00:55.480 New York developer
01:00:57.000 with funny hair
01:00:58.000 who has become a symbol.
01:00:59.880 I don't think
01:01:00.360 he's ever led
01:01:01.400 this group.
01:01:02.700 He got out
01:01:03.580 with a tuning fork
01:01:04.700 and he found out
01:01:05.880 that it resonated
01:01:06.960 with the existing
01:01:09.080 frustration
01:01:09.800 and fear
01:01:10.200 in this group
01:01:10.740 and so he became
01:01:11.880 a symbolic leader
01:01:12.960 for them
01:01:13.440 and he was convenient
01:01:14.620 for them.
01:01:15.120 In some ways
01:01:15.780 they helped him.
01:01:17.000 They were
01:01:17.600 something that gave him
01:01:19.700 a base that
01:01:20.620 caused other Republicans
01:01:22.340 to fall in line
01:01:23.340 but he was also
01:01:24.620 very much useful
01:01:25.800 to this group
01:01:26.860 because now
01:01:28.300 you had a persona
01:01:29.480 that was relatively
01:01:30.460 legitimate
01:01:31.040 as the position
01:01:32.000 of the president
01:01:32.880 of the United States
01:01:33.600 would be
01:01:34.080 who was saying things
01:01:35.880 that added legitimacy
01:01:37.440 to this radical movement.
01:01:39.980 I think at this point
01:01:41.060 were he to come out
01:01:42.100 and give a discussion
01:01:43.360 I think they would
01:01:44.520 simply say that
01:01:45.700 aliens have come down 0.80
01:01:47.600 and they've taken
01:01:48.220 the beloved leader
01:01:49.100 and he's no longer
01:01:50.340 himself
01:01:50.780 and what we've
01:01:52.760 got to hold true
01:01:53.520 is to the ideas
01:01:54.960 and they would
01:01:56.680 continue to go
01:01:57.500 their own way.
01:01:58.740 If he genuinely
01:01:59.660 tried to change
01:02:01.320 the direction
01:02:01.880 of this movement
01:02:02.580 now I don't think
01:02:03.600 he'd have any effect
01:02:04.580 on it.
01:02:06.300 And you know
01:02:06.920 Sam
01:02:07.660 we saw something
01:02:08.900 similar
01:02:09.420 in the relationship
01:02:11.100 between
01:02:11.800 Bin Laden
01:02:13.220 and Zarqawi
01:02:14.720 the first real
01:02:15.540 violent actor
01:02:16.520 in Al Qaeda
01:02:17.580 in Iraq
01:02:18.020 who was able
01:02:18.480 to drive the movement
01:02:19.300 and you know
01:02:21.080 you would think
01:02:21.600 Zarqawi would have been 1.00
01:02:22.800 you know
01:02:23.360 you're the great leader
01:02:24.040 what should I do next
01:02:25.020 and as we were
01:02:26.460 just discussing
01:02:27.000 he went down
01:02:27.500 a different path
01:02:28.180 we saw the correspondence
01:02:29.940 back and forth
01:02:30.960 and Bin Laden
01:02:32.060 tried to do that
01:02:33.760 and it was
01:02:34.420 the sorcerer's apprentice
01:02:35.380 you know
01:02:35.800 the buckets are
01:02:36.960 running around now
01:02:37.680 and you can't control it
01:02:38.640 and Zarqawi's response
01:02:39.760 to Bin Laden 0.90
01:02:40.720 when Bin Laden 0.90
01:02:41.840 was sitting
01:02:42.260 in his home office
01:02:43.020 in Abbottabad
01:02:43.600 saying
01:02:44.100 hey 0.99
01:02:44.620 you're cutting heads off 1.00
01:02:46.660 you're burning people 1.00
01:02:47.500 in pits
01:02:47.980 this is not
01:02:48.700 the intent
01:02:49.180 of the movement
01:02:49.680 we are here
01:02:50.400 to fight the far enemy
01:02:51.920 that's over there
01:02:52.820 in the United States
01:02:53.480 that was a point
01:02:54.140 of 9-11
01:02:54.720 and Zarqawi's response
01:02:56.560 was essentially
01:02:57.200 come say that
01:02:58.420 to my face
01:02:59.000 we are the new generation
01:03:00.560 we own this
01:03:01.700 and you're no longer
01:03:02.820 relevant to what's
01:03:03.480 happening on the battlefield
01:03:04.240 what about
01:03:06.200 the relevance
01:03:07.360 of what could happen
01:03:08.380 to Trump
01:03:09.300 right
01:03:09.820 I mean like
01:03:10.160 what do you think
01:03:10.960 should happen
01:03:11.820 and what do you hope
01:03:13.420 would happen
01:03:13.960 in terms of just
01:03:14.480 the optics of
01:03:15.500 you know
01:03:16.740 the kind of unraveling
01:03:17.780 of his presidency
01:03:18.540 or just how
01:03:19.300 how we move forward
01:03:21.060 I mean he's been impeached
01:03:22.420 at the time
01:03:23.360 we're recording this
01:03:24.080 but there has not yet been
01:03:25.380 a schedule
01:03:26.780 of a trial
01:03:28.580 in the
01:03:29.000 in the Senate
01:03:29.660 it's almost certainly
01:03:30.800 not going to happen
01:03:31.540 before the inauguration
01:03:32.780 but you know
01:03:33.460 whether there will be one
01:03:34.720 has not been announced
01:03:35.440 is there any
01:03:37.180 emphatic
01:03:38.240 and ignominious
01:03:39.540 closure
01:03:40.300 to his presidency
01:03:41.880 that could make
01:03:43.300 this whole
01:03:44.360 collection of ideas
01:03:46.880 less attractive
01:03:48.960 to people
01:03:49.960 or is
01:03:50.580 do you think
01:03:51.280 it's
01:03:52.160 uncoupled
01:03:53.100 from anything
01:03:54.080 that's going to happen
01:03:54.700 in that space as well
01:03:55.700 yes Sam
01:03:56.740 I think the answer
01:03:57.520 is on two different levels
01:03:59.240 on the level
01:04:00.320 of the groups
01:04:01.460 that have been radicalized
01:04:02.900 Trump has already
01:04:04.160 been martyred
01:04:04.900 Trump is now
01:04:06.580 somebody who's had
01:04:07.660 the job stolen from him
01:04:09.440 so he serves
01:04:10.360 their purpose now
01:04:11.400 almost as though
01:04:12.640 he no longer is alive
01:04:13.940 and so
01:04:15.000 he is going to become
01:04:15.880 this symbol
01:04:16.420 and this idea
01:04:17.140 I do think
01:04:18.700 however
01:04:19.060 holding him to account
01:04:20.460 while it will give
01:04:22.060 a little bit of fodder
01:04:23.040 to those groups
01:04:23.740 is very important
01:04:25.020 for the other opportunist
01:04:26.400 politicians
01:04:27.560 I think
01:04:28.600 what we've got to do
01:04:29.640 is make it
01:04:30.220 very clear
01:04:31.120 that his kind
01:04:32.060 of behavior
01:04:32.660 the dishonesty
01:04:34.040 that we've seen
01:04:35.000 the leveraging
01:04:35.900 of radical ideas
01:04:37.640 and whatnot
01:04:38.100 for his own purposes
01:04:39.680 doesn't pay
01:04:41.020 and so I think
01:04:42.440 there's a generation
01:04:43.620 of existing
01:04:44.520 and up-and-coming
01:04:45.680 political leaders
01:04:47.180 who need that lesson
01:04:48.880 and they need to see
01:04:50.060 it very clearly
01:04:50.700 Do you guys have a sense
01:04:52.360 of how the military
01:04:54.000 in aggregate
01:04:55.140 views this situation?
01:04:57.080 I mean traditionally
01:04:57.660 I have assumed
01:04:59.780 I'm sure there's
01:05:00.520 polling on this
01:05:01.320 that the military
01:05:02.000 has skewed
01:05:02.740 Republican
01:05:03.740 and has been
01:05:06.400 I'm sure it was
01:05:07.580 sympathetic
01:05:08.000 to Trump
01:05:09.020 up until a certain point
01:05:10.980 and I'm just wondering
01:05:11.740 if
01:05:11.960 where you think
01:05:13.400 we are
01:05:13.880 with respect
01:05:14.380 to the perception
01:05:15.360 of the military
01:05:16.220 around what
01:05:17.560 has been happening
01:05:18.240 So based on my own
01:05:20.100 experiences
01:05:20.780 in the service
01:05:21.580 there inevitably
01:05:23.400 there's going to be
01:05:24.360 reports about
01:05:25.240 you know
01:05:25.660 this army sergeant
01:05:28.000 this special operator
01:05:29.900 etc.
01:05:30.780 with a QAnon account
01:05:32.600 or who was in the mix
01:05:34.280 in the capital
01:05:34.900 protest
01:05:36.080 just the law of averages
01:05:37.920 tell us that'll happen
01:05:38.860 but it's important
01:05:39.700 to remember
01:05:40.160 a few things
01:05:40.960 that our military
01:05:42.140 as it stands
01:05:42.780 which makes it unique
01:05:43.600 around the world
01:05:44.220 is a cross-section
01:05:45.580 of our society
01:05:46.600 right
01:05:46.980 so you have
01:05:47.340 a cross-section
01:05:48.080 of opinions
01:05:48.620 it skews
01:05:49.160 conservative
01:05:50.180 historically
01:05:51.400 that's where
01:05:52.200 a lot of the support
01:05:52.860 for the military
01:05:53.400 comes from
01:05:54.080 and the economic
01:05:55.540 support for
01:05:56.260 growth in the military
01:05:57.200 so a lot of that
01:05:58.180 is understandable
01:05:59.060 but I don't think
01:06:00.560 we should get distracted
01:06:01.300 when those stories
01:06:02.000 come up
01:06:02.420 that says
01:06:02.780 that's what
01:06:03.520 the military
01:06:04.080 thinks
01:06:04.700 I get those
01:06:05.820 questions all the time
01:06:06.560 as does Tam
01:06:07.020 what does the military
01:06:08.160 think about that decision
01:06:09.380 like well
01:06:09.840 I don't know
01:06:10.780 the military
01:06:11.380 isn't a person
01:06:12.500 the military
01:06:13.000 is a range
01:06:13.680 of people
01:06:14.660 so you'd have to ask
01:06:15.900 a lot of them
01:06:16.660 to get a sense
01:06:17.260 just like you would
01:06:18.000 in the general population
01:06:19.680 I think
01:06:20.500 the amazing
01:06:21.720 thing
01:06:22.600 about the US
01:06:23.660 military
01:06:24.280 is
01:06:25.440 and the most
01:06:26.920 beautiful thing
01:06:27.660 about it
01:06:28.040 is that it doesn't
01:06:28.840 have a collective
01:06:29.640 opinion
01:06:30.080 it will
01:06:30.800 do what it is
01:06:32.160 asked to do
01:06:32.880 and its leaders
01:06:33.580 will come back
01:06:34.240 and you know
01:06:34.600 if we're talking
01:06:35.080 about just normal
01:06:35.880 international affairs
01:06:37.360 and say
01:06:37.760 here's the risk
01:06:38.380 calculus on that
01:06:39.280 here's the range
01:06:40.480 of your options
01:06:41.600 here's what it
01:06:42.280 will cost
01:06:42.880 here's how long
01:06:43.340 it will take
01:06:43.860 does this meet
01:06:45.120 the intended
01:06:46.320 end state
01:06:46.840 of our
01:06:47.340 civilian
01:06:48.000 elected officials
01:06:48.880 I learned
01:06:50.280 the most
01:06:50.880 about the
01:06:51.380 relationship
01:06:51.880 and that
01:06:52.520 the respect
01:06:53.940 for civilian
01:06:54.660 authority
01:06:55.140 that the military
01:06:56.100 needs to have
01:06:57.660 from the senior
01:06:59.020 military leaders
01:06:59.620 I worked for
01:07:00.840 when I was in the
01:07:01.380 service
01:07:01.700 it takes you a while
01:07:03.140 to get senior
01:07:03.600 enough to understand
01:07:04.160 there's a relationship
01:07:05.020 between four star
01:07:07.320 generals and admirals
01:07:08.460 and civilian
01:07:09.900 elected officials
01:07:11.240 even though that
01:07:11.980 elected official
01:07:12.940 might be you know
01:07:14.180 33 years old
01:07:15.360 there's a demeanor
01:07:16.180 to differentiation
01:07:17.540 to the civilian
01:07:19.580 side of the
01:07:20.480 constitution
01:07:21.000 and the military
01:07:21.720 will be the first
01:07:22.400 to stand up
01:07:22.860 and say
01:07:23.140 that's that's
01:07:24.300 the absolute
01:07:24.720 point
01:07:25.140 so it is
01:07:25.620 at its best
01:07:26.980 and collectively
01:07:27.620 very unbiased
01:07:28.520 in that view
01:07:29.480 and so I think
01:07:31.220 the biggest risk
01:07:31.840 is we'll get
01:07:32.300 distracted by
01:07:33.260 the story of
01:07:34.400 the former
01:07:34.780 special operator
01:07:35.480 that was somewhere
01:07:36.120 in the mix
01:07:36.760 and take that
01:07:37.580 as representative
01:07:38.240 of the
01:07:38.940 the broad military
01:07:39.840 in recent days
01:07:41.720 there's been
01:07:42.820 obvious concern
01:07:44.100 around what
01:07:44.760 Trump may yet
01:07:45.980 do in his
01:07:47.860 remaining days
01:07:48.460 in office
01:07:49.040 and I think
01:07:51.520 it's been reported
01:07:52.520 that there was a
01:07:53.320 a phone call
01:07:54.300 from Nancy Pelosi
01:07:55.200 to someone
01:07:55.940 in the Pentagon
01:07:56.500 trying to seek out
01:07:57.800 some assurance
01:07:58.320 that the nuclear
01:07:59.660 football is not
01:08:00.740 quite as available
01:08:01.700 to Trump
01:08:02.580 as it might have
01:08:03.600 been during the
01:08:04.440 rest of his time
01:08:05.040 as president
01:08:05.520 I wonder
01:08:06.920 this is the
01:08:08.280 the moment
01:08:09.560 that we ran
01:08:10.560 into at the
01:08:10.980 end of
01:08:11.440 the Nixon
01:08:12.360 administration
01:08:13.380 when you know
01:08:14.640 he was drinking
01:08:15.200 a lot
01:08:15.660 and I forget
01:08:17.160 who it was
01:08:17.680 it might have
01:08:18.220 been his
01:08:18.460 secretary of state
01:08:19.200 someone said
01:08:20.640 if you get
01:08:21.240 any calls
01:08:21.780 from the
01:08:22.300 president
01:08:22.640 in the middle
01:08:23.280 of the night
01:08:23.620 about initiating
01:08:24.720 a nuclear
01:08:25.140 first strike 0.54
01:08:25.760 on anyone
01:08:26.300 come to me
01:08:27.480 first
01:08:27.900 right
01:08:28.200 and I'm
01:08:29.840 wondering
01:08:30.020 what you
01:08:30.380 think
01:08:30.920 the posture
01:08:32.440 is of
01:08:33.760 the military
01:08:35.060 in this last
01:08:36.600 week of
01:08:37.180 Trump's term
01:08:38.600 with respect
01:08:39.640 to any
01:08:40.320 orders
01:08:41.640 that might
01:08:42.700 come
01:08:43.180 from the
01:08:44.000 White House
01:08:44.860 to engage
01:08:45.740 anything of
01:08:46.640 substance
01:08:47.260 militarily
01:08:48.100 I would say
01:08:50.260 Sam that
01:08:50.940 they are
01:08:51.740 thoughtful
01:08:52.260 I would say
01:08:54.060 they are
01:08:54.400 always thoughtful
01:08:55.320 you know
01:08:56.600 whenever you're
01:08:57.220 going to use
01:08:58.120 military power
01:08:59.000 if it was
01:08:59.440 something as
01:09:00.200 extreme as
01:09:01.120 launching nuclear
01:09:01.960 weapons
01:09:02.440 they're going
01:09:02.960 to be
01:09:03.600 extraordinarily
01:09:04.320 careful as
01:09:05.300 they always
01:09:05.960 are
01:09:06.300 I think
01:09:07.620 that the
01:09:08.020 conversation
01:09:08.620 between
01:09:09.160 the Speaker
01:09:10.340 of the House
01:09:10.820 and the
01:09:11.500 Chairman of
01:09:11.860 the Joint
01:09:12.200 Chiefs
01:09:12.760 was no
01:09:14.740 doubt
01:09:15.040 substantive
01:09:15.640 but it
01:09:16.100 was also
01:09:16.840 made public
01:09:18.020 and I think
01:09:19.060 it was made
01:09:19.500 public for a
01:09:20.260 reason that
01:09:20.720 people wanted
01:09:21.300 to know
01:09:21.800 that that
01:09:22.220 conversation
01:09:22.860 had occurred
01:09:23.380 and so
01:09:24.600 I think
01:09:25.160 that there
01:09:26.320 is a
01:09:26.900 always a
01:09:28.500 concern
01:09:29.040 for a
01:09:30.240 decision
01:09:30.620 which might
01:09:31.140 be made
01:09:31.560 in haste
01:09:32.080 or in
01:09:32.380 anger
01:09:32.720 by any
01:09:33.180 leader
01:09:33.460 but I
01:09:34.440 think
01:09:34.680 that
01:09:34.980 now
01:09:35.780 we are
01:09:36.720 close
01:09:37.220 enough
01:09:37.600 to the
01:09:38.560 end of
01:09:38.860 President
01:09:39.160 Trump's
01:09:39.780 administration
01:09:40.440 that
01:09:42.040 people
01:09:43.380 are more
01:09:44.200 thoughtful
01:09:44.540 than ever
01:09:45.060 and so
01:09:46.360 maybe not
01:09:47.000 Donald Trump
01:09:47.860 but certainly
01:09:48.520 the people
01:09:48.940 around him
01:09:49.640 are more
01:09:50.100 thoughtful
01:09:50.360 than ever
01:09:50.800 so I
01:09:52.020 don't think
01:09:52.800 the danger
01:09:53.500 of that
01:09:54.120 is one
01:09:55.440 of the
01:09:55.660 higher
01:09:55.940 risks
01:09:56.340 right now
01:09:56.840 so if
01:09:58.440 you guys
01:09:58.780 were advising
01:09:59.460 the Biden
01:10:00.960 administration
01:10:01.620 what should
01:10:03.320 their priorities
01:10:04.140 be in the
01:10:05.660 first hundred
01:10:06.120 days given
01:10:07.060 what's happened
01:10:07.720 let's assume
01:10:08.340 the inauguration
01:10:09.060 comes off
01:10:09.960 without a
01:10:10.720 hitch and
01:10:11.780 obviously
01:10:13.300 you know
01:10:14.020 he's got
01:10:14.860 massive
01:10:15.960 challenges
01:10:16.580 responding to
01:10:18.180 COVID
01:10:18.480 responding to
01:10:19.200 the economic
01:10:19.960 unraveling
01:10:21.060 born of
01:10:21.580 COVID
01:10:21.940 dealing with
01:10:23.660 an increasingly
01:10:24.980 aggressive
01:10:25.620 China
01:10:26.300 restoring
01:10:27.480 our
01:10:28.000 stature
01:10:28.720 in the
01:10:28.960 world
01:10:29.220 with respect
01:10:29.780 to
01:10:30.180 foreign
01:10:30.660 policy
01:10:31.080 generally
01:10:31.540 he's got
01:10:32.480 a lot
01:10:32.660 to do
01:10:33.100 but he
01:10:33.500 but it
01:10:34.060 seems to
01:10:34.640 me that
01:10:35.000 there's
01:10:35.620 some
01:10:36.060 post-mortem
01:10:37.440 on
01:10:38.000 this great
01:10:39.260 unraveling
01:10:39.840 we've
01:10:40.060 experienced
01:10:40.560 in recent
01:10:41.160 months
01:10:41.540 you know
01:10:41.900 around the
01:10:42.260 election
01:10:42.680 fraud
01:10:43.120 and just
01:10:43.740 having
01:10:43.960 half of
01:10:44.460 a society
01:10:45.240 believe
01:10:46.340 that their
01:10:47.280 government
01:10:47.660 has been
01:10:48.000 stolen from
01:10:48.540 them
01:10:48.720 this requires
01:10:50.340 some
01:10:50.600 tending to
01:10:51.160 what do
01:10:51.440 you
01:10:51.540 what would
01:10:51.960 you advise
01:10:52.560 Sam
01:10:54.420 I'll
01:10:54.900 I'll
01:10:55.700 beat the
01:10:56.060 drum
01:10:56.340 that I've
01:10:56.920 been beating
01:10:57.540 for nearly
01:10:58.300 20 years
01:10:59.000 now
01:10:59.300 which I
01:10:59.980 watched
01:11:00.380 happen in
01:11:01.120 in the
01:11:02.440 counterterrorism
01:11:03.480 community
01:11:03.940 really under
01:11:04.900 McChrystal's
01:11:05.960 leadership and
01:11:06.560 then generations
01:11:07.240 beyond now
01:11:07.840 I worked
01:11:09.100 underneath a
01:11:09.820 generation of
01:11:10.380 leaders who
01:11:11.040 were willing
01:11:11.640 they came into
01:11:12.720 a fight
01:11:13.240 when it
01:11:14.520 literally looked
01:11:15.360 like sort of
01:11:16.000 all is lost
01:11:16.740 right
01:11:17.160 we're not
01:11:18.300 going to be
01:11:18.540 able to
01:11:18.780 beat Al
01:11:19.100 Qaeda 0.85
01:11:19.300 just overwhelming
01:11:20.880 odds and
01:11:22.040 looking at
01:11:23.980 the brink
01:11:24.460 for the
01:11:25.100 force
01:11:25.420 right
01:11:25.660 and we're
01:11:26.460 in a
01:11:26.680 similar
01:11:26.900 state
01:11:27.240 right now
01:11:27.860 if I was
01:11:28.400 in that
01:11:28.680 incoming
01:11:29.000 administration
01:11:29.500 you know
01:11:29.960 things look
01:11:30.460 pretty bleak
01:11:31.040 every direction
01:11:31.740 you you
01:11:32.720 observe
01:11:33.040 and so
01:11:34.060 there was a
01:11:36.000 recognition at
01:11:36.720 that time in
01:11:37.160 the military
01:11:37.620 we need to
01:11:38.600 start doing
01:11:39.240 things
01:11:39.660 differently
01:11:40.580 we need to
01:11:41.340 communicate
01:11:41.860 in a
01:11:42.560 completely
01:11:42.880 different
01:11:43.120 fashion
01:11:43.540 with
01:11:44.260 honesty
01:11:44.700 with
01:11:44.920 transparency
01:11:45.380 don't
01:11:45.880 show me
01:11:46.240 what the
01:11:46.600 org chart
01:11:46.980 looks like
01:11:47.440 don't show
01:11:47.980 me
01:11:48.200 case studies
01:11:49.320 of how we
01:11:49.700 did it in
01:11:49.960 the 90s
01:11:50.460 we're going
01:11:50.780 to rebuild
01:11:51.220 this thing
01:11:51.680 on the
01:11:52.440 fly
01:11:52.800 because we're
01:11:53.700 losing
01:11:54.040 because we
01:11:54.760 are in a
01:11:55.120 lot of
01:11:55.420 trouble
01:11:55.680 and I
01:11:56.520 watched
01:11:57.040 McChrystal
01:11:57.580 and the
01:11:57.920 others put
01:11:58.320 themselves at
01:11:58.880 the center
01:11:59.380 of that
01:11:59.880 and communicate
01:12:00.920 with forces
01:12:02.360 civilians
01:12:03.280 host nation
01:12:04.560 allies all
01:12:05.300 around the
01:12:05.680 world on a
01:12:06.320 24-7 cycle
01:12:07.540 for years
01:12:08.460 on end
01:12:08.880 now I
01:12:10.220 wouldn't
01:12:10.560 put the
01:12:11.400 president in
01:12:12.060 that but
01:12:12.600 his team
01:12:13.380 needs to
01:12:14.220 start thinking
01:12:14.780 like that
01:12:15.360 who are the
01:12:16.160 people that
01:12:16.480 need to be
01:12:16.760 at the
01:12:17.100 table and
01:12:18.040 how do we
01:12:18.460 get honest
01:12:19.200 information
01:12:19.740 into that
01:12:20.980 mix so
01:12:21.700 that we're
01:12:22.000 all having
01:12:22.780 a dialogue
01:12:23.260 about how
01:12:23.840 we solve
01:12:24.240 these problems
01:12:24.920 what the
01:12:25.800 president can
01:12:26.380 do is
01:12:27.280 enter into
01:12:28.460 that mix
01:12:29.020 and reintroduce
01:12:30.480 ideas of
01:12:31.480 honesty and
01:12:32.260 competency and
01:12:33.620 fundamentals of
01:12:34.560 what it means to
01:12:35.140 be a servant
01:12:35.660 leader that's a
01:12:36.960 process plus a
01:12:38.620 cultural change
01:12:39.540 that was critical
01:12:40.500 for us and
01:12:41.080 it I think it's
01:12:41.980 absolutely what
01:12:43.300 is needed right
01:12:43.920 now a focused
01:12:45.720 interagency
01:12:47.520 whole of
01:12:48.360 government
01:12:48.740 effort that
01:12:51.020 breaks a lot
01:12:52.340 of rules
01:12:52.720 don't tell me
01:12:53.420 you can't
01:12:53.780 share in that
01:12:54.200 information
01:12:54.600 don't tell me
01:12:55.220 you work for
01:12:55.600 that person
01:12:56.000 we are all
01:12:57.200 Americans right
01:12:57.820 now and we
01:12:58.320 need to lean
01:12:58.840 into that
01:12:59.380 and the
01:12:59.860 president can
01:13:00.400 set the
01:13:00.720 tone
01:13:00.980 it's nothing
01:13:02.500 if not
01:13:02.840 interesting
01:13:03.240 there's a lot
01:13:04.480 of blue sky
01:13:05.100 if you want
01:13:05.680 to reinvent
01:13:06.500 civilization
01:13:07.660 at this
01:13:08.200 point and
01:13:09.020 we'll get to
01:13:10.160 a place where
01:13:11.160 we're doing
01:13:12.180 things differently
01:13:13.640 and better
01:13:14.380 and cutting
01:13:15.180 through just
01:13:16.300 bad assumptions
01:13:16.980 that have
01:13:17.520 led us to
01:13:18.500 the place
01:13:18.900 we're digging
01:13:19.600 out from
01:13:20.080 so I
01:13:20.460 I'm certainly
01:13:21.760 no one has
01:13:22.380 ever accused
01:13:22.880 me of being
01:13:23.200 an optimist
01:13:23.780 but you know
01:13:25.040 I have my
01:13:25.360 moments
01:13:25.760 but it will
01:13:26.860 be quite a
01:13:28.240 relief to get
01:13:29.020 to the other
01:13:29.400 side of the
01:13:30.640 Trump administration
01:13:31.260 and see
01:13:33.300 something like
01:13:34.380 a resurgence
01:13:35.240 of competence
01:13:36.420 and professionalism
01:13:37.680 and civility
01:13:38.480 and you know
01:13:39.120 all of the
01:13:39.560 qualities you
01:13:40.940 just enumerated
01:13:42.340 Chris
01:13:42.720 it's
01:13:43.060 I just want
01:13:44.800 to thank you
01:13:45.160 both for taking
01:13:45.780 the time to
01:13:46.500 help educate
01:13:47.280 me and my
01:13:47.760 audience on
01:13:48.580 the kinds of
01:13:48.940 things we
01:13:49.220 should be
01:13:49.460 thinking about
01:13:49.980 and looking
01:13:51.020 for going
01:13:51.620 forward
01:13:51.940 absolutely our
01:13:53.440 pleasure Sam
01:13:54.080 thanks for
01:13:54.420 having us
01:13:54.880 yeah great
01:13:55.620 discussion Sam
01:13:56.300 thanks and
01:13:56.800 thanks for
01:13:57.480 trying to get
01:13:58.340 the message
01:13:58.700 out there a bit
01:13:59.240 you
01:14:07.700 your
01:14:08.560 you
01:14:08.580 you
01:14:09.960 you
01:14:10.600 you
01:14:11.160 you
01:14:12.620 you
01:14:14.140 You