Playing to Win - 061- Why is Russia Attacking Ukraine？

00:00:00.120 I would actually be interested to know if Tim was kind of like flying over where you're doing something on the ground at some point over life.

00:00:08.240 Hey guys, what is up?

00:00:09.860 So we're talking today about what's going on between Russia and Ukraine.

00:00:15.200 Let me introduce my guests if you don't know them.

00:00:17.020 Tim Davies is a retired RAF tornado pilot.

00:00:20.460 Ground attack roles mostly, wasn't it?

00:00:22.680 Yep, old ground attack.

00:00:24.320 Yeah, and Paul was, you know, one of the guys on the ground, you know, dealing with American conflict theater.

00:00:31.500 So I thought it'd be cool to invite both of them on to sort of like offer a little bit of insight from their perspectives, you know, working with the various native militaries, you know, and theaters, a campaign that they were in.

00:00:44.120 And I've spent the last week or two just like consuming loads and loads of content and sharing some of the stuff on my Twitter feed.

00:00:53.380 And it's interesting because there's a lot of people starting to go back and forth now and form like very strong opinions in established camps.

00:01:04.060 What are your, like, what's your thought, guys?

00:01:06.580 I mean, Tim, I'll start with you.

00:01:07.680 Like, what's your position and what's been going on right now with Russia and Ukraine?

00:01:14.140 I think what I should start off here, Rick, by saying it's probably the biggest disinformation campaign that we've ever seen.

00:01:19.160 Like, if you...

00:01:20.020 Beyond COVID?

00:01:21.440 Well, there it is.

00:01:22.480 I mean, is COVID the start?

00:01:24.200 Is that where we're at now?

00:01:25.300 I mean, because, you know, I can get all technical about our government and the problems that Boris Johnson had, for example, and how this does alleviate a lot of those, let's be honest.

00:01:32.860 I mean, he did quite well out of COVID, to be fair, with what he did.

00:01:36.160 We're one of the countries with, I think, the more minimum lockdown constraints.

00:01:40.580 I think we're talking to a Canadian here who we're looking at the whole of what was probably one of the most liberal sort of Western democracies become the most tyrannical, I think, alongside maybe New Zealand and Australia and things like this. 0.87

00:01:51.820 So that's an interesting one.

00:01:52.940 But when you start trying to find out what the facts are and you're going through social media channels or even mainstream news channels, I don't know how you can ever choose, unless you go through something like Bellingcat, which tries to identify locations and things like that.

00:02:04.940 How do you even know where the disinformation is coming from or what kind of angle some of these guys are coming from?

00:02:09.580 I can't even work it out myself, you know, I struggle with it.

00:02:13.320 What do you see right now as far as the sources of the disinformation?

00:02:17.620 Because, I mean, you open with that as like the big point.

00:02:19.680 So what are you seeing, you know, based on your experience?

00:02:22.400 Well, I think you could take disinformation from like literally every side.

00:02:26.000 And it's not even overt disinformation.

00:02:28.360 It's not even like the mascarovka we see or whatever it might be or the hybrid warfare that Russia has been implementing for so many years and that we're so familiar with.

00:02:36.120 And it's even when you get maybe, say, the president of Ukraine maybe standing up and saying whatever he's saying and putting an emphasis on it.

00:02:44.000 And, of course, that appears on the front page of a newspaper.

00:02:46.100 And there's little kids there.

00:02:47.860 There's women, there's children, everything else. 1.00

00:02:49.540 It's you just got to say, where's the imbalance?

00:02:51.960 You know, where is the balance?

00:02:53.260 Is it an imbalance?

00:02:54.040 Where is it?

00:02:54.460 Are we seeing anything that is fair or justified?

00:02:56.280 And I just want to say, by the way, that there's no way I'm saying this invasion was in any way is any way acceptable to anyone. 0.95

00:03:03.840 I mean, it's the most ridiculous thing ever.

00:03:04.920 But there's probably reasons why it happened and we can get into that later.

00:03:08.600 So I try and I'm really I'm really struggling between trying to find out what what is right by using mainstream news sources and that going back into something like, you know, Twitter or anything like that or any online source really and trying to work out where they've got better angles on it.

00:03:24.580 So, you know, how you kind of know the journalists that you trust.

00:03:27.340 And then those journalists become we sort of covered, didn't we?

00:03:30.440 Those journalists become kind of all in on one side, but they're not saying they're all in.

00:03:33.460 They're trying to make out the balance, but they're kind of going all in and all in again.

00:03:36.620 And you think, well, now, who do I now kind of turn to?

00:03:39.580 And I must admit, to be fair, I'm a little bit lost about the whole thing.

00:03:42.540 And I've been covering it like like you, you know, so.

00:03:44.640 So I look at it like you have to look at motivations because there's the time of unbiased sources is gone.

00:03:53.520 And so I have to look at it from a standpoint of, all right, what is the motivation of each different party?

00:04:00.300 And then when a news source comes out, where are they getting that information from and how are they cherry picking that information to fit that narrative?

00:04:10.220 And then from there, that's a starting point, at least, of figuring out what's kind of true, what's not.

00:04:16.960 And then trying to find raw sources as well.

00:04:19.900 So, like, now for me, I have a benefit of knowing different people in different areas of government.

00:04:24.900 I'm not, I'm kind of out of it now, right?

00:04:27.780 I'm just an infantry guy in the National Guard now.

00:04:30.280 But I've been on special operations tiers and I've been on several deployments.

00:04:34.860 And I know people in government positions right now.

00:04:38.700 I know people in the Pentagon now.

00:04:40.220 I can't disclose a lot of that stuff and anything they might disclose to me, they're limited in what they can even say on certain things.

00:04:47.040 But I'll get different information from those sources, video clips that people put on different, like, was it something 360?

00:04:55.040 Like, there's different sites that where they allow you to put uncensored clips of what's going on in the battlefield, different things like that.

00:05:01.760 And so you just kind of have to vet through it a bit from that.

00:05:05.280 But knowing, though, like, if I'm watching something that's pro-NATO, pro-Ukraine, it's going to be spun to fit a narrative.

00:05:13.320 Now, that doesn't mean it's not true.

00:05:15.200 But maybe it's elevated or maybe it's, you know, whatever, you know, exaggerated, right?

00:05:24.440 The information.

00:05:25.460 Great example.

00:05:26.580 You know, what was that island where there was 13 guys that said F-U?

00:05:31.500 And then they were killed and, you know, they weren't killed, right?

00:05:36.700 They're captured, you know?

00:05:37.980 And so that's a huge, like, oh, this hero story.

00:05:40.560 Now, why would they do that?

00:05:42.060 Well, because they need to, they're one of the biggest assets that they need in Ukraine is people to fight, right?

00:05:50.000 I mean, so they need a lot of things.

00:05:52.360 They need ammo.

00:05:53.080 They need money.

00:05:53.980 They need weaponry.

00:05:54.940 But they need people to stick around and want to stick it out and fight.

00:05:58.420 And so they have to ignite these people to do that rather than get complacent and give up against a much larger military force.

00:06:07.380 And that's how they're going to do it.

00:06:08.780 You know, they're going to have those hero stories to, you know, get them motivated to get out there and keep fighting.

00:06:16.540 And that's why, you know, it's a big reason for that.

00:06:18.320 Then Russia has their own campaign that they're running so that they can, so Putin can still have the support from his people, at least enough to not get, you know, murdered somehow or, you know, have revolts in the streets in Russia.

00:06:34.420 They have to, he has to exhibit control over people.

00:06:37.100 And he does it through his own disinformation thing and by force, too.

00:06:41.940 It's kind of both, you know.

00:06:43.520 Yeah, let's dive into that a little bit.

00:06:45.000 But I mean, like, I've watched now in my lifetime on screens unfold the Falkland War, which is pretty much more of like a one-way source of information because you'd sit there and you'd turn on the TV and it would just, you know, give you info.

00:06:59.100 We live in an environment today where you can actually interact with people creating content and providing the information with social media.

00:07:04.900 And we've had, what are the words that we have since then?

00:07:08.260 Iraq one and two, Afghanistan how many times, and all the various conflicts sort of in between there.

00:07:14.740 And, you know, it's only recently that I've unplugged.

00:07:17.520 Like, I've been very honest about this.

00:07:18.880 Like, I've, you know, I've just believed everything they told me, you know, for the vast majority of my life.

00:07:23.460 It's only been recently that I've been like, well, hold on a second.

00:07:25.420 That doesn't really add up.

00:07:26.380 And one of the things that's really stood out to me over the last couple weeks is how quick the mainstream media and the large, you know, conglomerate media sources, politicians, anybody in any kind of position of power has been so quick to turn the attention away from beer bug over to Russian man bad.

00:07:47.480 And it's gotten to the point where they're, like, cancelling some of the strangest things.

00:07:52.940 Like, I've seen them cancel Russian cats from competing in, like, breeding competitions.

00:07:57.940 I've seen them cancel some of the most bizarre stuff.

00:08:02.040 What else have we seen in the last couple weeks?

00:08:04.620 Russia's favorite, isn't it?

00:08:05.520 We've seen the same thing over here.

00:08:06.660 Absolutely.

00:08:07.060 I think the ballet was cancelled over here.

00:08:08.720 Nikit and Bazapin.

00:08:09.800 Nikit and Bazapin's been cancelled from F1.

00:08:11.820 I've seen that.

00:08:12.220 Well, I say cancelled.

00:08:13.380 He's been dropped from a hat.

00:08:14.340 So let's be realistic.

00:08:15.180 A lot of the big tech companies have also restricted access to their services in Russia.

00:08:20.940 So, for example, if you're a 14-year-old kid that lives in Moscow and you have an Xbox, you can't play with it anymore, right?

00:08:28.340 Because Microsoft has cancelled, you know, access to, I guess, online gaming, you know, for example.

00:08:33.060 So it's like these, like, small incremental cancellations, you know, some might say, well, it's designed to annoy the public maybe to have them uprise against the government sort of thing.

00:08:43.480 That's the hope, but that could back there, too.

00:08:45.840 Yeah, like, I think there's an argument to that as well.

00:08:47.700 But, I mean, like, the cancellation of some of the most bizarre things, I don't think I've ever seen this before.

00:08:52.380 Have you guys?

00:08:52.840 I don't think so.

00:08:55.740 I mean, I look at this and I equate this and people will have a go at me here for this because, of course, the two, one involves a significant amount of death and the other doesn't.

00:09:03.240 But the reason that the Russian forces would target housing establishments and everything else, say, in Syria, that kind of stuff, and we're seeing the same thing as they're working their way through Ukraine, they're targeting blocks of flats, is to demoralize the population.

00:09:16.620 It is to make sure the population hasn't got a home, the population is seeking peace, they haven't got a car anymore, they haven't got a means of income anymore, all these kind of things.

00:09:25.840 And we're just doing it in a kind of different way, don't get me wrong, it's not, you know, it's not as brutal as what's happening there, and that needs to stop immediately.

00:09:33.420 But when we're restricting all these services to ordinary Russians, we're expecting these Russian people, and Russian people, they're like us, by the way, you know, we are good people, we're just managed and everything by people with sometimes nefarious intent, or they just got their own agenda.

00:09:47.400 And these people, they're expecting, we're expecting to go and take that fight to the streets and to protest and everything in Russia, which I believe is illegal to protest in Russia.

00:09:55.140 I think 1,600 people have been sort of taken into custody for protesting.

00:09:58.960 That's what we're trying to do.

00:10:00.160 So by restricting these services, I believe we're trying to get people to go out on the streets and to campaign against what Putin's doing in Ukraine.

00:10:06.160 That's all it is.

00:10:07.040 I think it's despicable, Rich, to target what I would say an innocent populace, really, with all these restrictions. 0.96

00:10:12.900 I mean, we know that Russian cats are dicks, we should never have Russian cats in these kind of competitions anyway, but everything else. 0.75

00:10:18.380 I was a supporter of Nikita Mazepin, I felt that was a young man trying to do his best after a really bad start in life, okay, son of a billionaire. 0.98

00:10:25.140 But, you know, he was fighting back from that charge of grabbing his girlfriend, whatever, and everyone was launching out in, you know, the virtuous.

00:10:32.480 I've never done anything wrong in the life.

00:10:34.440 We're launching on this young dude trying to make the best out of a career in F1.

00:10:37.780 I was supporting that dude because he's Russian.

00:10:40.740 I mean, can you listen to what we're saying?

00:10:42.560 Because he's Russian, we're going to stop him driving in Formula One. 1.00

00:10:45.480 Because he's Russian. 0.51

00:10:46.940 Do you know that Kristallnacht in Germany, you know, where all the Germans are going around breaking all the Jews' windows?

00:10:51.080 I thought we learned from that back in the Second World War.

00:10:53.180 It's happening again now in Germany.

00:10:55.140 They're going around smashing up Russian restaurants and stuff.

00:10:58.240 Yeah, I've seen that.

00:11:00.260 There's Germans that are destroying Russian restaurants and, like, stores, you know, small, like, boutique mom and pop shops. 0.80

00:11:08.300 There was a few, you know, millionaires with yachts that had them seized, apparently, in Mediterranean ports.

00:11:15.960 Like, what do they have to do with Putin or a war in Ukraine?

00:11:20.660 And it's like they're building this systematic campaign.

00:11:23.980 And it's just like, you know, it sounds and feels a lot like the whole, like, anybody that didn't want to take a jab, then they would call you an anti-vaxxer.

00:11:31.540 And then they would sort of segregate you and separate you out.

00:11:33.840 Oh, sure.

00:11:34.160 You know, like, you're one of the bad guys because, you know, and, like, you know, today on Twitter, I saw Boycott McDonald's was trending.

00:11:42.080 And I'm like, okay, well, what's this about?

00:11:43.400 And I clicked it.

00:11:44.240 And apparently all of the NPCs are trying to convince other NPCs to not buy McDonald's because McDonald's hasn't boycotted or canceled, you know, their services in Russia.

00:11:56.420 Right?

00:11:57.400 Well, we're in cancel culture, right?

00:11:58.920 I mean, so it's always been there's always been some element of that because we're tribal, you know, as a species, human beings are tribal.

00:12:07.080 And so there's always been an element of segregation through culture, racial and stuff like that when there's these wars.

00:12:16.080 But we're also now in a cancel culture where we want to feel good about ourselves for essentially doing nothing.

00:12:23.740 Right.

00:12:24.340 And so, oh, I boycotted Russian vodka.

00:12:27.520 I'm doing my part.

00:12:28.500 Right.

00:12:29.140 Yeah.

00:12:29.660 Nobody cares about that.

00:12:30.920 Chris is in the chat.

00:12:31.740 He said Russian vodka was taken off the shelves here in Ontario.

00:12:35.460 The LCBO is a liquor control board of Ontario.

00:12:37.960 So Doug Ford, which is our premier, you know, decided, well, we're going to teach the Russians a lesson and take their vodka off the shelves. 0.96

00:12:44.440 Yeah, that'll show them, you know, like it's just virtue signaling because we're not really doing anything because sanctions classically have not actually done anything to motivate Putin or the Russians to do anything different.

00:12:58.580 We are doing it pretty harsh.

00:13:00.620 I mean, so there is going to be economic damage from that, but it's not going to stop them from shelling.

00:13:05.620 It's not going to stop them from fighting.

00:13:07.540 So it's not real.

00:13:09.400 You know what I mean?

00:13:10.080 There's some damage, but it's not it's not actually what they can feel.

00:13:13.980 We can we can feel that like we're doing something.

00:13:16.160 And that's what's important is emotions.

00:13:17.880 Yeah, there's a comment here from the competent man.

00:13:20.340 He says the best part of this BS sanction thing is how is how energy transactions are exempted.

00:13:24.880 So Europe is still buying oil and gas from Russia.

00:13:28.060 And if I'm not mistaken, there's still oil and gas being sold to America from Russia.

00:13:31.800 Is that correct?

00:13:33.560 Yeah, because they don't want the even though it would impact us the least here in the United States.

00:13:40.080 It's the approval ratings and all that stuff.

00:13:42.120 They don't want it to go down when at the pump, the price goes up a bit.

00:13:46.580 They don't want that.

00:13:47.560 So Igor says Russian living abroad.

00:13:49.760 It's effing a nightmare.

00:13:50.620 Ukrainian civilians bombed 10,000 Russian soldiers dead.

00:13:53.380 Most were sent without being told where.

00:13:55.580 Yeah, apparently Putin sent in his his basics, you know, the fodder at this time.

00:14:00.280 I don't think he sent in, you know, the elite guard from what I understand.

00:14:03.980 Yeah.

00:14:04.500 Well, talk about that.

00:14:05.260 That's it.

00:14:05.820 Yeah.

00:14:05.980 Paul, go on.

00:14:07.940 Talk about talk about the young guys going in.

00:14:09.580 These are young conscripts.

00:14:10.620 You know, they probably didn't have much future looking forward to in the towns they grew up.

00:14:14.240 But the army provides them with an income.

00:14:15.620 So they join the army, hopefully learn a trade if they can.

00:14:19.840 They're on exercise down by the border.

00:14:21.260 Then all of a sudden they get told to go across.

00:14:23.220 Now, one thing and I want to hear Paul's view on this because this is the expert down here.

00:14:26.660 Not me.

00:14:27.020 I'm an air guy.

00:14:27.840 I'm not a ground guy.

00:14:28.940 But, you know, I don't think Putin actually meant to send those people in.

00:14:33.220 I think he was I thought he was going to take maybe the two provinces to the east because they're Russian speaking.

00:14:38.780 And there's guys in the chat here know a lot more about this than I do.

00:14:41.440 And I just think that he was being called out on all the kind of the false flags and everything.

00:14:45.840 And he just went, you know what?

00:14:46.540 Just put him in anyway.

00:14:47.260 Put him in.

00:14:48.480 And before you know it, they're knocking on Kiev without any support whatsoever.

00:14:51.680 It's not permissive air environment for them whatsoever.

00:14:53.820 They haven't got the air.

00:14:54.640 They're being hit by, you know, all sorts of manpower, manportable air defense systems that were being provided by, you know, external states like ourselves.

00:15:04.440 And these guys are just taking hits and where they never should have been huge losses.

00:15:08.580 They should never be that far forward.

00:15:10.160 They should have taken these eastern provinces.

00:15:11.620 Paul, I mean, I'm interested in your taking this, buddy, because I literally am uneducated on this.

00:15:15.500 This is just what I'm reading.

00:15:16.460 And I know what I'm reading isn't necessarily factually correct.

00:15:18.640 So, yeah, well, and I'll make my own caveat is I'm just a guy on the Internet, too.

00:15:23.560 So everyone needs to do their own research here.

00:15:26.180 I just I came on the show because it occurred to me.

00:15:29.280 Well, besides the invite and, you know, Rich is the man here.

00:15:32.320 That's why I always show up on an invite with him when he says, come on.

00:15:35.640 But besides that, it's there are so many opinions out there that are are crazy to me.

00:15:42.040 And so because of the the the, you know, different media campaigns, people don't know who to trust. 0.98

00:15:48.240 And so they're literally bringing on like, hi, I'm an idiot who's over in Ukraine. 1.00

00:15:54.040 Oh, hey, idiot. 1.00

00:15:54.900 What do you think is going on? 1.00

00:15:56.040 And then he just gives his political opinion.

00:15:58.460 And people are like, yeah, that makes sense.

00:16:00.540 And I'm sitting back going, you guys have no idea what you're listening to.

00:16:03.860 You're talking about just from having some experience in the military.

00:16:07.560 You know, I'm no general, no strategist.

00:16:09.700 But it's a point of view that I'm just I'm realizing people just don't have it.

00:16:13.840 That's kind of why I'm here.

00:16:14.720 But now on the ground, here's the thing, Putin exists in a vacuum to some degree. 0.98

00:16:21.140 He's not stupid. 0.96

00:16:23.480 He's not suicidal. 0.98

00:16:25.160 He actually is a bit calculated, but he's in his his his problem is he has his own disinformation

00:16:30.720 because he runs in an oligarchy.

00:16:34.240 Right.

00:16:34.640 It's people aren't going to tell him he's wrong.

00:16:37.080 People aren't going to tell him, hey, you know what?

00:16:39.660 This is a bad idea.

00:16:40.660 You should do this or whatever.

00:16:42.400 And that's a problem.

00:16:44.120 So he makes a lot of assumptions.

00:16:46.700 And this has been a problem with Russia for a lot.

00:16:50.480 And back to the USSR days is they run a propaganda campaign and then they believe their own propaganda. 0.85

00:16:57.340 It's like a guy who gets on the Internet, puts on a personality, and then he believes his own craziness that he's saying on the Internet.

00:17:03.460 And this is just what ends up happening.

00:17:05.440 So, like, I think he believed the BS that he was putting out to a degree because people were, you know, he's in a vacuum where people are telling him, oh, yeah, absolutely, because they don't want to go against him because that's going to be consequences for them.

00:17:20.920 Right.

00:17:21.620 And so that's the problem.

00:17:23.620 And so when he went into Russia, I don't know if it was like he didn't intend, but I think he thought that it would be easier than it is.

00:17:30.820 You mean the Ukraine?

00:17:33.400 Yeah.

00:17:33.880 Yeah.

00:17:34.520 Did you guys see Putin's speech?

00:17:36.940 I think it was titled Empire of Lies.

00:17:38.620 Did you see the translation to it?

00:17:41.320 Yeah.

00:17:41.760 So here's the thing on motivations there.

00:17:44.180 Like, I'm going to try to look at this unbiased and understand just like I'm here with Tim on this one.

00:17:49.840 I'm not justifying anything when I say a motivation.

00:17:53.600 But, okay, Russia has $1.5 trillion GDP with two resources to trade, and then that's it.

00:18:01.920 It's the same size GDP as Spain, basically, just for perspective, just so you guys understand.

00:18:07.120 And Russia's a massive country.

00:18:08.580 GDP is the size of Spain.

00:18:10.520 Right.

00:18:11.200 And they have like 100, I think it's 100 and 88 or 80 million people.

00:18:17.920 So they're less than us, but more landmass.

00:18:21.140 And interestingly, too, sorry to keep chiming in because I have so much information that I've consumed over the last week.

00:18:26.460 But Russia lost half of its population in 1991 when it broke apart.

00:18:31.940 So all of those breakaway states, I can't remember the total count, but all of those breakaway states,

00:18:36.400 amounted to Russia losing half of its population.

00:18:39.560 Sorry, Gary.

00:18:40.680 No, no, yeah.

00:18:41.440 So they're not a wealthy country.

00:18:45.340 They're poor.

00:18:45.980 They have a lot of landmass.

00:18:48.260 Land rich.

00:18:48.660 They do have a lot of people.

00:18:50.720 And like our GDP is, you know, United States is 21 trillion, you know, or yeah, 21, sorry.

00:19:00.780 Yeah, 21 trillion or 21 trillion, whereas theirs is 1.5.

00:19:04.520 That's a huge difference.

00:19:06.620 So when they trade, they don't have leverage.

00:19:10.340 That's the thing.

00:19:11.080 They got two government things, which is gas and oil, but they run it through the government.

00:19:16.300 Now, whenever you run something, government versus private sector, it's more inefficient, not profit motivated.

00:19:21.880 So you have a bunch of people who walk away with money and then everybody else stays poor.

00:19:26.480 Military budget, like they have a $60 billion budget, or we have a, like the United States, we just signed in last year, $777 billion budget.

00:19:38.260 So that's big differences here in money and resources.

00:19:42.860 So his motivation is mainly resources.

00:19:47.460 And then he sees, I mean, here's the way they see it, is that NATO and NATO countries fix the trade so that they can't get ahead.

00:19:57.720 It's kind of how they look at it in a way.

00:19:59.880 And that's, and so he sees NATO countries, he sees us, the perception as we're evil because of how we set trade up.

00:20:09.440 So it's a concept of mutual gain.

00:20:12.040 So mutual gain works like this.

00:20:13.700 If I trade with Tim and we both benefit, then everyone's happy and no one tries to fight each other, right?

00:20:19.600 But here's the problem.

00:20:20.520 If I'm trading an iPhone and Tim is trading bags of rice, how many bags of rice is it going to take to pay for this iPhone?

00:20:29.040 You see what I mean?

00:20:30.060 And this is how countries will stay poor in this structure unless they can diversify their economy.

00:20:36.580 There's a lot of people that are like super concerned about Russia, you know, going further than Ukraine.

00:20:44.540 And I don't see that as a problem.

00:20:47.160 Yeah.

00:20:47.440 So what they want to do is restore borders back to like old borders because they don't have.

00:20:53.280 Yeah, I got a slide for that. 0.82

00:20:54.360 Hold on a second.

00:20:55.040 Yeah, they don't have strategic borders.

00:20:56.600 So like they have open space now with all these countries around them where if they take some of these countries, then they can have more natural borders, right?

00:21:05.840 Mountains, rivers, things like that, you know, that would provide for them better security.

00:21:11.860 Because here's the thing.

00:21:12.980 Without economic advantage, they want to use a military advantage to leverage their economic, you know, to try to leverage trade basically, right?

00:21:23.000 Can we just go back to the border thing?

00:21:25.720 Because I put this up on the screen here.

00:21:27.880 So where's my mouse?

00:21:30.320 Does it show up?

00:21:30.760 Yeah, there it is.

00:21:31.200 So most of these countries off here to the east had nothing to do with NATO until very recently.

00:21:38.080 You know, when the Second World War ended, there was a NATO pact sign and then there was a Warsaw Pact.

00:21:46.040 Now, the Warsaw Pact is now changed to the CSTO Pact, I think it's called, guys.

00:21:51.140 Mm-hmm.

00:21:51.460 Yeah.

00:21:52.200 So that's basically Russia, Armenia, Belarus, and I think one or two other countries.

00:21:57.620 There's not a lot.

00:21:58.280 But there's been a lot of ground push easterly with all of these countries over here.

00:22:05.260 I think we've got, that's Belarus.

00:22:08.440 No, that's not Belarus, is it?

00:22:09.680 No, Belarus is over here.

00:22:11.000 That's Poland.

00:22:12.580 And then we've got a few of these other minor countries over here that have all joined NATO.

00:22:16.620 It's been encroaching eastwardly.

00:22:18.660 And there's, I think it's called Article 5 Pact or something like that, where if a NATO country is attacked, then it's essentially, like, you're basically going to declare war on the entirety of NATO at that point.

00:22:34.280 Right, that's right. 0.99

00:22:34.940 Which is, like, stupid. 0.99

00:22:36.260 I mean, I can't see a country like Russia invading a NATO country because they're going to get, I mean, you're going to lose that and badly. 1.00

00:22:45.600 You know, whether you have nukes or not, it doesn't matter.

00:22:47.420 I mean, you're basically going to be on the losing end.

00:22:51.440 So, I mean, like, these borders, like, do you think there's any risk of Russia pushing further westerly?

00:22:57.560 I don't think so.

00:22:58.640 I think that they're going to, I think they want to push into more of an economic gain.

00:23:03.660 And they're using military leverage in order to try to do that, if that makes any sense.

00:23:12.720 And that's, I mean, because I look at motivations, whether you're saying it or not.

00:23:16.500 But it all comes down to money.

00:23:18.800 Like, the reason why we're more popular, or not popular, the reason why we're more powerful than they are is money.

00:23:24.340 That's the reason.

00:23:25.380 You know what I mean?

00:23:26.100 We have a lot more money to throw at a problem than they do.

00:23:29.060 And that's where they lose is money.

00:23:31.380 So, they have to lean on force.

00:23:33.700 And so, back to the invasion part, I think that in that bubble, they thought that they were going to kind of go in and easily start to take those cities and then place a, you know, overthrow the government, place a puppet government.

00:23:48.940 I mean, I thought that was going to go easy for them.

00:23:51.820 Well, the thing is, NATO tactics and training that we've been giving them and equipment, the little bit of equipment they have from us, is, at least from a tactical perspective, we're better than they are.

00:24:05.800 All right?

00:24:06.100 Just as it's a fact.

00:24:07.320 Okay?

00:24:07.660 Because they're in a bubble training in 1940 Soviet tactics.

00:24:13.520 And so, what happens is they come in, they start losing.

00:24:16.380 Don't the Soviets have a fairly modern army now, though?

00:24:18.440 Like, isn't it on par with, like, NATO type of equipment?

00:24:22.500 Yeah, but tactically speaking, they're not good.

00:24:26.300 And you can tell, because look at how many bodies they're losing. 0.92

00:24:29.720 Look at how much equipment is getting destroyed.

00:24:33.180 And even some of that, some of those numbers may be awful.

00:24:34.800 Putin's pushing in his, like, lower-tier soldiers.

00:24:37.400 Like, this is fodder right now that he's pushing in, from what I understand, right?

00:24:41.280 Well, that's the claim.

00:24:42.340 I think that people give him a little bit too much credit on how smart they think he is militarily.

00:24:49.300 Again, he's, I think, my opinion is that he believes his own propaganda.

00:24:53.300 Like, so when they have a video showing, like, jacked Russian dude recruiting video, jumping out of a plane, like, and, like, makes him look, like, super tough.

00:25:02.840 He believes that.

00:25:04.060 And this goes back, like, really far, where they used to have athletes, and they still do this.

00:25:09.920 They have these pretty much military athletes.

00:25:12.100 Wait, but doesn't, don't all NATO personnel now have pronouns on their badges on their shoulders with rainbows and stuff?

00:25:18.500 Right.

00:25:19.900 It's getting there, though.

00:25:21.100 It's getting close.

00:25:22.260 We're a little, yeah.

00:25:23.340 And they do, they are physically tough people.

00:25:26.440 I'm not saying Russians aren't tough.

00:25:27.540 It's just that.

00:25:28.460 But it's, like, what they'll do is they'll have these guys doing backflips and throwing hatchets.

00:25:33.360 Yeah, we've all seen the promo reels.

00:25:34.980 Yeah, they're, like, scissors.

00:25:35.560 Right, you know, and it's, and the thing is, though, these guys that are, it's just, like, the guys in our Pentagon or guys, they're not, they don't know what, you know, shoot, move, and communicate looks like.

00:25:47.700 Right?

00:25:48.060 So, like, if you have a bunch of people doing a bunch of acrobats, the batik stuff, and putting on a show, it's, like, they don't know the difference.

00:25:54.800 Like, do you think that a guy who's got moved himself into a position in government knows the difference between, you know, these guys doing a bunch of, you know, doing a show versus what is actually tactically good?

00:26:08.520 No, they really don't.

00:26:09.280 And so this is what ends up happening is, is they end up buying into their own propaganda because they're not, they don't vet like we do.

00:26:18.800 Like, so in the United States, how it should work, although there is a bit of politicking, is there's a level of, you know, challenging, you know, saying, hey, that's not the way it is.

00:26:30.740 Like, asking a general, and the general says, no, that's not the way it is.

00:26:34.540 And why?

00:26:34.960 Because the general talked to other commanders who have talked to other commanders, you know, and they're all giving them this feedback saying, hey, here's what we need.

00:26:44.060 Here's what we don't need.

00:26:44.900 Here's what works tactically.

00:26:46.340 We run war games where we challenge ourselves in the game, not trying to put on a show.

00:26:52.800 Right? 1.00

00:26:53.020 We, we, and we, when we run these war games, like we have stupid things happen constantly, like we're idiots, you know, and we're like, God, how are we so stupid, right? 0.98

00:27:02.000 And like, we're really hard on ourselves and how dumb we are in the, when we run things that like JRTC and different, like, you know, NTC training center and how dumb some of these missions turn out. 0.98

00:27:13.300 We're like, God, what's wrong with us? 0.96

00:27:15.100 But that's good though, because we're, it's like going into jujitsu practice and getting the crap kicked out of you and go, man, I can't believe that happened to me.

00:27:22.120 Let me, let me figure out what to do better.

00:27:24.620 They, there's a lack of that over there because of their propaganda stuff.

00:27:29.060 I mean, I'm not saying they'd never train or whatever, but if you're, if you're training in all these things that don't matter for combat, then you're not, you're not putting your resources and training into things that do matter for combat, which is shoot, move and communicate.

00:27:42.840 And so we're just better than they are because of that.

00:27:45.500 It's just simply like difference between learning how to do acrobatics and, you know, fighting for Hollywood or something, and then going and rolling around on the ground or boxing in a real jujitsu class or boxing class and getting beat up, you know?

00:28:00.300 Got it.

00:28:00.860 Got it.

00:28:01.300 Right.

00:28:01.580 Tim, I want to, I want to throw this back up again.

00:28:04.260 I mean, do you have any concerns with, you know, Putin coming, knocking on your door in the UK or like pushing into any of these other European countries over here, touching NATO?

00:28:12.180 Like, do you think that's an issue?

00:28:13.760 Well, seeing as we, I think most, most property in London is owned by Russians at the moment.

00:28:18.060 So we always have that.

00:28:18.840 I don't know whether they're going to, they're probably already here.

00:28:21.940 It was interesting what Paul's saying.

00:28:23.160 You have to remember NATO is a defensive pact.

00:28:25.620 It's not supposed to be an aggressive pact.

00:28:27.120 So if a country was to go and invade another country, it's not like NATO is going to pile in behind them.

00:28:31.220 It doesn't work like that.

00:28:32.040 It's a non-aggression pact.

00:28:33.620 You have to remember as well that when, back in the early 90s, I think it was, when the USSR, the Soviet Union, in fact, sort of disintegrated and they had breakaway.

00:28:42.180 So I think there was a lot of nuclear weapons left within, I believe it was Kazakhstan, Belarusia, and I believe it was also Ukraine.

00:28:49.040 Ukraine apparently had one of the largest stockpiles too, yeah.

00:28:51.440 That's right.

00:28:51.980 And so part of the non-proliferation, the nuclear non-proliferation treaty, I believe, back in 94 was to make sure those weapons went back to Russia.

00:28:58.780 And Russia, when that treaty was signed, part of it was making sure that those countries were recognized by Russia and represented on the UN Security Council, which they are, of course.

00:29:07.580 So when Putin now has gone into Ukraine, he has actually gone into what is a sovereign state.

00:29:12.380 I think that's the issue.

00:29:13.360 I don't think he ever meant to literally go in and do that.

00:29:15.640 I think he meant to go in, like, annexed like he did with Crimea. 0.69

00:29:18.480 He wanted to take a segment off the eastern side.

00:29:20.340 That would have been fine.

00:29:21.740 But there was an opportunity there.

00:29:22.860 And I think he's just gone all in.

00:29:24.260 I think it was a tactical error.

00:29:25.860 It's just what Paul says.

00:29:26.640 And he's absolutely right what Paul says.

00:29:27.780 It's not just the tactics, though, Paul.

00:29:29.520 And I fully appreciate that.

00:29:30.760 And there are some exceptional units within Russia, not so much like the bot farms and things like this.

00:29:34.640 Yeah, yeah.

00:29:35.600 You know, these things are exceptionally innovative and they do great damage and fair play to them.

00:29:39.820 They're going to be wrong.

00:29:40.480 But it's the equipment.

00:29:41.400 What we're finding, I saw a Pantsir S1 that was a superb piece of a surface-to-air missile system that I was a specialist in in the Air Force.

00:29:50.020 And it was stuck in the mud and it was captured.

00:29:51.800 I remember thinking I would do anything to have a look around that thing.

00:29:54.660 It was an absolute, to grab hold of that and to take that off the battlefield and to take it apart.

00:29:59.360 And there's been some superb things that have been captured.

00:30:01.680 I've seen throwing petrol bombs at some stuff and me saying, no, don't burn it.

00:30:04.660 Don't burn it.

00:30:05.120 Keep these things.

00:30:05.740 Keep it.

00:30:06.080 You know, they're occupied.

00:30:07.500 They've been left alone.

00:30:08.160 Capture them.

00:30:08.760 Get a tractor.

00:30:09.620 Get a farmer.

00:30:10.220 Let's tow these things so we can re-engineer this stuff.

00:30:12.180 Because I'm very interested in this stuff.

00:30:14.440 Now, the reason that these things get captured is because they don't have the ability to move off-road at the moment because the levels of maintenance that were required have just not happened.

00:30:22.800 So the tires have degraded.

00:30:24.620 Sunlight will degrade tires or inactivity.

00:30:26.240 And when they take these vehicles that weigh, you know, tons off-road, the tires get stuck in the mud.

00:30:31.060 We know the mud's a problem anyway.

00:30:32.240 It's a problem for any conflict.

00:30:34.220 And the tires come apart.

00:30:35.620 They separate.

00:30:36.380 And then the vehicle is immobile.

00:30:37.620 Now, what you would have, of course, and Paul's more into this than I am, you have a logistics chain that's following up.

00:30:43.240 And the logistics chain would be bringing up and replanning everything.

00:30:46.060 And they don't have that.

00:30:47.180 And there's two reasons they don't have that.

00:30:48.360 Because, one, they didn't expect this to actually go in towards Kiev.

00:30:50.720 They thought it was going to stay in eastern regions where they could easily resupply.

00:30:53.500 And the second thing, they probably didn't realize how badly engineered these vehicles or maintained the vehicles were because they're senior commanders.

00:31:00.020 Because of a lack of truth to power, which is exactly what Paul's speaking about in a Western military, there is the ability to speak truth to power.

00:31:05.880 You can literally say to a general, general is actually a bit worse down than you think it is.

00:31:10.060 And the general will turn around and go and have a smoke with you or something or just have a chat and go, well, I'm interested.

00:31:14.500 Tell me.

00:31:14.900 And, you know, a lot of it, people will say you're bleating.

00:31:17.360 But actually, the general is interested.

00:31:19.380 In Russia, it doesn't work like that.

00:31:20.800 When a foreign defense company is piling money in to supply tires to this brigade, there's every chance that the senior commander in Russia is sort of backhanding that a little bit out to the boys and everything, or to himself and a bit of senior commanders.

00:31:32.540 And the money isn't actually being spent on tires.

00:31:34.060 As opposed to having a two-year interval where you may replace all the tires and vehicles, he's probably like, well, let's do a four-year.

00:31:40.300 Nothing's going to happen anyway.

00:31:41.440 We haven't used these vehicles for the last decade.

00:31:43.140 And now, when we do need to use them, and he has promised Putin and the commander that everything is, you know, everything is great, it's not just the tires.

00:31:50.700 It's the rubber seals in the engine.

00:31:51.960 It's the tire inflation units.

00:31:53.160 It's everything else within the vehicle that's being degraded as well.

00:31:55.420 So, I mean, like, as far as you guys are concerned, you're suggesting that Russian military equipment is poorly maintained, organized, supply lines are nowhere near as good as NATO supply lines.

00:32:06.480 Oh, let's talk about logistics for a minute.

00:32:08.160 So, yeah, that's another thing, too.

00:32:09.940 Again, it goes back to being able to falsify data and being able to, you know, challenge power, truth of power, as Tim says.

00:32:18.580 It's like we run training exercises.

00:32:21.960 A big concern in the training exercise, to the annoyance of a lot of the infantry guys on the ground who just want to run around and shoot at each other, is logistics and logistical support and getting people challenged on how they're going to support things logistically.

00:32:36.200 And then there's also the money aspect.

00:32:37.840 Look, they have, you know, let's look at, again, $60 trillion budget versus $777 trillion budget, right, for military.

00:32:47.100 So, when we go in with our, not only our tactics and equipment, but money, let's look at Iraq or something or Afghanistan, we're setting up logistical support behind those Ford guys that are going in.

00:33:00.760 Those vehicles require fuel.

00:33:02.760 Those vehicles require maintenance.

00:33:04.480 Even our stuff, which may be better maintained, arguably, still breaks down, still turns into a, you know, into a pile of trash if you don't maintain it.

00:33:14.280 I mean, literally, between runs and going out in the field, you're going into a maintenance section and you're fixing something in a vehicle.

00:33:23.280 And to not have that, that's how you have these vehicles just, whoops, my tank broke down and now a farmer is going to run off with it, right?

00:33:30.500 And so, they're running out of fuel, food, they can't maintain things.

00:33:34.600 I think they thought that they would just take the infrastructure in Ukraine easily and then they would use that infrastructure, which is why they didn't.

00:33:42.220 Well, they're preserving it.

00:33:43.140 That's for sure, though, right?

00:33:44.840 Right.

00:33:45.280 And so, because they want that, they want to own Ukraine either through a puppet government or if they have to, own it themselves to capitalize on the resources there to reestablish boundaries.

00:33:55.740 Do you guys think that a puppet government would work in the Ukraine?

00:33:58.660 Because in 2014, when Russia went for Crimea, they had a big uprising.

00:34:03.660 They threw out the Russian puppet government.

00:34:05.880 Like, it doesn't seem like they're going to fall for that again.

00:34:10.000 I'm going to say this, like, and this is what I experienced, although Poland's not Ukraine and, you know, and everything.

00:34:16.520 I had the opportunity to go to Ukraine to do training missions when I got back from Afghanistan on my last trip.

00:34:24.420 This would have been in 2020.

00:34:26.120 I chose not to go on that trip.

00:34:28.620 But I've been to Poland for a little bit and trained those guys, worked with those guys.

00:34:32.820 I have this, you know, I mean, I know I'm American, right, or whatever, but, like, they're more American, okay, than our own people in the United States are in the sense of the belief in, like, wanting freedom and opportunity and economic opportunity and democracy and a representative government.

00:34:53.720 Like, all of those things, they value that so much.

00:34:57.120 We got dum-dums here in the United States that don't know how good they have it to live in a free country. 1.00

00:35:03.620 You know, when they go on and show up to some protests, they don't realize how good they have it that they're allowed to do that.

00:35:09.760 You know, I say allowed, but that they're not getting, you know, rolled up and disappearing in a gulag somewhere or killed in the streets necessarily, right?

00:35:18.800 And so we don't appreciate, at least here in the United States, how free we actually are, even with problems that we do have in our own government.

00:35:27.960 And they do appreciate that in places like Poland and, from what I understand, Ukraine.

00:35:33.740 They want their economic freedom.

00:35:36.520 They do not want to be owned by an oligarchy.

00:35:38.680 They will, there's people in Ukraine that will fight that till, to the death.

00:35:44.960 I mean, if they have to.

00:35:45.920 So that's not an option.

00:35:46.860 And they'll continue to.

00:35:47.380 Yeah.

00:35:47.840 No way.

00:35:49.140 What you're looking at is an insurgency, just like we saw in Iraq or Afghanistan for 10, 20 years.

00:35:55.060 You know, if they own it.

00:35:56.820 That's not good for anybody.

00:35:57.600 Not good for anybody.

00:35:58.300 Well, you know what?

00:35:59.000 Here's the sad part.

00:36:00.200 And this is where, a little bit critical of, you know, the NATO thing, right?

00:36:04.280 In my own, even my own, my own government, in a sense, is that we'll let that happen.

00:36:09.480 You know, we don't, we don't care in a way.

00:36:11.360 We'll let them, we'll let a proxy war happen in another country.

00:36:15.300 Well, wouldn't that be an advantage to NATO countries?

00:36:17.360 Because it'll tie up Russia's attention and resources. 0.73

00:36:20.460 That's what it is.

00:36:21.400 Right.

00:36:21.620 So they would ideally want to facilitate that, wouldn't they?

00:36:25.100 Well, it's not like they're going to, I mean, it'd be better if we had Ukraine and sort of add them as an ally and stuff.

00:36:32.180 But it's not, it's a failing that, you know, keeping Russia busy with Ukraine's insurgencies is good too. 0.71

00:36:37.180 Exactly. That's what I mean.

00:36:37.560 That's a secondary plan.

00:36:39.280 Yeah, exactly.

00:36:40.300 Because why, we're not going to, we're not going to just throw our resources into that country to save them necessarily if we can keep a proxy war going.

00:36:50.500 And that's the sad thing about it because we make, this is what makes me angry a bit about our politicians here, is that, you know, we make promises and that we do not keep our promises.

00:37:01.020 And so with our current regime, they do it all the time though, you know, and, and the current leadership right now, that is unfortunately what the way it is.

00:37:12.180 And it's not Afghanistan, unfortunately.

00:37:14.100 Okay.

00:37:14.300 So, so I've got a clip here.

00:37:15.740 I want to get some commentary back from Tim and Paul on this one.

00:37:20.580 It's a retired U.S. Army Colonel Douglas McGregor.

00:37:24.260 He went on the news and he told the truth about what led up to the Russia-Ukraine conflict and why it happened.

00:37:29.940 So let me just throw this up on the screen.

00:37:31.420 Let me know if you guys can't hear this.

00:37:34.100 Let me just hit play here.

00:37:35.980 And here is Colonel Doug McGregor, a former senior advisor to the Secretary of Defense.

00:37:40.740 Thank you for joining us.

00:37:42.840 Why do you think Putin is doing this?

00:37:45.600 What is his end game?

00:37:46.840 Well, Vladimir Putin is carrying through on something that he's been warning us about, at least for the last 15 years, which is that he will not tolerate U.S. forces or their missiles on his borders.

00:38:00.660 Much as we would not tolerate Russian troops and missiles in Cuba.

00:38:05.680 And we ignored him and he finally acted.

00:38:08.380 He was not going to allow Ukraine under any circumstances to join NATO.

00:38:13.160 What's happened now is that the battle in eastern Ukraine is really almost over.

00:38:18.280 All the Ukrainian troops there have been largely surrounded and cut off.

00:38:22.640 You have a concentration down in the southeast of 30,000 to 40,000 of them.

00:38:26.540 And if they don't surrender within the next 24 hours, I suspect that the Russians will ultimately annihilate them. 0.93

00:38:33.220 That's why Zelensky is meeting with Putin's representatives right now.

00:38:37.860 The game is over.

00:38:39.360 And he's going to have to negotiate the best deal he can get.

00:38:42.580 And we've already told him, the president of the United States has, that if he opts for neutrality for Ukraine, we'll back him.

00:38:49.240 And I think that Vladimir Putin will do that for western Ukraine.

00:38:52.960 That is Ukraine beyond the Yemper River.

00:38:56.540 But behind it in the east, where he is now, I'm not sure what he has planned there.

00:39:00.360 Whether he forms another republic, annexes it into Russia, because historically it has been Russian.

00:39:06.580 But the territory west of Ukraine is not.

00:39:09.280 He knows that.

00:39:10.180 And he's happy to live with that as a neutral state.

00:39:14.220 I am not a military expert.

00:39:16.000 I'm not even an expert on geography.

00:39:17.560 But if he takes Ukraine and Ukraine abuts Poland, then he's going to have a NATO country abutting him.

00:39:25.120 So if that's what he doesn't want, then isn't he going to just have to keep going until he runs out of NATO countries?

00:39:31.100 I guess I should say it again.

00:39:34.560 He has no interest in crossing the West, the damper, and heading west to the Polish border. 0.99

00:39:41.280 So, Tim, like, what are your thoughts on that clip?

00:39:43.560 Yeah, that's what I was saying at the beginning.

00:39:44.580 I want to reach, like, if he'd stopped with the eastern states.

00:39:46.980 One of the things we have to, and I think that's what you want to do, stop with the eastern states.

00:39:50.720 I'm just going to take those.

00:39:52.240 I'm going to annex these things.

00:39:53.400 I'm happy.

00:39:54.340 The thing about it is, I mean, the Monroe Doctrine, when was that going back to you now?

00:39:57.920 It was after the Second World War.

00:39:58.840 That's what prevented, that's what the Cuban Missile Crisis was about, wasn't it? 0.54

00:40:03.260 It was stopping, if I remember correctly, and don't get me wrong, that could be inaccurate.

00:40:06.620 But that was stopping anyone putting any missile systems or anything on western territory, in effect.

00:40:12.280 That's what Monroe Doctrine said.

00:40:13.900 And, of course, I'm not saying, we tend to be holier now, don't we, in the West,

00:40:18.440 thinking that we're not ever the aggressor, we're always.

00:40:21.200 Yeah, right.

00:40:23.120 And just, like, being economically aggressive is still aggressive.

00:40:26.580 Right.

00:40:27.100 If not more so.

00:40:28.480 I mean, people still die.

00:40:29.480 We just don't, it's not blown apart.

00:40:30.840 They're just, like, not fed, or, you know, this kind of thing.

00:40:33.140 Right.

00:40:33.500 They just die the most horrible deaths.

00:40:35.280 So, you're absolutely right.

00:40:36.820 And I think you have to look at Ukraine, as well, as being the breadbasket of Europe.

00:40:40.060 I mean, the mineral wealth of that country is staggering.

00:40:42.360 I mean, the oil and gas there and everything else is huge.

00:40:44.740 Yes.

00:40:45.140 I'm not saying that's a thing that he's wanting.

00:40:46.800 We've already discussed about the population loss and everything else that he had.

00:40:50.360 But it's a very valuable country.

00:40:52.100 And, of course, all these, I'm not even, see, I'll tell you the whole thing about this

00:40:55.560 that I find quite interesting.

00:40:56.620 You become almost like a Putin apologist by accident.

00:41:00.740 And we're not.

00:41:01.540 We're just trying to be rational about it.

00:41:02.960 We're just trying to say, look, if you're going to be the aggressor the whole time,

00:41:05.380 you're going to get, it's like in the playground, you walk around, punch people in the face.

00:41:08.540 At some point, someone's going to punch you back.

00:41:10.520 If you take it from the Russian perspective, and you look at Syria and Libya,

00:41:13.520 and you look at Iraq, and you literally sit back there, and I know he was supportive

00:41:17.280 in certain actions within those conflicts.

00:41:20.920 You know, we stepped, I remember when I was stepping into Iraq for the,

00:41:23.960 I only went in on the 2003 through 2007 bit.

00:41:27.720 And I remember we had a lawyer come to the, we were operating on an old UN mandate,

00:41:31.240 and the lawyer came to the squadron and said, if you drop any weapons, and I never did,

00:41:34.380 and I'm very fortunate I didn't, taught many people to do that, but I never did it myself.

00:41:37.520 If you do drop, your actions are indefensible currently under the mandate we have.

00:41:42.240 And that's what we were told before we went out there, one of the first ones in Iraq.

00:41:45.340 I mean, how hostile is that as an aggressive actor,

00:41:47.360 it's to go into these countries and to think that we know better than they do?

00:41:51.720 Yeah.

00:41:52.520 Paul, go ahead.

00:41:53.760 Oh, well, yeah.

00:41:55.800 So, I mean, that assessment's pretty good,

00:41:58.820 because he does want to restore old borders

00:42:02.560 because of natural geographical, like the river, for example.

00:42:07.260 If you start looking at where the old borders were,

00:42:09.300 there were natural geographical, you know, defense mechanisms,

00:42:15.120 body of water, you know, some, you know, elevation or whatever,

00:42:19.480 mountain type thing, like whatever.

00:42:21.060 And I'm not really great on the geography, but if you start going through it,

00:42:23.920 that's what you'll see.

00:42:24.800 And the new borders leave basically open territory

00:42:28.360 that they don't have the resources or manpower to protect.

00:42:32.040 And so that's part of it.

00:42:34.120 And then, yeah, he's saying, I don't want missiles,

00:42:38.000 but we're not necessarily pushing to do that.

00:42:42.320 It's, again, goes back to the way that they view the world is

00:42:47.220 these guys are economically aggressive

00:42:50.500 and we're a poor country because of them.

00:42:53.380 And therefore, we need to use military leverage

00:42:56.700 in order to negotiate these things.

00:42:59.400 You know, they need to have negotiating power

00:43:01.360 with the prices of their resources because of that.

00:43:05.240 They don't understand.

00:43:06.400 They don't think like we do as capitalists,

00:43:09.000 which is, okay, let's let's let free market diversify an economy

00:43:15.060 so we're not just trading two things.

00:43:17.940 You know what I mean?

00:43:18.600 Let's let's let's work trade deals and let's have a diverse economy

00:43:22.740 because that's how you climb out of a financial hole.

00:43:25.760 They don't see it that way.

00:43:27.520 And case in point is the government runs their two, their companies,

00:43:32.240 the major companies, the government just runs it.

00:43:34.700 So they're not, they don't, they don't understand free market,

00:43:37.660 free enterprise, or at least they don't respect it like we do

00:43:40.300 because the people in power benefit from not having it that way to a degree.

00:43:44.840 Right.

00:43:45.220 Because they take that money.

00:43:46.660 And so they're not understanding, like, well,

00:43:48.780 we can get out of economic poverty this way and be better trade partners

00:43:54.180 the way that their ideology is.

00:43:56.240 Well, we need to, they're thinking just in terms of force and territory

00:44:00.020 and land space and people, you know, and then, hey,

00:44:04.540 we can just say Ukrainian sovereignty really doesn't exist.

00:44:07.880 We'll make that up now, even though, of course,

00:44:09.800 obviously the Ukrainians are very motivated to not be owned by Russia.

00:44:13.960 But they'll, they'll just say that that's part of the campaign

00:44:16.900 and try to move those borders back, fight for something called

00:44:21.140 a divisibility of security, which means that, you know,

00:44:24.120 we keep things even and we don't put weapons on each other's borders

00:44:27.480 and, and to halt NATO because NATO expansion means they lose military leverage,

00:44:33.220 which means then they lose the, any kind of economic leverage that they have,

00:44:37.060 which isn't very much.

00:44:38.340 Does that make sense?

00:44:39.560 Yeah.

00:44:40.100 Yeah.

00:44:40.360 Um, here, let me get these super chats and I got another clip.

00:44:42.580 I want to get some feedback from you guys on a competent man.

00:44:44.980 It's talking about article five mutual defense.

00:44:47.020 Yeah.

00:44:47.340 Um, so we covered that, uh, revenge imperialism.

00:44:51.260 That's what it is.

00:44:52.880 Steve says, just looking to get the band back together again.

00:44:56.000 Part of it.

00:44:56.600 Yeah.

00:44:57.760 Uh, 22 Ruskies reunion to our shirt on sale.

00:45:00.460 Uh, okay.

00:45:02.160 So I've got it.

00:45:02.800 I've got this other clip here and I think this guy's an analyst or a professor,

00:45:05.880 if I'm not mistaken.

00:45:06.740 Let me just throw it up on a screen.

00:45:07.920 And this is, uh, from March 1st.

00:45:09.600 So some of this stuff is slightly dated, but again, uh, tell me if you guys can't hear

00:45:13.680 this, I can switch over, but, uh, which one is this here on my tabs?

00:45:19.420 Uh, this guy.

00:45:21.540 Okay, here we go.

00:45:24.760 Yeah.

00:45:25.080 But I actually think that what's going on here is that the West is leading.

00:45:30.020 By the way, I think this clip here is from 2014, 15.

00:45:33.060 Yeah, it's back from that Ukraine down the primrose path. 1.00

00:45:37.020 And the end result is that Ukraine is going to get wrecked. 0.91

00:45:41.780 And I believe that the policy that I'm advocating, which is neutralizing Ukraine and then building 1.00

00:45:47.200 it up economically and getting it out of the competition between Russia on one side and

00:45:51.260 NATO on the other side is the best thing that could happen to the Ukrainians. 1.00

00:45:54.060 What we're doing is encouraging the Ukrainians to play tough with the Russians. 1.00

00:45:59.520 We're encouraging the Ukrainians to think that they will ultimately become part of the West 0.99

00:46:04.900 because we will ultimately defeat Putin and we will ultimately get our way.

00:46:10.160 Time is on our side.

00:46:12.280 And of course, the Ukrainians are playing along with this. 0.99

00:46:14.340 And the Ukrainians are almost completely unwilling to compromise with the Russians and instead 0.81

00:46:19.620 want to pursue a hardline policy.

00:46:21.300 Well, as I said to you before, if they do that, the end result is that their country is going

00:46:25.300 to be wrecked.

00:46:26.440 And what we're doing is, in effect, encouraging that outcome.

00:46:31.020 I think it would make much more sense for us to work to create a neutral Ukraine. 0.67

00:46:37.040 It would be in our interest to bury this crisis as quickly as possible.

00:46:40.480 It certainly would be in Russia's interest to do so.

00:46:42.940 And most importantly, it would be in Ukraine's interest to put an end to the crisis.

00:46:47.220 Thank you.

00:46:49.680 Thoughts on that, Tim?

00:46:51.300 Yeah, his actual speech is about an hour, 40, no, hour, 15 minutes long.

00:46:56.860 It's worth watching the whole thing.

00:46:59.800 There's a couple of experts that have come out.

00:47:01.200 Obviously, three experts are here, right?

00:47:02.920 You know, we could just be guys sat around a chicken wing bar, couldn't we, being experts

00:47:06.500 and stuff with a few beers.

00:47:08.160 But there's other experts, apparently, that have studied their whole life who reckon they

00:47:11.580 know better than us.

00:47:12.440 You know how that is.

00:47:12.980 I hope so.

00:47:15.540 Hopefully, there are.

00:47:16.280 I hope so, yeah.

00:47:17.660 If we're in charge, it'd be a lot worse than this.

00:47:20.440 Probably a lot more fun.

00:47:21.440 But yeah, so that guy is worth watching, Ian.

00:47:23.400 And I can't remember his name.

00:47:25.160 He's a pretty decent dude.

00:47:26.480 Pretty worth finding out, Rich.

00:47:27.700 We'll put a link in the description here.

00:47:29.260 Because he does explain how the West kind of led to this, really.

00:47:32.820 And I can kind of see that.

00:47:34.020 Oh, it's interesting as well.

00:47:35.020 And I know we're going to probably get onto it at some point, Rich.

00:47:36.760 But the weakness or the perceived weakness of someone like the perceived weakness of the

00:47:42.340 West by someone like Putin, of course, who is trying to restore the USSR to pre-Yeltsin 0.88

00:47:48.160 days.

00:47:48.680 And that's going back.

00:47:50.200 I think he's always hung up on the fact that the strength he felt was a superpower, wasn't

00:47:54.220 it, when it was the USSR?

00:47:54.960 There's only two superpowers in the world, of which he was one.

00:47:56.680 And now he's not really a superpower, either by GDP or anything else, or military might.

00:48:00.280 It's embarrassing for him what's happening right now, of course.

00:48:02.260 But it hasn't just happened very quickly.

00:48:04.100 It hasn't been a Blitzkrieg.

00:48:05.240 He's in Kiev and he's stalling power.

00:48:07.040 It hasn't happened.

00:48:08.100 And I think he's very, an ego like that is very delicate and very wounded.

00:48:12.720 You know, the West is very good at promising people, as Paul was saying earlier, a lot of

00:48:16.020 things.

00:48:16.420 And then they're not delivering.

00:48:18.400 Things happen.

00:48:19.160 We have governments that last for three years, for example.

00:48:21.600 How long has Putin been in power for now?

00:48:23.240 I have to go back and try and work that one out.

00:48:25.420 He's one of the longest standing people in power, I think.

00:48:29.120 There's a video clip somewhere of him with every American president, like since George

00:48:34.760 Bush, I think one or two.

00:48:36.260 Must have been.

00:48:37.180 Yeah.

00:48:37.560 There was Mediev, wasn't he?

00:48:38.480 He swapped positions with Mediev, didn't he?

00:48:39.740 And then swapped back again after he changed the constitution to allow him to stay in further.

00:48:42.740 So he has been part of that infrastructure, I suppose, Yeltsin, for many, many years.

00:48:46.040 And of course, a guy like that who feels he is probably, you know, the father of Russia

00:48:50.640 and he's rebuilding it in the image, the czarist imperialism, as it probably used to

00:48:54.660 be.

00:48:54.800 And he has talked about that in the past, of course, quite considerably.

00:48:57.520 You can understand that for him, it doesn't seem like he's doing anything aggressive.

00:49:01.960 He's just trying to reestablishing the borders that worked when the country was great.

00:49:07.520 And of course, it's almost a kind of, it's kind of, it's almost understanding for a historian.

00:49:14.400 I think David Starkey was saying something very similar to this.

00:49:16.900 A British historian we have was saying something very similar.

00:49:19.060 It's understandable.

00:49:20.500 Just for us, wrapped up in our very short-term Western ways, we see it as a supreme act of

00:49:26.320 aggression against the sovereign straight, which of course it is.

00:49:28.740 But how far historically do you want to go back?

00:49:31.240 You know, how far do we go back?

00:49:32.940 Well, that's always the argument though.

00:49:35.900 And I, and that they like to make any of the, any, any of these sort of dictators to like

00:49:42.100 to make when they invade someone is like, well, a hundred years ago, it was like this.

00:49:47.100 So we're going to go in now and take it back.

00:49:49.580 Like, Hey man, it's not a hundred years ago.

00:49:52.020 We're now, and now Ukraine is a sovereign nation with people and families that are running

00:49:58.420 their own system.

00:49:59.200 You don't just go in there and take their stuff because even 2030, whatever old Soviet 1.00

00:50:05.980 union, you know, how many years ago, a few decades ago, it was different back then.

00:50:10.200 Like, you know, that's like your girlfriend breaks up with you and remarries and you kick

00:50:14.100 the door in and you grab her and take her back. 1.00

00:50:16.340 Cause 2010 years ago, we were in a relationship and coming with me, you know, like, it's like,

00:50:21.440 that's not reality or where we're at now, but we know that, but that's, that's the argument

00:50:26.280 they like to present before we have to look at this in a context as well.

00:50:29.700 I mean, my house is, my house is older than your entire country.

00:50:32.120 I'm not being funny.

00:50:33.280 It was built in 1500.

00:50:34.280 I mean, you know, don't get me wrong.

00:50:35.840 You know, it's my grandma's older than America, but you know, from his context, Russia is foundational.

00:50:41.620 It goes back and back and back.

00:50:42.940 There's a huge amount of his history there.

00:50:44.760 And of course he sees the imbalance.

00:50:46.560 He sees the naivety of America and I'm not saying that at all, don't get wrong, but he looks

00:50:50.680 at it very differently than how we look at it and it's, it's just, I think, I think if

00:50:55.920 we were in his position, we'd be looking at it going, what's going wrong here?

00:50:58.880 You can literally see, I think he did a conference with the oligarchs in here after this, and

00:51:02.760 you can see it sitting there and every other conference, I believe after that, his voice

00:51:06.280 wasn't used.

00:51:06.900 It was a, it was a narrator, but that particular one, you can find it.

00:51:10.060 The conference with the oligarchs post the, the invasion, he sat there and his voice was

00:51:13.840 fragile and he realized, I think he pushed the bad position.

00:51:16.720 He just crashed the economy 30%.

00:51:18.400 And this dude sitting next to people where he realizes all of a sudden, he's not the

00:51:22.000 biggest dog in the pound anymore. 0.66

00:51:23.460 There's people there that could kill him.

00:51:24.740 Like there are literally very wealthy people and he's just destroyed their hereditary wealth.

00:51:28.820 It's like, this is familial wealth he's got rid of now.

00:51:31.140 And they're going to have to rebuild this.

00:51:32.300 And they're looking at him.

00:51:33.040 You see the stairs.

00:51:34.260 They're like, what did you do that for?

00:51:36.180 Like, what was that about?

00:51:37.180 And of course they know it's about ego and everything else.

00:51:40.140 And as far as they can say, they just want to make sure their wife gets down to Croatia for

00:51:43.260 a holiday and she's giving him stick now.

00:51:44.680 So it's a, it's a very difficult thing, but you know.

00:51:48.980 Oh no.

00:51:49.480 Yeah.

00:51:49.760 You're well, and that's, you make a great point there, Tim, is that there we're dealing with

00:51:53.480 fundamentally different ways of looking at the world here.

00:51:56.740 And that's something to always keep in mind and try to try to see it from the other person's

00:52:02.280 perspective so that we can figure out the best strategy.

00:52:05.820 If we're in a position, I'm not positioned to figure out anything other than my, what I'm

00:52:10.560 going to do this afternoon, but if I were in that position, I want to know that perspective.

00:52:16.860 And sometimes I think there's a lack of that.

00:52:19.520 We see it in things like, well, Afghanistan is a great example.

00:52:23.220 The people of Afghanistan and that leadership think different.

00:52:28.140 And we're still human beings.

00:52:29.680 We're more alike than we are different, but there are certain fundamental ways of thinking

00:52:34.840 and ideology that makes us different in how they approach a problem.

00:52:39.720 And so we have to understand that in order to understand, okay, why, what are his motivations?

00:52:44.300 Why is he doing this?

00:52:45.480 And then, well, how can we solve this without using Ukraine as a place to stack bodies? 0.97

00:52:52.480 You know what I mean?

00:52:53.060 How can we do this in a way that we can sort of, you know, everybody kind of gets some sort

00:53:00.420 of win out of it or feels like they are at least, again, without running a proxy war of

00:53:05.940 insurgents out of Ukraine for the next 20 years or whatever.

00:53:10.020 And so, yeah.

00:53:11.000 And so that's, that's the thing.

00:53:11.980 It's really important to ask ourselves these questions.

00:53:14.660 What are these different individuals thinking?

00:53:17.040 Not just what they're saying to try to convince the public, but how do they view the world?

00:53:21.740 You know what I mean?

00:53:22.240 What should guys take on this, you know, notion that Putin's going into to like, you 0.93

00:53:28.740 know, crush the Nazis or punch a Nazi sort of thing?

00:53:30.920 Because there's apparently like these, these photographs that are circling. 0.99

00:53:34.760 I've seen a few of them.

00:53:35.540 I didn't share them on Twitter because I wasn't sure about the origin or, you know, what the

00:53:40.300 reality is.

00:53:40.840 But there's apparently like these groups of like Ukrainians that are using Nazi symbolism.

00:53:46.460 And that's one of the arguments Putin's been using to try to, you know, clear out the

00:53:50.660 fascist, you know, scourge sort of thing.

00:53:53.180 Like, yeah, it's something I think that, you know, he was probably trying to get to

00:53:57.660 resonate with the American public.

00:53:59.560 Yeah.

00:54:00.140 And so that's right.

00:54:00.960 It's propaganda.

00:54:01.760 He's trying to get, you know, that emotional buy-in for people.

00:54:05.080 And he's so disconnected.

00:54:06.360 He's not a Nazi though, right?

00:54:07.920 No, absolutely not.

00:54:09.640 No, no.

00:54:10.760 The guy, I think, I think he is.

00:54:12.980 Tim, you kind of raised an eyebrow when I said that.

00:54:14.580 Again, it's just this information.

00:54:17.140 Okay, so let's define what, what, what Nazism is.

00:54:19.560 Are we still talking about national socialism and the rise from the 30s in Germany, are we?

00:54:22.580 We get people over in the UK here drawing swastikers on walls.

00:54:25.320 I wouldn't have said they were Nazis.

00:54:26.360 I would have said they were just young, disenfranchised men that haven't got any proper parenting. 0.99

00:54:29.920 I mean, I'm not saying there's an instance of one of these people, but how do we define

00:54:32.720 this?

00:54:33.280 How do we quantify?

00:54:34.480 It's a very, and Paul's right.

00:54:35.900 It's like, you can, I'll tell you the funny thing, because you do this to me, Rich, sometimes.

00:54:39.760 You do this to me.

00:54:40.340 And all of a sudden, we're just down the road and rant, but we're not ranting.

00:54:44.360 When you tell so many, when so many lies are told, and if you switch from one lie to another

00:54:48.060 lie to another lie to another lie to another lie, and it happened to me the other day with

00:54:50.500 someone accusing me of some stuff, some troll came on Twitter, and I'm like, hang on, let's 0.90

00:54:53.580 just go back and discuss the first lie you told, which was that I was a racist.

00:54:56.700 Let's go stop.

00:54:57.440 Oh, but now I'm, what, now my wife's having affairs, and now there's, what's that?

00:55:01.460 It's like, how many lies?

00:55:03.280 Before you leave, you just, there's too many.

00:55:05.140 And people will concentrate on the one they want to concentrate on.

00:55:07.640 So people will go, ah, Zelensky, yes, National Socialist, he's a Nazi, let's concentrate, 0.89

00:55:12.380 because that, that's their, that's their bit.

00:55:14.060 Another person will go, well, Ukraine could have, they could have gone into discussions

00:55:17.660 much earlier, and that's the bit, before you know it, the thing is blown wide open.

00:55:20.920 So I struggle to find any kind of, I really kind of struggle to say, well, what is, what

00:55:25.620 are you saying about this, these Nazis in Ukraine?

00:55:28.560 What are they doing?

00:55:29.300 What are they?

00:55:29.940 Who are they challenging?

00:55:30.680 Where it is?

00:55:31.360 It's hard to find that stuff.

00:55:32.660 I remember someone on an Australian program the other day was chucked off the set, because

00:55:36.220 he talked about how the Ukrainian government was killing Russians in Eastern Russia, and

00:55:40.460 he came up with this figure, like 9,000.

00:55:42.280 And the host said, you might be thinking about this for a while now.

00:55:44.900 In fact, I think you should get out.

00:55:46.280 And he chucked this young man out of this Australian talk show.

00:55:49.500 Oh, yeah.

00:55:50.160 Actually, I've got that clip.

00:55:51.560 Let's just, yeah.

00:55:51.860 And I remember thinking, so now we can't, even if the dude was wrong, and he may be wrong,

00:55:56.640 he's a young dude reading some stuff on the internet.

00:55:59.080 We've all been there, whatever.

00:55:59.880 I didn't have the internet when I was a kid, luckily, but let's pretend he's wrong.

00:56:02.820 He's completely wrong.

00:56:04.100 Why would you not say to him, okay, young man, why don't you come down on here on a stage,

00:56:07.460 sit down here, tell us what, tell us your thinking.

00:56:09.320 Where do you define this information?

00:56:10.340 Let's see if we can work out whether it's right or wrong.

00:56:12.280 When did we stop doing that, Rich?

00:56:14.140 When did that stop?

00:56:15.260 Okay, so here's a clip here that you're making reference to.

00:56:18.540 So as someone who comes from the Russian community here in Australia, I've been pretty outraged

00:56:23.180 by the narrative created by our media depicting the Ukraine as the good guy and Russia

00:56:27.900 as the bad guy.

00:56:29.200 Believe it or not, there are a lot of Russians here and around the world that support what

00:56:33.420 Putin is doing in the Ukraine, myself included.

00:56:37.040 Since 2014, the Ukrainian government, together with Nazi groups like the Azov Battalion, have

00:56:42.600 besieged the Russian populations in the Donbass, killing an estimated 13,000 people, according

00:56:49.640 to the United Nations.

00:56:50.860 That's the lie.

00:56:51.960 That's the lie.

00:56:52.980 Could I finish?

00:56:54.080 Just quickly finish and then we'll come to that and put that to the panel.

00:56:57.840 So my question is, you know, where was your outpouring of grief and concern for those thousands

00:57:01.780 of mostly Russians?

00:57:02.980 Oh, goodness.

00:57:03.480 Okay.

00:57:04.480 I have a question earlier about Russia and it's been playing on my mind.

00:57:08.860 And Sasha, people here have been talking about family who are suffering and people are dying.

00:57:17.360 And I understand you wanted to ask you a question about, is there some reasoning for this?

00:57:23.200 But you supported what's happening, hearing that people are dying.

00:57:27.320 And can I just say, I'm just not comfortable with you being here.

00:57:30.920 Could you please there?

00:57:33.740 I've been, it's really, no, Sasha, I'm sorry.

00:57:37.400 You, you, you could ask a question, you could ask a question, but we cannot advocate violence.

00:57:43.000 I should have asked you to leave then.

00:57:44.260 It's been playing on my mind and I'm sorry, but I have to ask you to leave, please.

00:57:48.020 Okay.

00:57:48.420 Well, could I?

00:57:49.040 No, no, no, please, please, please.

00:57:51.160 Just, just, just, just out of respect.

00:57:53.400 He died, Satan died tomorrow. 1.00

00:57:54.960 What the fuck? 1.00

00:57:55.480 He did not do that. 0.99

00:57:56.820 Just, no, please, we're not having the conversation, Sasha.

00:57:59.520 We can't have people advocating violence.

00:58:02.960 And I should have asked you to leave.

00:58:04.680 It's been playing on my mind.

00:58:05.760 I wanted to have a proper conversation about these things, but I have to ask you to leave.

00:58:10.360 I'm really sorry.

00:58:12.040 Okay.

00:58:12.820 I'm sorry for that.

00:58:13.900 But, you know, these things happen.

00:58:15.420 It's live television.

00:58:16.600 You think about these things.

00:58:17.840 It's really been troubling me that we can have a conversation and we can look at where the arguments are.

00:58:24.640 And we can try to look at the sides of the argument.

00:58:28.700 We can't have, have that.

00:58:30.340 And I'm sorry.

00:58:31.120 It should have happened to us.

00:58:31.900 So, I mean, the thing that troubles me about that is you can't have anything that goes against the mainstream narrative.

00:58:39.100 And they're using the same tool out of the toolbox that they use with the beer bug.

00:58:44.180 And it's like, you know, if somebody says, hey, look, I want to wait to take the jab or I want to see what the studies look like or I'm not at risk.

00:58:51.100 You know, for example, anything that's counter mainstream narrative, it's shut up and you go over there and let's get you out of the studio sort of thing.

00:58:58.620 That's what bothers me about that.

00:59:00.020 I'm not taking sides here. 0.97

00:59:01.080 No, so now that I say on this, too, I think, though, a lot of it that that sort of disinformation gets is emotionally motivated because here in the West now we've turned into a bunch of emoting little candy asses. 0.96

00:59:17.180 Can I say that here? 0.94

00:59:18.140 Well, you know what I mean?

00:59:18.700 That's what we are.

00:59:19.820 Right.

00:59:20.020 It's all a bunch of emotions and it's that whole, you know, virtue signaling culture.

00:59:24.920 And so this guy is saying something which I don't you know, he's he's probably wrong in a lot of things he's saying there, but it doesn't matter.

00:59:33.320 He's saying something that goes against the grain.

00:59:35.020 And instead of saying, OK, let's look at that and that's wrong because and bring some other facts to play.

00:59:42.100 It's it's the emotional response.

00:59:44.080 And that's where that censorship comes from.

00:59:46.200 And then people capitalize on that with interests, companies that want you to order more stuff from them.

00:59:52.200 Right.

00:59:52.400 They'll virtue signal or whatever.

00:59:54.200 I'm we're going to cut off, you know, this Russian entertainment or something like that to to get something from you. 1.00

01:00:00.140 So that's how we do it.

01:00:01.460 Whereas these other places like like Russia, it's government controlled propaganda, like more so.

01:00:09.060 You know what I mean?

01:00:09.500 It's like it's like here's our narrative.

01:00:11.260 But isn't that starting to happen with like Western sort of media publications like we just saw there?

01:00:15.940 Like, Tim, like, what do you think, man?

01:00:17.440 Well, that's exactly it.

01:00:18.440 I mean, so one thing I'm obviously spent 20 years in the military.

01:00:22.080 But if you're not honest about stuff with each other, especially then people just die.

01:00:26.200 It's like, as Paul knows, people die.

01:00:27.900 You know, if you don't tell people when you can.

01:00:29.420 If I brought a jet back and I've broken a bit of the jet, whatever, if I didn't tell my engineers, even if I've done it myself, they'll put your hands up and go, I messed something up.

01:00:35.740 Next guy gets in.

01:00:36.560 He's a mate of yours.

01:00:37.220 He goes and flies and he just kills himself because the thing breaks.

01:00:40.140 So we have free speech, whatever it might be.

01:00:42.860 I want to hear more from that young dude.

01:00:44.580 All right.

01:00:45.260 I want to see.

01:00:45.920 OK, buddy, what are you reading?

01:00:47.240 All right.

01:00:47.520 Because if you're reading something that I'm not reading, and if so, you know what, I think the worst thing we ever did was force Alex Jones to go underground.

01:00:54.300 But that dude, you know, when you go back and I'm not saying Alex Jones, you know, whenever you go back and you listen to a lot of stuff that Alex Jones actually said, irrespective of a sounding hook and other things he said were there were atrocious, of course.

01:01:05.100 A lot of things he said actually made a lot of sense.

01:01:06.760 And I've been proven to be correct as well.

01:01:08.440 We force him underground.

01:01:09.460 And our only narrative someone like Alex Jones might have is built up in these kind of these cauldrons that we can't even listen to now.

01:01:15.700 We don't even know what the heck they're saying until Timothy McVeigh comes along and blows up something.

01:01:19.920 So these things, we shouldn't be forcing these people underground.

01:01:22.400 We shouldn't be forcing these people out of studios, especially young people who are influential and are going to be our next leaders.

01:01:27.500 We should be saying, come down here, bring another chair out, get this dude a glass of water, talk about this.

01:01:32.820 I'm going to get a guy having a look at this now.

01:01:34.320 I've got an expert over here and we're going to, we're going to either debunk these theories for you and help you get over them.

01:01:38.220 Or we're going to accept them into the narrative we're talking about and have a balanced conversation.

01:01:41.960 He actually said something like, we're not having this conversation.

01:01:44.300 Did you hear him say that?

01:01:45.000 I think it was like, yeah, we're not having this conversation.

01:01:48.460 Well, he started with the whole emotional thing.

01:01:50.800 Like, I feel like, and anytime you hear like a statement opening with like, I feel like, like that's a very feminized position to, you know, deal with discourse, right?

01:01:59.560 Like, well, I feel like it hurts my feelings.

01:02:01.600 Must be true.

01:02:02.140 Yeah.

01:02:02.660 I mean, come on.

01:02:03.620 Yeah.

01:02:04.740 Guys, I want to take some of these super chats here, but before I do, I just want to pay a few bills and run a sponsor reel.

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01:04:34.720 Let's get on with the show.

01:04:37.340 All right.

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01:04:52.080 Anyway, so back to what we were doing here.

01:04:55.940 Let me just grab these supers. 1.00

01:04:57.440 So we dealt with a Nazi question in Ukraine.

01:05:00.920 Prayers for Coach Red Pill in Ukraine.

01:05:03.240 I did invite Gonzalo to come and join us on this show.

01:05:07.340 He didn't respond after about two days ago, so I don't know if he's okay or what's going on with him.

01:05:12.620 But, you know, some of the things that he said in a few of his streams, and he's a Westerner, an expat on the ground living in the Ukraine.

01:05:21.700 And he was talking about what Zelensky did with these wooden crates of AK-74s distributing to the population.

01:05:30.800 I want to get your guys' thoughts on this because apparently a good chunk of the guys that got their hands on these weapons started to use them to settle scores, you know, between themselves, you know, rivalry sort of stuff.

01:05:40.700 And then there was a good chunk of them as well that figured that they were G.I. Joe with no military training and went after the Russians and apparently got slaughtered.

01:05:48.080 I think his take on it was that he was under the impression that Zelensky wanted to use that as a photo opportunity to sort of be like, hey, world, look, you know, citizens are getting destroyed over here.

01:05:58.640 Look at all these bodies sort of thing.

01:06:00.620 What are your thoughts on that with that whole, like, crate delivery to the population?

01:06:03.500 Because I don't know that that's a good idea or a bad idea.

01:06:05.660 Like, I'm not sure about that one.

01:06:07.520 Good idea.

01:06:08.700 Good idea.

01:06:09.000 But I'm, I mean, coming from the United States, America, pass the guns out, man.

01:06:16.280 We're doing it.

01:06:17.600 Well, I mean, they, they like passed out, you know, like Russian and Chinese made AKs to the Afghanistan population, right? 0.99

01:06:26.040 Like, how did that work out when you guys were in conflict?

01:06:28.140 Like, they probably got slaughtered too, right?

01:06:30.380 Well, I mean, it's, it's, you.

01:06:33.020 Like, this is part of the insurgency sort of strategy.

01:06:35.240 Right, right, right, right.

01:06:36.580 Well, I mean, there's, you could get slaughtered, you know, that could be what happens.

01:06:40.580 Or, I mean, it's, it's tough because these people want to protect themselves and feel like they need to protect themselves.

01:06:47.180 You know, it's, it's so you, would you rather have them running around the streets, throwing rocks and getting shot in the face or being able to shoot back?

01:06:54.380 You know, they don't have the ability to leave necessarily, nor do they want to.

01:06:58.760 They want to fight.

01:07:00.020 They don't have the training.

01:07:01.720 That's, you, you, you have an, you have to do the best with what you have sometimes.

01:07:06.200 And having a bunch of people who are willing to take up arms against an occupying government is persuasive to that occupying government.

01:07:15.760 It may get that individual killed.

01:07:18.100 That's a decision they're making.

01:07:19.620 There's plenty of people in every one of our countries here.

01:07:22.740 Well, I mean, they don't really have that choice because Zelensky has stopped males from the age of 18 to 60 from leaving Russia as, or sorry, not Russia, Ukraine as refugees.

01:07:32.580 Like, they've been sent back.

01:07:33.960 So it's like.

01:07:35.080 Yeah.

01:07:35.940 Do they really have a choice?

01:07:37.300 That part I don't, yeah, that part I don't agree with personally, but, you know.

01:07:42.960 I mean, I didn't hear about like a big lineup of feminists, you know, getting together and saying, well, what about us? 1.00

01:07:47.260 We want to be part of this too over here, you know.

01:07:49.320 This is surprising to me.

01:07:50.920 Yeah.

01:07:51.340 Surprising, shocking, right?

01:07:52.740 They can do everything a man can do.

01:07:54.080 I don't know why they're not out there, you know, getting dirty.

01:07:57.040 I don't understand, you know, but there's a couple, though.

01:08:01.080 I will say there are a couple.

01:08:02.640 There's very, very small percentage.

01:08:04.280 Yeah.

01:08:04.460 There are women in the Ukrainian military.

01:08:06.140 There are quite a few.

01:08:08.120 Yeah.

01:08:09.020 And they will fight.

01:08:09.980 Yeah.

01:08:10.120 Absolutely right.

01:08:10.640 But the thing is that the law of armed conflict actually protects civilians.

01:08:14.420 That's unarmed civilians.

01:08:15.180 It doesn't affect.

01:08:15.960 Once you give a weapon to a civilian, they're now combating. 0.84

01:08:18.320 OK, so you've got to be very careful when you do that because you make your entire country combatants, which means that the artillery shells hitting the streets and everything are justified under international law.

01:08:26.720 If they're not targeting population.

01:08:28.300 But they're doing it anyway, though.

01:08:29.340 Yeah.

01:08:29.920 So, you know, so they're already killing civilians.

01:08:32.660 And they are.

01:08:33.240 They are.

01:08:33.800 They are.

01:08:34.060 But that's what we said about them in Syria, wasn't it?

01:08:35.800 Targeting in Syria was to bring down the population was demoralized.

01:08:40.220 And, of course, it's a war crime. 0.78

01:08:41.300 You can't target indiscriminately into populated areas.

01:08:43.160 But, of course, if you've got I mean, I feel sorry for these people, because if you if you listen to the propaganda or whatever coming out from, say, the Ukrainian government saying the convoy is weak, it can be attacked and everything like this.

01:08:54.020 You've still got Russian troops there that are heavily armored.

01:08:56.020 And if you walk up there with your mates with some AKs, you might have three three magazines of, what, 30 rounds each or something like that.

01:09:01.380 And you're walking up there.

01:09:02.100 That's you done.

01:09:02.960 You're there.

01:09:03.580 There's no support.

01:09:04.820 There's no light support weapon in depth.

01:09:06.800 There's no inflate fire.

01:09:08.840 There's no air support.

01:09:09.840 There's nothing.

01:09:10.320 And as you, you know, four dudes about to open up on a convoy, that's 40 miles long.

01:09:15.340 It's you're young.

01:09:16.420 Your brain, your prefrontal cortex hasn't fully developed.

01:09:19.120 You don't understand consequence yet because you're young dudes. 0.98

01:09:21.540 You're going to get ripped apart.

01:09:22.400 And that is exactly what happens.

01:09:23.660 You do get ripped apart.

01:09:24.600 Yeah. 0.99

01:09:24.900 If it was back, like, don't shoot at tanks with a gun and all this kind of shit. 0.99

01:09:28.780 You know what I'm saying? 0.99

01:09:29.680 Right.

01:09:30.280 Well, it happens the other way around, too, though.

01:09:32.000 Don't we see these young Russian military guys who are under trained getting out there, standing out in the open and getting just wasted?

01:09:40.880 By, you know, Ukrainians buying cover shooting at them who have NATO tactics. 0.88

01:09:44.820 Yeah.

01:09:45.240 You're always in an advantage when you're in a defending position, though, right?

01:09:48.460 They are.

01:09:48.980 And this is the big thing that people underestimate.

01:09:52.960 How hard it's much harder to take a defensive defending position, to run an attack, and to occupy.

01:10:03.420 It's much riskier, much harder to do that than to bunker yourself in and defend.

01:10:08.020 Yeah.

01:10:08.520 You know, unless you shell and bomb it, right?

01:10:11.260 Yeah.

01:10:11.480 Yeah.

01:10:11.700 Cool.

01:10:12.600 What do we got here?

01:10:13.920 Adriano says, all cities are encircled in a major cauldron, and the east has encircled the Azu Battalion of 45,000 to 100,000 men, all in nine days.

01:10:23.060 How are they losing?

01:10:23.680 I don't know.

01:10:27.060 I don't know.

01:10:27.420 What's he saying?

01:10:28.140 All right.

01:10:28.380 So, circle majoring.

01:10:32.080 I know that they're not really pushing into cities.

01:10:35.980 They're more or less circling them right now, right?

01:10:37.520 Well, they are now because they were getting slaughtered, and because then they have defensive positions.

01:10:42.580 They would have.

01:10:43.340 This idea, that's another thing, like, back to internet people who are running around in Kiev, making statements and saying things that they don't know they're talking about.

01:10:53.060 If Russia would have been able to- 0.80

01:10:54.580 Are you talking about Coach Red Pill now?

01:10:56.200 Might be.

01:10:56.940 Okay.

01:10:57.240 Yeah.

01:10:57.900 Yeah.

01:10:58.260 I'm sorry.

01:10:59.000 I know that there's disinformation out there, but that doesn't mean that, you know, a weirdo with a cell phone getting kicked out of hotels has any information that's useful.

01:11:08.720 All right?

01:11:09.100 It's an opinion.

01:11:10.080 And a lot of, I've, I've, just like that, that young kid who got kicked off a show, don't kick him off the internet, but I know, I've already, I've seen little clips, and I just can't even watch the thing watchable for me.

01:11:22.400 Because I know that there's stuff in there he's saying that's absolutely not true.

01:11:25.420 You know, let's say it's completely, it's a, it's just his own misinformation that he has, right?

01:11:32.460 And maybe I have misinformation, who knows, right?

01:11:34.620 I'd throw that out there as a caveat, but at least I'm saying that, you know, it's, there's a perceived authority because you're there, but you don't, you're not really doing, you're not, he's not fighting, he's not in the government, he's not talking to any of these people.

01:11:48.520 Like, he doesn't really know what's going on.

01:11:50.500 He's hiding out in places.

01:11:52.300 He knows what's going on through his perspective.

01:11:54.100 You know what I mean?

01:11:55.800 To me, it's not that valuable.

01:11:57.920 At least not enough to look at it and go, oh yeah, everything he says is true, and anything anyone else says is not true.

01:12:04.100 It's like, no, dude.

01:12:05.260 But, but yeah, that being said, I, what was our, I don't know if I lost your track, what are we talking about?

01:12:10.320 Are we talking about the, the, the arming the populace still?

01:12:13.300 Or, yeah, so it's, I mean, this is my thought, and this is why we have an armed populace in the United States, is again, it's much harder to take a populace of people if they have the ability to defend themselves.

01:12:28.460 They don't have to.

01:12:28.940 There's a big difference, though, because Americans that own guns, like, they'll go to the range, they'll train with them pretty extensively.

01:12:35.180 I mean, if you drop a wooden crate of, like, AKs into a city center and a bunch of people that have never touched a rifle before pick it up.

01:12:41.720 Yeah, but I wouldn't say that that would be the case in Ukraine, though, because they, they, Ukraine, they have the rights to have weapons.

01:12:47.900 They're not, they're, they're not a, they're not like Australia, you know what I mean?

01:12:51.480 So people in Ukraine know how to shoot and do, do stuff, like, especially the, the males in that population, they grew up around that.

01:12:59.000 And they have a Russian threat. 0.62

01:13:00.360 So same with, like, Poland. 0.93

01:13:02.460 Polish people know how to handle a weapon.

01:13:04.380 You know what I mean?

01:13:05.720 They're, they're a formidable populace, for sure.

01:13:09.200 And the Ukraine is the same way.

01:13:10.380 So it's not like, it's not like dropping a crate of weapons in a village somewhere where they've never seen what that looks like.

01:13:17.600 Even Afghanistan. 0.69

01:13:18.740 I mean, Afghanistan, they know what weapons are.

01:13:21.440 Every male is touched an AK-47 and shot it probably before because they're in a warring nation.

01:13:26.800 And that's the tool that they use for war. 0.95

01:13:29.380 So these are not, like, completely ignorant people who don't know how to use it. 0.98

01:13:33.480 But they're not trained in military tactics and they get themselves killed. 0.96

01:13:36.380 Well, people trained in military tactics get themselves killed, too.

01:13:39.840 So it's just like saying, it's like saying this.

01:13:42.660 If I have my, my, my girlfriend or my friend's daughter or something like, you know, don't fight back.

01:13:49.920 If the, you know, the guy tries to kidnap you and do bad things to you and don't carry a weapon because, you know, you might get yourself hurt.

01:13:58.180 Because you're not trained with it.

01:13:59.360 Well, no, I want that person to have as much leverage as possible.

01:14:03.440 The ability to fight increases their chances of survival in winning, even if they're against a stronger opponent.

01:14:10.380 And so I want to give the, I would want to give these people the most ability as, as that I could give them to fight.

01:14:17.500 And in absence of us, say us, meaning U.S. or Canada or, you know, Britain or any NATO country sending in troops, in absence of that, what are they supposed to do?

01:14:29.200 You know what I mean?

01:14:29.920 And so, and as far as, you know, Zelensky is a leader with certain, everybody has selfish motivations.

01:14:37.540 But I wouldn't say that they're, they're not, there's not a benevolency to those motivations.

01:14:43.080 Like this presentation that he's this power hungry dictator, just like worse than Putin.

01:14:49.500 It's a kind of a crazy assumption.

01:14:51.580 I don't see that at all.

01:14:52.780 There's some people in chat right now, you know, to that point where, you know, the more you're talking about Nazism is a key component of the Ukrainian identity.

01:14:59.760 They have even a stadium named after a collaborator who butchered not only Ukrainians, but Polish too.

01:15:05.120 I don't, I don't know that much about that part of the country's history.

01:15:08.320 Is that anything that, you know, that you guys know about?

01:15:10.400 Well, when it says Nazism, do you mean they're anti-Semitic or something or anti-Zionist?

01:15:16.180 Yeah, what do they mean by that?

01:15:17.380 I think it's potentially fascism, you know, more than anything, right?

01:15:21.400 Okay, okay.

01:15:22.380 It's a, it's a very broad church.

01:15:24.040 Yeah.

01:15:24.720 Well, well, fascism is, you know, is, you know, corporations linking up with the government and being controlled by the government and having an unholy alliance between those two to control people.

01:15:36.600 That sounds a lot like the West.

01:15:38.080 Right.

01:15:38.380 So what do we mean, right?

01:15:41.280 And this is what I mean, like, so, so you're going to say it's a part of their identity, but what is German Nazism?

01:15:47.380 Not that Hitler's book, like, what do we mean by that, right?

01:15:52.180 Because we call people Nazis, say we, but the woke culture calls people Nazis who don't agree with them.

01:15:59.160 Right.

01:15:59.640 So what does that comment mean?

01:16:01.120 See what I mean? 0.97

01:16:01.580 And then this is where it gets a bit tribal and a bit silly. 0.83

01:16:03.740 Yeah, this is one of the, like, you know, typical sort of thoughts that guys have at times like this when they've been told that masculinity is toxic and, you know, like all this for their entire lives. 0.99

01:16:11.720 And all of a sudden, you know, by the way, all these Ukrainian men forced in the military, men suddenly have value when society goes to shit. 0.99

01:16:18.200 Why Ukrainian women are not forced in the military because because it's because it's the standard, you know, societal, you know, convention, guys, when you unplug, you understand that women and children are always protected. 0.98

01:16:27.620 Women, children and dogs are always loved unconditionally.

01:16:30.280 Men are only loved under the condition they provide something of value.

01:16:33.140 In this case, in Ukraine, the value that they're looking for these men to provide is to protect the country from the invaders.

01:16:40.260 I don't, like, literally, I don't know what value a 60-year-old guy would have in the military.

01:16:45.080 Like, I'm, like, I'm in my late 40s and I don't know how useful I would be.

01:16:49.020 You know, like, I wouldn't be able to carry a 80-pound rucksack, you know, for, like, a long march.

01:16:54.300 Like, I just wouldn't be that useful.

01:16:56.400 Other things, perhaps, but I don't know.

01:16:58.400 Like, I questioned, you know, some of these strategies, you know, to be honest with you.

01:17:01.460 Yeah, well, I think it's out of desperation that these strategies are being completed.

01:17:05.540 It is desperation, yeah.

01:17:06.700 I mean, like, you throw a, I mean, you force 60-year-olds back into the country that are trying to leave as a refugee. 1.00

01:17:12.240 It's definitely, you know, desperation clause.

01:17:16.180 The Westerns have censorship live.

01:17:18.840 He's referring to that, yeah.

01:17:21.560 Women are not drafted, very big difference. 1.00

01:17:23.360 A female Ukrainian doctor would be valuable at a front line. 1.00

01:17:25.740 100%.

01:17:26.360 There's plenty of women that are valuable in all the military, all the militaries. 1.00

01:17:31.080 It's, when we have some of these discussions, I'm referring to, my issue now, this is sort of getting off into a different thing, but you don't have this issue, interestingly, as much like, say, in the Polish military or some of these other ones, is that it's a lowering of standards to, you know, make women, you know, as successful as men, right?

01:17:54.160 Blank slate equalism, blank slate equalism, excuse me, that gets implied and it lowers the standards for the quality of the soldier who's in an infantry position or special operations fighting position.

01:18:07.260 That's the problem.

01:18:08.300 It's not like women are the problem. 0.99

01:18:10.060 And it's the social dynamics, you know, and then this protect all women kind of, you know, anti-Me Too stuff that goes on, that's a little overboard, right?

01:18:23.180 And you miss, you lose the social dynamics that you need in a squad or fire team level amongst men who are doing the fighting.

01:18:31.500 It's not that women aren't valuable in the military, though. 1.00

01:18:35.180 They absolutely are.

01:18:36.580 But forcing anybody, though, to fight or be, that doesn't want to be there, it's not really the most valuable thing, I think.

01:18:43.560 There's something else I wanted to also kind of throw up as a talking point, too, because a lot of people these days are, like, behaving like human conflict is something new and that it's bad and that it should never happen and we should put an end to it.

01:18:55.560 But I came across, you know, the slide over here.

01:18:58.720 This is global deaths and conflicts since the year 1400.

01:19:02.980 So this is about 600 years worth of data.

01:19:05.940 And it's not just been like this for, like, the last 600 years.

01:19:08.780 It's been like this throughout human history.

01:19:11.380 If you can't really see it that well, the bumpy line here is the total number of deaths in hundreds of thousands of people.

01:19:18.140 And each little dot that you see are wars during that period of time in history.

01:19:23.140 Obviously, the largest ones being First World War, Second World War, and the Thirty-Year War.

01:19:27.980 But there's a bunch of minor conflicts, you know, throughout history.

01:19:31.280 Human beings are not peaceful people. 0.99

01:19:33.440 Like, we are fucking warring. 0.99

01:19:35.280 And we like conflict. 0.99

01:19:36.920 We've always loved conflict throughout history.

01:19:39.360 We're basically like chimpanzees.

01:19:41.300 I mean, if you study some of the primates and you see how chimpanzees, like, fight and organize and war with each other, 0.67

01:19:46.340 and they'll literally, like, rip off each other's genitalia. 0.99

01:19:49.360 Like, they'll murder the shit out of each other. 1.00

01:19:51.540 So it's like, this is not uncommon. 0.97

01:19:53.780 In fact, it's uncommon right now in this period of history here, off to the far right.

01:19:59.660 You know, we're in the 2000s, where we don't have that much in the way of conflict and deaths.

01:20:04.920 You know, wars tend to be quite rapid, efficient, and they're over and done with, you know, reasonably quick, you know,

01:20:11.320 versus how they've been dealt with in the past.

01:20:13.240 Do you guys have any thoughts on that?

01:20:14.460 We're quite lucky to be living in this time, aren't we, really?

01:20:17.800 I mean, I think I was going to ask, one of the questions, which I was going to say is, like, about the,

01:20:22.320 and I hate to use the term, you know, the pacification of the West,

01:20:24.500 but it was definitely the dumbing down of the hardness of the West.

01:20:27.760 You know, how has this happened?

01:20:28.680 And does that have a reflection?

01:20:30.080 Has Putin been sitting there watching us talking about pronouns and LGBTQA, PPK, 2S, whatever?

01:20:36.840 Well, I've run out of the figures.

01:20:38.500 You know what?

01:20:39.040 They're adding stuff on.

01:20:40.160 Has he been watching what's happening, especially, I think, in what we see in American schools,

01:20:43.460 where they're trying to bring in critical race theory or critical social justice?

01:20:46.500 Well, we've seen him talk about it in some of his speeches where he's like, you know,

01:20:50.080 I've been watching what's been happening in the U.S., and it's an interesting experiment.

01:20:54.380 You know, and I'm paraphrasing here, and he basically says, you know,

01:20:56.740 we'll see how it turns out for them.

01:20:58.740 Yeah.

01:20:58.900 Yeah.

01:20:59.100 Well, yeah, and so that's, and there's, and that's in some ways, and that's, you know,

01:21:04.520 to caveat, like, Ukraine is not in, like, these other old USSR countries.

01:21:11.980 They're not going with woke narratives either, though, right?

01:21:14.800 Like, Eastern Europe is not getting into that.

01:21:18.000 You know what I mean?

01:21:18.560 They don't have, it's always, like, kind of infiltrated, like, through the universities,

01:21:24.400 usually, is that where that happens, like, liberal universities, but they're not bought

01:21:29.580 into, like, some of the things that, like, California, you know what I mean?

01:21:34.800 You don't have a California equivalent over in these countries.

01:21:38.100 So they do see things fundamentally different, and they see masculinity and some of these things

01:21:45.020 differently, and they understand and embrace masculinity a lot more in Eastern Europe and

01:21:50.900 in Russia, but just because of that, that doesn't mean that their other decisions are

01:21:55.020 good or strategically the right answer, though.

01:21:57.580 You know what I mean?

01:21:58.180 And so, like, I can support Putin's idea of, you know, maybe woke stuff isn't a great

01:22:04.660 idea, and we don't want that here without supporting the other things you might believe

01:22:09.360 in.

01:22:09.620 You know what I'm saying?

01:22:10.800 Do you guys think that the softness that the West has portrayed to China and Russia may

01:22:19.160 have played a role in Putin invading Ukraine, thinking, okay, look, the time's right.

01:22:24.000 You know, we just wrapped up this COVID thing.

01:22:27.440 He's actually got a serious problem with his population because he's not replacing population 0.99

01:22:31.460 right now.

01:22:32.060 Like, his population growth is completely stagnant.

01:22:34.780 So he doesn't have time in 20 years to do this.

01:22:37.480 Like, if he was going to do this, it needed to be done now, too.

01:22:39.860 So that's one of the other things to consider.

01:22:41.660 But do you think that he's looked at the West and been like, hmm, all of these, you know,

01:22:45.720 like, people doing all these weird, fluffy things has obviously made them softer?

01:22:50.620 Absolutely.

01:22:51.480 Yeah.

01:22:51.640 Absolutely.

01:22:52.540 Yeah.

01:22:53.000 He, our leadership is seen as weak right now because of that.

01:22:57.340 Globally.

01:22:57.740 Like, like, the world sees the West as like a weak sort of softening.

01:23:00.720 Right.

01:23:01.140 Like, and so like, yep.

01:23:03.020 And so like, you know, love or hate the guy, I don't think this would have happened with

01:23:07.480 Trump sitting in office because he wasn't seen as that weak person.

01:23:13.000 One of the things that Tim and I talked about when we did a cast back in the day a few months

01:23:17.100 ago, and you guys should watch it.

01:23:18.200 It's a really good conversation on my channel.

01:23:20.260 And Tim and I did one on his channel as well, too.

01:23:22.760 Fast Jet Performance.

01:23:24.600 One of the things that we talked about was some of this diversity and inclusivity training

01:23:28.800 that's now being brought into the Royal Air Force.

01:23:31.080 Is this something that the U.S. military is doing a lot of as well, too, Paul?

01:23:35.740 To a degree.

01:23:36.420 Yeah.

01:23:36.920 To a degree.

01:23:37.740 You know, I mean, it's and it's being some of these narratives are being pushed off.

01:23:41.000 I mean, I'm a little I, you know, I try to purposefully not look at it, you know, and

01:23:47.400 stay in my corner and just train these guys, train my guys.

01:23:51.680 And and what and why do I do it?

01:23:54.140 Like, because I will ask, like, you know, you have thriving, you have pretty good, you

01:23:58.720 know, Apex Mindset's a good business right now.

01:24:00.880 I mean, I'm doing helping a lot of guys out.

01:24:02.900 I got a new sense of purpose.

01:24:03.980 Why do I do this still with the military?

01:24:06.280 And and the reason is, you know, I know that at any point war can work and happened and

01:24:14.340 that young guys are going to have to go fight.

01:24:16.880 And I have skill sets and things from previous wars and previous training to impart to these

01:24:24.520 guys, even if it's just in a National Guard sense.

01:24:27.060 Because in the US, we don't draft any more, we cycle in the National Guard to, you know,

01:24:33.780 deal with, you know, troop numbers and stuff like that.

01:24:37.880 And those National Guard guys, they're gonna have to fight and be infantrymen, just like

01:24:43.520 active duty infantrymen when they get in that conflict.

01:24:46.020 Like, there's no difference then once they're once bullets are being exchanged, they're

01:24:51.000 going to survive or not survive based on their skills.

01:24:53.540 And so that's why I do what I do still, because it can happen at any at any point, you know

01:24:59.640 what I mean?

01:24:59.960 And we have to have that mindset.

01:25:01.280 But we lose that mindset because of comfort.

01:25:04.900 We're in a situation where we're very comfortable.

01:25:07.660 We're so comfortable that we can cry and whine on the Internet about just about anything.

01:25:12.440 I mean, we destroy ourselves with how comfortable we are.

01:25:14.960 We decimate our economy over a virus that kills some people, but a very small amount because

01:25:23.900 we're too comfortable.

01:25:24.960 You know, we collect, we hand out government checks and let our economy suffer for it because

01:25:31.100 we're so comfortable.

01:25:31.940 And now that's being looked at by these other countries going, yeah, they're weak, they're 1.00

01:25:38.060 sissies. 0.99

01:25:38.780 We can do this now. 0.96

01:25:40.080 And because they're on the other side of it, we're economically viable and they are

01:25:46.000 not.

01:25:46.440 They're economically suffering and their population is going down, which means you're going to

01:25:51.500 suffer more.

01:25:52.760 I mean, that's a problem is that they're on an economic decline.

01:25:58.020 They have to stop that.

01:25:59.440 And this is how they feel like they can stop it because they feel like it's our fault that

01:26:04.740 they're on a decline.

01:26:06.180 And in some ways, the way we set trade up, it kind of is.

01:26:08.940 Tim, what do you think about all this stuff?

01:26:11.760 I think America does have significant problems, to be honest.

01:26:15.820 I think the West of the world does.

01:26:17.520 Is it just America or is it the other allies?

01:26:19.220 No, I think the West of the world definitely does.

01:26:20.860 I don't think Putin's Russia is that different to what we're seeing out in the West.

01:26:25.280 If anything, we call it American theory over in Europe.

01:26:29.140 Most definitely, he calls it American theory.

01:26:30.640 When we look at wokeism coming from what is the Western United States, I think, where we

01:26:33.920 look at critical social justice and the damage that that's doing through the institutions.

01:26:38.820 And of course, our institutions are also infected by this.

01:26:42.340 HR, massively infected by this.

01:26:45.380 Coming out of the military as a white dude, I was told that I'd have to wait six months before

01:26:50.200 I could apply to a certain company, let's say, to become an instructor on a certain platform

01:26:53.940 because they were looking for women.

01:26:55.800 And they use the term BAME, which I think is horrendously divisive.

01:26:58.500 And I never use that term BAME.

01:26:59.860 But they were looking for more ethnically diverse people to come and teach on very complicated

01:27:03.940 platforms.

01:27:04.500 And of course, they didn't find anyone when they called me up again.

01:27:06.560 I started a company like Paul's.

01:27:08.460 And you have to.

01:27:09.420 And then you're doing your own thing because we have to start companies.

01:27:11.800 That's what men do. 0.72

01:27:12.500 You have to forage.

01:27:13.200 No one's going to look after you.

01:27:14.000 We're not victims.

01:27:14.700 We're going to do the work.

01:27:15.620 We put the work in.

01:27:16.320 That's exactly what we do.

01:27:17.220 That's what you preach in your channel, Rich.

01:27:18.400 Don't get me wrong.

01:27:18.940 I think that Putin, though, is very connected to the West.

01:27:21.840 He looked at it as a time when we were distracted.

01:27:24.760 Is that what we want to use?

01:27:26.180 We're distracted with George Floyd.

01:27:28.200 We're distracted with BLM.

01:27:29.700 We're distracted with critical race theory, critical social justice.

01:27:32.800 We're distracted with a president who maybe is a little bit not necessarily in a connected

01:27:37.820 way, such as Trump was.

01:27:39.220 He's not there.

01:27:39.380 We should just say that.

01:27:40.680 Yeah.

01:27:41.060 Well, you know, I'm not.

01:27:42.320 You know, it's Rich's president.

01:27:44.260 It's not my president.

01:27:44.880 Sorry, Paul's president, not my president.

01:27:46.100 Paul's not mine.

01:27:46.720 Yeah.

01:27:48.220 Mine's another Muppet.

01:27:49.700 You have your other.

01:27:50.680 Yeah, exactly.

01:27:51.380 I got no emotional skin in this game.

01:27:53.620 It's just not going to offend me one bit.

01:27:56.100 It's just, I mean, because then that's another thing.

01:27:58.340 I mean, back to, I mean, people, and I'm not trying to, I'm not like this Trumper.

01:28:03.600 Like everyone is so ideological.

01:28:05.360 I can see the chat where like, he's like this and he's like, dude, I don't know.

01:28:10.240 I really don't care.

01:28:11.280 It's like, I'm just trying to look at things objectively as possible.

01:28:15.480 And I know that, of course, I have a point of view that is, you know, is different than

01:28:21.000 other people because of my influences.

01:28:22.680 But I'm trying to be objective here.

01:28:24.440 And objectively speaking, Trump is very good at negotiating with these other countries.

01:28:29.040 You know, if you look at his foreign policy, when he says things like, oh, you know, Putin,

01:28:34.820 he's very smart.

01:28:35.560 He's very smart.

01:28:36.340 You know, that people lose their mind.

01:28:38.020 How would you say that about him?

01:28:39.120 But Paul, he made mean tweets.

01:28:41.300 Yeah, right.

01:28:41.820 But here's the thing.

01:28:42.600 They don't understand.

01:28:43.400 They don't understand that by calling him smart and not being insulting, that allows

01:28:48.040 him to show up to the table in a negotiation and have a connection and a talk and then talk

01:28:53.980 about needs, wants and leverage things and then get to an agreement that doesn't involve

01:28:59.480 a proxy war in Ukraine.

01:29:01.060 There was a video clip.

01:29:02.140 I couldn't find it.

01:29:02.980 But there was a video clip of Trump sitting at a table with, I think, a German group of

01:29:09.780 parliament, like, you know, something to do with EU.

01:29:12.440 And he was basically like lecturing them on, look, you know, you guys are getting all your

01:29:16.900 oil and gas from Russia and there's all these compromises that we've made.

01:29:21.400 And he's like, I'm not having it anymore.

01:29:22.760 And he's and he's basically grilling him on that.

01:29:24.800 And I mean, look, whether you love him or hate him, I mean, he you know, he stood ground

01:29:29.860 and you've got to respect somebody that, like, stands ground based on on principles that

01:29:34.860 are right for your country.

01:29:37.360 You know, but there's always somebody that lose, you know, gets their panties in a nod

01:29:40.640 over those sorts of conversations.

01:29:42.880 If if Putin's goal is to reestablish the Soviet Union, neutral Ukraine that does not aspire 0.93

01:29:48.320 to join NATO.

01:29:49.120 Well, Ukraine's been talking to NATO, you know, quite a bit.

01:29:52.540 There's a there's a really good video, which I'm going to drop in the chat and kind of close

01:29:56.460 with in a little bit, but we'll just buy time for Russian military prep.

01:30:00.500 Great analysis by Paul.

01:30:01.640 Thank you.

01:30:03.580 There's a video here, which I'm going to drop in the live chat.

01:30:07.520 It's it's on real life lore, which is a really interesting kind of like it's a great YouTube

01:30:13.580 channel.

01:30:13.920 It's got five and a half million views.

01:30:15.380 And the title of it is why Russia is invading Ukraine.

01:30:17.920 It's basically a 31 minute documentary that breaks down every single step along the way.

01:30:22.740 So I'll drop that in the chat and also put it in the comments when the video

01:30:26.420 render so you guys can check that out.

01:30:29.440 I want to start to wrap it up, guys.

01:30:31.460 Is there anything else that you all wanted to hit on with this show?

01:30:35.140 I do want to say something before we close off real quick in that just that I have a lot

01:30:39.720 of compassion for people in both countries, right?

01:30:44.180 The Ukrainians and the Russians, too, like the Russian people as well.

01:30:48.700 And so, you know, when I'm getting on here and talking about this stuff, I'm talking about

01:30:53.660 leadership and strategy if I'm being, you know, it's come across as critical as like some

01:30:59.720 of Russian policy, for example.

01:31:01.160 Well, I think it's rightfully so, but that doesn't mean I have anything against the people

01:31:05.920 of Russia who have to live there and have to deal with what they're dealing with or the

01:31:10.480 people of Ukraine.

01:31:11.440 I mean, these people are relatively similar and would probably get along really well.

01:31:16.640 They're more the same than they are different.

01:31:18.360 100%.

01:31:18.860 Exactly.

01:31:19.800 If it wasn't for the governments that we have trying to leverage, unfortunately, a

01:31:27.020 conflict to gain from it.

01:31:28.980 So I just right or wrong, whatever it is, whatever your beliefs are, I just have that

01:31:34.800 that my heart goes out to all these people who are being affected in both places.

01:31:39.740 And I always want to get that one out there, you know, because this conversation, people

01:31:44.000 get emotional and they get into their, because everyone has a safe world theory, right?

01:31:49.300 They can't objectively look at things.

01:31:50.960 I have to believe Russia's terrible for my safe world theory or else, or I have to believe 1.00

01:31:56.260 NATO is wrong and Ukraine is this or this guy is that. 0.95

01:32:00.260 It's like, relax.

01:32:01.440 There's been a lot of mistakes made on both sides.

01:32:04.160 A lot of mistakes on both sides.

01:32:05.340 Yeah.

01:32:05.620 Absolutely.

01:32:06.220 That documentary that I dropped in the live chat, definitely watch it.

01:32:09.880 It's a good use of 32 minutes of your time.

01:32:11.820 Tim?

01:32:11.960 Yeah, I mean, I think you're absolutely right.

01:32:15.240 And Paul, I think it's been great listening to today, you know, I completely back up what

01:32:18.100 you're saying and what Richard's saying.

01:32:19.220 Sometimes, I mean, as a tornado pilot, people used to be quite critical of the fact that

01:32:22.260 we'd go to a target and destroy it until it was dead.

01:32:25.060 It was never going to, and it was an overwhelming weight of five pounds, something the Americans 1.00

01:32:28.240 know very well.

01:32:29.080 You know, when you're attacking something, you're going three to one.

01:32:30.820 And why do you do that?

01:32:31.480 Because if you don't do that, it prolongs the engagement and more people die.

01:32:35.080 Civilians die where they wouldn't have died before. 0.99

01:32:37.580 And really bad things happen and escalate.

01:32:39.280 So very often, and I think one of the most damaging things that Putin has done here is

01:32:42.340 he's not been decisive in what he's been doing, unfortunately, because now we're going to

01:32:46.320 see a lot of people caught up in a conflict, probably over many years, possibly, and I

01:32:49.740 hope that's not the case.

01:32:50.640 That wouldn't have happened if he'd gone in there and he'd captured these keynotes with

01:32:54.080 proper logistics and proper armor and brigades coming down and flanking other brigades and

01:32:58.120 a mass blitzkrieg mobility into Kiev.

01:33:00.480 And there'd probably been a very little loss of life.

01:33:02.220 And he could have then hoisted the flag and gone, now we're going to discuss my occupation of Ukraine.

01:33:06.160 Unfortunately, by not doing that, this could end up really badly.

01:33:09.680 A lot of people don't understand that this, you know, like what we call like, not soft

01:33:14.740 power as such, but just the failing military campaign can have such a detrimental effect

01:33:19.560 over many, many sort of decades.

01:33:21.840 And maybe people, and I wish Rich, you know, I don't know, I haven't seen that video yet,

01:33:25.500 but I wish people could read up on warfare and how strategists do warfare properly,

01:33:30.300 especially, you know, generals and everything else that have been there for a long time.

01:33:33.020 And the reason that there is such significant violence instantaneously is to save life over

01:33:37.560 a longer period of time.

01:33:39.080 Does that make sense?

01:33:39.840 It's a misunderstanding when people think we should go in softly.

01:33:43.340 And unfortunately, I think we're going to see that in Ukraine if we're not careful. 0.99

01:33:46.520 Yeah, it's, you know, it's one of those things.

01:33:48.640 You know, I spent a lot of time watching, you know, military history, especially like the

01:33:52.940 World War II conflict.

01:33:53.980 So this is the video here.

01:33:55.960 It's dropped in the chat.

01:33:57.200 You know, definitely go check it out.

01:33:58.660 It breaks it down nicely. 0.99

01:34:00.920 War sucks. 0.99

01:34:01.540 People die. 1.00

01:34:03.100 You know, borders change.

01:34:04.300 Like, there's all kinds of things that's going on right now.

01:34:07.200 And I invite you to, you know, take a look at this from every angle possible.

01:34:12.040 And the one thing that I'm always going to be critical of, especially lately, is like,

01:34:17.700 just question.

01:34:18.620 Like, ask questions.

01:34:19.560 Like, is this true?

01:34:20.760 Is this real?

01:34:21.300 Well, you know, like, the mainstream narrative to me has led us astray horribly, especially

01:34:27.740 over the last few, you know, few years.

01:34:30.600 We saw what happened with COVID.

01:34:32.280 You know, we saw the lies that they fed us there.

01:34:35.280 And, you know, some people have unplugged.

01:34:37.760 There's still a lot of people that, like, you know, like, lock me down harder, Daddy.

01:34:40.940 Like, make me wear 17 masks and jab me 3,000 times.

01:34:44.040 Like, there's, you know, there's a contingent of that, too. 1.00

01:34:46.200 But, you know, just open your eyes and pay attention and, you know, thank God this shit's 0.99

01:34:51.560 not happening on our soil. 0.99

01:34:53.320 But, yeah, you know, hopefully it wraps up soon and, you know, they settle their differences

01:34:58.020 and, you know, it works out for the best, really.

01:35:02.000 Yeah.

01:35:02.520 I mean, like, what else can you say and do at this point?

01:35:04.920 Yeah, right.

01:35:05.520 Not much.

01:35:06.740 All right, gentlemen.

01:35:07.500 I want to thank you for hopping on with me.

01:35:09.780 And, guys, definitely go check out that documentary.

01:35:12.140 It's really interesting.

01:35:14.000 Have a good one.

Playing to Win - March 12, 2022

061- Why is Russia Attacking Ukraine？

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