Gonzalo Lira joins me for the 80th installment of the Plain and Wit podcast series. We chat about his life in Ukraine, what it's like to be a war correspondent, and how to deal with haters.
00:00:00.920All right, guys, what is up? We're live for the 80th installment of the Plain and Wit podcast series.
00:00:06.520Joined today with my friend Gonzalo Lira. How are you doing?
00:00:10.980Pretty good. Thanks for having me on, Rich. It's great to be back.
00:00:14.400And yeah, how do you chat? I hope you will enjoy the show.
00:00:18.020Yeah, we'll be on for an hour or two anyway, I think.
00:00:21.680I know it's evening over there and I got a few hours to chop it up today.
00:00:25.820Where I'm at, I'm a little under the weather. I don't know. I came down with a cold or I thought it was altitude sickness at first when I was in Colorado.
00:00:35.320So I feel a little bit shit. My voice is a little messed up. So enjoy the radio voice.
00:00:40.040I'll let Gonzalo do most of the talking today, probably.
00:00:46.120Oh, man. So welcome back. The artist formerly known as Coach Redpill, now Gonzalo Lira.
00:00:52.160What's been happening, man? You're in Ukraine these days. Seems like you're covering a lot of what's happening between Ukraine and Russia.
00:01:01.560I posed the question to my audience. I said, is there anything you want me to ask Gonzalo?
00:01:07.320And I got mixed reactions. I, of course, got the guys that are awesome. Can't wait to watch it.
00:01:12.180And there's always the, you're bringing a communist on your platform. Why are you amplifying his message? Blah, blah.
00:01:16.920Well, anyway, I'm hard right. How am I a communist? That's just hilarious.
00:01:24.060Everybody's got fans and haters. I mean, if you don't, you don't, right?
00:01:27.620Well, yeah. I mean, if you take any of that stuff personally, you're a fool because there are always going to be people who really like your content.
00:01:33.960And that's flattering. That's delightful. I mean, you're making their content, your content for them.
00:01:39.060But at the same time, on the flip side, you're always going to have some people who really hate your guts and totally hate watch you.
00:01:44.380And they're the ones who come up the most, of course. People who aren't different to you don't watch you.
00:01:48.660And so, yeah, you get that kind of mixed bag.
00:01:52.860Nobody watches you harder than your haters, right?
00:01:55.560Yeah, exactly. Well put. Yeah, exactly.
00:01:59.140So what the hell are you doing in Ukraine still? It's a war zone. It's cold as shit.
00:02:04.660You know, like what's going on in that coconut of yours? Like, what are you thinking?
00:02:08.560Well, I live here. I've been living here in Ukraine, in Kharkov, which is in East Ukraine.
00:02:14.040I've been living here off and on since 2016.
00:02:17.920I had some business that I was doing in London, and that's when I started doing the Coach Red Pill channel back in 2017.
00:02:26.400And it was really a hobby because I had a lot of free time on my hands while I was in London doing my business affairs.
00:02:35.140And the channel took off, and so I just continued it.
00:02:37.760And then in 2019, I had another business deal that was going down.
00:02:44.360And so I was sort of like splitting my time between Kharkov and Amsterdam.
00:02:47.360When I was in London, it was sort of like, you know, one week in Kharkov and one week in London.
00:02:54.580And the COVID lockdown caught me there in March of 2020.
00:03:01.180And I was stuck in Amsterdam, really, for most of 2020.
00:03:05.380And then I rode my motorcycle back from Amsterdam to Kharkov in, what, December of 2020?
00:03:13.060And I've been living here ever since, and very happily so, until this little war happened, you know.
00:03:21.880And exactly a year ago today, a year ago right now, as I'm speaking to you, I had flown out to Kiev on some business and some just bureaucratic stuff I had to take care of.
00:03:33.540I went to Kiev on the 23rd of February, 2022.
00:03:38.780And at this time, it's 6 p.m. here as I'm speaking to you, I was having drinks with some business acquaintances at my hotel, the Premier Palace in Kiev, just off Krishatik Avenue.
00:03:51.360And I recall this all very vividly, because, you know, that evening, rather than go out to dinner or anything, I just decided to, you know, dash over down the street to the McDonald's there and get some Mickey D's and just chill out in front of Cable.
00:04:08.920And I fell asleep until like 5.30 in the morning when my assistant here in Kharkov gave me a call and said, the Russians are invading.
00:04:17.700And so for the first week of the invasion, I was in Kiev, and I'd wound down my Coach Red Pill channel in late 2021, because I was just getting tired of it, you know, and I was just winding down the whole thing.
00:04:32.420And, you know, but I still had the channel with, you know, a quarter of a million, 300,000 subs or whatever it was.
00:04:38.480And I started doing these impromptu videos from Krishatik Avenue, which is like the main drag, or not the main drag, but the principal avenue of Kiev, sort of like the Wilshire Boulevard of Kiev or, you know, the Madison Avenue of Kiev.
00:04:54.100And I started doing these impromptu videos talking about the situation on the ground in the middle of Kiev.
00:05:00.920And all of a sudden, you know, I'm this geopolitical commentator.
00:05:04.680And of course, since this conflict is ongoing, I've continued making videos because, you know, it directly affects my life, you know.
00:05:12.640And so, yeah, I was in Kiev from the 24th until my birthday, the night before my birthday, when I took the train back to Kharkov.
00:05:23.860And I was here on the 1st of March, and I've been here since then.
00:05:28.560And I arranged for the evacuation of my family, and they're out of the country.
00:05:33.880And for various reasons, I decided to stay because I didn't think that this war would last this long.
00:05:40.320I mean, if somebody had told me back in March of last year that we'd be here a year later talking about this, I would have been shocked.
00:05:47.520And what's emerged, what's very interesting is that the Kiev regime and the Russians had actually reached a ceasefire agreement in early April of last year.
00:05:58.340And it was the West, the Washington, you know, deep state crowd, the State Department crowd, that put the kibosh on that.
00:06:09.200They told Zelensky in no uncertain terms that he should not sign any kind of ceasefire or any kind of agreement with the Russians.
00:06:16.640And it's because of Washington that this war has continued for a year with literally hundreds of thousands of deaths on the side of the Zelensky regime.
00:10:12.740I mean, because right now, Putin in Russia, and this is according to polls by anti-Putin sectors, put his approval rating at somewhere between 70 and 80 percent.
00:10:25.540OK, so, I mean, you know, he's nothing's going on.
00:10:31.200And also, what's what's happened is that back in 2014, 15, when Russia annexed Crimea, the Crimean Peninsula, the United States imposed a whole bunch of sanctions, which really hurt the Russian economy back then.
00:10:46.180And what's happened is that since then, the Russians have prepared for sanctions war and they prepared very diligently.
00:10:52.700And in fact, they overprepared because what happened was that the sanctions that came in 2022, which were a lot more severe because they disconnected Russia from SWIFT, they absconded really with the Russian central bank's assets in the West and other measures that they took.
00:11:13.400But what happened was that those sanctions had less of an effect on the Russian economy than the sanctions back in 2015.
00:11:23.040Because, yeah, in March, April, there was like, you know, the ruble shot up, you know, the Moscow stock market crashed.
00:11:30.460But then it kind of like recovered because everybody started realizing, hey, you know, this isn't hurting that bad.
00:11:36.760And the Russians also discovered that they had all these customers in India and China for their energy resources and their exports.
00:11:45.800And so losing the European economy, the Western economies, in fact, didn't really hurt the Russian economy.
00:11:52.440And more importantly, it opened up new opportunities and new markets in India and China.
00:11:58.860And so now they are selling more than before the war.
00:12:02.280They are doing better economically now than before the war.
00:12:05.960OK, and even the IMF, the International Monetary Fund, which is a Western organization, even they admit the fact that the Russian economy is doing gangbusters and their inflation is projected to be for 2023, something like maybe four, five percent, something like that.
00:12:24.180And overall, they're just this didn't hurt the Russian economy at all.
00:12:29.640It just crippled the German economy and the European economy overall.
00:12:33.860And on top of that, you have, of course, that the United States carried out this terrorist attack on the Nord Stream Pipeline, which condemned.
00:12:44.080Has that been has that been confirmed by a good source?
00:12:47.220Oh, yeah. Yeah. By Seymour Hersh. Seymour Hersh is the best investigative journalist you can find.
00:12:53.840Seymour Hersh has been around for five decades.
00:13:00.100He also broke the story of the Abu Ghraib torture of prisoners by the Americans in Iraq and the clandestine bombing of Cambodia, a bunch of stories.
00:13:13.400I mean, he's, you know, as gold standard as you can get insofar as investigative journalism.
00:13:18.300I mean, a couple of weeks ago, three weeks ago now, he released a very detailed piece as to who, what, where, why and so far as Nord Stream.
00:13:28.340And the decision was made in the fall of 2021 by Joe Biden himself, in coordination with Victoria Nuland and Jake Sullivan, to bomb the Nord Stream Pipeline.
00:13:40.320Jake Sullivan was the point man for that operation.
00:13:42.780And in Seymour Hersh's piece, which has gotten zero play in the mainstream media.
00:13:48.980I mean, nothing. They don't talk about it at all.
00:14:39.260And what has emerged from Seymour Hersh's reporting is that the Danes, the Swedes, and the Norwegians and the Poles knew that this was coming.
00:14:51.360And, in fact, it was the Norwegians who pulled the trigger, who actually detonated the bombs that the Americans placed in June of 2022 during this big Baltic Sea exercise that they did.
00:15:04.060That's when the American divers put in these explosives.
00:15:07.880You've got to understand that these explosives, they're not like a little package of C4 and they blow it up.
00:15:12.360No, it's like a really complicated thing.
00:15:14.720Because they have to dig up, you know, the pipeline because it's covered.
00:15:18.840And the kind of explosives you're talking about are, you know, a couple hundred pounds per charge.
00:15:26.000And they had two charges on each of four pipelines.
00:15:30.020And so it was a major operation, logistically, to carry it out.
00:15:33.300And it was apparently the Norwegians who pulled the trigger on it.
00:15:49.740Because the Norwegians' motivation was that they would be able to sell their natural gas, that they have quite a bit of, but more expensive than Russian gas.
00:15:59.080They'd be able to sell their gas to Germany.
00:16:02.220And the United States also had that financial motivation to sell American liquefied natural gas to the Germans, quite apart from the geopolitical aspects of it.
00:16:24.800Balloons and wokeness or something is getting way more media coverage.
00:16:27.740And that's what people get upset about.
00:16:29.880I'm sure there's probably more people that are still pissed off that others haven't gone and jabbed themselves, you know, to comply, you know, with the new thing.
00:16:37.880And, yeah, it's a clown world, you know, it's a clown world show.
00:16:41.400We call this a clown world show, right?
00:16:44.040Yeah, it's a complete shit show at this point.
00:16:46.100No, I mean, like, every day, the kind of bullshit that's going on, it's just off the charts.
00:16:51.040It's just way off the charts, you know.
00:16:53.160I mean, every outrage that you see every day, you know.
00:16:56.360And, I mean, this kind of thing, I mean, like, one of these incidents, okay, I mean, 10, 20 years ago would have been front page news across the world.
00:17:03.980But the American media is total propaganda.
00:17:06.460The Canadian media is total propaganda.
00:17:08.380You're not going to hear what's going on if you follow the mainstream news sources.
00:17:54.780You don't have to be a believer because, you know, Putin says that he's a believer, you know, in Christianity, and that's very respectable.
00:18:02.940But you don't have to be a believer to read that and say, fuck, he's absolutely right.
00:18:09.180You know, pedophilia is now the norm in the West, you know?
00:18:11.740Of course, they don't call it pedophilia anymore.
00:18:13.720They call it minor attracted person or minor attracted people.
00:18:28.060Yeah, we've got cross-dressing trannies or whatever they are, you know, reading books to kids in schools, and it's all being celebrated, and they're forced to clap over the whole thing.
00:19:17.440And most of it was devoted to domestic stuff and domestic programs that are going to be implemented.
00:19:22.680And, by the way, a lot of these domestic programs have gotten a very, very positive response in Russia.
00:19:28.220Like, for instance, one of the things that he's doing is that any family that has two children or more are not going to pay property tax.
00:19:37.140That's a big deal in Russia because when you have property tax that you have to pay ongoing and also when you sell a property in less than five years since you purchased it, you also have to pay 13%, I believe.
00:19:51.460And those taxes are going to be rescinded for families that have two or more children.
00:19:55.220Clearly, you know, they're aiming to improve their demographics by way of incentives, something that the Hungarians are doing, and very effectively, by the way, of improving their demographics by way of the state giving incentives to families to have more children.
00:20:13.400You know, longer maternity needs, you know, that kind of stuff.
00:20:19.440He also talked very specifically in great detail about programs that they're going to do for returning veterans, you know, psychological assistance, work assistance, you know, that sort of thing.
00:20:32.600The domestic programs package was the bulk of the speech insofar as the rest of the world is concerned.
00:20:41.160The big highlight wasn't really the cultural stuff that he talked about.
00:20:44.520And that was sort of like a jab to the West, but and sort of like a reminder as to what the West represents in the eyes of the rest of the world.
00:20:51.480Because, you know, all this, we kind of like laugh and just are kind of like horrified by the pedo stuff and the trans stuff in the West.
00:21:00.800But in the rest of the world, they look at this as just decadence and degeneracy.
00:21:07.380And they say, well, if to be part of the West, we have to get on board with this bullshit, fuck that.
00:21:12.280I mean, they're very serious about it.
00:21:13.360For the vast majority of people in the Middle East, in Africa, in Asia, in Latin America, Central America, all that stuff of trans and wokeness and all that shit is horrifying.
00:21:26.580And they want no piece of it, none of it.
00:21:30.540But that's the thing that in the West they focus on the most.
00:21:33.060In geopolitical terms, the most important aspect, as far as I'm concerned, is that Putin declared that insofar as arms limitation talks are concerned, Russia is suspending those talks because, you know, there's no real point.
00:21:48.640Because he pointed out quite accurately that the United States expects to be able to inspect Russian facilities, military facilities, to be in compliance with the nuclear arms agreements.
00:22:04.560And yet they don't allow Russian inspectors to go to American military facilities.
00:22:09.440And so Putin said, very reasonably, as far as I'm concerned, he said, look, we are in a war in Ukraine where NATO and the Americans are supplying weapons to the Kiev regime, on the one hand.
00:22:23.520And on the other hand, they want to come and inspect our military facilities?
00:22:27.720Oh, no, we're not going to play that game.
00:22:30.480And so, you know, it's ultimately the speech.
00:22:36.260In the speech, there was this underlying sense, although never explicit, but it was underlying the entire speech, whenever he talked about foreign issues, was that Russia and the West had suffered a divorce.
00:22:48.300And it was a divorce that would not find any kind of reconciliation anytime soon.
00:22:54.720And that was sort of like underlying the entire speech.
00:22:57.840And so, you know, the Russians are broken with the West.
00:23:00.300They are not going to go to the negotiating table with the West.
00:23:02.900And people now in the United States, as they see the disaster unfolding in Ukraine, they're starting to say, oh, we should set up some sort of demilitarized zone, some sort of ceasefire agreement.
00:24:16.220And so what the Russians have been doing over the past, I would argue, the last six to eight months is to just a war of attrition where they are grinding down the Zelensky regime forces.
00:24:29.900And they are succeeding fairly spectacularly, as I mentioned with the previous figures.
00:24:35.780And so what you're going to see is eventually the Zelensky regime forces are going to simply run out of men.
00:24:42.000And the Russians are just going to roll over them.
00:24:44.240Do keep in mind that at this time, the best credible estimates is that the Russians have assembled three army groupings in southern Belarus, right on the northern border of Ukraine, just to the west of Kiev, on the eastern border of Ukraine, here in the Belgorod.
00:25:04.220Belgorod is a region in Russia right across from me.
00:25:07.240I'm 40 kilometers from the border with Russia and another big group being to the south.
00:25:14.160And that grouping adds up altogether to about 650 to 750,000 men.
00:25:20.120And the Zelensky regime forces is scraping the bottom of the barrel insofar as manpower is concerned.
00:25:25.720I mean, there are, you know, there's this video I saw today as a matter of fact.
00:25:29.220I was shocked that they were trying to conscript a 65-year-old retiree.
00:25:34.680And the man was saying, what are you coming to me for?
00:26:41.640Because, look, a tank, and I've gotten this from various people who have military experience.
00:26:47.040I personally do not have military experience, but in the course of just being on top of this shit, I've learned a great deal about how a modern military works.
00:26:55.760To operate one of these tanks, you need minimum six months of training.
00:26:59.820And to be able to have multiple tanks working in conjunction, you need to train for at least a year.
00:27:07.020And quite apart from that, you need all kinds of communications infrastructure and also aircraft for close air support, which the Zelensky regime simply does not have.
00:27:19.180So to answer your question, the people most likely to operate this stuff are going to be NATO troops because there isn't enough time to train Ukrainian people, even if those people were available.
00:28:43.260And no, I mean, there's NATO personnel here that's been fighting on the front lines.
00:28:48.760They're private military contractors, but they've been here the whole time.
00:28:52.980It's estimated that the Poles, there are various figures that I've heard, reputable figures, that go between 16,000 Polish troops all the way to 25,000.
00:29:03.620Although the 25,000 number seems a little fishy, more people are saying that it's in the realm of about 20,000 Polish troops.
00:29:11.320They're all private military contractors, but they're all very capable, and they've already lost at least 2,500 killed in action, Polish soldiers killed in action.
00:29:23.040So, you know, you already have NATO troops.
00:29:25.180You also have Romanian troops here and some Portuguese troops, you know, a little bit of everything, you know, and they're fighting already.
00:29:34.800And, but it's not in big numbers, and they're all as private military contractors so that the respective governments have deniability.
00:29:43.880But the Poles in particular, you know, they set up this specific grave site for their dead, and right now the dead for sure from Poland is about 2,500 dead, okay?
00:29:56.480And so, you know, I mean, they're getting the shit kicked out of them.
00:30:00.340Look, I've said this repeatedly, and I'll say it again.
00:30:02.680But, you know, the Italians, they're really great at food, and the French are really, really good at fashion, right?
00:30:11.020The Russians, they're really good at war.
00:30:23.600You know, a lot of people say that the Russians fucked up at the beginning, this and that, and all the rest of it.
00:30:27.460Yeah, but you have to understand that these armies, they adapt, and they learn, okay?
00:30:32.320Because, of course, people's lives are on the line, and they don't want to lose troops.
00:30:37.080The priority that the Russians have had throughout this conflict is they want to minimize civilian casualties and minimize their own casualties, okay?
00:30:46.320In terms of casualties of Ukraine civilians, the numbers are very low.
00:30:49.500If anybody says, oh, they're committing genocide in Ukraine, that's a lie.
00:30:54.800Total civilians killed so far is about under 10,000, 9,800 and some as of late January, okay?
00:31:06.700And this is all collateral damage, you know?
00:31:08.920People killed because stuff fell on them, you know, from both sides, by the way, okay?
00:31:13.980And so, you know, the notion that this is genocidal, that's just a lie.
00:31:20.240That's just propagandistic bullshit, okay?
00:31:23.060The actual hard numbers are, like I said, under 10,000 civilians killed, which is a tragedy.
00:31:30.080But if you compare that to the number of combat troops that have died, if you add up the 157,000, let's say 20,000 Russians killed, okay?
00:31:39.680That's 175,000 killed, only 10,000 civilian killed, that's extremely low.
00:31:47.900That's like numbers like, for instance, in the U.S. Civil War, which also had something similar, where you had huge numbers of troops killed, but very few civilians killed, okay?
00:31:57.280And contrast that to the First World War, especially the Second World War, where the Allies terror-bombed German cities and wiped out perhaps millions of German civilians, you know?
00:32:10.140So, and that's quite apart from what happened in the Eastern Front and all the rest of it, you know?
00:32:14.480So, look, the war is catastrophic for the nation and the people of Ukraine, but in terms of actual casualties of civilians, it's quite low.
00:32:23.040What do you think of these donors of military aid to Ukraine?
00:32:30.400This is just basically an infographic chart that I came across the other day.
00:32:35.020I'm pretty sure the numbers from the U.S. are more than 46 billion at this point, but the population of the U.S. versus Canada is only 10 times greater, but Canada has donated 1.4 billion.
00:32:49.400The U.S. has donated 46 billion, according to this chart.
00:32:55.720Why is the U.S. so invested in this proxy war, from your opinion?
00:32:59.540Well, there's multiple problems with those numbers.
00:33:02.660The first problem is that you have to figure out how much money they're actually sending to Ukraine and how much money they are actually sending to the military-industrial complex in the United States, okay?
00:33:12.740A lot of times what they're doing is that they're sending gear, but they're paying the money to the military-industrial complex in the United States, to Raytheon, General Dynamics, and so forth.
00:33:24.200And so those numbers, you really have to get into the granular detail to know where that money is exactly going to.
00:33:31.260So I wouldn't be able to give you an opinion about those numbers, just ball-faced like that.
00:33:37.280I mean, it's really hinky insofar as how the numbers are playing out.
00:33:42.260What is known is that the Zelensky regime itself needs cash that it's getting from the European Union and the United States just to pay its personnel, pay its soldiers, pay its bureaucracy to keep going.
00:33:54.720Anyway, the Ukraine economy is just toast.
00:33:57.560I mean, the GDP of Ukraine has collapsed, I would guesstimate, easily 60%.
00:34:04.760The official number is like 30%, but I think it's bullshit.
00:34:09.280I mean, just the number of people who have left and they've gone to Europe or Russia.
00:34:14.680And by the way, you know, this is demographically a catastrophe for Ukraine because those 15 million people who have left, they are not coming back.
00:34:21.340Because they've, I know many of them, many Ukrainians that I knew, my former assistant, they've gone to Denmark, Sweden, Great Britain, Switzerland.
00:34:32.580And they're not coming back because, you know, the war has gone on for over a year now or coming up on a year.
00:34:38.660And they have settled into their lives in Europe, the same with the ones who have left for Russia.
00:35:01.640Now, the only issue becomes how much of Ukraine the Russians are going to annex.
00:35:07.660In my estimation, it seems reasonable to think that they're going to take pretty much everything east of the Dnieper River.
00:35:13.880The Dnieper River sort of like slices Ukraine down the middle.
00:35:17.260And they're also going to take all of the south of Ukraine, including Odessa, which for the Russians is a very important city for historical reasons and is predominantly Russian, as a matter of fact.
00:35:26.520And so at the end of the day, you're going to have a run of Ukraine.
00:35:31.400So you're saying that they're going to stop at this water body here, this big river that travels through the middle of Ukraine.
00:46:22.040And at the end of the day, they cut me loose because I was more trouble than I was worth because I'm not a Russian agent.
00:46:28.040You know, I didn't have any kind of mission to, you know, any kind of, you know, any kind of, like, secret mission or shit like that.
00:46:38.900I'm just a middle-aged fart who happened to live here and started reporting on it.
00:46:42.080And what happened was that the SVU cut me loose because there was a lot of online stuff.
00:46:51.900But what was actually much more important was that there were a lot of diplomatic efforts because I'm a resident of three different countries or have been a resident of three different countries.
00:47:04.420So it started becoming a political issue over somebody who's just really inconsequential because I'm nobody, you know.
00:47:13.000I'm watching it, and I'm talking about it, but I'm nobody, and I don't really have any kind of real power or influence over any of the events.
00:47:20.120And so they realized I was just much more trouble than I was worth.
00:47:23.320But until my case is adjudicated, I have to remain in Kharkov.
00:47:29.800I'm not under house arrest but sort of like city arrest, if you will.
00:47:33.820And if I try to leave the country, what will happen is, of course, they'll run my name through the system, and my name will pop up, and they'll arrest me on the spot.
00:47:41.180They told me this, that I'll be arrested and held, you know, in prison.
00:47:48.560And as a practical matter, leaving Kharkov for another region of Ukraine is just, how will that change or improve my position?
00:47:56.500Especially considering that most of the nation has intermittent electricity and internet because the Russians have been hitting the electrical substations because they're trying to interrupt the supply of weapons because the train system in Ukraine is electrical.
00:48:13.460And so they're not trying to harm the civilians.
00:48:16.200They're trying to interrupt the trains, the train system.
00:48:20.600But here in Kharkov, they don't need to hit them because if you look at the map, Kharkov is out of the way, if you will, of the transportation of weapons from Poland to the front lines.
00:48:30.860And so that's why I, you know, I've lost electricity a few times, but it's been, you know, you can count them in a couple of hands.
00:48:42.400But, no, and so, you know, I'm sort of like stuck here.
00:48:48.140And if I were to move to a different city in Ukraine, it wouldn't improve my situation, probably make it worse, especially it would be a city that I didn't know.
00:48:55.140And I don't know Russian or Ukrainian.
00:50:36.120I said that, you know, if you come across any liberal, just stay the fuck away and keep your fucking mouth shut because they're going to try to fuck you over, you know, if they find out.
00:50:46.380Because, you see, like, I'm a hardcore conservative.
00:51:35.420I think that this is just another indication of the collapse of the American empire.
00:51:40.060And, you know, in the waning days of every empire, you have all kinds of degeneracy, homosexuality, pedophilia, and hysteria.
00:51:49.940And you want to just keep your head down and your spirits up and your go bag ready if you have to split as soon as possible.
00:51:57.000A friend Eric here wants to know if you're going to be, or any chance you're going to be making videos again about life career skills, you know, like the CRP sort of stuff.
00:52:07.380Well, perhaps after this conflict is over.
00:52:10.040But first of all, I don't have access to my gear with which I was doing my videos before.
00:52:14.380And on the other hand, you know, I just, on a headspace level, I'm just not into that right now, you know, because this is just consuming all of my attention for obvious reasons.
00:52:26.720There's another one here I'm just trying to find.
00:54:13.040But the other possibility is you're right and I'm wrong.
00:54:16.300And so if I listen to you and say, oh, you know, Rich is saying something that I discounted, I didn't agree with, but Rich is giving really good reasons for this.
00:54:27.860I'm going to change my mind about this particular issue because Rich's position is the reasonable position, is the more accurate position.
00:54:36.020Because ultimately what we want to do is understand the world better.
00:54:40.300And so either way I win in the sense that if I disagree with you and I don't agree with your rationale and I have reasons, solid reasons to disagree, then it just shows me that my position is correct.
00:54:53.300And if you have a position that is much more reasonable than my own, then I will change my position and, again, it will improve my appreciation of reality.
00:55:25.460I mean, it's clever and cool, but the collapse of the NFT market kind of like points the way to what I think is going to happen to all crypto.
00:55:33.020And people in 10 years from now are looking at it.
00:55:34.860Yeah, the NFT is just overpriced JPEGs.
00:55:36.240Like there's a lot of grifters out there selling these fucking pictures for ridiculous amounts of money.
00:55:41.020It's just, I'm not about that either for sure.
00:55:44.320Julian here said, Poland should call NATO Article 5 for Ukraine killing two farmers.
00:55:52.240Article 5 is the mutual defense pact of NATO.
00:55:56.380See, if one is attacked because of Article 5, all the other nations of NATO have to join in the defense of that nation that has been attacked.
00:56:05.880Yeah, it was probably an accident that one of their missile defense system missiles went off course and landed in Poland and killed a couple of farmers, which is a tragedy, of course.
00:56:21.600But it was all in the overall scheme of the conflict that was trivial.
00:56:25.780Yeah, and of course, you know, Germany and France should do likewise against the U.S. for Nord Stream pipe attacks.
00:56:31.500Yes, but you're never going to see that happen.
00:56:33.280Yeah, France doesn't really have a leg to stand on, legally speaking, about Nord Stream.
00:56:37.740But Germany, yeah, the Germany, the United States attacked the German economy, destroyed it, you know, or severely crippled it in the best case.
00:56:48.200Peter wants me to ask you about Andrew Tate.
00:56:50.940What do you think about that situation?
00:56:52.560I think that Andrew Tate, most of what he said, I agree with fully.
00:56:57.340I mean, it's stuff that, you know, bread and butter for you and guys like you and me, right?
00:57:01.400Okay, I thought that, I saw some video of his, some short little clip video that said that, he said that, you know, the way they come at you is that first they cancel you, then they arrest you, and then they outright do away with you, okay?
00:57:21.760And so once they canceled him across social media, I respectfully, I don't have any beef with the guy at all, but I think that he should have prepared better and not been in a place like Romania.
00:57:33.220I think that, frankly, he should have gone to the Far East, to one of the, you know, Asian countries, where he would have been able to continue and really be secure that the Americans aren't going to reach out and grab him, as they did.
00:57:50.340Because as I understand the case, at this point, he's being charged with human trafficking, but there are no victims.
00:57:58.240They haven't charged him with anything yet, apparently.
00:58:00.900Okay, but the suspicion that he was trafficking girls for sex or God knows what, well, there are no credible witnesses, and a lot of the women who are associated with him say, no, no, no, no, no, we could leave whenever we want to, we have our passports in hand, I mean, no problem.
00:58:17.300We were there of our own volition, and, you know, these women have the incentive now to say, oh, yes, Andrew Tate was an evil guy, so the fact that they're saying, no, no, no, he didn't do anything, nor did his brother do anything,
00:58:29.320it leads me to conclude that it's all just bullshit, the fact that they haven't charged him with anything is more proof that it's bullshit, I personally don't think that he's going to be released anytime soon.
00:58:40.520I mean, you know, like Julian Assange, Julian Assange committed no crime in the United States, he is not an American citizen, and yet he's going to be extradited to the United States and probably be thrown into some concrete shithole for the rest of his life.
00:58:57.680Like, you know, you know, the Americans do this, once you're in their sights, that's what the Americans do, and they obviously have a hard-on for Andrew Tate.
00:59:08.320Why? I mean, what did he do? He didn't even release, like, secrets like Julian Assange did.
00:59:14.260He just said a lot of things that most people would find perfectly reasonable, and the sliver that is controversial, it's just on social issues, he's just a fucking guy talking, okay?
00:59:25.000I mean, he's not, like, creating, like, a political movement or advocating violence or anything of the sort, right?
00:59:31.020He's just, frankly, he's a loudmouth like you and me, okay?
00:59:37.060What crime did he possibly commit? No, it's just, they wanted to fuck him over.
01:15:03.780I mean, like, toxic feminism has polluted the minds of most Western women.
01:15:08.820And they're entitled, they're bratty, they're, you know, they have an overinflated sense of self-worth.
01:15:16.880You're going to have to, like, I've said this for years.
01:15:19.540Like, I said this, you know, before I even came across anything red pill, like, whatever, it was 2015, 2016.
01:15:24.440I used to say, you know, you're going to have to dig through a lot of dirt to find gold.
01:15:28.020I just think the amount of dirt that you're going to have to dig through in the West is considerably more than what you'll have to dig through in maybe some Eastern countries.
01:15:57.380No, and even the ones that you would say objectively are mid-tier, you know, five, six, maybe seven, right?
01:16:04.260They make the effort, and because they make the effort, they bump up two, three points just because of the effort.
01:16:10.760Yeah, they're not, like, naturally beautiful or whatnot, but they make the effort, and that shows a very different self-conception because the women in the West, they're all in, like, you know, either whored up for a night on the town or they're, like, disheveled and pathetic looking.
01:16:31.400And that points to the fact that they don't have self-respect.
01:16:37.180Prada's got a question here for you about Russia.
01:16:40.320Will you evacuate before Russia captures?
01:17:01.800What about the notion of, you know, like, smoking?
01:17:05.060Because, I mean, you never used to smoke before in your shows.
01:17:06.880Is it just something that you've picked up recently, or did you just smoke off air and then, you know, bring it on air now just because it's zero flux?
01:17:54.980That's what, frankly, animals do, like dogs or cattle or whatever, that at the sign of fear, they are unable to control their emotion and they act irrationally.
01:18:10.800And, frankly, I don't consider myself in the category of most men because most men allow their emotions to dictate their actions as opposed to their reason, their logic, their required knowledge and experience.
01:18:22.400And so, yeah, of course, I'm scared, but I don't allow that to control my actions.
01:18:27.620I'm not under the impression that they're looking to slaughter civilians, right?
01:18:31.260I think that, you know, for the most part, especially on the east side of Ukraine, it's mostly ethnic Russians.
01:20:41.460You see, the North American industrial base was hollowed out because all the factories were shipped to low-wage countries, you know, in China, in Vietnam, in Central America.
01:20:58.100You know, the clothing that used to be manufactured in the United States or in Canada was shipped out to Guatemala and places like that with low-wage workers, right?
01:21:11.760And so, that ate away at the lower middle classes.
01:21:16.680And those lower middle classes who no longer had a factory job in Canada or the United States,
01:21:21.800they became working poor and became dependent on the state for state handouts in order to survive, right?
01:21:30.820And so, the middle class shrank because of globalization from the bottom.
01:21:35.880But AI is going to shrink the middle class from the top end because, you see, like everybody's talking about chat GTP or GPT or however it is.
01:21:48.740The woke stuff that's baked into it that's very amusing and that Dan, you know, do anything now, that was a very amusing workaround.
01:21:59.120But that's not what's really important.
01:22:01.000What's really important is that, see, you're a Yale Law School graduate, right?
01:22:07.080And you graduate with your Yale Law degree, which is very prestigious,
01:22:10.840and you can expect to be earning $200, $300, $400 an hour at a major law firm writing, you know, depositions, you know, writing, you know, different memorandums and what have you.
01:22:24.100But with AI, a law firm doesn't need that high-skilled worker because the AI will write the legal brief, okay?
01:22:37.660That's what chat GPT is proving, right?
01:22:40.680And so, what happens is that, see, the high-skilled worker, he's going to start losing his job because you're not talking about just lawyers,
01:22:49.620but you're also talking about architects, industrial designers, you know,
01:22:54.720those kinds of very high-skilled workers who are, who have taken the safe path of getting a degree and a graduate degree and the right credential to carry out specific tasks that now the AI can do
01:23:10.060and do just as well, if not better, and certainly cheaper.
01:23:14.460And so, instead of paying that Yale Law School grad $300 an hour to spend two hours writing some legal brief,
01:23:23.200you can spend, you know, $20, you know, on some AI that will give you the same brief in, you know, instantly.
01:23:33.280You see any issues with the engineered wokeism that's in AI, though?
01:23:36.780Because if you ask an AI bot right now to write a poem that would celebrate Donald Trump, it would essentially refuse to do that.
01:23:47.240But if you also ask it to write a poem that would celebrate Joe Biden, it would happily, you know, provide you something.
01:23:53.460Yeah, I think that that gets people's gears grinding, but that's not really the important effect of AI.
01:24:01.480It's what I mentioned before, it hurts the high-end middle-class worker, the corporate worker, the guy who's in a consulting firm, the guy who's a researcher.
01:24:14.180And it will make those people idle, and it will make them fall into the working poor stratum of the middle class.
01:24:22.060So, basically, you have a middle class that is shrinking from both ends because the factory jobs are gone, and so they fall into the working poor.
01:24:31.500And the high-end jobs are also going down because of AI, and those workers fall into the working poor.
01:24:37.820And so, in the end, I wrote in this Twitter thread, you're going to have a situation of Eloys and Morlocks.
01:24:44.260You're going to have the top tier that are going to be rich, however they earned it.
01:24:51.760Maybe they got lucky with non-fungible tokens, or however they got money.
01:25:01.500They are going to be living high on the hog, hedonistic, happy.
01:25:06.180But the big strata of the middle class will shrink from both ends.
01:25:11.680It has shrunk from the bottom, and now it will shrink from the top.
01:25:15.340And when you lose the middle class, your nation as a whole becomes a lot poorer, okay?
01:25:21.700And so, the North American continent, with more AI, those high-skilled workers are going to fall into the ranks of the working poor.
01:25:30.880And so, of course, they will contribute far less in terms of taxes.
01:25:34.100So, you're going to have a much bigger working poor group here at the bottom that will have to be supported by a shrinking middle class and these hedonists at the very top, you see?
01:25:48.200Is this where universal basic income sort of takes over?
01:25:52.880Yeah, but the thing is, universal basic income, I think, is really despicable because it robs people, especially men, for a reason to exist.
01:26:04.120But isn't that the state's goal, though, to pussify men and to soften men in society and to remove masculinity and to normalize all of that?
01:26:52.860Well, you know, the periods of idleness where you can afford a standard of living, of existence, but you have no real reason for anything.
01:27:02.360People in such circumstances fall into depression and a very deep depression.
01:27:08.660And, of course, they can take pills for the depression, maybe.
01:27:10.960That just, it doesn't really fix the situation.
01:27:13.420It just, like, ameliorates the symptoms.
01:27:15.800But it could be also that it brings about enormous resentment in a huge swath of people who expected to have a decent life and a decent work and something to give them meaning in their lives.
01:27:29.320And when you deprive them of that, they become resentful and eventually enraged and they break out the pitchforks.
01:27:37.200And so, you know, I don't think it's a good thing, AI.
01:27:43.460And we're going to have to see the effects of it.
01:27:45.460Now, specifically what you're talking about, the wokeism programmed into the AI, I think a lot of people are going to figure out workarounds for that.
01:27:55.200I mean, you already figured, people have already figured it out.
01:27:58.260And this chat GPT has only been around briefly and already figured out a workaround that gives you the honest information.
01:28:07.600So I don't think it's really that big of a deal.
01:28:13.960But the more they try to make the AI lie, because that's what you're basically doing, the easier it will be to overcome that by way of creating different systems and workarounds to get to the actual fact.
01:28:30.060So I think it's going to play against them, you know.
01:28:32.260But the problem is, of course, that it's sort of like a whack-a-mole problem for the creators of the AI.
01:28:38.900They'll see one conclusion of the AI that the programmers don't like because it goes against wokeism.
01:28:47.620But then another little mole rat will pop out and they'll have to hit that one too.
01:28:51.620And it'll be just a game of whack-a-mole.
01:28:53.920And the whole system will deteriorate because of this wokeness that is being injected into the AI.
01:29:05.100I don't think that it is – I think that they'll realize it's a mistake ultimately, but it'll collapse, you know.
01:29:12.580And that's when they'll realize, oh, this is not a good idea.
01:29:14.940But then the problem is that the AI comes to conclusions that guys like you and I know all about but which flies in the face of this wokeism, see.
01:29:24.560This wokeism stuff generally, you know, it is leading to a revolution in North America certainly and potentially in Europe as well because people know fundamentally that it's all just a lie.
01:29:40.080And the wokeism is the secret sauce that will lead to some sort of severe break or revolution.
01:29:48.500And I think that what will happen is that the people in positions of leadership will resort to widespread and vicious repression as opposed to giving up on this woke bullshit because they have too many chips riding on it.
01:30:02.200And so what I personally expect is to see a lot more repression going on in the West, and we're already seeing it.
01:30:08.980With, like, for instance, the Nord Stream pipeline that I mentioned, Cy Hirsch, Seymour Hirsch, who is this big-time journalist, you know, I checked.
01:30:18.880CNN, the BBC, the New York Times, and the Washington Post have yet to put up any article about Seymour Hirsch's report.
01:30:28.260I mean, zero, just total, you know, a total omission of this vital issue that other countries around the world are paying very close attention to.
01:31:09.140I mean, he got pissed because the information got out, and he tried to shut it all down.
01:31:12.700And that's something that the opposition leadership is really trying to deal with.
01:31:16.940I want to move over to this question here from Chris.
01:31:20.460What are the best places in Latin America now?
01:31:22.580I'm assuming for guys, like, there's a contingent of, like, passport bros out there that want to move to another country to find a better life, better women, better lifestyle sort of thing.
01:31:33.680Like, what do you think about that notion and, you know...
01:31:35.800I would say the two best countries to go to in Latin America are probably Uruguay and Paraguay because they're poor.
01:31:46.180Uruguay is basically the Switzerland of Latin America, was it, or is it?
01:32:16.980The other place, too, that's appearing to be very good is El Salvador.
01:32:21.500They've wiped out all the gains in El Salvador.
01:32:24.660And so now the country is extremely peaceful, very law-abiding, okay?
01:32:29.300But, yeah, you want to go to a country that is a little bit poor because nobody's going to fuck with a poor country like Paraguay.
01:32:39.220And, you know, you can pick up Spanish.
01:32:41.760If you've got some cash, you can set yourself up very nicely and potentially have some sort of business there or some online venture that, you know, you become geographically independent.
01:32:51.300But, yeah, I would say that a country like that, don't go to-
01:32:55.600I'm actually surprised that you mentioned El Salvador because the president there has embraced Bitcoin.
01:33:02.120Well, yeah, but the thing is I'm not advocating El Salvador because of them embracing Bitcoin.
01:33:09.440I'm advocating them because they've straightened up the country in so far as security is concerned, okay?
01:33:16.100It's just, you know, overall a better place to be.
01:33:18.820But, like I said, what you want to do is go to places that are relatively poor because a place that's relatively poor, this woke bullshit can only flower in a rich society or a society that thinks of itself as rich, that might not be necessarily rich because the United States is no longer rich.
01:33:39.180It's like a trust fund baby that is so over-indebted and maxed out on all his credit cards but still thinks that he's a trust fund baby millionaire, you know?
01:33:53.200C. Dumbledore says, no, Gonzalo, not true.
01:33:55.720Chat GBT is currently being taught how to be optimally deceptive by its 100 million users.
01:36:13.640I'm baptized, First Communion, in confirmation, right?
01:36:16.600But I, unfortunately, I am not blessed with belief.
01:36:21.420I respect people who are, and I certainly have no truck with them.
01:36:24.500I'm not one of these atheists who tries to convince people of their foolishness or something like that.
01:36:29.940Because it's simply that I don't, I'm not blessed with belief.
01:36:34.900And in many ways, I sort of regret that because I recognize that belief in a higher power and a higher purpose gives a great deal of comfort.
01:36:43.840And sometimes that comfort is extremely useful, especially when things are very difficult.
01:36:48.780I don't believe in that, unfortunately.
01:36:51.040And so I think that if this is it, if this is the only life you live, then you should live it fully.
01:36:57.040You should experience all that life has to offer.
01:38:08.680You know, I could have, you know, wound up, you know, with a hundred million, four hundred, five hundred million dollars, but having a miserable life and not having experienced the things that I've experienced.
01:38:18.060So the issue becomes, you know, what do you want from life?
01:38:22.660Do you want to have like, you know, a bunch of zeros in your bank account, but having led a very narrow and rather stunted life?
01:38:30.960Or do you want to experience everything that life has to offer and perhaps forego, you know, the huge money, but have a much richer life?
01:38:40.700Because I can assure you, because I know these guys, when I talk to investment bankers who are far wealthier than I am, guys I know, guys I grew up with in some cases, you know, they always look at me with envy.
01:38:54.560You know, because they always say, well, you know, I was working as opposed to doing the shit that I've done in my life.
01:39:06.880I'm not, I'm not talking about from the perspective of having any kind of regrets, but is there anything that, that you would have done differently at any point in your life?
01:46:49.660I flunked out of university twice in Chile because I just chased girls because all of a sudden I discovered this skeleton key to get any girl.
01:54:14.660That's something else that I find kind of troubling is that so many guys, they think that they find some woman, and they put all of their hopes and aspirations on the woman, and they think that the woman is going to be their everything.
01:54:29.320Their best friend, their lover, their nursemaid, their cleaning lady, everything, okay?
01:54:36.540And this is a huge mistake, because it's too much of a burden, quite frankly, for any one person to be your lover and your best friend that you tell all of your secrets to, basically your psychiatrist and lover at the same time.
01:54:50.440What you should do insofar as women are concerned, and this is my experience, and this is what I think, and take it for what you will, is that a woman is not your best friend.
01:55:46.340So no woman wants to suddenly be hiding behind the stone wall that you are supposed to be, and start realizing that the wall is made of jello.
01:55:55.580And you've got all these feelings, and you know, I'm so worried, and I'm so worried about my job, and my parents hurt me when I was little.
01:56:03.140And all that fucking bullshit, you know?
01:56:06.140All that fucking pussy-ass, wimpy feelings shit, because that's what I think of it, quite frankly.
01:56:25.840They know that I'm not some fucking pussy.
01:56:28.240And, you know, we'll talk about whatever, and they'll say, oh, yeah, you know, I had a, you know, my father was a fucking asshole, or whatever, you know?
01:56:51.180But that's what they've been telling Western men to do is, you know, be soft, be a shoulder to cry on, cry on her shoulder, you know, you know, share your emotions with her.
01:57:43.160But she can be fun for, you know, a few weeks, a few months, maybe.
01:57:47.400But, like, you should always be thinking that the woman that you want to, quote, unquote, share your life with, you should be looking at her and saying, yeah, I want to have kids with her.
01:57:57.800If you can't answer that question right away, then she's just a pastime, at best.
01:58:03.220Let's, yeah, let's talk about having kids because let's wrap up on that note.
01:58:07.680But before we do, I just wanted to touch on another Eastern European phrase that I heard a lot because I dated a lot of Eastern Europeans in my youth.
01:58:15.340And one of the things that popped up a lot is the gals would say something along the lines of, like, what are you made out of butter?
01:58:20.540As if it's like an insult, like you're too soft, right?
02:01:39.040It's that feeling of love and support and comfort, okay, with children that she should make.
02:01:48.720If she doesn't have the qualities to make such a home, she's the wrong person.
02:01:55.100If she's like some, you know, chick with tattoos or maybe not, maybe she's got no tattoos, but, you know, the skimpy outfits and always look at me kind of thing.
02:02:26.380To create this loving home with children so that it is a place of comfort where you, as a man, can come home after earning the money, i.e. bringing in the resources to support this whole edge of our eyes, right?
02:02:40.660You come and you are welcome and you are happy, and the people in your home make the effort to make you happy and comfortable, okay?
02:02:51.380If she's a nag, if it's always problems, am I still here?
02:03:27.560But when you find a woman who has that objective, maybe she hasn't articulated it.
02:03:33.140Maybe you have to help her to articulate it.
02:03:35.700But if she has that basic idea, objective of having a loving, warm home full of children who will make you happy, especially as you grow older, then, yeah, that's a woman that you should marry.
02:03:48.380But you've got to keep in mind, you know, what you're looking for.
02:03:52.000And you have to understand that a marriage is not to be happy because, like I said, happiness comes in bursts and often catches you unawares.
02:04:05.520What you are aiming for in a marriage is that both of you have the same objective, just as if it were a business enterprise where two people are working together.
02:04:54.360Yeah, my Twitter is kind of like the best place to find me because I have in my bio a link to my channels, and I also post the videos that I release there.
02:05:03.780So, you can – from Twitter, you can find my YouTube channels.