The Joe Rogan Experience - Joe Rogan Experience #1713 - Mike Baker

00:00:01.000 Joe Rogan Podcast, check it out!

00:00:04.000 The Joe Rogan Experience.

00:00:06.000 Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day.

00:00:13.000 Hey, you know what?

00:00:16.000 We turn to you.

00:00:17.000 We turn to you to find out what's happening. 0.99

00:00:19.000 Whenever shit gets completely sideways, it's time to bring in Mike Baker for some sort of analysis. 0.98

00:00:26.000 That sounds very Sunday morning news talk show. 0.99

00:00:30.000 Great.

00:00:31.000 Well, thanks, Chris Wallace, for having me. 0.99

00:00:33.000 Tell me what the fuck is going on. 0.99

00:00:34.000 This place is falling apart. 1.00

00:00:36.000 Who's running the show?

00:00:37.000 What's happening?

00:00:38.000 Well, first of all, I want to thank you for my antibody test.

00:00:40.000 I'm psyched about that.

00:00:41.000 You don't need that wacky booster.

00:00:43.000 No, no.

00:00:44.000 I got a picture of it and everything.

00:00:47.000 So you must have been exposed.

00:00:48.000 You've been vaccinated, but then you probably got exposed to COVID somewhere along the line recently.

00:00:53.000 You said you had a day where you kind of run down?

00:00:55.000 I had a day where I was a little bit run down, and then...

00:00:58.000 But I got the second of the vaccine shots was at the end of February.

00:01:05.000 So that's, what, seven months?

00:01:06.000 Yeah, it's a long time.

00:01:07.000 Yeah, it's a long time.

00:01:08.000 And those little lines on the...

00:01:10.000 Not that I understand it.

00:01:10.000 I'm talking like I understand what I just looked at.

00:01:12.000 But the lines on the antibody test results looked pretty damn good.

00:01:18.000 Pretty stiff.

00:01:19.000 Yeah, stiff line there.

00:01:20.000 Very virile.

00:01:21.000 Looked good.

00:01:21.000 Yeah.

00:01:22.000 So I think... 0.99

00:01:24.000 And I've been traveling like a son of a bitch, right, over the past three or four months. 0.99

00:01:27.000 There's no way I haven't been exposed. 0.99

00:01:28.000 And I got the boys, right, going to school.

00:01:30.000 They're coming home, you know, and it's not like they didn't bring back every germ, you know, ever invented before the pandemic.

00:01:37.000 So they're doing the same thing with COVID. So I'd have to assume at some point, yeah, I got exposed.

00:01:42.000 My kid got a regular cold recently.

00:01:44.000 Oh my god.

00:01:45.000 Do they still do that?

00:01:46.000 I didn't know they were still around.

00:01:48.000 She got a regular cold.

00:01:49.000 I was like, this is crazy.

00:01:50.000 I know. 0.95

00:01:52.000 There's so many things that are fucked up about this, but people have forgotten that every year, maybe you go out and you get your flu shot. 0.95

00:01:59.000 It didn't mean you weren't going to come down with the flu that season. 0.95

00:02:02.000 It just would be maybe a little bit better, right?

00:02:04.000 Yes.

00:02:06.000 But this COVID thing was sold in a different way.

00:02:09.000 It was not sold that you're going to get COVID, but it won't be that bad.

00:02:14.000 Like, Fauci was literally on TV saying, you won't get it and you won't spread it to anybody.

00:02:20.000 Both those things are patently false.

00:02:22.000 Well, now we got President Biden wearing a mask yesterday, getting a booster.

00:02:25.000 Do you think he got a booster?

00:02:27.000 Do you think that was a real booster?

00:02:28.000 You mentioned that before we started talking, and I hadn't thought about it before, but you know what?

00:02:33.000 When I watched it on TV, when I watched him getting his shot and his mask on, all I could think of was this is performance art.

00:02:41.000 So the next step of performance art would be like not giving him the booster, but just giving him a shot.

00:02:47.000 I think if they were going to give him a booster shot, the last thing they would do is give it to him live on television.

00:02:53.000 What if he dies?

00:02:55.000 What if he blacks out? 0.99

00:02:57.000 What if he gets hit and faints?

00:02:58.000 Because people have had very bad reactions in the moment for whatever reason.

00:03:03.000 Right.

00:03:04.000 I think they still tell you.

00:03:06.000 They give you the shot, and then they'll say, stick around for 10 or 15 minutes.

00:03:09.000 They want to make sure you don't fall down.

00:03:12.000 I agree, because every other step of the way, with any president, they're so careful.

00:03:18.000 So careful about the messaging, the optics, the security issues related to it.

00:03:24.000 It would be not unheard of.

00:03:27.000 Unless Kamala Harris talked him into it.

00:03:29.000 She's like, go ahead, take it.

00:03:30.000 Take a double.

00:03:31.000 Give him a double. 0.98

00:03:31.000 I don't know. 0.98

00:03:32.000 I don't think she wants the job anymore.

00:03:34.000 You don't think so?

00:03:34.000 No.

00:03:35.000 She seems quite quiet.

00:03:36.000 She's been very quiet.

00:03:38.000 Weird, right?

00:03:39.000 I'm not sure.

00:03:40.000 She may have left the country. 1.00

00:03:43.000 There was that fucking whole border thing. 0.99

00:03:45.000 Like, oh, she's going to address the border. 0.99

00:03:46.000 And now you look at it, you're like, what is going on down there?

00:03:49.000 Apparently she took care of it. 0.76

00:03:51.000 It's under control.

00:03:52.000 They brought Haiti to the border. 0.99

00:03:54.000 That's the crazy thing is how many Haitian folks are trying to get in. 1.00

00:03:58.000 How did that happen?

00:03:59.000 I thought it was just Mexicans.

00:04:01.000 Well, and if you look at the map, it's not a logical migration, right?

00:04:06.000 If you look at a map, you've got Florida, which would seem to be, I don't know, maybe a natural point of landing.

00:04:12.000 Certainly closer.

00:04:13.000 Yes.

00:04:14.000 And then you've got You got this diversion over to Texas.

00:04:20.000 But look, we've been seeing this happen for a while.

00:04:23.000 I think it was Panama said, look, this time last year they were processing maybe 300 people coming in.

00:04:30.000 And now they're up to like 30,000 a day coming in.

00:04:34.000 Yeah, mostly Africans and Haitians.

00:04:35.000 Into Panama? 0.61

00:04:36.000 Into Panama, yeah.

00:04:37.000 30,000 a day?

00:04:52.000 And, you know, I get the idea.

00:04:54.000 Everybody's looking for a better life.

00:04:56.000 People want to get the hell out of someplace that they don't see any future.

00:05:00.000 You know, used to be that if you were seeking asylum, you'd go to the next safe harbor, right?

00:05:05.000 And that would be your point of, you know, kind of where you're going on.

00:05:09.000 Looking for asylum.

00:05:10.000 But now you can pass through any country and then get to America and claim asylum, even though you've been going through a variety of other countries to get here.

00:05:19.000 So I'm not sure how the definition changed at some point.

00:05:21.000 But no, I think to get back to the original point, I think VP Harris, she's done a fine job with the border. 0.97

00:05:29.000 What the fuck is going on where he was saying that they're going to punish the guys who are on horses because they're strapping these Haitian immigrants? 0.99

00:05:36.000 Did he not even watch that? 1.00

00:05:38.000 That's a crazy thing to say because isn't that defamatory?

00:05:43.000 It is.

00:05:45.000 On planet Earth it is.

00:05:46.000 Because they did not hit those guys with straps.

00:05:49.000 He was pretending that they were whipping these guys.

00:05:52.000 That's not true.

00:05:53.000 No, it's not true.

00:05:53.000 They use what are called split reins.

00:05:56.000 It's a simple thing.

00:05:58.000 I've been riding horses since I was a little kid.

00:06:00.000 And what we're getting now is we're getting policy made by people in Washington, D.C. who have no idea what a horse looks like, right?

00:06:11.000 And they...

00:06:13.000 They saw this picture.

00:06:15.000 They leapt to a conclusion.

00:06:17.000 The optic, you know, from their perspective, was awful, right?

00:06:20.000 And, okay, yeah, you look at that and you go, okay, now put it in context.

00:06:25.000 My thought when I see that picture is, I want to know what happened immediately before and what happened after.

00:06:29.000 But let me say something real quick.

00:06:30.000 It's impossible for him to be whipping him because he's grabbing him.

00:06:34.000 Right.

00:06:34.000 Look at his arm.

00:06:35.000 That is his arm, right?

00:06:37.000 Yeah, and that's also a rain.

00:06:39.000 That's part of the rain.

00:06:40.000 It's a rain, but it's very clear that his hand is grabbing him and his other hand is up there.

00:06:46.000 There's no hand to whip him.

00:06:47.000 Right.

00:06:48.000 It doesn't exist.

00:06:49.000 But that doesn't matter.

00:06:50.000 That's not...

00:06:52.000 Facts don't matter in Washington anymore.

00:06:56.000 Facts don't matter anywhere.

00:06:58.000 I just can't imagine that they don't matter when you're the actual president. 0.99

00:07:01.000 It's one thing if you're CNN and you're just full of shit, but this is just the president of the United States saying that someone would be held accountable for strapping these people. 0.99

00:07:13.000 That's just a lie. 0.99

00:07:13.000 They're taking the horses away from the Border Patrol. 0.99

00:07:17.000 That's how stupid the world is now. 1.00

00:07:21.000 Based on that, because the optic in their mind, again, it's not the reality. 1.00

00:07:26.000 It's the narrative now that they can glom onto.

00:07:31.000 They can now make decisions such as taking away one of the most effective tools with the border patrol in that part of the country is the horse.

00:07:41.000 And now they're going to take it away.

00:07:44.000 So you've got Jen Psaki up in Washington, D.C. Proclaiming these things as if she's been an equestrian all her life and she understands exactly what she's talking about.

00:07:53.000 What did she say?

00:07:54.000 Well, that's exactly what she said.

00:07:56.000 Taking away the horses from the Border Patrol.

00:08:00.000 Because of the optics that came from that...

00:08:02.000 Oh, she didn't say because of the optic.

00:08:03.000 But she said because...

00:08:06.000 It's too effective?

00:08:07.000 Well, no.

00:08:08.000 They don't care.

00:08:09.000 Again, it's not tied to any logical reason.

00:08:11.000 That's the part that's so bizarre.

00:08:12.000 It's not tied to, because this happened, we're doing X. It's just because of this photo, literally.

00:08:18.000 And now the media's walked the dog back a little bit, and they've said, okay, yeah, we get it.

00:08:22.000 Those are reins.

00:08:22.000 That's not a whip, and so we understand.

00:08:24.000 Oh, okay, fine.

00:08:25.000 We shouldn't be chasing people.

00:08:26.000 Split reins is that instead of a loop that goes from one side of the horse's mouth to the other, there's two Two separate strings or pieces of leather or whatever it is?

00:08:34.000 Yeah, the reins are split, exactly what it says.

00:08:38.000 And so that's – again, I keep going back to that one point, which is it doesn't really matter what the facts are anymore.

00:08:48.000 As an example, today was—now I'm kind of bouncing around a little bit—but today was hearings up on the Hill.

00:08:54.000 The Senate Armed Services Committee was holding hearings.

00:08:57.000 So who did they have?

00:08:59.000 They had Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin.

00:09:00.000 They had CENTCOM Commander General McKenzie, great guy.

00:09:05.000 They had the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Milley.

00:09:10.000 So they all, to the last one, said, yes, we were advising the president that, you know, our advice is to maintain a small troop presence, minimum of 2,500 troops,

00:09:26.000 right, in Afghanistan.

00:09:29.000 And our belief was not that it would collapse as quickly as it did, but that it would collapse if you took those advisers, those troops out, that it would collapse maybe by fall, this fall.

00:09:40.000 And yet you've got the president saying, I don't recall being told any of that.

00:09:46.000 And that's okay.

00:09:48.000 Now, because nobody's questioning it, right?

00:09:51.000 Nobody's saying, well, hold on.

00:09:53.000 How about some pushback?

00:09:54.000 How about saying, what do you mean you don't recall?

00:09:56.000 This is one of the most important decisions you've made or will be making.

00:09:59.000 And you don't recall whether your senior top military advisors were telling you that in their advice, keep the troops in there for a period of time.

00:10:09.000 And he's saying, I don't remember.

00:10:10.000 And there's really no serious pushback.

00:10:12.000 This whole hearing, if anybody wants to know what Washington, D.C. is like and how that city runs, I'd recommend maybe on Thursday watching some more of these hearings on the Afghanistan process because it's just...

00:10:25.000 On one hand, it's very depressing. 1.00

00:10:27.000 It's just a shit show. 0.99

00:10:28.000 You've got the senators on the Armed Services Committee who have been there, who have been privy to all sorts of intelligence over the past few years, right? 1.00

00:10:35.000 Now, sitting in a hearing to understand what happened, what went wrong with the Afghan withdrawal, and they're all acting as if, you know, they could be surprised by this.

00:10:45.000 When these politicians have been sitting up for Capitol Hill, being briefed on this shit, having the opportunity to ask questions, doing all the things they should be doing, but now because it's all theater, now they get to sit in a hearing in front of some of the senior military commanders and act as if they're a little bit surprised by all of this. 0.91

00:11:03.000 And, oh my God, how did it happen? 0.98

00:11:04.000 How can we prevent it from happening again?

00:11:06.000 Senator Gene Sheehan actually asked that.

00:11:07.000 I think it was of Milley saying, you know, well, how do we prevent this from happening again? 0.98

00:11:11.000 Are you fucking kidding me? 0.98

00:11:12.000 Happening again? 0.99

00:11:13.000 Yeah.

00:11:13.000 That's your question?

00:11:15.000 Jesus Christ.

00:11:16.000 Anyway, I tell you what, it's been a fascinating period of time.

00:11:24.000 Let me ask you this.

00:11:25.000 So the president has the ability to say whatever the...

00:11:29.000 So if someone advises him to leave 2,500 troops, he has the ability to say, I don't think so, no troops.

00:11:37.000 Yes, yes, he does.

00:11:38.000 So he can take all that advice.

00:11:40.000 And the military leaders are saying, look, we provided this advice.

00:11:45.000 Right.

00:11:46.000 That's a strange thing, right?

00:11:48.000 That one man has the ability to make all these decisions.

00:11:54.000 I mean, obviously, this is what the president is, right?

00:11:55.000 He's the commander-in-chief, yeah.

00:11:56.000 But that one man has the ability to make these economic decisions, right?

00:12:00.000 These decisions about healthcare, these decisions about taxes, these decisions about the military, these decisions about the future of the troops.

00:12:11.000 I mean, there's even this discussion that they're throwing around about making it so troops that won't get vaccinated, they get dishonorably discharged.

00:12:22.000 Have you seen that?

00:12:23.000 No.

00:12:24.000 That's a new one on me.

00:12:26.000 I have not seen that.

00:12:26.000 I don't even know if they can do that, but there was a soldier, and she had made a video, and she is releasing this video explaining what's happening, that they're going to get discharged if they refuse to get vaccinated.

00:12:41.000 I can't believe they would dishonorably discharge them. 0.88

00:12:43.000 That would be a real fucking shock if that's what they were doing. 0.95

00:12:47.000 See if that's true. 0.98

00:12:48.000 It might have been exaggerated in an article for the headline, but I think that they're planning on doing something along those lines.

00:12:56.000 Well, look, I think it does surprise people sometimes when they see the extent, and if they were watching these hearings and understanding The information flow about Afghanistan.

00:13:09.000 Look, there was a lot of talk, right, in the aftermath of this withdrawal clown show, that, you know, what happened?

00:13:17.000 Who was advising who?

00:13:18.000 How did we miss certain pieces of intelligence?

00:13:20.000 And there's a lot to figure out there, but the idea that That the president would sit there in his office with all these senior advisors around, and they would say, sir, here are your options, because that's always basically what they're doing.

00:13:35.000 And theoretically, they are supposed to be strong enough to argue their point as strongly as possible, right?

00:13:42.000 They're not there to just go along.

00:13:43.000 So they all come in, they say, we think you should be keeping troops in there.

00:13:50.000 And the president then steps away.

00:13:52.000 And now Millie, McKenzie, others, they all said that Biden listened very, you know, seriously to them.

00:13:58.000 But there was a political decision here, right?

00:14:01.000 That political decision was, we're getting the hell out.

00:14:04.000 Now, the interesting thing is, is that Biden, he kind of wants to have it both ways, right?

00:14:12.000 He wants to take credit for being brave and saying we're getting the hell out, right?

00:14:17.000 But then he also wants to blame the previous administration for the reason why he had to be getting the hell out.

00:14:23.000 So he wants to blame the Doha agreement that Trump signed in February of 2020. And what was that?

00:14:28.000 Well, that was when the Trump administration made a deal with the Taliban in February of 2020, and basically it had conditions within that.

00:14:39.000 And General Milley and McKenzie talked about those conditions, I think, today in their hearings, actually.

00:14:44.000 There were seven conditions placed on the Taliban.

00:14:49.000 For this agreement to go forward.

00:14:51.000 And there was a May withdrawal date. 0.99

00:14:54.000 Now, the administration, the previous administration, people don't want to hear this shit, right? 0.99

00:14:58.000 Because they're so entrenched in their own camp, right? 0.99

00:15:00.000 So people who are on the hard left, they're not going to want to hear the fact that the Doha agreement was based on conditions, right?

00:15:08.000 But the most senior military commanders today reaffirmed that, yes, there were seven conditions for that agreement to follow through, for us to follow through.

00:15:17.000 We had eight conditions for the U.S. And now, during the course of the discussions and the negotiations, and this whole agreement was based on a power sharing.

00:15:25.000 The idea was, we want to create an opportunity for the Taliban and the Afghan government. 0.80

00:15:30.000 We want them all to come together and create a power sharing agreement.

00:15:33.000 Well, you know.

00:15:35.000 On one hand, you could argue and say that's never going to happen.

00:15:38.000 Sounds crazy.

00:15:38.000 Yeah, it sounds crazy.

00:15:39.000 But that's where they were.

00:15:41.000 And you could also argue, and again, because people are so entrenched, no one's going to give any credit to whether they want to give credit to Biden or they want to give credit to Trump or any Republican president or Democrat president.

00:15:53.000 The Trump administration did kind of broker the hard, heavy lift of saying, we're getting the hell out.

00:16:02.000 There had been talk around the edges in previous administrations about how long would it be there, right? 0.98

00:16:06.000 But the German administration did finally actually say, fuck it, let's get a negotiation, let's go and let's set a time to get the fuck out after 20 years. 0.99

00:16:14.000 Right or wrong? 0.99

00:16:15.000 So they put that on the table.

00:16:17.000 They set the table for that, you know, hardline withdrawal.

00:16:21.000 But the Taliban never met those conditions.

00:16:24.000 The only thing they did was not attack U.S. troops directly.

00:16:27.000 But as Milley and Mackenzie said today, they never met any of the other conditions.

00:16:33.000 So it had been explained to the Taliban that if that was the case and you don't meet these conditions, we're not going to leave in May.

00:16:40.000 We're going to just keep pushing the withdrawal date further to the right.

00:16:44.000 So why was the decision made to withdraw then?

00:16:47.000 Well, look, in part, I think, because I think everybody got behind the idea that we can't stay there forever because I think everybody understood that it just wasn't happening.

00:17:00.000 They weren't buying what we were selling.

00:17:02.000 They never have, right?

00:17:03.000 And you don't want to be completely fatalistic all the time, but with Afghanistan, it's not a bad frame of reference to remember all the other times that things like this have failed. 0.76

00:17:13.000 And so the idea that somehow we were going to build a stable pseudo-democratic government in Afghanistan was always flawed, and there was never really any evidence to show that that was going to happen.

00:17:26.000 And it was propped up, and I think nobody really wanted to tell the truth in positions of leadership, whether it was military or government or intel community. 0.98

00:17:37.000 And so I think there was general agreement that, yeah, we got to get the fuck out. 0.98

00:17:44.000 And then it came down to, well, how do we do that? 0.98

00:17:46.000 And we faced some of the same problems that the old Soviets faced getting the hell out of Afghanistan. 0.99

00:17:51.000 But I think with this case, part of it was We had pulled advisers off the Afghan units, you know, two, three years ago, right?

00:18:04.000 That had been a process.

00:18:05.000 So the withdrawal process had been going on for a number of years, you know, over the past decade or so, you know, in a sense, right?

00:18:13.000 We'd been drawing back, pulling out some resource, pulling out troops, lowering the troop numbers, putting more responsibility on contractors.

00:18:22.000 Once you take the advisors out of the Afghan units, in a sense, you don't have really eyes and ears inside the Afghan military.

00:18:30.000 So you can have President Ghani or some bullshit Afghan commander just telling you whatever you want to hear, but you didn't have a lot of folks... 0.99

00:18:40.000 At ground level, working with the troops saying, all right, this shit's not going to hold, right? 0.99

00:18:47.000 Particularly after the Doha agreement, right? 0.99

00:18:49.000 Once I think that the Doha agreement was made, I think the writing's on the wall and even the Afghan military could see it, right? 1.00

00:18:56.000 And they could read it and they could say, okay, this shit's not going to happen. 0.99

00:19:01.000 We're not going to keep getting money. 0.99

00:19:02.000 We're not going to keep getting advisors.

00:19:03.000 And we're not going to get the air support that is really the only thing that keeps us in power.

00:19:11.000 So, you know, at some point over a period of a few years, we were degrading our own ability to actually understand just how bad it was getting, right?

00:19:21.000 And so then it became a logistical exercise.

00:19:27.000 You got to move personnel and you got to move material out of the country.

00:19:31.000 And that's where you could argue it all kind of went sideways. 0.99

00:19:37.000 Well, they left behind how much shit? 1.00

00:19:39.000 A lot of shit. 1.00

00:19:40.000 A lot of shit. 1.00

00:19:41.000 Crazy shit, right? 1.00

00:19:43.000 Blackhawks? 1.00

00:19:44.000 Yes.

00:19:44.000 Hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars as a conservative estimate.

00:19:48.000 Why?

00:19:49.000 That's a conservative estimate.

00:19:51.000 Well, partly because you could argue that some of the material was decommissioned.

00:19:58.000 Some of the heavier platforms were made non-functioning.

00:20:02.000 Okay, fine.

00:20:05.000 To answer the question, I don't know why the military wouldn't have moved more of the light gear out there.

00:20:13.000 In other words, the night vision devices, the weaponry, the small arms, ammunition.

00:20:19.000 Why not spend three or four months getting that gear the hell out?

00:20:25.000 You don't have the troops that require them. 0.99

00:20:27.000 So now you've got all this shit stored. 0.99

00:20:29.000 Now the thought could have been that this is for the Afghan military. 1.00

00:20:33.000 They're going to hold.

00:20:36.000 But here's the thing, the interesting point that came out from General Milley and General McKenzie during these hearings is that they claim, they're stating, and I have no reason not to believe them, they're stating that the general consensus by the fall of 2020, right?

00:20:51.000 Was that without the troops in there, once you take the U.S. troops out and the money, then the government's going to collapse probably by fall of this year.

00:21:04.000 It took like three hours.

00:21:06.000 Yeah, it took 11 days.

00:21:07.000 Now, in a classic piece of Washington speak, I think it was the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in answering a question said, no, we never saw any assessment that said that the government would collapse in 11 days.

00:21:19.000 He's very specific, right?

00:21:21.000 He's not saying in short order.

00:21:23.000 He's just saying, I didn't see one for 11 days.

00:21:26.000 We had one for like two weeks. 0.99

00:21:28.000 So that's just the shit that happens on the side. 0.98

00:21:32.000 So they assumed that the Afghan army eventually was not going to fight the Taliban. 0.99

00:21:36.000 Yes.

00:21:36.000 So what they're saying is we all...

00:21:38.000 And look, the intel community, we've been talking about that for years.

00:21:43.000 All you had to do was study the Soviet papers during their time, their occupation in Afghanistan, to understand how we were likely going to replay that scenario.

00:21:54.000 And we did, right? 0.90

00:21:55.000 So, you know, you could argue that what should have happened was years ago, we should have looked around and thought, this is a bullshit exercise, right?

00:22:06.000 Doesn't mean that, you know, and I think the military today The senior commanders today and during this week, I think you'll see them make a huge effort to say, first and foremost, the veterans and everyone who fought there and all the hardship,

00:22:26.000 it wasn't in vain.

00:22:28.000 I think they're going to focus on that and they're going to say, because for two decades, We haven't been attacked on our home soil.

00:22:38.000 And in a narrow definition, yes, that's why we went in.

00:22:42.000 And then it kind of got blown up into this idea that we were going to create this bastion of democracy in Afghanistan.

00:22:50.000 But it's been widely known forever that Afghanistan is insane.

00:22:53.000 Like, it's impossible to manage.

00:22:55.000 The Soviets couldn't handle it.

00:22:57.000 You know, the whole area is incredibly mountainous.

00:23:03.000 Like, it's very remote.

00:23:05.000 It consists of these little clans that are run by warlords.

00:23:08.000 Like, it's not...

00:23:09.000 Like, Kabul is essentially the only real city, right?

00:23:12.000 Yeah.

00:23:12.000 Are there other cities there that are real cities?

00:23:15.000 There are, but there are...

00:23:17.000 They still run like little fiefdoms.

00:23:20.000 Fiefdom is a good word. 0.92

00:23:21.000 I know, right?

00:23:22.000 I like how you pulled that out.

00:23:23.000 Write that down.

00:23:24.000 Write that one down.

00:23:25.000 Fiefdom.

00:23:25.000 Well, no, I can't because I don't know how to spell it.

00:23:27.000 It's like something from The Hobbit.

00:23:29.000 What is a fiefdom?

00:23:30.000 Do you know what a fiefdom is, Jamie?

00:23:33.000 Let's see what the spelling on the fiefdom.

00:23:36.000 While we're talking to you, did you find anything out about the dishonorable discharge thing?

00:23:41.000 Yeah, so I had to dig through it.

00:23:43.000 I found, starting with this, it says the White House opposes a provision banning it.

00:23:48.000 Oh, so they oppose a provision banning dishonorable discharge, so they keep it open.

00:23:53.000 So it's possible.

00:23:54.000 So yeah, again, it hasn't happened yet.

00:23:57.000 And then digging through the military.com, I think, was the best.

00:24:01.000 This one, yeah.

00:24:02.000 So here's a good explanation, I think.

00:24:04.000 Troops who refuse to be inoculated may not necessarily face dishonorable discharge or even separation, according to Kirby.

00:24:13.000 But I don't like that word, may not necessarily.

00:24:16.000 I don't like that phrasing.

00:24:18.000 Yeah, that's definitely a Washington phrase.

00:24:20.000 The Pentagon has repeatedly stopped short of saying it will boot troops for refusing the shot.

00:24:25.000 Commanders will have a range of options.

00:24:27.000 That's stopped short of punishment under the Uniform Code of Military Justice, Kirby said.

00:24:31.000 The services will also allow religious exemptions to the vaccine.

00:24:35.000 But that's a weird one.

00:24:36.000 Couldn't everybody say, I got a religious exemption?

00:24:38.000 Look at this.

00:24:39.000 Actually, there's a really good quote down here.

00:24:40.000 When an individual declines to take a mandatory vaccine, they will be given an opportunity to talk to both their medical providers as well as their own chain of command.

00:24:48.000 Yeah, you know how excited they're going to be to go and talk to their own chain of command so that they can fully understand the decision they are making.

00:24:54.000 Jesus Christ.

00:24:55.000 That sounds like going in and talking to a high-value target.

00:25:00.000 I want you to fully understand the decision you're making right here.

00:25:04.000 Go.

00:25:05.000 Yeah, that's...

00:25:07.000 Boy, talk about a pivot, but we'll go from Afghanistan to the COVID thing.

00:25:12.000 Yeah, I just wondered while we were talking to Jamie, I just wanted to clear it up.

00:25:15.000 Yeah, no, there's a fiefdom.

00:25:16.000 Oh, fiefdom.

00:25:17.000 Oh, wait a second.

00:25:18.000 Look, see?

00:25:20.000 Hmm.

00:25:20.000 An organization or department over which one dominant person or group exercises control.

00:25:26.000 The Duke's fiefdom had been greatly expanded as a reward for his dutiful military service on behalf of the king.

00:25:33.000 As it should have been.

00:25:34.000 As it should have been.

00:25:36.000 Because he was a fine, fine lad.

00:25:38.000 So the point is that Afghanistan, you can't really control it. 1.00

00:25:42.000 It's incredibly rugged terrain.

00:25:45.000 You're not going to get vehicles in there, right?

00:25:47.000 It's mostly mountainous areas, unless you're flying helicopters.

00:25:50.000 If you don't have air support.

00:25:52.000 And that's really why this fell down.

00:25:53.000 And the idea, and there's been a lot of talk about why did we close Bagram?

00:25:57.000 Why did they close the air base before they'd finish this whole process, right?

00:26:01.000 So I guess one of the things is this is very layered.

00:26:05.000 And again, as with just about everything else that goes on in the world today, because everybody's got attention deficit disorder, Nobody takes the time to look at all the various layers, right?

00:26:19.000 So this fell down, as you said before, it fell into teams, right?

00:26:22.000 So you're either pro-Biden or you're not, right?

00:26:26.000 You're either pro-vaccine or you're not.

00:26:28.000 And that's not the case, right?

00:26:30.000 There's all sorts of ground in between those two positions.

00:26:34.000 And so I think with Bagram, the idea was In a sense, that wasn't there necessarily because it's some Pagram Air Base is like 30 miles away from the US Embassy in Kabul.

00:26:49.000 And so would that have been an effective departure point, you know, for all the people we were looking to move out during the withdrawal?

00:26:57.000 Okay.

00:26:59.000 You could argue it would be helpful, right?

00:27:01.000 But it wasn't right there.

00:27:02.000 And that's our point.

00:27:03.000 Well, you know, Hamid Karzai airport was right there.

00:27:05.000 It was much more immediate.

00:27:06.000 We need to secure that.

00:27:07.000 And by the way, if we're going to keep Bagram open, we needed, you know, upwards of five or 6,000 troops to secure it. 0.97

00:27:14.000 But it all comes back to this idea that, you know, the agreement with the Taliban, because both sides are using it In sort of an effort to cover their own ass. 0.50

00:27:25.000 So the Democrats are using it because, well, we were boxed in. 0.96

00:27:28.000 We had no choice.

00:27:29.000 Look, Trump made a bad deal, right?

00:27:31.000 And so we had to go with it, right?

00:27:32.000 Because if we didn't go with it, the Taliban would start attacking us again. 1.00

00:27:36.000 Well, yeah, no shit, right? 1.00

00:27:38.000 But there you go. 0.99

00:27:39.000 And the Republicans are using it by saying there were conditions built into the agreement.

00:27:43.000 And you didn't have to honor the agreement.

00:27:47.000 Now, that would have meant we would have had to probably put more troops in, you know, to secure the people that we already had there, the advisors that were there.

00:27:52.000 So it's a morass, right?

00:27:54.000 And over top of all that is this general feeling I think that most people had that it was time to leave, right?

00:27:59.000 So again, it's the process of leaving.

00:28:02.000 It wasn't the decision to leave.

00:28:03.000 It was the process of how you executed that.

00:28:05.000 And Bagram was kind of a central point in that because if you could maintain air cover for the Afghan military, right, during the point when you're withdrawing, You can prevent the Taliban from doing what they did, which was that immediate overrun of the country.

00:28:20.000 They couldn't do it with our air support, without our air support, I mean.

00:28:25.000 So the questions that someone would have on the outside is, when this happened, did this strengthen the Taliban?

00:28:32.000 And did it strengthen not just their military position because they have all these new weapons and everything, but did it also strengthen morale because they now force the Americans out and beat them and then punished all of the allies that worked with the Americans,

00:28:47.000 which is devastating because you got to think now people are going to be way more reluctant to cooperate with Americans and help them.

00:28:56.000 In a similar situation, because we kind of abandoned all those people that were translators, all those people that – there was a lot that got left behind, right?

00:29:06.000 Yeah, there were.

00:29:07.000 Some got rescued.

00:29:08.000 Yeah, they're claiming – I think they're – look, what's happening is they're trying to say, look, the withdrawal process was a huge success.

00:29:18.000 Have they really said that?

00:29:19.000 Yeah, oh yeah.

00:29:20.000 Well, President Biden said this was an extraordinary success, the whole process.

00:29:23.000 Now, I think strategically, you could argue that it's not a success.

00:29:26.000 You know, from a logistical operation, did they lift a lot of people out of the country in a short order of time?

00:29:31.000 Yes.

00:29:31.000 But was it chaotic?

00:29:33.000 Absolutely.

00:29:34.000 Did things happen that shouldn't have had to happen?

00:29:36.000 Yes.

00:29:37.000 I think it's really hard to define this as a success, but, you know, in their position, they got to spin it the best they can.

00:29:43.000 But if you think about, you know, what you were just saying, in a small sense, it's tough enough.

00:29:50.000 If I'm in Afghanistan, and I'm trying to develop sources inside the country while I'm there that can tell me about Taliban movement, right?

00:30:02.000 So I'm trying to convince some tribal elder somewhere, for whatever reason.

00:30:07.000 Maybe his kid was killed by the Taliban.

00:30:09.000 Maybe the Taliban took his underage daughter into marriage.

00:30:16.000 Maybe They denied him medical care, whatever.

00:30:20.000 It doesn't matter whether it's this case or whether you're recruiting anybody.

00:30:23.000 You're always looking for a point of weakness, right, in a sense.

00:30:25.000 That sounds wrong, but you're looking for leverage.

00:30:28.000 And so I'm trying to convince this person to work with me and provide me with intelligence.

00:30:36.000 That's counter to his best interest in a sense, right?

00:30:39.000 Because he's probably going to think, okay, well, if I get found out, I'm getting whacked.

00:30:43.000 So it's not going to end well for me.

00:30:45.000 Now, imagine trying to do that now when you don't have a presence on the ground.

00:30:49.000 You still need that insight.

00:30:50.000 You still need those people reporting to you.

00:30:52.000 But now you've just gotten off the X and left some people there and you've bugged out.

00:30:58.000 And they look at this and go, well, what the hell is now is my incentive for helping the Americans, providing them?

00:31:03.000 And this feeds into... 0.99

00:31:05.000 I'm jumping all over the fucking place. 0.97

00:31:07.000 This feeds into this talk now that's become the favorite phrase in Washington of over-the-horizon capability, which means conducting operations from a distance because you don't have resources within that area of operations. 0.98

00:31:23.000 So you're over the horizon, but you're going to dip in occasionally whenever you need to and carry out some type of operation.

00:31:34.000 And so, yeah, to answer your question, it makes it very, very difficult.

00:31:40.000 Morale was already not good.

00:31:45.000 Once the Doha agreement, I think, was signed.

00:31:49.000 And again, look, I think, you know, the Doha agreement... 0.96

00:31:53.000 Somebody had to finally memorialize the idea that we're getting the fuck out of Afghanistan, right? 0.99

00:31:58.000 And so they did. 0.95

00:32:00.000 Is it a good thing that we got out of Afghanistan? 0.99

00:32:04.000 In a very pragmatic sense, yes.

00:32:08.000 Yeah, because I don't know what the hell we were doing there.

00:32:12.000 I mean, the idea was, fine, we go in initially, and we punish those who were responsible for 9-11, right?

00:32:18.000 And we tell them, don't let this happen again, and then we should have gotten the hell out, right?

00:32:25.000 Avoided the last 20 years because we'd had a recent case study with the Russians. 1.00

00:32:28.000 We knew from what the Russians did there, you know, how it could end and how it likely could end. 0.83

00:32:33.000 And yet we thought, because, you know, there's always hubris involved, we thought we're going to do better.

00:32:37.000 Look, the Taliban had no place to go when the Russians were there, right? 0.99

00:32:40.000 So they're just going to wait it out.

00:32:42.000 It's like Vietnam. 0.97

00:32:43.000 The Viet Cong had nowhere to go. 0.87

00:32:45.000 They're going to wait, right?

00:32:47.000 They know we're rolling troops out there on a, you know, 6 or 8 or 12-month deployment.

00:32:51.000 They're going to go home, you know, and they want to get home.

00:32:55.000 These people have no place to go.

00:32:57.000 Taliban, again, same thing this time around.

00:33:00.000 So I don't know why anybody should be surprised about the overall result.

00:33:06.000 But yes, I do think it was time to go.

00:33:08.000 I think it was time to go quite some time ago.

00:33:11.000 That was very poetic.

00:33:13.000 Anyway, yeah, it's just nobody spoke the truth in Washington about the situation in Afghanistan because nobody wanted to hear it, right?

00:33:26.000 And they felt that it wasn't politically a good move.

00:33:28.000 And so nobody wanted to stand up because they're all so fucking worried about their jobs and say, this is my opinion, so what it's worth, and say the tough things about the situation there.

00:33:42.000 Either because they felt like if I say something negative about what we're doing in Afghanistan, it's disrespecting the troops, which it's not, or I'll probably get drummed out of my nice political position.

00:33:57.000 And when you watch hearings that take place in Washington, D.C., the whole thing is about just finding somebody to blame other than your own self or your party.

00:34:06.000 And it seems like no one's going to get blamed.

00:34:08.000 No one's going to get blamed.

00:34:09.000 No.

00:34:10.000 No.

00:34:10.000 That would mean that there would be accountability.

00:34:13.000 And I don't think...

00:34:15.000 I don't know when that happened last in Washington, D.C. So how do you think they could have pulled out and made it less of a clusterfuck? 0.93

00:34:23.000 Well, I think they have to...

00:34:26.000 Look, they pulled the advisors out.

00:34:28.000 There were two parts to this, right?

00:34:29.000 There's the...

00:34:32.000 There's the, whatever they call it, the retrograde, right?

00:34:35.000 And drawing down the troops, right?

00:34:38.000 And the troops that we had there, right?

00:34:41.000 The 2500 were basically to train, advise, and assist.

00:34:45.000 That's very, very important, right?

00:34:47.000 For the presence.

00:34:49.000 It almost becomes, at that troop level, almost becomes an optic. 0.99

00:34:52.000 But that's still important to boost the ability of the Afghan military to hold their shit together. 0.98

00:34:58.000 And this 2500 was the one that they had advised that they leave behind. 0.97

00:35:02.000 What was the total amount of troops that were there before we pulled out?

00:35:06.000 It was coming down.

00:35:07.000 It was before I think before the inauguration, we were probably in the 5,000 to 4,000 range.

00:35:14.000 We had probably 3,000 or so paramilitary troops there from the agency.

00:35:20.000 We probably had, I don't know how many contractors, you know, a few thousand more contractors.

00:35:24.000 So it was a significant – at that point, it was a significant presence, but it was a significant drawdown from even a couple of years ago, right?

00:35:32.000 So again, the drawdown had been happening, right?

00:35:38.000 And so you had the retrograde of the military operation, and then you had This evacuation, right?

00:35:46.000 Or this withdrawal of all the, you know, diplomatic personnel, other Americans there, the SIVs, all of those people.

00:35:55.000 And that you could consider as sort of a separate operation.

00:35:58.000 And that's the withdrawal part of the whole thing that took place that seemed so chaotic and was, right?

00:36:05.000 But the military also Look, the military is very good at planning a variety of scenarios. 0.99

00:36:10.000 So it's not like they didn't think, there's a chance this whole thing goes to shit. 0.99

00:36:14.000 And so they pre-positioned troops. 0.99

00:36:17.000 They had a lot of air assets available.

00:36:21.000 But again, at a certain point, you could think of it in terms of a UPS operation.

00:36:28.000 In this case, you're moving people and you're moving stuff.

00:36:32.000 And I just think that we We completely botched the job of understanding how shitty the government and military capability was there.

00:36:47.000 And that is down to bad intelligence.

00:36:53.000 It's down to political maneuvering in Washington and just a desire to get the hell out and maybe ignoring assessments. 0.95

00:36:59.000 Because whether you're saying your assessment is, as General McKenzie and General Milley are saying, is that, you know, by the end of 2020, they were basically saying, advising the president and his team that things could fall to shit in a matter of months, 0.97

00:37:14.000 right? 0.97

00:37:15.000 Or whether you're saying things could fall to shit in a matter of a couple of weeks, you have to plan for the worst case scenario. 0.98

00:37:20.000 That's your job. 0.98

00:37:21.000 So their default position should have been, this thing's going to collapse in a couple hours.

00:37:27.000 And they didn't do that.

00:37:28.000 And I'm not quite sure, you know, why, but I don't suspect we're ever going to get full transparency on this because, again, it's not the way Washington works.

00:37:37.000 Do you get concerned when you see all this sort of woke ideology making its way into the military?

00:37:48.000 I know you've seen these...

00:37:50.000 Oh, yeah.

00:37:52.000 You know what I'm talking about?

00:37:53.000 Yeah, I do.

00:37:54.000 Yeah.

00:37:55.000 Yeah, I got a lot of calls about the CIA recruitment video. 0.99

00:38:00.000 Yeah, what the fuck was that? 0.99

00:38:03.000 Explain that to me. 0.99

00:38:04.000 Yeah, that was...

00:38:05.000 Look, somebody decided that the right messaging for trying to improve recruitment ability for the agency, and mind you, the agency isn't lacking in candidates, right?

00:38:18.000 We have a lot of people applying for the agency.

00:38:23.000 But at some point, someone thought the right message was to just go all out on the...

00:38:28.000 Whatever you want to call it, the woke issue and the inclusion.

00:38:31.000 And so they had an individual who basically spent her time talking. 0.67

00:38:37.000 While she said she didn't want to be identified in such a manner or in such a manner that she then proceeded to identify herself in these various categories.

00:38:44.000 Right.

00:38:47.000 I just think somebody should have test marketed that message inside the agency first before they decided to run with it because they took a lot of heat and people just thought it was ridiculous.

00:38:58.000 But I get what they're doing.

00:39:00.000 You have to have...

00:39:02.000 From an operational perspective, you know, set aside all the woke issues and the desire to be inclusive and everything, just from an operational perspective, you know, you want an intel service that is remarkably diverse because you're operating all over the world.

00:39:16.000 And you don't want everybody to have the same mindset and the same ideas and sitting around a table dealing with a potential problem because they're all going to throw the same idea at it, right?

00:39:25.000 So you want a variety of personalities and backgrounds and everything, but I just think that they, you know, They could have test-marketed that one a little better.

00:39:32.000 Well, it's not just about the agency, too.

00:39:34.000 There was another one that was...

00:39:37.000 Who was the person that was put in charge of...

00:39:42.000 There was someone who was put in charge of inclusiveness and diversity in the military, right?

00:39:48.000 Wasn't there... 0.98

00:39:49.000 And people were like, hey, hey, hey, what the fuck is this about? 0.98

00:39:54.000 This is all woke talk. 0.98

00:39:56.000 When woke talk invades the military, like, woke to me is, like, well-intentioned people that have bought into a cult.

00:40:06.000 That's what a lot of it is.

00:40:07.000 You know, it's, like, well-intentioned.

00:40:09.000 Like, if you look at that, like, we should...

00:40:11.000 I can say good with that.

00:40:12.000 Yeah, we should...

00:40:13.000 Celebrate all of our differences, and we should have people that feel comfortable in all walks of life, whether it's gay, straight, bi, trans, black, white, Mexican, Asian.

00:40:26.000 Everyone should be included, and it should be a meritocracy based on your performance, and you should look at all these factors.

00:40:34.000 That make this United States a wonderful place with all these different kinds of human beings and we should celebrate that.

00:40:41.000 But it's not just that.

00:40:42.000 It's highlighting that to the point of that being the primary concern.

00:40:47.000 The primary concern being inclusiveness and diversity and highlighting these various minority groups.

00:40:56.000 Highlighting them to the point where you're thinking about that more than you're thinking about anything else.

00:41:01.000 Operational effectiveness or capability, experience, actual qualities.

00:41:06.000 And you're seeing that in corporations are running into this problem where they have to have a certain amount of people, regardless of their qualifications, that fit these certain criterias.

00:41:16.000 And people are going, well, this is not good for our overall bottom line.

00:41:20.000 This is not good for the machine that we're running.

00:41:23.000 What you're doing is you're doing something that's good for your optics, but you could perhaps...

00:41:28.000 Hire someone who is lesser qualified but has these very specific characteristics that you think will appeal to the woke crowd.

00:41:38.000 The problem with that is the woke crowd is never satisfied.

00:41:41.000 Oh, no.

00:41:42.000 They will keep pushing left to the end of time. 0.99

00:41:44.000 Until we're in a communist shithole, they're not going to stop. 0.95

00:41:50.000 I think some people miss that sometimes.

00:41:52.000 You're never, ever, ever, no matter who you are and what your thought process is and what you believe, you're never going to be righteous enough for the mob.

00:42:00.000 You're never pure enough for the mob.

00:42:02.000 Thank you.

00:42:02.000 And that is absolutely true.

00:42:04.000 100%.

00:42:04.000 Yeah.

00:42:05.000 And I think everybody, no matter where you are in that political spectrum and what your beliefs are, you might want to keep that in mind.

00:42:11.000 Yeah, because it's not, they're not really, you know, the whole idea is that they're about kindness and consideration. 0.96

00:42:16.000 That's horseshit. 0.71

00:42:17.000 They're about control. 0.99

00:42:18.000 And they're using kindness and consideration and inclusiveness, all these things, as talking points to allow them to exercise control.

00:42:27.000 This is an ideology.

00:42:29.000 It's a cult.

00:42:30.000 It really is.

00:42:31.000 It's a weird one.

00:42:32.000 It's a weird one because it's sort of embedded itself in our universities and then now it's made its way into corporations.

00:42:38.000 And when I see it in the military, I get very fucking concerned. 0.99

00:42:41.000 Because my concern is, how do we know that this shit isn't manipulated and put into there by foreign governments, by foreign intelligence agencies? 0.99

00:42:52.000 I'm sure you've seen that video from... 0.99

00:42:54.000 Did you ever see the video from the KGB? There was a guy from the KGB in the 1980s that was talking about the plan to destroy America.

00:43:04.000 Have you ever seen that video?

00:43:05.000 I have, yeah.

00:43:06.000 I know what you're talking about.

00:43:07.000 It's a wild video.

00:43:08.000 Should we play it?

00:43:08.000 Yeah.

00:43:09.000 Do you know the video, Jamie?

00:43:10.000 If it's still up and running.

00:43:11.000 Play a little bit of this.

00:43:13.000 This is KGB defector Yuri Bezmenov's warning to America.

00:43:21.000 Let's listen to some of this.

00:43:22.000 The times before about ideological subversion, that is a phrase that I'm afraid some Americans don't fully understand.

00:43:29.000 When the Soviets used the phrase ideological subversion, what do they mean by it?

00:43:35.000 Ideological subversion is the process Which is legitimate.

00:43:40.000 All word.

00:43:42.000 And open.

00:43:43.000 You can see it with your own eyes.

00:43:45.000 All you have to do, all American mass media has to do is to unplug their bananas from their ears, open up their eyes, and they can see it.

00:43:52.000 There is no mystery.

00:43:54.000 There is nothing to do with espionage.

00:43:56.000 I know that espionage intelligence gathering looks more romantic.

00:43:59.000 It sells more deodorants through the advertising probably.

00:44:03.000 That's why Hollywood producers are so crazy about James Bond type thrillers.

00:44:10.000 But in reality, the main emphasis of the KGB is not in the area of intelligence at all.

00:44:17.000 According to my opinion, and opinion of many defectors of my caliber, only about 15% of time, money and manpower is spent on espionage as such.

00:44:28.000 The other 85% is a slow process.

00:44:32.000 Which we call either ideological subversion or active measures in the language of the KGB or psychological warfare.

00:44:42.000 What it basically means is to change the perception of reality of every American to such an extent that despite of the abundance of information no one is able to come to sensible conclusions In the interest of defending themselves,

00:45:00.000 their families, their community and their country.

00:45:04.000 It's a great brainwashing process which goes very slow and is divided into four basic stages.

00:45:13.000 The first one being demoralization.

00:45:16.000 It takes from 15 to 20 years to demoralize a nation.

00:45:19.000 Why that many years?

00:45:20.000 Because this is the minimum number of years which requires to educate one generation of students.

00:45:28.000 In the country of your enemy, exposed to the ideology of the enemy.

00:45:34.000 In other words, Marxism-Leninism ideology is being pumped into the soft heads of at least three generations of American students, without being challenged or counterbalanced by the basic values of Americanism, American patriotism.

00:45:48.000 The result?

00:45:49.000 The result you can see.

00:45:51.000 Most of the people who graduated in the 60s, Drop-outs or half-baked intellectuals are now occupying the positions of power in the government, civil service, business, mass media, educational system. 0.90

00:46:04.000 You are stuck with them.

00:46:05.000 You cannot get rid of them.

00:46:07.000 They are contaminated.

00:46:08.000 They are programmed to think and react to certain stimuli in a certain pattern.

00:46:13.000 You cannot change their mind.

00:46:15.000 Even if you expose them to authentic information, even if you prove that white is white and black is black, you still cannot change the basic perception and the logic of behavior. 0.90

00:46:28.000 In other words, these people, the process of demoralization is complete and irreversible.

00:46:35.000 To get rid society of these people, you need another 20 or 15 years to educate a new generation of patriotically minded and common sense people who would be acting in In the interest of the United States society.

00:46:56.000 And yet these people who've been programmed and as you say in place and who are favorable to an opening with the Soviet concept these are the very people who would be marked for extermination in this country?

00:47:07.000 Most of them yes.

00:47:08.000 Simply because the psychological shock when they will see in future what the beautiful society of equality and social justice means in practice Obviously they will revolt.

00:47:22.000 They will be very unhappy, frustrated people.

00:47:26.000 And the Marxist-Leninist regime does not tolerate these people.

00:47:32.000 Obviously they will join the links of dissenters, dissidents.

00:47:37.000 Unlike in present United States, there will be no place for dissent in future Marxist-Leninist America.

00:47:44.000 Here you can get popular like Daniel Ellsberg and filthy rich like Jane Fonda for being dissident, for criticizing your Pentagon.

00:47:55.000 In future, these people will be simply... 0.99

00:47:58.000 Squashed like cockroaches. 0.98

00:48:00.000 Nobody's going to pay them nothing for that. 0.90

00:48:02.000 We're seeing this happen right now.

00:48:03.000 I mean, this goes on.

00:48:05.000 This is a 13-minute video.

00:48:06.000 The title of it is KGB Defector Yuri Bezmenov's Warning to America.

00:48:12.000 You should watch it.

00:48:13.000 It's on YouTube. 0.98

00:48:14.000 It's fucking wild and it's so accurate. 0.96

00:48:17.000 It is exactly what's happening. 0.98

00:48:19.000 This guy was talking about it in the 1980s.

00:48:22.000 When was it?

00:48:23.000 The 1990s.

00:48:24.000 29 years ago.

00:48:26.000 Yeah.

00:48:26.000 2013, so...

00:48:28.000 Yeah, but that's when it was posted.

00:48:29.000 I don't believe it's from that.

00:48:31.000 I believe it's from the 1980s.

00:48:32.000 Can you scroll down and see if it says...

00:48:34.000 It didn't say that, so I was looking.

00:48:35.000 Maybe in the comments, but...

00:48:36.000 Vesmanov...

00:48:37.000 I'm trying to think of...

00:48:39.000 Yeah, I'm pretty sure...

00:48:42.000 See, it says 29 years ago he said it.

00:48:46.000 So, yeah, what is that?

00:48:47.000 What's 29 years ago?

00:48:48.000 I mean, it doesn't matter.

00:48:49.000 He could be talking in 82 if it's, or 84. 84. Yeah, I think it's 84. He could be talking in the 1950s.

00:48:55.000 But it says 29 years ago from 2013. Yeah, 84. 85. Okay, so imagine how accurate that is.

00:49:05.000 Imagine that this guy, first of all, he's talking about social justice back then.

00:49:09.000 That was a term that really didn't make its way into the vernacular of the American public until about 10, 15 years ago.

00:49:16.000 I mean, when you really started hearing social justice as a common term, like when was that?

00:49:22.000 Well, that was even more recent than 10 or 15 years ago.

00:49:24.000 Probably, right?

00:49:24.000 For most people, yeah.

00:49:26.000 Let's just say 10. So this is, like, we've resisted as long as we can.

00:49:32.000 But we're fucked. 0.99

00:49:33.000 You know, I was watching this video on my favorite Twitter channel, Libs of TikTok, because it is insane, some of these fucking kids that are coming up through these universities that are saying these buzzwords and talking points as if they make sense, 0.99

00:49:48.000 and they're talking about the destruction of the American civilization, like the destruction of the American country, that it needs to happen in order for people to be fair and free. 0.88

00:49:59.000 And I'm like, and replaced with what?

00:50:02.000 This is the thing.

00:50:03.000 It's like you have these shallow-minded, very narrow perspectives of what they would like to accomplish with no view whatsoever of what the future looks like.

00:50:12.000 Whereas this guy, this KGB defector, is talking about this very long game that the KGB was playing with the United States.

00:50:22.000 Yeah.

00:50:22.000 And they don't, you know, they're not the only ones, right?

00:50:25.000 The Chinese intel services is actually much more patient than the Russians even.

00:50:31.000 But what he's talking about, what Besminov's talking about in terms of active measures, you know, we might call, in the U.S., we might call covert action campaign.

00:50:40.000 It's...

00:50:41.000 It really is.

00:50:42.000 Now, he's low-balling the amount of resource they spend on actual intel operations and other things, but he's making a very important point, which is from their perspective, you get more bang for your buck from the active measures campaigns.

00:50:57.000 And we've been doing, look, every intel service that's worth its weight Is, in a sense, doing the same thing.

00:51:06.000 You could argue that- How do we do it?

00:51:07.000 Well, you could argue that Voice of America is an example.

00:51:11.000 Fast and the Furious 9?

00:51:12.000 Is that what they're doing with that?

00:51:13.000 Oh, yeah.

00:51:14.000 Yeah.

00:51:15.000 I mean, it's our movies, it's our blue jeans, it's our rock albums that destroyed the Soviet Union. 0.89

00:51:25.000 But we've- Look, what he's saying there all those years ago, all you have to do is look at the way that the misinformation campaigns have been going, that the Russians have been working on during the past six years,

00:51:41.000 five years, right?

00:51:42.000 Where, in part, one of the things they're doing is...

00:51:46.000 To your earlier point, they're using sort of our woke culture, and they're turning it into a wedge.

00:51:54.000 And so they understand that if you can create chaos or ratchet up the pressure, whether it's racism or sort of the divide between the right and the left, Whatever it may be, that's their advantage.

00:52:08.000 And so that's what they do.

00:52:09.000 They start out by saying, how do we influence public opinion?

00:52:12.000 And just like a marketing firm, they do all of the things that you would think.

00:52:17.000 They study, they do all the analysis of how do you shift an audience Even five or six degrees to one side or the other of an argument, right?

00:52:27.000 And then you multiply that, unlike a marketing campaign, which is looking to get returns for its shareholders over the course of the next year or the next couple of quarters because they want to sell more coke or whatever they're doing.

00:52:38.000 You know, as you pointed out, they're talking about 20 years, 30 years, 40 years, right?

00:52:42.000 So that, in part, makes it even more effective.

00:52:46.000 It's nothing new.

00:52:48.000 The Russians have been doing this. 1.00

00:52:49.000 They were doing it during World War II, right?

00:52:56.000 It shouldn't be a surprise to anybody, but people don't see it when it's right in front of them.

00:53:02.000 They just read their Twitter feed or they read something on YouTube or they read something on Instagram.

00:53:08.000 And they take it at face value and it just inflames them a little bit further, right?

00:53:12.000 And it confirms, you know, what they...

00:53:14.000 Because look, this thing says it.

00:53:15.000 Nobody does the research.

00:53:17.000 Nobody wants to go two or three or four steps to figure out how did this thing originate?

00:53:21.000 Where is this from?

00:53:22.000 Right.

00:53:22.000 Who's saying this?

00:53:24.000 Right.

00:53:24.000 Are we being manipulated?

00:53:26.000 We're being manipulated, absolutely.

00:53:27.000 And again, it's not just the Russians, the Chinese are engaged in the same game, right? 0.98

00:53:31.000 They understand if you can create dissent within the US and everything that was being done in the last election was designed to create distrust of the election system, whether it's from the right or the left, right? 0.99

00:53:44.000 Ultimately, do they give a fuck who wins? 0.98

00:53:46.000 Not really. 0.99

00:53:47.000 They just want to create the chaos and the distrust of the system.

00:53:51.000 And that is Important from their endgame.

00:53:55.000 That's what they're really striving for.

00:53:58.000 Again, we don't see it because it's staring us in the face, and we can't get our noses out of our phones, and we believe whatever's put in front of us, and everybody gets further and further siloed into their own opinion, and then you got nothing.

00:54:13.000 It's also there's so much emphasis put on boogeymen, right?

00:54:16.000 The boogeyman of Donald Trump. 0.72

00:54:17.000 He's the boogeyman. 1.00

00:54:18.000 He's bad.

00:54:19.000 This is what the problem is.

00:54:22.000 Like the Clinton-Russia collusion story, right?

00:54:26.000 I don't know if you've been paying attention to Russell Brand.

00:54:29.000 Russell Brand, this is a crazy thing, because Russell Brand, who I love dearly, I think he's awesome, but he was this comedic actor and stand-up comedian, and now he's become one of the most trusted journalists in some weird way.

00:54:45.000 Right?

00:54:45.000 Like, he's a guy, like, when he talks about stuff, he's got his notes, he's very informed, and he's discussing, like, what Clinton was saying that Trump was doing, they were actually doing.

00:54:58.000 They were actually colluding with Russia.

00:55:00.000 Like, it's actually a real thing.

00:55:01.000 Yeah, and nobody wants to revisit...

00:55:04.000 I mean, nobody has a...

00:55:06.000 Nobody has an interest in revisiting anything because it doesn't, again, it doesn't verify their narrative.

00:55:10.000 Nobody wants to go back and say, well, we might have made a mistake and so we don't want it to.

00:55:14.000 And yes, you're right. 0.95

00:55:15.000 People don't explain it well and so it becomes too complicated and I think, oh, shit, I got to cook dinner or I'm not going to bother. 0.67

00:55:21.000 I just want to read this top line, you know, two or three sentences and then that's my opinion. 0.74

00:55:27.000 Yeah, but Russell Brandt, good point.

00:55:29.000 It's like, what's his name?

00:55:31.000 Jeff Skunk Baxter from the Doobie Brothers has become like a noted military technology authority.

00:55:39.000 Is he really?

00:55:39.000 Yeah, he's been up on Capitol Hill.

00:55:41.000 From the Doobie Brothers?

00:55:42.000 From the Doobie Brothers, yeah. 0.89

00:55:43.000 I'm pretty sure I got my guy right.

00:55:45.000 Been up on the Hill testifying about weapons and military development.

00:55:50.000 Where did he get educated on this?

00:55:52.000 I don't know.

00:55:53.000 I don't know.

00:55:54.000 Michael McDonald, maybe?

00:55:55.000 I'm not sure.

00:55:56.000 Maybe he was like a CIA plant all the time.

00:55:59.000 You know, that's like one of the big theories about a lot of the stuff that happened during the 1960s, right?

00:56:05.000 Because wasn't Jim Morrison's dad in the agency?

00:56:09.000 I don't know about Jim Morrison.

00:56:10.000 Stuart Copeland from the police, his dad was.

00:56:13.000 Yeah?

00:56:13.000 Yeah.

00:56:14.000 I think it was like Jim Morrison's dad was some sort of intelligence operative.

00:56:21.000 Is that correct?

00:56:22.000 Jim Morrison might have been as well.

00:56:25.000 According to that, his father was the rear admiral in charge during the Gulf of Tonkin.

00:56:32.000 Oh.

00:56:33.000 Oh.

00:56:34.000 Well, there you go then. 0.99

00:56:35.000 Well, that's about as fuckery as fuckery gets, right? 0.99

00:56:40.000 So now we've figured out the Vietnam War. 0.99

00:56:44.000 Yeah.

00:56:45.000 Oh, God.

00:56:46.000 No, but the Bezmanov thing, I'm glad you pulled that up because that is something that people should watch and take away something from because it does talk about the idea of manipulation. 0.98

00:56:59.000 But again, what's going to happen is People who have a certain mindset are going to look at that and go, oh, that's bullshit, right?

00:57:06.000 I mean, if they're on the hard left or they believe that Marxism is the way to go, you're not going to ever change their mind. 0.90

00:57:12.000 Just like somebody on the hard, hard right is not going to change their mind.

00:57:16.000 So once again, you're left with a dwindling center.

00:57:20.000 But speaking of weapons technology, the U.S. just tested a hypersonic weapon.

00:57:28.000 And that's something to keep an eye on when people are thinking, where's all the money going?

00:57:34.000 I mean, it's really the top priority for the U.S. It's a top priority for Russia.

00:57:38.000 It's a top priority for China.

00:57:39.000 So anyway, the U.S. just the other day successfully tested a new, there you go, a new air-breathing hypersonic weapon.

00:57:46.000 Mach 5 hypersonic missile.

00:57:47.000 What does Mach 5 mean?

00:57:49.000 Five times the speed of sound.

00:57:51.000 It's about 3,800 and a change in terms of miles per hour.

00:57:55.000 3,800 some odd miles per hour.

00:57:57.000 Five times the speed of sound.

00:57:59.000 Yeah.

00:57:59.000 Jesus.

00:58:00.000 I know.

00:58:00.000 And the whole idea is, when people say, well, why is hypersonics?

00:58:04.000 Why is that important?

00:58:06.000 It's because...

00:58:08.000 Whoever develops this capability first on the planet basically has defeated all air defense systems, which in the past were always designed for ballistic missiles.

00:58:20.000 And so it moves at such a rate that you've removed the reaction time.

00:58:26.000 And it also can move in such an unpredictable fashion.

00:58:29.000 A ballistic missile goes up and it comes down and it's all in a certain pattern.

00:58:33.000 And you can predict that.

00:58:34.000 Do you see the numbers there?

00:58:35.000 Yeah.

00:58:35.000 A mile a second.

00:58:37.000 Yeah.

00:58:38.000 So you can imagine that coming.

00:58:39.000 And you imagine having no time to react because you don't even know where it's coming from.

00:58:43.000 Right.

00:58:44.000 And so basically, that's why hypersonic weapons and the ability to counter them is really the top technology priority for the U.S. And it's where a lot of – we'll talk about where money goes.

00:58:55.000 It's where a lot of money goes.

00:58:57.000 And because the Russians and the Chinese are – Busy, busy, busy trying to develop this, because whoever does it again, it renders existing air defense systems useless. 0.99

00:59:07.000 Which brings me to UFOs.

00:59:08.000 Tell me what you know.

00:59:11.000 Well, if I may... 0.99

00:59:13.000 Because I think there's some shit going down. 0.99

00:59:16.000 There is some shit going down, and it's actually really interesting. 0.99

00:59:18.000 And this would be a perfect time for me to plug the second season of my Science Channel Discovery Network series, Black Files Declassified. 0.98

00:59:27.000 Science Channel, Black Files, declassified, hosted by Mike Baker. 0.98

00:59:31.000 Look at that handsome bastard. 0.98

00:59:32.000 Look at that. 1.00

00:59:32.000 Look at you. 1.00

00:59:33.000 I now run a global intelligence and security firm.

00:59:36.000 My experiences have given me unique insight and access to a secretive world.

00:59:41.000 Each year, the U.S. government hides over $60 billion in a black budget.

00:59:47.000 Hidden away.

00:59:49.000 Unseen.

00:59:51.000 Unexplained.

00:59:52.000 Holy smokes, look at that. 0.88

00:59:54.000 Look, look, look, look at the light. 1.00

00:59:58.000 Holy shit. 0.99

00:59:59.000 The money funds classified programs, projects, operations, and tech developments. 0.99

01:00:05.000 And each of these activities is a black file.

01:00:09.000 Now, travel with me as we open up the black files.

01:00:13.000 What you learn will change the way you think about our past and our future.

01:00:22.000 Look at that.

01:00:23.000 That looks very exciting, Mike.

01:00:25.000 Everybody should be watching.

01:00:26.000 You should?

01:00:27.000 It's coming to you in the new year.

01:00:28.000 Are you going to tell people what's going on with UFOs?

01:00:30.000 What was the thing with the red lights that shot up there?

01:00:33.000 It's a drone swarm.

01:00:34.000 It's a drone swarm.

01:00:38.000 Let's just keep watching it.

01:00:39.000 Put it on a continuous loop for the next hour.

01:00:43.000 That drone swarm right there?

01:00:44.000 Yeah, that's a drone swarm.

01:00:46.000 How big are those drones? 0.66

01:00:47.000 They look tiny.

01:00:47.000 They are tiny, and that's part of the gameplay.

01:00:50.000 That's real?

01:00:51.000 That's not like CGI? No, that's real.

01:00:53.000 There were a hundred of those there.

01:00:55.000 Oh, look at that.

01:00:56.000 You can get that look on his face.

01:00:58.000 So that, they just rise up.

01:01:00.000 There's about a hundred of those.

01:01:01.000 They're all, what they're doing at that point is, they're programmed, they're computer controlled, they're all going to a designated altitude, and then they'll take off and they can fly in whatever pattern you end up putting them into.

01:01:13.000 And these are weaponized drones?

01:01:16.000 Are they like armed?

01:01:18.000 Those are not.

01:01:20.000 Those are displaying the abilities.

01:01:22.000 Surveillance?

01:01:22.000 Yeah, they could be surveillance drones, but you can weaponize them.

01:01:25.000 And that's part of the concern in terms of where the battlefield could take us in the future.

01:01:33.000 I mean, think about a drone swarm coming in on a high-level event, for instance, right?

01:01:38.000 The ability to stop 100, 200 drones that are maneuvering.

01:01:44.000 The goal, ultimately, is to get those to think on their own, right?

01:01:48.000 So you'll have like a queen bee out there controlling a whole pack of these things.

01:01:55.000 And with artificial intelligence, they can make decisions on the fly, right?

01:02:01.000 They're not quite there yet, but they are to the point where...

01:02:07.000 You can program a swarm of these things to do a variety of tasks.

01:02:13.000 And if you weaponize them, again, you can see where the problem lies in trying to stop that, if you're responsible for security.

01:02:23.000 Of a high-level target or individual or event.

01:02:28.000 So it's a fascinating field.

01:02:32.000 And the idea that—I mean, think about if you're in—pick a place.

01:02:38.000 We're not in Afghanistan anymore, apparently.

01:02:40.000 We talked about that, I think.

01:02:42.000 But if you're in Serbia or you're in Kabul or you're in Mogadishu or whatever, And you've got boots on the ground, but limited boots on the ground.

01:02:51.000 The ability to throw out a drone swarm to do the recon of a facility, and depending on what those capabilities are and whether they've got FLIR or whatever they may be operating on to gather intelligence about what's ahead,

01:03:06.000 right?

01:03:07.000 I mean, it gives you a tremendous advantage just from the recon, the surveillance point of view, much less that, not even talking about the weaponized.

01:03:15.000 They're very small, so what's the range on these things and what powers them?

01:03:20.000 You know, that's where I look.

01:03:23.000 Do I look like a drone engineer?

01:03:26.000 That seems like a question that I would ask if I was hosting a television show.

01:03:29.000 And I did.

01:03:30.000 And they didn't tell you?

01:03:31.000 No, they did.

01:03:32.000 You can get, depending on the size of the drone, you can get distances that would be not...

01:03:41.000 You know, not extensive.

01:03:42.000 Right now, you're not talking about a drone produced by Northrop or Boeing that's going to be up in the air for three days.

01:03:51.000 You're talking about something that's going downrange maybe a couple of miles, right, and is up and active for maybe on a battery charge, maybe Anywhere to 20 minutes, 30 minutes.

01:04:05.000 But think about that Queen Bee up there. 1.00

01:04:08.000 They can then go and get recharged.

01:04:11.000 They don't have to come back to wherever you're staging.

01:04:14.000 So you can come back and you don't have to come back to the staging site.

01:04:19.000 So it's like a refueling tanker.

01:04:22.000 So what does it look like, this thing, the mothership that they fly to?

01:04:26.000 Yeah, it's basically a mothership, yeah.

01:04:27.000 And they fly to and just stick onto it or something like that?

01:04:29.000 Yeah, it's just a larger drone with more juice, more capability, and so it charges up.

01:04:34.000 And it's...

01:04:36.000 And again, the goal for all of this is to ultimately get to artificial intelligence capability, right?

01:04:45.000 Whether they can get there any time in the near future is problematic.

01:04:50.000 But the big question is who gets there first, right?

01:04:52.000 Who gets there first?

01:04:52.000 And that's the case with just about everything nowadays, whether it's space and worrying about—space has already been weaponized, right?

01:05:01.000 The idea of space in the 60s was it's a community of nations and we're all going to live together. 0.99

01:05:04.000 That's bullshit. 0.79

01:05:05.000 We're already up there worried about how do you take out the satellites or how do you approach a satellite covertly to maybe gather intel from a Chinese satellite that's up there or the Chinese going after one of our satellites. 0.99

01:05:20.000 Space is weaponized at this point.

01:05:23.000 So yes, everything that goes on is in a sense based on the competition.

01:05:30.000 I'm not letting you off the hook with UFOs, but I want to get to this.

01:05:33.000 While we're talking about China and artificial intelligence, Sagar from Breaking Points put up a video recently where he was talking about there was an AI company that sold 50% or 51% to China.

01:05:54.000 And China immediately repurposed the entire company and sort of kicked them out and renamed it.

01:06:03.000 It's calling something different, and they have no recourse.

01:06:05.000 And they now hold all of the artificial intelligence that this company had.

01:06:10.000 This company thought they were going to work with them and make a bunch of money, and China just sort of took it over.

01:06:16.000 Because they had like a 51% control of it. 0.97

01:06:19.000 And now they're fucked because they changed the name of it. 0.97

01:06:22.000 They're calling it Chinese technology. 0.99

01:06:24.000 Sager did a way better job of explaining it than I can.

01:06:28.000 But that's what's happened to a variety of companies that always seem to think that they could do business with the Chinese regime and come out on top.

01:06:36.000 They get greedy, right?

01:06:37.000 They think of all these billions of dollars they're going to make from this deal, and they start thinking about ski chalets and driving a Ferrari.

01:06:44.000 And the next thing you know, they're, you know...

01:06:46.000 Yeah, no, it's true.

01:06:47.000 And so whether it's a pharmaceutical company thinking they're going to go over and somehow protect their R&D, but build a facility over there, or it's a software company that loses all their coding, it's always the same result.

01:07:02.000 It's amazing that they don't know that, or that they're willing to listen to what the Chinese are selling. 1.00

01:07:09.000 Them, you know, on the subject.

01:07:11.000 Like, yeah, we love you.

01:07:12.000 We're going to work with you.

01:07:12.000 And then, boom, they just change the name, completely repurpose all the technology, say it's Chinese technology.

01:07:20.000 When Saga was explaining it, it's a stunning story.

01:07:23.000 See if you found it yet?

01:07:25.000 And it happens a lot more often and in some very pedestrian companies and sectors, but it's just emblematic of the Chinese understand and have understood for generations the lure of their market to the West,

01:07:43.000 right?

01:07:43.000 Everybody's wanted to get into that market, right?

01:07:45.000 Whether an insurance business or energy or pharmaceuticals or whatever it may be.

01:07:49.000 Oh my god, I gotta get into that market.

01:07:52.000 And they've understood that.

01:07:53.000 And so they manipulate that.

01:07:55.000 They use that as leverage. 0.99

01:07:57.000 And they never give a shit about sort of the end result where you get screwed, right? 0.99

01:08:02.000 It doesn't matter to them, right? 0.99

01:08:04.000 Because they win in the end.

01:08:06.000 And just as with this case, they end up with the technology or with the...

01:08:10.000 You found it?

01:08:12.000 Yes.

01:08:12.000 Yes, this is it.

01:08:13.000 Give me some volume and play this from the beginning. 0.99

01:08:17.000 This is pretty fucking crazy. 0.95

01:08:18.000 Alright Sagar, what are you looking at? 0.95

01:08:19.000 Well, some of you may recall that in the video announcing Crystal and I were going independent, I mentioned one of the reasons we wanted to do so was so we didn't just have to chase views, but so we could focus on more substantive issues that belie the news cycle and our economy.

01:08:33.000 I specifically pointed to semiconductors.

01:08:36.000 As you all know, one of my personal obsessions.

01:08:39.000 Because they are the electronic backbone of the new economy.

01:08:42.000 He who controls semiconductors controls the future.

01:08:45.000 Not quite true yet, but it will be in my opinion.

01:08:48.000 And that's what I want to take you on a tour of today.

01:08:51.000 One of the most brazen views yet into the corporate battles of the future and a development which has immense implications for the future.

01:08:58.000 They're calling it the semiconductor heist of the century.

01:09:01.000 It's dramatic, I know.

01:09:03.000 But once you learn the details, you'll be as outraged and as afraid as I am.

01:09:06.000 So the company in question is known as ARM. They are widely regarded as the most important semiconductor intellectual property firm.

01:09:15.000 Their IP is in cars, it's in Amazon, cell phones, AI, everything.

01:09:19.000 Pretty much everything.

01:09:21.000 Intel, semi-analysis.

01:09:23.000 They point towards...

01:09:24.000 Clearly an important company, right?

01:09:26.000 Now, as we have learned with the car shortage, the PS5 shortage, and more, the entire U.S. economy can grind to a halt without these things.

01:09:34.000 Now, prior to 2016, ARM was a British-controlled company, but corporations are going to corporation.

01:09:40.000 And in 2016, it was acquired by a Japanese firm, SoftBank.

01:09:45.000 You probably know SoftBank from their storied roles in the drama behind WeWork and Uber, pouring Saudi cash into the startups to create the veneer of success, and eventually having the bottom fell out of both.

01:09:56.000 Now, SoftBank's plan to make ARM even more money is the same thing that they did with Uber.

01:10:02.000 They wanted them to enter the Chinese market.

01:10:04.000 So in their infinite wisdom, they created a joint venture.

01:10:07.000 It was called ARM Holdings.

01:10:09.000 And they sold 51% to Chinese investors for $775 million.

01:10:15.000 That, per Semi analysis, is a paltry sum.

01:10:17.000 But it highlights what it means to do business in China.

01:10:20.000 There's no such thing as independent business there.

01:10:23.000 All Western businesses have to have Chinese partners. 0.72

01:10:26.000 They are controlled at the behest of the Chinese state.

01:10:29.000 And this is where things get really crazy.

01:10:31.000 The Chinese branch of ARM, it holds much of ARM's intellectual property and designs for the next decade.

01:10:38.000 Well, it's basically been stolen now by the Chinese with zero recourse. 1.00

01:10:43.000 I'm really serious.

01:10:44.000 The details are crazy and they highlight exactly why letting our most valuable technology go to China in the first place and why business entanglements there are untenable in the long run.

01:10:54.000 In 2020, ARM and a bunch of investors found that the head of their China operation was using his control of the company to attract investments to his other firm.

01:11:04.000 So, by a vote of 7 to 1, at the board level, they decided to boot him.

01:11:09.000 There's just one problem.

01:11:10.000 That CEO's name is on the Chinese license.

01:11:13.000 So despite the fact that the company wants him gone, Alan Wu, he's not going anywhere because he controls the license.

01:11:19.000 So instead...

01:11:21.000 Under Chinese law, he's in control. 0.96

01:11:23.000 He fired executives who didn't side with him.

01:11:25.000 He now has security that has kept representatives from his parent company out of the building.

01:11:29.000 And now he's just taking it over.

01:11:31.000 So this culminated this week when ARM China just held an event where they declared their independence.

01:11:37.000 They have a new name.

01:11:38.000 Now they say they are China's largest CPU IP supplier.

01:11:41.000 That is now independently operated as a Chinese-owned company.

01:11:45.000 Now critically, the technology that they preview and claim is their own, but really is just the IP and resources of its old company, is now being used to deploy billions of cameras across China to fulfill their dream of a fully integrated technological surveillance state.

01:12:02.000 Social credit score is everywhere, everywhere you go is tracked, your travel is restricted, and the The state knows everything about everyone, all the way down to the DNA level.

01:12:09.000 So that's it.

01:12:10.000 It's over.

01:12:11.000 They control the company now.

01:12:13.000 As semiconductor people are referring to it, it really is the heist of the century.

01:12:17.000 So we should just, first of all, shout out to Crystal and Sagar from Breaking Points. 0.99

01:12:23.000 It's one of the best fucking shows. 0.99

01:12:25.000 Oh, you got cigars. 1.00

01:12:26.000 Look at you.

01:12:26.000 Come with gifts.

01:12:28.000 Literally one of the best shows that you can watch on the news and get an independent, real, objective perspective because They're honest.

01:12:36.000 They're not controlled by anybody.

01:12:37.000 And they cover stories like this that you're just not getting from anywhere else.

01:12:40.000 And that, to me, is a terrifying story.

01:12:43.000 And he's absolutely right. 0.96

01:12:45.000 And although the thing that he showed there, which was the one in five North American companies, claimed that they had IP stolen the past year, is so fucking low. 0.89

01:12:56.000 Is it really?

01:12:57.000 And it said like seven out of 23 companies, I think it just said, further down that point said, seven out of 23 companies said they'd had IEP stolen over the past decade. 0.89

01:13:08.000 Again, it's ridiculous.

01:13:09.000 Here's the honest guy's truth.

01:13:11.000 If you take a company over there and you build facilities, you are giving up intellectual property.

01:13:17.000 Maybe not all of it, But they're going to take what they can get their hands on.

01:13:21.000 And so that number, when it says 1 out of 5, it should probably be 5 out of 5. It should be 23 out of 23. And we do this all the time.

01:13:28.000 We underestimate the numbers.

01:13:44.000 I just, I don't know what it is about this lack of desire to call them out for what they do.

01:13:50.000 And part of it is, I get it, if you're running a business, and you've got facilities over there, you've got personnel, you've got investment over there, okay, fine, I get it, I get why you're being somewhat cautious.

01:14:00.000 But the reality is that Until we start really being serious with them, and even then, I'm going to stop right there because nothing's going to change their behavior.

01:14:12.000 The Chinese regime is what it is. 0.84

01:14:14.000 And certainly under Xi, who has strengthened his position immensely over the past few years.

01:14:21.000 They're not changing.

01:14:22.000 So how do they allow them to do business like this?

01:14:26.000 How is there no sort of oversight, such a critical aspect of technology, right?

01:14:34.000 These semiconductors, this is a huge issue. 0.94

01:14:36.000 And for the Chinese to have control of this intellectual property that was developed over here, simply because somebody underestimated their ability to commit fuckery. 1.00

01:14:49.000 How is that so simple? 0.84

01:14:51.000 I mean, that seems like such a simple takeover that they did that.

01:14:55.000 Yeah.

01:14:57.000 In part, you get...

01:14:59.000 In part, there's bad advice.

01:15:02.000 In part, there's greed, right?

01:15:03.000 I mean, it's, you know, oh my God, we get $770 million.

01:15:05.000 There's no due diligence.

01:15:07.000 There's poor due diligence.

01:15:08.000 That's a big part of it.

01:15:09.000 I know that's a lot of money, but it's not a lot of money.

01:15:12.000 If you're talking about the whole world and control of the semiconductor market and the control that they're going to be able to have using their surveillance state and their social credit score and how that's going to impact China.

01:15:23.000 No, it's not.

01:15:24.000 And you're absolutely right.

01:15:25.000 It's not a lot of money, but in the scheme of things, You know, people get excited, you know, we're going to make this deal, right?

01:15:34.000 We're going to get this, this thing's going to get done.

01:15:36.000 We're all going to, like you said, we're all going to get our new boats and our ski chalet and it's going to be fantastic.

01:15:44.000 Yeah.

01:15:44.000 I don't know.

01:15:45.000 I mean, I've seen, you know, I've got a company that does, you know, one of the things we do is a lot of due diligence.

01:15:51.000 And with China, I've seen a lot of bad due diligence done over the years. 1.00

01:15:58.000 We'll get reports saying, well, this is what we got two years ago.

01:16:01.000 You know, what can we learn now about the company and its principles?

01:16:04.000 And you have to really dig.

01:16:06.000 When you're talking about looking at a potential investment, Or personnel there, whatever it may be, you've got to just keep digging because the first batch of information you see is usually not correct or it's obfuscated or there's a second set of books somewhere or a third set of books.

01:16:23.000 And, you know, people are keen to get an investment done, right?

01:16:28.000 Usually when you're talking about an investment, the overall goal is to make it happen.

01:16:32.000 It's not to find a reason to shelve it, right?

01:16:37.000 That part of it makes sense I guess in a way.

01:16:39.000 I don't know.

01:16:41.000 It doesn't make sense in a way, but the way that China can do this and the way that China can take over a business simply by investing in it and pretending to be in partnership with them, but then everything they do is connected completely to the Chinese Communist Party,

01:17:00.000 right?

01:17:01.000 So you're just doing business with the Chinese Communist Party.

01:17:04.000 You're pretending that you're doing business with another corporation.

01:17:09.000 Yes.

01:17:10.000 And some entities there are more state-owned than others, right?

01:17:15.000 Really?

01:17:16.000 It varies?

01:17:17.000 Yeah, but that's a nuanced variation, right?

01:17:20.000 So you have levels, I guess you could say, of Chinese state interest in a particular business or a sector, right?

01:17:29.000 But ultimately, no.

01:17:31.000 You never have complete control in a commercial sense.

01:17:34.000 So at some point, the Chinese state is always going to have the ability to override any business decision that's being made.

01:17:42.000 But to some degree, you have different levels of interest, again, based on what that interest, particularly technology, AI, anything in engineering that's going to be of more interest than sort of straight up manufacturing.

01:17:57.000 It seems to me, and this is a horrible thing to say, but there's an advantage that they have that's almost unstoppable in being connected to the government that we just simply don't have, and they can take advantage of the fact that people are greedy, right?

01:18:11.000 And that people do look at this and go, hey, this is a great score for us here.

01:18:16.000 We're going to make 500 and whatever million dollars.

01:18:18.000 Let's get on board.

01:18:19.000 Yeah. 0.89

01:18:20.000 Like, wouldn't it be, this is where it's going to sound fucked up, wouldn't it be advantageous for us to have a similar relationship with corporations when these corporations want to make deals with other countries? 0.90

01:18:34.000 Again, I'm not advocating that the government get involved in corporations, but what I'm saying is they're at a huge disadvantage if the Chinese Communist Party is always involved in deals and in all the corporations and they're inexorably connected to these corporations. 0.68

01:18:50.000 If we're not, and you let some knuckleheads who are thinking about getting that house in Tahoe, and they are thinking about getting a private jet, and they're thinking about all that money and not the ramifications on the global market, the ramifications on the surveillance state,

01:19:06.000 how it's going to impact.

01:19:09.000 Right.

01:19:10.000 They're allowing this intellectual property to get taken away from them.

01:19:17.000 Yeah, you're talking about, is it a level playing field for countries coming in, companies coming in from other places?

01:19:25.000 And the answer is, honestly, no.

01:19:28.000 It's a completely unlevel playing field in China, and they don't really try to hide that fact, right? 0.99

01:19:36.000 Unlike some places.

01:19:37.000 I mean, look, you can go to other countries, France or wherever you may go, and you could argue that because the government Views part of their responsibility as bolstering their commercial sector, right?

01:19:51.000 And, you know, okay, you can argue, you know, the U.S., everybody wants, every country wants their commercial, you know, industries to do well.

01:20:00.000 France or a variety of other countries around the globe, they have sort of a much more connected line between government, intel services, other parts of their government to promote and protect and help bolster their commercial businesses,

01:20:20.000 right?

01:20:20.000 So you get an Airbus situation like in France.

01:20:23.000 And that is not necessarily uncommon, right?

01:20:27.000 Here in the U.S., We have a firewall built up, right?

01:20:32.000 So that the idea is we don't want to help a particular company because that would screw the sort of idea of free markets, right?

01:20:41.000 So you don't want to – if you gather intel, that could benefit a company in a particular sector.

01:20:49.000 Well, you don't provide that to the company because that gives them an advantage over other businesses, and that's counter to the idea of a free market system. 0.98

01:20:56.000 And I know people listening to God, oh, that's bullshit. 0.94

01:21:00.000 But it's the way it actually works, right? 0.96

01:21:03.000 And it's very frustrating to some folks in the intel community and within the government that we always are at a disadvantage oftentimes in doing business, in pitching for business overseas, whether it's licensing, whether it's in the energy business, whatever it may be.

01:21:20.000 And China being the primary example of a place where you walk in and you should understand immediately that you're at a disadvantage when you're dealing with the Chinese system, the Chinese regime.

01:21:34.000 It's just the way they put it together and their theft of intellectual property, their economic espionage, everything is designed to get them to the top of the food chain.

01:21:46.000 That's their rightful place as far as the regime is concerned.

01:21:51.000 Everything.

01:21:51.000 Yeah, and that's where they're going.

01:21:53.000 I mean, honest to God, you know, if we're not careful, if we're not...

01:21:56.000 And, you know, you could argue the horse has left the barn because...

01:21:59.000 That's what I'm worried about.

01:22:00.000 Yeah, yeah.

01:22:01.000 And you're right to be worried because, you know, we're not talking about something.

01:22:04.000 People imagine that because the previous administration under Trump, because they banged on about China, you know, over the past four years, that somehow it's a new problem.

01:22:14.000 And we've talked about this before.

01:22:16.000 It's not.

01:22:16.000 It's been going on for generations.

01:22:18.000 But it seemed like Trump was unusually cautious about it and highlighting it in a way that other administrations hadn't highlighted it.

01:22:27.000 Yeah, definitely.

01:22:28.000 We talked about it more during the previous administration and in more realistic terms in terms of the Chinese looking to hose us in a variety of markets and places and ways that they were doing it and highlighting the idea of theft of intellectual property. 0.97

01:22:45.000 Yeah.

01:22:46.000 It was a much more straightforward conversation, and I think that's a very good thing.

01:22:50.000 I'd like to think that the current administration under President Biden is going to continue with that.

01:22:55.000 But again, do I think that sanctions or do I think that a hard line is going to impact the regime enough to change their ways?

01:23:03.000 And suddenly they're going to...

01:23:04.000 I mean, like under President Obama, the idea was, well, we've talked with them.

01:23:08.000 They're not going to engage in theft of intellectual property.

01:23:11.000 They're not going to engage in cyber shenanigans.

01:23:13.000 Well, that didn't work out.

01:23:14.000 Right.

01:23:15.000 So I don't know that there's anything that's going to alter their view because in their mind it's a strategic decision.

01:23:20.000 It's how they're getting to the top of the food chain.

01:23:22.000 And it seems like at this point in time, this is what scares me.

01:23:27.000 That one of the only ways we may be able to keep up is to implement the same sort of strategy that they're doing.

01:23:34.000 That's what scares me.

01:23:36.000 That the government here gets intertwined with corporations.

01:23:39.000 That a social credit score here gets employed.

01:23:42.000 That we start doing some of the same things that they're doing in order to keep up.

01:23:50.000 Yeah.

01:23:52.000 Is that real?

01:23:53.000 I don't think...

01:23:53.000 Well, never say never, but at least for the time being, it really runs counter.

01:24:00.000 Again, you can only base it on what you've seen in your own experiences.

01:24:05.000 And when I talk about this firewall that exists between the government and the commercial sector in terms of promoting and helping and advising and providing support, It exists,

01:24:22.000 right?

01:24:23.000 And I don't know that we're—it's probably not going to change, you know, regardless of what administration comes in.

01:24:30.000 It just seems like it's ingrained in the system at this point.

01:24:34.000 It always means we're going to be at a disadvantage.

01:24:37.000 It always means that we're, to some degree, in a variety of places around the world, operating on an unlevel playing field.

01:24:42.000 But that's fine.

01:24:43.000 We just got to work harder.

01:24:45.000 I mean, that's just my opinion for what that's worth.

01:24:47.000 We got to work harder.

01:24:48.000 What does that mean, though?

01:24:49.000 That sounds like platitude.

01:24:51.000 You know, that sounds like sort of a...

01:24:52.000 Yeah, it does sound like a platitude.

01:24:53.000 You know?

01:24:54.000 We got to work harder.

01:24:55.000 Okay, we'll fix that.

01:24:57.000 Well, it just means our...

01:24:58.000 All elbow grease.

01:24:59.000 Our technology has to be better.

01:25:00.000 Our product has to be better.

01:25:01.000 What we're selling has to be better.

01:25:03.000 What our intelligence that we collect as a company, right?

01:25:07.000 I mean, look, companies spend a great time.

01:25:09.000 I know this because we work for a lot of companies.

01:25:12.000 We mean your security firm.

01:25:14.000 My firm, yeah.

01:25:15.000 It's an Intel security operation, Portman Square Group.

01:25:18.000 Look at that.

01:25:19.000 I just promoted it.

01:25:20.000 Yeah.

01:25:21.000 So Portman Square Group is a business that's been doing this for a long time.

01:25:25.000 I changed the name some time ago when I bought the company back from the previous investors.

01:25:30.000 And we work with a lot of companies that have very good, very capable in-house resources to gather information related to...

01:25:42.000 You know, risk and operational awareness on the ground and maybe they're going to build a new facility somewhere.

01:25:49.000 So they spend a lot of time trying to get that right and trying to understand.

01:25:53.000 But I will say this also, when they've got a potential investment coming, right, or the opportunity to get into a market or whatever.

01:26:00.000 The tendency, again, is always to make it happen, right?

01:26:04.000 It's not a happy day when you present information that says, this is a bad investment, you shouldn't do this, or this is shaky, or here's the problems you're going to deal with, because there's a lot of people who are invested in making something happen and growing the business or doing something.

01:26:19.000 You know, occasionally, you know, the companies that do really well overseas are the ones that approach it very pragmatically and say, yeah, you know, if this looks bad, then we're going to pivot.

01:26:30.000 We're going to find something else that looks better.

01:26:31.000 And they don't ignore it.

01:26:33.000 But a lot of companies tend to ignore sometimes good advice. 0.96

01:26:37.000 And that gets them into a situation where then they got to, at the end of the day, reverse engineer and figure out how they got fucked. 0.99

01:26:43.000 But, yeah. 0.93

01:26:46.000 The social credit score thing freaks me the fuck out because I see vaccine passports and these type of deals as being a step towards this idea.

01:26:58.000 The idea that you have to keep something, whether it's an app on your phone, that you need at all times.

01:27:05.000 That freaks me out.

01:27:06.000 And there was a discussion recently that was in Yahoo News, I believe I saw it, Where they were talking about how your browsing history may affect your credit.

01:27:19.000 That your credit is not just going to be, have you paid your bills?

01:27:25.000 How much money do you make?

01:27:26.000 What is your history in terms of loans?

01:27:30.000 But look at this, credit scores may soon be based on your web history.

01:27:34.000 Is that a good thing?

01:27:35.000 First of all, Ethan Rotberg, no.

01:27:39.000 No, that's not a good thing. 0.98

01:27:42.000 But let's read this because it's kind of fucking crazy.

01:27:48.000 Lenders could soon be using data from your browsing, search, and purchase history, your digital footprint, to create a more accurate credit score, according to the International Monetary Fund researchers. 0.72

01:28:01.000 The working paper shows that combining your credit score and your digital footprint further improves loan default predictions.

01:28:09.000 This scares the fuck out of me.

01:28:11.000 And how exactly would this data be collected and used as part of your credit report?

01:28:15.000 Survey says artificial intelligence and machine learning.

01:28:19.000 The IMF isn't the only group...

01:28:22.000 To ponder such futuristic notions, a 2018 study from the Frankfurt School of Finance and Management also looked at lenders using personal online data in tandem with traditional data from credit bureaus.

01:28:34.000 So what does your online behavior really say about you?

01:28:37.000 Their findings show that digital footprint allows some unscorable customers to gain access to credit.

01:28:43.000 See, there's the carrot.

01:28:44.000 Oh, you can have access to credit while customers with a low to medium credit score can either gain or lose access to credit depending upon their digital footprint.

01:28:55.000 But I like how they said that.

01:28:56.000 You can either gain or lose.

01:28:59.000 Probably don't lose.

01:29:00.000 Don't worry about the losing part.

01:29:02.000 Pay no attention.

01:29:03.000 Yeah, depending on your digital footprint. 0.98

01:29:06.000 So people are going to give up their fucking browsing history in hopes that they're going to get more money. 0.96

01:29:12.000 Now, how many people... 0.97

01:29:14.000 What if they show, definitively, that if you give up your browsing history, you'll get X amount of points more credit, period. 0.97

01:29:22.000 People are just gonna fucking do it.

01:29:24.000 They've already done it, right? 0.97

01:29:26.000 Yeah, but this way they'll do it openly. 0.93

01:29:29.000 And I think this moves you one more step closer to a social credit score system, which I'm fucking terrified of.

01:29:37.000 Yeah, well, in a variety of areas, look, fraud control.

01:29:43.000 Take fraud control as a...

01:29:46.000 Sort of a data aggregator.

01:29:48.000 The amount of information that a company that's focused on assessing whether your transaction, right?

01:29:56.000 You walk into a place, you're going to buy a pair of sneakers, right?

01:30:00.000 You put your card in the machine.

01:30:02.000 It takes whatever, like four seconds, whatever, for it to come up and say approved.

01:30:07.000 In that four seconds, There is hundreds of points of information being reviewed instantaneously about whether this is a potential fraud transaction or not.

01:30:21.000 So it's already happening and they're looking at the algorithms that are used are all based on, in a sense, and it's artificial intelligence to some degree, on machine learning of Transactional awareness of where this card was before over the past six months and how many times it's been used and what type of purchases it's been made.

01:30:46.000 So you think about all that information already out there, already being used, and A, it's...

01:30:54.000 It's a little bit scary from the sense of hacking and the ability to access millions and millions of people's information because now it's all being held in a variety of silos.

01:31:06.000 But then you also think about it being used, again, advancing it one or two steps and using it for this type of purpose.

01:31:13.000 And I think people...

01:31:16.000 I've gotten so blasé about their information, and in part it's because, well, I love the fact that I don't have to use cash, you know, and so I don't care.

01:31:25.000 Or part of it is, you know, I've got my details out there on so many different shopping sites, and it doesn't matter.

01:31:32.000 So they're all so used to it, all been so conditioned to it, that I don't know that a lot of people are going to be scared by the next step.

01:31:39.000 I don't think they're going to be scared by this at all.

01:31:41.000 Again, like I said, as long as it allows you to get access to more credit.

01:31:45.000 Which, generally speaking, if they could just give you a little more credit and have access to your browsing history, you're going to do it.

01:31:52.000 A lot of people are going to do it.

01:31:53.000 Most people are going to do it.

01:31:54.000 Like, Mike, your home, you wanted to get credit.

01:31:59.000 Looks like you can get this house if you let us look at your browser, or you can get that house if you don't.

01:32:06.000 Yeah.

01:32:07.000 People are going to do it.

01:32:08.000 If they find out you're going to get $200,000 in a loan or $100,000 in a loan, depending upon whether or not you allow us to have access to your browsing history, how many people are going to say yes? 0.99

01:32:22.000 They're probably going to try to clean up their fucking computer. 0.98

01:32:24.000 They're going to be unsophisticated, take all the porn down. 1.00

01:32:27.000 They're going to go, Mike, you look at eight hours of porn a day. 0.53

01:32:30.000 This is kind of crazy.

01:32:31.000 Don't knock a man's hobby.

01:32:32.000 Don't knock a man's hobby.

01:32:34.000 But you know what I'm saying?

01:32:34.000 It's like there's so many people that are going to be willing to give up that data.

01:32:38.000 The same way, one of the things that I heard argued about Facebook, which is really fascinating, they were saying that Facebook treats you like you're a customer, but in fact you're the product.

01:32:48.000 And you are providing them with data that they then sell.

01:32:53.000 And there's a big difference between you being a customer and being a product because you're treated like you're a customer, but you're actually a product.

01:33:03.000 Right.

01:33:03.000 And we've all just sort of accepted that and we've given up this data.

01:33:07.000 So we've given up this commodity that we didn't even know was valuable at the time and now it's become literally one of the most valuable things in the world.

01:33:17.000 You have these companies like Google and Facebook that have enormous amounts of money entirely based on the fact that they have access to your data.

01:33:27.000 Well, and also, you've got a lot of companies out there that, for whatever reason, can't get investment, can't get credit, can't get, you know, and so, you know, are they going to say, no, I'm not going to give up what they already assume they're doing anyway,

01:33:43.000 for the most part.

01:33:44.000 Most people understand that they've given up a lot of information, you know, in the commercial world.

01:33:49.000 You know, again, I know that the bogeyman is always like NSA. NSA is collecting information on you.

01:33:53.000 Right.

01:33:54.000 That's not the point of this exercise.

01:33:57.000 It's the commercial side of things because it is monetized and there is a revenue stream.

01:34:02.000 That's where you're giving up all your information.

01:34:04.000 But I think most companies, most individuals, I agree with you.

01:34:07.000 If they think that there's a potential upside, they don't care because they're already doing it or their minds are already doing it.

01:34:14.000 Right.

01:34:15.000 Or somehow they can write off the security risks or the concerns that might be there or the privacy rights that, you know, frankly, most people have assumed have long gone.

01:34:25.000 So, you know, again, I think, you know, from my perspective, I've never, because I spent so much time within the government, I've never been one who's worried about, you know, big government collecting huge amounts of data on me, right?

01:34:39.000 I mean, for the most part, they can't organize panic in a doomed submarine.

01:34:44.000 And I think that it's the Googles and it's the Amazons and it's the others who have been busy for years and years just figuring out how do we make money off of you. 0.70

01:34:54.000 Right.

01:34:55.000 Well, that's what's interesting, right?

01:34:56.000 The argument has always been that private companies are better at a lot of things because there's profit involved versus the government.

01:35:04.000 And we're seeing this with like SpaceX, right?

01:35:06.000 Like Elon Musk, because it's not...

01:35:09.000 Funded by the government, like NASA is, they're able to do incredible things, and they have kind of like free reign to figure out the right ways to do things, and they have enormous resources because of all the money involved.

01:35:21.000 Right, right.

01:35:22.000 I think, yeah, having, you know, because I'm so shameless about this, but having now almost got to the finish of filming the second season for that Black Files Declassified, one of the things that we do is we do look a lot at the The intersection of government and the commercial sector in terms of development of whether it's technologies for weapons development or whatever it may be.

01:35:46.000 And there is an enormously healthy, robust partnership between the government and a variety of sectors out there, in part because I think there is this understanding That at some point,

01:36:06.000 you've got to take this idea and it's got to be germinated in the commercial side.

01:36:09.000 That's where it's really going to come to fruition, right?

01:36:13.000 In certain parts of like DARPA and some parts of the government, you've got incredibly smart people.

01:36:17.000 But ultimately, you've got to get it into the commercial side to get it developed.

01:36:21.000 It's like that hypersonic weapon that was built by Raytheon, right?

01:36:24.000 And DARPA came out with the announcement and DARPA is heavily involved.

01:36:28.000 But it's the Raytheon engineers, and they're not doing it because they're mostly worried about who's going to be at the top of the food chain.

01:36:36.000 They're doing it because there's a revenue stream that they understand is very, very important for their next 10 or 20 years of growth.

01:36:41.000 And so they want those contracts. 0.96

01:36:43.000 And so they're going to do every fucking thing possible to be successful at it. 0.97

01:36:47.000 So I don't know where I was going with that. 0.98

01:36:49.000 Which brings me back to UFOs.

01:36:51.000 I knew we were going back to UFOs.

01:36:53.000 When you see all of these announcements, I'm sure you know more than I do, and I'm not asking you to say things you're not supposed to say, but when you see these announcements, like when the Pentagon talks openly about UFOs,

01:37:09.000 When you see it in the New York Times, that 2017 article where they're talking to people, like highly respected people, like Commander David Fravor and all these people that have had these encounters with unexplainable technology.

01:37:23.000 When you see this being discussed, Do you think that some of this is just obfuscating?

01:37:32.000 Some of this is just like covering up for the fact that we have some super advanced technology that we're not letting be public?

01:37:44.000 And you can say, oh, well, we don't even know what's going on.

01:37:47.000 This could be UFOs.

01:37:48.000 I don't believe, whenever I see these public announcements about technology that we don't understand, that is coming from alien worlds, that, to me, I always go, why would they tell us that?

01:38:03.000 What is the reason for all of this transparency all of a sudden? 0.98

01:38:09.000 Like, and how much of this is bullshit? 0.80

01:38:11.000 How much of this is just covering up that there's some insane technology that they have a handle on? 0.98

01:38:17.000 And this brings me to this What is that?

01:38:22.000 Was it a CIA document, the UFO document?

01:38:26.000 Do you know what I'm discussing, Jamie?

01:38:28.000 Where they were talking about the technology and there was some sort of a patent on the same type of technology that is potentially being utilized by these unexplainable crafts, where they're using some sort of a magnetic-based propulsion system.

01:38:45.000 What is behind the U.S. Navy's UFO fusion energy patent?

01:38:50.000 This is what it is. 0.99

01:38:52.000 Oh, you motherfuckers with their pop-ups. 1.00

01:38:55.000 Oh, blocked! 1.00

01:38:56.000 Sons of bitches. 1.00

01:38:59.000 So if you scroll down, there's some sort of a patent. 1.00

01:39:02.000 Yeah, PICE. You know what that is?

01:39:04.000 So tell me.

01:39:06.000 Plasma-controlled fusion device.

01:39:08.000 They filed a patent for this plasma-controlled fusion device in 2019. And it says it's either a giant breakthrough or mad science.

01:39:16.000 According to the patent application, the miniature device could contain and sustain fusion reactions capable of generating power in the gigawatt, one billion watts to terawatt, one trillion watts range or more.

01:39:29.000 A large coal plant or a mid-sized nuclear power reactor, by comparison, produces energy in the one to two gigawatt range.

01:39:39.000 Which is insane. 0.97

01:39:40.000 So you're talking about something that can produce the amount of power that a fucking coal plant or a mid-sized nuclear power reactor can make. 0.98

01:39:52.000 Yeah. 0.95

01:39:53.000 Now, the interesting thing about this is, and we actually featured this in an episode of Black Files Declassified, second season coming in the new year.

01:40:01.000 Thank you very much.

01:40:02.000 And Dr. Peiss, the government did investigate his ideas, his patents.

01:40:11.000 From what we've seen of the paperwork that's been released and declassified, you could draw the conclusion, although it's not complete, that there was nothing to it after they examined his theories,

01:40:27.000 his ideas about how to generate this level of energy in a small contained device.

01:40:31.000 And they came out and said, we don't think there's anything there.

01:40:35.000 It appears as if at that point, funding for research into what he had proposed stopped.

01:40:43.000 I like that word, but.

01:40:44.000 Yeah, but one thing that we seem to be learning is that it's a rare day when funding is allocated to something and then stopped, right?

01:40:59.000 Usually that money then is shifted or the program morphs or the idea or the theory or the testing moves into some other area.

01:41:10.000 So what we're looking at now is, did they come up and say, okay, we don't think this works?

01:41:16.000 Or did they essentially wrap that up because it became known and then morph it into a different essentially black file or black budget or whatever you want to call it and continue looking into this type of energy production,

01:41:33.000 right?

01:41:33.000 But if you follow the trail of available paperwork and the people that we've talked to, you get to a point where they say, no, there was nothing there.

01:41:43.000 And so we stopped researching.

01:41:44.000 We stopped funding that research.

01:41:47.000 And my experience has always been that nobody then says, okay, you can have your money back, right?

01:41:54.000 Or they're looking to, like with some of our past stealth aircraft, they just shut it down, but they move the whole thing into something completely different, right?

01:42:05.000 So that it's now classified and hidden.

01:42:10.000 It's...

01:42:13.000 Can I just show you the language?

01:42:15.000 Go to that second tab that you opened up, please, Jamie, on that subject.

01:42:20.000 Look at the language that they use at the top of this.

01:42:23.000 Space-time modification weapon. 0.98

01:42:26.000 What the fuck does that mean? 0.98

01:42:30.000 Space-time modification? 0.98

01:42:34.000 See that if you scroll back to the top.

01:42:36.000 Navy spent three years in considerable sums of money testing the Pacific, which yes, we've proven.

01:42:40.000 It may have transferred the program to another agency.

01:42:43.000 That's the part.

01:42:43.000 You just said it.

01:42:44.000 There you go.

01:42:44.000 Look at that.

01:42:45.000 And they're saying that this is no bigger than the size of an SUV that could potentially have the same amount of power as a nuclear reactor, which is just fucking insane.

01:42:56.000 Because a lot of the sightings, one of the things about some of the more interesting sightings over the past, particularly over military facilities or by, whether it's Fravor or other military aviators, is, again, the lack of propulsion,

01:43:12.000 right?

01:43:12.000 Yes.

01:43:12.000 Well, so we didn't see anything.

01:43:13.000 We got no heat signature.

01:43:14.000 We saw no evidence of engines.

01:43:16.000 There was nothing to indicate how this thing would be moving.

01:43:19.000 And so that becomes a big part of the question.

01:43:21.000 But to go back to your original question...

01:43:25.000 It is one of the most fascinating parts about this right now is why the Pentagon decided to sort of set the table with opening up about AATIP, as an example, and saying, okay, we're going to talk about this.

01:43:41.000 Look, they had the advanced, what it was, Aerospace Weapons Systems Application Programs, right, which kind of preceded AATIP. And the idea, I think, that the military...

01:43:53.000 At some point recently, they decided it's better for us to talk about this in a sort of operationally logical fashion.

01:44:02.000 So I think they approached it from saying, well, look, of course we have an office like AATIP, right?

01:44:08.000 You know, Lou Elizondo and a bunch of others have already been talking about it.

01:44:12.000 So it came out, and I think the military thought probably the best way for us to explain it It's just simply by saying, well, of course we're going to be looking at unidentified or aerial phenomena that we can't explain.

01:44:23.000 That's a national security issue and it is.

01:44:25.000 It makes sense, right? 0.97

01:44:26.000 So you have an office that would go out there and if you spot something, you know, particularly if it's an aerosensitive facility, then yeah, of course you want to know what the fuck it is, right? 0.57

01:44:34.000 So you get a sighting and, you know, Is it a way for them to set the table so that it just kind of shuts everybody up and they go, okay, I get it. 0.62

01:44:43.000 Thank you for talking to us about it, right?

01:44:45.000 Or is it a way for them to say, here's a logical explanation.

01:44:50.000 Now we don't have to talk about the technologies that we've been developing or where that others have been developing.

01:44:58.000 Yeah, I don't know.

01:45:01.000 But I think it makes sense.

01:45:02.000 I'm impressed that the Pentagon would take this route, but I'm curious as to how far they'll go.

01:45:10.000 So what we're hoping to do is sit down with them and say, okay, why exactly?

01:45:14.000 Because no one's really asked them, why are you talking about this now?

01:45:16.000 And if they have asked them, I suspect the answer will be, well, we're just explaining why AATIP existed.

01:45:23.000 Now, something like this.

01:45:24.000 Let's assume that this program is legitimate.

01:45:27.000 It's a big assumption.

01:45:28.000 Let's just assume for the sake of this conversation.

01:45:30.000 How many people are involved?

01:45:33.000 How many people know about the capabilities of this particular weapon slash propulsion system that they're working on right now?

01:45:44.000 Yeah, well, they're all signed, you know, to...

01:45:47.000 Death warrants.

01:45:48.000 Death warrants. 1.00

01:45:51.000 Keep your fucking mouth shut, bitch. 1.00

01:45:52.000 So we'll never, never know. 1.00

01:45:54.000 But, you know, typically any of these programs is pretty close hold, you know, whether it's coming out of the Skunk Works or whether it's wherever it may be.

01:46:01.000 You're not talking about a lot of people, but it's an engineering exercise.

01:46:06.000 So you're talking about a range of backgrounds and experiences and people.

01:46:13.000 I guess if we had Two things.

01:46:20.000 If we were holding...

01:46:22.000 This is going to sound strange, but if we were holding aliens at Area 51, as an example, I firmly believe there's no way we could have kept that secret for any period of time.

01:46:32.000 Why do you say that?

01:46:33.000 Well, because it's human nature.

01:46:36.000 It's the...

01:46:37.000 Well, that's Bob Lazar, then.

01:46:39.000 Yeah.

01:46:39.000 Because he didn't keep it secret.

01:46:41.000 I know.

01:46:41.000 It's just...

01:46:42.000 But I think also...

01:46:46.000 In a shorter period of time, I'm talking going back decades and decades, so ever since Area 51 became ground zero for some of the thoughts and ideas about aliens.

01:46:57.000 But in recent terms, if you're talking about the past handful of years and you're developing new technologies, new propulsion system, whatever it may be, do I think that the government can keep that secret over a relatively short period of time?

01:47:10.000 Yes.

01:47:12.000 So I don't know where I'm going with that other than I suspect that what's happened is that we...

01:47:19.000 Here it goes.

01:47:20.000 The document also shows that a team of at least 10 technicians and engineers were assigned to design and test an experimental demonstrator and that testing was being conducted as recently as September of 2019. So this is my question.

01:47:36.000 When you have these unexplained things like what Commander David Fravor sees off the coast of San Diego, what is the potential that that is the United States government testing some of this insane technology that they're trying to keep under wraps?

01:47:53.000 And then when they release some sort of a statement like this, What would be the purpose of even releasing this statement?

01:48:02.000 Well, I think there were so many questions, and it had gotten out there and had been in the press and had been enough stories about it that I think, in part, I don't want to say damage control, but I think they were just trying to get ahead of it a little bit.

01:48:11.000 So they say, we tried, but it wasn't successful, so we abandoned the program.

01:48:16.000 Sorry, it's over.

01:48:17.000 But then this article highlights exactly what you said, that they probably moved it to another agency, which means it's probably continuing this cycle of development.

01:48:26.000 There is no way they stop researching or working in a sort of a feverish pace to develop this type of technology, this ability.

01:48:38.000 Because there's a potential for it.

01:48:39.000 Because there's a potential for it and because it's so important.

01:48:42.000 And again, it comes back to the idea of competition.

01:48:44.000 We know the Russians and the Chinese are doing everything they can.

01:48:47.000 Right?

01:48:47.000 To develop new propulsion systems, new material science issues related to hypersonics.

01:48:51.000 And, you know, can you get a manned hypersonic aircraft?

01:48:54.000 You know, probably not in our lifetime, frankly, because of the speed we're talking about and the impact on the materials that we've got.

01:49:03.000 There's no way that we're not—just because they shelve one file, one research project, doesn't mean they're not moving into something else, or they're not taking an aspect of it and saying, okay, this could work.

01:49:17.000 And so, yes, could what flavor have seen been something that we were testing and developing?

01:49:23.000 Part of me says, well, look, if that's the case, they wouldn't have been doing sorties close enough.

01:49:30.000 They would have found a more remote location.

01:49:32.000 Unless they wanted it to be discovered.

01:49:35.000 Yeah, and there is some of that that's out there in terms of what do we release to the outside world, meaning countries that are not aligned with our interests.

01:49:45.000 And so there's something to that.

01:49:48.000 That gets them worried.

01:49:49.000 That gets the Chinese thinking, well, what exactly do they have, right? 0.98

01:49:51.000 Right.

01:49:54.000 So, yeah, I just think that it's...

01:49:57.000 The Fravor thing, we've talked about it before, we keep coming back, and it is really, you know, one of the few sightings that you look at and you go, I don't know, this thing, you know, there's not an explanation for it yet.

01:50:09.000 And there's not a...

01:50:10.000 You can't write it off, right?

01:50:13.000 And...

01:50:13.000 I mean, it was above 60,000 feet above sea level, and it got down to 50 feet in less than a second.

01:50:21.000 And he wasn't the only one.

01:50:23.000 He's not the only one that had eyes on target.

01:50:25.000 So it's such a credible sighting that it does create...

01:50:30.000 And if that's the case, then look, you can't...

01:50:33.000 Anybody who says absolutely there's not phenomena out there that we can't explain, I don't understand how you...

01:50:42.000 Hold that point of view, right?

01:50:43.000 We don't know, right?

01:50:44.000 Not only that, if it's an individual occurrence, if it's one thing that occurs in one place, how do you know whether or not this happened?

01:50:52.000 Just because it's not repeating all over the country like, you know, the sighting of bald eagles or something.

01:50:56.000 Just because it's not something that you can go out and absolutely prove to be true, like when something happens, a unique occurrence. 0.99

01:51:03.000 It's very difficult to say whether a unique occurrence actually took place unless there's real evidence, and there's video of this fucking thing. 0.97

01:51:10.000 Yeah, exactly. 0.95

01:51:12.000 And we know from other materials from OSAP and also from the successor operation, the AATIP office within the Pentagon, And again, that's the point.

01:51:27.000 They talk about, well, ATIP, we stopped that a few years back.

01:51:33.000 Really?

01:51:33.000 Do you think that they've stopped investigating aerial phenomena that they can't explain right off the bat?

01:51:40.000 I mean, it's ridiculous to think that.

01:51:43.000 So there's an element somewhere under a different acronym that's doing the same thing.

01:51:47.000 And so what have they seen?

01:51:49.000 And there's been multiple sightings.

01:51:51.000 And again, one of the more interesting things about the sightings is that they're over a number of times over sensitive facilities, sensitive installations.

01:51:59.000 And so that leads you to wonder, okay, are they...

01:52:04.000 Is that because they're home-based there, whatever the technology is, whatever platform we're testing, whatever it may be?

01:52:10.000 Or is that because it's from a different nation that's out there trying to figure out?

01:52:14.000 Or what is it?

01:52:15.000 Right.

01:52:16.000 Or if you want to get crazy, is it from another planet?

01:52:18.000 Is it from another planet?

01:52:19.000 Right. 1.00

01:52:19.000 And so, you know, although if they're coming out here and they're looking, they've got to be thinking, oh, fuck this. 1.00

01:52:26.000 We'll just keep moving on. 0.99

01:52:27.000 We can't.

01:52:29.000 Except for entertainment value, there's nothing to see here. 0.97

01:52:31.000 Maybe they're worried that we're going to do something really fucked up. 0.95

01:52:35.000 I mean, when you have countries that have so many nuclear weapons that we could kill everyone on the planet multiple times over and literally turn this whole thing into a glowing ball... 1.00

01:52:46.000 Maybe if I was from another planet, I'd be like, let's just keep a close eye on these crazy fucks. 1.00

01:52:51.000 Yeah. 1.00

01:52:51.000 Let's keep a close eye. 1.00

01:52:52.000 We have basically these creatures that are going from tribal warfare to nuclear technology to fusion reactors that are the size of an SUV capable of producing gigawatts.

01:53:06.000 In short order.

01:53:07.000 Yeah.

01:53:08.000 One of my favorite little, I don't know what you call it, little tidbit of information, is...

01:53:14.000 Is you think about the Wright brothers.

01:53:16.000 Yeah.

01:53:17.000 And then you think about, what, 50 years later, we're landing on the moon.

01:53:21.000 It's pretty crazy.

01:53:22.000 It's absolutely crazy. 0.98

01:53:23.000 If you think about that condensed period of time going from, eh, I think we can get this thing made out of paper and twigs to fly, and then we're landing on the fucking moon. 0.98

01:53:31.000 And they go even crazier than that. 0.68

01:53:33.000 The technology involved in that is nothing compared to this little thing that you've got sitting in front of you that sits in your pocket.

01:53:38.000 So they went from a whole room full of gigantic supercomputers in the 1960s to something that's way more powerful that just sits in your pocket that now the new one has a terabyte of storage.

01:53:52.000 Yeah, my 10-year-old boy, Muggsy, picks up and it's like a part of his body.

01:53:59.000 There's no fear of technology.

01:54:02.000 It's completely intuitive.

01:54:03.000 And they know how to change things.

01:54:05.000 No, I'll show you, Dad.

01:54:06.000 And they're in the settings.

01:54:08.000 Oh, my God.

01:54:11.000 My kids, all three of them, Scooter, Sluggo, and Muggsy, they understand.

01:54:17.000 It didn't take them very long to understand that from a technology point of view, they're far advanced compared to me.

01:54:23.000 Yeah, they're locked into it, right?

01:54:24.000 It's like learning a language.

01:54:26.000 They say it's the best time.

01:54:28.000 When you're a kid, you learn a language.

01:54:29.000 You can learn a second language very easily.

01:54:30.000 When you're old like us, it's a grind.

01:54:33.000 By the way, there's phenomenal cigars.

01:54:35.000 It's Very good.

01:54:36.000 And that other one's a Partaga Series D4, which is just outstanding.

01:54:40.000 Did you have to go to Cuba to get these?

01:54:42.000 I might have.

01:54:43.000 Can I confirm or deny?

01:54:45.000 I can't either.

01:54:46.000 Either one.

01:54:48.000 But this whole subject...

01:54:52.000 To me, it's like, I could buy it on surface level, which I love to do, and say, oh my god, the government's coming clear because they want us to know, because they can't stop this, and this is such a big issue.

01:55:02.000 But one of the more confusing things about it, and one thing that kind of confirmed my suspicions about this time that we're living in, where there's this overwhelming amount of information that something just gets lost in the news cycle, and then a new thing comes out, and you just forget,

01:55:18.000 because there's so much...

01:55:19.000 We can't keep up. 0.98

01:55:20.000 That they release this information and no one seems to give a shit. 0.99

01:55:24.000 I mean, obviously it came out in the middle of the pandemic, so everybody's kind of fucked anyway. 0.98

01:55:28.000 But it seems to me that they would not have any real motivation to tell us the truth about this stuff. 0.54

01:55:38.000 So when they're talking about this stuff, I'm always wondering if they're preparing us for the implementation of some technology that they've been developing that they can now say they don't have control over and they could use it to their advantage.

01:55:51.000 The fact that we might be willing to believe that it is from another world or another dimension because they've already said, well, there are real things that are out there that we can't explain.

01:56:03.000 Yeah.

01:56:03.000 I mean, I think one part of this is just the The pace of development—we talked about it a little bit just now—but the pace of development within weapons technology and artificial intelligence, right?

01:56:17.000 That's a whole separate— You know, issue in terms of, you know, like you said before, right? 0.96

01:56:26.000 If aliens fly by and they look and they go, well, these guys are pretty fucked up and they're capable of blowing this whole planet up here in short order.

01:56:32.000 If you layer on top of that our old traditional nuclear systems, I don't know where I'm going with this, but, and then you put onto that sort of the ability to remove the human from the equation, right? 0.98

01:56:43.000 So that your defense systems aren't For whatever reason, aren't attached to a human, right?

01:56:49.000 That, you know, what is that?

01:56:51.000 And the Soviets did it, right? 0.98

01:56:52.000 With that old dead hand project that they had.

01:56:56.000 You know, and the idea, now the US says, nah, we're never going to go that route.

01:57:01.000 You know, we're never going to, you know, make our security systems based on no human involvement.

01:57:10.000 But, again, not sure where I was going with that other than I find it fascinating that we seem to think that's a remote possibility and the idea that technology might outpace our ability to control it, you know, is interesting.

01:57:23.000 Not saying that robots are going to take over.

01:57:25.000 But artificial intelligence could one day become sentient.

01:57:28.000 I mean, that's the real concern that people like Elon have.

01:57:31.000 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

01:57:32.000 You know, that one day we're going to flip the switch on something that we can't turn back.

01:57:35.000 Yeah, there's a number of people that feel that way.

01:57:37.000 There's another people on the other side of it that say, no, that's never going to happen.

01:57:40.000 I don't buy those people at all.

01:57:41.000 Yeah, because again, you don't know what you don't know, right?

01:57:44.000 So you don't know where this is going.

01:57:45.000 No one saw this coming.

01:57:46.000 No one saw this phone.

01:57:48.000 But the thing that freaks me the most out is that no one saw the internet coming, even in science fiction.

01:57:54.000 If you go back to the old Star Trek episodes on Captain Kirk, they thought they were going to have a walkie-talkie.

01:58:01.000 Kirk out.

01:58:02.000 Yeah.

01:58:02.000 It's like there's so many things you can't predict in terms of the progress.

01:58:06.000 The old flip communicator thing, yeah.

01:58:08.000 No screen, no FaceTime.

01:58:10.000 There's so many things you can't predict when it comes to innovation and technology and the expansion of these ideas that branch off into these sort of unpredictable ways when the new piece of technology, whether it's this space-time manipulation thing that they're talking about or anything that gets...

01:58:30.000 Designed that no one saw coming and is a complete game-changer like the internet has been If that happens with artificial intelligence and they can one day develop something some something ex machina like or even weirder something that's like literally controlling society like artificial intelligence Well,

01:58:49.000 and again, if you think about the intersection of how these things develop...

01:58:53.000 By the way, I think they...

01:58:55.000 I don't know who created the Dick Tracy cartoon, but remember they had the old wristwatch.

01:59:00.000 Yeah, now we have those.

01:59:01.000 You can actually see people on there.

01:59:01.000 Don't people thought that was crazy?

01:59:03.000 Yeah.

01:59:03.000 Remember?

01:59:04.000 I thought I was going to get a personal jetpack.

01:59:06.000 You're talking to your phone. 1.00

01:59:06.000 I was supposed to get my fucking personal jetpack. 1.00

01:59:08.000 Yeah, where's the jetpacks? 1.00

01:59:10.000 Pissing me off.

01:59:10.000 Yeah, they still haven't figured that out.

01:59:12.000 But if you think about the...

01:59:13.000 You put artificial intelligence in there and then going to something like this hypersonic weapons development where you've reduced the reaction time almost down to zero, right?

01:59:22.000 And that's one of those...

01:59:23.000 So you've kind of got these things.

01:59:24.000 You've got people who say, well, never take the human out of it.

01:59:26.000 And then you've got this worry about, well, but we're reducing the reaction time.

01:59:29.000 Beyond the point where humans can react, so maybe we've got to have this artificial intelligence capability to drive most of the reaction time. 0.98

01:59:36.000 So you can see how this whole thing could compress into a real shit show. 0.93

01:59:40.000 Especially if you're dealing with companies that have been compromised by the Chinese Communist Party, which we know that was the deal with Huawei, which we've talked about many times before. 0.95

01:59:51.000 They had installed these sort of third-party systems where third-party access was available to routers and a lot of their technology, and it's one of the reasons why they stopped allowing Huawei to sell their phones in the United States.

02:00:07.000 Right.

02:00:08.000 I mean, again, you're putting a backdoor access point into whatever it is that you're selling.

02:00:13.000 So if that happens with artificial intelligence that actually is controlling our defense systems, and then there's hypersonic weapons that these artificial intelligence programs are supposed to be able to detect, but they've been compromised because we bought Chinese technology.

02:00:28.000 Right.

02:00:29.000 I mean, you've dropped the reaction time down to almost nothing.

02:00:32.000 It's unpredictable.

02:00:33.000 So now you're thinking, okay, well, you know, a human can't look at the data on this incoming object and process it fast enough.

02:00:40.000 So we got to get the machines in there.

02:00:42.000 And then, you know, it's a short step.

02:00:44.000 Again, I don't want to, you know, be one of, who knows where it's going.

02:00:48.000 But I'm just thinking it's silly to say that it's not a problem.

02:00:51.000 Right.

02:00:51.000 That's what I'm saying.

02:00:52.000 Who knows where it's going, but it is silly to say that if you just think about where this all goes as it expands, as this technology expands, it doesn't necessarily go to a place where it's controllable. 0.96

02:01:04.000 And if we decide that the only way to have this stuff really truly be competitive with the rest of the world is to give it a certain amount of autonomy and allow it to make decisions, then we're really fucked. 0.91

02:01:22.000 I mean, that's what bothers me. 0.97

02:01:24.000 It's time to start drinking.

02:01:25.000 The only way I see this getting out is if, and this scares me maybe even more, is that we integrate with technology.

02:01:33.000 And I kind of think that's where we're going.

02:01:35.000 And when Elon starts talking about his recently saying that he's going to stream music in your head, have you seen that, Jamie?

02:01:42.000 Who's saying that through Neuralink, you're going to be able to stream music into your head.

02:01:47.000 So you'll be able to be playing music just like you'd have AirPods on, but no one will know.

02:01:53.000 And you're sitting there at work just bebopping along.

02:01:57.000 To me, that doesn't seem like a strange thought.

02:02:00.000 Again, because of the pace of...

02:02:02.000 Everything's exponential.

02:02:03.000 The pace of tech development.

02:02:06.000 And so I... Yeah.

02:02:08.000 Again, what do I know?

02:02:09.000 I'm not a rocket scientist.

02:02:11.000 Do you pay attention to security when it comes to your phones and Pegasus and stuff like that?

02:02:19.000 Yeah.

02:02:20.000 Do you scan your phones?

02:02:22.000 We do.

02:02:24.000 I try to – and I'll tell you why.

02:02:27.000 It's not because I'm engaged in national security issues anymore.

02:02:31.000 It's in part my concern over security is because I got kids, right?

02:02:35.000 So I'm just worried about it as a parent.

02:02:40.000 Part of the driver for why I'm always kind of focused on data protection or protecting yourself or your identity, whatever it may be, is just because it's apparent, right?

02:02:50.000 I mean, so to me, that makes sense.

02:02:52.000 From a business perspective, you would be surprised at how lax a lot of systems are, whether it's in the commercial side or government. 0.88

02:03:05.000 I mean, shit, look, it wasn't that long ago, right, that we had, what was it? 0.90

02:03:10.000 Four years ago that we had the release on the WikiLeaks of Vault 7, right? 0.99

02:03:18.000 All the hacking tools that got pulled out from the CIA and released, some of them released on WikiLeaks.

02:03:27.000 Which is a whole different story.

02:03:29.000 Yeah, we were going to talk about that, too.

02:03:30.000 Yeah, we're going to talk about that.

02:03:31.000 About how there may have been conversations with intelligence agencies and Trump, allegedly.

02:03:38.000 This is a problem.

02:03:39.000 When I see that released like that, you know, those kind of—I'm like, who's benefiting from releasing this that they were thinking about whacking Julian Assange?

02:03:48.000 And do you buy into that?

02:03:50.000 What do you think?

02:03:50.000 Yeah, I think elements of the story, we're talking about a story that was on, I think Yahoo News actually broke it, but it's only been in the past day and a half or two days or whatever.

02:04:04.000 The idea was that during the previous administration or the Trump administration, particularly because Mike Pompeo, who at this particular point in time was the CIA director, was so incensed over WikiLeaks releasing some of the Vault 7 information about CIA hacking.

02:04:23.000 And a lot of other people in the agency were also likewise very upset about it.

02:04:28.000 According to the story, anyway, there was talk within the Trump administration over, you know, can we kidnap Assange, who, I mean, at the time, he'd been in the Ecuadorian embassy, you know, taking refuge there in London for,

02:04:43.000 whatever, five years.

02:04:44.000 And he was only on, like, the second floor, right?

02:04:46.000 When you go to that balcony, you're like, Jesus Christ, he's right there.

02:04:49.000 There he is, yeah.

02:04:49.000 You can just get a tall guy to grab him.

02:04:52.000 A really tall guy, yeah.

02:04:54.000 And we don't hire a lot of them because they stand out at the agency.

02:04:58.000 So he's there, and the idea was that there was conversations, discussions, and some planning scenarios developed about how can we kidnap Assange.

02:05:09.000 And then according to the story, there's also some talk about, well, could we assassinate him?

02:05:13.000 Where could this thing go? 0.99

02:05:16.000 If anybody had walked in, if I had been in a position of responsibility at the agency, and someone had walked in and said, yeah, we need to draw up some scenarios for the White House over how we can either kidnap and or assassinate Assange, I would say, get the fuck out of my office. 0.99

02:05:31.000 Get back to work. 0.98

02:05:32.000 I would like to think that you would say that.

02:05:34.000 I would have said that.

02:05:35.000 It's an insane story.

02:05:37.000 I realize that...

02:05:40.000 It doesn't condone the – because you know where I stand on people like Manning or Snowden.

02:05:47.000 I think it's a treasonous act.

02:05:49.000 I think I get why people are very supportive of them for releasing – or for stealing the information and releasing it.

02:05:56.000 I get that, but I'm not on that side.

02:05:58.000 But at the same time, that doesn't give you justification to say you're going to go into a sovereign nation's embassy in another sovereign nation in the UK and render a...

02:06:16.000 I mean, it's insane.

02:06:18.000 Can I challenge you on the Snowden thing?

02:06:19.000 Yeah.

02:06:20.000 Because if Snowden released something that showed that the NSA was involved in something that's unconstitutional and completely illegal, doesn't he have a certain amount of responsibility as a patriot to release that information to the general public and allow them to see that the government,

02:06:37.000 which is really just a bunch of people, Is doing something that is completely illegal and monitoring people in a way that they had no idea was taking place.

02:06:47.000 Meaning that they were all of their phone calls, all their emails, everything was being stored and it could potentially be leveraged against them if they were inconvenient.

02:06:59.000 I'm not going to say no.

02:07:00.000 I get that.

02:07:01.000 I understand it.

02:07:02.000 I can't, from my position, get myself there to say that it was a patriotic act.

02:07:10.000 What I think would have been the right approach was for him to go.

02:07:14.000 And I know that people say, it couldn't have happened.

02:07:16.000 I think releasing that information within the intel committees, figuring out a way to get that information through a whistleblower chain, Pushing it and doing everything possible to do that and getting it out.

02:07:30.000 Is that important?

02:07:30.000 Yes, I get that.

02:07:31.000 But I can't just, you know, again, we have to base it on our experiences.

02:07:35.000 And, you know, based on what I've done, I can't get myself to the point of saying what he did was a patriotic act.

02:07:40.000 But I understand...

02:07:42.000 I understand the point of view entirely.

02:07:44.000 And in a theoretical sense, yes, I get it.

02:07:47.000 I just can't get myself there.

02:07:48.000 I understand what you're saying because of your position and that you worked for the agency for so long, but you're not dealing with the CIA at this point, right?

02:07:55.000 You're dealing with the NSA. It's a different organization, but they were doing something that is completely illegal.

02:08:02.000 Like, the United States...

02:08:04.000 Oh, you get no argument from me on that.

02:08:05.000 Right.

02:08:05.000 So what do you...

02:08:07.000 How does one stop that from happening or make the public aware?

02:08:10.000 Because I don't know how much has changed, because they, you know, WikiLeaks and Assange, he's still...

02:08:21.000 He's still like being held for something that I can't even understand why he's being held, right?

02:08:28.000 He's in a London prison.

02:08:30.000 Right, but it doesn't make sense.

02:08:31.000 Like the charge, the original charge, was like surprise sex or some kind of sexual thing where he was...

02:08:38.000 That was dropped.

02:08:39.000 I think that was dropped.

02:08:41.000 He's being held based on like a 2000...

02:08:45.000 2012 warrant in the UK. And I think that, and this is, again, this is part of the problem.

02:08:53.000 I mean, this story that came out about, you know, about Pompeo pushing for options in terms of could we kidnap him, could we, you know, whatever.

02:09:03.000 Look, the U.S. Department of Justice has been working on trying to figure out how do we get him extradited back to the states.

02:09:10.000 But here's the question, why?

02:09:12.000 Hasn't the damage been done?

02:09:15.000 Hasn't he really...

02:09:16.000 Is it to punish anybody else that might consider being a whistleblower in the future and to send a message?

02:09:21.000 Why would they want to...

02:09:22.000 If the guy has already essentially released all those documents, Why would they be so concerned with what he has to say now?

02:09:32.000 Well, yeah, there were a couple of aspects of where the U.S. government was going after him.

02:09:37.000 One was that he was actually working to help, remember Manning, now Chelsea Manning, to facilitate.

02:09:48.000 So it wasn't just a receptacle.

02:09:50.000 It wasn't just receiving documents, but was helping Manning to try to facilitate the theft of Of classified material.

02:09:57.000 So is that espionage?

02:09:58.000 Yeah.

02:09:59.000 And then they also layered on some espionage act for actually publishing classified information.

02:10:07.000 That's, I think, probably a weaker position than actually trying to work with someone to facilitate the theft of intellectual property.

02:10:13.000 That's not a journalistic role right there.

02:10:16.000 But publishing, you could argue, okay, that's a journalistic role.

02:10:19.000 So which person would have done the more egregious crime in terms of the position of the intelligence agencies?

02:10:28.000 Would it be Manning or would it be Assange?

02:10:30.000 Because Assange is still locked up.

02:10:33.000 Manning is now free.

02:10:35.000 Yeah, I know.

02:10:36.000 And it's...

02:10:37.000 This is...

02:10:38.000 That's been this...

02:10:39.000 This whole discussion, whether you're talking about Manning, Assange, Snowden, the whole...

02:10:43.000 Throw it all into this bucket, and it's very emotive.

02:10:49.000 I'm conflicted in the sense that on the Snowden issue, I agree, again, what NSA was doing.

02:10:56.000 And they were lying about it.

02:10:56.000 It needed to be brought to light.

02:10:58.000 It needed to be brought to light, but I just think it should have been brought in a different fashion.

02:11:01.000 But the thing is, there's no repercussions.

02:11:03.000 What Manning did was theft of documents.

02:11:05.000 What Assange did, and the way that the agency was viewing Assange, in a sense, was that he was not facilitating, but being like an arm of or being used by,

02:11:22.000 to some degree, as an example, Russian intel services to do harm to the US. You could argue the But the story itself is insane.

02:11:38.000 And again, I go back to the same thing.

02:11:39.000 It makes no sense.

02:11:41.000 How logical, reasonable people could sit around...

02:11:44.000 I get it that they were pissed off about in the aftermath of the Vault 7 information disclosures and the embarrassment that that caused and just the trouble that it caused and the release of that sensitive information.

02:11:57.000 But that doesn't then mean you should sit and have operational meetings.

02:12:01.000 About kidnapping him.

02:12:03.000 You know, right across the water, the Department of Justice is busy trying to do their thing.

02:12:08.000 And if they can do their thing legally, great.

02:12:10.000 If they can't, then okay.

02:12:12.000 Then they couldn't.

02:12:13.000 Do you think they're punishing him?

02:12:15.000 By continuing to imprison him, and by not releasing him, and by not dropping this case, and even if this discussion was true about killing him, is it to send a message to other people?

02:12:31.000 Yeah, I think the idea was, at some point, again, part of this, I think, needs to be explored further.

02:12:39.000 Hopefully, other outlets will pick up the Yahoo News story.

02:12:42.000 I think it deserves more investigation.

02:12:45.000 But part of it is, at a certain point, moving from the Obama administration to...

02:12:54.000 Because you have to remember all the various parts here.

02:12:57.000 You had the Democratic email releases in 2016. And that was viewed as a Russian operation.

02:13:05.000 And WikiLeaks was in concert.

02:13:09.000 Rightly so or no?

02:13:09.000 Do you think that was, in fact...

02:13:11.000 Sure.

02:13:12.000 Yeah, I think so.

02:13:13.000 I mean, you know, we go back to, you know, Yuri's comments about, you know, active measures and sure.

02:13:19.000 Do you think that this was in coordination with Trump?

02:13:23.000 Do you think that Trump had some sort of a direct or was it more advantageous for the Russians to have Trump in the position as president?

02:13:33.000 Like, why do you think they would work with WikiLeaks to release the Clinton emails?

02:13:37.000 Because it caused us...

02:13:39.000 It caused chaos.

02:13:40.000 It caused chaos.

02:13:41.000 It caused further distrust in the system, caused further splintering of our population.

02:13:47.000 So it was very effective if you think about how much we've been divided since 2016. Yeah, and again, when you showed that great clip of Yuri talking about this and you're realizing it was...

02:14:00.000 Whatever, 40 years ago, they're still doing it, and they're still finding it to be successful.

02:14:08.000 And they're finding the technology that exists out there, these phones that we just talked about, and the social media outlets, they're finding all of that to help.

02:14:16.000 I mean, that's a great thing.

02:14:17.000 In the old days, if you wanted to do a covert action campaign, you'd go to hire some journalists, right?

02:14:22.000 Develop a network of newspaper journalists, right?

02:14:25.000 Find people that could plant articles that you would, you know, skew it a certain way to influence the population in that country, you know, so that they would say, oh, yeah, you know what? 0.99

02:14:34.000 The dictator does suck, you know? 0.98

02:14:36.000 But you had to cobble together. 1.00

02:14:38.000 It was a heavy lift. 0.97

02:14:39.000 And now it's fucking so much easier, right? 0.94

02:14:43.000 Because you got all these social media outlets. 0.92

02:14:44.000 You can do it, you know, sitting in Moscow, and you can influence millions of people and...

02:14:50.000 That was unheard of even 25 years ago.

02:14:53.000 And I find them sometimes, man.

02:14:55.000 I'm like, I'll sometimes find a story and then I'll see a really aggressive or odd take.

02:15:01.000 And then I'll go to that person's Twitter page and I'll see, what is this?

02:15:05.000 And you look at it like, I don't think this is a real person.

02:15:07.000 You go and they're just reposting all these stories about either the Republicans or the Democrats.

02:15:14.000 With occasional commentary attached to that and very aggressive viewpoints.

02:15:19.000 But the human being behind it just seems non-existent.

02:15:23.000 And you see the amount of followers they have.

02:15:25.000 It's usually very minimal.

02:15:26.000 And there's usually some sort of a generic photo that identifies them in their Twitter profile.

02:15:31.000 And you're like, wow, knowing what I know about the Internet Research Agency and knowing that there's probably multiple different similar organizations in a lot of these other countries that oppose us. 0.97

02:15:44.000 Like, how many of these fucking things are out there? 0.95

02:15:46.000 Because they know that there's hundreds of thousands of fake accounts that are being utilized by foreign governments. 0.99

02:15:53.000 It's nothing more than a marketing campaign.

02:15:56.000 I want the population to drink more Pepsi.

02:16:01.000 I'm going to figure out how to make that happen.

02:16:03.000 What drives that sector?

02:16:06.000 What drives the demographics that I'm interested in?

02:16:08.000 It's no different than trying to figure out how to increase your viewership of a show or whatever it may be.

02:16:14.000 And when you put the state-sponsored resources behind it, it's an immensely powerful thing.

02:16:20.000 And again, the technology has made it so much easier.

02:16:24.000 So the idea that we're being manipulated, and it's Again, it happens in a variety of different ways.

02:16:30.000 People are going to say, well, I don't care about the Russians.

02:16:32.000 I care about Amazon trying to manipulate me or whatever. 1.00

02:16:35.000 And they're doing it, too.

02:16:37.000 How many times do you search for something?

02:16:39.000 I search for something on my phone, and then I spend two days getting unsolicited pop-ups saying, oh, by the way, we got another, whatever, MGB for sale over here.

02:16:51.000 I took delivery finally of that.

02:16:53.000 Yeah?

02:16:53.000 Back in 1965 MGB Roadster.

02:16:56.000 Does that have a wooden frame?

02:16:57.000 No, no.

02:16:58.000 Some of them did, right?

02:16:59.000 The older ones?

02:17:00.000 All the old ones, yeah.

02:17:01.000 But this one, this one's 65. My uncle used to have one on a wooden frame.

02:17:06.000 Really?

02:17:06.000 Yeah.

02:17:07.000 Wow.

02:17:07.000 Oh my God, it was sketchy.

02:17:08.000 That'd be a tough ride.

02:17:12.000 So these pop-up ads show up and it's just like, There.

02:17:15.000 There you go.

02:17:17.000 They know what you're looking for.

02:17:19.000 They know what you're looking for, but the idea that the Russians would look at our society today and go, yeah, it's so easy to divide and conquer, and that's what they're doing. 0.97

02:17:32.000 Whether they're playing black against white, they're playing rich against poor, it doesn't matter what the subject is. 0.73

02:17:37.000 They know it doesn't take much to increase that chaos.

02:17:42.000 And ultimately, to some degree, that's all they want to do.

02:17:45.000 And we got lost in the idea that it was because they wanted Trump to win or they wanted Clinton to win or they wanted whatever.

02:17:51.000 That's not their point.

02:17:52.000 Their point is to create chaos.

02:17:54.000 Yeah.

02:17:54.000 And to create dissent and to make sure that we are even further divided.

02:17:59.000 Right.

02:17:59.000 And bring down the system eventually.

02:18:00.000 I know that sounds old school and very Cold War-ish, but it's still there.

02:18:04.000 Well, if you look at the result, it seems like they're being very effective.

02:18:09.000 Yeah.

02:18:10.000 I mean, we've never been more divided.

02:18:12.000 Do you ever have any sort of suspicions at all that potentially COVID-19 could have been purposely released?

02:18:24.000 Because, I mean, you have to take it into consideration, right?

02:18:28.000 You do.

02:18:28.000 It's like everything else.

02:18:29.000 It's like planning for the withdrawal from Afghanistan.

02:18:32.000 You've got to figure out what's the worst-case scenario, and you've got to create something around it.

02:18:36.000 I'm not saying that it happened, but it's one of those things where you've got to go, okay, This is something that you can't completely ignore the possibility of it.

02:18:44.000 One of the things we covered on my sci-fi show way back in the day was this idea of a bioweapon, about using some sort of a manipulated virus that gets out into the general population and wrecks havoc.

02:18:59.000 Obviously this one was worldwide, but it's not like it was targeted in one specific area, but in getting something that does go worldwide, Look at the amount, the authoritarian response just in Australia. 0.98

02:19:14.000 Australia has turned into a fucking prison colony.

02:19:18.000 And then here's one where the Second Amendment advocates step up and say, hey, this is why we have the Second Amendment. 1.00

02:19:24.000 Like, you could always say that...

02:19:27.000 The Second Amendment is supposed to apply to protection of yourself and a well-armed militia. 0.94

02:19:32.000 It has nothing to do with some guy being able to have 150 fucking ARs in his bedroom, and this is crazy, and it's overreach, or it's being abused, rather. 0.95

02:19:45.000 But Australia has no guns. 0.98

02:19:48.000 The general population, there's a few people that have rifles for hunting, but there's nothing like we have here in America, and they are being overrun.

02:19:58.000 Cops are pulling people over for simply being outside their homes, and they're throwing them to the ground like thugs.

02:20:04.000 You're seeing these protests where they're literally pepper spraying old ladies in the face. 0.67

02:20:10.000 It's crazy how much they've been divided. 0.73

02:20:12.000 And what scares the shit out of me is I've got to think that any foreign entity, any foreign government that sees what's possible in Australia would like to see that happen in America.

02:20:26.000 Well, yeah.

02:20:27.000 Nothing divides the population more than seeing this place that was always a great place to visit. 1.00

02:20:35.000 People were so friendly, and now it's a fucking police state. 0.99

02:20:38.000 How does this deteriorate so quickly? 0.99

02:20:40.000 I spent part of my childhood there.

02:20:41.000 I didn't come to the States until my last year of high school, right?

02:20:45.000 And I was in Australia.

02:20:48.000 What's it like for you watching?

02:20:51.000 I'm stunned by their...

02:20:53.000 Their reaction, first of all, to imposing the regulations, the requirements, the protocols that they've got in place.

02:21:03.000 And I'm also kind of stunned at the Australian population's willingness to...

02:21:08.000 You know, allow it to happen in a sense.

02:21:10.000 Well, they're rejecting it now.

02:21:11.000 Yeah.

02:21:11.000 It took a while, though.

02:21:12.000 It took a while, because this has been going on for a while.

02:21:14.000 I think they were hoping.

02:21:15.000 Melbourne's the most locked down city in the world.

02:21:17.000 Yeah, which is crazy.

02:21:18.000 And the amount of deaths they've had is so minimal.

02:21:20.000 Yeah.

02:21:20.000 It's so small.

02:21:21.000 It's like Florida on a weekend for the entire pandemic.

02:21:24.000 I'm not kidding.

02:21:25.000 No, it's true.

02:21:25.000 It really is like that.

02:21:26.000 Yeah.

02:21:27.000 So I'm shocked by the way that it's taken place.

02:21:31.000 I never would have picked Australia as a place where they would have tried enacting this.

02:21:37.000 It's a bit of a proving ground, though, isn't it?

02:21:39.000 It seems that way, although you could argue a former penal colony.

02:21:43.000 Maybe it's reverting the type.

02:21:46.000 But I think that...

02:21:48.000 You know, look, I have no doubt in my mind that this thing, you know, originated in the lab.

02:21:52.000 No doubt.

02:21:53.000 There is no doubt.

02:21:54.000 I mean, we're talking about that as the likely scenario back in January of 2020, right?

02:22:01.000 And then people started, you know, it's a conspiracy.

02:22:04.000 And they said it because...

02:22:06.000 It was Trump.

02:22:07.000 Right.

02:22:08.000 Which is insane. 0.99

02:22:09.000 But so much of what's happened over the past few years has been insane because it's just automatically, if it emanated from the previous administration, it was bullshit, whether it was or not. 0.99

02:22:18.000 Some of it was bullshit, but whether it was or not, it didn't matter. 0.98

02:22:22.000 So facts didn't matter. 0.99

02:22:24.000 But I have no doubt that it emanated.

02:22:26.000 Do I think it was deliberate?

02:22:27.000 No.

02:22:28.000 Do I think the Wuhan lab had...

02:22:31.000 Dealings with the Chinese PLA with the military?

02:22:33.000 Absolutely.

02:22:34.000 Were they, you know, conducting some research on the military's behalf?

02:22:37.000 I have no doubt about that either.

02:22:39.000 But do I think that it was designed and released deliberately?

02:22:43.000 No.

02:22:45.000 I'd probably draw the line at that point. 0.99

02:22:47.000 But, look, we don't know what we don't know because the Chinese are being so fucking, you know, non-transparent about this. 1.00

02:22:54.000 And that's the problem. 0.98

02:22:55.000 We just had that last intel assessment.

02:22:58.000 It came out.

02:22:59.000 What?

02:23:00.000 In late August of this year.

02:23:03.000 And, you know, I've never seen anything as an assessment that tells you less, right?

02:23:09.000 But at least they're honest because they come out and go, well, you know, it's still inconclusive as to whether it originated in the lab because that Chinese won't cooperate, right? 1.00

02:23:18.000 And our intel is so poor there, you know, we just don't have the sources.

02:23:20.000 And you're talking about a very heavy lift in terms of getting intel We're good to go.

02:23:40.000 But isn't it so interesting how the division in this country is so clear between left and right that left is defending Fauci and they're essentially ignoring all this information that he and the NIH funded that EcoHealth Alliance,

02:24:01.000 which in turn funded what Rand Paul and many others believe you could describe as gain-of-function research.

02:24:10.000 They even refer to it in the same way in emails that were released, and Fauci lied in front of Congress when he was being questioned about this.

02:24:20.000 It's pretty clear, right?

02:24:22.000 Yeah.

02:24:22.000 I think, again, it's all based on where you sit and try.

02:24:27.000 But if you try to assess this thing objectively, if you can, if it's possible to take the politics out of it, and you simply just look at what facts have been established, then You can certainly make the argument that Fauci lied about the extent to which he was aware of what was going on and then the extent to which there was an effort to try to cover for the Wuhan lab and create a different narrative over this.

02:24:56.000 So it's bullshit at this stage of the game that people still look at this and go, you know, I don't know.

02:25:02.000 It could have been still natural causes and maybe didn't come out of the lab. 0.96

02:25:06.000 And that's That defies logic if you just simply look at pattern of behavior and evidence that exists currently, right?

02:25:14.000 Much less what hopefully will come out from better intel sources.

02:25:17.000 And then new evidence about the three people that worked at the lab that turned out to be sick with illnesses that resemble 100% COVID-19 infection.

02:25:28.000 Yeah.

02:25:28.000 I just think it's...

02:25:32.000 It's like everything else.

02:25:34.000 Going back full circle to what we started talking about, which was the Afghanistan withdrawal, if you were to read the transcripts from the first part of the hearings with the Armed Services Committee and the Chairman Reed,

02:25:51.000 Democrat Senator, he has the right to make the opening statement.

02:25:55.000 Then he asks the first questions.

02:25:56.000 And he frames the whole thing from the very beginning in a partisan way. 0.99

02:26:01.000 Simply by trying to essentially say, any shit that happened here is not Biden's fault. 0.98

02:26:07.000 It's because of the previous administration agreeing to this Doha agreement. 0.99

02:26:11.000 And that's how he frames it.

02:26:13.000 He doesn't start this hearing, this investigative hearing, by saying, we brought these experts who spent each four decades in the military and were intimately involved in what was going on in Afghanistan.

02:26:25.000 We brought them here to hear from them.

02:26:26.000 He starts it out by framing the way that he would like this to go. 0.96

02:26:31.000 It fucking works there in Washington, right? 0.95

02:26:34.000 Because we allow these people to stay in office forever, right? 0.99

02:26:37.000 Nobody wants to make a brave decision because they're all worried about getting elected again.

02:26:41.000 And so he starts that out.

02:26:43.000 Then he asks questions when he has the opportunity to start out by asking questions.

02:26:46.000 And it's all about the Doha Agreement.

02:26:47.000 And don't you think that this was the problem?

02:26:49.000 And this was... 1.00

02:26:51.000 It's just bullshit. 0.99

02:26:52.000 Everything that goes on in Washington is either about not creating transparency or finding someone else to blame. 1.00

02:26:58.000 And that's, you know, again, for what it's worth, I think it's in part because of fucking term limits or the lack of. 0.97

02:27:05.000 That's just me. 0.98

02:27:07.000 Well, that seems to be a real problem for sure.

02:27:09.000 Yeah.

02:27:09.000 But the China thing, I think, is—in my mind, there's no doubt.

02:27:14.000 It's the lab.

02:27:16.000 But I also have no doubt we're probably not going to get clarification of that because there's no upside for the Chinese to cooperate. 1.00

02:27:23.000 They just don't—it's like everything else they do.

02:27:25.000 They don't feel like they need to.

02:27:26.000 So it's too difficult to get, like, a definitive statement or a definitive— Like timeline of exactly what happened and how it happened and this is the cause.

02:27:34.000 Unless you can get your hands on one of the researchers that was inside the lab and is somehow willing to provide you with that intel.

02:27:43.000 I mean that's an enormous lift, right?

02:27:45.000 It's like trying to get intel on the Iranian nuclear program or anything else.

02:27:48.000 I mean there's certain targets that have always been difficult and in part it's because you have a small pool of people who have access to information that you need to know or you want to know.

02:27:58.000 And then you have very limited ability to get to those people.

02:28:02.000 So again, they scrubbed whatever information may be available from open source.

02:28:12.000 That's not available.

02:28:15.000 And so I have a feeling that we're never going to get to the bottom of it necessarily, again, unless we get really lucky with a particular intel source.

02:28:22.000 But there's no upside for the Chinese to say, ah, you know what, now let's be open and transparent. 0.70

02:28:28.000 Why would they?

02:28:29.000 It seems like the pandemic was particularly effective at dividing Americans.

02:28:33.000 And obviously, what's happening in Australia and France and quite a few other places where there are these massive protests, but you don't see the same in Russia and you don't see the same in China.

02:28:45.000 Like, what about those countries?

02:28:49.000 I mean, it seems like Whatever strategy they have, if there really is some sort of a government-funded strategy to try to increase the division amongst the left and the right and just people in general in America and distrust in the system,

02:29:06.000 this pandemic has turbocharged it for America, but maybe not so much for our enemies.

02:29:15.000 Well, yeah.

02:29:17.000 In part, that plays to our open society, right?

02:29:22.000 Our access to information, right?

02:29:25.000 And you look at a place like China where access to information is fairly limited.

02:29:30.000 Severely curated, yeah.

02:29:32.000 And you look at a place like Russia where people make jokes all the time about the Russian population's ability to suffer.

02:29:39.000 And it's true, right?

02:29:42.000 You know, it's pretty impressive.

02:29:45.000 But I think with the US, I just think that they look at it and, yes, it's just another, I guess, to carry on from the point before about the active measures and the idea of driving wedges in.

02:30:01.000 If I was sitting in the Russia desk for active measures at the FSB and I was sitting there and I thought to myself, now what can we do?

02:30:08.000 Now what topic should we pursue?

02:30:10.000 Now what area can we pull on to further create this dissension and this lack of unity and, ah, the pandemic.

02:30:17.000 So it's just another topic, just like racism or fraudulent election or whatever it might be.

02:30:24.000 It's just another target you can put on the table and go, now how do we do this?

02:30:28.000 Okay, look, what we need to do is look at this war between anti-vaxxers and pro-vaxxers.

02:30:35.000 Let's do something there.

02:30:37.000 Let's focus on some misinformation there to drive that wedge in further.

02:30:41.000 So for them, it's just another opportunity.

02:30:44.000 And it's naive to think that they wouldn't take advantage of it.

02:30:48.000 And it is.

02:30:50.000 It's striking how we've politicized the idea of the vaccine.

02:30:58.000 I don't know. 0.99

02:30:59.000 Look, I got vaccinated, but I don't give a fuck. 0.99

02:31:02.000 Everybody do what you're going to do. 0.99

02:31:04.000 I can't get...

02:31:06.000 You know, I can't get bent around the axle over, you know, oh my God, you're not going to get... 1.00

02:31:10.000 Who the fuck? 1.00

02:31:11.000 It's your decision. 1.00

02:31:12.000 It's your choice.

02:31:13.000 I have no idea what anybody's thinking about that.

02:31:16.000 You just do it.

02:31:17.000 Fine.

02:31:18.000 Right?

02:31:19.000 I mean, to me, that part of it, and yet, you know, people are out there yielding their self-righteous swords of justice, you know, talking about, you know, you've got to get vaccinated and...

02:31:31.000 And the anxiety over the whole thing.

02:31:33.000 That's one of the real problems with social media, right?

02:31:36.000 Is that this self-righteous, virtue-signaling sort of behavior is encouraged.

02:31:43.000 It's encouraged because people pile on, you get reinforcement, you know, like, yeah, I'm People reinforce your decision to post something aggressive.

02:31:52.000 They're with you on it.

02:31:54.000 And they're rewarded for this with likes and clicks and retweets.

02:31:57.000 Yeah, look at that.

02:31:57.000 I got a thousand new followers.

02:31:59.000 Exactly.

02:31:59.000 Oh, it's fantastic.

02:32:00.000 And you see that.

02:32:02.000 Sometimes you see like some of my favorite people on Twitter are like the people who claim like, oh, I used to be a Republican.

02:32:08.000 And they become some of the most woke people. 0.99

02:32:10.000 And you know that every day they're posting some bullshit, right? 0.99

02:32:14.000 And it's just simply so they can get that feedback. 1.00

02:32:17.000 Yes.

02:32:17.000 Get that dopamine hit.

02:32:19.000 That dopamine hit, right.

02:32:20.000 Yeah, and the opposite is true too.

02:32:22.000 People who used to be on the left and they got red-pilled and now they're all in on this.

02:32:26.000 But the other thing is you can't ignore all these issues either.

02:32:30.000 So it's like, where do you go for sanity?

02:32:32.000 Because when someone says the election's a fraud, and you go, oh, Jesus, do I pay attention to this?

02:32:38.000 And then you see all these things, like Maricopa County just found 17,000 duplicate ballots.

02:32:44.000 What does that mean?

02:32:45.000 Is that an accident?

02:32:46.000 Or is that election fraud?

02:32:48.000 If that's election fraud, there's evidence of election fraud?

02:32:51.000 17,000 is a lot.

02:32:53.000 17,000 is oftentimes enough to win a district or a county, right?

02:32:58.000 Right.

02:32:58.000 But the only way it works is if then you can say, okay, and you've got an impartial media that is out there saying, well, that's an interesting story, so I'll pursue that.

02:33:07.000 Exactly.

02:33:07.000 You don't have that anymore.

02:33:08.000 You have completely biased media, either for the left or for the right, and so much so that they're ignoring stories and even censoring them.

02:33:17.000 Stories that turn out to be accurate, like the lab leak hypothesis, right?

02:33:21.000 For the longest time, if you tried to put that on Facebook, they would ban it and they would ban you.

02:33:25.000 Now, it's widely accepted that that's the primary theory. 0.98

02:33:30.000 But nobody goes back and lets those people back on and says, sorry, we fucked you. 0.99

02:33:34.000 Right. 0.96

02:33:35.000 Or you don't have any sort of intrepid investigative journalists going, okay, well, let's really dig into this now. 0.88

02:33:40.000 Let's take a look because, you know, maybe I spent, you know, six months, you know, shitting on the story.

02:33:45.000 I'm certainly not going to do a reversal.

02:33:47.000 So I think without a—and people talk about that all the time, the objective media, and they talk about how it used to be objective.

02:33:54.000 Well, it never really was, but— It was more objective than it is now.

02:33:58.000 It was more, or they just, they made the effort to appear objective, right?

02:34:03.000 Even though they may not have been.

02:34:04.000 They suppressed their own personal, and that at some point went away, and now, like everything else, we're conditioned, and we don't think it odd that you can open an entire New York Times article with nothing but anonymous sources, right?

02:34:16.000 Yes.

02:34:17.000 And you don't have to justify what it is that you're saying.

02:34:19.000 That's crazy.

02:34:20.000 Yeah.

02:34:20.000 It's crazy.

02:34:21.000 But I don't think, you know, you can't walk that dog back. 0.95

02:34:24.000 But again, going back to this idea of influencing the public, you know, whether you're trying to get them to buy cigarettes or whether you're the Russians and you're trying to create more dissension, you know, the only defense really comes down to the individual and each person taking a little bit of fucking responsibility and saying, 0.92

02:34:42.000 I'm going to...

02:34:43.000 I'm going to curate my information a little bit better. 0.99

02:34:45.000 I'm going to pay a little bit more attention to what the fuck I'm reading or hearing. 0.69

02:34:48.000 I'm going to push back and question, regardless of whether it goes against, you know, my point of view or not, right? 0.97

02:34:54.000 I mean, I've got some really dear friends who are completely on the opposite side on certain issues.

02:35:00.000 But I love getting together with them.

02:35:01.000 Yeah.

02:35:02.000 And, you know, we'll have great conversations, you know, and sometimes we'll...

02:35:10.000 Is it argumentative?

02:35:11.000 No.

02:35:13.000 But at the end of the day, then we finish up and we have drinks, we have dinner, we hang out, we talk to, you know, about kids.

02:35:17.000 That's very rare.

02:35:18.000 Yeah.

02:35:18.000 It's very rare today because people decided that the other side is the enemy.

02:35:21.000 And this is this wedge that you've brought up.

02:35:23.000 It's been so effectively utilized.

02:35:26.000 Whether it's by design, which obviously we think it is a little bit, but also just through human nature.

02:35:32.000 Whenever you're in a time of great stress, like now, people, they find comfort in groups, and they also like to gang up on people that don't agree with their ideology.

02:35:44.000 And my concern is, what you're saying about curating your own information, I've been telling people to try to do that as much as possible, I try to do that as much as possible, but I don't think the majority of people are on board with that. 0.99

02:35:56.000 I think the majority of people, they will go to MSNBC, they will get the news that aligns with their ideology, they'll go to Fox, they'll get the news that aligns with their ideology, and then they'll point fingers at the other side of the fence and go, these motherfuckers are ruining America. 0.98

02:36:12.000 Well, it's because they see it... 0.99

02:36:14.000 Again, I guess I was really disappointed.

02:36:17.000 I keep going back to the same Armed Services Committee hearing because I was really disappointed.

02:36:22.000 I was expecting something more.

02:36:23.000 I don't know why, but it was so partisan.

02:36:27.000 So the left was busy trying to figure out how to blame the previous administration, and the right was simply banging on...

02:36:34.000 The Republican senators were simply banging on about, we left people behind, and nobody...

02:36:42.000 Was taking the opportunity of having, you know, these senior commanders in front of them, you know, to ask impartial objective questions and actually try to get... 0.93

02:36:50.000 They were all trying to make their own fucking point, which is always going to happen, which, again, I don't know why I was surprised, but it's inevitable.

02:36:58.000 And every issue, you know, including the pandemic, is framed in that way. 0.99

02:37:05.000 How do you walk this back?

02:37:07.000 I know people that have become completely alienated from others, friends of theirs, because of their opposing views on the pandemic.

02:37:19.000 They all want the same thing.

02:37:21.000 They want to be safe and healthy, and they want their kids to be safe and healthy.

02:37:24.000 Great!

02:37:25.000 You choose to do this, you choose... 0.99

02:37:27.000 But people are so goddamn tribal. 0.99

02:37:30.000 They've always been so tribal. 0.99

02:37:32.000 It's a part of our DNA. It's so difficult for people to abandon those ideas and to reach across the aisle with earnestness and try to be kind to the other side and have a balanced, civilized conversation.

02:37:48.000 It's not encouraged anymore.

02:37:50.000 What's encouraged is calling people out.

02:37:52.000 Tax the rich! 1.00

02:37:53.000 That kind of shit. 1.00

02:37:55.000 What's encouraged is people with radical ideas that attack the other side, that attack the opposing ideology, and then a bunch of people get on board with it and start retweeting it, and then the other side gets even more furious and people dig their heels in the sand. 0.99

02:38:12.000 Well, once you get this involved, right?

02:38:14.000 Once you go public, right?

02:38:15.000 And you tweet something, right?

02:38:17.000 Then that's when, you know, everything goes sideways and you've got another but a goat rope because that's when you get that piling on effect, right? 0.96

02:38:26.000 And then people can, oh my God, look, I got my own community here and I just got 50 more likes for my fucking post and I don't know what the fuck I'm talking about, but I'm going to lambast whoever this person is and that person may not even be a person. 0.94

02:38:39.000 And so it all comes back to- Right, that's part of the problem. 0.99

02:38:42.000 And so anyway, for what it's worth, read multiple sources of information and investigate what the fuck you're reading. 0.95

02:38:49.000 Mike, where does this all go? 0.98

02:38:50.000 If you had to, like, I don't want a rosy, rose-colored glasses view of the world.

02:38:59.000 You're not going to get it from me.

02:39:00.000 I know.

02:39:01.000 But I mean, where does this go?

02:39:03.000 If you see how bad things have been divided since 2016, what happens by 2026?

02:39:10.000 I mean, where do you see us?

02:39:12.000 Yeah, I don't think—unless the internet shuts down and we all get back to some sort of other type of community-based communication, I don't think it's going to become less—it's not going to become less divisive.

02:39:28.000 So that's sort of the starting point.

02:39:33.000 We've hardened our positions because of a variety of reasons, right? 0.99

02:39:37.000 So I know people who are on the left who genuinely believe that anybody who doesn't think like them is stupid, right? 0.99

02:39:48.000 And they need to be educated and they need to be helped or brought along. 0.98

02:39:50.000 And I know people on the right who think the same way about the left, right?

02:39:56.000 And you're not going to fix that.

02:39:59.000 There's not going to be something that comes along unless aliens manifest themselves and then we've all got a common enemy.

02:40:05.000 You're not going to fix this divide that exists.

02:40:08.000 So what does that mean?

02:40:10.000 Maybe it means we develop some other political Opportunities, right?

02:40:17.000 So we get a third party that's legitimate, right?

02:40:20.000 That actually can play a role in the political process.

02:40:22.000 Can you envision anybody allowing that to happen?

02:40:25.000 No.

02:40:25.000 Because the powers that be on the left and the right are so entrenched, right?

02:40:29.000 Yeah. 0.99

02:40:30.000 Yeah, and that's where, I know I bang on about this every now and then when we're talking, but that's why I keep going on about fucking term limits.

02:40:37.000 I looked at that, I watched some of that, and I watched some hearings the other day on a different subject, and I look at these people, and I realize that these guys have been up on there doing these political jobs as senators or congresspeople, and they've been there for 35 or 40 years. 0.98

02:40:52.000 And you think, you know, what the fuck are we doing now? 0.80

02:40:54.000 And they're not that impressive as people anyway. 0.98

02:40:57.000 And they've got a certain character flow anyway because they went into politics.

02:41:00.000 That's my opinion.

02:41:02.000 Might as well.

02:41:02.000 So you're right.

02:41:07.000 That was a theoretical concept of throwing out a third or fourth party.

02:41:11.000 But I think that would be very helpful in...

02:41:16.000 In not healing, but in mitigating some of the problems from the device?

02:41:21.000 I just think that the powers that be will do everything they can to keep that from happening, especially a third party that doesn't have all the trappings that the first two parties do, like the deeply entwined roots of the Democratic and the Republican parties.

02:41:38.000 The Democrats, they're not giving up what they have.

02:41:42.000 And anybody that comes along that's reasonable, that's a third party. 0.62

02:41:45.000 You know, Brett Weinstein had an idea for, he called it Unity 2020, and he was going to reach across the aisle and say, like, take a qualified candidate from the left and a qualified candidate from the right and bring them together as a third alternative.

02:41:59.000 But popular figures like Dan Crenshaw and Tulsi Gabbard, those were the two most likely candidates they were talking about.

02:42:05.000 Twitter removed their profile.

02:42:08.000 They banned them. 0.96

02:42:10.000 I mean, it makes no fucking sense. 0.83

02:42:12.000 They said they were using bots. 0.97

02:42:13.000 There was no evidence they were using bots.

02:42:15.000 They reviewed it.

02:42:16.000 They confirmed their initial suspicions, they said, and wouldn't reinstate the thing.

02:42:22.000 But their position was they were so worried that Trump was going to win.

02:42:28.000 And that all resources that could perhaps take votes away from the Democrats and Joe Biden needed to be stopped.

02:42:38.000 And so this idea could potentially take people that would have voted for Biden because they were opposed to Trump, and now instead they're going to vote for Tulsi Gabbard and Dan Crenshaw.

02:42:47.000 This is going to fuck things up for the Democrats.

02:42:49.000 Which, I mean, they always make that argument, whether it's Ralph Nader or Ross Perot or whomever.

02:42:55.000 Ross Perot actually did do that.

02:42:57.000 That's why the argument is kind of interesting.

02:43:00.000 But it's also fascinating because then you dip into that whole concept of the big tech and their impact on...

02:43:06.000 On the same thing that we were talking about with Uri, right?

02:43:08.000 Right.

02:43:09.000 I mean, it's not as if Twitter's not involved in active measures, right, in their own way.

02:43:13.000 Well, the Hunter Biden story.

02:43:14.000 Right, yeah.

02:43:15.000 Which is crazy.

02:43:16.000 Yeah.

02:43:16.000 Literally leading up to the election, there's some real interesting evidence of potential corruption.

02:43:22.000 If he's telling the truth in these emails, he's saying that his father got 50% of all the stuff he got.

02:43:29.000 I have to kick 50% up to the big guy.

02:43:30.000 Yeah.

02:43:31.000 This is what he's saying, which is...

02:43:33.000 That is corruption, right?

02:43:35.000 At its core.

02:43:36.000 And where do I think that is?

02:43:37.000 I think that that's Hunter Biden just blowing smoke, trying to get more money for himself. 0.89

02:43:41.000 And so he's just, he's doing what a lot of people do in D.C. Bullshitting. 0.91

02:43:44.000 Well, exactly.

02:43:45.000 So there's no real evidence that he did get that money.

02:43:47.000 Right. 0.99

02:43:48.000 It could be just bullshit. 1.00

02:43:49.000 Right. 0.99

02:43:49.000 Well, what I mean is, do I think Joe Biden sat around and go, yes, okay, son, I'll take 50%. 0.99

02:43:53.000 No, I think Hunter Biden's just, you know, has got some character flaws, and I think he's out there just- Wait a minute.

02:43:59.000 You think Hunter Biden has character flaws?

02:44:00.000 Although, he's a hell of an artist.

02:44:03.000 Have you seen this? 1.00

02:44:04.000 Fucking artwork's going for big money. 1.00

02:44:06.000 Fantastic. 1.00

02:44:07.000 $75,000 or $80,000.

02:44:08.000 If he sells at the prices that they talk about at this exhibition that he's going to be doing.

02:44:14.000 If I was a dude who did a lot of coke and I had a bunch of money, I might be interested in a Biden in my house. 0.71

02:44:19.000 Yeah.

02:44:19.000 That's Hunter Biden.

02:44:20.000 That fucking guy. 1.00

02:44:21.000 Well, apparently they've hung some of it in the White House. 1.00

02:44:23.000 What?

02:44:24.000 Yeah.

02:44:24.000 Come on.

02:44:25.000 Well, this is a story that came out, was that some of the stuff that he's done is going to be marketed now as having hung in the White House.

02:44:33.000 Oh, my God.

02:44:34.000 Which, that's a little sketchy from an ethics perspective.

02:44:37.000 That's a lot sketchy.

02:44:37.000 What does it look like?

02:44:38.000 Can we see a Hunter Biden painting?

02:44:40.000 Yes.

02:44:41.000 I would like to see some of his work.

02:44:43.000 I don't know whether it's abstract or whether it's...

02:44:44.000 I don't know anything about it.

02:44:46.000 Some of the $75,000...

02:44:47.000 I'm not a fan of modern art to begin with. 1.00

02:44:50.000 I think a lot of it is shit. 1.00

02:44:52.000 Yeah. 0.99

02:44:52.000 Some of it's really interesting, don't get me wrong, but there's a lot of it, like we were talking about this couple that's getting divorced in Manhattan, real estate developer, is worth hundreds of millions of dollars, and he has a $600 million art collection. 0.99

02:45:06.000 So we put up this one painting that's worth somewhere between $40 and $60 million, and it looks like dog shit. 0.99

02:45:11.000 Holy shit. 0.99

02:45:12.000 It looks like something you and I could easily do. 1.00

02:45:14.000 Oh, God.

02:45:15.000 It just splatters.

02:45:18.000 Nonsense.

02:45:19.000 I'm old enough that I was in when they opened the Sydney Opera House, because I was living in Australia.

02:45:22.000 I remember we took a trip over to Sydney to see the Opera House, and we were walking through, and I was just a little kid, and we walked through, and there's a big Jackson Pollock there. 0.99

02:45:32.000 And I looked at the Jackson Pollock, and I looked at my dad, and the tour guide was standing there, and I said, I could do that shit. 0.99

02:45:38.000 Yeah. 0.99

02:45:39.000 I remember my dad still told that story until he died.

02:45:41.000 Is that a painting?

02:45:42.000 Oh.

02:45:43.000 It's mixed media.

02:45:44.000 Mixed media.

02:45:44.000 So it's photograph and then paint.

02:45:48.000 That's not terrible.

02:45:49.000 That's not terrible. 1.00

02:45:52.000 Let me see some of his other shit. 0.99

02:45:54.000 That right there, let me tell you right now, that's not terrible either. 0.99

02:45:59.000 Maybe cocaine's really good for your creativity.

02:46:01.000 Some of it's hanging in his mom's office, so technically it's in the White House.

02:46:04.000 It looks a little paint-by-numberish there.

02:46:07.000 I don't know.

02:46:07.000 Let me go back to that.

02:46:08.000 I could see that being in a gallery somewhere.

02:46:10.000 That is not terrible.

02:46:11.000 Oh, I could definitely say, given on what else sells out there.

02:46:14.000 Yeah.

02:46:14.000 And that's the scheme of things.

02:46:15.000 We've lowered the bar.

02:46:17.000 Should I get a Hunter Biden for the studio?

02:46:19.000 Oh, if you could get a Hunter Biden.

02:46:21.000 Are they hard to get?

02:46:23.000 Look at that one right there. 0.85

02:46:24.000 I think if you're willing to pay enough money.

02:46:25.000 Is Hunter Biden's art any good?

02:46:28.000 What's he doing, a line off of that?

02:46:29.000 Oh, he's blowing the paint.

02:46:30.000 Yeah, he's blowing through it, so it's like a reverse.

02:46:32.000 Oh, some splatter paint.

02:46:34.000 Dude, his art's not bad.

02:46:35.000 I have to be honest.

02:46:37.000 Hi, I'm on cocaine and my dad's the president.

02:46:39.000 Look at him.

02:46:40.000 He looks happy.

02:46:40.000 Doesn't he look happy?

02:46:41.000 Well, he's clean now.

02:46:42.000 I shouldn't say he's on cocaine anymore.

02:46:44.000 Hunter Biden snaps at critics of art dealings. 1.00

02:46:47.000 Fuck him, he says. 1.00

02:46:49.000 Wow. 1.00

02:46:49.000 Wow, yeah. 1.00

02:46:50.000 That art is not bad.

02:46:51.000 I'm telling you, I'm a little shocked.

02:46:53.000 I'm saying this, but I'm just being honest.

02:46:56.000 I don't know if you can get a Biden.

02:46:57.000 I bet I could get a Biden.

02:46:58.000 Oh.

02:47:00.000 I'm an NFT. No!

02:47:03.000 No with the NFTs.

02:47:05.000 Do you think they're hard to get?

02:47:07.000 I think he's having an exhibit here soon.

02:47:09.000 I'm not paying $75,000.

02:47:11.000 He wouldn't come on the podcast.

02:47:13.000 Set up to $500,000.

02:47:14.000 When he was releasing his book, they touted him out $500,000.

02:47:18.000 $500,000?

02:47:20.000 Oh my god.

02:47:22.000 Then you could probably resell it, because then it hung in your studio here.

02:47:25.000 That's got to put a premium on it.

02:47:27.000 $502,000?

02:47:27.000 Yeah.

02:47:31.000 Oh my God!

02:47:32.000 His works are being offered for as much as $500,000 a piece.

02:47:35.000 Offered, I guess.

02:47:35.000 They're hoping someone will buy it.

02:47:36.000 His art dealer said he would follow ethics guidelines that the Biden administration helped to develop.

02:47:42.000 Wow.

02:47:43.000 Yeah, there's a push by, I forget who it is in the House Ethics Committee, that says, look, we need to know who's buying his art so that it's not just a bunch of Chinese dealers looking to gain some influence.

02:47:53.000 Yeah, but the gallery in Soho says it will not disclose the identity of buyers or details of the sales.

02:47:59.000 Interesting.

02:48:01.000 My God.

02:48:02.000 Imagine if that was Donald Trump Jr. I bet they would divulge all of that information.

02:48:07.000 I bet they would dox those people. 0.83

02:48:09.000 They would find out who's involved.

02:48:11.000 They would go deep on that.

02:48:13.000 They're giving them a free pass.

02:48:14.000 I don't think Don Jr.'s artwork would be that good. 0.98

02:48:17.000 How the fuck do you know? 0.99

02:48:18.000 I thought Hunter's was going to suck. 1.00

02:48:20.000 I did, actually. 0.99

02:48:21.000 Not bad.

02:48:22.000 Yeah.

02:48:22.000 No, I've changed my opinion.

02:48:24.000 I'm going to talk to my wonderful wife and see whether we can- See if you can scrape up a half a mil. 1.00

02:48:29.000 I know we were going to buy a house, but maybe- Fuck it. 0.99

02:48:32.000 Maybe just get a painting. 1.00

02:48:33.000 Yeah, just get a Hunter.

02:48:35.000 Nice splattered paint all over.

02:48:36.000 I'll just show it to my boys and say, that's your college fund right there.

02:48:39.000 I've got to say, it's not bad.

02:48:41.000 It's not bad stuff.

02:48:41.000 It's not bad, but would it sell for $500,000?

02:48:45.000 Probably not.

02:48:46.000 No, not if it was somebody else.

02:48:48.000 And I think that's the question.

02:48:52.000 But, eh, what do I know?

02:48:54.000 What do I know?

02:48:55.000 Mike, tell everybody about your show one more time.

02:48:58.000 Let's bring this bad boy home.

02:48:59.000 This is a good one, but I feel bad about it. 1.00

02:49:01.000 I feel like the future's fucked. 0.98

02:49:04.000 We really do. 0.98

02:49:05.000 In all our conversations, this one seems the most disturbing in terms of the implications for the future.

02:49:11.000 No, you're right.

02:49:11.000 I always try to end on a happy note, and I don't know that I did.

02:49:15.000 Well, we did with Hunter Biden because we agreed that it's better than we thought.

02:49:18.000 It's not bad.

02:49:19.000 It's not bad.

02:49:20.000 It's pretty good.

02:49:21.000 Like I said, I wanted to have him on the podcast.

02:49:23.000 And he said no?

02:49:24.000 Well, they reached out initially.

02:49:26.000 They touted him as a guest, and then somewhere along the line, I reached out back, and I said, yeah, let's try to get him on, and then they passed.

02:49:34.000 So they might have just thrown a bunch of shit out there in terms of, like, invitations, and then they said, oh, Brogan's probably going to... 0.53

02:49:42.000 You know what that was? 0.99

02:49:44.000 That was the White House saying, no.

02:49:46.000 I'm sure.

02:49:47.000 That was the messaging crew in the White House saying, absolutely not.

02:49:51.000 Meanwhile, it would have probably been a great conversation.

02:49:53.000 I'm not interested in making the guy feel bad.

02:49:55.000 If I had him on, I would just...

02:49:57.000 I don't fault the guy for having a drug problem.

02:50:00.000 I've had a lot of people in here that have had drug problems.

02:50:02.000 And oddly enough, he's not the first person to take advantage of a family name in trying to further business.

02:50:08.000 I wouldn't even be interested in that.

02:50:10.000 I would just want to know what is it like to be the son of Joe Biden?

02:50:13.000 What is it like to get off of cocaine?

02:50:17.000 What is it like to have your whole life exposed to the world in the way he did?

02:50:21.000 What, did he write a book recently?

02:50:23.000 Is that what he did?

02:50:23.000 Yeah.

02:50:23.000 Yeah, I don't know whether it's sold or not.

02:50:25.000 I haven't heard a peep about that book.

02:50:27.000 Well, he's been more focused on the visual art.

02:50:30.000 This art's half a million bucks a painting, man. 1.00

02:50:32.000 I would be pushing that shit out. 0.99

02:50:34.000 I'd be on Adderall right now in a gallery going, what next? 1.00

02:50:38.000 I'd be crapping out one canvas after another.

02:50:41.000 Anyway, so the show, yeah, Black Files Declassified.

02:50:44.000 I don't know whether we want to run that trailer again.

02:50:45.000 No, we can't do that.

02:50:47.000 No, we can't do that.

02:50:47.000 Can't do that to people.

02:50:48.000 But it's coming up.

02:50:49.000 We've been filming the second season traveling all over the country and around the world.

02:50:53.000 When will it be released?

02:50:54.000 In the new year.

02:50:55.000 We don't have a launch date yet, but after the holidays...

02:50:59.000 And the old episodes are available online.

02:51:02.000 Streaming, I believe, on Discovery Plus still.

02:51:05.000 This is a big science channel program on the Discovery Network.

02:51:09.000 And yeah, it's been a hell of a lot of fun, man.

02:51:11.000 Mike, always a pleasure.

02:51:13.000 Appreciate you, sir.

02:51:13.000 Thank you very much for being here.

02:51:15.000 Next time I'm going to be a lot more optimistic.

02:51:16.000 No, no, no.

02:51:17.000 I like it like this.

02:51:18.000 Give me the truth.

02:51:19.000 Thank you, everybody.

02:51:20.000 Bye.

The Joe Rogan Experience - September 30, 2021

Joe Rogan Experience #1713 - Mike Baker

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Transcript