The Joe Rogan Experience

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

00:00:03.000 The Joe Rogan Experience.

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

00:00:12.000 There you go?

00:00:13.000 Yeah, ready, ready, yeah.

00:00:14.000 Well, thank you, sir.

00:00:15.000 Very nice to meet you.

00:00:16.000 Cheers, Joe.

00:00:17.000 Cheers, great to meet you.

00:00:18.000 Great to meet you.

00:00:22.000 I always wanted to smoke a cigar and have a scotch with a national security advisor.

00:00:27.000 So here we go.

00:00:29.000 I always wanted to be in one of them smoky rooms where all the shit goes down.

00:00:36.000 Is there a moment, because every person, every civilian wants to know, is there a moment when a president gets into office?

00:00:44.000 Where someone like you has to sit them down.

00:00:47.000 They just got elected.

00:00:49.000 Someone like you has to sit them down and go, all right, buddy, here's what's going on in the world.

00:00:54.000 Yeah, I think so.

00:00:56.000 I mean, we're facing a number of challenges and opportunities, and a new president, I think, suddenly realizes that he's responsible for how we respond to those challenges and opportunities.

00:01:06.000 So I think, of course, as a National Security Advisor, that's kind of your job, right?

00:01:10.000 You're the only person In the foreign policy national security establishment who has the president as his or her only client, right?

00:01:19.000 So it's your job to help the president succeed in the area of foreign policy and national security.

00:01:24.000 Trevor Burrus And that job – you have to kind of be like a psychologist as well as a national security adviser, right?

00:01:31.000 Because – especially if you're dealing with someone like Trump.

00:01:34.000 Who's a big personality.

00:01:36.000 Yeah.

00:01:36.000 And of course, you know, every president is different and receives information differently and has a different set of priorities.

00:01:44.000 And so I think it's really important to ensure that the way you interact with that president is consistent with the way that president receives information.

00:01:53.000 You know, thinks, you know, him or herself about the world and help them evolve their understanding of these challenges and opportunities that we face internationally and then give options, right?

00:02:04.000 As National Security Advisor, like, your job is not to determine foreign policy.

00:02:08.000 Nobody elected you, right?

00:02:09.000 Your job is to give that elected president the benefit of the best information, intelligence, analysis available, and then to tee up options, right?

00:02:19.000 And have forums for discussion where he can not just listen to you because you're not omniscient, right?

00:02:24.000 You're not an all-knowing national security advisor.

00:02:26.000 You should help convene groups that can help the president make the best decisions.

00:02:30.000 We always have, on the outside, we always have this idea of what a president says they want to do when they're running and then once they get into office, oftentimes they change or they abandon a lot of their policies, a lot of their ideas.

00:02:45.000 And the speculation is always like, I wonder what they learn.

00:02:50.000 Because, you know, people want to say, oh, they're just liars.

00:02:52.000 They were lying the whole time.

00:02:54.000 And I'm always like, maybe, or maybe they get in there and they learn that there's some serious issues that they were not aware of, and that there's some top secret stuff that the general public's not privy to, and they get briefed,

00:03:09.000 and then it's a, whew.

00:03:11.000 Yeah.

00:03:11.000 Well, the key is to think through the long-term costs and consequences of any decision.

00:03:17.000 And often that involves a decision to take an action, but also not doing something as a decision, right?

00:03:23.000 So I think what a national security advisor should do, any of the president's advisors should help the president think longer term.

00:03:29.000 And to recognize, right, that we're involved in complex competitions, right?

00:03:34.000 The future doesn't depend on what we decide to do.

00:03:37.000 It also depends on the actions of others, oftentimes adversaries, rivals, and enemies.

00:03:43.000 And that interactive nature of foreign policy and national security competitions is sometimes lost.

00:03:49.000 And this is what I write about in the book, is this idea of strategic narcissism, right?

00:03:53.000 The tendency for leaders to think, That what they do or decide not to do is decisive toward achieving a favorable outcome.

00:04:00.000 That's actually a pretty arrogant way to look at the world, right?

00:04:03.000 You have to recognize the agency, the influence, the authorship over the future that others have.

00:04:10.000 But if they decide something that's incorrect or something that's correct, it kind of does have a large impact on the world, right?

00:04:18.000 Oh, absolutely.

00:04:19.000 Right?

00:04:20.000 I mean, if you think of just, you know, decisions in recent history, right?

00:04:24.000 Decisions to either engage or not engage, right?

00:04:26.000 How about, you know, everybody wants to talk about, for example, the invasion of Iraq, right?

00:04:31.000 That's been the big debate over the last couple of decades.

00:04:34.000 Should we have done it?

00:04:36.000 Should we have invaded Iraq?

00:04:37.000 And I think what we ought to debate more often is who the heck thought it would be easy and why did they think it would be easy, right?

00:04:42.000 Do you think they thought it would be easy just because of the first Gulf War?

00:04:46.000 I think that's a big factor.

00:04:48.000 You know, I write about this in Battlegrounds.

00:04:50.000 It's an odd thing to start a book out on, but I write about our tank battle in Desert Storm.

00:04:55.000 And I write about that in context of our cavalry troop, the same cavalry troopers who were patrolling the border between East and West Germany from Camp Harris in Coburg, Germany, in November of 1989 when the wall came down.

00:05:10.000 And, of course, that event, I think, was significant in terms of bolstering our confidence, right?

00:05:16.000 Our optimism about the future with good reason, right?

00:05:18.000 I mean, you know, the East German government faded away.

00:05:21.000 The Berlin Wall came down, right?

00:05:22.000 The Soviet Union broke apart.

00:05:24.000 We won the Cold War, right?

00:05:25.000 Without firing a shot.

00:05:27.000 And so there was a sense of optimism then going in to the Gulf War as well.

00:05:31.000 And so our troop was training, you know, in August of 1990 when Saddam invaded Kuwait.

00:05:38.000 And I brought the whole team together, you know, 140 cavalry troopers.

00:05:42.000 And I said, hey, we need to make the most out of this training because the next operations order I give you...

00:05:47.000 I think we're good to go.

00:06:11.000 You know, that an arc of history had guaranteed the primacy of our free and open societies over closed authoritarian systems.

00:06:18.000 The second is a great power competition.

00:06:21.000 That's a relic of the past.

00:06:23.000 You know, how'd that work out?

00:06:24.000 Look what's going on right now with Russia and China.

00:06:27.000 And then third...

00:06:28.000 And this is what I think you're alluding to, is that there was this idea that future war would be fast, cheap, efficient, right?

00:06:34.000 Waged at standoff range with our advanced technologies.

00:06:38.000 And what we forgot, I think, is this interactive nature of war.

00:06:42.000 I mean, there are two ways to fight.

00:06:44.000 And you know this from jiu-jitsu, you know, asymmetrically, where you use that person's strengths against them, or stupidly.

00:06:52.000 I mean, Saddam fought us stupidly, and we also had a very narrow political objective.

00:06:57.000 Hey, turn Kuwait back to the Kuwaitis.

00:07:00.000 Now fast forward, okay, to the wars after 9-11, the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, and then in Iraq in 2003. I think we went into those wars under this assumption, the short war assumption, right?

00:07:14.000 We could just do this quickly and kind of, you know, almost take the George Costanza approach to war and just leave on a high note.

00:07:20.000 When in fact, war has always been an activity that involves the consolidation of gains to get to a sustainable outcome consistent with what brought you there in the first place.

00:07:31.000 And so this idea...

00:07:33.000 In battlegrounds is strategic narcissism, right?

00:07:36.000 This tendency to not consider, you know, the interactive nature of war.

00:07:41.000 The interactive nature of war and the consequences of each and every single decision that you have to make.

00:07:48.000 Absolutely.

00:07:50.000 And, you know, I had this wonderful experience in the Army across 34 years, right?

00:07:55.000 And in recent years, you know, the last couple of decades, I was on the receiving end.

00:08:02.000 Of plans and strategies and policies developed in Washington that made no sense from where I was in places like Iraq and Afghanistan.

00:08:11.000 So how does that work?

00:08:13.000 So a person like you as a national security advisor and a general, who comes to you with these ideas and plans?

00:08:22.000 Well, it's your job to kind of convene the president's cabinet, right?

00:08:27.000 The principal's committee of the National Security Council.

00:08:30.000 And, you know, Joe, I write about this in the book.

00:08:34.000 I walked into that office really unexpectedly, obviously, right?

00:08:39.000 You know, I had been walking down Walnut Street in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

00:08:43.000 Thank you.

00:08:50.000 Thank you.

00:09:08.000 And my phone rings, and it's a partially blocked number from the White House.

00:09:13.000 Oh, boy.

00:09:13.000 And they say, hey, the president would like you to interview for the job of National Security Advisor at Mar-a-Lago on Sunday.

00:09:18.000 It says partially?

00:09:19.000 Partially blocked?

00:09:20.000 So it just says 202. It's just 202. That's it?

00:09:22.000 That's it, yeah.

00:09:23.000 Oh, boy.

00:09:23.000 That's some, like, Batman shit.

00:09:24.000 So that's why.

00:09:26.000 That's why I answered it.

00:09:27.000 Typically, I wouldn't answer my phone on the way to a meeting, but maybe I ought to answer this one.

00:09:31.000 So, you know, it came out of the blue.

00:09:34.000 And so that was a Friday, right?

00:09:35.000 And Sunday, I'm interviewing for the job.

00:09:38.000 He hires me on, you know, President's Day, Monday.

00:09:41.000 I fly back to Washington, right?

00:09:44.000 You know, on Air Force One.

00:09:45.000 And you interviewed at Mar-a-Lago?

00:09:46.000 At Mar-a-Lago.

00:09:47.000 So you're having, like, shrimp cocktails?

00:09:48.000 Hey, I didn't know how to get food there, man.

00:09:50.000 So after the first interview, right, they said, hey, the president would probably like to talk to you again.

00:09:55.000 So I stayed.

00:09:56.000 They kept me there for the rest of the day.

00:09:58.000 I went into the military aides office, you know, because I know those guys on the military.

00:10:03.000 So I'm hanging out in their office.

00:10:05.000 I'm doing emails for my regular job.

00:10:06.000 And, you know, of course, calling my wife and calling Katie and talking to her about it.

00:10:11.000 And there's no food.

00:10:12.000 I don't know how to get food.

00:10:13.000 So I ate everything that those guys had.

00:10:15.000 I ate their pistachio nuts, man.

00:10:17.000 And I left them a note, hey, sorry, guys.

00:10:19.000 I'll have to replenish your supplies.

00:10:20.000 You can't ask Trump.

00:10:20.000 Hey, buddy.

00:10:21.000 Where's the man get a steak around here?

00:10:23.000 I probably could have gotten some meatloaf or something.

00:10:24.000 I'm sure.

00:10:25.000 I'm sure I could have.

00:10:26.000 Missed opportunity.

00:10:27.000 But so anyway, that Monday I fly back to D.C. and I didn't even live in D.C. So they had these Osprey aircraft waiting to take me back to my house in Tidewater, Virginia.

00:10:40.000 I packed the bag and I started on Tuesday, man.

00:10:42.000 I mean, so it was quick, but I had this great gift that the Army gave me, which is the opportunity to study history, you know?

00:10:49.000 And And so I walk into, to me, McGeorge Bundy's office, the guy who was National Security Advisor when Vietnam became an American war.

00:10:57.000 And I wrote a book called Derelition of Duty about how and why Vietnam became an American war and identified all of the deficiencies in the decision-making, policy-making process, right, in Washington.

00:11:09.000 So I resolved at least, okay, I'm not going to make the same mistakes, right?

00:11:13.000 And so one of those mistakes for what you're alluding to is...

00:11:17.000 You know, they didn't spend enough time thinking about the nature of the problem, right?

00:11:20.000 They didn't frame out the problem, use kind of design thinking to think about it, right?

00:11:25.000 So when I came into the job, you know, we established, you know, what I thought were the top 16 challenges to our security and prosperity in the world, right?

00:11:36.000 And then we organized a framing effort around those, and we put together a meeting called A principal small group framing session where the president's cabinet, right, the secretary of state and defense and all the heads of the intelligence community come together to really approve how we've described the problem associated with Chinese Communist Party aggression,

00:12:00.000 with Russian aggression, with Iran and Iran's pursuit of a nuclear weapon, with North Korea and North Korea's nuclear program and other threats from North Korea, threats that are occurring more frequently in We're consequential in cyberspace, for example.

00:12:15.000 And so as I came into the job, I was grateful for the opportunity to study it from a historical perspective anyway.

00:12:21.000 Well, you're famously nonpartisan.

00:12:26.000 You're a guy who didn't even vote while you were in active duty.

00:12:31.000 You decided a long time ago that that was the best course of action to stay completely unbiased and to concentrate entirely on the goals and objectives of the military.

00:12:42.000 Right.

00:12:42.000 So when you're with a guy like Trump, you're going to be associated politically.

00:12:48.000 If you're a part of the Trump administration, it's like you're immediately associated with Trump and then with all of the good and the bad that comes with that.

00:12:58.000 So was that a shock to the system?

00:13:00.000 What was that like to go from, you get this phone call from this weird number, all of a sudden you're in Mar-a-Lago trying to find some food, and then you're the national security advisor.

00:13:11.000 Well, you know, I really think it was a benefit to stay on active duty, you know, and I really think, I mean, I know like you do.

00:13:18.000 When I look at the polarization in our society today, this partisan politics, I think, okay, why can't we just talk about what we can agree on?

00:13:24.000 So I think in the area of foreign policy, that ought to be an area where we could agree.

00:13:28.000 Like, who wants Iran to have a nuclear weapon?

00:13:30.000 Who wants the only hereditary communist dictatorship in the world, you know, the Kim family regime in North Korea, to have the most destructive weapons on Earth?

00:13:38.000 Who wants Russia to intimidate all the countries on its periphery, develop destabilizing nuclear weapons, try to coerce us like they're doing now?

00:13:45.000 Who wants China to eat our lunch economically?

00:13:47.000 Okay, let's talk about that across partisan lines, right?

00:13:50.000 These shouldn't be partisan issues.

00:13:52.000 So I think Donald Trump was the fifth commander in chief I served in uniform, right, when I took the oath of office at West Point.

00:14:01.000 The oath at West Point as a plea there in, gosh, the summer of 1980, Reagan was president.

00:14:09.000 So it didn't matter to me who the commander-in-chief was.

00:14:12.000 I was going to do my best to fulfill my oath, which was to support and defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic, and to bear true faith and allegiance to the same.

00:14:22.000 And I felt like I could serve Trump well by...

00:14:26.000 By helping him determine his agenda.

00:14:29.000 He's the guy that got elected, right?

00:14:31.000 And then once he made decisions to help orchestrate the sensible implementation of his decisions.

00:14:37.000 And that's the job I took on.

00:14:39.000 It's such a weird time politically and just socially in this country because everyone is so polarized.

00:14:45.000 It's so uniquely polarized that even a good decision, a decision that if someone takes that's the president that is good for America will get attacked by the other side just universally.

00:14:59.000 No one from the right is going to look at anything that Biden does and goes, that is a great move for America.

00:15:05.000 Kudos to him.

00:15:06.000 It just doesn't happen anymore.

00:15:08.000 I know.

00:15:08.000 And we've got to try to get back to that.

00:15:10.000 And I think the only way to do it is for, like, your audience, you know, for people to demand better from those we elect and say, okay, hey, stop compromising our principles and our future to score partisan political points, right?

00:15:24.000 And I think you see some inklings of that.

00:15:28.000 I mean, there's a little bit of a consensus, I think, on the threat from the Chinese Communist Party, for example, and that's a big problem.

00:15:34.000 Bold shift we put in place in the early days of the Trump administration.

00:15:38.000 You know, when we pulled together that principle, you know, this small group framing session on China, I read an excerpt from the existing policy toward China and made the observation, hey, we're about to affect the biggest shift in U.S. foreign policy since the end of the Cold War.

00:15:55.000 What was the original – like from the Obama administration, how did they approach China and what was the difference between the way Trump approached it?

00:16:04.000 It was a series of administrations.

00:16:06.000 And of course, there's the opening to China in 78, right?

00:16:09.000 And really even before that with Kissinger's trip, right?

00:16:12.000 But then the opening to China was really based on our view of China in the context of the Cold War.

00:16:19.000 So we saw China as a potential balancer against the Soviet Union.

00:16:24.000 I think we're good to go.

00:16:42.000 Great power competition's over, right?

00:16:43.000 Arc of history, guaranteed primacy of democratic governments.

00:16:47.000 And so a series of administrations really took this approach to China that was based on a fundamentally flawed assumption.

00:16:56.000 And that assumption was that China, having been welcomed into the international order, Would liberalize, right?

00:17:02.000 As it prospered, it would liberalize its economy and that it would liberalize its form of governance.

00:17:06.000 And what we didn't consider is the degree to which emotions and ideology drive and constrain Chinese Communist Party leadership.

00:17:15.000 We underestimated the degree to which, you know, the party is obsessed with control, maintaining its exclusive grip on power.

00:17:23.000 And the party from the very beginning saw themselves in, I mean, from the beginning of this assumption period in the 90s, In an ideological competition with us, but they were smart about it, right?

00:17:33.000 They took a hide-and-bide approach.

00:17:37.000 There's a good book out recently by Roche Doshi about the long game, about how the party took this as a long game, and that there's a lot of continuity even between Deng Xiaoping in the 90s, right, in the opening up, and Xi Jinping, although Xi Jinping,

00:17:53.000 the current chairman of the Chinese Communist Party, is taking it to the next level in terms of aggression against us.

00:17:58.000 So that was the dynamic, was this assumption.

00:18:02.000 President Bill Clinton, you know, advocated very hard, you know, for...

00:18:07.000 Allowing China into the World Trade Organization, even though it was a state-directed economy that had all kinds of unfair competitive advantages like state support for their main state-owned enterprises and so forth.

00:18:20.000 And when asked about, you know, well, what's going to happen in China?

00:18:23.000 He said, well, the Chinese Communist Party is going to have to liberalize, right?

00:18:26.000 Because of the internet and information that's available to the Chinese people.

00:18:30.000 He said trying to maintain control by the party in China would be like trying to nail jello to a wall.

00:18:36.000 Well, how's that working out?

00:18:37.000 They're pretty good at nail jello.

00:18:38.000 They're pretty good at nail jello.

00:18:40.000 Was there any anticipation at all, or did anybody predict that what China's done today is they've developed a sort of unique hybrid economy where they're still communist, they're still run by the Communist Party,

00:18:56.000 but they're very much capitalist.

00:18:58.000 I mean, there's billionaires in China, famously, and they walk Step in step with the orders of the Communist Party.

00:19:07.000 And that's a very unique form of government and a very unique inexorable connection between the big businesses and the corporations and the government.

00:19:15.000 They all work together.

00:19:17.000 That seems, at least tactically, to be a unique advantage that they have economically and militarily over the United States.

00:19:26.000 Because we have conflict between Our business and our government.

00:19:31.000 There's conflict and there's manipulation and influence, but it's not seamless.

00:19:37.000 What they seem to have is seamless power and control over their corporations.

00:19:41.000 If you are involved in any sort of large business, electronics, military, whatever, you work with the government.

00:19:49.000 You work together.

00:19:49.000 You follow their orders.

00:19:51.000 You have to.

00:19:52.000 Or you'll be disappeared.

00:19:53.000 Yeah.

00:19:53.000 And that's what's wild about that country, that they do that.

00:19:57.000 And we have to recognize, right?

00:19:58.000 We have to recognize that this is an authoritarian regime that is determined, right, to succeed at our expense, right?

00:20:05.000 Xi Jinping just said it like last week.

00:20:07.000 He was talking to the provincial chiefs and he said, hey, make no mistake about it.

00:20:11.000 We're in an ideological competition with the United States and other democratic and free market economic countries and systems.

00:20:19.000 And we have to acknowledge that, right?

00:20:21.000 There's a national security law that requires every single company in China, you know, whether it's a state-owned enterprise or like a pseudo-private company, to act as an arm of the government.

00:20:33.000 It's a requirement.

00:20:34.000 And if you stray from that, he's going to reel you in, right?

00:20:39.000 Look what he did to the education sector.

00:20:41.000 That was a $60 billion a year industry.

00:20:44.000 It's completely gone, right?

00:20:46.000 Look what he's done to many of these executives.

00:20:49.000 They just disappear for months at a time.

00:20:51.000 Jack Ma, you know?

00:20:52.000 And Joe, what I think would happen there is I think he looked at Dorsey and others, you know?

00:21:01.000 Mark Zuckerberg and saw what they were doing to Donald Trump in the United States and said, hey, man, that's not going to happen here.

00:21:07.000 And so Jack Maude disappears.

00:21:09.000 You know, the tech sector crackdown is ongoing.

00:21:12.000 And, you know, I think we just have to begin to alter our behavior and factor in this geopolitical, geoeconomic risk into our business decisions.

00:21:22.000 What kills me, Joe, is I think that we are...

00:21:25.000 We're good to go.

00:21:46.000 Their development of military capabilities and what their civilian companies are doing in the area of artificial intelligence, but even their hardware, you know, even their fighter jets and their naval ships.

00:21:58.000 I mean, companies, Chinese companies that develop those military capabilities list on the U.S. Stock Exchange.

00:22:03.000 I mean, it's...

00:22:04.000 It's nutty.

00:22:05.000 U.S. pensioners, teachers and policemen and firemen, their retirement funds are being invested in China in many of these companies that are developing capabilities to compete against us, right?

00:22:19.000 I mean, it sounds trite to say this, but it's almost as if...

00:22:23.000 These pensioners are underwriting and helping the Chinese develop weapons that the Chinese may use to kill their grandchildren if they succeed in maintaining the party's grip on power.

00:22:33.000 So I really think it's important for Americans to all wake up to the multidimensional aspect of this competition, the military dimension, the economic dimension, and the informational dimension, the influence dimension of the China threat.

00:22:48.000 I'm glad you said that because I think that that's a real concern.

00:22:51.000 I think that most Americans aren't aware of this.

00:22:54.000 I mean, I think that the general population probably isn't totally aware of how the government and the businesses work together and that there is no escape and they are exactly the same.

00:23:05.000 But when the supply chain got hit during COVID, I think a lot of people woke up to realize that, first of all, most of our medicine is made over in China.

00:23:13.000 A lot of our conductor chips, so much of our electronics and so much of what we need for day-to-day life.

00:23:20.000 We can't buy an American-made cell phone.

00:23:23.000 That seems crazy to me that we have the biggest cell phone manufacturer, Apple, the number one in the country, the number one in the world, and it's made in China.

00:23:32.000 We don't have the ability.

00:23:34.000 We don't have a plant.

00:23:35.000 We don't have the capabilities to make...

00:23:38.000 The core components of our day-to-day lives, our computers, our electronics, the electronics in cars, there's a shortage.

00:23:45.000 You can't buy a Ford F-150 if you try to buy a Raptor.

00:23:49.000 You can't get them because of the chips.

00:23:51.000 There's an overseas problem with the supply chain.

00:23:54.000 That seems crazy to me that we have somehow or another lost our manufacturing in America to the point where essentials, things that we need to run our society, we have to rely on foreign countries to create.

00:24:05.000 It is crazy.

00:24:06.000 And if you think about it, it's going to get worse before it gets better because you mentioned semiconductors and microelectronics and the degree to which that is the critical point, right?

00:24:14.000 The point of failure in many supply chains.

00:24:18.000 But as we transition to renewable energy and green energy, so much of that supply chain is also concentrated in China, solar panel manufacturing, but also what goes into that, rare earth metals and rare earth metal refinement, battery manufacturing.

00:24:33.000 And so, What we have seen is an artificial concentration of a huge percentage of the world's manufacturing in the southeastern portion of China.

00:24:44.000 That's unnatural, right?

00:24:45.000 So I think businesses that get ahead of this, that recognize it's time to adjust, it's time to make supply chains more resilient, it's time to onshore, nearshore, diversify, they're going to be ahead of the game.

00:24:57.000 The ones that are doubling down on their bets in China, look at what Xi Jinping's doing, right?

00:25:02.000 He's completely doing everything he can to extinguish human freedom, right?

00:25:05.000 And any inkling that any Chinese person might have that they might, you know, deserve a say in how they're governed, for example, right?

00:25:13.000 You see this with the extinguishment of human freedom in Hong Kong now and you see this with Peng Shui, the tennis star, you know, who disappeared.

00:25:22.000 But you see it in a genocidal campaign in Xinjiang.

00:25:25.000 There's no way.

00:25:27.000 There's no way to say that it's not genocide, right?

00:25:29.000 It's a campaign of slow genocide.

00:25:31.000 You know, Uyghur birth rates in certain areas are down 60%, right?

00:25:36.000 I mean, so I think it's important for us to all take a stand now, you know, and demand better from our leaders and demand better from your pension funds, demand better from if you contribute to universities, right, that they're aware of the threat of China's sustained campaign of industrial espionage against us.

00:25:55.000 To steal sensitive technologies and intellectual property.

00:25:59.000 I mean we really have to wake up to the competition.

00:26:01.000 We have done some things like ban the use of Huawei cell phones in the United States.

00:26:07.000 They came very close to selling.

00:26:09.000 I believe they had a deal with AT&T and some other providers and they decided to cut that off.

00:26:15.000 And China's phones are, that's the other thing, is like technologically they're at the peak.

00:26:21.000 Those Huawei phones are fantastic phones, and especially back then when they imported that band, a lot of people were very excited about them, like technophiles.

00:26:29.000 But is there something that the government can do to impart to the general public and to put pressure on some of these technological corporations?

00:26:43.000 To let them know you're in a quagmire here.

00:26:46.000 It's a bad situation because you're doing what you're doing because it allows you to maximize your profit by utilizing these plants and using places like the plant that makes cell phones or iPhones.

00:27:03.000 I mean, like Nike, right?

00:27:06.000 Yeah.

00:27:15.000 And then you have VW also with a plant in Xinjiang as well.

00:27:21.000 And I think companies are now coming to this realization, right?

00:27:26.000 Look at how they crack down on the tech sector.

00:27:28.000 Look at how they crack down on apparel manufacturers.

00:27:30.000 Look at how they crack down on Marriott, the NBA, right?

00:27:34.000 Right.

00:27:34.000 The NBA who...

00:27:35.000 I don't think any backbone, right, to stand up to defend Daryl Morey, who is now in a good spot in the Philadelphia 76ers, you know, from Philadelphia, so I'm glad to see him land there, the former general manager for Atlanta.

00:27:49.000 So I think...

00:27:50.000 I think we have to demand better from corporations.

00:27:56.000 The big issue on corporate boards these days is ESG, right?

00:27:59.000 Environmental sustainability and governance.

00:28:02.000 And there are a lot of concerns now that companies behave in a way that promotes equity and so forth.

00:28:12.000 And that's all good, but how is genocide not an ESG issue, right?

00:28:17.000 It should be.

00:28:18.000 It certainly should be.

00:28:19.000 And is there a problem also with the corporations in America is that they're all publicly traded companies, so they all have an obligation to their stockholders.

00:28:31.000 So if they make a big, bold move to start opening up plants in America and those plants aren't as Profitable or at least the profit margin is not as high?

00:28:43.000 What can we do to incentivize them or is it something the government can do to make the general public aware so maybe the general public puts pressure on these companies to start some plants and to start manufacturing in America?

00:28:58.000 The essentials like cell phones, laptops, things that we're 100% going to need.

00:29:03.000 Right.

00:29:03.000 So that kind of supply chain assessment is happening now.

00:29:06.000 And I think this is where the Biden administration should get a lot of credit, right?

00:29:09.000 I mean, they're doing a complete assessment of critical supply chains.

00:29:12.000 If there's a star in that administration, I think it's the Commerce Secretary, Gina Raimondo.

00:29:17.000 She's phenomenal in what she's doing there.

00:29:20.000 And I think we're just not doing it fast enough, right?

00:29:22.000 This is where people should be coming across the aisle in Congress and passing the Strategic Competition Act and the legislation on ships.

00:29:30.000 What is that?

00:29:31.000 Strategic Competition Act?

00:29:36.000 In sectors in which we are unfairly disadvantaged by China's authoritarian statist economic model, right?

00:29:44.000 And so computer chips is one of those, right?

00:29:46.000 And the CHIPS Act is part of this range of legislation on the Hill, which I hope gets passed here soon, that will help us return to arenas of competition that we vacated.

00:29:58.000 You know, Joe, what happened is under this assumption, right, that China would liberalize, it would play by the rules, right?

00:30:03.000 We just stopped competing, right?

00:30:05.000 And if you're not on the field, you know, you're going to get your ass kicked, right?

00:30:08.000 So a lot of what we're doing is re-entering competitions that we'd stopped, right, under this false assumption.

00:30:15.000 And so I think the supply chain issue is a big part of this and the assessment of vulnerabilities.

00:30:22.000 You know, we're in a race because it takes like five, six years to develop a fab, you know, to generate semiconductors.

00:30:27.000 There are big investments happening now in Phoenix.

00:30:30.000 You know, for example, Phoenix is going to be the site of a TSMC, a big fab.

00:30:38.000 TSMC is the chip manufacturer that's based in Taiwan, which is, you know, a single point of failure almost.

00:30:46.000 You know, for big parts of our supply chain internationally.

00:30:48.000 And of course, the reason that's significant is it's in a place that's under threat by the Chinese Communist Party as well.

00:30:55.000 Yeah.

00:30:55.000 I think they're making a Samsung plant, a chip plant here in Texas as well.

00:31:00.000 They are.

00:31:00.000 Yeah.

00:31:01.000 Right.

00:31:01.000 And in Austin.

00:31:02.000 It's outside of Austin.

00:31:02.000 Yeah.

00:31:04.000 It's just terrifying to think that we have to catch up in six years.

00:31:08.000 Because six years in the world of tech, that's a hundred years.

00:31:13.000 It's an eon.

00:31:14.000 It is.

00:31:14.000 Well, there's a lot you can do even before that, and I think it's starting to happen in terms of the shifting of supply chains elsewhere.

00:31:21.000 You just saw Intel is going to invest a lot in Malaysia.

00:31:23.000 And you might think, well, why in Malaysia?

00:31:24.000 Well, I think the key is it doesn't all have to be in the United States.

00:31:28.000 It has to be in a number of places so it's resilient, right?

00:31:32.000 What if there's a natural disaster, a power outage, right?

00:31:35.000 You want multiple sources.

00:31:37.000 And of course, as you mentioned, the reason this became apparent to all of us was at the beginning of COVID, when you couldn't get PPE and pharmaceuticals and so forth.

00:31:46.000 So I think we're just waking up to this competition.

00:31:50.000 And this ought to be one of those areas where we all come together, right?

00:31:53.000 This should not be a partisan issue at all.

00:31:56.000 And it should be a multinational issue, right?

00:31:58.000 The reason the subtitle of the book is The Fight to Defend the Free World is we need others to come with us, right?

00:32:04.000 We need the European Union and the UK and Japan and Australia.

00:32:07.000 I think that's starting to happen as well, right?

00:32:10.000 Because, you know, look at what Xi Jinping has done just since the pandemic, right?

00:32:16.000 Foisted the pandemic on the world.

00:32:18.000 We're good to go.

00:32:43.000 Weaponizing islands in the South China Sea.

00:33:03.000 What I would often hear, you know, from friends, you know, in Southeast Asia and beyond, you know, these are my counterparts who I was engaging when I was National Security Advisor.

00:33:12.000 They would say, don't force us to choose, right?

00:33:14.000 Don't force us to choose between Washington and Beijing.

00:33:17.000 And what I would tell them is, hey, that's not the choice you face, right?

00:33:20.000 The choice you face is between sovereignty and servitude, right?

00:33:24.000 And, you know, the United States is on the side of sovereignty.

00:33:28.000 China wants servitude because what Xi Jinping wants to do, And the party's clear about this, is they want to establish exclusionary areas of primacy across the Indo-Pacific region and excluding who?

00:33:41.000 Us, right?

00:33:42.000 As the first step in really being able to rewrite some of the rules of international commerce and political discourse and then to isolate their regional rival, Japan, right?

00:33:52.000 And so I think we're at a critical moment where we have to compete effectively.

00:33:56.000 And this does not mean that we have to...

00:33:59.000 We're on a path to confrontation.

00:34:01.000 Actually, I think, Joe, because we had vacated these competitive spaces, China became more and more emboldened, and we were actually on a path to confrontation, when now I think this idea of transparent competition is what we ought to really pursue with China.

00:34:17.000 So do you think that that makes us less likely to be in competition with China in terms or less likely to be in conflict with China if we can change our whole economic profile here in terms of tech, in terms of manufacturing?

00:34:32.000 I do.

00:34:33.000 I do.

00:34:33.000 Because I think, really, we have to recognize what China's trying to do, right?

00:34:37.000 So people talk about decoupling all the time.

00:34:40.000 And you alluded to this a little bit, like, hey, you know, businesses have to make a decision, right?

00:34:43.000 I mean, they've got responsibilities to their shareholders, you know, and so forth.

00:34:47.000 So the whole idea of a complete decoupling, that's always been kind of like a red herring, right?

00:34:51.000 That's not what we're talking about.

00:34:52.000 I mean, what we ought to do is ask businesses, take a Hippocratic Oath, right?

00:34:58.000 Don't do any hurt or harm in three areas.

00:35:00.000 First of all, Don't help the Chinese Communist Party gain an unfair differential advantage over us militarily or in the emerging data-driven, you know, global economy.

00:35:13.000 Second, right, I mean, don't help the party, you know, don't help the party perfect its technologically enabled world.

00:35:22.000 Orwellian police state, right?

00:35:24.000 Don't help them do that.

00:35:25.000 Don't invest in Chinese AI companies, right, that are extinguishing human freedom and weaponizing people's social networks against them and everything.

00:35:32.000 And then the third is don't compromise the long-term viability of your company in exchange for short-term profits, right?

00:35:40.000 And so many companies have been through this, right?

00:35:42.000 And so I think that's a way to think about it and to think about it in light of what the Chinese Communist Party leadership wants, right?

00:35:51.000 So what Xi Jinping talks about...

00:35:53.000 It's a dual circulation economy, right, where they get a grip on critical supply chains internationally.

00:36:01.000 I mean, if you want to look at human rights abuses, look at what they're doing in the DRC in the Congo, right, in terms of extracting at a horrible humanitarian price the rare earths that they need to continue their manufacturing of microelectronics, for example.

00:36:17.000 But what he wants to do is get a grip on those supply chains and then create enough domestic demand that he doesn't need anybody else, right?

00:36:25.000 That he can write the terms to everybody else, that he has everybody else, you know, in a position where he can use coercive power.

00:36:33.000 And what I describe in Battlegrounds is the strategy.

00:36:36.000 I think the easy way to think about it is co-option.

00:36:41.000 Coercion and concealment, right?

00:36:44.000 Co-opt you, co-opt businesses, co-opt elites, right?

00:36:47.000 With the lure of short-term profits and access to the Chinese market, right?

00:36:52.000 Chinese investment.

00:36:54.000 And then once you're in, right, to use that influence for coercive purposes, right?

00:36:59.000 Look at what they're doing to Lithuania.

00:37:01.000 Look at what they're doing to Australia, right?

00:37:02.000 Look at what they did to Marriott, MBA, U.S. and international companies.

00:37:08.000 And then to conceal all of this is, oh, this is just normal business practices.

00:37:13.000 Well, it's not normal business practices, right?

00:37:15.000 If you look at One Belt, One Road, right, which is their – they have three main strategies, right?

00:37:21.000 Military-civil fusion.

00:37:22.000 I'm just going to describe all these in the book, military-civil fusion.

00:37:25.000 Then associated with that is made in China 2025, which is part of this dual circulation economy, becoming completely no longer dependent at all on any external sources of advanced technologies,

00:37:41.000 for example, or aspects of supply chains.

00:37:44.000 And then finally, One Belt, One Road, which is an effort to create servile relationships with companies by overly indebting them, right?

00:37:53.000 And so the new vanguard of the Chinese Communist Party, you know, is a Chinese Communist Party official accompanied by a Chinese National Bank guy with a duffel bag full of cash, right?

00:38:06.000 And they get the most traction in corrupt governments, you know, and then once they indebt them for generations, right?

00:38:13.000 Then they can trade debt for equity or they can use it for coercive purposes.

00:38:17.000 If you say one crossword about the party, we're going to call back all your debt and you're going to go broke, right?

00:38:22.000 So I think we just have to recognize co-option, coercion, concealment, defend against it.

00:38:28.000 But then of course, you know, as we look to the future, how do we maintain and expand our competitive advantages?

00:38:34.000 Because we have tremendous competitive advantages in this country, right?

00:38:37.000 That we ought to be aware of and we ought to accentuate.

00:38:40.000 And especially, I would say, you know, the unchecked, unbridled entrepreneurial spirit, right?

00:38:45.000 I mean, if you look at China's centralized control, do you really think that's going to work in the long term, you know, compared to the freedom that we have here?

00:38:53.000 You know, I don't think so.

00:38:55.000 What concerns me is that they're utilizing our entrepreneurial spirit by co-opting these companies, by getting involved in these companies, by making these enormous investments and getting them to give up whatever it is, semiconductor chip technology,

00:39:10.000 AI technology, and then it's theirs.

00:39:13.000 I mean, Sagar and Jetty from Breaking Points did this brilliant piece.

00:39:18.000 I forget the name of the company, but there was a An American company that sold a large percentage of what they were to China, and then the Chinese people that they were communicating with stopped communicating with them back, renamed the company,

00:39:33.000 and completely took all of the technology and then proclaimed it to be Chinese technology, and they're going to utilize that technology for AI. Absolutely.

00:39:43.000 I mean, you see this in so many areas, right?

00:39:45.000 In solar manufacturing, in wind turbines.

00:39:48.000 You've seen it with other industries as well, like battery manufacturing, right?

00:39:55.000 I think Elon Musk, I know you've had on.

00:39:58.000 I mean, I think he's in for a wake-up call, sadly, there.

00:40:01.000 In China.

00:40:01.000 Yeah, because he's very high on China.

00:40:05.000 He said China's awesome, and he goes over there, and he's...

00:40:08.000 And a lot of people are criticizing it because, you know, where he's put this showroom is...

00:40:15.000 In Xinjiang.

00:40:16.000 Yeah.

00:40:16.000 And a lot of people say, like, well, look what's happening there.

00:40:19.000 Right.

00:40:20.000 And of course, you know, the dilemma is, right, what people say and what he says, I'm sure he believes this is, well, you know, do we really want to give up?

00:40:28.000 All engagement with China, right?

00:40:30.000 Right.

00:40:30.000 And drive them even more into sort of a, you know, into an exclusive competition with us and really mask opportunities for cooperation, right?

00:40:41.000 And maybe a breakdown of the hostility of the Chinese Communist Party.

00:40:45.000 But what I would just say is what we have to recognize is the party is shutting down so many of those opportunities, right?

00:40:52.000 I mean, academic exchanges, think tank exchanges.

00:40:54.000 Look at what they did in the education sector.

00:40:57.000 You know, I really think that we have to recognize the nature of the party.

00:41:01.000 We ought to try, I believe, we ought to try to advance areas of cooperation.

00:41:06.000 I, for one, Joe, I think we ought to, every Chinese national who comes here for a graduate-level education in a key area of science and technology ought to get a green card staple to the diploma, right?

00:41:20.000 I mean, stay here and work for a U.S. company.

00:41:23.000 Now, you have to be careful, right?

00:41:25.000 Are they able to do that?

00:41:26.000 Like, when they get sent over here, do we know what the motivation is of a lot of these guys?

00:41:32.000 I mean, have they been courted by these Chinese corporations and the government?

00:41:37.000 Absolutely, many of them have.

00:41:38.000 And we were so complacent.

00:41:41.000 I work at the Hoover Institution and we have a program there called the China Global Sharp Power Initiative.

00:41:46.000 I recommend going to the website.

00:41:48.000 There's great material on there.

00:41:49.000 And one of these is a study of Chinese espionage within research facilities in universities and U.S. labs and so forth.

00:41:59.000 How prevalent is it?

00:42:00.000 It was terrible.

00:42:01.000 It's getting better, right?

00:42:03.000 And what we did in the early days of the Trump administration is we stood up the China division in the Department of Justice.

00:42:10.000 And I'm telling you, they did great work.

00:42:12.000 They did really good work at really starting to focus on this problem.

00:42:16.000 What's happened is once we focused on it and there were investigations and some prosecutions...

00:42:22.000 Now, the Ministry of State Security, their intel arm, and the People's Liberation Army, who also is in charge of a big part of the infiltration of our sensitive technology and research, they had to back off, right?

00:42:34.000 So a lot of those people who were here under false pretenses as academic researchers or associated with private companies, they've been pulled back.

00:42:44.000 And so what we need now is a better effort at counterintelligence, right?

00:42:49.000 You don't want to turn, you know, Stanford University, where I am, into the FBI, right?

00:42:53.000 But the FBI has got to do their job.

00:42:55.000 But also you have to just do some decent due diligence, right?

00:42:58.000 And if you especially are taking U.S. government money From the Department of Energy or the Department of Defense, hey, I think it's pretty reasonable to say we shouldn't have People's Liberation Army scientists in those programs, for example, right?

00:43:12.000 And what's happened in universities in particular, Chinese students are a cash cow.

00:43:18.000 I mean, you know, they pay full price, right, for tuition.

00:43:22.000 And a lot of universities have become dependent on Chinese international students.

00:43:28.000 Now, I think we should have – I would welcome more Chinese students here, right, but with more diligence and to make sure they get a really good experience in terms of understanding the American system, American democracy, and maybe expose, right, that as a contrast to what they hear from the party.

00:43:45.000 You know, in terms of democracy is a failed system and, you know, the party is superior and you don't really need a say in how you're governed and freedom of speech is overrated.

00:43:54.000 And, you know, so I think, you know, I think that more students here is a good thing as long as they are not working for the PLA and the MSS and infiltrating our sensitive research.

00:44:07.000 And this is biomedical, too, is another area where this has been a big problem.

00:44:10.000 How does one vet that?

00:44:12.000 How do you find out, if you have a student that comes over here from China, how do you know if it's just a student who wants to go to Harvard and learn at the best place in the world versus someone who has been indoctrinated in the Chinese Communist Party and they're sent over here specifically to learn things So that they can aid the party and then also infiltrate and get all sorts of secrets and whatever they could possibly get and then bring it back

00:44:42.000 to China, particularly if their family is still over in China, which I'm sure has influence over them over here.

00:44:49.000 You can't do a detailed, in-depth investigation on every single Chinese student, can you?

00:44:55.000 No, but what you can do is you can understand the problem better and understand what kind of operations are run out of some of these embassies, right?

00:45:02.000 And I think what is most galling and what we ought to be the most upset about is how the party is extending its repressive arm into our own country.

00:45:12.000 And intimidating Chinese students who are here, who are afraid to say anything in class, right?

00:45:17.000 Because others might be reporting on them and reporting back to the Ministry of State Security or into this organization called the Chinese Students and Scholars Association, the CSSA, which is really a front organization for the MSS, the Ministry of State Security.

00:45:32.000 And then, of course, these other organizations like Confucius Institutes, which are used as an arm of influence of the party, I mean, those ought to be shut down, you know, or marginalized.

00:45:42.000 And then we ought to maybe take it on ourselves.

00:45:45.000 And I think this is what every university president and provost should get behind is, hey, make sure that no student, regardless of where they come from, are subjected to intelligence collection and intimidation.

00:45:56.000 Right?

00:45:57.000 A university campus ought to be a university campus, right, that allows for the free expression of ideas.

00:46:02.000 So I think there's a lot that we can do that's not controversial at all, right, at the university level.

00:46:07.000 And in this report I mentioned on the China Global Short Power Initiative, we provide a guide for like, hey, if you run a research project, You know, activity.

00:46:17.000 Here are just some steps you can take just to do due diligence, right?

00:46:20.000 Not to become an investigator, but just to make sure that you're insulating your sensitive technologies and intellectual property from industrial espionage broadly, not just from China, but especially from China because theirs has been such a massive effort.

00:46:33.000 When I look at it personally with the entrepreneurial spirit of America and the freedom that America provides its citizens versus this connection that the Communist Party has with all businesses and looking at it side by side,

00:46:52.000 it's a very unique and unprecedented competition.

00:46:57.000 We're good to go.

00:47:18.000 So I would say that when we realized the scope of the competition with the Soviet Union, which became the Cold War, we did have an assessment like that.

00:47:27.000 There's this idea today that the Soviet economy was completely decoupled from the West.

00:47:32.000 It wasn't really, especially in the areas of energy and some other areas.

00:47:35.000 So there were some actions taken and legislation passed and regulations put in place that were aimed at restricting the flow of technology and competing Against an authoritarian rival with a statist economy.

00:47:51.000 So I think you can learn from some of that.

00:47:54.000 We have systems in place like the Committee for Foreign Investment in the U.S., right, where we look at investments coming into U.S. companies to ensure that those investments aren't, you know, a Trojan horse designed to exfiltrate sensitive technologies that are critical for defense,

00:48:09.000 for example.

00:48:10.000 But what we need now is kind of reverse CFIUS as well to look at our investments going into China to make sure we're not enabling – we're not underwriting our own demise, right?

00:48:20.000 There's a – There's a quotation that is probably wrongly attributed to Vladimir Lenin, right, which is that the capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them.

00:48:30.000 Well, it's actually worse in the case of China because we're actually financing their purchase of the rope so they can hang us.

00:48:40.000 Jesus, that's a crazy way to look at it, but it sounds pretty accurate.

00:48:44.000 It's interesting that up until the Trump administration, I think, there was a lot of the general public that wasn't even aware that there was this big economic conflict with China.

00:48:55.000 And when he started this discussion of the unfair exchange and the way trade is done with China and how it's unfair, there's a lot of people that were upset about that.

00:49:08.000 I think, but during that negotiation or during the discussion of that, when it became a public point of interest, it seemed like the fog lifted and showed the threat of China.

00:49:21.000 And I think it's only since 2016 on that most Americans are aware of how deep the rabbit hole goes with China in terms of what you were saying earlier about what they're doing in the Congo and other places to Control and extract minerals and resources and also to give loans out that they know can never be paid back.

00:49:43.000 So then they'll dominate these areas and control them.

00:49:47.000 And strategically, they've been moving these pieces in place at a kind of frightening rate.

00:49:52.000 Absolutely.

00:49:53.000 And, you know, the thing is with, you know, I talked about, you know, co-option, coercion, concealment.

00:49:57.000 I mean, the Chinese were really good at the concealment thing, right?

00:50:00.000 I mean, they could just go, oh, you know, we're, We're about to liberalize.

00:50:03.000 It's really coming.

00:50:04.000 And I'll tell you, we have a short attention span, Joe.

00:50:07.000 We don't look at history at all.

00:50:09.000 And I think they used personnel changes and administration changes to say the same thing over and over again.

00:50:14.000 Look what they did on cyber espionage, right?

00:50:17.000 Massive cyber espionage.

00:50:18.000 And President Obama had that rose garden session with Xi Jinping.

00:50:22.000 He said, OK, we'll stop.

00:50:23.000 Well, actually...

00:50:24.000 They ramped it up.

00:50:26.000 They tried to get smarter about not getting caught so easily.

00:50:28.000 And I'm sure he went back and chewed everybody's ass and said, hey, you guys have to get better at this espionage.

00:50:33.000 But they didn't stop it, right?

00:50:34.000 So I think that, you know, we have to stop being chumps, right?

00:50:38.000 I mean, we have to recognize the nature of the competition.

00:50:41.000 And I think, again, you know, this is the strategic narcissism idea, right?

00:50:45.000 To find the world in relation to us.

00:50:47.000 And then what happens is when we do that, we fall into all these cognitive traps.

00:50:52.000 A friend of mine, he's a great historian named Zachary Shore.

00:50:55.000 It's worth reading anything the guy writes.

00:50:57.000 I mean, but he has this term, strategic empathy is what we need, right?

00:51:00.000 We need to see competitions from the perspective of the other.

00:51:04.000 Take time to look at this from the perspective of Xi Jinping and the Chinese Communist Party.

00:51:08.000 What are they obsessed with?

00:51:10.000 They're obsessed with the fear of losing control.

00:51:14.000 That's why they're extending and tightening their exclusive grip on power.

00:51:17.000 And that's why they're promoting their authoritarian mercantilist model, you know, internationally.

00:51:23.000 And I think once you realize that, you recognize, hey, we have to take a fundamentally different approach.

00:51:28.000 And this is what happened in early 2017. And I think we had some of the right people in the right place.

00:51:34.000 I mean, this guy, Matt Pottinger, who I got to work with, he was our senior director for China, later became deputy national security advisor.

00:51:41.000 Extremely knowledgeable about China, you know, had studied China, had been the Wall Street Journal reporter in China, had been a U.S. Marine, you know, for a break there for a while, and then was involved in international finance and private equity.

00:51:53.000 So he kind of, he saw this multi-dimensional competition.

00:51:57.000 And I really helped drive that, what we call an interagency process, right?

00:52:02.000 To frame the problem and to begin to develop a strategy, which we implemented.

00:52:06.000 And, you know, this strategy was largely part of it.

00:52:10.000 A foundational document to it was declassified right before President Trump left office.

00:52:17.000 It's called the Indo-Pacific strategy.

00:52:18.000 You can find it on the internet.

00:52:20.000 And it just lays...

00:52:21.000 I sent this out in the form of a cabinet memo.

00:52:25.000 In my last few months in the job as a National Security Advisor.

00:52:28.000 And that document was meant to turn the ship completely, you know, away from what had been an approach of cooperation and engagement, right?

00:52:35.000 That sounds nice, right?

00:52:37.000 I mean, who doesn't want cooperation and engagement?

00:52:39.000 Well, if you're the only ones really cooperating, man, you're getting your ass handed.

00:52:43.000 Then you're a chump.

00:52:46.000 You know, that was a big shift.

00:52:48.000 And then, you know, our U.S. Trade Representative, Bob Lighthizer, man, that guy's a guy to be reckoned with, man, because, you know, he's extremely knowledgeable, and he had seen all of these previous iterations, right?

00:52:58.000 So when we started these, early in the Trump administration, we started these strategic dialogues, right, with...

00:53:04.000 You know, with the Chinese leaders, you know, how could that be bad?

00:53:08.000 Strategic dialogue, that sounds nice too, right?

00:53:09.000 But all this was another means for them to string us along, you know, and to obfuscate and to really try to avoid any consequences for their unfair practices and really economic aggression against us, right?

00:53:23.000 And so it was a big shift.

00:53:26.000 Some of the right people were in place and And, you know, I think it's an area that has enjoyed some bipartisan support.

00:53:32.000 I just hope people don't go soft on it.

00:53:33.000 You know, I hope that they recognize this is a high-stakes competition.

00:53:36.000 We have to remain determined.

00:53:38.000 It's a high-stakes competition.

00:53:39.000 There's certain aspects of it that just haven't existed before, and one of them is social media.

00:53:44.000 In watching what's going on with social media, particularly the use of troll farms and bots and even apps like TikTok, when you find the difference between the way China uses their version of TikTok,

00:54:00.000 To highlight scientific experiments and athletic accomplishments and then they shut it off for kids at 10 p.m.

00:54:07.000 Like you're not even allowed to use it.

00:54:09.000 Meanwhile in America, kids are drinking piss and lighting their farts on fire and doing anything they can to get likes and they're rewarded with these likes and there's unquestionably a concerted effort to make these kids More addicted to these apps,

00:54:29.000 get them more viral with the most ridiculous things that they can do.

00:54:33.000 And it's sort of like...

00:54:34.000 It's a directed dumbing down of kids.

00:54:39.000 And this insanely addictive app that when software engineers have back-engineered TikTok and looked at how it's operated, it's one of the most invasive applications they've ever found in terms of the way it...

00:54:54.000 It checks your use of all other platforms and collects data.

00:54:58.000 I mean, it was stunning when they looked at it.

00:55:01.000 Absolutely.

00:55:01.000 I heard your conversation with Tristan on this, by the way, which was great.

00:55:04.000 And he's awesome on this topic.

00:55:07.000 And I think the point that he makes and the point that's absolutely right here is that we made this assumption, right?

00:55:12.000 Hey, the opening up, the internet, social media, I mean, it's going to make authoritarianism untenable, right?

00:55:18.000 There's no way they're going to be able to maintain control.

00:55:20.000 Well, I mean, the Chinese Communist Party has figured out a way to weaponize social media and a way to extend their grip on power to do what you mentioned, which is really to condition people with certain messages, right?

00:55:31.000 And in the U.S. too, right?

00:55:33.000 The way that the algorithm presents information is a way to slowly change kind of your opinion of China, Chinese Communist Party and so forth.

00:55:42.000 But internal to China, they've also weaponized people's social networks against them, right?

00:55:48.000 So if you say a crossword about the party, then those who are in your social circle could get punished.

00:55:54.000 And so they put pressure on you, hey, conform, conform, right?

00:55:57.000 And so it's something beyond Orwell even ever imagined in 1984. And so I think what we have to do is we have to recognize, obviously, you know, the negative effects of social media here and protect ourselves against it because China and Russia especially is quite adept at this.

00:56:15.000 Yeah.

00:56:22.000 And to pit us against each other to reduce our confidence in who we are as a people, right?

00:56:28.000 And our confidence in our democratic principles and institutions and processes.

00:56:32.000 You know, for example, I mean, I don't think the Kremlin gives a damn who wins our elections as long as a large number of Americans doubt the legitimacy of the result.

00:56:40.000 Now, that's important to state because I think a lot of people are under the impression that they wanted one party or another party to win.

00:56:48.000 Their goal is to undermine democracy in America.

00:56:51.000 Absolutely.

00:56:51.000 And this is what they did in 2016 and again in 2020. In 2016, remember, I went into the – I ran the White House at the end of February, right?

00:56:59.000 So unexpectedly, my predecessor had just left.

00:57:05.000 You know, just started the job and left early.

00:57:08.000 And quickly.

00:57:10.000 But again, you already heard this cacophony, right, of, hey, the election was determined, you know, by the Russians, which I believe is untrue, right?

00:57:19.000 I really don't think the Russians care who won in 2016 either.

00:57:23.000 What they wanted to do was to raise doubts about it.

00:57:26.000 And one of the reasons why I conclude that is that if you look at the Russian bot and troll traffic from the Internet Research Agency, this front organization, right, for the For the GRU and the SVR, the military and civilian intelligence wings who are running this operation,

00:57:44.000 the traffic went like way up after the election, right?

00:57:49.000 And the purpose of that was, again, to raise doubts about it.

00:57:52.000 The initial campaign that they actually launched and then had to pull back was on the assumption that Hillary Clinton won.

00:57:59.000 I mean, actually, I think...

00:58:01.000 I think that the Russians were as surprised as Donald Trump was when he won the election, right?

00:58:08.000 And so their initial campaign was, hey, Trump would have won, but it was rigged.

00:58:16.000 Well, then they realized, oh God, Trump won.

00:58:17.000 What do we do now?

00:58:18.000 And so they changed the message to Trump would have won the popular vote if it wasn't rigged, right?

00:58:22.000 So what they want you to do is believe that The results of the election are invalid.

00:58:27.000 Why is that?

00:58:27.000 Because the strength of our democracy is that we believe we have agency, right?

00:58:33.000 We have a say over our future, right?

00:58:35.000 Because we have a vote, right?

00:58:36.000 That's a beautiful thing, man, that we have the opportunity for self-correction and improvement short of revolution.

00:58:44.000 But if you stop believing that, right, you start believing that I'm disenfranchised.

00:58:48.000 I don't have a say.

00:58:49.000 It encourages all kinds of, you know, maybe even violence, right?

00:58:53.000 And what you saw on January 6th, for example.

00:58:56.000 Or what you saw in Portland and Seattle on the other end of the spectrum.

00:58:59.000 So what they want is they want more Americans to feel disenfranchised, to feel like they don't have a say in how they're governed.

00:59:05.000 And the main way to do that, hey, reduce confidence in our elections.

00:59:09.000 Did you see Ted Cruz question that woman?

00:59:12.000 I don't remember her name.

00:59:14.000 She's from the FBI, and he asked her about agent provocateurs at January 6th.

00:59:20.000 And whether or not they engaged in any activity there, and she said she could not answer that, and whether or not they engaged in encouraging violence, and she could not answer that.

00:59:31.000 Like, did you see that?

00:59:32.000 I didn't see it, but I mean, I would be surprised if there weren't, right?

00:59:35.000 Now, the thing is— Why do they do that?

00:59:38.000 Why would the FBI engage in that?

00:59:42.000 Not answer—oh, the FBI wouldn't.

00:59:44.000 That's what they were talking about, agent provocateurs.

00:59:48.000 Not from us, I wouldn't say.

00:59:49.000 Now, I would say there might be FBI agents who infiltrate organizations that have a violent agenda, right?

00:59:55.000 We want them to do that.

00:59:56.000 But I thought you were talking about the Russians.

00:59:58.000 I think what the Russians try to do is...

00:59:59.000 But FBI agents that...

01:00:01.000 If the FBI agents were involved in January 6th, right?

01:00:07.000 Joe, that doesn't sound right to me.

01:00:08.000 I mean, I don't know.

01:00:09.000 What doesn't sound right?

01:00:10.000 Agent provocateurs?

01:00:11.000 Yeah, agent provocateurs from the government.

01:00:13.000 I mean, I can't imagine they would do that.

01:00:15.000 Well, why wouldn't she just say no?

01:00:17.000 I don't know.

01:00:18.000 You want to see it?

01:00:19.000 Yeah, I'll take a look at it.

01:00:21.000 What is the guy's name?

01:00:24.000 Ray Epps?

01:00:25.000 The guy that everyone keeps discussing?

01:00:27.000 Because there's a guy who is encouraging people to go into the Capitol.

01:00:30.000 He was a guy that was in multiple videos, and some people thought he was a Fed immediately, and other people were listening to him, but this guy was trying to encourage people to Go into the Capitol building.

01:00:47.000 Here, let's play this, just so you can hear Ted Cruz.

01:00:49.000 I want to turn to the FBI. How many FBI agents or confidential informants actively participated in the events of January 6th?

01:01:02.000 Sir, I'm sure you can appreciate that I can't go into the specifics of sources and methods.

01:01:08.000 Did any FBI agents or confidential informants actively participate in the events of January 6th?

01:01:14.000 Yes or no?

01:01:16.000 Sir, I can't answer that.

01:01:18.000 Did any FBI agents or confidential informants commit crimes of violence on January 6th?

01:01:25.000 I can't answer that, sir.

01:01:27.000 Did any FBI agents or FBI informants actively encourage and incite crimes of violence on January 6th?

01:01:37.000 I can't answer that.

01:01:40.000 That's disturbing to the American people.

01:01:42.000 They see something like that and whether it's poor messaging on her part or whether it's...

01:01:48.000 It's like Agent Friday, you know, just the facts, man.

01:01:51.000 It's just like, come on, open up a little bit.

01:01:53.000 You know, the analogy that comes to mind, and I, of course, we'll continue to learn more about this, but...

01:01:59.000 Is that, you know, I'm sure there are DEA agents who participate in drug deals, you know, for example, because they're trying to gain visibility of an organization, for example.

01:02:07.000 So my concern would be that, you know, I think, I hope that this commission takes kind of a longer view, right, and says, why were so many people Believing, right?

01:02:21.000 Believing that the election was invalid and believing that their only recourse was to assault the Capitol.

01:02:28.000 And I think, Joe, if you take a long view of this, it goes back, I think, to the transition to the global economy in the 90s.

01:02:35.000 You know, I think that there are large numbers of Americans who were disenfranchised, left behind by transitions in the economy.

01:02:41.000 And then, of course, after World Trade Organization entry of China, that accelerated, right?

01:02:47.000 A loss of a lot of good manufacturing jobs.

01:02:49.000 I don't know if you ever saw the...

01:02:51.000 There's a great documentary on Dayton, Ohio, like, what happened to Dayton, Ohio, like, in this period of time.

01:02:56.000 And then you add on top of that, right, you know, you add, you know, the unanticipated length and difficulty of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

01:03:03.000 You lay on top of that a financial crisis, right, 2008, you know, 2009, and so many people who were affected in a profound way, you know, about that.

01:03:12.000 And then how about laying on an opioid epidemic at the same time?

01:03:17.000 And I think, You know, I think our society has received these blows, you know, and there are a large number of Americans who don't have faith in their political elites.

01:03:26.000 They feel like they don't give a damn about them.

01:03:28.000 They don't understand them, right?

01:03:29.000 That they're, you know, that they're in this Washington bubble.

01:03:31.000 And so, you know, I think that that dynamic of disenfranchisement, loss of confidence, also maybe explains some of the far left, you know, violence in Portland and Seattle.

01:03:45.000 I think what we have to do is work together, man, I mean, to restore our confidence, right?

01:03:50.000 Our confidence in who we are as Americans, our confidence in the great promise of this country.

01:03:55.000 We all have to work together to help the younger generation take advantage of the great promise of this country, overcome the obstacles associated with, you know, with education, right?

01:04:04.000 I mean, you know, it shouldn't be determined, you know, based on your zip code.

01:04:10.000 How many obstacles you have to overcome before you can take advantage of the promise of this country, you know?

01:04:15.000 So I just hope, oh man, I just hope that this experience that we've had, you know, in recent years can begin to bring us back together.

01:04:25.000 Because the trend has been, it's just driving us even further apart, you know?

01:04:28.000 Yeah, and that trend is definitely accentuated by social media, and I'm sure by foreign actors involved in social media as well.

01:04:35.000 But I think when we're talking about the feeling of disenfranchisement, when you see something like that and you think that maybe the FBI was involved in some agent provocateur maneuvers where they were trying to encourage people,

01:05:04.000 I'm sure you're aware of that, that most of the people that were involved in that plot to kidnap her were feds.

01:05:10.000 That was revealed when people said, well, what's going on here?

01:05:14.000 They're organizing some fake kidnapping attempt on a governor and trying to get people involved to do this.

01:05:21.000 What was the amount of people that were...

01:05:24.000 It was the majority of the people that were involved in this plot turned out to be undercover agents.

01:05:30.000 And that kind of shit, it does as much to decrease our confidence in the way things are governed as anything.

01:05:40.000 Well, and that's why we have to really put at the top of our agenda, strengthening institutions, right?

01:05:45.000 You know, and, you know, none of our institutions are flawless, obviously, right?

01:05:50.000 And what you want is judicial review, right, for warrants.

01:05:54.000 You know, we know what happened with the, you know, the abuse of warrants and wiretap information associated with, you know, the Russia investigation and all that going back to 2016. But I think that we have to put institutional reform on our agenda.

01:06:11.000 If we want to look at it from a positive perspective, you know, I mean, our founders, Joe, came up with a great system, man.

01:06:18.000 I mean, you know...

01:06:19.000 It's pretty amazing how much they nailed it in the 1700s.

01:06:22.000 They nailed it, man.

01:06:23.000 I mean, separation of powers, right?

01:06:24.000 Due process of law, you know, and...

01:06:27.000 And, you know, representative government.

01:06:29.000 And, you know, the number one branch in our government is the Congress, right?

01:06:33.000 Because the radical idea of the American Revolution was, hey, the people govern.

01:06:37.000 Sovereignty is with the people, right?

01:06:39.000 Now, not everybody was enfranchised, right?

01:06:41.000 It took almost 100 years for us to remove the greatest blight on our history of the institution of slavery.

01:06:46.000 But our country has been always a work in progress, but founded, I think, on principles that made those previous abuses untenable over time, right?

01:06:56.000 You know, like slavery, like Jim Crow.

01:06:58.000 And so I think what we saw on January 6th, there's a positive story to it, not to be Pollyannish about it or anything, you know, but I'm telling you.

01:07:05.000 You know, look what happened.

01:07:07.000 You know, every case of, you know, of fraud, of potential fraud in the election was brought before judges, right?

01:07:15.000 And judges heard that.

01:07:17.000 You know, and these were—it doesn't matter who appointed these judges, but they were adjudicated.

01:07:21.000 On that day, you know, I mean, Senator McConnell will never be accused of being charismatic, man.

01:07:26.000 You know?

01:07:27.000 But he gave a pretty damn good speech right before the assault on the Capitol.

01:07:31.000 The Vice President did the right thing.

01:07:33.000 Our institutions held up even though they were under duress, right?

01:07:36.000 So when, you know, I think when we look at our system, we ought to be proud of our system and recognize, okay, it's time for us to really reform it and to strengthen our institutions.

01:07:45.000 Do you think that anything could have been done to prevent what happened on January 6th?

01:07:49.000 Like, could the president have done something?

01:07:51.000 Do you think that he could have given a speech or he could have said something?

01:07:55.000 Absolutely.

01:07:56.000 Yeah, I think...

01:07:57.000 I think a lot of what we've seen in recent years, and I would say this is the case of the president associated with the events leading up to January 6th, but also politicians on both sides of the spectrum, okay?

01:08:10.000 I'm a nonpartisan guy still, right?

01:08:13.000 I mean, I don't—you know, I'm a washed-up general, right?

01:08:16.000 I don't think washed-up generals should become partisan.

01:08:19.000 You know, I think sometimes that could even— Did you vote in 2020 for the first time?

01:08:22.000 I did, Matt.

01:08:23.000 I did.

01:08:23.000 I won't ask you who you voted for.

01:08:25.000 I'm registered independent.

01:08:27.000 And so I think that what we have to do is demand better, right?

01:08:32.000 So you had...

01:08:33.000 I think what you've seen these days is anti-leadership.

01:08:36.000 It's like the opposite of leadership, right?

01:08:38.000 Leadership should convene people together.

01:08:41.000 It should get to really the politics of addition, right?

01:08:44.000 We should start conversations with, hey, what do we agree on here?

01:08:48.000 And I think if we did that...

01:08:50.000 We could get so much done in so many of these areas just on the basis of what we do agree on.

01:08:55.000 But so much of politics now is performative rather than formative.

01:09:00.000 It's to get in front of the camera.

01:09:01.000 It's to do a grandstanding interview.

01:09:04.000 It's to get your name and your party out there and advance your party's interests.

01:09:08.000 How about just the interests of the American people?

01:09:10.000 And there are leaders who do that.

01:09:11.000 But if you look at President Trump's behavior, which I think is abhorrent up to January 6th, But also look at some of the statements then-candidate for Vice President Kamala Harris when she said, I wouldn't take a vaccine from the Trump administration.

01:09:25.000 Well, she said that for partisan purposes.

01:09:27.000 Or when then Vice President Biden before the election said, hey, if President Trump doesn't leave, the Joint Chiefs of Staff will march him out of the...

01:09:35.000 I mean, come on.

01:09:36.000 The military has no role.

01:09:37.000 Actually, what's brilliant about our system, Joe...

01:09:40.000 The executive branch has no role in the transition.

01:09:43.000 If you look at what happened, right?

01:09:45.000 It was under Article 1, the Congress, and then especially Article 3 to adjudicate any of the claims of fraud.

01:09:56.000 This thing with Whitmer, do you got that article?

01:10:01.000 I've always wanted to ask someone who's deep in the government.

01:10:05.000 At least 12 FBI informants infiltrated the alleged kidnapping plot that led to the arrest of six men.

01:10:15.000 The crux of the case is whether the five alleged extremists or the FBI fueled the plan.

01:10:21.000 BuzzFeed reported that the FBI helped start the plot, recruit members, pay travel costs, while the other reporters found one informant even led military training as a part of the plot.

01:10:32.000 Now, I don't know how much of this is real or true, I don't know what's accurate, but why would anybody do that?

01:10:40.000 Well, you know, the good thing about our system is, you know, we're going to find out.

01:10:44.000 Because what I really like about, you know, when the FBI gets involved in a case, whether it's a terrorist case or anything, it all becomes public record, right?

01:10:53.000 So as these trials go on, you're going to be able to read the whole thing yourself, you know?

01:10:57.000 Right.

01:10:57.000 And not rely on a BuzzFeed report or any other report.

01:11:00.000 But I think it's an important question to ask, right?

01:11:02.000 What is the appropriate role of the FBI and did they conduct the role appropriately?

01:11:06.000 Now, I'll tell you, I've worked with a lot of FBI agents across my career, mainly abroad, you know, in places like Iraq and Afghanistan.

01:11:14.000 They're tremendous professionals, right?

01:11:32.000 Toward reform in a nonpartisan direction.

01:11:36.000 And that's what I think we have to demand, you know, from our leaders at the political level who are appointed, you know, attorney general and so forth, but from the director of the FBI, who of course is now serving across two administrations, you know, and I think that's, I'm sure that's the top of their agenda.

01:11:50.000 So, in looking at this with giving it the most charitable consideration, would you say that this is what they're trying to do is find people who were trying or actively interested in doing something like this and kidnapping and then trying to encourage them to go forward with that because then you could infiltrate these organizations?

01:12:14.000 Like, what would be the charitable view of something like that?

01:12:17.000 You'd have to ask somebody who's done this before.

01:12:19.000 And I know you have some people that you've had on the show who could speak more knowledgeably about it.

01:12:23.000 But, you know, of course, something tips off an investigation, right?

01:12:27.000 You get some kind of report of a crime.

01:12:29.000 Then you have to open a case, you know, and there's a whole process associated with that for opening it.

01:12:33.000 And then you have to get authorities, right, to infiltrate, to wiretap and that sort of thing.

01:12:39.000 So, you know, there's...

01:12:41.000 I think what's good about our country more than anything else is rule of law, right?

01:12:47.000 And the ability to have our rights protected, right, under the law.

01:12:52.000 And so this is going to play out.

01:12:54.000 I would just say I think we have to be patient about it and see what happens.

01:12:57.000 But there's a long history of those kind of activities, right?

01:13:01.000 Agent provocateur activities to infiltrate a peaceful protest and instigate violence and then turn it into a non-peaceful protest so they could shut it down.

01:13:10.000 Yeah, I don't know enough about, like, the history of law enforcement and that sort of thing.

01:13:14.000 But, you know, the FBI, in my experience, and with the people I've worked with, you know, these are professionals who are nonpartisan, the people I knew.

01:13:26.000 You know, not like the ones that I think solely the reputation of the police.

01:13:31.000 You know, of the Bureau that we've learned about over the past several years, especially associated with, you know, the Russian investigation and that sort of thing.

01:13:41.000 Yeah, but when it comes to eroding the confidence, I mean, this is also a factor in what you were talking about.

01:13:48.000 The Russia investigation is also a factor in eroding the confidence that Americans have in our institution.

01:13:54.000 Social media is a big one, and you talked about it earlier about the role that these foreign agents and foreign organizations have in infiltrating our social media, getting people to distrust the economic process,

01:14:10.000 the political process, the democratic process.

01:14:12.000 What can be done to mitigate the influence that these social media attacks and these organized campaigns have had?

01:14:24.000 Yeah, I think a lot of it, and this, you know, this sounds like a general sort of recommendation, but it's education, you know?

01:14:30.000 I mean, it's the reason I wrote Battlegrounds.

01:14:32.000 I really think the people who are best informed, better informed, you know, about the challenges we're facing internationally, for example, or these issues, are those who are least susceptible to manipulation, obviously, right?

01:14:43.000 And then I think the second is really reform in the media, you know, in what used to be called the mainstream media.

01:14:52.000 And I don't know if you've had, have you had talked to Barry Weiss?

01:14:54.000 Have you spoken with her?

01:14:55.000 Yeah.

01:14:55.000 Very good friends with her.

01:14:56.000 I love her.

01:14:57.000 She's phenomenal.

01:14:58.000 Yeah.

01:14:58.000 I love her, too.

01:14:59.000 And she, you know, I think what she did on leaving the New York Times, you know, pulled the curtain back on the fact that what was really a paper that you could go to, you know, and have confidence in the facts that are presented.

01:15:11.000 Right.

01:15:11.000 You know, it has really been taken over by an orthodoxy, right?

01:15:14.000 Exactly.

01:15:15.000 And if you don't adhere to that orthodoxy, you can't be there, right?

01:15:18.000 And so, you know, why is it that if we lean in one direction, you know, politically, you know, you watch one cable news station.

01:15:24.000 If you lean in the other direction, you watch one of the other two.

01:15:26.000 And I think that the business models are off, the incentives are off, right?

01:15:31.000 And a lot of social media fills kind of a void associated with the lack of confidence in the mainstream media, but then also are driven...

01:15:40.000 By algorithms that are based on the avarice of these companies, right?

01:15:44.000 They want to get more and more advertising dollars.

01:15:46.000 The way they get it is more and more clicks.

01:15:49.000 And the way they get more and more clicks is to show more and more, you know, extreme conspiratorial content to lead you down a path.

01:15:57.000 So I just think, you know, your listeners are self-selecting into long-format conversations because they care about, you know, understanding more holistically the challenges we're facing and what's going on in the world and the country.

01:16:09.000 And I think that if we just educate ourselves, you know, we'll be less susceptible to it.

01:16:15.000 My concern is there's not enough people educating themselves.

01:16:18.000 There's many more people who are just allowing this to take place and they just don't have the time to really pay attention and do a lot of objective analysis of what the true facts are.

01:16:29.000 You know, a lot of them have families and jobs and mortgages and there's a lot of stuff going on and they don't have enough time to really sit down and parse out all the information.

01:16:38.000 Yeah, right.

01:16:39.000 And there are still places to go.

01:16:41.000 You know, I think that the think tanks that I've been associated with, I mean, at Hoover, I think they do a great job going into more depth.

01:16:49.000 And we're also trying, you know, we have a serious call, not to plug my podcast on yours.

01:16:55.000 Plug your podcast.

01:16:56.000 It's called Unimaginatively Battlegrounds, the same as the book.

01:17:00.000 But it's international perspectives on the challenges we're facing.

01:17:03.000 This is the book right here.

01:17:04.000 It's available right now.

01:17:05.000 Look at that handsome bastard.

01:17:06.000 Look at him.

01:17:07.000 I apologize for that, yeah.

01:17:08.000 No worries.

01:17:27.000 And I've had them with Prime Minister Abe and world leaders to ask them about the challenges we're facing and to hear it from a Japanese perspective, from the Afghan perspective, from a German or French perspective or Colombian perspective, Mexican perspective.

01:17:44.000 So that's the idea behind it.

01:17:47.000 And I think that, you know, going to the media like yours and others, you know, listening, taking the time where you're working out, you know, listen to a podcast.

01:17:56.000 I think there are a lot of really solid ones out there.

01:17:59.000 You know, I think...

01:18:00.000 From newspapers, I mean, you know, the Financial Times, man, I still, you know, I think that has not been infected.

01:18:06.000 I don't think that badly.

01:18:08.000 You know, the journal, I think, is still solid, especially on the China reporting has been really good.

01:18:12.000 So, but then, you know, I think, you know, going to, you know, short videos sometimes, like we have a policy ed program at Hoover, which are, you know, they're They're eight minutes long, right?

01:18:25.000 And if you want to know about, you know, the national debt, right, and the effect that, you know, that some of the COVID, quantitative easing and payments and so forth are having on the debt, you know, there's an eight-minute video on that, you know?

01:18:37.000 Or, you know, what does deterrence by denial mean and how does that relate to Taiwan and deterring China from an invasion of Taiwan?

01:18:45.000 That's one that we did recently.

01:18:47.000 So I... The media is out there.

01:18:49.000 I think it takes time, though, to find the right ones that you're comfortable with.

01:18:53.000 But I would just say try to reject those that are trying to manipulate you where you've become the product because they're selling your data, right?

01:19:00.000 And then they're trying to get more and more advertising dollars by showing you extreme content that is often dubious and invalid.

01:19:10.000 Well, on top of that, one of the things that the social media platforms are doing is also a lot of censorship.

01:19:18.000 And censorship along ideological grounds and making decisions that are based on what they want people to hear rather than just community guidelines that, you know, everyone could agree to, like, you know,

01:19:34.000 harassment, doxing, that kind of stuff.

01:19:36.000 Everyone could agree that that is negative.

01:19:38.000 But they're censoring in ways that have nothing to do with that.

01:19:43.000 Like, they're censoring scientific consensus data.

01:19:46.000 They're removing videos and striking videos on YouTube for talking about consensus scientific data that they believe is harmful to whatever narrative they're trying to project.

01:19:58.000 Yeah, and then recently we just heard that the head of the CDC, you know, come out with a responsible question, make a statement that people were removed from Twitter for saying.

01:20:06.000 Yes, removed from Twitter, removed from YouTube.

01:20:08.000 Yes.

01:20:09.000 Right.

01:20:09.000 So this is a big problem, right?

01:20:11.000 Do we really want, you know, the heads of these tech companies to be the arbiters of free speech?

01:20:15.000 Yes.

01:20:16.000 I don't think so.

01:20:17.000 No, I don't think so either.

01:20:18.000 My friend Lex Friedman, who is an artificial intelligence scientist, formerly at MIT, he's one of the most brilliant people I know.

01:20:27.000 He did a podcast with a gentleman and they were talking about...

01:20:32.000 This gentleman was one of the people that Fauci and Francis Collins had conspired to dismiss and to dismiss as conspiracy theorists in this most recent leak of emails.

01:20:45.000 And he talked about the dangers of COVID. And he said, COVID is absolutely dangerous.

01:20:50.000 And I'm paraphrasing.

01:20:52.000 He said, it's more dangerous than the flu.

01:20:55.000 But for children, it's actually less dangerous than the flu.

01:20:59.000 Because of that statement, which is consensus scientific fact.

01:21:03.000 COVID is not that dangerous for children.

01:21:05.000 He got a strike against his channel on YouTube.

01:21:08.000 I mean, this is scientific consensus fact backed up by statistics.

01:21:13.000 He agrees with Lori Lightfoot.

01:21:14.000 You know?

01:21:16.000 Right.

01:21:17.000 The mayor of Chicago, right?

01:21:18.000 Yeah.

01:21:19.000 Who's up against...

01:21:19.000 It's probably the only thing he agrees with her on.

01:21:22.000 Right.

01:21:23.000 Yeah.

01:21:24.000 That lady.

01:21:26.000 She's right on the teachers, though.

01:21:27.000 You know, my mom taught in inner-city Philadelphia for over 30 years.

01:21:31.000 She was a phenomenal teacher, man.

01:21:33.000 I mean...

01:21:34.000 And she really did not like the teachers' union because she saw the teachers' union as an impediment for reforms.

01:21:40.000 And also she saw them as guilty of, you know, the...

01:21:43.000 You know, the soft kind of, soft racism of sort of low expectations, right?

01:21:49.000 And that they become complacent and weren't focused on the student, right?

01:21:53.000 If you look at the discourse now around education, why aren't the students at the center of it, right?

01:21:58.000 I mean, they should be at the center of it.

01:22:00.000 Yeah, they most certainly should.

01:22:02.000 And I'm worried that students are being influenced by these narratives that are being portrayed on social media to the point where it's hard for them to see the objective truth, the real reality that's around them.

01:22:13.000 And I don't think these social media companies are doing this because they're bad people.

01:22:18.000 I think they believe they're doing the right thing because I think they've been indoctrinated to believe that their ideological beliefs are superior to the ideological beliefs that they suppose and by any means necessary they should diminish and reduce the impact that the opposing perspective has on our culture.

01:22:37.000 And they have this unique opportunity which has never existed before where one ideology, which is essentially leftism, controls a vast majority of what's being disseminated.

01:22:50.000 Absolutely.

01:22:51.000 And so, actually, I write about this in Battlegrounds in the conclusion and in the afterward.

01:22:56.000 And I refer to it as kind of a curriculum of self-loathing that our young people have been exposed to, Joe.

01:23:05.000 And so, as a historian, I kind of trace this back to...

01:23:09.000 You know, the new left interpretation of history, which is tied to kind of Marxist ideology and now, you know, post-colonial theory, right?

01:23:18.000 Post-colonial theory, which really is, I want to oversimplify here, is that really all of the ills of the world prior to 1945 were due to colonialism.

01:23:26.000 All the ills of the world after 1945 were due to capitalist imperialism.

01:23:31.000 And this interpretation, of course, is profoundly arrogant because what it does is it doesn't acknowledge causality except for us.

01:23:42.000 And it assumes that other actors, including enemies and rivals and adversaries, only act in response to us and what we do.

01:23:50.000 It's that they don't have an agenda of their own.

01:23:53.000 And I think this is connected to the really lack of solid history curricula in secondary school and in universities.

01:24:03.000 And many students are subjected to this kind of orthodoxy, right?

01:24:07.000 And what I try to tell students in university settings, whether it's a Stanford or Arizona State University, Is to just say, hey, if anybody tries to push an orthodoxy on you, reject it.

01:24:19.000 Do your own thinking.

01:24:21.000 Read a number of different accounts or interpretations of whatever the issue is and come to your own conclusion.

01:24:27.000 Yeah, that narrow binary perspective is also profoundly ignorant in its analysis of human beings.

01:24:34.000 Like, throughout history, human beings have been evil and ruthless, and we're probably less evil and less ruthless now than ever before.

01:24:43.000 And, you know, we should acknowledge that it took a lot of horrible shit to get us this perspective where we know better now.

01:24:51.000 Absolutely.

01:24:52.000 And so this is the problem with, you know, these critical theories, right?

01:24:56.000 I know you've had a couple shows on this as well, but, you know, essentially, critical theory is based on the assumption that the whole system has to be brought down, right?

01:25:10.000 Because structurally, it's biased against us, right?

01:25:15.000 So the problem with this theory is that it leaves you With a toxic combination of resignation and anger.

01:25:25.000 And I think if there's a message to the younger generation is, hey, you do have agency.

01:25:30.000 You can build a better world for generations to come.

01:25:33.000 And, you know, just look at our history, okay?

01:25:36.000 We fought a war of independence based on principles.

01:25:40.000 That we're radical, right?

01:25:42.000 Again, this idea that, you know, sovereignty lies with the people and the separation of powers, you know.

01:25:47.000 And, of course, it was imperfect, right?

01:25:49.000 You know, it did take almost 100 years to remove the greatest blight on our history of the institution of slavery.

01:25:55.000 And then, of course, you know, that was great because, you know, we were able to emancipate.

01:25:59.000 Four million of our fellow Americans in the bloodiest war in our history.

01:26:03.000 But of course, disappointments followed, you know?

01:26:05.000 Failure of Reconstruction, rise of Jim Crow and the Ku Klux Klan, separate but equal, right?

01:26:12.000 Redlining and segregation.

01:26:14.000 But hey, the Civil Rights Movement dismantled.

01:26:17.000 Right?

01:26:17.000 De jura, segregation, inequality of opportunity.

01:26:20.000 Now, hey, did de facto, you know, segregation, inequality of opportunity persist?

01:26:24.000 Yes, it did.

01:26:25.000 Do we still have work to do?

01:26:26.000 Hell yes, we do.

01:26:27.000 So let's get after it.

01:26:28.000 Let's work on it.

01:26:29.000 Let's improve, you know, our society.

01:26:31.000 And I think this, whenever you put the, if you put the adjectives institutional, you know, or structural in front of every problem, right, what you're saying is, hey, you know, We're all screwed.

01:26:42.000 I think that's a fun thing to say for people too.

01:26:44.000 Like they love to say structural racism, institutional.

01:26:47.000 That's like those are some terms that people that I don't even think they really know what they're saying sometimes.

01:26:53.000 They say like online like a lot of people.

01:26:55.000 It's one of those things you could just sort of like lay a blanket over an issue and go, oh, it's structural racism.

01:27:02.000 Which for sure exists, especially when you're talking about redlining.

01:27:05.000 Yeah, right.

01:27:06.000 And one of the things that you brought up that I think is very important is you said that just because you come from a different area code or a different zip code, you shouldn't have limited opportunities.

01:27:17.000 We should figure out a way to make it so that we at least have a base starting point that's similar.

01:27:25.000 Right, absolutely.

01:27:26.000 In this culture, in this country.

01:27:29.000 And we don't right now.

01:27:30.000 And if bad policies got there?

01:27:31.000 Right, like redlining.

01:27:33.000 I saw the book The Color of Law by Richard Rothstein.

01:27:36.000 If bad policies got us to where we are, hey, well, good policies should be able to correct it.

01:27:42.000 But people aren't willing oftentimes to discuss real solutions, right?

01:27:46.000 So the problem of education, the way I see it, and of course I'm not an expert in this, but Hoover does a lot of great work on it, and I talk to people about it.

01:27:54.000 And it's often a topic on this other podcast we have called Good Fellows, where the three Hoover Fellows talk about, you know, we talk about issues like these, is that it's an opt-out system, right?

01:28:05.000 So if you're in a crappy school district, right, you can opt out in a number of ways.

01:28:09.000 You can opt out by, you know, by earning more money, moving out of that district, right, to get your kids a better education.

01:28:13.000 You can opt out by earning more money and send your kids to private school.

01:28:18.000 But if you can't do that, if you don't have the resources to opt out, you're stuck, right?

01:28:23.000 Right.

01:28:24.000 And so why should that be the case?

01:28:25.000 And why shouldn't school choice be more broadly available, for example?

01:28:30.000 And of course, impediments to this include teachers' unions.

01:28:33.000 So I think what you're seeing now is a nascent movement on the parts of parents to be more vocal on this issue.

01:28:40.000 I think education was a lagging issue.

01:28:42.000 I think it should have been an issue a long time ago, but it's good that it's at the forefront now.

01:28:46.000 But I think all of us, especially washed-up generals like me later in our careers or second careers or whatever, I think it ought to be our mission to help build a better future for generations to come, to help strengthen our republic and to help more Americans take advantage of the great promise of this country.

01:29:07.000 The people you talk to who are most enthusiastic about what we have Are recent immigrants, most often.

01:29:14.000 Oh yeah, for sure.

01:29:15.000 Especially, well, what's hilarious is when you talk to immigrants that have come from communist-led countries, and they are the most fiercely American people you're ever going to meet in your life, because they know the alternative.

01:29:28.000 Absolutely.

01:29:29.000 And, you know, one of the fellows at Hoover's, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who, you know, grew up in a hellish situation.

01:29:35.000 I've had her on the podcast.

01:29:37.000 Oh, yeah.

01:29:37.000 I've had her.

01:29:38.000 That's right.

01:29:38.000 Yeah.

01:29:38.000 She's phenomenal.

01:29:39.000 Yes, she really is.

01:29:40.000 And what she looks at today and laments, right, is tribalism, is what she describes it as.

01:29:46.000 And she said, hey, I know what tribalism looks like.

01:29:49.000 Hey, Joe, I know what it looks like, right, from places like Afghanistan and Iraq.

01:29:52.000 It's not a pretty picture.

01:29:54.000 And in other similar cases, Yeonmi Park, who escaped from North Korea, and her perspective on what is going on in Colombia, she's like, Jesus Christ, this is as scary as North Korea to me.

01:30:06.000 When I look at all the woke bullshit that's going on there, she was like, these kids have no idea what they're ushering in.

01:30:13.000 Well, I'll tell you, we have a big problem with this now.

01:30:15.000 This is kind of a, you know, a revenge of the new left and post-colonial theory and critical theory.

01:30:21.000 We have exported this to parts of the world as well, right?

01:30:24.000 From the American Academy, right?

01:30:27.000 So the home of critical race theory is Harvard Law School, right?

01:30:31.000 Among the disadvantaged there.

01:30:33.000 It's really where it gained a tremendous amount of momentum.

01:30:37.000 And of course, that's become a buzz phrase now, you know, but really, I think it's important to look at the aspects of it and to draw the aspects of it into question.

01:30:46.000 So, I think we should say to our children, do you really believe that we ought to judge people by their identity category?

01:30:55.000 Rather than by the content of their character, as Martin Luther King said, or, you know, or their work ethic or their dedication or their loyalty, you know, honesty, right?

01:31:05.000 I mean, of course not, right?

01:31:06.000 Who should believe that?

01:31:07.000 Do you really believe that you're unable to empathize with somebody because they fall into a different category?

01:31:13.000 You can't put yourself in their shoes.

01:31:15.000 You can't be empathetic, right?

01:31:17.000 I think a lot of what we're seeing is this orthodoxy is leading to an end of empathy, right?

01:31:22.000 And if we lose the ability to empathize with one another, we're screwed.

01:31:25.000 And so I hope that these are the conversations that we should be having, like, on university campuses, right?

01:31:32.000 And in local communities.

01:31:34.000 And I think if we combine that...

01:31:37.000 We're good to go.

01:32:03.000 We have to strengthen communities from the bottom up, right?

01:32:07.000 We can't wait for the political class to do it from the top down.

01:32:09.000 I think we got to work on this at the local level.

01:32:12.000 What do you think could be done in the United States as a whole to deal with these disenfranchised communities like South Side of Chicago or Some areas of Detroit and Baltimore that have been historically just overwhelmed by gang violence and drug dealers and just crime.

01:32:33.000 It's a part of the fabric of the community and the people that grew up there are just immersed in this despair.

01:32:39.000 It's very difficult for them to imagine a life where they have a prosperous future, like maybe someone growing up in Orange County, California would have.

01:32:50.000 Yeah, you know, I think this is the most important problem we're facing, right?

01:32:54.000 And, of course, it's a combination of initiatives that have to be implemented over time.

01:32:58.000 And, you know, I know this is not completely analogous, but, you know, from the years that I spent in places like Afghanistan and Iraq, what happens, right, when there's lawlessness is communities fall back on themselves, on themselves, right?

01:33:12.000 And they seek protection from within their communities or their tribes.

01:33:16.000 Right.

01:33:16.000 And what that does is it fragments society and it allows extreme elements to operate within that society and to pose as patrons and protectors, right, of the beleaguered community, right?

01:33:29.000 This is what happens in gangs, right?

01:33:31.000 You have adolescent, you know, mostly young males who are seeking affirmation.

01:33:36.000 Where do they get affirmation?

01:33:37.000 They're not getting their family.

01:33:39.000 They're not getting their church.

01:33:40.000 They're not getting any kind of community.

01:33:41.000 So they're drawn into gangs and criminal activity.

01:33:45.000 And this sort of activity then perpetuates itself because those gangs become strong.

01:33:49.000 They perpetuate the violence.

01:33:51.000 And I think of it as a cycle.

01:33:53.000 Mainly I've thought about this on how to really separate terrorist organizations from sources of ideological support.

01:34:00.000 I think of it as a cycle of ignorance, hatred, and violence.

01:34:05.000 Ignorance happens when people aren't being educated, where they're not having experiences that allow them to understand the opportunities that they could have in this country.

01:34:14.000 And then that ignorance is used to foment hatred, to portray victimhood as a new heroism, and to have everybody angry about their status as a victim, and then to lash out in ways that That creates violence,

01:34:30.000 right?

01:34:30.000 You have to break that cycle at the ignorance part, right?

01:34:33.000 At the education part and create a sense of belonging and community that transcends these, you know, these gangs, for example.

01:34:43.000 Yeah.

01:34:43.000 And if we're looking at the United States and we're looking at this as if we have a multi-tiered approach to try to strengthen this union and try to strengthen the community that is the United States, Dealing with these disenfranchised communities has to be a key part of that,

01:35:00.000 because one of the ways that I've always said, like, if you really want to make America great, we should have less losers.

01:35:05.000 Like, what's the best way to have less losers?

01:35:07.000 Give people a more even shot at a starting point.

01:35:12.000 And that should be something that we concentrate on.

01:35:15.000 That seems like something that China is doing in sort of a long-term strategy.

01:35:20.000 They're looking at the whole of China.

01:35:23.000 I mean, obviously, they're doing it in some ways in a very evil way, like what they're doing with the Uyghurs and what they're doing with dissent.

01:35:29.000 But there should be, in my opinion, some sort of a concerted effort to get this national dialogue going about how we fix these communities and how we fix these aspects of our culture.

01:35:44.000 Because they're not changing.

01:35:45.000 They've been the same way for decade after decade, with very little improvement.

01:35:49.000 And what I'd like to see, obviously, as a historian, is pay attention to what didn't work.

01:35:53.000 How about that?

01:35:54.000 And, you know, of course, we had, you know, the first book I wrote was called Derelition of Duty.

01:35:59.000 It's about how and why Vietnam became an American war.

01:36:02.000 And in the book, I focus on Lyndon Johnson's decisions that led to an American war in Vietnam from, you know, from November 63 to July of 65. Johnson, actually, one of the main reasons he got into Vietnam is because he saw Vietnam principally as a danger to his domestic goals and wanted to keep Vietnam on the back burner.

01:36:21.000 And to do that, what he had to do is placate people on both sides of the issue.

01:36:25.000 So he took this middle course, really, based on deceit, deception, lying to the American people.

01:36:30.000 Which in retrospect looks like, wow, Johnson really wanted to get in the war.

01:36:33.000 Well, he actually didn't, right?

01:36:35.000 What he wanted to do was protect the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act and the Great Society.

01:36:43.000 And, of course, you know, that legislation was pushed through and had some fundamental flaws in it, you know, but now it's time to inventory what's worked, what hasn't worked, and how do we create opportunities.

01:36:55.000 I think the other way to frame this topic is to, you know, now the buzz phrase is diversity, equity, and inclusion, right?

01:37:04.000 Equity has become a word that I think sounds great, right?

01:37:08.000 But I think it really alludes to equity of outcome, right?

01:37:12.000 And it often then becomes associated with, you know, income redistribution, for example, or something.

01:37:18.000 When I think we can all agree, who's going to be against equality of opportunity?

01:37:23.000 And so how come we can't inventory the obstacles that are preventing equality of opportunity?

01:37:30.000 Yeah.

01:37:30.000 And then try to overcome those obstacles with effective programs, you know, at the national level.

01:37:36.000 But I mean, really, many of these problems are local problems, right?

01:37:39.000 And whether it's, you know, whether it's education or homelessness or the drug problem associated with both of those.

01:37:47.000 And, you know, a lack of a sense of community, right?

01:37:50.000 I mean, there's a great organization here in Austin I've learned just a little bit about called Mobile Loaves and Fishes.

01:37:55.000 I don't know if you're aware of those guys.

01:37:57.000 Yeah.

01:37:58.000 But really, they want to create communities of knowledge and of caring, right?

01:38:04.000 And that's their way out, they think, the way out of the homeless problem or a way to mitigate it.

01:38:12.000 And what they found in their research is that Yeah.

01:38:23.000 Yeah.

01:38:25.000 Yeah.

01:38:37.000 But we are more and more disconnected than ever emotionally and socially and psychologically, right?

01:38:42.000 And the message we hear so often, you know, from the proponents of, you know, critical theory and so forth, is that you can empathize with people, right?

01:38:51.000 You have to sort people, you know, in a hierarchy of oppressors and victims, right?

01:38:58.000 And I just don't see America as being founded on that kind of a way of thinking about our society and what's possible in this country.

01:39:06.000 No, I don't think so either.

01:39:07.000 I think unfortunately there's some very charismatic people that promote those ideas for their own gain.

01:39:12.000 And that's where things get very slippery because people that are young and that are very sympathetic and very compassionate, they see those things.

01:39:22.000 They think this is the real problem with America.

01:39:24.000 And so they support these ideas and they don't necessarily understand the root of where it's coming from.

01:39:30.000 Right, absolutely.

01:39:31.000 And I think, you know, it's important to listen to alternative voices, right?

01:39:34.000 I mean, you know, I'm at the Hoover Institution where Thomas Sowell is, you know, the guy's...

01:39:39.000 He's amazing.

01:39:40.000 I think if you listen to Glenn Lowry, the next generation of someone who has a really strong and important message, I think, that can help bring Americans together.

01:39:49.000 You know, and to help us really work together to improve equality of opportunity.

01:39:55.000 And open communication is one of the most important things, which brings me back to the censorship that's on social media.

01:40:03.000 Do you think that the government has a role in mitigating some of the censorship that's on social media?

01:40:10.000 Do you think that...

01:40:11.000 Like, when Twitter first came around, it was basically just a place where people would post what they were doing today.

01:40:17.000 Like, you know...

01:40:18.000 Hey, me and HR are gonna go to the movies.

01:40:20.000 That kind of shit.

01:40:21.000 That's what it was.

01:40:21.000 And then it eventually became a key part of Arab Spring and it became a key part of how we disseminate information and how people find out the news and breaking world events.

01:40:33.000 And it's also one of the most important features in our society when it comes to whether it's Facebook, Twitter, YouTube.

01:40:43.000 These social media companies are the most important features when it comes to our ability to express ourselves and the ability to shift and change public narratives.

01:40:52.000 But they're being censored and they're being controlled by corporations and people will say, well, it's a private corporation.

01:41:00.000 They should have the ability to decide what is and isn't on their own platform and make their own standards.

01:41:04.000 But I think it's bigger than that now.

01:41:06.000 I really do.

01:41:07.000 And I think that they should be regulated the way utilities are.

01:41:10.000 I think not regulated in a sense of the government comes in and says what you can and can't say.

01:41:15.000 But the government says that you can't tell people what they can and can't say.

01:41:19.000 I think they should be protected by the First Amendment.

01:41:22.000 Right.

01:41:22.000 Yeah, I think so, too.

01:41:24.000 And, of course, then you have the problem of hate speech.

01:41:26.000 Right.

01:41:28.000 You know, who are part of the problem.

01:41:29.000 You also have foreign agents who are very active.

01:41:33.000 That's what I was getting to.

01:41:34.000 How do you mitigate that?

01:41:35.000 I think there has to be some degree of legislation, but there has to be kind of also the ability to have recourse in terms of...

01:41:47.000 Maybe civil suits and so forth.

01:41:49.000 What would you do to stop a troll farm, like the IRA? How would one stop that?

01:41:54.000 Well, you have to gain visibility of really their expropriation of sites, which is often what they do, and the false content that they...

01:42:06.000 You know, that they put on social media.

01:42:09.000 And, you know, I'll tell you, when we first got visibility of this, it was pretty easy to take some of that down or to understand, really, where it's coming from.

01:42:15.000 Like, for example, you know...

01:42:17.000 Well, I don't know if I can talk about this.

01:42:19.000 I can't talk about it.

01:42:20.000 Okay, but for example...

01:42:23.000 Can you tell me later?

01:42:25.000 Maybe.

01:42:26.000 Maybe?

01:42:27.000 I'm good at keeping secrets, man.

01:42:30.000 But, you know, it was very easy to see patterns associated with disinformation.

01:42:36.000 And then once we saw that, then we became more adept, partnering with others to, you know, to be able to take some of that content down.

01:42:44.000 But then they got better, right?

01:42:46.000 And if you look at, okay, if you look at now, this has been openly reported, that a lot of the Russian and Chinese disinformation is run out of places like Uganda.

01:42:54.000 You know, it's offshored.

01:42:56.000 So it's much more difficult now, right, to understand where it's coming from.

01:43:00.000 And then, of course, you have the condition these days where they don't have to create all the bad content.

01:43:07.000 They just have to amplify the bad content that's already there, that we're already doing.

01:43:10.000 We do this to ourselves fundamentally, Joe.

01:43:13.000 Right.

01:43:13.000 And then what they do is they widen the gaps between us and they make it worse.

01:43:18.000 What I think could help a lot is to try to generate what we could all agree or almost all of us could agree about.

01:43:29.000 Are, you know, are really verifiable, trusted sources of information, you know?

01:43:34.000 And this is part of the reform in the mainstream media effort.

01:43:38.000 This is what Barry Weiss is doing, right?

01:43:40.000 This is her agenda, right?

01:43:42.000 Is to create media alternatives that people can go to and have confidence in.

01:43:46.000 Yes.

01:43:47.000 And then there's a – I write about this in Battlegrounds.

01:43:51.000 There was a startup in Palo Alto called Soap AI. I don't think they really took off.

01:43:57.000 But the idea was that whatever's out there on social media, think of it like soap bubbles, like it's going to bubble up to the top.

01:44:03.000 So today we're talking about the engagement between the Russians and NATO, right?

01:44:08.000 So that's a big topic.

01:44:10.000 Well, if you have these kind of trusted sources of information and you want to know what think tanks are saying about it, what mainstream media is saying about it, you can then go to this kind of clearinghouse of various information sources and know that you're not going to get, like, the crazy stuff or the manipulative stuff.

01:44:26.000 So I think that there are ways to maybe block the bad content.

01:44:29.000 First of all, I would say, why the hell is it possible for the Chinese Communist Party to buy ads on Facebook Right?

01:44:37.000 When Facebook has no access into China.

01:44:39.000 And those ads are designed to advance the Chinese Communist Party's disinformation efforts, right?

01:44:45.000 I mean, that's crazy.

01:44:46.000 So there are some defensive measures that I think are no-brainers, right?

01:44:50.000 Don't allow state-supported content through the use of advertising.

01:44:53.000 But then from more of an offensive perspective, how do you create a space that people can trust and that people across the political spectrum can go to and know they can access reporting and opinions that will help them understand the issue better?

01:45:09.000 Well, I think even corporations are recognizing that the business model they have of this distorted news that's completely ideologically based, whether it's on the left or the right, is not as effective.

01:45:24.000 It's unwatchable.

01:45:26.000 Right, it is.

01:45:27.000 It's unwatchable.

01:45:27.000 Especially like CNN and MSNBC, and they're losing ratings in a staggering manner.

01:45:33.000 And I think that if you looked at the future, I think we're going to see corporate sponsored objective news make a resurgence because it's more profitable.

01:45:43.000 I think if you look at some of the real trusted news sources and particularly trusted journalists that are now operating on Substack.

01:45:52.000 Guys like Glenn Greenwald, Matt Taibbi, Barry Wise, these trusted journalists that have ethics and morals and values and they're not beholden to any corporation and their Substacks are taking off and now they're independent and more profitable than they've ever been before because they're trusted.

01:46:10.000 Yeah, absolutely.

01:46:11.000 And I think, you know, you can trust certain people.

01:46:13.000 Like, you know, I'll plug my colleagues, you know, Neil Ferguson, who I'm with at Hoover.

01:46:17.000 You know, he does a great weekly column.

01:46:18.000 You know, I think it's on Bloomberg, I think.

01:46:21.000 It's really, you know, really insightful, you know, and from the perspective of an economic historian about some of the big issues of the day.

01:46:28.000 John Cochran, another of my colleagues, has a blog post called The Grumpy Economist.

01:46:32.000 So, like, I'm not an economist, you know, but I hang out with them sometimes, but I still shouldn't talk about it because, you know, I'm not an expert on the economy.

01:46:39.000 But if you want to learn more about the economy, that's another great example of a place to go, right?

01:46:43.000 So I think you can find places that put together, like, if you're interested in China, there's a China Weekly Alert.

01:46:51.000 That the Hoover Institution puts out.

01:46:53.000 It's worth signing up for.

01:46:54.000 You can skim through it.

01:46:54.000 It's well categorized.

01:46:56.000 And, you know, I'm partial to and I'm affiliated with the Hudson Institute and Foundation for Defense of Democracy, who also have these weekly compendia, right?

01:47:05.000 And so what I do is, you know, I skim through that in the morning, you know, and I like when there are summaries because you can see what it's about.

01:47:12.000 You know, there's a guy named Bill Bishop who does a newsletter called Cynicism.

01:47:17.000 Which is phenomenal.

01:47:18.000 He has eight points every day that's relevant to China.

01:47:21.000 So, I mean, find these sources, listen to your podcast, you know, when you're working out and everything, and then skim through these other sources and curate your own go-to places, you know, where you have confidence in the information and the analysis.

01:47:37.000 Right.

01:47:37.000 And it's hard for people to find those sources.

01:47:40.000 I'm glad you listed those, and we talked about the guys and gals on Substack and the like, but for a lot of people, they're getting their news from the New York Times and from these publications that are mainstream publications that were previously very trusted and now at least are sometimes suspect.

01:47:59.000 And I think you need a grounding of it.

01:48:01.000 So, you know, I'll tell you, I don't do this.

01:48:03.000 I'm not a plugger of my book or anything.

01:48:05.000 But I made a mission statement for myself when I left, you know, 34 years of service in the Army.

01:48:11.000 And it was to contribute to a deeper and more full understanding of the most important challenges and opportunities we face as a way to bring Americans together for respectful, meaningful discussions.

01:48:21.000 And to help us understand better how we can work together to build a better future.

01:48:25.000 I wanted to help reverse the polarization, you know, and that's what motivated me to take on this book.

01:48:30.000 And I worked with, you know, I worked with like, you know, 20 to 30 research assistants who are phenomenal at Stanford.

01:48:36.000 And, you know, I was cursing myself through the middle of it, man, thinking, what the hell did I do taking this on?

01:48:42.000 This is a big-ass book.

01:48:43.000 Well...

01:48:44.000 That's a real book.

01:48:45.000 It's a page turner, though, man.

01:48:47.000 It's a page turner.

01:48:47.000 I'm sure.

01:48:48.000 But if you want to learn about Afghanistan or South Asia or Iran or North Korea, the way I organized this was I outlined it.

01:48:57.000 Initially, I was going to have like one chapter on each.

01:48:58.000 I couldn't do it, man.

01:48:59.000 So there's a chapter on how the recent past produced the present because I believe that that's important, right?

01:49:06.000 If you're going to make a projection to the future, you have to know kind of what's happened in the past, right?

01:49:10.000 And then the second chapter is, okay, what the hell do we do about it, right?

01:49:14.000 And I mean, I'm not saying I'm right about this stuff, but I think that, you know, the details and the stories that I tell in this and about previous efforts to, like, get Iran to denuclearize or North Korea to denuclearize, I mean, we ought to at least take a vow,

01:49:29.000 like, not to repeat the same mistakes of the past, right?

01:49:33.000 To try something different.

01:49:34.000 And And the idea behind it is that we have to improve our strategic competence, right?

01:49:41.000 And the reason we're incompetent, I think, these days is this idea of narcissism, looking at the world only relation to us, right?

01:49:48.000 Not recognizing the agency and influence of others, but also not recognizing how important it is to integrate ourselves.

01:49:55.000 Like, all elements of national power and efforts of like-minded partners, right, to help shift the balance or situation in our favor and to compete more effectively.

01:50:06.000 I mean, I'll tell you, Joe, we stopped competing at the end of the Cold War.

01:50:10.000 I mean, I think we...

01:50:11.000 And after the Gulf War, I think we thought, hey, it's easy from this point on.

01:50:16.000 And I think we're waking up to really important 21st century competitions.

01:50:21.000 When you say competing, in what way do we stop competing?

01:50:24.000 Well, we stop competing, I think, from a diplomatic perspective because we assumed, you know, that great power competition was over.

01:50:31.000 So, you know, one of the quotes I use is from John Kerry, you know, when he was Secretary of State.

01:50:37.000 Remember when...

01:50:39.000 Do you remember when Russia invaded Ukraine and that is Crimea in 2014?

01:50:44.000 He said, gosh, you know, that was so 18th century.

01:50:47.000 Well, no, actually, it happened in 2014. There was this assumption that we're going to have to compete like that anymore.

01:50:54.000 And what I think about is this failure to understand that the world was competitive.

01:51:00.000 It led to over-optimism in the 90s and I think a tendency to under-appreciate the costs and consequences of action, right?

01:51:10.000 And I think Iraq invasion 2003 is a great example of that, right?

01:51:13.000 Again, I think we ought to debate, okay, who the hell thought it would be easy, right?

01:51:17.000 Rather than should we have done it?

01:51:19.000 And I think it was because we assumed, right, that wars would be fast, cheap, efficient.

01:51:23.000 But then once we confronted, right, these series of blows, right, the unanticipated length and cost of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, financial crisis, 2008, 2009, Obama administration comes in.

01:51:34.000 And what the Obama administration does is I think that they replaced optimism, right?

01:51:39.000 With pessimism and almost resignation.

01:51:42.000 And I think it's fair to say that the Bush administration underappreciated the risks and costs of action, but also fair to say that the Obama administration underappreciated the risks and costs of inaction and disengagement.

01:51:54.000 And, you know, one of those examples is the complete withdrawal from Iraq in December 2011, right?

01:51:59.000 Lloyd Austin, General Austin, great guy, he's now the Secretary of Defense.

01:52:04.000 He was there, right, when Vice President Biden went to Baghdad.

01:52:09.000 We're good to go.

01:52:21.000 Think about the arrogance associated with that.

01:52:23.000 Hey, man, wars don't end when one party disengages.

01:52:27.000 And so what you had is you had the reinvigoration of Al-Qaeda in Iraq, which morphed into ISIS, which, you know, which by, you know, by three years later had taken over territory the size of Britain, became the most destructive terrorist organization in history, you know, conducted, you know,

01:52:43.000 190-some attacks outside, you know, outside of the area they controlled in Syria and Iraq.

01:52:51.000 And guess what?

01:52:51.000 Hey, we had to go back, right?

01:52:53.000 We had to go back and conduct a sustained campaign really until, you know, 2018, 2017, 2018 against ISIS. You know, and so I think the Libya war is another example, right?

01:53:05.000 The unenforced red line in Syria.

01:53:06.000 I think you can draw a direct line from the unenforced red line in Syria.

01:53:11.000 This is when President Obama had said, hey, I think he said it in 2012, 2013, you know, if you use chemical weapons and commit mass murder with chemical weapons, that's our red line.

01:53:21.000 I mean, Assad in Syria did it, right?

01:53:24.000 Murdered hundreds of people, hundreds of children, right, in a nerve agent attack.

01:53:29.000 And we didn't do anything except invite the Russians in, right, under this idea that they're going to get rid of the chemical weapons, which they didn't do.

01:53:35.000 Wasn't there some controversy as to whether Assad actually did that or whether it was a false flag?

01:53:39.000 It wasn't a false flag.

01:53:40.000 There's no way.

01:53:41.000 Yeah, I mean, no way.

01:53:42.000 But there was controversy?

01:53:43.000 Yeah, there was.

01:53:44.000 And I'll tell you why.

01:53:45.000 Is what the Assad regime and the Russians especially do...

01:53:50.000 Is they send out false reports of jihadist terrorists, right?

01:53:55.000 Like Al-Qaeda or Al-Nusra using chemical attacks.

01:53:58.000 And they do that as to kind of set up their disinformation campaign.

01:54:03.000 And so the disinformation campaign would be that another foreign agent empowered Al-Qaeda or some other terrorist cell.

01:54:11.000 Right.

01:54:11.000 Or they took over captured stocks.

01:54:13.000 To do this and then blame it on Assad.

01:54:16.000 Right.

01:54:17.000 Right.

01:54:17.000 Yeah.

01:54:17.000 So that we would then take action against Assad.

01:54:20.000 It's very confusing for someone on the outside trying to pay attention to all this.

01:54:23.000 Which is what the Russians want, right?

01:54:25.000 So in the book, I describe Russia's strategy, another string of alliterative words, you know, is disruption, disinformation, and denial, right?

01:54:35.000 So Russia disrupts, right?

01:54:37.000 You see what they're doing right now.

01:54:38.000 They're massing on the Ukrainian border.

01:54:39.000 Disrupt there.

01:54:41.000 They're weaponizing migrants.

01:54:43.000 You've talked about this on the border of Poland through Belarus, right?

01:54:48.000 They're active in Syria enabling Assad's serial episodes of mass homicide there.

01:54:54.000 They're in Libya.

01:54:55.000 They're encouraging Serbska to secede from Bosnia-Herzegovina to start really another Balkans conflict.

01:55:02.000 They're intervening in Kazakhstan, right?

01:55:03.000 So they're disrupting cyber attacks, right?

01:55:06.000 You know, the cyber attacks that we've seen, solar winds, for example.

01:55:09.000 So disruption, and then disinformation, right?

01:55:13.000 And my friend Mark Sidwell, who was the National Security Advisor for the UK, he used to call it implausible deniability.

01:55:19.000 Remember when they shot down the airliner?

01:55:21.000 You know, I think 2014, 2015, 2014?

01:55:25.000 That wasn't us.

01:55:27.000 Well, you know, on social media, this is going to power social media, right?

01:55:29.000 I mean, people are taking the photographs of the air defense missiles rolling in, shooting, you know, the debris of the...

01:55:36.000 I mean, so it was inescapable that they shot it down.

01:55:39.000 And then they just deny, really, you know, even their most egregious acts.

01:55:45.000 And that's what Russia does.

01:55:46.000 Like Russia now is saying, you saw the statement maybe, you know, last couple days, hey, you know, we don't really want to invade Ukraine.

01:55:52.000 Well, when they say that, what they mean is, yeah, they really do want to invade Ukraine.

01:55:56.000 It's the opposite of reality.

01:55:58.000 I would never advocate that we follow this pattern, but how much of a disadvantage is it in this country that we have at least the potential for a new president every four years to eight years?

01:56:11.000 That when every four years someone comes on the job and they're really new, You know, they don't really know.

01:56:19.000 They have to sit down with someone like you and get an assessment of what's going on in the world.

01:56:22.000 They have to figure out what to do and what not to do.

01:56:25.000 I mean, there's so much, I would imagine, that a president doesn't understand until they get into office.

01:56:31.000 Whereas someone like Putin has been in power for how many decades now?

01:56:35.000 Yeah, since 2000. He came in on January 1st.

01:56:39.000 Yeah.

01:56:40.000 Gave a speech that if you go back to that speech, he kind of lays out what he's doing right now, you know?

01:56:45.000 Yeah.

01:56:45.000 Restore Russia to national greatness.

01:56:47.000 He is driven by a sense of honor lost associated with the breakup of the Soviet Union and this associated drive to restore Russia to national greatness.

01:56:57.000 But his advantage being that he has been in that position of power now for 20 years.

01:57:03.000 Yeah.

01:57:04.000 And this 20-year gap between – the difference between 20 years and someone just getting into office is hugely significant.

01:57:11.000 It is.

01:57:12.000 And the biggest disadvantage is continuity in policy, right?

01:57:16.000 And I think that there's a way around that.

01:57:18.000 I mean, we wouldn't want to give up our democratic system.

01:57:20.000 We wouldn't want to Of course.

01:57:21.000 To give up our say and, you know, who's in the Oval Office and make sure that the president, you know, is beholden to the American people, like Putin is not beholden to the Russian people.

01:57:31.000 But I think that the way to do that is, again, to, you know, have the kind of discussions we're having, you know, to understand.

01:57:38.000 The problems we're facing to build more consensus that's not partisan.

01:57:42.000 I mean, it's not that we, you know, I don't mind about, like, disunity, right?

01:57:46.000 I mean, we don't have to all be unified on everything.

01:57:47.000 We should have different opinions, right?

01:57:49.000 Sure.

01:57:49.000 But on certain areas, there should be a general consensus that transcends both political parties, right?

01:57:56.000 And especially in the area of foreign policy and maybe even long-term economic policy as well, you know?

01:58:01.000 And the sad part about it is that that's not been the case.

01:58:05.000 And, you know, what I read about is this tendency For new administrations to come in to define their policy mainly as an opposition to those who have gone before them, right?

01:58:15.000 And I think this was the case with the Obama administration, right?

01:58:18.000 The Obama administration's foreign policy was a reaction to President Obama's opposition to the Iraq war.

01:58:25.000 And you can almost see...

01:58:27.000 Every decision he makes, especially in connection with the Middle East and South Asia, through that lens, right?

01:58:32.000 And I think that was the impulse for Trump, too, because of Obama's policies, although I think there were a lot of corrections to policy that were long overdue when Trump came in.

01:58:43.000 And I think most of his foreign policy adjustments were positive, with the exception of, I would say, South Asia and Afghanistan, which was a disaster, you know?

01:58:51.000 Yeah.

01:58:52.000 But, you know, I think that we have to demand more from our leaders again and that they not compromise, you know, our prosperity, our security for partisan advantage.

01:59:04.000 Is there any other way that we can mitigate the advantage that someone that has a long reign like Putin or Xi Jinping has?

01:59:12.000 Right.

01:59:12.000 Again, I think it's being educated about the issues, but then it's also, I think, cultivating bipartisan support.

01:59:17.000 So whenever we were going to put in a big change to policy, right?

01:59:20.000 So we're smoking these cigars that are actually made in Miami by Cubans who came to the United States.

01:59:29.000 We put a huge shift in policy on Cuba, you know, between Obama and Trump.

01:59:35.000 And as we were doing that, we held sessions with members of Congress.

01:59:40.000 With a session for those who were in favor of the Obama policy, those who were in favor of the Trump policy, what became the Trump policy, and we heard from them at the beginning, explained our rationale to both of them, and I think the policy has a certain degree of bipartisan support.

01:59:55.000 The same thing with the China policy, for example.

01:59:58.000 I think...

01:59:59.000 You know, these days, I mean, you can't distinguish from what, you know, Tom Cotton is saying and what Senator Schumer is saying on China, right?

02:00:07.000 I mean, they're pretty much the same message, right?

02:00:09.000 So we can do it, you know, and I think on Russia there's a degree of bipartisan support on what we need to do.

02:00:15.000 I think the administration is dropping the ball on this a little bit in terms of actions necessary to deter Russia.

02:00:20.000 But...

02:00:21.000 Like Nord Stream 2 and then also the military component of deterrence I think is lacking in connection with the actions toward Ukraine.

02:00:29.000 So perhaps our opposition to what we deem as a real threat, whether it's China or Russia, could be something that unites us.

02:00:37.000 Or a real opportunity too, right?

02:00:38.000 So, you know, hey, everybody's talking about climate, carbon emissions and how that relates now to energy security, for example.

02:00:47.000 Those are all interconnected, right?

02:00:49.000 Those are interconnected problems.

02:00:50.000 And so what is the solution to that, to reducing carbon emissions without constraining economic growth, ensuring economic security?

02:00:57.000 I mean, we're beginning to realize the components of that because we're seeing Germany can't keep the lights on, man.

02:01:03.000 And their gas prices are going through the roof.

02:01:06.000 Because they just said, okay, we're going to jump right to renewables.

02:01:09.000 And we're going to shut down nuclear at the same time.

02:01:12.000 Well, you can't do that.

02:01:13.000 So what are they doing?

02:01:14.000 They're doing what China's doing, which is they're burning more coal, which is the most damaging, right, to the environment.

02:01:19.000 So what is the solution?

02:01:20.000 Well, it has multiple components.

02:01:23.000 It does involve nuclear, right, for sure.

02:01:25.000 And the EU is debating this right now, whether this is going to be a green source of energy.

02:01:29.000 I think it has to be.

02:01:30.000 It's the most green.

02:01:31.000 That's what's so crazy.

02:01:32.000 Especially next generation, right?

02:01:34.000 Next generation.

02:01:35.000 And then natural gas as a bridge into getting off of coal is immensely important.

02:01:41.000 And then, of course, all the range of renewables, right?

02:01:44.000 From solar to wind and so forth.

02:01:46.000 But it's worth pointing out, man, that if every car in China is electric, And they're charged with electricity that comes from coal-fired plants?

02:01:54.000 Right.

02:01:54.000 It doesn't make a difference, man.

02:01:55.000 It's actually worse.

02:01:55.000 It doesn't make a difference at all.

02:01:56.000 It's worse, yeah.

02:01:57.000 And then you're dealing with conflict minerals as well, that they control the resources.

02:02:01.000 Right.

02:02:01.000 So how is it that energy policy is partisan, man?

02:02:06.000 Right.

02:02:07.000 I mean, it's crazy.

02:02:08.000 It's crazy.

02:02:09.000 It's weird.

02:02:11.000 We're so divided as a country politically that any time there's a topic that gets adopted by either the left or the right, the opposite side opposes it.

02:02:20.000 And whatever it is, gun control, free speech, whatever it is, censorship, energy.

02:02:28.000 It's crazy.

02:02:29.000 And it leads to this illogical stuff.

02:02:30.000 Like, the senators from Massachusetts are calling for price freezes on natural gas while they're canceling pipelines, you know, that would have helped make natural gas, you know, more readily available.

02:02:41.000 You know, they have to actually import Russian natural gas to Massachusetts, right?

02:02:46.000 To Boston, yeah.

02:02:47.000 Really?

02:02:48.000 Yeah, because our infrastructure is not mature enough to use U.S. natural gas.

02:02:52.000 And we're exporting LNG. I mean, it's just...

02:02:54.000 It leads to all this nonsensical...

02:02:56.000 So we canceled a Canadian pipeline, right?

02:02:59.000 And then greenlighted a Russian one.

02:03:01.000 And then by canceling the Canadian one, now we're forcing Canada to sell more to China and giving China economic leverage over Canada.

02:03:07.000 I mean, it's just...

02:03:08.000 It's like we don't think this stuff through.

02:03:10.000 And the Canadian pipeline canceling was due to environmental concerns, right?

02:03:14.000 When in fact, it would have been much better for the environment to have the pipeline than to move oil on rail lines.

02:03:21.000 Was the concern though some sort of a spill or some sort of an underground leak or anything that could happen that could damage streams and waterways?

02:03:29.000 Absolutely.

02:03:29.000 But actually, the chance of a damaging spill is much greater if you're moving it by rail instead of through the pipeline.

02:03:37.000 Yeah.

02:03:38.000 I mean, any Yahoo can just lay some shit over the tracks, which is crazy.

02:03:43.000 Right.

02:03:43.000 And just the whole process of transferring it and everything.

02:03:47.000 How much of a concern is the vulnerability of our power grid?

02:03:52.000 Yeah, it's a big concern.

02:03:54.000 It's a huge concern.

02:03:55.000 And I think that, you know, we're waking up to it.

02:03:59.000 We're doing a much better work now.

02:04:01.000 You have an organization that was established early in the Trump administration called the Cyber and Infrastructure Security Agency, which is working with all sorts of service providers and owners of critical infrastructure, power, water,

02:04:17.000 transportation.

02:04:19.000 To establish and help them come up to standards in these areas.

02:04:23.000 Now, pipelines, for example, were voluntary, right?

02:04:27.000 A voluntary participant, unlike utilities, which are mandatory participant.

02:04:31.000 And of course, we saw that problem with the Colonial Pipeline and the hack on the ransomware on the Colonial Pipeline.

02:04:38.000 So I think we're getting better at it.

02:04:40.000 But the problem is, Joe, I mean, hackers are getting better and better.

02:04:45.000 Their skill sets are transferable across borders among hostile nations, which I think are cooperating with each other to develop capabilities.

02:04:53.000 And I would say those that, you know, that includes Russia, China, you know, obviously, you know, Iran, North Korea are at the top list of the state actors we're concerned about.

02:05:03.000 And then the surface area that they can attack us on is just getting bigger and bigger, right, because of the Internet of Things and everything's connected and so forth.

02:05:11.000 So what we need is we need defensive measures so that our infrastructure would degrade gracefully rather than fail catastrophically, like maybe we are at our age, you know, degrading gracefully.

02:05:24.000 And then But then also, you need all companies, you know, private companies that have responsibility for critical infrastructure, communications, and so forth included, to look at their enterprise, you know, as Fort Knox,

02:05:40.000 right?

02:05:40.000 And the data that they have and the infrastructure that they have has got to be the gold that they're protecting.

02:05:45.000 And the only way to do that is with kind of a multi-layered defense where you're cognizant of the threats that are out there, which has more and more of an offensive component to it.

02:05:55.000 And then also to really harden your enterprise, not only from hacking, but physical infiltration and from a traditional counterintelligence capability and so forth.

02:06:08.000 So I think this holistic approach to security is growing in the private sector.

02:06:12.000 The government is helping more and more.

02:06:15.000 But I think what's going to have to happen is more and more offensive capability against these actors.

02:06:20.000 And I think that we still have the best people at this.

02:06:24.000 And the idea here is that if you think of your surface area for a cyberattack, As being subjected to a bunch of arrows that are just being shot into it all the time.

02:06:34.000 I mean, you can shoot down the arrows, right?

02:06:37.000 But you're not going to maybe get all of them.

02:06:38.000 You got to go after the archer as well.

02:06:41.000 So the offensive component of cyber defense is really important.

02:06:44.000 It's important that those who are doing that for us, you know, have the authorities to do it.

02:06:50.000 Those who are defending our.gov, like our government internet and.mil, the military internet, they do a good job at this.

02:06:59.000 I mean, actually, the head of NSA, I mean, sometimes the government puts the right guy in the right place, man.

02:07:04.000 They did it this time with General Paul Nakasone.

02:07:07.000 He's phenomenal, you know, phenomenal guy.

02:07:10.000 I think we need something now for the dot-com, you know, the rest of our internet, an organization that's more active.

02:07:18.000 So perhaps another organization, like a new organization, is dedicated to that?

02:07:22.000 A new organization with different authorities, maybe, but tied, obviously, to the other kind of intelligence work that we're doing in that field.

02:07:28.000 What about the physical vulnerabilities in terms of not a cyber attack on our power grid, but a physical attack on it?

02:07:34.000 I mean, is there any way we can mitigate that?

02:07:36.000 Because, you know, one of the things we found in Texas last year when we almost lost the power grid was it's terrifying the idea that a grid can go down.

02:07:46.000 And then I started thinking about, like, well, what about the entire national grid?

02:07:50.000 Like, if...

02:07:51.000 If something happened physically, if there was some sort of a joint effort by multiple players to simultaneously attack our power grid, I mean, it would be devastating.

02:08:01.000 It would be.

02:08:02.000 And this is why you need systems that degrade gracefully, right?

02:08:04.000 I mean, so we can learn from the experiences of others.

02:08:07.000 When Russia invaded Ukraine and asked Crimea, they tried to shut down the power, right?

02:08:13.000 But the Ukrainian system was old, you know?

02:08:16.000 And I'm picturing a guy like in great coveralls, man.

02:08:19.000 He goes in the back room, throws the switch on, you know, and the power came back on.

02:08:23.000 So much of our systems are exclusively digital and so forth.

02:08:28.000 There are some private companies now that are being formed by really bright people.

02:08:32.000 This is why, this is our advantage, man.

02:08:34.000 I mean, it's our unbridled entrepreneurialism, right?

02:08:38.000 And I know some of the people who have formed some of these companies because they teach at the Graduate School of Business at Stanford.

02:08:43.000 And these are people who have We've formed companies who will design solutions for resilience in power grids, right?

02:08:52.000 And they're developing all sorts of new techniques.

02:08:54.000 I think it's analogous to the wildfires in California, right?

02:08:58.000 And now, you know, too late.

02:09:01.000 You know, PG&E, for example, you know, the power company in the north.

02:09:05.000 Realize, well, I guess maybe we should bury our electrical lines.

02:09:09.000 And maybe we should put wind monitors up in areas of high risk and so forth.

02:09:15.000 So I think what we have to do is imagine what could happen.

02:09:21.000 And as almost a worst case scenario, and then understand what we have to do now to prevent that from happening.

02:09:28.000 Because what we often do is, you know, after a colonial pipeline attack or after the attack on our financial sector, this goes back to, I think, 2012 when the Iranians attacked our, you know, our financial institutions with denial of service attacks.

02:09:41.000 Our financial sector got much better at cyber defense in partnership with, you know, with the government and experts in the government.

02:09:49.000 So I think it's time for that now in these other sectors of critical infrastructure.

02:09:54.000 And there's a growing awareness of it.

02:09:55.000 You know, there's a mapping of the critical infrastructure.

02:09:57.000 There are good organizations working on this.

02:09:59.000 There's a pseudo-think tank that a lot of people don't know about called MITRE Corporation that is partly government-funded, and they do a lot of really good research in this area.

02:10:09.000 But the key is incentivizing the change, right?

02:10:12.000 You got to get people to realize, hey, don't wait for the day after the attack.

02:10:16.000 Do it now.

02:10:17.000 There's two key areas of concern that a lot of people have in regard to foreign relations.

02:10:24.000 One of them is if China attacks Taiwan, and the other is if Russia attacks Ukraine.

02:10:31.000 Now, what if they attacked both of them simultaneously?

02:10:34.000 What if there was a coordinated effort to create a real chaotic situation where America had to act, or the possibility that America had to act?

02:10:45.000 What do you think would happen in that?

02:10:47.000 Are we in the position where we would have the potential for a hot war?

02:10:53.000 Absolutely.

02:10:54.000 I'm really concerned about the erosion of deterrence, right?

02:10:57.000 And deterrence by denial.

02:11:00.000 You know, there's a guy named Thomas Schelling wrote about this in the 1960s.

02:11:03.000 And essentially, deterrence by denial is convincing your potential enemy that the enemy cannot accomplish his objectives, right, through the use of force.

02:11:12.000 And the basic equation for this is capability times will, right?

02:11:17.000 You need the capability to impose costs on them beyond the ones that they would accept.

02:11:21.000 And they need to believe that you have the will to do it, right?

02:11:24.000 And I think we're deficient in both areas now.

02:11:27.000 You know, the defense budget is big, you know, and people talk about the amount we spend on defense and so forth.

02:11:33.000 But we are addressing a huge bow wave of deferred modernization in the military, again, based on this assumption that we were the top dog.

02:11:41.000 You know, our security would be guaranteed by America's technological military prowess.

02:11:47.000 Well, Russia and China, they studied us, really going back to the ass-kicking that we gave the sixth largest army in the world in Desert Storm.

02:11:55.000 And they said, okay, how do we take apart this American system, joint system?

02:11:59.000 Counter satellite.

02:12:00.000 Offensive cyber capabilities.

02:12:02.000 Tiered and layered air defense.

02:12:04.000 Drones, like swarm drones undersea and unmanned aerial systems.

02:12:10.000 How about electromagnetic warfare capabilities?

02:12:13.000 Long range fires, like hypersonic missiles, but just long range missiles overall.

02:12:18.000 And so they developed a suite of capabilities, not to replicate like our advantages in stealth, but to break apart like our short communications and our precision strike capabilities.

02:12:28.000 And so what we need now are countermeasures to those countermeasures, right?

02:12:33.000 To make our force more resilient and to demonstrate to Russia and to China, hey, you know, don't take us on because we can deal with all this.

02:12:43.000 And then the other aspect is will.

02:12:45.000 And I'll tell you, Joe, after the humiliating—I call it a surrender— I really think that there's a perception that we don't have the will, you know, to stand up to them.

02:12:58.000 And I think what's analogous is, again, we were talking earlier about the unenforced red line in Syria, 2014. I think you draw a direct line from that to the annexation of Crimea and the invasion of Ukraine, to the building of violence in the South China Sea,

02:13:13.000 you know, and I think Russia and China just concluded, hey, the Americans aren't going to do anything.

02:13:17.000 So, you know, I think it's important what the Biden administration is doing now on, you know, on threatening economic sanctions on Russia.

02:13:27.000 But, you know, I don't understand why we wouldn't do something like deploy a task force to Romania, right, who's on kind of the front line.

02:13:34.000 That's a NATO country, right?

02:13:35.000 You know, the auspices of deterrence or an exercise.

02:13:39.000 Because what Russia really wants to do is send the message, really, to countries in the Black Sea area, like, who's your daddy?

02:13:44.000 That's the message, right?

02:13:45.000 Right.

02:13:47.000 And so I think there has to be a military component of deterrence.

02:13:51.000 You see a lot of measures taken in the Pacific, Indo-Pacific, to deter more effectively.

02:13:56.000 The quad format, which is India, Australia, Japan, and the U.S., that's tighter diplomatic cooperation, military exercises.

02:14:05.000 You see, just in the last couple of days, Australia and Japan are going to enter into a defense relationship.

02:14:11.000 And then, remember the AUKUS thing at the end of last year, the Australia-U.S., You know, and UK agreement.

02:14:19.000 So I think that countries are realizing that together, we have to send the message to Xi Jinping and the CCP. Listen, you know, you may say you're going to make China whole again, that you're going to say that, you know, that you're going to resolve the Taiwan issue, but you can only do that at an exorbitant cost.

02:14:38.000 When people, particularly people on the left, discuss the military, one of the things that comes up all the time is the defense budget and the rising defense budget is always criticized as being extraordinarily expensive and not necessary and the result of corruption and the influence of the military-industrial complex and that we create tension and conflicts overseas so that we could justify these budgets.

02:15:04.000 Yeah.

02:15:04.000 In your opinion, do you think that's accurate?

02:15:07.000 Or do you think that we actually probably have an underfunded military and we need more resources and more money?

02:15:15.000 I believe we're underfunded, right?

02:15:17.000 And I know that's controversial.

02:15:18.000 People are going to roll their eyes, right?

02:15:20.000 I know.

02:15:21.000 You can hear them rolling their eyes in Starbucks.

02:15:23.000 I know.

02:15:23.000 And the military-industrial complex, and that's a career I had and so forth.

02:15:28.000 But I think what you have to do is look at the numbers.

02:15:31.000 First of all, Russia and China lie about their numbers.

02:15:35.000 So you often hear that America spends more on defense than the next 10 combined or whatever.

02:15:41.000 But what you have to realize is China's going to surpass us in...

02:15:48.000 Enforce modernization, right, and purchase of weapons in about the next, you know, five years or so.

02:15:55.000 You know, so China has increased its defense budget 800 percent since the mid-90s.

02:16:04.000 The other aspect of our budget is we are burdened by a lot of personnel costs that they're not burdened by.

02:16:09.000 And this is our retirement, you know, I'm getting a pension, you know, and the salary for our soldiers because we have an all-volunteer force and our servicemen and women I think deserve to be paid for what they do.

02:16:22.000 So you have to really look at the numbers.

02:16:24.000 The organization that's done some really good work on it is the Heritage Foundation.

02:16:28.000 They're a conservative think tank in D.C. But they're very good on defense.

02:16:34.000 And they have a recent paper where they just lay out the numbers.

02:16:37.000 Hey, you always hear this about defense.

02:16:39.000 Here's what the reality is.

02:16:40.000 And that doesn't mean there's not waste in defense.

02:16:42.000 Hey, believe me.

02:16:43.000 But, you know, what happened, Joe, over the years is...

02:16:47.000 Is with, you know, with the Budget Control Act, you know, and what's called sequestration, which means you couldn't do multi-year budgeting and you had to, you couldn't project further out.

02:16:59.000 It made the Defense Department do a lot of illogical things.

02:17:02.000 Like we held on to legacy systems that are super hard to maintain when we could be purchasing more capable weapons, right?

02:17:10.000 Really a reduced cost over the life cycle, for example.

02:17:13.000 So there are a lot of procedural changes that have to be made.

02:17:17.000 You know, there's a guy named Chris Brose who wrote a great book on this, you know, about what needs to happen to fix defense.

02:17:25.000 It's pretty accessible.

02:17:26.000 It's really well laid out.

02:17:28.000 And I think that it's time, you know, to change our processes that will help us eliminate the waste.

02:17:33.000 But I do think that the defense budget is underfunded.

02:17:36.000 Now, Congress, I think the Biden budget that went to Congress would have been really, you know, a kick in the ass and diminished our defense capabilities.

02:17:47.000 But the Senate approved a budget that was, I think, $25 billion more than the president asked for because they realized bipartisan, you know, which is another one of the few areas where there's bipartisanship is in the National Defense Authorization Act, that that would have been disastrous for deterrence.

02:18:04.000 Because ultimately, what do you want the military to do, right?

02:18:06.000 You want the military...

02:18:07.000 To deter conflict, right?

02:18:10.000 It was George Washington who said that being prepared for war is the most effectual means of preserving peace, right?

02:18:17.000 And then, of course, you want your sons and daughters who are in the military to be able to respond with what they need to fight, right?

02:18:24.000 To fight and win, right?

02:18:26.000 If deterrence fails.

02:18:27.000 Right.

02:18:28.000 One of the most controversial ideas that's floated about when it comes to the military is the idea of compulsory service.

02:18:37.000 Obviously, some countries have this.

02:18:39.000 Famously, Israel has this.

02:18:42.000 I'm not saying I'm a proponent or an opponent of it, but it seems to foster a level of patriotism in Israel.

02:18:53.000 That is not necessarily present in all of America.

02:18:59.000 It's present in a lot of America, but there's certain parts of America.

02:19:03.000 Look, I had an American flag in my LA studio behind me, and someone accused me of being racist for having an American flag behind me.

02:19:12.000 Which is one of the craziest things I've ever heard in my life.

02:19:15.000 Like, oh, it says a lot about you that you have an American flag behind you.

02:19:19.000 Like, bitch, you live in America.

02:19:20.000 The fuck are you talking about?

02:19:22.000 That's the dumbest thing I've ever heard in my life.

02:19:24.000 America's all of us.

02:19:25.000 It's supposed to be a community.

02:19:26.000 Like, that flag, to me, represents opportunity and freedom and a community.

02:19:31.000 It doesn't represent the worst aspects of what the American regimes have done.

02:19:35.000 It represents the best of what we are as a whole.

02:19:39.000 Do you think that there is a place for the discussion of compulsory enrollment?

02:19:46.000 That service, whatever, a year term or something like that, and even if it's not compulsory, even if you're not required to do it, that there might be some great incentive that would go along with a short stint in the military that,

02:20:04.000 of course, you could lead to a career in the military if you so chose, but that You would say to people that there's some benefit to doing this, and it would give us a better understanding of what it really truly means to serve, what it truly means to be a part of this military,

02:20:20.000 and what it truly means to be a part of America.

02:20:24.000 Yeah, I think those are all the advantages.

02:20:26.000 I mean, those are clear advantages, right, to compulsory service.

02:20:30.000 But, you know, I think that what, of course, is difficult in the military is you need to build an organization that can fight, right?

02:20:37.000 Right.

02:20:37.000 And what's amazing about our military are the young men and women who join our military.

02:20:42.000 I'll tell you, I mean, I... Anybody who doubts really the direction our country's taking or our future just needs to go visit like an army platoon or company and talk to those people who have volunteered to serve their country.

02:20:59.000 They're phenomenal people.

02:21:00.000 And I'll tell you, the younger generation, they're much pilloried, man.

02:21:04.000 They're always criticized as this or that or...

02:21:08.000 I'll tell you.

02:21:08.000 I mean, those, you know, some 17, but, you know, 18, 19-year-olds, I commanded Fort Benning, Georgia, right, which is kind of the, you know, it's a gem in the Army.

02:21:19.000 You know, it's where we train all of our infantry, armor, and cavalry forces, you know, and— And when those basic training graduations, man, I mean, anybody goes, if you're around Columbus, Georgia, go to one of those, right?

02:21:32.000 They're right off post by the National Infantry Museum and Museum of the Soldier there.

02:21:37.000 That's a great spot to visit.

02:21:39.000 And so I think that what Americans should understand, first of all, are the tremendous rewards of service, right?

02:21:46.000 I think, Joe, like this whole, I call it the valorization of victimhood.

02:21:51.000 Right?

02:21:52.000 Where I think that the perspective people have on soldiers, on servicemen and women, is that they're kind of hapless, you know, victims of circumstance, that they don't exercise agency, right?

02:22:04.000 And demonstrate combat prowess, because we don't cover any of that anymore.

02:22:09.000 Right.

02:22:09.000 And, you know, American soldiers are warriors who are committed to each other and they're committed to a mission bigger than themselves.

02:22:16.000 And what you see is what you're alluding to in terms of, like, the cohesion that builds.

02:22:20.000 I mean, you know, people come from all over the country, right?

02:22:22.000 They come from all different, you know, backgrounds, identity categories, whatever.

02:22:27.000 And of course, they're going to bring with them certain prejudices and biases.

02:22:31.000 But I'll tell you, when you put people together in a challenging circumstance, you know, and they have to rely on each other as a team, all that melts away, right?

02:22:40.000 And they judge each other by their character and their toughness and their courage, right?

02:22:44.000 And their selflessness and their sense of honor, right?

02:22:48.000 Their willingness to sacrifice.

02:22:51.000 That's the warrior ethos that binds these organizations together.

02:22:55.000 And that makes them great soldiers.

02:22:57.000 It also makes them great citizens, too, you know?

02:23:00.000 Now, can that be replicated to some degree in other forms of national service?

02:23:05.000 I would be all for that.

02:23:06.000 What I'm concerned about is once you lose the all-volunteer force, Not everybody wants to be there, maybe.

02:23:12.000 Right.

02:23:12.000 And they're not there for long enough, man.

02:23:14.000 I mean, you know, a three-year enlistment, you need that.

02:23:18.000 Because, I mean, you know, an infantry soldier, a cavalry scout, a tanker, you know, an aviation mechanic.

02:23:24.000 I mean, these are skills you have to develop and then apply, right?

02:23:28.000 It's tough to just come in and out.

02:23:29.000 Now, in Israel, it's different, right?

02:23:31.000 In Israel, you know, they have geographic realities there.

02:23:34.000 They have hostile neighbors.

02:23:35.000 They need that force to be able to mobilize rapidly.

02:23:37.000 And they need a huge reserve associated with it and everything else.

02:23:40.000 They have a different geostrategic situation that drives them in that direction.

02:23:44.000 But you're right.

02:23:45.000 It gives them a formative experience.

02:23:47.000 Now, you know, all three of our daughters served not in the military.

02:23:52.000 Two of them in Teach for America, a program called Teach for America, and one of them served in the government area of counterterrorism.

02:23:59.000 And, you know, I think that they had experiences that really make them better citizens in a form of service, right?

02:24:06.000 And so I think that's what I would really advocate for.

02:24:10.000 There was a national commission on national service that concluded its work about two years ago.

02:24:17.000 I think it was pretty good.

02:24:18.000 But I'd like to see us do it, you know.

02:24:20.000 And you're right.

02:24:20.000 I mean, A step would be maybe not compulsory, but provide some incentives.

02:24:26.000 Right.

02:24:26.000 So what I benefited from tremendously, Senator McCain was a big advocate of this, is when I was in Iraq, Afghanistan over those years, they extended GI benefits to your kids or to your spouse.

02:24:41.000 So you would get, I think, four years education paid for, state school level tuition.

02:24:47.000 And it used to be you can use that for yourself, right, as you come out as a soldier.

02:24:51.000 But they extended it so you could actually also apply that to your kids.

02:24:55.000 So I think there would be incentives like that that would be attractive to people, you know, that could bring more people into service positions.

02:25:03.000 And, you know, I'll tell you, Joe, I interact with a lot of college students.

02:25:06.000 There is a huge, untapped desire to serve.

02:25:10.000 And I think a lot of students don't realize what those opportunities are.

02:25:14.000 You know, so I think that...

02:25:16.000 And one thing that could happen in universities and in high schools in particular would be to highlight the opportunities to serve.

02:25:22.000 I mean, I think that, you know, service in our military is a tremendous opportunity.

02:25:27.000 You know, I think that oftentimes, you know, popular culture cheapens and corsens the warrior ethos.

02:25:35.000 You know, Hollywood doesn't tell us anything about why, you know, the soldiers serve, you know, why they fight for each other.

02:25:42.000 You know, the tremendous rewards of being part of something bigger than yourself, being part of an organization which the man or woman next to you is willing to give everything, including their own lives for you, right?

02:25:51.000 I mean, that's an experience you can't really replicate.

02:25:54.000 Except maybe is it firefighters or others that are engaged in those kind of service that involves danger and the prospect of death and sacrifice.

02:26:06.000 Some of the best people I've ever met in my life have served.

02:26:08.000 Some of the best people I've ever met in my life in terms of their discipline, their character, and discipline and character are some of the things that people criticize the most about the youth of America.

02:26:22.000 That they're lacking in discipline, lacking in character.

02:26:25.000 And this thing that the military provides, not just discipline and character, but structure and the ability to overcome adversity creates better humans.

02:26:33.000 And confidence, right?

02:26:35.000 Yes.

02:26:35.000 And what do we hear today, right?

02:26:36.000 We were talking about this earlier, like structural, institutional.

02:26:39.000 Nothing you can do about it.

02:26:40.000 You know what I mean?

02:26:41.000 I mean, hey, if you go to U.S. Army's Ranger School, man, you know, you go through that.

02:26:45.000 Yeah.

02:26:45.000 You have a sense of agency when you come out.

02:26:47.000 100%.

02:26:47.000 Yeah, 100%.

02:26:49.000 Let's talk about the withdrawal of Afghanistan because in our lifetime it's one of the most...

02:26:54.000 I mean, I don't want to use the term embarrassing.

02:26:59.000 Disappointing.

02:27:00.000 Yeah, disappointing.

02:27:01.000 Sickening, yeah.

02:27:02.000 From your perspective, watching it happen, watching the way we...

02:27:09.000 Is it dead?

02:27:10.000 It's dead, yeah.

02:27:11.000 Thanks.

02:27:12.000 Watching this...

02:27:17.000 And watching the Taliban also come in and take over and drive down the street in our Humvees and utilizing all of our equipment that we left behind.

02:27:28.000 Like, what was that like for you?

02:27:30.000 And what could have been done better?

02:27:32.000 Well, you know, I'll tell you, I think that these are the consequences of surrender, right?

02:27:37.000 And nobody wants to call it that, you know, but that's what happened.

02:27:41.000 We lost our will, and we surrendered to a terrorist organization.

02:27:45.000 When you say we lost our will, Obama wanted to get out at one point in time.

02:27:52.000 Trump wanted to get out at one point in time.

02:27:54.000 What was done wrong?

02:27:57.000 I've got a chapter on this in Battlegrounds.

02:27:59.000 I call it a one-year war 20 times over.

02:28:03.000 It wasn't a 20-year war.

02:28:04.000 It was a one-year war 20 times over.

02:28:07.000 How so?

02:28:07.000 What do you mean?

02:28:08.000 It goes back to really the 2001 invasion and the idea this was going to be fast, cheap, and efficient, quick victory, and then we're out of here, right?

02:28:15.000 And remember, everybody talks about President Bush on the aircraft carrier mission accomplished?

02:28:19.000 Yeah.

02:28:19.000 That same day, Donald Rumsfeld was in Afghanistan saying the same thing, hey, we're out of here.

02:28:24.000 Well, guess what was happening across the border in Pakistan?

02:28:26.000 The Taliban were regenerating.

02:28:28.000 With the help of Al-Qaeda and the help of the Pakistan inter-services intelligence.

02:28:33.000 And the war was intensifying and we said we're out.

02:28:36.000 Now what did the Afghans do when we said we're out?

02:28:37.000 They looked over their shoulders.

02:28:38.000 Who's got our back, man?

02:28:39.000 Nobody?

02:28:40.000 We need to hedge our bets.

02:28:41.000 And so what they started to do is to try to gain up a power base within various groups within Afghanistan in advance of a post-U.S. withdrawal.

02:28:50.000 So our short-term approach to a long-term problem lengthened the war.

02:28:54.000 The Obama administration came in.

02:28:56.000 They did a...

02:28:57.000 A long-term assessment, right, of, you know, they took a long time, you know, to, what are we going to do in Afghanistan?

02:29:02.000 What they came up with was a reinforced security effort, which the president announced at West Point in December 2009. But then he announced the timeline for withdrawal at the same time.

02:29:11.000 How the hell does that work, right?

02:29:13.000 And then try to negotiate with the Taliban.

02:29:15.000 So you're saying to the enemy, hey, you know, here's our schedule for withdrawal.

02:29:19.000 Let's negotiate an outcome.

02:29:21.000 And, of course, that wasn't going to work.

02:29:22.000 And then what we finally did, I think, in the Trump administration in 2017 is, again, you know, I wrote this book, Dereliction of Duty.

02:29:33.000 One of the problems that Lyndon Johnson had is people around him told him only what he wanted to hear, right?

02:29:37.000 You know, and what they did is they shined up one course of action, you know, for one strategy for Vietnam that met the president's domestic political agenda, get elected in 64, pass a great society in 65. And that was the strategy of graduated pressure in Vietnam.

02:29:53.000 That's what led to an American war in Vietnam without thinking about the long-term costs and consequences and without developing a strategy that was aimed for the reality of the war.

02:30:02.000 So when I got into the job as National Security Advisor, I believed that the war in Afghanistan had become not only ineffective because of these inconsistent and fundamentally flawed strategies, it had become unethical.

02:30:14.000 Because we had soldiers fighting and dying there, and they didn't know what the hell they were doing it for, right?

02:30:18.000 There wasn't a clear policy and strategy.

02:30:20.000 So the president, remember, he wanted to get the hell out.

02:30:23.000 He said that during the election in 2016. We presented him with multiple options, and we showed him the consequences.

02:30:30.000 We said, okay, you can get out right now.

02:30:32.000 But here's what it looks like.

02:30:34.000 And the picture we painted was what happened in August and September of this past year.

02:30:40.000 And he looked over that precipice and he said, okay, you know, what other options do you have, right?

02:30:45.000 And so what he did is he gave a speech in August of 2017. I'm telling you, it's worth going back to.

02:30:51.000 That is the strategy we should have kept in place, right, in Afghanistan.

02:30:55.000 Now...

02:30:56.000 And what was that strategy?

02:30:57.000 That strategy was really a fundamental shift in our approach there.

02:31:00.000 What we would do is...

02:31:02.000 We would take the timeline off.

02:31:03.000 We would not withdraw on a timeline.

02:31:05.000 We would get this, right?

02:31:07.000 We would actually designate the Taliban as an enemy.

02:31:09.000 Under the Obama administration, they said the Taliban is no longer an enemy.

02:31:12.000 They were still killing our soldiers, committing mass murder, you know, in schools and hospitals, you know, in Afghanistan.

02:31:19.000 And we weren't actively targeting them.

02:31:22.000 You know, with intelligence and with air power and so forth.

02:31:25.000 And we didn't have advisors down at the level where we could help, you know, enable Afghan security forces.

02:31:30.000 And the whole thing was going to hell.

02:31:32.000 If you look at the mass murder attacks, man, in September, in the summer of 2017, it was falling apart then.

02:31:40.000 And so the president made the decision...

02:31:42.000 He designated the Taliban an enemy, took the timeline off, said, okay, Pakistan, you can no longer have it both ways.

02:31:48.000 You can't act like you're helping us and give you assistance and continue to support the Taliban.

02:31:54.000 So we cut off assistance to Pakistan and began to take action there as well.

02:32:00.000 And then he said, hey, this Afghan government's got to reform, right?

02:32:05.000 They've got to take on the reforms within their security forces to strengthen them.

02:32:10.000 Which they began to do.

02:32:12.000 Now, hey, the endless wars mantra was what we're up against, right?

02:32:16.000 And I left in March of 2018, April 2018. And I knew that the president had people in his ears saying, end the endless wars, get out of there.

02:32:25.000 Based mainly on the argument, Joe, hey...

02:32:28.000 Afghanistan is not Denmark yet.

02:32:29.000 Well, guess what, man?

02:32:30.000 Afghanistan is never going to be Denmark.

02:32:32.000 But what we are is we're helping the Afghans fight on a modern day frontier between barbarism and civilization.

02:32:39.000 And we're doing it, I think at the time, you know, it was like 10,000 troops or something like that.

02:32:44.000 Not a huge amount and a sustainable level, right, of funding.

02:32:51.000 With, actually, a lot of help from European allies and others there as well.

02:32:55.000 So the argument that I was making is it's a sustainable level of commitment.

02:33:00.000 Afghanistan is not going to be Denmark, but it's not going to be the hell that it is now, either, right, if we have a sustained commitment.

02:33:06.000 What was the largest amount of troops that were in Afghanistan?

02:33:10.000 Probably 140,000, and that's including NATO troops.

02:33:13.000 140,000 at the peak of it, like 2010, 11, 12. So the idea of a sustained occupation of about 10,000 troops would have essentially mostly pulled us out, but also left enough troops in there to not allow Kabul and Afghanistan to collapse under the Taliban.

02:33:32.000 Absolutely.

02:33:33.000 And under General Miller, because the big change was, hey, you can fight the enemy now, right?

02:33:39.000 How about that?

02:33:40.000 And so a lot of districts were being taken back over by the Afghan government.

02:33:44.000 Now, a lot of them were still contested.

02:33:45.000 Some were still in Taliban control.

02:33:47.000 But in Bhadikshan in the Northeast and in the Pakti area in the East, which have always been very tough areas, the government was gaining some momentum.

02:33:55.000 And we have to remember, right?

02:33:56.000 Everybody, you know, the president included, President Biden said, you know, the Afghans, you know, they weren't willing to fight.

02:34:02.000 Joe, 70,000 Afghans gave their lives in the military and in the police, right?

02:34:08.000 To prevent the hell that we're seeing today, right?

02:34:11.000 I think that's worthy of support, right?

02:34:13.000 And so what happened is, you know, once the president decided to withdraw at all costs, essentially, you know, buying into the, you know, the endless war narrative, He sent Zal Khalilzad to negotiate a surrender document.

02:34:29.000 There's nothing else you can call it but a surrender document.

02:34:32.000 And what kills me about this, what is crazy to me, is that if we were just going to leave Afghanistan, why the hell didn't we just leave?

02:34:40.000 Why did we actually empower the Taliban and weaken the Afghan government security forces on the way out by delivering psychological blow after psychological blow, right?

02:34:49.000 So blow one.

02:34:50.000 We negotiate with these jackasses in Doha, right, the Taliban Political Commission, without the Afghan government.

02:34:57.000 What does that do to the Afghan government's legitimacy?

02:35:00.000 Then we enter into a secret agreement where we start to pull back our intelligence support from them.

02:35:06.000 We start to pull back our active air support from the Afghans.

02:35:11.000 And now they're in defensive battles, right?

02:35:13.000 They can't get out to fight except in reaction to what the Taliban are doing.

02:35:17.000 And we take away what their competitive advantages were.

02:35:20.000 Then we force them to release, the Afghans to release, 5,000 of some of the most heinous terrorists on Earth, right?

02:35:27.000 For nothing, with no concession.

02:35:29.000 We don't demand a ceasefire.

02:35:31.000 Meanwhile, what's the Taliban doing?

02:35:33.000 They're attacking maternity hospitals, Joe.

02:35:35.000 I mean, they were gunning down expected mothers and infants in a maternity hospital, attacking girls' schools.

02:35:42.000 And we're doing nothing?

02:35:43.000 We're just executing our withdrawal?

02:35:47.000 And then the Biden administration came in and just doubled down on the withdrawal timeline.

02:35:51.000 They extended it, you know, it's from May to September, but then prioritized withdrawal over everything else.

02:35:56.000 Now, think about this from an Afghan perspective, right?

02:35:59.000 The Americans are leaving.

02:36:00.000 Told you they're leaving.

02:36:01.000 They're taking their support away.

02:36:03.000 What do you think the Taliban are doing?

02:36:05.000 They're going around at the province district level to a court commander and say, hey, let me tell you how it's going to be.

02:36:11.000 You know, you accommodate with us when we give you the wink, or we kill you and your whole family.

02:36:16.000 How does that sound?

02:36:16.000 Right?

02:36:17.000 And so it's no surprise at all.

02:36:21.000 That it collapsed.

02:36:23.000 Think about what these guys are saying now.

02:36:24.000 They're saying like, well, the collapse really surprised us, but it was inevitable.

02:36:28.000 I mean, it's just completely contradictory.

02:36:30.000 And then the other thing is, the worst of all, of all, and this is like the, I call it in the book, the paragon, like the most extreme example of strategic narcissism.

02:36:41.000 We created the enemy we preferred.

02:36:44.000 In Afghanistan, rather than the actual enemy.

02:36:46.000 Look at what we heard from some of these Taliban apologists in the New Yorker and the Washington Post, you know.

02:36:52.000 Oh, this is just some kind of rural movement, you know, that just kind of came out of the countryside, and maybe they'll be more benign this time, and maybe they'll share power, you know.

02:37:01.000 But you know what?

02:37:02.000 This is an international terrorist organization.

02:37:04.000 That was built up by Al-Qaeda, the Haqqani Network, the Pakistani ISI, with donations that came in from Gulf donors, right?

02:37:13.000 This is an international organization.

02:37:15.000 Remember those guys all kitted up when they came into Kabul airport?

02:37:18.000 That was Badra 313. That was an Al-Qaeda brigade.

02:37:25.000 We're good to go.

02:37:41.000 Okay, well, what do you think you're going to accomplish with diplomacy without the threat of force with these guys, right?

02:37:47.000 Haibatullah Akinzada, all you need to know about the Taliban is that their leader, Haibatullah Akinzada, encouraged his 17-year-old son to commit mass murder by suicide.

02:37:57.000 That's who's in charge.

02:37:59.000 And you hear, well, we just have to ask them to be more inclusive.

02:38:03.000 I mean, really?

02:38:04.000 I mean, these people are delusional, Joe.

02:38:07.000 They are delusional.

02:38:08.000 I saw this one Taliban commander was asked whether or not they were now going to allow women into government and the military, and he started laughing at them.

02:38:16.000 He started laughing at the reporter, like, what the fuck are you talking about?

02:38:20.000 Do you not know who we are?

02:38:21.000 No, we didn't know.

02:38:22.000 We created this illusion of who we think they are.

02:38:26.000 It's almost like a weird...

02:38:28.000 You know how sometimes where abuse victims identify with their abusers, you know?

02:38:34.000 Yes.

02:38:34.000 I think I saw that dynamic, you know, across the U.S. government, even, and in the press.

02:38:40.000 I mean, it's almost like these people were advocates for the Taliban, and they would complain about President Ashraf Ghani.

02:38:47.000 Okay, all right.

02:38:48.000 Do you really think Haibatul Akinsat is better?

02:38:53.000 I mean, what should be done?

02:38:55.000 I mean, is what's done done and now we just have to live with the consequences?

02:39:00.000 Or should there be sort of a re-engagement with Afghanistan?

02:39:05.000 Well, I think we ought to re-engage with Afghans who are not the Taliban, right?

02:39:08.000 And the way to do that is to first help anybody get out who we can help get out of the hell there.

02:39:15.000 And I think what we ought to be doing is helping Afghans organize some kind of a government in exile that's representative.

02:39:22.000 You know, people always talk about, like, we need more diplomacy.

02:39:26.000 But you know what we did in Afghanistan?

02:39:28.000 We actually, as we're negotiating with the Taliban, we had a really anemic diplomatic effort inside of Afghanistan.

02:39:34.000 We closed our consulates in like 2011, 2012. We closed our consulates in Herat, in Jalalabad, in Mazar al-Sharif, in Kandahar.

02:39:46.000 And we went into this Kabul bubble instead of helping Afghans come together around an agreed vision for the future.

02:39:53.000 Zao Khalilzad, when he went to negotiate with these guys, he actually was advocating for a coalition government to undercut the Afghan government with Karzai, the former president, and Abdullah and others.

02:40:06.000 And so I think we ought to help them organize some kind of a government in exile.

02:40:11.000 We ought to help them take the legal actions necessary.

02:40:14.000 To put a freeze on resources, to make sure that we don't do anything to strengthen this Taliban government, it's gonna fail, Joe.

02:40:21.000 It's gonna fail.

02:40:21.000 I mean, there's no way this government can survive.

02:40:25.000 Why is that?

02:40:25.000 Because it just doesn't have the resources necessary.

02:40:28.000 It's a humanitarian catastrophe.

02:40:29.000 We have to...

02:40:30.000 Try to address that through, like, the World Food Program and so forth.

02:40:34.000 But we shouldn't do anything that strengthens this government.

02:40:37.000 You hear people now talking about, you know, should we unfreeze assets?

02:40:41.000 Should we give them resources?

02:40:42.000 Hell no, we shouldn't give them any resources.

02:40:45.000 And then, of course, what we have to do is work on the terrorist problem now from the outside in, right?

02:40:50.000 Remember, you heard all this stuff about...

02:40:53.000 You know, over-the-horizon counterterrorism.

02:40:55.000 It's a complete pipe dream, right?

02:40:57.000 I mean, if you don't have, you know, on-the-ground intelligence capability and the ability for sustained surveillance, I mean, you can't get at these groups effectively.

02:41:07.000 You know, we had Afghans who were bearing the brunt of the fight.

02:41:11.000 Now, is it up to us and a couple drones?

02:41:14.000 I mean, there's no way that's going to work.

02:41:15.000 And we have to put, I think, much more diplomatic pressure on Pakistan.

02:41:18.000 We ought to remember, right, that You know, that the president of Pakistan, you know, when this whole thing collapsed, you know, this is Imran Khan, said the Afghan people have been unshackled.

02:41:33.000 That's what he said about the Taliban taking over.

02:41:35.000 I mean, why are we not holding him and the Pakistanis responsible for that?

02:41:40.000 I don't know.

02:41:42.000 How much does this damage the confidence in the United States when it comes to any group in the future participating and cooperating with us?

02:41:50.000 Because there were so many Afghanis that cooperated with the United States military, and then they were abandoned, left on their own, and subsequently attacked.

02:42:01.000 Yeah, it's heartbreaking.

02:42:03.000 You know, I'll tell you, one of the things you talk about, the younger generation, I was so proud of our students at Stanford.

02:42:08.000 You know, I have an amazing group of research assistants, you know, and we mobilized for this, like so many other veterans did.

02:42:14.000 We played a very minor role in trying to fill gaps, right, and to be in communication with people.

02:42:19.000 We're good to go.

02:42:38.000 To try to help the State Department people, to help the military people who are trying to get people out to build an effective database.

02:42:44.000 So we took all these WhatsApp messages and we took all of their visa paperwork or applications to paperwork visas.

02:42:53.000 We helped them fill out the special immigrant visas and the P1 and P2 visas, advocated for those visas to be approved.

02:43:02.000 We're good to go.

02:43:17.000 You know, couldn't get manifested on a flight.

02:43:19.000 And then they couldn't get through the perimeter, right?

02:43:21.000 And so we went through that harrowing period working on this.

02:43:24.000 Again, very small contribution that we made.

02:43:26.000 Many others were involved in this, including, you know, certainly our servicemen and women on the ground at Kabul and those working in the State Department here and so forth.

02:43:36.000 But what we're shifting to now is a sustained effort to do really four key tasks, right?

02:43:43.000 To continue to help people with the paperwork who want to get out.

02:43:45.000 These are people who helped us.

02:43:46.000 We're in the armed forces, you know, and so forth.

02:43:48.000 How many people are still over there?

02:43:50.000 Oh, I think, you know, I mean, in that category of those who helped us, I mean, tens of thousands.

02:43:55.000 I mean, you know, it depends on where can you draw the line.

02:43:59.000 How is this not taken into consideration at the time of the withdrawal?

02:44:02.000 Well, you know, here's what I think about that.

02:44:05.000 You know, and of course, you know, I'm a general, retired general.

02:44:09.000 I know a lot of the key guys that are in positions of leadership.

02:44:12.000 And so I don't want to say, hey, you know, it wasn't on the military or anything like that.

02:44:17.000 I mean, I think there's shared responsibility, certainly.

02:44:19.000 But hey, once you tell the military, here's the date and here's the troop cap that you have, what do you think you're going to get, right?

02:44:27.000 Right.

02:44:28.000 I mean, they were actually restricting the number of general officers who could be on the ground.

02:44:32.000 So the main general officer who had responsibility to advise the Afghan security forces was not allowed to sleep in the country.

02:44:40.000 He had to commute from Qatar so we didn't offend the Taliban.

02:44:43.000 I mean, it was crazy what was going on.

02:44:46.000 And then, of course, once you say, here's your cap...

02:44:49.000 You know, 2500, whatever it is, you know, you have to close Bagram, which is the big airbase.

02:44:54.000 But we gave up all these airbases, which makes no sense, right?

02:44:57.000 And so what needed to happen, I wrote an op-ed about this in, gosh, it was May or June.

02:45:02.000 It was early, you know, before the catastrophe.

02:45:05.000 And it was essentially, you know, I wrote with a guy named Brad Bowman from the Foundation of Defense of Democracy.

02:45:11.000 It was in the Wall Street Journal.

02:45:13.000 And it essentially was, if we don't do these six things, right, it's going to be an unmitigated catastrophe.

02:45:18.000 And one of those six things was to keep the airfields open.

02:45:20.000 But hey, you can't do that if you don't have enough troops, right?

02:45:24.000 I mean, Bagram Air Force, Bagram Air Base had, I think, 78 guard posts to man, right, around the perimeter.

02:45:30.000 You need people to run the surveillance operations.

02:45:32.000 You need people to, you know, defend that big base.

02:45:35.000 But, you know, what we could have done in this period of time, if we cared to, is we could have made that a safe zone.

02:45:42.000 We could have extended it to Panjshir, where Amrullah Saleh was trying to organize the remnants of those who would continue to fight.

02:45:49.000 This is a former vice president and a real scrapper, that guy.

02:45:53.000 You would like this guy.

02:45:53.000 He's a...

02:45:54.000 He's a controversial guy, but you know what I love about him?

02:45:56.000 He always says what's on his mind.

02:45:58.000 And so he fought until he was driven out of the Panjshir.

02:46:03.000 And when he was driven out of the Panjshir, it was a major Taliban offensive with Pakistani drones being flown against him.

02:46:10.000 So this idea that this is just some rural movement is complete nonsense.

02:46:15.000 This is an organization that enjoyed a lot of international support, some financial support from Russia and from Iran as well.

02:46:24.000 Because once we said we're out, right, we're out, that encouraged a lot of other hedging behavior internationally, right?

02:46:30.000 So the Russians are like, hey, let's build a relationship with them, the Chinese.

02:46:34.000 So we created a vacuum, and the real victims are the Afghan people.

02:46:42.000 We're good to go.

02:47:01.000 They do a tremendous job helping these families get in here and get integrated.

02:47:04.000 You know what?

02:47:05.000 They're going to be our best citizens.

02:47:06.000 I mean, they're going to be amazing U.S. citizens, them and their children.

02:47:10.000 And then we're doing an oral history program, Joe, to kind of, at the Hoover Institution, to amplify their voices, right?

02:47:17.000 Because I keep hearing people saying, well, we need to engage the Taliban on the future of Afghanistan.

02:47:22.000 I mean, how about engaging some, the other, the 90% of Afghans, you know, who were utterly opposed to the Taliban all along?

02:47:31.000 Well said.

02:47:33.000 Listen, it's been a pleasure and an honor talking to you.

02:47:36.000 I really appreciate it.

02:47:37.000 For everybody listening and watching, the book Battlegrounds, The Fight to Defend the Free World is available right now.

02:47:45.000 H.R. McMaster.

02:47:46.000 Thank you, sir.

02:47:47.000 Thank you for your service.

02:47:48.000 Thanks for being here.

02:47:49.000 Really appreciate it.

02:47:49.000 Hey, I really enjoyed it.

02:47:50.000 Great to be here.

02:47:50.000 Do you have social media or anything where people can follow you?

02:47:52.000 I do.

02:47:53.000 It's at LTGHRMcMaster on Twitter and Instagram.

02:47:57.000 Okay.

02:47:58.000 All right.

02:47:58.000 Beautiful.

02:47:59.000 Thank you.

02:47:59.000 Thanks, Joe.

02:48:00.000 Bye, everybody.

02:48:01.000 Thank you.

Joe Rogan Experience #1763 - General H.R. McMaster

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