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00:03:11.000Simple facts of what happened Friday night in Reuben's hometown of Sarasota, Florida, are familiar by now.
00:03:15.000According to the county sheriff's office, three detectives...
00:03:19.000They sent it three guys to catch people jerking off at the XXX South Trail Cinema to watch the audience that was watching a triple bill of Catalina 5-0 Tiger Shark, Nurse Nancy, and Turn Up the Heat after the sting operation had hauled in three men on charges of violating Florida State Statute 800.03,
00:04:30.000For the sheriff's office, if the charges were dropped, a department spokesperson said that the deputies did not feel the time they had enough probable cause to charge Rubens with attempted bribery.
00:04:41.000Is that bribery really when you say you're going to perform at an event?
00:07:48.000There was a bunch of those that were happening while Trump was in office, but they didn't tell him about it because they were worried he was going to shoot them down, which I thought was fucking amazing.
00:08:21.000It had solar panels to keep those propellers churning.
00:08:24.000They knew exactly what they were doing and where they were going.
00:08:28.000And, you know, it shows up over, whatever, Alaska, the end of January, whatever, and proceeds to travel across the country in a path that is clearly designed to...
00:08:43.000You know, collect intelligence from sensitive facilities.
00:09:36.000And look, it's not as if we're not, you know, taking measures or countermeasures to prevent surveillance, because the Chinese have spy satellites, very technical, very, very advanced.
00:09:48.000So we know how to protect communications.
00:09:51.000We know how to protect—and we also know what's available, right?
00:09:55.000So satellite imagery is going to give you a fair amount of information anyway.
00:09:58.000So the question is, okay, well, why the hell was this thing, which was as tall as the Statue of Liberty, why was it floating around up there with an array of antennas obviously there to collect?
00:10:22.000You know, the U.S. government, the military was like, well, we don't believe, after the fact, after we shot it down, we don't believe that it was collecting.
00:10:31.000And we took measures to prevent it from collecting.
00:10:33.000And not only that, we didn't shoot it down at the beginning because we were monitoring its capabilities and learning from it.
00:11:00.000Yes, most of it signals intelligence and capabilities.
00:11:03.000It's not really imagery that you're getting from it, although that's part of it.
00:11:07.000But, you know, so I have no doubt that You know, because everyone was saying, well, why wouldn't you just shoot the fucker down when it showed up over Alaska on the 28th of January?
00:11:15.000Or when we became aware of it initially.
00:11:18.000And, you know, because we live in this highly partisan world, everybody was saying, well, because Biden's inept and, you know, they didn't know what they were doing and they let it float all the way across the states.
00:11:30.000So you can't discount the argument that says, well, part of it is we let it go because we were gathering intelligence ourselves from their capabilities.
00:11:39.000It's just like when we – here I go disappearing down a rabbit hole.
00:11:42.000When we lost that platform, that era I said during the Abbottabad raid and we had to leave it behind and they destroyed to the degree they could everything that was in it of interest.
00:11:54.000But the platform itself was of interest, right?
00:11:57.000Because the two things that are important nowadays are stealth and speed.
00:12:01.000There was a stealth design involved there.
00:12:04.000And there's also material science that's interesting.
00:12:07.000So we left it behind after they bagged bin Laden.
00:12:32.000So I'm not one of those people who said, I should have shot it down immediately because I don't know what they were getting from it.
00:12:37.000But I do know that the purpose of the balloon was to gather intelligence on us, on our sensitive facilities to some degree.
00:12:44.000So anyway, and then they sent all the remains after they recovered them off the coast of South Carolina to wherever Quantico.
00:12:54.000And that was kind of the last we ever heard of it, right?
00:12:57.000Because we've all got attention deficit disorder.
00:12:59.000Nobody wants to, you know, think, okay, what did we learn?
00:13:02.000Can we do a hot wash on it and figure out?
00:13:04.000And to what degree can you tell the public what the hell was going on?
00:13:06.000Because honestly, I don't know that we ever would have learned about it if it hadn't been so large and, you know, members of the public hadn't seen it or spotted it.
00:13:14.000What altitude was it hovering around at?
00:13:18.000It cut a path through a couple of other bases, Minot and I forget where else it was to the south of there, but the fact that it hovered over a period of time over Malmstrom is really all you need to know.
00:13:38.000Because if it's a weather balloon, I guess one point being, we never really pushed the Chinese regime under Xi for anything.
00:13:49.000We haven't forced the hand on the pandemic.
00:13:53.000And we're going to have another pandemic.
00:13:55.000So it would be nice to know what the fuck actually happened.
00:13:58.000Why do you think we're going to have another pandemic?
00:15:38.000If you're investing in a pseudo-state-owned enterprise or whatever, you always know there's gonna be three or four or five sets of books, right?
00:15:45.000They're just very good at obfuscating.
00:15:48.000And they also think they don't need to answer.
00:15:53.000And Xi believes that they are still on Despite some problems in their economy, they're still on the slow march to the top of the food chain.
00:16:19.000We've had sort of an unsatisfactory relationship related to China for decades.
00:16:25.000We just, we haven't, no administration has really pushed back appropriately against their theft of economic intelligence or research and development or whatever.
00:16:41.000I mean, look at some of the things they're doing now.
00:16:43.000I've gotten bizarrely focused on the issue of, we've talked about this before, critical minerals, right?
00:16:49.000Because one of the things that I find really interesting is this push towards net zero, you know, carbon production and getting rid of fossil fuels, stopping fossil fuels.
00:17:01.000Well, you can't stop fossil fuels and regulate mining out of existence at the same time.
00:17:12.000You've got to do one or the other to fuel production, to fuel manufacturing, to heat people's homes, to produce whatever you're going to produce.
00:17:21.000And so if we want to get rid of fossil fuels, by definition you have to increase mining of critical minerals.
00:17:30.000If you do both, which the Biden administration is basically trying to do, I think they're placating their base by, yeah, we're going to get rid of fossil fuels, and they're also making decisions.
00:17:55.000If we're going to continue to march away from fossil fuels, but the current administration just keeps under this theory of keep it in the ground, right?
00:18:03.000And so – and that's a big push by environmentalists, right?
00:18:41.000If the US continues, and this is where I'll bring China in, and by the way, China, they own or operate, I think it's like 15 of the 19 cobalt mines in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
00:18:57.000So it doesn't matter whether they're leading the way.
00:19:00.000And China controls 30 of the 50 critical minerals anyway.
00:19:25.000If you look at one case, because we've talked about cobalt, we've talked about lithium, which is here we could be mining, but, you know, the government's, you know, shutting down opportunities to do that, either by declaring things off limits in terms of the land area or just making the permitting process so damn difficult.
00:19:43.000But, you know, phosphate, I mentioned that as an example.
00:19:47.000I got disappeared down some rabbit hole looking at all of this.
00:19:50.000It's not on the critical minerals list.
00:19:55.000Now, phosphate, along with two other things, nitrogen and potassium, are the key nutrients that you use for fertilizers to feed the world, not just the U.S. You can't do mass farming.
00:20:09.000Everybody wants to grow local, but the reality is it's a lot of people, right?
00:20:14.000And if you want, you know, the least privileged people around the globe to eat, you got to do large-scale farming.
00:20:31.000And they produce like five times more combined, five times more than we do in the U.S. And yet there is significant pushback here in the U.S. in part because it fits a Chinese narrative and the Chinese have decided, the regime has, not the people,
00:20:47.000the Chinese regime has decided that one of the best ways to get what they want In terms of U.S. behavior is not to try to influence, you know, the White House, but it's to reach out to local and state officials.
00:21:03.000When you look at decisions made at state level or local level, the Chinese regime and the ODNI, the Director of National Intelligence, released a report, and they talked about this.
00:21:14.000They said that the Chinese are doubling down on their efforts to Exert influence through a variety of means, environmental groups, encouraging litigation against mining operations or whatever it may be,
00:21:31.000social influencers to try to get a message out that influences local and state regulators to do things such as saying, no, got to keep it in the ground.
00:21:41.000No, we don't want phosphate mining, as an example.
00:21:47.000Whether an environmental group or whether a group that's out there that focuses on these things and files lawsuits constantly for environmental purposes.
00:21:56.000And then, by the way, those lawyers usually recoup their funds from what is called the Endangered Species Act that allows them to get their money back.
00:22:05.000So you think, oh, wow, these lawyers are fighting and it's pro bono.
00:22:09.000So, but they're doing it, whether they do it knowingly or whether they do it unwittingly, it still serves the purpose of the Chinese regime, which is looking to say, keep it in the ground, because we want to control all of this.
00:22:21.000And again, whether it's cobalt, whether it's lithium, whether it's phosphate, whatever it may be, it's a fascinating thing.
00:22:26.000But the point being that we can't pursue a green future and at the same time over-regulate The mining process.
00:24:21.000I mean, look, China produces more carbon than all the developed nations combined.
00:24:29.000Which is very important to talk about when people are talking about going green because the amount of impact that would happen even if the United States went to zero, went to zero carbon output, you're not going to put a dent in what's happening to the world because most of it is coming from China and India.
00:24:48.000So all this shit about don't eat meat because we're going to save the world, you're not saving jack shit.
00:24:54.000I don't understand where that message is coming from or why there's not a nuanced perspective where people are taking into account all these other variables.
00:25:47.000And then you think, well, because you've got like a local or a grassroots community community.
00:25:52.000Activist group, and they're not Chinese spies, they're not working, but the Chinese regime identifies them and says, you know what, if we can influence them, it's just pure propaganda or covert action campaign, if I can influence that activist group,
00:26:08.000To go out and tell those, whomever, the city officials or the county commissioners or whatever, that this is bad, right?
00:26:16.000And this is, we need to stop this, right?
00:26:19.000We shouldn't be mining for lithium in Nevada or wherever.
00:26:22.000We shouldn't be pursuing, you know, logical steps to get, you know, control over the critical mineral supply chain issue, right?
00:26:49.000Again, it shows you I've been spending too much time reading on this shit, but I'm fascinated by this idea that we're trying to do two things that are completely opposed to each other.
00:27:01.000Stop fossil fuels and also keep critical minerals from the ground that we're going to need.
00:27:43.000So they had a hearing in Arizona not too long ago.
00:27:47.000About critical minerals, the issue of critical minerals, and the importance of them, and the importance of speeding up the permitting process.
00:27:54.000Again, if we want to pursue a green future, you got to do it.
00:27:59.000And this guy, Congressman, I know I've got a note here, Gozar, Paul Gozar, from wherever, Arizona, said, and this is a quote,"...the anti-mining actions by the Biden administration hurt America's economy, threaten our national security, and push mineral production abroad." Where environmental and labor standards pale in comparison with our own,
00:28:35.000Because there's just, there's too much pushback.
00:28:38.000And no matter what mineral you're talking about, I don't see that necessarily changing, unless you get maybe a change in administration, and then you get the effort to deregulate, and then you speed up permitting.
00:28:48.000But at some point, we're going to be screwed.
00:28:50.000China recently put the brakes on exporting a couple of minerals that are critical to producing mineral systems and solar panels, and they've done that in the past, right?
00:29:03.000And that should be a clear signal to us that we've got to change our thought process on all of this.
00:29:08.000But I'm not confident that will happen.
00:30:10.000Well, there's also we need a push for nuclear.
00:30:14.000We're legitimate new nuclear power plants in this country, which is...
00:30:19.000It's so hard for people to wrap their heads around because of Three Mile Island and Fukushima, but that is the safest, cleanest electricity that we can generate in this country.
00:30:29.000Well, you would think that that would be a logical...
00:32:39.000I think, I mean, I'm an armchair conspiracy theorist, but if I had to guess, I would say that all this stuff that's coming out slowly but surely about Biden is on purpose, and they want to get rid of him.
00:32:51.000I think he wants to run again, and I don't think the Democrats think that he can win.
00:32:55.000I think they're right, and I think they're going to slowly but surely expose more of these very clear pieces of evidence of corruption.
00:33:09.000The fact that this isn't all over the New York Times and the Washington Post and mainstream news, that they're not blaring it from the rooftops because you know they would be if it was Trump.
00:33:46.000But I've got investigators, great people.
00:33:49.000The most rewarding thing about building a business is just the wonderful people that you eventually get to work with and they raise families and they stick with you.
00:33:58.000And so I've got some investigators that I guess the point is, they could have wrapped this puppy up some time ago, right?
00:34:06.000It's an asset tracing exercise, is what they're engaged in.
00:34:16.000But when you've got an asset tracing exercise, you've got a myriad of single purpose companies set up, you know, around them.
00:34:25.000First of all, when you look at a case and you say, we've got 20-plus single-purpose companies set up here for a pass-through of funds, that's what we would call a clue about money laundering, right?
00:34:39.000To hide beneficial ownership, to hide the flow of funds and transactions that are involved, to obfuscate and make it difficult for the obvious because their feeling is Most people will maybe dig once or twice, but then they'll get bored and they'll move on, right?
00:34:54.000Let's make this as complicated as possible.
00:34:56.000And so you start to see, there's always fraud indicators, you start to see certain things in an investigation.
00:35:02.000And the great thing about asset tracing also is that there are records, right?
00:35:05.000And that's what they're finding out now.
00:35:07.000And I'm glad because whether it's Biden, whether it's Trump, it wouldn't matter.
00:35:12.000If you've got an asshole who's in office, And is engaged in pay for play, right?
00:35:18.000And there's no way, frankly, that this president didn't know that he was being used as the dog in the dog and pony show, right?
00:35:27.000And so they've got these records available to them.
00:35:31.000And with the power of the government, their ability to subpoena and do all these things that they can do, they will have the case figured out at some point.
00:35:37.000The problem with Washington is do they have the...
00:35:39.000Do they have the grit to stick with it?
00:35:42.000And then the next question is, does anything happen as a result?
00:35:46.000But it is, in my mind, anyway, for what that's worth, there's no doubt.
00:36:13.000And they're taking every effort and they're now having to contort themselves into certain ways because it's getting more and more difficult to provide top cover for the Biden administration.
00:36:23.000And, you know, they're just at some point, maybe the dam breaks and there's so much paper evidence that they can't ignore it anymore.
00:36:30.000But you would have thought that some enterprising young journalists who understand the importance of objectivity, whether it's a Democrat or Republican, would have gotten off their ass.
00:40:18.000There are people that will vote for a fucking box of hammers before they would vote for Trump.
00:40:24.000And that's a real segment of our population.
00:40:26.000I don't know what percentages, but it's probably fairly high.
00:40:31.000They have enough trust in the Democratic establishment They think that the Democrats would figure out a way to run the country better even with a puppet than they would with Donald Trump in office.
00:40:46.000And I think there's also the independents.
00:40:48.000Don't forget, independents are sort of the moderates that previously had voted for Trump and then got tired of the chaos and then in the last election said, no, I'm not going to do that again.
00:41:09.000Now, what is your take on this Georgia thing?
00:41:11.000Because the Georgia thing is interesting, because I was just watching this video today that was detailing what they were claiming was evidence of fraud in the Georgia election.
00:41:22.000And there's apparently some videos of people moving boxes around and doing some things that seem a little, at least on the surface, suspicious without an adequate explanation.
00:41:53.000So they probably understand that it falls apart in appeal, right?
00:41:57.000And I don't think that that's going to hold up, but I don't think they care because last night, I mean, again, it shows you how bizarre this is.
00:42:06.000First of all, here's an interesting fact.
00:42:08.000First of all, the indictment showed up on the county website.
00:42:16.000In the afternoon, before the grand jury had voted, before they had come across with what the charges would be.
00:42:23.000And so, all of a sudden, that comes across on the public domain.
00:42:28.000And I think it was Reuters that snapped it and kind of ran with it as a story, but then it was taken down off the county's website.
00:42:36.000And they were asked about it later on and they said, ah, it was fictitious or some bullshit, right?
00:42:40.000So you wonder, okay, how did that get leaked?
00:42:42.000Because then those charges that showed up earlier in the day matched what ended up being voted on by the grand jury.
00:42:47.000So that's a little odd and it's, as far as I can remember, I think it's illegal to leak that sort of information, right, ahead of time, but also how would they know?
00:42:56.000How would they know how the grand jury was going to decide at the end of the day what indictments to throw out there or to put out there in this charge?
00:43:04.000That's something that probably should be looked at, but in today's world may not.
00:43:09.000But I think really she was pushing last night at whatever, 1130, 12 o'clock at night.
00:43:14.000Who holds a press conference at this point at that time of night?
00:43:19.000But she was saying she wants it out there to start this trial in six months.
00:43:25.000And so six months from now is February.
00:43:30.000So right in the middle of all the caucuses and all the campaigning that goes on.
00:43:36.000And whether it's that one or whether it's the one from D.C., it doesn't matter.
00:43:58.000And by the way, if Trump was in office and Biden was running against him and this evidence was available, this evidence of all the corruption with his son, I mean, that's far clearer.
00:44:13.000Well, but they always come back with, well, look, it was, you know, the Trump kids were working and doing business and, well, you know, they had a business, right?
00:44:27.000Now, you know, that's part of the problem.
00:44:32.000That's how it gets muddied is Is that people, you know, in the media or people who are supportive of an administration will say, yeah, but everybody does it.
00:44:50.000That might, you know, be worth some investigation, but again, I don't think that the point of this exercise on the part of the various DAs, and that's another thing.
00:45:04.000Look, the DA down in Georgia, that's an elected position, and she's running for office again, and she's campaigning based on getting Trump, right?
00:45:12.000And she's raising money off of, this is what I'm going to do, I'm going to get Trump, right?
00:47:06.000He's making his way towards, you know, he's just turned, whatever, 14. And he's making his way towards six foot, and he'll get as tall as he needs to be for a point guard, but he's a focused kid.
00:47:20.000People are doing all kinds of shit to their kids now.
00:47:23.000They're juicing them up with human growth hormone to get them to grow.
00:47:25.000It's crazy, and they're reclassing them three or four times, right?
00:49:56.000He was out there for a visit and had a chance to play some lacrosse.
00:50:00.000And, you know, whether he applies or not, Again, it's the experience of seeing what's out there and what's possible.
00:50:08.000And if you leave all the doors open for the kids and you try to get them to understand the importance of not shutting doors by stupid behavior or poor academics or whatever it is, it's all you can do as a parent.
00:50:18.000And then at some point they run and they do their thing.
00:50:21.000But from our perspective, you've got to keep every door open for the kids so they don't get there and think, God, I should not have done that because now I can't go there or I can't do this.
00:52:10.000And so the local officials were like, yeah, that sounds like a great idea.
00:52:13.000Well, it ran through the investment, CFIUS, the investment operation that looks at foreign investment to make sure that it's above board and kosher.
00:52:22.000And CFIUS said, ah, we don't have any opinion.
00:52:49.000And then that became a bit of an issue and then started to see in Congress, you started to see all this talk about, well, my God, the Chinese are buying up farmland all across America.
00:53:21.000So I think the bright spot here is that people are becoming more aware of The problem and that not every time is nefarious, not every time, you know, I'm not saying that, you know, it's not always going to be nefarious, but you should at least be smart enough to look and see.
00:53:36.000It's like when we talk about, you know, Chinese equipment being put on regional telecoms all over the world or the country.
00:54:00.000And he said that it connects to a Chinese server.
00:54:03.000And it says when the thing is loading up, it's connecting to this Chinese server and then it connects to your network.
00:54:09.000And this Chinese server potentially has access to your network and could choose to shut your network off, siphon information, do anything it wants.
00:54:22.000It's like the Internet of Things, right?
00:54:36.000And that's been going on for some time, right?
00:54:40.000I mean, that's been the capabilities, the ability to gather intelligence From seemingly innocuous things, your fridge that talks to you or whatever.
00:54:50.000Certainly, obviously, and you've talked about this a lot, the cell phones, and how hard you have to work to turn off applications that will do that.
00:55:02.000And most people just don't have the patience.
00:55:05.000If you want to prevent your You know, 80-inch TV in your home from being switched on remotely as a monitor, what's going on in your home, you've got to really dig through the layers on that TV to get to the point where you can switch that off, right?
00:55:18.000And I mean, who's got the time nowadays?
00:55:26.000Robot vacuums can be used by hackers to spy on conversations, Singapore researchers say.
00:55:31.000LiDAR phone attack can take advantage of the device's built-in sensor to gather potentially sensitive data NUS computer scientists discovered to prevent misuse.
00:55:40.000Team advise owners not to connect the robot vacuums to the internet.
00:55:47.000A spy on private conversations university said on Monday, the method called LiDAR phone repurposes the LiDAR sensors that a robot vacuum cleaner normally uses for navigating around a home into laser-based microphone to eavesdrop on private conversations.
00:58:23.000I was doing the whatever, the flossy and the...
00:58:25.000The rumba, or I don't even know what the dances are anymore.
00:58:29.000But anyway, today, today, this is, look at me segueing, today is the two year anniversary of the Afghan withdrawal.
00:58:38.000And I was, I forget how I got started on that one, but I was looking at total cost of what we spent so far in Ukraine.
00:58:48.000And not only is it a two-year anniversary of the withdrawal from Afghanistan, but other comparisons we've spent in Ukraine since whenever, January 2022. So, you know, a little over a year, obviously a year and a half.
00:59:03.000We've dropped about upwards north of $80 billion there, right?
00:59:09.000More than that, in all honesty, because I don't think we actually know what the full number is.
00:59:12.000I don't think the State Department knows.
00:59:14.000I don't think the Pentagon actually knows.
00:59:15.000They certainly don't know necessarily where all the money is going to.
00:59:17.000But we've dropped at $80 billion, say, let's call it that.
00:59:22.000From 2001 to 2020 in Afghanistan, we spent about $73, $74 billion.
01:00:22.000But the Afghanistan thing, two years after the withdrawal, we've spent, since then, since the withdrawal, we've spent, or the U.S. government's allocated about $8 billion.
01:00:32.000Now, the interesting point there is, who's been in control there in Afghanistan since, you know, the withdrawal?
01:01:09.000It wasn't that long ago there was a...
01:01:12.000Because there is an inspector general.
01:01:14.000They call him the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, SEGAR. And he testified before Congress, I think much earlier this year,
01:01:30.000it might have been the January-February timeframe, about Afghanistan.
01:01:39.000I cannot sit here and tell the committee or the American taxpayer that we are not funding the Taliban through this money that is being allocated for Afghanistan.
01:01:57.000Unfortunately, as I sit here today, I cannot assure this committee that the American taxpayer or the American taxpayer that we are not currently funding the Taliban.
01:02:05.000He continued, nor can I assure you that the Taliban are not diverting the money we are sending to the intended recipients, which are the poor Afghan people.
01:03:27.000It is stunning that then the Inspector General will come out and say he can't get sufficient information from State Department and from USAID that's responsible in part for allocating these funds.
01:03:42.000And in pure, typical Washington D.C. bullshit, The reason is because the State Department says, well, you know, we withdrew from Afghanistan, so therefore the Inspector General, you know, doesn't have the same job.
01:03:58.000We're not reconstructing Afghanistan anymore, so we don't have to respond to his request for information.
01:04:05.000So, which is, you know, it's like this bizarre, but we're going to continue to give money out.
01:04:11.000And meanwhile, the Taliban's just shitting all over the people, right?
01:05:48.000If you spend too much time looking at the way the government sometimes operates and switching back to Ukraine and saying, okay, as an example, one of the things we're not doing is we're not fully sanctioning Russian oil.
01:06:23.000So, we're spending, what, 80 billion dollars on Ukraine?
01:06:27.000At the same time, we're not doing everything we can to shut down the ability of the Russian government to make money by sanctioning the oil the way we should.
01:06:35.000And therefore, they continue marching on.
01:06:41.000It's, I don't know, I just find it all, you know, going back to that original thought, you know, it's like, we're going to stop fossil fuels, but we're also going to keep all the minerals on the ground.
01:06:51.000But the Russia-Ukraine thing seems to be even crazier than the Afghanistan thing in terms of long-term costs and in terms of not having any solution of how this could ever possibly end.
01:07:24.000He's been going out and trying to garner support from a variety of countries.
01:07:29.000For his or for the Ukraine government's peace plan, which basically calls for return of all their lands, including Crimea, and obviously the exit of all Russian forces.
01:07:41.000And so he's out there talking and saying, this is what needs to happen.
01:07:44.000We need to gather international support for this peace plan if it's going to work, which is not incorrect, right?
01:07:50.000Meanwhile, you know, the Chinese are trying to, you know, play top dog in the world stage by proposing their own peace plan.
01:07:57.000You know, Saudis are making an effort.
01:08:00.000But there is no exit strategy, really, to speak of.
01:08:05.000But hasn't Zelensky openly stated that he wants Putin to step down?
01:08:10.000Well, yeah, I mean, he's expressed that desire, but you also think about they've declared him a war criminal.
01:08:18.000So what's Putin's, you know, what's Putin's motivation for stopping if he reaches a peace settlement and then is basically, that's it.
01:09:36.000Nobody was out there planting flags in their gardens and saying, we stand with Ukraine.
01:09:41.000And in fact, Ukraine was viewed as a highly corrupt place, you know, where, you know, a Ukrainian energy company would hire the son of the vice president.
01:09:52.000Oh, but at the same time, you can't, you know, we can't allow Putin's adventurism, right, to stand.
01:10:01.000So I do believe we have to And without our support, without our NATO allies' support and others, they wouldn't have been able to accomplish what they've done, right?
01:10:11.000And now whether they can make the counteroffensive a significant victory or not still remains to be seen because the Russians, you know, they used the opportunity during the lull to really dig in, right?
01:10:23.000They've created almost their own Maginot line, although it's more effective than the old Maginot line.
01:10:29.000They've created that along their perimeter, and it's been a real tough slog.
01:10:34.000You know, the Ukrainian counteroffensive has gone much slower than people thought.
01:10:51.000Are we going to continue to just allocate every couple of months and say, well, we're putting another $800 million in there?
01:10:57.000You know, we've already, you know, approved F-16s, Abrams tanks, Patriot missile system, I mean, HIMARS. We're doing everything possible, intelligence support, satellite support, and again, rightly so.
01:11:13.000You know, Putin, you know, needs to be driven out of there if possible.
01:11:18.000But at the same time, they need a logical thought process about how you have a settlement if there's going to be one.
01:11:24.000What are your feelings about NATO's encroaching on Russian territory, like getting closer and closer?
01:11:31.000Like the treaty at the end of the Soviet Union stated that NATO would not move any closer to Russia, but yet they have.
01:11:43.000And yet they have, yeah, and it's had just the opposite effect, right?
01:11:45.000I mean, what Putin did, because he's, you know, I think he imagined and he had bad intel, but he imagined that this incursion, this invasion was going to show the cracks in NATO, right?
01:11:58.000And it had the opposite, it grew NATO. And so...
01:12:03.000Look, he legitimately believes you have to understand the motivations of whoever's on the other side of the table.
01:12:09.000And with Putin, he legitimately believed that, you know, the collapse of the Soviet Union was a terrible, terrible tragedy, right?
01:12:15.000And he's been trying to recreate in some fashion the whole thing.
01:13:36.000Is it helpful in reaching a peace settlement?
01:13:39.000Look, if all your goal is, and maybe we need to say that, okay, is the U.S. goal to drive Russia completely out and reclaim all the lands that they had taken since 2000, then fine.
01:13:54.000That's our stated goal, and we just keep doing everything possible to make that happen, short of boots on the ground.
01:14:02.000But it would seem to me that our goal should also be, instead of that, maybe we find a way to end the war.
01:14:10.000Typically, you get into a war and you want to end it.
01:14:45.000But they're enthusiastic and anticipatory, I don't know if that's a word, about This potential, and I saw this back during the Iraq days, right, when we went in to reconstruct Iraq, right, which went on for several years,
01:15:01.000produced massive amounts of fraud, created all sorts of bullshit 8A companies, right?
01:15:07.000Everybody suddenly, everybody was looking for women-owned or Native American-owned or Eskimo-owned companies that they could set up so that would allow them to get those government contracts to go in and do some piece of reconstruction, whether they had experience to do it or not.
01:15:22.000And there was a, my god, the amount of energy that was involved in D.C. at the time of companies just shooting up out of nowhere, right?
01:15:30.000I remember people walking through the door.
01:15:32.000We had an office in D.C. for the business and people walking through the door with, you know, looking for security, right?
01:15:40.000And saying, well, we're going to start this company.
01:17:50.000We ended up making the same mistakes, you know, the same hubris.
01:17:53.000Look, there were years where we knew...
01:17:58.000During that 20 years that there were immense weaknesses and corruption inside the government, the Afghan government and the military.
01:18:06.000We knew for years that the Afghan military was problematic.
01:18:15.000And so this idea that we were surprised or shocked That they fell apart in a matter of hours, basically, as the withdrawal was taking place.
01:18:43.000If we're going to withdraw and pull everybody out and get all our allies and Contacts and people who had supported us all those years out.
01:18:50.000We had the perfect resource to do that and we didn't.
01:18:54.000They shut it down and then they, you know, they used Hamid Karzai Airport and that was just from a simple security process.
01:19:02.000I mean, we do security assessments on large, you know, facilities and it's not rocket science.
01:19:09.000You see the same things over and over again in terms of how you protect your assets and how you protect your people and how you move things.
01:19:16.000That's a part of a logistical exercise.
01:19:27.000And yet, you know, and then they come out with a bullshit assessment earlier this year.
01:19:31.000The White House does and basically blames the Trump administration for, you know, cutting a deal with the Taliban with a timeline that We had conditions which the Taliban never met, which we didn't have to stick with, frankly.
01:19:45.000And yet, you know, we thought politically the optic would be bad if we didn't.
01:20:41.000You know, I have no idea where with Ukraine, because sure, there's diplomatic efforts underway that we don't see, that aren't on the radar, right?
01:20:57.000You know, obviously we've got the U.S. is doing other things, but the public wouldn't know it.
01:21:04.000And I think the government and the military, government in particular, the White House needs to be better at explaining things, right?
01:21:10.000What's going on and why we're doing this, right?
01:21:14.000Because you don't want aid, military aid in particular, to dry up to the Ukrainian government.
01:21:19.000But, you know, if they don't do a better job of explaining why we're spending this money, People are going to get fed up or they're going to start questioning, is this really something that we should be worried about?
01:21:32.000And, you know, it's tough when you've got problems at home.
01:21:34.000It's tough to get people to focus on something as large as, you know, you don't want the recreation of the Soviet Union because then that might encourage China on Taiwan and then, you know, anyway.
01:21:53.000Because I think Xi looks at what's happening in Ukraine, and he probably thinks, all right, that's Russia, you know, small GDP equal to a European country, small European country.
01:22:09.000He looks at China and says, okay, is the West really going to go into a proxy war over Taiwan?
01:22:17.000And I think their calculation is probably no.
01:22:20.000So I think from their perspective, it's a matter of time.
01:22:23.000And they're probably calculating, can we do this in a slow, sort of soft war way, where we just...
01:22:30.000Seed the ground that eventually we have Taiwan, much like, you know, with Hong Kong, where we, you know, eventually we look and go, oh, Hong Kong, right?
01:22:37.000It used to be a bastion of democracy in that little spot.
01:23:52.000And given Taiwan's importance in the tech sector, you know, their chip manufacturing, and that would create potentially another real bind in the supply chain system, right, for future use, right?
01:24:07.000You have to think about down the road.
01:24:09.000If we got into a major conflict with China at some point, what are they going to do?
01:24:14.000They're going to stop anything they can, right, that would help us, right?
01:24:19.000Their ability to restrict the importation of chips necessary for much of our economy now in terms of running, that's sort of a key point.
01:24:33.000That's more of a practical economic issue, right?
01:24:37.000Then you've got the issue of, well, look, it's a democracy, right?
01:24:40.000Are we just going to let another democracy get rolled by the communist government?
01:24:45.000That sounds like an old 1960s Cold War theory.
01:24:51.000The reality is our values and what we think important say one thing.
01:25:00.000The realities of how that would play out say something else.
01:25:03.000So again, it's hard to marry those up.
01:25:06.000How far would we go down the road to protect Taiwan?
01:25:10.000Maybe what that means is, you know, down the road we need to be better at, you know, manufacturing on our own.
01:25:17.000We've got to bring things back, which is part of what's all that talk about onshoring and bringing manufacturing back.
01:25:23.000Underlying that is our concern over national security issues.
01:25:26.000Should they get, you know, control of, you know, more...
01:25:34.000Commodities or whatever you want to refer to.
01:25:35.000Well, that was one of the more shocking things about the pandemic was when you realize how dependent we are on China for medicine, for chips, for so many different things that they produce that we don't produce over here.
01:25:48.000And like, how did we allow that to happen?
01:25:51.000And did we just allow that to happen because there's higher profit margins and we put the entire country at risk because of that?
01:25:58.000I think it was, yeah, we got addicted to cheap stuff, right?
01:26:02.000Both, you know, cheap stuff and, you know, high-tech cheap stuff.
01:26:34.000We came out of World War II, as an example.
01:26:37.000This may not be the best example, but we came out of World War II. At the time, we had the Office of Strategic Services, which was the predecessor to the CIA. So World War II ends, and the next day, Truman says,
01:27:14.000And then the Soviets went on the march, and suddenly they were like, okay, fuck it, maybe we need it.
01:27:19.000So they started the CIA. And that's the lesson that should have been learned from there, was you're always going to need an intel apparatus that helps support national security concerns.
01:27:33.000Then we had the opening of a relationship again with China, and I think there was this imagining that suddenly things were different, right?
01:27:50.000You know, we maybe didn't see exactly what their plans and intentions and motivations were, you know, and we always mirror our values, right?
01:27:58.000So, you know, we imagine everybody's marching towards democracy and that's not how it works.
01:28:04.000So I think we, you know, that's in part how we ended up in this situation.
01:28:08.000But now, again, there's more effort and more understanding, I think, to go ahead and You know, onshore and be more concerned about the supply chain.
01:28:19.000And you're right, the pandemic pointed that out pretty clearly.
01:28:25.000And I think maybe that helped accelerate the process.
01:28:30.000It takes years just to do the simple things, right?
01:28:33.000We talked about the mining issue and critical minerals and the things that we need to lessen our dependence on China's control over critical minerals.
01:28:41.000You're talking about 6, 8, 9, 10 years, right, to get a mine open in the U.S.? So, you know, you think down the road, we better, you know, I guess my point is we better accelerate our ability to do this, right?
01:28:57.000Maybe, hopefully one day we're all holding hands and everybody's singing Kumbaya and, you know, unicorns are flying out of our ass, but I think it's probably not going to happen.
01:29:06.000So we just need to be a little more aware.
01:29:46.000I've gotten very cynical about the way that countries interact with each other and our ability to be realistic about that rather than just design strategies based on what we'd hoped for or what we feel like would be good to happen.
01:30:44.000I think it's excellent that we're actually having these hearings and that there's a subcommittee and that they're actually looking at this issue.
01:30:54.000Because I think the more transparency, the problem the government's had in the past is not being transparent enough.
01:31:15.000You're not a commanding officer on a carrier.
01:31:18.000He was on the Nimitz at the time in 2004. You don't get to that point by being irrational or hallucinating up in the air or, you know, just being whimsical.
01:31:29.000And the same with the other fellow, Ryan Graves, the other pilot.
01:31:31.000He was flying Hornets out of Virginia Beach about 10 years later when he reported on some of these incidents.
01:32:32.000I find David Fravor extremely credible.
01:32:35.000I've never met Ryan Graves, but again, given his experience and given the fact that he wasn't the only person seeing this off of Virginia Beach back in 2014, And with Ryan Graves,
01:32:51.000when they upgraded their sensors, they upgraded the capabilities of these jets, that's when they started seeing all these things.
01:32:58.000And he said it was shocking that they were encountering them all the time.
01:34:32.000I think, A, the logic of saying that we're doing this because if you have something out there that you observe that you can't identify propulsion or any sort of known-to-us systems...
01:35:00.000First of all, is it just something that is showing up on the radar and it's a natural phenomenon, it's a whatever, parallax or whatever they call it, then fine.
01:35:10.000Or is it something from a foreign government, that new technology being developed, propulsion systems, material science, whatever it may be, And they are working on these things all the time.
01:35:23.000The Chinese and the Russians are, frankly, still ahead of us in hypersonics capabilities because they've invested longer and more effort into...
01:35:36.000So, you have to figure out, is it a hostile foreign government doing this?
01:35:40.000And then the other part is, all right, well, is it non, whatever Dave Grush says, non-human, or is it a, you know, legitimately not from Earth?
01:35:50.000That can't be taken off the table, right?
01:36:17.000But I do know that you can't discount anything because, again, going back to the reason why you do it, it's in our national security interest to figure out what the hell it might be.
01:36:28.000And at some point, if you start with, like right now, The new office, the new office is whatever it's called, typical government, the all-domain anomaly resolution office, right?
01:36:42.000That's what they came up with at the Pentagon, yeah.
01:36:44.000So this guy, or this person, Dr. Kirkpatrick, runs it, I think.
01:37:08.000And maybe you take off 90% of them, or even more, but you end up with this short list of things, perhaps like the Tic Tac in 2004 with David Fravor.
01:37:18.000Where you just don't have an explanation.
01:37:22.000But be more transparent about it, right?
01:37:28.000And Ryan Graves said something interesting during the hearings.
01:37:33.000And he said that if the general public or if Congress could see the sensor and video data that he's seen, Then it would change the national conversation.
01:37:50.000That's a really interesting statement from an experienced former pilot, from an F-18 pilot.
01:37:59.000So that deserves more scrutiny, right?
01:38:02.000And that also means, well, maybe the government should release a few more, you know, videos that they may have.
01:38:09.000Maybe they should release some of that because they haven't released radar data.
01:38:12.000They haven't really been open about that.
01:38:14.000And so, you know, there's still information or data points on the Tic Tac, for instance, that hasn't been released.
01:38:26.000I mean, if you honestly haven't figured out whether it's foreign technology or not, then maybe you should put it out there and maybe the commercial sector will help you in that investigation, right?
01:38:38.000What would be the motivation to not be transparent about it?
01:38:42.000And is there any possibility that any of this stuff is ours?
01:38:48.000Is it possible that there's some black ops...
01:38:53.000Thing going on where they've developed some advanced system of propulsion that is completely independent from burning fossil fuels and shooting them out the back to propel something to go forward.
01:39:11.000And one thing that Dave Grush said, look, I don't know about his comments about, because he was speaking from, look, I haven't seen any of this.
01:39:18.000You know, I've gotten it from interviewing, you know, dozens of witnesses.
01:39:27.000But one thing that he did say was that he believes, and he's seen, he says, evidence that the government is misappropriating funds in order to prevent government oversight of certain programs.
01:40:25.000At some point, just like with the Biden administration situation and they're looking at their bank records, there will be a trail somewhere.
01:40:34.000That money has to eventually show up somewhere.
01:40:37.000And usually it's a line item that's not easily explained, usually in some mundane terms, whatever it might be.
01:40:43.000So Graves is absolutely correct in the sense that That's something worth looking at, right?
01:40:48.000And if there are programs like that, then the reason is, okay, we're keeping it secret because we don't want the Chinese regime to know, or we don't want the Russians to know.
01:40:59.000And so, you know, again, having come from where I come from, I get it, sources and methods.
01:41:04.000There are reasons for secrets at times.
01:41:06.000But if that's not the case, then I see no reason not to be more open and transparent about Some of the other information that they may have and the sightings they have.
01:41:18.000You know, I know Graves was talking about they've got biologics and, you know, those things.
01:41:36.000It had been running for decades, he said.
01:41:38.000I think he said that He said that the government, in his opinion, based on his interviews, as he was working, I think, with the National Reconnaissance Office and he was tasked with going around and, you know,
01:41:53.000identifying the programs related to UAPs, he said that the U.S. government was likely aware of non-human issues.
01:42:19.000It's really hard for them to keep a secret.
01:42:33.000And now when you pay attention to some of the video footage that has been released about these unidentified objects and when you listen to what Bob Lazar said about how these things operate, it mimics that.
01:42:49.000Not only that, like the way he described the propulsion method.
01:43:54.000I just have a hard time believing the government is that good at keeping a secret, right?
01:43:58.000Sometimes it just seems like they can't organize panic in a doomed submarine.
01:44:01.000So I think that that's, from my perspective, that's a question mark, right?
01:44:07.000Could they keep this secret that they've got frozen bodies of aliens sitting somewhere?
01:44:12.000Wouldn't you imagine, though, that if there was something like that, that the level of attention to detail to protect secrecy would be significantly ramped up?
01:45:52.0003D printed model designed to house three foot tall creatures from another galaxy.
01:45:58.000But I think there's, look, we do also tend to imagine, look, we can only, like when we look at, or when Fravor, it was interesting, Fravor looks at the Tic Tac, right, and he, you know, in Dietrich, they're looking at this, and And they're trying to interpret it based on what we know right now,
01:47:54.000You know, they said, okay, we have AATIP or the – whatever it was, the Advanced Aeronautical Threat Identification Program, which supposedly shut down in 2012 or so.
01:49:12.000Again, nothing was solved as a result of the hearing, obviously.
01:49:16.000And I think people were excited, and they're always excited when there's going to be something like this in the previous hearing, and this world, this UAP world starts talking.
01:49:26.000But You know, every hearing ends up the same way in a sense because we don't get a resolution, which then leads to more suspicion that the government's hiding something, which has always been the case, right?
01:49:37.000For decades now, that's where it tends to end up.
01:49:40.000Well, the government's hiding something.
01:49:46.000And rather than holding on to evidence and trying to keep it a secret, which again, it's tough.
01:49:55.000But do you think that if it's ours, like say the Tic Tac is ours, is it possible that the government could create some advanced propulsion system and do so in complete secrecy as well?
01:51:00.000We don't want to put it out in the field to be used because we don't want it to fall into, you know, into the wrong hands, right?
01:51:06.000And then they realize that we've got this capability.
01:51:09.000So it's much like we talked about before, if you get a target in your sights, maybe you want to watch that target for a period of time to understand what it's capable of doing, what it's doing.
01:51:18.000You don't want to just let out, you know, okay, we're good.
01:51:20.000So, yeah, is it possible we developed a new propulsion system?
01:51:25.000And, you know, we're just playing a game where we're saying, okay, we're still working on hypersonics, you know, and air breathing engines, and we're trying to see what we can do here.
01:51:32.000And, you know, and meanwhile, we've got this in our back pocket, right, waiting for someday.
01:52:10.000What I'm saying is it's so revolutionary.
01:52:13.000If they do have this thing that is the ability to go from 50,000 feet above sea level to 50 feet in a second, something that defies our current understanding of at least assuming there's a biological entity inside that thing.
01:52:30.000One of the examinations of the video footage that they got from the jets, they said the way that thing took off Any biological being would be turned into Jell-O. You would be pink mist.
01:54:45.000We're going to work to make this happen.
01:54:47.000And there has been some discussion of magnetic propulsion systems and gravity propulsion systems, something that defies what we understand is possible today.
01:54:57.000Way back in the 60s, they were talking about this, just theoretically.
01:55:31.000Now, roughly, is $800 billion a year or so, a little over, probably, give or take.
01:55:38.000So you could siphon some of that off to some program, or move it to a program?
01:55:44.000You would put it as a line item in some other innocuous program.
01:55:48.000And then, again, that has happened when we're talking about developing something as, you know, sort of not, say, pedestrian, but as straightforward as, like, surveillance aircraft, right?
01:56:00.000Then, um, we would, you put that money somewhere else, you develop the program, you get the team that's going to be working on it, whether it's at Skunk Works or somewhere, right?
01:56:10.000And, but you sometimes have to turn to the same usual suspects, right?
01:56:15.000Which is why I bring up Skunk Works, right?
01:56:17.000And you have to do these, you know, because there's, you know, at the end of the day, there's not that many material scientists with that, you know, capability, level of intelligence.
01:56:28.000And so then you go from there and you, you know, you work like hell to keep it secret, which, again, if they've done that, you know, I consider that, that'd be a great win.
01:56:42.000We're still trying to play a little bit of catch-up on hypersonics, and that's the next theater, right?
01:56:47.000I mean, aside from, you know, cyber warfare and warfare in space, you know, space has already been weaponized, hypersonics is it, right?
01:56:57.000And so, you know, we're already seeing deployment of hypersonics.
01:57:00.000And look, to be fair, you know, ballistic missiles, you know, it's all, you know, the difference between a hypersonic and a ballistic missile is the maneuverability, right?
01:57:10.000Which creates at the speed, it creates this, you keep shortening the gap for response time, right?
01:57:19.000So if you fire an ICBM, you know what the trajectory is, you know, a hypersonic glide vehicle, you don't know, right?
01:57:27.000It comes at you so fast and it comes from different directions and you can't predict, so it defeats air defense systems, which is why it's so important.
01:57:34.000But we're still playing catch up there.
01:57:37.000Is this what we're saying publicly, that we're playing catch-up, and is it possible that we aren't playing catch-up?
01:58:16.000And it is a massive hurdle to overcome.
01:58:22.000But that's what everybody's working on.
01:58:24.000So, you know, were they capable of working on this and they developed something like that or were testing it back 19 years ago when Fravor saw whatever he saw?
01:58:31.000Yeah, it's a great sort of theoretical exercise to think about that.
01:58:37.000The reason why I say this is I don't know why I have these instincts.
01:58:43.000Because you know I'm a UFO nut, right?
01:59:02.000All the grush stuff, all the disclosure stuff, all the biological entities, the recovered vehicles, the recovery program, the back engineering program.
01:59:52.000I would get some information to a guy and encourage him to leak it and then encourage him to have these hearings and talk about all this stuff and put all this weirdness out there where it kind of confuses the narrative like what is real and what's not real.
02:00:09.000I just something about it to me and this is again, but here's part of my feeling on it too if Disclosure was real if they are if they we really are visited and we have been being visited since the beginning of time Wouldn't that maybe my feeling is that that would seem so alien that that would seem fake anyway because I always felt like If there was a moment of disclosure,
02:00:34.000if there was a moment where the president got on television and gave a press conference and said, we are not alone, and we know this for a fact now, and this is our concern, this is what we have to worry about in terms of national security, in terms of whether or not they're malevolent.
02:00:52.000I feel like that by itself would be so alien, even if it was true, that it would seem fake.
02:01:19.000And this is, again, I'm not calling anyone a liar.
02:01:22.000It just seems like bullshit, and I don't know why.
02:01:27.000Yeah, I think part of it is we're kind of conditioned to assume that the government hides information from us, right?
02:01:36.000Oftentimes not for any necessary national security reasons, just because it's such a large operation and they just – it can sometimes seem very – Whimsical or capricious, why they don't, you know, provide some level of disclosure about things.
02:01:53.000But I think with Grush, I think Here's my take on it.
02:02:43.000And maybe the difference between us is I spent a lot of time with the government.
02:02:52.000The government is, sometimes can be really, really dysfunctional.
02:03:00.000And I just, it goes back to keeping a secret.
02:03:03.000The idea that they could have this, what essentially is a covert action campaign, you know, to spread this information about what they actually know, right?
02:03:13.000When the easier thing to do is just to have the program You know, again, if it's the U.S. government's, you know, development of technology, right, and we're doing this, to have the program and just keep your app shut about it, not go for a disinformation campaign,
02:03:29.000not try to muddy the waters by doing this, because in a sense, you're just creating more conversation around it.
02:03:35.000You're creating, you know, now there's a little bit of a, you know, movement within Congress to say, we have to do this, now we have to...
02:03:40.000So they're going to look, perhaps, for a misappropriation of funds, right, because They're not going to pursue like the UAP issue necessarily, right?
02:03:47.000But they might be interested in pursuing misappropriation of funds.
02:03:50.000So if you're running a program, if it – again, going back to the idea that it's a US government thing, if you're running a program, that's the last thing you want to do is because you're doing this program to avoid government oversight, you're not going to create – You know, this alternative narrative that, you know, could generate the sort of publicity or the conversation,
02:04:08.000particularly up on Capitol Hill, that causes them to then start looking and saying, well, where is money being spent?
02:04:34.000I would like to say, you know, I don't think we're going to get there.
02:04:36.000My instinct is to say, how do we solve this?
02:04:40.000Or how do we come to some sort of logical resolution?
02:04:43.000As opposed to saying, what is it right off the bat?
02:04:46.000My instinct is to say, all right, if the all domain anomalous or anomaly resolution office has 800 cases, Then tell us what those 800 cases are.
02:04:58.000Let's work our way through them or have a little bit more transparency about working through those cases.
02:05:02.000Again, you'll probably whittle them down.
02:05:05.000When we were doing Black Files and we were going around talking to people about various sightings and things, you're basically just crossing things off, going, okay, that was this, that was this, that was this.
02:05:16.000But you whittle it down to maybe one or two things that you can't explain, and then you can investigate those and say, okay, all right, let's dig further on these.
02:05:24.000But right now, it's just like all over the map, and they've got so many cases, and they just kind of lump it all together.
02:05:30.000Are they doing that to obfuscate and create this situation where it does seem like bullshit?
02:05:41.000Again, I don't know, but I think I'm not willing to shut the door on saying that those handful of those few sightings that where we do have technical data, we've got video, we've got, you know, radar lock, we've got gun camera footage, whatever it may be,
02:06:14.000And if that leads us to the doorstep that says, oh, that's a US government program and they've developed the technology – Okay, you know, fine.
02:06:21.000But, you know, I realize that, you know, I just, I'm not willing to close the door on saying it could be something else.
02:06:32.000There is that problem with the infinite nature of space, which seems to actually be getting bigger.
02:06:37.000Yeah, there was a good way of putting it that my wife, who's a hell of a lot smarter than I am, tried to explain it to me, and I kept looking at her like this.
02:06:47.000But she had heard a program at one point where the person explained it like, okay, imagine how vast the ocean is, right?
02:06:56.000And, you know, how we've explored the ocean.
02:07:00.000But then you look at space and how immense it is, right, compared to the ocean.
02:07:05.000The amount that we've explored in space, right, is equivalent to like a wine glass full of ocean water.
02:07:13.000So you take a wine glass full of ocean water, you look at it, and you go, eh, there's nothing there.
02:07:22.000And then, you know, you think about space, and you think about what we know and what we don't know, and how we imagine, like, our limited capacity to imagine what life outside of Earth could look like.
02:07:34.000But when you hear talk of, like, crashed retrieval programs...
02:07:39.000Yeah, that keeps taking me back to this whole idea of if there was a crash retrieval and reverse engineering program like David Gresh talked about and had been in existence for decades, Somebody would have fucking opened their yap and talked about it.
02:08:10.000Well, I haven't seen it, but I talked to somebody who knows that it exists, right?
02:08:14.000And I think maybe it's because we're human, we're programmed to actually want physical evidence, right?
02:08:19.000We want to actually see it before we believe it.
02:08:23.000But, you know, that really hasn't happened yet.
02:08:26.000One of the things that's fascinating is the narrative has shifted so wildly from it's completely preposterous to credible people like David Fravor and Ryan Graves and all these different people that are talking about multiple sightings.
02:08:39.000Things that completely defy our understanding of what a vehicle is capable of doing.
02:08:43.000Hovering completely motionless in 120 knot winds.
02:08:47.000The whole, you know, whatever that thing is, the cube inside a sphere that they keep seeing over and over again.
02:08:58.000So I think, you know, one of the good developments out of all of this, and one of the things that may eventually lead to transparency, right?
02:09:07.000Provide an avenue for these sightings, whether it's commercial or military pilots, as an example, to report it, right?
02:09:13.000And to be more, and for the government to take, perhaps, you know, again, it depends on whether it's a big conspiracy or not, to investigate in a more logical manner, in a more detailed manner.
02:09:26.000So I think just, again, the sheer act that we're talking about it, Which then takes me back to the idea that if you're running a secret program, you don't want people talking about it, so you're not going to muddy the waters with a false narrative if you don't have to.
02:09:39.000If your concern is that someone's getting close to the truth and you've got to do it, okay, then maybe so.
02:09:45.000Do you think it's also possible that there are patriots that do think that the American public deserves to know about this information and they have been sitting on it for a long time?
02:10:18.000Well, if I'm, you know, one of the people on that subcommittee, I'm going to say, you know what, to my staff, schedule, you know, a SCIF meeting with Grush.
02:11:55.000The information from Grush, who said he was unable to discuss specifics on what he told the Pentagon's watchdog arm, lawmakers want to sit down with the former official in a sensitive compartmented We're good to go.
02:12:26.000Luna argued that the SCIF with Grush could help lawmakers better understand the type of legislation they need to write regarding UAPs.
02:12:33.000She said she supports legislation that would declassify information on the phenomenon.
02:12:38.000So there seems to be some issue of secrecy and what's possible to discuss or what's legal to discuss.
02:12:45.000Well, but yeah, look, the government casts a very wide net when you're talking about classified information, right?
02:12:51.000The government has overclassified information for decades and decades, right?
02:12:56.000And you've got secret, top secret, code word, you know.
02:13:00.000And they tend to just hoover everything up and classify it, right?
02:13:07.000And then it takes fucking forever, right, to go through that process of declassification.
02:13:11.000And because nobody wants to put their neck out at that point and say, yeah, let's declassify this, right?
02:13:30.000And if they're sincere about trying to get to the bottom of this, and that's theoretically their job, then they should, because again, going back to the main thing, and people can say, well, why are you wasting your time on this?
02:13:39.000But you can always circle back to the top line, which is, it's for national security purposes.
02:13:44.000We want to know what the hell's going on.
02:14:35.000I haven't seen any stories that talked about the follow-up with Grush.
02:14:40.000There were a couple of stories talking about, you know, the fact that perhaps his medical records were leaked, you know, as a result of this.
02:15:24.000I mean, that's the whole purpose of providing these services for veterans, that when they do have suicidal thoughts and they are struggling with PTSD, that they get help.
02:15:37.000I mean, the idea that they're shaming him and saying that his report is not credible because of this seems ridiculous.
02:16:21.000Our assistance, right, to veterans, I mean, you look at the number of homeless situations, it's pathetic.
02:16:29.000And so when he talks about it, it's good that he's talking about it, right?
02:16:35.000I think that transparency helps, and he clearly views it that way, too.
02:16:39.000And he said, look, I don't have any problem with discussing it, but we should be concerned by the fact that, you know, somehow his medical records were put out there.
02:16:47.000And then, you know, some people will look at that and go, well, is that the government's effort to discredit them?
02:16:52.000You know, or is that somebody's effort to discredit them?
02:17:22.000No, I'm glad you were able to bring Nixon into this conversation.
02:17:25.000Yeah, Nixon apparently was drinking buddies with Jackie Gleason, and they were tying one on, and Nixon was like, you want to see some fucking shit?
02:17:35.000Apparently they jumped into Air Force One.
02:17:39.000And the legend goes that they showed him this retrieved UFO and they showed him alien bodies.
02:17:46.000And the legend also goes that Jackie Gleason became a UFO nut after that.
02:17:51.000And one of the things that points to that is he actually had a home built in New York State that was in the shape of a UFO. And there's a, I mean, you could see the home.
02:18:02.000Yeah, it's like this circular, flying disc-looking home that he had built in New York State.
02:22:33.000It starts on the 5th of September every morning at 6 a.m., about 20 minutes, and all we're going to do, the reason I love this project is because Like with the president's daily brief, right?
02:22:44.000It drops in the Oval Office every morning.
02:22:46.000It's very, as his name implies, it's very brief, covers the top issues around the globe, and provides a bit of context, and then that's it.
02:22:57.000And that's all the president gets, right?
02:22:58.000Just every morning to kind of get that, okay, here are the things going on that I need to pay attention to.
02:23:02.000That's the stuff that they said that Trump wouldn't read unless his name was in it.
02:24:19.000It was a large gathering, and it was a dinner.
02:24:21.000And at the end of it, and also George Bush was there too.
02:24:27.000Had a brief chance to talk with him, but with Bill Clinton, the striking thing was, he came through the room, and I was just standing there talking to my wife and a couple others, and he came up, and he stood there and he looked at me, and he started talking to me about something that We had done,
02:24:44.000when I was with the agency, and he was president, an operation that we had done.
02:24:50.000And, you know, I don't think he knew I was going to be there or anything, but he stood there and started talking about this operation in real detail.
02:25:00.000I mean, no sources and methods or things, but the recall was surprising.
02:25:03.000And he was adding context about why they had made, you know, some decisions from the White House that they did about what we were doing.
02:25:14.000He was just really focused on talking to the point where the Secret Service at a certain point were kind of like, you know, getting antsy and saying, can we move on?
02:25:35.000But he had this ability To zero in on people, right?
02:25:39.000And the thing that he had as a politician was not only could he make you feel like you were the only person in the room, but he had this recall, the ability to talk about things in detail that, you know, left you realizing, okay, he was a smart dude.
02:25:53.000He was, you know, he was a bit of a wanderer, right?
02:26:43.000I would love to talk to a president about what that experience, I mean, it's my main, if I had a question for Trump, that's one of the big ones.
02:26:52.000Like, what is it like when you get in there?
02:26:56.000What's the difference between perception and reality?
02:27:00.000What is the difference between your ideas of what it's like when you get into the Oval Office, what it's like when you get debriefed?
02:27:08.000Because pretty much every politician has these plans.
02:27:12.000They all have these things that they say they're going to do, and then they get into office and very little of it happens.
02:27:20.000I think they're fighting against the machine, first of all.
02:27:23.000And, you know, maybe they show up and they imagine, I mean, that they're going to accomplish whatever it is going to be that they're going to accomplish.
02:27:33.000But then I think the reality is Washington, D.C. set in.
02:27:38.000I think that it's tougher now than it used to be.
02:27:42.000Not to romanticize the past, but I think it used to be easier to get people into a room from both sides of the aisle and hammer out a platform or an idea or a bill or whatever it may be.
02:27:54.000And I think that's much more difficult now for people to do because it's so damn partisan.
02:28:02.000Yeah, it is, it's a, you know, we had the good fortune of being in the White House a few times, and it's, I can't imagine that it's not this overwhelming feeling when you go, if you're just elected,
02:28:17.000right, and you walk into the Oval Office, this overwhelming feeling of responsibility, you know, and even for somebody like Trump, you know, who probably, you know, I mean, He probably sat down and thought, of course I'm here.
02:28:33.000And then your number one job is essentially to take a lot of shit that's happening, distill it down to its key points, and delegate.
02:28:43.000Because there is such a machine around you that tries to plan every moment of your day, I think.
02:28:50.000And it's not unlike being a CEO of a Fortune 50 company where you've got a lot of plates spinning and you can't focus on all of them.
02:29:02.000So, which is part of the, you know, look at me, part of the President's Daily Brief, the purpose of that that goes into the Oval Office is to try to keep a focus on sort of the national security issues that are at the top of the hit parade.
02:29:20.000Because no matter how interested the president is, and look, Bush, as an example, used to go through those things with a fine-tooth comb and ask question after question after question, right?
02:29:28.000Clearly, I don't think that was Trump style.
02:29:30.000I don't know what Biden does, right, in terms of that, but You know, every president's a little bit different in how they receive information, process it, and then prioritize in their mind what's important.
02:29:42.000But behind you is a machine that, regardless of what you're thinking, is prioritizing concerns of the day.
02:29:48.000National security issues and military concerns and the economy and all the rest of it.
02:29:53.000So, at the end of the day, maybe we put too much We imagine the president's got more ability, right, to do things or to change things or to shape things than they actually do.
02:30:11.000So, again, not in any way to minimize the importance or the stress of that job.
02:30:41.000I think the people that want Trump in office, they view the hypocrisy of this administration, the corruption, the open borders, the economy collapsing, the open checkbook to Ukraine.
02:31:33.000He does seem to talk directly about the issues.
02:31:36.000Unlike some of the folks who are speaking more aspirational and talking about direction of the country, he does seem to focus more on...
02:31:43.000These are the things we need to do specifically.
02:31:45.000He's also clearly very, very intelligent, like superior intelligence.
02:31:51.000Like when you hear him discuss nuanced issues, he also has very good emotional intelligence because I've seen him not just challenged but disparaged on radio shows and podcasts and he handles things very, very well.
02:32:03.000And that discussion with him was what got Don Lemon removed from CNN because Don Lemon and him went at it.
02:32:09.000I think he's—but he's very young, too.
02:32:13.000Would people want a 37-year-old guy running the entire country?
02:32:16.000Even if it's a truly exceptional mind and a truly exceptional person, which I think he is.
02:32:25.000Meaning sort of this Biden— I mean, if Biden ends up, do you think, that's the second part of the question, do you think Biden's gonna be the guy?
02:32:39.000Yeah, I think it's probably gonna be Gavin Newsom.
02:32:41.000I think they're probably gonna try to whitewash all the failures of California and all the disastrous policies and just view him as the most presidential of the leftist progressive candidates.
02:32:54.000And keep Kamala Harris as the VP? No way.
02:33:52.000And, you know, yeah, you hate to say anything about anybody's health, but, you know, without something on a health perspective happening with Biden.
02:33:58.000Well, the health perspective has already happened.
02:35:09.000So maybe somebody like Vivek says, I'm going to sit this one out.
02:35:13.000I mean, to me, that would be the smart thing.
02:35:15.000If you've got aspirations and you've got the ability, but you're young, you think, maybe I'll just let the whole system reboot right now because this Biden-Trump thing is just so bizarre.
02:35:25.000Well, Trump could choose him as a VP, and I think he would be a formidable VP. If Trump runs with him as a VP, I think that's a massive asset.
02:35:42.000When I listen to him talk, I'm like, that's what I want from a president.
02:35:45.000I want a level-headed Super intelligent, rational person who has had a massive amount of success in the real world, who decides to enter into politics because he thinks that he can serve in a meaningful way and he thinks that he can impart change in a meaningful way.
02:36:00.000At least that's what I'm getting from him in my most rose-colored glasses view of the world.
02:36:07.000I don't know if that's what the voters want, right?
02:36:10.000Well, he would balance out what people don't like about Trump with this bombastic personality.
02:36:18.000But also, you've got to give credit to the guy because that bombastic personality really did expose the deep state.
02:36:25.000It really did expose all this corruption and the fucking Russia collusion, the fact that the media was completely on board with that, that there's been no apologies that this was all bullshit.
02:36:36.000There's so much of that that he exposed because of the fact that he fights tooth, claw, and nail.
02:36:41.000The fact that he won't back down, and he literally goes after the intelligence community, which is, obviously from your perspective, is a terrible idea.
02:36:51.000Well, no, it's not a terrible idea if you're going after it for For certain individuals politicizing, because that can never happen, that's a death knell for any intelligence organization as far as I'm concerned, or a federal law enforcement organization like the Bureau.
02:37:05.000So you should always be on the lookout for that.
02:37:12.000But my point is always, at least with the organization that I know, It's not the body of the organization, right?
02:37:21.000You get individuals who become enamored of their access or the power or the closeness to the policies or they let their personal agenda take over.
02:37:33.000That's a real danger and you can never let that happen.
02:37:37.000That's what I think people need to understand when they talk disparagingly about the intelligence community and that my opinion, my personal opinion, is that most of these people are patriots.
02:37:47.000And that there are people that get into positions of power in every single organization, no matter what it is, where they abuse that power and those people become corrupt.
02:37:57.000And this has happened in every business, I'm sure every branch of government.
02:38:03.000I'm sure it happens everywhere, but it doesn't mean that the intelligence communities are unnecessary.
02:38:08.000That would be like saying, okay, the CEO of a company has got a certain political agenda, like with BlackRock.
02:38:16.000Maybe the head of it is enamored with whatever it was, equity and...
02:38:30.000Well, okay, probably not everybody there thinks that way, right?
02:38:32.000But, you know, all it takes is a handful at the top level on the seventh floor or wherever the organization is, and that's a problem.
02:38:40.000So you defeat that in part by having a very proactive, curious, you know, government, right, with the proper committees and the intel, you know, committees that are up on Capitol Hill, as an example, that We're good to go.
02:39:20.000And Raskin and Schiff and others spent years getting in front of the cameras and just spewing bullshit about the Russian collusion story.
02:39:28.000And yet the fact that they don't see it because they're so partisan and they don't understand.
02:39:33.000Look, the important thing here is it doesn't matter if you're a Republican or Democrat.
02:39:37.000You know, everybody should be subject to the same concerns and behavior and scrutiny, right?
02:39:45.000But, you know, it's not going to happen.
02:40:43.000And that's a dangerous precedent to set because if that happens, what's to stop some authoritarian Republican from utilizing the same methods to go after people in your group?
02:40:57.000And then you get into banana republic territory.
02:41:01.000But again, I would be hard-pressed to imagine Biden's going to end up going all the way through the whole process, securing all the delegates, running, winning.
02:41:31.000Yeah, I mean, well, I know, but what I mean is when they say that, you think, well, she enjoys this position of being loved by lots of people.
02:41:38.000And so Michelle Obama, she's in sort of that sweet spot, right?
02:41:41.000Everybody's like, oh, my God, it's Michelle Obama.
02:41:43.000As soon as you put yourself in that arena.
02:42:32.000And I'm sitting in a committee, and I hear somebody talk about a new program that's going to be developed to develop a new type of propulsion system.