#277 Michael Lester - Are We the Bad Guys?

30:22It's, those are the two things that come to my mind. It's a lack of trust in institutions, all institutions. All institutions, right? And when you look at it, all of our major institutions that make a country what it is, our government, our healthcare, our education, our law enforcement, our social services, our military. we've lost faith in almost all of them because of things that have happened. And how do you lose faith, right? Well, you never see any consequences or repercussions or anybody held accountable in any position of power. It's obviously a two-tiered system. This isn't a fucking conspiracy anymore.

31:17It is a fucking two-tiered system. Without a doubt. You know, and so how do you get the trust back? Well, first you have to pin somebody's ass to the wall who actually did something wrong. And these people don't have the fucking courage to do that. Without a doubt. You know what? And if there's... I just finished, uh, Assad Khan's book, Betrayal of Command. And, you know, he was talking about some of this, right? And if there's anything I take out of that, and anything that I like to see in the U.S. And what I used to see in the Marine Corps, and I haven't been in the Marine Corps since 1994, right?

32:01But Marines used to be proud that they were Marines. And no matter what, if you said something, that's the way it was. If you did something wrong, at least the people I was with, you would say, yeah, my bad. I screwed up. I'll fix it. Or tell me what I need to do to fix it, but I screwed up. Right? You don't see that a lot today. There's no ownership. No. And especially with our government, you see something happen. I'm like, just, we see what happened. We're not stupid. We see what happened. Just own up to it and tell us how you're going to fix it. Don't blame it on everybody else. Yeah. That is the weakest, I would say form of leadership, but it's not even leadership.

32:51That is the largest abdication of leadership when you won't even own up to things.

33:04I know, we both just take a deep breath and like, what are we going to do? Because it's not going to get fixed. It's not. It's entrenched now and it's systemic. And that means that there has to be a systemic change. And I don't want to be the one that comes on your show and says, revolution, right? But things have to change. And, um, we are right now, whether we want to define ourselves that way or not in the world, we're an empire. We control other countries economically, militarily. We tell them what to do and they have little choice but to comply. We're an empire. If you study every empire that has ever existed on the planet, they all end and they all end badly because they start believing their own lies and they stop taking accountability for what they do.

34:06They do it because they can, and they get away with it because they can, and nobody ever calls them on it until you just, you can't do it anymore. It's like a Ponzi scheme. Eventually it falls. If we had leaders that took more accountability, like I said, if something went wrong, say it went wrong. Don't try and spin it. Don't try and convince us that it was the right thing. We all see it. And I think that's one of our biggest things that has to change or the future will change us. What was the last empire? Ooh, the last empire. The last empire? The last empire that fell this way. Great Britain.

34:58Great Britain. Before that, you had the Spanish. Obviously, you had things like the Ottoman Empire. you've had a couple of Chinese dynasties. How about the Soviet Union? Soviet Union was never, I don't really look at them as having been a strong empire. They were a strong country. They were building a strong military and starting to challenge. But they didn't have functional, they weren't functionally established in other countries to where they could control them and the people around them. I think the United States actually did a pretty good job of containing that. But look at the colonies, all the colonial stuff from Great Britain, right?

35:52There's a joke, what is Great Britain given to the world more than any other country? And the answer is Independence Days, right? They were everywhere. And eventually you get overextended. The Roman Empire, huge, lasted for what, 2 ,000 years. But eventually they got so big, you can't sustain it anymore. And then you get regional fighting and you don't have the power to stop that. Their Senate started arguing amongst themselves, not taking responsibility. It was this person, it was that person. And Rome falls. When you look at the parallels, they're not as not tangential as you think. They're closer than you think.

36:47I think a lot of people don't see the empire because it's not our flag everywhere. It's not the risk board that every country's one color. It's proxies. It is proxy. And it's also, if it is us, it's not necessarily boots on the ground. It's economic, right? We hold economic control where, you know, we've got, we have the top seats at the World Bank. You need help? We'll give you big loans. But when we do that, you have to do what we want you to do now. And again, a lot of people would say, well, that's just real politic, right? That's just politics. We're going to do something for you and you have to do something back.

37:31And that's okay unless it goes a little too far. And it's like, well, now you're not just giving something back. We're holding you hostage. And it's not just us, by the way. There's a whole system of this in the world. China. Yeah, absolutely. China and Africa. Absolutely. Space. There's one that we haven't seen yet. I think whenever something happens, we're going to see stuff that we're just like, where did this come from? We didn't even see that coming. I mean, do you think, you know, I had told you, you know, my theory or whatever you want to call it about division, you know, and that I don't think it could be kinetic.

38:24I do think there are other ways. do you think there could be a transfer of power that's not kinetic i guess driving us into civil war revolution regime change whatever you want to call it yeah i mean that's still semi-kinetic but you know when i'm thinking about world war three and power transfer and all this stuff i mean when we look at china i'm your dude brought up the power grid earlier you know how infiltrated they are in our power grid we've covered that several times on the show. People or anybody listening should be well-educated on that. That could be a catalyst for a transfer of power.

39:03The supply chain, which China seems to own, that could be a transfer of power. Space race, transfer of power. AI race, transfer of power. There's four other things that could potentially lead to maybe a peaceful transfer of power, maybe, if they just overtake us with technology. And then we, I mean, if you look at shipbuilding capacity in China, the amount of power that they are harnessing, I think they've overtaken us with power. We're building nuclear already. We're sending nuclear up to space, I believe.

39:51um and we're still here fucking around with a 50 year old grid we are and I marvel that we spend so much money on other countries we send so much money to other countries and I'm gonna I'm just gonna say Israel because they're our number one they're a first world country with a better standard of living than we have and we're sending them billions of dollars when our own infrastructure is crumbling we've got veterans that are homeless we've got bridges that are rated d you know on a scale of a b c d f ready to fall the worst There's no crisis in the world. Right. But we're sending money to other people.

40:46I'm like, you know, it's time to say, hey, we'd like to help, but we need to take care of ourselves because if we don't, we won't be around to help. It's kind of like that in the airplane. If the oxygen mask falls, put it on yourself first before you help others. Because if you pass out, you can't help anybody. If we keep sending all of our money everywhere else and our own infrastructure crumbles, there won't be any money to send anybody else. We'll just have a collapsed infrastructure. I was going to bring that up as well. I mean, there's also the devaluation of the U.S. dollar, the world reserve currency.

41:24We have BRICS actively doing that. I mean, it doesn't take a fucking genius to see how worthless our money is becoming. I mean, just since COVID, I mean, gold was what,$1 ,000 an ounce? Yeah. I still remember it at$400. You know, six years later, it's, what is it, like$4 ,300 an ounce today, I think? Yeah, something crazy. Fucking four times? Everybody's buying it. And we took ourself off the gold standard, right? And right now, countries are buying deep into gold because it's an asset. It's something you can hold. I'm not a big fan of digital currency. I look at it like, okay, this is just made up.

42:08Somebody decided I'm going to have this and somebody else said, yeah, I'll, I'll believe it and I'll assign a worth to it. But then when you look at it, ever since we went off the gold standard, the U S dollar is a digital currency. We're just people. Yeah. People think it has value. So it does, but it has nothing behind it specifically. And we do have the country and everything, but it's not tied to anything. and it that makes it a little more susceptible to fluctuations and changes in world economy you know i did do you think we have any real allies in the world no i think we have associates and i think we have allies of convenience but if there was somebody where our back was up against the wall.

43:02And we said, hey, even if it is difficult and hurts you, you got to come help us. I mean, come on. If you got a buddy and you're real allies, they get in a fight, you're like, I'm going to jump in. I'm going to get hurt, but I'm going to help you. I don't think there's another country like that for us. And quite honestly, we're not like that for any other country. We're not willing to jump in. unless there is something in it for us. No, God. Right? I mean, we'll go do it if like, well, yeah, I'm going to help you out, but you're going to do this for me afterwards. If you have a real ally, that's not the conversation.

43:44If you have a buddy that gets in a fight, you're going to go in the fight with them because they're your buddy. Do you think anybody has a real ally? Any country? No. I think they're all opportunist. You don't think Russia, China, India? No, I think they're opportunist. I think they wouldn't take damage to themselves to help the other. I'm going to go back to the buddy in a fight. You know, if my best friend gets in a fight, am I going to jump in? Yeah. Is there anything in it for me? No. Right? May I get hurt? Yeah. Is a country going to do that? And should a country do that? I don't know. I think they would.

44:27You think so? I think they would. I think there's enough hatred for this country and the world that when the world realizes how many of them there are versus how many of us, just like in this country, there are about 200 people running this fucking country. There are 340 million of us. And look at Pakistan now has, well, India has more money than China has. Or not more money, more people than China does. Do they really? They do. They have crossed the line. They have a larger population than China. Wow. I did not. Wow. Yeah, check that out. Oh, shit. It just happened like a year ago. Pakistan? Or India.

45:09See, again, I got to go check it out. But India or Pakistan now has more people than China. Because I always thought China. Billions of people. Yeah, well. Well, the one-child policy didn't work out too well. Oh, that was a horrible, horrible, horrible thing. All you had to do was, you know, again, that was one of those things where you solve the symptom right now and create a bigger problem down the road. You've heard of the cobra conundrum? Have you heard of this one? No. In India, they had a problem with cobras, too many cobras. So the government, rightly so, said we need to do something. So I said, we're going to pay a bounty for every Cobra you guys bring in that's dead.

45:58We'll pay you so much. Right? Sounds good. Okay. Well, then a couple of enterprising people figured out, well, we're going to start raising Cobras. So they started raising them so that they could just bring in, you know, a hundred of them and get the money. Well, the government figured that out and said, yeah, we're going to stop it. No more. No more payments for Cobras. So all the people that were raising them, just let them all go. Well, now they have more Cobras than they started with. So the solution to their problem actually created a bigger problem in the future because they didn't think it through.

46:36They should have put constraints on it and just said, you know, whatever, something small, they could have said, we'll pay you for every one you bring on up to five a year, right? But you can't bring us in a hundred and whatever. That whole one child thing, I mean, all you had to do is extrapolate out 18 years and go, we're going to be hurting. Right? And they didn't. And now once they lifted it, a lot of the families don't want more than one because they're like, well, that's going to cost us money. Why would I do that? I'm living a good life. Yeah. And their population is shrinking.

47:22There's an interesting... A lot of populations in the world shrinking right now. Oh, they are. There's a really interesting book called The Next Hundred Years. It was written back in, I think, 2008 or so, around then. And the guy predicted, here's what's going to happen over the next hundred years. So far, it's not far off. But one of the most interesting things he wrote was he said, if you take nothing else from this book, take this one fact. And that is the rate that the population is growing is decreasing. It will cap at about 2050. So the population is still going up, but it's going up less and less.

48:10And they said, we're going to cap unless something weird happens. We're going to cap around 2050, and then the population is going to start decreasing on the planet. On the planet? On the planet. He says planet-wide, the population growth, the rate of population growth planet-wide is decreasing. We're not growing as fast as we were. I mean, his projections are about 2050. 50, we'll, we'll hit the tipping point and we'll actually start decreasing. He gives a lot of reasons for it. Like, uh, we all started as agrarian nations and in an agrarian nation, the more people you have, the more money you can make because more people can work the fields, right?

49:03And say everything. Once we became more of an industrial nation, having more kids does not get you more money. It gives you more expense. They don't bring anything to you. And he said, because of that, family sizes have gotten smaller and smaller over the years. And we see a lot of people now with one child. Well, there's two of you, right? So you need two just to break even. Three if you want the population to grow, right? And we're not seeing that. And as he's tracking this year after year after year, you can, you can see the chart, right? Population is growing like this and then it just starts curving off a little bit.

49:49Once that happens, now the world population starts to be in a decline for a while. And that creates a whole new dynamic. What happens when you have more houses available than you have people? I think about this all... I think that's going to happen when the baby boomer generation is deceased. I mean, you look... We're still building like pain busters. It's fucking crazy. Right. They're building apartment complex after apartment complex after 55-plus neighborhood after 55-plus neighborhood. It's fucking crazy. what are i think i literally think about this all the time what is just in the country alone what is going to happen when the baby boomers are gone right what happens what happens when you've got more houses than you have people what happens when you have more jobs it's a total done than you have people right all of a sudden you're like well we don't even enough have enough people to run the machinery that we have, what do you do then?

50:55I mean, everything we've had happen on this planet up until when that happens has been under a growing population. We have more people than we have room for. People start fighting for more room, right? We have more people than we can feed, you know, all of this stuff. What happens when the opposite is true? We have no experience with that. I can't even imagine how that's going to look. What do you even fight or argue over? People? You can't go steal them and bring them in. You know, we can't press them into service like, you know, the Royal Navy did when they needed sailors. So what happens then?

51:44And I have no idea. That is so far beyond my event horizon vision, I can't imagine. But I can imagine it's going to be a problem.

51:56We've not seen this. No. Ever. Wow. We've seen microcosms. I mean, the US, microcosm that comes to mind. Detroit. People moved out of Detroit. What happened? Crime shot up. whole neighborhoods went abandoned. And when that happened, rats and cats and everything moved in, you know, and in order to just keep, you know, disease away, the city ends up having to go in and just bulldoze whole tracts of land. I actually did not know that happened. Yeah. Wow. So it's a total reset. Yeah. And then what?

52:48Back to the basics. I don't know. Back to hunting and gathering. And I don't know. You know what? I mean, you were a SEAL. I was in the Marines. In football. As soon as things get too complicated, you always say, let's go back to the basics. What do we need? Maslow's hierarchy of needs, right? We need shelter, food, water. First couple things, right? Self-actuation, whatever. But you go back to basics. Yeah. I don't know what that'll mean for our country, though. What does that look like? I think that looks like there is no more country and it's every man for themselves. That's what I think. Could be.

53:38Could be. you do start to ask yourself, what is the purpose of a country? The purpose of a country is to provide for its people, provide for the common good, welfare, public defense. You know, we outline those in the Constitution. If that... It's a system that you trade. What's that? You trade your freedom for this system that is supposed to protect you and take care of you. now that system is damaged on rogue it's on life support and still here we are I mean I hate to say it like that but that's what a what do you think a country is that's what I think it is a country is supposed to be there to provide services for its citizens it's supposed to and you do you give up you trade freedom for Right.

54:35For convenience. For civilization. For safety. Safety? Ah, well, you've heard the sayings. For a system. A system of whatever. A system. A system that's able to do things that you can't do as an individual. I can't go out and buy grain from another country. A country can go buy grain from another country and bring it in, right? So you do trade some personal liberties for hopefully a system that gives you more than you could have gotten on your own. But I think human nature is if you're not getting anything back, then you start asking, why am I giving up something if I've got nothing back?

55:28And it's a lot of what I write about in the book. I write about systems, right? You have to look at the system and see what is it doing? Why is that system there? And is that system operating the way it should be a system. not you need either change the system or get rid of it and the worst part is when you don't even see what the system's doing i go a lot back a lot to like george orwell's 1984. you don't even see what's happening right and that's the tragedy damn well this is going to be a heavy interview What's that? This is going to turn into a heavy interview Well, you know It was a good talk Ready to get into the big one?

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58:55Yeah, so a mutual friend introduced us and he had told me he's got a friend that wrote a book. I get about a thousand of those a day. Right. But he's mutual friend. And then when he told me the title of the book, I was like, oh man, I've talked about, I've talked about, are we the bad guys several times on the show? Mostly, mostly about the Iraq Afghanistan war. Yep. Absolutely. But, um, but you, I, I'm really excited about this conversation. I think this is going to be an eye opener for a lot, a lot of people. So you wrote a book, we are the bad guys what i mean what why did you write it it's a great question uh i get that a lot right and the answer is easy i started noticing more and more my time in the marine corps and when i would travel and i think a lot of people notice this they just don't know how to articulate it, that what we're seeing and what we're seeing happen in the world doesn't match what we're hearing.

1:00:06We get told one thing and then we say, yeah, I'm told this, but I'm seeing this. That doesn't make sense. And we all get this uneasy feeling, right? That something's not right. I have a brain that can't ignore that. So I kept digging into it and digging into it and talking more. And I had more and more episodes where I would talk to people and find things out that led me to believe, hey, you know what? In the world stage, we're not the good guys. We have this idea of ourselves that this American exceptionalism, right? We're the defenders of democracy. We are the champions of liberty and freedom.

1:00:54And then you talk to people from other countries and they're like, why do you think that? And unfortunately, we don't have a good answer. And I think one of the most important things in any democracy is that the people that are participating in the democracy need to know what's going on. You can't make good decisions. You can't know who to vote for. If you don't know the whole story, and right now I think we don't get the full story. So what I wanted to do was basically help people see some of the stuff they may not see. Let's talk about why we don't have the full story. Let's talk about the story you didn't hear, right?

1:01:46And I give examples. Um, in the introduction, I talk about Christopher Columbus, Christopher Columbus discovered America, right? He went out to find new worlds and we love that story. And in elementary school, you hear Christopher Columbus discovered America. Great. Then in high school, you learn, well, not really. The Vikings knew about it before, right? Then you go to college and you learn, you know what? He never even set foot on the continental United States. Closest he got was the Bahamas, right? On his fourth voyage. Did you know he made four voyages? Most people don't. They just thought he went out once, he found America and he came back.

1:02:34Did we teach that he was arrested and brought back to Spain in chains just eight years later in 1500. He discovered in America in 1492. In 1500, he was charged with brutality, with embezzling money, stealing, theft, and chained and brought back to Spain to stand charges. And Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand didn't want the big scandal, so they just pardoned him and made it go away and died. He died eight years later, penniless, without titles, without anything that he thought he earned. We don't teach that part, but it's important that people know it so that they know, hey, you know what? The story we were taught is not the full story.

1:03:28And that's what my book does is it starts to bring out the rest of the story and say, here's the stuff you didn't know. And here's probably why you didn't know it, but you should know it in order to be a good functioning person in our society. Wow. I actually didn't know that. The book's full of that. Uh, I was talking to one of your staff earlier today and telling him, look at Hawaii, right? One of our states, Hawaii. Did you know that they didn't want to be a state? Did you know that we landed Marines and had a naval vessel there and forced them, pretty much at gunpoint, to become a state? Did you know that their queen at the time said, I will abdicate power, but only because I don't want the United States to kill my people?

1:04:17I did not know that. Changes the story, right? But it's not the story that we teach. and I go back to George Orwell's book, 1984, and he has a statement in there. He says, whoever controls the present controls the past because they get to write the history books. And whoever controls the past controls the future because that's what the kids learn.

1:04:52We don't teach the full past. And I think we need to if we want to be honest with ourselves about where we are, what we're doing, and how we're getting there. Yeah. Wow. We'll have to give you an introduction here. All right. Michael Lester, author of We Are the Bad Guys, which is an examination of American power. Graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy and decorated Marine Corps combat pilot. You're also a member of Mensa with degrees in history, engineering, and leadership. I asked Jeremy what Mensa was, and then he told me. It's for people with high IQ, and I said, that's why I don't know it. It's a club.

1:05:36It's a club. But now you teach graduate-level cybersecurity courses, and you have a quote in the book. I was proud to defend my country, show the flag, and support democracy. But I slowly started feeling that something was off. I felt that too in the wars that I fought. And I've articulated that several times. So that really resonated with me. And before we dig into your analysis of American power, I figured we'd check on the wisdom of the crowd. So are you familiar with Polymarket? No. Okay. Well, Polymarket is a site and a lot of people are on there and they talk about the chances that things will or will not happen.

1:06:24So Polymarket says there's only a 1 % chance that the U.S. will not conduct strikes against another country before 2027. Only a 1 % chance. Somalia on the other hand Has a 57 % chance Of being the country Of being the next country Struck So Man that's not good odds Only a 1 % chance that the US Will not conduct strikes against another country Before 27 No new wars though right That's the rumor Yeah right That's what we're told That's what we were told No new wars must be true Must be true. I heard it on TV. It's going great. It's going real good. And then we have a subscription account. It's on Patreon.

1:07:14And there's about 100 ,000 people on there. It's quite the community. And they're the reason that I get to sit here with you today. And so one of the things we do is we give them the opportunity to ask every guest a question. And this is from Dana Bowen. Drawing on both your combat experience and your 20-year investigation using declassified records, what moment or discovery most fundamentally challenged your belief in America's role as a force for good? And how did that realization change the way you understand national security today? Great question. Difficult to answer. I will attempt to answer it, and hopefully this answer is satisfactory.

1:08:02I didn't have a single aha moment where I just went, oh, I see it now, right? The fog is lifted. Here it is. It's a slow learning process of, well, this didn't make sense, and this didn't make sense, and this didn't make sense. If I start drawing the line, I'm seeing a pattern here, right? There have been some events that are larger than others. A minor event was I was, long story, stuck in Italy without a passport and without money once. And I had to go to this hotel and I started talking to people. I speak German. I was speaking German to them because they were past the point where, um, they're in, in the, uh, in the northern area, they speak German and Italian.

1:08:58And then you get a little further south, they speak just Italian. I was stuck in the area where they only speak Italian. So the people I was speaking to all spoke broken German about as well as I did. And they all asked me like, where are you from? After we had been talking for a while, we're talking, laughing, joking the best we can. And then they said, where are you from? And I said, where do you think I'm from? And they said, not German. Your German's not good enough. Denmark? I'm like, no. They're like, Netherlands? No. We don't know. And I said, I'm from the United States. And the demeanor changed.

1:09:36And this was back in the late 80s. They all just went, oh. In the 80s? In the 80s, late 80s. They all just kind of went, oh. and the conversation was kind of over. And I remember thinking about that. I just thought, well, that's weird. I wonder why that is. Maybe, and of course, my own American exceptionalism, I thought maybe they were intimidated. Later, I look back and go, no, maybe it wasn't intimidation. Maybe they just looked at the United States as not being the best people to be allied with. later gulf war first gulf war uh second gulf war i started looking at things like you know we're going to go into iraq because of weapons of mass destruction we all knew there were no weapons of mass destruction we had just been there all of our weapons inspectors were telling us on the ground hey, we're here looking every day.

1:10:38They don't exist, but we went anyway. Those kind of things that you see and you say, okay, this doesn't match. The things we're doing and why we're saying we're doing them just don't match. So there is no event. There is a series of events, if that makes sense. Wow. Back in the 80s. Yeah, right? That's surprising to me. I had to think back on that one, but I remember it now. And then in the, again, 80s, I was an exchange officer with the Japanese Navy. And everything was fine and good. You know, we're all happy allies. eyes. Um, but then at night they'd take you out and they'd start doing some drinking and start saying things.

1:11:34And you're like, that doesn't sound like you really like us much. Kind of put up with us maybe. And again, thinking this is our ally, but once the niceties end, there's an undercurrent of dislike. Mm-hmm. And you have to ask yourself then why? Probably because we bombed them after they surrendered. Right? What? I mean, you would assume there would be some animosity there, right? After they surrendered, they had a surrender. But then we're saying, okay, they're our ally. We're linked with them. but it didn't look that way underneath the covers a little bit. And again, you have to ask why, why was it because, okay, we defeated you in the war.

1:12:34Okay. What was the reason in Italy? When I go to another country, what's the reason? And they all have their reasons. And then you have to start looking at yourself and saying, is it all of them or is it me? What am I doing? What am I doing that's not building friendships? What am I doing that's causing people to dislike me? Now, I agree with everything you're saying and everything that we had talked about on the hot question. What I want to ask you is how do you decipher what is justified animosity towards the United States and just regular jealousy? It's difficult. I think justified animosity follows a pattern.

1:13:17It's usually not one thing either. You can be jealousy and say, hey, look, you've got this and that, right? We don't. But then again, dig a little deeper. We believe people all want to be living in America. Um, statistically we don't have a better lifestyle. We have, what are we? We're seventh in life expectancy, 55 in freedom of speech or whatever. Uh, we're, we incarcerate more of our people than any other country on the planet. So our exceptionalism where we think everybody wants to be us isn't always well-founded in facts. when you start digging into that and saying, okay, is it jealousy or is it animosity because of what we're doing?

1:14:14And a lot of times I think you find our activities around the world are not building good friendships. We use people more than help people. And we all have, I would say friends, but not really friends, acquaintances that try to use you. But as soon as you ask them for something back, they're like, nah, I'm busy. Right. That's a problem. You make friends by being a friend. And sometimes we don't do that. Not always, but sometimes.

1:14:59I think a lot of countries have a justified gripe about the way the U.S. conducts business. I don't know that I feel that way about Europe.

1:15:18I don't see Europe as a big issue. I think a lot of countries, I agree. I think a lot of countries have a justifiable reason for not liking us. And I think we sometimes have the choice of how to do things. And sometimes we choose the expedient way. Hey, this is fast and we can get this done. Like, yeah, but we leave a lot of hate and discontent in its wake. If we took a little more time and were a little more diplomatic about it, we would probably do better long term. We tend to have a very short term view on getting things done.

1:16:05How long did you spend writing this book? I've got two answers to that. If you take my entire time that I was just processing it in my brain, 20 years. eventually though everything got to a point and i'm like i've got to start putting this down from the time i started putting it down it was a year and a half and it's it's funny uh it's the only book i've ever written so far now i've got about three or four others in the in the hopper that i want to get out but i learned something about writing a book, writing a book is like having a child. What you see when they're born is not what they become when they're 18 and they leave the house, it matures.

1:16:56I mean, the book started with seven chapters, but then I'm like, well, that doesn't explain this, you know? So you add, and then you add another one and then you're like, well, but this should be its own section. This should just talk about this. And you write a whole section. And you're like, but then that doesn't explain this. So it matures and it grows over a year and a half from what it started as until what you finish with. And another thing I learned is you have to know when you're done. You can keep going forever, right? And all of a sudden you've got a 4 ,000-page book that no one will ever look at.

1:17:40You know, uh, so you've got to know like, okay, this is deep enough. We'll stop. Well, let's talk about the origin story. Okay. The origin story, how it all started. Yeah. Let's talk about how it started. The book. Mm-hmm. Um,

1:18:06like I said, it's a number of points. I told you Italy and Japan that I went in the military, and I was in Desert Storm. Why are we there? Well, we're there because the Iraqis invaded Kuwait. Were you thinking that back then, or were you thinking that in retrospect? Well, no, at the time, we would sit there and ask, why are we here? Well, like, Iraq invaded Kuwait, and we have a treaty with Kuwait. Okay, that makes sense. but then sit by yourself in a desert for nine months. You do a lot of thinking and you start thinking, well, wait a minute. Did we not see this coming? Did we not know about this?

1:18:50Why are we here? What's our goal? What is our goal, right? When do we know when we're done here? Is our goal to just push them out of Kuwait? No, that wasn't it. Is our goal to invade Iraq? No. So what is the goal? The goal is to remove all of their military power. Okay. Got that. Why did they invade Kuwait? Because, you know, we're just told, well, they wanted their territory. Well, then you go back and you learn, well, there was more than that. There were some, Iraq believed that Kuwait was really part of Iraq to start with. And look back, that's not untrue. Um, there were charges that Kuwait was horizontally drilling under Iraq's borders into their oil fields.

1:19:46Most of that has been debunked, I believe. Um, then we've got some incidents where Saddam Hussein actually talked to the Arab League and others and said, hey, I've got a beef with Kuwait. We need help. You guys got to step in. And they go. No, we're not going to do that. April Glaspie, who was part of our State Department, talked to Saddam Hussein. And he said, hey, you guys got to do something. And April Glaspie told him, we have no interest in Arab-Arab affairs and we don't want to get in a war over oil. Well, Saddam Hussein took that as the U.S. is going to stay out of it. I'm going to go in.

1:20:37And as soon as he goes in, the U.S. jumps in. And it surprised Saddam Hussein. He didn't think we were going to do anything after what our State Department told him. Again, these are things that we weren't told. But when you start learning more about the system and what happened, you start saying, maybe our hands aren't as clean here as we thought. Maybe there are other issues. Then I know as a personal kind of affront, when we were in Saudi Arabia, we got word that, you know, we listened to the news like, well, Saudi Arabia is paying for us to be there. Right. And a bunch of the other pilots and I looked at each other and goes, well, then we're just mercenaries.

1:21:23We're not doing this for the United States. We're doing this because somebody else paid us to. That's not what I signed up for. And that's when it starts eroding some of the belief and trust, and you start... It's a process. Once that starts, once you start looking at it, you can't unsee it. Mm-hmm. And the more you look, the more you see. And the deeper you dig, and the more you pull that thread, the more it unravels. That's how this started. And I kept pulling the thread. I wouldn't let go of it. Well, I can tell you how it popped on my radar, because like I said, I've been talking about this for a while, and the Dick Cheney connection to KBR in the Iraq war, looking for weapons of mass destruction, they're way, way too fucking long.

1:22:18Yep. That is what tipped me off. Tipped me off. And then also in Afghanistan, we spent, what, 21, 22 years? A place where empires go to die. Yeah. And, I mean, I was working. I worked there on the SEAL teams. I worked there when I was contracting for CIA. Yeah. For a while there.

1:22:48I mean, I really believed in what we were doing. and then probably around, I'm gonna say right around 2010 timeframe, I just, it was, the rules of engagement changed, the mission changed, everything changed and everybody was confused. Everybody was wondering, what the fuck are we doing here? Why are we, this isn't doing anything? We're putting ourselves at more risk. Right. And, and it seemed like the, the, the, It seemed like the administrations were working against our own people. And anyways, that's when I started thinking about it. And I think it's funny because I was afraid when I first wrote this.

1:23:38Afraid of what? I thought, I'm going to be the lone voice in the wilderness. I'm going to get no support. from writing this. And then I published it. And a lot of my classmates, I asked my classmates, I said, hey, go read this. Other people that went to the Naval Academy and served, some of them, 20 years, 25, 30 years. And I thought, I'm going to get ostracized for writing this. And I was shocked. I was shocked at the number of veterans, classmates and other veterans that came back and said, I've been feeling this. I've seen this. We're with you. Like, it's not just me seeing it. So many veterans are seeing, and they all have basically the same story.

1:24:28We all came in believing in the country, still believe in the country, but believing in the mission, believing on why we're there. But after you're there for a while, you're like, this isn't what they said. This is not what I signed up for. And the rules, the things you're telling me to do, this isn't right. It makes you wonder how much of what you think you know is a lie. Mm-hmm. It does. How much do you think you know is a lie? Absolutely. And why were you told what you were told? what's the agenda? What is the goal? And again, I write about this. We have these information bubbles and we are fed information in a certain way so that we believe certain things.

1:25:28And it's also done in a way that people dig in. They get entrenched where you can't challenge what they think they know, right? Because I know this is true. I'm like, maybe not. You're like, don't tell me maybe not. That's fake news, right? Or I don't believe that or whatever. Whatever they want to say to shut down the conversation. Rarely do we have the conversation where people say, you don't think that's true? Why? Give me some facts. Talk to me. Tell me what you think. We don't get a lot of that anymore. We just get digging the heels in and pushing back. And I think it's important for us to ask why.

1:26:13We should be able to articulate why we have a certain thought, and we should actually look forward to people questioning it. If I believe in something, I want people to question me. I think I'm right. If I'm not, show me that I'm not, because I don't want to be wrong. And I want to be able to articulate to you. And if I can't do that, then it's more of a feeling than something that I know. People refuse to poke holes in their own stories these days. No, it's comfortable. It's comfortable to believe something and then just stay within that comfort area. We fall into confirmation bias, right? I'm going to look up information that confirms what I already think I know.

1:27:02What about looking up information that refutes it? No, I don't want to do that. That would require a lot of effort and thought, and I'm comfortable just revaluating over and over again what I think I already know. It's comfort.

1:27:20Well, it's destroying us. It is. It is. And I've said it many times, the most important part of a democracy is an informed electorate. you can't make good choices if you don't have the right information. I mean, it's impossible to get... Are you talking about voting? Voting. How would you get the right information? I mean, I've sat here for the past two years and probably interviewed about half of the current administration. Yeah. I've interviewed a shit ton of politicians. Yeah.

1:28:00And nothing they say they're going to do happens. For example, no new wars. Here we are one fucking year in. Venezuela, Ukraine, Iran, Gaza. Like, what the fuck is this? And, oh, it's told the Ukraine-Russian war will be done before he ever takes office. Right, right. Here we are. Yep. So you have to ask yourself. Make it go, Epstein files. Right. We're going to release them all. Yeah. With black lines over everything. Oh. In less than 1%. I love the, at one point in time, we're going to release the Epstein files. Then it was like, well, they don't actually exist. Yeah. Well, you just last week said they were on your desk.

1:28:57Well, yeah, but. Had a bunch of influencers go to the White House. and hold up a bunch of binders. Right. And I have people ask me, what do you think about the Epstein files? I'm like, not a vent at this point in time. There's been so much water under the bridge. I can't believe that even if they released everything they have, I can't believe that's it anymore. Yeah. I can't believe that's it. I can't believe, hell, I can go on Photoshop and make whatever you want, right? Yeah. Tell me that all of that is exactly what it was, hasn't been changed. And yeah, they'll redact a bunch of stuff so we feel like, you know, it's original.

1:29:38They redacted all of the abusers' names. Right, right. They redacted all of the abusers' names. Yeah, right. I just... It's... It is definitely the most transparent administration of all time. That's for damn sure. But the point is, you know, whatever. Being hard on this administration, I don't think the last one was any better, probably worse. But point being, they're all just fucking liars. They are legitimately all just fucking liars. So how would the American people even formulate an education? The opinion or their decision would be formulated off complete bullshit anyways because everybody in office is a lying piece of shit.

1:30:28For the most part. But then you have to ask yourself why. So do you believe that everybody before they went into government was just a liar to start with? Is that just politics? If you go into politics, are you a liar? Not necessarily, but I do think that it does have a certain draw. It does. It does. I think that's true. I think we also have to look at incentives. We incentivize the wrong things. If we look at the same thing happening administration after administration after administration, regardless of who's in power, and it's always the same, then you have to say, okay, it's not the administration.

1:31:14It's not the Republicans. It's not the Democrats. It's not the libertarians. They all do the same thing. Then it's the system. Something's wrong with the system. And then you'd look at the system and say, what's wrong with it? And usually it's the system is set up to incentivize money, not necessarily the outcome that the system should have. I'm going to use a, hopefully, a fairly nonpartisan example. Look at our education system. We spend more money per student than any other country in the world. So you would think we would have the best rankings in education. We're what? Fifth in math, 10th in reading, and 25th in science or something like that.

1:32:08Those, I may have mixed up which ones are which, but it's 515 and 25 right now. But we spend more than any other country. If we cut funding, we're still 5th, 10th, and 25th. Money is not the issue, but we're obviously incentivizing the wrong things. We're not incentivizing learning. So what are we incentivizing? Well, we're the only country in the world that has education for profit. What are we incentivizing? We're incentivizing profits. Well, if we incentivize profits, then you don't care about grades, and the results show that. So it's not that people say, hey, we need better education. It's like our system is set up wrong.

1:32:58Change the system if you want a different outcome. Don't throw more money at it. Don't cut money from it. Those are great talking points for an election, but they have zero effect on the outcome because the system is still the same. And that's just education. And we can talk about every other system we have in the U.S. and they all follow the same kind of pattern.

1:33:24How about the power system? Power grid. I think it's old. It's fallen apart. I think it's not as secure as we would want. Being in cybersecurity, I look at that, obviously. It hasn't been updated in a meaningful way. You know, I'm sure somebody in power distribution system would say, oh no, we updated this. Yeah, okay. In a meaningful way, have we kept up with what we can do with cybersecurity? No. No. Not even close. We haven't. Did we update the software on the servers? Yeah, we did. Are we still running servers from the 70s? Yeah, we are. Right? You think there's no other... I mean, China produced the Transformers.

1:34:22Right?

1:34:26Yeah, our power distribution system, I think, is precarious. Yeah. Without a doubt. Yeah. And we were talking a little earlier, if something happens in the future, a future conflict, kinetics won't be that important. if you can take out our power, take out our food distribution systems, water, I mean, who can fight, who can do anything if you're hungry, dehydrated, and have no electricity? It's hard to fight. Can't even pump gasoline. Might have it, can't pump it, no power.

1:35:15Just like we talked about in the hot question, then we just turn on each other. Yeah. Back to basics, right? Could be. I see a lot of people that are uneasy today, more so than I've seen before, because they all feel like something's going to happen. If nothing else, they feel like we can't continue, right? That this can't stay like this. and most of us that have that uneasy feeling though, we don't know what's going to happen. Like what is going to happen? I don't know. Maybe people that are a little bit closer to the centers of power do. I'm not sure what's going to happen, but I do know it can't continue like this.

1:36:06Something's got to happen. Do you feel like that's something sooner than later? constantly, uh, I get nervous. I keep feeling like something's coming. I think a lot of Americans do when I talk to people, even around where I live. Um, a lot of people feel uneasy. It's not a good, Hey, everything's, you know, rainbows and we're out drinking margaritas, having fun. do for a little bit to try and you know get away from it but deep down people are concerned yeah i don't know anybody that um has no concern right you don't know anybody that's just saying oh things are good don't know what you're talking about yeah yeah everybody's a little concerned right now everybody's a little at ease un at un at ease so where do we start with we are the bad guys where do you want to start Where do we want to start?

1:37:16You know, I wrote the book and my first editor was my wife. And she read through it, gave me all sorts of pointers and said, might want to tone this down, might want to do a little better here. Don't need to go in depth here. Missed a comma, you know, all that sort of stuff. But it's funny, when she got done, she said, you know what this is? This is your love letter to the United States. I said, you know, not the way I thought of it. What do you mean? She goes, well, you're pointing out what has to change. And I thought about that a little bit more. And I thought, you know what? But if you love somebody and they're doing something destructive, they're ruining their life, they're drinking too much, they're doing drugs, whatever, whatever it is, they're gaming, whatever it is they're doing, it's starting to affect their life.

1:38:21If you don't talk to them about it, that's not a kindness. That's avoidance. And avoidance is not helping them. If you truly love them, you confront them and say, hey, look, I've noticed this happening. And you need to start noticing it too, because we have to make changes, because I don't like where this is going to end up. That's what this book is about. This book is about saying things have to change. And maybe you're not even aware of why. Maybe you're so involved you don't even see it. I'm going to try to help you see it. And I'm going to do that by giving you examples of things that have happened that we've done in other countries.

1:39:17So that you know why other countries look at us like you're not the good guys. I'm going to cover this is why you think that. not your fault. We live in information bubbles. And I cover, you know, one of the first things, you know, when you're a SEAL, when you're talking to somebody, when you're interrogating somebody, you want information, right? One of the first things you do is isolate them. You don't want them to have other information. And then you feed them the information you want. And then you reinforce it. We do that to ourselves. I mean, first we have one country to the north and one country to the south.

1:40:00We don't get around to a lot of other countries. So we are already isolated. And then through algorithms, through the internet, through our news channels, we isolate ourselves even more. Well, when all you get is one piece of information, I can tell you what your opinion is going to be. So let's get more pieces of information. Let's get more visibility and let's start having the discussion. That's how this came about.

1:40:34So I had the conversation all the time with people verbally. Finally, I just said, you know what? I've got to get this down. Yeah. What are some things we've done in other countries that? Oh, yeah. Um, there are some things that are just, it's, you and I talked about some, it's amazing the things that we don't know. I start to point them out to people and they look at me like, huh? Are you crazy? Right? Uh, I'm like, no, it's all documented. I have to point out too, I've got 448 pages, 120 some are footnotes. Because I would tell people all the time, don't believe a word I say. Don't believe me.

1:41:22Please, for God's sakes, go research it yourself. Here's the footnotes. Here's the documents. And no, the footnotes aren't Wikipedia, right? Here are the actual documents. Go read them. Validate this for yourself. I mentioned, um, I've used the example because a lot of people can relate to it and it's close to home. Hawaii. Hawaii did not choose and want to be a state. We forced them to be a state at gunpoint. We landed Marines and we had Navy ships and essentially told them be a state or we're going to come in and occupy you and make you a state anyway. And the queen at the time of Hawaii said, I will abdicate my rule under protest purely to keep the Americans from killing my people.

1:42:19How many people know that about Hawaii? We just look at it as, oh, it's a beautiful place. We get to go there and have lays and, you know, drink margaritas on the beach, but we don't look at what we did to get it. Um, Panama, we're talking about, we should take back the Panama Canal. Not ours to take back, but Panama wasn't even a country. It was part of Colombia. And then our CAA went down and helped some dissidents say, you know, shouldn't you guys be your own country? We would support you if you did. and we helped them form a little mini revolution. And one day they said, we're now an independent country called Panama.

1:43:10We immediately put two warships, one on the East Coast, one on the West Coast, off the coast and said, Colombia, if you try to take this back, you're going to fight us. They're independent now. We gave them their constitution, said, You guys are a new country. You need a constitution. Here's one. We already wrote it for you. Oh, by the way, Yad contains some things in there that says we reserve the right to come in anytime we think things aren't going the way we want it to, but pay that no mind. Um, it was signed by, um, forgot their names. It was signed with not a single representative from Panama.

1:43:53Are you kidding? It was signed with a French person and an American before the Panamanians even knew it. We're like, yep, we already signed a treaty. You're good. You're a country. Here's your documents to run your country, right? Here's your constitution. Does that make us the good guys? No. If you looked at any other country, all the other countries around there, they would look at that and go, this isn't a friend. This is somebody we need to be afraid of. Right? We did similar things in Honduras. We did similar things in Nicaragua. You know, we had the whole Iran-Contra affair.

1:44:43Can look back at that. You know, we were selling weapons illegally under our own laws and then funneling funds, you know, to the Contras. Does that make us the good guys? No. No. Think about how much everything else in your life has leveled up lately. Your phone is a supercomputer, your car practically parks itself, and your headphones cancel noise like magic. So why is your Razor still flimsy, overpriced, and stuck in 2008? That is exactly why I love Harry's Plus. I've switched to the Plus because it actually feels like a high-end piece of gear. The first thing you notice is the weighted metal handle.

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1:46:56With that being said, I'm just curious of your opinion. I mean, we're not the only ones doing this. No. China's doing this. No. Russia's doing this. Yeah. Especially China. all over Africa, South America, Taiwan.

1:47:22While I do not disagree with you, are we the bad guys? I think we are.

1:47:31What should an empire be doing? Well, first, I love that you used that term. We are an empire. And you have to ask yourself, what does an empire do? And what constitutes an empire? An empire is a country that controls other countries. And we are one. We control a lot of the world. Maybe not militarily always, but economically, socially. we have more control in the world right now. I would argue the United States has more control in the world than any other country. Is China a superpower? Yes. Is Russia a superpower? Yes. What makes us different?

1:48:23We spend 10 times as much on our military. I'm sorry, wrong statement. We spend more on our military than the next 10 countries combined. That includes China and Russia. China, Russia, and the next eight countries, we spend more than them. We are the biggest power on the planet, and we can coerce them. You say, you know, other countries do this too. They do. Not to the extent we do. And we are paying a huge price for that. that$1 trillion could go to fixing our bridges and our power system so that we're not weak. Are we being, I think there's a real scenario where our power system could get attacked.

1:49:15We're spending money on kinetic weapons and new bombs, you know, and now we're talking about making a new Trump-class destroyer, right? Or not destroyer, battleship, right? We phased out battleships for a reason. We don't need battleships, especially in the age of drones and satellites and everything. Autonomous. It's a sitting target. I mean, it just makes no sense. We're making another fucking battleship now? Have you not heard this? What's this one going to be named? The Trump-class battleship. Of course it's going to be fucking named the Trump-class. The Trump-class battleship. It's going to be the biggest, best battleship there ever was.

1:49:53Most beautiful battleship. Most beautiful battleship. Yep. Well, everybody else is making autonomous vehicles. We're making fucking battleships. Jeez. So we can slap a fucking name on it. Right. Amazing. We figured out that swarming and multiple, you know, hundreds, if not thousands of small drones are harder to combat than one centralized threat. So now we're going to build a new battleship? That makes no sense at all. Right? And this is kind of where we're going down the wrong directions. But I'm getting off topic. Other countries do this, but we're the biggest, baddest ones out there. We're doing it the most.

1:50:45We have 740 some military bases around the world. 740. There's only 198 recognized countries by the UN. Got 740 bases manned by Americans out there. No other country comes close to that. One of our biggest enemies right now is Iran, right? Didn't used to be, by the way, used to be our only friend in the Middle East. We can go into that. How many foreign bases does Iran have? Zero? One. One. Small little outpost in Eritrea. Eritrea. One little outpost. We've got 740-some bases. How many does Russia have? I don't know the number, but it's under 100. China? How many bases around the world? nowhere near.

1:51:44I mean, so, so we are acting like an empire. And then you have to, the thing that frightens me is not that we're an empire. Thing that frightens me is that historically every empire has eventually fallen and it falls because it starts, it falls because of maintenance. People don't attack it. It can't maintain itself any longer. It gets so spread out and tries to do so much and it's, people aren't supporting it. Right. And when people stop supporting it, then you have to fight them for it. And that takes energy away from your populace. So now instead of, again, fixing our infrastructure, we're sending money overseas to other countries.

1:52:38Why do we send so much money overseas? I have no idea. I mean, the only thing I can think of is greed. The only thing you can think of is? Is greed. Greed and control, honestly. Here we go. Ready? I think our country is occupied. I think most of our politicians are beholden to other forces. Do you think they even know that? Oh, yeah, they do. All of them? Uh, it would be hard not to. Do you feel like the caliber of person that's going into politics is lower caliber than before? I think they're opportunists. you think they go in as opportunists i think they well i think many of them do i think many of them go in with all the right reasons and then get corrupted i have a friend in uh atlanta that is running and i he asked you know hey i'm running right i'm the challenger i can use funding can you help out, right?

1:53:55I said, I'd love to, but I said, as a friend, I, I would hate to see you win because if you win and you go there, you will become dirty. You can't get around it. You will need to make deals with the devil and it starts with a small one and then a bigger one and then a bigger one. And eventually you get four or five years down the road and you're like, I'm bought. I can't help it. I did it for all the right reasons. But now I owe this person that because I agreed to that. And I owe this person this because I agreed to this. And I don't think either of those are right, but I have no choice. You're trapped.

1:54:39You're trapped. I think that certain people are propped up because they would be very easy to manipulate. I see. I think you see that all over Congress. And let's not talk about the Epstein files here, right? I'm sure there was none of that in there. Yeah. Yeah. It, um, but I think that some of these freshman congressmen and probably senators as well, I think that they have been hand-selected because they are young and stupid. They're young? They're impressionable. They need funds. And just so happens there's a huge PAC out there that's ready to give them everything they need to win because they want their support.

1:55:33Who do you think we're occupied by? APAC.

1:55:39A lot of people think that. The evidence is there. The evidence is all there. It's, it's, come on. We spend eight, we send$18 billion a year to Israel. Why? Just ask the question, what do we get out of it? Nothing. We get nothing. Are we doing humanitarian work? No, they're charged with genocide. They're killing off Palestinians.

1:56:16are we helping them survive? Well, they've got a higher standard of living than we do, a longer lifespan than we do. Free education, free housing, free healthcare. But we're sending them money. Why? Ask yourself why a U.S. congressman can wear an Israeli military uniform in congressional chambers. I would think that would be an act of treason. But they did. Nobody said anything. Ask why the Israeli Prime Minister can bypass the president, fly directly in and speak to our Congress without any other government interaction. I didn't know that could happen. Oh yeah, Netanyahu did. Flew straight in, bypassed the president, talked to the Congress.

1:57:07Congress gave him 26 standing ovations. I think most pop stars would like 26 standing ovations. Our Congress gave Netanyahu, a foreign prime minister, 26 standing ovations.

1:57:25I have difficulty looking at that in any other way than we're occupied.

1:57:38Statistically speaking, we have shown that whoever spends the more money on an election wins, 94 % of the time. Whoever spent the most wins. We can also show that every time somebody spoke out against Israel or AIPAC, the next election, their challenger was highly funded and wins. The facts are all there. All you have to do is look at them. Now, we shut down that conversation quickly, right? Whenever we try to talk about it, you get told, well, that's anti-Semitic. No, it's not. Calling things the way they are is not anti-Semitic. Right? In my book, I have a whole section on Zionism where I cover this.

1:58:38Mearsheimer and Waltz wrote a book called The AIPAC Lobby where they went in depth and looked at this. And again, the data's there. you just have to look at it. Their book, they got threatened. They got threatened with personal harm and shut out of a lot of things as soon as they published their book.

1:59:02What happened to them? They're still teaching right now at universities and whatnot, but their book did not... It sold well, but did not take off as much as it should. It got hammered. By people saying, well, this is just anti-Semitic. You're just, you hate us. I'm like, you know what? Again, I cover a whole section on Zionism. Zionism is a political movement. Excuse me. Zionism is a political movement that says you must agree with everything Israel does, no matter what. I don't agree with everything the U.S. does, no matter what. Why should I agree with another government? If you're doing something wrong, I should be able to say so.

1:59:51That has nothing to do with Judaism. It has nothing to do with the rights of Jewish people. We're talking about a political movement that has bought much of the Congress of the United States, if not many of the presidents. We had Biden come out and say, I am a Zionist. Really? You support another country's expansion over everything, no matter what? Aren't you supposed to be the President of the United States? Hmm. That doesn't seem right.

2:00:36I mean, we've seen a lot of things. a lot of, I mean, for example, when we bombed Iran, it's been told to me by people on the inside that not one of our 18 intelligence agencies reported that they were enriching uranium. Then Mossad comes along and tells us they're enriching uranium. Absolutely. And we said, so what? Who is the number one source of, hey, they've got weapons of mass destruction? Mossad.

2:01:09if you look at it. So let me ask you this. Yeah. Because I've heard all this before. And I didn't know we were going here. I'm not afraid of the conversation. I do know there's a lot of loudmouths out there that are just spewing this shit for views and fame or whatever they want. But, and so it gets hard. It gets hard to, just like the information more that we were talking about. It gets hard to figure out what is bullshit and what's not. But there are a lot of things visible, like what I just said, happening right now, probably more under this administration than the last, at least from what I'm noticing.

2:01:53And it's fucking alarming. Very alarming. In fact, it seems like just about everything we do, they have influence over. more than we would think. And again, once you start to see it, you notice it. Before you see it the first time, you don't even think about it, right? Once you start to notice, then you're like, but this is everywhere. Yeah, kind of. Kind of is everywhere. So let me ask you this.

2:02:38Because I've heard that I didn't know that they were calling them weapons of mass destruction. I was busy back then. I was involved. I didn't have time to look around. You didn't have the nicety to stop and think, let's talk about politics. But so what is the goal? What is the goal? Whose goal? Well, if we are occupied by Israel, then what is their goal? the greater Israel. Now, what does that mean? Does that mean we become Israel? No, no. It's interesting. The Israelis have this idea, similar to what we had, of manifest destiny. It is our destiny to control this much. Their idea is pretty much all of Palestine.

2:03:34about half of Lebanon, about half of Syria, all of Jordan, and a great swath of Saudi Arabia, what is now Saudi Arabia. Now you would think that seems pretty ambitious. All you have to do is look at an Israeli uniform right now. We have an American flag on our shoulder. Look at the Israeli uniforms. They have a symbol of what they call the greater Israel, which is everything I just told you. Palestine, part of Lebanon, part of Syria, all of Jordan, Saudi Arabia. That's what they have on their uniform right now. That's what their vision is. That's what they want. Why? Why do they want those specific regions?

2:04:25They believe that that is their God-given land. God gave it to us, all of this. We deserve it back. We'll take it. You've been in the Middle East. I've been in the Middle East. When I start looking at a lot of the things we've done in the Middle East, at first we say, well, it's because of oil, it's because of this. Even that doesn't always fit. The thing that fits the closest is when you start saying, how does this affect Israel? Iraq was building a huge military force. It would have been a threat to Israel. We need to get rid of that. Weapons of mass destruction. We'll go in and kill a million Iraqis and kill and destroy all of their military.

2:05:17Okay, no longer an issue.

2:05:22Libya is growing a huge military. They're also trying to break away from the dollar and form a pan-African monetary system that would challenge the American dollar as a trading thing. Can't have that. Wait, that's not part of BRICS. There's another initiative. Oh, this is before. This is before with Gaddafi. Oh, God. Sorry. Yeah, this is not BRICS. Before with Gaddafi, Gaddafi had the idea of a thing he called, oh, I don't remember what it was, but it was basically a pan-African currency that they could use and not use the dollar. Didn't Gaddafi actually mention something about Zionism in the U.S.?

2:06:10Oh, he did, yeah. He said, yeah. What did he say? He was saying that the Zionist influence was keeping the U.S. entrenched in the Middle East to do their bidding, basically. And he fought against that. So what happens? The U.S. go in and bomb him and kill him. You wanted to know, what have we done? Was Qaddafi a great leader? No. He did a lot of bad things. He tortured people and everything. him. We have Guantanamo Bay, right? We're waterboarding people and whatnot. Well, we say we're not, but anyway. But he also took a country that had a literacy rate of less than 5 % and got it up to almost 100%.

2:07:00He made infrastructure so that they had water and they had electricity. he increased education they started you know having more entrepreneurs he gave every newly married couple funds to help purchase their own house so that they could all be affluent the country was growing sounds like a lot of shit that needs to happen in the u.s Yeah. Then we bombed them. And now it's just, it's been civil war and strife and it's nothing what it used to be. Again, going back to, were we the good guys? Why did we do that? Well, we did it to protect our dollar economy. We did it to protect Israel from their military.

2:07:49military. Now we've got Iran. Iran's building a big military. Can't have that because if Israel strives to move in, Iran will fight them. Well, we'll get rid of it. I don't want to sound like a conspiracy theorist, but the more you look at this, the closer the parts fit and you start putting all the parts together and you're like, call me crazy, but the data is showing this. And you've got that whole concept of Occam's razor, right? You cut away everything that can't be true and what's left, regardless of how plausible it sounds is what the truth is. and you start cutting things away and looking at it and you're like, this pretty much leads to one conclusion.

2:09:02This hits different when somebody like you is talking about it. It's a tough subject. the opening part of this section in my book i say something to the effect of when you're searching for the truth eventually you come across something that is so sensitive so highly protected that to even question it risks ruin and in our government that topic is zionism as soon as you go down that path you are courting ruin meersheimer and waltz found that out i had friends after they read this saying you need to start looking after your personal safety because they are not going to like this

2:09:57i told them hey the book's out doing something to me wouldn't hurt me people like you have more of a risk because you're an ongoing, you know, show. But still, as soon as you address this topic, you get more than just pushback.

2:10:18I've seen it. No doubt. No doubt. Are you worried? I'm not. I'm not. Me personally or as a country? You personally. Me personally, I'm not. Like I said, the book's already out. You know, the bell has been rung. What do you do? I'm retired. You know, um, yeah. Can you go after my social security? Okay. Yeah. I mean, look at what we're doing, you know, to our admirals. Um, can things happen? Sure. does that mean we should be quiet? No. If you're afraid to speak the truth, you've already lost.

2:11:12If we believed that, then we wouldn't be a country. Our founding fathers would have just not said anything and said, well, if we fight the British, we could lose, you know, our land. Did they shy away from that? No, they didn't. That's why we're a country.

2:11:36How else are we being influenced?

2:11:43Money. I mean, I hate to say that capitalism is the problem. Capitalism is the best economical system we've been able to find on this planet so far. But it needs a little bit of pruning. I mean, if you let a rose bush grow without pruning, you don't get pretty roses. You get a big, gnarly bush that's got a lot of thorns on it. But if you prune it and keep it growing, you get something beautiful.

2:12:17We, our government, is so focused on money and where the money goes. we have this system now and i get it congressmen should fight for things for their people in their state right that's the way our system is set up but there's also got to be some sort of conscious control over it somehow and i don't have the answer to what that means excuse me but there's got to be a way to not do what we're doing the F-35 was a great example of this a part of it is built in all 50 states really? is that the most efficient way to do that? we've got parts being built in places that have no infrastructure to build them so we'll go build a big factory because every state needs a part of the pie right?

2:13:19And instead of saying, well, hey, we'll take this from this program, you guys take that from that program, every senator and congressman is in there fighting saying, we need a part of every single program. I mean, we've got parts from the Navy being built in Montana, Wyoming, and Kansas. Really? Is that the most efficient? And then we'll ship them all somewhere else and see if they fit. and if there's a change, we'll ship them back, and then they'll change it and we'll ship them back. And I'm like, it creates so much waste, but it is all driven by money. Who gets the money?

2:14:03And we haven't even gotten into... That doesn't answer your question about how we're being controlled. It doesn't. Tell me about it. This is ever since we did the Citizens United and said that companies are to be treated like individuals and they can have the freedom of speech and freedom of choice to do what they want. We now have large corporations, similar to what AIPAC is doing, giving huge amounts of money to candidates. and if you get hundreds of thousands or a million or millions of dollars from a donor, you are going to help do what they want you to do. There's no way around that. And we have large corporations doing that.

2:14:58We have healthcare doing that. We have defense doing that, defense contractors. We have billionaires doing that. We have billionaires doing that. We have individuals doing that. Absolutely. Absolutely. I want to ask you more about APEC. Yeah. Because I've heard a lot about this, too. I'm concerned. Yeah. I've seen a lot of people talk about it. I saw something with Matt Gaetz the other day where he was talking about they would hang a barcode over each congressman and senator and literally scan it. And there comes your donation. Yeah, right? At least I think that's what he was saying. Something along those lines.

2:15:34I hadn't heard that. Anyways, so I dove into some of the sites and I looked to see how much money is APEC donating to congressmen, senators. Yeah, I mean, I don't think it's a substantial amount. It's not. I don't think it's a substantial amount. I looked and it's$50 ,000 here,$250 ,000 here. Yeah,$50 ,000 can make a lot of people dance and do whatever the fuck you want. But, I mean, if you're making, what,$175 ,000 a year in Congress, I mean, is 50 grand really that much? No. Is it really enough to make you sell your country out? No. I don't know. So then I called some friends that are in Congress and in Senate, and I asked them about it.

2:16:27and they are staunch defenders of Israel,

2:16:36going off of their faith, what the Bible says, that's how they decipher it, fair enough. They're doing what they believe in. And they told me that they go, if you think that the APEC has a lot of funds, then you should look at the Saudi Arabia back. Without a doubt. And so then I'm, you know, I hear that, and I'm like, all right. And I love this person. I trust this person. I think that he, I don't want to reveal his name, but I think that I've seen, I have no reason to think that that guy is not doing what he truly believes in and is serving his constituents. One of the only fucking people in there.

2:17:27So I take what he has to say very seriously. And so tell me about APEC, because that's what I know. I know that they are not registered as a foreign lobbying firm or whatever that is. Yeah, when? When what? You got to go back and always ask when. So AIPAC didn't start as AIPAC. It started as the American Zionist something group. When the Foreign Agents Act was passed and said, you need to now register as a foreign agent, if you are supporting a foreign country, the American Zionist whatever group, I forgot their name again, should have registered. Instead, they renamed themselves APAC and said, we are not, we are no longer representing a foreign company.

2:18:22We are now representing Americans who have certain beliefs. Okay. Well, that keeps them now from registering as a foreign agent. little sleight of hand, but okay. And you're absolutely right. Go look and see how much money APAC has contributed to people. In the big scheme of things, minimal. So let's say, and I know this would never happen, right? But let's say I wanted to give you some money, but I don't want everybody to know that I gave you money. What can I do? Crypt bill. I can go call 10 of my friends and I go, Hey, I want you to go give Sean 20 ,000 and you give Sean 20 ,000 and you give Sean 20 ,000.

2:19:17You give Sean 20 ,000. I've got 200 friends. All of a sudden you've got a lot of money. Now who donated to you? individuals. A company here, an LLC there, an individual here. APAC itself is not giving a large amount of money, but they orchestrate huge amounts of money. They tell people, you should support this candidate. And if you start, and this is again where you start pulling the thread, if you start going down a few levels and looking, then you start finding this. There's another, APAC used to do a lot of things that they don't do now. There is another organization, forgot the name, their sole purpose is education.

2:20:16We're trying to do education, a lofty goal, right? We all agree education is good. What does that mean? They're a 501c3, so you can donate to them and your money is tax deductible. All they do is pay for congressmen and people in power to have free trips to Israel so that they can go show them, look how wonderful we are. We gave you a free trip to Israel. We'll take you around Tel Aviv and show you how wonderful this is and why we need more money and then send you home. But it's education, right? Are they, is that AIPAC? They're affiliated and AIPAC works with them, right? There's five or six other larger groups.

2:21:05Last I saw, there were over 200 charities, groups, political action committees that support this. And that's just the groups that are registered. That's not the individuals. So AIPAC, think of AIPAC like a clearinghouse. They're the clearinghouse, but they're good. You can't just say, hey, you just gave$2 million to this person. But again, look at the results. every time there's a person in Congress that speaks out against Israel, the very next election, they have a challenger who is very pro-Israel that has huge amounts of funding. That's not by accident. That didn't just happen. And it's not just that it happened in one state.

2:22:03It happens in every single state in the union. That's not accidental.

2:22:11are they the only ones doing this pardon are we the only ones doing or are they the only ones i don't know what about china in the u.s

2:22:26i don't feel like they have that much that they need to control with us they already own so many things we let them buy properties and buildings and businesses our power grid You know, we buy Chinese goods because they're cheap. Well, I mean, if you look at them, there's a handful of politicians that have Chinese businesses. Mitch McConnell, one of them, has a shipping business. Feinstein had something.

2:22:59There's a handful of them. You know, it's amazing how you go into Congress with a net worth of$300 ,000,$400 ,000. you get paid$170 ,000 a year, and four or five years later, you're worth$8 to$10 million. Oh, yeah. Isn't that amazing? It is. It's amazing. Tell me that that's ethical.

2:23:21I don't think anything in D.C. is ethical. No, I agree. I agree. And we can sit here and tell everybody everything's wrong, right? That doesn't do anything. The only way to start fixing these things is to be informed, understand what's happening, and try not to be influenced by it. How far does this go back?

2:23:56At least... 50s. Why? What happened in the 50s? At least, well, 40s.

2:24:07Before that, actually, and again, I'm going to go back to the whole Israeli thing. So Israel was created in our current world by Resolution 181 of the United Nations that said the Israeli people should have a homeland of their own. Many people know that fact. What they don't know is, is that same Resolution 181 said, you may not displace people that already live there. It didn't say you get to have a state that is only Jewish and everybody else has to leave or you get to expel them. It also said there will be a Palestinian state. There will be an Israeli state and a Palestinian state. It said that.

2:24:59Resolution 181. That was passed in November of 1947. In 1948, Israel declared itself a distinct, free, and new nation. You know how government works. When somebody says something and you want a resolution or you want to do something, how long does that take in government? Years. Could be. Israel declared themselves independent. President Truman recognized them seven minutes later. Seven minutes. It's like he's hovering over the phone, just waiting for the call. They said they're independent now. I recognize Israel. What about the rest of the resolution? Did he recognize Palestine at the same time?

2:25:55No. Had Truman recognized Palestine and Israel at the same time, we wouldn't be having this issue.

2:26:05But we started it off right there. That was where it started.

2:26:13And, of course, you can go back before that, the Balfour Agreement. What's that? Sykes-Picot. So there were a couple people. So this is going on during World War II. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Before. Well before. Before. Well before. So Theodor Herzl wrote a paper, a treatise, called Der Judenstaat in German. And it means the Jewish state. And he said the Jewish people should have their own state. They should be allowed, you know, to not be under any other state because we should be our own people. right he petitioned the british government and said hey you know we we need to make a place for the jews lord balfour who was um i forgot his position but he was a lord in the government wrote a letter then said the british government recognizes that the jewish people should have their own state Well, the British government didn't actually say it, Lord Balfour did, but the British didn't want to be embarrassed and say, we're going to go against one of our own lords.

2:27:30So they didn't refute it. Herzl and some others took this and then petitioned the League of Nations and said, we should be our own state. They said, well, we don't recognize you yet, right? Right. After World War II, feeling a lot of guilt, they again pulled up the Balfour letter and said, you guys said we should get our own state. You need to do something. After World War II, we're carving up all the land, right? Sykes and Pico, the two people that were assigned to kind of figure everything out, said, well, we'll, we'll give this to Israel.

2:28:17We'll give the Hashemite kingdom over here to this brother who helped us fight the Ottomans, and then we'll carve out this part over here. We'll call that the Hashemite kingdom of Jordan. We'll make the rest of Palestine a mandatory Palestine that we'll continue to manage, you know, and they. divvied everything up pretty much on the back of a napkin. There was not a lot of thought. They drew lines and said, what do you think about this? Yeah, okay, we'll do that. That was Sykes-Picot that basically distributed everything, all the land, after World War II. Palestine became the mandatory Palestine under British rule.

2:29:08Um, Palestinians didn't really like that. Neither did the Jewish people. There were a lot of battles between Israelis and the British and Palestinians and the British. You know, and then the British finally at one point said, you know, we're out. Kind of like the French did in Vietnam. Right. And said, yeah, we're done. We're out. And, and they left. Um, and Israel took what they were supposed to have and expanded and took all sorts of other land, expelling all sorts of Palestinians. There's the Nakba, the catastrophe of when all of these Palestinians were forced out of their land. And now you hear things like, well, you know, there's the right of return.

2:29:57Sounds good. Until you realize that the right of return doesn't mean Palestinians. Palestinians don't get a return. The right of return is a term that Israel uses that says, anybody that's Jewish can come back here. What about the people you kicked out? Yeah, they can't come back. We're not letting them back. I mean, today, try having Palestinian ancestry and going into Israel. You'll be disallowed. You won't be allowed in.

2:30:30So yeah, this started, this is not new. This has been going on for 70 years at least, and had the precursors even before that.

2:30:43I think this is something that happens quite often. We see the current state. We don't spend enough time going back and saying, how did we get here? And I was a history major at the academy. And that's, I mean, you always went back and said, to understand the battle today, we have to understand how we got here. Because otherwise, we don't understand what the motivations are. Right?

2:31:15What do you think? I don't know yet. I'd join you with that. It's a journey. It's a journey. is you build more information and you start looking. And I've got to tell you, when I was researching this book, I rejected a lot of information when I first heard it. I would hear information and I would think, that can't be right. I don't believe that. I would say the same thing, right? Then I'd find a second piece. I'd be like, well, that supports that. But, hmm, God, if I believe that, That leads to a dark place and I don't want to believe that. And then I find more and more information and after a while you're like, I can't, I can't argue it anymore.

2:32:09This is true. We have people, we have organizations in our country that are controlling our Congress, not for the good of Americans. I don't like that. It leads me to a bad spot. but I can't refute it. I don't have any conclusive evidence to the opposite. I have a large body of evidence that shows that is true. And I always tell people, prove me wrong. For God's sakes, give me more info. I'm happy to change my opinion. And if you can show me information that this is not correct, that is yet to happen.

2:33:02gives you applause, doesn't it? Yeah.

2:33:12Let's take a break. Sounds good.

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2:35:56Your insights can help shape the show. Join us on Patreon now, support the mission, and become part of the Sean Ryan Show's story. All right, Michael, we're back from the break. This took a very unexpected turn. It did. It went a little deeper than I thought we would, but that's okay. These things need to be talked about. Let's continue. All right.

2:36:24Where do we start? I don't know. You're the expert. All right. Right. It's... How are they doing this? What other countries are being influenced? It's not just us. There have been a lot of, there has been a lot of pushback in Great Britain about the same thing. Too much Zionist influence. the thing is is you need to have a strong democracy with strong freedoms of speech assembly and uh some sort of rules about making donations and things without limits that constrains you how much of how much effect can Zionism have in China? Not much. They don't get to do that, right? So they're a little blocked there.

2:37:37Russia? Russia has its own reasons for doing whatever it is it's going to do, right? Do they support Israel? Some. Not to the effect we do. We have our own democracy and our own freedoms used against us. And our founding fathers, they were smart men. But I heard the statement, they weren't demigods, right? They were just men in their 30s trying to form a new country. Could they think of everything? No. Could they have, in their wildest dreams. Imagine the internet, instantaneous communication everywhere, freedom to do the things we do today. There's no way. They envisioned senators and congressmen being business people or farmers that would come and serve for a period of time and go back.

2:38:45right they never envisioned having a whole class of people whose lifelong job was to go serve in congress that was never part of the vision and that has morphed and changed and it's these things that give rise to the the nuances that allow the influence from foreign governments or are proponents of foreign governments that we see today. And I'm not a congressional lawyer that goes deep in this, but from what I've seen, you wouldn't have these freedoms in other places, and that is used against us.

2:39:46What do we do?

2:39:51It's a great question. I would love to just say, what do you think we should do? But that doesn't go very well.

2:40:02I think there's a number of things we can do. First, anybody that advocates for another country should be registered as a foreign agent. I wanted to ask you about that. Yeah.

2:40:19So, okay. APEC is not considered a, what is it, a foreign? Foreign agent. Foreign agent. Yeah. They're not registered as a foreign agent. So let's say that now they're registered as a foreign agent. Yeah. What changes? They have to disclose everything that they're doing. They have reporting and saying, we did this because of this. We're giving this much money. This is where the money came from. And this is the money that we are advocating others to do. It makes everything a lot more transparent. Do you think that would actually work? To a degree. I don't think it's the silver bullet. I think there's always ways around things.

2:41:05I think systemically in our government, we have other issues that we need to take care of to prevent things like this from happening.

2:41:17term limits for senators and congressmen. You shouldn't be able to spend a lifetime there. The longer you spend, the more you get beholden to other people because of the deals you have to make. I think it's a nature of the system, right? I think things like we shouldn't have riders on bills. You shouldn't have a health care bill that you attach a farm subsidy bill to, right? You vote on one or the other. But it shouldn't be like, well, if you want this, you also have to agree to these other 10 things we tacked on. Do you think voting matters? In Congress? Anywhere. Yes. I think in Congress, because when they pass a bill, they have to vote on it.

2:42:04Do we have sovereign elections? Do we? Mm-hmm. Less and less. Less and less. Uh, because of gerrymandering, because of media influence. I think I said earlier in the show, we have statistics that show that whoever spends the most money wins 94 % of the time. Well, that's not a democratic system. What about the last presidential election? Yeah. Who spent more money? Oh, by far. Trump did by far. Did he? Oh, yeah. You know, what's really funny is... Are you sure about that? I think so. I... Okay, I won't state it as an absolute, but I am pretty sure about that. Bernie Sanders was originally trending higher in the ratings.

2:43:04But he got less airtime. Why? He wasn't spending the money on it, and he wasn't one of the two parties. That, to me, seems like we're being fed the person that we want to win.

2:43:25Because the reason I'm asking is I think the, yes, how do we fix this? I think the only way that we can fix this is through education. I've got a different way. Education is, and in my book, I talk about education as one of the prime things always to fix a lot of ills. Now, what I mean by education is educating the population about this. Yeah. But if you don't think we have a sovereign election system, then that really doesn't do anything. anyways. Doesn't matter. Because the vote doesn't matter. Yeah. But let's look at the system, right? First, we've got the voters. Need to educate them so that they can make educated decisions.

2:44:16There's been a lot of research done on the last election. Most of the people that voted for Trump, voted on a more emotional level. I feel like he's the best person, right? The opponent, I think they are the best person. We have this think versus feel thing going on. And we see it a lot when we see the news. People feel this way, they think this way. that that creates a dichotomy now if you if you will accept that if we have people that are educated that know what's going on and then you have to look at it and say is the voting fair I would say the voting is not again because of gerrymandering and redrawing districts and everything else.

2:45:20I saw this wonderful thing once where it had five columns of 10, and it said, let's color them all in. We'll make three columns blue and two columns red. If you just total the votes, who's going to win? The three blue column. You've got 30 to 50, right? They said, what if we go across and we say, okay, but we're going to vote by county, and each row is a county. Well, if you go by county, by row, there's three blue, two red, it votes blue. You tally it up, you've got 10 votes for blue, right? Because that's the way you're counting now. So first it was 30 to 50 if you do a popular. If you go by row, then it's 30.

2:46:17if you go by column, you've got three red and two blue. Now it's three to two. And then they show, but what if we redraw this like this and they show this shape? And if you redraw it like that, it comes out three to two red, even though it's 60 % red, 20 % blue. Unless I'm mixing up my colors here. But it's all about how you draw the lines and say, this is what we're going to vote. And it showed how you can redraw the lines so that you do not represent the populace. We have that going on. It's called gerrymandering. It happens all the time. Every time somebody's in power, they redraw everything so that they can win the next election.

2:47:07That is anti-democratic. That is not following the principles of a democracy. see it's following the principles of someone in power that wants to maintain power a lot of people are doing that a lot of people are doing that without a doubt if we want to fix going back a little bit if you educate people they should vote more for what they think is right if they know all if they have the information, they can make a more informed decision. And I cover in the book a lot about how they don't get all the right information. So then you have to ask, why don't they have the right information? This goes back to the statistic I said earlier, whoever spends the most money wins.

2:47:59Why? They get to do the most advertising. They get to do the most marketing, right? Whoever is influencing your opinion the most is the one that wins. How can we stop that? How about campaign limits? Saying, hey, if you're running a presidential race, you cap out at$20 million. That's all you get. You can't spend$20 million in one. So both of you, assuming that you can raise the same amount, are going to get$20 million. You get an equal shot at convincing your electorate. Senate,$2 million. congressman 500 ,000 whatever it is i don't know what the numbers are but put a limit and this would get rid of any one large donor saying hey i'm going to give you know a billion dollars to this candidate doesn't matter they can only spend this much that gets rid of so many things if we could just do that we won't because the only people that can do that is congress and they don't want that.

2:49:09So your question, what can we do? And even education. I just covered it earlier. Right. People don't want to believe what doesn't align with whatever they're thinking. Yeah. They want to be comfortable. Challenging your beliefs is not comfortable. It's painful. College is painful because you are learning new things and challenging assumptions and beliefs that you are forming early on. That's difficult, especially as we get older. We're like, I don't want to waste time with that. I already feel this. I'll just keep doing that. But that doesn't lead to a good place.

2:49:59And that's, again, what I'm trying to do is just give people more information, ask the questions, question everything.

2:50:10That should be my tagline, question everything. Ours is everything is a lie. Well, many times it is. Right? In other countries, are they seeing the same thing we are? I don't think so. Not that I've seen. And again, I'm not an international academic. I can only tell you what I've seen. I haven't seen the same level of influence that we have, which sort of makes sense. Because even if you could have the same level, we're the biggest country. We have the biggest military. If you want to influence somebody, influence us, right? So it's not unreasonable that we would be the biggest target for influence.

2:51:03Just another question.

2:51:11Why do they need our money if they have enough money to influence? No, they don't. No, yeah. It's an ROI equation, right? I can influence with$1 billion and get$18 to$20 year after year for the next how many years? By the way, that$18 billion doesn't get paid piecemeal through the year. We give it lump sum, which we don't always have. So we sell bonds and take on debt in order to be able to give it to them. It's a crazy, crazy system. And that doesn't include all of the military gear we give. You know what bothers me is we believe in democracy. We are a democracy. Well, and just because I don't want somebody coming up and going, no, we're not.

2:52:03We are a democratically elected republic.

2:52:13public. We don't always act like a democracy and we don't act like we believe in democracy. I see this most blatantly at the UN. What is a democracy? The greatest good for the greatest number. whatever the people decide is what we do, right? So we have cases, numerous, over and over and over, especially with Israel, in the UN, where the vote in the UN is unanimous, except for Israel and the United States. So if you think you've got 196 countries voting yes, and Israel and the United States votes no, it would pass. It would be yes. It's 196 to 2. But when we helped write the Charter of the United Nations, we said that anybody on the Security Council, one of them being us, can utilaterally veto anything.

2:53:21So every time a vote comes up, there have been, I don't want to see an exact number, between 50 and 100 resolutions censoring Israel and saying we should do this because they're not behaving well as a country. Every single time the U.S. vetoes it. All the other countries vote for it and we veto it. Like that's not democracy. How can we say we believe in democracy when we just veto every time what most of the people want? and then it comes back to, okay, I get it. Democracy for us, not for you. Well, if you believe that, then you can't believe that democracy is the best system.

2:54:15So which is it? Is democracy not the best system, or are we not believing in it and using it the way we should? I happen to believe that democracy is a good system. I believe the people should decide what they want. But you can't say good for me, not for you.

2:54:53Let's talk about how we are the bad guys.

2:55:01You know, I get people ask a lot of times, are we the bad guys? Are we always the bad guys? Don't you have anything good to say? Right? And my answer to that is always, what I am trying to do is give the other side of information that you don't have. You've already been told over and over, you're the good guy. You're the good guy. Right? It's like the young person whose mom and grandma and aunt all tell them they're the best singer. You are the best singer. You should be a professional. And then they go on America's Got Talent and they can't carry a tune at all. And Simon Cowell goes, who told you you could sing?

2:55:50I've always been told I could sing. Yeah, somebody should have told you you can't before you get up here and embarrass yourself. Right? We keep telling ourselves we're the good guys, we're the good guys, we're the good guys. Maybe somebody should go, you know, not always. Let's look at what we're doing. And again, I've said history will not judge us on our intent. History will judge us on our outcome. Are Americans bad guys? No. American people are caring, loving, good people. They mean well. is the outcome of what we're doing in the world viewed by the rest of the world as us being the bad guys.

2:56:40Yes. It would be hard to look at what we've done in so many countries and for another country to look at us and go, oh yeah, you did that for the best benefit of everyone. Versus, you know, you may have benefited you, but you screwed everybody else. and then you want to come to us and say, hey, do you want to be our friend? Yeah, I don't trust you. Because from what I just saw, you're going to turn on me as soon as it's not in your best interest. And again, some people will say, well, that's politics. That's just being the big dog and getting along. And you can believe that and that works for a period of time.

2:57:25But it doesn't work forever. And the empires, the societies that have lasted the longest have learned this and try to be more beneficial to everyone. Who? Rather than that. Romans did a fairly good job. Ottoman Empire, the Persian Empire actually didn't do too badly with that.

2:57:59we're only 250 years old, and we're seeing some big cracks. These other empires lasted for thousands of years. I can't imagine us lasting thousands of years operating the same way we operate today. And this gets back to like a business plan, right? Businesses grow and mature, and you change. If you don't change, then you become obsolete and you die out. America needs to change. We need to change some things and cannot continue doing the things we're doing today. It's just that easy. We can see where it's leading. The only question becomes not, do we need to change? The question is, will we choose to change or will change be forced upon us?

2:58:56Those are the only two options. It's easier to do the change yourself, but harder to make that decision.

2:59:09So as we're talking about all of this, I think that's where we're at.

2:59:17and I know now how do you make those changes right how do you get people to want to change I had a gentleman once that was in business salesman he said every salesperson sells the same thing you sell change because everybody's got a way to do something you're trying to convince them to change to your way of doing something. That's what you're selling. I thought that was an interesting way to look at things. You sell change, right? Every once in a while, a product comes around that everybody thinks they need now that wasn't there before. And you don't need to sell that because everybody just looks at it and goes, I want that.

3:00:05But as soon as they've got it, how do you sell the next one? You have to convince them to change from the first one to the next one right people don't want to change change is hard i heard one person say change is what you want other people to do not you right but this is a i think this is a part of our country in our society we need to look strongly at and say what do we need to do to change? How do we need to change to grow for the next 250 years?

3:00:49Let's fast forward 250 years. What do we need to look like? And again, businesses do this all the time. Markets change quickly and you've got to pivot. You've got to say, we need to change and do this. Otherwise, we're going to be left in the dust. I think as a country, we need to look at ourselves and say, how do we become what we want to be in the future? Where do we want to be? What do we want to be? We might decide, hey, we're okay being the United States by ourselves. We don't want to be the world's policeman. We don't want to enforce everything. We just want to survive by ourselves, and that's okay if that's what we decide.

3:01:33We may decide we want to be an empire that rules most of the planet, if that's what we decide. But we need to decide and make a logical decision about it, not just blunder into it, and then figure out what do we need to change to get there.

3:01:54That sounds impossible.

3:01:58I will tell you that of the empires I have studied it has never been them empires get change forced upon them because changing internally is just too difficult that's a sad way to look at it though maybe we can be the first

3:02:28What patterns have you seen with regime change with countries that we occupy? and how far back does the pattern go well regime change is interesting because usually when we say that there's an external force many times the external force is us we go in and say we don't like this leader we don't like what's happening we're going to help you change and we force them So we've got the CIA, we've got our economics, you know, we'll help overthrow one leader or kidnap them and we'll sponsor the next one, you know, and make sure they get in power and they have enough to get situated and get going.

3:03:27Every once in a while you have a regime change that is internally driven. We saw that in 1979 in the Cultural Revolution in Iran. Right? What usually happens there is, and you've seen this, you know this, people are so unhappy with the way things are going. They figure even if we get killed doing it, we're better off than if we just keep living like this. And they start an internal revolution. the problem with internal revolutions is you've got a huge pendulum swing you know the country has gotten over to here and people get unhappy they're like we need to fight right we need to change this well when they change it the pendulum doesn't come back to the middle they're like we need to offset this So the pendulum swings all the way over here.

3:04:27And now you've got the exact same kind of regime, just the opposite, right? We were very secular. Now we're very religious. We're very religious. Now we're going to be very secular. Rarely does it come back to the middle without some external force. So most of the regime changes I've seen internally. get this pendulum swing and that becomes just as dangerous as anything else. We already have that. Yeah.

3:05:05Yeah.

3:05:09We see it here in a kind of microcosm every four years. We see it in other countries when they have had internal revolutions. China had one. Iran had one.

3:05:30There's some others not as major. We think of those mostly. We go back and forth.

3:05:39It would be nice if we could put a dampener on that pendulum and kind of say, change is good. Let's dampen how fast we change. And maybe we can settle in the middle a little bit where everybody is happy, the greatest happiness for the greatest number. Have we ever had a successful regime change where the country thrived after we've left? Wow, that is a great question.

3:06:12I cannot think of one. I cannot think of any regime change that we have fomented in one way or another where that country is better off after we were there than before. Because usually one of the first things we do after a regime change is put somebody in power that is very friendly with our desires. That usually means allowing our companies to come in, buy land, use resources, take whatever it is their country has, process it, sell it, usually to us for a deal, to others for a little bit more. And usually that does not translate to money to the populace. It usually translates to money to whoever's in power.

3:07:15I can't think of a single instance where the country as a whole was better off.

3:07:54There are situations similar. You can look at wars where we have defeated somebody in a war. And I remember when I was a kid, I was told at one point in time, the best way to rebuild your country is pick a war with the US and lose. because we'll go help rebuild you, right? But I think it would be amazingly arrogant to think that any country that grew after being defeated by us, it was all because we helped them rebuild. Think specifically of Japan. Japan is a thriving economy. I don't think it's because we rebuilt them. I think they had their own drive

3:08:43um did we help some yeah right at first but i don't i don't think that we were the reason that they then became as successful as they are today but that's different than a regime change we didn't go in and try and just overthrow a government and put a new government in i think that's a completely different situation Can you think of any that are better off? No. Yeah, I can't. Maybe Panama? I think the Panamanians might have a different view of that.

3:09:32Yeah, I'm thinking around the world. I can't think of any. And again, it goes back to were we the good guys then? And we come in a lot of times and say, hey, the ruler you have right now, they're a despot. They're a horrible ruler. We want to come in and help you guys. We'll overthrow them. Sounds good. Sounds like we have all the right intent. But then what we do after that does not help the country as a whole. And again, usually because we just put somebody in power, that will do our bidding. And like we talked about earlier, is that just what empires do? you want the m if the goal is just to grow the empire at any cost and you don't care what happens to anybody else then that works until it doesn't until you need a friend somewhere because you can't do it all alone and there's nobody left yeah

3:10:49I want to touch back on the, if I can, the question you asked early, do we have any allies? It's a great question.

3:11:01Because it doesn't seem like we do. And once you come to that realization, and I hadn't thought about it that way until you asked it. But it's been rolling around in my brain here while we're talking. that's like somebody coming and asking you, do you have any friends? And if you answered, no, I don't have any, you kind of have to ask why. Why not? Now, as we get older, people move apart, but you still keep friendships wherever they are, right? It's not like in high school where, hey, this is my best friend, I'm with him every day and everything. But you still have friends. But if you get to the point where you say, I don't have any, then you have to ask, why not?

3:11:52Either I just don't want any, don't think they're important. You have to self-reflect. Yeah. And I think that's what we need to do as a country, and I think that's what we need to do as individuals in our country. We need to self-reflect. Look at ourselves in the mirror. Ask the hard questions. be honest with ourselves.

3:12:20I'm with you. The only way that I can see that happening is by trying to bring people together. And that's what I'm trying to do here. But it's not working. It's hard. People don't want it. They're not ready for it. you know and they don't want to compromise i'm right you're wrong why should i even try well they won't even listen true they won't they won't even listen and i mean i brought people on here that i despised before meeting them but opened the floor open for a civilized discussion and we got those and

3:13:08everybody hated me for it and then i did it again good for you and i'll do it again yeah and maybe i'm ahead of my time or maybe we'll never arrive at this but it's i just it's nobody's talking nobody's talking we talk at each other instead of with each other. Exactly. I wrote a small article on pardons that I put on LinkedIn and at the very bottom I said, sources welcome. Tell me I'm wrong. I'd love to have the conversation. Not a single reply. No one ever replied to it. I'm like, you know, we shouldn't be afraid of the conversation. We shouldn't be afraid of being wrong. Oh, I'm wrong all the time.

3:14:04You know, I don't think any of us has a monopoly on that one. But we shouldn't be afraid of that. And we should welcome the conversations. I love sitting and debating things with people, as long as it's respectful. I'm happy to respectfully have a conversation and debate anything. Tell me I'm wrong. I'll tell you why I don't think I am. You tell me why you think, why you think I am. I'll tell you the opposite. But if we can't exchange that information, we can't grow. But we've got to be able to do it respectfully and not just yell at somebody and go, well, you're an idiot and you're wrong, right?

3:14:51That just shuts down the conversation. Now, what did you learn? You learned nothing. And you're stuck in the same spot you were before. You're doing a great job trying to get information out to people. You can't make them listen. But at least the information is there if they choose to. And slowly, over time, you know, given enough exposure, and maybe taking away some of the constant confirmation bias reinforcement where they reinforce their own idea from others that believe the same thing.

3:15:34Maybe, maybe they start to question. Unfortunately, to your point, I see too many people that have already made up their mind and all they do is listen to one newscast over and over all day long, 24-7, to get reinforced of the same ideas they already have. And over a day, a week, a month, a year, those ideas become so reinforced, those pathways become so ingrained in their brain, it's almost impossible to break them. Now, I don't know. Maybe there is some positivity here. I mean, if I think about when I'm talking about really any of these interviews, a lot of these interviews get a million, two million, over that views, plus all the downloads on Spotify.

3:16:27Yeah. And, yeah, I don't read all the comments. I read a handful of the comments every once in a while, and especially when we release one like that. and they are overwhelmingly negative, but maybe there's 50 ,000 comments on a video that has 2 million views. The loudest person in the room is always the biggest shitbag. And if you look at where we're at, I mean, today we're ranked number two on Spotify. Out of everybody. That's awesome. Out of the world. So, I mean, I'm not saying that to brag. I'm saying that if you look at the comment-to-view ratio or the comment-to-download ratio, there's a lot more people listening in not commenting than there are commenting.

3:17:19So maybe a lot more people, you know, are paying attention than I think. I think they're listening. I think they are. Like I said, it takes time. We started this whole conversation with you said, you know, what caused me, what event caused me to write this book? And I said, there was no one aha event, right? It takes time. And I think as people listen, it takes time. But they've got to be exposed to a different form of information over time. and that will slowly make a change. The only question I have is do we have that much time? I hope we do. I don't think the United States is going to end. I do think we're going to have to change.

3:18:24I think, you know, you asked, are we getting ready for World War III? Is something coming? Change is coming. How does that look? I don't know. And is it going to be a one-time thing? No. Is it going to be like, okay, this changed and now we're done for the next 200 years? No, we're going to continue to change. So I think the dissemination of information is important. it has to be and you know one of the first things you want to do if you want to brainwash people or make them think a certain way is just give them one set of information just yours don't allow them to see any other information that will refute that so the more we get information out us others the other side of the story everything the better we are.

3:19:24Do you think information is going away with the rise of AI? AI is interesting. Do I think it's going away? No. Maybe not information. Truthful. Hmm.

3:19:44I don't think AI is the culprit here. I mean, all they need to do is feed AI, whatever data point they want, and then that becomes truth. Yeah. Just like history, when we opened this. Yeah, yeah. It's interesting. I saw a statistic the other day, and I can't repeat it, but it was an interesting data point where it said, it was about YouTube and about films and Hollywood. And it said, I'm going to make this up. So anybody listening, do not quote me on this. Something to the effect of, there's more YouTube video being uploaded every day than was created the entire time since film started until 2020, whatever.

3:20:44Interesting. The more interesting part was we have lost more film than is uploaded every day in YouTube. I'm thinking, really? We have? There's a lot of films that no longer exist. We made them. They were hits in the time. Maybe they weren't digitized yet. Maybe they were just, you know, cellulose film and there was a fire. We've lost them. They're gone. There's a lot of information in history that has just disappeared. We no longer have it. the internet is an interesting thing here's a question for you how many times have you looked on your computer for information you know you have and you can't find it

3:21:38a handful yeah it's like i know i have this yeah you would think that i can put on a search engine or something to find it. I know it's here, but you can't. You can't find it. Somewhere, somehow, something happened. It's gone. There's no way to get that back. And I know when I was, again, when I was studying history at the academy, we used a lot of written information. People would write letters, you know, and they would survive for a long time, right? We'd find them or diaries or journals or whatnot. we don't have the same thing electronically we say hey we can we can back it up we can keep it that's true but we tend not to do that it tends to get lost i've had you know i i know i had a video of my daughter when she was you know one year old can't find it I've looked everywhere.

3:22:41I've tried everything. I'm sure somewhere, someplace it was on one hard drive that crashed and it wasn't backed up in the right place. It's just gone. So we lose information. And when we do that, we lose a vision into how we got here. So AI, AI can only go off what it has, right? People can remember things even if they can't produce it, AI can't. So I think AI both expands our reach and information and it constricts it to whatever AI knows. Now, AI is an interesting topic. In my courses, I teach students to use AI. It's a tool. Use it. But be careful how you use it because it will give you wrong answers.

3:23:37You know, and different AI are trained on different language models. They will give you different answers. So you could ask a question. Well, I'll give you an example. Here's a great example. I use AI to do research sometimes. Because I can go out and do 50 Google searches to try and find the right document. Or I can just tell AI, I need a document that I know exists. It's about this from around this time. Can you find it? AI goes out and goes, is this it? I'll be like, no, that's not it. Is this it? Okay. Yeah. That's the one I'm looking for. Where can I find that? And I'll say, oh, well that's in the national archives here.

3:24:28Here's the address. And then I go to the national archives and I get the document and then I can read the document, right? That's a good use of AI. But if you just ask it a question, so we were talking about Zionism earlier. I asked the AI once, I'm like, what do you think about Zionism? And he goes, I can't answer that because that would be anti-Semitic or something like that. And I'm like, seriously? I said, what if I asked you, and I had a conversation with the AI. So what if I asked you about what do you think about white supremacy? And it's like, oh, well, that's blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

3:25:04And it starts going, I'm like, why did you answer this and not that? It's like, well, one is politically charged about, you know, people's religion and the other is not. And I'm like, no, they're not. I said, you're biasing your information. And you've got to be careful. AI will do that to you. If you use AI for your information source, you're probably just as bad as just getting it from, you know, one news station.

3:25:36That's scary. Here's a trick for you. I teach my students this. There's an old riddle. If you're trapped in a room and there's two doors, one leads to heaven and one leads to hell. And you have two computers. One computer always lies and one computer always tells the truth. But you don't know which one is which and you don't know which door is which. you can ask one computer one question how do you figure out which door to go through right it's a logic riddle and the answer is go to ask them what door they're going to go through but if you use the computer that lied it would tell you the wrong thing if you use computer that tells the truth it would tell you the right thing but you don't which one is which So the answer is to go to any door and ask one computer, if you were the other computer, would you tell me that this is the door to heaven?

3:26:37And whatever it answers, it's the opposite. Because you know that you're absolutely going to get a negative answer regardless of which one you picked, right? I tell my students to do this with AI. ask AI a question and then go to a different AI and say, is this question correct? Is this answer? I asked this question, got this answer. Is this correct? Is there anything that is not correct in it? Would you say, and maybe even use three AI models and see what they say. It'll be amazing how much they might contradict each other and give you a little bit of different answer.

3:27:25So what does this have to do with how we get people to know more?

3:27:32People are using AI. They can't just ask the question they think they want to know because they might get the wrong answer. And whoever owns the AI is the one that's giving it the information that it wants to pull from. Mm-hmm. That was what I was getting at. Yeah. I heard something the other day and wow, I can't, I can't recreate it exactly, but something like somebody asked Grock, who is Elon Musk's AI, you know, who is the biggest threat to American democracy or something like that. And it came back and it answered Elon Musk and he'll like, I'll bet they're going to fix that one on that. That's not going to last very long.

3:28:23We need to tweak that model a little bit. Yeah, it's interesting stuff. Information. You know, we used to say way back in the 80s when I was in the military, information will be the battleground of the future. And we were looking at more as tactically. How do we tactically have enough information to do what we do? I mean, I'll date myself. When I went to the Gulf War, GPS didn't exist. We had no GPS. So you had maps. Well, a map of a flat desert doesn't do you much. It's kind of hard to navigate when everything's just flat. Or topographically, I've got a five-foot ridge. like how could I see that in a helicopter right um and then today you know you've got GPS and tracking and you've got pips everywhere that tell you where you are everybody knows where you are they can track you it's different and we were looking at information as the battleground of the future that way we were thinking tactically in theater we can have better information to see what's happening on the ground.

3:29:42We didn't really consider that in the future, information is the battleground for the human mind. How people think, what they think, how they feel about it, and what they're going to do is the battleground. And I use those terms specifically because I taught a course on communication and I say there's three parts to every communication. What do you want people to think? What do you want people to feel? And what do you want people to do? Frequently, we only think about the first one. What do I want them to think? And you give them information. But you have to think more and think, what do I want them to feel about this?

3:30:30Okay, they know this piece of information. Do I want them to feel good about it or bad about it? indifferent, which will usually give you different results. I can tell you something. Do I want you to think that's a bad thing or a good thing? How do I want you to feel? And then what do I want you to do? If I just gave you information and made you feel good about it or bad about it, what do I want you to do? Because if there's no action, then why bother? why if it doesn't change you in any way then why did we spend that time communicating you will spurt it around what's that spurt it around

3:31:19it's

3:31:23it's interesting

3:31:36I'm going to go back to the book for a second. What do I want people to think? I want them to think that maybe what they've been told is not the full truth. Maybe there's more to the story that they should know. What do I want them to feel? I want them to feel like maybe they're being lied to. I want them to feel uneasy that, hey, I don't know the whole story. And I'm going to feel bad if I'm saying something and it's not the whole story. I'm going to look like an idiot. And what do I want them to do? I want them to ask questions. Ask questions. Do research. Find the answers. make your own decisions, not what somebody else decided they thought you should think.

3:32:34I think that's how we change things.

3:32:57that it is my control. Hear from whistleblowers. Why have I got a letter from the CIA? Shocking insights from experts. If you've ever wondered who's really pulling the strings, it's time to find out.

3:33:12Target Intelligence. SIOP, an Ironclad original. Hosted by Sean Ryan. Listen today wherever you get your podcasts or watch the enhanced version on YouTube at This Is Ironclad.

3:33:31When did you see it become dangerous to ask questions? Ooh.

3:33:41You know, even in my time in the Marine Corps, and this was late 80s and 90s, in the military, a lot of times, don't ask questions. just take this for the way it is right um i think that has been that way for a while i couldn't comment from before i was in i couldn't comment about when i was out but yeah you were not encouraged to ask questions in the civilian world

3:34:21I seem to remember

3:34:27early on we were encouraged to ask questions. I seem to remember even thinking back even mid-90s late 90s we were encouraged to ask questions. Right? Think about what you're doing. Think about why you're doing it. Around the 2000s or so is when I started hearing more, don't ask, right? Or it wasn't you were told not to ask. It's you were not treated well if you'd asked. What were the questions that were forbidden back then? Back then? Mm-hmm. in the early 2000s? Oh. In my opinion, it's COVID. You know, COVID was a good one. A lot of controversy around that. Right? A lot of different feelings. Quite honestly, 9-11.

3:35:37I was at a dinner the other night and somebody asked me, what do you think about 9-11? Was it a conspiracy? Did it happen the way it was supposed to? You know, what happened? I told him, quite honestly, I don't have an opinion. I can give you my opinions. They are not researched. I don't like giving opinions that are not researched because I could be 180 degrees off. I said, the only thing I will say is there is conflicting information. And kind of the same thing with COVID. There is conflicting information. Do I have feelings? Yeah. Do I think it just spontaneously erupted out in the wild? Yeah, sure.

3:36:23Right.

3:36:28Statistically, not. You know, but can I, do I have any proof? No.

3:36:38Um, there was a lot of misinformation, a lot of urban legend stuff going on. Um, and it's, it's bad when that happens because there's so many outlandish things being said. They mask things that may have been true. And it's really difficult to dig through all of that and figure out what is correct and what isn't. And to some extent, I think it's more difficult to do that than it was in the past. It's hard. And that's why some things I'm like, I can't even form an opinion on that. Because there's conflicting information and I can't find enough other information to make one more reasonable than the other.

3:37:32you start to lean that way as you get more and more information. But I'm like, so far, I, right? Just don't ask. Getting better at hiding things, in my opinion. So what do you think about COVID? What do I think about COVID? Yeah.

3:37:56and I I think that

3:38:04I think it was planned

3:38:09you think the release was planned I think we were lied to I think we were lied to do you think they plan to release it I think the

3:38:23I don't know. I think it's a very good possibility. It's funny, though. We talk about the coronavirus, right? And again, connect the dots. First, we heard about SARS, Southeast Asia Respiratory Syndrome. It's a coronavirus. It was not very contagious, but if you got it, it had a high mortality rate. It was dangerous to get, but it was hard to get. Four, five years later, we have MERS, Middle East Respiratory Syndrome, a coronavirus that is amazingly easy to get, but not low mortality rate. it's almost like we bracketed it and said, okay, now we have COVID. Fairly easy to get, fair mortality rate.

3:39:20All we have to do, and we all say, everybody says we're not working on chemical weapons. Right? We're not working on chemical weapons. Nobody else is either. Why do you call working on one part of a virus an increase of function? Right. That sounds kind of military to me.

3:39:48And yeah, do, do I think that all of these just happened? It seems a little weird that they happened in the way that they did. Right. And then kind of scary though. Um, even back in the eighties, people asked me, are you worried about nukes? somebody getting a suitcase of nuclear material into the U.S.? I'm like, no, I'm not. That would be so difficult with some of our tracking systems and everything. I'm worried about somebody infecting themselves with anthrax coming over to the U.S. and throwing themselves in the New York water supply or anything else. I mean, once you release something, there's no stopping it.

3:40:36It's Pandora's box, you can't get it back. That's what worries me. Mm-hmm. And it takes a lot to make a fissionable material to a degree that you could use it. Doesn't take that much to create something in a lab. That's scary.

3:40:59Do you think we had a part in COVID? Do you think we had a part? The US.

3:41:07Yeah, I do. We had doctors over in Wuhan. We were coordinating. What do you think that was? What do I think it was? Yeah. The virus itself? Do you think it was planned? Was it scheduled? I don't think the release was planned. You think it was an accident? I think it was accidental. Why don't you think there was any repercussions for China from the entire fucking world? Why there was any what? Why don't you think there was never any repercussions? It's a great question, right? Every time something happens, we say we're going to investigate. It just... For what? The fuck are we investigating? We should investigate were we trying, were, or were the people in Wuhan trying to create a virus that was virulent to human population.

3:42:10Were we? We say we're just, we're trying to figure out what someone else would do so we could guard against it. Really, did we guard against it? Because, yes, we came out with vaccines, lots of controversy about those, but, and we came out with them fairly fast, so you might say maybe they were working on them beforehand. And testing. And testing. It didn't work. But if that's true, why didn't we even have them when the first release came through? I mean, if our goal was to find out how to make something and then guard against it, why didn't we already know that? Or is it that, hey, timing was bad.

3:42:56We had figured out, hey, we can make this, but we haven't figured out how to stop it yet. was it an accident I don't know if I look at what is the reasoning someone would want to release it I don't come up with anything good what is the reason somebody would want to release it

3:43:20well that's the problem what is the reason I can't think of a good one why someone would say hey we should go release this unless you wanted just general worldwide population control said, Hey, we're growing too fast. Too many people. Let's get rid of a million. That seems like a, not the best way to do that. We've killed that in a single war. Be faster just to, you know, pick a war with somebody. I don't, I don't see a good reason for that. and that's why I tend to believe it was an accidental release. Do you think it was an experiment? That we were experimenting on it or an experiment to release it?

3:44:05A PSYOP. Hmm. I don't know. Maybe not a PSYOP. Wrong word. Yeah, I don't think it was a PSYOP. I don't see that. A FTX. I think it would have been careless to release it if we didn't know we could control it. Anybody. You're going to, you're going to, I mean, it's indiscriminate, right? So anybody to release it without having a way to control it, I think would be irresponsible. I can't see a good reason for it, which again makes me believe, do I believe that it was created in a lab? I personally do. I don't think that spontaneously just erupted in nature. I know that people will disagree with that.

3:44:57And that is a feeling I have no real proof of that. I can't think of a reason to release it specifically. It makes no sense to me. What did anyone gain? Did anyone gain anything from it? Well, Pfizer and Moderna did. Well, yeah, that's true. That's absolutely true. They asked them to give up their profits so that we could use it, and they said no. What's that? It was a gross abuse of power. Oh, that's true. I'm sure they learned. it gets back to a lot of things talking about our system that is based on who makes the most money. Right? Pfizer and Moderna made a lot of money. Okay. Quite a large price to pay for making that money.

3:46:05Hopefully that wasn't the reason. But there's a lot of times in our society where money is the deciding factor, not people. If we can make a profit, but yeah, you know what? A lot of people might die. We'll make the money. I mean, we see that in some of the water pollution that we've done with different... We see it in Iraq with KBR. Absolutely. Right? Right? Absolutely. Totally different scenario? Yeah. Same fucking thing. Do we care? No, we made money. Who made money? Well, all the weapons manufacturers did. Our military industrial complex did. We pull out of Afghanistan and leave how much equipment there?

3:46:58Do we care? Eh, we have to replace it all now. Yep. as a country, we give away military equipment every year. And somebody asked me, why do we do that? I go, well, think about it. Think if you're a car dealer. You buy as many cars as you think you're going to sell during the year. The new year comes along, new models come out, you have a bunch of old models left. What do you do? You discount them and get rid of them because you need to make room for the new bombs. Every year we need new weapons. So what do we do? We just give away our old ones to our allies, right? We resupply them and go, here, we'll give you all these because we've got a new one that we want.

3:47:48And we keep rebuying our own military equipment over and over again every year. That's why we have a$1 trillion budget. Now, the other option is, You know, I don't want to do the Soviet model where we're fighting 1980 and 1990 battles with, you know, 1940 and 50 tanks and things. That's a little bad, but do we have to upgrade it as much as we do? Do we need everything that we're using? I remember in the military, you may too, being given a lot of equipment I'm looking at going, I'm not going to use this. I don't want it. I don't want to carry it. I don't want to maintain it. Well, you have to have that.

3:48:35That's part of your loadout.

3:48:42You know, we always used to joke that the stocks on the M16 are made by the lowest bidder. I think Mattel was making them for a while. So we had Mattel toys. i mean i would rather have it not need it than need it and not have it i agree that that is that is always a thing to think about i am all about an abundance of military equipment i am not about fucking selling it and giving it away just so that primes can reproduce the same damn thing yeah and resell it and give it away by new and I am not in favor of getting weapons and things that are there because somebody thought it was a good idea, but people in the field look at it and go, this isn't what we need.

3:49:34I mean, in the Gulf War, we were given holsters for Berettas that were straight out of World War II in Vietnam, made out of leather, you know, and went on webbing, you know, on your waist. I'm like, that nobody needs this. We need it on our thigh. It's got to be where we can grab it, you know. But you couldn't do that. You've got to have this leather flap closed over it and everything. I'm like, this is, what is this going to do in the desert? You know. It was interesting. When I was at the post-grad school, I had a course on international politics and whatnot, given by one of the gentlemen, and I forgot his name, but he was in line to be one of the choices for Secretary of Defense.

3:50:20Other person got it. He went to post-grad school and taught. Really interesting pieces of information from him. And he said, you know when you were in the Gulf War? I'm like, yeah, just got back, right? And he said, how was the ammunition? And he'd go, we didn't have enough. when I was in the Gulf War, we got there. We had 50 cals on the helicopters. We're doing some practice with them. We each got nine mils as pilots, got some ammunition for those. And then one day about six months in, they came up and said, there is no more ammunition. Whatever you got, you need to hold. And we said, yeah, but what about when the supply ship comes from the U.S.?

3:51:13And they said, there is no supply ship. There is no more ammunition. When the push came in January and we started moving north, I was flying a 53 Echo. We had one can of 50 Cal for two weapons. It's like 50 rounds. Yeah. I said, we can blow that in four seconds. And they said, that's all you get. And I said, well, we need more. And they're like, there is no more. And I said, well, then we might as well just take these off their mounts and throw it at them because we could do more damage. So I went back to the post-grad school and I thought this was stupid. I don't know what happened here. Supply logistics.

3:52:01And this guy was telling us, you know, what happened was about eight years ago, they needed money for this new weapon system. But they didn't have it. So they said, well, we've got a stockpile of ammunition. We don't need to replace it every year. So we'll take the money that we were going to spend replacing ammunition and we'll put it over here on this new Star Wars whatever system. And next year we'll buy more ammunition. Well, the next year came along and said, you know, we've still got a stockpile, less than we did before, but we still have one.

3:52:39We've got cost overruns over here. So let's take this year's ammunition budget and we'll put it over here. Next year, we'll do three times as much. We'll order more. Well, next year comes along and they look at it and go, whew, we can't spend that much on ammunition. We've never spent that much on ammunition. And we don't really need that much. So we'll just take half of it and we'll put it over here on this weapon system. And next year, we'll buy three and a half times as much. He said, what happens is you build this bow wave of debt, right? That you can't ever fill again. Well, then the Gulf War happens.

3:53:22We're like, we don't have any more ammunition. There is none. And I'm like, we went into war without the ammunition to sustain it. I'm like, had our enemy known that? They could have just waited us out to run us over. I'm like, that.

3:53:42is fighting warfare through economics, through, through, I mean, it's not economic warfare, but, but that's capitalism ruining our ability to defend ourselves. I was, that's one of the points that I was so disappointed at, you know, when I'm thinking and building this book, I'm taking data like that and going, this is the wrong idea. We're doing the wrong things and we're saying it's for the right reasons, but it's the wrong thing to do. And when I finally learned this, I was like, you know, it makes total sense. Now everything they told us makes sense because it made no sense at the time. I really envisioned a cargo ship showing up from the US with more munitions, and it just didn't exist.

3:54:40That's a sobering thought as you're heading into combat. I think we just had that happen recently, didn't we? Yeah, well. And they came out with the win-hold-win. We'll win one war while we're holding the other, then we'll pivot and do the other one. I'm like, yeah, how well do you think that's going to work? We can't even do one right now without running out of equipment.

3:55:07But what did we do? We bought more ammunition. We replaced all of our equipment that we left in the Gulf. We replaced all the equipment we left in Afghanistan. All of the military industrial businesses made billions of dollars of profit. All the congressmen could go say, I brought money into my state. But is that how we run a country? No. Not well. Not well.

3:55:44Could you talk about seeing the pattern of the imperial playbook? I think this is something that people would like to hear about. Yeah. Imperialism is, we don't talk about imperialism a lot. We are an empire. And as an empire, we have to do things that empires do. And frequently those things are not what's best for everyone else. It's very, very focused on what's best for me, not what's best for everybody. And you have to be careful with that. Because if you essentially poison the waters for everyone, you poison your own waters. Right? If I understand your question right, as an empire, we end up doing a lot of things that I think are short-sighted.

3:56:46They protect the empire. They don't protect the environment we live in. And we can talk about, for example, the environment. It does us no good to be an empire if all we're doing is poisoning ourselves. But we do. It's funny. I was in the military. Number one polluter in the world is the U.S. military. Hands down. uh we have signed all sorts of accords with other countries saying we're reducing impact and we have an exclusion that says except for our military we don't report on it we don't say what we're doing we don't say how much fuel we're burning we don't talk about what we're throwing overboard in the ocean you know we don't talk about the munitions that we bury or leave behind or you know what metals they're made out of or what they're doing to the water supply, you know, we just ignore all of that.

3:57:48That is one of the trappings of empire. We don't care about it because it doesn't help us build the empire at all.

3:57:59Um, there's a number of things that work like this. Economically, we do the same thing as an empire. We will do what's best for the empire, but not what's best for the world economy. Well, the empire only operates in the world economy. It's kind of one of those things like a rising tide lifts all boats, right? A lowering tide will do all boats sink. You might be the biggest boat, but if the tide is going down, you're going to sink just like everybody else did. I do have a section in the book talking about empire and the things we do because of that. Um, economics is a big one. Global, um, uh, ecology is one.

3:58:48And these things are things that we get caught up in. And I think they're the trappings of empire that they're hard to not get trapped in. I don't know how to get out of it. Other than to understand sometimes it's not just what's best for you. It has to be what's best for everyone. Does that make sense? Of course. Yeah, it's... We need oil, right? We live on oil. We don't even have to fucking live on oil. We don't have to. We should be focusing on nuclear. Yeah. And here we are, fucking around in Venezuela with oil. Yeah. And we're the largest producer of oil in the world right now. Right? And what are we doing?

3:59:37We're going to drill more. It's becoming an obsolete source of fuel. Yeah. And it's definitely not the most efficient. And here we are in an AI race with China, and we're fucking around with oil. We have, unfortunately, 130 years of infrastructure built on delivering oil products. It's already a losing strategy. Yeah, it is. It is. They're focusing. Yeah, they're implementing coal right now, but they're focusing on nuclear and we're fucking around with oil and gas. When's the last time we built a new nuclear plant? I can't remember. It's been a long time. Right? Right? We built a bunch and said, hey, these work.

4:00:22These are good. I think we had, you know, you had Fukushima and, what was it, Grenoble? Yeah. And everybody's like, ooh, let's not do this anymore. Yeah. You know what? It's dangerous. It can be. We need safeguards. But we can put into place the right safeguards. We've had nuclear power plants on our ships now for the last 25 years. We build them very carefully and train people very well. Seven Mile Island, you know, all of this stuff. It's like, well, we're afraid of it now. really you should be afraid of everything we're doing with oil the amount of money we spend to move it around the world and burn it and what it does to the atmosphere what it does to us you know oil is in everything i don't know what we would do without it right now we build plastic with it we everything has oil product in it somewhere but we've got to get away from that We have to.

4:01:31And quite honestly, most of the problems in the Middle East go away once we get off an oil standard.

4:01:39What I was referring to was regime change instability. Sanctions, civilian suffering. Proxy wars, plausible deniability. Yeah. Yeah. All the things we do as an empire. We talked earlier about how, has a country ever been better off after we have done a regime change? And it hasn't. It's better for us. Hasn't been better for them, right? Right.

4:02:16Proxy wars? Better for us. We don't have to fight on our ground. We can use other people's land, fight there. Better for them? No. Do we go fight Russia directly? No. We can fight in Afghanistan and Ukraine and whatnot, right? It gives us a position of deniability. that's not good because we don't see the consequences of what we're doing. And this gets back to, do people understand and know what's going on? Because when we fight proxy wars, they don't see it. And it's easy to ignore it if you don't see it. But it's just as devastating. economically, when we are, we have a tendency to, there was a good book, Confessions of an Economic Hitman, where he talks about how his job, this author, I forgot his name, Peterson, he would go in and convince countries, you need to help have us come in and help you, We'll give you a loan.

4:03:32We'll give you a loan and we will make sure that we build out your infrastructure and everything. You just pay back the loan with everything you make from what we've given you, right? What it does though is it locks these other countries into loans that can never be repaid. They're in debt to us forever. And actually, we look forward to them defaulting on the loan because then we can go in and restructure it and do it all over again.

4:04:02he was saying that we've done this in Brazil. We've done it in Venezuela. Saudi Arabia. 1978. I think it was 78. 77? 78. Mid-70s. Saudi Arabia cut off our oil. We were in dire straits. I remember being a kid, 16, 17 at the time, driving a car. You couldn't get gasoline. You would line up in a line almost a mile long and then be limited to five gallons because there just wasn't any because they cut us off. Now, after that, what did we do? We did two things. First, that's when we started the strategic oil reserve and said we're never going to allow somebody to hold us hostage like this again. Right.

4:04:52So we started stockpiling our own oil. Good choice. we also went back to saudi arabia and we said look we're going to make some deals with you and saudi arabia was not a huge country at the time in terms of of profit and whatnot look back at maps and things you'll see they don't have huge shiny cities and all we said we're gonna come in here and we're gonna pay to sink your wells we're gonna pay to build refineries. We're going to loan you a lot of money and you're going to pay us back from the proceeds. Also, you're going to sign an agreement that you will provide X amount of oil to us for the next 50 years.

4:05:41I think it was. Well, that agreement just ran out a couple of years ago and you may have heard where Saudi Arabia was talking about. Oh, that agreement said they could only sell oil in US dollars to help our economy. I know where you're going. A couple of years ago, you heard chatter about Saudi Arabia saying, maybe we'll sell oil in rubles now because our agreement ran out. And they started rattling our cage a little going, you know, unless you give us a new agreement that we like, we're going to start trading in yen and we're going to start trading in ruble. And when everybody can buy our oil in yen and ruble, they don't need the dollar anymore.

4:06:31And your economy is going to collapse. And we were frightened. Same thing with bricks. If everybody starts using a different currency, it doesn't keep ours afloat anymore. right and that is that is terrifying to us that's why anybody that has tried to sign on to bricks we are not friendly to um it's getting bigger pardon it's getting bigger yeah it is it is you can only hold it off for so long but we made those deals with saudi arabia and saudi arabia sold oil only in u.s currency and made a ton of money. You know, they've got so much money now. They're spinning it, building 100-kilometer long, straight cities that make no sense.

4:07:27But a couple years ago, yeah, they were talking about maybe moving off the dollar. Yeah, I remember. I don't know what happened. All I know is they were talking about it. A lot of people got frightened. Next thing, nobody's talking about it again, and we're all buddy-buddy. Now we're selling them some fighters too, I think. Recently, I just thought we were sending a new shipment of fighters over to Saudi Arabia. You sure that wasn't Israel? No, we would send them to them all the time. But I was surprised because I flew with some Saudi Air Force and I'm like, I don't see them flying these.

4:08:10I don't know. or was Israel selling them to them? Israel was going to sell them. I believe we just sold$6 billion in F-15s. Oh, excuse me. Did I use the word sold? You did. My bad. Gave them. Yeah. About$6 billion in F-15s. That was about a week ago. I thought this was something else. This was about a month ago. I'm going to have to look into it. I'm just going to look this up. Yeah, yeah, look into that. I was actually having a conversation with Mike Walsh about funding to Israel, and he said, we did not do that. And then... Beautiful thing. The next day. Yeah, right? Right? The next day. We would never do that.

4:08:59It's amazing how many times we say, we're not doing that, and then the next day or next week you see the news that, yeah, it's exactly what we did. Yeah. I'm joking with my kids all the time because they ask a question and I say, you know, it's too bad you don't have a small device you could hold in your hand that connected you to some knowledge of all human information where you could research that.

4:09:34Anything?

4:09:38Yes, the United States recently awarded Boeing an$8.6 billion contract to supply up to 50 F-15 fighter jets to Israel through the foreign military sales program, with the initial batch of 25 aircraft funded largely by U.S. military aid. Can you look if we just sent any to Saudi Arabia? I thought I just saw. that we were doing that. Boeing offered F-15 to Saudi Arabia on November 16th, 2025, but no deal was signed. Okay.

4:10:22Yeah, it surprised me because, like I said, we worked with the Saudi Arabian Air Force back in Desert Storm. That was a while ago. I just didn't see them flying these aircraft.

4:10:41but still why do you think we import so many refugees after we leave a country that we went to war with or had war on their turf yeah you know the bigger question is why do we make so many refugees you know I do believe in we are talking about being accountable if we create refugees especially through a proxy war we should do something about that I don't think it's I don't think it's ethical to go create refugees and then say okay you're on your own I think we should do the right thing as a country. Either help them build what they need so they don't have to be refugees, or take them in. The easiest thing is to take them in.

4:11:43But then you have to think about, okay, can we take in all the world's refugees? No, we can't. Should we take in some? Yes, we should. Well, let's be intelligent about the way we do it. Let's make sure we get them what they need to become contributing people in the United States. That doesn't mean just put them somewhere and go, okay, you're on your own. We brought you here, now struggle to survive. That's not a good plan. Unfortunately, I think we do that a lot of times. I think we bring people in, don't give them what they need to be able to succeed, and then sit there and say, why aren't you?

4:12:29Why don't you think we do that? So fucking counterproductive. I think two things. Number one, money costs money. And number two, it doesn't buy any political capital. Nobody gets to their next election by saying, look what I did to help these people. And this gets back to our main problem with our political system that is based on money and politicking for the next election instead of doing what's right. I just had this conversation with Ro Khanna. I mean, he is the, if you're not familiar with him, he wanted to raise the billionaire tax in California 1%. Silicon Valley lost a trillion dollars in wealth in, what, one week.

4:13:10and so we had the conversation it was civilized conversation you know and he's he's i mean he wants people to have medical um health insurance and you know all the all the things that you would need to be successful but you know i just i said what what do you i asked him i said what are you even going to spend the money on we have all this waste fraud and abuse in the country and second of all we send all of our money to ukraine to israel to afghanistan to iraq we never everywhere but here yeah

4:14:00but it's what it was it was it last week they estimated 600 billion dollars in waste fraud and abuse in the country. What if you took a billion, what if you took$2 billion and put it in the top 300 cities in the U.S.? Why don't you tackle the waste, fraud, and abuse first before you ask for more fucking money that is going to leave unaccounted for? And you know what? He didn't have an answer. And taking Musk and having just randomly cut people from different jobs was not the answer. But why wouldn't they just, why wouldn't you fix the waste? How is that not even, it's like it's not even, it's not even a viable option in these people's minds.

4:14:50Yeah. I know. Great. I want everybody to have fucking health care. Yeah. I want everybody to have free education. That's great. I think it betters our country. Yeah. But I don't want to fucking pay for it. I don't want to pay more. When we have$9 billion in Minnesota alone going to Somalia. Yep. We have$600 billion in the country in one year that's waste, fraud, and abuse. And who got that? Who got that? Who got what? That$600 billion, where did it go? Nobody knows. But somebody got it. Yep. It's not like that money just disappeared. So when you say it's waste, fraud, and abuse, who did that money go to?

4:15:38That's a great question. But nobody wants to tackle, it's, okay, well, great. You're going to tax us another 1 %? How much of that is going to go to bullshit? How much of that is going to leave the fucking country? How much of that is going to go to a country that has free housing, free education, free health care, free everything?

4:16:01Probably damn near zero poverty. Yeah. We spend more money on other countries and waste, rotten abuse than we do on our own citizens. And we allow it to happen. And we do. And why? That's the question, right? I happen to believe our politicians are more involved in getting elected again than they are in doing what's right. Waste, fraud, and abuse? Yeah, if you were running a company, if you're running a corporation. I have a congressman right now that's after me. Sent me a cease and desist, tried to silence me, tried to sue me. Went back at him.

4:16:50He tells everybody, I'm doing this shit for clicks and views. this guy's done more podcasts than i have in the past two weeks and i'm a fucking podcaster yeah right and it's all about his re-election because he's probably not going to get re-election right re-elect he's probably going to get primary because i fucking blasted his ass and it got i don't know 10 20 30 million views yeah while he goes on something gets 800 views it's going to take a lot of podcasts with 800 views to fucking dig yourself out of that hole yeah but that's the only thing that guy gives a fuck about yeah we have i mean i just listed off all the shit that's going on in the country but this fucking guy is worried about shit talking on the internet right right oh they do it all day long yeah that's all he does i saw and you know what he's probably gonna get fucking re-elected like i would love to say that he's gonna get primaried they will probably fucking re-elect the same dipshit again and complain about the same fucking bullshit again.

4:17:58And so it's almost like we deserve exactly what we're living in. Almost. I mean, think about half the stuff that happens here. We didn't pass a budget. We. The Congress did not pass a budget. What did they do when the budget didn't pass? They went on vacation. Are you freaking kidding me? Didn't we allow it? If I was running, I mean, if the budget didn't pass, they should be locked in congressional chambers and fed pizzas until it passes. You don't leave. I look at being a military officer and I'm like, can you imagine if you're out in the middle of combat somewhere and you just said, you know, yeah, I didn't get this.

4:18:45So I'm going to leave. I'm just going to go. I'll come back and finish this later. we want everybody else to be ethical and and dedicated and our own congress is i don't know they're not public servants they're public masters and they act like that it's like you know what you were elected that doesn't make you some superstar, you know, King, whatever. Uh, I feel the same way about movie actors. It's like you act in a movie. I'm not going to glorify you. You got elected. I'm not going to glorify you. You work for me. You work for all of us. You should act like a public servant. And if you were running a company, say you're the CEO of a company.

4:19:38Hey, your company made however many billion or a trillion, but you lost 600 billion. You want to increase your profit? Go find out where the 600 billion went. You either cut expenses or you create income, create revenue. 600 billion? I, I, it boggles the mind that nobody cares. They almost look at that like a rounding error though. We have on our whole economy, they're like, ah, 600 billion. Eh, you know, based on the whole economy, that's a decimal point. Yeah. Well, that decimal point could pay for, you know, more than pay for universal healthcare for everybody in the country and free health and free education for everybody in the country.

4:20:35That rounding error is not insignificant to us. You know, if you're talking about trillions, you may not care. But to us, that's not insignificant. It affects the way we live and it affects our standard of living. I think it just proves that the money isn't even real. You think it's what? It's not. It's the money isn't real. No, it's not. It's not, it's numbers. It's numbers.

4:21:05I agree with that. And we keep paying our taxes and have less say of where it goes.

4:21:21You see things all the time that you ask yourself, what happened to this? And I'm, I'm, I'm going to pick on this one for a minute in Trump's first administration. I'm going to build a wall. It's very important. We build a wall. We have to build a wall. Okay. The wall didn't get built. Okay. People push back on it. I get it. You didn't have carte blanche. Biden comes in. We're not building a wall. Okay. Trump comes in again. this was the most important thing. Are you building the wall? I'm worried about Greenland. Well, you just told us this was the most important thing. We did spend a couple billion on it.

4:22:06Yeah, but I'm worried about Greenland now. Was it important or wasn't it? If it wasn't, we just wasted a lot of money. And that's our short-sightedness where it's always like, you know, what am I doing today? how am i getting people riled up today how am i getting reelected today not a long-term view when i was a kid they uh they were going to build a bridge uh from where my dad lived over to this island there was a small bridge they're like we're gonna we're gonna upgrade the bridge gonna build this beautiful beautiful new bridge right they said we are gonna pay for it uh with a toll to go across the bridge.

4:22:48Should pay for itself in four years. Okay. So they brought out all these barges and everything, and they were sinking these huge, you know, whatever you call them, pedestals down, you know, to build this bridge. I remember looking at it going, you know, I've seen the growth projections of this island. And I said, this two-lane bridge is going to be too small in five years. Why not? Right now, while you have the barges, why not build the pedestals for four lanes? And then you can just add it later, right? And I was told it's politics. None of the taxpayers want to pay for that today. so you want to be able to say, I put this in today, get reelected, and then you can use another new addition to the bridge as your next election campaign.

4:23:54Whereas if you said, hey, we're going to go more in debt right now for something in the future, people wouldn't reelect you again. I said, that seems so short-sighted. We waste more money because of that. But it's all about the election cycle. You can get two election cycles if you build it twice versus one election cycle. And that just wastes money.

4:24:27That's part of our system where every congressman, every senator fights for their state. and nobody is overseeing the federal budget in a way that makes sense

4:24:41again goes back to education though people need to see what's going on

4:24:49what do you want to talk about that we haven't talked about yet what do i want to talk about that we haven't talked about yet That is a broad opening. I feel like throwing something out that's just totally off the wall. It's, you'd be like, might be a good thing. You'd be like, what? Where did you come up with that? Oh, we've talked about a lot. We have. We have. We've covered a lot. Um, do you have any words of encouragement? I do. Thank God. I do. education is the best thing you can do for yourself your kids and everything else you've got to know what's going on it's not too late we can make things better the only thing we're missing the only thing I'm seeing missing sometimes is the gumption to go do that just go do it ask questions, question everything.

4:25:54Every time somebody tells you that something, ask yourself the question, do they have an agenda? What is the opposite point of view? How do I know this is true?

4:26:10Love that. And you'll be surprised sometimes, especially when somebody says, hey, this, and you go, how do I know that's true? And I see it all the time where somebody says something to someone and a day later they parrot the same thing. Oh, well this. I'm like, did you validate that? Do you know that's true? So question everything. Ask questions. Do your research yourself. Love it. Thank you. And I forgot to give you a gift. Uh-oh. Everybody gets one. Oh, are these the? These are the gummies? Those are the gummy bears. I saw those. Still legal in all 50 states. I'm excited for these. Thank you.

4:26:54You're welcome. You're welcome. I appreciate that. Michael, that is a conversation that I've been wanting to have for a long time. I enjoyed it thoroughly. It's been very hard to find the right person to do it, and you were the right person to do it with. I appreciate that. I appreciate you having me on the show. I appreciate you giving me the opportunity to meet all of your listeners. Let them know who I am, what I'm doing. Where can they get the book? You can get the book on Amazon. Perfect. Best place. I tell everybody, if you get the book, write me a review. That's what tells other people that it's worthwhile.

4:27:34I think you're about to sell a lot of books. I hope so. I really hope so. And more than selling the books, I hope I can change some perceptions and ideas and help people make this country even better than it is today. That's my goal. I know that's your goal.

4:27:58And another reason that you were the right guy is there are so many voices out there that I just don't trust them. Yeah. You know, I just don't trust them. They're getting notoriety. They're getting fame. They're getting something out of talking about this. And a lot of it is outrage. And I know damn well you're not going to make your retirement off selling that book. And I know you're here for the right reasons. And that is extremely important to me and my audience. So thank you. I appreciate that. Thank you. My pleasure. I hope to see you after the next book. Well, I was going to say, when I finish the next book, we'll talk again.

4:28:43Sounds good. All right. Thank you, sir. Appreciate it.

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