Transcript of #277 Michael Lester - Are We the Bad Guys?

Foreign.

Michael, we're getting ready to start the big interview here, but we have this. We have this segment we do before the big interview called the Hot Question. So here we go. In World War II, the trigger was visible September 1, 1939, and the world had a line you could point to. Today. There are. Excuse me. Today, there may never be a single invasion moment because everything is being weaponized at once. Narratives, markets, technology, supply chains, and domestic division, with psychological warfare coming from outside and from within. Excuse me. So here's the question. Are we watching the modern version of the 1930s where pressure campaigns and propaganda set the conditions until a major war becomes unavoidable? And if so, what are the clearest World War II era parallels you see playing out in real time right now?

Wow, that's quite the question. I'm actually going to take it back. A war, okay. Before World War I, before World War historians would say the world was a tinderbox. It was ready to go, right. And then you had the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand. That kind of kicked everything off. Right. Even more than in 1939. 1939, Hitler invaded Poland and people were on edge. But in World War I, even more than that, there was more going on that the whole world was on edge. Right. And ready to go. I frequently, when I'm talking to my wife, I'm saying, you know, the world right now is a tinderbox. Everybody is on the edge of their seat waiting to see what's going to happen. I see massive parallels to before World War I. I think we are more of a tinderbox than we were before World War II. World War II, there was still a possibility for. For diplomacy and some actions that could have been taken that may have forestalled a world war. World War I, everybody was so ready to jump in that it was almost a foregone conclusion. So having said that, yeah, I see a lot of parallels right now.

Information is a huge area of warfare. The way information is disseminated, how it's disseminated, who it's disseminated to, is pitting people against each other. In the US I think we are more divided than we've ever been. It's us versus them, and we talk at each other instead of with each other. I think internationally, we are not just us. Everybody is starting to position. And for those of us who are a little bit older and played the game of Risk, where you used to, like, put things on a board and figure out where you're going to get power and get ready, I'm seeing All of the pieces moving around, and it scares me.

What exactly are you seeing as far as is pieces moving around in strategic locations? I mean, we've been talking about Greenland, we've been talking about Panama, China, Thailand, Taiwan situation, Russia, Ukraine, now Venezuela. I don't know if that's a strategic location other than oil.

I think it's strategic not only for oil. A lot of people are saying, hey, it's oil. Right. And it is largest oil reserves in the world. Right. It's also a positioning maneuver. It's positioning the US as we can do what we want, where we want, when we want, and we have power, and it's kind of putting everybody else on notice.

I mean, I don't feel like that's a new thing.

What's that?

I don't feel like that's a new thing.

It's not, but it's never been so overt. We're more in the open with it now. I think before we were a little more subtle.

When is before?

Are we talking about World War I.

Or are we talking.

No, no, actually, I would say yeah. It's funny because in my book, I detail a number of countries that we've done this to.

Mm.

And it's not new. We. We started, you know, back in the Spanish American War, and then in Haiti and in Nicaragua and in Honduras. You know, we've been doing this for a while. I feel like now it's been because of information. The Internet is great for getting information out, but it's also great for getting selective information out, if you will. Right now, the way that things are happening, more people are aware of what's happening, and we have to be careful about the way it's being spun in the narrative. When we, for example, we helped Panama secede from Colombia, Right? Yeah. Not Colombia. Yeah. When we did that, how many people know right now, if you talk to people and say, well, Panama's always been a country, right? No, it hasn't. We helped them declare independence, and then we put warships off of the east and west coast to make sure that they maintained it. Because we wanted control of the whole Canal area. That information is lost. And even at the time, not that many people knew it unless you read it in a newspaper somewhere. Now we're live casting from Venezuela. We're live casting from Ukraine.

We're live casting from Gaza. You know, the information is out there so fast and unfiltered, and then you've got people coming in and trying to filter it and spin to a narrative. Right. I think this creates A whole different battleground, if you will. Because now people can't just trust their government to say, well, you guys have the information. I'll trust you're doing the right thing. They're looking at, hey, I just saw this on the news. What are you doing? Does that make sense?

Yeah, it makes perfect sense. They don't know how to deal with it.

They don't. And quite honestly, you and I have seen things in warfare, you more than I. We're broadcasting it into people's living rooms now, and I think we're. We're causing PTSD in the human population from seeing this. And that has its own set of issues and its own set of consequences.

Yeah. What. What other parallels are you seeing? Was the country this. I mean, was the country this divided before World War I? Was that. Is that a parallel?

I. Not as much. And now we're gonna. I'm gonna skip all over. Not as much. Not as divided as much as in World War I as it was prior to World War II. Remember, right before we entered World War II, before Pearl harbor, we were very divided on whether or not we should enter the war. A lot of people were isolationist and like, hey, let's just stay out of it. Not our war. Right. Other people were, no, we have to go help. Pearl harbor kind of galvanized everyone together under one opinion that, hey, we gotta go. We were attacked. We're going. Right. For all the right reasons. I see. I haven't seen, though. I think we are more divided right now than I have seen or that I have noticed in history. We're very partisan now. I mean, I. Look, we're going to get deep into some things here. I kind of trace that back. Personally. I trace it back to mid-80s. Newt Gingrich was one of the first ones in our Congress that started looking at political parties as warfare and started saying, you know, we have to treat this as warfare. Right. We have to attack the enemy.

We have to overcome. Right. And he wasn't. He didn't have a monopoly on that. But that before that, even though there were arguments in Congress, it seemed that people were more willing to negotiate and say, we both agree on the same outcome. We just disagree on how we should get there today. I don't see that willingness. I see it as more of those people are bad and we hate them and we don't want to believe anything they say, and we're good. And then four years later, it's like, well, those people are bad and we don't agree with them. Right. And we try and undo everything. Instead of building on what has happened before, every four years, we try and undo what they did. Right. And you can't do that and move forward. I mean, think about it in business. How would a business do that? Where every time you changed a department head.

No, it'd be destroyed.

They wanted to come in. Yeah. I'm going to undo everything they did.

I mean, we're. We're. I mean, even we're talking about people moving chess pieces on the board all over the world.

Yeah.

You know, and I mean, we just saw with Afghanistan. I mean, China's a huge threat. We gave up Bagram, super strategic location for a potential conflict with China, and we gave it up. And now we got this guy in. He wants it back, you know, and it's. It's. I just. It's like we're two separate. It's like we're two. It's like we're two different countries. So it is like we're a schizophrenic country.

It is, it is. And it. It's gotten to the point. I love debating things with people, and I am the consummate devil's advocate. Whatever you're going to tell me, I'm going to argue the other point. I may not believe the other point, but I want to argue it. If nothing else than to just sharpen my own understanding. Like, I want to hear, I want to learn, I want to hear. What have you got Right? Because that helps me understand. I don't see a lot of that happening today. A lot of it is just as soon as you hear something you don't like, you just say, I don't believe that. Fake news, conspiracy theory. Not true. Not even gonna consider it. Well, what if it's not true? You've got to at least consider it and think about it. And if there's one thing I think I've learned in life is perspective is everything. I've sat on a number of juries in my life, and it's fascinating where the prosecution comes in and they give their opening statement, and you think, oh, this. This person's guilty of sin. There's no way. Right. We can just stop the trial right now.

He's guilty. And then the defense attorney comes in and tells you the same thing but using different words. You're like, oh, he's absolutely innocent. It's all how you spin it and how you approach it, which a large part of my book is about. It's about how Americans live in information bubbles. Right. We don't See all of the information and then we make choices on partial information and that leads to bad choices.

I don't even know if it's possible to get all the information anymore with the way the algorithms are set up and put you in a cage.

Right.

It would be. I mean I just, I don't even know if it's a possibility.

I agree.

And then you have to sift through all the, whether it's mainstream media or social media.

And one of the techniques of keeping people confused is overloading them. They don't have time. Who has time to sift through all of this? So what you do is you find somebody that you think sifts through it and you listen to them. Yeah, right. That's dangerous. Yeah. Because you never reevaluate. Once you've made your decision and said I trust this person, you don't go back and go do I still trust this person? Right. Am I going to reevaluate? You just. You buy what they say. Right. And they have ulterior motives as well. I'm going to do a gratis plug, if you will. I use an app called Ground News that I love. I found it. I'm always looking for a news aggregator to get as much news as I can because I want it from different places. Ground News does that and they, I love it because they say here's a, here's a headline. Here's the bias bar. 20% of the left wing newspapers are covering this. 50% of the right wing are covering this. So you're going to get more right wing coverage than left wing then they have. This has been in 44 newspapers.

Here they all are on a graph of where those newspapers generally lie. Choose which one you want to read and we'll give you an overview. But you can choose and see what kind of bias you're going to get when you read this.

Interesting.

I'm like, well that's nice. And I'll typically on. On kind of hard charging issues. I'll pick the most right wing one and the most left wing one I can. And read both articles and kind of see. Okay, what do we, where are we? What's going on?

Yeah, there's another site called Real News. No.

Oh yeah.

If I want to check that one out, it's pretty good too. I've had the, I've had him on.

Yeah. So people are trying.

They are, they are trying. Even some politicians are trying. So not very many.

I gotta tell you, I saw the most interesting ad the other day and I think it was God, I think it was governor of Wisconsin. Are they re electing one?

No idea.

I forgot. But both of the candidates came on together and said, we need to improve. Here's what needs to improve. Then they both looked at each other and went right? And they both went yeah. And one guy said, I think we can best improve by doing it this way. The other guy said, I think we can best improve by doing it this way. Wow. And one guy said, I hope you vote for me and I hope you agree. The other one said, I hope you vote for me and hope you agree. When they look at each other and.

Said, when did this happen?

And they said we approve this message. I'm like, oh my God. Wow.

Holy.

This is what politics should be. Yeah. Disagree on how you're going to get there, but let's agree on what we need to do.

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Feels that way.

It sure does. Absolutely does.

When you look at everything going on, the outlook does not look good. When I was a pilot we talked about chain of events. Whenever there was a mishap, when something happened, it didn't happen in a vacuum. An event happened. But you look back and you're like well before that this aircraft had a maintenance issue. The pilot had a flat tire on the way to the squadron that day. Right. The other pilot had was in a fight the night before. You know, you go back and you see a chain of events and we were trained to start noticing those. Notice when you see a chain starting to form and break it, it's okay to come in and say, hey, someone else needs to take this flight. Because I see this happening, and if I just extrapolate, it's not going to end up in a good spot. I see a chain of events happening right now. It worries me. It worries me a lot because. Not because the chain is forming. And I don't think I'm the only one to see it. I think a lot of people are feeling uncomfortable. The thing that worries me is that the people that should be able to break that chain are not.

Would you say they're escalating it?

I would, actually.

How so?

If you look at world events right now, I mean, was there a reason for. For Russia to invade Ukraine right now? Are we talking about bombing Iran right now? Are we toppling the government in Venezuela right now? Talking about Greenland right now? I mean, if you look back, there are so many things happening right now, it's hard not to put those together and say, it's building, it's escalating.

I'm with you. I just. I try to look for something positive.

And.

I can't find it. So I. I don't know if the world had less activity 25 years ago or not because I wasn't paying attention. I was. I just wasn't old enough to give a. Yeah. And so I don't know, you know, if this is more escalation than what we've seen.

You know, I think it is.

It feels like it.

It does. When I look back, same same thing, right? When you're young, you don't notice a lot of stuff going on, but you start to. And then you think back and you can go back and research and go, was there ever this much stuff going on? And I would say not to this degree of number and not to this intensity. There's a lot going on and something has to change. Either we end up in a world war or somebody de. Escalates somehow. But even a world war, it's not going to be the way it was. World War I and World War II were, what, 10, 12 years apart? Same kind of warfare, upgraded weapons a little bit, but generally speaking, same kind of warfare. Not today.

Yeah, we're almost. It won't even look similar to the Afghanistan, Iraq.

No, no. I mean, I can, I can. I don't know. I'm out of the military. I don't have any access to anything classified. I know what was around when I was in. And if I extrapolate that. Wow. I can't imagine, you know, we see things that happen and a Lot of people, us, all of us, we don't always connect the dots and say, well, if this happened here, then this could happen here. And little things, well, not little, but they seem separated. Remember when New Orleans, the dike broke and flooded most of New Orleans after the hurricane, Right. It was a disaster. People couldn't get food, they had no electricity. You know, started getting disease, famine, everything in a major US City, Right. All an enemy has to do is turn off our power. Right. And that's could be cybersecurity. Our cybersecurity on our power system has not been upgraded to a great extent for the last 15 years. If I were another country that wanted to attack us, I don't need bombers, I don't need nuclear weapons. I need cyber. I need to turn off your power, I need to turn off your communication, and I need to somehow short circuit your supply system.

All of those are not hard to do. So when we say World War 3, I'm not seeing bombs and lines of battle. And I think it's going to be much more systemic than that, than anything else.

When I look at some of the stuff that China is saying, Russia, they don't like us being the world police. I don't like us being the one. American police don't want us to be the world police.

Yeah.

Bricks.

Yep. I just.

I don't know if we have any real allies. I think it would be. I think we're going to have a run for our money here, and I don't think it's going to go kinetic.

I agree. I don't think it'll be kinetic.

I don't even know if they would. Because right now, I mean, if you think, if you look at what they're doing right now with all the propaganda and, I mean, I think we're doing a great job of turning ourselves against each other as it is, but Russia's also doing it. China's also doing it. I'm sure there's other players involved as well. And that's, you know, they're dumping gas on this. And I just had this conversation, I can't remember with who, but I think we are so fragile right now as a country.

That.

They'Re not going to need to cut our power. They're not going to need. I don't think they're going to need to do anything where there could be a trace back to them.

I think we'll do it to ourselves.

I think we'll do it. I think they're helping us do it to ourselves, and they're dumping gas on, on the fuel for us to do it to ourselves. But if they can do it, if they can cause a civil war, regime change, same shit that just going on in Iran right now.

Yeah.

If they can cause that to happen here. And we're pretty close. We are close and we, I mean look at what's going on in Minnesota right fucking now and probably in a lot of other cities. I think we're, we are very close. We're on the brink. It could go into civil war, it could go into regime change. A lot of things could happen. Once it does happen though, the amount of guns and weapons in this country, It is astronomical. Astronomically more than anything that I've ever seen. And I've been in some nasty places.

Yeah.

And so if they can get that to happen, we will, we. This will become the most dangerous country in the world. Nobody's coming in here. I, I, there's no nation building.

No.

When the US turns its on itself.

No.

It is fucking pure carnage everywhere you look. And everybody here is armed to the teeth.

And I think, quite honestly, if we're honest with ourselves, we are already one of the most dangerous countries in the world. Other countries, you know, we warn US citizens, don't go to Iran. Right. Don't go to Venezuela, don't go to wherever other countries are warning their citizens. Don't go to the US I mean if you look at the number of civilians that are shot and killed every year, we're number one. What country has more of its citizens in prison than any other in the world? We're number one. Right. I mean if you step outside the US and you start looking in, we're not a safe place.

I mean you, you don't even have to pull up statistics. By the way, I'm very pro gun. I Love, I am Pro2A.

I am too.

Want to give them up.

I, I am too.

But it is a fact. And, but I mean, pretty well traveled. We travel a lot, you know, for business. We go to other parts of the world. I mean this county is really nice. But go to Chicago. To Chicago and then go to some city overseas and shittier.

What's that?

Tell me which one, which one is shittier? Which one has outdated infrastructure? Where do you feel, where do you feel like there are constantly threats around you? Where it, it's a big fucking lie.

It's funny. I go to Tokyo. I walk around downtown Tokyo in the middle of the night as a foreigner and feel absolutely safe. I was recently in Istanbul. 2:00 clock in the morning we decide, let's go get some food, just walk around Istanbul, feel absolutely safe. I go to New York City, I'm looking over my shoulder every two feet, you know, I don't, I feel very unsafe there, right? Los Angeles, same thing. Chicago, same thing. It's weird because we have this American exceptionalism where we are the best, okay? And we are, we're a great country, but we shouldn't be afraid to go out in our own cities. And if we are, we have to be honest and look ourselves in the face and say, why? It's not just a system, it's not just a symptom of a large city, because other large cities in the world aren't like that. So what is it? What are we doing?

We have, I think it's a number of things. I think it's greed. All of our money is leaving the country. I think it is. The bastardization of law enforcement, the lack of respect. Not just all the shit we see in the news right now, it is, I mean, we have, we have, we have destroyed trust and law enforcement. So there's that. Now all these guys are too scared to do their job rightly. So if they make a mistake, they're probably going to pay with it with their life, sit in prison. You know, it's, those are the two things that come to my mind. It's 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 health care, 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, you never see any consequences or repercussions or anybody held accountable in any position of power. It's obviously a two tiered system, but this isn't a fucking conspiracy anymore. It 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 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 US and what I used to see in the Marine Corps, and I haven't been in the Marine Corps since 1994. Right. But 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. That is the weakest, I would say, form of leadership, but it's not even leadership. That is the largest abdication of leadership. When you won't even own up to things. I 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 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. They 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 that fell this way more than last.

Great Britain for that. You had the Spanish, obviously. You had things like the Ottoman Empire. You've had a couple of Chinese dynasties.

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? There'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.

They'Re not as, not tangential as you think. They're closer than you think.

I 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, right?

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 and 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 there, 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, we, I, I had told you, you know, my theory or whatever you want to call it, about division, you know, and then I don't think it could be kinetic. I 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 III and power transfer and all this stuff, I mean, when we look at China, you'd 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 are, anybody listening should be well educated on that. That could be a catalyst for a transfer of power. The 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 or send a nuclear up to space, I believe. 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 just going to 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 ABCDF ready to fall.

The worst fentanyl crisis in the world.

Right. But we're sending money to other people. I'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 US dollar, the world reserve currency. We have BRICS actively doing that. I mean, it doesn't take a fucking genius to see how worthless our money's becoming. I mean, just since COVID I mean, gold was what A thousand dollars an ounce?

Yeah. I still remember it at 400.

Six years later, it's. What is it, like $4,300 an ounce.

Today, I think 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. Somebody decided, I'm going to have this. And somebody else said, yeah, 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 US Dollar is a digital currency. We're just people. People think it has value, so it does, but it has nothing behind it specifically. I mean, 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? 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 and 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. Yeah. 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.

Okay.

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. If 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.

You think so?

I think they would. I think there's enough hatred for this country in 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 or 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 more. They have a larger population than China. Wow.

I did not.

Wow. Yeah. Check this out. It just happened like a year ago. Pakistan or India. See, again, I gotta 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. All you had to do was, you know, again, that was one of those things where you, 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? 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. We'll pay you so much. Right. Sounds good. Okay. Well then a couple 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, 100 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. They 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 in.

Up to five a year. Right. But you can't bring us in 100 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, and now once they lifted it, a lot of the families don't want more than one because they're like, what, they're going to cost us money? Why would I do that? I'm living a good life. Yeah. And their population is shrinking. There's an interesting, A lot of populations.

In the world shrinking right now.

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. And 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. And he's, his projections are about 2050. We'll, we'll hit the tipping point and will actually start decreasing. He gives a lot of reasons for it. Like, 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? And 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 see the chart, right? Population is growing like this, and then it just starts curving off a little bit.

Once 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 displaced. I mean, you look, you look, we're still building.

Look at Florida.

It's 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? I 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? And 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.

We'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, and in order to just keep, you know, disease away, the city ends up having to go in and just bulldoze whole tracks of land.

I actually did not know that happened.

Yeah.

Wow. So it's a total reset.

Yeah. And then, Then what?

Back to the basics.

I don't know.

Back to hunting and gathering. And I, I, 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, could 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, 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.

Yeah, it's on life support.

And so here we are. I mean, I hate to say it like that, but that's, that's what a. I mean, I. 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.

You're trading.

Supposed to. And you do you give up.

You trade freedom, right.

For convenience, civilization, safety.

Safety.

Ah, well, it, it, you, you've heard.

A system, a system of, 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? And 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? Because if it's 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 or Wells, 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. Yeah, well, you know, it's a good talk.

Yeah.

You ready to get into the big one?

We're not done. Again, let's get into the big one.

This episode is sponsored by Better Help. As February rolls in, it's hard to miss the focus on relationships, flowers, candy and non stop talk about love. It can feel like everyone else has it figured out. But the truth is, whether you're married, dating, single or focused on yourself, most of us are still finding our way. Here's the reminder, you're right on time. Therapy can help you get clarity on what you want, understand what's weighing you down, and take some of the pressure off. Whether it's for you or your relationship, it's about identifying what's in the way and finding a clearer path forward. BetterHelp makes it incredibly easy to get started. They are the world's largest online therapy platform, having served over 6 million people globally. Their therapists are fully licensed in the US and work according to a strict code of conduct. What's great is their therapist match commitment. You fill out a short questionnaire to identify your needs and they do the initial matching work for you. With over 12 years of experience, they typically get it right the first time, but if you aren't happy with your match, you can switch to a different therapist at any time.

It really works. They have an average rating of 4.9 out of 5 for live sessions based on over 1.7 million client reviews. Sign up and get 10% off@betterhelp.com SRS that's betterhelp.com SRS Want to stay up to date on all things SRS? You bet your ass you do. Our newsletter brings you the latest SRS news and critical updates. Get instant alerts on the newest episodes. Never miss a beat. Exclusive intel briefs from counterterrorism expert Sarah Adams. You've seen her many times on the show. She's going to give unfiltered insights on global terrorist activity for Patreon exclusives. You're going to get epic range days with me and damn near every guest that's come in the studio. You're also going to get behind the scenes content and guest updates. You're going to get first dibs on new merch drops and limited edition items that will never be sold again. Plus exclusive offers from our partners you won't find anywhere else. So subscribe to the Vigilance Elite newsletter right now. Yeah, so 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, 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, 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. 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. We 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. 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. And 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. And I give examples. 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.

Did 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. And 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. 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?

I 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. We 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.

Let me 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 US 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's a club. It'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 IB 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. So Polymarket says there's only a 1% chance that the US will not conduct strikes against another country before 2027. 1. Only a 1% chance. Somalia, on the other hand, has a 57% chance of being the country, of being the, 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.

Yeah.

No new wars though, right? It's the rumor.

Yeah, right. That's what we're told.

That's, that's, that's what we were told.

No new wars. Must be true. Must be true. I heard it on tv.

It's going great, going real good. But, and then we have a, we have a subscription account, it's on Patreon, and there's about a hundred thousand 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. I 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 during, in the, in the northern area, they speak German and Italian. And 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? Like, no. They're like, Netherlands. No, we don't know. And I said, I'm from the United States. And the demeanor changed. And 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, 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.

They 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.

It. It. I had to think back on that one. But I, 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, but then at night they take you out and they'd start doing some drinking and start saying things, and 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. And you have to ask yourself, then why?

Probably because we bombed them after they surrendered, right?

What? I mean, you would. 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 we're linked with them, but it didn't look that way underneath the covers a little bit it. And again, you have to ask why? Why? Was it because, okay, we defeated you in the war? Okay, 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. It'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 live in America. 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, where 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? And a lot of times I think you find our activities around the world are not building good friendships. We are. 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.

I think a lot of countries have a justified gripe about the way the US conducts business. I don't know that I feel that way about Europe.

I 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'd 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.

How long did you spend writing this book?

I've got two. 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 funny, it's the only book I've ever written so far. Now I've got about three or four others 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, when they're 18 and they leave the house, it matures. I mean, the book started with seven chapters, but then I'm like, well, that doesn't explain this. 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. 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.

Like I said, it's a number of points. I told you Italy and Japan. Then 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 reference?

Well, no, at the time, we would sit there and ask, why are we here? Well, Iraq invaded Kuwait and we have a treaty with Kuwait. Okay, 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? Why 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 the monarch away? 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. There were charges that Kuwait was horizontally drilling under Iraq's borders into their oil fields. Most of that has been debunked, I believe.

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 Glassby, who was part of our State Department, talked to Saddam Hussein and he said, hey, you guys got a. Do something. And April Glassby 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 US Is going to stay out of it. I'm going to go in. And as soon as he goes in, the US 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 a front. When we were in Saudi Arabia, we got word that, you know, we listen to the news like, well, Saudi Arabia is paying for us to be there, right?

And a bunch of the other pilots and I look at each other and go, well, then we're just mercenaries. We'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. 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. 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 could Tell you how, how it popped on my radar because like I said, I've been talking about this for a while and, and you know the, the Dick Cheney connection to KBR in the Iraq war, looking for weapons of mass destruction.

Yeah. Yep.

They're way, way too fucking long.

Yep.

That is what tipped me off. Tipped me off. And then also in Afghanistan, we spent what, 21, 20, 22 years.

The place where empires go to die.

Yeah. And I mean, I was work. I was work. I worked there on the SEAL teams. I worked there when I was contractor for CIA.

Yeah.

For a while there.

I mean, I.

Really believed in what we're doing. And then probably around, I'm gonna say right around 2010 time frame, I just. It was, I mean, the rules of engagement change, the mission change. Everything changed. And everybody was confused. Everybody was wondering what the 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 that the, it seemed like the administrations were working against our own people. And anyways, that's, that's, that's when I started thinking about it.

And I think it's, it's funny because I was afraid when I first wrote this. I thought of what I thought, I'm going to be the lone voice in the wilderness. I am 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, you know, 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. We 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. 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 are, this isn't right.

It makes you wonder how much of what you think you know is a lie?

It does.

How much do you think you know is a lie?

Absolutely. And why were you told what you were told? What's, what's the agenda? What is the Goal. And again, I write about this. We. We have these information bubbles, and we are fed information in a certain way so that we believe certain things. And it. It. 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. We 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 are. People refuse to poke holes in their own stories these days.

It's comfortable. It's comfortable to believe something and then just stay within that comfort area. Mm. We fall into confirmation bias. Right? I'm gonna look up information that confirms what I already think I know. What 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 reevaluating or revalidating over and over again what I think I already know. Discomfort.

Well, 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. I've interviewed a shit ton of politicians, and 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. Yeah, like the 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. And then with black lines over everything. Oh, in less than 1%.

I, 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. Well, yeah, but had a bunch of.

Inflows go to the high 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, non event 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 I can go on Photoshop and make whatever you want. Right. 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.

But they, they redacted all of the abusers.

Right, right.

They redacted all of the abusers names.

Yeah. Right. I, I just, it's, it is definitely.

The most transparent administration of all time, that's for damn sure. But, but, but, 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 liars. Well, they're legitimately all just liars. So how would the American people even formulate an edge? The, the, the, the, the opinion or, or their decision would be formulated off complete bullshit anyways. Because everybody in office is a lying piece of.

For 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?

And 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, it'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, 5th in math, 10th in reading and 25th in science or something like that. Those I may have mixed up which ones are which. But it's 5, 15 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. Change 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 US and they all follow the same kind of pattern.

How 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. I'm sure somebody in power distribution system say, oh, no, we updated this. Yeah, okay. In a meaningful way. Have we kept up with what we can do with cybersecurity? No, and I don't.

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, right?

Yeah. 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, the 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, 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.

Just 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. 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. 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. It can't continue like this. Something's got.

Do you feel like that's something sooner than later?

Constantly. 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, 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 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 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? You know, I wrote the book, and my. 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. You're Pointing out what has to change. And I thought about that a little bit more and I thought, you know what, 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, whatever it is they're doing, it's starting to affect their life. If 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 so 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. We 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. To have 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, there's some things that are just. It, 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? I'm like, no, it's all documented. I. 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, please. 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 I use 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.

How 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. 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. We 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. Yeah. It 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.

It was signed by. Forgot their names. It was signed with not a single representative from Panama. Are you kidding me? It was signed with a French person and an American before the Panama, Panamanians even knew it. We're like, yep, we already signed a treaty. You're good. Your country. Here's your, 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. You can look back at that. You know, we were selling weapons illegally under our own laws and, and then funneling funds to the Contras. Does that make us the good guys? No.

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Yeah.

Especially China. All over Africa, South America, Taiwan. While I do not disagree with you. Are we the bad guys? I think we are. What should an empire be doing?

Well, first, I love that you use 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 superpower? Yes. Is Russia a superpower? Yes. What makes us different? We 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.

We'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 battleship now?

Or you have you not heard this?

What's this one going to be named?

The Trump class battleship.

Of course it's going to be named.

The Trump class Trump class battleship. It's going to be the biggest, best battleship.

Beautiful battleship.

Beautiful battleship. Yep.

Well, everybody else is making autonomous vehicles. We're making battleships.

We figured so we.

Can slap a 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. And this is kind of where we're. We're going down the wrong directions. But I'm getting off topic. Other. Other countries do this, but we're the biggest baddest ones out there, we're doing it the Most. We 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?

0.

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. I mean, so we are acting like an empire and then you have to. The thing that frightens me is not that we're an empire. The 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, can't maintain itself any longer. It gets so spread out and tries to do so much and 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.

Why are we, why, why do we send so much money overseas?

I have no idea.

I mean, I, the only thing I can think of is greedy doing.

Thing you can think of is, is greed. Greed and control. Honestly, I, I Here, 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.

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 Atlanta that is running and he asked, you know, hey, I'm running, right? I'm the challenger. I can use funding. Can you help out? Right. I 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, you're like, I'm bought. I can't help it. I did it for all the right reasons. But now I. 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.

Trapped.

You'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.

And let's not talk about the Epstein files here. Right? I'm sure there was none of that in there. Yeah, yeah.

It. But I do. I think that some of these freshmen 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 pack out there that's ready to give them everything they need to win, because they want their support.

Who do you think we're occupied by apac? A lot of people think that I.

The evidence is there. The evidence is all there. It's. It's. Come on. We spend 8. 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. Are 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 health care. 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. Congress 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. I have difficulty looking at that in any other way than we're occupied. Statistically speaking. We have shown that whoever spends the more money on a 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. Mearsheimer and Waltz wrote a book called the APAC Lobby, where they went in depth and looked at this, and again, the data is 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.

What happened to them?

They're still teaching right now at universities and whatnot. But their. 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 US does, no matter what. Why should I agree with another government? If you're doing something wrong, I should be able to say so. That has nothing to do with Judaism. It has nothing to do with the rights of. Of Jewish people. We're talking about a political movement that is 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? That doesn't seem right.

I 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 send.

So what was the number one source of, hey, they've got weapons of mass destruction. Mossad, if you look at it.

So let me ask you this.

Yeah.

Because I've heard. 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 for views and, And. And. 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 and what's not. But there are a lot of things visible like what I just said.

Yeah.

Happening right now. Probably more under this administration than the last. At least. At least from what I'm noticing. And it's 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 this. But this is everywhere. Yeah, kinda kind of is everywhere.

So let me ask you this because I've heard, I've heard that I didn't know that they were calling the weapons of mass destruction. I was busy back then. I was involved and.

Right.

I didn't have time.

Look around. You didn't have the nice thing to stop and think. Let's talk about politics.

But, but. So what is the goal? What is the goal?

Who's 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, about 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?

They 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. Okay, no longer an issue. Ah, Libya 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, you know, the American dollar as a trading thing. Can't have that.

Wait, that's not, not part of brics. There's another initiative.

Oh, this was before. This is before with Gaddafi. Okay, sorry, yeah, this is not bricks. Before with Gaddafi, Gaddafi had the idea of a thing he called. Oh, I don't remember what it was, but 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. oh, he did, yeah, he said. Yeah.

What did he say?

He, 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 US Go in and bomb him and, and kill him. And you wanted to know what have we done? Was Gaddafi a great leader? No, he did a lot of bad things. He tortured people and everything. 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 an illiteracy rate of less than 5% and got it up to almost 100%. He 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, so we bought.

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. Now we've got Iran. Iran's building a big military. Can't have that because if Israel tries 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.

This hits different when somebody like you are 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. Mersheimer 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. I told them, hey, the book's out. Doing something 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.

I'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. Yeah. Can you go after my Social Security? Okay. Yeah. I mean, look at what we're doing, you know, to our admirals. Can things happen? Sure. Does that mean we should be quiet? No. If you're afraid to speak the truth, you've already lost. If 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.

How else. How else are we being influenced?

Money. 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. 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. We. 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 F35 was a great example of this. A part of 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? And 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, you know, 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? And we even have. Haven't even gotten into. That doesn't answer your question about how we're being controlled.

It doesn't. Tell me about this.

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 APAC is doing, giving huge amounts of money to candidates. And if you get hundreds of thousands or 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. We have healthcare doing that. We have defense doing that, defense contractors.

We have billionaires doing that.

We have billionaires doing it.

We have individuals.

Absolutely. Absolutely.

I want to, 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 Gates the other day where he's talking about they would hang a barcode over each congressman and senator and literally scan it and, and, and there comes your donation.

Yeah, right.

At least I, I think that's what he was saying something along those lines.

I hadn't heard that.

Anyways, so I dove into some of the sites and I looked to see, you know, how much money is APEC donating to congressmen, senators? Yeah, I mean, it's, I don't think it's a substantial amount. It's not, I don't think it's a substantial, I looked and 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, 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 and they are staunch defenders of Israel going off of their faith. What the Bible says that, that, that's what they're, that's how they decipher it. Fair enough. They're doing what they believe in. And they sort of told me that the, they go, if you think that.

The.

APEC has a lot of funds, then you should look at the Saudi Arabia pack.

Without a doubt.

And so then I'm, you know, I, I hear that and I'm like, all right. And I, I have, 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've, I have no reason to think that that guy is not doing what he truly believes in and, and, and is serving his constituents one of the only people in there. So I, I, 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 gotta go back and always ask when. So AIPAC didn't start as apac, 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 AIPAC and said, we are not, we are no longer representing a foreign company. We 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 AIPAC 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? Crypto. 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. You 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. AIPAC 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. We'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. Last 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. It happens in every single state in the union. That's not accidental.

Are they the only ones doing this?

Pardon? Are we the only ones? Are they the only ones? I don't know. What about China in the US I 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, there's a handful of politicians that have Chinese businesses. Mitch McConnell, one of them is as a shipping business. Feinstein had something. There's a handful of them.

You know, it's amazing how you go into Congress with a net worth of 3, 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 amazing. Tell me that that's ethical.

I don't think anything in D.C. is ethical.

No, I, I, I agree. I agree. And we can sit here and tell, 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?

At least 50s. Why? What happened in the 50s, at least? Well, 40s. Before 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 said that. Resolution 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? No. Had Truman recognized Palestine and Israel at the same time, we wouldn't be having this issue. But we started it off Right there. That was. That was where it started. And of course, you can go back before that. The Balfour Agreement.

What's that?

Sykes Pico. So there were a couple people.

This is going on during World War II.

Oh, yeah, yeah. Before. Well, before.

Before.

Well before. So Theodore Herzl wrote a paper, a treatise called Darudenstadt 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. 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. 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. So 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 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. We'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 will make the rest of Palestine a Mandatory Palestine. That will 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 Pico that basically distributed everything, all the land. After World War II, Palestine became the Mandatory Palestine under British rule. 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, 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. Sounds good. Until you realize the right of return doesn't mean Palestinians. Palestinians don't get to 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. They can't come back. We're not. We're not letting them back. I mean, today, try. Try having Palestinian ancestry and going into Israel. You'll be disallowed. You won't be allowed in. So, yeah, this started. This is not new. This has been going on for 70 years at least, and had the precursors even before that. I 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.

Mm.

Right. What do you think?

I don't know yet.

I join you with that. It's a journey. It's a journey as 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. I would think that that can't be right. I don't believe that. I would say the same thing, right? Then I'd find a second piece and be like, well, that supports that. But, 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. This 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. I don't have any conclusive evidence to the opposite. And 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 has yet to happen. Gives you pause, doesn't it?

Yeah, Let's take a break.

Sounds good.

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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, where do we start?

I don't know. You're the expert.

All right. It's.

How are they doing this? What other. 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, you need to have a strong democracy with strong freedoms of speech, assembly, and some sort of rules about making donations and things without limits. That constrains you. 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. Russia. 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. We have our own democracy and our own. 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.

Right. 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 proponents of foreign governments that we see today. And I'm not a congressional lawyer that, that, 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.

What do we do?

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

So, okay. APEC is not considered of. What is it? A foreign.

Foreign agent.

Foreign agent, yeah.

They're not registered.

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

Do we have sovereign elections?

Do we less and less. Less and less because of gerrymandering, because of media influence? I think I. 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, but 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.

Because the reason I'm asking is I think the. Yes. How do we fix this? I think the only way that we could fix this is through education.

I've got a different way education is. And, and in my book, I talk about, education is 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, 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. There'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, 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. I 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, you know, 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 you're, 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. If 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, they show the shape and if you redraw it like that, it comes out 3 to 2 red, even though it's 60% red, 20% blue. Unless I'm mixing 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 line 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.

That is anti democratic. That is not following the principles of a democracy. 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. Why? 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 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.

Yeah.

So your question, what can we do?

And even education even 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 were 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. And that's again, what I'm trying to do is just give people more information, ask the questions. Question everything. I should buy my tagline question everything.

Ours is. Everything is a lie.

Well, which 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.

Just another question. If, if. Why 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, you know, 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 felt 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. And you know what? 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. We are a democratically elected republic. 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 unilaterally veto anything. So 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 US 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. So 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.

Let's talk about how we are the bad guys.

You know, I get people asking 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? I'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. 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? Yes. 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, but 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 not Romans, did a fairly good job. Ottoman Empire, the Persian Empire actually didn't do too badly with that.

We're only 250 years old, and we're seeing some big cracks.

Mm.

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? Those are the only two options. It's easier to do the change yourself, but harder to make that decision. So as we're talking about all of this, I think that's where we're at. And 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. But 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 and 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? Let's fast forward two hundred and fifty 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, we 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.

That sounds impossible.

I will tell you that of the empires I have studied, it has never been done. 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.

What patterns have you seen with regime. 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 usually 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. We've got the CIA, we've got our, our economics, you know, will. Will 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, get going. Every 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. And 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, Yeah. We 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. There are some others not as major. We think of those mostly we go back and forth. It 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, 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. I 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 regime change is put somebody in power that is, you know, very friendly with our desires. That usually means prior, 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 is in power. I can't think of a single instance where the country as a whole was better off.

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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. Yeah, 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 them? 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. I want to touch back on the if I can. The question you asked early. Do we have any allies? It's a great question. Because it doesn't seem like we do.

And once you come to that, 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. 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 either. 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.

Okay, now I'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.

Don't want it. They're not ready for it, you know.

And, 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 open the floor. Open for a civilized discussion. And we got those. And. Everybody 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, 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. You 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. 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? That 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 taken away some of the constant confirmation bias, reinforcement, where they reinforce their own idea from others that believe the same thing. Maybe, maybe they start to question. Unfortunately, to your point, I say 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 million, 2 million over that views, plus. Plus all the downloads on Spotify.

Yeah.

And yeah, you know, I don't read all the Com. 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, you know, 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. Congratulations.

So yeah, that's. I mean I'm not saying that to brag. I'm not saying, I'm saying that if you look at the comment of you ratio where the comment to download ratio, there's a lot more down. There's a lot more people listening and not commenting than there are commenting. So maybe there may be, 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, Ruth, you said, you know what caused me, what, 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. I 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.

Do you think information's going away with going away?

AI is interesting. Do I think it's going away? No.

Maybe, maybe not. Information truthful.

I don't think AI is a culprit here.

All they need to do is feed a. I mean they, yeah, AI, whatever, whatever data point they want and then.

That becomes, it becomes what AI tells you.

That becomes truth. Yeah, just like history.

But we're. When, when we open 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. Interesting. The more interesting part was we have lost more film than is uploaded every day in. 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? A 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, 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. I'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. You know, 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 a 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, you 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, here'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 AI once. I'm like, what do you think about Zionism? 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 Aya, 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. And 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. 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.

That'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 the computer that tells the truth, it would tell you the right thing, but you don't know 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? And 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, you know, and maybe even use three AI models and see what they say? It'll be amazing how much they might contradict each other and, and give you a little bit of different answer. So what does this have to do with how we get people to know more? It, it's people 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.

That was what I was getting at.

Yeah, I heard something the other day and wow, again, I can't recreate it exactly, but something like somebody asked Grok, who is Elon Musk's AI? You know, who is the biggest threat to, to American democracy? Or something like that. And it came back and it answered Elon Musk. And you're like, I'll bet they're going to fix that one on that. That's not going to last very long. Yeah, we 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 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. And then today 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. We 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? Okay, 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 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 spread it around.

What's that?

Spread it around.

It's interesting. I'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. I think that's how we change things.

Do you feel it that something's off?

This is propaganda. As a weapon.

The revolutionary audio docu series it's essential.

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Hosted by Sean Ryan they're called Psyops. Is now available to you for free. There's no question that it is mind control. Hear from whistleblowers why have I got a letter from the CIA? Shocking incident Insights from experts if you've ever wondered who's really pulling the strings? It's time to find out. Target Intelligence Psyop, 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. When did you see it become dangerous to ask questions?

Oh, You 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. 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. I seem to remember. Early 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 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. I 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. I would. I can give you my opinions. They are not researched. And I don't like giving opinions that are not researched because I could be a 180 degrees off. I said, the only thing I will say is there's 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, Right. Statistically not, you know, but can I. Do I have any proof? No. There was a lot of misinformation, a lot of urban legend stuff going on, and 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. I. And that's why some things I'm like, I. I don't. 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. You 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. And I. I think that. I think it was planned.

You think the release was planned?

I think we were lied to.

I think we relied to. Do you think they planned to release it?

I think the. I 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. Had a high mortality rate, it was dangerous to get, but it was hard to get. Four or five years later, we have mers, Middle east respiratory syndrome. A coronavirus that is amazingly easy to get, but not low mortality. Right. It's almost like we bracketed it and said, okay, now we have Covid. Fairly easy to get. Fair mortality rate. All 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. And. Yeah. Do I think that all of these just happened? Seems a little weird that they happened in the way that they did. Right. And then kind of scary, though. Even back in the 80s, 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 US and throwing themselves the New York water supply or anything else. I mean, once you release something, there's no stopping it. It's Pandora's box. You can't get it back. That's what worries me. 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.

Do you think we had a part in Covid?

Do you Think we had a part.

The U.S.

Yeah, I do. We had doctors over in Wuhan. We, 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, it was accidental.

Why don't you think there was any repercussions for China from the entire 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.

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? Were 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 very fairly fast. So you might say maybe they were working on them beforehand and testing and testing.

That didn't work.

But if that's true, why didn't we even have them when the first release came through? I mean, if we, 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. We 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?

Well, 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 want to 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?

A psyop?

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.

A ftx.

I think it would have been careless to release it if we didn't know we could control it. Anybody you're gonna, you're gonna. 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 and that is a feeling. I have no real, you know, 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 profit so they could use it. 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? Fiso and Minerma made a lot of money. Okay. Quite a large price to pay for making that money. Hopefully 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. Absolutely.

Totally different scenario. Yeah, same 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? Do we care 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 models. 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. And 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 this 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. That's part of your loadout. You know, we always used to joke that the stocks on the M16 are made by the lowest bidder. They're. 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 selling it and giving it away just so that primes can reproduce the safe 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. I 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. 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. Other 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, like, yeah, just got back, right? And he said, how was the ammunition? And he go, we didn't have enough. When I was in the Gulf War, we got there, we had 50 cals on the helicopters. You know, we're doing some practice with him. 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 hold. And we said, yeah, but what about when the supply ship comes from the US and 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. That's like 50 rounds. Yeah. I said, we can blow that in four seconds. And they said, that's all you get. 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. And 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 I 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. We'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, whoo. 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. We'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, run us over. I'm like, that is fighting warfare through economics, through. I mean, it's not economic warfare, but that's capitalism ruining our ability to defend ourselves. That's one of the points that I was so disappointed at. When I'm thinking and building this book, I'm taking data like that, 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. That's a sobering thought as you're heading into combat.

I think we just had that happen recently.

Yeah. Well, then 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. But what do 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.

Could 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 cited. They 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. Right. I would that. It's funny, the. I was in the military. Number one polluter in the world is the US military, hands down. 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, we just ignore all of that. That is one of the trappings of empire. We don't care about it because it doesn't help us build the empire at all. 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. 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. Economics is a big one, global ecology is one. And 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're. We need oil. Right. We live on oil.

We don't even have to live on oil.

We don't have to.

But we'd 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?

We're going to drill more. It's. It, it's becoming an obsolete source of fuel.

Yeah.

And it's definitely not the most efficient. And here we are in an air race with China and we're around with oil.

We have unfortunately, 130 years of infrastructure built on delivering oil prices.

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 around with oil and gas.

When's the last time we built a new nuclear plant?

I can't, I, I can't remember. It's, it's been a long time.

Right. We built a bunch and said, hey, these work. These are good. I think we had, you know, you had Fukushima and, and was it Grenoble? Yeah. And everybody's like, woo, let's not do this anymore. Yeah, you know what? It's dangerous. It can be. We need safeguards, but we can put in to 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. And quite honestly, most of the problems in the Middle east go away once we get off an oil standard.

What I was referring to was regime change. Instability, sanctions, civilian suffering.

Yeah.

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. Proxy 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. We'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. He 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 5 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. So 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, 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 gonna loan you a lot of money and you're gonna 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. I think it was. Well, that agreement just ran out a couple 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 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 and your economy is going to collapse. And we were frightened. Same thing with brics. If everybody starts using a different currency, 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.

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 US currency and made a ton of money. You know, they've got so much money now, they're spending it building 100 kilometer long straight cities that make no sense. But, but a couple years ago, yeah. They were talking about maybe moving off the dollar. Yep, 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.

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. I don't know. Or was Israel selling them to them? Israel was.

I believe we just sold $6 billion in F15s. Excuse me, did I use the word sold?

He did, my bad.

Gave them. Yeah, about $6 billion in F15s. 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. Going to look this up real quick. Yeah, yeah, look into that.

I was actually having a conversation with Mike Walsh about funding Israel and he said we did not do that. And then.

Beautiful thing, the next day. Yeah, right, right. Next day. We would never do that. It'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. But 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 the. Some knowledge of all human information where you could research that. Anything?

Yes. The United States recently awarded Boeing an $8.6 billion contract to supply up to 50 F15 fighter jets to Israel through the Foreign Military sales program, with the initial batch of 25 aircraft funded largely by US 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 F6 F15 to Saudi Arabia on November 16, 2025, but no deal was signed.

Okay. Yeah. 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. But 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 were 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 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. But 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?

Why don't you think we do that? So counterproductive.

I think two things. Number one, money costs money, and number two, it doesn't buy any political cash, 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's. He is the. If you're not familiar with him, he just. He wanted to raise the billionaire tax in California 1% Silicon Valley lost a trillion dollars in wealth and what, one week? And so we had the conversation with. Civilized conversation, you know, and he's, he's, I mean, he wants people to have medical, 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 and every. Everywhere but here.

Yeah.

But it was, it was it last week they estimated $600 billion in waste, fraud and abuse. I don't know 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?

Right.

Why don't, why don't you tackle the waste, fraud and abuse first before you ask for more 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 what, what, what, 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.

Yeah, I know.

I want everybody to have health care.

Yeah.

I want everybody to have free education. I want. That's great. I think it betters our country.

Yeah.

But I don't want to 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, that's, that's waste, fraud and abuse.

Who got that? Who got that 600 billion? Where did it go?

We don't. 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?

That's a great question, but nobody wants to tackle it. It's, it's. Okay. Well, great. You're gonna, you're gonna tax us another 1%. How much of that is going to go to.

Yeah.

How much of that is going to leave the country? How much of that is going to go to a country that has free housing, free education, free health care, free everything? Probably 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, man. 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.

Yeah.

Went back at him. He tells everybody I'm doing this for clicks and views. This guy's done more podcasts than I have in the past two weeks and I'm a podcaster.

Yeah. Right.

And it's all about his reelection because he's probably not going to get reelection.

Right.

Reelect. He's probably going to get primaried because I 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 dig yourself out of that hole. Yeah, but that's the only thing that guy gives a about.

Yeah, we have.

I mean, I just listed off all this that's going on in the country, but this guy is worried about 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 going to get real, like, I would love to say that he's going to get primaried. They will probably re elect the same again and complain about the same again. And so it, it, 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?

Then 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. So 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 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. 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, hey, 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. Right. You either, you either cut expenses or you create income. Right. Create revenue. 600 billion. I, I, it boggles the mind that nobody cares. They almost look at that like a rounding error, though. Yep. On our whole economy, they're like, Ah, 600 billion. Yeah. 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 health care for everybody in the country and free health and free education for everybody in the country. That 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.

Oh, it's not. It's numbers. It's numbers. I agree with that. And we keep paying, keep paying our taxes and have less say of where it goes. I mean, and you see things all the time that you ask yourself, what happened to this? And 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 pushed 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. Yeah. 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 shortsightedness 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 were going to build a bridge 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 and build this beautiful, beautiful new bridge, right? They said we are gonna pay for it with a toll to go across. The bridge should 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, 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.

Whereas if you said, hey, we're going to go more in debt right now for something in the future, people wouldn't re elect 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. Yeah, that's part of our system where you know, every congressman, every senator fights for their state and nobody is overseeing the federal budget in a way that makes sense. Again, goes back to education though. People need to see what's going on.

What 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. You'd be like, might be a good thing. You'd be like, what, what? Where did you come up with that? Oh, we've talked about a lot. We have, we have, we've covered a lot.

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. Every 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?

Love 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. Oh, everybody gets one.

Oh, are these the. These the gummies?

Those are the gummy bears.

I saw those still legal in all 50 states, so I'm excited for these. Thank you.

You'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.

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.

I 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. And. 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 out. A lot of it is outrage. And I know damn well you're not gonna make your retirement off selling that book. And. 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 read the. When I. When I finish the next book, we'll talk again.

Sounds good.

All right. Thank you, sir. Appreciate it.

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