Transcript of #289 Michael Lester - Is the United States Going to War with Iran For Israel?

Osterfreude für alle zum Aldi-Preis. Milani Milchsnack, 10 mal 28 Gramm für nur 1,79 Oder Dr. Oetker Vitalis Müsli, ab 516 Gramm für nur 2,22 Aldi, Gutes für alle. Michael Lester, didn't expect to see you so soon.

Yeah, I didn't expect to be back so soon, but, but Thank you.

Well, surprise, we're at war again. Yeah.

Wow.

And so repeat guest, we had you on about a month ago and we, you had just written the book, We Are the Bad Guys. Phenomenal episode. I've been wanting to, I've really been wanting to tap into, you know, the Israeli influence over the United States, but I wanted to find the perfect guest for it. I think you You were it and had a fascinating discussion. I think a lot of people found very interesting. And now we're at war with Iran and it's looking like, oh, might be Israeli influence. So I thought you'd be the perfect guest to come back. I wanted to let the Iran war kind of develop a little bit before I just start talking like everybody else. And so now I think is the time to dive in.

Perfect.

Before we get too far into it, let me give you a quick introduction. Michael Lester, a decorated U.S. Marine Corps combat pilot, graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy and member of Mensa, master's in electrical engineering from the Naval Postgraduate School and an MBA, served across Asia and the Middle East as a combat pilot and later taught both electrical engineering and leadership at the Naval Academy in Annapolis. You now teach graduate-level cybersecurity as an adjunct professor at St. Mary's University and Wake Forest University and run your own family and personal information protection company, Ironclad Family. Spent 20 years investigating US foreign policy after what you saw overseas didn't match what you were told back home. That investigation became your book, We Are the Bad Guys: How the US Wages War, Controls Economies, and Calls It Freedom. We're bringing you back because the world just changed. Operation Epic Fury kicked off on February 28th, and your book reads like it predicted the playbook. But, um, yeah, you know, we were just chatting right before the interview started about how, how is anybody keeping up with all this stuff? I mean, it's just developing so fast, and the, the geopolitical spectrum is just It's going— it's— did you see this stuff in Cuba?

I did. You know what? And again, like we talked about before, all of this is a pattern. I mean, you know, Venezuela, Cuba, Iran, it's all part of the same pattern. It doesn't surprise me. On one hand, it doesn't surprise me. On the other hand, you you have to scratch your head and go, what?

Why?

Why are we doing this? Because it doesn't make sense, at least not from an American point of view as a country. It's like, as a country, why do we do this as a country?

I don't think any of it makes sense.

Right.

I mean, Hegseth said what, back, was it June, that we had completely obliterated the enriched uranium facilities? I mean, I got the quote here. We'll get into it later. And now here we are in a war. And the other thing is, I mean, now we're talking about Cuba. We snatched Maduro out of Venezuela. Are we stretching ourselves a little thin here? We still have Ukraine, Russia going on. I mean, where the fuck are we going to get all these resources? Our munitions are low. Israel's munitions are also low. So why would they— I mean, I think we know why they would. Invoke this, right? But anyways, we'll get into all this stuff. First thing I saw this morning, my good friend Joe Kent resigned.

Yeah.

And I want to read— I thought his statement was really good. And, you know, I've been really hoping that somebody of— somebody notable in this administration would make a statement and resign.

And he did. And it—

he—

it's a great statement.

I think that— I think that's all you can do at this point is— and if you're in there, because there's a lot of them in there that don't agree with what the fuck is happening.

Yeah.

If you're in there and you've been selected and trusted to do a job and you're not able to do it, then what the fuck are you still doing in there? This is the way—

we can ask that of a vast majority of the people, not all government employees. I think we have to ask that question about most of our representatives.

I just want to read a couple of sections of his resignation letter.

Yeah.

President Trump, after much reflection, I have decided to resign from my position as director of the National Counterterrorism Center effective today. I cannot in good conscience support the ongoing war in Iran. Iran posed no imminent threat to our nation. and it is clear that we started this war due to pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby. I'm going to skip this next part and skip to the end. As a veteran who deployed to combat 11 times and as a Gold Star husband who lost my beloved wife Shannon in a war manufactured by Israel, I cannot support sending the next generation off to fight and die in a war that serves no benefit to the American people nor justifies the cost of American lives. I pray reflect upon what we are doing in Iran and who we are doing it for. The time for bold action is now. You can reverse course and chart a new path for our nation, or you can allow us to slip further toward decline and chaos. You hold the cards.

Mm-hmm.

That's Joe Kent, you know. And for anybody that doesn't think that we are under Israeli influence, there was a really good article in the Wall Street Journal about how Lindsey Graham, Senator Lindsey Lindsey Graham out of South Carolina is influencing Trump and the administration into this war. And here's one section out of this: to help make the case on Iran, Graham traveled several times to Israel in recent weeks, meeting with members of the country's intelligence agency. They'll tell me things our own government won't tell me. That's in quotes. He said he spoke with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu coaching him on how to lobby the president for action. Netanyahu showed the president intelligence that persuaded Trump to go ahead.

Yep.

So we, we have a— think in—

let that, let that sink in. A United States senator traveled and talked to a foreign leader and mentored them and coached them on how to get a better deal from our president. That should be treasonous.

How is it not?

How is it not?

More, more on this. This is Secretary of State Marco Rubio, March 2nd, 2026. We know there was growing— excuse me, we knew that there was going to be an Israeli action. We knew that would participate in attack against American forces, and we knew that if we didn't preemptively go after them before they launched those attacks, we would suffer higher casualties. It's, it's, it's everyone.

It is. And how many more pieces of paper do you have? Because you can keep going.

I have a lot.

I'm just going to keep going.

I wanted— I just want to— I want to set the stage right up front before we get into the nitty-gritty stuff of how prominent this is. I mean, last time you were here, you said We're occupied. Said by who?

I answered AIPAC, but Israel. Yeah. It's— and when we were talking, Sean, I told you it's there for anybody to see if you just take the time to look. And if you actually question, we have a tendency to hear things in the news. And we just go, oh yeah, and we move on. But like, take Senator Lindsey Graham. Stop and think for a minute. Don't just say, oh, he went and visited Israel and he came back. Yeah, Israel's an ally. Wait. A senator on his own, not part of a diplomatic mission, went and talked to the foreign country's leader. Directly. How many parliament members, how many members of any other government, not the president or prime minister, come and directly speak to our president? Never happens. But our senator is going and doing that. And by his own words, coached him and mentored him on how to deal with our president. For the benefit of the other country, not the benefit of Americans, not the benefit of the people he's representing, not for the benefit of our country, for the benefit of another country. And people just glance right past that and go, whoa, wait a minute, stop and think about what happened here.

No one should be okay with this.

What is your pulse on this? How many people do you think are okay with this?

It's weird. I think the people that understand what's happening, the vast majority, I feel, and I have no empirical evidence of this, but the people I've talked to and what I'm reading, I feel that the people that are aware of what's going on are by and far against this. I think there's a lot of people that are apathetic. I talk to people about some of the stuff going on. I talk to them about the Epstein files and I talk to them about what's going on in Palestine. And I literally have them say, I don't care.

They don't care.

I don't care. It doesn't affect me. I'm like, no, it does affect you. It affects our country. Like, 'Nah, I don't care about the Epstein files. Don't care. Don't want to know.' Like, how can you say that?

Because they're so comfortable. That's right.

But you, you would have to move out of your comfort zone to address that, and they don't want to do that. So I think we have two groups. We have a group of people that they, they don't want to know, they don't care. I vote every 4 years and somebody else takes care of it. And then you have the other people that are looking and seeing what's going on. Actually, I'm going to break them into 2 parts. You get the people that are looking and seeing what's going on with an open mind and getting all the information they can, who are largely, I would say, against what's happening. And you have a third group of people that feel like they're informed, But really, they're getting all their information from one source that's highly curated. So the information they're getting is leading them down a path that is not representative of the whole truth.

The news organizations.

The news organizations. And this is not a partisan thing. I mean, there are very right-wing news organizations and there are very left-wing news organizations. Then we have people watching both to the exclusion of the other, you know. And you, you have to look at both. You have to look at everything and not let someone else make up your mind for you.

How else were we influenced for this particular war right now?

With the war going, a lot of people say, well, we haven't actually declared war. Like, okay, whatever. Our men and women in the service are going to die whether or not we call it a war or not. So I'm going to call it a war. Right. But it's actually a really weird nuance that we can get into later that has all sorts of effects for our service members that I am absolutely against. I support the service members. I think our service members are out there doing everything they should. They're loyal, they're patriots, they are standing in harm's way. And then it's like, well, yeah, you were injured, but it wasn't a war. So you don't get these benefits because you would only get those benefits if it was a war. I'm like, wait a minute, that's not fair.

I didn't even realize that.

What do you mean? You know, and there's life insurance policies, you know, that, well, yeah, you have a life insurance policy, but any act of war or act of aggression by the United States or whatever doesn't count. So your life insurance policy doesn't count anymore. There's so many nuances that go on with this stuff. That I think are unfair to our service members. But back to your point, it's in motion. What can an individual do right now? It's difficult. Number one thing you can do is make your position known. I mean, do I think your senator and congresswoman are going to listen to you specifically? Maybe not. They've shown that they're pretty good about ignoring us so far. But sooner or later, I mean, you've got Joe and others that are standing up. I mean, it gets to be such a groundswell, you can't ignore it anymore. I think we're gonna have some real surprises during the midterm elections.

I think so too.

And I think if you're not paying attention, I think you'll be paying attention after the midterms, 'cause that's just gonna be a precursor of the next presidential election. Assuming we have one.

Do you think that's actually a possibility? There's been a lot of rumors going around about Trump's third term. Yeah, I think that's a real possibility.

I read an article about 6-8 months ago, um, written by a constitutional attorney that said there are ways you could have a third term. You know, here's a trivia thing that in a trivia game, right? What's the longest a US president can serve? And almost everybody gets this wrong. Everybody says 8 years, right? 2 4-year terms. That's actually not correct. The actual answer is 12 years. And the reason is the way the law is written. The law says you cannot be elected as a president more than twice. So here's a scenario. You're the vice president. Your administration wins. The day after the president gets sworn in, he has a heart attack and dies. You become president. You have now never been elected as president. So you get to serve 4 years as president and then get elected twice. You could effectively serve 12 years, right? It's all the way everything is worded. So could Trump serve another term? He can't legally be elected to another term. Could he serve as another term? Uh, an easy scenario, not saying it would happen. What if he ran as a vice president? Can he run as a vice president?

Yes, nothing says he can't. And let's say that ticket wins, and the day after, the vice president says, I resign. Trump becomes the president for the next 4 years again. Legal, 100% legal. Can that happen? Absolutely. That is an absolute legal scenario that could happen. There are ways around everything where it could happen. This scholar proposed 4 different ways that he said this could happen. Some a little bit more nuanced than others, but it's going to be an interesting 2028.

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After you purchase, they will ask you where you heard about them. Please support our show and tell them our show sent you. Again, that's stopboxusa.com and use code SRS for 10% off your entire order. President Trump, after much reflection, I have decided to resign from my position as Director of the National Counterterrorism Center. Effective today.

We just learned, get this, the director of the National Counterterrorism Center, Joe Kent, has just announced he's resigning.

I cannot in good conscience support the ongoing war in Iran. Iran posed no imminent threat to our nation, and it is clear that we started this war due to pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby. Especially as the wars went on, it just seemed like we were screwing up the end, like we, the U.S. government, like we were screwing up the intel piece. You get representatives in the House and the Senate who have no background whatsoever in national security, and regardless of what they say on the campaign trail, they go to D.C., and the next thing you know— What is the— what is it that everybody's talking about if he does a third term? There's something about being at war.

So it seems like there's some kind of— there was some comment that he said if he declared a state of war, you could suspend elections.

Yeah.

During wartime.

Yes.

From what I am not an attorney, I am not a constitutional attorney. From what I read, that is a problematic statement. We have had elections during wartime before. It would be very problematic to say that the country was in such turmoil that we couldn't even hold an election. You would almost, you would almost have to have the U.S. soil invaded you know, in order to say we are under such turmoil that we can't hold elections. But again, that's a nuance. Could we be at war with Russia and/or China or a big war and say, hey, with everything going on, we can't distract ourselves with this. I'm going to declare martial law. Then we're going to suspend elections until we're done. Possible. Probably. And again, not an attorney, but I think that would be a difficult one to pursue. And but yeah, I read the same things you are, that there are some people knowledgeable in this that are exploring ways to make this happen.

There's been a lot of contradictions. A lot of contradictions. I'm going to pull out another— yeah, another one sheet here.

You know, there's a Chinese curse: may you live in interesting times. This is an interesting time.

No kidding. Here's what they said on the campaign trail. Trump advisor Stephen Miller on X: Liz Cheney is Kamala's top advisor. Liz wants to invade the whole Middle East. Kamala equals World War III. Trump equals peace. Tulsi Gabbard, October 28th, 2024. A vote for Kamala Harris is a vote for Dick Cheney and a vote for war, war, and more war. A vote for Donald Trump is a vote to end wars, not start them. Miller also wrote, Kamala will send your sons to war. JD Vance, 2023. On the Wall Street Journal. Trump's best foreign policy? Not starting any wars. He has my support because I know he won't recklessly send Americans to fight wars overseas. The Republican National Committee promoted Trump-Vance as the pro-peace ticket. Trump on October 30th, 2024: They're all war hawks when they're sitting in Washington in a nice building saying 'in quote, oh gee, let's send 10,000 troops right into the mouth of the enemy.' Pete Hegseth, December 2025 speech: 'Our department will not be distracted by democracy-building interventionism, undefined wars, and regime change.' Every single one of these things is a complete fucking Why?

Don't forget, you're missing a great one. During the Biden administration, Trump said this president is going to drive us into war because he doesn't know how to negotiate. Oh, I think he said it into war with Iran because he doesn't know how to negotiate.

Well, here we are.

Here we are.

The entire World is worried that we're going to go into World War III here, for good reason.

The entire world, for good reason.

Everybody is pissed at us.

Yeah.

Where do you want to start? How about Israel? Why is Israel so keen on taking Iran out? What is the grand scheme here?

I mean, well, we talked about this a little bit last time.

Decimated Gaza.

So Israel does want greater Israel, right? They want to be, well, Netanyahu came out recently, last two weeks. And I don't have the quote memorized, but he said, we are going to be a superpower in the Middle East and a superpower in the world. Israel wants to be a superpower. Well, to be a superpower, you have to be more powerful than anybody else, right? There are a number of, over the last 50, 60 years, a number of other countries that could have challenged Israel's military supremacy in the Middle East. We have systematically removed all of them for Israel. Iraq was growing a large military force. Iraq's military force was vetted. They fought the Iran-Iraq War in 1980. Right? Ended up as a stalemate between the two, but they had wartime experience. They knew what they were doing. And Israel looked at that and went, we can't have this. We need to neutralize Iraq. Iraq invaded Kuwait. We went there for Desert Storm, Desert Shield. Years later, we went back. Did Iraq invade anybody? No. Why did we go back? Weapons of mass destruction. They have weapons of mass destruction. Our own intelligence service said they do not have weapons of mass destruction.

Israel told us, we're over here. We're closer to it. We know, trust us. They have weapons of mass destruction. You need to go in and completely decimate their military, which we did. A million Iraqis dead. Their military in a shambles. We left their country. Their country was fairly vibrant. And again, I'm not going to get into the You know, was Saddam Hussein a good leader, a bad leader? Were there atrocities happening? Yes, absolutely. I don't want anybody to think I'm painting Saddam Hussein as this wonderful, beautiful halo over his head leader. Not the case. But they did have a growing modern society where education was up, literacy was up. Food wasn't an issue, right? And we left them, the whole country, decimated. But we got rid of their military.

Mm-hmm.

Libya. Can we—

before we go into Libya?

Yeah.

I did not know about the Israeli intelligence about the, the—

they, they were a big part of the weapons of mass destruction whole—

I'd like to add a little bit more to this.

Yeah.

This interview hasn't come out yet. It's coming out next week. It's 12 hours long. It's a 12-hour long—

really?

And I interviewed—

you do this in one day?

We wound up— I got so disgusted after 8 hours that I said, hey, I think we're done. We've accomplished the goal. We've exposed what needs to be exposed.

Yeah.

And I was only about halfway through the outline.

Yeah. Yeah.

And, and And then I went home that night and woke up the next morning. I couldn't sleep and I called him and I said, hey, this is Pete Blaber. I'm talking about Pete Blaber. He was a colonel over at Delta. And I said, hey, this is an incomplete project. You have to come back. We have to finish this. We hadn't even gotten to the Iraq War. So he came back, wound up all together. It's over 12 hours long. Releases next Monday. Wow. That it's going to be the interview after this one. And in there, when he talked about the invasion of Iraq in 2003, yeah, whoever sent him and his team over at Delta the intelligence that they, that they had gathered, and they wanted them to take a peek at it, and he said, that's great, just send me the imagery, wipe all the context out, we'll, we'll handle the context, we don't want to be influenced by anybody else's thinking. They sent him a a, a GRG, um, you know, a zoomed-in scaled map of a facility that was in the middle of the desert.

Yeah.

And so they did what they, they put their heads together, and what the U.S. said, what Colin Powell was saying, was that there was, uh, some type of an air purification system on the roof. There was a some kind of a truck that had a missile on it, on the side of it. And there was a sentry outside of the building. Well, what Pete and his team came up with, they said, actually, that air purification system is an air conditioning unit on the roof. That truck that you think is a missile is a water truck. That is refueling the fucking water system. And if you zoom in on that Sentry, that's just a guy taking a piss on the side of the building. They got this information back, they totally discarded it and presented the previous—

the previous, um, yeah, I think this happens more often than we think in Iraq. I mean, once somebody has decided for whatever reason, we need to go attack this country, then we start manufacturing information to justify it. And you see what you want to see, right? You see what you expect to see. Now, most of our military analysts are trained to analyze and analyze well. But if you're If you have a political agenda, you want— it's that whole confirmation bias thing, right? You want information that confirms what you already think. So yeah, I'm going to see an air conditioner as an air purifier. Prove me wrong, right? Especially once I vomit it and it doesn't exist anymore. Prove me wrong. So yeah, I think there's a lot of that.

And then there's the whole KBR thing with Cheney. Point being, and I know we're moving to Lebanon, we went to war for weapons of mass destruction that were never there. These last wars lasted, what, 20— was it 21, 22 years long? I have a 4-year-old. I don't want my 4-year-old going and looking for weapons of mass destruction that don't fucking exist.

Yeah.

And potentially getting killed over it. No, we're watching how fucked up he gets.

Yeah, right.

From being in combat.

Yeah.

Because we all see that, especially if you watch this show. You see how— you see the cost that it takes on people.

And it is a huge cost. And it's not just the, um, it's, it's not just the people that lost a leg, lost an arm, died. And that is absolutely tragic. The mental cost and the toll just on your body from being in some of these wars is more than most people recognize. You know, I mean, we, a lot of our veterans, I mean, you come back from some of this stuff and you can only be part of this and see it for so long until it affects you. You know, and you don't just walk out of warfare and walk back into society and say, okay, yeah, yesterday I'm sleeping with my weapon in my hand with one eye open because anybody can attack me at any moment, and now you want me to go to a hotel room and go to a conference tomorrow. It doesn't work that way. The cost that we pay for this is much higher than the money and much higher than just what's visible, I think.

Let's move on to Lebanon.

Lebanon or Libya or Libya, wherever we were going. I was just, I was just making the rounds. If you just make the rounds of who's around and Lebanon is one, make the rounds of who's around Israel. We systematically help them get rid of any military force. The one that's been left, the one that's the strongest, and I mean, think about it. The strongest one is always the one that's last, right? And that's Iran. And we need to, is Iran a threat for the US? Has Iran attacked the US? No, some people can say, well, yes, I will.

I will say yes, because when I was over in Iraq, they are the ones that introduced the EFP. The EFP, it's, it's a, it's an IED, a roadside bomb. Killed a lot of my friends. They're constantly, you know, they were, they, they had a lot of influence over IED manufacturing facilities. And this is the argument to everybody between me and my, my The people that I talk about this stuff with, and, you know, it's like, well, they've killed a lot of Americans. And I'm like, yeah, you're right. They have killed a lot of fucking Americans. And you know what would have been great is if we would have retaliated immediately for killing our friends. But this isn't what this is about. We're not— this isn't retaliation for what they did a number of years ago in the Iraq War. And probably in the Afghan war as well. This is, this is about what Israel wants. This is about nuclear weapons that probably don't even fucking exist.

Well, let's talk about that. Why? What was the first thing we were told on why we were going into Iran?

Nuclear weapons.

Nuclear weapons. Great. Trump's own director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, testified in front of Congress there is no evidence that Iran is building any sort of nuclear weapon. Our own intelligence says that the director of the IAEA, the International Atomic Energy Association— no, I forgot what the last A is— came out and said there is absolutely no evidence that Iran possesses or is in the process of possessing a nuclear weapon. Don't forget that Obama in 2015 signed the JCPOA, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, which we call the Iran nuclear deal. That required that in order for us not to put sanctions on Iran, that they would agree that they would not refine any sort of plutonium into weapons grade, and they would not seek a nuclear bomb, right? And they would allow international inspectors to come in and inspect anywhere in Iran to make sure that this was true. That was signed in 2015. In 2018, Trump said, I want to put sanctions on Iran. Well, you can't because we have an agreement that says we can't. Well, then I'm going to pull us out of the agreement. So in 2018, Trump pulled us out of the agreement that allowed us to send inspectors in.

And now we're saying, well, they're building nuclear weapons. They have to agree to inspections. We had an agreement for inspections.

Did they allow our inspectors to get in?

They did.

They honored the agreement.

They allowed international, the International Atomic Energy agency, that's what it is, to send inspectors in and look. We already had that. We took it away. And then we say, we think they're building nuclear weapons, but our own intelligence service says they're not. Yeah, well, we think they are, so we're going to go in.

So was that, was that done on purpose to manufacture a narrative?

It would appear that way. I couldn't say if it was or not. I don't have insight to that, but it certainly gives the impression of that. Sheesh. And again, all of this— look up Tulsi Gabbard, look what she testified in Congress, look up the IAEA and see what the commissioner said. All of this is public record.

I remember this is right before— this is right before we bombed them in June, correct? When Tulsi said this.

Tulsi said that, yeah, right beforehand. Yeah, this is not, this is not, you know, 20 years ago or 10 years ago. This is recently when we were looking. This is like, this is right before. I think this was in, this was actually in March.

I mean, I'm not one of our 18 intelligence agencies reported that. Only, only Mossad.

Yeah. So you gotta look at that and say, so let's just, a normal intelligent person would look and say, if we weren't there because they had nuclear weapons, which it appears they didn't, then why are we there? Now, oil? You could argue it, but how much oil do we get from Iran? Almost none. That is not an American issue. Oil for us isn't an issue. So what are the 4 things that the US said that we need to do? Why are we there? What are our goals? And I'll talk about this a little bit later when we talk about the 1913-1939 parallels. What are our goals? Our goals are to completely destroy their missile program. Okay. Laudable goal. Do those missiles, do they threaten the US? No, they have no missiles. They have no intercontinental ballistic missiles. Who do they threaten? They threaten Israel. We want to, quote, annihilate their entire Navy. Do they have a blue-water navy that could come over to the United States and attack us? No. Who can they attack? Israel. And they can use that to stop the flow of oil through the Hormuz, Straits of Hormuz, right? We want to sever their proxy threads, right?

Because they do, they support other groups through proxy, right? And again, we can talk about that, that people don't understand that most of those proxy groups are there because of Israel as well. And we'll talk about that because you can't just take these independently and say, well, look at what they're doing. Okay, great. Why are they doing that? How did they get formed? What is their goal? Right? And you've got to understand all of that before you understand the reaction to it. And then the final one is ensure that Iran never gets a nuclear weapon. Okay. Interesting goals. The first three are actually measurable. Can we measure whether or not we destroy their missiles, annihilate their navy, and cut off their Proxy threads, we can measure those. And this is one of the reasons why I go back to the 1913 thing. All of this will tie together. In 1913, they had no definable goals. We don't have a definable goal. Those three are not bad. We can put a check in the block and say, yes, we've accomplished that. We can go home now. Ensure that Iran never gets a nuclear weapon. When is that done?

That's never done. We just signed up for a forever war here. If that's one of our goals, that means we will be there forever. We will never leave because the second we do, they could form a bomb. So if that's one of our goals, we have just announced that we will never leave the area. I don't think the American public wants to sign up for a forever war in Iran.

I don't know anybody that does other than Lindsey Graham and his cronies up there in the Trump administration.

The most recent, uh, Reuters poll— or Gallup poll, sorry— um, says 56% of Americans absolutely do not want us at war. So yeah, I don't think this is what what people signed up for.

Let's talk about the economic impact of the world right now. What, what, what this has caused and what it will potentially cause. Yeah. Oil's what, over $100 a barrel now?

Yeah.

Europe's pissed.

Yeah.

China's pissed. Everyone in the Middle East is pissed except Israel. Dubai's getting hit. I can't even— I can't even— Jordan's been hit. UAE's been hit. Lebanon's been hit. What else has been hit? Israel's been hit.

Kuwait.

Kuwait's been hit.

Yeah.

And I was watching this, I think it was on YouTube. This guy was talking about the— how the UAE could potentially collapse because it's no longer safe to live there.

Yeah.

When Iranian missiles are hitting the city.

Yeah. And look at Bahrain, it's right there. Yeah, it—

yeah, Qatar. Qatar got hit.

Yeah.

So these are wealthy countries that sell oil and invested in our stock market. So if nobody goes to Dubai or Abu Dhabi or Oman or Qatar anymore, you know, for these tax safe havens are good for medicine, business owners, a wealthy expat community, if they lose that, which it sounds like they probably will because it's no longer safe to be there then we lose all that money in our stock market and then the stock market collapses.

We do lose that money. Now, there are no— no business in those are not as big as oil right now. It is growing, right? And they've been doing a good job trying to promote these areas as places for business. And it's without a doubt been growing. Still, the region is based on oil, right? Oil exports. Many of the countries are trying to get away from that because they see it, rightly so, it's a single point of failure, right? If our entire economy is based on oil, it's a single point of failure. We need to diversify just like any other stock portfolio. And they've been trying to build businesses there. So yes, this will hurt business. Oil's $100 a barrel or more. Now, is that a good thing for the oil companies? At first you might think, well, yeah, look, they must be making massive profits, right? Hmm, maybe. But $100 a barrel on 50% of your previous production doesn't get you anything. It is absolutely a supply and demand type of deal, right? Oil is up because supply is questionable. We've got countries releasing their strategic reserves to try and stable out the cost of oil.

We've got the US that has released some of our strategic reserves in order to try and make sure the gas prices don't just shoot through the roof. If we're not getting oil in, we'll release some of our strategic reserves. How much? I think I saw like 15%. Don't quote me on that, but there was a number. It wasn't huge, but it's, those are our strategic reserves. And the other countries too, their strategic reserves. That's kind of like your savings account. Once you start dipping into that, you— if things continue to go bad, you don't have as much cushion anymore. And that's the decision us and other countries are making. And the other countries aren't happy that we're forcing them to make that decision.

You know, I've read that China gets roughly around 10% of its oil from Iran. 75% of its oil goes through the Strait of Hormuz. Japan, I think I read 80 to 90%.

Yeah, I saw 90 per— 90 plus percent comes through the Strait.

I think India was 60-ish percent, I believe. Then there's Europe. I mean, but I just— there's so much going on. I just don't— I don't— I— you know what this reminds me of? This reminds me of the Afghanistan withdrawal, a knee-jerk reaction that turned into a complete fucking disaster. But the stakes are a lot higher with this because this is us. This is the US.

And let's, let's explore that for a little bit, because recently I saw that we had ordered, depending on where, 2,500 troops initially, boots on the ground, with possibly another 25 behind them. Did you see that?

I saw 2,500 Marines going on a MEU.

I saw 2,500 on a MEU that we're going to look at maybe putting boots on the ground on Karg Island. We'll see. Again, all of this could sound to an armchair quarterback sitting there in the living room like, yeah, let's send in the Marines and we'll, we'll secure the area. Right. Just to give people a little background here. Afghanistan, I think all of us would agree, was a debacle. Afghanistan has the moniker of the place where empires go to die. You cannot conquer it. It is mountainous. It is tribal. There's so many places to hide, so much to do. It's a brutal landscape. Right? I don't think people understand that Afghanistan is bordered with Iran. A lot of Iran is the same, and Iran is not a small country. If it's weird because of the way we do the Mercator projection on the maps, you look at it and it looks like, well, that's not very big. If you take it and you put it between the parallels, the latitude parallels, and you move it over to the US and scale it the same, it's like half the size of the US. Wow. The thing is huge.

And a lot of that is mountainous terrain, exactly like Afghanistan, except unlike Afghanistan, they have a fully functional government. They have a fully functional coordinated military. Do you think we're gonna put boots on the ground in Iran? That's not going to happen.

I mean, they've even stated publicly that they're waiting for that. They're ready. Oh, it almost sounds like they're anxiously awaiting that.

Bring them on. We fought the Iran-Iraq War. We know how to fight in this region. These are our mountains. This is our military. Bring it on. And you know, which is more difficult to do? Go on an offensive or defend? It's always easier to defend because you get everything there. You know where it is. You're ready. You've mapped out. They have to move. You just have to stay. And that would be absolutely disastrous for us to put boots on the ground there.

I mean, they were the innovation for a lot of the weapons that Taliban, ISIS, Al Qaeda were using. They were the innovators. They were the brains behind it.

And this is where a lot of their proxy support came from. The Iran-Iraq War in 1980 taught them that they don't want to fight on their own ground. They can and they're ready to. It's easier to fight on someone else's ground. The US does the same thing. We don't want to fight on our land. We want to go over and fight on your land. Right? And Iran really took this to heart and they started building more of their military based on engagements outside of their homeland. They invested heavily in missiles. They invested heavily in drones. Right? Because they want to project and get the battle away from them. Right. And they did. They have perfected a lot of this technology and they perfected it in a way that it creates a problem for us. If nothing else, an economic problem. They're using Shaheed drones, right? We've seen them on the news. You've seen them used. A Shaheed drone costs $20,000 to $35,000 to build. We shoot them down with a Patriot missile system. Patriot missile system costs $4 million for one missile. $20,000, $4 million. It's a 200-to-1 ratio. We are spending 200-to-1 to their cost.

They can keep that up a long time before we can. We estimate we spent $4 billion in the first week. Of the Iran War. $4 billion of munitions that just go bang and they're done. Which gets back to the whole point, who wins? Well, now we have to resupply that $4 billion. So, hey, Boeing, Morton Thiokol, you know, whoever, here's a $4 billion contract. We need more weapons. So our military-industrial complex gets immediate contracts to resupply all of these weapons. And again, did that help us? Are our gas prices lower? Are food prices lower? Do we have better healthcare? Do we have better services?

Are we safer?

Are we safer? The benefit to the American living in America is zero to negative. Who benefited? Israel benefited. So it's difficult to look at this any other way than to say we are fighting this war with our munitions and our people and putting our people at risk. Last number I saw was 13 Americans dead for Israel. I don't know any other way to interpret that.

I don't either.

I don't either. And that is a sad comment.

You know what really scares me about Iran is their proxies— Hamas, the terrorist organizations. Yeah, the sleeper cells that are supposedly embedded all over the United States and what that could look like. And I don't, you know, I think, you know what, I don't know how many attacks we've seen since, but, uh, what, ODU in Virginia just got hit and somebody yelled Allah Akbar. Who knows if that was that or not. But when I bring on Sarah Adams and she talks about the sleeper cells that are all over the U.S., now do I think they're going to hit no matter what? Yeah, if they're here, yes, I think they're going to hit no matter what. But does this give them a lot of Extra motivation? Absolutely. And so, you know, I just want to paint a scenario real quick. I mean, they're talking about simultaneous attacks. That doesn't— I mean, simultaneous attacks throughout the country. One in Dallas, one in New York, one in Chicago, one in Nashville, one in Miami, one in Los Angeles. Now, you know, what if they have simultaneous attacks inside of each one of those cities and it all happens simultaneously to, to, to, to to suck up all of the, the resources and the contingency plans with the police and the first responders, you know.

So if they, if they do simultaneous attacks in LA and they hit a hospital over here, and then 30 seconds later they hit a school, and then 30 seconds later they hit a university, and then a preschool, I mean, there's going to be gridlock. Nobody's going to be able to respond. That's one city. Oh, and then you think about all of, you know, all these major cities in the United States, what, what that could actually look like. Yeah, it'd be a hell of a lot scarier than missiles because there's true terror.

Oh yeah, you know, when I was studying terrorism, um, one of the things we studied first was what is the goal of terrorism? What's the goal? And what I remember, and when I was studying it, and quite honestly, the definition may have changed these days, but the goal of terrorism was to make a populace feel that their government could not protect them. So what you want to do is you want to go in and do some act. They go, oh my God, this happened, right? The best thing to do as a terrorist then, oh, and you need news coverage of that. People need to know you did it. And then what's going to happen? The government is going to increase security, right? And then do another one. That shows the people that even when the government tries, they can't stop us. And this is regular, just insurgent tactics, right? So could that happen in the US? Could. I kind of go back a little more pragmatically though and say, what, how would that benefit? That's a lot of money, a lot of time, and a lot of investment. What's the actual benefit from that? Let's say Iran did that.

What would our response be? If we could prove Iran did it, our response would be an all-out attack on Iran. Iran knows that. Would it help them? I don't know that it would. I would think a rational, a rational war planner You've always got to ask, if you're going to do something and you're going to expend assets, what's the benefit? And the benefit has to be greater than the assets expended.

Well, I mean, are you asking me? I'm asking you, what do I think the benefit is?

What do you think?

I think that this is a— I think that this is a religious war, and I wanted to get in this more towards the end. We just killed their fucking pope. They're pissed. They're extremists. They're Shias. They are extremists. Their goal is to get to heaven. How do they get to heaven? Come over here and pull a jihad. That's what I think the goal is.

I don't know that I agree with that.

Why is that?

Um, If you, in Islam, if you die while you are doing God's work and doing good things, you are shaheed and you go to heaven. If you die doing things that are not in the best interest of the people and are against righteousness, yeah, you don't go to heaven. That's not considered something that's good. I don't think Iran looks at the US as the big Satan. They say that and they chant death to America. Why? Because we're bombing them. And we should get into this. We need to look at the history. You want to get into this now?

Yeah, let's do it.

Let's look at Iran, right? So first, most people know Iran was Persia, right? Some people don't know that. I say that and they're like, what? I thought Persia was a fictional area. No, it was Persia. It was renamed Iran in 1953, '53 or '35. I might have those mixed up. But anyway, because Iran— Persia was an English name. That we used. The internal name that they used was Iran. So they renamed themselves as Iran. What a lot of people don't realize was after the Persian Empire fell and Iran was a growing country, they were our number one ally in the Middle East. People don't know that. Right now we say Israel is our only ally in the Middle East. It was Iran. We had the largest embassy ever in Tehran. We ran the CIA headquarters out of Tehran. CIA headquarters for all of the Middle East and Asia was all based out of Iran. That's how close we were with them, right? Now, what happened? Well, First thing that happened was they had a prime minister, Mohammad Mosaddegh, right? In 1953, Mosaddegh— well, in '52, Mosaddegh nationalized their oil and said all of this oil belongs to Iran.

Prior to that, Great Britain had been mining and pumping most of their oil. The United States, CIA, and MI6 did a joint venture. United States called it Operation Ajax. MI6 called it Operation Boot. You can look this up, right? We orchestrated a coup. We got rid of Mossadegh and we took him out of power. In his place was Mohammad Shah Pahlavi, right? He was the Shah. Pahlavi, thanking the US for getting him back into power, signed over 40% of the royal fields to the US and Great Britain. 40%. 40%. Wow. Now think about if somebody signed over 40% of American farmland to another country. Americans would be pissed. Iranians were not happy. Now, Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi was actually in power as a figurehead, kind of like the king, if you will, in Great Britain, and Mossadegh was the prime minister. Mossadegh got more power. We took Mossadegh out. Pahlavi takes power again, and he became pretty brutal. He had the SAVAK military or intelligence. He was, he was a brutal ruler. Iranians were getting fed up. Iranians are like, we're nothing but an American puppet. American CIA and MI6 came in, removed our prime minister that was democratically elected, put the Shah in power.

The Shah is being brutal. We're giving away all of our oil to America. America's running their CIA out of our country. They had a revolution, 1979. We're all familiar with that. 1979, they have a revolution and say, we're kicking the US out. We want to be our own country. The oil belongs to us. We don't want you here running your politics out of our country. By the way, the students that took over the US Embassy, the US Embassy tried to shred all sorts of documents. They went and pasted them all back together and they've got all these documents from the CIA pretty much validating all of this, right? So after that happens, it's a pendulum swing. It was very secular, not very religious, and they're like, well, that didn't work. So in 1979, they said, we're going to put in a religious leader. And the pendulum swung over here, right? And that's where we're at pretty much today. So if you look at that, this is not a country that's just out there by themselves that said America is evil. This is a country that America orchestrated a coup in. This is a country that ran their CIA from their country and who took most of their oil.

I am not defending them and saying that they're the good guys, but our hands aren't clean here. Right. So when they come back now and they're like, okay, we're not even, you know, we're not even going to do anything. But then Israel comes and says, hey, you need to get rid of Iran. You know, they don't like you. They're they're against you, right? And they kind of like fan the flames. And those flames are already there from before. But it's important to understand the history of how we got here. Because I don't think anybody wakes up one day and says, I don't like this country. I, I don't. Maybe some people do. But anytime there's a country that we don't like or that doesn't like us, we should always go back and ask why. What happened? What happened that made this animosity? And I think it's always important to go back to that and understand that because that understanding is going to drive how we act in the future. Does that make sense?

Makes perfect sense.

So right now, does Iran want to take over the US? They don't. They don't want to come here. They don't care about— they just, they want to be left alone. We're not leaving them alone. Israel isn't leaving them alone. And Israel is our new best friend. So let's go take out Iran.

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Does Israel want us out of the Middle East?

Eventually. Why? They want to be a superpower all on their own. Netanyahu came out, what, 3 weeks ago, 4 weeks ago, and said we want to wean ourselves away from American support.

I saw that too.

2 weeks ago, 3 weeks ago, again, within the last 6 weeks, he was doing a speech. It's in Hebrew, but it is translated, where he said we will be the superpower in the Middle East. And that means not, not using us. That means on their own.

Are they in talks with China?

No idea. No idea.

There's a lot of speculation that that's going to be their new best friend.

I heard something about a year ago about them talking to China. And I remember at the time thinking to myself, well, they've used us up, let's go to the next one and see what we can get from them.

That's exactly what crossed my mind too.

Yeah.

And they had mentioned, you know, that this could— this— they had mentioned that they will help China with their tech. I don't know if they need help with their tech.

Israel's very is unabashedly and unashamed opportunists. Whoever's going to help them is their friend. Whoever isn't helping them is their enemy. It's that easy. And right now, we're the host and Israel's the parasite living off of us. And eventually it'll eat you up until you're dead and then it'll move on to another host. That's a sad comment to make, but that's— It seems like we're going there. If you just follow it, if you just look at what's happening, that is what works. That's the answer that works.

Have you seen this clip of Netanyahu talking about Rome?

I saw part of that.

Where he says, we won't lose this time. And a lot of speculation is saying that the United States is the new Rome.

We're Rome, yeah. So historically, there's also some religious texts and whatnot that mention Rome, the powers in the West. And they use Rome. That doesn't mean they mean Rome in Italy. We are the new Rome. We're the empire that was the Roman Empire, right? And again, I always have to caveat a little, people, because we didn't come from Rome. I'm like, I'm not saying that. I'm saying that what Rome was at the time, we are today. Right? We're the empire that has the greatest amount of power in the world.

So is there a long-term goal to take us down?

Tough to answer that because we talked about the last time, no empire has lasted forever. You don't have to take an empire down. It will eventually eat itself. The question is, is not does the empire survive? No empire has ever survived. The question is, is what does it become? Does it decrease gracefully to a sustainable power? That continues to be relevant in the world, or does it implode completely and disappear? That's the question. And history has examples of both of those. Every empire in history has ended. Some have ended gracefully and become powers that remain. Great Britain was an empire, right? Pax Britannia. They held the peace. They were the policemen of the world, right? They were everywhere. They declined. Still a powerhouse, still a viable, powerful country, not a world empire anymore. There are other empires, the Roman Empire, completely imploded and gone. You know, there's examples of both. As a historian, I look at this and say, eventually the US empire as an empire will end. Our question for us is, do we end by pulling back and not being an empire, but being a strong country? Which, God, I hope is the case, or do we just charge until we just run out and we completely start over from scratch and we're something else then?

Who knows? I love the United States and I hope that we have the intelligence to just pull back a little, focus on the United States, and be a superpower without being an empire?

I don't even think that's a possibility when you look at all the conflict that we're involved in and have been involved in. Yeah, I mean, Ukraine, Venezuela. Yeah, Gaza, Iran, Taiwan. What am I missing?

Pretty much from all over the world.

But you— I just, I just— now we're talking about Cuba already. Yeah, we're what, 3, 4 weeks into this? 3 weeks? 3 weeks into this war with Iran.

Yeah. How far were we into Venezuela before Iran? 3, 4 weeks. Oh, don't forget Greenland before that. We haven't attacked them yet, but Greenland, Venezuela, Iran, Cuba. Don't forget that we said we were going to take back the Panama Canal. It's, Sean, it's crazy.

What is going to happen to our economy? Not just the— what's going to— let's start with the US economy. I mean, What happens if we have pissed off the GCC so bad that they decide they're not going to trade oil in US dollars anymore?

There is a huge, huge concern. And again, I don't think a lot of people understand why it's important. And again, you hear this from me over and over. You have to go back and look at the history a little bit. You have to know how we got here. The US used to be on a gold standard. And what does that mean? It meant for every dollar you held, it was backed up by gold, right? Well, we know we went off the gold standard. So what is a US dollar backed by? It's backed by the belief that the US is good for it. A dollar bill, a $10 bill, $100 bill, whatever, is a promise. It's an IOU that says you're going to give them something back that's worth this much, right? If it's gold-backed, that means I'm going to get that amount of gold for this. If it's not gold-backed, it just means we all agree that this is how much it's worth. Well, That can change overnight. What if we all agree it's not worth that? And right now we use it to trade oil. Every country trades oil in dollars. There's some talk about why that is.

And if you look at the Confessions of an Economic Hitman, he talks about how we signed agreements with Saudi Arabia and others that said they would trade in US dollars. That forced the US dollar to have value because you could trade it with oil and everything else, right? But now countries are a little tired of that. By the way, again, this is all one big spider web. Going back to Libya, Gaddafi wanted to form a new currency for Africa called the unit. Right, that would not use US dollars. That was sacrilege. Couldn't have that. That's another reason we attacked theirs. We couldn't have that. Now, what's the big threat to the US dollar?

BRICS.

BRICS wants to get off of the US dollar and have their own trading units that is not US-based.

Last time I checked, that went from what, Russia or— I'm sorry, Brazil, Russia, India, China. Now I believe what there's— last time I checked, there was 22 more countries.

Yeah, people are signing on.

Why wouldn't you? I mean, you hear these conversations, you know, that they have to be happening. I mean, China is engaging other countries and literally saying, hey, we don't have to put up with this shit.

Right? We don't have to. And it's one of those is like, hey, kind of in secret on the side, it's like, let's you and I agree that we don't have to use American dollars. And as soon as enough of us agree, we'll just stop and we'll switch over to this. But we need enough of us first to make the switch. So right now there's still talk of let's get enough of us so that we can all agree and then do the switch, right? Also though, you've got a lot of tie-ins with other countries have invested in the US. They own buildings, they own land, they own companies, right? So if our economy tanks, their investments tank. Everything is so interconnected. It's not just an easy, we're going to pull out because we're also going to take a hit then. But then these other countries have to look at it and go, which is worse? This hit or the long-term stability and freedom to do what we want without someone else telling us what to do?

The movement's growing. BRICS is growing.

Movement around the world is growing.

I'll bet it's going to grow real fast now. What does that look like though? What does it look like if we don't— if the Middle East no longer trades their oil in US dollars? What does that mean for us?

I don't know. I'm not an economist and the little I've read Not good. Uh, our dollar value compared to other currencies would decrease, um, could decrease to the point of the dollar being worth pennies on the dollar right now. Now run that out with people's 401(k)s, retirement, You know, what happens when all of a sudden your retirement is worth 1/20th that you thought it was? That becomes a big issue. That becomes an issue for us as a country buying goods, services, and food from other countries. It becomes an issue for us as individuals. We're like, hey, I thought I was set up and I had this much value and now I don't. What do I do? It has an issue for young people saying, well, how do I start a family and grow if what I have is not worth anything? And there are people a lot better versed on this and the economics than me to cover that. But Not something I would look forward to.

I mean, the whole— they're talking about a global depression.

A global depression could be because everything's tied together.

Do you think there is a possibility that they're not— do you think there's a possibility that all these recent attacks on other countries, pulling Maduro out, Iran— do you think that this is an attack on China's energy? They get 70-75% of their oil from the Strait of Hormuz. Then there's Venezuela, we snatch them. I'm just asking, maybe, maybe— I'm just asking if maybe we're we don't have a full picture?

Well, I, I don't think we do have a full picture. I think by design we don't see all of it. The internet has been great in that we get a lot of information we didn't used to. It's horrible in that it's also easy to hide some of the information. You have to really go dig for it to try and find some of these things, and a lot of it is still hidden.

I don't think that. I don't think that. But I'm also trying to think of ways that something that may be a little more positive other than we're under Israeli influence. And so even go back a little bit farther, the Panama Canal, which was supposedly controlled by China.

A Chinese company.

We fixed that.

Yeah.

You know, we pulled Maduro out. Now we've bombed the shit out of Iran and they closed the strait.

So you're asking is, do you— is there a possibility that this is a planned, orchestrated— it's China's bigger picture in order to contain China.

It's China. Now, you know, on the caveat to that, I mean, they're investing, from what I understand, heavily in nuclear capabilities. Capabilities. So I think that would just speed that up, and they don't have to deal with all the fucking red tape that we have to deal with. So I think that would be a, you know, relatively easy pivot for them.

I think it would be an easy pivot for them. And per capita, the U.S. consumes more in oil per person than China does, by far. It would hurt us more than it would hurt them. I think if we're looking at ways to contain China, I wouldn't see this as an advisable path. There's too many things that can go wrong and too many things that'll destroy an economy as a side effect. You know what I'm saying? And look at what they're doing with chip manufacturing and robotics and drones and whatnot. I don't think we would contain them by this. It'd be wonderful to think, hey, somebody has a grand plan here. You know, somebody, somebody's got this figured out. I'm not seeing that.

Yeah, it's a friend of mine. My attorney actually brought that up to me and I was— I said, you know, I don't think that, but I hope you're right. I hope there's a, there's a broader plan here than what I would— what, what seems to be the obvious.

But, you know, there's lots of times I hear some of these, I'm like, God, I would love to believe that. Yeah, but call me skeptical.

Yeah. Yeah.

And again, I don't, I don't want to sound always doom and gloom, right? That, you know, all of this is bad. You know, everything is falling apart. There's still a lot we can do. America is still, in my opinion, the best country in the world. Right. Look at the people we have. Look at our land. Look at our resources. We have a lot of oil, right? We have food that we export. Our problem, if you will, is we have stretched out so far to try and extend our power and control that we're starting to lose the whole reason for having that power and control. And that is the lifestyle and benefits to American citizens. And that's why personally, I would, I'm a proponent of pulling back some of what we're doing worldwide and concentrating on America. Let's make sure, and again, Iran, is this helping anybody here? I can't see that it is. We're spending a lot of money and we're not benefiting Americans. We're benefiting Israelis, certainly not benefiting Iranians. I want to benefit Americans.

Or any of the other Middle Easterners.

Or any of the rest of the Middle East.

Or the world.

Or the world. So let's concentrate on us. That's where I want to go with this.

I think we leave that section for the end. All right, but, um, let's take a break. But before we do, you know, I got a Patreon. Of course, they're the reason we get to be here today. And so this is from Zach Walton. What does victory in Iran look like? The president's four objectives are to stop the production of ballistic missiles, prevent nuclear proliferation in Iran, destroy the Iranian Navy, and prevent Iran from funding proxies. To achieve these objectives, is there any outcome except regime change to a Western-friendly regime?

You know who put this in?

Zach Walton.

Zach, Zach, great question. I love it because as a military person, you always want to know what's the goal? Why am I here? And more than that, when am I done? When I, when I, when I hit this threshold, when this happens, I'm done. And the one thing we don't want is forever wars where we don't define what done is. I apologize if I'm repeating myself. I was talking to some people beforehand. I've been talking to people every day and I keep saying the same things. And sometimes I'm like, who did I say this to and who didn't I say this to? But we have to know what done is right. And Zach was right. Those are the 4 objectives that were stated. And you and I, when we were starting this, we talked about 3 are very measurable. One is not. So let's talk about regime change. We did it. We killed their leader. They put in a new one. How'd that work for us?

Not great.

Let's kill this one. Guess what they'll do? Put in a new one. How will that work for us?

You know, this is exactly what we did in the Afghan war.

It is.

I think the— there was a time period when I was in where the the number 2 in charge had a 2-week life expectancy.

Yeah.

And it was just a revolving door.

Yeah.

Didn't change a damn thing.

And then people say, well, we need to really do a regime change. And by the way, I always take a little offense at regime. It's a government. We call it a regime when we don't like it, but it's a government. We want to forcibly change the leader of another government. Let's call it what it is. Now, we did that. We did that in 1953 when we put Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi in power. That was a Western-supported, Western-aligned leader. How did that turn out for us? That ended up with the 1979 revolution to kick him out. The answer is not to put in leaders that are American puppets. The answer is to treat people and countries respectfully, respect their resources, negotiate with them to get good prices and agreements where we share resources. You know, with the best terms we can get, but not go in, beat them over the head, take their resources and say, well, we got the best deal for us because we're taking it. That never ends well. Never has. So I'm not a fan of regime change. Number one, it's never worked. In any situation I can think of, if it works temporarily, it eventually falls and you're worse off than you were before.

Iran is a poster child for that.

I mean, it seemed like a lot of the people in the administration were also against this. Remember, I read those quotes at the beginning. Maybe I should read them again right now. I'm not going to, but, you know, a lot of talk about endless war, no more endless wars, no more regime change, no more pushing democracy. All of that right down the ship.

And you know what, we have some really smart people in the government. We have some people in our Foreign Service, we have some people in the State Department. And if any of you are watching this, thank you for everything you're doing. They have spent their lives studying how to interact with foreign countries. They have spent their lives studying the economy and the culture of foreign countries so that they can advise our leaders better on how to interact with them. What I see us doing right now is ignoring all of them. Well, we're just going to go in and do this. That's probably not what you want to do. I think we have completely and totally misread or ignored Iranian culture and, and thought patterns.

Do you think that the majority of Iranians want to see a regime change?

Great question. I was talking to some of the other people on your team here earlier. We were discussing this. I read a really interesting article written by an Iranian gentleman. And he said, I'm Iranian. I live in Tehran, right? I see this every day. So I'm not happy with my government. My government is not representing me the way I would like. I don't want America to come in here because quite honestly, we've seen— and this is his opinion— We've seen what happens to countries after America comes in, and that's worse than what we have right now. Do I want our government to change? Yes. Do I want America to come in here and do it? No. That is one Iranian's opinion that I read. But it's an interesting perception, and it starts you thinking of like, well, So what is the Iranian viewpoint right now? We see on the news women have to wear niqabs with their whole face covered and, you know, they have no rights and anybody can do anything at any time. But then go get on some of these other social media sites. And I'd like to look at all of them, right?

As much as I can. And you get videos and things sent by teens and 20s out there having fun. You know, they're at nightclubs dancing. They're driving. They're nothing of what we're seeing in the news. And that's when you start questioning, going, am I getting the real story? 'Cause when I've got random people putting this out here and I've got my official news telling me this, I come to the same cognitive dissonance we talked about before. These don't match. Somebody's not telling the truth. And I have suspicion that one of these has an agenda. One of them is just random. So I'm like, maybe we should start paying attention to this a little bit.

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All right, Michael, we're back from the break, and, and, you know, we talked a little bit about ground troops and Trump sending ground troops to Iran.

Yeah.

I want to elaborate a little bit more on that and get into some, what are the chances that we use nukes? But before we do, as of this recording today, PollyMarket says there's a 16% chance that the US will invade Iran by March 31st. Do you think that's a possibility?

I don't think we will. Again, I don't think there's a military person alive that's going to tell you that it is a smart thing to invade Iran.

You don't think so?

I don't. And even people were saying, well, what if we just occupy Karg Island? Right? Some of my friends were like, well, that's their big oil production thing. So let's occupy that. I went, yeah, yeah, let's do that. Let's put all of our troops in one little area where they have no means of escape next to a country that has one of the best missile systems in the world. That's a great idea. Let's not do that. So if it's not Karg Island, then where are we putting troops? Tehran? How do you put troops in the middle of a city? I mean, you've done military operations in urban terrain. Horrible. I mean, it's worse than the mountains. There's so many hiding places, so many places to go and do, and you clear one building and as soon as you leave it, it's reoccupied. That's a tough thing. So we have to go back to, for what effect? What's the goal? What would be our goal in doing that, and what would we accomplish?

But I think the goal would be to topple the entire government.

That's going to be tough because that means taking Tehran. How easy would it be for somebody to take Washington, D.C. right now? I mean, you're not talking about 2,500 Marines anymore. You're talking about regiments of army that, I mean, I can't even imagine what that would take.

I mean, I think we would destroy it from the air and then send in the ground.

Ground is always an issue.

I think that it would be tenfold worse than what Fallujah was.

But, but So let's play that scenario out. Let's say we do that. Well, let's say we take that as a goal, right? How much munitions and how much American military power would it take to do that? And don't forget that while we're doing this, while we are depleting our weapons systems, while we are, again, $4 billion a day, how many missiles have we fired? 2,000 some? We've got China and Russia just sitting there going, hey, go ahead, deplete your military. Because it'll take you years to recover. And while you're doing that, yeah, Ukraine is 100% ours and you can't say anything about it. Taiwan is 100% ours and there's nothing you can do about it because you don't have any more fighting capability left. Is that capital we're willing to spend?

It appears so.

That's scary. That is scary. And you went into the, you know, are we going to use nukes? Are we willing to nuke an entire city for what? Hiroshima and Nagasaki, we were fighting a war with that country that was attacking us. We're not doing that here. So if we're talking about using a nuclear weapon to destroy a city of millions of people, we better be ready to justify that with something. And I can't think of a justification for that. Again, talking with people, they're like, well, what about less than that? I'm like, theater tactical nukes. Okay.

What if Israel uses their nukes against them?

That, again, that has always been a concern. When I was in Desert Storm and Desert Shield, we were worried about Israel using nukes. And I know that Saddam fired a bunch of Scud missiles at Israel, almost trying to get them to use them. And our belief at the time was, if they use nukes, then other countries are going to go after them. They're going to say no. Right? Luckily they didn't at the time. If Israel uses nukes, that's a red line that you cross and every country in the world is going to jump in on that one. I don't think anybody's going to sit by while somebody else uses nuclear weapons and do nothing.

Definitely seems to be taboo. But I mean, if you look at I mean, we make a lot of these countries out to be unpredictable. I think the country that's probably the most unpredictable right now is Israel.

Without a doubt. I agree with that.

No restraint. They do anything they want and we back them 100%.

Yeah.

I mean, did you see the school that was all-girls school? Approximately 175 to 180 Yeah, killed, I think, 100 and 100. It was— I can't— but most of those were little girls, just like what they did in Gaza.

Did you see that?

Over 20,000 kids. Now we're doing it in Iran and we're fucking backing them.

Yeah. Well, and you saw that all analysts right now point to this school in Iran being hit by a Tomahawk.

I didn't know that.

All analysts have looked at that and said, this is almost surely a Tomahawk missile. Only two countries are using Tomahawk missiles, the UK and us. That's the only ones we sell them to. So that was an American missile that hit that. They have videos of them going through the wreckage and finding parts that say USA on them. When the analysts have looked at the blast and whatnot, they're like, this is signature Tomahawk. That opens up a whole new can of worms. So now we're providing collateral damage to civilians for Israel. And again, I tell people all the time, don't believe me, go look it up.

But yeah, what would our— what would our— excuse me, what would our strategy be, do you think, if we went to a ground war?

For a ground war? Yeah. I don't know. I can't imagine what we would do in a ground war where we would meet any of the objectives that we're saying we want to meet. Annihilate their Navy? No. Destroy their missile systems? We can do all that from the air. Why are we putting ground troops in harm? Cut off their proxy pathways? I don't need troops on the ground for that. Keeps them from developing nuclear weapons. Again, I don't need ground troops for that. So I'm not sure why we would engage ground troops. I don't see the military goal that that would support.

What about their water supply?

For ground troops, we could take that out from the air.

Do you think we would?

I think we run the risk of then going down the path of war crimes and collective punishment to the civilian population that is not a military target. I mean, this is what we're looking at Israel doing. I mean, they cut off all water to Gaza. They cut off food. Is that affecting the military fighting? It's affecting civilians. And we've seen the horrendous videos from there. Right? That is expressly not supposed to happen under the Geneva Convention and what is it, the second amendment to it or whatever. But that's what they do. Everything is justifiable. The end justifies whatever means there are.

When does this end with Israel? I mean, is Iran the last one or is Turkey going to be next?

I don't think it ever ends.

So that brings me to what is the real goal here? Is this a holy war?

It is for Israel.

Are they trying to speed this up?

And they absolutely are. And we're going to get into an area I have to be a little bit careful of here. Is this a religious war for Israel? Yes. They believe we are the chosen people. God gave us this land. All of this land is ours. And if you are in our way, you're non-human. We can kill you, do whatever we want with you. You don't count because you're not God's chosen people. There's so many statements that support that.

I mean, just read The Epstein Files. You can figure that out real fast.

Yeah, whatever it takes, right? Uh, we'll do blackmail, we'll do assassinations. Read the book Rise and Kill First. It's just a complete dictionary of all of the assassinations that Israel does. Is Israel in any way, shape, or form interested in peace? Absolutely not. You remember, obviously, they were fighting with Hamas. Do you remember Hamas said, we will negotiate? They were supposed to meet in Doha. Israel bombed the hotel that the negotiators were in and killed them. Well, if you're killing the negotiators, clearly you don't want to negotiate. So the goal was never peace. The goal is destruction of everybody other than Israelis. And that's always been the goal. And the Israelis have this saying, you know, never again. And I used to think that was a very laudable, wonderful, laudable thing to say. Never again. This should never happen again. Then I realized that's not what they mean. They mean never again to us. We can do the same thing to you or others, just never again to us. Well, that turns something that should be very laudable into something that is reprehensible. It's basically saying, I count more than you do, and I can do whatever I want to you because you don't count as much as me.

And you're in my way. So, um, where does it end? Is it a religious war? So we talked about our Congress that constantly supports Israel, and we talked about how I said they were occupied by AIPAC. AIPAC is the tip of the iceberg, really. Um, we talked about how AIPAC was a coordinator of funding. Right? And it is. But AIPAC itself doesn't contribute that much money directly. We didn't get deep into that. There's obviously more. In 2021, AIPAC— so AIPAC is the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee, right? So they just want to work on public opinion, which makes sense. Again, we have to go back and look at the history a little bit. In 1943, there was a group called the American Zionist Emergency Commission.

The American Zionist—

the American Zionist Emergency— I think it was Commission. I don't remember what the C stood for. But I think it was commission. 1943, bad things are happening to Jews. We need an emergency committee. I think of a committee, American Zionist Emergency Committee. We need to form a group in the US that is advocating to help Jews, especially in Germany, World War II, everything going on. Great. 1943, they were made. 1949, the war is over. They said it's no longer an emergency, we will rename to the American Zionist Committee. And again, I think it's committee anyway. So that's what they did. Now during the '50s, then the Eisenhower administration, Farah came in to effect, the Foreign Agent Registration Act, that said if you are representing another country, you have to register and be clear that you're representing a country. Right? So Eisenhower was pushing hard for the American Zionist— I don't think it is committee, but anyway, group— to register as a foreign agent. In 1962, Robert Kennedy's DOJ said, essentially, we're done. Register as a foreign agent or we're disbanding you. So the American Zionist group shut down, rebranded as AIPAC, the American-Israeli Public Affairs, and said, we are no longer representing a country.

We're just working on public affairs. There was one guy, and I forgot his name, but he was the head of the AZC, and they— and he was a registered foreign agent himself. And then when they formed AIPAC, they said, okay, we don't want you to be part of AIPAC because we don't want to have to register. So this is the genesis of AIPAC. AIPAC was the American Zionist committee. It's not committee though. I can't remember what it was. But group. That is their genesis. That is how they were formed. And they then started, they didn't register as a foreign agent. And then they started though coordinating how they could influence people. Well, in 2021, they said, we're not doing enough. So in 2021, they formed the AIPAC PAC, the American-Israeli Public Affairs Committee Political Action Group, that would then directly fund people. They also started another group called United Democracy Project. What doesn't sound good about that? It's united, it's democracy, United Democracy Project. They are a super PAC, which means they don't have to report who they gave money to or how much. Well, isn't that convenient? Nowhere in their brochures do they mention AIPAC, but the only people they fund are people that are supportive of Israel.

In our Congress right now, 80—

What is this organization again?

The United Democracy Project.

The United Democracy Project.

Correct. Yeah, look them up.

I will.

They're a super PAC. They're run by AIPAC. So we've got AIPAC, AIPAC PAC, and the United Democracy Project. 80 of our congressmen list APAC, AIPAC PAC, or UDP, United Democracy Project, as the largest primary funder of their campaigns. Tell me we're not occupied and being controlled by Israel. Now there's other groups. There's hundreds of these groups. This is kind of like swarm technology, what's harder to defend against? One incoming missile or 100? It's hard to shoot down a swarm. It's hard to get your hands around a lot of smaller groups that are all doing different things. And any one group, you can't say, well, that's bad. So again, United Democracy Project, it sounds good. The other one is the American-Israeli Education Foundation. Education's good. We can all agree that education is good, right? Well, what does it fund? The only thing it funds is trips for congressmen and senators to go to Israel.

Are you shitting?

That's all it funds. And almost every congressman and senator is gone. They have free, all-expense-paid trips to take them to Israel. Parade them around and show them how wonderful Israel is, not going into Gaza or West Bank, and then send them home. That is the American Israeli Education Foundation.

We got one of those letters.

Oh, I don't doubt it. Oh, they want you to go see. Let us show you how good we are.

I'm sorry. I don't need any more fucking propaganda.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

I don't know if it was from that organization.

I can't remember. Like I said, there are hundreds of them. There are so many small organizations that By their name and everything, they sound good, but it all is all going towards the same effect. It's going towards getting the US to spend their money and send their sons and daughters in harm's way to Israel. You just can't get around that. And now we're going to get into something that's a little sensitive.

Oh boy, this wasn't sensitive.

No, no. Ah, yeah. Sometimes I'm talking with my wife and we're discussing this. She's like, don't go there. And I'm like, yeah, but How can you not? There's 6 to 7 million Jews in the United States. That means they're about 2% of the population. Not huge. They're 10 to 12% of Congress, which right away says they're overrepresented by you know, 5 to 1 at least. But that's not where the money is. That's not where the influence is. That's not enough to get our congressmen to listen and, and do whatever they want them to do. So here we start looking at the numbers, and we get to Christian Zionists. Christians who believe Jews have to take over and own and run Israel for the second coming. And until that happens, you know, we're stuck here on earth. Christian Zionists represent about 25% of the United States.

25%?

Most of the evangelical Christians that are Christian Zionists About 25%. So start looking at that. Now the politicians are paying attention. And that's why you've got, you know, like Ted Cruz coming out and saying, God commanded us to support Israel. He's a Christian Zionist. You've got Biden that came out and said, I am a Zionist, not because He's Jewish. He's a Christian Zionist. He believes that Israel must exist. Jews must be in charge of Jerusalem in order for the Second Coming. And that's what the Christian Zionists want. And it's another one of those things where follow the money, follow the votes, follow, you know, why are our congressmen doing this? They need those votes. This gets even more salient when you start looking at, in our elections, how many people actually vote? Of voting age, how many voters actually vote? Sadly, 50 to 60%. Well, if 25% are Christian Zionists, and they're very I mean, we have to make sure this happens. Only 50% vote, but 25% are Christian Zionists. All of a sudden, you're looking at 40% to 50% of the voting population voting in this way. That's what congressmen and senators are looking at.

And this is something that isn't brought up very often. I'm going to keep going down the rabbit hole a little further.

Keep going.

So why do Christian Zionists believe that Jews have to be in Jerusalem for the Second Coming? And the big answer to that is something called the Scofield Bible. We all know the King James Bible. If you've ever read the King James Bible, It's written, I mean, it is a translation. It's hard to read through. And there's a lot of background information you don't have, right? Unless you actually study each book and say, why was this book written? You know, like this was Paul's letter to this people, because Paul was told these people were doing this. So Paul wrote them a letter that said, this is what you should be doing, right? A lot of people don't understand that. They just figure the entire Bible is the word of God. You're like, well, no, it's a bunch of books made up of Paul and others writing about this, right? But it's hard to read. I have trouble reading it. I've read through it, but sometimes it's a slog. To get through it. In 1909, a guy named Cyrus Scofield wrote a reference Bible. And he said, what I'm going to do is I'm going to translate this a little into more modern English so it's more accessible to people.

And I'm going to give them my interpretation of what this means. There's the tough part. The Scofield Bible is one man's interpretation of what it means. And this has been like one of the best-selling Bibles other than the King James for decades. He published it in 1909. It was picked up by a guy named Untermeyer, who was a lawyer in New York. A Jewish Zionist. And he, like, gave it to all of the book clubs. He gave it to the influential people in New York to try and get it more and more published because it supported the Zionist cause. Because he would take comments like Genesis 12:3 that says, I will bless those who bless us and I will curse those who curse us. That statement, Schofield took and said, this means we have to support Jews in Israel forever. I'm like, that's a pretty big stretch to take that from this, but that's what the Schofield Bible says it means. So that's what the Christian Zionists believe, that that line in Genesis means we have to support Jews forever.

Who is this guy? Is this guy a rabbi or something?

Cyrus Scofield. Cyrus Scofield is not a rabbi. He was a Christian. But he interpreted the King James Bible and wrote the Reference Bible.

Okay.

Again, look him up. Look up Cyrus Scofield. Look up the Scofield Bible. Look up the guy named Untermeyer. I forgot his first name. I don't remember his first name. His last name is Untermeyer.

He's the one that got it out.

He's the one that got it out. He was a Jewish Zionist lawyer in New York. He bankrolled it, got the money for publishing, made sure it got out. And again, talking with me, you know, I keep going back to look at the history and see how this got here. When you see how it got here, all of a sudden it starts making more sense why it is what it is today. But then the question always becomes, okay, great, we're here. How do we change that? And that's the tough part, because history builds a momentum of its own, and it's tough to change that. And the only way to change it is through education, knowledge, and people being willing to look at preconceived ideas and see if they're correct or not.

And that's where you think this all stems from, the 25% voting block. Of Christian Zionists.

That is a big, huge part of it. So if you put together the propaganda through AIPAC, the funding through the United Democracy Project, the American-Israeli Education Fund sending all of our congressmen and senators to Israel, put that together with the evangelical Christians every Sunday at church saying, We support Israel. There's another group, the Christian United for Israel. Christian United for Israel has 10 million members, more than the 5 million that AIPAC has. And it basically preaches, we're united for Israel. Israel needs to control Jerusalem because that is what it's going to take for the second coming. If you're Israeli, you're going to use that and make sure that people keep saying that and using it to get the support you need.

And what is their motivation? It's obviously not the second coming. It's, it's the coming.

Yeah, it's We were promised this land, it's ours. We want to be completely in control of this land and we want to be a superpower where no one can challenge us.

And what do they believe has to happen? The building of the third temple.

It's weird because I do have to comment, not all Jews are Zionists. When Zionism first started, a lot of Jews saw it as heresy.

When did it start?

Oh God, Theodor Herzl was 1893, 1898.

This goes back that far?

Yeah, Theodor Herzl was back in that time period. Uh, he was considered— he was the one who wrote the book Der Judenstaat. The Jewish state that proposed that Jews should have a state of their own. That was 1890-something. 1898 sticks in my mind, but I'm not sure that that's actually— but 1890s. But even back then when he was proposing that, a lot of Jews were saying, this is heresy. You can't force God's hand. God, yes, God said that someday the Jews will return to Jerusalem. That's on his time schedule, not yours.

I mean, it's been said that that's the biggest sin of all, is to try to manipulate God into— yeah, the end times.

Yeah, but they look at it like Well, he didn't say it wasn't. Now maybe he's just waiting for us to make it happen.

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Yeah, not a huge amount, quite honestly. I know it has to be built.

So right now, there's what the— what do they call it? The Dome of the Rock. The Dome of the Rock that is built over the old Jewish temple.

Yeah.

And they want to—

the extremists— there's the Al-Aqsa Mosque built on top of what they say was the temple. You've got the Western Wall, which they say was part of the temple. Archeologically, there are some issues with this. Archeologically, when they look back, they're like, this doesn't really look like this was the temple. It looks like it was a retaining wall over here. Tough to tell. It's been destroyed throughout the ages. There was a temple, there was— it was torn down. A mosque was built, it was torn down. A church was built, a temple was built, And everybody is like, well, this is ours. Yeah, but right now, I mean, the goal is we need to tear down everything that's there and build the next temple. And we've got the red cows that we need to sacrifice to purify the land. You know, there's a lot of ritualistic stuff in here that—

well, I mean, a lot of people, a lot of people say that Netanyahu is not even a real Jew.

He's not. He was born in Poland. His real name is Wilkowski or something like that.

I mean, the people in Iran are burning statues of Baal. Have you seen this? Yeah, burning statues of Baal with Netanyahu and Trump's face next to it. Yeah, saying that the US is under Israeli influence and that, and that these are basically demonic forces, entities, whatever you want to call it, basically Satanists.

If you read— so you've got the Torah, The Torah is really just the 5 books of the Old Testament, right? You've got the Talmud, which is all sorts of other instructions and sayings, right? If you read through some of the Talmud, it's kind of shocking. You know, it says things like, You know, if somebody isn't Jewish, you can do whatever you want to them because they're subhuman.

It actually says this.

Yeah.

Is this where the term goy comes in?

Yeah. Well, goy means somebody, what, not Jewish, right? There's other terms, there's other meanings to it, and I'm not a linguistic in that area, but I know that for the most part, yeah, you're not Jewish, you're a goy. And we can do whatever we want. It's okay. It's okay to charge usury, high prices to non-Jewish people. Can't charge it to Jewish people. It's okay to kill non-Jews. Can't kill a Jew. Right? I mean, there's all of these because they're chosen, you're not. So they can do whatever they want to you. There's so many things, and I'm not even going to go into some of them. Because it just sounds too fantastic that they would say this. But there are some really weird stuff.

I've heard some of it. It's outrageous.

Yeah. And you're like, I've actually looked some of it up because one of the things that you can do the same thing with the Bible in some cases. You can take one line out of context. Right. And People do this all the time. When I was— there was a point in time I had classes in comparative religion, and my professors would say, "Text out of context is nonsense. You've got to know what's around it." Right? And you can take a line out of the Bible and say, "Look at this line." "Oh yeah, that's horrible." Okay, but let's look at the 3 lines before and the 3 lines after. Oh, okay, well, now it makes more sense. People do this with the Quran all the time. They take one line and say, look at this. Okay, what does it say before that? What does it say after it? And you're like, well, that makes more sense. When I see some of the things from the Talmud, I, on a Kindle, I actually have the whole Talmud, and I look it up and I'm like, well, let me see what it actually says. And I'll go and I'll read it.

And first I'll validate, okay, is this what it says? Close. Translated a couple of words wrong. I love when I see translations of Arabic that say infidel. There is no word infidel in Arabic. That's an English word. The actual word that they usually use is, it's like polytheist. If you believe in multiple gods, then you don't believe in the one God, which is the God of Abraham, the same one that Christians and Jews believe in. But they translate polytheist as infidel. They're like, well, that's wrong. But anyway, I'll go in the Talmud and I'll read it and I'll see, does it say what people say it says? And then I'll go a couple lines above and below and I'll see, What's the context? Is this being taken out of context? I'm shocked at the number of times I read something that is a little unbelievable from the Talmud that is not taken out of context. I'm like, this is weird, right? So yeah, so what's the endgame for them?

What is the difference between the Talmud and the Torah?

The Torah is the first 5 books of the Bible, Old Testament, right? Genesis and whatnot, that's the Torah. The Talmud is instruction after that on how to live your life, what to do. How would I explain it? It's, um, it's years of rabbinical opinion on what all of this means.

I mean, I've seen clips— I'll roll one right now— of rabbi talking to younger Netanyahu saying that we need to speed this process up.

Mhm.

There's another rabbi who is talking about how they would destroy the mosque that sits over the, the Al-Aqsa Mosque that's over their temple.

Mhm.

And they would— sounds like right now, and this is just You know, this one rabbi, not, you know, it's one rabbi saying this, but he is talking about, and I want to roll this clip too, he is talking about with all the missiles coming in from Iran, they should just blow up the mosque.

I'm surprised it hasn't happened yet.

And rebuild the temple themselves. I blame it, blame it on Iran.

Absolutely. I, I am shocked it hasn't happened. 'Cause when all the missiles were coming in, I thought, you know, Israel's just gonna blow up the Al-Aqsa Mosque and say it was Iran. I'm shocked it hasn't happened yet. And while we're on that topic, public opinion is moving against Israel right now. Public opinion is growing quickly against any further interaction with Iran. If you were in a think tank and you were tasked with how do we stop the public opinion from going this direction and redirect it back to this direction, what do you do?

You victimize yourself.

Victimize yourself, and probably by doing a false flag event. I am waiting for a false flag event in the US. I am waiting for a terrorist attack like 9/11 in the US blamed on Iran. And I'm like, I don't want to see it. Dear God, I don't want to see it.

You feel it coming.

But Israelis get backed into a corner and they get wild, and I could see them doing that because all you need is one event that they say, look at this, the Iranians came and attacked you, and it's Pearl Harbor all over again. It's, well, we weren't going to get in the war, but now, now we're going. And I hope to dear God it doesn't happen, but I'm afraid that somewhere somebody's planning it.

Do you think it's happened before?

Oh yeah. Oh yeah. And quite honestly, Israel's done it before and been caught at it. I mean, we talked about it before, the Lavon affair, where they dressed people up and went them in Egypt to go bomb American and British places where they stayed, hotels, restaurants, and blame it on the Arabs. Problem is they caught one of them and he confessed and said, yeah, we were working with the Israelis. We were instructed to do this. It's the same playbook. You just take it out, you polish it, you dust it off and bring it up to date.

Do you know anything about the USS Liberty?

Yeah.

What happened there?

USS— the USS Liberty was an intelligence gathering ship off the coast of Egypt. Long story short, Israel bombed it, killed Americans. They said, we made a mistake. We thought it was an Egyptian ship. Looks nothing like an Egyptian ship. It was flying American flags. Israeli jets flew over it 2 or 3 times to identify it. It is, again, anybody could have identified it as American ship. There was no question. And then they bombed it. They strafed it, dropped bombs on it. The American ship called and said, for help and said, we need help, we're being attacked. Um, aircraft were sent from— I don't remember— American aircraft were sent to go help and then called back. And later called back and then called back. And later it was said, well, we didn't want to embarrass our our ally. Israelis say, yeah, it was a mistake. Sorry. Yeah, sorry. Well, this was right before Israel was going to attack. Let me think. Israel had an attack planned and they didn't want people knowing it. And the USS Liberty was an intelligence gathering ship. They didn't want us being able to broadcast anything or tell anybody anything. So they attacked our own ship.

They killed Americans. And then when they said sorry, we just accepted it and went, yeah, it's a tragedy. We're sorry.

Holy shit. When was this?

Oh God, this was, uh, 60-something. I don't remember for sure, but again, anybody can look up USS Liberty. There's been books written about it. There's been whole books written about this.

It just popped up on my radar recently.

Yeah, yeah, there are so many incidents like this. So that, by the way, is the one and only time in history that another country has directly attacked a United States vessel and there has been no repercussion. Every other time somebody has attacked an American vessel, we have a response attack. None with Israel. We just kind of wrote it off. And now you've got— you're going to get me on a roll here. Tucker Carlson, you work with him, you've interviewed him. He did an interview with Mike Huckabee. Right. Did you see that interview?

I had to turn it off.

Right. You start watching it and you're like, Who are you representing? He kept saying things like, well, our borders. I'm like, you mean Israel's borders? You're representing the United States. What do you mean our borders? And then Tucker asked him, you know, well, the Israelis believe in this larger Israel, which we discussed before, where they need to take part of Saudi Arabia and part of Syria and part of Lebanon. And Huckabee said, yeah, let them, they should. And I'm like, again, who are you representing? You're the American ambassador to Israel. What happened to promoting America? But you're 100% just promoting Israel. Things like this, Sean, give me headaches. I'm like, how is this even possible?

Do you think he even realizes what he's doing?

I think he's so indoctrinated into I'm supporting Israel that he doesn't even think, hey, I'm supposed to be supporting the United States anymore. He is now an Israeli representative to the US. Not an American representative to Israel. And again, this stuff just blows my mind. I mean, our government is supposed to be representing the people. We the people. And let's go on. Our I'm a Marine. I took an oath to defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic. And the Constitution says we the people determine what we want and we elect people that represent our will. Our representatives should be doing what we want them to do. 56% of Americans, according to the Gallup poll, don't want us to be in Iran. We're in Iran. Should we be there? You would think our representatives at least would ask that question. How do you ask that question legally? We have something called the War Powers Act. The War Powers Act says that, well, first it's been misused. The War Powers Act says that the president can engage troops for one of three reasons and one of three reasons only. Number 1, Congress has declared war.

Congress is the only body that can declare war against someone. Number 2, Congress has statutorily authorized the president to commit troops. Basically, they've preempted and said, if this happens, you're authorized to respond. We give you that authority. And number 3 is a direct attack against the United States. None of those 3 have happened yet. We ordered an attack on Iran. Now, twice, twice. Now let's be clear, Trump's not the first one to do this. Other presidents have done this too. Other presidents have unilaterally sent troops in violation of this clause. But then what happens is the War Power Acts comes into play. And Congress then needs to go to the president and say, you need to explain yourself. You have 48 hours to give us a full report on why you put troops in, what your goal is, and what happened that you thought you could justify this. If the president doesn't give that to Congress within 48 hours, and if Congress doesn't approve, all military has to be removed within 60 to 90 days. That's what the War Powers Act says. Well and good. This is part of our country's checks and balances, right?

This is all well and good. February 28th, we attack Iran. A few days later in the Congress, in the House and the Senate, a proposition is put in that said we need to vote on the War Powers Act to hold the president accountable and find out what's going on. The Senate voted 53-47 against. We're not even going to invoke the War Powers Act. We're not even going to ask the question. The House voted 212 to 219 against. We're not even going to ask the question. We're not even going to hold the president accountable. We're going to let him do whatever he wants. Congress abdicated their power to declare war to the president. That's not what the Constitution says. The Constitution says the only ones able to declare war are Congress, and Congress just abdicated that by voting not to even invoke the War Powers Act. I look at that as a complete abdication of our representatives' responsibilities. And this gets worse. We have a great country. We have a great legal system. We have tools available to take care of these things. We just have to use them. And the people that we trust to use them are not using them.

We have something called the Leahy Act. Are you familiar with that?

No, I'm not.

The Leahy Act says that it is illegal to sell any armament or munitions to any other group or country that is violating human rights. That's what it says. Well, Israel's been charged by how many countries now? With genocide. We're giving them weapons. So what should happen? What should happen is somebody should invoke the Leahy Act and say, we need to investigate, is Israel violating human rights or not? Because if they are, we need to stop all of our payments to them and all of our weapons transfers to them. So a bill was introduced in the Senate that said we need to investigate, not cut them off. We just need to investigate. Is Israel creating or is Israel committing human rights violations? The Senate voted 72 to 11 to not even investigate.

Are you serious?

I'm absolutely serious. Look at it. And again, I tell people, look it up. 70 to 11, 72 to 11, we don't even want to know. We don't even want to check it out because we're afraid of what we might find and then we'd have to stop sending them weapons. So we're not even going to look.

APEC.

This is all of the information that I think Americans need to know because I don't think most Americans understand what is happening. When they vote and they choose someone, I don't think they understand that their will and quite honestly just standard American values are not being upheld.

How are we going to fix this?

Always the question, right? And it is a great question. I'm actually working on a second book. Why don't you hurry up? I know, right? I alone, in my just working, reading everything I can, taking in everything I can and Quite honestly, there are a lot of smart people out there. And I try and read all of them. And the things I'm seeing, you know, they're not— I'm not coming up with all of this on my own and nobody else is. There are some smart people out there. There's John Mearsheimer. I think his name is Andrew Bacevich, Chalmers Johnson. One's a professor at Chicago University, one at Boston University, one's a CIA analyst. They're all writing the same thing. They're all seeing this and they're all saying the same thing. It's just they're getting drowned out by all the rest of the propaganda and sensationalism. But there's some smart people out there looking at this stuff, and I'm trying to read as much and gather as much as I can. I've put together 19 points of what we can do to change or what needs to change And the thing I'm working on right now is categorizing this.

Some of these would require congressional change to the Constitution, an amendment, which is, God knows, going to be almost impossible. Others of it are things that people can do now. I'm going to give an example of two. One of the things I think absolutely has to change is we need to get rid of the Electoral College. And some people go, no, it's necessary for this. No, it's necessary for that. It's not. Again and again, I keep going back to what are the facts and what's the history? The Electoral College was a compromise during the Constitutional Convention when we were drawing up a constitution between the North and the South. The North said, you know, one person, one vote, right? The South said, ooh, but yeah, a lot of our population is slaves and they don't get to vote. And the North said, well, you don't get to count them. And the South said, well, that's not fair because you guys are just going to run everything then. So they came up with a compromise and they said, okay, instead of everybody just voting, we'll come up with the idea of electors. And you'll get as many electors normally as you would have congressmen, because it's based on how much you are.

And we'll count every slave as 3/5 of one person. So when we're adding up your people, we'll add up the slaves, multiply it by 3/5, and we'll add that to the voting population. That's the Electoral College. We're still using a system based on slavery.

Wow. Wow. I had no idea.

Right, right. And this gets really weird because, because of the Electoral College and the way things are counted, you would think, I get for congressmen, I mean, the way we did it was two senators, right, per state. Great. Everybody's kind of equal as a state. But then you get how many congressmen you have based on population. So they kind of offset each other. And then you've got this really weird Electoral College thing. Well, with the Electoral College, when you look at how many votes a state has and how many people it has, we see some really weird things happen. If you're in Wyoming, a person, a one, it's not one vote, one person. Because of the Electoral College, a person in Wyoming's vote counts 15 times more than a person's vote in California because they get more electoral votes for the state, but there aren't as many people. So their vote counts more. That's undemocratic. That's not fair. And that's why people say, well, why do effectively in presidential campaigns, they have swing states. Anybody ask what a swing state is? It's one of those states that because of the Electoral College, their votes count more.

So for every person you can convince to vote for you, it's like convincing 15 people in California. Or New York, right? So we're going to go concentrate on these states. And basically, if we put all of our campaigning into these states, I really don't care what the other states vote because these have such a 15, 18, 12 to 1 ratio. If I just get these, I don't care about the rest of the country. I don't think that's the way our country should be run. I think the Electoral College has to go. So that would take a constitutional amendment, which is not going to happen. So some really smart people put together something called the Popular Vote Compact or a popular vote— I think it's compact— popular vote agreement. It's a state-by-state thing. And a state passes a state law that just says, once enough people sign on to this, that we have, what is it, 273 electoral votes to elect the president? I think it's 273.

I'm not sure on that.

270-something. I'll say 3, but anybody listening, if it's not 3, forgive me. 270-some electoral votes. Once enough states sign on that they control that many electoral votes, then this law kicks in. And this law would say, whatever the popular vote is across the whole US, we will give all of our electors to that winner. That effectively bypasses the Electoral College without a constitutional amendment. And it makes the president elected by popular vote. Right now, I think there's— it changes. I think there's 22 states that have signed on to this.

Really?

And I think we're up to 250 or 260 electoral votes. They only need 20-some more. And it has been proposed in almost every other state. So you want to do something today? Go talk to your— not your federal congressmen and your senators and representatives. Go talk to your state representative and state senator and say you want your state to be part of the Public Vote Compact. As soon as we pass that, the Electoral College is effectively null and void and presidents will be elected by popular vote.

What was the name of this again?

The, the popular vote— I think it's compact. The popular vote—

the popular vote compact.

Popular vote compact, I think, or popular vote something.

Interesting. Yeah, I've not heard anybody talking about this.

It is a great way for us to get over the Electoral College. It's a great way because once this happens Presidents can't just focus on swing states anymore. They have to go campaign everywhere because everybody's vote counts the same, which I think is a great thing. No longer can we ever have a president that the populace didn't vote for, which if you believe we're a democracy, we're not. We're a democratically elected republic. But if you believe in the democratic process. The president should represent the majority of the people. 5 times in history they have not. They got the electoral votes, they did not get the popular vote, which I believe is totally wrong. It's one of the first things we can do, excuse me, to fix this. That's a bigger thing. We talk about our Congress being beholden to AIPAC, Zionists, the United Democracy Project, and all of this. There are tools out there, and I'll get more of them to you. I don't have them off the top of my head, but there's one, for example, called AIPAC Tracker. You can go in AIPAC Tracker and see who's getting money. When the elections come up for the midterms, when the elections come up in, um, 2028.

Go find out and ask the candidates, have you taken money from AIPAC? Are you taking money from AIPAC, Saudi Arabia, Russia, China, or any other foreign country? You should know, because if they're taking money from them, especially if they're the number one funder of their campaign, That's who they're going to be representing. Those are little things that you can do today, or as the elections come up, right? Um, as much as they may ignore you right now, don't give up. Write your congressmen, write your senators. Let them know what you think. Tell them you do not support the Iran War. You do not want us there. I heard somebody say, don't send them an email. I don't know if this is true or not. I looked up part of it. Emails just get aggregated, right? In the morning you get, hey, we got 200 emails. This many said this, this many said that. I was told if you really want to, you know, mess with the system, Send them a physical letter. Physical letters have to be opened, read, and manually entered one at a time.

Interesting.

I'm like, I think I'll send them 1,000 a day or something. I'll just, I'll just, let's see, how many cents for a ticket, for a stamp now? 50 cents for a stamp. Let's see. So if I spend $50 a day, well, oil skyrocketing, so that's going to get more expensive, right? Right? But exactly. But yeah, all these things. I mean, there are things people can do. I'm trying to put together a, basically a citizen's handbook and say, here's, here's how you can make sure that your country is doing what you want and how you can make sure that your representatives are representing you. And I'm trying to break it into areas, you know, easily done now, take some work, you know, an amendment needed. But let's work on them one at a time.

They'll listen.

What's that?

They'll start listening.

I think so. I think people are hungry to hear. It's just getting through all of the chaff and And propaganda.

I think people just need to keep getting loud. You know, Congress has what, a 90% reelection rate?

Or, uh, they do.

And a 10% approval rating.

I, I saw recently, uh, 7%.

7%?

That the— they— I saw a listing of Who do people— now, okay, I take it back. That was probably approval rate, 10% approval rate. I saw an interesting survey of who do you trust? And it had a whole list of lawyers, doctors, car mechanics, you know, everybody, right? Who do you trust? Number 1 and 2, you'll never guess. Veterans. And nurses, number 1 and 2.

No kidding.

Veterans and nurses, people trust. Dead last, politicians. Politicians, 7% trust rate of politicians. That is a sad, sad comment on our Congress.

Yeah.

But again, the good news is we can change this. It's we the people. It's up to us. People just need to have to want to do it. They need to want to get involved and not say things like, I don't care about this, because that affects you whether you know it or not. When you say, I don't care what's happening overseas. Yeah, well, that war. Those oil prices, that's going to affect your pocketbook, your gas prices, your heating bill, your food bill, whether or not you have enough money left over to go to education. I mean, you don't understand how all of this ties together. You should care.

And your kids.

Yeah. I want, I want all of our kids to be able to grow up in a country that gives them opportunities.

Do you think they would institute a draft?

I saw something just the other day that somebody was talking about it. Again, politically, how would you do that unless we are under attack? We did it in Vietnam. And how did that turn out?

Not great. I mean, I just wonder where— I don't know where we're at. I know recruitment and retention during the Biden administration was at an all-time low. Yeah, I know that it's come back.

It's come back.

So I don't know how much.

I don't either.

But now I feel like it's going to fall off again.

Yeah, I don't know. I think the more people see warfare that doesn't benefit us, the less people want to go be in our military. You were in our military. I was in the military. I mean, we want to support our country. We want to make sure that our way of life, our country is safe and protected. But you get real disillusioned when you start getting sent places that don't support America. And I know I did when I was in the military, looking at it going, why are we here? And don't tell me for oil, because I didn't sign up to go protect oil. I signed up to protect our way of life. Our beliefs, our freedoms. I didn't sign up to go prosecute other countries. And some people would say, well, that is part of our freedom. I'm like, that's a really long tether that I would like you to explain to me because that breaks down in a lot of places. And especially when you start losing American lives. So I think a lot of young people are looking at that going, I don't want to get sent over here.

I think the younger generations get this a lot more than the older ones.

Oh yeah, I believe— I, I agree. I agree.

We are in a sad state of affairs. It's very scary.

It, it's a sad state of affairs and it's scary. I want to continue though to say it's not a foregone conclusion. If people get involved, if people become good citizens where they're holding the government accountable instead of just agreeing with whatever they do, this can change.

What do you think about what Joe Kent did this morning?

I admire him.

Me too. I was hoping somebody would come out and give up their position of power.

Yeah.

For the betterment of the country.

Yeah.

And, you know, I didn't— I just, I, I feel like that is, in my opinion, that's the next step. These people that have been put into the administration who are not able to do the job that they're supposed to be doing because too much overreach. If you're not able to do what you went in there to do, what the fuck are you still doing in there?

You know, I've known a couple people that have in my life that have resigned over principle, and I highly respect them because that is a horribly difficult thing to do, especially when it's your family's livelihood. I'm getting paid. I'm paying my bills by doing this. But for principle, I'm going to quit because I can't do this. I, um, you posted on, on X this, and I, I responded to it and I said, you know, One of the most selfless patriotic things you can do is sacrifice your own well-being for the sake of your country, to whatever degree that is. And this is that.

Yeah, I hope more people follow suit.

The problem is we, we, we run into a really weird Here's the thing, though. I think it's a laudable thing to do. I think he was a real patriot by standing up and saying, I don't stand for this, and I will not be a part of it. But what happens now? Now, a person that does just follow the administration gets put into his place. Are we better off?

You know, I think we are because he's just— Trump just fires everybody that doesn't agree with him. Well, he's wanting the yes-men.

Yeah.

Look at—

yeah. Oh, without a doubt. Everybody, everybody that's his best friend within 2 years gets fired and they're the demon.

That's what I'm getting at. And so yes, I think that the— yeah, it could definitely backfire, and it probably would. But one way or another, you have to get the public opinion—

oh yeah—

in, in, in, in that favor. And I think that's— that's— I mean, people in America now idolize politicians. I know that's a 7% trust rating, but that's all anybody talks about in They idolize them. Yeah, you would think there are mental gymnastics that people do to defend, right, Trump or Biden or who— just insert politicians.

And they're like, oh my God, you're a politician. You're like, they're a public servant. You voted for them.

And so when they see people come out— I mean, who else just did it? Marjorie Taylor Greene just resigned.

Yeah.

Joe Kent's now resigned. Yeah, wouldn't surprise me if Tulsi Gabbard winds up resigning.

Um, here's a question for you. Which is better, to resign or start doing your job the way you know it should be done that doesn't follow the instructions you're getting to do it the wrong way and be fired for it. One way you're like, okay, I just quit the game. The other way you're saying, I played the game until they took me out because they didn't like— one way you get ahead of the narrative, one way you're behind the narrative, one way you're quitting the game, the other one you're playing the game until they force you not to play it anymore. Which is better?

Normally I would say fight it out to get fired. Yeah, but then you don't— you don't—

you don't—

may not get the opportunity to explain exactly why you were fired, because all the attention will go to the person that fired you, the president. So in this specific example, I think resignations are more powerful. I think as you're willingly giving up Yeah, exactly what you said. You're willingly giving up what's, what's supporting yourself and your family and you're going out with a statement. If you get fired, you might not ever get the opportunity to release that statement.

Totally agree with that. I think we need a mixture of both. We need some people to resign and get high visibility. I think we need others to stay and fight it out. And get fired and then get support from the others that said, yeah, I knew this person. They were— but you're right, they get the first narrative. And usually the first narrative is the one that people remember. Yeah, I— when I'm on social media, I see people post things and a lot of times I just— I let it go by. And then every once in a while I'm like, okay, I can't, I gotta answer this, right? And that usually drags me down a rabbit hole. And two things go through my mind. One is a thing called Bandolini's Law. Bandolini's Law, it's also called the The bullshit asymmetry principle. And what it says is the amount of effort it takes to refute something ridiculous is twice what it was for somebody to just post it. And it's true. Somebody posts something and they just went, oh, this is true. Well, that didn't take them much. But now you've got to spend so much time to go, well, no, that's not true because of this and because of this and because of this.

You know, so to try and refute this ridiculous stuff takes so much time. And we know Israel especially has bots that are just looking for this because they want to get you tied up. And if you're tied up, then you're not doing other things. I see this sometimes when I post something and literally within seconds, I've got a well-formatted, you know, paragraph-long response. I'm like, that's a bot. Nobody read this, thought that, and typed this that fast. So I've got bots, right? And then I also remember that what that's saying is never wrestle with a pig because you get dirty and the pig likes it. Yeah, right. Yeah. But you hate seeing some of this stuff. You see what they're writing and you're like, that's just patently not true.

Do you think— we're wrapping it up, but I did just— I had a question pop in my mind. Do you think China would entertain being allies with Israel? I mean, it sounds like the connection between Israel and the United States is pretty much strictly a religious standpoint because of the Scofield Bible. 25%.

I'm going to reverse that.

Okay.

Do I think Israel would be allies with China? Israel is able to be allies with us because it can control our government systems because of the freedoms we have. It takes advantage of those and it is able to do the propaganda it needs. It is able to fund people that it needs. Can't do that with China. Their government is not the same. And if you can't have that influence, is it still somebody you want to ally with?

Probably not.

So I don't see that happening. And I see China right now is sharing aerial imagery with Iran. Russia is sharing intelligence with Iran, right? It would be weird to see an Israeli-Chinese agreement.

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Let's do it.

Let's cover it, because I don't feel like I gave you a good answer the last interview when you asked, do you see this as 1939? And I said, no, I see it as 1913. 1913 was a tinderbox. Everything was set to go.

World War III.

World War III. I didn't give you a full answer, and I'd like to do that. So is this closer to 1939? Is it closer to 1913? And I've been giving this more thought. 1939, we had a defined, visible problem. We saw what was going on, right? And the problem with asking the question, is this 1939, is we keep asking that. And we keep saying, well, this is just like 1939, right? Iraq was like 1939. Vietnam is like 1939. Iran now is like 1939. And when people say that, What they're saying is, is you either see this as such a clear event with known outcomes that if you can't see it, somehow you're morally deficient. And it shuts down the conversation because it's like, this is clear. How can you not see it? We're not going to discuss it. And since we use it so often, you have to ask your question, is every single adversary Hitler? Or are we just saying it's 1939 to stop talking about it because we think it's so clear, right? The other problem with focusing on 1939 is who was the villain? Hitler. Why was he the villain? Well, one big huge thing was the Holocaust, right?

So immediately when we go to 1939, we start framing this as this is bad for the Jews without even saying anything else. But Germany in 1939 is horribly different from Iran today. In 1939, Germany had the largest conventional military in Europe. They had already occupied Czechoslovakia. They had already occupied Austria. Their stated goal was territorial expansion. Their national song was Deutschland, Deutschland über alles, Germany, Germany over everyone. And they had a concept of Lebensraum, which means living room. We need more room. They wanted to expand. Contrast that with Iran. Iran has not tried to expand its borders anywhere. They fought Iraq. They have proxy fights going on. None of those are to expand their borders. So right away, the— we're a little bit different here.

Maybe it's very similar to 1939. We're just playing on the other side now. Could be because somebody's trying to expand their borders.

Somebody is. That's true. Not Iran. It's not Iran. Somebody has a stated goal of expanding their borders. Somebody has committed atrocities very similar to those in the Holocaust. You're not supposed to say that, but because only one people get to ever use that card. But it's true. Very true. Here's what's important, though. Here's what happened in 2013. There were 3 things that happened. And I think as I talk about these, you'll, you'll, you'll see them happening. The first one was there were So everybody talks about World War I being kicked off by the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand.

Great.

What does that mean? There was a Serbian national that shot Archduke Ferdinand in Sarajevo, and he was an Austro-Hungarian. That event should have been containable. Because at the time, Europe had a very elegant system of statescraft. They had very experienced people interacting between countries. They should have been able to contain this. What happened though was there were a system of interconnected obligations that nobody looked at. So a Serbian national shoots Archduke Ferdinand in Sarajevo. He, uh, Archduke Ferdinand is an Austro-Hungarian. Austria immediately goes and says, we're going to punish Serbia. Okay, fine. What does that mean? We'll get to that in a second. But they go to punish Serbia. Serbia has agreements with Russia that if we're attacked, you will help us. Well, hey, Austria just attacked us. Russia steps in. As soon as Russia steps in, it triggers Germany. Germany had agreements that if any, if Russia ever moves, we're gonna step in too. Russia starts to mobilize. Right after that, France says, if Russia moves west, were active. It was like a domino effect. It was like you've seen these things on TV where there's a whole room of mousetraps and you throw one marble in and everything goes.

That's what happened, right? And if you look at that today, we have NATO, we have NATO contracts and agreements. With Turkey, Kuwait, Bahrain. And guess what? Turkey just got hit with missiles from Iran. So did Bahrain. So did Kuwait. Turkey invoked, what is it, Article 4 of the NATO self-defense of mutual defense and said, are you guys, what are you guys going to do? I haven't seen an answer to that yet. And they're, you know, but I'm like, We have agreements that says when, you know, you attack one of these, everybody jumps in. And that could happen right now. The other thing is, is there was no defined endpoint. So Austria said, we're going to punish Serbia. What does that mean? When are you done? What? Nobody knew. So it just— everything kept going on. There was a, um, um, a historian named, um, Christian Clark. Christian Clark, who wrote a book called The Sleepwalkers. And The Sleepwalkers talked about this and said all of the European countries. They weren't evil. They weren't ignorant. They were sleepwalking. They sleepwalked right into the biggest catastrophe of human history with 17 million people dead because they weren't paying attention to what went on.

Another author named— what was her name?

Tuff.

Starts with a T-H-U, Thur something. I can't remember her name. Wrote a book called The Guns of August. And what she said was the problem with what happened in July and August in 1914, 1913 was when he was killed, 1914, all this lights off, was once the military mobilization started, you couldn't stop it. And the mobilization started because everybody had contingency plans. Again, this happens, we do this. Mobilization already began. And as soon as the mobilization begins, it triggers this one. There, my mobilization begins. Right now, in Iran. We see this happening. We have interlocking agreements with other countries. We have a mobilization starting. Don't forget, Tulsi Gabbard said they do not have nuclear weapons. IAEA director said they do not have nuclear weapons. The day before we bombed, February 27th, Oman, who we were using as a conduit to talk to Iran, said, we have reached an agreement with Iran. They agree they will not refine nuclear material. They will not stockpile it. And they will agree to inspections. They agreed to everything we wanted. And the Omani foreign minister said, peace is at hand. The next morning we bombed them. What the Guns of August was saying was once things were in motion, you can't stop them.

When you were in, when I was in, let's say we're gonna attack somebody February 28th. As a pilot, I don't wake up in the morning, they go, hey, today you're going to go do this. Let's say February— I don't remember what day it was. Do you? What day the 28th was? I'll make it up. Let's say it's a Friday. The latest I'm going to know about it is Wednesday. The planners knew about it the week before because we've got a plan. Well, what's our target? Right? If that's our target, what weapon system are we going to use to hit it with? Where is that weapon system located? We're going to send planes in? Okay, well, if we're going to send planes in, we've got to take care of their anti-aircraft first. We'll do that with ground batteries over here. We've got to let them know so they can do a targeting solution for that. And then the ship has to say, well, What planes are available that aren't in maintenance can do it? Do we have that weapon systems on board? What pilots are current and trained in that? Can we get those planes here with this weapon systems at this time?

We need to coordinate with the ships that are firing Tomahawks so that we're not shooting down our own planes when they go in. The amount of coordination and planning that goes into this. Is at least a week long. So we started mobilizing an attack on the 28th well before. So on the 27th, when they came out and said, hey, we've got an agreement, peace is at hand, too late, we're already moving. And this is what they said happened in 1913. Things were already moving. They couldn't stop it. And decisions stopped being made and response packages started getting executed. We already have the response package. This happens, we do this. Well, there's no human interaction in there. And quite honestly, this is why I see huge problems with— I know you interviewed the guy from Palantir, the CTO. I have huge problems with AI targeting applications that don't have human interaction, because they can make decisions that don't have any intellect to them. They're logical, but they don't have the human element in them anymore. And that's what gets us into situations like this. And in 1913, everybody thought this is going to be quick. We're going to go in and have a contained regional conflict and be done.

Germany had the Schlieffen Plan. They thought they could defeat France in 6 days. France thought, you know, we're going to survive because of élan, our fighting spirit. Great Britain had reduced its military down to a smaller elite unit that they said, you know, we don't need a big force. We can just have a smaller one that's more surgical. You put all of this together and you look at it in hindsight, it's like, well, of course this happened. With the interlocking obligations, right? The hubris that we could just do things fast and get out and the lack of any defined goals that were achievable. It was a foregone conclusion. This is going to happen. What's different today is we know that that happens. We have the books, The Sleepwalker. We have the book, The Guns of August. We've seen this happen.

Creeps up on you.

We need to put a stop to it. Or we're going to see this. This could expand and keep going. And I would hate to see that. I hope that gives a better answer to the 1913, 1939, because at first I just said it was a tinderbox, but I didn't go into all of the interconnections and everything. And I think that's important in understanding what's happening in Iran today.

What do you think it would take for China or Russia to join forces with Iran? Not sure until not sure imagery.

Neither of them are stupid either. I mean, they see this. I mean, if they joined forces with Iran, it is a de facto American war. I want to back up a second. The other thing is this is the only war the US has ever been in. Where we said we're doing a joint war with someone else. It's an Israeli-American attack. We have been in wars where we lead and we have a coalition. We have never gone into war with someone because we said, well, they were going to go, we're going to go with them, this is a joint thing. That's something to think about. Again, going back to the We're doing Israel's bidding. It's the only time we've done that. So Russia would be hard-pressed to join with them. They've weakened themselves with Ukraine. You know, China would look at this and go, oh my God, if we do this, if we overtly join Iran, It would be an American— it's going to be around China against America. I don't see that happening. I would see them being more subtle, maybe supporting them. I mean, they're supporting them with aerial imagery right now, maybe supporting them in other ways too.

I don't think they would ever come right out and say, we're going to join. There's nothing to benefit them.

That's good. That's good to hear. I got one hot question. Uh-oh, you ready?

No.

For the last 2 years, China hasn't needed a formal invasion to keep pressure on Taiwan. It's used gray zone tactics, aircraft incursions, naval presence, Joint Sword exercises, and psychological pressure to normalize military cohesion around the island. Now, while the world is locked on Iran in the Strait of Hormuz, Taiwan is again reporting PLA aircraft and naval activity. Beijing is publicly announcing humanitarian aid to Iran, Jordan, Lebanon, and Iraq, and Washington is even pressing China to help keep major energy checkpoints open. So here's the question: Are these just separate headlines, or are we watching China exploit a moment where America is being pulled back into the Middle East, using one crisis to cover, to test how much pressure it can place on Taiwan before the world treats it like the next emergency?

Yes. One of the problems I see with us and Iran is we are depleting our military ability to project force in other areas. If I were Russia and China, if it were me, I would let Iran play out longer. I would let the US use more of its military warfighting capability. And then when I've— they've played it down enough, I would go take Taiwan. It's what they wanted to do for a long time, but we are kind of holding them back. Well, we've got two carriers in the Gulf. People could only stay on board for so long. The nuclear power plants can run forever. The people get tired. We can't take them right from there and move them over. I mean, we've got the one carrier in the China Sea, but same thing. I mean, we've got 3 carriers out there fielded right now. The others are in dry dock or, or maintenance. So if we've got them over there fighting more and more, the longer they're there, the less time we have to move them somewhere else and do something else with them. If I were China, I would say let's let them play this out.

We'll let them get tired. Once they're tired, we'll do what we want to do and they won't be able to stop us because they're going to be too tired to come over here and do that.

I mean, I don't see why they wouldn't. I mean, Xi has said he wants to take Taiwan by 2027.

Yeah.

And we talked about this at the beginning when I was talking about the sleeper cells within the U.S. and I had mentioned that our, our aren't we stretching ourselves a little thin here?

We are, yeah.

And once again, Venezuela, Ukraine, now Iran, Gaza, Cuba, Panama, Greenland. It's a lot of resources going out. And so we're already declaring low munitions. Israel is declaring low munitions. Wouldn't it be interesting if Israel demanded more munitions from us and we refused, and then they just just fucking pulled out of this. You think that's a possibility?

It's a possibility. I think— I don't— I wouldn't put that past them at all.

There goes Rome.

You're on your own. I don't know that I covered this, you know.

They literally just say, you initiated it, you started it, you go finish it.

Yeah, yeah, I could see that.

Me too.

I don't think I covered this and I don't— yeah, it's not classified. In Desert Storm, when I was there, we were there for 9 months and American fighting machine, strongest, biggest, best in the world. And we are. There's a lot of nuances to that, though, that people don't understand. When I was there, right before we kicked off the offensive to move north, right, in late January, February, we got told, hey, whatever ammunition you have right now, that's what you get. Small arms,.50 cal, 9mm. That's what you got. And we went, you mean that's what we got until we kick off our forward movement, right? They're like, no, that's what you got. We said, well, what about when the supply ships come from the US? And they're like, there are no supply ships from the US. This is it. So we had one can of.50 caliber for our machine, our big 50 cals on our helicopter. That's gone in 4 seconds. And we said, well, what about then? They're like, take it off its mount and throw it at them because you've got nothing else. We're like, what happened to all the ammo? And I didn't understand it.

It was just, it was, it was a mystery to me. I'll get to the end in a minute. The other thing that happened was the engines in our helicopter we have big engine air particle separators on the front that have these cyclonic tubes. So if you suck in sand, it spins it, throws it to the outside, removes it. So you get clean air in your engines. Smart thinking. We found out that in Saudi Arabia, the fans, the sand was so fine, it's like flour. It wouldn't spin out. But it was highly corrosive. So we started eating away and eroding the front edge of all the blades of our engines, our turbine engines. What happens is, is in a turbine engine, you suck the air in, these blades compress it, and once it's compressed, you put fuel with it and you light it off, and then it expands out the back and gives you thrust. Well, each one of those little blades is like a wing. And if the wing is degraded, it doesn't fly anymore. It doesn't compress anymore. When that happens, you have fuel being poured into an engine at a rate it thinks it's getting air for, but there isn't that much air.

So the fuel just burns and eventually your, your engine lights on fire. Essentially, it's called a compressor stall. There's a little more to it, but eventually Effectively, your engine catches on fire. We would train for this in flight school and we all joked, we're like, has anybody in the history of flying ever seen a compressor stall? We're all like, no, never happened. Well, it started happening to us every single landing. Every time we landed the helicopter, we'd get a compressor stall in one engine to the point where the copilot would have his hands on our control levers. Watching the engines, just waiting, because you know one of these at least is going to go when we land. And you had to pull it offline immediately or it would light on fire. We burned up one whole aircraft because we didn't get the, we didn't get it off fast enough. The engine lit on fire, lit the other engines on fire, lit the gearbox on fire, and the whole helicopter just burned to the ground. But What the US did was, well, we're sending you new engines. So out there in the desert, we would swap an engine, right?

Mm-hmm. That lasted for about 3 months, and those engines got degraded. And then we said, okay, we need new engines again. They're like, there aren't any. We swap engines like one engine a year. You just swapped 3 in 2 months. We don't have spare engines to put on here. Whatever you've got on that aircraft right now is what you're going into combat with. And we're like, so we're going into combat with engines that don't work and guns that we don't have ammo for. And again, this is where a lot of my problems with what we were doing came from, where I'm like, what are we doing? What we're being told, what the American public is being told, and what we're seeing on the ground aren't the same. So knowing all of that, I was then sent to the postgrad school. And one of the courses I had in the postgrad school was on international relations and military action. It was taught by a guy who was in line to be one of the two choices for Secretary of Defense. The other person got it. This person came and taught the course and he covered this and he said, you know what happened was 6, 7 years before the Gulf War, we're building these big, fantastic Star Wars, you know, technology weapons systems.

Well, they have cost overruns. It's costing more than they thought. Congress isn't giving them more money. So they looked at it and said, well, we need to find money somewhere. Why are we creating this much ammunition? We don't need that much ammunition. Let's take the money we're supposed to spend on ammunition and we'll put it over here on this weapon system this year. Next year we'll give twice as much to ammunition and rebuild it. Okay. Next year comes up. The weapon system is still over budget. They're like, okay, let's borrow this year from ammunition and we'll put it over here. And then next year we'll put 3 times as much for the 2 years we missed and the year we have. Okay. The next year comes up, still over budget, or a new system needs money. And they went, oh, we can't take more. We need to build some ammunition, but let's just allocate half of what we were supposed to allocate to this year and take that half and put it over here. Well, now we've got this bow wave of debt. Where we're not making the ammunition we need. And by the time the Gulf War hit, we were 4 or 5 years behind in how much ammunition we should have had stockpiled.

So when it came to all of a sudden we've got to go to war, we're like, we don't have any.

With what?

We're sorry, we don't have any. I was shocked. I hate to say it, but at the time we were flying going, you know, if the Iraqis just keep coming, we can't stop them because we have nothing to shoot them with. And our helicopters are probably going to stall and we won't be able to fly. So it was a weird, weird thing to be in the largest, biggest military in the world, which we are. And have little things like this that are being made, decisions made by politicians that are affecting our warfighting capability. And that sort of thing, I think, is still going on today. And when I, so when I think of what we're doing and how much money we're spending on prosecuting Iran, I have to ask myself, how is that going to translate into our ability to maintain our citizens' safety and our way of life moving forward? That's a tough question to ask.

I don't even know what to say to that.

I don't either. That is a, it's a sobering reality. And it's a sobering, when you start thinking of things like this and you start looking at actions we do in the world with a little bit different lens, you start getting a little bit different answer than you would if you didn't have this extra information. Aber was ich noch erzählen wollte: Meine Nichte kämpft sich ja ganz schön durchs Studium. Semesterbeitrag, Laptop, Bücher, Software, Handy, Internet. Ey, so ein Master ist echt teuer. Ach, sag ihr, sie kann sich das zurückholen. Ja, du meinst von der Steuer absetzen, ne? Aber sie verdient ja nicht.

Egal. Zauberwort: Verlustvortrag. Macht sie ganz einfach mit WISO Steuer.

Und wenn sie dann arbeitet, heißt es Katsching! Das geht? Safe!

WISO Steuer.

Hol dir dein Geld zurück.

Jetzt kostenlos ausprobieren. How many people in DC do you think— how do I say this— they all think exactly the same? They're in a fishbowl. I don't feel like there's any new ideas being injected into that.

I think there's a dichotomy. I think we have this partisan group of people that come and go with the different parties every 4 years, right? We do have some career people that, let's face it, you were in the government, you know, they hide there forever and they're not doing anything. But we have some really, really good professionals in there that do try and give alternative ideas. I've met a couple people that were in the State Department, in the foreign services, brilliant people that really knew what they were doing. You get caught up in the politics where it's like, oof, You can't say that. You know, they'd write up a report and it'd be sent back to them going, mm-mm, not sending this up the chain. Tone it down. Right. So they end up, for political reasons, downplaying some things, which I think is too bad. I think we should be able to— I mean, give me the worst. Don't sugarcoat it. What's the worst that's going to happen here? Tell me so I can make a decision. You know, but if everybody's sugarcoating everything because they're afraid of the political ramifications. And I mean, right now with our Secretary of War and others, they don't want to hear certain stuff.

You try and tell them this, they're like, not true. Well, no, it is true. We should address that. But there's politically, there's not any appetite for that.

I guess it's up to us.

It's up to us as citizens. The best we can do is vote for all of its frailties and everything else. Vote. Let congressmen and senators know what you feel. Be involved. Be knowledgeable. The number one responsibility of a citizen is to know what's going on. Don't abdicate that to somebody else. Don't say, I don't want to know. You need to know, and you need to hold your representatives responsible and accountable for doing what you want.

Yeah. Yeah.

I mean, and I understand what I want may not be what the majority wants, but let's make sure you know what the majority wants. And if they're not doing what the majority wants, we need, we need to do something about that.

Well, Michael, I can't wait to, I can't wait to hear about the 19-point plan that you've—

I told you before, I've actually got two I'm working on. The book of lies that I told you about on how people tell lies, what they do and why they do it, and how you can see them. And then the 19 points, kind of working title, Citizen's Guide to the United States on what we can do to be better citizens.

Well, I'd love to have you back when you wrap it up.

I look forward to it.

And one more time, what was the contact the state congressmen, state representatives for the state, what about the Electoral College? What is that movement again?

The Popular Vote Compact.

Popular Vote Compact.

I think it's compact at the end. But anyway, the Popular Vote Movement, if you just Google those, you'll find it. Yeah, look it up. I am.

And I'm going to start getting loud on that because I feel like that is very important. So thank you.

It's great. I love seeing when a new— and they've got a whole tracker. These states have passed it. Here's how many electoral votes we have. These are— they've been submitted. You know, these have had a first reading, these are in voting, you know, so you can see where it's tracking. But yeah, definitely, I'm going to start getting loud on that. And if anybody doesn't know, go, go look it up, find out if your state has approved it yet. If they haven't, call your representatives and say, hey, I— we support this.

Thank you, Michael.

My pleasure. Thank you. Thank you for having me again.

It's my pleasure. And, and thank you for coming with some, some solutions. That's—

I hope next time to come with even more solutions.

I know you will.

It's a great country. We need to protect it.

Damn right. All right, Michael. God bless. Thank you.

Thank you, sir.

Yeah, I think that went awesome.

I think it went great.

Is there anything that we didn't hit that you wanted to hit?

No. I mean, we could have hit Zionism more, but we beat it to death.

Yeah.

We're not recording right now, I don't think. But my, my wife. So my wife and I run a personal security company.

Oh, really?

Personal privacy company. And my wife is like, how come you didn't mention us? And I said, I'll add it to the intro. I'll put it on the intro.

Okay. I'll read the intro then.

So let me tell you what we do, though. It might be interesting to you. Both my wife and I had parents die, and we don't— there was information we should have had that we didn't have. And a lot of people have gone through this. So we thought there should be a way to programmatically do this. So we put together a system, and our company is called Ironclad Family. We provide personal very high security vaults that you put information in. Then if anything happens to you, we make sure that the people that you wanted to have this information gets it. This especially with like Bitcoin, people are investing in it. You've probably heard of people like Gerald Cotten, $35 billion worth of Bitcoin. He was the only one that knew the codes to his wallet.

Got him.

He had a stroke and died. $35 million worth of Bitcoin disappeared overnight. And we're like, that shouldn't be. So what we do is we provide these ultra-secure vaults where you put information in. If anything happens to you, we contact the people that you wanted to have the information and we make sure they get it. So it's a way to preserve information and make sure people get it in the future. But you might not want them to have it right now.

Gotcha.

Our claim to fame is we use zero-knowledge end-to-end encryption. We don't even know what's in your vault. We can't break it. It's the same encryption the military uses for secret messages. And people can't remember passwords. So we count on people's memories. And we tell them, tell us 3 things that you've never put on social media. We don't want to know your mother's maiden name and all this other crap. Tell us 3 things, or you put down 3 things that only you and this other person know. And I use the example, it's like, for a spouse, what's the name of the restaurant we were at when we first kissed? Nobody knows that but the 2 of you. When I was at Thanksgiving and I spilled ketchup on my tie, what name did your mother call me? We use those answers to create a 128-bit key and encrypt everything. What we do, if you put something up in the cloud, what normally happens is it gets sent up to the cloud and then the company encrypts it and they store it on their servers. Problem with that is if they encrypted it, that means they have it in the clear and they know what it is.

That means a disgruntled employee could find it, as many celebrities found out when their naked photos were exposed. A hacker could expose it. A government subpoena can expose it. We actually download a little snippet of code to your computer and encrypt it on your computer before it even gets sent to us. By the time we even get it, it's already been encrypted. We can't decrypt it.

Interesting.

And then what we do is we, we find out something happened to you and we do it through, you know, we send emails, we send texts, we monitor. Are you responding? You stop responding. We send you an email and say, Sean, you're not responding. You know, you need to let us know you're here. No answer. We send you a text. Sean, you're not responding. Are you here? No response. Our automated robocaller calls you up and says, hi, this is Ironclad Family. We want to make sure you're okay. Please press 1 to let us know, blah, blah, blah. No response. A human picks up the phone and calls you. If they don't get a response, they call your recipients, the people that are supposed to get it, and say, hey, we can't reach Sean. Is Sean okay? And we could get a, yeah, he got hit by a bus, or a, he's on a 3-month sabbatical, he won't be available. Like, okay, if they say he was hit by a bus, we're like, okay, we're going to need to know when, where, we've got to go validate. As soon as we validate, we release the vault for delivery.

The recipient gets an email that says you need to come to this site And on the site, Sean said you would know the answer to these questions. You put the answers in. Now we know two things. We know that it is really you because you're the only person that could answer it. We download the encrypted file to their computer. We download the code and we decrypt it on their computer. So again, we don't know what was in the file.

Wow.

This is our way to make sure that people can transmit information to people in the future if something happens to them that they don't want them to have today. That's our company called Ironclad Family. We're a personal family information security company.

What other kinds of information are people putting in there?

People put in all sorts of things. Wills, powers of attorney, and you can make as many vaults as you want. So like I have a vault for my wife. I have a vault for each one of my kids that has like the video of their first steps. Here's your pictures. Here's your high school diploma. Here's your birth certificate. You know, all of that information, because if our house burnt down, right, all that could be gone. So we've digitized it and put it all in the system. Um, they get that when they're 21. They get access to that vault. And then we have another vault for each of my kids that is a— if something happens to me, here's a final video of me.

Holy shit. Holy shit, you did that?

Yeah.

Wow.

Wow. So yeah, so Like, like right now when I'm, I'm writing books and talking to you, my wife is home, uh, working on the company.

That's— I've never heard anything like that.

Yeah. There are a couple other companies that do something like us. We're the only one that does zero-knowledge end-to-end encryption because it is difficult to do and it costs money. Luckily, both my wife and I are technicians, so we We designed it that way from the beginning to make sure that it's ultra secure.

Wow. I'm going to use that.

You should.

How long have you had this company?

Oh, we've actually been doing it for 8 years. We're up against some other big guys, quite honestly, that They took $20 million in venture capital and they're just flooding the market with, with marketing and advertising. We keep looking at them going, but you don't really protect their information. You don't really encrypt it.

We're starting one too. We're starting a cybersecurity company.

Are you?

Yep. To do phones, VPNs, starting out as a VPN service. So when I went to Taiwan and, and, uh, wound up on the Taliban hit list for some other shit, whatever, a lot of things, and, um, he got really nervous my phone was being tapped. Yeah, it probably is.

Probably.

So I started looking around for the black phone and, and called some old friends of mine and, you know, hey, what's the newest thing? And they sent me to this company called Glacier Security, and they make a black phone. I— they have an iPhone. See, the thing is that most of these are not iPhones, and yeah, if you use an iPhone or not, but anyways, I use an Android.

I like having more access to my tools, but it's safer.

But, uh, and they can make a better phone with the Android, um, But they've made it with the iPhone. And anyways, I wanted— so I wanted to get one, but they're like $8,500 a phone.

And like the original Iridium. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And I had asked about having some equity in it and because I wanted to buy one and I was like, man, more people. Then I found out the price and I was like, maybe no equity. That's what we're shooting for.

Yeah.

0.0001% of the population here, and maybe we can get some government contracts. But I think we should, you know, I'm interested in something a little more consumer-friendly. So, uh, we built an application and, um, keeps about 99% of your data from being getting sucked, from being sucked out of your phone. Uh, VPNs that are all American VPNs, because I like all this China.

Get this going, let me know, because It's—

we have beta.

Phones are a pain in the ass. I'm always looking at it going, who's on this? But I, I do a factory reset of mine almost once a month because I'm like, oh my God, there's so much shit that gets loaded onto your phone. I don't even know what's on there. So I'll send you—

we were— we're— it's, it's in beta right now. So yeah, I'll send you the link if you want to test it out. And then the other thing that we have is a— we have a burner number thing. So, you know, if you're talking to a politician or just getting a hotel room, ordering a pizza, whatever, you know how that shit gets out. And then the next thing you know, you're getting 20 million texts and emails.

What— now I heard Signal had given texts to somebody.

Oh great.

And I'm like, wait a minute. Whoa, whoa, whoa. What do you mean they gave the text to them? This was supposed to be the secure end-to-end. I need to look into that one a little more. Well, like you, we travel overseas and I'm like, I'm going to bring a $19 flip phone. I can't bring my smartphone because there's no way I'm going through these countries with that.

Yeah.

So, so the viewers are interested in that.

So yeah, you can, you can pick any area code you want and you get a, you'll get a burner number and then, you know, if you didn't want me to have it, you just jump the number.

And how are you pricing this?

It's going to be about— we're still working details, but it's going to be— I think it's going to be $14.99 a month. Okay.

And then reasonable.

You will have to purchase your your burner numbers.

See, those are reasonable, right? Yeah. Reasonable pricing. Pricing for our system, $189 a year.

That's it.

That's it.

Oh, I'm definitely doing this.

Because once we, once we built it, we're like, it's just computer code. I mean, we're not building, you know, machinery. So Yeah, to us it's a no-brainer.

Yeah, yeah, I love that idea.

That's actually— you send me the beta thing, I'll send you an account. We'll set you up an account.

Perfect.

And you can go play with it and see what you think.

And thank you.

Tell me, tell me what you think.

I will, I will.

And now my wife can say, so you mentioned our company?

Well, next time to— next time we'll do a whole segment on it. So this, this one's all the way at the tail of the interview, but next time we'll put it up front.

You know what else I was talking to my wife? I was— I get these wild hairs up my ass where I'm just sitting there thinking, I'm like, she looks at me like, what are you thinking? Because I start chuckling to myself. I'm just sitting there and I'm like, she's like, What now? And I said, you know what'd be fun? She's like, go ahead and tell me. She said, I said, well, my tagline is question everything. Sean's tagline is it's all a lie. Him and I should co-write a book called It Ain't Necessarily So, and we can just go through everything from all of these interviews and put it in a book. And she's like, yeah, you got other books to write first.

It could be a really long book. But, well, Michael, seriously, pleasure. Thank you.

Thanks for having me back. I always enjoy these conversations.

Me too. Me too. Hope to see you again several times.

Hope so. Next time, hopefully I'll be flying in from the Caribbean somewhere.

Right on. No matter where you're watching The Sean Ryan Show from, if you get anything out of this at all, anything, please like, comment, and subscribe. And most importantly, share this everywhere you possibly can. And if you're feeling extra generous, head to Apple Podcasts and Spotify and leave us a review.