Video URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wu6USAUpGDg
[Music] mike baker are we [ __ ] mr rogan we are [ __ ] this is not good right this is not good how much fun is this every time we get together there's some it seems like [ __ ] happening yeah yeah every time the world is uh somewhat falling apart yeah yeah well it's good for business um i didn't mean that actually that's it no no that's what people expect me to say i think but um yeah yeah i think uh nobody really expected the potential for thermonuclear war uh right after two years of a pandemic i don't think anybody actually saw that coming yeah there's no break for the weary yeah exactly it comes out i did have a thought which was i talked to my i talked to my daughter the other day she's just turned 28. and i thought after i hung up she was talking about it and she was kind of basically saying what the [ __ ] right and so i people that age if you think about those the folks in that age group uh she was born you know she was old enough to understand 911 right in a sense from a child's perspective and then through the iran or the iraq afghanistan you know [ __ ] that that whole time with the war on terrorism a couple of recessions okay global pandemic now you know approaching cold war 2.0 getting close to thermonuclear war not that we are uh and the disastrous pull out of afghanistan and afghanistan uh inflation possibly leading to recession seven dollars a gallon gas in california people people of that age not not able to save money for for a house they must supposed to be thinking what the [ __ ] yeah where's our you know big build up where's our like the 50s or the the 80s you know well it just seems so supremely incompetent everything seems like the whoever the grown-ups are that are running the show have [ __ ] up so many different things yeah yeah um yeah there's a lot of there's a lot done back there isn't that statement the putin thing scares the [ __ ] out of me
though because he's a you know when it comes to warlords he's a legitimate warlord who is in charge of i didn't know that they had more nukes than us i mean i guess it's kind of a moot point right because everybody's gotta need yeah everybody's got enough to kill everybody how many times over yeah isn't it something crazy like 10 times over yeah they did the math and and it was it was in double digits it's not good it's not it's not good but it's look if you if you step back everybody's everybody's thinking okay how did this you know how did this [ __ ] up situation happen well it's been building obviously right i mean we have how much news coverage do we have of well they're adding more troops to the border with ukraine i wonder what they're doing it could be military exercises so there was a tremendous amount of speculation leading up to what the [ __ ] is going on which in a sense points to how uh lacking the intelligence is on on putin on plans and intentions right and he's like that's a heavy lift right to come up with that sort of intel because ideally you're gonna want a human source um you know you can get again you can get whatever you could you can gather intelligence from a variety of sources but you really want human access people who can tell you you know what i had a meeting with him and boy i tell you what he was pissed off or this is what he said this is how he looked without that without knowing what plans and intentions are or you know being able to gather intel on say the command staff everybody was kind of speculating willy won't he what's he going to do well stepping back if you look at what he's done he's been pretty damn consistent right over the years and so i guess you know in a part a lot of it was optimistic thinking okay he just wants the eastern part of the country he's just going to go in there and take that because you know maybe he's he's already got it he's declared those two republics legit
maybe that's all he wants he's already taken crimea and so that i think that was optimistic thinking hoping that you know the guy's not going to lose his [ __ ] and go all the way through the country well that's what he's done and in part because again if you look at what he did in chechnya if you look at what he did helping assad in syria if you look at what he did annexing crimea if you look at georgia abkhazia south of every step of the way he's been following in his mind this stated desire that he's made very public over the years to rebuild his sphere of influence right so in in part you could argue we kind of missed the obvious right we didn't see the obvious in front of us because we were all kind of hoping and mirroring our values on onto onto putin who doesn't deserve to have our values mirrored onto them because we're thinking maybe maybe he just wants a little bit maybe he's just trying to make a point maybe he just wants them to sign a charter saying they won't be part of nato so anyway uh i you know my point being twofold i guess we we missed the boat on that we missed it in part because we we're always trying to be optimistic and trying to think okay well maybe they think like we do maybe there's a rational process there and then part of it is intel was lacking and when it comes to intel when you're talking about like in-person intel how difficult is that to get on a guy like putin it's really tough it's i mean that you know look it's a it's a very heavy lift the higher they go up the food chain um because the the smaller your pool of potential access points are right so you know you've got some mid-level person floating around you know a government office somewhere in some target country and you know maybe you've got lots of options okay who do they socialize with right who can i get access to who who might you know be next to them you know do they have a driver can i recruit the driver things like that right it's sometimes it's very simple but uh putin's had a increasingly small circle of close
advisors and a people that he he counts on and trusts and part of that may be you know the fact that that was accelerated through the two-year pandemic where he decidedly was shutting himself off uh because he was he was you know paranoid like a lot of people were about covet do you remember when there was a guy who suicide drove into putin's car and putin wasn't in it yeah when was that that was a few years back yeah some guy there was oncoming traffic and he timed it right when uh there must have been someone communicating with him letting him know where putin's car is but putin wasn't even in it yeah and turned right into oncoming traffic and used his car as a weapon and killed the bolt of them yeah and i think killed the both of them uh yeah i'll we'll get you to look up when that when that works you've seen the video though yeah it was it was a while back though it was uh four or five years yeah um but he's you know people have been talking about is is he losing this [ __ ] is he you know is he going crazy i i don't think he's i don't think it's any of that right he's he like gets on a table when he negotiates and talks to people he's like 40 feet away yeah yeah and so he but he and that assessment was was clear during the course of the pandemic he was he was isolating himself he was being you know very very cautious but i mean and so maybe that had something to do with it but he anyway point being is is it's tough to when you've got a small potential well of targets you can go after when you're talking about recruiting somebody who's got access to a high priority target that's you know that's that's probably one of the heaviest lifts we've got how do you get like how does someone get access to like a driver do you use a girl um is that the best way to do it no not really i mean you know what it's because what you're looking to do this is not to fall into like you know by talking spy talking recruitment 101 but um the movies and beach books and everything will have you believe that
you know the best way to hook somebody to recruit somebody is you know blackmail or or a honey trap or something you know there's right usually you're working on on something else you're not necessarily working on the ideology but you don't want to start from a negative basis right because in even in normal terms in the best of circumstances when somebody's recruited to spy on their country to spy on on their organization whatever it may be there's a clock starts ticking you know and it because because things start to decay right the person starts to decay it's very wearing on a human right and for a variety of reasons um and so you know that window is going to close at some point and it may not end well so you're trying to optimize that and if you start from a negative perspective right if you if you're you've got someone cooperating with you because they're blackmailing they're under the gun here and and and they hate you and they hate you know what they're doing that's not what you're looking for you're looking for a more and it sounds weird but you're looking for more positive so how do you approach that like how would you get a driver to be your buddy well um it's a there's a there's a recruitment process a cycle that you go through but uh i hope everyone's taking notes uh but you uh first of all you got to know what information you're looking for right and and so that that task gets set you know outside the the building if you're talking about the agency or or really any intel service theoretically the administration of power is setting priority tasking so they send over this and they say hey we need this is a priority target for us this information so you look around you go okay well who's got access to the information um all right you build up that world then you figure out who might be accessible right because maybe you you're interested in you know uh a target here but he never leaves the country you know it's a denied area and uh so then you find out who's got the
access to information who might be accessible why might they be minded to talk to you can you create a scenario where you can get next to them and then you're looking for points of leverage right you're really looking and that doesn't necessarily mean you're looking to find a negative right you're looking for something that drives them what makes it are their kids the most important thing to them right do they do they have a kid who you know needs medical attention uh do they have a kid who they desperately want to send away to college but they don't have the money you know so you're looking for something like that that may again it sounds strange because you're talking about recruiting somebody for espionage but it's a positive rather than a negative and that creates then a longer shelf life in a sense for that asset if that makes sense it does make sense but it would have i would imagine that when you're dealing with someone like say kim jong-un or putin or you know some dictator like they they have to be prepared for things like this right so they probably are very cautious on who gets into their inner circle yeah and that's that's a counterintelligence issue right so every you know every government out there um you know they're worried about that that very thing right and so i mean look and putin he was a kgb officer for 15 years right yeah now interestingly going back to putin he he served in east germany i think for about half a dozen years uh never really had any exposure to the west so that's also something when you when you're talking about trying to assess his mindset understand where he's coming from part of it is look if he if he had been exposed to the the west in a much bigger way maybe he served in new york you know or he served wherever you know as a london someplace where he had more exposure but you look at that guy and you go he doesn't really understand how we think right and so that's an important thing you got to tick that box and put that in there when you're doing an assessment of his
personality and trying to because that's part of understanding why he's doing what he's doing you don't think he understands how we think in what way well i know fundamentally i mean if you look if you live in an environment right if you you know if you go to china you live in you know wherever you know shenzhen or shanghai or amazing and you're there for a few years you're going to understand the culture the mindset much better than you know somebody who's never lived there and is you know just you know sitting in washington in a think tank talking about what the chinese regime may do next so it's that immersion it's that exposure it's dealing with those people it's the contact that you have um look i'm you know i'm old enough that i remember we uh when the when the wall started to fall uh when when the soviet union was collapsing from our perspective right as a as a as a government as an intel service right we saw that as an opportunity there's chaos there right and what did you have you had intel officers like putin right kgb gru officers who saw their world collapsing around them because at the time before the the the soviet union collapsed they were living the good life right they were the elite in a sense right they were they were pampered their kids were going to get the best education they were set for life their kids were set for life all of a sudden the soviet union starts going to [ __ ] right and you could see it and you know so what did we do well we were out there busy right working over whatever targets we might have access to trying to see if maybe they think you know maybe there's another option here maybe there's an alternative maybe i can uh you know save myself my family you know perhaps put aside some money by working for the other side and that's a natural thing to do right every service is going to do that if there's chaos on the other side so i remember you could see the confusion and the humiliation right and the fear in some of these guys
as this was happening and so putin went through that same process again it's one of those things you do you put all that together to try to create this profile of this of this individual right so i'm not buying the talk when you know people get on tv and go oh he's he's going crazy he's losing his mind he said uh i'm not buying that there's a reason why he's he's driving the way he is and again he's being somewhat consistent he's never given a [ __ ] about civilian casualties right never bothered him before i mean that that yeah that situation in chechnya when they went in there right and i mean that was that was yeah i have to argue there was the other side was you know was different as well some of the chechen separatists were some of the [ __ ] that they were pulling um but at the same time he didn't care whether he was killing civilians or you know separatists and you know members of their militia military so i i don't know i think it's it's one of those things where i think with with putin we've got to uh we got to be really pragmatic here we got to understand i don't think he's he's not crazy he's not going to say okay i'm in a corner i'm going to i'm gonna push the button and fire off a couple of tactical nukes right i think what he's gotten to the point is is you know you guys have disrespected me this is how he thinks right you've disrespected me [ __ ] you all i told you i want my spear of a sphere of influence and i don't care whether i have to break it i'm going to have it when you say sphere of influence do you mean he wants to reclaim what is the former soviet union yeah he said that he said he said publicly in the past he called the collapse of the soviet union the greatest tragedy of the 20th century that's and he's he's serious about that he means that so he's not he's not [ __ ] around um and and again if we look at it he's being consistent right he's been consistent over the years he's a you know he's uh he he's a dictator he's a despot he's looking
increasingly more like you know he's isolating himself which you know that's that's a danger uh in a sense to uh all those people around him right he's already cut loose some of his inner circles just over the past couple of weeks right has he yeah he's gotten rid of his uh way put under house arrest a couple of his fsb uh uh senior command why do you do that the domestic service because because the intel was so bad because go again oh because of ukraine yeah because of ukraine yeah so yeah because of ukraine so they went in and the assumption wasn't and now again this is where our intel is lacking was he given bad intel or was he given intel and he just chose to ignore it but it appears as if what he believed and what the top military commanders some of whom have also been let go um or possibly reassigned i don't think that's a good thing in in russia uh is uh that they were gonna they were gonna get in there maybe within 48 hours they were going to have control of kiev they would be welcomed by the population in ukraine and they would be able to establish a puppet regime a new government i mean they moved the previous president that was a know russian-backed they moved him from russia to uh minsk uh in preparation it appeared to move him down to take over the government which is in a sense batshit crazy because he was kicked out during the during the last revolution right by the people 2014 yeah that was that orange revolution that they had um yeah we did we were blissfully unaware of that in the west because we didn't think it affected us i mean you asked the average american citizen about the ukraine revolution in 2014 like what are you talking about what are you talking about we just found out recently that a comedian is running the country which is uh hilarious yeah everything is everything is short-term here in the us and that's and that's also including with our politicians right and and they want a simple story so everything's coalesced around this this simple narrative about you know and
and we have to be i i don't know we have to we have to be very careful about certain things the emotions are running high um we hear uh russian moral you know troop morale is bad um you know they yeah we're hearing that from our media and we know that our media is not exactly accurate they love a good story they don't just love a good story they love a narrative and they're willing to ignore facts to push that narrative that's what scares me what scares me is i i mean i think there are objective journalists that work for the washington post and new york times and there's real solid journalists out there but i don't necessarily know if you're getting all the information i think i think it's safe to say that you're not sure some [ __ ] is afoot i mean the new york times just now is admitting that the hunter biden laptop is real and you know we remember from the debates with trump bringing it up to biden and biden's saying it's [ __ ] and he's intel it's a lie yeah a flat out lie everybody knew it was a lie the new york post had that story that was banned from twitter which was just outright crazy that one of the oldest newspapers in the country yeah and i don't think anybody's going to go back and apologize to them no no one's apologizing but there's a dynamic here that i mean i love this topic in a sense not not so much because of you know whatever the [ __ ] hunter was up to but in part because now when you look at the at the the the liberals uh dems and the progressives it doesn't matter to them if you read some of the the narrative that is out there now the social media in the past day or so ever since the new york times came out with this they're they're just dismissive of it yeah and they don't care or they're they're willing to overlook it which is the same thing they accuse the the the right of doing both sides we've talked about this before but both sides are just so [ __ ] so [ __ ] crazy they're both so crazy it's just it's which does leave
you with a question of where where does where do we go with that um but this the russia ukraine situation has created an interesting dynamic in dc where you've got sort of this weird bipartisan support for uh you know let's give them let's give them the migs you know let's let's push back you think but from what i understand there was an american billionaire some guy who actually has a mig he's uh an astronaut and see if he can find the story and he was like the migs are technologically inferior to what russia currently has and if we sent migs over there they would just get shot down it would be a massive moral victory for russia yeah is that true it um it depends on the training right because so much of this depends on the the capabilities of the pilots uh the ground crew and and how well maintained the the platforms are but um and just from a technical perspective yes it's true here's this guy american who owns a mig-29 isn't sure the fighter jets would help ukraine much a billionaire astronaut who helped train u.s fighter pilots loves his high-performance soviet jet but thinks it's no match for russia's newer planes first of all that's when you know you're a baller when you got your own [ __ ] fighter jet yeah right a russian fighter jet i'm just gonna i'm gonna fly to the hamptons did you ever see a billionaire operation odessa is it it's a documentary no i don't think so it's a [ __ ] hilarious documentary it's about these guys that are smuggling cocaine into america and they they buy a uh a submarine from the former soviet union and uh while they're buying a submarine the guy asks them if they want nukes to go with the submarine it's just an aside yeah operational is outstanding yeah no we worked i tell you what if we get into a whole different rabbit hole there talking about the gray arms market because it is a we work the great arms market for a while it is a fascinating place i can't recommend this documentary enough it's [ __ ] amazing and yeah it's so amazing that while you're watching you're like what that is real it's really funny yeah it's just it's really good it's also really scary because it's true well yeah
if you think about it but see that's that's something else i mean well there's a lot there um no i i flew in a mig a mig-15 um and which was you know that was built in [ __ ] they were built in 1954 really yeah and mig's i mean it makes changed the world right in terms of aviation right we had never seen that design we didn't think the soviets could build that right when they when it came out um i know some of this [ __ ] because we we do a whole thing on it in in black vows to classified which uh the second season just started last week uh that's on discovery right it's on discovery yeah uh science channel discovery plus um but uh when the migs showed up over the skies of of uh korea during the korean conflict we had no idea what the hell we were doing right and so it literally changed we i we actually had some prop fighters still up in the air flying from world war ii yeah so we were still yes we were still flying that's how we were where we were at that point so the mig shows up i guess the point being is that you know for a long time it was you know and then and one of the things they were able to do was produce them rapidly right it's basically a couple of tiny wings and a big rocket right and there's no the funny thing is there's no uh there's no safety protocols right i mean there's no it's not like they were concerned about their pilots and so there's no ejection seats in fact when we strapped in and and were taxing you know i was talking to the pilot and and he says yeah he says okay so if if things go sideways here and we're up there um what you have to do is you have to you have to use both hands to pull your canopy back it's a mechanical canopy you have to pull it back he says it it's tight so you have to force this thing back you have to undo your seat harness you know and don't get [ __ ] up and undo your parachute which you're sitting on and then he's got to get that thing over right he's got to turn it over so you can tumble out oh my god that was the safety briefing i mean no it it was more than that but it was that's how you get
out you don't get burned alive by the jet engine yeah basically yeah or that you can come out cause there's no space in there so you're gonna be stuck anyway no matter how you know how successful he is turn it upside down you can't get out yeah no you're not gonna get out i mean what do you because you think about that thing you know how fast it moves you're gonna be trying to climb out of the canopy so you gotta it was it was one of those things where i thought to myself i you know you know if if something had gone wrong basically my insurance policy would have been uh who not not valid who has the most advanced fighter jets today people are going to say well of course you're going to say this the u.s i i think they you know in terms of technology it's moving very quickly because what's what's developing fast is material science right and so material science has has been developing because the holy grail of all of this is speed right and speed can defeat a lot of things including air defense systems so you know i would argue from everything i've seen the u.s i mean china is you know right there in part because they're very good at stealing whatever we're developing i had to get that in uh but uh in terms of development of new materials and that that's going to allow for the breakthrough eventually i mean not probably not in our lifetime but of manned hypersonic flight which is going to be insane it's going to be crazy how does china steal um technology like that did they find someone who's working on the technology and bribe them yes um they go through a variety of ways so one way that seems very uh unobtrusive and and uh and and logical is they have people out attending all the various academic uh events conferences and they and so they do that they'll hoover up whatever they can in that regard that's very low key right that's and that's always done and oftentimes it's done in cooperation with u.s academic institutions right they love that cooperation they also love the
money that comes into their institutions here in the u.s right from china uh one way they do it is they is they put students here right and and you know people could say oh my god that sounds xenophobic or whatever no but a portion of students you know come to the states are cooperative assets or working on behalf of because sometimes you know that's just what they're going to have to do well if they want to go back to l.a china right right that is the deal right and so they they work and they i mean you know you can have you can have someone show up here go to undergrad go to grad um end up working in a in in raytheon or wherever over a period of 30 40 years right as essentially as an asset of chinese intel gathering information all along the way answering specific questions sometimes it's it's uh it's straight up appealing to uh the homeland basically so and they're very successful at targeting uh people who could be second third generation even uh china chinese and that's a that's an appeal that they'll work on constantly because they believe it works and at times it has worked they're very adept at just identifying potential targets who may eventually be in a position of access and they're willing over years and years to work on that we have a much shorter time frame right so we we look at an asset you know in a very short period of time right and and uh and in part it's it's i i don't know what it is but it's it's the nature of kind of our intel collection operations right we send people overseas to work and you know maybe they're gonna be someplace for two or three years and and so they know if i'm gonna get promoted i gotta recruit i gotta get some recruits i gotta do so there's this this thing whereas sometimes china is much more patient in that regard right they don't think about that way they're not gonna you know they're not gonna base it on okay did you get two recruits they're gonna based on did you develop somebody did you push them a little further down the path that's a good thing if you did because maybe that path
is gonna take another five years six ten years twenty years they don't care they're willing to invest the time where sometimes we get very impatient because in part you know i don't know i don't know why we're americans we're you know we have a short attention span so it i mean i don't mean that in a glib way but there is that decided difference between the services do we do the same thing do we have people over in chinese universities that are working with the united states government can you say that um it's no we would never we don't well no we would never do that joe come on what the [ __ ] although i had now that you just stayed out it sounds like a good idea i think you have to right i mean if this is the game you're playing right if the game you're playing is uh everybody's cheating you kind i mean it's it seems like it's part of the strategy that you have to employ if you want to be successful yeah yeah i would say it's it's it's much more difficult for us we have an open society right they don't right so if you think about it our ability to have a to have us say a student if we're going to go that route you know apply to a university in china um that's a that's a much more rigorous process right because they start from the perspective of there's something wrong here why is this person applying to our university so immediately they're flagged as a potential counterintelligence issue right whereas we have i don't even know at this point maybe 300 000 more uh chinese students here in various academic institutions going to school probably more than that and how many are monitored like when you have 300 000 do we have enough federal agents to go hey let's make sure this guy isn't stealing information and sending it back to the ccp no but every day literally every day the fbi is an example is opening up a new case on on a chinese intelligence issue every state every day every day so they're stretched then on a lot of
fronts um including you know terrorism fronts international domestic and but the the chinese issue and counterintelligence every single day they're opening up a new case at least one i was having a conversation with a friend of mine and about this i was saying you know what's kind of [ __ ] is that what we do in america is every four years we have an election where it's a popularity contest for the most important job in the country and so if you got the most important job in the country every four years someone's new at it it's crazy yeah imagine like imagine if you had to do any other job whether it's brain surgery or you know whatever the [ __ ] it is you know building cars and you've never done it before i mean that's literally everyone you only get to do it twice you get eight years max right yeah yeah everything that's a good thing right i guess it is a good thing i guess it's a good thing but when you look at what they're able to do in china and then this is not me advocating for totalitarian control by the government but what i'm saying is it is a massive advantage that they have in that they don't have that restriction like they get to be really good at their job and they understand it deeply so like one of the things that you know what the tinfoil hat brigade likes to talk about is the deep state right they always like to talk about the deep state right and what i was saying is like what if we didn't have a deep state do you know how [ __ ] we would be if we didn't have career politicians and career intelligence agencies and people there for long periods of time that actually do understand it if the fir the person i mean every time yeah listen i've disrespected joe biden enough i don't i don't think i should do it anymore because i think i've said enough about him on my show we're gonna stop being mentally incompetent i mean he's just compromised he's an old guy we there's no we know we know right everyone knows the guy's falling apart but imagine if he really was the only say in how things run and how things go
if he really was like a dictator we would be beyond [ __ ] yeah luckily we got the 81 year old nancy pelosi to back him up oh it's so important so she's falling apart harder than him wow yeah it's i don't know if that's true it's close but it's it's it's it's a massive disadvantage isn't it though i'm not this is not me saying this like advocating for any different system right but what i'm saying is that if you just look at the structure of our government the way we do elect a new leader every four years every four years someone is new they start from scratch which is crazy yeah i think what what's what saves the system is what you've pointed out which is you've got career uh personnel right and they really do run the country basically the folks that are there the civil service group um the folks who now if government gets too large which you could argue it already has then you got a problem you got entrenched you know folks who you know maybe i i don't know i so i'm a little conflicted on that but certainly for the intel servers right and i know people are going to say well [ __ ] that it's not it's not apolitical but you know what it's you know i you can only speak from your experience mine was that the the agency uh is essentially apolitical you know occasionally you get uh someone like uh you know john brennan who you know has a very close relationship with the president he's been dinged for it in terms of you know he got all political just like the fbi you know has obviously taken heat uh in in the past but you want those institutions to be uh okay let's say as a political as possible and not rotating out and i've been to countries where there's a change in government there's a change wholesale change in the intel service that's good you know it's not good you got it they're completely beholden to whoever's in charge you don't want that um but you know we've talked about before um you know i'm a huge believer in term limits right and and it's never gonna happen but i'm big believer
and it's just that you look at you look at the current leadership i i i don't know i mean how do you look at schumer at uh mitch mcconnell at pelosi at you know uh president biden and you think we got we got octogenarians running our country and i don't understand you know we got 330 million people in there how do we not get uh a better slate of candidates you know repeatedly since it is in every four-year process or you know good god congress it's every two years look at some of the people we got in congress now it's [ __ ] up well it's it seems like a lot of our best and brightest don't want that gig i think that's exactly it i mean who wants to put themselves through that yeah who wants to put themselves through that and then on top of that you know who wants to deal with all of the infighting and all the the the politics that are involved once you get into a position what scares me is the idea that intelligence agencies would side with one party or one candidate or the other and not side with the greater good of the united states because then there could be a situation where information is withheld or information is not necessarily distributed evenly to republicans or democrats depending upon you know what the party favors or what what the agency favors that sounds crazy to me yeah no you cannot have that the intel community um you know has to be very large it has got to be a apolitical and you've got to be you've got to work at it right i mean you got it because you've got to be very careful um and now look the director uh is appointed right so um and then approved uh through congress and and you know so you you have to there's a process in place you've got to be able to evaluate and look at people and make a decision okay are they you know but the the for the most part again i would say i would argue and people would expect that but i would argue that you know for the most part the the agency has done a good job of being apolitical through the years now that doesn't mean mistakes
haven't been made through the years that's not what i'm saying i'm saying that they've done a good job of for the most part being a political and i'm basing that on seeing other intel services around the country around the world and knowing how [ __ ] up they can be so we're not the worst we're not doing yo but it's not the worst that's a resounding but here's the question when a guy like trump gets into office and then like openly disparages intelligence agencies and openly disparages whether it's the fbi or the cia or whoever he's in some sort of a personal feud with that seems very dangerous well it's dangerous to i suppose if you if you think if if all you're thinking about is okay morale right i mean right this would work on a few levels so yeah sure there was a lot of talk during you know trump's uh time in office uh you know um that morale was sinking at the agency because he was you know kicking him in the ass on occasion right right well honestly the agency's taking a beating over the years from a variety of administrations and all i can again speak to is my experience which spanned a handful of administrations you know from uh from a collection point of view from just getting the job done you know you don't give a [ __ ] just tell us what the tasking is right and we'll go out and do it you know the and and the idea was always the director was your top cover the director served as a liaison between the the white house and kind of you know protected the agency right from you know all the machinations or the back and forth now once you collect that intel right if you're out in the field and you pull it until you throw it into the mix right you send it back or whatever and it once it leaves that building and it gets into that washing machine of washington where there's lots of different you know people editing and looking at it before it ends up in you know in some briefing somewhere in the national security council yeah there's an editing process that goes on there that's where a lot of the the spin a lot
of the you know the agenda can be built in how does that work well i mean you've got a lot of hands touching you know while intelligence is one thing right you you find somebody out in the field and they said yeah this is what putin means because i was sitting in a meeting with him and two of the the command staff and this is what he said okay great that's raw intelligence right so you report that back word for wart you don't put your spin on it right as a person that's collecting and that goes back but now that's going to get looked at by the guys writing the reports up and and doing the analysis and assessment of of this they're putting it together with other intel maybe they're collecting from other sources right and then it you've got so the more hands that are touching that you know once it gets back to washington the more potential for editing right and for analysis and and and opinion you know might get in that's just a natural thing right that's going to happen but it's the raw intelligence that really matters and sometimes i feel like we should have a more direct line from the actual raw intelligence if you can protect sources and methods direct to the end user you know to try to keep that editing process to a minimum otherwise you're playing a game of telephone too right um it's not so much telephone where you you know you get the i guess we used to say chinese whispers i i guess we can't say that anymore can we yeah you're older the idea being it's like that party game where you whisper something to someone they've whispered along to somebody it's not quite like that because they're kind of it's it's more like um it gets blended in right and then that blending process with other sources of information and then just the natural inclination of people who are writing up reports or passing it from one you know uh office to another to say well i think this is kind of what it means and or this is the most important part here and so she can move around it's it's it's like editing a a newspaper article right the more hands
get on it the stranger is going to look right it doesn't necessarily mean that the facts are wrong maybe just the context or the priority part of this is is is missing or different so i i know i'm probably no it's no one's there but no it is it's important to be nuanced i guess because someone like me doesn't really understand how the process works and i think most people don't most people uh you know they they just know that we find out certain things about a certain terrorist cell or you know what have you happened in other parts of the world and we really don't know the process of how the intelligence gets to the people that make the decisions i think what would surprise people too is how imperfect that intelligence can be sometimes right um and you know that's one of the i again you know every time i say something positive about about the agency i get i get you know a couple thousand notes going uh [ __ ] idiots yeah uh i know i know i i don't although listen although i will say this much can i i'm gonna i'm gonna veer completely in a different direction now that you said this uh one of my boys i got three boys right and so uh scooter sluggo and moxie i always talk about them and scooter the the the oldest one came to me he says i found this funny [ __ ] threat in some you know reddit or something like that where there's this whole bunch talking about the boys and what their names are right and so i actually wrote down some of them um and there's just speculation and people saying no that's not their names so oh they think they fake names well well that's what they're saying i mean they're saying so instead of scooter slugo and mugsy i've got scooter bozo and [ __ ] that wasn't it somebody thought it was pooper bung hole and skidmark that's not it scooter bam bam and [ __ ] knuckle definitely not it tweaker barfo and butzo you are wasting time repeating the things someone in a cubicle was bored out of the [ __ ] online i know
probably on adorable but my boys like this and the last one the youngest one mugsy he likes he's adopted the new name mcfuck stick because he thinks that's funnier than anything except for [ __ ] knuckle he thought that was funny those are both pretty funny yeah so anyway uh good nickname i don't read them except for that one when my boy brought it to me and said you gotta read this yeah don't read the comments oh no no but it's my number one piece of advice for everybody the problem do you get comments i'm sure i do yeah i'm sure there's a few out there you can't you'll go crazy it's the only way to stay sane listen no and the more controversy comes my way the more i'm solidified in my position let me ask you this do your kids read the comments my kids are very healthy they they know what's going on they understand that their dad has a very weird job but they know me like i have a very good relationship with them i communicate with them so when wild [ __ ] happens i have to sit down with them and have a conversation with them but they don't get concerned okay you know they're they're reasonably adjusted to this very strange position that i'm in so they don't die they don't dive in on their own into comments and read about okay that's very healthy i've i've educated them to that it's uh you know we live in a strange time of information and the ability to communicate and i think there's a lot good in that yeah but you have to navigate it correctly it's like there's a certain amount of freedom in our ability to communicate and our ability to express ourselves and i think that's ultimately good i am of the opinion that people should be able to express themselves um but you got to realize like if you gave me a twitter account when i was 15 years old and you you let me tweet at mike baker i'm going to say some [ __ ] horrible [ __ ] to you dude if i if i was like a 15 year old kid and they let them have their [ __ ] phones in class right yeah so if the teacher's not paying attention and i'm bored out of my mind because i don't give a [ __ ] about math and i'm sitting there in my class i'm going to just tweet at mike baker yeah if mike baker bites
and you know and people do bite you know yeah they bite oh this mo what did you say you son of a [ __ ] and then you know you got fun you got fun on your hands you're tweeting people you got something on the line yeah you got it you got you got a trout on the line right there yeah people love to just make up a completely fake story and and see if the that makes it into the news they get like there's been a a whole thing where a hundred people at least have texted me and and sent me emails and contacted friends because they heard trump was coming on my podcast and the the source of it is a fake trump account on twitter that said i'm going on the joe it's a trump's face and it's a fake account that said i'm going on the joe rogan podcast soon and i think it came out of uh the fact that trump was on the kneel boys podcast and then youtube removed that podcast they they they pulled the podcast which is you know that's one of the craziest things you can do because then everyone's going to talk about how youtube removed remove that podcast you can't even have trump talk right right well former president of the united states you you can't let him talk somebody did send me apparently not but somebody did send me a uh uh a note saying that he was going to be on your show that's crazy yeah and i thought um i've got yeah not really sure if that's the case somebody's it's not the case i'll send you the uh look uh i am i'm i have decided that uh i am very apolitical when it comes to uh the future and like in political candidates uh i don't want to have that kind of an influence and i don't want to i don't want to i want to be someone who can watch and observe i don't want to be someone who's actually affecting this yeah there's a certain amount i'm i'm affecting no matter what i do and i i'm trying to find this [ __ ] trump thing do you know where it is jamie yeah so it's a it's a fake tweet we can just clear this this is the fake tweet ah okay donald trump is scheduled to go on joe rogan podcast who said this well he got it from somewhere else though he got it from from this fake one that i got this was the first one that i saw
did it has a hundred oh i got a thousand likes on it yeah i got the original one now hold on a second here i'll text it to you this is this is the one that somebody sent me this is not real i don't know who this person is but who is this person that's a fake baron trump account well kids get a mustache you know you don't think that's really him i yeah i know it could be yeah it'd be a very uh clever yeah but they also put their also gmail address today yeah well send that guy a lot of dick pics because he's just making [ __ ] up so i sent i sent jamie the original one and this is the original one that got sent out and you know look this guy because the other one though so the normies and the casuals this guy put up first the other one was put up three hours before this one oh really okay other trump accounts started tweeting it to give it more validity because it looked like a trump account was tweeting uh well yeah you're right that only has eleven thousand likes twelve thirty another one was like yeah i you know as uh uh i've i've decided like what i'm actually interested in is talking to people i'm not actually i'm not nearly as interested in affecting things and unfortunately so many [ __ ] people paying attention i'm doing it the same way i've always done it but now there's more people paying attention well i'll be honest with you i never thought you were trying to affect anything i always said what you were doing was having people on asking them questions having them talk asking more questions i mean that always seemed and so regardless of where they are on whatever spectrum you're talking about it seems like a pretty straightforward formula right yeah but it doesn't matter to people because of the numbers the sheer numbers of people that are paying attention you know yeah yeah and also it's independent the fact that it's this big
and you know this is the [ __ ] skeleton crew yeah millions of people are paying attention yeah it's it's a good crew it's a skeleton solid a good crew solid crew tammy's the best yeah but it's just the idea that one person can have that much influence is disturbing to a lot of folks who would like these giant corporations that are controlled by the pharmaceutical companies and whoever the [ __ ] else is paying their advertising to decide what can and can be talked about and not not be said or not discussed and you know what's misinformation and what's real information it's like well it's it's you know what it is everybody we we are living soft lives now yeah and this is one of my favorite topics and so we all have the time on our hands to be offended by everything where before we were out there trying to collect some food and some clean water i i'm not saying we were trying to do that 10 years ago but we've gotten to the point now where you know we can all be just offended as [ __ ] over anything there was a free speech uh uh conversation debate held at uh where yale uh just just may have been this past week and it was interrupted by a large protest from a bunch of the law students there who objected to the fact that there was a free speech debate that is [ __ ] madness it's [ __ ] madness and it's dangerous and these [ __ ] kids they don't realize how goddamn dangerous it is when you stifle debate then who decides what can and can't be talked about it's not going to be you i got news for you and these these woke kids who think because they scream the loudest and they pull fire alarms and they stop discussions and they stifle debates they think that they have more control than they really do but what they do do in that is they set a precedent and that precedent is you can stifle information that makes you uncomfortable you can stifle discussions where people have points of view that you don't agree with and you think you're right so you think you should be able to stop those points of view
that is not the way to do it it's just not it's never been the way to do it it's a dangerous precedent to set because then when more power is uh acquired by whoever whether it's social media companies or the government or whoever the [ __ ] it is they get to establish a narrative and that narrative might not be honest and that's a real problem and the only way to find out what's real and what's not real is to let people talk you know i had on uh daryl davis i don't know if you know who he is but he's uh he's a musician who personally himself has taken more than 200 klansmen and neo-nazis and got them to completely abandon their ideology and hand him their robes he's this really interesting guy because he's he's a brilliant musician but through his music and doing these uh concerts and shows he's done he he ran into a klansman back in the day and had a conversation with this guy and the guy and he's black and the guy was like i've never talked to a black guy i've never had a drink with a black guy before he's like what he goes yeah i'm in the clan he thought the guy was joking he goes the guy shows him his clan id card there's id cards i guess that's fantastic who knew i guess they don't trust that you're really in the claim until you see what the id card in the decoder ring this is daryl that's daryl there well he was on uh last week and he was on with bill ottman who is the ceo of minds and minds is a decentralized social media company that does not believe in censorship they they stop threats and doxxing and things along those lines but they believe that the only way to really sort out what's right and what's wrong is to let people communicate and daryl has the [ __ ] patience of a saint i mean the man is a saint he he what he's done is extraordinary he's affected people personally through his own intelligence and his own ability to stay calm and communicate with people who have ridiculous ideas and give them better and through these conversations he's got them to change their minds well and then think about the multiplying effect of that right maybe people say well a couple hundred people but
all the people those folks know that right they can impact their families their behavior their actions and impact their friends i mean then come on here and then establish that and and have these conversations on here which reach millions and millions of people and they hear about it and they talk and then they they find out these conversations that this guy's had with these people and it makes them think yeah you can't just stifle communication and think that you know there's dangerous thoughts out there and we have to stop them and that's how the aclu used to fight for the right jewish lawyers used to fight for the right rights of nazis to express themselves the most important people in society fight for their right to express themselves because the the the opposite of that is more dangerous stifling speech is more dangerous yeah well i'm not sure how we how we walk the dog back uh from where we are right now um i did see an article i don't remember where the hell it was and it was just just the other day that was written i think it was an op-ed piece that basically argued that part of the problem are it started out by saying why are young folks so susceptible to disinformation well the problem was what they were saying was their susceptible disinformation from one side right so imagine it was absolutely it was written by a progressive uh author and and as it turns out their argument was we spent too much time on stem on science and technology english math not enough on philosophy and critical thinking in teaching kids that so that we should be teaching more of that and the problem with stem is that it teaches you know finite answers or definitive answers and doesn't teach critical thinking i i i read the whole thing and i well it's critical theory not critical thinking yeah because critical thinking allows you to look at all sorts of different subjects and different you know different facts and and what's what are the variables and what are the influences and what's going on here yeah lets you look at just try to look at things critically but
critical theory and you know is a lot of it is like progressive ideology it's they have a dogma and when you have a dogma it's not much different than religion in a lot of ways where you you don't want anybody to have an opposing perspective that challenges the dogma and that's not good if you're if you're [ __ ] if your ideology doesn't stand up to scrutiny it's not a good ideology and the only way to find that out is to apply it to scrutiny or apply scrutiny to it just test it that was the idea that's right yeah yeah i mean that's that's the whole concept and that's why i mean science that was always an interesting debate during the past couple of years no the whole point of science is to constantly question it right and and to test your theories and but anytime you'd say anything during the course of the the past two years it was like well you got to you know i got to [ __ ] believe the science yeah well that doesn't mean you just take the word of somebody in a public health position that means you listen to it take it on board and then compare it and test it and ask other questions right you but you're right i mean we've gotten to this point where it became a religion almost well john abramson is a guy that i had on the podcast that really opened my eyes to how these things work in terms of pharmaceutical companies and one of the things that he said is that when studies are done that the people the the scientists that are conducting the studies do not have access to the raw data they have access to the interpretation of the data that's provided to them by the pharmaceutical companies you know what that sounds like intel collection it will tell the whole process well also the thing the difference is intel they're not personally making billions of dollars off of that information yeah and then they don't also do something that winds up being incorrect and costs the lives of tens of thousands of americans by hiding information and lying i mean unless you want to talk about weapons of mass
destruction and things along those lines because well there's that there's a little bit of that okay um well pfizer came out and said you know i think uh maybe we need a fourth booster that's moderna but modernity that came out oh is it pfizer modern is trying to get um they're trying to get fda maybe fires have done it as well but modern you know pfizer you're right and then because i remember their stock i took a look at their stock to see what it was doing shortly after that statement and it went up right that's both of them yeah so they both have done okay so they seek authorization for boosters for older americans well look if the [ __ ] data is real and if the date but you've got to have access to the real data i mean you if if if the data shows that uh another booster for older americans is beneficial then yeah they should have access to it yeah but the what abramson is saying you don't get access to the raw data you get access to the pharmaceutical company's interpretation of the data and the and they oftentimes skew that in a way that would be more profitable for them and so he talked about there's a a product that was on the market called vioxx and i have a friend who took this stuff and had a stroke because of it this stuff they knew was going to cause all sorts of cardiovascular issues with people and blood clots and the like what was it designed to do it was it's an anti-inflammation drug that wasn't any better than non-steroidal anti-inflammatories like advil and ibuprofen and abramson was part of the team that you know was prosecuting this and it was part of the team that was in court about this and they showed that they knew that this was going to cause these events and somewhere in the neighborhood of 50 to 60 000 americans died because of their interpretation of what this stuff was versus the reality of what the stuff was and one of them was a buddy of mine who got a [ __ ] stroke because he had knee problems when you think about the pharmaceutical industry they go out i mean there's a whole chain of then the sales reps going
out to the doctors you know and introducing these new you know uh therapeutics and saying hey this is a great opportunity you know and yeah i i don't profess to understand that that uh well my wife's mom and so i found out about this years ago where she was explaining how the doctors would um the pharmaceutical reps rather would take the doctors and the nurses out for these expensive dinners and they they're not allowed to bribe you but they get real close so it's like what you were talking it's like what you were talking about with um you know what you do to an asset that's how that's how they treat it and i'm sure there are some bribes being i'm not naive but for the most part the way they do it is they sweet talk and i have a friend who's a good friend who actually owns a pharmacy and he explained to me that before that he was a pharmaceutical representative and he used to do that and he was told listen i want you to know their [ __ ] kids names you're going to show up at the baseball games you're going to cheer them on you're going to give them gifts you're going to do whatever the [ __ ] you can do to get close to these people so that when something comes up and maybe they could prescribe your drug they'll be more inclined to do that and that is the way you sell more drugs it's a product yeah it's like you're pushing 10 or anything else you look good in that car that car 1965 mgb looks bad [ __ ] car is great i know you were making fun of it the last time i was here [ __ ] it's got 100 horsepower oh my god it's crazy does it even have 100 it's got like 72. [ __ ] goddamn don't say that out loud uh yeah we weren't born here right no no it's important just outside of london the original the original spot the mother country god bless the queen but it's you know it's the only way we i mean this could bring it back to the censorship thing the only way we find out all these things whether it's information about pharmaceutical drug companies or information about the influence of foreign bodies on students or you have to [ __ ] talk about things yeah you have to have open communication and the only way you find out if
someone's full of [ __ ] or if someone's lying or someone's withholding information is to let people talk and let people sort things through the if the the truth is messy there's a lot going on in the world and you can't stifle information and debate it's not healthy for anybody and you can't do it just because you think your side is correct it's not good it's not it's not what's amazing about a free society and you can't decide that there's certain ugly aspects of this society that you think should be suppressed because when you do that then people can decide your aspect of society is ugly your perspective is ugly if we get a [ __ ] hardcore putin type leader running this country and they start cracking down on legitimate journalists that are exposing corruption then you get into dangerous circumstances and this is the problem that i had with like the new york post article on the biden hunter biden laptop being suppressed it's not that i'm a trump supporter i'm not i didn't vote for him i didn't vote for any republican ever in my life but you're looking at something that's real information and you're hiding it from people because you don't like the result that you think is going to come out of that information that's not that's not how we're supposed to be doing things well i think that's and that and it's all part and parcel i think it's why there's so much dissatisfaction you know there's so much distrust uh because i think people are starting to realize right regardless again where they are in the spectrum both sides have an equal ability to think i don't think i'm seeing or hearing or being told accurate information here and and you're right i mean putin look [ __ ] if you you know you talk about uh you know biden and and uh his age or you talk about any you know any presidential term and the fact that we roll it over you look at the opposite side of it putin got into into power in 99 right so yeltsin that's crazy yeah yeltsin nominated or made him uh acting president in 99 so 23 [ __ ] years of running that country yeah well he he took a break and saw in 08 as he was the prime minister not really a break and uh
that for four years and now he's been in office running that country literally since 99 and they've changed the the rules of the game uh he actually if his health stays and he's whatever 69 70 69 he uh he can be in office until 2036. well he has access to the cutting edge technology and science and and and medical advances that guy can be healthy as [ __ ] for a long time we're we live in a different world now you know and i can say this from personal experience being a 54 year old guy when i was a kid 54 year old men were dead yeah you don't look a day over like 53. thank you yeah appreciate that welcome but the what you can do with your body is so different yeah if you have access to hyperbaric chambers and human growth hormone and testosterone replacement and you know nmn and nad and all these different things that lengthen telomeres and improve your biological age i mean there's a whole science behind this now what's it what's the lifespan now for uh in america us male 1 well it still sucks because we drink too much and we smoke too much as i put down and we eat garbage food and you know the there's a vast majority of us are sedentary and uh are overweight and we we've talked about this on the podcast ad nauseam but it was this it's a real problem the metabolic health of the average american is piss poor and it's because most people first of all they're stressed out they work too much they don't have a lot of time you know and they also haven't made it a priority to take care of their physical health but if you were a guy like putin and you had boundless resources i mean by all accounts that guy is worth an astounding amount of money possibly the wealthiest uh russian alive possibly even more so than than some of his buddies who have spent a number of years now uh making him the richest person i was going to talk to you about that so what is this whole deal with the oligarchs and what do you think is the strategy behind that because all these guys are like trying to hide their yachts and some of them
have had their yachts taken away from them first of all where do those yachts go and who gets access to them now right how does that happen my business there were a handful of times in the over the past years where we were asked to go after and seize a an asset like a yacht and it's it's good fun but it's uh we don't get to keep them unfortunately which does uh you know whoever send them off yeah i mean whoever it depends on why it's being seized if it's being seized you know for failure to pay then you know it goes back to whoever's you know holding the note but uh but like now when they're they're seizing yachts government you know like france was involved in picking up a couple uh just recently uh party on them now yeah i'm thinking my crohn is on board one of those yachts having a time of his life but but this is i mean you touched on a really important part of what the hell is happening right now is because uh one of the reasons putin just made these comments the other day right he came out he talked about you know the people that aren't real russians they're scum they're traitors what really set him off because sometimes it's it's a little simpler than we imagined kind of going back to what we talked about before we kind of overlook the obvious in terms of the why he acts the way he does part of this is he when he came into power nobody really gave him any any you know thought right and he'd been a like a deputy mayor in leningrad and he showed up he proved himself fairly capable um got himself tight with uh yeltsin uh was appointed as head of the fsb you know the old uh kgb the domestic service and um fsb is the new version of the kgb yeah yeah yeah and uh so they they uh he he sort of found himself in this position rising to the top and one of the first things he did which surprised a lot of people was he reigned in the oligarch supposedly right he called them all together and he says you know [ __ ] you he took over uh media companies he understood the importance of shutting down you know media that was possibly in opposition to him as as he grew in strength
um reigned them in and you know there was it's really been other than horikowski there's been really nobody that's that's gotten out of line over all these years now one of the things the oligarchs didn't exchange was you know help essentially hide manage money on his behalf and now what's happened recently since the ukrainian invasion invasion of ukraine is that some of these guys uh michael friedman uh avin um who else uh abramovic they've they've come out and they haven't criticized putin directly but they've criticized the war said no we shouldn't be doing this we've got to stop this you know we've got to stop the bloodshed stop this we shouldn't be fighting the ukrainians that as an example it really sets putin off right because he's like [ __ ] you i made you in his mind he made them right in their minds they're thinking no [ __ ] not we you know [ __ ] knuckle to use a name they uh they made him or they made him the wealthiest guy right and so there's this there's this other element and again you're always trying to piece together why the [ __ ] what's because you're trying to again beaver down into say okay what are his plans and intentions what's he gonna do next to know that you gotta you gotta get inside his head and so part of this is understanding why he's doing things and why he's thinking so anyway then he comes out and he says [ __ ] you and your villas i don't mind you having phyllis well of course next he's got you know he's got some really nice places right uh spread around doesn't he have some gigantic billion dollar castle that he's sort of denied owning but they they do believe that he has it oh yeah yeah there was some like newspaper report on it this massive compound his his assets are remarkable right and a lot of them are are are very well very well hidden in part because he's used these smart guys who spend a lot of time hiding their own money right and so anyway this this point is is is putin just kind of went off so that's what he's going
off about he's going off about this yeah he's also he's also had some you know some of the military command um and uh come out and express concern there's some anecdotal evidence it's again the intel solid intel you know is it's not as good as it is we'd like but there's anecdotal evidence that there's you know an increasing amount of discomfort within the command structure and within his uh security services that this is the wrong this we shouldn't have done this this is the wrong tact where is this going it's uh it's impacting the russian people in a big way he's [ __ ] over the russian population right he's creating this this situation where you know he's isolating the country right and he's really putting them um as sort of the uh you know he's almost creating a situation and this is i'm going off on a bit of a tangent here with china where china is going to start looking at russia the same way they look at north korea which is uh for [ __ ] sake we got to take care of these people now right we got to we're going to be the ones supplying now china looks at this and goes yeah fine and for for the time being well it looks like a you know like you know they look at russia like it's a costco now you know we can get oil and gas you know on the cheap because the price is discounted now because there's not a lot of buyers or there's fewer buyers uh agricultural products uh minerals so china's looking at it like a a place where they can go they don't look at russia as an equal right they don't look and think oh we gotta you know we gotta rise to the top and one of the things we have to do is get past russia they've already done that right um but they i think putin is he's strategically overreached here and he also doesn't understand how that relationship works right he's imagining somehow that that he's on par with china and that they're going to have this relationship china is she is only going to work with russia and maintain relatively close ties for as long as
it's in china's interest that's it you don't think putin knows this i don't he seems to have been mistaken on a number of things when it comes to assessment of the situation with with ukraine so you got to wonder how good is the information reaching him how isolated is he and so this this this understanding of the relationship between he and g i think jesus looking at this and going this is a great opportunity for us right now now if it gets uglier in ukraine if things really really get ugly then i think you're going to see some daylight between you know she's going to look and go okay you know politically economically it's now in our interests to create some space there right and not they're not going to change their their situation with russia because we threaten them with sanctions you know threatening there's this whole thing that the biden administration is doing right now where they're talking about well we're and think we're we've threatened them with secondary sanctions if they supply military you know hardware to to russia i think that's a complete misread of how you should be dealing with she in the regime right now you don't threaten him publicly maybe you talk to him privately in conversation but don't don't don't blast it all over the airwaves so this is what we're doing i think they're doing it i don't know why maybe just look tough do you would you think that that is what's that a function of like who's who's pulling those strings that's is that the intelligence agencies is that the is that biden's administration themselves like who's who's making those decisions well the intel services job would be to be providing as good an intel as well-sourced intel as possible on what the chinese regime's thinking right and then that they would use that the administration would factor that in when they're thinking about a strategy and how to deal with uh with with g so who ultimately would make those decisions though so the intel agencies provide the white house would make that the white house the white house would
make the decision and then it would be typically i mean like when we're talking about china you would see it mostly through uh anthony blinken in the the state department right um but you know lincoln's getting out there and publicly berating china and threatening sanctions again i'm not saying we don't talk to them privately and explain how you know our viewers and what we want them to understand from our perspective you do that you'd be very clear with the chinese but i think that's right i can't have biden do that right um well he's he's he's starting to do it but yeah the problem with president biden is you know i don't know that um when he says something it never really seems to be said with much conviction right and so and his actions in the past i mean look you know if you're if we're talking just about putin here putin knows biden's team you know to some degree because he's seen biden he's seen some of these cats on on biden's team during the obama administration right and so if you think about when putin's been really aggressive it was during the obama administration and now right so he knows he feels he knows what he's dealing with and yeah you have to assume that chinese do the same assessment but i guess my point being is the xi is doing a daily risk gain calculation in terms of their relationship with russia and they're saying okay is it still in our best interest and as soon as it's not from g's perspective and sell in the china's self-interest to maintain you know sort of this this notion of of closer ties with russia then he'll back off and you know again i think he views it right now as an opportunity and always if it's an opportunity to kind of poke at us he'll take it i have this uh screenshot that someone sent me of uh the way the the people on the left were talking about about uh the ukraine
uh situation before the war i'm gonna send this to you jamie sorry um but this is this is one of the things that's so weird is that they were very disparaging of ukraine and they were talking about the massive corruption of ukraine and how horrible it was over there and now all sudden they're looking at it like they're heroes yeah i mean that's the same the same exact people yeah which is this is what's confusing this is how the west was covering ukraine before the wars welcome to ukraine the most corrupt nation in europe that's fox a new europe ukrainian president rule becomes increasingly corrupt and authoritarian ukrainian president zelinski deepens alliance with the far right and this is one of the things that you know we're hearing from people on both sides that they have a nazi problem over there there's a lot of nazis involved in ukraine and there was something that i saw on facebook where facebook allowed no i don't know who the this is what's so confusing about you know what they call the fog of war it's not necessarily really the fog of war it's the fog of the distribution of information is that we're supposed to just completely take a hard right turn or a veer away a hard angle away from the narrative that was being pushed just a couple of years ago and we're supposed to ignore all this stuff now and i don't know what's right and what's wrong because there was just something about facebook allowing likes yeah facebook allows war posts urging violence against russian invaders like what yeah i know i know i saw that [ __ ] is that like what is that well i mean both things can be true right you know the ukraine's had a serious significant corruption problem over the years they got a really interesting history people should spend time reading the history of ukraine and understanding what the the troubles have been just recently even with corruption trying to get that under control and it can also be true that all right
uh in terms of so yeah even so right um you know what putin's done is you know reprehensible and needs to be appropriately dealt with so you're kind of it's a good example of working in the real world right i mean the saudi relationship is a good example also we're going to bring that up yeah us us uh uh activity with the saudis or another good example is the fact that we're we're working with putin's government in our ongoing negotiations with iran yeah because the current administration the biden administration is so keen to to rejuvenate that uh 2015 iran uh deal and so we're actually while we're doing all this well we're calling him a war criminal and we're providing you know we just provide another aid package full of at4s and javelins and stingers and um and helmets helmets always a good thing uh we're also working with them to try to negotiate this deal so we're using what we're referring to now as a war criminal as our liaison with the iranians to try to strike a deal with the iranians or to get them back on board and into this deal and people look at that and rightly so we're thinking what the [ __ ] but it's it's how it's always worked right you you know it's it's a very pragmatic approach i suppose in one in one sense and you know you can't you can't say okay i'm going to be i'm going to be the leader of the free world and only do things by emotion only only two things if they're morally you know the high ground right i'm never going to deal with people who uh are you know reprehensible at times yeah this what one of the things that's happening now is because of social media and because there's so much access to information is that all this stuff is brutally transparent that yeah like the united states is contacting uh saudi arabia and and trying to broker some sort of a deal now
we're hearing that saudi arabia is considering using the chinese currency instead of american dollars right for their oil right which scares the [ __ ] out of people and the fact that i mean i don't know if it's true but um that saudi arabia is not taking biden's calls no that wasn't that was a one of those things that flew out there and is that what it was yeah it did i don't think there's any basis to that there was some talk about oh my god the uae and saudis are saying we're not taking your calls anymore yeah i saw it because there was a trevor noah sketch where he or you know a little monologue thing where he was doing where he was saying that this would never happen if you know that trump was the president they would take his calls like you can't just not take his calls i know who's there it's president i'm busy yeah yeah but this idea that all of a sudden now we want to do a deal with saudi arabia and saudi arabia's like you know what how about [ __ ] you we're going to do a deal with china and that this is well you're pointing to it i mean that's a god there's so many things that are you know going on in the world that are they're all [ __ ] connected because the world is is much smaller than it ever used to be but but the saudis have been working with the chinese the chinese regime has been providing the saudis with uh missile technology assistance right and developing their their capabilities and they've been increasing their economic cooperation at the same time and this is another example of this you know what the [ __ ] people are you know it seems like a strange board game the chinese are also increasing significantly their economic cooperation with iran right so from chinese perspective hey and from the regime from xi's perspective that makes perfect sense it's in china's self-interest right yeah we're selling you know missile technology and we're we're we're getting a better toe hold into uh into saudis capitalizing on chaos capitalizing on chaos and at the
same time we're dealing with the iranians they don't see any conflict there because again it's all in their self-interest it's a very simple calculation from their perspective when it's not they won't do it when it is they'll do it and so this is you know that but there's so there's so much to unpack there because they're selling technology to the saudis that they originally got from the russians right so the the weapons technology transfer over the years has always been essentially from russia to china right now china is they advance the ball right so they're they're better at it than the russians are you know because they do what they always do they take all they suck up all that information and all that that that research and development and then they just expanded they got far more resource than russian so now they're they're much better now russia turns to china and says we could sure use some assistance right uh there's a there's a lot of [ __ ] going on out there just beyond the sort of horrible conflict that's taking place in ukraine right now there's all these things taking place on the world stage look at india india is you know india and china have refused to say anything bad about the uh invasion right and i and they're not calling it a war they're not calling an invasion by putin they're not calling it and they're just they're they're trying to stay well out of it and india's got a long relationship obviously in history with russia but you know we we imagine somehow that okay these sanctions are gonna are gonna destroy russia and over a long period of time the sanctions we put in place are going to really [ __ ] that economy and it's going to hurt the russian people a great deal but india and china look at it and go gives us an opportunity you think india is going to stop supporting most of the indian population you know strongly supports putin and and russia because they've had this relationship and russia has provided india with all sorts of military technology and capability and so it's
it's i guess and also andy looks at and goes hey now we get oil and gas at a discount keep buying it why is our gas so high because one of the things that i was seeing was that putin was mocking the idea that the gas prices in america have anything to do with the crisis in ukraine and he was saying that you know the united states only gets three percent of its oil from russia and the idea that the that we're responsible he he was saying russia that this was responsible for the increase in the price of gas and the destabilization of uh inflation that has it's nonsense well it's i mean is that in part no i mean recent recent price increases or fluctuation in both the price of oil and what you're paying at the pump right you can attribute to sort of the chaos and the instability that took place once the invasion started right once it became clear that there was this was about to kick off and and ever since but how does that raise prices how does that work well it's it's a world market right and so traders are out there they're they're looking at at everything that goes on in the world right so china as an example look they've locked down right they're starting to open up uh shenzhen and a little bit but they've got millions of people now under new lockdowns because of covid and they're they've got that it's the omicron omicron omicron uh and so that can impact because now suddenly what happens that people are looking at the chinese economy is going to slow down and in fact it has they came out and said you know our their numbers our expected growth is it's actually going to be slower than it's been in in decades or so i think they'll look at that and go okay that's got to be factored into how we're going to price uh you know crude and or petroleum products and so or they look at um they look at the the iran deal and the iran negotiations and they think oh you know price came down below a hundred
dollars a barrel in part because there was like it looked like the people were making noises like we're going to get a deal with iran that was going to open up the spigot and so we're going to be able to replace the amount of oil that's going to be missing from the market because of the sanctions on russia so the traders are you know globally look at everything that's taken place in the world and they set the prices right and it's not it's not the oil companies thinking here we're going to set the price of crude that's why it's it's such a fallacy when you know somebody in washington dc uh comes out and goes are they they're profiteering you know no i'm not naive could profiteering maybe be taking place you know in in the oil business and elsewhere well sure there's a possibility and you always you know you want to be aware of it and and be focused on that but that's not how prices get set and so it's one of those simplistic ideas you know it's we're going to stick it to the man it's got to be the oil company's fault that i'm paying seven eight nine dollars a gallon now and you know so but the the gas was going up you know ever since biden came into office i think again i don't hate to disappear on rabbit holes but every ever since president body came into office their initial plan was to end the fossil fuel business and they were very clear about that right they made it very known we're gonna we're gonna wrap up our dependence on fossil fuels is that physically possible not in any short or midterm no it's not and so not unless you wanna well no it's not we can't replace it what are we going to replace it with at this stage we don't have people think well solar and wind yeah no but the capacity is not there yet when they say that so it's also not just that it's stopping production uh and stopping uh pumping of
american oil right well what that does is fracking or at least minimizing it well it it it yeah i mean they layered on regulatory you know concerns on to the industry after they got in office right so that because what what does that do that tells oil companies out there we don't have a future in five or ten year investments right okay if if you're going to kill this industry what's our incentive to invest a lot of money look they're talking about exxon mobil oh exxon mobil made you know like 23 billion dollars in profit in uh in in 2021 well you know what they lost in 2020 they lost about 22.3 billion dollars in in that that was their loss so there's a they've got to invest in the future i'm not i'm not here to show for oil companies but i'm just saying this is how it works right and so if they're told there's no future in long-term investment well guess what you know okay they're gonna they're gonna start shutting production down they're gonna they're not gonna invest in new new opportunities and so yeah that's gonna have an impact and i think what what the buy administration did that was was uh incorrect was it not the simple thought that energy in today's world equals national security it is a top national security priority right there's no doubt about it and so therefore if you think energy is a critical national security concern in this world therefore it's not unreasonable to think we should do everything possible to achieve or get as close as possible to achieve energy independence that should be our plan you can still at the same [ __ ] time you can invest in alternative forms of energy you can do both at the same time but there seems to be this thought with some folks that no no you can't do that you gotta you gotta throw all in on alternative energy sources and just and [ __ ] the fossil fuels well you can do both and eventually yeah hopefully one day we get there you know to to you know yay green energy but it's not going to happen it's probably in our lifetimes yeah it's a long process yeah so how how much have we decreased our reliance on in energy that the united states
produces yeah i don't know i i don't know the exact numbers but look we we've been pulling in on a daily basis from russia as an example 670 000 barrels a day right i mean um if you think about you know our concern is how do we make that up could we make that up by not having um kind of not not not having put our boot on the neck of of the energy business here again not saying we shouldn't be pursuing other good god i mean you can i keep going back to the we can multitask we have that ability in fact oil companies spend a great deal of money researching alternative fuels because it's a capitalist motive they understand that if they can get there they're going to make money right right and so it's like it's like battery development whoever develops the next best smallest battery is going to win so you know it it shouldn't be that hard to assume but the problem is we we send people to washington who then just throw [ __ ] on the wall right because it seems like a popular thing to say right and so the next thing you know we're talking about let's do a windfall tax maybe what and now there's some talk about we should you know price cap you know oh how about we cap the price of of of uh gas so that we're going to set price controls and so you can't charge any more than this and we tried that right and the problem is some of these people that that are up in washington dc aren't old enough to remember but in the 70s right they they had price controls on gas which we also had long lines for gas and we had all sorts of problems in terms of gas and it and the resulting it didn't do any good in terms of lowering prices long term and then they finally released that and they finally said okay take all the price controls off and prices started to come down because again it's a supply demand it's a market place and so again it doesn't doesn't mean you're against uh eventually figuring out how to get rid of fossil fuels i think everybody who's reasonable can say yeah that's a good worthy goal it's how you
do it so that you don't [ __ ] over your own country so what are the factors like one of them was the keystone pipeline right well yeah i mean there's some argument over that because like the worry is the the environment that's what i mean that was one of the things that when the bad administration came in a lot of people that are environmentally conscious were very happy because you know they were talking about the green new deal they were talking about doing things for the environment preparing for the future of this country for the future of the children and not leaving a poison polluted world because a bunch of people were greedy right but what you're saying is that if correct me if i'm wrong there's it's much more complicated than that and that our reliance on oil is kind of absolute we have a certain amount of reliance on oil you can't just erase that immediately and you know natural gas i mean people you know imagine they're going to plug their electric car in you got to get that electricity from somewhere right now right and i mean you know what about nuclear well and that that also you know causes some heads to explode right because they you know god forbid we should think about nuclear energy we're much more capable now than we were 20 years ago of of uh producing safe systems you know to produce nuclear energy but it's that's again very emotive right it's a super emotive subject and so okay i get it but we should be looking at all these things we can we can have this you know sort of balanced energy approach with a goal eventually of getting rid of fossil fuels you can do that but it's it's sort of that all or nothing simplistic mentality that you know seems to be in a lot of other areas not just not just energy but anyway it's it's it is interesting but i think um we look at you look at uh what europe did and europe's reliance on russia for energy and if you don't think that putin knew what he was doing in terms of driving you know this this uh uh european dependence on russian oil and
gas he knew exactly what he was doing he's he's considered energy as a weapon for a long time at this point and so what's he doing he's he's he's being called a war criminal by countries that are in a position where they don't have an option they got to keep paying them right they got to keep putting money in his in his coffers if oil is up where it is now it's over a hundred dollars a barrel again it was up to what 139 at one point uh he can afford this military adventurism right he can afford to do what he's doing when oil is down at 30 35 bucks a barrel he can't he that because of his dependence on oil and gas petroleum products as a revenue when it's like that you know so in our minds we should have been thinking okay again from a geopolitical standpoint what do we have to do to ensure our national security security of our allies everything else that's a that's a part of it that's a factor that we should be thinking about but man we didn't so [ __ ] it so boy yeah what how does this end this is what's uh disturbing to someone like me who doesn't know [ __ ] when i'm when i'm looking at this i'm going where how does this guy get out of this like how if he really did make a massive miscalculation he thought that ukraine would fall quickly and you know there's yeah talk of i don't know how many russian troops have been killed but you know that's a good that's a good point we talked about intel and sort of lack of intel intel estimates are you know anywhere from a couple thousand to ten thousand right which that gap anytime you look at a gap like that in intel assessments whether it's that or whether it's well how far the iranians away from breakout in terms of creating a weapon you know and it says well a month away or 12 months away that what that tells you is that your intel source is really solid until they're lacking and you need to tighten that up but uh so you know uh russian troops killed you know some estimates are are hovering around seven thousand or so but yeah you gotta take that with a grain of salt
because the intel is not really there um that's a lot though that's a lot it's a it's it's it's more yeah it's i mean think about it he committed about 200 000 troops to this uh invasion and if he's lost seven to ten thousand already including a handful of top commanders right so he said he's had generals killed in the field right i mean that's that's an astounding thing if you think just about that alone he said i think four at this point four uh uh commanding officers general staff killed in the field and what that would imply is that they're putting themselves into positions where they can get you know whacked out in the field because things aren't working properly right they shouldn't be out you know at the front of some convoy where some sniper's gonna be able to take them out they should have much better command and control uh systems in place the communication should be better but clearly they've had all sorts of problems here and and that's just one again one of those small indications of of some of the difficulties that they've been experiencing so and do you think that this is because is this because people aren't willing to be straight with putin because they fear the consequences or is this just that they didn't know how fiercely the ukraine's ukrainian people would fight uh yeah i think at the 30 000 foot level their risk threat assessments were way off right way and and which is astounding because you think about the ability for the russians their intel service in the military to have assets or information on you know what's going on in ukraine i mean it's the long history the ties between the two and their ability to place assets in there over the years and to understand you know what what's going on and you would have assumed that they would have had uh recon in uh ukraine you know um for months leading up to this telling them about defensive strategies about you know the the build up in the ukraine what are
they going to be facing what's it going to look like and so yeah i think it's i think he's he uh he he was given bad intel or he ignored it i suspect it was more along the lines of giving bad intel in part because i think he's distrustful perhaps he um doesn't you know he's not i don't know it's it's again it's speculation because you know the only person who really knows what putin's thinking is putin so when you see these videos and i've seen quite a few of them it's hard to know what's real because there was one video that was being touted as evidence that turned out to be footage from a video game do you see that there was like some dogfight scenario that was it turned out to actually be footage from a video game yeah and this is i mean this is a problem with the world we're living in today right it's it's there's so much chaos in terms of like accurate information but there's these videos of russian convoys and there's these uh essentially they're using guerrilla tactics or hiding behind buildings and shooting these uh grenade launchers and missiles at these tanks as they roll by and blowing them up and killing these russians is all that stuff real yeah that's that's real one one of the things that has emerged from this if you're just looking at the battle spaces you know tanks may not be a thing anymore right tanks were tanks were critical you know world war one they showed up and and um you know thank you winston churchill for you know pushing that along um but now you know with the the available uh you know systems that are in place and we've been providing the javelins javelin is probably the most effective uh anti-tank weapon out there at this stage anyway um and it's proven it's it's it's mobile right it's guided it's extremely effective and so that has definitely changed the calculation right and i don't think they were anticipating that uh they probably weren't anticipating oh they should have
how could they not anticipate the effectiveness of the stingers right they faced that in afghanistan right that's what one of the the key elements that got them out of afghanistan was you know the ability for the mushadin to shoot their you know platforms out of the sky and so they certainly should have understood what that meant but so but you but you're right also in the sense that you got to be really careful with the information that's coming out and and and people should always say okay let me just understand what this source is that i'm looking at i'm looking at this video or i'm hearing this report you know is it accurate where is it coming from and that can be tough right trying to trace it back to is it a legitimate source um but yeah it's it's a it's a bizarre world i mean we we kind of went through watching war on tv right uh during the you know the the iraq uh uh 2003 and and on um and even before then the first gulf war so we kind of got used to a little bit but this is really playing out in in social media and it's really playing out and it and it creates emotions right and so people start and that to go to your point you know we're covering it two years ago or ukraine was covered in an entirely different way but now because of of the way that people get their information the speed and then and that creates this emotion and so it's it is a it's a strange [ __ ] world what do you think putin thought was going to happen i mean when you're when you're driving these tanks down you know many many miles on a straight road where everybody knows where they're coming from everybody knows where they're going right why did he think that that would just be a way to or why do these generals or whoever is in charge of making these military plans why do they think that that was a viable option to just drive these convoys of military vehicles and and personnel carriers and fuel tanks and
tankers and yeah ah well i'm sure that's the same question putin probably asked his generals before he let them go uh is he letting him go or is he like putting him in the same place where they put jack ma for a few months yeah yeah exactly uh i think he's uh he's putting someone under house arrest um you know i it's it's a very good question the russian military was supposedly going through a professionalism or sorry sort of this upgrade over the past decade and a half or so it doesn't appear to have worked very well he's got a lot of of uh of of uh apparent issues with the training certainly experience right they got a lot of young people who you know gone into the military they haven't been in combat they certainly haven't been in urban combat which is the most [ __ ] up you know situation and so he's dealing with a lot of of uh of uh issues um but you're right you would have imagined that the planning and i think that's one of the reasons why you're starting to see again if we can believe a lot of the anecdotal evidence while you're seeing this this uh it's starting to bubble up a little bit through the the command structure and to the elite we have to hope that continues because ultimately you know what's going to get them to to back off is you know unless there's some miraculous peace deal because he finally says [ __ ] it like you know we're not gonna we're not gonna win um is sort of the russian population the elites and the military command basically finally just saying enough's enough you know this is this is too [ __ ] up we can't back this horse anymore and you know maybe we get there it's probably not going to get there anytime soon but it's one of the things we should be doing is just driving information into the russian population right giving them the visuals not propaganda we just all we got to do is show them what's happening right they have what do they have access to now state-run media yeah state-run media shut down really access to everything else i mean so they they're getting and
a decent population of russia you know the older population certainly they're you know they seem perfectly content with watching state-run media and um so it's a it's a younger part of the population that you have to hope you know continuously look he's supposedly they've arrested up to 15 000 protesters right and you know god bless those folks did you see that video of this woman who is standing in the middle of the square and she holds up this small sign and then immediately the cops grab her and and shove her into a van yeah there's a number of of incidents like that um it's it's it's remarkable in terms of the speed with which they show up on scene and they know they're going to get arrested but it's that's what putin just like rajeev what's g most worried about he's worried about public unrest right he's worried about that massive population you know thinking oh [ __ ] this right and so that's you know and look with putin he wants everyone to believe that you know he's doing this because he's trying to protect the russian people and he's trying to protect russian serenity and he said and and so there was this thought well oh my god we we did this we created this problem because we were we were enticing ukraine into you know democracy and [ __ ] the only thing that was a threat was a threat directly to putin's power that's all it was was having a successful democracy in ukraine you know and and incrementally slowly getting past the corruption issues and becoming more and more of a successful democracy that poses a threat to putin's control his own control in the situation um and he doesn't that's you know so when he talks about a sphere of influence it's in part you know yes in his mind he's thinking about the soviet union and i'm keeping nato at bay but really what he's thinking about is i don't want [ __ ] successful democracies on my on my western flank is it that but it is is it also that if uh ukraine joins nato then nato can park
their weapons in ukraine well that's this is the bizarre part too it's like nobody was going to invite ukraine to join nato it wasn't no it was that that and so which is why it's an easy ask right which is why zelinski's now said well you know we just have to realize that we're you know the door's not open to to join nato i mean that wasn't going to happen anyway right so no no that's because that's all we keep hearing yeah but but uh underneath that underneath the whatever public discourse may have been taking place and the idea that ukraine was becoming more of a democracy and you know they were tamping down to corruption and maybe eventually they get nato countries you know being very pragmatic we're looking at it and going yeah ukraine is different ukraine's different than poland ukraine's different than than uh uh you know uh the czech republic on that border right because the history of ukraine with russia right and so there was a there's a tacit understanding that that's not going to end well you know we don't want to put ukraine in a position to bring them into nato so again you know who am i i'm not running the world but i would argue that that wasn't going to happen and you know but you know again i i i think with with putin it was simply um this presents a a challenge to my authority and [ __ ] it i want to be president until 2036. so you think it's just entirely because if ukraine succeeds as a democracy and if it becomes less and less corrupt and the democracy becomes more and more established that that somehow or another could trickle into russia yeah and there was also uh little to zero chance that we were going to place um you know uh key strategic weaponry inside ukraine now i mean that's that idea is also because people look at it from a certain perspective which is yeah that's that might be a bridge too far in the in the
previous world before this invasion they would have looked at that as that's too escalatory that's that's that's taking things a bridge too far for you know so we want to maintain a balance we understand that would you know send putin over so we're not going to do that either right so i think there was this pragmatic understanding of where ukraine was going to be they're perfectly happy to keep pushing them and trying to get them to be more and more you know uh aligned with the west uh but i think there would have never been that moment where they said okay and now you can join nato and guess what here's some you know some uh you know missile systems that we're going to place in that we know for a fact uh will be a provocation to putin why do that so so one of the things that i read recently was that putin had established a certain amount of parameters that need to be in place for them to pull out of ukraine one of them was that they agreed to not join nato that was something that had been expressed do you think that's because now that he's invaded ukraine that the nato countries might look at it as an opportunity to try to have ukraine join nato now and that this that's where this narrative is coming from no i think it's just he wants it in writing for whatever that's worth i guess nowadays but but i think he wants it and because look it's in their constitution you know about the opportunity to join nato he wants that removed and he wants it clear in any potential agreement that they're not going to i think that's the easiest ask that you can you can put on the table for zelinski right um the hard one is the demilitarization of ukraine right yeah and i think that can be met by agreeing not to uh not to deploy certain uh weapon systems into ukraine right it's not gonna mean that dismantling of ukrainian army i don't think that they would ever get to that point i don't think that's gonna be possible as an agreement but uh so there is a there's a way this could this could work but both sides are gonna have to give up something right and both
there's no way otherwise we're gonna get a a any sort of ceasefire and peace deal here and the idea should be we're looking to de-escalate right nobody wants as here people always say now nobody wants a shooting war with russia right that makes perfect sense right but i think you know we we have to be realistic about this and so as distasteful as it is zielinski's gonna have to give up certain things putin's certainly you know gonna have to be willing to figure out okay i gotta figure out how to draw a line here and then you know get out but that's a that's a big lift now because he's he's upset a lot of people he's created these sanctions it's not like we can just lift all these sanctions as soon as they come to the table with a ceasefire right and so there's going to be a period of time where russia is going to basically be a pariah out there in the global community and we got to be we got to be careful in how in pragmatic and how we deal with with putin in that regard because again we got to think about what's in our best national security interests what's in the best national security interests of europe and you know there's always a tendency sort of like the verse side treaty to really [ __ ] over the you know the offending party and i think the reality is we're gonna have to be saying okay well you know it doesn't seem right but okay putin officially gets crimea and maybe officially gets you know the don bass region he's you know he's had troops and proxy troops in there for a long time now so is he going to give up crimea no you know so zelinski's going to they're going to have to recognize that as part of russian territory probably that's gonna be part of the the deal it's gonna be distasteful but they gotta figure out a way to you know uh unwind this otherwise i think putin's attitude is gonna be i don't give a [ __ ] anymore i'm just gonna break it i don't care if we end up with a broken ukraine i've proven a point you know we don't want him to get to that point now the
motivation of the russian troops like it's one of the things that's so it's got to be very strange for them is that just a few decades ago ukraine was a part of the soviet union and now they're going to war with an urban area where it used to be their countrymen so when they see the losses uh we don't know what the losses are in the russian army but how do they i mean how do they boost their morale how do they get them excited about because it seems like if we if we were going to go to war with canada right and we decided we're going to invade toronto and you shouldn't provide uh invade montreal first it's a much nicer city i like both places they're both nice i shouldn't say anything about that yeah i'm a big fan of both places yeah that maybe it's that's bad because montreal was never a part of america right maybe like if we invaded [ __ ] alaska whatever you know what i mean it's something along those lines some something crazy where there just a few decades ago were our countrymen right that's got to be a very strange ask for these russian soldiers and there's a lot of there's a lot of stories that have come out about you know statements from some of the captured russian soldiers talking about how they didn't even realize they were doing anything other than a uh training exercise long-term training exercise on the border and then you know the tanks start rolling in so yeah there's again it's one of those things in terms of intel you know how bad is the morale well you know we don't really know we have to piece together everything we can and make a determination about that there's a lot of talk right now because it's a it's a good narrative to say that the russian military is collapsing because these soldiers are they're young they're disheartening they're walking away but that may be true but it it doesn't take into account what they're
still willing to do right and what they're willing to put up with and what the command staff is willing to do and instruct them to do so you know everything has to be taken with a bit of a grain of salt but yeah it's it's look you look at the history of the the these two countries i mean go back to who is it abramovic you know roman baritch who owns chelsea football club he's handed over control of it now because i think he reads some of the writing on the wall in terms of his assets but i think his parents if i'm not mistaken i think that brandman's parents still live in ukraine jeez right so he comes out and says this is not a good idea we shouldn't be doing this you know he's he's talking from a very personal place right putin looks at that and goes [ __ ] you buddy so you can see why there'd be anger there right but and also it's it's so it is it's fascinating it's always more complex than what than what we hear it's always more complex than the headlines or the stories um and uh it's all this inner connectivity and and the reason why the country's the reason why people are doing what they're doing i just it's fascinating [ __ ] it is fascinating [ __ ] but look one of the things that uh fascinates me about the oligarchs is why are they going after those guys are they going after those guys because they're they they have influence over putin and that the more those guys get their money taken away and their assets taken away and get their bank accounts seized that this will somehow or another make these incredibly wealthy people less supportive of putin yeah because he needs them in order to is that what's going on well it's it's the idea being is that they you know the more uncomfortable they are uh the the more uh it hurts them the more likely they are to pressure you know putin into changing his strategy this thought process coming to the table doing some sort of ceasefire so i think that that is a big part of it right do they have influence over him um well there are indications that it's
it's less than it certainly was right so it's and it's decreasing the more that they come out and and say something not again negative directly against putin but against this this uh invasion so you have to argue that you know putin at a certain point is going to think yeah [ __ ] you i don't mind the sanctions on you it look financial sanctions i've never really worked on putin anyway so it's one of the few things we can actually do it's the leverage that we've got and so i think it's important to to do it but and a lot of you know a lot of corporations have been taking it upon themselves right to pull out or to not do business you know the oil companies are saying [ __ ] it we're not they pulled out before you know uh the white house you know took any action so it all it has a cumulative effect but not in the short term right this this is going to this is a process and so it's dissatisfying to a lot of people who say we should be doing more right and you know there is a fair amount of aid being provided to them um but in typical washington fashion everybody focuses in on the migs you know it becomes the narrative becomes a story if we could just get them the migs we'd solve this problem and well i hear people talking about a no-fly zone that we need to enforce a no-fly zone and then i've heard other people going you don't know what you're asking for because you're you're literally asking to enforce that which means if america enforces a no-fly zone that means america is going to shoot down jets that violate the no-fly zone right that's war right and i'm i'm on board with that that's it's it's one of those even doing it for humanitarian corridors right people imagine somehow that it's a it's a tidy process and it's not i mean you point out it's a major goat robe right if we do something along those lines and the chance for direct conflict is massively increased and even if it's just if it you know it doesn't matter whether it's nato or whether it's us
we're all in the same you know shitstorm then at that point theoretically right and and maybe putin one of his calculations is i don't know you know what you know is nato really gonna push you know it's 30 countries i think one of the things he was looking to do was try to identify if there are any cracks in nato as well so you know they're staring at everything that nato and the us does and saying you know where's the weakness here do we have some weak links do we have some countries and there are a handful of countries now calling uh for uh a no-fly zone from nato right i think lithuania yeah the baltic states basically because why they feel they feel the most threatened yeah basically and so yeah i i think it's you know you talk about what's a bridge too far i think that's a bridge too far i think you know we do not want to uh we don't want to engage in in that uh game because that i don't think ends particularly well no yeah no that sounds terrifying it's well that's one of the crazy things about mutually assured destruction right that all war is sort of like a slap fight it's like into you know what i mean like you don't you don't necessarily throw leg kicks and head kicks and and pick each other up and dump each other on your head yeah you're agreeing you just slap for a little bit yeah yeah yeah and then at some point somebody gets really pissed off and then yeah and then it all falls down yeah they tighten up a fist and then next thing you know it's not take downs and yeah yeah i mean it seems like with mutually short destruction because of the nuclear power it's it it's it seems like how do you negotiate your way around that how do you get out of that while you're actually killing people because they're actually shooting missiles into apartment buildings we're seeing the destruction we're seeing the real consequences of war i mean i watched a video it was horrible of these it looked like old ladies like a house coat that were outside this apartment
building that were blown apart and these people were screaming and crying and the dust was in the air and it was it had they'd just been hit by missiles and they they've literally rebellized mario paul right which is strategically as important from their perspective russian military's perspective right and um it it's we have these this you know that you hear the the politicians talking well is it a war crime i don't know is it a war crime we're gonna have to you know gather evidence and we're gonna have to take it to the international court and we have to decide when everybody can see it like you just said right everybody can see it now it's a cell phone video yeah they don't rely on news reports anymore people who pull out their phones or are filming this stuff right and and so it's clear that they're engaged in war crimes right so that is that's another part that you have to put into the mix when you're trying to determine what putin's plans and intentions are right he's gone this far right and he's he's gone that far before look he helped assad in syria they didn't have a problem with chemical weapons at that point didn't bother him um and so yeah you have to it and again it all gets thrown in the mix when you're trying to think about what what the hell is his mindset what is he going to do next what is he thinking and so if you look at that and you go okay he's he's clearly doing the same thing he's engaged in in the past right and and and they they you know chechnya is another good example but it doesn't so so we sometimes process things the way that we do right we process things through our lens and as you know uh okay here in america it's americans and through our values and you know and you know people always say oh yeah yeah yeah yeah but but we do right i mean we we try to you know okay this and we mirror those values in on whoever our opponent is and we can't do that with putin we can't do it with g we have to be you know we have to be smarter than that um but anyway um yeah i'm not i'm not particularly optimistic that
putin's going to look at all this and go okay i'm going to back off i do worry that what his thought is at this stage of the game is i've gone this far doesn't mean he's going to use tactical nukes or he's going to you know thermobaric weapons or you know which again he's used and you know i don't think he's gonna have a necessarily a problem with that but uh there's talk about chemical weapons and you know at what point you know do we if he goes that far i mean imagine him using chemical weapons on the people of kiev because he just can't you know break that nut what are we going to do you know does he think nato at that point is going to step in right well are you going to get 30 countries you know all in agreement to use military force at that point in defense of people who aren't in a nato country you know so again that's why i think one of putin's efforts here has been to try to identify weaknesses within that alliance and see if he can play on that as well do you think that time is on his side or against him in that regard it depends on depends on the russian people i hate to say it but i think this is my speculator this is my opinion time is from my from just a crushing the country and breaking it militarily um time is on his side right um if we if we kind of have drawn the line where we're willing to provide assistance and we say okay this is it we'll continue to provide eight packages of some military assistance and you know maybe we'll ratchet up there's not much else we could do on the sanction side but we'll ratchet up some more sanctions i think time is on his side if he just all he wants to do is break the [ __ ] right but he he knows look the ukrainian people have overthrown what two russian-backed governments already he knows a long-term
occupation isn't in the cards right and he's also destroying a lot of the infrastructure that he would need you know to have a successful long-term occupation and so that's can't be an upside from his perspective he's got to figure okay i put a puppet regime and i've done that before and it hasn't worked right and it's certainly not going to work now because now i got a nation that hates me a lot more than they did a month ago right and so then you know what does he what is he looking to accomplish and that's again that's i'm just raising the question i have an answer but that's the big question what the what the hell's his endgame i was reading this thing where they were making an assessment of what would be required to occupy uh ukraine and they said it would be a minimum of 500 000 russians and maybe more than that it's it's a big ass place and and then they would have to run everything yeah they would have to take over the government they would have to take over the utilities they'd have to take over the grid the internet yeah and they that's why i say i you know does he realistically does this command staff do they realistically believe that and and going back to your question before and your point before which is okay so what was he thinking what did he think was going to happen again i think the assessments were so far off base but they honestly believed they were going to get much more support from the ukrainian people than they imagined people were going to support a military invasion yeah i think that i think that was an assessment i mean again in part because they thought well they'll be you know they'll be far more docile than they are because there is some history there obviously and there's a there's a lot of there's a lot of mix right a lot of family with with family in in russia a lot of uh russians with family in ukraine and i think they just imagined somehow that it was going to blend
and that's just a failure of intelligence gathering and understanding you know risk versus gain and and i think so that was a real bomb and they assumed that you know okay we're we'll be we'll be into kiev we'll get rid of zelinski we'll have a puppet you know regime uh in place probably within the first week and bob's your uncle no one's gonna do anything about it because nobody did anything about crimea nobody think did about georgia uh the world pretty much left him alone in chechnya so you know they were basing it to some degree on past actions why do you think it's so different why do you think they they were so successful in crimea and chechnya and georgia like why why did that happen so easily because crimea is it's very important in access for oil and natural gas yeah black sea port yeah yeah um you know it's a it's a that's a great question uh you know to be honest i don't have a real good answer for what what has changed what was the the difference in part it was um the size of the operation right they're calling it a military operation i can't believe i just said operation the size of the the invasion um and i think there was a a sense with zielinski that look that it wasn't going to happen because there wasn't a russian-backed sort of puppet regime or a regime in place that was supportive of russia and so that had a a lot to do with it as well the current government under zielinski is not inclined and hasn't been inclined and they don't view themselves as controlled by the russians in fact you know zalansky was put in place because for the very reason that they were going to you know advance the ball with the west and you know create more of a relationship there that's what the people wanted that's why they threw out
the last president and because they they didn't like the fact that they were getting closer and closer to russia so and the last president was you you said they were waiting to reinstate this guy well that was a possibility because they there was you know intel that he'd moved to minsk right so he was going to be sitting in belarus waiting and then once they got to keeve they just you know he shows up and somehow you know if that was the case and that was who who they were going to pick i mean it's it does seem insane that you're going to install the the previous guy who was thrown out but you know again if you think that their assessments were so bad maybe that was the case so in 2014 how what went down like what was the the what was the rebellion it was it literally was a massive uh uprising from people it was just it was it was started as street protests over um over a handful of things corruption ties to uh to uh to russia um increasing ties to russia um efforts by that uh regime at the time to back away uh from the west and i you know it was it was it was kind of a remarkable uh series of events but it was it was a popular uprising which is remarkable right in a sense and that's what you know that's what you would like to think possibly could happen in russia where people are saying now you know what we don't want to return to the bread lines here you know we we don't want to be isolated like this we went through that long enough you know we didn't think that's the way russia was going but dave but ukraine didn't have an established ruler like putin who's been in there since 99 like how do you how would anyone other outside of an assassination how would anyone take over i mean so he must be terrified of assassinations or extremely paranoid yeah because he's done it yeah there's um oh he's done uh yeah again that yeah you think about it
allegedly [Laughter] i think sergey skripal i think uh i think i think navalny i think they'd all think it's more than a legend but they uh yeah he's he's never had a problem with reaching out and and uh terminating political opponents wherever they happen to be right um and the favored uh uh method it's always been poison right um and so polonium 210 would lit litvinenko and so i think yeah i think he's he's increasingly isolated which causes problems for us because you do have to then figure out okay you know what information is he getting how good is the information he's getting and is he making decisions based on sound intelligence and information uh is he getting you know somewhat paranoid and and there's been some reporting that you know he's fired a lot of his staff and um what the [ __ ] does he bring in it brings in other people i i have no idea his cousins it's his kids um i mean that's what trump did right he's got yeah that's [ __ ] up his kids were did trump have food tasters i don't know maybe he did supposedly according to some reports he's got people testing it they're tasting his food now before he eats it so that kind of gives you an indication but you look at this rally he just held it was one of the largest football stadium they've got and you look at it and if you didn't know better it's an old soviet-style rally or it looks like sort of something north korea would put on i haven't seen that yeah they've they've got the stadium's just full of of people supposedly it's a pro-war protest you know because those are really popular you know let's have a big you know let's have a big rally to celebrate the war and so he's got this stadium filled and they're all waving flags and he's out there talking and it's it's crazy oh my god look how many people there are yeah so these people are all waving russia is it possible that there's that much support for the war over there um i think people that yeah i think there is support for it from folks who
you know are staring at state-run tv or older folks who you know appreciate the fact that you know what is this says russian state tv cuts away from putin at pro-russia rally russian president vladimir putin spoke to defend what he called the special operation in ukraine so happening the beginning of the operation so he's uh i mean it's it's crazy um and this this took place i think it's it was close to her on the eight year year anniversary of the the annexation of crimea well look but this does look it looks exactly like what you would expect soviet propaganda to look like you know or again something coming out with kim jong-un in north korea exactly and you know i'll bring out the bands maybe [ __ ] riot will play what is this guy saying maybe they won't oh boy so it's very bizarre it's it's a very bizarre thing to see and it tells you in a sense again putting all these little things into a bucket to try to assess his mindset it tells you why did he feel the need to do this well you know and how many of these people are actually out there to support it how many you know were instructed in their apartment block you know what you're going to show up at the stadium we're going to have a rally um we expect you to be there yeah like what do you yeah what do you say when they say that well they already know i mean most people there because you know ward does get around i think they're aware that thousands of protesters have been arrested and aren't doing well just yet but um i think they they understand that so that was inside so is this picture of the stadium the outside is that a bunch of people that are trying to get in um yeah i think those are just uh people who have gathered uh or have been invited to also attend it says they cut away from him mid-sentence and they went to they went to uh some nationalistic songs right so they yeah that's gotta be disrespectful though isn't it to cut away from his speech yeah i don't know the production values
are on state tv anymore i don't know it's you know it's may not be quite as good as like the ncaa's or something like that i think it's it's probably lacking um but it is it is it's just a bizarre indication of the situation over there right now and you would again but it's hard to read right we'd like to imagine because we imagine what we would do we'd like to imagine or what would hopefully do we imagine that the russian people will get out there and say no this isn't right but they there's a lack of information so i think we need to one of the things that we should be doing hopefully we are is trying to pump accurate information into the russian population remember you might not have access to this there might not be even understanding what's going on across the world there's there's a lot of folks in this again it's you know stories of of you know you talk to people in the ukraine and they've got relatives in russia and the relatives in russia are going well we're just we're trying to beat back the neo-nazis who are killing russians in the eastern part of the country and you think oh okay is that that's your story and that but that's what's being fed on national tv or state-run tv and so in the old cold war days we had voice of america right i think we need sort of a voice of america on steroids uh delivered very quickly so that we're getting accurate information so that they can kind of see what not again not we don't need to do propaganda all you got to do is show what the [ __ ] happening and what they're doing and at least give them that opportunity to see what what is going on you know easier said than done but it's an important part of this exercise it's you know it's a traditional covert action campaign right just like we tried to do in the in the cold war you know to uh to to let them know what the hell is happening in the rest of the world how do they get that i mean if the internet is down and all they have access to is state-run television they've got to be suspicious if the internet is down right i mean that's one of the things that i've heard from friends of the russian is that
russians don't trust anything the politicians say or anything the news media says anyway they d they have a dismissal dismissal of anything that's like the standard narrative that they're worried about happening in america it's one of the things that right people say when they talk about the misinformation that like when cnn lies about stuff and when they withhold information they worry that we're gonna eventually develop this same sort of nonchalant attitude about our mainstream media right right i think it's already happening right yeah we talked about that i think it's it's yeah that's and that's the danger and then you have the media here saying why it doesn't make sense why do they distrust us you know why why isn't it and in part it's because you know every every outlet now spends more time on opinion pieces and opinion you know uh journalism than just reporting the facts right just you know someone should dump some money into a into a a network that does nothing but like the old cnn they're doing that yeah supposedly that's what the the new yeah cnn got bought out and so the new owners of cnn apparently want to re-establish objective journalism on cnn which is wise because first of all there's a market for it yeah second of all the people that they have giving out opinions they wouldn't survive if they were on their own if they were independent i imagine imagine brian stelter had a podcast how many [ __ ] people listen to that you know what i'm saying yeah no it's like that's this is exactly the problem it's like the people that you can get to do that job are not the people that people want to listen to right and it's that would be a great thing if if that's the case and cnn is actually able to do that i mean you remember when they spent a lot of money on field uh bureaus and yeah and that you knew that okay i'm gonna turn on cnn because i'm gonna get the news yeah this was a long time ago it seems but that's what you did and i and i agree with i think there's a market for it i think people you know if you just tell them what the [ __ ] going on and you don't try to tell them how to think about it exactly it's not a bad
thing people have a hunger for that and that's one of the reasons why independent news is is thriving now and and they're trying to stifle that and it's one of the things that people have a problem with also with social media is that independent news sources are being stifled while these corporate news sources are being promoted yeah and it's uh i mean i get i get calls from you know uh various outlets network outlets and they'll say hey can you do uh could you come on like wednesday or whatever whatever time and for some of them yeah fine okay you want to talk about x but there are a number of them that will say okay so what you know what are your thoughts on this you know can we get your talking points on this because we're going to have you know somebody from you know another whatever your opinion is we're going to have somebody from the other side and you're going to yell at each other yeah yeah i said i don't have an opinion i'm just going to say what seems to be the situation on you know on the ground or whatever it is and you know how how about that and so there's there's a number of times now where you just have to say no i can't do it i'm not available because it's not advancing the ball and it's kind of in fact it's feeding the the beast here right it's just like all i'm gonna do is sit there and listen to somebody yell at me and then i'm supposed to yell at them and uh nobody learns uh you know anything well here we are we're two hours plus into this and there's been no commercials right so we're just talking and when you realize that when you're going on one of these other shows they're so handicapped by the format that they exist in where they have an hour to do the show and in between segments you're going to have you're going to have to pause your commercial you have to interrupt the conversation you have to come back and pick up and usually you've got a whole new subject when you come back yeah so you get a cursory examination of each individual topic and it's all based on having people argue so you got three heads you know there's the yeah sometimes more than that i love when they have the
brady bunch thing where they got like four or five or six people up there and you each get 10 seconds whose idea is that it's so stupid especially when you're dealing with something that's as complex as any sort of international action like what we're handling now yeah well if you're talking about i mean syria was a good example they did a lot during during uh when isis was raging and rampaging and and so they they say okay we've got about three and a half minutes all right okay so you've got about three half minutes to talk about a very complex situation and then you figure you've really only got about a minute and 20 seconds because you know the anchor is gonna their their question is gonna last a minute yeah right it's never just well why is that or what happened there or what's next or who is responsible or there's never like a a short one-sentence question i feel like there's going to come a time in the future where those shows just don't exist anymore because because they're so limited in the way they can cover complex subjects and if people want to get information i mean if you want to get sound bites that's one thing but sound bites i i think they're just so inadequate when it comes to something complex well it works in part because i mean again this is not rocket science but i think it works in part because you know people love to have their opinions you know affirmed they're you know um yeah reaffirmed and so you know if i can tune into a station and i know i think a certain way i don't really want to know what the [ __ ] going on i just want someone to tell me i'm right right you know so that's where and again it doesn't matter whether right or left you know the left will say oh that's fox and you know fox would say well that's msnbc yeah and in reality it's both sides it's just it's part of its human nature but if you had that outlet that just said hi here's what's going on right now yeah here's the footage here's here's here's what's happening and then yeah i don't i don't need to dive into well okay will you tell me how i'm
supposed to think about that or have six people come on in different boxes on the screen and kind of yell at each other for 20 seconds each and then i'm supposed to make sense of it no wonder we're kind of [ __ ] right and there's there's short attention span and you try to talk to you try to talk to kids i mean i try to talk to the boys all the time about what's going on now as an example in russian because i want them to understand right and i just want them to understand how complex things are you know and and and not to just go to school and they'll hear some kid parrot something that their parents said and they'll come back and they'll repeat and i'll say well why do you think that is you know and you so i don't know i i it's i worry that again here here i go again i'm going to talk about one of my kids my daughter when she was in university she got out of university and we were talking about it shortly after graduation and one of the things she talked about was you know i spent like you know four years thank god it was only four years four years not really saying anything in classes where there would be you know conversation because she's she's sort of a centrist right so she's not she's not hard left and i mean she isn't she's kind of she's nicely balanced right i mean she i think she's turned out to be a real smart person but um but she just wouldn't open her mouth in conversations in the classroom because if she had a dissenting opinion she didn't want to get into it right and so she just never argued she said that was not uncommon you know people would just if somebody was really strong about something or felt really strong about something fine just let him go right and and don't debate it that's a that's a you know people talk about it and so i'm not raising anything new but you know it it hits home when it's your kid and you've spent all that money on their university education well i think that's a giant chunk of our country when it comes to ideology that most people are in the center i had a conversation with someone the other day and she was like i would be down with republicans if they would just drop all the gay [ __ ]
she was like all that gay stuff like leave those [ __ ] gay people alone like this is it's one of the the dumbest aspects of hardcore conservatives yeah that they absolutely that they deny gay rights and uh i i go i think you're probably not alone i think there's probably a lot of people to feel that way there's a lot of people that are in the center on whether it's from left-wing issues or right-wing issues you know with left-wing issues maybe it's uh trans women in sports or maybe it's uh you know gender confirmation it's like this don't say gay thing in florida when i heard that i was like what what are they saying you can't say gay is that really what's going on that turns out that's not what it is that's not what it is at all what it is is ages it's first through third grade they're saying you're not supposed to talk about sexual orientation gender orientation or sexual proclivity or or you know what what you're interested in they said you should just teach math and science and history to little kids yeah just let the toddlers be toddlers and then they can you can then you can start ramping up your instructions you know and and people are opposed to that but it's like listen your teachers are not supposed to be the people that explain gender to uh [ __ ] seven-year-old yeah it's just who are these teachers and how do you do you know what their perspective is are they intelligent about it are they trying to indoctrinate the child to any particular point of view whether it's pro-transgender or anti-transgender or anti-gay or pro-gay they shouldn't have any say at all when you're talking to a seven-year-old kid i mean i feel like that is the job of the parents that's the job i mean and you hope the parents are doing it but um when kids get older and they you know they develop feelings for either the same sex or opposite sex or they feel like they're in the wrong body then these conversations should be had by qualified people that can discuss this from a nuanced perspective and understand what the psychology of a
young person who's trying to figure out who they are in the world is but the idea that this is uh don't say gay because you're you're you're saying that ages uh you know first grade to third grade that you shouldn't be bringing up these subjects of them i think a lot of people are saying no i just don't want you grooming my kids for whatever your ideology is yeah whether it's a right-wing ideology or a left-wing ideology i want you to teach them [ __ ] science yeah there's a responsibility here just teach teach the kids the the the the course work that we as parents i think you know that's what you expected i think one of the things that pandemic did was it kind of showed because you had the home school all of a sudden we had a nation full of homeschoolers uh working with their schools local schools then they started to realize wait a minute their their assignment is what they got to do what and so i think it did it did raise this awareness level i i mean i agree look one of the funny things about you know conservatives i've always found is that you know they talk about freedom and and you know small government a lot of times you know the government just got to get out of the way and then and then at the same time they want to like you know uh orchestrate what goes on in the bedroom and you think how about you just stay out of all that [ __ ] stay out all the social [ __ ] everybody just do that right democrats republicans stay out all that [ __ ] as a government just focus on the things you're supposed to focus on national security infrastructure uh treaties with foreign countries uh you know try not to to [ __ ] things up but otherwise stay out yeah i it's it's always one of those things where i can see why it drives the left crazy with with you know republicans where they just can't help themselves they keep diving back into abortion they keep diving back into the you know the the gender the gay issue whatever it is i just think no how about you just stay out of the kitchen and and focus on the big things but look it's hard enough to learn history it's hard enough hard enough to learn grammar and the
proper use of contractions like jesus christ you're getting a proper you know contractions no it's true that's a tough one it's all this is like you're teaching [ __ ] seven-year-olds yeah like all that stuff is hard enough and if you but first of all it's not your business to indoctrinate a child into your ideology and i think there's many teachers that feel like that is their business and that part of their job is not just to teach a child about important things about science and math but they feel like it's to prepare a child for what they think is a better world whether it's a more conservative world or it's a more progressive world yeah i think there's a lot of people that have a real issue with that well it's the difference between teaching a kid how to think and and what to think right and so i think that's you know there is that divide and and um you know we've over the years you know we've we've had some outstanding teachers for our kids and then every now and then you'll get a a teacher who seems like they're just kind of yeah they're not focused right and they're just and it's more about i'm going to teach your kid what to think as opposed to how to think right right so it's it's a yeah it's a it's interesting but i don't know again you you raise all these issues and then you think well how does it how do we walk it back how do we how do we change that and you know that's always where you kind of run up against you know uh yeah no you got to get smarter people in office and you know it's it's uh it's it's a problem but i i do think going back to kind of where we are in the world today um i worry that you know collectively nato the us um maybe we're suffering as a result of not consistently sending our best and brightest into leadership positions right they don't want the gig they don't want they don't want the gigs yeah you see the way people get attacked and and brutalized on the campaign trail it's
like jesus christ who wants to subject themselves to that not only that but there's also such a disingenuous quality to it to the people the very people that are attacking you and calling you the worst piece of [ __ ] that's ever lived then they'll join up with you um and and be your vice president and go hey it was just politics just politics like well what the [ __ ] is politics are you guys liars yeah sorry about that time i called you a racist i'm i'm happy to accept the offer to be the vice president sarah said you're a rapist i didn't really mean it i just wanted to [ __ ] you over because i wanted to be the president so now i get second position i'm willing to support you i mean it's like madness and and also it kills people's trust in what these people have to say because i i can't believe you now because you already admitted that you lie yeah and i think that's a big problem that the president's having right now is sort of the credibility issue and i mean who is going to go i'm not i'm you know i don't want to dive into politics necessarily but you look at the midterms coming up and you look at the presidential election in 2024 and um you know nothing i'm not particularly optimistic regardless of where it goes whether how it turns out right because you know we got the same cast of characters for the most part and we just keep shuffling them around until they get old enough to pass away there's a few bright lights not much a lot of his business as usual and i think once a lot of these people that have like great ideas once they get into the system they get compromised and then they realize once they're in the system like oh my god like this is what a [ __ ] mess this is think about being a congressperson right it's a member of congress and you're every two years right so you get in and six months into it you're being asked to raise money for some of your fellow congressmen uh congresswoman congress people and uh and then you gotta worry about your own coffers to get yourself reelected every two [ __ ] years but it's a it's a constant cycle it never never really it's not like you wait two years and then you start up again you're doing it all the time you're always raising money and it just seems like a [ __ ] job and uh
and and so anyway some people enjoy it they seem to love it yeah and you do get a lot of people who like i was head of the young democrats club where i was head of the young republicans club and now i'm going to be a state legislator and now i'm going to then i'm going to run for congress and it's it becomes this career thing that goes on which again coming back to term limits but then it comes back to what you said which is well if you keep rotating this you know and and you've only got people in office for a certain period of time yeah it's yeah but then what's the alternative to that yeah someone like pelosi well putin yeah you're getting a putin in there yeah and and he'll be in office for i can't do the math on that but if he's in office until 2036 say um he's never getting out right i mean he doesn't have to leave not unless he's driven out not unless not not does he have elections uh allegedly no not well they did they changed it from four-year terms to six-year terms and then and now it's written basically so that he can he literally can stay until 20 i think it's 2036. so that's uh again new math but it's i should have spent more time on stem 14 years 14 years another 14 years 75 70 no 73 years old he's 69 yeah 69 so what the hell is that that's 83 um and that will have meant three yeah that's only 37 years running that country so at 14 yeah so he's 69 now so if he's 83 he'll be just older than biden okay that's a good point i hadn't thought about it that way just older i mean because biden's like 80 right isn't he 80 i don't think he's 80 yet whatever it is yeah yeah i mean it's not a good it's it's good yeah it's a it's it's it's it's a yeah it's a it's an old late 70s it's not going to just release the power right so how does this end well how does this like russia thing end well is there a way that it ends well is there a way the way it ends well is if they if both sides give up enough right and putin now think about this putin then
means has to essentially uh retreat move all his his personnel uh all that hardware out of the country um you gotta think about how what a process that is right and what that's going to look like and what putin imagines that to look like so he's going to have to gain some real concessions here from zielinski in order to in his mind i suspect justify that withdrawal but i don't think again of course i always be wrong but i i don't think that he sees a long-term occupation of ukraine as a an endgame here because it just appears that he's just hell-bent on on busting it and maybe he thinks at that point if he breaks the will so badly that he'll walk away and just leave a broken country on his western flank which is better than a successful democracy getting closer and closer to the west i i don't know it seems it seems bizarre he's he's lost the game already right he's turned that country completely against him i mean it was it wasn't necessarily pro-russian before it's definitely not now so what what the [ __ ] has he gained isn't that what really scares people though is that he could be desperate well yeah and there is that talk that says well if he feels backed into a corner then he'll launch the tactical nukes or he'll use chemical weapons or he'll and then the question becomes what do we do what do they do let's imagine that launches a nuke and kills a hundred thousand people uh flattens a city yeah yeah then then you say to yourself okay what are we going to do in response are we what are we going to do you know uh take troops go into a in into that country and um fight on the ground against or we're going to launch uh our own nuke in response and then when we haven't been attacked nukes chicago or seattle or jesus christ i mean look the response time nowadays i mean in the old days it was i don't say it was easier but it was in a sense the attack time uh calculation was a lot different in the old days the co the cold war beginning of the cold war whatever a
soviet bomber takes you know five hours to get into you know uh position uh for u.s airspace and that's five hours and then it with with uh missile technology it eventually made its way down to about 15 minutes uh less with a sub-launched uh missile and so suddenly your attack time you know to consider us a response a retaliatory response was down to you know minutes rather than hours and hours and now with uh the development of hypersonics right you're talking about no time whatsoever you're talking about uh weapons that can completely evade current existing air defense systems so mutual assured destruction was in part based on this idea of a retaliatory response right so i can go in and i'll have time to respond to your attack now it it changes the calculus because it's not a sucker punch yeah yeah exactly and so now maybe there's not enough time for it so it it takes that off the table which is a frightening thought which is why you know the development of hypersonics is is so important and we talked about that before but uh it is it's part of the new theater of war and and that also includes everything including cyberspace and and russia has not really putin has not launched the sort of cyber attacks i think that that people were imagining would take place right there was there was some talk here in the states thinking oh my god we got to be well we do have to be prepared but there was a this thought process that he was going to you know attack the u.s in a sort of significant way through cyberspace but that is a definite scenario that can't be ignored at all right and we we still haven't done enough to protect our systems you know both commercial and government and then also you know space and and the weaponization of space so all these new theaters of of war but part of it is also the removal of that mutually assured destruction doctrine right and the idea that i mean look at the soviet thinking right the soviet thinking back in
in the 80s late 70s 80s they established a weapon system that didn't need any humans right to launch the nuclear missiles because they thought to themselves all right response time is getting to be a problem what if we lose all our leadership so they developed a weapon system that if the soviet leadership is wiped out the system will essentially go out there look for that leadership if it's not there it will on its own send signals to launch the remaining available surviving uh missiles that are out there and so it's called the the the dead hand system perimeter whatever and so that's but again that's another important thing to think about when you're talking about putin's mindset and where he comes from and sort of the development of of of military strategy and how you act so yeah it's and that's one of the reasons why the buy administration rightly so was so concerned about escalating to a point where we're getting dangerously close to something that we thought was pretty much off the table for all these decades right nuclear war you know and so it's you know it's rightly so you have to be careful again i you know people are quick to criticize whatever administration's in power but i think you have to you know it has to be more of a conversation than that you can't just say i disagree with them because they're in the other party or whatever and the question is if someone's willing to kill a few thousand people i mean how many people have died in ukraine how many civilians have died so far do we have an estimate of that uh it's in the i think they were they were looking at in terms of the soldiers military losses for the ukraine side it was in the 1500 range or there abouts and civilians i think we're talking in the you know it's hard to get an accurate uh estimate but i think uh un was placing it around close to a thousand just under a thousand so a couple thousand people dead yeah it's how do you
i mean not to mention his own personal personnel yeah if he decides that a tactical nuke one individual tactical nuke to send a message kills a hundred thousand people if if they've already killed a few thousand people and he's lost a few thousand people he thinks a way to stop the bleeding and keep this from escalating to a point where he loses a hundred thousand troops is to just drop a nuke and then we have to figure out what happens next like imagine a world in 2022 which is so nuts to think that a nuclear bomb could be detonated by a superpower like russia just to say hey i'll do this right and what what what do we do we then negotiate what do they do well that's and that's again that's that's the unknown right it's like it's like cyber warfare you we don't know because it's it's unknown right we always had a strategy for nuclear warfare we always thought we did right we always because we always kind of placed it on okay of rational actors out there right i mean there's always the outlier okay what a rogue state gets it or a terrorist group gets one but we always had it in the back of our minds that it was rational actors and so therefore this is how it won't play out because people will be rational yeah and now we're faced with this this this question again and the question is you know if that happens if he fires a tactical nuke because he he's decided again he's just going to break it he's having a hard time uh encircling key he's not you know making the head where he wants to uh he feels as if he either wins or he's out of power and he does this it's you know it's the unknown what are we going to do do we think that it's like it's like with china if china goes after taiwan says we're taking taiwan do we think that the u.s is going to get into a shooting match with china to save taiwan you know i i'm not in charge but i suspect there's going to be a lot of debate about that and by the time we finish that debate and our democracy maybe it's it's too late so i don't i don't know i mean i don't mean
to to bum you out oh too late hey i'm just here to jamie's got that you know what if we want to have a happy ending then we've got that 30-second trailer for black files to classify it on discovery we should end with that because i'm so bummed out right now but don't be bummed out i'm tearing i'm not bummed out about your show but i'm terrified that this is a real scenario when you're talking about these supersonic weapons that go fast in the speed of sound that we really don't have any time to retaliate they'll hit us before we even realize it especially if it's coming from like a submarine right yeah well and they shoot something subsonic from a sub supersonic rather from a submarine yeah there's been all sorts of of uh developments in terms of uh because you want to you want to be able to uh you know hypersonics you want to be able to um uh use a variety of platforms now the thing about it is the thing with submarine launched uh attacks was it got you closer right it got you closer to the target um with hypersonics it doesn't really matter because of the speed with which they're moving and the ability to evade air defense systems because they're moving in an unpredictable pattern ballistic missiles kind of go up they come down you can you know plot the trajectory and you know how to intercept uh hypersonics don't don't move that way uh they don't move at those predictable speeds so yeah that's where the attack again the attack time is is completely reaction is completely recalculated and that's where that's where the problem is and again i i've we've talked about it before but that's why that's why it's so important i think for people to pay attention to you know who's doing what where are these developments coming from where are people spending their money on on weapon systems why is that important why is the weaponization of space important why is you know cyber warfare what is what are the rules in cyber warfare we don't have any because it's unknown turf and we don't know how bad it could get how quickly it could go south and so uh people are very reluctant to talk about major cyber warfare uh scenarios
yeah it's terrifying the destruction of the grid's terrifying the idea that you know that it's not that hard to take out our entire power grid not at all not at all it's uh yeah no it it it and that those grids are being tested all the time right and you know okay fine people say well we do the same thing well yeah we do we're plotting and planning we're testing you know infrastructure in nations that don't have our interests at heart but china russia iran any nation that's got the ability they every day are testing our systems and they've been drawing up maps and and understanding the weaknesses and the in the access points and they've been doing it for years and they've got playbooks in place already so if it if it were to head south that way and suddenly we're in this goat rope then they just turn to their playbook they open up the page one and they've already got it mapped out because that's what they've been doing they've been testing our systems for a long time and yeah our power grid goes down and uh it shuts everything down you know fuel transport access to cash food health care uh it's it's a yeah i mean you can imagine the message i mean people are inconvenienced when you know a winter storm causes a power outage for two days right it's like oh my god are we gonna survive so anyhow there's an article i read yesterday about oliver stone sitting down with putin and watching dr strangelove and it's it's all about i mean i don't think putin had ever seen the film and that film is all about a bunch of generals who think it's a good idea and they they talk about these very preposterous ways of starting these nuclear bombs whoa what's that is that it it's video of them watching it oh excellent yeah so this is and by the way uh oliver stone he was on was saying that this when he was telling us he was saying that this film dr strangelove was based on real
live conversations exaggerated but real live conversations that generals had had during the cold war about launching a first strike nuclear attack on china or russia because they're worried about them eventually doing it to us and putin says it indeed makes us think despite the fact that everything you see on screen is make-believe he foresaw some issues even from a technical point of view i mean things that make me think about real threats that exist this is putin watching dr strangelove talking to oliver stone about you know this satirical movie from i was like 1960 something right yeah i know it's all slim pickings right in the bomb down yeah at the end uh no it and and yeah it is it was based on there were there were i mean the conversations that took place seemed surreal when they started talking about accepted casualty numbers during the cold war and they're talking about you know if if you have to launch a retaliatory strike okay what you know what are acceptable casualty numbers what are your anticipated casualty numbers what does the president do in times i mean presidential executive action documents that were created in case of of of of an attack right and what they thought authorities that would be given to the president to make you know unique individual uh decisions right in in a situation like that it's it's a remarkable period of time and now bizarrely you know we seem to be back in the cold war but this was inconceivable just six months ago yeah so it was certainly in people's minds right i mean you know we were worried about a mask i had a [ __ ] mask you know and and you know the pandemic everybody was was uh it was just tired of it and everybody anticipated i'm going on spring break it's going to be great now we're going to get out of this thing and and now you got to deal with this so i don't even think this is going to be a wake-up call if we get through this my fear is that people will just move on to the next thing to be outraged about i'm really i'm really concerned because i feel like unless things physically change
with our society and our life unless there's some sort of physical action like a 9 11. no during one thing after 9 11 is the amount of people that drove around with american flags in their car was insane it was there's a feeling of patriotism you felt united there was less road rage people were kinder it was different it was like we felt like we were all in it together and we don't feel like that right now now we hi we're we're separated by ideology and left versus right and blue versus red and who controls this and the midterms are coming up we have to drop some restrictions or people are going to vote the wrong way and all this craziness that has us divided well because it's not it's not that i mean it was it was obviously on a home turf right so 911 happened and it was against us yes right and so that allowed us to come together because okay now what we got this shared enemy we've got this common you know point that we can and so you're right it was remarkable right but with with this with what's happening yeah i mean look this is a sick this is a serious threat to our national security and to the safety and security of us and and our allies life on earth yeah and exactly and so but we but we don't we don't feel it quite that way right and so it's it's not that it's not that same thing we can't compare the two i guess but um we should be we should be smart enough and that's why it it for a brief moment it was like oh we're all americans we all have to support the government and and and make sure that we're doing the right thing in terms of russia and ukraine and that only lasted for a couple of days and then it's all like ah you know you know biden screwed up or you know they they're doing the problem so the republican you know they talked a good game up in in washington dc for a couple of days about how well we are all coming together and this is something we all have to be worried about it's national security and then they couldn't help themselves and so now we're back to
partisan politics over something as important as this what we're currently facing for whatever reason human beings have we don't have an ability to think things are real if they're not affecting us right now we think that we know that they're a real threat and we'll argue about it on twitter but it doesn't change it's not like it's not like a near-death experience it's not like something that really makes you reassess right how you behave and how you think and life in general and i mean okay part of it is i was going to say part of it is is understandable in the sense that you know everybody's putting food on the table they're worried about their kids they're worried about you know getting to work in the morning or finding a job or whatever and so unless it's unless it's a direct attack on on the home front you know it it really needs to be that it needs to be a punch in the face that you actually feel as opposed to something like this which some for a lot of folks i think seems like a theoretical exercise you hear a lot of people say well why should we be concerned what do we you know why are we getting you know wrapped into this yeah and rightly so again we don't want nuclear war with russia but we do need to be aware of what it means what are the long-term ramifications if putin is successful and just you know we accept the fact that he now holds ukraine and then he decides okay well maybe moldova's next because i'm kind of pissed off about moldova and you know they're making noises now about possibly and he's already got a sort of a a russian-backed part of moldova right so you could see him uh securing ukraine and then looking at modover and saying well half the population's already you know in my camp right you know i'll get that then i'll expand my sphere of influence so yeah i know right that's why mike tell us about your show oh well here it is look at this uh tell people when it is wednesdays wednesdays 9 p.m science channel and uh it's on discovery plus
black fall is declassified uh it's season two we traveled all over the [ __ ] place and we got some great uh great stories a lot of good investigations we we could spend the whole hour talking about mk ultra again um that we uh we we looked at i did a interview with uh i might have mentioned this to you last time but with a a woman whose sister was one of the subjects up in canada uh of a doctor who was being funded uh through mkultra and what she went through completely broke her as a person ruined the family right you can imagine over a period of time uh it never got over this this poor woman was in an institution being expected experimented on by uh you know what was essentially supposedly canada's leading you know uh psychiatrist and some of their funding was coming from the mk ultra project uh all those years ago so it wa and and sitting down with this woman who was the the this lady's younger sister who and she's now obviously much older and it was just it was just heartbreaking because it really brought it home right it was i mean sometimes you can look at these things and they go wow that's [ __ ] up and put together a person yeah it was crazy all right mike uh we'll we'll end the show with this thank you very much oh thank you mb company man on twitter uh what are you what you're on the instagram right uh i i guess i am on the instagram i i don't really know i i don't use instagram much uh but yeah empty company man on twitter and uh yeah i appreciate you i appreciate you coming down here love the camera i really do i do as well thank you bye everybody why was our government investigating the paranormal that information is still all classified to this day whatever was being done was done for mind control you fully immerse yourself in the enemy this was by far the most terrifying experience of my life it's abandoned syndrome there might be something right here it seems like an effort to keep the public in the dark that's exactly how psychological operations work hello i wouldn't call this a treatment i would call it torture the soviet union created a doomsday
system these systems are always learning they're always developing is that an existential threat to mankind the navy is already looking at how to use aerial drones to attack an objective whoever can master those techniques will rule the world [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] foreign