Andrew Bustamante, a former CIA officer and author of "Shadow Cell," reveals how he and his wife were unknowingly used as bait to catch a mole within Falcon House, a unit in a nuclear-armed nation. He details the classification of his book due to its exposure of Scimitar's operations and critiques Pentagon disinformation regarding UFO sightings at Malmstrom Air Force Base. The discussion expands to a potential $20 trillion black budget funding secret tech and continuity of government bases, while analyzing how social media censorship and political corruption distract from rising US debt and nuclear threats. Ultimately, the episode warns of a surveillance state and suggests wealthy Americans may relocate abroad by 2027 as the nation faces strategic vulnerabilities. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: CohereLabs/cohere-transcribe-03-2026, WAV2VEC2_ASR_BASE_960H, sat-12l-sm, script v26.04.01, and large-v3-turbo
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The CIA Interview Story00:14:33
It's lovely to have you back, Mr. Bustamante.
So, which is not even your real name.
Do you remember?
You were the first person to interview me of any significance.
Like, I did like little 15 and 5,000 person podcasts back, but 19, 20 was the first time we spoke.
No, 20 was the first time we spoke.
Yeah, maybe 21.
I think it might have been 20 or 21.
Yeah.
I was telling this story recently.
Yeah.
How everybody online thinks you're a CIA plant.
Thanks to you.
And that you're intentionally putting out propaganda across all the podcasts on the internet.
And I was explaining, like, people don't know the purely organic rise of Andy Bustamante.
Matthew B. Cox, the true crime writer, met you to help you with his book that he was writing.
And you happened to be like a local guy in the intelligence community in St. Petersburg.
So he somehow got a hold of you.
Yep.
And you helped him with his book.
Yep.
And then he came on my podcast and he goes, dude, There's this super handsome CIA guy.
You got to have him on your podcast.
That's awesome.
And this is before I was interested in any of this stuff.
Why do I feel uncomfortable that Matt Cox described me as handsome?
It's like complimentary.
He was very over the top with calling you handsome.
Like he was just, he could not stop talking about how pretty you are.
Oh, Matt.
And he was just like, dude.
And then six months later, dude, have you called him yet?
Have you called him yet?
And then finally, I called you and you showed up and you ended up being on all the biggest podcasts in the world after that.
It was like totally, it was not like the CIA was knocking down my door trying to get you on my podcast.
It was supernatural.
Yeah.
You know, it's funny is Julian Dory actually did like a whole section, a piece on why he believes I organically grew, why he believes I wasn't like planted and fueled by CIA.
And it was really well researched because Julian knows his shit.
Like, Julian's a pretty brilliant guy in reality.
He thinks he's super brilliant.
And that's very frustrating because you're like, Julian, you.
You actually are smart.
You're just not smart enough to not call yourself smart.
He's the best, dude.
Yeah, he's a galaxy brain when it comes to this stuff.
But this is the first time you're actually able to promote your book that you've been working on for years.
And you finally got the CIA to sign off on all the covert ops you've been doing in your whole life.
Because you're one of the guys who has so much interesting things, so many interesting things to say, and so many unique things.
You have such a unique perspective on everything that's going on around the world.
But you can't talk, you've never talked about any of the stuff that you've done in super detail, but now you can.
And it's been really frustrating because CIA has to, when you sign up for CIA, when you're recruited by CIA, when you volunteer for CIA, whatever it is, you sign two secrecy agreements.
Nobody ever talks about that.
We always just talk about, oh, yeah, we signed a secrecy agreement.
No, you sign two.
You sign one that is a contract with the Central Intelligence Agency, and then you sign one that is a criminal liability form with the U.S. federal government.
So, at any time, you are always exposed to double jeopardy.
If you violate the rules and you talk about something that isn't approved by CIA, they can either pursue you criminally or they can pursue you in a civil court, but you are always exposed.
So, they make it very clear to you that that's kind of how they approach it.
And as a result of that, it keeps most CIA officers very, very quiet after they leave because there's double jeopardy here.
I could be held in criminal court under a civil case, or I could be hit with a civil case, or I could be hit with a criminal case.
So, for me, Hold it up for people so you can see.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So, for me, when my wife and I set off to write this book, it was 2019 when we sent our first email to CIA and said we'd like to write our story.
And the world and geopolitics were at a place in 2019 where our story seemed like it might be something that the world would, like CIA would let the world read.
It was the kind of waning years of the Trump presidency.
He was talking about increasing transparency and declassifying.
You know, multiple different types of case files.
So we're like, let's try it.
CIA came back and said, yes, we approve.
You can tell this operational story.
We wrote the book in 2020, one year.
Didn't take us years to write the book.
It took us one year to write the book.
2021, we submit the manuscript to CIA.
They come back and they're like, ooh, this is sensitive.
We're going to need to put this through an advanced level of review.
2022, fucking the world turns on fire with the invasion of Ukraine.
We have China spy balloons in the sky.
We have Iranian.
You know, incursions, we have multiple conflicts in Yemen and Syria, and it's the fucking world's on fire.
And CIA comes back and they're like, there's no way this book's ever going to be published.
Like, you can never talk about the operations in here because they're so relevant to today's intelligence collection operations.
So, from 2022, they basically said, your book is classified.
We still have the email.
It was a ridiculous email.
The premise and content of your book is classified.
We knew it wasn't true, but you can't argue over email with CIA.
Lives are in danger.
So, from 2022 to today, Well, basically, 2022 to a year ago ish, six months ago, we were just hamstrung.
So, the whole time that I'm talking online, the whole time that I'm kind of building our business and sharing my point of view on what's happening geopolitically, while all these people are accusing me of being fake, and then other people are accusing me of still being recruited, like still being inside CIA, nobody ever wants to believe the truth.
There's nothing we can do to defend ourselves.
There's nothing, there's no evidence that we can put out there because our hands are tied.
To just continue boring you with the story, Six months ago, eight months ago, CIA, my wife gets involved.
And my wife is brilliant, introverted.
She has anxiety disorders.
She has all sorts of issues that just make her not want to pursue conflict ever.
She goes through the manuscript and she's like, This book is definitely not classified.
Like it's sensitive, it's telling, it's truthful, but it's not classified.
So she writes CIA and says, I would like to challenge your classification.
CIA writes back and says, You have no right to challenge our classification.
My wife, Has a law degree from here in Florida.
She was like, I actually do have a right to challenge that classification.
So she finds an attorney, a guy named Mark Zaid, probably the most successful, most high impact attorney in Washington, D.C. for all things related to classified information.
So if you don't know the name Mark Zaid, you should.
Super successful guy, and I love him to death.
She hires Mark.
Mark looks at our story.
He can't actually look at the story because remember, CIA said it's classified.
So he can't see the story.
Wow.
But he hears our case.
He's like, So you're telling me that you wrote a book, you'll stand by the book and say that it's not classified.
And that the content of the book is what we explained.
And I'll tell you in a second.
And she explained to him, yes, everything you're saying is truthful.
CIA put us into an operation where we were intended to be bait for a mole inside CIA.
And they never disclosed to us that they were using us as bait.
And he was like, oh, you've got a First Amendment case.
You can sue CIA for violating First Amendment rights if they don't let you tell your story.
And that was all it took.
And you sued CIA.
My wife threatened to sue CIA.
She wrote CIA and said, We have a case for a First Amendment lawsuit against you if you don't let us tell the story.
It took about three weeks and they wrote back, you're approved.
No way.
Did those checks, are the checks still coming?
So, yeah.
Or did they slow down?
Yeah, right?
We'll see.
We'll see.
That's wild, man.
So, that's the story.
That's how it got there.
It got there exclusively because of threatening legal action against CIA.
And they did not want that press.
And it took over five years.
It took three years of fighting and a five year process between the first request and the last approval.
Wow.
So there is, I mean, I've only read the first 100 pages and it's already fascinating.
Thanks, man.
You talk about there's a country in there that you can't name and you called it Falcon.
Right.
Can I guess what Falcon is?
Absolutely.
You're expected to guess.
I would not show up here without expecting you to guess.
Good guess.
Every guess is a good guess.
So I'll say good guess.
So can you lay out for people like, Or give like a brief summary of like what happened and how you got into working in that country and then what specifically you and your wife were doing because you guys got teamed up.
Correct.
Yeah.
So, I mean, I'll start really brief and I'll let you ask whatever questions you want.
But in essence, my wife was very, very successful at CIA.
She was a shithot officer.
That's just like I told you here at the end.
She was, she's when you, when she gets involved, shit happens.
I was a fucking shit show at CIA, which is what's hilarious to me about all these people who accuse me of.
All sorts of stuff online.
Like they've never heard the truth.
The truth is, I was a horrible CIA officer.
I didn't play by the rules.
I pissed people off.
Like I was not cut out for military or CIA.
Because I wasn't good, quote unquote, good at following instructions, I got all the shit jobs.
So I was out there talking to extremists and pedophiles and, you know, weapons smugglers.
Like I was doing shitty, shitty operations that your really successful people weren't doing.
My wife was doing all the really important operations.
So we meet at CIA, we fall in love, and we start to date.
And now we're approaching marriage.
And at the same time that we're getting ready to get married, CIA identifies they have a mole inside the agency a mole that they've never disclosed to the public, a mole that was advised to them, not even by their own internal group.
An ally, an allied country sent us a message that said, Hey, we have intel that you have a mole, that you have a problem.
Where was the mole specifically?
Inside CIA, inside one of CIA's most sensitive intelligence collection.
What we call houses.
Was this an officer out in the field or was this somebody like in Langley?
They didn't know at the time.
They didn't know if it was a person in Langley or a person in the field, but what they knew is that the person was highly connected because they were able to get information that was of like leadership plans and intentions.
It was a high placed asset, high placed mole.
And this is not the person you're talking about in the beginning of the book who ends up getting a private contracting job for a bank.
That is the same person.
Recruited.
Okay.
Yeah.
So the.
Every case in CIA is encrypted, and we have a specific way that we encrypt.
I wanted to tell everybody what that specific way was that we encrypt assets, but of course, CIA wouldn't let me.
So, we use code names in the book to kind of give you a sense of that.
So, the code name for the mole is Scimitar.
Scimitar is identified, CIA learns of Scimitar from an allied power that says, Hey, you have a problem, you have an asset, you have a mole inside your agency, meaning a sworn US intelligence officer.
Is giving secrets to a foreign country.
And the foreign country is Falcon, and Falcon is one of our largest, most strategic adversaries.
You've made your guess, other people have made other guesses.
One of our largest, most strategic.
Yes.
So CIA has a problem.
CIA needs to fix this problem, but the problem is magnified because how are you going to fight this mole?
You don't know who the mole is.
Can I ask you one quick yes or no question?
Yeah.
Does Falcon have nuclear weapons?
Yes.
Okay.
There's a lot of nuclear weapons out there, but there's a lot.
We'll narrow it down.
So CIA has to find a mole in Falcon House, which means they don't know who the mole is, but they know the mole is in Falcon House, so they can't trust any fucking buddy in Falcon House.
So, when they go to build new operations, they can't look inside their own most talented division.
They have to look outside of the division and they have to look for people who have no reason to have ever been connected to any high stakes operations.
And that's how they find my dumbass, right?
Chasing files and gun runners.
And they find my wife, who's doing super sexy stuff in a completely different part of the agency.
So, they find the two of us and they bring us in and they're like, we need the two of you who are about to get married, we need you to build new operations.
It was because we were not part of Falcon House.
Therefore, there was a very low likelihood we were connected to the mole.
There was almost no likelihood that we were the mole.
So we were trustworthy because we were outsiders.
Interesting.
And you talk about using like Al Qaeda style tactics.
Correct.
Can you explain that?
Yeah.
So CIA followed one very specific, what we call modus operandi, MO, for intelligence collection.
And it's been the same MO since the Cold War.
Basically, you send people in to a country.
They make friends and they steal secrets.
And then all of those secrets go through a big bureaucratic funnel all the way to the top of the agency, where they're then added to the president's daily brief and briefed to the president.
You know as much intelligence as you have a need to know.
But as you go up the chain of command, the people at the top of the chain of command have the most need to know.
So they have the full picture.
So they have the full picture.
So the higher you get in leadership, the more vulnerable all the operations of CIA are.
Because if you become a mole, You have access to everything.
So, Falcon House, who was under significant pressure because they had a mole, they had a penetration, they were having problems with operations.
They were like, We have to find a way to fix this.
So, when they called us in, they were like, We need you, Andy and Jeehy, we need you guys to create a new level of a new method of operating that controls the flow of information so that we can still give the president intelligence, but we can also protect the sources and methods that we use to get that intelligence.
That's like an impossible task.
We learned in our training program the same way everybody else learned.
You can't teach somebody algebra and then say, We need you to find a new way of doing algebra.
You can't even conceptualize it.
Bureaucracy and Sleeper Cells00:15:18
So when they sent us on this operation, my wife and I were sitting together.
We were like, How the fuck are we going to do this thing?
I assumed we were sent on an operation just destined to fail.
There's no way we're going to succeed.
I'm already a fuck up.
Now they're just ruining your career too.
But my wife was like, No, they must have sent us for a reason.
We must be.
Smart enough.
We must be good enough.
And so there were lots of fights over dinner where I was like, we're just here to waste our time.
And she was like, no, we're here to make a difference.
And then it struck her.
She was like, you know what we could do?
We could just copy terrorist operations and use them for CIA collection because the United States had been fighting a global war on terror for the last 10 years.
Right.
Nobody else was fighting a war on terror.
Russia wasn't.
Iran wasn't.
North Korea wasn't.
China wasn't.
Nobody.
So what we had learned from Al Qaeda.
Was basically our intellectual property.
Nobody else had learned anything about how they operated.
So, we could mimic terrorist cell activity and essentially be a brand new threat to all of our enemies.
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And what about like transferring information?
And like, because I'm assuming if there's a mole, you don't know where it is.
You don't know if it's in the field, if it's outside Langley, if it's in the office, it could potentially have access to like cables coming in and stuff like that.
Exactly.
Like, what process do you even take to sort of like protect information so a mole can't get access to it and you don't even know who the mole is, right?
And B, find the mole.
So, once we identify that there might be something to the decentralized process of terrorist operations, it's really important that you understand, at least superficially, how a bureaucracy works.
I think we all know how bureaucracy works.
If you've been to public school, you know how fucking bureaucracy works, right?
President knows or the principal knows everything, the vice principal sucks the principal's toes.
And then everybody else is fucked.
That's basically how bureaucracy works everywhere.
So, when we had the way terrorists work, the principal doesn't know anything except an attack has been successful.
Everything about the preceding decisions for that attack, they don't know about.
Oh, really?
Because the principal knows he's target number one.
Osama bin Laden knew he was target number one.
So, all he had to do was approve attacks.
He didn't have to plan them, he didn't have to know when, where, how, who, whatever.
He just had to say yes.
So he had underlings and underlings and underlings, and different cells would plan different types of attacks.
Run the suggestion would go up the chain through a courier, and the courier would say, Hey, cell A wants to blow up a train in London, cell B wants to attack an airport in Kuwait, whatever.
And then all the person above them had to do was say yes or no.
And then the most biggest successful attacks would basically continue going up the chain.
So everybody in leadership didn't know anything about the details of what was happening underneath.
Each cell.
Of 12 to 15 radicals, they were completely dedicated to their operation.
You've heard of the term sleeper cell.
That's what a sleeper cell is.
A sleeper cell is a cell of people who know that one day they might be activated, but they don't know who each other are.
And when they're activated, they make all of their decisions internally, fully decentralized.
Wow.
So we were like, well, what if we did that from within CIA?
What if we made a cell where we made all of our own decisions and all we told leadership was the final plan?
We didn't look for their guidance.
We didn't look for their support.
We didn't look for their anything.
We were just looking for their approval, basically.
And then the way that we're.
It's a great way to stovepipe stuff.
Correct.
Keep it secret.
And that's if you're trying to protect yourself against a mole and you don't know where that mole is, the stovepipe is the best way to go.
And how'd you find the mole?
We didn't find the mole.
So when we were put on the mission, we were told after we had gotten deep into it, we were told afterwards, hey, by the way, there's a mole out there.
And the mole is messing things up and we need you to fix things.
That was a very important part of the story because had they told us, there's a mole, you need to fix things.
And we're going to use you fixing things as bait to bait the mole.
Had they been transparent like that, we would not have had a First Amendment right because we would have agreed essentially.
Right.
So instead, our lived experience made it so that we didn't know what was going on.
And there's no evidence, or else if there was evidence that they would have told us, then that would have not made it through the review board.
Right.
And did the mole get caught?
The mole ended up being caught as a result of not just our operation, but because of multiple other operations that were happening compartmentalized.
In adjacent to us, and so, um, jumping to the end kind of a little bit, the mole was arrested, I think, in 2019, possibly 2017.
Um, I'm not sure, was this public?
Like, was it in the news?
It was public in the Department of Justice, like archives, which are publicly available.
There was no headlines, though, because the headlines are not, uh, headlines are a little bit more controlled than we think they are.
They are, yeah, what, yeah, because you it's really easy to publish something and not tap a journalist on the shoulder, right?
Anyways, so the mole was ultimately arrested, but the mole was arrested after we had already left CIA.
So we were not actively involved in the effort to arrest the mole.
We basically just served our operational purpose, and then the mole was kind of tracking us, and we didn't find out about it until after the fact.
Wow.
That's pretty wild.
It's pretty wild.
I can see why CIA would do that, because frankly speaking, it's exactly what I would do if I was a senior leader at CIA.
You don't want.
Of course.
You don't want to warn the people because that's going to distract them from their mission.
Right, right.
It also makes sense because what we did with our shadow cell was just one new experiment.
It would have made total sense for them to have two or three other teams of officers, some married, some dating, some gay, some friends, who knows?
But multiple other people out experimenting also because you're putting out more bait.
When you go fishing, unless you're a very skilled fisherman, right?
When I go on a charter boat fishing trip because I'm a dumbass fisherman.
The first thing they always do is throw a bunch of chum in the water to bring the fish in.
So that's all we were.
We were just chum.
Right.
Wow.
That's amazing.
I'm happy that you were finally able to publish it.
So, speaking of headlines, I sent you the other day that headline from that Wall Street Journal article about basically how, and people are familiar with this, there were two articles I did.
One of them was that the Wall Street Journal said that the UFOs are a Pentagon disinformation campaign.
And they were Air Force hazing rituals.
For Air Force officers that were working on nuclear sites.
And B, they were also secret EMP experiments designed to test EMPs on live nukes that we have in our silos to see if they can take out the nukes.
So, what did you think of that?
Well, so it's a really interesting article because it's a New York Times article about Wall Street Journal.
Was it Wall Street Journal?
Yeah, Wall Street Journal.
Okay.
It was a.
I will accept it.
It was a Wall Street Journal article that was making a claim about what the DOD was doing.
Steve, you can probably find it.
And so that's interesting in and of itself because who's the disinformation campaign?
Is the disinformation campaign the DOD or is there some bad info going to the Wall Street Journal?
Right.
Or is there nefarious intent on the part of the Wall Street Journal?
So it's a classic source questioning issue.
But what I focus on is the actual content, right?
I served in Malmstrom Air Force Base.
Exactly, which is why this is super relevant to you.
Absolutely.
I served in Malmstrom Air Force Base.
I was a missile crew commander in, deputy commander in Malmstrom Air Force Base.
I was a command post commander in Malmstrom Air Force Base.
I spent years around these nukes.
Weird shit happens all the time around nukes for lots of different reasons.
But there was one specific incident when I was in Malmstrom where we had an occurrence that was very, very similar to the UFO reports that you've heard from, what's his name, Salas?
Yep, Robert, uh, Robert, Bob Salas.
Yeah, Lieutenant Bob Salas.
Yep.
That kind of event is very, very rare and unique and kind of inexplicable.
Like you can't explain how a nuclear weapon, our series of nuclear weapons go off in that fashion.
So something like that happened when I was in the command post.
Multiple witnesses, multiple reports.
We wrote the whole thing up.
Now, there wasn't a light in the sky, there wasn't any of the same stuff that Salas reported, except for the systematic shutdown of missiles.
Several missiles.
When we filled out our report and submitted it up the chain of command, we basically got a response that said, Thank you for submitting the end, which is really, really unusual.
Generally, when you send a report up, you get an explanation down, especially when you're talking about operational weapon systems.
Interesting.
Operational weapon systems, they have to either be tampered with or flawed to have something like that happen.
So, one way or the other, you would need operational fixes to be put in place.
So that's why you would always expect to get a report back that says you were either flawed or you were tampered with.
Please take these corrective actions.
But to just get a report that says thank you is strange.
So, for people that aren't aware, Malmstrom Air Force Base is in Montana.
Is that right?
And it's one of the places that silos a bunch of the Minutemen missiles that we have?
Minutemen 3 and Minutemen 2, which are the most advanced nuclear weapons that we have, are in Malmstrom Air Force Base.
And how many nuclear missiles do we have there?
When I was still active duty, there were 200.
Nuclear ICBMs.
I think they shut down, and I would need to be fact checked on this.
I think they shut down one squadron, and now there are 150 nuclear ICBMs there.
But what makes these ICBMs special is that these are the newest generation ICBMs.
So those ICBMs carry 10 nuclear warheads each.
Yeah, multiple independently targeted re entry vehicle, MIRV, a MIRV.
So there were 150 with 10 warheads on each.
Holy shit.
Yeah, it's a giant firing range.
And one of those warheads would do how much damage?
It would depend on what the warhead was equipped with.
Compared to like Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Oh, so we don't make our tactical warheads, our strategic warheads now are not anywhere near as high yielding as the strategic warheads of World War II.
So they would be about a third to 25% of the size because we have so many of them.
So now that they can be targeted, you don't need to worry about just mass destruction.
So, this is before CIA.
You're in the Air Force and you get sent to go work at Malmstrom underground.
I don't know how far underground, but I. 100 feet.
Wow.
So, you're in charge of.
So, what is like the day to day working at Malmstrom managing all these nukes?
Like, I mean, I imagine it's one thing to say that, okay, Robert Hastings wrote that book, UFOs and Nukes.
He interviewed over 167 nuclear officers that worked at these nuclear missile silos around the world.
Right.
And they claim to see weird UFOs in the sky.
Correct.
But also, can you allude to how psychologically sound you have to be to be an officer to working at one of those missile silos?
Absolutely.
So, it's, The connection between UFO sightings, and let's keep in mind, UFO means unidentified flying object.
It does not mean alien.
It does not mean little green man.
It means there's something in the sky that cannot be identified.
And that means it cannot be identified by Air Force radar.
It cannot be identified by anything that's on the ground in the moment.
It can't be identified by FAA.
What the fuck is it?
We don't know.
There are lots of things that can be unidentified.
Of course.
But that's what we're talking about unidentified objects.
So when you sit underground, you are.
Rigorously recruited because you have to deal with the stress of living underground and going through the routine and the mundane, the mundane moments andor the mundane lifestyle and the high stress moments that come from living down there.
But that's, but you're just two of multiple people because there's a whole security guard force that sits and lives in a house above the capsule.
So if you think about it, it's like a tic tac underground, right?
Like it's actually almost shaped like this.
So this is a hundred feet underground.
And then you have an elevator shaft that goes up to a house.
Up on top.
Inside that house, you have a cook.
They're not a very good cook, but you have a cook, five or seven security guards.
You have the basic needs to make sure that life in the capsule is possible.
So when you talk about a missile site, you're actually talking about 14, maybe nine to 14 people at any given time.
The people underground are highly vetted, the people above ground are less highly vetted, right?
You've got officers who have college degrees underground, you have an 18 year old enlisted kid on the top floor.
So, it's a mixed bag.
But everybody carries a very high level of security clearance.
These are not people who lie.
These are not people who do drugs.
These are not people who fabricate.
And the job is hard and rigorous.
So, you can trust the opinions and the experiences of these people, even if they don't know what they are seeing.
When they say they see something and they don't know what it is, they see something and they don't know what it is.
They're not fucking drunk on the surface level or something.
Confused Military Contractors00:13:40
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They're Q cleared, right?
You have to have a Q clearance.
So it's the Q clearance is the highest level of nuclear clearance.
These guys are category six, category 12 cleared.
Okay.
That's a subcategory underneath what's known as special compartment information.
So they're TS slash top secret slash special compartment information, SCI slash cat six, cat 12.
Okay.
So this Wall Street Journal article about the Pentagon disinformation that fueled America's UFO mythology.
One of the crazy things, which my friend Jesse Michaels did a great comprehensive review of this whole article on his YouTube channel, is that this lady, Susan Goff, was the primary source for this article.
And if you look at her LinkedIn, Her top thing on her resume is leader, head of psychological operations for Booz Allen Hamilton.
Like, if that's not an insane red flag, I don't know what is.
Yeah.
And that she would even think it was appropriate to put that on her LinkedIn profile.
Right.
So, this is important because what you're seeing now and what this is revealing is the weird interconnectedness between military and commercial.
We have nuclear missiles.
Who makes those nuclear missiles?
In Malmstrom Air Force Base, Boeing makes those missiles.
Oh, really?
So they're just like you fly on a Boeing when you go from Texas to LA, you fly on a Boeing when you go in 30 minutes from Montana to Russia as well.
How long do they get away with whacking all those whistleblowers?
So Boeing makes these things.
They build them to U.S. military specs.
They test them, they show them, and they maintain them.
So Boeing has a shit ton of money folded into the whole project.
Similarly, you've got.
Booz Allen Hamilton and other major contract firms who also support the federal government.
So you've got this weird mix where you've got outside contracting firms that are supporting nuclear missile operations, supporting UFO investigations, supporting all sorts of priority issues that the Senate and the House agree on.
So here you've got Congress saying these things are important.
You've got the military saying, understood Congress, we'll take care of it.
And then they go hire contractors to do the work.
And those contractors are the same ones who built the original systems.
That are in question.
Oh my God.
So it's all fucked up, but that's the way the system works.
So Susan Goff, head of psychological operations at Boeing, who knows what that means, but it does make sense that Boeing would have an office of psychological operations because anytime somebody needs some kind of psyop, the military doesn't have the capability and they're going to hire somebody.
So who are they going to hire?
They're probably going to hire the prime contractor, Booz Allen Hamilton.
And the thing that originally struck me with this, Is that that information was so easy to find?
Like, this was a super, it seems like a super lazy debunking job.
And I thought, like, this is so stupid.
It has to maybe be like a reverse psychology thing.
You know, like, it seems so silly to me, and maybe you think differently, that we would test EMPs or have the ability to, like, covertly wheel up this giant EMP to the front gates of Malmstrom Air Force Base and set it off.
Yeah.
And then also, EMPs, I don't know for sure.
I'm not an expert on EMPs, but I don't think you can set it off and shut down all the nukes and then miraculously they'll all come back online within 10 minutes.
Right.
So there's a couple of things that are being confused.
And I don't know if they're confused in the documentation or if they're confused by the Wall Street Journal or if they're confused in some other way.
The equipment that goes into the capsule underground is shielded against EMP.
Because an EMP creates permanent damage.
When an EMP goes off, it destroys all of the electrical components that go into transiting electricity across a motherboard or a chip.
So they create permanent damage.
So you don't want to set off an EMP around your nuclear weapons because, yes, they're shielded, but do you really want to test to see if they're shielded?
Because you could take them offline forever.
You could make it so that you have to replace the motherboard of.
Of a nuclear launch control capsule that controls 10 nuclear warheads.
You lose control of all 10 of those warheads.
So the EMP theory isn't, it's highly unlikely that you would test an EMP near operational weapons, especially since it's a commercial product.
Boeing created the whole thing.
They have testing sites in Nevada, Arizona, Utah, they have Southern California out in the desert where you can put the same component that's underground and you can put an EMP and you can test it right there in the field.
Right?
Without having to be anywhere near operational weapon systems.
That's how these things happen.
So, if EMP testing was occurring, it wouldn't make any sense to do that in an operational weapons field.
You would do it somewhere else.
Right.
So, EMP testing did happen, almost guaranteed it did happen.
But why would it happen there?
So, I don't know if someone's confused or if it's disinformation is an interesting word that the Wall Street Journal uses here because it has a very specific meaning.
Disinformation is fabricated.
Intentionally false.
Strategic deception.
Information.
Exactly.
You're lying and you know you're lying intentionally.
You know what the truth is and you are delivering something that is not the truth.
The two other types of information are misinformation.
Misinformation is mistaken information, incorrect information that is not known.
So in that case, you don't know what the truth is, but you say you do, right?
That's mistaken information.
That's misinformation.
And then there's a third category called malinformation, malicious information.
Malicious information is when you know the truth.
And you pick what part of the truth you share so that you can create a malicious outcome.
Right.
So I know that your ex girlfriend sent you a text message.
I also know that you told her she's a creep and to go away.
But what I tell your wife is just, hey, did you know that Danny's texting with his ex girlfriend?
That's malicious information.
I know more, but I'm only selecting what's going to get me the outcome I want.
Right.
So does the Pentagon use disinformation?
Absolutely.
But is this a case of disinformation?
Is it a case of malinformation?
Is it a case of misinformation?
I'm not sure.
And the other aspect of the article is the hazing rituals, which, if they're hazing rituals, why are all these other countries doing the same hazing rituals?
And that's a very valid point because when you look at the correlation between nuclear activity and the sightings of UFOs, it's consistent worldwide, consistent worldwide among countries that share that information publicly.
So I was commissioned, my company was commissioned back in 2023 to do a study for an ultra high net worth who was planning to invest in.
A mine that was near a nuclear facility overseas.
So he reaches out to my company.
He's like, Hey, I want you guys to do an intelligence study of this investment property that I'm looking at because it's close to a nuclear site and all the locals say that there's all these UFOs.
And I don't want to.
What kind of mine?
I can't tell you the kind of mine.
He's like, I want to invest in the mine, but I don't want to invest in a mine that's not going to have a high yield return.
And if there's a bunch of government activity in the sky, if there's aliens in the sky, If there's something in the sky above my mind, it's not going to be a good investment for me.
Right.
So, you know, I got this and my company was so young.
Well, what if a UFO crashed there?
It'd be a great investment.
Or would it?
Or would it?
Or would the government just take the property from you?
Probably take it.
Right?
That's the kind of stuff he's saying.
Depending on which government.
And it's overseas, exactly.
So you've got all these concerns that are very valid.
I remember getting the email and I was like, this is stupid.
I looked at my wife and I was like, this is stupid.
Are we actually going to, I mean, for a five figure deal, are we actually going to do like a put months of research into this and actually figure this should deposit clears?
And that's what it boiled down to in 2021.
That's what it boiled down to.
So we do the study.
I'm totally blown away by the findings because what we find is that all over Europe and all over North and South America, nuclear facilities have this high incident rate of UFO identification.
Now, our conclusion is that it's due to other identifiable issues, right?
There's a bias towards reporting in areas where there are more people.
So, military installations don't have more population, but they have more trained observers.
So, when military bases see more things in the sky than, say, you know, some farm town in Kentucky, it's because the populations might be the same, but the military base has more people who are looking.
They're looking and they're looking in the sky.
Right.
Where the farm town, they have people there, but they're not trained to look up in the sky for security reasons.
Right.
So, you've got this incident reporting bias that happens.
And because of that, now you have more incidents that are being reported near nuclear facilities.
More militaries and more facilities worldwide.
They're all looking in the sky.
They're all reporting this stuff.
And then you end up having this kind of mass psychosis where now, before you ever show up to this base, like when I was in Malmstrom, you already know it has a history of having strange things in the sky.
So then you go there and what do you do?
You look even more for things in the sky.
So we definitely found the incident reports and we found that there was correlation.
But we also found that intelligence agencies and space agencies were constantly involved in the process of clearing information.
So If it was really nothing, if people were seeing planes and balloons and drones and birds or bats, if they were seeing nothing in the sky, nothing would be classified.
But sometimes things were classified.
So, what were they seeing in those instances?
So, it became this very interesting element for me where I was like, oh, you know what?
It's not consistent.
With the people who say there's nothing in the sky, it's stupid that we're looking.
And then you've got other people who are like, it's a giant government conspiracy.
Both sides are wrong.
But there is something in the middle, there is some truth to.
There's UFOs in the sky that have national security implications that qualify to be classified.
Well, you also have people in Congress testifying of being in skiffs, being shown things and beings that are not from this earth or they don't believe are from this earth.
They're at least non human.
And when you have sitting Congress people talking about seeing this stuff and high level people like David Grush talking about this stuff, it's insane to me that a private company, and I would assume that.
There's military contractors that are holding these secrets, possibly even they probably have more information than like the military even does, just from anecdotal stories I've heard.
And it seems just so bizarre to me that in the world we live in, there can be a private military contractor that has information that would, if let out, like change humanity and change our view of our existence and the universe.
Why is that surprising to you?
It's not surprising to me.
It's insane to me.
It's funny because it's the, I see it as probable.
And I also see it as kind of American.
Because remember, we're a country that thrives on innovation, ingenuity, unfair advantages in business and development.
If the military were to get their hands on some sort of alien tech, they wouldn't be able to do anything with it because they don't have any of the skill sets that it would take to reverse engineer, to study, to research.
So all they would do is call in a commercial company to come do the thing.
And the commercial company knows that any work they do, they want to wrap it up in intellectual property.
White House Journalist Block00:02:42
Right.
If I'm going to touch this thing, I need to be able to own what I learned from this thing.
And that way, government, you're going to save money.
Right.
So instead of charging you $50 million to take apart this space device, I'm going to charge you $10 million, but I get to keep the IP.
And the government, of course, is like, government would do that.
Absolutely.
They do that shit all the time because they've got a budget to keep by the end of the year.
And they're like, oh, you know what?
This is going to turn into a whole bunch of nothing.
We found some space junk.
We don't know what the space junk is.
We're going to call in Booz Allen Hamilton.
And we're going to let them look at our space junk.
And we're going to trust them to tell us the truth because they've sworn a secrecy agreement with us or whatever else.
And Booz Allen Hamilton's like, we'll take a look at your space junk and we're going to give you a 50% discount, but we keep the IP.
Ah, good deal.
Fist bump, high five, because guess what?
When I retire as a general, guess where I'm going to get my next job?
Booz Allen Hamilton.
Wow, man.
So, after seeing an article like that, knowing what you know, spending all that time at Malmstrom, like, what do you make of that?
Like, why?
Why would the Wall Street Journal?
Want to publish something like that, even and then Jesse points out in his video there was a White House staffer, yeah, somebody who was in the White House that tried to like create an op ed, right, pointing that like there is something here, this is not correct, or whatever, and they decided to push it to the side and ignore it, yeah.
So, I don't know what drives the Wall Street Journal, I don't know what drives them to deem something journalistically sound, I don't know what drives them to deem something newsworthy.
There's usually a criteria that has to be met.
When you're talking about professional journalism, an op ed is not professional journalism.
It's an opinion and it's an opinion in editorial format, which means that any editor can choose to let or block the actual opinion from getting into the newspaper.
So we have to recognize that because it shows how cultivated our news is.
Your news is not truth, your news is cultivated selection of information to sell newspapers and to sell advertising.
So that's what we're seeing with the Wall Street Journal, without a doubt, is that.
The idea of sharing this opinion of a White House staffer who worked collaboratively with another researcher, they wanted to block that story.
But they want to release a story like this.
So, what are the politics?
What is the purpose?
Why are you shaping the information the way you're shaping it, Wall Street Journal?
And that's what I don't know.
Right.
Yeah.
And then, you know, just speaking to companies like Booz Allen Hamilton and Boeing.
Banking Money Trails00:09:27
that are doing all this stuff.
I had this lady on here a couple weeks ago, a couple months ago, actually.
And she's a, she worked under the Bush administration for the Department of HUD.
And she was, she's like this math wizard.
And she was responsible for figuring out all the mortgage fraud and figuring out like what was happening, where the money was going and how to fix it.
And she has this crazy, and I understand sometimes really, really smart people can be cuckoo.
But this lady's like legit.
She worked under the Bush administration.
She's like a math wizard, and she explained her theory to me that how, you know, half after right before 9 11, Donald Rumsfeld came out and said there's like two point something trillion dollars missing from the Pentagon.
And I think now it's ballooned to over 20 trillion of missing money.
She thinks all that missing money, she was trying to figure out where it went.
And she's like, she said, right when all that money started missing, offshore counts she noticed started to balloon, like random off some sort of like banking balance sheets.
Of offshore banks that she could track.
She saw their balance sheets ballooning simultaneously with the money disappearing from the Pentagon.
And what she hypothesizes is that that's where these contractors are getting the black budget money to do some of this secret stuff that people in Congress are trying to get access to.
Like when you're talking about going into the SCIFs, talking about secret technology, UFOs, reverse engineering stuff, she thinks that the trillions and trillions of dollars could be going to that.
It also could be going to building continuity of government underground bases.
Things like this all across America for in case there's like a nuclear war or there's like a catastrophic world ending cataclysm or something like this.
But that shit kind of blew my mind.
I mean, strategically, it makes sense.
It does make sense.
And we have to understand that there is a black budget and the black budget is the black budget because it prevents who has the ability to see where it's going.
Right.
The black budget is not illegal because essentially what funds the black budget is all of our efforts to.
To crack crime and to essentially run operations that are supposed to be commercial operations.
So we're supposed to make fake businesses so that we can steal secrets or whatever else, right?
Yeah.
But those fake businesses become profitable.
So what do you do with the profit from the fake business?
Right.
Well, you got to put it somewhere and you can't just, you can't make it part of next year's budget item so that CIA can spend it.
You have to do something with it that kind of obfuscates it so nobody sees where it goes.
Because China's looking, Russia's looking, Iran's looking, everybody's looking to see where your money goes.
Mm hmm.
So, they just put it into a black budget.
So, it makes sense that a black budget would grow and it makes sense that a budget would increase.
And it also makes sense that money would leave a black budget and somebody would be able to see the money leave and then offshore accounts would increase because you have to launder the black budget money before you apply it to the operation that it's going to.
That stuff makes total sense.
It also makes sense.
It's not outside of the realm of probability, not just possibility, but probability.
That's what she's saying, it's going to make sense.
I don't know about the UFO research, but the continuity of government preparing for like the next world war, preparing for nuclear war, that makes a ton of sense.
The craziest fucking thing she said is she thinks it's the bankers who run the world, which I think it's probably, I mean, the bankers, the biggest bankers are probably like the most powerful people in the world for sure.
But she thinks it's the global bankers are trying to create a breakaway civilization in case something like this happens so they can get off the earth and save themselves.
And that's where you go from like, Probably zero to 100 real quick.
He just jumped off the cliff there.
Yes.
The cuckoo cliff.
Yes.
So I don't think that's the case because here I was in a meeting just a few weeks ago with a team that was in charge of managing the movement of money between clandestine operations.
Clandestine operations that were partially commercial, partially military, partially federal government.
And they had a problem because it's very hard in today's era to move that money.
It's very, very hard to move the money without it being seen, without it landing on a blockchain, without it landing.
Without triggering some kind of alert on some foreign banking system, in large part because America has put so many demands on so many foreign banking systems so that we can track terrorism and we can track drug trafficking, we can track human trafficking.
So it's very, very hard to move money without people being able to track the money back to where it came from.
And if we can do it, so can our adversaries.
So can any advanced mathematics degree, accountant, actuarial sciences person.
So, the question becomes well, how do we bury the movement of money inside of financial tools?
How do you make it so that, like, essentially someone's 401k can launder the money?
And then you can pull from that 401k to fund the operation, right?
How do you use a financial tool to hide the money instead of just moving it from bank account to bank account?
That's kind of the future of illicit funding.
And we're seeing that that is already being used in Iran and China and Russia to move money.
You fund.
Efforts in Belarus, and then Belarus transitions that money to Romania, and then something in Romania hands physical cash off to somebody in Moldova.
That's how money gets moved now.
It's not just shell company to shell company.
When did that start to change?
Because I know, I remember like Iran Contra was even really confusing, right?
Like they somehow sold weapons to Israel or gave weapons to Israel.
Israel sold the weapons to Iran.
We used that money to move it to another country.
That is very, very complicated.
And it's funny because the way that traditionally we've made it difficult is By making it administratively complex, right?
So, who has the authority?
How much money was sent?
When was the money sent?
And you have to track amounts 27K on this day, 105K on that day, and 35K on this day.
And they're all going to the central bank.
And that's how it used to work.
And you could just have a good accountant who was patient and would be able to reverse engineer everything.
And that's what we do with Iran Contra.
It started to change when cryptocurrency became widely adopted.
And then it also started to change when competing financial sectors started to emerge.
When it was just New York, which was the financial capital of the world, it was easy.
Now you've got Dubai and you have Shanghai and you have other countries that are continually trying to create new financial centers.
So now you can move money between financial centers.
And how do you move large amounts of money?
You move them through financial tools.
You have bankers who do nothing but investment banking.
And then you've got like venture capital firms that do nothing but venture capital.
And you have now with venture capital, you essentially have a reasonable expectation that something's going to massively increase in value.
Well, is there really a company that's massively increasing in value, or is there a company that's just laundering hundreds of millions of dollars for a federal government somewhere?
Right.
You can hide it so much easier now.
Yeah.
The problem is, it still takes, the problem is that there's always a digital trail.
So you can hide it, but there's always a digital fucking trail.
Breadcrumb trail that someone can follow.
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Back to the show.
What do you make of this push in the US to adopt these stable coins?
I think it's a good idea because, yeah, because I am not a fan of unregulated cryptocurrency like your bitcoins of the world.
Not a fan of that.
Decentralized.
You're not a fan of decentralized.
Decentralized, yeah, no, because it makes it.
It takes away all the incentive.
It takes away all the financial benefits of currency exchange.
And then it also makes it so that bad guys can use real money to do bad shit.
Yes, good guys can use real money to do good shit too.
But if you have centralized currency, good guys still get to do good shit and bad guys don't get to do bad shit.
So, and you get the financial benefits, meaning every time we have a transaction, some bank collects money off of that transaction.
And now you've just increased the production of value and you've captured currency, you captured revenue as part of that service.
So, it's a.
So, banks get to make money off of it if it's centralized.
And that's good.
That's good because the money that banks make becomes tax based that pays taxes so that you and I don't have to pay taxes.
For uncentralized banking to happen, decentralized banking to happen.
There's an argument that one of the biggest arguments for Bitcoin is that it's decentralized.
It's decentralized because it's good.
And it's basically equal to the ultimate freedom because you can see how people can use money to trap people and turn on and turn off money.
That's the biggest fear with decentralized coins.
And in China, for example, they can turn off your wallet, turn off your.
They have the WeChat or whatever thing that can basically do everything.
You bank through there, you communicate through there, and all your social media is in that thing.
So, like, It's an easier way to control and lock down people.
Elected Presidents and Lies00:09:10
And that's what I think people are trying to run away from.
And that's what they fear is going to happen with the US government.
It's because people are stupid.
Really?
Oh, yeah.
People are stupid, dude.
What do you think about the idea that, like, so with Doge, right?
We want to figure out how to cut waste, fraud, and abuse.
Theoretically.
Theoretically.
He went after the IRS, the HHS, and the Treasury Department, and they sucked out all this information and they simultaneously were powerless.
Partnersed with Palantir AI.
So they want to take all this information of all the individuals in the country, take all their IRS data, all their personal data, all their healthcare data, centralize it into one database and combine it with Palantir's AI.
Use Palantir's AI.
Now, if I want to find waste, fraud, and abuse, why wouldn't you just go to the fucking black budget?
Why wouldn't you go to the missing $21 trillion and figure out what happened there?
You can't figure out what happened there because it's not documented.
So it seems like.
It's also not fraud, waste, and abuse because that money.
Can't get into that budget without essentially being captured outside of the American tax base.
So it's just a big lie, and you have to accept it that the money's not missing.
It's just went to black budget stuff.
Yeah, you just have to accept it.
I'm sorry.
Like, here's nobody likes to hear it, but here's the fucking truth.
You are a stupid cog in the American economy, America.
If you hear me, if you hear me, you are like me, stupid cog in the system.
That's just what we are.
Our job is to have a job and pay our taxes.
Or your job is to start a business and pay fucking taxes.
Or your job is to hire people and then have the people you pay pay taxes.
That's our job.
That's why we exist.
That's why we die and nobody cares.
That's why new people join the workforce and nobody cares.
That's our job.
Because without us, there's no foundation for a tax base to create military superiority.
And if you don't have military superiority, you don't have any protection against some other country coming in and destroying your country.
So, the United States only matters in as much as the government survives because it's the government that makes us the United States.
And the government knows that.
It's not the American people that make us the United States.
I mean, I understand all the fucking people who are crying in their panties right now.
I get it.
But the truth is, most wars are won because an invading force walks into a village, and guess what the village does?
Because all they want to do is just keep feeding their kids and keep going to school and keep doing whatever.
They don't really care if they're France or Nazi Germany.
They don't really care if they're Poland or Nazi Germany.
We're seeing it happen in Ukraine right now.
The world is letting Ukraine lose to Russia because the whole world is like, we don't really care if they're Ukraine or Russia.
What do we care?
We'll have a conversation in Alaska and we'll decide the future of your country because you don't have a voice at the table.
That's exactly what's happening right now Putin and Trump talk in Alaska about what's the future of Ukraine.
Yeah, they're supposedly like meeting right now.
Correct.
As we're sitting here.
As we're sitting here, right?
And you're listening to us.
Yeah, right.
But the point is, we just have to accept that we live in a society where we don't have a say.
And the one thing that we do have a say in is who gets elected to office.
And we don't fucking exercise that say.
We sit around and we bitch at the dinner table and we'll complain at the bar and we'll drink our Coors Light and try to rule the world from our little bar stool.
But we're fucking stupid because the one thing that we can do.
To actually shape the future is to get off our ass and vote every time we have an opportunity to vote and to do the research so that we have an informed vote when we choose to make that vote.
Instead, we have Congress people in Congress who don't represent us, and all we do is complain about it.
And when the time comes to reelect them, we either don't go or we go and just vote based off of some party line.
Yeah, but even the elections are rigged though.
Like, even the two people that end up making the primaries on both sides, and you get this binary choice between who's going to be president, it doesn't seem like I think there's a general sentiment in the country right now.
That the president doesn't run the country.
The president's not even a puppet anymore.
The president's just a fucking actor now.
That would be a wrong assessment.
That would be a wrong assessment.
Absolutely.
If anything, the president is more powerful now than they've ever been in the past because the Congress, who's supposed to have power, is a bunch of pussies.
So they keep giving more power to the president so that when their constituents complain to them, they can be like, hey, it's out of my hands.
The president has power.
Well, if the president has so much power, let's use Donald Trump as an example, who Is doing all the opposite things he would campaign that he was going to do, right?
He campaigned, he was going to release the Epstein files, campaigned that he was going to drop the debt, campaigned that he was going to stop all the endless wars.
He's continued the endless wars.
He just increased the debt by three to five trillion.
And he's like, who the fuck?
Epstein, who?
What?
You still care about this?
It's like, it's insane.
And all the biggest people who supported him and campaigned for him, all the high IQ MAGA people, are all like pushing back against this now and questioning what the fuck is happening.
Like, is he in charge?
Because it doesn't seem like it.
So, the fact that he can just do what's against his campaign promises shows that he has the power to do whatever the fuck he wants to do.
You just gave the exact example as to how much power the president has.
Well, why wouldn't he want to do what he promised the people that he was going to do?
Why do you think he promised the people?
Do you think he just said what he had to say to get elected?
It's what every president has done since Obama.
It's what every president has arguably done forever, right?
They make promises to get into office and then.
They don't fulfill their promises.
Like, we've been littered with failed campaign promises.
And every president goes through the period where everybody accuses them of not following through on their promises.
And then you have a few presidents that try to fulfill that promise, and then they get criticized for that, too.
That was Obama's Obamacare, right?
He's like, I promise we're going to do this.
And then the only way he could get it done was with executive orders and hijacking Congress.
And then when he did it, we're all like, oh, you just broke the thing.
You made it worse than it was before.
And you created this new precedent for executive orders.
So let me ask you this why can't any of the presidents follow through?
On what they campaign on.
Do they campaign on the things that they believe are good?
No.
That the people think are good?
No.
They campaign.
Presidents are elected officials.
And what we have discovered, like what the government has discovered and what professional politicians have discovered, is that the people who vote for the president are determined based on age and a piece of paper that they've filled out.
That's basically it.
Everybody has an opinion, everybody has a vote.
Well, how many opinions are right?
Right.
So, how many voters do you think actually know what the fuck they're voting for?
Right.
So, every Four years it becomes a race, arguably every two years it becomes a race of how do you get people to get off their ass and go vote?
Not vote for the right person, not vote for what they believe.
They just, how do you just get them to just go vote for whatever the fuck they're going to vote for?
Based on whatever propaganda you've been indoctrinated in.
Bingo, right?
And that's essentially what it is.
So that's the game right now.
Donald Trump is a marketing master.
He knows how people think.
He knows so well how people think that he's been maybe, maybe super rich, maybe not rich.
Maybe successful at real estate, maybe not successful.
Nobody fucking knows because he's so good at just getting people to take action that that's what he's done.
So when he ran in 2016, even the party that he was running for didn't want him to win and he still won.
And then when he ran again, he was a convicted felon.
He had all sorts of reasons why nobody should have voted for him, but he won again.
And just like you said, the people who were the high IQ MAGA people who backed him are now not backing him.
He even convinced them.
Which never happened with Obama, by the way.
It's just because Obama was still groomed by a party, right?
There's no party.
There's no party with Donald Trump.
The party is Donald Trump, right?
There is no Republican party that backs Donald Trump.
There's no future plan for the Republican party to stay in power.
There's none of that.
He's just a wild, loose cannon that I think the political landscape is kind of like, what if this happens again?
What do we do then?
Because everything was supposed to be controlled.
Right.
If you remember the leaks that happened when the Democratic Party pushed back, like deliberately held back Bernie Sanders in order to advance Hillary Clinton, like they were shaping their politics.
The party was shaping who was supposed to move up in the hierarchy.
Donald Trump just threw a giant fucking grenade in the whole hierarchy of the Republican Party.
And now they're trying to figure that out.
But who is the party?
Like, who are you saying?
Perverting the American Future00:09:04
Are these financial interests?
Like, what is who is the party?
Who's deciding who to push Bernie Sanders out and to put Hillary Clinton in?
Who are these?
Dark, mysterious people that run the world.
They're not really dark and mysterious, and they don't run the world.
So, among very wealthy people, you have a few people who are known as kingmakers.
Have you ever heard the term kingmakers?
Yeah.
So, kingmakers are people who are so wealthy that a change in policy can massively amplify their wealth or massively deteriorate their wealth.
Consider, just as a very simple example, all the people who create paper, right?
All the manufacturers that create something based off of the pulp of wood.
A small change in environmental policy.
Massively transforms the entire paper industry.
So, you've got lobbyists who are watching out for whatever happens with wood.
So, whether it's toilet paper, whether it's paper, whether it's books, whether it's cardboard, you got lobbyists who are like, wait a second, we want to make sure certain policies don't happen.
And even better, we want to make sure that other policies do happen.
So, they get involved into both parties to try to discourage environmental policy in the blue party and try to make sure that nobody encourages.
Environmentalism in the Red Party.
Right.
So you have lobbyists that get involved, and those lobbyists are backed by very wealthy people who have money tied to these industries wealthy investors, wealthy conglomerates of investors, wealthy individuals.
And they're not mysterious and they're not dark.
They're the ones who shape each party.
Correct.
They're also called market changers, right?
And they're people who can literally change a market based off of how they invest.
If you follow cryptocurrency, again, I don't like decentralized cryptocurrency, but I think cryptocurrency is the way of the future.
Centralized cryptocurrency, a digital US dollar, for example, I think that is the way of the future.
But when you look at cryptocurrency, the 30 to 40% of cryptocurrency is these institutional.
Investors, whales, who just pick up the phone and they're like, hey, we're going to buy $10 million of Bitcoin today.
And when they buy their $10 million of Bitcoin, the price shoots up, right?
Because now everybody thinks that Bitcoin's going crazy.
And then after that trade is done, two weeks later, the Bitcoin price drops, right?
And then they're like, oh, they sell their Bitcoin.
They buy $10 million on Monday.
The price jumps up by Wednesday.
They sell their $10 million in Bitcoin on Wednesday.
And then the market turns down again.
That's how.
Super wealthy people work.
So if the government, the United States government, is what really matters and what America really is, and the people should sit back and suck on their thumbs and let the American empire do what it does, you're also making the argument that it's all run on capitalism and lobbying and industries and things like this.
And it doesn't seem like it's a monolithic strategic thing.
It seems like it's a very, very discombobulated, With all these different financial entanglements of people, billionaires, whoever they are, that aren't looking out for anything except for their bank accounts and making sure that their kids and their grandkids are going to have a legacy or have a fail safe.
So, I mean, that's what every middle class person is looking out for, too, just to make sure that their kids and their grandkids have some kind of fail safe.
Sure.
So, again, for all you criny, whiny, panty bitches out there, just get your handkerchief right there.
I dare you.
Yeah.
Our country is a perversion of what it was supposed to be.
What our founding fathers created here is a far cry from what we have become, right?
And I'm not talking about the white landowning male.
That's an oversimplification bullshit.
What the founding fathers wanted was a country where you would own property and by owning property be invested in the future of the country.
And only then would you have a vote in what happens to that country.
So if you didn't own land, you were fucked.
You were supposed to be a worker bee.
And your whole goal would be to work your ass off so that you could own a little bit of land.
And then by owning that land, show that you are invested in the future of the land that you have.
And then you would gain the right to have a say in what the future of our country is.
We've perverted that to the place now where all you have to do is breathe for 18 years and you get to have a say in what the future of our country is.
You're not invested.
How many fucking people have a vote and they don't even want to live here?
Right.
They're like, oh, you know what I really want to do is I really want to go live in Costa Rica off of $14,000 a year.
And it's so unfair that my company in California won't pay me to live remotely in Costa Rica.
You don't have a say.
You're obviously not invested in the future of our country, right?
You're invested in your own personal future and you're trying to capitalize off of the few people that actually are heavily invested in the success of the nation.
So, are there any people who aren't these?
Oligarchic, like capitalistic companies that are trying to lobby for things to go their way?
Is there anyone who sits above them that says, let's make sure everything stays on the up and up?
Let's make sure this country doesn't fall apart.
Let's make sure.
No, there's not.
And I think that what we're seeing right now, and for anybody who's trying to anticipate what comes next, you're seeing that there isn't anybody watching out for the actual welfare of the country because all the people that the forefathers assigned that responsibility to, right?
Another perfect example the forefathers thought that you should be a successful business person.
Before you spent a short period of time as a public servant serving in the Congress.
And then you would take a pay cut to work in the Congress so that you would go back to being a productive member of society.
We have perverted that process to now you can be a professional politician, where you don't ever have success outside of politics.
And all you do is spend 20 or 30 years in Congress doing dick all, getting paid what you think you should be paid, because guess who passes the laws about how much congressmen get paid?
Congress.
So we've completely perverted our system.
So as a result, if you look at that over the course of almost 300 years that we've been alive, we've gone from what was a solid theory to this perversion where now everybody who's supposed to be watching out for the future of the country is really only watching out for their own success for the current election cycle.
Whether that's a president or a senator or a congressman or a school board member or a mayor or a governor, they're not trying to make a better future for America.
They all say it.
But that's not what they're actually trying to do.
Once they say it to get the office, and then once they're actually in the office, they're thinking, how am I going to make it through retirement?
What do I need to do to make sure that I can get the next better job?
The next quarter.
We have to make sure the stocks are up the next quarter.
We have to beat our revenue goal.
Because I need to have something to campaign on again in two years.
And I want to be able to campaign on a winning government.
I want to be able to campaign on lowering the base rate for interest rates.
I want to be able to talk that I want to take credit for the boom in the economy.
I want to talk about how more houses were sold.
I want to hide how less jobs were created.
That's where we live right now.
It's a shitty place to live, but it's where we live right now.
And it's not going to get better.
It's just not going to get better if we keep thinking that politicians are going to fix it.
Because even if they are well meaning, which if they are well meaning, they will never make it to office because they'll get chewed or weeded out before that.
So then the people who are actually conniving enough to get to the final race, when they take office, they're going to be incentivized the same way every other president and every congressman is incentivized now.
Yeah, this is what you and Kiriakou were talking about when you guys were both here last time.
And you were talking about, I think it was John Brennan, somebody that you were talking about how basically this guy just kissed every ass, got all the way to the top of the CIA.
Correct.
And it was just like, you have to be the type of person who is just looking out for themselves, figuring out how to weasel their way through the system to get to the top.
And you're going to sell yourself out and all the people around you.
Output transcript Out to get to where you want to get.
And that's the kind of people that are optimized to get these kind of jobs.
Like that's how you have to be optimized to thrive in that world.
If you have principles, I appreciate your principles.
But you know, you know, exactly.
You know as well as I do, your principles hold you back.
John Kiriakou is such a good example.
And I really appreciated our conversation with John, even though I still disagree with John.
You guys agreed on about 90% of the things.
Stable Coins and Crypto Markets00:03:04
Yeah, on many, many of the things.
Principled interests that he has.
But John is making his money from Russia.
Not anymore.
They fired him.
He now has a great YouTube channel.
He has his own podcast on YouTube.
Hell yes, John.
Good job.
Good job disengaging from the Russian machine.
But I promise you, John is looking at the future and he's like, this is fucked.
He's like, my dollars in my bank account are about to lose all their value.
And then the economic incentives that are coming up are going to force people to either borrow more money, which will, of course, cause the government to print more money, which will continue to decrease the value of our dollar.
He's like, so how do I get my money tied to something other than?
The US dollar or something in addition to the US dollar.
The crypto markets have been going through the roof.
I don't know if it changed today, but at least for the last four or five days, they've been doing very, very well because everybody's, everybody.
Pay attention.
Since, what is it, Friday?
So I think since Monday of this week, they started to rally really strong.
Let's see what it's at.
Bitcoin.
Oh, it's at 117,000.
I think it broke a record on Wednesday there, right?
120.
Oh, 120.
Yeah, on Wednesday or August 13th.
Hit 125.
That was just, yeah, it was two days ago.
Wow.
So crypto markets are rallying because people are like, I need to put my money somewhere other than the US dollar.
Because what's going to happen if Trump actually brings down the interest rates and everybody starts borrowing money?
We're in a world of hurt.
And all the smart financial people know it.
But all the stupid cogs in the wheel are like, yeah, bring down those interest rates because I want to buy that house that's overpriced anyways.
We forgot that everything got overpriced at the end of COVID, right?
So everybody wants to go buy their RV.
They want to buy their truck.
They want to buy their new house.
They want to whatever.
They want it.
They want their fucking inflatable on the lake on weekends.
Trump knows that.
And Trump knows that we will dig our own fucking hole.
And then there's going to be this false boom in the economy because our devalued currency is going to start buying all this other shit.
And then people are going to see all this increased sales activity.
And that's going to make us feel like we're out of it when all we're doing is getting deeper into it.
Meanwhile, the EU continues to have a stable euro compared to the US dollar.
And the fucking.
Runminbi in China is sitting here watching and laughing at us because they can manipulate their currency without needing the masses.
Right.
Which is what we want to do, right?
Which is what we are doing.
We would love to be doing that with stable coins.
So, stable coins, stable coins that are centralized to the currency, like the US dollar stable coin, for example, that is a manipulatable currency, just like the US dollar is a manipulatable currency.
But a stable coin like, say, XRP, Ripple, is a different kind of stable coin because that's a stable coin that's supposed to just Carry value from platform to platform.
So there are differences in stable coins.
I mean, like government sanctioned stable coins.
Correct.
Is it Christy Gnome?
Government Surveillance Tactics00:16:11
They want to be able to control those.
You are correct.
Yeah.
The government always wants to be able to control its currency because it has to be able to shape the economy.
So it has to be able to control its currency so it can shape what we dumbasses know about economics, which is this much.
So they want to be able to say, hey, your dollar value is up.
Or if your dollar value is down, they want to be able to say, oh, your dollar's value is down, but your purchasing price is up.
Right?
Or they want to be able to say, oh, it's a soft landing.
Do you think that the people who are at the top of the government, who run the country, do you think they are envious of what the CCP has over their population?
Like the control they have, the level of control, the level of surveillance?
I think that.
10 years ago, the answer would have been different.
I think 10 years ago, the answer would have been no, they're not envious.
But right now, I think our government is looking at the American population and saying, how do we have more surveillance?
How do we have more control?
How do we take more power away from the American voter and let us just do it ourselves?
Because it makes complete sense if you look at it pragmatically.
Things get done faster when you don't have to take it to a vote.
Things get done in a more efficient manner when you don't have to have 12 people review it or check off on it.
When you can create surveillance models, you create efficiencies because you don't need people.
You don't need police officers with.
Radar guns anymore.
UAE has poles like every 25, every quarter of a mile all across their highways.
Automated cameras, about 15 cameras on each pole.
And all they do is check your speed, record your license plate, and then, oh, by the way, your license plate is tied to your national ID, which is tied to your credit card.
So then when you're caught speeding, boop, boop, boop, you're immediately charged.
That's it.
You think our government wouldn't kill for that?
I don't know what China's like right now.
I haven't been.
Into China since they've really modernized after the Olympics.
Wow, dude.
That's wild.
And you think our government wouldn't kill for that?
I think they would.
Absolutely, they would.
You think they wouldn't kill to replace fucking patrol cars with drones that are automated?
Absolutely.
Now all of a sudden you're talking about, and that's just police.
And I love police, I'm a huge fan of the police.
But police is an unpopular topic because of the way that media has portrayed them.
And they're an expense, like we're seeing in Washington, D.C. and L.A., they're an expense that's super easy for the government to jump on and be like, You're terrible at your job.
You're not good enough at your job.
Clearly, you're not efficient at your job, and we need to fix you.
Like, policing is such hard work, and police officers are so underappreciated, anyways, that when they get shat on, it's such an easy case for the government and the people to get behind to say, You know what?
Yes, let's take away budget from the police and use it to create surveillance state.
That's a great idea.
It's not a great idea.
And when you have.
Information centralized the way it is right now with YouTube and Google, which is like ultimate centralization, right?
And you have control over turning on and off the spigot of revenue from these people who are the journalists now.
So now you not only can you have a full surveillance state and have literally everyone's data sucked into one master database that's controlled by Palantir, but you can turn on and off the fucking or turn up the volume or down the volume on people on YouTube or Google who are the people that are trying to be.
Doing journalism, which the definition of journalism is like exposing truth to power and like expose what's really going on and you know shining a light on things like corruption or conspiracies or things like this.
So, I do, I want to make sure that whether you choose to cut this or not, I want to make sure that people understand that I'm not cutting nothing.
That 99% of what you see on YouTube is not journalism, right?
There's journalistic process, there's journalistic rules, there's journalistic review that goes into calling something journalism, and that's why journalism is dying.
That's why the few Poor idealistic bastards out there who are trying to be journalists understand the incredible challenge they have in front of them because who's going to review it?
How are you going to take the time to vet it?
Because it has to be researched and it has to be reviewed before you ever produce it.
And then when you produce it, who's going to come in and say, This is an example of journalism?
Who also has the credibility of saying, This is an example of journalism?
So, what you're seeing with most YouTube influencers, me and you included, what you're seeing are people who have an opinion, who are bringing on individuals to have a conversation that might be eye opening, but what we're not doing is not journalism.
Sure, it might not be.
You might not want to qualify that as traditional journalism, but even podcasts.
Podcasts are the biggest thing in the world right now.
I mean, you have the presidents being decided on podcasts.
So, having somebody on a podcast who has unique insight into something that a lot of people don't know about.
The government might not want people to know about that.
For sure.
And they can turn the volume up and down on that.
Of course.
Absolutely.
I'm not disagreeing with your conclusion about the danger of a centralized environmental or a centralized information landscape.
All I'm saying is I don't want people to think that I'm a journalist by any means.
I have met real journalists.
I have incredible respect for real journalists.
When I was in the Intel community, we followed similar rules to journalists.
That's why things take time.
So do you agree with that?
Do you think that's good?
Do you want that to happen?
Do I want which to happen?
Do you want the.
Our country to be centralized to that kind of degree to where they have control over everything and everything that anyone can possibly say.
Questioning the government.
Nobody wants that.
The same thing that you're talking about with UAE, with them basically figuring out if you were speeding and turning off your credit cards if you sped too much or something.
Yeah.
So nobody wants, I don't think anybody wants that who is not tied into wealth or power in some way.
When you're tied into wealth and power, there's always carve outs for you.
But when you're just, A cog, there's no carve out for you.
So, like when somebody says you did something, when minority report happens, you've got no say.
Right.
Right.
But when you're higher up the food chain, you're fine.
So, what I would say is I don't want that, but I think that that is an almost inevitable outcome because of efficiency, control, economic benefit, but also because the ignorant base that doesn't participate in their own choosing of governors and mayors, that ignorant base is also going to be.
Motivated, some population is going to be motivated to vote for it when that comes up.
And the government already knows that.
So it's kind of like all we have to do is find a way to shape a policy, create some messaging, get the narrative out there, and then the people, the 55 plus community that gets up to vote every two years, they're going to get up and say yes.
And they're going to vote yes, and then everybody else is going to bitch.
Right.
And I assume, I could be right, I could be wrong, depending on how much is going on, but I assume that.
There already is some of this going on with like turning up and turning down the volume on certain things online, which always makes me skeptical of things that are like everywhere.
Like, is this being promoted?
Is this a disinformation thing?
Is this bot?
I mean, there's been, I don't know if you've noticed, but there's been an overwhelming amount of bots on social media lately, like fake accounts that are trying to influence the narrative.
There's this phenomenon that happens in the YouTube comments, this pylon effect, where if there's enough comments saying one thing about, A guest on a podcast, right?
A new, like a real human being like me or you that goes in and reads the comments are there's a way higher chance of me adding my two cents that fits into that narrative that's already there, and a way lower probability of me saying, You all are crazy.
What are you?
Am I watching a different fucking interview than you are?
So it creates like this weird sort of unnatural.
That's mass psychosis.
Yes.
We've seen it for a long time, only now it's digitized.
You're completely right.
And, uh, And I think you're also, we're already seeing how humans and algorithms shape what information gets spread.
This is a fantastic example of this the fact that most YouTube, as an example, as a simple example, YouTube is content essentially like or dislike ambivalent.
It doesn't really care if you like or dislike something.
It cares that you clicked a button that said whether you liked or disliked something.
So even if everybody who watches it hates it, it still gets spread around, right?
Especially if it's also creating comments because now you've got, now what YouTube wants is for you to be engaged in the algorithm.
So, of course, taken to its far extreme, it's not.
It doesn't always apply.
But what they're looking for is engagement.
What content is getting comments?
What content is getting thumbs up and thumbs down?
How does that piece of content react with these different demographics and these different age groups and these different education levels and these different income brackets?
Where can I go to maximize the chances of people staying on the platform by sharing this?
X is the same way.
Instagram is the same way.
That's why, no matter how hard you try, once you've watched one video of a A monk doing push ups, you're going to keep getting fed pictures of monks doing push ups.
Right.
Right.
Because the algorithm's like, are you interested now?
Are you interested now?
And, and of course, you still scrolling through it, you're like, oh, there's another monk, there's another monk, there's another monk.
Why are there so many monks?
And, but what's, what the algorithm sees is that you're pausing, touching, watching, et cetera.
Right.
Yeah.
There definitely is that.
But there's obviously guardrails on that, depending what you do.
Like you, like for sure, during certain times, like you, doctors were getting kicked off YouTube for talking about different treatments for COVID, which I'm afraid to even fucking talk about in a podcast now.
And it's, Worked on me, right?
Their operation is working.
I've gotten video shut down and threatened to lose my YouTube channel over talking about COVID.
So I don't fucking say a shit about COVID anymore.
And there is that effect of self censorship that I think is very effective with people who have kids to feed.
Because they're making their livelihood off of YouTube.
Right.
Yeah, for sure.
Right.
And that activity, sorry to interrupt you, but that type of shaping is CYA shaping.
So the same self censorship that you're applying.
CYA.
Yeah, cover your ass.
Okay.
Right.
The same self censorship you're applying is CYA.
You're like, I got to.
I got to make sure my channel doesn't get shut down.
Well, somewhere there's some fucking human who's sitting at Facebook, sitting at YouTube, who's like, we've got it's on my ass to make sure that the policymaker doesn't come in and say, hey, you're supporting disinformation from foreign media.
Because if you recall back in 2016 and again in 2020, FBI and the Center for Counterintelligence sent notifications, public notifications, telling people to specifically watch out for disinformation from foreign media trying to influence elections.
All of your social media platforms.
Well, all the social media platforms also don't want to get shut down.
None of them want to be penalized with taxes, want to be criminally liable, want to end up in front of the Senate, like intelligence, any kind of committee, defending their choices on what information they shared and what information they didn't share.
So they're taking a super conservative approach, too.
So they're like, hey, you know what, guys?
Anybody talking about these five or seven topics, just shut them down, shut them down, turn them off, demonetize them, whatever.
I see it on my channel too.
And this all ties back to USAID as well.
This guy, Mike Benz, who's been talking about USAID, he worked at the cybersecurity division of the State Department, I believe he was working.
And I guess companies like Facebook are trying to maintain their monopolies overseas in other countries.
And the government is basically going to them and saying, if you want to maintain the monopoly overseas, In the same way it is here in the US, without having to deal with their specific laws, you have to agree to our censorship terms.
And these companies are basically like, okay, whatever, as long as we can maintain our companies and our freedom in all these other countries, we're going to censor whatever the fuck you want us to censor.
And he was like exposing all this stuff that USAID was doing and how the State Department was specifically trying to get, specifically Facebook, and there might have been some other social media, maybe it was Twitter was one of them, to agree to these crazy censorship terms and like deplatforming people for certain things.
I don't know.
I don't know anything about it, but it would make sense.
It would make sense because.
A company does not want to lose market share.
And the world is a much larger market than just the United States.
The United States might be a very profitable market, but if you have global reach, you want global reach.
You don't want to lose part of your share to WeChat, right?
You don't want to lose part of your empire to WhatsApp.
So you're trying to keep yourself internationally relevant.
And if you're an American company, this is why it's what people need to understand.
If you're an American company, you are controlled by American policy.
Mm hmm.
You're not free.
You're not free to just do whatever you want.
Your company has to fit policies that are directed, that are developed by government, which is why when you have a giant international conglomerate, it's worth spending tens, hundreds of millions of dollars a year to choose who wins the race to presidency, who wins the race for a certain subcommittee inside of the Congress, who wins the race to the mayor of your state, right?
Or the governor of your state.
It's worth the investment because one policy change, Can have massive financial impact, which means you're impacted, your shareholders are impacted, your business market share is impacted.
Right.
That's the downside of capitalism.
On this topic, we kind of started on the Trump campaign stuff and we kind of like came all the way around to the social media stuff.
But I think there's an interesting little nugget here in the middle.
It seems like with all of the division that social media has been able to do.
In the last since like 2016 when Trump first started coming on, and how it's pushed everybody into these silos and these ideological echo chambers, basically.
It seems like what's happening with Trump and the Epstein stuff has brought everyone together on Israel.
It seems like there's this general consensus.
I don't know how much of it's natural, I don't know how much of it's bots, but it's all over social media.
There's just a disdain for Israel right now in the country.
And I don't know how real it is, I mean, I don't.
Have these conversations with people going to the grocery store.
It's all, I only see it online.
So it's hard to tell what's real, what's not.
It's also all over the media, like traditional media, like television and stuff like this.
But it seems like more than ever that people are just aware of things like Israel paying off our Congress, not having to register as a foreign agent, getting these billions, the billions of dollars they're getting every single year, and getting away with blackmailing our politicians.
And it doesn't seem like there's anything that's going to change because, you know, I think like a lot of people, myself and I think a lot of other people were very optimistic when Trump was running this most recent time about like how it was going to fix what was going on.
Biden was there.
Epstein Files and Blackmail00:14:52
He wasn't, it was obvious he wasn't running something.
It was somebody behind the scenes pulling the strings.
And Trump was going to come in and fix the problem.
And the Epstein stuff, it just seems like.
If you want to, and you can accuse me of being like a conspiracy brain, but if you want to go by Occam's razor, Donald Trump seems to be doing anything and everything that Israel wants him to do.
That's not Occam's razor, but go ahead.
Well, okay.
Well, let me show you where I'm going here.
Yeah, yeah.
Trump, it seems like, just based on the evidence that is available to the public, was very much tied to Epstein.
Gets an office.
He's doing everything Israel wants him to do.
We know Epstein.
Anyone who's paid attention to this knows Epstein was more than likely a Mossad and a CIA agent, right?
He was working for the CIA and the Mossad.
If he was working for the Mossad and he had all these high level politicians and high level billionaires and scientists going to his island and to all of his houses that were wired with hundreds of cameras, it's likely he was some sort of an access agent that was getting blackmail on people if he was bringing them around younger, underage girls and filming it, right?
So if Trump was connected to that guy, one plus one equals two.
Trump was probably, there's probably footage of him at one of Epstein's houses doing something.
With a girl who's probably underage.
Otherwise, why the fuck would he be doing everything Israel is asking him to do?
So, we don't know what Israel's asking for.
And he's doing it when it's blatantly obvious that his base does not want him to do it, which is unlike him.
So, there's a couple things here that are a little bit conspiracy brain.
And I want to propose something that was new information to me that was proposed recently to me that I was like, that about Epstein that I think makes a lot of sense.
So, the conspiracy element here is that.
We don't know what conversations are happening between Donald Trump and Netanyahu.
We don't know what Israel's asking for or not asking for.
So we can't say that he's doing what Israel is asking for because we don't know what Israel's asking for.
Maybe he is doing some of what they're asking for.
Maybe he's doing none of what they're asking for.
Maybe Netanyahu understands Trump and knows how to predict Trump's actions better than we do.
So he's just putting things in place and kind of forcing Trump's hand.
We have no idea.
The other thing is about Trump's base.
Trump doesn't have.
In all likelihood, he doesn't have a third term to be president.
What does he care about his base?
Right.
He gives two shits about his base.
He's not loyal to the Republican Party.
So if his base blows up, they can't use him either.
So what does he fucking care?
All he cares about is Donald Trump and the future profitability of the name Donald Trump.
He wants to monetize this thing till the fucking wheels fall off.
And you know what?
The four years that he wasn't president, you wouldn't have guessed it because his name was still in the headlines every day in all the biggest metropolitan areas all over the country.
So if that happens for the next four or eight years, That's all free marketing in Donald Trump's world.
So he doesn't care about his base.
Anybody who thought that Donald Trump was going to come into office and fulfill his promises, we were just as stupid as Elon Musk, who spent how many months leading Doge trying to capture efficiencies, only to then find out that Donald Trump wasn't going to give him what he wanted at the end.
Donald Trump is an expert at business, an expert at unethical business, because he gets people to believe he will deliver and then he doesn't deliver.
And then at the end of the day, you didn't get what you wanted.
You'll go cry in your soup or whatever else you're going to do and decide later on whether you're going to come back to kiss the ring of the king of the country again, right?
Like, that's just the way it works.
If you thought something different was going to happen, it's kind of shame on you.
That's just the way it works.
I recently was, I want to propose a different theory for Epstein that someone shared with me that made just a ton of sense.
Everybody, including me, has pontificated on the idea of whether or not he would work for CIA.
And I still don't think he would ever work for CIA.
I don't think there's Any likelihood he was a CIA asset.
I think that's a really, that's a it's a silly.
Well, then, why would Alex Acosta say that he was told to back off because he was told he was part of intelligence?
Massad?
So, hear me out now.
Intelligence isn't CIA.
CIA is one of 36 intelligence agencies in just the United States, right?
I have long said that if he was a CIA, if he was an asset for an intelligence company, an intelligence agency, it could be Massad.
Massad would run a guy like that all day long.
Right.
And there's definitely intelligence value in Epstein.
Sure.
The theory that I want to propose is what if he wasn't tied to foreign intelligence at all?
What if he was tied to FBI?
What if he was a covert informant, which is an intelligence asset for FBI?
I think that's possible.
The reason I'm saying this is because somebody brought to me the idea that if there could be a connection between how he made his money, which nobody understands how he made his money, but we all know that he was involved in the efforts.
To help other people hide their money in overseas bank accounts.
So, if he's helping people hide their money, he's already engaging in illegal activity.
That makes him a prime target for FBI.
All the sex trafficking child stuff aside, if he's helping rich people hide their money offshore so they don't pay taxes, that is an FBI issue.
And if FBI finds him in the middle of this mix, and that would explain how he makes so much money, because if you're helping other people find money, you take a fat commission on that.
And if they're rich enough, they don't even feel the commission that you're making.
And in the meantime, you're the guy that's helping them hide their money.
You become buddy buddy with everybody who's trying to hide money in offshore accounts.
That makes him all the more interesting to FBI.
So, FBI would go to him, and in any classic FBI investigation, he's not the guy they're trying to take down.
They're trying to take down the rich people who are hiding their money.
So, when they approach a guy who's an interlocutor like that, they're like, hey, we know what you're doing.
You could go to jail for 30 years, 50 years, for the rest of your life, but we're not going to press criminal charges.
Instead, what we need you to do is become a CI, a covert informant, a clandestine informant for us.
And we will give you protection in the activities that you're engaging in.
As long as you continue to provide information for us, that protects him against investigation because he's an FBI CI.
So now all the shit that he's doing, as long as he's telling the FBI he's doing it, could potentially fall under the same protection.
So now nobody's thought, I haven't heard people talk about that opportunity.
That is a far more probable, far more likely, far more sensical possibility than any of the Mossad, any of the CIA stuff.
Because it makes absolute sense that, especially the Obama.
Era years would be trying to hunt down wealthy people and how they hide their money.
Right.
And that would protect him.
And now, if that doesn't say that Donald Trump's not on that list, that doesn't say that other wealthy people are not on that list.
But now, what it does show is why the Epstein files wouldn't be released because they may legally not be able to be released because he was a covert informant and he is protected by certain laws because he was giving information to the FBI.
And it could also explain why he got whacked in prison or.
Escaped from prison because he was.
If he was a covert informant for CI for FBI, the it'd be easy to whack him inside prison because nobody likes a rat.
It would also be easy for someone to go in and exfil him from prison in one minute because it's the FBI and they already have a whole like they have a whole structure for how you take a protected witness and keep them safe.
That to me, when I heard that, it made a ton more sense to me than any other theory that's been.
I think the FBI thing does make a lot of sense, and I think it makes sense, especially when you have Alex Acosta saying that he got information that he was part of intelligence because.
Alex Acosta would not get information that he was part of Mossad intelligence.
He would have no fucking clue about that.
I think it's most likely he was a double agent.
He was working with, I think he was probably recruited when he was at the Dalton School, who the head of that school was Donald Barr, Bill Barr's dad, who was CIA and recruited a lot of people at that school to be in the CIA.
So I think there's a huge connection there.
I think it's impossible that there was no connection between Donald Barr and Epstein getting into the world that he got into.
And then in, I forget, I think it was in the late 80s that he got introduced to, Ghislaine's dad, Robert Maxwell, who was like a triple agent, right?
He was a MI6, then he was recruited by the FSB, and then Massad.
So he was working for all three.
And, you know, him introducing his daughter to Epstein, and then Epstein, I mean, with the cameras that were in all the victims, explain how there was like giant rooms filled with monitors because every room and bathroom was wowed with cameras.
And if you're, if you're, Do you agree that he was getting blackmail on people?
I don't know.
I don't know how he was using the information.
If you were to guess that he had all of his rooms wired up with cameras and had underage girls there with politicians and presidents, do you think that there's a high possibility that it was blackmail?
The problem with the blackmail thing, in my perspective, is if you're a politician, why would you go into a room with an underage girl and a camera in it at all?
Well, they wouldn't know there were cameras.
So then, how do the witnesses know that there were cameras everywhere?
Because they were living there.
Okay.
Like one of the girls, the girls who was running his office in Manhattan, who was there every single day with a bunch of other girls.
And she was the one who testified.
I think it was in a lawsuit where she actually said, and this was also in the New York Times, that she said Trump was there every week.
And one time he actually came through and he was like looking at her, licking his lips.
And Epstein said to her, she's not for you, or said to Trump, like, she's not for you.
Keep moving, buddy.
She was there every day.
She saw, she explained how she saw the inside of it and there were cameras everywhere.
So, um, I don't know if the plane had cameras on it.
So, this is to me further evidence of the FBI CI scenario because that's who would, you would, an organization, a law enforcement organization would need documented evidence.
And that's what cameras are, that's what audio mics are, that's what bugs are.
And if they're hidden cameras everywhere, it's interesting because if it was blackmail, then Epstein would have already known that.
He couldn't use any of the evidence that he collected in court because it wouldn't have been acknowledged.
It wouldn't have been evidence.
And that's my point.
That's my point with this whole Epstein files thing.
Like, if it was blackmail and he was an Israeli access agent, Israel would never let anybody else get a hold of that blackmail because then it's useless.
Then you risk somebody else using your nuclear weapon.
Correct.
And then that nuclear weapon is worthless to you.
Right.
So I don't think they, I would bet that it was an Israeli blackmail operation.
They have the blackmail on all these people, including Trump.
And I don't think we have it.
We don't have the fucking access to it because then it's useless.
Yeah, it's an interesting point.
Again, we're all left guessing because we don't know.
The takeaway for me is that whatever's on those files is not appropriate for public release.
That's in and of itself to me, that tells me all I need to know.
It tells me that the government knows what's on those files and they're not going to release them to the public because in some way, shape, or form, it causes national security risk to the current government.
That means it's not kosher.
Whatever's on there has to be classified.
That's a big deal.
He was not acting like himself whenever he was, and he's calling it a Democrat hoax.
Like, it's insane.
It's like you can see, like, he's great at reading the room, Donald Trump, on any issue.
He knows how he can take the temperature of his base.
He can figure out what they want.
He knows how to signal to them.
He knows how to talk to them.
He knows how to schmooze.
But with this thing, he's like Helen Keller, man.
He doesn't know, like, everyone's looking at him like, what?
Like, this doesn't make sense.
This is not his MO.
Find the.
That reminds me, speaking of the hidden cameras, there's an article that just came out on the New York Times a week ago, maybe, Stephen, where it showed the inside of his Manhattan apartment and it showed the bedrooms with the cameras.
And they weren't that hidden.
It was kind of like.
Like, if I was a president going in there, I would almost think, like, maybe I should look around, like, there's something, something.
Yeah, I would love to see the pictures because this is all interesting to me.
It's not interesting to me that we are, even now, right?
Frankly speaking, you and I are too smart and too wealthy to be talking about Jeffrey Epstein.
That's my opinion on this.
We're too smart and wealthy?
Too smart and too wealthy to be wasting our time on Jeffrey Epstein.
I get it.
I get it because part of our wealth is going to come from the people who live in it.
I think it's what most people want to hear.
Hear about.
They want to hear people talk about it.
And I want to hear, I want to see like if this guy, if the president is going in and claiming to wipe out the deep state, right?
And you're the one covering up for files, you are the fucking deep state.
There's nothing more deep state than covering for files.
I think that's why people want to know more about this because it's just like, it's the most abhorrent thing a human being can be tied into.
And other than like murdering babies, I think they're probably equally as bad.
But like, I don't know.
It just seems like people are trying to avoid it.
And I think it's frustrating for people.
So I don't, yeah, I'm not trying to avoid it.
I'm trying not to.
We have kicked this horse, this horse to death.
Yes.
There's nothing else that's going to come.
Right.
So why are we talking about this?
If you want to talk about something that's relevant to this, talk about how the files aren't being released.
Just stop talking about what's on the files.
Stop theorizing about Epstein and start theorizing about why isn't the government releasing this?
Demand the government to release it, right?
Your congressperson says, hey, this is some bullshit.
Why would you not release this?
At least give us additional information that justifies why you're not releasing it.
Are you not releasing it because it would cause public panic?
Are you not releasing it because there was some sort of protected investigation that was in the middle of this?
Are you not investigating this because there's a foreign connection?
At least give us something to show us that you serve the public and not that you serve yourself.
But that's not what we're asking for.
Secret Service Power Sources00:03:18
Instead, we're out here talking about, oh, he could have been this, he could have been that, he could have been this, he could have been that.
That fucking doesn't go anywhere.
It doesn't do anything, it doesn't help anything.
And we've all talked about all the theories already.
And all we're doing is making up more theories.
So, what's the point?
That's why I'm saying, I see what you're saying.
Like, we, you and I, I'm just saying this because I've watched you grow.
I've watched people, I've watched your channel grow.
I've watched your influence grow.
I've watched how you yourself have transformed as a host and a journalist, as an investigator.
I've watched it.
And the platform has so much more potential than to just be revisiting all this old shit.
Don't gaslight me, Andrew Buston.
All right, here are the photos.
This is what you're talking about, right?
No, it wasn't on AOL, but they're probably the same photos.
Well, this is it.
This is it.
This is it.
Okay.
I couldn't find any inside, really.
There was one.
There was at least one of a bedroom with a camera on the top corner.
Keep scrolling.
Keep going.
Boom, boom, boom.
Yeah, right.
Yep.
See it right there?
It circles it.
Like, it's.
Yeah, that's not a hidden camera.
It's not really discreet.
Even though it's tiny.
But like if I'm Bill Clinton going in there or if I'm Bill Gates going in there, I'm fucking, I'm concerned.
The other thing is, and this is what's tough.
If a president is going in there, even a former president, they have an advanced secret service detail.
And that secret service detail would have to case the location before they let the president in.
And they'd have to press it there to be present when the president's in there.
Unless the president waived their secret service detail for that event.
So when Bill Clinton went to the island, he had to bring a secret service with him, even though he was on Epstein's plane?
Yeah.
Or he would have waived Epstein.
I don't even know if they have the right to waive their detail.
They must have the right to waive their detail, but it would be stupid to waive your detail.
You're going to put your life as a former American president or current American president completely in the hands of a businessman and whoever's flying his plane?
That is weird.
That is weird, right?
So if security.
I never thought about that.
If the Secret Service was able to case this, then they would have been able to report their cameras.
If they weren't able to case it in detail, like if Epstein had a no.
No police or no security in the building, kind of thing.
Sometimes they do that, right?
Sometimes they really do, and especially celebrities will outsource their security exclusively to the host of the building.
If Secret Service was not allowed in the building, they would have done a signals search.
So, an external search looking for signals inside the building to see if it's wired, if it's tapped, if there's transmissions, if there's receivers that are coming in.
They would have known that this thing, if there's cameras in every room, multiple cameras in every room, I mean, the signatures would have been off the charts.
There would have been wireless signals.
There would have been electrical signals.
There would have been a huge power source.
I mean, there would have been a data center.
That data center would have had a super cold ambient temperature in that room to keep the servers cool.
It would have had a huge power source to power that cooling.
It would have had a secondary power source.
Yeah.
Like there's no way that they didn't know.
Inflation and Billion Dollar Costs00:15:17
Right.
Yeah.
That's odd because the president, I don't know if there's any documentation of Clinton ever going to the Manhattan house, but the island or anything else.
Yeah.
It's just, it's just, there's big questions.
So, so, um, Tucker or not Tucker Biden, a Hunter Biden just did like three interviews on YouTube with this dude Andrew Callahan who has a channel called Channel Five.
He did like a three hour interview with Hunter Biden.
I don't know if you saw it or seen any clips of it.
It's incredible.
Like the dude just literally took his gloves off and just went after everyone.
It was amazing to see.
He talked about crack, he talked about like his crack addiction and like how like the ins and outs of smoking crack.
Like he just didn't give a fuck.
He just like took his mask off and he just like explained, did a tell all.
It was beautiful.
It's because his dad gave him lifetime immunity.
I know.
I saw that.
I'm glad he did that.
It's his last son.
You know, it's all he's got left.
So in the interview, Hunter said he recited this guy, Michael Wolf's reporting on the Epstein stuff.
Michael Wolf's a journalist who interviewed Jeffrey Epstein the year before he died.
I think it was the year before he died.
I think it was in 2019.
He interviewed him.
And it's all on audio.
And Epstein's talking about Trump.
How they were friends for 10 years and how Epstein introduced Melania to Trump and all this stuff.
And just earlier this week, Melania Trump filed a $1 billion lawsuit against Hunter Biden for citing.
This is the video right here.
Yeah, this is hilarious.
You got to see this.
Ladies and gentlemen, the day of presidential litigation has arrived.
It's lawsuit time.
In my hand is a legal demand letter addressed to Mr. Hunter Biden from the First Lady of the United States.
Demanding.
A retraction of Channel 5's video called Hunter Biden Returns, in which Mr. Biden here makes some speculative comments about the relationship between Jeffrey Epstein, Melania Trump, and Donald Trump.
Okay.
Well, they knew each other well.
They spent an enormous time together.
According to his biographer, is that Jeffrey Epstein introduced Melania?
That's how Melania and the first lady and the president met.
Really?
Epstein made the intro.
Yeah, according to Michael Wolf.
And so I only can go by what people are saying, and I don't know.
He didn't make these claims out of nowhere.
They come from another journalist named Michael Wolf.
Who is a biographer that actually spoke to Jeffrey Epstein?
But now here we are.
And I've got a billion dollar document in my hands because Mrs. Trump is seeking $1 billion in damages if we don't take the video down and if Hunter here doesn't issue a formal apology to Mrs. Trump.
So now we're here maybe to give you the platform to apologize to the First Lady for your statements that you made about her possible connection to the president.
Do you have the outfit that he's wearing?
Fuck that.
That's not going to happen.
Shame on him.
Pretty crazy, bro.
Now, let's see what happens.
It's a fucking wild world we're living in right now, man.
What?
So, like, all this stuff aside, like, to you, what, what, what, like, on the whole geopolitical landscape, there's so much shit going on.
You have Iran, Israel, China, Taiwan, Russia, Ukraine.
Trump's meeting with Russia right now.
Like, out of everything, like, what are you most interested in?
Like, what are you paying attention to the most?
And, um, Like, what is most interesting to you right now?
I mean, frankly, the most interesting thing to me is how much distracting media is coming out that is getting attention.
Russiagate, as an example, Epstein, as another example, this lawsuit here.
When you're brought up in intelligence, you not only focus on the things that are happening that you know are important, but you become very aware of all the other things that are happening at the same time as the important thing.
Right?
Because there's a time and causal connection that could also be a causal relationship between the two things that are happening.
So, as an example, Trump is trying to negotiate some kind of conclusion to Hamas Israel, to Russia Ukraine.
He's trying to not look like a fool after failing to meet his campaign promise.
So, he's trying to do that and it's not working.
He's trying to turn around an economy and it's not working.
He's trying to do a lot of things that aren't working.
And then we have these other allegations that pop up.
We have a billion dollar lawsuit here.
We have a Russiagate accusation somewhere else.
We have the DNI releasing evidence about the failed analysis of CIA and the false accusations that there was a Russian conspiracy.
Why?
Why are these things happening now?
Maybe they're valid, but even if they are valid, why are they happening now?
And why are they being released now?
I mean, In any kind of information landscape, you have to be thinking about what's the primary focus, what's the secondary focus, what's the distraction, what's the distraction that's going to take our eyes off of something else.
And that's what I think is happening.
That's what I am most interested in all the new things that are happening that aren't based in national security, aren't based in the economic well being of the country.
They're just distractions.
And that's what's becoming very frustrating to me is that we are all letting ourselves be distracted because.
Politicians and marketers and PR advisors understand the 24 hour news cycle and how we respond in that 24 hour news cycle even better than we do.
It's better to have content creators creating content that's speculative about bullshit than it is to have us creating content that's speculative about things that actually matter.
Right?
We are facing some very difficult times ahead of us.
Very difficult times in terms of our military stance in future conflict, very difficult terms in terms of Uh, partnerships with key allies financially, militarily, politically, like Europe.
We've watched as three major economies in Europe have reset, have disbanded their parliament and gone back to a revote.
Right?
France, Germany, Portugal all dissolved parliament and went and had a complete revote to bring new people in.
These are the strongest, wealthiest, two of the strongest, and wealthiest democracies in Europe.
Nobody's talking about that.
What does that mean for democracy worldwide?
What does that mean for the future of America and our democratic process?
And these are the things that are really going to affect you, me, our kids, our businesses, our property values, the extension, the big, beautiful bill, and the additional debt that's been placed on us, the value of the U.S. dollar.
These are things that are actually going to affect us.
And we're fucking talking about whether or not.
CIA wrote a bias report that Obama knew about in 2016.
Who fucking cares?
Who cares?
I'm saying who cares?
Donald Trump cares because if he puts that up on Fox News, all the Fox News people are watching that.
Hey, you know what?
Don't worry about the future, guys.
Let's keep hating on Obama.
Hey, let's not think about the cliff that we're rolling towards.
Let's worry about this other thing instead.
Meanwhile, what I'm seeing in my client base and in my circle of peers is People are planning for a shitstorm.
Wealthy people are diversifying investments.
They're moving currency out of US dollars into foreign currency.
They're buying property in foreign countries.
They're taking golden visas.
They're getting residency in other countries.
You've got people who are actively buying more commercial real estate because they think that there's going to be inflation and the inflation is going to be so out of control that the poor are going to get wildly poor, but property values are going to skyrocket because that's what the government is going to try and do to shape the future economy.
And when you think about the real threats facing us rationally, It makes sense.
Some kind of aggressive activity against China or China against Taiwan, some kind of aggressive activity that's going to happen in Europe to continue the conflict between Russia and NATO.
These things make logical sense.
It makes logical sense that Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin are going to come out of this meeting in Alaska and Putin's going to say, I agree to a ceasefire.
And Trump's going to tell his group, We did it.
We got a ceasefire.
Five days later, Someone's going to break a rule somewhere.
Ceasefire is going to be over.
Trump still gets his victory.
Putin still gets his country.
Ukraine's still left alone because who's going to fucking support Ukraine?
It doesn't make any sense to support Ukraine.
Right.
That's the world that we live in.
So I'm watching how much distracting news is creeping up.
How much bullshit news is coming up because Donald Trump knows that if you really want to get a dog off a bone, you throw down a small piece of juicy steak on the other side of the room and it will leave its giant bone.
For that small piece of juicy steak on the other side of the room.
Also, to your point, there seems to be a lot of people that are like building these nuclear bunkers all over the world, like Zuckerberg doing this giant nuclear bunker and all these other people.
They seem to be, there seems to be like more and more of this doom and gloom sentiment of the end of the world coming soon or the end of America.
And the diversification of finances and buying real estate, I've noticed that too.
Where are these people getting their info?
It's not that people are getting their info from a new source.
It's that they've studied what happens economically at moments like this in history, right?
2007, 2008, we had the real estate bubble burst.
Following that, what happened?
You had poor people get wildly poorer.
You had the government step in and bail out the biggest businesses.
And then you had this period of time where wealth yielded more wealth because of the inflation of the US dollar, because of all the currency that was flooded into the market to stimulate the economy.
Dumb fucks get stimulation money and spend their stimulation money, which is exactly what they're supposed to do with stimulation money.
Rich people don't do that.
Rich people get stimulation money and suck that shit away or invest it.
They don't go buy a new car, they don't buy a new collection of friends' DVDs.
That's not what they do, but that's what dumb fucks do.
And dumb fucks are the ones that kind of are supposed to re stimulate the economy.
So when that happened in 2007, 2008, guess what happened immediately following COVID?
The same thing.
The same thing.
The government inserted a bunch of money, bailed out businesses that were going to fail, tried to stimulate the economy, gave dumb fuck stimulation checks.
What did they do?
Bought more Friends DVDs, bought more cars, refinanced mortgages on houses that were going up in value, not realizing the inflationary pressure of their money.
What did rich people do?
Invest that shit and save it away, convert it into foreign currency, right?
Do something because rich people are seeing how.
The future is going to work.
And when you have money, you have options.
When you don't have money, you don't have options.
When the US dollar declines in value because of increasing inflation, the amount of dollars you have becomes even more important.
And when you don't have a lot of money and the money loses value, you have even more poverty than you did before.
And when you have lots of dollars and it loses a little bit of value, Don't really phase you, especially not if you're diversified in commercial real estate where the value is going up.
You have a multi million dollar personal home where the value of the home is going up because the value of the home is increasing on the same inflationary pressure that's making the value of the dollar go down.
So your $3.3 million house is still $3.3 million.
It's just new inflated dollars.
It costs $5 million, right?
So your $15 million commercial building is not worth $20 million, but in future inflated dollars, it is.
So that's how rich people think about money.
And the government needs to incite poor, ignorant people to spend more of the money that the government gives them so they can come right back to the government.
Do you see a pathway anytime in the next five to 10 years where the American dollar is not the number one financial system?
Not in any kind.
Oh, yes.
So let me make sure I'm understanding the question.
Do I see a pathway in the next 10 years where the US dollar is not?
The number one traded currency?
Yes.
Yes.
I do see a pathway where that happens.
What happens when that happens?
The US dollar is no longer the dominant trading currency.
Some other denomination is, whether that's the pound, the euro, the yen, the renminbi, we don't know what it's going to be.
And dominant does not mean majority.
Right now, something ridiculous like 92% of all transactions around the world happen in the US dollar.
That's dominance.
If 60% of transactions happen in the US dollar, that's still the majority of transactions, but that's not dominance.
Yeah.
Right.
That's a big change.
It's a big change in the wrong direction.
And the way that the US dollar is going now, the big beautiful bill, in the best case scenario, the big beautiful bill is going to invigorate the economy for the next 12 to 18 months, which will give us time to change our economic production so that people make more money, so that we can essentially bounce back from this recession that we're not admitting that we're in, and then we're better off.
That's the best case scenario.
The worst case scenario is it just makes things worse and it makes things a lot worse.
And now we're trying to dig out of it for the next five to 10 years.
And that's if we can dig out of it in five to 10 years.
Otherwise, it might be decades longer.
That whole time, that whole time that this is happening, foreign investors are choosing whether or not they should keep investing in the U.S. They're wondering whether or not they should call in the loans that they currently have and take their money out of the U.S. They're diversifying just like we are.
I mean, every time you see a U.S. dollar go into a cryptocurrency, that's one less U.S. dollar that's going into the U.S.
Yeah.
That's going to the U.S. financial engine, right?
So I'm not trying to bore you, but I don't see good news in the future.
So what is this, Steve?
Foreign Investors Pulling Out00:05:21
Oh, this is our debt right now.
Oh, $37 trillion?
$37 trillion.
And it's expected, it'll be at $52 trillion by 2035, expected.
And our interest every year is a trillion, right?
Let's not even think about that, right?
Let's not even think about interest and let's just boil this down in as simple a way as I can think of it, right?
When you take a bunch of loan today, like let's say that you took a $35,000 loan today.
If you knew that the dollar was going to inflate, meaning it was going to lose value, if you knew that the dollar was going to inflate and you took a $35,000 loan today, you had to pay it off in 10 years.
When you pay off that $35,000 loan, you're paying it off with dollars that are less valuable.
So, the actual cost that you're paying it off is less than when you took the loan.
That's why you get an interest only loan.
But now imagine you're the government and you can control the price of the dollar.
Right.
You take a $5 trillion loan, you put yourself $5 trillion in debt because you already know you're going to lower the value of the dollar.
So, when, if you ever pay that off, which you have no plans to pay it off, you're going to be paying it off with decreased value dollars.
So, you're actually saving money overall.
Yes.
And then in the process of that, you're.
Creating a false bump in the economy that you're going to take credit for when it's time for you to run for election, or that your party will take credit for, or that the midterm, your entire party will take credit for during the midterm.
So everybody sees this bump that's artificial.
And then your presidency ends, and some new president steps in.
And what's that new president going to do?
That new president's going to be like, you know what?
I can either try to fix this whole thing and be the president where the economy collapses.
Exactly.
Or I can do the same fucking thing.
Be the hero of the day.
And I can just extend it again.
Yes.
Bingo.
Now, how many presidents do we trust to come in and do the right thing?
That's the big question that wealthy people are asking themselves.
And most of them don't trust any future president to come in and do the right thing.
Because the president who comes in to fix this is going to be the president who puts us in the next Great Recession or Great Depression.
And that is going to be a wildly unpopular president.
Something you said that really stuck with me on Julian Dory's podcast, the last episode you did with him, is a lot of people in America don't understand what it means to be an American.
And your experience, Being in all these other countries.
And I think you were, this was in, you were talking about like the US dollar and America not being like the number one superpower anymore.
He's like, what people don't realize is that when you're not America, you realize like the luxuries that you have that you're not aware of.
Like, for example, and I thought this was a brilliant fucking example, is raising your kids to only learn one language.
Like, you don't understand what a luxury that is.
Like, imagine having to be like, if I want my kids to have any sort of success in life, they have to know at least two languages.
I've never thought about that.
That's insane, man.
It's powerful, man.
Yeah.
It's powerful.
And there are still countries in the world where you can't drink the water that comes out of the faucet of your kitchen.
That's crazy.
Yeah.
There are countries in the world where you can get arrested without cause and you can go to jail without a trial.
It just happens.
Like the luxury of being American is a massive luxury.
The number one reason I want to take my kids out of the United States.
Is so that they can get the perspective of being the hell out of the United States.
Right?
Get away from the US.
Yes, you're going to see all the warts.
For sure, you're going to see all the things that we do wrong.
But you're also going to really appreciate all the things that we do right.
And when you really appreciate what we do right, you come back to this country and it's worth fighting to keep those things.
But if you don't know what you have, of course you don't know that it's worth fighting for.
It's just you parroting a line that you heard from grandpa ah, freedom is worth fighting for.
You don't fucking know what you're talking about until you really see what.
What life looks like for people who are not free, then you're like, holy shit.
Right.
I've got to fight for this.
And are you still planning on like leaving the country for good?
So it was never for good.
Okay.
It was never for good, but we are, we have, we are scheduled to leave the country.
Like it's on our calendar right now in the spring of 27.
We were trying to do it in the spring of 26.
We always had plans to do it before 2030.
But I'm super excited that we actually are like to a place now where we have a detailed plan for the spring of 27.
What country?
Not going to tell anybody.
Can you tell me what continent?
Maybe off camera.
Off camera?
Because I like you and Julie.
I want to know a country to go to.
Well, I'll tell you a handful of countries that you should consider.
Okay.
You want them right now?
Yes.
Costa Rica.
That was my first choice.
New Zealand.
I would recommend Portugal, even though Portugal is going through some shit right now.
Croatia is a very good option for people.
Armenia is a very good option for people.
Okay.
And these are all places, if you're an American, that you should continue.
Costa Rica's got great surf, then.
Tactical Nuclear Launches00:15:50
Yeah.
So I'm saying this as.
The business owner of a multi million dollar business that's not tens of millions of dollars yet, that has a family, that has young kids, so that I can have a balanced work life existence.
There are lots of super rich people out there who have no kids or who have lost their kids because their kids don't love them anymore, whatever else, that will tell you Dubai is the place to go, that will tell you that you're stupid if you look at Europe.
People that will tell you, and then you've got, there's plenty of broke ass people out there who will be like, you got to go to Mexico, right?
There's people everywhere that will tell you all sorts of ideas.
But if you have wealth and you have a way of continuing to make your wealth, the five countries I gave you are excellent, excellent options.
Now, what about when it comes to surviving a thermonuclear war?
If there is a global thermonuclear war, it's going to be miserable to survive.
You might as well.
No place?
If it's a global war, we're all done.
Well, it would have to be a global war.
If one nuke gets shot, they all get shot, right?
Not necessarily.
I know that's what people out there say.
That's what I saw your interview with Andy Jacobson.
That was amazing.
And Andy and I disagree on this.
Well, we disagree on this, and we have context where we agree on this.
And Annie is a fantastic person in general, and then a fantastic person to talk to about this too.
Strategic nuclear weapons are essentially you shoot one, and everybody's going to launch.
That's the policy.
Whether or not people will actually execute on the policy is a different story.
Or launch on warning, right?
Or like response.
Well, like the idea, as far as I understand it, is if our satellites detect.
A rocket being launched in Pyongyang, we have to make a decision within like minutes to empty our Minutemen missiles because they're not, they're stationary.
Like they're vulnerable there.
So it's use it or lose it.
Correct.
And everything you just laid out is correct.
We have to find a way to make that decision.
We only have a few minutes to make that decision.
Our destruction is guaranteed, it's just a matter of whether or not we're willing to commit to someone else's destruction in the process.
And that's, for me, that's a big variable in the process.
And let's also, as ridiculous as As this might sound, if you were Pyongyang, if you were Russia, if you were China, and if you were going to engage in thermonuclear war against the United States, five minutes before you launch your missile, you try to assassinate the president.
Because guess who's the only person that can launch the missiles?
The president.
So if you assassinate the president five minutes before you launch your missile, can you say that one more time?
If you are any thermonuclear capable country, and you're preparing a launch against the United States, Five minutes before you launch your missile, you attempt an assassination of the president.
Who would do the assassination?
It doesn't matter.
It doesn't matter whether you do it or whether you hire somebody else to do it.
What matters is that you don't launch that missile until you know if the assassination was successful or not.
Because if the assassination is successful, the only person who can open the football is now dead.
You launch your missile, and now the warning comes across, and now the DOD is like, the president needs to access the football.
Well, the president is now the vice president.
Unless the vice president is sitting next to the president when they're assassinated, there's a logistical challenge getting the football to the vice president.
And now times are ticking, times are ticking.
So if you really wanted to play out thermonuclear war, it's not just going to be somebody launches a missile, it's going to be assassination attempts, distractions, bombings, all sorts of stuff that happens to distract and delay the timeframe before the U.S. can make its counter launch decision.
That's if we're talking strategic missiles, which I don't think anybody would use.
I think people would use tactical battlefield nukes.
Before they ever use strategic nukes, that's what actually keeps me awake at night.
What keeps me awake at night is China barricades Taiwan in the preemptive move to take Taiwan.
The United States deploys some sort of carrier group in that direction.
And then China uses a tactical one mile blast radius nuke and destroys the entire carrier group before it can even get there.
Do we call that nuclear war?
Do we then launch all of our nukes on China?
Right.
I don't know.
And that's assuming China is the country that launches it.
What if it's not even China?
What if it's some splinter group that launches a rocket portable nuclear warhead that has a small blast radius, a tactical battlefield nuke?
Or, like, I think you guys laid this out, but I thought about this is like, if Russia wanted to hide a nuke somewhere in some militia's fucking truck.
Right, exactly, and detonate it, and then it gets detonated, and you're like, oh, well, we don't know whose nuke this is.
Correct.
The whole classic.
Mutually assured destruction argument about how strategic nuclear war would break out is it's obsolete, it's obsolete because it has no tactical battlefield advantage.
We learned this in World War II when we bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki, we had to go back in and rebuild the fucking places.
It cost a ton of money to rebuild Japan, and we had to deal with nuclear fallout and we had to deal with like civilian distrust of the new government and everything else, not to mention the way it rattled cages everywhere across the world when the United States used nuclear weapons in World War II.
So now everybody's like, nuclear weapons are a fantastic deterrent, which we're seeing in North Korea, which we're seeing when Iran wants nuclear weapons.
They want to have.
This is a great point you made on that podcast, too.
They want to have the ability to protect themselves.
Yes.
And that Kim Jong un is likely going to die of a natural death in his bed at night because he's armed with nuclear weapons.
And And he was saying that Clinton or something, it was Kim Jong il made a deal with Clinton not to do nukes.
And behind his back, he did the nuclear program.
And now we don't fuck with them at all.
Yeah.
We don't mess with them because now you have a fucking one eyed rabid dog.
Right.
You're going to cross the fence?
No.
You're like, let's just let that thing die.
Let's find some other way.
Let's pay South Korea to poison it.
Like, that's how we're going to deal with that threat.
But so everybody wants strategic nuclear weapons because it keeps people out of your fucking property.
Yes.
But nobody wants to use strategic nuclear weapons because if you use them, You don't get any benefit.
It's suicide, right?
It's suicide to you.
And if, let's say we launched all of our weapons at Russia and Russia, for whatever reason, didn't counterattack, we just nuked all the prime real estate in Russia.
It's useless to us.
And don't they have a dead man switch?
Don't they have some sort of system there that it detects, even if everyone's dead?
Yeah, that's what Annie says, and it exists in Russia.
Yeah.
I don't know of any kind of dead hand that we have.
The dead hand.
The dead hand.
So if everyone's dead, they have sensors that will just unleash hell.
Yeah, essentially it's like you're holding the trigger not to launch.
And then, if you're killed, the trigger is released.
I hope that thing doesn't get a false positive.
That's crazy.
Yeah, right?
It's just a Charlie horse.
Oh, we're fucked.
Right.
Fuck, that's crazy.
So, what do you think the probability is that a strategic ICBM gets launched?
Almost zero.
Almost zero.
And I think Annie and I agree with this that the probability is almost zero.
That does not mean that I don't believe a nuclear weapon will go off.
I believe that a tactical battlefield nuke, some kind of dirty nuke, some kind of suitcase nuke, transnationally controlled nuclear device, something like that, I think that has about a 30% chance of going off in the next five years.
I always worried that the cartels would get a nuke.
That's a perfect example.
It's a transnational threat that can afford to buy a nuke.
They can totally afford to buy some old Russian, old Soviet nuke that found its way into Belarus.
It's not impossible.
Keep in mind, of all the nuclear.
Capable countries.
There are other countries that are not nuclear capable, but still hold nuclear weapons for other countries.
Really?
Yeah.
They're like little fucking nuclear closets in other countries.
And they hold the nukes usually for us, but they also hold them for Russia.
So now, if you're trying to get your hand on a Russian nuke, you could buy it on the black market.
You could work through a weapons dealer directly in Russia.
You could try to find some old nuke that has been decommissioned, steal it, buy it, whatever else.
Or you could steal it from a third country that's supposed to be controlling nuclear weapons for Russia.
Well, cartels were buying submarines and shit when the Soviet Union collapsed.
They were buying Soviet subs.
I mean, who's to say they didn't buy a fucking nuke?
From something from that, absolutely.
North Korea, if North Korea has a nuke that weighs less than 500 pounds, which they probably do, a warhead that weighs less than 500 pounds, I they would sell it to anybody, they would for sure sell it to somebody who doesn't like the U.S. government, like a cartel.
Now, North Korea, as far as I understand it, is their submarines are like way below our standard, like they only have they don't have nuclear powered submarines, I think they only have diesel powered submarines, okay?
So, so I guess they can't get around like the countries that really have the um.
What do they call it?
The handmaidens of the apocalypse, the submarines.
And when you see all the traffic of all the nuclear subs around the world, it's freaky, dude.
Like they're literally circling both coasts of America and like Central America and South America.
And all of these nuclear subs are just loaded with Merved rockets.
Yeah.
And it's just crazy to me the idea that these things are patrolling the oceans at all times.
And it's like, Every single country has a gun pointed.
We all have guns pointed at each other's heads at all times.
So, this is what's important.
We don't all have that.
If you're an American citizen, you have that.
There's always a gun pointed at your head if you're an American citizen.
Especially if you're living in the United States, always a gun pointed at your head because the United States is the threat.
When you're a US citizen and you're living in Azerbaijan, nobody cares about Azerbaijan.
Armenia cares about Azerbaijan.
And that's pretty much it.
You're a US citizen.
So, when you come into the country, people know that you're there and they're going to assume that you have wealth and you could be targeted for petty crime.
But there's no national country trying to assassinate you in Azerbaijan, especially not if you're just a random digital nomad living in Azerbaijan.
And if you go down to Costa Rica, nobody's pointing submarines at Costa Rica.
It's a waste of resources to point submarines at Costa Rica.
It's not a waste of resources to point at the United States.
So, every major country that has a beef with the US.
Are all targeting the US at all times, targeting our cyber structure, our water, our infrastructure, our electrical grid, targeting us with cruise missiles, with nukes, with submarines, with satellites, with space based resources.
We're always being targeted, right?
That's not something to be afraid of, but it's something to be aware of because guess what?
You're not being told in the headlines every day how dangerously close you are to being killed.
We just assume that we're safe all the time.
There's no reason to assume that we're safe all the time.
Yeah.
And another thing, Annie talks about is the interceptor system that we have, which is we have 44.
Interceptor missiles that each have a 40% accuracy, which is like shooting a bullet out of the sky with another bullet.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So, a great example of this was when Iran launched rockets against the base in Djibouti.
Was it recently?
Yeah.
After Trump bombed Iran, Iran had a counter strike.
Dude, those videos were insane.
Weren't they?
They were hypersonic missiles.
It's like they were going like.
Like that, so the sky, yeah.
So, the uh, I don't know if they were hypersonic, we can look that up.
But what's interesting, the reason I bring that up, find sorry, continue, I don't want to interrupt, but to find videos of the Iranian hypersonic missiles that recently hit, um, there it is, yeah.
No, that's Tel Aviv.
So Tel Aviv deals with hypersonic missiles.
Okay.
But when Iran launched its counterstrike against the American military base, the reason I bring this up is because Iran announced, told the U.S., we're going to launch rockets.
We're going to launch whatever it was, 180 rockets or 80 rockets or whatever.
We're going to launch rockets against your military base, which gave the United States a chance to say, hey, perfect.
We're going to evacuate civilians from the base or we're going to evacuate the base down to like, you know, core requirements and we're going to deploy our.
Rocket shield.
We're going to deploy our rocket interceptors.
And then when they launched the rocket interceptors, it was an average of, I think, five interceptors per rocket that was inbound, which is even less than the 40% accuracy Annie's talking about.
It means 20% accuracy for an American weapon system that's first world, an American weapon system handled by the Americans trained to handle that weapon system.
They had a 20% accuracy rate shooting down the inbound rockets.
And what we did in that exchange was show Iran.
That we only have a 20% accuracy.
Right.
So now, luckily, they told us, hey, we've got 80 missiles coming in.
And of course, we do the math and we're like, oh, sweet, 80 times five.
That's how many we're going to make sure we have these on staff.
Well, if you don't know how many rockets are coming, how much, how much munition are you supposed to have to defend yourself?
Right.
Is this it?
I don't know.
What is this, Steve?
Oh, these are the hypersonics.
No, this is, oh, yeah, this is Tel Aviv again.
Interceptors in Tel Aviv.
Okay, yeah, this isn't what I was talking about.
There were videos of these high, maybe.
Oh, yeah, you see how it speeds up, dude?
What a fucking crazy thing.
Could you imagine?
Yeah.
No.
Exactly.
And I hope we never have to live it.
But to your exact point, we're not that far from this in the United States.
It's not happened yet, but if it were to happen, it could happen overnight.
It's not like it would take six weeks for people to start launching missiles at us.
They could do it from a submarine off the coast in the next five minutes if they chose to.
But wouldn't it be suicide for them?
Wouldn't we just nuke them?
That's what I'm saying.
According to strategic policy, it would be suicide if we could counter launch in time.
The reason you have submarines off the coast is so that you don't know if you can launch in time.
A MIRV has to be launched from.
An ICBM, ICBMs have to go into the stratosphere to launch, to drop their munition to then be able to drop each individual warhead, right?
That takes 30 ish minutes.
A submarine off the coast of San Diego launches a cruise missile, it takes three minutes.
And all of a sudden, if you had like five submarines that pop up, unless you have attack submarines to counter them, here's another thing that's fascinating about the United States.
When you're in the Middle East, you have anti air and anti ground systems everywhere.
When was the last time you were in California, Virginia, Maryland, Florida, and you saw any kind of anti aircraft gun or any kind of counter sea or counter incursion weapon?
We don't need them because we have the oceans on both sides.
Think Tanks and Terror Assets00:05:52
Unless?
The submarines.
And how are you going to destroy a submarine before the submarine destroys you?
There's all these elements that we take for granted.
We take them for granted, but the submariner for the Navy knows how fucking scary it is.
Well, also, the people to survive the longest.
If that happens, are going to be the guys in the nuclear subs, right?
Yeah.
And think about how miserable that existence is going to be.
You just have to starve, slowly starve to death.
With none of your loved ones, knowing all of your loved ones are gone.
Oh, God.
And then are you going to starve to death?
Are you going to have some kind of radiation poisoning as soon as you open the hatch?
Right.
You're going to spoil from the inside while you try to make it back to Georgia to see if your kids are alive.
I wonder how long you can survive.
I wonder how much rations they have with them on the, like, water and food on those nuclear submarines.
I mean, the submarine logistics are fascinating.
Yeah.
I mean, I've had a chance to visit operational subs.
I've had a chance to talk to submariners.
They're a quirky bunch of people.
I bet.
But, I mean, they, that thing is a mobile survival chamber.
It's pretty amazing.
And we're doing those new, uh, Those new Columbia class submarines, where they spent like, I think there was like two and a half billion dollars per sub, where they're doing like 10 of them or something.
They're supposed to be like way better than the Ohio class.
But if that, if something like that video was to happen to us and some country decided to do some sort of like a tactical submarine strike, which country would it be?
Or would there be countries that are allying together?
That's the big question, right?
Because that's what seems like is happening with this whole Iran, Russia, Ukraine thing.
It's like we're pushing, China and Russia closer together, it seems like, with this whole Ukrainian thing, right?
Oh, yeah.
And the Iranian thing.
For years now, we have watched a whole new axis of resistance emerge, right?
When the United States really started putting pressure on Russia under the Biden administration in the Ukraine conflict, that was sending messages all over the world that this is what the United States will do to you.
If we disagree with you, we'll seize your assets, we'll hold your money.
We'll slap sanctions on you.
We'll force Europe to slap sanctions on you.
Now we're double sanctioning Russia, right?
Yeah, we're talking it again.
Let's really listen.
So we're going to sanction the people that do business with them now.
Yeah.
So there's all sorts of like the message is loud and clear that if the United States doesn't like you, then it's going to punish you, even if you're not fighting the United States.
If you're just doing something the United States doesn't like, they're going to punish you.
Yeah.
So that forced China to pull money out of, pull assets out of US dollars and assets out of US control.
Russia and China start doing business together.
Iran and Russia start doing business together.
India, who is an ally of the United States, quote unquote, and nuclear, starts doing business with China and Russia because it's pragmatic.
You've got cheap oil that's way cheaper than buying it from somewhere else.
It's much closer.
All you have to do is pay in rubles.
And then the ruble went up.
So you can see how bash-ackwards it is.
Yes, there are weapons off the coast of the United States at any given time.
Yes, that's scary.
Yes, that's creepy.
That doesn't mean.
That's the most practical way to attack the United States.
I think what our enemies have discovered is that if you leave the United States alone, we attack ourselves.
I remember when I was going through CIA training, we went through this simulation where we went to a training course, and in the training course, they were showing us how different the actual threats were against the United States than the threats against other countries.
So they shared with us this case study that was identified by a group thinker, a think tank in.
The United States.
And the think tank posited that if they were Russia or if they were a terrorist group, how would the terrorist group affect the largest damage on the United States?
Would it be by launching coordinated terrorist attacks inside the United States or some other way?
So this think tank came up with a strategy to launch multiple coordinated terrorist attacks against civilian centers in Mexico.
To basically attack Mexico, where the police are less organized, where the military is less efficient, where borders are less controlled, and then make sure Mexico understood they were being targeted because of their proximity to the United States, with the whole goal being to cause mass migration to the United States, to the southern border of the United States.
Oh, wow.
Because the think tank was like, the United States is prepared to fight terrorists, but it's not prepared for hundreds of thousands of immigrants to flood Mexico.
From the South because they're trying to find home.
And our immigration policy is such that if they're trying to seek asylum or escape from violence, they have a right to come to the United States.
So essentially, by forcing this issue from the South, it would distract American policymakers.
It would cost the economy a fortune.
It would put the border in disarray.
And through that border, the same terrorists that were attacking Mexico would be able to infiltrate the United States and carry out continued attacks in the United States in the same areas where the immigrants were.
Which would then cause additional chaos to the United States.
So, the best way to attack the United States is not through a rocket or a missile or a tank.
It's to attack it from within.
It's to attack it in a way where the people, where we as the American people freeze or where our politicians start to run into some kind of consternation that puts them at odds with each other or odds with us.
Undocumented Worker Pathways00:09:15
And then we'll just destroy ourselves from within.
We're talking about the national debt.
Right.
We're destroying ourselves from within.
All China has to do is sit there and eat popcorn.
It's crazy.
It's crazy how right you are.
All this unconventional, slow, slow burn strategic stuff that just takes forever when we're just there.
Like you said, the first podcast that we ever did is they're looking 50 years in the future.
We're only looking three months in the future.
It's true.
It's insane.
What are we going to do for Christmas?
Yeah, exactly.
I haven't even thought that far.
Yeah.
What do you think about all of this ice stuff?
All of this crazy, you know, showing up at Home Depot and arresting all these like workers and I have a friend who owns a commercial concrete company.
He installs all of the wastewater treatment plants all around Florida.
And his crew, he's got like 350 employees, and they are 99% Mexican.
And the top ones are maybe I shouldn't have said this.
They're undocumented.
And basically, what they've done now, because one of them got arrested.
And look, these guys aren't gang members.
These guys aren't rapists.
These guys are their biggest gripe is they can't work on Sunday sometimes.
Like they want to work eight days a week, right?
That's all they care about doing.
And one of the guys got busted, and one of the guys is in the holding facility.
So I guess you can elect whether to be deported immediately or you can stay and try to fight it or whatever.
Anyways, this guy's 23 years old.
He just had a kid, and now his wife.
Is living alone with the kid, and like his co workers are pitching in to help like pay for her or whatever.
And now, what he's doing is he's getting his top workers, he's hiring them personal drivers.
So, if they get pulled over, they can't ask for their ID and they can't arrest them and deport them.
So it's like, you know, my practical view of it is like, can't you at least, if you're a company that is hiring these people, can't you make the person who runs the company like responsible for these guys or try to make it to where like if you have all these illegals working for you and they're supporting your business, your multi million dollar construction business, figure out a way to make those companies, those guys pay tax on these guys or find out like a quick way to citizenship for those people?
So I appreciate where you're coming from.
I have a different point of view.
I think that we have to be looking at how you do this practically.
And our immigrant, this really highlights that our immigration policies are not practical.
The argument that an illegal immigrant, an undocumented immigrant who isn't a rapist or a criminal is somehow okay is a false argument.
If they're here illegally, you got to figure out a way for them to pay taxes.
No, they're illegal.
They're not documented.
Okay.
They shouldn't be here.
That is against the law.
But if I'm an American and I have a huge successful corporation like Walmart.
Congratulations, you worked your ass off to get it.
And I need these illegals.
You don't need them.
If I want to make a profit on all the shit I'm selling, I need to have them.
If my business is going to remain profitable or else I'm going to have to jack the prices up.
Then do that.
The argument here has nothing to do with business owners.
That's a false argument.
It has everything to do with the decisions of the individual who came here illegally.
Right, if you came here illegally, if you broke a law to come here, get out.
You don't belong here.
We have a process for you to come in legally.
If you don't have patience for that process, if you don't like that process, if you don't have skills that make you valuable to the United States, that's your fault.
That's not our fault.
So, if you are turned down, get out.
If you never tried to get in because you snuck in, get out.
That's simple, that's clear.
There's no differentiating between rapists and criminals and just general illegals.
Illegal is illegal.
The flip side to that, though, is if there's a need for that unskilled person, we need to make it easier for the unskilled person to get in legally.
These people are skilled, though.
That's the point.
They're skilled by trade.
People in America aren't incentivized to do this kind of work anymore.
That's not my problem.
My problem is not, it's not our problem that Americans are not incentivized to do the job.
No.
Arguably, if you got 10 skilled Mexicans out, there would actually be a salary that could support the one skilled American that might incentivize them to do the job.
But here's the thing.
I've lived in California.
I've driven by the strawberry fields, and I know there are shit tons of unemployed Californians who, on principle, aren't going to go pick strawberries.
They'd rather apply for welfare and they're going to get their welfare and whatever else.
I've been there.
I've seen it.
If we want strawberries, we need Mexicans to come in and pick the strawberries.
So, what we need to do is make it legal for them to come in and have that job.
We can't have it both ways.
We can't have it where we keep them out, but we need them.
And we hunt them down to get them out because all that's going to do is create a loss for us.
Right.
We need to fix our immigration policy.
But we're not going to get there by saying, oh, we should just let the illegal immigrants come in who don't break the law.
They already broke the law.
That's what makes them illegal.
Right.
It's stupid to only think that there's a difference between criminals who are violent and criminals who are not.
Do you remember there was a legislation on immigration that was about to be passed right before 9 11?
I don't know.
And 9 11 shut it down.
Can you find out what that was, Steve?
There was a, where did I hear that?
I heard this somewhere recently, and I was actually just talking to Julian about it.
It was like one of the most reasonable immigration policies that I have ever heard.
Made so much sense that was proposed and it was about to pass literally like right before 9 11 2001.
Because that's what, but to your point, that's what frustrates me.
We need a reasonable immigration policy.
We were a country built on immigrants because people came to our country, people immigrated here who had skills or who didn't have skills but did the jobs that nobody else would do.
We need both people.
We need to have a policy that covers both types of people.
Instead, we just ignore the second type.
Is this it?
The DREAM Act?
Yeah, there's three of them.
DREAM Act is one of them.
Okay, the DREAM Act was proposed legislation introduced in 2001 aiming to provide a path to citizenship for undocumented youth who came to the United States as children and meet certain criteria, such as graduating from U.S. high school.
No, that doesn't sound like it.
The worker.
The bill sought to provide legal permanent resident status to certain undocumented and non immigrant aliens, including alien workers, those eligible for admission to U.S. institutions for higher education, or 65 years of age.
So that sounds reasonable.
The other one was the Refugee Protection Act.
The bill proposed changes to the procedures and handling of asylum seekers, including exempting certain individuals from expedited removal.
That's not really it.
No.
So, I mean, what we're getting at here is I do think that the owner of a company who has undocumented employees that he or she finds out about should have a path to say, hey, I want to sponsor these people.
Yeah.
Like, especially, many of the illegals are already paying taxes.
Mm hmm.
So, it's not like they're dodging taxes.
That's not their crime.
Their crime is illegally crossing the border and not registering their presence.
So, this, I remember it now.
I don't know if you can find it this way, Steve, but basically, what it was was it was going to say that illegals who are working in the country and they don't have legal citizenship, they would provide them a pathway to citizenship, like a very easy pathway, quick.
But they would only be allowed, they would have to go back to Mexico or their home country for like X amount of time during the year, like four or five months out of the year.
And they could come here and work during like six or seven months of the year.
There was something else to it, but.
There's solutions.
That's what kills me.
There's solutions.
There are solutions, yeah.
And the whole immigration debate is a silly debate because the truth is we need immigrants.
We need skilled and unskilled foreign laborers.
Yeah.
And part of the reason we need it is because of the stupid ass Americans who are trying to hold out for a management position or who never bothered to get a skill or who are living off of the tit of the government, whether it's state or federal.
We got a bunch of lazy fucking Americans that won't work.
Mm hmm.
We still need someone to do the work.
So, how do we reward?
And the immigrants are the ones that have more kids as well.
Like white people aren't having kids anymore.
I mean, I don't know one way or the other, but I do know that foreign workers are a value add, but we can't reward illegal border crossing because all that does is incentivize more illegal border crossing.
Losing Ground in Ukraine00:09:02
So, what about the ICE thing?
I walked through, I was in LA last week on multiple shows in LA last week.
And it broke my heart to walk down streets in Koreatown, walk down Sunset Boulevard, walk through various areas of LA and see signs in Spanish on light posts with numbers to call if there's an ice raid, warning people to be ready at any time to leave to go to a new location.
Like they're actually communicating and preempting the ice raid so that if your neighbor's house gets raided, you call a number and it activates all the illegals in the area.
To get them to grab their go bag, get out of their house, and go to another safe haven where there's no life, there's no ice raid.
Wow.
Like that's bullshit.
We're just, and that's what we're doing.
We're now making it harder for ICE to do its job.
We're incentivizing the response of illegal immigrants to stay here illegally.
We need to understand who is putting those signs up.
It must be other illegals.
Yeah.
Unless it's some kind of, and it's California.
So who knows?
It could be some kind of nonprofit organization that's organizing the whole thing based on American dollars.
California is a wild place to be.
Yeah.
So, okay.
Going back to the Russia stuff.
What do you think ends up happening with the Russia Ukraine thing?
Like, do you think it everyone's like a lot of people say it's just going to end up being like a stalemate?
Nothing's going to happen.
And it's just going to keep being like a slow burn of nothing.
But then some people are also saying that it's going to have to be because Ukraine is losing so badly.
And they've, it doesn't seem like when Putin went in there, when we've talked about this before, that he wanted to take all of Ukraine and rebuild the Soviet Union.
It seemed like, Just based on the evidence that, like, right before he invaded, he proposed a treaty that we didn't, we wanted nothing to do with.
And, you know, it's always been, that's always been his red line, his number one red line.
It hasn't been any of the other NATO countries.
It's always been Ukraine, yet we just ignored it and we kept trying to go into Ukraine.
And he even wrote that essay or whatever that was like a year or like six months before he invaded, basically like laying out the sentiment of like, I don't think he said he wanted to rebuild the Soviet Union, but he thought it was like, a disgrace that the Soviet Union fell and he like laid all this stuff out.
I don't think there's any hard evidence that he actually wanted to take over Ukraine.
I think he just wanted to maintain the Crimea area and the Donbass region, which according to the Russia proponents, they say that the people in Donbass, they are ethnic Russian and they want to remain ethnic Russian.
They don't want to.
And I don't know.
You can't know.
That's the problem.
You can't know unless you're like there talking, interviewing the people and no one does that.
And I just had a war journalist on here last two weeks ago.
Who was on the ground during both the Chechnyan Wars?
And what was his name, Scott Anderson?
And one of the things that he was saying about the Ukraine war is that any reporters who want to go into Ukraine and actually talk to people, interview people, it's super sanctioned.
You have to literally be with this group of people who take you to places.
You're not allowed to just be a rogue journalist.
So I think it's really hard to cut through the noise of what's going on.
Absolutely.
So at the end of the day, My assessment on Russia hasn't really changed since 2022.
Right.
There have been shifts in who has battlefield advantage.
And every time those shifts happen, you hear these inflated promises or these inflated ideas, right?
Like you just said just a few minutes ago, now that Ukraine's losing so badly, Ukraine's not losing so badly.
They are losing ground, but not much.
They're losing very little ground.
Like it's not like Russia's gaining 1% of Ukraine per day or anything like that.
It's largely been the same.
Lines of battle just, you know, a few hundred kilometers back and forth for the last two years.
Putin understands he has the advantage.
He's had the advantage since the beginning.
Even through, and as we've layered on sanctions and as we've given Ukraine weapons and as we've fed them intelligence, the fact that Russia continues to persist without losing significant ground, they only lost ground in the counteroffensive that nobody foresaw coming the very first summer.
That's the only time that they've lost significant ground.
Yep.
And there's lots of battlefield reasons why that happened.
And I think a big general came out publicly and said, like, this is where we need to go to the negotiating table now because we have Russia on their heels right now.
This is the perfect time.
Right.
Biden's administration said, F off.
Right.
And I think both the U.S. and Russia understand that as long as Ukraine continues to be in the middle of it all, they both have something to gain.
Russia knows that it needs insulation from NATO.
Russia also knows it wants to control eastern Ukraine because eastern Ukraine is where the primary.
Infrastructure for oil export to Europe lives.
All of Russian oil leaves Russia to enter eastern Ukraine to then get distributed to Europe.
It's like having a farm and you collect all of your grain and store it in your neighbor's house.
Right.
Well, who controls that grain, you or your neighbor?
So Russia's just like, fuck that.
We're going to now control everything about our oil.
That's number one for us.
Plus the fact that there's rare earth minerals, plus the fact that there's cultural interests.
There's all sorts of reasons why they want eastern Ukraine.
They want it a whole hell of a lot more than the United States wants Ukraine to have its original territory back.
If anything, what the United States benefits from is Ukraine continuing to distract Russia, continuing to weaken Russia, and the benefits that we have of financially being able to rebuild Ukraine when the whole thing ends.
That's what Donald Trump's looking at.
He's like, I want this thing to end in a way where we get to spend, we get to go in and claim Ukrainian ground, claim Ukrainian resources.
In debt Ukraine to rebuilding their country so that we can build another Germany, another France, another Poland, another UK, another Japan, because you're war torn, you're going to need us.
That's what they're really looking for.
But Trump wants to keep his territory more than he wants to keep the war going more than he wants to let it go.
Because how is Russia and the economy going to bounce back if they shut down the war?
Right.
And I think Lindsey Graham said the quiet part out loud a couple months ago where he's like, there's Trillions of dollars in natural resources and minerals in the Ukraine that we can't let China get a hold of.
Yeah.
So, I mean, everybody's interested in Ukraine for something other than protecting democracy or the people that are there.
So, it was such a blatant and it seems heartless lie to the American people that that's what we were doing.
It seems so crazy that people can't see, like, we wouldn't let Mexico become an allied partner of China or Russia or be in their like defensive umbrella.
Yeah.
We would never let that happen or Canada.
So, it's not that hard to believe.
So, again, The thing that Putin does really well is he knows how to string Donald Trump along.
Donald Trump is a business person who knows how to twist the American system legally, marketing wise, business wise.
He's very effective at making profit out of thin air.
Vladimir Putin is a trained KGB operative.
He understands human beings, he understands international affairs, he understands geopolitics.
He knows that he just has to give Trump a small victory so that Trump can claim a big victory, and then he's free to go back and renege on his victory.
And then Trump's going to complain and Trump's going to have a way out.
Remember when Trump was like, we're going to end this in a day?
He came after it didn't end in a day.
He eventually was just like, you know what?
Ukraine and Russia aren't taking it seriously.
So I'm done here.
He basically said, it's not my fault.
They're children.
That was him giving himself permission and giving all of us vocabulary to not blame Donald Trump for why Ukraine and Russia didn't end in one day.
And Putin knew that.
And Putin was like, we're going to give Trump an out.
We're going to give Trump an out so that it's not his fault he didn't meet his campaign promise.
And it worked.
And now we're back to it again because Trump's hunting for a victory.
He needs victories because he's having so many failures.
He's having so many areas where he's not succeeding.
He needs small areas to succeed.
He knows he pissed off people when he went into Iran.
So now he needs people to forget about that and think about something else.
He knows that the economy is in a shit place and that the big, beautiful bill isn't going to fix it right away.
So he needs to distract people and something else.
Yeah.
It's so much.
It's almost too much to cut.
It's too much stuff to cut through with the news cycle every day, bro.
That's why we have people like you to tell us what's really going on.
Distracting from Campaign Failures00:01:37
Don't gaslight me, Danny Jones.
Andy, dude, thanks for coming on and doing this again.
This is probably like our sixth episode.
I hope there's more.
I mean, I'm going to.
Fall off the map before too long, so I don't know.
Well, we got to do one more like the day before you leave.
Bring the go bag in, and there you go.
You're ready to roll.
I like that.
Are you, uh, are you still, uh, you're no longer in Florida?
Is that right?
Left Florida, you're in uh, Colorado, yeah.
Colorado's been home for about a year, and uh, and we're loving it.
The kids love it, it's a beautiful place to be.
That's amazing, bro.
Um, again, tell people about your book, hold it up so they can see the beautiful cover.
Yeah, Shadow Cell.
Uh, my book hits bookshelves on September 9th.
You have a very cool pre publication copy because you're a special guy.
Look at that.
You'll find it anywhere books are sold.
Jump in there.
Don't miss it.
It's been selling like crazy in the pre sale market.
It's getting tons of excellent reviews from both critics and from pre readers.
I'm really excited about it.
And it's the most modern, contemporary, and transparent look at modern tradecraft that has ever been written.
And I'm very proud of that.
It is.
It's amazing.
When are we allowed to drop this episode?
I don't know what date you were given, but after September 9th.
Oh, but PBD gets to drop his two days ago.
He didn't talk about the book.
He did it?
He didn't even read the first 100 pages.
Oh, wow.
So, all we did at the end of PBD was say, Hey, there's a book.
All right.
Well, I'll give you a chance.
But you, we actually got to talk about it, and I want you to be featured properly.
Cool.
So, if you're watching this, then it's available at least for presale or for sale fully right now.