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Sept. 4, 2023 - The David Knight Show

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The David Knight Show - 09/04/2023

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	Thank you.
	Thank you.
	Using free speech to free minds.
	Soon.
	You're listening to The David Knight Show.
	The David Knight Show
	The David Knight Show
	Thank you. Thank
	you. Welcome back, and joining us now is Stephen Friend.
	I have talked about Mr.
	Friend and what he did in terms of standing up to the weaponized, politicized FBI, coming after people after January the 6th.
	And of course, what began with January the 6th?
	It's now metastasized to the Department of Justice and the FBI being concerned about parents who show up at a PTA meeting or at a school board meeting or things like that.
	This is the danger of this, and I'm always interested in talking to whistleblowers.
	I've talked to John Kiriakou many times about blowing the whistle on CIA torture program, which ultimately bore the fruit of lying us into the war in Iraq.
	I've talked to Joe Bannister, who was an IRS agent who was an investigator, part of the Criminal Investigation Unit, carried a gun.
	And he did that for a number of years.
	And then he came across some things that people were saying.
	He said, well, how do I answer this?
	How do I answer this concern that they've got about the income tax code?
	The supervisor said, don't talk about that.
	What? When you look at people who are honestly concerned about the law and about justice, this creates a real conflict of conscience for them.
	And of course, many had that same kind of situation presented to them throughout 2020 and 2021.
	With the mandates and the lockdowns and do I give up my job?
	What do I do? I'm violating my religious principles if I take this type of thing.
	These types of tests are always coming to us.
	He's now written a book. It came out yesterday.
	True Blue, My Journey from Beat Cop to Suspended FBI Whistleblower.
	And it dropped yesterday. You can find it on Amazon.com, Barnes& Noble, all the regular places that you buy books.
	Again, it is True Blue.
	The author is Stephen Friend, who joins us right now.
	Thank you for joining us, sir. Thank you very much for having me today.
	And thank you for being a whistleblower.
	I really do appreciate it. I mean, I know that's a difficult thing.
	I know that it had tremendous consequences for you and for your family, and I want to talk about those.
	But first, tell us, what was the tipping point?
	You had worked as an FBI agent for, what was it, 12 years, I think?
	No, actually, today would have been my nine-year anniversary date of my hiring.
	I'd worked in law enforcement before that, so I've got about 14 years of law enforcement experience at a state, local, and federal level.
	So what was it that you saw in this that, I can't go along with that, is what you had to say.
	Tell us a little bit about that. Yeah, I didn't really have a moment where I sat down and said, I'm going to become a whistleblower.
	I just had a concern about the cases that were in my office that were January 6th related.
	And to take a brief step back on my background, I joined the FBI in 2014.
	I spent my first seven years on Indian reservations.
	And the nature of those cases are quickly evolving.
	You have a huge, tremendous volume of cases.
	And as a result of that, I became very familiar with the FBI's rulebook for how to work cases and brought that with me when I eventually transferred to Daytona Beach, Florida, where I am currently.
	And once I was reassigned to work domestic terrorism cases in my office, I was reassigned from child pornography cases and told that those were no longer going to be resourced.
	Those were a local matter. Really?
	Correct. Well, what kind of cases were you seeing at the Indian reservations?
	I mean, it was a lot of drug trafficking and stuff like that and, you know, violent crime, things like that.
	Yes, it's violent crime, major offenses.
	You know, I've worked a lot of aggravated assaults and homicides, sexual assaults, child molestation.
	You really do the work of like a city violent crime detective on the reservations.
	And it's an interesting jurisdiction that the FBI has to take on due to some...
	Some weird federal laws that we currently have on the books, and it basically precludes the tribal police officers from investigating some defendants who aren't Native American, and then even from bringing heavy charges against others so they could only really charge misdemeanors for some fairly significant crimes, and the FBI has to come in and fill that gap.
	Wow, that's interesting. So you were a police officer, and then when you started working for the FBI on these Indian reservations, you're still kind of doing police officer type of work, that you're doing that.
	But when you became an FBI agent, they'd first put you on child pornography and things like that?
	Yes, I accepted a transfer in the summer of 2021, and my understanding was it was going to be a position in the office to work on pornography cases and human trafficking cases, which are sort of a weird kissing cousin to the Indian reservations within the FBI because they're very hard to staff.
	People don't want to work it.
	It's sort of a violation that you can actually beg out of because it's so mentally taxing for a lot of folks.
	Oh, I imagine it is. I imagine it is.
	was made to reallocate resources and manpower, which is another major problem within the FBI.
	They basically have a quota system that they try to hit every year.
	And when I saw the January 6 cases, it was immediately apparent to me that the FBI is not following its rules with those cases.
	And I became concerned about because not because I had any sort of political ideology attached I'm not a simp to one side or another, but I'm a law enforcement professional.
	And when I go to trial, I want to make sure that my case is buttoned up as properly.
	And the fact that these cases have been just rubber stamped as they've gone through the District of Columbia doesn't mean anything to me.
	If my name's at the top, I want to make sure my case is buttoned up.
	And I knew for a fact that That these cases were not in, they were departing from the FBI's rules for how they managed the cases, which was interfering with how we were able to actually do our investigations.
	We were waiting for directives from Washington, D.C. when we were on paper supposed to be in charge of our own cases.
	Wow. So it's coming straight from D.C. Your concern is, like a prosecutor, I don't want to take this case to court because I could lose, right?
	And you don't want to have a long streak of losses there.
	But you're concerned about that.
	And this is coming straight out of the District of Columbia.
	They're identifying people and telling you to do what to them.
	Well, the January 6 case should be one case with however many subjects there are that are being investigated.
	But very early on in the process, a decision was made that they were going to open up a separate case for every single person.
	And then instead of running those from Washington, D.C., where the incident happened, they were going to assign those cases to the field, to all the various 56 field offices around the country, where the subject lived.
	So if you lived in Florida and you went to the Capitol that day, the office in Florida would be handling your case.
	And you could make the case that it is in compliance with the FBI rules.
	It's a little atypical, but it certainly...
	Yeah.
	Yeah. Yeah.
	Yeah. Yeah. So if you look at police officers in the line of duty deaths, there's a spike in 2001, and that's because there were a significant number of officers in the towers who died.
	That doesn't mean that nationwide there was a spike in violence against police officers.
	It's a statistical anomaly.
	And the FBI has now perpetuated that and has brought it the last three fiscal years and argued in front of Congress the need to enhance salary funding.
	And and then on top of that, the bosses in each one of the field offices get bonuses for hitting the quotas because there is a demand for domestic terrorism cases.
	It is the charge du jour that we are seeing now from the political leadership in Washington.
	So the FBI, if you ask for it, you shall receive and, Thank you.
	Yeah, it's like any other bureaucracy.
	They're trying to make a case to grow.
	They succeed by growing their little fiefdom.
	That means a bigger head count.
	That means more responsibility and a higher salary for everybody at the top if they do that.
	And the big game that they always play is statistics.
	And we've seen these types of games played by a lot of different agencies.
	The FBI has played these kind of statistical games to show that, you know, you've got to increase their department.
	But, again, they're like every other bureaucracy, and it is a federal bureaucracy of investigation if you look at it that way.
	You know, we have seen this, Stephen, we've seen in the past.
	The FBI has, in my opinion, been weaponized against people on the left.
	And conservatives said, that's right.
	You know, we don't like those people.
	Let's go after this.
	And they kind of bent some of the rules with that stuff in the past.
	But now the politics has, the pendulum has swung in the other direction.
	And now they're starting to come after people who are conservative.
	And it really does seem like a politicized issue here.
	But before we get into that, I'm jumping ahead a little bit here.
	Tell us a little bit about some of the incidents that you had that really bothered you.
	Because you mentioned one of them, in particular, that you went to interview somebody.
	Tell us a little bit about that. Yeah, the cases that were in my office were basically investigated, and there wasn't much to do on them, which is, again, they were sitting in Washington, D.C., our own cases.
	We weren't really in charge of them.
	So I didn't have a whole lot of investigative work to do.
	I really had only a couple things.
	One was I was tasked to go and interview a gentleman who was said to have been at the Capitol that day and had been Inflicting violence against police officers.
	The folks in Washington, D.C. had done a workup on his phone GPS, and that was negative.
	The facial recognition that they had was negative, and it was an anonymous tip.
	So there was really no way we could actually bring a successful prosecution forward, even if the man were to confess, because he could just be a crazy person.
	But nevertheless, I was told that I didn't have the option to just say it shouldn't be resourced.
	And I went and contacted that gentleman at his house and wasn't going to waste his time, but it was very direct and said, we're going to get the Capitol on January 6th.
	And he responded that he was not because that was the day of his son's funeral.
	And that is just one case of the collateral damage of this giant dragnet that the FBI has now inflicted on the population.
	And we see that even with righteous subjects who may have committed crimes on January 6th.
	And in the case with my office, where I eventually came forward and said I didn't want to participate, was an individual who was going to be charged with a felony, but had pledged to be cooperative with the FBI.
	And when he'd spoken to the FBI, a year and a half had transpired between him being recontacted, and they were going to send SWAT to his house to arrest him.
	Wow.
	Wow.
	Yeah, crazy.
	I mean, I was on SWAT for five years.
	But I know that that is not in keeping with the tradition of law enforcement.
	You should be using the least amount of force necessary.
	That's an unnecessary risk to the public, to our personnel.
	And I voiced my concern because I felt like the person in the room the day before Waco or the day before Ruby Ridge.
	And we can Monday morning quarterback those incidents into perpetuity.
	And say, well, if I had been there, I would have voiced a concern.
	Well, I was there for that incident that I foresaw the potential to have another incident like Ruby Ridge or Waco, and I wanted to voice my concern.
	And unfortunately for me, for my professional future with the FBI, at every level I went to three different levels of management.
	I was rebuffed, and I was told that I had a really great reputation and that I was risking my career by...
	I'm expressing my concerns.
	And I've always said I had an oath of office to upkeep.
	I had specific training where at the FBI Academy they send you to the Holocaust Memorial Museum and they send you to the MLK Memorial.
	And the purpose of that is to really hammer home that unless someone throws the flag in law enforcement and law enforcement just puts their head down and follows orders, that can only lead to civil rights atrocities and genocide.
	Yes. And it was my sincere belief that that is what the FBI is on course to do at this point.
	But again, management didn't share my sentiment and actually pushed back when I said that I had an oath to upkeep.
	They told me I had a duty to the FBI and had to follow orders and was being insubordinate.
	Wow. And we've seen this even with military who were told that they had to take the vaccine.
	And they said, well, you know, we've got a lot of problems with that.
	You know, religious liberty, for example, is one of those that I have.
	And people say, well, you have an obligation to obey orders.
	I said, no, I have an obligation to defend the Constitution, and that's what I'm doing by defending my rights.
	You're very right to point out How Ruby Ridge and Waco blew up because of the excessive use of force and so many people died.
	I wanted to get back, though, to this person that they reported to you that was an anonymous tip or something that somebody had accused them.
	There were so many people who were flagged Because of geofence information, because I had the phone companies and Google and all the rest of them turning over people's records if they were anywhere in that area.
	We had Bank of America go even further, and they gave a list to the FBI, presumably, of Anybody who had any financial transactions around the Capitol, but not necessarily buying anything there at the Capitol, but anywhere in Washington, D.C. or in the suburbs of Virginia or Maryland, I mean, they had a very big net.
	Anybody that bought anything went to the FBI.
	And presumably the FBI then looked at their political background and looked at whether they owned guns or anything like that.
	And it was that type of circumstantial stuff that got people caught up.
	Did you have any situations like that, that kind of wild circumstantial geofencing or transactions?
	And then, oh, by the way, this person is also a conservative, maybe owns a gun, so let's go visit them.
	Was that what you were saying too?
	I know that the individuals in my office saw that, but when it came to my involvement, I was moved over in October of 2021, and all of that background work had already been done.
	But that is very consistent with everything I've talked about with the other agents who investigated those cases, and not in my office, but in a multitude of other offices.
	And I think it's sort of in line with, you know, In President Eisenhower's farewell address about a military industrial complex and a scientific industrial complex, there's now an information industrial complex that exists with the ease of which digital information is shared, and there's a collusion that has gone on between the federal government and private industry to share that information.
	And it is circumventing the constitutional protections, and they sort of think they've found a hack.
	But, you know, nobody's in the room saying, well, if you're doing the bidding of the government, regardless of whether or not they've asked you to with the proper service, a proper subpoena or a search warrant, you are in fact an agent of the government.
	That's right. And that needs to be challenged in court.
	It needs to be upheld, and it needs to be confronted at a legislative level by our elected officials.
	I'm glad to hear you say that.
	I've talked for the longest time about, you know, everybody likes to talk about the deep state, the dark state, all the rest of the stuff.
	It's the deputized state.
	And we've seen it, as you talk about information, we've seen it with censorship.
	They deputize the social media companies, but they also deputize Bank of America to do the search warrants for them.
	And the pretense that they've got, of course, with it, Stephen, is that they always go back to the rulings where AT&T was spying on people.
	And they said, well, you know, you want to get this information from them.
	You got the PIN number stuff.
	And it's data that belongs to you.
	So would you like to turn it over to us since, you know, we give you a nice monopoly of all the phone lines and all the rest of this stuff?
	Sure, yeah, we'll turn this over to you.
	Well, happy to be of help to you.
	And so that's really kind of, you know, part of there's a lot of different things that are going on.
	to violate the Constitution, due process, search warrants, and all the rest of this stuff to say that, well, this data belongs to the corporation.
	The corporation is voluntarily complying with us, and we're not actually doing it.
	Now we see that there's all these back channels where they're actually telling them who they wanted to come after and all the rest of this stuff.
	This is very concerning, and I'm glad that you're talking about this because I think as a whistleblower who has seen this kind of stuff happening, you've got a lot of weight and a lot of integrity for standing up to this.
	Tell us a little bit about... How, again, you raised your concern and they said, well, gee, you know, we really would like, you got a great job here and a great work history, would really hate for you to ruin it.
	I mean, how did they really respond to this?
	Was that kind of it?
	And then what happened? Yeah, so the real seminal moment for me was the day before the arrest operations were going to be happening.
	I was summoned to my headquarters in Jacksonville, so I drove up there and had a long conversation with two assistant special agents in charge of my office.
	I expressed all the concerns here that I've spoken about and said I believe that we could be putting people's Did we lose?
	Okay, well, shoot.
	Okay, we're going to try to reestablish contact there.
	Has it dropped or still connected?
	Okay, drop it and then try to reconnect with him.
	And we just lost our line there.
	But I do want to ask him about that, and I want to ask him, is he back?
	Okay. Oh, good. Okay, great.
	We lost. Yeah, I never lost you there.
	Sorry. Oh, you didn't. Okay. All right.
	Good. It froze up on our end for some reason.
	I'm sorry. You were in the middle of talking about how they responded when you told them that you weren't good with this.
	If you can back up a little bit.
	Yeah, yeah. So, I mean, I expressed that to them.
	We had a long conversation about it.
	During the course of that meeting, several remarks were made to me that were credibly concerning, especially when I said I have an oath of office, and they said I had a duty to the FBI. One of the bosses in the room said that police officers were killed on January 6th by the protesters.
	And when I said that that was not actually factually accurate, he told me I needed to go and reexamine the facts.
	I proposed alternatives that we could use to bring folks into custody.
	I mean, it could just be a phone call to an attorney, surrender.
	We could send local law enforcement.
	We could use surveillance to interdict somebody.
	I didn't feel that SWAT was necessary, but all those were turned down.
	And at the end of the meeting, I'm a pretty straight shooter, so I said, you know, fellows, Where were we left with this?
	And I was given the assurance that this was going to be a long process.
	This is the federal government and things take a really long time.
	And I went on my merry way and three hours later got an email that told me that I was insubordinate and I was ordered to stay home the following day and report myself as AWOL. Wow.
	So I never actually had the opportunity to be insubordinate and not show or something like that.
	I was ordered to be AWOL, which I did and was Dr.
	Day's Bay before returning to work.
	And then subsequently had a meeting with the next level of the chain of command with the special agent in charge, in which she told me that I was a conspiracy theorist and that I represented a fringe belief and that I needed to do soul searching to determine if I wanted to have a future with the agency.
	And then after that, she told me she had already referred me for investigation to the FBI's inspection division and to the security division.
	Wow. And at that point, I kind of knew that the writing was on the wall because the FBI has retaliated against whistleblowers using a very nefarious process, and that is the security clearance.
	Because in order to work at the FBI, you need to have a security clearance.
	Mm-hmm. So my security clearance was suspended 30 days after my initial disclosures that I made to my bosses.
	And the reason that it was suspended was not because I blew the whistle or raised concerns.
	It was because they determined I accessed the employee handbook improperly.
	And therefore, they had to do a full investigation of that and walk me out the building.
	I was placed in an unpaid yet still employed status.
	Which is a strategy that they use to essentially wait people out and hopefully, I hope that due to financial stress that they will resign and then they can attribute any sort of accusations that you make as being the concerns of an angry ex-employee and not taken seriously.
	But unfortunately for them, I'm pretty stubborn and I'm also pretty financially savvy.
	I had done a fair amount of saving in preparation to be fired during the COVID vaccines.
	I knew that they were developing a registry and I told my wife, look, we're going to have to prepare for a time that I'm going to be looking for a new job.
	So we had sort of a war chest built up.
	Didn't anticipate having her lose her job, which did happen a few weeks after my suspension under some suspicious circumstances.
	Her Facebook account was also shut down immediately, and I was denied my training records, which I would need for outside employment.
	I put in two requests for outside employment, which you're entitled to do when you're unpaid, and they denied both requests.
	My medical information was leaked to the New York Times.
	And they also told the Times that I was accused of shooting a firearm in my backyard.
	And finally, I received communication from the FBI Inspection Division that attempted to put a gag order on me, and I was told that I was not allowed to speak about anything that was happening as far as the investigation of the allegations against me with anyone, to include my family, friends, attorneys.
	Which is an illegal gag order.
	So this is just a long train of humiliations and abuses that came from the FBI and ultimately culminated where I had an opportunity.
	I had a job offer from the Center for Renewing America.
	They had a fellowship come available that I applied for, submitted samples of my writing and interviewed for and was actually offered a position for.
	And ultimately accepted the day that I testified in a closed deposition for the Select Committee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government.
	And I want to talk to you about that.
	I want to talk to you about the organization that you're working for now.
	But that is absolutely amazing.
	The fact is that they were the ones who were insubordinate.
	They were insubordinate to the Constitution.
	They told you you had a duty to the FBI.
	You got a duty to the Constitution.
	You are supposed to be subordinate to that.
	And yet, you know, it doesn't surprise me that they would call you a conspiracy theorist because, of course, that's what the FBI coined, that phrase, you know, in terms of JFK assassination.
	But it is truly amazing to see the links that they will go to in order to set up dirty tricks and to, again, leak what they think is derogatory information about you, make accusations about you that aren't true, shut down your wife's social media account make accusations about you that aren't true, shut down your wife's social media account to try to gag you That truly is amazing.
	But I've seen this before, Steve.
	I talked about how I've interviewed...
	You know, whistleblower for the CIA, John Kiriakou, and Joe Bannister from the IRS, but of course also talked to some NSA whistleblowers, Thomas Drake, William Benny.
	Thomas Drake, when you mentioned the fact that they, you know, accused you of something about the employee manual, they tried to get Thomas Drake sent to prison because they said that he had taken home documents with him.
	He denied that he had them.
	But, you know, the documents that they had were things like, security is my friend.
	It was an opening employee trainer manual.
	And, you know, it was ludicrous what they even considered to be documents that were of concern, and then the fact that they tried to set him up with those and tried to put him in jail.
	Did they ever come after you with any kind of criminal charges?
	I mean, you're mentioning things about, you know, well, he had accusation of shooting a firearm in his backyard and other things like that.
	Was it even a setup to try to say, we're going to take your security clearance and And then wait and see if you latched a hold of something that had security classification on it?
	Was that part of it?
	They tried to set me up to be charged with a process crime for lying to an investigator.
	So I had to submit to a compelled interview with the FBI Security Division.
	And one thing that you have to know is in the meeting that I had with my two assistant special agents in charge, I wanted to memorialize, and I was law enforcement.
	I consulted with a—I live in the state of Florida.
	It's a two-party consent state.
	There's a law enforcement exemption to recording conversations.
	Consulted with state-certified law enforcement beforehand to confirm that I was in the good to do that.
	I might be outside of the FBI's policy, but policy isn't the law.
	And I recorded the conversation that I had with them.
	And when I submitted to this compelled interview with the security division, they asked me, point blank, did you record the interview?
	And I answered, honestly, yes, I had.
	And it was very apparent to me, and it's sort of like one magician trying to impress another magician with a trick.
	When you're a trained investigator or a trained interviewer, I kind of knew what they were doing.
	And the natural follow-up to that question, where I had made some...
	I'd given them some information that there had been some pretty damning statements made during this interview, this meeting that I had with these executives that were trying to compel me to violate my oath of office.
	You would think the natural follow-up would be, Steve, can we get a copy of that interview?
	And they never did that.
	And they were hoping that I was going to say no, and then they could cut the search warrant for my house and charge me with lying to a federal investigator.
	Because in going back and having listened to that meeting that I had, which I actually have transcribed, and it is in my book, so anybody who gets a copy will have access to.
	And then the FBI tried to get me to redact during the publication process, but I'm not going to do that.
	It was very clear to me that they were recording They were trying to divorce my ability to come forward as a whistleblower from my orders to submit to participating in those operations.
	And they repeatedly kept saying, so what you're telling me, Steve, is you're refusing to do your job.
	And I kept saying, no, I'm doing my job.
	So I think that they have a recording of it.
	They know what was said, and they weren't concerned about what was said.
	They were just worried about the exposure that the FBI has because the FBI, their prime directive is protect the image, protect the shield.
	That is the reputation.
	That is all that matters to the FBI. Well, I'll tell you what, their reputation is in the toilet now.
	It's the things that have happened in the last few years, especially.
	That must be a very interesting transcript because I can imagine, and that is what I've always said about all this Trump stuff.
	I said his real jeopardy is going to be a perjury trap, you know, blathering about something and carelessly talking about things.
	And so you know that.
	You know things like how they come after celebrities like Martha Stewart.
	They got her for lying to the FBI, not for insider trading.
	So this must have been a real mental battle to try to carefully phrase these terms in ways that they could not get you with a perjury trap.
	It must be a fascinating read. Of course, that transcript is in your book, True Blue, Stephen Friend.
	I imagine that would be worth the price of the book right there to see that back and forth With you and these interrogators trying to entrap you, you know, any kind of an error that you would make, you know, any kind of factual error.
	They would come after you.
	As a crime to lock you up, it's truly amazing.
	And it is frightening for the rest of us, because you know how those rules are, and you know how they're operating, but the rest of us don't.
	We're babes in the woods, right?
	Somebody is accused of something, and our first instinct, if we're innocent, is to say, yeah, I don't mind talking about this.
	I've got nothing to hide. I'm innocent.
	And it's that kind of an entrapment that is really a danger for the average citizen, isn't it?
	Exactly right. And we've gotten to a point now where the FBI is no longer an objective force for good.
	They have weaponized the process crimes to go after people.
	We saw that happen with somebody like Mike Flynn, where James Comey sent agents over to specifically get him to answer a question that lacked candor or could be contrived to have lacked candor in a way, and they could bring charges to force his either criminal charge or at least his firing from the National Security Advisor.
	And that is why we'll see these ongoing investigations of somebody like former President Trump, where they could just say, well, you wore an illegal necktie.
	And he could say, that's ridiculous.
	That's not illegal. I'm not going to participate in your witch hunt.
	And they could say, oh, well, now you've obstructed our investigation, and we'll charge you with a process crime.
	Wow. Yeah, it truly is amazing what has happened.
	Now, you are working, since you testified, before we get into what you're doing right now with the Center for Renewing America, let's talk a little bit about the response from Washington, congressional hearings, all the rest of the stuff.
	I mean, what has been the response, since this is a politicized investigation, what has been the response from Republicans, for example, to any of this?
	Or even from Democrats? You know, do Democrats care?
	Are they full on with this?
	What have the Republicans said, if anything?
	There was definitely some appetite from some of the Republicans on the select committee on the weaponization of the federal government.
	Matt Gates and Dan Bishop both participated in my deposition.
	They both brought questions forward and seemed genuinely interested in not only the information I had as a whistleblower, but also other information and concerns that I have, which I feel is vitally important to bring to not just Congress's attention, but to the American population's Unfortunately, the FBI and the Democrat Party and mainstream media have all colluded and attacked the messenger.
	And here's the thing about being a quote-unquote whistleblower.
	I've been a self-styled whistleblower, as I believe what CNN says I am.
	It's 5 U.S.C. 2303.
	I followed it, the letter of the law.
	I made a protected disclosure to numerous members of my chain of command, the Inspector General, the Office of Special Counsel, and to Congress, both Democrat and Republican.
	So I've gone through a list of those.
	Each one of those was a protected activity on my part.
	I don't have to be right about my concerns.
	I just have to be reasonable.
	And it is incumbent on those authorities to take that information and do an appropriate investigation and assessment as to whether or not I'm right.
	I brought that information and they could say, Steve, you're wrong.
	Here's why. And I would have said, okay, going back to work now.
	Or they could say, Steve, you're right.
	We're going to fix the problem.
	And I said, okay, I'm going back to work now.
	But instead, all of the guns were turned, all the energy and the resources of the FBI and the Democrat Party and the media were turned against myself and the other gentleman that were at the table with me when we testified last month.
	Which, in fact, can only mean one thing.
	You get the flack when you're over the target.
	They are not willing to entertain any of the information we brought forward, which we were prepared to discuss in great length, in great detail.
	But instead, the members of the minority there were happy to just pontificate for five minutes each and then accuse Marcus Allen of tweeting improperly, even though that wasn't his Twitter account.
	And accused me and Garrett O'Boyle of being bought and paid for when we were given a charitable donation several months after being suspended indefinitely without pay.
	And we're accused of doing that by Dan Goldman, who is one of the wealthiest members of Congress.
	Truly is amazing. How many other people were there?
	Were they other FBI whistleblowers in this testimony or were they from other agencies?
	Were they all FBI people? How many were there?
	There were three FBI whistleblowers and Tristan Levitt, who was an attorney for Empower Oversight, who represents me.
	And that's an organization, 501c3, that represents government whistleblowers.
	And then they've been defending me as well as Marcus.
	So he was there to sort of be a subject matter expert and share his knowledge.
	He has a wealth of it with Congress.
	But, you know, it was just the three FBI personnel, two agents, and one support staff.
	And we were able to present some information.
	I mean, obviously, I wanted to get in the more salacious information about having gone to school board meetings and gotten license plates from people as part of the process.
	Thank you.
	My project now at this point is the integrated program management system that the FBI has and has had for 10 years, which is the quota system.
	That's the ticket book for the traffic cop, where they are quotas for opening number of cases and using certain tools and getting a certain number of arrests.
	And in order to keep the budgets flowing, there's games played, like where they will open up thousands of domestic terrorism cases off of January 6th, which is not an adequate and accurate representation of what that actually was.
	And now you have the special agents in charge of all 56 field offices since those cases were spread around the country.
	They're all collecting bonuses somewhere in the area between $30,000 and $50,000 because those numbers were met.
	Wow, that's amazing. I've covered the case of Adrian Schoolcraft, who is a New York City whistleblower for the police.
	And he had situations like that where they said, you know, hey, it's Halloween.
	I just want you to round up anybody that you can bring them back and we'll book them and we'll find out what to charge them with later.
	We don't care. Just bring people in.
	You know, you've got to quote a type of system like that.
	And he started recording and recording other police officers.
	Once they found out about that, his father was a police officer.
	And he was a, again, your book is True Blue.
	He was a True Blue believer as well.
	He really believed in being a cop.
	They tried to punish him by making him walk a beat.
	And he goes, well, that's good. I think it's a good thing for me to be out there and deter crime and get to know the people in the community.
	He didn't see that as a punishment.
	But they eventually came around and he had another recording that was up on the wall behind some books that memorialized what happened with that.
	But they went to his apartment.
	The guy who was number two in the New York City Police Department They arrested him and put him in an insane asylum.
	His father, who was a retired cop, found the other recording and got him out.
	But, I mean, that's the thing.
	They turn against people.
	And when the institution becomes that level of being corrupt, exactly what do you think we should do with the FBI? I mean, is it to the point where it is salvageable?
	I don't think it is. I think you need to do away with the FBI entirely.
	And I know that sounds scary to people, but this country existed before the FBI. It can exist after the FBI. There's a strong argument that I've been making for the last several months that the FBI isn't a constitutional organization.
	There was no legislation brought forward to originate it.
	It was actually backdated. And so the FBI was about preserving status quo.
	Not necessarily about protecting the Constitution or the rights of Americans.
	So in the 30s, 40s, and 50s, the FBI, to preserve the status quo, went after communists.
	And I think Americans assumed that they were the good guys.
	But then the FBI went after draft dodgers, because, you know, and then you can have the debate over the legitimacy of the Vietnam War.
	And I think there were still people that thought they were doing good work.
	COINTELPRO and infiltrating the Black Panthers.
	There's some civil rights concerns there, and we can jump all the way into the 21st century, where after 9-11 and national security mission creeps started to occur because our military stomped down the foreign threats significantly.
	The FBI had to justify its national security branch's existence and budget, so they started to look from We're
	good to go.
	As being anti-government white supremacist.
	And two of the top priorities for the FBI in counterterrorism are anti-government extremism and ethnic extremism, parenthetically, white supremacy.
	So you've now got the FBI preserving the status quo for a radical left that is in charge of our government.
	Yeah, it is.
	And allow those guys who have the local knowledge of what's going on in their town, they know the usual suspects, they know the crime that's going on on Main Street, they can pursue criminal cases at a federal level, local, state, however they see adequate, bring those cases to a U.S. attorney's office if it's appropriate.
	And that will empower the local agencies to essentially staff the federal government and really let federal law enforcement do what's best for the locals as opposed to what their minders are asking them to do in Washington, D.C. I
	couldn't agree with you more And now a lot of people who have been applauding them are seeing this, but it's always been that way.
	And it's always been an unconstitutional agency.
	Let me ask you, because we talked about the deputized state, what about things like, you know, the Southern Property Law Center has been used as a consultant for the FBI in the past, pointing the finger at other people.
	It gives them plausible deniability.
	It gives more credibility to these charges, but they work in a kind of public-private partnership type of thing.
	Did you see some of that when you were working there?
	Yes, yes. Even at the FBI Academy when we had training on terrorism, we had to watch a video provided to us by the Southern Poverty Law Center where they ranked pro-life activists as higher on the threat level than ISIS. Wow, really? That's amazing.
	Doesn't surprise me, I guess, but that truly is amazing.
	Let's talk about what you're doing right now with the Center for Renewing America.
	You're a Senior Fellow on Domestic Intelligence and Security Service.
	Tell us a little bit about the organization first and then tell us what you're doing there.
	Well, thank you for that. So Russ Vogt, the director of the OMB under the Trump administration, is our president and founded this organization.
	And we are focused on confronting woke and weaponized government in any way we can.
	And my contribution to that is in this We're good to go.
	During that week-long event that we had in January, and brings those concerns forward and has basically crafted a new budget that should be implemented on day one if power were to change hands.
	And I'm trying to just provide my insight there, as well as advising this select committee on the weaponization of the federal government.
	So in a cruel twist of irony, I get to investigate the FBI who is investigating me.
	And they continue to just represent what this group means and speak out.
	And I've just started to come around to the message of I'm swinging a hammer at a giant stone and it might not break.
	For the first 999 times, but on the 1,000th strike, it does.
	And that doesn't mean that my 1,000th swing of the hammer was what did it.
	It was everything along the way.
	And then I'll just continue to hammer away to get this message out there to as many people as possible.
	That's right. The price of liberty is eternal vigilance and its persistence as well.
	And this is such a dangerous thing with the power, the money, and the technology that is behind the federal government.
	For it to have this massive, weaponized, politicized police force is a very, very dangerous thing for all of us.
	I mean, we should learn the lesson from the Stasi.
	And they didn't have, you know, but only a fraction of the power.
	Thank you.
	Thank you.
	And I hope that they get that again.
	The book is True Blue, and Stephen Friend is the author.
	You can find it wherever books are sold.
	He doesn't have a separate website to sell that, but you can find it on Amazon, anywhere that you buy your books.
	Is there anything else that you would like to, in kind of a parting way, to tell people in America about the dangers of this, or anything else you'd like to tell us?
	Well, yeah, thank you.
	And thank you for allowing me the opportunity to share that information about the book.
	You know, it's not intended to be, it's not political in any way.
	It's just the information being brought forward.
	And I certainly share your sentiment with this growing intelligence state that is now, the FBI has evolved into an intelligence agency with a law enforcement capability.
	If there's any final idea that I just threw out into the ether, everybody wants to say that they're a First Amendment absolutist, and the Second Amendment is there to support that.
	I think we need to start looking at our Third Amendment, and I know that that's the quartering of soldiers, and it kind of makes an eyebrow raise, but when we look at things like the way that big tech has colluded with government, there's not a whole lot different than a red coat listening on your bedroom wall From the guest room than the cell phone that's next to your night table that you're charging every night.
	Boy, Stephen, you and I are on the same page.
	I have said that so many times.
	I said, they're living on your computer.
	It's even worse than living sitting on your couch asking you for potato chips.
	That is so good.
	We are in 100% agreement on these things, and I'm so glad to hear you saying that.
	You have so much credibility for walking the walk.
	Freedom is not free. Somebody has to pay the price for it.
	You've paid the price for this.
	You have kept your integrity.
	You've been honest and faithful to the Constitution.
	I cannot thank you enough.
	And certainly, you are spot on in understanding what the real dangers are here, and you have the courage to speak out.
	I can't thank you enough for doing that.
	Thank you. Thank you very much. Have a great day, and God bless you.
	Thank you. Again, the book is True Blue.
	The author is Stephen Friend, and I think it would be worth the price of admission just to see the transcripts going back and forth between him and the FBI. Obviously, he won because he's not in jail.
	Thank you, Stephen. Decoding
	the mainstream propaganda.
	It's the David Knight Show.
	Kim Witsack.
	She is someone who has worked and had a lot of experience, and we're going to talk about her own personal experience, with SSRIs.
	And she's had a tragic experience in her life, and she has worked very hard to try to make sure that this doesn't happen to other people.
	As she pointed out, she became an accidental advocate for And again, for people to be informed about the risks and dangers of SSRI and many other drugs that are out there.
	Her site is woodymatters.com.
	Woody was her husband.
	We're going to talk about that and about SSRIs.
	Thank you for joining us, Kim. Great.
	Thanks for having me. Thank you.
	Tell us a little bit about, you said you became an accidental advocate.
	Tell us a little bit about your story and your husband's story.
	Sure. Well, I like to call myself the accidental advocate because I certainly did not choose to do this work, but sometimes our greatest life purposes choose us.
	So I was married, it was almost, it'll be 20 years ago this August, but I was married on August 6, 2003.
	I'll never forget that.
	changed the trajectory of my life.
	My dad called to tell me that my husband, Woody, was found hanging from the rafters of our garage dead at age 37.
	Woody was not depressed.
	Woody had no history of depression or any other mental illness.
	He had just started his dream job with a startup company and was having trouble sleeping, which is not really that uncommon for entrepreneurs.
	But what he did is, you know, I always call Woody the athlete who, you know, used doctors because they put them back, Humpty Dumpty, you know, they put them back.
	So Woody went and saw his GP, somebody he's trusted for a long time, and was given a three-week sample pack for It's crazy.
	I was out of the country the first three weeks he was on the drug.
	We both lived, we had very successful careers in advertising, so I was out of the country.
	It was our busy time in production.
	So I wasn't even there when he first got put on these drugs.
	And like I said, the three week sample pack automatically doubled the dose.
	And so that's really the story, but what put, you know, like, we never once, and I'll tell you one thing that happened right before Woody's death.
	I came home and Woody walked in the back door, completely sweat through his blue dress shirt, fell to the floor in a fetal position with his hands around his head like a vice.
	Kim, you gotta help me.
	I don't know what's happening to me.
	My head's outside my body looking in.
	Wow. And I remember like, yeah, it was really, you know, and at that point we'd been married for 10 years.
	I've never seen this kind of behavior.
	And we calmed him down.
	He called his doctor and the doctor said, give him four to, you got to give the drug four to six weeks to work.
	Wow. To kick in.
	Wow. Give it time, yeah.
	It's amazing when you look at this, and when you look up the definition of SSRI, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, what you will see on the internet, they'll say, well, it's the first line of pharmacotherapy for depression and And other psychological issues due to its safety, its efficacy, and its tolerance.
	It's amazing that they can put this message out there after all the stuff that's happened.
	And I've talked in the past, Kim, to people who have just started collecting SSRI stories.
	They call it SSRIstories.net.
	They've got over 7,000 of those.
	And we're trying to get this information out there.
	You know, when we look at this and how destructive this has become, how people will commit suicide, and how sometimes as part of that is mass murder.
	We've seen that being a factor in many of the shootings that are out there.
	And yet, the public doesn't really understand, and there's so much...
	Trust in the doctors and in the pills that people are taking.
	I imagine, as you talked about the dosages, when I've talked to the people at SSRIstories.net, they said where it gets really dangerous is when people are having negative effects and they decide that they're going to adjust the dosage, maybe even cutting it, not even taking more of it, but just changing the dosage one way or the other, more or less, can trigger these types of suicides or murder-suicide.
	Correct. And it's like they always say, you know, we never, like you just mentioned, we never once questioned a drug because, you know, it's advertised safe and effective, given to him by his doctor and the FDA. And, you know, the most...
	And at the time Woody's death, there were no warnings.
	So that became... Kind of our mission.
	And the night that Woody was found, the coroner gave us a gift.
	And I call it a gift because intuitively I knew like something didn't make sense.
	Like my husband who loved life, we just booked our 10 year anniversary trip that he took his life.
	But she asked one simple question.
	Was Woody taking any medication?
	Yeah. And the only medication he was taking was Zoloft.
	And she said to us that we are going to have to take it with us.
	It might have something to do with his death.
	So they took the bottle of Zoloft with her.
	So that became clue number one.
	Ironically, on the front page of our Minneapolis paper, they had an article that said the UK finds link between antidepressants and suicide in teens.
	Wow. So that was the same night, which is, you know, I look back now and I feel like, you know, that was Woody's note because there was no note, right?
	And that became our mission and started to go out to D.C. So what a lot of families don't realize is before this time, When we Googled Zoloft and suicide, we had no idea that the FDA had hearings in 1991 on the emergence of violence and suicide with Prozac, and did nothing.
	They never warned, and they said to study suicidality, The Eli Lilly never did.
	You know, the FDA never followed up.
	And meanwhile, here comes Zoloft from Pfizer, GlaxoSmithKline's Paxil.
	It gets approved for kids.
	And so that became our mission to get black box suicide warnings added to these drugs in 2004 for kids and then 2006 for kids.
	For adults. But, you know, a lot of people aren't really aware of that because, you know, they just assume, you know, our commercials.
	I mean, the whole thing is just, it is a very important topic that we must constantly keep in front of people like you're doing with this show.
	Well, yeah. You know, when we look at it, you've got on your site, Woody Matters.
	Woody was your husband's name.
	WoodyMatters.com.
	You have some interesting factoids and graphics that are there.
	You say that there are $19 spent on ads by the pharmaceutical industry for every $1 that they spend on research.
	That's pretty astounding. And of course, that's the Ask Your Doctor commercials.
	And those things really exploded in the 90s.
	That's when that first phenomenon started happening.
	I've talked many times about how We moved to an area where we didn't have TV reception, and we're traveling a few years after this stuff happened.
	We're in a hotel, and we turn on the TV, and it's like, wow, this is just one pharmaceutical ad after another.
	I've never seen anything like that before.
	But $19 worth of ads for every $1 they spend on research.
	That's amazing. Yeah, it's a great, you know, that was a study that was done by a couple of researchers, and it's fascinating because it's not just, you know, advertising that we see on television, but it's all of this other marketing.
	You know, there's so much marketing, and I, you know, have been The interesting thing is I'm still in advertising and marketing, so I have a lens that looks at everything through the marketing and advertising lens.
	And, you know, it's the perfect, and especially when you look at this, it's, you know, the drug commercial, then we've created all these side industries, and then we've created the advertising with the media networks.
	All of this influences that, but then you look at I call it, like I said, the spider web.
	And it's all the trappings of marketing that doctors aren't even aware that they're being marketed to.
	Yeah, that's right. It can be very, very subtle.
	It can be very overt.
	And what we saw with the opioid industry, they were selling this as like the panacea for everything.
	Give it for every type of thing.
	Getting a lot of people addicted to it.
	And when they went back and they saw how they were...
	You know, influencing doctors and spending so much money on vacations and even on hookers with some of them.
	It was amazing what they were doing with that.
	And so you can imagine that if the...
	All the commercials that we see on television, on cable news especially, are just the tip of the spear.
	You know, how much is being spent with the rest of this stuff?
	And free samples and all kinds of studies that they fund.
	But, of course, all those commercials guarantee that the news agencies, the big news agencies on cable, aren't really going to cover this topic.
	You talked about the fact that whenever the...
	When the coroner was looking at your husband, Woody, and asked you, you know, what kind of drugs is he?
	Oh, Zoloft. Okay, we'll take a look.
	Whenever we see some kind of a crazy mass shooting, that has been for the longest time what I try to get to.
	Oh, look, this person was under psychological evaluation and under medication, but they won't say, typically won't say what it is.
	They always still cover for the pharmaceutical companies.
	And if you dig far enough, you probably will find in almost all these cases that it is SSRIs or something like that that is a part of that, you know, it's part of this medication.
	But it's very interesting to see how many of these shootings has been involved with and how the press now doesn't like to mention that whatsoever.
	Yeah, you know, again, I go back to the simple question of where was he on any drugs, right?
	So that gave me another insight.
	So every time there's a mass shooting, a lot of these shootings really started since the advent of antidepressants.
	And you look at whether, you know, there's some of the, there's a famous one that had the Donald Shell case down in Kentucky.
	And, you know, they actually settled with the company, settled, and so it became like so there wouldn't be a jury verdict when the drug was on the trial, right?
	And so these guys have known about it for a long time.
	It's a simple question.
	I have always, like, one of the things that we've been out there advocating for is anytime there's a shooting, we as the public, you know, your HIPAA rules no longer apply.
	That's right. We need to know what medications, again, It does not say it's causation, right?
	But is there a link?
	Is there a curiosity that we should be asking?
	We should be knowing what medications they were on.
	And their privacy doesn't really matter because we are all sitting ducks.
	And we should, as a member of the public, we should be demanding that our legislators are...
	Pushing for, you know, information or this kind of information or investigations when we do have big shootings because we need to get to the bottom of, like, what's going on with this increase?
	Why are we seeing it? Again, I always say it's not causation, but is there a link?
	And we need to be curious.
	Yeah, they're going to great lengths to keep this manifesto from the shooter in Nashville under wraps, but I'd be as interested, if not more interested, in finding out what was going on with them, with her, with the evaluation, the treatment, the psychological treatment that she was undergoing.
	What kind of medication was she on?
	We need to take a look at that as well as the manifesto.
	Tell us a little bit about this Donald Schell case that you referred to, where they settled.
	Well, sir. So Donald Schell was in the 90s, and he was a factory worker, and he shot up some of the people.
	I think it was in Kentucky.
	I believe it was in Kentucky, Louisville.
	But anyways, the judge didn't know that there was a secret settlement.
	I actually just tweeted about it earlier in the month.
	But there was a secret settlement that the judge found out.
	But it really gave...
	It let the drug company off, which was Eli Lilly, because it was Prozac.
	They let them off the hook.
	And, you know, one of the things I didn't mention as part of my, as I call, battle for Woody, we had a lawsuit against...
	A wrongful death failure to warrant lawsuit against Pfizer, where we were able to get a bunch of documents out from under seal.
	And there were some in there that...
	Pfizer helped to create a prosecutor manual in the 90s.
	Now, I just have to say, why would a drug company help to create, or why would there need to be a prosecutor manual being helped for the, and it was called the Zoloft prosecutor manual, to be used for any time somebody used the Zoloft defense?
	Again, that's from the 90s.
	Then you go back.
	And it's really I mean, it's really crazy.
	They really war game this.
	They war game all this stuff.
	They war game all the different stories about what they're going to tell people, you know, about the warp speed vaccines and everything.
	They've got it planned from the very beginning.
	So if somebody says that, you know, they were under the influence of Zoloft, here's what you do to take that away.
	Wow.
	Yeah.
	Again, from the 90s.
	And then, you know, what a lot of people also don't realize is, you know, Prozac in Germany was never approved for a couple of reasons initially.
	Risk of suicide, lack of efficacy.
	And eventually it did get approved, but with a tranquilizer.
	Hmm. Now, that idea with a tranquilizer never got translated to our U.S., right?
	And so, you know, that is what we have to remember.
	There's that whole agitation and akathisia, which is the side effect that can cause, you know, when Woody was having that head outside the body, or it's this extreme agitation, this extreme psychosis, that actually Pfizer's chief medical officer said,
	Wrote an entire article about akathisia and if people would get experience akathisia, quote unquote, his words, not mine, death may be a welcome result.
	Wow. And so that journal article is public, right?
	But what wasn't public and came out in my documents was a letter that the chief medical officer wrote to his salespeople that said the attached journal article is not suitable for general practitioners, but may be for neurologically inclined psychiatrists.
	And I was like, they intentionally kept the side effect of akathisia from the GPs, but you know, 80%, 70-80% of these drugs are written by GPs and not by the psychiatrists.
	And akathisia, that was similar to what your husband Woody was experiencing with his mind outside of his body type of thing?
	Yep. And it's like an extreme agitation.
	It's like, you know, where you just want it out.
	You know, I just want it out.
	And that's the thing that they said would be...
	Death would be considered to be preferable for many people like that.
	And, of course, a lot of people, if you're having situations like that, and some people would alter their dosage for SSRIs because of physical things that were happening to them, right?
	Not just a mental thing that was happening to them.
	They might be doing other things to their body, and so they would adjust the dosage for that or get off of it.
	You weren't there when your husband committed suicide.
	So you're not sure if he was having this akathisia and it was driving him nuts.
	Maybe he made the connection and just didn't take it.
	Maybe that could have sent him over the edge as well because it will exacerbate changing your dosage.
	This is an important thing for people to know.
	Changing the dosage can really trigger this thing and, you know, almost like taking an overdose for it.
	In many cases, even to reduce it a little bit.
	Tell people about the black box warning that is on these things that you were able to get put on, the FDA black box warning.
	So the black box warning is the most serious of all warnings.
	That means that there's some type of serious adverse event or death that can be associated with the drug.
	It is literally in a black box in your paperwork that you get from the pharmacist.
	But more importantly, it is a conversation that your doctors should be having with us.
	of prescribing.
	And, you know, there's also for kids, there's an FDA medication guide for parents that talks about the suicide, where the dangers are, also with some of the anxiety medications, how there's addictive, you know, qualities also with some of the anxiety medications, how there's addictive, you know, qualities to them or that they're on the So these are all very, very important conversations.
	And you know, it's funny.
	I always say when people are like, well, everybody, you know, the media sometimes will say, everybody knows that there's warnings on these drugs.
	They just have to put it on. I said, no, that's not true.
	If you, like in 1991, I was a young kid.
	I didn't even know that the FDA was having hearings on Prozac and it was a big deal.
	Prozac and suicide and violence, right?
	Mm-hmm. So in 2004 or 2006, when I was in the thick of advocating for those and out in D.C. almost every other week, if you were like these parents now, if they were kids, they didn't know anything about this, right? Yeah. So I think it's one of those things that we have to constantly be reminding people.
	And, you know, just recently, there was a study that looked at, that was done by Dr.
	David Healy and Peter Getchy out of Copenhagen.
	And they got the data that was used to originally approve Prozac for kids.
	It's part of the reanalysis of the original clinical trial, and then they can look at what the data says and then compare it to what the journals say.
	say about the medication?
	Well, they just did and looked at Prozac approval that came out of the, using the MRHA, which is the UK version of the FDA regulatory body.
	And they reanalyzed it and looked at what the data said that got, was used to get approval.
	And then what it looks like in the journal and how it got reported.
	And they left out suicides.
	So they're actually calling for the journals to actually update their data because they've reanalyzed it.
	But you know, it's funny looking at what we've seen in the last couple of years with just the, you know, the COVID vaccines and like, you know, all of the censoring and talking about it.
	We didn't have that same experience, meaning we didn't have social media and the media environment when we were trying to get the antidepressant black box warnings.
	But now I'm seeing anything to do with antidepressants especially around the shootings, but also this reanalyzed data study that just came out.
	We're The mainstream media has not touched it.
	And it should be one of those game-changing findings, this new study that is using old original data that was used to get the drug approved.
	So, you know, I feel like there's so many parallels between those two worlds.
	Oh, yeah. We are living in a different world, and at the end of the day, it's you and I, the people who either are taking, or we have loved ones, or we need to be the ones questioning and pushing our officials and You know, I today sit on the FDA advisory board, the same advisory board that in 1991 didn't do their job and they all took money.
	So I have a very unique perspective also sitting on the psychopharmologic drugs advisory committee, seeing how new drugs are coming to market using fast tracking and breakthrough.
	So I think there's just a lot of, you know, the system is not really built to protect you and I. It's really protecting others' interests, and a lot of interests are at play when it comes to the medications that we take.
	And it's an unbelievable amount of money that is involved.
	You know, I mean, people are willing to kill for billions of dollars.
	I mean, we've seen that certainly corporations are.
	But tell us a little bit about that experience that you have sitting in there on the FDA committee, and your role in that is as a consumer advocate.
	Tell us what you're seeing. You mentioned that they're speeding things up, and of course now we're seeing that as they come out with one new vaccine after the other, they have established this paradigm.
	We heard Fauci talking about it in October 2019 at a Milken Institute thing.
	They said, you know, how do we get everybody to take a flu vaccine?
	Well, they have now established a protocol where they can just run through all these tests without waiting for a decade, as they were talking about.
	We're seeing one vaccine coming after the other with mRNA without really any testing.
	Is that what is happening to the psychological drugs that you're looking at in your committee?
	How are they speeding that up there?
	Or are they? Yes, they are.
	And so one of the things that Congress kind of granted is something called a breakthrough.
	There's all the fast-tracking mechanisms, because, you know, back in the, I think it was the 80s, with AIDS drugs, and you remember all the groups were saying, hey, it's taking you too long to approve these drugs, right?
	That was another Fauci thing. Yeah, it's taking too long.
	We've got to make it faster, right?
	So that was one thing with, like, you know, PDUFA. But then also with Congress, they started, they have...
	Different regulatory, like it's called breakthrough therapy, fast tracking.
	Everything is, if you start watching and listening to the drugs that we take, everything is an unmet need.
	And so when there's an unmet need, that means that you can bypass some of the more stringent or what I used to think were gold standards with our clinical trials.
	Mm-hmm. So a lot of the drugs that are coming before my committee, and I've been on it, I've just been extended until the end of next year, which I still laugh because I tend to be the only one that votes no.
	And it's very interesting because I see it from a very different, like, it's not about just, I mean, market, you know, to get these drugs, you've got to remember what clinical trials are.
	The whole idea is that is there because they want to get it on the market for marketing purposes, right?
	And so they can get it. So, you know, it's about getting, doing the data, getting the best, you know, like a lot of the clinical trials don't even, you know, aren't real world scenarios.
	They're the best case scenario for something.
	Then you have, and so that's one thing.
	But then if you don't have sheer volume or numbers, because like, you know, I had a couple of drugs and I just actually, it's an article that's coming out today.
	It was the Rixalti, which is an antipsychotic that's currently on the market.
	But the big unmet need right now is Alzheimer's dementia agitation.
	And so they have been, for years, with the elderly, been using antipsychotics.
	But the government cracked down on it because they literally have been killing elderly people regardless.
	And so this company...
	The drug is already on the market, and they just got approval from the FDA, and I was the only...
	The data that they used was marginally beneficial for a patient.
	There was no... Or I should say, I almost think this was more for the caregivers or the nursing homes as opposed to the patient.
	There were no patient...
	You know, satisfaction type, you know, where a lot of those drugs can deaden somebody.
	As well as then it also had a four times rate of death over the other drugs.
	But this, I was the only one that voted no.
	And it's amazing to me.
	And I really, you know, I leave these meetings often thinking, am I the...
	Am I the only one that's seen this?
	Am I the only one?
	I'm like, why bother?
	I want to hit my head against the concrete.
	It doesn't make a difference.
	But here's where I do think, at least I'm on record.
	I get to challenge the drug companies.
	I get to challenge the FDA officials.
	And I come from a safety lens.
	And I will always come with a safety lens.
	Because these drugs are coming to market Really, with smaller clinical trials, and it ultimately is what happens when millions of people take the drugs, and then we start seeing, you know, the different issues happen.
	But, you know... Over time.
	Over time. And as you point out on your website, I'd encourage people to go there, woodymatters.com.
	You say there have been no initiated drug studies by the FDA. They don't do the studies.
	It's the people who are going to sell you the stuff that do the studies, right?
	Exactly. I mean, that was shocking too.
	And then the other thing that I'll say that was also shocking to me when I got into this work, again, the accidental advocate work, is I would have assumed that doctors learn about how the FDA works and how this works in med school.
	But I found out they don't learn how the FDA works.
	That is not part of all of this critical thinking kind of things that you've got to be aware of, of the marketing, the ugly side that's behind the scenes.
	That's right. Versus, you know, versus just being educated by pharma.
	So the idea that, you know, they're not learning about it was shocking.
	The idea that, wait, the FDA doesn't do the trials?
	You mean you're doing it?
	And you are the one that wants to sell the product to me?
	Of course! Like, we do this all the time in advertising.
	We know how to set up clinical trials.
	We know how to, like, play the game.
	That's right. So, anyways.
	You see that all the time.
	You'll have three different companies making a drug for the same thing at the same time, right?
	And they'll all run their own studies, and they'll say, well, mine is better than brand X and Y, and then brand X and Y will do it, and theirs will win as well.
	They rig these studies so much.
	It's such a rigged market, and, of course...
	The real key is education, and that's why what you're doing is so important at WoodyMatters.com.
	Thank you so much, Kim.
	Kim Witsack, I'm so sorry about what happened to turn you into an advocate, but thank you for being an advocate, and thank you for being eyes and ears as to what is happening inside the FDA. We all need to understand what is happening with that.
	Thank you so much. Thank you so much for having me.
	Appreciate it.
	Bye-bye.
	All right, we'll be right back, folks.
	��
	�� In a world of deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.
	You're listening to The David Knight Show.
	Joining us now is Paul Charest.
	He has a previous book, The Army of None, about artificial intelligence.
	He is a former Army Ranger who served in Iraq and Afghanistan.
	His book, Autonomous Weapons in the Army of None, was an award-winning study.
	He is Vice President and Director of Studies at the Center for New American Security.
	And this book, which is a real page-turner for something that is...
	Heavy into technology, but also politics.
	It covers a wide range of areas, and I've got to say, I really did enjoy it.
	It's a massive book, but I did enjoy reading it.
	The book is Four Battlegrounds, Power in the Age of Artificial Intelligence.
	Thank you for joining us, Mr.
	Shari. Thank you so much for having me.
	Really appreciate it. Well, thank you.
	I want to focus at the very beginning of the book, and this is one of the things that hooked me, this book is about the darker side of AI. And that's what I want to focus on.
	Too often we get this Pollyanna vision version of the future, you know, and everything is going to be just shiny new toys and technology.
	But the reality is a little bit concerning, isn't it?
	I thought it was interesting that you began the book with a talk about an AI dogfight.
	And again, there's a lot of great anecdotes through this, which makes it such a good book to read.
	Tell people what was happening in DARPA's ACE program, this Air Combat Evolution.
	Yeah, thanks so much.
	I'm glad you enjoyed that one.
	I thought it was really exciting to learn about.
	I talk at the opening of the book about DARPA's ACE program, Air Combat Evolution, and the DARPA Alpha Dogfight Challenge.
	So the ACE program is designed to create an AI agent that can go into the cockpit to assist human pilots.
	And the Alpha Dogfight Challenge that DARPA did a few years ago, taking a page from AlphaGo that beat the best humans at Go, was designed to beat a human in dogfighting in a simulator.
	And there's a lot of caveats that apply from a simulator to the real world.
	It's not the same. But nevertheless, a big challenge because that's a very difficult environment for humans.
	You're maneuvering at high speed, requires quick reflexes, situational awareness, anticipating where's the other pilot going to go.
	Yeah, let me interject here and say, you know, one of the things that surprised me about that was that because of technology, typically missile technology, right, you don't have dogfights anymore.
	But that's really a measure of pilot skill is how they were using that.
	So tell us how it went. That's right, pilot skill.
	And in some ways, pilot trust.
	Pilot trust in the AI, right?
	If the AI can do dogfighting, then it's going to help pilots trust it more.
	So in this competition, a number of different companies brought their AIs.
	They competed against each other.
	Now, the winner was a previously unheard-of company called Heron Systems, beat out Lockheed Martin in the finals.
	And then their AI went head-to-head against a human, an experienced Air Force pilot Totally crushed the human.
	15 to 0, human didn't get a single shot off against the AI. And the thing that was most interesting to me was the AI was able to make these superhuman precision shots when the aircraft are racing at each other hundreds of miles an hour, head to head, that are basically impossible for humans to make.
	So the AI actually was not just better than the human, but was fighting differently than the human.
	Mm-hmm. Yeah, and as you point out in the thing, typically we've all seen dogfights in movies over and over again, even in Star Wars.
	The whole thing is to maneuver around and get behind the guy and take the shot from behind, but it operated differently.
	What did the AI do? So for humans, exactly.
	They want to maneuver behind, get into the 6 o'clock position behind the enemy, and then get a shot off.
	But there are these split-second opportunities when the aircraft are circling and they're nose-to-nose, and there's just a fraction of a second where you could get a shot off when they're racing at each other head-to-head.
	And the AI system was able to do this.
	It's a shot that's basically impossible for humans to make.
	It's actually banned in training because it's risky for humans to even try because they risk a collision when the aircraft are racing at each other head to head.
	But the AI was able to make that shot, avoid a collision.
	And the really wild thing is AI learned to do that all on its own.
	It wasn't programmed to do that.
	It simply learned to do that by flying in a simulator.
	Wow. So it's basically playing chicken with the other plane, and then taking a kill shot and getting out of the way, and not getting out of the way.
	That is pretty amazing. Pretty amazing.
	Now, of course, you point out in the book that it has complete situational awareness, which is something that helps it.
	But later in the book, you talk about poker.
	And I thought that was very interesting because for all the years I haven't been following all the different game stuff that's been happening.
	You know, we had all these competitions where you had computers against chess players and against go players and all the rest of this stuff.
	But I remember at the time, the early days when I was looking at that stuff, they were saying, well, the real thing would be poker because in poker, you don't have you don't know the world, the entire world situation.
	You don't have complete surveillance of everything that's there.
	And now, as of 2017, you talked about what happened with poker.
	Tell people where AI is with poker and how it got to that situation.
	Exactly. So poker is a really exciting challenge for AI. It's really difficult because it's what's called an imperfect information game.
	There is this hidden information that's critical to the game.
	So in chess, in Go, the AI can see the entire board.
	You can see all of the pieces and where they are.
	But for poker, the most important information, your opponent's cards, is hidden from you.
	And so human players have to make estimations.
	What do I think this other player has based on They're betting and based on the cards that have come out so far.
	And it's a really hard problem for AI. It is yet another game that has fallen to AIs.
	And I talk in the book about Libranus, the first AI that was able to achieve superhuman performance in head-to-head, Texas Hold'em, and then Pluribus, which actually could do this against multiple players, which is way harder from a computational standpoint, because now there's way more factors.
	Yeah. And the really wild thing to me about this was that when you think about what it would take to achieve superhuman performance in poker, you think you would need something like a theory of mind.
	Understanding, okay, this other player, what are they thinking about?
	Are they bluffing?
	Turns out, actually, you don't need any of that.
	You just need to be really, really good at probabilities.
	And the AI is able to do that and to beat the best players in the world.
	Wow. I'd like to see it do a game of Blackjack 21.
	Definitely be banned at the...
	That'd be an easy one for it to do that.
	But yeah, that is interesting. And you tied that into your experience in Iraq, I guess it was.
	Maybe it was Afghanistan, but imagine Iraq with IEDs and how people would try to guess which path would be least likely to hit an IED. Talk a little bit about that and how the application...
	Yeah, so I tell the story in the book about sort of what is, you know, how might these tools that are valuable in poker be used for warfare in a variety of ways?
	And in fact, the company or the researchers rather that built the Libra is the system that achieves superhuman performance in poker.
	They now have a defense startup, and they're doing work with the Defense Department, trying to take this technology and apply it to military applications.
	So I talk about some of the things that I saw in Iraq during the war there, where you're worried about IEDs, roadside bombs, being on the side of the road.
	And I would have discussions with other soldiers about, okay, what's the strategy here, right?
	Do you swerve from side to side to keep them guessing where you're going to be?
	Do you drive down the middle? If you see a pothole, do you drive around the pothole to avoid it because there might be an ID hidden in the pothole?
	Or is, you know, they know you're going to drive around the pothole and then if you go around it, there might be a bomb on the side of the road and you should drive through it.
	And there's not like a good answer to these.
	That's right. That soldiers talk about when they're in the war and trying to figure out what to do.
	But one of the things that's really compelling about this technology is it might give militaries the ability to be more strategic.
	And instead of apply sort of like, you know, just guesswork, which is basically what we were doing, to then apply a little more of a rigorous strategic approach to keep the enemy constantly guessing.
	It's interesting, you know, in your book, you point out how the AI in some of these war games was super aggressive, always on the attack, never tired, never exhausted.
	My son said in Terminator, the Terminator would block blows from humans.
	An actual AI wouldn't do this.
	It's not a threat. It would take the blow and immediately kill the person.
	You know, but it is very different in the way that it fights.
	And people are saying this is...
	It's going to change everything as it gets onto the battlefield, isn't it?
	Well, that's what's amazing is, you know, I talked about how this AI dogfighting agent fights differently than human pilots.
	It uses different tactics. That's true across all of these games.
	So the AI system that plays poker actually uses different betting strategies than human poker players.
	That's also true in chess, in Go, in real-time computer strategy games like Starcraft 2 and Dota 2.
	We have these simulated battlefields with different units.
	And there are some commonalities actually across how the AI systems are different than humans across all of these games.
	And so one of them is that in some of these computer games where these AI agents are fighting against the human units, the human players talk about the AIs exhibiting superhuman levels of aggressiveness.
	That they constantly feel pressured all the time in the game.
	Because there'll be these little skirmishes among these units.
	And then for humans, the battle's over, and they have to turn their attention elsewhere.
	And then they look to a different part of the game, and they figure out, okay, what am I going to do over here now?
	And the AI can look at the whole game at the same time, and it doesn't need to take a break.
	It doesn't need to turn its attention somewhere else.
	So this has really significant effects from Warfare.
	Because when you look at how real wars unfold among people, there are lulls in combat.
	The enemy has to take a rest.
	They have to sleep.
	They have to eat. They have to go reload their ammunition.
	They have to focus their attention and say, okay, what are we going to do next?
	The AI doesn't have those challenges.
	It's not going to get tired.
	It's not going to be emotionally stressed.
	And so we could see not just that AI is changing the tactics of warfare in the future, but even the psychology.
	Wow. Yeah, you go back and you look at World War I, the trench warfare, you know, people waiting long periods of time.
	I've heard many people say, you know, war is these long periods of boredom where nothing happens and then sheer terror, you know, that type of thing.
	And even going back to the Civil War, I mean, they would even fight seasonably, right?
	You know, would take the winter off or something like that.
	So the pace of all this stuff has been accelerating, but now...
	With AI involved, it really puts the pedal to the metal.
	And I want to talk about the four different battlegrounds here and a little bit about deep learning.
	But before we do, you've also talked about the ethics of some of these things.
	Things like, will it surrender?
	It sounds like it's pretty aggressive, and will it recognize surrender, I should say.
	Will it recognize surrender, or will it just keep coming?
	And that's one of the ethical issues about this.
	I mean, what do we do in terms of trying to keep control of this, even on a battlefield, so that it doesn't get out of control and just keep going even?
	Does it recognize that it wins even?
	Right. And this is a central problem in AI, whether we're talking about, you know, a chatbot like ChatGPT or Bing or a military AI system where the consequences could be much more severe.
	How do we make sure that these systems are going to do what we want them to do?
	How do we maintain control over them?
	Some Chinese scholars have hypothesized about this idea of a singularity on the battlefield.
	At some point in time in the future, where the pace of AI-driven combat exceeds humans' ability to keep up, and militaries have to effectively turn over the keys to machines just to be effective.
	And that is a very troubling prospect, because then how do you control escalation?
	How do you end a war, right, if it's happening at superhuman speeds?
	Yeah. Yeah. And there's no answers to that right now.
	That's the thing. Yeah.
	This is hanging over our heads.
	And this technology, again, it's, you know, we can't have an AI gap.
	So everybody's working along these lines.
	It's one of the things that reminded me as I read your book.
	It reminds me of Michael Crichton and the reason that he wrote Jurassic Park was to awaken people to how rapidly genetic technology was changing and the fact that people were not talking about it in terms of how to control this or the ethics involved in it.
	It's just like, can we do this, you know, and just run with it?
	And it seems like we're getting in that situation with this as well.
	Let's talk again before we get into the four battlegrounds.
	The whole idea of swarms of hundreds of thousands of drones, as my son said, nothing good ever comes in a swarm.
	So this aspect of it, have you ever read the book Kill Decision by Daniel Suarez back in 2012?
	It's kind of the theme of that, where they had come up with swarms.
	Are you familiar with that? I am.
	It's been a while, but yes, that's a great book, yeah.
	So where are we in that kind of scenario where you've got this massive swarm of killer drones that are communicating with each other?
	We don't have to get into how they communicate, but it basically is kind of following on an insect model.
	Is there a defense against that?
	Is that something that is in his book?
	Essentially made ships obsolete, made all the conventional weapons obsolete, and the military-industrial complex had to reset the board and make all new weapons, and they liked that.
	Yeah. Well, I mean, I think we're not there yet, but I do think it's coming.
	So right now, today, drones are largely remotely controlled.
	There's a human on the other end, if not directly flying the drone by a joystick, at least telling the drone where to go, giving it the GPS coordinates, and then the drone goes there.
	And generally speaking, there's like one person to one drone.
	But that's limited because that means that for every drone you put on the battlefield, you need a person behind it.
	And people are expensive.
	People are limited. And so this idea of swarming is that now you could have one person controlling many drones, tens, hundreds, thousands of drones all at the same time.
	And the human obviously is not telling each drone where to go.
	They're just telling the swarm what to do.
	So telling the swarm, go conduct reconnaissance.
	Or look over this area, find the enemy and attack them.
	Or it could be for logistics, right?
	Resupply our troops, give the troops the ammunition and supplies that they need.
	And the swarm figures all that out on its own by these individual drones, or they could be robotic units on the ground or undersea, autonomously coordinating with one another.
	It is likely to be a major paradigm shift in warfare, a huge shift in what militaries call command and control, the way that militaries organize themselves.
	So we're not there yet. Most of the systems today are pretty remotely controlled, little bits of autonomy, but that's likely the path that this is taking us, and it's going to transform warfare in very significant ways.
	Yeah. Yeah, you talked about earlier when we talked about the ACE program that DARPA had, Combat Warfare.
	Of course, DARPA runs these contests all the time.
	I think the first one they had was autonomous cars.
	But they've had some, one of them, Intelligent UAV Swarm Challenge.
	Tell us a little bit about that and how that turned out.
	So we're seeing the U.S. military and the Chinese military invest heavily in these new types of experimentations and demonstrations.
	So the U.S. has done a number of swarm demonstrations where they'll take swarms out to the desert somewhere and drop them off of an airplane and swarming drones and have them coordinated together.
	China's doing the same.
	So they're taking a page from what the U.S. is doing.
	They're often following up with experiments of their own.
	And the really difficult thing for the U.S. military is this technology is so widely available.
	So, for example, we're already seeing drones used in Ukraine, commercially available drones.
	There are some military ones coming from Iran and Turkey, but also commercially available drones like you could buy online for a few hundred dollars.
	And civilians are using them.
	They're using them to assist the Ukrainian military.
	And in some cases, we've even seen artificial intelligence integrated into these drones.
	So AI-based image classifiers that can identify tanks, for example, and find them using AI. And so just the widespread nature of AI and autonomy is a real challenge for militaries.
	Think about how do you control this technology?
	Huge problem for the U.S. military because all of the U.S.'s advantages are negated when anyone else has access to this.
	Wow. Yeah, and it's kind of interesting that they're being used for, you know, mainly reconnaissance.
	Like we saw, you know, that was one of the key things that early planes were used for in World War I was mainly reconnaissance.
	Before that, they had, you know, reconnaissance balloons and Civil War and that type of thing.
	Then eventually they start dropping small munitions and then it's on, you know.
	And so it's going to escalate much faster with that.
	One of the things that you've talked about...
	Is, again, in terms of the AI running away from us, you talk about a flash crash of stocks.
	Talk about what that would look like with a flash war.
	You know, we've got circuit breakers for the stock market.
	You know, what do we do for that again?
	You know, what is the problem? Define the problem.
	Right. So, you know, the essence of the problem is just how do you control operations going on at machine speed and in a competitive environment?
	So we envision what this might look like in warfare.
	So our machines are operating at machine speed faster than humans can keep up.
	Their machines are doing the same.
	They're interacting. We're not going to share our algorithms with adversaries.
	They're not going to share their algorithms with us.
	There's this potential for these unexpected interactions.
	Things to spiral out of control.
	Well, we've seen this. Actually, we've seen this in stock trading where there are algorithms executing trades in milliseconds far faster than humans can respond.
	And we've had accidents like these flash crashes where the algorithms interact in some unexpected way with market conditions and these rapid movements in the price.
	And the way that regulators have dealt with this in the financial system is they put in these circuit breakers you talked about.
	They take a stock offline if the price moves too quickly in a very short period of time.
	But there's no referee to call timeout and win.
	So who's the regulator?
	There's nobody. And so if you're going to have some kind of human circuit breaker, that's something that militaries have to do on their own, or they have to work with competitors to agree to do that, which is needless to say, that's really hard to do.
	Yeah, not too likely to happen.
	That is very concerning.
	Again, as you point out, it's a great analogy in the stock market.
	We've already seen how that works, but there is no referee in a war.
	Talk a little bit about the non-belligerent use of artificial intelligence other than as killing machines.
	So, AI is a widespread, multi-use technology.
	We're seeing AI integrated into any aspect of society, in medicine, in finance, in transportation.
	One of the really troubling applications that I talk about in the book is the use of AI for domestic surveillance.
	extreme implementation of this inside China, where half of the world's 1 billion surveillance cameras are in China.
	Yes.
	And the Chinese Communist Party is building up this really dystopian model of this tech-enabled authoritarianism.
	Because if you've got half a billion cameras, how are you going to monitor that?
	We'll use AI. And they're using AI for facial recognition, gait recognition, voice recognition, tracking people's movements, in some cases for really trivial infractions.
	Facial recognition being used to go after people for jaywalking, using too much toilet paper in public restrooms, but also, of course, to go after political dissidents and to clamp down on control that the Chinese Communist Party has, and to repress its citizens and minorities.
	Hang on right there. I want to show people this little clip.
	I know you can't see it there.
	This is actually a China restaurant.
	And in order to get toilet paper, the guy has to go up to a screen, and it gets a facial scan of him.
	And then it spits out just a little bit of toilet paper.
	But that's the state of where this is.
	I mean, this is...
	That's kind of where it hits the fan, isn't it?
	I mean, it's even for that, and perhaps they're going to grab his DNA. Who knows?
	This is the toilet paper.
	You talked about going to China, and I don't know what year you went to China.
	It was a very different situation from when my family went, about 2000, what was it, 2005, 2006?
	And now you talk about what it's like coming into the country.
	What do they do when you come into the country now?
	Tell people. Sure.
	So I did several trips to China just before actually COVID hit, was able to get in there before all the restrictions came down, and got to see firsthand how a lot of AI technology is being employed by the Chinese Communist Party to surveil its citizens.
	So one of the first things that happens is you get your face scanned when you come through into the country, and it gets recorded in their database.
	Now I'll point out, that also happens at many border checkpoints here in the U.S., Yeah, it's rolling out the TSA now, yeah.
	That's right. So when I came back through Dulles Airport in Washington, D.C., also got my face scanned.
	Now, what are some of the differences, right?
	So same technology, but it's being used, same application, that is to check that people are who they say they are, but under very different kinds of political structures and governance regimes.
	So here in the U.S., there are laws that govern how the government can do that.
	They're set by the elected representatives, by the people.
	There's also a lot more transparency here in the U.S. The first place I learned about this wasn't going through a checkpoint in the U.S. It was reading about in the Washington Post.
	So the fact that we have independent media in the U.S. also, you know, a way to have more checks and balances and government power and authority, none of which exists in China.
	And that to me just really highlights it's not about the technology.
	It's about how we use it.
	And are we going to use it to protect human freedom or the Chinese model to crush human freedom?
	Yes, it's hard power versus soft power.
	Soft power is going to be coming from our dedication to the rule of law, to individual liberty, to those types of things.
	And the problem is that it's getting to the point now where if they want to collect your facial information in order to fly, They may tell you all about it, but if you don't want to have your facial skin done, maybe you won't fly, and that'll be your choice. You don't get to fly, but we'll tell you we're going to do this.
	And so it's that kind of level of coercion that kind of has the pretense of choice with it.
	I'm very concerned that we're just a couple of half steps behind the Chinese.
	And that most people in this country, as well as elected representatives, most people are sleepwalking through it.
	Most elected representatives don't really have it on what they're looking at.
	But talk a little bit about what is happening in the area that they are so focused on, the Uyghur area, and as they are looking at that particular population and how they weaponized it there.
	So China in particular, the most sort of extreme version of this techno-dystopian model that China's building is in Xinjiang, where China has been very active in repressing the Uyghurs there as part of a mass campaign of repression against them, including imprisonment,
	home confinement, and then throughout the area and the major cities, a series of police checkpoints that dot the cities every few hundred meters that check people via facial recognition, gate recognition, That scan their phones, that use biometric databases, all to track the movements of these citizens and where they're going.
	So, for example, if someone, you know, drives through an area, a camera checking the license plate on the car, and then sticking that to other data like the person's face or their geolocation data for their phone, and saying, okay, you know, is this a person who owns the car?
	And if not, bam, you get flagged.
	And the government's going to come take a look at you and You know, it's all part of this model the Chinese Communist Party is building to control every aspect of its citizen's movement.
	Because if you can control how much toilet paper people are using, then you're not going to have people rising up against the government.
	That's right. Yeah. And of course, you know, as I've said, we look at central bank digital currency.
	That gets us there really fast.
	But these other aspects, constant surveillance, geospatial intelligence, even being used to anticipate where people are going to go, anticipatory intelligence.
	Talk a little bit about that, what people typically think of as pre-crime for a minority report.
	Talk about how they are pulling all this data together, data mining it, and making decisions about what you're going to do in the future and who their suspects are going to be.
	That's right. So one of the things that they built is a platform for looking at people's behavior, tracking it.
	China's put together a social credit system scoring people based on activities that they're doing, including sometimes trivial infractions like not sorting the recycling.
	That might get you docked points to try to shape people's behavior.
	And then also trying to anticipate where they might find something that looks suspicious.
	So if someone books a hotel room on their credit card in the same city that they live in, that gets flagged by the police.
	And the new police cloud database that many police departments in major cities and provinces are building in China, where they'll say, OK, well, that's suspicious.
	What are you doing? We're going to look at you.
	Looking at geolocation data.
	So if they see a person is going to be in an internet cafe at the same time as another person, multiple times during the week, they're linking these people and saying, okay, what's going on between them?
	Trying to ferret out any kind of behavior that the party might see as a threat to it.
	Yeah, and that's the thing that's very concerning.
	And of course, the reason you're talking about this is because it's artificial intelligence that allows them to be able to make these correlations and to sort through just a staggering amount of information.
	If we go back and we look at the Stasi, they were keeping track of everybody.
	And you point out that they put in some Han Chinese in the Uyghur area to be informants.
	But that's nothing compared to all the biometric surveillance and the artificial intelligence and how they can put that stuff together.
	They had so much information.
	Everybody was spying. More than half the people were spies and informants on the other less than half of the people.
	And yet they didn't have a way to put that stuff together.
	That's the kind of leverage that this technology now gives to dictators, right?
	That's what's chilling about it.
	So it's not that the Chinese Communist Party is just using this to, you know, crack down and find the dissidents if there's another Tiananmen Square protest in the future.
	I walked through Tiananmen Square, surveillance cameras everywhere, as you might expect.
	I estimated about 200 cameras across the square at every poll, watching every single movement.
	It's the goal really for the party is making sure that the dissidents never even make it to the square.
	Yeah, yeah, yeah.
	I imagine if you did something there in Tiananmen Square that indicated that you were concerned about that, that would really put you on their list for sure.
	Talk a little bit about Sharp Eyes.
	This is something that came out about 2015.
	I remember when this program came out.
	Talk about the Sharp Eyes initiative in China.
	So China's been steadily building components of this digital infrastructure to control its population.
	So one of the first components of this was the great firewall, firewalling off information inside China.
	There's a propaganda component of this.
	But increasingly, with programs like Skynet and Sharp Eyes, China has been creating the physical infrastructure as well.
	So not just controlling information, but now controlling physical space.
	Sharp Eyes is a massive government program to build out surveillance cameras in every aspect of China so that every single place is covered.
	Bus stations, train stations, airplanes, hotels, banks, grocery stores, every kind of public area is surveilled so that any place someone goes inside China, there's a camera watching them and tracking their movements.
	And you mentioned Skynet.
	You mentioned in the book that they didn't name it after the Terminator, but it's kind of a transliteration of what they've got.
	But it's essentially going to be the same thing, I guess, once they hook it up with some military equipment.
	Let's talk about the four battlegrounds, because that's what your book lays out.
	And your book is set up primarily for people who are in the military, I think, to look at the You know, where we are relative to China in terms of, you don't really talk that much about Russia.
	You do have a quote at the beginning from both Xi Jinping and from Putin about the importance of artificial intelligence, but the real threat seems to be coming from China in this.
	And so you look at this from a power standpoint, and you talk about four different areas.
	Talk about the first one, data.
	Sure. So how can the U.S. stay ahead of China in this really critical technology?
	Well, data is essential.
	Data is essentially the fuel for machine learning systems.
	Machine learning systems are trained on data.
	Now, it's often said or people might have this impression that China has an advantage in data because they have half a billion surveillance cameras.
	They're collecting data on their citizens.
	When I dove into this, my conclusion ultimately was that that's not true, that China doesn't have an advantage in data for a couple of reasons.
	One is that what matters more than the population size of a country is the user base of these tech companies.
	So China's got bigger population than the US or Europe.
	There's more people. They're going to collect more data on their citizens.
	But US tech companies aren't confined to the United States.
	So platforms like Facebook and YouTube have over 2 billion global users each.
	Whereas, in fact, China's WeChat has only 1.2 billion users.
	And other than TikTok, Chinese companies have really struggled to make it outside of China and break into the global marketplace.
	So that's an area where the population turns out to be not really an advantage for China.
	In fact, the US probably has advantages in global reach of these companies.
	Another reason why people think that China might have an advantage is because the Chinese government is doing all the surveillance.
	Well, it turns out that the Chinese government doesn't let Chinese companies necessarily do that same level of surveillance.
	So the Chinese Communist Party is actually pretty restrictive of who gets its spying powers.
	They don't want Chinese companies have the same spying powers that they do.
	And they've been passing consumer data privacy laws.
	So even though there's no regulations inside China on what the government can do, they actually are passing regulations on what Chinese companies can do to Chinese consumers.
	So those same spying powers don't necessarily exist on the corporate side.
	Whereas, of course, in the U.S., U.S. consumers have actually acquiesced a fair amount to this sort of model of corporate surveillance of U.S. tech companies hoovering up lots of their personal data without a lot of pushback, grumbling, but there's no federal data privacy regulations.
	And that's the key thing.
	We've said for the longest time, if it's free, you are the data.
	You're the product, right?
	Your data is the product.
	And that really underscores how much better they're able to get that information from people just by providing a free product and we give them all the information about ourselves.
	That's right. So we actually are giving up a ton of information voluntarily, at least to companies, if not to the government.
	And so I'm not sure that China actually has an advantage here.
	I think both countries are going to have access to ample data.
	The more important thing is going to be building pipelines within companies or their militaries to take this data, to harness it, to clean it up, to turn it to useful AI applications.
	Yeah, talk a little bit about how that is used by AI, why data is so important.
	As you mentioned, people said data is the new oil or whatever, because of machine learning.
	Tell people why there's so much concern and emphasis on the quantity of data that they've been able to collect about us.
	How's that used? Yeah. So as I'm sure people are aware of this conversation, part of it is this huge explosion in artificial intelligence in the last decade.
	And we've seen tremendous progress through what's called the deep learning revolution.
	So not all of AI, we talked about poker, it doesn't use machine learning, but a lot of the progress right now is using machine learning and a type of machine learning called deep learning that uses deep neural networks.
	Which are a connectionist paradigm that are loosely modeled on human brains.
	And in machine learning, rather than have a set of rules that are written down by human experts about what the AI should do.
	And that's how, for example, like a commercial airplane autopilot functions.
	There's a set of rules for what the airplane should do in any given circumstance.
	Machine learning doesn't work that way.
	And instead, the algorithm is trained on data.
	And so people can take data of some kind of behavior and then train this AI system, for example, on faces, right?
	If you have enough pictures of people's faces and then they're labeled with those people's names, you can feed that into a neural network and it can learn to identify who people are based on really subtle patterns in the faces, the same way that we do, really subconsciously, not even thinking about it.
	We can identify faces.
	And the thing is you need massive amounts of data.
	So AI systems that do image classification, for example, that identify objects based on images, use databases with millions of images.
	Text models like ChatGPT or Bing use hundreds of gigabytes of text.
	In fact, a good portion of the text on the internet.
	And so having large amounts of data and having it ready to train these systems is really foundational to using AI effectively.
	One of the examples that you have is being able to distinguish between an apple and a tomato.
	Talk a little bit about that. So if you think about a rule-based system, the old model of AI, how would you build a rule-based system to tell there's an apple and a tomato?
	So they're both round, they're red, sometimes green, they're shiny, maybe they have a green stem on top.
	If you're trying to tell the difference to someone who's never seen one before, that's actually kind of tricky to do.
	But they look different, and in fact, a toddler can tell the difference between them if they've seen both of them.
	And it turns out that building a rule by system for AI to tell the difference is really hard.
	But if you feed enough labeled images of apples and tomatoes to a machine learning system, it can just learn to tell the difference.
	The same way that humans do based on all of these subtle cues about the texture and the shape and how they're different.
	And so that's a great example of these kinds of problems that AI is really powerful for using machine learning.
	Yeah, you know, when we look at generative AI, the AI that people are using so much for artwork and that type of thing, and you compare it to the chat programs that we've seen and the real colorful episodes that people had as they were working with it, you know, it's the same type of thing, essentially.
	They're able to create this interesting artwork because they've got so many different images that they have seen and just pull these elements together.
	But that's exactly what they're doing with the chat when it goes off the deep end as well.
	They've had all of this massive amount of conversation and scripts or whatever, novels, and they're able to pull that kind of stuff together just like they pull together the interesting elements of artwork to make something that's different.
	Isn't that a good analogy or what would you say?
	Oh, absolutely. They're doing essentially the exact same thing, just one with images and one with text, where we've seen this explosion in generative AI, like ChatGPT, like these AIR generators.
	They're really, really powerful.
	And they're not actually sort of copying and pasting from the database.
	What they do is they have a model that's trained on these massive databases of images or text.
	And then what happens is they build a statistical model of statistically associations of text or associations of pixels and what an image looks like.
	And then with a prompt, if you're talking to, say, ChatGPT or to Bing, you start having a conversation, you give it a prompt, and then it's going to spit back a response.
	And almost all of the really weird stuff that these language models are doing, when you think about it, it's modeling something that exists on the Internet.
	So these models, you know, they can get argumentative.
	They're arguing with users.
	They're trying to deceive them.
	You know, in one case, the model is telling this user that it's in love with him and he should leave his wife.
	Well, all of it seems like really loony behavior, but there's all that stuff on the Internet.
	Yeah. Like, there's all sorts of weird, wacky things on the Internet.
	So it's learned, based on this text on the Internet, those kinds of behaviors.
	And then it's no surprise that it spits them back at us when we prompt it to do so.
	Yeah, even coming up with a kind of HAL scenario like from 2001.
	I was watching these people on the cameras.
	They didn't know I was watching them on the cameras, that type of thing.
	Yeah, it strikes me as we're talking about the importance, and I don't really understand how these machine learning models work.
	I mean, I've just come after this from a procedural standpoint, you know, in engineering and programming.
	So I don't really understand how these things can assimilate this and build these models from looking at, you know, pictures, a lot of pictures of tomatoes and apples and everything, but they do it somehow.
	But the key thing with all this appears to be the data.
	And so I was wondering, because I've been wondering why There's so much fear and concern about TikTok with various people.
	And I know part of it is that, you know, it's going to be easier to scrape this data off of...
	If they own the platform, they can get the data more easily than they could if they were just trying to scrape it off publicly because everything on Facebook and all the social media is out there publicly.
	But the key thing about this, I imagine besides...
	Getting information about interesting individuals might be the larger access to having that big platform of data because you're talking about feeding as kind of a strategic resource for nations, the fact that you can get this stuff from Facebook or other things to feed into your artificial intelligence.
	Is that part of it, you think, with TikTok?
	Absolutely. Data is part of it.
	And then the algorithm behind TikTok is another big part of it.
	So TikTok looks really innocuous.
	I do think it's a major threat to U.S. national security, not because the platform itself is a problem, because the ownership is a problem, because the company is owned by a Chinese company.
	It's ultimately beholden to the Chinese Communist Party.
	And so one of the problems is that the app could be used to take people's personal data.
	So it's on your phone.
	Your phone doesn't have to ask for permission.
	Oh, this app can access other information about you, your location, can access other apps.
	And, you know, I'll be honest, like myself, maybe a lot of people just, okay, allow, sure, right?
	But then all of a sudden that app's grabbing all sorts of information.
	Maybe your contact list.
	Maybe it's grabbing your geolocation.
	Maybe it's seeing what you're doing with other apps.
	And it's sending it back.
	And in the case of TikTok, if the Chinese Communist Party says, we need access to that data, the company has no choice.
	If they say no, they go to jail.
	So when the FBI told Apple, you need to unlock this phone, Apple fought the FBI. They fought them in court, and they fought them in the court of public opinion.
	And neither of those things exist inside China.
	A Chinese company can't Right.
	Yeah. Right, so for all these platforms, they're feeding you information based on this algorithm saying, okay, we think you should look at this information.
	And companies are all very opaque about this.
	They're not very transparent about what's in the algorithm.
	There's been a lot of controversy about many of the US platforms that maybe they're pushing people towards more extremist content.
	The problem with TikTok in particular is that this algorithm could be a vehicle for censoring information.
	And in fact, it has been.
	And in fact, there's been leaks coming out of TikTok that shows their internal censorship guidelines.
	That's been leaked. We've seen it.
	We've seen extra guidelines.
	And TikTok has said they would censor political content.
	So anything about anything that might be offensive to the Chinese Communist Party, something about the Tiananmen Square massacre, That's censored.
	And so that's a real problem we think about.
	This is an information environment that Americans are using.
	This would be like the Chinese Communist Party owning a major cable news network in the United States.
	That's a real threat to U.S. national security, and we have to find ways to address it.
	Sure. Yeah, it's kind of like what we saw with the Twitter files.
	You know, we saw how at the beck and call of officials and government that they would censor or they would give them information on people.
	And, of course, we see the same thing when we look at 5G. You know, they're concerned about Huawei because the Chinese government is going to use it to surveil us.
	But, again, our government is going to use the other 5G that's made by our companies to surveil us as well.
	Talk a little bit about, you know, while we're on data, The issue of synthetic data, because I thought it was interesting.
	As I mentioned earlier, you know, the first competition that DARPA had was the self-driving cars.
	And in your book, you talk about the fact that Waymo, the number of miles that they've driven, and then how they've synthesized this data.
	Talk a little bit about that. Sure.
	So synthetic data is AI-generated data.
	That could be AI-generated text, like it comes out of ChatGPT.
	It could be AI-generated artwork.
	But it's also a tool that companies can use in building more robust AI systems.
	Self-driving car companies, for example, are collecting data driving on the roads.
	They have the cars that are driving around with all the sensors and all the cameras, and they're scooping up data as they're driving around.
	But they're also using synthetic data in simulations.
	So Waymo's talked about they're collecting data on roads, but they're also running simulations.
	I think they've done 10 million miles.
	On roads, collecting up data, and I think it's 10 million miles a day they've said that they're doing in simulation.
	So they're able to supplement with many orders of magnitude more because they can run these simulations at accelerated speed.
	And so now if there's a situation where there's a car, there's a new situation on the highway they've never seen before, Car cuts them off, does something weird.
	They capture that data, they put it in a simulation.
	Now they can rerun it different times of day, different lighting conditions, different weather conditions.
	And all of that can make the car more robust and more safe.
	So it can be a really valuable tool as a supplement to real-world data.
	Or in some cases, just as a complete replacement.
	And this is what the Alpha Dogfight did.
	That AI agent was trained of 30 years of time in a simulation.
	So synthetic data in a simulation teaching it how to perform a task.
	That's interesting. And, you know, when we look at it, you point out 10 million driving miles every single day, 10 billion simulated miles as of 2020.
	And yet, you know, we look at this and some skeptics of AI are talking about the fact that we've gone through a couple of different waves of AI where everybody was excited about it and then things didn't pan out and it dropped off and we're now like the third time of that.
	We've just had Waymo lay off 8% of their labor force, and they're having a problem with it.
	It was in San Francisco, I don't know if it, I think it was Cruz, maybe not Waymo, where their vehicles all went to one intersection and blocked it, you know?
	So, you know, there are certain hang-ups like this that are happening, but even in San Francisco, where Waymo is headquartered, they were all very upset about the fact that the cars are moving slow, they're having difficulty, you know, if you've got a situation at a four-way stop or something, they have difficulty.
	Difficulty negotiating with the humans as to who's going to go next, and so they just sat there.
	Talk about that. Is that showing a real Achilles' heel for artificial intelligence, what we're seeing in a self-driving car?
	Oh, absolutely. I mean, we're talking about all the amazing things that AI can do, but it's worth keeping in mind that a lot of the things we're talking about are really narrow, like playing Go or poker or even generating art images, and humans have the ability to perform all of these different tasks.
	Humans can write an essay.
	They can make a painting.
	Maybe not a great one, but they can do it.
	They can use a camera to take a picture.
	They can get in a car and drive.
	They can make a pot of coffee.
	They can have a conversation. We can have some special purpose AI systems that can do some of those things, but the AI systems are really brittle.
	And so, you know, if there's something that comes up that's not in their training data, they might do something super weird.
	And that's a big problem for self-driving cars because you need a self-driving car that's good, not just some of the time, not just 80% of the time or 90%, but that's good all the time.
	It's safer than humans.
	I think we'll get there eventually, but we're seeing the self-driving cars, how hard that is out in the real world in an unconstrained environment.
	And the human brain, for now, remains the most advanced cognitive processing system on the planet.
	And so when we think about using AI, you know, there are going to be some tasks where we might be able to use AI instead of people.
	But people are still going to need to be involved in all sorts of aspects of our society because humans have the ability to take a step back, look at the bigger picture, understand the context, apply judgment in a way that even the best AI systems can't do.
	Yeah, and you know, when you look at it in terms of the self-driving car, you've got the different levels of driving ability.
	Five is fully autonomous.
	Four is, we're doing most of it for you, but if it's an emergency, we're going to kick control back to you.
	And of course, that's a really dangerous one because typically at that point in time, the person is fast asleep or playing a video game or whatever, and it's like, you know, here, take this.
	Take the wheel right now.
	And so, you know, when we see that, I would imagine that's really the big issue.
	You know, we started talking about the dogfight.
	I imagine that's the really big issue with the pilots.
	You know, it's like, oh, okay, now we're in a tight spot.
	It's up to you now. I can't handle it.
	I'm going to kick it back to the pilot.
	I mean, I'm sure that's the issue with them as well, right?
	That's a huge problem. It's a huge problem because right now, you know, if you have this AI can do some things but not everything, how do you balance what the AI does and what the human does?
	And what we often do, which is a terrible approach, like you're saying, is we can have the AI do as much as it can and then we expect the human to fill in the gaps.
	Mm-hmm. And that leads to situations that are just not realistic for humans.
	So the idea that someone's going to be sitting in this car, going on the highway at 70 miles an hour, not paying attention because the AI's driving, and then in a split second, the human's going to realize, uh-oh, something's wrong.
	I need to take control, see what's happening, grab control of the steering wheel to the car.
	It's not realistic. Humans can't do that.
	And so we need a model for human machines working together that also works for human psychology.
	And in fact, one of the things that this DARPA program is doing with putting an AI in the cockpit is looking at things like pilot trust.
	And in fact, what they're doing is now they're taking these AI systems.
	They're out of simulators.
	They're putting them in real-world F-16 aircraft.
	They're flying them up in the sky.
	The AI is doing maneuvering of a real airplane.
	And that itself is challenging.
	We move from a simulator to the real world because the real world's a lot more complicated than a simulator.
	But they're also looking at what's the pilot doing?
	So they've instrumented the whole cockpit, and they're looking at things like tracking them.
	What's the pilot looking at?
	Why is the pilot looking at the map and thinking about the higher-level mission, which is what we want the pilot doing?
	Or is the pilot looking at the controls, trying to figure out what the AI is doing, looking out the window, because the pilot doesn't trust the AI? And getting to that level of trust, getting to that seamless coordination between humans and AI, is going to be really important to using AI effectively.
	Let's talk about the other three battlegrounds.
	We talked about data. The next one is compute.
	Tell people what that represents.
	So compute means computing hardware or chips that machine learning systems run on.
	So machine learning systems are trained on data.
	They're trained using computing hardware or computing chips, sometimes massive amounts of computing infrastructure.
	And for a large language model like ChatGPT, it's trained on hundreds of gigabytes of text, often trained for thousands of specialized AI chips, like graphics processing units or GPUs, running for weeks at a time, churning through all this data, training them up. If data is a relatively level playing field between the US and China, in hardware, in computing power, or it's sometimes called compute, the US has a tremendous advantage.
	Because while the global semiconductor supply chains, they're very globalized, they fall through a number of countries, and in fact, the most advanced ships are not made in the US. Zero percent of the most advanced ships in the world are made here in the United States.
	They depend on U.S. technology, and they're made using technology, tooling, and software from U.S. companies, and it gives the U.S. control over key choke points in the semiconductor supply chain.
	And the U.S. has used this to deny China access to semiconductor technology when it was strategically advantaged to the United States.
	The U.S. did this to Huawei when it turned off Huawei's access to the most advanced 5G chips.
	They weren't made in America, they were made in Taiwan, but they were made using U.S. equipment.
	And so the U.S. said, using export control regulations to Taiwan, you're not allowed to export any chips to China of this certain type to Huawei that are made using U.S. equipment.
	And now the U.S. has done this actually across the board.
	Biden administration put this out in October.
	Very sweeping export controls to China on semiconductor technology and the most advanced AI chips.
	And then on the equipment, and this is really critical, for China to make its own chips, only by China's own domestic production.
	Yeah, that's changed quite a bit since I was a young engineer.
	We had, you know, the state-of-the-art in terms of...
	Geometries, they were unable to, domestically here, the company I worked for was unable to do it here.
	All of their yield was coming out of Japan.
	They were able to do it. But we had, in terms of commodity products, That had already been seeded 40 years ago to offshore sources.
	But we had kind of a lock on CPUs and things like that.
	That now has changed, as you pointed out.
	And I was surprised to see that in the book, that pretty much all the sophisticated chips are coming out of Taiwan.
	You said Taiwan has 90% of the most advanced chips in the world made in Taiwan.
	And so that's one of the things that we're looking at here with China and Taiwan.
	That is extremely important and why I think that's going to be a source of conflict, flashpoint, all the rest of the stuff, why we're seeing this tension build up there as the Chinese are moving towards Taiwan.
	It's because of the advanced chips there and how it is really kind of at the center of the state of the art of the semiconductor industry, whereas we've just kind of got a few choke points here and there in the semiconductor industry.
	They've got the big foundries as well as the most advanced foundries there, right?
	Absolutely. So 90% of the world's most advanced chips are made in Taiwan, as you said.
	And that's a real problem when we think about security of supply chains, because Taiwan's an island 100 miles off the coast of China.
	The Chinese Communist Party has pledged to Absorbed by force if necessary, so Taiwanese independence protecting Taiwan is critically important, and finding ways to ensure that China doesn't engage in that military aggression as important political and economic and military reasons.
	Yeah, yeah. And that's important to understand as people look at this conflict building up, the strategic interest that the U.S. perceives in this.
	And as you point out, I thought it was kind of interesting, you know, looking at Moore's Law, very familiar with that, the computing, that the...
	That the chips would increase an exponential rate doubling every couple of years, but you pointed out that there's another law that I had not heard of, Rock's Law, that semiconductor fabrication doubles every four years, and that computer usage,
	because of all this deep learning stuff, It's doubling every six months, so it's outpacing it, but the cost of the semiconductor manufacturing facilities is causing an amazing concentration because of the capital cost involved in putting up these state-of-the-art facilities and foundries.
	That's right. So the technology that's used in making these most advanced chips is simply unbelievable.
	It's some of the most advanced, difficult technologies on the planet.
	And as the costs continue to go up, so a leading edge foundry might cost anywhere from $20 to $40 billion to build that foundry.
	Using the most state-of-the-art technology, what we've seen, of course, as a result of these market pressures and rising costs, is the number of companies operating at the leading nodes of semiconductor fabrication has continued to shrink.
	And so we've seen at the most leading edge now, it's now just two companies, really, TSMC and Samsung.
	On the equipment side, there are some companies that have a sole monopoly.
	So for the equipment that's used to make the most advanced chips, there's one company in the world, a Dutch company, ASML, that makes the equipment needed to make those chips.
	And these concentrations of the supply chain give the U.S. and allies unique elements of control over who gets access to this critical resource, the computing hardware that's needed for the most advanced AI capabilities.
	And of course, this complicated, complex distribution of the supply chain is something that is very worrying as we move towards the future.
	The lifestyle that we have and the things that are just strung out all over the planet, and it is truly amazing to think about how How that has happened with globalization.
	You know, you got one company in this country and another one in another country with a different aspect of it.
	Talk about talent.
	We're just about out of time.
	Talent and institutions, but let's talk a little bit about talent because China had the 1000 Talents Program, and we saw this manifest itself in a Harvard professor during the concerns about bioweapons and other things like that.
	Talk a little bit about the U.S. versus China in terms of talent.
	Yeah, so the last two battlegrounds are human talent and institutions, the organizations needed to import AI technology and to use it effectively.
	And the U.S. has a tremendous advantage over China in human talent because the best AI scientists and researchers from around the world want to come to the United States, including the best scientists in China.
	So over half of the top undergraduates in China studying AI come to the U.S. for their graduate work.
	And for those Chinese undergraduates who come to the U.S. for graduate school, who study computer science, do a Ph.D., 90% of them stay in the U.S. after graduation.
	So the best and brightest in China are actually coming to the U.S. and they're staying here.
	And that draw of top American universities and companies as a magnet for global talent is a huge advantage that China cannot compete with.
	You've got an anecdote about China and their chat program.
	Talk about that, the China dream.
	Oh, yeah. Yeah.
	So, you know, one of the chatbots in China, a Microsoft chatbot called Chowice, said on a Chinese social media platform, someone said, well, what's your Chinese dream?
	It's a phrase used by Xi Jinping to talk about sort of their version of like the American dream.
	And this chatbot says, well, my Chinese dream is to go to America.
	And they're not like that.
	They probably censored that chatbot.
	Yeah. See, I think that's why, you know, when you look at soft power, I think that, you know, having a climate of liberty and freedom and prosperity, if we can maintain those things, that really, I think, is upstream, you know, our overall system.
	And that's really what concerns me when I look at talent, when I look at what is happening in universities and other things like that, because we're starting to lose that kind of freedom.
	But talk real quickly, before we run out of time, a little bit about institutions.
	So institutions are our last key battleground, and it's institutions that are able to take all of these raw inputs of data, computing hardware, and human talent, and turn them into useful applications.
	So if you think about airplane technology, airplanes were invented here in the United States.
	By the time you got to World War II, they gave the U.S. no meaningful advantage in military air power.
	All of the great powers had access to aircraft technology.
	What mattered more was figuring out, what do you do with an airplane?
	How do you use it effectively?
	The U.S. Navy and the Japanese Navy innovated with aircraft carriers, putting aircraft on carriers, using them in naval battles.
	Great Britain, on the other hand, had access to aircraft technology, but they squandered that advantage and they fell behind in carriers, not because they didn't have the technology, but because of bureaucratic and cultural reasons.
	And so finding ways to cut through government red tape, move faster, innovate, be agile, are really essential if the U.S. is going to stay in the lead and maintain an advantage in artificial intelligence.
	It's been fascinating talking to you.
	We could go on a long time about this, but again, the book is Four Battlegrounds.
	The author, as you've been hearing, is Paul Charest, also the author of Army of None, and I don't know what that was.
	Thank you so much, Mr.
	Shari. Thank you. Appreciate you coming in.
	Thank you. Thanks for having me.
	Thank you very much. And thank you, folks, for listening.
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	Joining us now is Noah Sanders.
	And he has, I think, something that all of you are going to be very interested in.
	His site is redeemingthedirt.regfox.com.
	And he's talking about farming.
	And he's also talking about pulling community together.
	And even talking about sharing God's gift of the early spring, showing God in the growing of this food.
	But he's got a lot of details.
	There's going to be some...
	Seminars that are going to be coming up.
	He's got April training, May training, and we'll talk about that, you know, where you can go there and get hands-on experience in doing a lot of these things.
	It is something I think is incredibly valuable, something that I look at with jealousy of the people who are able to do this type of thing.
	I come from a different background where this is all new to me, and so we're trying to get our family up into the foundations for farming, but that is the Name of his training is Foundations for Farming.
	So joining us now is Noah Sanders.
	Thank you for joining us, Noah. Thank you.
	I appreciate you having me on the show today.
	Let's talk a little bit about some of the things that you cover, talking about scaling up for homestead-level food security.
	What do people need to do?
	Because that's what a lot of people are looking at.
	Food security, people are very concerned about that.
	A lot of uncertainty, but it's better to be able to grow your own than to stash it, I think, and you can get better quality stuff as well.
	Talk a little bit about what people need to think about for food security.
	Yeah, so in the US, we have, you know, kind of a generational disconnect now from a lot of that connection with the land.
	Historically, God's provided, you know, an amazing way that you can put seeds in the ground and they'll produce food without any huge complex industrial, you know, economic system and throughout history.
	That tends to be what people always revert to, whether it's in World War II at the Victory Gardens.
	You had that in the Civil War in the South here.
	You had people have to go back and learn how to grow flax and make their own linen all the way back in the Revolutionary War.
	It's the only way that we were able to separate from Great Britain.
	So food has always been linked to freedom.
	And I think it's encouraging to realize that this is something that has been when times are good, people tend to move to other disciplines from agriculture, tend to get disconnected from the soil and then have to rediscover that.
	It's not unique to our generation.
	It may be we have unique circumstances because of our technological situation, but it's something that's had to be done over and over again.
	And I think the biggest key for all of us in trying to get back to improving some of the food security in our own areas is to be willing to do what God loves to see, which is to be faithful with little first before we try to do everything.
	And a lot of people get burned out trying to do that.
	So that's what we really focus on with Foundations for Farming is teaching people the basics of success so that they don't burn themselves out trying to do too much too fast to underestimate how much success.
	Yeah, I've talked to people in the past and said that's the rookie mistake, is that you go out and you try to grow all your food simultaneously at the same time.
	You've got to pick something and you've got to start with that, pick something that's simple.
	So what is simple? What do you tell people to start with?
	Yeah, so we kind of break it down to three different levels of agriculture.
	One is, you know, growing some of your own food successfully.
	That's like your first, you know, thing.
	And normally that's a garden is the best place to start with that.
	The next level up is what we would call a homestead where you're trying to actually grow a lot of your own food, you know, maybe a larger percentage.
	And that is more of a lifestyle commitment.
	Like you're really going to have to make some sacrifices to do that.
	Yeah.
	The third is where you're actually getting other people to pay you to grow food for them.
	And that's when it's actually like a business venture.
	A lot of people, we try to, you know, we get right into farming when to start a business.
	And anybody can learn to farm, but it's kind of like I love to play the fiddle or the violin.
	And anybody can learn to play one.
	But you don't quit your job tomorrow and buy a violin and a how-to-play-violin book and expect to make a living, right?
	There is a learning curve.
	Yeah.
	How do you get to Carnegie Hall?
	Practice, right? Right.
	And a lot of mistakes.
	That's right. And that's where starting small is nice because it's a whole lot easier to make a mistake where you lose half your chickens if you have only 10 than if you have 100.
	Yeah. Yeah, that's right.
	And as you talked about that lifestyle choices, you've got a lot of farm animals.
	If you go real big with a homestead, that's going to tie you down on that homestead, taking care of those chickens, taking care of We've done, our first dip into this was chickens, and we've lost, you know, a couple dozen, two different times, to predators that were there.
	And that is our biggest concern.
	Other than that, we were doing great.
	We liked the chickens, they liked us, and they gave us lots of eggs, but it's, you know, we had some predators in Texas who loved the chickens even more than we did.
	Yeah. So that was our big issue.
	But we're getting ready to try to do some gardening.
	But when you talk about just starting to get into it with a garden, what type of things would you recommend that people do to start out in a garden?
	Yeah, so we really take the approach of trying to understand that a lot of us, when we get started, in this day and age of information, some of our biggest challenges is an overwhelm of information.
	You know, you go on YouTube and you try to be like, what's the best way to grow a tomato plant?
	And you get inundated with all these conflicting ideas of what's the best way to do that.
	And I faced that same situation when I started farming was it wasn't as simple as, you know, when I used to do some blacksmithing.
	And there wasn't a whole lot of controversy on how to make a knife or how to make a nail.
	But you ask people how to grow a tomato plant or raise a chicken.
	And there's some real, you know, different battling perspectives, which really boils down to worldview.
	Whether you view that nature has all the answers or you view that science and man has all the answers.
	And those impact the way that you view life and the way that you make decisions about how life should or shouldn't be treated.
	And so as Christians, I think it's important for us as we come to the land, not only just to say, well, practically, how can we make a success of this?
	But we've always really said it starts with the heart of us recognizing that to become the greatest farmer requires the greatest humility.
	And the farmer that I learned from the most is a guy from Zimbabwe, Africa named Brian Oldrieff, who founded Foundations for Farming.
	And he actually was a failing farmer who was losing money in Rhodesia in the 19 early 1980s on their farm.
	And so he finally got to a point that he just went to the woods where everything was growing perfectly fine without all the plowing and the fertilizer and everything that he was trying to do in his field.
	And he just asked God because he saw in Romans 120 where it says that God's eternal attributes are clearly displayed through what has been made.
	And he said, show me how to farm God.
	And he just felt like God showed him two simple principles that were different than what he had been doing.
	And one was that there was no regular deep inversion plowing in natural creation.
	And secondly, that there was always this beautiful blanket of mulch covering the ground that protects the soil.
	So he just applied those two simple principles to his farm on a small scale first and then implemented over the entire thing.
	And they were so profitable and successful that at their height, they were he was managing the second largest privately owned farm in Africa.
	And then, if you know the story of Zimbabwe, the white farmers lost all the land, and so the foundations for farming kind of was born out of some of these white farmers who loved Jesus saying, if a man takes away your tunic, you let him have your cloak as well.
	How do we apply that? If a man steals our farm, let's teach him how to farm.
	So they took the principles they had learned on a large scale and brought it down and began teaching it to the last, least, and the lost.
	And that's really had a huge impact in the poor.
	And so for us when we teach people about approaching gardening we just we build it on three Our attributes of Christ the foundation of foundations for farming is Jesus Christ and it's his humility His faithfulness and his unselfishness that he displayed when he came So we display the humility by saying like Jesus said I only do what I see my father doing So when we face any problem we look at creation.
	We say well, what does my father do?
	What kind of way?
	How did he design it to work, you know?
	And then when faithfulness, recognizing that we've got to reflect who God is and the way that we do things, and we do that by doing things on time to a high standard with minimal waste and then with joy because that faithfulness is what God adds to to produce a profit.
	And then the unselfishness comes into play when we realize that the land God's given us is not just ours to do it for our own selves and our own benefit.
	But we want to be able to use that to bless others and to teach others and to pass along what we've learned so that the skill of growing food can be a community thing, not just an individual thing.
	Boy, that's fascinating. And, you know, that is an example we've seen over and over again.
	People copying what God has done in creation.
	You know, you take a look at Velcro, for example, right?
	They'd look at stickers and things like that.
	And copying his design, his aerodynamic design, in terms of airplanes or in terms of even submarines, looking at how he's done the contours, that is really interesting.
	Very interesting. And what you began with.
	You know, you can go to YouTube and you can get all these different perspectives and stuff.
	Part of that, you know, the old phrase for that is analysis paralysis.
	You can do so much analysis that you actually paralyze yourself from actually getting anything done.
	And so I think that's an important thing as well, to have somebody who has a system that they know works and just follow that system without trying to pull this stuff together ad hoc.
	But talk a little bit about what happened when they had their land taken away.
	So what did they do to the people there in the local areas?
	White farmers had their land taken away.
	What did they do?
	How did they engage the people there in Zimbabwe?
	Yeah, so it actually started a little bit before he had his land taken away.
	He felt like God was like, I gave you this simple system of minimal tillage and using a mulch, not just so that you could be a successful farmer, but so that you could share with the village across the river here.
	And so they began to go in and share.
	They would take a farmer and they would plant a field for him and show, you know, hey, just take care of this and you can compare it with your plowed plot and see how much better it is.
	When they came back at the end of the season, they began to realize that every year they would have neglected the field and not taken care of it.
	And what they found eventually is that because they were selecting one person, they were creating jealousy and the neighbors would have the witch doctor come and curse the field and then the family would be too scared to come and work in it.
	So they realized it wasn't just a technology issue.
	There was also a spiritual element that you've got to address when you come to looking at some of these broken situations.
	And there's also we want to share with everybody and invest in people who are faithful with it.
	So that's kind of what they began doing is just having right now they have a model farm there in Zimbabwe where they apply these principles.
	Right now they have a model farm there in Zimbabwe where they apply these principles and then they bring in the kind of the forgotten communities, the last, the least, the lost, which is where God loves to start, you know, in rebuilding a nation.
	And they invest in those people, not only in farming, but in stewardship in general.
	Foundations for Farming, we're ministry partners with Crown Financial Ministries, which focuses on stewardship of money because we're teaching stewardship of the land.
	So when we bring these communities in and they're discipled in faith, farming, family and finance, then they're sent back as a community.
	They really have a huge impact.
	A lot of times when they've seen and the trainers and the love they have for them and they hear the gospel, many of them, you know, will put their faith in Christ and start a church when they go back.
	And so recently they've developed a very simple model of growing food called Fumvudza.
	But it's basically a small plot that's about one sixth of an acre where you can grow, where they grow corn, which is the primary staple crop that they have there in Zimbabwe and much of sub-Saharan Africa.
	And it allows a family for $50 worth of inputs to grow enough food to feed themselves for a year.
	Wow. And most people are trying to grow five acres of corn over there and they can't feed themselves.
	But when they're done, they do it what we call God's way by looking at God's creation and copying his nature in the way we manage it.
	It's amazing to see that.
	And the government actually came and asked them to teach into all the agritechs, and they taught it down into the communities.
	And they had achieved a food security for the first time since their collapse in 2008, two years ago, by applying this with a hoe.
	Wow. Just this simple principle and simple technique.
	But it started by...
	Brian Oldrick originally went to the top, the president, the minister of agriculture, and tried to sell them on the idea.
	They wouldn't listen. But then he said, well, God's upside-down kingdom, let's go to the poorest of the poor first.
	And it was actually those people, when the poorest of the poor were the only people in the nation feeding themselves with enough extra to sell...
	the government's attention and then they you know then pharaoh came calling and asked them to teach you know it into the into the public sector and i think that's an important thing for us as the church to remember is that when jesus came he didn't go to the rich the powerful the educated he went to simple ordinary people and he turned the world upside down that way and that means that all of us in whatever sphere of influence we're in can have an impact and you know in our nation that's wonderful
	uh you know that that is a real grassroots movement It is! They're helping themselves by helping others.
	In the long term, they're helping themselves.
	They would be starving, and people would be fighting over food.
	And so they're showing people how to grow not just their own food, but to grow their independence and to grow their community and to grow their dependence on God.
	I mean, that's just the perfect way to do this.
	It's wonderful to hear about that.
	So they have—how do they—since they lost their farm— How did they survive financially?
	Teaching other people to do it, did they take a share of what the other people were doing?
	Is that how they financially made it through?
	It has been different for every person.
	You know, a lot of what the farmers told me there is that when the, you know, there were about 5,000 white farmers, I think, that employed about a million people in Zimbabwe.
	And when they got their land taken away, you know, you have three choices.
	You can either fight, and those who did died, or you can flee, which is what most of them did, or you can stay and forgive.
	And only a few of them chose to do that.
	And so that's what some of my friends did.
	There's been times that the team, which right now the teams there that are training are mostly black African Zimbabweans who are really taking this on because it's Foundations for Farming.
	We have really a discipleship multiplication kind of model of ministry.
	It's not an organizational, you know, top-down kind of thing.
	And so they're really the ones rolling it out.
	And there have been seasons where they've continued to come to work even though there was no money.
	You know, just because they were willing to serve.
	Because over there, when you have a debauched currency, and they keep having high inflation and stuff.
	Hyperinflation, they're famous for that, yeah.
	Right, they're going through it again, and yet they just said, you know what, it really helps you.
	To invest your treasure in heaven.
	because there was one of my good friends over there, and he said that he and his wife invested in several retirement funds, really worked hard their whole life to do that.
	And when they went to cash those in, it took them out to lunch, barely, without any drinks.
	But really the freedom then that they have to just serve and the heart change that they said that for them as being very prideful culture that they were before, self-made farmers, this one farmer friend of mine said he kind of got it backwards.
	as being very prideful culture that they were before self-made farmers, this one farmer friend of mine said he kind of got it backwards.
	He said he thought he loved his workers and his people.
	He said he thought he loved his workers and his people.
	He took good care of them and all that, the people that worked for him and his business.
	He took good care of them and all that, the people that worked for him in his business.
	But he said God told us to rule the land and love the people.
	And he said he actually realized later that he loved the land and ruled the people.
	And it took losing his farm to get that heart change that he said he was worth losing his farm over.
	Wow, that's amazing.
	But that's the way that God works, right?
	He takes the stuff away from us so that it opens our eyes, resets our priorities.
	And I love the fact that this, you know, what they're doing and what you're doing here, you're trying to do the same thing here.
	And we certainly do need it.
	And it'd be good for people to start preparing before something really catastrophic happens here.
	But the thing that I think is really key is the fact that you're not just trying to come in and help them materially.
	You're looking at the whole picture, as you talked about, you know, family, creating a strong family, your faith, your finances, as well as the farm.
	That is the key thing.
	You're dressing all of this together instead of just focusing on one little aspect of it, and I think that is so important.
	Yeah, it is. And I think that's, you know, as the church, what people are looking for in the world is hope.
	And the hope is not just in some nugget of information, you know, that we can share with them.
	But it's in a life, a personal life, that is experiencing transformation in the same struggles that everybody else is dealing with.
	And that we are then just passing it along to others.
	And unfortunately, for me, I'm really passionate about agriculture because I feel like agriculture and creation stewardship is an element of what we've been given stewardship of as the church that we've kind of neglected and we haven't addressed.
	Right. And if we fail to recognize the battleground that it is, the spiritual...
	Like, either Jesus is going to have, you know, rule and reign over it, or the enemy is.
	And when the enemy comes to kill, steal, and destroy, we shouldn't be surprised when we've abdicated and we've failed to, you know, bring the principles of Scripture to bear on how should we view this as Christians.
	How should we not just say, well, what's permissible...
	A lot of the farmers in the U.S. are Christians, but I've realized that many of us are not reflecting our own fate in the way that we farm.
	Not on purpose, but just because we haven't evaluated it.
	And there's a lot of Problems that we don't want necessarily, whether it's poor health or unsustainability or lack of profitability, but it all kind of boils back to if we aren't experiencing increase or profit or abundance in an area in our life, And not in a prosperity gospel sense, but there's this principle of if you're faithful with little, God will add to you.
	Right.
	And as you measure, you'll be he'll measure to you.
	So if we're losing money, if we're losing health, if we're losing our kids, if we're losing all these things, maybe we're saying maybe God's telling me I'm not being faithful because he keeps taking away from me.
	And maybe I need to reevaluate, you know, whether what is like I was reading the other day.
	If we want to shine his lights in Ephesians, it says we need to find out what pleases the Lord.
	And as farmers, we're never going to do everything perfect because we live in a fallen world and we all have different starting points.
	But are we asking the question, when I go out to take care of my lettuce plants, when I go to raise a chicken, when I go to do whatever I'm going to do, am I trying to find out what pleases the Lord so that I can grow in that?
	And then... Not only do I get vegetables from my garden, but I also get to experience more of Him in the process, which is the real reward, you know, at the end of the day.
	That's right. Yeah, I think we can apply that lesson whatever we do for a living.
	You know, we've seen with technology and everything that's there, we're constantly being moved in a direction where we're more obsessed with the technology that we're using, and we don't see the bigger picture of things.
	And I think that, you know, that can happen even to farmers, how much more so to people who are not farmers, who are working on, you know, outside of, you know, God's direct creation.
	You know, we're working many different levels away from it.
	And I really do think that that is a key part of what we're...
	I certainly know that the people that I know that have started homesteading and working on farms are some of the happiest people I have seen.
	Especially because they're doing it themselves, they're working with their hands, they're seeing God's Creation and what they're doing.
	And so I think that is...
	And tell us a little bit about this training sessions that you've got.
	What do these things look like? You've got one a month that is happening.
	How long does it last?
	And give us a little bit of detail about what that looks like.
	Yeah, so our family, we spent 13 years running a small-scale market farm where we sold kind of organic vegetables and meat and eggs.
	And then a couple years ago, after some of the things that we've learned, we really felt like God had kind of given it to us to be able to equip the church.
	To be more faithful in, you know, agriculture.
	So one of the things that we've done in trying to take some of what we've learned from Foundations for Farming and implement it here in the United States is we're trying to develop some very simple tools, very simple kind of recipes for people to be able to get started on a good foundation if they're going to get, you know, start growing some of their own food.
	So our tool for that with gardening is what we call the Wellwater Garden Project.
	And that's a very simple 20 by 20, 20 foot by 20 foot garden that teaches all the principles of observing God's creation, of good management, of sharing, you know, genuinely your faith in the way that you do it intentionally.
	And it's a kind of a paint by the numbers thing.
	Here's how you space your crops.
	Here's how you put in your bed.
	Here's how you take care of them.
	Because not everybody needs to be an expert in every area.
	God's called each of us to different domains.
	I'm not a self-defense expert, but I love learning from somebody who is so that I can be adequately prepared for whatever responsibilities I have in that.
	So I kind of feel the same thing with agriculture.
	You don't have to be a chef.
	To cook lasagna.
	You just need to have a good lasagna recipe and how to follow it.
	Doesn't mean it's the only lasagna recipe or the best lasagna in the world, but it does help more people to be able to share around their community the joy of making and eating lasagna.
	So that's what the Well Water Garden Project is.
	And we've got some free PDF at thewellwatergardenproject.org that people can download to be able to walk through and plant their own.
	And then our trainings in particular...
	We are focused on helping impact as many people as possible to grow some of their own food by training trainers.
	We really are encouraging every family who grows a garden to pray that God would bring two people a year I think?
	It's really normal everyday people being faithful to do what Jesus said, not just do, you know, like do good works, do what Jesus said, but it says blessed are everyone who practices and teaches these commands.
	And I think the commands of Jesus apply even how do we take, how we grow food in our own backyard.
	And that's, that's what the training that we do in April and May is a training for trainers.
	It is equipping people to plant a garden, to learn the whole process that we teach of, like you said, a simple system, and then also how to go back and teach people in their own community and to do it even if they have no agricultural experience.
	And of course, that's one of the best ways to learn something is to teach it to others as well.
	So it really drives it home to you if you know it well enough to teach it to somebody else and if you're watching them try to do it.
	You talk about how, let's give a couple of samples of the type of things that you're talking about.
	Eight simple questions to create an easy but effective garden plan.
	What type of questions?
	Yeah, so planning, we always tell people, is, you know, daunting to some people, and it's like what everybody else sometimes lean on too heavily, but planning is just a part of faithfulness because it's trying to answer ahead of time the questions that you're going to have to ask anyways, right?
	There's a lot of questions when you plant a garden.
	Where are you going to plant stuff? What are you going to plant?
	When are you going to plant it?
	So planning is trying to answer those questions ahead of time so that when you're actually in the moment, you don't have as many decisions to make.
	So we've kind of boiled it down to four questions about the garden itself and then four questions about the crops that you're going to grow.
	So the four questions about your garden is why are you planting it?
	Because the motive behind it is really important.
	Is this who is this for?
	Why is this?
	Is this food security?
	Is this just nutrition?
	Is this for beauty?
	Is this to teach somebody else?
	that's going to determine how you design your garden.
	The second is, who's going to take care of the garden?
	A garden is just a reflection of the gardener, so you can't have a garden without a gardener, and you need to make sure you match the garden with the labor and the skill level that you have at your disposal to take care of it.
	Mm-hmm. Then the fourth, the third is where will you put it?
	And then what are your space, you know, space limitations and those kind of things?
	And what's your site? And then how big will it be based on, you know, some of the previous questions?
	Mm-hmm. Then the last four questions, once you've got your garden in and you've got a good site and you've got a good foundation for that, is who are you growing the food for?
	When I was growing for market, a big part of our success was knowing how to identify what our customers value.
	Because you can be a really good farmer and gardener, and if you grow something that at the end of the day was a 100% successful crop and yielded a huge harvest, but nobody wants it, You haven't added value to anybody's life.
	Overproduction is the worst form of waste.
	Identify who it is you're growing for and make sure that you're not growing something that you're going to drop off or they're going to harvest and be like, I don't care about this.
	I had a friend of mine who was trying to serve a community with a garden and he realized nobody cared about the food at this point in time.
	He grew flowers again the next year and it was one of the biggest, most popular things in the community because everybody wanted flowers.
	Because he was able to identify better, like, what it is that that garden was for.
	And then, you know, based on who it's for, what are you going to plant?
	That's the second, you know, the second of the four questions.
	And then, where will you plant each of your crops?
	And that has to do with rotations and, you know, organization of the garden.
	We give tools and help people understand how to lay that out simply.
	And then there's just the scheduling.
	When are you going to plant it? And for me, like, I'll have a calendar you can see in my back wall here.
	And I just write down, once I get all this planned, I'll just write down, this week I'm planting spinach.
	And I can look at all the questions I've answered.
	I know the spinach goes here, and this is how much I'm planting, because this is how much we need.
	And here's the spacing it's going to be, and I just go do it.
	And it's a whole lot of fun, because there's not a whole lot of stressful questions to answer once I actually get out into the garden.
	That's great. You mentioned the thing that was a fundamental insight was that he could do the planting without any plowing, without any tilling.
	So how does that work?
	What do you do instead of that?
	How do you get the seeds in the ground?
	Yes. Well, it's amazing.
	All the plants that we see growing out here that's not part of my garden in Alabama, they grew without any plowing or any fertilizer or any chemical sprays or any of that, and they look a whole lot better than most of my stuff.
	So God already has in place an amazing natural fertility system, and the plowing and tilling that we tend to see today...
	It's different than what, like when the Bible talks about plowing, their plows were more like a pointed, you know, you talk about you beat your plows into, you know, your plows into swords and your, you know, it's just, it wasn't like this huge thing.
	Yeah, I can't remember.
	There's one verse where it goes one way and one way goes the other.
	And so it was just, it opens up the ground and scratches it where it's minimally disturbing it.
	Just like the birds do or, you know, when an animal goes and roots up in the forest, a seed that's laying on top of the leaves will get in touch with the dirt, and that seed-to-soil contact, that's all it needs to grow.
	And what we often share with people is we go out and we just show, we look in-depth in natural creation and the soil and look that natural soil has...
	Life in it. It has an amazing system of microbes that are continuously fertilizing the plants.
	It has strata.
	It functions in layers.
	It has a continuous application of organic matter on the top.
	And all these amazing things that, yeah, it's not We're good to go.
	Initially, without disturbing the soil as much as possible.
	So we'll do that by either just cutting them off right at the surface, kind of like you'd remove sod, or we'll smother it.
	You ever left something out in the lawn too long?
	The grass is dead, right?
	And then we'll add compost on top of that and mulch on top of that, and then the worms and the bugs come in, and they make the structure of the soil kind of like a loaf of bread or a slice of bread.
	It's got air. It feels firm, right?
	It doesn't feel fine, but it's got...
	Up to 70% air in it.
	It will wick moisture up and keep it near the roots of the plants.
	It's stable so it doesn't wash away.
	It's got plenty of channels for the microbes to do their things in.
	What we tend to do is plant in flour, just straight flour, you know, that's pulverized.
	And it seems loose and nice, but it actually ends up being more of a growing medium that we have to inject fertilizer into and becomes more and more dead over time.
	So it's...
	A very simple system that is incredibly effective, even here in our Alabama red clay soil that seems like you would have to break it up and plow it to be able to grow things, and you don't.
	It's amazing. It really is counterintuitive.
	Every time I do it, I'm like, this should not work, but it does.
	That's really interesting. How do you keep the birds from eating the seed that you put out, or do you just put out more seed knowing that they're going to?
	What do you do about that?
	Well, we do cover the seed up, and we teach people that, you know, From understanding a biblical worldview, a biblical worldview is just knowing the story that we live in, right, of history.
	We live in a world that was intended to be one way.
	God had intended. We turned away from that way and decided to do it our own way, so that broke stuff.
	And so then now we live in this broken world that Jesus came, and he...
	Provided a way for our hearts to be restored to God, and then for some of those, that heart to then apply a degree of redemption to creation currently, but we're still in the midst of this broken world looking forward to the ultimate, like, restoration of anything.
	So we're not going to have the Garden of Eden.
	Right now. We're still going to deal with death, decay, disease, disorder, all that kind of stuff, but there is a beautiful picture of that redemption when we come and apply that.
	So part of our job as gardeners, once we plant the garden, is we've got, I always teach you, there's three Ps that you've got to do once you plant your garden.
	You've got to provide for it.
	So that means, you know, maybe it's support, maybe it's water, like a trellis to grow up, or you have to water it, you gotta maybe add some extra fertility through some more compost, or a chicken manure tea or something to give it.
	And then the second P is you gotta protect it.
	There's all sorts of things that want to, you know, threaten your garden.
	And so I've got a fence around mine, I've got some frost cover on it right now, I've gotta watch for the bugs, I've gotta watch for all sorts of things, because The reality is a lot of us are growing vegetables that are not native to the climates we live in.
	So they require a little extra babying because they're from the Mediterranean or somewhere.
	And then the third P is you've got to pick it.
	You've got to make sure you get out there and take care of it.
	But as far as the birds go, we cover the seed up so that we make sure that they can't actually see that.
	But we also expect, when I was doing my market garden, if I can get 70% of what I plant, To harvest.
	Then that's a good, you know, I'm always factoring in that 30% margin of just some things aren't going to make it and that's okay.
	And that's part of the process of humility.
	That's great. You have wellwateredgarden.org.
	Is that correct? That's the website?
	Yeah, that's the resource, the free resource where people can download that.
	And then redeeming the dirt dot com is where people can go to learn more about the trainings if they want to get equipped in that resource more in depth and actually learn to teach people in their own communities, because we really need an army of biblically Christians with a biblical perspective on creation stewardship, where we can teach people to use what they have at their disposal in their own communities to feed themselves.
	Because once you get to the point in our nation where food shortages affect people's meal today.
	There's going to be so much demand for people wanting to know how to grow their own food that it's going to be unneedable.
	That's right. And so I really want to focus in this season of time that we have of equipping as many people to be in these communities to say, I can serve you, you know?
	I'm not in the same boat you are.
	Like, I'm... I've started with my family and I'm here with what I have to serve you.
	It's so easy to fall into this mentality of protect ourselves from the poor and the people who might not have anything in those kind of situations.
	But in Psalms 41, it actually says, if you make a plan for the poor or if you consider the poor, God will protect you from your enemies, provide you in the land in times of trouble, deliver you from your sickbed.
	All the things that we as preppers sometimes are trying to attain, God says, I'll take care of those if you have a heart for the poor.
	If you use what I've given you to share with the same people who were in the boat you were just a little while ago before Jesus started helping you in these areas.
	I think that's the DNA that I want to equip the church with so that we are in a position to really Have an army of harvesters for the harvest both of people that want to return to stewarding the land well and rebuilding our local economies but also that then are hungry for hope spiritually when what they've normally been hoping in has failed them.
	It's so true. And if you look at what the plan is, the plan is to isolate us.
	The plan is to shut us down and to have us all in our Fed, whatever they want to feed us, in our own little cubicle, small micro apartment or something like that.
	They don't want us meeting together.
	They don't want us going to church.
	I think this is the perfect counter-example to that.
	teaching people how to understand how to provide food for themselves, building a community, building faith in each other.
	I think it is the perfect counterbalance to everything they've been trying to push and are going to try to push against us.
	That is one of the ways that you've got to push back in terms of building a community, building things up from the grassroots level, and it ultimately is going to be the food.
	I mean, we can talk about people storing all types of things to protect themselves and to be able to barter with, and all that is important, but you've got to have that food, and at the same time, you're building a community.
	I think it's a great plan.
	Tell us a little bit about why thewellwateredgarden.org.
	Is there something specific about the way that you're setting that up, or is that just the title that you came up with in terms of taking care of the garden?
	No, I love that question.
	The well-water garden comes, that term is not really referring to the way we irrigate the garden or anything.
	It really refers to the heart behind the garden, which comes from Isaiah 58, which that whole part of Isaiah 58 is where the nation of Israel is saying, you know, God, we're having all these problems and you're not blessing us.
	It's like you're not hearing us.
	And we're rending our clothes and fasting and doing all these religious things.
	Why don't you hear us and heal our land?
	And he basically comes back and says, the fast that I'm looking for is that you clothe the naked, that you feed the hungry, that you have a heart for the poor.
	You have the same heart that I have.
	For others, to show that you belong to me and that you care about me.
	And he says if you do that, then one of the things that he promises is that we'll be like a well-watered garden in an arid place.
	Like this beautiful, vibrant example of life, of light in the midst of darkness.
	And that's the heart we really want to have behind the Well-Watered Garden Project is where it's really an others-centered motive for planting a garden.
	This is not a fear-based We're good to go.
	And if you prioritize what I prioritize, which is the last, the least, and the lost, because that's really recognizing that's all of us without Jesus.
	And as we experience that hope and change, if we're really experiencing it, then we'll want to pass that on to other people.
	And so the idea of that well-watered garden is really referring back to that heart based in Isaiah 58.
	I really love that. And, of course, we saw that with the farmers that began all this stuff in Zimbabwe.
	What a different approach than you would expect, right?
	Rather than fighting it or running from it, okay, you're going to take the land?
	Let me show you how to grow food on it.
	So we can all eat.
	That's just amazing to me.
	But it is really the heart of Christ and the heart of God.
	And I love what they did.
	I love what you're doing with this stuff.
	I'm anxious to see your wellwateredgarden.org website.
	I really do appreciate what you're doing, Noah.
	Thank you so much. And people can find out about...
	And I'll just give people a couple of bullet points that are here because I think it's very important.
	We didn't talk a lot about a lot of the specifics here, but you did mention the eight simple questions about creating an effective garden plan.
	And, of course, there'd be a lot more detail in that with the seminars.
	Clear a spot for your garden without plowing or tilling.
	Make thermal compost and natural organic fertilizers.
	Because that's a key thing.
	That's one of the things that everybody is, you know...
	When they're trying to put the farmers out of business in the Netherlands, they're actually turning fertilizer into contraband.
	It's like, you know, they're just trying to smuggle drugs across here.
	We don't want your fertilizer in here.
	That's the way they shut the farmers down.
	And so, you know, making your own.
	Lay out garden beds with a simple system.
	Allows for an ease of management space for a variety of crops.
	Plant seeds or transplants with a simple spacing system.
	Easy to follow, easy to remember.
	Care faithfully for your garden with three simple tasks.
	Train others what you've learned.
	All this stuff. As well as alternative off-grid energy and backyard chickens.
	Give us a tip for protecting our chickens.
	Well, I could probably write a book on how chickens can die because there's a lot of different ways that they can do that.
	But no, just a really good fence, a really good shelter, a really good dog.
	There's a lot of different ways that you can provide physical or biological ways to protect those chickens.
	But a lot of this just has to do with Go out, and when you have a problem, God sometimes gets our attention through these things because he wants us to come back and ask him.
	There were some, one more story, some guys in Africa were in a village situation.
	They had been trained by my friend Brian Oldrieff on how to put in a garden and some plots, and one of the questions he had taught them is, you know, to ask God when they faced a challenge, you know, to say, what does my father do?
	And they had the problem of elephants getting into their garden.
	Yeah. That would be hard to think.
	Yeah, like you can't even build a fence for that kind of thing, right?
	And so they just said, all right, well, we'll just, Brian taught us to pray and ask God, so we'll just ask God.
	Well, God showed them that elephants don't go near their own manure, so they went and collected some elephant manure, put it around their field, and they had no more problems with elephants.
	Wow. But sometimes, you know, it's just that's why I say to become the greatest farmer requires the greatest humility.
	Because, you know, Joel Salatin is one of the greatest recent modern-day livestock innovators.
	And he is always like, how does God design things?
	Brian Oldrieve went back.
	He kept to a point of, I don't know how to do it.
	How do you do it, Lord? And like you said, in so many other areas.
	But most of the time, you know how it is.
	I'd rather go to my phone.
	Then stop and pray.
	There's just this spiritual block because it requires a humiliation of degrees for us to say, I don't know it, and ask God.
	But if we can learn to do that, God is just waiting.
	He's the master farmer. He has the solution to every problem, and he is ready to share that with us.
	And if we knew, personally, the best farmer in the entire world, and he said, you can call me up any time, why wouldn't we do so, right?
	And we do have that.
	And that's... Those kind of testimonies is then what gives us the opportunity when we share with other people about our own garden, that we can point back to that experience, where it's not just a, oh, by the way, let me tell you about Jesus.
	But it's like, I was at my wit's end, and then I asked, and the Lord showed me this.
	And then it's genuine.
	Yeah, that's amazing. I've seen pictures of elephants just for fun pushing down trees.
	I mean, there's not anything that you're going to do to stop an elephant, but they don't like their own excrement.
	That's interesting. That's great.
	I love that story and the other stories, and I love what you're doing, Noah.
	And again, people can find this at redeemingthedirt.com.
	That's where you can find out about the training sessions.
	They have them coming up on a regular basis.
	If you want to start building your community, think of a better way to do it than to help other people to grow food and to all the other aspects of this.
	And of course, you have the free site at wellwateredgarden.org.
	Thank you so much, Noah. Great talking.
	Yeah. Can I share with you one more resource for your students is redeemingthedirtacademy.com is a free online training platform where it has a community and training videos and all that.
	If people want to get a sneak peek and go ahead and get started in some of the material...
	We have hundreds and hundreds of farmers and gardeners and homesteaders from all over the world that love Jesus and love farming and gardening on there, sharing resources, learning together.
	And if anybody wants to really get plugged in that community, they can go to RedeemingTheOrtAcademy.com and sign up for free.
	That'd be great. Okay, super.
	Yeah, we'll definitely check that out in our family.
	Thank you so much. No, I really do appreciate what you're doing.
	It is a real blessing to see something that is positive like this.
	We talk about all the different problems.
	We talk about the threats that are coming.
	Here is a solution, folks.
	An amazing solution. The common man.
	They created common core to dumb down our children.
	They created common past to track and control us.
	Their commons project to make sure the commoners own nothing.
	And the communist future.
	They see the common man as simple, unsophisticated, ordinary.
	But each of us has worth and dignity created in the image of God.
	That is what we have in common.
	That is what they want to take away.
	Their most powerful weapons are isolation, deception, intimidation.
	They desire to know everything about us while they hide everything from us.
	It's time to turn that around and expose what they want to hide.
	Please share the information and links you'll find at TheDavidKnightShow.com.
	Thank you for listening. Thank you for sharing.
	If you can't support us financially, please keep us in your prayers.

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