Dominic Tripi and Michael Tribbler dissect Minnesota’s escalating unrest, comparing it to 2020’s George Floyd protests while warning of extremism—leftist intimidation tactics (e.g., stolen cameras, AK-47 attacks like Garrett Foster’s) and provocateurs like Jake Lang. They critique U.S. immigration policies, including H-1B visa abuses ($70K vs. $150K wages) and unchecked legal immigration (20M–50M entries), alongside AI risks—corporate workforce replacement and unregulated military/policing applications. Tribbler’s geopolitical analysis blames NATO’s 1999–2004 expansion, broken assurances to Gorbachev, and U.S.-backed coups (Maidan 2014, Orange Revolution 2004) for reigniting Ukraine’s conflict, framing it as a pattern of Western provocation over Russian response. The episode ends by previewing deeper dives into Middle East, Africa, and colonial-era corruption while urging financial support for independent media. [Automatically generated summary]
And we're also going to clean up the YouTube and Rumble channel because right now it's currently a mess.
The goal with all of this is by having the gray area be really our marquee show on Thursday and Sunday, we're going to reorder things as to where when people check us out, it's actually fun and makes sense and time congruently to check us out with all the work that we've done.
100%.
It's kind of just like shotgun rain.
We got to stop doing that.
So it's really, it's really good what you've been working on behind the scenes and putting together.
So, and that's the thing is, is it really, is it really about that one lady when you see like all the people there, you know, or is it about, you know, like literally fighting the ICE people?
And I don't like ICE and I'm open about that.
My audience gives me a lot of pushback on that.
But ultimately, it's like a football game where you have the MAGA Chud and the ICE on one side.
Let's go ahead and pull up this first clip, Andrew.
I'm just seeing Rex showed me the one that you have pulled up right now with the guy just being pinned, getting his limbs basically torn away from him as he's like, he's got a bunch of protesters around him.
It's not funny, but it's not funny, but it's funny.
You know, this reminds me where when Rittenhouse, when that incident happened, immediately after it happened, people were like, he gunned down three black people.
I mean, my perspective on this is like people don't know what they don't know.
So why are they out there pretending like they're doing the Lord's work?
Like not every situation.
Okay.
There are situations where you have ICE going out there, grabbing people who shouldn't be grabbed, right?
Like I don't support them just like not going after the criminals and just picking up like random like, you know, Mexican moms and her kids off of a consuelum.
What you're doing right now is you are giving, you're adding fuel to the fire by not actually taking the time to, you know, have some discernment and decide who actually needs to get picked up.
Well, you have both sides and both sides are like, we are righteous because we're fighting for X cause, whatever that cause is, and therefore we can never be wrong.
So like both sides are inherently non-self-critical, and that's accelerationism and extremism.
Well, and just it's going to be like Lord of the Rings will be out there like, 1,000 years ago, we tried to close the border.
And even if the thing is, Just see, I want all the people out here, but I wanted an operation that could have taken place administration through administration through administration where you could have had a net negative over time.
And meanwhile, you know, all these other countries are sitting there watching, but we're not actually the only one in with like those people have real legitimate like issues and real protests to address.
Like ours are like first people, first world problems, if you think about it.
Well, I was just saying like our government is corrupt, no doubt, legal corruption, but like, you know, your inflation isn't at like 3,000% and like you actually can't afford to even eat like a McDonald's cheeseburger because the guy in cabinet actually took $3 million from the federal funds.
Dominic Michael Tripley is an independent political commentator and the founder of World Independent News.
Over the past years, he's built a large audience by covering politics and global events in real time and speaking directly to people who feel disconnected from traditional media.
His work focuses on how information spreads, why trusted institutions has collapsed, and what the rise of independent media says about this moment.
Dominic operates outside legacy journalism by choice, prioritizing speed, transparency, and direct access to his audience.
Tonight's conversation is going to be about his journey into media, how World Independent News came to be, and what he's learned by watching the information landscape change over time.
It makes it so much easier when you have a buddy that's helping you out or a staff member.
Like, for instance, a lot of people don't even know what World Independent News is.
World Independent News is actually Owen Schroyer's organization that runs his show.
So I do the back end stuff as far as take care of sponsorships, run like a store.
I do a lot of the producing for his show.
I give him a lot of what I think are good editorial takes and tell him or make suggestions as far as like the best stories to cover and things like that.
But that's actually what I do.
And then obviously that goes along with my own, you know, you can call it reporting, but really it's just news aggregation.
I mean, I'm not the biggest fan of Jake, of Jake Lang.
Now, obviously, what happened to him was absolutely, I mean, it was atrocious.
It was disgusting.
It was terrible that he was put in that violent situation by these, you know, like leftist psychopaths or however, whatever other, you know, bad adjective that you'd like to call these deranged people.
That being said, though, you know, just last week or two weeks ago, he's outside of the APAC headquarters doing the Roman salute.
Before that, he is, oh, yeah.
Before that, in Dearborn, Michigan, he's strolling around with a pig's head cut off, purposefully trying to basically incite these Muslims.
Because you understand, like, yeah, a lot of them in many ways are religious fundamentalists in ways that, you know, like normal Americans or Christians or whatever you'd like to refer to them as, you know, they don't do stuff like that.
So sometimes I kind of feel like if you go digging, you know, you grab a shovel and you go digging, you're going to find some dirt, man.
And I think that what happened to Jake absolutely is wrong.
I think that it definitely showed just how crazy, chaotic, and totally dangerous the situation is on the ground in Minnesota.
However, it's like, Jake, I mean, you kind of threw a line out there in the middle of the lake, brother, and you got some bites.
I kind of feel, I feel, you know, multifaceted about it, but mostly I think it's terrible.
Also, I think, you know, he was trying to probably be a bit of a provocateur.
And if you remember, he also, Jake Lang is the person that threw this rally for Austin Metcalf last year at some point when Austin was murdered.
So, I mean, he just does a lot of these things that are kind of lightning rods.
And I don't think that's necessarily bad as long as you're doing it with the right intentions.
But, you know, even Owen has told me that he was kind of doing some maybe just some things that sort of rub some people the wrong way as far as J6 and some fundraising techniques and things like that.
But at the same time, as far as that instance, yeah, that was terrible what happened to him.
And I hope, I hope that something happens to where these other journalists like Nick Sordor or whoever else is out there.
I hope some measures are taken to where that's not being tolerated because somebody's going to get killed, guys.
This is why I say, like, okay, it's fine to do, you know, you're investigating and do an investigation, do your journalism and things like that.
But like, when you go out there intentionally, did you see that situation where like there was like the Muslims that were just like praying in like a random parking lot and like the guys just came out and just doing crazy agitation and like being like, you want this bacon and all that stuff?
And what you do is you don't, you anger the people who have like nothing to do with any of that.
Just me as a person, I'm pretty independent.
I'm in the middle, right?
But like, I'm not going to sit there and be like, well, I'm like pro-Islam and stuff like that.
But I'm also not pro like you just being a dick and just doing whatever you want because you're like, well, America, freedom of speech, freedom of practice.
The whole political culture, especially locally, we want to talk geopolitics, but this is a great example of just local meltdown.
It's become a greasy horror show.
And maybe it's been this way for quite some time, but it really, like, I look at it and I'm someone who like I grew up winning.
I grew up win.
I grew up going to these like protests, rallies, events, whatever you want to call them.
And over the years, I've progressively seen it, especially from 2020 forward, get really, really dark to the point to where like it is a very dangerous profession to choose.
What do you think about our domestic politics?
Do you think it's just a distraction from the foreign stuff as our country is being sold away and ripped apart?
Honestly, man, I think that we are basically ran on a system of legalized bribery.
I feel that the only solutions that we truly that are so critical to actually getting our country back on the right path, those critical decisions are being made by people that are ultimately bought and paid for.
They are making decisions and they're, you know, writing legislation on the behalf of special and corporate interests almost only.
And it's to the point now where I think that so many people are realizing that this is happening that there's so many very obvious things that should be passed as laws.
But let's just say this.
I think that in a just and fair country, we should probably say at this point that lobbying to the level that it's allowed to happen in our country should not be allowed because it's basically enabling all these forces that should have no influence on our government to be able to really push for decisions that otherwise are bad for the majority of Americans.
So in any just nation, we would have to pass laws in order to make that illegal.
But the problem is, is every time that we need to pass these laws, the same people that are the primary beneficiaries of these unjust laws are the ones that would ultimately have to pass them.
So they are never going to actually put themselves at a major disadvantage, just like how they're right now trying to do this stock thing.
They will put fine print in these bills that says that other people in their families or other traders or basically someone just as a technicality that's not them will be able to make the same trades on their behalf.
It won't change anything, but it's just a little dangle of red meat to throw to the base to just push it up.
I did an entire breakdown on just political corruption and the insider trading and just seeing like all of these politicians year after year beat the market, beating Warren Buffett of all people, who's literally the one of the rest of them.
I think lobbying should be like almost abolished in general.
Like I don't think you should be able to allow someone to go in and pay an amount of money to influence any decision on a macro level like that.
I think the average person like us, we have to sit there, call up our local congressmen and do it the hard way to like, okay, we have these particular issues that we're passionate about.
Whereas this guy has the hotline.
He's the congressman of that particular state on that particular issue.
And he's like, all right, I got a cool million dollars for you.
Well, first of all, what Tim just said as far as abolishing it completely, I completely agree.
I think, look, people need to learn.
And unfortunately, just at a very simplistic level, if you're a kid and there's a ton of bad behavior and you keep stealing cookies out of the cookie jar, well, mom might stop buying the cookies altogether, or maybe she'll, you know, gently smack your hand while you're going for the jar.
Here's the honest to God's truth: if these politicians need to be abolished completely, and if any, there needs to be extremely strict oversight of lawmakers' financials.
And if they get caught having some, receiving a payment that is from some foreign source, from some corporation, literally anything, we'll call it over, you know, a thousand dollars.
We'll say, well, there has to be some threshold.
But I think that if you're caught doing that, you should immediately be arrested and not allowed to be a politician.
We cannot have private money and huge corporations determining every decision for the American people.
And that's essentially what is happening right now.
Trump, look, man, I voted for Trump three times.
A lot of people get kind of upset with my Twitter account because a lot of it sort of seems to highlight either corruption or things that are negative about the current administration.
It's not so much about him alone.
It's about our state of government in general.
And the thing is, he is very openly selling off influence of our government to these huge corporations.
You just look at who is at the actual inauguration.
You've got people that were, you know, political enemies of people like us.
I would like to think, like, you know, Bill Gates, we've got Sam Altman, we've got Jeff Bezos, we've got, obviously, Elon Musk, we've got all of the largest people.
The guy from BlackRock, Larry Fink.
It's like, basically, I feel like our country is being controlled by these large corporations, is being controlled by foreign interests.
And it's so obvious now that I feel that some sort of major censorship is coming because I think there's too many people that are hip to what's going on.
I mean, guys, it's so obvious that this is a presidency that is meant to prioritize billionaires in the donor class.
And I mean, to a lesser, well, not to a lesser extent, but also Israel.
I mean, it's so clear.
And that's the reason why I think you're starting to see Trump sort of change his rhetoric a little bit in the last month or so because he's kind of understanding like, wow, a lot of people really are upset.
You know, we ran on no more wars.
We ran on affordability first.
We ran on putting America first, which in my mind means putting the American people first, especially hardworking Americans that pay their taxes, that do what they're supposed to do, that consistently face a world that's considerably more difficult to live in and especially to flourish in meaningfully.
So I feel that him so, so much focusing on all of these global issues, being around everywhere.
I mean, on the 22nd next week, he's giving the keynote speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos in person.
And it's just like this man seems to have always been someone that personified and symbolized the outsider fighting this, you know, he said it himself, this cabal that truly does run our country.
And now I feel like he not only is in cahoots with this cabal, but he is the grandmaster of their parties.
You know, he is just parading all these billionaires around, bragging about, oh, we got trillion dollars from this foreign country and trillions of dollars from here.
And it's like, look, brother, you need to focus on us because as the stakes in the world become more intensified and more challenging, we really need to do the best that we can to secure our own people's future.
And I feel like all we're worrying about are our figures on pages.
I mean, the thing that's so tough about Trump and the thing that I talk about a lot on this show is I believe he really took what I like to call the Reagan deal, right?
Where they're like, hey, we can't believe you got through again, but listen, we're going to kill you.
We're going to do XYZ.
We're going to release the Eps team files and say or prove that you're in there or do whatever.
But hey, you can just be the new de facto leader of the Republican Party.
You can toe the line.
You get to play leader and do whatever you want.
And everyone will like you, Trump.
And I just, I voted for him twice.
I was as true a believer as you can get.
I saw him in the first Republican debate with Jeb Bush.
I told my dad he'd be president.
And my dad called me an idiot.
Like I've been really day one for Trump.
And in 2024, I mean, that was one of the reasons why I got involved in politics again was because I was like, hey, maybe we're actually going to get out from under the boot of Biden.
But it's almost worse when you know something is bad and it's bad anyway versus when something is promised to be good and it's just a total failure.
And that's how I see the administration.
And people will say, oh, you're harsh.
You're whatever.
Michael, do you remember when they said, do you remember when they said that $5 billion was too much to build the wall and that it was too expensive?
Do you remember this?
And 2017, we spent 300 billion in Ukraine and just kind of like talk about it as something, oh, we just kind of wrote that on a napkin.
It's not real money.
It doesn't matter.
And you brought up Larry Fink.
Larry Fink goes over there with Witkoff and Kushner to meet with Zelensky.
It's a racket.
It's a mafia-like operation.
That is the government, whether we like it or not.
And the thing is, it's very clear that they're not pretending anymore.
They're not pretending that you and your little votes or you and your group of people that share a certain ideology can make any difference.
They're openly mocking anyone.
I mean, he said it in one of his posts, truth, postal, truth, social posts himself.
You know, we don't need you.
He essentially told people that we're free thinking, that we're at least challenging some of these things, some of these principles that we actually believed were at the core of the Republican Party, which in this instance would be protecting children.
But it's like when all of these magazines come out, and I don't know if you're familiar with this 1992 New York magazine article where Trump refers to Jeffrey Epstein as one of his closest friends for 15 years, and he makes a sort of a laughing comment about how he loves the younger ladies and all this stuff.
It's like Trump also was the guy that was talking about grabbing them by the pussy.
Trump is also a guy that was very open about liking beautiful ladies, pageantry, all that type of stuff.
It's like, look, man, just admit that he was one of your boys.
You're one of very two, very few people where you both had residences in New York and in Palm Beach.
You know, you ran in the same circles.
How many people are billionaires throughout the 80s, 90s, and early 2000s?
I mean, not very many.
So I just think that there was such a lack of transparency and there was intentional deception that made so much of the base angry.
And honestly, we were supposed to talk about geopolitics.
I think that some of the reason that you're seeing some of these brash geopolitics, geopolitical maneuverings, and you're seeing some of these unpopular statements being made, whether it's like 600,000 Chinese or whether it's about not actually deporting people with jobs or some of the other things that have been highly unpopular.
I think you're seeing some of those things because he knows they're going to lose in the midterms.
And now he knows that it's kind of like, well, fuck these people.
I don't really care what they think of me now.
I'm the king and I'm going to act as I please.
And, you know, these pleblians and these people that are worthless because I don't care about anyone that's on a billionaire, you know, fuck off.
As long as there's new events in the news every single day and more chaos in Venezuela, like we already kind of forgot about Venezuela, like just in the last 24 hours, right?
Because Iran was the last topic for the last, you know, 48 to 72 hours.
Like everybody's talking about the carriers being repositioned.
As long as there's new news coming out and Trump does all this chaos, there will not be any day in which they actually release the Epstein files and do all that.
Because all he has to do, it's a waiting game.
He just has to let all of the humans become coldfish brains and forget the fact that like the Epstein files exist and the fact that it was all redacted.
When's the last time you saw on X people like actually talking about the redacted files?
We haven't even been covering it and we talk every single day.
My thoughts are that it's absolutely, it's not if, it's when.
And I think that it was actually going to be this week if he was told basically that there was no chance of a removal of the regime and a decapitation strike.
He was told that we absolutely would have to have, if not one, probably two carrier strike groups there.
We're going to need tons of artillery, tons of missile defense systems for Israel.
Because once the regime in Iran actually knows that they are trying, there's an active attempt to supplant them and to basically have an active foreign coup or whatever you'd like to call it, they're going to throw every single possible thing that they have at Israel.
And you saw for that brief period of time, I think, you know, during the 12-day war when Iran actually was actively firing on Tel Aviv.
I mean, they had several strikes and there was a media blackout in Israel at that time because they didn't want people to see the extent of the destruction.
But they absolutely were capable of hitting them and hitting them in main areas.
And now with the development of this Fatwa 2 hypersonic missile, which they have no so the missile defense situation in Israel is very complex.
They actually have five different levels.
So, you know, they've got David Sling, they have, what is it, David Sling one, David Sling two, something called David's Arm.
They have the Golden Dome, and they have one other level of defense.
And if they, all those fail, then normally they will scramble their own fighter jets and U.S. fighter jets to try to take out the missiles themselves manually, which actually, surprisingly, has a very high rate of success.
But anyways, you know, there were reports that Benjamin Netanyahu told Trump that, hey, you have to pump the brakes on this because we're not prepared.
There was also several images of all of these FAAD missile delivery systems going around Israel in preparation for a conflict.
And then this is something important to remember: that the United States actually drained 30% of their global supply of FAAD missile defense projectiles just in the 12-day war with Israel.
So if we were to have a prolonged conflict with Iran to where we're going to have to defend Israel with our own FAAD missiles, I mean, we could really put the U.S. in a pretty vulnerable position if we continue to just be, you know, shameless bodyguard for Israel's overt attempt at establishing the Greater Israel and defeating the, you know, the other remaining pretty large power there.
So I think it's definitely going to happen.
I would say it happens before April on a late timeline.
But realistically, with the rate in which they are gathering military assets in the region, I could see it happening even before mid-February.
I think they're going to strike.
I think they're really going to throw a hell of a lot at them.
And I think it's going to be ugly, man.
I mean, as you guys know, Iran's a very large country.
I think that the damage of the sites from U.S. media was unbelievably overstated.
And actually, right after it happened, you saw reports from the New York Times and Washington Post that said that the damage was something like, you know, only something that 120 days would take to fix.
And actually, Trump sued the New York Times over it.
Trump actually made a whole big deal out of it because he said, oh, you're disrespecting our military and such.
But no, if you actually looked at their whole plan, which was to use these, they're actually, what are they called?
It's something ordnance penetrator bomb, where it digs in extremely deep and then you ordnance penetrator bomb, I think they're called, but then you blast the second one down the same hole.
And so, I mean, look, man, that sounds cool and everything, but to actually destroy an entire nuclear facility that's built under a mountain, that could easily have only been 5%, 10% damage if we're talking about, you know, factoring it into an equivalent.
And I think that's even the plot of the new Top Gun movie that came out a year or two before.
We don't know what's going to happen.
We don't know what our military is going to do.
The thing that I look at, just from like the perspective of the grotesqueness of it all and it just like us being involved in multiple theaters, we say we're not at war.
We say we're not actively preparing for World War III, but we're off the coast of Venezuela.
We're in Ukraine, even if we say that we're not.
We're giving, like you said, we gave 30% of the THAD batteries to Israel during the 12-year war.
And we're also kind of coming in on the South China Sea.
I was literally just like, yeah, like, where does this go from here?
And I have the fundamental belief that we're stretched too thin.
Yeah, I would say with China, that's like the monster hiding underneath the bed that absolutely nobody talks about enough.
I don't think China is outwardly aggressive in the sense that they would ever take a direct attack on the U.S. or any of the U.S. allies.
It's just Taiwan that they want.
They've made it clearly explicit that, like, we will take it.
There's nothing you can do about this.
That's the way that they get involved.
But China's military, they've been building it up for so long that we're not ready for that.
I mean, we have bases in the Philippines.
We've got assets moving over to Guam and all these different places.
But like, truly, when your whole mainland is right there and you can infinitely supply yourself with everything and prepare for every scenario, meanwhile, we're still attacking Iran and we've got assets in Venezuela.
You think about it, and like we're America and we're over here and we're all the world policemen on the high seas.
We're everywhere.
China is this massive place and they're not even able to get out of their own backyard because of the Philippines, because of Japan, because of Korea, because of all the other places that surround them.
Do you think they're going to make a move on that, Michael?
Do I think that China is going to make a move on Taiwan?
I think that China, realistically, I think that China wants to, at one point, China and U.S.'s trade relationship was everything was made in China.
I mean, you know what I'm saying?
It was good for their country to a large degree.
I feel like the China, I feel like China and the U.S. kind of are very boisterous to each other.
They do a lot of barking at each other, but ultimately, there's been lots of different times where this could have happened in the past and they've avoided it.
So the only event that I think would cause China to take Taiwan is if the U.S. legitimately gets into a full-scale actual war, something that's akin to what we did in Iraq and Afghanistan.
If we happen to be in a full-scale Middle Eastern war trying to essentially take over Iran, then I could see them, then I could see them taking Taiwan.
And I could actually see, I don't think the U.S. is going to try to go to war with such limited capability with China for Taiwan.
I think that they probably would urge some sort of diplomatic solution or I think something would happen that allowed for a diplomatic solution that still let China kind of take it over, but without there being just completely invading it and taking that away.
I think what the United States is really afraid of right now is like, okay, chip manufacturing, 90% plus is being built is already foundationally in Taiwan.
And, you know, we've now made all these propositions like, oh, we're moving manufacturing here to Texas and all these different things.
We're not even, it's going to take us almost like five to 10 years to get to that level to where we could actually offsource.
Also, if you look at Taiwan itself, they don't want to give up the market itself.
We've asked them, hey, are you willing to like, you know, you know, scale down to like maybe 50, 50 and the United States takes over half?
They're like, no, we're not doing that.
We own the market.
So our chip manufacturing here has so many glitches.
You look at the Samsung plants that they've built here.
They don't have the level of capability to actually do the chip manufacturing that's necessary for these AI and high computing services.
So the United States already knows we're kind of screwed.
Like you only have one choice but to either defend it till you die or you just concede and then China has another play.
So that's why the United States, I feel like, is not just like, they're like, okay, if China has the raw minerals and the chips, then what cards do we have besides like, oh, we're not going to buy your stuff anymore.
We're not going to buy your stuff.
Like that's, that's the only thing I can think of that like the United States would cripple China's economy temporarily, but they're pretty self-sustaining.
I ultimately think that if China really wants to take Taiwan, they can take it.
I don't think that the U.S. is going to have, I don't think it's in the best, I don't think it's in our interest for the U.S. to have some sort of hot military conflict with China to begin with.
I also think, and if you just examine Trump's behavior, he's got that bravado and he's got that kind of like mafia guy, like, hey, I'm the man around everybody.
But when he's around Xi, he is like second.
You can tell that he is like, he feels not as powerful.
I truthfully think that he wants nothing to do with the war with China.
I think he wants to maintain good relations.
And I think that it would be more than likely, at least outwardly, that China and Taiwan would come to some sort of agreement that looked at least somewhat amicable rather than like a hostile takeover where everyone knew, you know, that they basically just took it over.
I don't know.
I'll be honest with you.
That's something that it's not that I don't know a lot about it.
I do know a lot about it, but it's not something I focus on very much because basically it's kind of like a, well, what are they going to do sort of thing?
People have been talking about China taking it for quite some time.
I think the U.S. response to it, though, would be a little bit less than people like to pretend.
I think ultimately we don't want to have a war with China.
Well, I think that it's been, as far as the globalization of the financial system, I think that that has only, you know, Trump has only really pushed that along and maximized it to, you know, an incalculable degree at this point.
I mean, we're really the fact that we, I mean, we hear more about what's going on, even economically, with other countries, especially through all this tariff talk, but we're hearing more about other countries than we're hearing about our own states times 10.
And the truth is, the thing about a globalized economy is that might be good for the GDP and that might be good for large corporations, but largely it's disadvantage.
It's really a disadvantage to American people because now, you know, mostly it lowers jobs for actual Americans because there's plenty of people from across the world that will do jobs for considerably cheaper.
And all these large companies, like that's why H-1B visas and all these other types of visas are usually such a controversial subject matter because it's clear that with globalized economy equals more immigrants hiring cheaper foreign labor and disadvantaging the American worker.
We should be moving away from a lot of that stuff.
Honestly, we should be making more things.
And honestly, we should be restricting trade to a certain extent because that ultimately is the only thing that's going to stabilize our own domestic, you know, at least our own domestic labor force.
I think that we should have minimal to no immigration whatsoever, legal and illegal in every interpretation of it for at least 10 years.
I think that the culture of America has changed to such an extent that I think it's not really sustainable.
And I think that we're losing ourselves.
And I think that there's just been such an influx of people that are not American, that have not attempted to assimilate many of them that came here that would not necessarily be desirable people to be here that it's going to be very difficult to get many people out of the country, especially that are here legally.
And there's many instances where I'm against that because, you know, if they got here under the law, it's pretty tough to kick them out.
But especially since so many have come in and especially because of how drastic the changes to America have been over the last decade, I think we should have none for an extended period of time.
I always say be careful what you ask for because there's things that happen in which you don't know how integrated a system is into like the growth of your economy as well.
So when you talk about, you know, shutting off the faucet, essentially, that knee-jerk reaction is often what breaks things, as you've seen.
Like, that's what our government has made mistakes over and over again is like we just make a simple tactical decision and actually instead of thinking about the long-term consequences.
What I will agree with you on is like, I don't like what these count these companies did in India with the H-1B where they were gaming the lottery system, where they were taking people and putting their names in like six or seven times over and turning the same people as like a way to like make more money.
And I didn't like the fact that you had people specifically taking the same equivalency job where somebody had the same experience.
And then yes, you were giving that to an Indian guy who would take it for 70K over 150K.
I don't agree with that stuff, right?
What I do agree with in terms of is like the free market aspect of like you put the person that's most qualified in that position regardless of certain nationalities.
And I'm not talking about every position.
I'm talking about specific ones that actually have high impact on the nation and technological advances that we have in the United States.
And a lot of the Amazon, Apple, all those different things, there are actually people from all over the world where they are the brightest people.
And I know a ton of those people as well who come here and their countries that they come from are suffering because of the fact that all the brain drain that happens and they're actually building the stuff here and it's helping us still stay at the top.
So that's my standpoint on it.
It's not necessarily illegal immigration is something completely different.
I don't think we should be letting illegals in just like that.
I'm talking about like legal immigration is where I start to push back on like, be careful what you ask for.
No, I mean, there's definitely an argument to be made over, you know, immigration, over H-1B visas, all those things.
Rex just he barely touched on it, but he mentioned something like, well, you know, the 20 million that came in.
That's my whole thing.
We had such a large amount that came in.
Many of the people that we don't even know who they are or there's no record of them even being here, but they surely are here.
I mean, there's been estimates that upwards of like 50 million people came into the country over the last five to six years.
So, I just think we need an open and shut moratorium altogether.
I think that, you know, if we can't find people within America already to fulfill some of these positions, then I think we're in trouble.
And we're going to need to start learning how to train people.
And that's my whole point is many of these geopolitical situations America finds itself in, there may be a time and place where you might be able to make the argument that it's in the best interest of the country to carry out some of those things.
But when we're in a managed state of decline, the country clearly is getting worse in almost every metric, unless you're already an old person that's established or someone that advanced in life meaningfully before, let's say, 2020.
Everything is more difficult and every goal to achieve in this country is twice as hard to achieve in only five years' time.
We are basically in free fall and we're sitting here talking about Ukraine and Israel and Iran and Venezuela and China, but we're not talking about the hardworking people in Missouri or Texas or Ohio.
And it's to the point where clearly all of the corporate interests, all of the global interests have supplanted what the entire goal of the government is supposed to be, which is to keep safe and advance the interest of the American people.
And I just feel like all of the stuff we've been involved in, we're ignoring what's best for us.
And I also think that bringing in tons of different people from nations that are not culturally congruent with America is, has also not been good for Americans.
So I think that we, I want to talk about another debate that me and Tim have about AI in the future, because ultimately the point that I'm going to make off all of this is we're talking about illegal immigration, legal immigration, whatever.
Ultimately, what they want is the optimus robot in the field, holding the gun, doing whatever.
That's what they really want.
That's why the AI data center is important.
And you talk about a managed state of decline.
I really like that term.
Maybe I've heard that before.
Maybe I have it, but that's very clean.
I'm going to steal it.
Managed state of decline.
That's what we're in now.
And if things remain stagnant, which is almost why, and it's a bad thing to wish for or want, and I don't want people to get hurt or die, but ultimately there has to be some sort of economic crash or break in the system because if this continues for another decade or so, it's just going to be like you live in like.
And don't make, like, make no mistake, these people brag about how they want to replace human beings in almost every facet of society with their own technological slave that'll do whatever it wants.
Like, why would a company have a human being when it can hire, I'm talking about the McDonald's of the world and the large corporations in the world, factories that actually make cars, which you're already seeing, many of them are all AI.
But why would someone hire a human being that's going to require way more money, health care, they're going to need consistent paychecks, they need workers' rights, all the things that you know that come with a job, when instead you can hire something that's a $30,000 one-time fee that listens exactly to what you say, wakes up when you say, goes to sleep when you say, and does the work as efficiently, if not better, than what a normal human being could do.
We have to have laws in place that restrict AI in a pretty significant capacity, other than fields like perhaps the military or other critical parts of the United States where you can make the argument that it's a national security risk or whatever not to do it.
I can understand developing it further for like the government or the military because I know other governments and military are.
But for the public, I really think that We're talking about the most dystopian hellscape that even your worst horror movie couldn't even dream up for you if we don't put some reasonable guidelines and guardrails to what's coming.
For me, being an engineer at the forefront of a lot of these things that have to do with automation, technology, those things, like I see it firsthand day in and day out.
I mean, the site that I work at is very highly automated, has a lot of automation into it, in which we have tons of robots that do a lot of repetitive motion and things like that.
Where I will agree with you guys is the fact of like, you know, you can't just let the bumper guards off and have no guardrails for the average person because the problem is, is we don't have any systems in place that like actually take care of people.
Universal basic income is one of those things like that is very like, oh, well, people call you communist if you even mention it.
Or like things like, you know, basic housing affordability where like the government actually provides housing for people.
Like people don't want to talk about those things.
Humans are naturally not even supposed to be in this like nine to five, 40 hour work week.
We weren't designed fundamentally for that as just a species in general.
It's a construct that we created during the Industrial Revolution and we didn't change the system.
Where automation is very powerful and it helps out is taking the human that actually normally gets hurt because I deal with a lot of these like repetitive motion.
You'll see after like a decade of somebody being on an assembly line, taking this part, doing this, they'll end up having all type of things like carpal tunnel, damage to their, to their limbs, all types of like beat up, and they're just depressed sitting on the line doing that.
Where the robot comes in place and takes that person out, it is a shame if you think about it from like, oh, well, that person doesn't have an income generated.
Yes, that's a shame, but like there's also a bunch of upsides in which you allow humans to go do what humans are supposed to do.
You're not designed to sit in a chair, look at this thing and make sure that every single Karl Marx argument.
Right.
I don't like it.
But what I'm saying is, is that like, if you have AI and automation integrated in a way in which like you allow humans to not have to do the nine to five, you have to be able to provide them something to where they have a baseline quality of needs.
And then people can actually have the freedom to do other things.
So people might not be designed to sit in a desk or do some menial work like many people do with their 40-hour work, but they are absolutely designed to have a purpose.
And without a purpose, most people's lives unravel at an astounding rate.
So when people aren't able to have a job, which oftentimes gives them a sense of identity and gives them a sense of purpose, even if it's not the greatest purpose that they feel they could fulfill, they're going to be left with being extremely depressed, feeling like, you know, a car that's spinning its wheels.
It's not going anywhere.
And, you know, Elon Musk talks about the future of jobs being just an option, saying the future of jobs will be like, you know, you can buy vegetables at the grocery store, but having a job will be like growing them your own.
You'll have to choose to do so.
And the level of automation that advanced robotics and these advancing AI systems may actually bring.
I mean, think about some of this like synthetic skin and some things that are going to be coming along within the next 10, 20 years, implantable, you know, biometric devices that can enhance human performance in many different ways and brain chips and things.
It's like this is going to go to places that truly are of the worst imaginable thing possible.
And if it's consistent with everything that we've seen, which is that the U.S. and the world really is ran by greed more than anything else, these people absolutely intend to and will replace the population of human beings with a shitload of robots simply for money.
You're already seeing it actively happen for reasons that many will argue over, but many also can't explain of why the birth rate is declining in such a drastic way.
So I think that their takeover is very much happening and it is a managed decline to a whole different type of civilization.
So one other thing I'll add to it, and I'm enjoying this conversation because I have conversations a lot.
There's multiple things that you said there, and this isn't like trying to be debating about these things, but I bring in context because I exist in this world of the Elon Musk and everything that they're saying.
And it's very easy to be like, I don't want to say black pill, but it's very easy.
He's very optimistic.
I'm more of a white pill.
He brings a little more of the black pill sometimes.
And we conflate on those things and we have some friction.
What it means is that we have to start reconstructing society in a different way that actually works for the system because we're still running on the same things that happened in the 1800s.
And there's a reason why depression is an all-time high.
It's because you got to wake up at seven o'clock in the morning, go to a stupid job that you don't want to sit there and have your boss tell you what to do.
And you're like, I have no, people don't feel like they have purpose when they're shipping boxes at Amazon.
Like there's no purpose behind that.
So if you create systems and government systems need to focus on giving people actually real things to work on outside of the confinement of you must be here at this time doing these things.
Otherwise, you will not be able to afford food on your table.
I want to make a point to that because you describe the situation as being so bad.
And I agree that it is.
No one has health care.
No one has a house.
Everyone's renting.
Everyone's working in the gig economy.
People can't afford to get their children treatment that they need or even take care of them basically or give them electives.
And I would say where our opinions meet, me and Tim, I would say like, yes, of course, we deserve better than this.
And I look at the bloated budget of the United States military and everything that that's done and the mismanaged social programs that have really prevented all this good positive change from happening.
And it's like that $5 billion example that I gave to Michael earlier.
I go, Don't you remember when they said $5 billion is too expensive to build the wall?
They tell us that it's too expensive to treat us properly as Americans.
But instead of doing that and having peace over here, and you know what, maybe we waste all the money and we're like Europeans and everything is awesome over here, right?
Instead of that, the good option somehow is to go declare war on other people.
And that makes the domestic situation so bad that you're like, I have to work this hard to just keep this job and just keep my family where we're at.
Yeah, I mean, I think that the UBI stuff is coming regardless because I think that once enough of these jobs are ultimately replaced, then I think it's just an inevitability.
So honestly, yeah, no, I agree with you guys too on many of the things you're saying.
And here's the thing, too: I absolutely understand advancements in AI and how they can positively impact society and positively impact the lives of average Americans.
My only concern is that the people that are in charge of these companies are truthfully just so unscrupulously greedy that they will make decisions that not only are disadvantageous to Americans, but that are just, you know, they are outright risking the safety of like the earth and the human race.
I mean, if things go bad with these types of things, when AI truly is implemented in every working military vehicle and every software system and every police car and everything, I mean, just think of the nightmares type of situation that could happen.
It really is like Skynet.
And I think that people sort of just downplay just how what the likelihood is of a scenario actually developing that's like that.
I don't think that continuing to advance and implement AI to a to a significantly greater extent into society is something that is worth the risk of the potential fallbacks.
So you look at the 20th century and you look at the invention of the nuclear bomb, right?
We're in the 20s.
That happened in the 40s, right?
So what is the next leap and jump in the technology?
I think we're at a stage now where like people saw the plane at Kitty Hawk and they're like, ha ha, that thing got up in the air for 13 seconds, whatever.
And then in a decade or two, it's dropping bombs.
So like, I think that'll happen.
I do believe in kind of that Skynet future.
That's why I'm opposed to it, man.
It's like, when you guys see, you're like, everything's going to be awesome.
People are going to be able to, the productivity is going to be so good.
The robot's going to do it.
Ultimately, if they don't need people, they're going to kill everybody.
No, I know there's a couple of a handful of guys who say that have all the money and all the power and all the influence.
I'm talking about like, again, it becomes a cognitive bias when we say, well, these people represent the whole group when it's just a small, like, yeah, you have a couple of people like Peter Thiel that say something crazy, but then there's also, you don't see all the other billionaires that actually see good things that are happening for humanity.
Like there's more of those people.
I would make the argument, and this is true.
Otherwise, we would actually be in a very bad society that there are more people working for better things than just to create chaos.
We are talking about this now, but people have been talking about these things for generations and decades.
If you go back to the 1950s or you go back to the 1960s, 70s, 80s, even when we came out with internet, people were saying these things at that point, right?
When they didn't realize that, like, you just have to go back 100 years, go live and experience what life was like back then.
I think some of the bad things that can happen, I don't necessarily think that they'll be intentional.
I just think that when you're dealing with a power that you don't really understand, that's of a greater magnitude than human beings themselves.
I just think that it's inherently very dangerous to deal with.
And I think that us really implementing it into everyday lives, like a commercial aircraft or commercial passenger vehicles and military technology and everything else.
It's just like if something happens to where we lose control of it, it's fucking curtains, boys.
Like, and I, and I just don't understand why more people don't at least speak about it because it absolutely is a concern that really could happen.
When you have innovation without checks and balances, a good thing can become a bad thing, right?
And humanity goes through these cycles.
Like, we always forget.
This is the reason why on the Grey Area, we talk about history, we talk about things to remind ourselves of what it used to be like because context is everything.
At certain points, humans go through this cycle where we have something, this new technology, where we're like, this is so amazing.
And then we always go to the point at which like we take it to the extreme and it becomes a bad thing.
Industrialization period was something that was new because people used to do a lot of manual labor, all those different things.
And like the machines that we created did the job of 10 people.
But then also we created so many machines that we actually needed people to run the machines and all those different things.
And then the bad situation that came out of the industrialized revolution is you had like kids working out of coal mines, basically dying day in and day out to actually fuel the machines because you actually needed coal to run a lot of these things.
So yes, it's an example of like we had this technology, people didn't know what the implications of it.
And then you had a bunch of kids dying and unnecessary, we had pollution.
The whole United States was like what you would see in some other countries where you can't even breathe outside and people are getting like lung cancer and all those types of things.
And that's the really bad situation.
But then society course corrects once they realize, oh, we can't be doing this.
And there's a new generation that's like, we're sick and tired.
So then they course correct that particular thing.
And I'm going to say the same thing is going to happen with AI.
It's like, it's like, yes, we were aware of the advances that we saw to society upon the creation of the gas engine or obviously like the airplane, but those had sort of singular objectives, at least at the time.
And it was to actually as a form of travel or as a form of operating, you know, something that needs an engine for like a drill or whatever else, anything that needs an engine.
But with AI, it's such a broad, it's almost indescribably broad and abstract to even explain just how many things it can do, both in the physical world, simply digitally.
I mean, its immense power and its just variance in the way that it can affect so many different things is unlike any prior invention or creation or discovery that we really have ever encountered as human beings.
And that's the reason why, especially once GAI is achieved and we actually truly confirmed have reached the quote unquote singularity.
I just don't understand how people think that they're going to be able to control an entity that is so many degrees smarter than them.
An object that can simply turn itself on again or turn its light on and give you every indication that it's turned off, but still be operated.
Like there's just things that can happen that I don't think people have an appropriate level of concern about.
Like if you do things unchecked and you allow the AI to have its own ideas and operate as its own entity without having checks and balances to that, yes, that can happen, but we're like forgetting that like the people who actually create the AI itself are taking these things into consideration.
And the natural cyclical nature is like, we're not going to get to the point where like the A, like the probability that it becomes dystopian and like everything goes to crap and we're, we have like AI robots just murdering people inside of their houses is so much less than actually it turning out to be something good for people.
All I'm saying is that we've allowed some of our fears to come from the media and the movie.
No, not media, like in terms of like dominant.
I'm talking about movies.
Like you see iRobot and then you see like the neon thing that's like in your house cleaning, oh, that robot's going to murder you just like the, just like that robot and iRobot.
I think of instances like being pulled over by, because like, look, the future is going to have, like, especially when you see scenes that are very chaotic in American cities, like you're seeing kind of like in Minneapolis.
Well, you can make many arguments why it's better to have an AI police officer that's fully capable of speaking, looks friendly enough, and all the other weird stuff that they're going to have probably on these things.
But like, what happens, you know, when these soulless things just treat you based off of data instead of actually having a connection to another human being, like a friendly police officer giving you a warning instead, or, you know, you guys liking the same ball team or something and you getting off of something.
Or this is a better example.
You see like movies sometimes where like maybe an opposing or adversarial soldier will meet like a child or something in a city and the child will hand him a flower and then the soldier like pats her on the back and like lets her go.
The situation with an AI is it reads it as a national, you know, a foreign national combatant and just kills her.
Just the world operating under AI is just a colder, less forgiving, and a world that's very fertile for even more increasing corruption.
But there's the aspect of that you're forgetting that AI is smart enough to know that killing doesn't actually make things better.
Also, it knows that creating violence also doesn't make things better.
It would create scenarios in which it's actually trying to not do those things that we're talking about.
Humans are more flawed because we have the emotions that come into play in which the anger comes out.
And a person who's like angry that day goes out and does a school shooting, even though his cognitive consciousness says, well, killing is bad.
The AI wouldn't have that happen because it knows right from wrong from a level of what humans have inputted in general and just the laws of nature in general at the same time.
Because if everything is destroyed, then AI, there is no AI.
These robots can't maintain themselves to that extent.
Like it's not like, again, there's a little bit of fiction that comes in with these movies or nonfiction that comes in with these movies that like, I mean, sorry, fiction that comes in with these movies that make it feel like, oh my God, this is going to be a really bad thing.
But you're going to be surprised.
Guys, the train is already going to move whether or not we sit here and debate about it, including everybody who's watching this.
Like the technology is going to keep going and you guys are just going to have to.
I mean, my opinion of is what is I think there should be more focus on what you just said.
Trump is one of the people that is extremely opposed, even through executive order, of putting in any sort of guardrails or any sort of meaningful restrictions to AI on a state-by-state basis.
And I just think, again, I think that things need to be done to secure American jobs.
I think that things need to be done to secure American prosperity in general.
And I just think that the continuation of aligning the government with these corporations that are advancing this technology, working hand in hand, as you know, Pete Hegzeth is bragging about using Groke as we speak.
So clearly, these AI companies are learning all the data possible about every single person in the world.
They're siphoning this information to intelligence agencies, to the military.
And then we're going to have robots that are workers and police officers and everything else.
They're going to know everything about you through similarly ran technology.
Palantir is going to be going through everything.
I just, I think we're going towards like a hellish techno state.
And I just don't think that you are right, Tim, that we're going in a certain direction no matter what.
But I just think that at least until we're there, we've got to be speaking out against it.
And one thing, a big credit to your dad, Rex, because he's actually a person that, you know, got me in this way of thinking well over a decade ago because he often even spoke about things like this in the future explicitly.
And like the thing is, I just, I heard the description for AI about a decade before it came out, and I heard it from him alongside all the other predictions.
And people in the modern era are kind of upset with my dad or whatever.
And everyone's like, oh, Candace Owens, whatever.
Like, she's the new conspiracy queen.
People know about Alex for a reason.
They don't just, it's not just like, oh, it's the lizard.
Oh, you think a wizard man's on the moon?
Oh, you believe in the wizard man?
No, it's because he talked about all this stuff.
And like, ultimately, that's why Infowars is really taken off the internet, right?
So it just, it's very chilling for me.
And it works in the way, I think this is a phenomenal discussion on AI as a whole.
And we'll just wrap it here, but it works the way I always thought Google would work as a kid, right?
Like you find out about a search engine, right?
Or at least I did.
I found out at one point that, you know, you could look something up on the internet and find a result.
So you ask it a question, right?
Like naturally, you ask it a question.
And that's not how it's designed to work.
You're trying to find a query.
You're just trying to find a data point on the internet.
Now, with the AI, it produces a vector of exactly what you're looking for, exactly what you want.
Even if it doesn't get there, it gets closer and closer and closer every time.
And that ease is so seductive, I think, to the modern populace, to people, Millennial, Gen Z, God help Gen Alpha.
Who even knows what's going to happen there?
That's a whole nother topic.
But I think a lot of us are just going to take this deal and it'll be like Cyberpunk 2077 and people have the Neuralink and the superpowers and whatever.
I love bouncing different ideas off of people, especially guys that are as smart as you.
So no, I, and look, I definitely lean towards the black pill stuff.
In all reality, do I think that this sort of hellscape scenario that I've been describing, do I think it's going to come anytime very soon?
No, I don't.
But I think that once these things are fully normalized, once like seeing an optimus is just like not anything that even sparks any thoughts to you, it's just like everyday life.
Once they're truly that integrated, where they've got numbers and they're strong and they're fast and whatever else, it's just sketchy, guys.
unidentified
It is.
I think any reasonable person thinks it's a little sketchy.
Yeah, I'll do just a little bit of background just about myself just to give you guys a little scope.
So for about 12 years, I was an executive in the freight logistics industry.
I worked with Hardy's, Wendy's, Panera Bread, and let's see, Krispy Kreme Donuts.
But the biggest one was for Five Guys Burgers and Fries, where I did their shipments of their potatoes from the point of origin in Idaho Falls, Idaho, to their 18 different distribution centers throughout the United States.
So I was slinging some serious goy slop, like $100 million worth a year in revenue.
Long story short, not from me making the revenue, but in the actual freight moves, because refrigerated freight going cross-country, very expensive per load.
You do enough loads.
It's a lot of revenue for the business.
Long story short, I was successful in that for a long time.
But since a lot of my customers were in the quick service food industry, which at the time, you know, was often inside, like people like Five Guys didn't really have a lot of drive-thrus.
It was more of a place you came inside at.
And when COVID happened, I was always very politically involved.
I always was talking, you know, to guys like Owen Shroyer or like Savannah Hernandez is a friend of mine or some other popular commentators that you guys are probably familiar with.
Always been friends with a lot of these people just through my connections with Troyer and things like that.
But once 2020 happened, man, I went into hyperdrive mode because I just felt that the whole COVID situation, the vaccine situation, was just such a slap in the face of the American people and just, you know, setting a lighter to the First Amendment.
And I just became getting a little bit more politically involved at that time.
Also, it affected my freight business.
You know, I was a successful executive for over 10 years, and a lot of my volume in my industry drastically fell, as you can imagine.
And ever since that time, actually, if you were to Google the term the great freight recession, the industry has not quite recovered ever since those times because a little bit of a disadvantaged economic situation.
Or even if you look at the latest numbers from like a Chipotle or a fast casual restaurant, they're like 40% down year over year in traffic right now.
Like people are just hurting and there's not as many of these food shipments that are going out.
So as I increasingly became politically involved, as I increasingly became a little bit more, we'll call it radicalized and angry over the situation with COVID.
I decided to start doing some writing and doing some producing behind the scenes for a couple of different podcasts.
Eventually, that came to Owen finally going to prison for the January 6th stuff.
And so when Owen went to prison for January 6th, I decided to start a Twitter account on his behalf and it got up to like 80,000 followers rather quick.
And I was doing some other stuff on there, a little bit of opinion and things, but it was in Owen's name, though.
And we released like a prison phone call that ended up actually getting him in trouble.
I was the guy on the other line of that.
And anyways, after he got out of jail, he had for a while he had like his own Rumble stream and stuff.
Even when he was at InfoWars, it was just like one or two nights a week, but he wanted to start a store.
He wanted to kind of work on, you know, potentially his own thing.
And at that time, he wanted to stay with InfoWars while doing some of his own things.
Yeah, sorry, a little long-winded, but we were just getting totally fine.
And these things are interesting because, you know, not a lot of the audience knows, you know, the background of every single person that we bring here on as a guest.
Guys, the only reason why I have a different perspective on the AI stuff is because I live in that world extensively to where I see things that other people don't get to see on a day-to-day basis.
Like I could, I don't know if I could legally do that, but I would love to show some pictures of like the environments that I work in.
And like for background information, like I went to school for engineering, and then I've worked in multiple different industries, agriculture.
Look, you got to put a roof over your head at the end of the day.
And both the people in the audience that have been watching the show, they know our positions on these things because we talk about them.
And that's what's fun about now us having like a, I guess it's called a disgraphy or whatever, like your body of work, you know, if it's music or whatnot, but this is a show, right?
So if you guys have been watching for a while, you can go and identify our positions on these various topics because like we've literally titled episodes sometimes that way.
Because that's the biggest thing that I'm seeing a lot is like people existing in these echo chambers where they're not having a healthy discourse to be able to like challenge some of their beliefs.
And we are all susceptible to cognitive biases and primacy and like the things that you consume and not actually diving deeper and those types of things.
That's why you have to have different people that expose you to new information.
It's no fun to do the show where all wearing the MAGA hat and trying to sell the Trump coin or trying to sell like a fuck ice flag and like watch the city burn.
That's not fun.
What's fun is me and Tim are both individuals that have different life experience, different experience with politics, economics, all these different factors.
You know, there's a lot of fun conversations that other people can't have because of just differences in background, opinion, but also things we can connect to on a core human level.
So, like, you live an entirely different reality of like what your existence was prior to this.
And, like, to come into this space and then, like, be able to like provide people different perspectives based off of what you've experienced in life, as well as like what you're knowledgeable about.
I mean, I look, I was a Democrat, I was true and blue, and all those different things.
And then, you know, when the COVID vaccine situation happened, and they said, well, you can't go to college unless you actually get the vaccine and you can't hang out with your friends and you can't do all these different things.
And then knowing that, like, my mom, she's out, she's also like got her doctor.
She's like in the medical space and she's not taking it.
And she's like, you need to be careful about these things.
I don't have a choice.
So that's where my issue came from.
And, you know, it caused me to go right into the center.
And that is where I stay.
I don't lean into the Trump slop or the Biden slop anymore.
And we're in the United States and NATO have like as much as I don't want to say, we are like fully responsible for it.
Like I don't even crazy.
I don't even blame Russia for being our enemy.
Like Cold War is one thing.
Fine, USSR.
But after the point at which it dissolves, you're going to see all the different things that we did where I don't even know who was making the decisions and who even gave that person the ability to make decisions for millions of people and what ended up happening.
What it led me to believe is that everything that you're told in terms of narratives needs to be taken with a grain of salt.
And I know we always talk about propaganda and the, you know, the Victor writes the narrative, but like, you're going to see that these things really are written by the victors.
And it's weird because as I'm watching these conflicts play out, we forget that the United States has its own narrative and history books where we put stuff in there for people to consume.
And other countries have their own too.
And even beyond Ukraine, like America says Vietnam War.
And in Vietnam, they call it the American War because America is the one that waged that war, which we will do a deep dive on that.
Right.
But to get into the specifics, you know, the Ukraine-Russia war is like, it is geopolitically important because it is conflicting.
And that like invested in that Russia invaded out of nowhere.
And that, you know, it.
But the problem with that is we're skipping almost a decade of two worth of context to actually understand why Russia went into Ukraine in the first place.
And the United States, the United Kingdom, and NATO have been deeply, deeply, deeply, deeply involved since the beginning.
And since 2022 alone, NATO governments led by the U.S. have sent hundreds of billions of dollars into Ukraine as you have seen it.
So, you know, after the USSR falls or Soviet Union, you had this new leadership that comes in where it falls to a guy named Boris Yelsin.
And he was governing it from 1991 to 1999.
And so, you know, he believed that Russia's future depended on cooperation with the West.
So he wanted friendly relationships with the United States.
He wanted to end the Cold War hostilities.
And he wanted to integrate Russia into the global economy, which, you know, from the surface, like that, that sounds fine, right?
Like you're like, okay, well, let's try to cooperate with our enemy.
And so in 1992, you know, you had this new radical policy known as shock therapy.
And it was something that was endorsed by not only the International Monetary Fund, it was also endorsed by the U.S. Treasury, Treasury, and the Clinton administration.
And you're going to see that this completely changes Russia completely upside down.
So let's go ahead and pull up this video of what the shock therapy is for people to understand what their new plan was for Russia after in the 1900s.
Federation, Yeltsin, Publix, enter Boris Yeltsin, the first president of the Russian Federation.
Yeltsin inherited a country in turmoil, shrinking economy, rising nationalism, and widespread uncertainty.
To address these challenges, he turned to Western economists and institutions like the International Monetary Fund, IMF, and the World Bank, who advocated for shock therapy.
Shock therapy was rooted in the belief that transitioning to capitalism should be as rapid and sweeping as possible.
The idea was that short-term pain would lead to long-term gain.
These architects like Jeffrey Sox and Anders Eslund argue that gradual reforms risked a return to socialism.
Instead, they pushed for a clean break, dismantling the planned economy in one fell swoop.
The first step was lifting price controls, which had kept goods affordable during the Soviet era.
Overnight, prices skyrocketed.
In January 1992 alone, basic necessities became unaffordable for many.
A loaf of bread that once cost a few Kopex suddenly cost several rubles.
Hyperinflation reached 1,354% that year, wiping out savings and plunging millions into poverty.
For ordinary Russians, this was a nightmare.
Imagine an elderly pensioner who had saved her entire life under the Soviet system, only to find that her money was now worthless.
People began selling heirlooms, furniture, and even clothes in makeshift street markets just to survive.
This period became a symbol of desperation.
Grandmothers hawking antique samovars and men bartering tools for food.
Unemployment, a concept virtually unknown in the U.S. hour, surged as industries shut down or downsized.
State-owned factories, once the backbone of Soviet life, could no longer compete in the global market.
Entire towns built around a single factory, known as monotowns, were devastated, leaving residents without jobs or prospects.
Privatization was another cornerstone of shock therapy, and it was here that the seeds of Russia's oligarchy were sown.
State assets, from oil fields to aluminum plants, were sold off at bargain prices.
Ordinary Russians were given vouchers to buy shares in these enterprises, but most sold them for cash to survive.
The beneficiaries, a small group of well-connected insiders who amassed vast fortunes almost overnight.
Take the example of Roman Abramovich, who acquired the Sibnev oil company for a fraction of its value, or Michael Khodarkovsky, who became one of the richest men in Russia by acquiring Yukos Oil.
These olive arcs wielded immense power, not just economically, but politically, shaping Russia's future in ways that still resonate today.
Yes, industrial production and national income in Russia did decline significantly in the 1990s.
Specifically, Russia's GDP fell by 50% between 1992 and 1998, and industrial production declined by 56% in the same period.
This economic downturn was a result of shock therapy policies like we just talked about implemented by the Yeltsin government to position Russia to a market economy.
Like most economies grow by like a few percentage points, and you know, that that's what you focus on is like how the country is doing for a company or for a country in just a eight-year span to drop 50% means it's drastic for the people that live there.
And then you're also going to see, let's go ahead and show people what the life expectancy actually happened for the people living there as well.
This is the male life expectancy at birth for a former Soviet Union person, right?
Burachovsky said the exclusive club of tycoons included Smolensky and Potetin, along with banker and media mogul Vladimir A. Guzinski, now 46, oil magnate and banker Mikhail B. Kordashovsky.
But it's interesting because coming out of a communist or socialist economy, they would have no or like leaving it, they would have no concept of antitrust because that's essentially they're leaving the extreme version of that behind.
Like, in a communist situation, they thought communism was going to work, guys.
Like, before that, there was a lot of issues why the USSR was even founded before.
It's because a lot of the corruption that was happening during that time period.
And so a lot of people felt disenfranchised.
And they're like, look, we need to unite together and go under this new Marxist regime type of thing in which like everyone would benefit.
Now, you can make the argument that like, well, communism was at least working slightly for them prior to this because we, instead of trying to spread out the cost of this over a course of like five to ten years, they're like, no, we need to make it now.
We've got to shock it.
We got to make sure capitalism works so that the communists never have a chance.
And isn't that crazy?
Like, who in their right mind, some guy who has like some PhD in some psychology or whatever, or a finance degree is like, all right, this is the strategy, guys.
Listen to me because I have authority.
I guarantee it was like a group of just like five people that made that decision.
That is that, and we are going to get into that, but we have to talk about the NATO expansion first.
Oh, my favorite because when Russia was collapsing originally in 1991, after the Cold War ended, Russians believed that NATO would not move towards their borders.
And so, this belief literally came from direct conversations in which, yes, in which 1990, during negotiations, like during the German reunification, in which you had the Berlin wall come down and you had the reunification of not having East and West Berlin and all those types of things, U.S. Secretary of State James Baker told the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev, I think is how I pronounce his name.
He said explicitly, NATO would not move one inch eastward.
And specifically, he was talking about in the context of like, hey, look, you know, we know you guys, we want to be done with this Cold War.
Like, let's just make this happen.
And this is our concession.
And a man's word is everything.
I say this all the time.
So the United States gave its word during this time period.
And so you actually have declassified notes, transcripts that show the Soviet Union leaders were repeatedly given the expectation that NATO wouldn't expand east.
So let's go look at what actually happened.
Andrew, let's go ahead and pull up this NATO map to show the expansion.
It just can't make this stuff up.
All right.
Zoom in a little bit so people can see.
Oh, well, it's kind of weird.
Now, you can zoom out, honestly.
Go down to that.
Yeah.
Okay.
This is like a vertical graphic, so it's not the best.
It's the 1999 one that you have to pay attention to first because that's the one in which you see not just that, like Russia is like, they're like, well, this wasn't a misunderstanding.
You know, is the West saying that, you know, we're not going to do this.
And the West is saying one thing.
And then when Russia is weak, they're doing another thing.
And we're bringing these countries in that are literally near their doorstep in which they can actually put boots on the ground.
And so then you actually see a situation where this all really starts getting out of hand.
And it's when NATO starts bombing Yugoslavia.
And this video, just pay attention.
This is really the first time where, like, this is what causes like people like Vladimir Putin to come into power because they have serious issues with what NATO's starting to do at this point.
Got to unmute it.
unidentified
Russia may have taken had broken theirs.
Russia may have taken the expansion of NATO more lightly if it weren't for another major event in 1999.
The NATO Bombing of Yugoslavia The first bombing of its kind in NATO history.
On March 24, 1999, Western nations carried out their threat against Serbia and began the biggest military conflict on Serbian soil since World War II.
This was the first time NATO used military force without the approval of the UN Security Council and thus international legal approval.
This showed that NATO would operate not only as a defensive alliance, but an offensive alliance that had no problem bombing sovereign states it disapproved of.
Russia observed all of this and never forgot it.
Even the famous Russian writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn decried the action, saying, NATO has proclaimed to the whole world, might is right.
Those who are strong are always right.
He added that it was the destruction of a beautiful country in full view of humanity, while civilized governments applaud this.
Not only Russia, but many countries across the world oppose these actions by NATO.
It was a serious departure from what NATO claimed to stand for, and people would not quickly forget this.
And it's just like, I know everything about everything.
I'll never critically think or revisit past events again.
And when you look at it kind of in a tapestry like Tim likes to do, and we're going to get further down the line, like there's, there's precipitating actions to all these things.
So in 2000, he's inheriting a country that's been traumatized from the 1990s.
So in just the course of Putin coming into power, he started to do things for his own people.
Right.
And isn't it crazy?
Like, I'm going to cover this stuff for sure.
But like for me to sit here and say this and almost feel like I feel uncomfortable feeling like I have to defend Putin because I have been somewhat propagandized to a certain extent.
Like, for me to sit here and say that I'm feeling uncomfortable means that I was taught something at a very early age that Russia is the enemy, and I still kind of have that psychology.
And FBI don't come raid my house after this.
You know, I'm just trying to give people the facts and figures, right?
That guy's plane just like blew up suddenly in the sky.
Like, oh, what happened there?
Yeah.
So going back to the point, even after all of this, when 9-11 happened, Russia actually supported the U.S. during 9-11 and helped lead co-insurgency strikes on the Middle East.
Like they were like, we give unwavering support to actually help them.
And NATO still kept expanding after this.
So then in 2007, he's publicly warning NATO expansion is a serious provocation.
Yeah, we'll hear exactly from the horse's mouth of what exactly he said.
So let's go ahead and pull this clip.
unidentified
All of this.
When 9-11 happened, Russia still declared full support to the U.S. in fighting terrorism.
America didn't seem to care about this gesture of goodwill.
In 2004, NATO underwent another round of eastward expansion, this time taking in the Baltic states, Romania, and several other Eastern European countries.
In 2005, President Putin complained to American diplomats.
You Americans need to listen more.
You can't have everything your way anymore.
We can have effective relations, but not just on your terms.
In February 2007, he delivered a dramatic speech in Munich where he protested the continuous expansion of NATO.
It turns out that NATO has put its frontline forces on our borders and we continue to strictly fulfill the treaty obligations and do not react to these actions at all.
I think it is obvious that NATO expansion does not have any relation with the modernization of the alliance itself or with ensuring security in Europe.
On the contrary, it represents a serious provocation that reduces the level of mutual trust.
And we have the right to ask against whom is this expansion intended.
So like, and then I just think about this other thing.
You have a country like India.
Basically, they're peaceful, right?
And they're friends with the United States and they're both friends with who our quote-unquote enemies are, Russia.
So please tell me, if somebody is so bad and they're like killing and they're mass murderers and you can't trust them, why would a country that's neutral like India be trusting and having mutual cooperation?
The whole point of having an alliance is like so that you don't have an enemy.
But clearly, like if Russia isn't our enemy, then who would be the enemy after that?
But in the chat, I'm just very curious from your guys' perspective, how many of you guys have grown up not knowing anything about these sequence of events that happened in the 90s?
Because that is where the secret sauce is in terms of I didn't know anything about shock economy and therapy.
Like the president at that point had good intentions for his country.
He didn't know that the economy, like, it's like you're trusting the adult in the room to make the right decision because you're in shambles.
This is the first time since your existence before the USSR was actually formed that you've now had some sense of autonomy.
And now all the people that were in power prior to when Kennedy and the Russians were having this whole conflict, like that's in the past.
So they're like, what do we do now?
Now, it gets worse than this, guys.
You have something called color revolution, in which throughout the 2000s, the U.S. was basically creating these like backdoor revolutions inside of Ukraine.
And this is where Ukraine comes into the situation, right?
With their websites and stickers, their pranks and slogans aimed at banishing widespread fear of a corrupt regime.
The democracy guerrillas of the Ukrainian Pora Youth Movement have already notched up a famous victory, whatever the outcome of the dangerous standoff in Kiev.
Ukraine, traditionally passive in its politics, has been mobilized by young democracy activists.
Oh, I wonder who invented those and will never be the same again.
But while the gains of the orange-bedecked chestnut revolution, literally color revolution, are Ukraine's, the campaign is an American creation.
Oh, a sophisticated and brilliantly conceived exercise in Western branding and mass marketing that in four countries in four years has been used to try to salvage rigged elections and topple unsavory regimes.
Funded and organized by the U.S. government, deploying U.S. consultancies, pollsters, diplomats, the two big American parties and U.S. non-government organizations, NGOs.
The campaign was first used in Europe in the Belgrade in 2000 to beat Slobodan Milcevac at the ballot box.
And like, one of the main things that pushed me really hard into being a Trump supporter was I knew the Russia hoax was the Russia hoax from day one.
It's ridiculous.
Hillary Clinton paid Christopher Steele, they come with the Fusion GPS document, and it's all Trump being peed on by the Russian hookers, et cetera, et cetera.
Whatever you think of Trump, whatever you think of Epstein, I think he's implicated, and I'm critical of that.
And I call him out on that, and that's why I don't support him anymore.
And I think it was one of the things that really made the administration turn rancid, especially now going forward, because Trump's like, oh, you think I like Russia, don't you?
And ultimately, like that, that's what I'm disgusted with because we should never be okay with war, period.
But the United States government and really this last administration, as we're getting into the history here, it's not that Obama or Bush or Trump first term or Biden are any crazier than Trump is now.
I just think things have reached their logical conclusion.
I think that's what all of this is.
Like, ultimately, you say, okay, we're not going to expand our military alliance.
We continue to expand our military alliance.
Oh, something you didn't mention, but I know this is a true factoid.
You can Google it, look it up.
NATO, out of all the countries in Europe, that's where they've had the second most NATO exercises is in Ukraine.
So this isn't the only thing that NATO's involved with.
Now you have between 2003 to 2008, you have the same pattern that appeared in Georgia called the Rose Revolution, in which the United States was training the Georgia's military.
And so let's go ahead and play this video for people to understand what this conflict was and who was actually responsible for this conflict.
It doesn't get any better than this.
This is why I love the gray area, I gotta say.
unidentified
But that wasn't all.
In 2003, the Georgian government was also overthrown by a U.S.-backed color revolution known as the Rose Revolution.
Like in Ukraine, it threw out a government that was friendly to Russia and installed one that was pro-NATO.
Between 2003 and 2008, the U.S. began arming and training Georgia to engage in war with Russia.
What's the point of all of this?
Just to train him in the fundamentals of offense and defense.
Big overall question.
Why?
Why is the U.S. actually doing this?
Just to pause it.
Well, you need to answer that question for him.
They were training the Georgian military to attack Russia.
And DEF CON 1 is like, you're actually ready to launch the nuke.
DEF CON 2 is like still a very big deal.
And we were willing to do that when the Russians, we found out that Russia had missiles like 90 miles right outside of our actual continent.
And now we're saying, all right, well, Ukraine is there.
How is that not hypocrisy?
If we're enemies, right, which you're framing it as such, or you're saying, well, we're really friends, then why do you feel the need to park missiles outside of my house?
And it really just, this is the thing that I've been able to resonate with just looking at the Russian perspective and their position is they're they're literally they they go through this economic crash like you talk about with the like planned economy going to just another version of the planned economy where the oligarchs are in control and then you have this guy that kicks the oligarchs out and stabilizes Stabilizes things.
And that guy's like, look, like, we just want to exist here.
Like, there's no, there's no, and we create unnecessary conflicts that just keep going on and on and on again because we're not willing to break the cycle.
They could have stopped all of this mess from happening if somebody didn't have his cool little calculator and say, this is how we solve the Russian economy.
And, you know, this, guys, this is literally why I do these deep dives because the truth is not very clear and it's clouded in a shitstorm of information.
And I try to distill it down in a way for you guys to comprehend how we got from there to here.
And so the next thing you need to understand is that it, wait, there's more.
And Ukraine now is the next target.
And this becomes the red line for Russia in 2014.
So strategically and historically, Ukraine mattered more to the Russians than any other country, right?
I mean, it's literally their neighbor.
And this wasn't speculation.
In 2008, the U.S. ambassador to Russia literally warned Washington that the Ukrainian entry into NATO was the brightest of all red lines.
And not just for Putin, but all across the Russian political class.
Like not everybody likes Putin in his own country, right?
Even his adversaries, but they all could agree on this.
It's like Biden and Trump sitting in the same room being like, all right, look, we agree on this thing that no nukes in no nukes in Cuba, right?
Anyways, going back to the main point, like this was very clear.
And so let's go ahead and pull this next video up of what ends up happening in 2014.
unidentified
In 2008, the U.S. ambassador to Russia, William J. Burns, wrote to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice: Ukrainian entry into NATO is the brightest of all red lines for the Russian elite, not just Putin.
In more than two and a half years of conversations with key Russian players, from knuckle-draggers in the dark recesses of the Kremlin to Putin's sharpest liberal critics, I have yet to find anyone who views Ukraine and NATO as anything other than a direct challenge to Russian interests.
American officials were fully aware that Ukraine joining NATO was something that no one in the Russian leadership could tolerate, whether they be in Putin's circle or his liberal critics.
Nevertheless, in 2014, the U.S. government under Barack Obama backed the infamous Maidan revolution in Ukraine.
This revolution overthrew the Russia-friendly government of Viktor Yanukovych and replaced it with a pro-NATO government.
John McCain, Victoria Newland, and other American government officials were literally on the ground in Ukraine cheering as it happened.
And this just tells you everything about the attitude of the leaders, quote unquote, or the elites, quote unquote, in the West, because like, like, they think they have the right to do this.
This is, I have so much fun on these streams, I tell you.
The main reason is because during his age when he was young, he got a command from somebody on Wei High Mountain and said, you need to go to this place to do this thing and get captured.
Do you not see the irony, guys?
And by the way, I'll do a deep dive on Vietnam, but here's what you need to know about Vietnam.
The North Vietnamese actually never attacked America.
It was a false flag situation in which the submarine.
They didn't even bother to hide their involvement.
Just a week before the coup occurred, there was a leaked phone call of Victoria Newland speaking about the Ukrainian opposition as if she controlled it.
When asked about how the EU would react to all of this, she replied, the EU.
So that would be great, I think, to help glue this thing and have the UN help glue it.
And, you know, the EU.
Oh, exactly.
And I think we've got to do something to make it stick together because you can be pretty sure that if it does, if it does start to gain altitude, the Russians will be working behind the scenes to try to torpedo it.
That's how much she cared about European interests.
And people listening to this in the EU area should seriously consider that.
In response to this coup, the ethnic Russian regions of Ukraine, such as Donetsk, Luhansk, and Crimea, immediately rose up in rebellion against the new Ukrainian government.
Kiev declared them all to be terrorists and launched what he called an anti-terrorist operation to destroy them.
Russia, seeing the opportunity, gladly stepped in to back these separatists and annexed Crimea.
Crimea had long been disputed between Russia and Ukraine, and this was seen by Moscow as the chance to settle the issue once and for all.
A war began between the Russian-backed separatists of eastern Ukraine and the U.S.-UK-backed government in Kiev.
The New York Times reported plainly in 2024.
The partnership between the CIA and Defense Intelligence of Ukraine began in late February 2014.
So, immediately upon the Ukrainian government changing, it was recently revealed in declassified documents that the CIA built 12 military bases on the front lines in Donbass.
And these are regions that are ethnically Russian.
These people, vast majority of them, they speak the Russian language.
This is how they talk to their children.
This is how they like their children to be educated.
But people in these regions have been, since the 2014 Maidan coup and revolution, they have been systematically persecuted by the Ukrainian government because we enable, obviously, like whenever we go into a place, look at Syria, we're like, who can we put in charge?
It's like, it's like if Mexico and the United States were to go to like some sort of conflict and all the people who live on the border of like Texas and the Mexicans were like, yeah, we're, we're, this is our region and we're going to decide what happens in there, even though like the Texans are literally living underneath like all the same traditions that Americans do and speaking English and all that.
But they're like, nah, you know what?
You're, you're part of our territory and we don't really care.
And that's a, that's a boiled down version.
It's a, it's a lot more complicated than that, which is why I didn't include it in this segment because it would be a whole nother show to understand that.
And so he was doing that to tout because he really did in 2017 give javelins to the Ukrainians to basically have anti-tank missiles and expand the military training.
So then, you know, like the United States is supplying.
You've got United.
You've got Trump who's supplying javelins, all those different things.
And so, you know, this is like the first time the U.S. has openly armed Ukraine to fight the Russian-backed forces.
And this is after the accords that they had prior to that 2014 time period.
Right.
And so, like, we just talked about Trump actually bragged about that to destroy the Russians' tank.
And from the Russians' perspective, you know, the frozen conflict was no longer seen as frozen.
So then Ukraine is starting to be turned into a NATO armed forward position.
And then in 2021, 2022, this is when the acceleration of that conflict happens again under President Biden, in which the U.S. military aid surges again.
And then they have weapons that are being shipped there.
And then their training is intensified.
And then the intelligence sharing is deepened.
And then by 2022, early, they're heavily armed.
They've got Western intelligence.
And then they also have Ukraine saying, bring us to NATO.
We want to be part of NATO.
And so like, what are the Russians going to do at that point?
What, how many people died in India because of the starvations, the famines, all that.
But then, not to like get into the weeds, you talk about World War II and like who is like the champion of the world and who liberated the good society and the good people.
Do you understand that it is not a coincidence that a lot of these countries like I'm not going to put Israel in it because we talk about Israel?
We talk about Israel and it gets messy, but a lot of these countries like Vietnam, India, all these other regional places that had occupying forces from France and in the UK, they start declaring their independence in this small like five-year period because they had been conquered by the Germans by that point.
So that's like when you start seeing the world order because, you know, they no longer have the power that they are.
But now the U.S. is like trying to spin up this like weird, psychologically abusive.
It's not now we're like killing millions of people the same way that the British did.
We're just like patting them on the head and like stabbing them in the back with a knife.
Well, it's it ultimately comes from like our weakness comes from a position of strength.
And this is what has to be understood, right?
Of course, our system is declining.
Things are falling apart.
Things are not the way they used to be at all.
But we do ultimately have fish as neighbors to our east and west and weak neighbors to our north and south.
So we can sit here.
How dare you?
We can sit here with our nuclear weapons.
And we think with our infinite budget and just the money printer turns on and goes, burr, burr, burr, we can do this stuff forever.
And I think as we've done the roundup today, I was really shocked.
And people in the comments made the observation of, you know, like post-Soviet Union immediate Russia really reminds me of our country right now.
And, you know, the oligarchs and the special interests and all of it.
And you make the point, it's not as extreme, but I think we're on that road.
And you look at Russia, Russia was a place that really, really suffered for a very, very long period of time.
Talking about having no religious freedom, no private ownership of anything, no actual property.
The state owned it all.
And coming out of that and not only coming out of that, but surviving a vulture-based Western financial system that tried to go in there and take over the country, these are people that have literally, it's like they've walked through a long, dark forest with the sword and they've fought demons.
And we're literally, we're over here like eating cheeseburgers, vaping.
And it's like we just sit here fat with our nuclear weapons and we look at other places that are landlocked or connect to dozens of other nations and we try to take them over.
We can't feel their pain or empathize with them because the fact that every single person that exists in the United States as of current, doesn't matter how old or how young, has never known what it feels like to have another country tell you what you should and should not do with your economy and how you should or should not run your people and your culture.
Well, it's a little different now to where it's not so much as much as the government.
We're getting into the point at which you have these global corporations that are now becoming the influence.
And it's becoming less and less of like the British style.
And like these things wouldn't be able to happen on mass scale in the modern first and second world, where a lot of this stuff is still happening and needs to be caught up is you go to Africa.
You go to certain parts of the Middle East in these regions which don't really have a lot of media attention in which a lot of these colonial aspects and degradation of like their societies are still happening, not even just from a country, but a personal extraction from the companies itself.
And I just want to say, look, if this is the first time checking out the show for you, we really appreciate it.
Number one, I hesitate to ask you to do anything, but if you like this, if you want to support us, if you want to help us get better guests by just having a bigger show to where we can go, hey, look, like we have a thousand followers.
We're not crackheads somewhere, right?
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And on YouTube, if you go to the bio, you're going to see where our X links are too, by the way.
Like you can actually go and click and it'll take you to X. Right.
Because I'm sure a lot of people who have YouTube have X. Just cross-pollinate because these things really do help and it brings legitimacy to the thing that we're doing.
You see how there's really moments where we're able to elevate the perspective by not doing the circle jerk, which is what we've been sick of just watching media in general.
And like what we wanted to do ultimately is cover the news and give value to people.
And then for me, I grew up doing a lot of stuff similar to this, right?
And I grew up going on shows and doing guest appearances, but this is a really big deal for both of us because like we're building the community here of people that are interested, right?
So I want to be here.
If you really do enjoy listening to us and the points that we make and really just the show topics in general, I am doing a two-hour show that's really tight, really fun, just really chill, just a chill stream every day between 6 and 8:30 on days that aren't Thursday and Sunday.
And of course, that's the big show with Tim where we do guests.
And part of the thing that we also want to do in the future and why we ask for you guys to continue to support is because we want to pour into the people that are now behind the scenes helping us.
You know, they're working for free to help us because they believe in what we're doing here.
And at the end of the day, this is a whole system in which we just want to give good content.
So thank you, Andrew.
You don't really get a chance to talk a whole lot.
You know, I'm curious.
You know, just for the stream, how about you turn on your mic?
And you've called the way you knew us because you called in on the show one of these previous times and you just kind of reached out and we were like, ah, let's make it happen.