Mike Baker and Joe Rogan dissect America’s political dysfunction, from Trump’s rise despite vague "winning" rhetoric to Hillary Clinton’s private email server scandal—$6B in DOJ resources spent yet no indictments. They critique nation-building failures like Afghanistan and Libya, where 30% of Guantanamo detainees recidivate, with 46 of 91 now stateless. Baker warns against enhanced interrogation techniques, calling them ineffective, while Rogan questions drone strikes’ morality. The episode ends with a call for pragmatism over polarization, urging deeper analysis beyond media distortions like Zero Dark Thirty or Hollywood’s Top Gun inaccuracies. [Automatically generated summary]
We were talking before the show started about the current cover of The Economist that has Donald Trump dressed up like his Uncle Sam, and it just says, really?
Well, you as a man who's been deep in the world of security or CIA operative, you've got the inside scoop with how this machine runs to a certain extent.
Don't you think that at this point, it's so complicated that almost no one wants to be president?
It's not a job that people are scrambling to get anymore.
But the point being, I suppose, before we moved out there, I was on the East Coast, and my wife is involved in politics to some degree, but we spent some time in Connecticut.
Right.
Watching the governor race there.
And they would have to go from town council to town council.
It works based that way.
I mean, you have to get the vote of the Republican Party or the Democratic Party in the town council.
And the first question any of them would ever ask was, you know, can you self-fund basically?
You know, how much money do you have?
And so you put that together with the idea that nobody wants to open their family up to the ridiculous scrutiny that's involved.
I mean, my problem with Hillary is it's purely an operational one.
I know that if I had handled Even in a conservative way, if you look at what she did with the email server and her colleagues or cohorts did, and you say, okay, in a conservative way, I'm looking at how bad it was.
done that, I would have been sent to prison.
And I know because we had various counterintelligence operations, and you're trying to find the leak, you're trying to find the problem.
And you watch people get banged up for less egregious acts than what she's been involved in.
So my problem with Hillary is, look, one set of rules for everybody.
And David Petraeus is a good example.
He He hands over some information to his mistress, who had a security clearance, and he gets a couple years probation, a large fine, has to plead guilty.
She literally hands it over to the Chinese, the Russians, and any other state and non-state sponsored hacker out there.
For whatever her motivation, she initially said it was simply a matter of ease, After saying that she didn't really know because it wasn't her gig, she set up a private email server in her bathroom.
So we're supposed to believe she's living in a one-bedroom, one-bath place, you know, 800 square feet.
And so she used this, and essentially the problem is traffic was directed through this unprotected server that now...
And she's arguing semantics.
She's saying, well, I never saw that it was classified, and yet it's either classified or it's not, and you know it.
And when you sign on to be, whether it's a senior official at her level or some moak that's walking around just carrying papers at the agency, whatever it may be, You sign agreements that you will protect classified information and it doesn't say it has to be marked classified.
It says that you are aware because you go through a briefing about what is and what isn't and how you look at a piece of information to determine.
So she's saying it wasn't classified when she saw it or when it hit the server.
But what they were doing is essentially cutting and pasting from classified documents so that they could bypass traffic.
And what their motivation was, I have no idea.
Whether they thought it was quicker, whether it was easier.
You know, I don't read a lot of nefarious intent.
I just read an egregious mishandling of classified information that anybody else would be punished for.
And it's, you know, I don't think it's going to happen.
I think the Bureau is engaged in a couple of different investigations.
I think they have all the information they would need to put the ordinary person, you know, or move for an indictment.
And I mean, again, it's sort of, you know, the left makes fun of the Republicans, as they should, because look what we've got as our frontrunner.
But, you know, they make fun of the idea that, you know, the Republicans are all upset because they're anointed one, whether it's Rubio or whomever.
You know, is in the dust right now.
It's the same way on the other side, right?
I mean, you know, there's a lot of people, you know, with their knickers in a twist on the left, upset that perhaps their anointed one isn't going to get in.
If Huma Abedin or one of her cohorts who was involved in this, who also were being looked at in a very, very serious way, if one of them gets banged up for this, then I don't know how it doesn't spread to her.
She was in charge.
And, you know, I understand shit rolls downhill, but...
Anyway, so that seems like the only way it wouldn't is the whole thing that we're talking about her in the first place that she's just so deeply entrenched in the system She's so political and she's washed so many hands and you know They're all tied in together and this is the fabric that's sort of keeping her afloat right now her whole Sort of, you know, political operating mechanism.
I mean, she's just so deeply entwined in the Washington system.
And that seems to be what's keeping her from...
I mean, if this was going on, and somehow or another this was someone like Trump, someone who's an outsider, Jesus Christ, they would chase him down.
And they feel like this is the only guy that's saying, hey, it's imbalanced.
And the people that...
Understand economics are apparently upset at him.
I don't understand economics.
I'm lucky I don't have to.
But the people that, you know, if I was a fucking accountant, I'd shoot myself.
I'd jump off a bridge.
But the people that understand it are like, this guy's policy, this is not going to work.
Like, none of this is going to work.
So that's an argument for other people.
But the people that feel like we got screwed in 2008 with...
The whole bailout and the banks and all the craziness with the economic collapse.
They feel like at least some guy's coming along that's addressing that and he's the only one.
So that's what people are gravitating towards.
And there's a lot of social stuff like his gravitating towards the Black Lives Matter movement and wanting to make medical marijuana legal and all that stuff.
That I understand too, but there's not one person that stands out where I go, there's my guy!
I've tried to pay attention to how the—I mean, essentially what he wants to do is anyone who makes more than a certain amount, he wants to impose a very large tax above that certain amount.
You know, figure out whatever that number is, whether it's $10 million a year or whatever the hell it is.
Anything over that, he's just going to tax the fuck out of it.
But the problem is that's not going to pay for everything he needs.
That tax is going to roll down to the middle class and the lower middle class.
And that's sort of the elephant in the room that nobody wants to talk about.
I mean, Hillary's been talking about it a little bit.
She's been bringing this up.
And the Republicans haven't been talking about it because I don't think they view him as anybody that they're going to be facing in the general election.
You know, taxing that 1%, the 2%, the 3%, whatever it is, you know, you could raise those taxes up to 99%.
You're not going to pay for free healthcare and education for this country.
When 2008 hit, when the economy really went in the shitter, you know, growth in terms of employment, you know where it happened most in this country was in Washington, D.C. I mean, you saw the growth of government as...
The economy was absolutely heading south.
And that's just – that's the way it works.
There's certain things about big government that hold true whether it's here or outside this country.
But anyway, so I look at Bernie and I think, yeah, I get it.
I like the fact that he's been consistent.
I think that makes sense.
But then you look at the Republican side and we go back to that picture of Trump and you think, how does that fucking happen?
How do you get to this point?
And you think about poor, what's his name, Scott Kelly, the astronaut, he's coming down after, you know, he's out of a long sleep up in the space station.
I hope to hell that they haven't told him shit about what's happening.
Because how funny would it be for him to land, and Trump is the leading candidate, and nobody's said anything to him yet.
And he just comes home, turns on the TV, it's Super Tuesday, Trump's won everywhere, and he's going to be, I mean, he's dealing with gravitation and all the rest of it, so I guess this isn't his biggest deal.
If she gets in trouble for this, and it's Bernie, that's it, on the Democratic side.
And on the Republican side, it's essentially down to...
I mean, Cruz seems like he's fallen out of it.
It's Marco Rubio and Donald Trump, and Rubio is a distant second.
And people are so excited about Trump, because he talks shit, he's bold and brash, he insults people, and he's got his own money.
He says a bunch of crazy shit like there's a great picture of him where it's it's a photoshopped picture of Somebody made a picture of him and he's got a gun And he's pointing it out the window of a car and it says get in pussy.
We're gonna make America great again But it just seems like there's so many goofy white guys who are ready and psyched to have Trump as president, like some insulting reality star kind of a president.
We have more crisis around the world right now, more hotspots, more potential very, very serious conflicts going on.
And now is the time you would think, whether it comes from the left or the right, that you want really clear-minded, strategic, smart, pragmatic, reasoned leadership.
And this ain't it.
I mean, you know, Trump isn't the guy.
Hey, great that he's insulting people.
Great that he's talking outside.
But he doesn't, you know, and I'm sure this is going to piss off.
I don't know how many Trump supporters you've got listening, but he doesn't stand for anything, right?
I mean, he stands for...
What?
I mean, I suppose the supporters would say he stands for winning.
But the fact that we've been having a conversation about it, where we're talking about whether a guy like Trump is suited to be president, is astounding.
We get that far.
We shouldn't even have that conversation.
We should be up at the 30,000-foot level and say, no, let's push that to the side.
He's got some wacky ideas, like he's got a great picture of himself, a painting that he had done at his home, where it's him and Jesus is behind him, and Jesus has his hands on his shoulders.
And we've gotten to that point where there's so many problems with our system.
But one of the problems is I think that...
People are hell-bent on finding the candidate that they agree with everything on or that agrees with them on everything.
And I've got – my three little boys are, what, eight, six, and four, and they know they're not going to get everything they want, right?
But they also know that if they work it enough, they'll get some of what they want, and then they're going to be happy enough, and they'll go off, and the day continues.
In politics, and so you're getting, everybody's splintering off.
And so, you know, the worry, obviously, and it's not an epiphany, people are talking about it all the time on the Republican side, it's just, you know, people are throwing these verbal hand grenades out, and there's no way to repair the damage once there is some nominee, if there is a nominee.
He would talk to his cabinet guys, or guys would come in and he would be dictating notes, and he'd be squatting on the pot there.
And you gotta admire that.
The guy was comfortable in his own skin.
But I think that everything's gotten sliced and diced, and Which is by itself also very divisive.
So the more that you do that, the more you take the country and say, well, we're going to slice this up into various demographics and sectors and groups and opinions, and we're going to go after this one.
Well, by definition, you're going to end up pitting groups against each other.
And that's what we've been seeing.
And I think that's in part why we're so fucked now.
And it's not a new phenomenon.
I'm not going to throw all that on the current administration.
I think they've been more divisive than they have been unifying.
You know, overall, as a country, and part of it may be the speed of information and all the rest of this shit, but it just seems like we're getting to the point where I think we're going to have to get rid of the two-party system.
We'll keep the two-party system, but we're going to have to have a third, maybe a fourth.
There's going to have to be more potential opportunities for people because that's what they're demanding.
I mean, when something happens and something goes wrong, like someone said to me something about drones.
They were talking about drones, and Obama has blood on his hands.
I'm like, do you really Do you think he's in charge of all that?
Do you really think there's any way this guy could be on top of the economy, could be on top of international trade, could be on top of international relations, and he's also piloting drones?
There's a shitload of work that goes on in getting to that point where you can say, we've got the target package.
Can we go or not go?
People, you know, and again, I understand, you know, people think that the, you know, the agencies out there, you know, looking to create a one world government to screw everybody over, but...
I mean, there are so many, and maybe, because we talk about checks and balances, and we talk about the intel committees, and sort of that nature, but maybe what really keeps us safe from the one-world government is the fact that there's so much territorial pissing that goes on between the different agencies.
But the point being is that once you get that target package, you've got to go get approval.
And the approval's not housed in the agency.
It's not housed at the Pentagon.
Final decision-making's over at the White House.
And it's basically a legal perspective.
And so once that's done, then yeah, sure, you can fire a rocket up their ass if they're still where they are and you can get the decision made quick enough.
Yeah, but I agree with it.
So your point is correct.
The president is like the CEO of a company.
He didn't know what the hell's going on past his division leaders.
I mean, if you just define a base as U.S. permanent or semi-permanent presence, yeah, it's a lot.
And not just that, but, I mean, every other operation that goes on, every other activity that goes on, that's why...
But I will say that's why you want at the top, while we still have a president, that's why you want someone who's very reasoned and clear-eyed, not thin-skinned.
You want someone who can negotiate.
You want someone who doesn't think they're the smartest person in the room.
And then they need to be able to pull together the cabinet that is going to actually start making decisions.
And I think presidential candidates, even at this stage, should be required to say who's going to be in their cabinet.
Who would be your choice for these various positions?
My big fear is that we're going to have artificial intelligence and that one day artificial intelligence is going to govern world policy and world issues.
I really believe that.
I know I'm retarded for thinking this.
But I think that there's going to come a point in time where we establish rules of operation.
Do no harm or do the least harm possible.
These are the laws.
These are parameters that we need to operate in.
These are the rules that we need to enforce.
And this is when something like ISIS, when it gets to a point where everyone agrees, okay, we have a tremendous issue.
We've got to do something.
Militarily, strategically, some choices have to be made.
What do we do?
That you could punch this in somehow or another to some sort of artificial intelligence, and it will dish out some sort of a decision based upon the rules of engagement, based upon the agreed-upon parameters that we have set.
I know that we'll get to that point, but we certainly war game scenarios out where you're running a large number of potential possibilities through the system.
And it is literally, like you said, it's spitting out likely outcomes.
And you're weighing that against them.
Because one big part, it's always missed because, again, there's this tendency to think that people are just out there doing shit for the hell of it.
But there's a big risk versus gain calculation that goes on, whether it's at the agency or the military or anywhere else.
And so you're constantly evaluating this.
And part of that eventually becomes political risk, political blowback.
So, you know, that's like the Benghazi thing.
How did I end up on that?
But you look at Benghazi and you think, here's the part I don't understand about that, not that you asked, but All they had to do during the course of that attack, and they had no idea how long that attack was going to go on for, all they had to do was put the birds up with the guys in them and head towards Benghazi.
That's all they had to do.
And then this would not have ever been a story.
They probably wouldn't have gotten there in time to save lives.
But they would have gotten there.
They would have been there.
They would have secured the facility.
They would have helped with the dust to clean up.
And it wouldn't have been an issue.
But the idea that they could all be sitting around in the war room Watching this and not have that, you know, pop in their heads because three to four weeks down the road was a national election, and all they could imagine was there was going to be some goat rope, and they couldn't get to the point where they thought there'd be zero risk.
But it doesn't make any sense.
All those guys on the ground wanted was to know that the cavalry had been called.
They didn't expect to be saved, but they thought that help would be on its way because that's what you do.
And it's one of those strange – so when you talk about scenarios and war gaming and potential political blowback and all that, it's a fascinating world where you sit in a war room and all these different sides are being debated.
My perspective on Benghazi is I just don't understand why they didn't just try.
That's all they had to do and it would have been a story.
And for that reason that you said, there is this understanding that you will make the effort, you'll try.
And nobody out there on that pointy edge of the spear expects that they'll be saved, but they do expect that someone's going to call the cavalry and try.
And particularly to make sure that that fucking never happens again.
Because if you know that every time there's an election coming up and, well, they're not going to do shit because there's an election coming up in two weeks, now we can go in again.
I just, in looking at it, all the various scenarios and knowing what resources were available and knowing What the guys expected on the ground, I just don't get it.
And, you know, for a group, meaning the administration that's supposed to be so clever and politically savvy, it just didn't make any sense.
And now they've been having to suffer with it ever since.
And aside from the fact that they just didn't fucking make the effort to try to save these people.
And again, not that they would have, but how do you not try?
I don't understand whenever they're making decisions based on whether or not there's an election coming up, and you would do something differently if there was, and people's lives could be lost because an election's coming up, versus how you would behave it was first term, or first year, first term.
And we got to a point, and it's not just a recent thing, it's not just this administration, you know, to be fair, But there's this understanding or this belief somehow that we can get to a zero risk on a military operation or an intelligence operation and, you know, so show me that we won't have casualties.
Well, what the fuck does that mean?
You're in a risk-taking business.
You want to try to minimize that risk for sure.
When your decision making gets to that point and you start then, it starts feeding down through the ranks and you start getting mid-level managers rising up who believe that a good watch is when nothing happens on their watch, you've got a real problem.
It's unrealistic.
Again, you don't want to rush out there until you want to have a game plan.
You want to know what you're doing operationally.
There are certain things that are worth bending your spear over.
Now, for a guy like you, that was in the CIA for so long, has been involved in this stuff for so long, how exhausting is all this?
Because it seems to me that, like, it seems like it never ends.
It seems like...
You step back for a little while, and it just piles up more.
If you retire, the new guy comes in, and you look at the new guy doing it, and the same shit's happening, and it doesn't seem like anybody put a dent in anything.
And it continues to go on, like the Middle East.
At one point in time, I mean, how- Well, I don't know what you're getting at there.
We spent a lot of time trying to get the Soviets out of Afghanistan during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan.
And the Soviets spent a lot of time trying to get themselves out of there.
About four years into their occupation there, they realized, and we know this because we've seen the Kremlin papers and we've had access to a lot of their thinking at that time.
They, after about year four, they said, this is fucked up.
We got to get out of here.
But what could they do?
So they spent the next five years or so trying a variety of things.
They tried, first of all, they tried to find a government or individuals that they could leave in place that would continue to push their agenda.
They couldn't find anybody.
They were dealing with corruption.
We know that.
They couldn't get past a lot of the corruption.
That sounds familiar.
They retreated from the countryside and decided, well, we'll just hold the urban center.
So that's exactly what we did.
So they went through the same problems that we did.
If you had said anything, when we were out there handing weapons systems to the Mujahideen, And in retrospect, maybe that wasn't a good idea.
But if you had told us that we'd be back...
Two and a half decades later, doing the same thing that the Soviets were doing, trying to...
I don't know what we were trying to do, build a nation, sell democracy where they don't have a fucking clue what we were selling.
So we don't...
Part of it is what you were saying.
We don't learn from our mistakes.
So that's why...
That's probably the most tiring part, is watching shit happen over and over in cycles.
And every generation thinks they can do it better.
And that's a good thing, probably.
But...
There's a lot of hubris involved in thinking that you're going to do this.
Somehow it's going to be different this time.
I had a guy – I was debating this guy who will remain anonymous.
He was in the military and we were in Afghanistan at that point already with trying to nation-build.
And I was very pessimistic about the whole thing.
And I kept saying, this is not what we should be doing with our boys, or women as well, and our resources and everything else.
I said, they don't understand what the fuck we're after here.
And we did a great tactical mission right after 9-11.
We did a beautiful, I sound like Trump, beautiful tactical mission.
And that's what we're good at.
We're great at tactical missions.
But then about springtime in 2002, we should have gotten the fuck out.
I said, if you do it again, we're going to come back.
We didn't.
We stayed because we wanted to build a road or improve their literacy rate by a couple of points.
So this guy said, well, it's different this time.
Because I was saying, look, it didn't work for the Russians.
Why do you think it's going to work for us?
And he said, well, they hated the Russians.
And I thought, wow, that's your reasoning?
Is it because somehow they like us?
Or we're going to throw chocolate bars out to them and stockings and they're going to come running?
I mean, what the hell is that point?
But we have this This mentality that we're going to do it better this time.
So you look at ISIS, you know, for example.
I mean, who couldn't have guessed if we completely walk out?
You can debate all sorts of things about Iraq, but who couldn't have seen if you walk out of that place, it was going to devolve into chaos.
You know, if you leave a vacuum, it's not good.
And so that's what we've got.
But we keep doing the same things over and over again.
And you could argue what we're doing in Iraq, we did all those years ago after the Soviets left Afghanistan.
And so we left, and it devolved into what it devolved into.
And oddly enough, there were a lot of neocons who thought, that was terrible.
We felt guilty about that, so now we're going to get it right this time.
When they were running for president and Obama was talking about going to Afghanistan and I remember this is a very sobering moment where McCain said, what are you talking about going to Afghanistan?
You're just gonna send troops in?
Do you understand that place?
And it was clear that Obama didn't.
You could tell by his body language.
You could tell by the way he was speaking about it.
McCain had this really clear sentence.
He said that place hasn't changed since Alexander the Great was running it.
And when he said that, I remember thinking like, whoa, what the fuck?
So then I started researching Afghanistan.
Then I started researching the terrain and how crazy it is.
It's literally like trying to control the Rocky Mountains.
Gaddafi was kind of our guy on counterterrorism for a few years before he got pushed out.
Because he had found Jesus, you know, not literally, I guess, you know, whatever, however they put it.
And he had started to cooperate with us.
And then the Arab Spring happened.
And then there was this bizarre belief that democracy was going to sweep through the region.
And the Italians and French came to us and said, you know, we got lots of interests there in Libya.
Would you back us up?
We had no national security interests in Libya.
And yet we went in and we did what we did.
And now it's a shithole.
It's 130 some odd tribes in Libya.
And we're still talking.
Right now, we're still talking as if somehow we're going to find a federal government.
And that's what's going to help us because then one of the generals just came out yesterday or today or whatever, and he said, well, I don't think the Libyans are going to be able to take care of ISIS themselves because ISIS now got a very strong hold in Libya.
Because they're smart.
Because they realize they're having problems in Syria and Iraq.
They've been looking for another place.
Libya is chaotic.
So the general says, you know, so once we get this unified government, then we can work on training and assisting and providing resources.
And it's just over and over.
So to answer your original question, but in a very roundabout way, yes, it's tiring because you see the same shit over and over again.
Just trying to nation build and seeing these people that, first of all, you're dealing with completely different cultures, completely different cultures, completely different educations, people who are so backwards, so far gone, that taking a 45-year-old man who's so fucked up and crazy and religious and trying to convert him to the ways of the West...
Like these fucking people that executed that kid the other day in the middle of Iraq for playing music because he was playing Western music.
We can't process it, but we have never been able to.
You talk about the Viet Cong and we used to go in and we thought we were helping a village and going to an inoculated village and the Viet Cong had to come in there and kill them because they'd had contact with us.
One of the first people that we hired some time ago for my company, Diligence, for all your information and security needs.
One of the first guys we hired was a Russian, came out of their GRU. And right after we'd gone in for the Tora Bora operation, he came to me.
And he had been a tank driver out in Afghanistan during the occupation for the Russians.
And he came and you could just see the intensity on his face.
And I had known him for a while.
So anyway, he grabbed me and he said, that was brilliant.
He said, meaning Tora Bora, meaning how quickly we had acted.
He said, that was brilliant.
He says, don't stay.
He said, don't stay.
They're like cockroaches.
Meaning you step on them here, they show up over here.
And you could just see in his face.
And that son of a bitch was right.
And if I had been smart, I would have dragged him back to the States...
I've taken them into the Pentagon and had them say that every hour on the hour, you know, until somebody figured out what the hell we should have been doing.
But...
Yeah, we don't seem to listen.
Sometimes you got to jump in.
Sometimes you got to take charge.
And sometimes you need somebody who's in charge.
You need a leader at the top of this food chain around the world.
Because if you don't have one, you get what we get now.
I would argue that part of the problem we have is the administration, for whatever their motivation, whatever their reasons, and again, you know, fine.
They want to do it.
That's what they're going to do.
They've stepped off the world stage to some degree.
They don't want to be...
The world's policeman or the world's leader.
They don't want to be at the top.
And when you do that, it's not as if suddenly a community of nations fills that void.
Some other interest is going to try to become the top dog.
And the more I talk to people that have been to those fucked up parts of the world, the more that picture is starting to be clear and clear.
The more I talk to guys like Jocko Willink, who've been over there, SEALs, people that have served over there, you get this picture of this place that's not America.
And you get a lot of people that are talking about the rest of the world as if we're talking about America, like bad spots in America.
Like, well, we need to fix Chicago.
Well, let's just fucking fixing Chicago is a goddamn cakewalk compared to fixing Kabul or fixing any of these spots in the world, like Syria.
Well, you actually have a qualified opinion, and that's the difference between your opinion and someone who's going, the United States, man, we need to stay out of other countries, man.
I think we need to pay attention to what's going on outside of the United States for sure.
I just don't know what you could possibly do to sort of smooth over the Middle East and bring them up to date.
I just don't know how you could, how do you bring ISIS up to date?
How do you say, hey guys, you really, you can't execute 15-year-old kids for listening to rap music.
You can't, it's not an organization that we're going to be able to deal with in a manner that would make us all feel happy because we talked them down from, you know, from the ledge and they're not going to commit violence anymore.
That's not going to happen.
And you can't also kill your way out of it.
That's the other part of it.
So how do you do it?
Well, you try to manage it.
And you manage it in part by not allowing The extremists to have their own fucking territory.
Because that caliphate that they've been jonesing for all this time, that's one of the reasons why they've been having so much success in recruiting forward fighters.
There's been a shitload of people going into that place.
And they do it because, hey, look, we finally got our own turf.
Now, we can take that turf away.
It's now much more problematic because we sat on the sidelines for some time and the Russians are in there and nobody wants to get into a shooting match with the Russians at this stage of the game.
Denying them territory.
And then realizing that, like with cockroaches, they're going to pop up over here.
And then they're going to morph and they're going to be over here.
We're just going to have to play whack-a-mole for the rest of our lives, probably.
This doesn't go away, but we can minimize it.
And we can be aggressive enough without saying we're going to try to nation-build and also sell them something that they don't understand.
So, I don't know.
But, again, having sat on the sidelines for a while, we've created more of a mess at this stage of the game.
The Russian and Iranian influence, In Syria, the Iran's have more influence in the Middle East now than they've had in modern times.
And they can't imagine their good fortune.
And so now what are we doing?
Well, now the headlines are, look, they just had elections and the reformists are winning.
As if somehow...
Iran's going to change its tune.
It's insane.
We've had that hope for decades and decades.
And every time there's a little glimmer of maybe the reformists to the moderates are going to rise up, it doesn't happen.
And so that wasn't a happy chapter in the sense of...
You know, was the Shah our guy?
Well, yes.
But have we had other guys that were, you know, despots or not so much despots as just really unsavory people that in an ideal world you wouldn't want to associate with.
But the real world doesn't work that way.
There are some fucked up people out there.
And the fact of the matter is sometimes you got to deal with the person that's there.
Again, how does it happen that this country, this fantastic country, and again, I spent most of my life overseas, I can go to the deepest, darkest shithole somewhere out there, middle of nowhere, and someone will say, If I go to America, I can work this hard and I can do really well.
I just have to, you know, if I can get to America, they still, people out there in the middle of nowhere still believe the American dream.
And yet you worry about it because I think we seem to be giving up on it here if this is the best we've got.
If we're willing to follow this guy, you know, down the tunnel, I don't know where we're heading, but it's not good.
And I also worry about – part of it with Bernie Sanders, going back to him, is I think sometimes the young people who support him, part of it is sort of being disheartened.
Since 2008, they don't see themselves as being part of the American dream.
And if you don't imagine yourself working hard and becoming wealthy, then you don't give a shit whether tax rates go up to 85 percent or not.
It doesn't matter to you because it's not going to be you.
Well, it's just so confusing to people that no one can get it right.
I mean, everybody had these hopes and dreams for Obama, and he was going to get an office.
I remember this lady that was, when Obama got elected, she was so happy, and she was saying, I'm so happy because now I know that if my mortgage needs to be paid, he's going to help me.
And it was like this really weird...
Like moment where I realized like wow these people don't really understand how complex this entire system is and you're dealing with a guy who's stepping into the office right when all these banks are failing.
Right when all this this collapse is happening and people think that all of a sudden this guy's gonna come in and he's gonna have a completely different set of priorities and he's going to find all these people.
Yeah, and so you get what you get, and I understand.
Okay, everybody was excited, sure.
Hope and change and all that.
It was a very powerful message that they were delivering.
It was a smart, smart campaign.
You would think that over a period of time then, what we'd really want now is somebody, and again, I don't know where you find them, but somebody with that combination of experience and character and a proven ability, a track record, to work both sides, right?
To say, look, we're going to be able to negotiate, we're going to compromise, we're going to find, you know, it's not rocket fucking science.
To work out some of these problems, right?
But the more problems we get and the more negative we get about them, it seems insurmountable.
But we should be able to find somebody in this massive country of ours who, you know, can propose some clear-eyed ideas.
Taking a guy who, this is an analogy that makes sense to me, taking a guy who's never fought before, and then make him run for the UFC, and now you're gonna fight in the UFC. Well, what's your fucking experience fighting?
You don't have any experience.
You know what I'm saying?
Like, all of a sudden, this guy gets this job.
It's the most complicated and impossible job in the world, and he's never served.
He's never been overseas.
He's never experienced combat.
He doesn't know what it means to be involved in a war.
He's never been there physically, boots on the ground, okay?
I'm not saying he has to, but I'm saying, wouldn't that help?
But wouldn't that flavor how you would understand and consider military action if you had actually been there?
Whether you'd been there...
At least Bush Sr. had been in the CIA. He had been the head of CIA. Bush Jr. was a classic.
You don't get to those positions by being an idiot.
You may disagree with people's positions.
I disagree with Bernie Sanders.
I don't wish him any ill will.
I'm not horrified that he's running.
I think that's the way it works in this country.
I disagree with the concept of socialism or democratic socialism.
But at the same time, I understand and I appreciate the fact that that's what he believes and he's believed it for a long time.
So great.
Let's...
And you're right.
We should be trying to help people that need a leg up.
We should be trying to provide the safety net for the people that need it.
We should be trying to, at the same time, promoting the concept of hard work and success.
There's nothing wrong, fuck it at all.
There's nothing wrong with success.
You work hard.
It's like Monopoly.
Monopoly's decided they're going to, I don't know whether for all their board games or not, but Monopoly's going to take away the paper money and give you a bank card.
What?
Yeah.
Is that real?
Yeah.
I couldn't believe it when I saw Hasbro, which owns Monopoly.
They said, well, we're going to use a bank card from now on.
So all those kids out there, because I don't know, maybe they don't want them to learn how to count paper money because maybe it's unseemly.
I'm reading something into it that's not there, obviously.
You might not be.
Yeah.
It's part and parcel.
My kids, they started playing basketball a couple seasons ago.
I remember the first league, they didn't want to keep score.
I could ask my six-year-old, I could ask Sluggo, way into the third quarter of a basketball game, I'd say, what's the score?
And he would know the score.
All the kids knew the score.
They're all keeping score.
And so we're just blowing smoke up a parent's ass, and consequently we think we're being clever with our kids.
They're saying, eh, this will be fine.
But I don't know how I got off on this.
My kid walked off the scooter, the oldest one, walked off the lacrosse field and looked at me and he said, so how'd I do?
And I said, well, honestly, do you want me to be honest or do you want me to blow smoke up your ass?
And I'd said it, and I didn't realize there were the parents around.
They were horrified.
And then I got dressing down.
But he said, God bless him, he said, I want you to be honest.
And I said, well, you didn't really try as hard as you could.
I said, you know, you don't have to be the best, but you've got to try really hard.
And the only reason that other kid was scoring on you was because he wanted it more.
And I said, and you can do that.
And you can tell kids that they're not playing their best in a nice, constructive way.
By telling them this crap.
And now what do we get?
All those kids that started years ago when we started this movement to not keep score or anything, now they're all at Yale or Amherst.
And they think that being contradicted means they're being persecuted.
And so we created this monster ourselves.
And now a lot of those people, they look and they don't believe because they've been told they're victims and the system's rigged and they're getting fucked every day.
They don't believe they can be part of the system.
So sure, they look at Bernie and they think, yeah, that's about right.
It's good for you, it's good for me, as long as you're competing fairly, it generates, that competition generates a lot of good things.
First of all, it generates ambition, it generates success.
If you overcome these obstacles that are created by competition, you understand what needs to be done in order to achieve things.
If you're going to go through life and you're never going to have any obstacles, you're never going to have any character testing moments, you're not even going to know what you're capable of.
But you just, like you said, it made you work harder, it made you push harder, and you realized, it's like, you know what, it's like interrogation training.
I don't know why this is popping in my head, but it's interrogation training, the whole point of interrogation training is to break you down so that you realize you've got a point where it's just going to happen.
I mean, you also have the other side of the coin, which is learning how to interrogate and negotiate and all the rest of it.
We like to call it negotiation.
But the idea being is that when you're in interrogation training, the idea is you have to understand that at some point, No matter who you are, it's going to fall apart.
And then what you need is you need to be able to pull yourself back together again.
So the idea of interrogation training in part is to show you that, A, you can go farther than you thought you could, but also at some point you're just going to say, fuck it.
I mean, because, you know, depending on where you're at, You know, you're going to break.
I mean, it's going to happen.
And when you do, you've got to be able to, otherwise you're just a puddle of goo, right?
You've got to pull yourself back together again.
So it's a bit like that.
Failure, like you said, failure teaches success.
Failure drives success unless...
You know, unless we're creating a culture of just fucking mediocrity.
Because they're fucking competing against each other.
Chevy is competing against this company, they're competing against Ford, and they're all trying to make a car that goes zero to 60 in a half a second.
And every fucking year they get closer to that.
I mean, there's one reason for that, and it's because there's other cars out there that are doing a better job.
Their skid pad numbers are getting higher, their quarter-mile numbers are getting lower, they're getting faster, they handle better, they're getting safer.
They're doing this because of competition, and that's the only thing that fuels innovation.
Competition fuels innovation and this desire that everybody has to, I want to get the newest, greatest shit.
The better thing to tell them is, you know this horrible feeling that you've got in your stomach right now?
Use that as fuel.
Fuel yourself with the fuck-ups.
Fuel yourself with the failures.
But it doesn't mean we love you less.
Like, your parents and your friends are gonna love you no matter what.
You know, Randy Couture said this to me once.
We were talking about fighters and how he talks to fighters that he's training.
And he said, the most important thing is you can't be afraid to lose.
It's going to happen At one point in time, if you keep fighting, everybody loses.
But you have to think to yourself, what is important in life?
Your family loving you, your friends loving you, they're still going to love you.
All those pieces are going to be in place if you lose.
Accept that and then go out there and do your best.
And as long as you've done your best, You can keep your chin up and you can understand that whatever failure that you've experienced there, whatever mistake, this is like a mathematical problem.
You've learned.
Well, you can't throw a one-two and then drop your left hand and you get hit with a counter right.
Now you know.
But if you don't get hit with that counter right, you never know.
If you go through life just throwing a one-two and winning every time, you think you've got the perfect game plan, then you teach that to someone else, and that person realizes, well, no, this game plan's no good.
You gotta keep your fucking hands up.
If you don't keep your hands up, you get hit.
There's a certain reality.
It's one of the reasons, I keep going back to fighting, but it's one of the reasons why people like fighting, because it's so absolute.
If you're a parent and you're living your life through your kids' sporting exploits, go fucking do something else.
Encourage them and give them what they need to succeed.
But don't value yourself through what your kids are doing in sports.
And there's so many parents out there that do that.
I coached For a while, my daughter, who's now in college, she played a lot of softball, and so I was coaching at one point before she got to the point where I had nothing to offer, and so they had to actually get coaches who knew what they were doing.
But I remember at one point, there was this one dad who was just a complete douche, and he was always a douche, and he'd just show up, and he'd berate his kid, and his kid was fantastic, and she was wonderful.
And one time, she actually walked up to me, and you could tell she wanted to cry, but she didn't.
She was a great kid, and she apologized for her dad's behavior in the dugout because the dad was leaning over the fence and screaming.
How old was she?
At that time, she was 14, I guess.
And I said, look, honey, it's not your deal.
It's not your fault.
Then I had to go over, and I said, look, fella, you're a fucking douche.
And I said that to him, and I thought he was going to try to take my head off, but he was a big boy.
He couldn't argue with me.
I think he knew, deep down, he knew, yeah, okay, the guy's right, I am a douche.
I think when people have to deal with nature, when they're dealing with winter and storms and just the reality of being in nature, it humbles you and it also hardens you a little bit to the realities of changing climates and the realities of just wildlife and all the dangers and all the wonderful things that come from nature.
I mean, not far being, you know, a handful of hours drive.
And you go up to a place, and if people haven't, if they're listening, haven't been to Yellowstone, good God, you know, do yourself a favor and go there.
Don't go during high tourist season.
But if you want to see something that just is stunning, spend a few days up in Yellowstone.
And it really does, it puts you back a little bit.
And it makes you realize, A, how Amazing, you know, this planet is.
How incredible this country is.
And it also kind of puts your priorities a little bit more in shape.
We tracked a bunch of grizzlies up there for a Travel Channel show.
There were times when you'd forget what you were doing.
You'd just stand there and just stare out there at the scenery.
And of course, it was a travel channel show.
I was supposed to be co-hosting, and yet I was just gobsmacked.
I didn't have the words, which is not good for a co-host.
Apparently, you're supposed to be able to describe what you're seeing.
And I would just say, man, this is fucking incredible.
Yellowstone's done a wonderful job of bringing back a number of things.
And there's a fairly active wolf population up there.
The bears are looking great, the grizzlies and everything.
But the point being is that if you grow up out there, I think, or if you spend a lot of time out there, you understand that, yeah, Life isn't fair, right?
And if we just keep telling our kids that life is fair and everybody gets to be equal and That's not the way it works.
And even in the human species, it's not the way it works.
Like you said, somebody's always going to be harder, tougher, smarter, more intense, and that's a good thing.
But you get addicted to hitting 11 when everybody else is hitting 6 on a good day.
A crazy day today.
I got up to 6. Imagine if you're Chuck Liddell.
He's like, oh, what did you do today?
You did a fucking mile?
You ran a mile?
You fuck?
You know?
It's like the the idea of danger and reward of consequence these are these are all They're so intense to someone who's been involved in like really heavy competition I see with fighters all the time this very reluctant Decision that they have they're very reluctant to step away from the game when they've been knocked out a bunch of times and they start to lose their chin and they start to experience some cognitive issues and And it's so hard for them and they need
someone to step in and grab them and go listen to me man if you don't get out now It's gonna get real ugly in the next couple years and you could you could reach a point where you're never gonna bounce back You get a few more knockouts three four more knockouts and you might be fucked for the rest of your life And we see it now with a lot of NFL players.
We've definitely seen it with a lot of fighters I mean Jesus look at the greatest of all time the greatest boxer of all time Is a physical wreck.
Muhammad Ali is in the worst shape of Like literally any public figure that has ever been so graceful and beautiful in his movements and the way he talked and so charismatic and now you look at him and he cannot talk at all.
Well, I have friends that, you know, they'll let their kids fight.
They'll let their kids fight, but they won't let their kids get involved in football because they're like, look, if you fight and you get really good, it's you and one guy.
And you might get hit, and you're probably going to get hit, but if you do your diligence and you work on your technique and you understand footwork and you understand the rules of engagement, And you understand, like, correct strategy as far as movement and do all your work in the gym and understand how to...
Defense, number one.
That's the number one most important thing.
If you do that, you're gonna mitigate a lot of that issue.
There's a lot of fighters that walk away from the game and they're okay.
It is possible to do.
Look at Floyd Mayweather.
Fucking guy's 49-0 and he's fine.
You might not like him, but shit, he doesn't get hit.
He doesn't get hit.
I mean, the difference between him and a guy who decides to bite down at his mouthpiece and just slug it out and to see who's the last man standing, there's a giant difference in his strategy and the consequences of his strategy versus a guy who just likes to put on a show for the fans.
That guy's going to be in a fucking wheelchair when he's older.
I took karate when I was 14, but I really got serious when I was 15. I took a little kung fu when I was younger than that, but I didn't get serious until I was a sophomore, right before freshman to sophomore.
Well, I've been interested because I was small and I didn't want to get picked on.
There was definitely that.
But the big thing was, it was just straight luck.
I was a baseball fan.
I went to a Red Sox game at Fenway Park.
I was walking home, and as I was walking home, me and a buddy of mine were going to the T, the public transport.
There was a giant line because it was the baseball game we had let out.
So we were walked by this Taekwondo school, and I walked upstairs.
And it was this long staircase up to the Jae-Hun Kim Taekwondo Institute.
And as I was walking up, just by luck, there was a guy named John Lee, who was the national Taekwondo champion, national light heavyweight champion, and he was training for the World Cup.
And he was in just peak training for the World Cup.
And as I got up to the top of the stairs, I heard this sound, this whomp!
And then this, like, chink!
Like these chains, like chink!
And I was like, what the fuck is that sound?
And as I got to the top of the stairs, there was this area you had to take off your shoes and you had to walk in.
You could watch these guys train.
And John Lee was kicking the bag.
And he was doing this spinning back kick on the bag and bending this 100-pound bag in half and sending it flying.
And I remember thinking, I gotta learn to do that.
I couldn't believe anybody could hit anybody that hard.
I mean, you could add all this meaning to it and you might be right or you might just be guessing.
But to me, it was a gigantic moment and decision in my life to go up those stairs and to see that guy doing that changed my whole life because that became my life.
And from 15 to 21, that's what I did every day of my life.
You see parents do that all the time with their kids.
You know, I want a kid to be a baseball player.
And they just push and push and push.
Instead of saying, look, I want to expose these kids to various things and see if they spark themselves.
Find the things.
Because part of it's got to be internal.
You can't for a period of time, and then that's it.
It's only going to go so far.
But if you can find that thing like you did, That sparks something and the kid realizes, you know, I could become really good at this and I enjoy it and it sets me apart.
It makes me different.
It makes me special.
God bless, you know, if you can do that with your kids, you're halfway home.
You know, I walked up there and I was like, Holy shit, I was surrounded by black belts who were kicking people's heads off and I was like, this is insane!
It was just, to me, it was so terrifying, but it was also, in a good way, it was very much like a cult.
Because, in a good way, they didn't take advantage of you, but you had to bow, you had to say, yes sir, there was some intense discipline, and you got to see some intense consequences to fucking up.
Because I got to see a lot of guys get knocked out.
I saw a lot of guys get knocked out in tournaments, I saw guys get knocked out in practice.
And there was also the belt system.
The belt system, I think, in martial arts is very important for kids because, like, you start out as a white belt and you get that blue belt.
Like, here's a perfect example.
Anthony Bourdain is 58 fucking years old.
He just got his blue belt.
And he told me he was the happiest he's ever been in his life.
More important than anything other than, like, the birth of his child.
It was like, to him, it was like, I fucking did it.
And here's a guy who, like, used to be a heroin addict, smoked cigarettes, just drinking all the time, had a terrible lifestyle.
His wife, who's obsessed with jujitsu, got him to take a jujitsu class, and then all of a sudden, for whatever reason, that switch goes on.
But like you said, for kids, it's that success, which runs counter to sort of the concept of team sports right now anyway with kids.
So you give them that opportunity.
And I've got, again, the middle boy who's six right now, he's that kid who likes to know what the parameters are and likes to know That there's a system in place, right?
So he's the kid of all of them.
And he's very aggressive, too.
He's a very physical kid.
So we've been looking at what's out there and where we live to see where would be a good spot for him.
But he's definitely the kid of the three that he looks at that and he goes, I get it.
But I can't recommend that enough for kids, for young boys especially, because it takes away this fear of engaging with other kids.
It takes away this fear of getting your ass kicked, a fear of the unknown.
If you don't know how to fight, you wind up getting involved in fights accidentally because you posture, you stick your fucking chest up, and you don't know.
The consequences are so alien to you that you wind up talking too loud or trying to bluff someone and you can fuck up and run into the wrong dude.
If you don't know what the hell you're doing and if you don't have the discipline and if you're not constantly training, Yeah, there's a serious potential for fuck-up.
There's a serious potential for fuck-up, and that's my own issue, my personal issue, with all these fucking states that are open-carry states, where you don't even have to have any training.
Like, I think it's kind of crazy.
I think, first of all, I'm a big supporter of the Second Amendment, I have guns, so let me get that out of the way.
But I think you should learn how to fucking use a gun before you should get one.
How come I can get a car, I have to go through all this shit, I have to learn how to drive, I have to fill out forms, I have to learn the rules?
I can just go get a gun!
All you have to do is just not be a criminal, and you can get a gun.
The training aspect of it is, anybody who's serious about weapons, anybody who's dealt with them, anybody who's had to carry them for a livelihood, you gain a real appreciation for how quickly things head south.
And the idea that...
I agree with you 100%.
And I'm a huge supporter of the Second Amendment.
And I got a big old walk-in safe and happy to have it.
But at the same time, I just can't get behind the idea of people going out and not training, not practicing.
And that's a large...
Not a large, but I have...
You know what?
I'm about to speculate, so I probably shouldn't.
But There's a decent percentage of people who go out, they buy it, and then they put it in a lockbox, hopefully they put it in a lockbox, and then that's it.
Maybe sometime they're going to need it and they don't know what the fuck they're doing.
So it's the training and you just have to be constant repetition, constant repetition, because if you do need to use it, everything else shuts down.
All your little controls go away depending on your big muscle mass and repetition and muscle memory.
When you're nervous, All the training comes out, and you're going to fall back on your training.
If you train incorrectly, you're going to perform incorrectly under pressure.
And that's the same with firearms, the same with everything.
If you don't prepare...
But see, we have this country where everybody's like, you're trying to take away our guns!
We're trying to take away our guns!
No one's trying to take away your guns.
But I think the idea of firearms, owning a firearm, being a right, I think it should be a privilege.
And I think much like driving a car is a privilege.
I don't think you should keep anyone from doing it just arbitrarily, but I think you should prove that you know what the fuck you're doing before you put other people in danger.
You've never gotten on a lake, and you've got some drunk asshole who's never gotten behind the wheel of a boat before, and all of a sudden he's doing 30 down the lake, and you think, what the fuck?
And the other thing is, I've never woken up in the morning and thought to myself, good God, I've got to get myself another.45, or I've got to get myself another AR-15.
And I've got teams in my company that do nothing but due diligence on people, right?
And now it's not for purposes of a weapons permit, but...
I know how difficult that process is, even for relatively straightforward due diligence.
And so the idea that I have no problems with expanded background checks, and I know a lot of people right now are screaming and saying, how did you do that?
Oh my God!
You're one of us!
But again, I'm a huge supporter of the Second Amendment.
I'm an NRA member, all the rest of that shit, and God bless it, but at the same time, We have to be able to find those ideas, those answers, or at least talk about them without immediately starting to pull the pins on the grenades and throwing them at each other.
And that's, you know, going back to the earlier conversation about politics and everything else, it's, you know, probably no other, well, there's other emotive issues, but certainly with the Second Amendment, you know, the idea that you're going to spend a little bit more time on a background check, you know, if you've got to rush into the store and buy your handgun and get out of there as quick as possible, what's that all about?
I mean, just take, you know, you can take a little time.
And then the variations in training for classroom work for concealed carry permits.
You know, you got great training programs, and then you got less than great, significantly less than great.
And you're talking about carrying a weapon out in public, and that is an enormous responsibility.
And I think it's important, you know, and I think it's...
It falls in line with what we're talking about.
But how do you get to that point if as soon as you raise that issue, again, people start throwing hand grenades at you and you think, well, wait a minute.
I'm raising this as a possibility.
Maybe there's some other tact here that we can take.
And not just the Second Amendment.
Every fucking thing out there, right?
Obamacare.
It's either all this or all that.
Instead of saying at the early outset, what would have been wrong with saying, let's do pre-existing conditions, let's keep kids on their health plans for their parents a little bit longer, and then let's try to figure out where else we can make improvements.
I think one of the things about owning a gun, and this is very important to anybody that has a gun, you should want to be educated in proper firearm safety.
If you have a gun, you should want this.
So training shouldn't be something that you would fight.
It should be something that everybody would embrace.
If you have a gun, you understand the dangers and the consequences of having a gun.
You also understand that you need someone to show you how to do it right.
If you don't have anybody who puts it in your head, you know, always have your finger off the trigger.
This is the safety.
Know it.
Know it when it's pushed back, you know, you're here.
If you live out West, and again, I mean, because down South, you could argue the same thing about hunting culture and everything else, but there's a certain appreciation for both the use of weapons and the responsibility involved, because there are so many people out there that hunt.
And there are so many, I mean, I would suspect that, I mean, everybody I know that owns a weapon goes to the range, or they're out I mean, I have no idea, but...
I mean, depending on who you're talking to in law enforcement, there's a lot of folks in law enforcement that look at it and go, yeah, I mean, it's not what they would prefer.
It's not up to them to make that call, but at the same time, I look at it, and I think if there's one issue that probably summarizes The sort of the emotive nature of politics nowadays, it's probably this one.
I mean, I think that we've gotten past the whole gay marriage thing, and the abortion thing always flares up and always will, probably.
But the Second Amendment...
You know, and so you do think, okay, well, how do we?
Because the default position for the administration is always, you know, it's always, you know, blowing it up, right?
And so, you know, they misplay it as well, right?
I think if there was more compromise, more discussion in the center where they could have this quietly outside of the, you know, the realm of media, but they just seem to be unable to do it.
So every time there's an incident, the first thing you see is somebody from the administration up behind the podium Making statements and talking about gun control, and that fuels the other side.
That fuels the side where they think they're just trying to take away all our weapons, because they see this.
They pulled and they found out that he had shut off the function that uploads data to the cloud in October.
And so they were able to get everything up to October, but then that's two full months prior to the attack.
So they said, okay, well, we can't get this.
And the phone has, you know, this default position where if you try the password 10 times and it erases everything.
So they took the phone.
The Bureau took the phone to Apple.
And this was well before they had to go to get a court order, well before it became public knowledge.
They actually went and had numerous quiet conversations with Apple, and they went to Apple and they literally said, you can take the phone, keep it on your campus, keep it in your facility, put it in your lab.
All we're asking is for you to create a systems information file that you can force on that phone, that one phone, And pull the text, which then allows you to brute force the password, right?
And get the texts off of there, get the data off of there that exists.
And then you can destroy the SIF, the systems information file.
You can keep the phone.
We don't even need to touch it.
You know, whatever.
You just give us the shit that's on the phone.
And Apple has been helpful in the past.
They've been helpful in the past.
This time, for whatever motivation, they've decided to draw a line in the sand and say, no, we're not going to do this.
And it's not as if...
They haven't been helpful, and there's an ongoing dialogue, and so it's disingenuous to say that Apple is now the bulwark for privacy, because they have been helpful in the past, and they will continue to be helpful, I suppose, in their own way.
But for this particular phone, for this one time, where they could have held onto the phone, created that SIF, destroyed the SIF, at that moment that they've pulled the text off, say, that's it, that's done.
So now what Tim Cook is saying is, not that it's creating a backdoor.
He's not saying that.
He's saying it creates a precedent.
But the precedent was already that if the Bureau goes through the process that Congress has set and then goes through that process and gets a court order— And the court then looks at it and says, yes, you've got probable cause.
You've got reasonable concern here.
They provide a court order.
Then they go and they make this request for assistance.
I've heard people say to me, and again, I understand.
Don't get me wrong, because I understand fully the importance of finding the right place on the pendulum for security and privacy.
I get that.
I get that.
And that's an important discussion.
I'm not saying it's not.
You should always have that conversation.
But part of that is then during the course of that conversation, Congress, the courts, they make those decisions.
Where does that pendulum, you know, settle between security and privacy?
And then it settles here?
Okay, fine.
Then that's what the Bureau or whomever has to go through to get approval, to get some assistance.
And that's where it stands.
But, you know, to say that – because now you've got all three branches of government have said, yeah, we think that really we could use this information off of this phone.
But I've heard everybody say, well, why don't they just do the rest of the investigation?
Well, of course they've fucking done the rest of the investigation.
They've done all the other investigative steps.
So what are you saying?
In a situation like this, you just want them to do 80% of the investigation, and you know that you've got material on here which may lead to operational activity in finding other people who were involved or finding people overseas who were somehow assisting or whatever it may be.
If you're saying, well, just, no, you know what, for the sake of this...
We're not asking for a backdoor.
They're asking for that one phone.
And that's where this whole thing is really headed south.
And it's become this idea that, you know, which is erroneous.
But I understand what Tim Cook is saying about the precedent, although not really, because again, they've done this before.
For some reason, for this one, they're drawing a line.
So, anyway, but I've heard that.
Why don't they just do the rest of the investigation and skip this part?
What?
I don't follow that logic train.
And then the other people are saying, well, why don't they just get it off the metadata?
And that's another one of those things where people never believed what the government was saying.
But the meta-fucking data was numbers and volume.
That was it.
There was no information to be had there.
You could sit in a fucking room full of metadata and not know what the hell you're looking at.
You had to go through the court process to then get that particular numbers information.
And that's probably going to set a precedent for maybe.
Maybe.
We'll see.
Because it's a little bit different.
What the judge essentially was saying in that case, and it involved a narco-trafficking investigation that was going on, And by the way, this isn't just for terrorism.
Imagine what if this was for pedophilia.
Imagine a large pedophilia ring.
What are you going to say?
No, we don't want to catch those fucking douchebags that are involved in that because privacy?
You know, I understand the privacy aspect, but each case has to be looked at on its merits.
And if you say through the courts and through the Congress that these are the hoops that the Bureau has to jump through, and they jump through those hoops then...
Then what?
Then it's up to each company to decide whether they want to support it or not.
I don't know.
That seems strange.
But anyway, the point being is that the one in New York, the judge essentially was saying, well, look, you want the courts to make a decision on this for something that Congress should really make a decision on this.
And so, in a way, his decision was a pushback against the concept that the...
The Bureau was basing this on, which is a very old law.
And so the judge is saying, look, relying on a law that's a couple hundred years old or whatever, maybe instead we should be having this looked at through the legislature.
And so there was an interesting sort of legality to his response to this.
But it definitely favored Apple.
And sure, that's great.
Let's legislate it.
But do you think that just maybe...
There are times when, from an operational perspective, you might want to move a little bit quicker than asking Congress to take up an issue and debate it and then maybe eventually come up.
So maybe occasionally you're going to have moments like the San Bernardino shooting where you've got a phone in your hand and all you're asking Apple to do is take possession of it.
And who knows?
Maybe their problem is they're worried that if they create the SIF at that moment, someone's going to steal it from them.
One of their employees.
So maybe they've got an internal security issue because then they can destroy it.
The bureau's not asking for that phone back.
They're not asking for that SIF. They're not asking them to do it on any other phone.
See, I understand the common person's perspective.
They don't trust the government, the whole Edward Snowden thing and WikiLeaks thing.
Everybody's freaking out about that.
And then they look at this saying, well, this is the slippery slope.
Again, this is the thing that if the government has access to your phone, but we're talking about a fucking mass murderer and a guy who's already dead and we have one phone.
And here's where, and I think going back to that overriding theme, which is nothing resides in the center anymore.
You're right.
We do have to be concerned about privacy.
And I agree.
Okay, what happens if you know Big Brother?
But there are times when operational concerns probably override at least...
An element of this where a reason that people can exist in the middle and say, yeah, on this occasion, because you've gone through all these orders, and because we've set up this protection now, meaning Apple holds on to it and everything, But, you know, that's not the way it works.
And so, therefore, Apple comes out and says, and then the misinformation, ah, they're trying to create a backdoor to all our Apple devices.
By the way, what do you think Apple does with their devices that they sell in China?
You think the Chinese government would allow Apple – someone ought to talk about this in the media.
Do you think the Chinese government would allow Apple to sell devices that they can't get into?
They openly support counterfeit shit to the point where there's entire stores that have Apple logos, they sell Apple products, and none of it is legit.
No, there's not a rule of law there, even though they've been ...
They were talking about this for a while.
They've been saying, "Oh, it's a new day." And this is, again, this is why you're going back to that ...
Everything goes back in circles, but the idea that we need a leader right now that's reasoned and pragmatic and smart and clear-eyed is you look at China and you look at ...
A, you look at their economy, and their economy is heading south.
Is it?
Yeah, their economy is not doing well.
Their growth projections are way off.
There's always been this belief that their numbers have been cooked in numerous ways.
Xi, the head of China, has been consolidating power.
He's been creating new security apparatus.
He's been hiding behind this anti-corruption drive to some degree, which is, again, part of his consolidation of power.
And this idea that, oh, somehow this rule of law is coming up.
Nobody actually believes that.
And they are continuing to be incredibly aggressive in economic espionage.
I mean, they're not the only ones.
Everybody acts in their own best interest.
But the Chinese have, I don't know, four dozen-plus academic institutions that are funded by the Chinese military, the PLA, that have responsibility for...
We've got economic espionage, developing new means of basically stealing shit.
They've got a couple dozen, at least, information warfare units that we've identified run by the PLA that are specifically designed to hoover up intellectual property and research and development and all the rest of that.
Not just from us.
I mean, from around the globe.
So the idea, yes, the idea that we would do business there and believe somehow that the authorities there in China aren't going to have our shit.
They're not going to have whatever it may be.
A pharmaceutical company that sets up a facility out there isn't going to lose their R&D. Of course they are.
Everybody knows.
Anybody in a serious manner who's doing business out in China knows as soon as you set foot in there and you establish yourself, you know, manufacturing or just sales, whatever it may be, Your information becomes their information.
Well, I have a friend who works for the Bureau, and he was explaining to me How Chinese espionage works in the United States and how they catch people that a guy will come over here and live a completely normal life and won't look like there's anything going on with him whatsoever.
Family guy, no weapons, no crime, no nothing.
Befriend someone who works in some sort of an intellectual capacity, whether it's for some sort of a corporation that makes computers or something that works for the United States government in rocketry or whatever.
They befriend that guy and then slowly...
I know people that can pay you a lot of money for some of the information that you have.
And by the way, this information is out there anyway.
Because she, by doing this, and this sort of is in a roundabout way, we're bringing it all back, puts it in perspective why it's so dangerous that she had this unprotected email problem.
Because by copy and pasting classified information or deciding through her own decision-making process or the people that were with her, what's okay to copy and paste and what's not okay to copy and paste, and not whether or not you go by the established protocols of top secret or not top secret or clearance or whatever clearance level you have.
And the interesting thing is, they don't necessarily care.
I mean, obviously, it blows their skirt up to get top-secret information.
But they'll take anything.
They'll take it all.
They'll take the daily dribble that goes on through her email just to gain a better understanding as to what makes a person tick or who are the people around her.
They're looking for potential targets.
And that's part of it.
You're looking for, you know, where is there a chink in the armor?
Where is there an opportunity...
To get in to her organization.
Is there somebody on the periphery?
It could be a landscaper.
Hey, now I know who landscapes their...
Great!
It's like you're targeting a company.
Who are you going to target?
You're not going to target the CEO. You're going to target the cleaning service.
You're going to target the secretary or the caterer.
Yeah, and again, I get it.
It's like with Benghazi.
People roll their eyes.
Oh, the private email server.
But if you've been involved in this and you understand how aggressive it is out there, again, not just the Chinese, the Russians, everybody's at it.
We need to understand that it was a serious problem.
It was a breach.
And again, going back to the same thing, if it had been me, yeah, sure, I would have been done up.
If it had been somebody else, it would have been banged up and probably done time.
Well, I mean, I don't know what the ins and outs of NSA are in terms of their protocols for protection.
Firewalls on systems at government agencies tend to be, if they're used properly, are pretty robust.
But at the same time...
You know, any human system.
It's like TSA. Is someone going to be asleep at the wheel and somebody gets through with a shoe bomb?
Well, it could happen because it's a human system.
But where do I stand on it?
No surprise.
And, you know, again, it's all based on what your experiences are.
And I get the fact that people, you know, consider him a hero or a whistleblower or whatever they want to call it.
You know, he signed paperwork that said he was going to protect national security interests, that he was going to properly protect the information that he was given responsibility for seeing.
And he didn't do that.
And he also, despite what people may want to believe, He caused a lot of damage, a tremendous amount of damage in terms of information that was released about the way that we do things here, sources and methods that were of extreme interest to not just a terrorist organization, but extreme interest to Russian interests, extreme interest to Iranians.
Well, having that conversation is always good, but we can have that conversation without him doing what he did.
And we should.
And part of that responsibility lays on an aggressive and inquisitive, constantly aware checks and balances that exist within government.
So the intel committee, and that was the Senate and the intel committee, and all these people, they tend to play a game in Washington.
They know what the fuck's going on.
Like with the interrogation program or rendition program, these people were briefed.
They knew what the hell goes on, but there's a political game in Washington where they get to express outrage when something becomes a political football.
Hey, we're talking about it, and that's important.
Again, I keep going back to that.
I'm not – what's the word?
I'm not – unsympathetic doesn't sound right.
I understand I appreciate the importance of finding the proper place on the pendulum, but I have probably an overriding appreciation for security because of what I did.
And I understand that other people have an overriding appreciation for privacy because they didn't have the same experiences or they've had different experiences.
And so that's great.
I appreciate that.
And all I'm saying is I look at it from my perspective.
I don't look at him as a hero or whistleblower in any way.
I signed the same agreements, and I'm expected to live up to those just like anybody else who does.
He found a way that he thought was appropriate to make his point.
I have no idea what goes on in his head.
I just would have thought it would have been nice if, I don't know, we made the point in a way that also protected our national security interests a little bit better.
And there were lots of little bits and pieces because he misappropriated, he stole a lot of information that was then essentially – if anybody thinks that Edward Snowden was smarter than the Chinese authorities or the Russians and that they didn't get a hold of everything and that somehow he just secreted he stole a lot of information that was then essentially – if anybody thinks that Edward Snowden was smarter than the Chinese authorities or the Russians and that they didn't get a hold of everything and that somehow he just Thought.
Last time I don't believe that Edward Snowden is smarter than the PLA and the resources of the FSB in Russia.
I just – Maybe I'm wrong.
Maybe he's like the Lex Luthor of IT. I don't think so.
But as an example, the surveillance program supposedly that we had against European leaders.
Remember the outreach with Angela Merkel and the fact that we're listening in on some of her conversations, the ones that we would have access to.
Oh, my God.
Really?
Really?
Because you know what they're doing?
They're listening on the conversations of their allies.
And I mean, the French, the former head of the DGSC, the French Intel Service, turned to the head of France at one point when the head of France was, you know, sacre bleu and how could we be doing this?
And, you know, and the former head of the Intel Service looked at a French guy and said, are you fucking kidding me?
Yeah, I mean, the hand-wringing and all the, oh, I can't believe that our Americans would be, allies would be doing this.
So they kind of assumed I guarantee you what was going on in the back rooms was the intel service directors were all, you know, sitting down and I would hope to think that our director was looking at them and saying, what the fuck?
You know, and they were probably having a, you know, having a drink and saying, yeah, okay, we get it.
We get the joke.
You know, everybody's doing this.
And so the idea that somehow we're the bad guy...
Look, the French intel service is incredibly aggressive, as an example.
And there have been numerous cases where they've targeted U.S. corporations for economic espionage.
And the idea that somehow...
You know, people should be shocked that one nation is acting in its own self-interest and listening to other nations.
Again, same theory with economic espionage.
We better hope we're playing offense and defense in the way the world actually works.
It'd be great if we all held hands and, you know, winged monkeys on unicorns, flew out our asses, and we could all sing songs together, but it's not how the world works.
But this rabbit hole is kind of important to talk about because you actually have some pretty deep knowledge about this rabbit hole.
And this is some of the things that get speculated left and right and back and forth, and either you take one side or the other, and everybody argues about it.
I mean, no one wants the government to have unchecked access to your emails, your phone calls.
Sometimes it seems like the U.S. is the only one that apologizes for it.
But if you did nothing else other than approach foreign policy from the perspective that every nation acts in its own best interest, we wouldn't get caught short as many times as we do.
Look at Putin.
I mean, Putin absolutely is an old-school KGB guy.
He's always regretted that the Soviet Union fell apart.
He considers it a huge catastrophe, probably the biggest catastrophe, he called it, of the 20th century.
And he's been busy ever since trying to figure out how to rebuild at least influence, if not territory.
And in 2005, he made one of his first statements about how it was a horrible thing that the Soviet Union fell apart.
And then a couple of years later, three years later, the troops rolled into Georgia.
And they still own territory in Georgia.
And people don't talk about that.
Abkhazia and South Ossetia.
They've still got large numbers of Russian troops in there.
So he got that.
He got Crimea.
Eastern Ukraine is, for all intents purposes, going to become part of Russian territory.
And he's always been the same way.
He says what he means.
He acts in Russia's best interest.
The Chinese are the same way.
We always seem to feel like that's unusual.
I mean, I remember times when we'd be engaged in some counterinsurgency operation overseas.
We'd dress them up and we'd give them money and party hats and we'd train them.
And then they'd go out, meaning the foreign service, you know, the foreign military, and they wouldn't act like we would, right?
There would be problems or there'd be human rights abuses or whatever.
And, you know, the Senate, you know, the Intel Committee would say, I can't believe this.
How come they're not, you know, well, because they're a fucking different culture, just like you talked about earlier with the Middle East.
They're You can dress them up and give them money and training, and they're always going to act differently.
It's just the way of the world.
But we never seem to quite get that.
And it's sort of like this acting in your own best interest.
We always seem to be, well, we do it, but we feel like it's unseemly somehow.
So is this a part of the problem with people getting access to information on how the world works?
As time goes on, that information becomes more and more accessible and people get more and more upset about things that essentially have always been like this.
Well, it seems incredibly confusing, and I don't think anybody's ever offered up a reasonable scenario where you could take places that are like the Middle East and straighten it out.
No one's offered some sort of a step or a program where you can say, well, here's where they are now.
Here's the human rights violations.
Here's the real problems they have with religious freedom.
This is how we can get them out of that, and we can get them to a place where the United States is, where people have much more freedom.
Yeah, I'm here to tell you, again, I've been to a lot of places, and we won the lottery.
And I realize everybody's coming from different positions and places in life, and it's pretty fucked up for a lot of people here sometimes.
But this is a good place to be overall, and there still is the potential, even though it may seem far off sometimes for some people, but there's still the potential.
If you work hard, you can do really well in this country.
And even those times when, I don't know, maybe I'm just kidding myself.
Maybe I'd like to continue believing that and maybe, who knows, maybe it's not true.
I got young kids, so I'm going to continue to believe it's true.
I mean, 1776, George Washington knew the importance of intelligence.
He talked about the importance of intelligence in the Revolutionary War.
I mean, the first...
I'll probably get this wrong, but the first entry into the...
What do they call that book of expenditures?
You know, that accounting book that they kept?
Basically, the first entry was to pay for spies.
And it was.
It was to establish a spy network, I believe, outside of Boston.
And so they understood, even at that time, the importance of it.
So yeah, to your point, there's been telephones, there's been people listening in.
And...
And you need to check and balance that.
You need to ensure that it's not overreaching.
I get all of that.
I'm just saying that when you do find that point and Congress enacts the law and the courts go with it and say yes, when you do that, and you're jumping through the hoops that have been put in place, and you've got to—theoretically, again, you would always like to think that we have committees up on the Hill that are inquisitive and aggressive in their questioning and are paying attention— But when all that is done,
then you'd like to think if you have an operational concern and you go through those hoops that, yeah, you'd be able to get the job done.
Kind of bringing it back to the Apple thing, I guess.
So I think kind of in a lot of ways, we're talking about a lot of similarities.
That we have, on one hand, we have the ideal utopia, we have the shining light of honor and dignity, and then you have the dire consequences of the worst-case scenario, right?
One thing you learn in the agency is that there's nothing black and white about the world.
And you learn, the CIA is very good at teaching you how to sort of exist in the gray areas and understand that you're never going to get all the information that you want.
You know, it's not like the beach books or the feature films where they get all the details and, okay, now it's time to go.
Let's do that operation.
You know, I remember most of the stuff that I was doing, most of the operations, you know, in the back of mind, you're thinking, boy, I hope this doesn't get fucked up, you know, because if you wait for all the information, you know, before you do something, something bad's going to happen.
It's going to be a fucking goat rope.
You've got to get off the X at a certain point, and usually that's before you have that full comfort.
So they teach you very well how to do that, how to do risk versus gain calculations and how to figure out, okay, this is what we're going to have to do.
But you've got to make a decision at some point.
The world would like it to be, again, sort of a zero risk.
That's why we always talk about counterterrorism.
They say, well, when are we going to get this over with?
Part of it, I think, the biggest problem now is the speed of information, right?
So everybody's a fucking journalist on Twitter.
Everybody's a judge and jury through the speed of information.
Nobody bothers to check facts anymore.
Everybody's racing to get ahead of the news cycle, which exists in minutes now instead of hours.
I mean, remember, it used to be, what, you know, like the 5 o'clock news, the 11 o'clock news?
All day long, journalists had time to check their facts and their stories and their sources because they just had that one newscast or two newscasts in the evening.
And now, you know, let's fucking throw it out there and hope that, you know, we don't get it wrong.
So I think that weighs on anybody who's in politics.
Maybe it serves a good purpose as well.
It keeps, who knows?
Maybe it keeps them more honest.
I don't know.
But anyway, I think that has something to do with it.
2009 to 2006, January 2016. Yeah, if we could throw up like a seven-year split on Trump now and see what Trump will look like after seven years in office.
But he's a smart son of a bitch and he was fortunate in a lot of ways and he governed well and he understood the importance of compromise and negotiation.
And that was still at a time when you could do that, I think.
I don't know whether it's still possible.
I mean look at some of the shit that comes out of the Capitol Hill where – You know, I mean, Scalia is barely dead.
People are saying, we're not going to listen to anybody who gets proposed to, you know, come in here and replace him.
And you think, well, you probably could have held off on that statement for a little while.
It's got to be a good feeling, too, with that last day.
I mean, I know there's obviously a lot of sadness and there's a lot of worry about, well, how am I going to be remembered?
But that last fucking day when you finally get to hand over the keys, get the hell out of there and go have a few pops and not have to worry about waking up in the middle of the night because some disaster is going on.
I think there's certain things you do and you don't do, and whether it's him or whether it's any other president, I think there's something to be said for maintaining the dignity of an office.
Well, you remember that point in time, it was a very sad point in time, when all of a sudden you realized that the Trans Am, the Camaro, the Mustang, they all started to look just the same.
Remember that car that had the plastic seats with the handles in the back facing towards the rear?
What the hell was that?
That was like a Subaru.
What the fuck was that thing?
It had plastic little seats in the back where you could put the kids, and they had little handles.
That was the safety feature.
It was little plastic handles that the kids could hold onto as you drove down the road at the highway doing 70 miles an hour after having a couple of martinis at the old club.
My dad had a Chevy that had the rear-facing wagon seat, and me and my brother would fight over it.
And we literally would go to the officer's club.
My dad would have a few drinks, and then he'd pile all the kids back in the Chevy wagon and barrel down the highway as we're all flying back and forth over the seats arguing with each other and fighting about who gets the rear-facing seat.
I remember it was an option on a, because I got a Land Rover one time and it was probably, okay, to be fair, it was more than 10 years, it was probably 15 years ago.
But I remember that was an option to get was the back seats.
And I thought, at what point am I ever going to use these?
Yeah, maybe the FJ40, but that was way more than 10 years ago.
See, the FZJ80 was a classic Land Rover, and now it's like, I think they stopped making that in 97 or 98, and that's a classic one because it has a solid front and rear axle, and those motherfuckers can drive over everything.
They just, you know, to this day, people refurbish them.
I think he probably sensed, in part because he'd had some problems with one of the One of the facilitators that he had, and he was looking actually to replace one of his people that actually dealt with him, sort of his liaison guy between the Pakistanis and Al Qaeda and him.
And so, you know, if we'd held off or if we hadn't found him and then only had a month to plan, you know, it could have gone completely the other way.
We could have shown up and it would have been an empty place.
Because he was actively looking to move to a different location.
Well it's kind of funny that the way they had to do it was do it in the middle of the night, land helicopters, one of them crashed, break in, and then shoot them that way.
There were, I don't know, seven or eight plus guards, but the women and children were there.
And the decision was made, no, we can't do that.
We can't fire a rocket down there because we don't want to take out all those people.
That's an indication, you know, again, people are going to say, well, fuck you, you just want to go after the oil, but, you know, trying to do the right thing.
Designing an insanely complex operation like that.
But it's interesting that they've released these documents at this point in time.
And it's fascinating to see kind of inside his mind a little bit more and understand to what degree he did or didn't have sort of operational understanding of what al-Qaeda was doing at the time.
Yeah, so anyway, for those of you that are looking for something to read...
If you showed what actually happened, the audience would kill themselves out of boredom because you'd be watching eight years worth of surveillance and eight years worth of struggling to understand what one credit card receipt meant in Relation to something that was happening over across the other side of the world.
All these things that go into this that nobody ever sees.
So they condense it down.
It turns into a movie.
And then up on the hill in Capitol Hill, they get confused and they don't realize that maybe it's a movie.
I don't know if you remember that kerfuffle they had after they released it where they called them back and said, well, maybe over the interrogation program, maybe you didn't tell us everything.
And you think, well, no, they just made a fucking movie.
And there were people that were upset with Zero Dark Thirty because they thought it put too much importance on interrogation, and there were people that thought it didn't put enough importance, and I'm thinking, it's a fucking movie.
Well, there's a movie that they made, I don't know if you saw it, the Foxcatcher movie that's based on Mark and David Schultz, the wrestlers.
That movie is just filled with bullshit.
And it's a real problem for Mark Schultz, who was an Olympic gold medalist, one of the best wrestlers the United States has ever produced.
And that guy's alive, okay?
His brother got shot by that crazy DuPont fuck, but Mark's alive.
And they changed all sorts of shit in that movie that doesn't make any sense.
Historical shit about his career as a wrestler, his career as a UFC fighter.
They even changed the time where the UFC was invented.
They made the UFC, they made him watch the UFC like...
Almost like six or seven years I think before it ever really existed and then on top of it the guy he watched fight was a historical character Big Daddy Goodrich Gary Goodrich was one of the original pioneers of MMA and he in the movie is watching Gary Goodrich fight Paul Herrera when in reality he fought Gary Goodrich in his first UFC fight Also, in the movie, Mark Schultz isn't fighting in the UFC in his first fight.
He's fighting in some small organization and it's like kind of sad and he's fighting a white Russian dude.
He fought a black guy named Gary Goodrich.
Gary Goodrich is a historical figure.
It's like it's historical fact in the world of mixed martial arts that Mark Schultz was like one of the greatest talents from wrestling to ever compete in MMA. And Gary Goodrich was a real pioneer, a guy who was very dangerous, and Mark took him down at will, and it was kind of crazy to watch how good of a wrestler he was.
Well, in the movie, they bullshitted their way through all that.
But Mark went crazy after the movie was released and went on this Twitter rampage.
We were supposed to do a podcast about it, but he's an odd guy.
He's very elusive.
He's talked about doing it, and I said, look, man, let me know when you want to do it.
I'll fly you out.
We'll talk about it.
But he went on this rampage about it on Twitter, and then someone compiled a website where they talked about all the things that they got wrong in that movie and all the stuff they made up in that movie to make it More interesting.
Anytime anybody releases a story, or anybody signs over something, or anybody picks up a book and says, I'm going to make a movie out of this, and that's it.
It becomes an editorial process.
It's like saying, how does raw intelligence get out of the field and then suddenly become something that's not?
Well, it gets into this editing process, and you've got a bunch of people taking a whack at it over at the National Security Council, and eventually, they've got a spin on it.
I wanted to ask you one question before we get out, because I think we're closing in on the three-hour mark.
The interrogation school that you were talking about, like, what do they do to you when you're in an interrogation school to try to get you to understand what it's like to break?
Anyway, the point being is, yes, that enhanced interrogation techniques including sleep deprivation, which is probably, at the end of the day, sleep deprivation, white noise, stress positions...
An interrogation facility is a very finely controlled, very labor-intensive place.
And it's not like...
People think, wow, it's like Abu Ghraib.
Well, Abu Ghraib wasn't an interrogation facility.
Abu Ghraib was a military holding cell run by people that didn't have the experience.
They basically turned it over to junior officers and people that Shouldn't have been in there running a facility like that.
And it was completely wrong.
But an interrogation facility, you go in and it's all about doing your homework.
You don't ever go in and sit down with a detainee unless you have done all your homework.
You know where you want this conversation to go.
You know the questions you want to ask.
You don't want to appear to be wavering.
You don't want to appear to be unsure.
And if you don't do your homework, it's like a polygraph.
If the polygraph operator doesn't do his homework, lie detector, if he doesn't do his homework, that exam is fucked.
It's not a science, so it doesn't work in the sense that, yes, it will tell if you're lying or not.
It's a tool in the kit bag.
Of understanding what kind of person you're dealing with.
So for some people it works because they feel guilty about everything, right?
And so they remember that in 1902 they stole a pen and now they feel bad about it so they're going to, you know, and so the physiology of it is starting to react.
Right.
And that allows for the operator to go, well, there's something strange about that question.
They reacted a little bit differently.
They're breathing, you know, whatever it may be, the sweat.
But I guess my point being is that or interrogations or even negotiations or interviews.
I mean, if you're out there and your job is to interview people, well, then...
You know what it's like.
You've got to know who you're talking to.
And that's how it becomes effective.
But in training, yeah, you go through all these things and it can be fairly intense.
But the idea, again, part of it is to show, well, look, this is what it does.
This is how you can deal with it.
This is how you stay close to something that's plausible.
It's like an alias or a backstory, whatever you want to call it.
You want to try to keep it close to the truth.
The problem that people have in interrogation sometimes is they'll say something that's not true.
Now they've got to remember that.
Then they go back in for another session.
They got to remember what they said before.
Now if they say another lie, now they got to remember those two things.
And it's pretty soon after three or four interviews, they're trying to remember this string of lies where what you really want to do is you want to try to keep it as close as possible to, you know, whatever the truth may be so that you don't have to spend all your time struggling to remember what was the hell I said last time.
So anyway, I don't know where I'm going with that other than to say that it's...
And whether it's military, whether it's my old outfit or whomever, it's an important part of training because, you know, again, you have to understand what's possible now.
It's a changed world, right?
The DOJ and the White House and everything came out and said...
Most of the time, all the information we got, basically, if people took the time to go through DOJ memos and look at the actual information...
Most of what we did was based on conversing, based on knowing who you're talking to, doing your homework, figuring out how the pieces fit together, and talking to people.
But those people don't have much incentive to talk sometimes if they know that, well, you can't do shit to them anyway.
It's like all the other discussions we've been having in terms of...
You know, people base this on their experiences, and so there's people that you're never going to shift off this position, you're never going to shift off of this other position.
It was all torture, or it's not, and there's some things that exist between talking to a detainee and what is torture.
If you read what took place, people read those DOJ memos and realize how much it was, if they actually took the time and understand all the back and forth that took place between the field and headquarters over, well, can we do this?
Can I put my hand on his chest and push him against a wall?
Well, okay, build a fake wall so it's not, can you do this?
Okay, no.
Can I, what can I do?
And there was back and forth and back and forth over what could be done.
And yeah, okay, it's not supposed to be nice and it's not pleasant.
And we can argue, and obviously people do.
Torture is wrong, and we shouldn't do it, but do I think that there were some things like a sleep deprivation or stress positions or noise?
What's a stress position?
Well, you know, like put your forehead against the wall and walk back.
Lean your head against the wall and walk back and stay in that position for 15 minutes or whatever.
Alright, you say you shouldn't be torturing, but what if you have someone who knows that a 9-11 is about to take place and you've got to get information out of them?
What other ways are there if you have a small window of time?
You keep them standing or you keep moving them from place to place or you pump in some Arabic music or baby crying or whatever it may be.
And you just keep them awake.
Again, it's labor intensive because you've got to keep checking on them, making sure they're awake.
But you do that in a controlled environment.
We're not talking about five days of this.
And again, if people took the time to understand or read, they would realize there were a lot of doctors, psychiatrists involved that were saying, yeah, you can or you can't do this.
It wasn't, you know, again, I get conflicted because I understand why people are so emotive about it, and I get that.
And I do agree there's...
You know, you have to look at what you can and can't do, and you have to be very, very critical about that, and you have to be very careful.
But I guess I keep coming back to the same thing, is we've kind of given up to Ghost.
You know, from now on, going forward, everybody out there knows what we can and can't do.
And so whether we were going to do it or not, which we weren't in terms of the torture side of things, they didn't know that.
And so you could speed the process up of getting them to comply to some degree, because they didn't know what was coming down the pike.
And you keep them on the back foot, and you keep them guessing.
And that's your advantage in a situation like that.
But yeah, again, I keep going back to the same thing.
I get it.
I understand why people are so...
And to be fair, the left really did a great job of framing the argument.
They really took it and said, you're either talking to somebody or it's all torture.
And so people say, well, I can't believe you would put somebody in a stress position, or you would make them uncomfortable, or you would keep them awake for 36 hours.
I can't believe you would do that.
Really?
I mean, what the fuck do you want to do?
Of course, and we'd always try.
You'd always try to develop relationships with people.
That is, in fact, the best way to do it.
Find out about their psychology.
Try to find ways to get them on side, to get their sympathy or to bring them on board.
Whatever you can do.
But to just say, we're taking all these other things out of the kit bag, whether we're ever going to use them or not, and here's all we can do.
You're pretty much guaranteed that there's a lot of people out there who are walking around in Syria and Iraq for ISIS carrying a field manual in their back pocket who know exactly what we can do and we can't do now.
Here's where people would say, I can't believe it.
Guantanamo has always been more about...
A holding facility.
And you could argue that the, depending on how you want to frame it, if you want to say it was all torture, fine, then the torture or the enhanced techniques, whatever, for the most part took place overseas in facilities that, you know, we were running that were temporary or our host countries were running.
And that's where I would much rather have, we treat people a lot better than some of our allies do, frankly, and particularly a lot of our Middle Eastern allies.
And err on the side of caution when we're picking people up off the battlefield?
Yes.
Did we do a lot of good by removing a lot of these people and some of the key players off the battlefield and out of the operational system within Al-Qaeda and some of their supporting elements?
Yes.
So it's not a satisfying answer because it's not black or white.
You don't hear us talking about catching a lot of people anymore.
And part of the reason why is because you'd rather just paint that target and blow the fuck out of them than risk your career Picking up somebody and then getting accused of mishandling a detainee or all the crap that can happen because suddenly they've decided a program for capturing somebody and bringing them back to Guantanamo or wherever is not possible.
So what you've found over the years, recent past, is it's a lot easier to just smoke them than to pick them up.
I hate to say that.
I mean, that's a sad thing to say.
And so what does that mean?
From an operationally efficient point of view, that means your pipeline of potential intelligence is drying up.
Everybody was getting their ass kicked for being involved in an approved program, whether it was rendition or an interrogation program or whatever part of that or periphery.
People look at the drone program and think, wow, that's really expanded under Obama.
What if they come up with a way one day to actually...
I mean, I know that they have something called FMRI, functional magnetic resonance imagery, I think it's called, where they've used it, I believe, in India.
It was a real problematic case because they convicted someone for murder because they had functional knowledge of the crime.
I talked to this neuroscientist who was kind of an expert in fMRI, and she said there's a huge problem with that and that would never fly in the United States because functional knowledge of the crime could have been established through her interrogation process, through questioning, through asking her about the case.
She could have functional knowledge of the crime scene.
So, like, proving it through an fMRI, she's like, it doesn't work.
So what they're convicting someone on is something that would never fly in America.
I really appreciate your candor and your openness and exploring some uncomfortable and difficult subjects and giving us some inside information that It's very difficult for people to get any other way.
Unless they're talking to a guy like you.
A lot of it is speculation and bullshit and posturing and reading websites that might be completely inaccurate.