Mike Baker, a security expert and Idaho resident, contrasts his family’s rugged upbringing—including Sluggo’s six-year-old groin punch—with Joe Rogan’s observations on public lands, citing $3.17B hunters in Minnesota fund wildlife and law enforcement. They debate Trump’s intelligence community tensions, Snowden’s leaks vs. Manning’s commutation, and geopolitical shifts like Iran-Russia arms deals in Iraq/Egypt, warning U.S. retreat fuels extremism while dismissing Clinton’s cyber-military threats as unrealistic. Baker argues Putin’s KGB-driven expansionism demands pragmatic strength over moralizing, critiquing past interventions like Afghanistan’s corruption under Karzai, and mocks media tribalism—where critics root against their own country’s success—forcing dialogue into chaos. [Automatically generated summary]
There's actually these foldable skis and you strap these things on and they can stuff in your pack when you're done and apparently it's way better than snowshoes.
So when guys are trying to traverse like really fresh snow, no path, thick stuff, They're doing cross-country skiing.
Well, listen, man, we were saying right before people from Idaho don't like to talk about how beautiful Idaho is because they're trying to keep people out.
And this is something that I put on my Instagram yesterday and the day before as well because there's a bill that got introduced that's being proposed to sell off public lands.
And there's this one representative.
What's that fellow's name?
Jason Chavitz.
Jason Chavitz from Utah.
He introduces Bill, how dare you, Jason, to try to sell it.
Look, he's a young fellow.
He doesn't fucking know what he's doing.
He looks like he's in his 30s.
Just, people don't realize how lucky we have it to have so much of this country, public land like that, where you can, and it's not just hunting, folks.
You know, people say, oh, you care about hunting.
No, listen to me.
You could hike this.
You could fish.
You can camp.
You could just go lie down and stare at the stars.
It's your land.
This is all ours.
And it's unprecedented in this world.
There's no other country that has anything remotely like our public land system.
You want to see money for conservation for hunting.
You want to see some staggering numbers.
The Twitter page, Rocky Mountain Elk Federation, RMEF, and they post these charts that show the billions and billions of dollars that go towards conservation every year, all because of people who fish and hunt.
You go to Cabela's, and you know, I always wondered about this.
You go to Cabela's, you buy something at Cabela's, or Bass Pro, wherever you got in your local area, And, you know, routinely they're saying, well, would you like to donate a dollar to, you know, conservation fund?
Would you like to donate a dollar to, you know, of course you would.
Plus the percentage of your sale goes directly to it anyway.
If you buy hunting equipment, a certain percentage, I forget what the number is, but it's a good healthy percentage that turns out to be millions and millions of dollars every year.
There we go.
Just Minnesota, look at this.
More people hunt or fish in Minnesota, 1.65 million, than double the combined populations of Minneapolis, St. Paul, Rochester, and Duluth.
And $3.17 billion is the amount spent by 1,649,000 hunters and anglers in a single year in Minnesota.
That's an incredibly large part of the economy, folks.
And a giant chunk of that goes to preserving wildlife habitat, to preserving wetlands, to making sure that animal populations are kept healthy, to make sure that predator populations are kept in balance, and that ranchers aren't impeded upon by mountain lions and wolves and shit like that.
You know, and then you think of the other states all combining together, you know, it's the reason why we have more white-tailed deer in America today than when Columbus landed.
That's a fact.
Look at this, Michigan.
$576 million in state and local tax revenue.
Enough to support the average salaries of nearly 11,000 police and sheriff's officers.
Girls, you can say, you're going to have to tell me, you can do this, but you have to tell me.
My guys are like, you know, like Kato from, you know, the Pink Panther.
I walk in the house and they're like lurking somewhere.
And then their whole goal is to try to punch me in the junk.
And they think that's hilarious.
And they, the, the, uh...
The middle one, again, the middle one, Sluggo, he caught me one time when I came in the door, the front door of the house, and I was carrying a bag.
I'd just gotten off the plane.
I was carrying a bag, and before I could even put the bag down and say hello, and the kids were kind of coming down the stairs, you know, I thought it was just like a Norman Rockwell thing, you know, they're going to come hug their dad and adore me a little bit, you know, and daddy's home.
And Sluggo comes around the corner out of nowhere and says, Dad, and just punches me square in the nuts.
Not appointed, but he's brought somebody in as an advisor on that who is, you know, against vaccinations, whatever that term is.
And the intel thing...
There's so many ways you can take this.
Basically, it was a self-inflicted wound.
It was unnecessary.
There was no reason for him, in the early stage of this, when that narrative started to build about, oh, there's this rift building between Trump and the intel community, it was because of his tweets, right?
And it was because of him questioning the intelligence about Russian meddling in our election system.
Now, to talk about that just for a second, Of course the fucking Russians were meddling.
The Russians have been meddling in U.S. politics and campaigning over here in a way since they've been around.
You could go back to, and people said this was a fascinating period of time in history, back to like 1941. Go back to when the Russians were still in an alliance and a pact with the Nazis.
And so from the Russian perspective, their goal, their point was to keep the U.S. out of the war.
And so what did they do?
There's an isolationist wing in the States, and Roosevelt was under a lot of pressure.
Roosevelt was becoming very close to Churchill.
He understood the threat.
He was one of the few people that did at the time.
He understood how important it was going to be for America to get into this battle.
The UK was about ready to fall, and so the British were actually running their intelligence operations out of New York.
They had a place over in Rockefeller Center, because they were worried.
The island was going to be run over by the Nazis.
You have this going on.
The dynamic with the Russians was that they were still in this pact, you know, with the Nazis.
Stalin didn't see this coming.
He didn't see that, you know, and the Nazis were running a very large propaganda campaign, a diversion effort to ensure that the Russians wouldn't know that they were about to invade.
So the Russians spent a great deal of time and money and resource here in the U.S. influencing U.S. public opinion about staying out of the war.
There's no reason to be in the war.
Why would you want to get into another war in Europe?
And they bought journalists and placed newspaper articles.
They paid off journalists.
They were setting up associations that were supposedly independent but were run by the Soviets.
They were influencing unions, dumping money into unions and bribing basically to get them to steer their membership to isolationist agenda.
So to say that, oh, I don't know if the Russians were meddling, of course they've been doing it.
And then all the way through the Cold War, you know, this is what they do.
So, you know, but the narrative, because it always has to be simplified, I think as far as the media is concerned, the narrative was that they influenced the election.
Well, no, they were meddling, but they weren't hacking into election systems.
They weren't hacking into voting booths and changing these things.
So when you say meddling, what they were doing is essentially they were getting information that was private, that was being distributed between the Democratic conventions.
Were they involved in whether they directly did the hacking to the Democrats, or were they privy to the information because someone sold it to them or got it to them?
As with most of these things, usually there's cutouts, right?
So there's plausible deniability.
But the Russians have been very adept over the years at creating mayhem, creating chaos around democratic institutions.
Their whole goal I think we're good to go.
I think we're good to go.
Again, a self-inflicted wound.
He hadn't gotten the full briefings yet.
He hadn't seen the intelligence about this.
And prior to that then, he's sending out a handful of tweets saying, I don't know, I questioned it.
It didn't make any sense.
You have all the opportunity in the world to question the intelligence.
And the time to do that, you know, you're sitting there, you're getting the briefings from the heads of the agencies, which happened.
And then if you notice, after that briefing, His tone changed completely.
And he came out and, you know, okay, well, the Russians were involved, right?
And it didn't make any – now he had to walk that back.
So then he goes out to the agency and he has a meeting, which I think was a great thing.
I was really happy to see that he did that.
And so soon in the administration, he goes out to our headquarters out.
Out there in Virginia.
And, you know, he got sidetracked, but that's his personality.
He starts talking about, you know, the inauguration numbers.
He starts talking about the media, you know, the unfair media.
Well, you know what?
You could just go out there, thank the people, say you're looking forward to working with them to protect national security interests, shake some hands and leave.
But it's not in his nature, right?
So he's going to get sidetracked and he's going to talk about other things.
And then that becomes the story.
You know, not other things that he's doing.
He's talking about spending more resource on human intelligence, right?
And that's something that gets talked about and is done in cycles.
So after 9-11, what happened?
Well, suddenly George Tenet, the director at the time, was instructed, you've got to get more officers.
You've got to get more cadre.
We've got to recruit people.
We can't just rely on signals and intercepts and, you know, technology.
So that happens over a period of time.
He's talking about revamping the DNI, or maybe, you know, taking it apart.
Well, that's been talked about for many years.
The DNI was put together after 9-11, and, you know, it's a big layer of bureaucracy, frankly.
James Clapper was the previous guy going in there, running that.
It's going to be interesting because the DNI was no...
from Mike Flynn, who's now the national security guy, he had a rocky relationship with the DNI. He feels like they basically pushed him out of his last position in the intel community.
So it'll be interesting to see how he deals with this issue of, do we restructure?
But I guess my point being is that...
I don't really have a dog in the hunt.
You know, was Trump my preferred candidate?
Well, no, but now he's the president.
And from my point of view, now you want it to work.
Now you do everything possible.
But just like with anybody else, you look for the good and you say that's great.
And if something you don't agree with, well, then you can say that, too.
We got that right in this country.
You know, we don't have to agree with every single thing that any president.
We can disagree with the policies, but we don't have to, you know, slag people off.
And if I veer off and say, well, I don't think President Trump should have veered off and talked about inauguration numbers in the media when he was standing there in our lobby in front of the stars on the wall, you know, I get a couple hundred tweets, you know, saying, you know, you're a fucking idiot.
You know, how could you say that?
Well, I say it because You know what?
How is that somehow insulting?
You know, I'm gonna like some of the things that he does.
I'm not gonna like some of the things he does.
That's the way it works, right?
I don't know.
I'm veering down a rabbit hole right now, but I think it's because I'm getting pissed off because we seem to have gotten away from the idea that nobody's perfect, right?
And everybody that's a dyed-in-the-wool Trump supporter right now, who for the past eight years hated the fact that Obama supporters were adoring of him and said everything he does is brilliant, now some of those folks are doing the same thing with the new president.
You know, like I said, I'll be honest with you.
I'm happy she didn't win.
I'm ecstatic that Hillary Clinton didn't win, frankly.
But that doesn't mean that I've got to now stand up and say everything Donald Trump does is great.
Obviously I'm trying to pick my words carefully here.
Because I'm trying to be diplomatic.
I didn't like what I perceived as a lack of character.
I didn't like what I perceived as...
Again, here's the problem.
I didn't like either of the candidates.
Neither candidate was my choice.
I didn't really have a choice.
I didn't have a dog in the hunt.
But if I looked at her, I just felt like there wasn't anything there.
And I felt like we had the past eight years, I felt like with the previous president, again, I liked some of the things he did.
I didn't like some of the stuff that he did.
But I was always concerned that he didn't have principles that he stood on.
He said, you know what, this is where I draw the line and these are my principles.
This is what I believe in.
And I felt like she was similar in that way.
And I think we've just had enough of sort of that bend in the wind and do whatever we're going to do.
This country's lost a lot of leverage overseas.
And I know people say, well, that's good.
We shouldn't be the police person around the world.
You know what?
The fucking truth is somebody's got to be.
And if we're not at the top of the food chain, that's fine.
We can step off because we want to build more roads here, and we want to spend our money here, and I get that, and that's important.
But if we're not, if somebody's not at the top of the food chain, somebody else will try, or it'll be chaos, or it's a vacuum.
And it's not a community of nations that gathers together and acts in a global community spirit, you know.
Our interests don't align very often with other countries.
We have certain allies where it does.
But no, that's not how it works.
It's chaos out there, and it's pretty nasty at times.
And so I'm a big believer in, yes, we shouldn't be out there policing everything, but we're going to need to, and we should want to be at the top of the heap.
I get this idea, you know, the whole idea of the military-industrial complex controlling all the resources of the world.
I get it.
I totally understand.
But know this.
There are some bad...
Countries out there, not bad people, but countries that are run by dictators, countries that are run by extremely ruthless people, and a lot of them have access to some significant military power.
You know the I mean there's massive criticism the United States and a lot of them are valid it makes a lot of sense but Human beings are just flawed.
This is the most recent country.
This is the newest country.
And this is the only country that exists like this, this experiment in self-government that exists today.
There's nothing like it out there.
And the more you look into it, you have a much more intense and deep understanding of it than I ever will because of your experience in life and all the different places that you've been and all the things that you've seen.
There's no way, if you look at the rest of the world, there's nothing remotely similar to what's going on over here.
This is a crazy place.
It's a crazy place as far as innovation, a crazy place as far as creativity and art and film and comedy and music.
There's so much bubbling in this one part of the world.
And that's, you know, that's a small, you know, a small group and that's fine and it's gonna happen, I suppose.
But, you know, when they're out there talking about oppression and being oppressed in America, My thought is always the same.
I always think, you know what we should do?
We should reenact the standard mandatory service.
Everybody should have to serve two years, whether it's in the military or some international component where you go overseas and you spend a little bit of time in some shithole, and you see how bad it is and how bad it can be.
But all these people that walk around here and talk about it, and I get it, you know...
How did the FBI, and now eventually the FBI came around to the CIA's conclusions, but for a long time the FBI was disagreeing with the CIA about whether or not the Russians had anything to do with hacking and DNC. Yeah, I think the big disagreement was really over motivation, right?
Was that what it was?
I thought it was an evidence-based thing, that they didn't see any evidence that the Russians were involved, which eventually became clear.
Now there was an arrest.
There was an arrest, an unprecedented arrest a couple of days ago, right?
So let's just get, you know, the preponderance of Intel.
Let's see where it leads us.
Some of it's going to be conflicting.
Some of it's not well-sourced.
But let's all see what it tells us, you know.
And so part of it is how they approach reaching a conclusion.
But, you know, they were both going to get to the same place because eventually they sit down and they compare notes.
But part of it was the difference of opinion over the motivation.
And motivation is the toughest thing, one of the toughest things to prove in this business and intelligence.
You know, you can say, okay, they did this.
But, you know, unless you've got a source sitting in the tent who was there and part of the conversation when somebody said, well, you know, this is why or, you know, this is how we're going to do this and this is a reason or...
Without that sort of sourcing or intercepts, it's tough to prove motivation.
So it took a while to kind of get around to that notion.
And it's still, to be honest, it's still a little bit up in the air.
We're probably never going to get it unless, again, we get our hands on a really quality, good source.
That may still be a little bit up in the air.
But the bottom line is, yeah, the Russians were engaged in doing what they always do, covert action, propaganda campaigns, whatever it may be.
Their 30,000-foot view is always the same.
They want to sow a sense of mistrust.
They want to create some chaos.
They want to chip away at the belief that democracy is a great thing.
And they did.
Look how much time was spent talking about the integrity of the election system and whether we actually had a legitimate president or not.
That's a win.
So you've got a couple of colonels in the FSB, which was the old KGB, who undoubtedly have been promoted as a result of that operation.
Because the narrative was Russia hacked the elections.
That's what everybody kept saying, and that's what all these Democrats, these left-wing people, were saying to try to pump up this idea that Trump was not a legitimate president.
Russia hacked the election.
Russia hacked the election.
Well, no.
Someone, maybe Russia, whoever it was, put that Information out that the DNC had sent through private emails, but the information was what they sent.
They didn't hack anything.
They didn't get into any election machines.
They didn't get into the voting machines.
They didn't do anything other than release information that was supposed to be private that indicated a bunch of really shady shit.
They might have dug up some shit about both of those guys.
But Bernie was an interesting guy.
There was not a whole lot of people that are in his position for as long as he is that have the kind of principles he has.
Like, when he was able to say, you know, why don't you release the transcripts of all these different speeches you gave to all these banks that you got paid a quarter million dollars.
And he goes, I'll happily release mine because I don't have any because I wouldn't take a penny from those people.
There's not a whole lot of people who can say stuff like that in a big debate.
Right, because we wouldn't know how fucking corrupt she was.
We wouldn't know that Debbie Wasserman Schultz had done what she'd done, and Debbie Wasserman Schultz wouldn't have gotten fired from the DNC and then immediately got hired by Hillary's campaign.
I mean, they picked her up in a couple of minutes.
How interesting would those conversations, though, in the Kremlin or at FSB headquarters?
Where they're talking about this, and they're thinking about it, and they're planning it.
Someone had to write a note, right?
Someone had to sit and say, you know, I got an idea for an operation.
And they had to say, you know, they're a bureaucracy like everything else.
And so they would have had to sit and figure this out.
It would have made its way to Putin because, you know, this is obviously the concern over the blowback and the publicity of it all.
So Putin clearly knew what was going on.
But again, that's just the way it works.
Stalin knew back in the day, knew exactly what they were doing, trying to influence public opinion here back during the early World War II. Yeah, there's no surprise.
Cyber hacking or whatever, people always go, yeah, well, you don't have any right to talk.
The U.S. does it as well.
Well, yeah.
That's actually a good thing, given how aggressive and how nasty the world is out there and how We're constantly being hit and attacked out in cyberspace.
I mean, yeah, we better hope we're good at it.
And, you know, if people knew how often, how consistently and constantly our commercial and public sector infrastructure is probed and tested and attacked on a daily basis, people wouldn't sleep at night.
One of the big arguments was that the Russians definitely wanted Trump to win because if they didn't, then they would have hacked the RNC and they would have released their emails too.
But that's a hard argument to make because you don't know that they said anything inappropriate.
Well, and there was also attempts to hack the RNC. And the RNC, as would one company to a next, not every company is running the same security protocols on their infrastructure.
So the RNC had different security protocols on their infrastructure, but they were probed and tested and attacked.
You know, that idea that they wanted Trump to win, frankly, if Putin sat there and thought to himself, well, what I want is what's in my and Russia's best interests, well, then I'm going to go with a known quantity.
I'm going to go with Hillary Clinton, because I know what I got there.
Now how much of a factor do you think it is that Hillary was not ever prosecuted for deleting all those emails after a subpoena?
Because it seems like In any other case, if you do something like that, top secret clearance, you're found to have violated it, and you delete all those emails.
And people are tired of hearing about this from the left.
They're like, are you still bringing that up again?
But I gotta think that in light of what you said about them trying to hack into the RNC, but no evidence that they actually got in, but they did get into the DNC, and you think about all the different security errors that they've made, especially with her having that private email server and all that shit with Huma was using the same goddamn computer and printer that...
It's time for, I would say, you know what, that's dishonoring the service, the Secret Service, and you know what, maybe, I'm sure they'll ice her, put her in some admin position.
By the way, did you see that little clip that was making its way around at the inauguration, on the inauguration stand of Bill Clinton checking out Melania?
I mean, there's no one that's really qualified to do it.
And every time someone gets in, it's like, okay, let's see what kind of flaws in your character are going to be revealed by this.
And in that case, when you look at it that way, at least from the point of view of representing a stately sort of like an intelligent, articulate leader, Obama did a great job in that regard.
That's why the people on the left love him, because he was the...
You know, the projection of the intellect.
He was, you know, and fine.
And he was.
He was sort of one of those folks you look at and go, that's our president.
But again, you could say he did certain things well.
And I would say from a foreign policy perspective, it was not good.
But, you know, you got to be able to say there was good and there's bad, you know.
And that's what I'm worried about with the new president is that I'd like to think that all those supporters aren't just going to say everything he does is good, that you still got to But they always do that.
I mean, hear what's going on right now with the Dakota Access Pipeline, where everyone's blaming Trump for this.
They forget this all started while Obama was in office.
All of this, where they were putting easements on people's private land, when they were arresting these ranchers for protesting against it, trying to keep these guys from drilling into their fucking private land.
Suddenly he spends three years naked and in the dark.
Yeah.
No, it's not, you know, the truth is, again, I'm not saying this is from the right wing or from the left wing, I don't give a fuck, but the truth tends to always be somewhere in some defined middle.
The parameters shift on the middle, but, you know.
Yeah, and then the question is, there was a lot of people that thought he was going to pardon Bo Bergdahl, you know, Sergeant Bergdahl, the fellow who walked into the Taliban camp, turned himself in, walked off his post.
I thought Snowden would have been a very interesting one, but apparently what he said, and it made a lot of sense, was the difference between what Chelsea Manning did was, Chelsea Manning was arrested, went through trial, was convicted, and then he pardoned her, commuted her sentence.
That Snowden never faced trial.
And so, because he fled, and because he went to the, you know, essentially our enemy, to Russia, to live there, you can't do that.
Well, I saw it in more of a simplistic operational perspective, because again, what we talked about before, everybody looks at these things from their own life experiences.
My life experiences are different than somebody who hasn't done this.
You know, you sign up your fucking agreements.
You sign, you commit yourself to protect national security.
You commit yourself to treat classified material honorably.
Well, yeah, and I don't necessarily disagree with that, but I think that the point is that...
Yeah, you're right.
What failed us was up on Capitol Hill, where they failed to do what they're supposed to do up there as politicians.
We've got...
There are protocols in place.
And a curious public or a curious people's representatives are always supposed to be having these discussions about where on the spectrum between security and civil liberties and freedom, you know, where does that pendulum rest at any given time?
These people up on the Hill in the intel committees There's a well-worn path from NSA, from the CIA, from others, up to that hill to brief those people on every fucking thing that goes on.
I mean, this just...
And people are going to roll their eyes, but that's the way it fucking works.
And so then there's also this game that gets played in Washington where they pretend like they don't know, and then they get outraged, and they stand up and say, well, I just saw them all angst-ridden.
Horseshit.
Those people didn't ask...
They didn't pursue.
They didn't ask the questions.
They didn't demand that we have these discussions internally.
And so I think politicians in part drop the ball.
They don't do what they're doing.
The healthiest thing we can have, of course, are people up on the Hill who are constantly questioning the system, constantly talking about it.
Because you're right, and it's very important.
You have to figure out where that goes.
Now, another bomb goes off somewhere, and that pendulum's going to swing back to security, and people are going to say, fuck it, I don't care.
You know, check my shoes, do whatever the hell you want to.
But, you know, read my emails, just keep us safe, you know, in particular if it's a big incident, and God forbid, but that's, I guess, my point being is that pendulum's constantly moving.
Because that's where the conspiracy theorists come in.
Whenever something goes on and there's any sort of a terrorist attack, conspiracy theorists jump in and say, this is a false flag because they've been trying to erode our privacy and erode our civil liberties, and this is the way they do it.
So instead of looking at it in a broad perspective, looking at it saying, well, okay, is it possible that a terrorist act took place and now they have to tighten up security because of that?
No.
No, no, no.
People automatically go to know they orchestrated the terrorist attack so that they could tighten up security, because it's this overall global plan to turn this into one world government.
You know, local politics and, you know, you see, in Idaho, hey, look, we're talking about Idaho again.
Everybody's like, oh, for fuck's sake.
But in Idaho, as an example, I can walk down the street in Boise and bump into the governor, lieutenant governor.
We have a nice chat.
They're great guys.
I mean, they're great people.
Ranchers, and, you know, they do this.
And in Idaho, they do, there is a point to this story.
I'll get it to it in a second.
But they have, the legislature just is in office for three months.
They do all the work they need to do, then they get back to their damn jobs, right?
Insurance broker, car guy, rancher, whatever it is.
So it's kind of the way it should be, right?
You don't need people governing you 12 months of the fucking year.
It's not necessary.
See, I forgot the point of the story.
But anyway, you've got this environment where you can watch the local politics.
That's the point of the story.
And you can see the congressman, because I'm on the flights with him all the time, and the senator, Senator Risch, great guy.
He's on the Intel Committee, brilliant guy.
But you see what they have to do to stay in office, particularly the congressman.
They're always campaigning.
They're always raising funds.
They're always politicking.
And you think, that's pretty fucked up.
And so that's why I'm a big fan of term limits and a big fan of saying, you know what, there's nothing set in stone that says our congressmen, congresswomen have to be just two-year terms, right?
We did that in the old days because nobody wanted to be in D.C. because it was a swamp and they had to get back to their farms and actually earn a living.
So, stretch that out to four years, say you can be a congressman for a total of eight years, you get two terms, you can be a senator for two terms, six years each, and then get the hell out, go back to your jobs, do something else.
And I think we would deepen the pool of potential candidates.
We would see other people come up, rise up, maybe take some of the money out of it, maybe.
If I know somebody's going to be in office and on the Ways and Means Committee for 36 years, I'm going to invest a lot of effort and time in that individual if I'm a lobbying firm on K Street in D.C. But if that person's not going to be there, I'll figure out how to work the system, I'm sure.
But it's going to at least shake it up a little bit.
And I think it would take some of that money and influence out.
But I don't know where I was going with that story.
You were just comparing the difference between local politics, where people have an actual job on top of being a local politician.
Yeah, I mean, look, it's a dirty business.
As soon as you're in the business of governing people, you're in the business of controlling people, you're in the business of trying to pass laws that help the people that put you in power in the first place, and it just gets real squirrely.
You can look at the New York Times, and you can pick up the New York Times on any given day, and they've got a front page above the fold story that's relying almost exclusively on anonymous sources.
And supposedly the narrative became then, for those that would like to have believed it, it became, well, the person that wrote it is a very distinguished former MI6 officer from the British Secret Service.
It's usually, I've talked to girls that are dominatrixes, and one of the things they tell you, it's always these guys that are like big-time CEOs, they run corporations, they have all this power.
But it was, you know, again, that got out there completely unsubstantiated, but it became the narrative, right?
And people would start talking about it.
Let me tell you about it.
I overheard a conversation today.
Hopefully these people that I overheard aren't, you know, I hope they are listening.
I was at the hotel I'm staying at while I'm in town, and I was standing at the bar getting a cup of coffee to go early this morning, and there were two fellows sitting in a couple of chairs, and they were talking about the new administration.
And you could tell they were seriously angst-ridden about the whole thing.
They were hyperventilating, very upset about it.
And one of them said, well, I tell you what I'm worried about.
I'm worried about this whole Muslim ban thing and returning to the days of being a white supremacist nation.
What?
Mind you, both these guys were white.
And the other guy goes, doesn't even blink an eye, doesn't even question what this guy just said.
The other guy goes, I'll tell you what I'm worried about.
I'm worried about him signing an agreement with Russia.
And next thing you know, they go to war together in the Middle East, not just one country, the Middle East, to get their hands on all that oil.
And the other guy says, in response to that, says, that's already happening.
Well, people get on their team and they stick with it, whether it's team left or team right, which is why all those people that are anti-war refuse to go crazy about Obama and the drones.
If you look at all the drone deaths that happened during the Obama administration, what percentage of them were innocent civilians, it's pretty staggering.
But you don't hear about that from the left.
All you hear about from the left is that the right is a bunch of warmongers and they're doing terrible things.
Look, terrible things are done.
Right.
That's how the world operates.
It would be nice if we didn't do terrible things.
Yes, it would be.
It would be nice if there weren't places in the world that were horrific right now.
Well, I mean, at the 30,000-foot level, sort of not to start from a different direction, but at the 30,000-foot level, we've lost a significant amount of leverage in the Middle East.
So, as an example, when previous Secretary Kerry from President Obama's administration talked about going to a conference to talk about peace in Syria, It's a joke.
It's ridiculous.
We don't have any influence in there.
We're not the player out there anymore.
Because again, this idea that we're going to step off the world stage a little bit.
As we did that over the past several years, Iran, in particular, has realized more influence, more leverage in that region than they've had in modern times.
And they're ecstatic.
They can't believe their good fortune.
And, you know, I'm not just beaten on that whole, you know, ridiculous nuclear agreement that we ended up signing, which if Secretary Kerry was telling the truth and saying that it was all based on verification, we're kind of fucked.
Because I'm here to tell you, we don't have really good verification on their programs.
And we haven't had it for a long time.
So we rely on the Israelis to a great deal.
And some of our, a couple of our other allies out there Who have better human-sourced intelligence.
But if it was down to us, you know, we'd be flying a little bit blind because it's a tough, tough target.
So anyway, point being is the Iranians, you know, saw an opening over the past few years to do what they wanted to do for a long time.
And now they have an increasingly tight relationship with Iraq, of all places.
The Russians saw the same thing that the Iranians saw in the Middle East.
And we'll get to Israel in a second.
But Israel's just kind of sitting there, right?
Like Fort Apache, the Bronx.
So Israel's sitting there.
They're questioning whether we've got the same sort of commitment to them over the past few years.
Russia sees the same thing the Iranians see.
So Russia goes in and they start doing what?
Well, they've signed weapons agreements, arms agreements with Iraq, of all places.
Iraq.
They're selling hardware to the Iraqis after everything we were doing and all the blood.
And then they've done the same thing with Egypt.
They've signed weapons agreements, significant weapons agreements with Egypt.
They haven't had a relationship with Egypt since the Nasser days, going all the way back.
Increasingly, you know, obviously the Russians, you know, they were never ever going to give up on what they had in Syria.
They've got one port for their Black Sea Fleet.
That's it.
And it's in Syria.
They're not going to...
The idea that we were going to work together, this is one of those fallacies, again, where you think, well, maybe, you know, our interests are aligned as far as fighting ISIS. No, they're fucking not.
They are not at all.
And so the idea that somehow we were going to, you know, work, you know, and that Russia had the same sort of agenda, Russia was never, never going to let a side go, unless they had a rock-solid replacement who was, you know, on their team.
So they've created this alliance.
Turkey, in the meantime, is kind of slid in there as well with that same pact.
Again, because we kind of stepped off the stage, and people were curious, or not curious, but people were confused.
Where does America stand?
What are our commitments?
And when we don't say it out loud, when we don't prove it, then they start looking elsewhere.
So Germany and Turkey start creating an alliance.
The UK and China create economic alliances.
You know, France and Russia working together, again, in counterterrorism.
You start getting these weird alliances that have been built up over now the past recent few years, and then we're surprised that somehow the European Union is kind of coming apart a little bit at the fabric.
And so, anyway, but the point being is then Israel sitting there, Fort Apache, the Bronx, obviously Netanyahu and President Obama not exactly the tightest of relationships.
And You know, they don't have a lot of options.
It's not like they could look around and say, well, we'll align ourselves with somebody else to protect what is obviously an existential threat for them.
They don't have a lot of options.
It's pretty much us.
And so that kind of creates the environment that we currently exist in.
Now, obviously, there's A feeling that there's a bit of a sea change and that the US is recommitting itself to Israel, to its alliance.
Look, it's the only democracy, legitimate democracy out there.
Again, like with any alliance, we should always be able to question and everything.
But we should understand that we've got to make these things as tight, you know, so that there's no visible daylight between us and our key allies that others, because they're always looking for that daylight, that others could play off of and look to take advantage of.
So that's a 30,000-foot look at...
At the region.
It's very disconcerting.
There are six or going on seven failed states in the Middle East right now.
And every one of those poses, in a sense, a threat to Israel because...
And, I mean, Libya, it doesn't get much in the press, because the previous administration had no interest in talking about it, because they had pushed for the regime change in Libya.
And...
That was a disaster.
Again, I don't want to relitigate Iraq or Afghanistan or anything else.
What you were saying earlier was that this idea that we shouldn't be involved in policing the world.
The real problem with that is when you pull back, you create this vacuum.
When you remove leaders, as brutal as they are, you create a vacuum.
And as horrible as Saddam Hussein is, It was almost better for those people when that guy was in power than having what's going on right now, which is essentially chaos.
Not funny, it's terrible to say that that way, but the strange thing about Libya was, look, Gaddafi was working on our behalf in the world of counterterrorism for several years leading up to his being removed.
The only folks that were involved in that exercise that really had national interests in Libya were the French and the Italians.
And they somehow convinced the previous administration to get involved and that it was a good idea.
And now, I mean, look, Libya's got, what, 130 some odd tribes.
It's even worse than Iraq in the sense of sort of a fractured tribal environment.
And It's a disaster.
So what I mean by each failed state potentially poses a threat to Israel is that what you get is you get the sucking sound as all the air leaves the country and it becomes chaos.
And chaos is where a group like the Islamic State or Al-Qaeda or Boko Haram, that's where the extremists make their money.
That's where they make their hay.
So they gravitate to places like that.
It's guaranteed.
You know, so I don't know how it's way above my pay grade when you talk about, well, what does President Trump do now with the Middle East?
Well, he met with Mattis and he met with a bunch of folks over the Pentagon today.
And one of the things he said is, you know, we're going to take action and destroy Islamic State.
Well, good luck with that.
You know, that's one of those things where it's a nice soundbite, but nobody should actually think that if we somehow rid Iraq and Syria of the Islamic State, that we've solved the problem.
We're going to install democracy in Iraq or something.
The Afghans still don't have a clue what we were trying to sell them.
They don't have a fucking clue.
And a guy that worked for me when I started the business, the business had been up and running for about a year, and I had a Russian working on staff, a very interesting cat, was a former GRU, military intelligence, and had been a tank driver.
And he had been out in Afghanistan during the Soviet occupation.
We're still carrying some shrapnel around for that.
And when we went into Tora Bora, I remember he came up to me, he was visibly shaken, and he said, that was brilliant, really brilliant, but don't stay.
He says, they're like cockroaches.
You step on them over here, and they come up over here.
And you fucking step on them, and he was really livid.
You could tell this guy just was, you know, he was starting to go off.
And he was absolutely correct.
We should have gone in there, did our tactical mission, which we're very, very good at, and then left.
But we were feeling the pangs of guilt from having left previously, after we had that operation to get the Soviets out of there.
And by the way, you know...
I'm one of those who are happy to admit that maybe if you sell shoulder-fired weapon systems to, you know, a bunch of folks in Afghanistan, at some point it's going to turn out to be a bad idea.
So you have to go back and buy them back.
Yeah, that was a piece of work.
But anyway, point being is we should have left at that point, but we were feeling guilty about having left before.
And the idea was like, oh, if we just stayed, then Al-Qaeda wouldn't have found a home base in Afghanistan and who knows what we might have prevented.
And the honest guy's truth is they would have found a home base someplace else, and we would have just been sitting in Afghanistan for another 25 years, leading up to now.
I think that's one of the most frustrating things about international conflict, when people start thinking about it, especially people like me that have nothing to do with it.
You look on the outside and you go, how does this ever get resolved?
Yeah, of course you've got to work with communities.
It's a huge lift.
And the local and the state and the federal authorities here in the U.S. are actually spending a lot of time trying to build some level of communication and trust with the Muslim communities here in this country.
Because at the end of the day, if you just want to talk about somebody popping off and doing something horrible here in our country...
Again, the concept of the lone wolf attack, whatever you want to call it...
Your real only chance of identifying that individual, because they're not coming up on comms and it's not on the radar already, they're not associating, unless they do, maybe they do, but usually they're not associating with known targets.
And so your best bet is a mom or a dad or a brother or a sister picking up the phone and saying, I'm worried about, you know, whomever.
And I think that's probably more likely to happen now after San Bernardino.
When that San Bernardino attack happened, there was a lot of people that knew those folks were really into guns and saying a bunch of crazy shit, but they just went, let me just get out of here.
Nothing's going to happen from this.
Let me just leave these fucking loons alone.
And then they wind up...
unidentified
And I also don't want to be called an Islamophobe.
She had female genital mutilation when she was a baby.
They cut her clitoris off.
She's lived under that oppressive regime.
She risked her life to get out of there.
She risked her life to come to the United States, and they still call her an Islamophobe for it.
Anyone that said I mean, this is like it's fashionable anyone says anything critical about Islam, but you become an Islamophobe or a bigot Yeah, you're a bigot and then yeah, you're yeah, so somehow it's I Yeah, I'm not even sure how we got to that point, but well, it's the left, you know people go I mean,
it's just like the far left gets nutty the far right gets nutty far reaches of any ideologies They all they're you know, they they're blinded blinded by their beliefs and they are supported by other people who are equally blinded and You're right.
But when you talk, when you have this, you know, you have just a massive amount of experience when it comes to foreign relations, and when you're talking about the almost like hopelessness of...
Creating peace on earth, you know, like that concept is always what everyone's always wanted, right?
Peace on earth, that's what we all want.
But when you talk about the Middle East, and you talk about how hopeless it is, and then you go back to like the fucking Carter administration, you go back previous to that, I mean, it seems like it's always been a mess.
When you look at the relations that these countries have amongst themselves, it's pretty fucked up.
And then you think about our relations, our efforts with them, and that's on a whole different level.
I don't want to say it's never possible.
That's too pessimistic.
But from a pragmatic point of view, I think we just have to be realistic in our foreign policy.
And we have to do what we can to create allies, to do our best, always acting in our own best interest.
Get away from this concept that somehow it's a community of nations all working together for the good of the world.
Some groups do.
Like I said, you can have your allies, and that's a great thing, and we should always look to promote that.
But...
Ultimately, I think we're the only nation, sometimes it seems, that apologizes when we act in our own best interest.
We almost feel like it's unseemly or it's not the right thing to do or whatever.
It's bullshit.
Every other nation out there, including our allies, close allies, they look at it first and foremost.
How does this benefit me?
How does this benefit our country?
If you just assume that's a principle on dealing in foreign policy, and then you also assume that another principle is that nothing is unconnected, nothing happens in a bubble, then with those two things as guiding principles, You know, you got to start to creating a foreign policy that makes some sense, you know, and is beneficial.
Again, you know, the difficulty is in at what point do you exert your influence?
At what point do you decide to be the police person, you know?
But don't you think that that's evidence of the fact that it's because of the fact that we are essentially the premier superpower in the world, and everyone else is a very distant second.
So it's kind of like we're the big boss.
We kind of have to go, well, you know, we probably shouldn't be doing that.
I mean, because you, again, I agree with those people that say we can't be policing everywhere.
You talk about China.
I mean, it's a good industry.
When you say we're the lone superpower, some people would say, well, what about China?
And, oh, I just said it like President Trump does, China.
Then part of China's problem is, well, they've got several, but one is that their economy, this idea that somehow they were going to rise to the top of the heap In the world because of their economy I think has always been flawed.
There's a lot of, we spend a lot, my company spends a fair amount of time looking at Chinese companies on behalf of financial institutions and others from outside of China.
There's a lot of smoke and mirrors, a lot of bad paper there floating around.
They've got some problems, really shaky problems in their infrastructure, in their economy.
And tied to that is a problem that if they can't manage the slowdown, you know, if they can't manage it, it's not good for us either, so we have to hope that they do, but if they can't manage a slowdown, and part of that is in their economy, and part of that is It's managing or putting a damper on people's expectations.
They've kind of gotten away for some time now with people thinking, oh, I'm rising up.
I'm coming up out of the poverty class.
I'm getting up to the middle class.
I can be middle class.
Well, there's only so far in that economy they're going to go, and they've hit that ceiling, basically.
So there's a lot of discontent, in a sense, and a lot of problems that they're trying right now to mask.
I don't know whether they're going to be able to do it, but we should all hope that they're somewhat successful since, again, nothing happens in a bubble and we're connected.
So if they have significant problems, there could be issues.
So I've never been, you know, when people say, well, what about China?
China's sort of a rising superpower along with us.
Well, yeah, militarily, I mean, you know, but we're still...
As long as none of these people like Iran or Pakistan or anybody who has nuclear weapons, as long as they don't launch anything, as soon as they launch everything, we're all fucked.
So we've got to kind of keep everybody from launching everything.
Well, and you've raised really where the crisis is.
The crisis isn't with us and Russia going to war or us and China going to war.
The crisis is a A smaller nation with nuclear weapons losing its shit and doing something stupid, or some of those materials falling into the wrong hands.
Those two scenarios are still the ones that are most worrisome.
When you look at a country like, I hate to say this, you look at a country like Pakistan.
Shane Smith was telling me about, Shane Smith, the head of Vice, was telling me about, what is that one city in Pakistan that he was talking about that he said is essentially the most dangerous spot on earth?
He's like, there are so many murders created in this city.
Like, what does that mean by someone being upset that he wants to put America first?
I mean, if there's bad treaties, if there's bad agreements, if there's anything that doesn't favor us or our economy or our safety, why wouldn't you want them to put America first?
Well, she said some crazy shit about Russia that we should be able to respond militarily to the cyber attacks.
I was like, you really can't say shit like that.
And apparently what was said was that they had said to the Russian people they were in contact with, look, this is all just rhetoric, don't worry about it.
When you start trying to imagine what's that line where another nation engages in some sort of cyber shenanigans and we're going to respond militarily, the Pentagon is still trying to figure that out.
The Pentagon has been working on this for some time.
But the idea of what are your protocols for cybersecurity, for cyber attacks, cyber warfare, they're still trying to figure that out because it's so freaking difficult.
Now, if it's a serious and coordinated and sophisticated attack...
You know, you may be down for three, four, five, six weeks, seven weeks.
Could be longer because we don't manufacture a lot of that gear for the system anymore here in this country.
And we're putting, you know, lipstick on a pig for most of the patchwork quilt of the power grid.
And so it's a fairly frail thing anyway.
But if they take that down, then you think to yourself, well, how do we respond?
Do we do the same to the attacking nation that engaged in that?
Do we respond militarily?
And that's where, you know, again, the Pentagon has been sitting there trying to figure out, what do we do?
What are the protocols?
What are the responses?
What line do we need to see before we...
So, you know, it's a whole different world, and this is something to really pay attention to, because going forward, when you talk about, well, you know, maybe something happens and you get, you know, people starting to launch nukes, yeah, maybe, again, you get some crazy-ass, you know, leader of a small nation, you know, that decides to do something, or they get overrun, and, you know, it falls into bad hands, whatever.
But more likely than not, what's going to happen is something that spins out of control in cyberspace.
And because we either, you know, we overreact or we underreact and then we're playing catch.
Which is why, again, I sometimes make fun of diplomacy, but diplomacy is very, very important.
So you've got to have those communication channels open all the time.
People have to be talking.
Intel services talk to each other all the time.
Even when two countries, or even when us and another country are going at it in the media, or we're really...
The Intel services tend to be working together, keeping their line of communication, because they know it's pretty serious shit.
You've got to do that, and things can get sideways really, really fast out there.
And so...
You know, you got to hope that, you know, the conversations continue.
And we've got good people.
I look at the new administration's sort of second and third tier folks, you know, where crap actually gets done, you know, not the cabinet level or anything, but the down, you know, second, third tier.
And they brought in some good pragmatic people.
They've got some smart folks.
They understand, I think, the, you know, the way the world works.
They're measured in their response.
Now, does any of that matter?
You know, because the president is, you know, can be, you know...
I don't know if you've noticed this online, but there's a bunch of weird sort of now...
Now very obvious right-wing guys, but people that were just sort of online commentators or they would have a blog or a little of this or that.
And then when it kind of became a movement, this Trump thing became a movement, all their stuff got really pro-Trump and they started using words like cuck, calling people cucks and falling into these camps where you're just seeing these tribal sort of behavior patterns play out.
Yeah, I mean, I... Early on, I signed on to a national security letter with some other folks and basically said that, you know, we didn't believe that Donald Trump, now President Trump, was the right candidate from a national security perspective.
And, you know, I took some heat for that.
But some of those folks are now looking for jobs in the administration.
And I think, I don't get it.
But I will say this much.
Once, you know, once the person wins, and this is maybe where, you know, I have a hard time understanding some of the angst that's out there.
Once the president gets in, you've got a duty to, you know, work and make the country, you know, go forward and work.
And so I've got no problem supporting the administration in the sense that I want them to do well.
And I don't think there's anything incongruous with that, in the sense that, yeah, it wasn't my candidate, you know, fine.
But now that he's in, I want this place to do well.
And so I want this administration to do well.
I'm glad that they've got good people coming in.
I still say, there's going to be things that he's going to do that I'm going to say, yeah, it's great, good, excellent.
And there's going to be things that he does that I'm going to think, what the hell is that?
And if you can't be in that position and you've always got to be all on board or all against, I don't see how people live that way.
Do you think it's possible that he could pull this off and he could be a good president and he could listen to the advice of the people that actually know how the world works and stay off Twitter?
And if he goes in that direction, if we see that now, again, you've got people questioning sort of the spending.
So, you know, the jury's out on what they do with taxes.
Seems like they're going to go in a decent direction on the taxes.
Yeah, I think it could surprise people because I think what people are missing is they see chaos.
They see a lot of chaos.
But you could also argue it's actually a beneficial thing to have a lot of people talking at you, because they do seem willing to listen to a lot of different people, right?
At least at the early stage.
I realize that could change or maybe, you know...
And I don't want to make too much of it, but they do seem like there's a lot of different voices that are being dragged in and saying, what do you think about this?
What do you think about that?
Now, he's going to make his own decision, but we get lost.
We don't see those things happen.
You know, it's like the discussions that they've already started about how do we realign the intel community so that it's more efficient, it's more effective.
That's a good conversation to have, but we don't see that because people get lost in the tweets, and they get lost in the various headline of the day.
Once a guy gets in, you might criticize his movements, you might criticize his decisions, but ultimately, you should want him to do well, because it will be good for the entire country.
Hopefully it just leads to more discussion, more debate, more communication, and more people having a better understanding of how the system works.
I think if one thing that we can look forward to with Trump is that he's so transparent, and if something pisses him off, he's immediately going to talk about it, that we're going to get to see more and understand more about how it works behind the scenes.
And I think that's one of those things that people look at and...
Unless they hate him, they look at that as a positive and they think, you know what, I'm happy that he's out there tweeting because I want him to bypass the media and tell me what's going on and that sort of thing.
And I think he genuinely believes that that was a big part of why he got elected.
They get crazy when, look, everybody looks at someone who's in power, whether they're the president or whatever it is, they look at them as being some irreproachable, some person of much higher moral cloth and value and intellect, and when you see him, he's clearly not.
Yeah, I've got very progressive liberal friends who, you know, that's the first thing they say, he's such an idiot, he's so stupid, and he appeals to all the stupid people out there.
And I said, you know what, how do you think you ended up with President Trump?
By spending eight years telling people how stupid they are, right?
And minimizing their importance and making fun of them.
I mean and he played off of that really brilliantly He's a very smart persuader in that regard you know Scott Adams who the creator of Dilbert who predicted this whole thing a long time in advance and took a big hit for it told me cost him millions of dollars people Boycotting him hating him and by the way, He doesn't even vote because he's not voting for Trump.
He says I don't want to have a dog in the war He's like I don't have a dog in the fight He was like I feel like it's I can be objective about if I don't talk about it or if I don't vote right right So he's not voting.
He didn't vote for Trump He didn't vote for anybody and he said what he thinks is that just Trump is an excellent persuader He's like he's his powers of persuasion are amazing.
Yeah, and he goes in a way He understands how to manipulate the press and say outrageous things so they talk about him constantly so he gets free press and I mean, what he did in that sense, Scott was totally right.
And Scott was looking at it completely objectively.
He's not a Trump supporter.
Many people accuse him of being so, and that's why he took so much heat about it.
He's like, he's going to be president.
And they're like, you're a piece of shit!
And they hated him because of it.
It's really fascinating, because when you get to know Scott, you realize he's a brilliant guy.
But he's unafraid to discuss what he actually believes will take place, regardless of whether or not people think that's what they want or, you know...
That Secret Service operation, I know it seems like it only makes the news when there's some bad thing that happens to fuck up or something people find funny, like some hookers or whatever.
That would be nice, but I think she's going to at least be on ice for a while, based on that.
But, yeah, you know, it's...
And that's true of any executive protection detail.
Obviously, it's a heightened situation when you're talking about the president or U.S. dignitaries or whatever.
But anybody in that business, there's no room for ego, can't have an ego.
Bodyguards, people think about bodyguards and they tend to think about somebody who's protecting the Kardashians or something.
It's not a celebrity bodyguard.
But the executive protection world is a fairly large business.
You know, it's a really tough industry, and there's no room for egos, and it requires a real variety of skills, diplomacy, common sense on top of all the typical skills you would imagine.
And it is, again, it's just a sort of a thankless job.
You know, you're often dealing with principals who...
We really don't even want you there.
High net wealth families, high net wealth individuals.
Or they think after a while you're just there to carry bags.
And so the folks that do those jobs...
In serious details, it's really tough.
And then, like, out in Hollywood, you know, you sometimes get, you know, the bodyguard, you know, they'll hire whoever happens to be biggest.
And that's the worst thing you can do.
You don't want, you know, some big, thick-necked guy out there thinking that he's going to protect you, or he's the best guy, when it could, in fact, be the, you know, 5'2 woman who's going to be actually the smartest, because she's got all the right skills.
She's got the combination.
And if you've got something busting up on top of the principle, you've already fucked up.
You've already missed the opportunity to sort the problem out.
Yeah, I remember one of my friends, you know, one time we were sitting under the desk, and Mark said, we started talking, and I looked at him, and I had older brothers, so they'd already told me how bullshit that whole exercise was.
But I realized that my friend Mark, sitting there as we kind of ate our lunch underneath the desk, you know, it seemed like this was going to do it.
So anyway, no, I think we should be worried about Putin in the sense that his agenda, his interests don't match up with ours.
We should be worried in the sense that he honestly believes that the biggest catastrophe was the collapse of the Soviet Union.
And he's never believed that there was a peace dividend from the end of the Cold War.
Never, ever thought that way.
And we did.
There was talk about up on Capitol Hill after the end of the Cold War, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, we could shut down the CIA. What do we need that for anymore?
And that was the same thought that happened after World War II. World War II ended, and Harry Truman signed an order that ended the Office of Strategic Services, which was the old precursor for the CIA. Shut it down.
It took two years, two years while the Soviet Union started building up and rampaging for the president to think, you know, maybe this is actually a good idea.
So then he created the CIA at that point.
You know, we thought we were going to get some sort of dividend out of the end of that, and it just wasn't going to happen.
The Russians never, ever believed that.
Putin, in particular, and his cohorts never thought that was the case.
So, yeah, we should be concerned about Russia.
They're not going to ever be—it's not going to be a bipolar world again where they're the other major superpower.
But— In the sense that we need to deal with him realistically.
We should always talk, fine, let's have to do diplomacy.
But we just need to be pragmatic and understand, look, our interests aren't the same.
And as long as we keep that in mind, sure, talk all we want to him.
And when I say that he thinks it was a catastrophe, those are his words.
He said that the collapse of the Soviet Union was the greatest catastrophe of the 20th century.
And he's absolutely serious about it.
So he's been trying to rebuild that in some fashion or another ever since then.
And it's not just territory, although he's done a pretty good job of that.
We forget that before Crimea...
He rolled troops into Georgia, right?
Not the state of Georgia.
I'm thinking, oh my God, really?
That doesn't make any sense.
I don't think Mike knows what he's talking about.
But into Georgia, the Republic of Georgia.
And I'll be damned, but he's still got troops there.
He's got a lot of troops there in Abkhazia and the south of Sesia.
And then he's also, obviously, he took Crimea.
And why did he take Crimea?
Well, because it's important to his fleet.
I mean, it's not going to...
It's not going to happen.
He's not going to risk losing that.
And then, you know, part of the Ukraine.
But it's not just territory that he's interested in.
It's leverage.
It's influence.
And that's where, when we go back to that conversation about the Middle East and we realize what they've been doing in the Middle East in particular, they've been active in other places, but mostly in the Middle East.
That's all part of this same process.
And so it's not a mystery why he does things.
If you take him at his base word, which we should do because he tends to say exactly what he intends to do most of the time, and not try to read our values into it, right?
Not say, well, I'm sure he doesn't mean that.
I'm sure what he means is like, you know, he's...
He wants to get to democracy eventually, but that's a lot of horseshit.
But we tend to mirror our values on other people, right?
So when we were talking about, you know, earlier about how, you know, there's not another nation out there that really kind of approaches global concerns the way that we do with a certain set of principles and desires, even if we make mistakes, and obviously we do from time to time, of course.
Then, you know, you look at Russia and you think, yeah.
You know, he doesn't do that.
He doesn't look at something and go, hmm, maybe that would be best for all of us.
I don't think he's ever had that thought.
You know, he literally is single-minded in his desire to do whatever will build back up Russian influence in the world.
So we have to be pragmatic about it and dealing with it.
And to get a better understanding of him, I think there's a great podcast between Sam Harris and Garry Kasparov, the chess champion who's a big critic of Putin who's managed to stay alive somehow or another.
But Kasparov highlights the fact that he's a former KGB agent, and he says that you have to understand the mentality of the KGB. Like, once you are KGB, you are KGB for life.
I mean, there's an extreme form of nationalism and patriotism and this loyalty to the KGB. Yeah, and he's absolutely right.
But again, we do this thing where it's basically called mirroring, right?
And then we get tripped up.
You could look at Iraq and Afghanistan as an example.
Of course they're going to love this.
They're going to love democracy because we love it, and we want to do well, and we want to improve their literacy rate, and we want to do these things.
Well, that's all great stuff.
But it doesn't work in the sense that that's not how they view things.
You know, Karzai looked at that, and that's a shitload of money that I'm going to be able to steal here.
The entire Karzai family was just completely corrupt.
And remember, there was that period of time when we just adored him.
It was adulation.
You know, how wonderful is Karzai.
Look how well he dresses.
What the hell?
Yeah, so Putin, I think, again, not in the sense that we've got some World War III coming up against Russia.
That's not the case.
That's not why we should be concerned about him.
Although you do have to, again, worry about military buildup, worry about their nuke program and what they're doing with theirs and what we're doing with ours.
Unilateral disarmament, not a good idea, whether we're talking about Putin or anybody else.
You can always want peace and you can strive for peace, but I have not seen a world that works differently.
You've got to do that through a position of strength.
I think these conversations are so important because when a guy like you talks about this, you're not talking out of your ass, and you get a chance to understand how crazy this situation is worldwide and how difficult it is and what a balancing act it is.
Identifying specific countries with Muslim majorities and carving out exceptions for minority religions flies in the face of the constitutional principle that bans a government from either favoring or discriminating against particular religions, Romero said...
Do a little quick search to try to find that dude's name, because he's got a bunch of really hilarious videos.
But he made a compilation of all the wackiest moments on Jim Baker's show where he tries to sell the survival food, and he's got this table that he sets down.
Instead of on legs, it's set down on these buckets of survival food that he recommends.
So we're not going to be here for the Fight Companion on Saturday, but we're going to play the fights and not watch them.
So I'm not watching them on Saturday night.
I'm going to record them here, and then we're going to come in on Sunday, and it's going to be Brendan Schaub, Eddie Bravo, Brian Callen, and my pal Jimmy Burke.
It's going to be a good goddamn time, folks.
So if you want to get in with us, Sunday, 7pm Pacific.
Don't watch the fights before then.
We'll have it on record.
We'll probably fast forward through the commercials.