Joe Rogan and Mike Baker mock the president’s eclipse mishap while critiquing political polarization, citing Trump’s retweets of debunked claims like Pershing’s pig-bullet myth. Baker warns privatizing military ops—like Iraq’s Blackwater (now Academi)—risks profit-driven conflicts, comparing it to failed nation-building in Afghanistan and Libya. They blame decades of U.S.-China policy for North Korea’s nuclear escalation, dismissing Scott Adams’ "masterful persuasion" theory as Trump’s erratic tweets undermine trust. Rogan ties institutional secrecy to parenting failures, while Baker stresses human nature and overpopulation as barriers to global peace. [Automatically generated summary]
Well, I'm telling you, that's probably, again, it's an indication that they don't have a lot of discipline in that communications department of the White House.
I was up there in the mountains over the past few days, and it was just hippies coming in from left and right, and the entire state just overrun with hippies.
I mean, they're parking in people's ranches.
They're just driving up on fields that have just been planted.
It's the weirdest shit.
It's like they don't even think.
But they came out, hey, God bless them.
I don't know that I was intellectually curious enough to really worry about the eclipse.
I think a lot of intellectual curiosity is great, and a lot of hippie values are great, but then you go too far into the hippie retard gene pool, and you get these dopey hippies that are hippies that, you know, they're the worst kind of hippies.
The hippies that don't really want to do any work, but they want universal basic income.
They want all these, hey man, these one percenters, they have plenty of money, so the new one should have to work ever.
They just passed a tax up in Seattle that's probably going to get struck down, but it basically was up in Seattle.
Well, God bless them up there.
They've decided that they're going to go against the state charter, which says you can't have a tax, an income tax, and they've gone ahead and done it for the, I think it's for the top...
Well, what's interesting is that's the whole reason why a lot of companies like Amazon and Microsoft, that's the reason why they've located to Seattle, you fucking dummies.
And they're going to pull out, and then you wouldn't have any jobs, and then you'd be poor.
And their plan, the plan of the governor and the rest of the crew there is...
When you need more money, tax Fairfield County, which is home to New Canaan and Greenwich and Darien and Stanford.
The people that work in the city or the people that are working in finance.
And now what they've had over the past three or four years, ever since the governor's been running the shop, is people moving out.
I mean, GE moved out.
General Electric, the entire operation with General Electric said, went to the state and said, I know people are thinking, why are we talking about this?
But they went to the state house and they said, you can't keep doing this.
You can't keep jacking it up on us to pay for everything.
We're happy to pay, and we are, paying our fair share.
So they did that.
General Electric said, we're going to move.
The state didn't believe them.
They've all relocated to Boston.
They've got, who else is moving?
Aetna, I think, the large insurance company.
You know, now, Connecticut's known as sort of the insurance capital, right?
They're leaving.
Hedge funds, private equity groups, moving down to Florida.
And again, great, pay your fair share, but at a certain point...
Everybody's got to contribute something, right?
You can't just say, that's what you're going to do.
And I'm not in the 1%.
I wish I was.
It used to be when you were a kid, you wanted to be rich, right?
I mean, the people that have accumulated too much wealth, especially when it comes to hedge fund people and finance people, it's like, what are you actually doing?
And you're using that money to influence policy, and that policy allows you to extract more money from the system, and it gets real slippery because occasionally you guys fuck up and it crashes the whole economy.
But when you're talking about someone who's developed a legitimate product, they sell it and they're successful, they work hard, they've made something, They're building a business.
There's this couple that I'm friends with, and their sons surf, and they live in Malibu.
They have a house in Malibu, and they were surfing in the water in front of this house.
This guy comes out and yells and screams at him, you know, get the fuck off the beach, because, you know, he has this $10 million house right there on the beach.
And they're like, what are you talking about?
Like, we live right over there, you piece of shit.
And like, not only that, anybody can be on this beach.
If you get to that point where you can entertain the idea of maybe I'll put 10% down and then I'll take the rest in a mortgage, then yeah, you've probably got too much money.
It reminds me of that scene in The Big Lebowski when you meet the other Lebowski and he's in the wheelchair and his wife's offering to suck dudes dicks for a thousand bucks.
You know, it's like, that's the kind of shit that happens.
You get a trophy wife, you buy yourself a mansion, and your days are just filled with stress.
Isn't that a great thing to have fish that you caught in your freezer that you can go back to that you know was only like an hour old by the time you threw it on the ice?
Yeah, there's definitely some issues with polar bears in areas that have less ice.
But apparently the polar bear population, this is something that I read about Canada, at least in Canada, the polar bear population is higher than it's been in years.
There's not a shortage of polar bears, but if you go over there to...
Like, they have hunts for polar bears.
Like, they pay people to take them on polar bear hunts, but then you can't bring the polar bear back to the United States.
Like, you can keep it in Canada.
You can...
Like, if you come from Europe and you want to hunt a polar bear, you can...
I mean, you probably won't need anything as long as the bears have fish.
They really have no...
There's an area that we've shown this video before of this enormous grizzly that gets right next to this guy who's sitting there photographing these bears eating fish out of the river.
And the bear literally couldn't give a fuck about him.
Just looks at him and just sort of wanders off.
And there's actually a statistic that no one has ever died in this area.
No person's ever been attacked or killed in this one area just because it's just overrun with salmon.
But it's also, you know, you talk about how things change around the planet and the salmon runs are, you know, really being impacted right now by a variety of reasons.
You know, it's not just one thing.
But, so, anyway.
But that'll be good.
And I know that everybody was really keen to hear about my upcoming trip.
Well, you know, I mean, it is interesting to hear people's take on the climate issue, because there's hard left and hard right.
Hard right is, it's a cycle, it's always happening this way, and you're impeding business.
Hard left is, we're all gonna die.
And then Miami's gonna drown.
I mean, and Al Gore had already predicted in that movie, An Inconvenient Truth, that we were gonna be covered in water in 2014. Wasn't it 2014 they were predicting that the ocean levels were going to rise to the point where we're going to have to start evacuating some of the coastal cities?
But that just shows you where his mind's at, that he's willing to say yes to that.
That's someone who wants to acquiesce with no uncertain terms to the left.
Meanwhile, he had a television show out years ago where he was describing gender, and he was basically saying there's two genders, and it's about X and Y chromosome.
I mean, which is what everybody's been told in science and biology class.
Then he has this show just a few years later, where now the tide has turned politically, where this is such a weird subject about gender and sexual identity and gender identity.
And so he's got these songs about, you know, like, what?
That lady singing that song, like, hey, this is fucking terrible!
Like, all you're doing is just, like, the same thing as President Trump staring at the sun.
All you're doing is setting yourself up for ruthless criticism that's going to diminish any potential legitimate point that you actually have.
Yeah, I think some people made fun of him, but I think Bill Nye, for the most part, he knows that's a very comfortable place for him to do, or for a lot of people.
If they say, look, I just want to get the adulation of the left, of the far left.
I think he does give a shit about science, but I think he gives a shit more about people liking him and fitting in with this crowd of people.
There's a weird thing that's going on in science, and there's nothing...
Look, science is fantastic.
It's critical for our civilization.
I'm not a science criticizer, but there's a weird thing about people that are a part of science, where their own egos and their own need for Positive affirmation sort of supersede any critical thinking.
So there's certain subjects that cannot be discussed.
There's certain things that, like, they're almost like, it's almost like science religion.
You know, so there's certain subjects that aren't even open to scrutiny.
Well, I think that's right, and I think part of it is also we have gotten to a point where you can't And I don't know how you walk it back, but you can't have conflicting ideas in the same statement or the same sentence.
And things conflict all the time, right?
And you can have truths that collide with each other and don't necessarily make sense.
But it seems as if now everything has to be in absolutes, and whether it's climate change.
So you can't say, you know, if you just have this...
Middle-of-the-road discussion where you say, well, look, of course, humans, I'm sure, have some impact.
I don't know what that is.
And this is a problem, and we do have to do our part, and we do have to work to try to be the best we can be.
But that's not good enough.
You've got to be sort of totalitarian about the whole issue.
And it's not just that.
Any argument, it just seems as if...
And it's not just the millennials.
I'm not one to beat on the young kids or the generation of whatever we want to call them nowadays, because I know a lot of good kids that are out there that are working hard or they're in the military, and it's a fantastic group of folks.
So I think we're just fine in that regard.
But there does seem to be something about each successive generation, and we've gotten now to a point where people have a hard time processing this dissenting opinion idea.
And that starts to shut down Debate and it starts to shut down the the idea that you can have a discussion about science where you have You know these conflicting ideas and how do you how do you resolve them?
That used to be the whole concept about science is that test theories and come up with what works and Anyway, I think it's because we're attaching egos and personalities and virtue signaling to to the actual hard data itself But here's here's the thing that we should all be concerned with Pollution.
We should all be concerned with human waste.
We should all be concerned with the damage that we're doing to our water, the damage that we're doing to the environment.
There's a host of different things that human beings are involved in that are creating irreparable harm to the environment.
We should absolutely be concerned with that.
But what's weird is that you hardly ever hear about that.
You hardly ever hear about doing something to curb the plastic in the ocean, doing something to eliminate some of the sewage waste that goes into the ocean.
There's a ton of different things that we're doing that are huge issues.
But instead, you hear about climate change, and it becomes this ideological left versus right battle, which is very weird to me.
And I understand that climate change is a real issue, and if the ocean water continues to rise, coastal cities really are fucked, and if the temperature does rise, we really might have to migrate to better climates.
There's a lot of other shit going on that seems to get ignored during this process.
Well, federally, hemp has been illegal since the 1930s.
That's what it is.
I mean, and all that goes back to William Randolph Hearst conning people into making it illegal so he didn't have to switch over his paper mills from wood.
Him and Harry Anslinger, and what they did is they organized an actual campaign against hemp as a commodity by demonizing this thing that they called marijuana, which wasn't even the name of cannabis at the time.
Marijuana was a name for a wild Mexican tobacco.
They applied that name to cannabis to say that there's this new drug that's making Mexicans and blacks rape white women.
You know, he was a piece of shit, that William Randolph Hearst.
Try to convince you they know what they're talking about.
So, speaking of Citizen Kane and Orson Welles and conspiracies, last night I re-watched the episode of Geraldo Rivera's Good Night, America, when they introduced the Zapruder, because you know Dick Gregory just died?
They introduced this Zapruder film to the American public 13 years or 12 years, 12 years after Kennedy's assassination.
And then I went and read that paper, the articles that was printed a couple of weeks ago that you even tweeted about it, about the CIA questioning the official story of the JFK assassination.
But, yeah, it was interesting that the, you know, as typical with a lot of these things, the headline doesn't necessarily actually match once you get into the body of the story, but the idea being that the agency...
had some concerns over the idea that perhaps Cuba was behind the assassination, or the Russians to some degree, or working more likely in a combination of the two.
Do I think that he could have taken that shot?
Yeah.
It was not...
I've been up in that book depository from that vantage point.
We did a story on the whole issue, the conspiracy theory, and what could have happened, and we tried to find some new witnesses.
Could he have made that shot?
Yeah, it was a straightforward effort for someone who had some training.
He wasn't the world's best shot, but he had sufficient training to make that shot.
No, that's separate from...
You know, his motivations and any potential support that he may have gotten during the course of that.
And, you know, I think that he, in his mind, he genuinely felt that this was going to get him into the revolution, right?
That this was going to...he had had a very unhappy experience in Russia when he was over there living, came back, saw what was happening in Cuba, desperately wanted to be part of that, I took an unexplained trip down to Mexico, which could well have been in an effort to find somebody who could support his desire to take some sort of action, whether he had formed in his mind that's what he was going to do at the time or not.
So, you know, is there still a possibility that the Cubans, which the intel service there, would have had the file on him?
I mean, he was a very, very well-known quantity, obviously, by that time for the Russians.
The Russians were solely responsible for training up the Cuban intel service.
So there's a massive file on him, and they knew, you know, who they were dealing with.
They knew his weaknesses.
They knew his...
They knew his motivations.
They knew what to do in terms of trying to get leverageable information on him.
So I think that the jury's still out.
And I'm not a conspiracy guy, but I think there's enough there that says, you know, yes, it's kind of like what we're talking about with climate change.
I believe this, but this also could be true.
So I think he could have taken that shot, for sure, and succeeded.
I think it's also possible that he may have had the encouragement of, in particular, the Cuban intel service through the Russians.
Because at that time, in particular, the Cubans didn't do anything without the Russians' support, blessings, and direction.
So that is entirely possible.
Do I think that there were a variety of other things at play?
Did they help him get the weapon?
Was there actual logistical support in there?
I don't think so, but maybe.
It's a fascinating thing.
And again, nobody wants to think that something that...
Impactful could have been just one guy who, you know, had a dream about being a hero of the revolution.
It's such an awful thing to think about.
You want something bigger.
You want something more behind it.
I will say the one thing that I think there was something else to was the MLK issue of Martin Luther King assassination.
We looked at what the train yard engineer reported seeing with a sort of a puff of smoke that he thought he saw over by the fence line.
And we looked and we thought, yeah, you could, you know, from that position, they opened that place up and we were able to go back up there and you could see it.
We ran a couple of tests and fired off a few shots and that's always fun.
If you want to have a good time, take a rifle to Dealey Plaza and fire off a few shots without the tourists knowing what the hell is happening.
And the Dallas police, by the way, were tremendous during the course of that.
What you want to do is you want to do every investigation.
This company that I've got, we do a lot of investigations.
You've got to build, just like with a homicide case or anything else, you've got to build it on stable ground, right?
So you have to start from, you know, the very basics.
Because if you start building ideas and investigative inquiries on something that's not sturdy underneath it, you know, not based on evidence and fact, then you got a problem.
The whole thing becomes suspect and usually comes toppling down.
So, you know, you got to keep an open mind about all these things.
And I think it's important.
Right now, people are going, oh, Well, I'm sure that agency, the CIA, was involved, so I'm a terrible source of information.
I've heard that before.
I said, you can't talk credibly about this because, you know, the CIA was involved.
My biggest reason for believing D.B. Cooper died and his chute is hanging up a tree, and that's a vast wilderness up there, is that people can't help themselves.
At some point, people talk, or somebody talks, somebody associated with it, or somebody nearby, or somebody involved, or somebody on their deathbed, or somebody says something they shouldn't have.
It's, you know, the idea that they've maintained this sort of secret over a period of time, I find hard to believe.
I'm not discounting it entirely.
Again, you've got to leave a little space open for something that could be just amazing.
And did he express a desire to do something like this to the Russians at some point?
And they thought, okay, well, here's an interesting opportunity.
Yeah, they would have sparked on that.
And they would have thought about it.
Would they have actually, no play on what's intended, but would they have pulled the trigger on an operation trying to push him into doing an act like this?
And again, the Russians, it shouldn't be any surprise to anybody when you talk about what they did during this election.
I mean, they've been doing this forever.
You go back to the 1940s, and the Russians were spending a lot of time and effort and money here in the States trying to keep us out of the war back before...
Hitler invaded Russia when they were allied with the Nazis still.
So they spent a lot of time.
They set up independent associations, supposedly.
They paid off a lot of unions and union members, journalists.
I mean, they were doing everything they could to strengthen the idea of isolationism, just to keep us out.
They've been doing this for as long as they've been around.
So anybody who says, it's shocking the Russians would be engaged in this.
But the Zapruder film was the one that got people weirded out by it.
But I'll tell you what, man, I've watched that film a bunch of times.
And one of the things that don't jive is if he did get hit from the front, you know, his head goes back to the left, why is the blood spray out forward?
See, it's weird the way the impact of the blood is.
It's like the blood sprays forward and then his head goes back into the left.
It could have possibly been that he was hit from the front and the back at the same time.
That's entirely possible.
I mean, that is a tactic you would do, right?
You would roll someone into an area where they would be in a crossfire and they would get shot from both sides.
If the grassy knoll was, in fact, a second side for a shooter, then...
By the time it hits that corner and starts its path, just before the shots were fired from the book depository in Oswald, if you're going with that, if you had another shooter up on the grass, you know, you're basically looking right at the front of the vehicle.
And because of the way that it's positioned and the knolls kind of turned, and then it's just that It's just that there's not a lot of concealment up there.
Right.
And they had the fence, the picket fence.
It's not the original one that's there anymore, but it's basically in line with it.
And there's plenty of pictures of the previous fence that was up there at the time.
And you did have the train yard engineer report sometime after the fact that he saw a puff of smoke, that he wasn't quite sure what that was all about, and he'd seen a couple of people back there.
So, that's an interesting thread to pull on, right?
And I think that it's been researched ad nauseum.
It doesn't mean you couldn't still find something.
When someone gets shot, especially when the president gets shot, you'll have five different stories from five different people and gunshots heard from the moon.
And, you know, so, yeah, eyewitness accounts tend not to be particularly credible.
Reliable, yeah.
And you've got to, you know, you've got to take them and then you've got to, you know, match it up with other information you can pull together forensically.
Initially, it was because the Bureau was saying, okay, we're closing this case.
And then there's some talk now over the past day and a half, two days, that they might have found something up in the wilderness that might be a piece of the chute that he had.
The thing about, I mean, it could be, but the thing about something that's that long ago, we have to realize how many people die in the woods every year.
And, you know, there was some talk, well, you know, because some of his money was found, you know, after the fact, stacked in a little...
Part of the river that seemed unusual, right?
It seemed like it would have had to make a pretty amazing journey from the wilderness down through the stream system out to the river and then be found on this sandbar.
And it was all stacked one on top of the other.
But it had the serial numbers.
And so there was some thought that, you know, how did that get there?
Did it naturally just float down there and end up on this sandbar and covered in sand and eventually was found by some kid that was on a picnic?
Well, what's weird is I was watching this interview today where this guy, this fucking pencil-necked dork, was supporting Antifa violence and saying that the only way to fight against fascism is violence.
And I was like, oh, Jesus.
And then there was this other guy next to him who was saying, no, that's not true.
The way you fight it is with a peaceful protest like just happened in Boston.
Like, that's the best way to handle it.
Yeah.
I want to say there was more than 100,000 people in Boston, wasn't there?
How many people in Boston came out?
Let's see if we could find that out.
And it was completely peaceful.
I think there was like 400 retards with KKK banners.
And so, you know, but we can all agree that there's no space for them.
They're assholes.
But there's also no space for violent, you know, counter-demonstration.
There is space for protesting it because they're absolutely wrong, right?
I mean, and that's...
That's, again, this idea that you should be able to argue both, right?
No, you can't respond with violence, and yes, you guys, you shouldn't be here.
If you're going to hold those views, it's abhorrent.
You are protected by the First Amendment, and so that's fine.
It doesn't mean we have to like it or in any way condone it.
But you've got to know, okay, those sort of fringe ideas are going to exist.
And I agree, the best way to resolve it is peaceful demonstrations, massive peaceful demonstrations, to show, you know, sort of the weight of where the good thoughts are.
You know, my dad didn't fly in World War II, you know, so that somehow you could have a resurgent, not that there is, I think it's a small group, just like it's a small group on the left that wants a violent solution to this, or, you know, honestly believes that, you know, violence against police is somehow the answer, which is insane, but...
Again, there you go.
Truth is somewhere in the middle, right?
I mean, get rid of the fringe, and we've got to figure out a way for the folks that are in kind of the common space to work together.
Otherwise, I mean, A, I don't think the Democrats care where the Republicans care.
In fact, they're happy that shit's not getting done.
I guess he's not dead yet, so I don't want to kill him off.
But he's an amazing...
A political individual.
That guy could make you think that, you know, I met him once overseas.
This sounds dodgy, but in Saudi, I met him at a party.
It does sound really sketchy.
And so, but he had that ability, right?
Now, again, I wasn't a fan necessarily, but I, you know, again, You just want, whichever administration's in charge, you want it to work.
You want for the country to move forward.
So you met him, and it's true what people used to say about him, which is that he made you feel like he was talking right to you, and nothing else was important.
He wasn't one of those guys that looks over their shoulder thinking, is there somebody else I should be talking to over there?
You know, and I'll tell you what, I mean, George Bush, that'd be a guy I'd like to sit down and have a beer with.
The Bush family, a good bunch.
I know people go, oh my God, I couldn't stand his policies.
But, you know, sometimes it comes down to a personal thing and you think, yeah, you know, maybe the guy's got some, you may not like his principles, but he sticks with them, right?
There was one time where the Supreme Court had a ruling that he didn't like, and there was a speech where he gave, and I've seen it quoted in print, and then someone showed a video of it.
But he was essentially saying, well, we have to uphold the decision of the court.
I'm not happy with it, but this is the way our system works.
And then it went to Trump.
Talking about the Supreme Court, you know, not backing his travel ban and all the different various things that he's lost in court.
You see the messaging get out, and he gets ahead of the message, or they need to play catch-up then, and people like Mattis and John Kelly now and Pompeo and others are trying to race to...
Makes sense of some of these things.
And there's this self-inflicted wound after wound for this administration.
But as a guy who's been in the intelligence community for so many years, and you're stepping back, and there was also a real issue with him being at odds with the intelligence community and diminishing the intelligence community.
Yeah, that was a strange or sort of an interesting narrative.
It didn't really...
It got overblown to some degree.
I mean, the people, in the sense that the people at the agency, you know, at the end of the day, they just take whoever's in charge, they take their marching orders from.
It's not, and I know people don't believe it because, you know, everybody likes the feature films and everything, but it's a pretty apolitical organization.
Whoever's in the administration, they're going to prioritize their national security concerns.
Your tasking comes out of that, and then you just march on and do your job.
And yes, the director is in a pointed position, And, you know, John Brennan was certainly much more political in the previous administration than previous directors have been.
But, and the operational level, you know, down at the street level, people just get on with it.
You know, they're human, so of course, you know, they may have their own personal preference, but I'd spent a long time there and behind the curtain and...
You know, they just tick on and do whatever.
You know, there were people that weren't happy with Obama, there were people that weren't happy with Bush, there were people not happy with Trump.
Just tell us what the priorities are, tell us what the tasking is, and we'll get on with it, you know, and go out there and do the collection operations we're supposed to do.
It seems to me that at this point in our history, the history of our society, we kind of have to look at that position and wonder whether or not it's even logical to give so much power to one person.
Nor could they have seen people wanting to stay in Washington for 36 years or 42 years and become career politicians.
They were all just interested in doing their duty and serving the way they were supposed to or they felt obligated to and then getting the hell out, right?
Getting back to the farm or whatever their job was because nobody wanted to stay in Washington for any longer than they needed to.
So, yeah, you're right.
Could they have foreseen all...
No, definitely not.
And so...
What does that mean though?
It means amendments to the Constitution as we've done in the past.
And then again, going back to what we talked about towards the beginning was cobbling it together, understanding that we needed to get our hands on everything west of the Mississippi.
Now, clearly there were some issues there, but, you know, it's sort of that vision that says we're going all the way to the coast.
But It'll be interesting to see, obviously, this is probably the stupidest statement people will hear all day, is where we're going to be in, say, another 200 years.
Because I've got a theory that says where every generation is making it easier for their kids, and eventually you hit a point of diminishing returns and everybody's just a big pussy.
I wonder how much there are parts of the world where obviously things are way more difficult than they are here, and maybe we're losing some sort of a competitive edge because we've made our lives so easy.
Haven't replaced the convenience of civilization with something that tempers our human instincts, like some difficult tasks, rite of passage for young men, you know, something that develops character.
Instead, we're making safe spaces and making words violence and, you know, making it...
And kids don't want you to blow smoke up their ass, right?
You know what?
They'd come off the court and if my...
You know...
Like the oldest boy, Scooter, he's 10 years old, and he plays a lot of lacrosse.
He's been playing for five years, and so he really likes it, and he does well, but I'm not raising a Division I champion there, right?
Right.
But he plays other sports, too, so there's sort of a well-roundedness there.
But we came off the field one day, and we were walking along, and all the parents were kind of marching off, and the game was over, and And he says, how'd I do?
And I said, well, you know, you could have done better.
I said, I just get the impression you didn't try as hard as you could.
What do you think?
And he looked at me irritated, right?
He looked at me like, I can't believe you didn't just say I did great.
And so he said, what?
And I looked at him, and I'm walking along, and I didn't realize the parents were within air shot.
And I said, well, look, Scoot, do you want me to blow smoke up your ass, or do you want me to be honest with you?
And to his credit, he said, no, you should be honest with me, even though he wasn't happy about the honesty.
He said, you should be honest with me.
And so we tell kids that they know better.
You know, if you tell a kid that they're great and they're doing wonderful and they didn't, what do they take away from that?
They take away from it that you're kind of bullshitting them.
Right.
You know, unless they're just super, super young, they get it at a pretty early age.
Well, here's something that's important to relay to children.
That you are not your accomplishments.
You are you.
And the only way you are going to get better at accomplishing things is to be 100% honest about the amount of effort you put in and what the actual result of that effort is.
Whether it's a failure or a success, that does not define you.
That defines your participation in this particular activity.
It is not you.
You are an individual that will hopefully learn from all of your endeavors.
But you're never gonna learn shit if you lie to yourself.
You're never gonna learn shit if somebody makes this, nobody scores a point, and there are no winners, and there are no losers, and everybody's amazing.
Because there's going to be people out there that are fucking driven and psychotic, and they're going to get ahead.
There's people that are task-oriented and goal-oriented, and they have an idea ahead of them.
They're going to try to figure out how to make this happen.
They have a goal.
They want to reach it.
And if you're competing with that person in any form of life, and they're not burdened down by the bullshit That we give so many kids today, they're going to have a massive advantage.
And this idea that this kid who's been coddled and treated like he's always going to be a winner, that somehow or another they're going to be happier is fucking crazy.
The sooner they're able to assess that equation, effort and result, and compare it to what's going on around them, and then understand it.
One of my boys played basketball.
They enjoy it, but it's not their primary activity right now.
So they tried out for AAU, and they got in, but not at the top team.
And They were upset about not being placed on this top team.
And I said, you don't...
And I didn't say it quite this way, but my point was you don't deserve to be on the top team because you're not working as hard as those kids that are working hard and that's their thing.
They wanted to be there and so they put in the effort.
You are happy playing and you could be there, but you're not doing it yet.
And so therefore, A, don't get down on yourself, but B, certainly don't get down on anybody else because they put out the effort and they accomplished something that you didn't.
Right.
You know, you're always trying to find that balance.
We're not doing our kids any favors right now.
Obviously, that's a broad-brush statement, but in general terms, I think society is not doing us any favors.
And you see that.
I have a daughter that's in college, and she talks about her classmates and others.
You know, sort of the conversations they have in class and the discussions and what passes as debate nowadays, which is not much.
The idea of the old debate where you can voice your opinions and they can be different than somebody else's and you can, you know, hash it out and you can have a winner and a loser, but that's fine.
You go away and you come back the next day and you have another rousing debate in that class.
It doesn't really exist.
You know, it seems like anyway, because everybody's so afraid of saying something that might be offensive, or not offensive, but just might be upsetting.
And so when you're going through the training, the point of it is to get them to that point, they realize that, okay, you know, it's not the end of the world.
I know that at some point I'm going to end up talking, right?
I'm going to say something.
I'm going to have to do that because I can't.
Otherwise, I'm either dead or I'm completely broken.
And the idea is if you do that, and then the rest of the training and beyond that, you're building them back up because they understand that.
Now, if, God forbid, something should happen, they get picked up and there's actually an interrogation going on, in the back of their mind, they understand that.
And they're able to process it so that if they do get to that point where now, okay, I'm going to have to talk.
I'm going to have to come up with something.
Then it's not completely devastating.
It doesn't leave them completely broken.
And they can walk back because they understand, I got to that point.
I understand what my boundaries are, but I can work within that.
I don't know where I'm going with this other than...
Part of it is you've got to assess who you're dealing with, right?
You've got to assess what you think their parameters are, what could be coming down the pike, in other words.
So how is this?
And that's part of the training, too, is understanding what different groups, what different places could mean, what that interrogation could look like, how bad it could get.
So you're processing that.
Part of it is understanding what it is that's okay to give up.
What are you going to say that's not going to put anything in jeopardy, anybody's lives or any operations or anything in jeopardy?
Part of it is, you know, then you've got to understand, you've got to stay close to the truth, right?
Where you start getting people out on interrogations is where they can't remember what they've said.
The closer you are to the truth, the easier it is to remember what you've said.
And these things, I mean, if it's a bad situation and you're in there day in and day out, You know, and your sleep deprivation and they're, you know, knocking you around and there's no food and it's...
You're gonna have a hard time keeping track of even the basic things.
So, you know, you're trying to keep it as close to the truth as possible and as minimal as possible, you know, in terms of damage.
You go in, you know, and typically you've thought through all of this.
It's like everything else.
You do your homework ahead of time and God forbid something should happen and, you know, usually it won't.
But anyway, point being is that You know, the idea is in the training portion of it, you want people to understand that, you know, everybody's got a breaking point, right?
And that's just, that's the way it works.
And some it's, you know, it's here, some it's further down the road, but everybody's going to break.
And you don't want that to devastate the person if it should happen, you know, knock on wood.
I mean, it's an interesting topic because, I mean, understanding that there's going to be severe penalties and that there's going to be repercussions and that, you know, this is a bad situation you're in.
And understanding that going in is going to help you a lot more than if you go in there from, you know, a soft, padded world where you don't think there's going to be any adversity whatsoever.
You know, just to finish that thought, is that the interesting thing about people talked about the interrogation program that we had, obviously, right?
And I don't want to revisit that.
And, you know, the left did a very fine job of grabbing the moral high ground and saying either you're talking to people or it's all torture.
Right.
But the point being is that even if you don't ever intend to use any enhanced interrogation techniques, You don't want to tell the enemy that.
Because once you tell them that you're constrained by the army field manual, as an example, that's all you can do.
Guess what?
Every mook out there fighting us and wanting to harm us is carrying a copy of the army field manual in their back pocket.
Despite the fact that they did for a while, they don't live in a cave.
And so once they know what's coming down the pike, That's gone.
Their incentive is gone, right?
To talk to you.
Because once you know, once you don't have that unknown, if you're not sitting in some squat box and the temperature's up and you haven't eaten and you're thinking, what the hell are they going to do to me next?
You have no idea.
If that's gone, and you don't have that anxiety, that intense anxiety, then you're okay.
They're just asking questions, and you can hold out for a much longer period of time.
And yeah, maybe there'll be some clever person working in the interrogation facility, and they'll develop a personal relationship over a period of time.
But you know what?
By then, your operational information has lost its interest, right?
Life on that stuff is not particularly long, typically.
But it's an enormously labor-intensive process, even in those cases where you think, okay, we've just picked up a high-value target, and we feel that they've got operational information that we really need to know related to whatever.
It's not as if you don't go in there and start beating them over the head with a two-by-four.
Nobody does that.
Maybe some liaison partners in fourth world countries would think that's...
What that stuff does is, first of all, it kills all of your inhibitions, gone.
All of your anxiety, gone.
And all of your insecurities, gone.
And what you're left with is this over-serotonin, over-dopamine state where you just love everything and everybody.
If you could give that to enemy combatants, I guarantee you, if you could talk to them, you would get shit out of them that they would never want to discuss.
The reason why they don't think it would work is because they haven't done it.
If you get anybody in the Bureau or anybody in the CIA or wherever who has done ecstasy, they would listen to this and they would not want to say they've done it, so it would be a real issue.
But I'm telling you, you give people two tabs of ecstasy and then start asking them questions.
No, there's nutrients that you take called 5-HTP. 5-HTP actually converts to serotonin in your brain.
It's the building blocks for it.
So what you do is, while you're tripping, you're supposed to double down on 5-HTP, and it helps you as you come off of it, your serotonin jumps back up.
Well, if you're really smart, you actually take L-tryptophan and 5-HTP, because L-tryptophan converts to 5-HTP, and you should also take adaptogens, like some B vitamins and different things as well.
Well, I think we could have we could see the market, you know, kind of stall at this point.
I mean, I think people have been amazed at how the market was resilient and not just resilient, but, you know, blasting upwards and showing apparently no concern for You know, how disheveled the administration has been over the first several months.
That's an operation we could work on, you know, because that's not targeting detainees and then we don't have all those regulations we've got to worry about.
But I think, you know...
If Rodman, you know, willingly offers up ecstasy and Kim says, fine, then it's too consenting adults.
And besides, when the season arrives, I put on my handmade New York Giants sweater from my daughter, and I don't take it off until after the Christmas season.
I've told my kids, look, if things get bad, if I start to...
You know, God bless, my mom's 98. And she's all there.
She's great.
My dad passed away when he was 90. He was all there.
And so I've got a knock on wood.
I'm hoping to make it a good long ways.
You know, I've also seen folks deal with the problem of, you know, onset dementia and Alzheimer's problems that creates horrible things.
I told my kids that, well, I haven't told them, but I told the oldest one, I said, just wheel dad out to the back and you guys all take turns shooting at me and, you know.
They'd pull their camper or their Volkswagen, Vanagon, right out in the middle of a planted field, a freshly planted field, because not everything is fenced and gated out there, right?
There's a lot of space.
And they're like, come on.
Or they'll take their, like the guy said, they'll take their Prius up in the back roads.
Did you see that video, that one officer who was trying to get that fellow to stop, and he was wearing a body camera.
And so he had asked him to stop, and he matched a description of, I think, of robbery.
And it's been on video quite a bit.
And so the officer is trying to get him to stop, trying to get him to stop.
He won't stop.
He says, I will tase you.
And he's coming around, right?
So he's Yeah.
you know pie in that chart there and he kind of gets around and he sees the hand and he starts saying take your hand out take your hand and his body cameras running and the guy pulls out a weapon and shoots him repeatedly and it's just it's all there on kids it's It's it's a it's a perfect example of how Difficult that job can be right and it's astounding so I don't know whether that video is available Yeah, it is available.
Yeah, there's there's a bunch of those I mean I've seen one of them where a guy pulls over this one Man and the guy was a Vietnam vet gets out of his car He's got a rifle.
He's yelling at him get back in the car put the rifle down put the gun down and the guy starts shooting him and And he's, you know, shooting multiple rounds into the guy's car, and the guy starts screaming, then he goes around by the passenger side and kills him.
It's all like on camera and video.
You have to realize this is a routine traffic stop.
Pulls him over for speeding or whatever it was, and this happens.
And it can happen all the time, and that's something that's on a cop's mind every time he pulls somebody over.
And you might think, hey, I'm a good person.
I'm not doing anything.
So I was going five miles an hour over the speed limit.
You know, why has this guy got his hand on his gun?
Why is this guy freaking out?
Well, maybe watch that video.
Maybe he's thinking about his kids.
Maybe he's thinking about getting home to his family.
You're doing something wrong, he's pulling you over, and you gotta comply and be polite and call him sir, and try to diffuse a certain situation and be as friendly and as polite as possible.
And, you know, so just, if you're stopped, just Comply.
Comply.
Nobody's ever, I mean, you just gotta, you gotta be concise and smart about that.
And I tell my kids, and I try to demonstrate by, like when I stopped, you know, and the sheriff came up and, you know, my kids were in the car and I was polite and I was saying, he got to the window and I said, I don't have any excuse.
Or they're all PTSD'd out and they're just not designed for that job in the first place.
I mean, it's very difficult to tell who's going to crack under pressure, the pressure of the day-to-day situation that a lot of cops find themselves in.
You know, we were talking before the podcast started about what could possibly go wrong in Afghanistan and that Trump was going to make some sort of an announcement.
And you were talking about the idea of privatizing.
The military over there and bringing in contractors.
Talking about it from the point of view that I don't agree with the idea.
Yeah, exactly.
In terms of disclosure, right.
My company, Diligence, we've got a security services group.
And starting back in 2003, we started building up a fairly significant presence out in Iraq as private contractors, providing support to the infrastructure operations that were going on out there.
And so that's an important effort because, you know, they need the same level of security that a forward operating base or a military base or facility would need, you know, but the military is not going to allocate resources for private companies.
So a lot of what the private contractors were doing was that.
And then also private contractors, you know, Getting contracts to provide additional security support or logistical support to the military, to military facilities, where they can't afford to allocate resources to perimeter security to the degree that they would like, so private contractors come in and help with that, or providing support in the movement of dignitaries or whatever it may be.
Point being is, we were out there for quite some time in Iraq doing that.
And we were there at the beginning of sort of this private contractor thing, right?
And people started becoming aware of it.
And we started working with groups, including Eric Prince's group.
We didn't work directly with him, but what I mean is that the various groups that were out there doing these contracts and this work, you know, realizing they needed to start to form an association or start to get some sort of, you know, grip on How this thing would look, right?
So that there was some consistency amongst training and what were the regulations for, you know, the various companies for, you know, weapons and everything else.
It's complicated, but, you know, long story short is, you know, we had upwards of 400 people, I guess, out there at a point providing security and intelligence support.
So I've got some experience in this.
And now what's happening with Afghanistan is...
That one of the options that's been being considered is handing over—we've got about 8,400 troops out there right now doing mostly training missions, training operations, and support for the Afghan troops.
So the idea was, well, let's let the private contractor take that over.
Let's move that out and let's not have the brave men and women of the U.S. military engaged in Afghanistan ad nauseum.
And this idea is being pushed to some degree by Eric Prince.
And he's said things like, well, if you want to keep having this conversation, you want to have the conversation 10 years from now, fine, let the military keep doing it.
I guess the overlying, the 30,000-foot view that I've got is that if it's important enough for us to be there, then that's a military function.
Then we have to commit in a way that, you know, we're not right now.
We've been in this sort of stalemate situation right over there, and now we're somewhat surprised or people are surprised that the Taliban is resurgent.
Well, where the hell did they think they were going to go?
The Taliban don't have any place to go.
So they're going to wait us out.
This was entirely predictable.
And we're trying to sell them this pseudo-federal democracy.
The Afghan people don't understand, for the most part, I don't think.
Maybe I'm just too cynical.
But they don't understand what the hell we've been trying to sell them for all these years.
So this doesn't diminish all the pain and sacrifice and suffering of all the people that have been out there and the lives that we've lost.
It doesn't diminish it at all.
What I'm saying is that we need to think about what's our endgame?
What's our objective?
So if we're worried now about the Taliban resurging and ISIS kind of coming back in, well, fine.
But let's say this is our objective.
And to meet that objective, then we're going to need more troops on the ground.
And let's see how that plays out.
I don't think a lot of people are going to be happy about it.
You don't necessarily do things to make people happy if it's a national security interest.
If we decide that that's in our national security interest, then yes, we need to commit and do it.
But handing it over to a privatized force, to me, is just slightly left of insane.
It doesn't make any sense.
And it's always easy for people to stand around and talk tough and say, we just need more troops.
I don't know that the objective is sufficiently clarified to say that we need more troops.
I haven't heard...
I don't care whether we improve the literacy rate of the Afghan people by another percentage point or if we build another road.
I don't think that's in our national security interests.
And so I think we need to be a little bit more clear about why we're there or what we're hoping to accomplish at some point.
We wanted to be there so that they wouldn't use it as a playground for terrorists to then develop and plot and plan and attack the West again.
So maybe the thing that we should have done was go in there, kick the shit out of them like we did in Tora Bora and elsewhere, explain to the remnants of the government, if you allow that to happen again, we're going to come back and we're going to do this again.
And we're very good at that.
We're very good at strategic operations.
And we could have done that.
And maybe that's the thing we need to do now.
And then that government's been corrupt for a very long time.
Karzai government, holy shit, they were completely corrupt.
And yet we all rallied around Karzai as if he was, you know, because he dressed well.
Trump is sending 4,000 more troops to Afghanistan.
Is that good?
Now here's the thing about when it comes to operations over there and what the objectives are.
One of the things that I've been hearing from people that are in the military that I know is they say they are happy that Trump is supporting them and that Trump Trump is kind of essentially giving the reins to the military, saying, look, this is what you guys do.
I'm not going to get in your way.
In fact, I'm going to support you.
And there seemed to be one of the few groups that is fairly universally happy with his decisions in that regard and with the people that he's appointed.
I think if you feel like you've got top cover, you know, then, you know, and that was one of the problems.
I mean, people talked about the, and we talked about it briefly, about the idea of the, you know, sort of the narrative of sort of a battle between Trump and the intel community.
Well, the intel community had a problem with the previous administration because they kept shifting the goalposts.
They were going to criminally prosecute people in the agency for engaging in that interrogation program and rendition program that had been approved by the previous administration.
That creates some ill will.
So the fact that the military and to some degree others and certainly law enforcement feel as if they've got this top cover from the current administration, that is a good thing.
And if you're willing to not politicize, All of this and make every decision related to national security based on how you think it's going to move the polls, then that's also a good thing.
As long as you're getting good, solid advice and you're consistent in your decision-making process, all those things are good.
I don't know enough about Trump to know how he...
He makes those decisions.
But he does have good people.
Mattis is a good person.
Pompeo is a good person.
John Kelly is certainly a great guy.
McMaster.
All these people are solid people who in any other administration would, you know, people would be saying, yeah, that's great.
You know, they're very highly regarded.
But sort of there's this cloud over it because it's Trump.
And people are still not sure how things play out in that administration.
But if he does listen, I think, yeah, that's a good thing.
But sending 4,000 more troops, that's not quite 50% on top of what we've currently got there.
Right.
What does that allow us to do?
Well, some of those troops are going to have to be involved in security operations of the trainers.
Some of those troops are going to have to be involved in, you know, logistical support, intel collection support.
So, you know, will it make us more effective in defeating in the short term some of the pushback from the Taliban and identifying and taking out more ISIS? Well, sure.
Watched the whole capture of him and the whole thing.
It was just fascinating to watch this brutal, evil, murderous dictator all of a sudden get caught by these common people, these rebels, you know, like, you know, outside of his palace and freaking out and his hair's all fucked up.
Isn't it always the case, too, that we have these dictators, we prop them up, and then after a while, we'll go, Jesus, this fucking guy, we gotta get him out of there.
I mean, you know, but, you know, hey, how did it...
How did his presence when they were at odds with Iran, you know, how did that help our overall sense of strategic, you know, foreign policy?
So things happen and you don't, you know, you don't get to pick and choose sometimes.
I guess maybe you do, but then it'd be kind of a strange world.
But you got to deal with sometimes with the people that are out there and, you know, So it's, I don't know, 4,000 more troops in Afghanistan, is that going to somehow solve a problem?
It's going to, I suspect, kick the can down the road again.
I'm not saying it's an easy, by any means, A, it's above my pay grade, but B, I think ISIS creates a different situation there.
If we hadn't seen ISIS develop and start to impact to some degree things that are going on in Afghanistan, then I think we could be better off just saying, okay, we're going to figure out a way to work with the Taliban.
I mean, the Taliban, I think at this stage of the game, could be contained within Afghanistan without allowing their place to be used as a shelter for terrorism.
I say that now, caveating saying now you've got ISIS, and that's a different kettle of fish because they're at odds with each other.
So what are we going to do?
End up, you know, in some weird fashion supporting the Taliban and their efforts to, you know, stamp out ISIS?
This is, we're talking thousands of years of history of failed efforts in Afghanistan.
And do I think, do I have the hubris to think that we somehow are going to solve this?
No.
So, you know, maybe the answer is just find that point on the curve where you can support an existing government that you can hold your nose and live with.
It's, you know, corrupt and, you know, but at least they're Working in the counterterrorism realm, you know, and they're supporting those sort of interests from our perspective.
And yet, you know, I don't think we're ever going to get to that point where we see a stable, self-supporting, you know, pseudo-democratic nation exist there.
I just don't think it's going to happen.
So that's a hugely unsatisfying answer.
But, you know, maybe it's like pollution.
You do little things, you know, and hope that it helps.
And maybe that's what we're doing here.
You know, if you just start from the point of view of saying, we're going to create a bulwark of democracy, you're overwhelmed.
It's never going to happen.
So you don't do anything.
You back out of it.
Part of me just, I hate the idea of leaving, right?
And quite frankly, that's typically what happens, you know, and particularly with ISIS, you know, in a presence that they would see that and they would see an opportunity.
Now, you know, they're at odds with the Taliban and the Taliban is pretty brutal.
Could they handle it on their own?
You know, meaning could they, you know, destroy ISIS on their own?
I mean, excuse me, support the Taliban in their battle against ISIS. I could see elements of the Taliban saying, look, we just want to fucking self-govern, right?
Could you ever imagine a scenario where the United States would support the Taliban because they were at war with ISIS? Like the Taliban could soften their stance on some things, would reach some sort of common ground?
Well, it seems like the only way we're ever gonna get peace and harmony in the world is if there's no fifth world, fourth world, third world, or second world.
We were at war in the 1940s, and now we're absolutely at peace.
I mean, and Germany is prosperous, and it's a great country, and everything's great.
I mean...
I would wonder what would have to take place for this to be a worldwide thing, where the rest of the world sort of rises up to an adequate level of civilization and we no longer engage in the potential global war that we're all looking at right now.
We're really looking at the possibility with Russia and with North Korea and all these different players.
There could be some sort of a twisted World War III going on.
I mean, at the end of the day, Russia's got a GDP, you know, equivalent to a mid-sized EU country, right?
I mean, so they just...
You know, and Putin is very clear he wants to rebuild the Soviet Union to some degree, in some fashion, right?
And he's been...
He's done it through some territory.
He does it through energy policy, through meddling, like they always do.
But so, you know, I don't think Russia...
But to your point...
Yeah, as with the U.S. and Germany, could we see a way that the U.S. and Iran, for example, could find common ground, and suddenly, 40 years from now, be at peace, and not only at peace, but supporting each other's economy, and, you know, have that sort of interaction, and...
But it's not going to be the North Koreans firing off a missile or whatever.
It's going to be this idea.
It's going to be a pandemic.
Something that we didn't quite see coming.
A mutation of a disease or something that...
Because I do believe in the idea that, you know, nature takes care of its own eventually, you know, just like a deer herd or whatever, and eventually the overpopulation issue becomes a concern, and that's how the earth tends to reset itself.
No, it's not his theory, but he is very well educated and very well thought out in regards to his choice of suits and a man wearing a well-tailored suit.
I remember Madonna, as soon as she started seeing Guy Ritchie, I was living in England at the time, and she just suddenly, out of nowhere, had a British accent.
Mmm, yeah silly goose, but it was great when she had like a fro like look at her over there with that Yeah, full white family orange spray tan from Lincoln County, Montana little Ruth Ann's girl But she feels like she identifies with black people more she likes the culture more and You know there's always been people that like the culture more and talk was sure like they're a part of the culture Well, you don't say you are.
When we went into Iraq in 2003, early 2003. People started looking at the business opportunities of Iraq, right?
I remember there was that whole idea, excuse me, that there was going to be all sorts of business opening up in Iraq because I don't know what they were thinking.
So then it became people looking for contracts, government contracts, commercial sector contracts to do business in Iraq.
And so the idea was suddenly there was a mad rush.
up minority-owned and veteran-owned and women-owned businesses.
So the idea was if you had like an Inuit Indian, you know, Eskimo, who was supposedly in charge of your business, that gave you extra points when you were weighed in the bid for a contract that you were going for.
So there became this cottage industry, much like the casino business, of trying to find tribes that you can represent in order for them then to open up, and you're creating essentially a tribe to have a casino.
Well, the Native American casino business is very weird in that regard.
And also that a lot of people in these areas, because they're a certain percentage, and I think it's as little as 1 16th Native American, you can get a check.
So if the casino is raking in the cash, the people that are a part of that tribe all get free money.
Well, Native American reservations are very strange when you think about, like, how long ago it was that these tribespeople were, you know, roaming the earth in nomadic fashion and living the life they did before the Europeans came, and that now they've become this segmented part of our population that's sort of a part of America, but has their own kind of, like, nation inside of a nation.
Yeah.
And it has weird rules.
Like, the way they have it up in Canada, they call them First Nation people, but in Canada it's real weird in regards to wildlife.
Like, I don't know if you know how it works up there, but they can shoot anything they want all year round.
And they have it that way in Washington State as well.
For moose, so like they drive at night with 4x4s, the moose see the spotlight, they freeze, they blow them away with high-powered rifles, and they can kill them as many as they want all year round.
That they hunt cats, like what we think of as a pet.
And they're like, why?
And I'm like, listen, I know it doesn't seem right, but the feral cat population is just run out of control.
Like, we did a podcast once, we pulled up the feral cat population in America and what it does, that they kill billions of birds and rodents in America.
Yeah, but the feral cats, yeah, in the ranches, I mean, you'd be out repairing fences or something, and, you know, you'd just kind of get off, or they'd spook the horses, or you'd put your hand down to pick something up, and they'd just come out of nowhere, and they're just, you know, they're bastards.
And we were there, and at one point, it was getting to be twilight, and I came around a corner, and I was with a couple of the rangers and...
There was a vehicle stopped.
It was a minivan.
It was stopped on the side of the road, and there were half a dozen people out of this minivan, and they were all kind of fussing about, you know, and just a little bit in the field there on the side.
What are they doing?
And then it became clear that there was a little calf out there, a little bison calf.
It had gotten separated from the herd, and I guess they had seen it, but now you could hear it.
It was kind of over there, bleeding, and they wanted to get it.
They wanted to round it up.
Bleeding meaning bleats, bleats, the noise.
Yeah, not bleeding, although that was probably the next step in this calf's evolution.
They were trying to figure out how to round it up and get it back to its...
Oh, God.
And the rangers said, here we go again.
And they said, I mean, look, this happens.
Unfortunately, people don't realize it's nature.
So they had to get out and I stood there and listened while they explained to these people, look, this calf is somebody's dinner now.
It's going to be found and devoured by other...
Forces of nature out here.
Most likely wolves.
Yeah.
And that wolf population is coming back up there, which is great.
And so these people were horrified.
They were amazed that the rangers wouldn't do something like, I guess, catch the calf, put it in the back of the truck, and drive it to the herd.
The Frank Church wilderness is insane in terms of the size.
I've read a really good book called The Big Burn, if anybody's looking for a book to pick up and read.
It's about this massive forest fire that took place mostly in Idaho.
And it was during the course of Teddy Roosevelt's time.
So it also covers Teddy Roosevelt and his efforts and the way that he got kind of turned on to conservation.
And the beginnings of the firefighting, you know, profession, you know, forest fires.
And it's a fascinating read.
I mean, you think about it, people get here and go, really?
I'm going to read a book about a big forest fire?
But it's incredible.
And they weave in the history and the time of the administration and how they were declaring parks and what they were doing and how they tried to tackle this fire and what that meant for future conservation.
And it's a fascinating book.
So it's called The Big Burn.
I'm drawing a blank on who wrote it.
But if anybody's out there listening and wants to book, pick it up.
Weather forecast and the part of the You know, it was politics and it was, I mean, back then in Roosevelt's time, it was all the timber barons, right?
And the mining barons and the railroad barons.
And, you know, they weren't interested in Roosevelt's idea of claiming land for the public.
Right.
And so, you know, it was, I mean, it's a fascinating, it's a fascinating read.
And again, sort of go back to that same thing that we talked about before, how did this nation get cobbled together and how did it end up looking the way it looked?
We have this incredible national park system and all this public land.
I talked to a wildlife biologist who said that that's one of the reasons why we have all these issues with like bark beetles and all these different dead tree issues that when we get a forest fire today, it's like so out of control because we don't allow these burns to take place, which they do naturally in nature.
You know, if you're looking at an accessible trip, you know, I get to ask this all the time, what would you do?
Where would you go?
If you had, like, two weeks, you know, take the kids and drive them somewhere, I would just point the car towards Utah, Idaho, you know, Montana, Wyoming, and just, you know, just head up there, and then just see what you can see.
You know, you got plenty of opportunity, a tremendous number of excellent parks, and, you know, show the kids something different.
But you're right, because we tend to plan everything for them.
Okay, now you've got to go to your, whatever, your hockey lesson.
Now you've got to go to lacrosse.
Now it's going to be baseball.
Now you've got a chess club or whatever the hell you're doing.
Yeah, you're right.
And it also kind of goes back to that idea that we used to manage these things for ourselves.
Right.
And so kids would go out and they would organize their own teams.
Right.
I worry about that, too.
I mean, God, you know, just the ability for kids to meet up at a playground and say, okay, we're going to, you know, maybe it happens and I'm making too much of this.
Because if you're in a situation where you're like an old broad who's got a lot of money and you want some young fuckboy and he wants a car, it's a good move.
And she would take notes and then, you know, do the letter or whatever that you'd put on paper and you'd post it in the mail and that's how you got business done.
Because, you know, we all used to dress like that.
I don't know if you can zoom in on that, but that was actually, we would get that after we completed training, they would actually give us an outfit like that.
Yeah, and that goes back to Afghanistan, what we were talking about.
What's the endgame?
If you're going to do this, don't let it...
Let's not do this thing where we're dying by paper cuts or whatever you want to call it.
And that's kind of where it's been.
I just feel like we've been in a holding pattern for years now when it comes to Afghanistan without really knowing where we're going or where we want to be when we get to the end of that road.
Yeah.
Somebody like Madison and people in general in the military understand if you're going to do something, you do it to win.
That's your objective.
And I worry that, well, maybe 4,000 troops is not exactly doing it to win.
It's doing what they feel they can get away with.
And I don't know where that gets us at the end of the day.
This whole Trump thing is getting weirder and weirder with every day.
So to even predict where we could be six months from now, forget about four years from now, or three and a half years from now, I think that when you look at some of the stuff that he does, you really have to wonder about his mental health.
And I don't say that like, you know, there's a lot of people that are saying that, I think, because they would like to think that he's mentally incompetent and it would be convenient for their argument.
But when I read that, I don't know what agency it was, was trying to get the IP addresses of people that visited an anti-Trump website.
Because as soon as people lose confidence, and that's one of the biggest issues with Trump as a president.
If people lose confidence in the institution, like one of the things that was very disturbing to a lot of people was that when he had those Russians over and he was explaining how ISIS is thinking about using laptops as bombs, and they're like, Jesus fucking Christ, this is top secret shit.
You're not supposed to say that, because then this could potentially...
Compromise people that are embedded in ISIS, that are distributing this information, like you have a bunch of people, you're giving up this information, there's a trickle-down effect, and it also diminishes the potential for people to trust the office, trust the person running it.
You see that, I mean, the previous administration had problems where they, sort of in their desire to rush to the podium to declare a victory in something.
There was...
A disregard for sources and methods, a disregard for the importance of occasionally...
Secrets are good in many cases when it comes to Intel operations.
Again, you want checks and balances.
I completely get that.
And of course, people are losing their minds.
I can't believe it's a CIA guy talking about checks and balances because I'm sure he doesn't believe it.
But it's true.
The place for that is in the committees and up on Capitol Hill where you're supposed to have an engaged, aggressively curious, inquisitive operation up there between the various committees that are supposed are charged with overseeing the work of the inquisitive operation up there between the various committees that are supposed are And oftentimes they do know exactly what's going on.
They just play this game where they disavow any knowledge when it looks like there's political blowback.
There's a fairly well-worn path between Langley, as an example, and Capitol Hill for the briefings telling people this is what's going on.
And then, you know, the general unwritten understanding is, you know, they're going to be assholes if it becomes politically expedient to do so.
They'll disavow that they knew about it.
They'll demand, you know, so it's a game that gets played sometimes.
But, yeah, I think that It's hard to say.
I've got friends who are very hard left, and they're convinced that Trump's on his way out in the not-too-distant future.
He's also a guy, though, that wants love and respect and wants to be a winner.
Like, everything he does, like, in regards to, you know, business, decisions, I mean, he'll tank something personally himself to declare a victory, right?
And you gotta wonder whether or not he would put someone in position, you know, to say, like, the fake news is so out to get him that what we've done is we've created a structure that's the best people for the job, and then I'm going to concentrate on business and helping them from the outside.
I mean, you could escape and have some sort of escape route.
Again, it sometimes seems as if there's no grown-ups in charge of the messaging that comes out of the White House, right?
And that's been the case since day one, basically.
And part of it is...
You know, maybe people say, well, it's the way he likes to play it.
He likes to play people off of each other, and he likes the chaos.
Well, you know what?
He never ran a big organization.
People imagined or thought, if you didn't spend any time up in New York, and having watched...
The Trump Organization for years and years and years.
If he hadn't done that, then you imagine it to be this massive organization.
Well, it's not.
It's always been kind of a family business, right?
So the chaos that's around that shouldn't be a surprise.
What is a surprise is that You know, he wasn't, you know, he wasn't sharp enough, I don't know what it is, to understand the importance of inserting the discipline in there.
And at least, if nothing else, being consistent and disciplined with the messaging that comes out.
That war thing, the North Korea thing is kind of frustrating in a sense, right?
Because nobody should be out there thinking that, and I'm sure very few do, that somehow we got to that point with North Korea because President Trump is president.
We got to this point with North Korea because we kicked the can down the road for two and a half decades of failed foreign policy with North Korea, and in part with China.
And so they've been very clear about what they wanted to do, and now they've gotten to that point.
Where they've created the weapons program and the ballistic missile program that they want or that they are close to having.
And, you know, when you get to that point, you naturally lose some of your options, you know?
So the decision tree gets smaller.
And, you know, Trump happens to be the president in office now when North Korea reaches that stage.
And North Korea is pretty consistent in the way that they've been behaving.
You know, they're always doing the same thing.
They throw their teddy out of the cot when they get upset and they want some attention or they feel they can get something out of it.
Typically, they do get something or China gets something that then they're willing to rein them into some degree.
And just like, you know, Trump could well be the guy sitting in office when Iran gets to that point.
Because anybody who thinks Iran is not spinning the centrifuges and continuing to work on their weapons capabilities is somewhat insane.
I mean, there is no...
John Kerry said the whole Iran deal was based on verification.
And we don't have verification.
We haven't gotten access still to some facilities that we would need to see.
We signed off with the previous administration, signed off on a study or an assessment, basically just to get the deal done, because the Iranians insisted that that investigation into their capabilities at one of their military sites come to a close.
It wasn't like we suddenly got answers and we were satisfied that there was no, and we just, okay, that was part of the deal, so we'll end that investigation.
We don't have that verification.
So Trump could, to my point being, Trump could just be sitting in that seat when North Korea gets where they are, when Iran possibly, you know, because that could happen sooner rather than later.
And then, yeah, then you'd like to think that the person in that position Would be rational.
I read an article today that's saying that him saying all that crazy shit about fire and fury that the world has ever seen might have actually been what he needed to say when you're dealing with someone like North Korea.
But the argument was that when you're dealing with someone that's as fucked up as Kim Jong-un, you're probably better off having someone as crazy as Trump as president who's gonna say some ridiculous shit like that.
So this guy goes, alright, this guy's just as nuts as me.
Frankly, those messages, those things that he said, were probably more important in terms of how China received them than how North Korea received them.
And honestly, 20 plus years of measured diplomatic language and restrained talk didn't really do anything.
It just kicked the can down the road.
Yeah, maybe a different approach in a measured fashion.
But the problem is, because of their perceived chaos, nobody has the confidence to believe that he's doing it in a disciplined, reasoned way.
So they don't look at it and go, yeah, he's saying that's a message he's sending.
They just look at it and go, he's just blasting off another tweet.
I mean, I can see where people, and I've heard that from Trump supporters, you know, where they talk about how everything's measured, everything in his own way is actually disciplined, because I've said numerous times that I think they lack discipline, and they say, no, no, no, no, actually, this is all part of the plan.
And I'm thinking, hmm, it doesn't look like it's part of the plan, because you've got other people that are in those senior positions that seem to be scrambling to catch up to the plan.
It was part of a conversation amongst the cabinet.
Anyway, missiles aren't going to be flying between us and North Korea.
I think China may actually see, at this stage of the game, They may see that they need to affect a different mindset for North Korea, and they may be doing that.
And part of it may be, again, not necessarily because it was a reasoned, thought-out plan, but Trump's comments about the trade imbalance with China.
And if the Chinese legitimately thought that we were going to put that under the microscope and maybe attack them on the trade imbalance in a serious way, then maybe they look at that and go, okay, if we can get them to back off...
Then, yes, we're willing to extend ourselves and actually listen to the sanctions and take part in the sanctions and, you know, exert some additional pressure on North Korea that maybe they weren't in the past, because China always acts in its own best interest.
And so they're looking for something.
What are we going to get out of this?
And maybe, so maybe that's, you know...
Anyway, in the meantime, it seems to have resolved itself to some degree, but I do worry that...
You know, once again, we're just kicking it down the road.
You know, I mean, until there's something, some sea change where, you know, maybe somehow we can affect a unified, you know, Korea with China's assistance.
It's going to have to be with their assistance and blessing, obviously, or something along those lines to get actual deterrence, you know, off the table and more of a removal of the nuclear threat.
We're just going to be doing this same conversation in another couple of years when they rattle the cage again and we have to figure out how to resolve it.
And the further you go down the road and the better their capabilities get, the fewer options you have.