Mike Baker, a former CIA official and Idaho rancher, critiques Gina Haspel’s 2018 confirmation hearings, arguing her post-9/11 interrogation role was legally justified while senators like John Brennan faced no scrutiny. He slams the 2015 Iran nuclear deal for lacking site access (Parchin) and verification, warning North Korea-style agreements without oversight are futile. Baker also exposes China’s state-backed espionage via Huawei/ZTE, dismissing moral pacifism as ineffective against adversaries like Russia, which poisoned Sergei Skripal. The trio debates diet science—Baker’s veganism, Rogan’s red meat defense, and Atkins’ death misconceptions—before linking modern health dogma to ideological extremes. Ultimately, their conversation reveals how geopolitics and personal habits alike suffer from oversimplified narratives. [Automatically generated summary]
I was just listening to a podcast where these guys were talking about wolves and about how they were hiking and they found four dead mature bull elk inside of like a couple mile stretch.
That had been torn apart by wolves and they started to freak out.
Idaho's an interesting place because it's a part-time legislature, which is the way I think all states should operate, which means everybody goes home to their jobs.
Well, if you look at the top of the state, the governor, Butch Otter, great guy, Brad Little, lieutenant governor, terrific guy.
They're both ranchers.
Full-time?
Yeah, basically.
They look at it from a different perspective.
Here in California, if you say you've got a wolf problem, that raises one perspective and one issue.
Well, I mean, people are losing their minds right now over the past 24 hours because of Iran, right?
And so what you're hearing is you're hearing a lot of the critics of the current president, and apparently there are some, that are saying, oh, he's inching us closer to a military conflict with Iran.
Well, these are the same brainiacs that said he was inching us closer to a war with North Korea, and everybody was completely wrong on that.
I'm not saying that Rouhani and the others in the Iranian regime might not decide to become more bellicose, I think they're looking at it wrong.
I mean, this idea that – because there's a couple of parts.
Part one is that they're saying, oh, look, he doesn't have a plan B, implying that it's either this deal, which even our European allies say is inadequate, right, or it's a military conflict.
And that's kind of what the previous president was all about.
We either get this deal or we're having a military conflict.
Well, no, there's other things in the works.
There's other options in that decision tree.
And so I think that's a false premise.
And the other thing when they talk about it over the past 24 hours anyway is that, well, look at this.
This is going to make it harder to get a deal with Kim Jong-un from North Korea because he's going to think that we don't support our deals.
Well, I look at it a different way.
I think that Kim Jong-un is going to look at this and think – Okay, they're not going to put up with an inadequate deal, right?
So he's going to look at it and say, well, yeah, because nobody disagrees with the Iranian deal.
They want to talk about how, look, the Iranians are complying with it.
Well, the Iranians are complying with what they agreed to allow in the deal, which is none of their military sites.
The number of times inspectors have actually gotten on and inspected a military site, including Parchin, the most important military facility in Iran, since that deal was signed in 2015, was zero.
Haven't been there because the Iranians didn't agree to allow any of those sites in this deal.
So that's like saying, That's like saying if you're a serial killer, you'll allow the police to come in and search your home, but you can't go in the basement.
Not that all serial killers put their bodies in the basement, but I suspect that's the case.
So anyway, it's an interesting thing, and I guess I wanted to throw that out there right off the bat because I think Iran right now is consuming so much of the oxygen for people out there.
Yeah, I think the idea that we have to stay in it because it's better than the alternative when the alternative, you know, being war.
Is not framing it properly.
I don't think that doesn't make any sense to me.
But I think that the fact that the UK, the French, the Germans have all agreed publicly that it's an inadequate deal and needs to be fixed, that tells you something.
But it also tells you that they have real strong financial incentives for continuing to do business in Iran.
And as do Russia and China, frankly, the other signatories.
So, you know, and also, here's the other part.
I mean, Trump, you know, what is it now?
We're 16 or 17 months into Trump's administration.
So it's not like he got into the White House and the next day, you know, he canned the deal.
He's been talking, but nobody listens to anything.
I'm not a supporter of Trump, necessarily.
I mean, I want the government to work.
So it's not that I'm supporting Trump.
I want the government to work, just like the previous administration.
I wasn't a supporter of Obama, but, hey, I want it to work.
I want good things to happen.
And so he went out there and there was some talk about, look, let's see if we can find some way to get rid of the sunset clause, some way to rein in their ballistic missile development program, some way, although it's not going to happen, to rein in all the...
You know, the shenanigans, if you want to call it that, that they're engaged in the Middle East.
And, you know, that didn't happen.
So I think he, you know, took a step that is not as god-awful as his critics would like us to believe.
The new director-designate for the CIA. And so today she went up on Capitol Hill, had open and then subsequently closed-door session with the senators.
And some of the senators, the reason I bring this up is because a handful of the senators were asking her and seemed focused on saying, well, how about this rendition program, the rendition and interrogation program?
How did you feel about it?
You know, morally, you know, did you have any quandaries?
You know, we know that the agency was doing what was allowed within the Department of Justice because the Office of Legal Counsel was directing that from the Department of Justice for that program all those years ago.
And laws have subsequently changed.
But at the time, they didn't want to necessarily talk about that because I don't think they wanted to highlight the fact that the DOJ had said this is, you know, what is able to be done.
So instead, they focused on how did you feel?
And I guess the reason I bring it up is because when I was in the outfit, I'm not a deep thinker, right?
So I never stood around and thought to myself, how do I feel about this on any given moment, right?
No matter what we were doing, it never occurred to me to sit there and question it, you know, as long as we knew what we were doing was proper and legal and was pursuit of, you know, tasking from national security concerns.
Then, yeah, and I don't think you want your military or your intel service, I don't think you want everybody out there at the pointy edge of the spear, you know, saying, well, I'm going to do things based on how I feel about it in the moment.
And it just seemed like a strange line of questioning.
And tell people, so if they're just listening to this for the first time, what you used to do for the CIA so they understand that you're coming from a position of – you actually understand this stuff.
So the agency is made up of, essentially, they change the name sometimes, but four directorates.
So you have operations, you have intelligence, which is all the smart people, the reports or officers, or sorry, the analysts.
You have science and technology, which is where they develop all the amazing gear that comes out of the agency, a lot of which then ends up in the commercial sector.
So if anybody's walking around with a defibrillator, that battery technology came out of S&T research, drones, satellite technology.
The U-2 stealth program, U-2, you know, plane was developed out of and run out of the agency.
So incredible things would come out of there.
And then admin.
But I was in the operations directorate and worked on everything from counter-narcotics operations to counter-insurgency operations and then obviously counter-terrorism operations.
So I guess the point is that – I mean there's something here.
I'm not quite sure how to explain it, but there's an interesting point that I think I've been pondering, which is that listening to the hearing today and listening to the way that the senators – the Democratic senators who were looking to kind of make this the key issue, there's – There's a sense of...
We're not putting it in context of the time and the national mood.
And that's a dangerous thing because the laws were different than they are now.
And they were different...
And what that means is that because in the wake of 9-11...
And I don't want to say that values change, but I think that they do in the sense of what people are willing to do.
And whether you're talking about, okay, we're willing to have a rendition interrogation program in the wake of 9-11.
Now we're not, of course.
Anyway, I think there's a danger to that line of questioning where they kept talking about how did you feel about it.
They're mixing this, and I'm not eloquent enough to explain it, but I found it fascinating that that was a question they wanted to focus on.
I think there's a real danger to people or for people that don't have any experience in actual war or really understand combat or really understand What can happen and what can go wrong in talking about it with the same sort of language that you would use to describe office politics?
I mean, look, there was actually this – some people were entertaining the idea that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed would come out and talk – To the senators, you know, as they're going through this confirmation process about what?
Explain who he is.
Well, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was a mastermind of 9-11.
And I think in part, again, because there's distance, right?
There's time.
So anyway, she should, again, she should be confirmed.
The whole rendition interrogation program was reviewed ad nauseum, thousands of pages written.
And interestingly enough, a lot of the people up there on the Hill right now in this confirmation process, the senators, who are saying that they need to know more are the same ones who were there before.
So theoretically, either they didn't read all the material that was given to them about this, or they've forgotten it, or they're, you know, or in reality, this is more about Trump than it is about her, which...
I don't want to be shocking anyone by saying that perhaps there's political grandstanding going on.
Look, seven operational tours, several management positions, and I guess at the end of the day, it comes down to I would rather have somebody Who's gone through that experience.
She played a small role.
She was not a senior person.
By the way, John Brennan was far more senior in the organization at the time of that program being run.
And he was confirmed as President Obama's director.
So maybe the senators have a different standard for a female candidate.
Well, interesting enough, I mean, that was in 2013 when he was confirmed.
But in 2009, He was – they wanted to confirm or they wanted to bring him up as the appointee for the director of the CIA. Again, it would have been President Obama's first term, but they decided not to because they – for the reason that they thought, well, maybe it's too close to after the – and they didn't want to go through the heartburn of having this process.
So instead, they brought him into the White House.
He became assistant to the president and deputy national security dude for counterterrorism.
And then four years later, they brought him in as a – they confirmed him as the director for the CIA. So – I guess – and he has now come out in support of Gina Haspel, the new director-designate.
So I think she will get there, as she should.
The focus should be going forward.
She's been very clear about we are not revisiting the old days of rendition interrogation.
It's not going to happen.
And she's been very clear about that, including today during the hearing.
So hopefully it will get done because it would be nice to think the senators would do their job and choose somebody who's appropriate for the job.
Well, it's strange who gets to choose and who doesn't get to choose who runs an organization like the CIA and whether or not they have an actual understanding of what goes on behind the scenes.
Yeah, that's a really good point because some of the questions today from some of the senators made you believe that perhaps they don't really.
They do.
I don't want to be glib.
You know, look, they all sit on the committees.
They theoretically are privy to all this information.
There is a very well-worn path that goes from Langley where the agency headquarters is based up to Capitol Hill from briefers going back and forth and back and forth and discussing programs and that, you know, they're classified material, but these people, the Gang of Eight, the people that are the minority majority leaders, the heads of the committees, The intel committees, they're all privy to this information.
And they were all privy to the information about the rendition program and the interrogation program.
And they all knew about it.
There were no objections raised at that time, 2002, 2003. So these people all knew about it.
So maybe those senators are asking her how she feels about it now.
Maybe they should turn around and look in the mirror and ask themselves how they feel about it.
But they're not going to do that.
So anyway, enough said.
She's eminently qualified.
Should happen.
Because we've got big issues.
We've got Iran.
We've got North Korea.
We've got dealings with China and the South Pacific.
You know, I would say that, yeah, it's astounding.
And so...
The reason why they're raising the alarm with Huawei and ZTE is because of the voracious appetite of the Chinese government and their commercial sector for information.
It's a little bit like, you know, shutting the door after the horse is headed down the hill because we're late to the game.
They've been doing this for years and years and years.
They've been, oddly enough, you know, a lot of our military gear have parts in it manufactured in China, right?
And so, you know, we should have been raising the concern about this and talking with China and trying to come to terms with this issue years ago.
I mean, we're trying to have that conversation with them now.
And up on Capitol Hill, you know, the Congress is trying to enact legislation, kind of like this Huawei thing.
They're doing it in a clumsy fashion, but the overriding principle is correct in that China made some decisions years ago that they were going to become a major power in the world.
In a certain timeframe.
And to do that, by definition, you've got to compress your research and development time, right?
And there's one way to do that, essentially, and that's to steal information, to acquire information if I want to be diplomatic about it.
And that's what they've done.
Japan came out of World War II and their idea was we're going to become a major power through manufacturing.
So they did.
They built up their manufacturing base and created this amazing result.
China decided we're going to skip the R&D for the most part, and all of that entails the cost and time involved, and they're very adept at it.
They throw an enormous amount of resource out there into hoovering up everything, not just from us, but from everybody.
And using that to advance their goals.
They have no firewall between their intel service, the PLA, military intelligence and others, and their commercial sector.
So not only are they there to protect national security, they're there to promote the commercial side of China.
And that's why it's so important.
And so that's why they're talking about Huawei, because of the potential for them to use their reach to further their desire for information, whatever it may be.
They'll hoover it up and then decide whether it's useful or not.
But they have the resource to do that as opposed to, you know, a smaller country that maybe doesn't have the resource and is much more targeted and focused.
On their intel collection or their efforts to gather information.
So that's sort of a, you know, that was a wordy explanation.
And when I read it, I read a bunch of tech articles where people were questioning whether or not it's even possible for Huawei to be using those phones to spy on people.
But then there were some other articles where Huawei was being charged with, what was it again that they were using?
Knows that that's the case because, I mean, and to be fair, back in the old days, again, we had compasses and maps.
But even when we started developing new technology and gear, quite frankly, if you've got to go out and do anything, the first thing you do is throw everything away that's got a battery in it.
And so we weren't necessarily...
You dumb it down because you assume something's going to go wrong.
And usually it does.
And usually it's based on kit, on gear.
And so, yeah, I never really became very adept at it.
We've got a...
I got these three little boys, Scooter, Sluggo, and Muggsy, and I got them...
So the tech people that are skeptical, what they're saying is that if Huawei really did have something in their phones that allowed them to spy on people, you'd be able to find it.
Here's what I would say about that, is that I'm sure there's obviously a lot of very smart tech guys within diligence for all your information and security needs.
We have some very smart tech people.
But when you're talking about the Chinese state and the resources and capabilities that that entails, yes, if you're saying that NSA could possibly detect this, but if you're talking about just dispersing kit out into the marketplace, And the way that that thing gets spread and disseminated and inserted into companies and then potentially allows points of access into these businesses.
And again, it doesn't matter.
It's not like they just have to go after IBM or Raytheon or something.
They're going after everything because it potentially is all of interest to them.
But they have proven themselves enormously adept at doing this.
And they've – and not that others don't, right?
Russia does the same thing.
A variety of others.
Even a lot of our allies.
Everybody, to the degree that – They have the resources and the motivation and they consider it an issue related to national security, whatever it might be.
They're willing to do it.
They're willing to try.
So it is interesting.
But yeah, the Huawei thing and the ZTE, again, I think the rollout of that concern and the rollout of sort of trying to provide guidance has been a little clumsy.
So, one thing that was speculation was that people didn't have to worry about the phones, but what essentially they're trying to do is cripple the company financially and not allow them to get a foothold in America, because they're the third largest cell phone manufacturer in the world.
Number one, Apple.
Number two, Samsung.
They're number three, but in America, no one knows who they are.
And so the idea is, what they're trying to do is make sure that the Chinese government It doesn't get a foothold in this country where those companies, or Huawei, the company Huawei, becomes a popular brand for people to buy.
And that would allow them, even if they didn't have any spy device on this phone, it would allow them to get other devices into people's homes that could potentially spy on them.
And then more importantly, get into companies and spy on the companies.
And this is one of the pieces of speculation that I read about was that they had certain servers That we're sending an exorbitant amount of information out, and they were trying to figure out what was going on with them, and that there was like an excessive amount of information, data, that was leaving the servers versus coming in, and they're like, this really seems like some fucked up shit's going on with this.
Huawei, first of all, Huawei's already present here in the country.
They manufacture a lot of things besides phones, and so they've already got a pretty big footprint in this country, and with our allies as well.
So, I think it's smart to consider the nature of a particular regime or government when you're talking about the potential for their products to enter into the commercial sector where They may have access because if they've shown a pattern of activity for acquiring intellectual property,
which is again a very delicate way to put it, then I don't think it's a stretch to say we should be concerned by their efforts to put communications gear, even if it seems pedestrian at the outset.
I'm not sure that I'm buying the idea that it's some nefarious plan to shut out Huawei so that they don't get a foothold in the phone business.
No.
And I say that because I've been, you know, 30 years, I've been You know, dealing with the Chinese in terms of their efforts to acquire information, both in the government and the commercial side of things.
So I come at it from a very cynical point of view, much like I do with the Iranian issue and the likelihood that they have not been living up to, you know, their part of the bargain.
And people will say, well, again, I go back to the same thing.
Well, we've been inspecting and they've been complying with all of that.
Well, yeah.
You know, this limited amount of inspection that we have to their civilian sites.
It's not a secret, you know, at this point.
It shouldn't be a secret that, again, we have no access to their military facilities.
So I tend to look at things in that view, and I... If I see a pattern of activity, I'm very reluctant to think they're somehow going to stop that pattern of activity for whatever reason.
So again, North Korea, same thing.
The problem with all of this, North Korea, Iran, Syrian chemical weapons, the problem with all of that, I realize I'm kind of jumping around.
I'm just...
Huawei's over here, but...
Is the verification issue.
It's always the weak link in any type of agreement related to containing a weapons program is verification.
And we know that.
It's something we should know anyway.
We seem to keep forgetting it.
So unless we can lock that down with the North Koreans, then a deal with them or a deal with the Iranians or a deal with the Syrians over their chemical weapons efforts, it's not worth anything.
So that's where the focus has to be.
And for whatever reason, the previous administration was keen to get this deal done, and they were willing to set aside this issue of all the military sites, set aside the issue of ballistic missiles.
And by the way, the deal that the president has just scuttled...
Did nothing to impact or affect or tamp down or moderate their behavior.
They've got more influence in the Middle East than they've had ever before.
They're engaged in more activity related to, you know, the countries in the Middle East against our interests than they have been in decades.
So that all by itself should tell us, well, I'm not saying that they're using all the money we gave them to support actions against our interests by Hezbollah or by the Revolutionary Guard or others, but they are.
And so, again, I don't have a lot of angst over the idea that we step away from the deal for a period of time.
Maybe we can come up with something better.
And we should.
We should always keep diplomacy open.
Always have a channel of communications.
That's important.
Keep doing that.
But be pragmatic and realistic about what you got.
They literally said, I forget which senator it was, asked Gina Haspel about Huawei and ZTE. And I don't know where they were going with it, but then it devolved into just trying to get us all those Senate confirmation questions due.
It just The senator's saying, well, I just want a yes or no answer.
Like, wait a minute, why don't you want some detail?
So they say, yes or no, would you buy Huawei?
And Gina Haspel was like, well, no, I wouldn't buy a Huawei phone.
Well, you know what, it becomes a bit of a sideshow, and it's a format as well.
Any confirmation hearing is, you know, five minutes for each senator, and you can't, you know, they spend three minutes making a statement, you know, that they can then, you know, send back in sound clips to their constituents.
Maybe they get a question in, and it kind of goes from there.
So it's...
You don't really learn much, which is fine.
They learn a lot in the closed-door sessions, and we rely on the senators to make decisions when it's classified information on behalf of the people they represent.
So that's how it's supposed to work.
Eh, what do I know?
I always like to finish my sentences with, what do I know?
And my wife always says, why do you do that?
You're leaving the impression that you don't know anything.
I think people are a lot more engaged than sometimes I think the media gives them credit for.
I mean, listen to conversations I have when people want to talk about something other than Joe Rogan, I get the impression that they're paying attention to what's happening out there.
Well, it is a big deal, but it's a regional issue, and I think there is a way we're going to get some success here.
I think it actually is going to work out to our benefit.
I'm not buying the doomsayers who say it's all heading to a conflict.
So I am not looking at that one.
Nothing really stands out.
I guess if you said what's the biggest concern from a security perspective to the country, it would be the same thing it's been last year and the year before and for a number of years, which is the frailty of our infrastructure and its susceptibility to either cyber attack or physical attack.
Here's what I would say about that is, and again, everybody speaks from their own experience.
People have their own perspective.
My perspective is based on what I've seen in a lot of places around this planet.
We better hope we do it, and we better hope we do it well, because it's a very aggressive world out there.
And so when people kind of roll their eyes and go, oh, well...
We do it as well.
So we're kind of like dismissing the whole activity.
I guess my point is, yeah, I get what you're saying.
I'm not saying it from a self-righteous point that the Chinese are very good at acquiring intellectual property, or I'm not saying it from a self-righteous point that the Russians have been meddling in our elections.
That's my argument for people that are super progressive and really liberal when it comes to these conversations.
I always say, alright, if the world is the way it's described, if China really is constantly meddling, if Russia is really actively trying to sabotage our elections, if Iran is really doing what they're – what should we do?
You don't think that we should be involved in meddling?
You don't think you should be involved in manipulating or monitoring or making sure that our interests are safe or that we're not going to get attacked?
The idea that we're never going to get attacked again or no one's going to get attacked, that doesn't even...
When you look at human history, that is completely preposterous.
The idea that all attacks and all war is going to somehow or another stop because you eat vegan, that's fucking crazy!
I mean, that's a crazy way to look at the world, and that leaves you incredibly vulnerable to attack.
And we're the ones who seem to always apologize for it.
But we better hope that we do because it is a chaotic, messy, aggressive place out there.
And you may want it to be different, but it's not.
And it's kind of like that questioning today in the CIA-designate confirmation hearing, how do you feel about it?
Well, at the end of the day, it doesn't matter how you feel about it.
What are the laws on the books?
Follow those laws.
Protect the American interests and national security.
And if you don't feel good about it, then leave and go do something else.
But this idea that somehow we're all going to – could you imagine a combat gate out there and half of them decide, well, I don't really feel good about this particular action.
Maybe we should stay back.
That's not how the world works.
So I don't know.
Hey, it would be great if we all could – Be bad at people.
But isn't it, again, we're talking, and this is coming from a person that hasn't experienced combat, but we're talking about a bunch of people that really don't understand and really haven't seen the things that you've seen or seen the things that the military's seen, and they're talking about the world in this sort of idealized, rose-colored glasses view of things that's not accurate.
And so their version of what America should do is based on...
It's based on ignorance and this idea that we don't need intelligence, we don't need a military, we don't need a presence in all these other countries.
I just don't buy that.
I don't think that makes sense when you look at all the different conflicts that are going on in the world.
I think that there is an element out there that says, if we just take Iran as an example, you know, I've spoken with people who honestly seem to believe that In part because the previous administration – I mean, now former Secretary Kerry is out there publicly and President Obama is out there publicly.
They're all saying, well, but the Iranians have been complying.
So it's – they're implying that it's our fault.
It's our fault for backing out of this.
It's our fault that somehow that the Iranians have been cheating on the missile sanctions.
Look, the UN even agreed in – At the end of 2014, just in October of that year, the Iranians had been busting agreements related to their ballistic missiles and their development.
And we signed that agreement a few months later, three months later.
It happens.
No matter what you may want to think, it's a messy place out there.
I would love it to be different.
I would love everybody to get along and, hey, it would be great.
Think what we could do if we didn't have a defense budget.
Well, people are always going to have an idealized version of the world, especially when they don't experience it themselves.
But I think that, for the most part, when people think of intelligence communities, if they think about the CIA or the FBI, generally, for whatever reason, in America, you get a negative response.
People don't think about it in terms of something that's necessary and beneficial and really a cornerstone of the protection of the people in this country.
You could go back to World War II, the end of World War II. OSS, which was the founding organization that then became later on the CIA, amazing people involved in OSS. And basically, what they did during the war was incredible.
So anyway, but they do this.
And while Bill Donovan was the head of OSS, So imagine all these dedicated people dropping in behind enemy lines, both in the European and Japanese theater, and engaged in all this activity for the years that it took to win that war.
And we got out of the war.
We finished.
And I'm assuming most people listening know how that ended.
And Truman literally just kind of writes a little note to Bill Donovan.
I've seen the note.
And it says, you know, Bill, hey, great job.
Thanks so much.
Wrapping it up.
All the best.
Good luck in the future.
And they shut down OSS, right?
They don't need it anymore.
They didn't need the intel service because we won the war and things are gonna be looking pretty good.
Well, about a year later, you know, they got the band back together because what was happening, the Soviets were running, you know, all over the place and it was the Cold War and the Soviets had no intention of being benign and living in a community of nations.
And so suddenly they got the band back and said, okay, so that's when the CIA was created in 1947. At the end of the Cold War, not that long ago, although it seems like ancient history now, there were a lot of serious people in Washington, D.C. when the wall fell who basically said, let's wrap up the agency.
We don't need the CIA anymore.
So there's this pattern of – and that's good.
People want to think the best, and that's a good thing.
I mean Americans tend to be – Whether it's ideological or naive or just optimistic, whatever it is, that's a good thing, right?
But it butts up against the reality of how the world actually works.
I mean, they're about as good as it gets in the world when you wander around America for as large a nation as this is.
Things are pretty goddamn good for the most part.
And I think that's part of the problem, is that these people, they're not traveling to these war zones.
They're not experiencing...
I've talked to so many people that have been overseas and been to these places of conflict, and they come out with a dark view of what is possible if you're in the wrong place on the planet.
There would be value if somehow we could enact some program where everybody had to spend a couple of years in service of some sort, military service or overseas service.
I know we had the Peace Corps and all of that, but high school kids say, well, I went to Bermuda and I built a house for a week, so I got my international experience.
It's better than nothing, but I think something that would mean people would have a little more skin in the game, but you're right.
You go to some of these places, fourth and fifth world countries, and And you do realize, and people roll their eyes, but, damn it, this is the best country in the world.
And I say that repeatedly, and I believe it firmly.
We make mistakes.
There's no doubt about it, but we tend to course correct.
We try.
Sometimes it takes a little bit longer.
No matter what administration is there, we try to do the right thing.
And so when people talk about us just stepping off and not worrying about our place in the world, You know, someone's going to try to take that position on the ladder, and it's not going to be as benign as we tend to be.
Not always.
Again, again, I realize we make mistakes.
Fine, okay, fine.
I'm not going to self-flagellate over it, but, you know, still, we do a pretty damn good job.
Don't you think the people are more open to this idea that it's necessary now because of the Russian situation and because of understanding the amount of power that Putin wields and the way he has just really ultimate control over that part of the world?
I mean, he really does.
I mean, you could...
Drone on all you want about democratic elections, but we all know that's horseshit.
I mean, he fucking kills anybody over there that's a legitimate threat, kills anybody over there that's a journalist.
Yeah, and Garry Kasparov was talking about him, and he's a vocal critic of Putin, and he was saying that if you look into all the different companies that they've confiscated and acquired, this is what they do.
If they have a political enemy, They essentially just take over their company and charge them with some sort of a crime and throw them in jail.
Because, again, we look at it from a different perspective.
We look at it and go like, how can people with a straight face stand by while he gets a fourth term and he's just like president for life?
Well, look over at China.
Xi has spent the past few years locking that down, building up the security apparatus, kind of stepping on this idea that somehow there's a rule of law.
He's now built back up this Cult of personality that we haven't really seen since, you know, Deng Xiaoping or certainly Mao and he's there for good.
And so that gives them a strategic advantage, right?
Because they can look at problems in the long haul whereas here we're looking at it in an election cycle.
So when we've got a major issue to deal with with China, Xi's not looking at it and thinking, okay, well, I've got to sort this out in the next short period of time.
He's looking at it and thinking, Trump's got maybe two years left.
And there's going to be a transitionary time in between the two candidates or the two presidents where things get real sloppy and they might be able to slip in something.
That came out of that New Jersey incident with Anna Chapman.
And those individuals were just basically there to exist, right?
Their whole point of being was just to see whether they bump into somebody of interest.
And they weren't going to be responsible for then developing that potential target.
That would be somebody else's responsibility.
And that person who had the responsibility to develop that target, it wouldn't be their responsibility to maybe task them or make some sort of light pitch.
That would be somebody else's responsibility.
So there's people up that food chain that take on more and more responsibility if they happen to find a target of interest.
And that's just the resources devoted to one part of the country.
Only because I'm not sure if I've seen it in print.
But Chinese-American and obviously part of the attraction for bringing that person into the agency was their Chinese language.
Well, part of the attraction from the Chinese Intel perspective is… The Chinese ethnic background.
First generation, second generation, third generation doesn't matter.
They tend to play off that very well.
So anyway, this individual worked for the agency for a period of time and then left and then set up shop overseas and then his actions became suspect.
And so that's when we ended up getting them.
But that happens.
And when you catch somebody who's been engaged in that, first thought is, you know, thank God we caught them.
And the second is, how does someone do that?
Now, I say that, again, not to be self-righteous, because we're always out there looking for targets to recruit, to turn on their country.
If we could find ourselves an Iranian scientist, it's not like we would be coy and say, well, we don't want to put them under that stress of recruiting them.
Of course we do for national security interests.
But I mean just from a psychological perspective, you think about that.
And, you know, I understand the people out there who say, well, that's, you know, you can't make that equivalence.
I don't know.
But I never had any problem.
I never had any problem determining the good people from the bad people.
You know, and that's like, today, one of the senators in the confirmation here, I'm sorry to keep going back to the CIA director-designated confirmation hearings up on the Hill, but One of the senators, it almost sounded like he was trying to make some moral equivalency between terrorists and agency officers who were doing what they were allowed to do underneath the laws of that time and the DOJ, Department of Justice regulations and legal readings.
And his point was, well, if you waterboarded somebody, well, then what happens if one of your people got picked up by terrorists and they were waterboarded?
Would you think that that was justified?
And I'm thinking, okay, wait, wait, wait.
It's a very odd construct for a question.
And, you know, I mean, frankly, if ISIS or Al-Qaeda or Boko Haram picked up one of our people and all they did was waterboard them, you know, that would be a happy day, right?
Because they don't operate under any laws, which is what Gina Haspel said.
She handled the question very well.
And kind of shut it down.
But this idea that sometimes you'll bump into that where people, I don't know what it is.
And they're also trying to frame a narrative instead of trying to understand the situation objectively.
Instead of really asking someone who was there, asking a bunch of people who were there, getting a sense of what was the climate, what was going on, what actually happened.
Instead, they're trying to frame it.
Wouldn't it be justified if someone got ahold of one of our troops and did that to them?
I think there's so little – and it's obviously much worse right now with the current administration, President Trump.
It just seems like nobody – I mean, it's like World War I, right?
Everybody's in their trenches throwing hand grenades at each other.
Nobody's in the middle ground.
Nobody's even trying to get up and go into the middle ground.
And so nobody's having those conversations, like you said, where they even make a lame attempt to try to understand what the other perspective might be.
Yeah.
It's exhausting in the sense that not everything that this administration, again, you know, the caveat being, I didn't vote for Trump.
Hey, I didn't vote for Clinton.
You know, we got 320 million people in this country.
You think we could have come up with two other candidates?
But who did you vote for?
You know what?
This sounds really lame, but I just sat it out.
I couldn't get myself to go vote.
I mean, I was going to vote for Ronald Reagan's ashes or something, but I figured I'd be the only person.
So I didn't vote.
I couldn't figure out how we got to that point.
And the one person who should really be pissed off was Bernie Sanders.
I mean, the only collusion we've really proven up to this point is Isn't DNC colluding to keep Bernie down?
And yet because of the self-inflicted wounds that they constantly have coming out of that White House, because of his tweeting for the most part, people aren't focusing on – look, we should all be able to agree.
Democrats and Republicans should be able to agree that if you can get your way to peace on the Korean Peninsula, that's pretty damn good.
Yes.
They just released the three North Korean prisoners – well, American citizen prisoners who were held in North Korea.
So Secretary Pompeo is flying back right now from Pyongyang, and he's bringing those three back.
Him saying his nuclear button's bigger than the other guys and – It's like, but I gotta tell you, I was really happy watching the video of Kim Jong-un shaking hands with the president of South Korea and the meeting and the DMZ. I was happy.
That to me was like, wow!
Like, that made me think, they're both smiling.
I know Kim Jong-un's a fucking murderer and he killed his own uncle and his nephews and all these different people that he thought might go against him, but seeing him Shake hands with the President of South Korea made me think like, wow, they might settle this.
I mean, look, that's the very first time His granddad, Kim Il-sung, and then his dad, Kim Jong-il, neither of them ever stepped foot on the southern side of that DMZ, on the southern side of Peace Village.
Never happened.
So that in itself, you're absolutely right, that's a major development.
Now, maybe nothing comes of it, right?
It's a low percentage shot.
You have to agree.
There's so many moving parts.
So maybe nothing comes of it.
And I think the administration is making that case, saying, look, we have to be realistic.
But this is a good thing that it's moving in that direction.
And if you talk to people that know him, that were partying with him, that guy would be up all night drinking and partying and then show up and play fucking phenomenal the next day on zero sleep.
Yeah, Billy Corgan was friends with Rodman, and Billy Corgan from the Smashing Pumpkins on the podcast was talking about how they were mad at him because Rodman was taking Billy Corgan partying and then showing up the next day with zero sleep and playing, and they were blaming Billy Corgan.
They saw a badger carrying what they thought was a squirrel.
They shot it and it was actually carrying a baby.
So they took this baby badger, and now they're raising it.
And he's raising this baby badger, and he says that you can, given the option of fight or flight, they'll often fight, but if they're bottle-fed, handled constantly, and extremely well-socialized, they can be kept in captivity easily and make fun pets.
This has nothing to do with a badger, although we're still talking about small animals.
Somebody sent me a clip of an incident where a police officer was driving down the road, and he stopped traffic on both sides because a groundhog was trying to come across the street.
And so he was trying to...
It was about a quarter of the way across this two-lane road, and he was trying to back it off the street.
Okay, that was a nice humanitarian thing, right?
He's trying to help this animal get off so it doesn't get hit by cars.
And this – he keeps trying.
He keeps trying.
It's not working.
The groundhog won't leave.
And eventually the groundhog – I guess something snapped in his mind and he decided, fuck this.
And she's a great kid, but she always says, you know, Dad, could you just not maybe bash them as often as you do if I'm flying back over there to work?
Although I will say, I was giving a speech one time about national security issues, and I got off on the subject of the intellectual property theft.
It's perpetrated by a lot of different countries.
And this was a large conference.
And so I'm talking about the Chinese and their tendency to do this.
And I look down there, I see a guy that I know who's with one of the companies that brought me in for this speech, and he's got this funny look on his face, like, oh my god, I can't believe you're talking about this.
And he kind of, like, motions over there, and they're in, like, the third row of this area.
It's this contingent of Chinese business folks sitting there, and they just look, and I've just been spending 10 minutes just railing and talking about, you know, how awful they can be sometimes in this whole, although good.
Honest to God, I can't remember where I was going with this story.
And so I was just like rambling until I get my head straight.
I'm like that deer in that video.
So those two were, again, same thing, supposedly engaged in espionage.
And so they got chucked in.
So we'll see.
I mean, you know, whether we're able to get anything from this, who knows?
But that's a good sign.
The fact that he met with, as you pointed out, President Moon from South Korea, a very good sign.
The Chinese have, they sent their foreign minister over to Pyongyang a couple weeks ago.
First time the foreign minister's been over there in maybe 11 years, 12 years.
So they understand the importance of this.
And I think everybody's The dynamic has shifted because I think we've kicked the can down the road for so long that they're basically at the point where their programs are close to being fully developed.
And I think that the Chinese understand that that means that all those other options perhaps of kicking the can down the road, Aren't on the decision tree anymore.
And so, you know, they don't want chaos on the peninsula.
They don't want military conflict.
Nobody does.
And so I think the Chinese for basically the first time have been aggressively assisting with the sanctions that were put in place.
And that had a very quick response on Kim Jong Un.
He's not suicidal.
He just wants to survive in position of leadership.
So he's looking at it thinking, okay, the calculus has changed.
So I got to do something different.
And again, being pragmatic, maybe it doesn't work, but at least we're trying.
And they've talked about this in terms of just a simple – not simple, but the idea that the population in terms of its physical stature compared to the South Koreans is – they're shorter.
And that's a malnutrition issue.
I think also I think they've realized that there's only so much they can do going forward to lock the place down.
And technology at some point, even though it's North Korea and there's not a lot there, There's enough, and I think there's a sense that they – how long can they control the population the way they have?
So again, he's not – Kim is not suicidal.
He wants to maintain power.
When you think about every country acts in its own best interest or every leader acts in their own best interest, that's his thought process.
And how do I do that?
Well, okay.
Maybe – so I think that it could happen.
We could get something really good out of this.
We'll see.
You know, but the Iranians are watching it and North Koreans are watching what we did with Iran.
I disagree with that whole notion that North Koreans are going to look at it and go, ah, that means we can't trust them.
Look, if President Obama was so enamored with that deal that he made with the Iranians, well then take it to the Senate, right?
Make it a treaty.
You made it an agreement, an executive order basically.
And so they're not looking – I don't think the North Koreans are looking at this and going – Trump is going back on his word.
I think they're looking at it and going, Trump's – OK, he means it.
He's not going to put up with a bad deal.
And this wasn't that good a deal.
So I think that's the way that they would process it.
And we'll see.
But, you know, who knows where the Iranians are going to go with what they're doing.
And people right now listening are probably thinking, okay, I'm tired of listening about the Iranians.
Well, I think only because, you know, if it's not handled properly and there's a lot of moving parts, meaning our allies, meaning the wild card of what Rouhani and the regime is going to do.
But look, make no mistake, there's no – this idea that somehow this was a moderate Iranian regime.
All you got to do is look at what they're engaged in doing in the Lebanon, in Yemen, in a proxy war with the Saudis and others, in Iraq and Syria, in the work that they're doing.
And all the soldiers, U.S. soldiers that they killed in Iraq, you know, through the provision of weapons, the training that they gave to the Iraqis that were fighting against us.
Yeah, look at all of that.
At what point did somebody make some decision that the Iranians were somehow moderate?
Because they're not.
That regime isn't.
The people themselves – we keep hoping one day – I mean you go all the way back to the fall of the Shah and people hoping that the people will rise up and overthrow the clerics.
That part of it I don't really understand, again, because you would think that you would base that on people's performance, and all you've got to do is look at past performance of the clerics and the regime they're in Iran that runs things.
And I don't know how you come away from it thinking, well, they're being actually pretty moderate.
They're being pretty conciliatory.
And that's what we got.
The previous administration, they just stretched themselves thin trying to sell this deal.
I mean they did everything they could to try to race to it, make sure it was going to happen.
They set things aside.
And, you know, we've caught the Iranians in the past cheating.
And this business with Netanyahu, and he came out with this information that they pulled out of this warehouse where it was being stored.
Yes, that was, you know, historical, covered the period of 1999 to 2003. And what was that again?
How did that work?
Mossad had an operation that they engaged in.
There was a warehouse in Tehran where the Iranian regime, rather than destroy all their research and all the work they were doing on nuclear weapons up until that time, during that time, they stored it.
And so they put it in a warehouse facility.
Mossad and some other liaison service found out the location, and then they mounted an operation, which is very labor-intensive.
You've got to do a lot of surveillance.
You've got to recruit assets who can provide you with key information about this.
And then eventually they hoiked out a bunch of these documents, 50,000 pages of documents and almost 200 CDs.
That information covers 1999 to 2003 and one of the things that it shows definitively is that one of the things the Iranians were doing were they were designing and looking to build a minimum of five nuclear warheads, right, for their ballistic missiles that they're also developing and building.
Which puts a nail on that whole idea that it was nothing but a peaceful program.
But people looking at it, they're apologists, and they're saying, ah, it's old history, it's old news.
It doesn't tell us anything new.
Well, it tells us and confirms to us what we've been saying all along, which is that, you know, they were lying about it.
And they were lying about the extent of their centrifuge operations, the extent of the stored materials that they had.
I just don't know how you make that leap to then say, okay, now they're fine.
Now we can believe them.
Why?
Because why?
I don't get that part.
So I'm not willing to see it until they want to give us 100% access to all their sites.
They want to say, come on in and look at Parchin.
Come on and look at the military facilities where we used for weapons development in the past.
Now you got something and now I'll back off and say, okay, maybe that's a good deal actually.
Give us access to all those sites and let us go in and look around.
The IAEA, which is the international organization for inspection of these nuclear sites, they spent 12 years trying to figure out what the hell was going on at Parchin, which is a military site near Tehran, and never, never were able to get the access they needed, never were able to solve the question.
And they went on and on with that investigation.
Well, guess what?
As a result of the drive by the administration to get a deal signed, Part of the conditions from the Iranian regime was that they stop this investigation, just draw a line under it.
They had no answers.
They just said, well, no, we're not going to sign a deal unless you stop that investigation.
So we did.
We stopped the investigation.
And like I said, they also said, well, you can't visit our sites, our military sites.
Oh, okay, fine.
We won't.
By the way, this doesn't affect our ballistic missile technology development or weapons program.
Well, this was two years, as former Secretary Kerry would like to say, you know, it was two years of diplomatic work and hard negotiations.
Hard negotiations, come on.
So, you know, we worked reportedly in concert with the Brits and the French and the Germans and the Russians and the Chinese, although it was mostly, you know, from our side.
And...
It is what it is.
So are they complying with what they've got in the terms of the agreement?
Yeah, fine.
But like I said, I just think – and it kind of goes to that point about the truth is always kind of in the middle, right?
I mean the truth is somewhere there.
It's not like – it's not me throwing grenades at the progressives of the left or the democrats saying, you know, it's a terrible deal.
It sucks.
It's like, no, look, a deal could be good.
And I'm glad that we've been able to inspect those sites that have been available.
That's a good thing.
But don't couch it as something that's not.
And, you know, if the Brits and the French and the Germans are now willing to say it's an inadequate deal, but we still want to stay in, you know, that should tell people something.
And, you know, but anyway, that's not where we're at.
We're at everybody stands around screaming at the sky because they're upset about one side or the other.
And so then you get what we get, which is people reading crap on Twitter and thinking that it's always true, or that's how they form their opinion, or it's all this or it's all that.
The world is not that.
The world exists somewhere in the middle ground.
But I don't think we're failing our kids by a desire to make life easier for them, maybe.
There's a shocking lack of adversity that a lot of people have to go through in this life.
And if you go through too much soft living, you start to develop these lazy habits and this distorted perception of reality and a lack of understanding of what really hard work is and how difficult it is to get by in this life if you don't live in this cushy place that we live in.
That if you didn't do good enough, you need to figure out what you did wrong and go back and improve and work on it.
And then if you do get in next year, you'll get an amazing feeling of accomplishment rather than an amazing feeling of entitlement that you belong in everything you try out for.
Nobody's going to cut you any slack, theoretically.
Yeah.
But, no, that's right.
The idea that, you know, you've got to – I mean, it's like my two older boys are – you know, people are going, oh, Mike's now talking about his kids all the time.
My two older boys have gotten to the point now where the sports thing, they play, and if they don't play well, they sit.
Because earlier than that, everybody plays.
It's equal playing time.
That's what you typically get.
And that's a good thing that little kids are learning how to play the game and where to stand and all the rest of it.
So, but then they get to a certain point, it becomes merit-based, or it should, anyway, which is how it works in Idaho, basically, at least with the teams that we're associated with, is that if you don't play that well, then maybe you don't make the team, and if you make the team and you're not playing as well as the other kids and you're sitting on the bench, and so, you know, my kids, you know, when it first started happening, you know, they were just, they were complaining, you know, like, ah, you know, screw it, I'm not getting any playing time, and I'm thinking, well, okay, what's the next part of that thought process that you need to work your way through?
If you're not getting enough playing time, it's because you're not, what, playing as well as you should be compared to the other kids.
Therefore, what do you need to do?
So you have to walk them through this process.
And that's okay because kids don't know this stuff inherently, maybe.
They're making it too difficult for the children, and they're not having a good time, and it should be about companionship, and it shouldn't be about competition.
Well, you're setting your kid up for failure, because it can be about both.
It can be about companionship, but also about competition.
Right.
Look...
The world is competition.
It's filled with it.
If you're not competing, if you just decide you don't want to have anything to do with competition, that's your choice.
But if you engage in something that does require competition, you want special access.
If you don't have that nature, if you don't have that competitive side of you, okay, fine.
But then don't go through the rest of life thinking, well, just because life is a competition, which may upset you when you find that out, that you don't get special dispensation just because you're not a competitive person.
And to be fair, Muggsy, the youngest one, got called in for...
He got called in for using the word douchebag one time, but a funnier one was when he and two of his buddies, who shall not be named, were out in the playground not too long ago.
And they were sitting down and they were playing some game, right?
And it was recess and all the kids, all the different grades are out there running around.
And everybody knows my little kid, you know, Muggsy.
He's like the mayor of the town.
He's just a jolly happy guy.
He's going to be the guy that takes 10 years to get out of college, right?
And so he and his two little buddies are sitting there and they're playing some game where they got to count with their fingers.
So at one point, Jack has the number one and he puts up a finger, right?
And one of the other kids starts laughing because he's got an older brother who told him what it means.
So he tells him what it means.
So they start shouting this out, this word.
They start shouting.
Well, a couple of the older kids walk by and they hear these three kids, six years old, yelling this word and laughing uproariously because they think it's the funniest fucking thing they've ever heard.
And so they get called into the principal.
Well, what happens next?
I have to find out about this, right?
So now they notify the parents.
And admittedly, the principal's laughing when they're telling the story.
But now I have to have a conversation with Muggsy when I come home.
So I come home and I said, Muggsy, anything happened today?
And I look out of the corner of my eye, I see his two older brothers, like, around the corner, just waiting, because they know he's going to get his ass kicked, right, for this.
And they're just like, they can't wait.
And so I said, no, I don't need to know what it is, just don't do it again.
Whatever you do, don't do it again.
And he goes, no, no, no, no.
You've got to know what this means.
And he's really intent on it.
And so I said, and these two other boys screw his son, they're like, oh, he's going to get so drunk.
And I said, all right, what does it mean?
And I had no idea what he was going to say, but what he did say was, Motherfucker!
And that's what they were yelling on the playground.
unidentified
All three of them at the top of their lungs yelling, motherfucker!
But that's part of the problem, is that they're going to, it seems so attractive, you know, to do, because they're not supposed to do it, and when no one's around, like, you know what I heard?
I don't think I really rolled out douchebag until I was probably 12, maybe 13. Well, we were talking yesterday about access to the internet where kids see so much more and hear so much more today.
Especially like violent images and their access to terrible things.
There's just so much that if you leave a kid alone with a computer or a phone that's online...
They're just going to find out everything about the world way before their little brains are ready.
Well, they can do school research if they need to.
They can, like, the middle one loves basketball.
He loves basketball.
So he can look up, you know, Steph Curry videos, things like that, as long as they've got supervision.
They have to have supervision.
You have to know what they're doing.
But you're right, because if you let them have free reign, it's a freak zone out there.
And they'll find it just by accident.
And you're right.
I think their minds can't...
You can't ask kids to process all the crap that's out there on the internet at that early age.
It's not fair.
It's not right.
And you can't tell me that there's not some correlation between access to all that imaging and violent images and everything else and some of the problems that we have in the world today when we ask, how does that kid, how does he go so far off the rails that he steals a gun or takes a gun out of the house and shoots up a place?
How does that happen?
I don't know.
I mean, again, I'm not a psychiatrist, so people don't listen to me and take that as medical advice.
I mean, there's a reality of the world that we live in.
And these images, I mean...
You're not going to change the world that we live in by limiting the access these kids have to these things, but it is strange how much access we have to disturbing images, violence, violent videos.
Your brain knows that that's out there and that there's just so many more examples of it to watch.
Well, the world's changing, but it's changing faster than we realize.
That we're aware of in regard to the impact that it has on kids.
I just think it's changing for the people that are adults, like, wow, the world's changing.
Yeah, it's changing for that four-year-old that's growing up in that world right now, and they're going to have, the moment they get online, it's going to go from, I'm just a little kid, live my little kid, that's my mommy, that's my daddy, to woof!
The big world, all in one big smash.
I don't think an adult's brain is designed to handle most of this shit that we have access to online.
Forget about a growing mind.
What influence that has on society is really yet to be determined.
I didn't know that was a career you could engage in.
Like I said, I've got a daughter.
There's an interesting age difference, right?
So what is that?
That's about 12, 13 years age difference, right?
And so I feel like there's a social thing there where you can study this as a case study.
What my daughter went through growing up and accessed information.
Which was uniquely different than now, even though she started, there was really no internet or anything, but then it exploded by the time she was essentially a tween, I guess.
No internet, and then it became the internet when we're fully formed and as an adult.
And then you got a chance to see it, and even then screwed it up and made mistakes and got online and got viruses on your computer and saw some stuff you really didn't want to see.
Yeah, like Bill Blumenwright, who's the owner of the Wilbur Theatre in Boston, who was owner of the Comedy Connection back then, always jokes around about it.
He was like, you got a lot of work because you were the only comedian with a cell phone.
So he can call me up and say, hey, this guy just got a flat tire on his way to New Hampshire.
Before the cell phone technology hit, and this is the early days of being with the agency, when you were overseas, if you were in an urban setting, you spent half your time looking for operating payphones, right?
In some third or fourth world country, you're trying to find a payphone that actually works because you've got to make some sort of call related to whatever operation you're engaged in.
And, you know, the kids today in the agency don't understand that, you know, because they've all got great technology and mobile communications.
But, yeah, in the old days, it didn't work that way.
But today you say, fought in a phone booth, and people go, why not just say they could have fought on a fucking, you know, something else that doesn't exist anymore.
You could probably find one occasionally that's got a phone in it, but it wasn't that long ago, I remember, they actually had functioning phones in those things.
And I remember we got an answering machine where you could call it, and then when the dial tone went on, you would punch in a code, and you could listen to your messages, and you weren't even home!
That would have been like 15 years after this happened, or 14 years after they invented it in St. Louis.
But yeah, I remember when they, you know, the mobile phone then was that big case, you know, that we carry around, and you have to get out of your car, set it out on your car, and then they started getting there.
Oh, hey, before I forget, and I probably should have told you this offline, but Newt Gingrich thinks it would be excellent to sit down and talk to you.
And during the summer, you just go out there, and in the high season, when you're not fishing, you just float around, do a little water skiing if you want to, but mostly just kind of hang out.
Well, you know how you have a tree, lots of snow falling, you know, you got powder, and so what'll happen sometimes is you get the appearance of solid snow, but around the tree, the base of the tree, you'll get these little caves, almost.
There's nothing around the bottom of the tree, so...
The tendency is for the snow, if you get too close to the tree well, you'll collapse into it.
And then you're at the bottom of this hole, right?
And usually it happens when there's beautiful snow and it's all powder and you can't get out.
So anyway, my wife and I were on the backside of this mountain.
And so there's nobody around.
She got out ahead of me.
I fell into this thing, and that's the time when I thought to myself, after about 35 minutes of trying to haul my ass out of there, I thought, I could actually die here, but the snow was falling lightly, you know, and there was still a little bit of sun coming through, and it was a beautiful thing.
And I literally thought, I had to lay down for a minute to catch my breath and think, I've got to give this another try.
I've done fishing a few times recently with my kids, but it's ocean fishing where you're out there trolling, you know, you're in a boat and you're pulling the line.
It's not as fun.
Casting, like, on a lake is the best, like a topwater bait or something like that.
If you get them big enough, while I'm talking, I'll bring this photo up.
I don't know why.
Oh, my phone's dead.
Never mind.
Ha!
Really?
Technology fails me again.
But yeah, the prime space in between, I forget what the cutoff is.
I think they have to be over 80-something inches.
I'm sure somebody can dial in and tell me.
80 inches?
Yeah.
And if it's not over that, it's a little bit over that, then you've got to toss it back in because they're still in prime fucking time and they produce more babies.
It was a purchase treaty by the Senate on October 20th of 1803, doubled the size of the United States, and opened up the continent to its westward expansion.
Well, one of the things that we saw when we were in Montana for the first time on the Missouri was you saw these homesteads where people tried to make it out there.
And they realized you can't grow anything out there because, you know, that mud is just...
And people tried forever because they just thought, let me just find some ground, and all you have to do is live there for a certain amount of time, then it would be yours.
But there's these really old, broken-down houses from, you know, the 1800s, 1700s, whenever people were out there, and you could still go there and touch the wood.
Yeah, and just, you know, they don't often look happy, but it's, you know, they were living a hard life, and they're making their way across the country, and sometimes you imagine they're just thinking, uh...
Fuck it.
This is as far as I can go.
And they just put up stakes there, right?
They said, fine.
We'll just build here.
And maybe it was good land.
Maybe it wasn't.
But can you imagine when you get to that point where you're suddenly staring at the Rockies and you think, really?
I got to cross this in those days?
I mean, the expansion, the westward movement of people.
There was a series called...
It's misogynistic, but it was called The Men Who Built America, right?
The first one was The Men Who Built America, and then they did another series about The Frontiersmen.
And that is the one I'm thinking of.
I think there's like, I don't know, five or six episodes to it.
I think it's on Netflix.
I don't know.
But it talks about, I mean, it covers the whole thing, but it covers Davy Crockett, Daniel Boone, all the characters that you remember hearing about, but it goes into real historical detail about it, and it's fascinating when you look at how this place was cobbled together.
If you think about just a couple hundred years' time in relation to the rest of the world, a couple hundred years, things didn't change that much at all.
Anyway, yeah, but yeah, if you're doing it for real and you think about the amount of calories you burn and what you need to replace, you know, and then you realize that's what it was all about.
People spent every damn waking hour collecting food and water to keep themselves going.
Well, you realize that when you go on hunting trips, like if you had to just hunt for survival, a hunting trip, you could easily go five, six days and not even see an animal.
And those people did that with muskets and bows and arrows and tried to make it across the country without any idea what the fuck was in front of them.
Yeah, well, the interaction between the two of them, the way Dr. Rhonda Patrick talked about it, I could get a hold of her and try to get her to do it again and explain it to me.
But it's the interaction between saturated fats and carbohydrates.
It's not saturated fats on themselves, on their own.
Saturated fat like red meat and organ meat in particular, extremely healthy for you.
Very good for you.
But people are so used to consuming sugar and simple carbohydrates and processed foods for fuel that your body just gets accustomed to it.
When you add saturated fat to processed carbohydrates and sugar, that's when you get issues.
That's why a lot of these studies that show that Red meat increases heart disease.
If people eat red meat over four or five times a week, have higher instances of heart disease.
But they're not asking what are they eating with the red meat.
Are they eating it in a burger?
Are they eating it with fries and shakes?
Because that's different than eating a grass-fed steak.
With avocado and maybe a salad.
That's not bad for you.
At all.
Look, if red meat really gave people heart disease and cancer and all these things that people say, there'd be no people.
Because people have been eating red meat from the beginning of time, and literally 97% of the population eats meat.
They have a lower glycemic index, and it really usually is dependent upon whether or not they're connected to fiber.
Sugar in the form of fruit is not bad for you.
If you eat an apple, it's connected to fiber.
You're eating the whole fruit.
That's what it's supposed to be.
That's how it's supposed to be consumed.
The real issue comes when you take that sugar out of that fruit, You know, whether it's high fructose corn syrup or whatever the fuck else you're getting sugar from, and then consume that sugar.
Because then it's sugar free of all the natural things that contain it.
Fiber.
And the actual, you know, the tissue, you know, the actual fruit itself, the tissue of the fruit.
We try to keep processed foods out of the house for the most part, right?
So we try to keep the kids eating healthy and all that.
Things we're supposed to do.
But it is interesting in the sense that, you know, from an economic standpoint, right?
Eating healthy, there's a, you know, you're advantaged if you're, you know, middle class or upper class, right?
If you're, if you don't have the financial wherewithal, I think that's, I don't know, maybe I'm just blowing smoke around, but I think that there is something to be said for that.
I mean, because if you're going and you're thinking, I'm going to eat organic, I'm going to eat all this.
And so you think, okay, well, so you've got a group of people that are disadvantaged in the nutrition side of things because they end up defaulting to the processed foods or the fast foods.
But I'm happy to hear about the red meat.
Now, you know, I'm going to walk out of here.
I'm going to say, I can eat a steak whenever I want, and then I'm going to get bit by this tick.
Give you a real understanding of the actual science behind...
Food versus the misconceptions and versus the misinformation because there's so much of it out there and then there's so much you know we've talked about this before this is probably a good thing to talk about this now and I need to know what's true and what's not true remember we talked about how the guy who started the Atkins diet died and he was 258 pounds and all that well apparently when he fell and hit his head He had serious problems in the hospital and gained somewhere
around 50 pounds while he was in the hospital.
Even more than 50 pounds.
I believe he was 195 pounds, they're saying, when he was checked into the hospital.
And his heart disease had nothing to do with his diet.
It was a viral illness that caused his heart to fail.
And this was all related to organ failure.
He had massive organ failure and massive water retention because his body was falling apart while he was in the hospital.
Well, most people think he died falling and hitting his head, which is true, but the vegan propaganda was that he actually died of a heart attack and that he was 258 pounds when he died, so his diet didn't work.
But they're saying that, no, when he was checked into the hospital after he hit his head, he was only 195 pounds.
So all this weight gain that they're attributing to his diet, they're being disingenuous and untruthful.
Well, this guy, I mean, when he checked into the hospital, he was fucked.
Apparently, I mean, he fell and cracked his head open on the ice.
And, you know, it wasn't a good scene.
And he was an older gentleman when it happened.
I believe he was in his 70s.
But he died.
He had massive organ failure.
So somebody sent me something yesterday about it so that whatever his heart disease was, it was not from hardening of the arteries, from cholesterol, from eating all that food.
It's so hard to understand what's right and what's wrong, too, because people get so ideological about it, especially vegans.
And even some meat-eaters get ideological about it.
People aren't looking at the real relationship between food and health.
I mean, that seems to be a reasonable attitude, I think, in terms of when it comes to your diet, right?
I try not to overthink anything in life, and we just...
We're in that point in society where maybe because things are easy, and we have made it easy because of technology and everything else, that we're able to just analyze everything to a fucking fairly well, right?
So I'm just thinking maybe it's not that complicated, you know?
Just...
You know, you work out, you burn more than you take in, you know, you try to eat healthy, you stick to the basics, you know, grains and fruits and vegetables and meat and fish.
We used to, there were times when, if we were traveling or whatever, and you were sitting in some safe house somewhere, And just waiting for something to happen or just happened to be holed up for whatever reason.
And there was like nothing in there.
I mean, I remember times when I would eat oatmeal.
That was all I would eat because that's all that was available.
And you'd eat oatmeal for like three weeks in a row just because you were waiting to get on the road and move.
You didn't have access to other foods.
You're thinking, wow, that's a lot of oatmeal.
Or something, right?
And so I developed, when I was younger, I developed sort of this attitude of, it's just fuel.
Just, you know, keep moving forward.
So you've got to eat something.
And so for a long time, I didn't really put much stock in, oh, it tastes great, or it's, you know, it's really good.
It was just more, you know, got to consume something to keep moving.
And, you know, so it's only, it hasn't been, it's been recent when I've really kind of got focused on it.
You know, what do you have to do to When you've got little kids, you know what it's like.