Mike Baker reveals Discovery’s unreleased reality show on military covert ops, including laser heart-rate tracking and "universal soldier" tech developed by the Pentagon, HECS, and universities. Deepfakes—like Russia’s doctored Pelosi video—threaten media trust, while Brexit’s sovereignty success could inspire EU exits. Baker critiques U.S. cannabis legalization stalls, citing pharmaceutical and prison guard union resistance, and contrasts Iran’s propaganda claims with China’s Huawei espionage dominance. Iraq’s democracy failure and Syria’s Assad survival highlight Western policy missteps, yet sanctions on Iran prove effective despite flawed deals like 2015’s nuclear accord. Polarized politics and UFC fighter parallels underscore America’s ideological gridlock. [Automatically generated summary]
Yeah, there's several meetings going on here, but we just finished...
It's a filming show, a reality show, for, can I say the network?
They're kind of hinky until we get closer to the air date, which is October, but it's for the Discovery Network, and it's going to be a great show that I'm hosting.
When they do release things, like, long, long after, like, I was reading something, I forget what the case was about, but it was something about how the files won't be released under the Freedom of Information Act until 2080. How do you...
And sometimes they roll it over and it's not even then, right?
So sometimes they extend that.
Other times they don't.
And so some information comes to light periodically.
And so this does look at, this show will be looking at some historic, but a lot of current things that are going on and where the money goes.
What are we spending our money on when it comes to this high-speed operations that the Special Forces and others are involved in?
Yeah.
So it'll be very good.
I was lucky to be able to work with, again, some really great people on the production side, but just also going out there and meeting some of these cats.
The shit that they do, even after being around a while, as I have...
And sometimes that shit stays on the shelf, right?
It was like the running joke at the agency at the CIA was, you know, we have a fantastic S&T group, a science and technology group.
And they're the ones responsible, like Q from Bond, right?
They're the ones responsible for developing all the gear.
Responding to specific operational requirements.
How are we going to do this particular thing?
Well, let's develop a piece of kit that's going to allow us to do it.
But the running joke is always that, you know, they'll develop it and they'll show it to you before an operation, but then they'll put it back on the shelf because they don't want that shit getting out there, right, and people finding out that they've got it.
So they'll give you like a 20-year-old piece of kit to use instead, and you'll be walking around with like a phone the size of a brick.
Knowing that they've got something high speed on the shelf.
Like, when you talk to the average Joe on the street about technology and the government, there was like, dude, the stuff they have that they probably don't tell us about.
One thing that they're doing, and this is actually something I wanted to talk about today, because it's going to affect everybody.
It's not just something that's going to affect people in the military or in the intelligence community.
But one of the things that they've been working on is, imagine you've got a...
You've got to rock up on a target.
But before you do that, before you get the customers on site and you're going to hopefully obtain some high-value targets there at that location, before you do that, you've got to...
Okay, actually, I was going to say, sometimes you want to actually capture them and get their intelligence.
We've gone past that, right?
Because the years where we were getting our ass kicked for holding on to people in detention facilities, you know what that did?
That pretty much convinced everybody that was involved in this to just whack them, right?
Because then you don't have to deal with the aftermath.
You don't have to worry about, are you going to get in trouble for interrogating somebody?
Right, exactly.
So that actually increased the lethality of operations.
You started painting targets and just blowing the shit out of there rather than trying to grab the target and get their intel.
That's a problem because then the pipeline dries up for the intel.
But anyway, so imagine you've got this site.
The first thing you've got to do is determine if your target's there.
And it's not like the Tom Clancy movies where...
You're looking through walls and all this shit.
That technology, night vision devices and that ability in low light conditions to monitor and to identify specific individuals.
It has always been a problem.
They've made great strides on it to the point now where in no light conditions, with the right stack database, with the right information in that database, meaning the right amount of information about individuals.
You're constantly populating this database with new faces or with new photographs of individuals that you're going after.
With enough of that to sift through, They're getting to the point now with no light conditions that they can identify positively the targets in that room or the targets in that facility or in that building, whatever it might be.
But they can literally, with video, somehow or another, they can zoom in on you with some scanner and recognize that this is a particular individual because of their heart rate.
There was an article that was written about it, and I know that there's a company...
Do you know what HEX is?
H-E-C-S? It's a company that's been used pretty extensively by the scuba diving community and now by the hunting community as well because it blocks the electrical signal that your body gives off.
And I think they're doing work with the military as well to develop suits that will somehow or another stop someone from being able to recognize your particular heart rate.
It's all the data that you can acquire for that warfighter.
How do you create the perfect environment on that individual as he's moving through an environment to, you know, be a more efficient, effective, lethal fighter?
And, you know, things like that, identifying target, whether it's with a laser, whether it's with low light or no light conditions where you can, as you're rocking up on the target, you can do that.
All these things, you know, the ability to carry more gear, right?
Hump it another extra, you know, 10 kilometers, whatever it might be.
It's pretty incredible what they're doing.
And it's a joint.
It's not just the military.
They're working with, you know, companies like HECS or they're working with the commercial sector and academics too.
Have you been paying attention to this Elon Musk Neuralink thing that he's coming out with?
Where they're going to somehow or another insert fibers into your brain and then have a Bluetooth enabled device that you wear that's going to allow you to somehow or another interface with data at a much higher bandwidth.
I don't know what the fuck any of those words mean I just said.
But I think the military application would be great for that, too.
Everyone could synchronize data.
You could give them...
Navigation in their head, like if there's some sort of augmented reality where you could literally see the targets in front of you.
If you had a map, say if the Pentagon really does have this laser beam, they could identify specific individuals, and you have a map of a building that's in your head.
And they can identify the very location, absolute perfect location of each individual person in that room.
And you could see that as you're running into this building.
You're seeing like a 3D grid in front of you.
And you know, I mean, you could shoot them right through a fucking wall.
This brings me to a point that I think is kind of important where people – We always talk about the military budget and how high the military budget is.
We need to take some of that money and put it in other places.
Maybe some of that military money is not being used for the best good of the human race.
Maybe.
Maybe some of it.
But in order to be able to develop stuff that keeps people safer, in order to develop all the stuff that you're talking about that could potentially save the lives of Soldiers and even innocent civilians because you're going to be able to target the correct people.
And it's also, there's an upside if you want to get moralistic about the whole thing to developing advanced technologies.
You can be more surgical, right?
The drone capability, as an example, gives you a much better understanding of your target.
target, you can avoid the collateral damage, you know, the deaths of civilians on site through the use of proper technology and that creates that environment and so it's a good thing.
And again, I mean, look, you know, the CIA, their S&T group over the years, the shit that they've developed for operational purposes that then made its way into the commercial sector and benefited people.
Like what?
Battery technology, anybody walking around with a pacemaker or a defibrillator, you know, in part can thank the agency because what were they doing?
They were working, they continue to work on battery technology, shrinking those batteries as a power source, what, initially operational purposes so you could, you know, put a transmitter out some site, you know, and, you know, so what are you doing?
You're eavesdropping on a hostile target or, you know, gathering intelligence.
But then that effort, all that work that was done, then that later on benefits the general public.
Drone technology, same thing, right?
I mean, the agency was front and center on developing drone capability.
Now what are you doing?
You're doing that for environmental concerns, for mining?
If you have a good bow, like, see, the way you calculate accuracy with archery is you have a rangefinder, and that rangefinder has built-in adjustments for angle.
There's angle compensation for up or for down.
But I don't know if it has it for straight up in the air.
Because you've got to think, you're judging how much an arrow is going to drop over the course of the flight.
But with the bullet, obviously, there's less compensation because it's much faster.
But there's a video that's hilarious of this guy who got tired of this block party in Brazil.
So he loaded up a drone filled with fireworks, and he hovered it over the block party and started launching bottle rockets down on these guys that are making too much noise.
So one of the things I want to – I don't know how we – it's not a smooth segue, but we were talking a bit about technology.
Technology is – particularly with the 2020 election coming up is this idea of deep fakes.
Fantastic stuff.
And – The technology to create this nowadays, to create a deepfake, which essentially just means you're doctoring a photo or video and making it do what you want it to do to try to convince people of whatever it is.
Technology is advancing and it's stunning what can be done.
And imagine if he gave some off-the-cuff financial data on Tesla.
Talked about it as if he'd just come out of a shareholder call and now he was releasing some information.
I mean, think about what that means to all of a sudden the stock price of a company if that happens.
The quality is so far beyond even that now that it can be done by, and we're talking mostly state actors like Russia, and so the problem we're facing now is it's not just, everybody's kind of aware of, you know, sort of the tweeter-verse or whatever, Twitter, and the trolls that exist on there and the bots and all of that, but it's the video, the ability to do the video.
They released one, one was done not too long ago with Nancy Pelosi, And all it did was slow down her speech, just slightly, but just enough to make it sound as if she was slurring her words.
Maybe she'd had a couple of drinks.
And that thing was blasted all over social media.
And people to this day still think, and they still talk about it, like, you know, she's kind of losing it a little bit.
No, there's nothing like that happening up on Capitol Hill.
It's something that people should watch.
It's something that people should read up on a little bit, look at it, because the technology is advancing so quickly that the effort to combat it, the effort to detect it, and there are some companies out there, and certainly the government, Is working to do that.
DARPA and some others are working.
But the effort to try to identify doctored videos, right, particularly when you're talking about elections, campaigns, it's going to be an increasing problem that we're not really discussing that much.
Congress is paying a little bit of attention to it right now, but it's really problematic.
And there's things that you used to be able to look for, right?
Lighting and noise and just sort of the movements of the face, what they call micro heartbeats and all the little things.
Is the subject in the video blinking, for instance?
When you doctor it, sometimes the blinking wouldn't be there, and that was a tell.
But the people involved in all of this and creating these deep fakes are working, you know, at such a pace that they're getting ahead of that.
So, I mean, it's fascinating.
Anyway, they're coming up with ways to try to counter it, but I guess the biggest point is, it sounds like a public service announcement, is people need to be aware of it.
And they need to be smart about, of course they won't be.
Everybody goes to the internet and they lose their minds and they believe whatever it is that they read that agrees with their opinion.
And there's no bothering of checking, you know, whether anything is actually legit anymore or not.
But that would be my one piece of advice.
Going into 2020, starting now, pay attention.
Don't believe anything you see until you prove it.
I guess I'm saying it wrong, because you're right.
I don't mean to imply...
I guess what I'm saying is trust but verify, right?
When you're looking at video of a candidate or you're looking at anything really on the internet now, just be aware of the capabilities.
Maybe that's a better way of putting all of this because you're right.
Part of the problem and one of the things that Russia does and others who are involved in this whole propaganda effort One of the things they do want to do is undermine our confidence, obviously, in media.
So by me saying, don't believe what you see, I'm kind of feeding into that.
So you're right.
I shouldn't go that route.
Be aware of what the capabilities are.
Pay attention.
Everybody should just be a little bit smarter about what they're doing.
Well, not only that, you have to give your name and your email to get that application.
And then they have a photo of your face that correlates with your name and your email.
So what they've done is they've gathered up more than 150 million emails.
and faces and they have data on people yeah that is that's pretty powerful stuff like if you think about what facebook has done right what facebook has made billions and billions of dollars by essentially mining data right that's what they're about right google's the same thing they're mining data well russia managed to do that with 150 million people in a very very short amount of Oh, let's see what I look like when I'm 100. Now, what do you think they're doing with that data?
They're slicing and dicing this, trying to understand the American electorate, right?
They're not going to stop doing what they did.
And they've been doing this forever.
We talked about this before.
They've been doing this since the 1940s, right?
Busy trying to keep the U.S. out of World War II before they broke up with the Nazis.
It was a serious breakup.
But when they were still aligned, they were busy paying off journalists and buying trade unions and all the rest of it.
So they're never going to stop what they do because it's worked for them and it's just kind of in their DNA. But isn't that also what the United States does as well?
The Chinese government's constant theft of intellectual property.
Somebody inevitably will come up afterwards and they will kind of roll their eyes and go, well, we do it.
It's not like it's just them.
The U.S. is guilty of it, too.
Well, you damn well better hope we are, right?
Because if we backed off and said, you know what, just for the sake of being a righteous individual, we're not going to do any of this shit.
You would have to be willfully ignorant and naive or just fucking stupid to think that Russia, China, these other actors out there are going to stop also.
We're all going to hold hands and unicorns are going to be flying out of our ass.
It's not going to happen.
So, yeah, I mean, I guess the answer to that is always the same, which is, yeah, you better hope we do it, and you better hope we do it well.
Yeah, I don't know that she's—I don't think anybody would—I mean, from an intelligence perspective, she'd be one of the last people you would trust to actually keep her mouth shut over any period of time.
That's what I'm saying.
Yeah, that's a tough one.
But that was—that's also part of the issue of leaks, as an example, right?
Basically, now what they're concerned about, of course, is it's a hard exit, right?
No deal.
But he's saying it doesn't matter.
If that's the case, then that's what we've got to do.
And there's a lot of people.
It's interesting.
The dynamic is a little bit like here in the U.S. If you're in the Northeast Corridor, Washington, New York, whatever, Boston, or you're out here on the West Coast, you tend to view the world differently than everything else, the rest of the mass of the country, which is why people lost their minds and they thought, how could Trump possibly get elected?
The UK is a little bit like that.
That Brexit vote came around, and everybody in London was convinced that it's going to be 95%, we're not leaving.
And so when it came time and they voted to leave in 2016, the people in London lost their minds.
They couldn't believe it, and they still to this day think everybody else is just an idiot, right?
So there's similarities there, which is I think why in part Trump feels sort of this kinship with Boris Johnson.
But yeah, so he's – Boris Johnson has said, that's it.
Do you really want to have your country, your sovereign nation, run by a bunch of faceless technocrats living in Brussels who have really zero interest in your sovereign nation?
That's at the heart of it.
It's not an economic decision.
People always make that problem with Brexit.
They always say, well, from an economic perspective, this is not a good thing.
Well, the deal at heart isn't an economic concern.
It's the issue of sovereignty.
It's the issue of being run, again, by Brussels.
And sort of this morass of regulations that they've imposed, the inability for the UK to make their own decisions about trade.
And so there's a good argument in that regard.
Is it going to be a financial problem for them?
It's not going to be a disaster like some people throw out there and say, oh my god, this is going to – The UK is going down the toilet fast.
That won't happen, but there'll be an upheaval if they leave without a deal.
But they'll adjust, because people want to do deals, right?
They want to do trade.
It's not like Germany and France, which are the only two partners in the EU that really matter.
Instead of watching new shows, I end up re-watching shows that I really liked, that I've watched before, and it's been a while, so I re-watched the first season of Breaking Bad again.
Well, if you think about when Photoshop – Photoshop was out in, what, the early 90s, I guess.
Late 80s, early 90s.
Think about where we've come since then.
Again, not to go back into sort of this whole thing with deepfakes.
But it is – when people talk about Russia collusion and they talk about – we kind of lost our way, right?
And everybody's kind of guilty of it, whether it's Mueller and his investigative team or whether it's Congress or whether it's just the general public.
We all kind of lost our way over the past couple of years, imagining somehow that the big story here was – Trump's collusion, right?
Well, that was a political dodge, right?
That was a shell game that was being played on us.
It was the big story is what did Russia specifically do, right?
What exactly did they do?
How did they do it?
How successful were they?
Show us some case studies of specific examples.
That's what an investigative team should have been doing for two years.
And then deliver that information and keep throwing it out at the public and keep talking to the public about it.
I guarantee you, the GRU and others, the FSU and the Intel services in Russia, they're happy that we didn't do that, right?
Because, again, they've been advancing.
They've been improving their capabilities.
They're going to do it again.
So I guess that's why I keep beating on this is that I don't think we really focused our attention where we needed to because we all get lost in this political bullshit.
I mean, that thing gets thrown out there now to the point where it's, you know, I hate to say it, but it's almost losing its meaning in a sense, right?
They just keep hammering away.
Anybody they disagree with, and I'm talking about the hard left progressives, You're a racist, right?
It's not possible you could possibly disagree on policy, right?
Like the, whatever, that's a squad, you know, AOC and her compadres.
I don't give a shit about, you know, where they're from.
I care about the fact that their policies, from my perspective, other people I'm sure love them, you know, are screwed up.
There's a guy named John Norris who was just on – My friend Steve Rinell's podcast.
It's called the Meat Eater podcast.
And he's a warden.
He's a game warden.
And one of the things that they had to deal with somewhere along the line was they had to become enforcers for illegal drug marijuana growing these establishments in public lands, in national parks.
So these guys that were supposed to be just catching people with too many trout on their stringer are now being forced to stop illegal grow-ups, and it's all cartel members.
And what he's saying is that 80 to 90 percent of all of the marijuana that gets sold illegally in this country, in the Midwest and all the different places where it's illegal, is coming out of these grow-ups.
And a lot of it is tainted with dangerous pesticides because these guys are trying to...
They're actually using poisons to keep animals from eating the marijuana.
And so these kids that are...
Who the fuck is buying it?
They're buying this pot from these illegal places.
No one's testing this stuff.
You don't know what the fuck you're getting.
And you very well could be smoking pot that's poisoning you.
Yeah, a guy that I know, a really good guy, he's a huge landowner here in California, to the point where you can spend all day on an ATV and still not get to the end of one of his plots of land.
I don't know if you call it a plot of land.
And anyway, he's had those incidents, right?
He's had where it's such a massive piece of property.
That a small element from a cartel will set up a grow spot there, and they'll camouflage it.
It's very well done.
They bring in the piping for the water, because pot uses a huge amount of water.
Look, I... I feel like we should take those guys and reprogram them.
You get a guy who's willing to carry a hundred pounds of piping on his back and walk eight miles into the backwoods, that's a fucking industrious individual.
You gotta lure him away from the cartel with a better deal.
If that guy worked for a competing corporation, he'd be like, look, I like the way you do business.
Well, we should feel bad when we see someone who's just a poor mother who's trying to come over to America to get a better job because she's stuck in Guatemala and it sucks over there and there's no opportunity whatsoever for her to excel.
That's a different animal than someone who is a member of some fucking terrible cartel gang that comes over here.
The question is, how do we differentiate and how do we make it so that that woman who's a mom can come over here?
As strange as it is, the environment, I mean, maybe the fact that he is disruptive and sometimes doesn't seem to give a shit, maybe that's a good thing because it gets us talking and gets us talking in areas that we haven't before and in ways that we haven't before.
So maybe that results in something.
Maybe, like the Chinese, the public's just going to wait for him to go and then we'll get back to business as usual.
But even business as usual, the concern is like...
How do you differentiate between someone who's coming in illegally because they want a better life versus someone who's coming in illegally because they're literally going to commit murder and sell fentanyl and deal incredible harm to whatever community they wind up in, and they're a member of MS-13.
There's both things that are going on at the same time, and you're a heartless person if you don't want that lady with a child from Guatemala.
To come over here and do better.
And she's probably going to work as hard, if not harder, than any good, old-fashioned, red-blooded American that's over here trying to make their way through this world.
And why should we be able to have this opportunity when they can't?
One of the beautiful things about America, right, is that if you're a poor person and you live in Baltimore, you can get your shit together and get out, and you can move to maybe Silicon Valley.
You can move somewhere where there's more prosperity, there's more opportunity, and you can get something...
The key here is, and it's a democratic talking point, right?
I mean, this is a strategy.
And that's fine.
Both parties use different strategies.
But the Dems have obviously decided in this period of time, because it's so intense, There was clearly discussions within wherever, the DNC or elsewhere, that this is our policy.
We are going to push this.
And you just keep hammering that word, racist, racist, racist, no matter what.
I think you can do both, but I think the real big picture, the real big picture, if you had to look at the solution objectively, the real problem is Mexico has...
Like, real economic situations that we don't have here in America.
They're far worse off in a lot of the areas.
And as is Guatemala, as is El Salvador.
Neighboring countries are economically devastated.
Until they are not, until they come up, until they experience prosperity, you're always going to have people that are committing crime because they want to try to get by, and you're always going to have people that are going to want to try to get to America because it's a place where there's more opportunity.
That's the real issue.
The real issue is that it's so much better over here.
I mean it's not just based around immigration, but it's more control of your own nation's security and destiny, etc.
But I think that that's – you could argue that national security from a U.S. perspective – Would warrant improving your ability to impact nations like Guatemala, El Salvador, wherever, and working with Mexico to not just improve sort of the security, the liaison that goes on and improving that, but you're right.
I mean, working conditions, criminal, you know, or crime and instability, that's in our national security.
And so there's no controls over how that money is spent.
There's no metrics to say whether it's spent wisely at the end of the day.
But I would argue that, yeah, I agree.
I mean it's in our national security interest when we're talking about border security, immigration, to view that as sort of the top line issue.
Why are they on the move?
Well, like you said, they're on the move because they want a better life because where they're at ain't good.
How do you work with them?
I think people sometimes look at that and think, well, that's pushing a rock up a hill.
It's never going to happen.
And so maybe they just stop.
We've ignored Latin America, Central America, South America for decades, which is how we ended up in part with Chavez and Maduro to follow and some of the horseshit that went on down there because we ignored it.
We didn't give it the resources.
We didn't give it the attention.
We didn't treat it seriously as a national security concern.
We were all focused on wherever, improving relations in Southeast Asia or elsewhere.
So, yeah, we need to refocus.
And I think, ultimately, do we see it immediately?
But I really think, in the interest of national security, legalizing marijuana federally would stop the profitability of these gang members, because you'd be able to have legal marijuana.
You wouldn't need to buy it in these other places.
You'd be able to grow it yourself, and the price would drop through the fucking floor.
And it would be not profitable for these guys to haul three miles of pipe on their back and into the backcountry and use someone else's land to make these grow-ups.
And one of the reasons why they're doing this, particularly in California, I found out, is that when marijuana became legal in California, these illegal grow-ups became a misdemeanor rather than a felony.
So they do them over here.
Instead of doing it in Ohio or somewhere else where it's illegal, and also you could basically grow year-round here.
Yeah, private prisons is something that, you know, and there have been, I mean, again, with this current administration, you know, there's been some prison reform issues that have been making their way through, right?
They've been actually focused on it to some degree.
Well, I mean, I will tell you this, apropos of nothing.
I've gotten calls, a couple of calls, from people in the industry who are saying, and the only reason they're calling me is they're saying, can you hook me up with Joe?
It's like we hang out together all the time, of course, right?
Because we're always hanging out in the pool together, Joe and I. So I said, no, look, dude, that's not my job.
That's one of the heaviest lifts in the business has been intel collection on Iran over the years.
I'm not talking about just recently, but over the years it's been very difficult.
They are extremely buttoned up over there, and they have an incredible level of control over their population, which is – at some point you would think, well, maybe the population is going to object to this, but it hasn't happened yet.
So part of it is they came out with this, I think, 17 individuals that they claim were cooperating with the CIA in some fashion or another.
And they claimed that they were fairly high-level individuals.
IFA, I don't believe anything that comes out of their mouths.
I don't believe them at all.
I think they've got a long, long track record of lying about a variety of things.
And so, you know, why would they come out with this?
You know, perhaps they're cracking down and it doesn't hurt to come out and if you're going after some of these individuals anyway, why not?
Put the paintbrush on them that they're working for the CIA and that will appease some of the population there.
So I don't know.
Again, I'm not buying it.
It has been a difficult intel task, and collecting intelligence on their efforts with their ballistic missiles, their nuke program as well, has always been problematic.
But again, they've done this before where they've talked about how we've wrapped up a CIA spying network, and it's kind of horseshit.
We've had networks wrapped up before by other countries.
Cuba, the Cuban Intel Service years ago, which was completely built by the Russians, by the way, by the old KGB. They owned and operated the Cuban Intel Service for a long time, still do.
They, at one point, wrapped up pretty much everybody we had on island and elsewhere.
No, we had, you know, I don't remember the numbers, but it was a few.
Yeah, let's just say it was not good.
And they had done a very good, it was from a counterintelligence perspective, it was a pretty impressive effort.
So it's happened.
Russia's, you know, done the same when we've, usually when, with Russia, usually when we've got a traitor or a mole, you know, somebody like Robert Hansen, Jim Nicholson, Ed Lee Howard.
It was a show based on the idea that at one point in time there was a Russian family that had come over here and infiltrated and became American citizens and seemed like, you know, Joe and Mary next door.
The reason The Americans was created was written, as do a lot of things do, based on some smart writer who sees an opportunity because he reads a newspaper article.
Years back, 2011, I think it was, we had a sleeper cell that we wrapped up in Jersey.
I like how she walks across when you're mowing the lawn.
You're right.
So she and a bunch of other people lived in Jersey in the suburbs.
And their whole reason for being was just to spot people.
They were not...
These were not the heads of the organization, right?
So their job is spot people, live there, be social, meet people that might be of interest.
Maybe it turns out that somebody in the PTA where your kids go to school, maybe somebody's working for Raytheon or they're working for some interesting company.
And then you've got other people in that chain of events who are a little bit higher up the food chain who then assess, right?
And will look at that person and go, yeah, maybe there's something there.
This person works for whatever company.
It doesn't matter what the company is, by the way.
It could be Qualcomm.
It could be...
Think of one that, because the application could be Corning, could be anything.
I mean, there's all sorts of companies out there that have applications that may be of interest from an Intel perspective for a hostile state.
So then, you know, they do a little assessment, and maybe they come away and go, yeah, yeah, that person's interesting job.
Let's develop a little relationship there.
Now, maybe one of those individuals will work on that relationship, or maybe somebody else will come in within this group, and they'll develop a relationship.
And then maybe they'll task the person.
So maybe – say the guy works at a tech company, and you're going to think, okay, I want to see if this person has any weaknesses.
How – You know, can I leverage anything here?
And so what you'll say is, you know, my kid, you know, is doing this school paper and it's on, you know, something and I can't, you know, they're just not getting in it or they're not doing the research or whatever.
Do you have anything, you know, and you're not asking for anything classified.
You're just saying, look, you work in a tech company, you know, don't you have Something that would be of interest, you know, my kid's got to write this stupid paper, and you're not looking for anything of intel value.
You're looking to see whether they'll accommodate you, right?
Will they actually come back and go, yeah, well, you know what, we got this, and it's kind of interesting, and it's this research paper that's been out in the press for a long time, but yeah, it's interesting, hey, you know.
Hands it over.
Well, now maybe you got something, right?
Now you got something that you can see that they responded to a little task.
And then, so you set the hook a little bit, and then you just keep on working on that.
Maybe they go to work, maybe they don't, maybe they're a spouse, you know, a stay-at-home spouse.
Well, what do they do?
They hang out with other stay-at-home spouses and create friendships because of kids, and the next thing you know, you're all having dinners with each other.
But I don't think anybody's succeeded, but there's been a ton of guys from England that have come over here, and they do very well on the American pool tour.
He plays, and he just constantly—all he wants to do is play.
And so we've got to the point where, you know, for a long time, we'd go out, we'd go to court at home, and I'd play, and I'd kind of let him—and then it gets to the point where I can't really beat him.
I've got height on him, right?
Right.
His handles are extremely good now.
And I'm not the fastest kid on the block anymore.
And so it's gotten to the point now where he's legitimately beat me a handful of times.
And it's very embarrassing because he doesn't really have an edit button.
So he just rubs that shit in, right?
And it's like the Lion King when Scar wants to take over, right?
And he's just like, that was pretty good, wasn't it?
The thing is, though, that kid's going to be the tough one.
Yeah.
It's always the youngest ones.
You see it in the UFC. When there's older brothers and younger brothers, the older brothers generally pick on the younger brothers, and the younger brothers, once they reach adulthood, almost always can fuck up the older brothers.
And I know that they're doing that in regards to modems and a bunch of other things as well, but it appears at least, and a lot of companies are exclusively using their 5G modems as 5G rolls out.
We would never do whatever the Chinese authorities say.
Think about that sentence.
Think about a company.
With the global reach of Huawei, of that importance to the Chinese state, and think about them saying, trying to say with a straight face, we wouldn't do things that the Chinese government might ask us to do.
Yeah, you would not be in business for that long, or there would be a change in the senior management of the business.
And Huawei's been called out.
They've been called out in Europe to the degree where, at a certain point, you think, Germany and others that are deeply involved with Huawei now in terms of the 5G infrastructure, where they've just made this decision.
Look, it's financially better for us to work with Huawei, and we can set aside the security risks.
And so that's their calculation from a U.S. perspective because we are – look, there's two – essentially two superpowers now, right?
I mean China's advancing and we're not the lone superpower on the stage anymore.
And so we are the number one target.
And, you know, our calculation has to be different.
So we've been going at it, and I think it's been pretty well covered.
It didn't used to be covered very well, but it's been pretty well covered over the past couple of months.
And now what's happening is we've been in these trade negotiations with China, and I think...
Unfortunately, I think the current administration, the Trump administration, is going to blink.
And I think that because Huawei is such a huge issue for the Chinese, and the idea that we would prevent our companies from selling into or purchasing from or dealing with, and that we would have sanctions on other countries that do, they view that as such a threat to their own interests and their own future that Huawei is front and center with any trade deal.
So they're looking.
They're not doing any trade deal unless we make concessions on Huawei.
And I have a feeling the Trump administration is going to make those concessions because, from a political perspective, they want a trade deal.
And so far they've actually said to Google that Google's going to stop using the Android operating system for the Chinese phones, for Huawei's phones at least.
They're going to not let them license out the...
So Huawei's actually been...
At least rumored to be in production of their own operating system, which would mean they would have to have their own, not just operating system, but they'd have to have their own ecosystem.
So they'd have to have an app store, they'd have to have all the jazz that we have today.
If you buy an Android phone, you have access to the Google Play market, which is this huge resource of applications.
And as soon as you take that away, you've got to kind of rebuild that whole thing from scratch.
You know, they'll be fine, you know, because the state will provide and ensure that they have the resources they need.
They also, you know, we're the outlier here, right?
I mean, we've been working with New Zealand and Canada and, you know, the UK to some degree, but the UK has been, you know, they've been kind of pushing back a little bit on this idea that we're going to isolate Huawei.
The way to put this would be, imagine a communications network that spans the globe.
And Huawei builds and provides gear, and certainly going into 5G, they're a leading provider, and then financially they can offer countries much better deals than other providers.
But they are an intricate part of that communications web.
So if you imagine that Huawei is a state-sponsored entity and will respond to Chinese authorities' requests for information or intelligence that's passing through this communications web around the globe, our business communications,
our military communications, intelligence communications that all kind of go through at some point this interconnected system, That's the problem, because they're essentially building backdoors into that system that allow them to suck communications out of that network and use it for their own purposes.
It's a great intelligence tool, right?
So if you think about it in a way, basically it's a...
It's an advancement on the idea that you are wiretapping somebody or, you know, you've created an ability to intercept some communications, right?
They link themselves with the EU. Well, what happens?
We've got military communications, right, with the EU. Our military talks to the EU military and we've got NATO concerns and everything.
So if there's an element in that infrastructure that touches in and has a door that opens to some Huawei gear, right, then the danger here is, and they've We've had backdoors discovered in the past and then Huawei puts their hands up and go, oh, well, we didn't know that was there.
We'll correct it.
And then it turns out they don't correct it.
And then, you know, oh, sorry about that.
They honestly don't give a shit.
When I say how aggressive they are in terms of sucking up information, I can't overstate it, right?
And so that's why it's a problem for us is because – You know, if we convince Australia and, you know, the Five Eyes nations, New Zealanders, and others, not to work with Huawei, and then, say, Canada, you know, which is willing to do a deal, well, we've got seamless communications infrastructure with Canada.
So, all of a sudden, the fact that they're doing business with Huawei, but we're not, we're still at risk.
We're still in jeopardy, because that information is still flowing to some degree where it's accessible to Huawei.
And I know people listen to that and they go, why is that of any concern?
Well, it's a concern because it used to be in the old days it was us and the Russians, Soviet Union.
Russia's, you know, they got the GDP of a small EU nation.
China is on the march.
They view themselves in a certain fashion.
That's why they're pushing out in the South China Sea.
They've been building up their military.
They've been doing deals all over the world for rare earth minerals, to labor deals, access to naval ports.
It doesn't matter what it is.
They've been busy doing that because they view themselves at the top of the food chain.
Now, I guess we could say, well, okay, fine.
Maybe it's their turn or something.
But that's not how I view the world, right?
I mean, we can either be on top or we can, you know, be sucking wind.
And so it goes back to that one of those early questions you asked is how much do we spend on defense?
How much do we spend on defense?
On Intel, how much do we spend on whatever it may be?
And I think the answer is that's where intelligence comes in.
You have to know what the hostile nation is doing.
You have to know what the competitor is doing.
It's like in business.
And you have to spend enough to stay ahead of that, right?
Even if it's a small amount, you've got to stay ahead.
And it behooves us not to fall behind.
That's never a good thing.
I know we don't always do things right, but as a nation...
The world is much better off with us sort of at – and this is going to sound wrong to a lot of people.
They're going to think, oh my god, that's terrible.
But with us at the top, we're more altruistic.
Maybe that is – I don't know if that's the word or not, but I think – It's a good word.
Yeah.
So anyway, so that's my view.
A lot of people say bullshit, but everyone has got different experiences.
Well, is there a way to detect, like when they release, say if they release a Huawei phone, which is really interesting that just a few years ago, Huawei was not even a major player by any stretch of the imagination.
Now it's the number two cell phone provider in the world, past Apple.
Which is incredible when you consider the fact that they barely have a foothold in the American market.
Very few people buy their phones, and if they do buy their phones, they buy unlocked phones from overseas.
It's really kind of crazy.
But is there a way where they could detect whether or not there is a backdoor in these phones?
Or is it something where they could develop it to the point where you really would have no idea?
Yeah, it's a good question, but I would say that as long as we continue what we're doing in terms of counterintelligence and tech advances and efforts in cyberspace and elsewhere and certainly in communications hardware...
hostile activity.
I think we're okay.
We're good at detecting problems.
We're good at identifying weaknesses in these systems.
The problem is, again, it's a global community.
We can't isolate ourselves in terms of communications infrastructure.
So, yeah, I mean, anyway, but that's Huawei, and I do think that the interesting part will be what does the administration do in their desire to get...
Are they willing to blink on this?
Because they put their foot down, right?
And now, because we're so dysfunctional here in the States from a political perspective, now you've got people like Chuck Schumer going, well, Trump better not blink on this.
This is important.
So suddenly Chuck Schumer is a hawk on...
You know, protecting us from Chinese espionage, right?
But simply because, you know, he sees there's a political opening here.
You know, if Trump backtracks on Huawei now, hey, good from the Democrat perspective, they can use that to bang on him, you know?
But this is something that people didn't even understand was an issue, like, nationally.
This is something that no one was even aware of until a few months ago, and when I started reading about it, one of the first things that I was reading about was, you know, I'm kind of a technology nerd, and so I was fascinated by some of their newest phones, which were really far advanced to what you're getting offered in the United States.
Yeah, and a lot of that ability to create in record time comes from theft of intellectual property.
Yeah, and that's how they, over the years, again, that was a collective decision by the authorities there, that this is how we're going to advance, right?
They looked and they'd make a calculation that says we can't afford to wait decades while we do our own research and development.
There are, but Huawei has been, because of their size and their connection to the government, and because of the resources that the government's been willing to provide to them, the advantage that they have, And the speed with which they were able to kind of embed themselves into other nations' telecommunications infrastructure, that's why they're so important, right?
But the general – yeah.
Are there other companies we – well, of course, yeah.
I mean there's a variety of companies we should be worried about from that perspective.
And it's not – look, to be fair, I spent some time on China because it's just – they're the number one state-sponsored perpetrator of theft of intellectual property.
All the Apple stuff's getting built over there now.
There was just a recent story where Tim Cook was trying to get Trump to back down off of some tariffs because they're going to have a 25% tariff on some Apple products that they're building in China.
And it may not be something that they worry about now in terms of access.
I mean, people say, well, why do they want the access now?
They just want to know that they can.
I mean, imagine a conflict in the future where they have that ability, right, either to real-time monitor communications through this network that they've been able to build trapdoors into, you know, or to impact the flow of communication more aggressively, more proactively to do things.
You know, it's like mapping out our infrastructure, right?
The testing, the probing that goes on of our electrical grid is an example.
I mean, that's just planning for the future in the event that something bad is going to happen.
If there's going to be a conflict, you know, they want to know, as do we.
I mean, again, to your point that, you know, hopefully we're doing the same stuff.
It's something else interesting when you're talking about China, though, and you think about, okay, what should we be watching?
We touched on Russia a little bit.
It's the possible alliance between Russia and China, and it's an interesting dynamic.
Traditionally, Russia and China haven't been together.
There have always been some areas of concern, you know, distrust.
But there are signs, there are things happening that appear as if China and Russia have made a strategic decision to align themselves closer.
And that would be because they've made that determination that somehow it's in their best interests.
You know, and not necessarily that it's going to be that way for any long period of time, but right now in the current environment, you see Russia Acting as if what they want is a stronger alliance, military alliance and political alliance, economic alliance with China.
And it's an interesting dynamic that we need to be watching, we need to be aware of.
And part of that is...
Again, this idea that there was this Russia-Trump collusion and thinking, okay, well, that's good, except our relations with Russia haven't been this bad in a long time.
So maybe it's all a very clever mind game that they're playing because they're closely aligned, but I don't think so.
So we've actually laid on more significant sanctions on Russia We've attacked them from an energy perspective in terms of our ability to create our independence, particularly from natural gas.
That has damaged Russia's abilities.
So I think there's reasons why they're gravitating towards China right now.
But this idea that somehow Trump is super friendly and is a useful idiot of Putin, it doesn't play out when you look at the reality of the relationship between the two countries.
The whole Russian collusion thing is a very confusing narrative because on one hand you have the Democrats who are saying without doubt there's Russian collusion and then the other side you have the Republicans who say the Mueller report essentially exonerated Trump.
From being a part of any sort of Russian collusion.
I don't think either one is totally accurate.
I think there's a lot of weird gray in both narratives.
To this day, they're just still amazed that they lost, and so there must be some grander reason why, because clearly we couldn't lose to this guy.
And it was also a talking point, much less, you know, let's hit everybody with the racist hammer.
It's a talking point, and it's worked for them over at least the first couple of years.
On the Republican side, Look, the Russians knew what they were doing, right?
They were fucking with the election on several different levels.
It wasn't just trolling through the internet.
It wasn't, you know, just placing stories that they could.
It wasn't just trying to foment, you know, divisiveness and discontent.
It was also doing these little dangle things, you know, where they're looking to see, are they going to bite?
What are they going to do?
I mean, you think about that Christopher Steele dossier.
That was a piece of shit.
I mean, if we saw that In the commercial side of things, you know, I've got a business in global intelligence and research and security, that thing was just, there was nothing, it was shot full of holes, right?
And so you think, well, what's, somebody should have asked, tell me about your sources, you know, why are your sources talking?
What was, you know, you've got to, anytime you've got a piece of intelligence, right, you've got to do a few basic things, you know, where'd it come from?
Yeah, it was basically just – look, they were going after opposition research, political opposition research, right?
So Christopher Steele, who was a paid, hired consultant, used to be with British intelligence, not a James Bond type, but a decent enough by all accounts, a decent enough guy.
But he entered the world of private sector information gathering, right?
And I've got a company that's what we do all around the world.
And you can't relax your standards just because you're now in the commercial sector, right?
When you get a piece of information, you need to test that piece of information.
And one of the first things you need to do is understand what's the sourcing for it?
And why did they have access?
You know, how credible are they?
What's their track record?
And why, by the way, are they providing this information?
And how did it eventually make its way to this report?
And those are the sort of simple things that whether you're a corporation that's gathering intelligence about a market that you may enter with an investment, Or whether you're still in the business and you're an intel officer and you're talking to a source that works in some foreign ministry somewhere, you've got to be able to stress test the intelligence.
And shit wasn't done.
People liked what they saw.
They saw negative information about the candidate and just run with that shit.
And the more times you...
It's like the old WMD reporting that came out of the early days in Iraq.
The more you repeat it, Even if it's one source and that source is a piece of shit, when you repeat it, people are going to buy it.
In the old days, it was sort of a struggle for supremacy in the world, right?
I mean, that's kind of at its core.
That's what it was, right?
And their ability to chip away in faith in democratic institutions was at the core of a lot of the crap that they pulled.
And it still is.
I mean, so that's all the...
When you're talking about a propaganda effort like the screwing with the last election, what's their goal?
Well, their goal isn't necessarily...
That's where they...
Do they care whether one candidate or another wins?
Well, maybe they do, right?
But you'd be hard-pressed to argue that they were working against Hillary Clinton, who had said, you know, we want to have a reset and have a new relationship with Russia and work with them.
I mean...
Maybe they looked at Trump and thought, yeah, that's the guy we want to work with.
But over that, the more important issue was in just chipping away at Americans' belief in democratic institutions.
Get us all so that we question the credibility of a democracy.
And that's been the fundamental belief for propaganda efforts within the old KGB and now the FSU. So it's as simple as that in a way.
And it worked.
Look at this.
We've spent years now just bitching at each other and yelling and screaming and complaining and we bought into it because we all, like we talked about before, we all were easily duped.
And I don't know how you get around that.
I don't know how we walk that back.
Maybe we don't, but I think it's an informed public that helps to battle this.
But we haven't, we lost sight of what was important here.
And so I think the public needs, it's their responsibility.
You like this?
You know, you like where you live?
Then you gotta make an effort to try to keep it, right?
And part of that is being an informed public and understanding what hostile elements may be out there, you know, without being paranoid, but just understand why they're doing things in the way that the world operates.
And you'll always have that group of people that don't buy into any of that bullshit and think we should all be holding hands.
When you've talked to people that have seen terrible things that take place all around the world, that narrative is hard to swallow.
When you read about these gang members that are coming in and growing pot and fucking shooting at people, they've got these high-level task force just to deal with these cartel members that are growing weed.
If you push them out of the market because you legalize everything, which I'd assume that's kind of the direction we're going, then do they fill that gap, again, from a revenue perspective with fentanyl or something else, whatever the next choice is?
It doesn't mean you shouldn't make a good-faith effort.
But for the drug control, for the narcotics, counter-narcotics...
Part of it is what we talked about also about working with the other governments, right?
We've had some success in doing that, where you work with the Mexican authorities, you work with Colombians or out in Southeast Asia, you know, to try to, you know, push back on the heroin trade.
And it's unsatisfying because you don't see an immediate return sometimes.
And it's also, it sometimes seems like it's just a big, you know, bottomless pit where you're tossing money, right, and effort and resources.
But it's something that has to be done.
It doesn't mean you shouldn't still do it.
But it is.
I mean, corruption in a place like Mexico, where the people just don't have any faith in the institutions because they've lived in this system for so long where all the officials, in their minds anyway, are corrupt.
The police are corrupt.
The federales are corrupt.
You know, the marines down in Mexico are probably the most trusted institution because they're not viewed in the same vein.
I mean, it's odd, but that's a large organization, and they've been able to kind of stay above the fray to some degree, which is interesting.
I have no idea, but it's been the perception, and for the most part, it's true.
When you work down there, often enough, you do get that impression, but it's how do you get rid of that endemic corruption in that society and turn that public perception around?
You know, because that will impact.
I mean, look what happened in the previous administration when they seriously went after cartel members.
Remember that spree of violence that they kicked off?
It was in part because the Mexican authorities were going after cartels in a more serious manner, right?
Previous to that, they were managing the problem.
So they said, okay, look, let's manage down the violence, and we'll let you keep doing your business.
It's going to happen, so you guys do your business, but just, you know, let's keep sort of public order, you know, as something that we want to demonstrate that we're capable of.
And when they went after the cartels in a more serious manner, that's when that real harsh spree of violence kicked off.
And, you know, there was more headroom, so these various members were, you know, they were combating each other, and they were going after the public.
They understood that they had to, you know, basically wear down the public, which is what happened.
The public said, after a while, they said, fuck it, we can't deal with this.
The violence is too much.
It's awful.
And so...
Government, you know, eventually went back to managing the problem.
Drug trade didn't go away, of course.
They just went back to the old ways of doing things.
Yeah, there was an officer in particular that was killed, and the Fast and Furious, anytime you talk about as part of an intelligence collection effort, right, or a law enforcement effort, that you're going to supply the hostile element with weapons or whatever it may be, it's probably going to go sideways, right?
We're so concerned with Afghanistan and Iraq, they're nowhere near us, and we've got this thing connected to us that's literally filling this country with illegal drugs.
And were there other issues that we should have been more focused on?
Yeah, sure.
But then you're conflicted because you think of all those people that fought and died over there and the effort that other people came back with horrible wounds and the trauma of all of that.
You know, I feel somewhat conflicted because then you talk about, you know, you don't want to minimize what they did, right, for the country.
But you also have an obligation, I think, to look at policy and what did we do and what was the purpose of it?
What was the point of that exercise?
And I don't think we still to this day know, right?
I mean, what are we going to create some pseudo-state federal government there that's going to be a bastion of democracy?
It's not going to happen.
So anyway, I don't want to disappear down the Afghanistan rabbit hole.
But we'd like to think that we could turn that into another America.
That's what we like to think.
When we think about nation building, we think that we can go in there and establish democracy and these people are going to be better and they're going to be able to go to school and it's going to change the whole environment.
If we just make Iraq a bastion of democracy, then maybe it'll help to turn the tide in the Middle East and suddenly everyone will have more of a respect for individual liberties and rights and all the rest of that.
I mean, the shit that we don't want to talk about.
Look, we don't want to talk about Syria.
Nobody wants to talk about Syria.
And, you know, Assad, you know, his butcher, he's still in charge.
Why is he in charge?
Well, because Russia propped him up.
We want a Russia problem, along with Iran.
There's a nasty piece of work there, as an axis goes.
Russia had no intention of letting Assad go.
We should have been able to figure that one out.
But we didn't, and in part because we have these impulses that say, well, we're going to do better, and because we're going to create this ability for people to create their own democracy.
So, yeah, so anyway, Syria is, again, one of those places that nobody really wants to discuss or talk about.
We've got attention deficit disorder.
Nobody talks about North Korea anymore.
Remember, we're all going to get blown up by Kim Jong-un.
Yeah, I mean, the last article I read about North Korea was about how did Kim Jong-un get his Mercedes, since there's some sort of a boycott or an embargo.
Although we've been more successful, I will say this, we've been more successful than in the past, and part of that is a technology issue.
We've gotten better at imposing and enforcing sanctions than we used to be, and part of that is because our abilities to understand the movement of money Tracking transactions is better than it used to be.
So the sanctions, as an example, we put on Iran.
This is the most difficult time that this regime has faced in Iran since the fall of the Shah.
And it's because we've gotten better at looking at Russia, China in particular, that traditionally always kind of circumvented the sanctions.
We're better at enforcing that.
And we're better at working with the EU and pressuring them, right?
I mean, so that's a good thing, but I don't know where that's going, you know?
I mean, Iran is kind of flailing about a little bit.
They seized a tanker, you know, a British tanker.
They actually seized a couple, but they're holding on to one.
In response to – they were trying to ship a bunch of oil over to Syria against sanctions that exist, right?
So they had a tanker that was taking 2 million barrels or whatever of oil over to Syria and the British in the territorial waters of Gibraltar intercepted that ship.
That was the beginning of July.
And in response, the Iranians have done a number of things, right?
But the most recent thing that they've done was they seized a British flag tanker and they're still holding the crew.
And that's sort of an example of – I don't want to say they're desperate, right?
Because they've got an ability, I think, to withstand and their control over the population is so strong.
But it's an example, I think, to some degree of them flailing a bit and trying to figure out what are they going to do?
What's their next move?
And I know people say, well, we shouldn't have gotten out of the deal and we shouldn't have this issue anyway because it's Trump's fault for getting out of the deal.
But again, I don't have a lot of confidence in them sticking to the terms and agreements of any deal because they've never done it in the past.
There's always been effort and they've always broken it.
The agreement.
So I don't know why suddenly they would change their tune.
If we can keep the sanctions on hard enough and force them to the table, the only thing they care about is staying in power.
If they think they're going to lose that grip on power, they'll come to the table and they'll make a better deal.
And that deal would include us being able to access their military facilities for inspections.
We had no access to any other military sites in that country because we didn't make it a condition of the deal.
So we basically said, sure, we want verification that you're following the agreements.
They said, well, fuck you.
These are the places that we agree to let you look at.
I don't want to oversimplify, but that was the terms of the deal.
And so any deal that we do with them in the future needs to be able to say, no, we want 100% verification.
So when we heard about it, what we're hearing in the news from the people that are opposed to the deal is that Trump broke this deal and he was foolhardy to do so, that Obama had put in place this deal and that Trump had broke it and it sort of leaves us in this terrible quagmire.
But what you're saying is that the deal was terrible.
And that it didn't really give us access to understand exactly what their nuclear program was, what their military program was.
If the way that you judge the value of a deal, and this is what the previous administration, the Obama administration did, was to talk about how it's important that we verify and we've got verification.
Well, yeah, you've got verification of the sites that the Iranians agreed to let us look at.
And so, yeah, it was a deal.
Was it a good deal?
No.
They wanted to sign this deal and the Iranians knew it.
And so, yeah, I think that That justified saying, no, we're going to redraw this.
And even the EU, which has been clinging to the old agreement, even the EU says, well, yeah, we could improve it.
We could make it better.
But there's no – if you just keep things as they were, there's no incentive for the Iranian regime to make any concessions or improve it.
So the point being is we're trying to force them back to the negotiating table.
And again, given that their self-interest is to stay in power – And remain in charge, then, you know, with the economy and the condition that it's in currently, if it gets much worse and they feel as if they're losing a grip on the population, then I suspect they will come.
They're not going to lash out.
Iran doesn't want a—nobody wants a military conflict.
We don't want it.
They don't want it.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Can they close the Strait of Hormuz, you know, where, depending on who you're talking to, a fifth of the world's oil passes through?
Yeah, they could close it temporarily or cause some friction, but they don't have the ability to shut it down for any real period of time.
We've just got too much in terms of leverage over there and our assets.
So, yeah, who knows?
But I'm one of those people that says, you know, we...
We shouldn't have done that deal until we got it right.
And just saying that we got a deal for the sake of it because you had partial verification doesn't give you anything.
We've had partial verification of their programs for decades and they just keep advancing their program.
Polemic figure because he's – so many people just hate him that any opportunity to have some sort of political talking point against him sort of confuses what the actual issue is itself.
And nobody's going to get out and venture into no man's land in the center.
Nobody's living in the center anymore.
So I just think everybody...
It's a disservice to everybody.
But yes, I think most things that come out of Capitol Hill right now is based on...
Look, here's an example.
My daughter went...
She just got out of grad school.
And she's done a number of internships.
She's worked over in Asia.
She's been in China on internships.
And she's...
Smart kid.
I'm subjective.
Smart kid.
But she went for a job up in Capitol Hill.
And it was not a direct hire, meaning the office had to go through the other offices to get approval to hire an individual to fill this position.
And because the House is controlled by Democrats now, she was – everybody looked and said, yeah, she's a top candidate.
We want to offer the job.
Well, what happened was they submitted her details that we want to hire this person to this office within Capitol Hill controlled by the Democrats now because it's a House majority.
And they came back and said, no, because you know why?
Because she did an internship in the current administration, right?
So a young person wanting to work in D.C. in policy and security studies and elsewhere, Doing a variety of internships around the globe, does an internship at the White House.
Normally you would think that's a good thing, right?
So they said, no, because she did this internship at the White House, we're not going to approve the hiring.
And then it turns – well, she did an internship in Bill de Blasio's office too, right?
And so they said that.
And the response was, well, we don't like him either.
Which I think was – that actually provided some humor, right, to the whole situation.
But it shows you – I mean that's a little tiny thing and it's a personal issue.
But it shows you – Washington, D.C. is possibly the most dysfunctional location in all of North America.
And I was going to ask you this about foreign policy, because as a guy who has been involved in the CIA for as long as you have and has seen all the inner workings of government and all the conflict, and do you ever feel like you just...
We're just running up a 70 degree sand dune that you're never going to get to the top of.
You know what I mean?
It just seems like it never ends.
I mean, you're just basically trying to like, oh, there's another hole in the dike.
That's one thing that I completely agree with you on, that I think that this idea that...
Everybody who supports Trump is racist.
It makes those people so angry that they just want to go, okay, well, you're obviously nuts.
I can't be on your side.
You people are crazy.
You want to open up the borders, and you want to take all the money from everybody that's a hard-working American and give it to all the poor people and fuck you.
And I think what's happening is the people that count in the primary, that's a completely different bag than what goes on in the general.
I think the people that are in the primary right now, all those people that are going to be voting in the primary, they're watching these debates, as an example, or they're just watching the daily Twitter feed from these people, the candidates, and they're thinking, can I see this person debating Trump, right?
Right.
But not only are the policies that these candidates are spouting are moving further and further to the left, which is going to make it harder when the general election comes to shift to the center.
They're not going to be able to do it, right?
That center is now shifted further to the left if they even make the effort to get back there.
But...
You know, you're getting sort of like the worst instincts coming out from these candidates because they think, well, I got to show that I can throw a firebomb here because they're looking at me as, you know, can I debate Trump, right?
And so you're going to get somebody who's not – so I don't think Tulsi Gabbard is going to make it because I think they're going to make that calculation.
I think that you're probably going to look in there.
You're going to end up with Harris or maybe Warren.
That was a great moment, and then it was an interesting fight.
And I thought, I wasn't quite sure at the end where it was going to go, but I liked, I've watched Pacquiao over the years, and it's kind of that typical, you know, you get older and you're kind of rooting for the old guy, right?
He dominated Tyron Woodley, which is even crazier.
But then Woodley went into that fight injured as well.
I mean, it's just the nature of the beast.
If your job is to hurt people and break their bodies, you're going to have to practice breaking bodies along the way, and you're going to have to practice it with people that are trying to break your body, and occasionally they succeed.
If you wouldn't mind, once they give me the go-ahead, because apparently I'm prescribed from talking about it, but when they give me the go-ahead, you won't be able to get it to shut up.