Mike Baker, a former CIA officer, debunks the "World War III" narrative after Soleimani’s strike, calling Iran’s terrorist architect a "psychopath" responsible for thousands of deaths. He details U.S. reliance on human intelligence from allies like Israel and Jordan to counter opaque regimes, while critiquing Apple’s refusal to unlock encrypted iPhones amid privacy concerns. The duo also dissects Epstein’s suspicious death, questioning missing evidence and his ties to Prince Andrew, who the queen distanced post-scandal. Shifting to ATIP, Baker reveals classified U.S. investigations into unexplained aerial phenomena, including hypersonic tech, with China as the primary threat. Ultimately, the episode exposes geopolitical risks, media manipulation, and the blurred lines between national security and privacy in an era of rapid technological change. [Automatically generated summary]
Sulaimani is, I mean, I guess I should first say where I stand on all this, which is I'm not mourning his passing, right?
I mean, I think he deserved it.
I think it's justice that should have been served up some time ago.
He's responsible, not just for, as people have talked about, the hundreds of U.S. servicemen, but thousands and thousands of people.
This guy was a completely bloodthirsty douchebag.
I mean, there's no way about it.
And we're talking about the second most, structure-wise, the second most important person within the Iranian regime, next to the Ayatollah.
But the idea that somehow we took out a foreign leader, right, or a military general like he was some sort of Ikea, you know, Eisenhower, is insane.
The guy was a mob boss.
He was the head terrorist for a state that is the number one sponsor of terrorism around the world.
But he's been on target lists for a long time.
You go back to, I think, 2008, there was an operation to take out a guy named Mughnia, who himself was also a bloodthirsty psychopath.
And he was running Hezbollah operations.
So the Israelis had been tracking him, as had we.
And at one point, they had an opportunity to take out Mughnia and also Suleimani.
And they backed off at the time, essentially because the U.S. wouldn't get behind the idea that we're going to take out Suleimani.
That was, you know, at that point, that was a step too far.
So eventually we got Mughnia.
But Suleimani is just, I mean, I don't even know where to start with the amount of blood that he's responsible for.
People talk about, again, okay, he authorized operations and activities in Iraq against U.S. soldiers and against Iraqi soldiers and Iraqi civilians.
But it goes back to the beginning of that.
I mean, you could go back to 2003.
And Suleimani was the architect.
He dreamt up this idea as the U.S. was going into Iraq that he was going to, I mean, what he did was insane.
He basically authorized, I mean, he's in charge, right?
So he authorizes the release of a bunch of Sunnis that they've been holding on to.
Iran being Shiite, arch rivals being the Sunnis, essentially.
And the Saudis are their arch enemy, a Sunni nation.
But he released all these Sunni extremists that Iran had been holding on to, essentially ever since we had gone into Afghanistan, right after 9-11.
And he released them into Iraq, including a guy named Zarkawi, who became the head of al-Qaeda in Iraq.
And within a few months of our getting out to Iraq, these Sunnis, basically under Sulaimani's tutelage, had a series of bombings and started bombing everything from Shiite mosques to UN facilities, a Jordanian embassy, a variety of targets, killing thousands of Shiites.
Now, he's a Shiite, right?
So this is how bad this guy is.
He goes into Iraq with this plan that I'm going to push the Shiite in Iraq to Iran.
I'm going to make them come to us for protection, for coverage, essentially.
We can ride in there because what does he want?
He wants to exert their influence within Iraq.
He doesn't want a strong Iraq.
He doesn't want the U.S. in there building a strong, stable Iraq.
I mean, you go back to the Iran-Iraq war where Sulaimani started his military career.
And, you know, he's not, there's no way, he's a true believer.
There's no way he's ever going to let Iraq become stable again.
And he's insane enough that he kills thousands of Shiite, his own people, right, in order to push the Shiite population in Iraq to Iran.
unidentified
I don't know if I'm middle-aged to be eloquent enough.
Yeah, but he's authorized and he's pushed them into Iraq to do this.
And so he was always very unusually capable at walking a fine line between his own Shiite beliefs, population, everything, and at times being able to be sort of a puppet master for Sunni extremists when it suited his cause.
And it's anyway, it's fascinating stuff.
And whether it was dealing with Hezbollah or the Palestinian Islamic Jihad or whomever, he, again, I keep going back to the same thing.
He deserved what he got, no doubt in my mind.
And I'm just surprised it didn't happen sooner, maybe not from us, but from others.
Back in October, the Iranians claimed they foiled an assassination attempt against Suleimani by Israel and some unnamed Arab agents.
So it's not as if we just plucked his name out.
He'd spent two decades engaged in death in mayhem.
I saw that, and I talked to a handful of people who kind of leaned in that direction.
And also, you get the same thing with Sulaimani.
Now, Suleimani, I can understand, he's wrapped in the cloak of a military uniform, and people saw him sitting next to the Aitolla, and they're like, oh, okay.
But I look at it the same way.
This is not assassinating a foreign leader.
This is not assassinating a revered scholar.
These are taking out terrorists, bloodthirsty terrorists who have a long track record of killing people.
And it's not, he was not, you know, he was not choosy, right?
With Suleimani, we're talking about, again, Iraqis, Yemenis, Syrians, his own people.
They talk about maybe some 1,500 or so protesters being killed in Iran in the past few months as a result of the protests against the Iranian regime, primarily because of corruption, the fact that they've driven that economy into a toilet at the expense of the Iranian people, lack of rights of any sort.
And Suleimani, again, as the head of the Quds force, and the number two person there, he's responsible.
So I don't understand anybody who doesn't just say, yeah, and I think the left had a hard time with it.
The hard left, you saw them spinning a little bit saying, okay, we don't say he shouldn't have gotten it.
We don't say he didn't deserve it.
But, and then they had to try to figure out some way to, because it's all got to be about politics now.
So they have to bring it back to the current president, to Trump.
Well, we've lost our ability to, I think, to look at things just in an objective fashion, in any sense of the word objective.
Or certainly we don't have civil conversations anymore, but the idea that we can look at and separate the politics from it.
Look, again, I don't care whether people like Trump or not.
I didn't vote for him.
I don't necessarily care for the individual, but that doesn't mean I can't like policies.
And whether you're talking about what's going on with Iran, whether you're talking about the way that we've been dealing with China lately, other issues, hey, I liked President Obama, didn't like his policies.
Well, but they talk about it, and there is a great deal of conversation that goes on, not necessarily with the president.
I have no idea how he processes his information.
But there's a great deal of conversation and discussion that goes on in the Pentagon within the Intel community and National Security Council.
What happens once they lay out these options in front of the president?
I don't have a clue.
But he does have that authority.
He's got that ability.
And President Obama had that authority.
President Obama took out, remember, U.S. citizens who were overseas in the Middle East.
And there was a hue and cry over sort of the legality of it, but you didn't see a lot of people saying, you know, in part, okay, I admit, because it wasn't, again, this, you know, Suleimani is wrapped in the cloak of his military uniform.
Yeah, I think what changed the calculus here is Iran is, you know, the regime is brutal and awful.
They're not crazy.
And the one thing they want more than anything else is to retain power.
That's it.
And I think they looked at the idea of a military conflict, a direct military conflict with the U.S. And this is not to say that their proxies won't strike out at us someplace around the world at some point.
But the regime looked at that and thought, nah, you know what?
We're not going to do this.
In part because the killing of Suleimani is important on a much bigger level than just taking out a terrorist of his stature.
It's important for deterrence purposes.
And so, you know, again, I think they looked and felt like the calculus in dealing with the U.S. has shifted now.
And they don't understand it.
They're not comfortable with it.
And also, they can't afford it.
Look, if we got in the military conflict, there's the idea that somehow we were going to get in World War III.
It would be over in an evening.
Literally, it would be over in one night.
We have the ability to take out their entire energy infrastructure, their missile bases, their key military facilities.
And I don't want to oversimplify this, but after that first night's activity, that's it.
They're done.
So the idea that somehow there's going to be.
Now, does that mean that we should do that?
Of course not.
Nobody wants a military conflict.
But, you know, and again, there would be knock-on repercussions, et cetera, et cetera.
So hopefully we can sort this thing out through now that we're doing the military deterrence and they understand that we're serious.
We've got the economic pressures, we've got diplomatic pressure, primarily to keep them isolated.
I think we're on the right track with Iran.
I think we're going to see a different reaction from them.
I mean, we shot down an Iranian passenger jet years and years ago, right?
The Russians shot down.
They still won't admit to it, but they shot down a passenger jet over Ukraine, what, just a handful of years ago, which they still won't admit to.
It's human error, and it's human error in a conflict zone, in a situation where there's a lot of moving parts, and it's never going to be a zero-risk game.
So if the Iranians had done this, as tragic as it is, and come out and said, oh, my God, we did this, okay.
It would have been horrific, but they did this to themselves because they just couldn't bring themselves to be truthful.
They've got a long track record of not.
And so they engaged in this and shot it down.
When you find missile debris in a field where you're doing an investigation of a plane crash, that's pretty good indication.
And then about 30 seconds later, not quite 30 seconds later, a second missile hits.
There's another fireball.
And the plane stays up in the air for a period of time just because it's not devastated.
But it was some 20 miles from the airport.
It had actually kind of made as if it was turning back to the airport probably right after that first missile hit.
But here's the thing.
I mean, that's a tragic disaster right there, right?
But the idea that nobody's actually saying they did it on purpose.
They didn't do it on purpose.
It was an accident.
They mistook it for either an incoming missile or a hostile aircraft coming in for a bombing run after they launched their ballistic missile strike.
So nobody's saying it was done on purpose.
But it's, again, it's indicative of the Revolutionary Guard force and the regime itself that they spent several days denying it and saying it was mechanical failure and pressuring the Ukrainians to come out and say it was mechanical failure, which they then reversed course on that once it became obvious.
Yeah, so it's a tragic situation.
But now the protests out in the streets of Iran, which are a continuation of the past several months, which were targeted at a corrupt regime, have picked up strength in light of that because the people are just tired of this.
And who knows where it's going to go?
I suspect, unfortunately, I'm fairly cynical about all this.
We've been hoping the Iranian population would kind of rise up for decades.
And it doesn't happen because it's a pretty brutal regime.
We don't understand that.
We don't understand how difficult they are, right?
And how serious-minded they are about holding on to power.
So every now and then we think, okay, here come the protests.
And if they're consistent about one thing, both those countries, it's that they act in their own best interest.
And they would look at that and go, yeah, yeah, I'm sorry.
I mean, look, so what are we dealing with in that immediate area?
Iran's closest ally is Syria, right?
Suleimani spent billions of Iranian dollars or money that they couldn't afford to and that should have been spent on its population, arming, training, equipping, and dealing with the Syrian war and keeping his pal Assad in power.
So Iran and Syria are tied together, but is Syria in a position to somehow rise up and engage?
This is not going to be, this wouldn't have been a conflict as we imagine it, right?
It wouldn't be a conflict of occupying space and ground and all the rest of it.
Nobody wants it.
Nobody needs it.
It's not good for anybody.
I'm not saying that.
I'm just saying that in the scheme of things, we would have overwhelming superiority.
And yeah, I can't imagine a scenario where Russia would come in.
And in fact, we would probably, as anybody would, we would say, okay, look, the Russian military is in Syria.
We're going to liaise where they're going to advise you, you know, shit's coming down.
And because the last thing we want to do is drag them into it by hitting some of their facilities or personnel or whatever.
So there would be that level of coordination, which there always is no matter who the parties are.
There's always some element of coordination.
But anyway, yeah, I don't see that happening.
I think we've averted that.
I hope we've averted sort of further military conflict.
I think, again, I think the Iranian regime understands that it's a new day, perhaps, that they'll come to the table eventually.
That's what this whole maximum pressure campaign is about, is to, again, create sufficient economic pressure, ensure that they understand the idea of deterrence, which I think they do after this strike on Suleimani.
And that goes back a ways.
This wasn't just like something that just they thought of after an American contractor was killed.
The Iranian regime had been ratcheting up their aggressiveness and their attacks and their various operations out in that region for quite a while.
And we had been talking to them about it or getting the signal to them that you've got to stop this.
And back in December, they were told, look, if you continue this path, we are going to take serious action.
You know, Iran's always been a tough target for us, just like North Korea is a tough target.
And so we rely heavily on our liaison partners.
But oftentimes, no matter how good your signals intelligence is, no matter how good you are at gathering SIGINT or photo interpretation of overhead imagery, it's still, to this day, no matter how good technology gets, you can't beat having an asset, having a human who's sitting in a meeting somewhere.
And then for whatever their motivation is, whatever their reason for doing it, they're cooperating with you or our liaison partners.
And they're saying, well, here's what happened.
Or here's how that person looked.
I mean, maybe you get signals intelligence because you're picking up communications.
And then what do you got?
You've got something on a piece of paper and you're reading a transcript of a meeting.
But if you've got somebody who's in that meeting and who can tell you what people looked like or what the actual atmosphere was or the mood or the way that, I mean, that's invaluable.
And so we rely a great deal on that.
But you basically, you hoover up everything you can from all the various different types of intelligence capabilities.
But it's a tough target.
I mean, there's no doubt about it.
I mean, that's why this whole nuclear weapons program with Iran has always been so difficult.
And you talk to people and they go, well, they've got about a 12-month breakout time before they'd have a nuclear weapon.
And then other people say, well, I think they've got about a three-month breakout time.
Well, when you're talking about how long it's going to take them to have a nuclear weapon, you'd like to get those parameters a little closer together so that you're not having a complete guess.
But it's tough.
And we spend a lot of time working on that.
But I would say that we have tremendous allies in that region.
And I know that people, it's fashionable nowadays to say, well, the Trump administration, we've been pushing away our allies and they don't want to work with us.
And you know what?
They do.
And in part because, again, it's the same old story.
Is there any benefit to having someone like Trump who's very difficult to read?
Because he's what he's the kind of guy like when Baghdadi was killed, he said he died like a dog.
He says crazy shit.
And he talks about, like, with Iran, that they might respond back with disproportionate results or with a disproportionate response in comparison to the initial attack.
That's where I say, look, I understand why people go, oh, my God, you know.
But at the same time, that doesn't mean you can't like, you know, policies that are in place.
So I always put that out there.
I always say, yeah, I get it.
That's ridiculous, right?
And it's a self-inflicted wound, and you could argue that most of the problems they deal with out of this White House are self-inflicted wounds because there's a lack of discipline.
And so it'd be nice if the president was more buttoned up.
Of course, that's not going to be the way it works.
He, I think, what do I know, but he firmly believes, I think, that this is why he got elected.
Yeah, I think a lot of why he got elected is because he's wild and people like it.
They like it.
They're like something different.
They're tired of these people that sound like politicians.
You know, you hear, you know, pick a person, Elizabeth Warren, you hear them talk, and you feel the bullshit coming out of their mouth while they're talking.
You know that they're playing a role.
You know that with Trump, he might be arrogant.
He might be crazy.
He might be ridiculous.
But that's him.
That's that guy.
I bet if you're around him all day long, he's like that.
I mean, that's the thing that people, one of the things that people like about him, he's like that all the time.
That's who he is.
He doesn't need to bullshit.
He's Donald Trump.
He's a fucking multi-billionaire who is now the president of the United States.
So it's like he doesn't feel the need to put on an act for anybody.
So when he comes out and says he died like a dog, like that's that's how he would talk.
And if things are going well economically, and if it turns out that this thing with Iran doesn't turn into anything disastrous by the time November rolls around, I think he's going to win in a landslide.
I don't see, unless Bernie Sanders and Tulsi Gabbard get together and then everybody goes, you know what, that would work.
Like this is a real combination of people that I could get behind.
Unless it's something like that, where there's like some overwhelming candidate.
But I don't see that.
And they seem to be pushing for Elizabeth Warren.
I don't see that.
She was a Republican most of her career and she became a Democrat when she was in her late 40s.
I think you could argue with that about anybody in politics.
So you could say that, I mean, you've met that person, right, who's in politics now who started out by being a head of the Republican or Democratic club in high school.
That's all they want to do.
Then they're a state senator.
And then they say, oh, am I going to run for Congress?
I got my oldest boy for Christmas, 12 years old, a great, great, great kid scooter.
I got him an Airsoft, a Glock replica.
And I didn't know much about Airsoft, right?
I mean, who does?
I mean, I've got a walk-in safe full of weapons, but none of them are airsoft weapons.
But he really wanted one.
His buddies have them, and they go out shooting, and they do the old school thing, right?
They put on a couple of layers of clothes and some eye protection, and they go shoot each other.
So how could I say no?
So we go to the store to this combat supply shop that specializes in airsoft.
And I was really impressed.
I mean, the machining on these things is fantastic, right?
First of all.
And I was expecting some, you know, the old school pellet guns and BB guns, the Crossmans, things like that, you know, that are plastic for the most part and everything.
But this is a solid piece of work.
And anyway, so get on this thing.
It's turned out, I don't know where I was going with the story.
Oh, shooting and the shot.
He's actually, I suspect he's a better shot than Cheney, as it turns out.
And he's got his hunting certificate, and he's been through that education program.
And, you know, he's in the scouts, and so we can go out shooting every now and then.
But it took him almost no time at all, right, in terms of practice to develop.
I'm boasting about my 12-year-old's target shooting ability.
Nobody's going to primary this president, and I think we're left with this field of potential candidates on the Dem side.
And I tend to agree.
I think it's going to be a landslide unless there's some if the market tanks for whatever reason because there's some international crisis somewhere and it sends things down through the floor, maybe.
But if the economy stays the way it is and the Dems seem to wander into their primary season as unorganized as they seem to be, I could see him winning again big.
Yeah, I mean, they want the economy to be the way it is, but they want Bernie Sanders' economic policies.
You know, it's interesting because I think that someone who supports big business the way Trump does, he encourages people to move business forward.
I mean, it encourages the market, encourages people to spend money.
It encourages people to take risks.
The more he makes it easier for these big businesses, also the more people get outraged, but then the economy picks up.
It's like, boy, there's a I don't know what the correct way to do this is, but even though I'm not a Trump fan, there are definite benefits to the way he has been running the country.
They don't want to screw up, so they want to have a kind of a safe moment.
And they go through.
I agree with you.
I like Bernie because he's been consistent.
You can go back to the 80s.
He's saying the same shit that he's saying now.
And I think there is something to that.
Now, I don't buy his arguments.
But I like the guy, and I like the fact that he's consistent and he means what he says.
And so, again, I can separate out liking him from liking his policies.
I don't see a problem there, but I don't think they're going to let Bernie.
There was a moment, I'll tell you about it last night on this debate thing where I think it was the CNN moderator.
She asked Elizabeth Warren.
Elizabeth Warren had come out the other day and said that she had a private conversation with Bernie.
And during the conversation, yeah, Bernie said, you know, a woman's never going to win.
That's my bernie.
A woman's never going to win, can't win being president.
He was more eloquent than that, but the voice sounded just like it.
And so he's denied it.
So the moderator last night during this debate asked Bernie Sanders, let me just be clear, she said, are you saying that you've never said this to Elizabeth Warren?
And Bernie said, absolutely not.
Very next words out of the moderator's mouth was she turned to Elizabeth Warren and said, So, Senator Warren, when Bernie said to you that he never or no, when Bernie said to you that a woman couldn't be president, how did you feel?
I've listened to on tape, this is like the fourth or fifth one that I've listened to on Native Americans over the last couple of months.
But this is the best one.
This is the best one because not that the other ones weren't great.
They were great.
But what's interesting about this is the actual words of a man who lived that life.
It's not just a historical book about the time and describes the events of the time.
This is a guy describing what he saw, and he was talking particularly about war, about the way it was when they killed Custer.
And he was there when they killed Custer.
And just the battles between the American soldiers and the Native Americans.
It's like, it's crazy.
It's crazy to think that it happened just a short time ago.
And it's also crazy to think that if no one came to America, if the world just stayed in Europe and Asia and the way it had been before Columbus and before the Pilgrims and all that shit, these people would probably still be living like that because that's not that long ago.
Yeah, I want to get someone to come in here who's a Native American, who's a historian, who really understands the history of their tribe, someone who can come in here and talk to me about it.
Because I just had a sort of a peripheral understanding of it up until about five or six months ago.
I really, you know, I had seen movies and I had read books and I had kind of understood, but I didn't really, really get into it until I started reading these books.
And it's just incredible to think that there was millions and millions of tribes or millions and millions of members of different tribes living in this country, like basically like Stone Age people.
Well, as soon as we figured out repeating guns, as soon as they figured out revolvers with more than one bullet, because they were fighting the Comanches originally, they were fighting them with muskets.
And the Comanches could shoot like six arrows in 10 seconds.
So they would just lighten these fucking soldiers up because they couldn't reload.
So they'd wait for the initial volley and then they'd charge in.
And they also could, they were such great horsemen, they could actually shoot underneath the horse's neck.
So they would hold on to the reins somehow where they were under the horse's neck and they were protected and they were shooting at the soldiers.
I've spent more time reading sort of the military aspects of the Indian Wars from the U.S. military side of things.
And occasionally a book will stray into sort of, okay, well, let's look from a perspective of whichever tribe they were in battle with, but not usually very good.
So I'll pick up this book because it's an amazing history.
Yeah, there was a show, Men Who Made America, I think.
Or it was a follow-on from that.
But they had a handful of episodes about Kit Carson, but they kind of went through, they picked out some of the sort of the individuals you would imagine, right?
I mean, Daniel Boone and some of the other characters as the frontier, I think, Men Who Built a Frontier, I think is what it was called, as a follow-on to that series that they did about the men who built America.
Okay, which seems misogynistic.
Women probably helped.
Behind every great titan of industry, there was a woman and several of his mistresses.
But I think that this thing about building the frontiers was interesting.
They tried to provide a perspective from the Native American Indians' point of view.
I don't think they necessarily did a very good job because I think they just had so much room to cover.
And then people are trying to game the system, no pun intended, but people are gaming the system and saying, oh, I'm going to create this non-existent tribe.
You get that in Washington, D.C. is can't swing a dead cat without hitting some lobbyist who's trying to push for designation of some obscure element as a tribe, right?
So that they can simply apply for a gaming license.
There's the Native American Indian Museum in D.C. that opened several years back.
It's very good.
It's a little tough to follow.
I will say this much in terms of just the way they've laid the museum out, right?
But it's just absolutely full to the ceiling of incredible stories and artifacts and history bits.
But it's definitely worth people going to D.C. If they're saying, okay, I'm going to go to the Smithsonians, they should put that one on the list because it's really fascinating.
It's really good.
Anyway.
But what else?
Oh, I know what I went to, I was going to bring up because I can't come on the show without talking about Huawei.
Today, the Trump administration signed this first portion of a deal with China.
And so it's a trade pact, right?
There's been this trade battle, obviously.
And I just thought I was flying out here and I was thinking about it.
It's an interesting dynamic, right?
Because people talk about this current administration as not having any strategy.
And sometimes it does seem frankly that way.
But I was thinking the other day that there is actually an interesting split in terms of how they're dealing with China.
So on the one hand, we've got this softening of the trade war.
As a result of signing what they signed today with China's sort of the first stage trade agreement, it mostly involves increased purchases by China of U.S. goods.
There's some talk about them scaling back their theft of intellectual property.
But at the same time as they're doing this, and as a result of that, we're going to cut in half our tariffs on quite a bit of a large amount of goods.
And I think we're going to drop the idea of imposing more tariffs on some other goods.
But even while we're doing that, so that's happening.
But as we're doing that, we're also ratcheting up pressure and some sanctions and some legislation against the technology side of things.
So we're still coming down on Huawei.
Congress is trying to push through something that's going to make it even more difficult for U.S. companies to do business with them overseas.
But I think it's interesting, right?
Because there's some people, I think, in Washington who go, well, we can't do both.
Well, of course you can do both.
You can talk to the Chinese in real terms and say, yeah, let's focus on the trade war.
We're going to do this.
We're going to make it a little bit easier.
Let's create a trade environment where it's good for both of us.
At the same time, you know what?
You're still stealing our shit, and Huawei is still a national security threat.
So we're still going to focus on this.
And this is not saying I'm singing praises of this current administration.
I'm just saying that any administration should be able to operate on different levels when it comes to the same.
But we haven't seemed to do that.
It's like with Iran.
Well, okay, in the past, if they just gave some indication that they were going to play ball with us, we'd ease up on the sanctions, even though they hadn't done anything about their pursuit of terrorism and other things that they were doing.
Because we felt like in Washington, I think sometimes D.C. is like, oh, you can't do two things at one time that seem to be conflicting.
Well, the real world says I think that you can.
So I think China gets it.
Now, I don't think they're going to stop stealing.
Especially when you consider the fact that the government is so inexorably connected to Huawei.
Like when you were explaining how big business and the government are hand in hand, they're not two separate entities.
They work completely together.
And so with Huawei, since they have been busted, having third-party access to data and stealing packets and stuff with routers, because they have done that, you've got to think, well, that's probably a part of the way they do business.
This is how we're going to achieve superiority in the world, right?
We're going to get to the top of the food chain by skipping all the cost and pain of research and development.
We're just going to hoover up everything we can from not just the U.S., but everybody.
So, you know, part of all this pushback against China has been specifically trying to say, look, you got to stop that.
We understand it.
We're calling you out on it.
Now, we've tried doing that a handful of times in the past in a half-hearted manner.
This time, you know, I think the Chinese understand we're more serious about it.
And we are trying to implement certain measures that will prevent some of that theft.
But at the same time, I think, as you said, it's part of how they do business.
So I think we have to be pragmatic in all of this and think, yeah, it's good that we're pushing them on it.
It's good that we're telling them.
It's good that we're trying to rebalance the trade environment, that we're calling out Huawei, that we're talking to our allies about not doing business with them because all they really want is they want an access point, right?
So if they do business with the UK, suddenly in this seamless world of communications, now they've got an entry point into the U.S. So we're working to try to get our allies to stay on board with us about that.
But yeah, the Chinese, they subsidize Huawei, and the government does in a big way.
And we just have to be realistic.
We're not going to change their behavior in a major way.
They're just going to become more sophisticated or more obtuse about how they do it.
I'm actually, you know, I got a contract with Huawei, so that's why I keep banging on the Google thing really fucked them up because before that, a lot of the tech guys in America were buying them from Amazon or buying them from websites and then just putting their SIM cards in it and using it even though ATT won't sell them and Verizon won't sell them.
But now that won't even work anymore because now you don't have access to the Google Play Store.
If they could figure out a way to sweet talk their way back to the Google Play Store, they would be the biggest fucking cell phone company in the world.
They offered a developer $26 million to build apps for his flagship phones after being banned from using Google's App Store.
Yeah, but the thing is, like building the apps is not good enough.
You have to have apps that everybody's using.
If you make your own Instagram, nobody gives a fuck.
You're not on Instagram.
Are you on Instagram?
It says there are major apps available through Huawei's app gallery, such as Amazon, Snapchat, TikTok, and Fortnite.
I'd read some study somewhere and I've put it out of my mind, but I do remember there was an aspect of it that did say, you know, what do women see as an attractive element of a man?
And to this day, it's still the ability to provide.
The whole idea is this platform, because these companies can argue all they want to that they're independent from the Chinese authorities.
But ultimately, if the Chinese authorities knock on their door and say, we would like access to your database because we want to hoover up all the information about every U.S. military person that's stationed wherever, or they're going to do it.
Yeah, I was going to say, I drive slugo to his basketball practices, and occasionally there's two or three other knuckleheads in the car, and that's all they're doing is they're talking over comparing TikTok videos or anything.
And not to disappear down a rabbit hole, but I agree.
I think we have no idea.
We have no idea what technology is, how it's going to impact in the long run.
We don't have enough of a test case yet.
And I can look at my kids and just within my little microcosm of my three little dudes, their sort of their attention span, right?
And their ability to, and you can see it impacting it.
You can see it impact the way that they study, the way that they learn, the way that, and I don't think we're, you know, again, I'm not a Luddite, you know, but I don't know that we're doing ourselves any favors, right?
I don't think we're doing ourselves favors either, and I don't think there's any way of pulling back from it.
There's no, like, you could tell your kids to pull back.
You could maybe get your friend's kids to pull back, but culturally, no one's pulling back from this stuff.
They're getting more and more immersed in their phones, more and more immersed in apps and internet.
The big thing is apps to me.
They all get on these little social media apps, like whether it's TikTok or whatever it is, and they're all direct messaging and looking at each other's stuff, and it becomes a giant part of your life.
You know, these kids, like you look at their phone, my daughter has friends that don't have any restrictions on their phones.
I mean, how many times have you sat in a restaurant and everybody at the table is staring at their phone?
Yeah.
Or you get on the, I got on the car rental bus today, and I dropped my bag on the thing, and I stood there, and I looked down at the bus, and everybody was staring at their phone.
Well, you know, we had the shooting down at Pensacola.
And so it was a Saudi soldier who was down there for flight instruction and killed three people in the classroom.
They're finally taken out by deputies because we don't allow our soldiers to carry weapons on the base.
And anyway, point being is that when this happened, he had two phones, Apple.
I think one was a five, one was a seven.
And so the FBI got the phones.
They went to Apple, but asked for assistance with the first one.
I don't know which phone they were asking for.
And Apple claims that, yeah, yeah, we provided assistance.
We gave him access to iCloud data backup and some transactional records and what they were asking for.
And then they went to Apple, I think, just a week ago or so, with a request for assistance with the second one.
They subpoenaed Apple a couple days later.
So, you know, we need assistance in getting into these phones.
Still the same problem that they had three or four years ago, the San Bernardino show.
Yes.
And so we had that big kerfuffle where they were saying, look, Apple's not assisting.
They're not helping us get into this.
Government had to go to, as it turns out, to an Israeli forensics group, spent a lot of money to get cracked into these phones.
Anyway, so Bill Barr, the attorney general, came out just yesterday, past couple of days, and he's been lambasting Apple, saying, you're hampering this investigation.
You're not helping us in terms of dealing with this terrorist incident.
And Apple's saying, you know, what the fuck, we are providing some assistance.
So we're back in that same thing that we were in four years ago, where you got this battle over access and pushing an investigation forward and the concern over privacy.
Trump wants Apple to unlock the Pensacola shooters' iPhones.
Here's why it won't.
First of all, this is CNN, which is fake news.
Oh, fake.
It's all fake news.
It says, we have always maintained there's no such thing as a back door just for the good guys.
Backdoors can be exploited by those who threaten our national security and the data security of our customers, Apple added.
Today, law enforcement has access to more data than ever before in history, so Americans do not have to choose between weakening encryption and solving investigations.
We feel strongly encryption is vital to protecting our country and our users' data.
Yeah, but I don't understand, like, what are they looking for that they won't let these guys find?
It's one thing that like back doors, but I'm not talking about a back door.
I'm talking about like there should be a way that they can get into the phone, right?
There should be a way that you can, not just the iCloud backup, but you could open up the phone and do it with like the Apple should have like some skeleton key or something like that.
I don't know the details of that, but I would suspect so.
But there's other data that you can access from that phone that would be relevant to this.
Now, I tend to, in this situation, I tend to side with Apple.
I understand the Attorney General, his responsibility is whatever, protecting American citizens.
So, okay, he's going to have this position.
But Apple's basically saying, look, we're not going to break the terms of our contract with all the people that have iPhones where we're providing them with privacy.
And they're also, I think, saying to some degree, look, yeah, we understand that criminals can use encryption, right?
I mean, they do, right?
They take advantage of the encryption that's available and the lack of access.
But so do millions of citizens who use the iPhones just to keep their bank records or whatever they have on there.
And so the encryption benefits everybody in a sense.
Obviously, it benefits the criminals.
Now, I think I also kind of side with Apple at this point because, frankly, I think technology has kind of made some of these arguments moot, meaning that there are ways to get into these phones now.
So the Bureau or the government doesn't have to just go to Apple and say, please let us in.
When you're saying, okay, well, a company that's got that access point, like the Israeli company or several others out there, Grayshift and a few others that provide this.
So then you're relying on them to control who they're selling to.
And some of these companies sell only to the government and to whoever is DEA or so I guess the point being is that I don't think the old arguments of even a few years ago that says we can't get in so we need Apple's assistance.
I think that's kind of going by the wayside.
And the government does have the ability to get in there at this point.
So I'm not quite sure why they're picking a fight.
Again, I don't know all the details, but I don't know why.
Right, but shouldn't it be possible if they don't want to hand over that software that they could just open it for the government and the government doesn't have to get the software?
Yeah, the government's made that argument to them before, for whatever reason, because I think it part is the optic, right?
That says, okay, well, apparently Apple's willing to do this.
I think they just want to hold the line and say, absolutely not, because I think they're looking at this from, again, from almost a pure commercial perspective.
We're back having that same argument that we had a few years ago, right?
And we haven't.
And I think, like I said, I'm not sure why Barr is pushing this argument necessarily the way he is.
I mean I get what his position has to be given his job as attorney general.
But I think we're past that point.
I think there's hacking solutions that are legitimately available through forensics groups that have been developing these things that can assist the government to do this.
It is interesting because it's like, I understand that Apple does not want to open up too much to the government's demands.
And if they do, look, we don't have a tyrannical government, but what if we did?
I mean, like what's going on with China and Huawei?
It's like very similar.
If Apple sort of opens up the door to the government and they slide right in and start really using Apple's software and their phones to manipulate people and access data that they really shouldn't have access to, people that are under investigation.
And it's just like it opens up the door to all sorts of other weird possibilities.
But then there's the thing about them collecting data, like the NSA collecting data and collecting all your phone calls, collecting all your text messages.
So it's got a camera and the whole idea was, well, we'll do this so that we can figure out what you're watching and what you think of it.
So not only is it watching, but it could listen.
So it's the commercial site that's collecting information, not necessarily for nefarious purposes, collecting it for marketing purposes to make more money, which is what they're in business to do.
But they're the ones that are hoovering up data, right?
That then leaks out because somebody hacks, grabs all that information, and then they use it for something nefarious.
It's like it's almost celebrating the idea that the system is broke.
We're just going to fucking shoot everybody who's rich and light everything on fire and let these fucking mentally ill people not take their medication and just run things.
And he was Joaquin Phoenix, first of all, he's on another level.
Like his portrayal, he's always been an amazing actor.
But that movie, boy, they created a work of art with that character.
I know, again, I'm sorry about this, but I'm sitting out on the porch.
I look up, and it's the sun's setting, and the stink flies out from the top of the roof.
We got like this four-story brick place, and out comes this thing, and then another one, then another one.
We had bats flying out because it's getting dark, and they're coming out of our attic.
So I think, you got to be kidding me.
So we went to a wildlife specialist who came over, and he kind of staked out the place a couple of nights, figured out what the story was with him, and we got eventually got rid of the bats.
You remember as a kid, though, it was always, the rabies thing was always, you don't want to get rabies because you got to go in for these series of shots in your stomach.
Well, if you're watching screens, too, like, that's not good for a kid to be watching screens eight hours a day all day long, just driving across the country while they're playing with their iPads.
Well, it probably makes sense because, you know, I don't know that he's the sharpest tool in the box, and he's probably thinking we can make a lot more money if, but they're not supposed to make any money off of being a member of the royal family.
And yet they've trademarked, apparently, sort of their brand, Duke and Duchess of Sussex.
And they're not allowed to make any money off of the royal family.
So they're given allotments, allowances, you know, living expenses.
How much?
It's a significant amount.
Look, they've got a house on the grounds of Windsor Castle they're going to continue to live in.
So I guess here's my point.
They can do whatever the fuck they want, but it would have been nice if they told their grandmother so that she didn't have to find out about it on the news.
Michael Shermer, who's the head of Skeptics Magazine, who doesn't believe anything, found out that the tapes were missing and that the fucking cameras didn't work and that the tapes were deleted from the first, accidentally deleted from the first time he attempted suicide.
And Shermer's like, oh, this is a conspiracy.
Like, it was enough evidence that one of the biggest skeptics, a professional skeptic.
Well, he probably didn't think it was ever going to get to the point where they were actually jailing him.
You know, when they actually got, because remember he had that deal where he was on work release so he could just do whatever he want and fuck off for 16 hours a day, then he had to check into the jail at night.
That's when she was at In-N-Out reading a book on ex-CIA agents who've been murdered.
That's literally what she was reading a book on, right?
Wasn't that?
Yeah.
It was about CIA operators that have been murdered.
So the idea was that what they said, what people believe, and there's many different versions of what people believe, but look how many pictures she posed for.
It's so strange.
But what many people believe was that what he was doing was compromising a lot of these wealthy, powerful people by getting videotapes of them hooking up with young girls, including Prince Andrew, right?
The North Koreans used to, that was their phone security, is they would get on the phone and when they had something really classified to talk about, they would whisper.
Well, part of it was years ago, I think they just never believed any Westerner could understand Korean.
I think that was kind of part of it, was that they just believed we were all too stupid or just so complicated that we'd never be able to figure out what they were saying in their own language.
just push that right off the front or but but but but to get to get back we can talk about north korea but to get back to this epstein thing is that a common strategy that intelligence agencies would use where they would try to compromise people in order to get like what would be the benefit if you had like if the massad was doing that and they were doing that to and using that's that's the the theory right right right um Yeah, it's a good point.
I'd say from an Intel services perspective, I mean, one thing I will say is the U.S., and people are never going to believe this because I'm saying it.
They'll say, oh, that's bullshit.
But the U.S. agency doesn't do that.
We don't use honey traps.
We don't do that sort of thing because that sort of leverage always going to head south on you.
And so we don't try to coerce somebody in that sort of a relationship that then we can take advantage of.
And yet other services do, Russians being one of them, they do that all the time.
Israelis, yeah, they've had some very successful efforts to do that.
And if you get somebody in that position, It doesn't matter how they're compromising themselves, whether you're putting themselves in with like an Epstein situation where suddenly you've got them, you know, you've got video of them with an underage person, or whether they've provided a document that they shouldn't provide.
It's all this, the concept is always the same, right?
It doesn't matter what that action is.
You're getting them on the hook.
You're getting something that's leverageable over them.
And if they don't just go forward immediately, say, and turn around to their boss and say, I'm guilty, did this.
Sorry.
Then they're compromised.
And then you've got them.
As an Intel service, you've got them.
You can start reeling the hook in because now you know that not only did they do something, but provided you with a document, even if it was an unclassified document.
If I go to somebody, if I'm developing a relationship with somebody, some target overseas or whatever, and I'm thinking, all right, now I'm exploring.
This person's got access.
They're in an interesting position.
They're an interesting job.
And they've got access to information that we want to know.
It's priority target.
And then I want to say, okay, now I want to develop the relationship a little bit.
Maybe I bump into the person at a few parties.
Maybe we're in the same parent-teacher organization, whatever the shit is, right?
And our kids play on the same soccer team.
So then I go and I think, okay, what do I want to do?
I want to test the waters a little bit.
I'm not going to say, hey, listen, you know, I understand you work at the foreign ministry here in whatever country you happen to be in.
How about you give me some documents?
But instead, maybe it's something different.
Maybe they work at the foreign ministry.
Maybe they work at an aerospace business.
That's a target.
And you say, but you've developed a bit of a relationship, and then you say, yeah, my kid's doing this school project, and it's all about whatever, hypersonic flight.
And you know that they work at some aerospace company and say, do you have anything just on hypersonics?
And you're not looking for anything classified.
You're just looking for a research paper or a study or something.
And if they come back and say, yeah, you know what, here, this is an interesting study.
Now that act alone, they're not giving you something classified, but that act alone means something big, right?
We've already swept it under the rug, and there's already new stories out that have got our attention.
We forget about things so quickly today.
The news cycle is so fast.
When something happens, even something as ridiculous as the Epstein case, where it's so obvious that he was murdered, and then Michael Badden goes on 60 minutes and says this is consistent with someone who was strangled.
I've never, in all my years, have seen people hanged.
I've never seen them with these kind of fractures.
This is fractures are indicative of strangulation.
Well, I tell you what, if this new series I'm doing gets picked up for a second season, well, I'm going to recommend to the producers they put the Epstein case on there.
Even though it's not quite in line with what we do.
I mean, you're talking about a mile a second or so for a missile, a missile traveling.
So that's what Russia just came out and announced a deployment of a new hypersonic missile or a weapon.
And that's where the war in space is going, basically, is into hypersonic, mostly unmanned.
There's some effort to try to figure out can we create a manned vehicle?
It's really problematic because you think about traveling that fast and you think about what that means for punching through the air and the heat and the materials that are needed.
But as far as unmanned glide vehicles or whatever, I mean, that's where a tremendous amount of resources are being put right now by the Russians, the Chinese, the U.S. And it's pretty frightening because we don't have any way to defend against it.
Like the one fellow mentioned in that clip, is that if you think about a triple sort of a ballistic missile, it's got a trajectory, right?
It goes up and it comes down, just like the Cold War days.
We had all the defenses set up to intercept Russian missiles coming towards us.
Well, we knew what the path was going to be, right?
And so we were able to deploy a defense system against this.
The idea with hypersonic weapons is you have no idea, right?
You've got almost no warning, and you'd have no idea what that trajectory is for those going so fast and it's adjustable, right?
So it's not just depending on a missile, ballistic missile goes up and it's going to come down and you know exactly what that path is going to look like.
So one of our, I think it may be our first episode is going to be focused on hypersonics and it's, but there's a variety of other episodes in this thing, but it's all looking at this idea that the black budget exists.
It does exist.
And there's, you know, each project, whether it was a project to develop hypersonic flight, in which the U.S. government had that, whether it's, you know, advanced aviation threat identification program, whether it's the Space Force, which has been actually around for a long time, there's budgets that account for these programs.
And they have to be hidden somewhere.
I mean, the government's got to spend the money, right?
So the idea being, what started this thing off was the idea that, well, what if you just literally just did follow the money, try to figure out from the money trails how they were developing these projects?
And could you identify the various projects that these pots of money go to?
And it turned out to be really, it's very interesting.
I'm subjective, of course, but it's pretty good.
And we don't have a specific air date yet.
They're being very mum about it, but it'll be on Sunday nights coming to a science channel near you soon.
So it is, you know, and it's the development, the effort to try to develop manned hypersonic flight has got a really fascinating history.
I mean, and particularly here in the U.S. But we're not there.
We're not there yet.
That's, you know, may not happen in our lifetimes just because of the difficulties.
You talk about, I mean, I interviewed some terrific people during the course of that, which is the best part of this series being out from my perspective.
You travel around, you see all these interesting things.
You talk to these fantastic folks, right?
I mean, some incredible people, a former pilot for the old Blackbird program, right?
This guy, you know, strap into this thing and get up to altitude on the edge of the atmosphere doing these overflights of Russia and gathering or wherever and gathering intelligence and just the dangers involved in these aircraft, these experimental aircraft that were being designed, and the whole goal being eventually trying to work your way towards this hypersonic manned flight.
Hey, these people are amazing, right?
You start talking to some of them and you realize what people are capable of if they can set aside their fear and they have that risk appetite.
And like that one fellow that I, there was a little bit in the clip where I asked this old guy, looks like somebody's granddad, right?
You know, do you believe there'll be manned hypersonic flight in your lifetime?
He says, well, this guy's the story of this guy testing experimental aircraft to try to get to that point and some of the things that he did.
And it's astounding.
And you look at him, you think, you're not normal.
And I talked to his wife, and she said, yeah, it's interesting.
She's been married to him forever.
But she says, you know, one of the interesting things you learn about being married to somebody like this, a test pilot or somebody else in a position like that, is, you know, they don't process things the same way.
They don't necessarily have a lot of empathy because they're just focused on this thing, right?
And they're not necessarily thinking, well, I don't want to go up there and die because I'd be leaving my family behind and all, you know, it's not in the thought process.
Anyway, so that's, there you have it, ladies and gentlemen.
What do you think about all this stuff about, I mean, the New York Times had articles about it.
Air Force test pilots have come out talking about encountering flying saucers or unidentified flying objects, particularly Commander Fraver, who had that tablet.
We do an episode on that on ATIP, on the Advanced Aviation Threat Identification Program.
And look, again, I always say the same thing.
I'm not a conspiracy guy.
I tend to be very cynical about everything.
But after talking to some of these folks, including Fraver and a handful of others who were both pilots and also were involved in the ATIP program for the U.S. government, for the military, there's things out there that we haven't been able to identify.
And I'm not jumping on the, I'm not jumping on the alien train, right?
Necessarily, but what I'm saying is that there are things that extremely experienced pilots, military pilots with significant amounts of experience couldn't figure out, couldn't identify, right?
And so I'm certainly not going to be smart enough to say, okay, this is what it was.
Was it a foreign government's experimental aircraft?
Was it something?
I don't know.
But what I do know is that the U.S. government took it seriously enough that they developed their own internal program within the Pentagon to try to sort out the wheat from the chaff, right?
And say, okay, what do we actually have to worry about?
In part because it's a national security issue, right?
If there is an aircraft or if there's something up there that a pilot, a military pilot sees, for instance, that they can't identify, all right, we have an obligation to figure out what that is.
Because if it's a hostile foreign government's efforts to develop craft that we don't know about or propulsion systems we don't know about, then yes, we should be working on that issue.
The problem has always been that once you talk about that, then people immediately go, oh, aliens, huh?
Area 51, you know, and it kind of gets dismissed.
But there was a much more serious effort than I knew about before I started working on this thing.
And so I don't know.
I think I've got an open mind about that.
It's like that old thing about how can we really be the only people out here or life forms out here.
I don't know.
That seems, you know, seems a little obscure for me to believe.
No, there's several things about that that leave you scratching your head.
Again, I'm not making a case one way or the other.
You know, the point of this is to, again, is to kind of use the money trail as a way to get inside some of these programs.
And then to the degree that you can without, you know, to the degree that you can talk about things that are declassified.
You know, not necessarily try to make a case.
We're not trying to say it is this or it is that, you know, but I think we're presenting a lot of interesting information that, you know, again, with this situation with Fraver as an example, you come away from it and you think, okay, I'm not dismissing anything at this point.
Just, you know, it would be, I think, foolish to her.
It seems like if we had to admit it was real, if it was something that was real and we were being contacted on a regular basis or at least a semi-regular basis, that would change the way everybody feels about everything.
I mean, think if, you know, if that did come out, which is part of the allure, right, is the idea that the government's been keeping this from us for all these years.
And you think about what that would mean, not just obviously, oh my God, really, there's something going on out there, but then sort of that breakdown in trust, not that it's not happening already in terms of the government and its ability to play square.
But yeah, I mean, look, Area 51.
Area 51 was scouted out for use as an experimental test site for aircraft.
And it made perfect sense.
Well, then you get all these experimental aircraft being developed out there and flown some successfully, some not.
And locals see this shit, locals being a fairly good-sized region because of the distance on these.
And it's understandable how you start getting some of these stories.
But having said that, I sat down with Fraver, right?
We talked about this a lot for this one episode.
And I talked to several others.
And yeah, again, I come away and I'm not sure what to think.
But again, I'm not closing the book on anything at this point.
Well, I was just thinking that if they were going to come down here and examine us, I mean, they could just do it a couple of times and people have these stories and everybody has dismisses it.
Like, where are they?
Where are they?
I don't see any aliens.
Because you really wouldn't.
And you probably don't, if they're capable of moving at the speed that Fraver described, where it was just impossible to track with the human eye.
Well, and that's the problem always is, and people will point to that and say, you know, even the gun camera footage is, you know, look at this.
It's not hard to follow a little bit.
It's not clear necessarily what it is I'm looking at.
But it is more compelling than a lot of the other crap that's been out there.
So I think it was surprising.
But yeah, the hypersonics is the, of all the episodes we did, I think the hypersonics is the one that really makes you stand up and think this is pretty fucked up.
If we get beat to this, you don't want to be in an arms race, but you essentially are.
Oh, no, they can reverse engineer the shit out of anything, right?
And then they do learn from that.
But, yeah, it's China would be the number one.
Look, if you go to Washington, the interesting thing about threats, if you look and say, okay, what are the top threats to face the U.S.?
The top three have never really changed in decades, right?
Russia, China, Iran.
And then what fills out the top two after, if you go for the top five, critical infrastructure here in the U.S., which is actually probably at the top.
I mean, if you say to people in D.C., what worries you the most, they'll say attacks on our critical infrastructure.
But Russia, China, Iran, they may switch places occasionally, but they're always up there in that top five.
Terrorism ranks somewhere down lower.
So China is always going to be an issue.
And they've been very aggressive, both in terms of acquiring information, economic espionage, their military build out, their desire to kind of take back the Pacific from us.
And so, yeah, it's our primary competitor.
But Russia punches above its weight.
And the narrative about Russia collusion has captured the imagination for three years now.
And still seems to hold some interest for some Dems in Washington, D.C., no matter what happens.
And then Iran kind of plays that role because of its nuclear pursuits.
North Korea is up there to some degree, but it kind of bounces in and out of the top.
Anyway, for what that's worth.
But yeah, if suddenly we find that Fraver's right or that there's this contact, suddenly, guess what?
People, it's hard because you watch that movie today and you're watching it having seen all the other movies that it's affected and all the other science fiction genre movies and special effects movies.
But that movie was special.
In 1979, when that movie came out, that was a special movie.
Yeah, I'm on board with the second part of that as well.
I don't know.
I find it hard to believe it would be such a secret.
And also, knowing the U.S. government, look, I mean, it's harder to find out from the network when they're going to start this show than this getting secrets out of Washington, D.C., right?
So I'm thinking, yeah, we would have known for now if it had happened, but I do believe there's other shit out there, right?
But I'm also fascinated to think that if they did know that something was here, that they would visit it occasionally, you know, drop in on it occasionally for a scientific expedition, just see what the fuck we're up to.
When we study baboons, you know, people, scientists return, you know, Robert Sapolsky, he spent many years going back and forth to Africa studying baboons.
And baboons are boring as fuck compared to people.
If you weren't a person, if you weren't a person, if you were from some enlightened race a million years advanced from us, you would be so fascinated to come by and look at people.
I mean, wouldn't if we had a time machine, tell me you wouldn't be amazing if there was a time machine, but it could only go back 500,000 years ago to the beginning of man.
Like the early, you know, whatever ancient hominid that was that was alive back then.
God damn, that would be fascinating.
It'd be a fly on the wall and watch these primitive humanoids try to figure out fire and try to figure out hunting and become what we are today.
I mean, people should check their, this is, yeah, again, smart TVs, you know, if you've got one that's of recent vintage, check and you'll see there's a little hole along the frame.
That's the camera.
There's a microphone set up on an audio system.
Yeah, just put a piece of tape over.
That's your low-cost solution.
You can go in there and adjust and turn it off, but you try figuring that out.
That's like trying to program your VCR, trying to figure out how to get into your TV, into the settings to change the smart interactivity.
And then do you also want to trust that that's what's going to happen if you turn it off?
That's why I say, again, going back to that same old thing, which is like, oh, the government's trying to screw us over.
They're spying on us.
You know what?
Unless you're involved in criminal activity or terrorism, they honestly don't have any interest, but they also don't have the resources and the time available.
Commercial side of things, though, is different because it drives what they're all about, which is making money.
Consumer Privacy Act allows anyone who resides in a state to access and obtain copies of the data that companies store on them and the right to delete that data and opt out of companies selling or monetizing their data.
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California leading the way it's only for residents in California, though.
My worry is more of social media companies now than anything.
Even in a lot of ways more than the government spying on us.
I worry about the power that something like Facebook has, the insane amount of influence that they have on people and how through the use of their algorithms they actually instigate arguments and try to get people because that's how people respond and that's what makes people want to click on things and that's that's what generates revenue so their algorithms encourage you know but and it's you know the idea is that they they encourage outrage but they don't really but people like outrage so they encourage you to go seek out like ari shafir did an experiment
where he used YouTube and he only searched for puppies.
That's all he searched for, just puppies on YouTube.
And that's all YouTube would recognize.
So all they were recommending to him was puppies.
And he's like, oh, okay.
So it's really not nefarious.
It's based entirely on what your needs are or what your interests are.
But so many people are interested in things that outrage them that it becomes a very profitable thing for them when their algorithm shows these people what they want.
But the problem is the people itself.
It's not necessarily the algorithm.
It's not like the algorithm is some nefarious algorithm is designed to instigate strife.
No, it's taking advantage of human nature to some degree.
But it's also, I mean, you've raised a really important point because coming up on this election, people are talking about, oh, my God, they're going to hack in.
They're going to influence the vote.
Part of the danger is in the social engineering.
And it's very clever.
So if you look at something that just happened, this actually is really interesting, and it's still being investigated.
But a report came out from a group, Area 1, which is looking at hackers and looking at cybersecurity issues And it's not a particularly well-known group.
It's not like Kaspersky or some of these others that are out there.
But they just came out with a report a couple days ago, basically saying that the Russians, a Russian entity, likely the former GRU, the military intelligence group of the Russian intelligence service, hacked into Burisma.
Now, Burisma is that company in the Ukraine that Hunter Biden was sat on the board of.
And now you think, oh, Russians hacked into it.
And so what happens almost immediately when this report comes out saying a Russian intel operation hacked into Burisma recently, as it was sort of becoming an issue and Trump was banging on about it and Hunter Biden and there was talk about holding up Ukrainian aid if you don't investigate the Biden situation.
So you'd look at this and if you just looked at it on a very simple level, you'd go, wow.
And I've already seen some of that narrative saying, well, look, the Russians are working on behalf of Trump again.
They're hacking into Burisma, and that's what he was complaining about.
If you step back and you think about what are the Russians trying to do with all of their hacking efforts, all their social media engineering, they're trying to create dissent.
So now what have you got?
Now you're ramping up this story again.
Now, to what degree Area One's story or report is correct.
I mean, there's some discussion as to whether it's accurate or not.
But to that degree that you have to look at everything now with a very skeptical eye, and you have to say, okay, what is the purpose of it?
Why is this a timed leak of information?
Did they intend to, in other words, did the Russian Intel service, they don't do anything haphazardly, right?
Did they do this with the idea that we're going to leak this out now?
Because now it looks like we're still, you know, we're pushing this whole thing.
We're trying to help Trump.
We're going to get that narrative going again, right?
Because now we're getting into an election cycle.
It's interesting stuff.
It's like after Soleimani was smoked, almost immediately after, social media posts, sort of pro, very subtly, but pro-Iranian regime, pro-Suleimani, again,
very subtle, but in that vein, they spiked over the course of the next 48 hours, massive numbers compared to what had been in the past, of sympathetic, enough to turn people's thoughts, right, to get that narrative going of like, well, oh my God, they assassinated a foreign leader.
That's all they're looking to do is create that.
And the Iranian cybersecurity force is increasingly sophisticated.
Ten years ago, they probably wouldn't have been able to orchestrate sort of that sort of social media work.
I guess my point being is that we look at things very simplistically, right?
We look at it because we tend to look at it through this political spectrum saying, I'm right, I'm left, whatever.
But you have to step back and think, you know, what are they doing?
What's the purpose of this?
And maybe it's more complex or layered than just simply accepting what it is that's being said, which happens.
That's the danger of social media.
Everyone takes at face value shit that they see on Twitter or whatever.
And rather than stepping back and going, I wonder if this story is even accurate.
But somebody will post some bullshit.
Half the time, whether it's for the left or right doesn't matter, or whether it's from a foreign entity, the state-sponsored effort, you take it and you run with it.
Next thing you know, it's got 10,000 likes and people are talking about it like it's correct.
Yeah, that's a real problem with today's social media is that these agencies like the Internet Research Agency in Russia did before the 2016 election, they really can stir up dissent with these thousands and thousands of social media accounts that they have, and they can get people thinking in a certain way.
They can get people to argue things in a certain way.
And you hear those talking points at these bots and these, you know, these companies that are designed just to stir people up.
And look, the Russians have been doing this years and years ago, decades ago, they were buying off journalists to write favorable articles or articles that they wanted to get the narrative out there for.
So they would pay off journalists, whether it was overseas or here, wherever it may be.
And that was old school, right?
But the point of it, the reasoning behind it is still the same.
You're trying to affect the narrative.
You're trying to affect a certain opinion.
Or you're trying to foment dissent.
You're trying to create some chaos.
And you're right.
Here now, with a lot of the social media that foreign entities are doing, they're trying to take advantage and trying to drive wedges in.
So you get these things that try to drive and create more of a racial divide, as an example.
Whatever it is that they can do.
And sometimes they're doing it just simply to create the chaos.
Sometimes they're doing it for a more specific focused reason.
But we're not sophisticated.
I think we're more aware of it now because it's been in the news and we've been talking about it to some degree.
But as a population, we're not very sophisticated.
And so they're still going to take advantage of it.
And it's not just the Russians.
Any nation that's got the resource or the ability and somewhat motivation and sees it in their own best interest, they're going to be engaged in this.
So I have a cyber unit that's doing this sort of thing.
So I don't know where it's going to go, but you worry about sort of the impact that it has.
It's not the idea that they're going in there to voting machines and switching up data.
I mean, frankly, we should be going to a paper-based system.
If I was in charge, I would say, that's it.
No more paperless voting systems.
Get that shit out of here.
We're not going to rely on the internet.
You know what they're doing in Iowa for the caucuses?
It's all going to be Internet-based voting, reporting for the caucuses in Iowa.
But again, you think that whether it's independent hackers or state-sponsored from China or Russia, wherever, of course they're targeting this, and they're putting a great deal of resource into it.
And they've already probably mapped out the infrastructure.
So hey, get back to the old days.
If you're targeting a terrorist organization and you start having success picking up comms and communications and gathering signals intelligence on them, first thing they do is throw their phones away and go back to the old system of, look, I'm going to handwrite some message.
I'm going to hand it to my cousin.
He's going to hand it to his cousin.
And that's all.
That's our communication system from now on.
So we should dumb down and go back to the old days and just do a paper system, which takes longer and is a pain in the ass, but yeah.