Mike Baker warns about China’s cyber warfare—sophisticated, patient attacks on U.S. infrastructure like SolarWinds and Microsoft Exchange—exploiting political divisions, vaccine skepticism (via Sputnik propaganda), and social media narratives to deepen polarization, from COVID-19 mandates to mask-burning protests linked to foreign operatives. He criticizes inconsistent messaging from health officials and U.S. military secrecy while citing credible UFO reports like Commander David Fravor’s Tic Tac sighting, though transparency risks adversarial advantages. The discussion underscores how foreign interference weaponizes domestic chaos, from tech to culture, with Rogan questioning whether innovations like Neuralink could reshape human behavior or just deepen tribalism. [Automatically generated summary]
Yeah, I can't spot the line in what you just said.
I mean, look, there's so much we can talk about.
But if you think about it, just in the past handful of months, There was this SolarWinds hack, right, by the Russians.
So the Russians go in, they hack into a company called SolarWinds that is an IT management software company that happens to be fairly deep into government organizations, agencies, treasury, and a variety of others throughout the U.S. government.
And they're also into parts of the intel community, defense department, and a lot of commercial sectors.
So anyway, the Russians figure this out.
Now, around about December or January, Microsoft identified this as a problem.
And I think it was the head of Microsoft said, this looks like the most sophisticated attack we've ever seen.
So this is December, January timeframe.
And they're still trying to figure out the depth of this hack by Russians.
At the same time, and going back months and months and months and months before, the Chinese...
had been engaged in a more sophisticated attack that while everyone is focused on what's going on and so fully aware that we got problems, right, from nation states out there who don't like us, Everybody's talking about SolarWinds, and now it's, you know, they've just now released information about the Chinese attack against Microsoft Exchange servers, running the Exchange email systems.
And this thing is enormous.
And so the Chinese, yeah, I mean, we've been so focused for four years on the Russians, you know, and they're, you know, they're out there to cause us all sorts of problems.
And do it their way, which means we're going to bypass all the costs and the heavy lift of research and development over the years, which is going to steal everything.
And they've been doing it for decades.
So people think, oh, China, it's a problem.
We've talked about this before, this idea that perhaps this is just something relatively new or it's popped up during the previous administration of Trump.
Honest to God's truth is it's been going on for decades, and they decided that that's how they're going to get to the top of the food chain, is by stealing shit, because it's a lot easier to hoover up everything and then reverse engineer it.
And the technology has made it even easier, right?
It used to be old school.
They'd go out and recruit somebody.
They'd find some Chinese-American working for a company here in the States.
They'd appeal to sort of, you know, you got to help the motherland, and they would.
And that was the old school way of doing it.
You know, cyber theft is, it's incredible what they're able to do.
And this latest attack, while they're still trying to sort out the mess, right?
It looks like what happened here was that Their initial point of attack or the initial focus was intelligence, right?
So then it branched out, and it branched out very, very quickly, right, to hit everything, small companies, medium-sized companies.
And that's kind of the M.O. for the Chinese, the Chinese regime, right, and their intel operations.
They've got this long vision, and they've also got the resources, and they've got the desire to hoover up everything and then sort it out later.
We take, as a country, we take a very sort of targeted approach, right?
We say, okay, this is a piece of information that's a priority tasking for the U.S., for our national security.
We're going to go out.
We're going to figure out who has access to it.
We're going to develop a very sort of surgical strike to figure out how do we get to somebody who's got this piece of information.
That's typically how...
We or some of our allies would operate.
The Russians, the Chinese, have always had a different approach.
I mean, the Russians is less elegant.
The Russians just throw shit at the wall and see what sticks, right?
But the Chinese, they've got this long view and they've also got this ability.
So in this particular attack that they're still trying to assess that was perpetrated by Chinese state-sponsored hackers based in China, they They're just going to take everything, and then they'll sift through it.
They'll figure out what they got.
A lot of it's going to be just, you know, chafe, not of interest, but they're going to find a lot of gold in there, too.
And they're willing to do that because they've got the patience to do it.
They'll develop a target.
They'll develop a potential recruit for years and years and years.
Or they'll infiltrate a society or an organization, right?
They'll put a student out here who's actually working for the PLA, for their intel operations.
They'll put them out as an undergrad, and then they'll go to school, and they'll get good grades, and they'll go to grad school, and they'll get a job, and they'll get another job, and then 30 years down the line, it may pay off, but they're willing to make that investment.
Four years of Trump and sort of his antagonistic relationship with China, and people were all wringing their hands in Washington, D.C., sort of the think tankers and the traditional pundits and the diplomats of the U.S., the long-term people.
Oh, my God, we've got this adversarial relationship with China.
Well, you know what?
We better.
So that's not a bad thing.
So I'm hoping the current administration maintains to some degree.
And we'll see what happens.
They still haven't responded to the SolarWinds, to the Russian hack.
They're talking about it.
Now they're saying they're going to engage in several clandestine retaliatory acts.
Well, it's not that clandestine because they've announced that they're going to do it.
But I'm hoping that they will take serious action against the SolarWinds Russian Act, but they've got to with China.
They've got to maintain this posture.
We've got to make it clear and understood to the Chinese regime that we're not going to put up with this shit.
They're going to keep doing it, but we've got to make it painful for them.
You got to go with the sanctions because there's not much else.
Trade wars, you know, I know everybody hates a trade war, not everybody, but you've got to find a way because the problem with cyber shenanigans is that there's no real clear definition, right?
We know if a country fires a ballistic missile off, You know, we know what the retaliatory act is.
We know what an appropriate response is.
In cyberspace, when you're talking about warfare, Coming up with a definition is very difficult and hasn't been done yet.
We've got Cyber Command, right?
And we're still trying to sort out what are appropriate responses because it can escalate quickly, right?
Next thing you know, they could shut down our infrastructure, right?
They've done it – I mean the Russians did it famously in Ukraine, right?
I mean not that long ago.
And China's ability to interfere in infrastructure here in the U.S. or in India or with our allies is because for years now they've been probing.
There's been testing going on.
We talk about – it's a good example.
We talk about how in the US we have three grids and I think people were stunned to find out that Texas has its own power grid.
Well, yeah, but it's not so much – people were like, oh my god, look at Texas.
They're terrible because – they wanted to make it a political thing.
They wanted to make it sound like the reason why it's so terrible is because it's Republicans and they've got – they want their own independence.
Well, No, all three grids are fucked, right?
The East and the West and the Texas grids are all cobbled together over the years.
So it's a very...
So it's like a patchwork quilt.
And they were never built to withstand physical attacks.
I mean, you could drive by any substation, right?
You could get close enough to pee on it.
And there's...
They certainly were never designed to withstand a cyber attack.
So...
Over the years, what goes on is essentially a mapping exercise, right?
Whether it's the Russians, whether it's the Chinese, whether it's the North Koreans using Chinese capabilities, whether it's the Iranians, whomever, they're in there probing and trying to understand the weaknesses, and they're drawing up a map.
Now, the reason why they're doing that is to have a game plan, right?
And I guarantee you, sitting on a desk somewhere not too far from, you know, Xi's office, is a playbook that says, if this thing escalates, here's what we're going to do.
And if you think that it was bad in Texas a couple weeks ago when the power was out, and it was bad, but think about that lasting for 8, 10, 12 weeks around the country.
Power grid shutdown, what happens?
You can't transport shit.
You can't get cash.
Fuel doesn't get to the gas stations.
Food doesn't get to the stores.
Depending on the time of year, heat issues, obviously, water supplies.
And that's where the next big battle is going to be fought, right?
They're going to bring it to the homeland.
And we will do the same thing, right?
It's not like we're not doing it because people always say when I say something like that, well, the U.S. does it too.
Yeah, it does in a sense because – and this is where I think – You know, now personal opinion comes into it.
Look, I spent most of my adult life overseas, and I like to think that I've got a fairly pragmatic view on things.
I do admit that I, you know, obviously, look, I look at the U.S., and I like to think, and I have seen on occasion, we do a lot of things for the right reasons.
Sometimes we don't do it properly, right?
We make mistakes.
Of course we make mistakes.
But we try to self-correct.
I guarantee you, if we're talking about the major powers out there, if we're talking about China and us, if we're talking about the Chinese regime, I'm talking about obviously, if we're talking about the Russians, the Iranians, the North Koreans, we better hope that we stay up there, right?
And are able to exert influence and leverage and control the top, right?
Because if it's—and again, maybe I'm wrong here, but the Chinese don't view anything in an altruistic manner.
The Chinese regime, right?
It's all about self-interest.
And sometimes, I'll tell you what's frustrating, sometimes we seem to be the only country out there that apologizes, right, for that sort of thing.
And so when we act in our own best interest and we go, well, we're really sorry about that.
You know, we're kind of acting in our own best interest.
Well, every other nation does it and they don't give a fuck.
It's a giant difference between the amount of particulates, the amount of pollution, the amount of CO2. I think they've tried hard to mitigate that over the last few years in particular, but you remember when they had the Beijing Olympics and they had to shut everything down because the air quality was so bad that it would actually be dangerous for the athletes to perform and to compete.
He was relatively healthy, as far as the article says.
Takes COVID vaccination, dies.
So I'm trying to find out what this is, because somebody sent it to me, and then I Google it.
I cannot find it.
Two, three, four pages in, can't find it.
Duck, duck, go.
First page, right away.
I'm like, well, something's happening.
I think Google is trying to...
Look, I think they're doing it for altruistic purposes.
I think they think that they're being good citizens and good human beings, trying to encourage people to get vaccinated, and they want to discourage anti-vax propaganda.
If you have 320 million people that get vaccinated, you're going to have 100, 200, 1,000, 2,000 horror stories.
That's just...
That's if you give 320 million people Tylenol, you're going to have 2,000 horror stories, right?
I don't know what the fuck that is, but this is also the case with virtually anything that gets introduced to the human body.
We vary so much biologically that if you have a wide swath of people, if you have an enormous number, 330 plus million, you're going to have a few horrible cases.
Now, that doesn't mean that people shouldn't get vaccinated.
It doesn't mean people shouldn't eat Brazil nuts.
It just means you should kind of have access to all the information, but we also should have...
But the Russians, let me tell you about what the Russians are up to now, having just on the heels of the SolarWinds hack, which was very successful for them.
We still don't know how much intel they've pulled, and it's probably a great deal.
But now what they're doing is they are engaged in a covert action campaign, basically a propaganda campaign, against U.S. vaccines, Pfizer in particular.
They're trying to sell it to every country that will buy it.
And so what they're trying to do is they're trying to push down or they're trying to create a lack of credibility in the Pfizer vaccine in particular, U.S.-made vaccines in general.
And so they're seeding stories out there.
In the old days, before the internet, What you would do is you would pay off journalists, and you would get stories planted in the newspapers, when people read newspapers.
And that's how you would influence, to some degree, public opinion.
You do other things.
The Russians, you know, they're very good at this.
But that was one of the old days, the ways that you would do it.
Now, as we know from the elections in the past, they're using that same methodology that they did during the elections to sort of like put in this idea that our electoral system isn't credible, that there's problems with it.
That's in their benefit.
But they're also now doing it as far as the vaccines go.
And primarily the driver there is a monetary issue, right?
Yeah, I think it's using the same technology and the development of it was kind of the same, I think.
But they raced it out there, right?
And what they don't have to do is, it's like a lot of other things overseas, they don't necessarily have the FDA, you know, breathing down the neck saying, these are the sort of clinical trials you've got to go through, these are the sort of approvals you need.
So part of the problem that they've been facing with Sputnik is like, you got this out here pretty quick, right?
And so, to go back to that question you had, which I think is very interesting, is do I get frustrated by people saying, well, the US, you know, does it too?
Fuck yeah.
It's a hostile world out there, whether you want to believe it or not.
It's not a happy place out there, and there's a lot of people that would like to see us at the bottom of the food chain.
And so all those people that say, well, the U.S. does it too.
Yes, we do.
And you know what?
You're sitting here in the U.S., and you're using the benefits of being here in the U.S., so you probably want to, on occasion, just on occasion, maybe root for the home team.
I think it's a natural thing that people do when one country is the most innovative, the most militarily successful.
There's a lot of shit about the United States that angers people that even are a part of the United States in terms of our...
I mean, you've got guys like Ron Paul who don't think we should be anywhere.
We should be controlling the United States.
And you've got other people that think that we should go over there and fucking kick ass and conquer the whole globe and keep them on the straight and narrow the way allegedly we are.
But the thing that bothers me more than anything about the United States currently is like...
There's an unnecessary divide that I see amongst us.
There's a racial divide.
There's a sexual orientation divide.
I wonder how much of this is cultivated and how much of this is curated.
When I see even weird things that don't make sense, like in Connecticut, 15 of their state titles, state records for women's athletics are held by two biological males who identify as females.
There's one thing to be tolerant and to be open-minded, but there's one thing to look at the whole picture and go, what better way Across the board, with everything, to get people upset and frustrated and distracted and constantly engaged in arguments and battle than to seed social media with nonsense and constant propaganda.
We know from the Internet Research Agency and Rene DiResta's work and all this that Russia in particular and probably China and Iran Are constantly flooding social media with arguments against all sorts of policies and pro all sorts of other policies simultaneously just to encourage argument.
And you wonder, like, how much of the racial divide in America is real?
I think what's happening is the world is so filled with information and there's some players that are manipulating that information to keep people being antagonistic against each other.
And the thing is, they're over there and we think, oh, these motherfuckers are coming after us.
They're doing this.
They're hacking this.
No one is together, right?
Human beings are supposed to be like you and I are right now.
Having a cocktail, smoking a cigar, sitting across from each other.
And there's too many filters in this life between human beings sitting down and communicating with each other and breaking bread with each other and talking with each other.
Well, I will say, nobody should underestimate that point that you just made earlier, which is that There's a very active covert action wing within the Russian government, within Chinese intel, and their whole point sometimes is not to do anything other than just to sow distrust and instability and chaos.
People say, well, why would they do that?
Well, they do it because it's in their best interest.
Again, going back to that same thought.
So is it in the Russian...
Best interest to kind of see the idea of, man, you know what?
Domestic terrorism and racism, that's your top priority in the states.
Of course it is.
And so we feed into that, right?
And we do our own part too, right?
There's this desire to slice and dice the demographic, right, for political purposes, right?
If I can control this block, or if I can control that block, then I can win the election, right?
They're ways that people can figure out a way to sow the seeds of dissent and discontent.
And I think that...
One of the things that happened, we talked about the whole situation with the power grid here.
It was really sad to me to watch people on the left saying, hey, Texas, you still want your independence now?
Look what happened.
Man, you got babies freezing to death.
You got people without clean water.
Is that who you are?
Because as an American, I don't give a fuck if you're a Republican or a Democrat.
I share ideas from both sides.
I'm kind of a hybrid in a lot of ways.
I mean, I'm a big supporter of the Second Amendment.
I'm a big supporter of the military.
But I'm very liberal.
I'm socially very liberal.
Like, I don't buy this idea that I have to be a part of one party or another party.
I 100% support gay rights.
I 100% support women's rights, civil rights, trans rights, across the board, but not at the expense of other people.
Which is why I'm against this whole idea of trans athletes competing against biological females.
But it's also why I'm also in support of the Second Amendment.
Some people, they're raised poorly, they're abused, they're tortured, they're fucking put in foster care, they find their way into juvenile detention, they go to prison, and then they're out, and they have no money, and then the pandemic hits, and they want to rob your house.
If you don't think you should have a gun, To protect yourself from bad people who just, by circumstance or by bad fucking luck, find themselves at your doorstep.
You're crazy.
You're crazy.
You don't love your family.
If you don't think you should be able to protect...
If you're in a bad situation and it's you protecting people against an attack from bad people...
I mean, a lot of people like to imagine that there's this community of goodwill out there and that if just given the opportunity, all people would be inclined to go along with what's in your best interest.
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Look, I... Yeah, if you could find them as babies and raise them, right?
You're raising your kids, and the legitimate police response time is 20, 30 minutes, right?
Not because the police are overstretched, but even just because you're living in some place where that's how long it's going to take.
And it's like this idea of, what's a good example?
It's like when you're You talk about, well, should some of the teachers in a school be armed?
Well, we have in Idaho, we have schools where legitimately the sheriff getting to that school is going to take him 25 minutes because of the fucking distance, right?
So yes, do I want a couple of well-trained, vetted, responsible teachers in that public school to be armed in case there is, God forbid, some incident?
This is not a heavy lift to have someone trained up and then go through continuous training because they have to do that.
I mean the problem with a lot of people is they'll get scared or for whatever reason they'll think, oh, they're going to take away our guns so I better go out and buy one.
So they're important in that sense, but I think that it's important to insist that But again, that's common sense, right?
I don't want the federal government to say, you know, what you have to do, but it's like the masks.
I'll tell you this.
Flying into Texas on an aircraft I was on, one of the flight attendants came up and kind of tapped me on the shoulder as we were getting ready to land and said, well, be careful because, you know, Texas has gotten rid of the mask mandate.
And the point was, from the flight attendant, was...
I mean, because to be fair, they've got mostly six-foot distance.
The places that I've been here in Texas, they keep the social distance.
But I guess my point was like, you get this, and we talked about this earlier before the show, but was the idea that some people just like to suffer, and they suffer well, right?
It's a hard thing to even say because you don't want it to be real.
You don't want there to really be people out there that like...
There's some people that when we got shut into our homes and everyone was sad and everyone was scared, they enjoyed it because that's how they live all the time.
And I saw this post from this individual who is a professional, clearly from their job, and they posted, oh...
I'm dealing with such anxiety now because of the possible return to normal and the idea that I'm going to have to travel and I won't be able to have dinner with my kids and I'm just like...
And I'm thinking, fuck you.
It was clear from the Post that they've had the luxury of working from home and not losing their job and they could teach their kids And it's this idea of not opening the public schools.
These kids out here who don't have Wi-Fi, who don't have laptops, who have a one-parent home, who has to work, all those who can't afford a tutor, can't make a little pod to teach their kids...
You know, those people aren't doing well, right?
And those kids are suffering.
And then you get, like, the people who can afford to set up a private pod for their kids and bring a tutor in and have strong Wi-Fi and can do all those things, have English as a first language.
And they're doing just fine.
And they're like, well, we should not go back to school.
Fuck you.
Kids have disappeared off the radar during this past year.
And the schools don't even know where they are in places like New York and Chicago and other places.
And the problem with these narratives are, it's not that they're all completely inaccurate.
The problem is when you espouse these narratives in a very condensed, processed way like social media, you get a bunch of people that support it and a bunch of people that argue against it.
But if it's a narrative like, we should stay home, we should all wear masks, pretty hard for people to fight against that, right?
So people...
They pile on, and then people get addicted to the reactions and the interactions on Twitter.
It becomes this weird fucking method of communication, the method of discussing ideas.
And people get really attached to whatever they believe in.
Whether they believe the kids should be in school to the end of time, and all fucking interactions should be done through Zoom.
Or that we should all throw away our masks and achieve herd immunity and we should take vitamin D and go out in the sun and fucking exercise and be healthier and...
But at the same time, do I want my kids back in school?
Do I think it's healthy for my oldest boy Sluggo to, you know, be wearing his, you know, pajamas or his sweatpants all day long and learning from distance?
No.
And I think that it's just...
I do agree with the idea that there are people that suffer well.
They're wielding this whole thing as a sword of justice.
One of the things that a lot of my professional comedian friends have found is that there's a lot of people that never worked And when I say never, I'm exaggerating, but they weren't successful.
They weren't selling out clubs and theaters.
They weren't doing well.
And they're so angry that some comics have decided to go on the road again.
And those people need help, and they need support, and they need love.
But there's a reality to the people that are getting sick from this.
If everyone was healthy, this would almost be a non-issue.
Now, that's not a health-shaming thing, like we should be shaming people that are in poor health or people that are born with, you know, comorbidity factors like diabetes and whatever.
I'm focused because I got these three knuckleheads at home, right?
So I'm focused on the education side of things as well, as are you, but there's no science.
People believe science.
Well, of course, believe science.
That's one of the funniest narratives.
Believe science.
Well, who the fuck doesn't believe?
I mean, that's fine, but it's a political issue, right?
But I think that...
There's no science that shows that a six-foot distance in public schools for kids is essential to their health.
So, in fact, the science shows three-foot.
That's fine.
And what that does, though, the importance of that is logistics, right?
Because it allows for you to get the schools open again.
People will talk about the six-foot distance.
We can't get the kids back into their classrooms with six-foot distances.
We can't get enough of them in there.
It's the little things.
It's the logistics of it saying, well, get it down to three foot, which is what the science supports, and then you can get these schools, you can start opening these places back up in a responsible manner.
Honest to God, we're going to look at this thing in a year or two.
Maybe we won't because we're not going to be honest with ourselves.
But if we actually did an honest hot wash of this reaction to the pandemic, Our reaction has been pathetic over this past year.
It was developed by companies that have nothing but scientists and doctors and engineers working inside them.
And so, if you believe the science, then you better believe that they were developing vaccines that you should have been happy about.
So, you know...
I don't know.
It's the political nature of this country.
And again, going back to what we were talking about earlier with the Russians and the Chinese, they see that and they just keep sticking the knife in it.
And the more they do, the more they tear the threads of our belief in the system.
And the more polarized we get and the more yelling that goes on.
The more bullshit people believe when they read social media and they don't bother to say, well, who wrote this?
Is this actually a scientific piece of work or is this just – and what's the origin of it?
What's the outlet?
And half the time the outlet is overseas someplace and then you've got to dig into it.
It's like an asset tracing exercise.
Who owns that company?
Then you find out it's owned by some Russian entity that's got an operation out of Cyprus or whatever.
Well, there's a weird thing when you find something, like you find a meme, like a political meme or a meme that has something to do with anything that's going on in the popular culture, and then you go to the page that runs the meme, and you find that this page has this weird address.
And they're all memes and there's no quotes to the memes.
There's no English.
And you're like, what is going on here?
And you realize, oh my god, this is a propaganda page.
This is a page that someone or some entity has set up to try to make fun of things, to try to turn things viral.
And they churn them out six, seven, ten a day.
And they're just trying to make viral memes that influence the way people look at them.
Look, you go back to the sort of earlier days of the CIA and you think about trying to influence opinion or actions in a particular foreign government, right?
And again, going back to that idea that, well, you didn't have that many opportunities, so what did you do?
You tried to influence the local media.
Well, that was newspapers or radio or whatever, so you'd target that, you know.
How do I place these articles, right?
And the ability to do that now is – I mean, God, I wish I was still in the business now, right?
Because you could change public opinion in a heartbeat compared to what it used to be like.
But the Russians in particular are very, very good at this.
And people would criticize – As an example, Voice of America.
There's a weird narrative, a weird anti-American narrative that exists even inside of America, and that's oftentimes when you have children, they rebel against their parents.
I think there's a similar thing.
America's not perfect, but Iran executed an Olympic gold medalist in wrestling because he protested against the government, and that's a fact.
Yeah.
We were talking about China yesterday, what China's done in terms of there was that Jack Ma guy who disappeared for three months and came back and he's been, you know, whatever.
Look, that guy has spent years now cementing his place, and much like Putin did, but with more subtlety.
He's smarter than Putin.
Putin's a very smart politician, right?
He's kept himself in power in a place where it's a constant kabuki dance to try to figure out how to avoid your opponents.
Putin's proved himself to be a master at that.
But Xi has cemented his place in there.
He is the most important leader of China going generations back, right?
And he has done it through suppression.
He's done it through, you know, the buildup of the security surface, the internal security services, the suppression of information, oppression of journalists.
And so, yeah, do I think that Again, every time I start off on this path, I get these responses.
Do they think the further left, like, that the people in the moderate left will go along with the further left because at least it's far away from the far right?
Yeah, I just think that, you know, the extremes always make the most noise, right?
They always make, whether it's the far right or the far left, right?
And so I think that they're the vocal, in a sense, minority, right?
They're the ones who are always going to be beating the drums and screaming about shit.
And it's like this thing, not to change subject entirely, but it's like if you look at the far right.
We had an incident in Idaho, in Boise, not that long ago, a few days ago, where some parents brought their kids to the statehouse, and they had a mask-burning ceremony.
There's this thing going on where there's all these different arguments and there's all these different narratives and all these different people that are arguing their points and no one knows exactly what the motives are, exactly who's doing what or why.
You're worried about the far left if you're in the far right, and you're worried about the left.
Everybody in the right is worried about the left.
Everybody in the left is worried about the right, and everybody in the center is trying to figure out where the fuck the rational people are.
One of the things that I'm worried about, and this is going to sound really weird, but I'm worried that what all of this dissent and confusion is going to bring about is the rise of Of some sort of technological symbiosis where we can read each other's minds, where we can understand each other better, and it's going to make us less human than we are currently.
I'm really worried about that.
I'm worried about these weird interfaces, like Elon Musk is trying to do this...
Neuralink thing.
And I think he's doing it because he wants to increase the bandwidth between human beings and information, which is a very noble concept.
You're going to make people smarter, more access to information.
One of the things he said to me, you're going to be able to talk without words.
I think ultimately there's going to be some sort of technology that literally allows people to understand people's intent and to read their thoughts and ideas.
I think it's not that far away.
It might be 50 years, whatever it is, but we're moving in this direction where we're going to be less human.
And that might be because of all the bullshit that's been created by social media and by these conversations, by these algorithms that encourage people to be upset about things, that encourage outrage.
We're gonna move into some weird place where we're gonna have to change who we are in order to recognize what are the motives behind these different programs and campaigns that are forcing people into these situations where they hate each other.
Yeah, well, what I was going to say was, I mean, we used to say with the polygraph that, oh my God, can't you just put like a colander on our head and just read our thoughts?
Because that would be a lot more pleasant and easier, right?
So if you can hypnotize someone, get them, To believe a false narrative and then hook them up to a polygraph and then describe that false narrative, they'll show that they believe that thing, even though that thing is not really true.
You do not want to completely rely on the polygraph.
But I have seen it work.
Well, and then I've seen it fail miserably, right?
So, you know, what I would like to see, I mean, I look at it from a counterintelligence perspective, if we can create something that can read people's minds, Great, because you know what that does is that allows us to identify the traitor within the group, the mole, a lot quicker.
And counterintelligence operations are always an enormous lift.
People say, like, I can't believe you allowed whomever, you know, Hanson, to operate, you know, within the Bureau and have all those lives lost and betray us to the Russians for all those years.
And my response is always, you know, I can't believe we caught him because it's a very heavy lift.
It's a very difficult thing to do.
But to your point, yeah, do I want us to develop that ability in general?
If you go back in time and you go to Martin Luther and you go to the printing press and the ability to translate the Bible into a phonetic language and the changes that that had on society and you move that into the future and you go to the free press and then you go to the internet and you go to social media and you go to where we are today...
One of the things that's common, the thing that it all shares in common is that there's a course in this path that seems to be inevitable, is that there's a shrinking of the distance between human beings and information.
And information is far more accessible than it's ever been before.
And there is some resistance to that, right?
Like there's some censorship in terms of like what you're allowed to search and what you're not allowed to search, which we talked about earlier with Google and DuckDuckGo and things are curated and we're all aware of the problems with big tech censoring certain voices on social media because they're concerned with the narrative that's going to be...
Because they're thinking about it in short-term gains and losses.
But ultimately...
All technology is leading into, there's a boundary between human beings and information.
It's getting smaller and smaller and smaller, to the point where information is going to be instantaneously accessible.
whether it is a decade from now or a month from now or 100 years from now, whatever it is, it is inevitable, in my opinion, that as technology continues to progress and innovation continues to be something that people value and that is prized that as technology continues to progress and innovation continues to be something that people value and that is prized and that is rewarded, we're going to move to a position where You're going to be able to understand people's intent.
We're not going to trust people who aren't willing to do that.
And it's going to help people in a lot of ways because lying doesn't just hurt the people that you lie to.
It hurts you.
Because you're living some bullshit life where you're trying to pretend that you're something that you're not.
And I think ultimately people are going to get that.
And there's going to be people that fall by the wayside.
And there's going to be people that rise because of it.
And it's going to help culture ultimately.
But I think one of the big things it's going to do, it's going to eliminate propaganda.
And that's why I think it's going to be embraced.
Because you can't have propaganda if people can actually understand what people's intentions are.
In a clear, like, you know how you have, like, if you enable location finding on your phone, and you say, hey, I'm in Russia, and you're like, no, motherfucker, you're in Oklahoma.
I mean, maybe part of it is how much credit you give to individual humans, but I just think that we haven't done ourselves any favors yet.
Maybe we learn, and maybe, yes, maybe there's one day when it's all instantaneous, and so therefore everybody's showing their cards all at the same time, and there's no issues.
But I just have a feeling that so far...
You know, so far, I don't think the internet has really...
This is going to sound like I'm some sort of Luddite, but in terms of our children, in terms of general society and the way that we deal with each other...
I don't know that it's done us more good than harm so far.
I just have this feeling that the way that we are currently, right, and people, because people, the human condition is still going to be that they're going to, they're going to go to wherever they believe, right?
So the fact that I can, I know your intentions doesn't mean it's going to make me altruistic and understanding, right?
That's not human condition.
It's just going to make me harden my opinion or figure out some way to get around The aspect of what your intentions are.
Look, from my perspective, from an operational perspective, and from my business perspective, what do we do?
We're involved in a lot of investigations, a lot of fraud concerns, a lot of asset tracing, all these things that my folks do.
Hey, great!
I'd love to be able to know immediately what somebody's intentions are.
That makes the job so much easier.
I guess what I'm saying is I think it doesn't change the base nature of human characteristics.
And so I don't think it's going to make us suddenly come together as a community and understand and get together.
I think what's happened is the ability to access more information has just driven us apart and created these silos where we all just sit and listen to whatever...
Affirms our opinion and I don't think that you know a neural link or anything else is going to suddenly make us better people and I think it's going to Not be I don't know I and what the fuck do I know?
I'm not a neuroscientist, so I don't know I'm not a psychiatrist.
I don't know what the fuck do I know but my yeah, what the fuck do I know but my my Experiences so far have told me that oftentimes people's intentions aren't particularly good and And that we have to be pragmatic and sometimes being cynical is not a bad thing.
I don't think it's a bad thing either, but I think that what we're dealing with is there's a lot of confusion and there's a lot of distrust and there's a lot of conflict.
There's a lot of these things going on.
A lot of it is based on the unknown.
A lot of it is like, we don't know what the Russians are doing.
We don't know what the far left is doing.
We don't know what the far right is doing.
We don't know what the Chinese are doing.
And there's a problem with...
Our own biology.
It takes a long time for human beings to evolve biologically.
Like, there's not much difference between our DNA and the DNA of people that lived 10,000 years ago.
As we move forward, technology is increasing at a pace that biology can't possibly keep up with.
So we are left with these tribal biological instincts that were developed and that evolved when people were in tribes worried about other tribes coming over and attacking us.
We were worried about the unknown.
We were worried about animals.
We were worried about attacks.
We're worried about, you know, the sky turning into a monster that we didn't understand.
And now we know so much more, but we still have the same human reward systems.
We still have the same DNA and biology that was...
Essentially programmed to keep us alive during these ignorant situations.
We didn't really know, but now we know a lot.
But now we know so much we have this ability to communicate that's unprecedented.
And it's evolving and changing.
The only way I see that we can keep up with it is if we do something to interface with the technology in a way that's unprecedented.
In a way that's different than just looking at a screen Or looking at a phone because you're still using the same biology and you're interfacing with new information when you're using a phone.
And that's also created a lot of confusion.
You know, that's part of the reasons why people isolate and insulate and get into these fucking, these little bubbles of information and thought.
And, you know, they insulate themselves from opposing ideas and it gives them comfort and it makes them tribal.
It makes them more tribal.
And I think it's not a coincidence that the more technology increases and the more access to information increases, the more likely people are to get into these weird fucking groups where they have echo chambers.
I think one of the only ways it's going to move us out of that is some sort of technology that alleviates a lot of our concerns by giving us information about intent, give us information about what people's real thoughts are and real intentions are, and let people know that most of us want the same thing.
Most of us really, truly want the same thing.
And a lot of the conflict that's been exploited, whether it's by social media algorithms or it's by foreign countries or bad entities, they've done so by preying upon these biological limitations.
I was trying to think about what age do you do this if you do it to a baby because then you could hear what your baby's thinking but also you're going to have to replace that multiple times as they grow older or their brain might not develop correctly because there's already an interference.
But remember when we were talking with Jamie Messel yesterday about CRISPR? What if CRISPR gets to the point where there's some new technology that we literally develop the human mind to the point where it can access Wi-Fi, where it can access...
Some new software or some new hardware that allows people to communicate with each other without any...
What I want to grow up as a kid today compared to when I grew up, which was we didn't have access to that news.
We had like three channels for news, right?
Everybody had a shared experience in a sense, right?
Now, am I saying – I'm not somebody who looks back at the past and goes, oh my god, it was so wonderful.
There were problems then too.
Of course it was.
And so, you know, but – As an example, was there a benefit to having much of the country sitting down for the 5 o'clock news or the 11 o'clock news, and everybody had a shared experience.
They were getting the same news.
Now they would process it differently based on their own personal life experience and where they were sitting in life, but there was a shared moment in time.
This is a small example.
I look at that and I go, you know, was there some benefit to that?
And I think there was, because now you don't have that.
And that creates in part what we've got today with this divisiveness that exists.
And everybody's sitting in their trenches.
It's like World War I, right?
Everybody's throwing grenades.
Nobody wants to come out into no man's land.
And then I go back to the other part of it, which is still more touchy-feely, admittedly, which is...
I don't want to know.
There's an element of life that it's sort of the unknown.
I don't want to walk around knowing exactly what your intention is or what Jamie's intention is.
It's not a concern of mine.
Life can be pretty simple if you think about it.
If you think, what am I interested in?
I'm interested in trying to be a good person, raising my family so that the kids are good people and productive people.
The idea of getting to some point in life where we don't have to talk to communicate, right?
But the problem with the scenario that you're painting in these rose-colored glasses is that there was a small group of people that curated that information that was portrayed on the 5 o'clock news.
That's the problem.
It's like, then you relied on government entities and propaganda, and you could have people with unscrupulous ideas, and that's what led to Stalin, Russia, and Laos, China.
But are you saying that now it's better in terms of politics and the governments and our reliance on government and the way that we have our information?
I'm a believer in unbiased sources, and I think there's only a few of them out there.
It's one of the reasons why I like Apple over Androids.
They don't share your information the same.
And I think there's real value in that, because human beings have We've been using these things, whether it's Google or Facebook, and we always thought that that was the product, that we were using these things, and that these things, Facebook was the product, Google was the product, and then somewhere along the line we realized, no, we're the product.
Our data is the product, and we're selling.
But by using these things for free, by using whatever it is, their message services and posting on these things, we think we're getting something for free, but we're not.
Because we're giving up our data, we're giving up all of our metadata and all of our information, and through these algorithms they've been able to amass Insane amounts of wealth just by using our information.
I guess what I'm saying is I don't disagree in the sense of – again, going back to the operational perspective, there's a lot of advantage, right, from somebody who is worried about security and national security concerns.
Hey, there's a lot of advantage to getting to that point.
I just don't think it's going to improve the human condition necessarily.
I don't think there's going to be the upside that necessarily comes from – Instantaneous, immediate access to understanding people's plans and intentions and information.
If you follow like Steven Pinker's work and you follow like the analysis of violence and crime as it relates to the progress of civilization and humanity, there's a path.
And this is not to discount all the situations where people have been the victim of violence and the victim of crime.
But there's less instances of it statistically.
If you had an overlook, if you were looking at the earth from above and you looked at a trend in terms of the way civilization is heading, as technology progresses, as access to food and resources and information progress, you have less instances of violence Less instances of crime and less instances of all the undesirable things.
Whether it's sexual assault or racism, all the things, they occur less over time.
And I think that as technology increases, this will be a trend that continues to go in that direction.
This is just me guessing based on the work of other people far smarter than me that have gone over this sort of pattern and looked at it in terms of like, where are we headed?
We're not headed in a bad place.
People can concentrate on all the bad things that still do exist, whether it's sexual harassment in the workplace or whether it's violence or whatever the thing you want to concentrate on.
There's 8 billion people on this planet.
You can find massive amounts of data that can support your idea that this is still a problem, and it's always going to be still a problem until there's no problems.
Until we reach utopia, and I don't know if we're ever going to reach utopia.
At what point didn't his chief of staff or somebody, right, who was booking his tickets, didn't say, you know, Ted, this is probably the optic isn't looking good.
It's just like, if you're going to go to Cancun in the middle of a deep freeze, and then also be aware that you can't say, I was going to head right back when people can fucking research your ticket and find out you actually weren't coming back until Saturday.
Gave up all her text messages talking about how it's freezing.
But listen, if you have the means and you are stuck in a place where there's no power and the power's not coming back on and you can just fly to Cancun, I get the optics for Ted, but his family should absolutely be allowed to do that, if they have the money.
It's not like you shouldn't have to stay and suffer because everybody else has to stay and suffer.
Hey, look, in Connecticut, where we used to live, apparently when you moved to Connecticut, you signed some agreement, I don't remember signing it, that said every winter the power is going to go out at least four or five times during the winter and for days at a time.
I mean, not just a couple of days.
The first winter we were in Connecticut, because all the utilities are above ground, right?
So, you know, they get a lot of storms.
Trees come down.
So the next thing you know, the entire town and a bunch of other towns are without power.
It is a common occurrence there.
But the difference is, as opposed to here in Texas, you're used to it.
You're prepared for it.
So what happens is you get generators and you get food and you understand it's going to happen, right?
You have a fireplace.
It's going to be okay, even if the power is out for six or seven or eight days, which it It is, right?
It's not an uncommon occurrence.
So, I mean, I remember we didn't have a generator the first winter, right?
And I remember looking outside.
Power was out for a few days.
Other people got their lights on, right?
And our neighbors were great, and they'd say, come on over.
Just stay at our house for a few days until, you know, and that's what we would do.
And then eventually, you know, my wife, the finest person I know, you know, she said...
She knows not about that handy, but she said, you're going to go get a generator for the family, right?
And also, when you've got a channel that has millions of views on their reviews and you sell them a fucking shitty lemon and it keeps breaking down, you've made a mistake.
They have the worst reliability ratings, and it's unfortunate, because other than that, I don't know what corners they're cutting where their stuff sucks, because the engineering and everything, the design is amazing.
Yeah, the retro mod industry has really come on big.
You see a lot of this in the shows nowadays.
And sometimes it's tough.
I mean, if you're looking for something that's just straight up from the numbers and is legit, it's tough to find sometimes because this is kind of where people are going that direction.
Anyway, so yeah, we're going to go over to England.
I'll probably stop at the Home Depot outside of London, pick up some duct tape and some extra wire, then pick up the MGB, drive around, wait for it to break.
I was watching this video where Ben Stein was on the internet and he was talking about how bad he got wrecked by the second shot, but Ben Stein is like 80, right?
In fact, one of the guys, I got the shots because I was doing some work for a company that's considered to be a Whatever they call it, a critical infrastructure company.
And so they put me on their list of people that they wanted to have because they were given a certain number of vaccines.
So they said, you know, would you mind getting on the list?
And so I said, fine.
But I remember some of their folks, probably late 30s and early 40s, they all said the same thing, which is, yeah, the second shot knocked them on their ass.
It varied a little bit.
A couple of days, maybe three days.
They all had sort of the same thing.
Fever, chills, aches.
Flu symptoms, right?
Basically.
And again, I didn't think anything of it because I haven't had a reaction in the past.
But yeah, it was kind of shitty, but You know, I mean, look, I've got some, you know, I had a heart attack, right?
I've had cancer, right?
So I was happy to get it, right?
Because I don't want to, you know, you hear the stories about people, you know, get COVID and they've had other issues in the past.
In fact, I tried to work out that day when I felt like shit because you get, kind of get moving, right, and you feel, you know what it's, I mean, you know, and I went upstairs.
We got a home gym.
And I thought, fuck that.
I can't do it.
Because it's just the temperature changes were just really screwing with me.
But it is interesting.
I've been surprised by the number of people who don't want to take it.
Who are disinclined and included in that number are healthcare people who are saying, eh, I'm going to give it a pass.
So I think that surprised a lot of people.
The general public, and that doesn't send a good message to the general public when they see healthcare professionals saying, ah, I think I'm going to give this a miss.
And everybody's got to make that decision.
For me, it was like, fine, fuck it, I'll take it.
And again, maybe I'm too simplistic, but...
It's fine.
And my wife has got the first shot.
She's going to get the second shot at some point here, I think, the next couple of weeks.
So it'll be interesting to see because she's somewhat younger than I am.
Yeah, and that's interesting because, again, I think people need to go in and it's just like with everything else.
Regardless of what you're reading, you need to figure out what the outlet is, right?
Because there is no doubt.
I keep going back to the same thing.
I sound like I'm beating a fucking dead horse, but The FSB, the Russian Intel Service, is engaged in a covert action campaign right now to denigrate the U.S. manufactured vaccines.
So I'm not saying there's not legit information out there that says, you know, you should think about it.
Maybe it's not right for you.
Fine.
But at least know what the hell you're reading, right?
And pay attention to what the sources of information are that you're getting.
And until that day when we all can figure out what the intent is immediately...
Yeah, I mean, pay attention to what you're doing.
Whether you're reading about foreign policy or domestic politics or the vaccine, just fucking pay attention.
Yeah, I would think they'd be pushing people who have tested positive, like Jamie, who now has superpowers, that they would push them to the back of the line, basically, and say, you know what, I'm not going to prioritize you for the vaccine, because that actually doesn't make sense.
Look, you think about the population in the U.S. that's had COVID already, and then you think about the numbers that have been vaccinated, and you've got to think, okay...
Is that line shifting?
That line where we thought a year ago, we get to this number, we're approaching herd immunity or whatever they call it.
As much as he's an expert, and God bless him, but he keeps saying that one of the things he said that made me angry, he said, we're never going to shake hands again.
We're never going to go back to shaking hands again.
I never stopped.
What the fuck are you saying?
Wash your hands.
Shaking your hands is not going to kill people.
Stop saying things like that.
He says too many things that he takes back and too many things that he said in the beginning that masks don't work.
And a week before I had a stress test where they said, everything's good, man.
You look good.
And I got a family that's got a history of heart concerns, right?
So that's why I was in for the stress tests.
And if my wife hadn't been with me, I would have died on that plane because everyone would have thought, you know, how the engines wind up and you get ready and people fall asleep.
It's just, you know, it's a white noise.
Yeah.
But she jumped up and said, get this fucking plane back to the gate.
And one of the attendants said, would he like some orange juice?
Because, I mean, she probably thought I was diabetic or something, and I passed out.
And according to a couple of doctors on the plane who came to visit me afterwards, they said my wife was very funny.
She said, he doesn't want any fucking orange juice.
Get back to the fucking gate.
So we got to the gate.
Luckily, the Baylor Grapevine Institute, the Hart Institute, is like seven minutes away.
I couldn't have been luckier.
And so we get back to the gate.
They get me off the plane.
I wake up on a hospital bed staring up at the doctor who's like right there in my face, right?
And I come to and he says, he's very funny, but he says, you know how you can avoid this in the future?
And I'm like, where the fuck am I? Is this like, you know, have I gone to the afterlife and this is what it is?
But anyway, the point being is that what I learned from that episode and then the subsequent treatment and all the other things that go on with it, I should have known before because I'm old enough to be pragmatic, but a lot of medicine is educated guesses, right?
And yet the general population, right, has grown up to believe that medicine is science, is definite, is black and white.
Here's your answer.
And that's not the way it is.
And I think—so I think it's natural that with a pandemic like this, of course there's going to be—it's not misinformation, it's just— Inconsistent messaging because we're still figuring it out, right?
So that's not medicine's fault.
It's just the way it is.
But that creates this distrust among the public because they're anticipating that it's all going to be clear, right?
You're going to get the exact answer that you want and it's going to be right.
And it's not.
So we've had this period of time over this year where people kind of wig up and you get these different sides arguing about things.
We're just trying to figure the fuck out.
So do the smart thing.
Just try to be responsible, right?
But don't expect that, you know, medicine is going to give you the answers right off the bat and it's going to be correct.
Just like, don't fucking turn to the federal government.
I don't know where I'm going with this, but don't turn to the federal government for all your answers and, you know, don't buy an MGB and expect it to work.
It was very funny because they put me in this program where I show up and I'm...
Basically, it's an exercise program.
So I would go there four days a week, and everybody in there was at least 25 years older than I was.
I'm not young, but they were all in there, and so they'd kind of be walking around the track, and I was like, I'm hooked up, and I'm walking around with these guys.
I made some great friends, frankly.
Some of these guys were fantastic, and so you'd go there.
I actually was looking forward to it.
I'd go and have coffee with Fred, and Fred's 89 years old, and we'd have a great time talking.
But they'd be looking at me like I was 20 years old, which I kind of enjoyed, right?
Because I'm the youngest guy in there.
So it was a lot of, you know, build back up your level.
Now I work out just like I did before, right?
But the interesting thing is that they basically, now, when you go in and you say, because there was some talk about, well, let's do the other side, meaning let's get in there and clear it out, put a couple of stents on the other side and make sure you're all good.
But they're like, you know, you talk to one cardiologist and they say, maybe we should.
And the other said, maybe we shouldn't because there's a risk if we go in there.
So maybe we just wait.
And then their answer is always kind of like, well, if you start to feel anything, then, you know, we'll go in there and we'll intervene.
And you think, well, I didn't feel anything before.
I mean, look, I had a stretch of time with that, with the heart situation.
I also had colon cancer, right?
Because I did what a lot of guys do.
I thought I'd put off the colonoscopy, and I put it off.
You're supposed to start when you're 50, I think, is the general advice.
And I was thinking like, I have no interest in going in and getting a colonoscopy.
It just doesn't, it's not the sort of thing that, so I always found a reason to put it off.
I put it off for like five years.
And then finally, my wife said, no, you got to go and get it done for no reason.
It's just, I wasn't feeling bad or anything.
She says, you got to go get it done.
So I went in.
It turns out it's nothing, right?
If my one piece of advice to anybody as a dude, to other guys, is go get your fucking colonoscopy because you don't even know it's happening, you know, and it's not like some sort of prison situation.
You're fine, right?
You're gonna wake up, you have no idea it happened, but get it done.
There's a lot of people that try to make correlations between red meat being bad for you, but they're all from epidemiology studies where people are eating cheeseburgers and fries and shakes.
Yeah, never underestimate the strength of the power of someone feeling righteous and smarter than anybody else.
And that's, again, but to answer your question about every day a gift and everything, you know what, I kind of felt that way before, right?
I've seen my family go on, I've seen siblings and good friends, and so I always felt like, you know, yeah, every day's a gift, but I don't think you need some sort of life-changing moment If your priorities are right to think that.
For a little while, I tell you what, the one reaction to the heart attack on the plane was getting on other planes, right?
And I got to travel a lot, you know, for my line of work.
And so there was that moment where I get on a plane because you feel like, okay, I got no choice.
If I'm sitting on a 13-hour flight, and I'm halfway through it, I'm fucked if something else happens, right?
So there was that side of it, but otherwise, no.
There was no come to Jesus moment where I thought, oh my God.
I will say this.
I don't dwell on death, but I do find myself...
This sounds really odd, but I find myself sometimes thinking, you know, I just want, like, just give me 25 more years or give me, you know, give me 30 more years or whatever.
I'm going to buy something, I'm going to buy it right away.
I want the story to get over with so I can move on to the next one.
I'm going to binge watch something.
So yeah, I think there was something to that.
There were a lot of bad movies made in the old days, but a lot of them did allow for more dialogue, more story development, more character development.
Well, I think it's interesting for a couple of reasons, but one is just...
I found interesting was the...
The realization amongst a lot of people that we still had troops over in Iraq, right?
That seemed to catch a lot of people off guard.
Because what happened was there's eastern Syria where we did the airstrikes a couple of weeks ago.
We struck a facility that is essentially a hub, a center for transportation of fighters, foreign fighters, and money and hardware, weapons, that the Iranians have set up.
The Iranians have basically created a transportation system from Tehran to all the way to Beirut, right, in their effort to try to control the region.
And so you had this eastern Syria outpost with Iranian-backed militia, and they were engaged in occasional attacks against U.S. and coalition forces, right?
So they were lobbing missiles, and there were a couple of incidents where we lost contractors and some coalition members.
And so essentially what happened was the Biden administration, I think correctly so, said, okay, look, we've got to do something.
We've got to send a message.
And so they did.
They struck a facility there run by some Iranian-backed militia.
But the news that it was because of the attacks that they were committing on U.S. forces in Iraq, that's the interesting part because it caught people by surprise and going, what the fuck?
We still got people in Iraq?
Because we've gone well beyond that time when – support our troops.
Wounded warrior was always the ads up there and everybody thought about it.
But it's been, I think about how many years it's been, right?
And so I think we've forgotten that we still have, we don't have many, but we still have troops over there.
And so it raised an interesting question, which is an important one to talk about, I think, which is, you know, why are we still over there?
Or what are we doing over there?
Or what's our endgame?
What's our reason for being, right?
And, you know, look, 19 years.
Twenty years since we've been in Afghanistan, as an example, and what's the point?
And so I think that's a legitimate conversation to have, regardless of where you fall on the answer.
I think it's a good question to have, and we should be talking about it.
But we don't because we get wrapped up in domestic politics or we get wrapped up in COVID or whatever it is.
So occasionally something like that happens that causes people to shift their focus outside of their bubble and outside the US and think about what the hell else is going on in the world.
And that's, from my perspective anyway, that's a good thing, right?
Isn't it funny that it's sexist if you say there's movies that you think a boy should watch, but it's not sexist if you say there's movies that I think girls should watch.
But then you get called out because you exist somewhere in the center where you're trying to see that there's smart ideas on both sides, and yet people are so angry that they don't want that, right?
And it's like that idea that we were talking about before where… The people who are shining during the pandemic, who love the suffering in a sense, right, who really don't want us to return to a normal because they've actually found this to be a good time for them.
That sounds wrong.
I know that sounds wrong.
You know, a lot of people, but there are some people who seem to suffer well, right?
You know, to some degree, they're the same people who grieve well, right?
You know, you get those people who, they didn't know the person who died, but, you know, my God, they're grieving more than anybody else, including immediate family.
And so, I don't know.
I probably don't want to disappear.
I'll say something stupid, and then I'll get caught out again.
That's a good example of getting called out on shit.
I did a show on the 6th.
It was a news segment where I was talking and I said that President Trump's reaction that day was pathetic.
That's what I said.
And my point was, is that a lot of what he did over his four years, it was just self-inflicted wounds.
It was unnecessary, right?
And a lot of the noise was unnecessary.
It was because of his personality and the way that he responded, right?
Now, I know his base loved that because they felt like, well, that's real, right?
And he's really speaking truth to power.
He's not part of the swamp and all that.
But my point was, look, you can be smart enough as the president of the United States to come out and immediately say, regardless of what's going on, just say...
Back the fuck off.
This is wrong.
Don't do it.
You can protest, but not violently, and get the fuck out of the Capitol building.
And he didn't do that.
It was sort of the same thing that he always does, which is, it's not a strong statement, and it's a self-inflicted wound.
So I said that, and man did I take some fucking heat.
From who?
From the right side.
From the right side, who's saying, ah, yeah, yeah, yeah, I'm full of shit.
But I think that if we allow to normalize certain aspects of the electoral system, I think what you're doing – look, I work in fraud all the time, right?
That's what my guys do in my business.
That's all.
They work in fraud.
If you allow conditions to create the potential for fraud, then people are going to fill that gap, and they're going to rush in, and they're going to engage in fraud.
So this is the part that I can't figure out.
Everybody should want, right or left, to allow the ability, the easy access to vote for every U.S. citizen.
But we should also want To not have people who aren't citizens or Whatever.
I mean, just to not allow fraud into the system.
And so I have a hard time understanding how people can't come together and say, yeah, we want integrity in our electoral system.
Do you think any other country allows for a sort of lax, you know, program that says, yeah, we're not going to check and we're just going to – we're so keen to show how righteous we are that everybody has easy access to voting that we're not going to check and make sure we're a citizen.
I guarantee you every other country makes sure that the people voting are citizens of that country, if they're given the right to vote, right?
Well, what I'm saying is there's a potential if we just expand the ability to vote, right, in our desire— To non-citizens.
Right.
Well, no, I'm not even saying non-citizens.
What I'm saying is the way that we allow people to vote.
If we don't have integrity in ensuring that the vote is coming from a legitimate citizen, right, And the right and the left should want that.
You want people to be able to vote.
Of course you want fucking people to vote.
It's like believe science.
Of course you believe science.
But you want everybody to be able to vote, and you want them to be able to do it easily.
But you also want to make sure that you're not opening it up in your desire to allow people to vote so that you don't have the ability to check and make sure that there's no fraud.
So that doesn't seem to be a heavy lift.
Allow easy access to voting for every US citizen, but ensure that the integrity of the system allows you to make sure that you just have US citizens voting for your country's elections.
That's what every other country does.
And again, it goes back to that thing about sometimes we apologize for it.
Well, I think if your system – part of the problem, I think, is if your system isn't clearly explainable and transparent, if people can't look at it and go, I see – and the reason why, like, in-person voting, right, the day of the election was for so long, was – nobody questioned it – was because that's simple.
That's transparent.
You can look at it and you say, yeah, I get it.
That's what happens.
It's – It's election day.
Everybody go to the voting polls and vote.
And so if you're doing it online or there's just unsolicited mail-in ballots, then People can look at that and legitimately go, well, I don't understand it, and so therefore I don't know that it's credible.
Well, I think it's – there's a – You know, again, you go back to the human condition.
I think it's – if there's an opportunity for fraud, I don't think, you know, Republicans are going to be less inclined than Democrats or Democrats are less inclined than Republicans.
I just think it's the way it works.
But it's – I think you have to have a transparent, clearly explainable, you know – System that you can look at and go, yes, I get it.
That's why.
And so I'm a big fan of in-person voting.
And unsolicited mail-in ballots?
No.
In the old days, we had absentee ballots.
And look, we changed the rules to try to accommodate for the pandemic.
And that made sense, right?
There has to be an ability for both sides to look at the system and say it's credible because it's clearly explainable and transparent.
And I just don't think that's where we're at right now.
That's what created this confusion and distrust.
That's a very dangerous thing.
And also then we had outside elements trying to, you know, drop in there with their covert action campaigns to cede that inability to believe in the system.
So, yeah, we better get this nailed down before the next election.
Yeah, I'm worried that Trump comes back in 2024, and I'm worried that these people that were at the Capitol building get more organized and more emboldened.
The only difference is what's really kind of hilarious is these dummies were also anti-maskers, so they all showed up.
Well, look at the difference between when the Black Lives Matter protests were there and they had hundreds of security guards surrounding the Capitol building versus this, which is a pittance.
No, because it's Washington, D.C. Do you think that the attack on Capitol Hill in many ways is like what happens when the social media chickens come to roost?
That this divide that we've had on social media that is accentuated by algorithms, it does...
It emphasizes these echo chambers where people believe the election was stolen.
They only communicate with other people.
And you're a patriot if you go there.
We're going to get together patriots.
They were calling themselves patriots, violating the law, right?
No, but he did want to incite them to cheer and chant and let people know on his behalf.
That tape that got leaked of him calling up the governor of Georgia and telling them to change the election results and be a patriot, like that kind of shit.
Everything's a problem with his messaging and his self-inflicted wounds.
And look, we talked back in, what, November, right?
I think was the last time.
And I think at that time, I said that he's losing the election and The next important thing was going to be the Georgia Senate runs.
If you're a Republican, you should be pissed off that he wasn't smart enough to understand that after the election, He should have turned his attention to Georgia and simply said, all you've got to do now is you've got to focus on Georgia.
You've got to get out there and vote.
You've got to do everything possible.
He couldn't do that.
He couldn't do it.
Now look, that doesn't mean I don't like some of the policies of the previous administration.
You can have disagreements with the person who's in the White House and still like the policies, the attitude towards China and the way that we dealt with China, some of the other things that we were doing.
That's great.
We don't live in that world now where you can separate and kind of, you know, look and analyze policies from people, right?
Now it's like, if you say, look, there were self-inflicted wounds, people go, oh, you're fucked up, you're not a Republican, you hate the policy.
I didn't know.
I'm just saying, look, he clearly, through his actions, caused the Republicans to lose Georgia.
He could have, from that bully pulpit of his, he could have pushed, and we probably would have won both of those elections in Georgia.
Simply by shutting up about election fraud and realizing that this is – the Democrats, one thing that they do, right?
And again, I'm a centrist here, but one of the things that I always thought Democrats do well is they focus on the end result, right?
On the game, right?
On the game plan.
And sometimes Republicans get lost in, like, principle and theory and the purity of it all, right?
And it's like with, I don't know.
So I think that what he could have done was just immediately pivot after the national election, the presidential election, and said, look, we're all disappointed, right?
This is not the result that we wanted.
But now we have an important task ahead of us.
And that is the two Senate seats in Georgia.
If you like the policies that we've been promoting, and you like the deregulation, or you like the China policy, or whatever it is, focus your attention in Georgia.
But do you think that would have made a difference?
Because the people that are on the fence, do you think there's that many people that are on the fence that would have voted Republican but wound up voting Democratic?
No, look, I think it's good because I think the...
Look, it's for the same reason that Pentagon released the information about AATIP, about the Advanced Aeronautical Threat Identification Program.
I think it's actually good.
There's no reason why we shouldn't, unless...
You are talking about developmental aircraft as an example, which is important because when you're talking about hypersonic aircraft or missiles or whatever it is, there's some stuff that needs to be kept off the radar screen because there is a tremendous competition going on right now, particularly for things like control of space.
That's going to be a huge issue.
Because the weaponization of space, for a long time people were thinking, ah, space, it's a great exploration and it's good for mankind.
Frankly, There is a race to figure out how to weaponize space.
And so as an example of what we're talking about, the idea of just saying, oh, we're going to open the books as a country and reveal all our information about developmental aircraft, as an example, that's the wrong move, right?
But do you think there are any credible stories, whether it's from Commander David Fravor, who saw that Tic Tac vehicle off the coast of San Diego, or whatever video?
I'd say the one that if I were somebody who's looking for some redemption because I've been beating the drum about UFOs and nobody's ever believed me and they always roll their eyes, I would say the one thing that would give them comfort would be the incident with Commander Fravor and that sighting.
That's one that I have yet to see an explanation for that makes any sense.
Yeah, it's one of those things you look at and you go, okay, and look, the AATIP program made sense in the sense that, you know, if a nation is out there, if the Chinese are out there, or the Russians, whomever, and they're developing propulsion capability that we don't know about, then yeah, we should have a mechanism within the Pentagon, within the intel community to understand what that is.
Let's research it, let's investigate, right?
And so, oftentimes, you know, they come to a logical conclusion.
The Fravor incident, I have yet to see any information that explains it, right?
So, that to me, and also, as you pointed out, the way that it was tracked, the verification of it from very credible, you know, individuals, that...
And there's no upside for somebody like that, a very well-respected aviator with great experience.
There's no upside for these guys to come forward.
In fact, there's pressure to not because it's not necessarily good for your career to come in and say, I think I saw a UFO. What do you think is going on?
Well, they probably want to observe, but they don't want to interfere.
If they're super advanced, they probably realize there's a process.
that intelligent life goes through, where there's stages of their evolutionary development in terms of use of technology, understanding of each other, mitigation of war and conflict, and then ultimately entrance into the Galactic Federation.
I think that's about it actually we're getting I shouldn't say that this is interesting we're getting into invested recently in the cannabis business yeah I know I'm I'm starting to become a believer I'm not a believer in Bitcoin yet but I'm a believer in the cannabis business well it's a fucking giant business it's like not being a believer in trees yeah They're out there.
It's like the Lorax.
Yeah.
So, yeah, no, it's, we've, we've, but we're hitting it from a different direction.
We're hitting it from, I've always thought...
I've done some work, a couple of shows on the problems that are around cannabis in terms of the cash economy, the inability of banking systems to get involved and all of that.
We're going in on a business that does the...
Is worried about the tax and banking side of things.
So it's sort of the intersection of the trade with commerce and pulling it into sort of the legitimate world of commerce.
Well, that's one of the hopes of the Biden administration that they'll pass some sort of federal law on marijuana, that they'll change it and make it legal, which I think they should.
Like, um, if you were, uh, playing someone and they, you're like playing nine ball, someone would give you the eight ball if they were a little bit better than you.