Mike Baker, former CIA officer and entrepreneur, critiques the IRS’s expanded scrutiny under Biden—87,000 new agents targeting small businesses despite Republican resistance—while warning of China’s $54.6M donations to Penn Biden, including $23M anonymously, and its biometric espionage tactics, like Zhu Yang Jungzhu’s 20-year prison sentence for hacking U.S. aviation firms. He also dissects crypto’s unchecked growth, comparing FTX’s collapse to Madoff’s fraud, and questions Soros’ global influence via progressive media investments like Acronym. The episode blends geopolitical risks, business lessons from the CIA’s "get off the X" mentality, and pandemic-era cultural shifts, culminating in Baker’s free book Company Rules—a CIA-inspired guide to leadership—paired with steak knives and luggage as quirky promotions. [Automatically generated summary]
The one comment he made that I think I would go against, too, is that it has no intrinsic value because it seems that a lot of things have no intrinsic value.
Yeah, they're going after small to medium-sized businesses.
I mean, the popular narrative was, we're going to hire 87,000 more.
Now, look, does the IRS, do they need to update their computer systems, right?
Well, yeah, sure.
Yeah, it's the government, right?
Every computer system in the government needs to be updated to protect from cybersecurity problems.
But do they need 87,000 more agents?
No, but the narrative was from the Biden administration was, you know, we're going to go after the ultra-wealthy.
Fucking no.
That's what they're doing.
They've got 87,000 agents.
Think about how many additional personnel that is in each state, right?
In each region for the IRS.
They're not going to be occupied with wealthy people all over the place.
Now, a wealthy audit can be complex, but they're coming after small and medium-sized businesses.
And that's how they imagined the amount of money they were going to have on this land grab to help fund other things that they're doing, whether it's climate change or other policies that they want to push forward, great.
But the problem is Congress now under Republican control, sure, they can say, nah, we're going to stop that in its tracks, only until they march it across to the Senate and the Senate says, fuck you, no.
So we're still going to have 87,000 new agents.
That's not going to change.
Yeah, that's not.
You can't get that through Senate.
And even if they did, you know, the president would probably veto it.
So we're looking, we're staring down a barrel at a couple of years of that sort of activity where Congress will vote to do something.
It'll be stopped in the Senate or it'll be vetoed by the president's desk.
You know, regardless of A, I don't think they're not going to knock down the doors at the University of Pennsylvania where they found these things, right, at some think tank that they set up.
And so that's not going to happen.
But it is kind of fun to look at and think, oh, really?
But the truth is it happens with every administration, right?
Document control isn't that difficult, right?
You should be able to know which documents are secret, put them in a box over here, top secret over here, and then special code word, put them over here.
And you account for all those documents.
That's the way that you do it.
But it seems like every administration has this problem.
That to me is more interesting than the fact that he had almost 10 documents there.
Because, again, every administration does it.
It would have been amazing if Biden hadn't had classified documents sitting somewhere.
President Obama had the same issue at every administration, just because, again, it's this goat rope upon exiting and then before the new administration comes in, right?
It's just like this funhouse of activity, trying to box up all your shit.
And so that in itself is not a surprise.
It's a surprise that, you know, with Trump, they decided to use a sledgehammer to go into Mar-a-Lago.
But that's not going to happen with Biden.
And it is, you know, it's an interesting comparison.
But the Republicans thought it was an aha moment.
I don't think they're going to get anywhere with that because I don't think people genuinely care.
Well, yeah, whether it's the Clinton Foundation or initiative or whether it's any, really, you know, pick any think tank.
That would be a really interesting study by some intrepid, curious journalists who wanted to dig into the, say, the top 12 think tanks in America and where does the money come from?
And then compare that to what policies are they pushing out the door?
Who are they trying to influence?
Right?
Because, you know, every one of these has some agenda or some point of view.
I was just reading about Huawei that even despite the U.S. sanctions, despite the fact that Google won't let them use the Google Android system or the Google Pay Store, Play Store rather, they're still killing it.
They still have an enormous market share, which leads me to believe that if this didn't happen, they'd probably be the number one in the world.
I mean, well, yeah, it's Apple's got a nice walled garden thing going on where it's like a buddy of mine, my friend Tony, just switched over to Apple's.
I love when I get those new blue texts from people.
I'm like, ha ha!
You went over to the dark side, you fuck.
He was one of the last holdouts of the green bubble.
But they're so good at keeping you in there because your photos all go to the iPhoto.
And, you know, I use notes, you know, like for comedy, it's like the best thing.
But I also use Evernote, and you can switch Evernote in between platforms.
But it's so easy to keep people because there's so many benefits to iMessage.
Yeah, but with kids trying to, I mean, it's like the whole TikTok debate, trying to say, okay, we're going to shut down TikTok in the U.S. or we're going to somehow try to enact regulations to keep kids from accessing porn online.
Okay, yeah, in theory, that's great.
Shit, if you can figure it out, but it's just not going to happen, right?
Because no matter what you do, once that kid leaves your house and all that technology is still out there, right?
Somebody's circumventing it, right?
Somebody's figured out some way.
And most of these kids, it's incredible how smart these kids are nowadays.
It says after a geopolitical dispute with China, India banned the app entirely, citing a law that allows the government to block websites and apps in the interest of the country's sovereignty and integrity.
Look, people say, well, fuck, you know, Google, all sorts of platforms gather all sorts of information unless you opt out.
And even when you opt out, you know, there's still accessible information there.
But the big point here is it's a Chinese state-sponsored entity, right?
And if the government wants something, that company is going to provide it.
And the idea that the U.S. reps would say, nah, it's not the case, is just horseshit.
There would never be a moment where a Chinese company would refuse to share data with the Chinese regime.
It's not going to happen.
And so, you know, believe what you want, you know, but if you actually think that there's a firewall there, then, you know, it's incredibly ignorant or naive or both or whatever.
And that's, yeah, there's a couple of truths there.
There's no rule of law, really, to speak of in China.
There's no recourse for companies outside of China that are operating there.
And anything you take there, I'll give you an example.
Actually, this is very interesting.
Well, maybe it's not interesting to everybody, but the end of this past year, so I think it was mid-November or so, the Department of Justice released some information about a law.
It had been a fairly long-standing case that the FBI had been involved in and DOJ and others about a Chinese intelligence officer.
Now, the interesting thing about this case was this individual, Zhu, Yang Jungzhu, was the first Chinese intelligence officer to be extradited to the U.S. And the story behind this guy is fascinating.
He was a fairly senior, like a deputy director within the Ministry of State Security there in China.
So a career intelligence officer.
And he'd had about 20 years of experience.
He started 10 years ago or so targeting specifically U.S. aviation companies, both on the private and the defense side and government.
And he went after, it's just one example of, and he was now sentenced to 20 years in prison just at the end of this past year.
So as an example, if you look at what he did, it's a perfect case study of how the Chinese intelligence works to gather up information, right, to steal economic intelligence.
But anyway, so he targets U.S. aviation interests.
And as an example, he was using everything.
He was using aliases.
He was using cover businesses.
He was targeting universities.
He started looking at identifying targets within U.S. aviation.
And as an example, found a guy in GE Aviation.
And what he would do is he would just say, look, can you come to China and make a presentation at the university about something completely innocuous, right?
It's not classified by any means or whatever.
But oh, you know, you're so important and you're so smart.
We'd love you to come over and present to our university.
We'll pay your travel and a stipend.
So they do that.
So he starts doing this around 2013.
About 2017, they get this one GE aviation employee to travel to China and give a presentation.
And by this time, luckily, the FBI had tweaked on this guy and figured out there was something wrong with him.
So in cooperation with the company, the FBI started posing as him, right?
Because Jew's not having face-to-face meetings with this guy.
He's doing this all online.
So they start posing as this guy.
After a year of just sort of random, non-threatening contact with this aviation employee, he starts asking him for specific details, right, of their engine technology.
GE's got some incredible engine technology.
And so the guy with the cooperation of the FBI sends a document, and on the document, at part of it, it just says, you know, you're not allowed to disclose this outside company.
It's proprietary data.
Well, what does that do?
Well, the reason why they released that is because they wanted to set the hook on this guy, this Chinese intel officer.
And so he gets this and he goes, ah, it's working.
He thinks, I got this guy now.
I've tasked him with something that's actually interesting and important.
He knows he's breaking a rule.
He's given me this document.
So now he accelerates the tasking a little bit.
And he gets the guy to say, look, how about during one of your trips over to Europe, we meet.
So this is where Zhu made his mistake.
He goes to Belgium and gets arrested there.
And it took a while, but he was finally extradited to the U.S. and finally charged.
But he was doing other things.
He was handling.
He was the handler for a kid working as a student, came over here as a student visa in Chicago, gave him targets, said, here are some individuals, again within aviation industry.
So I want you to start looking at them.
And maybe some of them are interesting, and we might want to start developing some of these targets.
Running this kid, you know, who's living and working and studying in Chicago.
And the targets were all of Chinese or Taiwanese descent, which is typical, right?
They kind of hone in on that, you know.
And so eventually that kid got wrapped up.
Once we started to figure out what was going on with Zhu, then obviously started to unravel his network.
But this kid was also doing the same thing, was targeting under the direction of Zhu and the Chinese intel.
Other things he did, I can't say, again, I know I disappeared down a rabbit hole here, but to the point we made earlier in terms of operating in China, he was also targeting other countries.
So he went after a French aviation company that had a facility in China.
What does that mean?
Well, that means that every employee, every local employee is probably going to respond.
If Zhu knocks on the door and says, I need your assistance, you're going to have to be my asset.
They're probably going to say yes, right?
Because they're operating there in China.
Now they're working for a foreign company.
But does that really matter when the Chinese regime knocks on your door?
So they did.
And what they did was with the cooperation of this internal asset, they were able to place malware on a visiting Frenchman's computer with the hope of taking it back to France and then, you know, affecting their entire system.
So anyway, long story short, I guess the point of that exercise is the aggressiveness, right?
The ability.
You think about the years that they spend going after targets.
And yet we want to believe somehow TikTok, you know, that they're not going to touch that.
Oh, there's a lot of data there, but we're not going to go after TikTok data.
What kind of data do you think they're really accumulating?
The thing that's disturbed me is that this discussion that they're getting biometric data, they're getting facial recognition data and fingerprint data from both fingerprint readers from Android phones and biometric facial data from iPhone, the face opening thing.
Well, some of it isn't of much use to them in the present time, right?
But they don't care.
So their ability, because of their resources and their motivation, is to just hoover up everything.
And maybe there's no use for that biometric data right now, but maybe there will be, right?
So maybe they're collecting all of this and they're thinking, okay, at some point we're going to develop a technology whereby we can use this for a reason.
Maybe we can remotely, using facial recognition, unlock access.
Who knows?
Just coming up with that.
But the point at 30,000 feet is they don't really care.
They hoover it all up, and then they look at it at some point and they say, okay, well, this can be used by Huawei, or this could be used over here, or MSS or the State Security Service could use this.
They'll figure out a use for it, and if it doesn't have a use, fine.
It doesn't matter.
They put it in a box and marked maybe check back later.
And maybe they will have a use for it.
It sounds like it's one.
We tend to not think in those terms.
Everything we do tends to be targeted.
So we'll say, oh, this is our requirement.
Let's go do that.
The Chinese are looking 30 years, 40 years, 50 years down the road.
And so they've got a different approach to information collection, which is why a lot of companies get caught unawares because they think, I'm not doing shit.
I'm just making a widget.
Why would they be interested in me?
So, you know, whatever.
But, you know, I realize people are saying, oh, God, he's fucking banging on about China again.
But, you know, if you think about it, we're all occupied with Russia and Ukraine right now, but China's the bigger issue, right, in the long term.
And we just need to, we need to be able to multitask.
And yeah, we've got to worry about Russia-Ukraine conflict, and does that get out of control?
I don't think anybody's got a plan in Washington right now or NATO.
I don't think anybody knows.
I think they're all being basically reactive as opposed to, you know, what's the end game here?
What is the final way that we wrap this up?
And, I mean, look, we've spent, the U.S. has spent, I don't know, as of the end of 2022, and that was, that's almost a full year because it started in February.
So almost in a full year, the U.S. spent about $50 billion in assistance.
And about half of that is military aid, right, in a variety of forms, right?
The high MORA systems all the way to protective body armor.
So it's all over the map in training.
If you compare that, $50 billion in aid to, and so what's that, about $25 billion in military aid.
If you compare that to previous year or the year before, we were probably spending on the Ukraine, we were probably spending $250, $270 million in military assistance.
That's it.
So that ramp up is incredible.
And then that doesn't include what the EU's put into it, what the UK's put into it, and everything else.
So how do you back out of that?
How do you say, okay, now we're putting a Patriot missile battery in there?
And France and we have agreed, I think we're looking towards more advanced armored technology.
We're going to give them tanks that they've been hankering for.
Hankering?
I said hankering.
And so that might be a Ukrainian word.
I don't know.
I have no idea where it's going to wrap up.
Putin's not going to give up Crimea.
So what does that mean?
Well, you've got to create some middle ground then where it's not going to be a complete victory for the Ukraine.
And that's going to make a lot of people unhappy who are just standing around waving Ukraine flags, right?
And so where do you go from there?
I don't know.
Hopefully there's some serious negotiations happening off the radar screen, but there doesn't seem to be a lot of evidence to that effect.
And Putin doesn't seem to show any interest in it.
And he's been able so far to tamp down on the dissidents at home.
And really, much like with China, the only thing Putin would really fear is losing power.
Yeah, if you look at, if you look, I mean, maybe this is a good time to say, okay, 2023, here we are.
What should we pay attention to?
What are we going to look at?
With Russia-Ukraine, you're right.
If suddenly Russia decides I'm going with an unconventional weapon, right?
It's time to break out the nuke.
And let's see what that does to the community of nations.
So there's that potential in terms of how does this escalate.
Something happens in terms of NATO and it drags NATO into it.
That's a way this thing escalates.
A cyber security attack in the region.
Maybe initially targeted at Ukraine, but then it somehow goes off into NATO allies, creates a major issue, shuts down power systems in Poland and the surrounding region.
So there's ways that this thing could escalate, get a little bit out of control.
Maybe, as we talked about, maybe there's increasing protest movement in Russia, maybe, and that threatens Putin's regime, and that makes him decide to do something a little bit more drastic.
No, the Russian general population's always had kind of a dry, very sarcastic sense of humor towards information in general, right?
And what they're being told by the authorities, and that includes the media.
So, you know, he can't control the population the way they used to, but they still, you know, it's still a dictatorship, and so he's still got significant state control.
And the state media is still very good, as is the security apparatus, at controlling the message.
So they're very good at that, right?
And so that's kind of balanced against, and they're constantly in this battle against increasing technology and its ability to spread information that's outside the bubble.
And so, yeah, I mean, there's dissent.
There's a feeling of dissatisfaction.
But, you know, Putin's been, he's been very good in the past at finding the bogeyman, right?
Whenever he's threatened of pointing to some outside force, you know, usually us, and saying, look what they're doing to us, and kind of rallying the troops, getting everyone to, yeah, you know, the motherland.
So, you know, I wouldn't, it's like hoping that the mullahs, it's like hoping the Iranian regime topples under the weight of this current protest.
They've killed, depends on the estimates you read, but 450, 500 people on the street during protests, much less all the people who have just disappeared, and they're sitting held in prison somewhere.
They're basically saying, look, if they make that decision, they need, what, 25 kilograms of enriched uranium at like 90%.
That's weapons grade.
So they could do that within a week is a number of estimates, legitimate estimates.
That's for one.
And okay, so is there value in that?
Well, from their perspective, perhaps.
They could do three weapons in maybe a month's time.
So that breakout that we used to talk about in terms of, you know, year, years, at least many months now is shrunk.
And so the idea is, as a flashpoint, people say, well, why should we still be worried about Iran?
Well, because there's a high likelihood that if the Israelis get the sense that that's where they're heading, that they're going to do, then they may take action, right?
Kinetic action to stop it.
They've done it in Iraq.
They did it in Syria, gone after these capabilities.
And that could obviously cause a flash there that spreads out of control, right?
And draws us into it.
So there's reasons why, because people, sometimes people say, why do I care about Taiwan?
Why do I care about Iran?
It's because of the potential for a problem that we can't get our hands around, that we can't control.
And so with Iran, it largely comes down to this issue of what is their breakout.
Now, aside from just enriching uranium, they got to come up with the weaponization of it all, right?
And that could take longer.
That could take months and months.
But it's a heavy lift to figure out what their plans and intentions are.
And we kind of backed out of this Biden administration was clear that they wanted to get back into the nuke agreement from 2015.
It was like, yeah, we got to do everything we can.
And so they started those talks when they got in, and now they've kind of shut them down, basically, because the Iranians made some demands that weren't realistic.
And also, yeah, the protests, right?
And also, they're selling fucking weapons to Russia.
So Russia's turned to Iran and North Korea to resupply their hardware and get gear that they can't get, drones in particular from Iran.
So do we really want to be talking a nuke deal with Iran at this moment?
Probably not, whether it's pragmatic or not, but certainly from a political perspective, I don't think the Biden administration wants that heat.
So there's a lot of shit happening that's very interesting.
Look, these people are under a microscope and they got to figure out what their messaging is from moment to moment with him.
And they probably don't like the idea this is all playing out in public.
But he's just kind of fucking lost a plot, right?
Now he's come out.
I mean, the book is like he's talking about his dick and he's talking about Afghans that he killed while he was there on duty.
And, you know, there's actually something funny.
Somebody sent me, I don't know if it's true because I haven't had time to look into it, but somebody sent me that some Taliban commander is now trolling Harry over his talk about the Afghans that he killed.
But I mean, who, again, why did he, well, I know why he felt the need to talk about some of this shit in his book is because otherwise no one's paying him money for this, right?
It used to be more common because there used to be more conflict and it was the British Empire and, you know, off you'd go.
And they wanted to tick that box, right?
They wanted to get that so they could wear the ribbons.
And, you know, and they, you know, there was a sense of, you know, if we're going to be in charge, we need to show that we've actually taken part in these campaigns.
And so, no, look, God bless him for serving.
I think it's great.
I just, you know, I think that that part of it, you know, you can't deny find great.
Yeah, I think that is that's admirable.
It's just everything else.
It's just kind of, you know, bizarre.
And I admit to being a bit of a royalist.
I still have my British citizenship.
And, you know, one day we'll retire to a small Cotswolds village and solve murders for a living.
100% interfere with whatever you're really trying to do.
Whatever your actual work is, it'll 100% interfere with that and fuck it up.
I always tell people that, you know, concentrate on stupid shit, like if you concentrate on people that get mad at you on social media and stuff like that.
Like you only have a hundred.
Let's say if your mind, let's call it units.
You have a hundred units of information, of bandwidth that you can utilize.
Anytime you allocate any of those units to other things, now you have less units for the things that you care about.
It's in there, but it's not, I mean, I've got a lot of that.
I've got a lot of stupid information floating around my head for sure.
You know, I have obscure jujitsu fighter records bouncing around in my head.
But I think that, you know, so many people don't think about their mind as like if it was your money, if you had a certain amount of money and this is all the money you're ever going to have.
Like how much money are you going to donate to stupid shit?
How much money are you going to allocate to dumb things that don't help you at all and only ruin your life?
I needed to be home because I was at that point, it was just me and her.
And it was time to figure something else out.
And so, yeah, but I just think there was something about that job on the operations side that I found just very easy, right, to compartmentalize.
Some people found it very difficult in terms of the sort of like, I don't know whether they were thinking a moral quandary in terms of what we were doing.
And I don't know if this is, you know, I just never thought, you know, just tell me what the objective is, right?
Give that information to me.
You know, let's point ourselves in the right direction and just do it.
Now let's move on to the next task.
So I tend to be very simplistic when it comes to that.
And I think that helped with the business.
I never sat around, you know, staring at my fucking navel wondering, you know, where I fit in in terms of the big machine of the intelligence community.
But what happened was I got out, people were like, why are you leaving?
And what the hell are you going to do?
And as it turns out, over the years, it occurred to me that a lot of what I was doing in business were just some ideas that I had kind of settled with me from the agency days.
So there's just, you know, there's basically nine rules.
I couldn't come up with a tenth.
I wasn't smart enough to come up with a tenth.
So there's nine basic rules.
Everything, you start out from, you know, define your mission.
That's pretty much the first one.
It's kind of like what we talked about.
So in business, it's not just saying, okay, our mission is make money.
So you've got to define your mission.
Then you've got to clarify.
You've got to explain it to your personnel.
I'm a big believer in, once you do that, hire smart people, get the hell out of the way.
And that's worked out very well.
But there's other principles in there.
How do you make a decision with imperfect information?
That's one thing that the agency, you're not really realizing it at the time, but you realize when you're in there and then you leave that, you know what the agency is very good at is teaching people to just get off the X, make a decision.
Yeah, if you wait around, like if you've wait around for all the data to come in about before, let's take with business, before an investment, somebody else is going to come in and take that opportunity.
You've got to be able to say, it's not like the movies.
It's not like a Tom Clancy movie where you've got all the fucking details that you want before you go in on the target.
You're not looking through walls and you don't have an asset sitting in there telling you exactly where the target's going to be.
You don't know if there's 12 people over there and there's one person at the door.
That never happens.
You never know everything.
And if you wait for everything to show up, that's never going to happen.
But if you wait, then something bad's going to happen.
And it's the same in business, which is basically, so these ideas that I eventually, and again, anybody who worked for the agency, I'm sure they got their own ideas.
They're going to look and go, well, those aren't my ideas or my principles or my rules.
I have these.
But these are the ones that I took away.
And I used them to build a business.
And so all the examples are basically business-oriented.
So this is not a book about my time in the CIA.
And I don't think I'd ever write one of those because there's enough of that out there.
And I don't think anybody needs more of that.
But I just found this was interesting because nobody really expected me to be able to build a business and keep it breathing for as long as I have because I really had no business experience.
And part of it is there's an element of luck.
I never worked in an operation where there wasn't some element of luck.
And it's been the same with business, just in terms of good fortune or whatever you want to call it.
So anyway, there's these principles.
And it comes out on the 18th.
And Scribbed is the Netflix of Books, as they say.
No, there's no, you know, there's no real, in the scheme of things, it took me a lot longer, right?
It's not long.
It's like 15,000 words.
But that was like fucking pulling teeth, right, to get to 15,000 words.
And for me anyway, I'm sure that other people will look and go, that's like an opening sentence.
And no, so from a financial point of view, no, I didn't do it that way.
I did it because I genuinely am still surprised that I've been able to keep a business moving, right?
And I've got some of the people that have worked with me have been with me now for 17 years, right?
And they've had kids and they've raised their families with the company and they've done.
And, you know, that's probably more rewarding than anything else I've done in a sense aside from my family.
And so I guess I just wanted to put it on paper.
And then there's also that idea that this sounds stupid, but it's the same reason I like to do TV shows like the Black Fallsy Classified series is because at some point my kids can sit down when they're older and they can watch it or they can read this or listen to it and they got something.
I think the thing that people are weirded out by when it comes to intelligence agencies in this day and age is that they kind of act autonomously.
They kind of act outside of what we think of as the government.
We think of the government as being a bunch of people that get elected and those people do the rule of the people, but the people that are in the intelligence agencies, they're there forever.
And that's the term, the deep state, that everybody's so concerned with.
That's a common phrase that's been brought up over the last decade or so, where people are very concerned about the deep state.
There's a government that has its own rules and its own ability to enact things that are outside of elected officials and the will of the people.
Having been behind the curtain for all that time, I guess there's two parts to this.
One is never say never, right?
I mean, you never want to discount the idea that the Intel community or law enforcement or whatever could essentially develop a mind of its own, work separate from whatever government administration the people think they've elected into office.
So never say that couldn't happen because you always want to be wary of that.
I've spent enough time overseas in places where that happens, right?
And worse than that is where a dictator comes in, he goes out, wholesale cleaning, and then the new guy brings in all his people, right?
And they're just basically doing the will.
Now, in a way, that's more transparent, right?
Because you know what you're getting, right?
You're getting that guy's Intel service or that guy's law enforcement.
But having worked behind the curtain, at least the time that I was there, the agency was uniquely apolitical, right?
The people that I traveled around the world with or the people that I met worked with in various parts, we never talked about politics.
I think it's just been a process where, and I have no idea why, maybe in part because, no, I don't know.
I was going to say because it's become a little more transitory.
You know, in the old days, whatever the old days are, you know, through the Cold War and whatever, 70s and early 80s, people would join and the idea was I'm here for good.
I'm going to retire.
And now it's somewhat of a stepping stone to other things.
And so people move through these organizations on their way to somewhere else.
And maybe that creates some of this.
But I don't want to say it couldn't happen.
I just want to say, yeah, it's something you have to be always aware of.
I think that there have been individuals in various offices who got too close or too comfortable with political access.
Like with the CIA, you always want your director to have a good line of communication with the president.
It used to be more important when the agency, when the director had a seat at the table, right?
Now they pushed below the DNI.
So the DNI is the guy that talks and the agency director doesn't have the same access that they used to have.
And so then they subjugated the, subjugated the CIA director below that.
But the point being is you want that access.
Well, you know, if it gets too cozy or if the person in charge, whether it's the agency or the FBI or whoever, becomes too much of a political animal, now you've got a problem, right?
And that's when bad things can happen.
But the career people that I dealt with that I met with over the years, and the people that I still know, the career people, for the most part, they just want to do the job, right?
And I know people are going to say, well, of course that's what you're going to say, and I say that all the time.
So not long after Jack Ruby shot Lee Harvey Oswald on camera in the basement of Dallas police headquarters, a lot of Americans started to have some questions about the Kennedy assassination.
It was, you'd have to admit, a pretty extraordinary sequence of events.
A lone gunman murders the president of the United States, and then less than 48 hours later, that lone gunman is himself murdered by another lone gunman.
What are the odds of that?
It's one thing if you get struck by lightning, rare but possible, but if every member of your family also gets struck by lightning all on different days, you might begin to suspect these are not entirely natural events.
But oh, replied the U.S. government, they are.
This bizarre chain of killings was all entirely natural.
So less than a year after the JFK assassination, the Johnson White House released something called the Warren Commission Report.
And the report concluded that while their motives remained unclear, both Lee Oswald and Jack Ruby had acted alone.
No one helped them.
There was no conspiracy of any kind.
Case closed.
Time to move on.
And many Americans did move on.
At the time, they had no idea how shoddy and corrupt the Warren Commission was.
It would be nearly 50 years before the CIA admitted under duress that, in fact, it had withheld information from investigators about its relationship with Lee Harvey Oswald.
But even then at the time, before that was known, the government's explanation didn't seem entirely plausible.
And some people started asking obvious questions about it.
It was at that point, as Americans started to doubt the official story, that the term conspiracy theory entered our lexicon.
As Professor Lance DeHaven Smith points out in his book on the subject, the term conspiracy theory did not exist as a phrase in everyday American conversation before 1964.
In 1964, the year the Warren Commission issued its report, the New York Times published five stories in which conspiracy theory appeared.
Now, today, of course, the term conspiracy theory appears in pretty much every New York Times story about American politics.
It's wielded, now as then, as a weapon against anyone who asks questions the government doesn't feel like answering.
But despite 60 years of name-calling, those questions have not disappeared.
In fact, they have multiplied with time.
And here's one of them.
In April of 1964, a psychiatrist called Lewis Joylin West visited Jack Ruby in his isolation cell in a Dallas jail.
According to West's written assessment, he found that Jack Ruby was, quote, technically insane and in need of immediate psychiatric hospitalization.
Those are conclusions that, puzzlingly, no one who had spoken to Jack Ruby previously had reached.
Ruby had seemed perfectly sane to the people who knew him.
Lewis Joyland West pronounced him crazy.
But what West did not say was that he was working for the CIA at the time.
Lewis Joylin West was a contract psychiatrist for the spy agency.
He was also an expert on mind control and a prominent player in the now infamous MKUltra program in which the CIA gave powerful psychiatric drugs to Americans without their knowledge.
So of all the psychiatrists in the world, what in the world was this guy doing in Jack Ruby's prison cell?
The media did not seem interested in finding out.
In fact, the New York Times, in an extensive 1999 obituary of West, never mentioned the fact that he had worked for the CIA, much less his time in Jack Ruby's cell, which seems relevant.
So you can see why non-crazy people would wonder about what really happened.
And of course, many have wondered.
In 1976, long forgotten, the House of Representatives impaneled a special committee to reinvestigate the JFK assassination.
Their bipartisan conclusion?
Jack Kennedy was almost certainly murdered as the result of a conspiracy.
But the question is, a conspiracy by whom?
Well, the obvious suspect would be the CIA.
Why else would the agency withhold critical evidence from investigators?
Is there a benign explanation for that, for maintaining this level of secrecy for this many years?
Not that we're aware of.
And it is illegal.
In 1992, Congress passed the President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act.
That act mandated full disclosure of all documents by 2017, 54 years after JFK was killed.
The last administration promised to comply fully with that law, but under intense pressure from CIA Director Mike Pompeo, withheld in the end thousands of pages of CIA documents.
Today, this afternoon, the Biden administration did exactly the same thing.
That would be thousands of pages of documents after nearly 60 years, after the death of every single person involved.
But we still can't see them.
Clearly, it's not to protect any person.
They're all dead.
It's to protect an institution.
But why?
Well, today we decided to find out.
We spoke to someone who had access to these still hidden CIA documents, a person who was deeply familiar with what they contain.
We asked this person directly, did the CIA have a hand in the murder of John F. Kennedy, an American president?
And here's the reply we received verbatim.
Quote, the answer is yes.
I believe they were involved.
It's a whole different country from what we thought it was.
It's all fake.
It's hard to imagine a more jarring response than that.
Again, this is not a, quote, conspiracy theorist that we spoke to, not even close.
This is someone with direct knowledge of the information that once again is being withheld from the American public.
And the answer we received was unequivocal.
Yes, the CIA was involved in the assassination of the president.
Now, some people will not be surprised that they suspected it all.
I mean, when you say, I believe, right, and supposedly he's got access to the documents.
His comment is, I believe, that might be a tell.
He talks about, you know, it was all fake.
Sounds a little bit like a conspiracy theorist, even though Tucker says he's not one.
So, you know, without knowing who this source is and why he's got access to this and how they managed to find him, I'm skeptical about everything anyway.
Doesn't mean that there couldn't be some connection, right?
Again, never say never.
I don't know.
But look, Oswald, you know, there was when you say, well, why would the agency not want papers released?
You know, my mind immediately goes to, well, maybe because there's something related to Oswald's dealings with the Russians, right?
I mean, Oswald lived in St. Pete.
He traveled down at one point down to Mexico to meet with the Russians.
He was desperate to try to prove his worth to the Russians, right?
And that was part of his motivation, part of what he was doing.
So I don't know.
I'm just saying I tend not to be the sort of person that would watch that and go, oh my God, it's true.
My thought is, well, who the fuck is the source?
And so unless the guy is willing to out himself, and at this stage, if, you know, given what Tucker said, hey, everybody's dead.
Fine, come forward.
If you've got information like that, then maybe it's incumbent upon you to come out and talk about it.
And if that's the case and it turns out to be true, then, yeah, fuck.
But, you know, my feeling with him is that it doesn't add up.
What he was before, and then what he was leading up to the assassination of Martin Luther King, and then what he was shortly thereafter, making his way to Europe.
And this kid was a, or this guy, not a kid, but this guy was like a failed petty criminal.
He couldn't even be a petty criminal successfully, right?
He was in and out of prison.
He just, it was nothing going on for him.
And his ability then to turn himself into an apparently more successful individual, right?
Leading up to that, going off the grid, he disappeared for a period of time.
And then he ends up in Europe where he's arrested afterwards.
You know, the guy was never on a plane.
Now he's flying to Europe, right?
He never had any money to speak of.
He's buying a car and cash.
I mean, there's things that seem very odd, and not to mention just the general atmosphere, mood, context of the time.
And Martin Luther King.
No, I have no idea what organizations might be involved, but I'm more inclined to think that, to me, is something where I think there was a lot more to the story.
I'm not saying, again, I'm not saying that there isn't more to the Kennedy assassination.
I think it'd be great to find out the whole story.
But you compare the two, and for some reason, I just find the King issue more disconcerting.
And that was a highly motivated racist who, you know, decided somehow he was going to engage in this activity.
Look, you know, there was plenty of information about where King was at the time, right?
He was on the news.
I mean, shit, the evening news before the day he was killed showed him standing outside at the Lorraine Motel outside his room on the balcony.
So, you know, he had, if you just look at that and say, okay, well, he had information, he had access, he had an ability to gather that information, just like Oswald did with Kennedy, right?
And, you know, Oswald, you know, again, his connection to the Russians is the Soviets at the time, very interesting.
But, you know, I'm not the sort of person to say absolutely not, right?
That there was some involvement.
I'm just saying I haven't seen the credible sourcing yet.
And that, to me, with what Tucker did, is, you know, you can't say I've got a credible source.
It'd be like if I wrote an Intel report.
You know, I told the agency I'm working on something, you know, back in the old days and right down.
I got this great source.
He's got access to this, you know, the foreign ministry of this country.
Yeah, again, and that had happened, you know, you think about it, recent terms, right?
The CIA was, or OSS was disbanded at the end of World War II, right?
So, you know, there was precedent for it.
It's not unusual that there's that talk in Washington on occasion.
I mean, shit, after the fall of the Soviet Union, there were very credible people in Washington, D.C. talking about getting rid of the CIA because we've got a peace dividend now.
We don't have to worry about the Soviet Union anymore.
Do we really need this?
And these were credible people inside of the politics and the government.
So that cycle seems to, every now and then there's this regularity of like the agency, let's put it up on a pedestal and fire a rocket at it.
There is nothing benign about the way this world works.
And we'd love to think it's a community of nations, but it's not.
So if we want to fly blind without any insight into what countries that are hostile to our interests, and there are a number of them, are doing, then I guess, yeah, you could get rid of the agency.
The agency's primary function is information, is intelligence.
And you gather that intelligence to understand the plans and intentions of others, whether it's the Russians or North Koreans, the Iranians, Chinese, whatever.
And they are incredibly aggressive at doing it.
So we could be very self-righteous and pat ourselves on the back and say, hey, fuck it, let's disband the CIA.
Why do we need it?
It doesn't sound like it's a very good activity.
And I think we'd feel better about ourselves if we did.
Nobody else is going to do that.
It's not like this.
Again, the Chinese aren't going to say, oh, you're right.
Obama had an agreement with Xi back in the day to cease and desist on the shenanigans, economic espionage and cyber shenanigans.
And of course they didn't.
In fact, they're more aggressive now and in a more of a sophisticated manner than they were even a few years ago.
So I guess it comes down to protecting our own national security interests.
And if people don't give a shit about that, then fine, have an open discussion about it.
But I guarantee you, we'll get hosed nine ways to Sunday if we do that.
Because you've got to have insight.
It's how you develop your longer-term strategies.
It's how you inform the administration, whichever administration, as to where the next threats are coming from.
Hopefully you're anticipating those threats and you're not reacting.
So, yeah, but again, it's that sort of thing.
Look, obviously I've got a particular point of view.
People expect that.
But I'm just here to tell you, it's not that sort of world where we can say, let's shut it down and I'll bet things will work out fine.
There's a lot of actors out there who'd like to fuck us over.
So the answer is, yeah, there's nothing new under the sun when it comes to gathering information.
It's not like, you know, yes, technology changes at how you can, you know, signals, intercept, and all the things that you can do in cyberspace.
But ultimately, what are they looking to do?
What's the Chinese intel apparatus looking to do?
Well, they're looking to provide any information to the Chinese regime that will allow them to get to and firmly sit atop the food chain, the global ladder of success.
And at the same time, they're looking to, as part of that, they're looking to hoover up this information that will help their companies succeed in a shorter fashion, bypass all that heavy cost of research and development and just go straight to the product or whatever it may be.
They're looking to, look, they dominate, I mean, I don't know how many different ways we can go into this.
They dominate the world's global supply of rare earth minerals.
Now, that's not the same as, you know, most people have no, I mean, rare earth minerals are not like cobalt or lithium or copper or whatever sits in your air.
Yeah, I'm not smart enough to tell you, but I know that there's a list of rare earth minerals that are almost unpronounceable as far as I'm concerned.
But they are, you know, there's only a certain quantity.
And if you look at where those exist, right, vast majority exists in China.
And they're mining actively.
They're mining all of that because, again, these particular minerals are used in a variety of products that are critical both to security purposes and defense purposes and also just success.
But that's separate from people sometimes talk about like, well, we want to go electric.
We want to build more batteries.
And the minerals that are used in batteries are not the same thing.
We're not talking about rare earth minerals there.
We're talking about nickel and other things there.
But anyway, the point being is that whether it's the Chinese or whether it's the Russians, whether it's the Iranians, whether it's North Koreans, or look south of our border, Latin America has gone through a sea change recently.
And Lula, being back in Brazil, is just one example of the number of governments who have gone from right or right-ish to left or Social Democrat.
And so they may not have our best interest at heart either.
And so anyway, I'm not a buyer of the idea that we can be altruistic and just shut down our efforts to keep ourselves as informed as possible about where the next threat comes from.
We have to be able to do that.
And so when people say, well, we can't criticize China for doing this because we do it too.
But when you talk about intelligence operations, I mean, again, just you look at that.
Huawei.
I mean, we've talked about Huawei before.
And there was a case towards the end of this past year also, again, where we've picked up two Chinese Intel agents who were busy trying to bribe what they thought was an asset who could give them information about the government's position, prosecution of Huawei.
It turns out it was an informant working for the FBI, thank goodness.
But, you know, they were just, they were, these guys simply working to find assets who could tell them what is the U.S. government, what's the DOJ doing to prosecute Huawei.
I mean, that's, again, now, do you think we can operate in China in the same way?
Well, no.
It's a much more restrictive environment.
So we have to be more clever, more creative in the way that we gather information about China's intel and plans and intentions than they do.
Isn't there also a difference in the way they've infiltrated the universities and the education system in the United States versus what we have over there?
The university system here is a really good trolling ground for them.
And it's been that way for decades.
And look, this case that I mentioned where they just sentenced this fellow we extradited.
He was using the university system, going out and finding both private sector employees and also people in academics who were engaged in business related to aviation or whatever to entice them.
And again, it tends to follow a pattern, right?
If you're a Chinese American or a Taiwanese American and you're approached by someone who spends time buttering you up and telling you how smart you are and we sure could use you to come over to China to give a presentation, you might want to think about that.
There's a reason for it.
And yet they're very good at what they do.
Look, this guy, Zhu, when he would take somebody over or he would have somebody come over to give a presentation, the Ministry of State Security under the guise of academics or whatever, would take these people out to dinner.
Meanwhile, they'd bang up his hotel room, copy his laptop, do everything that you would imagine they would do.
That's what they do.
And again, I don't, I know people are going to disagree with this and they're always going to argue about it.
But I don't, and maybe that's because I'm simple.
I never viewed there as a moral equivalency between their operations and our operations.
We have firewalls.
We have limits.
We have things that we can't do.
And they don't.
If it works, it works.
And if they think it's got potential to work as an operation, then they'll do it.
Well, one of the things that a lot of people get scared of when it comes to overstepping boundaries is some of the shit that we hear with the FBI, like the governor of Michigan thing.
I mean, I think the way that you avoid problems typically is by having your frontline managers being very experienced in asking questions and stress testing every potential operation and activity or investigation.
And I can't speak to that one because I wasn't in the Bureau and don't know.
But I do know that if you don't have management at pretty much every level of the organization, whatever organization it is, that stress tests these things and says, okay, why do you think this?
Why is that important?
Who told you this?
What is the purpose?
Then, yeah, it's got the potential to spin out of control.
And part of it then becomes, okay, you've got some smart prosecuting attorney out there and thinks, hey, this is going to be great, right?
This is a high profile.
Look at that.
And so then they run with it.
And every investigation needs to be built on a very sound foundation.
If you start an investigation with an idea like, I bet these guys might be interested in doing it.
You've got to have evidence at the very bottom.
Otherwise, it's just sitting on this pile of sand.
So I think that's sometimes where these things go awry because there's such a desire to develop that opportunity or that case that people forget to say, well, how did this even get started?
What was the first piece of evidence or what was the first thread?
It's whether it's that sort of thing or it's going back to Sam Bankman-Freed.
If somebody early on had just said, let's go back and do due diligence from the ground up.
Look, you know, for all your information and security needs, Portman Square Group.
That's pretty good.
We have people that do nothing but fraud investigations and due diligence.
And I will say, maybe once or twice, but over years now, going on a couple of decades, there have never done a major fraud investigation where the due diligence on that entity or people or opportunity was done properly at the beginning.
It just doesn't happen.
If you do the due diligence properly at the beginning, and then occasionally you revisit that, because people change and you're always going back and looking at the current status of events and the company's structure and abilities and is what they say they do what they do.
If you do that due diligence at the outset, you don't end up with a Bernie Madolph or a Sam Bankman Freed.
But all these frauds at this level, particularly those, it's driven by, I don't want to necessarily say greed, but the fear of missing the boat.
So it gets to a certain point, a little momentum, and nobody asks the questions.
Nobody goes back and says, well, wait a minute, let's go back to the beginning.
Why is this successful?
Who is this person?
What does this company do?
Are all they doing is just wash trades?
What are they doing?
How is this success built at the very beginning?
But people don't do that because they get excited.
And again, there's this fear that I'm going to miss the boat.
And so the next thing you know, you've got Shaq and all these other people out there promoting it.
And then people say, well, if they're promoting it, it's good.
But yeah, look, how would one even like once, okay, let's say once that ball is rolling, you got all these investors, you got all this money rolling in, and here's a major point here.
They were the number two contributor to the Democratic Party, which is an enormous amount of money.
And there was this one conspiracy theory.
What was it on Michael Savage's webpage?
There was this one conspiracy theory that the United States government donates money to Ukraine.
Ukraine buys stake in FTX.
FTX donates money to the Democratic Party.
And that there's this direct chain.
Now, he removed that, right?
And it's a conspiracy theory, unsubstantiated conspiracy theory.
But when you've got that kind of money moving around, like billions went to Almeida Research Group and they don't understand.
And he was saying, I have no knowledge of this.
And you got money that's just flying all over the place and billions are missing.
Where is it going?
And how would one even step in and sort of try to get an assessment of that?
And in doing so, would you fuck up the whole thing?
And would all those people lose out on billions of dollars of legitimate money that they've invested?
Well, if it's built on sand, they're going to lose anyway at some point.
So it's always better to expose and create transparency, I would argue, when you're talking about something like this.
A couple of things.
First of all, if a company that you're looking at investing in suddenly names an arena, gets a corporate jet, buys a yacht, has associated real estate offshore, whatever it is, you might want to look at this thing.
Now, how do you do that?
I don't want to oversimplify it because a lot of folks in my industry, in the information and security industry, will try to make things sound very complicated.
It's not.
You ask questions, right?
You start by saying, I want to know who these people are, right?
You start investigating the people, the company structure.
You start looking at how do these companies relate to each other?
I mean, what do the trades look like?
What are they holding?
What are the assets that they're holding?
In what names?
What are the entities?
What associated entities are there?
What are their activities?
It wouldn't have taken much to figure out that Sam Bankman-Fried was basically just banging colleagues and doing whatever drugs they were doing.
You got to keep awake, I guess, if you're doing that much banging.
So it's the due diligence part.
Again, I don't want to oversimplify this, but I think I am because it's the easiest thing you can do to avoid getting wrapped up into a fraud or investing in something that goes south.
A lot of this was saying his donations were to help get influence and regulations and anything that was going to be happening with Congress and crypto because it's obviously on its way.
He's looking for plans and intentions of Capitol Hill, basically.
I mean, from an Intel perspective, he's looking to see where are they going to go with this so that I can either somehow block that effort or create an effort that's more advantageous to him.
And it seems like it was effective, at least in its intention, because Maxine Waters is like, you know, well, he doesn't really want to come in and testify.
You just, I mean, you compile information and maybe one or two pieces of it, like, okay, you look at the guy and go, this guy doesn't look like a rocket scientist.
And, you know, his lifestyle, you look at lifestyle issues.
Maybe they're bizarre.
But you compile as much information about the entire apparatus as possible.
And I would argue that anybody in their right mind, if they had taken the time to do significant due diligence, would have stepped back and said, oh, no.
not doing this guy.
I don't care how many celebrities he's got put in there.
And he was going after celebrities for a reason, just like you name an arena because it gives you fucking credibility.
If I really was desperate and I said, I really want my book to become a bestseller, well, one of the things I could do is I could set up a bunch of fake accounts on Amazon or wherever.
And then I could put money into those, all those different accounts.
Which, again, I would argue is one of the reasons why SBF was putting money into politics.
If you can get ahead of the game.
I'll tell you as an example.
There's a reason why I'm telling the story.
Early days of Iraq, I'm talking like 2003, 2004, 2005.
My company had a lot of people there because we were supporting security operations for a lot of the infrastructure companies.
And so they're out there trying to rebuild parts of the country.
They're doing things.
Well, they've got to have security and they've got to have people handling a variety of problems for them.
So we had gotten out there very early.
We were out there in early 2003 at the very beginning.
And it didn't take long.
At first, there were several months where it was relatively peaceful.
Shit started to hit the fan out there in about September of 2003, right?
Really started going south.
And then it started getting violent.
2004, 2005, the security business in Iraq just ballooned.
Suddenly, you couldn't swing at that cat without hitting another security company.
They just popped up out of nowhere.
You'd be out there and say, who are you guys with?
And they'd say some company you'd never heard of, and just put together because people saw opportunity.
I'm going to get some government contracts.
I'm going to work for these companies.
I'm going to do this.
And they were pulling people who had no business being out in a hostile environment and providing security.
So then they started having problems.
There were all sorts of issues.
Well, we started thinking, okay, this has got to get regulated.
State Department and Pentagon, they're going to come in and they're going to say, no, we've got to regulate the private security industry that's operating out here.
We know we need it, but it's just unregulated.
So we're going to do it.
So as part of that, once we realized that was going to happen, we got together with some of the more reputable security firms that were operating out there and said, let's form an association so that we can get ahead of the curve.
And we can help define what the regulations are for these security companies that are out there operating.
It's in our best interest.
And I would argue it's no different than what SBF was doing, kind of spreading the cash around so that he could understand where the regulations were going to come from and he could get ahead of the curve.
So, hey, from an Intel perspective, bravo, that's the right intuition.
So I think he's, you know, it's it's the amazing thing is, is if you've been involved in fraud investigations for as long as we have, there was no surprise at the point where it happened.
Now, you know, it would have been, I guess, I'm probably the wrong person to talk about this because I've never been a real believer in crypto, right?
In part because it's, as you can see from the fucking cigar lighter, I'm a fairly simple person, right?
So the likelihood that I'm going to understand crypto like Jamie does is even Jamie barely understands it.
But it's the allure of it is, is decentralized currency.
So you don't have to rely on the Federal Reserve and interest rates getting jacked up and all this stuff that people think fucks with fiat currency.
They say, well, if we have decentralized currency and then we allow it to flourish and you give the people power to trade and invest and then you get to this point.
But what they were dealing with, this is where it gets really weird, right?
They were dealing with not just crypto, but also with tokens.
Now, what are the fuck, that's where it all went south, right?
and the next thing you know you're in a hole you can't get out of is the allure that the people that got in early go ahead go ahead put it up Ad blocker popped up.
Oh, is the allure that the people that did get in early and did invest and then pull their money out, they did make money.
So some people made enormous profits.
And there was a financial institute.
I'll say, Binance is bleeding assets, $12 billion gone in less than 60 days.
Well, duh, buddy.
I don't know why he didn't see this coming.
While he tanks FTX and he doesn't realize that people are going to look at the whole industry and go, holy shit, this is all nuts.
The outflow of cash from Binance is worse than the CEO Chang Peng Zhao indicated last month, and it's become considerably more severe since then.
A Forbes analyst analysis rather shows Binance, the world's largest cryptocurrency exchange, is struggling to hold on to assets.
In the wake of the collapse of rival FTX, investors have been pulling their crypto in recent weeks.
And despite the assurance from CEO Shang Peng Zhao that the situation has stabilized, outflows are accelerating.
Customers withdrew a net $360 million on Friday, according to it, rightfully so.
According to data from crypto data firm DPhil.
Imagine being a crypto data firm.
Jesus Christ.
December 13th, Nansen, a separate crypto data firm, broke the news that Binance had lost 3 billion of assets over the previous week, representing 4% of the firm's total at the time, which is pretty wild.
Forbes' investigation revealed that, in fact, Binance lost 15% of its assets since Twitter posting by Zhao, widely known as CZ, on the same day he downplayed the Nansen report withdrawals.
Still nearly a quarter of Binance assets left the exchange in less than two months.
Forbes reached out to Binance seeking comments for this story, but did not receive a response by publication time.
And you have to think about the value, too, in terms of what is actual value, right?
Because Forbes also, and they're not the only ones, but there's been some study about what's the level of trade going on in that business that is, again, going back to the same phrase, wash trades.
So basically, just meaningless trades, right?
The whole purpose of doing the wash trades is to up the volume of trading, right?
Which your hope is that will generate an increase in value, right?
So, you know, a lot of what SBF was doing, as an example, was just selling low and selling and then buying or buying and then selling at a little bit of a higher price.
And if you think about, I mean, if Forbes is anywhere near correct and some of the other estimates are anywhere near correct, and 50% of all the activity in crypto trade is basically just that, right?
Again, buyer and seller on the same, you know, or on both sides of the transaction.
That's what they're saying.
And again, what do I know?
I'm the wrong person talking about this.
I'm talking about it from the perspective of someone who's been involved in fraud investigations for a long time.
And I guess I go back to the same story, which is, God, just, you know, a little bit of due diligence can save people a lot of heartache and loss.
And we see that no matter how big, Fortune 50 companies, you know, large investment firms, large banking institutions, right?
Sometimes they just don't do it.
They don't do the due diligence because, you know, hey, look, 20 years ago I worked with this guy.
He was at wherever some other institution.
He's a great guy.
Let's just, you know, for whatever reason, due diligence costs almost, in the scheme of things, compared to a fraud investigation, costs almost nothing.
And so, and everybody can do it.
It's not just like, you know, you have to go out to a company.
You don't have to be a big firm or a consulting firm, whatever, to do it.
People can do their own due diligence because there's so much information online nowadays.
But at some point, you also want to dig a little bit deeper.
You probably want to go out and actually talk to people, find out what their experience is.
We've seen deals overseas where people have invested in large companies and have just gotten massive holes shot in their books because they failed to just do the simple things.
Go out there and actually investigate the business and see whether the books they're seeing are the actual books.
So it's, you know, I can't say it often enough.
You know, two things people can do to protect their businesses.
One is do proper due diligence ahead of a key hire, an investment, any sort of venture.
And then the other is buy a cross-cut shredder and don't put information in the bins and let companies like mine pick it up.
Well, I think they missed the boat in a way, right?
Decentralized is not the same as unregulated, right?
And I think the reluctance, anytime you talked about regulation over the past couple of years, people would just like, whether they were libertarians or crypto enthusiasts or whatever, go, oh, no.
But there's certain reasons to have some regulation, right?
And this is a good example of how you can prevent, you know, not all the time.
Some people, you know, occasionally there's going to be someone who's actually really sophisticated and smart, and they're going to sneak through.
But some regulation, you know, is, you know, by definition is not a bad thing, right?
Just by saying the word, it doesn't mean that you're saying, you know, I want to turn it over to the government, leave the government in charge of it all.
No.
But you're looking to try to create an environment that protects investors.
And he's an example of someone who was very well motivated to do what he was doing, was sufficiently experienced and credible enough that, again, he got through because the same thing that we talked about, just a failure to do due diligence.
Yeah, less so, because they would get drowned out by the no regulation, bullshit, you don't understand crypto.
People that were calling bullshit on SBF, I think, were doing it in part just because of appearance, right?
And sort of lack of understanding.
You know, the lack of information, the lack of transparency should be another indicator, just like buying a corporate jet or, you know, I'd love to name an arena after Portman Square Group.
But I mean, if you think about the fact that they were that profitable inside of three years, if they really did start in 2019, by 2022, the fucking end of the year, the House of Cards had already fallen down.
I had a conversation with the governor of Texas about him, with Greg Abbott, where he was explaining to me what George Soros does.
And it's fucking terrifying that he donates money to a very progressive, very leftist, whether it's a DA or whatever politician, and then funds someone who's even further left than them to go against them and just keeps moving it along.
So he's playing like a global game and that he enjoys doing it.
Why it matters, Good Information Inc., that's the name of the company, aims to fund and scale businesses that cut through echo chambers with fact-based information.
As a part of its mission, it plans to invest in local news companies.
I mean, you would think that if you had that much money, you're 92 years old, you just want to go fly fishing and sit on the deck and drink coffee and talk to your grandchildren and just enjoy your life.
And I think I don't know that it's going to change anything out of the way from going with this, but I think there was an awareness over the past couple of years, maybe because of the pandemic and people sitting at home and reading more news and watching what's happening in their local community because they're not traveling, of the importance of knowing who your city council is or knowing who your state congressman is or whatever,
the head of the PTA, whatever it might be, and being aware of the importance of that because we all, again, we were so focused and people almost, you know, okay, fine, maybe I'll go out and vote for a U.S. Congressman or a senator, but I'm not going to take the time to go out for local elections.
And honestly, God, you know, if you want to bitch and moan, then, you know, your obligation on the other side of that is you got to take part.
Well, I don't think people realize the implications that it had on their actual lives, what politicians, what rules they could and couldn't enact until the pandemic, until they shut down businesses, shut down restaurants, mandated certain things, mandated vaccines for children in schools.
When you saw politicians doing things like that, that's when people started freaking out.
Like, Jesus, I didn't know you guys had that kind of fucking power.
But at least our kids could, you know, they could go outside and they could go up in the foothills and they could mountain bike.
So we were fortunate in that regard, but it was just a it was a shit show.
We finally put the two youngest into private school.
We moved him out of the public schools because it just wasn't happening, right?
And so we put him in a local Catholic school.
My wife is Catholic.
I'm not.
And so we put him in there.
And it was helpful in the sense that they were open, right?
But both of them, by the time they got in there, right, they had no grounding in Catholic Church or Mass.
And they did a regular Mass every Tuesday.
And I don't know if I told this story or not, but the middle boy, Sluggo, who's incredibly funny, but he would go into Mass and they were standing and they were sitting and they were standing and they were sitting.
It goes on for an hour, right?
And they have this priest who's a great guy, but it would just, he just gave him a huge thing.
He's banging on.
Holy shit.
And so anyway, one day, one day, he legitimately, I think it was every Tuesday was the Mass.
He legitimately just went over, right?
His legs locked up.
He passed out, right?
Boom.
So next thing you know, they're calling us.
They get him away.
He'd take him to the nurse's office and call us and say, well, you got to come pick him up because he's fainted.
I started looking early because I just had this feeling.
I was like, I don't like where this is going.
These motherfuckers said two weeks to flatten the curve.
And it just seems like they're enjoying putting the lockdown on people.
And once people have power over telling people what they can and can't do, and then they also, if they choose to turn it around and open things up, now they're responsible for whatever decisions they make.
So they're going to hedge their bets and they're going to be cautious, even if it greatly financially hurts the people that they're ruling and governing.
It means you've got to put your head above the wall, make a decision.
And now you're a target if you made the wrong decision, which is why a lot of shit never ever gets done because nobody wants to take the risk of making a decision one way or the other.
Like there's a lot of people that thought this was a conspiracy to crush America.
And I'm like, it's just natural human nature.
In the beginning, it was a normal inclination to shut things down.
Everybody felt that was the right thing to do, flatten the curve and all that jazz and stop the spread.
Everybody was freaked out because it was scary because it was a new thing.
And so it made sense.
But then once it stopped making sense and we got more data on it, like I have a friend, a good friend who's a doctor, and his initial concern was seriously cautious.
And then as he started looking at the data, he goes, my understanding of this is it's about twice as bad as the flu.
He goes, this reaction that we're having, the way we're treating this is absolutely wrong.
And he did it like sort of in about face with confronted with new information.
It was a little bit of a cult following as to how righteous can I be?
I'm going to be the most righteous.
I'm going to follow it to a T. Rather than saying, look, I'm going to look at, you know, it's science theoretically is you stress test everything, right?
You question everything and you always look for alternative answers and theories and you test them, right?
That's what you're supposed to do.
And I think it became one of those things where much like when you question, okay, what are we doing in Ukraine?
What's the end game?
Suddenly it's, ah, you're a fucking Russian puppet.
Well, no, I'm just asking you, you know, what's the end game?
But we're moving into a world where, yeah, it's strange.
You can't ask the obvious questions, right?
Again, it's like with SBF.
You ask a question, hey, you know, why are you investing?
You know, you obviously don't understand crypto.
Or, you know, Tom Brady did, so I'm doing it.
It's just, it's a strange environment that we live in.
It makes it more difficult, I think, now for people to, at a time when information's at your fingertips, it makes it more difficult for people to ask logical questions, right?
Because they're afraid of getting kicked in the ass by someone who views you as a threat to their particular beliefs.
We had an interesting debate in Idaho, and it worked out.
We were in a good position.
Like I said, I think we were very fortunate to be out there and go through the whole process at that point.
But I don't know.
I have a feeling that we're not, you know, people are already talking about, well, what's the next pandemic and what's that going to look like?
And I don't know that we are very good as a society of learning lessons.
So the next pandemic, and there'll be another one, right?
I mean, it's not.
There always have been.
And so wherever that one comes from, I don't know that we're going to look back and think, okay, it's like with Afghanistan, right?
We would, if I can spend all that time chasing the Soviets out of Afghanistan, we knew what they went through.
We saw the papers from the Kremlin.
We knew what the Soviet leadership had been trying to do and how difficult it had been and all those various areas, right?
And what do you do?
Shortly thereafter, we're in there for 20 years, going through the same problems.
So I don't know that we're going to, it's a weird example, but I don't know that we're going to next pandemic look and say, okay, let's review again how we reacted to the COVID.
And so we're doing what a lot of people are doing.
We're trying to say, okay, how about three days in, two days out?
But I know major companies, Fortune 100, Fortune 50 companies that are having a hard time, you know, getting pushback when they say, how about three days in and two days home?
Employees are saying, no, two days in and three days home.
It's really wild because this is a completely new thing.
I mean, I get their perspective that they don't want to commute and they don't want to deal with all the office bullshit and you want to be able to work with your pajamas on.
Well, you'd see some guys that could knock back four or five drinks in the course of the train trip.
And then they'd walk out, get their car and drive home.
Really?
I was always amazed that New Canaan Police just didn't have a permanent setup out there outside the train station.
But it was, you know, it was nice and we got a lot of business done there.
And anyway, so, but the point being is it was three hours every day.
So we moved to Idaho, and I cut my commute down to about five minutes at best, right?
Even when there's traffic.
And that's a quality of life.
So I get it when I hear it from folks that workforce.
That makes sense, but there has to be a balance because if you go too far one way, you're not making the revenue to pay their salaries and they're out of a job.
But we didn't during that whole pandemic, but we didn't let anybody off, right?
I mean, I could have made money if I'd laid people off, but I don't think that's the right, it's not like I'm running a commune or anything, but I don't think that's the right way to live, right?
So we just kept everybody on and just dealt with the fact that there was nothing going down to the bottom line.
Fine.
What do I care?
At the end of the day, these people are feeding their families and yada, yada, yada.
We kept everybody on and we were fortunate in that regard.
But I think everybody's trying to assess.
We're a small business, but even the biggest companies that we deal with, some of the largest in the world, they're spending an incredible amount of time trying to sort this out, trying to figure out how do we motivate this new mindset within the workforce.
And it's a generational thing, right?
Because the older personnel, like I'm back in the office.
And for the most part, it's not completely true, but for the most part, it's the younger staff.
There's a lot of younger people that have been sort of given this philosophy and this mindset that you're entitled to a certain amount of compensation.
You're entitled to work.
You're entitled to benefit.
You're entitled to all this.
It's not necessarily that you're providing a service for this company and this company benefits from having you in there like you're entitled to things without any consideration whatsoever as to what how this affects the bottom line of this company that you work for.
They're not thinking long term or in terms of a group.
They're thinking of themselves.
And people have been sort of programmed to think that way now, right?
But I think also one thing I've realized recently, maybe because it's this weird world that we came out of the pandemic and this new idea amongst the workforce to some degree, is we need to be more transparent about the business, right?
They can't be expected to understand the strains and stresses of running a business if they don't understand some of the basics, right?
So sharing sort of top line financials, explaining, you know, look, this is what we need to break even every month, right?
This is what we're making.
Here, look at this.
It's up and down, you know?
And so, you know, we're not like this cash gal that every time you turn around and ask for a pay rise, we're going to be able to give it to you.
You know, maybe we find other ways of doing it.
We, you know, we came up with, I mean, I stole an idea from a company that we work for as a client, or they're a client, and they do a mandatory rest and recovery break, right?
Like a week off, in addition to all the other time off.
They say, you've got to put your phones away.
We're not going to contact you.
You get this extra week.
And you know what?
And so we've implemented that in a way to try to find other, when we don't have the cash at the bottom line, to keep people incentivized, right?
But you're constantly looking for those things.
And then sometimes it's a little discouraging because you don't get the feeling that anybody, not anybody, but some folks don't appreciate it.
Yeah, I don't, I mean, again, we'll probably end up doing like, okay, you can take, oh, fuck, you know, a couple of weeks or whatever.
I mean, again, I'm not buying the idea that you're going to be at home, you know, running the household while your wife, you know, relaxes and recovers and enjoys the baby.
Oh, listen, a couple weeks or even a month, whatever it is, whatever reasonable number sounds right.
But when you get to 18 months paternity leave, if that is really happening, that seems fucking insane.
And it also seems like if someone was like the type of person that likes to game a system, like you just keep knocking up your wife and you just keep getting free money.
In a year and a half, like she's, I mean, that's Irish twins, right?
So federal law is not in tune with this to offer it.
I'm sure they will.
And they're by signing a measure that grants federal employees 12 weeks of paid parental leave.
Look, again, we're doing, what, three months maternity leave.
I'm sure we'll end up settling on something for paternity leave.
I remember our UK employees would get, God, I think it was like eight months, I mean, off.
And you had to hold their job, you know, which was great because our employees were terrific and we wanted to have them back, but you had to hold their position open.
And, you know, it's when you're a small company, that's, you know, that's a stress, right?
This is going to sound stupid, but I forget what triggered it, something you said just a short while ago.
I was thinking about, oh, I know what it was where you talked about your place in life and all that.
And I was thinking, I think one of the things that I've failed on with the kids is, and it's going to sound odd, is church is religion.
And I, you know, I'm not agnostic.
I'm not an atheist by any means.
You know, I think there's something higher up there.
I don't, I don't mean that I failed to take the kids to a certain organized church every Sunday, but we haven't really done that.
I talk about that with my wife.
And, you know, now that our kids are older, it's like every other family.
When you say, come on, kids, we're going to go to church on Sunday.
They're like, seriously?
You know, I got practice or I got to do this or I got to do that.
Or I'm on my Switch or whatever.
But I feel like I may have dropped the ball in giving them a sense of something bigger.
And I don't, again, I don't know whether that's, you know, it doesn't matter whether you're Church of England or Catholic or whatever, Presbyterian.
I'm just thinking, and it's interesting.
And I don't know why I was focused on that.
I've been thinking about that for a while, and I've been looking at my kids and thinking, did I really, did I screw up?
Because I tend to be somewhat not cynical, but my problem with organized religion is that idea that a particular religion has a lock on the truth.
And that's always kind of bothered me.
And I think a lot of religions do a lot of good.
They try.
And I think it's important for people to think about something bigger.
And whatever that thing may be, God bless them, go with whatever.
But I think because I always had this thing necessarily about organized religion that I may have gone too far in the other direction and just got worried about it.
And now as my kids are getting older, I'm thinking, you know, maybe I fucked up and should have given them at least the chance to think about it.
There's a benefit to that kind of structure, and there's a benefit to having like what I would call a moral scaffolding.
And, you know, this sense of a higher purpose, whether or not you believe all of it, there's something to it, and it's always existed in human civilization.
It's always existed in cultures.
It's a way that people keep people together and give people a sense of purpose.
I mean, some of the most disciplined people that I know are very religious.
It's really fascinating, particularly fighters.
Like a lot of the Islamic fighters out of Dagestan, they're some of the most dominant fighters and some of the most religious fighters, so devout, because they don't have the distractions that a lot of the hedonists do.
You know, they're not party, like the guys at Khabib Nerma Gametov's camp or some of the most dominant fighters.
They wear their hair all exactly the same way.
They practice.
All they care about is like family, religion, training.
They don't chase girls.
They don't drink.
They're just training constantly, like insanely dedicated to their craft.
I think for me, part is also just the idea that it, you know, hopefully it drives you to think about some of those issues and some of the bigger picture concerns.
We went to a local, what is it, United Methodist Church the other day on Sunday, just my wife and I because we couldn't get the kids to unass the sofa.
And so we went and they actually, they had a little, the guy, a nice guy, Duane, had a sermon about the Bible and sort of the way that it's viewed and how it's used in various ways in terms of interpretation, right?
But they did say one thing which was, you know, the whole point of the Bible is it's ambiguous, it's diverse, right?
It's a collection of books, essentially, over a long period of time.
And it's not intended to be like a manual, right?
And so that was the first time I'd really heard that about the Bible, where it's not an instruction manual or a how-to manual.
It's more of a way to pursue, in a sense, don't ask, what does it mean?
Just kind of ask, what am I looking for?
And I think that question about what am I looking for, I think for kids, maybe because to your point about community, maybe there's some value there.
And I guess never say never, the kids could always end up being interested in religion for whatever reason down the road.
I just think my own personal concerns of organized religion kind of shut that door when they were early on.
And for some reason lately, I've been thinking about that and thinking, you know, hey, what do I know?
People are like, what the fuck?
He's having an existential crisis on the middle of the show.