Mike Baker dissects Kendrick Lamar and Drake’s rap feud—eight songs, a Toronto shooting, and AI voice cloning (now requiring less than 30 seconds)—while warning of disinformation risks, like watermarking and blockchain solutions failing without public skepticism. He links Hamas’s $250M–$400M Iranian-funded October 7 attacks to undermining the Abraham Accords, noting wealthy leaders exploit civilian casualties for leverage. Skeptical of mail-in ballots and TikTok’s 170M U.S. users as tools for foreign influence (e.g., China’s 92% rare earth magnet dominance), they debate AI-driven military risks, like DARPA’s undefeated autonomous X-62 dogfights, contrasting U.S. resistance to nuclear AI treaties with China and Russia’s push for full automation. Baker’s new PDB podcast (launching May 18) aims to cut through media bias, but both agree tribalism and complacency threaten nuanced truth-seeking. [Automatically generated summary]
Joe Rogan podcast, check it out The Joe Rogan experience Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night, all day Mike Baker, it's very important that I ask you about this What's that?
Tennessee whiskey, a country song, written by Dean Dillon and Linda Hargrove, who was originally recorded by artist David Allen Coe for his album, The Same Name, peaking at number 77 in the Billboard Hot Country singles in 1981. Wow!
George Jones, 1983 version of the song, was included on his album Shine On and reached number two on the Hot Country Singles chart.
Did you hear that Randy Travis is using AI now to make new songs because he was paralyzed by a stroke, but because they could take his voice, which is an iconic voice, Randy Travis has it.
Incredible voice.
But because of AI, they can get recordings of him singing, and he could plug it into AI, and he can still make songs.
Well, that one specifically, I think someone else was, like, it was a conversation between two people, and they both were like, I didn't hear that, and I didn't say that.
unidentified
So they were like, all right, well, what could have happened?
So he must have had a secret recording, and then in that secret recording, he took it and then threw it through AI and had him say a bunch of N-words in there.
Whether it's audio, whether it's video, a combination of both.
And then there's the other side of it, which is trying to stay up with the capabilities of those that are trying to do these identity thefts or whatever you want to call it.
And that's sort of the proactive effort to lock down recordings, right?
And there's some interesting work being done in that space where if you film something, say you go to a campaign rally and you film that campaign rally, there are a handful of companies out there figuring out that you can essentially watermark it.
So, but detection, it's important, but it's not enough anymore.
So where the focus has to be is on ensuring that anything that's being recorded, whether it's a body cam for a police officer, whether it's maybe someone's at a protest, right?
And they're a protester or they're on the other side, whatever.
To be able to film something and then ensure that it's accurate and true going forward, right?
And that's a really important part because you can't, the detection side of it's important, but it can't stay up with the developments of all the folks out there, all the criminal gangs, criminal elements, and whether it's state-sponsored or not that's out there, you know, with this disinformation effort.
There are if you talk about Just what do they call a face swap, right?
So they can take a photo of somebody now they can take a little snippet of somebody talking now and There are over a hundred apps out there readily available to anybody right that can Basically do this FAPES face swap technology and put somebody else in there and the criminal elements are doing it all the time Yeah, so if I'm a fraudster And I send a note, say, to somebody in procurement.
I say, hey, you need to send a check for $100,000 to our vendor, right?
Here's the details.
Well, they might have protocols in place at the company.
He says, okay, well, first, this is a large transaction.
I better call the finance director, right, or whomever.
They've got a way that they can figure out how to spoof all of that, right?
So you could be talking to whom you think is the finance director, but they'll actually, with the face swap technology that's available out there, right?
You think it's the finance director, but they're talking to you and- Completely different person, their voice gets changed, their face gets changed, they look exactly like you, so I could use face swap technology that exists today, and with all the recordings that we have of you from this show, 100%, we could have you saying a bunch of shit that you never really said.
When they're doing all this face swap technology and all this different stuff, What what can be done to try to keep ahead of it to make sure like from a national security perspective like how do you?
Yeah, there's a couple parts to that one Netanyahu all of a sudden has some crazy speech right and says some wild shit and like we're going to war like hey Yeah, is that real well what they I mean again part of it is like this there's a handful of companies out there and They're able to, again, record, and instantly as it does it, it embeds information, right?
It embeds specific time, location, you know, your coordinates.
The real issue with all this stuff, though, is emotional intelligence and social intelligence.
And there's people that are very brilliant people that I know that suck at those other things, and that's held them back in life.
So are you smart?
Are you really smart if your emotional intelligence sucks so hard?
Your ability to read social cues, your ability to form meaningful friendships sucks so hard that you're isolated and nobody likes to be around you, but you have a high IQ. So I'm supposed to think that's good?
And you think about it, and you think about they all grow up, and people talk about this all the time, so it's nothing new, but, you know, kids grow up in the same environment, right?
And then they end up being so uniquely different in ways.
And you realize that when you see your kids grow up and you see traits that, like, there is no fucking way this is getting to you any way other than genetics.
I 100% agree with you, and I know that because Our youngest Muggsy is like what 12 years old now and So he's in seventh grade and he it was in the complete blast zone of woke, right?
Because and and like the oldest one who's you know 16 He kind of had some of it the middle one again didn't care.
He was like, you know fuck you you don't play ball, so I'm not paying attention to you and But the youngest one was in a complete firing, you know fire zone of this this is this wool culture and And you'll never meet a more conservative, sexist kid in your life.
Because he's just like...
He'll come back and he'll tell us some stories from his school, which is a great school, but it's pretty woke.
It's pretty liberal, right?
You got kids walking around as furries.
You got a lot of multicolored hair.
You got all sorts of things going on there.
And he'll come back and tell us stories.
And he's just like, I just don't understand what the hell's happened.
There's like a value, a social value to having anxiety.
There's a social value to what you would call childhood trauma, you know, or social value to like everybody has PTSD from like...
It could be from like high school.
It could be like from minor stuff, but it's looked at as, oh, we have to be...
We have to be considerate of someone's past.
Everybody's got trauma.
That's a part of life.
But the answer is not to overindulge every single aspect of everyone's ideas so that you do let a kid wear a fucking tail and ears and run around the high school and be a freak.
We used to go, all my brothers and I, we knew summer was approaching when my dad would say, okay, there we go.
And we had a home clipper kit, right?
And there was something great about...
That flat top, that crew cut, right?
And so, anyway, he's got his crew cut going on, and I suspect he's the only one in this entire school that's got this, and it's a good look for him, right?
And it also, you know, again, I think there's so much happening in the school in terms of...
The way kids are, what's the word I'm looking for?
Coddled.
I feel proud about Muggsy because he comes walking into school and there's no mistaking.
This is a very unique challenge for these kids to get through this bullshit and come out on the other end.
Understanding that no one's coming to save you, you're responsible for yourself and life, and you gotta get after it.
You gotta actually do something.
If you want a successful, happy life, you have to be engaged in some sort of a pursuit, something that you enjoy, whatever the fuck it is, find it, go for it.
Hard work is important.
The world really does operate on a meritocracy except in corrupt situations.
It's anybody in a position of leadership who's afraid of getting bullied, right?
And so nobody wants to state the obvious.
We went through the whole pandemic with one side screaming, believe the science, right?
And now they're like, well, no, you know, it depends on the context of whether a man and a woman are different.
You're thinking, look, you can, again, do whatever you want to do, but if you're a girl, but you identify as a boy, then you're a girl identifying as a boy, and vice versa, right?
Also, if you want us to trust the science, you've got to make the science trustworthy.
You can't leave the science in the hand of corporations that stand a profit if the science reflects one thing or the other.
You can't do that.
Because they do it.
They've done it forever.
They've been fined for it.
You know they do it.
You know it's standard practice.
You know that they run multiple tests and multiple studies and they'll throw out the ones that don't show any positive results and they finagle the studies to show some Kind of fugazi, positive thing, and then they'll start prescribing it to people.
And they do it for money.
You know they do it for money.
Everybody knows they do it for money.
So shut the fuck up about this science thing until you can sort the science out.
Unless you have a third party, non-biased, where there's not a revolving door between the government organization and the pharmaceutical drug companies, which we know there is.
And we know that they know there is, so we know that they know where the fucking bread is buttered, and they know how to get things through, and then looky-do!
No, we have a disguise unit at the agency, and I'm super proud of them.
Was the benefit of their expertise on numerous occasions, because you might guess, I mean, I'd spent almost all my time with the agency overseas in operations, and there's some places where I don't blend, right?
Because what they did was they went to Hollywood and there's been this liaison for years, years and years, between the agency and Hollywood when it comes to special effects, when it comes to makeup.
And again, and it's horses for courses.
So sometimes you need a light disguise, right?
I'm not giving away any secrets.
This stuff is all out there.
And so, you know, you get a light disguise.
It's for a brief, you know, cover for action.
You know, there's not, you're not going to be engaged in it.
And also, do you understand that the vast majority of people out there, no matter where you are, right, a fourth world country, U.S., wherever, they're not thinking about it, right?
And I've had extended conversations with people in disguise Where, you know, they don't give a fuck.
Look, I've been on the streets of, you know, capital cities around the world where I'm on a motorcycle and, you know, I've got a helmet on.
That's a pretty good disguise.
But you've got to get off that motorcycle at some point and walk the streets or go somewhere, whatever.
And so you've got to be able to do these things quickly, right?
So, again, not giving away any sources or methods, but I will say the disguise unit and Mrs. Mendez there, who they just showed briefly, she ran that operation to a great person and a great part of the agency.
And part of that is you're trying to get a sense of...
If you're trying to get a sense of whether they're lying, you're watching for certain things.
You're watching for their body movement and the way they're behaving and the things that they're saying.
A lot of times they're just...
They're not consistent with what they're saying.
So that's not necessarily watching their movements.
But...
A lot of times, if you're trying to get on side with somebody, right?
So if I'm trying to develop a relationship with the deputy foreign minister of whatever from some country, right, because they've got inside information on their NUC program, then I'll spend a lot of time Thinking about and watching and observing that person, and eventually I'm mirroring that person's activities, right?
So, you know, if you're sitting across from somebody and they lean on the desk, right, and they start talking to you, they move in a little bit closer, well, I'm going to do the same thing.
I'm going to come in.
They don't know it, they don't understand it, but it makes them more comfortable, right?
So if you start mirroring their actions, their activities, That's just one of those things.
My buddy told me that when you see people like leaning against a wall, that we see people in foreign countries leaning against a wall, nine times out of ten they're American.
Like with leaning like one shoulder against a wall.
He said it's a very American thing to do.
Like lean against doorways with one shoulder or lean against a wall with one shoulder.
Well, you know, if you hold your knife here and you hold your fork here, right, and you just keep eating with this hand, you don't switch the fork over to your dominant hand, right?
That's an interesting take, and I mean, like, if you're over in the UK, you see it all the time, right?
Americans are known for enjoying sweet treats for breakfast, a habit that may be seen as strange in other cultures where breakfast is typically a savory meal.
Americans are often seen as being obsessed with their appearance and constantly checking their appearance in mirrors.
It's because we're the shit.
Americans are known for wearing tactical sunglasses.
A style that we've seen as unusual in other countries.
Okay.
Americans are known for saying y'all.
Americans are known for the love of baseball caps, especially when worn backwards.
Americans are in love for the love of saying the U.S. or America when asked if they're from, even though these terms refer to the entire country.
Americans are known for their friendly grins and making eye taunt.
Basically just a leaning against the wall thing that seems odd.
I've seen that a lot here in the States, where people, like, they'll eat, you'll cut, you'll put down, you'll eat, and maybe it's just because I hang around with a lot of posh people, I don't know.
Did you see that I had a guest on the podcast that came with my friend Josh Dubin who works with criminal reform and getting innocent people out of jail?
So we had this guest that came on and then after he was on the show wound up killing somebody?
Cut some dude's head off.
Yes.
And the unfortunate surveillance footage where he tried to wear a blonde wig and walk around.
That's interesting, you know, that video that you just showed, because there's been some talk about the protests on campus, right, and the fact that all these...
All these outside agitators, activists, and then the students, the actual students, the ones that are actually affiliated with the university, most of them are wearing masks, right?
So, yeah, and that's a really good point because now it's made the life of somebody who's working in operations a lot tougher, right?
Because of the ability of...
And it's got to be a country where you're operating where they've got the resources and the technology, but it makes it a shit ton tougher to get away with things, right?
And as does the ability for communications intercepts and tracking of phones and all the other things.
So...
You know, while, you know, it's always the same story, right?
Technology's got an upside and a downside.
But the face recognition, the retinal scanning, it's creating all sorts of problems from an operational perspective overseas.
And here, of course, the problem is, you know, people are talking about civil liberties and, you know, invasion of privacy.
And, you know, so you've got some students out there and they're covered.
And next thing you know, they're identified, right?
Now they're suspended.
And You know I fine you you know you some of them aren't getting to graduate There's one girl I was watching this video with they were they just told her she couldn't graduate she got arrested well You know what you what do they say you play stupid games?
And that's the part, look, again, you know, hey, God bless the actual students who are out there feeling like they're being a part of something.
I get that.
They're young people.
Most of them are gormless, right?
They're just saying, whatever, right?
This is, you know, this is their moment to shine.
So they're excited.
So they don't, and then, you know, most of them couldn't find Gaza on a map of Gaza.
So I think that...
You know, that's one side of it, right?
And I can't, you know, whatever.
But it's the coordination of it all by the various outside groups and the activists and the funding of it, right?
And the potential for that funding and the coordination to tie back to groups like Hamas or Hezbollah, which basically means you're tying back to the Iranian regime, right?
Because that's the only reason those groups exist.
But nobody seems curious about that because a lot of the media wanted to portray this as just like kids being kids.
Oh, look, this is their moment to shine as student activists.
And isn't it wonderful?
And it's their Vietnam protests and bullshit.
Some of it, okay, fine.
So it's layered, right?
So some of that's true.
You got those kids that are just doing that.
There's the incuriosity of the media to say, well, what the hell's behind this, right?
And what groups?
Is it, you know, Students for Justice in Palestine?
Is it, you know, U.S. Campaign for Palestinian Rights, Samidun, right, which has connections back to Hamas?
There's education for whatever, just peace in the Middle East.
There's groups that have been actively engaging in this, and that's why you get the coordination of all of this, right?
But nobody asks, okay, what's behind it?
Ah, just students active.
No, it's not.
It's a coordinated effort.
And then you look at those groups who are always active.
In this realm, right?
And always looking to have organizations disinvest from Israel or to, you know, promote causes that are anti-Israeli, right?
And then you say, okay, well, who's funding it, right?
So you look at these groups and you say, okay, where's the money coming from?
And the money's always coming from the same places, right?
The Tide Center, right, which is part of the Tide's network, which gets significant funding.
No surprise, Soros' Open Society Foundation.
You get Westchester People's Action Coalition.
So you get these groups and you get the legal support.
So all these people, the activists who are getting arrested, they can turn to Palestine Legal, which provides legal support to the activists and the NGOs that are engaged in all this.
Again, they're getting their money from charities.
A lot of times the charities don't know they're putting money into these groups, right?
It goes into the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, right?
And the Rockefeller Brothers Fund provides money to these NGOs, you know, like Justice for Palestine or whatever.
And then...
And Rockefeller Brothers gets funding from Soros Open Society Foundation as well.
That guy seems to be a bit of a problem.
And now his kid is even more of an activist than George is.
What you're talking about, though, is a very important point, that this is not organic.
Exactly.
This is what I was going to get to earlier when I was talking about social media.
How much do you think foreign governments have an influence on certain trends and certain things that people are talking and promoting and pushing and being a part of on social media?
Because I think it's a big factor.
I think it's a big factor with a lot of things, and I think it's a big factor with all the most insane woke shit.
I think they push it as far as they can.
So that the stuff that's not as insane that was insane just a couple of years ago seems less insane now.
It seems more palatable.
And then they just keep moving the goalposts.
I think you can do that through social media with kids.
But then the Russians and the Chinese, they're all taking advantage of this as well, right?
Chinese bots have been out there trolling around and promoting the chaos.
If you were to switch on television in Moscow or in Tehran or in Beijing, you'll get a lot of coverage of these campus protests.
This is ideal for them.
It's exactly what they want.
And it feeds into their larger narrative of trying to discredit democracy and say what a losing system it is, capitalism.
But again, people are incurious, they're busy, they're trying to just do their lives, whatever.
They're not taking the time to sit and think, where am I getting my information from?
What's the validity of this information?
And if they don't do that, then to your earlier point, yeah, we're fucked.
Because it comes down to individual responsibility.
You've got to focus on where your information is coming from.
And, you know, right now...
You know, you could argue, I mean, whether it's the face-swapping techniques, whether it's AI that can mimic, and whether it's for criminal purposes or whether it's for state-sponsored efforts to try to put the knife into the American system or the West.
It's democratized misinformation, right?
It's made it so that everybody can engage in it, not just state sponsors, but everybody, because all those apps are out there, all the abilities out there, and you've got an incurious public, for the most part, that doesn't take the time.
Well, let me ask you this from a perspective of someone who kind of understands all these different influences and all the things that are happening in these universities.
What can be done to sort of like unwind some of this fuckery, if anything at this point?
I mean, are we just going to operate from here on out with this understanding that our kids get indoctrinated to this preposterous, ridiculous way of thinking where they're taught these Marxist, Leninist ideas as if they make any fucking sense and that they've ever worked anywhere and if they don't always lead to totalitarian,
authoritative governments that Take over and enforce all these socialist policies, which is a fucking nightmare that happens in every single regime when they go socialism.
So what can be done to sort of unwind some of this bullshit in colleges and balance it out a little bit?
There's nothing wrong with having ridiculous ideas, as long as those ridiculous ideas can be challenged.
But if you're the only one that gets to talk, and you just indoctrinate these kids, and no one comes along and says, You've never even functioned in the fucking real world.
Like, this shit that you're teaching these kids, unless they go into academia, they're fucked.
Or you're gonna ruin corporations with this ideology, because it doesn't jive with capitalism.
It doesn't jive with, and oh yeah, we're gonna tear capitalism down.
Okay, well then what, you fucking idiots?
Then no one has any incentive to get anything done?
Well, that's great for you, because you've never done anything.
So you think all these people that did things, even if you don't agree with them, even if it's Bill Gates, He still built that fucking company.
That's his.
He did it.
Do you want to be that guy?
Then go do what he did.
If you don't like what he did...
Then, you know, you can talk about it, you can protest about the idea that you should, everyone should have to give all their money away, and there should be no billionaires, and there should be no capitalism, and all the money goes into, and then who's in charge?
And who gets to tell you what you can do and not do?
Who gets to tell you you can't have your money anymore?
Who gets to take your house away because it's too big?
Shut the fuck up!
This is like so short-sighted and so stupid that it's so hard for me to believe that it's being taught in universities.
But, I mean, you look at the universities and think, yeah, university's supposed to be a place where you exchange ideas.
So that's great.
You want to talk about it.
You want to have classes in Marxism or whatever.
That's great.
But you're right.
You need to have that discourse.
You need to be...
Again, I keep reverting back to examples of the real world and from my own experience.
My daughter went to undergrad and grad school, and she kept her mouth shut for most of that time, six years, because she always knew, as she said, there was no upside to her arguing in class.
Yeah, but unless, you know, I do think there's some bounce back on the corporate side with DEI, for example, right?
I think there are a number of companies out there, just as with the sort of the climate.
You know, change.
You know, I've watched oil companies, like, do this complete left turn saying, we're gonna, you know, we're gonna make over half of our revenues from green energy in the future, near future, like a couple of years from now, and you think, like, it's not gonna happen.
But they have to play that game for a while.
And then they come back and go, it's not gonna happen.
So you know what we're doing?
We're investing in all of this shit, including fossil fuels.
So I think whether it's that or whether it's kind of the pushback on DEI from corporations that are saying, you know, maybe it is a grift, right?
Maybe you've got all these DEI grifters out there, and they got it.
It's a cottage industry.
They can make a lot of money off of this bullshit.
Get a lot of government grants and all those things.
But I think there's some pushback.
Universities, I think, are a tougher issue.
Yeah.
I don't think, unless...
Unless parents and kids just say, I'm not going to that bullshit.
I mean, look, have you seen some of these kids at these supposedly elite universities talk?
How the fuck did they get into these universities?
Because they must have passed the application process.
So you want me to talk about the Israeli-Palestinian issue without upsetting somebody?
Yeah.
And she's a brilliant person, but I don't think that's going to happen.
But I will say it is...
Obviously, it's complex, but it's complex in part because it's not absolute, right?
And everybody talks in absolutes when it comes to this, right?
Hamas is a terrorist organization, so fuck them.
But it's a Palestinian problem, or it's the Israeli problem.
You know what?
If you look at their history, right?
There's problems on both sides, right?
And yet, we talk about it like it's black and white, one or the other, right?
And we're never going to...
This problem's never probably going to get solved in our lifetimes anyway, but it is disturbing when you hear some of the Kids, the actual students, I mean, try to explain what this is, right, and what this problem is, and talk to me about the river to the sea, which, again, you can say that phrase, you know, in 10 different circumstances, it's going to mean 10 different things to 10 different people, right?
And that's legitimate.
You have to understand that that's, okay, I get it.
The Israelis view that as, like, you're talking for a destruction, genocide of Israelis, right?
Because that's a destruction of a group, right?
Not a war crime or something, not a crime against humanity.
Genocide is, your intent is to destroy the group, right?
So they'll see that.
Palestinians, some Palestinians, not Hamas.
Hamas has it in their charter.
They know what river to the sea means, right?
It's taking over that entire territory and, you know, fuck Israelis.
But Palestinians can say it and it means something else.
It's a yearning for whatever, freedom, for a homeland.
So there are variances in it.
But that never gets discussed sometimes because people are just screaming at each other like every other fucking subject out there.
They're just there because they think they're supposed to be a good person to be there, and they want to make all their friends think they're a good person.
They're carrying around signs and yelling out these things.
Meanwhile, it is a fascinating time if they allowed debates, because if you could see a pro-Israeli and a pro-Palestinian debate, like a real, legitimate, honest, intellectual debate in discussing all the various issues, like from the beginning of the formation of Israel to back in the history of the land,
And then what's going on today, all the treaties, all the different things that have happened, all the different peace talks, that would be a fascinating opportunity for people to hear both sides of this conflict and try to get a better understanding of it instead of just running out there with signs and camping on the lawn.
Universities and these places of higher education are supposed to be where these difficult conversations get sorted out.
Because you're supposed to have the smartest minds and to bring in the smartest minds from either side.
There's brilliant people that are pro-Israeli and brilliant people that are pro-Palestine.
They're brilliant.
And if you can get them together and have them sort out your details, all the people in the audience can get a better, more informed understanding of how complex this conflict is.
And that is supposed to be what universities are for.
That's what it should be.
It should be a place where people can sit down and learn something about something very difficult, which is international conflict.
These crazy moments in history where we get entwined with military conflicts that are happening all over the world and it's nowhere near you and it's complicated shit, man.
And to just run out there with a sign because these fuckers are organizing this on campus, it messes everything up.
It messes up everybody and to have like only one side's perspective heard messes up everybody.
Well, I think that the students for the most part, again, the actual students who have an affiliation with the universities, look, you know, the pro-Hamas groups, the pro-Palestinian activists, they tend to view the students, I believe, as essentially useful idiots, right?
Window dressing.
And it gives it a sort of a veneer of, as you pointed out before, sort of this organic grassroots movement that's sweeping the nation when in fact there's this underlying infrastructure that's always out there trying to take advantage of opportunities like this in the chaos.
And then aside from that, then you've got this other 30,000-foot problem where you've got the Iranian regime and others who are promoting this and pushing for it.
Look, you know, Hezbollah, Hamas, they've got a lot of money, right?
They have, again, not to disappear out of rabbit hole, but the leaders of Hamas are extremely wealthy, right?
You know, Ishmael Hanyay and Marzouk and Mashal and the other CACs, you know, They have billions of dollars, right?
Because for years, people say, well, how could that be possible?
Well, for years and years now, they have been receiving a great deal of money.
Conservative estimates from Iranian regime, Hamas gets maybe a quarter billion a year, right?
It appears gives them even more than that.
There have been years when they've given about 400 million dollars to Hamas for a variety of reasons, right?
Ostensibly.
And part of that money coming from Qatar is by agreement with Israel, right?
Because part of it is for over the years the idea that you're buying quiet, buying peace, right?
And so, yes.
And so there was a process in place to try to track that money, right, that came in.
Just same with the Palestinian Authority from over in the West Bank.
But that's a lot of money, right?
Not to mention even the money going to UNRWA. Right, and this is sort of the same situation with Ukraine, too, right?
allegedly belonging to 2014 when the fucking coup happened well ukraine has always had problems corruption corruption yeah yeah but I forget what this guy's position was but he was driving around and It's not Russell Brand.
Well, and that's, again, yeah, when you talk about, like, whether we're talking about money that goes to the Palestinian cause and gets filtered through Hamas, and they've been able to carve off billions of dollars for themselves.
They're living big lives in Qatar and Turkey.
But Part of the problem with Ukraine has been, you know, in terms of, well, they've got big issues, right?
One of them has been explaining why it's important to the American people, right?
The administration hasn't really accomplished that Yet, right?
And trying to say, why are we doing this, right?
They should have been doing it from the very start.
He doesn't you know He just wants to hold on to power right here two versions of what's going on I hear the war has already been won by Russia and Ukraine is down to like a minimum amount of soldiers They've lost half a million people rough estimates like no one really knows the real estimates Yeah.
And then I've heard other stories where Ukraine is actually doing much better than people think, and Russia has hemorrhaged people because they're essentially just sending people into the front line.
They're sending prisoners, and they're just using bodies to win this.
Russia's got a three to one manpower advantage in terms of population right what they can what they can do to recruit and put more people on the battlefield and Russia has a no problem with sort of a meat grinder strategy I just throw bodies at it right just and the stats on Fatalities on casualties on both sides are completely bullshit.
There's no transparency really and it's kind of understandable why you don't want to tell the other side how many soldiers you've lost or injured and Zelensky came out a while back and said, you know, we've suffered 31,000, you know, fatalities on the battlefield.
It's higher than that.
And it's higher on the Russian side, right, because of their strategy and the way they just, you know, Putin doesn't really care.
So he throws bodies at it.
The Russians are making headway on the east, right?
And they are making an effort to push through those frontline defenses that Ukraine has up on the eastern side of Ukraine.
And the lack of armaments, the lack of munitions, while Congress and the US couldn't figure out what they wanted to do, that was a decided problem for Ukraine, right?
If that continued, then yeah, Russia will win.
They will push through and they will eventually end up in Kyiv.
And look, Putin's already engaged in shenanigans in Moldova, in Georgia, right?
They're working very hard behind the scenes in Georgia, right, to split Georgia away from the EU, right?
And that's because they're worried that Georgia could eventually, you know, be part of the European Union and They don't want that.
And so they're engaged in all sorts of activity there.
Well, disinformation and political influence campaigns, instilling personnel that are, there's a party there in Georgia, the Georgian Dream Party or something, that's pro-Kremlin.
And they're pushing very hard on a variety of fronts, right?
They're pushing a bill that's sort of like a foreign agent bill, which is a Russian tactic, right, to basically You know, single out anybody who's got foreign influence or foreign involvement.
And that could be NGOs, it could be media, independent media.
And the Russians have used that foreign agent bill very successfully.
So, but my point is that...
It depends on your thought process.
If you think that, okay, Putin takes Ukraine, who gives a fuck, right?
That's all.
That's all that's going to happen.
He's not going to try to reconstitute the former Soviet Union in some fashion by going after a couple other states, right?
He wants a buffer zone with the West, which is what the Soviet Union was, right?
He wants to rebuild that in some fashion.
Not the same, right, but in some fashion.
So, my experiences and other people's are different, so that's why you end up with differing opinions, and, you know, God bless.
But, you know, mine is that he's not gonna stop there.
So, my belief is you gotta hurt him enough, get him to the table, and call it good.
And that good may look a lot like the way things were, you know, in 2022 when they started the invasion.
And that's gonna be unsatisfying to a lot of people, but at least you end the fucking conflict, right?
And fine.
But I think that's where this goes.
The idea that, you know, the only outright winner will be Putin if we back off and say, we're not going to provide you with certain armaments, certain weapons to allow you to inflict enough pain to stop this.
And this is an incredibly complex and dynamic environment because the U.S. The White House, the Biden administration, is pushing very hard on Zelensky to not attack any targets inside of Russia, right?
The Ukrainian military is like, well, fuck it.
Why aren't we attacking Russian oil refineries, right?
And energy infrastructure, like the Russians are doing inside Ukraine.
That's been a tactic of the Russian military for quite some time now, right?
Because it impacts morale of the population, it demoralizes people.
So the Ukrainian military is saying, do that.
The White House is saying, no, we don't want to escalate, so don't do that, right?
Now, the other side of that coin is, if you fuck over the Russian energy infrastructure, what does that do to oil prices around the world, and what does it do to gas prices at the pump when you're in an election year?
I don't want to be a conspiracy theorist.
But then you've got the Europeans, and, you know, Macron is over there saying, well, you know, if Kiev asks, I can see putting French troops on the ground in Ukraine.
This person, this woman that he's married to, even, even, even, even if it's a man, the real problem is they had a relationship when McCrone was 15 and she was 39. That, by itself, is wild.
I think that there's definitely a lot of corruption over there.
And to deny that, I'm sure you saw that one thing where Candace Owen was going back and forth with the New York Times when they were saying, what evidence do you have of Ukraine being corrupt?
She's like, oh, you mean your fucking newspaper, stupid?
She said these different articles about the rampant corruption in Ukraine.
But anywhere you've got vast sums of money coming in for a variety of reasons, which is, again, I'm always astounded when people say, oh, there's no way that the three top leaders of Hamas are worth $11 billion collectively.
I thought, okay, well, even if...
Take a tenth of that.
And you think about these guys running Hamas, which supposedly, I mean, they've been governing since, what, 2007, 2006, supposedly for the benefit of the Palestinian people.
And they're sitting on billions of dollars, and you think, and so that's why, you know, fuck Hamas.
And I understand the Israeli perspective, which is, we can't allow them to retain control.
I get that, right?
I understand that operational perspective, right?
The problem is...
That, you know, you're not going to win the narrative.
You're not going to win what's happening on the international stage.
And sometimes, you know, sometimes the Israeli government can act like they don't understand how public relations plays out, right?
Right.
Like, look at the past couple of days, what's happened.
Hamas wasn't going to accept a ceasefire.
Hamas has turned down opportunities for a ceasefire, right?
And then they say, okay, the other day, 48 hours ago, whatever, they said, we're going to walk away from the negotiating table.
Fuck that, right?
Knowing that Israel is ready to do some, you know, limited operations in Rafa.
So, because they're not stupid.
They've got a very good intelligence network, right?
And they've got a lot of...
And so they understand what Israel's about to do, right?
They say, we're walking away from the negotiating table.
Israel says, okay, fine.
Everybody, you know, evacuate Eastern Rafa.
You know, we're going to engage in some targeted strikes against Hamas targets that we've identified.
Hamas turns around shortly thereafter and says, ah, we accept a peace proposal, a ceasefire proposal from Egypt and Qatar, right?
So look at us, we're accepting a ceasefire proposal, and Israel's moving on Rafah, right?
That's a, you know, on one hand, that's a brilliant communication strategy, right?
Now you've won the day on the international stage, and exactly what they knew would happen, just like what they knew would happen after the seven October strikes, they knew What was going to happen?
They knew that civilians were going to die, right?
They understood that.
And again, everybody's got their own opinion.
Minus Hamas doesn't give a shit about dead Palestinians.
In fact, that's their currency.
That's how they work the game.
And so they understood what was going to happen.
Israel was in a bind.
They gotta respond.
They're in an urban environment.
It is fucked up, right?
And too many people have died, right?
I don't necessarily believe the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry in terms of their statistics, and also they don't separate out how many combatants were killed, right?
They're just like, oh, 34,000 people have died.
So people imagine, oh my god, 34,000 civilians.
Well, thousands and thousands of those people are fighters.
They're Hamas fighters, right?
Again, it's horrible.
I'm not saying it's not.
It's awful, right?
And both sides are problematic here.
But what I am saying is Hamas has a much better communications public relations operation.
So they knew what Israel was about to do.
They claim, oh, we accept the ceasefire.
The ceasefire was completely different from what had been presented, you know, by Israel and to Israel, right, just during the past 48 hours.
They say, no, this thing is not what we've been talking about.
We don't accept it.
So now they've moved in on Rafa, and they've lost, yet again, the narrative on the world stage.
So now they're the ones who are causing problems.
Anyway, so it's kind of fucked.
But again, the point is, it's also, when all that money's sloshing around, of course you're going to have people who are benefiting from it.
And in this case, it's people like, you know, Hanye, who can sit in Qatar with all that money, and What are they worried about?
They're worried about losing the revenue stream, right?
They know that if Hamas is destroyed, you think Iran's gonna continue giving them a quarter billion dollars a year, or Qatar's gonna allow them to live this lavish lifestyle and give them money, or they're gonna continue to be able to, you know, extract taxes from money coming in, or from goods coming into Gaza, you know, or put tariffs on things coming in, you know, to the tunnels, the contraband?
No!
So, in part, it's this It never changes, right?
Where there's situations like this, whether it's there, whether it's Ukraine or wherever, yeah, you're gonna get this, right?
You're gonna get this level of corruption.
And so I'm not surprised at all when people are worried about or concerned about what's going on with Ukraine and we give them another $61 billion and how much is that is ending up in pockets.
But I'd argue that that's part of the problem that the government, the US government has faced.
They haven't done their job.
They haven't provided As much transparency as possible and accountability to the American public, and so you lose the support of the American public, who had been just two years ago waving their fucking flags and putting Ukrainian flags on their Twitter sites and all the rest of that bullshit.
Well, they've been trying to put together an Arab states coalition, right, of countries that would then be responsible for a couple of things.
The rebuilding of the infrastructure and also security, right?
Again, no ceasefire, no permanent ceasefire is going to be accepted that allows Hamas to be the governing authority there, right?
So the U.S. has been pushing very hard to have the Palestinian Authority, right, run by Mahmoud Abbas, who's been in charge of the Palestinian Authority for, God, 20 years now.
And he's not popular in Gaza, right?
They were kicked out.
I mean, they were...
Well, there's been a rift with the Palestinian groups, factions, for some time.
You go back to...
When was the PLO? PLO was started in, like, the early 70s, right?
Yasser Arafat, remember him?
Looked a lot like Ringo Starr, and they were never photographed together, so...
I still think there's something there.
I was going to investigate that on the next season of Black Files.
Moving back to the PLO, so back then, part of the rift between the Palestinian Authority and Hamas is Hamas came out of the first intifada in like 80-whatever, 87. But they took exception with Yasser Arafat because he basically denounced violence, right, as a way to attain, you know, the Palestinian objectives and goals and everything.
He was like, okay, and he, you know, remember, he was involved in signing some peace accords in Madrid and Oslo accords and everything.
So Hamas, you know, in their charter basically is like, no, jihad is the way to go.
Violence is the way that we're going to You know, it's liberation, not negotiation.
They have all these sayings in their charter, right, about this.
And so, anyway, so there's, but there have been problems, and eventually, they had an election in, in, what the hell, what year was it, 2006, I think, in Gaza, right, and Fatah, Yasser Arafat's party, the PLO party, Was up and was expected to win.
Didn't win.
Hamas won.
And during the course of the next year, they actually got into a war, right?
Between Hamas and PLO or Palestinian Authority.
Hamas booted them out.
So they govern.
So when you think about Palestine or the Palestinian state or whatever it is, you've actually got two completely separate entities.
You've got Gaza run by Hamas and you've got the West Bank run by Mahmoud Abbas and the Palestinian Authority.
The U.S., Secretary Blanket and others have been pushing this idea that somehow the Palestinian Authority will be the governing body in Gaza.
And, you know, Gazans, look, they don't necessarily, you know, they don't want that.
He's actually less popular.
Mahmoud Abbas is less popular now than he was even before the 7 October attacks.
And Israel is saying, no.
Look, you know, Abbas and the Palestinian Authority, they haven't even denounced the attacks of 7 October, right?
We don't want them.
It's like, in their mind, it's almost like just trading one for the other, right, if they're the governing authority.
So I think when you say what it's going to look like, you know, it's probably going to be...
And Israel said, we don't want to occupy this shit.
They stopped occupying Gaza in 2005, right?
They were like...
You know, done.
Now, they still controlled the border and they controlled the coastline, right?
And the one crossing, there's basically two crossings there.
Karem Shalom crossing with Israel and Gaza.
Then there's a Rafa crossing.
But, you know, they're saying, no, we don't want them governing.
So it could end up looking like some type of UN-Arab states type of coalition that then is there and they're responsible for security of Gaza and they're responsible for the rebuilding effort.
Part of it is tied to the desire to scuttle the Abraham Accords and the potential normalization of relations between Saudis and Israel.
Really worries them, right?
And Ismail Hanyeh, right, came out, head of the political wing of Hamas, came out after the attacks and talked about this and glorified the attacks and also said that, look, this, you know, people, our Arab brothers, our Arab states, Should realize that Israel is not, you know, you will have no peace, basically, with negotiations and with relationships.
So he was clear in the way that he put it that, you know, he was sending a message to the Arab states about this idea of normalizing relations with Israel.
So that was part of it.
Part of the desire was to tank those discussions, which were pretty well underway, right?
And now we're back again, right?
They kind of took them off the table for a while.
But the Saudis and the US have been having some pretty good discussions recently over the normalization of all of this, right?
And I think it's in the Arab states, you know, look, Bahrain and Morocco and others, All understand, too, that long-term stability down the road is going to come from normalization of relationships and some long-term ability to have peace, which is part of the problem.
Look, they don't want—that's why they don't take Palestinian—they're worried about the Palestinian refugees, right?
You say, well, why doesn't Egypt open up the crossing and set up a refugee camp across the way from the Rafah crossing?
Well, in part because they're worried about their own security.
Egypt's been building a big wall.
They've been adding to their wall down along their border with Gaza Strip.
So, you know, look, they formed the PLO. Egypt was in charge of the PLO all those years ago, back in the early 70s, right?
You know, they were essentially the leaders they put in place in the PLO all those years ago were basically just puppets for Egypt, right?
And part of the reason why they were putting those people in place was because they wanted to minimize sort of the radical Islamic extremist actions, right?
And the acts that they took against Israel because they wanted stability.
The families down there, right?
Whether it's Qatar or the Saudis or the Egyptians or whatever...
They're just as worried about radical Islam, right, and the potential for them to lose control and to lose power as are the Israelis and others in a sense, right?
Not necessarily from the physical sense, but they've attacked, you know, Arab families, Arab leaders before.
So it's a complex problem.
I guess what I'm saying is there's a lot of moving parts here, and sometimes it all just gets...
You know, thrown into one simple-minded argument.
It's good or it's bad.
Israel's committing genocide.
You know, Palestinian people are terrible.
No, there's so much fucking more to this.
So, again, you know, I don't know that there's any solution that will be long, long-term committed peace in the region in our lifetime.
But in the short term, I think, you know, the conflict, when it's wrapped up, I don't see how it ends with Hamas still being in control of Gaza.
I think that's a red line for the Israeli government.
Now, maybe Netanyahu doesn't last as the leader of the government, and somebody like Benny Gantz takes over, and they're more inclined to say, now, you know what, just for the sake of some peace right now, you know, let's just call it quits.
Well, that's something that we talked about before, the people protesting on the street for months, hundreds of thousands of people protesting on the streets about Netanyahu expanding power with their courts.
Look, if there's a change in government, fine, they do what they're going to do.
I just think that, you know, from an operational perspective, and this is just operational, I'm not talking about the moral, the ethics of the whole thing, of people dying on this.
I'm just saying from an operational perspective, leaving Hamas in place isn't going to create any even midterm peace.
These guys have been, you know, living abroad for years, right?
They've been living abroad for years.
And in part because, look, Hamas runs a network of businesses and charitable organizations, just like Hezbollah does.
Hezbollah's got a global presence, right?
They're sitting over there in a country that is also one of our key non-NATO allies, right?
So we have our largest Middle East base there, you know, in Qatar.
And, you know, so it's only just recently, and recently is like the past week or so, where the U.S. has broached the idea of saying, look, if Hamas doesn't accept a ceasefire, right, then the Qatari government needs to move these people out.
They need to expel them, right?
And whether the Qatari government would do that or not, because they're playing all sides, right?
The Qatari government does, you know, they've hosted the Taliban, they've hosted ISIS leaders.
I'm just trying to paint the picture that it's more complicated than somebody sitting on a campus at UCLA might imagine.
And to your point, it deserves more debate.
It deserves more intellectual, open conversation.
Not necessarily when you talk about who's right and who's wrong.
How about focus on how do we fucking solve the problem, right?
And the problem is maybe intractable.
If the problem is a two-state solution, then maybe, you know, this thing is just never going to work because, you know, maybe a two-state solution is the best idea, but if one side or the other is not going to accept it and both sides have pushed back against it at various times, Then, you know, what do you got?
But the same thing happens with every major issue, right?
Because, again, if you turn on the news, you get a three-minute piece of news about a major crisis happening, right?
Like the Ukraine conflict or whatever.
So...
And, you know, not everybody wants to sit and listen, you know, to details about Israel and Hamas or Ukraine or, you know, what Iran's doing with their nuclear weapons program or whatever.
But, you know, we tend to have ADHD, right, as a nation, I think.
And so, again, people are busy.
People are just focused on other things.
But it deserves more conversation.
It deserves more detail and not the bullshit that gets thrown out there from one side or the other, right?
Sort of the hard edges.
Or the shit that comes in from outside elements like the Chinese, the Russians, the Iranians who don't have our best interests at heart.
And, you know, so again, we keep going back to the same thing.
If people aren't curious, And they don't take the fucking responsibility upon themselves to understand what it is that they're listening to.
Is it verifiable?
Is it credible?
Whatever.
Get a balance of news.
Don't just sit and get in a silo and listen to shit because you agree with it.
Have a conversation with somebody who disagrees with you.
Well, I think that's why, and I'm blowing smoke up your ass, but that's why I think your show works, right?
It's because you have conversations.
Now you piss people off.
Because I think sometimes people have a hard time putting you in a box, right?
And that makes people uncomfortable.
If they think, you know, okay, I know where he's coming from, and then you have a conversation where you're listening to something completely on the other side, right?
And you're not just saying, well, fuck you, that's wrong.
You're saying, well, why is that, right?
And you're having people explain things.
That can piss people off, right?
Because everybody wants to identify, make a quick judgment and say, move on.
Thinking is fucking complicated, especially when you're dealing with layers upon layers, decades and generations of conflict, like you are in Gaza and Palestine and Israel.
Well, I assume that they've looked at the scenarios and they thought to themselves, we can't have Biden step down and put somebody else at the top of the ticket.
So we've got to clear the ticket entirely, right?
Because we can't run Kamala Harris as the presidential candidate.
And we certainly can't bring in Newsom, a white dude, to run the top of the ticket and keep her in place, right?
That's not an optic they're willing to put up with.
You have to have a perfect storm for Trump to win in terms of the independents, right, and suburban moms, and you have to have enough people come back into the tent, right, to vote for him.
And...
I just, I don't know that I have enough confidence that that's going to happen.
So we end up with President Biden and Harris again, which means we will have President Harris.
He is, but again, I don't know that I'd make bank on polls nowadays.
This is going to sound like I'm going off topic, but after the 7th October attacks in Gaza, I think that the survey was done In maybe January and February timeframe.
They released it in March.
So a Palestinian research center based in Ramallah, I think, in Gaza.
I forget where it was.
But anyway, they ran a survey.
And according to this poll that they did of residents of Gaza, over 70% supported Hamas's 7 October attacks.
When you hear about shenanigans when it comes to voting, when you hear about particularly corruption involved with mail-in ballots, it seems to be a sticking issue with people.
How much of a security issue is that, like the mail-in ballots thing?
So I don't have any insight or inside information about, you know, to what degree there's a problem with mail-in ballots and voter fraud, but to me, I tend to be a little more simplistic.
I remember a lot of elections where you just show up, you show your ID, you fill out the form, and then by that evening, You found out who won.
It didn't seem to be that complicated.
And nobody seemed really disenfranchised.
So I would like to see us just go back to the normal way of voting.
And you do this all the time in the business environment or whatever.
You look at your protocols in place.
You remove lack of controls where fraud could seep in.
It's a common thing.
It shouldn't be difficult.
So then you have to look at it with some skepticism.
Are you genuinely concerned that somehow there were vast swaths of the population that were disenfranchised and not able to vote, or just can't get themselves an ID, which I think is an insulting stance to take for a lot of people.
I'm sorry, you're not smart enough to get yourself an ID. But you need one if you have a vaccine.
Well, he did it in the same way that Arnold Schwarzenegger did it.
He did it in the same way that a variety of people who are trying to suppress a bad PR story do it, right?
I think the trial that's going on right now involving Stormy Daniels in New York was the least favorite trial of the Democrats who are the most keen to see him put in prison.
They all felt as if this is probably not the one to start with, but they started with it because Alvin Bragg was dead set on doing it, right?
He just like, I'm going to throw this out there.
And, you know, a variety of other entities had looked at that case and said, we're not going to push it forward.
And so they've put this forward.
I don't think that there's anybody other than the hardcore never-Trumpers, the people that are just desperate to see him in a jumpsuit, who believe that there's any merit to it.
The analysts that you watch across the board, even the hard left ones, they tend to speak in caveats, right?
Like, you know, they're not completely convinced that this was the way to go.
So, I don't know.
But, having said that, if he gets convicted, and if there's like some, you gotta go to prison, sounds so fucking bizarre.
How did we get to this point?
Then, I don't know of anything that says he can't continue to run or be elected.
No, they're trying to tie this in to sort of the campaign issue of campaign funds influencing of the campaign.
They're trying to tie it into, well of course he's trying to suppress a story that he thought would be bad or that they thought, his team thought would be bad for a campaign.
But that in and of itself...
So they've got to tie it into how the funds were expended.
They've tried this in the past.
And again, it's not like there haven't been countless dudes who, you know, did the mess around and then had to pay to get the story suppressed, right?
I mean, there are PR firms that specialize in that sort of thing.
So...
I don't know.
I don't see that this is going to tank him, right?
And look, the Democratic strategists have been, you know, they stick to a message.
They're very smart and they're very disciplined.
But they all sat in a room somewhere and they looked at these various things.
They looked at the election calendar and they looked at, you know, where the primaries are and they looked at when they could maybe get these trials going.
And the idea being, let's just keep this thing rolling.
Keep him in the news as being in a court, right?
It's so crazy, though.
Look, the idea that he's got to sit there and can't leave, you don't see that, you know, that's not a typical move, right?
But now he's locked into that court on whatever, Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday and Friday or whatever.
So with the idea being he's not out on the campaign trail.
Well, you could argue that part of our problem was we coddled the Iranian regime for three years, and that's how things got to this stage.
And now what?
Suddenly he's had a good couple of weeks.
They're not leading the charge on any ceasefire negotiations, right?
In fact, you could argue that they're making national security decisions related to Israel based on domestic policy concerns or political concerns, right?
You don't want to lose the youth vote.
You don't want to lose the Arab American vote by being overly supportive of Israel.
What I was getting to was that if Biden did, if we went crazy in 2027, they get him on stem cells, and they put him in a hyperbaric chamber every day for four hours, and he's sharp as a tacker.
Imagine if Trump goes after him, because there's a lot to go after.
If they started uncovering the emails and the Burisma stuff and the fact that he said he never talked to any of his son's business partners, but Hunter Biden's former partner said they had at least 20 phone calls, the fact that he allegedly used a pseudonym when he was exchanging emails, all that's nuts.
All that is nuts.
If that was the case, if now Trump gets to go after him, Now we're dealing with insanity.
Now we're dealing with every time someone is president, they have the power to prosecute their political rivals for unnecessary means.
Well, look, I know I spent most of my life overseas, and I met a lot of people in some very bizarre environments and some sort of remote areas, and they all had this idea, you know, get to America, work hard, and you could do who knows what.
So it's still, and it still continues to be, a very dynamic and, you know, driving element of, you know, of people overseas.
I think we forget that sometimes, right?
And certainly, you know, you could look at the campus protests and go to, well, okay, maybe, you know, the youth of today, but that's not true either, right?
Because we can fall into that trap and say, well, the fucking youth of today don't understand how, you know, great they have it and everything like that.
Every generation has said that about their kids, for sure.
But if you looked at this population of college kids, and you could remove these kids from their friends, and with total immunity and total anonymity, Get their real opinions on all this stuff.
I guarantee you there's a lot of kids.
They say some of this is so crazy and you can't have opposing opinions and we just sort of accept it and we move on and it's what percentage of the kids are out there in tents?
What percentage of the kids are out there blocking the roads and protesting?
Well, I mean, if you look at the arrest statistics so far, right, you know, say it's not a completely accurate number, but about 2,400 arrests, right, campuses across the country.
And the statistics are starting to show that, you know, upwards of half of those arrests Those people have no affiliation with the university.
They're not college students, right?
They're outside either agitators, activists, however you want to refer to them, right?
So, yeah, I agree with it.
We're not talking about a lot.
And again, I would argue that, you know, from the outside activist perspective, again, whether it's, you know, Students for Justice in Palestine or, you know, the other groups that are involved...
They look at the students themselves as just window dressing.
And again, sort of useful idiots.
But I will tell you one thing is you can get cynical sometimes about the state of the youth, however you want to call it, the youths.
But then I took my oldest boy, Scooter, for his candidate visit at the U.S. Naval Academy a couple weeks ago.
That is a way to strengthen or reaffirm your belief in where we are as a country, right?
When you see the kids that are there, holy fuck, right?
And I probably shouldn't say that when I'm describing all the kids there, but what great kids, right?
But in terms of just the sheer number of people that aren't, it'll surprise you.
There's a lot of great people in this country.
We have our problems, and we're going to always have problems, but one of the ways we find solutions is by having problems.
And that's one of the ways we've come to understandings.
And the people that are trying to stop you from discussing this, that's the real problem.
The problem is not disagreement, folks.
The problem is people trying to stop people from discussing very important subjects.
And that is, look, Fucking all hail Elon Musk cuz that motherfucker stepped in spent 44 billion dollars and shifted the entire The whole like the environment of social media is very different because X is the Wild West Yeah,
it's very different everywhere Everything has to kind of relax just to kind of keep up with it because the the whole power dynamic the whole bell curve has shifted and And now you've got this one dude who's like, I don't give a fuck.
I meant to tell you, there's a great story in Wall Street Journal today.
And I love when they have stories like this, because I'm thinking, no shit, Sherlock.
It's about...
It's about access for the defense industry to magnets, rare earth magnets, which you need for everything.
Submarines, F-35s, whatever.
Think about what you need it for.
I mean, magnets are also obviously for a variety of everything else, household appliances and shit.
92% of rare earth magnets are controlled by China right now, right?
Materials and manufacturing.
And so now the US is suddenly realizing that they've got an issue because a while back, a handful of years ago, they put in place a law that will actually come into effect in 27 in a big way, which says, you know, no magnets, you know, from China where the materials or the processing or manufacturers in China.
Yeah, and so they're starting to put money into, whether it's us or the Australians or the Germans or whomever, they're starting to realize.
But good news is they've figured this out, but while we were paying attention to whatever we were focused on, China was dominating above 90% and knowing, strategically thinking ahead years ago, thinking what's going to be important.
And they're not playing the same game in terms of regulations and environmental concerns and practices.
One of the wildest things that these social media bots Who knows what countries are using these, but there's a lot of them that are being run by foreign countries.
And they'll, a lot of times, be real inflammatory about climate change.
And if they're funded by China, while China is building coal plants all the time, don't they have hundreds of new coal plants that they're building?
Yeah, opening up, I forget what it was, two a week or so, new coal plants.
Crazy!
And the EPA just crushed the coal industry here over the past week and a half or so with some new regulations that are going forward in terms of, you know, what you have to reduce your emissions by.
And then next thing you know, you find that there's outside elements involved because it's in their best interests.
And China's figured this out.
We've talked about this before.
They figured out that the way to impact the U.S. for their own good was to impact local and state regulations and regulatory policies towards things like mining, right?
Because it helps them in their cause to dominate the industry or to dominate whatever that market is that we're talking about.
So...
You know, again, it's just a matter of, you know, peel back the layers, pay attention, think about what you're doing.
This article talks about the overbuilding of plants, but they're going to run less frequently to keep their capacity high, and then it's asked, like, why, and that they might just be doing it just in case?
Well, it sounds like that old Saturday Night Live skit where they said the ride was so smooth in the Lincoln you could conduct a circumcision in the back.
So they had a rabbi in the back of a Lincoln doing a circumcision to show how smooth the suspension was.
These things go over everything and they stay flat.
They don't feel anything.
The car just stays flat as it's riding over all these bumps.
It's nuts.
And if you see how it works, like all the different things that are moving around inside of it, all the machinery that they've developed to have this insane suspension, it's crazy.
And part of that is because they've been strategic about locking up critical minerals overseas in terms of getting in there, working with countries to lock up that market and also to dominate completely the refining side of things.
I'd like to say that I'm a gradient salinity aficionado, but I'm not.
But this is interesting because we're behind the curve In developing, particularly from a naval perspective, these new capabilities.
And we're seeing how the drones and the unmanned vehicles from a naval perspective have impacted Ukraine, right?
And their ability to attack the Russian Black Sea Fleet.
We're seeing what the Houthis are doing with them, right?
And we've been a little slow to the game.
And so...
It's interesting to watch now that they're developing things like this, which you can take apart and then ship someplace, right?
It doesn't need to travel underwater to get to where it's going, right?
You just ship it off, you put it together, you assemble it, you put it in, and it's got a variety of uses and it can carry payloads, but it is fascinating.
But there's also, we talked about AI, and there's something else that DARPA's been doing, because this is a DARPA-related project as well, is something called ACE. And they've just finished an AI and machine learning dogfight.
They've created like X-something, X-62, which isn't...
Yeah, so autonomous.
Now, you put two guys in there.
There's still pilots in this thing.
It's a modified F-16, essentially.
You've got two guys in there, but they're not flying it.
So they've conducted actual dogfight scenarios against a human crew, an F-16, right?
And it's remarkable.
This plane is using AI and machine learning to dogfight, basically.
Well, I think most of that UIP sightings, and I think it's important for them, I'm glad the government and the Defense Department has finally at least come forward to some degree to say, look, we've got an interest in this, we want to investigate, we want to know what these things are, these sightings that we can't readily identify off the bat.
Look, we were tricked out in the Korean War.
The Russians, you know, designed the MiG, whatever it was, the MiG-15 maybe, and we had no idea, right?
So they'd come out, they'd roll out the MiG-15 against, we were still using, you know, old rotor aircraft from, propeller aircraft from World War II. In Korea at the outset, and we didn't know that the Russians had advanced material science to the point that they had so that they could build something like this.
So it would be insane for us to think somehow that the Chinese, you know, who have proven themselves to be brilliant at reverse engineering other people's technology, haven't figured out something else.
So, yeah, there's always this game of trying to understand how advanced they are, and I suspect some of the UAP sightings are definitely, probably Chinese, I don't think the Russians necessarily, but...
Not that they wouldn't try or not trying but I suspect the Chinese are further advanced on this and they've stolen a lot of technology from us over the years and we've talked about that but I think a number of the UIP sightings that get listed are just that but that's why they do it that's why they have a An office now that they've admitted to that investigates because it's a national security issue.
You've got to know if a hostile state has created something that we are not aware of, right?
Propulsion or material science or whatever it may be.
There's been some talk about various people, Salvatore Pais and some others, who have been working on supposedly on things similar, various propulsion systems, anti-gravity.
How do you change the laws of physics?
And I don't know that if...
I don't know how long that could be kept secret for, right?
Well, if they did keep it a secret, if that's what the Tic Tac thing was, that was 2004. It's hard to imagine them having that complex propulsion system that's so alien from what we currently know, and have that 20 years ago and no one hears about it?
If all the machinery works, if all the sensors work, if all the detection equipment, if all that stuff is accurate, that thing's doing something that no one's ever even seen before.
I don't think that would have been the case because I think that we wouldn't have heard about it because I think they would have had a classified briefing with Fravor and say, you saw nothing.
Do you think that's the case or do you think they allow some talk about it because a lot of the talk is nutty anyway?
A lot of these people that believe in UFOs, I am open-minded about the idea, to a certain extent, but a lot of these people, they could be telling you Bigfoot stories.
It's like the same kind of folks.
There's people that just see shit, and it makes their life way more interesting, and then there's people that have really seen those things.
I have good friends that have seen things, that have seen bizarre things.
That's the one that if you're going to really dig in, you're never going to shift me off the position that there were state, local officials, federal, whatever, involved in that.
Okay, so you know, we've got the President's Daily Brief, the podcast.
And that started up in September.
It's done remarkably well, despite me being the host.
So it's every morning, every afternoon, we touch on, we hit the top issues, critical issues of the day, international stories, conflicts, whatever.
And because it's done well, that's the weekdays, that they're going to launch a weekend version, extended weekend version, on our YouTube channel.
So we're going to video.
So, starting Saturday, May 18th, we're going to take the PDB. It's going to still be during the weekdays on Spotify and all your other podcast platforms.
But then on Saturday, May 18th, we start with this, the Situation Report.
It'll be an extended version on YouTube with video.
We're going to have guests, which leads me to my question of, how do you interview guests?
But it's going to be great.
News, commentary.
We're going to have some very interesting people.
Same idea.
Touching on critical issues and stories.
We're going to just stick with the facts.
We're going to stay away from opinion, which I think is one of the reasons why the PDB has done well, is that it's 20 minutes in the morning, 10 minutes in the afternoon.
We hit the facts.
Try to stay away from opinion.
Occasionally, I might make some stupid remark.
But for the most part, it's just a little bit of context.
There's a very unfortunate sort of combining of the people that give you the news with people that think they're activists.
You know, or people that think that it's very important that you stick to a very specific narrative and ignore information that's contrary to what your belief system says.
Well, if all you do is just say, here's what's happening, right?
Here's what we know is happening, right?
And you don't try to, again, you don't try to tell people what to think, and you don't try to say, okay, we're going to approach it from a particular point of view and leave out half of what's happening, right?
Yeah, so just, and it's like that old thing, you know, there's still some news outlets out there that do a good job of just presenting facts, but most of them, you know, like you pointed, most of them are opinion-based.
Right.
You know, if you look at...
If you sort of look at the...
There's a survey that regularly looks at the news in terms of objectivity, right?
And it changes somewhat.
And interestingly, your show doesn't change much, right?
It's always kind of...
It's right up there in terms of...
Because you're not...
You know, other news outlets disappear off of there, or they change position in terms of relative objectivity, right?
But yours has been very consistent.
But you've got outfits like Fox News or CNN, and they'll drop off the radar, right?
Because they become nothing but opinion, right, for a period of time.
Then maybe they self-correct, and they realize we need more news, we need more facts.
So they'll come back on the survey and come up higher in terms of relative credibility of actual news.
So anyway, it goes back to our original story.
Everybody's got to be a little bit more careful because it's getting more dangerous out there in terms of disinformation.
Sure sounds higher than 5%, tweeted Musk, along with the tag in the news article.
Okay.
So Dan Woods, global head of intelligence and cybersecurity company F5, who spent more than 20 years at the U.S. federal law enforcement and intelligence organizations, told The Australian that more than 80% Of Twitter accounts are probably bots.
That's so nuts.
Yeah, it's somewhere between 5 and 80. Even if he's halfway right, even if it's 50%, let's just say 50, 40. Let's even say 40% is crazy.
And then, but that is, that's probably, you're probably getting to accurate because just the Chinese alone, right, and the Russians, they invest an enormous amount of resource into this because they know it's effective, right, and they know how damaging it can be, and why wouldn't you, right?
And if you can just get, like, arguments going on Twitter, you know, people get engaged in those, and you need to, like, start a fire and run away from it.
Because, like, you go on a news show, and the question is five minutes, you know, and you think, okay, well, that question includes a lot of the talking points that you producers asked me to send to you.
But it's how people, I mean, whether it's that or whether it's the, you know, I get my news from TikTok, I get my news from X. No, that's the way to get it.
It used to be from The Daily Show with Jon Stewart.
That's where young people were getting their news, right?
Now they've aged out, and now young people are turning to TikTok, and they're getting their news.
And they're not thinking, okay, of course they're not thinking about it.
They're not thinking, I wonder if the Chinese regime is constructing this in a certain way.
But of course they are.
And of course they understand.
And that's really the danger.
People talk about the danger of TikTok as their ability to harvest personal information.
And that's a problem to some degree.
But the bigger problem is 170 million American users of TikTok...
Being vulnerable and reachable by a Chinese regime that does not have our best interests at heart, by any means, right?
So that's the bigger issue, I think, rather than the harvesting of personal data, which Amazon and Google and everybody else, how it has it, right?
They got all that shit.
So it's not, you know, yes, it's a hostile regime, and yes, they're harvesting your data, but, you know, I think it's more of the disinformation campaign and the potential for that that is the problem with TikTok.
Like if rather if you can control if you can control exactly what percentage of stuff gets out like if someone if you can limit someone's reach Like if someone posts something and it's some right-wing philosophy And they post that and they immediately tag it as such and limit its reach.
But then you take the other one and you expand its reach, whatever the contrary position is, and you promote it and you push it out everywhere.
How much of an effect does that have on young people?
And that's the whole point of the game anyway, is, you know, you're suppressing and you're promoting, and again, you're doing it to an audience for the most part that is very vulnerable.
And so, yeah, again, I don't know that they're going to ban TikTok.
Somebody's going to come in and view that as an opportunity buy, right?
And I think, so, they will be able to sell it, even though right now ByteDance is saying, absolutely not, we're not going to sell it, you know?
I think they probably will, right?
I don't see them banning it from app stores.
So, I mean, think about the angst that would create amongst the tweens and the teens.
If you're looking to suppress accurate information because you don't like what you think that's going to do for an election, that doesn't seem like you should be able to do that.
This seems like that's not good.
Don't do that.
If you develop an organization that is allowed to do that to all of social media by law, You're in territory that's real slippery now because it's just so ripe for corruption.
And it always goes back to this, which you talked about before, which is this idea that, well, okay, if one president can do this to another former president, then the next one goes, the next one goes, and it's the same problem, right?
Hey, it maybe sounds good to us right now to censor something or to suppress something.
But we're not going to be in charge forever, unless they've figured that out, how they can be in charge forever.
Well, again, not to beat a dead horse, but if people could take away one idea, it's incumbent upon you, whether it's for you or whether it's for the sake of your kids, to be curious and to actually make the fucking effort.
To understand what it is that you're seeing and reading and hearing.
And, yes, it takes time and, you know, maybe it sounds daunting and you'd rather have the government do it, right?
But that's not a good idea, right?
I think it comes down to individual responsibility, like a lot of things in life.
And I don't know that I'm optimistic about that as being the solution.
I don't see another way around it, right?
I mean you we can detect we can we can create apps to Protect and be proactive you can do all those things which are incredibly important But ultimately it comes down to the individual and if they don't take it upon themselves Yeah to go back to our earlier point then you know fucked yeah well I have hope Look at you!
Do you know what the US government's trying to do right now?
They're trying to get China and Russia to sign up to an agreement, essentially an international treaty, that would ensure that AI does not alone run nuclear weapons systems, right?
And there's no treaty that prevents that right now.
There's no treaty that prevents Taking the humans out of that decision-making process.