Mike Baker recounts a WWI-era fundraising trek across Saudi and Jordan’s deserts, mirroring Lawrence of Arabia’s 1917 route with five riders, ten camels, and injuries from the brutal terrain, while criticizing UK DEI hesitancy and USAID’s bureaucratic inefficiencies. On Gaza, he argues Hamas weaponizes civilians to exploit Palestinian suffering, blaming Iran for regional instability, but acknowledges U.S. foreign policy’s moral ambiguities—like $120B Ukraine aid or Iraqi Sesame Street funding—while Rogan suggests systemic transparency could curb fraud and distrust. They debate Trump’s pragmatic vs. Obama’s idealistic approaches, warning that unchecked geopolitical meddling risks backlash, and end by framing global influence as a necessary but flawed balancing act. [Automatically generated summary]
Look, it all started with some colleagues of mine from the UK Special Forces Club.
And these guys are tremendous, right?
But Howard Ledham and some others who came up with an idea.
They said, look, we have to do something to help the Benevolent Fund, which is for the UK Special Forces.
It's like wounded warriors here in the States.
And I can say this because I'm a dual citizen with the U.K. The British don't tend to be very good at raising money or asking for money for very important causes.
So here in the U.S. where you've got 100,000 different groups that are advocating for veterans...
Over there, it's not the case, right?
But they have the same need, right?
And they have all these wonderful people and their families.
So the idea was, what can we do?
A big event, something massive that can really help to raise funds and awareness for the Special Forces Benevolent Fund.
They came up with this crazy idea at the time, still crazy, to recreate...
A 1917 epic journey that Lawrence of Arabia did through what was considered the unpassable deserts of Saudi and Jordan, to go from essentially northwest Saudi through these unpassable deserts and then into Jordan and then down to Aqaba to route the Turks, who at the time controlled the area.
And with a small Arab army led by several sheikhs in Lawrence, they did this trek of about 1,100 kilometers.
Took them several months because they had stopped along the way, plus they were fighting Turks along the way.
So we took off in January, mid-January, five riders, ten camels, and an incredible support team.
They're called Shadads that sit on top of the hump.
That's a Saudi Shadad.
The Omani Shadad is different.
It sits behind the hump and is even less comfortable.
And now these things were probably designed some 2,000 years ago, and they've never felt the need to improve them.
They're basically just some wood, you know, tied together.
And then you try to throw a couple of things on top of this piece of wood to make it comfortable.
And I think all the Bedouins and others were laughing at us because we just kept piling blankets on to try to see if we couldn't, you know, it was tough.
And so ass blisters are a real thing.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah, so anyway, that's what you see there.
But there's no stirrups on these things.
Like a horse, you know, you're riding on the saddle, you've got stirrups, and it takes the pressure off your legs.
You're just hanging on.
So you don't want to ride with one leg on either side because it's just not comfortable.
So you hitch your leg over the front.
And then you kind of put your foot behind the other leg.
Jamie, can you show me what that looks like on a map?
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I don't know how you do it because, and then you have to trot, right?
You can't just walk.
Walking was comfortable enough, but you have to cover the distance, right?
And the trot on a camel is not comfortable, right?
And so it was, anyway, I just can't say enough good things about these people, but the cause, the UK Special Forces Club Benevolent Fund, if people want to go and read more about this, they can go to...
Isn't it crazy that you have to look at things through this lens of who in the furthest left, kookiest perspective is going to be offended by this because it's a bunch of white people in the desert.
If anything, it should give you a perspective on how unbelievably brutal the times were back then.
But I do think, I think we are on the downhill slope of DEI. I think the grifters who built up that cottage industry are going to have to be looking for new jobs.
Because I think most companies are starting to think, you know what, let's get off of this thing.
I feel like at this point in our culture, the divisions are so fucking crazy, and it's so counter to what America should be standing for, which is a United States, united country, a community, a large group of people that all agree on a few very key rules, one of them being freedom.
Any new emerging business, industry, technology, I think there are people who look and go, there's an opportunity here because regulatory policy hasn't caught up.
Dave Portnoy's been paying attention to all this, and he's been buying coins and tweeting about them and then selling them, and he's been making a lot of money.
And he's like, am I going to jail?
Like, what is this?
Because, you know, you're making real money.
Didn't he make like a million dollars off of one of them?
I always think, like, right now, the past couple of weeks in particular, it seems like people are just losing their shit and dropping onto the fainting couch over the idea that he's accessing your private information, right?
What's he going to do?
He's accessing your private information.
And you think, okay, well, first of all, I don't think the guy is looking to scam you out at 500 bucks.
Well, I'm actually listening to an amazing podcast I'd love to recommend to everybody because Elon recommended it on X and I've been listening to it.
It's fucking great.
Fall of Civilizations podcast, they're doing a series on the Mongols right now, Terror in the Steppes, and I am listening to it right now, so that's why I'm saying Genghis correctly.
But yeah, I think if they had come in, if the administration had come in and said, here's what we're going to do.
We are going to root out waste and fraud.
We're going to go after, you know, every dollar that's not spent on behalf of the American public and our national security and advancing American interests.
And we're going to do it in this efficient, you know, manner.
But, you know, and again, don't get me wrong.
I think sometimes, you know, the disruption of fast action is extremely beneficial at times.
And sometimes you can't see the benefit until other things happen outside the bubble that we may be looking in.
If they had messaged it a little bit differently, and then with the means, rather than taking a blowtorch to everything, because, and again, not saying that it can't be effective, but what I'm saying is that they're losing, I think, important opportunity from a goodwill perspective, and I know they probably don't give a fuck anymore, but all those people who voted, right, for them this time around, gave them that chance that didn't the previous time.
They said, oh, fuck it, I'm so toned with the Biden administration and all this bullshit.
They need to see, I think, more stability, less chaos.
And I think the Democrats are very good.
I think we all thought, perhaps, that the progressives, the Democrats, were just going to go into a cave and hide.
If you give them ammunition, obviously they're going to take advantage of it.
And I think some of the approach to this, again, not saying it's wrong in the sense of let's find that waste and fraud, but they're giving them opportunities to start firing back.
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There's probably 20. But the thing about it is they're all united in their message, whether it's MSNBC. I watched MSNBC the other day in the gym.
Oh, my God.
It was awesome motivation to work out because these people look morbidly obese.
And they had this language that they were speaking.
It was like almost...
It's almost like they were translating from another language.
It didn't make sense.
It's like, you know, we're in danger.
It was the way they were talking.
It's like, my people feel...
My people feel like they're in danger, like they're being criminalized.
We're being pushed out of society.
We're being told we don't exist.
And then, of course, you have to say you're an ally of the LBGTQ+. You have to be an ally.
They're digging their heels in on all that stuff, though.
That's not going to win anymore.
That's too crazy.
Even kind, progressive people realize...
You know, you've done a weird thing with women's sports.
You've done a weird thing with the safety of women in bathrooms.
And it's not to say that some of these people who are legitimate trans people who really do just want to use the women's room and be treated like a woman.
That's true, too.
But you open the door for perverts, and you're not admitting that.
You're just allowing guys with beards and hard dicks to wander around the women's room.
You know, it's like, this is like a core aspect of progressives right now online, is that when they're tweeting about stuff, when they're posting about stuff, it's very aggressive and very angry and insulting.
Yeah, it's pretty wild now that, I mean, we have a little bit of a problem where a bunch of people are selling like cheap things online and using my voice and we have to get them removed.
But that's just, you know, that's just opportunists are taking advantage, you know, I'm selling protein powders that I've never seen before, all that kind of shit.
I mean, there's very few, we've talked about it before, there's very few.
Very few because the idea was always sort of detection, right?
Okay, we've got to create better systems to detect deep fakes.
Right.
But now I think the focus has rightly shifted from sort of the detection to more proactive protection of material, right?
So get it at the moment of creation.
Embed the ability within the video clip, the audio clip, whatever.
To show that you've got proof of whatever you want to call it, reality, credibility, authenticity, and that's the way it's all going because you just can't keep up.
If all you're doing is trying to create better systems to detect deep fakes, it's a losing game.
It's like battling terrorists because you're coming up with an IT to prevent a terrorist attack based on the last terrorist attack.
Again, talking about regulatory policy not catching up, I'm kidding.
What do you do, right?
I mean, like, if you were in Europe, right, you could be fined and jailed, right, in a case for, like, pushing something that's disinformation or whatever.
But you can't, you know, if it's an obvious, to your point, if it's an obvious goof, then okay, you can probably get away with, maybe not if you're in Germany or somewhere, but...
The head of the Munich Security Conference literally cried after the speech when they were addressing EU leaders following the speech, right, talking about, you know, the impact and what it might have meant for U.S.-EU relations and everything.
Well, I think what they were anticipating at the Munich Security Conference was he was going to come in and he was going to talk about, obviously, the number one topic on the table for them was Ukraine.
And, you know, where are we going with that?
Because, obviously, the EU leaders are now very concerned about U.S. commitment to NATO. What is the Trump administration, you know, planning on doing in terms of further support for Ukraine, really further support for NATO? They're looking to distance themselves.
And Vance instead came in and didn't really focus on any of that shit.
He turned it on to the European Union and to EU countries and the UK, the UK in particular, talking about how...
You know, their biggest threat isn't necessarily Russia or China.
Their biggest threat is what they're doing to themselves in terms of suppressing free speech from all the various groups out there, including conservative groups, far left, whatever, determining that, you know, this type of speech is illegal.
We're going to pursue you.
We're going to fine you.
We're going to jail you.
Armed raids against people that are, you know, pushing content online.
So if you talk about the immigration problem, and you say, look, we've got to stop.
We've got to, you know, maybe secure borders.
If you talk about the Ukraine war and say, I don't think we should be supporting, you know, dumping more resource into Ukraine, all those things, or reproductive rights, if you're on the wrong side of that from a European perspective, you know, they're coming after you.
And so that's what J.D. Vance came after.
He turned the tables on them and focused on that.
And that was...
A, it was completely unexpected.
B, I think the reality of it, the fact that it's truthful, I think, upset a lot of them.
You know what I love is, I was just out in the Middle East for some things, including the amazing trek with the guys from the SF Club.
It was right during the period of time when President Trump announced his idea during that press conference with Netanyahu about, look, we're going to own, the U.S. is going to own Gaza.
The Israeli cabinet is fully on board with the idea, in part because I think they understand that, okay, look, this is probably not going to happen, but if we take this position, it's going to create It's going to create some movement, right?
And maybe that leads to something of interest.
And I think being out in the Middle East when that idea came out and hearing some of the responses from people out there was amazing.
But what I like about it...
Look, you're not going to move 2.3 million Palestinians out of Gaza, right?
That's a good point, and maybe a lot of people aren't aware of, is that the wall on the side of Egypt is way bigger than the wall on the side of Israel.
That is an impenetrable wall that's heavily guarded.
They do not want Palestinians coming into Egypt, which is kind of crazy.
So the costs involved, the potential for just never-ending trouble.
But what I do like about it is, look, now the Arab states are responding by having a summit, right?
They're having a summit at the end of this month, and they've been having little mini-discussions amongst themselves, but all the key players in the area are now meeting to discuss what's an alternative.
Right?
What is the way to make this happen?
And, you know, it's not going to be by the U.S. owning it and building the Riviera, right?
Or a series of casinos.
But the Arab states are having to react.
And so what that means is nothing's worked beforehand, right?
Nothing in terms of two-state, you know, option, other security agreements, peace agreements that have held for some period of time and then fallen apart.
None of that shit's worked.
So I think...
The sort of the disruptive aspect of sometimes of what Trump does, even though you may look at the idea on the surface and go, it's not going to work, you have these other effects, right?
So now you've got the Arab states having to respond, coming up with these ideas.
They're already over the past couple of days saying, well, Hamas can't play a role.
If you had said that a year ago, Egypt and Qatar and some of these other Arab states out there would have gotten on board with the idea that Hamas has got to go.
There's also a problem with the reality of the region at this point, right?
It's like, what do you want to happen to that area?
Because someone has to rebuild it.
Look, absolutely Israel shouldn't have done what they did and kill who knows how many innocent people and literally destroy most of the buildings there.
We all can agree that's a horrible thing, but it's done.
Are you telling me there were Hamas missiles in every single one of those buildings?
That's the entirety of the story?
Is that Israel just had to blow up this building?
Which, by the way, still I don't think would be morally justified.
But, like, come on, man.
Look, like, it's just, again, even to Dean's point, I always find this fascinating because somehow Americans could say this about the people in Hamas and go like, you know, like you said, yeah, I wouldn't like to be kicked out of my neighborhood, but if my...
Government had done October 7th, I'd accept it.
Your government, Dean, destroyed Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Somalia, Yemen.
The drone bombing campaign in Pakistan?
Can you get kicked out of your house now?
Is it not ethnic cleansing if we were to kick you out of your neighborhood?
This is so ridiculous that we impose these standards on these poor people that we would never dream of holding ourselves to that standard.
It logically makes absolutely no sense.
And it doesn't really matter what Hamas' approval rating is in the same way that it doesn't matter that George W. Bush had record high approval ratings.
That doesn't mean that the innocent civilians in the United States of America Our fair game, and neither should any other group of civilians.
No, I mean, look, if you could do surgical strikes and do nothing but kill Hamas terrorists, great.
Yeah.
But, you know, that's not the real world.
You know, Dave's talking about a world that we don't exist in, right?
I would argue.
This is where we would differ.
I like Dave Smith a lot, and I think he's incredibly intelligent.
But, you know, we fundamentally look at things sometimes...
In a different world view because of our experiences, right?
And my experience has been dealing with a lot of hostile actors who, you know, you may look at and think, okay, well, can't we just...
I don't say we'll get along, but they exist and we exist and do we really...
That's not the world we work in, right?
And urban combat is really ugly.
It's not dismissing, you know, the horrific nature of it and the fact that, yeah, sure, in a perfect world, it's morally repugnant.
And it is, you know, but...
It's the world that we live in, so I think, okay, on one hand, I get what he's saying, and I don't disagree on that moral side of things, but from my background, I don't tend to live in that world.
I tend to live in sort of the operational side of things, and sometimes you have to do things that are not good.
But we were justified based on a lie, which is even crazy, because they used that justification and went after a group of people that had nothing to do with it, based on a lie of weapons of mass destruction, which is even crazier, right?
Well, I think Hamas also, you know, these are disjointed statements, and I'm not really tying it all together very well at all, but, you know, there's also this element that Hamas doesn't give a shit about the Palestinian citizens, right?
The civilians, I mean.
If they did, they wouldn't conduct their operations.
Their methodology would be different, right?
They wouldn't bury themselves in their operations and their command centers and everything that they do, right?
Their depots, their missile weapons supply centers within the public environment, right?
Well, there's no way that the Iranian regime, I think, would have allowed them to do this if they anticipated they would get this sort of response.
So I think you're right.
And again, this is the problem.
People only hear what they want to hear, right?
So they hear me say from an operational perspective, I understand that they had an aggressive response.
But then they stop listening, right?
So what I'm saying is, was it over the top?
Well, yes, it was over the top.
And could they have been more surgical about this?
Well, yes, they certainly could have.
Could they have prevented some loss of civilian life?
Well, yes.
Would that have been difficult?
Well, yes.
Why?
Because Hamas puts themselves in the center of civilian life there.
They know this is what's going to happen.
This is their currency.
Dead Palestinians.
That drives their narrative.
And they always know it's going to turn against the Israelis as we're having these discussions.
That's what happens.
And they've got enough of a track record to know that's what's going to happen.
So they use it to their advantage.
You know, again, it doesn't excuse the killing.
I keep coming back to that same thing.
You could have, you know, disparate multiple, you know, thoughts in your head at the same time, right?
You can feel bad about that.
And at the same time, you can go, yeah, it was fucked up what they did on 7 October.
You're going to go after Hamas.
And then what you're going to find is urban combat is really, really fucking ugly, right?
And you're going to have casualties that you really, really regret having.
Were there more than needed?
I would say yes.
They didn't need...
The extent of their response, but I understand their mindset for why they went so hard after Hamas.
This is decades and decades, you know, built up saying no more, right?
We can't put up with this anymore.
Now, again, the problem is, you know, the problem is not that it's not really Hamas.
I keep coming back to the same thing.
The problem is that the instigator of all this trouble, the instigator of the vast majority of chaos and instability and violence and death.
In that region is the Iranian regime.
Most Arab states will agree to that.
Maybe not the Yemenis, right?
You know, but most of those Arab states are not going to be sad to see the Iranian regime fall for this very reason.
Everybody wants a better life, right?
However they perceive it.
The Iranian regime, you know, the mullahs and the IRGC, you know, they've got a stated objective and they are pursuing that as long as those people are in charge.
Ultimately, we're not going to get a big sea change here.
We're not going to get a huge shift in the way things go.
But if you want a better life, then you've got to look to whatever you want to call it, the head of the snake or the top of the mountain.
There they are, the Iranian regime driving a lot of this chaos.
So anyway, I'm getting away from the point, but I don't disagree with Dave.
I always like a lot of the things that he says.
I just think that we come at it sometimes from a much different perspective.
I don't tend to believe that the world is full of...
I don't think that's his perspective either.
Well, yeah.
I'm not putting it well, but I think what I mean is that there's...
It's not...
I was having a conversation the other day, and it was about U.S. involvement in a variety of groups, activities, associations over the years, looking to...
Topple governments looking to change, you know, the direction of a government.
All the nefarious things that the CIA has been accused of over the years.
And I was like, well, goddamn, what did you expect?
Of course that's what we're doing.
Of course, we're trying to influence hearts and minds.
Of course, we're infiltrating organizations to try to influence the direction of a government that, you know, you go all the way back to the Cold War, right?
We were convinced the Russians or the Soviets were going to blow us to hell, right?
Of course, we're going to be doing a variety of things.
You want a government over there that's more friendly to you?
Okay, how are we going to go about doing that, right?
If that means VOA or Voice of America or that means infiltrating some organization that's going to try to win them, yeah.
That's the problem, is that we don't live in a world of benign nations who, like, if we're not the police, you know, at the top of the food chain, nobody needs to be there.
Someone's going to fill that gap, and you know what?
Maybe I'm wrong, but I've been around a long time, and I've spent most of it overseas in unusual places.
We make a lot of mistakes as a country.
It's a human endeavor, but we do try to correct.
Can take time, right?
It can take a lot of time.
We make a lot of mistakes.
Of course we do.
But I've seen a lot of players out there, and I'd rather have us and our allies trying to direct traffic rather than some of the hostile actors that are out there.
Like, when you do have the ability to control other regimes, isn't it almost...
Doesn't it almost logical that you are you're gonna need a lot of money and you're gonna need a lot of influence to do that and so there's gonna be a bunch of people say actually We could use some of those minerals Actually, you know that natural gas is very valuable, right?
Actually if we could destabilize Russia's energy systems and you know pump up Ukraine's and control it That'd be pretty good.
And so then We start initiating things and we start the coup in Ukraine in 2014 and a bunch of different things.
We started helping things along that would benefit us both geopolitically, but also geopolitically in the sense that like you're controlling the geology of the land, which is the real term geopolitical, right?
Well, a lot of them are controlled on the eastern side by militias, right?
Congo's been a difficult place for everybody to try to wrap up licensing agreements, right?
You know, you've got 100-plus militias out there vying for control because it's money, right?
And so I guess my point is, I mean, you know, it's good you brought up China because, yes, they've been busy trying to lock up a variety of locations in terms of critical minerals, and they've got a monopoly on refining those minerals essentially at this point in time.
But I just think it's...
Yeah, maybe what I'm surprised by, because I'm so fucking cynical, is, you know, the idea when you say, you know, it's corporate interests, it's government interests, it's self-interest of a nation, you know, to pursue and do these things.
I'll be honest with you, I look at it and go, well, yeah, of course it is.
I don't know any other world, right?
I don't know that we're not going to walk that dog back over, you know, a couple thousand years.
You know, people have been doing the same fucking thing all human existence, I would argue.
So I just kind of look at it, and I, you know, maybe because I'm not wired that way, I don't sit around and go, that's fucking wrong.
We have to rail against this.
Yeah, I'm a very simple person, so I look at it and go, yeah, that's how it works.
And goddamn right, I'd rather be on the top of the heap than, you know, not.
So this is like a pragmatic perspective based on your experience overseas and your understanding of how these things are done is that if we don't do something, if we don't act in some way to influence these governments and control these regions and do whatever we can to make sure that our interests are being...
That we are the ones that are kind of directing the way things go.
Yeah, I just, you know, and look, I'll tell you something.
Look, there are people over the years, I think, you know, the CIA leadership at times, over the years, I'm talking, you know, all the way back to World War II and, you know, beyond, certainly during the Cold War.
Alan Dulles is a good example of that, where, you know, they legitimately would sit around and say, well, as far as I know, we're not in the business of overthrowing countries, you know?
And you think, like, Well, that's bullshit.
Of course that's what we're trying to do.
We're trying to influence countries because we want them on our side.
We want to create friendly governments that, yes, will be beneficial to our national security, our economic interests, all those things.
So I've always been puzzled also by people who try to minimize that in a sense, right?
I mean, if you're doing something, then goddammit, maybe own up to it.
John Brennan, who was a director at the agency, right?
He's a relatively well-known former CIA official for a handful of reasons.
He was very tight in the Obama administration.
But he said one time, I forget what year it was, but anyway, he talked about the business of the CIA and says, we don't steal secrets.
Goddamn it, of course we steal secrets.
That's the point of the exercise, right?
You think the FSB or the Chinese Intel apparatus isn't stealing secrets?
So I'm sure you've seen Mike Ben's take on USAID and what USAID was really all about.
And his perspective is that it's for everything that's too dirty for the CIA. He's saying USAID. Do you think there can be a rational argument, though, that a lot of these things that seem ridiculous, like sending all this money to influence the votes in Pakistan or in India, and then we look at it like, why are we spending $21 million on education here and $2 million there, and that these things are actually beneficial to the United States as a whole?
Because even though we're spending exorbitant amounts of money, the results we're getting is we are...
Maintaining peace by being in control of certain areas where someone else would come over, and then you'd get a regime that's not friendly to our interests.
Yeah, yeah, look, I mean, USAID, traditionally, they were set up, what, during the Kennedy administration as a, you know, as an independent organization, right?
Because at the time, I think that the thinking was, and they're not the only one that's set up as an independent agency, but, you know, at the time, the thinking was, we don't want it to be seen as like...
The U.S. administration is picking and choosing and driving sort of where the money's going, which, again...
It's kind of a strange way of doing things, right?
It's coming from the fucking U.S. government, right?
So people aren't going to parse words or discern somehow that, okay, well, it's an independent agency.
So I guess it's not really what the administration wants.
It's what the USAID wants.
So were dollars going into programs that the idea was, can we...
Can we turn this country around?
Can we change?
Who's in charge?
Is it Lumumba?
Is it Sukarno?
Is it, you know, God, pick any number of folks during that period of time and create a government that's more friendly to our interests?
Again, I look at that and go, well, yeah.
Is USAID also projecting whatever they call it, soft power, diplomatic power?
Well, sure.
And that's another way of phrasing it, I suppose.
Were they also doing things like feeding the poor?
Providing medicines out there, doing actually legitimate things that I think sometimes people in a righteous world are like, well, that's exactly what they should be doing.
Well, yeah, they should be doing that.
We should be, you know, the USAT has got a lot of important programs that they run, right, that actually help people around the world who don't have many options.
But I think the problem is the people that are opposed to this administration are never going to see the good in anything that comes out, even if it does uncover undeniable fraud.
I think we're just so dug in now, especially the fog of war post-election, which seems real in this country.
Fog of hate on both sides, gloating on the right, and bitterness and anger and hyperbole as to the extent of what's happening on the left.
It's all a constitutional crisis and a destruction of democracy and a real dictator that's in place.
And all the things that they feared coming into this election now have come to light in their eyes.
No, again, yeah, and that is the messaging that's gone out.
You can see them coalesce around it.
You know, I think the first weeks after the election, there was confusion and, you know, sort of a – they were going through that grief cycle on the left.
But now I think you're seeing that they are, you know, coming together on that messaging.
I think now they're starting to get more focused.
They probably understand.
They'll probably take the House in two years.
So they're getting their shit together again.
I think that—and on the right side, I think you'd like to think that the gloating is a bit unnecessary, right?
Well, again, and you would think that creating a more efficient government would be a uniting concept, right?
And I think it could be.
But I keep going back to that same thing.
I've never been particularly impressed with the messaging, and I get it.
When I say that, people always, you know, on the right come after me and go, oh, God, well, that's what makes MAGA MAGA, you know, that's what makes, you know, Trump, Trump is, you know, just, and I don't disagree with sort of, again, the benefits sometimes of being disruptive, but I do think that, you know, you can't just look at USAID and say it's all, it's a big old criminal organization, right?
You should be a little bit more, I mean, Kevin O'Leary, you mentioned him earlier.
For all that talk, I guarantee you if he had a large company, he wouldn't just shit-can everything right off the bat.
So your perspective is that, of course there's waste, of course there's fraud, but if you don't understand international relations, if you don't understand this long tradition of supporting regimes that...
Have our interests in mind.
If we don't do that, someone else will.
They'll gain control of these areas.
This is just the reality of the world that we live in, and we should be influencing other countries.
How could you review USAID while this is all going on, while they're still able to spend money?
Because they're still able to...
If there is corruption, if they're still able to dump a bunch of money into a bunch of different projects and funnel stuff around and move stuff into these areas where it can't be traced, which is apparently where at least some of it goes.
I would want, look, if you're doing a corporate fraud investigation, you don't walk in and say, there's fraud everywhere here, right?
Where everybody's going.
No, you don't.
You go in and you do your investigation because you don't know what the iceberg looks like.
You don't know what's underneath the surface.
So you want to be able to go through it in a methodical way.
And, you know, if you walk into the World Bank and say, we think there's fraud here in this department over here.
And the World Bank, just as an aside, if they think there's fraud somewhere, they have to notify the people that they suspect of fraud that they're going to initiate a fraud investigation before they do it.
Yeah, well, I think I would argue that, you know, they're going to find this is a years-long process anyway, no matter how much of a, you know, jump they get at the starting block, you know, but I think that...
It was published by the Associated Press in March of 1962, a second investigation later that year by a patrolman named Wim van der Waal on behalf of Dutch colonial government, came to the same conclusion.
Van der Waal was given a skull bearing no lower jaw and a hole in the right temple, the hallmarks of the remains that had been headhunted and opened to consume the brains, which he turned over to Dutch authorities who never asked him to write a written report and never asked him to verbally report his conclusion.
The information was apparently deemed politically sensitive in part because the fragile state of the Dutch Empire in the Indonesian archipelago and in part because of Nelson Rockefeller's political celebrity in the United States.
The findings of van der Waal's investigation are restated in the written memoir of Anton van der Waal, a successor missionary to van Kessel.
Yeah, there's a famous story of a guy where they killed his friend, chopped him up, threw his guts on him, and then they gave him, I think, a 30-second head start, and he escaped.
Michael reportedly told his companions, I think I can make it, and jumped into the water.
That was the last time they saw him.
Oh, this is when he swam to the shore.
1961, Michael Rockefeller was traveling to this dangerous area of dense rainforest, mangrove swamps, and crocodile-infested mudflats known as the Land of the Lapping Death when a small catamaran capsized in rough seas.
This is the...
Oh, so Michael Rockefeller, a strong swimmer, immediately jumped in the sea and began to swim to shore.
Well, he thought he could make it, and he's already visited them before.
There was another article that I had read, Jamie, that actually recounted the moment he was killed, that they picked him up in a canoe and speared him in the canoe.
There's been multiple times, starting with seven years later, to try to investigate what happened, and I don't know how you would really go about doing that.
Yeah, the most recent article was like there was some recent revelation, Some information that was given to them by the tribespeople about what happened.
When they say 4.7 trillion, they don't give you a timeline.
It's like that was the thing about Politico, right?
Like there was this talk about, we gave Politico $8 million.
Well, sort of.
What the real story was, there's a subscription model for...
for Politico where you get news like instantaneously and it costs like 10,000 bucks and there was a bunch of those subscriptions that were in many different agencies.
You know, roll that out rather than saying, you know, they've been funding, you know, because in a short burst, it sounds much worse, right? - It's still, you still can argue, is this really necessary?
But I think this is important, too, because today now they're talking about Social Security.
Yeah.
And that people are receiving Social Security that are 150 years old.
But I don't think that is the reality as it's being explained by people who understand COBOL. The language and this computer programming language they use is ancient, right?
Which is kind of crazy that they're still using that, right?
And so, yeah, again, from a messaging perspective, you know, does Elon need to, like, you know, screenshot that and then send it out as a tweet or whatever we call X nowadays.
And then suddenly you've got, you know, a couple million people going, oh, my God, we're paying dead people.
I'm going to send this to you, Jamie, because I would confuse myself.
And so I was like, what exactly are they saying?
Because it seems like the people that understand that programming language are the ones that aren't jumping on board and saying, hey, this is what's happening.
Vampires exist amongst us.
There's 300-year-old people getting Social Security.
That's not what they're saying.
The people that actually understand it are saying that's not really...
There's a gentleman named House of Carter on X. He said...
This isn't a vampire conspiracy.
It's just COBOL, C-O-B-O-L. Legacy government systems, especially Social Security, still rely on COBOL, a language designed before anyone thought databases would need to track people beyond 99 years old.
The numbers you're laughing at aren't literal ages.
They're most likely misinterpreted categorical codes or data artifacts from outdated formatting.
Social Security isn't paying 150-year-olds.
The system uses fixed-width fields, and when modern databases misread them, they mistakenly interpret grouping codes as real ages.
This happens when old mainframe logic isn't properly translated into newer systems.
So no, there aren't thousands of people, over 150, getting checks, but there are a lot of outdated systems that need modernization.
Maybe focus on fixing that issue instead of hyping up a non-issue.
So, there's multiple people that have said the same kind of thing.
This guy says, I'm an old...
Programmer, coder in today's parlance.
As many old programmers know COBOL, young coders don't.
When Musk claims that Social Security is paying thousands of 150-year-olds, I think someone should let him know that COBOL, in COBOL, if a data is missing, if a data is missing, the program defaults to 1875. Example, 2025, 1875 equals 150. So for some reason, if data is missing, the program defaults to this ancient date, and it's just a problem with data.
But this other one that I just sent Jamie, so there's this woman who's a whistleblower, and she's saying they were incentivized to qualify illegals for long-term disability, to qualify illegals for Social Security for life.
So they were set for life.
And in quotes, she says, they wanted us to try to identify them in such...
Now, long-term Social Security disability is for life.
So if they got identified and qualify for long-term Social Security disability, they're as good as set up for life.
That doesn't sound like a refugee to me, she's saying, just being honest.
It sounds like someone who's planning on staying here.
So they're instructed to try to identify, to try to get the client because once they arrive here, now they're called clients.
So they told us that we needed to talk to the client and ask them if they had any headaches, reoccurring headaches, or any lower back problems.
Anything that would qualify them for Social Security long-term disability, which is crazy.
So this is something that, you know, when people are talking about the problems of Social Security, this seems, if she's telling the truth, this seems real.
unidentified
Just being honest, that sounds like somebody who's planning on staying here.
A refugee stays until the problem's over and then goes home.
That's right.
And so they instructed us to try to identify, to try to get the client, because once they arrive here, they're now called clients.
They're now called clients.
Okay.
Because clients pay.
Sure, sure.
I'm starting to see where this is leading here.
So they told us that we needed to talk to the client and ask them if they had any Headaches, recurring headaches, or any lower back problems.
Excuse me.
Anything that would qualify them for Social Security long-term disability.
The benefit of that would be you get a voter for life.
If you are in whatever party, whether it's the Republican Party or whoever it is that allows this to happen and hooks these people up and sets them up, you would think that those people are going to vote that way for life because those are the people that gave them American citizenship essentially, gave them Social Security for life.
All you have to do is tell them, look, you get this check for life.
And that is the theory, the narrative that says that's why the last four years we had essentially an open border policy was to bring in 10, 11, 12 million new voters, right?
My take is, if you've got a place that's awesome, and you've got a system that's awesome, expand awesomeness.
Don't bring in people that aren't awesome.
And don't bring in people from places that aren't awesome.
So the problem is, if you bring people in that are criminals and have a lifelong history of selling drugs and being involved in the cartel, they're not going to come over here, you know what, I need to join the union and be a pipefitter.
They're going to fucking continue to do what they've done their whole goddamn life.
So, like, the problem is not...
The problem is, where you're from sucks.
So I think the best way, I mean, and I'm not saying we should take over all these countries and run them, but the best way is to get...
And the last four years, and I would argue during the Obama administration, they oftentimes, from a national security perspective, seem to run it based on how they hoped the world would be, right?
As opposed to how the world actually is, right?
And so...
You know, like them or hate them, you know, again, the current administration tends to, you know, I think, look at things in a more pragmatic way.
Do you think they'll be able to do that with USAID? Do you think they'll be able to convince some of these other people that are all these USA first people that don't think we should be spending any money overseas that maybe some of this money is well spent for our best interest?
So, I mean, but again, hey, look, I think it's great in the sense that I never thought I'd see the day where some of these Arab states would turn around and say Hamas has got to go.
I mentioned it before, but that's a sea change.
That's a...
Big goddamn sea change.
And it's kind of like with Ukraine right now, right?
He comes out and he says, you know, okay, we're going to start these.
They finished already.
Earlier today, they finished conversations in Riyadh, in Saudi Arabia, between Sergey Lavrov and Marco Rubio and Steve Witkoff on the U.S. side to start the discussions about peace in the conflict, right?
Without Ukrainian representation or the Europeans there.
But now that they've done it, right, again, under this idea that, yeah, you can't, you have to bring them in, but the fact that you just jumped into the breach and got started, right?
I mean, you think about it.
In the previous administration or in a normal administration, I'd argue, getting to the table where you'd sit down and talk, look, this is the first time we've...
Talked to the Russians really in a serious way since the invasion back in 2022. So the fact that most administrations would have taken a year just to map out, okay, well, this is what the talks are going to look like.
And this is what the conference table will look like.
And this is where people are going to sit.
And this is what we're going to be able to say.
And it would take months and months and months to get that.
These guys just said, eh, fuck it.
Let's go over.
We're going to sit down.
We're going to talk with them.
Now that's forced.
Right?
That's forced the Europeans to say, okay, how do we get involved?
We got to be relevant.
And they do, right?
But the European nations and European institutions have allocated more money to Ukraine than the U.S. has.
I mean, they're up to, depending on numbers you look at, they're up to maybe $130 billion allocated in financial.
So now the U.S. is the leading military provider of military hardware gear.
But if you combine humanitarian, financial, and military all together...
EU institutions and EU countries have actually allocated more than the US has.
And that, you know, logic would say, buys them a seat at the table for any peace talks, aside from the fact that they're sitting right there, you know, close to Russia.
They've taken in a vast number of Ukrainian refugees.
You've got Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania sitting right there on the border with Russia.
They've got a real reason to want to be involved.
But, again...
Trump's saying, let's just start the conversation with Russia.
It's forced the EU to say, okay, how do we get involved?
How do we rethink?
Much like the Arab states with the Gaza issue.
So now they're saying, well, Keir Starmer over in the UK is saying, we'd be willing to put boots on the ground for some sort of peacekeeping force.
And other nations, some are pushing back.
Poland, Germany, they're not about deploying troops to Ukraine to enforce some sort of peace deal.
And they're not going to be involved in the future of what happens to the invaded country.
So they'll be involved.
And Marco Rubio has said as much.
But I think it's good.
I think, you know, people are really up in arms over the idea that they've started the talk without the Ukrainians sitting at the table.
But I don't think there's any intention in any plausible scenario where the U.S. doesn't get them involved here in the very near future because otherwise it's going nowhere.
I mean, look, Ukraine, one of their big problems over years and years has been corruption and fraud.
And one of the reasons why there was pushback against this idea of NATO, even though back in 2008 or 9, 2008, at a European summit, they actually said during the NATO summit, they said, yes, at some point in the future, Ukraine and Georgia will become members of NATO. We're not going to give you a timetable.
I'm not going to tell you what that's going to look like, but you can become members of NATO. But one of the problems has been the level of corruption within Ukraine.
So is some of that money, both from the US and from the EU, gone missing and lining pockets?
Oh, absolutely.
I mean, there's no doubt about it.
Look at Iraq, the money that we spent in Iraq and how much...
I mean, just any time you've got government disbursement of that size, it's like fucking COVID fraud, right?
Yeah, you're going to have people who are going to take advantage of it.
So, yeah, that's not a surprise.
And Tucker's right for pointing it out.
I'm just saying it's not rocket science.
How much?
Well, that's, again, you would like to think that Doge, one of their jobs would be to go...
And I think if there was more transparency in how the money is spent, as there should be, then maybe the taxpayers would be a little bit more understanding or lenient.
Well, my company was out in Iraq, you know, shortly, actually a little bit before, but then, you know, following the 2003 entry of the U.S. into Iraq.
And so we were there for a handful of years, right, providing security assistance to a variety of organizations.
And, you know, you didn't have to look hard or far to see, you know, there'd be some group coming into town saying, hey, we just started up this company, you know, and it's an 8A company.
Look, we're owned by Eskimos or, you know, handicapped women or whatever.
They just set up some bullshit company to get government contracts.
No experience, no other.
And, yeah, so...
We watch that unfold.
Anytime you have an environment that's steeped in chaos, fraud is definitely going to happen.
So you have to be incredibly aggressive and willing.
To hunt it down, right?
But I think sometimes the problem is in government, there's like an accepted loss concept, like with, you know, credit cards or retail operators, right?
We ain't got an accepted loss.
We know we're going to lose a certain amount each year to fraud.
Your evenings were spent with a bowl of unshelled nuts, walnuts, and you'd crack them, and that was your activity while you talked to your mom and dad or something.
If you had one of them ones that had a little portable one with the cord attached, and you'd hang it up on that like a desk one, you could bring a long cord if you were lucky.
I saw that, and it's front and center, but I know exactly who's voting in favor of it, because I've talked to those people who don't understand at all how it operates.
Well, it just throws a giant monkey wrench into whatever ecosystem there is.
But the reality of the ecosystem in Montana, where they did reintroduce wolves, was that they were very overpopulated with elk, to the point where, well, she was explaining this, they used to have these winter seasons for cow elk, and, you know, it's basically shooting fish in a barrel because they're stuck in deep snow, and you could just pick them off.
And they did that because they were heavily overpopulated.
The land couldn't sustain the numbers.
And so they offered opportunities for hunters.
Hey, it's great.
You shoot an elk, you get even a cow elk, you get like 150 pounds of meat, 200 pounds of meat.
They started in 2020 and they said, okay, all our...
Closed cases.
We're going to start, you know, compiling all of them in one place.
Why weren't they doing that 40 years ago, 50 years ago?
How do you not do that?
Have a central repository.
Anyway, so they said, this is what we're going to do.
So they did, and they said, we're updating the way that we digitize and hold on to all our records.
And during the course of that, then when Trump issued his executive order about the release of the files, and also for RFK and MLK, Then the Bureau says, well, we were able to, because we'd done this digitizing and this way of tracking our records, we were able to find 2,400 documents that are related that we just didn't know about.
So there's those, and then there's maybe 5,000 other documents left that haven't been released.
I think what we're going to find is, this is just me speculating, obviously, but I think what we're going to find with the released documents is, A, there's no smoking gun.
B, it's not going to stop people from believing what they believe.
It's not going to put anything to rest.
And I think also there probably will be – one of the reasons I think some of these things were withheld was because it's embarrassing perhaps to the CIA and the FBI also in terms of their collaboration.
Look, Lee Harvey Oswald was on their radar for good reasons, right, for counterintelligence reasons.
He had lived over in Minsk.
He defected to the Soviet Union.
He'd lived over there for three years, came back.
So that alone puts him on the radar, right?
Now, suddenly, he's a CIA concern.
So the CIA is definitely monitoring him.
And then he goes down to Mexico, he goes to the Cuban and Soviet embassies, right?
He's desperate to get involved in the revolution, even though he's, you know, the Soviets by that time had decided he's a complete loser.
But I think it's – I guess – so my point is that I think he was on the radar.
And I think what happened was in the documents we may find that the CIA at the time was not proactive enough.
And they didn't work well with the FBI. There was real friction between those two.
And I think that, you know, if they had, if they had brought in the FBI, informed them, said, look, we've got the Cuban embassy and the Soviet embassy down in Mexico under observation.
We've had this guy on our radar for some time.
He's now come back to Dallas and New Orleans.
He's back in the States.
You know, we've got to keep an eye on him.
I think if they had done that, maybe history changes.
So he spells plunge, P-L-A-U-G. I guess it's plunge.
Wrist into bathtub of hot water.
Somewhere a violin plays.
As I watch my life whirl away, I think to myself, how easy to die and a sweet death to violins.
Oswald was discovered in time to thwart his attempted suicide.
He was taken to a hospital in Moscow where he was kept until October 28, 1959. Still intent, however, in staying in the Soviet Union, Oswald went on October 31st to the American Embassy to renounce his U.S. citizenship.
Mr. Richard A. Snyder, the then second secretary and senior consul officer at the embassy, testified that Oswald was extremely sure of himself and seemed to know what his mission was.
He took charge in a sense of the conversation right from the beginning.
He presented the following signed note.
I, Lee Harvey Oswald, do hereby request that my present citizenship in the United States of America be revoked.
And then they let him back in the United States.
So this is why the more tinfoil hat wearing amongst us say this fucking guy, he was working for the government.
This was all bullshit.
They were setting it up and they were using him as a patsy.
And I think the reason there is because, look, they, you know, Hoover and the federal and state law enforcement had a real hard-on for Martin Luther King, obviously, right?
And they were covering him three ways to Sunday, so including wiretaps, some that were signed off by RFK, right, by Robert Kennedy, so as Attorney General.
So I think...
You know, the family is like, look, do you really need to release these records?
Because I think they're worried about, you know, embarrassing information about their perhaps about his lifestyle.
Yeah, it's been talked about and everything, but I think if you dump it out there, you know, whereas...
Whereas with JFK's documents, look, they've released some 5 million pages of his, right?
I mean, estimates are like, oh, we've released like 99% of the documents.
It's not that high a percentage with MLK. So I think there's a potential for embarrassment, but I also, same thing, I don't think in those documents, because I don't think anybody's going to, they're not going to self-incriminate, right?
And I do think that there was...
There was something going on.
Look, James Earl Ray is a much more interesting case study, I think anyway, than Lee Harvey Oswald.
James Earl Ray and his behavior leading up to the shooting at the Lorraine Motel, kind of going off the radar, disappearing.
You know, the guy couldn't keep himself out of jail.
He was a failed petty thief, right?
And he was just a fuck-up.
And then suddenly he disappears off the radar screen and he shows up and he, you know, looks like a college professor.
And he's kind of got his shit together.
And then after shooting him, he ends up in Belgium.
My friend Evan Hafer has an interesting perspective on it, you know, Special Forces guy.
He thinks that those guys who got fucked over at the Bay of Pigs when they didn't get air support from Kennedy, that if you were going to find a group of hardened individuals that were essentially...
Well, also, he fucked them over because they got him elected in Chicago and then he turned on them and then they started investigating them and they're like, hey, motherfucker.
And then depending on who you talk to, Jack Ruby was either mobbed up or he did it because he was Jewish and he didn't want, you know, the Jewish community to take the...
ETH to accuse Chinese head fund CEOs of using brain computer weapons.
Allegations of mind control tech spark a crypto donation.
Yeah, this is it.
How do you say that name?
Hulazi burned 603 ETH to allege Chinese hedge fund CEO's use of brain computer weapons.
Large donations totaling of 1,950 ETH were made to various addresses including WikiLeaks in Ukraine.
A self-identified Chinese programmer has burned 603 ETH, approximately $1.65 million, and donated 1,900 ETH. And so this guy, I don't understand why he's donating the money.
Okay, he sent 500 ETH to the Byrne address with this message.
The CEO of Quan Day Investment, Feng Jin, and Yuji, used brain computer weapons to persecute all company employees and former employees, and even they themselves were controlled.
The individual, identifying as Hu Le Zi, Sent multiple on-chain messages accusing Quan Day Investment CEO Feng Jin and Zhu Zhu Zi of using what they term brain computer weapons against employees and former employees.
Quan Day Investment, known as Wizard Quant, is a hedge fund specializing in quantitative trading.
Well, but again, the amazing thing is that everything kind of repeats itself, I suppose.
You could look at it that way.
I'm not going to go into some grand thought, but look, I mean, we're engaged in World War I-style warfare in Europe now, right, with trench warfare between Ukraine and Russia.
We're talking about mind control from the Chinese regime.
That was what started MKUltra was fear of the Soviets and the North Koreans at the time getting engaged in mind control and the worry that we were somehow behind the curve and that they had this technology capability to control minds.
I wonder what's the method they're supposedly using to control these people's minds.
It was pretty vague.
Slaves to the digital machine.
Elaborates on alleged activities they're engaged in, which include deploying brain computer chips to control all citizens until they become complete slaves to the digital machine.
Sillumini, distraught, lazy, who described himself as an ordinary computer programmer and entrepreneur.
That's what I would say too, if I work for the Chinese government.
Claims he's been controlled by the mind control organization from the time he was born, but only discovered he's being manipulated in October, 2022.
So from the time he was born, they had a chip in his brain.
The thing about the release of those documents, though, that seems to me that that's something that you would document.
Yes.
Rather than say, I killed JFK, where do I sign?
Instead of that...
That's more tangible.
Like, if the government had recovered some crash in 1947 in Roswell, New Mexico, and it really was an alien spaceship, that seems like something they would document.
And it's also the same like with the COVID files, if there's such a thing as COVID files.
But sure, go through and look.
I mean, transparency, you know, to the degree that you can where, you know, you're not releasing national secrets that are going to get people killed.
Great.
But the Epstein files, you know, so I think there's real value in saying we've got – because the government always overclassifies, always overclassifies.
And, you know, it's unnecessary and it creates, you know, this distrust, I think, half the time.
For sure.
Yeah, they're just like, what the fuck?
We don't believe anything you're saying now.
So release everything.
Let the chips fall.
Because I don't think, honestly, I don't think there's a lot of information there.
But I do think with the UFOs, all the documentation and the investigations that took place of unknown sightings, but it's still going to not convince people that we're not holding on to, you know, crashed.
Well, when you've got guys like David Grush, you know, who's the whistleblower that comes out and says, not only do we have these ships, but we have biological entities.
Also, if I was going to obscure some sort of a government propulsion system that's like 50 years ahead of anything we could imagine, that's how I would do it.
I'd obscure it by saying, oh, there's some fucking alien technology.
It's available, and we don't really know how to use it, but they do visit us from time to time, and occasionally they crash.