FaceTime or Ask Patrick any questions on https://minnect.com/
Patrick Bet-David Podcast Episode 107. In this episode Patrick Bet-David is joined by former CIA Operative Matt Zeller and Gerard Michaels.
Download the podcasts on all your favorite platforms https://bit.ly/3sFAW4N
Text: PODCAST to 310.340.1132 to get added to the distribution list
The Bet-David Podcast discusses current events, trending topics, and politics as they relate to life and business. Stay tuned for new episodes and guest appearances.
About guests:
Matthew C. Zeller, is an American author, politician, and businessman. He is the CEO of No One Left Behind. He is a United States Army veteran of the Afghan War and he ran for Congress in 2010 as the Democratic nominee for New York's 29th congressional district. You can follow Matt on Instagram here: https://bit.ly/3z6nkl7
Gerard Michaels is an award-winning Writer, Director, Actor, Podcaster and Comedian with over 40 million views online. Follow him on Instagram here: https://bit.ly/3fMja9z
Connect with Patrick on social media: https://linktr.ee/patrickbetdavid
About the host:
Patrick Bet-David is the founder and CEO of Valuetainment Media, the #1 YouTube channel for entrepreneurship with more than 3 million subscribers. He is the author of the #1 Wall Street Journal bestseller Your Next Five Moves (Simon & Schuster) and a father of 2 boys and 2 girls. He currently resides in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida.
Bet-David is passionate about shaping the next generation of leaders by teaching the fundamentals of entrepreneurship and personal development while inspiring people to break free from limiting beliefs to achieve their dreams.
Follow the guests in this episode:
Gerard Michaels: https://bit.ly/3fMja9z
Matt Zeller: https://bit.ly/3z6nkl7
To reach the Valuetainment team you can email: info@valuetainment.com
Want Patrick on your podcast? - http://bit.ly/329MMGB
#PBDPodcast
00:00 - Start
00:23 - Matt Zeller Background
6:29 - Matt Zeller Afghanistan Commission
15:50 - The Taliban is lying to us
20:33 - Who botched the Afghanistan withdrawal
37:23 - Global Federalism/Ending Military Industrial Complex
48:16 - Event 201
57:48 - We were not prepared for the pandemic/Taking down the grid
1:13:00 - Is Trump A Russian Asset **HEATED**
1:36:42 - We're raising pansies today/Pete Butigeg For President
1:49:27 - Are UFO's Real?
Live today with Matt Zeller, who if you're not familiar with Matt Zeller, I think, what was it, three, four months ago, where you went viral all over the place, Afghanistan.
I think Brian Williams had you on.
Interesting.
Brian Williams just recently stepped down and he had you on and you were talking about Afghanistan, what the decision they made to leave Afghanistan was right.
And you went off, and the next thing you know, you and I spoke, I think the day after or two days later.
And then from there, we're seeing what's happened to Afghanistan now.
So before, if some people don't know your background, Matt, if you don't mind taking a quick second and give everybody your background.
Sure.
I enlisted after 9-11.
My family comes from a long line of people who signed up to fight when this country needs them.
My grandpa joined the Navy right after Pearl Harbor, for example.
So 9-11 for me was like our generation's Pearl Harbor.
I signed up to serve in the military, ended up getting recruited in the CIA, did a tour or two overseas in Afghanistan.
And yeah, I've been intimately involved in helping the Afghans get out of Afghanistan now for the better part of a decade because the only reason I'm sitting here talking to you is because my Afghan interpreter saved my life in a battle 13 years ago when he shot and killed two Taliban who were about to kill me.
And wasn't there a story done on that seven years ago with BBC or something like that?
Caroline, you can come here.
It's all over the place.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I think everybody at this point has told that story.
Yeah.
Matt, question for you.
So from that moment when you spoke and you called out, just to kind of bring people up to date if they didn't see it, here's what I remember about what you said.
You got on and you said, we send them the plans.
We've been telling them what to do.
We've been explaining to them how to leave.
Nobody responded back.
Nobody called us back.
You said you voted for Biden.
You said, this is a guy, you're not a Trump guy.
You voted for Biden.
You supported his philosophy.
I knocked doors in Philadelphia for him.
That's what I'm saying.
So, and then you are saying we can't go on lying about what we're doing and saying we did exactly what we're supposed to be doing.
But this is what I did.
So this morning, I'm leaving the gym and I'm sitting there saying, let me see what, how much, how much media has Matt Zeller gotten since those comments he made?
So I went on.
No joke.
I went on and I looked at your stuff last 90 days because that was about four months ago, three or four months ago.
So I looked.
There is nothing on you on media the last 30 days.
Nothing with any major media.
I don't see anything with MSNBC.
I don't see anything with CNN.
I don't see anything with Fox.
And everybody had you on for that week that you were on.
So who did you piss off where people don't want to hear your thoughts?
Apparently everybody.
Okay.
Tell me why, though.
Tell me why everybody's pissed off at you.
I know for a fact that I've been told specifically the administration won't meet with me or any group that has me at a meeting because I put them on blast on national television because they were lying to the American people.
As you said, we on the 9th of February 2021, a group that I'm a part of called the Association of Wartime Allies wrote a report highlighting, calling to attention to the fact that Afghanistan was going to collapse.
It was going to collapse faster than Washington could respond, and that it was going to necessitate the largest airlift in human history in order to get the vulnerable Afghans who had served alongside us, who are in need of rescue, out of the country.
And we were trying to call attention that it needed to begin at that moment because we understood that Biden at that point was up against what we called the Trump surrender.
They had surrendered Afghanistan to the Taliban in Doha in 2020.
There was an obligation that we were going to be out of the country by the 1st of May.
You know, Biden blew past that deadline and said, well, we'll extend it to August.
But the reality was that from where we were standing in February, we saw there was maybe 90 days on the clock and we had to start acting then.
So I, you're right.
I knocked, I'm a proud Democrat.
I ran for office as a Democrat.
I was the Democratic nominee for a district in New York State for Congress in 2010.
I thought that given everything I've done for the party and my connections, the fact that these are friends of mine, I know Jake Sullivan.
I know people in the White House.
These are people I socialize with in Washington.
So I thought if I send them a private email, I'm not putting this out on the New York Times.
I'm not going on CNN.
I'm not even going on a podcast or a blog post.
This was a private email.
So before you publicly called out, you kind of gave him a private section.
I gave them months.
Yeah.
Well, this was, I mean, you were part of the think tank that put together.
Yes.
You actively did step by step logistically how you would do the we wrote a white paper when no one paid attention to it.
Then we took it to like a proper think tank that I'm a part of called the Truman Project.
And we said, let's make this a thing.
Let's put some organizational support behind it, make it look professional.
Maybe they're just not paying attention because it came from me individually and not from a group of people that they would listen to more.
What we ended up learning was that they just weren't interested in the truth.
They weren't interested in doing it.
Why, though?
Why?
Why would they not be?
Because there is an arrogance in this administration that they think they know better.
And there is, honestly, they were more concerned about the optics of chaos than they were about doing the hard thing.
This is an administration that seems to be afraid of making the tough decisions.
They're afraid of making the hard call, right?
So they were more concerned about the narrative on television being, oh, this is bad, than actually having to take, roll the hard six and say, you know what, we're going to take something that might not be politically possible popular here.
Just to clarify, and that's an interesting point that you make because they seem to have that issue 100% with foreign policy.
Yes.
Domestic policy, they have no problem telling people to shut up and do what you're told.
Correct.
It makes no sense.
It's schizophrenic in its nature, right?
It seems like there's the foreign policy aspect of this White House that is very afraid of the world and is very afraid of how the American people are going to react to whatever they do.
And so they choose to just simply do nothing.
And by doing nothing, they actually engender the very worst outcome that they fear the most.
You're seeding too much ground to Autocrats, for sure.
So go from there.
Because right now, if you look at the news, you're not really hearing as much about Afghanistan as you did three months ago.
You're going to soon.
See, I've been busy.
I don't just sit down.
So what's going on behind closing?
I don't just sit around and wait for the media to call me.
So the last major media appearance I did was on the 14th of September.
Andrea Mitchell had me on her show.
I had just spent that morning watching Secretary Blinken get hammered by members of the House of Representatives and the day before he had been before the Senate.
And it was abundantly.
I remember that.
It was abundantly clear to anybody who watched, we weren't getting answers.
We were getting kabuki, right?
They were using Afghanistan as a cudgel.
Both sides were retreating into their narrative.
Democrats were saying we did no wrong.
Republicans were saying you're the worst thing ever.
And nobody was actually getting to the bottom of what went wrong and how do we prevent it from ever happening again.
But with Blinken, the worst part about that was he seemed as interested in the process.
He was like...
It was performative.
He was just there to check a box, right?
This is the time that I come and get yelled at.
And then this is it, right?
That's how it seemed to be.
It's like, okay, I've done my two days in the hot seat.
And that was Afghanistan.
20 years, $2.2 trillion.
Over 2,600 Americans killed in action.
Over 21,000 Americans injured, not counting the 66,000 plus Afghan military members, not even the civilians who died in this war.
You don't just do two days of hearings.
So I said on TV, she asked, you know, what do you think of this?
And I just, I spoke the truth.
I said, I think what was needed was a 9-11 style commission that was properly constituted to, in a bipartisan or even nonpartisan nature, investigate the entirety of the Afghanistan.
It will now, because guess what?
For the last three months, I have been very quietly working this issue.
So, Tammy Duckworth saw me on Andrea Mitchell and called me up and said, we agree.
We're writing something called the Afghan War Commission Act of 2021.
We need your help.
They then had me call up some Republican members of the Senate that I know and get them to jump on board to co-sign and co-sponsor this piece of legislation.
And then I did the same thing in the House of Representatives.
So much for those social circles, buddy.
It passed the House two weeks ago.
It's in what's called the conference package of the National Defense Authorization Act.
So the House has already passed their version of the law that funds the Defense Department for the next year.
The Senate is supposed to be passing it at some point this week.
It's considered non-controversial, right?
So it is going to absolutely pass when the Senate votes on this thing.
It's part of the language that everyone already agrees on, that it's simply just they're waiting for a vote.
As soon as the Senate votes on it, it goes to the president's desk and it'll be signed.
And what this is going to do is going to transform the discussion on Afghanistan because this commission will exist for the next four years.
It is going to be, it's modeled after the 9-11 commission.
So it's eight Republicans, eight Democrats.
No one can be elected and be on the commission at the same time.
You can't hold federal office in any way.
No one can be elected and be on the commission at the same time.
Correct.
So there's nobody who's using it to like politically grant.
You're not using it to just get sound bites to help with your next election.
It is going to have, this is what's, there's never been anything like this in American history.
It has the purview to investigate the entirety of the Afghan war, all 20 years.
All four administrations, all four White Houses, all four intelligence communities, all four defense departments, all four states.
Who's not happy about this?
And who's happy about this?
I would imagine that if you served in Washington in the last 20 years and worked on Afghanistan, you're probably going to get called by the commission at some point to testify.
Some people are going to be thrilled at that.
Some people are going to absolutely not want to be able to do that.
So give me like, who's not going to be happy about this?
I'm positive probably that Jake Sullivan in the White House and Mark and for example, Ron Klein, the current chief of staff, probably are not going to enjoy their time.
I'm absolutely positive the Trump people are not going to enjoy their time, particularly Pompeo in front of this commission, right?
Because this commission is going to get to the bottom of things.
It's going to figure out what went wrong.
Where did the war pivot?
Why did we end up losing?
Because this isn't what winning looks like.
Most importantly, at least for me as a veteran, my hope is that what comes out of this is policy and procedures that prevents the chaos that we saw at the end of a war from ever happening yet.
We have to fundamentally change how we go to and come home from war.
So let me give you a cynical citizen's perspective on that.
I mean, it sounds good, but at the same time, for my adult life, I've lived and I've never once seen any politician outside of maybe Ron Blagojevich ever held accountable for anything that they've ever done.
True.
I've never seen anybody in any capacity that was a civilian contractor be held accountable for anything they've done.
I think I read once out of the $2.2 trillion that we spent, over $2 trillion went to civilian contractors.
I mean, that's, I mean, there's a lot of people that became mega wealthy off of this.
Oh, yeah.
And they profited immensely off of this.
And we live in a society where rich people don't go to jail.
So what does this hope to accomplish?
I hear this and I say, okay, there's another couple billion dollars about to be spent on government lawyers.
There's another, you know, years of hand-wringing that that's going to be done.
And at the end of it, nobody goes to jail.
At the end of it, nobody's held accountable.
It's the Panama Papers.
It's, I mean, you know, who went to jail for the Panama Papers?
Julian Assange, the guy who was right about everything.
So I mean, listen, I'm not trying to dissuade you in any way from this.
Yeah, nor could I.
But I just, from our perspective, it's like, man, what do we do as citizens?
Because these people are never held accountable.
This is what we do.
I know that, look, I get it.
Accountability begins with an investigation.
It begins with shedding light on what went wrong.
So few Americans actually know what happened in Afghanistan, right?
That this is where that accountability begins.
That word that you use, accountability, is so important.
It's what veterans talk about all the time, right?
Because at my level in the military, if I had fucked up, I go to jail, right?
I go to the brig.
I get court-martialed.
I can be punished.
A general messes up.
They get to retire and they go get a sit on a board somewhere.
Where we bomb and we kill them.
And kill seven people.
And they're like, it's an honest mistake.
As a buddy of mine said, the Defense Department regrets to inform that your entire family has been killed due to processes and procedures not being properly followed.
Like, come on.
Yeah.
Come on.
I had a buddy of mine in a buddy of mine in Afghanistan brought to held his like his feet to the fire because of a firefight in which he had to call in an airstrike and then ended up killing some civilians, right?
And it was a legitimate airstrike and his feet was held to the fire because they wanted to make absolutely sure that all the right things were considered before they dropped these bombs.
These drone strikes, that's the difference now with warfare, man.
If you don't have people on the ground identifying people, you're just trying to rely on some kid over in Nellis Air Force Base in Nevada to try to figure out if the dude there is.
I mean, they killed the guy in Afghanistan we're talking about right now because he was packing water jugs into his car.
That's why he was killed.
It looked like he was packing what they thought were explosives.
It's called a war crime, isn't it?
It is.
It is.
And yet we don't hold anybody accountable.
This is how we hold it.
So what you're working on right now is that public info.
Do people know that you're working on this or it's private?
No, it is going to be public.
I mean, I'm telling you now, first person.
There will be a big media blitz about this coming out.
I'm going to be tooting my horn.
Trust me.
Because I put my head down.
I had to get this done.
This is actually how shit gets done in this country is these commissions.
Think about it this way.
My buddy Paul Rykoff, who is one of the founders of an organization called the Iraq and Afghan Veterans of America.
Paul is an Iraq war vet and he's currently teaching a class at Amherst College, his alma mater, on 9-11.
And everyone in the class was born after 9-11, which to me is mind-boggling.
Yeah, that's interesting.
He said the most invaluable teaching tool he has is the 9-11 Commission Report.
I don't know if you've ever read it, but it's actually the most easily readable government document ever made.
It reads like a book.
It doesn't read like a boring government document.
We all live through 9-11.
I'm sure for a lot of us, myself included, it feels like I'm back there yesterday if I talk about it, right?
But my daughter, who was born in 2012, has no clue.
This is going to be an invaluable resource for her.
There's going to come a time in our country's history where there are going to be Americans who look at Afghanistan the same way some of us look at like World War II and Korea and Vietnam.
We don't have a contextual experience with it.
It's something that our parents and grandparents did.
It's something we read about, right?
I'm hoping that the report that comes out of this is as invaluable to future generations as the 9-11 Commission.
Because again, we've never done a post-mortem at the end of a war like this.
We've never sat down.
In the military, we call it an after-action review.
The joke would be, nobody's going home until everybody gives me three positives and three negatives, right?
Right?
That is what we're going to be doing now.
We're going to be doing a proper after-action review of everything that went right and wrong in the war.
And this is good business, right?
Because this helps us prepare for the next war, too.
Yeah.
So, so, so go to it, though.
Go to, though, in regards to what we heard.
So, the moment Afghanistan was taking place three, four months, you saw the interviews that was going on with the Taliban, and you saw how, you know, the Taliban interviews were.
Well, they're saying they're going to be good to women.
They're saying, they're saying they're going to treat them fairly.
They're saying, you know, when you would see the interviews, one of the Taliban would say, You're talking about 20 years ago.
Things have changed.
I just saw 60 minutes.
Just saw 60 Minutes this weekend.
Well, I saw that.
Yeah, we're not sitting there talking about we are taking care of women.
That's an old thing you're thinking about.
And then you hear the stories where a video you see a 55-year-old, 60-year-old man taking a 12-year-old girl to be his wife because the mom and dad are giving her up because they need the money for food.
And you say, Wait a minute, that doesn't match what you just said.
And being a Middle Eastern, having been born and raised in Iran, heard a lot of those stories, saw those stories personally, saying, Yeah, this is what could happen in a place like that from your perspective, having contacts up there, having people up there.
What's going on in Afghanistan right now?
It is the nightmare we predicted it would be.
So, women have no place in society, they're trapped at home.
Compulsory education for women ends the minute they reach puberty.
They're not allowed to go to schools.
So, is CBS lying?
CBS might be talking to like the Taliban.
Like, think of like North Korea.
You go to North Korea, right?
A lot of people go to North Korea, they get like the official tour.
They take you to all the things that are open, everything else is actually closed.
You don't get to really see the poverty behind the scenes.
It's the same thing in the Taliban.
There's the dime tour that they take foreign media on.
You go out and actually talk to the people in the country, though, and people are starving.
As we predicted, this winter is going to kill more people through starvation and exposure than the Taliban could ever possibly hope to with their bombs and bullets.
And the reason why is because the international community fed and fueled Afghanistan for the last 20 years.
Afghanistan is holistically dependent on imports to feed and survive its population, right?
The Taliban have no international contacts or support.
They don't know how to manage the economy.
So, what they've done is they have completely become dependent on Pakistan.
They're selling off U.S.-made military equipment to Pakistan to try to feed themselves.
What aid they are getting from the World Food Program, I can show you right now if you want.
This is sent to me two days ago.
Here, I'll show you a picture.
The Taliban are refusing to give out food aid to anybody other than Taliban fighters.
So, if you are here, this is sent to me by a source at Afghanistan.
So, it's a picture.
Let me air drop it to him so you can put it on the screen.
Sure.
So, it's similar to the horror stories that we've heard of, like Mogadishu back in the 90s.
It's just as bad.
Like, people are selling their kids.
VT Studii Mac.
VT MacBook Pro.
People are selling their kids to feed themselves.
There's a picture on social media this morning of a guy literally selling his shoes in Kabul to try to buy food for his kids.
The BBC had an article today.
No, no, the New York Post had an article today about an Afghan woman who sold one of her twins to help buy food for the other one.
I mean, people are making.
Selling to who and for what?
Other people.
Selling the children.
Yeah.
She sold one of her twins.
Yeah.
So that she could buy food for the other one.
It's in the New York Post this morning.
But this picture that you're putting up.
This is Mario.
I don't know why Tyler's putting up Mario's picture.
It's give me a second.
I'm finding it.
This was taken by a source I have in Afghanistan.
Help them out.
It shows.
There it is.
Wait on.
Go back.
Down to the right bottom.
Right bottom.
So Mario Mario.
You're worried about what you're going to show Mario looking.
Yo.
All right.
Here we go.
All right.
So those are the Taliban.
They're standing in front of World Food Program and UNAIDS.
So that's actual food and then winter blankets and everything that comes from the United Nations via the World Food Program.
The Taliban in this photo are distributing it in, I believe this is in Helmand or Kandahar.
And what my source who was in the room was telling me is that the Taliban were saying that this is only for their people.
If you fought again, if you didn't fight with them or for them.
Your source is in the room.
Yes, taking that photo.
And what he was being told was that because they were basically you had to prove that you fought with the Taliban to get this aid.
They can.
So there's a trust me, I've been begging the U.S. government to make a deal because these people are transactional.
You know, our food and fuel for their people.
But let me read something to you.
Let me read something to you.
But apparently, by the way, that's not diplomatically allowed.
We don't put conditions on food aid, even though they put conditions on who they distribute to.
Well, Taliban pleads with Washington to show mercy and compassion and release $10 billion in frozen funds when it seized control of Afghanistan.
Afghanistan's foreign minister, Amir Khan Mutaki, said the funds would help millions of country citizens that are in desperate need.
He also claimed Afghanistan's new Taliban rulers are committed in principle to education and jobs for girls and women, a marked departure for their previous time in power.
We saw a history of oppression and human rights abusers.
Moutaki comments are not the first time he made a plea for the funds from Afghanistan's central bank to be released.
However, in October, Deputy United States Treasury Secretary Wally Adeyamo told the U.S. Senate Committee that he saw no situation in which the Taliban would be allowed to access the reserves.
What's the likelihood of these guys getting the reserves?
Never.
Okay.
All right.
So that's good news if they're not going to get the reserves.
So even the current administration is not going to release.
This current administration, I honestly couldn't tell you what a Trump administration would do.
I think he is such a moron when it comes to this stuff that he might actually think that he could get a deal with them and give them the money thinking that somehow it's going to lead to better whatever.
Who's a moron?
Trump.
You think Trump's a bigger moron than Biden?
When it comes to foreign policy, absolutely.
They surrendered Afghanistan to the Taliban.
The deal they signed in Doha, that's why the commission is so important.
You can't just look at one part of Afghanistan.
You have to look at the whole narrative and everything changes after Doha.
The Taliban were high-fiving each other in the room.
Do you get that?
They literally high-fived each other after Pompeo signed the deal because they realized that they had won.
The deal that we signed obligated us to pull all of our contract support from the Afghan military.
Everything.
We did all of their maintenance on their aircraft.
I have friends of mine who are Afghan Army Special Forces that are now fighting a resistance in Panchir.
And what they told me was that they were in the middle of a battle when all of a sudden their air support just disappeared.
It just went away.
There was no one flying helicopters.
Their intelligence went down.
Their communications went down.
Why?
Because all of the contractors that were actually providing those services, like U.S. contractors that were contracted to the Afghan military, under the deal we signed with the Taliban, had to be pulled by July.
There was, we signed a surrender agreement.
He signed that.
I don't care how popular he might be about anything else.
When it comes to Afghanistan, that man surrendered the country to the Taliban.
So it would be more accurate in your mind to consider this a retreat, not a withdrawal?
Is that?
I don't know what you would call.
No, this wasn't.
What just happened in August is beyond retreat.
It's a fiasco.
That was a collapse.
That was a complete and total abandonment of a country.
And that was why we were trying to warn about.
We saw all of this coming and we understood that the only way you were going to properly prevent the chaos that you ended up experiencing in the waning days of August was if we had begun this evacuation in the middle of winter when we controlled every single airfield in the country, when we still had 2,500 troops that the Taliban were afraid of.
Yeah.
That they wouldn't engage with, right?
Because they understood that if they escalated violence, it was going to be returned to a war that they understood that they were winning at that point.
Look, the one time I ever got to talk to a member of the Taliban was 2008.
We had just gotten into a battle that morning.
The Taliban had taken on an Afghan police force that we had been training.
And these guys had just gotten back from their training.
So they were actually pretty proficient at that point.
They hadn't sold off all their weapons and equipment at that point.
Taliban engages this unit.
The Afghan police end up killing most of them.
By the time we're able to get to the police, they've actually executed.
They had captured a bunch of these guys live and they'd shot most of them in the back of the head, all but one guy.
So I get this guy.
We explain to the Afghans that they can't kill him, that he is now a prisoner of war.
He has rights and he has to come with us for questioning because he's more valuable alive.
So I take this guy over and we're now waiting for a helicopter to pick him up and take him away.
And I realized I get a chance to talk to the Taliban.
I've never seen my enemy up close.
I finally get a chance to talk to this guy.
So I sit down as close as I am to you and I take off my helmet.
He looks at me.
He's terrified.
He's in flex cuffs, right?
And so I make the universal symbol of, do you want something to drink and eat?
He nods.
So I have some food and water brought over and then I take a sip of the water and I eat a bit of the food to show him it's not poison and he can trust me.
And then I make the universal symbol, do you want a cigarette?
Same thing.
I light up a cigarette in my mouth, take a drag, show that it's not poison, hand it to him.
And then as he's sitting there and he's smoking a cigarette and he's drinking water and he's eating some food and he kind of calms down a little bit, I asked him, I said, can I ask you a question?
When was the last time you had something to eat today?
And he said, actually, I haven't eaten in two days.
I said, really?
Do you understand that my country's flying in crab legs from Alaska tonight in steak?
Because it's Tuesday and that's how they feed us on Tuesday.
But you haven't eaten in two days.
I said, do you know how many bullets you had on your person when we captured you?
He shook his head.
No, I said, I counted your weapon.
You had eight bullets in your weapon.
Eight.
I have 300 just in magazines on my chest alone.
There's another 20,000 rounds in my truck, right?
I said, do you have an Air Force?
No.
I said, do you have artillery?
Well, we have some mortars.
But I said, what happens if I injure you?
Do you have a doctor or a hospital that comes and gets you?
He goes, no, unless we can get back to Pakistan, we probably die.
I said, do you understand then that if you hurt me, my government is going to spare no expense to make sure I can come back here and kill you?
I have an Air Force, brother.
I got artillery.
I got better armament.
I got better arms.
I'm better fed.
I'm better equipped.
Why in the hell are you fighting me?
Because I'm not here for your women and I'm not here to convert you away from Islam.
That you've been told.
I'm just here to make sure that your country isn't used to one day attack mine again and maybe possibly give your kids a better chance.
So why are you fighting me?
I'm not your enemy.
This guy, who had a Quranic education, meaning he went to a madrasa and he memorized the Quran as his schooling, sits in front of me, takes a drag on his cigarette, points at my watch, and says, You Americans have all the watches.
We have all the time.
This was 2008.
I knew at that moment we were going to lose.
I knew at that moment he understood how to better articulate their strategy for victory than we ever were able to.
In 20 years in Afghanistan, I challenge you to find what the definition, the U.S. government definition of victory in the war was.
It does not exist.
I looked.
Donald Rumsfeld actually said out loud, he had no idea what he was doing there and he didn't know how to define the enemy.
The closest we could get to, and that might have been the most honest answer anybody ever said in government.
The closest I ever heard was it was the absence of al-Qaeda and the Taliban.
Well, the absence of an ideology, once it's embodied in one person, you can't defeat it.
I want to address something here because you went through a lot of different things there, and I want to kind of bring you back a little bit.
So, number one, it is a powerful story.
You have the watches, we have the time.
Absolutely.
It tells you who has leverage because it's a story of patience, okay?
It's outlast.
We're going to outlast you, and eventually we'll flip on you, and we'll get what we want.
We'll outbleed you.
But this is the point I want to make to you.
So, number one, you said Trump is a, what word did you call him?
You said he's a sweetheart, he's brilliant, he's a genius.
What was the word you use?
I forgot.
War on.
Okay, that's the word you use.
And you said, because he pretty much gave him a what?
That we're going to by July, the contracts, all this other stuff.
The worst deal on the business.
You leave a little bit out, though.
You leave a little bit out.
The worst deal on the business.
Listen, you sound like the part that I'm going to push you, give you a little bit of pushback here is the following.
Why is it that the one thing Obama and Biden have in common, everything bad that happened during their administration was Bush's fault and Trump's fault?
Why is that?
I don't understand.
Why is it with everything bad thing that happened in Trump's administration was Obama's fault.
But wait a minute.
But then the part and part of every American president.
But then what you're doing, then what you're doing is you're playing to that.
So set that part aside because the agreement, if you look, let me finish.
I've listened to you for 10 minutes.
The agreement was, yes, here's the contract in July, but it was also we leave properly in May in the right sequence.
The biggest challenge with here is Trump's not the president anymore.
So you can't say, oh, it's Trump's watch.
It is not on Trump's watch.
They can sit there and say whatever they want to say about this guy, Trump.
He was this, he was that, he was this.
He's a negotiator.
He enjoys it.
I think he's a guy that gets a kick out of sitting there and he thinks he can outsmart some of these guys.
You can't outsmart shady people.
And the Taliban, you're not sitting down with business people.
This is not like businessmen and women that you're dealing with law and order and rules and guidelines and all these different regulations that you got to deal with.
They don't give a shit about law and order.
You're not dealing with people that are reasonable like you.
So I agree with you on that side.
You don't negotiate, you know, the famous line with Reagan.
What was the famous line with Reagan?
We don't negotiate with terrorists.
That's the famous line.
Okay, well, he did.
There's no reason to negotiate there.
However, bring it to today.
Biden has all these people around him.
You claim you listen to your generals.
You got Millie.
When they went through that whole thing, nobody answered anything.
They were afraid to blame Biden.
They were afraid to take responsibility because the careers was on it.
People are just kind of sitting there saying it was as if everybody was walking on eggshells and we learned nothing about what happened.
So maybe the July Agreement was a negotiation.
But I don't put Trump as a dummy because when people sit there and try to underestimate this guy with being a dummy, I don't think anybody we've had as a president the last 30, 40 years has more experience negotiating with others in any kind of capacity than this guy does in the area of negotiation.
Now, does he have foreign policy negotiation experience like some of these other guys we've had?
No.
Obama was a one-term senator.
How much experience does a guy have?
None.
Bush, lineage.
He comes with a lot of experience.
He's one phone call away from calling a guy that was a former director of CIA.
You know what he's going to get from that guy?
He's going to get some kind of counsel, and he's been in that life his entire life.
He's at drinks, food, dinner with some of the most powerful people in the world.
So he's a phone call away from anybody, right?
So I get Bush.
I get senior because of Prescott, you know, the grandfather.
I don't even get Clinton, but Clinton, maybe a little bit of experience with governor. Rhodesky.
I get that.
I give it to him.
But Biden, dude, 43 years.
Did you hear what he said in 08 about leaving Afghanistan?
But wait a minute.
Do you remember what he said in 08 about his?
I was there.
Okay.
I worked there.
He said, if we ever leave, we cannot leave equipment behind.
We cannot do this.
Do you understand?
This is billions of dollars.
Don't you know the old adage?
I'm doing the exact opposite thing.
Don't you know the old saying in Washington?
Show me a foreign policy issue Joe Biden's been a part of, and I'll show you.
No, the line is: show me a foreign policy issue, and I'll show you an example in which Joe Biden has been wrong.
Like, Joe Biden in Washington is always considered.
Never underestimate Joe Biden's ability to fuck things up, Barack Obama.
I worked for the Central Intelligence Agency during the Obama administration and the Bush administration, and I worked on Afghanistan.
I specifically was part of the debate for what's called the surge.
Okay.
At that time, the vice president, Biden, was the biggest proponent of something we called CT Light, counterterrorism light.
The idea was that instead of, so Stan McChrystal wanted this surge of 100,000 troops in Afghanistan.
And I understood why.
Because at that point, you have to understand at that point, all of the actual like fighting prowessness in the United States military is in Iraq.
Let me give you an example.
In Afghanistan, where I was, the Taliban figured out that if you could, you basically could stop our movement if you blew up our vehicles, right?
And they figured out how to make more and more increasingly powerful bombs out of fertilizer and gasoline.
And so we joked that they had the Radio Shack solution to the war.
They could blow up a $1.3 million vehicle with about 20 bucks worth of fertilizer and gasoline, right?
I mean, the economics of that are just not sustainable.
So what ended up happening was, was we got orders from our higher headquarters came down and said, we're sick and tired.
Like, for example, my unit was the first unit ever to be issued.
What's called an MRAP, a mine-resistant ambush-protected vehicle.
Again, these cost $1.3 million per chassis, okay, per chassis.
We're issued the entire, what's the GDP of Afghanistan?
I'd have to look it up.
I mean, I'm sure the MRAP budget probably was the GDP of Afghanistan, but we were issued four of these.
In April of 2008, four.
As of the 1st of May, three of them were destroyed.
The Taliban blew three of them up in five days.
Where's the Taliban getting support from, man?
Pakistan, Russia, Iran.
There's no way they're figuring this out.
Well, actually, they were really smart.
They had mobile training teams that went around and experimented on us and actually figured out how to embed these things underneath the road.
They used the road against us.
They basically would put these things stacked up in a V-shape in basically boxes.
And then what ends up happening is they put it in a culvert.
So it's like where a stream goes underneath the road.
It's like a tiny little bridge.
You stack the, you box, you basically pack the culvert with explosives.
And then what ends up happening is that the vehicle drives over the culvert, there's an explosion that happens.
The explosion isn't what kills everybody.
It's the force and it's all the volume of the road coming up and then flipping the vehicle.
That's what was killing people.
So I tell you all this because it came down from our higher headquarters about midsummer 2008.
We're sick and tired of losing vehicles and people.
We have this.
In that order, probably.
Yeah.
We have these engineering assets that are called route clearance patrols.
They're these big, you think the vehicles we drive are big and expensive.
Theirs are way bigger and way more expensive.
And they're designed specifically to go out and they clear the path in front of you.
They clear the whole road of roadside bombs.
We had three of these packages for like three of these route clearance units for the whole country in 2008.
Do you understand how long missions then back up?
Because you're waiting for one of these three assets to be available.
So what McChrystal is saying is, I need everything from Iraq.
There's only so many of these types of equipment in the U.S. military.
Most of them are currently in Iraq.
I want them brought to Afghanistan in such large numbers that we can basically go back out and rewin the Afghan war.
Because what a lot of people don't realize was that the Taliban basically went to Ranger school over 2006 to 2007.
And by 2008, had fought us to a standstill.
And so McChrystal comes back and reports all this and says, I need 100,000 troops.
It's the only way we're going to turn the tide.
And Obama is weighing the decision about whether to do this.
Now, in Obama's ear is the vice president.
And he's saying, uh-uh, I want, that's the wrong move.
We need to go a completely different direction.
We need to do something called counter-terrorism light.
What we need to do is we need to actually draw down our footprint.
We need to reduce the number of troops in Afghanistan down to about, at that point, it was around 20,000, 30,000.
He goes, we need to get down to about five to 10.
They need to be all special operations and intelligence troops.
We shouldn't have a big military footprint.
We should be doing targeted strikes specifically on al-Qaeda and Taliban leadership.
And that should be our only presence.
And he pushed this hard.
And Obama chose to go with what we called the middle option, which was not necessarily the surge and not counterterrorism light.
He surged by an additional 30 to 40,000 forces.
It didn't work.
He hedge like a politician.
Yeah, he has.
So this is...
Biden, by the way, the reason I bring this up, this has been in the back of Biden's head since that...
But this is what you got to understand.
And this is where I think America needs to understand.
And this is where our journalism in this moment is failing us.
Yes.
Because if we believe the Hunter Biden emails, if we believe that the big guy is getting tens of millions of dollars from Chinese corporations, from Pakistani corporations, from Ukrainian and Russian corporations while this is happening, he's advocating against the people who are fighting our own.
He's advocating, he's doing business for, at the very least, doing business with and for the very people who are fighting against our own troops in a proxy war.
And this guy is now the president of the United States of America.
There's no way to make an allegation about that.
There's a lot of, you know, there's a lot of correlation there.
You know, correlation isn't causality, but it's worth investigating, man.
Seeing, okay, who exactly was paying him, how much money, how much influence did he have, and how much influence did they have supporting the enemy of America at that time?
Now, in fairness, to anybody listening, my personal bias is I don't think we should have ever been in Afghanistan.
I don't think we should have ever been in Iraq.
I think the Patriot Act is the single worst thing that's ever befallen planet Earth from a geopolitical standpoint.
Okay.
I think Donald Rumsfeld is one of the most evil human beings to ever walk the face of the earth.
And I find it hilarious that I marched against No Blood for Oil in college.
And now Dick Cheney and the Cheneys are Team Biden.
And now everybody on the left in America is a war hawk.
You know, how times have changed in 20 years blows my mind.
But in your estimation and your passion about this, and first of all, thank you so much for your service.
And I'm glad a guy like you is on our side.
How do we, you said that the economics are unsustainable.
The economics of imperialism are unsustainable.
You have to decimate an entire country, then you have to occupy it for generations.
So the concept of going in as a peacekeeper and setting these places up, you don't, America, we, the revolution, we didn't beat Britain.
We just outlasted them.
We made it, we waited until it was unpopular enough at home.
And they were like, these are our cousins.
Let them have the place.
The War of 1812, they came back and kicked the shit out of us.
And then thank God Napoleon got antsy and said, I'm going to fight.
Otherwise, we'd still be British again.
And then Vietnam, over and over and over, the economics of imperialism, unless you're going to go in on some von Clauswitch shit and just mow everything to dust and start over, you can't do this anymore.
You can't fight these wars.
They're unsustainable.
Which is why this commission is so important, right?
Because we have to fundamentally change how we go to and come home from war, right?
And if we change what we're going into and we have a different end state in mind, right?
All right.
You just described it perfectly.
For too long, our end state has been the World War II model.
We come in, we beat you, right?
We're now in charge.
You, like the Japanese and the Germans, go along with it and don't fight back.
How often does that actually happen, right?
By the way, von Klaus, which is how we win World War II, we basically steamroll both of them, right?
We actually drop atomic weapons on another country.
That's how we get these people to capitulate.
Every other example that you have.
There's a profit incentive.
Wow.
That's again, that's what we have that you're right.
The economics of imperialism don't work.
The way that we go to war doesn't work.
And it needs to be fixed.
This can't happen again.
What was the very first thing that Biden's new Secretary of Defense did?
He gave a $250 million contract to Raytheon, right?
Who did he work for before he was Secretary of Defense?
It's a revolving door.
How's that okay?
It's not.
We're supposed to have ethics laws in this country.
There's supposed to be more a ban on lobbying and everything.
But again, as you pointed out, the rich and the elite and the powerful get to have special privileges.
Do you think that ever goes away?
Yes.
How?
But your strategy, where you're going to.
Do you think this ever goes away and show a time in history where that's gone away?
Marie Antoinette would say it goes away.
The powerful can only sustain power for as long as the powerless agree that they're powerless, right?
Especially domestically.
I've never in a million years would have thought that you could shut New York City down for two years and the New Yorkers would go along with it.
I never in a million years growing up in that area, I would have never thought that people would be like, you know what?
Yeah, you know, I'll go bankrupt.
It's fine.
I don't mind.
Yeah, whatever it takes.
I know that this doesn't make any sense wearing masks six feet apart.
You know, the bums on the subway, they're walking around doing everything you're telling everybody not to do and they're surviving for years.
But no, whatever you say, de Blasio, in a million years, I would have thought there would have been a riot.
I would have thought there would have been a revolution.
I would have thought there would have been people, you know, tarred and feathered and ran out of town on a poll.
And it's not happening anymore.
It turns out, you know, they said the pen was mightier than the sword.
The camera phone is mightier than the sword, man.
The camera phone is the most powerful weapon ever created.
People are so afraid to, you know.
And I think the problem, Pat, becomes in this moment, you talk about law and order a lot.
In this moment, it's such a dangerous moment because the only people that are making any sort of positive moves are the type of people that have absolutely no regard for the consequences of law and order.
Criminals, autocrats.
You know, what this is really going to be for people looking back at this 500 years you were talking about 1419.
People that are writing about this time, they're going to say democracy may be a great idea, but as long as there are autocrats and dictators, you may not be able to sustain it.
So there's a guy named Benjamin Barber who wrote a book called Strong Democracy back in the 90s.
And basically what he argues is that there's a progression of democracy that coincides with a progression of economies, right?
So economies go from agrarian to industrial to post-industrial or what we would call basically creative economies, right?
And we're in a creative economy.
We're post-industrial.
Britain's post-industrial.
Korea's post-industrial.
Japan's post-industrial.
Neil Pagley has talked about this a lot.
This is where androgyny comes in.
So what he argues, though, is he says that the harmony state of that we all grew up thinking of what capitalism and nation state relations and democracy should look like is the post-World War II environment, pre-true globalization.
What he basically calls is like the 50s and the 60s.
And what he argues there is that before you had transnational corporations, economies had companies that were based only in the United States, right?
Disney was just an American company.
Ford's an American company, right?
So they're subject to American law.
And if they want to do business, they follow American law.
They don't really have to worry about...
Yes and no, though.
I mean, Coca-Cola made Fanta to sell sugar water to the Nazis.
That's where he gets the point.
Is once you have, he argues that once you have transnational corporations, once capitalism expands beyond the borders of the nation state, transnational corporations actually become the most powerful entity on the planet, right?
Because they're beyond government regulation.
Hard to argue with that.
Okay.
So, what Benjamin Barber argues is that the only way to actually reel in the negative effects of rampant runaway capitalism, which we have robber barons now.
No, that's corporatism.
It's not really capitalism.
Global federalism.
No.
Yeah.
No.
It's the only, and I'm going to be honest with you.
I think that's where we move as a species.
That's what they're trying right now.
No, the idea, the idea.
Look, you have on your list here this crap.
So the problem is government, so we need a more giant global bureaucracy.
Listen, you have to think of it.
You're thinking of it as a one-government UN thing.
And I'm talking about more like United States of Earth.
Where Xi Jinping is in charge of Earth.
It's a democratically elected thing.
Okay.
Who's agreeing to that?
I'm telling you, I think that's where we move to.
Xi Jinping is agreeing.
There's no way the nations to if you're fundamentally arguing for the nation state, which has been around since the idea of the Treaty of Westphalia, I think at this point, honestly, you're arguing from a 20th century mindset.
We're beyond it.
We're beyond it.
We're in something different.
I disagree with you.
We are evolving.
I'm telling you right now, this is where the human race is headed.
Whether you like it or not, this is where I guarantee, I predict within 100 years.
You think there's going to be a common language within 100 years?
I don't know.
There's going to be a common culture in 100 years.
We're moving towards one.
No.
We're moving towards.
We are moving toward capitalism pushes us this way.
No, stop.
It does.
Oh my gosh, capitalism pushes us.
It does.
What?
The efficiency.
The efficiency of being able to.
Go on.
The efficiency of one.
There's no way.
Listen, let me ask you a question.
How long are you going to tolerate if I slap you on the back really hard?
How many times?
How often do you think?
If I keep doing it to you, right?
If I get up right now and come to you back, and I just start slapping your back really hard.
How many times can I get away with it?
Probably once.
Okay, that's what I'm trying to say to you, right?
But let's just say you're like, your first reaction is going to be what?
What's the matter with you, right?
Stop.
But you're first going to say, what?
Stop.
If I do it again, if I do it again, you and I are probably brawling over here, right?
Okay.
I don't think, I think the history of mankind, you've always had people that are driven by power and control, and you've had people that are driven by freedom and leave me the hell alone, okay?
One group masters the art of manipulation.
The other group masters the art of persuasion.
The strength of those that are driven by power and manipulation is they sell their concept more because they're better at bitching and crime and complaining because they have more time on their hands.
The weakness of those who are driven by freedom, leave me alone, is they're so occupied building something, creating something, winning for them and their families, they don't have time to bitch.
They don't care to bitch.
They're not going to go out there and try to do anything to you.
But if you sit down with them and you have the ability to reason, they can persuade you and say, here's why I live my life this way, right?
If the person's willing to pursue, you know, be open to it.
Now, historically, go and look at religions.
Many people will say most religions were created to control a populace.
Let's just say, I'm a Christian.
Some will say, you know, that is a form of, you know, the Ten Commandments to get people to not do anything to each other.
You know, don't do anything to a guy's wife and don't murder and do this.
Fine.
You take a hundred different religions and you put the structure together, but 90% of it is what?
Similar things.
You and I get to pick and choose.
You want to be a Christian, Presbyterian, you know, whatever you want to be.
Similarities right there.
Jewish, Christian, pretty much the same thing.
Christians have one other guy that came afterwards and they think he's a Jew.
Christians think he's a Jew.
Christians think he is the Messiah, right?
Okay.
But the ability to want to control isn't anything new.
The difference is people are a little bit more, not a little bit, more wiser today.
The negative side of it is we have a million and one distractions today that we didn't have before.
This is the ultimate distraction that we have today, right?
So where am I going with this?
Here's where I'm going with this.
I don't think, you know, I think there's a point where you can't push people that are driven by freedom too much.
I think if you cross that line, you're going to see a side of theirs you've not seen before.
I think that's kind of the direction we're going right now.
People are rising up.
You're a guy that voted for Biden.
You go up against them.
And you're willing to come to a podcast like this and have a conversation.
And we go back and forth.
And the people that win today is the audience because the audience sees us having differences.
We're having this discourse.
And they walk on and say, screw Pat, screw Matt, screw Gerard.
Or dude, Gerard's my guy.
I agree with them.
I wish Adam was here.
Pat's wrong.
Whatever they're going to do.
But the audience is winning right now, right?
My concern is the following.
Here's what my concern is.
Recently, if we look at what happened with coronavirus and COVID, the pandemic, have you followed the, what is that, the Event 201?
Have you followed anything with the Event 201?
You followed Event 201.
So if you want to pull up Event 201, just pull it up on Google.
And I'm curious to know what you're going to say about this.
So Event 201 is hosted by World Economic Forum.
This is public info.
This is not a conspiracy theory or anything like that.
This is just something everybody knows about.
So Event 201 was hosted.
This was in October of 2018, okay?
October of 2018, the John Hopkins Center's Health Security in partnership with the World Economic Forum and the Bill Melinda Gates Foundation hosted an event 201, a high-level pandemic exercise on October 18th, my birthday, 2019, in New York, New York.
The exercise illustrated areas where public-private partnerships will be necessary during the response to a severe pandemic in order to diminish large-scale economic and societal consequences.
This is October 18th.
Look at the suggestions.
Two months later, the pandemic happened.
Look at the suggestions.
You're on Google?
Yeah, let me.
What do you mean, the suggestion?
Well, I don't want to bog down the podcast, but with this, if they go one step further, they gave suggestions from their report, and it was to censor social media, not allow Discord.
Everything that happened the last two years.
Can you, can you, all right, on Google, go ahead and Google, I want you to type in, are we ready?
No, no, not rare.
Are we ready?
Are we ready?
My name, Matt Zeller.
And then the word Syracuse.
Okay, yeah.
No, no, go back up to Are We Ready to actually read that?
My Nightmare, the experiment?
No, no, take my name out of it.
Put Are We Ready?
And then actually take my name out of it, sorry, and put Strategic National Stockpile.
To circle back to what you were saying while we're waiting.
Yeah.
You know, I think you're ready.
There we go.
Right there.
Thanks.
Gerard, hang on one second.
Okay, so this is my master's thesis.
Yeah.
Go ahead and scroll down.
Take a look at the date.
06.
All right.
So in 2006, this team and I were hired by the United States House of Representatives on the Committee on Homeland Security to evaluate at that point the pandemic influenza response plan for the United States and to poke holes in it and to see whether or not it would work.
And what we learned was that if a pandemic ever hit this country, we were well and truly fucked.
It's what we had learned.
So we wrote this report.
And in our report, we don't choose it.
We didn't choose a SARS COVID type virus.
We choose something that was actually scarier, which is H5N1.
So H5N1 is a bird flu that has a higher lethality than Ebola.
And if it ever actually became airborne and was easily transmissible, it would be like with the movie Contagion portraits.
It would wipe most of us out.
We wrote it based on this.
The idea is that H5N1 arrives in the United States via a flight coming in from Asia and within 48 hours is everywhere.
And then through this report, all the recommendations in this were actually ended up being enacted into law by Congress.
One of the things that we proposed was regular practical exercises teaming up private industry, like you just saw, the 201 exercise on a regular scale to try to get government and private industry to begin thinking about how to work through pandemics.
So I mean, I don't think that there's those types of events happened all the time.
Yeah, but let me go back to my point here.
So this is, you guys just jumped in and went to a bunch of different directions.
Let's stay focused real second.
I'm trying to ask a question from you because I want to know what you're going to do.
My biggest concern is anticipation of what's coming next because COVID ruined people's lives the last two years.
I think that's absolutely, both sides would agree with their school, education, kids.
We don't even know the side effects of it for a long time with youth on what happened to them.
Right.
I mean, like, my daughter is home for a year and a half.
A nine-year-old, a 2000-year-old.
What does that do?
Yeah.
To their development.
In New York, you're saying.
Yeah.
No, Virginia.
In addition to that, she's been conditioned now to see every single human being as a potential threat to her well-being.
It's very interesting you say that.
Yeah, actually.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So we don't know what that feels like.
We don't know what the side effects of that.
We have no idea.
What do you do with the kindergarten?
Exactly.
And now California just announced it.
Anyways, California announced yesterday they're getting rid of L-A-U-Se.
They're getting rid of all Fs and D's.
I don't know if you saw that.
Oh, yeah, yeah.
They're getting rid of Fs and D's in California.
They're going back to indoor mask mistakes.
But here's where I'm going to.
So I'm looking at World Economic Forum.
I'm like, okay, so you guys did this October 18, 2019.
Two months later, the pandemic hits.
It's kind of weird.
A lot of the stuff you guys talked about.
Okay, let me put the hat on of being a little bit skeptic.
Recently, they had another one.
I don't know if you saw the simulation that they did.
So have you heard of Cyber Polygon?
Have you heard about the Cyber Polygon being ran by World Economic Forum?
I know of it, yeah.
Okay, pull that up Cyber Polygon so we can look at that.
So Cyber Polygon, if you want to pull up, that's not the first one.
There's another one you can go to.
Cyber Polygon is a project that they're doing.
Same thing again.
They're testing to see what would happen if there is a cyber pandemic.
So they're calling now the cyber pandemic.
So cyber polygon, these days as a disegation gadding example, in this environment, the best strategy to safeguard our future is to build up the right skills and understand the risks involved.
This is why Cyber Polygon 2021 was dedicated to secure ecosystem development.
Pat, if I can for a minute.
Just so people know, the World Economic Forum is not elected bureaucracy.
It is a non-government organization.
Yes.
Just like the World Health Organization.
Exactly.
So they have these great names as if they're like the UN, as if this is some sort of elected politicians, as if this is some sort of collaboration of world leaders.
It is not.
It is a non-governmental organization.
This is an international lobbying group that has just amassed so much control over our planet.
I mean, the control that the World Economic Forum and the World Health Organization have over our public policy is insane to a degree where sometimes it feels like they're leading our public policy.
But they are not elected officials.
These are not politicians.
These are not people that are representative of any people of any government.
It's a very, very dangerous group.
But anyway, go ahead.
So they just had a meeting and they did a simulation.
If you want to go to the simulation that we can read, this is Reuters' article.
Go to the next one.
By the way, these guys met in July of this year, which is quite scary because every time these guys get together and no, no, you just had it.
IMF, the Israel.
Tyler, you just had it up.
Yeah, I Xed out.
Just give me one second.
Oh, okay.
Just type in IMF, Israel.
Type in Israel.
Okay, there you go.
Okay.
So exclusive IMF, 10 countries simulate cyber attack on global financial system.
Okay.
And this thing lasted like three and a half hours.
If you want to go up a little bit.
So Jerusalem, December 9th, Reuters, Israel on Thursday, led a 10-country simulation on a major attack on the global financial systems in an attempt to increase cooperation that would help, could help to minimize any potential damages to financial markets and banks.
The simulator war game, and as Israeli's finance minister called it, and planned over the past year, evolved over 10 days with sensitive data emerging on the dark web.
With the simulation also used fake news reports that in the scenario caused chaos in global markets and a run on banks, if you can go a little lower.
The simulation, likely caused by what officials call sophisticated players, feature several types of attacks that impact the global foreign exchange and bond markets, liquidity, integrity, data and transactions between imposters and exporters.
These events are creating havoc in the financial markets, said a narrator of a film shown.
So it's five and a half hours that you can watch this.
Steve Wozniak is in it.
Some of the most powerful people in the world are in it, right?
Do you know what they're saying would happen if this was actually to take place?
Power shutdown.
You don't have power.
No AC, no phone, no internet, no nothing.
We've already seen it.
Banking system.
And it was in your country.
It's called Hurricane.
It's called Superstorm Sandy.
If you lived in New York, the power went down.
There were no ATMs.
There were no credit cards.
You couldn't buy gas.
So you could buy gas, but it was $30 a gallon.
Yeah, and you had to pay in cash, right?
And if you didn't have cash, good luck.
It was a week.
One week.
And it was chaos.
Okay, how bad.
Unpack the chaos.
Unpack it.
You live through it.
Unpack it.
It was, I mean, they had to call the National Guard.
It was that.
Yeah, but what I'm saying is people who didn't live there, they don't know.
Unpack it.
You couldn't, like, imagine you need food, right?
So right now you go down to like the grocery store, you go, you pay with your card, right?
There's no card.
Your card doesn't work.
So okay, you got to get cash.
Well, the ATMs are out of cash and they don't have power to begin with.
So how do you buy food?
You're hungry.
What did you guys do?
I was working for Christie.
You were working for Chris Christie at the time.
So what did you do?
I wasn't there.
I wasn't in New York.
I had friends who would tell me that they would literally, they had like rations.
Once you eat through your rations, what happened was capitalism.
People came from other states.
Some people volunteered.
Other people put a whole bunch of gas in their pickup truck from Pennsylvania, went down to Jersey Shore and was like, I got gallons of gas for 30 bucks.
And then there was this whole thing and the price gouging and the legality of it.
But people would fight over ATMs.
Like when ATM was like working and spitting out cash, they would like fist fights.
They would get into it.
Do you know what the wildest thing was?
Chinese restaurants delivered.
It was nuts.
People were ordering.
Everything was closed down, but Chinese restaurants would delivered.
So here's the thing, man.
Here's the thing.
We were not ready for the pandemic.
America was not ready for the pandemic.
We had no idea what was going to happen.
But here's what the pandemic did.
The pandemic made the creative people figure out a way to survive, right?
I remember we're in Dallas.
Pandemic comes out.
Non-essential, essential.
Our business was called non-essential.
We still showed up to the office.
The pandemic, we couldn't sell insurance face-to-face because people didn't want you to come into their house.
We've never sold on a Zoom.
We went from selling 100% of our policies face-to-face to selling 100% of our policies over Zoom.
We have to learn those skills, right?
What do you think is the likelihood of something like when World Economic Forum gets together and talks about something like this?
What do you think they're trying to say?
You think something like this is possibly likely to happen in the next 12, 24, 36 months?
I think that's 100% likely at some point because it's a tool of warfare.
Who's ready?
Who's ready for this?
Russia.
Russia's ready?
Who else is ready for this?
China.
Who else is ready for this?
Anybody who's figured out how to disconnect their country from the internet?
Is America ready for this?
No.
Do you think Russia and China are that far ahead of us?
Yeah.
Russia actively practices drills where they disconnect themselves from the internet entirely.
And Russia has an entire cyber warfare division that is charged with creating the chaos that this simulation tries to envision.
And we don't.
We do.
We have the exact look.
Digital tools are digital tools of digital tools.
Everybody can apply them the same way.
It's just that they don't have as much of an interconnected economy as we do.
They have figured out how to firewall their entire infranet, right?
So they can cut themselves off.
Dictatorship tends to be a lot of fun.
Yeah, exactly.
Yeah.
I mean, they have a kill switch for the internet in their countries, and they can cut themselves off at any time.
That would probably honestly be the first indication of a major cyber attack coming from one of those countries is if they cut themselves off to prevent retaliation.
Really?
Yeah.
So if they turn their own lights off, that's the red park.
It's a huge indication.
That's why we probably have to develop some type of like mutual assured destruction worked in the Cold War for preventing us from firing nukes at one each other.
We need the same thing.
There needs to be some type of like cyber mutual assured destruction, but we don't necessarily have that unless we have backdoors into their system.
Well, isn't this kind of the idea of Space Force?
I mean, I know everybody, every leftist comedian in the world, but this to me is scarier than that.
Well, you take out a couple of satellites up there and it's total darkness, man.
Sure, sure.
But in this case, with drones and balloons, we can get an internet up like that.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I suppose you put a high-altitude balloon with a repeater and you can actually broadcast as a cell network pretty high up and put an entire internet on top of something.
No, honestly, the scarier shit is fucking up with our ground stations and our getting into the cyber.
So all the computer systems in the country that run like the energy grid are based off of really, really old operating systems.
Somebody told me, talking about Jersey and Sandy, somebody told me that if the Linden Cogen plan had gone down, that wouldn't have had power for 90 days in the entire Northeast Tower Door.
If I was the Russians or the Chinese, the very first thing that I do, if I'm going to engage in cyber warfare, I shut down the U.S. power grid.
But here's the thing.
Let me ask you, what's the job of a journalist?
Is it to be to trust everything you see or to question and be a little bit skeptical?
I think it's to report the news and, you know.
Be a little bit skeptical, right?
You got to be a skeptic.
Like, you're a skeptic right now.
You're trying to find out what the hell happened with Afghanistan.
So you're going through this commission.
You're getting the guys in.
Everybody is that's non-current official that they don't really care about getting re-elected.
Republicans, eight and eight, Democrats, so it's a fair deal to do, right?
Let's be a little bit skeptical with this with this, what do you call it, cyber polygon.
What is the World Economic Forum?
What are these powerful people who fund something like this?
Which, by the way, can you pull up to find out who funds World Economic Forum?
What are they worried about?
Now, watch this.
Watch what this goes to when they unpack what their fears are.
So the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic is given away to no opportunities to cybercrime.
Okay.
Some new methods include deep fakes, cryptocurrencies, and mobile wallets.
Expect an increase in supply chain attacks, right?
Global cyber crime predictions for 2022, fake news 2.0 and the return of misinformation campaign.
Who are they talking about?
Probably only one guy, and that's the dummy that you're a big fan of, right?
That's President Donald Trump.
They fear fake news 2.0.
By the way, watch this.
Fake news 2.0 and the return of misinformation campaigns.
Okay.
The comma fake news surrounding the contentious issues has become a new attack vector yours.
Misinformation.
Okay, watch this.
Throughout 2021, misinformation was spread about COVID-19 pandemic and vaccination information.
The black market for fake vaccine certificates expanded globally, now selling fakes from 29 countries, fake vaccine passports.
Certificates were on sale for $100 to $120.
This is on their site.
This is on their site.
Which, by the way, did you get the video I sent you with Mark Zuckerberg and Fauci?
Pull that up real quick, which this is coming from Fauci, who is the most credible source, apparently, on the topic of vaccine and the topic of COVID.
Here's what he had to say.
If you have the video, I'll let you pull it up.
Okay, so this is the first one.
In addition, prior to 2022, 2020 U.S. presidential election, checkpoint researchers spotted surges in malicious election-related domains and the use of mean camouflage.
So again, aimed at shifting public opinion in the run-up to the U.S. midterm elections in November 2022.
So first of all, there's two things we learned about this so far.
One of them is that cyber polygon event that hosted by World Economic Forum, their worry is fake news 2.0, which is vaccines, because you know he's right.
And number two is midterms.
Those are two things they just revealed to us.
Here's what Fauci just had to say on Zuck, by the way.
I don't know if you saw this.
Raise the audio.
That a vaccine that looked good.
Go back, Tyler.
Okay, watch this.
Go back all the way back.
This would not be the first time that a vaccine that looked good actually made people worse.
One of the HIV vaccines that we tested several years ago actually made individuals more likely to get infected.
To get infected.
Actually made individuals more likely.
Did you hear what he just said, by the way?
Yeah.
Okay.
I've been hearing every word he said for years.
So he just said, hey, the vaccine, you know, we have a few friends that, you know, they're going through a vaccine and the next thing you know, they get the COVID.
I thought this is supposed to be kind of helping you out.
Well, maybe there's a fake, God forbid, as somebody says something.
So the folks at YouTube that monitor this stuff and shut stuff down, we didn't say that.
That's your guy, Fauci, that just said that.
But let me continue the second one.
Cyber attacks targeting supply chains.
Supply chains.
What do you mean by supply chains?
The cyber Cold War intensifies.
Data breaches are large-scale and more costly.
Mobile malware attacks increase as more people use mobile wallets and platforms, payment platforms.
Cryptocurrency becomes a focal point for cyber attacks globally.
Attackers leverage vulnerabilities and microservices to launch large-scale attacks.
Deep fake technologies weaponize.
Penetration tools continue.
Okay, if you want to pull up this article, here's what I read.
I want to hear both of your thoughts.
I just read this is World Economic Forum, the big guys that get together who are funding this, say the Pfizer guys that are funding this, say the guys that are funding this, that they're worried a person cannot come in and take too much control.
They're worried about elections.
They're worried about, God forbid somebody disagrees with them, misinformation.
They're worried about what's going to happen with the crypto community because it's not regulated.
They're worried about anybody that's an independent thinker, and that's their cyber polygon.
God forbid people can't think for themselves.
So what concerns you about something like this?
What do you think about when you read something like this?
Well, I'll start because I'm very interested to hear Mr. Zeller's opinion on this.
But this goes to what you were saying before about the global federalism, right?
To me, this right here is what they are striving for.
These NGOs want to take over the planet because they're the smartest people.
They're the best people.
They're the most noble people.
Eugenicists are always right.
And they are going to parcel out the world in a fair and equitable way with them at the top of the food chain.
I have no doubt that you are right in that this is the future that they see.
I will spend my every living breath fighting it because I don't believe they are noble.
And I don't believe that they are not ill-intentioned.
If they were, then we wouldn't have to wait 75 years to know what's in our super serum.
So my thing is this.
I've been lied to too much by people in power my life to trust people in power.
And that's just the fact of it.
I've seen too much.
I've been in these rooms and I've seen the wizard.
We cannot give these people control.
If you hate Donald Trump, then Donald Trump shouldn't have control over your medicine.
Donald Trump shouldn't have control over your life, over your education.
And if you hated that man, then why would you want that man, the apparatus that that man controls, to have that much influence and power over your life?
And now we're going to do that on a global scale.
I'm supposed to believe that Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, and Von, what's his name?
Klaus Witz, whatever the bald socialist is, he cares.
That guy looks like a guy from a movie.
He cares about me and my life.
He cares about my well-being.
See, these people, these greater good people, they think they're brilliant.
Everybody that's ever come before them is dumb, but they have it figured out.
They're going to get it right this time.
And those are the people that kill 100 million people.
And then like the communists that you interviewed, hey, you got to break some eggs to make an omelet.
It's for the greater good.
Well, those 100 million people that died, it's not for the greater good.
And the lying is nonstop.
All right.
Well, well, you know, we tried.
Oh, well, we just shut your life down for two years.
Oh, well, you know, things happen.
And now Facebook comes out and they say the fact checkers, right, you had Zuckerberg, these fact checkers, it turns out, they're just opinions in court.
When they finally got pressed in court, they say, yeah, no, these are just third-party opinions.
We're presenting people with a secondary opinion.
That's not how you presented it.
You actually demonetize people because our fact checkers said.
So, frankly, I've been lied to too much to trust these people.
And I think that they are too powerful in this moment.
And I'll be honest, Matt, I mean, you're a Democrat and you're one of the good guys, I'm sure.
But I think that I'm just going to be frank and I'm going to call it what it is.
I think the Democratic Party has been infiltrated by these international coalitions.
And I think that they are no longer representing the, by and large, I don't think they're representing the American people.
I think they're representing the global community.
And I resent the Democratic Party for that.
What are your thoughts about the cyber polygon?
That was a lot.
I'm not as worried about it as you all seem to be.
I think it's just an act for people.
Honestly, most of these think tanks are wealthy people trying to feel important.
And they spend a lot of time and money bringing people together in a room to role play shit, right?
Because they miss being in power.
They miss being in charge.
They miss being part of the action.
And this is a way to continue to have influence and stay in the game.
I'm sorry, I talked for a long time, but it's hard to say that.
And then you see build back better everywhere.
They're really, yeah, yeah.
Some of them are really good at messaging and they get hired to do this type of stuff too, right?
I am honestly, the thing that concerns me more is the chaos that would be unleashed if a nation state like Russia or China engaged in cyber warfare.
And I think it's a good thing that we try to practice and have forums in which we bring people together to try to think through how we're going to manage what could potentially be a horrific situation.
Here's what I would challenge you back is if you're skeptical, get involved.
Why don't you ask if you can join them?
I'm serious.
Or start your own cyber thing to examine this and put out your own information.
That to me, I think is the more effective thing here.
Again, be good capitalists.
Give them competition in the market for their own.
That which I agree.
Because I agree with you.
I don't think that there should be one entity that dominates this conversation, right?
I think that there should be multiple people.
We get to a better solution if we have multiple people working at the problem and there's competition between each other and they're trying to come up with a better solution because they're the ones that ultimately the market's going to drive to.
But when it comes to the chaos that could be potentially unleashed, if, for example, the GRU, which is the Russian military intelligence unit that have a pretty good cyber warfare capability, if they were to be, you know, truly unleashed their cyber warfare capability onto our economy and we weren't prepared, I mean, look, COVID was a pain in the ass.
Like shutting down the country for two years has sucked, right?
You know how much it would really suck if the power never came back on?
Like, I'd rather we at least practice it.
And unfortunately, the elites are the elites of the elites because they are who they are.
And they're going to organize themselves in forums like this to try to continue to have influence.
I think it's up to folks like us to challenge that influence by putting out our own ideas, by trying to engage and be involved in their discussions so that it's not just the same group of people always talking and making the decisions.
But I have no problem with organizations like this trying to come together.
I don't know how much influence they actually have.
You don't know how much influence the World Health Organization actually has?
I don't think the World Economic Forces.
These guys, the World Economic Forum at Davos did Build Back Better three years ago, and all you see all over the world is Build Back Better.
It's a campaign slogan for the entire North American leadership apparatus.
Justin Burdose, Justin Trudeau, stands in front of signs that say Build Back Better.
There's a bill, a $3 trillion bill that's being done.
I mean, both, so like, let's be clear, everybody's guilty of this, right?
If you go to the state level in the United States, where the state level governments, right?
There's an organization called ALEC, the American legislature.
Hold on, I got to look it up.
But ALEC is a conservative group that literally writes verbatim language that they then give to state legislators.
Sure, sure.
And they basically use carbon copy.
It's like everybody does it.
Yeah, okay.
Everybody does it.
Okay, but we go from they don't have any influence to everybody has this kind of influence.
No, I don't, I don't, I honestly.
Dude, you are a man's man and you're a brilliant dude.
Be straight with me.
Be straight with me right now.
Do you think the current leadership of the Democratic Party specifically is beholden to the American people of the global community?
I have no idea who they're beholden to at this point.
I really don't.
I don't know how to answer that question.
I honestly don't know.
I wish I could say that they're beholden to the American people, but given my personal experience over the last year, I don't know who they're beholden to.
I really don't.
I also tell you this.
They have a problem on their hands because they lost my vote.
And they haven't seemed to figure that out yet.
There's a sizable portion of people like me who, if Trump runs again, I'm not going to vote for Biden.
I'm not going to vote for Trump.
And that's a problem.
They don't.
They have unified government.
This is why I think it's so important to Santis Rones, man.
They've unified government, and yet they can't seem to accomplish anything.
And you're right.
They don't seem to be a party that cares about the average American worker anymore.
And I think that's honestly why Hillary, one of the biggest reasons why Hillary was a terrible candidate to run in the first place, considering where she was politically in terms of how the American people saw her.
But I agree with you.
She had active disdain for the plebeian.
And that's the thing about it, right?
Is Trump appealed to a bunch of people who feel like they've been left behind, that they've been abandoned, right?
That nobody has their back.
Because they have been.
Right.
They have been.
And I don't know if there is a party in this country that speaks to those people anymore.
I really don't.
I don't think the Republican Party, by the way, is a party anymore.
I think it's a cult.
It's a cult of personality.
When friends of mine like Adams of mine like Adam Kinzinger and Pete Meyer don't have a home, right?
When they're being active.
Justin Amish.
When they're being actively primaried, like Adam's a great guy.
He's a really, he's a true American.
But he's a patriot.
He gives a shit about this country, right?
Pete Meyer has been a friend of mine for 15 years, right?
Pete gives a damn about this country to the point that he got on a plane and flew to Afghanistan in the middle of the evacuation trying to help out just because he thought as a vet and a member of Congress, he might be able to get people through the gate faster.
He took a lot of shit for that, by the way, for what he did, because people called it a political stunt.
He was just going over there to try to help out.
Like, he's a guy who gives it.
These are all people who are being actively targeted because they didn't bend the knee to the dictator.
And that's what frightens me about Trump.
This idea that if you are, I'll give you my favorite example.
One of my business partners is a died-in-the-wool Republican.
During the 2016 election, he entered the election by bundling cash for Jeb Bush.
When Jeb Bush dropped out, he wrote one paper, a national security policy position paper for Lindsey Graham.
Because he wrote a position for Graham in the primary, the Trump world deemed him not politically allegiant enough to ever serve in the Trump White House.
He was banned.
He was banned.
He told me, I cannot get a job in this administration because I didn't show enough fealty.
That terrifies the fuck out of me.
That's such mafioso shit.
That's not how you get good governance.
That's how you get nepotism.
What are you talking about, though?
Like, Matt, like, be you say a comment like that.
You got to look at it on the other side as well.
You just talked about on the Biden side.
You know, we opened up the meeting with saying, how come they haven't had you on media since three, four months ago?
They don't want to hear the truth.
Yeah, so this isn't a loyalty is expected from both sides.
Don't get it twisted.
This is not like awful.
I don't disagree that it's awful, but loyalty is expected from both sides.
You can't just look at it from the one side to the other side.
No, listen, I'm not here to listen.
I'm just bringing up.
I bring up Trump because I personally hate the guy.
And I think he is honestly the biggest threat to this country's long-term survivability.
I know that you guys might be fans, but that man is like, I'll put it on.
In 2017, I'll show you the notes.
You can take a look at that.
What does that say?
What date is on that?
January 18, 17.
January 18, 2017.
These are notes that I wrote two days before he took office.
It's entitled, How They Take Over, or If I Were Putin, Here's How I'd Take Over.
The guy is a Russian asset.
And I know you don't want to hear this, but I'm telling you this is someone who used to work.
I worked at the Steel Diet.
It's not the Steel.
Listen, it's his behavior.
Why is it that he meets with Putin one-on-one without translators in the room and we never get a transcript from it?
Why?
Because he's checking in with his fucking handler.
All right.
I used to do this for a living.
You don't think I can look and see?
You don't think I can look across the table and see somebody that I would have recruited?
He's a fucking- You lost me there.
Hold on.
Explain why.
Explain why.
All right.
So the Russian playbook is all about what's called disinformation, compromise.
Sure.
Compromise.
I had Jack Barski on two weeks ago.
He's a former KGB.
I'm fully aware of what you're talking about.
So look at how Trump then engaged with the American people.
Anytime he was criticized, it's fake news.
He went and targeted people who wouldn't bend the knee.
Look who got attacked constantly by Trump World.
McCain in particular.
They went after John McCain.
Why?
Because he was the only member of the party with enough clout that might be able to push back on his cult of personality.
So what do they do?
They try to go after his legacy.
They try to go after and get compromising information to him.
Why is it that Lindsey Graham flips like this?
Lindsay flips like this because Lindsay is gayer than the day is long and he's afraid that if that comes out in South Carolina, he doesn't get re-elected.
That's why he suddenly goes from being John McCain's best friend.
I remembered them when they were like, I used to hang out with these people.
I saw them.
They were dear friends.
You're dropping some absolute bombs right now.
What does this have to do with Russia?
Go back to the Russia topic.
What I'm telling you is that Trump is trained to act like a Russian asset would.
He's trained to take over power in the way a Russian asset, if they were in place, would.
Look at what he's gotten us to do.
In four years, we all now yell at each other.
We don't trust anything.
That was Obama's second turn.
But we really don't trust it now.
He poured jet fuel out of it.
Why?
If you're an American president, is your job to unite and lead this country and make it better?
Oh, my God.
Or is it, hold on.
Do you feel like you came out of that presidency more united or more divided?
More divided by divided for sure.
Okay, hold on, hold on, hold on.
I listened to you guys talk for 10 minutes, my turn.
Sure.
All right.
If you feel like you came out of it more divided, let me ask you this.
What is the job of the American president?
It's to fight for this country.
It's to make this country great again, for example.
You really feel like you came out of this great?
You really feel that the antimosity and the strife that we all feel when we talk about this son of a bitch is good?
No, this is exactly what our enemies wanted.
I agree with you.
This is Putin's wet fucking dream.
And so this is what I come back to.
I went to a birthday party two weeks before, two weeks after the 2016 election.
It was a bunch of Polish family.
They had come here.
They'd grown up in Poland under communism.
I was standing on the back deck with the dad, and we were talking about the election.
And I asked him, so what do you think?
And he goes, do you want my honest opinion?
I go, yeah.
And he goes, you Americans have no experience with what just happened to you.
This is how they take over.
And by the time you figure it out, it'll be too late.
And it terrifies me because I loved this country.
And it's stuck in the back of my mind this whole time, right?
Sentimental story, but Matthew, you lose.
Look, look at the police.
But what's fascinating is I see it the same way, but I see it from a different perspective.
So to me, I mean, everything you're saying, I agree with, but I'm saying to myself, this started with Obama's second term.
The division.
I'm sorry.
You don't think he's an asset?
Look what he tries to do.
He discredits NATO.
NATO is the one thing that has kept Russia in check for 70 years.
And suddenly he's questioning the why is it that every foreign policy thing that that man did was in favor of Putin?
Why is it that it always benefited Putin?
That is the one country.
Doesn't think the Chinese trade deal benefited Putin?
Yes, absolutely.
The Chinese trade deal benefits Putin.
How?
Are you kidding me?
No, seriously.
All right.
Russia is sitting right next to China.
They're part of the Belt and Road strategy that China wants.
They're trying to integrate a market over there.
Anything that benefits China helps out Russia's economy.
Russia is just as dependent as the Chinese as we are.
They don't want the Chinese economy to collapse just as much as we don't.
You have to understand, Putin is playing a much, much longer game.
The best way I just heard it described is when the Cold War ended, we spiked the ball at the one-yard line.
We didn't put our foot on their throat.
This is a KGB officer who couldn't stand the fact that his country lost.
And he's been playing the ball.
Let me ask a question.
So go back and tell us this saint of yours that was perfect at foreign policy.
Who do you put as a standard?
Who's the gold standard for you?
I don't think there's a saint in U.S. foreign policy.
Well, who's your gold standard?
Because you hate this guy, so give us the gold standard.
Harry Truman.
Harry Truman's your gold standard.
If you were to pick an American president that was able to articulate, I mean, Truman, the Truman doctor.
You hate this guy.
I hate Trump.
You want to know why I hate people?
Yeah, I'm still curious to hear it.
People like you seem to like him.
Are you out of your mind?
Do you know people like me?
I like you.
People like me escape the bullshit of people like you that bought into the games me and played against guys like him.
I think you're what makes this country great, and I can't figure out why someone is smart.
You want me to explain to you why?
No, no, it's not, it's not, but wait a minute.
You make it seem like this is a Trump podcast.
No, it's not.
But like, I don't understand.
Forgive me.
Yeah.
The way I look at him is binary.
I can't look at him and see good things.
I can look at Obama and see good things.
I can look at Biden and see good things.
I can look at Bill Clinton and see good things.
Then you're better than I am.
It's not about being better than you are, buddy.
It's not about that.
I love America.
And I don't look at people from the standpoint.
I've sit down with mobsters, gangsters.
I've sit down with communists.
I love talking to communists because it's a great conversation for me.
I don't sit there and say, I hate this guy.
See, the challenge with your side, because you sound like a broken record right now, as if it's CNN or MSNBC.
Do you know what happened to their ratings when the world found out they were full of shit with Russia?
Go look at their ratings.
Go look at their ratings the week after the world found out this entire dossier was funded by a lady named Hillary Clinton.
What happened to the ratings afterwards?
You know why?
Because Americans were sitting there saying, we believed you.
Schiff, we believed you guys.
Cuomo, we believed you.
Laman, we believed you.
Cooper, we believed you.
And you fooled us.
And Brian Williams, who's a guy that interviewed you, says, what?
I'm done with this.
I'm worried because of what's going on to America today.
And he's stepping away.
So for me, when it comes down to guys that come out and say things like that about Trump and Russia, oh my gosh, like you tell me one president.
First of all, let's put the truth out there.
Has this been a guy that his entire life has been a master troll and a bully?
Yeah.
Yes, I don't disagree.
Has this been a guy that came from the streets of New York where negotiations are all hardcore and you got to go against other guys that are also hardcore because New York's DNA is like you are.
This is what I like.
Is that how New York is?
Yes.
This is New York's DNA.
America's not Matt Ziller.
No.
America's not Chris Christie.
No.
America's not Hillary Clinton or Trump.
America's not Cuomo.
America is more Tyler.
America is more just a regular person that loves his country, right?
Right.
Okay.
And then you come out and he say, Russia, When this guy was president, let me tell you what policies I like.
I go policies.
If you want to talk emotion personality, you can hate that guy's personality.
You can sit there and say, this guy knows the hell out of me.
I know people that hate Obama, hate Obama.
Every Obama interview I've ever watched, whether it's with Leno, whether it's with whoever, I've never seen an interview where I didn't like hearing him speak.
I would say, I'd love to watch a game with this guy.
Doesn't mean I agree with his policies.
So the emotions I pull out and I say, okay, let's look at policies.
When this guy took office, he was the first guy that was not afraid of facing off China.
First guy that said, you want to do this?
Tariff.
You want to do this?
Tariff.
You want to do this?
Tariff.
Look where we are today.
These barrels that we were getting from China that was $2,500 a pop, now it's what?
Containers.
$40,000 a container.
You think he will let them charge $40,000 today?
Hell to the no.
But Biden says what?
Oh, end of message.
End of message.
What end of message?
You're giving a speech on the guy that passed away.
End of message.
Trump stood up against China.
Trump was willing to sit down with these guys, negotiate.
Trump did Palestine and Israel.
Like, that's ridiculous to be able to do what he did 25 years.
Economy was doing good for whites, blacks, Asian, Hispanics, women, everybody.
But media hated this guy.
Why?
Because he called that bullshit.
And that's his flaw.
His fault, his fault was the following.
If somebody as an advisor gives him a fault, it's the following.
Charles Barkley said this the other day.
Kevin Durant asked him, said, how come you're not on Twitter?
He says, you know why I'm not on Twitter?
He says, why?
He says, because I'm old school.
If I'm on Twitter and people talk shit to me, I feel like it's my responsibility to respond back.
That's Barkley.
Guess what?
That's Trump.
Trump needs to avoid 99% of the shit people say to him, and you just focus on the 1%.
He wanted to fight everybody, and he made his life a living kill.
That's on him.
But that's how he's wired.
That comes with the territory.
But to say the guy's a Russian asset, Matt, I mean, you can say you disagree with his policies.
You can say, you know, Stormy Daniels, McDougal.
You can say, grab him by this with the Bush story.
You can say all, you can say McCain, which was an absolute to me.
What the hell are you doing going after somebody POW?
This guy's served the military.
You don't have the right to call out another military person.
How come all these generals you don't get along with?
What happened with Mattis?
I get Millie.
I get some of these guys.
But what happened with some of these other guys?
Of course, all of that stuff, fully agree.
I totally get it.
But to sit there and just put it all blanket.
Hillary Clinton just came out and said the following.
She said, I don't know if you guys read this or not.
Hillary Clinton warns 2024 presidential election could be the end of democracy national review.
Hillary Clinton warned that former President Trump is poised to run for election 2024 and said that if he wins, American democracy will suffer irreparable damages.
If I were a betting man, a betting person right now, I'd say Trump's going to run again.
I think that would be the end of our democracy, not to be pointed about it, but I want people to understand that this could be a make-it-or-break-it point.
If you or someone of his ilk were once again to be elected president, especially if he had a Congress that would be doing his bidding, you would not recognize our country.
For many outside observers, it looks as though Trump is gearing up to launch a campaign for 2024.
90% chance this guy's running.
You know what I know?
He's going to be running.
But I agree with what she said, by the way.
I think it is if he wins, it'll be the end of our democracy.
We are not a functioning, we are not, by the way, we're not a functioning democracy right now.
People said if people on a federal level, people said if Obama gets elected, communism's here.
But we're not a functioning democracy anymore on a federal level.
We're not.
We absolutely are not.
Unpack.
Unpack then.
Okay.
So how to begin?
You have one political party again that is a cult of personality.
Okay.
They do whatever Donald Trump wants.
There's no party platform anymore, right?
There's just whatever Trump wants.
And I know that you keep saying he's not a Russian asset, but why did they change the right of the Republican Party change the platform at the Republican Party convention in 2016 when it came to Ukraine once he took the nomination?
Why was it that was changed?
Why did he try to pull us out of NATO?
I'm sorry.
You had everything you the one thing that you never the one thing that you never said to me that explained is his Russian policy.
After all the investigations show one proof he's a Russian asset instead of just making accusations.
Show the proof.
For example, if somebody says Biden daddy, the big guy, $10 million, there is proof.
Okay.
The New York Times story, when it was blocked by Twitter.
Look at how much money he gets through Deutsche Bank.
Who do you think funds Deutschbank?
What I'm trying to tell you is show me he paid the last three and a half years.
You know, you think he's what kind of investigation could they have done?
He's a shitty businessman.
He can't even get lended to by anybody else other than the one bank that the Russians specifically fund.
I'm sorry.
Like, come on.
Stop it.
You're saying he's a shitty businessman.
Absolutely.
He's a shitty businessman.
He's a horribly shitty businessman.
You're losing credibility on that side.
Really?
This guy's a bad businessman.
How many of his casinos went bankrupt?
How many contractors did he never pay?
He's losing his hotel in Washington, D.C. right now.
Business works.
Really?
How do you think business works?
He had daddy's money.
You know, they did.
They figured out that if he had taken the loan his father gave him in the 70s and he had since he just invested in an index fund, he'd be worth $25 billion today.
That's how, you know, he's a shitty businessman.
He couldn't even keep up with the market.
Yeah.
So that just, to me, bleeds envy and frustration.
Not envy and frustration.
You're upset.
No, he's a it's totally fine if you are upset with the guy.
No, what I'm upset is what he's done to my country.
What he did to your country in four years.
Yes.
He poured jet fuel on a fire.
You're the president of the United States.
You're supposed to unite us.
Who's the last unified?
Who's the last unifier we had in America?
That's a great question.
I've been thinking that for a long time.
I've been trying to ask myself, like, who would be the last?
And it probably is Reagan, you'd think, like, maybe, because we think about it's the last landscape election.
I think Bill was able to get both sides to kill a new granguage to contract with American.
Fantastic.
You take Monica Lewinsky out.
Take that out of the way.
That's fair.
Okay, maybe, maybe.
I say Bill and Reagan.
That's kind of the start of the Monica Lewinsky thing, I think, is kind of the start of this Hatfield and McCoy fight that ended up.
Actually, it starts with the contract with America.
And the reason why is it starts in the 94 election.
So the 94 election, you have to understand this is a seminal election in American history.
The House of Representatives at that point for 40 years has been held by the Democratic Party.
Okay.
The Senate flipped a couple of times, but the House has been held for four.
Think about it.
That's my entire life, right?
40 years.
Used to be the working man party.
That's why.
So here's what happens in 94.
Newt Gingrich goes around to all the Republican folks running for office that year against Democrats, and he says, here's the common strategy.
You're going to ask the person you're running against in the debates, can you name the price of milk back home?
I remember that.
And elected members couldn't.
And the reason why was because the culture in Washington at the time was if you got elected to the House or the Senate, you moved your family to D.C. You didn't go back home to your district maybe other than a couple of times a year.
You absorbed into the swamp.
But you met people.
You went to the same church together, synagogue together.
Your kids played on the same little league teams, right?
Your spouses knew each other socially.
It made compromise and working together easier because these were people that you had personal relationships with that you might have policy differences and disagreements, right?
I don't think Patrick and I are ever going to agree on Trump being a Russian asset, but you know, hopefully at the end of the day, we can shake hands and walk away from this.
That'll always be the case.
Yeah.
They don't ever know that, but that's how Washington used to be.
It doesn't work like that anymore now because now they're not there.
They're there Tuesday to Thursday, a couple times, you know, a couple of weeks a year.
And then they're back home and they're on TV and they're screaming at each other and they don't know one another.
It's interesting.
I'm not blaming one side or the other.
I'm just saying everything changes with that one election.
I disagree with that.
And it's because it's that culture change that I honestly think changes the American.
To link it, but to link it, bro, to saying Trump is the guy that created the division.
He didn't create it.
We haven't had this.
It's jet fuel on it.
To be fair, to be fair, to be fair, is it fair to say, let's see if you can be reasonable here.
I'm hoping you can be reasonable here and take the emotions out.
Is it fair to say that out of all the people that have been elected during our lifetime?
You and I are the same age.
I think we're three years apart and he's two years younger than you, four years younger.
You're 36 or 30?
36.
36.
Okay.
So I'm 43, you're 40.
He's 30.
You're 40?
Oh, we have 40 in January.
Okay, so you're 39.
So, okay.
Is it fair to say the last 40 years, Carter winning, Reagan winning, senior winning, Clinton winning, junior winning, the GW winning, Obama winning, Trump winning?
Is it fair to say the biggest shell-shocking winner where you were like, what the hell just happened is Trump?
100%.
Is it even close?
No.
What do you put close to that?
I couldn't.
It was such a shock to my system.
I couldn't sleep that night.
I was at 3:30 up in the morning.
I'm on the phone with Tom.
Tom's like, he won.
I said, no.
New York Times just reported it.
I said, there's no Hillary's, Hillary's got the resume.
Newsweek had the magazine ready, madam.
I know.
That magazine right now is like priceless.
Everybody's trying to buy that magazine because it's so hard.
It's like a limited edition product, right?
We're sitting there.
We're like, this guy just won.
Okay.
So imagine a guy that's an underdog comes in, talks shit, calls everybody out whether he's right or wrong, and half of America votes for this guy.
So either half of America is a bunch of idiots, deplorables, which you and I agreed that they're not.
They're angry and frustrated.
I agree.
And they felt that he tapped into something that he heard them.
Beautiful.
It's less about him, guys.
I'm telling you, it's more about voting against versus voting for.
Say that on the screen.
My entire family is Democrats.
And I'm telling you, they're gone.
They're off the rails.
They have not voted Democrat for the first time in their lives because they do not feel like these Ivy Leaguers are always talking above them.
They're always lecturing them.
They're always blaming them.
And it feels like these people have the international community's best interest in mind and not our best interest in mind.
And we resent that.
So that's where this comes from.
And Donald Trump, he pulled one of the greatest illusions of all time.
This is a guy that grew up 90 floors above everybody else with a silver spoon in his mouth and somehow convinced West Virginia coal miners he was one of them.
So, I mean, that just goes to show you how badly, and honest to God, Matt, and this is kind of where I see it differently than you do.
He took the Obama playbook, the Obama political playbook.
And I think Obama is the greatest politician of my lifetime.
But he took their playbook and turned it on its head and ran their playbook.
You disagree with me?
Well, you're racist.
You disagree with me?
You hate America.
Took the exact same tactics, inverted it.
And if you think that's pouring fire, maybe it is.
To me, it's a Galilean dialectic.
You see somebody do something and it works, what do you do?
You emulate it.
So one of the other big things that happened for a guy like me over these last four years, I did not vote for Trump the first time.
I did vote for Trump the second time because I felt like Democrats did not learn their lesson.
At some point, they just had to be like, you know what, guys?
Socialism is a touchy issue.
We're asking for a lot of the hours of your life and taxes, and we're not really showing our work here.
And there's a ton of waste in government that we're not addressing at all, but we're just asking you for more and more and more of your money.
Maybe we shouldn't have just said, if you disagree with us, you're racist.
That was probably a bad tactic.
Sorry about that.
That's kind of all they had to do.
Let me ask this question.
Because, Matt, I want to go a little deeper with you because we only got 15 minutes, 13 minutes left.
So at a time like this, you know, every generation will use the line, this is a consequential election, you know, because you have to do, because that creates urgency.
Come out, vote.
Okay, I get that.
So script, everybody uses the script.
It works.
But are enemies today bigger than they've ever been?
Is China today scarier than what Russia was in the 80s?
Yes.
But it's not presented that way, I don't think.
But hang on a second.
So is China scarier today?
Xi Jinping, you know, is he scarier today than Hitler was in his era?
I don't know.
Okay.
They're not.
Well, fair.
They're not like, you know, invading the student land right now.
Yeah, yeah, but it's not.
I agree with you.
Yeah, but because we don't know.
Thailand's over there like.
Well, I mean, Taiwan is terrified, right?
I mean, they're doing air raid drills constantly.
And, you know, the buildup of their artificial islands in the Indo-Chinese Sea is obviously very, very, very concerning to anyone who lives over there.
It's very obvious, too, that China and Russia, specifically Iran, they don't have any fear.
But you know where I'm going with this?
Here's where I'm going with this.
Here's where I'm going with this.
They understand, by the way, that we have our own insurgency in our hands right now.
And after January 6th, they understand that we don't have the bandwidth.
Matt, here's my question for you.
Here's my question for you.
So do you remember when Calapari came from college to NBA with the Nets?
He flopped.
He went back and then he crushed it in college.
Do you remember that?
Do you remember when Carroll, the first time he came to the NFL, just didn't work out?
And then he went back to college with USC.
Then he won six seasons in row with 10 plus wins.
First coach to ever do it at that time.
Then he comes to NFL, Seattle, and then he crushes it, right?
You know how they say some coaches do better with college players than NBA players and some coaches are better in NBA.
Like Nick Saban didn't make it in the NFL.
He killed it.
He's going to be probably one of the greatest coaches of all time.
Passes Bear Bryant as the greatest coach of all time in college football, right?
What kind of a president do we need today?
That's what I'm trying to ask.
If you're saying it's not Trump, if we're saying it's not Biden, if we're saying it's not Obama, what kind of a president do we have today and who's the closest thing to that?
That's your opinion.
I'm curious to know what you say about this.
At a season like this, where America's at, where China's at, where Russia's at, where Iran is now allies with China, okay, where we got crypto community that's trying to say, listen, we don't trust anybody in the government.
At a time where we got cyber world economic form COVID, what colour do we need to do?
What president do we need today?
We need to tell the entire baby boomer generation to shut up, retire, and get out of the way.
They're the problem.
They don't have...
Baby boomers are the problem.
Yes, yeah.
They're too old at this point.
Look at anytime you have hearings in Congress on like Facebook or like cryptocurrency and you've got like, you know, like Chuck Grassley from Iowa, who's like 88 years old.
He doesn't understand any of this, right?
And he's just reading prepared remarks because his staff has written them for them.
They have to do that.
We need people our generation.
So are you saying like Musk said we shouldn't have elected officials above seven years?
Those are kind of I don't know.
I'm thinking that what the moment calls for right now is somebody, honestly, is probably a millennial.
Somebody who understands the COVID.
You're ready to turn the keys over to AOC?
No, Pete Buddha Judge.
It would be, if I was going to pick a person, it would be it.
Pete's brilliant.
I know Pete personally.
He's one of the smartest people you've ever met.
He called Highways racist, man.
Listen, the Democratic Party has a really weird thing when it comes to the domestic sort of politics and that type of stuff.
And I don't understand a lot of it.
I really don't.
I don't even begin to try to get into the discussion.
But if you're asking for, my response is, if you're looking for a guy or a woman, a person that I could identify right now in the national political landscape who can handle China, who can handle Russia, who can handle all the issues, who doesn't need to be brought up to speed, who's smart.
Tulsi Gabbard.
Do you think that's a good idea?
My God, no.
God, she is.
Listen, that woman should not be allowed to wear a uniform.
Oh, whoa, whoa.
Okay, there's a fundamental neither of you served.
No, he did.
I did.
All right, Susan, you understand.
You don't do politics in uniform.
She's going on social media in her colonel's uniform and doing politics.
That's a big no-no.
I'm talking about.
Everyone's done it.
I get what you're saying, but I totally do it.
And she was an Assad apologist.
I will never, she, she, no.
When you go and you meet with that, that man dropped barrel bombs on children.
She dropped barrel bombs on children.
They dropped chlorine gas on kids.
No, She does not get in a pass.
She's the only American official in seven years who stood with that son of a bitch.
If you want to talk about values, right?
Do we stand for something?
You don't go and stand next to Assad and he says he's a good man trying to do right for you.
Would you agree to do a sit-down with Tulsi and you?
Only if I could spit in her face.
Wow.
I can't stand her.
I think she is.
Well, that's just not going to work.
I think she is a complete and total disappointment.
She is derelict in her duty.
She is engaged in conduct unbecoming behavior.
She ought to be court-martialed for what she's done in uniform.
It's unfortunate you feel that way.
Conduct somebody.
Conduct unbecoming.
She got into a uniform and went on.
So let me ask you a different question.
Let me ask a different question.
It's the easiest charge to bring up, by the way, as a commander.
If I was her commander, I'd bring her up on conduct unbecoming.
I got two questions for you, and I got eight minutes to go through.
This is an incredibly strong opinion.
Let me go through this.
So go back to so what are your thoughts on Hillary Clinton?
She was a brilliant woman.
She really was.
Very, very smart woman.
Probably one of the smartest people who had ever been.
Do you think she's evil?
No.
I think she's misunderstood.
Okay.
You don't think Hillary's evil.
You think she's misunderstood.
Strong opinions on Tulsi.
That is very weird for you to say that, Matt.
I don't think she's evil.
You don't think she's evil.
You think the Ukrainian, Ukrainian?
So, by the way, the audience has to make a decision for themselves whether they agree with you or Tulsi.
But let me go back to Pete.
Let me go back to Pete.
So, let's say Pete is your candidate because you're a Pete Camp.
You're definitely not a Tulsi camp.
Okay.
I would have loved to have seen us sit down with you and Tulsi, but spitting can't go on on this podcast.
So, let's go back to Peter Peter.
I won't spit in her face, but I would not be happy to be in the same room with her.
Okay, well, then that's a problem in America, by the way, because I think I'm trying to get Obama and Trump in the same room, and I have my own money on the line because I think that's what we kind of need to do to get people to have discourse because that's how the American people win.
But it is what it is.
Let me go back to Pete.
I'll tell you why I want to sit down with her.
Why?
Because she would never say that she was wrong.
She would never say you're right.
Do you?
I'll tell you anyone.
I'm 100% right when I'm wrong.
Anytime.
I tell you all.
You haven't been able to show one proof of Russian asset with Trump, and you think you're right.
I know I'm right.
You haven't been able to disprove that?
I've never proved.
I think in my mind I have.
You think so?
That's like, so that's like a spiritual connection you have to an imaginary Russian asset.
Go back to Pete.
Forgive me, but only one person at this table was in the CIA and actually did this for a living.
And I'm telling you right now.
But I tell you, it's like a doctor who gave birth to 4,000 kids saying, I've never had a kid before, but I know what I'm doing.
I don't know your business, but it'd be like me coming in at this point.
And like, you see whatever your business is, you identify, but it's the same thing.
There's a bunch of people that would disagree with Pete.
Go to Pete.
Go to Pete.
Let's talk about Pete.
Because I actually like Pete.
I think Pete is smart.
I think Pete's smart.
I think Pete is smart.
I don't think Pete can get elected because he's gay, by the way.
And I think that sucks.
This is my concern.
I think he can get elected in America if he's gay.
Really?
In America.
In America, but that's not the problem.
Hear me out.
Let me ask a question.
I want to see what you're going to say.
Sure.
We live in America where we have gay employees.
I have gay executives.
It's not like a thing anymore.
It's not like I'm an Iranian Middle Eastern guy that runs an insurance company.
How the hell does this make?
When I would go to insurance conferences, no one looked like this guy.
Big nose, big ears, Iranian, Middle Eastern.
Like, what do you do?
Are you a security guard?
Are you bodyguard?
And I want the CEOs.
No way.
Yes.
Okay, cool.
I guess America lets people like you also make it to the top.
Fine.
I like that.
But if you go with Pete and Pete's sitting there trying to negotiate with a North Korea or negotiate with China or Russia to them, do you know how they still look at the gay community?
Do you know how Iran and Saudi and a lot of these guys look at you automatically lose 2 billion Muslims that you can't necessarily negotiate with?
So I don't think a guy like that would be good for foreign affairs because they would not negotiate.
They would laugh at a guy like Pete.
Not in America.
I think they would.
That's assuming he's not on paternity leave.
I think, by the way, I think paternity leave should be for everybody.
I think it's a good thing.
Not during a pandemic.
No, no, no.
The most important thing that we can be doing is developing good humans.
Agreed.
Okay.
Well, the most important stage of development is the first three years of your life.
It's when your brain is most malleable.
By the way, it's why I believe that the Scandinavians have it right.
You should have two years paid to stay at home with your kids and take care of them.
How many years?
Two.
The wife or the mom?
Both parents.
I know you think this is crazy, but think of this from a speciological development.
Oh my gosh.
Think of it.
You mean to say me and my wife, we stay home for two years to take care of the kids.
Yeah.
Think of it.
Think of it when a species of development.
Oh, my gosh.
I hate to laugh at you.
I'm just entertained right now.
You're a man of your time, right?
You're a guy who's been brought up in a culture in which you would, you know, I think this is the biggest pansy era of all time.
Okay.
For most of our species development, we didn't live in houses, right?
We were hunter-gatherers.
Okay.
Sure.
You're talking, the reason why we all get fat right now is because we eat foods that we weren't evolved to eat, right?
We didn't evolve to eat complex carbohydrates and breads, right?
That's why ketosis and all that shit works.
Okay.
So think about it from the hunter-gatherer perspective.
You're out there, you're on the planes, right?
Men is out foraging, women are foraging, whatever, right?
But kids, kids are constantly with their parents pretty much all the time.
They're being taken care of, right?
Today or back then?
Back then.
Okay.
Okay.
That's how we evolve.
What it's saying is that the idea now that you are born and then you're handed over to a daycare infrastructure or to a nanny or to somebody to watch you in the most important part of your brain's development.
And you're away from the two people, you have a biological connection.
I mean, you have kids, right?
Four of them.
Okay, so when they were born, the first thing that you do as a dad is you hold them to your chest, right?
So the kid imprints on you.
Okay, that's so important.
And it's not just that one time, it's two years of that.
Oh my gosh, man.
Listen, if you want better-formed humans, if you want better people who are better participants in democracy, I'm telling you.
You have your opinions on that.
So that's extreme because to me, I think humans were stronger and tougher back in the days.
I think we're getting softer and softer and softer.
And we're raising pansies today, if you ask me.
We're raising softies today, if you ask me.
We're raising people that can't be offended.
God forbid you say something.
Oh my gosh, I failed.
Oh my goodness, let's get rid of the F because it hurt my feelings.
What am I going to do?
People are going to laugh at me.
Yeah, we're raising pansies today.
So I think my dad in Iran works six days a week.
In Iran, Friday is here Sunday.
And I love my dad more than you would even know.
He's my best friend.
He lives with me.
I saw him once a week and I'm totally okay with that.
And I was raised fine.
He taught me the right values and principles.
And I think even back, if you're going to go history even further back, men used to leave and come back and they wouldn't see their family for a long time.
The longest, longest lifespan of any culture on the planet and the happiest, highest standard of living is in Scandinavia.
And the one thing that all of those countries have in common is that they all provide at least one to two years of paid, subsidized maternity and paternity leave.
From the major economies, the longest lifespan is actually in Japan.
Just so you know.
And they have a very different way of living life.
They build businesses.
They teach toughness.
They teach the right values and principles.
And the largest lifespan, longest lifespan, like how long people actually live in a country that's not considered one of the top countries, is Monaco.
It's 89 and a half.
Japan is 85.
Monaco is 89 and a half.
But I know we can tell a lot of statistics to sell Scandinavians are doing it right.
I can only imagine two years for me to be home with the kids.
That's probably not healthy for my wife and kids.
That's why you don't want to do it.
You don't want to be there.
No, I don't think it's good for the marriage.
I think my wife would say stay go to work.
Probably.
So, anyways, Matt, regardless of what happened, the one thing about you, bro, that you got to know that I respect a lot is we talk, we chop it up, and you're going to be invited back.
I have no issues with you.
I enjoyed the combo.
We still haven't talked about the biggest story that no one's talking about.
Then you got to come back.
What is it?
What the hell is flying up in the sky that no one knows what they are?
That to me, I don't understand.
We've got our both Thais and Maverick here.
Two people invited.
What was in Europe?
What was in California?
Took pictures of the same thing at the same time.
The government admits we don't know what these things are.
They're not our technology.
They're not any other known technology.
They are Russian assets.
No, no, they're not.
They're Russian assets.
I wish.
You know, it'd be less frightening if they were, right?
Because they violate the fundamental laws of physics.
Yeah.
And we don't know what they are.
It's the biggest story.
And everyone just kind of collected and went, eh.
Like, why isn't this something we talk about every day?
Like, there are things that violate our airspace, get closest to our most technologically advanced aircraft and naval equipment and personnel, the things that are guarding our shores.
And we go, I don't know what they are.
I don't know how they got there.
I don't know how to stop them.
That's your point.
It's terrifying.
I agree.
I agree.
Well, maybe that's what we talk about next time.
And you bring Tulsi Gabba.
We put a glass in between you guys.
Do you really know Tulsi?
Of course.
If you can get me an interview with Tulsi, I will not spit on her.
You got to be respectful, bro.
I would be respectful of her, but she needs to.
Because, by the way, here's one thing about Tulsi.
She's going to see this, and she's going to say something if she responds to it.
She loves her.
She is not going to.
Tulsi, if you want to have an opinion, take off your uniform.
I'm serious.
If you see this, I don't know.
What camera am I looking at?
Take off your uniform.
Tulsi.
She's a gangster.
Take off your uniform.
I'm saying this to you as one fellow officer or another.
I'm not sitting here doing this in uniform right now, right?
Take off your uniform if you want to continue to have an opinion.
You swore an oath like the rest of us.
How dare you?
That's why.
And by the way, apologize for meeting Assad.
You met with a war criminal.
It's like standing next to Hitler and being proud of it.
You seen Tulsi in a bikini?
She looks pretty good when she takes off her uniform.
Listen, Tulsi is somebody that makes a lot of sense and has a lot of loyal followers.
So it's going to be interesting to see what happens there.
But anyways, Matt, good to have you on.
Appreciate you.
We'll have you back on to talk about some of the stuff that we didn't get a chance to get into.
But aside from that, folks, this is the first week where we're doing podcasts today with Zeller.
Tomorrow we'll be with John Eaton, I believe, who is the lawyer representing XRP Ripple going against the SEC government.
He's going to break the whole, the whole XRP community is going to be here tomorrow.
And then Thursday, the great Danielle DeMartino Booth will be here.
So we're going to do back to back to back this week, three days.
