The Truth About Afghanistan w/ Lt. Col. Stuart Scheller | PBD Podcast | Ep. 194
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PBD Podcast Episode 194. In this episode, Patrick Bet-David is joined by Lt. Col. Stuart Scheller, Tom Ellsworth, & Adam Sosnick.
Check out Stuarts book here: https://www.amazon.com/Crisis-Command-Confidence-Americas-Politicians-ebook/dp/B09YS4M32L
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Patrick Bet-David is the founder and CEO of Valuetainment Media. 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.
0:00 - Start
6:06 - Who is responsible for the Afghanistan withdrawal?
22:31 - Elon Musk gives his thoughts on the war in Russia
41:43 - Who is America's #1 enemy?
47:04 - Is it a good thing that we left Afghanistan?
51:50 - How should the U.S. handle Iran?
58:32 - Reaction to the Alex Jones verdict
1:17:23 - Obama tells Democrats to move on from their obsession with Trump
1:22:22 - Reaction to the average American losing 34k in retirement savings
1:32:02 - Reaction to Kayne West buying Parler
1:34:59 - PBD Birthday Celebration
1:46:04 - Bloomberg admits to 100% chance of recession next year
1:54:38 - Nike founder declares war on the Democratic party in Oregon4
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Give us some protein in the all right.
So episode 194 with Lieutenant Colonel Stuart Scheller, which is a very interesting story.
By the way, folks, we've been gone for about a week on YouTube.
We just found out this morning.
We can come back on live.
We back.
We're going to do this on Vimeo, but it's good to be on with you guys.
We got, like I said, a special guest with a special story who's got a lot of courage, who stood up.
A lot of people were talking about it.
This man actually put his career on the line and made a decision.
And we got a lot of things to talk to him about, a lot of current events, as well as some decisions that he made.
So with that being said, thank you so much for being a guest on the podcast.
Thanks for having me, guys.
Excited to be here.
Yeah.
So, you know, for folks who don't know you, obviously I've seen you in uniform when your story went viral, when you were being talked about all over the place, when you made some comments against your leadership for the way they, you know, they left Afghanistan and you wanted accountability.
You came out, you talked about it.
You got that one comment made by somebody you respected to step away.
And then 17 years later, you make the video and you resign.
So why don't you tell us a little bit about how that whole thing came about and then we'll go from there.
Yeah, so I was a 17-year infantry officer in the Marine Corps, Iraq, Afghanistan, commanded at the platoon company battalion level, got a master's in military science.
And the Afghanistan evacuation was the straw that broke the camel's back for me.
It was just, there's no better list of mistakes that were made by senior military leaders.
And I was at a place in my career where I knew not only would no one take accountability, but that the military has figured out how to weaponize the media.
And so they would spin it as a victory or as a success.
And so I made a video where I asked for accountability of my senior military leaders.
And then I got fired and it escalated, ultimately culminating with me doing some jail time, pleading out at a court martial and exiting the Marine Corps short of my retirement.
So 17 years, benefits.
I know sometimes if they ask people to leave at 15, they'll give them benefits, but this is not the case.
You were three years away from getting the, I think it ended up costing you, what, around, $2 million?
Yeah, so it's about $4,000 a month for the rest of my life.
So yeah, if I live till 85, it could even be more than 2 million, right?
So somebody can do the math on that.
I'm 41.
But basically, I gave up $4,000 a month for the rest of my life.
When you were about to come out and say what you were going to say, there was a question that was asked that said, what do you want to get accomplished?
I think it was that question.
You're not going to come out without having processing it with other people.
It's not like you're a private or an E4 or you're an officer, Lieutenant Colonel 05.
It's not like it's just somebody who's emotional, irrational, coming out, had a couple drinks.
I'm going to come out and make the comments.
You're a family guy.
You got a master's.
You're somebody that's educated.
You're somebody that's smart.
So before coming out, you knew, you had to know that if you were to say something like that, it's going to hurt your 17-year career.
What was the tipping point for you to say, screw it?
I'm going to make this decision.
I'm going to go out and call him out.
You know, it wasn't thought out before that day.
But if you go back and watch the video, I stated that I knew I was risking my retirement and my job.
So I had obviously thought through it.
But there just comes a point where your individual values come in conflict with the system.
And this happens actually quite frequently.
But for me, this was one of those moments where it was so big that I just felt like the service members deserved a leader to give timely assessment of failure and that my individual advancement wasn't as important as the betterment of the institution.
So I joined the military to leave a better America for my children, not to have a secure stability and retirement.
And this was one of those moments where it was like, if it's not me, then who?
If not now, then when?
And I just decided that it was more important.
It was.
born out of love for the military, love of the organization and love of the Marines, that I felt like they deserved a leader to address what was really happening.
I think that part's obvious, that it came from a place of being a true believer.
I don't think it was coming from a place of wanting to get eyeballs or anything like that.
I firmly believe you came from a place of being a true believer to talk about it.
But do you think what you wanted to accomplish got accomplished?
Or do you think it's kind of an event that's been forgotten about and the likelihood of us holding those leaders accountable is slim to none?
Well, so the question is complicated because people ask it all the time, you know, did you accomplish what you wanted to accomplish?
First of all, we didn't get in this situation overnight.
We're not going to get out of it overnight.
And it's not going to be just like a binary.
We fix it or we didn't fix it.
It's a complicated problem.
I do think that conversations have been started, but ultimately, you know, am I able to influence the change?
It doesn't just stop with the statements I made.
You know, I wrote a book to double down on that story.
And then it's really what can I do in, you know, whether it's the political arena, the entrepreneur arena, the influencing of other people.
You know, this is a, it's got to be like a lifetime endeavor.
It can't just be one event.
So I'm still dedicated to it.
You know, here I am in southern Florida doing a tour, talking to people.
I've got two more events stacked up today.
And so I've been very busy since I got out.
I'm committed to it.
Can I say definitively that it will or won't change?
I just think it's a tough question to answer.
The book is Crisis of Command, which just came out September 6th, How We Lost Trust and Confidence in American Generals and Politicians.
When you were calling out the leaders, you know, specific leaders that you could have said, you know, that person had responsibility in this, because there's a lot of people that you, during that time, it was, it's Biden's fault.
How can you just pull it in and come out and, you know, it's president's fault.
He's the commander-in-chief.
He's the one that screwed up here.
Well, no, it's the general's fault.
The general should have given a better report.
No, it is Biden's fault.
No, it's the people in the, you know, who were actually there that didn't properly report.
Or no, it's the prior administration.
Everybody blames everybody, right?
From your perspective, from your point of view as an O5 who was in it, who knows the climate, who knows how not to leave, who knows that others are talking about this regularly.
Everybody knows we're eventually leaving Afghanistan.
Who does the buck stop with?
You know, if you have to say this person first, then this person, then that person, who would those names be?
Yeah, so I absolutely think President Biden made some bad decisions.
But when I went through my ordeal, I never actually used the word president, used the word Biden.
And every headline you read about me said Lieutenant Colonel Scheller criticizes President Biden's botched Afghanistan withdrawal.
Never used President Biden's name.
My wrath during my ordeal was on the military professionals.
And so where we're losing wars right now, politicians are outlining objectives.
So it's political objectives that we're using violence to try to compel an enemy to do something.
And right now our general officers are not being held accountable to that.
And there's a lot of reasons why.
One of the biggest ones is they rotate out every two years and you can't accomplish the goals within the timeframe of their little tours.
And so it's like, well, if none of us are accountable, you know, if one of us can't see it from start to end, then no one's really accountable.
And so my position was in April, and I can go through the list real quick.
In April 1, 2021, President Biden ordered a withdrawal of military forces from Afghanistan.
And the theater commander at the time was a guy named General McKenzie.
My opinion is General McKenzie should have pushed back and not allowed that to happen.
Now, General McKinsey in his congressional testimony has said that he disagreed with the president's order.
And he said as much through Secretary Austin, but the president said, no, this is what you're going to do.
So there's a moral case study right there.
So people often say, well, if you're the general, you have to follow the orders.
Well, there's historical case studies.
If you go back to Carter's presidency, there was a guy named Singlob, S-I-N-G-L-A-U-B, and he was the commander of all forces in Korea.
And it's like the same situation.
Carter and Biden, a lot of similarities.
And Carter said, I want you to pull all American forces out of Korea.
And Singlob's like, if you do that, the Koreans will all go to war.
That whole Korean war we had, it'll all be for naught.
And Carter said, I heard you out, but this is what we're doing.
And then Singlob went public with this disagreement with Carter, and he ultimately changed the course of those events, right?
So we don't make generals like that anymore.
So McKinsey could have done that.
He chose not to, right?
Secondly, not only are we evacuating military forces before we evacuate American citizens, no brainer, but we decide to do it from April to September.
Anyone that served in Afghanistan knows the Taliban hides in the mountains in the winter.
That's why we have what we call a spring fighting season.
So we could have conducted the withdrawal from October to March and been completely uncontested, but we did it in the peak fighting season because the PR date of September 11th was more important than American lives and American treasury.
So there's like two huge mistakes that I saw play out real time as I'm watching this.
And then the third week, so this is information that I got later, the military investigation that was presented to Biden.
I think the guy, the reporter's name was like Lester Holt, Luke Holt, something like that.
Lester Holt.
Yeah.
So he asked President Biden, hey, the military investigation, what do you think about it?
And President Biden's like, I reject it.
And so then he came back and he tried to ask like an intelligent follow-up question, like, well, what parts do you disagree with?
And he just said, again, I reject it.
And that's the only thing we've gotten from the president on that investigation.
Well, that investigation was sent to me by a disgruntled staff officer.
And in the investigation, it lays out that General McKinsey's planners, so when he was doing the withdrawal starting one April, he assigned a separate general officer to plan the evacuation.
So in D.C., they're planning a be prepared to evacuation separate mission.
Those planners planned on using Bagram all the way until the third week of June, when unexpectedly, then General McKenzie ordered them to pull Bagram off the table.
Bagram was the key piece of train that we needed.
The planners, even when you read the investigation, don't understand why he made that decision.
General McKenzie in his congressional testimony later said because 650 troops wasn't enough to hold the embassy and the HKIA airfield right next to the embassy.
And so he decided to pull off Bagram.
Well, so the next week we abandoned Bagram.
A month later, 10 August, the Taliban walks in, finds 7,000 prisoners.
I mean, that's more than we responded to in the entire Kabul disaster.
And that's not even counting the Taliban force, right?
So then those 7,000, all of the Taliban, walk up to Kabul.
Now it's 15 August.
This is when General McKinsey realizes his plan is falling apart.
He throws 5,000 troops in addition to the 650 at Kabul.
So two Marine battalions in the 82nd.
They clash with the Taliban.
The Marines have confirmed now that they killed, you know, five to six at least Taliban fighters.
That's never reported.
Then that same day, General McKinsey orders them to stand post with the people they just killed, calls them a critical external partner.
They obviously allow the suicide bomber to go through the checkpoint, probably came from the prison, kills the 13 service members, injures 20 more, kills hundreds of Afghan civilians in the gate.
In response, we conduct a drone strike, kill nothing but women and children, and then we stand there and call it an overwhelming success.
I mean, there is no better list of just poor decisions that were made.
And so, yeah, the junior enlisted service member standing on the wall, grabbing babies over barbed wire, is doing everything he can.
He's not thinking about politics.
And I got all that.
But no one is going back and saying, hey, the decisions that were made between the National Security Council and the four-star general put our service members in a terrible position.
And there was plenty of off-ramps and preventable ways to do this better.
Such as.
Well, I mean, you could just go through it.
Obviously.
And the reason why I asked this is the following.
Here's what I ask.
Let's just say all of a sudden, you know, in business, somebody's making a bad decision at the top, right?
And it's a big business, not a small business.
Afghanistan is not a small business.
It's a big business, meaning we put a lot of money into it.
We didn't put $10 million, $100 million, $1 billion.
We put real money into Afghanistan.
Some are saying a trillion, some are saying $3 trillion.
That's a lot of money that we put into this thing.
That's a big investment.
So when something like that happens and people are fully vested, their lives, their friends have died, they've seen crisis, they've seen issues, you've witnessed stuff, that stuff's going to be with you until the day you die.
You can't get that out of you, right?
So you're emotionally vested.
To an average person, it's like, what are you guys complaining about?
It's just, we're out.
It's done.
It's over with.
Why are you still complaining about it?
What are you talking about?
You weren't there seeing what sacrifice we were paying.
Was there hardcore arguments on the back end, disagreements, fights saying, what the hell are we doing?
Who's agreeing to this?
Was there anybody courageous enough to go to McKinsey and say, why are you making this decision?
Why are we going?
Were there any stories like that that we're not aware of?
No, not that I know of.
How is that even possible?
That's exactly right.
I mean, that's why I made the video because I felt exactly what we're talking about now.
No one's having these conversations.
And it's crazy.
It really, it was just quite, I couldn't fathom the list of decisions that were made.
And, you know, I've had some staff officers that wrote some of the operational plans and they told me that Bagram was always part of the plans, but the National Security Council rejected it.
Right.
And so, you know, they're not all dumb people, but it's just the way these decisions were made without pushback was really my whole contention from that first video.
So, okay.
So we've had multiple people that have talked about how different we could have done it.
You gave one of them we could have waited a little bit because the season would have been better if we would have gone October to March instead of, you know, because they're trained for that.
You know, but they wanted to do a PR stunt because of 9-11, so they didn't want to wait that long.
They wanted to get it done.
What other things could we have done differently?
Well, the no-brainer is we should have just held on to Bagram and maintained air support within the country.
I mean, for decades.
That would have been so easy to do.
That's what we still do in Korea.
I mean, we've got hundreds of thousands still across Europe from World War II.
I mean, that was the no-brainer.
With a thousand people, you could have held Bagram and you could have had this huge air presence.
And that's what we've been doing for the last five years.
I mean, people don't really like, it's not like the wars of 2009 through 12.
I mean, really, for the last five years, all we've done is provide air support for our Afghan national partners.
And so the decision to pull that, I mean, I just, it was hard for me to wrap my brain around it.
Stu, most of us saw this clip.
This clip went viral, you know, and then you hear people saying, well, you know, it's not really this.
It's Photoshop.
It's from another time.
It's this.
It's that.
You guys don't know what you're talking about.
Why are you guys spreading conspiracy theories?
What can you tell us from personal experience of what this image, this picture, this video that we all saw represents?
Yeah, I mean, that's real.
Some of those pilots.
So imagine a 03, a mid-20s Air Force pilot in that plane right now, and he has to make decisions of whether he's going to kill three young guys, right?
So like that's not talked about.
Think about the 20-year-old pilot that has to make decisions to either stop the plane or keep driving and kill potentially all those people holding onto the plane.
And they were afraid that if they stopped the plane, the plane was going to get overrun and destroyed.
And so that poor guy had to make the decision to essentially kill people to take off.
And who were those people?
What were they looking to do?
So this is the H. Kaya airfield.
So this is, we made the decision to basically drop down to two spots, the embassy and H. Kaya Airfield.
And then eventually we evacuated the embassy.
And now we're just operating out of this place.
This place was just not.
easily defended.
It had like 13, 14 checkpoints.
And what happened was on 15 August, when the Taliban rolled up, they pushed all of the civilians into the airfield and kind of used them as cover when they were getting into firefights.
And so when they pushed all the civilians onto the airfield, this is right when the Americans were also responding, didn't have their act together.
This was the chaos that ensued.
Gotcha.
Let me ask you a question.
Well, number one, genuinely, thank you for your service.
I know a lot of people just kind of say that, but genuinely, I'm getting this sense of deep, deep somberness and mindfulness from you.
So I'm going to ask you a personal question right now.
I'm asking Stu a question, not Lieutenant Colonel Stuart Schell, if you don't mind.
I'm asking Stu, like, how are you feeling right now?
Are you angry?
Are you distraught?
Are you fired up?
Are you confident?
Are you at peace?
Like, genuinely, Stu, how are you feeling?
You know, emotions are day to day, right?
Genuinely, right now, I'm kind of tired because I had to get up at 5 a.m. to drive over here.
But yeah, your question is my headspace.
And I'll tell you, when I wrote the book, and then you have to like reread the book a hundred times for editing purposes, that was like physically draining to me to the point where when I like read it for the umpteenth time at the end of April, I literally couldn't read it again.
And I didn't read it until it came out in September because it just took such a spiritual, physical, mental toll.
And yeah, and so there's a lot of unknown.
I've always been, I knew what was next, you know, high school.
Then I'm going to go to college.
Once I go to college, I'm going to join the Marine Corps.
And then I'm in the Marine Corps.
And, you know, I'm going to go to retirement.
And like right now, there isn't a plan.
And I'm trying to be comfortable with just kind of trying to see where this path leads me.
And so that also kind of takes a toll.
And then traveling, you know, I've been just in the last couple of weeks, I was in Texas and then Southern California.
Then after this, I'm going to Nashville and then to Vegas, you know, and so that also can be draining.
But I feel like I'm kind of guided by a bigger purpose.
And, you know, I like being busy.
And so I guess that's a lot of words to say.
I don't know, man's day to day.
What is your, you said you've been in the military 17 years.
Yeah.
All right.
You got in at 04?
Yeah, I put in the paperwork in 04.
I started boot camp January 05.
Okay, so and you got out less than a year ago, give or take?
Christmas Eve last year.
Okay, so you've been a civilian for less than 12 months.
That's right.
You talked about a bigger purpose.
Now you're kind of, you know, Moses in the desert, lost, wandering basically right now, not to get too biblical.
But what is your deeper sense of purpose now that you're a civilian?
Well, the natural path or like the way the current is taking me is towards politics.
But the truth is, I don't know if I want to be a politician.
The only thing that kind of outweighs that is I have a huge disdain for the current politicians, right?
So it's like, do I want to go and try and do that?
Because it's just, the last six months, I've been supporting different candidates.
And so I've kind of gotten a PhD in politics and how campaigns work, how town halls work, blah, blah, blah.
And so I have a deeper understanding of it, but it's just a ruthless game.
And I think I would be happier just, you know, being a farmer, to be quite honest with you, reading and writing.
But at the same time, what I'm probably most passionate about is leaving a better America for my children.
And if I don't see the leadership qualities and the people that are our representatives, it may compel me to go do that.
And so that's kind of the internal struggle right now.
You said you're tired.
At any point, you just, you said being a farmer, do you want to just take a year and just chill?
Seriously.
Yeah.
We all saw a gladiator, right?
And like, and just he wants to kind of just harvest his land and just touch the land, not fight anymore.
Yeah.
You're still fighting, but in a different arena now.
You're 100% right.
Yeah, absolutely.
That calls to me.
I don't know.
Right now, the drawback to waiting.
So when I was going through everything I went through, I'll give you an example of the risk to waiting.
So the NRCC, the way politics work, for Congress, at least the Republican Party divides the United States up into five regions.
And then each one of those five people find candidates for Congress.
So this guy came down and wanted me to run out of Congress for the GOP in North Carolina.
He came and he sought me out like September, October of 21.
And I essentially told him no.
But his argument was the longer you wait, you know, the notoriety, the name brand, the ability to influence degrades.
And I was like, well, that's fine, but I'm just not mentally, I don't have the headspace.
I'm going through a divorce.
My stuff's in storage.
I don't know where I'm going to be in six months.
Like, I can't do it.
Right.
And so now, you know, fast forward, I've got a place where all my stuff's out of storage.
My divorce is finalized.
I'm in a good place with her, the kids.
And I've wrote a book.
So I kind of got that story out there.
It's a little bit better, but at the same time, to your point, maybe now it's time to step back.
Or is it, you know, you weigh that against, you know, exploit the opportunities as you have them now, don't stop.
And so I don't know.
I don't think there's a right or wrong answer.
I think it's just something that I got to figure out on my own, but there's cost to both.
I want to do this because when you have something like this experience that you have, it's important for us to know when we're having currently Ukraine and Russia going on.
We have Taiwan and China going on.
We have these types of issues that's going on.
We have Iran going on right now with the people protesting.
I've got a lot of stuff going on right now.
We have an Elon Musk, who if you want to pull up his tweet, I'll just read it to you what Elon Musk just recently said.
I think we all saw it.
It was yesterday, but I'll just give the whole context so people know.
Just pull up the tweet so we can have it.
Let me see here if I have it.
Okay, so Elon Musk warned civilization is over if Ukraine doesn't give in to Russia.
Okay.
Self-proclaimed political expert, Elon Musk, obviously that comment means they like him a lot, has issued a stark warning to Ukraine as Russia's invasion countries continues.
Using Twitter, the platform, he is likely to soon own and control the world's richest man, made a number of eyebrow-raising predictions for eventualities regarding the outcome of Russia's invasion of Ukraine.
If Russia is faced with the choice of losing Crimea or using battlefield nukes, they will choose the latter.
The SpaceX and Tesla CEO tweeted, the West has already sanctioned cutoff Russia in every possible way.
So what more do they have left to lose?
If we nuke Russia back, they will nuke us.
And then we have World War III.
In short, Musk is arguing that Ukraine should give in to Russia's demand or else a highly controversial perspective that has already landed him in hot water recently.
Last week he announced SpaceX will no longer supply Starlink internet satellite tech to Ukraine, a decision he reversed two days later.
They're not saying why.
One of their diplomats, one of their leaders told him to go F off.
That's why he just canceled it.
But when you hear, you know, the experience and the lack of proper decision-making in Afghanistan that you second-guessed, and a lot of people also second-guess, you're not alone there.
And then we have this going on right now where a guy like Elon Musk is commenting.
How do you, what do you think about what Elon said?
And what do you think about the way we've been handling Russia on Ukraine?
Yeah, so two very different questions.
So first of all, Crimea, I mean, Russia annexed that way before the current conflict that we're having here.
So I think Musk's comments was they've already annexed Crimea.
Just acknowledge, give them that.
But then there's still a whole bunch of contested area right now in the eastern portion of Ukraine.
And so ultimately what Musk is advocating for is some concessions by Ukraine.
And, you know, the Ukrainians are been operating the way they have for the last 60-ish years and they don't want to go back to Russia-controlled territory.
I don't know.
It's complicated.
So I would say my opinion is that the United States, a lot of times, can't get out of its own way and makes matters worse.
And so I'm not sure that the billions and billions of dollars that we've given Ukraine was the best return on investment.
I think in a lot of ways it probably cripples our European allies who should be doing the same thing.
I mean, there's no better example of a pacified culture than the Germans.
And the Germans are right there and should really, in my opinion, be doing a lot more.
How this ends, I'm not sure.
I think people are getting a little too hysterical about Vladimir Putin not being a rational human being.
I don't know if I agree with that assessment.
I understand why he did what he did with the advancement of NATO.
But I do believe it was a strategic mistake.
I do believe he has old KBG thinking, KGB, excuse me.
And so, you know, his old style of thinking is more land equals more power.
And that's just not true in today's world.
Today, it's controlling the beliefs of the people is the ultimate power.
And if by going for more land, he polarizes all the beliefs of the people, he's actually degraded a lot of his power.
I mean, look no further than Sweden and Norway to look at his strategic failures.
So really what we're arguing about is some border region areas, and I don't know how that'll play out, but I'm not convinced that Vladimir Putin is not rational.
And I'm also not convinced that we should be giving as much money to Ukraine as we are.
What's the likelihood do you think of this thing getting ugly, the way Elon says if we make a couple bad moves, this guy goes first, we retaliate, it can turn into a World War III.
What's the likelihood of that?
I think it comes back to the beliefs of the people.
And so I think people in America often want to project Russians as these evil people.
Russians are, you know, very much like us, white Christian European type people.
Like if you actually hang out with a Russian, they are very kind to Americans and like Americans, right?
If I went into a Muslim country like Iran, they would not be as kind and they would have a different belief system.
Same thing with the Chinese.
And so I guess I'm just not convinced that the Russian people are going to allow it to happen, but crazier things have happened.
Is it a threat that we should be worried about?
Absolutely.
But Elon Musk projecting that Vladimir Putin is completely irrational.
Therefore, we must concede certain things, I think is maybe a stretch.
Did you hear the rumor that came out, Tyler, last week that they're saying Musk had a conversation with Putin?
Yeah, I've heard that briefly.
Did you hear about that this last week where Elon Musk had a conversation with Putin, an article saying, did Elon Musk speak with Vladimir Putin?
I don't know if, can you zoom in a little bit?
He's now repeating a Putin talking point.
He's a Putin asset because the guy doesn't want to do anything to piss off.
Let me read this story from 1945 that just came out a couple of days ago.
Biden's Ukraine strategy could start a nuclear war with Russia.
What too many of our current leaders and enthusiastic Washington Hawks somehow fail to recognize, however, is that unlike all our military opponents of the past several decades, Russia's possession of nuclear weapons means they can, in a moment of desperation of fear, initiate a nuclear war that could quite literally wipe the United States out of existence.
Obviously, that's a hard exaggeration, but this is what the writer is saying.
This should not be hard to understand.
If the U.S. and NATO finally provide enough firepower, intelligence, and training to Ukrainian troops that will enable them to physically drive Russian forces completely out of Ukraine territories, especially the highly charged emotional areas of Donbass and Crimea, Putin will be forced into a corner where he has to choose between allowing his entire force to be completely defeated or escalate to use of nuclear weapons.
What do you think about what this article says?
Yeah, I mean, that's a theory.
I'm obviously not Vladimir Putin, but I don't know if I agree.
There's a way, I think, for him to save face without giving him all of the Donbass area.
I mean, I'm not a geography major.
I've looked at it on a map.
Seems to be a pretty big area.
I mean, he already has Crimea.
And I think, quite honestly, we've already defeated him strategically.
Like, even if he comes out of this with parts of the Donbass, I don't know if he sees it as a victory.
So, let's define that.
What is victory and what is complete defeat for him?
I mean, I don't know.
I would submit holding on to Crimea might not be a complete defeat.
And there's probably ways where we could come to the table and make it not look like he completely got defeated.
Maybe I'm wrong.
Yeah, I think that's the real question, right?
What do you do for him to save face?
Because this is not a regular guy that's, you know, he cannot be publicly offended.
Yeah.
And that's what it's looking like.
Tom, history, you've been, you've followed stories like this for a while.
How do you think is the proper way to do something here where at least you please him, but also at the same time, you're not doing something where you're giving him everything he wants?
Well, I think there's a lot of examples of this that happen in the resolutions of the Arab-Israeli wars.
When you go back and take a look, like when Egypt came across Suez Canal and then occupied West Bank.
And remember, what happened was the Israelis pushed them all the way back into the canal, over the canal, and then took part of Egypt's land on the other side.
And what you had to do here is Israel is like, I'm not giving back the land on the other side of the canal because now I have a buffer against a known demonstrated aggressor.
And so I'm going to extend the buffer here.
And there were negotiations that had to take place to make it literally a demilitarized zone, that Israel only would accept policing that was 100% demilitarized by Egyptian forces.
And you had to give Anmar Sadat, even though he was the aggressor, a face saving.
Otherwise, the people, these Egyptian people that just at their core of their heart hate Israel, you know, we're not going to be happy and they're going to be rioting.
So you had to balance both things for the ego of the leader as well as the response of the people.
And I think that's exactly the delicate thing that had to happen here.
And the West had to whisper to Israel and say, listen, you took it back fair and square.
They came across and you literally kicked the crap out of them for seven days with U.S. equipment.
You're nodding.
You know the history.
I do.
And then they came back and they said, okay, we're going to come back across, but this will now be a completely demilitarized zone.
There can be no Egyptians that are armed in the area, but they can police it up to the old border.
So the old border was restored, but without presence of any military assets, which is what the only thing that the Israelis would allow.
There can be no military assets there because you've demonstrated what you do with them.
And so it saved face for Sadat.
It saved the people being the militant part of the people from being in open conflict the way they are constantly now on the other side of Jerusalem where you have the three territories that are never at peace.
And I think that's exactly what has to happen here.
An international diplomat has to step up, find a way for him to save face, maybe let him keep Crimea and then pull back on this because you've got You've got this leader, and it's happened before in history.
We have rational people around the world can come together to make, to defuse what could be a second bomb.
Can I ask a question?
Historically, what have been moments where a person who played the role of a diplomat or somebody that just was a unifier that held a meeting between in the middle of war that held a meeting between two of the hated leaders or presidents or prime ministers come together historically.
How often has it happened?
You think of people like Kissinger, you know, who was a who is U.S., but he was seen as this.
He was really seen as a old school, you know, ambassadorial light touch diplomat.
He was our guy and he was U.S., but he was able to negotiate.
Who's that guy today with soft skills that can have these types of conversations?
I think you go back.
I don't know.
I don't know.
Well, a couple of different points.
You're going to go blinking isn't that.
Well, the first thing that comes to mind was Clinton sitting down with Yasser Arafat and Yitzhak Rabin, Israel, PLO.
These days, former governor of New Mexico, Bill Richardson, he's kind of sent all around the world to get hostage out of enemy countries.
But to Tom's point, not to deviate, I don't know if you guys saw on Bill Maher this weekend, they had B.B. Netanyahu, the former prime minister of Israel.
You spent some time in the Israeli-Lebanon conflict in mid-2000s.
My ultimate question to Tom is that example that you gave of the Suez Canal and the Sinai Peninsula of Israel and Egypt, it's actually a great example.
The only difference is now this guy's got nukes.
And Putin has a much, much, much bigger ego, questionably a fragile, more fragile ego than Anwar Sadat.
So how do you grapple with the fact that he has such a large world presence?
Social media is so much more amplified.
Everyone's eyeballs on Ukraine versus an Egypt situation before social media.
And he's got nukes.
So is it really a fair analogy?
I think the human side of it is identical.
Just the tools and consequences are worse because the tools are bigger.
But the human side of it is the same.
And I also go back and I give credit to Jimmy Carter in the Camp David Peace Accords.
And I believe his guy was Bignu Brzezinski.
Mika Brzezinski's dad, yes.
Right.
Brzezinski.
Yep.
I think he was our guy that brokered.
Big time.
Big time.
Who didn't need newspaper headlines, didn't want a book deal, but he quietly made it happen.
And I think to your question, Pat, that's the kind of guy we need right now.
I have two points I want to make on this.
So first, I've been holding on to this Sadat comment.
I think Sadat and Putin, I understand the point you're making, but Sadat literally just wanted to cross the Suez as like a show of force.
I don't think he ever wanted to gain territory.
He just wanted to show the Muslim world that he could cross the Suez.
And then literally, as Israel was beating him back, he was declaring victory because it was more of a show.
Whereas Putin, I think, you know, wants to use violence and gain territory.
And so I've been sitting here thinking, you know, how could we give on this?
So Elon Musk's recommendation is strictly land-based, you know, concessions of land.
Literally, the reason what is driving Putin is not maniacal madness.
It's because he sees NATO's expansion as a threat.
So if the West is going to concede something, I think the Donbass in the Crimea is much less important than the threat that NATO poses to Putin.
So quite honestly, if the United States wanted to end this war right now, they could say, hey, the United States is pulling out of NATO.
We're going to take all those forces, put them on our own southern border.
You guys figure it out.
Putin says, I'm okay with that.
And he goes back to Russia.
I mean, you could solve that with something like that.
But the problem is so many people are invested in NATO that that would also be a hard sell.
But that would be a way you could de-escalate it.
Do you not think that it's vital for the United States to be a major part of NATO?
I think I would pull out of NATO completely.
I think, now, do I think a strong presence in the global arena establishes order?
Yes.
Do I think that America has set the world tone for the last century?
Yes.
Do I think NATO has extremely crippled our European allies?
Yes.
And so...
Why crippled?
Just...
The budget is probably the biggest one, right?
If we weren't there providing 80% of the budget, then they would be forced to spend more.
This is essentially Trump's argument for years.
Yes.
With determinants, pay your bill.
Remember, pay your bill.
But Trump was just advocating for them to pay their 3%.
And they weren't even doing that.
I don't think Trump went far enough.
And quite honestly, everyone can't figure out how to fix our southern border.
You don't even need to build a wall.
Just take all those NATO forces that are across Europe and put them on our southern border, and I could solve the problem in a month.
But that's what we do.
It's not even just around Europe.
I mean, how many bases does the United States have all over the world?
800-something bases.
We've covered this.
Whereas China has one in Djibouti.
I've been there.
Oh, you've been to Djibouti?
It's the worst place in the world.
Really?
Yeah.
I'm not going there with you now.
Do you think we need 800 bases all over the world?
You know, the number of the frequency of bases I'd have to take a look at because there are, like, Djibouti, for example, is where we fly all our UAS off of all those contested areas.
And so there is some strategic importance to some of them.
But yeah, to your point, I think we have maybe scattered ourselves a little thin.
And it's like one of those things that once you get a base, like just use Djibouti, for example.
All right, we need 100 service members.
Well, those 100 service members need 50 people to run the Chowha.
All right.
Well, those 50 people that run the Chowha also need another 100 people to service the bathrooms and build the houses.
And then these things just grow.
And all of a sudden, a hundred-man footprint is now a 2,000-person thing.
Somebody's got to operate the gym.
Somebody's got to operate the movie center.
And it just gets out of control very quickly.
Budget-wise, it gets out of control.
Yeah, I mean, you're suddenly a town.
And then if you especially look around the world and bases, they say that you're also bringing cultural dynamics that they don't want.
That when you're off base, you are influencing their culture.
And you came here, you started with base and ended up as a village, and now you're influencing my culture.
And that's where you get these deeper resentments.
Okinawa.
I mean, just look at Okinawa, the Marine Corps base.
Literally, they have hundreds of people that protest outside the gate every day because of exactly what is being described.
The culture feels like it's being influenced by the base and they want it out.
But the Japanese are like, no, it's too important to us.
It's funny with Okinawa.
A lot of guys would go to Okinawa and they'd come back married or they would stay and become school teachers.
Like people didn't want to leave Okinawa.
A lot of people come back with a Japanese wife when they went to Okinawa.
Really?
What was it about Okinawa that was so special?
I mean, I don't know if we can talk about it.
Okay.
No, but it's the example.
There you have it.
And they're here and they're influencing our culture and now they're marrying our women and there's all these things going.
Can you guys just leave, please?
That's what all these protests are.
Stu, I don't know if it's a binary thing, so feel free to elaborate.
But, you know, there's American interests, freedom, you know, everything that we stand for, you know, capitalism, democracy, kind of putting our footprint on the globe.
And then there's corporate interests, the military-industrial complex, like it has nothing to do with America and our interests.
It has to do with making money and, you know, people just sucking at the teat of the military.
Where do you see the military right now if those are the two binary extremes?
I think the industrial complex drives a lot of our conflicts, unfortunately.
I mean, just take a look.
General Mattis went from general dynamics to secretary of defense back to general dynamics.
Our current Secretary of Defense went from Raytheon to Secretary of Defense.
General Dunford right now is on Lockheed Martin.
I mean, all of them take these board member positions on the oligopoly of government contracting firms, and the government contracting firms hire them because it garners influence within the active general population and it incentivizes war, right?
And so it's a problem.
And I even put it in my book.
I think you can't stop a general officer from getting out and creating these, I don't know, immoral, unethical connections, but you can sure make him choose between his retirement and that board member position, but I don't think they should get both.
And so I would, if I was a Secretary of Defense, at least have a cooling off period.
I mean, that just seems common sense.
Like if you retire as a general for at least five to 10 years, you shouldn't be jumping on these boards.
But for whatever reason, we have a chance.
I've been thinking in politics with lobbyists.
Pat, you've gone in on lobbyists and how you could just jump from being a senator.
Now you're a lobbyist for a tobacco firm or whatever it is.
You've had extreme opinions on this one, Hunter.
We've talked about that many times when it comes down to lobbyists.
But by the way, let me ask this question.
So nuclear bombs have only been used twice in history in warfare, right?
But they've been tested over 2,000 times.
You got an article that just came out here about China saying China's vertical nuclear expansion is real.
Most concerning is the PRC's modern and grown nuclear arsenal.
More precisely, the significant vertical expansion and increase in the number of nuclear warheads of this arsenal in the hands of such destabilizing force.
It needs to be confronted post-haste by public accounts.
The PRC had approximately 240 nuclear heads in 2010.
Today it's at 350 by 2030.
They're projecting to have around 1,000.
Beijing will continue the largest ever nuclear force expansion and arsenal diversification in its history.
Beijing, is not interested in agreements that restrict its plans and will not agree to negotiations that lock in U.S. or Russian advantages, right?
Okay.
So if it's only been used twice, it's been tested 2,000 times, and everybody is concerned about people having nuclear bombs and everyone wants to have them, like, what are you having it for?
Because if one starts and it triggers and it's really a nuclear war that happens worldwide, what's going to be left over if they go that direction?
Why is everybody so obsessed with having nuclear bombs?
It's the assurance of mutual destruction.
So I will say, like, there are countries where you could look and their willingness to give up the nuclear bomb resulted in us exploiting them.
I mean, look at Libya.
I mean, that is a great case study on pursuing nuclear weapons.
We convince you to get rid of it and then we topple you.
You know, you could just keep going down the list with that.
But I, when looking at history, feel like when a country has nuclear power, at least the United States seems to respect them more.
And I mean, Pakistan is a great example where if we really wanted to win the war in Afghanistan at any point, Western Pakistan was the Taliban's United States of Kuwait.
What United States used Kuwait for to facilitate logistics is what the Taliban used in Pakistan.
But we didn't want to go in there because they were a nuclear power.
So I think if I was a country, that would be something I would get because if you don't have it and they do, they're going to treat you with less respect.
Very interesting.
I mean, it's just purely about, you know, making sure you have a little bit of leverage and protection.
That's an insurance policy.
That's all it is.
That's exactly.
It's something you may never, ever use, but just the fact that the other person knows you have it, they give you a little more respect.
That's right.
I think the phrase that gets used, and I don't mean this in an ethically derogatory way, but there is a phrase out there that says it's a Mexican standoff, which means that you're both kind of stalemated.
I mean, look at North Korea as an example.
Tiny little peninsula, and they're on the world stage because they got nuclear bombs, and that's literally probably all they have.
Their people probably have to eat nuclear pieces of bombs for breakfast.
But people forget what he's doing, right?
His nuclear capabilities are actually, you know, 1980 grade at best.
But what does he keep testing?
The ability to deliver them.
He keeps launching the missiles that are unarmed.
So what he's showing everybody is that he's increasing his rocketry technology so that he could deliver a bomb.
But his actual nuclear capabilities are more meager.
But it makes one crazy guy with one dirty bomb and the ability to deliver it into downtown Tokyo, not just a menace.
Now he's got a chip at the table.
Yep.
Interesting.
So you put this story up, Tyler.
North Korea fires powerful missile using old playbook in a new world.
The last time Pyongyang launched a weapon was over Japan in 2017 when Donald J. Trump was president and Kim Jong-un seemed intent on escalating conflict with Washington.
And if you recall, that's exactly when Trump was like, I will release great fire and fury, that whole thing.
And people were like, he's going to start World War III.
And next thing you know, him and Kim Jong-un are exchanging love letters.
It's probably when Millie started collecting up the nuclear launch goods.
And what's wild is nothing happened in four years.
That's what's wild.
Nothing happened in four years.
Everybody was just kind of sitting there saying, let's wait for this guy, this guy, to leave.
And then if we want to do anything, let's do it afterwards.
Boom, he's gone.
Next thing you know, Afghanistan and all the other stuff started.
Not during his reign, but it started right after him, and they tried to capitalize because maybe they were concerned he was going to do something about it.
He really, the guy's insane.
He really just wants a three-movie deal and a merchandising rights.
But back to Trump.
You'd be the expert here, but didn't he put together the agreement to leave Afghanistan?
Yeah, the Doha.
We didn't abide by anything in the Doha Agreements because the Taliban didn't abide by anything in the Doha Agreement.
Gotcha.
So everybody wants to go back to Doha, but we pulled out a Doha.
Okay.
So, yeah, I don't know.
He had a conditional agreement, and they did not meet the conditions of the agreement.
The Taliban did not?
Correct.
What I'll also point out, though, is that plan ended with us holding on to Bagram Air Base.
And so when I hear President Biden talking about the agreement that President Trump got into after we left Bagram, it's just, it frustrates me more.
Let me ask you one more on this topic.
I don't think anyone will object to the nature of which we left Afghanistan.
It was a mess.
We left $85 billion worth of hardware.
And now you hear Iran and whoever's getting their hands on it.
So no doubt that we could have left a lot cleaner, no doubt.
But the concept of just leaving Afghanistan or fundamentally leaving Afghanistan, I think a lot of Americans were just so sick of the fact that we're still 20 years later.
How the fuck are we still in Afghanistan?
Right?
So can you appreciate at least not the manner in which we left, but the fact that we at least got out of there?
Do you agree that there was at least a major appetite in America to get out of Afghanistan?
Yeah, I mean, if you go back, so my first video, I said, I'm not saying we have to be in Afghanistan forever, but I am saying, and then I went on to what I was saying.
I personally believe that we should have left a small footprint in Bagram.
That's my position.
Do I understand why the American people were over Afghanistan?
Yes.
I think it's short-sighted because, you know, just look at the al-Qaeda coming right back into Afghanistan.
Like, you need some type of base and presence, in my opinion.
It's a hotbed.
There's probably three or four countries where, you know, terrorism grows and Afghanistan is one of them, bottom line.
And so I think just from a national security standpoint, we need to have a footprint.
We already owned that terrain.
It made a lot of sense for me.
But do I acknowledge that the American people were over Afghanistan?
Yeah, absolutely.
And when we pulled out, would we have 2,000 soldiers in Afghanistan?
We started with 2,500 on one April, and then we went down to 650.
So it was a minimal force, and we were keeping peace and order.
That's right.
That's right.
So that exactly right.
With 2,500 troops, we owned Afghanistan.
We owned Afghanistan.
So the investment was 2,500 troops, and you own Afghanistan.
But that was too much, right?
And so that's, you know, and you just look, I wish somebody had the stat for how many forces are in Europe right now.
There's not a lot of terrorism being created in Europe.
I mean, there is some, but not to the point of Afghanistan.
And we probably have, you know, 50 to 100,000 troops in Europe right now, right?
So it's just, you know, do the math.
It seemed like a good return on investment for me.
Stu, this is a pretty blunt question, but, you know, there's a phrase that I think you've used this, Pat, that in the Taliban, they said that, well, you guys have all the watches, but we have all the time.
Like, spend the next couple decades here, buddy, spend 50 years here, 100 years.
We're not going anywhere.
Okay.
But at the same time, you're talking about the United States military, Marine Corps, number one in the world versus a bunch of sandal-footed, machete-wielding, gun-toting dudes.
How the hell did we not just...
Those are AKs.
Okay.
How did we not beat the shit out of them and just move on?
Well, why was it even close?
So I think we won most tactical engagements.
Now, that doesn't, that's not all of them, obviously.
But you also got to keep in mind, technology is one thing, but the most lethal weapon is a human mind.
And so if I grew up in Afghanistan wearing a man dress and sandals, but all I was told, I didn't have any TV, all I was told about was the warriors that fought the Russians.
And I was taught how to use an AK and I had my buddies and that was like the only thing in my world.
I don't care how much technology you've got.
I'm going to bring some lethal force to bear.
And the people that we had in our American propped up government and Afghanistan were not the real men.
The real men were the ones that were, you know, grew up hearing stories about fighting the Russians and they got with their buddies and they got little gangs together and fell within the structure of the Taliban, went over to Pakistan, got some more training, and then came over and fought.
And so, you know, I don't, the Taliban was never a terrorist.
And I talk about that in my book.
They were the government.
They were the conventional force.
We displaced them.
It was confusing because we were fighting a global war on terrorism in Afghanistan, but that only strictly applied to al-Qaeda, which we cleaned up very quickly.
So then we found ourselves in a position where we were going against the conventional force, the Taliban.
And like you said, how you started this was they had time on their side.
They were willing to wait us out.
So anyone that's willing to wait us out, if the American people get to a point where like we don't want to be there anymore, then they're going to win.
Like you can't exterminate them, right?
You can keep winning tactical battles, but then it requires the American people to say we're going to leave 2,500 in Bagram airbase so that we can continue to pound them with air support when required.
Yeah, you're really emphatic that 2,500 troops in Bagram Air Forces and airbase is all we really needed.
I think so.
Yeah.
I mean, you know, crazier things have happened.
But again, we've been doing that for the last five years.
Stu, when you were deployed and you were all over the place, what was the understanding or maybe even the interpretation you had on how different Iran was dealing with Iran as a government and military than some of these other countries in the Middle East?
I mean, everyone that I thought in Iraq was Iranian, mostly.
All the electromagnetic force penetrators were Iranian.
And so when you were in Iraq, you really felt like you were fighting Iran in a lot of ways.
All the things that I studied originated from Iran.
And that was my second war.
The first one was when I was in Beirut.
And again, Hezbollah was a lot of Iranian influence.
So, I mean, I've spent a lot of my time dealing with proxy groups from Iran.
And Iran's the major player in there.
And, you know, the United States has gone in and kind of destabilized everyone around them, you know, Syria included in that.
And now you've got Iran that kind of is just standing there by itself as the regional player.
What's their strength?
What's their weakness?
If you were to say, if you're going to attack them, if you're going to figure out a way to help their people revolt against them where a democracy can come there, you would do it this way.
But this is the one area of their strength.
You cannot beat them in this area.
I think Iran, much like China, strength and weakness is centralized control.
And so you can play that against them, but it also can work to their advantage, where the United States sometimes takes more of a deliberate group of people coming to a consensus where a government like Iran or China can move much quicker because of the autonomy and centralized control.
And so the problem with centralized control is if you move in a direction very quickly and it's the wrong direction, now you've actually set yourself back much further than you would in like a democratic process.
So the democratic process is more resilient because we have a lot of voices that need to be heard, but at the same time, it doesn't move very quick and efficiently, whereas a centralized government can.
And so that's what I see when I look at those two places.
Now, Iran, I don't see the Communist Party of China going anywhere, but I don't think the Iranian, the Alatolla Khamene, I don't see him lasting very long, quite honestly.
Crazier things have happened, but the Iranian people are very proud people and they're connected technology-wise to the rest of the world.
And they want to get, you know, the Persians of the day were probably the top of the food chain and they haven't been there in a long time.
And so I'd be surprised, but crazier things have happened.
But I see Iran going into a revolution in the next 30 years-ish, before the end of my time, I believe.
In the next 30-year-ish.
Yeah, yeah.
I'm not saying it'll happen anytime soon.
I got you.
I'm not saying it'll happen.
But you can see the cracks in the foundation.
And so this might take a couple of decades, but it'll happen.
So if I was a United States president, I would do everything to stay out of my own way because as I study that model, that model is destined for implosion on its own.
And the worst thing America can do, because oftentimes when you attack a system, you unify the system.
I mean, you saw it in the United States in 9-11.
You can see it in Iraq.
So if you attack the system, you unify the system.
And so I would do everything I could not to unify the Iranian system because that thing's had the implosion on its own.
If your enemy is making a strategic mistake, don't interrupt them.
Right that's, that's old school Sun Tzu yeah, very interesting, and in the concept of uh, 30 years Iran, so China.
But on the flip side, you said China, they're going to be around for a while.
I agree yeah, and I think uh yeah, China is continuing to get stronger.
I've read a lot of things about how it's all a shell game and they're going to implode, but i'm not sure I agree with it.
I think um, just the strength of their population and the you know some of the shortcuts that they're able to take right now that we don't take based on um, a set of morals, whether that be right or wrong um, they're accelerating at a much faster pace.
How, how wild it is that they're.
They're becoming allies because China signed a 400 billion dollar 25-year deal with Iran and for them to unify.
That, some people say it makes it even tougher for a revolution to happen sooner, because they got the big guys on the other side defending them, backing them up.
I think the alliance between Russia, Iran and China is an alliance of weakness.
So mostly when you get into an alliance with someone, it's because you see the world through the same eyes and you stand for the same principles and values.
That's not the case with Iran, China and Russia.
The reason they are aligned is because they got no one else to align to, and so when I look at that alliance, are they all powerhouses in their own right and does that, is that relevant?
Yes, but at the same time, you know, China doesn't want to be aligned to Iran.
They just don't have anyone else they can align to.
You think it's a sign of weakness?
I do.
I do, absolutely do.
Unpack that a little bit more.
I think it's like.
It's like, if i'm on a uh, on a base level, if i'm on a playground and one kid gets all the other kids to follow his lead, and so I try to make friends with like two other kids that maybe are, are not part of the big group, just because that's what's left.
I mean, China doesn't get to pick its allies right now.
Right, Iran doesn't get to pick its allies because of just their behavior.
And so, you know, do they add value by aligning to the other outcasts?
Sure, but to me it's, it's symptomatic of not having a lot of choices right, it's almost like they don't.
They don't have any friends, that's right.
So it's like if you have no friends, you're gonna hang out with the two other guys that have no friends.
It's like no one else wants to hang out like you're.
You're, you're breaking it down to a playground.
That's exactly what it is.
But, quite honestly, even then, like that might even hurt you a little bit too, because now you've aligned yourself with Iran right, and we could talk about, you know, the injustices of Iran.
Uh, for a while, same thing with with Russia, so it doesn't matter.
You know, do they get some strength and value by, you know, selling arms or importing and exporting?
Yes, absolutely they do.
But on the long term, is it helping them?
I'm not convinced you're talking about, you know, pariahs on the world stage.
But here's the question, coming together, if that's the case, then who?
Who is, in your opinion, the number one threat to us?
If you're saying it's a sign of weakness between Russia, China and Iran, then who is U.s' number one enemy outside of internal?
No, it is China, no doubt, no doubt.
But I, you know I, I stand by that.
Their alliance isn't, it's something based on what they had available, Right?
So is that a strength of theirs?
I don't know.
Let's transition into a different topic.
If you can pull up that article, it's a topic we haven't reacted to and had a conversation about yet.
You guys obviously heard this.
Alex Jones ordered to pay $965 million for the Sandy Hook lies until the political right argues this movement from its ranks.
None of this ends.
Senator Chris Murphy.
965.
And the way they came up with this number is to say that he used Sandy Hook to make a lot of money for himself.
So the families are, the judges ordering him to pay $965 million.
This can go to anybody.
When you first heard this number, I mean, I understood some number was going to come out.
But when you heard this number, 965, what was the initial reaction?
That's a lot of money.
I think so as well.
That's a lot of money.
Tom, what was your reaction when you saw this?
I think the verdict there in the penalty phase is political grandstanding.
Basically, what they're saying is, is whoever you are, you know, and let's set Alex's sins aside.
And what they're saying is, whoever you are, if we don't like you and you stand up to the scrutiny and you lose in this forum, we're going to take everything from you.
That's the message that's being played out here.
Set aside the things that Alex did well, Alex didn't do well, the people that believe Alex, the people that don't.
Set aside all that.
This is a political message that says we now have a precedent.
And if we don't like you and we can take you to the mat in court, we will take everything from you.
I mean, for me, this comes down to everything that's kind of been in the political circles for the last five, 10 years is what's the truth and what's just fake news.
And this is as fake news as it gets as far as Alex Jones and the Sandy Hook lie.
And he is paying the ultimate price for a massive, massive, to be blunt, like horrible, shitty lie.
And I 0% support Alex Jones in this arena on this.
With that being said, again, not a fan of Alex Jones.
What he did is disgusting.
But that doesn't mean that other things he says are now untrue, right?
Like you're going to have to kind of separate this horrible lie that he's going to have to pay the price for forever, a billion dollars almost.
And then he does have other things he has to say, which may or may not be true or false.
I don't know.
But this was a very, very bad lie, and he's paying the price for it.
There's been a lot of giant verdicts like this in history that no one believes that pennies are ever going to be transferred.
I'm sure he doesn't have 965.
It's a completely different thing.
OJ lost the civil suit and even pawning off his Heisman Trophy and all.
Now that's much different.
I mean, a crime was committed there.
He lost that suit.
But, you know, the Goldman's never got back tens of millions of dollars for their legal fees and everything else and the loss of their daughter.
You know, sometimes when you go ahead.
You were going to say something.
I was just going to say the random note.
So Alex Jones and myself connection, we were just both on the bestseller list.
So when I was number six, like USA Today in Wall Street Journal a couple weeks back, and I looked on it and Alex Jones had the, I think, number one book, number two book at that time.
He needs to sell a billion copies.
Yeah.
He needs to sell about a billion.
So what have the Bible several to pay this?
In terms of pure money, what happens with, does he ever going to pay this?
Is he bankrupt?
How does this work?
Follow the money.
No idea.
First of all, this is I have some thoughts on this, and this is what my thoughts are.
You know how sometimes somebody you hate, which this is on a list of a person that a lot of people hate.
I mean, this guy's hated by the people on the left.
Many liberals cannot stand this guy, and they're glad he got this.
And there are people that think this wasn't enough.
There's some that would like to see this guy go to jail and spend time in jail for the rest of his life.
Many people can't stand this guy.
Having said that, there are a lot of people right now that, you know, they're sitting on what they're thinking.
They're sitting there saying, oh, shit, I told a lot of lies at CNN.
Oh, my God.
What is this all about?
I mean, believe me, I can't stand this guy, but dude, 965 million?
Are you out of your mind?
Like, you know, when the Me Too movement came out and in Hollywood, first person got the Me Too movement, you all of a sudden saw a lot of players, a lot of big names are like, let me not attend the next party.
And those pictures that were taken with me at a party with this guy named, you know, what's his name?
Epstein, Epstein, whatever the guy's name is.
I want to make sure I've never been with that guy anywhere, right?
So the moral of the story is the following.
One, how they came out with the number?
They're claiming he made this amount of money.
Okay, fine.
Number two, if the standard is now that a person who's got opinions lies, you sue them.
Well, let me tell you, there's a lot of people in media that are about to get sued heavily by a lot of families that were affected by things like this.
And it ain't going to be pretty.
Don't get me wrong.
I'm not sitting here defending what he said or what he didn't say.
That's not my position.
My position is the following.
Remington got sued last year for $73 million that they paid.
You know for what?
For somebody else using a Remington gun to kill somebody they loved.
And the family got $73 million.
I don't know if you guys saw this or not.
Sandyuk family settled for $73 million with gunmaker Remington.
What did Remington do wrong?
But here's the other part.
If you go a little bit deeper, if you go a little lower so we can read the article, can you zoom in a little bit more?
So the families of nine victims, San Diego family, Tuesday, have agreed to a $73 million settlement lawsuit.
The model maker rifle used to kill the, okay, of a lawsuit against the maker of the rifle used to kill 21st graders and six educators in 2012.
Okay.
The case was watched closely by gun control advocates and gun rights supporters and manufacturers because of its potential to provide a roadmap for victims of other shootings to sue firearm makers.
This has got nothing to do with guns in my eyes.
This has got nothing to do with guns in my eyes.
Can you do me a favor?
Can you go pull up how many people got killed by a car accident last year?
How many people died from a car accident last year?
So doesn't this set the precedent for somebody to be able to sue a car maker to say, my loved one died by the car that you made.
So you made, but what do you mean?
I didn't drive it.
I understand, but you made this Ford focus.
You made this Tesla.
It's like Wakusha, Wisconsin, the guy drove the Ford through the parade.
So now you're making the case that you could go sue Ford because explore it through the parade.
That's what they wanted to avoid here.
The reason Remington settles for $73 million, which I can pretty much, I'm going to go out on a guess here, is that their corporate insurance paid that, right?
To get the settlement, they say, listen, we'll drop the suit and settle, but you're my insurance company.
You got to pay the 73.
They're like, done.
Here's what we don't want.
We don't want the legal precedent.
There's no precedent here.
There's a precedent of settlement, but there's no legal binding precedent.
Do you see?
So there is no court case to go back to as a hard legal precedent.
That is a disaster if you're a gun maker or a car maker or anybody that uses something.
So Remington, I think, used insurance money here and said, let's get this thing out of the headlines.
Let's finish this thing up and let's get out.
What's the alternative if they don't?
Say they say, we're not going to do it.
They go all the way and they have a risk of a crazy liberal jury, you know, handing down a legal precedent.
And then basically it becomes just like those class action asbestos lawsuits, buckle up.
Everybody who has ever nearly you see the asbestos ads that are on everywhere on new shows from 6 a.m. to 9 a.m.
I don't know.
Once you have a legal precedent, that's what you get.
You get class.
I get that.
But you know what happened with Candace Owens yesterday with her documentary that came out?
Did you hear about this?
George Floyd's family, they're considering suing them for the Black Lives Matter documentary that she made, right?
They click on that story right there, trending news.
So George Floyd's family feels betrayed by Kanye West as they considered suing rapper and Candace Owens.
After Kanye West falsely claimed George Floyd died from fentanyl and not an officer's knee on his neck, the family's lawyer says by the end of the week, we'll have at least an idea of what claims are viable, go a little lower, go a little lower.
So now an attorney for the Valmont General Canada's 46-year-old attorney Lee Merritt confirms to Rolling Stone that the Folloyd family is considering pursuing a legal case against a rapper and say that he is also looking into whether ultra-right-wing pundit Candace Owens could be held liable as well since West has plucked a debunked claim over her new Daily Wire produced documentary, The Greatest Liver Sold.
This is the whole BLM thing.
And while Merritt acknowledges that there's no real grounds to pursue the defamation claim on behalf of the deceased person, he says the near $1 billion judgment that Sandy Hook parents, there you go, bingo, that Sandy Hook parents won against InfoWars, Alex Jones, spreading conspiracy theory to press presents a possible pathway for legal recourse.
But not a decision precedent.
I understand that, but Tom, $965, $73 million.
This could be the new thing that people are going to see this and go there and just get a settlement.
They will most likely settle with you because they don't want to drag anything out.
I doubt Daily Wire has the kind of legal liability insurance that Remington has.
Well, and I also hope, or you said you hope.
I doubt.
Because remember, the insurance.
The insurance is always the pocket you go after.
Well, and let's not forget that George Floyd had enough fentanyl in his system to kill a horse.
So they don't have a case here.
He did have enough.
There were two different autopsies done on George Floyd.
One of which said he died of a drug overdose.
The second one said he died of a knee on the neck.
And let's not forget, there was a nine-minute tape of the knee on the neck.
There was nine minutes before that of George Floyd walking around.
You could tell he was under the influence of drugs.
You could tell all these things.
So this is not an apples to apples comparison.
Daily Wire could actually make a case here.
I doubt they would lose this.
Or settle.
I understand what you're saying.
So Jones provides the precedent for them to go after that.
All I'm saying is people are looking at this and they're like, oh my God, let me go get some money.
There's free money there.
Let me go sue this guy.
Let me go sue this guy.
This is becoming, you know, a for for folks who I remember one time I was at an event.
Georgeville was speaking.
And Georgeville, this is at Miramar Hotel Santa Monica, 2000 and I'll give you the date, exact date, March 20 something of 2009.
And he gets up and he says, do you know why these hook, you know, fishing hook companies, you know how they sell the hook and why they have to put a warning sign on it now?
Because a parent sued one of the companies saying, you didn't put a sign on there saying you shouldn't swallow.
My kid swallowed it and it hurt his belly, so they sued the company.
He says, do you know why so many parks in America are being shut down?
Because lawyers go sit there and watch a kid fall and break their hands and they're suing the city and they're getting money out of it because cities are settling.
So they're saying, hey, get rid of the parks.
We're getting too many of these lawsuits.
So kids are now obesity is going higher.
These types of lawyers many times ruin a lot of different good things.
So you have to know, like going back to the same thing with McDonald's hot coffee case, I'm not comfortable with this, man.
I'm not comfortable with this.
I think a lot of people are just so happy and they're litigious and they're going to look at going after a lot of different people and many are going to settle because they have the pockets, but Alex Jones does not have 965 million.
So I got a point on this.
So in my ordeal, I had some media, some publications in my book that ran not only, you know, we hate Stuart Scheller or their opinions, but like factually untrue things, right?
And so I actually looked into a defamation suit and I was told that it would be very hard to prove because I was considered a public figure.
And so once I make the videos and I'm a public figure, I go into a different class of legality.
So when you think of Sandman, that kid with the Trump hat, or you think of Kyle Rittenhouse, they're private citizens.
So when they sue these people, it's different than if Stuart Scheller were to sue them.
And the lawsuit, I've talked to three different lawyers.
The lawsuit all three of them brought up was Sarah Palin suing some newspaper.
I can't remember if it was the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal, but she sued them because that paper alleged that she had something to do with the school shooting and she lost because she was considered a public figure.
And so when you're talking about the New York Times.
Yep.
So when you're that that case right there set a lot of precedent that like if someone named Stuart Scheller has a YouTube video and it gets a million views and then newspapers run factually untrue things, the lawyer's advice to me is you're probably not going to win because you're a public figure.
Go look at Sarah Palin.
And so you've got to kind of differentiate the cases here.
Sandy Hook parents are considered individual people.
They're not considered public figures, whereas Alex Jones is a public figure.
So Alex Jones going to sue someone because he got his feelings hurt, it would be a different level of legality that he would have to get.
Now, where I don't know where it stands, George Floyd, you know, is he a public figure or is his family a public figure?
I don't know the answer to that question, but there is a delineation there.
There's also the media has given the malice defense.
You know, if there's absence of malice, hey, we don't hate Lieutenant former Lieutenant Colonel Stuart Scheller.
We were just reporting the news.
And the best facts to the best of our ability, that was the news of the day.
And we were reporting it.
And so that's referred to as the absence of malice defense.
I mean they compared me to Hitler in one of the – I served my country for 17 years.
I mean some of the stuff they said, they – And that's where the malice line crosses.
So when they make metaphors that are inflammatory versus just reporting it and then they hide behind, well, you're a public figure.
That's right.
But there is a line.
There is a line there that they can't cross.
Even the media can't cross.
Even the media can't cross.
What happened the last six years with what a lot of these platforms and media companies have been talking about?
It's got to be big enough.
It's got to be stark enough.
And you have to have enough resources that you can take it all the way.
Here's a question.
Here's a question.
When has a public figure won a lawsuit against a news publication?
Like, when's the last time that happened?
I can't even think of one, right?
And so maybe a viewer can in the comment section drop that.
But I would like to know, because quite honestly, the media has, it doesn't necessarily always report misinformation.
Sometimes they just report the information that they want.
But when they say factually untrue things, like how are we holding them accountable?
And that's where, you know, I really started getting frustrated through my ordeal because imagine a Marine officer that legally can't speak in the media because he's under a gag order and the media getting to say all sorts of things, some of them factually untrue.
Like there should be some type of legal recourse to that.
When we're talking 965 million, you know what I mean?
And then here I am and I'm not able to sue anyone because I'm considered a public figure.
It seems weird.
You say the last time that a public figure won a lawsuit against a news publication.
The first thing that comes to mind is that whole Gawker, Peter Thiel, Hulk Hogan, whatever that whole thing was.
I don't even know.
Wasn't that a thing?
Yep.
And it wasn't a lawsuit, but the Bush administration took Dan Rather to the map and he got fired.
Yeah.
The president, I think, has a little bit of a power, though.
I don't know.
No, no.
Correct.
Correct.
But the point is, it happens, but it's rare.
And if a news media organization just says, well, we're just reporting the news, then they are completely unassailable.
I mean, you're not going to be able to knock that over.
But when you've got what Gawker did with Hogan, if you're willing to go long enough and pay for it, you can go get it done.
But it's rare and it's hard.
I don't know.
It's going to be the ripple effects of this to see who's going to sue who next will be very, very interesting to see.
I mean, look how quickly they say they're going after Kanye and Candace Owens because of what happened here with Alex Jones.
You're going to see a lot more of these, but you're also going to see Rittenhouse going after a whoopee, what whoopee said.
You're going to see a lot of it on both sides.
And just like the Me Too movement, when it first came out, everybody was going after everybody.
Eventually, everybody said, guys, listen, I got you.
Not everything is this.
I don't know how far along this is going to go, though, where they're going to be targeting people.
Lawyers will only take cases like this on a sensational basis if there's a pocket to settle with.
They don't want to go all the way to the court.
They want to go to a pocket they settle with.
And that's where they're going.
We had a presidential candidate.
Oh, I just blanked on his name, North Carolina, John, who had the girlfriend.
John Edwards.
Yeah, he was a PI attorney.
That's what he did before he got into politics.
He was a PI attorney, and he talked about it.
What was it, the Esquire interview?
He said, listen, there's got to be insurance, you know, personal injury and these grand claims.
There has to be an insurance company pocket to go after because that typical company or person has no resources to go after.
This is another reason why if you're wise, you get into the insurance business.
That's done.
If you have wisdom, listen, get a life insurance policy, get an auto insurance policy, get a cell phone insurance policy.
This is how insurance companies make money.
Believe it or not, it just validates the importance of the insurance industry.
And drive down any American highway.
And who do you see?
Big, you know, smiling face, big rig accident, big rig accident.
They're going after the oil company.
That was their truck.
They're going after Walmart.
They're going after whoever commissioned or owned that big rig truck that caused your accident.
That's what all those billboards are on the freeway.
Those premiums.
Okay, so town hall article here.
Obama tells Democrats to get over their obsession with Trump.
The thing that I think sometimes we seem to make a mistake on is his behavior can be so outrageous.
And now folks who try to copy him and his outrageous behavior are getting a lot of attention, Obama said, referring to MAGA supporters.
And so we joined that game and we spent enormous amount of time and energy, resources, pointing out the lately, the latest crazy thing that he said or how rude or mean of these Republican candidates behaved.
That's probably not something that in the minds of most voters overrides their basic interests.
Can I pay the rent?
What are the gas prices?
What are gas prices?
How am I dealing with child care?
Obama continued.
So what's the reason why Obama is now saying this today?
Is it because midterms is less than a few weeks away?
Is it because He's just kind of watching people seeing how they're losing control and he's worried how bad things are going to be.
Why do you think he made the comments that he made?
Can I ask you a question for you?
What do you think that the Biden White House thought about these comments?
No, we don't want to talk about the economy.
What are you doing?
Do you think the Biden White House and the strategists appreciated the ex-president?
Not only that, but saying it when he says, Do you think maybe deep down inside he wants Biden to break his record?
You know what his record is, right?
Most seats flipped 61.
He's like, dude, that's not a record I want to hold.
It's like having the most strikeouts in the season.
It's like, look, man, I want you to take that strikeout record away from me.
All I'm looking for, Biden, is for you to flip 62.
Okay?
It's to lose 62, and I'm happy where I don't have to have that record.
But why do you think he made the comments that he made today?
Three weeks out, two weeks out.
Did he use Trump by name?
Did he say Trump?
I don't know.
That's not Obama style.
He might allude to somebody.
I don't know if he actually used Trump's name.
Obviously, we know who he's referencing when you use terms like outrageous and crazy, rude, and mean.
We know who he's talking about.
However, I don't know if he actually addressed Trump.
What's your point, though?
But I do have a I'm wondering if he used his name.
No, he didn't.
He didn't use his name.
So that's check one.
Number two, I kind of agree with Obama here about the time and the energy.
Jesus, and I fell victim to this: how much time and energy you spent to following up what the hell Trump said that day or that week or that tweet.
Jesus, it took a lot of energy and time for everybody, whether you're defending him and no, that's not what he meant.
And you're misinterpreting what he said.
And good people on both sides, like time and energy.
And if you're one of the people that were on the other side of the MAGA, you know, side of things, just the obsession that you paid attention to, all the ridiculous things that you lost nights of sleep over this man.
And I know there are not a ton of amazing things that you can say about Biden, but one of those things is he's not making ridiculous news that you can actually move on with your life and spend your time and energy on things that you can't control.
Your own money, your own pocketbook, your kitchen table issues, your family, your health.
So everything comes with a pro and a con.
Everything's binary.
But I do agree that people spend a lot of time and energy focusing on Trump.
You have any thoughts on this?
I just think Trump was the counter swing of Obama.
So it's always rings false to me when Obama is talking about Trump because, quite honestly, I think Obama's policies led to Trump in a lot of ways.
So, yeah.
We're on the same page.
I think he gave birth to Trump.
He did.
That's simple.
Yeah.
I think Bush gave birth to Obama, and I think Obama gave birth to Trump.
I've got an analogy doing some journaling, and I was thinking about this.
America's political system in a lot of ways is like, you know, a pendulum is one of those things we take and the ball goes and then it slowly stabilizes.
The American Democracy See was a pendulum that started in the middle and has like slowly swung one way and then it goes back the other way.
And like we're at a place now where it's like violently swinging from side to side.
And, you know, that is the Obama-Trump swing.
And, you know, back to Biden.
It just, I'm hoping we can get some leadership that can stabilize it and not have these violent swings.
Fully agree.
We've used that pendulum analogy a ton of times.
And I mean, how do you go from Obama to Trump to all the way back to Obama's number two Biden?
It's just because it's crazy.
Constant pendulum swinging.
And I've said it before.
I said it again.
I would love, whether it's JeSantis, whether it's anyone else, get to somehow a 60% approval rating.
Our last presidents have been hovering below 50 for the better part of five, 10 years now, if not longer.
And we need a unifier.
I'm agitator.
I want to do a story.
We got a surprise couple guests that are going to join us in Zoom from London, UK in a minute.
And it's a very interesting guest that I'm actually really curious to know why they did what they did.
But I'll tell you what that is here in a minute.
But prior to going there, so a story here: average American is losing $34,000 and everything else on Biden's watch.
We have calculated over the past 20 months the rise in consumer prices over wages means that the average family in America has lost nearly $6,000 in purchasing power, that negative returns don't even take account of inflation.
Don't doing so adds roughly another 13% or so to these stock losses.
Inflation also hurts returns from bonds, which typically accounts to between 20 to 40% of retirement funds.
Tie it all together, and we calculate that since the start of this year, 401k plans have suffered $2.1 trillion.
The average 401k plan has over $135,000 at the start of the year.
Today, these assets have shrunk to $101,000.
Wow.
In other words, today, the average 401k is down $34,000, more than 25% in less than one year.
Tom, thoughts?
I think this just underlines how badly the middle class is getting crushed, and the media doesn't want to talk about it.
Certainly, administration doesn't want to talk about it.
The reality is the media is getting crushed.
Related to this, B of A announced their third quarter results on originations of home equity, mortgages, and credit cards.
And home equity lines went from like 2.5 billion of new home equity lines Q2 to 2.4.
So it was down.
But what's interesting, you know what the average FICO score for the new home equity lines was in Q3?
792.
What?
The average.
Meaning, only the answer is only incredibly wealthy people that have got the juice were able to get the home equity line.
It gets worse.
Did you guys just hear what Tom?
Well, Tom, did you hear what Tom said or no?
The average person who got a HELOC, their average credit score was $7.92 in Q3.
That's directly.
Only people with very good credit score.
That's not very good credit score.
That's perfection.
Correct.
$7.92.
It gets worse.
Also, $16.5 billion of new mortgage originations happened in Q2.
8.7 happened in Q3.
So it's almost 50% down on mortgage originations.
Here it comes.
Average FICO of the mortgage originations.
This is B of A.
I double-checked it.
B of A announces $7.68 was the new mortgages in Q3.
So the only people buying our house are people that are way up and able to afford it.
So I think you take those two pieces of information that only the people with juice are able to get HELOCs and new loans, and you take a look at all this, the middle class is getting crushed.
And if you just look far enough, you're seeing the true depth of it.
People aren't buying new houses.
They're not able to get HELOCs.
And now they've lost all this power and they've also lost the retirement.
Middle class are getting crushed so badly.
True scope of it is not really apparent.
I don't know.
I think this article is a little disingenuous, and I'll tell you why.
Because I have a 401k, all right?
And, you know, I'm 41 years old.
I'm not retiring anytime soon.
So let's say I have a half a million dollars in my 401k right now, and it goes down from 500,000 to 400,000.
Doesn't fucking matter.
I'm not touching my 401k until I'm 70 years old anyway.
So it's almost irrelevant.
It's like, who cares?
However, who it does affect, so this is why I'm saying it's a little disingenuous, are seniors.
We've heard recent stories about seniors or people that were going to retire now have to extend their career for another three to five years.
They have to plan on that.
And then furthermore, we're seeing further stories that Social Security benefits are now being extended, what, 8.2% more than normal.
So retirees, if they don't have a better plan in place, then they're the ones that are going to suffer.
You know, the article specifically highlights the bond market.
You know, it's no secret that when you're young, you should have, you know, 80% in stocks, 20% in bonds, or as you age 60% in stocks, 40% in bonds.
But if you're 75 years old and you don't have 80% of your portfolio in bonds, what are you doing anyway?
Here's the challenge, though.
The challenge with that is, you know, as a person who was a financial advisor for 20 plus years, you know, 20 years, give or take, series 7, 66, 31, 26.
You take all this stuff.
I've sold, I can sell futures, commodities, bonds, stocks, you know, options, put, call, annuities, life, all that stuff.
I cannot tell you how many companies who people have their 401ks with, how few times the average 401k holder sits down to readjust and reallocate where their monies are at.
If the average, matter of fact, if a person's listening right now and you have a 401k with a company, okay?
When is the last time the 401k specialist of your company came in, sat down with you to tell you to reallocate it based on your age, where you're at with the current economy?
When's the last time that happened?
You know how often that happens?
It rarely happens.
And if it happens, it's less than 1% of the time.
So the average person is just sitting there saying, man, like, here's what happened the other day.
Somebody's got money in their 401k.
Pretty well-known person.
It's like, hey, Pat, man, I haven't looked at my 401k for a while.
Can you just take a look at it?
This is a person that's made real money.
I'm like, when's the last time you looked at it?
Not in a long time.
I'm like, seriously, and they're not young.
How old are they?
Late 50s, early 60s.
Yeah, they should be paying close attention to it.
But it's not that they should be.
You know, it's the same story with most people should get annual physicals done.
Most people should get their teeth checked out.
What most of us should do and what we do are two different things.
Most boomers are not sitting there reallocating their 401ks on time.
Most people reallocate it too late and they're going to pay the price for it.
So even though you're right, for a guy like you're like, dude, I'm not retiring for another 25 years.
Maybe you'll retire in three years because your style is different.
But for the average person in their late 30s, early 40s is going to go for a while.
People in their mid-50s, late 50s, early 60s, they're not sitting there reallocating their retirement.
They're being hit by it.
I'll add to that because we talked about the benefits of being the insurance industry.
We've all been in it.
And the number one thing, how I made all my money, is the concept of this annual review or a policy review.
You talked about a physical.
Hey, go to the doctor once a year.
Go to the dentist once a year.
go get an annual review the whole concept is you do it because you haven't if you have insurance or if you have a 401k get an annual review See what's going on.
And some advisor is going to tell you, bro, you're 65 years old.
You're 75% in stocks.
Your asset allocation is out of whack.
You got to change that.
It's just an annual review.
But a lot of people don't even know about that cost.
But you're a good agent, though, that you're doing annual reviews.
Correct.
Most advisors, 401k companies, most of them are not selling and they never come back.
A great agent who keeps getting referrals, they keep doing annual reviews.
The client's not going to do an annual review.
But is that on the agent or is on the client?
Because we talk about personal responsibility.
I'm going to say both.
You're making your commission.
Do your job.
You're making your dentist sends me the card and says your cleaning is in three months.
True.
Do you know how often I wake up in the morning thinking about cleaning my teeth?
Like, when's the last time you woke up saying, you know what?
Yeah, my teeth cleaning is in three months.
I'm counting it down.
90 days, 89 days.
Nobody freaking sits on you.
Somebody sends you that reminder, so I'm going to go to the doctor.
So, okay, anyways, I want to give a quick shout out to our sponsors.
Before we do so, I want to tell you two stories we're going to go through right after this.
So stick around.
We're going to talk about Kanye West, how he just bought Parlor, and we're going to talk about what Bloomberg yesterday said, that we're 100% chance of going into recession next year.
They didn't say 99.9 to leave a little bit out.
They said 100%.
And I have a prediction on when I think they're going to announce recession.
But let's get into our sponsor first.
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Having said that, Kanye West to buy right-wing social media platform Parlor.
Owner says this is an insider story.
Okay.
And this was all over social yesterday.
Kanye West has entered into a deal to buy Parlor, a right-wing social media service that builds itself as a free speech platform.
Its owner said Monday, Parliament Technologies announced the news saying that the deal would help create an uncancelable ecosystem where all voices are welcome.
West said, in a world where conservative opinions are considered to be controversial, we have to make sure we have the right to freely express ourselves.
Parliament Technology CEO George Farmer said that the company would be honored to help him achieve his goals.
Wes has recently locked out of his Twitter account after he posted saying that he would go DEF CON three on Jewish people.
Tom, when you heard this news, what's the first thing you thought about?
Well, Kanye needs a megaphone, and no one's given him one, so he's going to go buy one for himself.
But I think he also does believe in, he says, hey, you know, you shouldn't be shut down for free speech, even though some of the things he've said is like, Kanye, there's free speech.
And then there's just crazy, dumb comments that just are just way over the top.
But I think he's going out there trying to establish a megaphone so that people could be there.
People have to remember what took Parlor down wasn't what took Parlor down was a denial of access to infrastructure.
Their server contracts were cut by Amazon.
So, I mean, when these things go up, the playbook now is pressure on the infrastructure side and it just turns you off.
So, you know, countdown, you know, can he buy this?
Can he have a megaphone for himself?
But as soon as he upsets somebody, they're going to come after it and they're just going to try to turn servers off because that's a game.
And take them out of the app store.
It's so easy.
You know, you have the Apple App Store, Google, Android market.
Those two and infrastructure are off the air.
Does anybody know who owns Parlor?
Like who George Farmer is?
Do you know who he is?
He's Candace Owens' husband.
He owns what?
He's the guy.
That makes a lot more sense now.
Parlor.
Yeah.
I mean, just like if you want to connect the dots.
Yeah.
That's Candace Owens' husband right there.
What do you think about this?
You think this is a I have a lot of friends that are big fans of Kanye West.
And so, you know, exactly like Tom said, I think Kanye West does some dumb things, but he's an entrepreneur.
He is smart.
And I do appreciate someone that pushes back on systems where it may not be a popular opinion.
And he seems to do that pretty regularly.
So, you know, some ways I sit back and say, you know, I just watched him do an interview with Tucker Carlson.
It was pretty good.
You know, so he has moments where I think of like, quite honestly, brilliance, but then he has other moments where it's just like, man, I'm left scratching my head.
Guys, I'm so sorry, Pat.
Guys, I apologize.
I know you guys are talking about something serious.
Colonel, I'm a veteran too, so thanks for your service.
I have a big announcement, and it's happy birthday.
You're so funny.
You're so funny.
Happy birthday.
Let's go to you.
Out of nowhere.
Birthday, dear Pat.
That's awesome.
Craziness.
Let's go.
You came out of nowhere.
You scared the crap out of me.
Thank you, guys.
Let's go, baby.
Oh, Mo.
It's sexy.
Hey, dude.
The open end of the pazooka toward the enemy.
Just make a wish.
Let's go, baby.
You guys are awesome.
Was somebody pissed on Tom?
He was not happy with Tom.
Thank you, babe.
Love you, Tyler.
No, no, we didn't take too many.
There we go.
Yeah, it's fine.
Thanks, guys.
Okay, babe.
Thanks.
Thank you.
Vinny, you're crazy.
He came in out of time.
I'm like, something actually happened.
At the time, it was like right in the middle of us talking about Kanye.
Yeah, Kanye.
Pat, I mean, are we still in birthday mode right now?
You can't.
What happened?
That door, the average person shouldn't close that door.
Okay, go for it.
Well, let me just, can I do one thing real quick?
I know.
I played dumb.
I didn't know today was your birthday, but I actually did know.
Oh, really?
Adam's got a...
I got PPD a gift right here.
Okay.
There's going to be some humor involved.
There's also going to be a nice.
This is actually something you're very good at.
No, well, I wrote something down.
So let me get this.
What I got as a gift is a down payment.
Okay.
You are now currently 44 years of age.
You know, I am currently 42.
We have a bet or an agreement that if I get married by 44, I get married for free in your backyard, save that money.
I paid a whole thing.
Okay.
At the rate that I'm going right now, life's good.
I don't see myself getting married.
I'm probably going to have to buy you a suit.
Sure.
Because that's our end of the agreement.
You never know what could happen.
But in the spirit of marriage and wife and kids, I did get you a down payment of it's not the full suit, but there's some items in there that you can wear under the suit.
Oh, you're so amazing.
I know you wear shirts under there.
Yes.
Some Calvinists.
You're like my dad.
You know, my dad bought me for my birthday this morning is underwear.
Yeah, well, I was thinking about underwear.
That'd be a little extreme.
I don't think you're ready for that.
I don't know if we're there yet.
But here's some shirts, some undershirts.
You had a good buildup here.
A red bow tie that you could wear potentially.
Oh, okay.
A little papillon.
A little papillon.
You also have a black tie to wear potentially with the suit, Calvin Klein.
I like it.
Okay.
I like it.
I went for Salvatore Ferragamo, but on Lincoln Road, apparently they don't have that.
That's a handkerchief.
So this is a down payment for the suit in two years that I'll likely have to buy.
So with that being said, I have a you're 44.
It's a big deal.
So marriage, I don't know where I'm at with that, but I do respect the fact that you're a family man.
And I think, you know, as family men here, kids is an amazing thing.
So I think the example that you've set with the kids, the four kids you have, and Jen, how you treat Jen and Melva and your dad, and how you open your house for everyone, that's amazing.
And I think everyone really truly appreciates that.
But more important than that, you know, is the fact that you're a leader.
You're our leader.
And, you know, Shia LaBeouf, who's one of your favorite actors, he says, and he was being interviewed by John Bernthal.
Great podcast.
By the way, if there's ever a story of your life movie, John Bernthal could be the guy.
He's the guy.
Okay, just putting that out there into the atmosphere.
But he says that you become a man, you become a leader when you're responsible for other people.
And that's so powerful because what makes a man?
Is it you go to war?
Does that make you a man?
Does a million dollars make you a man?
When you become responsible for other people, that makes you a man.
And you're responsible for a lot of people.
Everyone here at Value Tainment, PHP, your family.
So it's family man, amazing.
I don't know if I'm going to get there, but you do aspire leadership.
And I'm going to read you a quote.
I asked you this morning if you know a rapper called Logic, right?
Logic, if you're listening, huge fan, massive fan, white boy rapper.
So he has two songs, and this will be very quick.
The first song was entitled 44 Bars, and the follow-up to that was called 44 More.
And I figured that very appropriate on your 44th birthday to kind of cite some of the lyrics of the song and how true it is to your life.
So without further ado, in the first song, Logic, 44 Bars says, it ain't all about the money and the notoriety.
It's all about the people making a difference in society.
But don't get it twisted.
This life I'm living is like a movie.
The godfather, the good fella, wielding an Uzi, one with the people, got people wondering, who is he?
Right.
And then he goes on in 44 more and says, I've done, made $20 million, right?
But I don't need a flex to be acknowledged.
At this point, it's common knowledge.
All you haters have been abolished.
You and the club throwing dollars, but I'm saving mine so my kids can go to college.
Right?
And then he says, oh, Lord, I'm a champion.
Know the name.
And now they know the alias, PBD.
That's for sure.
Pat, you gave him 44.
Now here's the 44 man.
Happy birthday, brother.
44.
Sick.
I love it.
I appreciate that.
Of course, bro.
Thank you.
Shout out to Logic on your 44th birthday.
Thank you.
Thank you.
That's awesome, man.
Appreciate you.
Anyway, so there's no underwear there, but no, my dad got me Puma underwear.
You know, this makes it 25 years straight that my dad for my birthday and Christmas gets me underwear.
I have so much underwear from this guy.
And like he comes this morning, he says, you already know what I got you.
First time in the history of my life, I got Puma underwear from my dad.
I've never had Puma underwear.
I think is Puma above Costco?
No, Costco makes some quality stuff.
No, don't hate him.
Papa went out of his power.
But just think that the one year he doesn't get you underwear.
You're going to be so bummed out.
He's like, well, where's my underwear?
You're right, though.
I look forward to getting underwear for many, many more years to come.
I'm hoping to get underwear everywhere.
There's probably a deeper story there.
He changed your diapers in Iran.
Yeah.
Right?
And now he's living in your house in your estate, your complex here in Fort Lauderdale.
But back to the roots.
Don't forget.
I've always given you the underwear.
It was so funny this morning where yesterday, my daughter's so funny.
She's like, she comes this morning.
She says, Daddy, don't tell anybody, but we have a surprise birthday cake and presents for you downstairs.
But it's a surprise birthday cake.
But don't tell mommy I told you.
She's like, we have a surprise waiting for you downstairs.
Everyone's waiting and she's trying to hide it.
So Santa cannot hide his face.
I was going to say, we've learned that Santa is not to be trusted.
It's a surprise.
She's funny.
She is funny.
How does it feel to be 44?
People are shocked that you're only a couple years older than me.
Like my friends are like, what?
Pat is only two years older than us?
This is insane.
Like everything you've accomplished, your age, what you've built.
44, it's not exactly young, but it's not old at all.
How do you process being this age now?
I mean, the only thing I woke up today, Jennifer gave me a pamphlet that tells you what happened in 1978.
So I learned some funny things.
So one, Transformers, you know that one scene where it's Shia LaBeouf and the actress, what's the actress that's now with MPK?
Megan Fox, and they're in that yellow car and she's trying to fix it.
And the car's not turning on.
She says, I'm going to walk back.
So what's the song that plays afterwards when the car turns on and goes gets the girl?
Do you remember the song?
It's by a group, a band called Player from 1970.
Baby Comeback, right?
So Baby Comeback is 1978.
It showed the average salary, who won MVP, who won the World Series, the Yankees won the World Series, you know, all these different things about 1970.
Number 44 was what?
Reggie Jackson.
You have Jim Brown, all these other guys.
But to me, it's just another number.
And, you know, everybody else, are we doing a birthday this year?
I said, we're not doing one this year.
We're going to do one next year.
And then there's going to be a break.
And then we're going to do the 50 one.
45.
And the 50 one is going to be legit, the 50'd one.
We're going to have a good time at the 50.
I don't know if you know this.
I wear it on my wrist, but it looks bright, PVD.
It's just the beginning.
It's just the beginning.
Anyways, okay, he had no clue what's going on today.
Stu over here.
It's like, what?
I just went from Afghanistan to Kanye.
But I do want to say this.
If you're able to rewind at the end of the podcast and go watch one of our home office employees really is upset at Tom because he just aimed it at his face.
It wasn't like directly that way.
Tom's trying to get the confetti off of him.
I watched it happen to me.
He's like, I watched his face.
Who was it?
Right over here.
Who was it?
I'm actually really cute.
Was it Robert or who was it that did that?
Was it Mario or Robert?
Who was it, Tom?
I got to go back to Philip.
Never attribute to Malice that which can be adequately explained.
I don't know.
I was trying to give you an idea of what happened with Alex.
I'm thinking, like, this is an opportunity for you to file for me.
Now, this is like one of those, this is like one of those Al-Qaeda fail videos where the guy's holding the bazooka the wrong way when he does the test firing.
That's absolutely.
And he takes out the back half of their little training camp, and then they're all freaking out.
Stu has zero glitter on him, confetti.
We're good, Pat and I. You're showered in confetti.
Someone had to have for you to.
You're going to go home today, and Kim's going to say, can I ask you why you have so much glitter on you?
You have to explain.
You're going to say, honey, watch the podcast.
Watch the podcast.
Where have you been, hon?
Yeah.
Oh, I'm going to make it rain in here.
Yeah.
So, okay, so let's go into, we got 10 more minutes to wrap up a couple stories before we finish off.
Okay, so let's go into the recession story.
If you want to go into the Bloomberg one with the last 10 minutes that we got.
So this article, this story comes out yesterday, and everyone's talking about a forecast for a U.S. recession within a year hits 100% in blow to Biden.
And Bloomberg is part of his camp that they went out of their way trying to help Biden win elections.
So this is not a good look when you're seeing a number like this.
Bloomberg Economics sees near certainty downturn will start tightening conditions, inflation.
Hawkish Fed way on outlook, 100%.
So if you can zoom in here to see what kind of numbers they have, the latest recession probability models by Bloomberg economists Anna Wong and Eliza Winger forecast a high recession probability across all timeframes with the 12-month estimate of a downturn by October 2023 hitting 100%, up from 65% for the comparable period in the previous updates.
Do they have any reasons how they came out with this model?
Bloomberg surveys 42 economists predicts the probability.
Next one was another 50% earlier.
I mean, the numbers just don't look good.
No matter where you look at, the numbers don't look good.
You're now finally hearing realtors in Texas is lower, meaning people are leaving the industry.
Mortgage is getting hit hardcore.
Rates are going to continue to go up.
Powell's saying they're going to keep increasing rates till they hit 2% inflation.
Next year, you're going to feel the unemployment happening in 2023.
My prediction is with that part, but I think recession will be full-on recession.
My opinion is November 8th, Wednesday of this year.
Is it November 8th or November 9th?
November 7th is midterm election.
Yes?
8th is the 8th.
8th is the election.
It's going to be November 9th, Wednesday.
This is when they're going to announce recession.
Till then, we're not in recession right now, according to the experts in the U.S. government.
The whole thing, right?
They're going to change the definition again.
It doesn't matter how many times we hit.
We're already in a recession, but they're just going to change the definition.
They're going to go to Webster's and have Websters reprint all new dictionaries.
This is not a good look, though.
Did you see the Gallup poll that came out?
Did you see the Gallup poll that came out about Gallup's been doing this poll for the last 80 years, since 1940?
And the whole poll is about a better job handling problem you think most important.
Who, Republicans or Democrats, do you trust can do a better job handling problems today?
And this is Gallup, the same Fox, the same CNN.
48% said Republicans, 37% said Democrats today.
And here's the crazy thing about this data.
Since 1940, when they started doing this poll, the widest margin they've ever had was 17 points in 1946.
Truman was president.
This is right after Nuke, you know, 1945.
1946, the American people went towards Republicans over Democrats.
11 is the second largest since 1946, the highest since 1946.
And again, this ain't Fox.
This is not New York Post.
This is not Breibart.
This is not CNN.
This is not MSNBC.
This is Gallup.
So the American people are sitting there saying, listen, Biden, I'm sure your family loves you, but we kind of are due for a different leader to run this country.
So what are your thoughts, Tom, when you hear this?
Bloomberg saying 100%.
I would say there's also 100% chance that Michael Bloomberg is running for president in 24.
And he's basically, you know, going to let these kind of stories go out and kind of help clear the decks.
And he's sitting back there.
I can see Michael Bloomberg sitting there at the scotch.
61 flips.
I'm going to make sure there's 80.
And then I'm running in 24, baby.
You really think he's running?
Well, I mean, you could connect the dots.
I'm being kind of cynical and funny, but I'm connecting the dots.
But I'll go back to something I said several podcasts ago.
Remember, I said that I thought that liberal media were kind of keeping themselves on a leash, but they were slowly rolling now on Biden.
And they're just waiting for when the DNC, because it's exactly the process you talked about for, you know, for individual candidates for Congress, that there's also a date that when the DNC has the thunder money available to the national presidential candidates, and there will only be about four or six of them to get access to that money.
And you know, Governor California desperately wants to be put on the short list so we can get access to it.
And I just think that what's happening with the media is some of the liberal media is coming clean and they're truthfully reporting things that are out there.
And it's not favorable to the president, but the gloves are off and they were trying to hold back a little bit, help the president.
But I think the gloves are off in the form of, hey, we're just going to say it what it is.
And the reason you can say it's 100% chance for a recession is because I believe, I think you believe, we're already there.
Take a look at here.
Look at what's happened in these home things.
So realtors have jobs?
I don't think so.
The people that are in loan origination have jobs?
I don't think so.
I think there's a whole section of the financial services industry that's unemployed or underemployed right now.
So when you take a look at all that, you're telling me that we're not already in the original accepted definition of a recession right now.
And I think the media is just coming out and saying it.
They're coming out and saying it.
First, Obama says, listen, this woke stuff's not working.
Then Bloomberg says, all in the same week.
Do you think there was a meeting saying, guys, it's time for us, the voices of the Democratic Party, to say we're not with what Biden's doing so they can come out and start their endorsement this week and next week?
So some of the people that they're endorsing, their voice has weight to say, we don't support the woke decisions that's been happening the last 24 months or 18 months.
We need to go back to what Dems used to do.
The timing of what Bloomberg said, Obama said all at the same time is kind of weird to me.
I agree with that.
By the way, I agree with you.
Do you think Obama's got friends that are in risky seats right now?
100%.
Sure, he does.
100%.
How ugly are things going to be?
Stu, how ugly things are going to be on midterms.
GOP is going to win the House.
They're not going to win the Senate.
And so that's how it's going to play out by my assessment.
And I think when they win the House, they're going to pull some military generals up.
The House will, because they'll have the ability to hold committees and call some people, make some headlines.
But ultimately, in terms of legislation, you still got the president that can veto.
Senate will still be a slim majority, if not almost a coin toss when you add people that can vote against the party.
And so really, we're going to have two years where it's really going to come down to the 24 election.
And so that's my assessment of it.
You know, you look at races like Herschel Walker in Georgia, where I think a lot of people thought he was going to win.
I'm not convinced he's going to win.
I don't think Oz has a great chance in Pennsylvania either.
I think that's another Senate seamless.
It's a weird one.
I know it is a weird one.
What is?
That's a very weird candidate.
So people want authenticity right now.
So look at the Democrat.
He's like this Philly guy with this big goatee.
And then you got this dorky white boy, Dr. Oz.
I mean, just on the surface without like a deeper look at their policies, I can see why people, especially from the Pennsylvania area, would be veering toward authenticity.
And then, you know, the Ohio race is much tighter than we thought it would be.
And then the New Hampshire race is one where the Republicans are trying to steal one.
And we'll see.
So those are really the four key races in the Senate.
And I guess we'll see how it plays out.
Ultimately, I think what you're saying is candidates matter, meaning like 100%.
You know, Herschel Walker, you thought that he'd have a chance, but Raphael Warnock looks he's going to win that same as Oz.
So if you use just generic polling like Pat referenced, generic Republicans have quite an advantage.
I think it went from 3 to 10% on independents, and that's on a New York Times poll.
I want to give you one last story here.
Were you going to go with that?
No, no, I'm just saying that in the Senate, I agree with you because if you're going to look at the actual candidates, forget about generic polling.
That's right.
You're going to go with the person who's a little more authentic.
By the way, that's a very weirdly authentic guy, though.
I mean, I don't know if you've watched him interview.
No, so yeah, my caveat is I don't know anything about him, but I'm just saying on the surface, I think what the appeal is, is that he's a Philly guy that relates to you, but I don't know anything about him.
Very, very weird situation.
So last story before we wrap up: Nike co-founder Phil Knight declares war on Democrats in Oregon.
Phil Knight said he will do anything to block Democrats from keeping their hold on Oregon's governor seat.
Knight 84 has poured cash into the campaigns of Democrats, Tina Kotek, opponents in governor's race.
He helped to kickstart a campaign for Betsy Johnson, a former Democrat running as an independent, who is serving as a major supporter to Kotec Johnson's candidacy has given Republican Christina Dresen the opportunity she needs in a liberal electorate, no longer confident in the state recent far-left policies.
One of the political cartoons after our legislative session had a person snorting cocaine out of a mountain of white.
Knight said Saturday.
It said, which of these is illegal in Oregon?
And the answer was the plastic straw.
Yeah, I'll tell you one thing.
Do you remember a couple years ago, Oregon legalized or decriminalized all drugs?
All drugs.
That's the one state in the country where whatever you want, have at it.
And ironically, what's illegal, not the pound of cocaine, the plastic straw that you can do the cocaine from.
It's very ironic.
I think this is sort of a sign of the times if this is like a canary in the coal mine or bellweather.
It's very weird.
You know, Phil Knight, Oregon, Nike, they're not exactly the most conservative people or conservative company.
They were behind Colin Kaepernick.
Exactly.
They were behind Colin Kaepernick.
But it just goes to show how far left Oregon has gone and they're in need of an over-correction.
Yeah, I don't think people understand just how rough the general citizens of Portland had after all of that stuff settled out.
Chaz.
Yeah.
That city or whatever they're built.
Yeah, the whole thing.
I mean, it was just terrible.
And you got citizens in Oregon now.
The reason this is close isn't because of Phil's money.
It's close because there's a lot of citizens out there and Phil's money.
And the citizens who are being pulled are like, this is the wrong direction.
This swung the violent pendulum you talked about, Stu.
And remember, this is also Oregon, the state that when a large whale was beached and rotting, the solution was to blow it up with dynamite.
So you have to remember the legacy of Oregon.
If anybody wants to go look on the Oregon whale that the highway department blew up with dynamite, this is, ladies and gentlemen, this is your Oregon.
You get what you vote for.
And you got to go back and vote for something else.
To wrap it up, Stu, your book that just came out a month ago, Crisis of Command, How We Lost Trust and Confidence in America's Generals and Politicians.
What can you tell the audience that's in this book that maybe we didn't talk about today?
Yeah, I appreciate it.
So I wrote the book for the American people.
I think since the all-volunteer force following Vietnam, the American people have been conditioned to thank military members, but they may not necessarily understand the systemic problems that exist in the military.
And so I wrote it to shed light for a normal American because, you know, we've been talking about voting here in the last segment and in politics.
A lot of Americans go and vote based on like what's right in front of their face, whether it's inflation, you know, prices at the pump, jobs.
And they don't think about military and foreign diplomacy a lot.
But quite often, military and foreign diplomacy affects everything, like inflation, jobs, you know, all these things, gas at the pump.
And so I really think it's important for Americans to understand how we can get the United States military back on track, which will allow, you know, all the things we were talking about when we started the podcast about who the global players were and are or will be in the future.
I think it's incumbent on the American people to make some of the changes.
And I lay out ways that they can do that.
And so the book goes through the first 17 years of my career in the first half of the book where I outline the macro problems.
And then it goes into when I posted that video, the micro story of what happened to me, the real raw portion of it that further reinforces the macro trends that I described.
So I think people enjoy it.
If you haven't yet ordered it, USA Today bestseller, Wall Street Journal bestseller, we're going to put the link below in description and chat.
Go ahead and if you support Stewart and what he's doing after giving 17 years of his life to the Marine Corps, going out there, you know, providing freedom for the rest of the Americans while he's out there serving, you can support him by ordering his book.
We'll put the link below as well.
Brother, thanks for coming out.
This was actually very interesting.
Sometimes we bring guests, they go three, four levels deep on a topic.
You went really, really deep on certain topics in regards to the military, and that was very helpful.
I hope the audience enjoyed it as much as I did.
Gang, happy birthday.
Thank you.
Thank you, everybody.
Are we back Thursday or we're not doing podcasts?
Kurt Schiller Schilling.
We were back Thursday.
Really?
Kurt Schilling's on Thursday.
That's going to be interesting.
Okay, sounds good.
Potential Hall of Famer, MLP.
No, he belongs in it.
The only reason he's not in there, you know, Reggie Janks has said, Kurt Schilling, thank you to your freedom of speech, the reason why you're not in the Hall of Fame.
