The Hidden Secrets Threatening National Security - Mike Baker - #759

Are you at AT&T? No, I am not. Yeah, that was one of those moments, right? What happened?

I think everybody thought it was the end of the world, right? Because they couldn't get on TikTok or send a text message. It was a disaster. I had a couple of meetings that morning, and people were losing their shit.

And it was funny because everyone was just sort of bailing out of things. Some people probably saw it as an opportunity to bail out of meetings, right? You know, I can't do it. It wasn't just you.

It's like, well, that meeting was my waiting for an excuse. Yeah, it does happen a lot. Yeah, it's a good point. Now, who knows, right?

The frailty of our comm systems, our telecoms, and our power grid, and our water systems, and everything else. Most people knew how easy that could actually happen. You know, not even talking about a targeted attack. Just it going down because systems are old.

You know, they probably wouldn't sleep at night. How so? What do you mean when you say systems are old? Well, you look at the power grid, and that thing was patched together, right?

Like a quilt over the years, right? We've got three grids in the country, east and west, and Texas in the US. And Texas has a zone grid. And yeah, so, but it was put together over a long period of time, right?

And never with the intention that it was going to have to stand up to some attack, right? Or really even with the idea that it's going to have to withstand some natural disaster. Strange disasters. You would think you would want to make it pretty resilient to that.

So that's why you can drive by a substation, you know, and reach out and touch it. That's why you look at the water treatment facilities and think, well, that doesn't look particularly well protected. I mean, most of the infrastructure was never designed to withstand a physical attack, and certainly not a cyber attack. Because that wouldn't have existed when it was supposed to be done.

No, exactly. And then a lot of the equipment used for, going back to the power grid, a lot of the major gear that runs the power grid, we don't even manufacture in the States anymore, right? So the idea that something would shut down and we'd have a catastrophic collapse and kind of a cascading effect like we had several years back that kind of hit the Northeast, you know, that's a devastating issue because we don't, it's not like we've got some, you know, large hardware or power plants we're able to just roll in and replace gear with. We don't manufacture that stuff.

We don't have a power plant. Yeah, so the idea, I mean, people always ask me, so what should I do to be prepared? Well, I mean, if you can afford it, it's easy to say, well, you should have this because, you know, they're not cheap, but you should have a generator of a decent size that will provide you with some level of power, right? If you don't have power, you know, the first thing most people notice is their phones die, right?

And then, you know, what are you going to do? You're going to sit in the dark and not have TikTok, right? So, right, yeah, it's so weird to think, when you think about attacks and problems with telecommunications, with infrastructure, with energy, with water, you think about actual attacks, but then you don't realize that just the inbuilt fragility of the system is a threat in itself. Oh, wow, we could take this down just by no malicious intent.

No one's done anything other than, so we don't know what's happening with AT&T. You know what, I was so disappointed. I was happy not to have communications with folks for a while. So, I was on the sort of thing, I got to get to the bottom of this.

I was like, okay, I got a little while to relax. A little celebration. Yeah, yeah, so I was, you know, I'm the wrong guy to ask about the AT&T kerfuffle, but I did find it charming. I've said before, you know, we don't really understand the damage that these things are doing in a way.

They're great. I mean, I'm not, you know, fucking Luddite, but, you know, it's going to be years before we understand what access to this for our kids means, right? And, you know, if anybody's got kids, they understand what I'm talking about, right? It's the impact of these instant information and access to material information that they should never have at an early age, right?

All these things. Again, it's an upside, of course, it's an upside, right? But, you know, we're not going to stand the impact this is going to have. It's like with, you know, AI coming in now, right?

We're not going to really know what this means, right? But I can tell you what it's starting to mean. Look, I had a hard time with my company, which is an intelligence and security firm, Portman Square Group. Thank you very much.

Yeah. Lincoln Bayer. Hey, first marketing club. And, you know, we've always had a hard time finding young folks who could write well, right?

I mean, you can find people who are curious and we gather intelligence, we gather information around the world, right? So that's part of what we do. But you've got to package that up. You've got to present it to the clients, right?

People are paying us for this. And you've got to be able to tell that in a smart way, take a lot of information, distill it down to its key points and provide that to somebody, right? And so finding young folks who can write well, who can do that, has been a problem. And if we think it's a problem now, you know, wait five or ten years with AI, when every kid is just using Chachi BTR, the next version, to create everything that they need for school, I think we've got a problem coming down, Pike.

Did you see Google's Gemini disaster? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, show me a fighting. It tried to be so anti-racist that it was racist.

And it managed to annoy leftists by portraying Nazis as black people. And then it managed to annoy rightists by portraying the founding fathers as black people. Yeah, I think the Nazis, it was a very diverse group of Nazis. I think there was an Asian Nazi, there was a Hispanic Nazi, there was a black Nazi.

Yeah, it was everybody except someone from the Aryan race. And because we all know that the Nazis, they loved DEI. They were all about the, I think Goebbels was the DEI minister during the war. By the way, this is very good.

You enjoying that? Yeah, it's really good. That'll fire you up. So yeah, AI, Gemini.

I mean, I was talking to a friend yesterday who's big in the world of fashion. Remember Balenciaga? Got in trouble a while ago. They kind of showed some very BDSM stuff that maybe featured kids' toys.

And it really crossed the line. It was very great. Yeah, I missed that one. It was like, you know, if you want to feed into the pedophiles who run the world drinking goat blood and sacrificing women at the full moon and stuff.

Like, it really played into that. But you really don't knock people's hobbies. They're 70% down from when they started. 70% down from when that first happened.

My point being that the antibody defense system that the public has many companies, many organizations, many individuals are trying to contrive and cynically portray some sort of image. Even interpersonally day-to-day. You don't tell your friend about the fucking athletes. It's all party.

It's all fucking smokey mirrors. But they're 70% down. Google is way more important than overpriced shoes. But I don't think that we should underestimate how catastrophic and apocalyptic for a company it can be for the veil to sort of be revealed.

It's like, here, we know that they were doing something. What's happening with the search engine? How can we trust Google overall? Yeah, because most companies now do things out of fear, right?

I mean, the fear that they're not going to be, whatever the term is now, they're just woke or progressive enough, right? And so, you know, whether it's their marketing department they've got to tick some boxes and, okay, fine. Marketing has always been that, advertising has always been that, right? Appeal to whoever you believe your consumer to be, right?

But I think that there is a level of fear now that exists. It probably wasn't there before that says we don't want to get sideways with the very loud, you know, vocal minority, right? That's out there. Because, you know, last time I checked, you know, the LGBTQ community, God bless them, right?

But they're not the majority of the population, right? But our consumer product seems to be like believing that they are. But it's not. It's just fear of upsetting a very loud minority of people who, you know, have figured out how to manipulate, right?

The narrative. And again, hey, good for them, you know, because everybody's trying to, I suppose, do the same thing and, you know, win the day. But, yeah, we live in interesting times, right? And if you raise, if you've got kids in school, right?

You see it almost on a daily basis. Because kids are pretty, pretty good until they get to a certain age, right? Young kids are pretty good about just kind of telling you the truth, right? They'll just come home and they'll say something.

They don't tend to edit things that much at a young age, right? And so they'll come back and they'll tell you today. And you go, well, you know, I had a girl hiss at me. I said, what do you mean hiss at you?

Well, she thinks she's a cat and so she dresses like a cat and she only communicates by meowing and hissing. And so she hissed at me. I said, well, I pulled her tail. Well, I think that's funny.

But you can legitimately get in trouble in school now for, you know, harassing a cat person. And so you hear these things and there's other versions of that story that come out on a daily basis. And you think, okay, you know, I get it. We're kind of accommodating everything nowadays, right?

And, you know, everybody's got their own opinion. You know, my opinion is that you probably don't want to do that, right? If some kid tells you that they want to be a dinosaur when they grow up, you know, they'll probably get over that. You don't need to look at a three-year-old.

He's a fine man when he wakes up and then he's a postman after lunch and he's an astronaut before dinner. Oh, God, I wanted to be an astronaut when I was young. I still kept this little essay that I wrote when I was in... I don't even remember what I was, how old I was, but that was where I wanted to be.

And I was never going to be smart enough to be an astronaut. My dad was nice enough to tell me that. But, you know, it was... I don't know your fantasy.

Yeah, yeah. You're the astronaut camper. Yeah, I mean, he did tell me. You know, you might want to set your sights somewhere else other than space.

But, yeah, I guess, anyway, the point is, I think the overindulgence, right, for kids at a young age is not, I don't think, actually, solid parenting. It seems different than just indulging a young person's desire for fantasy or a different life. This appears to be a complete rewriting of history. It appears to be...

Yeah, absolutely. 50% hiding reality and 50% erasing history. And think about how focused that was. Think about the thought process that went into that.

And it wasn't just one dude said, I'm going to create this code that's going to allow this to happen. This was a legitimate discussion. Nothing happens to a company that size that doesn't go through several layers of decision-making and has to get signed off on. It's bullshit if we imagine it was just one very progressive person who thought, I'm going to fuck with the system a little bit, so here we go.

The same as test-driven, do it fucking fairly well. And so the idea that they would... Now they come out and go, well, yeah. Who could have seen that coming?

Everybody in product development. Yeah, it is amazing to think about. And then you think about the power that that has. I mean, Google, you can't swing a dead cat without hitting Google at some point.

And so everybody, in a way, is impacted. And again, I go back to that original comment, which is, we don't understand, we don't have enough data points yet to understand what all this means for the development of the human race, maybe if you want to take it that far down the road. Definitely what you want to be doing, though, if you're in this position, you're at the very beginning of the inception of a new type of technology, of AI, of life language models, of all of that stuff, you do not want to activate the antibody system within the populace. You should be moving so slowly.

You shouldn't be allowing it to generate images. It should be just, you know, first off text. I don't think Gemini kind of jumped in straight into the deep end and did some super advanced stuff. But yeah, I think the implications for the rest of Google's unbiasedness or lack of is, I think this has really brought to the front a lot of latent skepticism that people had about that company overall.

I think so, but I think what they're probably counting on is what most companies count on, which is sort of the short attention span. Well, sorry, I'll turn that off. That's Google calling me. Yeah, yeah.

Hey, we just shut the fuck up. Yeah, I think they're counting on the short attention span, right? I mean, look, everybody imagines, well, okay, the far right imagines, but the light's going down, right? After that, it'll go, right?

Nobody gives a shit. At the end of the day, right? I mean, there was a dip, right? And they hit their stock price a little bit, but that company's not going out.

It's just not going to happen. And people forget these things, right? And our attention spans, particularly in the U.S. And I would argue, you know, in the West to some degree, but really in the U.S.

I see it. I spend a lot of time overseas, but here in America, we've got such a short attention span, and there's this inability, right? And I'm not saying you shouldn't look at Google and say, okay, now we've got to punish them hard, we've got to drive them out of business. That's supposed to, you know, boycott.

You don't like a product, don't use the product, right? But I don't think this is going to impact them in the long run, and I don't think they ultimately believe it will or care, right? They care in the very short term, but I think they understand the dynamics, and we're all like, you know, a bunch of raccoons chasing the next tinfoil ball. It's very easy to outwit somebody else by just looking at a longer time horizon than they do.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. You just realize right now, the Bud Light example is so perfect. This is the end of it, Kid Rock's shooting it with a gun. It's going to be Kid Rock with a gun.

Yeah, he wants to fucking drink it. Which is, Shane Gillis is now an ambassador for them. You've got like the Bud Light New World Order fucking booth at the Super Bowl, right? Exactly.

All the people are in their post-malones. I came out with a camo can. Remember that? I get so annoyed with people that are super vehement about a thing, and then forget about it, because you captured my attention with your bullshit over-the-top vehement denial or assertion about some fucking thing, and it's still in my memory, but it's not in yours.

There was this image of a single, swatty soldier walking down the streets of London, and he got forwarded on WhatsApp. This was during COVID, and it was, this is an image sent to me by my brother, who's part of the Enforces, and whatever, whatever. The army are going to come and force you at gunpoint to stay in your house. And this is, I don't know if you've ever seen this on WhatsApp.

There's a thing that says forwarded many times, and it's like a warning that this is being pushed around a lot on WhatsApp. This thing went beyond hyperviral, and people were adamant. Remember when there was like tanks rolling through Florida, Miami maybe? Miami Beach, and it was like, this is the beginning.

It's going to be martial law, and everyone's going to be locked down. Or, they're just fighting their time until we're less vigilant. No, dude, you don't get to make insanely certain assertions about the world. And then, like, allow them to move up.

It winds me up so much. No, if you've spent any time working for the government, or a government, you know, typically, what you'll find, unless you're in a totalitarian regime, unless you're working for Xi Jinping in China, maybe, you know, the government, you know, the U.S. government in particular is not capable of organizing panic in a doomed submarine, right? They just can't.

So this idea is how they're going to, you know, create this new world order, they're going to do these things. I mean, you always want to be vigilant, but, yeah, the COVID pandemic brought out a lot of that, I think, in part, because it kind of fed into, you know, it was a great trough, you know, for people who wanted to talk about conspiracies and things. And so, okay, great, but, you know, we all knew another pandemic was going to happen, right? We know another one's going to happen at some point, right?

We'll probably have the same reactions. We won't learn anything. But, yeah, I've never been a big fan of the idea, or a big believer in the idea that somehow the government's going to get this massive conspiracy over on us, because I spent much time working for the government, right? And your belief is that because they're so useless, this level of coordination would essentially be impossible.

Yeah, yeah, the idea that they could keep secrets to that degree, right? I mean, certain parts of the government, you know, Intel community is pretty good at keeping sources and methods, right? Because it's life or death, you know, for assets working overseas. But, I mean, on a big level, you know, we created some, you know, some, you know, secret layer somewhere where we're developing some new tech.

Okay, fine, maybe so. My experience, anyway, is that it's tough for the government to keep a secret if it involves multiple agencies or, you know, a variety of positions. I just don't, again, you have to go with what your personal experience is. That's mine.

I'm sure somebody else is, you know, sitting in somebody's basement with no experience, that's a different idea. So, did you see that Gemini also refused to create an image of what happened to Tiananmen Slat? Yes. Yeah, it did.

And I also saw that, what was it? Somebody asked him, I mean, there's so many examples out there. Correct. I think one example, and I haven't tracked it back to this original source yet, but somebody asked if it was all right to misgender.

I think it was Bruce Jenner, or, sorry, Caitlyn Jenner, in order to stop a nuclear apocalypse or Armageddon. And the kind of answer was sort of shaded. Well, it's not right, you know, because it could be considered discriminatory. Now, there may be other ways to stop the Armageddon.

Okay. That's a good lateral thinking. Yeah, there's other ways that was layered, I guess. But no, there's, I don't know.

What I worry about, I tend to think about things in very simple terms. My greatest joy in life comes from my family, right? So I think about a lot of things in terms of the impact it will have on my kids, what we're leaving behind for the kids, you know, what it means for their development. And So I look at something like, you know, AI, and again, it's a fairly simplistic way of looking at it.

I'm not necessarily considering the human race. I'm considering what impact we'll have on teaching my boys to be smart thinkers, to become, you know, productive, become leaders. What does all this mean? TikTok, what is that?

You know, not just TikTok, but I mean, just the access to information and social media. What is that doing to these minds, right? And, you know, again, I suppose, you know, the just recent generation had the same conversations with shooter games, right? Video games, right?

So, you know, every generation deals with it, you know? I'm sure my parents talked about rock and roll music, right? We're worried about that. So it's not, it's not, yeah, it's nothing new.

It's just, it does seem more insidious, right? It seems more, because it is, it's reaching more people, right? And it's having more immediate impact. And it's affecting the way that we think about things and how we react to news of the day, right?

We're tired of Ukraine after two years, right? We were in Afghanistan for fucking 20 years, right? And now we're all fatigued from it to some degree or in some fashion, but it took almost no time for people to get tired. And, you know, a lot of people that were out there couldn't wait to pin a fucking Ukraine flag in the front yard, right?

Or post a little Ukraine flag on their Twitter site. You know, now they're like, we can't spend more money there. You know, so, okay, what happened in the short span of two years? Well, immediate access to information and all those opinions and ideas, right?

And then people get siloed and start reading only things that agree with them. And then, then they're done, right? Now they're, now they've got a hardened opinion and you can't shift them off that position, right? Anyway.

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Could you see what happened with the Super Bowl where Alicia Keys' voice broke and then they went back and retroactively fixed her voice? Do you see this? No, I think that the Giants were not in the Super Bowl, so I didn't watch it. Right, well, you missed Alicia Keys.

Very good performance, oh sure, fantastic dancers, still pretty ripped. Alicia Keys' voice broke on the first note of this piano solo thing she was doing, but if you go back and watch the Super Bowl's recording of it on YouTube, her voice is perfect. And this has been, look, Alicia Keys is not the vanguard of us rewriting history, but you can certainly see between AI being able to misrepresent how history would have been, this sort of erasing of history and rewriting of the present, and then this retroactive changing, and even if it's just a little bit with regards to someone's voice, this is different to auto-tuning a song, this is a record of what happened in history. And I think this is starting to get quite worrying.

Like, I err on the side of non-conspiracism, but this is starting to get a bit, I don't like the doors that are being opened to it. Well, I think there are some mechanisms that are, and companies that are trying to, or have been trying to get out of the curve, I'm not sure that that's possible right now, but you have to, it's like the old days, you read an article in the newspaper, and you think, okay, that's very interesting, well, you know, but is it true? And so what's the basis for this? And it used to be, one of the defenses was sources would be named, right?

You couldn't write an article, you wouldn't get published if it was based on anonymous sources. Well, no, that's not true anymore. New York Times will publish a front-page article on the top half based on anonymous sources. And so you're trying to verify something, right?

And you push that forward to today, and you say, okay, well, now I'm trying to verify a clip that I'm seeing on X, right, or on YouTube or something. And how do you do that? Because the ability to manipulate video and audio is remarkable, right? There's, almost impossible to tell the difference, basically, without some assistance.

So there's companies out there that are trying to ensure that you are basically imprinting actual, the truth, right? So you take video, and that is the original source, and it's imprinted in the code. It says this is the date, the time, the location, and so you can verify that what's being said by that, political candidate, or whomever, right, on that podium is accurate. Because then you may see, a day later, you may see the same clip, but it's been altered.

And yeah, altered too. And so there are some companies out there that are working to do that to prevent deep fakes. But it's very difficult because you're relying on people's curiosity and them having the interest, right, to pursue to make sure that what they're saying. And most people don't.

They don't have the time, they don't have the patience or the interest. Well, the point with ChatGPT and these LLMs and AI and search engines is to reduce the friction from getting where you are to where you want to be. And the fact that it's frictionless is precisely where the attraction lies. It's convenience and all the rest of that.

And if you could imagine a world in which the most convenient route also bakes in a lack of accuracy. Because, look, you can find this out in three seconds, but there's an accuracy. You can be a little bit wrong either way. Or you can do your own research, it's going to take you a day and a half, and you're going to know what actually happened.

And everybody's going to do that. Of course, of course. And the thing is, you have the opportunity. It is more effortful to not portray the truth.

It takes more effort to do that. Now, it's less convenient, but it takes more effort to lie than it does to tell the truth. Well, yeah, that gap, that difference between lying and telling the truth is shrinking, right, because of the technology, because of the access to be able to do this. But you're right.

I mean, if you pair it back to just for the human nature, right, that's why if you're being interrogated, you've got to stick to the truth for the most part, right? You want to stay as close to the truth as possible, obviously, without veering off into something that's going to get your ass kicked. But the idea being, because otherwise, if you're lying, you've got to keep building on that. You've got to keep remembering.

And you spend all your time thinking, okay, where was, okay, what did I say there when I said that? And if you're dealing in an interrogation situation, you know, and that's what you're counting on. You're counting on if that person's lying to me, at some point, they're going to get confused, right? And they're going to start mixing up that story.

And particularly if you, you know, in the old days, you've got the ability for sleep deprivation, whatever it is, right, you can start messing with your mind a little bit, then yes, that's what you're counting on. So you're absolutely right in the sense that lying is much more difficult. Aside from the fact that, you know, it's like, if you make a mistake, right, the best thing, we were taught this at the agency, right, as being on the field in operations. I remember one of my first bosses told me when I landed on site before I went off to do whatever I was doing.

He said, you know, if anything happens, if you make a mistake, just come tell me. We'll sort it out, right? But just tell me. Smartest thing, right, you can do it.

To empower young people with responsibility, who are given responsibility, to know that if they make a mistake, come forward with it. And sure enough, you know, because of, you know, operations and agency out in the field, sometimes things happen. So, you know, and he was good to his word, right? We had a bit of a goat rope, and, you know, it worked out.

But you've got to be able to do that. You've got to be able to show. It's not enough to say, hey, you make a mistake, come tell me, we'll fix it. You know, if you kick their ass when they come in a mistake, then you'll fix it.

Yeah, exactly. So you've got to follow through. But you're right in the sense that telling the truth is always the easiest path, right? But I guess my point being is, in the world of disinformation now, if your job is propaganda or misinformation or disinformation, it's becoming a lot easier, right?

And a lot quicker, a lot more efficient, right? To create that. In the old days, if you were going to do a propaganda campaign, I changed hearts and minds in some country, right? That you're trying to sway the people.

You know, I'm not talking about overthrowing the government. It was good old days. So I'm sorry. That's not true.

Never did that sort of thing. Come on. But the point being is that you had, that was a lot of work, right? Because what were you doing?

You were using old media technology, right? You were finding journalists who might be inclined for whatever reason to write articles in a certain tone, right? And you create a network of them, and you kind of pepper the country with, you know, this narrative. And you build on that and hope that you're having an impact.

Bullshit. Much easier now. Are you kidding me? Think about, you remember Cambridge Analytica?

Yeah, sure. You know, targeted memes and ads that were trunched into cohorts. And we have the, maybe Hillary is a non-US citizen. Maybe Hillary is a, you know, all the different ways that this gets split up.

You had all of these different vulnerabilities and vectors of attack. But there was still a person making a meme or making an advert or whatever. So there was still human labor getting in the way of the rapidity of this. Whereas now, you have both the ability for AI to deliver it in a targeted manner, and also to create it.

So you can have Mike Baker profile on Facebook or Instagram or TikTok or whatever. Who wouldn't want that? No one wants that at all. But it's just you that it's targeted at.

So yeah, I think increasingly we're going to see real information, original sources. You know, maybe there'll be a way where being an actual person on social media will be a rarity in the next five years. Maybe humans are going to be, 99% of content will be created by bots. Every so often you'll see a tweet from you or someone else that's real.

Yeah. And it's, look, if you're talking about a state, right? If you're talking about creating something that's going to get past the scrutiny of, you know, Chinese intel or Russian intel or something. Yeah.

Then you're working your ass off, right? You're creating a very hard backed out, elaborate, elaborate cover. And it's a lot of work. But for the average person out there, if what you're trying to do is influence a campaign or you're trying to, you know, creating 10,000 fictional characters, you know, saying interesting things out there who then, you know, it's like the old separate circles who then get 5,000 followers each.

And it's, I guess, but again, it all comes down to the same problem, right? We can talk about all the, you know, the things you can do, but it's individuals, right? It comes down to each person saying to themselves is what I'm reading or hearing or watching true. You know, I don't know how you, you impact that, right?

Because human nature being what it is, we're just, you know, we're consuming shit and then moving on. Path of least resistance. Yeah. Path of least resistance.

And to be fair, most people are just trying to put food on the table or take care of their kids or whatever they're doing. And so you can't ask them to spend a lot of time scrutinizing. I don't have time to be my own personal snopes. Yeah.

Everything. Exactly. Yeah. So I think that there's, you know, there's, there's always going to be this, this, this, this problem.

And not to say that it hasn't always existed, right? But I do think the acceleration is pretty impressive, right? The speed of which you can create this, this, this fake, right? This deep fake or, or this persona that pushes information out there or whatever it may be.

And the speed with which people are willing to consume it and pass it along, right? So that's something we're going to be battling, I think, for a while. And will it impact this upcoming election? Of course it will.

And in future elections, right? Why wouldn't you? If I'm, if I'm Russian intelligence or Chinese intelligence or the Iranians or anybody who's got the resources, why wouldn't I try to fuck with the U.S.? Yeah.

So, or with the U.K. Really, it's not, it's not just a U.S. centric problem. Yes.

What do you think we learned from the Putin-Tucker interview, speaking of Russia? Well, Putin's a douchebag. I think I took that away, but I'd say I had a preconceived notion. That was something I walked into the interview with.

Like, I don't, I don't know. I think, I understand why Tucker wanted to do it aside from just 160 million views, however many he got, right? I mean, that was sure to be a winner in interest of ratings. I don't think it revealed anything clever or new about Putin's mindset.

He's a smart cat, right? So he knew what he was going to say, how he was going to act, what he was going to look like, you know? I mean, he's a very calculating individual, right? He survived Russian politics, right?

For this long, at the top, right? You don't do that by being a moron, right? Or stumbling into an interview with Tucker Carlson, right? Who's not exactly Lex Luthor, right?

I mean, so that, you know, again, that's not the look of Tucker. He's a smart guy. I'm just saying that it's not like, it was not like some Marvel, you know, movie where the two evil minds got together. Putin's a very calculating, clever individual.

So I don't think we, I mean, from my perspective, I didn't learn anything new about him. This idea that somehow we have no interest in Ukraine and we should just, you know, close the curtains on it. Yeah, Ukraine, great courage for two years. We all love that.

I'll keep my bumper sticker on the car for Ukraine. And now we walk away because we don't care anymore because we're tired of it. And we want to do something. And we spend that money back.

Of course, we should spend the fucking money at home, right? We got a lot of infrastructure problems and resources we should do, but we also have concerns over there. And so I think, you know, I'm amazed at the speed with which it happened, but you could argue that about a lot of things. I'm just thinking of which the support fell off.

Yes. I mean, look, again, I don't mean to jump all over the place, but Hamas rolls into southern Israel, slaughters 1,200 people, and probably the most medieval display of brutality that we've seen in our lifetimes, right? Which everybody agreed was incredibly brutal. And in record time, it's Israel's fault, right?

Because they've gone into Gaza to try to destroy the Hamas, which has been doing this, which has always been in existence to destroy Israel. And so, yeah, and of course, you don't want civilians to die. But Hamas has spent, you know, a couple of decades now, embedding themselves inside that population, knowing that every time that there is a conflict, civilians are going to die, knowing that that's going to drive the narrative. That's what they do.

So the speed with which that happened, the speed with which we've gotten fatigued in Ukraine, you know, it all kind of comes back around again to this whole idea. Nobility, die for something new. Yeah, I knew that the Putin-Tucker interview was going to be a big deal, and I sort of prepared myself for, yeah, this, like, cataclysmic meeting of, like, West and Soviet. And then, I don't know, I came away from it kind of just being like, oh, just very very unenlightened, kind of unimpressed, I think.

You know, you have this 30-minute treatise monologue soliloquy at the start about this is the history, and this is why we feel this way, and so on and so forth. And, you know, Tucker, he's a very competent interviewer. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Usually.

And, you know, I don't know how difficult it must have been, and this is something that people are never really going to see, the intermediary of a translator between the two adds a degree of complexity that can really, it's like fighting a southpaw or something. It throws you off your step a little bit. Right. And that sounds silly, but, you know.

No, no. They use that. I mean, that's always been the case. You always use a translator to your advantage, right?

It gives him a chance to say something back, to do whatever. Yeah, very interesting. But no, I just, it was a bit, and now, Navalny's dead. Yeah.

And that's the next, and that happens for a week, maybe, to 10 days after he sits down with Tucker. Yeah. And he doesn't care, right? I mean, we imagine that Russia cares what we think about them, how they're portrayed.

And we imagine that she worries about how China, you mean, like they've got a brand equity dashboard somewhere. Yeah, exactly. Like, what's our current rating? Oh, we're at 4.4 stars on TripAdvisor.

Yeah, what is that? The old Q rating or the Q factor. How popular are we? Yeah, they really don't care.

In part, not so much Russia, but more China, because they've got a longer view, right? They look way down the road compared to how the West tends to do it. But I think the parameters, what they were allowed to do, Carlson and his crew, when they went in, were pretty hard and fast, right? As you can imagine, there's a lot of back and forth.

He was late as well for it. Yeah. He was two hours late. Yeah.

Apparently, he's like half the coast with him. He was riding a tiger. He was going south. He was fighting a bear.

A couple of them. But yeah, if Carlson had borne in on Gerskowitz, right? Evan Gerskowitz, who's sitting in jail, or Paul Whelan, in a more aggressive fashion, said, okay, well, where's your evidence with Evan that he's been engaged in espionage? How about that?

You know, when you're actually going to do something about an actual, you know, open, transparent effort to discuss his case, you know, if you'd, if you'd, if you'd gone in on that more, but that wouldn't have been allowed to happen, right? That wasn't, that wasn't part of the. the agreed-upon, you know, playing field. So, I just, I didn't think we were going to get anything new, and I didn't feel like we did.

Again, I understand why he did it, had the interview, but anyway, but Navalny's situation, sudden death syndrome. You're in a false labor camp, just above the Arctic Circle. Being alive, being alive is a surprise. Like, the dead isn't a surprise.

Like, you lasted two and a half years. He went for a walk, and then he didn't feel well. That was the original comment. You know, he went for a walk, and then he didn't feel well.

Because that's what you do above the Arctic Circle. Go for a walk. And then, you know, there was some comment that he had bruising around his head and his chest, and their response was, well, he hit his head when he fell, and then the chest was when they were trying to revive him. So, from a Russian perspective, it was exactly what you would expect.

And whether he was poisoned, or whether they, you know, they, there's blunt force trauma, or whatever. The outcome was probably always inevitable with Navalny, because he was always a threat. And what's the gift of 30,000 for the people who don't know his background to Navalny? Who was he?

I'm trying to remember the year that he kind of really first surfaced. Yeah, I'm drawing a blank. But he, he, most, not most recently, but he became sort of a critic of Chechnya. He became a critic of some of the governance in Chechnya and the corruption.

He started being more vocal about, primarily about corruption issues, right? And then he fed off of that. I'm really oversimplifying it. But he had to be careful about how he was doing that, obviously, because you get, you get sideways with the Russian regime pretty quickly.

But he started getting a following, because he was one of the few people who was actually getting out and talking about things. People, you know, I suppose, in the back of their minds were thinking, yeah, there's probably some corruption going on here in the Russian government and around the region. And eventually, he went to run for mayor. And that didn't end well, right?

He didn't, he got convicted or charged with business corruption. And that was kind of the first salvo that Putin fired at him. I think in an effort to say, hey, look, just shut up, because I think, you know, you're going to find this is not going to go well for you. So it was business corruption.

You see that in China, too. Anytime somebody gets sideways with Xi, usually it's a corruption charge. It's some type of malfeasance. It's a business side, yeah.

And then they disappear. So Navalny made a bid for mayor of Moscow, feeling like that's where you can make a change, right? I think his real mindset was if you could get that post, then he really could, perhaps, longer term influence change in Russia. I mean, he was a proponent of democracy.

Then disinformation started getting. There was a lot of movement from the Putin regime painting him in, you know, a lot of different ways, right? Saying, okay, you're far right. You're an extremist.

You're good. All sorts of things started to come through. And then it kind of all went sideways. He eventually ended up, I think it was 2019, 2020.

He was on a flight that sick. You know, Novichok was the nerve agent that they used. Which is serious shit. Serious shit invented by the Soviets.

And so he almost died from that. He was out of the country. And then to his credit, after he recovered, okay, I'm going to come back straight back. Yeah, yeah.

So he flew back. He got arrested before he even really got anywhere near, you know, passport control. They just picked him up. And that was pretty much it.

But during this period, he had started to do YouTube. And he was flying drones at him. His team were flying drones over the top of Putin's billion dollar compound. Yeah.

Releasing stories that he's just got like an army of hookers and pole dancers and stuff just cycling their way through this place. And look at all the money and this is where it's being spent. But, you know, in order to be able to go as far as they did, it looks like pretty high grade technology to be able to capture this sort of stuff. Yeah.

I mean, it's, you know, again, drones being what they are nowadays. Yes. I like that. I like that.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's a great character. I know. So, yeah, the drone technology has changed everything, right?

And it's so accessible, right? You don't need much. A few bucks will get you a drone with a camera that you can, you know, get some really good footage of. But you're right.

You know, talking about his lavish lifestyle and spending, that hurt Putin on a personal level, right? And Putin only cares about one thing, right? Which is maintaining power. Same with Xi.

And you maintain power by keeping the people under control, right? So social unrest is the one thing that these guys all fear the most, right? Including the mullahs in Iran and, you know, Kim Jong-un, although he lives in kind of a fantasy world in North Korea. So Navalny, you know, at a certain point, for him it was inevitable.

This is where it was going. I mean, I remember watching it unfold at the time after this guy's been popped with a nerve agent and then slowly recovers and then starts doing his YouTube stuff again. And this is getting, in days, tens of millions of plays. And it's not even, it's only in Russian, right?

It's maybe translated into British subtitles, English subtitles, or whatever. And then he's like, I'm not scared of you. Like, you should be. Yeah.

You should be scared. And as soon as he got on that plane, right? To go back to the motherland, that was, at some point, within the next five years, you're probably going to be dead. Yeah.

And I think that, I can see the calculation that he and his, you know, his wife, I'm sure, and probably his close cadre made that the most impact he can have will be in-country, right? I mean, it's one thing to be at this and outside the country. You know, China's got a number of those, even though the Xi regime tries to track them down and change their minds. But I think Navalny probably spent a fair amount of time, who knows, but I suspect he spent a lot of time on that calculation.

Can I have more impact outside the country or inside the country? And this credit, he flew back knowing, I think, exactly what's going to happen. And so that, if you've got any idea what these labor camps are like, where it is and what it's like, do we have any information about that? This was what's known as a polar wolf.

It's the IK3 penal colony above the Arctic Circle. And I personally haven't spent time there. But it's reported to be one of the most brutal camps that they've got, right? Which tells you it's completely isolated.

And that's really what they were looking to do. It was just to put him away somewhere where people would forget about him. To his wife's credit, to his lawyer's credit, right? And to a small circle of supporters, they were able to keep some attention, keep some focus on it.

His mother as well. But the idea being was just out of sight, out of mind. And look, people talked about when he died, the headlines were all Putin's most prominent critic. Well, prominent implies that there's a bunch of others, right?

Only. Yeah, basically only critic at this point. I mean, there's some brave people who get on the street and, you know... There were a lot of protests, but then those people were being rounded up and arrested.

Yeah, preemptively. Some of them were picked up before there was even an opportunity to have not even so much a protest as a memorial service out in public, right? And then they refused to give the body back for a little while as well. They did.

Yeah, there was some talk about whether they'd let the poison dissipate. Honestly, you know, at this point, you know... We give a fuck. Yeah, would Putin's team think to themselves, you know, we're going to waste some poison on him up here, or we're just going to, you know, let it die?

Who knows how he actually ended up going? But his wife has, you know, promised to carry on. And, you know, there were lots of headlines saying, what does this mean for Russia? It doesn't mean shit for Russia, unfortunately, right?

We will not be talking about this, unfortunately, in six months' time. I know they laid some more sanctions on Russia. Yeah, 500 new sanctions largely against Russia's financial and military sectors. The round of sanctions are the most at one time since Russia invaded Ukraine two years ago.

And a lot of criticism that this isn't enough, this isn't sufficient. Biden basically made a threat, I suppose, or a deal that if Navalny died, that there would be more sanctions. We deposited half a thousand and it seems like it was kind of like it. Yeah, how about this?

How about we did those sanctions two years ago when Russia invaded? If we had additional sanctions we could lay on to fuck with their ability to make money to fund their military venturism into Ukraine, why didn't we do that before? I mean, what are we half-assing sanctions for? So they came up with, you know, sort of this bullshit price cap on oil, right?

And the only way Putin affords what he's doing in Ukraine is through energy revenues, right? So, you know, the sanctions at this point have been like, well, okay, well, you know, we're going to cap Russian oil at $60 a barrel. Can't buy it at a higher price. Well, you know, the world's like, what are we talking about, right?

So they've created this whole shadow fleet of merchant ships. They've sold $35 billion worth of oil to India, which turns around and refines a lot of that oil, sells a lot of that product to the US and the EU, right? It's just bullshit. They've got more cash in their account now in Russia than they've had in quite some time.

Certainly more than before the war started because the sanctions have been ineffective, haven't been aggressive enough, and we should be doing more. You argue the same for Iran, but, you know, again, I don't want to disappear down other rabbit holes, but, yeah, when they talked about it, they came out and, you know, they bloviate about we're going to lay out sanctions now because of Navalny. Well, you should have fucking done those sanctions two years ago, right? Squeezed him, made it so he couldn't afford this, right?

And maybe we wouldn't have spent billions and billions of billions of dollars to Ukraine because Putin couldn't afford to do what he's doing. But that's, you know, I don't know, I'm not present. In other news, this episode is brought to you by Element. Stop having coffee first thing in the morning.

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Right now, you can get a free sample pack of all eight flavors with your first box by going to the link in the description below or heading to drinklmnt.com slash modernism. And so I guess my point is that he spent the past 30 plus years trying to figure out how to rebuild it in some fashion. I don't mean the entire Soviet Union but he certainly wants to get back to something more than what he's got. He's very keen on sort of the glory of the motherland.

And okay, but he's nationalistic but he's ambitious in a land grab sort of way. So when he says that and he talks about the threat of NATO on his border he's not bullshitting. He means that. So the idea that he's going to take Ukraine and if we stop aid again, Washington's going to do what they do but if they don't provide resources to Ukraine going forward if we say that's enough let's focus on ourselves it's not important and people rationalize that by thinking that it's just Ukraine you know, why do we care?

It's one country. If they imagine that that's where he's going to stop he's going to end up with Kiev and then go, yeah, I'm good it's all fine now I don't care I'm going to now focus on improving myself and you know, the homeland you know, that's not his track record and I'm not sure where people get that belief or optimism from I think it's a rationalization because they don't want to spend any more money on Ukraine because they don't see the value in trying to prevent Putin from invading and taking over a separate country. How much truth is there in the Russia's got declining birth rates this is close to the highest that their population is ever going to be therefore their armed forces this is kind of a last chance attempt to be able to have the manpower to go into Ukraine. Is there any truth in that?

It's a story I've seen push around the line. Yeah, look, they've got a 3-1 manpower ban to Ukraine and more importantly they've got an ability to suffer and put up with pain that I don't think the West really understands and go back and look at their history in World War II and their losses they were willing to sustain is the culture still the same as them though? I think it's pretty well embedded in the culture I mean, you can argue that it's a more modern society and they've got access to information they read the people pretty well and you would imagine that there must be populations just rising up in the streets and it's not happening in part he was smart in how he was conscripting a lot of people he took them from the Netherlands the outer regions he wasn't recruiting a lot of soldiers off the streets of St. Petersburg or Moscow and because he doesn't want to bring war right to Moscow and make them feel the pain they went through that in Afghanistan to some degree when the Soviets occupied Afghanistan and eventually the popular unrest at home mothers of dead soldiers and so he could start to feel that I think they do have the appetite to wear a lot of pain and so I think that's what Putin counts on whether they'll have the manpower I think you know Putin they miscalculated so much right the Russian military intelligence apparatus made so many mistakes going into this invasion but I think one calculation that he's kind of clung to is that the West will get tired and that's kind of what's happening you can count on the shortness of the attention span yeah and I think he imagined NATO was going to break right at a slinter or there wouldn't certainly be the cohesiveness that there is and he certainly didn't anticipate it growing like NATO has but so there's a lot of mistakes there but I think he has correctly pinned some hope on the fact that we get tired of it and that there would sort of be this popular unrest and make no mistake the Russian disinformation apparatus is busy feeding that so again it goes back to what we're talking about with information that you read and trying to figure out what these opinions are on social media why wouldn't they it's impossible to think that the Russian regime the intel apparatus wouldn't look at the situation and go yeah we need to do what we can to influence the narrative in the States and the West they've been doing this forever they did it in World War II to try to keep us out of World War II before the Nazis or the Germans invaded Russia when they were allied they spent a lot of time focused on trying to influence public opinion inside the US to keep America out of the war so it's not something new they're just using different technology how much longer do you think manned warfare has?

got to have some boots on the ground but I think the pointy edge of the sphere in a major global conflict a big global not a regional issue that's definitely going to be taking place in cyberspace and I think that the first the goal will be to kill morale at home what will that look like? well I mean you'll do the usual that's why they're mapping out if you went to I don't know which office it is in China but if you went to an office you would find a playbook that maps out the infrastructure in the US, the UK, the West in terms of our power systems transportation, water treatment facilities how do you stop the financial systems simple things how do you keep someone from going to a cash point and pulling out money how do you keep somebody from being able to get their medicines how do you shut down the power grid you want to bring the pain to the home front as quickly as possible and you do that by attacking the infrastructure you may at a certain point but I think that that will be the first that will be the first major effort the weaponization of space you'll be looking to take out part of the problem when people talk about knocking out GPS well yes you can target a country's specific satellites but some of this like a massive EMP attack will impact everybody right to some degree so that will be more targeted surgical effort but it'll certainly play a role and yeah i think that's that's not but i don't think look we didn't imagine there would be another major land war in europe right if you said five years ago yeah we're gonna have like a world war one like trench situation where it goes into a war of attrition you know they make very little movement on either side and probably thought that was crazy you can go to the imperial war museum in london and go through the world war one exhibit right you look at it you see what took place during world war one and and how it impacted uh food production and energy production and you think well it seems somewhat similar so i think that there will always be a place for that but i think what we'll see is there will be that immediate desire to hurt the homeland as quickly as possible and try to impact morale because knowing that that's what's going to drive domestic decisions what about from a kinetic standpoint how much is going to be drones how much is going to be robotics how much is going to be unmanned aerial vehicles and stuff like that yeah well we're seeing that in a big way right it's almost like we're testing uh the capabilities right now and seeing what are the impacts uh forward-looking gathering of intelligence right for uh sort of short-term strategic planning of true movements or certainly immediate impact of targeting uh on on targets of opportunity uh drones um are proving to be invaluable right and you know give the iranian regime credit right they at some point they must have seen that several years ago because they built a certain capability in production of drones they they understood the value there uh as a variety of obviously you know us and uk have been uh in advanced drone production for years right uh but uh it's not just delivery of weapons on target it's it's the intel gathering you know functions that drones are really changing the battlefield in a certain way so that'll play a real important role unmanned uh capabilities yeah i mean we've been seeing that for some time there's been arguments you know we can take the human out of targeting right and the decision making of actually you know um green lighting again it depends how discriminated you want to be with the damage and collateral damage as well yeah i think there's also there's a moral implication there of saying you do we take the human out of a decision to target kill other humans uh i think that's a that's a big leap uh i'm sure it's gonna happen frankly i mean human nature being what it is i think the decision is going to be the drive towards whatever's most efficient and effective particularly if something kicks off if we've got a major conflict but for right now you know this looks happened before the soviets had what was called the dead hand system which essentially uh for if if all their leadership was wiped out they did have a system in place that would take over and and uh continue a counter response and so they had that um so it's not unthought of or undeveloped it's unused um but actually suboptimal compared with what's being used at least for the time being right yeah i think some things have advanced since the dead hand and the old Soviet Union for sure but uh yes i think there's what holds people back from that is again this uneasy feeling this moral issue of you think that the russians are prepared to put nerve agent into some dissident like rival well you know that's not going to be a consideration for them that doesn't seem like it'd be a consideration for well but the consideration i think is more of does it mean i lose power right you know the calculation is okay is this the end for me then if i do something oh i make myself obsolete by just becoming an algorithm in 148 to the slippery slope all the way down well that i think is part of it is that but i guess i was looking more towards sort of pushing the button on the big one right okay we're gonna get in there i think that's that's where it it you get that hard and fast now i don't you know i want to centralize yeah i like my army of hookers more than i wanted to i also like an army of hookers um did you see this modified rx9 hellfire missile this flying jinsu thing you look at this yeah this thing is hardcore yeah yeah yeah these samurai i think six six samurai blades come out the end it's three four five feet long and it can target an individual car and if you were stood two yards to the side of the car i mean be a big bang and you know that something happened right but you would be physically you would be fine yeah it's something out of an anime or a marvel ray film and they got um al zawari they got like one of the guys supposedly was a part of 9-11 morning coffee on a balcony and obviously some bloke just with a little laser targeter and they sent two they just think you have a backup yeah you always want a redundant system people always say yeah redundancy but no you want you want you want to back up in case you imagine you step out on your balcony back up your day having your morning espresso and before you know it you're just dust yeah yeah i know it's just look at the lethality of that but but also other weapon systems is pretty you know it would shock a lot of people i think but the the precision is also look i mean people talk about this you know and there's a lot of focus put on that because there's i don't think people really understand how much debate goes on before you you know uh pull the cord on a target and you think okay there's a lot of back and forth what's the blowback what's the you know potential civilian damage what it's not like a movie so yeah go you know we don't give a shit you know just get the target there's a lot of back and forth so as a result of that because people in the pentagon are always asking about zero risk and we want zero you know we want zero collateral damage right you can't you know things are messy right so something happens and you know there's a potential for collateral damage that's the way the world works but they have worked very hard uh on the weapons technology side to try to create these these systems uh minimal collateral damage in order to in part yeah the part is to avoid you know the killing is in part it's also to ensure that you when you got a high value target you know pull the trigger yeah you get it done yeah yeah what if you're thinking what's he's gonna do what are the optics of this you go he's a bad guy he's a bad guy you know that he's a bad guy you pull the trigger but then how's he gonna play in the press and all of these narratives begin to i guess subjugate a tactical decision with a branding decision yeah that's very very i that's i hadn't thought about that that it is a it reduces the friction between pulling the trigger because it is less likely to cause headaches down the road that's always the question that's always and it's become more and more of an issue is is you know what does that collateral damage look like and you know and then sometimes what they'll say is they'll say okay we have to wait we have to pull back hold fire and you lose the opportunity because that little opportunity on a particular target you know that shuts really quickly sometimes and so then you'll know whether and there's a there can be a lot of uh frustration involved because you know that that target you know you should act on it but you also know okay we got you know we do have a legitimate question so so the decision made at a higher level uh it's always you know it's gonna fall on that that side it's gonna say okay we have to we have to pull back is this a new degree of scrutiny around collateral damage yeah in warfare you know obviously collateral damage has been i know there's an obvious example but like bombing of dresden and that type of stuff right it was done for collateral damage uh whereas now it seems like yeah war is supposed to be the most surgical sterile targeted precise ethical way like i only want the fuel for my rx9 hellfire missile to be from renewable sources it's an ev we plug it in and we have a recharge station halfway there to target um yeah it is it's relatively new and i think part of it's also we keep coming back to the same thing flow of information speed of information you can see the discussion if people could watch something dressed and being bombed right or get photos of it people would go back to the civil war people had you know seen actual footage of what the hell was happening in the fields of gettysburg people were horrified right um d-day right if people could have seen the film that evening of what was taking place the first day you know public opinion would have shifted considerably but i think so yeah so that's helped to drive this idea that we gotta we gotta minimize that right we gotta minimize that damage you still gotta have bad actors in the world you still have to deal with them you know it's not it's not a fucking community of nations where everybody's acting in everybody else's best interest it's bullshit right and so you have to you have to account for the fact that uh at times things are gonna be unpleasant but yeah yeah i only thought speaking of the drone thing we walked past a dji store here in downtown miami and i didn't realize that the u.s had basically put so many restrictions on u.s drone creators they said we don't want anyone who's basically able to interfere with flight paths and create the technologies we definitely don't want at home right which left the market completely open to dji which i didn't know it's a chinese company yeah yeah go figure and now the entire drone market is dominated by dj and now america trying to play catch up and they're trying to relinquish some of these restrictions on domestic uh creators of drone technology and it's just it's their way with the wind we've done that in a number of areas right we're talking about i don't know lidar or anything there's you know regulatory policies and you know domestic concerns um have definitely impacted development of certain technologies uh and the chinese have no such restrictions right and they certainly have no such restrictions on on uh on providing uh information they spend a great deal of time hoovering up intelligence you know from a variety of sources overseas and providing that to their private sector right and that's part of the intel apparatuses how does that work role in life really steal information bring it home and funnel it into uh supposedly private but they're state-owned and pseudo-state operated companies um but i guess the point is that their intel apparatus's primary objective aside from you know keeping the population in check is uh is to develop promote their commercial side of things their economy and so the two work together yeah we don't go out you don't you know the the as an example the agency cia wouldn't get a directive a tasking order from general electric that says hey we need we need the plans from uh an international competitor you know that they're working on some some new engine uh component please go out and get that for us right that's not how it works right now you can argue that would benefit our economy i mean if it was because it certainly benefited china's economy to have that that cost but we had this firewall there so you know you don't take you know tasking with the idea that okay we're developing information your intelligence collecting it from others stealing it basically to provide it to the private sector right so there's a not an arbitrary line but there is a uh compartmentalization between the uh private and governmental sectors in the u.s yeah which means that resources and information of both aren't as uh yeah that's a good way to put it that's a really good way to put it because i would argue just along those lines which is that um we have hampered ourselves at times by not having a more robust dialogue between uh between the intel community and now with with cyber attacks and and the work that goes on in cyberspace also with uh federal law enforcement which is focused on you know some degree elements of federal law enforcement focused on preventing or or resolving cyber attacks from outside elements so i don't think we have enough of a robust dialogue between those between government and private companies right the commercial sector if you want to have a major u.s company protected or a british company or whomever protected from outside hostile actors in cyber terms for instance they need to know what's happening out there right they need to have more information right about the threats and how those threats develop and who's responsible and there has to be more of that ability to say okay we've got a problem turn to whether it's the fbi or the agency or whomever to say how do we resolve this right and it can't just be a one-way dialogue where the commercial sector provides their information to the government the government says thank you very much you know they need to be more informed right and they're trying to do that to some degree now they're trying to have more of that dialogue but it's not seamless by any means it's not like in china or even in russia or other places where where they don't see a need for a firewall they don't believe that right because they don't have a free market system they don't have a capital system you know but but our idea is you can't benefit one company because it'll fuck over other companies yes right yes so they don't give a shit about that i only learned about uh the purpling of the armed forces recently so can you explain what that means like what was what was that what was purpling of the armed forces uh you tell me okay yeah right well there was a particular extraction that was supposed to happen in the late 90s and a number of navy seals i think it was the highest number of navy seals that had ever been lost up to that point like maybe maybe 20 or 30 of them because there was air force overhead and the seals down on the ground weren't able to communicate with them and this was because each different segment of the armed forces acted independently they didn't have they literally didn't have communication systems to be able to speak and it's kind of this uh integration i mean that just seems so idiotic how do you manage to get yourself to the stage where the air force and the navy and the army weren't talking to each other and it feels to me not too dissimilar to this situation purpling i heard that you blended all the colors a bit purple yeah yeah i get that yeah there you go the siloing of the military branches um and their development of of their own whether it's protocols uh communication systems uh assets right air platforms i mean that's why you know you've got um in pentagon and dod you've got uh you know competition going on for who's developing who's getting money for the you think well hold on a second you know marines have their own air force and you think what's going on here why is that the most efficient way uh but that was siloing of the branches right and to some degree territorial you know pissing and kind of protection of their own turf uh development of their own internal capabilities that were uh i don't say redundant necessarily but um you know there was a sense that okay you've got spec ops we need spec ops we need this you need that i mean we've got and it's true each branch has its own obvious functions right and and specialties but you know there wasn't the sense that okay is there more of an efficient way that they can all uh blend together and we've got maybe one element that combines all that does a particular thing uh is there a way to certainly on the communication side right because you'll get um development of you know a a comm system right from the air force right through a contractor right that in the old days wasn't compatible necessarily or they wasn't their driving mode is it compatible with what the navy's doing or is it what the army's doing and part of that was just natural you know territorial protection right of what they're doing and protection of their own budgets and their you know their their reputation you know sort of their image there's a lot in there that's sort of soft science but you can see how that would develop right and then you get you know fucked up situations right because you have uh joint operations and suddenly realize you know whether it's just simple protocols or it's more technical you've got real problems right because it's not seamless it's lack of coordination it's the same through private public sector it's the same through government it's the same through everything yeah well we had i mean a major example obviously 9-11 when you didn't have federal uh state local law enforcement and the intel community um all on the same page communicating sharing information uh taking you know targeting and saying okay who's got what on this you know let's all put it together in the one big picture and see if it makes sense right and none of that was happening because again it was all siloed right bureau was doing their thing agency was doing their thing nsa was you know gathering their intel uh state and local you know they were worried about their own issues and yeah there wasn't this coordinated effort um there wasn't a and you know in part you know it was a supreme failure right but it's gotten better uh but it's still you know it's still not there it's a human endeavor so it's never gonna be you know perfect so talking about china and the yes threat and degree of rivalrousness you've mentioned that china is playing incredibly long game but i've also heard that their birth rate decline and the potential reduction in the volume of their population could be pretty catastrophic to any plans that they have how much truth do you think is in that how how much is china's plans going to be mitigated by the fact that their population might drop an awful lot of the next few years well it's a serious concern right i mean she you know has come out with her government's come out with a program basically says fuck more um i think that was the actual title of their program um and you know create more babies so you know as a population is probably the most popular thing she has instructed them to do at some time yeah yeah yeah okay you know as a husband not that i wanted to yeah yeah let's go yeah exactly just lay back and think about green um so yeah so it's uh it is obviously if the government's worried about it it's a serious concern and um you know they had a whole one-child policy for a long time obviously that was gonna have a lagging impact so i think that they they're trying to get ahead of the curve to some degree um but as you can imagine you know it's like it's like anything else you know you can you can say okay we've got a we've got a problem here we can see that there's gonna be a shortfall or a gap so let's get on it but there's always gonna be a lag um you know that was done uh again going back to 9-11 there was a real awareness um after that that in a hot wash that said look we we um after after a major go rope you know you lock 10 after a fuck up after something happens i'm sorry after something happens then you sit down as a whomever you know whomever's in charge and and elements that are responsible sit around a table and say what the hell happened and they've done some assessment so then people put out the card on the table and say this is where we fucked up this is what we should have done this is how we have to improve it this is how we mitigate the risk going forward and so that's essentially a hot wash and you do that after every uh fuck up and so after 9-11 as part of all that process there was a realization that the agency the CIA had spent uh had an overfocus on on signals intelligence and technology right and had gotten away from the recruitment of spies the agency is a pretty simple organization you steal secrets you steal secrets that address national security concerns protect national security interests right so that you know yes you can do it through uh technology but ultimately you also need human sources you can't get away from from the need for human sources but they they kind of did they moved away from that and so there i guess my point being is the directive was we need more people we need more officers who are out there in the fields recruiting gathering intelligence getting human sources that's where we missed the boat to some degree here we did we lost track of the importance of that because we got enamored with the technical side of things i mean i'm sort of putting money and resources there had fewer and fewer recruits going into traditional operations and but that's there's a lack my point being is there's a lag to that right you got recruit those people that can take years right that takes years and you got they got to develop right so then you got the whole problem of the time it takes to identify uh develop recruit you know maintain a source right so that's a long lifetime so i think these things don't don't just happen uh overnight anyway so that's where i think with china they you know they probably got a problem but i think they clearly are aware of it so they're addressing it um i mean you imagine here if we looked at our demographics and then we got a problem can you imagine the white house saying ah i got a job for all you americans yeah well speaking of that and this sort of population in the u.s i'm reading more and more about the number of military age asian men coming over the border mexico i think hawaii as well kind of has a little bit of this problem um yeah a little bit it's mostly the southern border okay and it's a shocking increase like a 73 percent increase year on year uh in uh in uh folks in china crossing over the border um now it's again as you pointed out it's mostly single males um you don't want to see when you're in when you're in intelligence or in that world you don't want to get paranoid right you want to see a spoof behind every corner right because that'll eventually really uh jam up the ability to get done yeah so uh but again playing the odds and thinking about you know probability does anyone imagine that the chinese intel apparatus which is incredibly well resourced and motivated would they actually look and go yeah i mean maybe this makes sense maybe we want to put a handful of people here like they spent decades um putting their own people from uh you know actual intel operatives to cooperative contacts through the u.s education system yes i've seen that the number of uh kids that were at university somewhere that turned out to be some yeah ccp sleeper agent yeah and oftentimes they don't have to be you know that i mean we imagine that as a super spy doesn't have to be that it's a cooperative contact someone who is is you know maybe they're getting their bill footed you know maybe they're good and you know the family's getting a little bit extra something you know back home or some consideration or whatever it is what you're hearing yeah exactly you work with us and that's great and then eventually you get a job at wherever an important u.s company or you know they don't even care because again they've got the long-term proof so they'll send someone to grad school here and again you don't want to say okay so every student is a spy that's not the fucking way we're talking it's it's just they're doing it right and we know that they're doing it and so the idea that they're not at least taking advantage of a porous border for other reasons is it would be pretty remarkable yeah if a mexican family with a dude that's got a stick with a bandana and a fucking satchel attached to the back of it like a hobo like riding the rails you know you remember those like it was that old and sighty like sure sure he's making coffee in a can of beans and he's yeah hobo joe yeah good-hearted guy if you're thinking that they can get across the border yeah but that the ccp isn't going to be able to facilitate right right or you know or the iranians aren't gonna look at it right and think to themselves and all that we can get some people over and this is a real fucking problem it's a real fucking problem and look it's it's a real problem from a national security point of view also from just a just a look we had this incident down in uh in athens georgia right there's four students uh this young 22 year old girl just the other day right she went for a job broad day like goes for a job um on a public trail you know and gets attacked blood force trauma killed and now they've arrested um an illegal uh immigrant um fellas name is uh ibarra from venezuela uh who crossed the border i think with his wife and maybe a kid young kid um i think through el paso maybe and then this is back in 2022 so this is his history comes from venezuela crosses the border just walks over they release him because they don't have room in the detention facilities so they're just releasing people sort of a mass parole idea right and they um they release hundreds of thousands to this again they call up parole but i don't have room for you so you go here's your call and i'd like you to show up in a couple of years right so they go to new york first of all he has a run-in with the law in new york they release him back on the streets and he makes his way down to athens where i think his brother from venezuela is residing and then now he's uh banged up for uh murdering this 22 year old nursing student who just goes for a fucking jog and um yeah and now the interesting thing i don't want to get distracted here but the interesting thing is is how it's dealt with obviously it's going to be a political issue right because it deals with illegal immigrant and the border is such an important issue going into the election so yes it's going to become a political football but the way that the white house decided to deal with it or democratic strategists i don't know whether anybody in the white house was clever enough to do this was basically to say hey you want to blame somebody for this sad death blame the republicans they just blocked the bill in the senate you know that would have provided funding for ukraine and israel and taiwan but also for the border so it's the republicans fault because for the past month and a half they've been stolen well that's implying that people are stupid enough to think that somehow the millions of people who have crossed the border in the past three years just came across now right during the month and a half while the republicans have been you know jackass and around up on Capitol Hill not doing anything and so that's that's the level of stupidity that they hold for the american public now there are people stupid enough to believe it right and there certainly are people partisan enough to buy that line of crap yeah it's the republicans fault that this poor girl got killed because this guy came across in 2022 right during the three years that the current white house is kind of ignored for a variety of reasons border security but so that's on a personal level for u.s citizens but on a national security level we have no idea of the millions and millions of people who have come across unvetted right and released into the country we have no idea who they are for the most part right we have certainly have no idea how many bad actors there are and we've caught you know hundreds on the terror watch list but who knows how many others because we've got an unknown number of known gotaways we've got over two million as a conservative estimate over the past two years of the current administration who have got through without any contact with law enforcement that's just a guess right and so there's no idea how many bad actors have come across and that's if the government's job is to protect its citizens any government's job is to protect its citizens then i don't know how you argue that they're doing a fine job because if you don't have a secure border and you know who's coming in and out which is why you have border control for every other country then you know you don't have a secure homeland but it's not a country anymore it's like an extension of what everybody else the territory of the countries that are around you yeah tim kennedy was telling me that there was this guy who appeared on the news there was a news report going on this guy just walks across the border and turns to the camera and say something like uh america will know my name and then facial recognition turned out that this guy is on some watch list but obviously not clever yeah i'm gonna be famous one day i mean finally where he is now yeah yeah oh they didn't stop him no because i mean it's just a news reporter yeah yeah i mean what's he gonna do hold him down he doesn't know but what about um the trancin fentanyl route is that do you know how that's getting into we got an idea about how those drugs are getting into the country well i think to some degree the government will argue that most of it's coming through ports of entry right and that's you know there's truth in that right no you know it's not as if you know the majority of narcotics whether it's fentanyl or anything else is coming in on in backpacks you know through you know border crossings outside of ports of entry uh but it's both right it's all it's all of the above and so it goes back to the same thing if you have a tight border it makes it more difficult right why wouldn't you make it more difficult for narco traffickers right and bad actors to cross your border it's just i don't again i don't understand the rationale behind this yes immigration policies in the states can be improved right and yes immigration has always been um a way that a country improves itself right but not by just you know letting in millions of people who you don't know who they are right no other country's going to do that right and yet we act as if that's okay right is there anywhere else on the planet that's doing that no look we had i think i'm probably getting these numbers wrong but i think the largest mass migration uh that you know of modern times has been in the 1880s i think when you know 10 million or so people came from europe to the united states we've had 7 million people in what the past three years come in um i'm not sure how we how we imagine that somehow we have things under control right but the problem that president biden has is that as soon as he you know the democrat strategist looked at this problem said yeah we got an issue obviously the poll numbers are showing so they're acting on this because it's an election year right three years they didn't do shit and in fact they did the opposite of shit they made it worse the detention centers are unethical and we shouldn't be and look at the separation of children from families making asylum easier making parole easier um so they actually you know created a more porous environment and but i think they look and they go god we gotta do something because the election's coming up the poll numbers are so bad so you know that's that's why they're acting now as if well look what we did we tried to push this bill through the senate and republicans thought okay if you're gonna if you're gonna normalize five thousand people a day before you take action maybe that's not quite what we're talking about here but uh so they they've got you know and i think they all knew that they could push a bill through the republicans would would back off of right that was the game that's liable deniability yeah so uh so they've got this issue but as soon as he talked about taking some executive actions then he got a hard push from the hard left right and and so all the progressives on that side said oh don't even think about it right don't even think about like doing anything that's trump-like right it all comes back to this bizarre world that we're living in now where there's people willing to imagine that president biden god bless him we're all getting older fuck it i forget shit all the time right but but to imagine that he's not possibly the best candidate right for another four years um but we're gonna vote for him because the other option is trump right that's the world we live in now um it's just we're you know i don't know i don't want to get too cynical but i think we're you know u.s politics is kind of fucked right now yeah i uh that wasn't a rocket science statement wow you hear what mike said that was that was revelatory i've heard some new information yeah man i uh i don't know i've been here for two years now and uh he was observing with great interest and intrigue more like a uh real life reality tv show with global consequences in 2020 um but i don't think that this year's gonna be any better i think we've seen you know 20 wow 2012 was the last uncontested mass uncontested election i think that 2016 we had this Russia collusion 2020 we had Dr. Steele 2024 there is no way i mean it's like you know it's one all going into overtime yeah you go back and we did have the hanging chad debacle you know with uh uh bush and gore right oh yes yeah yeah and so that was that was uh you know but it was it was mild compared to um so uh no i agree this is not gonna be any better look again you don't want to put too much stock in polls and surveys but it does seem like they've been consistent over the past handful of months which is that you know those survey none of them are particularly excited in fact they don't want a rematch of viden and trump um i think people are if given other alternatives i think they would they would go for it um i think the democrats are kind of boxed in i think they you know they've they've they've got a problem here um they're not gonna go for newson well they got to clear the ticket right and so but i mean if they're going to move biden off the ticket then how do you move kamala harris off the ticket what's the optic of saying we're going to ask kamala harris a woman of color who's been the vice president uh to to step aside for a white dude from california i don't know that the democrats are willing to go with that optic um you know aside from the fact that who am i to say but kamala harris may have may have may have floated to the top in a spectacular way despite her abilities and competency well so popularity and popularity and laugh okay i mean everybody's got a quirk you know but still um look you hamper yourself we got in this world where you know we're picking people because they they you know they tick certain boxes which is a ridiculous thing to do you know i think we'd all be better off if we just said we're going for competency right and who's the best person for the job and what they could have done was done her a favor by saying we're going to pick the best person for the job then pick her right rather than saying we're picking a woman of color if i get not the affirmative action thing is patronizing to the person that gets action well it hampers handicaps because you know yeah exactly so so i never quite understood the notion that you would say that rather just saying i'm going to pick the best person and then boy fine pick her but you know at least you've given her i don't think anyone was prepared to eat that lie if that had been pushed forward with canada so you know because it might be stupid but they're not that stupid yeah yeah and uh yeah dude i don't know no you're right no you're right yeah the remainder of this year is going to be it's going to be wild but yeah douglas murray went to um the streets of philadelphia and you've seen this trank crisis that's happening there and this this is like fentanyl's fentanyl and it's the people for whom heroin wasn't enough and then they moved on something stronger and that wasn't enough and now they've moved on something stronger and it causes necrosis and people's limbs are falling off and their shins are eating themselves on the street it's crazy yeah and it's also a fine demonstration of how uh that world works right you're always chasing the next product right always because you know you've got a shelf life on the current one right because eventually you know people will be looking for the next kick right and so we worked counter narcotics in the agency for years right before we won the drug wars and uh sorry that's a terrible like so we didn't win the drug wars uh uh drugs drugs won the drug wars right yeah so so uh but we were working counter narcotics and you know you could you could take a ton of gear off the street and it never would affect the price right because there's so much out there there's so much demand and yet also there's this massive product development uh you know it's it's like this this global um production uh effort that they're always looking for the next uh product to put out there so you know it's always going to be something coming down the pike right and that's just kind of the history of narcotics on the street there's always the next bit of gear that's going to hit the street and it's the icon 15 it's the icon 16 it's the icon 17 everything is working so cohesively from the synthesizers of the drugs to the designers of the drugs to the users of the drugs to the people who might have an incentive for a country and its populace to become more demoralized less healthy more of a burden generally on society everything spins up people are going to take drugs they're just wanting to take drugs you don't need a big globalist conspiracy to turn America into a bunch of walking zombies people will happily do that on their own I think there has been this line about China contributing to the fentanyl crisis in order to take down America and again never say never is there talk amongst some back room there that says well this is having a really negative impact on the West how about that do they view that as a downside no but is that driving the drug trade and all the demand out there it's super depressing it's one of those things you look and I'm not smart I've always been fascinated by the risk appetite it's like the kids that go to a party at somebody else's house and they open up the parents' medicine cabinet and they're willing to just take a handful of whatever to see what happens I've never understood that mentality that says I'm willing to just give it a go and see where it leads I think people get that one step at a time at least with what we're talking about here there'll be a little bit maybe I'll start drinking and then I'll start smoking weed and then I'll do some crack and then before I know I've lost my job and then once I've lost mention the fact that the US doesn't have a social safety net like we do in the UK especially the health if you've got a mental health problem or a physical health problem you'll just get picked up and put into the hospital you'll go to A&E the NHS isn't a bad solution to an awful problem but it is way better than no solution significantly better and this is the difference you can tell the difference when you see homeless people in the States they're shouting things at themselves a lot of the time sort of shuffling you just come in someone comes in and speaks you up and it's not a perfect system but you will be given medication and a place to live and a bed and a nurse that will say this is what you've got a biologist and you don't have that unfortunately you see front and center downtown of every major US city Los Angeles you drive by some of these I don't know what you call them communities or whatever but it's shocking but you're right it's the complexity of the substance abuse with the mental health with the I see no hope I've got no way to get off the street I can't afford so what's the point in trying with the I think the dysfunction of local and city and state governments that look at it and think well how come we can't just throw some money at it and solve it and without saying okay this is a very layered complex problem we've got to solve several issues here you can't just put somebody in a home if they've got substance or mental problems and you've got to deal with those and so you're right and it's also a much larger population and so it's becoming increasingly visible and so I'm not sure if there's a lack of movement it seems on the part of most major cities to try to figure out a path forward unless the Chinese is coming to visit yes and then and then you just take a hose to the street sanitize everything you gotta wash all the shit off the sidewalks and move people out one of the things that I've been particularly fascinated by since moving to America and even beforehand is the difference between how three-letter agency operatives are seen by the general public from a brand and position perspective and how armed forces veterans and acting soldiers are seen because many people you know tons of my friends have been in the SEALs and then gone into the CIA and then phased out of that too so it's like a single pathway for some some people just go into one or the other but it seems like thank you for your service something that's said to somebody that was in the armed forces you're part of a globalist network of shills trying to destroy the country is said to someone from a three-letter agency and what do you think is going on with the optics the poor brand do you know what I'm talking about the brand positioning of the people who are serving the country but one is seen to be unequivocably almost unequivocably in service and the other one is not too sure you're trying to take this down from the inside can we even trust you right yeah there's a bit of a sea change there in terms of how people view certainly the CIA and the FBI right it's very disheartening right but yeah I know what you're talking about it's a lack of trust in those organizations because of this narrative that they become just political tools right and that's a very dangerous thing what I mean is a political intel is a very dangerous thing right but the narrative that came out I think is at odds with the reality right now yes you can have you know a senior person leading an organization who's been appointed by the president who's you know enjoys that top cover and you want the relationship right you want the dialogue you always just say that you want the CIA director to have a seat at the table you know in major discussions because that's important right you're asking this agency to go overseas and do things on behalf of national security interests so the director should have that access and the FBI director you know same way they're leading the federal government's key law enforcement organization right and yet the narrative over the past handful they need to be torn down and destroyed and then rebuilt you know by whoever I vote into office right which is a fucking fourth world way of looking at things right because that's what they do you know overseas in some of the you know lesser developed nations where they're just willing to say okay now I'm in charge you know I'm clearing out the intel apparatus and putting my own people in right and that's exactly what they do in a banana republic I don't know if I can say banana republic anymore but so that's not what you want you can't do that right so this idea that you tear down these organizations and start over again is bullshit because the vast vast majority of these people just want to do their jobs right the FBI just wants to get out there they want to solve a variety of problems that face the nation from a law enforcement perspective and the agencies tell them what their tasks are to get out there they do their tasks they say what's the next task right and so I'm not one of those people that sits around and goes oh my god these organizations yeah you know could you argue that some of the senior management became too enamorate of a political power player or administration sure right and you never want that to happen so you have to ensure that you've got enough proactive inquisitive questioning people within the groups that are supposed to senate intel committee congressional intel committees and others who are supposed to ensure transparency to the degree possible but yeah I don't know how that narrative shifted I'm very glad that we still have sort of respect for the military that we do it's incredibly important and what's the numbers now it's less than 1% serve in the military I mean that's incredible very few people that's another statement have skin in the game right and understand what it means to serve and I think that's a problem too right I think if we had more people young people who I don't know whether an obligation or not but somehow served whether it's through the military or through government service or through some form of community service if you had some skin in the game I think you might develop with a somewhat different view on civics and the importance of the government and what's best for the country and it might get outside your own little bubble but there is this overbearing nameless faceless shadowy organization that's supposed to be a part of you but is maybe keeping you down and yeah if one person from most families in one form has served however it is that they do it then you think oh well you know Uncle John he's not one of the bad guys I know that he's not one of the bad guys everybody's put a little time in again not the draft I suppose we're never going to probably unless this is a major conflict we're not going to a draft but some fashion some service at some level I think would change the dynamic for the better but for right now I think the weaponization of DOJ that's a big topic certainly on the right and I think that's the result of just this dysfunctional political nature that we've got right now you can't find people living in the center anymore so you've just got people screaming at each other and throwing hand grenades at each other from both sides and so naturally you're going to attribute the other side to doing all sorts of nefarious bullshit getting up to all sorts of things and again I don't spend my days staring at my navel wondering what the DOJ's up to but I have a hard time believing that they're completely a political weapon of the current administration or would be of the next administration or previous one again government's a very large bureaucracy and my experience again hey everybody's got a different one but mine is that most people just want to get on and do their fucking job and live their life yes is that what most people miss in the sun about the CIA do you think that's just people trying to do their job yeah I think the agency has taken heat like the FBI has and I think again I think part of it is the narrative that's been driven out there in part look I mean again it's a well the agency's taken heat for a long time so I can't just say it's a recent thing I can go back to the church commission and go back to some of the other issues that the agencies had but yes the people I worked with were fantastic and we never sat around in some safe house in some shithole somewhere you know talking politics nobody gave a shit about politics maybe my time has passed and maybe now the new crew does something different but I don't really think so I think that on the operations side and certainly throughout the agency the vast majority of people know what their mission is and they do it honorably and they do it without any pats on the back like you said walks up to them to say thanks for your service because they don't know what the hell they're doing and you go to your grave keeping a lot of secrets and that's the way it should be so yeah people take it personally and it can impact morale when you're not used to this idea that somehow you don't expect people to go out there and go man that CIA that's a great organization but you don't expect them walk around and go we should tear it down start over again what the hell is it all about when you're making sacrifices when you're away from your family when you're doing things in dangerous situations working hard late nights right and not for money by the way when I started I was laughing with my wife when I started and we were doing some crazy shit I was making $17,000 a year $17,000 I was not doing it to get wealthy and I don't know anybody who does now still to this day that's not why you do it you're doing it because A. it's entertaining at times it's very interesting it's challenging and you feel like you're doing something more important than yourself so that's a quality of life issue of positive reinforcement from the optics of what you did has to be I mean I think about this all the time let's say there's an incident and the emergency services are called an ambulance turns up and everyone is so relieved a fire truck turns up and everyone is so relieved the police turn up and everyone is so angry yeah yeah yeah right exactly the phones come out yeah I'm sorry you want to do this job you want to go out there and confront situations where you have no idea what's happening you have no idea what you're going to encounter but you're doing it and look are the bad actors yeah are the folks that need to be removed are the folks that need better training that was the thing it drove me crazy about the defund the police movement you want a better police force then you need to actually fund them you need to spend more on training and on consistent training and future training that's what you do you don't defund the police now we're dealing with the aftermath of some of that in some locations that was a bizarre little point in time but the problem that that trend created wasn't just an encouragement of under-resourcing police departments it was the optics of what recruiting future members of police teams will be like who wants to go and take that job who wants to go and put their life on the line or their safety or work late nights or not earn a massive amount of money or do a thankless task or push papers around the desk or whatever job it is whatever part of the big cog of the law enforcement mechanism you were a part of who wants to go and do that everybody does that everyone would love to have a boss that appreciated the work that they did right and if you walked down the street like this is one of the things you're right to say it's good that veterans and this is something we don't have in the UK there is no equivalent of thanks for your service in the UK we don't revere our veterans in the same way you know there's no one walking around with a Vietnam veteran cap on I don't think I've ever heard acting British military please step on the plane first I've never heard that be called in British airports so you know we don't have that that's not so you've got poppy day maybe that's about it where people get out correct yeah remaining World War II veterans maybe but not more recent but even within that that was contested last year there was going to be all of these protests from Middle East and Middle East protesters were going to have a problem there was going to be interruptions for the parade I don't know whether it actually came out as badly as I thought but there was you know poppies were being ripped down because this is part of some colonialist imperialist thing it's so boring it's the same thing over and over again that there is some part of history which is unforgivable and that we are personally cursed with this you know I read this letter that Churchill's father sent him after he was admitted to Sandhurst on his third attempt and only bits of it remain but it's Churchill's 19 and his father says if you do not change your ways you will become one of the hundreds of social waste trolls having completely squandered all of your potential and he just lambasts Churchill for like a full page and then he signs off by saying your mother sent her a god your mother sent her a god and I remember thinking to myself it made me feel so sad that there was this guy that probably you know defeated the Nazis they're just rolling through Europe they go through one country another country another country another country and then they just think that they can do the same in Britain and it's the first time that they encounter any resistance to the battle of Britain it's the first time they actually get pushed back from anywhere people don't know this it's the first time they ever got pushed back from anything was the battle of Britain and then they go okay maybe this isn't maybe the thousand-year Reich in the Aryan race isn't this indefatigable force that we presume and I bet that at the end of that that Churchill probably still didn't feel enough you know that he'd managed to complete all of this stuff and he carries this desire for recognition and validation and acceptance by the world into his motivation to do the things that he did and even Chamberlain as someone who wasn't built to do what he needed to do very famously in his resignation speech says this is the one thing that the Nazis can't see they couldn't imagine someone putting their personal pride to one side in order for the good of the country that he steps aside so he makes a sacrifice in a very different kind of a way so the Churchill can then step up and I just think oh you know there's this new series on Netflix called World War II I think it's called From the Front Lines or something and they've used AI to make 4K and full color all of this archive footage available it's like maybe an 8 episode series it's awesome and you know it's so much more immersive now you can see it in full color they did World War I they colorized some incredible footage and improved it it was amazing well it seems less it makes it feel much more real to see it in that way and I'm watching this thing and thinking you know it was one of the first times in a long time that I felt really proud about some of the things that the UK had done and then like I say now for all the problems that there is over in America the UK doesn't it doesn't revere the people that have served it doesn't have it doesn't have the same kinds of um benefits you know you can go to a denny's and probably if i showed my military service card i'd probably get them sent off denny's no and well they still do they still do i mean you're right you pointed out the airlines right you know i'm on delta all the time and one of the things they do is you know servicemen active duty and retired you know board first right so included in servicemen uh no no no i wouldn't i wouldn't ever claim that i work for the government so the military right yeah i'm sorry military service um and uh so they do that yeah churchill uh so much of what he did yeah driven by his childhood and sort of this this feeling that you know he was always trying to get affection from his mom um and uh and his dad was a his dad was a bit of a hot mess but fascinating character um yeah but then he voted him out after you know hey one more two okay sorry you're out yeah and uh you know it's fascinating stories uh i just uh reread the uh three book series the last line which is a fantastic look at it's a history of churchill covers you know birth to death and it's a lot of detail but it's very readable and it's just there's a lot of it but did you what was some of the things that surprised you the most learning about him um i think oddly enough i've read a lot about uh world war ii history his relationship with roosevelt and and uh so the world war ii section although probably moved the quickest was the most you know was super interesting i think that the latter part right and also sort of prior to that his involvement with the uh the irish troubles uh that was very interesting i think but then afterwards it's getting out of war ii and how his uh political career uh kind of stagnated and then resurged and it was it's very interesting look there's also there's also a book written by his physician uh lord moran i believe it was it was the name of the physician um and he had churchill's uh okay once he uh passed away to write up his notes into a book right and he traveled with church all over the place uh the conferences and throughout the world war ii as his personal physician and it's a great uh book not not really read that i have read it i'm trying to remember the name of the book but it's written by a uh his doctor and again i think moran was his last name what was he saying about churchill's state of mind his physical health his mental health well look it's not it wasn't you know there was it wasn't like a kiss and tell book right so there was no shocking negative revelation um but he uh so it's not like today where you know you you know the idea if you get you know a contract published a book and you're expected to produce something shocking in it you know based on your experience uh i don't think that was the case it was it was fairly complimentary of churchill throughout right uh he obviously had a great deal of respect for him um but it did talk about his um a variety of things his capacity for um you know enjoying his own ideas and hearing himself speak uh his capacity for drink yes yeah um but his um his ability to um manipulate conversation to get the result that he wanted right and and he you know he his ability to win an argument uh because of his ability to yes it was pretty remarkable so um yeah uh what was it was that movie the darkest hour did you see that yeah there's a good line in there about he took the english language and sent it to war you know during his uh famous speech in parliament you know uh but i think uh yeah he's a fascinating character i i you know that's why i was the original comment about like this bullshit about okay we have to rewrite history and remove you know memories of churchill because you oh my god look at you know he was a racist product of time right i mean things move on right so things happen in a time frame we should be smart to understand what the context was and move on the assumption there is that people are so fragile that they can't deal with history it's like you just look i'm not one to quote this guy but there's a leftist streamer called hasan abi who a lot of people have huge problems with and i agree with essentially nothing he's got a phenomenal line where he says analysis is not justification analysis is not justification looking at why something occurred doesn't mean that you agree with it right but the alternative is to just sort of plug your head in the sand and have it be completely ignorant of it which makes you even worse off that's when you're a real disadvantage yeah speaking of churchill i got sent for christmas from a friend i got sent some of the champagne that he drank yes yes i got sent a bottle of that and i learned i learned from him that churchill commanded them to make a special custom-sized bottle did you know about that no so he found out in his opinion a half bottle was insufficient the full bottle was too much so he commanded them to make a pint bottle of that that's fantastic of that champagne yeah it tastes like sparkling apple juice it's phenomenal yeah um and uh yeah a half bottle was too too little and a full bottle was too much he wanted to be able to function but he needed it and it was you know followed him around these special bottles would follow him around every single entry he would always have one of these things i thought that that was that was fantastic that he's a little bigger not that big yeah i mean it was crazy i mean some of the things that in world war one he was on the front lines right he went to the front lines but he took his bathtub with him right yeah he had his bathtub front lines so that he could bathe right so i mean there's these little stories that are they're incredible about the time right yes anyway there's a ton of those in in uh again last line people have some time on their hands and they're looking for something three parts yeah three three book series and they want to dive deep into it um it's it's well worth it have you ever looked at theodore morrell hitler's physician no no that's a fascinating individual so uh i think it's maybe the very beginning of world war ii or perhaps just before hitler's suffering really badly with indigestions and stomach and sort of good issues and he finds the doctor theodore morrell who is this sort of quack doctor who uses all manner of homeopathic sort of progressive remedies but hitler recovers maybe by flucon maybe actually through whatever it is so he immediately as all manic people do proclaims that this is you know this guy is a fucking medical god uh and now morrell is part of the inner circle but the rest of the circle absolutely hated him him detested him goebbels detested him he was very messy he was a horribly loud eater his breath would sink superbly unclean so you know the clinical manner of this guy who's the personal position to the furor was not there at dinner and he would be sort of shoveling food into his mouth he's a really fat sort of guy and uh by the end of the war the concoction of drugs that hitler was on is absolutely insane so he's getting injected with bull semen he's on basically meth he's on a concoction of stimulants uppers and downers and then you know there's a really famous meeting i think between him and mussolini and uh he just completely flies off the handle and it's supposedly due to some uh concoction issue some dosage issue that happened that day and morrell's writing in his uh diary about you know the furor was this way today gave him you know so he's actually tracking his all this stuff it's like a fucking whoop band from 1945 wow and um there's a bunch of different documentaries just such like hitler's fiction or fio morale online so interesting but yeah i wonder i mean if it wasn't plain enough already this isn't me trying to excuse hitler yeah i'll just get that out but i wonder how much of the mental demise and complete insanity you know we're going to try and go east into russia at the same time as we try to go north into france as we try to defend you know as we try to south into africa how much of that can be attributed to this guy just being in a stupor you know propped up on this cocktail of drugs by this total quack yeah yeah i'm still thinking about you i'm not trying to dismiss hitler's actions yeah he wasn't he wasn't thinking straight yeah um yeah it's that's why i definitely look that up because i did enjoy this lord moran small book on on his experience as a physician for church so i can imagine this you know it's that same kind of thought process right inside you know the level of intimacy that you have with a physician uh is very high and you know it's it's the things that you maybe don't even admit to yourself about the fact that i have had that pain in my knee for a while you know how much is that impacting your sleep how much is that you know all the things that i like but yeah um you had a bad day just to say you know gets a shot of bullsemen and says let's let's do it yeah i bet it's gonna work out well for us yes uh although he did it he did assume it was could have maybe continued to steamroll through yeah well i think yeah that that certainly played the the key role i think um he was getting advice against it but uh that never you know swayed what he was doing but i think there was there was this uh lack of appreciation of size of vastness right and what that would do to supply chains yeah and their supply lines so and then all the trucks got stuck in the mud yeah trying to resupply who was the guy who was the dude from his inner circle that custom edited the fuel tank on a plane and flew to scotland to try and uh persuade the king it was one of his yeah god damn it it was the dude anyway the story is sort of 1943 1944 and uh everything's kind of the stalemates but the germans believe that the british think they're gonna be overrun and they're kind of just waiting for this they really don't understand that churchill's gonna keep on pushing so this guy gets one of the bombers to be fitted with long-range fuel tanks custom built and then without any without informing anyone him himself flies because he had once met a pretty met some duke or some monarch someone who was part of something and decided to fly himself from germany to scotland and then jumps out in a parachute thinking that he's going to be welcomed as the envoy and you know what's fascinating here there's another great series on netflix called uh churchill's inner circle i think um and uh it shows the how swayed everyone's opinions became because the political backpacking of wanting to be the closest to the eagle's nest and to hitler and so on and so forth and again this guy was adamant basically was driven by this sort of love for validation and this unrequited desire to be part of this in the circle and to be back in hitler's good racism if i flew to to scotland and obviously just immediately get taken to prison and and that doesn't happen and apparently hitler finds out about this and just you're waking up one morning because you wouldn't wake up you'd have these you know meth fuel diatribes until three in the morning no one would leave no one would be able to leave as he's there and he's shouting and screaming and doing all the rest of it everyone's just like i fucking wish he'd shut up and then yeah and then uh the next day he'd wake up yeah you wake up one day and you find out that some bloke's still in a custom built bomber and crash landed in scotland jumped down in a parachute yeah you don't hear that every day if you're hitler uh yeah it's a bad morning uh but you know luckily your doctor's name morale morale morale intuitive machines first ever commercial vehicle to land on the moon that happened yeah that happened that thing happened uh yeah you know i guess um didn't tip over on its side still operational yeah still working maybe suboptimally yeah um yeah i mean it is interesting when you think about um where are we going with that right what are we thinking about i mean we'll be going back to the moon soon well yeah and there's still that talk about you know that'll fuel the desire to go to mars and and um i don't know i mean i i lived through i was a young young person but i did live through the moon landing and you know that whole initial rushing excitement of uh moonshots and what that meant and that sort of feeling like okay we're just putting duct tape on things and flying to the moon and kind of was the way it was right and didn't have that calculation too right you can imagine nowadays you know trying to get and we can see that in terms of the bureaucracy of nasa and how nasa now relies on private sector um to try to push this whole process forward right but you know people got fatigued pretty quickly back in the day uh with the moonshots right it's like okay here we're going to land again what's the point right it's a little like ukraine what's the point why are we spending all this money same concept no novelty anymore um so i'm not sure you know again i'm definitely nobody's turning to me for scientific insight um but i'm hopeful that if there is a vast upside to this that the government will do a better job of explaining why it's important right but i do imagine that you know nasa's best days in terms of resourcing are probably behind it you know and so that's this drive towards the commercial side i think that's that's terrific it invades a lot um and going back to that conversation about the sharing of information and uh insight between the government and private sector uh it's a good example of why it's important um you know the agency uh you know there was a incutel right designed to try to foster that development of more technologies uh out in the private sector um so that's a it's an ongoing process but i looked at the moon landing here and i guess you know maybe i'm like a lot of people but i was like oh okay we landed on the moon great yeah okay now what right i i maybe i'm disappointed myself for not being more fascinated well i think you know whether we like it or not much of what we're doing is an attention and optics game and you know for instance you remember a red bull stratos do you remember when felix bomb got a jump from the edge of space yeah you know and you've got i think it's like a biffy kyro song it's this like beautiful voice and it's like a rock song and it's made into this perfect trailer and the whole thing was tracking it was live streamed and you know there's drama and he's not getting into the all this stuff and i remember looking at that and going that's that's like that's amazing and he's gonna go near the moon yeah so much of it is not understanding how humans interpret things not understanding the second third fourth order effects of okay and what happens if we release this and what happens if we release that it's going to disincentivize police officers and which of the communities in which are going to be the most damaged by this why it's the ones that we're trying to save i think that nasa and anyone that wants to achieve public support and interest in anything should be looking way more at advertising and human behavior and psychology more than they're looking at logistics and operations and efficiency because you need to get buy-in and excitement from the i mean dude if you did a go fund me or like some you know like an equivalent thing to be like do you want and you will have this is how far you move the rocket you know your ten dollars moved the rocket like one millimeter or whatever like however you want to do it incentivizing people like that i think would be so great we have the opportunity to do it but as you said that how is it that we've managed to get so much more advanced and so much less efficient from nasa being able to just put it down whereas all of the technology in the world you know your smartphone's more powerful than the entire room that nasa had in 1965 or whatever it was and the fucking thing fell on its side i just imagine you know like this this character from uh wally do you remember that movie wally that's a fantastic movie right 45 minutes into it before they had the first piece of dialogue right but you were captivated by it but anyway that's that's another but i think yeah it's the um it's the messaging um and i guess in part a good example of that would be ukraine i think the government the u.s administration in particular has done a terrible job of messaging explaining why it's important to the public and continually explaining and talking about it explaining why this is important um to the u.s uh if they believe it is right then why and you know why the money's necessary and how the money's being spent there wasn't enough transparency around look ukraine has had a very bad reputation of corruption for decades right very corrupt country lots of problems documented okay it's not so there should have been more awareness that if we're going to throw billions and billions of dollars over there that we should also have an effort to ensure that there's some transparency more transparency there has been in terms of how it's being spent right because that's also in ukraine's best interest right to to battle or be seen as battling corruption to ensure they maintain the support extend the longevity of support yeah so what do you get you get you know there's been a handful of uh corruption charges you know some dismissals over there in ukraine i think he's got to be seen as battling this problem but the u.s government on his part hasn't done a good enough job of explaining to the american public why you know and and how it's being done and i think if they had they could have tamped down some of this right but you know it's also coming from an unexpected place right the right right the republican party for the most part is seeming to be the part and so now you got the democrats in position of being the war hawks and the republicans being like oh you know let's focus on us first you know and again this idea that we can't multitask of course we can't multitask we should be able to do all these things right border security worry about this uh you know deal with the international crises but uh sometimes it seems like we're you know we're unable to to do that where we go from one problem to another without seeming to understand that everything's connected in a way right is there is there something that unlocks at least the beginning of these problems is is a potential route out of this to just improve inter-agency communication is it to be more transparent when it comes to the public like you know there's a lot of issues there's a lot of problems from the political standpoint to the military standpoint to the international standpoint to the supply chains to the drugs the immigration all that stuff are these all individual targeted problems that require very specific solutions or are there some fundamental uh unifying threads that are problems kind of throughout all of these if those were unpicked at least would would free up some stuff downstream yeah i think there are some um commonalities i think between some of the major issues that we're facing i think one of the problems that the government not just administration administration is recently has been slow to understand is is again the the access to information that the public has right and they've been slow to understand what that means in terms of how they should deal with the public right so i think you can you can sidestep some of the uh some of the the reluctance of the public to get behind you know whatever it may be border security well why is that important why we need to have tight border security why do we need to support ukraine in an effort against russia's and adventurism what's the point so i think that's one one element um i think a common thread with a lot of the problems that we face in the u.s anyway um is from a political standpoint and by that i mean i think something that would i believe this is maybe other people think it's bullshit but uh i think if we had term limits um i think that would be a really positive step for politicians for uh for congressmen senators right right so i think if we had you know if we were able to figure out a way i don't think we will to do that then i think you take you start to take some of the self-interest out of it right um you know nobody should be sitting up on capitol hill as a seven or eight term senator does that not create the same issue that we have with the presidency though where people just try and they don't have enough time in office to be able to get anything done and there's different incentives yeah i think if you give give uh give every congressman uh congressperson i guess um two four-year terms right now it's two-year terms it's nonsensical right that's based on you know when the nation was founded and washington dc was a swamp and no one wanted to be there to get back to the farm um so i think if you gave every congressperson two uh four-year terms and you give every senator two six-year terms and currently run six-year terms but not in perpetuity right so it's absurd when you look at it um and you realize the self-interest involved the the the wealth that some of these folks have built up over multiple terms of being in washington dc earning a fixed government salary right there's a fascinating actually it's a really interesting um uh stock tracking uh system where you can invest based on what elizabeth warren nancy pelosi yeah and paul pelosi what they're investing in right and you can do remarkably well yeah it's fascinating and i think but if you take that if you take the self-interest out of it and you take some up to some degree the special interest ability right if i know that you're going to be the head of the ways and means committee for you know 42 years or whatever i'm you know i'm going to act a certain way and i'm going to invest a lot in my relationship with you right if i'm dealing with somebody who's only there for two terms right eight years or 12 years of your senator um yeah i don't have the same hook i don't have the same ability to long-term influence you and push you a certain way for regulatory concerns whatever it might be um again you know the the pushback sometimes has been um you know you need to be here i think ted kennedy used to say you know you need to be a long time before you understand all the intricate rules and how it works thinking that just sounds like someone who doesn't want to be replaced yes it's like an it director who creates a system inside the company that's so complex only he understands okay so that's the communication to the public uh term limits potentially for the people that are inside the system yeah anything else yeah um you know in terms of in terms of some of the common you know problems at face i think there are uh issues whether it's border security or you know foreign policy decisions that are separate and distinct from from each other i think uh so i i don't know that i'm clever enough to find a common thread that binds all those together but i think um i look more at terms of how do you create a more functional government how do you create something that's more effective and with less uh self-interest and you know i keep going and you know campaign finance reform uh if you need to spend 40 million dollars to get yourself elected i think that means the system's kind of bullshit um if you can't explain your position to your constituents you know for okay let's say a couple million dollars then there's nothing wrong with the system right we're canceling out a large number of people who could be very qualified and very well meeting but i think most sane people look at the system the way it is now and say i would never throw my hat in the ring for that yes you know it doesn't make any sense so you but yourself it's kind of self-learning and it determines a certain type of person who goes into politics yeah that's again not probably anything new but uh now i don't know i like to get up on the term limit soapbox yes yeah i uh i was reading just this morning about australia has built the biggest navy since world war ii well that's their plan now the largest fleet that we will have had since the end of the second world war that defense minister richard marley on tuesday outlined a decade-long plan to double its fleet of major warships and boost defense spending by an additional seven billion dollars in the face of quickening asia pacific arms races yeah that's china's influence right china's been massively aggressive uh over the past decade in building out their military the navy in particular and so that's a direct response um you look at uh japan south korea um you know it's all the same concern it's the aggressiveness of uh china particularly in the short term in the south pacific uh region which they've always viewed as theirs and they've always been irritated by the fact that you know we uh the west plays a role there um as far as their concerns their turf so um but they've been expanding their uh military opening you know for the first time uh foreign ports uh they've got that um they do that thing where they make bases out of little islands right and it extends of like the boundary of what is china can you explain what that is yeah you just make an artificial um military facilities um they're not much to look at they're you know maybe starts off as a shoal and then you just you know you just uh you know come in there and pour a bunch of debris and concrete it and you know tarmac it and next thing you know you got an airstrip you know and then you you know that's part of your territory and that that can impact your uh international waters claims because you don't have like a 10 mile radius around all of these and the more of these that you can claim right and so i mean there's a lot of conflict the philippines of vietnam you know stradley islands is an example there's a lot of conflict over this in in that region but most people look at it and go right really it's the philippines versus china i think that's it but the the alliance we have out there the ozian alliance and and others very important um in terms of not you know it's tempering china's global ambitions right in a sense right and there's a lot of nervousness there look taiwan we haven't even touched on the issue of what's the future of taiwan right i mean they rolled over during the pandemic they you know they literally put out the last um little bits of democracy in hong kong right nobody gave a shit anymore because people got my head around the idea that okay you know it's china's game over but you know we're all looking at the pandemic and you know there's no more remnants of democracy or democracy movement in hong kong so they were successful there um taiwan is a you know it's a different animal i think it's a slow game for them it's a soft takeover i think it's how they're envisioning it we always imagine oh there's gonna be an invasion of taiwan i don't you know the chinese military and xi in particular they look at that and probably go and it's too chaotic right when they don't like chaos they don't want anything that's necessarily unpredictable but they also look at our support for ukraine and think okay you know so so what they'd be upset with us for a couple of years right and then we're gonna get back to their own business so you know the the idea of the one-time policy um you know it's been a comfortable uh kick the can down the road you know concept for forever but i think that if you look at the timeline when do they really want to um bring taiwan back into the fold i think you have to look at xi and say okay is he gonna leave office without doing that or does he want that as his key legacy right so that's what's his crowning achievement so i think then you look at xi and you look at his health and you look at his you know tenure and how long is that gonna last and you think okay maybe sometime within that period of time is when it's a move i don't know so it depends on his health it depends on you know not so much in terms of politics he seems to have a massive grip on there right you go back to mal maybe before you find someone who had that sort of lock on things and he's fortified the uh the security services right and he's removed kind of the concept of rule of law and you know some folks would disagree say oh it's a great place to do business and yeah you have to do business there you know it's not you don't you don't decouple from china it's not possible in today's world but you have to be more pragmatic about it right and um you know so i think we have to be aware of and companies are i think the most part nowadays it's better than it was even 10 years ago but nowadays you know the companies that we deal with in the private sector you know they're aware of the fact that if they start to go over to china they build a factory they build a you know some sort of research facility that intelligence that information that proprietary data is going to end up with the chinese right they can't protect it and so you know but 10 years ago or longer you know that was the thought well how do we keep our ip safe well you don't is the answer they're going to have it and so and a lot of companies are happy to sign agreements that basically allow that right because they want that market and so and china's always counted on that right we're the holy grail of commercialism i want to sell here so they've used that to their advantage but anyway the taiwan thing i think is more of a simple uh calculation because i do believe that that she doesn't want to walk off into the sunset without having that happen in his time frame so wow very spicy yeah i don't know i mean being a citizen that even cares remotely about the future is a very very scary and confusing like well you know what i mean like we've got the stuff happening in the middle east and stuff happening in the sort of northeast of europe and then stuff happening in the far east as well then we've got things happening at home or in southern border boy crisis then we've got 2024 election and that's happening and then you've got the general election's gonna happen in the uk and you know all this stuff you know the dude in al salvador has got like an 85% approval rating and then like half of the country in jail and you've got this guy in argentina like and it's just there's so much upheaval and our access to it has never been more seamless and and instant and it doesn't surprise me that people are kind of checking out losing faith in media losing faith generally in their ability to sense make you know it's a confusing time and um you might say well you know that you have the opportunity to discern information for yourself would you rather not have access to it at all and i'm like well look more information is good but also comes it bears a cost and the cost is everybody now has to do their own sense making and that's very arduous and it also has a mental cost right because you do feel overwhelmed right and you know i don't think there's that many people who can just check out you know because they don't have the means or you know they just don't have the ability to say okay i'm not gonna worry about this they're still gonna sit and worry about things right you can see that the angst that some people have on social media about shit that they can't control right but yet they spend time focused on right or the anger that they have over certain things you think okay dial it back a little bit you know there's one thing to be informed there's another thing to be uh you know uh outraged how do you how do you given that you're knee deep in all of these stories and so how do you bifurcate that emotionally for yourself how do you not get too caught up in the potential turmoil and catastrophes that occur yeah uh well hey i think you have to know your limitations right i'm not i'm not impacting much other than my family right um so i think you have to you have to look at it from that perspective um the agency also the agency i learned i learned i think if i had to think about it most of what i've learned that has been really valuable to me um has either come from my time with the agency or um from my family that's it dealing with uh my family and understanding how best to do that uh or my time with the agency and the time with the agency they they there was a lot of things that you could pick up if you know if you thought about it i sometimes didn't realize it at the time but um one of those things is you can't you you you're not there to impact you know great decision making right you're there to do a task you're there to do something right and i was never one of those people who sat around and wondered to myself i wonder how the seven floors gonna deal with this right or jeez i wonder why they made that decision on this policy issue you know tell me what the fucking god is right what's important right now and then do it and then move on to the next job right and so you develop you know unless you're overthinking things you develop a certain ability to just compartmentalize shit and and then move on and yeah and also you realize that there's not that many decisions on the decision tree or branches on the decision tree right people get very wrapped around the axle over you know what to do do i go here do i move right do i move left how do i deal with this problem facing it and when you when you look at a problem usually there's not that many options in terms of what you can do to resolve the problem to move on to to have some resolution and so i think the agency was very good about you know having you understand here's here's something happening what are my options and you can you drill down very quickly and realize i got two options maybe i got three but one of them's kind of bullshit so now i got two again um and so you learn how to do that very quickly and i i think that that proved to be really really valuable i mean i got out and had no business experience no business going into business right i just i people thought i was insane to leave and um so i started with a really a great friend of mine who came out of the british teams and um we had no idea what we were doing but because we had similar uh backgrounds and experience it didn't matter right we just looked at okay well we made this decision now what are our choices our choices were very clear right do this do that okay now we've done that now move on and we didn't overthink anything right we just kind of marched on accomplish a task and move on to the next one and it was all because the at least for me anyway the agency had kind of taught you that and it also taught you to make a decision without perfect information right a lot of people sit around and wait to gather all the data right people love data now because it's so readily available and the agency taught us very early on you know that if you sit and wait for that happy day when you get all your information something bad's gonna happen lowering the action threshold a little bit yeah yeah so that window closes or you know next thing you know you got everything's going sideways so you learn to make decisions with imperfect information right and just move on and and not sit around and stare at your fucking navel and wonder whether it was the right decision or not and i've never i've never been one of those people i've never sat in angsty and thought to myself jeez if i've done that you know because i don't see where that benefits anybody but so that's um that's kind of it i try to teach that to my boys life is not as difficult as we try to make it out to be right you you know life can be fairly simple right and you know what you have to do is you have to decide you're gonna work a little bit harder than everybody else which isn't hard because there's a lot of you know there's a lot of folks not working as hard as they could and if you do that then your results are that much bigger right you stand out that much more because you're willing to just put out a little bit more trying to teach that to kids is tough because at that age they envision that it's like i can't do that i mean that's i'm doing everything i can't they have no idea what they're capable of doing so when you say you gotta work a little bit harder and then you realize those benefits um it can be a difficult process but that's i think one of the most important things you can teach your kids and also again not to not to make life more difficult than it is right and and that's uh that's been my primary objective of my boys you know is and my daughter who's grown up now she's a terrific kid but uh the boys are younger and so trying to get them to understand that and to push themselves a little bit harder i mean everybody wants the same thing you want to produce productive you know good people uh you know the world's got enough average people i don't my job is not to produce average you know adults you know from the kids that we've got so anyway uh i'm not sure i was going with that i think there's definitely an allure of overcomplicating things because it feels sophisticated to have this high threshold of information and have a very well planned out org structure and this is where we're going to go and so on and so forth.

But yeah, you often end up being defeated by somebody who's just able to move more quickly than you within perfect information. And then finding the balance between these two things, because there are certain areas where I don't think you should compromise on quality. You know, if you're going to do a press release, don't rush it. You know, when it comes to naming and branding and incorporating and things like that, you should move relatively slowly to ensure that you're getting this thing done right.

But knowing where the battles for perfection lie are very, very important. Right. And you have to strike the balance between speed and effectiveness and quality, obviously, particularly in the commercial sector. I mean, we've dealt with companies that go into new markets on a regular basis, right?

And so they have to do an assessment of that environment and understand what the competitors are doing and so forth. But we've dealt with some very large corporations. It's, you know, where their mindset is, we've got to get into the market, right? And if we make some mistakes, fine, we'll clean up, right?

But we have to be in the market now. And so they will rush that process. And yes, they make some mistakes. Now, they're big enough as entities, as corporations to recover from that.

But if you're a small operation, right? If you're starting up in particular, you can't afford to make that mistake. Game over. Game over.

Exactly. But so it does depend on, it depends on size. But it is interesting that, you know, I remember having a conversation with one corporate, I can't really name them, but one, they're a manufacturer of a very well-known consumer product. And that was their whole point.

Now, we understand it's going to take a little more time to evaluate the environment, what competitors are doing, but we've been out of time. And we're going. And yes, they made mistakes. And it took them some time, took them a lot of money to recover, but they did.

So I guess they were proven right at the end of the day. Mike Baker, ladies and gentlemen. I appreciate that. Thank you for coming through.

No, thank you, man. I really appreciate it. It was a great conversation. I really enjoyed it.

Hopefully, I didn't bore you. No, no, no. Why should people go there when they keep up today with all of the things that you're doing? Well, I'm on X.