Mike Baker

00:15so mike how [ __ ] are we um well let's see i'd say we're [ __ ] yeah i mean it depends on where you want to start there's there's so many interesting things right i i will say right off the bat i didn't i didn't have uh monkey pox uh on my bingo card um it doesn't seem to be that big of an issue even when people get it they don't die they just get blisters and then the heels up and then they're good yeah and then they're fine and it's not good but it's not it's not good and it's also could be avoided if you have don't have a lot of unprotected gay sex yeah yeah unfortunately i i said the other uh what a month ago i made the mistake of saying yeah just don't don't don't have a lot of unprotected random sex uh at a rave or don't [ __ ] monkeys and apparently people took offense at that i

01:05don't think anybody's [ __ ] monkeys so they probably are there's probably like one guy out there it was one guy but i don't think that's what's causing it that's just the name of it right yeah it is yeah but to tell you what kind of world we live in now what they want to do is change the name because they think right the name is is what it's offensive to gay people in some strange way they want to call it like a number like you know atx one two four yeah some nonsense just it's already monkey box it's monkey box everybody's gonna notice remember when it was the uh when covert was the wuhan flu yeah yeah no that's not good either it wasn't good no you couldn't you couldn't do that and then and you know why is it okay to have chicken pox we can't have monkey box oh yeah what's up with that nobody cares about the chickens anymore um no it's it's

01:52it is interesting that that one of the primary concerns right now is you know aside obviously from from dealing with the actual issue is that we got to change the name and and i honestly god couldn't figure out why that would be offensive to anybody but monkeys i i don't think it doesn't make any sense i think it's just the name has already become synonymous with uh people having unprotected gay sex and so they just want to reduce it to a disease yeah yeah that's fair enough yeah i mean it's just it is what it is it's like out of all the things that we could be worried about it's not at the top of the list folks you can avoid it and if you get it you're gonna be okay you're not gonna die no i don't believe anyone has died from it which is crazy that it gets the kind of press it gets yeah it's i guess the number of cases caught people by

02:38surprise right i don't know where they are now i last piece of news i read about it was there were 10 000 cases i think in the u.s that's because gay dudes put in work yeah well yeah you got it i know they're prolific yeah if you could have if you don't have to convince some woman to have sex with you and you're just talking about a room full of dudes that's how they went how much gets done yeah it's like if i had a pair of tits i'd never leave the house so so i don't think i'd okay i should take that back yeah yeah yeah something like that yeah i think you'd still leave the house yeah i think you'd get accustomed to them after a while yeah you probably would you probably you probably would uh but yeah i didn't i didn't see monkey parks and and we got but you're right we got other things to deal with we got uh china's lobbing missiles over taiwan yeah that

03:22was wild so that would that's one of the things that i wanted to talk to you about like why the [ __ ] would nancy pelosi go to taiwan and then go to the dmz like it's are they trying to kill her well like what yeah i know it's i think what caught a lot of people by surprise was just how public the trip became right it's obviously a press stunt it well yes it although there was this this we don't know who leaked it we're not sure you know i mean from her office and from other places we don't know who really started talking about this um because there have been a number of delegations obviously going back and forth we just had another one in in taiwan i got almost no press right um but it really doesn't matter who would leak it because as soon as pelosi's staff decided they're going to start talking to their their taiwanese counterparts about

04:13arranging a trip like this from the very first conversation the chinese intel already knows about it right they've they've picked up on it so they're already aware but anyway so whether the chinese regime decided to leak it and make a big issue of it because they're they're getting very shirty about taiwan at this point um it's it's anybody's guess but i think once it became a public issue and a spectacle she had to go she couldn't she couldn't back down so that was a inevitable uh and you know did it accomplish much uh you know it's it's fine you know we've got a obligation uh we got the one china policy and we've got the you know unofficial recognition of taiwan and i don't think anybody in any administration going back to the beginning of that policy ever really understood what it all means it's very complicated it's messy everybody's

05:07preferred every administration preferred not to talk about it really because it's it's kind of like the middle east nobody ever thinks it's going to sort itself out properly so but you know to i never thought i'd say this to pelosi's credit she's she's been hanging in there as a supporter of taiwan for you know most of her time and whether that's because she's making a lot of cash over there on deals i don't know well she brought over her son yeah who is in the mining business she would have brought her husband but he was busy with that dui charge which is not a funny thing it's it's you know hopefully he gets help anyway i don't know where i'm going with that sympathy for paul pelosi no sympathy yeah it's i mean i guess they released a video it showed how [ __ ] up he was which you know people were very concerned with

05:58him getting released like they just kind of dropped the case and now so apparently it's back on again yeah yeah it's hard to believe that there could be you know two standards of justice crazy yeah i would never believe that yeah but everyone's accountable we're all treated equally under the law so what you're saying though is that the moment they started talking about doing it china was aware of it yes so is that because of moles is that because of spies is that it's it's because um taiwan um while an independent nation right and nothing happens on that island without the chinese regime knowing about it whether it's the ministry of state security or whether it's the pla's intel operations they know everything that's going on they they hoover up everything and and that's just on the taiwan issue we can talk about what they're doing you know

06:58lately in the rest of the world um but the the amount of resource that the chinese machine puts into not just under xi but previously puts into monitoring understanding uh you know what's happening in taiwan and importantly what the us is doing in relation to taiwan uh is is very impressive because at some point and it may happen sooner rather than later you know that china's been pretty clear about look by 2050 taiwan's coming back you know it's going to be part of china and there's no two ways about it but now people are talking about well that could be four years from now they've accelerated the timetable and that's causing a lot of concern there's been a very big buildup of the chinese military obviously and we've we've talked a little bit about that in the past but uh also they're just their aggressive behavior so as their military has been

07:51growing so has their sort of willingness to be aggressive about it and to put themselves out there which didn't used to be the case in part because i don't think they felt emboldened enough yet due to the strength of their navy in particular they've got the largest navy in the world so you know that's there's there's it's not they're not just doing it to do it right there's a reason for it and the reason for it is to prepare for the eventual day when they decide the time is right to bring taiwan back into the fold and that's going to be a very messy day from our perspective because you know i what are we going to do about it are we going to are we going to war with china to defend taiwan what are the two perspectives is there one perspective where some advisors are saying we have to let it happen to avoid the inevitable mass bloodshed because it's going to

08:42happen no matter what and then the other perspective is if we let them do that we're sending the worst message possible so we need to defeat this at all costs yeah there's there's basically yeah that's very eloquent actually you've defined the two tracks right yeah there's really nothing in between there's no middle ground although you could argue and this is what china's been watching also is what's been happening in russia and ukraine right [Music] so the idea that we've drawn a red line we're not putting boots on the ground right we're gonna do everything you know up to that to help support the ukraine in their efforts against russia china looks at that and they think okay is that is that where this would go you know once we if we send our navy across the strait there and and uh you know start dropping troops on the island you know

09:34where where is the u.s in all of this and they have to base their their strategy their their forward planning on on sort of the knowns right and one of the knowns is how we're dealing with ukraine we do not want to get into a shooting war with russia well china's gonna have to look at that and go well we assume they definitely don't want to get in a shooting war with us right so then they just that's how they start to calculate what that strategy looks like and what the potential then risks and damage could be from being sanctioned further um in certain areas uh in having uh arms resupplied to taiwan during the course of an invasion essentially so there's there's a lot that goes into it but i mean look it's interesting because we we miscalculated the the russia situation right we we figured out that russia was building up to an invasion

10:26but just about everybody said yeah it'll take them three or four days and they'll roll into kiev and it'll be over so we got that pretty wrong so now we have to worry about how good are our estimates of of you know the chinese pla the people's liberation army and their capabilities and the navy and how how good are they and then we have to worry about taiwan and say how what's taiwan's will to fight look like does it look like the ukrainians it's uh two different cultures so well that was a statement of the obvious wasn't it yeah it's a perilous time it's very disturbing when you're you're sitting here you feel helpless you read the news and you're trying to pay attention to what's going on and you're like jesus how does this end well like what's the best case scenario yeah well look we thought because again we didn't have we didn't

11:19have going back to using russia as a as a case study you know and obviously that war is going on and it's horrific and you know there's a lot of tragedy there but using it as a case study for what could happen in china and the potential we didn't get putin's plans and attentions right at all right we didn't you know once this thing dragged on beyond what he expected then you know there was a lot of speculation okay maybe this is a negotiated settlement you know so what does that look like and but they've just come out the defense minister and others have just come out and said there's no negotiation to be done here we don't view this as a as a way we're not going to settle this through negotiation they were very clear they made a very clear statement so they're in it apparently to uh win but what does that mean are they just are they going to be happy securing

12:08that eastern side of the country in the south and does that mean they want to take odessa i mean you know they're further beyond into odessa and you know no but again nobody really knows we could talk about how you know what does that mean was that an intelligence failure was it was it just because we were focused elsewhere spending 20 plus years on the middle east counter-terrorism and so does that mean that we were unable to because we didn't have the resources focused on the area to assess what was going to happen uh with a land war in europe and so what does that mean in terms of our ability to assess what the chinese regime's going to do and what their military capabilities are yeah it's it's a it is a big concern but how it ends again that's all speculation but it's it's going to be messy either way now what do you make of the people

13:00that say that this is provoked by nato constantly pushing the boundaries and pushing weapons up to the border of russia yeah i get the i get that argument i mean putin has been very clear and one thing i don't think we ever do very well is we don't really take despots or dictators at their word right so when they say something we tend to it's kind of like with g in china right he's he's a dictator they're going into a they're going to into a congress soon uh where he'll probably get a third term they've never had that happen there so he's cementing himself as being there forever but we've always i guess my point is we've never really been good at just saying okay he's that's what they're saying so maybe we should factor that into our analysis as to what could happen and putin was clear for all these years saying uh you know i want to rebuild the

13:47soviet union in some fashion right and and the collapse of the soviet union including losing ukraine and ukraine is they're coming up on their independence day um they what is that the 24th of august is is ukraine independence day that's tomorrow and they became independent in 91 got out from the so putin's been very upfront about how he wants to rebuild the soviet union in some capacity so yes i get the argument that says if we've been pushing nato uh for years right and trying to strengthen nato and and trying to get them to pay their fair share and trying to do all these things to bolster nato particularly along the border with russia he's going to look at that as an existential threat in a way right and we should we should have probably uh paid more attention to that but i you know i think you know that's it's it's that's a little bit too late for putin but i

14:47think what we should do is is use that again and look at what she's been saying and look at what they say during their their you know their congresses look at their five-year plans and you know be a little bit more uh aware that he probably means what he says so when they talk about taiwan they mean that when they talk about you know getting to the top of the food chain uh in a variety of areas whether it's pharmaceuticals technology uh telecommunications shipping oil and gas that's what they're going to do which is why they've been so intent over the years to hoover up or steal every bit of intellectual property and intelligence they can because that's how they're meeting those goals there's also some talk about them buying u.s farmland uh someone just brought this up to me the other day they just bought an enormous farm somewhere in the middle of america and

15:41their number one priority is feeding china yeah yeah um they've been doing all sorts of i mean we could we could literally we could literally sit here because that's all day long talking about what they've been up to um but but you're right the bureau the bureau had a great report not that long ago they it was a culmination of years of investigation and one of the interesting things that they were doing was looking at the financial side of things rather than kind of thinking of individual uh counterintelligence operations they started looking at chinese companies whether they were state-owned or whether they were just you know theoretically private but they had two or three cutouts between them and the state and they were looking at their deals and they're saying why would they do this and and if it's a if it's a private company that's out there to make money

16:34and to become successful to be successful to grow why would they be making deals that seem not profitable what's the point of that exercise and so aside from just acquiring assets and china's over the years has quite a massive amount of property and other assets here in the u.s and around the world is the idea that i think is a very clever part of their investigation from a bureau perspective is to say all right let's look at a chinese company uh like zte or huawei and let's try to understand why would they possibly be giving away their products basically dirt cheap prices uh why would they be interested in in acquiring land in a particular area why would they want to work with a particular regional telecoms provider here in the u.s and when you do that their activity becomes pretty clear even to people who are skeptics it becomes pretty obvious that i mean look just

17:42they've over the years i mean going back to 2000 before that huawei is as a telecoms company started in 87 and they're now the largest uh producer of telecoms gear in the world they do all the plumbing right they do the antennas they do the routers they do the servers you look at a cell tower now anywhere in the midwest or out no uh out west uh anywhere and it's likely got huawei or zte or other chinese components on that cell tower and one of the reports that the bureau came out with um after a lengthy uh investigation is fascinating and um i i'm pretty sure you've yeah you've seen this report that did the you look at the uh i-25 corridor it goes up uh wyoming uh colorado that area along the border of nebraska they did a deal with a regional telecoms provider out there viero i think it was and they now have their over the years they've put their equipment huawei has

18:48onto these cell towers they go up and down this corridor well the other thing that's up and down this corridor a variety of military bases and an enormous number of icbm sites for our our nuke program right so the idea that china was just you know willingly giving it vastly discounted prices uh their gear to a regional provider in the in in part of the us where we have an enormous number of icbm sites i don't know it could be a coincidence but it's it's it's a perfect example of what they do and and how they're willing to to invest state resources and how smart they are at at long-term targeting and understanding i want to know about this that's where the information is i'm going to get access to it and i don't care whether it takes me 10 20 30 years so we're having this conversation and you're explaining this to me i would imagine that if i was a person in a

19:49position of power and government i would want to stop this from happening so how did it ever happen um well it uh it wasn't really noticed it wasn't nobody yeah it wasn't i mean it's been a thing for a handful of years when you think about it if you think about huawei's been doing this for um i mean look we could talk about what they did up in canada too to uh one of the world's biggest companies up in canada in telecoms um or roughly the same time but anyway uh a couple of years ago what are we we're in 2022 now so a couple of years ago when they released this information when they finished their investigation and they looked and they said this is [ __ ] right we've got because one of the things about this equipment that's sitting on these cell towers is people will say well who cares it's telecoms you know it's my mobile phone i

20:38don't care if the chinese regime listens into my mobile phone well the pla's third department and their first technical reconnaissance bureau and other parts of the chinese machine that that hoovers up all this information that's related to our national security interests they're not just going after you know commercial cell phone signals this part of this investigation was to break down this equipment and try to understand okay wait a minute could this be going after the dod spectrum the the bandwidth that the military would use and if so what does that mean could they intercept communications yes according to the investigation and could they interfere with our communication so not just hoover up data packets that are going across this but also imagine if we're trying to send communications things get really hot they go after taiwan suddenly we're

21:26going on high alert they could they could either intercept or or block block jam i'm having a senior moment communications trying to get through on those uh capabilities and so it's a big it's a big deal um but once it once the investigation came out then people did start to pay attention but this is how the the how slow the us government can be um in in 19 2019 2020. basically what happened was to to oversimplify this was once it became clear what was going on and what what the chinese regime was doing uh using chinese telecoms providers um to do this the us government said okay that's it we got to take all this gear off these cell towers right these are regional providers right that in these areas because they what the chinese were very smart about was looking at our military bases seeing how many of them were out in the rural parts of america

22:27identifying who the regional providers are and saying we can sell you this gear for nothing how about that and over the years the regional providers are like great fine because they're not thinking you got some guy running some regional telecoms company he's not a counterintelligence specialist he's just working on his bottom line he's just working on his bottom line he said this is a great deal so they load up all these towers so anyway the us government said you got take all this gear off right you got to remove all this [ __ ] and we're going to replace it with with trusted care and and by the way huawei is on a trade list um as a zte and others uh at this point um so we can't going forward uh companies aren't using their gear but you've got all this stuff sitting up there anyway right and every time you need to do an update right

23:13one of the weaknesses on some of this gear is you gotta you know basically hit it with new software with an update and anytime you do that that's a pathway perhaps for them to do something else and so they said take all this gear off we're going to allocate this u.s government we're going to allocate just shy of 2 billion to do this none of the gears moved this was 20 20. two years later none of the gear has been moved because all the companies they said okay [ __ ] we'll make a list of all the stuff that's got to come off of there and they did and you're talking about you know 20 some odd thousand pieces of equipment that need to be pulled off of cell towers that you know are compromising or potentially compromising uh u.s national interests and they say well we can't do this for 1.9 billion dollars it's gonna cost us twice

24:05that at least which means it'll cost us probably three times that and so nothing's been done none of the gear has been removed um now the us government's saying well okay maybe we can partially reimburse you we're talking about companies that as you pointed out trying to you know improve their bottom line they're trying to make money so they're going to get partially reimbursed for taking this gear off right because the us government is is so slow in the commerce department started an investigation in 2021 they still haven't finished it about the same issue so i don't want to sound cynical but a i'm i'm very happy that the the bureau through some very good investigative you know efforts uh has highlighted this and it's important to be talking about this thank god it's it's we're getting better at talking about it but nothing's been done and it's so the same

25:00problem exists so it's kind of like when you go in and you talk i remember 15 years ago i would go and i would give a talk on chinese espionage you know that's how long i've been kicking this horse in the ass and people would just roll their eyes and it still kind of happens because they'll look and they'll go oh you know that's [ __ ] you're being xenophobic or well we do it too that's always one of my favorite arguments people say well the u.s does it too what the [ __ ] what kind of argument is that right i mean so it's it's it's so let them so just let them just let them yeah it'll be fine you'll just all do it and uh so anyway i that that's that's the that's one of the more interesting uh parts of this but i mean they're just the [ __ ] that they're doing they did the same thing up in in uh canada back in in in 2000 they

25:49infiltrated a company called uh nor nortel and nortel was one of the largest companies in the world super successful right based out i forget where ottawa maybe in canada and uh nortel went bankrupt in part because they had you know they had some [ __ ] uh business decisions made but in part because huawei and and others uh out of china just started hoovering up and stealing all their [ __ ] getting everything i mean look this this problem i i know i sound like i'm rambling but you could go back 10 years ago and then one estimate a legit estimate of the cost to us right from economic espionage and the theft of intellectual property by not just china but russia iran north korea any bad actor the theft the cost of that in one year at that time 10 years ago was 500 billion dollars in terms of blueprints and and technical information and

26:53and and then you then you factor in lost jobs right because when they're stealing information to advance themselves what they're also doing is kicking us in the ass and we're losing jobs right and we're losing and companies are shutting down or not making money so it's a it's it's a problem i know i bang on about it a lot but it seems like yeah this nortel company so what did they steal from them they took uh a lot of uh proprietary software uh nortel at the time was doing they were doing all sorts of things that were groundbreaking right they were coming up with touch screen technology before apple did right they were doing all sorts of things and they um at a certain point they just couldn't compete because all the all the information about their plans and intentions for for business operations for bids for everything we're now in the hands of uh

27:53chinese state-owned or favored companies and how were they doing this are they doing this through their routers and cert what were they doing they infiltrated a lot of they they basically malware that they laid onto their systems internally they also had some old-school kind of help right there's a lot of layers to espionage right there's a lot of layers particularly economic espionage so you know we all like to think about the cybers part of it now and that's true but you know chinese in particular also rely on humans on human intelligence right so co-opties or or recruits that they can get and they had they had a number of very uh very highly regarded and thought of uh engineers and developers and innovators and and uh working within uh nortel who were from china and that's a prime target for chinese intel right they'll always look to kind of play off

28:45of that connection to the motherland whether it's first or second or third generation so they uh basically just started neutral just started being unable to compete because they were just and at the same time oddly enough you know hallway was doing better and better and better and you know as nortel was getting crushed huawei was building up their uh you know innovation centers hiring more engineers including a bunch from nortel uh interestingly so i guess the the point to the the story there is it's been going on a long damn time and we we tend to think of it as like just something when i mean the previous administration trump administration you know they they talked a lot about china china china and that's a good thing right the more we talk about this it's not going to change their behavior but if nothing else maybe it makes

29:38businesses companies more aware i think one thing that needs to happen is is that the government has to do a better job right of explaining the case because again i've seen this for years now where people just kind of go ah yeah okay fine you're talking about chinese espionage and they're stealing our information and they don't really know what it means necessarily or they just don't imagine it's that big a deal so or they don't see the evidence and i guess maybe that's part of the biggest problem is because of what it is because you gather some of this government it you can't talk about sources and methods you don't just throw everything out there on the table and say look here's the evidence that huawei or or the third department of the pla or whoever is is doing all this activity and this is what it's costing us and this is how we know

30:26you can't do that in intelligence operations but i think we need to make we need to figure out a way to make an exception to that in this case because that's what will get people onside right that's what'll get people to be believers in all this is if you give them more evidence and it's like ufos you know if somebody actually talked about it gave you a piece of evidence and you go okay yeah maybe so but it's just it's it's it's a tough line to walk the bureau's getting better at it but um i think we need to be more transparent in explaining how we know some of these things to the degree that we can and there will be limitations but we don't do enough of it but the more we talk about it again it's not going to change the chinese regime's behavior because this is how they envision and it's worked so far getting to the top of the food chain

31:14but we got to do something so has there been a company in the united states that's been infiltrated the way nortel was oh sure i mean whether you talk about uh well not i mean nortow was an interesting case because it now it's bankrupt interestingly enough it went into bankruptcy they sold all their gear as part of an effort to raise funds right so they sold all this gear a lot of it who knows filled with malware filled with malware can i go to some other companies yeah we got a deal yeah terrific look at that and then all of a sudden jazz picks up a new signal oh look but yeah whether it's google uh yeah ge i mean recent cases ge whether it's it's there's yeah you know there's there's no um when when you look at what do they go after i guess part of it you could look at when they talk about every five year plan and they talk about where it's most important

32:08you could probably correlate that to then where their real collection efforts are going to be right it's going to be an oil and gas is it going to be in um it's going to be in in shipping is it wherever it's going to be and you can pretty much assume then you're going to see an increase in cyber shenanigans in those sectors right so but they they yeah they've gone after pretty much anything right they went out all the various cases they went after a small company years ago i'm trying to remember it was in salt lake city utah uh i figured it was called ibon or something it was a on the face of it it was just a company that um worked in the entertain or not the entertainment in the hospitality business right and you think well why would they hack into a business that does hospitality work in hotel chains and everything well because what do you have at hotel chains you

33:05have conferences and you have you know gatherings of business people and everything so what they were doing was they figured out how to get through ibond and then get into the communications of you're sitting in a conference room right you're listening to some speaker up there talk about um you know whatever it is um you know laser technology or it doesn't really matter and you know you're bored so you say well [ __ ] i forgot to call bob and i'll send him an email well they had managed to figure out if we get into ibond and we get into the way that they had connected with the various hospitality groups to help handle communications right for you know conferences and events so they could pick up all that email traffic so next thing you know you got you know somebody emailing their boss back home talking about you know something proprietary and

33:58it sounds odd but it's very effective so i guess my point being is whether it's that whether it's going after a pigment formula for creating a new type of pigment at dupont they don't they don't care they'll just they'll go after this stuff and then they'll feed it to their their businesses and people huawei is a good example people say well i mean because like huawei's you know they got a lot of employees here in the in the states and they've said for decades we have no connection we're not involved with the chinese government we don't do any of this all our telecoms gear has been checked out by the fcc um if the chinese regime goes to huawei and says we want your cooperation on something they'll provide that cooperation 100 100 percent they have to yeah it's not it's it's not like they would push back and go nah it's okay we don't we don't want

34:48to do that we want to play by the book i remember when the huawei stuff was going on there were some tech sites that were very dubious about it and they they were saying that trump is uh overstepping this is a terrible idea there's nothing wrong with huawei and i remember reading this and they're coming from a tech perspective you know they're just saying like this is innovative gear and they make great stuff and but it's it's bizarre that they don't get informed before they make these articles because these articles can shift public opinion particularly amongst people follow that stuff they would say well this is an overstep like why are we doing this this is xenophobic this is more trump this is why we don't like him yeah and that's you know that's that's a big part of the the pushback is well you're being xenophobic and you think um no

35:35i think people are smart enough to differentiate between the wonderful chinese culture and the people and the regime right the regime is is is not about advancing the the liberties and freedoms of the chinese people at the regime the chinese regime is all about staying in power that's what they care about and so i i don't understand i mean i guess but you know i just think [ __ ] off with that xenophobic argument because it's it's not i i do see that when they say it's overreaching i think that goes back to this idea that we're not being transparent enough about explaining how we know some of this and that's why i keep saying to the degree possible i think that would solve part of this issue and get more companies on side the bureau has gotten a lot better and other parts of the government have gotten a lot better going out to

36:21businesses and saying these are the problems this is what you you may be seeing in the future this is what they're trying to accomplish and trying to help but a lot of these companies are either you know just too focused on on shareholder reports and they've got us they've got a good internal security system they think or you know they just they they look at it and they say i you know i don't want to really go out there and report that we've been hit by a you know a ransomware or whatever because i what's that going to do to the bottom line uh or the the stock value so a lot of companies it's like crime it's a lot of it's underreported but uh yeah it's a yeah again i i know people listen to this and they go oh it's like it's like banging on about the chinese again but it's not just the chinese it's the russians but the chinese are the major

37:13perpetrators and and what it costs this country it's it's hard to quantify at times right you're trying to figure out because part of it's a soft science of okay well how much damage did that do to a particular sector to our company how many jobs weren't then created um what wasn't innovative on our side that we could have but uh you know they're look they're doing everything they've been caught in the recent past they've been caught out in the middle of agricultural land trying to dig up modified seeds right i mean that's pretty old school send a co-opty or you know some asset out to a field in nebraska to dig up some modified seeds to send back to china so they can take a look at what's going on um their their efforts are you know from an intelligence perspective you gotta admire in a way they're very you know they're well resourced they're aggressive they work

38:06hard at it it's kind of fascinating because the disturbing conclusion that one could make is that the only way for us to be able to compete with the chinese in the way they do it is if we do it that way so if we become gonna flip it upside down is if we become i'm gonna flip the top oh yeah look at that smartseeing looks like a monkey [ __ ] football but it's this thing where they have a complete integration between their businesses and their government so their government would never allow them if we sent american gear over there that hoovers up all their intellectual data right they would never allow that exactly there's no level playing field right there's a few realities there's no rule of law in china there's no level playing field if you go over to set up a manufacturing facility you have to assume everything's going to be compromised right

39:02your your proprietary information you're you're coding your software whatever and yeah they we don't they don't extend uh us the same open society concept right i mean terrorism terrorists have used that against us for years and years and years and years right that's the fact that we have a free and open society and we and we relish it and we should right that's a great thing but people who don't have our interests at heart are going to take advantage of that at some point and and they have over the years so i i think with you know i mean you look at uh look at look at china and you know something simple such as electric vehicles right by the way i i walked into a rental car place the other day uh a couple weeks ago and the guy said i just rented some bog standard sedan because i was only there for like two days the guy says hey i give you a deal on a tesla

39:57well i've never driven a tesla before so i thought okay i'll i guess so it was a simple whatever it was a model three i guess they call it so he says hey here you go and uh he gave me the little thingy the you know little card or whatever it is to go out and he says it's parked out there and space 407. so i walk out there and i realize i'm standing there with my little rollerboard bag that i don't know how to get into this car and how to unlock it and so i'm looking i'm walking around and i'm trying to figure this out i've got the little card and then i look inside and that big screen in there lights up and it says tap you know the the car so like a [ __ ] [ __ ] i'm out there tapping the car with this card right i can't figure out because i don't know that it's that little part by the window right with a little this little thing there

40:51i'm being very technical so i stand out there for about 10 minutes trying to open the car and i can't so i go back into the little center there and i said um i don't know how to do this so the guy walks out with minnie he uh shows me how to open again i get the car he walks away now i don't know how to start the [ __ ] so i had to i sat in the car in this in this rental car center and i googled how to start a tesla and had to watch a little video right like an idiot and my takeaway a long story short might not i've already made it long but my take away from driving the tesla for two days was i think if you're a technology person i think it's great you must people love it i'm i'm not clearly but to me it was it was there was no driving experience right there's no sound there's no feel it was like driving a golf cart and so

41:44anna i'm not saying you know i'm against electric vehicles but oh i know where i was going with this but the the chinese when you think about it they control 85 90 of the processing of minerals right that go into an electric vehicle battery and so when you think about that it's not that they have all those in their in in within china but they control the processing of it because they're smart and because they looked at this years ago and because part of their five-year plan at a certain point was we're going to advance the ball in green technology that's we're going to focus what does that mean that means we're gonna we're gonna lock this down and we're also gonna steal information related to this but we're gonna we're gonna do everything we can to get ourselves further up that chain so whether you're talking about lithium or cobalt or copper or whatever

42:30in that battery you know we are way behind the curve we got a real problem so we talk we imagine somehow we're going to develop you know this this green world where we're all driving electric vehicles and the reality is china has already set themselves up in a very strong way to kind of dominate that that industry it's it's it's fascinating i like it because it it shows again it shows the targeting aspects of intelligence and the thought process that goes into gathering information developing a strategy working towards it prioritizing your collection all these things but um yeah anyway i wasn't i'm not saying i wasn't a fan of tesla i like you know musk and the company and all that but i just i like to hear a noise when i'm driving that's just me yeah well i have cars that make a noise that's but i drove the tesla today yeah it's a

43:22[ __ ] rocket ship yeah it's the craziest car i've ever driven the model s plaid okay it goes 0 to 16 1.9 seconds yeah it's the acceleration is impossible it doesn't even make sense like it seems like you're in another time period like you're around these things they're all horses yeah and yeah you're in a [ __ ] corvette just i mean it's it doesn't even make sense how fast it is and also how quiet it is the quiet part bothered me maybe that was what it was i just was you know what do i know but uh you know it's it's listen to music yeah yeah they make a new uh challenger they just started uh releasing the uh promos on it and it's a challenger look at jamie on the [ __ ] wow um it's a charger actually charger daytona so is that a four-door or a two-door it's a two-door charger i was gonna bring it up because i just heard the

44:13sound of it yesterday yeah it's bizarre it's a fake sound let's play it wait because yeah yeah yeah listen it's it's this is the sound it's gonna make looks [ __ ] dope though give it that god damn it i'm gonna buy one so it's very similar in many ways what is that [Music] the back i don't know that's the sound i mean that's the first thing is that it looks [ __ ] i thought it was gonna play like the growl so yeah there's other videos jamie because i i did listen to the actual growl where they were rev revving it i don't know why they're not ready so it's just it's just set up to mimic basically the sound of attention sort of okay is that it right there i'm just checking to see if there's something else and it could be here welcome back daytona but thank you rules dodge i do not think no but i guaran i know it's available

45:18each headline says it has it and bro that's the sound that is sick might have been that i'm not sure how i feel about that oh there you go the it's fake yeah it's like a fake sound at least porsche when they they have the tie can the electric one it makes jets and noises see i would like that i i think that would be more entertaining than trying to mimic the actual sound of an engine because you're lying to people yeah so but the tesla i mean i am fascinated by the sort of the battery composition no it'll show you more you get to hear it from like inside the car that looks [ __ ] sick that car is supposed to be incredible to drive because it has like porsche dynamics in terms of like steering and handling and everything like that but it also you hear that yeah yeah but okay but that does look nice yeah that's incredible but that is to me indicative of like

47:15what i would like a electronic futuristic car to sound like i don't want them to pretend it's a muscle car when it's yeah it's not an electric that's not working you know what get a muscle car dork's gonna buy that thing yeah it says well that's why i say i can't i guess i just i'm too far you know down the road to appreciate the the technology behind it but i am fascinated by the the composition of the battery what that means in the future if what we're trying to do is transition to all electric vehicles uh where these minerals are located around the world what that looks like in terms of who controls that process but also just the simple stuff of like you know i know we're talking about this for environmental reasons but you know what i you know if what we're going to do is control more of this here in the us i don't think a lot of people are going to get

48:01behind the idea of like okay let's do more mining in the u.s right i mean that's you know oil and gas looks like you know a clean energy process compared to the process of mining for the most part it gets ugly yeah it gets really ugly we got where we got cobalt you got i forget i read one time that cobalt and a battery in an av battery there's a few kilograms of it and there's more cobalt in where in the republic of congo democratic republic of congo than anywhere else in the world so if and and again china controls a lot of the processing you know 80 plus percent of this so if what we're saying is okay we want to do more cobalt mining as just an example uh in the us there's a lot of cobalt in idaho believe it or not which i don't know if you know this but i'm in idaho now and uh most of that's on state forest land oh nobody's gonna yeah

48:59nobody's gonna say yeah let's let's start digging up forest lands to get more cobalt but so i don't know that we've actually thought this through completely in terms from an environmental perspective we all like the idea i do think there's a lot of people out there who think that the energy for an electric vehicle comes from the battery itself you know as opposed to you maybe charge that son of a [ __ ] up yeah which is unfortunate it's like what i mean if we had nuclear power to power electric vehicles and we could figure out a way to mine cleanly but that's those are euphemisms that's jumbo shrimp right there yeah yeah i mean that's yeah that's right yeah i i just don't i don't think it's um and again i'm not against it i think let's let's make a greener cleaner world but let's do everything all at the same time right but it seems like it's it's

49:47greener in terms of people's impressions of what's going on because you're not getting the exhaust fumes but it's not necessarily greener net for the world when you think about the environmental impact and right exactly what's involved in taking the stuff out of the ground and and also like how you're powering it yeah when we think about who leads the world in sort of the the cleanest form of uh of you know oil and gas exploration and and drilling for example you know and we say okay well we want to get away from oil and gas here and fossil fuels here in the u.s so we're going to start you know make it more difficult to pursue so but we're okay with the idea that you know other nations aren't going to change their habits their practices which are not as environmentally friendly right and so i mean there's a lot of layers to this again it doesn't

50:41mean i'm you know i'm just i'm just saying we need to be a little bit more pragmatic but i do think yeah i think part of the problem is people feel righteous about it yes and if those minerals are mined in congo or or you're getting lithium from chile or argentina or wherever australia fine because i don't have to look at it but what is the environmental impact there yeah how can we ignore that it's gonna i mean i would hate for green energy to become an oxymoron you know it's because it seems like that's it's one of those things that people love to say green energy like what does that really mean and if you think about the amount of cars in this country alone that are actually electric vehicles with low emissions that are powered by coal plants which is kind of [ __ ] wild yeah because that's a real thing in many parts of this country yeah i don't know

51:31where people think that i mean i you know again i'm not saying everybody thinks this way but i think there are a lot of people that just somehow imagine that battery is just self-charging but i think a lot of people just like the idea of be doing the right thing from their perspective how much can i do well if i drive a tesla or if i drive you know one of them electric hummers at least i'm not releasing exhaust fumes yeah we've got uh i got a i got a big truck i got a big gmc truck i got a suburban i got a 91 wagon air i got a range rover uh i got a little mgb i'm just kicking the [ __ ] out of the fossil fuels at my house i'm i don't have any evs yet but i've heard that there's potential technologies that can extract carbon from the air and that people are some people are looking at carbon as a potential resource that you could

52:23actually extract the carbon from the air and that carbon could be valuable that's a gravity yeah it doesn't it sounds crazy sounds like dilithium crystals from star trek but it's a great idea but if we're putting it out there doesn't it make sense that we could suck it out yeah all right it's a it's an interesting idea i i nowhere near smart enough to ponder it beyond saying it's an interesting idea but uh yeah i i do think that i mean again i'll wrap up the uh you know it's the bash china hour but where where we're five to ten years from now and you know the us government just passed this chips and science act because we're aware of the fact that we don't produce enough semiconductors enough chips here in the states most of it being done over in taiwan right i mean 90 basically of the sophisticated semiconductor you know uh product is produced in taiwan and

53:25so yeah okay fine pass the chips and science act invest some more money in doing that here i just don't know that we're going to be able to do anything about the about the minerals required for the ev part because i just don't see once people realize that it means you're going to start digging up more earth right in in these you know not good-looking mining operations i don't know that they're going to be on board with that so i'm not sure where that goes in terms of u.s independence in that industry but there's there's a lot of things we you know fine let's invest in but i just think that that idea that somehow we're going to shut down fossil fuels in the in the very near short term in favor of this no how about we continue with the fossil fuels that we have you know natural gas great we should be doing more of that uh but we can do

54:18these other things as well we can pursue all these other things at the same time but it's it's we we always in this weird argument where it's like it's it's all this or it's all that right and just no just multitask and and maybe eventually we'll get to that green future that everybody's banging on about i think people need to see the horrific consequences of mining i just don't think they quite understand it and this is coming from someone who has an electric car who loves it i get it but it's just what you're talking about is not clean at all and we're we're talking about doing this for every car in the country and i don't believe we even have enough minerals to power x amount of hundreds of millions of cars no i don't know what the natural what the mineral reserves are now around the world um you know in terms of rare earth

55:09minerals china's hit the jackpot right in terms of just where they're located so they've got when it's rare with minerals but i mean you know you can't you don't put cobalt and lithium and copper in that category but again they've got the the hands on the processing but it's yeah it is it is fascinating i just think that whether we're talking about their their efforts to gather intelligence whether we're talking about their build-up of their military whether we're talking about you know sort of their focus i just think that you know there needs to be more of an awareness of where we are in relation to china and what that's going to look like in five 10 15 years and i don't know that we've now bang on about something else that's interesting we spent so much time focused on the middle east and counterterrorism that i think we legitimately degraded our ability to

56:03worry about other parts of the world and russia and china being the two key ones um so i think we're trying to recalibrate but that takes time when you're talking about retooling your intelligence community to now move away from this idea that you know it's all counter terrorism all the time and you know we got to get back to the kind of the old school intel concerns it takes time to to do that it takes time to recruit new officers it takes time to to find those those mandarin speakers it takes time to to get the analysts who have all that experience a lot of them have retired over the years right so that's a that's that that's you know a ship you don't turn around on a dime so i think it's you know it's going to be interesting where we go but uh circling back i mean you look at at russia and i don't know where that mess is going to

56:56end up but i think we better be paying real close attention to what it means for our abilities to better assess what's going to happen with china you know particularly vis-a-vis taiwan and i just said vis-a-vis i can't believe it i gotta write down never say vis-a-vis again we have to be if they're doing that they have to also be careful that they don't degrade the intelligence on foreign extremists and you know and terrorists and old school the things that we've been worried about this whole time it's not like you want to ignore that no and i think that that late recent hit on zawari um in afghanistan i think that shows that we can do that we can you know we can we can multitask again but uh you're right you don't want to take your eye off the ball we're all tired of terrorism we're all tired of the war on terror which you know but the extremists aren't right

57:49they're still pretty energized right they're still pretty interested in you know can we turn afghanistan into a training ground again uh for our interests to attack the us and its allies yes extremists are still very interested in doing that so we have to stay focused in that arena but we can't afford to put so much of our resource in that area we've we've got to understand uh where our primary concerns are and certainly the top of that list look it hasn't changed in years right i mean you ask you know somebody in in washington dc within the military or intel community over all these years what are your top concerns and it's always going to be china russia iran north korea and so china's always been up there but the reality is we took our eye off the ball we focused elsewhere and that degraded our ability i argue to to do what we need to do and part of

58:43that is giving the white house whatever administration's in charge giving them the best intelligence you can and to do that you need the the collection capabilities that's that's the human and you know we do very well on on technical collection right nobody does it better than we do i'd argue but um but a lot of times your most important intelligence comes from a human a source right and and that's that's that's that's tough to do and then you need like i said you need the analysts who are capable and experienced enough to put together something that makes sense and allows the us then to forward plan but i guarantee you um you know from it's an accelerated timeline on taiwan and we better understand what that means and i i don't know that we uh i don't know we're paying a lot of attention right now what's the best case scenario like

59:36uh they don't do anything in our lifetime and they leave it to our kids to worry about because i don't know what else you know it look that i think they're gonna do something i don't think she's gonna step down until he's got taiwan back in the in the fold i think that's you know something that he probably desperately wants to accomplish on his watch so how much more time does he have i you know he set himself up as you know uh president for life basically king for life and so i i think it's um it's it's an inevitable conflict that i don't know that we've really thought through because we don't understand how they're capable of the chinese military is capable of integrating all their various elements china hasn't been at war for a long time right in real terms you know we you know we saw russia you know engage in afghanistan you know a few couple

60:30decades ago whatever um we had a sense of what that was going to look like um we still got it wrong the assessment you know we got it wrong we got their logistics capabilities wrong we got the communications capabilities wrong we we got wrong about how they uh you know what what sort of information was being fed to putin uh and how he was basing his assessments uh so there was a lot of mistakes that were hopefully we get wrong well we got i part of the the the problem we have or had and still have is you know putin's increasingly small circle of key advisors right and so understanding who he's paying attention to and what what he's the advice that he's being given and how that then you know formulates his actions and so i think we we had a real problem in assessing his plans and intentions his motivations and that's always a tough lift from intel perspective right um

61:23unless you've got an asset who's right next to him you know a key advisor or you're just you know tapping into his internal communications uh so that was one of the things we got wrong and then we got we we didn't assess really very well um you know all the look they got everything wrong they couldn't figure out their supply lines right their communications were awful their command and control was terrible which is why they've lost so many generals so they've they've had a series of problems it's even a harder lift to assess china's capabilities right now because um again in part they haven't been at war for a long time and there's more to it right they how are they going to integrate all their various military elements how are they going to use cyber you know for this effort if they move on taiwan um and you know i don't want to say we're

62:17unprepared because we're not we always game these things out and we've got lots of scenarios but i will say that you know we're there's there's a kind of a rush on to make sure that we're we're up to speed and so because again we had our resources focused elsewhere but you know i again to your most important question which is how does it all end uh nobody really knows do you think that i mean if they moved next year do we think the bite administration would go to war with china or would they say okay we're going to we're going to supply taiwan um we're not going to put any boots on the ground we're not going to get in direct conflict with china and we'll sanction china well that's a lot more difficult than it than it sounds right we can sanction russia you know from here until sunday because we're not really that intertwined we're

63:06very intertwined with with china right now uh from an economic perspective and so yeah there's there's a there's a lot of questions here as to what could happen and look the chinese are they're doing the same thing on their side of the table they're trying to figure out you know what what are we going to do that whole uh make america first thing received a lot of pushback from people particularly on the left because they looked at it in terms of like that that's a nationalistic xenophobic problematic perspective but i think a lot of people's eyes got woken up a lot of people's eyes got opened up during the pandemic when we realized how much what we need just in terms of medication and electronics and chips how much of it was being produced overseas and how little of what we make here is required i mean we don't make enough here to run the

64:02country we don't have the manufacturing capabilities that we would need to be completely independent we're not independent we need this stuff from and that can be changed but that's going to take a long time it's going to take a long time it's going to take a lot of resources to get people on board there's a there's a lot of there's so many areas we should be investing money into and instead of 80 billion dollars into the irs i just pulled that one out of my ass but i just i just i thought i was thinking about money that the us government invests and i just remembered that they're pumping 80 billion dollars 87 000 new irs agents and you know and everybody who supports that thinks they're going to go after those people that aren't paying their fair share all those rich guys but the problem is those rich guys have top shelf accountants that are making sure

64:49that all the eyes are dotted and tees are crossed it's middle class americans that they're going to go after they're going to go after people that don't have the resources they're going to go after people that may have you know fudged a little here and there and they're going to bring those folks down right and i mean and and it's interesting because when they first rolled this out um much like a lot of things that the the current administration does and again not that you know this they've done some good things they've done some some you know odd things but um their messaging always seems to be off right so they're always kind of batting cleanup they'll still do something and the next thing you know john kirby or somebody's got to roll out and explain that's not what we meant this is what we meant so when they rolled out this this

65:28the fact that there was 80 billion dollars in there to to uh uh pump into the irs and there's 87 000 new agents and uh they had really no message right and so immediately people were just losing their [ __ ] yeah and then because of democrats when that happens they are very good at then circling the wagons and coming up with a a narrative right and disseminating that out and making sure that everybody pushes that same talking point and then they stick to that talking point so the talking point then became after a few days of terrible optics on this was well the irs has been underfunded for you know years decades and because of that we haven't been able to go after the billionaires because we we've haven't been able to hire all those you know really clever agents who can do those sophisticated investigations of the billionaires and so this is all about

66:23refunding the irs because it's been underfunded we're going to improve the technology and we're going to be able to go after those billionaires finally okay um i'm not buying that why do you think they did it why do you think they decided to ramp up and hire 87 000 new irs agents to tone of the tune rather of 80 billion dollars yeah um look because they want to raise money but how much can they raise well they're claiming they're going to get 200 billion dollars over a period of time out of this increased effort so they're going to make money eventually the government will make money from who though uh well they argue nobody other than wealthy people just wealthy people the wealthy people that have been cheating yes that's their argument is basically there's so much money sloshing around out there that the wealthy people haven't been paying their

67:12taxes and they've been they've been cheating and hiding it that we need we need all these new agents because that's where the money is is there an argument there um you know what i is there an argument that you could probably uh uh i i don't you know that's a good question i don't know i mean i'm not being not being a wealthy person i don't know but i mean i made an assumption earlier that i really shouldn't have that the wealthy people are paying their fair share of taxes but i think a lot of them are i think uh i think corporations get a bad name look i mean corporations you know people say well look the oil and gas company you know this one you know paid no taxes well the previous year they suffered a 35 billion dollar loss right because they were you know exploring and reinvesting money into the company whatever so there's there's a there's

67:57it's more complicated than just saying people aren't paying their fair share but uh look are are people with a lot of money willing to spend some of that on accountants to make sure that they don't pay any more tax than absolutely necessary sure if i had if i had a lot of money that's exactly what i do i would pay what i'm supposed to pay but i wouldn't pay a penny more right yeah that's what people make arguments when they're allowed these tax loopholes they use them because they're there yes yeah and they're they're legal so are they going to go after people that have uh overseas accounts that are illegal like what is the how are they going to get all that money well and i'm sure that that'll be a part of it yeah if i'm if i'm housing money offshore uh and i'm not doing it in a way that's allowed then those and those investigations can be very complicated um and

68:46so you know asset tracing in general is a difficult process and when you're talking about someone with you know a couple billion dollars and uh you know several dozen entities spread around the world um then yes it can be it can be a complicated process and i have no doubt that you need auditors who are you know financially savvy and sophisticated enough to do that i always thought the irs had those people because that's what they were doing right i mean if you're if if you're a middle-class person then theoretically you're filing your forms right you're doing the thing you're supposed to do and um it's not over it's overly complicated i you know i guess what i i would say is instead of hiring 87 000 new agents spending 80 billion dollars on this process maybe they could have simplified the tax code right and come up with something

69:42better i'm not clever enough to figure out what that would be but maybe that was an option that they could have thought of but i think the optic is also good we're going after the billionaire that's an easy argument yeah that's an easy argument to make and everyone's like yeah [ __ ] the billionaire [ __ ] the man he's you know he's screwing us over um and then that helps to lead to today's environment where a lot of people are jealous or envious or can't stand the fact that someone's got a lot of money i mean well they feel like the system's rigged they don't feel like the person has a lot of money because they had an amazing product and even though they paid their fair share they they did something that's extraordinary so they receive extraordinary compensation yeah that's not the narrative that people hear

70:21you know the the narrative that people hear is you know you work your ass off you work your tail of the bone you can barely make ends meet and the reason for that is someone's out there stealing more than they deserve right not that you provide exactly the amount of resources that are worthy of the compensation you receive yeah nobody wants to hear that message no that's not that's not satisfying but that's what scares me is that there's so many people in this country that if they said we are going to uh just redistribute wealth in this country in a way that it makes it equal for everyone so there's no way that anyone is poor in this country we're just gonna take the money from other people and then but who's gonna do that and how that but people would sign up for that if we said that if they said that they made it some sort of a way like if they framed it in

71:11a way that's gonna change the country and make it in a better a better place the thing that they don't understand is these greedy [ __ ] that are out there sucking up all that money they're sucking up all that money because that's what they signed up for and in the process of doing that that's how amazing things get made because these people that are these greedy [ __ ] they are willing to work 16-hour days and put together these companies that achieve extraordinary amounts of money yeah they they achieve extraordinary amounts of success and and they employ people and they and they create spin-off companies and they create inventions and and patents and and so yeah i i've always been a firm believer in and maybe part of it's naive because yes there are some people out there screwing the system and there

71:59are some people that are undeserving of of the massive wealth that they have because it just kind of fell on their lap but whatever who knows but i don't i i don't really give a [ __ ] my theory has always been i did all i want to do is work as hard as i can i'd like to do as well as i can and that's it i just want to provide for my kids and i've always really held the belief that if you work a little bit harder i tell my three knuckleheads this all the time if you work out a little bit harder you can do exponentially better yeah you can you can achieve success but you gotta you gotta work harder and that that doesn't imply that people who aren't doing well aren't working hard a lot of people are they're working hard yeah it's not that but you have to think hard too you know i had a science teacher in high school that was a dork

72:45but he had this uh one thing that stuck with me forever he was a really weird guy but he said you cannot get by in this world by just working hard you have to think hard and thinking hard it's more important because you have to choose which path that you're on right and you have to think very carefully because to back up and start again is far more difficult than to choose a correct path in the first place and there's so many people in this country that feel entitled and they feel like the government owes them something and they don't understand where resources are coming from they don't understand like this whole capitalism gain that we're in we just they just think that it's rigged because they don't have it and it's almost always particularly people that are at the beginning of this journey right you're starting off you make 50 000 a year and

73:27you find out someone's worth 50 billion like well that can't be fair yeah but fair is not really what it's about you're playing a game and you can choose to play the game as a waiter where you have a very limited amount of money that you're ever going to make this is the amount of you have good days and bad days but this is this is the cap or you can choose the ceo route where you know you can have a company and you will get bonuses and they'll be disgustingly extraordinary yeah yeah and you know what i'll tell you i like i've got a i've got a business right it's a consulting firm can i say the name of it yeah it's called portman square group and i've been doing this it was under a a different name and then we were able to do a management buyout so it's portman square group where it's an intelligence and security services firm

74:15point being is it's it's our business right my you know my wife and i own she's got a crisis communications firm and so we merged that with with all my businesses and so point being is um you know when people hear that i've had these conversations with people they go oh you got your own firm yeah you got your own company you must be just you know rolling and don't right i worry about making payroll right all the time that's my primary concern is i want to make payroll i've had people working for me for for a decade and a half or more and those those people are raising their kids right they're doing they're building a life and have built a life and my responsibility is make sure that they have that right and that there have been times when i haven't taken anything right to make sure i can make payroll right and i worry about i wake up at two in

75:00the morning worrying about something right and so it never ends to your point you work 16 hour days yeah i argue you never turn off right if we if we go on a you know on a holiday somewhere i'm i'm constantly worried about something right and that's just what you do but i did it and i left the government to do this because i wanted to have possibly unlimited possibilities right i wanted to i didn't want a ceiling right i didn't want a cap and i knew what working for the government i always knew what i was going to make no matter how well i was doing and so i you know i do personally kind of take exception sometimes when people you know you know piss on you know people who are doing well because i don't sometimes think they see the amount of work that particularly small you know medium-sized companies what people put into that right and the

75:48amount of effort they put into it as owners and uh proprietors of these things and you got to work your ass off but you're doing it in the hopes that you know maybe there isn't a cap maybe there isn't a ceiling maybe it could this you know you don't know where you're going to go and not knowing where you're going to go i think is pretty exciting it's it's a real challenge it's interesting but i don't know where i was going with that but it's just it's un comfortable you know it's it's a if you're going to start a business you you the the unexpected the unknown it looms over everything you're you're yeah there's a reason why those guys all have heart attacks that's exactly what it is it's not it's not fun i mean i can't imagine running an enormous corporation i mean i'm very fortunate that we run this podcast with kind of a skeleton group

76:39because that's it's a quality skeleton group that's jamie's the [ __ ] he's the goat if it wasn't for him i'd have like four other people doing his [ __ ] job and it would be annoying did you see what he did when he pulled up that dodge charger he's always on top of it he's psychic oh let me i'm going to try to test him on something jamie there was a graphic and i saw it at one point that showed what i was talking about with huawei with the i-25 corridor and it showed where the regional telecoms providers is located that they've cornered the market on this chinese company has and where our icbm sites are and it was i forget who had the best there it is look at that so all everything that's in red is the regional telecoms the u.s regional telecoms provider and all their towers are outfitted with uh huawei and zte and other chinese telecom gear

77:36um up and down that corridor which connects wyoming and colorado and then has these arteries running off into nebraska and all those dots or icbm facilities so that is wild if you just think that there was some randomness to the fact that you know this chinese company was busy uh working with vero to establish this yeah anyway i thought that was a good graphic yeah of particular concern was huawei routinely selling cheap equipment to rural providers in cases that appeared to be unprofitable for huawei but which placed its equipment near military assets yeah yeah [ __ ] yeah so there oh there you go but i mean is there a way to circumvent this or to prevent this without the military and the united states government being completely integrated with companies yeah that's it's a really good that's our fear right our fear is that we to beat

78:34them or to to stop them we become them yeah that's a it's a really good question and it's important we've got a firewall people don't i think they're obviously the skeptics and people who you know think it's the one world government or whatever but but yeah one of our uh strengths and weaknesses is this sort of this firewall between the us government uh military and the way that we support private business right and by that i mean um the chinese regime or russia even france a lot of companies in uh countries in the eu even their remit for the intel operations there in that country is to help support their private sector right so intelligence that's collected can be disseminated to those companies sometimes favored companies uh within that country to help uh their development their growth securing additional you know contracts

79:27beating foreign competition whatever it is um and we've always had this firewall it says well we don't want to do that because favoring one company over another is going to you know screw up the the idea the free markets and capitalism and all the rest of it so you can argue it's a strength you can argue it's a weakness but you're right i mean how do we get around that well in part we get around it by bringing our capabilities uh you know up to speed doing more on our own uh rehousing a lot of the the manufacturing back here in the u.s and so these are the things that we've talked about and that you know this administration previous administrations have tried to do but it's difficult right it's tough it's it's costly it's you know it's it's it's uh it's not an easy process it takes time and sometimes it seems like we're not making any progress at all so wow

80:17but what do you think the administration's done well you said they've done some stupid things but they've done some things well well politically they've they've played a pretty good game politically recently so they've had uh i think the chips and science act is not bad i know people saying well why would we subsidize you know companies that are making money you know here in the us that are making lots of money why would we give them subsidies and well for the very reasons we talked about you got to do that right that's a that's a smart move um yeah you could argue putting a cap on on uh on uh medicare costs out-of-pocket costs i think that seems like the sort of thing you can you can get behind i mean i'm not a you know that i think that's a good move um i think they've been hijacked by the the climate change activists and parties so i i don't put

81:06that in a negative corner right i think fine you want to talk about it you want to focus on doing some things great but um i think there's a the the focus on that is a little bit insane at this point i think one of the things on the negative column is the way they've dealt with the oil and gas industry right and we've seen that right i mean germany right now is trying to figure out how to get away from from russia as a gas provider well you know what you know who could have helped them do this and helped us in the in the at the same time it would have been us we could have if we hadn't layered on additional regulation you know as soon as biden came in and he was very clear about going to war with the fossil fuel industry you know what fine you can i can't you could have they walked that well i don't think in a meaningful way they've they've

81:48they're they're i think they're talking on both sides of their mouth i think they they haven't eased up on regulations uh for the oil and gas industry so so no they're and these companies you know they they don't make investments based on you know the next six months right they make investments on you know a fairly long timeline so you know when when biden during his campaign you know a couple years ago talked about he's putting an end to the fossil fuel industry they pay attention right and that kind of directs where they're going and by the way not to i'm you know i'm not lobbying for the oil and gas industry but i am lobbying for the idea that you can do all of these various uh you know uh energy initiatives at the same time um they invest a [ __ ] ton of money in new technologies in clean energy you know you look like a company like bp and

82:40they're they're out there you know uh saying we're gonna make the non-carbon part of our operations our primary revenue earner in you know the next whatever 10 15 years so they're putting a lot of money into it because they realize that's a market they're doing it for capitalistic reasons because they want to make money down the road but i guess my point is they're investing in it right i think we just should be smarter but anyway so that's it's part of the problem this political narrative that you if you want votes from people on the left you have to say you're green you you support clean energy and that the climate crisis is going to kill us all like it it's like you know what i'm saying like there's this there's these narratives that people will um i've talked to people that talk about like climate change and uh we had uh steve koonin

83:32steve kuhn and on who is a physicist who wrote a book called unsettled and it's all about how the climate change is settled you know the climate science is settled he's like it's not and he went over long-term graphs that show that what we're looking at is our lifetime the lifetime of the people before us and this measurable increase in in climate change and he's like but if you go a thousand years which is really what you're supposed to do when you're looking at the the world because there's been these ups and downs that have always existed and they're very similar that although we are having an impact with our carbon footprint no doubt but these changes in terms of the temperature of the earth this they've always existed the sahara desert used to be vast green i mean it would be a [ __ ] tropical jungle 15 000 years ago or

84:25whatever it was and these things are just inevitable part of the cycle of earth we have to factor that in we can't ignore the fact that human beings are impacting climate in a negative way with our carbon footprint and with our particulates that we pump into the air in that in in you know places like um was it what was it um that we looked it was a south dakota was it no nebraska indiana indiana right indiana has multiple coal plants in this one area that are so bad like people's cars are covered with a thin layer of soot every day and they're breathing in this [ __ ] so you have a disproportionate amount of people with cardio respiratory issues and allergies and reactions to the particulates in the area and then people say well how do you fix that well nuclear clean nuclear and to do nuclear-powered plants that are far

85:16more sophisticated than the ones in fukushima with only you know one step removed back-up plan that if that fails they're [ __ ] which is what they are they're [ __ ] right but that's not we were talking about old technology and that nuclear in general the the if if it's engineered correctly to modern standards is the best version of clean energy that we're capable of producing but everybody's terrified of it because nuclear politically if you say nuclear power was like oh you're going to kill us all well you everybody thinks immediately with the china syndrome yes you know what is this chernobyl three mile island [ __ ] this so i think it's it but yeah i mean look we've been making progress think about what london looked like in you know pre-world war ii with the cold you know that was burning and the fact

86:01that you know they did literally you know that you couldn't see you know 10 feet in front of you because the the air was so bad china to this day still has this problem you go to some of these cities in china and then i mean nobody's building coal factory or coal plants faster than china right again um again not to get back on this but but you know when you talk about the world and where the world's going you talk about climate change and you talk about you know environmental concerns yeah i mean the reality is we can do these things we can make a change we can try to make differences i agree that you know there's no doubt we contribute to the problem i i i think it's a little presumptuous to say that we're going to we're going to cool the earth in 30 years or whatever i mean we're going to stop this you know climate change from

86:45happening okay but it doesn't mean you shouldn't make good faith efforts in areas that you can from a technology perspective but you know i i think with if if china if india aren't going to make any meaningful changes and they're not then you know overall you know we just have to be pragmatic about what it means in terms of you know global change right we're going to do our part and that's great and we always do but we also have to be realistic and understand what that means in terms of our national security interests and this isn't also part of the problem is that these discussions like what we're having right now this you know we're an hour and a half 20 minutes into this conversation like these these are long drawn out discussions where there's a lot of nuance to it there's a lot of things to discuss but politically when people are getting elected when they're

87:35discussing these things in terms of like trying to run for office and and trying to push a narrative that people are going to accept and be enthusiastic about for voting these these things don't get discussed in this way so most people don't hear these conversations unless they're listening to podcasts or unless they're listening to some long youtube dissertation on it so most people they just have this narrative in their head i've talked to so many people particularly on the left that are you know climate change is going to kill my children you need to we need to do something now and they don't have all the information at their disposal they just have a narrative right it's a way we live in this this sound by culture right yeah we've always got attention deficit disorder and it's all very tough to to sit and and watch a a documentary or watch an actual

88:23newscast it starts and puts everything in context people just don't have the time or they don't the interest or they don't have the ability to sit still long enough to do it um but but you're right yeah i mean everyone you've got uh you know everyone's got like a shallow sort of level of knowledge about a lot of things and a lot of that knowledge comes from social media i mean i don't know how many i mean good god the the uh every time you your twitter is a great example of that you know when there's an issue you know when pelosi goes to taiwan suddenly you've i had no idea we had so many you know experts on taiwan and the politics of taiwan and you know what that meant or you know monkey box everyone's an expert on monkey box so people people don't just say their opinion anymore right they say it as if it's fact right and so yeah they're convinced of that but

89:13they're convinced of it without having a body of effort of evidence that they've got a real comprehensive review of all the pros and cons because that's takes time and everyone's busy you know putting food on the table or you know and there's so many issues to think about like this it's not just that one there's so many different things going on simultaneously but it's it is i don't know how i don't know how we get to a a good spot when when you're right when when both sides you know when the when the republicans are the democrats when the right when the left when they talk in these sort of very narrow terms when they can motivate their base through just a very thin uh layer of information where they just throw a narrative out there and people say yeah that's it that's what that's what i believe in too and everybody's everybody's very siloed

90:07as i don't know how you get away from that because that would imply that you need to change somehow um you know human nature and human nature right now is just you know i look at [ __ ] you look at kids nowadays and including my kids and you know you try to engage them in a conversation about something of substance and you just see that it's hard for them to to sit still long enough right to really go through it because they're so used to you know just changing topics or changing you know uh i don't know what i don't know what it is talk mindset take time it's a tick tock mindset yeah they're just constantly inundated with new information new stimulus yeah and that's what they're accustomed to we took we this is a complete left turn uh my wife and i took the the three uh knuckleheads to uh to europe for uh july for the month of july this summer we

91:02thought we were going to immerse them in some history and culture and everything and so i thought so i i went through this whole thing i planned this this little trip out and uh we started off uh in a little village in the cotswolds in the uk i love the cotswold it's it's a you know i have i imagine someday i'm going to retire move there and just investigate the occasional murder in some quaint english village that'll be my my that's your move that'll be my move and it's going to be a cbs drama series yeah yeah me and angela lansbury it's going to be great and so uh she wrote european edition that's right i'll talk like dick van dyke from mary poppins uh so so i i rented this little cottage in this little tiny little village and i thought you know we'll take the boys for hikes in the countryside and uh we'll tour around we'll look at you know some

91:57castles and some sights and everything and now mind you they you know all three of them you know i like the outdoors and so the hikes were great they loved that part of it but uh it was pretty clear after the first day or so that the quaintness of an english village wasn't really for them they were like all right what the [ __ ] and and all three of them were like after the first couple hours you know they said the wi-fi sucks in this it's no wi-fi what are you talking about i said let's go out and look at another church and let's go you know we'll take i'll take you for a pub lunch it'll be fun and uh but it was it was fine so then we moved from there uh went to london but anyway ended up in paris at one point and uh we marched their asses all over paris right showing them all the sights and including we took them to the louvre to

92:48the museum for like six hours which i'm sure for these kids right what are they 15 and 13 and 11 it was kind of torture right at a certain point and um after they looked at the sort of the egyptian antiquities the mummies and some of the you know uh medieval swords and things i think that was pretty much all yeah by the way you go in to look at the mona lisa and the louvre i don't know if you've ever been there no it's you walk in it's a massive massive room right because the mona lisa and they're far into this room you can barely see it is the mona lisa hanging on how close did they let you get um well you could get you could probably get uh within maybe 10 feet of it if you could get there but the problem is this is what you're looking at you got a entire room full of all of these people you can barely get there and it's a crush and

93:43every single one of those individuals is taking a picture of this at the mona lisa and so everybody they're holding their cameras up so i i made a point of walking the boys said we're gonna go see the mona lisa and they were like what what's up with the mona lisa i said we should be we're here we're gonna go see it we walked in and my oldest boy scooter like he walks in looks at it we must have been we were at the far end of this room you could barely see this thing he held up his camera and his photo his phone took a picture like this and said okay what are we going to do now we walked out so we're walking them we're walking their asses down to the the notre dame this is when i knew that we were probably uh our kids had attention deficit disorder at this point yeah so we're walking along and uh emma and i are up ahead and and uh we're

94:30talking to scooter and the two younger ones slugo and mugsy are back behind us they're dragging their asses a little bit right it's hot day in paris and but i can hear them talking to each other and i hear i hear muggsy say where are we going and we're walking to the notre dame and and i looked at my wife and i said well i i kind of think we're done so that point of this story is that evening after we finished walking around the sun was going down and it is in paris is pretty special but the sun's going down we're walking back most people have gotten off the streets they're just kind of everyone's all the tourists are gone and we walk by his place maximes and max seems it's kind of a burlesque place old old school kind of burst burlesque place so again my wife and i walking up ahead three boys are back there somewhere and the oldest one tall enough to look

95:24over the kind of the curtains in the front of maxim's realizes it's a burlesque show and so i got these great pictures i turned around and there they are down there they stopped right and and scooter's got mugsy on his shoulders because he's not tall enough to look over the thing and and and uh sluggo's hanging from this still railing it's outside and they're staring and they were captivated right french titties right and then and my wife looks at me says are you gonna are you gonna stop them i said no i'm gonna video this so i just took pictures and so anyway afterwards i asked i asked the oldest one after this month of travel we finished up in greece i said what was best part of the trip he said french titties he's 15. he's 15. what do you expect yeah i couldn't what i couldn't argue with him and that's history yeah yeah if somebody tried to drag me around when i

96:21was 15 i would have been just as bored i think that's more fascinating for people with perspective and a longer life and you get to look back and go you know this was thousands of years ago these people built this this is pretty crazy that we can go walk around it today that's how my kids felt at the vatican you know i was beyond fascinated yeah yeah but my kids were [ __ ] bored out of their mind never been to the vatican it's insane when did you go uh we went well was we're in rome again this summer uh we didn't go to the vatican this time though but we went i guess uh before the pandemic so it was three years ago maybe four it might have been it might have been four years ago but uh the sheer amount of artwork even for kids is it's it's unbelievable like it's a museum for people that have attention deficit

97:15because there's [ __ ] every there's so much it's really like they're hoarders are you saying the catholic church has yeah i think they uh i don't i don't i think the irs should investigate those [ __ ] that's what i think i think it's been a lot of thought that the idea that those [ __ ] people don't pay taxes is bonkers to me oh yeah the idea that they have accumulated the kind of wealth they've accumulated and then they've set up this thing called the vatican which is essentially a country inside of a city that's a hundred plus it's like 100 plus acres and they they have no extradition so if someone's uh you know a confirmed sex offender from another country they hoard them over there and they can do whatever they want i mean that's literally the history of the country i mean it sounds like it sounds like a horrible thing to say if

98:07you said hey this there's this one religion that's synonymous with raping and they don't pay taxes he'd be like what yeah not only that like the people that have been the pope that are the head of this have actually moved people from other organizations where they were accused of molesting children to new places where unsuspecting kids like uh ratzinger before he was removed that [ __ ] guy took one particular priest that was accused of molesting children and moved him to a new place where he molested a hundred deaf kids that's real i mean there's this is all documented stuff yeah no they spent a long time just just covering up covering up and moving people around and never punishing people for it yeah and just accepting it as part of whatever it is that the catholic church is about which is madness i mean it was any other

99:04any other organization that was synonymous with molesting kids it would be the subject of international debate they would close them down they would shut them and they found out how much wealth they had acquired and what what they're doing with it it's pretty stunning that it's just sort of legacied in well i think i guess it's like everything else right it's all it's very layered so you have the people who um are part of the religion who are disgusted by that yeah and then you've got people who somehow are able to kind of look the other way and find accommodation with it and the sense of okay well i i'm still a devout catholic and despite all the flaws and the structure of this operation uh yeah i don't i don't get it yeah that's most people most people that are catholic are good people and they they subscribe or they ascribe to the best aspects of the

100:00religion be a good person and you know follow the good book and you know go to church because it's a great structure for ethics and morals and you know and then they hear about this stuff that they don't want to hear about they get angry yeah you know that's one area we haven't you know at the end of the day not that this is apropos absolutely anything but and i'm sure everybody was curious about my religious beliefs um but i feel i do feel like i i kind of dropped the ball on providing some kind of religious platform right for the kids right and i think i don't know what that would have been but i do think that there's in a sense it's nice to have something bigger than yourself whatever that is right and the community that used to provide and i think part of the problem in today's world i think is people don't have enough community and whether it's their

100:50neighborhood their church whatever it is but having said that man we you know sunday would roll around and i'd be like yeah go mow the lawn or something you know and it just it never became a part of what we do i think it's historical like in terms of like human beings human beings have always had some sort of a structure of belief system that they subscribe to and this has always been the case with tribes with large communities of people there's there's always like a belief system that they use that's beneficial to the greater good of the community yeah i think if you just made because i was lazy and i didn't invest time in figuring that out in terms of what to do with the kids um i think i just landed on some spot that said look try to do the best you can right live the best way you can right and you're kind of playing the odds right if there

101:48is something bigger out there and you know i finish up tomorrow and get hit by a bus or whatever um then you know i've played the odds i tried to be a good person and if there is something bigger than great right um i don't know it's it's a pretty rudimentary way of looking at at life but i would like to think there's something other than just you know you die and you're done and then yeah well that's the the greater picture but just in terms of like uh a moral scaffolding and just in terms of having some sort of structure a way that people genuinely agree will be better for everybody that's one of the good things that a church provides if it's a good church and it's a good religion it provides people with a structure it gives people peace it makes people feel better and it brings people together to worship together and they they leave there hopefully with a

102:39a better feeling of community yeah yeah and i think for a structure for kids too there's i think there's something to be said about that about the community of of a church and again sort of that idea that it's there's there's a bigger something right yeah i i you know again the problem i always had with organized religion was when people a religion would say and we have a lock on it right yeah you're thinking like i i don't know i don't think that's actually how it should or how it works i don't know if one religion has has a lock on the truth um well i think we have religions in this country which we have religions for secular people and that that's like i mean mark andreessen had a very good rant about what woke is it that woke is these these people that believe in the progressive movement they they treat it as a religion there's excommunication there's

103:34punishment there's there's rules that you can't question there's things and and guidelines that must be followed or you'll be punished yeah i mean i i think yeah you could argue climate change is a religion yeah i guess you could argue any i mean a lot of things yeah um political ideologies yeah they they're we treat them like religions in the absence of religions i think it's almost like a default way that human beings look at things yeah not to not to dive into a minefield here but i was i was surprised that they overturned roe i will say i was maybe i was stupid and wasn't paying attention but i thought we'd kind of moved on and i don't know i just i was what do you think that was about why why do you think that that took place well i mean clearly because we ended up with more conservative judges on there than than not i think they were just

104:31trying to return the issue to the states um i don't know how you have and i'm in a state um idaho where they you know they the state legislature was gonna put some crazy ass you know rules in place you know like i don't know whether it was a trigger law or not but basically saying almost no cases could be you know considered uh uh allowable for abortion i'd i i just again i'm sort of that mindset that says you know reasonable people could have come up with a reasonable solution yeah which said you know do you want to abort it at you know nine months in one day no probably not um but do you want to leave it is there to be you know good options for a woman to make that decision on her own well yeah so i mean come on find a [ __ ] middle ground here but i have been surprised by the number of states i again i'm clearly not paying

105:27attention well texas has brought it down to six weeks which is crazy yeah it's like you your period's late and then it's too late yeah you just don't know yeah you don't know um so i don't but you know it was i always for a while i always thought i was reading the tea leaves pretty well in terms of any administration and and where things were going from a policy perspective but um i i mentioned it to my wife i said well i was i didn't read that one well i just didn't see that coming it's also in terms of people that were on the fence that were you know kind of like leaning republican because of the way the country's going economically and all the the different things that are have been put in place by this administration that people disagreed with that they think is damaging to the economy and damaging to the overall quality of life and so they were like on

106:13the fence and then that comes along and they go oh well this comes with that [ __ ] yeah well [ __ ] that right and i think that's that's going to be the thing and and it's always been that it's always been that topic that's like kicked you know the republicans the conservatives in the ass right but they can't let it go right they just and i get it okay you're going to have you can have a segment there's a sliver there of of devout religious people who just say absolutely in no circumstances i'm thinking well okay well then what the [ __ ] but they're also i don't know it's it's like i said it's a minefield i guess i shouldn't have brought it up but it's it's it was uh it was surprising i do think it's going to kick the republicans in the ass they're not going to they'll probably take the house but probably not as

106:52big a margin as they thought because i think it will cause people to think no i think it most certainly will yeah it's uh there and there's also talk about going after contraception there's people that want to take it to the next level which is really wild yeah in terms of preventing pregnancy and you know preventing pregnancy with the uh plan b pill preventing pregnancy even with condoms there's people out there that you get far enough out they're gonna outlaw condoms they think sex should be for procreation they think that abstinence is something you could actually teach people wow which is hilarious that's like getting a semi-drunk person and and telling them no more drinks yeah do you imagine if sex was only for procreation it's crazy so you look at somebody who's got two kids you think you'd pour son of a [ __ ]

107:37what are you gonna do about the porn industry yeah you're gonna outlaw that i mean that's yeah that's the dirty little dark secret of america and most of the world it's a a giant industry that people want to pretend doesn't exist yeah that is uh i mean consumed by what percentage of the population some enormous percentage either it's like a small percentage that's consuming an enormous amount of it i don't think they're about 24 7. yeah i don't think it's been investigated but the sheer amount of traffic that's really okay what is the percentage of internet traffic that is pornography let's look at that because the the actual data i think the actual like when you look at the gigabytes and terabytes of data that's just porn that's on the internet now mind you a a terabyte is a terabyte is like a thousand megabytes yeah it's like

108:3170 000 gigabytes i think it's like 70 million pages of data is a terabyte so let's see what it says internet pornography by the numbers a significant threat how much of the internet consists website and mobile searches 13 to twenty percent thirty percent of internet content is porn is it true that seventy percent of internet traffic is no what is that dude it's consumed i heard it yeah okay so we seem to be about a third a third or so of internet traffic somewhere around thirty percent okay porn sites get more visitors each month than that's 2013 though okay now let's break this down by a third of it is is porn now let's break it down by types of porn not kidding yeah right how much is we don't said or boring we don't want it we don't want to go how much is step mom and babies that are porn in an airport pornography it says 35 percent there

109:27uh what does it say 35 of all internet downloads are related to pornography that is incredible 40 million american people regularly visit porn sites what is regular about 200 000 americans are classified as porn addicts 34 of internet users have experienced unwanted exposure wait a minute every day this as i got to disagree with it that can't be an accurate number every day 37 porn videos are created in the us it can't be just what 37 that's it that's it seven pornographic videos are created in the united states every day 2.5 billion emails containing porn or sent or received wow how's doing that 68 million search queries are related to pornography 20 but only but they don't really look they just i'm just curious i'm doing research 25 of total searches is porn hundred and sixteen thousand queries related to child pornography receivers are a little screwy can you

110:26bring that note bring it down just a little bit jamie the uh wait a minute every second 28 258 users are watching pornography on the internet every second three thousand dollars is being spent on pornography that's cheap who's spending who's spending money on porn though now only 372 people look at this every second only 372 people are typing the that seems that seems low that's a lot though one-third of porn viewers are women really or do they identify as women one-third where do you say oh how online pornography affects americans is it one-third our double x chromosome or one-third you know what i'm saying because like what percentage of those people are identifying as women with male genitalia yeah yeah it's got to be it's got to be a number we're looking at women with male child talent yeah oh jesus it's uh but that you know that's the i mean if they want to outlaw

111:38contraception how far away is this thing i've heard yeah this it's not a small amount of people that want that there's a lot of people that think that sex should be for procreation only and uh you know interestingly enough none of those people anybody wants to [ __ ] no it's kind of crazy no nor could they just you know i i yeah that's that's a uh yeah that's that's a crazy thought because if you say okay if you're in a state that wants to essentially uh ban all abortions you know uh and then they also want a bad contraception okay so they want religion yeah what do you i mean in terms of your responsibility for taking care of all those additional children then yeah how's that work i don't know um that's what jail's for that's like cages that's what cages along the border are for oh god um so uh just weird it's it's weird our way of looking at things

112:41well so blind yeah it's um again i i i don't think maybe i'm romanticizing some past era i don't i guess i am because maybe there was never a time when reasonable people found common ground and and you know you could compromise and and find policies and create uh legislation that you know could take the best from both sides and there you go so maybe that actually never happened um you know it's uh it's a little bit like the idea you think about how we're going to have the family over for thanksgiving and everyone's going to get along it's going to look like a norman rockwell painting and it doesn't happen you know everyone's pissing and moaning and arguing with each other so i think but the older you get maybe the you know the more you think well back in the day we used to compromise you know ronald reagan and tip o'neill would sit

113:24in the back room and you know have a drink and get some good piece of legislation done i don't know that seems like a thing of the past and i think uh part of that you could attribute to donald trump like the polarization of this country has never been more extreme yeah yeah i 100 agreed but he's coming back and i know if you remember this when maybe it was pre-pandemic when we made a bet i think i bet you a thousand bucks that said trump was not gonna run again so you owe me a thousand bucks well well he hasn't he hasn't he's gonna be yeah they're trying to yeah i'm probably gonna lose that but yeah yeah i think you're gonna yeah why did you want to bet that why would you think he wouldn't run again because i was being optimistic and thinking that you know we'd move on and we'd we'd uh we'd uh find you know different candidates and and uh we'd

114:20i i guess because i was a [ __ ] idiot um there's a large swath in this country that thinks the election was stolen which people have need to understand that has always been the way a large swath of americans both on the left and the right have felt about elections there was a documentary on hbo god what was it called i forget but it was all about voting machines and how hackable voting machines were this is the die bold machines that are contributed to the republican party this company this corporation that did this and they made these machines and so hacking democracy was the name of the documentary and they proved in this documentary that they can affect these machines with third-party input so it wasn't just a matter of one person voting the other person collecting it that a third person could come in and manipulate the numbers and that they had

115:12access to these machines in that way that these machines were actually set up for third party input this is terrifying to be because they said oh my god the republicans are going to steal the election right and that was that was the thought process behind it and now it's oh my god the democrats have stolen the election it's like they felt like john kerry got robbed when he ran against uh george bush and al gore al gore got robbed there's always been this section of the country that and that's very dangerous it's dangerous a if it's accurate right but it's also dangerous if it's a narrative if people don't believe that we live in a democracy so when someone does win even if they win legitimacy legitimately which you know would be great that's best case scenario but people don't want to believe yeah they're always going to say that that was the case in 2016 when

116:01trump won well i was going to say yeah hillary clinton that's a good example she spent the next several years arguing that she had won and but you're right uh trump because of his demeanor is the way that he interacts with people um and his social media usage we'd never really seen that before also the way he's ramped up dumb people yeah like the really dumb people that don't look in that all they do is just like [ __ ] rah-rah and they don't look at this in terms of like what kind of an impact does this have if you you can't just think of your side and like i want our side to win because it's supposed to be one side supposed to be the united states of america we're a community we're a group of people we bought we we're all bound together and we we do get together in times of great conflict like post 9 11. yeah i said that 911 was

116:52a horrible thing but one thing that came out of it that i found inspiring was how many american flags around people's cars immediately afterwards it's like people on the right and on the left it was like one of the rare times in the world where people joined together in this country and said hey we are faced with a threat from outside and we need to all yeah group together because this could happen anywhere and everywhere and this is the time to be patriotic we haven't really seen that since world war ii right right i mean that was i mean with the exception of the japanese american interns uh yeah they didn't actually probably feel the same way but um we hadn't seen that and i think it it it was a it was an interesting lesson for a lot of people but it wasn't really learned right it was it was a moment in time and we don't tend to it's like a

117:46lot of things we do we don't tend to learn from anything in any particular moment we're impacted by it on a motive level we think okay great but no one's looking back and saying okay you know here's what we need to do in order to be one country in order to be you know focused on what does it mean you know to move the needle as as one people right it just doesn't happen so and i think you're right trump was a you know because of the nature of the beast it just was part of it um i mean you look at you look at the reaction to the mar-a-lago raid and the immediate reaction of of like a department of justice and the bureau or you know are [ __ ] us over and they're doing there's it's the same thing if you if you lose your uh your faith in the the systems right whether it's law enforcement or it's the justice or whatever in the country just

118:40like with the political system it is a very dangerous thing yeah and you can always argue that okay you know are they having problems can they do better do they need to adjust was this a mistake whatever but that's different than losing faith in the system right and that's one of the things that bad actors from other countries are promoting and that's one of the weird things about these troll farms and these social media campaigns that they do via bots and be a hired actors like they're making people more frustrated and argue more about this by design yeah because again nobody nobody scratches the surface they read something it's like what you were saying before they read something and that's it that's their narrative that's what they yes that i believe that and it's a fact it's not just something i've read and i'm not going to try to figure out who

119:30actually you know posted that or who put it down so and and russia is a great example of that russia does that better than china even china is engaged in it and china is working hard to influence u.s public opinion about policies that relate to china or what they view as things of in in their interest but russia at the end of the day is is you know they're at the top of the heap of uh state-sponsored operations trying to influence what's going on here in the u.s and it's effective very effective and it's interesting because you know elon musk is a fairly polarizing character as well and his desire to figure out how many bots there are on twitter before he purchases it was met with so much resistance from people that are somehow another opposed to him whether they're opposed to him because he's a billionaire or opposed to him because of his tweets or what

120:28whatever it is it's like hey that's really important because these bots aren't just used by like people [ __ ] around these bots are used by people that are trying to they're trying to encourage dissent yeah they're trying to encourage arguments they're current try to encourage and erode our faith in our institutions yeah and then and they are very sophisticated they're very good at it and you know whether they're trying to foment um racism oh you know it's it's a fundamentally racist country so you know let's work on that that's a that's if you're like listing out things that as a as a foreign uh nation that doesn't have our best interests at heart if you're russia you're saying here's what i want to do yeah you're going to look to create dissatisfaction within the country for a variety of things your way of life the quality of your life the

121:20belief in in you know the justice system whatever it might be oh yeah the political system's screwed because it's it's all rigged right those are the things that you do and and and again we don't we're not very good at it we talked about it you know coming out of 2016 and and you know over the past handful of years but again it's it's it's not a substantive discussion right and [ __ ] that gets investigated people you know they'll they'll get all up in arms on capitol hill and politician will insist on an investigation but you know washington dc is yeah it's a place where investigations go to die nothing ever happens right nothing ever results from these things what do you think [ __ ] this this the raid was that justified um well i'll caveat this by saying it's it's speculation because i you know i haven't seen the affidavit no i you know not

122:14many people have so um but then i'll start by saying it's yet another uh self-inflicted wound by trump right he didn't need to end up like that he the departure from the white house was fairly chaotic as you can imagine right that's just the nature of what they were doing they you know there wasn't it wasn't the level of of uh organization it wasn't a very buttoned up administration right and it was in part because they had a lot of churn and personnel and all this but you know you can you can argue that every administration has some back and forth with the national archives over what is and it isn't presidential record what they can keep as their own personal material and what has to be the government like what's the what would be a reason well i mean if it's if they consider it personal correspondence or they consider it um you know information that that um

123:10you know is not uh classified and and is just material that you know one day can end up in a presidential library or they can use to write a book when they finish up and they want to you know make a few hundred million dollars on a book then fine but there's always typically some back and forth that goes on about okay what is and what what what isn't and what can we get but you know that requires a process right and that requires you know there's this protocols involved for saying what you can what you can take with you right and but you can and so if they had done that if they'd done the right thing they wouldn't have ended up in this situation and what they did was they once again you know trump is able to like suck all the oxygen out of the room right and and it's just it's one of those things that i think was just unnecessary was it

124:02was it was the raid justified uh i don't know because i don't know what what the specific documents were that they really had at jones about they were been negotiating this for some time right they've been talking to them and going back and forth and they discussed what you know what they had and how is it stored and all the rest of it and they'd gotten 15 or so boxes earlier um why they didn't just do that all in one you know effort and say okay we need we have more documents maybe it was taking the archives a while to understand what was and wasn't in the materials that were returned or was so i i don't know i just you have suspicions that it was a political maneuver uh was that the design was to cast more bad light on trump and eliminate him from the 2024 elections or well try to figure out a way to diminish his appeal yeah i mean i think there's

124:53there were there politics in the sense that um you know a lot of you know folks up on capitol hill took delight in it right and and found it to be you know uh a really good piece of entertainment but if you say politics from the the fbi's perspective um from the department of justice's perspective i mean i know a number of of guys that work for the bureau and i know them to be really solid people they're just they're street guys they're investigators they do their job they're very very good i don't know anybody senior in the doj or at the bureau so i don't know how politicized they are and whether that played into it or not but i you know people that are actually engaged in the in the search you know that show up uh at mar-a-lago they're doing their job right and they've been told this is what we have to do you know i think that it was such an extraordinary step

125:55and so unprecedented that um you know maybe i'll be proven wrong once they release the affidavit and we all find out what was what was sitting there but i can't open think that they they had a reason why they said no we can't we can't just keep dragging along here because we're not getting the responses we need so we do need to go in we need to knock on the door and say look we gotta you know now i i do suspect that they could have uh approached it differently you know and not had the presence they had and everything but um who knows it's again it's this is the problem we live in in this world today there's immediately after that took place there were people on the left and people on the right who were absolutely sure they had exactly the information to make a decision about what this meant and and why it was done or why you know why it shouldn't have been done

126:46and that's part of our problem you know the unsatisfying answer is you got to wait and find out what exactly occurred to see whether it was justified or not but nobody wants to hear that right it's like after a terrorism incident everybody wants an answer immediately right well it's an investigation and those things take time you know all i can say is the folks i know at the bureau are really quality people but do people at the top of an organization are they more politicized well sure there's a tendency for that to happen right because that's you know they've been around a long time they're at that at that position because you know they work closely with you know politicos or whatever but ah that doesn't really answer your question i just spent a lot of time talking in circles but well it's just it's all it's so confusing for someone

127:30like me that's like going well what is what's going on here is this all is there more than meets the eye or is this like clearly an example of him doing something that is 100 forbidden but he feels like he can do it because he's donald trump and he feels like the rules don't apply to him i mean that's the that's what the fear is right yeah yeah well i think i think he's he's certainly always pushed the envelope i don't think it's any it nobody can really argue the fact that he's kind of used his own playbook right all along and and you know you can't just say and then people he's saying things like well i declassified the documents you know they're all declassified well you can't just click your heels and say these documents are declassified right there's a process that takes place otherwise it's a complete [ __ ] goat robe right

128:13nobody knows what's classified what's not you know you can't just in your presidential head say okay i'm declassifying everything related to you know whatever this was does a president have the ability to declassify things sure unilaterally yeah unilaterally so he could declassify documents and then conceivably store these documents yeah but there's a process for that right i mean did he not go through the process based on what has been reported so far but again without the affidavit without the specific details who knows but if there's documentation that's not catalogued and marked as declassified right that's again that you know it has to show that if you've got a document that's you know top secret you know code word and you look at it and it's marked top secret you know um code word then you know you have to assume it's still

129:04classified right and there's a mere fact of him saying oh no you know last year i declassified that it's that doesn't hold water you can't you know he has to follow protocol and that's where i think he slips up is he doesn't necessarily believe that applies to him or he's just not you know it's just not the nature of he's not compliant yeah so and then he's isn't he suing now to get documents back yeah he is and also to have information not um not released i'd i think part of this problem again it kind of goes back to what we're talking about before with the transparency of the us government when they talked about this in this whole conference room in doj wherever they talked about it and they said uh you know we're thinking about conducting a raid and the bureau doesn't like to use the word raid or doj doesn't like to use word raid but when they say we're

129:57talking about doing a raid on the home of the former president they probably should once again from a messaging perspective step back and thought to themselves okay what is what does that mean how are we going to justify this not that they have to but they should have known how what a firestorm it was going to create and so they should have had that completely buttoned up and ready to go the moment they were going to do it and be as transparent within the limitations of what they can do of what they were doing and why they were doing it be because if they don't they create all that open space right and that's where everyone jumps in and starts declaring what exactly happened without knowing what the [ __ ] happened right and then you get all this misinformation and disinformation and and it's another [ __ ] you know goat

130:45rope so it's it you know it's a it's a process that i think you know they the attorney general probably should have uh handled better because he had to authorize it they also had to go in if the white house says they didn't know anything about it that's where i'm going to call [ __ ] at the white house saying we had no idea that the ag was authorized to search the president's former president's home yeah probably that's not the case they're going to you have to assume they got to walk in sit down and say sir we got a little something we got to talk to you about and just let you know this is coming down the pike yeah so how does that play out you think you think that is it nothing is it all much ado about nothing and will not impact him or will it be a significant factor yeah i think i'm gonna lose that thousand dollars to you because i think

131:31it's i think he's gonna run again i don't think it's gonna stop him from from running um i think they'll uh they'll realize this you know the the the hard left is saying oh he's got you know the world's most dangerous secrets held at mar-a-lago right and the right is saying you know he declassified it all there's nothing there and the truth is like it typically is somewhere probably in the middle and in the middle they're probably going to realize they don't have anything to indict them on that could do it's going to be like all these other things that they were kind of going after and yeah um so i'll be cutting you a check if you take a chance i could venmo you or paypal yeah yeah we'll do that yeah i do those things nowadays yes so for someone like me who's on the outside just trying to pay attention to as little as i can and still talk about it it's very

132:25yeah it is uh it's odd it's [ __ ] odd um if you think about it i mean we could end up with biden and trump running again in 2024. i don't think biden's gonna run i don't think it's possible i think he's so deteriorated i think he's gotten to this point where you know we're only two years in and he's already completely fallen apart where he can't form sentences anymore i can't imagine they're going to look at him as a viable candidate in 2024 i mean a large percentage of the democrats don't want him to run yeah that seems to be the case for sure uh and no one's excited about kamal harris they got that lady tucked away somewhere god i don't know what she's doing i really don't know what a job is anymore but um but you're right the problem is he's going to have to make that call right so he's got to make that decision to say i'm not running in

133:132024. therefore he clears the decks and then you get this mad scramble of a couple dozen people chasing him because i think you're right in in in previous times they would have deferred to the vp right i don't think they're going to do that you know i'm not going to they're not going to do that so you're going to have this this uh this free-for-all where you get people like gavin newsom pete booty uh probably bernie sanders again and yeah i think he's even older than biden i know but he's entertaining um and uh you get you're just gonna get a host of characters coming in uh because i don't think they're going to say fine we'll clear the decks for for harris so i agree with you 100 on that one but um it doesn't look good yeah it does well there's no like real like exciting options 330 plus million people i forget what the population of the us is

134:03nowadays but 330 plus million people and these are the options we get nobody wants to do that job it's a terrible job well plus you also get the primaries and they vote for the hard edge you know so you get that person who says i'm all for you know clean energy yeah climate change is the number one problem vote for me and then you get the people on the far right that say i'm all about banning abortion and contraception and porn and so the hard right you know maybe the conservatives on the hard right vote for them and that's what happens in the primaries unfortunately because you get the registered people that are voting you get that self selection that that that [ __ ] us over um you know what we haven't talked about is uh the fact that uh the russians and the ukrainians are lobbing missiles at each other near uh the uh zaparisia uh

134:52nuclear power plant yeah yeah we talked about nuclear power yeah um but yeah that's a crazy situation right there and there's just so much interesting [ __ ] happening in the world right i mean this is it it is a fascinating time if you think about what we're living through right now it's just people are so scared they can't be fascinated it's it's it would be nice if we knew how this plays out we don't have to worry like let's just watch it play out because there's only one way it can go but it can go so many different ways and worst case scenario is nuclear war that's what people are terrified of hypersonic weapons people terrified of yeah one world government i mean it's this klaus schwab world economic forum talk and they're like jesus christ who is that guy yeah what the [ __ ] is going on over there well

135:38you'll have nothing and you'll be happy like what yeah well i mean the hypersonics thing you know the chinese military has developed a pretty capable you know hypersonic you know uh weapon um do we um we have been testing right um and it's all about it's all about glide vehicles um and it's it's it's a fascinating field we need to be putting i think more resource into it uh when you say glide vehicles what do you mean by that well imagine a uh a missile you know carries a a hypersonic glide vehicle on its back goes up into orbit and then basically just lets this thing go and the thing about a hyper the next generation of hypersonic because icbms are you know hypersonic i mean that just means over whatever mach 5 in terms of speed but they have a planned trajectory and you can predict that uh but the you know what uh a hypersonic glide vehicle is

136:41traveling uh above mach 5 and also is maneuverable and that makes it uh you know that's very difficult to defend against because you can't predict the truth you can't predict this trajectory and and also just the timing and the speed with which it's moving uh and the uncertainty of its of its flight path and so uh yeah the chinese are uh you know uh they've been spending an ungodly amount on their research and also efforts to once again steal information we've been developing we've been working hard uh to do that but other areas you know you talk about uh quantum computing that's an area where we've got to get ahead of the game whoever russia china the u.s yeah those russia china u.s it's always the top three um are feverishly working uh to um develop quantum computing and that's great and everybody thinks okay yay we'll get to that point um

137:39and that just means when you're when you're there it's you know that the speed the capabilities of of quantum computers you know surpass sort of the classical computing thing but the problem there is and it's great for the the future of yeah um ai and a variety of you know uh sciences terrific but what it also means is you can defeat in a very simple way and i'm gonna oversimplify this but quantum computing once it's it's it's developed uh sufficiently once you're post quantum then uh you can defeat the cryptography that's on sort of their classical computer systems right that handle uh the cryptography that's that's basically protecting our national security communications our military communications the financial transactions on the internet right that we all rely on um so part of it is yeah it's great for future development of science and technology

138:38but there's this real concern over you know if uh if if again a nation that doesn't have our best interests at heart develop this and get kind of are in the lead on this then suddenly they can defeat the you know [ __ ] dog cryptographic capabilities of of our communication systems and that's a real problem so i guess what i'm saying is there's some areas that we need to be focused on putting more money into um and so every time i read that we're putting 80 billion in the irs or 370 billion into you know into uh subsidies for green energy just wondering okay i understand why it's appealing to some people but maybe it's not in our best interest and this quantum computer thing like we have those though right yeah we've we've we um japan germany variety again russia china we've been developing and working on quantum computing but you know it's

139:40it's not where it needs to be yet right so it's it's still in the uh development stages right it's still in sort of the nascent stages of where it's going to go and and so if you think about it we could be i think they were talking about like 2030 or so right it would be sort of that moment in time when we're at whatever they call it i've i'm not a obviously not a tech guy but a computer or a quantum supremacy or something yeah so so we're busy now the us government is actually focused on this they're trying to say okay we need to uh improve all our systems so that they are capable of defeating what that means down the road um at that point so it's i guess what i'm saying in not a very eloquent way is there are a lot of areas for concern that the u.s government needs to be focused on and [Music] i just hope that you know this administration and the next one

140:40whoever they are maybe understand it just seems our timelines are accelerated right for concerns that we we maybe had no vision on even five or ten years ago right and the world it strikes me as is it's a little bit more of a dangerous place right now um you know and so i think we we need to kind of get back to it i agree with what you said before which is every time you talk about us first or you know um you know u.s citizens patriotism u.s focus that you get a whole segment of society that looks at that here in the us and goes are you being nationalistic so that's that's the wrong thing to do but you know but in response to what's happening in the world it's really the only logical way to look at it isn't it it's how everybody else with any resource is looking at it right and if we're going to compete with them but that's what it gets scary it's like what

141:35is the solution is it complete integration of the government in in businesses the way china does it is it something different and this with the widespread distribution of quantum computing i mean what does that look like in 10 years 15 20 years if if cryptography no longer exists if there's no passwords don't mean anything anymore and all intellectual property is available to anybody and everyone that's that's weird yeah then then it's uh it's a utopia because we'll all hold hands and it'll be a community of nations we're all involved in one world digital currency that's controlled by the state are you invested in crypto i got a little bit yeah but i'm confused about the future of that too you know i mean this whole idea of decentralized currency was very attractive to people but now the government is talking about a centralized digital currency that they

142:25control and what comes with that of course is some sort of uh social policy that regulates and you know just distributes what access you have to it based on your social credit score and yeah that's terrifying that's what china has that's what i was going to say yeah that's what that's what a nation you know uh like china is is focused on um i you know i i would have assumed that once they start talking about um government regulation of of cryptocurrency that the whole shift would everybody's focus would go elsewhere right because it completely takes away the attractiveness of the of that space and the whole value of it was i always imagine was essentially i'm oversimplifying but the lack of of uh government uh regulation and dependency so um yeah i don't know where it's gonna go i uh you know i'm a old-school kind of investor i probably should be embarrassed to say i

143:32don't have any crypto in my investment portfolio but i don't have much of an investment portfolio well there's a lot of people that invested in crypto that lost a [ __ ] ton of money when it all kind of fell apart recently too that's the thing when things get weird people want to dump it you know they get they get panicky and you know there's there's long-haul investors in crypto that say there's ups and downs and this is just part of the process but a lot of people say no they're they're hamstringing cryptocurrencies they know what they're doing and they're they're doing it because it is a threat because if the government no longer controls currency right if currency is decent centralized and there's a finite amount of bitcoin and it's valuable at this level and people can use to buy goods and services and the government no

144:16longer controls it that's terrifying for people yeah yeah i think it's it you know the big uh government concern has been for all this time has has been that it's you know used by criminal elements right and and you know there was a yes there that was true to some degree but um it seems like the horse has left the barn so it's it's it's more of a you know it's gained more attraction than you know i would have thought you know but i then again i'd you know i looked down that i think okay fine i should have bought walmart um but yeah i i don't know i i think that with the the currency the way it is china look china's been looking to supplant a dollar or to replace the dollar as the global currency um they've had that argument for a long time i don't think the dollar is going anywhere but uh i do think that you know the more that the government looks to uh control uh

145:21alternative currencies the less attractive those currencies become and the more likely it is that the focus shifts elsewhere and there's you know just that there becomes then another attractive investment at the you know the nascent level the beginning so you know who knows but um yeah does is bizarre push to connect climate change to heart attacks have you seen that yeah yeah how dumb do they think we are [Laughter] pretty dumb i mean how much how much of an increase of climate change do you really need to get the massive jump in heart attacks that people have experienced i mean it was a cover of uh abc there was an abc article about it that was trying to connect it and it was met with almost universal disdain people like what the [ __ ] are you talking about like that that's not the only option there's probably other

146:11some stuff that might have went on yeah over the last couple years you guys remember those things yeah i i at half the time i think the you know and that's the problem with media nowadays i mean look you you you look at uh you know at uh most sites you know that are supposedly media uh you know news focused and it just seems like it's just a just a slew of [ __ ] that's there just to get your clicks and your likes and to bait you into clicking on it and most of the [ __ ] that's out there is just that right i mean there's there's very few solid news sources anymore well the good thing about that is that independent news sources are rising because of that because people have lost all faith and trust and i mean you're seeing the impact on cnn i mean they fired everybody now yeah they're they they fired stelter supposedly don lemon and

146:58jim acosta are on the chopping block as well and they're trying to make it an objective source of journalism now the [ __ ] cover cnn had a positive story on me the other day i was like this is hilarious did they yeah what did they say was about the abortion debate that i had with uh seth dillon is the babylon bee guy yeah okay you know he was uh saying that rape victims should be forced to carry babies i'm like you're out of your [ __ ] mind and his thought was that two wrongs don't make a right and then you know he's an evangelical christian and yeah he has a very rigid perspective on life begins it comes at conception and you know i'm like well what if it's the day of conception what if it's a rape victim day of conception you think that that child who got raped should be forced to carry that baby and that

147:43that's the way things get real [ __ ] squirrely and he said yes yes he said two wrongs don't make a right [ __ ] hell yeah that it's murder i mean that's the hardcore evangelical perspective of conception yeah i just didn't i didn't realize i think in part i didn't realize what an effort was had been underway for years right by that that that segment of society to influence uh state houses right yeah in anticipation of one day having the supreme court return the question to the states right so that was a a massively uh uh coordinated and and funded effort to try to get to that point and i that that completely happened at least for me off the radar i just didn't do you think that's a political decision or is that a position based on their religious ideology that life truly does beli begin at the point of conception that they're

148:37doing something that's ultimately just well i mean i i'm sure yeah i think it's both but i think i'm a lot of people out there who firmly believe in you know on the religious side of it and then there's you know there's i i i don't i don't know it's it's one of those there's no winning that discussion right because it's you know i can't i it falls in the category of [ __ ] it don't hurt people don't you do what you're gonna do i'll do what i do you don't need to celebrate me i don't need to celebrate you just get on with your [ __ ] life yeah and and you do what you but that requires i think for it to happen that requires again reasonable people making reasonable policies that people can live under right and you know that doesn't seem to happen because you know one side wants it all their way and one side wants it you know

149:23their way and everybody's throwing hand grenades at each other so uh i don't know how you i know how you walk it back what do you make about uh fouchy stepping down yeah i was probably about time i didn't realize he was as old as he is right yeah he's 80 something years old yeah yeah i didn't i didn't realize that but uh hopefully he's put enough away for retirement hopefully not i think he's he's what is he going to do he's going to keep working he's going to start and only fans yeah that's what i'm hoping yeah well you know it's 35 percent of the internet is porn so oh people with that underwear yeah well you know it's it's funny because i think the cdc is going through a shakeup right now right because they're actually trying internally to understand where they made mistakes and yeah their mistakes were pretty evident but they uh you know um

150:12at least it seems as if they're trying to make some adjustments internally for the next time we have to for survival purposes yeah yeah with that yeah that's true but we'll have another pandemic you know i mean it's not like and but i will say this the number of people that i still see walking around outside outside on their own by themselves wearing a mask today i saw it today some poor guy who looked like he never thought about his health for a moment in his life except for putting that [ __ ] mask on yeah it's like having a condom and putting it on after you get aids yeah well you're not gonna be like condoms anymore i guess no i don't find them in a store i don't think anybody's gonna go for that yeah that's a long sell yeah that i mean we would literally have to be at some sort of a [ __ ] religious domination of our culture to

151:02accept that yeah we're not yeah we're not giving up sex i'll say that much um yeah that's that's a red line uh i mean just condoms are the most innocuous of all of them you're literally just just putting a cap on it so it feels good and sort of and you kind of stop pregnancy it's just the whole thing is so goddamn dumb yeah i i i i'm really surprised i hadn't heard that before again because maybe i wasn't paying attention to the contraception industry yeah it's a not us it's a it's a significant part of that group believes that contraception also is an issue all right well that's see again you get into that part and then you could actually see a point where the republicans don't actually take the house in uh november um if they just keep you know if if there's enough of that going on because you have all the independence you have all the like you pointed out

151:54the people that are inclined to vote republican because they like policies that are there but then they see this and they think just stay the [ __ ] out of my kitchen yeah do the things you're supposed to do treaties and and you know security and you know foreign policy and everything else just just stay the [ __ ] out of it but isn't that a part of any system that the systems always want to grow and increase their yeah and that makes it easier if they have more power they can implement all of their policies and all the things they want to do that may be unpopular if they have more control yeah well that's how that's how we end up where we are right because we've created a system that allows politicians you know to stay in in office right an existing congress person or senator has enormous advantages over someone

152:41who's trying to challenge him for that seat yeah and so that's just that's what it is i mean how do i stay in office for you know 46 [ __ ] years um but yeah we'll get away from that you know we uh we also didn't talk about the uh the whacking of uh of uh that uh oligarch's daughter yeah that's uh in russia yeah yesterday yeah just outside of moscow yeah yeah that's crazy and it was supposed to be the oligarch himself but he got in a different vehicle right wasn't that the yeah it was um and it's not really even oligarch i guess is the wrong way to put it they call him putin's brain yeah he's a he's a ultra nationalist um and he's more of a commentator right on he's sort of a media face at this point but he um he was attending an event i think he was giving a speech his daughter was also there and um maybe the thought was they were going to

153:42get them both maybe the thought was going to get the dad and the daughter is she's like a commentator right yeah yeah she is uh daria um uh dugan she was a comedy was a commentator uh now she's blown the bits but uh so she got in they had two cars there at this event she got in one drove off and then the thing yeah detonated a dozen miles outside of moscow basically so um it and of course that you know the russian government immediately blamed the ukrainians um and a lot of them are calling for targeting of of ukrainian personalities now in kyiv so it just it just ramps up an already awful situation do you imagine a scenario where putin uses that's the ultimate fear right yeah the ultimate fear is that he takes over all of what was once the soviet union yeah well i think if you had asked that question uh a year ago i said no you

154:44know he's not gonna do it but now we've been so uh uh bad at kind of predicting his his activities that yeah maybe he would see that he could keep it a limited uh encounter right and you know we tend to think of a of a nuke as hiroshima or nagasaki and doesn't necessarily have to be like that you could deliver you know a smaller uh payload and maybe he feels like he could keep it regionally contained um so i wouldn't say it's i wouldn't say it's off the table it probably isn't off the table from his perspective from his mindset if he gets pushed into a corner uh yeah yeah and if he i mean look if they if they if the fight is taken to uh russia right inside russia and they've had a number of incidents already right they've and there have been a number of of uh of uh incidents in crimea and before this i guarantee you before february whenever they started the

155:49invasion february 24th putin you know probably imagine that would never happen he imagined he was going to be in kievan in five days so i think the more that may happen if the ukrainian military decides look what we're going to do is has used this drone capabilities that we have and and you know some of the other weapons we've got to start launching attacks and the us has been trying to you know trying to manage that ever since we got involved in this right and by saying you know these can't be used you know to launch attacks inside of russia because they don't want that to expand and that could be one of those things that could then set him off so something like this this this assassination um whether it was she was the intended target it was going to be uh her dad um that's the sort of thing that escalates right and it and it and it removes the

156:39ability if there was one to have any sort of negotiated settlement but look we're 10 billion dollars in in terms of of aid that we've dropped on to ukraine since uh uh really legitimately since biden's been in office but um this is they just approved a 775 million dollar additional assistance package mostly munitions and hardware um and you know that's the like the 19th 18th or 19th uh package of of uh of aid that we've put into ukraine since this started the congress or the senate approved a 40 billion dollar aid package in may so they haven't gotten anywhere near contributing all that to it yet but you have to ask yourself where you know where's this going right what are we what are we doing are we just going to continue a sort of a proxy situation what's the alternative do nothing well if we didn't do anything if we hadn't been providing all this

157:47there's no way the ukrainians could still be in the fight it just i mean no matter how strong their will is and everybody respects the fact that they they've had this enormous courage and will for this this battle but the reality is they need the hardware right they need and look they've lost it depends on the estimates but you know some of the estimates are they're losing 100 soldiers a day right um and we're at the six month mark of this uh today's like 180 80th day 180 first day of the invasion and while well sort of the figures are hard to pin down because both sides are you know in the business of not giving that information out and they're also in the business of exaggerating how much the other side has suffered you know estimates are you know maybe the russians have lost 15 to 18 000 and ukrainians are probably somewhere you

158:41know around that again if you figure 100 so it'd be 18 000 if they're losing 100 a day um so you've got this going on and you've got the us and nato just you know pushing more weapons and money in there and there doesn't seem to be an end in sight right russia doesn't seem inclined and they've said they won't negotiate uh zielinski doesn't seem inclined to you know push for a negotiated settlement um so i you know i don't know where that goes yeah exactly and and we have to we have to be a little bit clearer about this right because we obviously afghanistan was was one of those just ridiculous case studies right we kept talking about how we're creating the stable afghan government and then you know the military knew the afghan military wasn't gonna the u.s government knew you know deep down the afghan military couldn't stand up on its own

159:36and yet for years and years and years and years we kept this going right and we never really did a particularly good job of explaining to the american public why we're doing it other than well terrorism terrorism we can't allow them to use that as a base for attacking us again like 911. uh you know so 20 years down the road and all those lives and anything else yeah we're back to where we started basically taliban's back in charge and you know nothing's really changed and so with with this ukraine russia thing you know we don't want to get in the shooting war with russia do we really want to keep just pumping endless amounts of money in into ukraine where's the money coming from well well we're printing it up i don't know right i don't know we're uh we're uh it's money we're not spending on you know on on uh on other things on shoring up our

160:29telecoms and you know getting chinese gear off of cell towers it's not money we're spending on you know quantum computing is how many we're spending on hypersonics research and shoring up our national security interests at work but i mean i get it right you want to support the ukrainians you want to do the right thing i just don't i'm confused over what our end game is here and i'm i'm hoping that behind the scenes we've got some you know very aggressive effort uh to get the two sides to sit down do you think that's the case uh um probably not i don't think right because the russians aren't willing and probably zalensky you know um you know feels at least at this point that he's got um you know a lot of runway left in terms of getting aid and assistance from nato and from the us so they're you know but at a certain point it starts looking like world war one

161:21right little tiny tiny incremental steps you know on the battlefield and very little being done and you know potential for famine even though they've released some of the grain shipments so it just looks a lot like you know we were we were in when we were dragging the boys through um through london i took them to the imperial war museum if anybody's so inclined they should definitely go to the imperial war museum in london and i took the boys to the world war one exhibit it's fantastic it's an incredible thing but then you're standing there and you're you're reading all this about a land war in europe right and the lack of progress and people being you know killed and uh you know famine being created because you know just there was no agriculture going on and no ability to move food and grain you realize wow what the [ __ ] this you know

162:11it's 100 years on and we're doing the same thing again right it's just it was a little depressing it was kind of a depressing moment but um but with far more capability of destruction yes yeah and that's why the consequences are so much greater that's why this is so disturbing to people because if it goes sideways it goes sideways for the world yeah right exactly and that's which is yes that's that's that's exactly it so if it you know we were in a world war but it was a it was in a bizarre kind of way it was contained right the world's much smaller now yeah you know much smaller technology being what it is the potential for for major problems uh yeah so but i again i guess i think it's it down to maybe it's the same theme transparency on the part of the us government we have to do a better job of explaining maybe what our point to this exercise is rather than

163:03just the the immediate effect was it's a motive yeah i stand with ukraine right and where uh well what does that mean and we all imagined that you know maybe there was going to be a quick end to it one side or the other that's clearly not happening so i guess my point in in talking about the numbers the sheer amount of money and it's not it's not just the money it's just it's what are we trying to accomplish here right and that's that's part of the problem i will say putin completely miscalculated because i think part of his issue was he wanted to show cracks in in nato and obviously he didn't do that with now we've expanded nato and uh as a result of his actions so he got just the wrong result there um there's also a problem in getting to the russian people themselves because the propaganda that they receive is so thorough and their access to the

163:53information is so limited in terms of like the russian propaganda like i've talked to people who have relatives in russia and they think that the ukrainians are a bunch of nazis and that you know we have to go over there to liberate them right that's that's the the propaganda that the surface readers of russia are getting yeah it's it's it's an it's it's a complicated issue it's uncomfortable for people to talk about um you know a lot of aspects of this right ukraine was you know we didn't give a sh be honest we didn't give a [ __ ] about ukraine right before this happened we thought it was corrupt we thought it was corrupt yeah yeah and and had a lot of problems but but you can't if you say that out loud now like people are going what the [ __ ] are you unpatriotic you don't stand with ukraine and it's like everything else right it's

164:47it's like those easy fixes is just a few ukrainian flags outside of homes in in our neighborhoods you know where where we are i think you're like okay you're not ukrainian but you may if it makes you feel good great but you know do you really this we're very quick to jump on things that make us feel righteous you know and so yeah it's it's uncomfortable to say but ukraine was a place that you know as far as we were concerned it was corrupt right and there were problems there that you know it wasn't going to join nato anyway we weren't going to admit it into nato and why why is that well you know it in part because there was this this concern about admitting a country like ukraine into nato and what that impact would have on putin's mindset in russia right part of it was uh they hadn't met certain you know the standards or protocols that are in place for um

165:39nato membership and so what was lit missing um transparency in government corruption was an issue [Music] so i think if you say that now you know people just look at it and go that's well you're not on the right side of this argument well you there's nothing wrong with pointing out the flaws you know and you can still support ukraine in in this you know action that you know the russians have caused you can do you can have a more complex you know uh argument than than just it's either right or it's wrong but we're again we're in that world where it's all right or it's all wrong it's all this or it's all that so yeah bummed me out mike i don't mean to bum you out i was hoping you had like clear concise solutions that the powers that bee would listen to and go hey that mike baker guy he's on something yeah well no i just i i think more transparency i think being more

166:39realistic about what our foreign policy interests are um you know those are things but those that's difficult to do right it's very it's a very popular thing to to uh you know this is one of the few bipartisan issues that you've got is to is to grant more aid to the ukraine it's one of the few things that people on capitol hill seem to agree about there's only a handful of voices that are saying what's where you know what's it all about and where is it where's it going um i'm not saying don't i'm just saying let's have a discussion about it you know openly that talks about what our national interests are there and what we're trying to accomplish and i you know much like with afghanistan even with iraq and you know going all the way back vietnam and others i mean we've never really done it so again it's you know it's wishful thinking that we

167:28would um you know there's this narrative that's historically accurate that all empires eventually collapse yeah and that's what's terrifying to people here like what does that look like does that mean we become under the control of another empire does it mean we're under the whim of china and all our ideas about freedom and what we hold dear about the united states are gone forever and that this experiment self-government ultimately proved to be a failure it lasted a few hundred years but was overcome by the all the powers that be all the things that we're talk we've talked about so far and the fact that the very foundation that it was established under is not taken seriously or not thought of as so significant and important whether it's freedom of speech whether it's you know the bill of rights the constitution all these things that

168:24people want to change and erode and and shift based on their own political ideology they don't understand that this is immensely important now you're bumming me out um right because like where does it go if if china exists right now if we live at the same time that an entire country of over a billion people is controlled by a totalitarian dictatorship which is essentially what the ccp is i mean they have ultimate control over what's expressed they'll lock people up for dissent they'll take people that are you know billionaire heads of corporations that step out of line and they disappear them yeah does that happen does that happen here well there's a lot of people that talk about how you know but they've always been a you know segment of society that's talked about how democracy is failing and capitalism is a failing system and yeah you know alternative i uh yeah i

169:18don't i don't think there is an alternative i think um i think we allowed ourselves to get soft we talked about this you know while back which is you know part of it is is human nature right as a parent i want life to be easier for my kids right my parents wanted to be easier for me their parents i'm sure wouldn't be easier for them and eventually you get the diminishing returns because you know we're not hunting gathering looking for fresh water we're just you know sitting staring at our phones and nobody's doing [ __ ] right so it's it's you could argue that and we've you know so we've created a soft society um we have an inability to uh say difficult things to each other without getting completely wound up right i mean the words are violence no they're [ __ ] not you know it just but a free flow of ideas and exchange

170:04you know is it's very difficult thing to do nowadays right you're you're you know you people are afraid to say what they really think because oh my god they could lose their jobs they could lose their jobs yeah or my you know my daughter went to university and at the end of the whole process she was not an inexpensive university you know she very honest about it she said you know i just kept my mouth shut during you know most of the debates and conversations in class you know she's sort of a center right she's more of a centrist but she's center right and a political scheme of things and she just is extremely unpopular with young people yeah and so there was no upside for her whether it was with students or with you know uh professors to say anything so but you get that i guess the point there is you know you get this inability to to talk and to reason and

170:50and uh and so you end up right now it's it does seem like um yeah we do i don't know i i tend to think that the country's very resilient um i'm not one of those people that thinks that democracies on the on the brink right i didn't think that january 6 is going to mean the end of democracy i think it was it was a horseshit show right it was it was it was uh it was not good but i don't think it meant you know that oh my god you know democracy's on the brink no it isn't if you think that then i don't think you understand how resilient it is here in this country um but you know i don't know maybe we don't have enough people you know invested in the game maybe we need you know uh mandatory service you know for folks coming out of high school you know maybe you could defer that for after college but maybe everybody needs to put some

171:36skin in the game you know a couple of years of of community service or military time yeah that's what a lot of people have thought that one of the things that separates us from countries like israel beside the fact they're in constant actual military conflict with their neighbor is that they have this sort of monetary military service sort of like south korea does we don't want that in this country because we want people to have the ability to choose whatever they want but i think because people don't exactly understand the consequences of not looking at ourselves as a sovereign state not looking at ourselves as a community of people that are all banded together that we do have this sort of ignorant denial of our role in the world or of not just our role in the world of the world in general how the other players in this game look at us right and i think also um

172:33an understanding of how the country works or how it's how it's laid out right maybe not how it always works but how it's supposed to you know work according to the framework right and you know it's it's not to sound like wilford brimley but you know in school you used to take civics courses right and it was mandatory you had to know you had a government course right you had to know how things were supposedly working and right and i think that's there's an element of that too we need to maybe we need to spend a little less time on on people's you know feelings and following you know their passions in schooling and just get back to some basics you know do the things that that will help kids advance but give them a framework of understanding as to where you know how things work you know the social sciences find civics great uh economics right i mean

173:23teach some things that really i don't know prepare the kids um i don't know where i was going with that other than um i i see a list of courses potential courses that you know particularly my oldest boy can take in in high school now he's in high school and i'm like well you know i mean how about it's all over the map right it's just [ __ ] that you think i guess maybe that's maybe that's entertaining but um you know maybe some more focus on basic instruction in education well ultimately what is school preparing people for is it preparing people to integrate into the world is it is it educating people is is it just for their own edification and to expand their knowledge base or is it is it supposed to like help them become a functional part of society like what is the role of education yeah i think it's to become a

174:16functioning part of society i think it's to allow you to be a provider to you know take care of yourself um to be a responsible citizen um and yeah it but now it does seem a lot of it's for you know um you know sort of just self-realization and and following passion and doing all these things that uh you know i anyway i uh disappeared down at some educational discussion rabbit hole but are you concerned at all about the integration of technology into human beings you know there's one of the things that's uh coming up now that a lot of people are discussing are these technologies that are rising right now like there's neuralink and there's a few other ones and elon musk has actually just invested in some competitor to neurolink they're all working towards this integration of technology and human beings but when we're talking about the

175:11problems with technology and the problems with the fact that a lot of our technology is compromised and that if we do that to human bodies if we really do all connect to the internet via some sort of cyborg device like what's to stop that from being compromised right that's and that's really that's an extension of where we are right now right right and so it's it's no it's it's it's a it's a great question we we actually covered some of this in in uh i haven't even i've gotten all this way down the road and i didn't plug black files to classified on discovery and science channel but in the second season we did some work on this uh went to ucla robotics program went to madison wisconsin looked at some of this and i think it's fascinating it doesn't necessarily worry me from um i know there's discussions about the morality issues of you know linking you

176:07know uh machine and human and all that but i do think from a uh a security perspective like you pointed out i think there's some concern there because um and you know but you know research and development being what it is um you know i i was i've been super impressed with what superintendent i say super impressed i've been impressed with with uh what i've seen anyway from what some of the research labs are doing right in this in this field it is a it's an amazing area but what they're not doing because they're scientists right they're they're engineers they're not counterintelligence you know concerns you know and so you don't have that follow-on part that says well what does that mean and you know the ethicists are out there looking at the morality issues but i don't know that you know the uh from a ci perspective that anybody's been out there

177:00staring at this and and wondering well if china is controlling uh um you know communications telecoms from their their uh position right now once this goes further um what does that enable them to do and i i you know i don't know it's but it is it's a fascinating area it's just typically the security aspects or the and the counter intelligence aspects of anything tend to be a trailing issue right but you've got to think that other countries are looking at that in a different way well china is definitely china is er yeah they've got the they've got the advantage of being a dictatorship right so they don't sit around and worry about the ethics of things they don't worry about the morals of things they don't worry about civil liberties right and i'm glad that we do you know in the west i think that's great that's the way it should be but we

177:57just need to be aware that they don't yeah and what that means and why they are so focused on this i mean they're again they're focused on artificial intelligences similar to their focus on on other you know key technologies that they want to control so um yeah we just again it's it's one of those things where you don't want to sit around and and you know see uh uh you know some sort of conspiracy or a a security threat behind every corner but that one seems like it's not a corner it's like a giant gate yeah it's right in front of our face i mean if we all do integrate and you're talking about quantum compute computers and their ability to eliminate all of the the safety nets of cryptography that what what's to stop that from happening with human beings yeah no it's and again i don't think it's an area that's really been fully or

178:52not even fully just i don't think it's been an area that's been explored because we we tend to race into things right from a development perspective it's like a pharmaceutical company a pharmaceutical company you know they all they want to do is is is have a free flow of information right to share that information within the you know the the scientific community to get where they want to go right and you know then you've got somebody typically in a pharma company that's the the chief of security he's like you can't do that right because this information is not only is it valuable to the company but it's it's ours it's proprietary information we've spent billions of dollars on it developing it right you know you can't just take your laptop home or take it to you know on a trip to europe with you and assume that all that information on there is is secured so

179:39you're butting up heads against all all the time against free flow free flow of information and and security and it it's never you you're always trying to find a sort of that fine point on the line that that gives you maximum you know access to information for the people that are innovating and then locking it down to the point that you can on the security side uh which is a tough thing to do which inhibits the ability to have new technology yes and inhibits innovation right and that's well that's that's the view from the scientific side that's the view from the academic side right that's that's what happens and and yet um you know and and going back to that same dead horse that i've been kicking the you know the chinese intel you know uh whichever department it is there that may be out there looking around they understand that and they've been working

180:33the academic community you know for decades you know and because they understand they play on that right they understand that you know these folks don't think that way they don't think from a security perspective so you know i don't say they're easy pickings but you know they've they've worked the academic environment very hard over the years in terms of getting access to information so and how they done that uh co-opting uh individuals maybe uh it could be something as simple as uh identifying look i'm interested in material science so i see at a university here in in the u.s maybe i i identify a professor who's doing some particularly interesting research you know maybe i develop a scenario where he's approached by someone it seems very innocuous and they're just looking to get a some some insight into a paper that he's written or whatever so he provides you

181:24know some material it's not classified but he provides that material now okay now what has he done he's he's kind of accepted your tasking right now you kind of co-opt him a little bit more maybe you offer them a grant right you know to do some research um on something maybe offer a a trip to you know northwestern technical university in china to come and talk to some of their people you know in a in a seminar right you're you're looking to develop um individuals who have access to information that you want and they can be done in a variety of ways but um you know and then they they do a tremendous amount of just open source trolling right there at every major scientific seminar convention discussion panel session just trolling around they're gathering up information but they're also looking for potential contacts and again you know it's uh

182:19it sounds old-school it doesn't sound as as high-tech as you know getting online and hacking into you know um raytheon or whomever but it's part of the what the tools that you've got in your kit bag and so it's an important part and it's worked very well for them over the years um so anyway it's it's uh but again what's been happening we've been trying to be more proactive or the the bureau in particular has and other members of the community in the intelligence community going out to institutions and saying these are the problems you could be facing right these are the things you should be aware of you know if you're approached in this fashion it would be great if you wouldn't mind telling us all right um so you know it's it's again i i seem like i've spent a lot of time banging on this subject it seems like something to bang on it's something to

183:10bang on and it's an enormous cost to us and to our allies and i think you know the more that again the more that we talk about it uh the better off we are even though as a cynic it's i mean 2015 i think it was xi and obama uh had this meeting and you know there was this big fanfare about china agreed not to not to engage in cyber espionage or cyber shenanigans of any sort not to engage in economic espionage it was yeah it was like this and they all they touted the media was like wow look at this they've agreed to do this [ __ ] you know they have they haven't stopped in fact they've accelerated and you know all people have to do is google latest uh chinese espionage acts right and to get this long list of you know indictments and charges that we've you know the u.s has been able to make um they've got they've got uh an insane number of of uh

184:05counterintelligence investigations going on at the bureau bureau stretched thin right um uh and most of them against the china target so you know i don't want to sound like a one-trick pony but i think i have i think it's a good trick yeah it's uh it's well it's certainly something that people need to think about because i don't know where this goes if china's successful with this operation yeah um it looks like they're firmly convinced they're going to be at the top of the food chain right and i again i know people roll their eyes and they when they hear talk like that and they think well it's a community of nations you know there's room for for everyone up top and that's not that's not the way it you know they view it right we tend to mirror our values on other nations they don't right um and so there's no there's no misunderstanding on their part um

185:02and so if this congress takes place and she is you know given a third term and all indications are he will uh they'll just continue this march and they'll just continue building up uh their military their their uh you know their they look at the at the pacific region is basically their rightful property um they certainly again we talked about taiwan so i think we just need to we need to be aware of of what the dangers are in the world you know don't sit in a foxhole worried about them you know that'd be silly but if you think about what the past few years have looked like you know people have been just kicked in the ass constantly whether it's the pandemic or it's the russia ukraine battle whether it's you know increased tensions with china whether it's you know recession i don't know if it's a recession or not but if it's a recession um

185:50yeah it's been it's been a weird few years and but i think it'll get better you do i'm an optimist oh boy every time i walk out of here i always feel like i just all i did was like that's why we bring it in here i don't think about it as much as you do and i need to know like especially with your background what what your perspective of worst case scenario is yeah i do i do think it's important to be optimistic though and uh yeah i got kids so i have to be yeah right yeah exactly right so anymore i've been meaning that i've been following your your tour and uh kept trying to figure out a way to get to one of your shows it hasn't worked out with my schedule but do you have any more coming up yeah yeah i got a bunch i'm always somewhere yeah well we're always somewhere yeah i mean i'm always touring i'll hopefully find something yeah i want to get out to

186:41idaho anyway you got to you did that one show yeah i love it up there they still [ __ ] talk about it it's fun up there man yeah idaho's uh i mean i don't want to talk about too much because i don't want to ruin it yeah boise is an amazing place it really it really is you should see the construction you can't swing at that cat without hitting a crane well yeah people are leaving california like it's on fire yeah parts of it are parts of a car yeah by the way i don't know why you'd swing at that cat i uh i got two of them uh i never would do that to them but um yeah it's it's a fantastic town i will say this that we're coming up on the best fly fishing time of year september yeah up there in idaho so if if you've got you know any time on your calendar no my calendar september is filled with hunting okay yeah that's that's another yeah i was

187:26gonna say it's well yeah come up there you get both things done yeah it's not it's hard to get one done yeah yeah it's hard for me to escape you know what what what the when you go on the road when you do this tour not not i don't mean to like take over asking questions but i'm just curious please do what's the best part of doing that what do you enjoy the most people laughing yeah i enjoy the fact that it works that the people can go come out have a good time forget about their problems for a little while all laugh together and all laugh together as a group it's very you know that's a cliche that laughter is healing but it really is it's like a medicine it's a medicine for me and i i can sit in a comedy club and watch one of my friends on stage make me laugh i love it i still love it it's a it's a drug it's a it's a it's a perspective

188:14enhancer it shifts the way people think about life you get out of there you have a good time and you get out there with a big smile on your face and you have we have fun you know and that's what i like about it the most is that you can provide a moment of fun is it more difficult to do now than it was like 10 years ago it's easier in some ways you get more criticism but people are excited about it more it's like people want it you know it's like we've taken away all the wild fun movies you can't have a fun comedy movie anymore because they're controversial and people are terrified of controversy they're terrified of criticism they're terrified of uh being attacked and canceled and this and that and also these people have these jobs that are dependent upon you know providing the studios with these films that don't get attacked

189:03so that they can profit off of them and they they worry about it and so comedy stand-up comedy is one of the rare places that's pretty autonomous you just need a building with a microphone and there's a lot of them out there do you ever come up with something though and then or write it down and think no i can't i can't do that if it's not funny yeah if it's not funny then i don't do it but if it's funny if it works it makes people laugh it's this idea that it's supposed to you know we accept fiction in all sorts of forms of media whether it's literature or film where something happens is horrible and we don't think that it's a real thing that's taking place but when someone says something on stage even if it's satire even it's like there's certain subjects that they think you're not supposed to cover there's things you're not supposed to

189:48say regardless of whether or not they make people laugh and that's that's where the rubber hits the road with stand up that's that's the big pushback and in that sense stand up is very exciting right now because people are they're very happy that there is still an outlet where people can just say funny things just to make people laugh and it's these aren't statements they're not affidavits they're not you know they're not relation declarations of your real true feelings on things they're just funny things to say and that is still alive and well it's a very american art form and there's you know it takes a long time to develop the skills to be able to do that it takes a long time to gather up an audience that accepts you and knows that that's what you do and wants to come see you and i feel very very fortunate that i have

190:37that so yeah well you got the [ __ ] audience that's for sure so i keep doing it and there's a lot of us you know that's why um building a club out here that's why there's a big movement of uh comics that recognize the significance of this art form and that this is kind of under attack but i mean under attack is a weird way to say it it's under criticism but everything's under criticism there's more of an ability to criticize now than ever before well more yeah more people are self-editing right yeah i mean at um workplace no you do and but again it's a shame right because we've gotten to that point where you you can't just you know i've i mean i've have i've got friends that are all over the political spectrum and we have some of the greatest conversations and we're completely on opposite sides of things right but and we get you know it gets a

191:30little loud sometimes um but at the end of the day we're great friends right and you know we're all good with it and that's what's missing in this country is the ability to have differing opinions and still find common ground most people are good people most people the vast majority of us are good people but we're so divided scared and we look at each other with differing opinions as being the enemy and i think that's crazy the differing opinions are something to be considered and put into your own value system and try to like decide is this person right are they wrong why do i feel the way i feel why do they feel the way they feel why are we so divided like what what are what are our common beliefs what's our common ground but people aren't doing that right now they're so polarized well and everything everything's very siloed right so i'll

192:19you know you sit and you read and people i i talk folks about this they'll say well you know what should i read or what should i watch or what should i listen to well the answer is whatever you get your hands on right i mean just just read a wide variety of things right don't just don't just sit and read and your one source of news is this or it's all in this silo i know i'm going to agree with it if you're not uncomfortable sometimes with things that you're watching or you're reading then you know you're part of the problem as far as i'm concerned because yeah it's it's you could argue okay it's important if i'm on if i'm really feel strongly about something fine i get it you want to be you know what sort of that i feel like i'm part of a community because i know i'm i belong to this group that all feel strongly about something right but

193:07it's like knowing what the enemy thinks too you should get out and understand what the other side is saying what they they think because maybe it'll make your argument for your own perspective a little bit better right because now you understand what the other side's thinking if you don't you're just going to sound like a douche nozzle so agree yeah that's that's about it mike let's wrap it up yeah i think we solved a lot of problems we did we fixed everything we fixed it and you know what i always do and i'm an optimist things are going to get better joe i hope they do well you know sometimes when confronted with problems people find solutions maybe that's the the silver lining of all this is that people are going to be forced to look at these problems that we've created for ourselves and realize that maybe some of us are on the wrong

193:49path and maybe you know maybe this attitude that we have this polarized attitude is ultimately bad for everybody bad for your children my children the world in general and that we all need to like try to understand each other a little bit better and find out why we have these rigid belief systems and also recognize that there's a problem with human nature that we have these these these tribal identities that we attach ourselves to and that many of us they you know we just have adopted these predetermined patterns of behavior that aren't necessarily beneficial to either either or so you're saying people might become more self-aware and and uh i'm hoping yeah that's my hope it's not gonna happen some of us i think i think some of us are becoming more self-aware and also i think there's a movement where people are kind of tired of this [ __ ] they're

194:40tired of the polarization of this country and they they do realize that most people are good people and they have to kind of like they have to like logically and rationally come to those conclusions and and recognize why people have their own belief systems and what you know what caused them whether it's regional or whether it's a political like what's caused them to to find these patterns they've accept accepted as their own that they've adopted yeah i think if if that were to happen if people were to step back a little bit and think about um what they're saying if they would be just again a little more self-aware but i do think it also requires it requires some change in the narrative from on high right it requires some change in the narrative from from the politicians i don't that's where i'm really cynical i don't see that because

195:32there's too much that's how they get self-interest right right but if everybody just would chill the [ __ ] out a little bit and and just realize that words aren't violence differing opinions aren't violent it doesn't hurt to hear a different opinion right you can choose to accept it or not you don't have to [ __ ] argue about it then yeah then maybe we get to that point where there's a little bit more uh time spent somewhere in the middle ground i think it should be celebrated i think those kind of uh open discussions should be celebrated i think we should recognize the value in them of them that's it's an important part of any sort of civilization is to have open debate and discussions and it's really simple it's a simple solution to silence people but ultimately it's bad for everyone yeah it's bad even when people have they're

196:22saying things you're diametrically opposed to the right that they have to say that is very important to you oh yeah because if yeah if you try to shut down that yeah then they shut you down they'll shut you down and you're never gonna be pure enough for the mob exactly right so anyway i think this has been a very good therapy session i think we nailed it finishing on a positive note uh your show tell people about your show yeah uh black files declassified um going into a third season we don't have a production date yet we don't have a production date yet but we're standing by waiting it's on discovery discovery of course merged with warner and so now it's warner discovery and anytime something like that happens uh they then spend the next six to eight months waiting for the dust to settle before they move on and do anything

197:07but they've been terrific about the show and so we're hoping to get started again in the in the fall there's no shortage of subjects for you to cover oh my god yeah this and there's some good ones that they've they've mapped out early on until while we're waiting for uh for the green light i have to ask you about ufos before we leave oh yeah do you know anything new um do you ever have any thought that these things are drones that they're either something that the united states has developed or other countries have developed and it's some sort of a black declassified black file is that what you call it yeah black files yeah um i i what we've seen so far we've done a we've done some episodes on uh atip on the advanced threat uh you know program uh on uaps uh the pentagon's effort to try to catalog these things most of them come down to um

197:59to uh fairly logical explanations but there have been some cases and they just you know they produced this report the pentagon did last year which was a little bit unsatisfying for most people who were hoping to see a little bit more detail i'm not sure why they thought that would happen but uh you know i think that you know i i i don't deny that there's there's other stuff out there there's life out there i'm sure of that right um have they come here and visited i i don't know but most of the things we've looked at you can argue have been project aurora or you know some other um classified uh program around some type of air platform and probably unmanned right most uh a number of them unmanned yeah some some man because then you don't have to worry about the biological limitations of a human being right traveling at extraordinary speeds which is the

198:57problem and material science is lagging behind our desire to get a manned hypersonic vehicle for instance right it's just not it's not there yet so you know that's why the hypersonics that that are being developed are unmanned and that that makes perfect sense but they're turning into goo you're turning to goo you can't you just it's it's it we're just not there but i think that there have been some cases we've talked about one the one that stands out this is a couple of things that when in this in this arena one would be uh uh commander framers sightings i i have not seen any logical explanation for that yet and multiple eyes on target um clearly something there insane rates of speed no sign of don't make propulsion yeah no no no visible propulsion and um and fraver just an enormously experienced individual and again multiple eyes on

199:49that target so that's video evidence when people say what do you believe what do you don't believe that's one of those things that i i think is for me is one of the really big mysteries right that's the one that i would point to of all the various sightings that have been out there the phoenix lights and everything else i think can be explained uh logically um and then the other thing and this is going to sound like i've taken a complete left turn but if we're talking about things in this world would be the uh martin luther king assassination yeah you bring that up often i do i do it is a left turn but you that one you researched and you believe that there was definitely more to it yeah there's definitely something there we haven't found that out yet we haven't figured it out but i'll never shift off of that there was there were there was something there

200:37there and then it was it was uh it was a concerted effort um but those are the two things i think that to me really stand out in all the various investigations we've done um over the handful of years we've been doing it um anyway but thank you thanks for asking about the show i appreciate it my pleasure mike thanks for being here it's always good to talk to you even though it bums me out for a few hours afterwards but i appreciate it brother yeah i will i think i have to [Music]