Mike Baker (Ex-CIA Spy): China Is Preparing & We're Not Paying Attention! Here's What Happens If They Takeover! 5 Spy Tricks You Can Use To Get What You Want!

00:00China is at war with the West already. We just don't see it. And when I look at a map like this, I see a lot of problems. Here is one issue. Over there, Putin is threatening nuclear weapons. And then this regime has been engaged in assassination plots on the president-elect. And then over here, this is looming, right? That's a major issue. Who's the real enemy of the West, in your opinion? I've talked to a number of experts, and their take is, it's them.

00:24How do you think this ends? Um... Ex-CIA officer Mike Baker spent decades in the field mastering the spy skills you need to achieve success in business and everyday life. And offers unique insights into the looming geopolitical threats that's facing the West. When you left the CIA, you start being a spy for companies. Why? Because in its core, the CIA's responsibility is to get intelligence. Because without that, you cannot make smart strategic decisions.

00:52And if you can sell the idea to somebody that they should commit treason on their country... and betray their family to gather intelligence and protect U.S. national security interests. And that's an incredible skill to use in selling and business. And there's a lot of ways you can do this. People are capable of it more so than they realize. But there's a lot of similarities between what I used to do in the spy world and what you do in business.

01:13There's targeting, manipulation, psychology of how people think. Identifying weaknesses and leverage, how they close the deal. The most important thing I took away was what I referred to as getting off the axe. And that's how you get companies to stay with you for 20 years. Let's go through all of them. First of all, you start with I find it incredibly fascinating that when we look at the back end of Spotify and Apple and our audio channels, the majority of people that watch this podcast haven't yet hit the follow button or the subscribe button, wherever you're listening to this.

01:43I would like to make a deal with you. If you could do me a huge favour and hit that subscribe button, I will work tirelessly from now until forever to make the show better and better and better and better. I can't tell you how much it helps when you hit that subscribe button. The show gets bigger, which means we can expand the production, bring in all the guests you want to see, and continue to do this thing we love. If you could do me that small favour and hit the follow button, wherever you're listening to this, that would mean the world to me.

02:05That is the only favour I will ever ask you. Thank you so much for your time. Back to this episode. Mike.

02:16Who are you? And give me... A couple of sentences on the journey of your career and what it's exposed you to. I'm a dude who's been very fortunate in life. I started with the CIA at an early age, not necessarily expecting to start with the CIA and the operations directorate. And you joined the CIA at 22 years old? Yeah, basically. Early 80s, beginning of the 80s. How do you sort of encapsulate your mission into a couple of sentences during that time?

02:50This is gonna sound really weird. To do whatever I was instructed to do. to further the mission objectives. So, and what I mean by that is that's not just me or another officer or somebody else in there. That's their job. So, the CIA doesn't set priorities. It doesn't set tasking, right? That's done by the White House and those in the White House, in the government at the time, the administration at the time. for setting the priorities, tasking.

03:23And that's in part, obviously, guided by intelligence, provided by the intelligence community. So it's a symbiotic relationship. But the tasking comes into the agency. And the agency says, fine, get on with it. And that could be a collection of intelligence on a particular subject. So you could be talking about we need to know what Putin's plans and intentions are. We need to know what's the breakout time for the Iranian regime to actually reach weapons capability for the nuclear program.

03:56Whatever the tasking is, right, it comes into the agency. The agency then, fine, let's get busy with it. And Putin. There's other elements of the intel community all working very hard to accomplish that same thing. So it could be NSA is also working on that. It could be military intelligence is also working on that. There's a lot of moving parts, but my part was at the agency.

04:18So did you have to spend a lot of time overseas? And if so, if you were overseas, what were you doing overseas? Yeah, I spent my entire time. I never had what you would call a headquarters tour. So I spent all my time overseas traveling.

04:33What was your day-to-day like? Because it's just a world so far away from anything that I know. So I'm like, you spend all that time in the CIA overseas. When you wake up in the morning, are you undercover? If you're in a foreign country, presumably they don't know that you're part of the CIA. Well, no, we have different types of operations and different types of things. I mean, so you can... You could end up living in a foreign country for two or three years, right?

04:58You've got a home there and you're working there. And other times it could be a short one-off operation where you're just dropping in to do something in particular, maybe to meet an asset or whatever it might be. And what's an asset? An asset is a source. It's a recruited source. So... That's a good point. There's misconceptions sometimes in vocabulary, right? So they'll say CIA agent. Well, in reality, it's a CIA officer. The agent is the person that's been recruited or the asset, the human source.

05:32And so that's an incredible skill, right? To be able to go out, you have to identify. First of all, you start with what's the information you're looking for? And that's the fascinating thing. It turns out that what I used to do and what we do in my business, which is intelligence and investigations, security services, is pretty much the same thing. What information does the client – in the CIA's case, that's the US government. What information does the client need?

06:04Where does it reside? Who has access to it? And how can you get a hold of it appropriately? So how can you get that information? Yeah. You identify the target, then you figure out what you need to do to develop potentially a relationship. You develop that relationship, and if you're fortunate enough, you recruit that asset. That person could be a deputy foreign minister, could be a senior military officer, could be Could be a cab driver, you know, who can tell you everything that's happening in a particular neighborhood of interest, whatever it might be.

06:39But that process of that recruitment cycle of the spotting, you know, targeting, development, recruitment, running, then you've got to maintain that relationship. And the interesting thing is oftentimes, particularly when you're talking about a really – a really important asset, someone who's in a position of access, maybe because they've risen up through their own government. That window, from the minute you get them on board, you set the hook, you get them recruited, and they start reporting, taking tasking, that window starts to close.

07:20And there's a clock that's ticking because usually that's a it can be a corrosive thing on a person's character, right, on their being, right? So you recruit a Russian, right? You're always in the back of your mind thinking, okay, how long do we have here, right? Before, because it's, unless they're a psychotic, right? Then they don't care, they don't give a shit, they'll be happy to do this, but it's not a normal thing. So, to be able to convince somebody, to sell the idea to somebody that they should essentially commit treason on their country is a remarkable thing, I've always felt anyway.

08:14So, then when I went into business. You know, the idea of business development, of selling, seemed like, sure, that's an easy lift, right? Because, you know, that's... Anyway, I'm disappearing down a rabbit hole.

08:28No, you're not. I mean, this is exactly the rabbit hole that I wanted to go down, because... I mean, this is the Diary of a Seer, so I do want to understand how you think about selling, because that seems like the hardest thing to sell, to get, you know, potentially a Russian to commit treason against their country. I'm thinking, God, what are you offering them in terms of an incentive? So would your job in that be to convince them, or would it be to go and meet them to collect the information, or would it be something else?

08:54Could be all of those. Could be all of those. And then part of it depends on where, what location. I mean, sometimes you have difficult places. Obviously, it's more difficult to work in a challenging environment, like pick a place. I mean, right now, current conflicts. Think about working in Lebanon, right? If you're developing or working with a source. Yeah. I don't it's not a lot of potential recruits for Hezbollah right now. They don't even though there's headroom.

09:21They don't I don't think there's a lot of willing people wanting to take some of those jobs. But but the point being is is that you could end up doing all of those things. You might have spotted somebody you might develop and you might recruit them. Right. And you're going to handle them for a while. Maybe then you're going to head off someplace else and someone else is going to come in and take over that relationship. That's also a crucial point.

09:42Right. Because. If you've developed a personal relationship with somebody to the point where they're going, yeah, I guess I can do that. I can provide you with intelligence on this or that. Because think about it. They're not just betraying – they're not betraying their country. I've always thought about this, particularly when we're talking about – traitors here in the States, right? When we, you know, Ed Lee Howard, Jim Nicholson, right? Who are these people?

10:12Hanson, these are all traitors to the US. So moles, whatever you want to call them within the agency. Hanson was at the FBI, one of the most destructive traitors we ever had. But what did he do? He, interestingly enough, was a longtime FBI agent. who he was responsible for counterintelligence to some degree, for a big degree, related to the former Soviet Union and to Russia. And so he had a tremendous amount of knowledge about how the Russian service worked.

10:50Right. And then eventually he ended up. Allowing he wasn't even recruited he offered his services, but he offered him in such a way Because he understood how they worked that he was able to do it without the Russians knowing who he was, right? So it was a very remote relationship and he controlled it, which is fascinating, which allowed him to then do this for a very long period of time and betray a number of our Russian assets. And those people didn't have a happy ending.

11:24And so, but the idea is that you look at those people, or you look at anybody who does that, They're not just betraying their country, they're betraying their service, they're betraying their family, all these things because it's a fascinating psychology. And if you don't think about that, if you don't understand that, then I think it's hard to close the deal with anybody. What is that deal? So in the case of the gentleman you mentioned who was a traitor to the US, is he getting paid?

11:55Is it money that they're doing it for? Yeah, he was getting paid. He had some issues. He was kind of a quirky individual. He was spending a lot of money on a mistress or someone who he imagined to be his mistress. And motivation can be a difficult thing, right, sometimes. And sometimes it's a very straightforward thing. It's usually not ideology. Interesting. Yeah, I know that I had the same thought when when I first started and and they kind of went through this process of saying what are Motivations well money is a big one.

12:24So you've got you know, and then Ideology not so much. Sometimes it could be something as simple as They've got a sick kid. They can't get treatment for the kid in whatever country they happen to reside in sometimes it's It's more base than that. They just don't feel like they got enough hugs from their employer or they feel disrespected by their government or whatever. You have to be able to identify those weaknesses and then you have to be willing to play on them.

12:55And so on the point of identification, if you met me and I was an asset, that's the word, right? You would be, I mean, you know, if we had just met, you would be a potential source, a target, developmental source. Okay, so I'm a cab driver, and I drive a high-ranking official.

13:16And every day in the car, he's telling me everything that's going on. He's just offloading. So you want to recruit me, right? Yeah. So how do you go about recruiting me? Well, theoretically, it's just going to be, I'm going to find something that you're interested in. How? And then I'm going to be a conversation. It's as simple as that. So you might get in my cab one day? Yeah. And then I'll just get in your cab, and we'll start talking. And People love, I mean, you're probably on planes as much as I am.

13:44People love to talk, right? And they love to talk about themselves, right? So if you just ask questions, right? If that's all you do, you don't have to say anything about yourself, right? I don't know how many thousands of conversations I've had where... You know, it's almost just, so what are you doing? I said, eh, I'll give them some bullshit. I mean, not now, but... And as soon as you give them something that doesn't sound interesting, then fine, now you've got a runway.

14:13Then you just turn it on to them and say, so what are you doing? People want to talk about themselves. It's striking sometimes. And, I mean, we find this all the time, and it's just information gathering, right? Like, if we have a client... And they say, we've got a business in pick a place. Just for grins, let's say China. We've got an investment that we've made in China. But it's not making sense, right? We're not seeing what we thought we were going to see from the revenues or from the production, whatever.

14:46What's going on? If we have someone rock up at that factory or that manufacturing facility or whatever, and outside the factory is just rows of noodle shops or whatever, food trucks or whatever you want to call it. But maybe there's a security guard or some people just sitting around. love to talk because they've got nothing else going on in their day. And so the information you can get from people, whether it's a security guard sitting in a booth all day long who's suddenly going to tell you, well, no, the plant is only up and operating Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, or this is the number of trucks that are coming out, little benign stuff that no one's going to think anything of.

15:31The amount of information you can gather from people, maybe it's someone who's working as a cleaner in a building. Maybe it's a cab driver. It doesn't matter. You know, it's a secretary in a business, right? You're looking for people with access who they're just going to be inclined to talk, right? It sounds odd sometimes. But you get that conversation going. You find things that the person's interested in. Then you start mirroring that perhaps.

15:56Maybe that, oh, you know, I'm interested in that too. Maybe I'm not. Maybe I find it boring as hell. There was one where it was like chess. I was like, god damn, I hate chess. But the guy was really into chess, right? And it was overseas. And we were drinking and bumped into him at the bar. And, you know, we started talking. And it turns out that his passion was chess. suddenly my passion is chess. Problem is, you got to demonstrate that, right?

16:26And I sucked at it. So that was a quick crash course in how to at least make myself look somewhat reasonable. And then you're just looking for other points of access. And what that turns into is points of leverage. So that sounds, you know, once you take it far enough down the walk, it can sound very mercenary, right? And it is. You're talking about, again, asking people to do something that's not necessarily in their best interests. But you're doing it for a very stated purpose.

17:03Now, again, a lot of people will listen to this and go, well, that's just bullshit. You're just doing it for the man, right? You're doing it for the government. Okay, well, you know what? Nations that are hostile to US interests or UK's interests or Australia's interest or Canada's interest or Europe's interest. They're doing this all the time and they're doing it a lot more aggressively and with no guardrails about how they behave. So, yeah. So I'm that cab driver.

17:31I've started off loading to you because you've got me talking. You've told me your career is not interesting. I start talking. At what point do you seek out that leverage? So at some point you're looking for him to maybe say his son's sick or something, right? Well, I mean, yeah, something along those lines. You're just looking for – you're looking for – You're building a profile of the person's personality, right? So you're trying to understand what's important to them.

17:56You're trying to understand what drives them. You're trying to understand where their problems are. You're trying to understand if they have any grievances. You're looking for – you're really just building a map of what this person is like. You're not going to get that in one taxi ride, do you? Oh, no, no, no, not at all, not at all. So what do you want to do? You want to have a reason to meet up again, right? You're always looking in simple terms.

18:21You know, you get that first encounter. What do you want? Well, you want a second encounter. So you've got to find some reason for that. Now, sometimes it's easier than other times, right? So, you know, you can't... You know, you can't always get that, but that's what you're looking for. Another reason to meet back up with that individual seemingly just for no other reason than it just happens, right? Or I mean, it's like this morning I got in a car, right?

18:50It was an Uber. And at the end of the drive, the guy gives me his card. says, hey, if you ever need a ride, whatever, I've got a couple of cars, and so this is kind of what I do, plus I do the Uber, I like that as well. And so now, fine, I can give them a call back. And I've done that overseas in cases where I've said, look, I need to know that I can get from point A to point B tomorrow. Can I just call you rather than hope that I catch a cab? There's a lot of ways you can do this.

19:24It's not rocket science, you know, but it can be – it can be difficult when you're talking about a high value target. Yeah. Yeah. A cab driver is probably a little bit more straightforward because there's a clear reason why you'd frequent their presence. But maybe the head of the Iranian nuclear program might be a little bit more complicated to see again. Although that would be good too. Yeah. Yeah.

19:49So you're training. They find you at 22 years old, I hear. What do they train you to be good at? There's everything from tradecraft, which is a key part of it. And tradecraft encompasses a lot of things, right? It's how do you conduct yourself overseas? How do you do clandestine communications? How do you go undercover? How do you go undercover? Use of disguise. There's surveillance, counter-surveillance. There's a lot... to when I just say tradecraft, what that involves.

20:25And then there's other training. There's paramilitary training and other things that you do. What about people skills? What are the people skills they try and teach you? There's a lot of talking about the psychology of the recruitment process, which means you're diving into profiling individuals, the psychology of how people think. what that process does to an individual. I mean, and there's... It's interesting. I mean, there's some folks who I think struggled with that more than others.

21:04And I think the idea of getting people to that point, of recruiting people, I think, some folks I think found it difficult, maybe problematic, right, because of the manipulation involved. You know, I didn't, again, not necessarily being a deep thinker. I didn't sit a lot of the time, you know, at home, angst ridden over, you know, whether I was being manipulative or not. I would just, I have a task, I'm going to do the task and then move on. But the training can take quite a while, it can be a couple of years before they feel like you're ready to go out.

21:48So you eventually leave the CIA after a very, very long career there. Why did you leave? My daughter was young, and I was in the process of getting a divorce, which took a while. My ex-wife, great person, but not compatible by the end. I think my career was a little difficult. And so I needed to do something that kept me closer to home.

22:20You started doing corporate espionage thereafter. LAUGHTER We call it strategic intelligence and investigations. OK. So for someone that doesn't know what strategic intelligence and investigations slash corporate espionage is, it's effectively being a spy for companies. It could be. There could be an element of that. Yes, I'm not going to deny that. Look, there are corporations out there that are very aggressive in understanding what other companies are doing, right, in particular.

22:49But what we got started in was primarily a company will come to you and say, we're making an investment in business. a country we've never operated in before. Pick a country. Tell us everything we need to know. What are the problems? What are the risks? What are the threats? How do you assess that? It could be we've had a fraud, and now we've had theft of intellectual property. We need to know how bad it is. It could be we're doing a joint venture, and we just need to know about who we're investing in.

23:24You never know. It could be that they're saying, look, we're not having any success in... Maybe they're in the mining sector. We're not having any success in Africa where we're trying to pick up these licenses, and yet these other companies are picking them up left and right. What are we doing wrong? What are they doing right? Who are they dealing with? So now we're getting closer to what you referred to as corporate espionage. But you have to, because you're not working for a government, the guardrails have now shrunk in terms of what you can do.

24:00And so you have to know what is legally appropriate in each jurisdiction. And that changes. What you can do over here is different than what you could do in the UK or in France or in the US or wherever. So as long as you know what the parameters are, then you do that to gather information that's going to benefit the client. Did you have to go undercover in terms of physical disguises?

24:25Yeah, on occasion, which was great. I mean, if you like... I love the acting part of it, right? Because you'd be... I would get completely absorbed in it, right? And I loved it, so I didn't have a problem. Sometimes people don't enjoy it or they don't... It's not... If you're not confident, if you don't have... If you put on a disguise, whether it's a full overhead mask or whether it's just a disguise kit or whatever, if you're not comfortable doing that, it'll show out.

24:55But if you're walking down the street in disguise, nobody on that street is thinking, oh, that guy's in disguise. It's not how people think, right? So unless you do something stupid, it's not going to show out. Did you ever wear a mask? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's a probably, look, we had Hollywood makeup artists there that, I mean, their disguise unit is legendary, amazing what they can do. Yeah.

25:19Why did you write Company Rules? I felt like, for me, over a short period of time, after I'd been involved in private sector for quite a while, it suddenly occurred to me that I was, the reason why we were able to keep a business breathing. was because of some of these things that I absorbed from the company, right? These rules, these, and it's not like there's a book. They don't hand you a book and say, here's your company rules on day one, right?

25:45It's, they're implied, they're kind of embedded in the training process. Of the CIA. Of the CIA, right? And so what I hadn't realized was I, because I thought when I got out, look, people asked me when I said I was gonna leave, I didn't retire, I was too young to retire. I was leaving, right? I left behind my pension. Everything I didn't have, there was no financial reason to do what I did. And so their question was always the same, which, what the hell are you going to do?

26:16And I didn't have an answer, which probably should have been a red flag. But I knew I was going to have to go into kind of this world of gathering information of security services and, because I don't think I'd fit anywhere else. And so it took me a long time to realize that the reason why I was able to build a business and I couldn't have built a business without a very, very close friend of mine, Nick Day, who came out of, of, uh, um, SBS and, and, uh, uh, MI5.

26:47Um, But we couldn't have done that if I hadn't absorbed some of that training and those rules, as I put them, from the agency. And so that's why I wanted to try to say, look, this is why I was able to do this and keep a business breathing. Look, we haven't built a mega corporation, but we built a nice life for a lot of people. And what are the most sort of transferable rules that were...

27:13you were able to transfer from your time working in the CIA to the world of business that you were like, oh my God, this is exactly the same game here, the same technique. I mean, first and foremost, it was – we'll start out with the first one that I put down, which is define the mission, right? So the agency does that very well. At the very outset, you spend a lot of time sitting in classrooms listening to people explain how the agency works, why it works the way it does, where it fits within the government, what its purpose – what its mission is.

27:46And if you don't know that, right, then whether it's the CIA or whether it's your business – then you got a problem. You probably shouldn't really get started. And then you have to communicate that mission. And that's what they did very, very well. And so I took that away. And I was always very simple-minded in terms of a business. I always knew what I wanted to do, which was provide... Again, the best quality product possible. That's how you get companies to stay with you for 20 years.

28:15They know you're going to bust your ass and you're going to overproduce. And you're going to do everything within, again, within the balance of what you can do to give them the best information so that they can then win in whatever they're working or operating. And then I think if you hire smart people and you explain the mission, you communicate that properly to them. Then, you know, your battle's half won, right? You've really, you know, you've cracked that nut.

28:45But then other parts of it are you've got to know your risk appetite. And the agency spends a lot of time. I guess that was my point from earlier is that a lot of people think the agency just goes out and does shit. Let's just go blow that building up. Let's go pick up that high-value target or let's go whatever it is we're going to do. And they don't give any thought to it because that's how the movies operate. rate, right? And they just go do this shit.

29:10There's a lot of time spent on risk versus gain. And what's the potential blowback? What are those scenarios look like? So you have to know your risk appetite. You have to communicate that because everybody has to be on the same page as to what's allowable and what's not allowable. And that's true in private sector as well. We have to know you can't do this. You can't have a one-party conversation and record it in particular jurisdiction. Or no, you can't do the following because the information you're gathering is going to end up in court.

29:40It's got to be evidentially proper. So things have to be done in an appropriate way. So if you don't know all those things, then you're going to get yourself crosswise somehow. Know your operating environment is a key thing. This is a constant surprise sometimes with some companies that we start working with where you realize that they don't necessarily understand the operating environment, where they're working, what the market restrictions are, what their competitors are doing, right?

30:12What the government is like in that particular country, what the instability issues are, whatever it may be. You put all that together, you know your operating environment, you know your risk, you define your mission. And then at some point you got to make decisions, right? And I think that's- again, long-winded answer to your question, which is probably the most important thing I took away, was what I referred to as getting off the axe. And the axe is the ambush site.

30:41So in the old days, you don't want to end up on the ambush site. That's a bad place to be. And there are indicators, right? Whether you're talking about being in Mexico and rolling up on a cartel ambush, or you're talking about being overseas in a place like Iraq, and you're in a convoy movement and you have to understand what the indicators are that something bad is going to happen if you don't make a decision you're never going to get all the information you want in business right but there are a lot of people who get paralyzed by that they want all the data you know they want to be able to think through and that's a good thing if that's your mindset but something bad's gonna happen or you're gonna miss an opportunity it's gonna pass you by and so one of the things that the agency taught was make a damn decision right with the information that you've got you're always gonna want more but with the information you've got whether it's imperfect and not understand the nature of that information But then just make a damn decision, right?

31:38How do they get you to do that? Because there's a lot of people listening now that may be paralyzed in their own personal lives with a decision to leave a job, to leave a city, to leave a partner, you know? Or a big strategic decision. That's actually really good. That's a good point, yeah. The agency teaches you through sort of repetition and understanding that, I'm sorry you waited too long. This is not good. But in a better sense, I think what I've learned also is, look, I tell my kids this all the time.

32:16I tell my boys and my daughter this is that, There's never that many options on the decision tree. Not that life's completely binary, but we tend to overthink everything, and we tend to overcomplicate things. When we're faced with a decision, whether it's do I leave my job, do I move, whatever it might be, do I take a big strategic decision for my company? You tend to... you tend to overcomplicate, right? Life, I, I've always found, and maybe, maybe I'm simple minded, but one of the things that I took away from the agency is that life sometimes is just as simple as it seems, right?

32:56And again, why I'm not a big conspiracy theorist, theorist, but, um, So if you narrow it down and say, look, I'm not faced with an endless array of options here. You know, I may have on any big decision, I may have two or three options, right? I'm going to take this job. Okay, what does that mean? Well, it means I'm taking a chance. Okay, people talk about writing your positives and your negatives down on. I don't know whether that's really a helpful thing or not, right?

33:23Because then you get lost in this list and then you start imagining positives and negatives. And then it's a, so I always try to say, look, you gotta, you don't act just for the sake of acting, right? That's sometimes has its own negative consequences, but you, you take the information you've got and then you just, you, you make a decision, right? Because if you, again, if it's the inertia of not acting, if you're, If you're in an unhappy relationship and you say, you know, what do I do?

33:51Do I stay in this unhappy relationship because maybe it's going to get better? Okay, what are the odds of that happening, right? It's been going on for 10 years. Maybe you're not happy. Get the hell out, right? Do something different. If you're thinking about changing your job, if you're not happy in your job, which is It's a quality of life issue, right? And I tell that to my folks all the time. If you think you would be happier somewhere else, you gotta go give it a try.

34:12If you think you'd be happier going out and starting a business, you should do that, right? But you gotta jump in. And I know this is probably not as detailed as a psychiatrist would give, but I really do honestly believe that Any major decision, you can distill it down to a very, very limited number of options. And that makes it easier. But if you just sit there staring at it, and people do, I would see this in operations all the time, people would just start imagining all the different scenarios.

34:44And I thought, you know what? Honest to God, when the whistle goes, right, and the ambush starts, usually you shouldn't start an ambush with a whistle. It's going to go one way, another way. Don't get bogged down in what could happen, what might happen. That was another thing I think I did well at the agency was I didn't ever sit around and stare at my belly button and think, well, I wonder what would have happened if I'd done this. No. You live with your mistakes.

35:14You live with your consequences. You live with the good things. Life is tough enough as it is, right? And we just seem like we want to make it tougher. And I don't ever understand that.

35:26It's an interesting time in the United States at the moment. Is it? Something happened? Yeah. I mean, it's an interesting time in the world, to be honest, when you think about everything that's going on. Very, very unique times. But Trump has just been elected. He's now president-elect of the United States. Is that consequential? And if so, how would you believe it to be consequential? Yeah. What do they say? Don't talk about politics, religion or taxes.

35:55So, yes, I think it is consequential. I think it was something that very few people predicted the size of the victory. Look, he took all the swing states, right? He turned a surprising number of districts in favor of the Republicans in states that he didn't win. He... outperformed in most categories, right? The demographics were rather shocking, right? And people wanted to talk about how, well, it's going to come down to the women voters. Well, it didn't, right?

36:36Fewer women voters voted for Kamala Harris than they did previously for Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden, right? And he gained in suburban voters, women voters. So it's consequential in reshaping, at least in the short to midterm, people's understanding of the electorate, I think. Now, it's probably not consequential in the fact that I don't know that the Democrats, they don't seem to be doing it yet. I don't think they're going to be particularly self-aware or introspective, right?

37:13They spent months, longer than that, referring to a large portion of the population as moronic, as unintelligent, as sexist, as racist, as garbage, as fascists, as Nazis, right? I'm not quite sure, but they seem incapable right now of any sort of reflection on what they need to do as a party to maybe turn things around. So I don't know consequentially whether it's going to change the Democrat Party for the next election. But yeah, it'll be – and then you have to ask yourself, OK, the policies that are important from a national security perspective, from foreign policy, what are we looking at differently here with Trump coming in?

38:07Do you think he's going to end some of these wars, like the war in the Ukraine and Russia? Do you think he's going to end that? Because, I mean, he's pretty much said in the election cycle that he was going to call Putin and end it on day one or something like that. Yeah, that's right. I forgot about that. He's going to end it on day one. He's going to stop this war. Yeah, with... set Trump over here to the side for a second. And you have to look at what's happening on the ground, right, with Ukraine and Russia, because that will determine whether Trump's going to be successful in any move that he makes.

38:48So the problem that Ukraine is facing right now is either going into winter and a massive percentage of their energy infrastructure has been destroyed by, by Russia. So it's going to be a very hard winter. Um, you look at the resolve of the Ukrainian people and an institute in Kyiv does these very interesting surveys of Ukrainian citizens throughout Ukraine, not just in Kyiv on a regular basis. And they ask questions like, are you willing to fight indefinitely?

39:29Are you willing to stay in the game? Are you willing to give it your all for however long it takes? And to that question, to that phrasing, at the beginning of the year, 73 percent said yes, right, of the citizenry. Last month, it was 63 percent, right? And so that's a 10 percent drop is significant when we're talking about the fate of your nation. They – They're losing soldiers at an alarming rate and they have a significant disadvantage to the Russians in terms of manpower.

40:10Russian manpower has, depending on who you talk to, maybe a three to one advantage in terms of available combatants. The Russian military is gaining ground in the Eastern part of Ukraine, in Donetsk in particular. It's the front line is about 600 miles long, 620 miles long. In overall, right now, if you said, stop the war, stop the fighting, Right now, Russia controls 20% of Ukraine.

40:46Good time to put my little map here so you can show me what you're talking about. Why did Russia start this war? Well, I mean, if you wanted a sort of a theoretical 30,000 foot answer, you know, Putin has repeatedly referred to the collapse of the Soviet Union as the greatest disaster of the 20th century. And he meant it, right? And so he's been trying and he hasn't been shy about it ever since he's been in charge, which seems now like about 100 years, to recreate...

41:31the glory, the strength of the former Soviet Union in some capacity. Not entirely, he's not crazy, but he is completely jonesing for some form of a stronger Russia. And in his mind, that means he's got to have a buffer zone between him and NATO. And so this is part of that. He also considers, if you think about it right here, He's basically saying, this is mine, right? If you think that- Which is the east of- This is the eastern part of Ukraine, right?

42:09Here is Ukraine. Front line, this is not, I mean, I'm simplifying this, but the front line stretches about 600 miles. He's also annexed, of course, Crimea, but that's another issue here. And that's the only port for their Black Sea fleet, which Ukrainian military is frankly destroyed almost. at this stage of the game. But they own at this stage, they've got about 20% of Ukraine, if you were to say, stop the shooting now. And then the problem is that at the outset of this war, Zelensky and the Ukrainian government said, you know, the only answer here is total victory.

42:58We have to get all our territory back. Crimea, Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizh, we have to get it all back. And that is not, again, it's not satisfying to say this, but it's not possible. So the problem that is being faced right now is, When this war got started in the first year, year and a half, everybody was, you know, they were putting their flags, Ukrainian flags on their porch. They were putting a little flag on their X site, their Twitter site.

43:35And there's no doubt the Ukrainian military has been incredibly courageous and the population of Ukraine has put up with a great deal. Look, the months of September and October of this year, Those two months, there's only been one night when Kyiv hasn't been under attack by Russian drones, which is, if you think about it, is insane. And that's just Kyiv. All their other major cities have also been under attack by the Russians. They've destroyed much of their energy infrastructure.

44:11Now, a bright spot... was for the Ukrainian military was that they did a surprise offensive into Kursk, which is Russian territory. And in doing that, that was the first time there were foreign troops on Russian turf, right, since World War II. And that really shocked the hell out of Putin and the Russian military. Yeah. And they acted as if they really didn't know how to respond, didn't have the resources to respond. But this is a game of attrition, right?

44:43We're going into our full third year early this coming year. And what's kept them in the fight is U.S. support and EU or NATO support. And the EU has done a very good job. I mean, look, they've picked up a great part of the effort. Without that support, this thing would never have lasted this long, never. And so I think Putin, in part, has been very surprised. He miscalculated a lot of things, but he miscalculated the sort of support that Ukraine would receive from NATO in particular.

45:20And now... And why is NATO giving so much support?

45:25Why is this in their interests? Well, think about where Ukraine is. Think about where Poland is. Look, Russian missiles have flown errantly into Poland. Their history tells them or informs them that if Putin takes this— Ukraine. Yeah, it takes Ukraine. Then it's not as if he's going to say, OK, I'm done. I'm finished, right? They believe—now, whether they're right or not, but this answers the question about why such strong NATO support. They believe that that's not his inclination, right?

45:58It's not in his character to say, that's all I want. I'm good. What do you think? I don't— I take him at his word when he says he wants to recreate the former Soviet Union in a fashion. Do I think this is enough of a buffer from NATO for him? I don't think so. Do I think he might consider moving a little bit further north? Look, he already has. This is Belarus. Belarus is a solid ally of Putin. But is there a chance that he says to himself, well, you know – Maybe over here, he's already made verbal threats up here.

46:31It's Latvia. Latvia, yeah. And so I think I understand what their mindset is. It's like Israel, right? Sometimes we say, oh, my God, why is Israel acting the way they do? Well, because they're surrounded by a ring of terrorist proxies that all are there to serve the purpose of the Iranian regime, which is to destroy Israel. So that's their mindset, right? We don't live there. We don't understand it. So to say, OK, well, that's ridiculous for someone in the US to go, that's ridiculous that that's Putin.

47:00OK, you know, well, fuck off. You don't live here, right? You're not in Poland watching this if he takes over Ukraine. And so. And World War Two wasn't so long ago. Exactly. It wasn't until I studied World War II, which actually wasn't very long ago, it was about six months ago, that I understood the sort of geopolitical backdrop as to why you need to defend Ukraine. Because when you see, you can probably explain it better than me, but what Hitler did...

47:26And he just took a little bit. Was it like Czechoslovakia? Just a little bit. Take this piece. And then a little bit more. And then he took a little bit more. And then a little bit more. And by the end of it, he was trying to take the UK. He was trying to take Russia. He was trying to take the lot. Over here in the States, right, you had this isolationist feeling. So World War II is happening. And they don't want any of it, right? They went through World War I.

47:47They sent a lot of their boys over. And they were like, no, screw it. You know, look, we got this big ocean here. You know, we don't have to worry about it. And... Yeah, that's a problem. But you see that now. There's some of this isolationist attitude, which is why do we even care? And that's – OK, fine. That's a great question to ask. People should ask questions like that. But I'm telling you, having worked against Russia for a long period of time, it's a mistake not to – take Putin at his word, right?

48:18And we tend to always mirror our values. It's like when we were talking about the cab driver, how do you get them into a conversation? We start to mirror the values, right? And we do that as a nation sometimes in the US, where we imagine that people are gonna react the same way or think the same way about freedom or democracy, and it's not how the world works. So just going back here to the incursion into Russia that the Ukrainian military did. So, they're holding territory up there.

48:48Maybe it depends on who you talk to, maybe 500 square miles. It varies. But they've stretched their resources relatively thin and that's a problem because it all goes back to war as long as we've known war, which is supply lines, right? If you can't maintain your supply lines, you've lost the plot. What we're seeing right now is Putin has amassed about 40,000 Russian troops. and about 10,000 North Korean troops. And that's another story. So North Korea, because Kim Jong-un of North Korea is best buddies now with Putin, he has sent upwards of 12,000 troops to Russia.

49:30And they are now on the front lines, essentially. They're already in combat. But they're an important part of Putin's effort. And I think what he's trying to do— Trump has won. Takes us back to our original point of, OK, what's Trump going to do and what's this going to look like after the inauguration? Trump's won. I think there's a calculation here. Putin could be saying, I've got to do everything now. I've got to throw everything I can to gain that Russian territory back.

50:03before sitting down at a negotiating table and coming up with a deal. Because I don't want to sit at a negotiating table if Zelensky and NATO are saying, well, we have part of your Russian territory. You want it back? Well, we're going to need this back. We're going to need Eastern Ukraine back. Or we're going to need Crimea back. I don't think he's ever given back Crimea, right? Right. But it's likely, I think, if you have to make these decisions and without real insight into his mindset, it's true.

50:31It's all speculation. But I wouldn't be surprised if what he's calculated right now is I got to throw all these troops to regain this Russian territory the Ukrainians surprised us by taking. ahead of sitting down and doing a negotiated settlement, which again is going to be very unsatisfying to all those people who put Ukrainian flags on their porch and they're going to get all their territory back. No, they're not. They don't have the ability to do that.

50:57And I hope that what we don't see is if Trump – when Trump comes into office, So I think he and the people that he will have around him working on this issue will be sufficiently convinced that they have to maintain a level of support that allows Ukraine to sit down at the negotiating table. from at least a position of relative strength, right? Otherwise, they're just sitting and they're asking for whatever they can get in this deal. And that's not – that's never going to sell.

51:30Zelensky has got to sell this to the Ukrainian population. This is an incredible moment in time, right? This is an invading force from Russia into another country, an independent country, And there's so much complexity here. It's hard to explain without saying, OK, we're going to take the next five or six days to talk about it. But it's an incredible moment in time. And so, yes, it matters a great deal about – is this consequential? It's consequential if worst-case scenario, the next administration says, that's it.

52:07We're cutting off all assistance and all aid. Well, the rest of NATO will definitely stay in the game because they view it differently because they're right here. But US support is critical and it's critical to get a settlement. And if what you want is to end war, to stop the killing – And if you're pragmatic, you have to assume this is going to be a settlement that means that Russia is going to keep maybe not all of this. Maybe they'll keep this much, and this will be maybe a demilitarized zone, right?

52:41Patrolled by UN peacekeepers or whatever to act as a buffer. But then you have other issues. Is Putin going to say, no, part of this deal has got to be that Ukraine never joins NATO? And that's – I'm sure that's going to be a part of his deal. And then how NATO deals with that, I have no idea because they've already made sort of a guarantee. OK, you're going to be in at some point. Anyway, that's – How do you think it ends if you had to be – if you had to bet?

53:10I think – look, part of the reason why – Part of the reason why the North Korean troops have ended up in Russia, which is, again, is an astounding thing. is because Putin desperately doesn't want to do another conscription. He knows that's vastly unpopular with his folks. Which is when you ask your everyday people. You basically round up more people, right? I'm going to need another 150,000 soldiers because he runs what's essentially called a meat grinder operation.

53:43He just throws people in the front, right, as cannon fodder. I mean, the Russian casualty rate has been... It's ridiculous compared to the Ukrainians, but they've been willing to sacrifice all those people. So, I think the idea being, look, Kim Jong-un, he's making money off of this deal, sending troops up there. He's getting the troops that survive anyway will get combat experience and he doesn't have a military with any combat experience right now.

54:13He's also getting weapons technology transfer from Russia. So, he's getting part of a deal here. What's Putin getting? I think Putin's just getting bodies he can throw out there ahead of the next wave, which will be Russian troops. So I think those 10,000 North Koreans soldiers are fucked. There's been a rising sentiment in the United States that we should stop sending money to Ukraine and why are we bothering and this isn't our problem, et cetera, et cetera.

54:39What do you say to those people? Because that sentiment is rising. And it's rising, from my opinion, it's rising on the right side of politics. I hear it more and more on some of the big podcasts. I hear it more and more on X and Twitter. And again, it's only because I researched what happened in Nazi Germany in World War II that I suddenly go, okay, this is much more complicated than you think. And you can embolden someone if you don't resist them invading a local country.

55:07Yeah. And why stop at one? Right. Well, look, I mean, this... And the thing is... The world is shrinking, right? The world is and has been and continues to shrink. Nothing happens in a bubble. So what's happening right here is being watched by Xi Jinping in China in terms of Taiwan. I mean he's sitting there saying, OK, here's Taiwan. This is straight to Taiwan. There's no distance whatsoever. He's just conducted, Xi Jinping and the Chinese regime has just conducted the largest military exercise around Taiwan ever, basically blocking it off, blocking the ports and patrolling the airways.

55:45So the idea being he just wanted to show that he could do that. And… So he's watching what's happening over here in terms of the US response and NATO response. And he's saying, OK, at what point does it make sense for me to do this? Because at the end of the day, Xi Jinping is tied to his desired legacy, which is the reunification. And in his mind, this belongs right here. So let's move on to China. Yeah. Question was, how do you think it ends if you're a betting man?

56:14How do you think the Ukrainian war ends? I think in this coming year, I think in part – I know I've talked a lot about what the Ukrainians are suffering from. But there are reasons why Putin is going to need to figure this out as well. I think part of it is his economy is suffering. And – So I think it finishes with a negotiated settlement at some point during 2025. And I think that means the lines are going to look – again, I keep using the word unsatisfactory, but that's the way it's going to feel to a lot of people.

56:49The lines are going to look a lot like they did before the invasion. Maybe some additional territory being held by the Russians. And then I do think that there will be some agreement to have a buffer zone that will be essentially under the auspices of UN peacekeeping troops somehow, a no-fly zone, whatever you want to call it as well. I think that's how it's going to end up. I think Kursk, that region in Russia, goes back to the Russians. I think the problem is going to be, I think, in the short order.

57:20I think they're going to want to move quickly, right, before we get into the teeth of winter. I think that's going to be a mess. So that's going to be a major – when they start that offensive and we're talking again potentially 50,000 troops thrown at a relatively thin line, I think that territory goes back to Russia. In the next month. I would suspect, yeah. I mean, basically, you don't put troops there, you know, with all those resources without intending to use them.

57:54And I think the longer those North Korean troops sit there, the more trouble they will have in terms of command and control. So they're going to want to get them into the cannon as quickly as possible. So you mentioned China.

58:08China feel like Taiwan is theirs. Taiwan is this little island off the coast of China. Mm-hmm. I hear about this plan that they say China has, which is the 2049 plan. What is China's 2049 plan? Well, part of that was based around a timeline for how we want to refer to it, the reunification, the absorption of Taiwan, the taking over of Taiwan. Nobody really knows what that will look like because there's a concern Is it going to be a completely kinetic?

58:42Is it going to be a military operation? Is it going to be more of a soft takeover? Sort of like, you know, there's a good example right here, Hong Kong. You remember there used to be democracy in Hong Kong, and now there's not. And that happened over a period of time, but they basically just squashed all remnants of democracy, particularly during the pandemic. So what's it going to look like when they do take over Taiwan? That's the big question.

59:10But the timeline has shrunk. So... Now there's some feeling that the movement on Taiwan will be during the course of Xi Jinping's tenure. So what are you looking at? Well, that depends on his grip on power, which seems very solid. It seems like it depends on his health, which, again, I'd be speculating. So I don't see him riding off into the sunset willingly without finishing that project that, in his mind, is so important. He's consolidated power in China like nobody since Deng Xiaoping or Mao Zedong.

59:49So I think... I think he's serious. Again, take certain leaders at their word. Some bluster a lot. Some make very big pronouncements. Donald Trump would be one of them who tends to just speak off the cuff and throw things out. I think the danger sometimes is the Democrats, for example, take him at his word for everything he says. They take everything he says literally, but there are other leaders, Putin, Xi Jinping, need to pay real close attention to exactly what they're saying.

60:20So I think when he talks about absorbing Taiwan and making it part of the motherland again, he's not kidding around. Why does he want Taiwan? It looks like such an insignificant part of that part of the map. It's so small in comparison to China. It's a good point. When you look at the map, you go, eh, you really need to bother. You know what? Part of it is the history, right? Ever since the Chiang Kai-shek and the separatists escaping to Taiwan and raising it as a separate nation, it's just – it's hard to explain, but it's a very emotive subject.

61:01Why does the US care so much about Taiwan? Why? That's a better question too. Okay. Part of that is – I don't want to say emotional but it's the idea of look, they're democratic institutions. It's an ally. How could we possibly stand by and watch a communist regime step on it and destroy it? Part of it is practical. It's like, you know, it's an important chip manufacturing center. So, you know, there's a couple elements to it. Honestly, look, if all the chip manufacturing on Taiwan was reshored over to California somewhere, would we care quite as much?

61:50Well, we would still care on that sort of emotional values-based side. But, you know, We could probably overlook it in the long run. Now, are we going to send boots on the ground over to defend Taiwan if there's a military action? You know, going back to your betting person, I would bet no, no matter who's in office. But they all say they're going to defend Taiwan. Everyone, all of the US presidents are always asked, would you defend Taiwan if Russia invaded?

62:20And you'll probably know some of the quotes better than I do, but they've all said that they would. Yeah. Yeah. The only slip up at one point was Biden where he, I don't think he really meant to say what he said, which was, you know, sort of ambiguous towards the defense of Taiwan, but then he corrected it. So do I honestly think that we would send troops over? No. No, I don't. Do I think that we would do what we're doing with Ukraine? Sure. Yeah.

62:47Would we provide resources? But this is a much different situation, right? And so I think While I get the concept, I just don't know that there's be follow through. Because that is a very tough sell to explain why we're sending troops over to face down the Chinese military, which is about a stone's throw away from Taiwan. And look, this is going to be an interesting situation, right? Because the folks over here, the folks in China – They don't view the folks in Taiwan as Taiwanese.

63:30They view them as Chinese. Right? So are you going to have Chinese military shooting Chinese? I don't know. Maybe it's going to be a softer takeover. Maybe there's more influence. There's a massive disinformation campaign that go on on Taiwan courtesy of the Chinese regime. There's all sorts of efforts there to undermine Taiwanese leadership. And this is, again, the point being is this is a crisis. Look, this is already, this is a mess and has been and it's underway and it's hopefully in the Ukraine situation.

64:03But over here, this is looming, right, as a major issue. And if you think about that, there are other activities. This is what's referred to as a South China Sea. Which is below Taiwan. It is, yes. And it's, this is the Philippines here, Vietnam over here. China has always viewed this as their territory, right? This is their backyard. Well, ever since World War II, the US has essentially patrolled and maintained security in the South China Sea, right?

64:33In the interest of international free trade and freedom of movement. There are increasing numbers of encounters between the Chinese Navy and the Philippines and Vietnamese over China. this sea because, again, they view this as theirs. They're constantly in here pushing. They're building artificial islands for ports. There's a major flashpoint here for potential conflict. And China, I've talked to a number of experts that I really value, and their take is, and I think it's not incorrect, is that China is basically on a war footing with the West already.

65:19We just don't see it, or we don't feel it, or we don't want to acknowledge it. And I don't mean like they're going to launch missiles, but in their minds, they're at war with the U.S. already. And they're acting in a sense as if that's the case. And we act as if, well, they're just an economic competitor, but it would be nice if we could all get along. So I think we may be misreading the tea leaves.

65:42Who's the real enemy of the West, in your opinion? If you were the president of the United States, who would you be most concerned about? Well, this is our biggest concern, right? China. China is, I think, is the top line concern because of their abilities, their resources. And again, the sort of the increasing aggressiveness in this region, their desire to reshape the global structure, right? They don't want the West to be in charge. They view this as, how do we realign this so that we get the BRICS and – a different realignment of world order so that the US and its allies are not at the top of the food chain.

66:31So in a sense, that doesn't mean that I think that we're going to be in a shooting match with China anytime soon. I don't actually believe that's going to be the case. But that's where we have to focus a lot of our concerns when you talk about identifying and resolving and prioritizing threats. In the short term... Right here is Iran. Look, the Iranian regime has been engaged in assassination plots to try to kill now the president-elect, as well as several other U.S. officials whom they believe were responsible for the targeting back in 2020 of Qasem Soleimani, who ran the Quds Force and was a very close ally of the supreme leader, Khamenei.

67:23in Iran. You think Iran have tried to kill Trump? Oh, they have definitely. Yeah, there's no doubt that they've been engaged in. They have a hit list and they've actually been engaged in trying to get plots underway to a target, not just him, but Mike Pompeo, Mark Milley, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Mark Esper, former secretary of defense. Brian Hook and others. So – but I guess from setting that aside, setting aside the bizarreness of this state with a hit list of US officials, right?

67:58And that's – just saying that out loud should make people think, well, that is bizarre. But – What they've done in terms of establishing and building over the years this network of proxies, the Houthis, Islamic Jihad, Hezbollah, Hamas. Iran has stated numerous times. They've been very clear about it. Their desire, their objective is to wipe Israel from the face of the earth. So they've set up their proxies with the same objective and the idea being, okay, we'll let the proxies do the dirty work.

68:30We're not going to take accountability. We're not going to be in the direct line of fire. Now that's happened a couple of times, right? There's been this direct back and forth between Iran and Israel. So this is a very serious problem that will not be resolved as long as the Iranian regime and the Revolutionary Guard Corps, the IRGC, maintain their belief system that Israel needs to be wiped off the face of the earth, as long as they believe that.

68:58They will continue to be the primary cause of instability in the Middle East. So we talk about getting ceasefires in Gaza, talk about ceasefire with Hezbollah in Lebanon. Not that there's much left of the Hezbollah leadership, but that's just putting lipstick on a pig because you're not solving the problem. And I don't know that you've changed the belief structure of the Iranian regime and the IRGC. So in that case, what do you hope for? What do you hope for internally that there will be at some point the population will just say, we've had enough, right?

69:35I mean, there have been, how many cases do we need where women go out on the streets to protest, right? The new morality laws and they disappear, right? They're just, it's brutal. You don't hear any of that. You don't hear people, you know, you don't hear activists in the States going on college campuses and protesting the treatment of women in Iran. No, it's always, you know, God, my God, look what Israel's doing. Those protests in Iran, Do the United States fuel those protests?

70:03Do they cause disinformation in that country to try and destabilize it, to try and get a coup so that they can throw out the leadership? Is that how the world works? You know what? I'm going to what I'm going to say, I think a lot of people who would look at my background and go, well, of course, that son of a bitch is going to say that. This is what I would say is that what happens is, OK, let me put it this way. In years past, yeah, that's what would have happened.

70:32We would have tried to say, okay, how do we get that uprising? How do we get that? But now it's more, how do we get information into those people? And then if there is a protest that develops, how do we support it? What do you do to support that? And that, I would argue, has not worked. The Green Movement and a few other unsuccessful attempts by people to kind of get out on the streets and protest have been brutally put down. And the US and the UN and others, for the most part, they're going to protest and write a nasty memo, but none of it helps, right?

71:10How do you get information to the people in a country like that? You know, they have access... to some degree. Most of it's locked down, I guess, but they have access to some degree. So you try to push information out. Look, Voice of America is probably the best example over the years. VOA was for years, its whole purpose was how do we get information about what happens in the world into Russia, into the Soviet Union? And nowadays, you know, you could argue you've got more possibilities because of technology.

71:44That's outside my scope. And we start talking about how do you, you know, aside from dropping leaflets, which bizarrely enough in South Korea, North Korea, they still do. South Korea drops leaflets using balloons over North Korean territory to convince people that Kim Jong-un is bad and that life could be better. But yeah, the worst part is with Iran is you just – look, these people are under the thumb of the mullahs in the IRGC. And they are brutal, right?

72:13It's like Hamas. Hamas has ruled Gaza with an iron fist. And they've been brutal against anyone that they disagree with, LGBTQ activists, women, name them. And yet, you know, you never see protests outside the country about Hamas, you know, how they beat, you know, a gay activist. It doesn't happen, right? Campus protests are all about Israel. Right. Israel is surrounded by a ring of proxies built by Iran that wants to destroy them. So yes, they're going to think differently than we do.

72:45What happened in Israel on that day where, I mean, people rushed into their country and thousands of people died? Yeah. As a result of that? Yeah, their estimate was 1,200 and then 250 were dragged off into Gaza. I just don't know how that's possible when that state is so unbelievably paranoid about invasions and attacks and they have the Iron Dome. How does that happen? Yeah, it was a long-term project. that was very well orchestrated by Hamas with Iran.

73:23The RGC was fully aware of what was going on. The RGC provided some of the training to some of the Hamas fighters that eventually ended up in inside Southern Israel. So probably the best way to put it would be they lulled the Israeli government to sleep and the military to sleep. They made them believe that they really weren't interested in violence anymore. And what that did and that what they really wanted was, OK, we just want to like try to build up our economy, right?

73:56And try to make a better life. Well, that was horseshit on Hamas's part. That's what the Palestinians would like. But that was horseshit on Hamas's part. What they were doing was lulling them to sleep in that then they kind of took their eye off the ball. The Israeli government in particular started looking more inward. You had a lot of internal political battles going on. And they were doing that because they viewed that they didn't have the same existential threat on their doorstep that they had been dealing with.

74:26They sort of took the bait. And it was an intelligence failure. There's no doubt about it, in part because the people running that operation dumbed down their communications, right? They deliberately stopped using communications that they felt could be compromised or had been compromised. And we've seen that over the years. Al-Qaeda is a good example. Once Al-Qaeda understood the extent to which we could intercept their communications, they went back to the old days, right?

74:56Handwritten notes, right? This is my cousin. I want you to take it to that person over there who's his cousin. Only give him that note, right? And don't talk to anybody. Very hard to intercept, right? And so you – no, it's very hard to conduct your operations. It takes a lot more time. But that's the extent to which they went to try to get this thing done. And, yeah, unfortunately, they were very successful.

75:19How are you thinking about the world's perception, specifically the United States perception of what's going on in Israel and Palestine? You know, we talked about how support seems to be waning for providing support to Ukraine. Is support waning, do you believe, for Israel and the plight of Israel? Because there's been a lot of information around the amount of innocent people that have been killed in Palestine. Yeah, I would be more concerned...

75:42about Ukrainian support, then I would be losing the level of Israeli support. Why? Because I think... it's a little bit of a different dynamic, right? There's Israel has always kind of had this, this interesting place within U S psyche, I guess. And, and it's also, look, there's a massive Jewish American community, right? I mean, there's no doubt about that. So there's, there's a level of support there that, that Ukraine doesn't have. And, And also just the length of support.

76:16Look, we've been close allies of Israel for generations, right? Ever since it started. You can't say the same thing about Ukraine. So I guess I'm hopeful that moving into the next administration, and I know people say, oh my God, you know, it sounds like you're a warmonger. Well, no. Again, I go back to with Ukraine, if you want peace, if that's what you want, if you don't want the conflict, then my argument is... They've got to be able to sit down at a negotiating table.

76:43If Putin feels like he's winning, if he feels like the US is backing off, he's not going to negotiate. He's just going to move forward. He doesn't give a shit about his soldiers. He just keeps throwing them into the front lines. So, if you want peace here, then you need to continue support sufficiently to get them to the table. And I do think we're close because again, Russia, yes, they're making headway here. But a long term, you know, meaning another two or three years, I don't think Putin can sustain that with the Russian population.

77:18How does Israel-Palestine's war end? Unfortunately, I, again, being a cynic, I think it ends the way a lot of these have ended, which means we're just putting a Band-Aid on a sucking chest wound and they'll come up with a ceasefire. I think Hamas, they'll figure out a way to bring in the Palestinian authority to govern Hamas or, sorry, Gaza. I think Hamas, I think sort of the linchpin there is if they can get a ceasefire with Gaza, with Hamas. That will make it infinitely easier for the Houthis to say, okay, we'll back off.

77:58We're not going to keep screwing up the Red Sea firing missiles at international trade and U.S. and allied naval ships. And I think that it also allows for Hezbollah. Look, I think the Israelis look at Hezbollah leadership now. I think we've pretty much taken everybody out. And there's more of a structure in Lebanon. I think it's always been problematic, but I think the Lebanese government could – you know, could deal with the problem if there is an official ceasefire with Hezbollah.

78:31So I think it all comes down to – And I guess what I mean by the bandaid on a second chest wound is that's all well and good. We'll stop the conflicts, right? I think those will stop relatively soon. I don't think Iran is interested in getting into a bigger shooting match with Israel because I think they understand there's no way they do that without the US entering. The US has already got carriers forward deployed out here. A big show of force, right?

78:59We moved B-52 fortresses out there. nuclear capable, not that we drop nukes, but it's a show of force that I think Iran understands. And the mullahs, the mullahs, the IRGC in particular, which has its fingers in every part of the Iranian economy and has made itself wealthy, much like the Hamas leadership made themselves wealthy by stealing billions. That leadership in Iran, it's very similar to Putin, in a sense, and very similar over here to Xi Jinping.

79:27The one thing they want more than anything else is to retain control. So the Iranian regime is going to look at this and go, can we really afford to get into a shooting match with the US and Israel? And the answer is no. They can't win that. So I think they're not inclined to do this. So we're going to get these ceasefires, and then we're just kicking the can down the road. But if they get nuclear weapons, then they can hold their weight. Absolutely.

79:51Absolutely. Yeah. And that will completely change the calculus in terms of how do we deal with them and the negotiations. So... And again, this can make me sound like a warmonger. But that last retaliatory strike by Israel into Iran, they focused on missile production facilities and air defense systems. That's smart in that destroying a significant portion of their missile production capabilities impacts their ability to both attack directly Israel but also then to provide those missiles to their proxies.

80:25The air defense, you could argue, is setting the table, right? Right. If they decide that that breakout window for the Iranian regime to get a nuke is tightening to a point where it's not really acceptable. And if you basically destroy their defense systems and they're somewhat naked in that regard, then you're talking about – dropping and trying to disrupt their weapons capability. Now, most of that is significantly underground. How do we know they don't have a nuclear weapon?

80:57I don't think they could have kept their yap shut. They would have told us. Because for what you're saying, which is, okay, now what? I don't think they could have... kept that secret. Plus also we rely on our liaison partners. So the Israeli intelligence, Jordanian intelligence, Saudi intelligence, we rely on a sort of an input from a lot of the players. But the Saudis, the Jordanians and others, would they be upset if the Iranian regime were to change?

81:23No. What do they want? They want stability, right? Because that leads to economic prosperity. That's better for their populations, keeps their folks happy. And so, you know, are they going to come right out and say it? No. But there's a lot of reasons. So I think that the problem with these ceasefires, again, it's good. You want to end conflict. You don't want people suffering. It would be fantastic if the Palestinians had a much better opportunity for a great life.

81:52But you don't get there. as long as the Iranian regime and the IRGC are saying we want to destroy Israel, so we're going to keep pushing at it. That's not really a recipe for long-term stability. So that's why I say they're kind of key to this whole problem.

82:07Why is the U.S. so focused on Iran of all these countries not getting a nuclear weapon? The U.S. seem obsessed with making sure Iran of all people don't get a nuclear weapon. Well, because they're the largest state sponsor of terrorism is one issue. And they've shown it, right? I mean, they've been perfectly willing to. Look, I mean, the fellow who was killed in 2020, who was the head of the goods force, Qasem Soleimani, and it was his targeting that then created the supreme leader's desire and the Iranian regime's desire to target U.S. officials, including the president-elect.

82:44Yeah. He had the blood of thousands of U.S. soldiers on his hands because he was running operations to develop IEDs and get them out in the field, train up Iraqi militias to – so again – They hate the U.S. They hate the U.S., yeah. So I – look, it's – Again, going back to that same thing, it'd be lovely if we all lived in a community of nations. But when I look at a map like this, I don't see a community of nations. I see problems, which again, maybe makes me just a cynical bastard.

83:20Problems. You recently said we're in a more sensitive time right now than in recent modern times than we can recall. And you were referring here to nuclear weapons. People are normalising the limited use of nukes and that is worrisome. We've got Russia doing tactical nuclear drills on the border alongside Ukraine.

83:43How concerned should we be about nuclear weapons and why should we be so concerned? I actually didn't realise until recently when I spoke to Annie Jacobson that the president has the sole responsibility and the sole power to launch a nuclear weapon. They don't have to speak to anyone to launch a nuclear weapon. They don't have to have a meeting, don't have to speak to the House or the Senate. Trump could turn around and say, launch that nuke. Yeah, so could Biden, so could Barack Obama, so could George Bush or Ronald Reagan or let's go back in time.

84:15Look, the Russians created what was referred to as the dead hand system, right, which took people completely out of the decision-making process. I mean, if you want to talk about something that's even more frightening is let's remove humans from the decision to launch the nukes. What's the Deadhound system? It was what it was referred to as. The idea was during the Cold War, the idea was the Kremlin started sitting around thinking a little bit too much.

84:38And they said, well, what happens if there's a first strike and we're taken out, meaning the Kremlin, meaning their leadership? Well, okay, well, we need some system in place, an automated system that will respond. Right? And so they created this system that would luckily obviously never used, but it was referred to as the dead hand system. It was a non-human decision-making process that would assess the damage done in the first strike and would then make a decision on its own as to what to do.

85:15So that's a problem. But yes. And it's still there. No, it's not there. Supposedly. They've advised us that it's been disarmed some time ago. But, you know, again, who knows? I mean, and again, that's another problem with AI and its ability to supplant humans. You talk about drones and taking humans out of drone strikes. You can't do that either. You need to have – that element, I think, in any weapons system. But yeah, Russia talking about and Medvedev and Dmitry Peskov and some of the other minions for Putin rattling the nuclear saber on occasion, doing their tactical drills, and...

86:01You know, obviously North Korea.

86:03Who has nuclear weapons here? Well, I mean, the members of the nuclear club. So I've got United States, Russia, France, China, the UK, Pakistan. Pakistan. India? Yep. Israel? We don't know. I mean, that's a very, I mean, it's a great point. We assume, but we don't know. North Korea? Because they've never, yeah, North Korea, yeah. North Korea have got nuclear weapons. Well, we don't. They don't have a delivery system. So they don't have a missile that can fire.

86:31Right, right. And are they completely there is... is up for grabs. So that program isn't quite as well understood. The Iranian program is a heavy lift in terms of specific intelligence. The breakout window is often discussed, but it's anywhere from, oh, it's a couple of weeks to it's months. So that tells you because of the gap in that and the parameters there, that tells you that maybe the intelligence isn't as good as it should be.

86:58Just to give a context on how powerful these weapons are, there was a stat I read that said, the warhead on one US nuclear-armed submarine has seven times the destructive power of all the bombs dropped during World War II, including two atomic bombs combined. And the US has 10 of those submarines. Yeah. Are we closer now to nuclear war than we've ever been in the last century? Yeah. No. I think we were closer in the height of the Cold War, I think.

87:33There – it really was. I mean, it was a – Top of mind, people literally thought we were going to get into a shooting match with the Soviet Union. And I think we were close on occasion. So I wouldn't argue that we're – it's more prevalent, right? And by that, I mean there's more of them than there were at that point. There's more members of the nuclear club. But that was at a point in time when I think we were much closer because also in part we – There wasn't the understanding, the level of communication that exists.

88:09There's still a lot. You know, there's even when it seems like two nations are at odds. You know, I think sometimes people don't understand how much communication still exists off the radar between militaries, between intel organizations. People understand the risk. But my point is when you talk about it a lot, when you threaten it, you're normalizing it. And I think that could lead us down a very bad path. And then if the Iranian regime were to get nuclear weapons, are they on the logic train?

88:47Or do they view this as something that they use as leverage to exert, to get concessions from Israel, whatever those might be? I don't know. I think there would be an unknown player in that realm. And I think that causes some of this concern also as to why it's felt they shouldn't have it. And also if they announce, they announce that they have a nuclear weapon, then you can count on the Saudis saying to themselves, me too, right? I'm gonna get them.

89:12So I'm not gonna, look, it's not as if the Saudis and the Iranians are, are, you know, close friends. It becomes a tipping point here, doesn't there? Iran gets their nuclear weapons, Saudi want a nuclear weapon. And then most of the countries in this region and other parts of the world think, well, we need one now. We need one. And the Israelis, maybe that's the moment when they come out and say and confirm whether they do or don't, and they're not going to confirm that they don't.

89:34Yeah, so I think there's some real problems there. Look, it's bad that anybody has them, obviously. Everybody wants peace, but you have to deal with the world you got, not the one you hope for.

89:44It's interesting, when I think about the biggest risk to the world, And I think about all the potential things that could happen. We could have a solar flare. There could be, I don't know, whatever could happen. It's a meteor of death too. A meteor. Yeah, global warming could do it. The thing that seems to be so obvious to me is if you get more and more nuclear weapons and you've got more and more of these sometimes crazy egotistical leaders who are aging and they're trying to hang on to their power, and then you throw in AI, which is a kind of sentient being that can think for itself.

90:15For me, I go, I don't know, in the next hundred years, there's got to be an incident. There's got to be an incident, because, like, probabilistically, this many weapons, this many crazy leaders, this much disruption to technology, you know, people not wanting to let go of their power, something's going to go wrong. It might be a mistake or something, but all it takes is one missile to fly or one person to think that a missile's flying. Right, right.

90:39You get one broken arrow, you get one missing nuke, right? Gets in the wrong hands. How about the story, I think, was it in Hawaii, when Hawaii's missile detection system went off one day and they thought that they're about to be hit by a... Yeah, exactly. Think about what those people went through. And it wasn't like a minute or two. I think I forget what the length of time was before they got the all clear. 30 minutes, I think, roughly. Yeah. Yeah.

91:02Where everyone in Hawaii thought that a missile was about to strike them. Yeah. And I heard the stories of people trying to decide which kid to go to and hiding in cupboards and going out onto the beach and praying. Yeah. And by the way, just so everyone knows, hiding in a cupboard is not going to be helpful. Yeah. And that was just because one person in a office somewhere clicked the wrong button. And that's something that makes you into panic.

91:26So you can imagine in Iran, someone accidentally clicking a wrong button or... Or deliberately clicking a wrong button or whatever. I just think it's... You get... Look, there's always this concern, right? I mean, Russia has moved, you know, some of its arsenal to Belarus. Well, you know, okay. What happens if, you know, one of those goes missing? Or what happens if... if a non-state actor organization gets a hold of one of Pakistan. So there's a complete fallout in the Pakistan government.

91:53And suddenly you've got a very hostile government that has control. So yeah, it's an issue. You have to ask yourself sometimes, why would you want to be a world leader?

92:03What is your biggest concern as it relates to the map, but also technology and the future that we're heading towards? What's your biggest concern? I don't know that, that's a really interesting question, and I know I should have like a pat answer right off the top of my head. I tend to look at, the next big global conflict. So I'm not so much, again, don't get me wrong. These are bad, right? These potential flare-ups, these problems, this conflict here in the Middle East, these are all bad.

92:34People are suffering. But I think about the next actual global conflict. And... When that occurs, just like another pandemic is going to happen, it's not like we're not going to get another pandemic. When the next big global conflict occurs, I think what we're going to find is that the pain is brought to the homeland a lot quicker. So, what I mean by that is, say you're in the U.S. Well, we know that... nations that don't necessarily have US interests at heart.

93:09China, let's focus on China because they are, you know, close to the top of the heap and they're motivated to get to the top. Not again, not saying it's gonna be a shooting match, but the point being is every day, the critical infrastructure, critical systems in the US are being tested and poked and prodded and looked at and mapped out. And there's a reason why that happens, right? So they're developing a playbook that says in the event that it should happen and we have a global conflict.

93:37We are going to shut down everything we can shut down in the US. Suddenly, all power goes off, your water treatment facilities aren't working, you can't move fuel around, you can't get fuel, pharmaceuticals aren't being delivered, no food is being delivered, can't get cash out, whether you want cash or not at that point. The idea being is we're going to bring the pain to the homeland immediately. That's what you want to do. Will there be a kinetic element where you actually have a shooting match with troops on ground?

94:06Yeah, I'm not sure that ever goes away. But the next global conflict is going to be fought in a way that we have a hard time understanding. And then it'll be up in space as well. The Chinese has spent a great deal of effort on directed energy weapons. And one of the points of that is essentially to knock out satellite systems, right? You think about it. Take away satellite structures, whether it's Starlink or any of the satellite systems up there.

94:31You shut down GPS, right? People can't move. You shut down the internet. My God, people will lose their minds, right? Can't do TikTok. And so it's, you know, not to make light of it because we're talking about a different type of warfare, right? And so that's kind of the thing that I worry about. If you said, what do people really worry about? Well, yeah, the top concerns are always China and Russia and Iran. But it's the infrastructure and it's a way that it's going to be brought to the homeland that's going to create, I think, a level of pain that most people – aren't going to be willing to put up with for very long.

95:07When you say they're going to bring pain to the homeland, were you saying the US were going to shut down their infrastructure? No, I'm saying that whoever, again, I'm just as a, it could be any, you know, it could be the EU in a conflict. It could be the US and NATO in a conflict with another. But the point being is that, you know, they don't map out infrastructure for no reason at all. They're mapping the infrastructure. Well, Russia, China. OK, they're mapping our infrastructure.

95:31Our infrastructure. We're doing the same thing. Yeah, sure. People always say, they say, well, you're doing the same thing. Well, you better hope that whether it's the UK or whether it's Australia or whether it's the US, that we hope that we're engaged in the same activities because that's where this is going to end up going. Having said that, you know, if someone had said we're going to be engaged in a massive land war, World War I style with trenches and very little ground gain and lots of bombardment over it, people would have said, nah, it's never going to happen again.

95:58But that's happening in Ukraine right now. It's happening in Ukraine. You can go, you know, the Imperial War Museum in London, which is a wonderful museum. They've got a World War I exhibit. And you go through the World War I exhibit. And you look at it and you realize the same thing is taking place. You look at the aerial photographs of the front line and you see the trench lines here in Ukraine. It's stunning. And we're just making the same mistakes over again.

96:24It's funny how history has a strange way of repeating itself. Yeah, because we like to think that we learn. But we're dealing with the same old humans with the same old emotions and egos and ideologies and stuff over and over again. So it's... Yeah, because humans haven't changed. You're right. You're absolutely... Yeah, that's right.

96:39How are you preparing on a personal level? If you're seeing that some of these... A lot of guns and ammo. Really? No, I'm kidding. I'm kidding. No, I'm not kidding. But that's not how I'm preparing. I just like to, you know, load up. Because you're saying you don't believe Americans and Westerners really understand how the next big global conflict will look. Yeah. So is there a way they can prepare for such a conflict? Well, on one level – People need to read as much as they can and pay attention, right?

97:10I mean get as many different sources of information. Don't just read one outlet that you happen to agree with. But try to be as informed as possible, which – I think sometimes it's difficult to do because we're all busy, right? We're all putting food on the table and trying to take care of families and whatever. And so I think there's an element of folks just trying to be informed. And then that would be – look, I mean the pandemic that occurred, the COVID-19 thing – if people were really, really watching what was going on, you know, October 2019, right?

97:50There was, you know, there's this weird situation going on in China. A couple of cities were quarantined, and that started to bubble up, and people were paying attention to it. I was getting notifications about, you know, what the hell's going on in China well before there was any declaration of a problem, right? And, you know, So – and the Wuhan lab was mentioned repeatedly. So I think just being informed is one of the best things that people can do.

98:19And then I'm not a prepper, but it's always good just to be prepared for a natural crisis, right? Power goes out because there's a blackout. Fine. There's a – You know, whatever the reason may be, just be a little aware of and have a plan of some sort that says, if there is a natural disaster, not saying a shooting match, then what do I do? What's my commo plan? I got kids at school. How do I reach them? We're so unprepared because in our lifetimes, we've never had a war.

98:51So I grew up, I'm, what, 32 years old now. I assume wars happen in other places. They don't happen in the UK or in L.A. or New York. They happen over there. So I'm comfortable and I'm complacent to some degree. Like I could never imagine even an adversarial plane flying over my city. There's a level of – we've all gotten – I don't want to say soft necessarily. But look, every generation wants it to be easier. My parents were older when they had me.

99:24They were born in 1919 and 1920. And they went through the tough times, economic times. They went through a couple of wars. They went through a couple of wars. They wanted it better for their kids. Now, their parents, my grandparents, wanted it better for them, and so on and so forth. That's human nature. You want to be doing the best for your kids. You want it to be better for that generation. I think eventually you reach diminishing returns. And I do worry that that's kind of where we're at.

99:58I look at my own kids, and look, nobody's out there... In here or over here or wherever, there's certainly places in the world where that's not true. But, you know, these areas here that we're talking about, we're not out worrying about whether we can collect enough food and clean water necessarily. You know, we're worried about, you know, is my Wi-Fi signal strong enough?

100:18But it's interesting. When you were talking about Israel earlier, you said how Israel had got a bit comfortable, so they started infighting. Right. And what you're seeing over in the United States and other parts of Europe is infighting. It's like we've got nothing better to do. So we're arguing over identity politics and things are getting more woke and it's more divided because, I don't know, it's like we have nothing better to do. Right. And also that's being fuel.

100:41You never want to underestimate... the impact of the disinformation campaigns run by, I mean, again, I keep going, I sound like I'm just constantly throwing out the same bogeyman, but look, that's the way the world is. China, Russia in particular, Iran has proven itself to be very adept at this, at disinformation campaigns that prey on, whether it's in the EU or whether it's in the US or elsewhere, that prey on what they view as vulnerabilities.

101:04So it goes back to what we were talking about before, about recruiting an asset, right? Or, identifying weaknesses and leverage. Well, they look at the US and they go, you know what, if we if we can just keep poking at that racist issue, we keep poking it at woke issues, right? I mean, that's very divisive and it's and it does, right? It works. So the next thing you know, they're putting together a They're throwing out some misinformation or disinformation on X.

101:29Someone looks at that and goes, yeah, that's right. Then they just forward it on to their friends and their family. And it just keeps building. So those campaigns have a real significant impact on the West because – We're not inclined for whatever reason, we're not curious enough or we don't have enough time or whatever to look at a piece of information and go, is this even credible? What do you say to people that think that's just completely impossible, it's a conspiracy theory?

101:55There's no way China and Russia are involved in misinformation. There's no way they're trying to tear us apart. Yeah. You know what? All they need to do is a little fact-based research, spend a little time. They don't have to look at one side or another, look across the board at a variety of think tanks, research institutes that focus on this sort of thing. And no, there's, look, there is no doubt. There is a concerted effort to influence, whether it's an election or And they're not trying necessarily to get anybody to win.

102:27They're just trying to undermine the concept of democracy. They want to create some chaos. From their perspective, that's a win.

102:34So do you not think Russia wanted Trump to win? That's a good question. I don't know. If they did, I think they've made a mistake or they've calculated wrong here because I know there's sort of a trope out there that says, well, he's Putin's puppet. Well, we also have to remember that was a very large disinformation campaign or misinformation campaign. And I don't want to make it sound more nefarious, but people swallowed that hook, line and sinker and then ran with it, right?

102:58Over this idea that, oh my God, look at the dossier. So I think, um, You know, there's sort of this narrative that says, okay, well, yeah, Putin definitely wanted Trump to win because Trump's going to completely get out of Ukraine. I don't think that's going to happen. And, you know, there's already been reporting that he had a call with Putin already. Now, the Kremlin's saying, oh, that call never happened. But according to Western reporting, he had a call and he said, you are not to intensify this war.

103:26And then basically setting down a marker. Now, again... We won't know until we know, until he gets out there and he starts putting more people in place. I'm very curious to see who he puts in at the Pentagon, sorry, at the Defense Department. Because if I was Putin, I know Trump has ran his whole campaign saying he's going to end this war. And if I'm Putin, I go, that means that I don't have to throw more men at the front line. I can get my economy back.

103:53Putin also wants to end this war. But if Trump doesn't end that war in the next four years... the Democrats are going to get in because they're going to say, you said you were going to end the war. We're still out there fighting. You said you're going to end this. But think about it. If he does end the war, then they're going to say, well, yeah, that's because you and Putin like each other. And yeah, and you gave away some Ukrainian territory. Well, the reality is, look, Putin, he annexed Crimea during Obama's administration.

104:24He invaded during Biden's administration. He knew what he had. He knew what the response was going to be. Now, look, people say, well, Biden, to his credit, he kind of rallied and he pushed for more support. And yes, that's absolutely true. But Putin engaged in this during his time, right? because I think he knew, or he felt he knew, maybe that's more important, he felt he knew what he was going to get. Now, he wasn't anticipating that NATO response was going to be his hard line, and that's a good thing.

104:52I'm glad that Biden has done that. Biden has also withheld Trump. authorization to use long-range munitions to target Russian military sites that are being used to target Ukraine, right? Now you could argue that until Putin feels some pain or Ukraine is in a better offensive position of some sort that you can't get people to the negotiating table and again if you want to end the conflict you're probably gonna want to do that Unless you just want Putin to overrun Ukraine if you want if you want that to happen Then stop support and that's what's gonna happen but I think The narrative, I think, is a little bit off.

105:29I'm not- because, yeah, you're right. If the war continues, I'm not sure the Democrats have as much to play off of. But I think if the war is ended, then I think what they'll say is, oh, you gave it away, acting as if somehow Ukraine could have won and gained all their territory back, which is unrealistic. I think it's more- compelling to say we stopped all the wars. And I think for Americans right now, I think they want to, look, we saved your money.

105:55We stopped sending billions there. We stopped the war. People aren't dying anymore. I think that's a much more compelling narrative than, I don't think Americans care as much, this is a guess, about giving away a little piece of a land they're nothing about. I see what you're saying. You're right. That was my mistake. I think you're right in the sense that If the war is still ongoing, yeah, the Dems have it, the Democrats have a better chance. You lied.

106:15You said you'd shut it down on day one. Yeah, no, I see what you're saying. And from an electoral perspective, down the road, four years from now, wow, 2028. So if I'm Putin, I'm going, I know Trump, he's incentivized to stop this thing. And, you know, I can, so that puts me in a stronger position, because if Trump doesn't stop it, then maybe Eric Trump's not going to get in next year or whoever, or J.D. Vance is... Yeah. I mean, I think Putin also, I think, is smart enough to realize, to remember that it was the Trump administration that authorized lethal aid to Ukraine to begin with.

106:49Back during Obama-Biden years, they did not authorize lethal aid into Ukraine. And despite – apparently Crimea annexation was going to be a red line and it wasn't.

107:01We mentioned disinformation, TikTok. I mean, TikTok has ties to China, has origins to China. Right. Do you think TikTok is... The interesting thing about TikTok, so I worked on social media for 10 years, is TikTok as a platform, the algorithm is so unbelievably A-addictive. How would I describe it? I guess the word is the algorithm is so powerful. And you notice this, anyone that uses TikTok, you'll notice this because if you post something on your page and you have a million followers, the post could either get a thousand views or 10 million views.

107:36And when I think about algorithms, the variance in views you're getting basically are an expression of how powerful the algorithm is. So on Instagram, say you have a million followers and you post something, the variance between how many views you're gonna get is quite low, but on TikTok it's wide. So what the algorithm is doing is it's saying, take that and show everyone, take this, show no one. And what this means is that the app, so this is why it's so addictive to young people, because everything they're seeing is really, really interesting stuff.

108:06And they care a lot less about how many followers you have. And it's more about, is this really, really interesting? So as a platform, it's super addictive. It can put you in an echo chamber faster than anything, because if I'm looking at videos about, I don't know, X, it's going to keep showing me the most interesting, emotional, fear-centric videos about that thing. No boring. You're going to see no boring. So do you think there's a chance that TikTok is being used by one of our foreign adversaries to divide us?

108:32Oh, sure. Yeah, I think social media is... Look, in the old days, if you wanted to influence hearts and minds, if you wanted to change... say you were interested in turning the population in where, Kenya, Nigeria, Niger, then you It was kind of old school stuff, right? You would – how am I going to get information out there? I'm going to recruit a bunch of journalists, right, local journalists, and I'm going to get them to publish stories, right?

109:00Maybe there's a radio station. I'll recruit somebody who can put stories on the radio. Technology has given the ability to do covert action campaigns – propaganda, disinformation, whatever you want to call it, you know, a real jumpstart, right? So the concept is the same. I'm trying to influence opinion. I'm trying to, you know, get viewers, whatever it is, trying to change hearts and minds, but you can do it much faster, right? And that's the type of thing the US would have done to their adversaries, right?

109:33Oh, sure. The US would literally send a... entrepreneur, undercover, into these countries to start a perfectly legitimate business with his family. They'd find a way to potentially fund it in some way to make sure it was successful. And he might be starting a social media app in Russia, undercover. Like, that's the type of thing the CIA and other, you know, maybe MI6 or other forces would do. Yeah. You're looking for ways to, I mean, you wouldn't necessarily want to say, okay, I'm going to go into China, I'm going to go into Russia and start a business, right?

110:06Because now that's problematic from an operational perspective, right? But you're going to use the technology for sure to get to as many eyeballs as possible. And so, yes, I mean, you know, TikTok's a great example of that. There's a reason why Chinese citizens can't access TikTok inside China, right? I mean, if you think about that, is TikTok, you know, is it – Is it beneficial to our kids? Well, if it was, TikTok would probably be available inside China.

110:38But it's not. It's a tough one. We deal with that on a personal level all the time, trying to figure out how much screen time and what the kids can access. Now they're getting older, so it's – you're kind of fighting a losing battle on that one. Some people think that there's like a back channel where China are harvesting data from the back end of TikTok in some way. And I, you know, much like you, I'm less likely to believe those kinds of conspiracy theories.

111:05But one theory that makes logical sense to me is if I was China and I wanted to sow division in the United States, what I would do is make an app, a social media app that has a really, really powerful ecosystem. divisive algorithm, which really, really is strong, and I would just make it succeed in the country. I don't need the data because, as you said, what I'm going to do is I'm going to tear people apart. I would say, yes, that's a good point.

111:31And you see that based on what you're saying. I don't have anywhere near the level of understanding of the app. But you see that when you just say, OK, oh, I'm interested in that. Look at that. There's a protest over here. Next thing you know, you're getting 40 protest videos or whatever. But I would say also they still want data. They thrive on collecting data. mass amounts of information. And so, again, I don't know that tech world well enough to get into a conversation about that.

112:08But it is clear based on their economic espionage and efforts over the past that – they love nothing better than to collect as much information as possible. And it doesn't even have to be on a target that you think, no wonder they're targeting Raytheon or they're targeting a company that that makes sense. They'll go after anybody, really. And it is, yeah. But I think for the most part, when you talk about – Social media what I worry about the most is this tendency for people Not to question not to be cynical or not to be at least curious and say Where's this come from?

112:47And if they if everyone would just do that because there is no other defense At the end of the day you don't want the government telling you what you can see and what you can't see I don't think anyway, but There's no other defense in the front line, which is the individual with their smartphone looking at something and saying, and then stopping for at least a moment to say, where's this information coming from? Is it credible? Let me check elsewhere before I send this on to my family, right?

113:14And create, you know, more conflict. Just take the time to be quizzical. It's difficult because we all have like confirmation bias, right? So we're We're looking for what we want to believe. True. Yes. And so I was just thinking about that. You saw it in this election cycle. If that is what I wanted to believe and what I think is right, then I think that's true, and I will share that. And you see it in the election cycle. As someone who is this sort of outside observer, I'm watching disinformation on both sides.

113:41I'm watching them lie about Trump, and I'm watching them lie about Kamala on both sides, and I'm watching it happen and going, oh, no, that's a lie, that's a lie, that's a lie, that's a lie, that's a lie. But both sides are enraged, and they think they're the... the sort of bastion of truth. It's so interesting. The hard edges are equally problematic, right? And the problem we have is, you know, much like the conflict in Ukraine on the front lines in the trenches, people are sitting in their trenches throwing hand grenades at each other and there's nobody living in the middle anymore.

114:08Right. And, you know, it's almost become a nasty word to say compromise. But I don't know how you get meaningful things done, you know, without the ability to listen to both sides and say, OK, well, that idea actually kind of makes sense or that idea doesn't make sense. But at least to work together. But nobody is in the center for the most part. Or if they are, they don't make any noise. Right.

114:31Random idea, random thought I just had. Scott Galloway was on my podcast and he said there's a 33% chance that Trump dies in office based on his age and BMI. Like statistically, the age he's at and the BMI he has, there's a 33% chance he dies while he's in the next four years. I just wonder... what that might do to this whole thing. Because if Trump drops dead one day in the United States, people aren't going to believe that was innocent. They'd destabilize it.

115:00I just, you know. One of the best results that came out of this election was the size of the result. Right. That was important, regardless of who won. And, you know, I had how many conversations with a variety of people and, you know, on both sides of the spectrum of politics. And they all kind of felt the same way, which was, well, OK, well, whoever wins, I just hope it's convincing so that we don't then struggle with this over the next four years.

115:26But you're right. We. What happens in the next four years? Yeah. I've got my own theory of how it plays out. I think, again, part of it depends on how good the Democrat Party is at introspection. Not very good. Not very good, I don't think. But I don't think it's still the government. It's still the U.S. government. And we have to remember people are very upset about the idea that, oh, my God, maybe the Republicans have all three. They have the White House.

115:56They have the Congress. They have the Senate. But that's been the case for decades. many going back on how many administrations, but several, at least five or six, where the president started out with control of both houses. And so, you know, the lesson from that usually is that not a lot really gets done. It's still a very large machine. And so I know people are, you know, look, they spent, people spent a long time saying, if Trump wins, it's the end of life as we know it, it's the end of democracy.

116:25Oh my God, this is going to be... And then, you know, a day and a half later, President Biden, you know, comes out and goes, you know, we're going to be just fine. And then people are like, well, what the fuck was all that talk about the end of the world then? Right? It's politics. It's a narrative. But it's gotten so hyperbolic. It's just like this, you have to take it to the far extreme no matter what you're saying. Right? And so then now people have a hard time absorbing that.

116:50Well, you told me to go out in the street and rent my clothing and cry and gnash my teeth. And now you're telling me it's going to be okay? What? So... I think we're going to be just fine. And we would have been just fine if we had the other. It's a very resilient nation. It's a, despite these things that we've been talking about, it's a pretty resilient world, right? So, I think, you know, it's not going to be, we're not going to see 10 million people deported, for instance, right?

117:17I don't, I don't think that's going to happen. Will we have a tougher border policy? Will there be some deportations? Yes. Will they start with, uh, folks who are in the country illegally who have committed crimes. Well, yes. Is that a problem? I don't know. Is anyone upset if someone who's got criminal convictions and is here illegally is deported? I guess maybe there's some issue there. But, you know, so I think – We tend to get so over the top on whether we're talking about left or right that the reality is usually there's not the big sea change that people anticipate.

117:58So I think we're going to be OK. That's why I'm optimistic that this next administration will hold the line, realizing that holding the line is the best way to get – folks to the table to come up with a settlement. In Ukraine and Russia. In Ukraine and Russia. Sorry. Exactly. And, you know, again, I'm more cynical about this region just because I think nobody really wants to deal with the Iranian regime. And so, fine. Yes, we get ceasefires. Does it mean anything in the long term?

118:27No. We'll be dealing with this conflict. You know, our kids will be dealing with this conflict. So I'm a little bit more reluctant to say happy things about that. Anyway.

118:39Kids. Just to close off, if you had to give your children advice on how to be successful based on everything you learned at your time in the CIA, on how to climb whatever ladder that they aspire to climb in their life, what would you say to them? Well, I'll tell you what I do say to them, which is... My job as a parent is not to raise average kids. There's enough mediocrity out there, right? My job is to raise exceptional children. And that means they have to not give it 150%.

119:14I don't know what that is. People talk about that. You got to give 110%, but you have to work a little bit harder than – Everyone else, right? And your gain, your result is that much more. It's really shocking. You just have to work a little bit harder. And you can always do a little bit more than you think you can do, right? It's hard to explain that to kids because they think they're bulletproof. They think they've got 2,000 years ahead of them.

119:42They don't understand how time passes. Right? But if it's one thing I tell them, I mean, aside from the basics, you know, just be honest, be loyal, be kind. It's this idea. You just, you have to put in the effort. And if you do, you can, I don't want to say you can do anything. You probably don't have the genetic build of LeBron James, right? So you're probably not doing what he's doing. That's it. And I always felt it's a simple thing. But if I've learned one thing, whether it was in the agency or out, all you got to do is work a little bit harder.

120:21What about people? Advice you'd give them to... You know, because I spoke to Andrew Bustamante on the podcast and he talks about motivation and manipulation, being two sides of the same coin. When you think about what stands in the way of your life, when you think about the sort of geopolitical issues where we were describing, it's all just people. Your business at the moment is people. My business is people. Even doing this podcast, it's trying to understand people.

120:45One of the things I got from you, which I think is just really unappreciated, is just... the remarkable power of just listening and letting someone else talk so you can understand them. Is there anything else you think about if you're trying to create a good salesperson as it relates to people? You can't, I suppose a psychotic could, but you can't fake empathy. You can't fake real interest, right? You can't fake enjoyment of people, right? And I do think folks, even if they're not trained, they're pretty good at spotting that, right?

121:26They're pretty good at spotting if people are being disingenuous. it's, it's really, it's really that, I mean, you have to with, with, I mean, I don't want to dwell too much on business, but in that world, when I'm talking to my folks, um, I just know some of them aren't going to enjoy the process of sales, if we're talking about sales. They're not going to enjoy going out and doing business development. But they do an amazing job on the other aspects of the work, right?

121:56And all that work keeps clients coming back, right? So it's horses for courses. I think people are made up differently, and you can't ask everyone to do the same thing. The only things you can control – I keep going back to the same thing because I keep thinking about my kids now that we talked about them – is they can't, like the middle boy, you know, he plays basketball. That's all he wants to do. He plays basketball. He goes to an academy down in Florida, IMG, which is an amazing place.

122:25And it's a sports academy for the most part. And, He can't control how tall he is, right? How – I mean he can work on how fast he is, I suppose. But, you know, those sort of things. But he can control how hard he works. And he can always work harder than the next guy. You think about it. I've been in situations before where I thought I cannot take one more step. And then you think, well, yeah, I can take one more step. It's not – I know, again, this is not an epiphany.

122:53But people forget that, right? People sometimes lose sight in part because – they're not pushed or they're not challenged or the circumstances mean that they don't have to be pushed or challenged. And so people get away from understanding exactly what they're capable of accomplishing if they really think about it. So that's all. All I ask from my folks is, you know, be honest, work hard, keep the clients happy. And, you know, Bob's your uncle, but, you know, People right now are going, Mike, that's it?

123:22That's your advice? Bob's your uncle? You said you think life is much more simple than most people portray. And I think hard work is definitely one of those things that is both controllable and it creates such a disproportionate winning advantage. That's exactly right. That's a much more elegant way than... I'm going to steal that phrase. But it does. And it's not sexy because who wants fucking hard work? People want tricks and tips. There's got to be some, so what do you do?

123:52How do you tell if somebody's like, no, just, you know what, just unass the sofa, work a little bit harder. And you're right, it's not a popular thing to say. But I think people are capable of it and more so than they realize. We have a closing tradition on this podcast where the last guest leaves a question for the next, not knowing who they're leaving it for.

124:08And the question that's been left for you is, what do you think is the most important thing that has happened in your life to create your success? Wow. I mean, you obviously have some smart guests on here. I'm already jumped to the next point where I'm like, oh, what's your favorite color? You know what? The thing I would have to say, this is going to sound, what's it going to sound like? I don't know. I think I had... I think I had probably the best parents that you could ask for.

124:54My dad was an amazing individual, amazing individual. And They, I think, more than anything, right, if I have to go all the way back, look, meeting my wife, Emily, I mean, she's the smartest person I know, the funniest person I know. So, but, you know, I met her, you know, going on 20 years ago now. So what happened before the 20 years and what happened leading through, if I said that, then, you know, the first half of my life, I think it was my parents, right?

125:23And no doubt about it, my dad was just such a role model and just laid a foundation. But I would say then the next half would definitely be my wife. I think that's what does it, is the people. What was the model that your dad left you? Part of it was the work ethic. My dad worked hard. And he never complained, right? He didn't... And he loved my mother. They were married for 50 years. And that was part of it, too, is I was fortunate. I was blessed.

126:03And I realize it's... You know, a lot of people come from very different circumstances. But I came from one of those families where... I was, it was never in question. My father was fiercely loyal to my mother and she was fiercely loyal to him. And, um, And loyalty, I think, plays an important role in what you're doing. I think people see that as something that they can count on. And that sets you up for success too, I think. So I would say that was probably, again, the first half of my life, I would say that's what paved the way.

126:44And then meeting Emily, I completely outkicked my coverage, as they say. Did your dad know how much you appreciated the model of what it is to be a man that he set you? Yeah, yeah. I feel good about... I remember thinking about that. When he died, I remember thinking that... I remember thinking that I was very happy that I had told him, sorry, that I had told him what I thought of him. We were very good with each other in terms of talking about what we felt and how we appreciated each other.

127:27And that's a really good thing, because I don't think you want someone to go, and you think, well, I should have said that. I should have said something different. I was lucky. You know, we had a really good dialogue. Yeah. Where does the animation come from? You just, you know, it's, I think it's, That's that's humanity. It's just how you feel about it and your your experiences. you know, all my experiences with, you know, my dad were just solid, right?

128:06You know, just going out, just doing things, just getting together, just meeting up as, as, you know, when, when, you know, I was older and I'd come, I'd come back to the States for, you know, a few days and we'd get together and, and, you know, just like there was, there was a bond there that was just really solid. And I feel the same way with, you know, I've, you know, I've got brothers and, you know, They're older than I am. And, you know, that's a tight relationship, right?

128:37So, yeah, I think it's good. I don't get emotional about much, but family I do. Because at the end of the day, nobody... Nobody's going to write on my tombstone that I worked my ass off, right? Or that I was a real solid, you know, officer or that, you know, I sure built a really nice business. It's just not going to matter. It's, you know, all I care about is family and friends. If you could write something on his tombstone, what would you write?

129:12Hmm. Thanks. I don't know what else you would say. You know, just thank you. You know. I did write a little note. He was in his uniform when we buried him. And I wrote a little note and tucked it in his uniform pocket. But that's between me and him. So, but I appreciate you bringing this up. It's nice. I mean, it is nice to talk. I would, you know, I love talking about the family. But, yeah, that's it. It's not, you know, it's probably not the most dynamic answer you get from that question.

129:53I suppose people have more interesting answers. But I don't know, you know, one that would be more meaningful. So... Anyway. I think it's a perfectly, I think it's a wonderful answer because it says so much about your values and where you've come from and what's driving you and the man that you are and your priorities because it's so clear how much he meant to you and it's evident to me how you must be paying that forward. as a man to your children as well, in any way that you possibly can.

130:27And I think if we understand, especially for men, I think if we understand the role model that our father set us, we understand what we think is important and what we think is right. Because same with my father, my father and my mother didn't get on. But one of the things I'll always remember was even in the heat of their conflicts, if she needed something, mid-argument, he would do it. He never left because of the kids. And so there was clearly a principle in my father where...

130:56there was something more important than the argument, and that is the family, the love, and the taking care of your woman. So even now, when I'm in a relationship, if I'm in an argument with my girlfriend or we're disagreeing about something, I will always know that there's something more important, which is my responsibility to take care of these people. And that came from my dad. That's exactly right. That's exactly right. You have to know when to bend your spear, right?

131:20And you just, I think... Yeah, I think that's if you can if you can pass that sense of of whatever it is, of loyalty, of appreciation, of duty, of of hard work, of honesty, if you can pass that along to your kids, you know, you've done your job. That's why I say it's and that's what I mean by I'm not here to raise average kids. I don't mean like I've got to raise, you know, multimillionaires. So I've got to, you know, that's not what I'm talking about.

131:52I'm talking about their character and how they deal with the world. Mike, thank you. Thank you for doing what you do. As I said before we started recording, I'm someone that's quite naive to these issues. And part of that is because I'm very busy doing my own thing. So I try not to talk about these things and I don't understand. But the way that you deliver the information through your book, through your podcast, and even here today and on all the shows that I've seen you on is incredibly interesting.

132:17important because it's so accessible. Thank you. And that means that people like me can gain a better understanding of what's happening in the world and then make better decisions for my life, but who I'm voting for and why I'm voting for them, which are consequential to all of us. And that's a very noble, noble cause that you're pursuing. So thank you. I know. Thank you. I've enjoyed the hell out of this conversation. I really, really have. And it's gone by very quickly.

132:40And I apologize for marking up your map. It's all good. Thank you, Mike. I'm gonna let you into a little bit of a secret. You're probably gonna think me and my team are a little bit weird, but I can still remember to this day when Jemima from my team posted on Slack that she changed the scent in this studio. And right after she posted it, the entire office clapped in our Slack channel. And this might sound crazy, but at the Diary of SEO, this is the type of 1% improvement we make on our show.

133:07And that is why the show is the way it is. By understanding the power of compounding 1%, you can absolutely change your outcomes in your life. It isn't about drastic transformations or quick wins. It's about the small, consistent actions that have a lasting change in your outcomes. So two years ago, we started the process of creating this beautiful diary and it's truly beautiful. Inside there's lots of pictures, lots of inspiration and motivation as well, some interactive elements.

133:35And the purpose of this diary is to help you identify, stay focused on, develop consistency with the 1% that will ultimately change your life. We're only going to do a limited run of these diaries. So if you want one for yourself or for a friend or for a colleague or for your team, then head to thediary.com right now. I'll link it below.