#105 General Robert Spalding - Is TikTok a PSYOP?

Robert Spalding is a former United States Air Force Brigadier General and B-2 Stealth Bomber Pilot. General Spalding served as the chief China strategist for the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, the Joint Staff at the Pentagon. He has served in senior positions of strategy and diplomacy within the Departments of Defense and State for more than 26 years. His experience has made him one of the foremost authorities on U. S. foreign policy and intelligence concerning China. Today, he servers as the CEO of SEMPRE, a company specializing in secure, EMP hardened telecommunication and cloud systems that are redefining security across the industry. Shawn Ryan Show Sponsors: https://lairdsuperfood.com - USE CODE "SRS" https://helixsleep.com/srs - USE CODE "HELIXPARTNER20" https://meetfabric.com/shawn https://hillsdale.edu/srs https://moinkbox.com/shawn https://blackbuffalo.com https://ShawnLikesGold.com | 855-936-GOLD #goldcopartner General Robert Spalding Links: Company - https://sempre.ai X - https://twitter.com/SEMPRE_USA IG - https://www.instagram.com/generalspalding FB - https://www.facebook.com/GeneralRobertSpalding LinkedIn - http://linkedin.com/company/sempre1 Website - https://generalspalding.com Books - https://www.amazon.com/Stealth-War-China-While-Americas/dp/0593084349 | https://www.amazon.com/War-Without-Rules-Playbook-Domination/dp/0593331044 Please leave us a review on Apple & Spotify Podcasts. Vigilance Elite/Shawn Ryan Links: Website | Patreon | TikTok | Instagram | Download Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:30Speaker 01

  College football is back. So Hilton called to me, the superstition concierge, to make your fan rituals a reality. Need a room to match your lucky number? We got you. Want to make sure our team doesn't wash your lucky jersey? Oh, that smells lucky. Hilton's unmatched hospitality can keep up with any superstition. Even a marching band wake-up call at 5:55 and 55 seconds. Hit it! When you need a team that will do whatever it takes on game day, it matters where you stay. Hilton, for the stay.

• 1:05Shawn Ryan?

  General Robert Spalding, welcome to the show. Great to be here. It's an honor to have you here. I've been kind of following your X account for the past couple of years. And I love... I don't... "love" may be the wrong word, but you always are posting thought-provoking articles and thoughts that I don't think a lot of people think about. And, you know, it really... It... The stuff that you're putting out on there challenges anybody that's looking into what's going on. It challenges them to think and maybe not tie themselves so much to a particular party and/or candidate. And I just...

• 1:50Shawn Ryan?

  I really appreciate that because I don't think there are a whole lot of critical thinkers left in the world. At least, it doesn't seem that way. It seems like everybody's just wanting to jump on a bandwagon. And you see kind of both sides of the aisle here calling each other sheep. And the reality is, if you're not a critical thinker and you cannot call your own party or political candidates bullshit...

• 2:22Shawn Ryan?

  Then you just fall into the sheep category. And I think it's important that no matter how inconvenient the truth may be, it needs to come out. Corruption needs to be exposed, even if it inconveniences who you believe in. And so I just, I just wanted to say that I really appreciate that. Thank you. But I'm gonna go ahead and read your introduction here, which is quite the intro. So, CEO of Sempre.ai, globally recognized national security expert, United States Air Force Brigadier General,

• 3:04Shawn Ryan?

  retired former B-2 stealth bomber pilot, former Senior Director of Strategy at the National Security Council in the White House. Innovation while serving in the White House has led to a reset in national security and public policy regarding telecommunications in the United States as well as globally. Author of Stealth War: How China Took Over While America's Elites Slept and War Without Rules: China's Playbook for Global Domination. Received the Defense Superior Service Medal, Legion of Merit Defense Meritorious Service Medal and Joint Service Combination Medal. Received Air Force Meritorious Service Medal

• 3:49Shawn Ryan?

  with One Oak Leaf Cluster, Air Force Combination Medal with One Oak Leaf Cluster and Air Force Achievement Medal with One Oak Leaf Cluster. Flew in Chinese Mandarin. Under General Spalding's leadership, the 509th Operations Group, the nation's only B-2 stealth bomber unit, experienced unprecedented technological and operational advances. Served in senior positions of strategy and diplomacy within the Defense and State Department for more than 26 years. Senior Fellow at Hudson Institute, 5G/6G Technology Commissioner with the Global Tech Security Commission.

• 4:32Shawn Ryan?

  And I think that covers it. Am I missing anything? There's probably some things in there, but they don't really matter.

• 4:42Shawn Ryan?

  Wow. But never actually met a stealth bomber pilot. So.

• 4:51Speaker 03

  There's not very many of us.

• 4:52Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, very cool, very, I mean, that's not what we're here to talk about today, but I just, that is, that's really cool. I've never even seen a stealth bomber in person.

• 5:07Speaker 03

  It's because they're so stealthy.

• 5:08Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, I guess that makes sense, right?

• 5:12Shawn Ryan?

  But, so, I want to talk to you today a lot about 5G technology, what you're doing with your company, and, and I want to talk a lot about China, where you think they might have us cornered, things we need to look out for, things that you just want the general population to be aware of. I'm, I'm just very interested in, in, in that subject. I've had a number of people on to, to talk about things we should be looking out for from the CCP and, and, and, like I said, been, been following you for a while now, and I love what you have to say, so I just want to get more in the weeds with, with what you know. But before

• 5:57Shawn Ryan?

  we do that, I have a Patreon account, it's a subscription account, they are our top supporters, they've been with us here from the beginning, and, and they're the reason I get to sit here and do this, and that you get to be here and, and educate all of us. So I give them an opportunity to ask a couple of questions, a couple of good ones here. First one is from Gregory Lawton, and he wants to know, "Do you think China will attempt to take over Taiwan by force, and if so, how?"

• 6:34Speaker 03

  Absolutely. They've been very clear, they're going to do that. Xi Jinping has not missed words, you know, "We're gonna take back Taiwan." How? I think they're gonna come by the area. The, the, the general notion is that they're gonna use an amphibious landing. I think they will use elements of maritime forces, but I think that's gonna be a massive air invasion. And the reason I think that is because you can go to Unrestricted Warfare, the, the document written by two People's Liberation Army Colonels. And it's a dissection, in, in addition to a lot of other things, but it's a dissection of the Gulf War, the first Gulf War. And they really talk about the, the use of combined arms, particularly the Air Force, and how it was used.

• 7:19Speaker 03

  If you go back to that war, the air power was used to kinda kick down the door and then everybody flowed in. And I think they're gonna do the same thing. Obviously, they have been studying us for a long time. Do you think there are, when do you think this is gonna happen? At any time, literally at any time. We, you know, trying to predict, you know, we just had Admiral Calino come and testify in Congress, I think it was this week, that it's gonna be, they're gonna be ready by 2027. I, I don't like to put a date on it because that implies that we can have insight into that. We really can't. It's gonna happen on their timeline. And so what we have to look to, are they capable? And I would say they're absolutely capable.

• 8:03Speaker 03

  The, the weaponry that they've arrayed on their side of the Taiwan Strait has been building for decades. So, I mean, think about it, they've been preparing for this invasion for decades, stockpiling weapons. And when you kinda war game that, you can, you can take those weapons, you can make Taiwan look like the surface of the moon and still have weapons left. So, it's just, the, the, the forces are overwhelming. It's 70 miles off their coast. They don't really care about the people, they just want the, the ground. So, I just think that, you know, not calling a spade a spade is a problem. They, they're ready, they've said they're gonna do it.

• 8:47Speaker 03

  And so now, it's just, when are they gonna do it? And it's really, they're, it's on their timeline. Why is, why are they so interested in Taiwan?

• 8:58Speaker 03

  It's, you know, the Chinese Communist Party, you know, within about nine days after they annexed what was called East Turkestan, they call it Xinjiang, it's where the Uighurs live, they claim it was part of, traditionally part of Chinese territory. It's part of the Chinese Communist Party's lore, right? The restoration of the, of the Great Chinese Empire. And so they have built into this lore that Taiwan was always a part of China, and that's not true. And so it is something that they have basically, you know, concocted based on part of their platform, and they're a political party, and so that's what they have, you know, programmed

• 9:43Speaker 03

  the population to believe. I think when you look at it strategically in the region, it does complicate our ability to defend Japan, defend Korea, defend the Philippines, because it basically, it cuts the first island chain in two when they occupy that, allows them to, you know, offset forces even farther from their shore. So I think it's strategic territory, but, but really it's part of the lore that they've, that they've kind of created about themselves and about restoration of, of Chinese hedge money.

• 10:19Shawn Ryan?

  Is that why, is that the reason that we as Americans should be so concerned is because with, if they take Taiwan, we won't be able to strategically defend Japan, Philippines, Thailand, of the, the countries that you had just mentioned? Or would it be more towards, you know, the, the chip manufacturing that goes on there?

• 10:41Speaker 03

  Well, I mean, some of the, some of the candidates have said chip manufacturing is the only thing that matters, right?

• 10:49Speaker 03

  I think you got to go back to the end of World War II and the beginning of the Cold War. What interest did we have in protecting Western Europe? And I think the interest was in understanding that if we become the only society in the world that believes in liberty, then it makes it a lot harder for us to survive in that world. And so, part of the Cold War was really just saying, "We're going to stand for a set of principles and values and we're going to..." because we think that makes us safer in the end. And so, you can take the approach that it's just the chips. There happens to be a lot of American citizens that are living in Taiwan.

• 11:34Speaker 03

  I think that, you know, part of what's going on there is, you know, do we want to create a world that's beginning to slowly move towards China's direction, which is really authoritarianism and the right to basically subjugate, you know, a country of 23 million people? And, you know, there's a lot of complication in there. And originally, I was, you know, "We probably shouldn't fight over Taiwan." But the more I thought about it and the more I really just... I believe very strongly that we cannot defend our republic

• 12:17Speaker 03

  and the ideals of the republic if we're willing to basically just look away from that kind of activity. The problem is, though, we can't fight. Because if we fight, then it raises a specter of nuclear war. And there's no way of knowing, when you fight over Taiwan, where that goes, where that escalates to. You know, do you protect Taipei and then lose Los Angeles? Is that something that we are willing to do? And I don't think that any American would say, "Yes, I'm willing to lose Los Angeles for Taipei."

• 12:57Speaker 00

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• 13:25Speaker 01

  College football is back. So Hilton called to me, the superstition concierge, to make your fan rituals a reality. Need a room to match your lucky number? We got you. Want to make sure our team doesn't wash your lucky jersey? Oh, that smells lucky. Hilton's unmatched hospitality can keep up with any superstition. Even a marching band wake-up call at 5:55 and 55 seconds. Hit it! When you need a team that will do whatever it takes on game day, it matters where you stay. Hilton, for the stay.

• 13:56Speaker 03

  And so, you kind of get into this situation where if you're not, if you're not proactively transmitting what you're liable to do, then it's liable to happen. And then, at that point, you've kind of lost the advantage, or lost the escalation advantage. What we did during the Cold War is we said, you know, if you, if you come, if you invade Soviet Union, then it's going to be all-out nuclear war, and we're going to destroy you. And that kept the peace. We haven't said that with regard to Taiwan. So, and there's no, there's no policy. I don't think anybody in Washington DC thinks that this should be the policy.

• 14:38Speaker 03

  And so, therefore, the Chinese think that they have complete carte blanche to roll in there. And, you know, we've also done a very good job.

• 14:49Speaker 03

  During the Cold War and after the Cold War of preventing countries from getting nuclear weapons, particularly friendly, countries friendly to the United States. You know, obviously, countries hostile to the United States have been doing it, like, you know, North Korea, but countries friendly to the United States, we've, we've, like Ukraine, like Taiwan, we persuaded not to get nuclear weapons. And I think that's, that's dangerous. And so, um, we've kept them unarmed. We, we haven't extended our nuclear umbrella. In other words, we haven't said the same thing to the Chinese that we said to the Soviet Union. And so therefore, we're inviting war. War will come. Um, and it'll come on the, at the time of China's choosing.

• 15:32Speaker 03

  And so I think what, what we're left with is, do we want to evacuate the island? You know, do we want to, do we want to put Americans in harm's way for a neo? You know, that, to me, that, the Berlin airlift becomes kind of the thing that, um, that I think about when I think about Taiwan, at least at this point. If we're not gonna, if we're not gonna have some kind of declaratory policy that says, just like we did for Western Europe, uh, that we are going to, you know, uh, unleash the full retaliatory capability of the United States on the China, then I think then war will come.

• 16:09Shawn Ryan?

  When you, I wasn't planning on going down this road, but how advanced are China's weapons? And when we hear about, let's start, let's scratch that, let's go, nuclear war, we hear about it all the time with, with Putin and what's going on in Ukraine and, and he's threatened it. There is so much more technology out there now. Do we, I mean, are they even close to the technology that we have and, and, or is nuclear war still as much of a threat as it was?

• 16:53Shawn Ryan?

  With, with, from what I understand, we have

• 16:58Shawn Ryan?

  We have new technologies that don't, that, that, like these laser technologies, these, these, these directed energy weapons. From what I understand, we're very close to having a dome over the United States that will interdict anything that's coming in. I mean, are you aware of any of this type of technology that we have, this, this new, kind of new, modern age weapons?

• 17:22Speaker 03

  Okay, let's put it this way.

• 17:23Shawn Ryan?

  Okay.

• 17:24Speaker 03

  It's you against a thousand bad guys.

• 17:26Shawn Ryan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 17:27Speaker 03

  Thousand bad guys have all the ammunition in the world, don't have any training, and you've got 990 bullets.

• 17:37Shawn Ryan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 17:38Speaker 03

  And you're the best trained guy in the world. Somebody's gonna get through that.

• 17:43Shawn Ryan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 17:44Speaker 03

  Right? So it's all about mass in the end. And that's what we're talking about here with China. It doesn't matter, the technology doesn't matter if we're Winchester and they've still got weapons. And that's what we're talking about. Like, we can have the best technology in the world, we can have a thousand to one kill ratio, but it's that thousand and one that's gonna kill us. And that's the problem we face. It's just a pure numbers game, right? Nobody would say, "I'm gonna send a, I'm gonna send a, an ODA team against a battalion."

• 18:13Shawn Ryan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 18:15Speaker 03

  Right? That would be crazy.

• 18:16Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 18:16Speaker 03

  And that's what we're talking here. It's just, the, the numbers are overwhelming. Ships, planes, bombs, rockets, missiles, just, i- it is staggering.

• 18:32Shawn Ryan?

  Do they have more of everything than we have?

• 18:34Speaker 03

  Oh my gosh, so much more. And you think about what we've been doing recently, we've lot, we spent most, most of our munitions to Middle East and, and, and Ukraine.

• 18:44Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 18:44Speaker 03

  So, I mean, yes, they have so many more things. And so it doesn't matter how good you are, if somebody has just overwhelming amounts of people and weapons, and that's what the Chinese have. And they're willing to spend them.

• 18:59Shawn Ryan?

  Makes a lot of sense. Moving on, I wanted to get into, I mean, China has, they seem a lot more strategic than we are. And some of the ways that I've found that they seem to be taking the US, I want to just dive into some of those. Let's start with the cartels and the fentanyl crisis. They definitely seem to be behind the fentanyl crisis. They're sending in the chemicals. They're sending in chemists to train the cartels how to make the world's most deadliest fentanyl. They're moving on to the next drug. You know, fentanyl took heroin. Now they're developing this drug. I believe it's called nitacin. And

• 19:44Shawn Ryan?

  that's going to, that's already started pumping through the border. How legitimate is that? Is that, is it as strategic as I make it out to be? Or is that just cartels reaching out to China for the chemicals?

• 19:58Speaker 03

  I mean, you have to take a step back and say, what did the Chinese study? You know, who won the Cold War? We did. How do we win the Cold War? It's really about unleashing the power of our society. And so what the Communist Party wanted to do was figure out how they harness that, right? How to harness individual ambition for their own interests. And so if you can do that, if you can harness individual ambition to a certain set of interests, then you can unleash the creative capabilities of people, but still get the kind of outcome you want. So we don't have a fentanyl problem in China, do we? Because they know the people

• 20:38Speaker 03

  that are, that are making money at selling these things are precursors and, and helping both the cartels and the triads out of Hong Kong. They're, they can make all the money they want. They just can't allow any of it to seep into China, or they'll end up dead. You know, the Communist Party will kill them. And so they know that. So the triads, the, the cartels and the Chinese, these people that are involved in it make money. And they have factories in China and they create factories, you know, in, in Latin America and elsewhere, and move the drugs. And they move it, not just in the United States, all over the world. And it's a profit-making in Denver. Now, is Xi Jinping personally, you know, sitting back and managing this?

• 21:23Speaker 03

  No. They recognize that if you can narrowly, you know, enable your people to get rich, but get rich in ways that support your interests, then you've unleashed the American model in a way, right? And so that's what they do. And so there's all kinds of things that you can get rich at in China that are absolutely abhorrent and illegal here.

• 21:49Shawn Ryan?

  Wow. Wow. What about all the farmland within the US being bought by China or Chinese companies? Is that...

• 22:00Speaker 03

  Well, I think, again, there are multiple likely reasons for that. One is just if you have a lot of money in China and you want to have an escape route, transferring that money into some kind of real asset is very important. You don't want to keep it all liquid because that can be seized. So getting some kind of real property somewhere outside of China can be a way that you provide for resources if you have to escape. So a lot of the Communist Party do that, right? Because you can be in good favor at one time and then, you know, very quickly, like we

• 22:41Speaker 03

  saw with Jack Ma, the founder of Alibaba, you can be out of favor and then you have nothing. And so a lot of it, I believe, is getting assets outside of the country for themselves and their family members. Another is, and the Communist Party, the way that they look at what's called the Huachao or the... The expatriates that are outside the country, they look at them as a resource, just like a citizen lives within China. And so there may also be an interest, for instance, to build facilities within that are in strategic locations. There might be an interest to be a part of the food supply, you know, to provide security.

• 23:26Speaker 03

  So there's a lot of things where your individual interests can align with the Chinese Communist Party interests, and that's why, you know, property can be purchased. It could also be for influence. And, you know, as I was telling you, you know, we had Faraday Futures, which was an EV company that was building a factory outside an Ellis Air Force Base. This was when I was still in in uniform, where the mayor of Las Vegas comes to the wing commander at Ellis and says, hey, please don't say anything about this factory because I want to have jobs for Las Vegas citizens. So it can be a way to also influence, you know, local politicians, state politicians,

• 24:11Speaker 03

  federal politicians at about how you things that you want them to do. I'm going to go build something in your district so that you I scratch your back, you scratch mine. Now, the asks are not going to be, you know, deliberate, like, you know, obvious, you know, support us if we invade Taiwan. It's going to be more along the lines, you know, these are our interests and let's you scratch my back, I'll scratch yours. In the case of the Faraday Futures, okay, now, the Chinese Communist Party has built this advanced manufacturing facility right off to one of our most strategic air bases in the United States, where you can start doing all kinds of intelligence collection and whatever, that can be it can be a base for that.

• 24:54Speaker 03

  And so there's likely, there's no like one reason. I think people want one reason. There's no one reasons. There's a multitude of reasons that come through the relationships that are created by investing in real assets or in companies here in the United States. And you may not even understand what all those opportunities and benefits may be. All you know is you've just created a tie. You've created a relationship that can be exploited at some time in the future. I mean, this is a, this is a, this is a well-known intelligence technique, right? Gain, gain an asset, cultivate that asset.

• 25:37Speaker 03

  You may not, you may not know where that's gonna go. You may be like somebody that, that maybe has an opportunity to rise to some level of prominence within a society, but you've got them, you've got a relationship. And, um, and over time, you figure out how you're gonna exploit that. And that's what they're so good at.

• 25:57Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, this is, could you talk a little bit about how they would extract intelligence from a factory next to one of our most strategic airbases?

• 26:07Speaker 03

  Right, you're, you're collecting, you're collecting signals intelligence. Um, you're, you're, um, you've got people working there. So they're downtown in the, in the casinos and the bars, collecting human. So you just think about all, you've got the people, you've got the technology, you've got the, you've got the geography to basically set up a, set up a perfect place to, I mean, a consulate in the United States or an embassy in the United States is the same type of thing. It is a, it is a, is a, um, it is a resource to gather intelligence. That's why we shut down the consulate in Houston. So there, there, you can, all the forms of intelligence, all the INTS, you, that's a

• 26:52Speaker 03

  base for that, for that capability.

• 26:55Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, when you talk about human and signal intelligence, I just, I, what kind of, I'm trying to make this more real. I understand it, but I can't explain it as well as you can, I don't think. What kind of intelligence could they be extracting from that airbase? I wanna make it more real for the everyday listener.

• 27:18Speaker 03

  Um, you know, um, they, so first of all, it's off the departure end. So you get a real close look at the airplane and the underside of the airplane as they go over. So, um, and then with SIGINT, you're gonna be able to collect, um, information on transmission. Now, um, where you might be saying, hey, I'm not gonna turn on some, something, uh, here on the base, um, because I don't wanna, I don't wanna, um, run it through tests because this is going on. So it basically begins to, um, force you as the operator to change how you do things in order to prevent revealing certain things. And we already do a lot of this thing, these things already.

• 28:02Speaker 03

  For overhead intelligence collection. But, you know, having somebody right next door is a whole other effort. Like, for instance, when we would take the B2 over to airshows. All of a sudden, you've got an aircraft, like a helicopter hovering right over in front of the V2. No. You know, what are they doing with that aircraft? Are you using radar to basically understand the characteristics of the airplane? And how it uses that? You know, it's hard to tell.

• 28:44Speaker 03

  But, once you're within the fence line, there's all kinds of stuff that you can do that gives away secrets that we don't want to give away.

• 28:53Shawn Ryan?

  And then with the human intelligence piece, I mean, basically, what they could do is create an asset. You know, whether that's sex exploitation, financial reasons. And then you have, basically, a plant.

• 29:07Speaker 03

  Well, I mean, guys go out to the bar and they start talking about what they're doing on base.

• 29:10Shawn Ryan?

  Yep.

• 29:12Speaker 03

  Right? And you basically just invited a whole host of people in that you don't know. You know, we were like, oh, well, they're just workers. Well, workers in China are assets of the Chinese state by law. Right? So, you're inviting people that are part of the intelligence apparatus because, by virtue of the fact, they're Chinese. And what the Chinese Communist Party will say, well, then you're being racist. No, you have to recognize that this is the way that they orient their society and the way that they use their citizens. They co-opt their citizens. Like, you and me, citizens of the United States, no longer serving the government. Well, in China, we are.

• 29:56Speaker 03

  Everybody is. And if you don't, then you find yourself, you know, in a bad space with the government. So, you just have to understand that this is the way that their society is arranged, and this is the expectation.

• 30:14Shawn Ryan?

  You know, I think that this particular conversation is very relevant after the article that I saw you post on your ex account where Trump was talking about being friends with Xi Jinping and allowing him to open car manufacturing plants within the United States. And the argument seemed to be, oh, well, this is going to bring American jobs in. But from what I understand, what the article said, according to the article, is that China has more industrial robots than anyone else in the world, which means there would be little

• 30:57Shawn Ryan?

  to possibly no jobs for American workers as the robots take over the, basically, the blue collar jobs. On top of that, that also affects the chip war going on in Taiwan. But now we have the espionage piece as well. And so if you could go into kind of your thoughts on that.

• 31:20Speaker 03

  Yeah, you can look at the Belt and Road Initiative. Anytime that China builds a railroad, a bridge, a dam, you know, any type of infrastructure, a factory, you know, usually they bring in Chinese workers to do that work, almost always. So, yeah, there may be some Americans getting jobs, but you're bringing in Chinese too. You are creating opportunities for them to collect espionage. More importantly, I think they are committed to providing for the Chinese people, right? Opportunities for the Chinese people, even when they're outside of their borders.

• 32:03Speaker 03

  And so anything that they're doing, they're doing on the basis of for the Chinese people. So if you say, hey, I'm going to bring in a Chinese facility into my country, then you have to be of the mindset that the Chinese Communist Party wants it to benefit them. And so anything that you might, you think you might gain out of it is going to end up being not what you think. It's not going to provide as many jobs as you think. It's not going to provide the benefits you think, but it will provide a benefit to them because they see these things in zero sum terms, right? I will not do something that benefits you. That doesn't also benefit me more. And that's, that's the way you have to look at it.

• 32:45Speaker 03

  And I think it takes people, it's hard to recognize that you could orient a society this way until you take a step back and you understand that from the time you're, you start kindergarten to the, to the time you graduate university, you're taught a certain way of thinking. You're all your media, you know, all your social media, every single thing is wrapped around love and to love and cherish the party. And so you, while you have opportunities to advance your own interests within that framework, it's within a framework where everything you do is for the party and you know that. And so, I mean, that's what you're bringing in.

• 33:29Speaker 03

  When you bring in Chinese factories with Chinese people, they're there to harvest the benefits of America for China, period, end of story, and themselves, and themselves. You have to add that in there because that's how they're able to be so creative in the way they do it. Because at the end of the day, the party doesn't tell them how to do it. They just tell them it's okay to do it and I'll give you some resources to do it, but you guys have to figure out how to, how to do it. If you make a profit on it, great, great for you, great for me. And this is Huawei, right? This, we have, our model is different, right? We have the National Security Agency. National Security Agency, your tax dollar goes to the government, the government creates the NSA.

• 34:11Speaker 03

  NSA goes out and tries to figure out how to listen to things. Right? In China, it's like, okay, well, we just, we'll build the infrastructure so that we, it's built into, you know, this business model. So instead of it just being a tax on the American people, it's actually also a profit center. Right? If I, if I'm deploying all the infrastructure, now I'm not just spending money on a federal agency like the United States is. I'm actually making money while fulfilling the same mission. That's, that's the beauty of the model, right? I can make money in carrying out what I'm trying to do in terms of my political interests,

• 34:55Speaker 03

  rather than just having to spend money to do it. It's pretty. It's brilliant. It is, it is. How else are they doing this? You name it, and I think Unrestricted Warfare does a good job of explaining it. Every single thing that we find to be common, everyday things can be turned into weapons that support their interests. I mean, we just talked about, you know, fentanyl, we've talked about, you know, infrastructure, you know, electronics, you name it, you know, it's all, it's all, it's all done in the service of two things. One, individual interests, but that has to be aligned with national interest.

• 35:37Speaker 03

  And if you create the incentive system right, right? Like, for instance, if you're given a tax break for doing X versus Y, you're gonna do X. And so, or if you're, if you're given more loans to do X versus Y, you're gonna do X. And so, I can, I can basically create incentives for you to get rich, but do it in ways that I can use the levers of the state to, to direct you in the ways that I want you to get rich. Like, I want, I don't care how you get rich, until I have, I see an interest in it, and then I'm, then I'm gonna basically, I'm gonna align, so, I just mentioned Jack Ma, Alibaba,

• 36:20Speaker 03

  go out and build Alibaba, get rich, okay, I see now that some of this is actually creating a problem. In the case of Jack Ma, it's like, you're kinda drawing attention away from the party, right? You're, you're this, you know, very successful tech entrepreneur that's, has a somewhat kinda Silicon Valley-ish feel, okay, we need to, we need to pull attention back to the party, okay, Jack Ma, you're out of favor, and we're gonna, we're gonna take over your company. You know, this, this is the way that the party works. It's very, it's very capitalistic in a lot of sense, but it's capitalism tied to a single party state. And when you do it that way, it, it's just complete way, a completely separate way of doing business, of thinking about the world.

• 37:04Shawn Ryan?

  When it comes to, you know, the tech piece, which I think is probably where most of your knowledge lies, if I'm not mistaken, I would like to dive into TikTok. TikTok's hot in the media right now. It's been talked about for several years, how it's a ginormous spy apparatus. And, and a lot of people believe it is dubbing down the, the intelligence level of the, of the US citizens. Can you elaborate on why that was invented, what they're doing with it, and why you're for the ban?

• 37:44Speaker 03

  So, um, I think first of all, the, the, the bill, uh, that's going before the Senate, it's not technically a ban. It is a, you must divest ByteDance, which is the company that owns TikTok and owns the algorithms that are behind how TikTok does its thing. You have to divest of TikTok if you want it to stay. And if you don't, then it's banned. So, uh, I think the, the idea that it's just a ban, and that's all anybody talks about, is obviously perpetuated by TikTok. Um, I think you do know that, you know, the congressional lines were flooded as this was coming to vote. In fact, they took the, you know, took

• 38:29Speaker 03

  the, the phones off the, off the, off the air because they were overwhelmed by TikTok users calling Congress to say, "Don't vote for this bill." And that was all orchestrated by TikTok itself. And so what, um, what the, what the Chinese Communist Party recognized in what Silicon Valley was building was this enormous influence machine.

• 38:56Speaker 03

  Right? You can influence people's perceptions, their behavior patterns. Now, Silicon Valley's been doing this a long time. It's how you create a trillion dollar company like Amazon, right? Or Google. It's really about using the information you gather about people to then curate the content that brings them in line with what you want them to do. What do you want them to do? You want them to be better consumers on your platform, so you make more money. This is, this is the business model of Silicon Valley. Well, the Chinese recognize, okay, I can make you not just a better consumer. I can make you a better person, a better citizen. And how is that? And they, they say this, they said, you know, ByteDance, it's your job

• 39:38Speaker 03

  to make citizens, to create content for citizens that make them better socialists. Right? So ByteDance creates algorithms that power the TikTok platform. Okay, so, uh, so how, how might the Chinese Communist Party take advantage of this? Well, now thirty percent or more of you, of young people get their news from TikTok. That's a platform they get their news from. So I'm less concerned about the intelligence collection. You know, that's obviously a problem, but that's, that's, that's not where this is going. It's about, it's about creating a movement. It's about creating a, um, a community. A community, number one, that loves TikTok.

• 40:23Speaker 03

  But then, because it loves TikTok and it's on the platform, you know, often hours per day, then there's also things that you can begin to love, or at least not hate. And, um, and so it's a, it's a, it's an influence tool. It's an influence tool. You, you know, you can like, you sense this in your bones, like, if you put one of these things in the hands of somebody, there is slow, ways to slowly get them to do things. So he's just like, well, where's the evidence? Right? So another YouTuber, LaoY86, puts the evidence right on those things. Like, here is message after message after message promoting, you know, some policy that the Chinese Communist Party wants, different venues, different people, right?

• 41:07Speaker 03

  Because you have to take the message and you have to break it up into the content that people want. Who do they, what type of people do they want to see saying this message? What type of venue do they want them in? What type of, you know, what type of, you know, how do we frame that shot? So that we get this segment of people? And then you do it over a bunch of segments. He's shown verbatim messages that are in TikTok. Like, somebody's reading the message, but it's different people, different places, different times. And so, it really becomes a platform for you to do all kinds of things.

• 41:49Speaker 03

  And this is a thing that we never had prior to the internet. So, I think it's well-established that the Soviet Union had, you know, active measures programs, right? That they were trying to subvert the United States, people in the United States. But we didn't really give them purchase. Now, we've given the Chinese Communist Party, not just purchase, they are basically plugged in to, what, 180 million people in the United States of a population of 330 million? Directly plugged in to them. And do they love the Constitution? Hell, no. That is their biggest fear, is that their people become aware, somehow sentient of the US Constitution. And so, in the same way that we made the world safe for democracy during the Cold War,

• 42:33Speaker 03

  they're making the world safe for the Chinese Communist Party by slowly eroding our value system, our belief system, in terms of what's right, what's proper, what's expected by a citizen of a country. And, so that's the biggest thing. Now, you mentioned another that is, I think, equally a problem, and that is, you know, what happens to a person that stays on this platform for hours of a day? Well, they stopped doing other things, right? So just if you look at productivity, you know, national productivity

• 43:14Speaker 03

  as a, as a, as a positive thing for your society. If I can get you to do this for hours and hours of a day, then I can, at the macro level, 100, again, 170 million people out of 330 million, they're watching these things for hours of a day. Your national productivity goes down. Uh huh. Okay. We say, well, what, where's the evidence of that? Well, they have the, the, the Chinese language equivalent of TikTok called Douyin. Douyin, the kids get 40 minutes a day, max, by law, no more, shuts off. That's the Chinese version of TikTok in China. Chinese version. By the way, TikTok itself is not allowed in China. So no TikTok, you can't have Douyin.

• 43:59Speaker 03

  Basically Chinese language version of TikTok, but you can, you can do it for 40 minutes a day. And when you interview those kids and you say, hey, what do you want to be when you grow up? The number one thing is I want to be an astronaut. When you interview Americans on TikTok, the number one thing they want to be is an influencer. Right? So, so you, um, so you're influencing people, their behavior patterns. You're reducing national productivity. And you're also taking an entire generation of people and saying, you know, this is, this is, this is, this is the number one thing to be. Right?

• 44:41Speaker 03

  Not an engineer, not a doctor, you know? So it, it is, it's a very powerful tool. And it, and it's, it's just basically taking the tools that Silicon Valley created and just tweaking them a little bit for not just economic benefit, but for social and political benefit. That it's, it's, it's really very basic. And I think anybody that's in Silicon Valley and understands, you know, why you want to get somebody like Facebook to, you know, to 100, 200 million users. And the power of that as a platform, or Google, and the power of that as a platform, or Amazon, and the power of that as a platform can understand.

• 45:22Speaker 03

  A regime that's dedicated to the downfall of our constitutional republic, using those same techniques and tactics and procedures to slowly get the American people to stop believing in what is unique about America.

• 45:43Shawn Ryan?

  Do you think this differs? I mean, is this more dangerous than what we're seeing on other social platforms like Instagram, X, Facebook, Snapchat, and YouTube? Is it? I mean, because the messaging that's coming from Silicon Valley, as we just kind of discussed at breakfast, I mean, it's maybe just as toxic.

• 46:11Speaker 03

  Well, so I've been thinking about this for a long time. And so you kind of take the framework.

• 46:21Speaker 03

  If you've read the Federalist Papers, by and large, the Federalist Papers argue for a republic because of national security, what we would call national security. Basically, Alexander Hamilton, and quite a few of them, argues that we need to come together as a federal republic, because if we're separate, then we're going to be picked off one by one as states, as colonies, if you will. And so national security was heavily kind of the most, I think, important thing. There was other things, but primarily, how do we protect ourselves from England or any of these other monarchies that may want to take away our freedoms? We have to band together in order to do that.

• 47:06Speaker 03

  And so what are the things that we need to worry about? Well, and the Constitution says we need an army, we need a navy, right? So we had powerful armies, and we had powerful navies. There was no, like, we need a cybersecurity organization, or, you know, we need a cyber command, because there's no internet, right? So at least as they could conceive of a threat to our individual political independence and sovereignty, it could only come by force of arms, right? Somebody could come and occupy us and then take that away by force of arms. And that's why, you know, we have things like the Second Amendment.

• 47:46Speaker 03

  But imagine if you could say, hey, I can slowly erode your political independence and sovereignty by beginning to change your mind through this medium called the Internet. How might we have conceived of the republic differently and instantiated it not just in laws, but also in technology? And that's the thing that I think is a real problem. When Trump went to China, I can't remember who told him, but they basically said, hey, you know, we're going to be number one in AI. We've got all of our data and we've got your data. You really can't compete with that because you can't really collect data as a government and drive all the resources of the state to become the most powerful country in artificial intelligence.

• 48:29Speaker 03

  So we're going to dominate the world that's coming and get in line or don't and we'll either keep you in, plugged in, or we'll cut you off. Those are powerful, powerful ideas, right? What the former head of Google, China, I wrote the book, AI Superpower. What he says is, we want to become the Saudi Arabia of data, right? What does that mean? Well, that's oil for AI engines. We want to be dominant in artificial intelligence. And by doing that, we can, we can use all these tools, tools like ByteDance's algorithms to begin to manipulate the world in ways that we want.

• 49:12Speaker 03

  And I think recognizing that and recognizing that certainly since 2007, when the iPhone came out, and then shortly thereafter, about a couple of years later, when 4G networks started, iPhone on a 3G network was, was trash. It's like, it was fun for a little bit, but then you really didn't get a good user experience. But when they had a 4G network and you really had broadband, a broadband cellular link that you could connect that device. Now I've got something that I can get you hooked on. I can, I can create applications. I can get you. So now, you know, everybody's kind of stares at these things. When that happened, this ability to bypass, you know, these two

• 49:55Speaker 03

  big oceans that protect us and these two friendly borders and go directly to the heart of American civilization, that's what we created. And all you have to do is look at, hey, here's how these big tech companies manipulate you, the narrative, manipulate your behavior to make money from you, right? They're, they're, they're the 25% of S and P 500, the most economically powerful companies, you know, ever. And, and most influential companies ever. And so the Chinese Communist Party just, just takes, takes that in, learns about it, and then begins to iterate on it, right? They've, they've taken your technology and then they've advanced it for their own interests in ways that-

• 50:39Speaker 03

  What are you most worried about when it comes to the, to TikTok in China? Well, I mean, just the ability to take the, take our population- To manipulate it. To manipulate it and manipulate it in ways that, number one, reduce national productivity, and number two, get them to not appreciate the principles and values that are in our society, right? Why, why is the constitution, why the separation of powers? And so getting back to that, you know, that, that, what does it mean? It means the separation of powers really no longer exists. It's kind of a function of the 20th century. Because

• 51:20Speaker 03

  now we've gone in the 20th century where the narrative has become so hard to get past. I'm not saying China created the narrative. You, you mentioned it yourself. These tech companies have a certain political ideology. You know, Elon just said, hey, 99% of Twitter was, was basically donated to a single party. And as we've seen, that is starting to, that has, you know, basically crept into the tech companies. Well-

• 51:52Speaker 03

  And the Chinese Communist Party, to the sense, to the, to the fact that it actually benefits, is more than happy to use that as a tool to get its interests met. So, you know, in a lot of ways, the way that they manipulate us is through these corporate and financial relationships, and that's tied right into the tech company relationships. And so, you know, the fact that Apple wants to sell phones in China is a, is a great piece of leverage for the Chinese Communist Party, right? You want to be in China? Okay,

• 52:31Speaker 03

  well, this is what we want you to do. And so, you know, it is a way for, and I don't think, I'm not calling what's happened in this country, kind of a movement towards, what, have you read Cynical Theories? I have not. It's a really good book. It kind of talks about the history of post, postmodern, postmodernism, and how, you know, theories like critical race theory and, and DEI have become, started out as more or less a, an ineffective critique of the, of the Western

• 53:15Speaker 03

  order, you know, post-enlightenment Western order, kind of on the same line as Marxism, but became more than just a critique in universities and kind of like a sideshow to transition to more of an activist tone. And kind of walks you through that, you know, starts in France, and then kind of builds and builds and builds to where, and so when I was getting my PhD in university, I was starting to hear some of these things, but I really didn't understand kind of where it was going. And now it's fully matriculated throughout a university system, and then it's made, because our students are coming out and they're coming into white collar jobs, a lot of them, you know, Silicon Valley

• 53:56Speaker 03

  software developers. Now you've started to kind of build this throughout the framework of our society. And so if you look at China, just as a, as an influence engine, how the system works, you know, the party gives narratives centrally, and that gets, you know, gets... Sent down to the, to the local level. And so you have then a pretty comprehensive, clear-cut narrative that is, is the same across the country. And that's why when you talk to a Chinese person, they have certain responses to things like, "What do you think about Taiwan? It's Chinese territory." Because that is part of that whole process. Well, if you take a step back and you say, "Okay, what's going on here in the United States?"

• 54:39Speaker 03

  Effectively, we've created the same system. It's not a single-party authoritarian system. It's more of a, it's more of an ideology that escaped the university system, became embedded in the white-collar class, and then became a patina over the entire architecture. And then, when you, as the internet begins to grow, local media begins to lose value, be sold off, you know, consolidated. So now you have basically five major legacy, we call them media companies. I would, you know, it's better to think of them more as propaganda companies that have

• 55:23Speaker 03

  a similar kind of narrative that spreads to the technology companies. And then, so now you have a reinforcing kind of phenomenon where, I just mentioned, you know, 99% of Twitter employees were donating to a single political party. If you look within the Beltway of Washington DC, 94, 95% of people vote for, for a single political party. You have the tech companies, you have the government agencies, you have, you have the financial institutions, you know, the very big ones that own probably 10% or more of the major media companies, right? So you're starting to see the system that is not the same in terms of how, who it benefits,

• 56:07Speaker 03

  you know, a single political party, but more of a class of people it benefits, right? So, so we've created more of a class-based, central, centrally-controlled narrative system that's a very, very...

• 56:25Speaker 03

  Much like how the Chinese control their population, and also because these corporations have financial relationships with China, it's plugged into it, right? And so now you take a step back and like if you're, if you take a God's eye view of the planet and you see, okay, you know, you're creating narratives that are essentially acceptable in China and the United States. One's a democratic republic, the other is clearly an authoritarian system. How is that possible? Well, it's possible because they're connected. And they're connected and they're essentially, the mechanism that by which you translate that narrative are the same. It's just who they're benefiting. In the case of China, Chinese Communist Party,

• 57:07Speaker 03

  in the case of this, I would call it maybe the white collar class of the United States. And to the detriment of who? In China, it's anybody that's not in the Chinese Communist Party. To America, it's anybody that's not in that white collar class. Right? Or somebody within the white collar class that basically dissents to the narrative. And who is that here? That's the working class.

• 57:31Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, one of the arguments for the bill about the TikTok bill is a lot of people are saying it's the Patriot Act 2.0. What do you have to say about that?

• 57:43Speaker 03

  Okay, so first of all, I think the Patriot Act was the worst thing that we've ever done as a country. Absolute worst thing. It goes back to that point about open data. You know, that what Trump was told when he went to China. I think open data was the biggest destroyer of individual freedoms ever created. Right? And we created, you know, here. And I don't think that we recognized what we were doing. Right? It was, we were basically getting rid of those two big oceans and two friendly borders as a way to protect ourselves in addition to our military and allowing this thing to be built right in plain sight, right over us.

• 58:24Speaker 03

  And so, you know, I think that, that right there is the, you know, that's the problem. The Patriot Act.

• 58:40Speaker 03

  The Patriot Act is what brought the US government into this into this white collar, class-based narrative control, right? Gave it, gave it purchase. You know, the, the fact that, you know, Obama repealed this, you know, anti-propaganda law that we had on the books, that you weren't supposed to create propaganda. Well, you know, ostensibly, we're going to do it to kind of change the narrative for the terrorist threat. But in reality, it's been used in other ways, I think. And I think everybody would agree with that. I mean, there's court, court cases in front of the Supreme Court talking about, you know, the government now kind of being in league, in league with the tech companies. And this is a problem.

• 59:25Speaker 03

  It's a problem for a democracy because you have to have, you know, in, in a separation of powers, people talk about the fourth estate, the fourth estate being the press, right? So you have, you judiciary, legislative and executive branch that don't really have dominance dominance over, over each other. But then you also have a free press that's supposed to basically be the ones calling out the government for the things that, that are going wrong. And how many things have we found out that were being hidden from us over the years because of things like the New York Times? But if you can corporatize that and consolidate it, and you can tie it to a certain set of ideologies,

• 1:00:09Speaker 03

  now instead of New York Times throwing potshots at the federal government because they don't trust them, like, what are they hiding? There's something going on. They're like, if the government says something, they just repeat it. And that's where we, that's, that's where we've come to. And I think that's the, that's the challenge. So the people that are saying that the, that the TikTok divestment bill, ByteDance divest of TikTok, or TikTok will be banned. The people that are, that are against that, I believe, are the ones that are promoting this ability to continue to have TikTok operating in the way that it wants to here in the United States. Now, who are those? Well, there's, there's Jeff Yass, good guy, that invested in, in TikTok, wants to keep his billions.

• 1:00:56Speaker 03

  Right, he's obviously one of them that wants to keep TikTok around and and the Chinese Communist Party is not going to divest of, you know, what is a very good propaganda tool for, um, for the United Front Work Group. So I think if this does pass the Senate, you're going to see it banned and, and, and obviously he doesn't want to ban. There's others that don't want to ban. So there's financial motive for them to say, hey, it's either, it's either, um, government overreach or the government wants to use TikTok to spy on you. You know, um, I don't read that in any parts of the bill. That being said, Patriarch, very bad, needs to go away, period. Needs, it just needs to go away. And I think, I'll go one further. I think encryption,

• 1:01:43Speaker 03

  right? When we say, you know, free speech is a fundamental human right, or the right to keep bare arms, right? The right to protect yourself, the right to private property. I think the right to encryption of your data is a, should be characterized as a, as a fundamental human right. And that's because the power of these tools to manipulate you without your consent is based on the ability for them to take data about you and data that you own, and then turn around and characterize who you are as an individual, how you think, how you respond to stimulus, and then begin to feed those things back to you to manipulate you. And that's, that's why I think, you know, we have to be able, and we thought of encryption as the, the,

• 1:02:27Speaker 03

  you know, only the venue of the NSA or, you know, the federal government. They, they should have, you know, the ability to encrypt things, but you as a, as a person shouldn't. I disagree with that. In fact, I think our constitutional republic is probably the, the best, um, type of society that could, you know, accept a citizenry, not just armed, you know, with weapons, but armed with the power of their own data to protect from outside influence, whether it be the government, whether it be a corporation, or whether it be a foreign power.

• 1:03:03Shawn Ryan?

  There's also an argument that talks about, a lot of people are saying that this would basically infiltrate into supposed free speech platforms such as Rumble and X. How would that, how would this bill affect those platforms?

• 1:03:21Speaker 03

  It's very clear in the bill that it's tied to ByteDance.

• 1:03:27Shawn Ryan?

  Okay.

• 1:03:28Speaker 03

  And TikTok, right? I don't see anything where it's gonna go after any, it's really, really focused on ByteDance as a tool of the Chinese Communist Party, which it is. And we can get, the party has already said it, their words are there. And so, you know, it's, I don't know how else to do it, other than to read the bill yourself and tell me how you get, you know, and what would it be? It would be that Rumble was owned by the Chinese Communist Party, and then whoever owned that had that share of it would have to divest of it because they're a foreign power.

• 1:04:11Speaker 03

  Okay, I think that's great. So if you're the, if you're the CEO of Rumble and you're telling me that you want to have the ability to sell over half your company to the Chinese because you want to make a bunch of money, and you don't really care what happens with it, and so therefore you're gonna be against this bill, and I'm not saying that they are, but I'm just saying, these are the types of arguments that you could make is, you know, I should be able to sell my company to the Chinese Communist Party, who would give me a lot of money if I, you know, if they get kicked out of TikTok and they need some other platform. And they may do it in pieces, so it's not detectable, but that's a problem. If you can find, if you can discover that, hey, ultimately, the Chinese Communist Party

• 1:04:56Speaker 03

  is behind, you know, what's going on on TikTok, or, I mean, on, say, X, or Facebook, then yes, those people need to divest of their shares, and that's what the bill says, if it's a, if it's related to a foreign power.

• 1:05:14Speaker 03

  So I don't, I don't know how you get that the government, the US government is going to use that other than, you know, e- even if they got the Chinese to buy it for them, they would be in violation of the law. So.

• 1:05:27Shawn Ryan?

  Well, I think that people are getting that because that's what they're being told.

• 1:05:30Speaker 03

  Well, of course.

• 1:05:31Shawn Ryan?

  And, uh.

• 1:05:32Speaker 03

  I mean, that's, that's part of, that's part of, uh, the, the CEO of TikTok's, you know, that's part of his plan. And it's part of all the proxies plan is let's, let's make, let's, let's confuse the issue. Let's make it sound like this is government overreach because government, Americans hate government overreach.

• 1:05:50Shawn Ryan?

  Uh huh.

• 1:05:51Speaker 03

  And, you know, everybody will, will lap it up. You know, look, I understand people like TikTok. You can like something and have it still be bad for your republic. And I think, you know, that gets into, you know, another matter, which is do, do we really understand what our republic stands for anymore? Is that kind of just wilted away?

• 1:06:15Shawn Ryan?

  I feel like it's wilted away. On that note, let's, um, let's take a quick break. And, uh, when we come back, uh, we'll get into some 5G, 6G stuff.

• 1:06:32Speaker 04

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• 1:08:10Shawn Ryan?

  All right, we're back from the break. We're getting ready to dive into some 5G stuff, but before that, I wanted to talk to you about what kind of data is being collected, because we all hear, oh, they're collecting all our data, they're collecting all of our data and potentially weaponizing it or using it for whatever. Can you go into a little more detail on what they're collecting and how this is affecting us?

• 1:08:37Speaker 03

  Well, I think the best way to approach that is, how does somebody, how does somebody collect data about you? And the answer is, the software development kits for the applications that run on the devices have data about your device that they collect. Those developers collect it, it's sold on the open market. Anybody can buy it, you can buy it, I can buy it. And then you can take that data and you can, you can look at it, you can look at it and you can stare at it, you can get an intel analyst, or you can put, you know, do a massive

• 1:09:16Speaker 03

  learning model like ChatGPT, go over that data and begin to look at information. And so what does that look like? Well, it looks like, you know, when you look at data on a military base, for example, you can see when devices are at a certain location, what device is at a certain location. So you can start to see things like shift changes, and you can start to see like generations, and so you start to get a good picture of the ops tempo and the daily behavior that's going on at the base. But also, you can, you can watch that and you can see, hey, this device was in this location.

• 1:10:00Speaker 03

  Um, and this can be the Pentagon, this can be a military base, like White Men Air Force Base, where I spent a lot of my career, could be the White House. And then you can watch that device and watch what it does, and then that device will go home. Right? Off into the same place every night. So now you can say, okay, well, who owns that home? Now you can start to tie a person to the device. Now you have the person, you have the device, and now you can begin to watch that. Where does that person go? Right? Um, it's, it's a way to build a picture about what, what, um, what they do. And that's just for somebody that's not, um, that's not within a platform like TikTok. Right?

• 1:10:43Speaker 03

  So that's just the data, the metadata that's collected around that device. You can buy it, anybody can buy it. And so that's information, but then if you're actually in the platform itself, now you can, um, not only, um, collect that information, you know exactly who it is. And not only that, you know, the things that they begin, that they, um, respond to. Right? So you can, you can get a good picture of the personality type of the person and the behavior patterns and the things that they like. And that can lead into, um, you know, where you bump and say, hey, I, I just happened to randomly bump into this person and, hey, how's it going?

• 1:11:28Speaker 03

  By the way, you know what they like, you know, all the things they care about, you can strike up a conversation. This can be, end up, uh, um, developing into a friendship, and then that's how you become, you know, an asset. So it is, it is literally the best tool. So, I mean, wh- when the Chinese Communist Party did this, it was actually, in my opinion, the most brilliant use of technologies. Like, we talk about nuclear weapons being dangerous, yeah, they're dangerous, they're destructive, but there is literally no weapon that's ever been created that's as dangerous in the context of what war is, which is a political act, than, you know, what Silicon Valley created.

• 1:12:12Speaker 03

  It is literally the most dangerous weapon known to mankind because it's subtle.

• 1:12:18Speaker 03

  And most people aren't, they're not, they don't understand the technology, they don't understand how it's used, or how it can be used. Not just people don't understand it, our own government doesn't understand it. Right? They're not, they're not, you know, our intelligence community doesn't have, doesn't own Google, doesn't own Facebook, doesn't own Twitter. I mean, it's been, it's tried to like, and we've seen that, particularly with the Twitter files, that, hey, you know, this was going on, but it doesn't own those platforms. China owns those platforms. Right? So they become part

• 1:13:00Speaker 03

  of the fabric of Western society, and then they become assets for the Chinese Communist Party. Whether it's, you know, TikTok, and then ByteDance owns TikTok, and ByteDance is a Chinese company, or it's Facebook, and you're able to get in and get, you know, exploit their information. So whether they're, and, and I would, you know, that's, that's where, if I was going to build the most effective war machine today, it would be the war machine that, you know, basically Silicon Valley built. And it's not, they don't consider it a war machine, but if war is a political act, and, and you can,

• 1:13:41Speaker 03

  you can achieve political influence through this tool, then by nature, can't that be viewed as a weapon of war? I mean, the way we used it in Kosovo, the B2, was we used stealth bomber, 2,000-pound bombs, to take out factories owned by, and other assets owned by the elite in Kosovo, to get them to give up Milosevic, and within two weeks of us starting to do that, they did. And that's, this is, this is, so literally, in the Pentagon, I'm sitting there, in 2014, and I get this briefing, and I start to look at this, I'm like, wait a second, this is going on in our society, this, this influence

• 1:14:24Speaker 03

  of our, of our, of our corporate sector, and it's the same thing that we did in Kosovo, but I was doing it with 2,000-pound bombs, they're just doing it.

• 1:14:33Speaker 03

  It's the way they do business. And you start to go around the government, as we did, like, who knows about this? Who understands? Nobody, because the businesses aren't going to talk to government. They're afraid to tell government what's going on. You know, then it gets announced to the public and affects their valuation. Or, you know, in some way, torpedoes their business. So they don't want to share that information with the government. They want to cover it up, keep it quiet.

• 1:15:01Speaker 03

  This is going on across the United States. I mean, it's going on across every Western society. This, this, this slow erosion of the, of our, of our industrial base, our, our capacity. So, I mean, it's just, it is really, really effective to, to wage war in this way. And you don't have to create a whole lot of risk around it.

• 1:15:26Shawn Ryan?

  Let's, let's move into the 5G stuff. I don't, I am as green as it gets when it comes to the 5G, 6G technology. I, I, I hear oftentimes that we should be concerned about it. What, what is it? I don't even know where to start. So, but I know you're the expert, so please.

• 1:15:48Speaker 03

  Well, first of all, the, the, one of the things that people talk about is like, it's gonna, it's gonna, you know, create disease or, or start cancer.

• 1:16:00Speaker 03

  This, this, the spectrum, the frequency uses are no different than 4G. So the radio part is not really what's different. Although they do have a segment of the spectrum that's up in the, you know, 24 to, you know, 40 gigahertz range, really high frequency.

• 1:16:19Speaker 03

  By the way, that stuff, that frequency is what, you know, when you get in the, in the airport and somebody scans you, you know, it's the same type of frequency. It doesn't penetrate your body.

• 1:16:29Shawn Ryan?

  Okay.

• 1:16:30Speaker 03

  And so the, the, the, the carriers start to roll this stuff out very early. And they realize, okay, it doesn't penetrate your body, which means if, if your hand is blocking the phone, the phone can't pick up a signal. And oh, by the way, it goes about 100 yards. That's not good. For for user experience, right? So they abandon building out. So it's really not appropriate except for like very densely populated venues where they put up a lot of antennas and they can they have a lot of people on their devices. So they need a lot of bandwidth. Otherwise, it's not effective for use for cellular. So it's not a technology in terms of the radio that's going to cause cancer because it's really not a different radio technology.

• 1:17:14Speaker 03

  The radio, the physics of the radio don't change. The front end of the radio, you still have to have analog to digital and digital analog converters and you still have to radio energy. That stuff is all the same. What's differences, what's different is all the components that makes that a network used to be all hardware. And what 5G is, is really driving all of those components that used to be a specific piece of equipment, design a particular way that goes, you know, at the base of a tower and more equipment throughout the the network. Now that's all software components. And so

• 1:17:58Speaker 03

  what it does allow you to run, particularly with a technology called OpenRAN or Open Radio Access Network, allow you to run that software on just a regular server. Right? So now it takes away the kind of the the physical properties of the network and puts it all instantiates it all in software. That's the real evolution of 5G. Okay. So, so as we started, you know, in our company, we started to get into it like, okay, if you can, if you can take all that, all that hardware that things used to be spread out across the United States and you can collapse it and it's all code and code

• 1:18:37Speaker 03

  can be run on a, on a, on a, on a server, then why are we, why are we creating vulnerability by spreading that code out in different geographic locations? Why not put it all together so that if something happens, it's still their local and so the network can run. So that to me, you know, the real foundational difference between 5G, not the radio, it's a fact that the network itself is instantiated in software. Okay.

• 1:19:06Speaker 03

  Want to get into your company?

• 1:19:09Speaker 03

  So if you're kind of thinking about, let's look at what happened in Maui, right? Big fire, networks go down because pieces catch fire, you know, and you're not able to make calls. Let's look at Hurricane Katrina. This is really where, even though I started looking at this at the White House in 2017, it was really 2005 when I'm at Whiteman Air Force Base, you know, flying the B2 as a major. And I look at Hurricane Katrina and the Louisiana National Guard.

• 1:19:50Speaker 03

  We fly C-17s to Iraq to pick them up. They're in combat. We pull them out of combat, put them in jets, fly them back to New Orleans. They land and they get out on the ground. They're like, I don't see a difference in where I just left, right? Yeah. New Orleans is a war zone within just a couple of weeks. And you see how fast civil society can break down with the absence of services. Like one of the key things that brings us together is communications. And if you start to think about, you know, our networks as being things that weren't meant to survive natural disaster,

• 1:20:32Speaker 03

  like a hurricane, like a fire, like in Nashville here.

• 1:20:38Speaker 03

  And it was two Christmases ago, somebody takes an RV right outside the AT&T Switching Center. What happens? Yeah. Cell service is down for weeks. Single location. So a highly centralized system. And this new technology is going from hardware that has to be placed, you know, like it is today, to software and say, okay, well, if I can bring all this into a single location, I can create a much more decentralized architecture. Okay. So now instead of being able to hit one place and shut down Tennessee and surrounding states. I can still do that because we have a centralized architecture here.

• 1:21:22Speaker 03

  But if I can start to build, you know, attached devices to all these towers that are more decentralized and hardened, hardened against things like EMP and tamper and all the things that you would want to do. If I can do that, then I can start to create a network that survives all these things that we're concerned about, whether it be natural disasters or physical or cyber attacks. And so, you know, that's ultimately, you know, when I was at the White House, I got introduced to some technology that we were using in DOD to process radar data on aircraft, very high-performance compute, very low swap, low size, weight and power.

• 1:22:04Speaker 03

  So, small enough to go on an aircraft, but it was really, really powerful computer. And at the time, I went to one of the senior technology leaders in DOD. I said, "Hey, what if we take this and apply it to our telecom problem? We've got this highly insecure, open, vulnerable technology. Why don't we take that and apply it to there?" And so, some of the things we were looking at there is like, "How can we encrypt the data without inducing any latency on the network? So, super fast network, no latency. Can we encrypt the data, decrypt the data? So, basically begin to secure it." That's where it started when I was still in uniform. And then I just said, "Okay, here's an opportunity for me to go out in the private sector

• 1:22:48Speaker 03

  and do something that's in line with my oath of office, but that is related to something that I really like, which is technology." And so, we took that as a starting point and then began to build and think about, "How do we take it from a clean sheet of paper? How do we make resilient, secure infrastructure in the country?" And quite frankly, the people that invested in the company...

• 1:23:12Speaker 03

  Over thirty million dollars invested to date to develop the technology. Didn't know what I was talking about when I, when I said this. They mostly invested on the basis of they trusted me and they understood the problem, at least of the way I articulated. Don't know how it's gonna work, but we went, we sent around, set about to basically solve that problem and that's what we've done. In, in, in a little over five years, we've taken that idea and we've created devices that you can insert into the network that make it EMP hardened. The first commercial cellular equipment ever to, to be able to survive and operate through an EMP and it's been tested by federal agencies and passed.

• 1:23:56Speaker 03

  The first commercial equipment that can detect if you try to open it up, cut a hole in it, right? Most of the stuff is, as you know, military equipment. This is commercial gear that it, the, the, the thing will know if you try to open it up, you know, however you try to do that. That, that deploys autonomously. So the, the other thing that I realized is if we're gonna, if we're gonna make this available to military people, I don't have time, you don't have time, to set up comm gear. That, that often was the most frustrating thing for me is I've got three or four different comm systems I gotta put together and get running. And so, one of the things that we found out about cellular equipment is very complicated setup.

• 1:24:41Speaker 03

  I can give you a, a, a radio and baseband unit and the core and hand it to you and you could spend the rest of your natural born life and never get that thing to connect to a device. Because it is that complicated in terms of the settings and everything else. And so, there's an entire, there's an entire business in just building these networks for the carriers that the OEMs, you know, charge them for engineers after engineers after engineers. And you're like, why is this so complicated? Well, that's how, that's their business model, right? It's very complicated. Okay, so how do we take that, and this is really the hardest thing that we had to do, how do we take this very complicated system and make it so you can plug it in and it just works?

• 1:25:26Speaker 03

  What does that sound like to you? It sounds like a Wi-Fi router that you buy on Amazon, right? You cannot take cellular equipment today and plug it in like a Wi-Fi router. That doesn't work. And you have it connect to and operate your device. Can't do that. So that's what we did. That was the hardest thing to do and we finally finished that last year. So now we're starting to take it commercial and within a few weeks it'll be available for anybody to buy. And if you're sitting out somewhere and you don't have a cellular signal someplace, it's affordable enough that you can likely maybe get together with some of your neighbors and put something up so that gives you cellular service. So now, the reason that we don't have cellular service in rural communities or underserve

• 1:26:11Speaker 03

  urban communities is because the population density isn't such that the cost justifies investment in a very big tower, which costs millions of dollars. And so making that affordable, making it easy to deploy, making it resilient, making it secure. We did this for the military and we did it in partnership with the military, specifically the Air Force. But now it's available and it's going to kind of transform the way we grow the network and the way we grow capability.

• 1:26:41Shawn Ryan?

  So this is going to be, this started with the military project, then it went to the carriers and now it's going to go, now it's going to be available to consumers?

• 1:26:50Speaker 03

  It's going to be available to, you know, it's not, our business model is not yet where I can just sell service. That's not what we do. We're an infrastructure company. So we mostly help other companies provide this capability. But we are going to, we are going to allow people to purchase it directly. So, you know, it's, that's our model and we think that's the way to go because, quite frankly, people need agency and this, you know, if you're sitting around and you don't have cellular service, and oh, by the way, it comes with a data center, right? Because you have to run the, all that software. So by, by design, you need a data center. And so now you can start to create your own mini Silicon Valley right in your own backyard

• 1:27:35Speaker 03

  is kind of like what we're going to enable.

• 1:27:39Shawn Ryan?

  Is the cost of that gonna be?

• 1:27:41Speaker 03

  Well, um, let's just say it's less than, uh, it's less than $5,000 a month to deploy one of these things somewhere.

• 1:27:51Shawn Ryan?

  And you will have cell service?

• 1:27:53Speaker 03

  You'll have cell service and you'll have a data center.

• 1:27:55Shawn Ryan?

  And you'll, does that mean you control all the data?

• 1:27:58Speaker 03

  It means that you can control all your data. Yeah, you control the, you can, you'll be able to control your infrastructure.

• 1:28:05Shawn Ryan?

  When is this gonna be available?

• 1:28:08Speaker 03

  Within a, uh, we're, we're actually revamping our website right now, so I think probably four, four to six weeks.

• 1:28:17Shawn Ryan?

  Four to six weeks?

• 1:28:18Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:28:19Shawn Ryan?

  Did, so when you say you can control your data, does that mean I'm able to protect my data from? No shit?

• 1:28:27Speaker 03

  Yep, it's your data center, it's your network.

• 1:28:33Shawn Ryan?

  I'm getting one.

• 1:28:35Speaker 03

  That's what a lot of people have told me they want, and, uh, and so we've been very, working very hard, so that's what's coming out now. At the end of this year, that thing is pretty big. Weighs about 300 pounds when it's fully kitted out. In order to get the, um, in order to be able to, um, get the, uh, to get those prices, you're gonna have to agree to, you're gonna keep it powered on, plugged in, because, uh, we, we wanna allow other customers to come on to it, again, with, to protect their own data and have privacy. And, um, and so that's our business model, is to basically have shared infrastructure, but instead of, um, having more of a public network, now you have a private network that you own.

• 1:29:16Shawn Ryan?

  So, okay, so now I'm really interested in this. So, anybody, so how far is the range of this?

• 1:29:26Speaker 03

  Um, with the spectrum that we're using, it can vary, but around three miles.

• 1:29:30Shawn Ryan?

  Three miles?

• 1:29:31Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:29:32Shawn Ryan?

  So you can have a, uh, an entire neighborhood invested into this?

• 1:29:35Speaker 03

  Yeah, right, yes.

• 1:29:37Shawn Ryan?

  Can you control who can access it?

• 1:29:39Speaker 03

  Yeah, absolutely.

• 1:29:40Shawn Ryan?

  How do you do that?

• 1:29:42Speaker 03

  Well, so you you know how a Wi-Fi network works, right? You give the people the username and password. In this case, you got to give them a SIM, right?

• 1:29:51Shawn Ryan?

  Okay.

• 1:29:51Speaker 03

  So we allow you to basically create an eSIM. And then you that you can just send that eSIM to a device that accepts an eSIM. And boom, you can have the you can have that service.

• 1:30:03Shawn Ryan?

  So is this basically? Is this basically you are your own carrier?

• 1:30:08Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:30:08Shawn Ryan?

  You are your own Verizon? You are your own AT&T?

• 1:30:12Speaker 03

  For your little piece of the world, yes.

• 1:30:15Shawn Ryan?

  Wow, that's a wow, very interesting.

• 1:30:22Speaker 03

  But, you know, we also want to enable. We have partners that are on public carriers. So they want they want to grow their network and they want to provide. So if you are, for instance, you know, a carrier customer and you partnered with us and you can't it's kind of expensive to deploy your infrastructure in places where you don't have a lot of people. This is a very cost effective way to do it. And then all of a sudden, hey, we've got the most coverage of any network in the world, right? Because you can do it where, you know, our goal is to partner, not just domestic carriers, global carriers, so you have this ability to kind of extend your network organically.

• 1:30:57Shawn Ryan?

  That's incredible. Where do they where do people find this? What's the website?

• 1:31:02Speaker 03

  sempre.ai.

• 1:31:03Shawn Ryan?

  sempre.ai.

• 1:31:03Speaker 03

  Semper is actually an acronym. It stands for Secure EMP Resistant Edge. So it's not a word, it's an acronym. But sempre.ai is our website.

• 1:31:13Shawn Ryan?

  Very, very interesting. Wow, that's, I mean, that could change everything.

• 1:31:23Shawn Ryan?

  How long has that been in the making?

• 1:31:24Speaker 03

  Over five years. It it is it is hard.

• 1:31:29Speaker 03

  To EMP harden a commercial cellular network, it's hard to create a data center that can detect if somebody drills a hole in it or and there's a lot of things that we've had to develop in order to be able to detect that. It's hard to get servers to operate at the extreme temperature ranges that cellular equipment is designed to operate, right? They're typically in air-conditioned buildings. It's hard to then create the software that allows this thing to be completely automated and so that you don't need to know anything about cellular equipment. You can just plug it in and, you know, connect. So, these are all the technologies that we had to build

• 1:32:12Speaker 03

  in. In many ways, it's almost like the airplane that I flew, right? A very complicated machine that has all of these subsystems operating together to make this thing. It's not just... So, typically with a startup, you're creating a technology. We created technologies, plural, to come together in a systems of systems to make this work. It's kind of like what Steve Jobs did with the iPhone, but we did it on the infrastructure side. So, consequently, what we found out in testing our nodes, and we call them nodes, because I haven't figured out a way to describe them other than that,

• 1:32:53Speaker 03

  that you could go to Best Buy and get a smartphone and that would be perfectly fine, survive and operate right through an EMP, not even hiccup. But it couldn't connect to anything because that stuff was all taken out. And so, we took that same concept of a smartphone and basically put all the software in a hardened box and basically made it connect to the device. And now, the next one that comes out, and this is really what's exciting, is it will go from what it is right now, which is 300-pound box, to a 15-pound... Box the size of an Xbox, same capability. So, um, and that's really the, will be the kind of final instantiation of what we tried to, um, what we tried to create.

• 1:33:37Speaker 03

  The other thing that, that we did, um,

• 1:33:39Shawn Ryan?

  Is the, hold on, is this, is the thing that's, I think you said four to six weeks. Is that the Xbox size?

• 1:33:46Speaker 03

  No, no, that, that's going to come later in the, in, you know, towards the end of the year.

• 1:33:49Shawn Ryan?

  So will that be more personalized and not?

• 1:33:52Speaker 03

  No, same thing, same thing, just means that, um, so it turns out that one of the big things that kills cellular equipment is, um, flooding, right? It's on the ground, gets flooded, goes out. Well, our goal here is a single four by eight solar panel mounted on your roof, connected to this thing, gives your cellular network. So even if your house is flooded with water, your internet's not going to go out. Right? And we can do this, you know, in the same manner. And so our goal is to create highly resilient, highly secure decentralized architecture that supports our existing kind of cellular networks by interoperating with them.

• 1:34:32Speaker 03

  So you can, you can, you can basically have, um, your, your cellular, um, service, uh, continue to pay for it the way that you've always have. Or you can have this very private, uh, secure service. You know, it's, they coexist. And that's really the secret of 5G. It allows you to do these things because it's all in software.

• 1:34:55Shawn Ryan?

  Would, will the Xbox sized one that's coming out towards the end of the year, will that be the same pricing as the?

• 1:35:03Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:35:03Shawn Ryan?

  It will be?

• 1:35:04Speaker 03

  Yeah. Although our goal is really to drive the price down, right?

• 1:35:09Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:10Speaker 03

  And so the, how do you do that? And you do it through volume, right? And so as we, as we ramp up to full, full rate production, we want that price to, we want you to be able to acquire it. Um, so because ultimately the ability to have, um, private, secure, um, communications is very important, not just to the, not to the government, but also to people. So, um, so that's our goal. But yeah.

• 1:35:37Shawn Ryan?

  So nobody will be able to track what you're doing if you have one of these?

• 1:35:41Speaker 03

  You're not, you're no longer on a public network if you're, if you're using this.

• 1:35:45Shawn Ryan?

  Damn.

• 1:35:46Speaker 03

  You're in a private network.

• 1:35:49Speaker 03

  It's like you're on your own Wi-Fi except instead of going to 100 feet, it goes miles. And then you can start to string these things together and connect them, you know, so, you know, one of the things that we've done is, is enable them to be connected to Starlink terminals. So one pops up over here, one pops over, up over here, they locate each other, and now you can make calls. Right? So it doesn't, it's not helpful when a Starlink terminal powered thing comes up over here and one comes up over here, they have IP addresses that they can't discover each other. So we've made them, we've made a whole other network about linking these things together. So as soon as they come online, you can make a call, you know, so obviously the military

• 1:36:34Speaker 03

  implications are, you know, unit brings it up, you need to be able to call that unit. So it needs to be able to, they need to be able to find each other really quick. That's, that's part of the thing. So you can create, um, you know, a decentralized architecture that supports, again, supports the existing cellular networks and is, you know, can act as an overlay or an extension of them. That's our goal. It's really, so I think one of the things that, um, that it permits you to do is create this hybrid where you have these highly centralized, um, public networks that are supported by decentralized capability. So now, if you're a T-Mobile customer, or an AT&T or Verizon customer, and this, this

• 1:37:18Speaker 03

  node is connected to your tower, and service goes down, um, like, so we were just doing a demo of this capability for the Air Force, um, with Northrop, uh, out at White Men Air Force Base, and while we're doing the demo, somebody cut the fiber to the existing space, uh, existing, uh, base cellular infrastructure. Right? So everybody's cellphone goes, goes out. But ours keeps going, right? Because we, we haven't separated the brains of the, of the, of the radio from the, from the radio itself. It's all self-contained. So our stuff keeps right on trucking, doesn't ever stop. And so, when you think about it from a military From a military perspective, you can't have a, I have a service disruption, I'm loading bombs on aircraft.

• 1:38:03Speaker 03

  I'm relying on this network to be able to do that stuff. So it's a very resilient, it's made for the battlefield type network. But now you have access to it. So if everybody else goes down, if you've got one of these things nearby, you're going to be able to communicate. And really the space layer is how you're going to be able to get outside the local area. So if somebody's cut the fiber, you know, somebody, however you were connected before, if you're connected via space link, then you can get out and you go. So the way that, you know, as I, as we were developing this, thinking about it, you know, my, every time I watch a movie with my wife about some kind of Armageddon-ish, you know, movie where, you know, society collapses, she's like in tears at the end of the movie.

• 1:38:45Speaker 03

  And she's like, and then I'm on Amazon buying a road atlas because how are we going to communicate with their kids? So intuitively, you start to recognize, and the federal government spent a lot of money hardening AM radio stations against things like EMP. But do you have an AM radio? I don't have an AM radio. I don't really know many people that have AM radios. And so we, and then we just did a nationwide alert on cell phones.

• 1:39:10Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, I do have an AM radio, but wouldn't it be destroyed if there was an EMP anyways?

• 1:39:15Speaker 03

  Well, if it's plugged into the wall, yes.

• 1:39:17Shawn Ryan?

  Okay.

• 1:39:18Speaker 03

  If it's not, it wouldn't be. If it's not, if it's on battery, you know, it may or may not survive. It depends. It depends on which one you have. But the stations themselves have been hardened, but the federal government paid to do that. But your cellphone works just fine. It just doesn't have anything to connect to and tell us, you know. We finally give you something to basically make that connection. And then if you have an ability to get outside, you can not only communicate locally, you can call anybody within range of that radio locally. So if your police forces are within range, or fire, or medical, you can do that. Or if you're not, you can use a space to get out and make more distant calls.

• 1:39:59Speaker 03

  And so, but over time, as you start to link all these things together, you start to grow this resiliency. And that's really our goal, is to really make not just the government, you know, mission go and be like.

• 1:40:13Speaker 03

  As you know, none of the stuff that you use in your day-to-day life works very well when you're on the battlefield. Right? It's just, the infrastructure's not supportive of that. It's like LMR, you know, some kind of radio that is, only talks to other radios like it. What we wanted to create was an environment where you could bring in all these technologies and link them together. So that's one of the things that we're, that we're going to be doing for things like first responders. Remember the guy in Uvalde? Chief of Police runs into the school shooting, leaves his two-ray radio in the car, takes his smartphone. Well, because of the way we've designed these, we can start to bridge between those 5G network

• 1:40:57Speaker 03

  radios and the LMR, so that phone, he'd be able to call anybody on an LMR. And then you have agencies that are on like one brand of, they may be on Motorola, another one's on Harris, and they don't talk to each other. So we can bring them both in to have them talk to phones and talk to each other. So it's creating all of these new capabilities, like for instance, we're going to demonstrate how you can make an LMR call from one base to, you know, another base. So say like, you know, White Men Air Force Base has guys stationed out at Guam. They're going to be able to make an LMR call from White Men Air Force Base to Guam over the same architecture. So it gives you all of this flexibility that, for the military.

• 1:41:41Speaker 03

  But in reality, what we wanted to do is have a dual-use technology, which supports the military, supports first responders, supports medical and financial, but also supports the citizenry in terms of, in terms of having resilient communication. So then if the government needs to send out a nationwide alert, "Hey, we're getting ready to have an EMP attack, stand by for further news," like New York City did not too long ago, and the people are like, "Well, how are you going to send me notice? My phone's not going to work." Now they can say, "And your phone's going to work. Just don't plug it into the wall. If it's plugged into the wall, then that zap's going to go right into your phone." So as long as it's unplugged, set it on a mag charger, you're fine. Wow.

• 1:42:27Shawn Ryan?

  Um, so, sorry, like I said, I'm super agreeing with this technology. So I have a lot of questions. But so do, do, what carriers are, can I ask what carriers are you guys partnering with?

• 1:42:39Speaker 03

  I can't, I can't publicly divulge that yet.

• 1:42:42Shawn Ryan?

  Okay.

• 1:42:42Speaker 03

  But what I can tell you is the things that we are doing are going to shock the industry. Let's just put it that way.

• 1:42:52Shawn Ryan?

  Is this a public company?

• 1:42:54Speaker 03

  No, it's, it's still, still private, still, still, actually, we're still in fundraising mode. And, and yeah, it's been, I can tell you it's been the hardest thing I've ever done in my life. It challenged me in so many ways that my military career never prepared me for. So I'm sure, I'm sure, I'm sure you've seen, have had similar things.

• 1:43:17Shawn Ryan?

  I have, I'm a podcast, you're developing an entire 5G network. But, but I mean, if you don't mind me asking, how much of an investment are you guys needing?

• 1:43:30Speaker 03

  So we're, currently we're raising $10 million.

• 1:43:36Speaker 03

  And that's really going to be to, to ramp up growth of the company.

• 1:43:44Shawn Ryan?

  So when you, when we're talking about these protected networks that, that by the end of the year, I'll be able to put on my roof, I mean, is that exactly how protected am I? Is that they can't tell my location, they don't have my advertising ID, all the stuff we talked about with TikTok?

• 1:44:03Speaker 03

  Yeah, so, so let's just go back to what I was telling you about SDK data. If you, if you basically log into Google and Facebook and all your accounts, and you're, and you're allowing that data to go to them, then yeah, you're gonna, you know, you're, you're gonna have, you're gonna give away your stuff. But the other way that they can track you is through your IMSI, through your, through identifying your mobile device through the network. If you, so that's another way to basically track you is understanding your IMSI. So now you control that in a sense, so it's gonna be a lot harder for them to, to find that.

• 1:44:45Shawn Ryan?

  Okay. Wow, that is, um.

• 1:44:50Shawn Ryan?

  A lot cooler than, I mean, that's just, that's amazing. I've, one of the most innovative things I've heard of lately, so.

• 1:45:00Speaker 03

  Well, and I think that people have, the reason this hasn't been approached, I think, you know, is probably the big reason why we've struggled to raise money is because it's complicated, it's hard, and it's hard for people to understand what we're talking about. Because you see all these people that are advertising that they've created this, you know, black phone.

• 1:45:29Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:45:30Speaker 03

  Ultimately, when you connect to a public network, you know, it's very hard to then maintain anonymity when somebody else owns a network. It's a lot easier if you own the network. So, obviously, federal government understands that. But I think the average person, you know, the idea that you could own a piece of the infrastructure has never really been something that was possible prior to 5G. Again, software. So, you know, it really transformed the way that we can deploy these networks and make them available to people.

• 1:46:02Shawn Ryan?

  If I had this on my roof and I'm, I mean, can I call other carriers?

• 1:46:06Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:46:07Shawn Ryan?

  So I can call my friends that are on Verizon?

• 1:46:09Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 1:46:10Shawn Ryan?

  Because, you know, I would imagine it's gonna, it's gonna take a minute for this to spread.

• 1:46:15Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:46:15Shawn Ryan?

  And it's, it's very expensive.

• 1:46:18Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 1:46:19Shawn Ryan?

  You know, I mean, it's, it's less than what I was anticipating, but it's still, I mean, it's, it's gonna be hard for the everyday American to afford 5,000.

• 1:46:28Speaker 03

  Yeah, and I think, I think the, you know, our, you know, as I said, as we're shrinking it, our mind, in our minds, that this idea that you can't afford to build your own infrastructure, we're gonna, we're gonna make it affordable, and it's gonna, it's gonna, it's gonna get, over time, get more affordable. And the way that you can, what you can use it for, so you think about your phone, before the, the Apple could create the, the App Store, you had to get it in enough, in the hands of enough people. One of the problems in, today, in providing other types of capabilities, you know, automation, robotics, is really because we lack the ability to, to run those things in, in a local.

• 1:47:14Speaker 03

  Location. There's no infrastructure to support that. And and by themselves, a single application is not does not make that infrastructure, you know, and a worthwhile investment. In other words, if I'm just going to run this algorithm that runs on on cameras that you've put on your property, for example, it doesn't, the service is not going to pay for that infrastructure. It's not going to be enough. But if you have the infrastructure, now I can start to layer these services on top of it. And that's really our business. It's really about providing that infrastructure to support all of these applications and use cases in a secure way to so that they

• 1:47:59Speaker 03

  can actually be brought to market.

• 1:48:02Shawn Ryan?

  Wow, very interesting. I can't I can't I can't wait to see this roll out. When when are whatever carriers you are working with, when are they going to adopt this type of technologies?

• 1:48:13Speaker 03

  So I mean, it's already been approved by one. And now we're working on how do we how do we, you know, how do we price this, right? From their side, like we already know, but they have to they have to figure out like, what is this is not something the carriers do, right? What I'm what I'm explaining is not something that they would normally do. And and the attractiveness for them, obviously, is the government customer, because the government needs. So I mean, when you think about it, what are we doing? We're bringing the smartphone into the government customers so that they can take advantage

• 1:48:56Speaker 03

  of the economies of scale for the chipsets that run those things. You know, they're already hardened. You can drop in water, you can throw them around, you can zap them with the MP, they take a beating and keep on going. And get start to get the military away from having to use, you know, these, you know, bespoke technologies they don't like and they're aren't easy to use. They're hard to program. They don't talk to each other. That's the worst problem. And so we wanted to give that capability. How do you give that capability to the military? Well, you have to make it resilient and secure. That's the bottom line. And then they can start. Now you can go down to Best Buy, plug in your eSIM, and now you've got a, now you've got a secure connection with, with other technologies that get brought in. So other

• 1:49:38Speaker 03

  partners, for instance, allow us to do classified communications on, on this capability. It's not something we do, but our partners allow you to do that. And now all of a sudden, you create this capability that you can take on the battlefield and you can bring your infrastructure with you. And that's really what the small, the small backpackable one is. Put it in aircraft, put it in ship, put it on the vehicle, put it in your backpack. And now you can take your cell network and data center with you so that you can be completely independent from anything that's going on and it's resilient and secure as you need. And oh, by the way, if you get overrun, somebody grabs it, then they want to exploit it, they're gonna, they're gonna get nothing. You know, they're gonna get a brick because this thing's been designed to be lost in the battlefield.

• 1:50:23Shawn Ryan?

  Wow. Wow. Man, that's, I would, I mean, and there's, I mean, there's a, there's a lot of fear about an EMP attack. Power grid going down. I'd like to get into that with you here in a minute with, with what China's doing to our power grid supposedly. But I mean, I'm, I would think all the carriers would, and the government would want to subsidize this somehow. And, and, I mean, it's a, it's an EMP proof network.

• 1:50:54Speaker 03

  Right. I think when, so there's a lot of misconceptions. Number one, the first one that we heard was, why, why don't I buy this? The cell phone won't survive. No, the smartphones actually survive quite well. At least every single one that we got out of Best Buy and tested survived. So that's not a, it, it really is about the size. It's really about the shielding that's already designed into them. So they're already, so that's not an argument. The other argument is, my God, this is going to cost millions and millions of dollars. No, it's not. In fact, you know, we just had, we just had a meeting with one, with one government representative and they almost came out of their chair when we told them how much it was going to cost.

• 1:51:35Speaker 03

  Because they're told that, you know, it's like the, the old adage of the gold plated toilet seat. You know, this thing's going to be, you know, lots and lots of money. No, it's not. It, it, it's really, and we've designed it to be commercial infrastructure so anybody can buy it. And because, and we feel strongly, I mean, this company, this Semper, believes in the constitution. It believes in our republic. It believes the principles and values of, you know, our independent citizenry. And it believes in the need for communications as a life-saving key component of a functioning society. And so, you know, we're on a mission and, and I think it does shock people a little bit.

• 1:52:16Speaker 03

  When, and the implications are, so our hardest, our hardest problem, I would say, as a company, is people just not believing that we've done it, you know, that we've built this thing. And then they see it and they're like, oh. Wow.

• 1:52:35Speaker 03

  That's, um.

• 1:52:38Speaker 03

  I'm intrigued. Let's take a quick break.

• 1:52:44Shawn Ryan?

  I want to tell you about this business venture I've been on for about the past seven, eight months. And it's finally come to fruition. I've been hell-bent on finding the cleanest functional mushroom supplement on the planet. And that all kind of stemmed from the psychedelic treatment I did. Came out of it, got a ton of benefits, haven't had a drop of alcohol in almost two years. I'm more in the moment with my family. And that led me down researching the benefits of just everyday functional mushrooms. And I started taking some supplements, I found some coffee replacements, I even repped a brand. And, you know, it got to the point where I just wanted the finest ingredients available,

• 1:53:28Shawn Ryan?

  no matter where they come from. And it, it, it got to this point where I was just going to start my own brand. And so we started going to trade shows and, and looking for the finest ingredients. And, and doing that, I ran into this guy, maybe you've heard of him. His name's Laird Hamilton. And his wife Gabby Reese, and they have an entire line of supplements with all the finest ingredients. And we got to talking, turns out, they have the perfect functional mushroom supplement. It's actually called Performance Mushrooms.

• 1:54:09Shawn Ryan?

  And this has everything, it's USDA organic, it's got chaga, cordyceps, lion's mane, miyataki. This stuff is amazing for energy balance, for cognition. Look, just being honest, see a lot of people taking care of their bodies. I do not see a lot of people taking care of their brain. This is the product, guys. And so, we got to talking, and our values seemed very aligned. We're both into the functional mushrooms. And after a lot of back and forth, I am now a shareholder in the company.

• 1:54:50Shawn Ryan?

  I have a small amount of ownership, and I'm just, look, I'm just really proud to be repping and be a part of the company that's making the best functional mushroom supplement on the planet. You can get this stuff at layered superfoods.com. You can use the promo code SRS, that'll get you 20% off these Performance Mushrooms, or anything in the store. They got a ton of good stuff. Once again, that's layered superfoods.com, use the promo code SRS, that gets you 20% off. You guys are gonna love this stuff, I guarantee it.

• 1:55:34Shawn Ryan?

  Thank you for listening to the Sean Ryan Show. If you haven't already, please take a minute, head over to iTunes and leave the Sean Ryan Show a review. We read every review that comes through, and we really appreciate the support. Thank you, let's get back to the show.

• 1:55:56Shawn Ryan?

  All right, we're back from the break. We just had a quick conversation about, I have a question I think everybody would like to know. So to get, if you were to invest in getting this network on the roof of your home, or the community one that's coming out four to six weeks, to get the utmost, like the most possible privacy you can get, how, I mean, I had mentioned, would you run a slick phone, no apps, just calls and texts?

• 1:56:26Speaker 03

  Right, so I mean, we, and as you're starting to think about the architecture, invariably, what you're, what you're, what you're creating is a local database, right? It's a local data center. And, and the vulnerability in your device is based on the fact that you have data on your device, you have apps that run on your device. So like, when I was living in China, you know, somebody gets my device, they plug something into it and they pull the data down, right? And so, what you don't want to have is data on your device that somebody can hack and then, because the device gets hacked, then the data is vulnerable.

• 1:57:06Speaker 03

  And so, in our architecture, we felt that no data on the device is the most secure. And so, you know, the, the next iteration of what we will do is create this ability to have essentially a visual representation of your, of your apps on your device, but no actual processing or storage, right? So you push a button and it opens an app in the node, not on your phone. So there's no data stored on your phone, ever. There's no, there's no, there's very little software running on your device, so that, you know, somebody, so if you just, and therefore, the device itself is not very expensive, right? It's, most of it goes in, is all that processing power that's in it.

• 1:57:50Speaker 03

  So we get rid of that, get that off the device. So now, you just throw it away. You know, if, you know, if something happens and, you know, somebody tries to get it, I'm gonna exploit your device. No, you can't do that. It's, uh, and so you think about from a battlefield perspective, if you're walking around your smartphone and you're fighting and you lose it, you don't want that thing to get exploited. And so, in addition to having a tamper-proof, um, you know, autonomous data center that, that zeroizes itself and can destroy subcomponents if needed, um, you want to have it tied to a device that you're using that doesn't have any data on it. And so, somebody picks it up, they don't

• 1:58:32Speaker 03

  get anything. And that's, we really believe that's the, the, um, the most secure architecture for, you know, uh, doing things. The other thing that we did that's, um, unique about us is we actually have, we run two networks. Um, in any network, there's, uh, what's called the control plane and the data plane. The data plane is kind of where all your, uh, interactions happen. You know, when you're on a, um, when you're on a video call, that's all happening on the data plane. Setting up that call, controlling the network, you know, um, you know, anything that's going on in terms of command and control of your network, that's the control plane. So we've basically set, physically separated those

• 1:59:15Speaker 03

  two. That's part of our architecture. So the data plane can be encrypted, but in the control plane, um, the problem today on, on networks is that the control plane and the data plane run on the same path. So if you're running through, uh, overseas, you're running through whatever, who's ever equipment, which you have, you know, they have the ability to basically interfere with that control plane, the opportunity. We take that, we put it in space, we, we take that ability to have, uh, access to the control plane out in our node. So, um, that goes one path. It's not latency sensitive, meaning like when you're making a call, when you dial, all this call setup, that's all your control

• 1:59:57Speaker 03

  plane. Once it gets connected, it's the data plane. So, the goal here is to really create this very, very secure, hardened, decentralized network that, you know, um...

• 2:00:10Speaker 03

  So the best analogy to kind of the way that we operationalize this is is how we protect nuclear weapons. In nuclear weapons, we have something called nuclear surety. And that means that from the, in terms of personnel, the material and the procedures, we make sure that nuclear weapons are safe, secure and reliable. Well, that's just concepts, right? In terms of personnel, we want to make sure that anybody that touches a weapon has been vetted. In terms of material, we want to make sure that the weapons are fail-safe. In other words, they can only, they have to be authorized for use by the proper authorizer.

• 2:00:52Speaker 03

  And then in procedures, we want to make sure that that two people are, you know, doing the authorizing, right? So, so these are, these are principles we adopted into our company. So you want to make, do a software update, okay? It's got to take two people knowledgeable of the task, one to approve, first approve and the other second one to, you know, approve that approval. And we think that's, so when you look at our history, working with nuclear weapons, never been a detonation and we've, we've had airplane crashes where airplanes have fallen from, you know, 30,000 feet, weapons have fallen out and not detonated.

• 2:01:34Speaker 03

  So we've had accidents, we've had, you know, spills, we had, we had a silo blow up where the capsule went up and landed somewhere, that didn't go off. So we designed very safe weapons and then we applied these, these, these principles to how we operated to make them safe, secure and reliable. So we said, okay, if, if you want to think of a way to design something that is similar for what we believe to be the most dangerous weapon on the planet, which is not nuclear weapons, but the things that TikTok enables.

• 2:02:15Speaker 03

  And that's really your data. So you think of, you know, highly enriched uranium, plutonium as kind of the fuel of that nuclear weapon. We think of data as a fuel of artificial intelligence, which many would argue is the most dangerous thing on the planet for humans. And so we just took the same principles for how we make nuclear weapons safe, secure, and reliable, and apply that to data and how we design these things. And so that's the way that so everything that we think about is how do we ensure that only the person that has access to that data and has a reason to use it has is the is the person that's able to use it. So, you know, just like I think Apple did, you know, in

• 2:02:57Speaker 03

  fighting the FBI and saying, hey, I'm not going to design a device that you can break into. Now, people have broken into it. It's because an iPhone wasn't made tamper proof, right? It was made. It was made encrypted, but it wasn't made tamper proof. We made our nodes tamper proof. So if you try to break into it, you're not going to get anything. But if they did, that's kind of the way that we that's an approach that we took to the infrastructure side of things. And then, and then by taking a device and making it, you know, not have any data storage on it, and then having these very secure nodes that communicate to each other via encryption. So it makes a very secure platform for for protecting your data.

• 2:03:37Shawn Ryan?

  So how far could the device, once this rolls out, how far can the device be from the from the unit or the node?

• 2:03:44Speaker 03

  Well, it depends on the power and the depends on the frequency. But, you know, I think a good, a good, you know, one to three to five, depending on the frequency and the power that you put out, miles.

• 2:03:56Shawn Ryan?

  Okay.

• 2:03:57Speaker 03

  We're not talking, we're not talking Wi Fi distances. We're talking, we're talking, we're talking, you know, long distances.

• 2:04:05Shawn Ryan?

  Okay. Man, very innovative and exciting stuff. I wasn't expecting that much. So really, really neat. But moving forward, I want to get back into China a little bit. There's a lot of fear about the power grid and the EMP threat. I've had a couple of gentlemen on to discuss how China has infiltrated the power grid system, how we're not checking our, our transformers and

• 2:04:42Shawn Ryan?

  I want your opinion on how, I mean, how vulnerable are we in our, in our power grid system?

• 2:04:49Speaker 03

  I mean, extremely. We don't do the, we don't do the high-power transformers. We don't build those, very few of them, maybe 12%, maybe now. Certainly, less than 25% of them are, are not built in the United States. They take two to three years to build, like the high-power transformers. And most of them are built in China. And so, obviously, that's a vulnerability. Because it takes so long to be built. For example, if you're, if you're frying them, you're not, you're not getting that high-power transformer back in less than years, right? So, you're talking about if you have a significant event, you're not down where, you know, here, if we have, you're, you're, you're familiar with a storm where the power goes out and

• 2:05:34Speaker 03

  they rush equipment. That's not what we're talking about here. We're talking about a wholesale disruption that lasts not days, not weeks, not months, but years because of how long it takes to build these things. The other thing that you found out, that you find, find out is that it used to be when the grid went down, when you, as you start to bring the grid back up, you have to balance the loads on separate parts of the grid so it, so it can come up. And it used to be that engineers would get walkie-talkies and then they would communicate with each other and they would manually adjust at each of these locations so that, and they

• 2:06:19Speaker 03

  would work to get the grid to come back up. So, what they did is automate all that, right? And so, this, the skill of using walkie-talkies and manually adjusting the grid, it's no longer a skill that anybody's taught. And so, we're, we're depending on the networks to be up and operating, running software that, that automatically balances the grid. So, if you use the grid and you lose the network, you basically, you can't bring it back up, right? You gotta get that network back up, that software operating before you can start to think it back, get it back up. And so, that's another one. And then, of course, as we've seen recently with

• 2:07:00Speaker 03

  I think it's Bolt Hurricane. That the Chinese are planting malware in things like Cisco routers. That's waiting for, you know, an opportunity to infiltrate, you know, SCADA systems which control things like the grid. And that's going to be a problem for us. So, I mean, we're, we're, I think the thing is, and this is all from a kind of taking a view of national security and saying what's more important. And I think we, we began to think that fighting abroad and spending money on fighting abroad is more important than spending money here at home to make our society resilient and safe.

• 2:07:44Speaker 03

  So that they could take an attack and continue to operate. And this is, you know, when I, when I go back to that time in 2005 when Hurricane Katrina happened, I saw this was going on, I'm like, okay, what if this happens nationwide? And there's that book, One Second After, I think people have read about, you know, an EMP over the United States. And, and the threat's real. And it's not just China or Russia that have, you know, a lot of nuclear weapons. It's, it's a country with one nuclear weapon like North Korea that can be a threat. So that creates an enormous vulnerability for the society.

• 2:08:27Speaker 03

  And, you know, obviously we can't do anything about that. We're, we're focused on communications. But I do think that if you lose a grid, but you're still able to communicate, you can reassure the population, you can, you can start to, you can start to create centers. Like for instance, when we deploy Node, we deploy an EMP hard generator. So if you do lose power. You know, if the E and P does happen, the generator will continue to keep you going. And so I think one of the things that people have used for resilience or for electricity have been these concept of microgrids, right? So you have smaller, smaller capability. A lot of people have solar in their homes and generators.

• 2:09:08Speaker 03

  So to the extent that that survives, then you start to create, and you can communicate, then you can start to bring back some semblance of civil society where people are more kind of self-sustaining and they can, they can begin to work together. And I think the biggest thing, if you lose the power grid is be, if you're able to still communicate, government's still able to provide reassurance and hear distress calls, right? So they need to be able to respond to distress calls, whether it be first responders or medical. And you can make a financial transaction, which we would enable with our nodes, then you can start to, you can keep things going. And that's what our, that's really the concept here is that it would, it would, yeah, it

• 2:09:53Speaker 03

  would be a huge inconvenience. But at the same time, I think we could keep, we could keep, if the society was able to kind of do some of the things that they're able to do now and you're able to keep communication going, then you would be able to prevent a lot of that mass hysteria and, and things from happening. But there is no doubt that the grid is vulnerable. Our water systems are vulnerable. There's just a report that just came out about hacking of water systems. We've seen people get in there and like change the, the different chemicals that are going in. We saw that in Florida. People are shooting up substations.

• 2:10:35Speaker 03

  I mean, and then you've had, and then you have the border issues, like who, who is here? What are they doing? All the Chinese nationals, which I said are highly, highly loyal to the Chinese Communist Party. So there's a lot of things that I think we've kind of taken our eyes off the ball and just in terms of making our own society safe.

• 2:10:54Speaker 03

  You know, even for myself, you know, being a B2 pilot and having this most powerful weapon system in the world that carries nuclear weapons and just recognizing that my family is completely vulnerable, like, who's gonna take care of them if we have all that war? You know, when I used to go fly missions, you know, who's gonna do that for us? You know, that's the thing where I think we've just completely, we lost track of what's important as a nation in terms of national security.

• 2:11:24Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, it's, I mean, on a scale of one to five, how concerned are you about our power grid?

• 2:11:32Speaker 03

  Oh, six.

• 2:11:33Shawn Ryan?

  That bad?

• 2:11:34Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:11:35Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, is it literally as easy as just flipping a switch?

• 2:11:38Speaker 03

  It is, yeah. If you've planted malware, yes, it's as easy as flipping a switch. And that's kind of the point, you know, and what I recognize, you know, like Kosovo, you know, we're taking out communications links with 2,000-pound weapons from the B2. You are gonna stop us. If we want to take out a target, we're gonna take it out. But then I realized, you know, there's a whole other way, and just own it. Either you build the technology for it, or you actually, or the service provider, which the Chinese have bought a bunch of grids around the world that they operate, turn it off. You know,

• 2:12:15Speaker 03

  it's just kind of how, for me, it crystallized that the things that I was doing, I mean, I could be the best of the best. And that was my commitment when I was in uniform, to be the best of the best at doing, you know, fulfilling my oath, you know, to support and defend the Constitution. I could be the best of the best. I could go across the world, drop weapons, no problem, anywhere that the president needed the weapons dropped. And then realizing that, you know, at any second, somebody could turn the lights off, and every single day...

• 2:12:57Speaker 03

  The Chinese Communist Party was doing its damnedest to convert my kids to communism, slowly but surely. And our system was failing in that way. And so it really kind of brought home to me that we need to take a step back as a society and understand what's important, understand how we're vulnerable, and then begin to shore those things up. It's not just the border. It's not just our infrastructure. It's how our entire socio-economic system is vulnerable because we kind of, I think, after, when we won the Cold War, we assumed that we were safe from everything. Instead of that being true, what was true was that, no, there are still people that

• 2:13:42Speaker 03

  harbor ill will to the Constitution, to our federal republic. And now, they were just gonna, just going to pursue that, and then pursue it with us helping them. And that's, I think, the part that we completely lost. It is one thing for Churchill, Churchill came here after World War II, and it was right outside St. Louis, he gave this thing called the Iron Curtain Speech. He was iron curtain descending over Europe. And he was writing back and forth to Truman when he was coming to the United States, saying, talking about the speech that he was gonna give. And I think there was a sense of the threat that the Soviet Union could pose to our way

• 2:14:25Speaker 03

  of life then, by people like Churchill and Truman and Eisenhower. And I think, once that went away, once, at the end of the Cold War, I think we just assumed that our way of life was the way of life that everybody wanted. Well, no, there's others that have a different point of view, and that have waited and planned and plotted and worked together with us, seemingly in friendship, but in reality, to get to the point where they can, they can begin to turn the tide. And so, I guess, you could say the Cold War never ended, or we're in the middle of Cold War Number Two.

• 2:15:09Speaker 03

  But either way, I think, as opposed to where we were during the first Cold War, which was... At the end of the World War II, we were the only ones with an industrial base. And so we had to rebuild Europe. That was a Marshall Plan. We rebuilt their economies. We rebuilt their industrial base. And in conjunction with that, we helped them build their civil society institutions. And now we find ourselves in this Second Cold War, and China owns the industrial base. China has a Belt and Road Initiative, and China is building the world in its image. And we don't own the industrial base. In fact, our drugs come from China, our microelectronics come from, literally, everything comes from China.

• 2:15:52Speaker 03

  And yet, we're not, we don't have a sense, for whatever reason, I don't understand, how vulnerable we really are as a nation.

• 2:16:05Speaker 03

  I mean, why do you think they haven't made a, why haven't they struck yet? So, the reason, so, there's a couple. During the first year of the Trump administration, Liu He, who was the chief economic advisor to Xi Jinping, and Ambassador Lighthizer, who was the US Trade Representative, negotiated a trade deal, right? And this kind of gets to President Trump's comment about bringing Chinese auto manufacturing plants here. So, the same problem was going on with Japan in the 80s and 90s, right? And, you know, our US Trade Representative went over and negotiated with their economic

• 2:16:50Speaker 03

  person, and they created a deal that really was more, was more bilaterally healthy for both sides, right? So, Japan's kicking our ass, we go back, we go there, and a lot of those trade deals, trade agreements and relationships were made on the basis of, we have the only industrial base, we're going to give you An industrial base, but we want you to be a democracy so that, you know, we can make the world safe for, uh, for, um, for democracies. Um, and so Japan was a democracy, we're a democracy. We go to Japan and say, hey, this can't, this is not sustainable. You can't keep just basically, um, raiding.

• 2:17:33Speaker 03

  So we have to create a more equitable trade arrangement around, um, manufacturing. And the Japanese, as opposed, as opposed to what happened in China, and I'll tell you here in a second what happened, they said, okay. And so we have a great trading relationship with Japan, but that's on the basis of we both agree that, you know, kind of this democracy thing is important. Well, so in 2017, uh, that's Ambassador Lighthizer. In fact, before that, it actually was early 2017, um, when, um, when I was still in Beijing as a defense attache and I had just been hired to go to the White House, I asked to speak to Liu Ha personally.

• 2:18:17Speaker 03

  And, um, and he declined and he sent his assistant to talk to me and I said, look, I said, here's what's coming. You guys have been doing this thing for a long time and there's going to be a reset in the, in the, in the trading relationship. And if you do, do not reset, there's going to be a break and it's not going to be good for you, right? Because the reason you're successful is because you get our technology, talent and capital. Um, but that is on the basis of a shared beneficial relationship, which we clearly do not have. And so, um, after I had already left, you know, I got a message back from the embassy that, hey, you know, Liu Ha had apologized because he didn't meet with me because he didn't realize I was going to the White House.

• 2:19:00Speaker 03

  So anyway, we go back there, we go back to the White House and when I was at the Joint Staff, we had been working on this problem as I worked for, uh, first Dempsey and then Dunford and, um, you know, advising them on China. And then we started to, you know, see these things. And so we, um, I worked with the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs, who worked with the chief staff of the Air Force, and we created an office called the Office of Commercial and Economic Analysis. And that office, as I got back to the White House, I reached into the office, I said, "Hey, can you provide help to the US Trade Representative who was bringing this Section 301 agreement, or investigation?" And so they did, and so they, and if you read the Section 301 investigation,

• 2:19:45Speaker 03

  it tells you, you know, line and verse of what the Chinese are doing to our economy, right? And it comes from, so they went out and they interviewed business people, and all, it's all there. And so that's, on the basis of that, you know, Lighthizer created the tariffs, right? The same time this was going on, Lighthizer and Liu Ha started negotiating a trade deal, right? So now we're kind of doing the same thing that the US was doing with Japan, back in the 1980s. And they negotiate this trade deal, and it's about 150 pages. And so Liu Ha, US, Ambassador Lighthizer, you know, shook hands,

• 2:20:29Speaker 03

  and we think that we've basically kind of saved the relationship. Well, Liu Ha goes back home, goes to Xi Jinping. Xi Jinping basically tears up the agreement. Right? That's when it says we're gonna have a Phase 1 and a Phase 2. No, he just tears up the agreement. At that point, China was basically saying, "We're preparing for war." "We are not, we are not going to have a mutually beneficial trading relationship with you." Knowing that the tariffs were gonna come. And so at that point, there, we have, we have started to, we had started to separate. So that was, that was late 2017. And that's just been going on ever since.

• 2:21:14Speaker 03

  And that's where we're at right now with regard to, with regard to trade. And the economic and the financial relationship meanwhile, they're being much more controlling over their own companies with regard to allowing them to take investment from Wall Street. So there's a separation coming and that separation is not done because we recognize the threat to us so much as the Chinese Communist Party recognized that their ability to convince us to keep doing this had come to an end. Okay, so why aren't they attacking, why haven't they been attacking Taiwan prior? They hadn't been attacking Taiwan prior because they wanted the technology, talent, and capital from us to drive their economy.

• 2:21:56Speaker 03

  And they knew that same thing that happened to Russia, when they invaded Ukraine, we cut them off financially, that we're going to do the same thing to the Chinese, except the Chinese have been preparing for this. So the Belt and Road Initiative, last April, they brought in bankers from around the world to say, okay, I want you to emulate the sanctions that the United States put on Russia as an invasion of Ukraine and tell us how we get out from under that, right? So, and there are historical approximations of what I'm telling you. Good book called, is the memoirs of Ambassador, Ambassador Morgenthau.

• 2:22:39Speaker 03

  He's a, he's a Turk, he's a US Ambassador to Turkey prior to and at the start of World War I. And he's friends with the German Ambassador. So the German Ambassador confides in him in this memoir, it's a very small book, highly, I think, highly recommend people read it. And he tells Ambassador Morgenthau, yeah, you know, this is after the war starts, it's prior to the war, he said, yeah, the Kaiser called us all back and we had, we had a meeting. And they went around the, you had the generals and the bankers and everybody around the room and the Kaiser's like, are we ready for war? Are we ready for war? You got the bankers and the bankers said, no, we need to liquidate our assets. We need to separate ourselves so

• 2:23:23Speaker 03

  that when that happens, we don't, you know, there's going to be a fall in the stock market. We're going to lose our value. We want to sell those assets and then go to war. So what the Chinese have been doing systematically since that trade agreement was torn up is basically securing themselves from any kind of economic or financial harm. Meanwhile, so you can have all the money in the world, but if you don't produce your own drugs, you've got a problem. So right, so they've got the supply chain. Now they're separating themselves economically and financially. And now the reasons that war has been prevented, which were all kind of voluntary on the part of China because they wanted to get our technology,

• 2:24:08Speaker 03

  talent, capital are gone, right? They're mostly gone. Okay. So what's stopping them from attacking Taiwan? It's not, as we like to say in the military, it's not because we're much better because they have much more weapons, like way more weapons. They can, they have the ability to take all of our space stuff down right now. If they take our space stuff down, we're completely blind in the region, right? We depend on space. They don't depend on space. We could take all their space assets down. They're in the region. It's their backyard. They can see, they can hear. So we're vulnerable there.

• 2:24:48Speaker 03

  And then the just a mass amount of weapons, it's overwhelming. So, you know, we're in a bad place. And the only thing that was keeping us from actually going to war were the Chinese thought that they could get technology, talent, and capital out of us. Now that they know that they can't, and they're getting less and less, less and less money is being invested in China from America and other Western countries, then that motivation to not go to war is no longer there. That's, so that's what is happening, you know? So we're getting closer and closer to war and it'll happen. It'll happen at a timeline, I believe, when the United States is distracted.

• 2:25:29Speaker 03

  Likely from some other, you know, I could be Cuba, could be North Korea, could be, we've already got Hamas and Israel and we've got Russia, Ukraine, so we're already kind of distracted. I think it's gonna be, you know, and in being distracted is not just, it's just not that our attention's not focused there.

• 2:25:48Shawn Ryan?

  Uh huh.

• 2:25:49Speaker 03

  Like CENTCOM has forces, right? UCOM has forces. You know, so those forces that would be there in NDOPECOM to be ready, they're just not there, because we don't have them.

• 2:26:04Shawn Ryan?

  Man. It seems, it seems to me like they've got us from pretty much every angle.

• 2:26:16Speaker 03

  Checkmate. Checkmate. So, I mean, what, what do we have, what do we have remaining? Well, um, you know, we have each other and we have our constitution. And, um, I think, you know, we're, it's gonna, I, I feel like there, we're in for some hard times as a country. And, um, I think if we stay, stay true to our principles and values, I don't think we're gonna lose, I don't think the Chinese are gonna occupy us. They're gonna cause a lot of chaos. But as long as we keep our heads and we rebuild, I think we can, we can get through it. Um, it's only if we, if we allow kind of what's been going on here, which is this terrible,

• 2:27:01Speaker 03

  um, hyper-partisanship, which, by the way, they're feeding, because they, they benefit from it. And, um, it's, it's, it's by valuing the principles that, um, I think the founding fathers, I think they were right. They looked at nearly every other society that had been in existence and human, uh, with, with humankind up until that point, and I think they, they came up with a pretty good one. Now, they weren't sure it was gonna work, but it has for 240 plus years, but what they couldn't anticipate is the internet. And I think that's the part that we have to figure out, a way to, um, to be able to cut through what is a very powerful, um, controller of the narrative. And I,

• 2:27:46Speaker 03

  Remember I told you that Confucius actually has a really good lesson as analytics about the power of the narrative when he's asked, "What's the first thing you'll do if you were emperor?" When he says, "I would rectify the names." And what he means is what you say is what you think. And if I can get you to say something, you'll think that way. And that's really essentially what we're talking about here, right? If I can control the way you speak, then I can control the way you think, and I can start to create the type of society that has a patina of free speech, but in reality, people are watching what they say, and they're guarding themselves because they can be canceled

• 2:28:29Speaker 03

  or demonetized or whatever. This is the power of the First Amendment, right? This was why the founding fathers did it. And I think it was so brilliant when you take a step back. But again, there's no internet.

• 2:28:49Shawn Ryan?

  Man, it's scary times.

• 2:28:54Speaker 03

  It is.

• 2:28:54Shawn Ryan?

  Very scary times. You don't think they're gonna occupy us?

• 2:29:00Speaker 03

  I don't think they could, right? I think that's where... I think they can occupy our minds. They can occupy our hearts, and they already partially do. But I think there's something still, you know, as Americans that we share is this... I think there's still a spark of that in us, and that is, we do not go down without a fight. And even in our original kind of founding of the country, it wasn't everybody

• 2:29:40Speaker 03

  that fought. It's only a portion. In fact, I'm kind of ashamed to say, one of my direct ancestors was on the other side.

• 2:29:50Speaker 03

  And so there were, and the majority of people, I think, were on the other side, quite frankly, in the country, which is kind of what you, the feeling you get here. But I do think that there will be enough people that just will resist that. Obviously, we have the military and they're there to defend the country. But I don't think that they, the Chinese could successfully occupy the country. I do think that if this thing had, if they, if we hadn't had that agreement where it just kind of caused a fracture in 2017 where the Chinese decided, hey, we can't do this and we're going to prepare for war. I think at that point, if we would have kept going, I think they can occupy our hearts

• 2:30:35Speaker 03

  and minds using this, this, this system that we created, this global, globalized financial trade and internet controlled system that, that is very tightly linked together and which allows for a global narrative to kind of establish and perpetuate itself. I think that is, that is what's terrifying. Yeah, as we become more fragmented and more decentralized than I think we, and more local, I think local is hugely important. You know, local resiliency, communities that, you know, the community understands the Constitution and is supportive of it.

• 2:31:17Speaker 03

  I think we have that, you know, still within our, within our midst. And so whatever happens, I think we can still kind of recreate those conditions. At least I'm hopeful we can. I mean, one of the things, one of the cool things that I think people don't recognize is when you go and live abroad, like when I went to live in China, it was very easy to find, to see a foreigner in China, right? And you, you know, you, if you didn't look like that, if you didn't speak like that, boom, and our kids would be, they were young and blonde and people would crowd around us. But America, you come here, you've got all of these different races and all of these different backgrounds.

• 2:31:59Speaker 03

  And for the most part, prior to kind of all these people that have come across the southern border recently, for the most part, they all came here for similar reasons, right? They were escaping oppression or whatever. They wanted opportunity. And nearly every, nearly every friend I've ever had that, whose family is like first generation and they're, they were born here and raised here, their family teaches a very strong support of the country and the constitution. It's just kind of ingrained in them. And I think, I think, you know, as I was saying, I think that's part of our, how our society continues to renew itself. We have immigrants that come in that appreciate, they come from,

• 2:32:43Speaker 03

  or at least did, come from disadvantaged. They come in, they, they adopt our society, they adopt our language, they adopt these principles and values that, you know, our founding fathers believed were universal, because they weren't all, you know, of the same type. I mean, Alexander Hamilton was different than, than, you know, you know, somebody else that was in the leadership. So they were different, different backgrounds, but really believed in kind of some fundamental human rights. Those people that come in, which, you know, form the bedrock of our working class, I think, are the ones that then their kids go to school and become part of the white collar, white collar class. I think that's how we renew as a society constantly. And that's the thing,

• 2:33:28Speaker 03

  that's the thing that's magical about us. You know, we're all tied together by this single document that you can read, you can carry around in your pocket, and everybody understands, everybody knows what it means. I think that's hard to break if we, if we stay true to it. But when it's all connected, it's all centralized, and it's all, it's all kind of fed to you, and you're not willing to ask questions about what's fed to you, then yeah, that's easy. I've seen it. That's easy to break us down, divide us, make us hate each other. And that's exactly what, that's exactly what I see going on. Are you concerned about the collapse of the US dollar with BRICS? I am not concerned about the collapse of the US dollar in terms of there would be

• 2:34:13Speaker 03

  a, a competing currency for the US dollar. And the reason is...

• 2:34:20Speaker 03

  Because it's not just our economy. It's really the strength of our society, at least right now. So if we, as long as the United States continues to be the United States, the dollar will continue to be the method of, kind of the backstop of all trade. The Chinese yuan would never do that, right? They're the second biggest economy that's kind of a center. Europe can't do that because they're not really a federal public like we are, right? So we have a single monetary system, they have a single monetary system, but they also have different countries under that single monetary system, which have their own unique cultures and societies.

• 2:35:03Speaker 03

  We have, you know, a fairly homogeneous culture and society, although there are differences between the states. But ultimately, there's no place like the United States for a currency. So nobody would, so first of all, in order for the Chinese yuan to become a reserve currency, they would have to allow the yuan to float, right? They would have to allow it to be freely traded. Today, the only entity in the world that can exchange the Chinese yuan is the People's Bank of China, right? So anybody can freely trade the dollar, right?

• 2:35:41Speaker 03

  And the dollar has value in so much as the United States continues to exist as a sovereign nation. So I think, at least the way the world is organized today, I don't see a single entity that would come up and chat. Now, if China was all of a sudden to become a democracy and the yuan was to float, then yeah, I think you could see the yuan be the currency, the reserve currency. But not in the current instantiation, and the euro is not going to do it either, right? It requires, I think, a somewhat cohesive society, supporting that currency that really makes it attractive for.

• 2:36:25Speaker 03

  I mean, it's ultimately to trust the United States as an institution to survive and thrive, more so than it is, you know, the power of China's economy.

• 2:36:37Speaker 03

  And the reason the Chinese won't allow the yuan to float, because as soon as you allow the yuan to float, then they can have a run on their banks. Right? So what do we got now? We got a bunch of money invested in China that everybody's trying to figure out how to pull out, and the Chinese don't let it, they don't let it come out. And so, so as the economy in China tanks, if the yuan was free, and this is why they didn't do it, by the way. This is one of the things they did. In fact, in Under Pressure Warfare, they talk about, one of their biggest terrorists are George Soros. Right? Because he, they say he orchestrated the Asian financial, Asian currency collapse,

• 2:37:22Speaker 03

  and therefore, he's a financial terrorist. And so, one of the things that they wanted to make sure is that that couldn't happen to them. Right? You can't have a run on their banks, because they weren't going to allow their currency to float. Now, the mistake that we made, and I don't, still don't understand why, is that we allowed that to be freely, you know, part of the IMF's basket of currencies. Right? Why? It's not freely tradable. It's, there's literally no other country on earth that had, that's part of the international exchange, and you can't freely trade their currency. That's ridiculous, that we would have allowed that. But we did. And so, so I don't believe any of these things, you know,

• 2:38:05Speaker 03

  the United States will cease to exist, functionally exist as a politically independent and sovereign entity, prior to the dollar, you know, people going off the dollar as a reserve currency. Now, there's other problems that come because we're, we have the dollar as a reserve currency. One of them is, if you have a strong dollar, it's hard to trade American goods abroad.

• 2:38:29Speaker 03

  So we actually pay a penalty in terms of manufacturing. And that's why, you know, it's incumbent upon us to have a policy, an industrial policy that allows, that compensates for that. Because otherwise, all the manufacturing is going to leave the United States, which it, for the most part, has done. And so we have to basically compensate for that. Because having a strong dollar is not conducive to a good trading regime for you. And the other one, obviously, is we can't just keep printing money to pay the debt. I think getting our fiscal house in order. No, there was one caveat to that.

• 2:39:11Speaker 03

  And the caveat is if your GDP, if your GDP year over year is growing faster than you're printing, than you're accumulating debt, then you're able to absorb it. And your interest rates are low, right? So as your interest rates rise and your GDP is not, not growing fast enough, you know, and this is what's happening now, is your, the payments on the debt become more than you're actually spending in the federal budget. And I think they've already gone past what the, what the DOD annual budget is, right? So we're paying more, I think, right now, and somebody has to check this, on the annual debt because of the recent rise in interest rates, because of, we printed all this money

• 2:39:54Speaker 03

  due to COVID, then we're paying for national security in the United States, which is crazy if you think about it. But that's, that's where, but if our economy is growing faster than, than that debt is growing, then we can sustain that, you know, almost indefinitely. But obviously, there's going to be a time when that, when that comes down. So I think that's, we've kind of, what we did is we lived off the fat that we, so during the Cold War, we were organized right, we were structured right, we were postured right from a strategic perspective, and we, and, and that gained us all kinds of advantages in the world. And I think we just kind of, just through the, you know, it's like, it's like,

• 2:40:39Speaker 03

  You know, you work out and you eat healthy and you rest and everything and all of a sudden, one day you come home and like, I'm gonna drink and I'm gonna smoke and I'm gonna stop working out. And that's what the United States did after the end of the Cold War. Like, hey, I don't have to do it anymore. And that's now the bill is gonna come due. But I think, you know, as we start to rebuild our manufacturing, as we start to rebuild our infrastructure, as we start to make ourselves more resilient and secure from outside attack, that will have a knock on effect. When we went to China originally, and China entered the WTO, their economy was hugely, hugely underutilized, right? So they had all this

• 2:41:23Speaker 03

  latent labor and productivity that as soon as you threw some technology, talent, and capital, and it's like a fire, it blew up. Well, since the end of the Cold War, we've basically accumulated the same, what I would call latent productivity, because we haven't really been investing here in the United States. And I do believe as we start to invest in infrastructure and manufacturing, and we start to stop sending technology, talent, and capital in China, and we start to invest it in our own communities, that you're gonna see this latent productivity really take off, right? And so I think that's the part that, and as a consequence, you're also gonna see a strengthening of the working class, a more, they're gonna, it's gonna be more healthy for them, they're gonna be more hopeful,

• 2:42:07Speaker 03

  not hopeless. And I think you're gonna start to see a lot of the things that this hyper-partisanship kind of begin to decline. So, you know, I am optimistic of the future, but it requires us to actually look inward. It requires us to invest in our own people, invest in our own society, invest in our own communities, not invest everywhere else. We've done that for 30 years. We need to invest here in our people, you know, and during the Cold War, we were sending people to college on free scholarships, and they were called education for national security, right? We want you to become a scientist or an engineer. Stuff like that. These are things that we were doing in the Cold War. We built the national highway system.

• 2:42:50Speaker 03

  You know, we poured money into science and technology. 2% of GDP, the space race, all these things we took advantage of for the last 30 years that we're gonna have to start, we're gonna have to rebuild now.

• 2:43:02Shawn Ryan?

  I hope that starts happening soon. It'd be real nice to see the government invest into our own country again. And, uh, man, it's just, uh... I hope you're right. Gives me some positivity that you're thinking that way.

• 2:43:19Speaker 03

  Well, I pray, right? I pray. I pray every day that that's what's going to happen. I have to have faith. If you don't have faith, you know, I don't know what you... what you do. Because it is, it is, we're in a very bad spot. We're in a very bad spot. But we've been, we've been in bad spots before, but it does require that we, that we, that we look inward. We have to look inward and we have to, we have to question the things that we're doing. And we have to, and there is nothing wrong with any American standing up and say, "This doesn't smell right."

• 2:43:49Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 2:43:50Speaker 03

  And that person should be celebrated. If they question the government, "Why are you doing this?" And then, you know, then somebody comes, knocks on their door and, you know, starts to investigate, that's not okay.

• 2:44:05Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 2:44:05Speaker 03

  That's the kind of stuff that's going on that I think, you know, is really, really bad for our society.

• 2:44:09Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 2:44:10Speaker 03

  We want to encourage dissent.

• 2:44:13Shawn Ryan?

  I'm with you, 100%. But, uh, well, General, I just, uh, what an honor to have you sitting here. And, uh, very informative interview. And, uh, and, um, man, I appreciate it. I wish you the best of luck and, uh, I hope to see you again.

• 2:44:31Speaker 03

  Thank you.