#88 Chris Miller - The Future of Warfare | Part 3

Chris Miller is the former Secretary of Defense with a 27 year career in the United States Army. Throughout his career, he oversaw multiple special operations organizations, culminating with his command of the 2nd Battalion, 5th SFG(A). Concluding this three part series, Chris and Shawn discuss the latest developments in the Ukraine / Russia conflict and the implications it has on foreign policy and the United States' standing on the world stage. Chris and Shawn also discuss how warfare has evolved since their time in service and what the future may look like with advancements in technology. Shawn Ryan Show Sponsors: https://lairdsuperfood.com - USE CODE "SRS" Chris Miller Links: X / Twitter - https://twitter.com/cmillertigerhwk Book - https://www.amazon.com/Soldier-Secretary-Warnings-Battlefield-Dangerous/dp/1546002448 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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• 0:31Speaker 01

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• 1:00Shawn Ryan?

  Previously on The Sean Ryan Show.

• 1:04Speaker 03

  The leader of ISIS was Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.

• 1:10Speaker 03

  I mean, I usually don't do good and evil when you're talking about your enemy. I don't think it's helpful. I think it colors your judgment.

• 1:17Speaker 04

  I've been here too long and I've been very sick. It's very terrifying here. My name is Kayla Mueller. I need your help.

• 1:27Speaker 03

  This guy was the definition of evil. He is an evil man. Baghdadi, evil of evil.

• 1:36Speaker 03

  Everybody's looking for him. His trade craft is really good.

• 1:39Shawn Ryan?

  He would burn people alive if he had them, put kids in cages.

• 1:44Speaker 03

  When our intelligence officers put their mind to it, and our special operators put their mind to it, you can run, but you can't hide. The announcement comes through the Pentagon that the United States will provide no additional support to the Afghan government. And I was like, the war's lost. That's infuriating. Here we are. Yeah, man.

• 2:08Speaker 03

  I had a complete meltdown, dude. And I'm supposed to be a well-adjusted veteran, right? I'm like, wow, if I'm feeling this way, can you imagine?

• 2:21Shawn Ryan?

  All right, Chris, we're back from the, we're back from the break now.

• 2:24Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:24Shawn Ryan?

  And I got a whole slew of topics that I want to go over with you.

• 2:28Speaker 03

  What do you, we'll speed date it, man. You just hit it and I'll like hit it hard.

• 2:32Shawn Ryan?

  Well, let's see, we got future warfare, the industrial, the military industrial complex. Iraq was based on lies, energy weapons, January 6, China, Russia.

• 2:45Speaker 03

  Oh shit, we'll be done by what, 12:30 tonight?

• 2:48Shawn Ryan?

  It might be.

• 2:48Speaker 03

  That's only about 10 hours.

• 2:49Shawn Ryan?

  It might be. We'll get a good dinner. We'll get a good dinner. So let's just, let's kick it off here.

• 2:54Speaker 03

  All right.

• 2:57Shawn Ryan?

  There is so much happening in the world right now, you know, with, with China, Russia, Ukraine, the border. I mean, Taiwan looks like that's about ready to kick off any day. The COVID, you know, stuff that we're just kind of starting to move past, I think, the pandemic. And the US dollar seems to be collapsing. I don't know if that's fair. I'm not a finance guy, but it's getting serious. You know, this BRICS, you know.

• 3:24Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 3:25Shawn Ryan?

  You know, Brazil, Russia.

• 3:28Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 3:28Shawn Ryan?

  India, who else? China, South Africa, right? We, we have all these, the deals that have been made. The Chinese just negotiated the deal with Iran and Saudi Arabia. And then they just negotiated another deal with Brazil. It sounds like they're going to drop the dollar. What, what do you think is, is, as Americans, you know, what is the United States biggest external threat right now, in your opinion?

• 3:58Speaker 03

  I get, I get asked that and I always turn it and I'm like, I think the biggest external threat is actually an internal threat. I think we're spending so freaking much money right now. We're just printing money. And what do we add? I don't even know how many trillions of dollars in debt we are. And I'm not a finance person either.

• 4:21Speaker 03

  But wow, like checkbook in, money coming in, money going out, doesn't make any sense to me. And like, oh, you know, you can go to 110% of debt against GDP, nothing to worry about here. And when you get, when you get to 200%, usually your government's gonna collapse, your economy's gonna collapse. So I'm kinda right there right now. And I think the other stuff spins out from it, to tell you the truth. So like, until we get our house in order here, you know, we're just getting taken advantage of. You know, if, if we're

• 5:02Speaker 03

  looking at this as the op four, as the opposition force, you and I were like, let's, let's see how we should screw with America. It would, it would probably be all the things that are happening now, that in our, in our nation. And also, we'll go back to Afghanistan. I mean, the way we, we pulled out of there, everybody wants to say it wasn't, not everybody, but some people want to say, nothing to see there. Just, it's one of those things. But I really think that that showed our belly to the rest of the world. What happens after that, Sean? You saw it, the Chinese start flying, dude, they were flying, well, just then, back then, they were flying, what, 60, 70 fighters towards Taiwan, crossing into

• 5:46Speaker 03

  the whatever, across that line, and then coming back out. Just testing us, right? It was like the classic bully thing. I think the Russians got, I think, I think they saw with how we did our withdrawal in Afghanistan as a green light. They're like, we got this, Americans are, are weak. They miscalculated there. So that, that's my, my quick answer is I think this internal thing, but it comes back to like a lot of the other things you just talked about in your laundry list of 15 things. Defense industrial complex, what's our national strategy look like? How do we engage in the world economically? So.

• 6:21Shawn Ryan?

  Well, why do you, so, yeah, I said, I said, the, I said, external threats, you brought it internal with our spending. What is that gonna do? Explain that to the audience. What is, what is the, what is the excessive spending? What's gonna happen?

• 6:40Speaker 03

  Well, you just brought up the issues with the dollar is being Collapsing. Collapsing. You know, our, our bread and butter, pun intended, was, uh, you know, the United, the dollar was the reserve currency. You had, uh, you had David McCormick. He knows all this stuff. I don't, I'm like you. I just know that it doesn't sound right. And the, our greatest strength, I believe, is our economic power, right? I also think it's our informational power. I think that, I think the vision of America, of what we want it to be, that we all believe in, we don't always achieve it. I got all that. We can go on all day about that. So I think the informational element of power and the economic

• 7:23Speaker 03

  element of power are critical. You know, they call it the dime, right? Diplomatic, when we're doing strategy, when you're at the Pentagon or at the White House, doing strategy diplomatic, there are four tools of power. Diplomatic, information, military, economics, right? And it's how you bring those together is how, what your strategy is and what, obviously, the first question is, what are we trying to do with the world, right? And it comes, that's why I thought the last administration was neo-isolationist, which was like, pull everything back in, let's get our house in order here, before we start going off and trying to fix the rest of the world.

• 8:04Speaker 03

  Because like your business, business people, what do you do when things are unstable and chaotic? You hedge. Don't put any bet too big on any one thing. Do a little here, do a little there, see how things work out. So we, I'm worried right now, we're too heavily invested in the military, right? So our, the amount of money that we can spend in the United States, they call it discretionary spending, meaning it's not tied up in Medicaid, Medicare, Social Security. The rest of the budget, like, I looked this up online and it was the government accounting office, like 60% goes to the military.

• 8:42Speaker 03

  You can't even find out how much goes to information. Diplomacy is a couple percent, maybe 6%. Economics is Department of Treasury, really hard to nail that down. I'm like, let's go ahead and recalibrate a little and let's put more into economics. Let's put more into information. Let's put more into diplomacy. That's my thing. And so that's why I think it's incumbent that we, we're too strategic overreach, they call it. You know, we're, we're engaged in too many places. Let's collapse it in a little bit, just like you're running your business. Well, hey, uh, gonna be lost in advertiser. My income stream's gonna drop by this much. I'm gonna have to make adjustments in something else. That's where I think we should be right now.

• 9:27Speaker 03

  Does that make any sense?

• 9:28Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 9:28Speaker 03

  Was that too like talking pointish?

• 9:30Shawn Ryan?

  No, it does. And, and you know, changing course a little bit, we were just talking about the Chinese, Afghanistan. I mean, I, I feel like we missed a tremendous opportunity there with the lithium. The Chinese were there to negotiate those lithium.

• 9:50Speaker 03

  Right.

• 9:51Shawn Ryan?

  Minerals before.

• 9:52Speaker 03

  What was that about? Why didn't, yeah.

• 9:55Shawn Ryan?

  Was there?

• 9:57Speaker 03

  Do you think there was a big, you're, you're thinking, was there, was there some sort of big play with all these companies, these corporate elements?

• 10:05Shawn Ryan?

  Well, I'm wondering why we didn't make some kind of deal with the Afghan government on, on bringing that lithium to light and making batteries, especially with this big green initiative. I don't know if that was ever on the table. You would be obviously more privy to that information than, than myself, but it seems to me we missed a major business opportunity with the world by not utilizing the lithium in Afghanistan after we'd been there for 20 years. Then we leave, before we're even out, China's there to negotiate the stuff with, with the Afghan government.

• 10:44Speaker 03

  Makes you wonder.

• 10:45Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, do you have any insight on that?

• 10:47Speaker 03

  So the, the negotiations with the Taliban were really, really close hold, super close hold. I felt like I had a little bit of insight, but the guy at the time was this diplomat called Zal Khalilazad.

• 11:00Shawn Ryan?

  He was doing that. I don't know who he was talking to, whether he was talking to Pompeo, but the details. I think you're, I think you're on to something, though. That's like the art of diplomacy is there had to be some way to do something with that because remember they identified that early on, the rare earth minerals in Afghanistan, like there's that deposit just up there on their border of China is just huge, right?

• 11:30Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 11:32Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, was, I guess what I'm getting at is, yeah, I'm gonna, I'm gonna poke and blame the Biden administration for botching that entire thing. Let's, let's take the, let's take the everything else, you know, everything that happened out of it. The Chinese were there to negotiate that. We knew that they had that. We have this massive green initiative that, that, um, that the, that the government's trying to push right now. So why wouldn't we show interest in this, in those lithium deposits? Why would we let China come in and just take over that to produce the stuff that we're gonna have to buy from them eventually? It doesn't make any sense to me. And so, and so

• 12:16Shawn Ryan?

  a lot of people chalk this up to incompetence. There's so many things that are happening right now that seem to be chalked up to incompetence that I don't believe it's incompetence anymore. I believe it's, it's intentional. You know, so what I'm kind of asking you is,

• 12:35Shawn Ryan?

  at the end of the Trump administration, you were there was, and, and there were two other administrations, you know what I mean, that, that they could have done something with this, the Obama administration, the Bush administration. I mean, we have four administrations that had a hand in this. Was there ever, to your knowledge, any talk about some kind of a deal with Afghanistan to, to, to, to do something with all these lithium deposits?

• 13:02Speaker 03

  I thought there was early on when that, uh, those deposits were identified. I don't know. I don't know. Uh, there's, you said it at the start, though. It's not, it is factual that a lot of, uh, of Democrats.

• 13:27Speaker 03

  Foreign policy and national security people were either by philosophy or economically tied to partnering with the Chinese for years and years and years. So I don't know. But I wonder, like, the current crew, it's undeniable, if you look at their forums and who they've worked with in the past and their consulting organizations, it's undeniable that they were receiving a lot of money from Chinese interests, right?

• 13:55Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 13:55Speaker 03

  Isn't it irrefutable?

• 13:57Shawn Ryan?

  Exactly. You know, and it's, I guess, my, yes, it is. And, and yes, I do, deep down, I believe that this shit was intentional. I believe that, that's just what I believe. I believe that China has so much influence over the current administration that that's why it happened. But I guess, at the same time, I always like to play devil's advocate, and I would like to disprove myself.

• 14:22Speaker 03

  I do, I do, too.

• 14:23Shawn Ryan?

  And so what I'm getting at is, was there any plan, you know, I mean, because we were trying to bring stability to Afghanistan as well, correct?

• 14:33Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 14:33Shawn Ryan?

  We didn't want them exporting heroin, you know, that was their main export, correct?

• 14:38Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 14:38Shawn Ryan?

  So why not lift up lithium and drop heroin, you know what I mean? And, and that could have been, that could have helped stabilize that portion of the world.

• 14:49Speaker 03

  Yeah, better than going to Iraq.

• 14:51Shawn Ryan?

  Relatively fast, you know? And, and it seems like, you know, looking back, I've never heard anybody talk about it. And so I'm wondering if all four administrations completely dropped the ball on this shit.

• 15:03Speaker 03

  Could be, I don't know. I just remember that time where they did the survey, you know, they brought in mineralogists or whatever, surveyors, and like, there's a crap ton, like billions and billions of dollars worth, right? Trillions, was it trillions? I can't remember, in Afghanistan. And that's the last I remember.

• 15:25Shawn Ryan?

  Okay, it just, it seems, yeah, it seems odd that we poured that much money, that much sacrifice, that much, you know, time into that place and then bam, just on, it just seemed like it was just on a whim, like, hey, you know what, we're gonna pull out, um, couple hours. And, um, and, and, and, and that was it, you know, so.

• 15:48Speaker 03

  Beats me.

• 15:49Shawn Ryan?

  No clue.

• 15:50Speaker 03

  No clue, sorry. Serious face, got nothing.

• 15:54Shawn Ryan?

  All right.

• 15:54Speaker 03

  You know, I've got no internal lot and if I knew something, I'd voi, I'd pop off.

• 15:59Shawn Ryan?

  Well, I've heard you talk about what, external threats, and this is where I was going before you brought in the, this, the excessive spending, uh, which, which I personally would consider an internal threat. I've heard you say that the biggest threat to the United States right now is the fentanyl crisis.

• 16:17Speaker 03

  Mm-hmm.

• 16:18Shawn Ryan?

  Why do you think that? Over everything else, over China, over Russia, over all the other things that we're facing?

• 16:26Speaker 03

  First meeting I got to go into the Oval Office was on, um, it was right before Christmas. I can't remember what year it was. Well, it was probably twenty nineteen. Um, the, there, a Mormon co, uh, segment had been attacked and a bunch of people had been killed, Americans had been killed. Do you remember that, right in the border? And then, one of the drunk cartels took over a town in the south of Mexico and just like was, basically took a town over. And I got invited to be in the cheap seats in the Oval Office, which I'd never been into,

• 17:10Speaker 03

  uh, for a meeting. And I was like, oh, hell yeah, I'm going to this thing, because I was doing transnational threats as well as counterterrorism.

• 17:21Speaker 03

  Went in there and the subject, oh, you know what it was? It was the same day that Saudi pilot down at Pensacola shot, killed, I think, three people. Do you remember that terrorist attack? So that's the day. I can't remember, but I remember that event. And went in there and president's at his desk and then he had all the cabinet advisors lined up in chairs, like in front of him, like at school. That's how we did the thing. I got to sit on one of the couches that you see, like, you know, because I'm a nobody, right? Like, yeah, you can go.

• 18:04Speaker 03

  And then I found out later I wasn't supposed to be in there, but I just walked in anyhow. So whatever. And at the time, the president said, 77,000 Americans are being killed each year due to illicit drugs coming in from south of the border. And we're not doing much about it and I want to fix that. And that was his point about what do we have the military for if it's not to defend our borders? And I'd been working with a partner on getting additional Department of Defense military support on the border. And one of the key things that the military wanted and the counter drug people wanted

• 18:48Speaker 03

  was the simple radar. That if they had this radar, it was expensive radar, but it doesn't matter. It's in the system, right? They wanted this radar and that would help them see this whole different quadrant of the Caribbean track aircraft coming in. Right now, we're kind of blind. The Department of Defense was like, we can't give you that radar. Like, why not? They said, because it's, because we pivoted and we're focusing on China, Asia, Indo-Pacific. Like, no, no, no, no.

• 19:22Speaker 03

  77,000 Americans are being killed every year. That radar could reduce them out of that. Fought them kicking and screaming. You would have thought that it was the, like, we were going to, like, kick them out of the Pentagon or something. That was my first wake-up call, but the president brought up 77,000. Of course, it got politicized. Oh, this is just another play to shut down the border, build the wall, whatever the hell all that stuff was. But it wasn't. It was focused on the fact that how many Americans were killed in our, in our 20-year war? Let's call it 6,507,000. Vietnam War, what, 60,000? Every year, 77,000. You know what it is this year? You know what it is? 117,000.

• 20:07Shawn Ryan?

  It's gotta be over 100,000.

• 20:08Speaker 03

  117,000 Americans died this year, primarily because of fentanyl, of course, Chinese produce, started there, although they're making the crap out of that now, down south, aren't they?

• 20:19Shawn Ryan?

  Well, China's sending in chemists to teach these cartels how to make that shit. And supplying the, and bringing the supplies to make it.

• 20:33Speaker 03

  Isn't that, isn't that inherently governmental function for the military is to secure our border? Am I missing something here?

• 20:41Shawn Ryan?

  That's what I'm saying. That's, that's exactly what I'm saying. Am I missing something?

• 20:46Speaker 03

  But then, then you get the military, it's like, oh, no, we have to focus on, you know, high-end warfighting, near, what do they call it? Great power competition. That's what the buzzword is now. We have to focus on great power competition. We have to focus on Asia and Indo-Pacom and China and all this crap. And, and I'm like, no, the threat's coming in across our border to the south. Let's use our military capabilities.

• 21:16Speaker 03

  To defend against that, that's killing this many people. So I, I, I'm still like gobsmacked about like, why we're not doing more. And then you know, the command, the military command that uh, kinda is responsible for the border. There are two. One's Northern Command, which is uh, kinda border, but the other one is called Southern Command, which is in Miami that does Latin America, you know? They're the most, they're the most under-resourced command. Like, all the money goes to the Middle East and goes to the Pacific, and these people get table scraps. But there's something interesting happening down there, Sean. And let's, if you don't mind, the innovation piece, they

• 22:00Speaker 03

  have no money. And you talked about it earlier. When you don't have any money, you have to figure stuff out. They're doing the most interesting things with artificial intelligence, machine learning, data analytics. They're learning how to use cheap sensors and platforms because they don't get anything. So there's something really interesting going on down there. We can come back to that later. But this fentanyl thing, like, my thing is irregular warfare. It's conventional warfare, right? Tanks, planes, ships, you know, clashes of arms, you know, like huge World War II battles. There's a thing called irregular warfare, which is where you're fighting, it's not conventional. It's not like that. You're

• 22:41Speaker 03

  fighting for the will and the spirit of the people. And you're using different tools. You're using cyber. You're using psychological warfare, information operations. You're using uh, you're using your special operations forces to help local police forces, local constabulary, coast guard, military forces to protect, to become professional and also to protect uh, you know?

• 23:11Speaker 03

  Advance our, our goals. In this case, like, hey, no more drugs coming in, out of your country. And, uh, you know, I talked about strategic overreach. So your listeners are like, this guy said one, one, on one hand, he's like, come back home. The nuance in my argument is, no, we need to have small elements of the intelligence community and special operators, very small, out there sensing, learning, supporting, and when needed, bringing in additional capability, whether that's from the State Department, whether that's like loan programs from the Treasury Department. So that they're out there. So that's, that's kind of where you can save money. Bring everybody

• 23:53Speaker 03

  home, but still keep your sensors out there. But with the fentanyl thing, you know, that's the, that, you've, you know, the Chinese had that doctrine, total war book by those colonels? I read that thing. Wouldn't it come out like 90s or something, right? And they basically promulgated, when you're, when you're engaged with an enemy, and in this case, we're the enemy, everything's on the table. You know how we think about war? Tanks, ships, planes, people walking around in uniform. They're like, no, it's economics,

• 24:31Speaker 03

  it's disinformation, it's everything, it's communications. Everything is used to advance your goals. And this fentanyl thing, there's some writers that have come out with it, but it hasn't really been embraced yet. I'm very confident that, well, when this is all said and done, we're going to go like, that was a absolutely deliberate part of their total war campaign to undermine the United States. You're there, aren't you?

• 25:02Shawn Ryan?

  Absolutely.

• 25:03Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 25:03Shawn Ryan?

  It's true.

• 25:04Speaker 03

  It's happening. It's undeniable.

• 25:06Shawn Ryan?

  So, how do we fix this? One, hold on, let me backtrack. Why, I don't understand how this is not a bipartisan...

• 25:23Shawn Ryan?

  Initiative to secure this border. You know, at the beginning, I was like, all right. They, they, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's the liberal bleeding heart. They care about everybody, right? That, that, that, that's used to be what I think about that side. It's, it's all right. They just, they want to take care of everybody. It's all peace, love, all that kind of stuff, right? Which doesn't work everywhere. But then new administration comes in, we have more people in the camps. You know, just spreading COVID rampant. You got all these kids separated from their parents. All, all this information's coming out that the border crisis has gotten worse.

• 26:08Shawn Ryan?

  More people are in the camps. More people are dying. There's more trafficking going on. There's more sex trafficking. There's more drug trafficking. So you can't really give me the humanitarian argument anymore. Nobody's doing anything to make it maybe a little bit easier to come into the country legally. You know, for the good people that want to be here. We obviously need workers. It's getting hard to find Americans that want to get off their ass and go to work. Right? And, but nothing's being done. That's not happening. They're not easing up any immigration. More, whatever, I'm just, I'm not going to go over it all again.

• 26:47Shawn Ryan?

  But, so I'm not buying the whole humanitarian aspect on why we're not securing the border. So why don't they want to secure the border?

• 26:58Speaker 03

  I, it's beyond me. You know where I'm going to go with this because I'm going to go with like this political dysfunction. And I'm not about, like, my wife's like, it's all over. Like, I don't even know why we bother anymore. Declining power, just embrace it, you know, circle in the drain. And of course, I'm like, no.

• 27:21Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 27:22Speaker 03

  And I, I don't want to go like, I'm not a politician, right? So I hate to go there, but what the heck? Your show, you cover a lot of stuff. We need a change, man. We need a change in, in leaders in our, like,

• 27:39Speaker 03

  How many, it's, there are a bunch geriatrics right now.

• 27:42Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 27:43Speaker 03

  I mean, come on, next generation up to you, to your generation, we gotta do something. Do you think that, I gotta, I'm not giving up hope. I was really hoping that more veterans would answer the call. I think we got like sixty eight, eighty veterans serving in elected positions. You know, after Watergate and after we lost the war in Vietnam, seventy three was a huge change where they basically like kicked everybody out and started over. Biden got elected then. Whole generation came up with change and, you know, we're going to reinvent this country. You can argue about the success they had. I was really hoping that that was gonna happen because, man, people are, I don't know, maybe I'm missing it.

• 28:28Speaker 03

  Maybe I'm missing it. I must be missing it. It's just like, come on, we can do so much better and why aren't we doing that? Are we just so in love with our little world of, you know, our cell phone and our Netflix that we we're just getting, just getting opiate of the masses, not religion, it's Netflix. But that's, so that's where I am because I, I just like, this is a bipartisan issue. And I'm with, if I could, I'm gonna yell that, I'll get all sorts of hate mail. There needs to be, why can't we update our immigration system? If somebody wants to come to the United States, they pass screening.

• 29:06Speaker 03

  Why wouldn't we embrace that? I don't, I don't get it.

• 29:09Shawn Ryan?

  I don't either, you know, I actually, I went down.

• 29:12Speaker 03

  Seriously, Sean, what are we missing?

• 29:13Shawn Ryan?

  I don't, I don't understand it either. I went down, I went down to one of those border camps and pulled some immigrants out and interviewed them at a coffee shop. And then if, it's been about a year since I did this, so my numbers might be off a little bit, but. If I remember correctly, this guy, he had made the trek from Honduras. He's been living in a tent for, I believe, two years with his wife. You know how he makes money? He has a little cellphone charger, like one of those battery solar ones. And he runs around and sells power to anybody else in the camp for like 25 cents to make money. He's been waiting there for an approval for his immigration.

• 29:56Speaker 03

  Sounds like our kind of guy.

• 29:58Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, for over two years. And all he wants to do is come and work. Now, all he would have to do is walk about five miles east and cross the border. But he doesn't want to. He wants to do it right. You know, and so in my mind, I'm like, I didn't, I, that's one, two specimens out of the entire camp. You know what I mean? But what I'm saying is, you, you, we see it. You see it everywhere you go. You see illegal immigrants working. They're doing lawn care. They're working factories. They're cleaning. They're, you know, they're doing blue collar jobs. And they're doing them very well because no Americans, Americans think they're too good to do this shit now.

• 30:43Shawn Ryan?

  You know, and, and so why, why aren't they lifting the policies up a little bit to let these people in? To like the good ones? And, and, and, yeah, maybe there are a lot of good ones coming in illegally, but make them like, bring them in legally. That's more tax dollars, right? And, but they're not, they're not doing anything. There's nothing happening.

• 31:08Speaker 03

  Nothing.

• 31:09Shawn Ryan?

  Nothing is happening. It's just one side batting it back this way. And then the other side bats it back this way and nothing happens, you know? And so. I just don't understand any of it. But what was, did you have a plan for this? For the border, for the fentanyl crisis?

• 31:30Speaker 03

  It, uh, so it was really, really developmental. But there was, I was very much involved with some other people and what would this look like? Because we've done this before, remember? Probably the first use was it, was it Delta Force? Their first kind of coming out was, was it Pablo Escobar? Who was the Colombian that?

• 31:53Shawn Ryan?

  Escobar.

• 31:54Speaker 03

  Was it Escobar? Remember they went, we had people down there for years helping, assisting with the search. And so that's another one, like, isn't this a special operations mission? I, I'll tell you what, fellas, men and women in special operations right now are sitting around with their, sitting on their hands, bored to tears. So we go from, you know, just burning down the entire organization to now we got the next generation who came in because they want to go deploy, sitting on their hands. And I said, so we've got a threat to the South. This is an ideal use of all these things we've learned in counterterrorism about man hunting and how to, you know,

• 32:37Speaker 03

  and, because really man hunting can be applied to so many different things, you know? Fentanyl, drug distributors, it's networks, right? It's networks, you know this. It's figuring out networks. We've mastered that. Our special operations forces have mastered that. Why isn't this a mission for them? You know, why, why not go down? Now, Mexico's a different problem, you know, because that guy's taken over that damn country. What's his face, uh, oh, what did it, AMLO? That guy's becoming a dictator, but that's neither here nor there. You know, so they're very nationalistic. We don't want your help, you just screw everything up. We got a drug war because of you guys, all this stuff they say. I believe that to a point, but not enough. There's other stuff going on there, right?

• 33:22Speaker 03

  A lot of people getting paid, obviously. But the rest of the world, or the rest of Latin America? Why wouldn't we use our military capabilities? Sensors? Come on, man. We can, we can track those submersibles. Have you ever seen any of those?

• 33:38Shawn Ryan?

  I haven't.

• 33:39Speaker 03

  The homemade ones? Oh, my gosh, like the homemade subs.

• 33:42Shawn Ryan?

  Yes, I have seen them.

• 33:44Speaker 03

  That's some, that's some innovation there. We can, we can track all that stuff, right? But we made a decision not to put the resources against it. And I don't know why we have made that decision. Our goal, our plan, where we were going was to dedicate more resources, military resources, as well as judicial. At the end of the day, judicial branch, DOJ, ended up doing a lot, you know? But we thought that we could, we could accelerate and we could amplify their legal means through intelligence collection, training of, of local forces and introduction and change, change the narrative. But you brought it up.

• 34:28Speaker 03

  Ship was coming across from China. We had all our stuff. It was so funny. We'd have all our sensors. We had this thing set up perfectly for, for marijuana and cocaine and all that crap. Then all of a sudden, you got freighters coming across that are commercial freighters that are not part of the, of the sensor and assessment network, right? So we had to rejigger that. So that's where we were going with this. You know, the president said some very, very provocative things during these discussions, and everybody took him at face value. But, you know, the president was a real, he's a real estate guy. So in these New York, so he's always going to challenge you.

• 35:11Speaker 03

  And he was like the classic old boss I had growing up. I don't know if you had him, that would always be challenging you. But if you stood up and you answered, they were just checking your homework. And he'd say some provocative stuff. I'll tell you what he said. I'll, it's already public. Goes, hey, you guys got all those cruise missiles? Got all these great fighter aircraft? Why don't we just go bomb all these drug labs?

• 35:39Speaker 03

  Yes, question, why don't we? Mr. President, we absolutely can do that. Be a violation of a sovereign nation. We probably have enough intelligence that we can. There's gonna be a lot of collateral damage and gonna be a lot of blowback on that. We're gonna kill some innocent people and whatnot. Okay. Just asking the question. I think it's a good question to ask, isn't it?

• 36:04Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 36:05Speaker 03

  Got all these precision guided munitions.

• 36:07Shawn Ryan?

  At least it's, at least it's starting a discussion.

• 36:10Speaker 03

  Yeah, but everybody like, he's crazy. He wants to bomb Mexico. No, he was, he was pushing you.

• 36:16Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, why, why isn't this, why isn't this at the forefront? You know, we have, so there's this disconnect between Republicans and Democrats and everybody knows it, we're dividing, it's, it's ridiculous. You know, but what do you, what do we hear? We hear how, how bad the poverty is, the homeless situation, the, the deaths, 100, what'd you say, 117,000?

• 36:43Speaker 03

  117,000, I wanna say.

• 36:45Shawn Ryan?

  You know, I mean, and supposedly, I mean, who, who doesn't wanna be on the humanitarian mission for our own country, right? Well, you wanna fix the humanitarian problem that we're having right now, then you fix the f- and fentanyl crisis. You know, that takes care of a lot of the homelessness, that takes care of a lot of broken families, that is going-

• 37:07Speaker 03

  Could you imagine, could you imagine like if some, if we had a leader that just described it the way you did, that we're gonna come together as a country and you know, just the way you described it, where do I sign up? My kids would be like, yeah, I'll go do whatever I need to do. Where do you need me? Need me in, working here, here? You, you could absolutely rally. Couldn't you rally the country behind that? Or are we just dying, are we just dinosaurs? You're younger than I am.

• 37:33Shawn Ryan?

  I, I would think so. I mean, that's what I want, but not, but nothing is happening. And, um, so let's dive in. How would, how would we fix it? Would you, will we fix our border?

• 37:51Shawn Ryan?

  In Mexico, or would we fix our border by operating within, within our own border?

• 37:58Speaker 03

  You gotta push it out, you know, and that's why you can criticize me for like, oh, you want a strategic overreach. Strategic overreach is when you're doing stuff where, in places you don't need to be. This is, this is clearly not one of those cases. So, and I'm not gonna, like, we can't boil the ocean, you know, like, oh, if, if there was a better economy in El Salvador, there wouldn't be all these problems here. So, you know, you can only do so much, but we have the resources. Let's see, is it $868 billion a year goes to defense? 868 billion,

• 38:42Speaker 03

  with a B. So, let's just call it a trillion, because when you throw in there all the intel agencies, and I'll call it a trillion. So, we can't shift resources to a more holistic, and I'm not saying like, oh, we need to have childcare facilities on every block, we need to provide a job to everybody. That's not what I'm saying. But selectively targeted program, I bet you the network analysis, we can find out where the key nodes are to either attack kinetically, or to attack with program, programs, money, people. I just bet you we

• 39:24Speaker 03

  could. But let's be, come on, it starts with interdiction. If, if you can get, that's the problem with, you know, with this fentanyl, holy crap, you can get like, it's so easy to hide.

• 39:41Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, I don't even think we would need a covert action. You know, I mean, look, the Nord Stream pipeline just blew up. Nobody knows who did it, right? Maybe it was us, maybe it was somebody else. I don't know who the hell it was. But why, why, why can't we go back to the old school days, like the OSS, you know, and, and, and, and things like, what is that, what is all these, what are all these transactions going in? Cash? You know, there's all this human trafficking shit, they're smuggling stuff, guns?

• 40:11Speaker 03

  You want to hear a weird one?

• 40:12Shawn Ryan?

  Lots of guns. Why can't we? Maybe, I don't know. Put some kind of device in the weapon. And so

• 40:21Speaker 03

  Totally doable.

• 40:22Shawn Ryan?

  I, all this shit is doable.

• 40:25Speaker 03

  There's just as much You're triggering me. You're triggering.

• 40:27Shawn Ryan?

  There's just as much going from the, from the US into Mexico. Well, I guess I shouldn't say there's just as much because I don't know. But there's a lot of things, money, people, guns smuggled into Mexico from the US that we could, I don't know, maybe plant something in, knowing where it's going and then that location is now done. If we don't have to,

• 40:56Shawn Ryan?

  we, we don't take accountability for anything in this country anymore. Why the, you know?

• 41:02Speaker 03

  You're, you're triggering me because I got really deep into this planning stuff. Like went to a real dark place. I'm just learning everything I can. I'm talking to everybody, any organization in government. And you brought up gun flow. That was one of the biggest, that was one of the biggest issues. And the Mexicans would be like, you guys, you guys just let guns flow into our country. Not my problem. I checked this out. And I won't tell where because then I hope it's been fixed. Something as simple as license plate readers. So it was a state that will remain nameless. Border crossings had

• 41:47Speaker 03

  license plate readers for all vehicles coming from America crossing in.

• 41:54Speaker 03

  Then you could do pattern recognition by seeing what came back out. And you could do, they put it in the Google later and figure out like, holy shit. Here are 15 vehicles that clearly are doing something illicit. We don't know what it is. But now we're going to go ahead and focus on it. You know what happened? Had to remove those cameras facing north because it was some lawyers decided that that could be interpreted as a violation of American civil liberties and illegal search. Illegal search. Dude, I'm not making this up, man. I hope it's been fixed by now. But so that was where we were. Okay, we need to get that fixed, number one. Here we have these huge ideas, right? We're like, oh, my gosh, we can interdict here.

• 42:38Speaker 03

  We can do all these things. We can play these cartels off against each other. You know, doing all that stuff. And it came down to like, can we get? You go down there and talk to an officer on the border. Like, what do you need? Like, can we just get those cameras back? North, something as simple as that. So you kind of triggered me on the gun flow. It's, I don't know if it's any better now, but we didn't get it solved.

• 43:05Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 43:08Shawn Ryan?

  Is there anything else we can do to fix this? Or is it, do you think it'll ever be fixed?

• 43:17Shawn Ryan?

  What do you think about the idea of legalizing drugs? Do you, there's an argument saying that would end this?

• 43:29Speaker 03

  Man, I don't know. I'm still, I'm still, jury's out on that one for me. You know, marijuana is legal in DC now. I don't really, I'm kind of libertarian. I don't care. You know, I'm like, do what you want. I don't think it's a big deal. But then to legalize drugs. I just got, instinctually, it's kind of this iconoclastic libertarian. I'm kind of like, I'm not a libertarian, but kind of, you know, do what you want. Just don't do it so you screw with me or my family. I don't give a shit what you do in your home.

• 44:13Speaker 03

  My instincts are to say yes initially. But aren't the Dutch, aren't they rolling back all their legalization stuff after how many years?

• 44:23Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, honestly, I have no idea.

• 44:24Speaker 03

  I don't know. I don't know, man. I, you know, the war, they talk about the longest war was the war on drugs, right? And we haven't clearly, that's the thing, we're losing that one, too. Can we do something about it is your answer? I think, I think if we mobilize, I think we can. I absolutely do. Well, if we, why haven't we done it already? I can hear the counterargument. I don't think we really tried.

• 44:49Shawn Ryan?

  No, I don't think we have either.

• 44:51Speaker 03

  It's kind of half ass, just enough to keep, keep the politicians so they can get reelected. All right, that sounded pretty cynical, didn't it?

• 45:02Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, I mean, I believe you had mentioned this ties into the industrial military complex. Or the, excuse me, the military industrial complex. How is that?

• 45:14Speaker 03

  Well, just the deficit spending and the fact that we're spending so much on defense.

• 45:21Speaker 03

  I think some people argue with me, but I think right now we're spending more money in peacetime on the military than we ever have before. You get this counterargument, they're like, but you have to understand, Chris. The economy is bigger, so the way we should measure defense spending is a percentage of gross domestic product. Like, I'm like, okay, we need to have a flat rate. Right now it's at 2.8%. We need to increase to 3% regardless. Now, I, I love that when, that's an acute approach for them that advocate for this. This is all the rage right now. It should be a percentage of GDP because that's how we should calculate this.

• 46:06Speaker 03

  Now, if GDP falls, I want to see what they say. Like, oh, it's good as long as GDP keeps going up. But what happens if you have something happen and you have a donut hole and we collapse for COVID or something like that, GDP drops? What are they going to say then? Because their budget's going to go from a trillion dollars a year to 800 billion and they're going to scream bloody murder. But the point of that is, you know, you're talking about the future. You're talking about China, Ukraine, all this stuff. I just think we're organized incorrectly as a military. We're still in this industrial age, huge aircraft carriers, 14 billion a copy, planes at 35, 1.5 trillion dollars. Life of the program, that's not the future of warfare, right?

• 46:50Speaker 03

  You know, like, right now, like sensors and the ability.

• 46:56Speaker 03

  To target and take down offensive weapon systems is so cheap now, right? That's like, would you want to fly a helicopter over you, over Donetsk right now? No. Why not? You know, you know what I'm saying. Right? Yeah. Cause some dude's gonna jump out of a, a, a dugout or from a garage and shoot your ass down with a, with. So you're flying, what's an Apache go for? Well, let's use what they're flying. They're flying Russian made. I think those things go for like 18, 20 million dollars a copy, right? You hear that crap, some kids are gonna jump out with a shoulder fired missile and drop you.

• 47:40Speaker 03

  Unless you're flying at 25,000 feet and then you can't do anything, right? If you're at 25,000 feet, you're not gonna, can't even see your target, right? So if you're flying low, you are going to get shot down, right? Mm hmm. End of story. So. How do you counteract that?

• 47:58Speaker 03

  We're changing from the power of the offense, you know, World War Two, everything. Blitzkrieg, we're going back to like World War One where defense is more powerful and always rotates. You know that it always like flip flops back and forth based on technology, tactics, strategy and all that. Seems to me that we're flipping back to where the defense is more powerful.

• 48:22Speaker 03

  So. Because like, look, where are our phones? I mean. Dude, I bet you we could pull up where every United States arm, United States Navy carrier is probably online right now. You think we could? I bet you're right. I bet you we could. Now 20 years ago, that was top secret information, right? Like, oh my God. We were the only, only handful of us had satellites. Shit, you can get commercial satellite coverage now. You can go to Maxar, right? And say, hey, I'll buy all the imagery of this port, this port, this port, this port. And you can see, you can see where ships are pretty easy. So that's, that's kind of my, that's my thing is, you know, we're preparing our military for the wrong thing. We're just a military industrial complex.

• 49:06Speaker 03

  I know I'm talking too much. No, you're not. You got me fired up. I said the funniest thing one time off the record that ended up going on the record, where I was talking about the military industrial complex, F-35s. I said all this stuff. It was, I thought it was pretty funny. Of course Lockheed Martin and others didn't think it was funny, the producers of these aircraft. I used to get really, really angry, like really, really angry at the major defense contractors that are, you know, making these exquisite weapon systems, like, you know, hugely expensive, gold plated, you know, oh my gosh, thing can cook your toast in the morning, you know,

• 49:47Speaker 03

  launch a doggone anti-satellite missile in the afternoon and in the evening, you know, it can, you know, move across country and take out some tanks. I mean, these things are amazing, right? They're incredibly expensive. I used to get really, really angry at them. And then I recently, it's like, wait a second, pull your head out of your ass. They're doing exactly what the system is incentivizing. Does that make sense? It does. It's like, dude, it was like slapped to the head. I'm an idiot. Stop bitching about these companies that are fleecing the American public.

• 50:26Speaker 03

  They're doing exactly what the structure and the system has incentivized them to do. I was like, okay, so stop hating on them and understand more. So what do we do is the question. So we change where the money's coming from? Yeah. We give them a new incentive. Got to change the incentive structure. Okay, you brought up a whole bunch of companies earlier, people that have started their own companies, that's my gig now. It's like these small companies that have really patriotic people that are doing great work, that want to contribute to national defense, have these incredible products, you name it, artificial intelligence, oh, circuitry, you know, all this sensors, drones, counter-drone.

• 51:15Speaker 03

  Go down the list. We could just go down the list all day long. They can't get in the game. Because the way the incentive structure is, there's, there are people that are trying to change it. But there has, there has to be like full scale re-scoping of how we spend our defense dollars. All right. So you're, you're the, you're the, you're a GS 13, which is kind of a mid-level bureaucrat at the Pentagon. You're responsible for, you know, getting new, you're, you're responsible for like the new innovative boot for the army.

• 51:55Speaker 03

  And you have a choice between a company that has this great technology, great materials, great vision of how to do this, and they're small and scrappy. Or you can go to like Wolverine, you know, the biggest shoe manufacturer, I'm making this up, but you know, one of the greatest shoe manufacturers in the world. That's going to make an inferior product, but you know it's going to get delivered on time. Or if something goes wrong and it doesn't get delivered on time, or the quality's bad, and your boss comes down to chew your ass. And you go, hey, I went with Wolverine, it's the world's largest shoe producer. Okay.

• 52:36Speaker 03

  Now what if you said, oh, I went with ABC Footwear out of, you know, Dubuque, Iowa, and they couldn't deliver? You're going to get, you're going to get fired. But if you go with the main one, in this case, like a defense, major defense company, Lockheed Martin, like you go with Lockheed Martin and they fail, you don't get fired because the incentive structure, like, oh yeah, that happens, no big deal. If you go with some company down here in Franklin that has an innovative technology, and it's new, and it doesn't work exactly right. Congress is going to come in and yell at the Pentagon. The Pentagon, the poor person that's up on the hill getting yelled at, why, why did you go with, you know, Franklin Semiconductor?

• 53:20Speaker 03

  When you could have gone with Raytheon? And they're like, oh, because these guys, they're the best.

• 53:28Speaker 03

  We gotta, gotta flip that. That make any sense, or was that too like dorky?

• 53:33Shawn Ryan?

  I think it makes sense, but you're saying go after the most innovative.

• 53:38Speaker 03

  Change your incentive structure too. Allow, allow the program, the guy, the person in the, in the government that is cutting the contract, allow them to fail once in a while and don't, don't fire them.

• 53:51Shawn Ryan?

  And work with the, work with the smaller companies and set them up for success.

• 53:55Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 53:55Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, so, so there needs to be some type of liaison network between business and government, rather than just Raytheon, Lockheed, Boeing, what's the other one?

• 54:07Speaker 03

  Raytheon, yeah.

• 54:09Shawn Ryan?

  But, um.

• 54:11Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's, that's what I was trying to get at.

• 54:14Shawn Ryan?

  Makes a lot of sense. Makes a lot of sense. What do you think the future of warfare looks like?

• 54:21Speaker 03

  Anybody that predicts is full of shit, you know?

• 54:25Shawn Ryan?

  Well, I mean, I'm, I'm.

• 54:27Speaker 03

  But you gotta, you gotta make some, you gotta make some assumptions, right?

• 54:30Shawn Ryan?

  Well, we had talked, we had spoke a little bit offline about it and.

• 54:33Speaker 03

  Oh, I was gonna give you my answer.

• 54:35Shawn Ryan?

  Oh, okay. Well, I mean, we're seeing, we're seeing warf, I believe we're seeing warfare right now. I believe we're seeing a huge propaganda war. We had spoke, well, let's hear what you have.

• 54:49Speaker 03

  No, I wanna hear what you guys.

• 54:51Shawn Ryan?

  As far as warfare is concerned, I think, I think we're in the middle of a war right now. And I think people don't realize it. I think the fentanyl thing is part of the war. I think the buying our politicians out is part of the war. I think the TikTok and propaganda thing that's going on is part of the war. I think the disinformation thing is part of the war. I think all the bots that are interacting with social media outlets is part of the war. All the, all the, you know what I'm talking about, right? All the Twitter bots, the Instagram bots that, because it, it, it fires the population up.

• 55:33Shawn Ryan?

  It, it divides us. I think, I think that the big push on these, on the racism, the, the, the trans, I think all of that is part of the propaganda that's, that's, that's part of the war.

• 55:52Shawn Ryan?

  And I think we've spoken about this earlier and we'll get into it again. I think that there's a possibility that all of these, these chemical spills and, and, and contaminated water and food processing plants that are, that are catching fire and blowing up and the 18,000 heads of cattle that just

• 56:19Shawn Ryan?

  blew up. I think that's all part of the war. I think it's, I think they're hitting us from every angle possible. Except an actual force on force.

• 56:32Speaker 03

  There, you know, my smart ass remark was going to be, and how good is a M1 main battle tank? Or an F-35 or a four class aircraft carrier to deterring any of those activities that you just said?

• 56:46Shawn Ryan?

  It's completely worthless.

• 56:47Speaker 03

  Completely worthless. So we continue to invest in these, these miraculous weapon systems. That won the Cold War, won World War Two. Well, they're new ones now, obviously, but that kind of mentality, right?

• 57:02Speaker 03

  And success is going to come off of silicon. It's going to come across from what's between our ears. And that's my whole irregular warfare thing is why are we fighting them? The way they want us to fight them. Why don't we fight the way we fight? Which is use their tools back against them, which we can do.

• 57:24Speaker 03

  Information operations. Come on, man. We, we can sell, we literally, we, we can sell soap to people that don't need, or that's a bad example. I wasn't going to, you know, I'm trying to be careful what I say, because you don't want to say something crazy, but you know, we can advertise, we can sell you whatever, right? Sounds cliche. We can sell, you know, whatever.

• 57:50Speaker 03

  So we know how to do that, right?

• 57:54Speaker 00

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• 58:24Shawn Ryan?

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• 59:09Shawn Ryan?

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• 59:54Shawn Ryan?

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• 1:00:21Shawn Ryan?

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• 1:00:29Shawn Ryan?

  I want to give a big thank you out right now to all the Vigilance Elite patrons out there that are watching the show right now. Just want to say thank you, guys. You are our top supporters and you're what makes this show actually happen. If you're not on Vigilance Elite Patreon, I want to tell you a little bit about what's going on in there. So, we do a little bit of everything. There's plenty of behind the scenes content from the actual Sean Ryan Show. On top of that, basically what I do is I take a lot of the questions that I get from you guys, or the patrons, and then I turn them into videos. So we get, right now, there's a lot of concern

• 1:01:09Shawn Ryan?

  about self-defense, home defense, crimes on the rise, all throughout the country, actually all throughout the world. And so, we talk about everything from how to prep your home, how to clear your home, how to get familiar with a firearm, both rifle and pistol, for beginners and advanced. We talk about mindset, we talk about defensive driving. We have an end of the month live chat that I'm on, at the end of every month, where we can talk about whatever topics you guys have. It's actually done on Zoom. You might enjoy it, check it out. And if Zoom's not your thing, or you don't like live chats, like I said, there's a library of well over 100 videos on where to start with prepping,

• 1:01:54Shawn Ryan?

  all the firearm stuff, pretty much anything you can think of, it's on there. So anyways, go to www.patreon.com/vigilanceelite, or just go on the link in the description, it'll take you right there. And if you don't want to, and you just want to continue to watch the show, that's fine too. I appreciate it. Either way, love you all. Let's get back to the show. Thank you.

• 1:02:24Speaker 03

  We also, then, so all the tools they're using against us, we can actually do as well, right? So why fight? The way the Chinese want us to fight is, you know, they want us to prepare for this huge force-on-force confrontation. I don't think they ever plan to do that.

• 1:02:49Shawn Ryan?

  I don't either.

• 1:02:50Speaker 03

  I think they're like just laughing all the way to the bank. Americans, we have hypersonic missiles. Now, I think going to Taiwan, they're gonna have to have a conventional thing get there, right? I mean, that's gonna be old, kinda D-Day thing, whatever. Let's take that one. But when we get to competition worldwide, it's like they're using money. They're using all these tools, disinformation, misinformation, the things that you said. So here's what, I'm rambling, but it's like, we're doing exactly what they want us to do, which is invest in these huge weapon systems. $14 billion for an aircraft carrier.

• 1:03:33Speaker 03

  It can be defeated by a missile, a hypersonic missile. I don't even know what that costs, like a million? Still a little steep. You asked about the future warfare. I also, so, I'm with you, like, we have to use their tools back against them. Let's just use a quick example. If you're a totalitarian authoritarian regime, what's your biggest fear? It's popular unrest, right? So you need to have the population, because you're tyrants at the end of the day, right? I mean, you're totalitarian regime, you need to keep your population complacent. You can't have them rising up.

• 1:04:15Speaker 03

  That's bad for your governing longevity, right? So...

• 1:04:22Speaker 03

  They need to have an enemy, right? Every totalitarian regime has to have an enemy that they can point to their people and say, "The reason that we're acting the way we are is because those people mean to destroy us, so you need to support us." So every time we go with this big conventional, you know, "We need to put more tanks here, we need to put more aircraft carriers here," plays exactly into their narrative that they're using to, with their population, show us as the aggressor. So why do we do that? Why do we get, why do we feed their mechanism for maintaining control? Let's do something else differently.

• 1:05:06Speaker 03

  Let's, let's not use that. Let's use, like, there's a huge population in China that is, wants to break away. Why don't we support them? Why don't we use, like, "Oh, can I give you a quick one? Here's one for you." The COVID thing, when that broke, I was at the Pentagon and I was in charge of information operations as a civilian. And the Chinese, right away, just started hammering us. Like, there was this one thing where they accused a, a, an athlete, an Olympic athlete that was an American soldier, I can't remember how they did it, but somehow, like, she'd

• 1:05:50Speaker 03

  traveled and they, like, blamed it all on her or some crap. And you could see the disinformation coming out, like, you could just see it, real time. And they were using the bots, I mean, they were just flooding the zone with incorrect information. You want to know how long it took for us to respond? I went to the first meeting thirty days after what really triggered it. I forgot the details, but it was when they accused this woman soldier that was in the Olympic training program, bike rider, I want to say, as soon as they blamed her, it became my

• 1:06:32Speaker 03

  problem because now it was a military person before it had it had just focused on other stuff. So now I have a I we, the Pentagon had skin in the game. So we got involved. I went to the first interagency messaging meeting and I'm it's all online, of course, because we can't get together zoom call or whatever. And I didn't know what was going on. So you had State Department nitpicking about this, that and the other thing. And I got on and I said, I figured we'd had been doing this for months. I said, what else have you guys been doing? And they said, this is our first meeting. I said, so we're

• 1:07:13Speaker 03

  thirty days after the initial onslaught of their information operation against us. And we're having our first US government interagency coordination meeting to how to respond to COVID. I knew I knew we were done at that point. I was like, so how do but your point is we can do better, but we've decided not to. So I could go on all day, man. It's just like, we are looking at this. We have to retool for a different type of war that they are fighting that we are refusing to accept. And we just want to go back to World War Two. It's all we want. Like, just keep it clean. No, it's not clean anymore. It's everywhere.

• 1:07:57Speaker 03

  You brought up offices, strategic services. It's in my book. It's like, we need to have a new offices, strategic service, young people that maybe don't want to serve in the military or they don't want to go through all that, but they're geniuses at whatever cyber marketing. Maybe they just want to serve and they have these really crazy, cool skills. Shake and bake them. You know, learning how to march and salute and put on your uniform really takes, what, about 45 minutes?

• 1:08:25Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:26Speaker 03

  Doesn't take eight weeks. Bring them in temporarily and then have an organization of special operations, have all elements of the United States power in that one, that one organization. So, and that's, that's one of my things. We gotta, gotta really think about that because we are not, they're taking advantage of us just because they know how we do things. Easy. Read our books, right?

• 1:08:52Shawn Ryan?

  Mm hmm. I mean, do, do, do we know? Do we have them pegged? I mean, can we, is the NSA involved? I mean, are we doing anything about any of this stuff?

• 1:09:05Speaker 03

  I don't know. I mean, I don't know now. Your question, like, can we look at their communication pathways and how they're doing things? I went to, I'll just tell you straight up this way. I don't have to like get rolled up by the FBI for violating some security oath or something that I signed and didn't realize I was talking about secret information, which this isn't. I went to a commercial entity that does the, scrapes the internet and then can do these link diagrams and they can see usage. They just look at the internet, where everything's coming from and they totally, it's not just one. I've seen several. Apparently it's not that hard. And it was like, okay, this is where the rush, this is Russian troll

• 1:09:49Speaker 03

  farm one. Oh my gosh, we have a new Russian troll farm. I, while I was there that day, because it just pops off the, off the screen at you. And then you can scrape out from that. You can see what messages and what mechanisms they're using. Okay. 64% Twitter, Instagram, bleh, bleh, bleh, bleh, bleh, bleh. And then you can go in now with real, you know, with, with machine learning, get that crap translated. You can kind of get the sentiment analysis and all that. You can see what they're trying to do. We can do that. Your question is, are we doing anything back to them? Don't know.

• 1:10:25Shawn Ryan?

  How many countries are involved in this? Can you say that?

• 1:10:28Speaker 03

  What's that?

• 1:10:29Shawn Ryan?

  We know Russia's, we know China's.

• 1:10:31Speaker 03

  Uh, great question. I don't know.

• 1:10:33Shawn Ryan?

  Is Iran involved?

• 1:10:35Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Throw Iran in there, throw North Korea, but they're not good at it. Yeah, I was gonna, I was thinking of some other countries, but yeah, those are the primary ones.

• 1:10:43Shawn Ryan?

  What other countries?

• 1:10:45Speaker 03

  I was thinking of some countries that you wouldn't normally think of, and I'm not gonna tell you because I didn't. Sean, sorry, I just don't need the FBI showing up at my house.

• 1:10:53Shawn Ryan?

  I get it. I get it. I don't need them showing up at my house too.

• 1:10:56Speaker 03

  You don't either, man.

• 1:10:58Shawn Ryan?

  You know, and um.

• 1:11:01Speaker 03

  What do you think of Ukraine, though? You were talking about future war, and I was kinda like, there's something there with Ukraine too, really high tech and really low tech.

• 1:11:09Shawn Ryan?

  Well, you know, with the Ukraine thing, and I wanted to bring that up after the break, but we'll talk about it now, you know.

• 1:11:22Shawn Ryan?

  I don't know. I have.

• 1:11:26Shawn Ryan?

  I have mixed feelings on it. I've, I've heard multiple different perspectives. One of the, one of the best perspectives I've heard, uh, which I had not thought of, was from this guy that was on the show a couple of months ago, Andrew Bustamante is a, uh, he's a CIA.

• 1:11:44Speaker 03

  I watched it.

• 1:11:45Shawn Ryan?

  You did? So he says we're in Ukraine basically to spin up the military industrial complex, which gives us a positive GDP. I think there's definitely some validity to that. What I don't.

• 1:12:00Shawn Ryan?

  Here's what catches me, you know, one is all the money laundering that I believe is going on there. Two, they just pegged this, what, 21-year-old National Guard who had, for some reason, a 21-year-old National Guard. For those that are listening, the National Guard is basically, if you're 21 in the National Guard, you went there to get free college money.

• 1:12:23Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:12:23Shawn Ryan?

  That's it, you know?

• 1:12:24Speaker 03

  And probably the best you're doing is you're doing gate guard and cleaning up the latrines. You're not like sitting in with the four-star generals, talking about the future of war.

• 1:12:34Shawn Ryan?

  If you really wanted to serve the country in a full capacity, then you would just go active duty. You know, but, um, and that's not a hit on any National Guardsmen, but let's, you know, you're not all in if you're in the National Guard, we'll just put it that way. Why does a 21-year-old? And the National Guard have access to top secret information. And in that, I don't know what all was in that top secret information, but one of my former colleagues at CIA, who I trust immensely, reported, came out and sifted through these, whatever was leaked,

• 1:13:17Shawn Ryan?

  said that the media has been reporting that the Ukrainians have only lost 17,500 casualties. Russia, they reported, lost, what, 70, I believe it was 75,000 casualties. That's what's being fed to the media. Now, the reality is, after the leak came out, it wasn't 17,500 casualties on the Ukrainian side. It's 200, 200,000 plus casualties on the Ukrainian side.

• 1:13:56Shawn Ryan?

  And I would be doing a disservice to say the number of Russian casualties, but it was significantly less than 75,000. I can look it up and bring it after the break. But, you know, and so we're just lying to our own people again. And that's just one, one thing that I know of that's in that, that's in that information that's been leaked. And so it just smells like corruption, you know, to me.

• 1:14:29Speaker 03

  You, like 21-year-old kid, when's the first time you saw a top secret document?

• 1:14:35Shawn Ryan?

  Well.

• 1:14:36Speaker 03

  I didn't see him for, I mean, I was in special forces for a lot of years. I don't think I saw my first top secret report. Long, long time.

• 1:14:46Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, it's, I don't know. I can't remember what was top secret and what was secret.

• 1:14:51Speaker 03

  Right. I didn't know either. I just, because you handled them all the same, right? You didn't real, it was like, don't take this home and, you know.

• 1:14:58Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, I guess what, it would have been crypto probably. Even though it wasn't doc- documented, it was probably crypto or maybe some of the mission planning stuff that we were doing when I, when we went to Afghanistan. So maybe, I don't know. It could have been 21, but it was different. I wasn't a National Guards guy, you know, showing up one weekend a month. I was a Navy SEAL going to war. And had put in, in, it, it had definitely dedicated a lot of time and effort to be able to serve at that capacity. You know, and so, I mean, that's.

• 1:15:32Speaker 03

  Do you think that stuff was really out online for months and months and we, and the US government didn't pick up on it? I think that's true.

• 1:15:40Shawn Ryan?

  What stuff?

• 1:15:41Speaker 03

  The 21 year old kid, you know, they said, they say he posted stuff on Discord or one of these chat rooms. They had their private chat room and they say that he had started posting stuff months and months ago. And then they only found out about it when somebody took, like they had their private chat group. One of the people moved it over to a bigger platform and that's when it became exposed to the rest. It, the, you know, that he got caught. Uh, I don't know if that's true or not because I'm sitting here going, how much, after Snowden and all that, how much money did we spend to clean up? You remember like, oh my gosh, you couldn't have a thumb drive anymore.

• 1:16:23Speaker 03

  You had to have 18 authentication sources. You had to have this key thing, you know? And, and, uh, we did that and we had top secret documents out.

• 1:16:37Speaker 03

  In the ether for months and months and months. I don't know.

• 1:16:40Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:41Speaker 03

  If that's true, who's accountability? Nobody, you know, you know, some poor, you know, E6 is going to get fired over this. Some junior sergeant who who signed off on the guy's CAC card so he could access the the the facility is going to get fired.

• 1:17:04Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah. I mean, what what do you think about it, though? Are we there to spin up the military industrial complex? Or are we there to cover up corruption? Or what are we doing?

• 1:17:18Speaker 03

  In Ukraine?

• 1:17:19Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:20Speaker 03

  I'm all right bleeding the Russians, to tell you the truth.

• 1:17:25Shawn Ryan?

  Are we there to bleed them of their resources?

• 1:17:27Speaker 03

  Yeah, I'm kind of, I'm all right with. And I know a lot of people like, oh, we're spending all this money. It's 30 billion. We haven't spent near that. I think we're, I think they need artillery ammunition and other things other than all these sophisticated weapon systems, which plays into like, if you don't know what to do, do what you know, send them high tech stuff. They don't need high tech stuff. They need, they need kinetic weapons, like, you know, gunpowder, explosives with, you know, artillery, old school.

• 1:17:58Speaker 03

  You need some air defense stuff, too. So there's something to that. I I agree, because that's just the way the machine works. It's just the way the machine works. Now, your question, though, is kind of little, much more nuanced than that. I I got that, like, are we just there to, you know, sell guns and stuff?

• 1:18:20Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:24Speaker 03

  Eh, I'm not there yet.

• 1:18:26Shawn Ryan?

  You're not there?

• 1:18:27Speaker 03

  I'm not there yet. I'm not saying I won't change my mind. I'm just not there yet. I still think, you know, supporting the Ukrainians, fighting the Russians. I'm I'm good with that. Good question, everybody asks, what's the end state?

• 1:18:45Speaker 03

  I don't know, uh, Russians stop fighting. And then my other thing is the Ukrainians get a vote in this. We, I get, I get tired of like, we, the United States somehow can dictate to the Ukrainians, it gets time to stop fighting now. Actually, they'll, they'll decide when that is. Yeah, that corruption, what it was one of the most corrupt countries in the world, probably still a lot going on. I don't know, man. I still, I still believe a little bit, Sean, sorry. After all we've been through, I still believe a little bit that maybe this one, maybe things will turn out better on this one. Maybe Zelensky's the real deal.

• 1:19:29Speaker 03

  Maybe, you know, you want to hope that, don't you? Don't you want to hope that this is truly like people fighting for their freedom against Russian atrocities?

• 1:19:39Shawn Ryan?

  I want to believe that, but the way I understand it is that the portion of Ukraine that is being fought over is all Russian influence. And those people that live there want to become part of Russia. Now that these new numbers are out and there's been 200,000 Ukrainians, 200,000 plus Ukrainians that are dead, I wonder what the population is of the small portion of Ukraine that Russia wants to take.

• 1:20:10Speaker 03

  Now there you go. That's, that's a pretty dark assessment of where you're going. I'm not discounting it.

• 1:20:15Shawn Ryan?

  Did 200,000 plus people just die for 25,000 people?

• 1:20:19Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:20:20Shawn Ryan?

  That don't want to be part of Ukraine anyways?

• 1:20:22Speaker 03

  Yeah, well, you know, it seems that that's, that's going to end up being the negoti- eventually when this war and they just, when this war ends, you know, and I think it's just going to be exhaustion, right? And they're not exhausted yet. They're still willing to keep fighting, you know? But eventually, don't you think that's going to be kind of, that will be the agreement? You know?

• 1:20:45Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:46Speaker 03

  I mean, but the Ukrainians get to decide and the Russians get to decide to keep fighting. We don't. That's my point. I don't know. Still trying to figure it out. You've been, you haven't gone over there. You should take the show over there.

• 1:21:00Shawn Ryan?

  I've been invited.

• 1:21:01Speaker 03

  I bet you have, yeah.

• 1:21:03Shawn Ryan?

  But, yeah, I mean, I want to keep the hope, you know, I want to keep the hope of a lot of things. I've got a nineteen month old boy I'm trying to raise and I would like to see the country not go to complete shit before, you know, but um.

• 1:21:19Shawn Ryan?

  But you, you know, it's, it's, it's, it's hard to find positivity today, Chris, you know? Everywhere I look, I hate what I see.

• 1:21:31Speaker 03

  What are we gonna do about it, Sean? You always ask me what we're gonna do about it. I told you my, my thing is like, man, I got a hell of a lot of confidence in these young people. They just need some, they need some leadership and that's, and maybe that's just easy for me to say because that's the way we were raised. That's, that was our first careers, right? It's all about leadership. I still believe, you know, and I, and there's got to, you brought up the vision of the fentanyl thing. That can be used as a rallying call for America. And I just, we have this deficit of leadership right now and then, you know, you look out there like,

• 1:22:13Speaker 03

  okay, so who could step up? I don't know, man. I'm pretty, I'm, you know, I'm hugely cynical too.

• 1:22:22Shawn Ryan?

  I don't know who's gonna step up, you know, and, and.

• 1:22:24Speaker 03

  Somebody out there.

• 1:22:26Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, I don't know if it's, I'm starting to wonder if it's even possible to bring unity to the United States because you're gonna fight the media. No matter who you are, no matter what you stand for, you know.

• 1:22:40Speaker 03

  They're gonna destroy you, man.

• 1:22:42Shawn Ryan?

  If, if the right's gonna destroy the left, the left's gonna destroy the right. And it's just this, it's just, the pendulum's just swinging farther and farther each way. And why would anybody volunteer to serve in a elected capacity or in a really public?

• 1:23:01Speaker 03

  Yes, capacity if they're going to get destroyed. Like, so all you're going to have are megalomaniacal people, narcissists and psychopaths. Which might, in my humble opinion, that's kind of what we have right now. No, I'm serious.

• 1:23:16Shawn Ryan?

  I'm with you.

• 1:23:17Speaker 03

  I am with you. What kind of person would be like, hey, um, I'm going to go ahead and run for public office. I'm going to get destroyed in the media. I'm going to get absolutely, social media is going to tear my family apart and call me names and all this stuff. And I'm going to keep doing that. And because like you, you can do so much about like, this is about the country, but then you bring your family into it. And you're like, why would I ever put my family through that? Something like that. The only people that would do that are people that are psychopaths, narcissistic, or uh, so egotistical. It's off the charts, which would put them in some sort of narcissistic category, you know? It's like, that's what worries me.

• 1:24:00Speaker 03

  We are literally destroying our seed corn. Why, why would, why would anybody serve?

• 1:24:09Speaker 03

  Just circus. And you know what, Sean, they don't give a shit. It's, it's, it's sport in DC to build people up and then just destroy them. I mean, I got to see it kind of firsthand, you know?

• 1:24:22Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:22Speaker 03

  Fortunately, I just had 73 days, although it keeps kind of going on and on, but that's all right. You know, um, like you can, faith, faith can get you only so far, right? You know, you can bring up your biblical verses all day long, but man, when, when they're destroying your family, you know, or destroying your reputation, my wife, man. It's like, the only thing we have is our reputation. That's heavy, man.

• 1:24:50Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:51Speaker 03

  You know, so, and I'm, I'm older in my life. I'm in a good place. Don't really give it, dude, I don't really care about like, oh, did you see? I, everybody like sends me the latest crazy thing from Twitter or social media, some crap, you know, like, what, like, are you guys stalking me or what? It's kind of cute, you know, like, wow, are some, I don't do it, but I get it, you know, I get it in my feeds and all. I'm like, I don't care. I literally don't care. But, you know, that's easy for me to say when you're a younger person or it's your spouse or a family member and, you know, people are like destroying you. Yeah, so I'm worried too. I totally am. That's why, okay, I'm gonna put it, I'm gonna give a plug. That's

• 1:25:36Speaker 03

  why what you're doing is important, man.

• 1:25:38Shawn Ryan?

  Thank you.

• 1:25:40Speaker 03

  I know it's a pain in the ass. Cause you get, you get your ass beat up pretty bad, too.

• 1:25:45Shawn Ryan?

  It's heavy. It's heavy conversation, you know?

• 1:25:47Speaker 03

  Yeah, you know, and then you got your boy now. So, you know, your wife, she's, she's like, whatever. Yeah, you know, paying the bills, it's good. Love you, proud of you. But then all of a sudden, can you imagine your boy gets his first cell phone, right? You're not gonna give that shit to him till he's like 12, right?

• 1:26:04Shawn Ryan?

  Oh, it'll be later than that.

• 1:26:07Speaker 03

  When are you gonna give him his cell phone?

• 1:26:08Shawn Ryan?

  I don't know. Yeah, we haven't crossed that bridge.

• 1:26:10Speaker 03

  Yeah, that'll be, that'll be a fun one, you know, instead of him going to sneak cigarettes behind the house, he'll be sneaking his, uh, his cell phone that he has stashed like in a concealment device.

• 1:26:20Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, you know, uh, I, one of the topics that I'm really diving into this year, we haven't released anything yet, but we've got, um, we've got a couple in the can that we're getting ready to release is the sex exploitation, sex trafficking piece.

• 1:26:36Speaker 03

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:26:37Shawn Ryan?

  And you know, there's 366 million videos of kids being exploited sexually in this country.

• 1:26:46Speaker 03

  That's insane.

• 1:26:46Shawn Ryan?

  Rotating around today.

• 1:26:48Speaker 03

  That's insane.

• 1:26:49Shawn Ryan?

  So I interviewed one of those guys, his name's Matt Murphy, and he said, when you give your child a phone, not only are you giving your child access to the world, but you're giving the entire world access to your child. And that really resonated with me. And I'm gonna take that very seriously when it comes to raising my kid.

• 1:27:11Speaker 03

  Yeah, well, that's good because you're gonna go off grid because that kid is gonna have so, can you imagine the pressure? In our day, what was it was like, what kind of shoes you wore, whether you had enough money to buy Levi's as opposed to Kmart, you know, jeans, that was my thing, you know, like, oh, can you afford Nikes? Oh, you know, my mom, she'd be great. Go, we're gonna go get you shoes. And we'd go to, you know, Famous Footwear or some crap. And I'd get these, you know, shoes. I'd be like, humiliated. I can't wear those, you know, now you're gonna have, now, I can't imagine younger people now, the stresses and the pressure they're under to, with, with just being connected and all that. So you're gonna tell you, that'll be good.

• 1:27:55Speaker 03

  I want to see that one. I'll come back. I'll come back in 10 years. Invite me back in 10 years if I'm still alive. And we'd be like, hey, Sean, how's it going with the cellphone for your kid? He's what? He's 11 and a half now.

• 1:28:09Speaker 03

  What do you think, man?

• 1:28:11Shawn Ryan?

  I don't think I'm gonna give it to him. I don't think I'm gonna give it to him.

• 1:28:17Speaker 03

  Did you ever get a fake driver's license?

• 1:28:19Shawn Ryan?

  Oh, yeah, definitely.

• 1:28:21Speaker 03

  Like, I got to learn, like, I'm all about, like, my, my crazy fascination is like money laundering and all this illicit activity. I don't know why. Well, there's a reason why I was involved in some stuff, you know, where we had to think about stuff like that, right? So my kids, you know, they do the, they got the fake license, right? Where they literally send off to China with a photo. They get back like, like, first rate. I was like, wow, man, that's, that's impressive. And I like the kids' tradecraft. They get like a P O. Box. It wasn't coming to our house, or they'd have it sent to somebody else. Your son will be having his, his cellphone. He'll, he'll have a burner phone.

• 1:29:06Shawn Ryan?

  I'm sure he will.

• 1:29:08Speaker 03

  You know what I'm saying?

• 1:29:09Shawn Ryan?

  I'm sure he will.

• 1:29:10Speaker 03

  Uh, good luck with that. It's, it's important. I know. I, I, I'm glad I'm out of parent, the kid raising business. I don't know how, how you do it these days. All the challenges, it's just all out there. And I, you're right about the child exploitation videos. Holy crap. I can't even imagine that.

• 1:29:29Shawn Ryan?

  It's, it's, it's, it's running rampant and nobody's talking about it. There's only 8,000 law enforcement officials throughout the entire world trying to do something about this. In the world.

• 1:29:46Speaker 03

  Horrifying.

• 1:29:47Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, there's three hundred and sixty six million videos just in this country. That's eight thousand in the world.

• 1:29:55Speaker 03

  Well, that's that's why this AI thing just bugs me is we commercialized it so much. I love that chat GPT. Hey, so can I give you a hint? We're talking about having to give public speeches and all. My party trick now is I go to chat GPT and I'll write in motivational speech for whatever. And it kicks out three paragraphs. I'll read them. They suck, but it's really funny. And I'm like, that's chat GPT. I'll give you the real speech now. Uh, but, uh, yeah, but you know, the thing with AI that worries me. And I'm like Elon Musk, thing's going to take over, like kill us all, although it could. Uh, as long as we allow, like, how much more information do we need to have?

• 1:30:38Speaker 03

  Like Facebook started as this beautiful thing that was going to connect the world. Remember it was glorious. Nothing to worry about here. Fucking tearing apart our country, screwed up elections, you name it. Like, how much more damage can that thing do? And you're you're hearing the same thing with artificial intelligence right now, right? Like, oh, it's all good. Don't worry about it. We're a mature organization. We would never. As soon as you put that money behind it, you know, that thing is going to get perverted. And we have no idea what the second, third order effects of this thing are. You brought up like all the crazy stuff online right now. Can you imagine where this thing could go? So.

• 1:31:22Shawn Ryan?

  Well, you know, it's it's going to cause a decline in population for sure. So in Japan, right now, they're way ahead of us in AI. And as far as like commercial use and stuff. And so in Japan, they're having online sexual relationships with. I mean, it's all artificial intelligence. Yes. And so what's happening is the fertility rate, the sperm count in males is dropping because you've heard the term, you're not use, you don't use it, you lose it, right? So sperm counts of males are declining.

• 1:32:03Shawn Ryan?

  Fertility rates in females declining because they have these AI sexual relationships. Now they have a declining population. That's gonna happen here. I think it's gonna take out entire industries. It's gonna, what do you need a writer for for a TV show anymore? You don't. You have chat GPT. You don't need, you can generate an image. I mean, we've all seen the images of Trump getting arrested. Uh, we've seen images of Biden.

• 1:32:32Speaker 03

  The Pope and his puffy. That was a good one.

• 1:32:34Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, we've, we've.

• 1:32:36Speaker 03

  I could have believed that one actually, but then they showed his hand. They're like, it's a fake because his hand is a little off, but they figured out how to manipulate it now too, because it always comes down to that. You can always identify off the hands, right? And they're like, oh, no, no, we, we got that now.

• 1:32:51Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah. You know, and, and we're in this age of disinformation. How, how easy would it be to create something of, I don't know, the President of the United States saying, we're going to war with China. And it was all bullshit generated off artificial intelligence. You know, I think it's going to take over the entire medical industry. They're, they're already saying that they can plug in these symptoms in your DNA into these AI things and it'll diagnose you, you know, like that, which is a, you know, partially it's a good thing, but it's gonna, why do you need doctors?

• 1:33:27Speaker 03

  Hey, so what did you find out about your dog on heartburn? You had that looked at yet?

• 1:33:32Shawn Ryan?

  I did. We're good to go. Well, I'm having surgery. I'm getting scoped. Uh, but, um, by an actual doctor, not an AI.

• 1:33:42Speaker 03

  It's only a matter of time, man.

• 1:33:43Shawn Ryan?

  But yeah, you know, it scares, it does. It scares the shit out of me. And I, and there's so many things that I'm, I'm not thinking of, you know, already, but I mean, it's going to wipe out entire industries. I mean, it's going to get to the point where I don't need to have you come down here. I can just say, hey, generate me an, an interview with Chris Miller, former Secretary of Defense.

• 1:34:05Speaker 03

  And it'll just come out crazy. It'll come out crazy talk, Sean. It'll be, it'll be funny. But can you imagine? It'll be the, it'll be all over the map.

• 1:34:16Shawn Ryan?

  Right now, you know, but it's that shit's scary.

• 1:34:20Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:34:20Shawn Ryan?

  To me.

• 1:34:21Speaker 03

  It's legit.

• 1:34:21Shawn Ryan?

  You know, and, and, and yeah, I think we definitely have uses for it, but I mean, just to your example, you know, we, we saw where social media went. It's a complete disaster. It's a dumpster fire. It's divided the entire country.

• 1:34:35Speaker 03

  Sean, that was gonna, that was gonna bring people together. It was gonna allow America to, you know, govern differently in a good way. Remember all that crap?

• 1:34:45Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:46Speaker 03

  Like, oh, and now it's like just a festering cesspool.

• 1:34:50Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah. But, but it does. It's, it scares the hell out of me now. And what do you do though? Cause all these other countries are, it's a race.

• 1:35:01Speaker 03

  It is a race.

• 1:35:02Shawn Ryan?

  And so if we don't participate in the race, then what happens?

• 1:35:07Speaker 03

  Yeah. I just think let's put in a couple of guardrails. I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm not a big fan of government regulation typically because it slows everything down, but for like public safety, this seems to be one of those things. Like Food and Drug Administration started out as a really good idea because you shouldn't be, you know, killed by polluted food, right? Uh, there's gotta be a way to put a protocol in there, but man, hey, so did you remember they had the TikTok guy up in the hill, uh, wire brushing him a couple of weeks ago?

• 1:35:40Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:41Speaker 03

  It was pretty funny. We were talking about that at home. You saw the politicians, they were really careful. Like they'd wire brush them a little bit, but my wife goes, they gotta be careful because there's a lot of the future voters that are gonna vote for them someday or against them. Love them some TikTok. And I started watching the whole thing differently, you know? And it was interesting. I was like, yeah, they're, they're kind of triangulating a little bit. Like they'll beat the, they'll kick this guy in the you know what? And then they'll have another thing. So they were saying something to all these different audiences. And I was like, yeah,

• 1:36:23Speaker 03

  you take my kids TikTok away, my son, I mean, I think he will revolt. I mean, like he will march on. It, it, it's, he'll overthrow the government. I mean, the TikTok generation, you take their TikTok away? I think we could have a problem, Sean.

• 1:36:38Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:39Speaker 03

  I just made that up, man. I was just thinking about it, though. You know, we talk about internal dissent and internal problems like that thing back to your back to your thing. The Chinese. How brilliant is that? That's like a mind control experiment. Remember Manchurian Candidate? You know, that was so junior varsity. That was so 1950s. Like, holy crap.

• 1:37:04Speaker 03

  I don't know, man.

• 1:37:05Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:08Shawn Ryan?

  Well, let's uh.

• 1:37:12Shawn Ryan?

  Let's move on to. Let's move into these energy weapons. Let's get into some positive stuff that we're making. So.

• 1:37:22Shawn Ryan?

  At breakfast this morning, you told me that you are consulting with some of these companies that are coming out of these energy weapons. Can you describe a little bit about what these are?

• 1:37:32Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, finally, you know, lasers and all that stuff, all that good stuff, but really it's high, high, high energy. I'm not a scientist. So I'm like inch deep, mile wide, but that's been my life. We're finally at a place where we can generate enough power to like use directed energy lasers, um, um, microwave stuff. And, you know, I'm. I, I actually. I'm in the drone, counter drone business because. Small businesses and I'm not like giving a shout out to my companies. That would be lame, although I'd be happy to, you know, text me.

• 1:38:12Speaker 03

  Cause I was complaining about. The military industrial complex and how we need to, it's like, it's easy to just talk shit, but maybe, you know, you should do something about it. I'll fail, but I'm going to try. To, you know, accelerate the adoption of next tech, next generation technology to defend the United States. And it's drones, man. I mean, what they're doing with drones. In Ukraine on both sides is just the start, right? It's going. It's going to whole next level. You act about, you ask like, what's the future warfare look like? It's gonna, it's gonna be a huge uncrewed unmanned thing. Right now, like, oh,

• 1:38:57Speaker 03

  DGI drone, $2,000, send it in, you know, send three of them in. Dude, we're going to a place where it's gonna be a thousand hundred dollar drones that are gonna go in. So the interest is how do you destroy swarms of cheap, uncrewed unmanned vehicles that are just swarming at you? And we're finally at a place, the laser's not the answer right now, uh, cause it, it can't get enough shots. But this high-energy microwave thing, basically, the scientists have figured

• 1:39:36Speaker 03

  out a way to basically put up a wall of energy that when anything within a microchip, an electronic circuit hits that thing, it's done, right? It's kind of like electronic EMP. You talk about EMP on some show, haven't you?

• 1:39:52Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, a couple of them.

• 1:39:53Speaker 03

  It's essentially a mini EMP type thing that doesn't like go one, what was, what was that book? One Second After, One Day After, One Year After, whatever. That's a good book.

• 1:40:06Speaker 03

  So they, there's a way to modulate it right now and to use these weapon systems. Problem comes down to energy, right? To generate that much energy requires, in the past, you know, would require like, oh yeah, the laser's this big and the truck that has the power generator's like, you know, is 18-wheeler. Getting to the point now where you can generate power rapidly and you can pulse it out. We're not there yet, but for, it's a game changer.

• 1:40:34Shawn Ryan?

  So are you saying we could create a, a wall?

• 1:40:39Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:40:40Shawn Ryan?

  Of energy?

• 1:40:41Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:40:41Shawn Ryan?

  So could we?

• 1:40:42Speaker 03

  Like some Harry Potter thing, man?

• 1:40:44Shawn Ryan?

  Do we have a wall of energy around the United States?

• 1:40:47Speaker 03

  Not yet.

• 1:40:48Shawn Ryan?

  That, is that coming?

• 1:40:50Speaker 03

  It's totally within the realm of the possible.

• 1:40:52Shawn Ryan?

  So this is?

• 1:40:53Speaker 03

  That's what I was saying about defense against offense, remember?

• 1:40:55Shawn Ryan?

  So these supersonic missiles that China's, that China's developing are?

• 1:41:03Shawn Ryan?

  If we had a wall of energy are basically obsolete already.

• 1:41:07Speaker 03

  Right. So let's go ahead and invest a lot more. Star Wars Reagan was his idea, like we'll shoot down their missiles with lasers and stuff. That was kind of an information operation because he knew that we couldn't do that right now, but we made them think we could. So they kept spending more money and we bankrupted them. That's really what happened to how the Cold War ended. So I don't want to like over promise, but we're on the verge of, you know, a breakthrough with continental defense where we can protect ourselves from incoming missiles. Yes. Which is what Reagan started. So that's why I did the offense defense thing.

• 1:41:50Speaker 03

  Like the power of the defense, I think is stronger right now. So let's, let's stop and we need to invest correctly. And so we talked about future of war. It's not going to, there are going to be times where there are mass forces going against each other, but the start of the wars are going to be very, very discreet. They're going to be, you know, cyber, who knows? Maybe you said it's already started. I'm not discounting the fact that I do think that they're probing our systems, our computer systems, our industrial control systems. Absolutely. They're doing that. I think that's public knowledge. Tell you the truth, you know, they're doing their reconnaissance phase. So that's how that shit's going to go down initially.

• 1:42:33Speaker 03

  But eventually, all that stuff's going to be, we're going to have fired all our weapons, cyber, everything else. And now it's back. What do we do now? You know, and whoever can regenerate combat power fast enough, it's like satellites are going to get taken out, right? Oops. Satellites are going to get taken out. We're going to end up launching more satellites. Chinese will launch, everybody will launch. And eventually, there are going to be no more satellites left. Cause they're, we're out of satellites. What do they, you know, it costs a lot of money. And then it's just going to be back to the old school. And that's, that's why the Ukrainian thing, like high tech with low tech. I think you're going to have this back and forth.

• 1:43:18Speaker 03

  But at the end of the day, you know, it's just going to come down to duking it out. But that's a little different than the high energy weapons we were talking about, like. Like you need to have the ability to defend for a discreet amount of time because they're going to shoot all their stuff. And then, then we have to have a different plan after that.

• 1:43:39Shawn Ryan?

  That's incredible. I had no idea we had that technology.

• 1:43:41Speaker 03

  It's coming. We have it for like very, like we went out now and got one of the Leonidas systems and Epirus. I know, I don't work for them, so I'm not getting any money for a public, you know, shout out to them. I should, I should be wearing like, shit, you know, I should be like a NASCAR guy.

• 1:44:00Shawn Ryan?

  Damn, I was gonna go buy an energy weapon, but.

• 1:44:04Speaker 03

  I should have been like a NASCAR or an F1 driver and just come in here with all these, like, they got Lockheed Martin. I'm like, hey, I'm going on the Sean Ryan show. You want me to wear your shirt?

• 1:44:13Shawn Ryan?

  I want a wall of energy around my home.

• 1:44:15Speaker 03

  I'm the same way. So yeah, it's, it's getting there. There'll be defenses against it, but we're, we're about at the point, I'm a little down on lasers and I'll get yelled at just because take a lot of power and it's not like in the movies where it's like, you gotta like have that thing on target on a key component to burn through and they can, I mean, Israelis have systems that they can do it with. But I'm, I'm like, that's a good, that's a good brochure, a good video, like in the height, in the, in the heat of combat, I'm not there yet, man. I'm not, I'm like, that's really good when you're on this perfectly bright day, conditions

• 1:44:58Speaker 03

  are perfect, temperature 62 degrees, no wind, light, you know, off to this way, fly the something directly towards me and then the laser is like, like when that thing starts doing all this, I'm not convinced. I'll get, I'll, I'll get some help with that. I'm sure I'll get some defense contractor going, oh, actually we can do that. I'm not there with lasers yet.

• 1:45:25Shawn Ryan?

  What's power in these? How accessible is the power?

• 1:45:29Speaker 03

  That's, that's gonna be the, that's the key thing is they've figured out how to uh, generate bursts of power and I'm not a scientist, I don't know. Uh, but they've, that's the key thing is they miniaturized these things from 18 wheel trailers down to like, you know, trailer. Like a small, like a trailer.

• 1:45:47Shawn Ryan?

  I wonder what they're pulling from.

• 1:45:48Speaker 03

  Sorry, I'm geeking out on you.

• 1:45:49Shawn Ryan?

  No, I love this stuff.

• 1:45:50Speaker 03

  Yeah, you need to get, get, get somebody in on that.

• 1:45:53Shawn Ryan?

  I'm trying. You got any ideas?

• 1:45:55Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:45:55Shawn Ryan?

  Connect me.

• 1:45:56Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:45:57Shawn Ryan?

  I'll get them on here.

• 1:45:58Speaker 03

  They're not paying me either. I just, you know.

• 1:46:00Shawn Ryan?

  I don't care if they are paying you.

• 1:46:02Speaker 03

  I don't care about that. All right. You gave me the green light. Hey, I got an opportunity for you for $50,000. I can get you on the show.

• 1:46:07Shawn Ryan?

  Make some money.

• 1:46:08Speaker 03

  No, I won't do, I would, I would never do that, man, to you.

• 1:46:11Shawn Ryan?

  Make some money.

• 1:46:12Speaker 03

  Somebody else, maybe.

• 1:46:14Shawn Ryan?

  But, um, well, I think that's, that's, I think that's a plus. That's, that's some good technology that's coming out. I mean, we just had that spy, well, how many spy balloons just came over? You know, maybe they got zapped, although they did come out and say that they did extract a lot of information from our military bases from it.

• 1:46:34Speaker 03

  Oh, I think, I bet you they had a windfall.

• 1:46:38Speaker 03

  What do you think?

• 1:46:40Shawn Ryan?

  I don't know what to think anymore.

• 1:46:41Speaker 03

  Man, I'll tell you what, on that one, I'm pretty black and white.

• 1:46:46Speaker 03

  Should this whole narrative like, oh, actually, we just wanted to see their capabilities and we were aware of it and we minimized exposure, all that bullshit. I think it's complete. I, I, I'm not, I don't think so. I think they stole a march on us and, uh, and they got it. They got a lot of information. I think their, their technology, our technology is awfully good. Why is, there's, even if there's half that, they got, they got some stuff.

• 1:47:15Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:47:16Speaker 03

  I don't know, but you talked about the Chinese, like, why?

• 1:47:21Speaker 03

  So they're like, oh, that happened during your, that happened during the Trump administration. I was like, I didn't know about it. And then, so we had this, everybody's, when that happened,

• 1:47:36Speaker 03

  somebody released, oh, actually, this happened three times during the Trump administration. I'm like, I'm like, I didn't know about that. I wonder if it did. So you call around and you ask people like, no, didn't have a clue, didn't have a clue. And then back to your, then the rest of the story is like, actually, we found out after,

• 1:47:57Speaker 03

  apparently, they did fly some stuff, Chinese flew some stuff over the United States during the Trump administration. I think it was down North Carolina way. Okay. But we, they didn't, we didn't know it at the time, but then when they rewind the tapes, you know, like, play us everything that's happened, that for weird anomalies that didn't get picked up initially, like, change the settings and, you know, be more finite. They rewind the tapes, they're like, oh, man, actually, this has happened before. So that was, that was kind of back to your media. Interesting. So it did, so it did happen? Yeah, they, yeah. Did we do anything about it? Didn't know about it. Cause you know, those radars are tuned, I didn't realize this. I'm not a radar expert, but I hang out with some radar experts.

• 1:48:42Speaker 03

  I didn't realize, like, all our radars are tuned for fast-moving stuff. You knew this, right? Yeah. So I didn't either. By the way, I didn't either. But when it was explained to me, I'm like, why wouldn't we see a balloon? They're like, hey, dumbass, we have these world-class radars and everything is tuned for a fast-moving

• 1:49:02Speaker 03

  vehicle, a jet, you know, whatever the case, missile, whatever the case may be. For something that moves really, really slowly, this is why drones are so effective. It's not going to get picked up because it doesn't, you know, they've got their algorithm. It doesn't bounce into the like, look at this. So since it's moving so slowly, our radar systems that are automated don't ever spike, you know, they don't ever have a warning or a trigger on it. They, you know, subsequently, they've changed the settings. But we go into radar all day. I'm, I just stayed at a Holiday Inn Express. I don't really know much about it, but kind of learning, man. Last thing. Yeah. What do you got? What do you think about all these UAPs and UFOs?

• 1:49:46Speaker 03

  Man, biggest mistake I made when I was, no. I'm not gonna say biggest mistake I made. I made bigger mistakes, but what I failed to do when I was acting secretary of defense was to ask for that briefing. What was I thinking?

• 1:50:03Shawn Ryan?

  I don't know what you were thinking.

• 1:50:05Speaker 03

  I got, I got a little overcome, like I got to overcome with events. I really wish I would have gotten that briefing. So you go in there, you're asking about, what's it like the first day? Or when Trump tells you you're gonna do this? Go over to Pentagon, you walk in, the first thing they do, they take you back to this secret room. You know, ultra-secure room, and this four-star general and his two-star, you know, assistant. They literally grab you. As soon as you walk in, you haven't even like put your bag down. It's

• 1:50:46Speaker 03

  like, come with us. Guess what they brief you on? You know, they brief you on nuclear codes, nuclear war, how that works, how you're in the chain of command for if there's a nuclear attack and how we respond. And I was like, okay, I got it. They're like, wait, wait, wait. This is a three-hour briefing. It's like, it's like, this is like two minutes in. I'm like, I got it. Like, nuclear war, if they attack us, call the president, give him advice on what to do, and either ask for approval to launch a counterattack or a

• 1:51:26Speaker 03

  response, have him, you know, pull, you know, whole process, right? I'm like, I got it. Like, ooh, shit. Then the next, then they got another book like this. Like, okay, all right. They're looking at me like I'm crazy. And I'm like, I don't. Finally, I just said, hey, listen.

• 1:51:45Speaker 03

  That's part of the job. I got it. I understand that. Did you think I was just gonna become a weepy little like, I can't do this. Like, oh, my God, this is horrifying. It's like, this is part of the job, right? I got it. I'm comfortable. We can do some exercises later, but right now, got what I need. Got this next book. It's all about, I'm going like, oh, this is, and I gave the program name. I'm like, this is about terrorism strikes in the United States. I'm like, I got that, too. I'll make the call. Don't worry. They're like, okay. I said, is there anything else? You know what I should have asked for then?

• 1:52:27Speaker 03

  UAP. I said, give me the report on the UFOs. Should have done that. I'm serious of a heart attack right now. Should have done that. And nobody volunteered to give that briefing. And I wonder why. I wonder why. Why wouldn't, why wouldn't somebody come in? Well, I think I know why. It's because they don't want other people to know. If I would have asked for it, they would have had to do it. Because I was a super user. I'm read on to everything, right? Everything. I could ask for like, and for some reason, I didn't ask for that. I left, I left the administration, you know, when the, when things changed. And they finally,

• 1:53:11Speaker 03

  the Pentagon finally released a report. Congress required a report on UFOs, UAPs, and press started calling like, hey, did you ever get briefed? And that was, that was one of those moments. I'm like, I didn't. What was I thinking, man? Should have gotten briefed on that. Where are you in the whole thing?

• 1:53:36Shawn Ryan?

  I don't know enough about it to formulate a.

• 1:53:39Speaker 03

  You think it's possible?

• 1:53:41Shawn Ryan?

  UFOs and UAPs, what do I think what's possible?

• 1:53:44Speaker 03

  That those could be generated by a life form off planet?

• 1:53:48Shawn Ryan?

  Absolutely.

• 1:53:49Speaker 03

  I'm with you, man.

• 1:53:50Shawn Ryan?

  Absolutely. I also think it could be from this planet.

• 1:53:54Speaker 03

  Oh, there's a lot of that. But here's what I saw just on the open source stuff. Like they're like, we had 241, I'm making that up, you know, 241 anomalous incidents of which 228 we have determined were the result of, you know, whether it was it was us, opposition, some something funny going on, right? I'm like, okay, you know, what about the other 13 or whatever? Like, I don't know, man.

• 1:54:26Shawn Ryan?

  Hmm.

• 1:54:28Speaker 03

  I don't know.

• 1:54:29Shawn Ryan?

  I think we're gonna know a lot more sooner than later, but um, because they seem to, they seem to keep coming around and and hit the media and it's getting a lot of attention right now. But but anyways, all right, I'm done grilling you. But um,

• 1:54:45Speaker 03

  Thanks.

• 1:54:46Shawn Ryan?

  What what do you got going on now?

• 1:54:50Speaker 03

  I'll tell you, Sean, uh, trying to stay out of the media, which is hilarious because I'm in your show, the number 10, which better be like number six by the time this thing goes live, podcast. But you know, I wrote the book and I uh, made an obligation to the publisher that I would push the book, right? That's the way you're raised. Like they paid you, you gotta work for it. Uh, but made the decision, I really need to, and I don't want to be in the public spotlight anymore. I hate it. This stuff drives me crazy. Uh, but there are three things that I want to work on, um, that I'll go public on. Uh, one is Afghan refugee stuff. We still left a lot of people behind on there.

• 1:55:31Speaker 03

  So I'll go out and do stuff on that. Uh, Veterans Affairs is the other thing. And um, the final one is Havana Syndrome, where we've had intelligence officers and special operators and diplomats and military people get hit by directed energy and um,

• 1:55:50Speaker 03

  You had Mark Polly, I can't pronounce.

• 1:55:53Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:55:53Speaker 03

  You had Mark on.

• 1:55:54Shawn Ryan?

  You know Mark?

• 1:55:55Speaker 03

  Yeah, Mark P is a better way to say it because I cannot pronounce his last name.

• 1:55:59Shawn Ryan?

  Me neither.

• 1:56:00Speaker 03

  So Mark P, so I'll go public on that.

• 1:56:04Shawn Ryan?

  What do you mean you're going, what do you think about all this?

• 1:56:07Speaker 03

  Well, because I think, I think it's bullshit and I think the government needs to come clean. It's, you know, I've been in government long enough to see how they parse their sentences. And I'm like, everybody's covering their ass right now. Just come clean with the American public. You know, these people have been attacked. You know, I was very, very skeptical, extremely skeptical. Then I met a kid who got hit. I was like, he's a, and he was one of mine.

• 1:56:34Shawn Ryan?

  Where did he get hit?

• 1:56:35Speaker 03

  Oh, I'll just say in Asia. And he described the story, like you and I, he was describing an ambush and he was one of us. So when he described it that way, I was like, okay, game on. This is legit. So I changed my whole, I was pretty skeptical at first. So I want to support that by when the government says that there's no, that this didn't happen. Or they, they get, they, they get really careful with their language now, right? We, we respect the feelings of those that think they've been injured. They were injured, so let's just come clean with it.

• 1:57:19Shawn Ryan?

  Right. I mean, we just talked about, we just talked about these energy weapons. Now they're denying it.

• 1:57:26Speaker 03

  So I'll go public on that. Veteran stuff. I'm with this organization, Special Operations Association of America. New organization, everybody's got their special ops charitable donation. All we do is lobby Capitol Hill on behalf of special operation veterans. Last year, key thing we helped with, this was a coalition effort, was to get Veterans Administration to accept the use of psychedelics to treat, and alternative therapies to treat veterans suffering from combat-related syndromes, right? Normally that takes 20 years in the Veterans Administration from this request for a new therapy to a new therapy being accepted.

• 1:58:09Speaker 03

  We hacked that, Special Operations Association of America, with a bunch of other groups hacked that. And, you know, I'm an old dude, can see that. And I'm like, if, if alternative therapies give relief to one vet, any veteran, why wouldn't we support it? You know, I don't give a crap. Man, I just don't. And that's what, then Karshi Kanabad, who's back in Stan, I told you, I went through there in 2001. That thing was a toxic waste dump. And a lot of the people that were assigned there have really been, or gone through there, have horrible health

• 1:58:53Speaker 03

  issues related. There was radiological material, toxic stuff. So really supporting that to get, to get veterans and their families. Unfortunately, now we're dealing with families because some of their loved ones have passed. You know, getting recognition and getting the support they need, which really ties back into Havana syndrome, because the government will be like, we regret if anything bad might have happened, and we recognize your pain, and we'll, you know, provide you medical therapy and medical support, which is great. I mean, but we keep talking about accountability. Like, I'm good if somebody just says up,

• 1:59:34Speaker 03

  stands up and goes, we made a mistake. We all are good. We all are good with going through Karshi Kanabad. Our nation has this dude. It's all good. No hurt feelings, man. But inherent to that promise of serving the country should be a promise from the American people that those injured in the line of duty should receive the doggone benefits and care that they require. And I know you know this. So I'm fighting really hard on that. They got this burn pit thing. You remember the burn pit legislation that the Veterans Administration now, they call presumption of.

• 2:00:15Speaker 03

  Of a syndrome, you don't have to prove it. You just have to say like, hey, I was at this location. My tent was by a burn pit. Stuff came through all night long for six months. That's enough now if you're having some illness that could be related to that exposure that you're going to get, you're going to get benefits. Unfortunately, Jon Stewart, a comedian, who is more than a comedian, I think he's a great American, was the one who had to go up there and shame Capitol Hill and our politicians to sign that damn thing. Do you remember that? I do. You know, and I'm like, Sean, I'm like, you gotta be kidding me, man. I mean, Jon Stewart helped out the people that were on the pile and in, at the World

• 2:00:57Speaker 03

  Trade Center and got them support and legislation passed. You know, I really admire the guy and I know a lot of people, you know, he's a leftist, liberal, I don't give a crap. Yeah. You know, veteran stuff's bipartisan, brother. You know that, right? So like, it took a doggone Jon Stewart to go up there and embarrass those people to do the right thing. And I know there were all these political angles. Oh, this is related to the debt ceiling. I don't, come on. So working with them really closely and then finally, man, veteran suicide, working with Chekovat out of Fort Campbell, out of Clarksville. Wonderful guy, warrant officer I worked with, Michael Carmichael, who just said enough.

• 2:01:40Speaker 03

  I don't, I think Mike must have suffered some and he said, no more, man. And he, so we're doing that. It's really cool. Learning, dude. That one, like, those nonprofits, man, those things, they take a lot of work and a lot of energy and it's really, really remarkable to see that. And what do they say, 16, 18 veterans are taking their own lives each, each day. I think that, you know, it changes on the numbers, but you know, it's too many. Let's just agree that it's too many. And, you know, back to the other things, I think they're all kind of knit together in some ways. So that's what I'm doing. That's where I want to spend my time. Got to make some money. I'm, you know, I'm, I'm in doing the drone business, trying to put my money where my mouth is in regards to transforming, you know, our national security.

• 2:02:26Speaker 03

  Love that, trying to make some cash to fund the other stuff. At the end of the day, man, it's all like, gotta make some money, make, get my family secure, and then just give it all back, baby.

• 2:02:39Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 2:02:39Speaker 03

  So, that's it. Thanks for asking.

• 2:02:41Shawn Ryan?

  My pleasure. Well, Chris, I just want to say it's an honor to have you sitting across from me and, and, and thank you for making the trip and I hope to see you again.

• 2:02:50Speaker 03

  Wasn't kidding. Thanks for what you're doing. Thanks for being an example. It's really important, man. Veterans are helping veterans and I think that's the most powerful thing we can do for each other and you're leading by example and I appreciate you.

• 2:03:04Shawn Ryan?

  Thank you.

• 2:03:05Speaker 03

  Oh, here, man, you get a coin, dude.

• 2:03:07Shawn Ryan?

  I get a coin?

• 2:03:08Speaker 03

  Yeah, you got to.

• 2:03:11Shawn Ryan?

  Thank you.

• 2:03:12Speaker 03

  Yeah, I know you got tons of them, but.

• 2:03:13Shawn Ryan?

  Oh, man.

• 2:03:14Speaker 03

  That one, if you can sell that on eBay for like $3.50, do it.

• 2:03:18Shawn Ryan?

  I will, I'll put it on eBay tonight.

• 2:03:19Speaker 03

  Yeah, I bet you'll probably get, dude, you'll probably get like 98 cents for it.

• 2:03:23Shawn Ryan?

  Man, this is, thank you. This is going in the cabinet right behind me.

• 2:03:27Speaker 03

  Thanks.

• 2:03:30Shawn Ryan?

  Incredible. Well, best of luck to you.

• 2:03:33Speaker 03

  See you in 10 years.

• 2:03:34Shawn Ryan?

  All right. Thank you.

• 2:03:35Speaker 03

  Thanks.