#277 Michael Lester - Are We the Bad Guys?

Michael T. Lester, a U. S. Naval Academy graduate and former Marine Corps combat pilot who served in Asia and the Middle East, initially believed deeply in American ideals. Over time, he experienced growing disillusionment as U. S. actions abroad often contradicted official narratives and failed to align with stated goals of promoting democracy and freedom. His book provides a non-partisan analysis, arguing that repeated harmful outcomes across administrations are systemic features driven by incentives, not mere mistakes. It outlines an imperial playbook involving regime change, sanctions, proxy wars, and economic control, while linking foreign policy to domestic narrative management that manufactures consent. Lester applies this framework to current events like Ukraine, Gaza, and Venezuela, noting increasing global skepticism toward U. S. explanations. The provocative title refers to outcomes; from a global viewpoint, the U. S. often appears as the antagonist, emphasizing that denial hinders self-correction. Motivated by the view that silence enables complicity, Lester wrote this book to encourage honest reckoning in a multipolar world. Try Mindful Sparkling Water - https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0FPT6YPXX?maas=maas_adg_1C797BA219D5E6EE94343185A49EE100_afap_abs&ref_=aa_maas&tag=maas Shawn Ryan Show Sponsors: Try Rho Nutrition today and experience the difference of Liposomal Technology. Use code SRS for 20% OFF everything at https://www.rhonutrition.com/discount/SRS Sign up at https://BetterHelp.com/srs to get 10% off. #ad Our listeners get the Harry’s Plus Trial Set for only $10 at https://www. Harrys.com/SRS #Harryspod Go to https://DRINKAG1.com/SRS for a free AG1 Flavor Sampler, AGZ Sampler, free Vitamin D3+K2, and AG1 Welcome Kit with your first subscription order, plus a 90-day money-back guarantee (limited time, while supplies last). Michael Lester Links: LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/mtlester Books - https://michaeltlester.com 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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• 0:34Shawn Ryan?

  All right, Michael, we're getting ready to start the big interview here, but we have this, we have this segment we do before the big interview called "The Hot Question." So here we go. In World War II, the trigger was visible. September 1st, 1939, and the world had a line you could point to. Today, there are, excuse me, today, there may never be a single invasion moment, because everything is being weaponized at once. Narratives, markets, technology, supply chains, and domestic division, with psychological warfare coming from outside and from within.

• 1:15Shawn Ryan?

  Excuse me. So here's the question. Are we watching the modern version of the 1930s, where pressure campaigns and propaganda set the conditions until a major war becomes unavoidable? And if so, what are the clearest World War II-era parallels you see playing out in real time right now?

• 1:34Speaker 02

  Wow. That's, that's quite the question. Um, I'm actually gonna take it back a war.

• 1:43Shawn Ryan?

  Okay.

• 1:44Speaker 02

  Uh, before World War I.

• 1:46Shawn Ryan?

  Before World War I.

• 1:47Speaker 02

  Historians would say the world was a tinderbox. It was ready to go. Right? And then you had the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand that kind of kicked everything off, right? Even more than in 1939. 1939, Hitler invaded Poland, and people were on edge. But in World War I, even more than that, there was more going on that the whole world was on edge, right? And ready to go.

• 2:15Speaker 02

  I frequently, when I'm talking to my wife, I'm saying, you know, the world right now is a tinderbox. Everybody is on the edge of their seat, waiting to see what's going to happen.

• 2:23Shawn Ryan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:24Speaker 02

  I see massive parallels to before World War I. I think we are more of a tinderbox than we were before World War II. World War II, there was still a possibility for diplomacy and some actions that could have been taken that may have forestalled a world war. World War I, everybody was so ready to jump in, that it was almost a foregone conclusion. So, having said that, yeah, I see a lot of parallels right now.

• 3:00Speaker 02

  Information is a huge area of warfare.

• 3:05Speaker 02

  The way information is disseminated, how it's disseminated, who it's disseminated to, is pitting people against each other. In the US, I think we are more divided than we've ever been. It's us versus them, and we talk at each other, instead of with each other.

• 3:24Speaker 02

  I think internationally, we are, not just us, everybody is starting to position. And for those of us who are a little bit older and played the game of Risk, where you used to like, put things on a board and figure out where you're gonna get power, and get ready, I'm seeing all of the pieces moving around, and it scares me.

• 3:51Shawn Ryan?

  What, what exactly are you seeing as far as, is pieces moving around in, in strategic locations? I mean, we've been talking about Greenland, we've been talking about Panama.

• 4:01Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 4:01Shawn Ryan?

  China, Taiwan situation, Russia, Ukraine.

• 4:04Speaker 02

  Right.

• 4:05Shawn Ryan?

  Now Venezuela.

• 4:06Speaker 02

  Right.

• 4:06Shawn Ryan?

  I don't know if that's a strategic location, other than oil.

• 4:10Speaker 02

  I think it's it's strategic not only for oil. A lot of people are saying, hey, it's oil. Right? And it is. Largest oil reserves in the world, right? It's also a positioning maneuver. It's positioning the US as we can do what we want, where we want, when we want, and we have power. And it's kind of putting everybody else on notice. I mean, I don't feel like that's a new thing. What's that? I don't feel like that's a new thing. It's not, but it's never been so overt. We're more in the open with it now. I think before we were a little more subtle. When when is before? Are we talking pre-World War I? Or are we talking? No, no, actually, I would say, yeah, it's funny, because in in my book, I detail a number of countries that we've done this to. Mm hmm.

• 4:56Speaker 02

  Um, and it's not new. We we started, you know, back in the Spanish-American War, and then in Haiti, and in Nicaragua, and in Honduras. You know, we've been doing this for a while. I feel like now it has been, because of information, the Internet is great for getting information out, but it's also great for getting selective information out, if you will. Right now, the way that things are happening, more people are aware of what's happening. And we have to be careful about the way it's being spun in the narrative.

• 5:35Speaker 02

  When we, for example, we helped Panama secede from Colombia, right? Mm hmm. Yeah, not Colombia. Yeah. Um, when we did that, how many people know? Right now, if you talk to people and say, well, Panama's always been a country, right? No, it hasn't. We helped them declare independence, and then we put warships off of the East and West Coast to make sure that they maintained it, because we wanted control of the whole canal area. That information is lost. But and even at the time, not that many people knew it, unless you read it in a newspaper somewhere. Now, we're live casting from Venezuela.

• 6:20Speaker 02

  We're live casting from Ukraine. We're live casting from Gaza. You know, the information is out there so fast and unfiltered.

• 6:32Speaker 02

  And then you've got people coming in and trying to filter it and spin to a narrative, right? I think this creates a whole different battleground, if you will. Because now, people can't just trust their government to say, "Well, you guys have the information. I'll trust you're doing the right thing." They're looking at, "Hey, I just saw this on the news. What are you doing?" Does that make sense?

• 6:59Shawn Ryan?

  That makes perfect sense. They don't know how to deal with it.

• 7:03Speaker 02

  They don't. And quite honestly, you and I have seen things in warfare. You more than I. We're broadcasting it into people's living rooms now. And I think we're causing PTSD in the human population from seeing this. And that has its own set of issues and its own set of consequences.

• 7:31Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah. What other parallels are you seeing? Was the country this, I mean, was the country this divided before World War I? Was that, is that a parallel?

• 7:51Speaker 02

  Not as much, and now we're gonna, I'm gonna skip all over. Not as much, not as divided as much as in World War I as it was prior to World War II. Remember, right before we entered World War II, before Pearl Harbor, we were very divided on whether or not we should enter the war. A lot of people were isolationist and like, "Hey, let's just stay out of it. Not our war." Right? Other people were, "No, we have to go help." Pearl Harbor kind of galvanized everyone together under one opinion that, "Hey, we gotta go. We were attacked. We're going." Right? For all the right reasons.

• 8:32Speaker 02

  I see, I haven't seen though, I think we are more divided right now than I have seen, or that I have noticed in history. Um, we're very partisan now.

• 8:45Shawn Ryan?

  Uh huh.

• 8:47Speaker 02

  I mean, I like, we're, we're gonna get deep into some things here. I kinda trace that back personally. I trace it back to mid eighties. Uh, Newt Gingrich was one of the first ones in our Congress that started looking at political parties as warfare. And started saying, you know, we have to treat this as warfare, right? We have to attack the enemy. We have to overcome, right? And he wasn't, he didn't have a monopoly on that. But that, before that, even though there were arguments in Congress, it seemed that people were more willing to negotiate and say, we both agree on the same outcome.

• 9:32Speaker 02

  We just agree on how, disagree on how we should get there. Today, I don't see that willingness. I see it as more as, those people are bad, and we hate them, and we don't wanna believe anything they say, and we're good. And then, four years later, it's like, well, those people are bad, and we don't agree with them, right? And we try and undo everything. Instead of building on what has happened before, every four years, we try and undo what they did.

• 10:05Shawn Ryan?

  Uh huh.

• 10:06Speaker 02

  Right? And you, you can't do that to move forward. I mean, think about it in business. How would a business do that? Where every time you changed a, a department head?

• 10:16Shawn Ryan?

  No, it'd be destroyed.

• 10:17Speaker 02

  They wanted to come in, yeah, I'm gonna undo everything they did.

• 10:20Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, we're, we're, I mean, even, we're talking about people moving chess pieces on the board all over the world.

• 10:26Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 10:27Shawn Ryan?

  You know? And, I mean, we just saw with Afghanistan. I mean, China's a huge threat. We gave up Bagram, super strategic location for a potential conflict with China, and we fucking gave it up. And now we got this guy in, he wants it back. You know, and it's, it's, I just, it's like we're too separate, it's like we're too...

• 10:52Shawn Ryan?

  It's like we're two different countries.

• 10:53Speaker 02

  It is.

• 10:54Shawn Ryan?

  It's like we're a schizophrenic country.

• 10:56Speaker 02

  It is. It is. And it's gotten to the point, I love debating things with people. And I am the consummate devil's advocate. Whatever you're gonna tell me, I'm gonna argue the other point. I may not believe the other point, but I want to argue it, if nothing else, than to just sharpen my own understanding. Like, I want to hear, I want to learn. I want to hear, what have you got? Right? Because that helps me understand.

• 11:27Speaker 02

  I don't see a lot of that happening today. A lot of it is just, as soon as you hear something you don't like, you just say, I don't believe that. Fake news, conspiracy theory, not true, not even gonna consider it.

• 11:44Speaker 02

  Well, what if it's not that true? You've got to at least consider it and think about it. And if there's one thing I think I've learned in life is perspective is everything. I've sat on a number of juries in my life, and it's fascinating where the prosecution comes in and they give their opening statement. And you think, oh, this, this person's guilty as sin. There's no way, right? We can just stop the trial right now, he's guilty. And then the defense attorney comes in and tells you the same thing, but using different words, you're like, oh, he's absolutely innocent. It's all how you spin it and how you approach it.

• 12:29Speaker 02

  Which a large part of my book is about. It's about how Americans live in information bubbles. Right? We don't see all of the information, and then we make choices on partial information.

• 12:43Speaker 02

  And that leads to bad choices.

• 12:44Shawn Ryan?

  I don't even know if it's possible to get all the information anymore with the way the algorithms are set up and put you in a cage.

• 12:50Speaker 02

  Right.

• 12:51Shawn Ryan?

  It would be, I mean, I just, I don't even know if it's a possibility.

• 12:55Speaker 02

  I agree.

• 12:56Shawn Ryan?

  And then you have to sift through all the bullshit, whether it's mainstream media or social media.

• 13:03Speaker 02

  And one of the techniques of keeping people confused is overloading them. They don't have time. Who has time to sift through all of this? So what you do is you find somebody that you think sifts through it, and you listen to them.

• 13:20Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 13:21Speaker 02

  Right? That's dangerous.

• 13:24Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 13:25Speaker 02

  Um, because you never reevaluate. Once you've made your decision and said, I trust this person, you don't go back and go, do I still trust this person? Right? Am I going to reevaluate? You just, you buy what they say.

• 13:38Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 13:38Speaker 02

  Right? And they have ulterior motives as well. I'm going to do a, a gratis plug, if you will. Um, I use a, an app called Ground News that I, I love. Uh, I found it. I'm always looking for a news aggregator to get as much news as I can, because I want it from different places. Ground News does that, and they, I, I love it because they say, here's a, here's a headline. Here's the bias bar. 20% of the left-wing newspapers are covering this. 50% of the right-wing are covering this. So you're going to get more right-wing coverage than left-wing.

• 14:23Speaker 02

  Then they have, this has been in 44 newspapers. Here they all are on a graph of where those newspapers generally lie. Choose which one you want to read.

• 14:37Speaker 02

  And we'll give you an overview, but you can choose and see what kind of bias you're gonna get when you read this. Interesting. I'm like, well, that's nice. And I'll typically on, on kinda hard charging issues, I'll pick the most right-wing one and the most left-wing one I can and read both articles and kinda see, okay, what are we, where are we, what's going on? Yeah. There's another site called Real News, No Bullshit. Oh, yeah. You might wanna check that one out. Yeah. It's pretty good, too. I've had the, uh, I've had him on. Yeah. So. People are trying. They are. They are trying. Even some politicians are trying. Some. Not very many.

• 15:20Speaker 02

  I, I gotta tell ya, I saw the most interesting ad the other day, and I think it was, God, I think it was Governor of Wisconsin, are they re-electing one? No idea. I forgot. But both of the candidates came on together and said, "We need to improve, here's what needs to improve." Then they both looked at each other and went, "Right," and they both went, "Yeah." And one guy said, "I think we can best improve by doing it this way." The other guy said, "I think we can best improve by doing it this way." Wow. And he said, and one guy said, "I hope you vote for me and I hope you agree." The other one said, "I hope you vote for me and hope you agree."

• 16:04Speaker 02

  And they looked at each other and said- When did this happen? And they said, "We approve this message." I'm like, "Oh, my God." Wow, holy shit. This is what politics should be. Yeah. Disagree on how you're gonna get there, but let's agree on what we need to do.

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• 18:08Shawn Ryan?

  There's a follow-up question here. Do you think we are being herded into World War III?

• 18:15Speaker 02

  Feels that way.

• 18:16Shawn Ryan?

  It sure does. Absolutely does.

• 18:19Speaker 02

  When you look at everything going on, the outlook does not look good.

• 18:30Speaker 02

  When I was a pilot, we talked about chain of events. Whenever there was a mishap, when something happened, it didn't happen in a vacuum. An event happened, but you look back and you're like, well, before that, this aircraft had a maintenance issue. The pilot had a flat tire on the way to the squadron that day, right? The other pilot had, was in a fight the night before, you know? You go back and you see a chain of events. And we were trained to start noticing those. Notice when you see a chain starting to form and break it.

• 19:14Speaker 02

  It's okay to come in and say, hey, someone else needs to take this flight because I see this happening. And if I just extrapolate, it's not going to end up in a good spot. I see a chain of events happening right now. I, it worries me. It worries me a lot because, not because the chain is forming, and I don't think I'm the only one to see it. I think a lot of people are feeling uncomfortable. The thing that worries me is that the people that should be able to break that chain are not.

• 19:49Shawn Ryan?

  Would you say they're escalating it?

• 19:51Speaker 02

  I would, actually.

• 19:53Shawn Ryan?

  How so?

• 19:54Speaker 02

  If you look at world events right now, I mean, was there a reason for Russia to invade Ukraine right now? Are we talking about bombing Iran right now? Are we toppling the government in Venezuela right now? Talking about Greenland right now? I mean, if you look back, there are so many things happening right now. It's hard not to put those together and say, it's building, it's escalating.

• 20:23Shawn Ryan?

  Mm-hmm. I'm with you. I just, I try to look for something positive and I can't find it. So, I don't know if the world had less activity 25 years ago or not because I wasn't paying attention. I was, I just wasn't old enough to give a shit. And so, I don't know, you know, if this is...

• 20:53Shawn Ryan?

  More escalation than what we've seen, you know.

• 20:57Speaker 02

  I think it is.

• 20:59Shawn Ryan?

  It feels like it.

• 20:59Speaker 02

  It does.

• 21:04Speaker 02

  When I look back, same thing, right? When you're young, you don't notice a lot of stuff going on. But you start to. And then you think back and you can go back and research and go, was there ever this much stuff going on?

• 21:20Speaker 02

  And I would say not to this degree of number and not to this intensity.

• 21:27Speaker 02

  There's a lot going on. And I.

• 21:32Speaker 02

  Something has to change. Either we end up in a world war or somebody deescalates somehow.

• 21:41Speaker 02

  But even a world war, it's not going to be the way it was. World War I and World War II were what 10, 12 years apart. Same kind of warfare, upgraded weapons a little bit, but generally speaking, same kind of warfare.

• 21:55Speaker 02

  Not today.

• 21:56Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, we're almost, it won't even look similar to the Afghanistan Iraq.

• 22:00Speaker 02

  No, no.

• 22:02Speaker 02

  I mean, I can, I can. I don't know. I'm out of the military. I don't have any access to anything. Classified. I know what was around when I was in. And if I extrapolate that.

• 22:20Speaker 02

  Wow, I can't imagine.

• 22:23Speaker 02

  You know, we see things that happen and a lot of people, us, all of us. We don't always connect the dots and say, well, if this happened here, then this could happen here. And little things, well, not little, but.

• 22:40Speaker 02

  They seem separated. Remember when New Orleans, the dike broke and flooded most of New Orleans after the hurricane, right? It was a disaster. People couldn't get food. They had no electricity. You know, started getting disease, famine, everything in a major US city, right? All an enemy has to do is turn off our power. Right, and that's could be cybersecurity. Our cybersecurity on our power system has not been upgraded to a great extent for the last 15 years.

• 23:23Speaker 02

  If I were another country that wanted to attack us, I don't need bombers, I don't need nuclear weapons, I need cyber. I need to turn off your power, I need to turn off your communication, and I need to somehow short circuit your supply system. All of those are not hard to do. So when we say World War III, I'm not seeing bombs in lines of battle, and I think it's going to be much more systemic than that, than anything else.

• 24:00Shawn Ryan?

  When I look at some of the stuff that China is saying, Russia, they don't like us being the world police, I don't like us being the world, a lot of American people don't want us to be the world police. BRICS.

• 24:18Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 24:23Shawn Ryan?

  I just, I don't know if we have any real allies. I think it would be... I think we're going to have a run for our money here, and I don't think it's going to go kinetic.

• 24:39Speaker 02

  I agree. I don't think it'll be kinetic.

• 24:41Shawn Ryan?

  I don't even know if they would... Because right now, I mean, if you think, if you look at what they're doing right now with all the propaganda, and, I mean, I think we're doing a great job of turning ourselves against each other as it is, but Russia's also doing it, China's also doing it, I'm sure there's other players involved as well. And that's, you know, they're dumping gas on us, and I just had this conversation, I can't remember with who, but...

• 25:13Shawn Ryan?

  I think we are so fragile right now as a country.

• 25:18Shawn Ryan?

  That.

• 25:21Shawn Ryan?

  They're not gonna need to cut our power. They're not gonna need, I don't think they're gonna need to do anything where there could be a trace back to them.

• 25:31Speaker 02

  Think we'll do it to ourselves.

• 25:32Shawn Ryan?

  I think we'll do it. I think they're helping us do it to ourselves and they're dumping gas on on the fuel for us to do it to ourselves. But if they can do it, if they can cause a civil war, regime change, same shit that just is going on in Iran right now.

• 25:47Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 25:47Shawn Ryan?

  If they can cause that to happen here, and we're pretty fucking close.

• 25:51Speaker 02

  We are close.

• 25:52Shawn Ryan?

  And we, I mean, look at what's going on in Minnesota, right fucking now. And probably in a lot of other cities. I think we're, we are very close. We're on the brink. It could go into civil war. It could go into regime change. A lot of things could happen. Once it does happen, though, the amount of guns and weapons in this country.

• 26:21Shawn Ryan?

  It is astronomical. Astronomically more than anything that I've ever seen, and I've been in some nasty fucking places.

• 26:29Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 26:30Shawn Ryan?

  And so if they can get that to happen, we will, we, this will become the most dangerous country in the world. Nobody's coming in here.

• 26:41Speaker 02

  I

• 26:42Shawn Ryan?

  There's no nation building.

• 26:44Speaker 02

  No.

• 26:44Shawn Ryan?

  When the US turns its, on itself.

• 26:47Speaker 02

  No.

• 26:47Shawn Ryan?

  It is fucking pure carnage everywhere you look, and everybody here is armed to the teeth.

• 26:54Speaker 02

  And I think, quite honestly, if we're honest with ourselves, we are already one of the most dangerous countries in the world. Other countries, you know, we warn the US citizens, don't go to Iran, right? Don't go to Venezuela. Don't go to wherever. Other countries are warning their citizens, don't go to the US. I mean, if you look at the number of civilians that are shot and killed every year, we're number one.

• 27:29Speaker 02

  What country has more of its citizens in prison than any other in the world? We're number one, right? I mean, if you step outside the US and you start looking in, we're not a safe place.

• 27:48Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, you, you don't even have to pull up statistics. By the way, I'm very pro-gun. I love, I am pro-two-way.

• 27:56Speaker 02

  I am too.

• 27:57Shawn Ryan?

  I don't want to give them up.

• 27:57Speaker 02

  I, I am too.

• 27:58Shawn Ryan?

  But it is a fact. And, but I mean, pretty well-traveled. We travel a lot, you know, for business. We go to other parts of the world. I mean, this county is really nice, but go to Chicago, and then go to some city overseas and tell me which one's shittier.

• 28:23Speaker 02

  What's that?

• 28:23Shawn Ryan?

  Tell me which one, which one is shittier? Which one has outdated infrastructure? Where do you feel, where do you feel like there are constantly threats around you? Where, it, it, it's a big fucking lie.

• 28:40Speaker 02

  It's funny. I, I go to Tokyo. I walk around downtown Tokyo in the middle of the night as a foreigner and feel absolutely safe. I was recently in Istanbul. Two o'clock in the morning, we decide, let's go get some food. Just walk around Istanbul, feel absolutely safe. I go to New York City. I'm looking over my shoulder every two feet. You know, I, I don't, I feel very unsafe there, right? Los Angeles, same thing. Chicago, same thing. It's weird because we have this

• 29:23Speaker 02

  American exceptionalism where we are the best. Okay. And we are, we're a great country. But we shouldn't be afraid to go out in our own cities. And if we are, we have to be honest and look ourselves in the face and say, why? It's not just a system, it's not just a symptom of a large city because other large cities in the world aren't like that. So what is it? What are we doing?

• 29:57Shawn Ryan?

  We have.

• 30:01Shawn Ryan?

  I think it's a number of things. I think it's greed.

• 30:05Shawn Ryan?

  All of our money is leaving the country. I think it is.

• 30:14Shawn Ryan?

  The

• 30:17Shawn Ryan?

  bastardization of

• 30:20Shawn Ryan?

  law enforcement. The lack of respect, not just, not just all the shit we see in the news right now. It is. I mean, we have, we have, we have destroyed trust and, and law enforcement.

• 30:34Shawn Ryan?

  So there's that. Now all these guys are too scared to do their job. Rightly so. If they make a mistake, they're probably going to pay with it with their life. Sent in prison, you know?

• 30:49Shawn Ryan?

  It's.

• 30:52Shawn Ryan?

  Those are the two things that come to my mind.

• 30:57Speaker 02

  It's a

• 30:58Shawn Ryan?

  Lack of trust in institutions, all institutions.

• 31:01Speaker 02

  All institutions, right?

• 31:05Speaker 02

  And when you look at it, all of our major institutions that make a country what it is. Our government. Our healthcare. Our education. Our law enforcement. Our social services. Our military.

• 31:24Speaker 02

  We've lost faith in almost all of them. Because of things that have happened. And how do you lose faith, right?

• 31:33Shawn Ryan?

  Well, you never see any, you never see any consequences or repercussions or anybody held accountable in any position of power. It's obvious, obviously a two-tiered system, but this isn't a fucking conspiracy anymore. It is a fucking two-tiered system.

• 31:49Speaker 02

  Without a doubt.

• 31:50Shawn Ryan?

  You know, and, and so how do you get the trust back? Well, first you have to pin somebody's ass to the wall who actually did something wrong. And these people don't have the fucking courage to do that.

• 32:00Speaker 02

  Without a doubt. You know what? And if there's, I just finished

• 32:05Speaker 02

  Assad Khan's book, Betrayal of Command.

• 32:09Speaker 02

  And, you know, he was talking about some of this, right? And if there's anything I take out of that and anything that I like to see in the US. And what I used to see in the Marine Corps, and I haven't been in the Marine Corps since 1994, right? But Marines used to be proud that they were Marines. And no matter what, if you said something, that's the way it was. If you did something wrong, at least the people I was with, you would say, yeah, my bad, I screwed up. Mm-hmm. I'll fix it.

• 32:49Speaker 02

  Or tell me what I need to do to fix it, but I screwed up, right? You don't see that a lot today. There's no ownership. No. And especially with our government, you see something happen, I'm like, just, we see what happened, we're not stupid. We see what happened. Just own up to it and tell us how you're gonna fix it. Don't blame it on everybody else. Yeah. That is the weakest, I would say, form of leadership, but it's not even leadership. That's the, that is the largest abdication of leadership, when you won't even own up to things.

• 33:34Speaker 02

  I know, we both just take a deep breath and like, what are we gonna do? Cause it's not gonna get fixed. It's not, it's entrenched now and it's systemic. And that means that there has to be a systemic change. And I don't wanna be the one that comes on your show and says, revolution, right? But things have to change. And we are, right now, whether we want to define ourselves that way or not, in the world, we're an empire. We control other countries economically, militarily, we tell them what to do and they have little choice but to comply.

• 34:18Speaker 02

  We're an empire. If you study every empire that has ever existed on the planet, they all end and they all end badly because they start believing their own lies.

• 34:32Speaker 02

  And they stop taking accountability for what they do. They do it because they can. And they get away with it because they can. And nobody ever calls them on it until you just. You can't do it anymore. It's like a Ponzi scheme. Eventually it falls. If we had leaders that took more accountability. Like I said, if something went wrong, say it went wrong. Don't try and spin it. Don't try and convince us that it was the right thing. We all see it. And I think that's one of our biggest things that has to change. Or the future will change us.

• 35:16Speaker 02

  What was the last empire? Oh, the last empire, the last empire. The last empire that fell this way. Great Britain. Great Britain. For that, you had the Spanish. Um, obviously you had things like the Ottoman Empire. You've had a couple of Chinese dynasties. About the Soviet Union. Soviet Union was never, I don't really look at them as having been a strong empire. They were a strong country. They were building a strong military and starting to challenge. But they didn't have functional.

• 35:58Speaker 02

  Um, um. They weren't functionally established in other countries to where they could control them and the people around them. I think the United States actually did a pretty good job of containing that. But you look at, look at the colonies, all the colonial stuff from the Great Britain. Right? There's a joke, what is Great Britain given to the world more than any other country? And the answer is independence days. Right? They were everywhere. And eventually you get overextended. The Roman Empire. Huge, lasted for what, 2,000 years?

• 36:39Speaker 02

  But eventually they got so big, you can't sustain it anymore. And then you get regional fighting and you don't have the power to stop that.

• 36:51Speaker 02

  Their senate started arguing amongst themselves. Not taking responsibility. It was this person, it was that person. And Rome falls.

• 37:02Speaker 02

  When you look at the parallels, they're not.

• 37:08Speaker 02

  They're not as um. Not tangential as you think. They're they're closer than you think.

• 37:16Shawn Ryan?

  I think a lot of people don't see the empire because it's not our flag. Everywhere. It's not. It's not the risk board that. Every country's one color.

• 37:25Speaker 02

  Right.

• 37:26Shawn Ryan?

  It's it's proxies.

• 37:29Speaker 02

  It is proxy. And it's also if it is us, it's not. Necessarily boots on the ground. It's economic. Right? We hold economic control where, you know, we've got. We have the top seats at the World Bank. You need help? We'll give you big loans. But when we do that, you have to do what we want you to do now. And again, a lot of people would say, well, that's just real politic, right? That's just politics. We're gonna do something for you and you have to do something back. And that's okay. Unless it goes a little too far and it's like, well. Now you're not just giving something back. We're holding you hostage. And it's not just us, by the way.

• 38:16Speaker 02

  There's a whole system of this in the world.

• 38:18Shawn Ryan?

  Of China.

• 38:19Speaker 02

  Yeah, absolutely.

• 38:20Shawn Ryan?

  China and Africa.

• 38:22Speaker 02

  Absolutely.

• 38:24Shawn Ryan?

  Space.

• 38:27Speaker 02

  There's one that. We haven't seen yet. I think there I I think whenever something happens, we're gonna see stuff that. We're just like, where did this come from?

• 38:40Shawn Ryan?

  Mm hmm.

• 38:41Speaker 02

  We didn't even see that coming.

• 38:42Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, do you think, you know, we I I had told you. You know, my theory or whatever you want to call it about. Division. You know, and that I don't think it could be kinetic. I do think there are other ways.

• 38:58Shawn Ryan?

  Do you think there could be a transfer of power that's not kinetic?

• 39:03Shawn Ryan?

  I guess driving us into civil war, revolution, regime change, whatever you want to call it.

• 39:09Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 39:10Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, that's still semi kinetic, but you know, when I'm thinking about World War III and power transfer and all this stuff, I mean, when we look at China, you brought up the power grid earlier, you know, how infiltrated they are in our power grid. We've covered that several times on the show. People are, anybody listening should be well educated on that. That could be a catalyst for a transfer of power. The supply chain, which China seems to own, that could be a transfer of power. Space race, transfer of power, AI race, transfer of power. There's four other things that could potentially lead to

• 39:52Shawn Ryan?

  maybe a peaceful transfer of power. Maybe if they just overtake us with technology. And then we, I mean, if you look at shipbuilding capacity in China, the amount of power that they are harnessing, um, I think they've overtaken us with power. We're building nuclear already. We're sending nuclear up to space, I believe. Um,

• 40:21Shawn Ryan?

  and we're still here fucking around with a 50 year old grid.

• 40:26Speaker 02

  We are, and I marvel that we spend so much money on other countries. We send so much money to other countries and I'm gonna, I'm just gonna say Israel, because they're our number one. They're a first world country with a better standard of living than we have, and we're sending them billions of dollars when our own infrastructure is crumbling. We've got veterans that are homeless. We've got bridges that are rated D, you know, on a scale of A, B, C, D, F, ready to fall.

• 41:08Shawn Ryan?

  The worst fentanyl crisis in the world.

• 41:10Speaker 02

  Right. But we're sending money to other people.

• 41:16Speaker 02

  I'm like, you know, it's time to say, hey,

• 41:20Speaker 02

  we'd like to help, but we need to take care of ourselves because if we don't, we won't be around to help. It's kind of like that in the airplane, if the oxygen mask falls, put it on yourself first before you help others.

• 41:33Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 41:34Speaker 02

  Because if you pass out, you can't help anybody. If we keep sending all of our money everywhere else and our own infrastructure crumbles, there won't be any money to send anybody else. We'll just have a collapsed infrastructure.

• 41:48Shawn Ryan?

  I was gonna bring that up as well. I mean, there's also the devaluation of the US dollar, the world reserve currency. We have BRICS actively doing that. I mean, it doesn't take a fucking genius to see how how worthless our money is becoming. I mean, just since COVID, I mean, gold was what? A thousand dollars an ounce?

• 42:05Speaker 02

  Yeah. I still remember it at 400.

• 42:07Shawn Ryan?

  You know, six, six years later, it's, what is it, like $4,300 an ounce today, I think?

• 42:13Speaker 02

  Something crazy.

• 42:15Shawn Ryan?

  Fucking four times?

• 42:17Speaker 02

  Everybody is buying it. And we took ourself off the gold standard, right? And right now, countries are buying deep into gold because it's, it's an asset. It's something you can hold. I'm not a big fan of digital currency.

• 42:35Speaker 02

  I look at it like, okay, this is just made up. Somebody decided I'm gonna have this and somebody else said, yeah, I'll, I'll believe it. And I'll assign a worth to it. But then when you look at it, ever since we went off the gold standard,

• 42:50Speaker 02

  the US dollar is a digital currency. We're just, people,

• 42:53Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 42:53Speaker 02

  People think it has value, so it does, but it has nothing behind it specifically. And we do have the country and everything, but it, it's not tied to anything.

• 43:05Speaker 02

  And it, that makes it a little more susceptible to fluctuations and changes in world economy.

• 43:15Shawn Ryan?

  You know, I didn't. Do you think we have any real allies in the world?

• 43:21Speaker 02

  No. I think we have associates. And I think we have allies of convenience. But if there was somebody where our back was up against the wall. And we said, hey, even if it. Is difficult and hurts you, you gotta come help us. I mean, come on, if you got a buddy. And your real allies, they get in a fight, you're like, I'm gonna jump in, I'm gonna get hurt. But I'm gonna help you.

• 43:45Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 43:46Speaker 02

  I don't think there's another country like that for us. And quite honestly. We're not like that for any other country. We're not willing to jump in. Unless there is something in it for us.

• 43:59Shawn Ryan?

  Okay.

• 44:00Speaker 02

  Right? I mean, we'll go do it if we're like, well, yeah, I'm gonna help you out. But. You're gonna do this for me afterwards. If you have a real ally. That's not the conversation.

• 44:14Speaker 02

  If you have a buddy that gets in a fight, you're gonna go in the fight with them. Cause they're your buddy.

• 44:18Shawn Ryan?

  Do you think anybody has a real ally?

• 44:20Speaker 02

  Any country? No, I think they're all opportunist.

• 44:25Shawn Ryan?

  You don't think Russia, China, India?

• 44:27Speaker 02

  No, I think they're opportunist.

• 44:31Speaker 02

  I think, uh. They wouldn't. Take damage to themselves to help. The other. I'm gonna go back to the buddy in a fight.

• 44:41Speaker 02

  You know? If my best friend gets in a fight, am I gonna jump in? Yeah. Is there anything in it for me? No. Right? May I get hurt? Yeah. Is a country gonna do that? And should a country do that?

• 44:55Shawn Ryan?

  I don't know. I think they would.

• 44:57Speaker 02

  You think so?

• 44:57Shawn Ryan?

  They would. I think there's enough hatred for this country in the world that when the world realizes how many of them there are versus how many of us. Just like in this country. There are about 200 people running this fucking country. There are 340 million of us.

• 45:14Speaker 02

  And look at Pakistan now has, well, India has more money than China has, or not more money, more people than China does. Do they really? They do. They, they have crossed the line. They have more, they have a larger population than China. Wow. I did not, wow. Yeah, check that out. It just happened like a year ago. Pakistan? It was, or India. See again, I gotta go check it out, but I, India or Pakistan now has more people than China. Cause I always, always thought China, billions of people. Yeah, well. Well, the one child policy didn't work out too well. Oh, that was a horrible, horrible.

• 45:56Speaker 02

  All you had to do was, you know, again, that was one of those things where you, you solve the symptom right now and create a bigger problem down the road. You've, you've heard of the, the cobra conundrum? Have you heard of this one? No. In India, they had a problem with cobras, too many cobras. So the government, rightly so, said, we need to do something. So they said, we're gonna pay a bounty for every cobra you guys bring in that's dead, we'll pay you so much. Right? Sounds good. Okay. Well, then a couple of enterprising people figured out, well, we're gonna start raising cobras.

• 46:39Speaker 02

  So they started raising them so that they could just bring in, you know, a hundred of them and get the money. Well, the government figured that out and said, yeah, we're gonna stop it. No more. No more payments for cobras. So all the people that were raising them, just let them all go. Well, now they have more cobras than they started with. So the solution to their problem actually created a bigger problem in the future because they didn't think it through. They should have put constraints on it and just said, you know, whatever, something small. They could have said, we'll pay you for everyone you bring in up to Yeah. five a year, right? But you can't bring us in a hundred and whatever.

• 47:19Speaker 02

  That whole one child thing, I mean, all you had to do is extrapolate out 18 years and go, we're gonna be hurting.

• 47:29Speaker 02

  Right? And they didn't. And now, and now, once they lifted it. A lot of the families don't want more than one because they're like, well, that's going to cost us money. Why would I do that? I'm, I'm living a good life. Yep. And their population is shrinking. There's an interesting- A lot of populations in the world shrinking right now. They are. There's a really interesting book called, uh, The Next Hundred Years. It's written back in, uh, I think 2008 or so around then, and the guy predicted, here's what's going to happen over the next hundred years.

• 48:11Speaker 02

  So far, it's not far off. But one of the most interesting things he wrote was, he said, if you take nothing else from this book, take this one fact. And that is, the rate that the population is growing is decreasing. It will cap at about 2050. So the population is still going up, but it's going up less and less. And they said, we're going to cap unless something weird happens. We're going to cap around 2050, and then the population's going to start decreasing on the planet. On the planet? On the planet.

• 48:52Speaker 02

  He says, planet-wide, the population growth, the rate of population growth planet-wide is decreasing. We're not growing as fast as we were. I mean, his projections are about 2050 will, will hit the tipping point and will actually start decreasing. He gives a lot of reasons for it. Like, uh, we all started as agrarian nations.

• 49:25Speaker 02

  And in an agrarian nation, the more people you have, the more money you can make because more people can work the fields, right, and say everything. Once we became more of an industrial nation, having more kids does not get you more money. It gives you more expense. They don't bring anything to you. And he said, because of that, family sizes have gotten smaller and smaller over the years. And we see a lot of people now with one child. Well, there's two of you, right? So you need two just to break even, three if you want the population to grow, right? And we're not seeing that. And as he's tracking this year after year after year, you can, you can see the chart,

• 50:10Speaker 02

  right? Population is growing like this, and then it just starts curving off a little bit. Once that happens, now the world population starts to be in a decline for a while. And that creates a whole new dynamic. What happens when you have more houses available than you have people?

• 50:33Shawn Ryan?

  I think about this all, I think that's gonna happen when the baby boomer generation is deceased.

• 50:38Speaker 02

  It could.

• 50:39Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, you look, you look.

• 50:40Speaker 02

  We're still building.

• 50:41Shawn Ryan?

  Florida, look at Florida.

• 50:42Speaker 02

  Big bangbusters.

• 50:43Shawn Ryan?

  It's fucking crazy.

• 50:44Speaker 02

  Right.

• 50:45Shawn Ryan?

  They're building apartment complex after apartment complex after 55 plus neighborhood, after 55 plus neighborhood. It's fucking crazy. What are, I think, I literally think about this all the time. What is, just in the country alone, what is gonna happen when the baby boomers are gone?

• 51:06Speaker 02

  Right. What happens? What happens when you've got more houses than you have people? What happens when you have more jobs?

• 51:12Shawn Ryan?

  It's a total collapse.

• 51:13Speaker 02

  That need to get done than you have people. Right? All of a sudden, you're like, well, we don't even enough, have enough people to run the machinery that we have. What do you do then? I mean, everything we've had happen on this planet, up until when that happens, has been under a growing population. We have more people than we have room for. People start fighting for more room, right? We have, we have more people than we can feed, you know, all of this stuff. What happens when the opposite is true? We have no experience with that. I can't even imagine how that's gonna look.

• 51:54Speaker 02

  What do you even fight or argue over? People? You can't go steal them and bring them in. You know? Uh, we can't press them into service like, you know, the Royal Navy did when they needed sailors.

• 52:12Speaker 02

  So what happens then? And I have no idea. That is so far beyond my event horizon vision. I can't imagine, but I can imagine it's going to be a problem.

• 52:26Shawn Ryan?

  We've not seen this.

• 52:27Speaker 02

  No, ever.

• 52:29Shawn Ryan?

  Wow.

• 52:30Speaker 02

  We see microcosms.

• 52:33Speaker 02

  I mean, the US, microcosm that comes to mind, Detroit. People moved out of Detroit. What happened? Crime shot up. Whole neighborhoods went abandoned. And when that happened, rats and cats and everything moved in, you know, and, and in order to just keep, you know, disease away, the city ends up having to go in and just bulldoze whole tracts of land.

• 53:04Shawn Ryan?

  I actually did not know that happened.

• 53:06Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 53:07Shawn Ryan?

  Wow. So it's a total reset?

• 53:10Speaker 02

  Yeah. And then, then what?

• 53:18Shawn Ryan?

  Back to the basics. I don't know. Back to hunting and gathering and I, I, I don't know.

• 53:26Speaker 02

  You know what? I mean,

• 53:29Speaker 02

  you were a SEAL, I was in the Marines. In football, as soon as things get too complicated, you always say, let's go back to the basics. What do we need? Maslow's hierarchy of needs, right? We need shelter, food, water.

• 53:45Speaker 02

  First couple of things, right? Self-actuation, whatever. But you go back to basics.

• 53:53Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 53:54Speaker 02

  I don't know what that'll mean for our country, though. What does that look like?

• 53:59Shawn Ryan?

  I think that looks like there is no more country and it's every man for themselves. That's what I think.

• 54:06Speaker 02

  Could be, could be. You do start to ask yourself, what is the purpose of a country? The purpose of a country is to provide for its people, provide for the common good, welfare, public defense. You know, we outline those in the Constitution. If that

• 54:26Shawn Ryan?

  It's a, it's a system that you trade.

• 54:29Speaker 02

  What's that?

• 54:30Shawn Ryan?

  You trade your freedom for this system that is supposed to protect you and take care of you. Now that system is

• 54:39Speaker 02

  damaged.

• 54:40Shawn Ryan?

  Gone rogue.

• 54:40Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's on life support.

• 54:43Shawn Ryan?

  And, uh, so here we are. So that's, I mean, I hate to say it like that, but no, that's, that's what a, I mean, I, what do you think a country is? That's what I think it is.

• 54:54Speaker 02

  Yeah, it, it, a country is supposed to be there to provide services for its citizens.

• 54:59Shawn Ryan?

  You're trading.

• 54:59Speaker 02

  It's supposed to, and you do, you give up.

• 55:02Shawn Ryan?

  You trade freedom for

• 55:04Speaker 02

  Right.

• 55:04Shawn Ryan?

  For

• 55:05Speaker 02

  Convenience.

• 55:06Shawn Ryan?

  Civilization.

• 55:06Speaker 02

  For safety.

• 55:08Shawn Ryan?

  Safety.

• 55:08Speaker 02

  Ah, well, it, it, you, you've heard the sayings.

• 55:11Shawn Ryan?

  A system of, of whatever, a system.

• 55:17Speaker 02

  A system that's able to do things that you can't do as an individual. I can't go out and buy grain from another country. A country can go buy grain from another country and bring it in, right? So you do trade some personal liberties for hopefully

• 55:37Speaker 02

  a system that gives you more than you could have gotten on your own. But I think human nature is if you're not getting anything back, then you start asking, why am I giving up something if I've got nothing back?

• 55:56Speaker 02

  And it's a lot of what I write about in the book. I write about systems, right? You have to look at the system and see what is it doing? Why is that system there? And is that system operating the way it should? Because if it's not, you need to either change the system or get rid of it.

• 56:17Speaker 02

  And the worst part is when you don't even see what the system's doing. I go a lot, back a lot to like George Orwell's 1984. You don't even see what's happening.

• 56:29Speaker 02

  Right? And that's the tragedy.

• 56:36Shawn Ryan?

  Well, this is gonna be a heavy interview.

• 56:39Shawn Ryan?

  What's that? This is gonna turn into a heavy interview. Yeah, well, you know. It was a good talk. Yeah. Ready to get into the big one? We're not done again?

• 56:50Shawn Ryan?

  Let's get into the big one.

• 56:54Shawn Ryan?

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• 58:21Shawn Ryan?

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• 58:28Shawn Ryan?

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• 59:11Shawn Ryan?

  Plus exclusive offers from our partners you won't find anywhere else. So subscribe to the Vigilance Elite newsletter right now.

• 59:25Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, so a mutual friend introduced us and he had told me he's got a friend that wrote a book. I get about a thousand of those a day.

• 59:34Speaker 02

  Right.

• 59:35Shawn Ryan?

  But, um, but he's mutual friend. And then when he told me the title of the book, I was like, oh, man. I've talked about, I've talked about, are we the bad guys? Several times on this show, mostly, mostly about the Iraq, Afghanistan war.

• 59:50Speaker 02

  Yep, absolutely.

• 59:51Shawn Ryan?

  But, um, but you, I'm really excited about this conversation. I think this is going to be an eye opener for a lot, a lot of people. So you wrote a book. We are the bad guys. What? I mean, what? Why did you write it?

• 1:00:11Speaker 02

  It's a great question. Uh, I get that a lot, right? And the answer is easy. I started noticing more and more to my time in the Marine Corps and when I would travel. And I think a lot of people notice this. They just don't know how to articulate it. That what we're seeing and what we're seeing happen in the world doesn't match what we're hearing. We get told one thing and then we say, yeah, I'm told this, but I'm seeing this. That doesn't make sense. And we all get this uneasy feeling, right? That something's not right.

• 1:00:50Speaker 02

  I have a brain that that can't ignore that. So I kept digging into it and digging into it and talking more. And I had more and more episodes where I would talk to people and find things out. That led me to believe, hey, you know what? In the world stage, we're not the good guys. We have this idea of ourselves that this American exceptionalism, right? We're the defenders of democracy. We are the champions of liberty and freedom. And then you talk to people from other countries and they're like, why do you think that? And unfortunately, we don't have a good answer.

• 1:01:35Speaker 02

  And I think one of the most important things in any democracy is that the people that are participating in the democracy need to know what's going on. You can't make good decisions. You can't know who to vote for. If you don't know the whole story. Mm hmm. And right now, I think we don't get the full story. So what I wanted to do was basically help people see some of the stuff they may not see. Let's talk about why we don't have the full story. Let's talk about the story you didn't hear, right? And I give examples.

• 1:02:18Speaker 02

  Um, in the introduction, I talk about Christopher Columbus. Christopher Columbus discovered America, right? He went out to find new worlds. And we love that story. And in elementary school, you hear Christopher Columbus discovered America. Great. Then in high school, you learn, well, not really. The Vikings knew about it before, right? Then you go to college and you learn, you know what? He never even set foot on the continental United States. Closest he got was the Bahamas. Right, on his fourth voyage, did you know he made four voyages? Most people don't. They just thought he went out once, he found America and he came back.

• 1:03:04Speaker 02

  Did we teach that?

• 1:03:07Speaker 02

  He was arrested and brought back to Spain in chains. Just eight years later, in 1500, he discovered America in 1492. In 1500, he was charged with brutality, with embezzling money, stealing, theft, and chained and brought back to Spain to stand charges. And Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand didn't want the big scandal, so they just pardoned him and made it go away. And died, he died eight years later, penniless. Without titles, without anything that he thought he earned. We don't teach that part. But it's important that people know it, so that they know, hey, you know what?

• 1:03:53Speaker 02

  The story we were taught is not the full story.

• 1:03:58Speaker 02

  And that's what my book does, is it starts to bring out the rest of the story. And say, here's the stuff you didn't know, and here's probably why you didn't know it. But you should know it. In order to be a good functioning person in our society.

• 1:04:14Speaker 02

  Wow, I actually didn't know that.

• 1:04:18Speaker 02

  The book's full of that. Uh, I was talking to one of your staff earlier today and telling him, look at Hawaii. Right? One of our states, Hawaii, did you know that they didn't want to be a state? Did you know that we landed Marines and had a naval vessel there and forced them? Pretty much at gunpoint, to become a state? Did you know that their queen at the time said, "I will abdicate power, but only because I don't want the United States to kill my people." I did not know that. Changes the story. Right? But it's not the story that we teach.

• 1:04:56Speaker 02

  And I go back to, uh, George Orwell's book, 1984, and he has a statement in there.

• 1:05:05Speaker 02

  He says, "Whoever controls the present, controls the past." Because they get to write the history books. And whoever controls the past, controls the future. Because that's what the kids learn.

• 1:05:21Speaker 02

  We don't teach the full past. And I think we need to, if we want to be honest with ourselves about where we are, what we're doing and how we're getting there.

• 1:05:33Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah. Wow. Let me give you an introduction here. All right.

• 1:05:41Shawn Ryan?

  Michael Lester, author of We Are The Bad Guys, which is an examination of American power. Graduate of the US Naval Academy and decorated Marine Corps combat pilot. You're also a member of Mensa with degrees in history, engineering, and leadership. I asked Jeremy what Mensa was, and then he told me. It's for people with high IQ, and I said, that's why I don't know.

• 1:06:04Speaker 02

  It's a club. It's a club.

• 1:06:06Shawn Ryan?

  But now you teach graduate-level cybersecurity courses. And you have a quote in the book. "I was proud to defend my country, show the flag, and support democracy. But I slowly started feeling that something was off." I felt that too. In the wars that I fought. And I've articulated that several times. So that really resonated with me. And before we dig into your analysis of American power, I figured we'd check on the wisdom of the crowd. So are you familiar with Polymarket?

• 1:06:43Speaker 02

  No.

• 1:06:43Shawn Ryan?

  Okay, well, Polymarket is a site and a lot of people are on there and they talk about the chances that things will or will not happen. So Polymarket says there's only a 1% chance that the US will not conduct strikes against another country before 2027. One, only a 1% chance. Somalia, on the other hand, has a 57% chance of being the country, of being the next country struck. So. Man, that's not good odds. Only a 1% chance that the US will not conduct strikes against another country before 27.

• 1:07:23Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:07:24Shawn Ryan?

  No new wars, though, right?

• 1:07:26Speaker 02

  Uh.

• 1:07:27Shawn Ryan?

  It's a rumor.

• 1:07:28Speaker 02

  Yeah, right. That's what we're told.

• 1:07:30Shawn Ryan?

  That's, that's, that's what we were told.

• 1:07:33Speaker 02

  No new wars. Must be true. Must be true. I heard it on TV.

• 1:07:36Shawn Ryan?

  It's going great. It's going real good. But, um, and then we have a, uh, we have a subscription account. It's on Patreon and, uh, there's about a hundred thousand people on there. It's quite the community. And, um, they're the reason that I get to sit here with you today. And, uh, so one of the things we do is we give them the opportunity to ask every guest a question. And this is from Dana Bowen.

• 1:08:01Shawn Ryan?

  Drawing on both your combat experience and your 20-year investigation using declassified records, what moment or discovery most fundamentally challenged your belief in America's role as a force for good? And how did that realization change the way you understand national security today?

• 1:08:20Speaker 02

  Hmm. Great question. Um, difficulty answer. I will, I will attempt to answer it. And hopefully this answer is satisfactory. I didn't have a single aha moment where I just went, oh, I see it now. Right? The fog is lifted. Here it is. It's a slow learning process of, well, this didn't make sense. And this didn't make sense. And this didn't make sense. If I start drawing the line, I'm seeing a pattern here. Right? There have

• 1:08:58Speaker 02

  been some events that are larger than others. Um, a minor event was, I was, long story, stuck in Italy without a passport, uh, and without money once. And I had to go to this hotel and I started talking to people. I speak German. I was speaking German to them because they were past the point where, um, they're in, in the, uh, in the northern area, they speak German and Italian. And then you get a little further south, they speak just Italian. I was stuck in the area where they only speak Italian. So the people I were speaking to all spoke broken German about as well as I did. And they all asked me like, where are you from?

• 1:09:43Speaker 02

  After we had been talking for a while, we're talking, laughing, joking the best we can. And then they said, where are you from? And I said, where do you think I'm from? And they said, uh, not German, you're, German's not good enough. Denmark? Like, no. They're like, Netherlands? No. We don't know. And I said, I'm from the United States. And the demeanor changed. And this was back in the late eighties. They all just went, oh. In the eighties? In the eighties, late eighties. They all just kind of went, oh, and the conversation was kind of over. Um, and I remember thinking about that, but I just thought, well, that's weird.

• 1:10:27Speaker 02

  I wonder why that is. Maybe, and of course, my own American exceptionalism, I thought, maybe they were intimidated.

• 1:10:34Speaker 02

  Later I look back and go, no, maybe it wasn't intimidation. Maybe they just looked at the United States as not being the best people to be allied with.

• 1:10:44Speaker 02

  Later, Gulf War, First Gulf War, uh, Second Gulf War, I started looking at things like, you know, we're going to go into Iraq because of weapons of mass destruction. We all knew there were no weapons of mass destruction. We had just been there. All of our weapons inspectors were telling us on the ground, hey, we're here, looking every day. They don't exist, but we went anyway. Those kind of things that you see and you say, okay, this doesn't match. The things we're doing and why we're saying we're doing them just don't match. So there is no event, there is a series of events, if that makes sense.

• 1:11:29Speaker 02

  Wow, back in the eighties. Yeah, right? That's surprising to me. It, it, I had to think back on that one, but I, I remember it now. And then in the

• 1:11:42Speaker 02

  Again, eighties, I was an exchange officer with the Japanese Navy. And everything was fine and good, you know. We're all happy, allies. Uh, but then at night. They'd take you out and they'd start doing some drinking. And start saying things and you're like, that doesn't sound like you really like us much. Kind of put up with us, maybe. And again, thinking this is our ally, but once the niceties end, there's an undercurrent of dislike.

• 1:12:24Shawn Ryan?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:12:26Speaker 02

  And you have to ask yourself then, why?

• 1:12:30Shawn Ryan?

  Probably because we bombed them after they surrendered.

• 1:12:32Speaker 02

  Right? What? Uh, I mean, you would, you would assume there would be some animosity there, right? After they surrendered, they, they had to surrender. But then we're saying, okay, they're our ally, we're, we're, we're linked with them. But it didn't look that way underneath the covers a little bit. And again, you have to ask why? Why? Was it because, okay, we defeated you in the war? Okay. What was the reason in Italy? When I go to another country, what's the reason? And they all have their reasons. And then you have to start looking at yourself and saying, is it all of them?

• 1:13:17Shawn Ryan?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:13:18Speaker 02

  Or is it me? What am I doing? What am I doing that's not building friendships? What am I doing that's causing people to dislike me?

• 1:13:26Shawn Ryan?

  Now, I agree with everything you're saying and everything that we had talked about on the hot question. What I want to ask you is, how do you decipher what is justified animosity towards the United States and just regular jealousy?

• 1:13:40Speaker 02

  It's difficult. I think justified animosity follows a pattern. It's usually not one thing either. You can be jealousy and, and say, hey, look, you've got this and that, right? We don't.

• 1:13:54Shawn Ryan?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:13:55Speaker 02

  Um, but then again, dig a little deeper. We believe people all want to be, live in America.

• 1:14:05Speaker 02

  Statistically, we don't have a better lifestyle. We have, what are we, we're seventh in life expectancy, 55 in freedom of speech, or whatever. We incarcerate more of our people than any other country on the planet. So our exceptionalism, where we think everybody wants to be us, isn't always well-founded in facts. When you start digging into that and saying, okay, is it jealousy? Or is it animosity because of what we're doing?

• 1:14:43Speaker 02

  And a lot of times, I think you find, our activities around the world are not building good friendships. We are, we use people more than help people. And we all have, I would say friends, but not really friends, acquaintances, that try to use you. But as soon as you ask them for something back, they're like, nah, I'm busy. Right? That's a problem. You make friends by being a friend. And sometimes, we don't do that.

• 1:15:20Speaker 02

  Not always, but sometimes.

• 1:15:29Shawn Ryan?

  I think a lot of countries have a justified gripe about the way the US conducts business. I don't know that I feel that way about Europe.

• 1:15:48Speaker 02

  I don't see Europe as a big issue. I think a lot of countries, I agree, I think a lot of countries have a justifiable reason for not liking us. And I think we sometimes have the choice of how to do things. And sometimes, we choose the expedient way. Hey, this is fast, and we can get this done? Like, yeah, but we leave a lot of hate and discontent in its wake. If we took a little more time and were a little more diplomatic about it, we would probably do better long-term. We tend to have a very short-term view on getting things done.

• 1:16:35Speaker 02

  How long did you spend writing this book?

• 1:16:38Speaker 02

  I've got two, I've got two answers to that. If you take my entire time that I was just processing it in my brain, 20 years.

• 1:16:49Speaker 02

  Eventually, though, everything got to a point, I'm like, I've got to start putting this down. From the time I started putting it down, it was a year and a half.

• 1:16:59Speaker 02

  And it's, it's funny, uh, it's the only book I've ever written, so far. Now I've got about three or four others in the, in the hopper that I want to get out. But I learned something about writing a book. Writing a book is like having a child.

• 1:17:16Speaker 02

  What you see when they're born is not what they become when they're 18 and they leave the house. It matures. I mean, the book started with seven chapters. But then I'm like, well, that doesn't explain this. So you know, so you add, and then you add another one, and then you're like, well, but this should be its own section. This should just talk about this, and you write a whole section, and you're like, but then that doesn't explain this.

• 1:17:47Speaker 02

  So it, it, it matures and it grows over a year and a half from what it started as, until what you finish with. And another thing I learned is you have to know when you're done. You can keep going forever, right? And all of a sudden, you've got a 4,000-page book that no one will ever look at. You know, uh, so you've got to know, like, okay, this is deep enough, we'll stop. Well, let's talk about the origin story. Okay.

• 1:18:23Speaker 02

  The origin story. How it all started? Yeah, let's talk about how it started. The, the book? Mm-hmm.

• 1:18:35Speaker 02

  Like I said, it's a number of points. I told you Italy and Japan, that I went in the military. And I was in Desert Storm. Why are we there? Well, we're there because Iraqis invaded Kuwait. Were you thinking that back then, or were you thinking that in retrospect? Well, no, at the time, we would sit there and ask, why are we here? Well, Iraq invaded Kuwait and we have a treaty with Kuwait. Okay, that makes sense. But then, sit by yourself in a desert for nine months. You do a lot of thinking. And you start thinking, well, wait a minute. Did we not see this coming? Did we not know about this?

• 1:19:20Speaker 02

  Why are we here? What's our goal? What is our goal? Right? When do we know when we're done here? Is our goal to just push them out of Kuwait? No, that wasn't it. Is our goal to invade Iraq? No. So what is the goal? The goal is to remove all of their military power. Okay, got that. Why did they invade Kuwait? Because, you know, we're just told, well, they wanted their territory. Well, then you go back and you learn, well, there was more than that. There were some, Iraq believed that Kuwait was really part of Iraq to start with.

• 1:20:03Speaker 02

  And look back, that's not untrue. There were charges that Kuwait was horizontally drilling under Iraq's borders into their oil fields. Most of that has been debunked, I believe. Then we've got some incidents where Saddam Hussein actually talked to the Arab League and others and said, hey, I've got a beef with Kuwait. We need help. You guys got to step in. And they go, no, we're not going to do that.

• 1:20:38Speaker 02

  April Glassby, who was part of our State Department, talked to Saddam Hussein, and he said, hey, you guys gotta do something. And April Glassby told him, we have no interest in Arab, Arab affairs. And we don't want to get in a war over oil. Well, Saddam Hussein took that as, US is going to stay out of it. I'm going to go in. And as soon as he goes in, the US jumps in. And it surprised Saddam Hussein. He didn't think we were going to do anything after what our State Department told him. Again, these are things that we weren't told.

• 1:21:21Speaker 02

  But when you start learning more about the system and what happened, you start saying, maybe our hands aren't as clean here as we thought. Maybe there are other issues. Then I know as a personal kind of affront, when we were in Saudi Arabia, we got word that, you know, we listened to the news like, well, Saudi Arabia is paying for us to be there. Right? And a bunch of the other pilots and I looked at each other and goes, well, then we're just mercenaries. We're not doing this for the United States. We're doing this because somebody else paid us to. That's not what I signed up for. And that's when it starts eroding some of the belief and trust.

• 1:22:06Speaker 02

  And you start, it's a process. Once that starts, once you start looking at it, you can't unsee it. And the more you look, the more you see. And the deeper you dig and the more you pull that thread, the more it unravels. That's how this started. And I kept pulling the thread. I wouldn't let go of it.

• 1:22:28Shawn Ryan?

  Well, I can tell you how it popped on my radar, because like I said, I've been talking about this for a while and, and, you know, the, the Dick Cheney connection to KBR in the Iraq war, looking for weapons of mass destruction.

• 1:22:44Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 1:22:45Shawn Ryan?

  They're way, way too fucking long.

• 1:22:47Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 1:22:50Shawn Ryan?

  Is what tipped me off, tipped me off. And then also in Afghanistan, we spent what 21, 20, 22 years.

• 1:23:02Speaker 02

  The place where empires go to die.

• 1:23:04Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah. And I mean, I was work, I was work, I worked there on the SEAL teams. I worked there when I was contracted for CIA.

• 1:23:11Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:23:13Shawn Ryan?

  For a while there.

• 1:23:18Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, I really believed in what we're doing. And then probably around,

• 1:23:23Shawn Ryan?

  I'm gonna say right around 2010 timeframe, I just, it was, the rules of engagement changed, the mission changed, everything changed and everybody was confused. Everybody was wondering what the fuck are we doing here? Why are we, this isn't doing anything? We're putting ourselves at more risk than.

• 1:23:39Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:23:40Shawn Ryan?

  And, and it seemed like the, it seemed like the administrations were working against our own people. And anyways, that's, that's, that's when I started thinking about it.

• 1:23:59Speaker 02

  And I think it's, it's funny because

• 1:24:04Speaker 02

  I was afraid when I first wrote this. I thought, I thought I'm gonna be the lone voice in the wilderness. I'm gonna get no support from writing this. And then I published it. And a lot of my classmates, I asked my classmates, I said, hey, go read this. Other people that went to the Naval Academy and served, you know, some of them, you know, 20 years, 25, 30 years. And I thought I'm gonna get ostracized for writing this. And I was shocked. I was shocked at the number of veterans, classmates and other veterans that came back and said, I've been feeling this. I've seen this. We're with you.

• 1:24:51Speaker 02

  It's not just me seeing it.

• 1:24:52Shawn Ryan?

  Uh huh.

• 1:24:53Speaker 02

  So many veterans are seeing, and they all have basically the same story. We all came in believing in the country. Still believe in the country, but believing in the mission. Believing on why we're there. But after you're there for a while, you're like, this, this isn't what they said.

• 1:25:12Speaker 02

  This is not what I signed up for. And the rules, the things you're telling me to do are, are, this isn't right.

• 1:25:24Shawn Ryan?

  It makes you wonder how much of what you think you know is a lie?

• 1:25:29Speaker 02

  Uh huh. It does.

• 1:25:33Shawn Ryan?

  How much do you think you know is a lie?

• 1:25:36Speaker 02

  Absolutely. And why were you told what you were told? What's, what's the agenda?

• 1:25:43Shawn Ryan?

  Uh huh.

• 1:25:43Speaker 02

  What is the goal? And again, I write about this, we, we have these information bubbles and we are fed information in a certain way. So that we believe certain things. And it, it, it's also done in a way that people dig in, they get entrenched. Where you can't challenge what they think they know. Right? Because they're, I, I know this is true. I'm like, hmm, maybe not. You're like, don't tell me maybe not, that's fake news. Right? Or I don't believe that. Or whatever, whatever they want to say to shut down the conversation. Rarely do we have the conversation where people say, you don't think that's true?

• 1:26:27Speaker 02

  Why? What, give me some facts, talk to me, tell me what you think. We don't get a lot of that anymore. We just get digging the heels in and pushing back. And I think it's important for us to ask why.

• 1:26:43Speaker 02

  We should be able to articulate why we have a certain thought and we should actually look forward to people questioning it. If I believe in something, I want people to question me. I think I'm right.

• 1:26:59Speaker 02

  If I'm not, show me that I'm not, because I don't want to be wrong.

• 1:27:03Shawn Ryan?

  Uh huh.

• 1:27:04Speaker 02

  And I want to be able to articulate to you, and if I can't do that, then that's, then it's more of a feeling than something that I know.

• 1:27:13Shawn Ryan?

  People are, people refuse to poke holes in their own, in their own stories these days.

• 1:27:18Speaker 02

  It's comfortable, it's comfortable to believe something and then just stay within that comfort area. We fall into confirmation bias, right? I'm gonna look up information that confirms what I already think I know. What about looking up information that refutes it? No, I don't wanna do that. That would require a lot of effort and thought, and I'm comfortable just reevaluating or revalidating over and over again what I think I already know. It's comfort.

• 1:27:50Shawn Ryan?

  Well, it's destroying us.

• 1:27:53Speaker 02

  It is, it is.

• 1:27:58Speaker 02

  And I've said it many times, the most important part of a democracy is an informed electorate. You can't make good choices if you don't have the right information.

• 1:28:10Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, it's impossible to get, are you talking about voting?

• 1:28:13Speaker 02

  Voting.

• 1:28:14Shawn Ryan?

  How, how would you get the right information? I mean, I've sat here for the past two years.

• 1:28:20Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:28:20Shawn Ryan?

  And probably interviewed about half of the current administration.

• 1:28:23Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:28:24Shawn Ryan?

  I've interviewed a shit ton of politicians.

• 1:28:26Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:28:28Shawn Ryan?

  And you know, nothing they say they're going to do happens. For example, no new wars. Here we are, one fucking year in.

• 1:28:44Shawn Ryan?

  Venezuela, Ukraine, Iran, Gaza.

• 1:28:48Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:28:49Shawn Ryan?

  Like,

• 1:28:51Shawn Ryan?

  the fuck is this? And, oh, it's told the Ukraine-Russian war will be done before he ever takes office.

• 1:28:59Speaker 02

  Right, right.

• 1:29:01Shawn Ryan?

  Here we are.

• 1:29:02Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 1:29:04Speaker 02

  So you have to ask yourself.

• 1:29:05Shawn Ryan?

  Make it go Epstein files.

• 1:29:07Speaker 02

  Right. We're gonna release them all.

• 1:29:09Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:10Speaker 02

  And then what was it?

• 1:29:10Shawn Ryan?

  With black lines over everything.

• 1:29:13Speaker 02

  Oh.

• 1:29:13Shawn Ryan?

  In less than 1%.

• 1:29:15Speaker 02

  I, I, I love the, uh, at one point in time, we're gonna release the Epstein files. Then it was like, well, they don't actually exist.

• 1:29:23Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:23Speaker 02

  Well, you just last week said they were on your desk.

• 1:29:26Shawn Ryan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:29:26Speaker 02

  Well, yeah, but.

• 1:29:29Shawn Ryan?

  Had a bunch of influencers go to the high, influencers go to the White House and hold up a bunch of binders.

• 1:29:34Speaker 02

  Right?

• 1:29:36Speaker 02

  And I, people ask me, what do you think about the Epstein files? I'm like, not event at this point in time. There's been so much water under the bridge.

• 1:29:43Shawn Ryan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:29:44Speaker 02

  I can't believe that even if they released everything they have, I can't believe that's it anymore.

• 1:29:49Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:50Speaker 02

  It's, I can't believe that's it. I can't believe, hell, I can go on Photoshop and make whatever you want. Right?

• 1:29:57Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:58Speaker 02

  Tell me that all of that is exactly what it was, hasn't been changed. And yeah, they'll redact a bunch of stuff so we feel like, you know, it's original, but.

• 1:30:08Shawn Ryan?

  They, they, they redacted all of the abusers.

• 1:30:10Speaker 02

  Rights, right?

• 1:30:12Shawn Ryan?

  They redacted all of the abusers' names.

• 1:30:14Speaker 02

  Yeah, right. I, I just.

• 1:30:19Speaker 02

  It's.

• 1:30:19Shawn Ryan?

  It is definitely the most transparent administration of all time.

• 1:30:23Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:30:24Shawn Ryan?

  That's for damn sure.

• 1:30:26Shawn Ryan?

  But, but, but, but, but the point is, you know, whatever, being hard on this administration, I don't think the last one was any better, probably worse. But, um, point being, they're all just fucking liars. They are legitimately all just fucking liars. So how would the American people even formulate an edg- the, the, the, the, the opinion or, or their decision would be formulated off complete bullshit anyways, because everybody in office is a lying piece of shit.

• 1:30:58Speaker 02

  For the most part. But then you have to ask yourself why? So, do you believe that everybody before they went into government was just a liar to start with? Is that just politics? If you go into politics, are you a liar? And lie.

• 1:31:13Shawn Ryan?

  Not necessarily, but I do think that it does have a certain draw.

• 1:31:17Speaker 02

  It does. It does. I think that's true. I think we also have to look at.

• 1:31:26Speaker 02

  Incentives, we incentivize the wrong things. If we look at the same thing happening, administration after administration after administration, regardless of who's in power, and it's always the same, then you have to say, okay, it's not the administration. It's not the Republicans, it's not the Democrats, it's not the Libertarians. They all do the same thing. Then it's the system. Something's wrong with the system. And then you'd look at the system and say, what's wrong with it? And usually it's... The system is set up to incentivize money,

• 1:32:08Speaker 02

  not necessarily the outcome that the system should have. I'm going to use a, hopefully, a fairly nonpartisan example. Look at our education system. We spend more money per student than any other country in the world. So you would think we would have the best rankings in education. We're what, fifth in math, 10th in reading, and 25th in science? Or something like that. Those, I may have mixed up which ones are which, but it's 515 and 25 right now. But we spend more than any other country. If we cut funding, we're still 5th, 10th, and 25th.

• 1:32:51Speaker 02

  Money is not the issue. But we're obviously incentivizing the wrong things. We're not incentivizing learning. So what are we incentivizing? Well, we're the only country in the world that has education for profit. What are we incentivizing? We're incentivizing profits. Well, if we incentivize profits, then you don't care about grades. And the results show that. So it's not that people say, hey, we need better education. It's like our system is set up wrong. Change the system if you want a different outcome. Don't throw more money at it, don't cut money from it.

• 1:33:34Speaker 02

  Those are great talking points for an election, but they have zero effect on the outcome, because the system is still the same. And that's just education. And we can talk about every other system we have in the US, and they all follow the same kind of pattern.

• 1:33:54Speaker 02

  How about the power system?

• 1:33:58Speaker 02

  Power grid? I think it's old. It's fallen apart. I think it's

• 1:34:08Speaker 02

  not as secure as we would want. Uh, being in cybersecurity, I look at that, obviously. It hasn't been updated in in a meaningful way. You know, I'm sure somebody in power's distribution system say, oh no, we updated this. Yeah, okay. In a meaningful way, have we kept up with what we can do with cybersecurity? No. And I know. Not even close. We haven't. Did we update the software on the servers? Yeah, we did. Are we still running servers from the seventies? Yeah, we are. Right? You think there's no other? I mean, China produced the Transformers. Right?

• 1:34:55Speaker 02

  Yeah, our, our power distribution system, I think, is precarious. Yep.

• 1:35:04Speaker 02

  Yeah, without a doubt. Yep. And we were talking a little earlier.

• 1:35:10Speaker 02

  If something happens in the future. Future conflict. Uh, kinetics won't be that important.

• 1:35:21Speaker 02

  If you can take out our power, take out our food distribution systems, water. I mean, who can fight, who can do anything if you're hungry, hungry, dehydrated and have no electricity. It's hard to fight.

• 1:35:37Speaker 02

  Can't even pump gasoline, might have it, can't pump it, no power.

• 1:35:45Shawn Ryan?

  Just like we talked about in the hot question, then we just turn on each other.

• 1:35:48Speaker 02

  Yeah. Back to basics, right?

• 1:35:51Shawn Ryan?

  Uh huh.

• 1:35:51Speaker 02

  Uh, could be. I see a lot of, see a lot of people that are uneasy today.

• 1:36:01Speaker 02

  More so than I've seen before, because they all feel like something's gonna happen. If nothing else, they feel like we can't continue. Right? That this can't stay like this.

• 1:36:15Speaker 02

  And most of us that have that uneasy feeling, though,

• 1:36:20Speaker 02

  we don't know what's gonna happen. Like, what is gonna happen? I, I don't know. Um, maybe people that are a little bit closer to the centers of power do. I'm not sure what's gonna happen, but I do know it, it can't continue like this. Something's gonna happen.

• 1:36:40Shawn Ryan?

  Do you feel like that's something sooner than later?

• 1:36:44Speaker 02

  Constantly. Uh, I get nervous. I keep feeling like something's coming. I think a lot of Americans do. When I talk to people even around where I live,

• 1:37:00Speaker 02

  um, a lot of people feel uneasy.

• 1:37:05Speaker 02

  It's not a good, hey, everything's, you know, rainbows and we're out drinking margaritas, having fun. Do for a little bit to try and, you know, get away from it, but deep down, people are concerned.

• 1:37:19Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, I don't know anybody that, um,

• 1:37:23Shawn Ryan?

  has no concern.

• 1:37:25Speaker 02

  Right? You don't know anybody that's just saying, oh, things are good. Don't know what you're talking about.

• 1:37:30Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah. Yeah.

• 1:37:32Speaker 02

  Everybody's a little concerned right now. Everybody's a little at ease, un, at, at, unat ease.

• 1:37:37Shawn Ryan?

  So where do we start with we are the bad guys? Where do you want to start?

• 1:37:42Speaker 02

  Where do we want to start?

• 1:37:46Speaker 02

  You know, I wrote the book and my, my first editor was my wife. And she read through it, gave me all sorts of pointers and said, "Might want to tone this down, might want to do a little better here. Don't need to go in depth here, missed a comma," you know, all that sort of stuff. But it's funny, when she got done, she said, "You know what this is? This is your love letter to the United States."

• 1:38:21Speaker 02

  I said, "You know, not the way I thought of it." "What do you mean?" She goes, "Well, you're, you're pointing out what has to change." And I thought about that a little bit more. And I thought, "You know what, if you love somebody, and they're doing something destructive, they're ruining their life. They're drinking too much, they're doing drugs, whatever, whatever it is, they're gaming, whatever, whatever it is they're doing, it's starting to affect their life. If you don't talk to them about it, that's not a kindness, that's avoidance. And avoidance is not helping them. If you truly love them, you can confront them and say, "Hey, look, I've noticed this happening.

• 1:39:07Speaker 02

  And you need to start noticing it too, because we have to make changes, because I don't like where this is going to end up."

• 1:39:17Speaker 02

  That's what this book is about. This book is about saying, "Things have to change, and maybe you're not even aware of why. Maybe you're so involved, you don't even see it. I'm going to try to help you see it. And I'm going to do that by..."

• 1:39:42Speaker 02

  Giving you examples of things that have happened that we've done in other countries. So that you know why other countries look at us like you're not the good guys. I'm gonna cover, this is why you think that. Not your fault. We live in information bubbles. And I cover, you know, one of the first things, you know, when you're a SEAL, when you're talking to somebody, when you're interrogating somebody, you want information, right? One of the first things you do is isolate them. You don't want them to have other information and then you feed them the information you want. And then you reinforce it. We do that to ourselves.

• 1:40:26Speaker 02

  I mean, first, we have one country to the north and one country to the south. We don't get around to a lot of other countries, so we are already isolated. And then through algorithms, through the internet, through our news channels, we isolate ourselves even more. Well, when all you get is one piece of information,

• 1:40:47Speaker 02

  I can tell you what your opinion is gonna be. So let's get more pieces of information, let's get more visibility, and let's start having a discussion.

• 1:40:59Speaker 02

  That's how this came about.

• 1:41:04Speaker 02

  So I had the conversation all the time with people verbally. Finally, I just said, you know what? I've gotta get this down.

• 1:41:11Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:13Shawn Ryan?

  What are some things we've done in other countries that?

• 1:41:18Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:41:21Speaker 02

  There are some things that are just, it's, you and I talked about some, it's amazing the things that we don't know.

• 1:41:31Speaker 02

  I start to point them out to people and they look at me like, huh? Are you crazy? Right? Uh, I'm like, no, it's all documented. I have to point out too, I've got 448 pages, 120 some are footnotes. Cause I would tell people all the time, don't believe a word I say. Don't believe me, please, for God's sakes, go research it yourself. Here's the footnotes. Here's the documents. And no, the footnotes aren't Wikipedia. Right? Here are the actual documents, go read them, validate this for yourself. I mention, I use the example because a lot of people can relate to it and it's close to home.

• 1:42:16Speaker 02

  Hawaii. Hawaii did not choose and want to be a state. We forced them to be a state at gunpoint. We landed Marines and we had Navy ships. And essentially told them, be a state or we're gonna come in and occupy you and make you a state anyway. And the Queen at the time of Hawaii said, "I will abdicate my rule under protest purely to keep the Americans from killing my people." How many people know that about Hawaii? We just look at it as, "Oh, it's a beautiful place. We get to go there and have lays and, you know, drink margaritas on the beach." But we don't look at what we did to get it.

• 1:43:01Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm. Panama. We're talking about, we should take back the Panama Canal. Not ours to take back. But Panama wasn't even a country. It was part of Colombia. And then our CIA went down and helped some dissidents say, "You know, shouldn't you guys be your own country? We would support you if you did." And we helped them form a little mini-revolution. And one day, they said, "We're now an independent country called Panama." We immediately put two warships, one on the east coast, one on the west coast, off the

• 1:43:45Speaker 02

  coast and said, "Colombia, if you try to take this back, you're gonna fight us. They're independent now." We gave them their constitution, said, "You guys are a new country. You need a constitution. Here's one. We already wrote it for you." Oh, by the way, yeah, it contains some things in there that says, "We reserve the right to come in anytime we think things aren't going the way we want it to, but pay that no mind." It was signed by...

• 1:44:18Speaker 02

  Forgot their names. It was signed without a single representative from Panama. Are you kidding? It was signed with a French person and an American. Before the Panamanian, Panamanians even knew it. We're like, yep, we already signed a treaty. You're good. You're a country.

• 1:44:38Speaker 02

  Here's your, here's your documents to run your country, right? Here's your constitution. Does that make us the good guys? No. If you looked at any other country, all the other countries around there. They would look at that and go. This isn't a friend. This is somebody we need to be afraid of.

• 1:44:59Speaker 02

  Right? We did similar things in Honduras. We did similar things in Nicaragua. You know, we had the whole Iran contra affair.

• 1:45:13Speaker 02

  Can look back at that, you know, we were selling weapons illegally. Under our own laws. And then funneling funds. You know, to the Contras. Mm hmm. Does that make us the good guys? Hmm, no. No.

• 1:45:31Shawn Ryan?

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• 1:47:26Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, with that being said, I'm just curious of your opinion. I mean, we're not the only ones doing this. No. China's doing this. No. Russia's doing this. Yeah.

• 1:47:38Shawn Ryan?

  Especially China, all over Africa, South America,

• 1:47:45Shawn Ryan?

  Taiwan.

• 1:47:51Shawn Ryan?

  While I do not disagree with you, are we the bad guys? I would think we are.

• 1:48:01Shawn Ryan?

  What should an empire be doing?

• 1:48:04Speaker 02

  Well, first, I love that you use that term. We are an empire. And you have to ask yourself, what does an empire do? And what constitutes an empire? An empire is a country that controls other countries. And we are one. We control a lot of the world. Maybe not militarily always, but economically, socially. We have more control in the world right now. I would argue, the United States has more control in the world than any other country. Is China a superpower? Yes. Is Russia a superpower? Yes.

• 1:48:49Speaker 02

  What makes us different? We spend 10 times as much on our military. I'm sorry, wrong statement. We spend more on our military than the next 10 countries combined. That includes China and Russia. China, Russia, and the next eight countries, we spend more than them. We are the biggest power on the planet, and we can coerce them. You say, you know, other countries do this too. They do. Not to the extent we do. And we are paying a huge price for that.

• 1:49:27Speaker 02

  That $1 trillion could go to fixing our bridges and our power systems so that we're not weak. Are we being? I think there's a real scenario where our power system could get attacked. We're spending money on kinetic weapons and new bombs. You know, and now we're talking about making a new... Trump class destroyer, right, or not destroyer, battleship, right? We phased out battleships for a reason. We don't need battleships. Especially in the age of drones and satellites and everything.

• 1:50:06Shawn Ryan?

  Autonomous.

• 1:50:06Speaker 02

  It's a sitting target. I mean, it just makes no sense.

• 1:50:09Shawn Ryan?

  We're making another fucking battleship now?

• 1:50:11Speaker 02

  Or you, have you not heard this?

• 1:50:12Shawn Ryan?

  What's this one gonna be named?

• 1:50:14Speaker 02

  The Trump class battleship.

• 1:50:16Shawn Ryan?

  Of course, it's gonna be fucking named the Trump class.

• 1:50:18Speaker 02

  The Trump class battleship. It's gonna be the biggest, best battleship there ever was.

• 1:50:23Shawn Ryan?

  Most beautiful battleship.

• 1:50:23Speaker 02

  Beautiful battleship. Yep.

• 1:50:27Shawn Ryan?

  While everybody else is making autonomous vehicles, we're making fucking battleships.

• 1:50:31Speaker 02

  We've, we figured out-

• 1:50:33Shawn Ryan?

  So we can slap a fucking name on it.

• 1:50:35Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:50:36Shawn Ryan?

  Amazing.

• 1:50:36Speaker 02

  We figured out that, that swarming and multiple, you know, hundreds if not thousands of small drones are harder to combat than one centralized threat. So now we're gonna build a new battleship? That makes no sense at all. Right? And, and this is kinda where we're, we're going down the wrong directions. But I'm, I'm getting off topic. Uh, other, other countries do this. But we're the biggest, baddest ones out there. We're doing it the most.

• 1:51:15Speaker 02

  We have 740 some military bases around the world. 740. There's only 198 recognized countries by the UN. Got 740 bases manned by Americans out there. No other country comes close to that. One of our biggest enemies right now is Iran, right? Didn't used to be, by the way. Used to be our only friend in the Middle East. We can go into that. How many foreign bases does Iran have?

• 1:51:50Shawn Ryan?

  Zero.

• 1:51:51Speaker 02

  One, small little outpost in Eritrea. Eritrea, one little outpost. We've got 740 some bases. How many does Russia have? I, I don't know the number, but it's, I, it's, it's under a hundred. China? How many bases around the world? Nowhere near. I mean, so, so we are acting like an empire.

• 1:52:19Speaker 02

  And then you have to, the thing that frightens me is not that we're an empire. Thing that frightens me is that historically, every empire has eventually fallen. And it falls because it starts, it falls because of maintenance. People don't attack it. It can't maintain itself any longer. It gets so spread out and tries to do so much. And it's, people aren't supporting it. Right? And when people stop supporting it, then you have to fight them for it. And that takes energy away from your populace.

• 1:52:59Speaker 02

  So now, instead of, again, fixing our infrastructure, we're sending money overseas to other countries.

• 1:53:07Shawn Ryan?

  Why are we, why, why do we send so much money overseas?

• 1:53:10Speaker 02

  I have no idea.

• 1:53:12Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, I, the only thing I can think of is greed.

• 1:53:15Speaker 02

  The only thing you can think of is?

• 1:53:17Shawn Ryan?

  Is greed.

• 1:53:19Speaker 02

  Greed and control. Honestly, I, I, here, here we go. Ready? I think our country is occupied. I think most of our politicians are beholden to other forces.

• 1:53:38Shawn Ryan?

  Do you think they even know that?

• 1:53:39Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah, they do.

• 1:53:41Shawn Ryan?

  All of them?

• 1:53:42Speaker 02

  Uh, it would be hard not to.

• 1:53:46Shawn Ryan?

  Do you feel like the caliber of person that's going into politi- politics is lower caliber, caliber than before?

• 1:53:56Speaker 02

  I think they're opportunists.

• 1:53:59Shawn Ryan?

  You think they go in as opportunists?

• 1:54:01Speaker 02

  I think they, well, I think many of them do. I think many of them go in with all the right reasons and then get corrupted. I have a friend in, uh, Atlanta that is running. And I, he asked, you know, hey, I'm running, right? I'm the challenger. I can use funding. Can you help out? Right? And I said, I'd love to, but I said, as a friend, I, I would hate to see you win. Because if you win and you go there, you will become dirty. You can't get around it.

• 1:54:38Speaker 02

  You will need to make deals with the devil. And it starts with a small one, and then a bigger one, and then a bigger one, and eventually you get four or five years down the road, you're like,

• 1:54:49Speaker 02

  I'm bought. I can't help it. I did it for all the right reasons. But now, I owe this person that because I agreed to that, and I owe this person this because I agreed to this.

• 1:55:04Speaker 02

  And I don't think either of those are right. But I have no choice.

• 1:55:08Shawn Ryan?

  Trapped.

• 1:55:09Speaker 02

  You're trapped.

• 1:55:13Shawn Ryan?

  I think that certain people are propped up because they would be very easy to manipulate. I see, I think you see that all over.

• 1:55:22Speaker 02

  And let's not talk about the Epstein files here, right? I'm sure there was none of that in there.

• 1:55:26Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, yeah. It, um, but I think that some of these freshman congressmen, and probably senators as well, I think that they have been hand-selected because they are young and stupid.

• 1:55:47Speaker 02

  They're young. They're impressionable. They need funds. And just so happens, there's a huge PAC out there that's ready to give them everything they need to win because they want their support.

• 1:56:03Shawn Ryan?

  Who do you think we're occupied by?

• 1:56:05Speaker 02

  A PAC.

• 1:56:09Shawn Ryan?

  A lot of people think that.

• 1:56:11Speaker 02

  I, the evidence is there. The evidence is all there. It's

• 1:56:21Speaker 02

  it's, come on. We spend eight, we send eighteen billion dollars a year to Israel. Why? Just ask the question, what do we get out of it?

• 1:56:33Shawn Ryan?

  Nothing.

• 1:56:34Speaker 02

  We get nothing.

• 1:56:37Speaker 02

  Are we doing humanitarian work? No, they're charged with genocide. They're killing off Palestinians.

• 1:56:46Speaker 02

  Are we helping them survive? Well, they've got a higher standard of living than we do, a longer lifespan than we do. Free education, free housing, free healthcare. But we're sending them money. Why? Ask yourself why a US congressman can wear an Israeli military uniform in congressional chambers. I would think that would be an act of treason. But they did. Nobody said anything. Ask why the Israeli prime minister can bypass the president, fly directly in and speak to our Congress without any other government interaction. I didn't know that could happen.

• 1:57:32Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah, Netanyahu did. Flew straight in, bypassed the president, talked to the Congress. Congress gave him 26 standing ovations. I think most pop stars would like 26 standing ovations. Our Congress gave Netanyahu, a foreign prime minister, 26 standing ovations. I have difficulty looking at that in any other way than we're occupied. Statistically speaking,

• 1:58:10Speaker 02

  we have shown that whoever spends the more money on an election wins 94% of the time. Whoever spent the most wins. We can also show that every time somebody spoke out against Israel or AIPAC, the next election, their challenger was highly funded and wins. The facts are all there. All you have to do is look at them. Now, we shut down that conversation quickly, right? Whenever we try to talk about it, you get told, "Well, that's anti-Semitic." No, it's not.

• 1:58:56Speaker 02

  Calling things the way they are is not anti-Semitic.

• 1:59:01Speaker 02

  Right?

• 1:59:04Speaker 02

  In my book, I have a whole section on Zionism where I cover this. Mearsheimer and Walz wrote a book called The AIPAC Lobby, where they went in-depth and looked at this. And again, the data's there.

• 1:59:19Speaker 02

  You just have to look at it. Their book, they got threatened. They got threatened with personal harm and shut out of a lot of things as soon as they published their book.

• 1:59:32Speaker 02

  What happened to them? They're still teaching right now at universities and whatnot, but their their book did not

• 1:59:43Speaker 02

  it sold well, but did not take off as much as it should. It got hammered by people saying, "Well, this is just anti-Semitic. You're just you hate us." I'm like, "You know what? Again, I cover a whole section on Zionism. Zionism is a political movement.

• 2:00:03Speaker 02

  Excuse me. Zionism is a political movement

• 2:00:07Speaker 02

  that says you must agree with everything Israel does, no matter what.

• 2:00:12Speaker 02

  I don't agree with everything the US does, no matter what. Why should I agree with another government? If you're doing something wrong, I should be able to say so. That has nothing to do with

• 2:00:24Speaker 02

  Judaism. It has nothing to do with the rights of Jewish people. We're talking about a political movement

• 2:00:33Speaker 02

  that is bought much of the Congress of the United States, if not many of the presidents. We had Biden come out and say, "I am a Zionist." Really? You support another country's expansion over everything, no matter what? Aren't you supposed to be the President of the United States?

• 2:00:59Speaker 02

  Hmm. That doesn't seem right.

• 2:01:05Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, we've seen a lot of things, a lot of, I mean, for example, when we bombed Iran.

• 2:01:14Shawn Ryan?

  It's been told to me by people on the inside that not one of our 18 intelligence agencies reported that they were enriching uranium. Then Mossad comes along and tells us they're enriching uranium.

• 2:01:28Speaker 02

  Absolutely.

• 2:01:29Shawn Ryan?

  And we said, so what?

• 2:01:31Speaker 02

  It was the number one source of, hey, they've got weapons of mass destruction.

• 2:01:36Speaker 02

  Mossad.

• 2:01:39Speaker 02

  If you look at it.

• 2:01:41Shawn Ryan?

  So let me ask you this.

• 2:01:42Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:01:42Shawn Ryan?

  Cause I've heard, I've heard all this before and I didn't know we were going here. I'm not afraid of the conversation. I do know there's a lot of loud mouths out there that are just spewing this shit for views and, and, and, and fame or whatever they want. But, and so it gets hard. It gets hard to.

• 2:02:03Speaker 02

  It's a dangerous.

• 2:02:04Shawn Ryan?

  Just like the information more that we were talking about. It gets hard to figure out what is bullshit and what's not, but there are a lot of things visible, like what I just said.

• 2:02:12Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:02:13Shawn Ryan?

  Happening right now, probably more under this administration than the last, at least, at least from what I'm noticing. And it's fucking alarming, very alarming. In fact, it seems like just about everything we do, they have influence over.

• 2:02:34Speaker 02

  Mm hmm.

• 2:02:36Speaker 02

  More than we would think. And again, once you start to see it, you notice it.

• 2:02:43Shawn Ryan?

  Mm hmm.

• 2:02:44Speaker 02

  Before you see it the first time, you don't even think about it, right?

• 2:02:51Shawn Ryan?

  Mm hmm.

• 2:02:51Speaker 02

  Once you start to notice, then you're like, this, but this is everywhere. Yeah, kinda, kind of is everywhere.

• 2:03:03Shawn Ryan?

  So let me ask you this.

• 2:03:07Shawn Ryan?

  Because I've heard, I've heard that, I didn't know that they were calling them weapons of mass destruction. I was busy back then, I was involved and I didn't have time to look around.

• 2:03:18Speaker 02

  You didn't have the nicety to stop and think, ah, let's talk about politics.

• 2:03:22Shawn Ryan?

  But, um, but so what is the goal?

• 2:03:27Shawn Ryan?

  What is the goal?

• 2:03:29Speaker 02

  Whose goal?

• 2:03:30Shawn Ryan?

  Well, if we are occupied by Israel, then what is their goal?

• 2:03:36Speaker 02

  The Greater Israel. Now, what does that mean?

• 2:03:40Shawn Ryan?

  Does that mean we become Israel?

• 2:03:41Speaker 02

  No, no. It's interesting. The Israelis have this idea similar to what we had of manifest destiny. It is our destiny to control this much.

• 2:03:59Speaker 02

  Their idea is pretty much all of Palestine,

• 2:04:04Speaker 02

  about half of Lebanon, about half of Syria, all of Jordan, and a great swath of Saudi Arabia, what is now Saudi Arabia. Now, you would think that seems pretty ambitious.

• 2:04:20Speaker 02

  All you have to do is look at an Israeli uniform right now. We have an American flag on our shoulder. Look at the Israeli uniforms. They have a symbol of what they call the Greater Israel, which is everything I just told you. Palestine, part of Lebanon, part of Syria, all of Jordan, Saudi Arabia. That's what they have on their uniform right now. That's what their vision is, that's what they want.

• 2:04:52Shawn Ryan?

  Why? Why do they want those specific regions?

• 2:04:55Speaker 02

  They believe that that is their God-given land. God gave it to us, all of this. We deserve it back. We'll take it.

• 2:05:07Speaker 02

  You've been in the Middle East. I've been in the Middle East. When I start looking at a lot of the things we've done in the Middle East, at first we say, "Well, it's because of oil, it's because of this." Even that doesn't always fit.

• 2:05:25Speaker 02

  The thing that fits the closest is when you start saying, "How does this affect Israel?" Iraq was building a huge military force. It would have been a threat to Israel. We need to get rid of that. Weapons of mass destruction. We'll go in and kill a million Iraqis and kill and destroy all of their military. Okay, no longer an issue.

• 2:05:50Speaker 02

  Libya is growing a huge military. They're also trying to break away from the dollar and form a Pan-African monetary system that would challenge, you know, the American dollar as a trading thing. Can't have that. Wait, that's not, not part of BRICS. There's another initiative. Oh, this is before. This is before with Gaddafi. Okay. Sorry. Yeah, this is not BRICS. Before with Gaddafi, Gaddafi had the idea of a thing he called,

• 2:06:25Speaker 02

  oh, I don't remember what it was, but it, it, it was basically a Pan-African currency that they could use and not use the dollar. Didn't Gaddafi actually mention something about Zionism in the US? Oh, he did, yeah. He said, yeah. What did he say? He, he was saying that the Zionist influence was keeping the US entrenched in the Middle East to do their bidding, basically. And he fought against that. So what happens? The US go in and bomb him and, and kill him and... You, you wanted to know, what have we done? Was Gaddafi a great leader? No. He did a lot of bad things. He tortured people and everything.

• 2:07:11Speaker 02

  We have Guantanamo Bay, right? We're waterboarding people and whatnot, but what we say we're not, but... Anyway, but he also took a country that had a literacy rate of less than 5% and got it up to almost 100%. He made infrastructure so that they had water and they had electricity. He increased education. They started, you know, having more entrepreneurs. He gave every newly married couple funds to help purchase their own house so that they could all be affluent. The country was growing.

• 2:07:55Speaker 02

  Sounds like a lot of shit that needs to happen in the US. Yeah, then we bombed them. And now it's just, it's been civil war and strife and, and it's nothing what it used to be. Again, going back to, were we the good guys? Why did we do that? Well, we did it to protect our dollar economy. We did it to protect Israel from their military. Now we've got Iran. Iran's building a big military. Can't have that because if Israel tries to move in, Iran will fight them. Well, we'll get rid of it.

• 2:08:35Speaker 02

  I don't want to sound like a conspiracy theorist, but the more you look at this, the closer the parts fit. And you start putting all the parts together and you're like, call me crazy, but the data is showing this. And you've got that whole concept of Occam's razor, right? You cut away everything that can't be true and what's left, regardless of how plausible it sounds, is what the truth is. And you start cutting things away and looking at it and you're like, this pretty much leads to one conclusion.

• 2:09:32Shawn Ryan?

  This hits different when somebody like you is talking about it.

• 2:09:37Speaker 02

  It's a tough subject.

• 2:09:41Speaker 02

  The opening part of this section in my book, I say something to the effect of, when you're searching for the truth, eventually you come across something that is so sensitive, so highly protected, that to even question it risks ruin.

• 2:10:00Speaker 02

  And in our government, that topic is Zionism.

• 2:10:05Speaker 02

  As soon as you go down that path, you are courting ruin. Mearsheimer and Waltz found that out.

• 2:10:14Speaker 02

  I had friends, after they read this, saying, "You need to start looking after your personal safety, because they are not going to like this."

• 2:10:27Speaker 02

  I told them, "Hey, the book's out." Doing something to me wouldn't hurt me. People like you have more of a risk because you're an ongoing, you know, show. But still, as soon as you address this topic, you get more than just pushback.

• 2:10:48Shawn Ryan?

  I've seen it.

• 2:10:50Speaker 02

  No doubt, no doubt.

• 2:10:54Shawn Ryan?

  Are you worried?

• 2:10:55Speaker 02

  I'm not. I'm not. Me personally, or as a country?

• 2:11:02Shawn Ryan?

  You personally.

• 2:11:02Speaker 02

  Me personally?

• 2:11:05Speaker 02

  I'm not. Like I said, the book's already out.

• 2:11:11Speaker 02

  You know, the bell has been rung. What do you do? I'm retired.

• 2:11:17Speaker 02

  You know, um, yeah, can you go after my social security? Okay, yeah, I mean, look at what we're doing, you know, to our admirals.

• 2:11:29Speaker 02

  Can things happen? Sure. Does that mean we should be quiet? No. If you're afraid to speak the truth, you've already lost.

• 2:11:42Speaker 02

  If we believed that, then we wouldn't be a country. Our founding fathers would have just not said anything. And said, "Well, if we fight the British, we could lose, you know, our land."

• 2:11:54Shawn Ryan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:11:55Speaker 02

  Did they shy away from that? No, they didn't. That's why we're a country.

• 2:12:06Shawn Ryan?

  How else? How else are we being influenced?

• 2:12:13Speaker 02

  Money. I mean, I hate to say that capitalism is the problem. Capitalism is the best economical system we've been able to find on this planet so far.

• 2:12:25Speaker 02

  But it needs a little bit of pruning. I mean, if you let a rose bush grow without pruning, you don't get pretty roses. You get a big gnarly bush that's got a lot of thorns on it. But if you prune it and keep it growing, you get something beautiful. We, our government, is so focused on money and where the money goes. We have this system now, and I get it. Congressmen should fight for things for their people in their state. Right? That's the way our system is set up.

• 2:13:08Speaker 02

  But there's also gotta be some sort of conscious control over it somehow. And I don't have the answer to what that means. Excuse me. But there's gotta be a way to not do what we're doing. The F-35 was a great example of this. A part of it is built in all 50 states. Really? Is that the most efficient way to do that? We've got parts being built in places that have no infrastructure to build them. So we'll go build a big factory because every state needs a part of the pie. Right? And instead of saying, "Well, hey, we'll take this from this

• 2:13:53Speaker 02

  program. You guys take that from that program." Every senator and congressman is in there fighting, saying, "We need a part of every single program." I mean, we've got parts from the Navy being built in, you know, Montana, Wyoming, and Kansas. Really? Is that the most efficient? And then we'll ship them all somewhere else and see if they fit. And if there's a change, we'll ship them back and then they'll change it and we'll ship them back. And I'm like, it creates so much waste. But it is all driven by money. Who gets the money?

• 2:14:28Shawn Ryan?

  Uh huh.

• 2:14:33Speaker 02

  And we even have, haven't even gotten into.

• 2:14:38Speaker 02

  That doesn't answer your question about how are we being controlled?

• 2:14:41Shawn Ryan?

  It doesn't. Tell me about AIPAC.

• 2:14:44Speaker 02

  Ever since we did the Citizens United and said that companies are to be treated like individuals and they can have the freedom of speech and freedom of choice to do what they want. We now have large corporations

• 2:15:01Speaker 02

  similar to what AIPAC is doing. Giving huge amounts of money to candidates. And if you get hundreds of thousands or a million or millions of dollars from a donor,

• 2:15:18Speaker 02

  you are going to help do what they want you to do. There's no way around that.

• 2:15:26Speaker 02

  And we have large corporations doing that. We have healthcare doing that. We have defense doing that, defense contractors.

• 2:15:31Shawn Ryan?

  We have billionaires doing that.

• 2:15:32Speaker 02

  We have billionaires doing that, right?

• 2:15:34Shawn Ryan?

  Individuals doing that.

• 2:15:34Speaker 02

  Absolutely. Absolutely.

• 2:15:37Shawn Ryan?

  I want to, I want to ask you more about AIPAC.

• 2:15:40Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:15:40Shawn Ryan?

  Cause I've heard a lot about this too. I'm concerned.

• 2:15:44Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:15:44Shawn Ryan?

  I've seen a lot of people talk about it. I saw something with Matt Gaetz the other day where he's talking about they would hang a barcode over each congressman and senator and literally scan it. And

• 2:15:57Shawn Ryan?

  and there comes your donation.

• 2:15:59Speaker 02

  Yeah, right?

• 2:16:00Shawn Ryan?

  At least I, I think that's what he was saying, something along those lines.

• 2:16:03Speaker 02

  I hadn't heard that.

• 2:16:04Shawn Ryan?

  Anyways.

• 2:16:07Shawn Ryan?

  So I dove into some of the sites and I looked to see, you know, how much money is APEC donating to congressmen, senators? Yeah, I mean, it's, it's, I don't think it's a substantial amount. It's not. I don't think it's a substantial, I looked and it's 50,000 here, 250,000 here. Yeah, 50,000 can make a lot of people dance and do whatever the fuck you want, but I mean, if you're making, what, 175,000 dollars a year in Congress, I mean, 50 grand, really that much? No. Is it really enough to make you sell your country out? No. I don't know. So then I called some friends that are in Congress and in Senate, and I asked them about

• 2:16:52Shawn Ryan?

  it, and they are staunch defenders of Israel, um, going off of their faith, what the Bible says, that that's what they're, that's how they decipher it, fair enough, they're doing what they believe in, and it told me that the, they go, if you think that the APEC has a lot of funds, then you should look at the Saudi Arabia back. Without a doubt. And so then I'm, you know, I, I hear that and I'm like, all right, and I, I have,

• 2:17:34Shawn Ryan?

  I love this person, I trust this person, uh, I think that he, I don't want to, um, reveal his name, but I, I think that he, I've seen, I, I have no reason to think that that guy's not doing what he truly believes in and, and, and is serving his constituents. One of the only fucking people in there. So I, I, I take what he has to say very seriously, and so tell me about APEC, because that's what I know. I know that they are not registered as a foreign lobbying firm, or whatever that is.

• 2:18:12Speaker 02

  Yeah, when?

• 2:18:13Shawn Ryan?

  When what?

• 2:18:14Speaker 02

  You gotta go back and always ask when. So AIPAC didn't start as AIPAC. It started as the American Zionist something group.

• 2:18:24Speaker 02

  When the Foreign Agents Act was passed and said you need to now register as a foreign agent if you are supporting a foreign country.

• 2:18:37Speaker 02

  The American Zionist, whatever group, I forgot their name again, should have registered.

• 2:18:44Speaker 02

  Instead, they renamed themselves AIPAC. And said, we are not, we are no longer representing a foreign company. We are now representing Americans

• 2:18:56Speaker 02

  who have certain beliefs.

• 2:18:59Speaker 02

  Okay, well, that keeps them now from registering as a foreign agent. Little sleight of hand, but okay. And you're absolutely right. Go look and see how much money AIPAC has contributed to people. In the big scheme of things, minimal.

• 2:19:19Speaker 02

  So let's say, and I know this would never happen, right? But let's say I wanted to give you some money.

• 2:19:28Speaker 02

  But I don't want everybody to know that I gave you money. What can I do?

• 2:19:33Shawn Ryan?

  Crypto.

• 2:19:35Speaker 02

  I can go call 10 of my friends and I go, hey, I want you to go give Sean

• 2:19:42Speaker 02

  20,000, and you give Sean 20,000, and you give Sean 20,000. You give Sean 20,000. I've got 200 friends.

• 2:19:52Speaker 02

  All of a sudden, you've got a lot of money. Now, who donated to you?

• 2:19:56Speaker 02

  Individuals. A company here, an LLC there, an individual here. AIPAC itself

• 2:20:04Speaker 02

  is not giving a large amount of money, but they orchestrate huge amounts of money. They tell people you should support this candidate.

• 2:20:17Speaker 02

  And if you start, and this is again where you start pulling the thread. If you start going down a few levels and looking, then you start finding this. There's another, AIPAC used to do a lot of things that they don't do now. There is another organization. Forgot the name. Their sole purpose is education. We're trying to do education, a lofty goal, right? We'd all agree, education is good. What does that mean? They're a 501(c)(3), so you can donate to them and your money is tax deductible.

• 2:21:01Speaker 02

  All they do is pay for congressmen and people in power to have free trips to Israel so that they can go, show them, look how wonderful we are. We gave you a free trip to Israel. We'll take you around Tel Aviv and show you how wonderful this is and why we need more money, and then send you home. But it's education, right? Are they, is that AIPAC? They're affiliated and AIPAC works with them, right? There's five or six other larger groups. Last I saw, there were over 200 charities, groups, political action committees

• 2:21:45Speaker 02

  that support this. And that's just the groups that are registered. That's not the individuals. So AIPAC, think of AIPAC like a clearinghouse. They're the clearinghouse, but they're good. You can't just say, hey, you just gave $2 million to this person. But again, look at the results. Every time there's a person in Congress that speaks out against Israel, the very next election, they have a challenger who is very pro-Israel that has huge amounts of funding. That's not by accident. That didn't just happen.

• 2:22:29Speaker 02

  And it's not just that it happened in one state. It happens in every single state in the Union. That's not accidental.

• 2:22:41Shawn Ryan?

  Are they the only ones doing this?

• 2:22:43Speaker 02

  Pardon? Are we the only ones? Are they the only ones?

• 2:22:48Speaker 02

  I don't know.

• 2:22:49Shawn Ryan?

  What about China?

• 2:22:51Speaker 02

  In the US?

• 2:22:56Speaker 02

  I don't feel like they have that much that they need to control with us. They already own so many things. We've let them buy properties and buildings and businesses.

• 2:23:06Shawn Ryan?

  Our power grid.

• 2:23:08Speaker 02

  You know, we buy Chinese goods because they're cheap.

• 2:23:12Shawn Ryan?

  Well, I mean, if you look at them, I mean, there's, there's a handful of politicians that have Chinese businesses. Mitch McConnell, one of them is is a shipping business.

• 2:23:24Shawn Ryan?

  Feinstein had something.

• 2:23:29Shawn Ryan?

  There's a handful of them.

• 2:23:30Speaker 02

  You know, it's amazing how you go into Congress with a net worth of three, four hundred thousand. You get paid a hundred and seventy thousand dollars a year and four or five years later, you're worth eight to 10 million.

• 2:23:42Shawn Ryan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:23:42Speaker 02

  Isn't that amazing?

• 2:23:43Shawn Ryan?

  It is.

• 2:23:44Speaker 02

  It's amazing. Tell me that that's ethical.

• 2:23:51Shawn Ryan?

  I don't think anything in DC is ethical.

• 2:23:53Speaker 02

  No, I, I, I agree. I agree. And we could sit here and, and tell, tell everybody everything's wrong, right? That doesn't do anything. The only way to start fixing these things is to be informed, understand what's happening and try not to be influenced by it.

• 2:24:16Shawn Ryan?

  How far does this go back?

• 2:24:25Speaker 02

  At least fifties.

• 2:24:30Speaker 02

  Why? What happened in the 50s? At least, well, 40s.

• 2:24:37Speaker 02

  Before that, actually, and again, I'm gonna go back to the whole Israeli thing. So, Israel was created

• 2:24:49Speaker 02

  in our current world by Resolution 181 of the United Nations that said the Israeli people should have a homeland of their own. Many people know that fact. What they don't know is, is that same Resolution 181 said, "You may not displace people that already live there."

• 2:25:09Speaker 02

  It didn't say, "You get to have a state that is only Jewish, and everybody else has to leave, or you get to expel them."

• 2:25:22Speaker 02

  It also said, "There will be a Palestinian state." There will be an Israeli state and a Palestinian state. Said that. Resolution 181.

• 2:25:32Speaker 02

  That was passed in November of 1947. In 1948, Israel declared itself a distinct, free, and new nation.

• 2:25:48Speaker 02

  You know how government works? When somebody says something and you want a resolution, or you want to do something, how long does that take in government? Years. Could be.

• 2:26:03Speaker 02

  Israel declared themselves independent. President Truman recognized them seven minutes later. Seven minutes?

• 2:26:13Speaker 02

  It's like he's hovering over the phone, just waiting for the call. They said they're independent now. "I recognize Israel."

• 2:26:20Speaker 02

  What about the rest of the resolution? Did he recognize Palestine at the same time? No. Had Truman recognized Palestine and Israel at the same time, we wouldn't be having this issue.

• 2:26:35Speaker 02

  But we started it off right there. That was, that was where it started.

• 2:26:42Speaker 02

  And of course, you can go back before that, the Balfour Agreement.

• 2:26:46Shawn Ryan?

  What's that?

• 2:26:46Speaker 02

  Sykes, Pico.

• 2:26:49Speaker 02

  So, there were a couple of people.

• 2:26:54Shawn Ryan?

  This is going on during World War II?

• 2:26:56Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah, yeah, before, well before.

• 2:26:58Shawn Ryan?

  Before?

• 2:26:59Speaker 02

  Well before. So Theodore Herzl wrote a paper, a treatise, called the Judentstadt in German, and it means the Jewish state. And he said, "The Jewish people should have their own state. They should be allowed, you know, to, to not be under any other state because we should be our own people." Right? He petitioned the British government and said, "Hey,

• 2:27:28Speaker 02

  you know, we, we need to make a place for the Jews." Lord Balfour, who was, uh...

• 2:27:38Speaker 02

  I forgot his position, but he was a lord in the government,

• 2:27:42Speaker 02

  wrote a letter, then said, "The British government recognizes that the Jewish people should have their own state."

• 2:27:51Speaker 02

  Well, the British government didn't actually say it, Lord Balfour did, but the British didn't want to be embarrassed and say, "We're going to go against one of our own lords," so they didn't refute it.

• 2:28:03Speaker 02

  Herzl and some others took this and then petitioned the League of Nations and said, "We should be our own state." And they said, "Well, we don't recognize you yet," right? After World War II, feeling a lot of guilt,

• 2:28:19Speaker 02

  they again pulled up the Balfour letter and said, "You guys said we should get our own state. You need to do something." After World War II, we're carving up all the land. Right? Sykes and Pico,

• 2:28:36Speaker 02

  the two people that were, um, assigned to kind of figure everything out, said, "Well, we'll, we'll give this to Israel."

• 2:28:45Speaker 02

  We'll give the Hashemite Kingdom over here to this brother who helped us fight the Ottomans. And then we'll carve out this part over here. We'll call that the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. We'll make the rest of Palestine, a mandatory Palestine that will continue to manage. You know, and they divvied everything up, pretty much on the back of a napkin. There was not a lot of thought. They drew lines and said, what do you think about this? Yeah, okay, we'll do that. That was Sykes Pico. That basically distributed everything, all the land, after World War II.

• 2:29:30Speaker 02

  Palestine became the mandatory Palestine under British rule. Palestinians didn't really like that. Neither did the Jewish people. There were a lot of battles between Israelis and the British and Palestinians and the British. You know, and then the British finally at one point said, you know, we're out. Kind of like the French did in Vietnam, right? And said, yeah, we're done, we're out. And, and they left. And Israel took what they were supposed to have and expanded and took all sorts of other land, expelling all sorts of Palestinians.

• 2:30:13Speaker 02

  There's the Nakba, the catastrophe of when all of these Palestinians were forced out of their land. And now you hear things like, well, you know, there's the right of return. Sounds good. Until you realize the right of return doesn't mean Palestinians. Palestinians don't get to return. The right of return is a term that Israel uses that says anybody that's Jewish can come back here. What about the people you kicked out? Yeah, they, they can't come back. We're not, we're not letting them back. I mean, today, try, try having Palestinian ancestry and going into Israel. You'll be disallowed. You won't be allowed in.

• 2:30:59Speaker 02

  So yeah, this started. This is not new. This has been going on for 70 years at least. And had the precursors even before that. I think this is something that happens quite often. We see the current state. We don't spend enough time going back and saying, "How did we get here?" And I was a history major at the academy. And that's, I mean, you always went back and said, "To understand the battle today, we have to understand how we got here." Because otherwise, we don't understand what the motivations are. Mm-hmm.

• 2:31:40Speaker 02

  Right? What do you think? I don't know yet. I join you with that. It's a journey. It's a journey as you build more information and you start looking and... I've got to tell you, when I was researching this book, I rejected a lot of information when I first heard it. I would hear information and I would think that, "That can't be right." I don't believe that. I would say the same thing, right? Then I'd find a second piece and be like,

• 2:32:23Speaker 02

  "Well, that supports that, but hmm. God, if I believe that, that leads to a dark place and I don't want to believe that." And then I find more and more information. And after a while, you're like, "I can't, I can't argue it anymore. This is true." We have people. We have organizations in our country that are controlling our Congress, not for the good of Americans. I don't like that. It leads me to a bad spot. But I can't refute it. I, I don't have any conclusive evidence to the opposite.

• 2:33:05Speaker 02

  And I have a large body of evidence that shows that is true.

• 2:33:12Speaker 02

  And I always tell people, prove me wrong. For God's sakes, give me more info. I'm happy to change my opinion, and if you can show me information that this is not correct. That has yet to happen.

• 2:33:32Speaker 02

  Gives you pause, doesn't it?

• 2:33:35Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 2:33:42Shawn Ryan?

  Let's take a break.

• 2:33:44Speaker 02

  Sounds good.

• 2:33:47Shawn Ryan?

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• 2:36:36Shawn Ryan?

  All right, Michael, we're back from the break.

• 2:36:40Shawn Ryan?

  Just took a very unexpected turn.

• 2:36:42Speaker 02

  It did. It went a little deeper than I thought we would, but that's okay. These things need to be talked about.

• 2:36:49Shawn Ryan?

  Let's continue.

• 2:36:50Speaker 02

  All right.

• 2:36:54Speaker 02

  Where do we start?

• 2:36:58Shawn Ryan?

  I don't know. You're the expert.

• 2:37:03Speaker 02

  Ah, all right. It's, uh...

• 2:37:07Shawn Ryan?

  How are they doing this? What other, what other countries are being influenced?

• 2:37:15Speaker 02

  It's not just us. Uh, there have been a lot of, there has been a lot of pushback in Great Britain about the same thing, too much Zionist influence.

• 2:37:30Speaker 02

  The thing is, is you need to have

• 2:37:34Speaker 02

  a strong democracy with...

• 2:37:39Speaker 02

  Strong freedoms of speech, assembly, and some sort of rules about making donations and things without limits. That constrains you. How much of, how much effect can Zionism have in China? Not much. They don't get to do that, right? So they're a little blocked there. Russia? Russia has its own reasons for doing whatever it is it's gonna do. Right? Do they support Israel? Some. Not to the effect we do.

• 2:38:18Speaker 02

  We, we have our own democracy and our own, our own freedoms used against us. And our founding fathers, they were smart men. But I, I heard the statement, they weren't demigods. Right? They were just men in their 30s, trying to form a new country. Could they think of everything? No. Could they have, in their wildest dreams, imagined the internet? Instantaneous communication everywhere? Freedom to do the things we do today? There, there's no way.

• 2:39:02Speaker 02

  They envisioned senators and congressmen being business people or farmers that would come and serve for a period of time and go back. Right? They never envisioned having a whole class of people whose lifelong job was to go serve in Congress. That was never part of the vision. And that has morphed and changed. And it's these things that give rise to the, the nuances that allow the influence from foreign governments or proponents of foreign governments that we see today.

• 2:39:50Speaker 02

  And I'm not a congressional lawyer that goes deep in this, but from what I've seen, you wouldn't have these freedoms in other places, and that is used against us.

• 2:40:16Shawn Ryan?

  What do we do?

• 2:40:21Speaker 02

  It's a great question.

• 2:40:25Speaker 02

  I would love to just say, what do you think we should do? But that doesn't go very well.

• 2:40:32Speaker 02

  I think there's a number of things we can do.

• 2:40:35Speaker 02

  First, anybody that advocates for another country should be registered as a foreign agent.

• 2:40:43Shawn Ryan?

  I wanted to ask you about that.

• 2:40:45Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:40:49Shawn Ryan?

  So, okay, APEC is not considered of, what is it, a foreign?

• 2:40:54Speaker 02

  Foreign agent.

• 2:40:55Shawn Ryan?

  Foreign agent.

• 2:40:55Speaker 02

  Yeah. They're not registered.

• 2:40:57Shawn Ryan?

  So let's say that now they're registered as a foreign agent.

• 2:41:00Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:41:00Shawn Ryan?

  What changes?

• 2:41:01Speaker 02

  They have to disclose everything that they're doing.

• 2:41:06Speaker 02

  They have reporting and saying, we did this because of this, we're giving this much money. This is where the money came from. And this is the money that we are advocating others to do. It makes everything a lot more transparent.

• 2:41:25Shawn Ryan?

  Do you think that would actually work?

• 2:41:27Speaker 02

  To a degree. I don't think it's the silver bullet. I think there's always ways around things.

• 2:41:35Speaker 02

  I think systemically in our government, we have other issues that we need to take care of to prevent things like this from happening.

• 2:41:46Speaker 02

  Term limits for senators and congressmen. You shouldn't be able to spend a lifetime there. The longer you spend, the more you get beholden to other people because of the deals you have to make. I think it's a nature of the system, right?

• 2:42:05Speaker 02

  I think things like...

• 2:42:09Speaker 02

  We shouldn't have riders on bills. You shouldn't have a healthcare bill that you attach. A farm subsidy bill to, right? You vote on one or the other. But it shouldn't be like, well, if you want this, you also have to agree to these other 10 things we tacked on.

• 2:42:25Shawn Ryan?

  Do you think voting matters?

• 2:42:28Speaker 02

  In Congress?

• 2:42:29Shawn Ryan?

  Anywhere.

• 2:42:30Speaker 02

  Yes. I think in Congress, because when they pass a bill, they have to vote on it.

• 2:42:34Shawn Ryan?

  Do we have sovereign elections?

• 2:42:36Speaker 02

  Do we?

• 2:42:37Shawn Ryan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:42:40Speaker 02

  Less and less. Less and less. Uh, because of gerrymandering. Because of media influence. I think I, I said earlier in the show, we have statistics that show that whoever spends the most money wins 94% of the time. Well, that's not a democratic system.

• 2:43:05Shawn Ryan?

  What about the last presidential election?

• 2:43:07Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:43:07Shawn Ryan?

  Who spent more money?

• 2:43:09Speaker 02

  Oh, by far. Trump did by far.

• 2:43:12Shawn Ryan?

  Did he?

• 2:43:12Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah. You know, what's really funny is, uh...

• 2:43:16Shawn Ryan?

  Are you sure about that?

• 2:43:17Speaker 02

  I, I think so. I... Okay, I won't state it as an absolute, but I am pretty sure about that. Bernie Sanders was originally trending higher in the ratings. Um, but he got less airtime. Why? He wasn't spending the money on it, and he wasn't one of the two parties. That, to me, seems like we're being fed the person that we want to win.

• 2:43:55Shawn Ryan?

  Because the reason I'm asking is I think the... Yes, what I, how do we fix this? I think the only way that we could fix this is through education.

• 2:44:06Speaker 02

  I've got a different way. Education is, and, and in my book, I talk about education as one of the prime things always to fix a lot of ills.

• 2:44:16Shawn Ryan?

  Now, what I mean by education is educating the population about this.

• 2:44:20Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:44:22Shawn Ryan?

  But if you don't think we have a sovereign election system, then that really doesn't do anything anyways.

• 2:44:30Speaker 02

  Doesn't matter.

• 2:44:31Shawn Ryan?

  Because the vote doesn't matter.

• 2:44:32Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:44:35Speaker 02

  But let's look at the system, right?

• 2:44:39Speaker 02

  First, we've got the voters. Need to educate them so that they can make educated decisions.

• 2:44:46Speaker 02

  Um, there's been a lot of research done on the last election. Most of the people that voted for Trump voted on a more emotional level. I feel like he's the best person, right?

• 2:45:02Speaker 02

  The opponent, I think they are the best person. We have this, this think versus feel thing going on. Uh, and we see it a lot when we see the news. People feel this way, they think this way. That, that creates a dichotomy.

• 2:45:23Speaker 02

  Now, if you, if you will accept that if we have people that are educated, that know what's going on.

• 2:45:35Speaker 02

  And then you have to look at it and say, is the voting fair?

• 2:45:40Speaker 02

  I would say the voting is not. Um, again, because of gerrymandering and redrawing districts and everything else. I saw this wonderful thing once where it had five columns of 10. And it said, let's color them all in. We'll make three columns blue and two columns red. If you just total the votes, who's going to win?

• 2:46:05Speaker 02

  The three blue column, you've got, you know, 30 to 50, right?

• 2:46:11Speaker 02

  They said, what if we go across and we say, okay, but we're going to vote by county and each row is a county? Well, if you go by county, by row,

• 2:46:24Speaker 02

  there's three blue, two red. It votes blue. You tally it up, you've got 10 votes for blue, right? Because you're, that's the way you're counting now. So first it was 30 to 50 if you do a popular. If you go by row, then it's 30. If you go by column, you've got three red and two blue. Now it's three to two. And then they show, but what if?

• 2:46:56Speaker 02

  We redraw this like this and they they show this shape. And if you redraw it like that, it comes out three to two red. Even though it's sixty percent red, twenty percent blue. Unless I'm mixing in my colors here. But it's all about how you draw the lines and say, this is what we're gonna vote. And it showed how you can redraw the line so that you do not represent the populace. We have that going on. It's called gerrymandering. It happens all the time. Every time somebody's in power, they redraw everything so that they can win the next election. That is anti-democratic.

• 2:47:39Speaker 02

  That is not following the principles of a democracy. It's following the principles of someone in power that wants to maintain power. A lot of people are doing that. A lot of people are doing that. Without a doubt. If we wanna fix, going back a little bit, if you educate people, they should vote more for what they think is right. If they know all, if they have the information, they can make a more informed decision. And I cover in the book a lot about how they don't get all the right information. So then you have to ask, why don't they have the right information?

• 2:48:23Speaker 02

  This goes back to the statistic I said earlier, whoever spends the most money wins. Why? They get to do the most advertising. They get to do the most marketing. Right? Whoever is influencing your opinion the most is the one that wins. How can we stop that? How about campaign limits? Saying, hey, if you're running a presidential race, you cap out at twenty million dollars. That's all you get. You can't spend twenty million in one. So both of you, assuming that you can raise the same amount, are gonna get twenty million. You get an equal shot at convincing your electorate. Senate? Two million.

• 2:49:08Speaker 02

  Congressman, five hundred thousand, whatever it is. I don't know what the numbers are. But put a limit. And this would get rid of any one large donor saying, hey, I'm gonna give, you know, a billion dollars to this candidate. Doesn't matter, they can only spend this much.

• 2:49:26Speaker 02

  That gets rid of so many things if we could just do that. We won't, because the only people that can do that is Congress, and they don't want that.

• 2:49:34Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 2:49:39Speaker 02

  So your question, what can we do?

• 2:49:41Shawn Ryan?

  And even education.

• 2:49:42Speaker 02

  Even education.

• 2:49:43Shawn Ryan?

  We just covered it earlier.

• 2:49:44Speaker 02

  Right?

• 2:49:44Shawn Ryan?

  People don't want to believe what doesn't align with whatever their thinking.

• 2:49:51Speaker 02

  Yeah, they want to be comfortable. Challenging your beliefs is not comfortable.

• 2:49:57Speaker 02

  It's painful.

• 2:50:00Speaker 02

  College is painful, because you are learning new things and challenging assumptions and beliefs that you were forming early on. That's difficult. Especially as we get older, we're like, I don't want to waste time with that.

• 2:50:18Speaker 02

  I already feel this, I'll just keep doing that.

• 2:50:23Speaker 02

  But that doesn't lead to a good place.

• 2:50:29Speaker 02

  And that's, again, what I'm trying to do, is just give people more information, ask the questions, question everything.

• 2:50:40Speaker 02

  That's my tagline, question everything.

• 2:50:43Shawn Ryan?

  Ours is everything is a lie.

• 2:50:45Speaker 02

  Or, well, which many times it is. Right?

• 2:50:52Speaker 02

  In other countries, are they seeing the same thing we are? I don't think so. Not that I've seen. And again, I'm not an international academic. I can only, you know, tell you what I've seen. I haven't seen the same level of influence that we have. Which sort of makes sense, because even if you could have the same level,

• 2:51:21Speaker 02

  we're the biggest country. We have the biggest military. If you want to influence somebody, influence us, right? So it's not unreasonable that we would be the biggest target for influence.

• 2:51:33Shawn Ryan?

  Just another question, if,

• 2:51:41Shawn Ryan?

  Why do they need our money? If they have enough money to influence?

• 2:51:47Speaker 02

  No, they don't. No, yeah. It's a, it's an ROI equation, right? I can influence with 1 billion and get 18 to 20, year after year, for the next, you know, how many years? By the way, that 18 billion doesn't get paid piecemeal through the year. We give it lump sum, which we don't always have. So we sell bonds and take on debt in order to be able to give it to them. It's a crazy, crazy system. And that doesn't include all of the military gear we give. You know what bothers me is we believe in democracy. We are a democracy.

• 2:52:29Speaker 02

  Well, and just because I don't want somebody coming up and going, "No, we're not." We are a democratically elected republic. We don't always act like a democracy, and we don't act like we believe in democracy. I see this most blatantly at the UN. What is a democracy? The greatest good for the greatest number. Whatever the people decide is what we do. Right?

• 2:53:09Speaker 02

  So we have cases numerous, over and over and over, especially with Israel, in the UN, where the vote in the UN is unanimous, except for Israel and the United States. So if you think you've got 196 countries voting yes, and Israel and the United States votes no, it would pass. It would be yes. It's 196 to 2. But when we helped write the Charter of the United Nations, we said that anybody on the Security Council, one of them being us, can unilaterally veto anything. So every time a vote comes up, there have been...

• 2:53:56Speaker 02

  I don't want to see an exact number.

• 2:53:59Speaker 02

  Between 50 and 100 resolutions censoring Israel and saying, "We should do this because they're not behaving well as a country." Every single time, the US vetoes it. All the other countries vote for it and we veto it. Like, that's not democracy. How can we say we believe in democracy when we just veto every time what most of the people want? And then it comes back to, "Okay, I get it. Democracy for us, not for you."

• 2:54:36Speaker 02

  Well, if you believe that, then you can't believe that democracy is the best system.

• 2:54:44Speaker 02

  So which is it? Is democracy not the best system? Or are we not believing in it and using it the way we should? I happen to believe that democracy is a good system. I believe the people should decide what they want. But you can't say, "Good for me, not for you."

• 2:55:23Shawn Ryan?

  Let's talk about how we are the bad guys.

• 2:55:31Speaker 02

  You know, I get people ask a lot of times, "Are we the bad guys? Are we always the bad guys? Don't you have anything good to say?" Right?

• 2:55:43Speaker 02

  And my answer to that is always,

• 2:55:47Speaker 02

  what I am trying to do...

• 2:55:50Speaker 02

  Is give the other side of information that you don't have. You've already been told over and over. You're the good guy. You're the good guy. Right? It's, it's like the, the young person whose mom and grandma and aunt all tell them they're the best singer. You are the best singer. You should be a professional. And then they go on America's Got Talent and they can't carry a tune at all. And Simon Cowell goes, who, who told you you could sing? I've always been told I could sing. Yeah, somebody should have told you, you can't. Before you get up here and embarrass yourself. Right? We keep telling ourselves, we're the good guys, we're the good guys, we're the good guys. Maybe somebody should go, you know.

• 2:56:38Speaker 02

  Not always. Let's look at what we're doing.

• 2:56:42Speaker 02

  And again, I, I. I've said, history will not judge us on our intent. History will judge us on our outcome.

• 2:56:52Speaker 02

  Are Americans bad guys? No.

• 2:56:56Speaker 02

  American people are, are caring, loving, good people. They mean well.

• 2:57:02Speaker 02

  Is the outcome of what we're doing in the world? Viewed by the rest of the world as us being the bad guys? Yes.

• 2:57:12Speaker 02

  It would be hard to look at what we've done in so many countries. And for another country to look at us and go, oh yeah, you did that for the best benefit of everyone.

• 2:57:23Speaker 02

  Versus, you know, you may have benefited you. But you screwed everybody else. And then you want to come to us and say, hey, do you want to be our friend? Yeah, I don't trust you. Cause from what I just saw. You're going to turn on me as soon as it's not in your best interest. And again, some people will say, well, that's politics. That's just being the big dog and getting along. And you can believe that and that works. For a period of time. But it doesn't work forever.

• 2:57:58Speaker 02

  And the empires, the societies that have lasted the longest have learned this and try to be more beneficial to everyone. Who? Rather than that.

• 2:58:15Speaker 02

  Romans did a fairly good job. Ottoman Empire, the Persian Empire, actually didn't do too badly with that.

• 2:58:29Speaker 02

  We're only 250 years old.

• 2:58:33Speaker 02

  And we're seeing some big cracks.

• 2:58:37Speaker 02

  These other empires lasted for thousands of years. I can't imagine us lasting thousands of years, operating the same way we operate today. And this gets back to like a business plan, right? Businesses grow and mature and you change.

• 2:58:55Speaker 02

  If you don't change, then you become obsolete and you die out.

• 2:59:00Speaker 02

  America needs to change. We need to change some things and cannot continue doing the things we're doing today. It's, it's just that easy. We can see where it's leading. The only question becomes not, do we need to change? The question is, will we choose to change? Or will change be forced upon us?

• 2:59:26Speaker 02

  Those are the only two options.

• 2:59:30Speaker 02

  It's easier to do the change yourself, but harder to make that decision.

• 2:59:39Speaker 02

  So as we're talking about all of this, I think that's where we're at.

• 2:59:47Speaker 02

  And I know now, how do you make those changes, right? How do you get people to want to change?

• 2:59:56Speaker 02

  I had a gentleman once that was in business, salesman. He said, "Every salesperson sells the same thing. You sell change." Because everybody's got a way to do something, you're trying to convince them to change to your way of doing something. That's what you're selling. I thought that was an interesting way to look at things. You sell change, right? Every once in a while, a product comes around that. Everybody thinks they need now that wasn't there before. And you don't need to sell that, because everybody just looks at it and goes, "I want that." But as soon as they've got it, how do you sell the next one?

• 3:00:38Speaker 02

  You have to convince them to change from the first one to the next one, right? Mm-hmm. People don't want to change. Change is hard. I heard one person say, "Change is what you want other people to do, not you." Right? But this is a, I think this is a part of our country and our society we need to look strongly at and say, "What do we need to do to change? How do we need to change to grow for the next 250 years? Let's fast forward 250 years. What do we need to look like?"

• 3:01:23Speaker 02

  And again, businesses do this all the time. Markets change quickly, and you've got to pivot. You've got to say, "We need to change and do this. Otherwise, we're going to be left in the dust." I think as a country, we need to look at ourselves and say, "How do we become what we want to be in the future? Where do we want to be? What do we want to be?" We might decide, "Hey, we're okay being the United States by ourselves. We don't want to be the world's policeman. We don't want to enforce everything. We just want to survive by ourselves." And that's okay, if that's what we decide. We may decide we want to be an empire that rules most of the planet,

• 3:02:07Speaker 02

  if that's what we decide. But we need to decide and make a logical decision about it, not just blunder into it, and then figure out, "What do we need to change to get there?"

• 3:02:24Shawn Ryan?

  That sounds impossible.

• 3:02:28Speaker 02

  I will tell you that of the empires I have studied, it has never been them.

• 3:02:36Speaker 02

  Empires get changed forced upon them because changing internally is just too difficult.

• 3:02:45Speaker 02

  That's a sad way to look at it, though. Maybe we can be the first.

• 3:02:58Shawn Ryan?

  What patterns have you seen with regime, regime change with countries that we occupy?

• 3:03:06Shawn Ryan?

  And how far back does the pattern go?

• 3:03:08Speaker 02

  Well, regime change is interesting because usually when we say that, there's an external force. Many times the external force is us.

• 3:03:21Speaker 02

  We go in and say, "We don't like this leader. We don't like what's happening. We're going to

• 3:03:28Speaker 02

  help you change." And we force them. We've got the CIA, we've got our, our economics, you know, will, will, uh, help overthrow one leader or kidnap them. And we'll sponsor the next one, you know, and make sure they get in power and they have enough to get situated and get, get going.

• 3:03:56Speaker 02

  Every once in a while, you have a regime change that is internally driven. We saw that in 1979 in the Cultural Revolution in Iran.

• 3:04:06Speaker 02

  Right? What usually happens there is, and you've seen this, you know this,

• 3:04:14Speaker 02

  people are so unhappy with the way things are going. They figure, even if we get killed doing it, we're better off than if we just keep living like this. And they start an internal revolution. The problem with internal revolutions...

• 3:04:32Speaker 02

  Is you've got a huge pendulum swing.

• 3:04:36Speaker 02

  You know, the country has gotten over to here and people get

• 3:04:42Speaker 02

  unhappy. They're like, we need to fight, right? We need to change this. Well, when they change it, the pendulum doesn't come back to the middle.

• 3:04:53Speaker 02

  They're like, we need to offset this. So the pendulum swings all the way over here. And now you've got the exact

• 3:05:01Speaker 02

  same kind of regime, just the opposite. Right? We were very secular. Now we're very religious. We're very religious. Now we're going to be very secular. Rarely does it come back to the middle without some external force.

• 3:05:20Speaker 02

  So most of the regime changes I've seen internally get this pendulum swing and that becomes just as dangerous as anything else.

• 3:05:29Shawn Ryan?

  We already have that.

• 3:05:30Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:05:35Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:05:38Speaker 02

  We see it here, you know, kind of microcosm every four years. We see it in other countries when they have had internal revolutions.

• 3:05:52Speaker 02

  China had one.

• 3:05:55Speaker 02

  Iran had one.

• 3:06:00Speaker 02

  There are some others not as major. We think of those mostly.

• 3:06:05Speaker 02

  We go back and forth.

• 3:06:09Speaker 02

  It would be nice if we could put a dampener on that pendulum and kind of say

• 3:06:15Speaker 02

  change is good. Let's dampen how fast we change and maybe, maybe we can

• 3:06:23Speaker 02

  settle in the middle a little bit where everybody is happy. The greatest happiness for the greatest number.

• 3:06:30Shawn Ryan?

  Have we ever had a successful regime change where the country thrived after we've left?

• 3:06:36Speaker 02

  Wow, that is a great question.

• 3:06:42Speaker 02

  I cannot think of one. I cannot think of any regime change that we have fomented in one way or another, where that country is better off after we were there than before.

• 3:06:58Speaker 02

  Because usually, one of the first things we do after a regime change is put somebody in power that is, you know, very friendly with our desires. That usually means, or usually means allowing our companies to come in,

• 3:07:18Speaker 02

  buy land,

• 3:07:21Speaker 02

  use resources, take whatever it is their country has, process it, sell it, usually to us for a deal, to others for a little bit more. And usually, that does not translate to money to the populace. It usually translates to money to whoever's in power.

• 3:07:45Speaker 02

  I can't think of a single instance where the country as a whole

• 3:07:51Speaker 02

  was better off.

• 3:07:54Speaker 02

  There are situations similar. You can look at wars where we have defeated somebody in a war. And I remember when I was a kid, I was, I was told at one point in time, the best way to rebuild your country is pick a war with the US and lose, because we'll go help rebuild you. Right? But I think it would be amazingly arrogant to think that any country that grew after being defeated by us, it was all because we helped them rebuild.

• 3:08:28Speaker 02

  Think specifically of Japan. Japan is a thriving economy. I don't think it's because we rebuilt them. I think they had, you know, their own drive.

• 3:08:44Speaker 02

  Did we help some? Yeah. Right? At first. But I don't, I don't think that we were the reason that they then became as successful as they are today. But that's different than a regime change.

• 3:08:58Speaker 02

  We didn't go in and try and just overthrow a government and put a new government in.

• 3:09:04Speaker 02

  I think that's a completely different situation.

• 3:09:08Speaker 02

  Can you think of any that are better off? No. Yeah, I can't.

• 3:09:15Speaker 02

  Maybe Panama?

• 3:09:18Speaker 02

  I think the Panamanians might have a different view of that.

• 3:09:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, I'm thinking around the world. I can't think of any.

• 3:09:41Speaker 02

  And again, it goes back to, were we the good guys then?

• 3:09:47Speaker 02

  And we come in a lot of times and say, hey, the ruler you have right now, they're a despot.

• 3:09:53Speaker 02

  They're a horrible ruler. We want to come in and help you guys. We'll overthrow them.

• 3:10:00Speaker 02

  Sounds good. Sounds like we have all the right intent, but then what we do after that

• 3:10:07Speaker 02

  does not help the country as a whole.

• 3:10:11Speaker 02

  And again, usually because we just put somebody in power

• 3:10:15Speaker 02

  that will do our bidding.

• 3:10:19Speaker 02

  And like we talked about earlier,

• 3:10:23Speaker 02

  is that just what empires do?

• 3:10:27Speaker 02

  You want the, if the goal is just to grow the empire at any cost and you don't care what happens to anybody else, then that works

• 3:10:39Speaker 02

  until it doesn't, until you need a friend somewhere because you can't do it all alone and there's nobody left.

• 3:10:49Speaker 02

  I want to touch back on the, if I can, the question you asked early, do we have any allies? It's a great question.

• 3:11:01Speaker 02

  Because it doesn't seem like we do.

• 3:11:05Speaker 02

  And once you come to that realization, and I hadn't thought about it that way until you asked it. But it's been rolling around in my brain here while we're talking.

• 3:11:17Speaker 02

  That's like somebody coming and asking you, do you have any friends? And if you answered, no, I don't have any.

• 3:11:26Speaker 02

  You kind of have to ask why?

• 3:11:30Speaker 02

  Why not?

• 3:11:32Speaker 02

  Now, as we get older, you know, people move apart, but you still keep friendships wherever they are, right? It's not like in high school where, hey, this is my best friend, I'm with him every day and everything. But you still have friends.

• 3:11:45Speaker 02

  But if you get to the point where you say, I don't have any. Then you have to ask, why not? Either I just don't want any, don't think they're important.

• 3:11:56Shawn Ryan?

  You have to self-reflect.

• 3:11:58Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:12:00Speaker 02

  And I think that's what we need to do as a country, and I think that's what we need to do as individuals in our country. We need to self-reflect. Look at ourselves in the mirror.

• 3:12:11Speaker 02

  Ask the hard questions. Be honest with ourselves.

• 3:12:20Shawn Ryan?

  Okay, I'm with you. The only way that I can see that happening is by trying to bring people together. And that's what I'm trying to do here. But it's not working.

• 3:12:35Speaker 02

  It's hard.

• 3:12:37Shawn Ryan?

  People don't want it, they're not ready for it. You know, and

• 3:12:41Speaker 02

  They don't want to compromise. I'm right, you're wrong. Why should I even try?

• 3:12:45Shawn Ryan?

  Well, they won't even listen.

• 3:12:46Speaker 02

  True.

• 3:12:47Shawn Ryan?

  They won't even listen. And I mean, I brought people on here that I despised before meeting them, but opened the floor, opened for a civilized discussion, and we got those. And

• 3:13:08Shawn Ryan?

  Everybody hated me for it. And then I did it again.

• 3:13:12Speaker 02

  Good for you.

• 3:13:14Shawn Ryan?

  And I'll do it again.

• 3:13:14Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:13:16Shawn Ryan?

  And maybe I'm ahead of my time, or maybe we'll never arrive at this. But it's, I just, it's, nobody's talking. Nobody's talking.

• 3:13:25Speaker 02

  We talk at each other instead of with each other.

• 3:13:28Shawn Ryan?

  Exactly.

• 3:13:30Speaker 02

  I wrote a small article on

• 3:13:34Speaker 02

  on pardons that I put on LinkedIn and at the very bottom. I said, "Sources, welcome. Tell me I'm wrong. I'd love to have the conversation."

• 3:13:48Speaker 02

  Not a single reply. No one ever replied to it.

• 3:13:53Speaker 02

  I'm like, you know, we shouldn't be afraid of the conversation. We shouldn't be afraid of being wrong. I'm wrong all the time.

• 3:14:05Speaker 02

  You know, I don't think any of us has a monopoly on that one.

• 3:14:10Speaker 02

  But we shouldn't be afraid of that.

• 3:14:13Speaker 02

  And we should welcome the conversations. I, I love, I love sitting and debating things with people. As long as it's respectful. I'm happy to respectfully have a conversation and debate anything. Tell me I'm wrong. I'll tell you why I don't think I am. You tell me why you think, why you think I am. I'll tell you the opposite.

• 3:14:37Speaker 02

  But if we can't exchange that information, we can't grow.

• 3:14:41Speaker 02

  But we've got to be able to do it respectfully.

• 3:14:45Speaker 02

  And not just yell at somebody and go, "Well, you're an idiot. And you're wrong." Right? That just shuts down the conversation. Now, what did you learn? You learned nothing. And you're stuck in the same spot you were before.

• 3:15:02Speaker 02

  You're doing a great job trying to get information out to people.

• 3:15:07Speaker 02

  You can't make them listen.

• 3:15:10Speaker 02

  But at least the information is there if they choose to.

• 3:15:14Speaker 02

  And slowly, over time.

• 3:15:17Speaker 02

  You know, given enough exposure.

• 3:15:22Speaker 02

  And maybe taken away some of the constant confirmation bias reinforcement where they reinforce their own idea from others that believe the same thing.

• 3:15:34Speaker 02

  Maybe, maybe they start to question.

• 3:15:38Speaker 02

  Unfortunately, to your point. I say too many people that have already made up their mind and all they do is listen to one newscast over and over all day long 24/7 to get reinforced of the same ideas they already have.

• 3:15:55Speaker 02

  And over a day, a week, a month, a year, those ideas become so reinforced. Those pathways become so ingrained in their brain. It's almost impossible to break them.

• 3:16:09Shawn Ryan?

  Now, I don't know, maybe there is some positivity here. I mean, if I think about, when I'm talking about really any of these interviews. A lot of these interviews get million, two million. Over that views, plus, plus all the downloads on Spotify.

• 3:16:26Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:16:27Shawn Ryan?

  And, yeah, I don't read all the comments, I read a handful of the comments every once in a while and especially when we release one like that and they are overwhelmingly negative. But maybe there's 50,000 comments on a video that has two million views. The loudest, you know, the loudest person in the room is always the biggest shitbag. And if you look at where we're at, I mean, today we're ranked number two on Spotify. Out of everybody.

• 3:17:00Speaker 02

  That's awesome. Congratulations.

• 3:17:02Shawn Ryan?

  So, and that's, I mean, I'm not saying that to brag, I'm not, I'm saying that

• 3:17:08Shawn Ryan?

  if you look at the comment to view ratio or the, the comment to download ratio. So a lot more down, there's a lot more people listening in not commenting than there are commenting. So maybe there, maybe, maybe a lot more people.

• 3:17:24Shawn Ryan?

  You know.

• 3:17:27Shawn Ryan?

  Are paying attention then, I think.

• 3:17:29Speaker 02

  I think they're listening. I think they are.

• 3:17:34Speaker 02

  Like I said, it takes time.

• 3:17:38Speaker 02

  We started this whole conversation with you said, you know, what caused me, what, what event caused me to write this book? And I said, there was no one aha event, right? It takes time.

• 3:17:52Speaker 02

  And I think as people listen. It takes time.

• 3:17:57Speaker 02

  But they've got to be exposed to a different form of information over time, and that will slowly make a change. The only question I have

• 3:18:10Speaker 02

  is do we have that much time?

• 3:18:14Speaker 02

  I hope we do.

• 3:18:17Speaker 02

  I don't think the United States is gonna end. I, I do think we're gonna have to change.

• 3:18:24Speaker 02

  I think, you know, you asked, are we, are we getting ready for World War III or something coming? Change is coming.

• 3:18:32Speaker 02

  How does that look? I don't know. And is it gonna be a one-time thing? No.

• 3:18:38Speaker 02

  Is it gonna be like, okay, this changed, and now we're done for the next 200 years? No. We're gonna continue to change. So I think the dissemination of information is important.

• 3:18:50Speaker 02

  It has to be.

• 3:18:53Speaker 02

  And you know, one of the first things you want to do if you want to brainwash people or make them think a certain way is just give them one set of information, just yours. Don't allow them to see any other information that refute that. So the more we get information out.

• 3:19:13Speaker 02

  Us, others, the other side of the story, everything, the better we are.

• 3:19:24Shawn Ryan?

  Do you think information's going away with

• 3:19:27Speaker 02

  Going away?

• 3:19:28Shawn Ryan?

  The rise of AI?

• 3:19:30Speaker 02

  AI is interesting.

• 3:19:33Speaker 02

  Do I think it's going away? No.

• 3:19:37Shawn Ryan?

  Maybe, maybe not information, truthful.

• 3:19:44Speaker 02

  I don't think AI is the culprit here.

• 3:19:47Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, all they need to do is feed AI, I mean, AI, whatever, whatever data point they want, and then that becomes

• 3:19:55Speaker 02

  It becomes what AI tells you.

• 3:19:56Shawn Ryan?

  That becomes truth.

• 3:19:57Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:19:59Shawn Ryan?

  Just like history, when we opened this.

• 3:20:02Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 3:20:05Speaker 02

  It's interesting. I saw a statistic the other day, and I can't repeat it, but it was an interesting data point. Where it said, it was about YouTube and about films and Hollywood. And it said, I'm gonna make this up, so anybody listening, do not quote me on this. Something to the effect of there's more YouTube video being uploaded every day than was created the entire time since film started until 2020, whatever.

• 3:20:44Speaker 02

  Interesting. The more interesting part was, we have lost more film than is uploaded every day in YouTube. I'm thinking, really? We have? There's a lot of films that no longer exist. We made them. They were hits in the time. Maybe they weren't digitized yet. Maybe they were just, you know, cellulose film, and there was a fire. We've lost them. They're gone.

• 3:21:14Speaker 02

  There's a lot of information in history that has just disappeared. We no longer have it.

• 3:21:22Speaker 02

  The internet

• 3:21:25Speaker 02

  is an interesting thing.

• 3:21:28Speaker 02

  Here's a question for you. How many times have you looked on your computer for information you know you have and you can't find it?

• 3:21:38Speaker 02

  A handful. Yeah. It's like, I know I have this. Yeah. You would think that I can put on a search engine or something to find it. I know it's here. But you can't. You can't find it. Somewhere, somehow, something happened. It's gone.

• 3:21:54Speaker 02

  There's no way to get that back.

• 3:21:58Speaker 02

  And I know when I was, again, when I was studying history at the academy, we used a lot of written information. People would write letters. You know, and they would survive for a long time, right? We'd find them, or diaries, or, or journals, or whatnot.

• 3:22:15Speaker 02

  We don't have the same thing electronically. We say, hey, we can, we can back it up. We can keep it. That's true. But we tend not to do that. It tends to get lost.

• 3:22:28Speaker 02

  I've had,

• 3:22:30Speaker 02

  you know, I, I know I had a video of my daughter when she was, you know, one year old. Can't find it.

• 3:22:40Speaker 02

  I've looked everywhere. I've tried everything. I'm sure somewhere, someplace, it was on one hard drive that crashed. And it wasn't backed up in the right place, you know, it's just gone. So we'd lose information, and when we do that, we'd lose a vision into how we got here.

• 3:22:59Speaker 02

  So AI, AI can only go off what it has, right? Hmm. People can remember things, even if they can't produce it. AI can't. So I think AI both expands our reach and information, and it constricts it to whatever AI knows.

• 3:23:20Speaker 02

  Now, AI is an interesting topic. In my courses, I teach students to use AI. It's a tool. Use it. But be careful how you use it, because it will give you wrong answers. You know? And...

• 3:23:43Speaker 02

  Different AI are trained on different language models. They will give you different answers. So you could ask a question. Well, I'll give you an example. Here's a, here's a great example. I use AI to do research sometimes. Because I can go out and do 50 Google searches to try and find the right document. Or I can just tell AI, I need a document that I know exists. It's about this from around this time. Can you find it? AI goes out and goes, is this it? I'll be like, no, that's not it. Is this it? Okay, yeah, that's the one I'm looking for. Where can I find that? And I'll say, oh, well, that's in the National Archives here.

• 3:24:28Speaker 02

  Here's the address. And then I go to the National Archives and I get the document and then I can read the document. Right? That's a good use of AI. But if you just ask it a question. So we were talking about Zionism earlier. I asked AI once, I'm like, what do you think about Zionism? And it goes, I can't answer that because that would be anti-Semitic or something like that. And I'm like, seriously? I said, what if I asked you? And I, I had a conversation with AI. So what if I asked you about, what do you think about white supremacy? And it's like, oh, well, that's blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And it starts going, I'm like, why did you answer this and not that? It's like, well, one is politically charged about, you know, people's religion and the other is not.

• 3:25:13Speaker 02

  And I'm like, no, they're not. I said, you're biasing your information. And you've got to be careful, AI will do that to you. If you use AI for your information source, you're probably just as bad as just getting it from, you know, one news station.

• 3:25:36Speaker 02

  That's scary. Here's a trick for you. I teach my students this.

• 3:25:41Speaker 02

  There's an old riddle. If you're trapped in a room, and there's two doors, one leads to heaven and one leads to hell. And you have two computers. One computer always lies, and one computer always tells the truth. But you don't know which one is which. And you don't know which door is which. You can ask one computer, one question. How do you figure out which door to go through?

• 3:26:10Speaker 02

  Right? It's a logic riddle. And the answer is go to, ask them what door they're gonna go through. But if you use the computer that lied, it would tell you the wrong thing. If you use the computer that tells the truth, it would tell you the right thing, but you don't know which one is which.

• 3:26:28Speaker 02

  So the answer is to go to any door and ask one computer, if you were the other computer, would you tell me that this is the door to heaven? And whatever it answers, it's the opposite.

• 3:26:41Speaker 02

  Because you know that you're absolutely going to get a negative answer, regardless of which one you picked, right?

• 3:26:50Speaker 02

  I tell my students to do this with AI. Ask AI a question. And then go to a different AI. And say, is this question correct? Is this answer, I asked this question, got this answer, is this correct? Is there anything that is not correct in it? Would you say, you know? And maybe even use three AI models.

• 3:27:14Speaker 02

  And see what they say. It'll be amazing how much they might contradict each other and, and give you a little bit of different answer.

• 3:27:24Speaker 02

  So, what does this have to do with how we get people to know more? It's... People are using AI? They can't just ask the question they think they want to know because they might get the wrong answer.

• 3:27:41Speaker 02

  And whoever owns the AI

• 3:27:44Speaker 02

  is the one that's giving it the information that it wants to pull from.

• 3:27:50Speaker 02

  That was what I was getting at. Yeah. I heard something the other day and wow.

• 3:27:57Speaker 02

  Again, I can't recreate it exactly, but something like somebody asked Grok.

• 3:28:04Speaker 02

  Who is Elon Musk's AI? You know, who is the biggest threat to American democracy or something like that? And it came back and answered Elon Musk. And he'll like, I'll bet they're gonna fix that one on that.

• 3:28:20Speaker 02

  That's not gonna last very long. Yeah. We need to tweak that model a little bit.

• 3:28:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's interesting stuff. Information.

• 3:28:33Speaker 02

  You know, we used to say way back in the eighties when I was in military, information will be the battleground of the future. And we were looking at more as tactically, how do we tactically have enough information to do what we do? I mean, I'll date myself. When I went to the Gulf War, GPS didn't exist. We had no GPS. So you had maps. Well, a map of a flat desert doesn't do you much. It's kind of hard to navigate when everything's just

• 3:29:09Speaker 02

  flat. Or topographically, I've got a five foot ridge. Like, how could I see that in a helicopter, right?

• 3:29:19Speaker 02

  And then today, you know, you've got GPS and tracking and you've got PIPs everywhere that tell you where you are. Everybody knows where you are. They can track you. It's different. And we were looking at information as the battleground of the future that way. We were thinking tactically in theater. We can have better information to see what's happening on the ground. We didn't really consider that in the future, information is the battleground for the human mind.

• 3:29:53Speaker 02

  How people think, what they think, how they feel about it and what they're going to do

• 3:30:01Speaker 02

  is the battleground.

• 3:30:04Speaker 02

  And I use those terms specifically because I taught a course on communication. And I say there's three parts to every communication. What do you want people to think? What do you want people to feel? And what do you want people to do? Frequently, we only think about the first one. What do I want them to think? And you give them information. But you have to think more and think, what do I want them to feel about this? Okay, they know this piece of information. Do I want them to feel good about it or bad about it? Indifferent? Which will usually give you different results. I can tell you something. Do I want you to think that's a bad thing or good thing? How do I want you to feel? And then what do I want you to do?

• 3:30:49Speaker 02

  If I just gave you information and made you feel good about it or bad about it? What do I want you to do? Because if there's no action, then why bother? Why? If it doesn't change you in any way, then why did we spend that time communicating?

• 3:31:09Shawn Ryan?

  You will spurt it around.

• 3:31:11Speaker 02

  What's that?

• 3:31:12Shawn Ryan?

  Spurt it around.

• 3:31:18Speaker 02

  It's... It's interesting.

• 3:31:36Speaker 02

  I'm gonna, I'm gonna go back to the book for a second. What do I want people to think? I want them to think that maybe what they've been told is not the full truth. Maybe there's more to the story that they should know. What do I want them to feel? I want them to feel like maybe they're being lied to. I want them to feel uneasy that, hey, I don't know the whole story. And I'm gonna feel bad if I'm saying something and it's not the whole story. I'm gonna look like an idiot.

• 3:32:17Speaker 02

  And what do I want them to do? I want them to ask questions. Ask questions, do research, find the answers. Make your own decisions, not what somebody else decided they thought you should think. I think that's how we change things.

• 3:32:39Speaker 03

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• 3:32:47Speaker 02

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• 3:32:50Speaker 03

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• 3:32:55Shawn Ryan?

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• 3:32:59Speaker 03

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• 3:33:00Shawn Ryan?

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• 3:33:02Speaker 03

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• 3:33:04Shawn Ryan?

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• 3:33:13Speaker 03

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• 3:33:31Shawn Ryan?

  When did you see it become dangerous to ask questions?

• 3:33:37Speaker 02

  Ooh. You know, even in my time in the Marine Corps. And this was late 80s, 90s. In the military, a lot of times, don't ask questions. Just take this for the way it is. Right? I think that has been that way for a while. I couldn't comment from before I was in. I couldn't comment about when I was out. But yeah, you were not encouraged to ask questions. In the civilian world.

• 3:34:22Speaker 02

  I seem to remember

• 3:34:28Speaker 02

  early on, we were encouraged to ask questions.

• 3:34:32Speaker 02

  I seem to remember even

• 3:34:36Speaker 02

  thinking back

• 3:34:40Speaker 02

  even mid 90s, late 90s, we were encouraged to ask questions.

• 3:34:47Speaker 02

  Right? Think about what you're doing. Think about why you're doing it.

• 3:34:52Speaker 02

  Around the 2000s or so is when I started hearing more.

• 3:35:00Speaker 02

  Don't ask, right? Or it wasn't you were told not to ask. Yes, you were not treated well if you'd asked.

• 3:35:10Shawn Ryan?

  What were the questions that were forbidden back then?

• 3:35:13Speaker 02

  Back then?

• 3:35:15Shawn Ryan?

  In the early 2000s.

• 3:35:16Speaker 02

  Oh.

• 3:35:17Shawn Ryan?

  In my opinion, it's COVID.

• 3:35:23Speaker 02

  You know, COVID was a good one.

• 3:35:27Speaker 02

  Lot of controversy around that. Right? A lot of different feelings. Quite honestly, 9/11.

• 3:35:37Speaker 02

  I was at a dinner the other night and somebody asked me, what do you think about 9/11? Was it a conspiracy? Did it happen the way it was supposed to? You know, what happened?

• 3:35:48Speaker 02

  I told him quite honestly, I don't have an opinion. I would, I can give you my opinions. They are not researched and I don't like giving opinions that are not researched because I could be 180 degrees off.

• 3:36:04Speaker 02

  I said, the only thing I will say is there is conflicting information. And kind of the same thing with COVID, there is conflicting information. Do I have feelings? Yeah.

• 3:36:17Speaker 02

  Do I think it just spontaneously erupted out in the wild?

• 3:36:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, sure. Right?

• 3:36:27Speaker 02

  Statistically? Not.

• 3:36:32Speaker 02

  You know, but can I, do I have any proof? No.

• 3:36:38Speaker 02

  There was a lot of misinformation, a lot of urban legend stuff going on.

• 3:36:47Speaker 02

  And it's bad when that happens because there's so many outlandish things being said. They mask things that may have been true.

• 3:36:58Speaker 02

  And it's really difficult to dig through all of that and figure out what is correct and what isn't.

• 3:37:05Speaker 02

  And to some extent, I think it's more difficult to do that than it was in the past.

• 3:37:12Speaker 02

  It's hard. And that's why some things, I'm like, I can't even form an opinion on that.

• 3:37:20Speaker 02

  Because there's conflicting information and I can't find enough other information to

• 3:37:27Speaker 02

  make one more reasonable than the other. You start to lean that way as you get more and more information. But I'm like, so far, I, right? Just don't ask.

• 3:37:43Speaker 02

  Getting better at hiding things, in my opinion.

• 3:37:48Speaker 02

  So what do you think about COVID?

• 3:37:50Shawn Ryan?

  What do I think about COVID?

• 3:37:52Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:37:56Shawn Ryan?

  And I think that

• 3:38:04Shawn Ryan?

  I think it was planned.

• 3:38:09Speaker 02

  You think the release was planned?

• 3:38:11Shawn Ryan?

  I think we were lied to.

• 3:38:13Speaker 02

  Oh, I think we were lied to. Do you think they planned to release it?

• 3:38:18Shawn Ryan?

  I think the

• 3:38:23Shawn Ryan?

  I don't know.

• 3:38:26Shawn Ryan?

  I think it's a very good possibility.

• 3:38:28Speaker 02

  It's funny, though, we talk about the coronavirus, right? And again, connect the dots.

• 3:38:36Speaker 02

  First, we heard about SARS, Southeast Asia Respiratory Syndrome. It's a coronavirus. It was

• 3:38:46Speaker 02

  not very contagious, but if you got it, it had a high mortality rate. It was dangerous to get, but it was hard to get.

• 3:38:57Speaker 02

  Four or five years later, we have MERS, Middle East Respiratory Syndrome, a coronavirus that is amazingly easy to get, but not low mortality rate. It's almost like we bracketed it and said, okay, now we have COVID. Fairly easy to get, fair mortality rate. All we have to do, and we all say, everybody says we're not working on chemical weapons. Right? We're not working on chemical weapons. Nobody else is either. Why do you call working on one part of a virus an increase of function? Right?

• 3:39:41Speaker 02

  That sounds kind of military to me. And, yeah, do I think that all of these just happened? Seems a little weird that they happened in the way that they did. Mm-hmm. Right? And then, kind of scary though. Even back in the 80s, people asked me, are you worried about nukes? Somebody getting a suitcase of nuclear material into the US? I'm like, no, I'm not. That would be so difficult with some of our tracking systems and everything.

• 3:40:22Speaker 02

  I'm worried about somebody infecting themselves with anthrax, coming over to the US and throwing themselves in the New York water supply or anything else. I mean, once you release something, there's no stopping it. It's Pandora's box. You can't get it back. That's what worries me. Mm-hmm. And it takes a lot to make a fissionable material to a degree that you could use it. Doesn't take that much to create something in a lab. That's scary.

• 3:40:59Speaker 02

  Do you think we had a part in COVID? Do you think we had a part? The US.

• 3:41:06Speaker 02

  Yeah, I do.

• 3:41:10Speaker 02

  We had doctors over in Wuhan. We were coordinating. What do you think that was? What do I think it was? Yeah.

• 3:41:22Speaker 02

  The virus itself. Do you think it was planned?

• 3:41:28Speaker 02

  Was it scheduled? I don't think the release was planned. You think it was an accident? I think it was accidental.

• 3:41:38Speaker 02

  Why don't you think there was any repercussions for China from the entire fucking world? Why there was any what? Why don't you think there was never any repercussions? It's a great question, right?

• 3:41:51Speaker 02

  Every time something happens, we say we're gonna investigate. It just... For what? The fuck are we investigating? We should investigate where we try, were, or were the people in Wuhan trying to create a virus that was virulent to human population.

• 3:42:10Speaker 02

  Were we? We say we're just, we're trying to figure out what someone else would do so we could guard against it. Really? Did we guard against it? Because, yes, we came out with vaccines. Lots of controversy about those. But... And we came out with them fairly fast. So you might say maybe they were working on them beforehand. And testing. And testing. It didn't work. But if that's true,

• 3:42:41Speaker 02

  why didn't we even have them when the first release came through? I mean, if we, if our goal was to find out how to make something and then guard against it, why didn't we already know that?

• 3:42:54Speaker 02

  Or is it that, hey, timing was bad? We had figured out, hey, we can make this, but we haven't figured out how to stop it yet? Was it an accident?

• 3:43:06Speaker 02

  I don't know. If I look at, what is the reasoning someone would want to release it? I don't come up with anything good. What is the reason somebody would wanna release it?

• 3:43:21Speaker 02

  Well, that's the problem. What is the reason? I can't think of a good one. Why someone would say, hey, we should go release this.

• 3:43:30Speaker 02

  Unless you wanted just general worldwide population control.

• 3:43:35Speaker 02

  Said, hey, we're growing too fast, too many people. Let's get rid of a million.

• 3:43:41Speaker 02

  That seems like not the best way to do that. We've killed that in a single war. Be faster just to, you know, pick a war with somebody. I don't, I don't see a good reason for that. And that's why I tend to believe it was an accidental release. Do you think it was an experiment?

• 3:44:02Speaker 02

  That we were experimenting on it or an experiment to release it? A psy-op. Hmm. I don't know. Maybe not a psy-op. Wrong word. Yeah, I don't think it was a psy-op. I don't see that. A, a, a FTX.

• 3:44:22Speaker 02

  I think it would have been careless to release it. If we didn't know we could control it. Anybody. You're gonna, you're gonna, I mean, it's indiscriminate. Right? So anybody to release it without having a way to control it, I think would be irresponsible. I can't see a good reason for it. Which again, makes me believe, do I believe that it was created in a lab? I personally do. I don't think that spontaneously just erupted in nature. Uh huh. I know that people will disagree with that. And that is a feeling I have no

• 3:45:01Speaker 02

  real, you know, proof of that. I can't think of a reason to release it.

• 3:45:09Speaker 02

  Specifically. It makes no sense to me.

• 3:45:15Speaker 02

  What did anyone gain? Did anyone gain anything from it?

• 3:45:20Speaker 02

  Well, Pfizer and Moderna did. Well, yeah, that's true. That's absolutely true.

• 3:45:27Speaker 02

  They asked them to give up their profits so that we could use it, and they said, no. What's that? It was a gross abuse of power. Oh, that's true.

• 3:45:37Speaker 02

  I'm sure they learned.

• 3:45:41Speaker 02

  It gets back to a lot of things talking about

• 3:45:46Speaker 02

  our system that is based on who makes the most money.

• 3:45:53Speaker 02

  Right? Pfizer and Moderna made a lot of money.

• 3:45:58Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 3:46:01Speaker 02

  Quite a large price to pay for making that money.

• 3:46:05Speaker 02

  Hopefully, that wasn't the reason.

• 3:46:08Speaker 02

  But there's a lot of times in our society where money is the deciding factor, not people.

• 3:46:18Speaker 02

  If we can make a profit, but yeah, you know what?

• 3:46:23Speaker 02

  A lot of people might die.

• 3:46:26Speaker 02

  Hmm, we'll make the money.

• 3:46:29Speaker 02

  I mean, we see that in, in some of the water pollution that we've done with different. We see it in Iraq with KBR. Absolutely, right? Absolutely. Totally different scenario? Yeah. Same fucking thing. Do we care? No, we made money. Who made money? Well, all the weapons manufacturers did. Our military industrial complex did. We pull out of Afghanistan and leave how much equipment there?

• 3:46:59Speaker 02

  Do we care? Eh. We have to replace it all now. Yep. As a country, we give away military equipment every year. And somebody asked me, why do we do that? I go, well, think about it. Think if you're a car dealer.

• 3:47:18Speaker 02

  You buy as many cars as you think you're gonna sell during the year. The new year comes along, new models come out, you have a bunch of old models left. What do you do? You discount them, get rid of them, because you need to make room for the new models. Every year, we need new weapons. So what do we do? We just give away our old ones. To our allies. Right? We resupply them, go here. We'll give you all these, because we've got a new one that we want. And we keep rebuying our own military equipment over and over again every year. That's why we have a one trillion dollar budget.

• 3:47:56Speaker 02

  Now. The other option is, you know, I don't want to do the Soviet model where we're fighting nineteen eighty and nineteen ninety battles with, you know, nineteen forty and fifty tanks and things. That's a little bad, but do we have to upgrade it as much as we do? Do we

• 3:48:16Speaker 02

  need everything that we're using?

• 3:48:21Speaker 02

  I remember in the military, you may too, being given a lot of equipment, I'm looking at going, I'm not gonna use this. I don't want it. I don't want to carry it. I don't want to maintain it.

• 3:48:34Speaker 02

  Well, you have to have that. That's part of your your loadout.

• 3:48:42Speaker 02

  You know, we always used to joke that the stocks on the M sixteen are mated by made by the lowest bidder there. I think Mattel was making them for a while. So we had Mattel toys.

• 3:48:55Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, I would rather have it not need it than need it and not have it.

• 3:48:59Speaker 02

  I agree. That that is, that is always a thing to think about.

• 3:49:03Shawn Ryan?

  I am all about an abundance of military equipment. I am not about fucking selling it and giving it away. Just so that primes can reproduce the same damn thing.

• 3:49:12Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:49:14Speaker 02

  And resell it. And give it away by new. And.

• 3:49:20Speaker 02

  I am not in favor of getting weapons and things that are

• 3:49:27Speaker 02

  there because somebody thought it was a good idea, but people in the field look at it and go, this isn't what we need.

• 3:49:34Speaker 02

  I mean, in the Gulf War, we were given holsters for Berettas that were straight out of World War II in Vietnam, made out of leather. You know? And went on webbing, you know, on your waist. I'm like, okay, that nobody needs this. We need it on our thigh. It's gotta be where we can grab it, you know? But you couldn't do that. You've got to have this leather flap closed over it and everything. I'm like, this is, what is this gonna do in the desert?

• 3:50:03Speaker 02

  You know?

• 3:50:06Speaker 02

  It was interesting. When I, when I was at the post grad school, I had a course on international politics and whatnot. Given by one of the gentlemen, and I forgot his name, but he was in line to be one of the choices for Secretary of Defense. Other person got it. He went to post grad school and taught.

• 3:50:25Speaker 02

  Really interesting pieces of information from him. And he said, you know, when you were in the Gulf War? Like, yeah, just got back, right?

• 3:50:37Speaker 02

  And he said, uh,

• 3:50:40Speaker 02

  how was the ammunition? And I go, we didn't have enough. When I was in the Gulf War,

• 3:50:47Speaker 02

  uh, we got there. We had 50 Ks on the helicopters, you know? We're doing some practice with them. We each got nine mils as pilots, got some ammunition for those. And then one day about six months in, they came up and said, there is no more ammunition. Whatever you got, you need to hold. And we said, yeah, but what about when the supply ship comes from the US? And they said, there is no supply ship. There is no more ammunition. When the push came in January and we started moving north, I was flying a 53 Echo.

• 3:51:28Speaker 02

  We had one can of 50 cal for two weapons. It's like 50 rounds. Yeah. I said, we can blow that in four seconds. And they said, that's all you get.

• 3:51:43Speaker 02

  I said, "Well, we need more," and they're like, "There is no more."

• 3:51:48Speaker 02

  And I said, "Well, then we might as well just take these off their mounts and throw it at them because we could do more damage." So I went back to the post-grad school and I thought, "This was stupid. I don't know what happened here. Supply logistics."

• 3:52:01Speaker 02

  And this guy was telling us, "You know what happened was about eight years ago, they needed money for this new weapon system, but they didn't have it. So I said, "Well, we've got a stockpile of ammunition. We don't need to replace it every year. So we'll take the money that we were going to spend replacing ammunition and we'll put it over here on this new Star Wars, whatever, you know, system. And next year, we'll buy more ammunition." Well, the next year came along and said, "You know, we've still got a stockpile, less than we did before, but we still have one.

• 3:52:39Speaker 02

  We've got cost overruns over here. So let's take this year's ammunition budget

• 3:52:46Speaker 02

  and we'll put it over here. Next year, we'll do three times as much. We'll order more." Well, next year comes along and they look at it and go, "Oof, we can't spend that much on ammunition. We've never spent that much on ammunition.

• 3:53:01Speaker 02

  And we don't really need that much. So we'll just take half of it and we'll put it over here on this weapon system and next year we'll buy three and a half times as much." And he said, "What happens is you build this bow wave of debt, right? That you can't ever fill again. Well, then the Gulf War happens. And we're like, "We don't have any more ammunition. There is none."

• 3:53:27Speaker 02

  And I'm like, "We went into war

• 3:53:30Speaker 02

  without the ammunition to sustain it." I'm like, "Had our enemy known that? They could have just waited us out or run us over."

• 3:53:38Speaker 02

  I'm like, "That?"

• 3:53:41Speaker 02

  Is fighting warfare through economics, through, through. I mean, it's not economic warfare, but, but that's capitalism ruining our ability to defend ourselves. I was, that's one of the points that I was so disappointed at, you know, when I'm thinking and building this book. I'm taking data like that going, this is the wrong idea. We're doing the wrong things and we're saying it's for the right reasons, but it's the wrong thing to do. And when I finally learned this, I was like, you know, it makes total sense.

• 3:54:20Speaker 02

  Now everything they told us makes sense because it made no sense at the time. I really envisioned a cargo ship showing up from the US with more munitions. And it just didn't exist. That's a sobering thought as you're heading into combat. I think we just had that happen recently, didn't we? Yeah, well. And they came out with the win, hold, win. We'll win one war while we're holding the other, then we'll pivot and do the other one. I'm like, yeah, how well do you think that's going to work?

• 3:54:59Speaker 02

  We can't even do one right now without running out of equipment. But what do we do? We bought more ammunition. We replaced all of our equipment that we left in the Gulf. We replaced all the equipment we left in Afghanistan. All of the military industrial businesses made billions of dollars of profit. All the congressmen could go say, I brought money into my state. But is that how we run a country? No. Not well. Not well.

• 3:55:45Shawn Ryan?

  Could you talk about seeing the pattern of the imperial playbook? I think this is um something that people would like to hear about.

• 3:55:57Speaker 02

  Yeah, imperialism is, we don't talk about imperialism a lot. We are an empire. And as an empire, we have to do things that empires do. And frequently, those things are not what's best for everyone else. It's very, very focused on what's best for me, not what's best for everybody. And you have to be careful with that. Because if you essentially poison the waters for everyone, you poison your own waters. Right? Um, if I understand your question right,

• 3:56:39Speaker 02

  as an empire, we end up doing a lot of things that I think are short sighted. They protect the empire. They don't protect the environment we live in. And we can talk about, for example, the environment. It does us no good to be an empire if all we're doing is poisoning ourselves. But we do. Right? I would, that, it's funny, the, uh, I was in the military. Number one polluter in the world is the US military. Hands down. Uh, we have signed all sorts of accords with other countries saying we're reducing impact.

• 3:57:21Speaker 02

  And we have an exclusion that says, except for our military. We don't report on it. We don't say what we're doing. We don't say how much fuel we're burning. We don't talk about what we're throwing overboard in the ocean. You know, we don't talk about the munitions that we bury or leave behind, or, you know, what metals they're made out of, or what they're doing to the water supply. You know, we just, we just ignore all of that. That is one of the trappings of empire. We don't care about it because it doesn't help us build the empire at all. Um.

• 3:57:59Speaker 02

  There's a number of things that work like this. Economically, we do the same thing as an empire. We will do what's best for the empire, but not what's best for the world economy. Well, the empire only operates in the world economy. It's kind of one of those things like a rising tide lifts all boats, right? A lowering tide will do, all boats sink. You might be the biggest boat, but if the tide is going down, you're going to sink just like everybody else did. I do have a section in the book talking about empire and the things we do because of that. Economics is a big one.

• 3:58:41Speaker 02

  Global ecology is one. And these things are things that we get caught up in. And I think they're the trappings of empire that they're hard to not get trapped in. I don't know how to get out of it

• 3:59:00Speaker 02

  other than to understand sometimes it's not just what's best for you. It has to be what's best for everyone. Does that make sense?

• 3:59:10Shawn Ryan?

  Of course.

• 3:59:11Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's...

• 3:59:15Speaker 02

  We're, uh... We need oil, right? We live on oil.

• 3:59:20Shawn Ryan?

  We don't even have to fucking live on oil.

• 3:59:22Speaker 02

  We don't have to.

• 3:59:25Shawn Ryan?

  We should be focusing on nuclear.

• 3:59:27Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:59:28Shawn Ryan?

  And here we are, fucking around in Venezuela with oil.

• 3:59:32Speaker 02

  Yeah, and we're the largest producer of oil in the world right now. Right? And what are we doing? We're going to drill more.

• 3:59:41Shawn Ryan?

  It's becoming an obsolete source of fuel.

• 3:59:44Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:59:45Shawn Ryan?

  And it's definitely not the most efficient. And here we are in an AI race with China, and we're fucking around with oil.

• 3:59:54Speaker 02

  We have unfortunately 130 years of infrastructure built on delivering oil.

• 3:59:59Shawn Ryan?

  Already a losing strategy.

• 4:00:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, it is. It is.

• 4:00:03Shawn Ryan?

  They're focusing, yeah, they're implementing coal right now, but they're focusing on nuclear and we're fucking around with oil and gas.

• 4:00:12Speaker 02

  When's the last time we built a new nuclear plant?

• 4:00:15Shawn Ryan?

  I can't, I can't, I can't remember. It's been a long time.

• 4:00:19Speaker 02

  Right? We built a bunch and said, hey, these work. These are good. I think we had, you know, you had Fukushima and, and was it Grenoble?

• 4:00:33Speaker 02

  Yeah. And everybody's like, oof, let's not do this anymore. Yeah. You know what? It's dangerous. It can be. We need safeguards. But we can put in to place the right safeguards. We've had nuclear power plants on our ships now for the last 25 years. We build them very carefully and train people very well. Seven Mile Island, you know, all of this stuff. It's like, well, we're afraid of it now.

• 4:01:02Speaker 02

  Really? You should be afraid of everything we're doing with oil.

• 4:01:06Speaker 02

  The amount of money we spend to move it around the world

• 4:01:10Speaker 02

  and burn it and what it does to the atmosphere, what it does to us. You know, oil is in everything. I don't know what we would do without it right now. We build plastic with it. We, everything has oil product in it somewhere.

• 4:01:29Speaker 02

  But we've got to get away from that. We have to. And quite honestly, most of the problems in the Middle East go away once we get off an oil standard.

• 4:01:39Shawn Ryan?

  What I was referring to was regime change, instability, sanctions, civilian suffering.

• 4:01:47Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 4:01:47Shawn Ryan?

  Proxy wars, plausible deniability.

• 4:01:50Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 4:01:52Speaker 02

  Yeah. All the things we do as an empire.

• 4:01:58Speaker 02

  We talked earlier about how.

• 4:02:02Speaker 02

  Has a country ever been better off after we have done a regime change? And it hasn't. It's better for us. Hasn't been better for them, right? Proxy wars, better for us. We don't have to fight on our ground. We can use other people's land, fight there. Better for them? No. Do we go fight Russia directly? No. You know, we can fight in Afghanistan and Ukraine and whatnot, right? It gives us a position of deniability. That's not good because we don't see the consequences

• 4:02:44Speaker 02

  of what we're doing. And this gets back to, do people understand and know what's going on? Because when we fight proxy wars, they don't see it. And it's easy to ignore it if you don't see it. But it's just as devastating economically when we are... We have a tendency to... There was a good book, Confessions of an Economic Hitman, where he talks about how his job, this author, I forgot his name, Peterson, he would go in

• 4:03:23Speaker 02

  and convince countries, "You need to help have us come in and help you. We'll give you a loan. We'll give you a loan and we will make sure that we build out your infrastructure and everything. You just pay back the loan with everything you make from what we've given you," right? What it does, though, is it locks these other countries into loans that can never be repaid. They're in debt to us forever. And actually, we look forward to them defaulting on the loan because then we can go in and restructure it and do it all over again.

• 4:04:02Speaker 02

  He was saying that we've done this in Brazil, we've done it in Venezuela.

• 4:04:09Speaker 02

  Saudi Arabia.

• 4:04:12Speaker 02

  1978, I think it was 78, 77, 78.

• 4:04:17Speaker 02

  Mid 70s. Saudi Arabia cut off our oil. We were in dire straits. I remember being a kid, 16, 17 at the time, driving a car, you couldn't get gasoline. You would line up in a line almost a mile long and then be limited to five gallons. Because there just wasn't any. Because they cut us off.

• 4:04:41Speaker 02

  Now, after that, what did we do? We did two things. First, that's when we started the Strategic Oil Reserve. And said, "We're never going to allow somebody to hold us hostage like this again." Right? So we started stockpiling our own oil.

• 4:04:56Speaker 02

  Good choice. We also went back to Saudi Arabia and we said, "Look, we're going to make some deals with you." And Saudi Arabia was not a huge country at the time in terms of, of profit and whatnot. Look back at maps and things, you'll see they, they don't have huge shiny cities and all. We said, "We're gonna come in here and we're gonna pay to sink your wells. We're gonna pay to build refineries.

• 4:05:25Speaker 02

  We're gonna loan you a lot of money and you're gonna pay us back from the proceeds.

• 4:05:33Speaker 02

  Also, you're gonna sign an agreement that you will provide X amount of oil to us for the next

• 4:05:40Speaker 02

  50 years? I think it was?

• 4:05:44Speaker 02

  Well, that agreement just ran out a couple of years ago and you may have heard where Saudi Arabia was talking about. Oh, that agreement said they could only sell oil in US dollars.

• 4:05:56Speaker 02

  To help our economy. I know where you're going. Couple of years ago, you heard chatter about Saudi Arabia saying, maybe we'll sell oil in rubles now. Because our agreement ran out. And they started rattling our cage a little going, you know, unless you give us a new agreement that we like. We're going to start trading in yen and we're going to start trading in ruble. And when everybody can buy our oil in yen and ruble, they don't need the dollar anymore. And your economy is going to collapse. And we were frightened.

• 4:06:37Speaker 02

  Same thing with bricks. If everybody starts using a different currency. Doesn't keep ours afloat anymore. Right. And that is, that is terrifying to us. That's why anybody that has tried to sign on to bricks, we are not friendly to.

• 4:06:57Speaker 02

  It's getting bigger. Pardon? It's getting bigger. Yeah, it is. It is. You can only hold it off for so long.

• 4:07:08Speaker 02

  But we made those deals with Saudi Arabia and Saudi Arabia sold oil only in US currency and made a ton of money.

• 4:07:18Speaker 02

  You know, they've got so much money now, they're spending it building 100 kilometer long, straight cities that make no sense.

• 4:07:27Speaker 02

  But, uh, but a couple of years ago, yeah, they were talking about maybe moving off the dollar. Yep, I remember. I don't know what happened. All I know is they were talking about it.

• 4:07:39Speaker 02

  Lot of people got frightened. Next thing, nobody's talking about it again and we're all buddy buddy.

• 4:07:46Speaker 02

  Now we're selling them some fighters too, I think. Recently, I just thought we were sending a new shipment of fighters over to Saudi Arabia. Sure that wasn't Israel? Uh, no, we would send them to them all the time. But I was surprised because I flew with some Saudi Air Force and I'm like, I don't see them flying these.

• 4:08:10Speaker 02

  I don't know. Or was Israel selling them to them? Israel was

• 4:08:15Shawn Ryan?

  I believe we just sold $6 billion in F-15s. Oh, excuse me.

• 4:08:22Shawn Ryan?

  Did I use the word sold?

• 4:08:23Speaker 02

  You did.

• 4:08:25Shawn Ryan?

  My bad. Gave them.

• 4:08:26Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 4:08:27Shawn Ryan?

  About $6 billion in F-15s. That was about a week ago.

• 4:08:31Speaker 02

  I thought this was something else. This was about a month ago. I'm gonna have to look into it.

• 4:08:35Shawn Ryan?

  I'm just gonna look this up.

• 4:08:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, look into that.

• 4:08:38Shawn Ryan?

  I was actually having a conversation with Mike Walz about funding

• 4:08:44Shawn Ryan?

  Israel, and he said, we did not do that. And then

• 4:08:52Speaker 02

  Beautiful thing.

• 4:08:52Shawn Ryan?

  The next day.

• 4:08:54Speaker 02

  Yeah, right, right. Next day. We would never do that. It's amazing how many times we say we're not doing that. And then the next day or next week, you see the news that, yeah, it's exactly what we did.

• 4:09:06Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 4:09:10Speaker 02

  I'm joking with my kids all the time because I ask a question and I say, you know, it's too bad you don't have a small device you could hold in your hand that connected you to the some knowledge of all human information. Where you could research that.

• 4:09:34Speaker 02

  Anything?

• 4:09:39Shawn Ryan?

  Yes, the United States recently awarded Boeing an $8.6 billion contract to supply up to 50 F-15 fighter jets to Israel through the foreign military sales program. With the initial batch of 25 aircraft funded largely by US military aid.

• 4:10:00Speaker 02

  Can you look if we just sent any to Saudi Arabia? So I thought I just saw that we were doing that.

• 4:10:11Shawn Ryan?

  Boeing offered F-15 to Saudi Arabia on November 16, 2025, but no deal was signed.

• 4:10:18Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 4:10:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, it surprised me because like I said, we worked with the Saudi Arabian

• 4:10:29Speaker 02

  Air Force back in Desert Storm. That was a while ago. I just didn't see them flying these aircraft.

• 4:10:41Speaker 02

  But still.

• 4:10:44Shawn Ryan?

  Why do you think we import so many refugees? After we leave a country that we went to war with?

• 4:10:51Shawn Ryan?

  Or?

• 4:10:53Shawn Ryan?

  Had war on their turf?

• 4:10:55Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 4:10:58Speaker 02

  You know, the bigger question is, why do we make so many refugees?

• 4:11:03Speaker 02

  You know?

• 4:11:06Speaker 02

  I do believe in, we were talking about being accountable. If we create refugees, especially through a proxy war, we should do something about that. I don't think it's, I don't think it's ethical to go create refugees and then say, okay, you're on your own.

• 4:11:28Speaker 02

  I think we should do the right thing as a country. Either help them,

• 4:11:35Speaker 02

  build what they need so they don't have to be refugees, or take them in. The easiest thing is to take them in. But then, you have to think about, okay,

• 4:11:47Speaker 02

  can we take in all the world's refugees? No, we can't.

• 4:11:52Speaker 02

  Should we take in some? Yes, we should. Let's be intelligent about the way we do it.

• 4:11:59Speaker 02

  Let's make sure we get them what they need to become contributing people in the United States. That doesn't mean just put them somewhere and go, okay, you're on your own. We brought you here, now struggle to survive.

• 4:12:15Speaker 02

  That's not a good plan. Unfortunately, I think we do that a lot of times. I think we bring people in, don't give them what they need to be able to succeed, and then sit there and say, why aren't you?

• 4:12:29Shawn Ryan?

  Why don't you think we do that?

• 4:12:32Shawn Ryan?

  So fucking counterproductive.

• 4:12:34Speaker 02

  I think two things. Number one, money costs money. And number two, it doesn't buy any political capital. Nobody gets to their next election by saying, look what I did to help these people.

• 4:12:45Speaker 02

  And this gets back to our main problem with our political system that is based on money and politicking for the next election instead of doing what's right.

• 4:12:55Shawn Ryan?

  I just had this conversation with Ro Khanna. I mean, he's, he is the, if you're not familiar with him, he just, he wanted to raise the billionaire tax in California, 1%. Silicon Valley lost a trillion dollars in wealth in what, one week? And so we had the conversation, it was civilized conversation, you know, and he's, he's, I mean, he wants

• 4:13:18Shawn Ryan?

  people to have med- um, uh, health insurance and, you know, and all the, all the things that you would need to be successful. But, you know, I just, I said, what

• 4:13:32Shawn Ryan?

  what do you, I asked him, I said, what are you even going to spend the money on? We have all this waste, fraud and abuse in the country. And second of all, we send all of our money

• 4:13:42Shawn Ryan?

  to Ukraine, to Israel,

• 4:13:46Shawn Ryan?

  to Afghanistan, to Iraq.

• 4:13:50Shawn Ryan?

  And every, everywhere. But here.

• 4:13:54Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 4:14:00Shawn Ryan?

  But it was, was it last week, they estimated $600 billion in waste, fraud and abuse?

• 4:14:07Speaker 02

  I don't know.

• 4:14:07Shawn Ryan?

  In the country? What if you took a billion, what if you took $2 billion and put it in the top 300 cities in the US?

• 4:14:15Speaker 02

  Right.

• 4:14:17Shawn Ryan?

  Why don't, why don't you tackle the waste, fraud and abuse first before you ask for more fucking money? That is going to leave unaccounted for.

• 4:14:27Speaker 02

  And you know what?

• 4:14:28Shawn Ryan?

  He didn't have an answer.

• 4:14:29Speaker 02

  And taking Musk and having just randomly cut people from different jobs was not the answer.

• 4:14:36Shawn Ryan?

  But what, what, what, why wouldn't they just, why wouldn't you fix the waste? How is that not even, it's like, it's not even, it, it, it's not even a viable option in these people's minds.

• 4:14:50Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 4:14:52Speaker 02

  I know.

• 4:14:53Shawn Ryan?

  Great, I want everybody to have fucking healthcare.

• 4:14:56Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 4:14:56Shawn Ryan?

  I want everybody to have free education. I want, that's great. I think it betters our country.

• 4:15:03Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 4:15:03Shawn Ryan?

  But I don't want to fucking pay for it.

• 4:15:05Speaker 02

  I don't want to pay more.

• 4:15:06Shawn Ryan?

  When

• 4:15:09Shawn Ryan?

  we have nine billion dollars in Minnesota alone going to Somalia.

• 4:15:13Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 4:15:14Shawn Ryan?

  We have 600 billion in the country in one year that's, that's, that's waste, fraud and abuse.

• 4:15:20Speaker 02

  And who, who got that? Who got that?

• 4:15:23Shawn Ryan?

  Who got what?

• 4:15:24Speaker 02

  That 600 billion? Where did it go?

• 4:15:26Shawn Ryan?

  We don't, nobody knows.

• 4:15:27Speaker 02

  But somebody got it.

• 4:15:28Shawn Ryan?

  Yep.

• 4:15:30Speaker 02

  It's not like that money just disappeared. So when you say it's waste, fraud and abuse, who did that money go to?

• 4:15:38Shawn Ryan?

  That's a great question, but nobody wants to tackle it. It's, it's, okay, well, great. You're gonna, you're gonna tax us another 1%? How much of that is gonna go to bullshit?

• 4:15:50Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 4:15:50Shawn Ryan?

  How much of that is gonna leave the fucking country? How much of that is gonna go to a country that has free housing, free education, free healthcare, free everything?

• 4:16:01Shawn Ryan?

  Probably damn near zero poverty.

• 4:16:03Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 4:16:06Speaker 02

  We spend more money on other countries and waste, fraud and abuse than we do on our own citizens.

• 4:16:11Shawn Ryan?

  And we allow it to happen.

• 4:16:12Speaker 02

  And we do. And why? That's the question, right? I, I happen to believe our, our politicians

• 4:16:22Speaker 02

  are more involved in getting elected again than they are in doing what's right.

• 4:16:29Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 4:16:31Speaker 02

  Waste, fraud and abuse? Yeah, if you were running a company, if you're running a corporation.

• 4:16:36Shawn Ryan?

  I have a congressman right now that's after me.

• 4:16:41Shawn Ryan?

  Sent me a cease and desist, tried to silence me, tried to sue me.

• 4:16:44Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 4:16:45Shawn Ryan?

  Went back at him.

• 4:16:48Shawn Ryan?

  If he he he he he tells everybody I'm doing this shit for clicks and views. This guy's done more podcasts than I have in the past two weeks and I'm a fucking podcaster.

• 4:17:00Speaker 02

  Yeah, right.

• 4:17:00Shawn Ryan?

  And it's all about his reelection because he's probably not gonna get reelection.

• 4:17:05Speaker 02

  Right.

• 4:17:05Shawn Ryan?

  Reelect, he's probably gonna get primaried because I fucking blasted his ass and it got, I don't know, ten, twenty, thirty million views.

• 4:17:13Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 4:17:14Shawn Ryan?

  While he goes on something, gets eight hundred views. It's gonna take a lot of podcasts with eight hundred views to fucking dig yourself out of that hole.

• 4:17:22Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 4:17:23Shawn Ryan?

  But that's the only thing that guy gives a fuck about.

• 4:17:26Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 4:17:27Shawn Ryan?

  We have, I mean, I just listed off all the shit that's going on in the country, but this fucking guy is worried about shit talking on the internet.

• 4:17:36Speaker 02

  Right, right. Oh, they do it all day long.

• 4:17:42Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 4:17:42Shawn Ryan?

  That's all he does.

• 4:17:43Speaker 02

  I saw some.

• 4:17:44Shawn Ryan?

  And you know what? He's probably gonna get fucking reelected. Like, I would love to say that he's gonna get primaried. They will probably fucking reelect the same dipshit again and complain about the same fucking bullshit again. And so it it it it's almost like we deserve exactly what we're living in.

• 4:18:02Speaker 02

  Almost. I mean, think about half the stuff that happens here. We didn't pass a budget.

• 4:18:09Speaker 02

  We, the Congress did not pass a budget. What did they do when the budget didn't pass?

• 4:18:16Speaker 02

  They went on vacation. Are you freaking kidding me?

• 4:18:21Shawn Ryan?

  Didn't we allow it?

• 4:18:22Speaker 02

  If I was running, I mean, if the buzz it budget didn't pass, they should be locked in congressional chambers and fed pizzas until it passes. You don't leave.

• 4:18:34Speaker 02

  I I look at being a military officer and I'm like, can you imagine if you're out in the middle of combat somewhere? And you just said, you know, yeah, I didn't get this, so I'm gonna leave. I'm just gonna go. I'll come back and finish this later.

• 4:18:50Speaker 02

  We want everybody else to be ethical and and dedicated, and our own Congress is, I don't know.

• 4:19:00Speaker 02

  They're not public servants, they're public masters. And they act like that. It's like, you know what? You were elected. That doesn't make you some superstar, you know, king, whatever. I feel the same way about movie actors. It's like you act in a movie. I'm not gonna glorify you. You got elected. I'm not gonna glorify you. You work for me. You work for all of us. You should act like a public servant. And if you were running a company. Say you're the CEO of a company. Hey, your company made however many billion, or a trillion.

• 4:19:47Speaker 02

  But you lost 600 billion. You wanna increase your profit? Go find out where the 600 billion went.

• 4:19:56Speaker 02

  Right? You either you either cut expenses or you create income, right? Create revenue.

• 4:20:04Speaker 02

  600 billion? I, I. It boggles the mind that nobody cares. They almost look at that like a rounding error, though. Yep. On our whole economy, they're like, ah, 600 billion, eh. You know, based on the whole economy, that's a decimal point. Yeah, well, that decimal point could pay for.

• 4:20:28Speaker 02

  You know, more than pay for universal healthcare for everybody in the country. And free health and free education for everybody in the country. That rounding error is not insignificant. To us. You know, if you're talking about trillions, you may not care, but to us. That's not insignificant. It affects the way we live and it affects our standard of living. I think it just proves that the money isn't even real. You think it's what? It's not. It's the money isn't real. No, it's not. It's numbers. It's numbers.

• 4:21:05Speaker 02

  I agree with that.

• 4:21:08Speaker 02

  And we keep paying, keep paying our taxes.

• 4:21:13Speaker 02

  And have less say of where it goes.

• 4:21:20Speaker 02

  I mean, and you see things all the time that you ask yourself, what happened to this? And I'm, I'm, I'm gonna pick on this one for a minute. In Trump's first administration, I'm gonna build a wall. It's very important we build a wall. We have to build a wall. Okay. The wall didn't get built. Okay, people pushed back on it. I get it. You didn't have carte blanche. Biden comes in, we're not building a wall. Okay. Trump comes in again. This was the most important thing. Are you, are you building a wall? No, I'm worried about Greenland. But you just told us this was the most important thing.

• 4:22:04Speaker 02

  We did spend a couple billion on it. Yeah, but I'm worried about Greenland now. Was it important or wasn't it? If it wasn't, we just wasted a lot of money. And that's our shortsightedness, where it's always like, you know, what am I doing today? How am I getting people riled up today? How am I getting reelected today? Not a long-term view. When I was a kid, they, they were gonna build a bridge from where my dad lived over to this island. There was a small bridge. They're like, we're gonna, we're gonna upgrade the bridge. Can build this beautiful, beautiful new bridge. Right? They said, we are gonna pay for it with a toll to go across the bridge.

• 4:22:48Speaker 02

  Should pay for itself in four years. Okay. So they brought out all these barges and everything, and they were sinking these huge, you know, whatever you call them, pedestals down, you know, to build this bridge. I remember looking at it going, you know, I've seen the growth projections of this island. And I said, this two-lane bridge is gonna be too small in five years. Why not right now, while you have the barges? Why not build the pedestals for four lanes? And then you can just add it later. Right?

• 4:23:33Speaker 02

  And I was told it's it's politics.

• 4:23:37Speaker 02

  None of the taxpayers want to pay for that today.

• 4:23:41Speaker 02

  So you want to be able to say, I put this in today, get reelected. And then you can use another new addition to the bridge. As your next election campaign. Whereas if you said, hey, we're going to go more in debt right now for something in the future. People wouldn't reelect you again. I said, that seems so short sighted. We waste more money because of that.

• 4:24:09Speaker 02

  But it's all about the election cycle.

• 4:24:14Speaker 02

  You can get two election cycles if you build it twice.

• 4:24:19Speaker 02

  Versus one election cycle. Yeah. And that just wastes money. Yeah.

• 4:24:27Speaker 02

  And that's part of our system where, you know, every congressman, every senator fights for their state.

• 4:24:34Speaker 02

  And nobody is overseeing the federal budget in a way that makes sense.

• 4:24:41Speaker 02

  Again, goes back to education though. People need to see what's going on.

• 4:24:50Speaker 02

  What do you want to talk about that we haven't talked about yet? Hmm, what do I want to talk about that we haven't talked about yet? That is a broad opening.

• 4:25:02Speaker 02

  I feel like throwing something out that's just totally off the wall. You'd be like. Might be a good thing. You'd be like, what? Where did you come up with that?

• 4:25:13Speaker 02

  Oh, we've talked about a lot. We have. We have, we've covered a lot. Do you have any words of encouragement? I do. Thank God. I do. Education is the best thing you can do for yourself, your kids and everything else. You've got to know what's going on. It's not too late. We can make things better. The only thing we're missing, the only thing I'm seeing missing sometimes, is the gumption to go do that. Just go do it. Ask questions, question everything.

• 4:25:54Speaker 02

  Every time somebody tells you that, something, ask yourself the question, do they have an agenda? What is the opposite point of view? How do I know this is true?

• 4:26:10Shawn Ryan?

  Love that.

• 4:26:11Speaker 02

  And you'll be surprised sometimes, especially when somebody says, hey, this, and you go, how do I know that's true? And I see it all the time where somebody says something to someone, and a day later, they parrot the same thing. Oh, well, this, I'm like, did you validate that? Do you know that's true? So, question everything. Ask questions, do your research yourself.

• 4:26:36Shawn Ryan?

  Love it. Thank you. And I forgot to give you a gift.

• 4:26:41Speaker 02

  Uh oh.

• 4:26:42Shawn Ryan?

  Everybody gets one.

• 4:26:43Speaker 02

  Oh, are these the, these the gummies?

• 4:26:45Shawn Ryan?

  Those are the gummy bears.

• 4:26:46Speaker 02

  I saw those.

• 4:26:47Shawn Ryan?

  Still legal in all 50 states.

• 4:26:49Speaker 02

  I'm, so. I'm excited for these. Thank you.

• 4:26:54Shawn Ryan?

  You're welcome. You're welcome.

• 4:26:55Speaker 02

  I appreciate that.

• 4:26:57Shawn Ryan?

  Michael, that is a conversation that I've been wanting to have for a long time.

• 4:27:02Speaker 02

  I enjoyed it thoroughly.

• 4:27:04Shawn Ryan?

  Very hard to find the right person to do it. And you were the right person to do it with.

• 4:27:11Speaker 02

  I appreciate that. I appreciate you having me on the show. I appreciate you giving me the opportunity to meet all of your listeners. Let them know who I am, what I'm doing.

• 4:27:23Shawn Ryan?

  Where can they get the book?

• 4:27:25Speaker 02

  You can get the book on Amazon.

• 4:27:26Shawn Ryan?

  Perfect.

• 4:27:27Speaker 02

  Best place. I tell everybody, if you get the book, write me a review. That's what tells other people that it's worthwhile.

• 4:27:34Shawn Ryan?

  I think you're about to sell a lot of books.

• 4:27:36Speaker 02

  I, I hope so. I really hope so. And more than selling the books, I hope I can change some perceptions and ideas and help people make this country even better than it is today. That's my goal.

• 4:27:52Shawn Ryan?

  I know that's your goal. And.

• 4:27:59Shawn Ryan?

  Another reason that you were the right guy is there are so many voices out there that

• 4:28:07Shawn Ryan?

  I just don't trust them.

• 4:28:08Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 4:28:09Shawn Ryan?

  You know, I just don't trust them. They're getting notoriety, they're getting fame, they're getting something out of talking about this. And a lot of it's out, a lot of it is outrage and um

• 4:28:23Shawn Ryan?

  I know damn well you're not gonna make your retirement off selling that book and, and I know you're here for the right reasons and that is very extremely important to me and my audience. So, thank you.

• 4:28:34Speaker 02

  I appreciate that. Thank you.

• 4:28:36Shawn Ryan?

  My pleasure. Hope to see you after the next book.

• 4:28:38Speaker 02

  Well, I was gonna say, when I read the, when I, when I finish the next book, we'll talk again.

• 4:28:42Shawn Ryan?

  Sounds good.

• 4:28:43Speaker 02

  All right. Thank you, sir.

• 4:28:45Shawn Ryan?

  Appreciate it.

• 4:28:58Shawn Ryan?

  No matter where you're watching The Sean Ryan Show from, if you get anything out of this at all, anything, please like, comment, and subscribe. And most importantly, share this everywhere you possibly can. And if you're feeling extra generous, head to Apple Podcasts and Spotify and leave us a review.