Pod Insights Shawn Ryan Show #52 Andrew Bustamante - CIA Spy / World War 3, Money Laundering and The Next Superpower | SRS #52 Part 1 About this episode Andrew Bustamante is a former Air Force Combat Veteran and CIA Intelligence Officer specializing in covert action and clandestine operations, a.k.a, your everyday Spy. In Part 1 of this two-part series, Bustamante takes us through his recruitment into the Agency and how he met his wife in the field—a true "Mr. & Mrs. Smith" moment.
Bustamante & Shawn get honest with unfiltered opinions on COVID and American foreign policy with China, Russia, and Ukraine. Bustamante discusses proxy wars and the United States' interests in the current conflict in Eastern Europe and how that affects us here at home. Bustamante level sets with us on media & propaganda, declining US influence, and whether or not our politicians have something to hide.
Strap in. This episode is all about the world underneath, through the eyes of a Spy.
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Transcript 21,095 words · 9 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Speaker 00 Now, more than ever, we need someone on our side. But Rob Whitman? Whitman's votes drove up costs, cut Medicaid, and risked 350,000 Virginians' health care to pay for tax breaks for himself and his donors. He's not on our side. Shannon Taylor will fight corruption, cut taxes, and bring down costs. This November, vote for Shannon Taylor. She's for us. Paid for by HMP, the House Majority PAC dot com. Not authorized by any candidate or candidate's committee.
0:29 Speaker 01 Mr. President? My company tore me of the explosion on our rig.
0:33 Speaker 02 On October 2nd.
0:34 Speaker 01 Causing massive water displacement and triggering a tsunami. They all heap the blame on me.
0:38 Speaker 02 Tom Cruise is.
0:40 Speaker 03 Digger got us into this mess, and Digger's gonna dig us up.
0:43 Speaker 02 From the director of Birdman and the Revenant.
0:46 Speaker 04 What would happen if I stopped drilling? You stall, you freeze to death, that's what.
0:50 Speaker 02 With great power comes great deniability.
0:53 Speaker 04 I'm not the first then.
0:54 Speaker 02 Digger. See the trailer online. Only in theaters October 2nd. Rated R. Under 17. Not a minute without parent.
1:00 Shawn Ryan? There is a growing amount of concern in this country regarding the Russia-Ukraine conflict and why the United States is so heavily involved and invested in that war. There is also a great amount of concern, not just in this country, but across the globe, on China and how they are essentially taking over the entire world. They just negotiated a deal between Saudi Arabia and Iran, which is going to affect the United States, which in turn is going to affect the entire world. They are also trying to negotiate a peace treaty between Russia and Ukraine while the United States is fueling that war. So, there's a lot of concern.
1:44 Shawn Ryan? I brought in an expert on China and the Russia-Ukraine war, a former CIA operative. He goes by Andrew Bustamante, also known as the Everyday Spy. Ladies and gentlemen, this is a two-part series. First portion, all Russia-Ukraine. What that looks like if different scenarios play out. Part two is all about the China conflict and what that looks like if different scenarios play out. This is a very unique and factual...
2:17 Shawn Ryan? Episode that I think may shift some perspectives. I learned a lot from this episode. I think it's very important that everybody watches. Please like, comment and subscribe on the video. Head over to Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Please leave us a review and I love you all. Enjoy the show. It's a very informative one. Cheers.
2:46 Shawn Ryan? Andrew Bustamante, welcome to the Sean Ryan Show.
2:50 Speaker 07 I'm happy to be here, man. Thanks for having me.
2:52 Shawn Ryan? It's an honor to have you sitting here. I've been watching your stuff for quite a while now and we've, well, you and my wife have conferred back and forth for what, a couple of months? And it's just, it's awesome to finally have you here in the studio. I'm glad we could finally work this out.
3:06 Speaker 07 Yeah, I mean, it was, my schedule's been a disaster for probably the last six or eight months. It's a, it's a good kind of disaster, but, but man, when I first got the invite to come out to your show, I couldn't say yes fast enough. I was like, oh, hell yes, I'll come work with Sean. I absolutely want to support what you're doing. And then Katie was, you know, excellent and my schedule just got racked. And then I'm here, I am asking to, can we change it to April? Can we change it to March? Can we change it to February? So I'm super glad that we landed on a date.
3:35 Shawn Ryan? Oh, it's, we, we definitely understand being busy. So, but a little bit about you, former Air Force veteran in the nuclear program.
3:45 Speaker 07 Right, right. I was a nuclear missile officer with the US Air Force, what's known as a 13 Sierra.
3:50 Shawn Ryan? Incredible. Uh, then you've jumped over to CIA. You're a spy over there slash operative. You met your wife over at the agency, which we'll talk about here in a little bit. You started everyday spy with your wife. We'll get into that a little bit. It sounds like you're doing some awesome training. And you know, what I really like about what I've seen with your interviews so far is you have a very CIA unbiased approach, which goes right along the mission statement over at CIA, which I can't remember verbatim, but it's basically, we bring truth, unbiased truth. There's no.
4:32 Shawn Ryan? No agendas.
4:33 Speaker 07 Yeah, veritas esti conisere, man. That's what we go by. Just always the truth.
4:38 Shawn Ryan? So, I appreciate that. It's hard to find people that can look at both sides of the spectrum nowadays and to hear your interviews and how you are unbiased is, it's very refreshing.
4:54 Speaker 07 I appreciate it, man.
4:55 Shawn Ryan? Kudos to you. And everybody starts with a gift here on the Sean Ryan Show.
5:03 Speaker 07 Thank you.
5:04 Shawn Ryan? Any guesses?
5:06 Speaker 07 I already got the hat. I feel like this is the second round of gifts now, man. Come on.
5:10 Shawn Ryan? We just shower the guests with gifts here.
5:14 Speaker 07 Oh, nice.
5:17 Speaker 07 I'll take this.
5:18 Shawn Ryan? So those are Vigilance Lead Gummy Bears, legal in all 50 states, made right here in the USA. Those are hard to come by.
5:27 Speaker 07 Thanks, man.
5:27 Shawn Ryan? Those are hard to come by. You're welcome.
5:30 Speaker 07 So what you're saying is I can, I can keep one for myself and then send the other one to auction?
5:35 Shawn Ryan? That's right. We'll give you some extras for the kids, too. But diving right in, actually, let's talk about, so what I want to talk to you about is a little bit about your CIA career, not much. I know a lot of that's still classified and that'll just get confusing trying to navigate that. So, but I do want to, you know, give you the credibility that you deserve on why you can talk over these topics. I know you've worked all over the world, very extensively in Asia, which I really want to hit the China topic. I think we'll end with that. But I'd like to talk to you about what's going on in Ukraine. You have a very unique perspective that I have not heard before on what's going on over there and why we're involved.
6:21 Shawn Ryan? So I'd like to kind of kick it off there. At some point, I'd like to hit propaganda and how that's affecting people with the fake news and everything spinning out of control, which will lead us right into China. And there is no shortage of stuff to talk about with China and everything that they're involved in and how scary they're becoming. So, and if we have time, I'd like to hit some UFO, UAP, maybe free energy stuff, if you're into that, which we spoke last night.
6:58 Speaker 07 Yeah, you know, it's wild, man, because as you rattle off the list of things to cover, it really does speak to how dynamic our world is right now. I mean, we live in such an interesting time. And I get it. I get that there's people out there who want things to be simple. And there's always going to be people who reminisce about the old days. Like, you still hear people now talk about returning the world to a pre-Russian invasion world. I don't know if you've heard that yet. But there are people out there who talk about, you know, if we just do this, or we just do that, everything will revert back to February 24, 2022, before Russia invaded Ukraine. If there's anything that we should
7:40 Speaker 07 be accepting and leaning into right now, it's that the world is evolving at an incredible pace. You and I are of the same generation, right? We served at CIA at the same time, right? We remember the CD. We remember the tape deck. We remember the VCR. I remember when DVR first came out, when you could, when there was no recording a television show. And now, you're streaming television shows live on multiple different platforms. We should be embracing the fact that the world is changing at a massive pace. But also, we have to accept that if you're going to embrace change, not all change is change
8:22 Speaker 07 that you like. So that's why I feel like it's important to talk about change, to embrace change, and to be open about the fact that there's some change that we like, there's some change that we don't like. But we should really understand the pros and cons of both, right? That's something that's really important to me, and it's something that I wish more people would embrace. Because at CIA, change was one of those things that they drilled into us all the time. You have to expect, anticipate, and be prepared for the unexpected. You have to be ready for change.
8:57 Shawn Ryan? Yeah, adapt and overcome, right?
8:59 Speaker 07 Yeah, absolutely.
9:00 Shawn Ryan? When you're talking about this change, what specifically is in your head right now?
9:06 Speaker 07 So I would say, at the biggest level, we have to be asking ourselves the question, what would a world look like where the United States is not the largest superpower? We have to be asking ourselves. If you're not asking yourself that question, you're just staring at a wall. You're blinding yourself. We have to be asking ourselves a question. What do we do as a country? And what do you do as an individual? If America is not at the top of the mountain anymore? Economists are predicting that by 2033, China will be the largest superpower in the world.
9:42 Shawn Ryan? Do you agree with that?
9:43 Speaker 07 The largest military and the largest economy.
9:44 Shawn Ryan? Do you agree with that?
9:46 Speaker 07 If you're looking at empirical evidence, absolutely. If nothing changes, if nothing changes between now and 2033, they might even get there faster. So we have to accept the fact that the world is changing. Now, there's still a long time. That's 10 years. That's a decade between now and 2033. Can we effect changes now that prevent that from happening? I think we can. They'd have to be pretty radical changes, but I think we can do it. But if we just turn a blind eye and we say it's never going to happen? If we just ignore it? If we put our faith in politicians to do it for us? I'm not so sure it's going to happen in that case, right? So but that's the biggest question I ask myself every day is,
10:29 Speaker 07 what does my life look like as a 50-year-old man? If America is not the largest superpower? What does my children's college experience look like?
10:40 Speaker 07 If the United States is not the number one superpower in the world, if my children go into military service, what does that look like? If we're the second largest military? Those are questions no generation, my parents didn't have to ask themselves that question. It wasn't until I get back to my grandparents. And that was the generation, yours and mine. Our grandparents were the ones that actually saw the rise of the United States. You know, there was a whole generation between them and us that never even had doubts, never had to wonder if the US would be the biggest.
11:11 Shawn Ryan? Yeah.
11:12 Speaker 07 Right? And now you and I have to be ready to let our children graduate into a world where potentially they'll be number two.
11:18 Shawn Ryan? Do you think there's a possibility that they are already more advanced?
11:22 Speaker 07 No. I think there's always a probability. So CIA teaches us to look at, look at all outcomes as probabilities, right? Probabilities and possibilities. So probability is valuable because it's numerical. It's calculatable. It's empirical. So there might be a 2% probability of something happening, which makes it very unlikely, but it's still a possibility. Versus a 98% probability. A 98% probability makes something very possible, very likely, but still possibly not true, right? So you've got this large spectrum that you have to consider when you look at probabilities. So is the United States,
12:06 Speaker 07 or is China more advanced than the United States right now? Possibly, but not likely.
12:12 Shawn Ryan? Why do you say that? Why do you say not likely?
12:14 Speaker 07 Because you have to understand that China, starting in like 2001, 2002, early 2000s, they took a very different direction than the United States, right? When 9/11 happened, all of our resources went into terrorism, combating terrorism. Chinese didn't participate in that war, right? So what they did is they used that timeframe to start advancing, to start building the infrastructure that we had spent the previous 20 to 30 years building. China doesn't have wired telephone lines like we have in the United States. Any American knows what it's like to drive down any road in the United States and see telephone lines. We remember, you and I remember what it was like
12:59 Speaker 07 when you could only talk on telephone lines. The United States invented cellular signals. We invented cell phones. We invented cell towers. When the Chinese actually grew up to the place where they could become a first world country, they basically skipped past telephone lines and graduated directly into cellular era. So when our cell network goes down, we'll fall right back to telephone lines. When their cell network goes down, there is no backup. Okay. Right? People are going next door, neighbor to next door neighbor. It's old school telephone. Tell the person in front of you to tell the person in front of them how things work. Gotcha. Right? So they have grown up on our advancement.
13:43 Speaker 07 That's where we are now. That's why you still see issues with intellectual property and you still see issues with corporate espionage and economic espionage. They grow by stealing, reverse engineering, and then programming from there. Maybe they'll make an incremental improvement on what they steal, but for the most part, they're just learning how what they steal even works. And it's not just us they do it to. They steal from Europe, they steal from Russia, they'll steal from everybody to get the whatever is the most advanced thing on the market. Whereas here in the United States, we tend to develop, innovate, create our own economic advantage, right?
14:25 Speaker 07 All the semiconductors and superchips that we're all worried about because they're built in Taiwan, they're all designed here. They're just built there because we don't have a manufacturing base anymore. So that's why I'm not worried that China is already more sophisticated. They beat us to the punch in some things. They've got hypersonic missiles. We're just developing them, right? They've got different technology on aircraft that they've been able to steal from Europe and the Middle East that we're still developing, right? But then you look at other things. Their aircraft carriers don't compare to our aircraft carriers. Their operational organizational execution of military conflict, their approach to covert
15:06 Speaker 07 influence, or what we would call propaganda, is very, very much behind. Really? You think they're behind? They're behind in how they execute it because they have a state-run system. So they can basically blast. Fake news and withhold real news. That's essentially, that's rudimentary versus what we have in the United States, where free news, truthful news is out there and fake news is out there. That's a whole different, more sophisticated level of misinformation.
15:38 Shawn Ryan? Okay.
15:39 Speaker 07 Right?
15:39 Shawn Ryan? I don't want to go too much into this because we're going to do that on the back end of the interview, but I really am dying to pick your brain about TikTok and all the tech companies who are developing everything over there. And I'm sure you're aware, under Chinese law, they're forced to share the technology with the Chinese government.
15:59 Speaker 07 Yep.
15:59 Shawn Ryan? But breezing through that real quick, just because I do want to cover that extensively in the back end of the interview. If China does take over the, if they become the world's superpower by 2033, what you had mentioned, what does your life look like? What are you, are you preparing for that? What, in your mind, what happens?
16:21 Speaker 07 So I am preparing for that. My wife is some former CIA. We both have plans in place for what we would do in that situation. And, and there's, there's something important that I want to make sure that, that you especially and anybody listening understands. If the United States is no longer the world's largest superpower, then two things happen almost immediately. First, being an American no longer has an advantage. Everything we talked about, about having a hundred dollars in your pocket as an EDC or having a, having a, an international credit card, which is most of the banking institutions are American banking institutions. All of that takes second place because now everybody's going to want an HSBC credit card.
17:05 Speaker 07 Now everybody's going to want to have a passport from China, right? If, if China becomes the world's global superpower, everybody wants to go with China. You and I have actually traveled the world and we know what, you, being a Caucasian male, you know exactly what it's like to step into a place and have everybody want your attention. Because once they hear your American accent, they think to themselves, money, power, connections. I mean, you, it's amazing how much influence outside of the United States being an American gets you. I'm a, I'm an ambiguously brown guy with big hair. As soon as I pull out that blue passport that says United States on it.
17:46 Speaker 07 I mean, parts of the world open up to us that we've taken for granted because we've never remembered, we've never experienced a life where that little blue passport doesn't get you special perks and attention, right? Everybody wants to be friends with an American because they think America is the land of opportunity. It's the land of freedom. Most countries in the world do not know freedom and do not know opportunity. So when they meet us, we're their ticket. That's how everybody in the world, that's how the vast majority of the world sees Americans. Their ticket to opportunity, their potential ticket to freedom. If we're no longer the top of the food chain, then we lose that appeal.
18:28 Speaker 07 Because now, all of a sudden, you need to have a Chinese passport to have the ticket. You need to have a Chinese identity or a Chinese genetic background for people to take and pay attention to you, right? And that's gonna be hard. That's gonna be a big drastic difference for the generation that is our children because like they're, they're gonna know what it's like to have been 13, 14, 15 years old, an American, but then be 23, 24, 25, young professionals, starting their careers and be second-class citizens, essentially.
19:00 Shawn Ryan? Yeah.
19:01 Speaker 07 Right? So our plan is that if that's the direction that it goes, we're leaving the United States. There is no advantage to being an American inside the United States if you can basically rebuild your identity somewhere else.
19:13 Shawn Ryan? Interesting.
19:14 Speaker 07 So we would actually immigrate, most likely to Europe, because Europe will still be pro-US, right? If anything, Europe and the United States are going to be fighting a Chinese hegemony for probably the next 30 years. So go to Europe and essentially establish ourselves as dual-docked citizens. Spend five years in Portugal, five years in Spain, potentially get into Italy, spend three to five years building residency somewhere, working towards an EU citizenship. Because then you'd become dual-docked, EU and US. Whenever you're on the losing side of a battle, which nobody likes to talk about, but whenever you're on the losing side of a battle, sometimes the next best thing to do is to blend in and look like a non-threat.
19:59 Speaker 07 If you have a Spanish, a Spanish passport or a Portuguese passport, do you feel intimidated by Spain or Portugal? So neither will the Chinese. But people, if you're in second place, people feel intimidated by you. So if I had to pick how I was going to travel the world, when my children are 25 and I'm in my 60s, I'd rather travel the world under an EU passport as a dual docked citizen than travel under a US passport and potentially draw the attention and the ire of the world's superpower.
20:28 Shawn Ryan? Interesting. I love that train of thought. I am surprised to hear you say Europe, considering it's, you know, everything that's going on over there right now. I've thought about this too. My place, I believe, would be Paraguay.
20:43 Speaker 07 Yes, so Latin America and the Bahamas too? Well, the Bahamas are part of Latin America. You're thinking on the exact same lines. The main difference, the main reason I wouldn't go south is because first world electricity, first world internet, first world medicine, even if it's on the decline, it'll take probably two generations before it fully declines in a first world country. So if you're in, if you're in Italy, Spain, Germany, Poland, the UK, it's going to take 30 to 50 years before that infrastructure actually falls into such disarray because of a lack of economic stimulation. We're talking end times, right?
21:26 Speaker 07 If the world actually starts to decline because the new superpower basically imposes their will on the whole world, if that actually were to happen, it would take decades before those institutions degraded to a place where we would feel in our everyday lives.
22:31 Speaker 02 Comes great deniability.
22:33 Speaker 04 I'm not the first nanny.
22:34 Speaker 02 Digger. See the trailer online. Only in theaters October 2nd. Rated R. Under 17. Not a middle without parent.
22:39 Speaker 07 But in a place like Paraguay, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Chile, that same degradation would probably happen in about 15 to 20 years. So now you or I might be a 75-year-old man living on a healthcare system in a country that's falling apart. If we're in Latin America. If we're in Europe, we're a 75 or 80-year-old man in a country that still has 25 years more ahead of it of working healthcare system.
23:06 Shawn Ryan? Interesting. The reason I like Paraguay is it's, I mean, it's, there's nothing there, you know? There's nothing there. Their industry is farming cattle, to be specific. There's no, there's no tourism there. It's south of the drug trade, so you don't have to worry about all the cartel violence and everything. It's just, it's a lot of petty, petty crime. Petty theft, burglaries, getting, you know, robbed on the street. But you're south of all the cartels. You're south of all the drug trade. You're, you're kind of, you're just out there. Nobody knows about it. You're very close to Argentina, which I believe is first world.
23:46 Speaker 07 Yep.
23:47 Shawn Ryan? And so that's kind of my thought process. But, interesting. You're up.
23:53 Speaker 07 Well, the idea, I mean, what we're both getting at is, again, embracing this idea of change. You have to have an evac plan. Like, to stay and fight is a possibility, but we won't really know what the likelihood is of, of a good fight until the time comes. So it's always wise to have that go-bag. It's always wise to have that backup plan, right? Inshallah, in my hopes, in my dreams, if China takes over as the world's superpower, I hope I get a phone call from either the US military, or the CIA, or somebody that says, "Hey, we need to fix some stuff, and we would really appreciate being able to consult with you, bring you back on to get your thoughts." Something. I would love to see us rally
24:38 Speaker 07 to try to come up with, "How do we get out of this mess?"
24:41 Shawn Ryan? Yeah.
24:42 Speaker 07 Unfortunately, in the government that I worked for, that's not usually how it works. Usually whoever the incompetence is in charge, they just double down on their own incompetence. And then you've got to, they don't trust anybody who's former. Instead, they just try to hire new. And then you're like, how, this is not, you're leaving behind everybody who has accolades, everybody who has a history of solid, strong performance. You could be tapping into that library of talent to fix the next generation of solution, the next generation of problems.
25:13 Shawn Ryan? Yeah.
25:13 Speaker 07 Right? So I don't think we're gonna get that phone call. So I wanna make sure.
25:18 Shawn Ryan? And nobody really knows what the fight is gonna look like, if it happens. I think the fight is very much happening right now. And I think everything that's happening right now, if this escalates, it's just gonna be amplified. And it's gonna look very similar. It's just...
25:38 Speaker 07 Yeah.
25:39 Shawn Ryan? It's just gonna be amplified.
25:40 Speaker 07 I think that's a fantastic way of explaining it, right? The fight is already happening. And whatever happens in the future is essentially going to be an amplification of what we're seeing right now. I think that's a fantastic word to use. Because what happens is people start becoming afraid that it's gonna look like something else. Like, they're afraid it's gonna look like World War II. They're afraid it's gonna look like nuclear weapons blowing up in major cities. That's war. And the idea of conflict evolves. The reason World War II looked nothing like World War I, and the reason World War I didn't look anything like revolutions before that, is because conflict grows just like people grow. Why would we expect World War III to look anything like World War II?
26:25 Speaker 07 It doesn't make any sense. And over the last 30 years in US military history, and for sure in world military history, we've already seen the next evolution of conflict. And it looks like proxy and economic warfare. And guess what we're doing right now? Proxy war and economic warfare. Just like you said. All we'll see is an amplification of the current fighting style.
26:50 Shawn Ryan? Can you elaborate on proxy?
26:54 Shawn Ryan? I think there's a lot of people that don't understand what that is.
26:56 Speaker 07 Yeah, so proxy wars are wars or proxy conflicts are conflicts where the two primary instigators are actually not physically present at the site of conflict. So if you consider something like Syria, Libya, Yemen, those were all proxy conflicts. The Houthis were fighting in Yemen against other Yemenis. In Syria, there was a rebel group going against the Assad regime, right? Libya was split, two factions. But what ended up happening is superpowers or economic powers would fund one side or the other in the fight. So then the only people dying are Libyans.
27:39 Speaker 07 The only people dying are Syrians, right? The only people dying are Yemeni. Now, you and I both know that's that's an oversimplification. There are American troops, there are foreign troops, there are UN troops that are present, but they're present in the hundreds. They're not present in the hundreds of thousands. So the majority of death and carnage is actually localized to the conflict itself. But the economic foundations funding that conflict are two other powers who are vying for control. The same thing is happening right now in Ukraine. The only difference is people think that Russia is the superpower fighting in Ukraine. I would hope that the fighting in Ukraine has shown us all that Russia is not a superpower.
28:23 Speaker 07 But Russia is being funded somehow. It's being funded on oil money and oil that's being sold to India and China. India and China are two economic powers. China's the larger of the two. And we all know who's supporting Ukraine, right? The United States through NATO? The United States with a thin veil that it's NATO? I'm not sure how to how to put it in a more gentle way. But it's clearly a proxy war in Ukraine. And who's dying? Ukrainians.
28:54 Shawn Ryan? Let's talk about, we're gonna get into Ukraine too. Let's talk about your experience at CIA. Just a brief snapshot on what you were doing there. How you met your wife.
29:05 Speaker 07 Yeah.
29:05 Shawn Ryan? Maybe anything you can give us. Like I said, I don't wanna get too into the weeds cuz I know most of it's still classified, so.
29:11 Speaker 07 Yeah, absolutely. So I was recruited into CIA as I was leaving the Air Force. Now, I was a horrible soldier. And anybody, anybody who knows, anybody who knew me at the Air Force Academy, anybody who knew me in uniform, any friend or enemy or foe that I had ever had would agree that Andy, back then I had a different name, was not a good soldier. I didn't like to shave. I didn't like to polish my shoes. I didn't like to wear a nice uniform. I was, I didn't like the military. So it was really natural for me to wanna leave when my service obligation was up. I was trying to go into the Peace Corps because I'm a very simple creature. And all I really wanted at the age of 27
29:53 Speaker 07 was tent sex with a hippie chick somewhere in Africa. That's all I wanted.
30:00 Speaker 07 There's a lot of 27-year-old guys out there that would give me a high five cuz they kinda want the same thing, right? So that's what I was aiming for. Tent sex with a hippie chick in Africa saving children.
30:11 Speaker 07 I'm 42 years old. I would still say that that sounds like a pretty awesome ambition. So I'm applying to the Peace Corps. And in that application process, I get a tap on the shoulder from CIA. And CIA basically says, if you finish this application with the Peace Corps, you'll be disqualified forever from working in intelligence. Because those are two non-starters. Once you work at CIA, you can never do humanitarian work with the Peace Corps. Once you work for the Peace Corps, you can never do covert work with the CIA.
30:42 Shawn Ryan? I did not know that. Why is that, do you know?
30:44 Speaker 07 Because they wanna protect the humanitarian elements of the United States. And they want to protect them thoroughly and completely anywhere they go.
30:51 Shawn Ryan? Okay.
30:52 Speaker 07 So there are certain covers that CIA will never use because they're primarily dedicated to humanitarian service and they don't ever want humanitarians to be arrested on espionage charges. So you will never find an undercover Peace Corps officer. You will never find an undercover religious magistrate. Like you'll never find a priest or a rabbi who's truly an undercover CIA officer. You'll never see an undercover medical doctor or undercover nurse because these are protected categories and CIA wants the whole world to know that they are protected so that, you know, China, Russia, North Korea, Syria, Iran will never arrest a doctor and accuse them of being a spy.
31:35 Shawn Ryan? Okay.
31:36 Speaker 07 Right?
31:36 Shawn Ryan? Makes sense.
31:37 Speaker 07 So that's, that's why they do it that way. So that's why there's such a hard divide. So in my, what I wasn't realizing at the time is that all the things that made me interested in the Peace Corps were also personal interests that were attractive to CIA. If you're gonna go into the Peace Corps, you're gonna be risk tolerant. CIA wants people who are risk tolerant. You want to see the world. CIA wants people who want to see the world. You're not intimidated by foreign cultures. You're not intimidated by foreign language. You're not intimidated by, you know, long bouts of loneliness. CIA wants all of that too. Right? So it's a, it's a natural recruiting ground for the agency to basically be looking at
32:16 Speaker 07 people who are interested in other career fields that closely parallel what a CIA officer would encounter.
32:24 Shawn Ryan? Okay. What is it about you that you think they found interesting?
32:28 Speaker 07 To be very honest, I think they knew I was brown. I think they knew that I was an Air Force Academy graduate. Right? So from the time that I turned 17, my entire life has been in service to the federal government. So there were no surprises here. They knew my drug history. They knew my medical history, my dental history. They knew my family upbringing. They knew my, my grade point average. They knew everything because I had gone to a military college and then I was a military officer. So put those things together, plus the fact that I majored in Chinese at the Air Force Academy. I had traveled to China in the Air Force Academy. I had, you know, they had my scores. They knew that I was a top performing linguist.
33:11 Speaker 07 They knew that I was a top performing humanities student. Like, there were certain elements that they already knew because it was on paper and it was, that was known to them.
33:21 Shawn Ryan? And you obviously already had a very high clearance if you were on the nuclear program.
33:25 Speaker 07 Correct, and as a nuclear missile officer, I knew where our nukes were pointed. I knew whose nukes were pointed at us. I knew, and I had TSSCI, CAT 6 and 12 clearance, which is a nine-month process to get a TSSCI. So by hiring me, they basically shortcut nine months of my recruitment because I already have the clearance.
33:43 Shawn Ryan? Yeah. So you got in. What did they have you doing?
33:48 Speaker 07 So that's where things start to get kind of sticky. So I got in, I became a member of the National Clandestine Service, the NCS at the time. It's now called the Directorate of Operations, goes back and forth. I came on board through a program at the time that was called the, it was called CST. What is that? Clandestine Service Trainee, I think is what it was called. It was basically the old guys who come in to be spies. The young guys who come in to be spies are in a different program. So, because it takes them longer to train. But for us, we had life experience, so they kind of put us on a short track. And I went through that training plan, got my field training done, got all of my weapons training done, my driving done, you know, do all the training stuff that's pretty cool
34:32 Speaker 07 and fun, and then you start actually doing the work. And a lot of my work was focused in the Third World to start. So a lot of stuff in Africa, a lot of stuff in South America, a lot of stuff in Southeast Asia, and that was my primary focus, was doing kind of what I call the dirty work. There's a lot of dirty work in intelligence. Dealing with scumbags, terrorists, narco traffickers, drug dealers, whatever else it might be. People who pose threats to your national security, but they don't pose long-term threat to your national security. After a few years of that, my wife, my wife was kind of running a similar path. I came on as a, as a human intelligence officer, a field collector is what I came in as.
35:17 Speaker 07 My wife came in as a targeter. A targeter is a different skillset, but still in the same NCS, the National clandestine Service. Now, after we met and started dating, you know, because that intramural relationship isn't as uncommon as some people think it is. But after we married and started dating, there was an issue that popped up at CIA that's still very sensitive. I'm in the process of trying to get myself clearance from the agency to talk about it publicly. But there was an issue at the agency that forced the agency to move us, and not just us, but other people like us, out of third world, like, you know, garbage slinging, and into something called hard targets.
36:00 Speaker 07 Hard targets are those targets that pose a long-term threat to the United States. North Korea, Russia, China, Belarus. These countries that pose a long-term strategic threat to the United States are called hard targets. And they decided to move a number of high performers out of the third world and into these hard target jobs to fix the mistake that they had found themselves in. And that's how my wife and I ended up getting moved out of our roles doing third-world work into roles doing very strategically relevant work. And that's where we ended our career.
36:38 Shawn Ryan? What did you like better? Did you like the third-world operations or first-world?
36:42 Speaker 07 You know, it's interesting. I liked them both, but for different reasons. Third-world operations, you have to lean on your creativity and your risk-taking. Like, nobody really, nobody is giving you a lot of oversight. They just want you to get the mission done, right? This is the priority. We don't care how you do it. Get it done. So there's a big emphasis on individuality. There's a big emphasis on results. There's a big emphasis on outcomes. First-world operations, hard-target operations are different. There's a lot of oversight. There's a lot of weight in process instead of outcomes.
37:19 Shawn Ryan? Okay.
37:20 Speaker 07 But there's also much deeper pockets. So you're running way more sophisticated operations on larger teams. You're working with excellent, excellent colleagues, because only the best get pulled into these hard-target operations. So sometimes you might be dealing with the guy that kind of fell off the back of the short bus when you're in the third world.
37:38 Shawn Ryan? Okay.
37:39 Speaker 07 But you're dealing with really top-tier individuals when you're in hard targets. So I liked them both, but differently.
37:45 Shawn Ryan? Interesting. I never had the opportunity to work very much in a first-world environment. I did, I enjoyed third-world because it's so different.
37:56 Speaker 07 Yeah.
37:56 Shawn Ryan? You get to see how these people live and their way of life and the culture. And it's, no matter where I was, it was always, it was just fascinating to see that, you know, but...
38:10 Speaker 07 There's an element of third-world operations that really put you in touch with humanity. And that was something I valued. And I can sense that you're saying the same thing. You're saying it in a more politically correct way. Because in the third world, you really see the shit.
38:25 Shawn Ryan? Mm-hmm.
38:26 Speaker 07 Like, you see how cruel and how devastating and how painful human suffering can really be.
38:37 Shawn Ryan? Mm-hmm.
38:38 Speaker 07 And you see people persevere through that. You also see lots of people take advantage of it. But you see it, and it's a visceral reminder that we are human beings and at a certain level, we are just animals. But when you deal with really refined operations, when you only deal with first-world problems, you're dealing with like three layers above that core humanity. Now, it's all about who you know, and it's what you wear, and what words you choose, and, you know, how much money you're spending. The drug dealer who's out there, you know, cutting women open to stuff their breasts full of cocaine and turn them into mules, that's a despicable human being.
39:20 Speaker 07 But equally as despicable is the drug kingpin who sits in, you know, at the head of some corporation, 12 steps removed from that scumbag, who is the source of the funding and the source of the operational organization that makes that mule happen, even though they're in two separate categories as far as operations go.
39:40 Shawn Ryan? Interesting. Very interesting. Well, let's move into, we've established your credibility. Let's move into...
39:47 Speaker 07 I appreciate it.
39:48 Shawn Ryan? Let's move into what you're doing now with Everyday Spy. We were talking about some of your training courses last night at dinner, and... I've had a lot of people in here that run training. Most of them are from the SEAL teams or from DevGru or Delta or Green Beret or whatever. You have it. And it's always, it's a lot of tactics. Every once in a while, you'll get somebody that's teaching some mindset. But your niche is very specific and very unique.
40:19 Speaker 07 Yeah, and I appreciate, I appreciate that feedback. So Everyday Spy is the business that I created with my wife after we left CIA. And what we learned is that the skills and tactics that CIA taught us, not necessarily the skills and tactics in terms of shooting and driving, but social skills and mental tactics, that those have become the foundation of our success since leaving CIA. Influence, persuasion, relationship building, being able to predict human behavior, being able to control human behavior, being able to direct outcomes. Like, these are all very valuable skills in the commercial sector and in civilian life,
41:03 Speaker 07 equally as valuable as they are in espionage. So what we found is that we started having success in corporate America. And then, when we became entrepreneurs, we started having success in our entrepreneurial lives, applying these skills. So Everyday Spy is essentially our platform to teach the same skills that we've seen work in espionage, tailored to everyday life. And that's, that's what Everyday Spy is. And what we've had is, we've had success working with executives. We've had success working with corporate teams. We've had success working with entrepreneurs from the startup phase to the ultra-high net worth phase and all levels in between. Because what ends up happening is, at our core,
41:45 Speaker 07 what we're all looking for all the time is an edge, an advantage. And socially, we don't like to talk about that. Socially, we think everything should be fair and equal, right? Especially in the United States. If you, if you walked up to a stranger and said, "I actually want to have an unfair advantage over you."
42:07 Speaker 07 Nobody wants to hear that.
42:09 Shawn Ryan? Yeah.
42:09 Speaker 07 But that's what we're all secretly thinking.
42:11 Speaker 01 Mr. President, my company told me of the explosion on our rig on October 2nd. Causing massive water displacement and triggering a tsunami. They all heap the blame on me. Tom Cruise is.
42:22 Speaker 03 Digger got us into this mess, and Digger's gonna dig us up. From the director of Birdman and The Revenant.
42:28 Speaker 04 What would happen if I stopped going? You're stalled, you're freezing there, that's what.
42:32 Speaker 02 With great power comes great deniability.
42:35 Speaker 04 I'm not the first man.
42:36 Speaker 02 Digger. See the trailer online. Only in theaters October 2nd. Rated R. Under 17. Not a minute without parent.
42:41 Speaker 07 Right? What espionage is all about is gaining an unfair advantage. All the skills that CIA taught us, the mental skills, the social skills, we're all focused on an unfair advantage. How do you infiltrate a network, gain influence, gain credibility, and take control of that network in the shortest amount of time? You don't do that over a 30-year career, doing what the boss tells you. You do that in like three years by making the boss believe that your ideas are the best ideas. So, we kind of built a business that teaches that. And then we do it through digital learning, we do it through publishing, video publishing, podcast publishing, ebook publishing. And then, of course, we also do it in in-person training courses that we carry out for individuals and carry out for corporations.
43:25 Shawn Ryan? Interesting. Very interesting. How many courses are you running a year?
43:29 Speaker 07 So, we run about six live courses a year right now. And a big part of that's because I'm the limiting factor. I teach all the courses myself. I'm working on expanding that, I'm working on scaling that. But right now, we keep our classes small, between 12 and 16 people. We run about six courses a year. Each course runs between one day and three days total time. We also do some courses where we'll go and do private events for corporations. So, those are kind of separate from our own homegrown courses. But we might go work three, five, seven days with a client corporation somewhere at their behest. Again, the primary problem is just manpower. So, the good side to that is that we've been able to develop and command a very high price for our training,
44:13 Speaker 07 which makes it very elite and makes it very personal. So now, any company that hires us gets me and my wife and our content at their, like, at their behest. So the, the quality is very, very rich, but the quantity is very limited. Supply and demand curve means that they end up paying a premium price, which is excellent for the business model itself. As we move forward, we're trying to flip a lot of that into digital coursework. So now, startup companies, small and medium-sized companies, can essentially get the same training through a digital on-demand, uh, interface, and they don't have to pay that premium price.
44:53 Shawn Ryan? Gotcha, gotcha. Excellent. I'm gonna have to, I'm gonna have to take one of your courses. It sounds very interesting.
45:00 Speaker 07 Yeah, I mean, we can just go, I'll go give you one over, over beers tonight, man. We'll crash, do a crash course, just you and me.
45:05 Shawn Ryan? Perfect. That sounds great. Let's take a quick break. When we come back, we'll pick up on Ukraine.
45:14 Shawn Ryan? I want to give a big thank you out right now to all the Vigilance Elite patrons out there that are watching the show right now. Just want to say thank you, guys. You are our top supporters and you're what makes this show actually happen. If you're not on Vigilance Elite Patreon, I want to tell you a little bit about what's going on in there. So, we do a little bit of everything. There's plenty of behind-the-scenes content from the actual Sean Ryan Show. On top of that, basically what I do is I take a lot of the questions that I get from you guys, or the patrons, and then I turn them into videos. So we get, right now, there's a lot of concern about self-defense, home defense, crimes on the
45:58 Shawn Ryan? rise, all throughout the country, actually all throughout the world. And so, we talk about everything from how to prep your home, how to clear your home, how to get familiar with a firearm, both rifle and pistol, for beginners and advanced. We talk about mindset, we talk about defensive driving. We have an end of the month live chat that I'm on, at the end of every month, where we can talk about whatever topics you guys have. It's actually done on Zoom. You might enjoy it. Check it out. And if Zoom's not your thing, or you don't like live chats, like I said, there's a library of well over 100 videos on where to start with prepping, all the firearm stuff, pretty
46:41 Shawn Ryan? much anything you can think of, it's on there. So anyways, go to www.patreon.com/vigilanceelite, or just go on the link in the description, it'll take you right there. And if you don't want to, and you just want to continue to watch the show, that's fine too. I appreciate it either way. Love you all. Let's get back to the show. Thank you.
47:09 Shawn Ryan? Thank you for listening to the Sean Ryan Show. If you haven't already, please take a minute, head over to iTunes, and leave the Sean Ryan Show a review. We read every review that comes through, and we really appreciate the support. Thank you. Let's get back to the show.
47:29 Shawn Ryan? All right, Andy, we're back from the break. Conflict seems to be all around us these days with Ukraine, Russia, China, Iran, North Korea. Specifically, I want to talk to you right now about what's going on in Ukraine. And I think the latest, the latest headlines as of today seem to be, I think we just gave another, what, 10 billion to Ukraine? I've lost count on how much money we've spent on them so far. And then, just a couple weeks ago, the pipeline, the Nord Stream pipeline, that, that I've heard the UK blew it up, I've
48:11 Shawn Ryan? heard we blew it up, I've heard Russia blew it up. And so I pulled some headlines, because there was an investigative journalist that basically had said that we are the, we are responsible, we blew it up, White House denied it. All the headlines say, "We blew it up." But then you read it, and it says, "No, the White House is denying it." "Not that I trust the White House." But what is your take on that? What do you think is going on there?
48:39 Speaker 07 Yeah, there's so much going on. So when we talk about... The first thing I want to do is make sure that when you and I talk about Ukraine and Russia, we have to understand that we're actually talking about a much larger issue. What we're really talking about is Europe. That's how the United States, and Russia, and China, and NATO, that's how they actually see the conflict. It's important to understand that the way that national leaders see a conflict is much more comprehensive than the way media portrays the conflict. Media portrays it as Ukraine and Russia, because it's simple that way. The average American, and they're at a fifth-grade reading level,
49:24 Speaker 07 who maybe didn't finish high school, right? They can get behind this idea of a war between Russia and Ukraine. But it takes a college education, or even an advanced education, to understand that the implications at a continental level, at a European versus American versus Russian and Chinese level. The whole idea of geopolitics is an advanced concept, right? Newspapers and media want to treat us all like we're idiots. So they have to talk to us like we're idiots. But the reason so many of us get frustrated is because we know we're not stupid. So don't talk to us like we're stupid. So Ukraine and Russia, the money that's going into Ukraine, the conflict and the pressure that the world's putting on Russia,
50:08 Speaker 07 it's not really about those two countries, right? If you look at Ukraine on its own, Ukraine is a bit player in geopolitics for the first world. Do they supply food? Yes, to third-world countries.
50:26 Speaker 07 Right? Do they create oil? No. They're a transfer point for Russian oil. Right? Even their gold and coal mining operations that are there are really like secondary to the energy reserves that exist in other countries. So whether Ukraine belongs to Russia, whether Ukraine belongs to NATO is irrelevant. They're a small player. They're not a first world country. They don't deserve first world recognition or first world appreciation. They were never a democracy. They were a transitioning government that had ups and downs in favor of potential future democratic beliefs. In 2022, there was actually a mainstream government study done on Ukraine.
51:11 Speaker 07 You can Google it right now, right? And that gave them a score of 40% out of 100 in terms of their democratic scale. So why is it that the media outlets talk to us like the United States is defending democracy by protecting Ukraine? It's a great question. They were never a democracy. They were a transitioning country that had some elements of democracy. If you look at media outside of the United States, if you look at media, especially in Europe, Europe does not paint the conflict the same way we painted here in the United States. In Europe, they're very transparent about the fact that Ukraine is corrupt, heavily corrupt. You've had outstanding guests on this show who have very openly and transparently explained
51:56 Speaker 07 the struggles that happen in that conflict zone because of the current corruption. Materials disappear, money disappears, weapons disappear, they get resold on the black market. It's a mess, right? So we're gonna, if you only look at it in terms of Ukraine and Russia, we end up missing the bigger picture. Because the real conflict here is a conflict between which direction the United States wants to drive the world as a potential superpower. Right? If we go down, the Biden administration and the media all try to tell us that we have to protect Ukraine, that the United States' protection of Ukraine serves this larger
52:40 Speaker 07 purpose in protecting democracy and secures the long-term future of pro-democratic countries.
52:51 Speaker 07 That's all a party line. That's baloney. What the real reason the United States is involved in Ukraine is because as long as we keep a proxy war happening in a third world country like Ukraine, as long as we have that proxy war coming, we're wasting Russian resources. And as we waste and deplete Russian resources, we only have to compete against one other country in the world, China. If the war in Ukraine ends, Russia starts to rebuild in concert with China, and now we have two enemies without either of them depleting themselves, right? So that's one big reason why the United States likes war in Ukraine.
53:33 Speaker 07 Another reason why the United States likes war in Ukraine is because as long as we are creating weapons and sending weapons to Ukraine, we're practicing for a future global conflict that we might have to carry out against China. It's no small feat to send tanks 7,000 miles across an ocean. It's no small feat to create ammunition loaded into C-17s and then fly them as a, you know, fleet by fleet into Poland and then carry out the logistical challenges of delivering that material to the front lines. We're practicing war without fighting it.
54:11 Shawn Ryan? I feel like we would have that down pretty good now after 20 years of war all over the Middle East.
54:18 Speaker 07 The difference is, we had our own bases in the Middle East. If we go to war, who's the most likely person we're gonna go to war with?
54:27 Shawn Ryan? China.
54:27 Speaker 07 China. China is 15,000 miles away. 15,000 miles away. Afghanistan is half that distance. And we have bases in Afghanistan. We don't have any bases in China. The nearest that we would be able to get is actually the Philippines, where we would have to have a presidential allowance by the Filipino president to use their bases, right? And that's happening right now. So we would have to borrow and coordinate diplomatically with a host nation to be able to deliver our weapons to that country, which is exactly what we're doing in Poland right now, right? They're not our bases. We're working with the Poles. So it's a it's
55:10 Speaker 07 a different kind of beast. 7,000 miles is very different from 15,000 miles. You're talking about multiple aerial refuelings. You're talking about months on if you're delivering something by sea. You're talking about multiple stops if you're delivering something by air.
55:24 Shawn Ryan? I mean, it would just be a quick stop in Ramstein, Germany.
55:28 Speaker 07 We we would like to think of it. So a quick stop in Ramstein, Germany for 25 aircraft to then deliver weapons into a hostile zone and into a non-American controlled base. Right? It's very different than what we had in the Middle East.
55:45 Shawn Ryan? All right.
55:46 Speaker 07 Right? And who were we combating in the Middle East? Terrorists, not organized organized nation states and national armies.
55:54 Shawn Ryan? Okay.
55:54 Speaker 07 Now, all of a sudden, you know, you've sent a C-17 into Afghanistan and you have to worry about small arms fire and you have to worry about whether or not they got their hands on some kind of shoulder carried, shoulder mounted anti-aircraft. Delivering something to Taiwan or the Philippines, you've got to get near China. You've got to go near China's allies and and you have ships at sea that have anti-aircraft weapons. You have laser guided munitions. You have hypersonic missiles. It's a very different risk element.
56:23 Shawn Ryan? That's that's a damn good point.
56:26 Speaker 07 Yeah. So then and then the the last kind of big reason is we can't consider what's happening in Europe separate from what's happening in the United States. So when there's war in general, dating back to World War II, we've always known war is really good for the economy. The Biden administration, whether we whether you're pro Biden or anti Biden, the empirical evidence shows that our COVID response under President Biden destroyed the US economy. And most of the first world followed America's lead with our COVID response and destroyed their economies too, which is why you see massive economic collapse all
57:08 Speaker 07 across Europe, all throughout Asia, and all the countries that followed our lead. Right? We essentially we overreacted to something we didn't understand. And now, as a result, inflation is rampant, recession is pending.
57:21 Speaker 07 So our government, it's really important to our administration that we never have, we never formally announce a recession. We are in a recession. You feel it, I feel it, everybody watching us feels it, we know it. Our dollar doesn't go as far. It's hard to get people to go to work. Like, life is hard. We are in an economic recession. It's not like it was in 2010. But, according to economics, as outlined by national institutes, we are not yet in a recession. Because their definition of recession requires two consecutive quarters of negative GDP growth. We're not gonna have negative GDP growth. Why? Because we're funding a war in Ukraine. Right?
58:04 Speaker 07 If you look at the top five military contractors out there right now, if you pull it up on your computer anytime, look at Lockheed Martin, look at Raytheon, look at Boeing, there's a little company, there's a big company that very few people know about called Latos, I'm sure you've known Latos. Just look at their stock, dating back to June of last year. June of last year, when the stock market started to tank, these companies tanked along with it. And then February came along. February, the invasion started, the United States started offering military aid to Ukraine, and the stock price of those companies started going up. Because government spending started going into this Ukraine effort.
58:46 Speaker 07 That means, the federal government started boosting military efforts, they started boosting humanitarian efforts, medical efforts. All of that government spending, in an existing industry, the military industrial industry, actually inflated the GDP numbers for those productive segments of the society, of the sector, those industrial segments, right? So now, the United States is still suffering from a massive drop in GDP. I think our GDP last quarter was 2.8%, right? Down from like 5%. But it's being boosted, because we're funding this war in Ukraine. If we gave up on the war in Ukraine, that productivity of those sectors would go down, and we would actually have to announce a recession.
59:30 Shawn Ryan? Okay.
59:31 Speaker 07 So the Biden administration is artificially protecting us from recession, by selectively funding certain segments of our industrial base, that are tied to this conflict in Europe.
59:43 Shawn Ryan? I mean, when it comes to this, when it comes to the not announcing a recession...
59:49 Shawn Ryan? Does this actually benefit anybody but Raytheon, Boeing, you know, the, the, the military
59:57 Shawn Ryan? companies?
59:58 Speaker 07 So.
59:59 Shawn Ryan? Or are we just, is this just a mask? Do you know what I mean?
1:00:03 Speaker 07 I do, yeah.
1:00:04 Shawn Ryan? So is this like, hey, just do this, then we won't have to call it a recession? Because you just said, I feel it, you feel it, everybody feels it, you know? So. Yeah, maybe we're funding these, you know, these five companies, but what about, what about everybody else?
1:00:22 Speaker 07 It's not just those companies that are reaping the benefits, right? Remember, the military industrial base is certainly benefiting from a war in Europe. But so is the medical base, right? Band-aid and gauze manufacturers, alcohol manufacturers, tape manufacturers, all the body armor that goes into it, right? Think about all the steel, all the powder, all the car, the charcoal that goes into creating the ammunition, the munitions and the weapons. Like, there's, there's lots of secondary and tertiary sectors that benefit from the same conflict. But the place where you can most clearly see the benefit is with your military industrial complex.
1:00:58 Shawn Ryan? Okay.
1:00:59 Speaker 07 Now, your question, is there actually a benefit to anyone, or is it just a mask? Again, putting on that, that, that CIA transparency, truthfulness hat, the answer is both. It is absolutely a mask. America's intentions have very little to do with protecting Ukraine. And we'll talk about that in just a second, right? But that's the mask part. We want the world to think, and of course, the Biden administration wants Americans to think, that the most important reason that we're involved is we're protecting democracy. That's not the most important reason. There is a mask element. But then there is an element where we really do benefit. When America prevents itself from announcing a recession, it means that consumers like you and I always have uncertainty.
1:01:45 Speaker 07 Right? Uncertainty is not ideal, but uncertainty is much better than certainty that we are having a recession. As soon as the government announces a recession, people stop buying, people stop spending, the economy really does react, right? Because it's no longer speculation, it's confirmed fact. When GDP shrinks, now all of a sudden they're going to have to deal with actual Americans not going out anymore. Americans not being uncertain, but actually being afraid. So they want to prevent that from happening. And they can prevent that from happening by never allowing us to enter into recessionary status. Even though you and I feel it, the truth is that according
1:02:29 Speaker 07 to like the economic laws that we follow as a country, we're not yet in a recession. There's five indicators. We've hit four of the indicators, but we haven't hit the fifth indicator yet. We haven't had that negative GDP growth for two consecutive quarters. So there is a benefit that we're all feeling, if only because uncertainty is better than certainty of recession. Now let's talk about the mask, right? America and the Biden administration, like the Trump administration before it, and the Obama administration before that, and the Bush administration before that. If you've been tracking the four administrations closely, what you see among all four is a very steady,
1:03:09 Speaker 07 consistent effort to secure American primacy in the long run, to keep America as the world's largest economic superpower. They've all wanted that. They've all executed it in different ways. And of course, when they're up at the pulpit, they're all saying something differently, right? But the truth is, they all want to make America strong. They all want to make America wealthy, because they understand that a wealthy America is the world's largest superpower.
1:03:39 Speaker 07 What has gotten in the way is that with those four presidents especially, they've driven a strong polarity divide. They haven't talked about unity. They've talked about doubling down on their own party. Biden and Obama are super strong about this. Like, they, they talk about reaching across the aisle, but they force their own policies through. Right? That was something that really started with Obama, and we've never turned back. Obama passed executive orders. Obama was very staunchly in favor of abusing when the Democrats had both the House and the Senate under their control and forcing through the Universal Health Care Act. Right?
1:04:22 Speaker 07 So that set a precedent that then every president since then has just followed. So because of that driving of polar political ideas, we've had the situation where nobody works together. If we were all working together, if the House and the Senate were working together in conjunction with the president, all working towards American superiority, we wouldn't be in the mess that we're in right now. But instead, they're bickering about woke culture. They're bickering about, you know, whether or not pharmacies make too much money and whether or not, you know, fracking should be legal in East Coast states. They're bickering about baloney, and all of that is just wasting time and wasting effort that could be put into securing a long-term American future.
1:05:04 Shawn Ryan? I mean, do you honestly believe that our government officials, president included, want what's best for the United States?
1:05:15 Speaker 07 I believe, honestly, that our officials want what's best for preserving the United States government. That's what I believe. I do not believe that the senators and congresspeople that we vote for Maybe in their first or second term, they care about their constituents. But once they become career politicians, they care about their career. They don't care about us anymore. The president doesn't care about the people. The president cares about preserving the American government. Right, there's this, uh, there's a sociological pyramid. That's called like the Pyramid of Civilization. It's a fantastic thing.
1:05:58 Speaker 07 They actually had a fantastic exhibit in Chicago recently. That walked you through this civilization pyramid. And there's three phases on the pyramid. The base phase is individualism, right? It's when we were all cavemen and we had to fend for ourselves, right? Totally individualistic. If I wanted to eat, I had to go get my food. If I wanted shelter, I had to go make my shelter. That was the basic level. As you move up the pyramid, we became tribes. In a tribe, I might be good at picking berries. You might be good at killing bears. So I pick berries and share them with you. You kill bears and give the fur to me, right? We have some sort of community. But we're still free to basically punch each other in the face if we don't get along.
1:06:43 Speaker 07 The third phase above tribes is states. When a, when human beings organize themselves into states, two important things happen. First, we gain the efficiency of all the people in the state. So now, your really talented IT people can do IT stuff. And your really talented police officers can do police stuff. And we all benefit because everybody's working at their peak efficiency. It's way better than tribalism and for sure better than individualism. But in order to cooperate as a state, we also have to give something up. And the thing we give up is our individual freedom. Because now, if I didn't, if I didn't want to share with you as an individual, I didn't have to.
1:07:28 Speaker 07 As a tribe, if I disagreed with you, I could punch you in the face. But as a state, it's illegal for me to punch you in the face. Because the state has set a law that prevents my individual freedom of expressing myself and protecting myself or whatever else it might be, right? So as you move up this level, as you move up this societal chain, things get more efficient and things get more governable, but you lose your individual freedom. Also, as you move up the ladder, you start needing professional bureaucrats. Right? When you're an individual, everybody has to hunt, everybody has to build shelter. As a tribe, you have to have some useful skill that serves the tribe.
1:08:09 Speaker 07 But as a state, you can have no useful skills and just be in charge of organizing other people who have useful skills. Right? So that that pyramid is really important to understand because we live at the top of the pyramid. Which means the bureaucrats in that pyramid, their most important objective is preserving the state. The president and all the politicians that we vote for ultimately come to that conclusion that the most important thing in their career is preserving the state, not serving the people.
1:08:43 Shawn Ryan? I mean, the reason I'm asking you that is because all the corruption coming from China and possibly Ukraine. I'm more familiar with China, but you know, they are, all these politicians are opening these businesses in China. China can shut them down at any moment if they don't, because it's a communist country. You know, they control, they control everything over there. So your name is Joe Biden, Mitch McConnell, any Nancy Pelosi, Feinstein, you know, it doesn't matter what side of the aisle I'm bringing up, Republicans and Democrats here. They, all of these people have businesses in China that make lots of money, way more than here you.
1:09:29 Shawn Ryan? And you know, they could just shut, shut that down immediately and there goes, there goes the money.
1:09:35 Speaker 07 Right.
1:09:36 Shawn Ryan? You know, and so that's why I'm asking, are they, if you think that they still have America's best interest? Mr. President, my company for me of the explosion on our rig on October 2nd.
1:09:48 Speaker 01 Causing massive water displacement and triggering a tsunami. They all heap the blame on me. Tom Cruise is.
1:09:54 Speaker 03 Digger got us into this mess and Digger's gonna dig us up. From the director of Birdman and the revenant.
1:10:00 Speaker 04 What would happen if I stopped going? You stop, you freeze in there, that's what.
1:10:04 Speaker 02 With great power comes great deniability.
1:10:07 Speaker 04 I'm not the first then.
1:10:08 Speaker 02 Digger, see the trailer online, only in theaters October 2nd, rated R, under 17 and a middle without parent.
1:10:14 Speaker 07 Again, I'm differentiating. I don't believe they have America's best interest. I believe they are there to preserve the American government.
1:10:22 Shawn Ryan? Yeah.
1:10:22 Speaker 07 Right? So the, it's a nuanced difference, but here's, here's, here's an example, right? If you or I were to have a business in China, China would most likely reward us for having a business in China. They would direct business towards our business so that we would make more money. But then they would also have tax incentives and maybe even straight up bribes that pay us directly because they want to keep American money flowing into a Chinese business. Because that's what we're doing. We're funding the business in China using American currency. We take a loan with an American bank, convert that US dollar into Chinese renminbi, and then fund our business in China until we start making money in China.
1:11:06 Speaker 07 And then ideally, we would keep the money we make in China in China. Because if we were to bring it back to turn it into US currency, we would lose on the exchange and lose on American taxes. So China knows that. All foreign countries know that they want American ownership because it's a direct line that brings US dollars into their economy. So if you or I or any politician has a business in China, we're most likely getting two types of benefit. Kickbacks plus businesses being driven towards us. Now, we also realize that we're not going to be politicians forever. Right? We're only going to be politicians for a short period of time. 20 years at most in a 60 or 80 year life.
1:11:49 Speaker 07 And then we're going to be retired. So China knows that too. So what they want is to make sure that we have a positive experience doing business in China. So that when Mitch McConnell retires, or when Joe Biden retires, or when Nancy Pelosi retires, whoever replaces them wants to do the same thing and have a business interest in China. Because they're going to get kickbacks and they're going to get business out of it. Right? The revolving door in politics is very much a revolving door of benefits. Do you know congresspeople make $250,000 a year? I did not know that. Do you know who ratified the law that that's what they would get paid? Congress?
1:12:28 Shawn Ryan? Mm-hmm.
1:12:29 Speaker 07 That's insane. That's insane. The average voter makes $45,000 a year. The people they vote into office make $250,000 a year? Why did Biden get on stage during his, his State of the Union in February, just a few weeks ago? Why did he get up there and promise no new tax cuts to anybody, or no new tax, no new taxes on anybody who makes less than $400,000 a year? Why was that the number? Because senior politicians can make up to $400,000 a year, half of which is their salary for being a politician. He doesn't want to tax the Senate, just like the Senate doesn't want to ratify a law to pay themselves less.
1:13:12 Shawn Ryan? Mm-hmm.
1:13:13 Speaker 07 Right? It's just, it's, it's not corruption in a classic sense, because it is democracy. It takes 50 people, or it takes a majority of the Senate and a majority of the Congress to, to vote these bills in. I think it takes two-thirds for the Senate, right? The majority of people are saying yes to paying themselves a flat rate.
1:13:34 Shawn Ryan? Mm-hmm.
1:13:35 Speaker 07 So that's what keeps it from being corrupt. Because corruption is just when you and I do something, we don't tell anybody else.
1:13:39 Shawn Ryan? Yeah.
1:13:43 Shawn Ryan? Back to Ukraine. Let's talk about the pipeline.
1:13:46 Speaker 07 Hmm.
1:13:47 Shawn Ryan? All the different scenarios that that could have been.
1:13:50 Speaker 07 Yeah, and there's a lot of scenarios, right? So when I, when I look at this issue, it's hard for me to shake a few things. So first, it's hard for me to shake how little information we know. We just, we don't know enough information. And it's not because the information doesn't exist. It's because the information isn't being shared. So the American public and the public at large doesn't get to know all the facts. But we have to come to our own sort of conclusion. Meanwhile, the government organizations who are actually investigating, right? The military divers who go down there and check it out, the intelligence organizations who collect intelligence on it, they have more information than we have.
1:14:34 Speaker 07 But they're not announcing any conclusions. So instead, we're left wondering, what could it be? And it's hard for me, because I don't like to make conclusions without some sort of predominant information. So it's hard for me to shake the fact that we're not getting the information other people have. The other thing that's hard for me to shake is that it doesn't make sense that Russia, who's already got the ire of the world on them, and who has proven to be so questionably competent on the battlefield, how are they going to orchestrate such an effective covert
1:15:16 Speaker 07 sabotage operation that we don't know for sure that it's them? If we knew for sure that it was them, that would be everywhere. Everybody would share the proof of that, right? Biden has made it a new national policy to share intelligence when it benefits us on the battlefield. That's why he talks about Russia invading Ukraine, right? In the days, in the weeks before Ukraine, he talked about that, declassifying intelligence reports. Now he's declining intelligence, declassifying intelligence reports about China offering lethal aid to Russia. So if he can just swing a magic wand and declassify something, why not declassify the information?
1:15:58 Speaker 07 If they know for sure that Russia bombed those pipelines, then let us know. But that's not what's happening. So when I see information being hidden, and I also see a lack of transparency, then where my mind naturally goes is to covert action, right? Covert action is designed to be action that you take without having a government take responsibility for it. So it smells like covert action, but who's covert action? Is it the Russians paying some third party to destroy the pipelines? Maybe, but it doesn't really make sense, because eventually Russia's going to want to turn those pipelines back on again. Is it the United States paying some third party to attack those pipelines?
1:16:43 Speaker 07 Maybe, but again, it's unlikely because if the Americans get caught sabotaging European pipelines, that's a massive blowback. That's like the end of NATO. If America is caught interfering with its own pipelines. So if it's not either of those two players, who's the covert action behind it? Could be China, could be someone like Iran or North Korea, operating on their own in support of the war. Could also be a country like Ukraine that wants to continue to fervor conflict between that continue to create this hatred of Russia. So they could work through some third party or they could work through some mercenary group to affect the pipelines. Doesn't bother them, right?
1:17:27 Speaker 07 Blowback could be significant, but either way, whether it's China or Russia, North Korea, or even somebody like the Saudis, who are a total wild card in all world conflict, somebody seems to be using covert action on those pipelines.
1:17:44 Shawn Ryan? Do you have any opinions on who you think it is?
1:17:47 Speaker 07 I don't have enough information to say for sure. I will say, I don't think it's the Americans, and I will also say, I don't think it's the Russians. I don't think it's the two people that get accused the most. It just, it doesn't make sense. It doesn't make sense that either of those two world powers would take that step. It's nothing but, it's a net economic and a net tactical loss for either of those two countries to have done it. Other countries have more to gain and less to lose, right? So it just seems, through the lens of tactical operations planning, that it wouldn't be either of those two countries.
1:18:24 Shawn Ryan? What do you think about all the speculation with all the supposed money laundering that's going on over in Ukraine?
1:18:30 Speaker 07 I'm willing to bet that there's, that it's more than just speculation, right? Remember that prior to the invasion, Ukraine was a corrupt country, a corrupt, non-democratic country. And I mean, it had, it had criminal elements to it, it had organized crime elements to it, it had its own oligarchs, its own, right, fiefdoms. There was infighting, military commanders were siphoning off government money, like they were a mess prior to the invasion. The invasion made things... Like reorganize, it unified certain things.
1:19:11 Speaker 07 But all that skeletal structure for criminal activity, it was all still there. So it doesn't, I don't think it's speculation at all that there could still, that there is still money laundering, there is still weapons, a black market for taking aid and weapons and recycling it and reselling it, all of that still exists. It makes sense logically and there have been active reports from both military and humanitarian people on the ground who have confirmed it.
1:19:43 Shawn Ryan? What about US money laundering? That's the major concern right now in the media is are our politicians, is this money coming back into our politicians' pockets?
1:19:57 Speaker 07 That one's trickier, right? If you look on that scale of probability, I would absolutely say that it's a high probability that the money going into Ukraine is being recycled back to the politicians. It just makes sense. Between business cutouts, political organizations, humanitarian aid and tax benefits, future benefits, right? It makes total sense that there's a high probability that a portion of the money that's going into Ukraine is going to come right back into politicians' pockets. But is it going to be like a simple, direct link?
1:20:37 Speaker 07 No, it's going to be some convoluted, either legal or, or commonly accepted unprosecutable type of process to bring that money back in.
1:20:52 Shawn Ryan? What would that look like?
1:20:53 Speaker 07 I mean, it could look like a number of things. So keep in mind, the biggest, the biggest thing to keep in mind is that we're all talking about war in Ukraine. Nobody is talking about what happens after the war is over. Ukraine is destroyed. Entire cities have been leveled.
1:21:12 Speaker 07 The place was poverty stricken before the cities were leveled. So the day after this war is over, the whole country needs to rebuild. Who's going to get the contracts to rebuild the country? We are. And when that happens, where's the money going to come from for those contracts? Us. And from the Ukrainian government that's going to be in charge of the reconstruction. Right? That's going to bring money back into American businesses. It's going to bring tax incentives to American businesses. That's going to bring all sorts of secondary and tertiary financial benefits, right? Not to mention the fact that if Ukraine wins, which on the likelihood scale is low, but if Ukraine wins, there's going to be some kind of international court,
1:21:57 Speaker 07 some sort of NATO endeavor to essentially fine Russia or create debt for Russia to help fund and pay back the damage that was done to Ukraine. So that means Russian money is going to be used to pay back the United States. Also, don't forget the United States has frozen Russian funds in American banks. They've been frozen for six months, just sitting there. What's that money going to be used for? The reconstruction of Ukraine. Who's it going to go to? American companies, right? So for sure, that's how that money's going to work because that's not legally prosecutable. Nobody's breaking a law, especially not an American law, by letting that happen. But it's all still in the best interest of the United States.
1:22:40 Speaker 07 Remember earlier, we were talking about how the one kind of solid, consistent point from president to president has been making decisions that make America remain as close to the economic superpower as they can be. The war in Europe, the current war in Europe, and the aftermath of the war in Europe, in many, many ways, all benefits the United States. So the Biden administration, it's in their best interest to keep this conflict going. So the last kind of element, again, that people aren't really talking about, right? There's the reconstruction of Europe. There's a reconstruction of Ukraine. People aren't talking about that. The other thing people aren't talking about is NATO's role
1:23:22 Speaker 07 in the reconstruction of Ukraine and NATO's role in the Ukraine conflict. Ukraine and Russia, like you and I discussed. That is actually a conflict in Europe. We shouldn't talk about it just as Ukraine-Russia. We should talk about it as the European conflict. When you look at it as a European conflict, it's really interesting because NATO, and specifically the European countries in NATO, take America out, take Canada out. The European countries in NATO are very much divided on what to do in Ukraine. Germany didn't want to send them weapons. They only caved under intense pressure from the United States, right? The French president has been outspoken from the very beginning
1:24:07 Speaker 07 that he didn't want to stir up or anger and incite additional Russian aggression. He was the one that made Biden stop talking such fervent...
1:24:20 Speaker 07 I mean, if you recall, Biden made a speech in Poland where he called for the unseating of Putin, right? He called for regime change in Poland until President Macron came in and said, "We don't talk about that, right? You're not welcome to speak that way in NATO territory," right? So the French president, the German chancellor, even Hungary as a country as a whole, has taken a very strong stance against American direction of NATO. So if we were to take America out of NATO right now, support for Ukraine would dry up. The NATO countries, the European countries themselves, they don't want this conflict.
1:25:05 Speaker 07 They've really only acquiesced to intense American pressure for this conflict. And because America has put so much money into the conflict itself, when the conflict is over, they're not gonna... America's not gonna want to put in the money for humanitarian aid. America's gonna want to get its payback. It's gonna want to be paid back for reconstruction efforts, but it's gonna force the NATO partners to take care of all the humanitarian aid, right? So it's this situation where Europe can see the writing on the wall. Europe's in a hurt locker.
1:25:38 Speaker 07 They have to do what America tells them to do right now because America is like the only superpower on their side. China wants to woo Europe, but Europe doesn't trust China. And Russia's right on the doorstep of Europe, so they don't want to trust Russia. So they're left with only one ally, and it's us, and we're bullies too. So Europe doesn't really know what to do. They don't want this conflict. They've paid the price. Absolutely, there was an energy crisis all winter. It was not as drastic as some of us were expecting it to be because winter was warm, but they were still paying 400 times the price, or 400% more for energy than what they were paying before. Businesses still shut down.
1:26:19 Speaker 07 Governments had to subsidize individual people to be able to pay their heating bills and their gas bills over the winter. And it's not over yet. It's only March. So there's still cold weather in Europe. So it's just, Europe and the United States are not nearly as aligned as American headlines want you to believe. And all you have to do to see that is read European headlines, right? Read a newspaper from the UK. Read a periodical that comes out of Europe. Just put away CNN, definitely put away CNN. Put away all of your liberal news sources that are based in the United States. And you can still read liberal news sources in Europe and you'll get a more accurate representation
1:27:00 Speaker 07 of the fact that Europe is not nearly as aligned as our newspapers try to make us think they are. And they're worried. They're worried that they're going to get called in to spend a bunch of their money to help rebuild a Ukraine that never benefited them.
1:27:16 Shawn Ryan? Interesting. Last night at dinner, you brought up a very good point on how we are shipping all of our old military equipment into Ukraine. And it's an aspect that I never, it just had not crossed my mind. Can you go into that a little bit, please?
1:27:36 Speaker 07 Yeah, so wars are fought first through supply chains, right? And... During peacetime, the United States military has certain requirements to maintain a peacetime arsenal and peacetime-level production. So peacetime production and peacetime supply reserves are much less than wartime, right? And it's because the idea is if some kind of conflict were to break out, then all of the existing supply would be used to support the conflict while we spun up production to start producing more weapons. Well, what happened here is that the conflict wasn't with the United States.
1:28:18 Speaker 07 The conflict was with not even an American ally, but a country that we chose to support at a certain time. So all of our reserves of weapons, which were all dated, they all had a shelf life, right? It's kind of like when you fill your pantry with canned tuna fish and canned beans. You know, as soon as a snowstorm hits, you use that first because you want to use it up, right? You don't want it to expire. So we sent them all of these dated weapons. That was the first round of weapons that we sent. Well, then, as the conflict continued, we started seeing it as an opportunity for us to test some of our more modern weapons. So we sent HIMARS.
1:28:59 Speaker 07 Now we're sending different types of satellites and radio equipment, right? We started sending more experimental stuff, drones, to Ukraine. But we never started resupplying our stocks because we kept producing at peacetime levels, even though Ukraine is spending ammunition at wartime levels. So that was part of the reason the United States started telling Germany and France and Poland they had to start sending weapons to Ukraine, was because our peacetime reserves were used up and our peacetime production levels can't maintain the fight. So we're in this jam. And in this jam, we have to decide as a country, do we start producing at wartime levels, even though we're not at war?
1:29:45 Speaker 07 One of the big reasons that you see bipartisan support for the conflict in Ukraine is because both Republicans and Democrats know that their constituencies are going to benefit when the American military industrial machine starts producing at wartime levels, producing more ammunition, more cannons, more small arms, more protective gear. We're going to make a huge stockpile to support us if we ever go to war with China, but we're also going to create this huge stockpile that we can then keep using to supply Ukraine and drive up GDP, drive up American benefits, right? The same thing is happening in Russia, and this is where, again, if you're going to be honest, you gotta call honesty for what it is.
1:30:28 Speaker 07 Russia is fighting Ukraine with Russia's old weapons. That's why the tanks that they use and the guns that they use and the ammunition that they use failed them. We sent our surplus and our stockpile to support Ukraine. Russia used their surplus and their stockpile to launch an invasion. That's why it didn't work. Now, all of Russia's best stuff, Russia's a little bit like us. They create weapons. They invent weapons. They also manufacture weapons, but the main source of their income is in exporting those weapons. So for the last 25 to 30 years, Russia's been exporting their cutting-edge weapons and their dated weapons. They've been exporting them to places like China.
1:31:12 Speaker 07 So when you hear headlines now talking about China giving lethal aid to Russia, what that really actually means is China reselling their Russian ammunition back to Russia. That's not the same thing. America has given advanced weapons to Ukraine, essentially on a lease basis, right? We have given Ukraine better weapons than they previously had, and we're giving them our weapons. The lethal aid that people are trying, that the newspapers in the, in the White House are trying to say is so, is a red line of some sort. The lethal aid that China is trying to support Russia is actually just giving them back the
1:31:54 Speaker 07 same weapons that Russia sold to China in the last 20 years. 20-year-old shells, 15-year-old cannons, right? They're just giving, they're just selling them back the same munitions that they bought from them before. That's bull market. That's capitalism.
1:32:10 Shawn Ryan? Uh huh.
1:32:11 Speaker 07 Right? So it's interesting to me that, that there's such a, such a campaign right now at the NATO and the media level to make it seem like China's crossing some sort of red line by essentially just selling back Russian weapons back to Russia. Because Russia can't manufacture weapons at wartime levels either, right? It takes time to spin that up.
1:32:37 Shawn Ryan? Yeah.
1:32:38 Speaker 07 Clearly, there's hypocrisy going on here, right? We're giving high-tech weapons to Ukraine. Russia's buying back their own old weapons from China. It's not quite the same thing. I, is it lethal aid? It is, but we're also giving lethal aid to Ukraine.
1:32:55 Shawn Ryan? Uh huh.
1:32:56 Speaker 07 So is it because this war is illegal? There's no such thing as a legal war.
1:33:00 Shawn Ryan? Yeah.
1:33:01 Speaker 07 All war is illegal. So I'm not quite understanding here, outside of the lens of, of shaping a narrative, it's not really true, it's, it's not something that I understand, why we seem to think that it's worth it to escalate this conflict. Why would we escalate the conflict with China? Why would we risk escalating conflict with China over what Russia and Ukraine have been fighting for the last year?
1:33:28 Shawn Ryan? Do you think, do you think we're going to see some major technological advancements from this, from getting rid of all of our old stuff? And, and, and, I mean, we saw a lot of... New advancements in the last 20 years, you know, in the Afghan, Iraq wars. Do you think we're going to see that with this war, being that we're not really there?
1:33:54 Speaker 07 Absolutely. I think the answer is yes. And it's because of what you're getting at, right? When you have a true battlefield to test your equipment, that's called battle-tested, right? That's the most, that's the highest level of testing you can get. Field testing and then battle-tested, right? Battle-tested and approved. So not only do you have all of these new weapons that have been developed by the United States proving themselves out in the field, and you know, they don't all work. Plenty of the weapons that we've sent to Ukraine don't work. Cannons split, drones fall out of the sky, right? Body armor fails, night vision goggles don't work. There's all sorts of things that don't work. But
1:34:37 Speaker 07 we get a chance to take that feedback from the field directly back to the manufacturer, who can make instantaneous improvements and then test and send out more testable gear. So we're battle-testing American weapons, right? Without having to risk American lives. Now, that's important because, remember what happened in Afghanistan back in the 80s? We started funding and arming the Taliban, and then 30 years later, we had to go to war with the Taliban, and they were shooting down our helicopters with the same weapons we gave them.
1:35:09 Shawn Ryan? Yeah.
1:35:10 Speaker 07 We learned from that. We don't want that to happen again. So when we give our old weapons and our experimental weapons to Ukraine, and they break or get used up in Ukraine, we don't ever have to worry about them coming back to bite us in the future. So we can prove out the highest working, the most effective weapons, and we can keep that for ourselves. And let it just be a training ground in Ukraine, which is why you see this constant conflict between Zelensky, asking for more. We need more, we need more, we need more. Part of that is him being what he's supposed to be, right? He's supposed to be the cheerleader for the country. But the reason he doesn't get more is because the United States knows, we can't give him everything he's asking for, or else there's going to be this big surplus of American modern weapons in Ukraine.
1:35:54 Speaker 07 And if they lose, Russia gets all those weapons. If they win, we have a very formidable force, trained and equipped with top-of-the-line weapons. Right? That doesn't make NATO comfortable. That doesn't make the United States comfortable. So it's this hard balancing act between giving them just enough that they can keep the fight going, but not enough that they can actually ensure their own security. So will we have better weapons coming out of it? Without a doubt. Not to mention the fact that Ukraine itself, all of the talent in Ukraine, and Ukraine was a very talented country in terms of cybersecurity, computer warfare, engineering. There's a lot of talent in Ukraine before it was invaded. Now, all of those warfighters,
1:36:38 Speaker 07 who have been forbidden and restricted from leaving the country, they've turned their talents into weapons-making, right? They used to create apps for phones. Now they create apps for weapons. They used to create optics for medical devices. Now they create optics for weapons, right? It's a whole second revolution of technology that when America comes in and rebuilds Ukraine and starts investing in Ukraine businesses, they have first dibs on all that new Ukraine tech, funded by American dollars.
1:37:09 Shawn Ryan? Do you have any insight on these bio labs that are over there? I've heard so much in the media about who's tied to them, why they're there, who's been funding them. I don't trust anything that the mainstream media says.
1:37:23 Speaker 07 I think that's a very wise approach. I don't trust anything the mainstream media says. I especially don't trust it if it only comes from one media source. Right? Bio labs are tricky, man, because bio labs, they're a double-edged sword. You have to have them. You have to have biological labs. Because if someone else is producing a biological weapon, you have to always be producing a biological defense. So you can't just not have a bio lab. The flip side is...
1:37:55 Speaker 07 If your enemies are creating a biological weapon, and you're not creating a biological weapon to combat their weapon, then you run the risk of running, you're doubling down on the idea that you're going to create a solution or a defense that works. Nobody wants to be, nobody wants to play only defense.
1:38:13 Shawn Ryan? Well, why would we put something that sophisticated and that dangerous in a third world country that's right next to Russia?
1:38:23 Speaker 07 Why? Why do you think we would do that?
1:38:27 Shawn Ryan? Deniability.
1:38:27 Speaker 07 Deniability, lower cost. Do you know where some of the most advanced American? Do you know where some of the most advanced European drone manufacturing companies are?
1:38:37 Shawn Ryan? I do not.
1:38:37 Speaker 07 Belarus.
1:38:38 Shawn Ryan? Really?
1:38:39 Speaker 07 Why are they in Belarus?
1:38:41 Shawn Ryan? That's a damn good question. I mean, I'd...
1:38:44 Speaker 07 Because it's cheap.
1:38:45 Shawn Ryan? It seems high, high, high risk.
1:38:47 Speaker 07 High risk, high reward. Prior to 2022, prior to February 24th, people weren't afraid of Russian aggression extending into a foreign country. Everybody was very focused on exponential growth. Remember that COVID, it took, it took the whole world coming to its knees economically during COVID before we all woke up to the fact that China controlled the supply lines and the supply chains for the entire world. We let that happen. The whole world let that happen and didn't wake up until COVID. Could you imagine if COVID hadn't happened? China would still be at the center of the world's supply chain, and we would still be blind to it.
1:39:31 Shawn Ryan? I mean, they still are, correct?
1:39:33 Speaker 07 In many ways, they still are. But now, at least, we're trying to diversify. Southeast Asia, India, Latin America, countries have started stepping in to fill that supply chain gap. And at the rate that we're growing, China will lose its dominant role. Ideally, in the next five to seven years, as we diversify supply chains. But the truth is, had we not, had Covid never happened, we would have never turned on those additional supply chains. The same thing is true in Europe. Had Russia never invaded Ukraine, we'd still be putting high-risk, high-reward opportunities, like modern-day technology and bio labs, into third-world countries. We're only talking about Europe, brother.
1:40:15 Speaker 07 Think about Latin America, think about the Middle East, think about Southeast Asia. How much investment is in those third-world countries because of the cost of labor, natural resources, ease of shipping lines, right? It's insane. That's what a globalized world looks like. So we kind of, I feel like, again, going back to like a large-scale question, we're at this place, as Americans, we're at this place where we have to ask ourselves the question, what's the future that we really want? Do we want a globalized world, where everybody has an opportunity to be, to maximize efficiency and, and generate tremendous wealth?
1:40:56 Speaker 07 Or do we want to be a country that has monopolies and opportunistic advantages? And we control who gets opportunities and who doesn't get opportunities? The liberal media tells us that we should lean into globalization. Pragmatic national security tells you that you should not, right? Do we want a world, another question, do we want a world where the world is, is at peace? Where countries are, can afford to take care of themselves and feed their own people and everybody should have like equal opportunity? Or do we want a country where American primacy is secure and America remains the world's top superpower? Because you can't have both.
1:41:36 Speaker 07 You can't let Europe grow in terms of influence and let China grow in terms of influence and let Russia grow in terms of influence, because you want them to have more power to control their own peace, without taking away from American primacy. If you want a long-term secure America, essentially you want exactly what we have right now, where NATO is forced to do what America tells them to do, where America can single-handedly fund a conflict in a third-world country, right? Where we, as Americans, only have to worry about one enemy at a time, and our one enemy that we have to worry about right now is China.
1:42:15 Shawn Ryan? You don't have to answer this if you don't want. What is your opinion on the globalization stuff?
1:42:24 Speaker 07 My honest answer is that I want a long-term, secure America. There always will be a winner and a loser, always. So if I have a choice, I'm gonna choose to be on the winning side. Do I think that there is suffering in the world? Yes, there will always be suffering in the world. Do I think that some people live in unfair, harsh conditions? Yes, but they will always have unfair, harsh conditions. The difference is, I don't ever want those conditions to exist for me and my family. I know that makes me sound cold and crass, and I know that makes me sound, you know, like I just don't care about people. I do care about people, but in a priority order.
1:43:09 Speaker 07 And I care about my family and my fellow Americans before I think about anybody else.
1:43:14 Shawn Ryan? Well, you know, you've seen a lot. You've been around the world, you've seen how bad it can get. I don't think, it may sound cruel to the people that are listening to this that haven't been anywhere but, you know, the bubble that they live in. But for people like me and you who've seen how bad it can get, who've seen starvation and food shortages and power outages and more. You know, a different scenario for us. I, you know, I have, the reason I'm bringing this up and we're gonna talk about this later, hopefully after China, but
1:43:51 Shawn Ryan? as things, with everything that we know right now, I 100% agree with you, I want what's best for America. I want what's best for the United States because of my family, my fellow Americans. But with all these UAP, UFO, weaponizing space, all this stuff that is kind of starting to be shuffled into the limelight here, it makes me wonder, you know, what is out there that we don't know? And if there is something out there and it does happen to be a threat to our world, I don't think we're gonna get very far is as we are now,
1:44:35 Shawn Ryan? where we're all fighting each other and we're enemies. We're gonna have to, we're gonna have to unite eventually. If...
1:44:44 Shawn Ryan? That stuff is, is what some people think it might be.
1:44:49 Speaker 07 No, and I completely agree. And what's, what's important to understand there is that the whole, remember we were talking about that pyramid of society?
1:44:58 Shawn Ryan? Uh huh.
1:44:59 Speaker 07 There's individualism, tribalism, and then the state. When, when human beings are threatened as a whole, that pyramid disappears, right? Because now, we don't care that you're China and we're America. When there's a, if there's some kind of invasion, extraplanetary, extraplanetary, extraterrestrial invasion of Earth, the whole concept of state disappears.
1:45:28 Shawn Ryan? Uh huh.
1:45:28 Speaker 07 Because now it's, everybody is, is trying to just survive.
1:45:32 Shawn Ryan? Uh huh.
1:45:33 Speaker 07 I don't believe that an invasion of Earth would ever look like that. If there's intelligent life out there, just, I mean, you and I are intelligent life. If you had to plan the invasion of another planet, just you by yourself, you would not try to go into that planet, guns blazing, taking over everything.
1:45:53 Shawn Ryan? Uh huh.
1:45:54 Speaker 07 You would find somebody on the planet to partner with. You would promise them advantages. You would promise them special treatment. You would promise them some sort of edge over their opponents. And you would surreptitiously invade and take over the planet. If there's life out there, and they're intelligent, we always seem to assume they're more intelligent than us. So if our plan would be to surreptitiously invade a planet, and they're more intelligent than us, think about how advanced their plan would actually be.
1:46:27 Shawn Ryan? Uh huh.
1:46:28 Speaker 07 They wouldn't let humanitarian, they wouldn't let humanity unite. They would have a plan to make sure that humanity stays heavily divided, maybe even wipes itself out, and leaves behind a planet that they can take over. Right, like that's, that's the stuff that really scares me. The stuff in sci-fi movies is entertainment. It's there to make us feel, strong feelings, and forget about life for an hour and a half. That's what sci-fi is there to do.
1:46:58 Shawn Ryan? Yeah.
1:46:58 Speaker 07 Real-life strategy and real-life tactics is there so that nobody sees it coming. It happens quickly, it happens violently, and it's forgotten very quickly. That's what real life looks like. So when I think about an alien invasion, when I think about any kind of intelligent life form coming to take over Earth, it's not gonna look like it looks in a sci-fi movie. It's gonna look like some sort of very insidious plan that we don't even know is happening until after it's over.
1:47:28 Shawn Ryan? Yeah, I mean, it's all speculation up to this point, right? You know, nobody really, unless you know more than I know, then you make. But, um, and, and I wanna cover that. We'll get into the weeds on that, you know, on the backhand of, uh, on the back end of the China topic. But, um, but it is, it's an interesting subject, for sure.
1:47:47 Speaker 07 Absolutely.
1:47:48 Shawn Ryan? A lot of people think that the Ukraine-Russia conflict is gonna develop into World War III. What do you think about that?
1:48:01 Speaker 07 I think we're probably already in World War III, to be honest. World, World War III is not gonna look like World War II. We were talking about this a little bit earlier with the idea of proxy wars.
1:48:12 Speaker 07 Proxy wars are a tool that superpowers use to fight against each other without expending their own human lives. We've been in proxy wars since 2012. Syria, Afghanistan, I'm sorry, Syria, Yemen, Libya. We're all proxy wars. And those are just the major proxy wars. We're not even talking about some of the wars that you've seen in Thailand, in Myanmar, conflicts that have happened all across Latin America, coups in Africa. They're all smaller, less, less newsworthy proxy wars, and Americans are totally blind to it. In many ways, I would argue that we're already in the beginning phases of World War III.
1:48:53 Speaker 07 And World War III looks like proxy war between the world's largest economies, which those economies are starting to band together.
1:49:04 Speaker 07 Right? World War II was defined by Axis and Allies. Remember that? You had Italy and Germany, Nazi Germany and Japan, all working together with some other countries. And then you had the UK and the Americans and the Australians all working together with countries like Russia and China as the Allied Powers. We're already seeing that happen now. You're seeing it in the UN. You're seeing it with NATO. You see Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, coming closer and closer together, pulling Turkey into their own sphere of influence. You see Poland, Germany, the UK, the United States, Canada, all pulling together, right?
1:49:49 Speaker 07 And you see the countries, the world itself, dividing along these Axis and Allied Powers again. That's, to me, signs that the world is already preparing for a long-term engagement, a long-term war. The war just won't look like nuclear weapons and bombers taking over cities. It's gonna look like a line of Third World countries that everybody's gonna fight over. And there's gonna be devastation in these Third World countries that are resource-rich countries, mineral-rich countries, strategically important countries. But the majority of the population will stay calm because they won't feel like they're at war.
1:50:34 Speaker 07 World War I, World War II, you had mass panic, you had hysteria. People were terrified all the time. Children hiding under desks because there was a war going on and everybody could use that word. We've grown, governments have grown much smarter since then. They don't want people talking about war. They want people worried about nuclear weapons because that makes you support your own government. But as soon as you're at war, we learned in Vietnam, the people can turn against their government. No government wants that.
1:51:06 Shawn Ryan? Well, you know... I agree with you 100%. However, Zelensky is on the record saying America is going to have to send their their sons and daughters over here to fight and die alongside with us. And there's been rumors, and I'm sure they're just rumors. Um, I don't think there's any validity to them yet, but talking about a draft. Do you, you know, this could escalate and we are talking about all these different. I mean, look at Afghanistan. China was there to negotiate with Taliban before we were even pulled out. And um, I believe that was all over lithium.
1:51:46 Speaker 07 Hmm.
1:51:47 Shawn Ryan? You know, but what's to say that we don't send our own guys again into these into these third world countries that are rich in materials and and and um.
1:52:03 Speaker 07 Strategic importance.
1:52:04 Shawn Ryan? Yes.
1:52:05 Speaker 07 Yeah, there's always a probability, there's always a possibility, always. I just think the probability is low. When we, let's be frank when we talk about President Zelensky. All right, President Zelensky is a president of a third world country that is at war with Russia. Has he gone down and and secured his place in history as a heroic president? I would say yes. But he was an actor before he was elected by a third world population to become the leader of their country. And the show that he's famous for was a show where basically he was
1:52:50 Speaker 07 talking about Russian corruption in Ukraine. For all we know, he could still just be playing the same role that he was playing when he was an actor.
1:52:59 Shawn Ryan? Uh huh.
1:53:00 Speaker 07 He has no statesman chops. He has no background in understanding diplomacy or understanding politics. Over the last year, there have been at least a half a dozen instances where he has spoken out of turn and then been corrected. Do you remember when he, he said that he would never negotiate with Putin? Do you remember that?
1:53:21 Shawn Ryan? I do.
1:53:22 Speaker 07 That was like, what, eight months ago, six months ago? And then he got a phone call from President Biden that said something along the lines of, "You can't draw a red line like that." And then he changed his position, right? You saw him talk about how the war would never stop until Ukraine had regained all of its territorial integrity back as far as 1999. And then he had to walk that back, right? The guy is a very good populist leader. He's very good at getting people excited, and he's very good at making headlines. And that's good, because that's what Ukraine needs. But he's not a statesman, right? He's, he is not an experienced wartime leader in terms of actually knowing how to negotiate
1:54:07 Speaker 07 and, and reduce conflict. That's not what he's good at. He has to constantly get redirected by the United States, because we are the primary people funding his war, right? Funding his defense. So he's got, he's constantly having to renavigate us. So four days ago, or earlier this week, he made some comment about how if China gives lethal aid to Russia, the whole world is going to war. He doesn't know what the hell he's talking about.
1:54:37 Shawn Ryan? No.
1:54:37 Speaker 07 Right? President Obama said that chemical weapons in Syria were going to be a red line. And then Assad used chemical weapons in Syria, and nothing happened.
1:54:50 Shawn Ryan? Mm-hmm.
1:54:51 Speaker 07 Right? One of the biggest blunders of the Obama administration. That was an American president committing American resources to a conflict. So what right does President Zelensky have to commit world resources to a conflict that only involves him and his, him and Russia right now? It's just not likely.
1:55:11 Shawn Ryan? Yeah.
1:55:11 Speaker 07 Do you know what I mean? And for me, as an American watching this, it makes me very upset. It makes me very frustrated to see how Zelensky uses his public profile to continue to incite violence and continue to incite aggression.
1:55:30 Speaker 07 Yes, I understand Russia is doing the same thing. But I remember being a 10-year-old kid and my parents teaching me that you have to be the bigger man to win a conflict, right? So if he just resorts to the same kind of populist propaganda that the Russians use to incite their own people to violence, who's actually winning? And this is what's mind-boggling to me. The only country to propose a peace plan was China. China proposed a peace plan that both Zelensky and Putin actually publicly acknowledged and took the time to read and listen to.
1:56:15 Speaker 07 Now, as of today, they haven't agreed to any peace plan. But it's ridiculous that the one country who has thought up the idea of taking a leadership role in negotiating a ceasefire has been China. I think Turkey may have tried something early on, but it wasn't taken seriously by either side. But here, China is essentially the world leader right now in negotiating peace in Europe. That's mind-boggling.
1:56:42 Shawn Ryan? What does that look like for us?
1:56:45 Speaker 07 Dude, that's bad in so many ways. First of all, for China to even propose a peace plan means that they understand they have leverage over both parties. You never propose a peace plan unless you have something to gain from the peace. China knows that they're one of the primary sources for funding Russia. So they can definitely lean into Putin and say, "Hey, we're going to give you an out that saves face. We're going to protect your ego and protect your country by giving you a ceasefire agreement that benefits Russia. And if you do what we tell you to do, you'll continue to have the benefits of a Chinese partner, right, for the next 20 years." But they can also go to Ukraine and say, "Ukraine..."
1:57:29 Speaker 07 You do what we tell you to do because we have a collar, a leash on Russia. And we'll be able to protect and enforce any agreement they make. And because we bring peace to Ukraine, you'll give us dibs on rebuilding Ukraine. Or you'll give us beneficial treatment in Ukraine in the future. Right? So we're going to step in and essentially benefit from all the money in conflict that if, all the money and investment that's come from the United States. Do you remember what happened when we left Afghanistan?
1:57:57 Shawn Ryan? Which part?
1:58:00 Speaker 07 Every part, right? We left Afghanistan, China stepped in.
1:58:04 Shawn Ryan? Yeah.
1:58:05 Speaker 07 They took mineral rights, they supported the Taliban, they started the humanitarian effort.
1:58:08 Shawn Ryan? I, that infuriates me. I have, how did that, how did that happen?
1:58:14 Speaker 07 The same way, it's the same way they're setting it up right now in Ukraine. Right? The United States-
1:58:19 Shawn Ryan? I mean, how was that missed?
1:58:21 Speaker 07 Yeah.
1:58:21 Shawn Ryan? With, especially with this, with this green energy movement to, to, to abandon lithium deposits of that size is just, it doesn't, it doesn't, was it on purpose?
1:58:36 Speaker 07 You mean, I subscribe to Hanlon's razor, a logic razor, a logical saying that we're taught at the agency. Never subscribe to, never subscribe to conspiracy, that which can be explained with idiocy. I, that kind of conspiracy, to think that we orchestrated the abandonment of lithium mines to give them to China, that is so complicated that it just makes more logical sense to assume somebody was stupid. Doesn't feel good, but probability wise, that's the more probable outcome.
1:59:17 Shawn Ryan? But then you have all these ties between China and the Biden administration and China and Biden's son and, and-
1:59:28 Shawn Ryan? Is it that much of a conspiracy?
1:59:29 Speaker 07 So we think that these ties, we think that these ties are new. And that's why we think they're conspiracies. Stop to think about the fact that China did not participate in the war on terror. So what were they doing with all their time, money, and attention going back to 2001? They weren't fighting terrorists. They were, they were building this huge network of resources all around the globe. They were taking advantage of the fact that America was distracted. The other superpower was distracted by the war on terror. Right? We, we essentially, we got caught with our pants down. Right? The whole world ran on the back of Chinese manufacturing.
2:00:12 Speaker 07 When you follow the breadcrumbs of Chinese businesses? I mean, it's Shell Corporation on top of Shell Corporation on top of Shell Corporation. Where did they learn that? From us. More, more Chinese visas were granted for Chinese people to go to American law schools than any other country. And when they finished law school, they didn't become American attorneys. They went back to China to become attorneys for Chinese firms that helped negotiate contracts globally that they know they can enforce over the United States. One of the reasons that, that this chip war, there's a big chip war between the US and China. One of the big reasons that that chip war is continuing and the reasons that, that Biden
2:00:57 Speaker 07 has to pass presidential legislation to stop the transfer of chips is because legally, under existing laws, China has it all nailed down. That's how they took over Hong Kong. They took it over legally first. They've been laying the foundation to legally take over Taiwan for the last seven years. Right? Like, that's how they operate. They operate according to the, the rule of international law because then the international courts have no option except to support them. And they can do insane things like beating people in the streets in Hong Kong and not fall under legal ramifications because they've already got the laws all ironed out. Right?
2:01:40 Speaker 07 But going back to your point about, you know, what's it look like if China negotiates peace in Europe? It looks like the United States is a warmonger. And it looks like the United States no longer has a sphere of influence in Europe. Because the United States couldn't negotiate peace. It took China to negotiate peace. That's what it looks like. It looks like that 2033 timeline just got shortened by about three years.
2:02:05 Shawn Ryan? Yeah.
2:02:08 Shawn Ryan? We've been talking about if this goes to World War III. And it looks a lot like what it is now, just amplified. However, Putin has threatened nuclear missiles. So are you totally discounting that?
2:02:26 Speaker 07 I don't totally discount the use of nuclear weapons. Here's, I will say that the probability of a nuclear weapon going off in the United States is extremely small. The probability of a nuclear weapon going off in a NATO country is extremely small. It doesn't make any sense for Putin to use a nuclear warhead in a country that guarantees war with the United States, that guarantees retaliation with the United States. That doesn't make sense. But it's not nearly so cut and dry, right? People think, again, thanks to the oversimplification of media. We think that Russia's gonna launch some nuclear weapon that hits New York. That's not how wars are fought.
2:03:07 Speaker 07 Wars are fought with covert action and with plausible deniability. So what happens if a small-yield nuclear weapon goes off in Kiev? That was smuggled there in a briefcase through Belarus? That's a much more likely outcome. Who takes responsibility for that? Who does NATO hold accountable for that?
2:03:30 Shawn Ryan? Yeah.
2:03:30 Speaker 07 Right? The only facts, the only evidence you would have are a blast in Kiev. No missile, no source that you know of where it was deployed from. And maybe you can track it back to crossing the border from Belarus. But Belarus isn't at war with Ukraine. Belarus is a proxy for Russia, but you can't hold Putin responsible for what Belarus does. You have to hold Leshenko responsible for what Belarus does. But who holds him responsible? It's not a NATO country. So does NATO go to war with Belarus? You see how messy that would get? That's how this kind of conflict actually happens. You want there to be so much confusion that people can't plan their response.
2:04:13 Speaker 07 One of the benefits that autocracies have over democracies, China, Russia being autocracies, Syria, Iran being autocracies, is they don't have to worry about bureaucratic gridlock. The United States on its own has bureaucratic gridlock all the time. NATO, NATO is a conglomerate of bureaucracies. It's a bureaucracy of bureaucracies. So imagine the gridlock that they have to deal with. Part of the reason the United States is the one funding Ukraine is because NATO can't make a decision. They can't make a decision over six months, let alone six hours, right? At least the president can pass an executive order and everybody moves forward.
2:04:56 Speaker 07 So autocracies are constantly playing against that democratic weakness of bureaucracy. So a pocket nuke goes off in Kiev, or a pocket nuke goes off in the Donbass region, and it's smuggled through Romania, or it's smuggled through Moldova, or it's smuggled through Belarus. Who's held responsible for that? What's the global response to that? NATO is gridlocked. The United States is putting pressure on NATO to come to a certain conclusion, but NATO doesn't want to come to that conclusion because then they look like they're being bullied by the United States. In the meantime, you still have a nuke that just went off in Ukraine. That is absolutely within the realm of plausibility. But what's the benefit?
2:05:39 Speaker 07 Unless it's a city like Kiev, unless it takes out the entire presidential corps or the entire leadership corps, it doesn't really benefit Russia. And that's what Russia, if Russia's gonna use a nuke, if they're gonna use a nuke overtly or covertly, they wanna use it in a way that brings a very specific benefit to them.
2:05:57 Shawn Ryan? For anybody who's thinking, oh, this is a conspiracy bringing a nuke in a briefcase, I'd like to remind you that Andy was on the nuclear program for the US Air Force. So I think he's a pretty credible source. But, um, so.
2:06:13 Speaker 07 Nuclear missiles are very public things. Everybody sees the launch, everybody sees the reentry. It's all documented by satellites. It's a very public thing.
2:06:23 Shawn Ryan? Good. If we do lose this, if Ukraine loses, which it sounds like you're damn near certain that they will, what does it look like for the US? What does it look like for the rebuild?
2:06:36 Speaker 07 So I wanna define win and loss to start, right? Because Zelensky has made his criteria for winning
2:06:47 Speaker 07 to be so unstatesmanlike, he's basically said that the definition for Ukraine to win is the full reinstatement of all territories going back to prior to the invasion of Crimea. That's what it takes for Ukraine to win according to their own president. If he changes his stance on that, then that in and of itself shows that they've lost, right? So that's such an impossible outcome. That's why I feel like the probability of Ukraine winning according to their own definition of winning, I am damn near certain they're not gonna get that.
2:07:24 Shawn Ryan? Yeah.
2:07:24 Speaker 07 They will most likely get some kind of ceasefire where they are given the opportunity to acquiesce, to the vote of eastern Ukraine to join Russia, and there'll be some kind of, you know, dividing line, much like we see in between North and South Korea. That's what the world wants, but that may not be what Zelensky wants. So what does it look like after that? It looks like, if that ceasefire happens and it's driven by NATO, or it's driven by the United States, then it looks like democracy wins. If that ceasefire happens and it's driven by China,
2:08:05 Speaker 07 or it's driven by Russia, or it's driven by some ally that we haven't even heard of, of those two, like Turkey, then it looks like democracy is weak.
2:08:14 Speaker 07 Right? So if conflict continues, it looks like democracy is strong. If conflict ends, there's a split decision right now, right? And that's a big reason why the United States is happy to keep funding a war. It's also a big reason why NATO is so uncomfortable with continuing war. Because NATO does not want Russia, their neighbor. They don't want Russia to go insane, get out of control, or be provocated, provoked into launching some sort of counteroffensive into a NATO country. Even if Russia gets destroyed, France, Germany, Poland,
2:08:57 Speaker 07 they don't want a nuclear weapon going off in their country. How, that is, that is a devastating catastrophe for any government to have so poorly executed support for a proxy war that they end up being the target of a retaliatory strike. Think about, like, that's the end of not just political careers. That's the entire just destruction through a nuclear weapon of a large city. So whenever the, whenever the president or the chancellor of Germany or France has to consider what they're gonna do next, they always have to weigh that in their mind. They always have to be thinking, yeah, Russia might be destroyed, and so is Paris.
2:09:41 Speaker 07 Russia might be destroyed, but so is Munich. In the United States, we don't have to worry about that. In the United States, we might be like, Russia's destroyed, that's awesome. Paris took a bomb, that sucks. Americans are still safe, high five, right? That's how we think here. That's how we have to think here. If we're really thinking about a world that, that is led by the United States as their economic superpower, that's how we think.
2:10:08 Shawn Ryan? Rajan?
2:10:11 Shawn Ryan? Let's say, "Let's take a break." Actually, I'm gonna split this into a two-part series. Let's take a break, and then when we come back, we'll pick up with China.
2:10:20 Speaker 07 Okay, man. We'll do some lunch?
2:10:22 Shawn Ryan? Yeah. Next, on The Sean Ryan Show.
2:10:27 Speaker 07 If you recall, under Obama, Obama in his second term coined something known as "the Asia pivot," right? Where he pivoted, he started working to pivot through policy, all of our attention away from counterterrorism and into China.
2:10:42 Shawn Ryan? Why are we not shifting focus here?
2:10:45 Speaker 07 China has gotten to a place, specifically with China, the most significant thing about China is that it's gotten to a place where it has the potential to direct next steps in Europe.
2:10:58 Speaker 08 China's President Xi Jinping landed in Moscow, greeted by official Russian pomp, then whisked to the Kremlin. Xi is trying to position Beijing as a peacemaker in the war in Ukraine. Beijing proposed a ceasefire in a 12-point plan that's been rejected by the West.
2:11:16 Speaker 07 Hypersonic missiles, Huawei, rare earth minerals, Belt Road Initiative, they're involved in all sorts of stuff. That one thing, to me, is the most imminent, pressing concern. Because if they figure out how to do that, there's no way we're touching Taiwan, we're keeping Taiwan safe.
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