"Mossad Launching Missiles In Iran" - Chris Cappy EXPOSES Covert Ops, Israel’s Nukes & CIA Black Ops | PBD Podcast | Ep. 622

War Veteran and YouTube powerhouse Chris Cappy joins the Patrick Bet David for a deep dive into global conflict. From Ukraine’s front lines to secret CIA ops, Iran’s drone tech, China’s war timeline, and America’s futuristic weapons, this episode pulls back the curtain on how close we are to the next world war. ------ Ⓜ️CONNECT WITH CHRIS CAPPY ON MINNECT: http://bit.ly/40ClVCC 🥤 THE VT SUMMER YETI COLLECTION: ⁠https://bit.ly/4f6jtu8⁠ https://bit.ly/4f6jtu8 🎫 THE VAULT 2025 | SEPT 8TH - 11TH | THE GAYLORD PALMS | ORLANDO, FL: ⁠⁠https://bit.ly/40lR90L ⁠⁠ https://bit.ly/40lR90L 🍋 ZEST IT FORWARD: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://bit.ly/4jYg3Lh⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://bit.ly/4jYg3Lh 📕 PBD'S BOOK "THE ACADEMY": ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://bit.ly/41rtEV4⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://bit.ly/41rtEV4 🎙️ FOLLOW THE PODCAST ON SPOTIFY: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://bit.ly/4g57zR2⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://bit.ly/4g57zR2 🎙️ FOLLOW THE PODCAST ON ITUNES: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://bit.ly/4g1bXAh⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://bit.ly/4g1bXAh 🎙️ FOLLOW THE PODCAST ON ALL PLATFORMS: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://bit.ly/4eXQl6A⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://bit.ly/4eXQl6A 📱 CONNECT ON MINNECT: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://bit.ly/4ikyEkC⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://bit.ly/4ikyEkC 👔 BET-DAVID CONSULTING: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://bit.ly/3ZjWhB7⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://bit.ly/3ZjWhB7 📰 VTNEWS. AI: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://bit.ly/3OExClZ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://bit.ly/3OExClZ 🎓 VALUETAINMENT UNIVERSITY: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://bit.ly/3BfA5Qw⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://bit.ly/3BfA5Qw 📺 JOIN THE CHANNEL: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://bit.ly/4g5C6Or⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://bit.ly/4g5C6Or 💬 TEXT US: Text “PODCAST” to 310-340-1132 to get the latest updates in real-time! ABOUT US: Patrick Bet-David is the founder and CEO of Valuetainment Media. He is the author of the #1 Wall Street Journal Bestseller “Your Next Five Moves” (Simon & Schuster) and a father of 2 boys and 2 girls. He currently resides in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida.

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:29Speaker 01

  Build your front end and back end together on Base44. Describe the product logic with a managed database, authentication, and hosting included. Spend less time assembling infrastructure and more time getting your product live. Go to base44.com.

• 0:44Speaker 02

  All of our allies are funding and helping Russia.

• 0:48Patrick Bet-David?

  What's being built that's just an insane thing DARPA's got that the rest of us don't know about? That maybe it's been leaked.

• 0:53Speaker 02

  The B-21 bomber? It's probably the thing that scares China the most.

• 0:58Patrick Bet-David?

  So you went on the front lines of Ukraine?

• 1:00Speaker 02

  Everything that I saw in Iraq is nothing like the rules of how it works with Ukraine and Russia. This was probably the worst, most terrifying experience of my life because we're getting shelled by Russian artillery.

• 1:14Patrick Bet-David?

  Where are you at with this?

• 1:16Speaker 02

  If China were to invade Taiwan, it might be in their best interest to do it in the next three years.

• 1:22Patrick Bet-David?

  Really?

• 1:23Speaker 02

  The CIA has a YouTube channel, by the way. I don't know if you know this.

• 1:27Patrick Bet-David?

  The CIA is so bad now, they've become YouTubers.

• 1:29Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:30Patrick Bet-David?

  That is pretty bad. Who is actually an ally of US? And who is an enemy of US?

• 1:37Speaker 02

  My belief is that Israel is 100% our ally. But then, there's a lot that Israel does that is against American interests. And it makes you question if, are those things worth it at the end of the day?

• 1:50Patrick Bet-David?

  Such as?

• 2:19Speaker 04

  My handshake is better than anything I ever signed, right here.

• 2:23Patrick Bet-David?

  You are a one of one?

• 2:24Speaker 04

  My sundry is very good. I don't think I've ever said this before.

• 2:32Patrick Bet-David?

  Anyways, folks, I got Chris Cappy in the house. 11 Bravo. This is a guy that's got one of the coolest YouTube channels, breaking down things with military. Better than, I would say, he's in the top five of the guys that breaks down military stuff and he's got the moral authority to do it. Because he was in there and he's extremely fair on what he does and he's a big, our guys, massive fan of Chris here. At our studio, everybody talks about him. So Chris, it's great to have you on the podcast.

• 2:59Speaker 02

  It's great to be here. Thanks for having me.

• 3:00Patrick Bet-David?

  Yes, congrats on your newborn. Just became a dad for the first time a month ago.

• 3:04Speaker 02

  It's been quite a ride already. Yeah, it's been, so a couple of nights of no sleep, but I slammed a couple of Red Bulls before I got here.

• 3:12Patrick Bet-David?

  So you're ready. You look ready for this. Yeah, okay, good. We were having great conversations about upbringing and all the other stuff, but. So, you're in the army, you join after art school because somebody, you had a conversation with them, well, you had a little bit. Too much, what'd you drink that night? Apple juice or rotten grape juice or what was it?

• 3:32Speaker 02

  It was fermented.

• 3:33Patrick Bet-David?

  It was fermented.

• 3:35Speaker 02

  It was, actually, some people out there might be familiar with this. It's a game called Edward Forty Hands.

• 3:41Patrick Bet-David?

  Okay.

• 3:41Speaker 02

  Where what you do is you take two forties and you take some duct tape. And then, I think that's a good, there you go. And you have somebody duct tape you to the forties and then you just slam them.

• 3:52Patrick Bet-David?

  Is this serious? Is this a real thing?

• 3:54Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah. Colt forty fives. It was a real thing at art school in Manhattan in 2008, I believe. Yeah. So we would, they would sell these to us at the bodega across the street. And we would go, like, nine times out of 10, every once in a while, they'd be like, are you a cop? But for whatever reason, back then, you could just walk in and get the Colt forty fives and. Just, just get annihilated for the night because that's how you study at art school at the time. And one.

• 4:24Speaker 02

  I was like the one ultra conservative dude that would be saying, yeah, it's right that we're in Iraq, we should be there, we should be fighting there. And this, I'll never forget this, this German foreign exchange student said to me, you know, as he's sipping his 40s, like, if you really believe that, then why aren't you in Iraq right now, fighting? And it shut me up.

• 4:50Patrick Bet-David?

  Wow.

• 4:51Speaker 02

  And I had one of those moments where I like, where I wanted to look in the, I had to look in the mirror and kind of reassess and evaluate the fact that like, what I was saying wasn't aligning with what I was doing. And it gave me this kind of cognitive dissonance that was hard to rectify. It was hard to reconcile what that meant at that age of like 18, 19, back then. And, you know, it obviously wasn't just that. There were a number of different reasons that led me to want to-

• 5:22Patrick Bet-David?

  How much after that moment did you join?

• 5:24Speaker 02

  Right after that, I started seriously looking into and asking like, questions and getting the business card of different recruiters and putting into action that plan. But already I'd had the thoughts of like, you know, maybe I need service, maybe I need some discipline in my life instead of smoking weed and doing-

• 5:44Patrick Bet-David?

  Did you, did you drink more in the army or pre?

• 5:47Speaker 02

  I, in the army, not, not, didn't really have a chance to do any of that kind of stuff.

• 5:53Patrick Bet-David?

  Really?

• 5:53Speaker 02

  Because, so I enlisted in the Army National Guard in the infantry. So I did two weeks a year and one weekend a month, and volunteered to deploy right away. So most of my service was, I did some mobilizations to, I went to Latvia, helped train the troops there, who were right on the border with Russia, in a NATO exercise. I did some mobilizations in New York City for hurricane domestic missions, learned what, what the police kind of have to deal with every day, got a respect, I gained a respect for that. And then the deployment to Iraq. So most of my service was- Um, not the, I would get drug tested like it was one of the things that kept me sober

• 6:37Speaker 02

  for a long time by my, while I was in the guard was because they would drug test you like every month and I did not, you, you zero tolerance, you're done.

• 6:46Patrick Bet-David?

  Yeah, and by the way, you may want to explain to the audience, I don't know how they drug tested you. Vinnie and I were talking about today, he was in the air force, I was in the army. The way they drug tested you, they made sure you didn't use, you know, detergent or you didn't use anything to, they would literally look at your dangling while you're peeing into, while you're getting drug tested.

• 7:05Speaker 02

  We call, we call that the 92 Zulu, their job is a meat gazer.

• 7:09Patrick Bet-David?

  Meat gazer.

• 7:10Speaker 02

  They, they.

• 7:11Patrick Bet-David?

  What a great job, a meat gazer, someone who stares at another person's genitals, especially in a way that is considered inappropriate or unwelcome. Well, listen, in a military, that was very normal. We had a guy named Jackson, won't give his first name, but Jackson was always high, was always smoking weed. And on guard duty, he's like, yeah, but David, you know, you can't tell nobody. I'm like, listen, you, you can't get away with saying it's incense anymore. Everybody's figured it out. So in the army, they would say, step to the front if your last four starts with the number six. Jackson's number starts with the number six. Oh, come on, Sarge, come on, Sarge. And he steps out, boom, gets tested,

• 7:52Patrick Bet-David?

  goes from E4 to E1, and he gets a, what is it, Article 187, is that what they call it, that 187, Article 187?

• 7:59Speaker 02

  Uh, oh my god.

• 8:00Patrick Bet-David?

  Things like that when you're getting reprimanded.

• 8:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, I know what you're talking about, when they, Article 47, I think it was.

• 8:04Patrick Bet-David?

  Is it called, uh, uh, Article 137?

• 8:07Speaker 02

  I can't believe I don't remember.

• 8:08Patrick Bet-David?

  In a military, type, oh, that's exactly what it is. Article 187 is when you get in trouble. And he lost his rank and he dropped, and then, I'll never forget what happened there. But the testing was happened regularly. So you're living this life, the college life, the weed, the drugs, you know, partying, drinking, all this stuff, very committed to this Edward Forty Hands, I'm impressed, I've never heard of that before. We just did it, we don't need tapes. We're like, give it to me, we want more of it. Whether it was Mickey's or Old English or whatever the old ghetto cheap beer that we would drink. But then you come out, you intend, you voluntarily go to the front lines during the Ukraine war, I believe last year you went there, right, to just kind of learn for yourself. But maybe before we can get into that.

• 8:51Patrick Bet-David?

  So, I think we're doing Iraq the right thing, and we gotta go out there and all this other stuff. Friend challenges you, then you go. Did your impression of us doing the right thing change when you went there? Or you're like, why are we out here? What was your impression?

• 9:06Speaker 02

  It changed, but not in the way that I think a lot of people might think that it happens, where I didn't just turn around and I'm gonna throw all my medals and everything over the fence now, and I'm gonna burn my...

• 9:17Patrick Bet-David?

  Army Commendation Medal, Army Chima Medal, yeah.

• 9:20Speaker 02

  It wasn't like that. I just gained, it was, it's almost worse than that. I had a bit of like an ego death, where I'm there and I realized that it's way more complicated than I thought. Which is where I'd almost rather it be black and white, and it just be 100% wrong, that would be easier for me to mentally handle. But I came back with this understanding that it's more of a gray area, which is, there's nothing worse than when you're 19 years old, and you don't know what's true, you don't, you no longer really know what to believe, because there's some things that I thought that we did that I was proud of, and proud of my service, proud of going there. And then there's other things that I saw, we see a lot of innocent people get killed,

• 10:00Speaker 02

  and you start to think like, I remember thinking, maybe this isn't a positive thing, these, a lot of these people don't want us here, and maybe we're not liberating and bringing democracy, and maybe some of these things that I was told are not true. So, yeah, that, that kind of gray area was what I walked away with. And I didn't have like a intense tour, it wasn't like Fallujah crazy tour like that. It was 2009, solidly in the occupation part of the war. It's, I saw a lot of corruption, like a lot of our missions, we, I would go out one day, my platoon leader got us all together, we got in the Stryker armored vehicles, we drove

• 10:45Speaker 02

  out to a town nearby, and we gave a local sheik $100,000 in cash. And it was basically a kind of payoff, in a way. It's like, here, tell your people not to attack us now. And this was... Frequent throughout Iraq and Afghanistan.

• 11:07Patrick Bet-David?

  You witnessed a hundred thousand dollars being given away to a Sheikh.

• 11:10Speaker 02

  They called it a micro grant. You can look up the program. It's like the micro grant program in Iraq.

• 11:15Patrick Bet-David?

  So the money's coming from who, the taxpayers?

• 11:17Speaker 02

  It's not even, yes, and it's not even the worst idea. It's kind of a decent idea. We would give this money away so that, because otherwise, we went in there and these people, Iraqis, lost their job. They lost, a lot of people that used to be in the Iraqi army were disbanded.

• 11:33Patrick Bet-David?

  Mm-hmm.

• 11:33Speaker 02

  And then if you don't have a job, what do you do? You're gonna take a couple hundred bucks from an Iranian influence that is trying to kill Americans, or take a couple hundred bucks from Al Qaeda to feed your family. I understand the, what the idea was behind the program, but a lot of it went to corrupt local leaders, local sheikhs.

• 11:55Patrick Bet-David?

  So these micro grants are typically fifteen hundred to five thousand dollars. The one you did was a hundred thousand dollars. So that means, that's a pretty big micro grant. Who did we kill for us to feel that we need to give the Sheikh a hundred grand?

• 12:08Speaker 02

  They, they would give this money out in like batches. So, ten thousand here, ten thousand there. We, it would be that sometimes we would, you know, like artillery fire from our base. We would fire flares and it would, sometimes those flares would come down, like burn someone's car down or their house. And then we have to go compensate for that. It would, those type of missions are not in the commercial. And that's not to say that, like, I'm not saying that the bad-mouthing the army, but just, this is things that you kind of learn the reality of the situation, how the sausage is made.

• 12:49Patrick Bet-David?

  Are you, how old are you right now?

• 12:51Speaker 02

  Thirty-six.

• 12:52Patrick Bet-David?

  Okay, thirty-six. I'm forty-six. Are you proud, like, when people say, "Thank you for your service," are you proud that you served?

• 12:58Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. The whole, so...

• 13:02Speaker 02

  Big part of the reason why I even served in the first place was because I felt like America gave me so much and so much opportunity, the opportunity to go to art school and to, you know, I'm so lucky. And yeah, once I got back with the GI Bill, like so much opportunity and I'm born into this extremely lucky position in America and then America goes to war and the least I felt like I could do was to, this was my way of giving back for the freedoms and to the country that I felt like had given me a lot.

• 13:36Patrick Bet-David?

  Okay, so let's get right into it. You were at Task and Purpose and you know, if I go on the channel, you went in a very respectful way. I don't want to kind of make this conversation uncomfortable. Matter of fact, that's like the least of my concerns. I'm not interested in that. But if I go look at Task and Purpose and it's a channel that's got 2 million subscribers and if I go to their videos and if you go to the most popular, Rob, we can hear the background noise, Rob, if you go to the most popular videos, I think, is that first one you, the 8.4 million? So that's 8.4 million. You got 7 million views, the second one, 6.2, 5 million, 4.9. You know, you made some content that got millions on top of millions of views

• 14:16Patrick Bet-David?

  and the most common thing people would say is how fair your analysis is. So, we got a few things I want to go through with you. I want to go through Mossad, CIA, Iran, nuclear, Ukraine, Russia, DARPA, what weapons we haven't seen that's being worked on, and a few other things that I got based on your experience and research that you're doing. But let's start off with Ukraine. So you went on the front lines of Ukraine, Rob, if you can go back to that one video, you just had it on. No, you just had it on, Rob. If you go back to, you were literally just there, you, yeah, so you go to the front lines of Ukraine and just go to most popular and the invasion into Russia, but that's seven months ago,

• 15:01Patrick Bet-David?

  right? It's still going on. What did you see when you spoke to Russians, when you spoke to Ukrainian military? And then why is it when people from the outside are seeing, at first when it happened, they're like, Ukraine's gonna get their asses handed to them? Few years later, Ukraine's still standing tall, going up against Russia. Oh, they died more. Oh, no, they... Oh, no, we're gonna do this. Oh, no, we're gonna do that. What did you learn from being there?

• 15:24Speaker 02

  My journey through Ukraine, my reporting in Ukraine was, I think, a little bit of an extension of what I've always felt since I was 19, which was I want to know the truth about certain things in the world. And Iraq was one of those things where I wanted to know the truth about what was happening there and not just what I was hearing on the radio and on TV. And when I went to Ukraine, I wanted to know the truth of that conflict because you're hearing a lot of very different things. You're hearing that it's democracy versus autocracy. You're hearing all these different narratives about do the Ukrainian people really want to fight for their country, or are they just kind of being pressed into service

• 16:09Speaker 02

  in the service of American interests? I'm hearing all of these different narratives. And I wanted, I felt like as someone who studies war for a living, I felt like in order to have credibility with myself about what I was talking about, I needed to go and see what a high-intensity war, actually, how it works from the logistics, the nuts and bolts of it from the ground up. And because it's so different from a counterinsurgency war. Everything that I saw in Iraq is nothing like the rules of how it works in, with Ukraine and Russia. And just even getting to the country, I had to fly into Poland and then

• 16:51Speaker 02

  take an 18-hour train ride from Warsaw to, over the border, into Kyiv. And as I'm getting further and further east, I'm starting to see it gets more desolate, start to see the signs of war as I get closer to Kyiv. There are defensive positions still there. There's, you could see where shrapnel had hit some walls and those signs of war start to show up. And...

• 17:23Speaker 02

  Once I got there, I was very, it wasn't certain that I was gonna even get to go to the front, because when, they get a lot of people that go there and they don't know if they can trust them, or if they are going to be the type of person that has their head on straight, or get someone killed, because even going to the front is very dangerous, and you could, you're a huge liability, I'm unarmed, all I've got is a patch that says "press" on it, and so, I spend a day in Kyiv first, speaking to some politicians there, doing some interviews, talking to people that are in, because Kyiv's not as dangerous of a place, it's like the green zone, almost, and I'm really glad that I spent that day

• 18:08Speaker 02

  there, because I ended up getting drinks that night with some people in Ukrainian media, which is, all media there is at least half state-owned, and they have contacts in, met with some people in Ukrainian intelligence, and I get annihilated with them, we have some like, special Ukrainian drink that they drink, that is all jazzed up with vodka, and I wish I had gotten the name, I asked them, it was some name in Ukrainian, and then that whole night, I'm just asking them like, what different ways to say curse words in Ukrainian are, and it's a great way to bond with people, just like, going back and forth and sharing different translations on curses, for some reason, in Iraq and in Ukraine, people just,

• 18:53Speaker 02

  they love that, I love that, but, yeah, it might have been that, but it was, it was the type of drink where you start, you get to talking, and they're like, "What would you like to do when you're here?", and I said, "Well, I'd really like to go to Kursk, in Russia", thinking that there's no way, because they don't let Western journalists go there, this is the part of Russia that at the time, Ukraine had in their control, because they had invaded into Russia and taken over a small part of Kursk, and, to my surprise, the guy was like, "You know what, I like you, I happen to be very good friends with the guy who runs that whole area of operations, and I can get you in", and...

• 19:38Speaker 02

  So it's in that moment that I think to myself, oops, what have I gotten myself into? Uh, never been so scared in my life as the moment when we start heading further east. Because, once you start going further east from- Rob, is that your phone? Trying to see where that sound is coming from. Is that me? It's not mine. Okay. So you start going to Kursk. So we start going further east along from Kyiv to, to the border with Russia. And, the further and further you go along, you start to see even more of the signs of war.

• 20:18Speaker 02

  Which, one of the most, striking ones is that just about every 20 kilometers, there's a checkpoint. And there's Ukrainian SBU agents looking for deserters, looking for, checking IDs, looking for Russian saboteurs. And, buildings are blown to smithereens even that far east. And, so we get closer and closer to the front line. And, it's a part of the war, when I was there, was right when it was becoming, for the first time, it had become almost impossible to even get to the positions. Because there's drones everywhere.

• 20:59Speaker 02

  And, it's, to me, it reminded me a lot of Iraq in the sense that it's like IEDs, but with wings. And, it's difficult for both sides now to even get to the trenches. To get into and out of the trenches. And that's one of the things that the logistics of the war, that a lot of times people don't think about, is squads need to get rotated. Can't be at the trench 24/7. They have them go for a week, and then rotate out. But now, that puts a huge pressure on the logistics of it. Because, you have to worry more about getting to, getting into and out of the position, more than you really have to worry sometimes about once you're, once you're in the trench.

• 21:43Speaker 02

  So, it was very difficult to coordinate with the units on timing, so they could get us, basically you're running the gauntlet, from where it's safe to where it's dangerous. Kursk was the last part of the trip for me. Before that, I did several other missions, and there's, the videos are, are up there. But- One of the more terrifying ones was the drone mission that I went on where

• 22:11Patrick Bet-David?

  In Ukraine?

• 22:11Speaker 02

  Yes, where we went, I went with a vampire drone unit and we were, uh, yeah, that's the one. This was probably, probably the worst, most terrifying experience of my life because we're getting shelled by Russian artillery and Russian mortars and I wasn't aware how close I was to the front until they took me there because I don't speak the language. I'm there with a fixer and this guy was an amazing fixer. He kept me alive there and he's telling me, because I, he's like, hey, get into this car and we're gonna go. I'm like, okay, thinking if we're going with the drone

• 22:52Speaker 02

  unit, we're gonna be 20, 30 kilometers from the actual zero line where the Russians are, not realizing that they go to five kilometers, I believe it was, to the zero line. So you're within artillery range, you're well within drone range and it's this terrifying experience of being in a jeep that's just flying through the night, through these fields and I'm seeing artillery go off to the left and right and slowly realizing how close we're going and yeah, that was the journey. And at one part, we get a radio call right here where they let us know that they got

• 23:34Speaker 02

  intelligence that a Russian drone was tracking us and is overhead and is looking for us. And so they had to go hide the vehicle for a couple of minutes until they could get information back to them that the drone was gone. So we waited till the drone left and then we went to the positions and you, you see on, there's these live update maps that show you exactly where everyone's positions are and we're, I'm looking at these live update maps and seeing that we're so far forward that there are Russian positions surrounding the entire area and

• 24:10Speaker 02

  It's unlike anything in Iraq, having a front is so bizarre because you'll be at the front for a couple of days and then they go back and you go and you get dinner, you get a gourmet dinner at a beautiful town and it's this kind of like bipolar existence that they have there.

• 24:30Patrick Bet-David?

  So one minute things, you can go have a beautiful dinner and then a few miles down the street, there's a war going on.

• 24:36Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 24:37Patrick Bet-David?

  Okay, so from the outside looking in and you, you, you seeing this, the story about Russia versus Ukraine, why is it that Ukraine's been able to stand up to Russia for as long as they have? How much of it is themselves? How much of it is NATO? How much of it is, you know, us sending them weapons? Why are they looking strong against a behemoth like Russia?

• 24:58Speaker 02

  That was one of the things that I wanted to find out and I thought one of the best ways to do it would be to talk to your average Joe. Talk to your average soldier and find out their motivation, their reason for, for fighting, just to really pick their brain and in, during that car ride, I was able to ask them questions and when you're under that kind of stress, people are very, very honest with you. One of the guys was telling me that he'd been basically signed a contract six years ago, thinking it'd be three years and he's been forced into service since then, but, and so he's like, obviously hates being in the military, doesn't want to be there, wants to go home.

• 25:35Patrick Bet-David?

  For Ukraine.

• 25:36Speaker 02

  For Ukraine, but still even this dude was like, fuck Russia, they're crazy, this is our country and we're not giving it up. So I thought, okay, even if this guy who's basically forced into service for over three years now and is doing this ride every single day, if even he is like, screw Russia and it's good that we're fighting this war, that obviously isn't everyone's opinion, right? But it tells you something about what some of the Ukrainian soldiers think.

• 26:09Speaker 02

  That was very telling for me. I think that a large part of why Ukraine is able to defend themselves is because of their will to fight, which is something that fascinates me about conflict and militaries. The most fascinating thing I think is that how much of it comes down to just your regular Joe? And their willingness to pull the trigger on a small armed weapon, on an M16, on an AK-47. We tend to think that it's all about air power. It's all about these big missile systems and stuff. And obviously those are huge impact on the battlefield, but it means nothing without you having your regular Joe be able to face those kinds of pressures of being willing to kill somebody and be killed for something.

• 26:51Speaker 02

  Is, you can't just write it off as like they're being forced to do it. It's not that simple. I think evidence of that, what happened in Afghanistan. When we left and pulled out, we gave them billions of dollars, billions of dollars in training and funding, equipment, all of this. And what did they do? They were like, see you later, bye. Because they didn't have a will to fight. Doesn't matter how much weapon systems and training you pump into a place or how much you tell them that they should-

• 27:17Patrick Bet-David?

  So the importance of the will to fight?

• 27:18Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 27:20Patrick Bet-David?

  And you're saying Ukraine has more of it than Russia?

• 27:23Speaker 02

  No, I think they both have a will to fight. I think that it'd be dishonest to say that like the Russians themselves don't have, and obviously this is very, this is more complicated maybe than I'm making it sound, but I think that this helps explain a good amount of it. There's a lot of Russians that also are willing to fight. And that's why you have a situation where they're unable to reach a peace agreement because they're not ready to stop fighting.

• 27:52Patrick Bet-David?

  How do you think this ends?

• 27:55Speaker 02

  I think that it ends in not a very sexy or cool movie ending. I think it's really, I could be wrong. I think, I should say, one way that it ends is that it fizzles out and the front lines kind of end in a, just the intensity of the warfare dies down a lot. And we have these frozen front lines, wherever they might be. That's one possible way that it ends. Another way is that- Russia starts making more and more gains and they continue pushing forward as they are because the Russians, I assess that they're taking ground right now, they're winning in the sense that they're taking more territory.

• 28:35Speaker 02

  And then what I think you would very likely see is pushback from Europe and United States at that point because there's no way they're going to let Russia reach Kiev or cross the Dnipro, no way. I mean, what happened when, when America was pushing forward in, in Korea during the Korean War and they got close to the border with China, China poured troops in. They weren't going to let Americans close to their border. I don't think these European countries are going to let that happen. They'll deploy troops and so it'll be, we'll see, it'll be, it'll be slow ramp up of, there's escalation steps that happen. And so if Russia starts to make too much gains, you'll see the UK, France and other countries

• 29:19Speaker 02

  in Europe start to deploy troops into Western Ukraine, just their trainers, their advisors. But these, these type of escalatory steps would happen.

• 29:27Patrick Bet-David?

  Okay, so let's go to another issue. When it comes down to Iran and Israel and the nuclear sites, you know, today, I don't know if you saw the clip, Rob, if you want to play the clip of the, of the leader of Iran that's been interviewed by Bret Baer and he's asked, so what happened to the nuclear sites? Are they damaged? Were they hit hard? And he says, were you able to save some of the uranium? I don't know if you've seen this clip or not with Bret Baer while he's looking for it. What do you know about what happened there? And how did, how did we get into it without anybody knowing about it? I mean, it was so low key, you hear about Missouri, we go the opposite way to throw everybody off.

• 30:09Patrick Bet-David?

  How did we succeed in this whole Iran and Israel attack that we had?

• 30:13Speaker 02

  There's a couple of different theories about what happened with the bombing of the nuclear sites in Iran. I tend to think that they were very destructive against the Fordo nuclear site. There were, are different assessments that have come out of the, in the intelligence community, there's several different ones that you have to look at. The, the C I A puts out their own assessment. Each part of the intel community assesses how much damage they think happened based on different sources of information. They Intercepted communications from some of Iran's soldiers who went and actually looked at the site and they made it sound like it wasn't so bad, but this is where it gets

• 30:56Speaker 02

  complicated because you could think, well, maybe they just don't want to report bad news or they're purposefully reporting information that they know will be disinformation for Americans listening. So, other assessments have said that it did set the program back two years. The B-2 bombers tried to-

• 31:14Patrick Bet-David?

  You called a part of this, right? You called the bunker buster like several months ago. They said most likely, I think it was six or seven months ago when you called it.

• 31:22Speaker 02

  Oh, I did a whole video rundown on basically one of the air tasking order camp, one way that they might do an air tasking order on Iran. The funny thing is they ended up doing a very similar-

• 31:33Patrick Bet-David?

  Right.

• 31:33Speaker 02

  -strike to what I had predicted, but it's not really hard to predict that they would do it that way. It is funny. It was almost the exact same. The B-2s dropped several bombs and they did the dig tactic that we thought that they might do, which is they dropped several bombs in the exact same spot, kind of like trying to shovel deeper and deeper with the bombs. And, but what no one saw that they would do was that the deception tactic where they flew to the west, making them think that they were gonna go to Diego Garcia Base just south of Iran and to bomb them from there, but instead they flew straight

• 32:13Speaker 02

  east all the way to Iran to deceive them into thinking that they weren't going to attack.

• 32:19Patrick Bet-David?

  Got it. So here's, if you want to play this, Rob, this is the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Here's what he had to say about it. Go for it, Rob.

• 32:27Speaker 05

  Mr. Foreign Minister, what is the extent of the damage to the nuclear enrichment program after these attacks?

• 32:34Speaker 06

  Well, our facilities have been damaged, seriously damaged, the extent of which is now under evaluation by our Atomic Energy Organization, but as far as I know, they are seriously damaged.

• 32:49Speaker 05

  Did you, did the already enriched material survive? Is it accessible?

• 32:56Speaker 06

  Well, I have no detailed information. As I said, our

• 33:03Speaker 06

  atomic energy organization is now is responsible for that. They are now trying to

• 33:10Speaker 06

  you know, evaluate what has exactly happened to our

• 33:17Speaker 06

  to our nuclear material, to our enriched material.

• 33:22Patrick Bet-David?

  How close do you think they got to building a nuclear weapon?

• 33:25Speaker 02

  We assessed that they were within two weeks, a month, but I think that that's a very misleading way of thinking about it because people will hear that and then they'll think, well, I've been being told for the last 10 years that they're two weeks away from building a bomb. And then it makes you think they're lying to me. Why, if if they've been two weeks away from building a nuclear bomb for 10 years, are they really that close? But the distinction that I think is easily missed is that you Iran could build a nuclear weapon in let's it was assessed to be two weeks to a month or two months if they chose to. But they had not chosen to make that

• 34:08Speaker 02

  leap was the was the big distinction. So yeah, they've been two weeks, a month away from it for a long time, but they didn't want to make that next step, which

• 34:22Patrick Bet-David?

  What do you mean by that?

• 34:23Speaker 02

  Which me basically they'd have to pull the trigger and they decide, okay, we're going to enrich to weapons grade. And then from there, they would need another six months to build the actual warhead. And then they could just put it, they could put that on one of their ballistic missiles. But from if they decided we want to go nuclear, it would take them seven months, let's say.

• 34:42Patrick Bet-David?

  What do they need for that to get finalized? And how, for example, the biggest distinction is like, you know, there's a community, how many nuclear bombs does Israel have?

• 34:51Speaker 02

  We don't know. They don't they have strategic ambiguity.

• 34:54Patrick Bet-David?

  They have strategic ambiguity. How different is their ambiguity versus Iran?

• 35:01Speaker 02

  Well, we know, we assess that Israel has nuclear weapons and Iran, we believe they don't have them yet. Is that, is that the question that you're asking?

• 35:09Patrick Bet-David?

  Well, no, we've been, you know, a moderate estimate, Israel places them at 90, right? They've never really confirmed that they have it. The rumor on the streets is, the word on the streets is they have it. And most people are putting them as they have it. How do we not know, how do we know that Iran doesn't have it? What do they need to, you know, what do they need to officially have one?

• 35:32Speaker 02

  I, we don't know 100,000%, but we know based on, they do allow weapons inspectors into the country. We know where their main nuclear sites are at. So if they've been able to do this in secret, it would be very difficult.

• 35:47Patrick Bet-David?

  How? Why would it be difficult?

• 35:48Speaker 02

  Well, for instance, Israel knows where each and every of their nuclear scientists live. And they just murked like 15 of them. So think of how deeply embedded Israel and the American intelligence community is in Iran to know where these people live and to systematically for the last 10 years be killing them with like remote machine guns, killing them with, uh, Israel's killed nuclear scientists there frequently. Bless you.

• 36:18Patrick Bet-David?

  Excuse me.

• 36:19Speaker 02

  God bless.

• 36:20Patrick Bet-David?

  Yes, thank you.

• 36:21Speaker 02

  Um.

• 36:22Patrick Bet-David?

  Yeah, they, they just caught like what, 500 of them, 450 of them like a, a month ago. I don't know if you saw that report, the Mossad, uh, helpers that Iran just caught. Uh, they didn't say Mossad agents, it was Mossad, uh, what's the word they used? Uh, it's either 450 or 550, okay, there, the 700, right there, Rob.

• 36:41Speaker 02

  They brought the hammer down.

• 36:42Patrick Bet-David?

  Mass arrest, Iran has announced the arrest of over 700 individuals since the beginning of the Gaza, okay, multiple sources indicate that, David, significant number of individuals suspiciously tied to Israeli Mossad intelligence agency. So they're starting to realize that how are you catching us, right? Okay, but.

• 36:59Patrick Bet-David?

  So you're saying in order for them to have one, they would really have to be extremely tactical for Mossad to not know where the scientists are developing it and to hide?

• 37:13Speaker 02

  Yeah, because Mossad, that'd be the first thing Israel would love to release that information. They would love to put out a report that, hey, look, they're secretly at this site X lines.

• 37:22Patrick Bet-David?

  So it's interesting, your analysis on why you're certain that Iran doesn't have nuclear weapons because Israel would have known through Mossad. So your trust is in the fact that Mossad's doing such a great job with intel that they'd be the first to know?

• 37:36Speaker 02

  I would, I'd say that it's unlikely that they have a nuclear weapon. I, it's possible that they do, but for a number, yeah, one of the reasons being, we've seen other ways in which they've infiltrated and how deep they've infiltrated their networks. They seem to know everything that's going on in Iran. They even have Mossad agents on the ground launching missiles at their air defense and missile launcher sites. They've penetrated so deeply into Iran that it would, I, I'd be very surprised if they didn't know. It's, it seems unlikely to me because it's in their interest to make that information public. Why wouldn't they make it public?

• 38:19Patrick Bet-David?

  How deep, and again, I don't know how much research you've done. How deep do you think Mossad is in Iran?

• 38:27Speaker 02

  I think the best evidence of knowing how deep their intelligence agencies are are based on the operations that they've pulled off successfully already. The, the ones in 2010 where they killed a number of their, I think it was 2010, they killed a number of their nuclear scientists. And the way that they track, that, that is a level of, it suggests how deeply they've just penetrated into their nuclear program, that they have an understanding that Israel themselves have been the ones that have said that they're two weeks away from building a bomb. If they had a bomb or they were closer than that.

• 39:09Patrick Bet-David?

  Israel's been saying that for many years.

• 39:11Speaker 02

  Right.

• 39:12Patrick Bet-David?

  They're two weeks away.

• 39:14Patrick Bet-David?

  So it's either, so it's a few different things. Either they have it, which you're saying very small percentage, Iran has a nuclear weapon. Because Mossad would be the first to know. Number two, they're two weeks away, which has been two weeks for about 10 years.

• 39:31Speaker 02

  But they have chosen not to.

• 39:33Patrick Bet-David?

  Why?

• 39:34Speaker 02

  Because Iran, for a number of reasons, they've themselves have said that because of their religion, they don't want a nuclear weapon.

• 39:42Patrick Bet-David?

  And why do they have nuclear sites?

• 39:43Speaker 02

  They've insisted that their nuclear program is peaceful, that they're doing it for medical purposes and peaceful purposes. So publicly, they've said that they're not pursuing a nuclear weapon.

• 39:54Patrick Bet-David?

  So I'm building nuclear weapons for peaceful reasons?

• 39:57Speaker 02

  No, no, enrichment. They're enriching nuclear material for peaceful purposes.

• 40:02Patrick Bet-David?

  What does that mean?

• 40:03Speaker 02

  Because there are peaceful benefits to nuclear technology. You could have nuclear power and you can have, there's different cancer treatments. What you don't need is you don't need to enrich past, I think, 4%.

• 40:14Patrick Bet-David?

  Who believes that? Who's buying that?

• 40:18Speaker 02

  Well, I think I buy it because if they wanted, if they were, to them, what it is, is it's a deterrent. From their perspective, if we put ourselves in their shoes, and if I were to game theory out, like, what's Iran thinking, what's in their head from a strategic point of view? It's a deterrent, because they probably look at what happened to Iraq when Iraq didn't have nuclear weapons, or wasn't even close to having nuclear weapons enough to be a threat. People will invade your country and steamroll you and do regime change right quick if they think they can.

• 41:00Speaker 02

  That's just what happened in Libya, it's what happened in Iraq.

• 41:08Speaker 02

  Regime change was was something that we got a little bit carried away with for a period of time there. So if I'm Iran, I'd be sitting there thinking, okay, I need to have the, I need to be close enough to to a nuclear weapon that no one thinks of enacting some kind of regime change in my country. I need to be able to push a button and tell someone to go and, all right, let's go nuclear, start the process in a short enough timeframe that it would make someone think twice about messing with me, especially if I had really shitty air defense and not a, let's say, squared away military, not a great conventional power.

• 41:53Patrick Bet-David?

  Iran.

• 41:54Speaker 02

  Right. If you don't have great conventional power and you also maybe have a tenuous hold on the people and your government isn't popular, let's say, then having the threat of a credible threat of being able to produce a nuclear weapon in a short timeframe would serve as a deterrent.

• 42:12Patrick Bet-David?

  Okay, so intel, Israel has a couple thousand people in Iran. That's the number you hear about. Apparently if they caught 700, say they got 1300 people there right now. What kind of presence do we or MI6 have in Iran?

• 42:30Speaker 02

  We definitely have a strong presence because of several programs that we've run, like StutNax, which was one of the first, one of the first cyber weapons attacks ever conducted, where the United States and Israel used a computer virus to destroy one of their, a large part of one of their nuclear programs. I definitely think we have a strong presence, MI6 and the CIA.

• 43:02Patrick Bet-David?

  What did you call it, StutNax?

• 43:04Speaker 02

  Yeah. Is that how it's pronounced? S.T.U.X.

• 43:09Patrick Bet-David?

  S.T.U.X.

• 43:11Speaker 02

  Net. Stuxnet.

• 43:13Patrick Bet-David?

  Oh, Stuxnet, got it.

• 43:16Patrick Bet-David?

  And this is CIA working with, am I, uh, working with Mossad?

• 43:19Speaker 02

  With Mossad, yeah.

• 43:20Patrick Bet-David?

  But do we have?

• 43:21Speaker 02

  A join up.

• 43:22Patrick Bet-David?

  Foot on, do we have, uh, like CIA agents actually in Iran physically?

• 43:28Speaker 02

  I'm sure we have assets, yeah, without a doubt. We have their, it's, I would very much hope so. That's their, their mandate is to know what's going on in Iran and to know what they're thinking. That helps us build out a policy of how we act there.

• 43:45Patrick Bet-David?

  How much of the intel we have, we get from Mossad versus actually our agents, our assets that are in Iran?

• 43:52Patrick Bet-David?

  Are we relying on Mossad to get a lot of the intel? Are we getting it first?

• 43:58Speaker 02

  That's a good question. I don't, I don't know the, I, Israel definitely has more information there. I would, I would say we're probably acting off of them. Like for instance, in China, a lot of the CIA agents that we had there, officers, sorry. Uh, a lot of the CIA officers in China were killed in, I think it was 2011. When, uh, the MSS, which is China's version of the CIA, just cleaned house and caught something like 200, uh, CIA officers there.

• 44:32Patrick Bet-David?

  In China.

• 44:33Speaker 02

  Right. And so that gives us an idea of, okay, if we had that many CIA assets or officers in China, I'm sure we had a network in Iran. And so far Iran hasn't been, there's, hasn't been a big release of public information about how Iran rounded up and caught a bunch of American officers there.

• 44:58Patrick Bet-David?

  Yeah, apparently Iran caught 17 CIA officers in 2019, Rob, if you want to pull it up.

• 45:04Speaker 02

  And sometimes I, I, so are they verified or did they just say that it's?

• 45:12Patrick Bet-David?

  2019 Iran claimed to have arrested 17 individuals alleging they were CIA spies working on gathering information on Iran's nuclear and military facilities. The Iranian government stated that some of the accused have been sentenced to death. The US however denies these claims, President Trump calling them totally false. Iran Intelligence Ministry presented the arrest as a major counter espionage operation. Who knows, how do we know if this is the truth or if it's just BS?

• 45:37Speaker 02

  For instance, with the, with the, what happened in China, the CIA admitted it. They were like, yeah, they wrecked our network. We have no idea. We're blind there right now.

• 45:47Patrick Bet-David?

  Are we still blind in China?

• 45:49Speaker 02

  That happened over a decade ago and the last things, the last reports that I was reading was that they're still having difficulty getting intel out of, the CIA has a YouTube channel, by the way. I don't know if, if you know this, but they put out basically...

• 46:06Patrick Bet-David?

  So the CIA is, it's so bad now, they've become YouTubers.

• 46:09Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 46:10Patrick Bet-David?

  That is pretty bad.

• 46:12Speaker 02

  But what, the type of content that they make, this is where I like to get my content strategy cues from. So they put out videos periodically of they're essentially, we're trying to recruit assets in Russia and in China. I don't think they have one in Iran, actually. So maybe, maybe that is evidence that they have a pretty good thing.

• 46:33Patrick Bet-David?

  Go on the China one, Rob. Go on the China one from two months ago? Have we played this, Rob, or no?

• 46:37Speaker 02

  It's fascinating to me, because it's like...

• 46:39Patrick Bet-David?

  Put some audio, I'm actually curious to know.

• 46:44Patrick Bet-David?

  Wait, they're making this to talk to Chinese?

• 46:48Speaker 02

  Right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, so if you're living in...

• 46:54Speaker 02

  If you're living in China...

• 46:55Patrick Bet-David?

  If you can turn off the audio, Rob. I don't want to translate for everybody right now. I'm not in the mood. Just press mute and play the video. Just press mute and play the video, please. Go for it.

• 47:01Speaker 02

  Great cinematography. Really excellent. This is...

• 47:04Patrick Bet-David?

  And if you notice, they don't show a single face. Everything is away.

• 47:09Speaker 02

  Because you're supposed to, I think, picture yourself. You're, you're in China, you happen upon this. I don't know how you get access to this, but you see this and you're like, yeah, yeah. I don't like that they, they threw a bag over my uncle's head and he disappeared and disappeared to some, some underground facility in Beijing. You know what? Maybe I'll call up and become an asset for the CIA.

• 47:33Patrick Bet-David?

  I wonder how effective this is. I want, what's the other one, is there a Russian one, Rob? Or what's the other one that they're doing?

• 47:40Speaker 07

  There's a Russian one that they did. Funny enough, they did it right around the time, I think, when the coup happened there with Prigozhin.

• 47:48Patrick Bet-David?

  Press a little bit audio for Russian.

• 47:51Speaker 08

  Столько же был отцу, когда он погиб. В голове бесконечные мысли.

• 47:57Patrick Bet-David?

  Same, same approach.

• 47:59Speaker 08

  Сыну.

• 48:00Patrick Bet-David?

  Can you press pause and translate what it's saying? Are we able to see what it's saying in English or no?

• 48:05Speaker 07

  Uh, yes, hang on one second.

• 48:08Patrick Bet-David?

  I, I'm just curious to know what approach they're taking.

• 48:13Patrick Bet-David?

  Auto translate to English? Right there. Endless thoughts in my head, I smile at my wife's son. But inside I wonder if I have enough courage to resist this. What does it say this was?

• 48:27Speaker 07

  Betrayal of my father, was a practical man, believed in Russia. Talked about cosmonauts.

• 48:35Speaker 07

  And scientific achievements that the whole world admired. Was a paratrooper. When I was 15, my mother took me to Moscow for my first victory parade on Red Square.

• 48:48Patrick Bet-David?

  Wow.

• 48:49Speaker 07

  And suddenly I saw their blue berets, my future destiny. I was proud of my service in the airborne forces. If it weren't for the accident, I would still be holding a machine gun.

• 49:05Patrick Bet-David?

  Then I found a new way to serve.

• 49:09Patrick Bet-David?

  Try at least that what I done. So it's interesting, they're, they're the true enemy of, what is it, the true enemy?

• 49:14Speaker 07

  The true enemy of Russia is within itself, the top brass.

• 49:17Patrick Bet-David?

  Boom, okay. So they're using emotional words, emotional triggers. For me in Russia to watch this and say. Okay, I'm willing to release some information to you.

• 49:29Speaker 02

  And I'm do- and it doesn't make me a traitor, I'm doing it because I love Russia.

• 49:33Patrick Bet-David?

  Because I love my father, because I love my mother, because so my affinity is for what it was, not who it is today.

• 49:41Patrick Bet-David?

  Okay, so, so we're weak right now in China.

• 49:45Speaker 02

  Hi, I'm Chris Cappy, you probably know me from the YouTube channel Cappy Army, I'm now on Minect. You can find me there and you can ask me any questions about war corresponding, if you're interested in how to get into that. Geopolitics, defense industry, entrepreneurialism, anything you want to chat about, I'm on there. If you ever want to know some stories about CIA operations in Ukraine, that is some wild stuff.

• 50:09Patrick Bet-David?

  What do we-

• 50:09Speaker 02

  If you've been writing on some of that, that it only came out recently.

• 50:13Patrick Bet-David?

  Give me one of them.

• 50:14Speaker 02

  There's a giant story in the New York Times, the New York Times is one of the favorite places of CIA to go and drop information about some of their successes. They have a relationship with them for whatever reason, but they go and they're, they, I think a lot of times we only find out about what the CIA does when they fail, but they sometimes like to leak some of their successes. And it's, for a lot of times it's for policy purposes, they want people in Congress and the Senate to know about, hey, this is what we're doing. This is, uh, this is where this mission ended up going, so for instance, I believe that's the one about the 12 bases that they had on the front line.

• 50:53Speaker 02

  12 CIA fun- and they openly published this information themselves, they want the Russians to know this, that, yeah, they had 12 spy, it's, um-

• 51:02Patrick Bet-David?

  Secretized bases.

• 51:04Speaker 02

  From the Times article, this is the Euro made in press, because that's the orig- the original articles from the Times. Outstanding, outstanding piece of journalism. The guy, the journalist spoke to something like 300 CIA officers and got, and got all of this information together. Basically, the story is that in 2014, when Russia invaded into Ukraine kind of in the first time and took over Crimea, that's when the CIA started putting officers on the ground, ground branch guys, training Ukrainians on how to use drones, training them how to use Javelin anti-tank missiles, training them how to defend their country and training them on signals interceptions, so these 12 bases around the front, they were-

• 51:52Speaker 02

  Sucking up all of this Russian signals information. And it was, they credit as one of the reasons why they were able to stop Russia's initial push into the country. And it's just a crazy story of how they trained the Ukrainian HUR, which is like, if I'm not mistaken, it's like their version of the CIA, the SBU is like their FBI. And it takes you through just this crazy story of how they trained these HUR officers, HUR guys, and they were like, hey, but don't use any of this to kill Russians. And then they immediately went and killed a bunch of Russian generals and a bunch of,

• 52:36Speaker 02

  a bunch of Russian troops with this training that we gave them. And this is all in the article. But, and then there, this attaches very specifically to another story about how we gave them targeting information. So we used our satellites to send them what were called points of interest, which were Russian troop positions, which crossed a red, sort of might have crossed into a gray area of whether or not that was what was going to be considered a red line for Russia.

• 53:16Patrick Bet-David?

  I mean, I'm sure Putin's not going to be happy about the fact that you told them how they did it, and then Ukraine goes and uses it to kill off the generals. Putin's not gonna, Putin's gonna sit there and say, America, you did this intentionally.

• 53:30Speaker 02

  And there are two, there are ways to look at it where you could read it in the way that Putin was provoked, or you could look at it like we were trying to help Ukraine defend their sovereignty, and Russia was the ones that were first arming and backing separatist movements inside of eastern Ukraine.

• 53:52Patrick Bet-David?

  When was this article written, Rob?

• 53:53Speaker 02

  Uh, this was...

• 53:54Patrick Bet-David?

  It was something 24, so is it June, is it?

• 53:58Speaker 02

  May 29th of 2025.

• 54:00Patrick Bet-David?

  March 29th.

• 54:01Speaker 02

  Sorry, Mark.

• 54:02Patrick Bet-David?

  But that's not it, that's not the one. The one about the 12 bases, that's the one. That was, I think, in something 2024.

• 54:09Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 54:11Speaker 07

  One second, I can pull that back up.

• 54:13Patrick Bet-David?

  Right there. So what's the date on that?

• 54:14Speaker 07

  That is February 28th, 2024.

• 54:16Patrick Bet-David?

  Okay, so that's under Biden. So the CIA is releasing that under Biden? Huh. What?

• 54:27Patrick Bet-David?

  I don't, I don't understand the, the benefit of, of leaking this.

• 54:32Speaker 02

  There's a number of reasons. I think one of them is you want the Russians to, to know what you're doing. And you might even want to embellish it a little bit and make them think, oh, they know where we are. They know everything. The Americans are everywhere and they're having this huge influence.

• 54:47Patrick Bet-David?

  Paranoid on the inside and see who's on the inside. That's too, too.

• 54:52Speaker 02

  That's one option. Another option is that there could have been at the time, maybe funding was going to get taken away from the CIA or they were going to reappropriate away from operations in, in Europe. And this was a way to tell Congress like, hey, no, don't.

• 55:08Patrick Bet-David?

  We still need it. We still have a.

• 55:11Patrick Bet-David?

  I don't like it at all, to be honest with you. I, I don't like, I don't like it at all, in my opinion. I don't like it at all with what's going. By the way.

• 55:18Speaker 02

  It's uncomfortable. I, I would say the counterargument is we also wouldn't like it if Russia steamrolled through and they were at the border with Poland. That's another kind of, I think I would be uncomfortable with either.

• 55:30Patrick Bet-David?

  The way I would, the way I would do the story isn't the way they dropped it.

• 55:34Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 55:35Patrick Bet-David?

  I would drop it in a very different way than the way they did it. I wouldn't drop it this way.

• 55:40Speaker 02

  I 100% agree that this, I think they ended up putting something out that.

• 55:44Patrick Bet-David?

  What a dumb move.

• 55:45Speaker 02

  It, yeah, because it can, um, a lot of people interpret it, like Russia used this as.

• 55:51Patrick Bet-David?

  This is the dumbest way of releasing it. Let somebody like leak it. A, a anonymous source told us at New York Times, da, da, da, da, da, that this is what happened.

• 56:02Speaker 02

  Yeah, because this ended up being used as.

• 56:04Patrick Bet-David?

  This is the dumbest way to release it.

• 56:06Speaker 02

  Kremlin propaganda. They were like, they pointed to this article and they said, hey, look.

• 56:10Patrick Bet-David?

  Yeah.

• 56:11Speaker 02

  We were right all along.

• 56:12Patrick Bet-David?

  I, I, I, I don't know if this makes the institution look, uh, you know. I think this is a report you bring to the president and a leadership team and say, I just want to let you guys know, here's what we did.

• 56:22Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 56:22Patrick Bet-David?

  Let us give you a full report. Okay? This is still a valid reason why we need to be there.

• 56:28Patrick Bet-David?

  Yeah, so if Iran, how much have you looked at when we want spies? Or agents in China, or Iran? How much of it is flipping people internally that become assets? How much of it is us sending people from here to there to know that they're 100% believers of US? Because say you're recruiting and somebody calls you. I got a very weird message from somebody in China. We went back and forth. And he tells me who he's with, okay? And sends me a bunch of messages. Ba ba ba ba ba, here's what you need to know, here's what you need to know. This is who I am, this is who I'm connected to, this is why I'm real, here's my ID. Okay.

• 57:12Patrick Bet-David?

  If somebody from Iran's like, "Yeah, yeah, I definitely want to be a spy, I'll tell you everything." How the hell do you know? That they're not home team? Like, if I was Russia, you know what I would do? I would actually have 200 people to respond to you. And give you intel. And act like they're supporters of you to confuse the hell out of you. Like, you know those Chinese ads? We would respond to it. I would intentionally get a thousand of my guys if I'm China and I would say, "Guys, respond to it." And let's tell them these 28 different stories and confuse the shit out of America. And then let's control them and see what wrong information they're leaking. And then be like, "Okay.

• 57:57Patrick Bet-David?

  Well, this guy, we told this story through this guy to this guy. Now they're saying this person's got cancer." Okay, so now I know how to control this source that I have when I talk to them. That person, I know this. But what I'm trying to ask you is, if you're CIA, how do you send people from here that are true believers in Iran to infiltrate? Versus converting people that are Iranians.

• 58:23Speaker 02

  So it's actually interesting because for a long time they did it. It was easier to do because you could send people to Iran and it would be very difficult to figure out what your background was or where you come from or if you ever had any contact with the CIA. But things have changed tremendously where now in the digital age, they can look up instantly your whole history, who you are, where you've been, and if you're lying about any of it doesn't match up. If you have Facebook friends that were, you know, said, hey, you were interested in joining the CIA in high school, you're done. So it's very difficult to send assets to another country. I think it's easier now for them to flip somebody that's already there.

• 59:08Speaker 02

  The thing that I think is the most interesting thing happening in the intelligence community right now is that that switch from, for over 20, 20 years, we became professionals at counterinsurgency at the Middle East, and now they're having to change and prepare for near peer, prepare for doing missions against Russia and China again. And it's been a major adjustment for them.

• 59:42Patrick Bet-David?

  Yeah, so, so I had the founder of this company here on the podcast four years ago. Clearview AI. I don't know if you've ever heard of it or not. Founder of him is Hon Ton Tat. Rob, if you want to pull up clearview.ai founder. And you're somewhat there, but yeah, that's a better way of doing it. So we had him on, okay? Matter of fact, I just spoke to him a week ago. It's interesting. And he's doing big things. You know what technology he created that they used in Ukraine? He created a software, if you can go to their website, that they released this technology. Matter of fact, can you do me a favor? Type in Clearview AI Ukraine. Type in Clearview AI Ukraine.

• 1:00:27Patrick Bet-David?

  Uh, Ukraine's secret weapon is in Russia's clear, right there. Click on that. That's right, it was in Time Magazine.

• 1:00:32Speaker 02

  Oh, he's this guy?

• 1:00:34Patrick Bet-David?

  He's this guy. Ukraine's secret weapon against Russia is a controversial tech company. So the way they would do is whenever they would catch somebody and they would say, "I'm Ukrainian." They would use this camera, put it on their face, take a picture, and the technology would tell you, "No, no, no, this person's Russian." Vice versa. But Ukrainians got access to this technology. So, so i- in a way, this makes it very difficult to send CIA agents from America abroad to infiltrate because your facial recognition is gonna bring you back to you. You almost have to get assets internally. So how do you filter them out to know who to trust and who not to trust?

• 1:01:16Speaker 02

  It's a very, my understanding is a very difficult process to become an asset. I think it's gotta be, how do you trust them as well, I think is the biggest issue there. How are you gonna trust someone who's already in the country? Sending your own assets probably always gonna-

• 1:01:35Patrick Bet-David?

  There's one step.

• 1:01:36Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:01:37Patrick Bet-David?

  You know what the first step is?

• 1:01:38Speaker 02

  What's that?

• 1:01:42Patrick Bet-David?

  Okay, so... I mean, I don't wanna give it to you because I, I don't wanna say publicly, but one of the ways is, you know, I say, "Okay, so why are you feeling the way you feel about this?" "I hate Khamenei, tell me why." "Well, because of da-da-da-da-da." "Why, what part of it upsets you?" "Okay, how is it directly emotional to you?" "Do you know what they did to me? They killed my dad, and they killed this and they killed that." Okay. If I'm not getting the feeling that it's emotion attached to real pain and suffering, that you're sick of it, that we share a common enemy, I, I would've given a completely different angle, this is the basic one.

• 1:02:26Patrick Bet-David?

  And I have to believe it. So then how do I validate it, that that is true? Do I, do I ask the question to get the intel from you to show pictures? How do I find that that's actually happened to you? Cause my level of paranoia would be, the, the country is using it against me, especially when I'm putting public ads for China and Russia.

• 1:02:50Patrick Bet-David?

  What a weird way to negotiate tariffs with. What a weird way of negotiating a deal with Russia versus Ukraine. Hey, I want a peace deal. Hey, you want a peace deal? Yeah, can I ask you why the fuck on your CIA YouTube channel, Mr. Youtuber, you're putting an ad on how to get my people to tell you intel about me? What kind of a relationship is that?

• 1:03:15Patrick Bet-David?

  It's a very interesting world to be in.

• 1:03:18Speaker 02

  I'm curious, how do you see the peace deal in Ukraine and Russia? The negotiations, how they've kind of unfolded so far? Feel like it's going in a good direction?

• 1:03:33Patrick Bet-David?

  Well, I mean, it was supposed to happen a day after election.

• 1:03:37Patrick Bet-David?

  Right? It was supposed to happen January 21st.

• 1:03:39Speaker 02

  I'm surprised even this much headway has been made, or even an attempt. I mean, it's...

• 1:03:45Patrick Bet-David?

  You think progress has been made?

• 1:03:47Speaker 02

  I think that they've tried progress. I think that before, they weren't even trying. So it's interesting to see them trying. And I think even through that process of trying, we've learned a lot now that we didn't maybe know before for certain. I think we've at least learned that... It's funny, because their strategy was exactly what they said it was going to be, where they said, "We're going to come in, we're going to put pressure on Ukraine first, and use all the leverage we have, all of it, to strong-arm them into agreeing to go to the peace negotiating table." And then, in all these think-piece documents about what Trump was going to do, they said, "If that doesn't work, we'll turn around

• 1:04:32Speaker 02

  and we'll put maximum pressure on Russia with all the leverage that we possibly can." Which I think we're now in that step of it.

• 1:04:41Patrick Bet-David?

  Yeah, so, you know, Trump's losing his patience with Putin. He's threatening heavy sanctions, right? We saw this. Very significant Russia sanctions, bashes all talk Putin. There will be very, very powerful and very bad for the country involved. And he also publicly in an interview said that we have to give Ukraine more weapons. We have to help them out. Wait a minute. We're not giving Ukraine weapons? He said that in an interview openly. I think this was a week and a half ago, two weeks ago. So, I don't know if the relationship with Putin is as good as it was on the first administration. First administration conditions were a little bit different. Is this the one, Rob?

• 1:05:21Speaker 07

  This is where he announces more weapons for Ukraine.

• 1:05:24Patrick Bet-David?

  Go for it.

• 1:05:25Speaker 09

  Are you planning to send more weapons to Ukraine?

• 1:05:28Speaker 10

  We're going to send some more weapons. We have to. They have to be able to defend themselves. They're getting hit very hard now. They're getting hit very hard. We're going to have to send more weapons. You have defensive weapons primarily, but they're getting hit very, very hard. So many people are dying in that mess.

• 1:05:48Speaker 00

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• 1:06:18Speaker 11

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• 1:06:49Patrick Bet-David?

  You see, Hacksuts look as good, but the...

• 1:06:54Patrick Bet-David?

  His buddy sitting next to him is kind of like, "Oh my God, what are we talking about? I was not aware of this." But, um, where are you at with this?

• 1:07:03Speaker 02

  I think the secondary tariffs are the real weapon there. Because the Patriot missile systems won't really change the equation too much. They'll give more air defense capabilities to Ukraine, and that'll help them shoot down some ballistic missiles. But the real threat that's embedded in there is the secondary tariff, which is, you can almost think of it more like a sanction, the nuclear option of sanctions against Russia, if they actually end up going through with it in that 50-day deadline. It would be, they would be, basically putting, it would be putting a lot of pressure on China and India and anyone who buys oil from Russia, which is really what would put pain on them, if it really does go through.

• 1:07:45Patrick Bet-David?

  What do you think Russia wants here?

• 1:07:47Speaker 02

  I think that they're looking at the battlefield and assessing, "We could do this for another year or two. Why would we stop now? We're going to be in a better position, tactically speaking, on the battlefield a year or two from now than Ukraine."

• 1:08:01Patrick Bet-David?

  Why?

• 1:08:01Speaker 02

  Because just the momentum of the battle is they're gaining territory. Like, that place that I was in, in Kursk, where I was reporting from there, Russian soldiers stand there today. They've captured that territory. Same with that other drone mission. Most of the places along the front, Russia is standing where I was when I was there. And a number of the people that I spoke to and interviewed in those videos, I've gotten word now that they're missing in action or killed. And Russia, they have the battlefield momentum, so from their perspective, why settle for peace agreement now? Wait until the battlefield conditions are not in their favor, or it looks like they can no longer fight.

• 1:08:45Speaker 02

  To them, it doesn't make sense to stop now.

• 1:08:48Patrick Bet-David?

  You've been in it for how long now? Four years? What's the timeline? Three years? How long has it been now, Rob?

• 1:08:54Speaker 02

  Since we invaded Russia, 2022?

• 1:08:56Patrick Bet-David?

  No, we didn't invade Russia.

• 1:08:57Speaker 02

  I'm sorry, I'm sorry. Russia invaded Ukraine, uh, 2022.

• 1:09:00Patrick Bet-David?

  You started a war online. The US invaded Russia.

• 1:09:03Speaker 02

  Ukraine.

• 1:09:04Patrick Bet-David?

  Underground war.

• 1:09:07Patrick Bet-David?

  It's been about three and a half, four years.

• 1:09:09Speaker 02

  February 24th of 2022.

• 1:09:12Patrick Bet-David?

  Okay, so almost three and a half years, soon to be, yeah, three and a half years. Okay. So, three and a half years there. You're playing poker. You know, you have $10,000. You're in $9,000 of your chips, 90%. What are you gonna do? Say, "Ah, okay, you know what? I'll throw in."

• 1:09:31Speaker 02

  What do I gotta lose?

• 1:09:32Patrick Bet-David?

  What do I gotta lose? You gotta go and see what's gonna be, you know, happening and what the opponent has. So you're saying this thing's gonna continue with Russia for a while?

• 1:09:43Speaker 02

  Unless we, unless the leverage is successful in, in ending it. I, if I were them, I wouldn't stop unless pressure was being put on me. I don't know how realistic it is or not, whether that pressure works. I don't, I don't know if Trump is going to actually go through with those 100% tariffs is the threat currently, which would be, I mean, it would, it would threaten to, in a way, make the war more global than it is. Like, we know North Korean troops are fighting now for Russia. That was kinda shocking and a little bit concerning. And then if these sanctions put pressure and really hurt China because of what's happening

• 1:10:28Speaker 02

  in Ukraine, that makes this thing global in a way that it kind of wasn't before. We know China is providing a lot of aid to Russia. They're, the Chinese Communist Party is sending machine tooling parts, microchips for their drones. They're propping Russia up in their, their main ally in this war. Everything's short of munitions, but they're sending the, the nitrate that you need in order to make artillery shells, which is extremely important. And so, if we now start putting pressure on China, I think...

• 1:11:11Speaker 02

  It makes this war, it adds a different dynamic to the war that wasn't there before. It almost puts the United States in confrontation with China. I think it would be, I don't know. I'm very curious to see what happens in less than 50 days.

• 1:11:26Patrick Bet-David?

  50 days. Who are you noticing, Chris, that's advancing in military the most? I mean, when we look at budgets, right, Rob? If you can go back to that one that you had. You know, because we see this budget here, right? ARS 877. You got China, Russia, India, Saudi, UK, Germany, France, South Korea, Japan, Ukraine. Combined is not 877. They're 849, right?

• 1:11:52Speaker 02

  I think that this is, it tells a story, an interesting story.

• 1:11:58Patrick Bet-David?

  It's two years old.

• 1:11:59Speaker 02

  It's also, yes. And this ratio has been similar to this for a long time. I would say it doesn't tell the full story because I think China's actually spending a lot more than that. Because there's so many different ways that you can determine what's military spending and not. There's so many different ways that, it's almost an accountant game where China, for instance, there's large parts of their, what we include in our military budget, like things like the Coast Guard and the National Guard, for instance, the National Guard budget. China does not include their, what you would call their National Guard is not included in their budget.

• 1:12:41Speaker 02

  It's a separate thing that they include as part of their accounting for police force. Because so much of what China does is policing their own people. And so it's called the People's Armed Police. Huge budget. And this is, the People's Armed Police, by the way, have flamethrowers and rocket launchers and infantry fighting vehicles. Like, it's not... A regular police force. It's essentially another part of their military. But they just don't do the accounting that way. So it's one, and there's a bunch of line items that are like that. That's just one example.

• 1:13:19Patrick Bet-David?

  And also with our 800 something billion dollars, I wonder how much of it is maintaining our 780 military bases. Imagine the maintenance of that, the keeping, you know, that afloat. That's gotta be a big cost.

• 1:13:33Speaker 02

  I would love to see the breakdown of how much the overseas bases are. I would, I would make the argument that those bases are a net benefit to us. But the, they certainly do cost a lot of money. A lot of times, though, the countries themselves pay for a lot of the stationing of our bases. They want us there. The, in China, for instance, that budget is much larger also because of something called purchasing power parity. So if you account for, and this is not a perfect example of how it works, but goods in the United States cost a lot more. So buying an M16 here is different than what China would pay.

• 1:14:18Speaker 02

  So if you, if you account for that discrepancy, basically, there are, there's a firm, an actual economics firm, that ran the numbers and they assessed that China's budget's probably closer to twice as high as they, as-

• 1:14:32Patrick Bet-David?

  Claim it is.

• 1:14:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, or more so.

• 1:14:34Patrick Bet-David?

  So it's still not at the levels we are?

• 1:14:36Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:14:37Patrick Bet-David?

  Are they, what type of advancement are they making? You, you see the drone war, right? If you, if you see this other chart that we all see, and again, you're, you're getting me to not question the drone part. The country's set to dominate drone warfare by 2028. See where we are, okay? And then you got, this is by The Guardian. You got China, we're at 1,000. China, 68, Russia, India, Australia, Egypt, Turkey, Malaysia, Indonesia, Israel. Okay, and how are they calculating those numbers, Rob? Is there a number to it? Or what does the 1,000 mean? Do you see it on the bottom or no?

• 1:15:10Speaker 02

  It doesn't say at the bottom, I can find out.

• 1:15:12Patrick Bet-David?

  Brandon, can you send us what that 1,000 means in calculation? But when you're seeing, you know, drone warfare, future way of going to war, who is advancing in a more modern warfare than others? Are we still ahead of everybody?

• 1:15:28Speaker 02

  I think with the drones is probably the, especially the- Organic to the squad, that level of smaller drone. I think we were caught off guard a little bit by the FPV drones, the first-person view drones that are just for like the size of one soldier can use. Cause we were for a long time and it still are the leaders at the most high-tech and sophisticated drones. But so much of what's happening, so much of the innovation is those lower-level drones. So I think we're now catching up. For instance, we are basically right now what's happening in the US military is the largest transformation of how our forces fight since the 1980s.

• 1:16:10Speaker 02

  Like there, in the 1980s, the military went through a giant overhaul in the Cold War when we got the Bradleys, the Apaches, we got the big five systems, the HIMARS or the MLRS rockets. These systems changed our entire military doctrine of how we fight and we went and we were able to defeat Iraq in several days using these new systems. And now we're doing, this was the land-sea battle doctrine. We're now doing multi-domain task force fighting, which we're seeing we're less focus

• 1:16:53Speaker 02

  and emphasis on Abrams tanks and heavy tanks, more focus on these light jeeps called infantry squad vehicles, kind of like going back basically to the Humvee of the 80s. And we're gonna send troops out in these unarmored Humvees. These guys? Yeah, yeah, those. And then all those dudes are gonna have drones with them. So this is the new meta, you could say, of how we're gonna fight wars. It's fascinating to see. It's so crazy to see some, an organization like the Army that's so opposed to change and you really gotta twist their arm to get them to make any kind, an institution like that is very traditional and rooted in what works.

• 1:17:35Speaker 02

  So they're making massive radical changes that they, more changes in the time span of two years than usually they make in 20 years.

• 1:17:46Patrick Bet-David?

  Yeah, so drones, by the way, that thousand that we saw that was a thousand times a thousand. So we would be essentially at, it's a thousand individual military drones. Dollars monetary, so a thousand times a thousand, which means a million. That military drone warfare that's being built. By the way, when you look at, um, did you see the Russia drones that came out just released two or three days ago? Did you see these black drones that were shown? Rob, I don't know if you have this or not. Russia drones were just released, I think, three days ago, two days ago. Okay, two days ago. And Russia appears to be launching, go a little bit lower, be launching.

• 1:18:27Speaker 02

  Oh, from the pickup truck, the Ford pickup trucks, is that what you're talking about?

• 1:18:30Patrick Bet-David?

  This is not the one, Rob. If you go on X, type in the same phrase you put on there and just put it on X. And see what comes up. Russia drones and X and see what it, what shows us. You'll see the way.

• 1:18:43Speaker 02

  Right here, the Black Bee Drone Group.

• 1:18:46Patrick Bet-David?

  July 22nd, is that the one? I don't know if that's the one. Go a little bit lower, Rob, to see what we see. There were these drones that were just absolutely, I mean, you can see the, go a little bit lower, Rob.

• 1:19:01Patrick Bet-David?

  Yeah, I have to find it. Oh, is that, is that the one? What is that right there, Rob? The third one? Russia flaunts its massive drone, that's the one right there, July 22nd. Russia flaunts its massive drone war machine on state TV unveiling. Yeah, this is the one. Press play on this one if you can. It's giving you a hard time.

• 1:19:19Speaker 02

  Yeah, but hang on one second, I can download it and play it.

• 1:19:21Patrick Bet-David?

  These Russians never want us to see these videos. Look at this. This is it.

• 1:19:28Patrick Bet-David?

  So they, they want to play ball.

• 1:19:31Speaker 02

  Yeah, they're not joking around. And it's funny because they got, those Shahed drones are from Iran. They're Iranian technology.

• 1:19:38Patrick Bet-David?

  These drones?

• 1:19:39Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:19:39Patrick Bet-David?

  Are Iranian technology?

• 1:19:40Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah, yeah. Iran were the ones that, very famously, Shahed drone is Iran basically set up the, the, these production facilities in Russia. They sent CUDS force operatives to help train them on how to use. Because, because Russia has a lot of very sophisticated, it's kind of like the United States where we, they have sophisticated weapon systems. But they had this gap in drone technology and Iran happened to.

• 1:20:08Speaker 02

  Have the capability and the know-how for for these type of explosive drones and they provided that to Russia. Russia's now since run with it.

• 1:20:19Patrick Bet-David?

  Yeah, so these guys right here, pull it zoom a little bit. Yeah, Iran's a place of origin, Iran. Interesting.

• 1:20:26Speaker 02

  Iran, North Korea, Communist China Chinese Party, all of our allies are funding and helping Russia. They're all getting together and doing everything they can to help Russia, which is part of the reason why I am kind of of the mind and I'm like, maybe it's not such a bad idea for us in the West if all of our enemies, and I consider them our enemies, I think they they don't want us to do well, if they're all backing Russia, putting resources in, like, I would say that's a pretty good argument and evidence for why, or what I would say is a strong evidence for why we should support Ukraine to the degree that it's in American interest.

• 1:21:13Patrick Bet-David?

  That's interesting. What else is Iran known for building outside of this? What else is their specialty?

• 1:21:20Speaker 02

  Oh, they get everything from from like old Soviet Russian equipment, Chinese equipment. They get everything from them.

• 1:21:26Patrick Bet-David?

  What do they produce, though?

• 1:21:27Speaker 02

  Not as far as I know, the drone is their big like claim to fame.

• 1:21:31Patrick Bet-David?

  That's the one, their claim to fame.

• 1:21:34Patrick Bet-David?

  Military weapons, including various types of missiles, armored vehicles, aircraft and naval vessels.

• 1:21:38Speaker 02

  They do also, I should say, actually, that's that's maybe that's not accurate. They do a lot for the Houthis. So all of the ballistic missiles that the Houthis use, their anti-ship missiles that they fire in the Red Sea, for instance, all of that is Iranian technology that the Iranians ship to the Houthis.

• 1:21:57Patrick Bet-David?

  So so I guess here's a question. Whenever I'm doing any kind of a business deal or if I'm talking to my kids, wife, friends, investor, enemy, whoever it is, I'll go through five things that I'll try to answer. What are their concerns? What are their fears? What are their motives? What are their assumptions? And what's their ask? Very simple. So I want to know where you're at. Concerns, fears, you know, asks, assumptions and motives. Okay? Very simple. At the end, you're going to give me your ask. Last three years, we're watching Israel, Iran. You got a lot of people in US, all of a sudden, like, Israel's the enemy, Israel's the enemy, Israel's the enemy. No, no, no, it's Iran, you know Houthis, you know Hezbollah, what they've done.

• 1:22:40Patrick Bet-David?

  No, no, it's Israel, Bibi is this, and you know Hamas, you know, they're just trying to protect themselves. Palestine, Palestine. You've been there, okay? And, not Palestine, but you've been to, you know, the Middle East. What is your impression of who is actually an ally of US? And who is an enemy of US? Your impression?

• 1:23:01Speaker 02

  My belief is that Israel is 100% our ally. They have the same strategic goals that we have. Their adversaries are often the same adversaries that the United States has. Hezbollah, Hamas, Houthis, Iran. That's why I think Israel aligns very closely with American interests. They make it very difficult for us to call them an ally a lot of times, and I think they do a lot of things that I would say are reprehensible, and, again, make it very difficult for me to say that I am someone who supports Israel. But, I do think when you talk about it like you're talking about, strategically and where interests align, definitely Israel.

• 1:23:46Patrick Bet-David?

  What do they do that makes you say, what's the matter with you?

• 1:23:50Speaker 02

  Oh my, like, boy, if I could just give billions of dollars to some country and say, "Hey, can you delete our enemies in Hezbollah and in Hamas? And then, by the way, can you also destroy Iran's air defense systems?" Like, that type of strategic victory, you almost couldn't put a price tag on that. But then, there's a lot that Israel does that is against American interests, and it makes you question if, are those things worth it at the end of the day? Such as?

• 1:24:31Speaker 02

  I think the way that they've conducted the war in Gaza is awful. It's awful, especially now as a new father. I look at some of the images coming out of Gaza and it's hard, I think, as a human being to look at that type of stuff and not be affected by it. And, yeah, so I think those are things that Americans would look at that and be like, that's not someone I want to call my ally. But then you look at the other side of who their enemies are and the stuff that they've done and it's awful, dirty, it's such a mess. What have they done that's dirtier?

• 1:25:14Speaker 02

  October 7th was terrible to watch and observe. Being in, when I was in the Middle East, I thought that the way life is treated there is kind of different in a way, at least when I was in Iraq. Like, people, the Iraqi police officers, we lived on this small combat outpost, like the size of a football field and a concrete wall around it, and they mainly, mostly targeted the Iraqi police officers that we lived alongside of. The insurgents would kill them on like a weekly basis.

• 1:25:53Speaker 02

  And it's just was shocking to me at 19 to see people regularly killed and losing their life and that after I went back home, once my tour was over, like that was their life. That's just their day in and day out existence. Even though I was no longer there, that's still how things are there. And it's, I think, difficult for us in America to...

• 1:26:23Speaker 02

  To think in that, in those terms and to think about what it might be like to live in a, in a environment where you're under threat like that, for both, for both whoever is there, it's just that whole region, life is almost a different value. And yeah, it's, it's really, it's, it's a mess.

• 1:26:45Speaker 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' healthcare 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.

• 1:27:15Speaker 12

  Your website can do a lot more than you think. With Base44, describe what you want in your own words and build a website that looks your way and works your way. Let people book with you or buy from you with hosting already included. Then, help more people discover your site with built-in search tools, social content, and Google Ads. Build the website you've got in your head on Base44. Go to base44.com. That's base44.com.

• 1:27:47Patrick Bet-David?

  It is. None of those videos are easy to watch on both ends as you go through it. And, and the part about war is just, war is such a frickin' nasty game. It's so nasty, it's so ugly.

• 1:28:05Speaker 02

  I think a lot of people in the US, we see wars happening over there and we think, especially when, when there are things happening here, where we, especially when there are safety and security concerns happening in our own hemisphere.

• 1:28:22Speaker 02

  Those type of conflicts, it's much easier to then say, what are we doing? What are we doing with 800 something bases around the world when we've got a cartel operating on our border, bringing in boatloads of fentanyl, killing hundreds of thousands of Americans every year? It becomes a lot more difficult to justify those 800 something bases. So I think, and when we see wars in the Middle East, it becomes more difficult. So one of the things more recently I've been looking into are those national security concerns in the Western Hemisphere that I think a lot of times gets overlooked.

• 1:29:09Patrick Bet-David?

  Yeah, well, listen. It's when this whole thing ends and we learn more about everything that happened, I am so curious to know where the consensus will be on what really happened between Israel, Hamas, Iran, all of it, Palestine. And a lot of people in today's world, you can give your opinions, you can give your thoughts, and then there's guys that are on the inside. It's like, I remember my friend was a Delta Force guy for many years. We were in the Army together. He took my orders, and my orders ended up becoming Delta. And at the end, one time I met him, I'm doing a Zoom with him, late at night, I'm looking at him, he's emotional, I said, "What's up?"

• 1:29:54Patrick Bet-David?

  He says, "Man, I'm having a hard time." So what kind of a hard time? Like, really hard time, I'm having a really hard time. I said, "I'm gonna come visit you." I went and visited him in Europe, and I was with him, we went to a, did we go to an El Clasico game? I went to an El Clasico game, I think Messi was playing Ronaldo or whatever it was. And we hung out, and he started telling me, I said, "So, let me ask you." Like, he was in on many of the bigger projects that happened the last 20 years, starting six years ago. That's when he got out, give or take. So go back 2019, go back 20 years. 1997 was when I joined and I met him in 97, so.

• 1:30:30Patrick Bet-David?

  I said, "Who gets it right politically?" He said, "Nobody." "So what do you mean? Nobody gets it right? Everybody gets bits and pieces of it, but nobody gets it fully right. Both sides are full of shit and both sides get some parts right." So this is the part where you jump into conclusion when it's like, "Well, here's what... Here's what... The truth is this." Versus, "Here's what I think." You know? A lot of people talking with certainties today, throwing a lot of people off. What's the one war you're worried about that could potentially happen? What's the one that could get very nasty? Is there anything out there that... You hear about Taiwan, China, you hear the CHIPS, you hear all these other things. What's the one that as you're doing your due diligence and research on this, you're like, "Oh shit.

• 1:31:15Patrick Bet-David?

  When that one takes off, that's gonna be ugly."

• 1:31:18Speaker 02

  The NATO Secretary General just brought up, I think, what was exactly on point, which is the possibility that China invades Taiwan and at the same time Russia does some kind of military action against one of the Baltic states. And it's a coordinated attack. And that would seek to stretch American resources and personnel thin. Because how do you respond to situations in both parts of the world? That, I think, is something that they believe could happen in the next three years, which

• 1:31:56Speaker 02

  is when the intelligence community assesses that China will be basically at its most... At its... Probably its peak of its power. So if it were to... If China were to invade Taiwan, it might be in their best interest to do it in the next three years. Sometime in that window.

• 1:32:16Patrick Bet-David?

  Really?

• 1:32:17Speaker 02

  They believe that is when they'll have the most favorable demographic conditions, economic conditions, and their investment in their military power will be at a point where they're ready to invade. Will they do it? Maybe, maybe not, but...

• 1:32:34Patrick Bet-David?

  Is that just another war? Or is that a...? Is that a big war?

• 1:32:39Speaker 02

  True.

• 1:32:39Patrick Bet-David?

  And if they're saying some Baltic, like where are they talking about?

• 1:32:44Speaker 02

  Estonia, Russia would invade mass, mass forces on the border with Estonia, Latvia, or Lithuania and try, basically they're very small countries with small standing forces, well-trained and well-motivated, but there are tripwire forces there essentially. So, the idea would be if Russia were to push in, there really wouldn't be much you could do, short of nuclear weapons. But, something I think that we're learning more and more in the last three, four years is that our tolerance and threshold for war below nuclear weapons is a lot higher than we originally thought.

• 1:33:24Speaker 02

  So, Russia for instance, has taken a beating and at one point, they were retreating, full on. And Ukraine was, during their first counter-offensive, they were capturing a lot of territory back and it looked like the Russian forces, you might recall, looked like they might fully crumble at one point. And, they assessed, it was a 50/50 chance that they were going to use tactical nuclear weapons. They were planting the seeds, saying that Ukraine was going to use some kind of dirty bomb. It looked very likely, but it didn't happen. India and Pakistan just had war recently and attacked each other's nuclear, uh, India

• 1:34:06Speaker 02

  sent missiles at Pakistan's nuclear sites and no nuclear warfare happened. I think it wouldn't be unlikely to believe that the United States and China could have some kind of battle over Taiwan and not, it not be nuclear weapons, which I think is almost scary because it makes it more likely that they might assess that it, it wouldn't be the worst thing to do.

• 1:34:33Patrick Bet-David?

  Pakistan and India are top six, top seven most nuclear weapons, if I'm not mistaken. Both of them have a few hundred. One, one's got 40 or 50 more than the other one, whatever the numbers, Rob, if you want to pull it up. I don't know what the number is, but it's gotta be right.

• 1:34:48Speaker 02

  180 and 170.

• 1:34:49Patrick Bet-David?

  Okay, 180 and 170, 10 away from each other, so, six and seven. But would it be smart for China to try to do it when Trump's president? Or you gotta wait to see until Newsom, Pritzker, Vance, or somebody else is president?

• 1:35:04Speaker 02

  I don't know how much the administration goes into their thinking.

• 1:35:09Patrick Bet-David?

  You think so?

• 1:35:09Speaker 02

  In China, it it might. Under any president in America, the policy towards Taiwan has surprisingly been very steadfast.

• 1:35:22Patrick Bet-David?

  Consistent.

• 1:35:22Speaker 02

  It's been this consistent form of strategic ambiguity here that we have. And a lot of times people wonder like, what is the United States even doing in Taiwan? We used to have 30,000 soldiers stationed in Taiwan. We used to have a huge military presence there. And going back, like, we've had forces there since World War II, when we helped China defeat Japan. And we've had interests there in the South China Sea that we've been. China's been aggressive to a lot of the internationally recognized borders. And so ever since then, we've consistently

• 1:36:06Speaker 02

  sent aid and defensive weapons to Taiwan. So whether it's Trump, Biden, Obama, I think they would face a very similar response under any of the American presidents. It's one of the things that kind of crosses the political divide.

• 1:36:23Patrick Bet-David?

  I think a part of it is also. You you think the president with strong, hardline negotiation could tip off a war? If you negotiate too strongly? If you are too aggressive with your tariffs? If you're. You think that could prompt it or no? That's not going to do it because on the flip side, it's kind of like if you negotiate, if you do attack Taiwan now while we're doing negotiation, kind of like what the president said right now, I don't know whether.

• 1:36:59Patrick Bet-David?

  Agree or not, he said, you know, if the Washington commanders don't go back to the Redskins, I, we won't be funding whatever. What do they need from them, Rob? I, I think there's something that they need. He says, what's his position with the commanders and, um, so Trump's effort to squash DC's NFL, something like that, upsetting Trump, that the Washington commander to the Redskins, the progressive activists who want to kill the plan to build a franchise and shiny new stadium. I didn't believe at first that he would do something that stupid. Uh, they're destroying the chance of bringing a stadium and that's fine with me because I don't want a stadium. Oh, so he's saying if you don't go back to the Redskins, we're not going to bring a stadium to you. Okay. And we're not going to prove the city to

• 1:37:41Patrick Bet-David?

  build a stadium. All right. So is this a war he wants to pick or not? Who knows? He gets himself, himself in a lot of weird things, right? Um, to me, I still don't look at the Washington as Washington commanders. I look at them as the Redskins. I look at it as Mark Rippon. That's who I look at. Curtis Martin, I think they had a running back. Was Curtis Martin ever with the Redskins at one point? He used to be with the Patriots, but I think he was also with the Redskins at some point. I may be wrong. I don't know why I'm saying Redskins. I think he was.

• 1:38:10Speaker 02

  New York Jets and the Patriots.

• 1:38:11Patrick Bet-David?

  Okay. So who was the running back with the Redskins? They had a real good running back with the Redskins, whoever he was. Anyways, you know, well, he gets in and he says, well, listen, if you do X, Y, Z to Taiwan, guess what? We're gonna do such and such to you. Oh, Peterson's, Clint Portis, that's his name that was there. We're gonna do X, Y, Z to you, right? Do you think President Trump could be a guy that could prevent China from attacking Taiwan? Purely with the leverage on, uh, negotiations?

• 1:38:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, absolutely. And funnily enough, it would come a lot, I think, from the cooperation between the two countries. So very recently, we saw they relaxed the restrictions on H20 Nvidia cards, I believe it was, or maybe it was H10, uh, a high-powered.

• 1:39:02Speaker 02

  Card that is used for AI. And the theory is, hey, maybe if we get them hooked on our AI chips, there'll be a less likelihood of war. So Biden was going the exact opposite direction. He was cutting, basically trying to decouple. I would be of the mind that possibly if you can find a way to avoid decoupling, I think it makes war, it pushes it back a little bit. Makes it less likely from happening. I think Trump has a, certainly has a position right now where he could push the war, kick it further down.

• 1:39:37Patrick Bet-David?

  I think so. I think it's dumb for China to be able to do anything right now with the war. Last question before we wrap up. DARPA, okay? You know, a lot of times we, the weapons that we have, you know, timeline wise, 30 years, you know, you kind of see something like, whoa. And you typically see it first in a movie. Right? And you say, that looks a little too realistic. Right? What was the movie that Will Smith did with the robots? I, Robot?

• 1:40:07Speaker 02

  I, Robot.

• 1:40:07Patrick Bet-David?

  Yeah, you're like, ah. Was Musk the executive producer, I, Robot? Obviously, no. But I, Robot came out when?

• 1:40:17Speaker 02

  2004.

• 1:40:17Patrick Bet-David?

  21 years ago, holy shit. 20 years later, Musk is talking about that they're going to be deploying robots and making 10 million, 20 million, 30 million, at $30,000, right? With the robots. What's, uh, what is in store? What's being built that's just an insane thing DARPA's got that the rest of us don't know about? That maybe it's been leaked?

• 1:40:40Speaker 02

  There's a couple, there's a couple of really cool toys that they're working on. One of them, it almost doesn't look cool, but it's probably the thing that scares China the most, which is the Typhon launcher. It looks not cool at all. It looks like, uh, it looks like a, like a truck from Walmart going down the street. But this thing fires a frigging Tomahawk cruise missile and you can basically bring it wherever. It's terrifying because you can just roll up a truck somewhere in the Philippines, which by the way, they've now stationed these, they have a range of over a thousand kilometers and...

• 1:41:18Patrick Bet-David?

  They have a range of a thousand kilometers?

• 1:41:19Speaker 02

  Yeah, they can hit China. They've stationed them in the Philippines. The first time this has happened is a brand new weapon system and they're long range missile systems and...

• 1:41:31Speaker 02

  They're now within range of China. China's absolutely livid about it.

• 1:41:35Patrick Bet-David?

  How do you know that?

• 1:41:36Speaker 02

  They put out, their foreign minister puts out all these press releases being like, "Stop doing that. Stop putting missiles within range of our country."

• 1:41:44Patrick Bet-David?

  Wow.

• 1:41:44Speaker 02

  "You're destabilizing the whole region," is their words. That's what they're saying. But these things are freaking crazy. You just, they remind me of how there was those container attacks in both Iran and in Russia where those drones came out and attacked. It's like weaponization of containers are terrifying. The other piece of equipment that I think is really, really cool is the B-21 bomber, which is going to replace the B-2.

• 1:42:16Speaker 02

  The amount of billions of dollars that they're pumping into this is-

• 1:42:19Patrick Bet-David?

  What's special about this guy?

• 1:42:21Speaker 02

  It's like a B-2, but longer range and stealthier. It's going to basically be able to drop those bunker busters over China and avoid enemy air defense.

• 1:42:40Patrick Bet-David?

  Looks pretty cool. It's like you want one of those in our hangar, Rob. With that hangar we have in the back. We're not the kind of cool we put in the hangar. How much are these? Can I go to Walmart and buy one of these? Or is there like, uh, Amazon? Do they sell these? How much would something like this go for? What do they put into this?

• 1:42:57Speaker 02

  Uh, that's a good question.

• 1:42:58Patrick Bet-David?

  Rob, can you find out what they put into a B-2?

• 1:43:01Speaker 02

  Billions of dollars.

• 1:43:07Speaker 02

  Seven hundred million per aircraft.

• 1:43:09Patrick Bet-David?

  Oh my God, per. Wow. Seven hundred, including a precautionary operation fleet, at least a hundred bombers. It's estimated to be around $230 billion over 30 years, according to the Air Force. So we're building, we're spending $230 billion on a hundred of these. Why do you need a hundred of them?

• 1:43:33Speaker 02

  They need to be able to make sure that the enemy has thinks that there's no chance in hell that they could beat us.

• 1:43:42Patrick Bet-David?

  That's it.

• 1:43:43Speaker 02

  It's a deterrent.

• 1:43:45Patrick Bet-David?

  How do you feel about it?

• 1:43:47Speaker 02

  Military tech, it gets me going. Yeah, I feel, I feel good about it.

• 1:43:51Patrick Bet-David?

  Okay, alright, so are you pretty optimistic about the future?

• 1:43:55Speaker 02

  I actually am, yeah. I, I'm hopeful for the future. I think, I'm hopeful that all of these conflicts that we talked about today will be resolved in a peaceful fashion. I'm, I'm hopeful that, you know, we've, we've been doing it since the end of World War II. We've, we've found a way to not blow ourselves and each other up, so I'm, I'm confident that the next generation will do the same.

• 1:44:20Patrick Bet-David?

  You know what's the number one way to show optimism to the world?

• 1:44:24Speaker 02

  How's that?

• 1:44:25Patrick Bet-David?

  By having babies.

• 1:44:27Speaker 02

  I, I, I completely understand what you mean.

• 1:44:30Patrick Bet-David?

  You're not optimistic, don't have any kids, man, because if you have any kid, you're saying, hey, man, the future better look bright for my kids for me to be having kids, right? If you don't, you know, it's a very different way of looking at it. Anyways, uh, Chris is on my neck, if you have any questions for him. I know we got a big, uh, military audience on my neck with, uh, Andy, um, Stumpf, we have DJ Shipley, Cole Fackler, a bunch of those guys, and Matt Sappala, Marine, I can list you a bunch of them, and now Chris is on there as well. Uh, you can connect him, any questions you may have. And then also, Rob, if we can put his channel below as well for people to go subscribe, is there any project you're working on that you would like to drive the audience to? Anything you're working on right now?

• 1:45:11Speaker 02

  If, if you guys want to check me out, at Cappy Army on Instagram and on YouTube, I put out a video every week at least, and yeah, that's, that's all I've got. I really, I really appreciate it.

• 1:45:22Patrick Bet-David?

  You have a loyal audience. Is that really only 22 videos?

• 1:45:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, we've only been up for three months now, I think. It's been a blur.

• 1:45:30Patrick Bet-David?

  You've gone in three months to 541,000 subscribers?

• 1:45:35Speaker 02

  Yeah, yep, and I grew, I grew, I grew that last channel from zero to 2 million, so going...

• 1:45:43Patrick Bet-David?

  I can love it. Good for you, bro. For 22 videos goes to 541. There's a reason for it, my man. Again, thank you for your service. Congrats on your baby. And I'm sure we'll do this again in the future. Take care, everybody. God bless. Bye bye, bye bye.

• 1:46:01Speaker 02

  Hi, I'm Chris Cappy. You probably know me from the YouTube channel, Cappy Army. I'm now on Minect. You can find me there and you can ask me any questions about war corresponding, if you're interested in how to get into that, geopolitics, defense industry, entrepreneurialism, anything you want to chat about, I'm on there.

• 1:46:23Speaker 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.

• 1:46:53Speaker 12

  Your website can do a lot more than you think. With Base44, describe what you want in your own words and build a website that looks your way and works your way. Let people book with you or buy from you, with hosting already included. Then, help more people discover your site with built-in search tools, social content, and Google Ads. Build it, get it live, and start sharing. Go to base44.com.