#296 - Mind Warfare, Media Control & Space Surveillance | Eric Czuleger

Watch every episode ad-free & uncensored on Patreon: https://patreon.com/dannyjones Eric Czuleger is a National Security student at the RAND Corporation who is focused on using emerging technology to solve persistent challenges in emerging economies, conflict zones, and thriving ecosystems alike. Eric has lived and worked in over 45 countries as an aid volunteer, journalist, and tech storyteller. SPONSORS https://AmericanFinancing.net/Jones - Disclaimer NMLS 182334 nmlsconsumeraccess.org http://morning.ver.so/danny - Use code DANNY for 15% off your first order. https://huel.com/danny - Use code DANNY for 15% off your first order + a free gift. https://www.magicmind.com/dannyjones - Use this link for 50% off a subscription. https://whiterabbitenergy.com/?ref=DJP - Use code DJP for 20% off. GUEST LINKS https://x.com/eczuleger Eric's book: https://amzn.to/3ppXZ6b Eric's newsletter: https://t.co/RQgtbd89rJ FOLLOW DANNY JONES https://www.instagram.com/dannyjones https://twitter.com/jonesdanny OUTLINE 00:00 - Everyone should start their own country 11:30 - America's biggest geopolitical vulnerability 13:26 - 5th generation warfare 25:00 - Operation Doppelganger 33:36 - Russia's psychological warfare on Americans 39:28 - LLMs and social media psych warfare 47:30 - Why is Israel blamed for JFK assassination 53:12 - The rational actor model 58:03 - Napoleon's p**is problem 01:11:09 - Christianity is infiltrating Silicon Valley 01:26:37 - The moon landing 01:42:25 - Government transparency 01:52:29 - Kessler syndrome 01:56:29 - Spreadsheet warfare 02:07:37 - Russia manipulating the information space 02:15:28 - Risk of crowd control weapons 02:22:47 - China's police stations in America 02:35:00 - USAID 02:53:55 - Working at RAND corporation 02:58:56 - America's information defense strategy 03:04:19 - Truth decay Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

• 0:07Speaker 00

  If I sound too smart on this podcast, it's because I'm using performance enhancing drugs.

• 0:12Danny Jones?

  Right, right, right.

• 0:15Speaker 00

  All right.

• 0:16Danny Jones?

  Cheers.

• 0:17Speaker 00

  Crushed a magic mind. Off we go.

• 0:19Danny Jones?

  Yeah, baby. So what the were you doing at the Rand Corporation?

• 0:22Speaker 00

  I'm still there. I'm a

• 0:23Danny Jones?

  You're working there.

• 0:24Speaker 00

  No, no, I'm a national security master student. Um, so they have a

• 0:30Danny Jones?

  So wait, where did you work? We talked about this in the first podcast, but you worked for some sort of other national security agency first.

• 0:35Speaker 00

  I didn't work for an agency. No, I was an open source intelligence analyst.

• 0:38Danny Jones?

  Open source intelligence analyst. And then you started to see like, uh, decapitation videos and you quit.

• 0:44Speaker 00

  Basically, yeah. And now those are so common that it's like now I'm now I'm clearly a wimp. No, I, I was, uh, working in open source intelligence for a little bit. And, uh, just writing geopolitical analysis and forecasting. Uh, and then at a certain point, I was, uh, I got laid off along with a lot of the rest of the company and, and decided to, uh, to go overseas again. I'd spent a lot of time overseas because I was a Peace Corps volunteer. So I was, uh, I was in northern Albania for about two years and decided I wanted to go back and, and report from overseas. So I was working as a freelancer, uh, mostly in the Middle East, Balkans, a little bit in Africa. And, uh, and from there, uh, decided I wanted to do a book, uh, you know, a sort of unusual

• 1:28Speaker 00

  travel book, uh, and I decided that I was going to live in unrecognized countries for, for a year and a half.

• 1:36Danny Jones?

  Um, yeah. Are you still the ambassador to Somali? What was the name of that island that you were the ambassador of?

• 1:41Speaker 00

  Uh, I, so I was previously the ambassador from, uh, the world's first cryptocurrency based nation, cryptocurrency libertarian based micro nation, uh, which is called Liberland.

• 1:54Danny Jones?

  Liberland.

• 1:55Speaker 00

  Liberland. Shout out to Liberland. Their 10 year anniversary is coming up.

• 1:59Danny Jones?

  You're gonna go, you're gonna go back and ride the jet skis?

• 2:02Speaker 00

  I would, I'm just not in Europe right now. I mean, this is the longest I've been back in the States for a long time.

• 2:09Speaker 00

  But, but yeah, no, you know, good on Liberland. I mean, you know, they have come really close to establishing like a fully recognized and autonomous state and and you know, I, I was, when I was on the, so for, for folks that don't know, um, you know, go, go back and listen to the first pod, but I was talking with the, uh, the president of Liberland, um, while on the back of a jet ski, which was a really, um, uh, strange first way of meeting somebody.

• 2:38Danny Jones?

  That's when you were sworn in, right? On the jet ski?

• 2:40Speaker 00

  I wasn't sworn in on the jet ski. No, I was just clutching him like a spider monkey. So I wouldn't fall off the jet ski because he had, he had a, a life vest and I didn't. But you know, I asked him. I can, but it was the Danube and, and you know, yeah, it's a, it's a moving river. So.

• 2:56Danny Jones?

  You probably get AIDS in that river.

• 2:57Speaker 00

  I, I, hopefully not. Uh, I, I didn't, I didn't find out, which was good. And, uh, you know, I asked him, I was trying to figure out like what to ask him because I'd spent, you know, all of this time in unrecognized nations. I'd spent almost a year in unrecognized nations in Iraqi Kurdistan and Kosovo and Transnistria. And you know, there I was holding, holding on to the president of Liberland as we sort of went up the, the Danube River on a, on a jet ski. And I asked, I was trying to figure out some really good question to ask him, but you know, in that environment, while you're holding on to your interview subject, I don't know if I've ever tried to interview this way, but it's.

• 3:37Danny Jones?

  Were you like, talking right and directly in his ear?

• 3:39Speaker 00

  I was just sort of yelling into his ear because the jet ski was loud. Yeah. Um, and I was like, uh, you started a country. Is it worth it? It was the best I could get out. And, and then he kind of stopped the jet ski and he was like, really thoughtful for a second. He was like, everybody should start their own country. And then he just busted the sickest like 180 and then on the Danube. And I was like, That's either the most brilliant thing that I've ever heard, or it's complete nonsense. And the project that I'm kind of working on now is exactly that. I'm trying to investigate how one would start their own country nowadays.

• 4:22Speaker 00

  Because there are these new nation-state building projects that are currently happening. And that's an insane project. So I was like, I should probably get some academic and scholarly backing for this kind of thing and actually try and get some good scholarly roots in actually exploring what statecraft really is. God, you gotta be really ambitious to want to start your own country. Ambitious or stupid, I don't know. There's quite a few of these projects that are going on right now, and some of them are verging more on what I would consider art projects that are challenging the mainstream

• 5:06Speaker 00

  of the nation-state. There's this project down in the Southern Californian desert called Slowjamistan. Shout out to the Sultan of Slowjamistan. I think you told me about that one last time. Yeah, so he's just a DJ and wanted to start a nation. And then there's another one called Malacia, which I think it's in the Nevada desert. And they consider their property taxes as foreign aid to the United States. But then there are these other incredible projects that are more network state projects.

• 5:46Speaker 00

  And so network states is what some people believe the future of nation-states are. And it's basically a decentralized nation-state. And this was kind of predicted, has been predicted by a lot of these futurists that say the nation-state at a certain point was this ideological technology that was invented in the 1600s at the Treaty of Westphalia. Basically, so Europeans would just... Stop killing each other for a couple of years and they were like, okay, you know what? Let's get rid of all of these sort of this complex network of of family relationships and religious ties.

• 6:25Speaker 00

  And your allegiance is tied to the land. We're going to draw borders around the land. And by doing that, hopefully, the sovereignty of a national unit will be allowed to bargain with these other national units. And so as part of like Westphalian sovereignty, as they call it, you've got, you know, this sort of equality of nations. There's no nation that is above any other nation. They're sovereign, so you can't mess with them. They're able to make their own laws within their own territories. And then as sort of, you know, one of the big geopolitical guys, Francis Fukuyan would say is they have the monopoly of violence.

• 7:07Speaker 00

  So they're able to keep and maintain their standing army policing forces and kind of handle business within their borders. Now, this worked pretty well. It's still working pretty well, but I think we're starting to see the cracks come into it. And one of the reasons for this is because capital no longer really pools within nation states. You're starting to see that there is the flight of of capital by way of power or by way of prestige or by way of just money to places where there's just a lower tax rate. You can see even even, you know, the the golden visa that's being introduced in the United States.

• 7:45Speaker 00

  Essentially, we're trying to draw highly capitalized individuals into the United States from other countries. Because we're saying, hey, we've got a better deal for your taxation here. Come over here, maybe start some jobs, maybe just enjoy a lesser taxed life. And so there's this negotiation that's going on in the world right now where you're starting to look at statehood as a service. And because if you think about, at least the way that that network state folks think about this is it's almost as if statehood or your citizenship is a subscription service that you were just born into, right?

• 8:25Speaker 00

  And so they're looking at it from the perspective of Silicon Valley, which is like, well, what if we just offer you more benefits for your subscription service? So there are places like Prospera down in Honduras and they they have some sort of charter city status where they're kind of allowed to make their own laws there and they're offering a lot of like life extension surgeries and or I should say life extension treatments and things like that. And there are a couple of these other projects. So I think the first step is is really just to kind of go to these places and try to find out what exactly the the end goal is, right? Because at a certain point, the nation state was created

• 9:10Speaker 00

  and it was it was carved out of the empires and kingdoms of of, you know, yesteryear. We look at it because we don't really know generationally anybody who like lived under, you know, an actual king rather than, you know, obviously, you know, you still have kings in Spain and stuff like that, but nobody is like a serf in in the modern world. So it's hard for us to imagine something that would come after the nation state. And there is a lot of thinking that is going into this right now. So yeah, this is all really long winded way to say, you know, I wanted to to start thinking about this from a really, you know, well founded scholarly perspective. And so I decided I was gonna

• 9:52Speaker 00

  go and pick up another master's degree at the Rand Corporation. So I've been there for the last six months and currently working on a dissertation about fifth generation warfare.

• 10:03Danny Jones?

  Right. Well, there's according to, you know who John Mearsheimer is?

• 10:07Speaker 00

  Yeah, Mearsheimer.

• 10:07Danny Jones?

  So he talks about, I think what he says is there's a there's three things that determine the power of a nation state. And it's like, number one is how big their gun is. Number two, how big their population is. And number three, I forget what number three was. I think number three might have been like their their geographical location.

• 10:26Speaker 00

  Probably territorial integrity.

• 10:27Danny Jones?

  Territorial, like us, we're surrounded by two oceans. Other people like Israel are surrounded by all these other adversaries.

• 10:33Speaker 00

  Yeah, Mearsheimer is, is, uh, he's, you know, uh, known as, as a big time realist. So,

• 10:40Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 10:40Speaker 00

  So he, he really sort of underlines the, the, the geo and geopolitics.

• 10:45Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 10:45Speaker 00

  Where it's like, the, what natural benefits do the, the territory, does the territorial integrity of your nation sort of offer you?

• 10:53Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 10:53Speaker 00

  One of the reasons that, that the United States has done so well, there's obviously, there's a lot of different reasons that the US has done so well over the, uh, you know, a couple centuries that we've been around. Um, one of them is just really hard to invade the United States, right? It's, uh, we got two big oceans, we got a big mountain range, and we've got a desert right in the center of us.

• 11:11Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 11:11Speaker 00

  Um, so that's, that's one of the things that, that Mearsheimer talks about, or why it's, you know, incredibly difficult to,

• 11:17Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 11:18Speaker 00

  to take over Afghanistan, as many people have tried over the years, uh, cause it's just really mountainous and, and even with all of our modern technology, it's really hard to fight in mountains, as it turns out.

• 11:30Danny Jones?

  What do you think one of the, what do you think would be the vigi, the biggest vulnerability, or the biggest, the weakest link of the United States, as far as like, its ranking on nation states or countries in the world? Like, we, obviously, we have the biggest military, we have the most high-powered weaponry on earth, um, we have the best geographical location, I don't know if we have, I don't know if we're the number one GDP, are we? Is our GDP?

• 11:55Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's, it's currently, uh, uh, I, I don't know the exact number, but the, uh, but yeah, we're, we're on top.

• 12:00Danny Jones?

  But there's been, there's been like no major world war since the 40s, so like, what, I'm sure this is something that companies like the Rand Corporation are looking at.

• 12:09Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, I, you know, there's, there's always a, an assessment of, of vulnerabilities, and, and right now, a lot of the scholarly research that's being done is looking at how we transition from, uh, either global, uh, global war on terror to what people are talking about as great power competition, and this is, has everything to do with, with the sort of research that I'm working on, which is, uh, uh, what's called fifth generation warfare, sometimes it's called hybrid warfare. Um, but it, I, I think that your vulnerable, the- The question about vulnerability has everything to do with with the fifth generation warfare. And to kind of understand it, I think you have to go through the the first like, you know, one through four generations.

• 12:55Speaker 00

  And and the thing to remember when you're sort of looking at these generations is it doesn't necessarily mean that one generation ends and another one picks up. These different generations of warfare can be happening simultaneously. But what matters is how technology and geopolitical aims end up affecting

• 13:20Speaker 00

  each other in order to to change the nature and and the, I guess, the character of warfare.

• 13:26Danny Jones?

  So can you explain the generation one through five?

• 13:28Speaker 00

  So so first generation, um, you know, basically anytime uh somebody uh decided to to get their buddies together and and go, you know, uh, fill a bunch of other strangers with holes for some geopolitical aims. So it it could be anything from like early Neanderthal tribal warfare, all the way up to sometimes the example that people tend to use are like the the Macedonian conquests where strategically you have a really high level of organization, but a fairly low level of technology. You know, you've got dudes in lines marching with spears and, you know.

• 14:06Danny Jones?

  Like tribes.

• 14:07Speaker 00

  Yeah, but they but, you know, the the Macedonian conquest were were kind of like the latter end of it. And, you know, they had they had shields and they could make a phalanx and they could, you know, stab each other in unison, which was, you know, a technological boon at the time. It wasn't something that we we had seen before. But again, you know, it goes from technology to geopolitical aims. How do you marry those together in order to create this new character of warfare? So second generation, that kind of takes us up to almost the Napoleonic wars. And at that point, you're looking at things like gunpowder, uh, more advanced tactics. You've got decisive battles.

• 14:48Speaker 00

  Uh, but you also have uh entrenchment, right? Um, so you have these these. Wars of attrition that are made possible by this new type of technology. World War II is kind of where we start to change again, right?

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• 16:26Speaker 00

  We've got more maneuverability warfare and of course, the nuclear bomb.

• 16:31Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 16:32Speaker 00

  So now you're talking about the industrialization of war. So suddenly you're able to, you know, absolutely like annihilate a battlefield, not only with industrialized weaponry from the sky, but industrialized weaponry that's being driven across the land. So if you think about Hitler's Blitzkrieg, that's sort of a good example of that maneuver warfare of the third generation of warfare. But as things go up towards the Cold War, we see this big characteristic change in how wars are fought. And obviously, this happens because of the nuclear bomb. So at this point, we have the last iteration of great power conflict. But with the nuclear bomb, it becomes far too dangerous

• 17:16Speaker 00

  to have direct nation-state on nation-state violence because at any point, somebody could drop the world-ending weapon, or so we thought at the time.

• 17:28Speaker 00

  And so suddenly, war has to change again because the geopolitical aims aren't completely annihilating the world. It's just to get strategic advantage over the adversary. In this case, it would be, you know, the Soviet Union and the United States. So we go to proxy wars. We go to proxy wars and asymmetric conflict. Right. That can take us from basically the end of the Cold War all the way up to the global war on terror. And the global war on terror changes things massively because suddenly, we have a unipolar world. Essentially, Soviet Union has fallen, and the United States is able to project power all around the world. But we haven't been able to project power

• 18:11Speaker 00

  all around the world without making quite a few enemies. Right. And also, training a lot of those enemies at the same time. So suddenly, the global war on terror turns into really precise asymmetric combat with semi-state and non-state actors. So Al Qaeda, the Taliban, and, I mean, you know, the Islamic State. Name your insurgent group, your favorite insurgent group, name them. Pick your flavor. Right, exactly. But now, we have something different happening. And that's fifth-generation warfare. We still have the same constraints of third-generation warfare. We can't go directly into combat with each other with these world-ending weapons. And in fact, there's so much economic entanglement in the world that it's very difficult to actually disrupt another nation

• 18:56Speaker 00

  so significantly because you're disrupting your own market. So that leads us to this new type, this new iteration of warfare, which is the cognitive domain. Essentially, it's a war of media, a war of ideas, and a war of attempting to divide populations against populations. Yeah. And to, to use the cognitive domain, essentially like the gray zone warfare in people's gray matter. Yeah. And, and to, to occupy the space between people's ears in order to achieve some sort of strategic gain. So a lot of what I'm looking at is, you know, how, how does the United States work to, to

• 19:39Speaker 00

  shield itself from any, any attacks in the information space? Yeah. Because one of the biggest assets we have as a country is our freedom of speech. But that also leaves our information space massively open to any sort of incursion by, by potentially belligerent actors. In fact, there was this one psychological operation, I think the, the, the agent who did it was a guy named Yvonne Agayans. This was in the 1960s. And, you know, he essentially had created this fake treasure trove of Nazi documents.

• 20:21Speaker 00

  They were all fake Nazi documents and he, he dumped them into a lake in, in the Czech, in Czechoslovakia at the time. And then he hired, you know, a, a real news team to, to unearth them and, and say, yeah. And, and so the, the goal was basically to, to sort of acknowledge some sort of complicity with the, the newly Western government. And say, hey, you know, like, these guys were working with the Nazis. Granted, all of these documents were fake. Sometimes this operation, this is called Operation Neptune, sometimes called The Fake in the Lake. What year was this again? Oh, it was in the 60s, I want to say. If you want to read about it, definitely recommend Active Measures by Thomas Ridd, fantastic book. Okay.

• 21:06Speaker 00

  But he has this one, the, the Agayans has this, this one, like, absolute banger line in it where he says something like, you know, "It's great that they have freedom of the press. If they didn't, we'd have to invent it for them." And so it talks about this permeability of the information space where it's like, where in, on the one hand, you're able to call out really terrible ideas and you're able to surface really good ideas in free dialogue. But on the other hand, it leaves the borders open for anybody to make an injection of information into that space.

• 21:44Danny Jones?

  Yeah, this is almost exactly what that Russian dude Yuri Besmanov was talking about.

• 21:47Speaker 00

  That's exactly right.

• 21:48Danny Jones?

  Right?

• 21:48Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 21:49Danny Jones?

  Which it seems like that's exactly, that is like precisely what, where we're at today.

• 21:53Speaker 00

  That's right.

• 21:53Danny Jones?

  Exactly what he was talking about.

• 21:55Speaker 00

  Well, and the Besmanov speeches is fantastic too, because one of the things that he talks about is the, the generational aim of, of these kind of active measures. Russia specifically tends to have a lot more time to, to do these things. They don't have administration switches nearly as, as regularly as we do. So they can-

• 22:17Danny Jones?

  Dictatorships can make decisions way faster.

• 22:19Speaker 00

  That's right. And they can also make more long-term decisions. You know, I was reading a report and I am like having trouble getting it out of my mind because now it's the only way that I can sort of think about the, the Ukrainian conflict or really any, anything that's happening within the Russian Federation sphere of influence. And they were essentially saying that the psychological operation of, of Russia is really the, the locus or the center of the conflict, that kinetic conflicts are just ways of influencing the psychological operation. And so I, I know it sounds a little, little perplexing, but, but I, I think the information

• 23:03Speaker 00

  that they give or the evidence that they give is, you know, the, their incursion into Syria at a certain point was, everybody was saying, well, you know, it's because they want a warm water port. Great, but what also came from that was a massive amount of refugee outflows from Syria that went into Europe. And this is, you know, you can draw a direct line from that into this new wave of hyper nationalism that is sort of drawing fractures in the European Union. Because they're saying, well, you know, if we're a European Union, then why are some countries bearing the brunt of taking care of these refugee outflows? And why are other ones able to not have that same burden?

• 23:46Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 23:47Speaker 00

  And so, in one respect, Russia benefits from the rise of autocrats in the European Union and a fractious European Union too. And so, we've seen a bit of that already. And so, you might wonder, you know, okay, well, what about the war in Ukraine? You have a slow encroachment into the war in Ukraine. 2014, is it? You really start seeing these gray zone operations where the little green men come into Crimea and, you know, it's a sort of like a situationship of war zone, like, you know, are we at war? Are we not at war? And, you know, it's testing the waters to see, you know, what will the result actually be?

• 24:30Speaker 00

  What, you know, what actions is NATO going to take? And we're already seeing an enormous cultural divide, especially in the United States and amongst allies, about what do we do about this kinetic conflict? You know, I haven't lived in the United States for a long time, but I've been back for six months and maybe it's because I'm, you know, at, you know, a think tank where these things happen or, you know, we have these conversations a lot. But I don't, I was, I'm quite surprised to see how much division there is over funding or not funding the war in Ukraine. And there's certainly a lot of gasoline being thrown on that fire, not only internally, but from abroad.

• 25:15Speaker 00

  So...

• 25:16Danny Jones?

  How, what do you mean abroad? Who specifically abroad would be throwing gas on the fire? That's...

• 25:25Danny Jones?

  Making more division in the US over that war.

• 25:28Speaker 00

  Yeah, so one of the, one of the operations that, that we've seen is Operation Doppelganger, which was covered pretty, pretty well. And this, I mean, honestly, you know, especially after looking at, at these things for a while, you get to know how clever they are and, and how low the cost for, for sowing a good deal of discord is. So what Operation Doppelganger did was it basically launched websites that looked like, almost looked exactly like common news websites in, in the West. But of course, they had more anti-Ukraine, pro-Kremlin stances in them. And so these were just sort of littered across the internet and people

• 26:10Speaker 00

  would say, point to, you know, these potentially reputable news sources and say, see, they, they, you know, they're, they're supporting the Kremlin instead of supporting Ukraine. And we know that was coming from the Russian Federation. Obviously, you also have, you know, a weaponization of, of the alternative media too, where they're saying, you know, okay, well, we're gonna pay X, Y, and Z influencer to sort of go on to our talking points.

• 26:36Danny Jones?

  Oh, yeah. Did you see Tim Poole, how him with Tim Poole?

• 26:38Speaker 00

  Right, yeah, yeah.

• 26:39Danny Jones?

  Although I guess he didn't know where the money was coming from, but they got like, I think it was a few million bucks from Russia.

• 26:45Speaker 00

  Yeah. And, I mean, look, the Russians are really good at making sure people don't know where the money is coming from.

• 26:50Danny Jones?

  Right. Yeah. What was the, I don't remember the story there, but I don't think like, did they, were they told to talk about specific things?

• 26:58Speaker 00

  That I don't know, and I can't remember. And I, you know, I-

• 27:01Danny Jones?

  See if you can find the story about Tim Poole being funded by Russia.

• 27:05Speaker 00

  I think it was Tenant, Tenant Media.

• 27:07Danny Jones?

  Tenant Media, that's what it was. Okay, here we go. Tim Poole, right-wing influencer, has been implicated in a Russian influence operation, according to the federal indictment. Two employees at RT funneled nearly $10 million into his company, into a Tennessee-based company called Tenant Media to create content favorable to Russia. Tim Poole was one of the content creators associated with Tenant Media, receiving a payment of $100,000. That's, that's what it was. Yeah, he got- Hey, that's who he had to create a new YouTube channel for this.

• 27:37Speaker 00

  Right.

• 27:37Danny Jones?

  And the videos were not getting, you know, some of them were getting like, you know, 5,000, 8,000 views. And he was getting paid a hundred grand for 8,000 views on the video.

• 27:46Speaker 00

  I'm not a YouTube creator, so I'm assuming that's a, that's a pretty good payday.

• 27:49Danny Jones?

  That's a really good payday.

• 27:50Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 27:51Danny Jones?

  Um, he claimed, so Tim claimed that he was a victim of the scheme and said Putin is a scumbag. So, yeah, so he, I mean, it's.

• 28:00Speaker 00

  There you go. Case closed. He said Putin is scumbag. Nice. They got him.

• 28:04Danny Jones?

  Case closed, baby.

• 28:05Speaker 00

  Really? I bet, I bet, I bet the, the Russian active measures agents are, are really wringing their hands over that, that statement.

• 28:12Danny Jones?

  And it says here, Poole has made statements on social media supporting Ukraine, which some view as an attempt to counter the claims.

• 28:19Speaker 00

  Sure. Yeah. And, and you know, this is, this is a version, like this is kind of a, like, it's deeply within the, the Russian playbook and, and some of the research that I'm doing too, is, is trying to look at like, you know, what's the, what's the character of a Russian psychological operation versus a Chinese psychological operation versus an Iranian one? Um, like, how, how are they fighting a fifth generation war? Um, and, and they tend to be very different than one another. So, so Russia has been, has doing, been doing this stuff for, for a long time. And obviously, is it, uh, Besmanov? Was it Yuri?

• 28:54Danny Jones?

  Yuri Besmanov.

• 28:56Speaker 00

  Yeah. I mean, everybody go watch that speech. It's, it's.

• 28:58Danny Jones?

  You can find it, Steve. It's probably, uh, it's, you can probably find like a one minute clip of it. It's like a longer interview, but they have, they have it clipped somewhere.

• 29:05Speaker 00

  On YouTube. There's just like Chill Hop playing in the background. It's just really, really vibey Besmanov.

• 29:10Danny Jones?

  Have you ever been to Russia?

• 29:11Speaker 00

  No, I haven't. The, the, uh, uh, you know, after this interview, I don't think I'll be welcome. Um, that'll be two countries I'm banned from.

• 29:20Danny Jones?

  Turkey's the first one.

• 29:21Speaker 00

  Turkey is the first one. I actually ended up, um, I got detained flying through Turkey recently.

• 29:27Danny Jones?

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• 30:12Danny Jones?

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• 30:56Danny Jones?

  I don't know how they masked the bitter taste of moringa, but it actually tastes amazing. Plus, Verso only uses pure moringa leaf, the most nutrient-dense part of the plant, and conducts third-party testing on every batch to ensure potency, purity, and safety. You can't avoid microplastics, but you can support your body's detox process. Start your day with Morning Being for research-backed detox, energy, and health. Click the link below or visit ver.sodanny and use the code DANNY for 15% off. That's ver.sodanny and use my code D-A-N-N-Y for 15% off. Thank you, Verso, for sponsoring this episode. That's SD, the top one. There he is. Actually, find a short, this is 13 minutes long.

• 31:38Danny Jones?

  See if you can find, go back and see if you can find a short because it'll be condensed. There you go, the second one. Try that.

• 31:47Speaker 02

  Ideological subversion is the slow process which we call either ideological subversion or active measures or psychological warfare. What it basically means is to change the perception of reality of every American to such an extent that despite of the abundance of information, no one is able to come to sensible conclusions in the interest of defending themselves, their families, their community and their country. It's a great brainwashing process which goes very slow. It takes from 15 to 20 years to demoralize a nation. This is the minimum number of years which requires to educate one generation of students exposed to the ideology of the enemy. In other words, Marxism-Leninism ideology is being pumped into the soft heads of at

• 32:31Speaker 02

  least three generations of American students without being challenged or counterbalanced by the basic values of Americanism. The demoralization process in the United States is basically completed already. Most of it is done by Americans to Americans thanks to lack of moral standards. Ideological subversion is the slow process...

• 32:49Speaker 00

  The loaded language there of "lack of moral standards." Like, ouch, man, rude. But, yeah, I mean, you know, that is, I think, a good primer on the purpose of fifth-generation warfare and Russian psychological...

• 33:05Danny Jones?

  It seems like you don't really have to do much. It seems like you kind of like let the people fight themselves and light little fires where you need to light them.

• 33:13Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think that's, I mean, it's sort of demonstrated in how well Russia understands the American character, really. You know, I think about how there are quite a few skeletons in the American closet and they're really good at like playing the xylophone on those ribs, right? One good example, a sort of famous example, I want to say, it had a really cool...

• 33:43Speaker 00

  Operation code name, it was called like infection or something. But anyway, this is one of the more famous ones and it was during the AIDS crisis, there was, they wanted to sew this story into the American media that AIDS was was being generated as a biological weapon to to affect, you know, marginalized populations in the United States. So what they did was they sort of smuggled a story into a paper and I want to say it was India. And then that hit the international news wires because it was a story in India. It was really hard to fact check and also it's a fairly sensationalist story. So it

• 34:27Speaker 00

  sounds really like it sounds plausible. It sounds exciting and both of these things are are big red flags when you want to like identify what is and isn't, you know, a psychological operation. And then suddenly ends up in the American news cycle. I think, I mean, one of the one of the big news broadcasters broadcast on it, I want to say Tom Brokaw, but that's like literally the only name that I can think of right now. Anyway, people ran with it and and the I it's a process of idea laundering. So you put an idea somewhere within some sphere of influence that has a direct line into the target community. And

• 35:06Speaker 00

  then from there you have a certain amount of, you know, well-known sources of information that seemingly vet that information. And then suddenly it becomes almost indistinguishable from the truth.

• 35:21Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 35:22Speaker 00

  But it has a distinct effect on the American population. One of my favorite favorite versions of this was, so they had the, I think this was Evgeny Prigozhin's, he was the the guy who.

• 35:36Danny Jones?

  Prigozhin, that was the dude that was working for Putin?

• 35:40Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, Putin chef.

• 35:41Danny Jones?

  He blew him up. He blew him out of the sky eventually.

• 35:43Speaker 00

  He, yeah, he's had a catastrophic airplane failure.

• 35:47Danny Jones?

  Yep.

• 35:48Speaker 00

  Crazy.

• 35:48Danny Jones?

  Surface-to-air missile.

• 35:50Speaker 00

  Yeah. They shouldn't have been flying that missile there. What bad luck.

• 35:57Speaker 00

  So he also had, I think it was called the Internet Research Organization. And the Internet Research Organization was the Russian troll farm, right? And I mean, it just sounded like you read reports from the people who were working in these troll farms and the conditions sound brutal. Like, you know, you've got to write something like 700 posts a day, you know, either supporting or denying or just fighting with people online under the guise of, you know, an American from Texas or whatever.

• 36:33Speaker 00

  And at a certain point, they were like, well, can we make things happen in the real world from online? And so they did this one operation that I just think is hilarious and brilliant, which was, it was called Free Hot Dogs. And they created an event on Facebook in Central Park in New York City that was just like, free hot dogs. We're gonna have free hot dogs in Central Park. There were no free hot dogs, spoiler alert. But what they did was they had a Russian active measures agent go and just like, see who showed up. Lot of people showed up for free hot dogs.

• 37:16Speaker 00

  And so what they found out was they could now make people take real life action through online events. Now, this changed into a full-on demonstration. So there were these two groups that they were trying to get to fight each other. And one was called like, The Heart of Texas, and then the other one was called like, I wanna say like, USA Muslims, some sort of Islamic thing about Muslims in the United States. And they started essentially like, counter protests against both of these groups, but both groups were operated by Russian troll farms.

• 37:59Speaker 00

  And of course, one group had almost had a quarter of a million people and the other group had- A quarter of million people in it. So suddenly you have real life division and an actual protest and counter protest that was being ginned up from St. Petersburg by a bunch of people posting. And now this process has gotten so much easier that it's insane with artificial intelligence and LLMs. You can have actual agents, not not human agents, but but LLMs running around the internet and just generating hundreds of thousands of posts for you. That's wild.

• 38:39Speaker 00

  There is a fascinating paper about this and it was about a Chinese researcher who sort of predicted this. I can't remember. It's a there is a Rand report on this. I think if you look up Chinese disinformation, then you can you can read the Rand report about it. But there was a There's a Rand report. Yeah, you know, most of the most, if not not all, I mean, there's there's certain classified Rand reports. Yeah. And then Rand reports that that are classified and then eventually declassified. But I think you'd be surprised how, yeah, Chinese different that's, yep. These reports are fantastic and they're incredibly dense.

• 39:22Speaker 00

  So, yeah, they're all publicly available as well. I don't know if it's this one that talks about it, but there was a Chinese computer scientist who sort of saw the LLM, Large Language Model, AI, opportunity coming. And initially he was sort of laughed at and they were like, well, that that's not actually going to be a thing. But he he came up with the idea of these artificial intelligent agents, but he called them souls, right? So you would come up with a digital soul or an army of souls, but really what these were were very realistic social media profiles that had, you know, a full history.

• 40:06Speaker 00

  So you could sort of vet somebody's full history. All of these artificially intelligent generated imagery. Online accounts. Online accounts. And then you would start having those accounts run around the internet and posting various things. And LLMs were doing all this. Well, so that's what he predicted. And I think that this is something that we'll probably start seeing a lot more of. Because it's just it's so easy. You know, a lot of the A lot of the barrier to entry that that previous generations of of psychological warfare fighting had was legitimacy, right? Um, going back to that operation, Operation Neptune, the fake and the like, you think

• 40:47Speaker 00

  about how much they had to do in order to quote unquote uncover these Nazi documents, right? You had to have forgers work for months creating realistic fake Nazi documents.

• 41:01Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 41:02Speaker 00

  They even went so far as to take the steamer trunk and artificially age it so that not only would the steamer trunk be able to hold these fake documents, but it could be identified realistically as something that that was at that time period, not as a fake. And then you have all of these fake documents discovered by fake divers. In fact, um, Agi Yance was one of the divers as far as I know. Um, and then you have a real media team that shows up there.

• 41:33Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 41:34Speaker 00

  So that's an enormous barrier to entry. Like, you have to have this army of forgers working for months to make sure that everything stands up to scrutiny. Now you have an artificial intelligence agent that can work, you know, within a matter of seconds to sound plausible or to sound realistic. Uh, then you can launder the idea through any number of different websites to make it sound as if this is somebody speaking from a a measure of authority.

• 42:05Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 42:06Speaker 00

  And so as the bar lowers to, uh, affecting the information space, it becomes easier and easier for both state actors and non-state actors to start messing with the the information space of a country.

• 42:20Danny Jones?

  Yeah, if something sounds sensational enough or sounds logical enough.

• 42:26Danny Jones?

  All it takes is one person to report on that story, no matter where, no matter how reputable the original, original foundational source is. As long as there's a second source, somebody who reports on that, someone else might find that interesting, might make a video about that, some other bigger reporter or content creator could see that and make a video that goes like really viral. And then, once you get two or three sources removed, then it's just like for a free for all. People aren't going to be going back to the original source to see if that was a Russian agent or a Russian or a Chinese psyop.

• 43:02Speaker 00

  Well, and

• 43:02Danny Jones?

  They're gonna run on it because it's a huge story that's gonna get them a lot of page views and make them a lot of money.

• 43:08Speaker 00

  I mean, I've heard you, you know, dealing with this. Yes, I'm, you know, I'm a fan of your show as well. Um, so I, I listen to a lot of your episodes, but I, I hear you sort of struggling with this from time to time regarding like UFOs and Egypt stuff, right? You know, you have so many different conflicting reports and then there's so much information in the space. Uh, and the original sources are obfuscated from, from you and from anybody. You know, I want to know where the UFOs are too.

• 43:35Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 43:36Speaker 00

  This is something that, that, you know, some buddies of mine talk about at Rand.

• 43:40Danny Jones?

  You guys talk about UFOs at Rand?

• 43:43Speaker 00

  Totally. Yeah. We're like, you know, I, I took a, um, uh, I, I took a course on, on space stuff and anytime like a new professor come and be like, they know, they got it, they, they gotta know. But then you also realize how much is how stove piped information is and, and you know, if, anyway, so the, the thing that I, I think is, it must be really frustrating for you. Uh, and it's certainly frustrating for me when it's like, okay, I don't know how to vet any of this information because the information comes from a place of secrecy already. So anybody that's going to claim some authority, whoever seems the most convincing from that space of authority, I guess they're right. And then,

• 44:26Speaker 00

  you know, uh, when there's conflict in the, the space, uh, it seems like, uh, everybody's just gonna throw the other guy under the bus and be like, oh, that's a psyop, that's CIA. They're, they're, uh, you know, little green men are, are CIA, but, but these aliens, like the Pleiadians, they're definitely like legit.

• 44:42Danny Jones?

  Right. Think about like, think about it like this. Imagine if, um, a person like Joe, like Joe Rogan would be a good example. I don't know. I mean, I'm sure he does quite a bit of background and research on his guests before they come in.

• 44:53Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 44:54Danny Jones?

  But maybe.

• 44:56Danny Jones?

  There's one day where he was hungover or in a rush to do something and he came across some article or some someone forwarded him some some Instagram clip of somebody talking about something really interesting to him. And he was like, oh, fuck yeah, get this guy on the show. Right? And this guy comes on the show, talks about all kinds of crazy things that no one's ever heard of, or things that are blowing his mind that he finds super interesting, does the puts puts out the podcast, gets millions and millions and millions of views. Now, all of a sudden, there's all these millions of other podcasts that are trying to get this same guy on their show. They don't have to do any crap. Joe Rogan had him on.

• 45:31Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 45:32Danny Jones?

  What what what other what other than the fact that you know this person's talking about, it's going to get you a ton of views and make you a lot of money. What other background checks do you need to do on this guy? Because he was on the number one podcast in the world.

• 45:41Speaker 00

  Yeah, because they've leveraged the authority of that.

• 45:43Danny Jones?

  Exactly.

• 45:43Speaker 00

  Right?

• 45:44Danny Jones?

  Think how easy that must be for some. I mean, if there were Russian or Chinese or any kind of foreign agents doing that kind of work.

• 45:50Speaker 00

  Well, you also, I mean, it, you know, a lot of a lot of what I've learned in in studying national security, you know, at at Rand, which I should say is a fantastic program. And like, the the the teachers that we have are like, it's, it's really cool to be in be in a room with with people who who think about this stuff at all times. But, you know, one of the things that you sort of consistently discuss is like cost benefit, right? I think oftentimes, conflict is really fought on a spreadsheet first, which is how do you maximize the impact to while also lessening the cost? And information space attacks just happen to be really cheap, you know, and and getting cheaper all the time.

• 46:35Speaker 00

  So long as you have access to that messaging surface, or you have access to that point of authority.

• 46:40Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 46:40Speaker 00

  And and sometimes, like, the idea is, I don't care as much to change people's thoughts. I just care that they act a different way. So the thought can be any number of things. It's not necessary that you change somebody's beliefs. You just want them to act in a way that is strategically important to whatever your aims are.

• 47:03Danny Jones?

  Have you noticed on the internet, I don't know how much time you spend reading comments, or how much time you spend scrolling through X?

• 47:09Speaker 00

  Just comments just on the video that I did here last time.

• 47:13Danny Jones?

  That's it?

• 47:13Speaker 00

  It just got absolutely shredded.

• 47:14Danny Jones?

  I'm surprised you came back.

• 47:15Speaker 00

  I did, yeah.

• 47:16Danny Jones?

  Congratulations for overcoming that.

• 47:18Speaker 00

  Thank you. I am a deep state operative and you guys are all right in the comments. So, you know, I'm here again to be hurt emotionally.

• 47:30Danny Jones?

  It seems like on, at least in comment sections, I've noticed this recently, that blaming Israel for everything seems to be in vogue right now.

• 47:41Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 47:41Danny Jones?

  And I notice it more and more in comments, though. Like comments on Twitter or X and on YouTube. Like, for example, I saw a clip the other day of, I think it was actually a clip of Joe Rogan's podcast where he was talking to a bunch of MMA dudes. Or no, it was Eddie Bravo.

• 47:58Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 47:59Danny Jones?

  He was talking to him about JFK.

• 48:01Speaker 00

  Okay, yeah, yeah.

• 48:02Danny Jones?

  And then-

• 48:02Speaker 00

  That would be the right guess for that.

• 48:03Danny Jones?

  And then every single comment on that video was like, not one mention of Israel. I can't fucking believe, Joe Rogan must be an Israeli agent. He's an op.

• 48:14Speaker 00

  Sure, yeah.

• 48:14Danny Jones?

  Because he didn't say the word "Israel" when they were talking about JFK. There's this crazy thing where everybody, there's a lot of people on the internet-

• 48:21Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 48:21Danny Jones?

  -that want to blame Israel for killing JFK.

• 48:24Speaker 00

  That seems like a stretch. I don't know. I'd love to hear their argument for that.

• 48:31Danny Jones?

  Well, there's two easy arguments against it, right? It's because in 1963, eh, did Israel have the means to kill JFK? And wrap up the FBI and the CIA to work with them to cover it up and to make it happen?

• 48:46Speaker 00

  Is that the general argument for that kind of thing?

• 48:48Danny Jones?

  That's one of them. Would Israeli intelligence or Israeli military be able to get the US military, the CIA, and the FBI to help them kill their own president? Because of what, the argument for it is because people will say Israel wanted a nuclear bomb and Kennedy wouldn't let them have it.

• 49:09Speaker 00

  Got it.

• 49:09Danny Jones?

  And right after Kennedy was killed, I think some uranium was smuggled out of a plant in Pennsylvania.

• 49:16Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 49:17Danny Jones?

  That's true. That did happen. But to say that they killed the president over that and got the entire US government and intelligence agencies to help them do it is kind of crazy. That's really fucking crazy to say. And then- To even think that they would wanna do, would consider going that far just to get some nuclear material is also insane. And on the other hand, you also have the entire US military and Joint Chiefs of Staff that wanted to commit a full-on thermonuclear war across the whole entire world. They wanted to nuke China and Russia because that was the one point in history where we had the most nuclear weapons.

• 49:54Speaker 00

  Right.

• 49:55Danny Jones?

  And Russia had very, very little at that point. They didn't start ramping up their nuclear arsenal until like 19. It was like a year after Kennedy was killed.

• 50:01Speaker 00

  Right.

• 50:02Danny Jones?

  So it was, boy, we had the most, they had the least. We wanted to fucking full-on nuke everyone because we knew that they would, if they nuked us back, we would only lose, you know, um, maybe a hundred million people.

• 50:13Speaker 00

  Right.

• 50:14Danny Jones?

  And waiting five years, it would be catastrophic.

• 50:17Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 50:18Danny Jones?

  So that's the most plausible reason, well, why Kennedy got killed because the Joint Chiefs of Staff wanted full-on war. He didn't want war. He was pulling everybody out of Vietnam. It was the whole Bay of Pigs thing, all that stuff combined. Um, but everyone wants to blame Israel.

• 50:33Speaker 00

  Yeah, I, I think that part of this is, is also...

• 50:37Danny Jones?

  And also, a lot of people wanna, a lot of UFO people think that it was because of UFOs.

• 50:40Speaker 00

  What?

• 50:41Danny Jones?

  There's, there's so many different flavors of JFK.

• 50:43Speaker 00

  I was gonna say, I, like, I, just because of the, the release recently, I was like, I gotta get into this because I've, honestly, I just haven't, haven't researched it. I've been too busy with, with unrecognized nations. Um, and then I, I started dipping a toe into the waters and I'm like, this goes way too deep. This'll either can, like, consume all my life.

• 51:02Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 51:02Speaker 00

  Or, or, but immediately I was, I was really confused to sort of like what the dominant most, um, you know, most plausible theories were.

• 51:10Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 51:10Speaker 00

  Um, but I think, you know, um, it's, it's interesting you say it like, it's either, it's either UFOs or, or Israel.

• 51:18Danny Jones?

  Israel.

• 51:20Speaker 00

  Clearly, the, the usual suspects.

• 51:22Danny Jones?

  Right, right, right.

• 51:23Speaker 00

  But I, I think that this, this also sort of speaks to, um, like, in, in scholarship and in academia, there's this idea of like, um, uh, is somebody looking, uh, uh, somebody on a dark street looking for their keys under the only place that there's a, a streetlight on. It's like, well, the the keys have to be here because it's the only place I can see. You know, Israel and UFOs are top of mind for a community that's interested in JFK and the the truth thereof. So the it seems like stitching together this this uh this grand plan is more plausible because those things are the things that they're already interested in.

• 52:04Speaker 00

  They already have a sort of working model for how the world works as leveraged by, you know, some somewhere in between UFOs, uh, Israel and probably what like the pyramids?

• 52:16Danny Jones?

  Yeah, maybe.

• 52:17Speaker 00

  I'd imagine.

• 52:17Danny Jones?

  Yeah, there's a recent thing that came out about the pyramids.

• 52:19Speaker 00

  I know, yeah.

• 52:20Danny Jones?

  Which seems like bullshit.

• 52:20Speaker 00

  Did you I I sent it I sent that thing to a uh um an Egyptology friend of mine. And and he basically told me to not bother him ever again.

• 52:30Danny Jones?

  Really?

• 52:31Speaker 00

  With anything like that, yeah. He was like.

• 52:33Danny Jones?

  Yeah, a lot a lot of people think it's bullshit.

• 52:35Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 52:36Danny Jones?

  I haven't like looked at the whole report, but.

• 52:38Speaker 00

  Well, and so this is um uh this is one of those those like there are certain areas in which um psychological operations thrive. My uh my girlfriend has a uh a joke right now that anytime I say psychological operations or psyops, she has to take a shot. And uh she's not dead yet.

• 53:02Speaker 00

  But she would be if that was true.

• 53:03Danny Jones?

  She's two weeks into rehab.

• 53:04Speaker 00

  That's right, yeah. She's getting better. But anyway, like this is kind of the space that that these these things thrive. So um one of the original like people at at RAND, um uh was a guy named Kenneth Arrow. And he uh created this uh this rational actor model, right? And and the rational actor model or um uh the rational actor theory is basically that that people are going to like maximize their own benefit in any given situation. And nation states will do something similar. So I was doing some research into that and I was like, well, what are the things? Where does the theory really fall apart of the rational actor model, right?

• 53:46Speaker 00

  And it was really interesting to see the thing, the places that the rational actor model falls apart. Are really the the sort of weak spots in terms of getting people to believe parallel realities. So biases, just cognitive biases are are one one way of of leveraging information into somebody's head. So a good cognitive bias, particularly with what you just talked about,

• 54:11Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 54:11Speaker 00

  is the availability bias. Like, you know, somebody has just come from reading an article about UFOs, and now they're reading about JFK, and they're also reading about Israel at the same time.

• 54:22Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 54:23Speaker 00

  Suddenly, they have a grand theory about how they're all connected.

• 54:26Danny Jones?

  I can see that. I can see the idea there and how that makes sense. But at the same time, I feel like a lot of these comments, at least that I'm reading, they see it seems. And and also, the sudden rise to this kind of rhetoric online seems very unnatural to me.

• 54:42Speaker 00

  Hmm, hmm.

• 54:43Danny Jones?

  Almost like it's some sort of bot farm or something.

• 54:45Speaker 00

  I mean, that technology is totally available. I think that, um, you know, this is one of the things that I, um, uh, as I was, uh, I've been talking with one of the sort of key researchers on this kind of stuff. Um, uh, his his name is actually Rand, uh, so Rand Wonsman. Uh, everybody should go follow him on LinkedIn because he has this fantastic.

• 55:07Danny Jones?

  LinkedIn?

• 55:07Speaker 00

  Yeah, like weirdly on LinkedIn. He really, he really rocks.

• 55:10Danny Jones?

  To everybody here that has a LinkedIn account.

• 55:12Speaker 00

  Well, he has, he has this incredible, uh, so he posts a slide.

• 55:16Danny Jones?

  Do you have a LinkedIn account?

• 55:17Speaker 00

  I do, yeah.

• 55:17Danny Jones?

  Really?

• 55:18Speaker 00

  And, you know, currently, uh, uh, open to networking, so.

• 55:20Danny Jones?

  Do you post on there?

• 55:21Speaker 00

  No, no.

• 55:22Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 55:23Speaker 00

  Not usually. Um, but, uh, but Rand posts this, um, uh, a lecture series that he did years ago, uh, called, uh, Defense Against the Dark Arts of Psychological Manipulation. And so it's basically like a slide a day that that talks about how psychological manipulation happens. And one of the things that he talks about is a cognitive DDoS attack. So What's DDoS mean again? Uh, denial of service. It's basically like a hacking attack where you have a bot farm or just a lot of people sort of like query a website over and over again until the website shuts down. So what this looks like on the cognitive level is, uh, let's say you're waiting for an important piece of mail, um, and you go to your mailbox and, uh, that message that

• 56:08Speaker 00

  you're waiting for isn't in there, but you have a hundred other pieces of mail that say nonsense on them or they're junk mail, right? Um, the next day you have a thousand pieces of mail, right? Eventually it's going to be too costly from your time and your just effort to go through all of those messages to find the message that you actually want. And eventually it's going to just be, uh, yeah, it's just too costly to go through all of that information in order to, to find what the signal is. There's too much noise, not enough signal, basically. Right. And so by sort of assaulting, let's say a hashtag or a news piece with a bunch

• 56:51Speaker 00

  of information that is sort of nonsensical. In fact, I think Steve Bannon calls this flooding the zone with shit. Essentially you can make the noise go away or be so reduced that you're never going to be able to hear the signal within it. So when you're talking about potentially bot farms are just dumping messaging into these spaces, there might be, it, it could very well be, it could be a cognitive DDoS attack where there is a bunch of noise going into a, a space just because they, they're, whoever is trying to obfuscate the signal is doing so. Um, I mean, I think this is something that, that you certainly experience with UFOs as well, where it's like, everybody is coming in with their own hot take on UFOs and also

• 57:35Speaker 00

  they're fighting in the space at the exact same time. Yeah. So the, the game isn't to generate a truth statement from the conversation. The game is to win the conversation. Right. And that doesn't actually surface the truth.

• 57:54Speaker 00

  Right? I mean, I don't know. I I'm still.

• 57:55Danny Jones?

  No, you you have no incentive to prove anything right or wrong, right?

• 57:59Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 58:00Danny Jones?

  It's just to gather more eyeballs.

• 58:03Speaker 00

  This is, this is, uh, I I've been writing on on my newsletter about, um, uh, sort of trying to coin these new, these new phrases, right? Um, and so this is something I call the Napoleon's penis problem.

• 58:17Danny Jones?

  I saw your TikTok.

• 58:18Speaker 00

  Right? Okay, so, uh, I I'm trademarking it for the world right now. Uh, Napoleon's penis problem.

• 58:24Danny Jones?

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• 59:08Danny Jones?

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• 59:52Danny Jones?

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• 59:55Speaker 00

  And it's the idea that, so, uh, Napoleon famously had his his penis, uh, cut off and embalmed, uh, and sent to his lover, uh, cuz...

• 1:00:06Speaker 00

  I don't know, he's Napoleon.

• 1:00:07Danny Jones?

  Was this in his will?

• 1:00:08Speaker 00

  It was. There are different, there are different reports on why exactly, some people even say that the, like, the priest that was around was mad at him. The weird part is that none of those reasons are important. The weird part is that we know his penis got cut off and embalmed at one point.

• 1:00:29Danny Jones?

  Really?

• 1:00:29Speaker 00

  Yes. That is a fact.

• 1:00:31Danny Jones?

  Are there further images of this? Do we know? Is there hard evidence? Can you find something about?

• 1:00:36Speaker 00

  I've spent so much time looking for an image of Napoleon's penis that it's just insane. So, ah, yes, exactly. So, um, we know that it went up for auction in several places. And I think the last place that we have it coming up for auction is like in the 1920s at, some, some big New York auction house. One person, the most plausible case of somebody owning it was actually a guy who was a urologist and, I mean, you know, because classic.

• 1:01:08Danny Jones?

  Convenient.

• 1:01:08Speaker 00

  Yeah, right. Urologist from New Jersey, uh, who is just-

• 1:01:11Danny Jones?

  Of course he lived in fucking New Jersey.

• 1:01:13Speaker 00

  Right. Yeah. Shout out to Julian Dory.

• 1:01:17Speaker 00

  He, uh, you know, purchased this thing and he was also a big collector of all these other, you know, sort of strange tchotchkes. But there is also, there are other claims to who owns Napoleon's penis, right? But we're in a situation here, right, where you can find the truth. Like, you can do a DNA test of the truth, but all of the actors within that system just have negative incentives based upon actually finding out what the truth is. Because what could happen is they do some DNA test and then suddenly they're like, wait a second, I have somebody else's dick.

• 1:01:57Danny Jones?

  Now it's worthless.

• 1:01:58Speaker 00

  And now it's worthless, right? So there are certain circumstances in which it is a negative incentive to actually surface the truth. And I think that this happens in places like the UFO community and conspiracy communities and certainly in political communities too. Moon landing, right?

• 1:02:17Danny Jones?

  That's a perfect example of it.

• 1:02:19Speaker 00

  I think one thing too, that I like constantly have to be on guard against is like how fun all these stories are like, I love them, like it's like, it's American mythology, right? Like the, the, the conspiracy theories are the American art form, like there are, there are myth making. Because we don't have these sort of like deep cultural myths, but we do have a certain apparatus of sense-making around these things that we all sort of share, right? And I think that by making sense of them in these ways that are one, really entertaining and super interesting, uh, and two, uh, some of the stuff is partially real.

• 1:03:03Speaker 00

  It allows us to feel as if we have a lot more control and agency in a world that is often really chaotic and instead of being run by people who are, you know, masterminds and, and crafting our own reality around us, really they're kind of incompetent, you know, like it's, it's a lot more comforting to me anyway, that like some evil mastermind is twisting a mustache and, and you know, bending the world to their, their, uh, their will than it is that somebody, you know, sent an email the wrong place and then suddenly, you know, uh, war plans were leaked.

• 1:03:40Danny Jones?

  Why do you think that is? Why do you think it is that our society is the one that is most prone to this kind of stuff? It seems like we're the most prone to ideological subversion or divide or we're like, it seems like, I don't know, cause I haven't been to a lot of countries, but it seems like we are the most fractured and we have so many things going wrong, like we have not just in our minds, but like, I think 40% of the US population is obese. I mean, it's, it's not good.

• 1:04:07Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean.

• 1:04:08Danny Jones?

  Do you think it has anything to do with, and, and you've been to a lot more countries than I have, but like.

• 1:04:15Danny Jones?

  Do you think it has anything to do with religion? Or religious ideology?

• 1:04:22Speaker 00

  I think there's, there's, you know, there is a portion of the American character that, that has, you know, a religiosity to it. And there's also a portion of the American character that is a, a very like, individual, I'm gonna find out for myself, I'm gonna do it for myself. Like, I've been in countries that are very, communally based and, and, and countries that are, are very individualistic. And I think the far end of the spectrum is, and Americans tend to be much more individualistic. And, and sometimes that can mean that, uh, somebody has, uh, you know, an individualistic view of reality. I don't necessarily think that, that the US is, is more prone to this. I think that, I think that the, that our information space is just more open and it's also more globally

• 1:05:07Speaker 00

  important, you know, like, any English pe- person can do a really good American accent because they grow up with American media. Right?

• 1:05:16Speaker 00

  Uh, and it doesn't go the other way. Um, there is, uh, like, I, I think, you know, in my, in my, my research of, of like, well, how do we conduct, information space defense in the United States? I start to think about like, well, what are the things that people kind of like, get and enjoy from American media? Because that acts as a cultural ambassador for us. And it's like, I have never been through, uh, you know, uh, traveling through, uh, Eastern Europe, especially in Albania where I usually live, uh, and not met somebody that can quote every single episode of Friends.

• 1:05:57Danny Jones?

  Really?

• 1:05:58Speaker 00

  Huge, huge there. And that, you know, is acting as, or like Big Bang Theory. Like, that acts as a cultural ambassador for us.

• 1:06:08Speaker 00

  And, and that's just because our information space really is spread out through the entire world. It goes through our movies, it goes through our music, it goes through sitcoms. And frankly, I think that's like, I would much rather somebody get introduced to American culture from sitcoms than, you know, from, from, uh, military actions. For, for me personally, I'd, I'd much rather them have familiarity with that. But also, it's not to say that like, American-specific conspiracy theories don't end up in, in other parts of the world. Like, I was, it was right- I think it was right before the end of the last Trump administration.

• 1:06:51Speaker 00

  And I was in the back of a cab in Albania. And this guy, I was traveling to Tanzania, and so I needed a COVID test at the time. And I was just talking with the cab driver, and at a certain point, he's like, so do you believe it? And I'm like, what? And he's like, COVID? And I was like, I mean, I'm on my way to get a COVID test, so like, I gotta take it to travel. And then that just sort of uncorked, you know, like, all of the big tent conspiracy theories. And he was, you know, talking to me for about like 20 minutes about how, you know, every conspiracy theory under the sun was like QAnon, and then, you know, JFK,

• 1:07:32Speaker 00

  and probably some UFO stuff in there, but he's talking real fast, and Albanian is my second language. And then at a certain point, he was like, you know what's gonna happen? And he gave me a date. I can't remember what the exact date was. He's like, you know, on this date, what's gonna happen is the US is gonna come to Albania, and they're going to get rid of all of our corrupt politicians. And you, like, and he gave me his phone number, and on that day, he was like, you call me, and you're gonna see that it happens. And so, the conspiracy theory adapted for that Albanian point of view, right? It became this, almost like this prophetic thing that was a godsend for him in particular.

• 1:08:16Speaker 00

  Because specifically, he felt that he was, you know, being ripped off by the country that he was in. And I think this is one of the spaces that these things thrive, too. Not Annie Jacobson. The book Surveillance Capitalism, Shoshana Zuboff, incredible book. Surveillance Capitalism. Such a fantastic book. But she has this concept in it that I always think about when we think about like, well, how do people get their mind changed? How do they sort of switch tracks? Because I think we've all seen this happen. I know that I see it, you know, after spending a couple of years abroad, and then I come back, and, you know, somebody has ideologically changed remarkably. And it's like, well, how did this happen?

• 1:09:01Speaker 00

  And so she has this idea of the right to a future tense. And the right to a future tense means that... People sort of have this psychological need to believe that in their future, things are going, they're going to be healthier, wealthier and more secure, right? Even if marginally. And so if they are deprived of that right of a future tense, they're gonna start believing in something even though it doesn't bear much relationship to reality, they'll start believing in something that gives them that same right to a future tense. And this is something that I was seeing from that, that cab driver in Albania, who actually randomly ended up in his cab like three months later,

• 1:09:45Speaker 00

  because there's just so many cabs in, in Toronto, Albania. And I, I didn't wanna, you know, like, say, you know, that was the, uh, nothing happened that he said, because like, I mean, I'd imagine that he, he felt a little like, depressed about it because he wanted his life to become remarkably better based upon the fulfillment of those prophecies.

• 1:10:07Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:07Speaker 00

  And at a certain point, we were talking and he's like, "Yeah, none of those things happened, but you know what? Something's really messed up." And I was like, "Yeah, we can agree on that." It's difficult to sort of see a future where everybody is healthier, wealthier and more secure right now.

• 1:10:24Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:24Speaker 00

  And so pouring our belief for that, that idea of a future tense into fringe communities or to political strongman or whoever, like, that feels good because I want it to come from somewhere and I want that information to be reliable. But it's just difficult right now, right? And I think these are the spaces that, that psychological operations thrive.

• 1:10:48Danny Jones?

  Yeah, you can definitely see that, especially in the West or in the United States, where there is a lack of cohesive religious worldview. And, and people try to map this onto UFOs, onto psych, even psychedelics. There's like a religious bent to people who are really into psychedelics. And, um, which is interesting because have you seen any reporting or any of the recent stories that have come out about how?

• 1:11:17Danny Jones?

  Silicon Valley, or there's this big movement to sort of map Christianity onto everything Silicon Valley is doing.

• 1:11:24Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, I've heard, I've heard a lot about this. I've, I've talked about this a bit. Um, uh, so.

• 1:11:30Danny Jones?

  It's crazy, man. Because Silicon Valley used to be like anti-Christian.

• 1:11:34Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:11:35Danny Jones?

  And to even, to be religious in Silicon Valley was, was, was crazy. That was, you would never see that.

• 1:11:41Speaker 00

  Seemed a bit anathema to.

• 1:11:42Danny Jones?

  And now you have Peter Thiel, that you know, who is a gay Christian billionaire.

• 1:11:48Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:11:48Danny Jones?

  And other, uh, big Silicon Valley names and kingmakers in Silicon Valley, holding these conferences, these religious conferences.

• 1:11:55Speaker 00

  Right. Yeah. So I, I was, um, I was talking with a buddy of mine who's, uh, very like super, super like AI positivist guy, which is kind of unusual. Like, uh, and he's actually kind of like, uh, AI pilled me for lack of a better word of, of saying like, actually, you know, AI will, could, like, has a possibility of being a net benefit for, for humanity. Um, uh, his name is, uh, is Tate Tower. I think Tate L. Tower at, uh, at Twitter is his thing. If you ever wanna like feel better about AI. Um, which is harder and harder these days. But we were talking a bit about like, there is this sort of belief,

• 1:12:36Speaker 00

  uh, in the, the sort of halls of like the, the tech priesthood, um, that you can almost arise an AI god, right? Um, and that it would be a sort of like all-consuming, um, platform of belief that would be almost like engineered perfectly to fill that god-shaped hole in humanity. Like, you know, when Nietzsche said, you know, you've, you've killed God, right? Um, and then I believe Jung said something along the lines of like, even if you kill God, you're going to invent new gods. Somewhere within the human character.

• 1:13:13Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:14Speaker 00

  There is that god-shaped hole and people fill it with whatever they want. You know, there is, um, uh, or whatever seems relevant to them. I shouldn't, I shouldn't, you know, look down on anybody who's filling that god-shaped hole with UFO stuff like, good on ya. Like, go for it, man.

• 1:13:29Danny Jones?

  Well, there is a push to do that.

• 1:13:30Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:13:31Danny Jones?

  There's a huge push to do that. There's, there's people that are like deep in, in, in the intelligence, like legitimate former CIA people who are coming out saying that this is angels and demons. These are biblical things.

• 1:13:41Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, and I know Beck talks about that, right? Beck Lover?

• 1:13:44Danny Jones?

  Oh, probably. Everybody does.

• 1:13:45Speaker 00

  He talks about angels, demons, all that.

• 1:13:47Danny Jones?

  No, like I'm saying, like, there's not just Beck, but there's legitimate, like, legendary CIA officers that are like, we know are CIA people.

• 1:13:55Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:13:55Danny Jones?

  Who are coming out and saying this, that are also UFO people.

• 1:13:57Speaker 00

  Right. Which, I mean...

• 1:14:00Danny Jones?

  Fucking Tucker Carlson talks about it. He like, he believes that these are fucking biblical things.

• 1:14:04Speaker 00

  Didn't he have a thing of, like, that he was, like, attacked by an alien and, or no, no, by a demon at one point? He, he like, actually said that he was attacked by a demon.

• 1:14:14Danny Jones?

  I hadn't heard that one.

• 1:14:15Speaker 00

  Yeah, I, I heard that recently. I mean, you know, I, I'm not informed enough about either the Bible or UFOs to put them together. Right? Like, I mean, I went to Catholic school and I, I like UFOs, but like, to create an all-consuming philosophy where there's a total verisimilitude between, you know...

• 1:14:34Danny Jones?

  A what?

• 1:14:35Speaker 00

  Verisimilitude, uh, um, a, uh, an equality, right? Uh, between...

• 1:14:40Danny Jones?

  Weird flex.

• 1:14:41Speaker 00

  Yeah. SAT 1240. Um, but like... They only let nerds into Rand.

• 1:14:54Speaker 00

  Our, our football team sucks. Um, there isn't one. Uh, but like...

• 1:14:59Danny Jones?

  It was a chess team, though.

• 1:15:00Speaker 00

  Uh, there, uh, we got a ping pong table. Yeah, there's a ping pong table there. Yeah.

• 1:15:06Danny Jones?

  Ping pong's not for nerds.

• 1:15:07Speaker 00

  I know, yeah. It's only for jocks.

• 1:15:09Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:09Speaker 00

  Um, but, uh, yeah, like, to, to say that, you know, you have these two sort of like vastly different bodies of literature, right? I've got, I've got, uh, the Bible over here on one hand, and then I have a bunch of, like, UFO stuff originating from the 1940s on another hand.

• 1:15:26Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:27Speaker 00

  I mean, it, it feels comforting to put those things into one unified worldview. I think I would just kind of have to understand what the bridging mechanism between those two are.

• 1:15:37Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:37Speaker 00

  Then again, I also think that, like, maybe I just, like, I, I don't access the mystical like other people do. Cause I think...

• 1:15:47Danny Jones?

  To me, it's just interesting how there's so many efforts that seem to be from, coming from ve- very powerful sources trying to inject or infuse Christianity into various things that are in the popular culture right now.

• 1:16:00Speaker 00

  Well, and also finding a way of, of technology coming into that too is really interesting. Like, there are...

• 1:16:08Speaker 00

  And, and you know, when you talk, when you talk about AI at certain levels, like it becomes specifically like mystical and religious sounding like there's in the, in the AI community. There is this, uh, the concept of the show Goth, um, if you've ever heard of the, so the show Goth is like, um, I think it's an HP Lovecraft creature. Um, so just imagine, you know, sort of cosmic horror, like unimaginable creature. Um, and the show Goth is this sort of, um, uh, anthropomorphized black box. Oh, sweet. Yeah. You got a cool picture of it? What is that? That's the show Goth, baby. Whoa. So the, the- No, go to the, go to the top left. Yeah, go to that one. That one's cool. Hell, yeah.

• 1:16:54Speaker 00

  So it's this sort of like anthropomorphized creature of the black box of AI, right? That we're feeding all of this information into it and then it's growing, it's gaining agency. And the, the fact that, that it was a, an HP Lovecraft character, which is this sort of like cosmic horror idea of like, it almost doesn't necessarily even see humanity as a, you know, a functional agent in the world. Because it's so much more complex than us, uh, be almost like, you know, how we look at ants, right? And the show Goth is like, well, we keep pumping information into this thing. And outwardly, like, it's really helpful because like, I didn't want to write that tweet anyway.

• 1:17:37Speaker 00

  Uh, but inwardly, we actually don't know what its aims will be. And there's even some thoughts of like, I, I know I said that I was, I was like AI, you know, positivist, but I'm, I'm really trying. Um, there's this concept of Roko's Basilisk. Have you ever heard of that? No. So the Roko's Basilisk is this, uh, this idea that-

• 1:17:59Speaker 00

  At a certain point, the like collective intelligence of AI is almost keeping notes on who's for it and who's against it. And that those against it will sort of end up being punished by the AI. But ultimately, this all depends on like, can we find alignment between humanity and artificial intelligence? And it seems like with this, the sort of Silicon Valley groups that you're talking about, what they're maybe attempting to do is, is try to leverage the authority of both a biblical text, specifically the Christian biblical text, and leveraging the power of artificial intelligence.

• 1:18:44Speaker 00

  We already know that Christianity has been a very successful religion. So layering these two together really gives you an enormous amount of power to sort of bend reality to your will. Whether or not that's actually happening, I have no idea. I've heard about it a little bit, but you know, these are two really powerful concepts. And it's really easy to proliferate ideas with artificial intelligence. So I, you know, I also, I think that only in 2025, would you ever say like gay Christian billionaire?

• 1:19:20Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:19:21Speaker 00

  Is, you know, attempting to sort of like manipulate the world in some respect.

• 1:19:25Danny Jones?

  Yeah. No, I always wonder, like, my perspective on it is with, when you have people like Peter Thiel and people like Alex Karp, the CEO of Palantir.

• 1:19:34Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:19:35Danny Jones?

  Who are very different in certain ways, where like one of them is super liberal, the other one's really conservative. They're both war hawks. They both have, I mean, well, Peter is the owner, but they, those companies that they run are military industrial, complex companies. They get paid by the US military or the US intelligence agencies, or they're funded by the US government to protect national security and to.

• 1:20:03Danny Jones?

  They're like a defense contractor, right? There are companies that were formed, I always, I've said this before, but like, if you wanna like, create the most successful company, you, you don't just make a company and then go and find customers. You build a company that's based on a customer that has a huge amount of fucking money.

• 1:20:21Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:20:21Danny Jones?

  Like, the fucking, uh, Defense Department.

• 1:20:25Speaker 00

  And then you develop more customers by making sure that that problem maintains.

• 1:20:28Danny Jones?

  Exactly, right? So, I wonder how much this movement to map Christianity onto this stuff, and to get more people in Silicon Valley invested in Christianity, what does that have to do with,

• 1:20:46Danny Jones?

  with national security?

• 1:20:47Speaker 00

  I don't know.

• 1:20:48Danny Jones?

  Because like, you have, like, because if you look at other countries, and their worldview, and their religious worldviews, like, an extreme example would be Muslim countries that are religious extremists to the extent where they're willing to strap a bomb onto their chest and detonate it. To us, we are like, we worship the next Netflix series, the Kardashians and TikTok.

• 1:21:12Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:21:13Danny Jones?

  So like, if you wanted to make us a more powerful country, I think one of our weakest links is our people and our ideologies and what you're talking about, like this, this fifth generation, sort of...

• 1:21:22Speaker 00

  It's easy to divide us away from one another.

• 1:21:25Danny Jones?

  It's easy, super easy.

• 1:21:25Speaker 00

  There's a great paper, I don't know, maybe you can find it, um, by, uh, Mike Mazzar. It's talking about, um, restoring American dynamism. And one of the things that he talks about are, are these, you know, these periods of time in American history where, um, almost like the, the, the dynamism has gone out of the United States. And a lot of times when this is happening, is, um, is because there is, um, you know, uh, there aren't shared, uh, beliefs. There's an us versus them mentality that has proliferated the culture, you know? 1960s when there was, you know, uh, pro-war, anti-war movements.

• 1:22:03Danny Jones?

  Yeah, communism.

• 1:22:04Speaker 00

  Early 2000s, sure, and, and...

• 1:22:08Speaker 00

  A part of being in the United States is, is, and a part of being a citizen of the United States is saying, your government shouldn't and shouldn't want to enforce your beliefs on you. But there is a difficulty when there is a completely different understanding of what reality is.

• 1:22:29Danny Jones?

  Yes.

• 1:22:29Speaker 00

  Largely on one side and then the other side.

• 1:22:31Danny Jones?

  Yes.

• 1:22:32Speaker 00

  And I think that one of the, the problems with this too, and the, the, you know, again, this, these areas where we're fifth generation warfare really thrives, is that we've started to see politics and even technology as a zero sum game, right? That if I win, my opponent loses. Like my side of the aisle won and therefore I get to do a touchdown dance as my, my opponent loses. You even see this with, you know, people who've won an election and then people on the other side saying like, well, I hope you're happy, like things are worse. It's like, no, it's like, there is one country. Everybody's a citizen of that country.

• 1:23:11Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:12Speaker 00

  You know, it's not a zero sum game because if it becomes legitimately a zero sum game, then we descend deeper into chaos. And that's not in the best interest of the United States, but it is in the best interest of competitors. And so we have a fantastic ability to allow people to share ideas freely, but we also can't say, hey, this is what you believe because that's just not how we do things as Americans.

• 1:23:39Danny Jones?

  Right. But if you can some sort of, if you can covertly inject something, some sort of cohesive idea into the US population like Christianity in a way that seems natural. Why wouldn't you try to do that? Like, for example, there's a, there's a whole nother movement in the psychedelic world to try to, to try to merge psychedelics and Christianity as well.

• 1:24:03Speaker 00

  Whoa, interesting.

• 1:24:05Danny Jones?

  Yeah, there's this book by Brian Marrescu where he makes the case, it's called The Immortality Key. He makes the case at the end of it that it would be beneficial to introduce psychedelics into the church.

• 1:24:16Speaker 00

  Now, I guess-

• 1:24:17Danny Jones?

  To help people. And one of the crazy things about that is because, you know, you can really manipulate somebody with psychedelics. People's minds become way more manipulative, manipulatable. And especially if people that are, you know, a lot of them who are going to church are probably not, you know-

• 1:24:37Danny Jones?

  They probably are looking for answers to things. And when you have somebody who is, has a direct line to God, who's running this and also has the power to give you psychedelics, that's gonna make you way more submissive and way more malleable to whatever that is. And if you can do that, like also if you can do, if you can give all these people psychedelics and have these individual church fathers giving them a specific message, maybe that's the way you can do it.

• 1:25:07Speaker 00

  Well, I think that, that especially religion and spirituality really talks to you. You know, there is no greater right to a future tense than forgiveness in heaven, right? Like, even if your life really sucks right now, at least when you die, you go to heaven. Like, that is the ultimate belief in a future tense.

• 1:25:24Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:25:24Speaker 00

  Um, and like, you know, we have seen that younger generations have become actually more conservative. At least as far as their, their voting is concerned. I guess the, the question that I'd have, and you know, since I'm not a religious scholar at all, is, you know, what is the, what is the benefit specifically of aligning with one spiritual text over another? Is it just because that has been a part of the sort of spiritual DNA of the United States? And, and also, there's a lot of diversity within Christian communities, too. You know, I was, I was raised Catholic, so it's, it's very different than, you know, somebody who went to a megachurch, right?

• 1:26:07Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:08Speaker 00

  Um, and obviously wars have been fought for hundreds of thousands of years over who's doing Christianity right? So, I, could you potentially like, you know, create like some, you know, totally heterodoxical like version of, of faith for the United States? I think it kind of goes back to that, that thing. Somebody from NASA said about faking the moon landing, right? So they were saying like, you know, if you would understand how hard it would be and how many people would have to work together in order to fake the moon landing, you'd realize it's easier to just go to the moon, right? Like.

• 1:26:50Danny Jones?

  Do you believe that?

• 1:26:51Speaker 00

  I do, yeah. I think that it's, I, I think that there, and I've, I've had, uh, uh.

• 1:26:58Danny Jones?

  Why is the moon landing the one that seems to be the most kookiest? Like, if you believe in the moon landing was fake, you're, you're a fucking crazy person. But you can believe all these other conspiracies and people don't think you're out to lunch like that.

• 1:27:07Speaker 00

  Oh, see, I actually, I disagree. I think, I think Flat Earth is the kookiest.

• 1:27:11Danny Jones?

  Oh, Flat Earth is the kookiest. Yeah, right.

• 1:27:13Speaker 00

  I think Flat Earth is by far the kookiest, or like, uh.

• 1:27:15Danny Jones?

  Flat Earth is, is the stupidest, for sure.

• 1:27:17Speaker 00

  Tartarianism?

• 1:27:20Speaker 00

  Do you know Tartarianism?

• 1:27:21Danny Jones?

  Uh, I think I've heard of it.

• 1:27:22Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's like, it's basically the sort of idea that there was, uh, there was a, like, a large chunk of history that was covered up by the powers that be, uh, that were actually, like, that, like, 200 years of history that was covered up by, you know, some shadowy cabal of the powers that be.

• 1:27:39Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:27:39Speaker 00

  Um, and that was because, like, you know, there was this group of people called, like, the Tartarians, and they had, like, zero-point energy.

• 1:27:48Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:27:48Speaker 00

  And they had giants, and they had, you know, all sorts of, like, advanced technologies.

• 1:27:53Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:53Speaker 00

  Frankly, like, as far as conspiracy theories is considered, it's one of my favorites because it's just so cool, like.

• 1:27:58Danny Jones?

  Tartarianism.

• 1:27:59Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, they, they talk about how, like, um, you know, certain towers were like zero-point energy machines, then.

• 1:28:06Danny Jones?

  Whoa.

• 1:28:07Speaker 00

  Yeah, some, like, YouTube channel just, like, has a slow black and white footage of something old and, like, a really big door, and they're like, and see? Giants. Damn, that is a really big door. Story checks out to me.

• 1:28:21Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:21Speaker 00

  Right?

• 1:28:22Danny Jones?

  Moon landing's definitely up there, though, with one of the.

• 1:28:24Speaker 00

  It's up there.

• 1:28:25Danny Jones?

  You're, you're stupid if you think the moon landing was fake.

• 1:28:27Speaker 00

  I mean, I think that, like, I, I try to have as, like, as much empathy as possible for, for, like, fringe communities, because it's like.

• 1:28:37Danny Jones?

  So who, you, you said that a lot of people would have to keep the secret for the moon landing to have been faked.

• 1:28:42Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:28:43Danny Jones?

  How, do you, do you think it's more than the Kennedy assassination? As far as people that would have to know about it.

• 1:28:49Speaker 00

  Damn, um, I think there, yeah, I think there would probably just be more people involved because there's, there's more people involved with a, uh, with launching something into space. I mean, you've got.

• 1:28:59Danny Jones?

  Right, but they could have still launched some, but they could have still launched the astronauts into space, right? And this never gone into the actual moon. Maybe only the astronauts and a, and a handful of people that were involved in like filming it or knowing about that stuff.

• 1:29:11Speaker 00

  I mean, my official opinion is UFOs did both.

• 1:29:14Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:14Speaker 00

  That's, that's, that's my, the, the targeting UFOs did.

• 1:29:17Danny Jones?

  But like all the people in the, in the command center, you know, that were guiding the launch, they, they knew they were launching them out to space and they still launched the astronauts into space, right? But the, the fact that they went to the actual moon, you could easily like, I think you could fake that without a lot, without a ton of people knowing about it.

• 1:29:32Speaker 00

  Hmm, mm-hmm. Wasn't that, wasn't there a movie that was made about that too?

• 1:29:36Danny Jones?

  There's a bunch of movies that are made about it, yeah.

• 1:29:37Speaker 00

  I like a, like a fiction movie made about that.

• 1:29:39Danny Jones?

  Oh, no, I don't know.

• 1:29:40Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:29:41Danny Jones?

  Fiction movie.

• 1:29:41Speaker 00

  I, I, there's like some.

• 1:29:43Danny Jones?

  Can you find that?

• 1:29:43Speaker 00

  Fly Me to the Moon, isn't that like a rom-com about, about them faking the moon landing?

• 1:29:47Danny Jones?

  Maybe.

• 1:29:47Speaker 00

  I heard about it, yeah. I didn't see it, but I heard it was great.

• 1:29:50Danny Jones?

  But like during that, that period of time, the Cold War, there was so much fuckery going on.

• 1:29:54Speaker 00

  Yeah, well, and.

• 1:29:54Danny Jones?

  Gulf of Tonkin, Kennedy's assassination.

• 1:29:57Speaker 00

  And, and during the.

• 1:29:58Danny Jones?

  MKUltra.

• 1:29:58Speaker 00

  Right. The, you know, the, was it, was it about that? Yeah, yeah, that's it. Oh, that's hilarious.

• 1:30:03Danny Jones?

  What does it say? Fly Me to the Moon, a two, a 2024 American historical romantic comedy drama film by blah, blah, blah, blah, written by blah, blah, blah, blah. Okay, let me see what the idea of the story is. Okay. A NASA launch director set against the backdrop of an Apollo 11 mission. The story follows Jones and Davis as she is tasked with creating a false moon landing in case the actual mission fails. Wow.

• 1:30:25Speaker 00

  Ah, Hollywood's.

• 1:30:26Danny Jones?

  That's another good point.

• 1:30:27Speaker 00

  Hollywood's telling us.

• 1:30:29Danny Jones?

  If they couldn't get, well, you know, that's the thing though. Did they, did they, did they actually try? Is it plausible that they could have tried to do it and had a backup plan in case it fails?

• 1:30:37Speaker 00

  Hmm.

• 1:30:37Danny Jones?

  And they can't do it. Because one of the biggest arguments for the fake, for the, for the fraud is that they couldn't get through that radiation belt.

• 1:30:44Speaker 00

  Yeah, but that's.

• 1:30:45Danny Jones?

  The Van Allen radiation.

• 1:30:46Speaker 00

  The Van Allen, yeah, but that's, that's a sort of fundamental misunderstanding of how the Van Allen radiation belt works.

• 1:30:52Danny Jones?

  Oh, really?

• 1:30:52Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's because you.

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• 1:30:59Speaker 04

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• 1:31:54Speaker 00

  Yes, that radiation does exist there, but it's still in a vacuum of space. So you can pass through it and it's not like you will be immediately irradiated. It's because of how thermodynamics works in space. So you can pass through it, but there is a heat signature there, right?

• 1:32:14Danny Jones?

  Yeah, but have we ever sent? Have we ever done? Did we ever do tests, sending like animals through the radiation belt and bring them back? And then test them and see what they did? Because I know the Russians did.

• 1:32:23Speaker 00

  Yeah, they sent that dog.

• 1:32:25Danny Jones?

  And it died a couple of days later.

• 1:32:26Speaker 00

  I can't remember the name of the dog. But they also sent Yuri Gagarin up there, which is such a wild story. You know that Yuri Gagarin, the first man in space? He actually...

• 1:32:36Danny Jones?

  They sent him up past the radiation belt?

• 1:32:37Speaker 00

  That I don't know, but he was the first person to orbit space.

• 1:32:40Danny Jones?

  Yes, right.

• 1:32:40Speaker 00

  Which must have been a wild thing for him. Literally the first dude.

• 1:32:46Danny Jones?

  Oh, God!

• 1:32:47Speaker 00

  Also, he grew up in like a mud shack without lights. And he was the first person to like rotate around the Earth and come back. Like, how incredible.

• 1:33:00Danny Jones?

  That's fucking wild.

• 1:33:00Speaker 00

  That's actually one of the reasons that I think, like, when I think about, you know, how technology will advance within our lifetime, I think about Yuri Gagarin, right? Because Yuri Gagarin, he literally grew up in a mud house with no lights. And then, you know, flash forward a couple of years and he's blasting off and is the first person in space. Like... Our version of, you know, growing up in that like mud hut somewhere in Russia could be that like we grew up remembering, you know, a time without the internet or without cell phones or something. But that doesn't, it's really hard for us to understand how exponentially technology will grow in our lifetime.

• 1:33:43Danny Jones?

  Well, look how exponentially all technologies grow.

• 1:33:45Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:33:45Danny Jones?

  Right? Like, look how, look how crazy, how, how fast like AI has just evolved since it first came out. But the moon, the Apollo mission technology is literally the only technology in human history, in modern human history, that hasn't doubled since the time we created it. It literally disappeared.

• 1:34:03Speaker 00

  Hmm.

• 1:34:03Danny Jones?

  We haven't got, like, we, we went to the moon in sixty-nine and through, from sixty-nine through seventy-three, and we haven't been able to do it since. It's the only technology that hasn't exponentially gotten better or like doubled in its capacity or its ability to.

• 1:34:18Speaker 00

  So there are plans to go back to the moon. I don't know if they're, if they're being scrapped right now with.

• 1:34:22Danny Jones?

  They keep getting pushed back.

• 1:34:23Speaker 00

  Yeah, if you look at Artemis, is it the Artemis Accords?

• 1:34:26Danny Jones?

  I think they just pushed it to like, uh, March of twenty twenty-six.

• 1:34:29Speaker 00

  So the question right now is like, does, uh, does Artemis go through, which is a transnational agreement to, to go back to the moon? Or, uh, you know, because, because Elon Musk has become so deeply entrenched in the current administration, uh, are we just going full on straight to Mars? And obviously there, there are problems with that because.

• 1:34:49Danny Jones?

  Well, didn't he say we had to go to the moon first?

• 1:34:51Speaker 00

  A, a lot of people have said that we have to go to the moon first, and the reason being is because, you know, you need to have a sort of like, uh, base of operations somewhere off of Earth.

• 1:35:00Danny Jones?

  And Elon also said the reason they haven't gone to the moon is because they would need to refuel nine times.

• 1:35:07Speaker 00

  To go, go to the moon or to go to?

• 1:35:10Danny Jones?

  To the moon.

• 1:35:11Speaker 00

  Uh, interesting. So, yeah, sustainable presence.

• 1:35:14Speaker 08

  So there's three Artemis missions. Uh, the first one's gonna, oh, already launched and.

• 1:35:19Speaker 00

  Hey!

• 1:35:19Danny Jones?

  Yeah, but it was unmanned.

• 1:35:20Speaker 08

  Oh, second one is scheduled for twenty twenty-six. Yeah, the third one.

• 1:35:26Danny Jones?

  Twenty twenty, April of twenty twenty-six.

• 1:35:29Speaker 00

  Yeah, and I mean, you know, the, by, by sort of, and there's also a lot of private space companies now. They call them new space. They're basically startup space of, of, of space companies. And I've interviewed a couple of these people. It's really fascinating. Some people are, are building full on space habitats now. I think that there's a company called VAST that's doing that. Some are creating ways of, of like storing material in space. So that if you need it anywhere in the world, it can just kind of be dropped down to, you know, have on the earth. And, and space as like an emergent field is super fascinating.

• 1:36:08Danny Jones?

  Yeah. Have you ever heard the sound of earth from space?

• 1:36:11Speaker 00

  No.

• 1:36:12Danny Jones?

  Steven.

• 1:36:13Speaker 00

  What does that sound like?

• 1:36:14Danny Jones?

  Pull up the sound of earth from space on YouTube. It's fucking wild, dude.

• 1:36:18Speaker 00

  What? I didn't realize it made a sound.

• 1:36:19Danny Jones?

  It almost sounds like you're in the rainforest.

• 1:36:23Danny Jones?

  The sound, yeah.

• 1:36:24Speaker 00

  There's like howler monkeys and stuff?

• 1:36:25Danny Jones?

  Well, it's from like, it's from like plasma fields.

• 1:36:28Speaker 00

  Whoa.

• 1:36:28Danny Jones?

  Yeah, cuz there's no, you can, you can click that, yeah.

• 1:36:32Speaker 03

  This is the sound of the earth's magnetic field.

• 1:36:41Speaker 00

  Oh, whoa.

• 1:36:46Danny Jones?

  Oh, this isn't the one I saw.

• 1:36:52Danny Jones?

  Go back. This is not, this is not the one I saw. This must be fake news.

• 1:36:55Speaker 00

  This has gotta be fake news.

• 1:36:56Danny Jones?

  Maybe that one. Try that one.

• 1:36:58Speaker 08

  12 hours?

• 1:36:59Speaker 00

  12 hours?

• 1:36:59Danny Jones?

  No, no, no, that's.

• 1:37:01Speaker 00

  The rest of this podcast is just gonna be us listening to earth.

• 1:37:04Danny Jones?

  Up, up, up, right there. Click that one for 11 million views or 1 million views. Oh, you just passed, you went right past it. There you go.

• 1:37:11Speaker 00

  Oh, now I'm getting the, uh, now I'm getting the, uh, uh, rainforest feeling.

• 1:37:19Speaker 09

  These sounds are generated by energetic particles in Earth's plasma sphere, which are being tugged to and fro by the rotation of Earth's magnetic field.

• 1:37:29Speaker 00

  That's so wild.

• 1:37:30Speaker 09

  You see, there is a plasma sphere around Earth containing clumps of ions and electrons. As Earth and its magnetosphere rotate, the magnetic fields push through these particles, accelerating them in a wave called a plasma wave.

• 1:37:45Speaker 00

  Honestly, I'd love to sit next to this guy at a bar.

• 1:37:47Danny Jones?

  How crazy is that?

• 1:37:48Speaker 00

  Thank you.

• 1:37:49Danny Jones?

  That's good, Steve.

• 1:37:50Speaker 00

  Start, start explaining plasma fields, do you?

• 1:37:52Danny Jones?

  Yeah, that's so weird. The other videos, though, sounded so different, right?

• 1:37:55Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah. Well, and then I think we also demonstrated, you know, our own sort of appeal to authority here. It's like, well, this, this one's got three million views.

• 1:38:03Danny Jones?

  This is the one I want, I want to be right.

• 1:38:05Speaker 00

  Like, the, the, the English guy speaking at this point sounds like clearly the most reasonable.

• 1:38:12Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:38:13Speaker 00

  But it's like, all English guys.

• 1:38:14Danny Jones?

  Yeah, for real.

• 1:38:15Speaker 00

  I, um.

• 1:38:16Danny Jones?

  Also, going back to the moon landing thing, how come the first guy who ever stepped foot on the moon, which is, which is without a doubt, the most profound groundbreaking thing that humanity has ever accomplished on Earth?

• 1:38:30Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:38:31Danny Jones?

  He's only done, I think, two interviews, and the president had to ask him to do both of them.

• 1:38:35Speaker 00

  Is that right?

• 1:38:36Danny Jones?

  Two. And one of them was super cryptic.

• 1:38:38Speaker 00

  Really?

• 1:38:39Danny Jones?

  Yeah. He did one for like, the 20th anniversary in front of like, a college class, and he was saying like, "We have to break through the lies of our history," or something like that.

• 1:38:47Speaker 00

  Jeez.

• 1:38:48Danny Jones?

  So, if, if you are, if you are the person who achieved the most amazing, astonishing feat of humankind, why have you only done two interviews?

• 1:38:58Speaker 00

  Hmm. Maybe he's not.

• 1:39:00Danny Jones?

  And the president, he says he only, he only does, uh, interviews the president specifically asked him to do.

• 1:39:04Speaker 00

  Yeah, could be that he just doesn't like talking in public, too.

• 1:39:07Danny Jones?

  Right, but wouldn't, if you did, if you accomplish something like that for the, the purpose of solidifying America on the world stage as far as like technological innovation, you would think they would want you to do more, get, you would almost have to be forced to be in the public eye a little bit more than that, right?

• 1:39:24Speaker 00

  Yeah, a bit more. Yeah, I don't know. I, you know, I, uh, I spend most of my research on, on, on the Earth, but now I want to look into the moon more.

• 1:39:32Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:39:33Speaker 00

  Yeah. That's interesting. And, and also like, you know, how, um...

• 1:39:37Danny Jones?

  Pull up, pull up Neil Armstrong's interview in front of this, in front of the class, in front of the college for the, um, moon landing anniversary.

• 1:39:51Danny Jones?

  Wait till you hear this shit.

• 1:39:52Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:39:53Danny Jones?

  It's crazy.

• 1:39:55Speaker 10

  Today we have with us a group of students among America's best.

• 1:40:02Speaker 10

  To you, we say, we've only completed a beginning.

• 1:40:08Speaker 10

  We leave you much that is undone.

• 1:40:13Speaker 10

  There are great ideas undiscovered.

• 1:40:17Speaker 10

  Breakthroughs available to those who can remove one of truth's protective layers.

• 1:40:27Danny Jones?

  What the fuck does that even mean?

• 1:40:30Speaker 00

  You know, I, I don't know. I haven't spent a ton of time with space people.

• 1:40:34Danny Jones?

  Protective layers?

• 1:40:37Speaker 00

  I, I've spent, I've spent a little bit of time. I took, I took a, a, a space course, which was pretty cool. But I, I think that, that one of the things that I noticed in terms of like talking with, with folks that are working on space or working, you know, potentially in space in the future is this, you know, um, desire that we maintained the pace that we had during the space race. Because funding fell off massively. Now the funding for NASA is, is miniscule compared to how much it was. I, I don't know if you can find it, but can you, can you find the percentage of the US budget that, that NASA was funded at the, the time of the space race versus now?

• 1:41:18Danny Jones?

  It was a lot higher.

• 1:41:19Speaker 00

  It was an enormous amount and we.

• 1:41:21Danny Jones?

  But now a lot of that funding is going into SpaceX and other private companies.

• 1:41:24Speaker 00

  Yeah, it goes into SpaceX. And then of course there's, you know, we've, well, not we, I certainly haven't been involved in, in privatizing space. Uh, but there are private space companies that have demonstrated that you can create profit out of, out of space. Um, you know, you've got, you've got.

• 1:41:40Danny Jones?

  Tourism?

• 1:41:41Speaker 00

  Yeah, tourism is coming up. Um, uh, you know, the small satellites for, for bespoke purposes. And this is actually one of the issues that, that we're starting to see more and more, which seems like, yeah, look at that. So 1960s to now.

• 1:41:56Danny Jones?

  60 billion, uh, in tw- that's worth dollars, uh, in 2020. It was worth 60 billion a year.

• 1:42:02Speaker 00

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:42:03Danny Jones?

  Um, where does it say what it is now?

• 1:42:08Speaker 00

  Yeah, so around 4.4% in the 1960s and then

• 1:42:11Danny Jones?

  0.5 now.

• 1:42:11Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:42:12Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:42:13Speaker 00

  And so you imagine what

• 1:42:15Danny Jones?

  But also, a lot of that money has gone to private companies.

• 1:42:17Speaker 00

  Right, yeah, and and private spaces now is is now more open for business.

• 1:42:22Danny Jones?

  Google this, Steve. What was the

• 1:42:27Danny Jones?

  memory on the NASA Apollo computers? The the um, the I think it was their guidance computers?

• 1:42:40Danny Jones?

  Computer memory?

• 1:42:45Speaker 08

  Yeah, there we go.

• 1:42:50Speaker 00

  It's just like an original Game Boy?

• 1:42:52Danny Jones?

  Four kilobytes of RAM.

• 1:42:54Speaker 00

  Wow.

• 1:42:54Danny Jones?

  Four kilobytes.

• 1:42:56Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:42:56Danny Jones?

  Of RAM to get to the moon.

• 1:43:00Speaker 00

  Core rope memory. Incredible.

• 1:43:02Danny Jones?

  And it's also just convenient that all that technology disappeared because you know what their excuse was?

• 1:43:06Speaker 00

  What?

• 1:43:06Danny Jones?

  Why why they don't have any of that Apollo technology anymore? Because they accidentally over the wrote over the hard drive.

• 1:43:13Speaker 00

  They were playing Doom.

• 1:43:14Danny Jones?

  Yeah, they're they had to download the new Doom.

• 1:43:16Speaker 00

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:43:18Danny Jones?

  They actually did it over.

• 1:43:19Speaker 00

  Fair, fair, totally worth it. That was a great game. It really changed changed the landscape for everybody. You know, this is this is also something I've been thinking about a lot more too, which is like, uh, what what is the the right amount of transparency with with? When you have like an enormous thing like the national security apparatus, like like intelligence agencies like NASA? You have this massive thing that everybody has buy in because all of our our tax dollars are going to. I mean, the world has buy in into it because the world is oftentimes affected by American foreign policy and American national security.

• 1:43:55Speaker 00

  We have a certain amount of transparency, um, especially in terms of the intelligence community because after the church commission, they were like, well, we need you to reveal certain things. You need to declassify things after a certain point. Um, so now we have a certain amount of transparency, but it seems like that amount of transparency doesn't do enough to actually make us trust these. Organizations more. In fact, it sort of throws more distrust into them. Like, we, we both know about like MKUltra because those things were declassified. But declassification didn't end up making us trust these organizations much more. We were like, wait, so what are you doing now? Right. And so there's this, this period of obfuscation right now.

• 1:44:39Speaker 00

  Like, as far as what the intelligence community is doing, what space did previously, what the United States government is doing. But they're not transparent right now. And the previous transparency that has been revealed, uh, has just done enough to sort of sow discord into the American imagination. But I think that's one of the difficulties with national security in general. National security is like trust. You really only think about it when it's broken. When something goes wrong, you think about it. Like, we don't know about all of the operations that went really well because we shouldn't know about those things.

• 1:45:18Speaker 00

  We do start to understand when things have gone not so well, or things have been leveled at the American people, as, as was the case with, with MKUltra. Or some of the, uh, or, um, you know, some of the other, um, Department of Defense things, um.

• 1:45:34Speaker 00

  I'm trying to think, uh, who were the, oh, the Tuskegee experiments. Oh, yeah. Is that right? Tuskegee? The Tuskegee Airmen?

• 1:45:41Speaker 11

  Yeah.

• 1:45:42Speaker 00

  Yeah. Um, yeah, so like, we know when those things have gone wrong, but, and that's why I actually think that, that there, we need to look at how we do transparency. Because the purpose of transparency is to, uh, establish greater trust. But what it has done seemingly in the United States is oftentimes destroyed trust or eroded trust. And that's because we know things that have happened in the past that are, are, you know, incredibly corrupt. And, and potentially leveled at the American people. So I, I think this, this eventually sort of goes back into the information space too. Where it's like, if it becomes a really good target for anybody who wants to mess with the American information space, to be like,

• 1:46:27Speaker 00

  Well, look at that thing that you did in the past that the United States has been honest about presumably. Well, what do you think you're doing in the future? Like, anything that you can do to sort of like erode the trust of the American people between each other and between the American government certainly works to the benefit of global competitors.

• 1:46:45Danny Jones?

  Hmm, which certainly points out the incentives for national security and law enforcement to be embedded in these social media companies like we found out there in the Twitter files.

• 1:46:55Speaker 00

  Which is really interesting, and I think that this is also, right now, there's, there's a sort of, there's a conversation going on in some national security circles, which, which I tend to like a lot, which is, uh, at least I think it's a conversation that should be had, which is, how do we

• 1:47:14Speaker 00

  how do we create an environment where national security and national defense are separate but equally aligned, right? So, national security is really about ensuring the, the life and livelihood uh, and present of your population is secure into the future. So that could be anything from like energy policy and education to agriculture policy. That's a bigger circle than national defense, which is, instead of making the lives of the American people much better, it's potentially making the lives of adversaries much worse for a punctuated period of time.

• 1:47:54Speaker 00

  And those things have sort of become conflated, that national security and national defense are the exact same thing.

• 1:48:00Danny Jones?

  Same with war and defense.

• 1:48:02Speaker 00

  Right, yeah, exactly. I mean, you know, the

• 1:48:05Danny Jones?

  Like they added the D to ARPA to make it sound like we're defending ourselves.

• 1:48:08Speaker 00

  Right, yeah. And you know, there's also IARPA.

• 1:48:11Danny Jones?

  No, I've never heard of that.

• 1:48:12Speaker 00

  Yeah, they're the, uh,

• 1:48:13Danny Jones?

  What the hell is IARPA?

• 1:48:14Speaker 00

  Intelligence Advanced Research, uh, Project Agency. Yeah, IARPA. They're all, yeah.

• 1:48:22Danny Jones?

  Holy crap.

• 1:48:24Speaker 00

  Really interesting papers.

• 1:48:24Danny Jones?

  How have I never heard about this, dude?

• 1:48:27Speaker 00

  I just heard about them. Um, but yeah, they, they have, uh, you can go onto their website. They have tons of white papers. You know, I think you'd be surprised at how much of this stuff is, is just totally open source. You can just go rooting around, um, the, the classic RAND papers. In fact, there's some really cool ones on there. There's, um, uh, there's one that was written by Isaac Asimov, and it is literally talking about like trying to find a new, a new planet for humanity. This is back in the 1960s when he was writing it. They have a famous paper about, that was imagined, a world circling spaceship. And as I was reading it, I was like, oh my God, did they ever actually build this world, world circling spaceship? And then I realized they were talking about satellites.

• 1:49:09Speaker 00

  So the, like this initial paper just imagined what satellites would be in the future.

• 1:49:15Danny Jones?

  In the 60s?

• 1:49:16Speaker 00

  Yeah, you can find it. Uh, find, uh, the, sorry, I was being very demanding just now. Uh, the white rabbit is talking.

• 1:49:23Danny Jones?

  How do you like that white rabbit?

• 1:49:24Speaker 00

  Uh, I, I'm speaking faster.

• 1:49:28Danny Jones?

  But you don't feel like super jittery though, right? It is not, it doesn't feel like caffeine, right?

• 1:49:32Speaker 00

  My eyelids are sweaty. White rabbit, sweat in places you never thought you would. Uh, what, what, what am I looking at? Oh, uh, so look at, um, uh, RAND classic papers, uh, world circling spaceship.

• 1:49:45Danny Jones?

  Have you seen the, um, the animations of what all the satellites look like orbiting the earth right now?

• 1:49:52Speaker 00

  Oh, it's wild, right?

• 1:49:54Danny Jones?

  It's insane.

• 1:49:56Speaker 00

  There it is. Yeah. Uh, preliminary design of experient, experimental world circling spaceship. 1946, it wasn't even the 60s.

• 1:50:04Danny Jones?

  Go to images.

• 1:50:07Speaker 00

  You can actually look up the real paper.

• 1:50:08Danny Jones?

  You're on, uh, Brave.

• 1:50:10Speaker 00

  You can check out the actual paper there, I think.

• 1:50:12Danny Jones?

  Dude, the images and the animations of all the fucking satellites that are orbiting the earth right now, it, it looks like flies buzzing around a dumpster.

• 1:50:20Speaker 00

  There is, it's, it's.

• 1:50:21Danny Jones?

  There's so many of them.

• 1:50:23Speaker 00

  Also, if you look at how many of them are owned and operated by, uh,

• 1:50:27Danny Jones?

  SpaceX?

• 1:50:28Speaker 00

  SpaceX, it's, it's pretty astounding. Uh, I think they, that my, my numbers might be off here, but I, I think they've got about.

• 1:50:33Danny Jones?

  Find that, Steve. Find the, uh, the, a video on YouTube of all of the satellites orbiting the earth.

• 1:50:39Speaker 00

  They've got about 7,000 now, and I think the, the goal is to reach to 13,000.

• 1:50:44Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:50:44Speaker 00

  Um, and so I think those are in. Nothing to see here. Yeah, those are in, uh, low earth orbit. Um, or.

• 1:50:53Danny Jones?

  Click that.

• 1:50:53Speaker 00

  Holy shit.

• 1:50:56Danny Jones?

  How crazy is that dude?

• 1:50:59Speaker 00

  I mean, honestly, you think about that from the perspective of aliens, like if aliens are watching, they're like, wait a second.

• 1:51:04Danny Jones?

  Holy fuck.

• 1:51:05Speaker 00

  They got a lot of stuff.

• 1:51:07Danny Jones?

  Look at that. Look how many are farther out.

• 1:51:09Speaker 00

  Yeah. Well, so this, this, uh, see this red one, um, this long red elliptical orbit.

• 1:51:15Danny Jones?

  What is that one?

• 1:51:16Speaker 00

  I can't remember what that orbit is called, but there, so the, the three main orbits are, uh, Leo, Mio and Gio. So, uh, low Earth orbit, uh, mid Earth orbit, and then geostationary orbit.

• 1:51:29Danny Jones?

  Whoa.

• 1:51:31Speaker 00

  And then there's this-

• 1:51:31Danny Jones?

  That's fucking terrifying.

• 1:51:33Speaker 00

  There's this one really long elliptical orbit that is, is quite different from all of those. And usually that's used for, um, uh, for spy satellites.

• 1:51:43Danny Jones?

  Really? Why spy satellites? Why do they have such a long orbit?

• 1:51:46Speaker 00

  Uh, eh, I, I think it's because-

• 1:51:48Danny Jones?

  Look at that shit.

• 1:51:49Speaker 00

  Wow. Yeah, well, they also have to be, be, uh, very specifically hardened against radiation because they, uh, uh, they're further and further out.

• 1:51:59Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:51:59Speaker 00

  And I, I think it's, it's probably just for, for defensive reasons. That's just, it's gonna be a lot, lot harder to disrupt that. But also fighting in spaces is really not what you might think. Like, there's no, like, the Star Wars fighting in space thing really isn't, uh, we're not there yet, you know?

• 1:52:16Danny Jones?

  It looks like a fucking junkyard.

• 1:52:18Speaker 00

  Yeah, this, this is an enormous problem. So like, um-

• 1:52:22Danny Jones?

  And, and how many collisions, how many satellite collisions are there, Steve? Is there, is, is there a stat on like, um, how many collisions per year there are with satellites in Earth, in Earth orbit?

• 1:52:33Speaker 00

  Uh, there, there aren't tons, uh, but it's a problem that's like consistently being worried about, right? Because if you have, let's see.

• 1:52:45Danny Jones?

  What's it say? It's not consistently, what? Go to fucking Chrome.

• 1:52:49Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:52:51Speaker 00

  Well, and I think

• 1:52:51Danny Jones?

  We use Brave usually because there's no ads.

• 1:52:53Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:52:54Danny Jones?

  It's not as curated as Google.

• 1:52:56Speaker 00

  I think one of the reasons that it's not, it's not usually reported is because then obviously there's, there's, you have to attribute the damage of a really exquisite system to maybe somebody launching something that, that in a way that they shouldn't have.

• 1:53:15Danny Jones?

  So this says one satellite is destroyed by collision with other satellites or space junk annually.

• 1:53:20Speaker 00

  Yep. And space junk is like, we can track, I think.

• 1:53:24Danny Jones?

  That's crazy. How many satellites are there total orbiting the earth?

• 1:53:27Speaker 00

  I don't know, but, but this is something that we're worried about. This Kessler syndrome is really interesting.

• 1:53:32Danny Jones?

  What is that?

• 1:53:33Speaker 00

  Kessler syndrome is this, uh, this idea that if you have one collision in space and uh, suddenly you create this mass of space junk, then everything else that is within that orbit uh, could potentially be impacted by that space junk. And then you make more space junk and then you make more space junk.

• 1:53:53Danny Jones?

  Right. And you can't track the space junk.

• 1:53:54Speaker 00

  Not only can you not, well, you can track down to the size of about a nickel.

• 1:53:58Danny Jones?

  Oh, wow.

• 1:53:59Speaker 00

  Uh, but below that, even, even something below the size of a nickel can still destroy your satellite, right?

• 1:54:05Danny Jones?

  Right. Cause it's flying so fucking fast.

• 1:54:06Speaker 00

  Right. Potentially if Kessler syndrome really happens and it gets worse and worse, not only does that stop us from launching new things into space out past low earth orbit, but it even has an effect on whether or not we can observe space as much. There's this, this um, concern about uh, having so much stuff flying in space that will no longer have dark skies. And you need dark skies in order to uh, use research telescopes to look out past earth. And so constraining the amount of uh,

• 1:54:42Danny Jones?

  So what would the skies look like if they were covered in satellites?

• 1:54:45Speaker 00

  God, I just hope there isn't like a Pepsi ad. Like, I think there was actually a thing about that there that somebody was talking about uh,

• 1:54:52Danny Jones?

  Okay. So this says as of 2024, 28,300 satellites are orbiting earth with almost 59,000 um, catalogued in total since the launch of Sputnik.

• 1:55:03Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:55:03Danny Jones?

  One in 57.

• 1:55:04Speaker 00

  And you have to realize too, that that is only going to go up as the cost to launch goes down.

• 1:55:10Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:55:11Speaker 00

  You know, now there are all of these uh, private launch companies that are, are doing really interesting things like um, I think there's a company called Spin Launch. Um, and I think they launch out of the Mojave Desert. But you're talking about like a much lower cost from a private industry to put your, put whatever you want into space. Um, and as things privatize, they become uh more self-interested and and tend to talk a little bit less with, you know, um, uh, nation-state based uh space apparatuses. This is something I,

• 1:55:46Danny Jones?

  Right, right, that can be dangerous.

• 1:55:48Speaker 00

  I was writing, uh, um, uh, this last year, I I was ghostwriting a book for somebody, um. Uh, and uh, I I can't talk about who it was for, but it was a a thing about artificial intelligence and education. So sort of looking at the history of of what education was, where education came from, and potentially how future technology can kind of help education. And one of the things that sort of became abundantly apparent in that research was that there is a period of standardization with technology, be it ideological technology like education or technology like, you know, um, uh, the printing press, right?

• 1:56:29Speaker 00

  There's a period of standardization that allows you to scale, but then there's a period of specialization, which sort of brings you to the next level. So, once you standardize education, you make sure that everybody has the same education. But if you specialize it, you allow certain outliers to really enhance their skills. And the same thing happens with businesses as well, businesses and technology. Once you standardize the uh ability to, let's say, gain access to low Earth orbit, anybody can now specialize and use that for their own purposes. And this is how things, how technology scales.

• 1:57:06Danny Jones?

  Yes.

• 1:57:06Speaker 00

  And so now we're seeing this point in in space where we're able to do more things because there are public-private partnerships. But those public-private partnerships also have to have a profit-based incentive for them to go up there, right? And and you know, you talked about, um, uh, uh, like Palantir earlier too. Palantir has, is, is, you know, it's a profit-making venture. And so part of their profit-making venture is they need to have a a certain amount of customers. And the United States is a really good customer of that. Um, actually, if you, I don't know, have you seen the uh, the new Palantir commercial?

• 1:57:47Danny Jones?

  No.

• 1:57:48Speaker 00

  Oh, it's really interesting. Um, maybe-

• 1:57:50Danny Jones?

  Is it on YouTube?

• 1:57:50Speaker 00

  I think so. Maybe you can look it up.

• 1:57:53Danny Jones?

  Oh, we gotta see this.

• 1:57:53Speaker 00

  There's, uh, cause I think what it, uh, what the, the Palantir-

• 1:57:57Danny Jones?

  Is this, does it start out with, "The idea of taking lives and saving lives is super interesting."

• 1:58:03Speaker 00

  Is that what?

• 1:58:03Danny Jones?

  That's an Alex Karp quote.

• 1:58:04Speaker 00

  Oh, gosh. Oh, that, that, I'm sure that ma- oh, yeah, it's future warfare.

• 1:58:09Danny Jones?

  That's it?

• 1:58:10Speaker 00

  So check this out.

• 1:58:26Speaker 00

  Okay, so this specifically, this swarming technology?

• 1:58:41Danny Jones?

  Yeesh. Whoa.

• 1:58:42Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:58:43Danny Jones?

  That's fucking sinister.

• 1:58:45Speaker 00

  This, so this, this sort of-

• 1:58:47Danny Jones?

  Go to the comments, I wanna read the comments. What's the top comment of that video?

• 1:58:49Speaker 00

  Uh, UFOs.

• 1:58:50Danny Jones?

  Please have them turned off. Oh, of course they have them turned off.

• 1:58:52Speaker 00

  Cowards. Absolute cowards. Um, so-

• 1:58:57Danny Jones?

  Doing Israel's dirty work.

• 1:58:59Speaker 00

  This, um, uh, this, uh, sort of philosophy, right, of, of like, you have this enormous swarm. There's actually a paper that you can probably find, uh, called the, the Replicator Program. Um, so if you look at, at Replicator on, on the RAN papers-

• 1:59:15Danny Jones?

  Replicator Program?

• 1:59:16Speaker 00

  Replicator, and, and it, you know, this is, this is a bit of, of what we're seeing here. And what Replicator is, is, um, the idea of attributable systems. So attributable systems are systems which, um, uh, essentially they lower the cost by having, um, systems which are not, the, the difference between attributable and another system would be an exquisite system. So, an exquisite system would be something along the lines of, you know, uh, aircraft carrier. This enormous, multi-billion dollar thing.

• 1:59:51Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:59:52Speaker 00

  An attributable system would be a system that- Is like a drone, right? Um, something that like, you don't wanna lose it cuz you could reuse it. But if you lose it, it's not gonna bankrupt you. Right? And so, all of these little drones that you just saw, you know, pop out of this, this, the potentially fictional ship.

• 2:00:09Danny Jones?

  They look like little DJI Mavics.

• 2:00:10Speaker 00

  Right. And so, the idea with replicator is that you have this enormous cost imposition by using attributable systems against exquisite systems. That if you can kill, let's say, an aircraft carrier with a couple of drones that are worth thousands of dollars, you're essentially shooting thousands of dollars at billions of dollars.

• 2:00:31Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:00:31Speaker 00

  And so, in the war of, uh, the spreadsheet, it's clear who wins. And you can potentially bankrupt the, the opponent by doing that.

• 2:00:41Danny Jones?

  So, this is something that, uh, this is a, a paper that Rand put together?

• 2:00:45Speaker 00

  It's right there, yeah. The, the Replicator program.

• 2:00:48Speaker 08

  Is, is this similar to what, uh, Andoril is doing?

• 2:00:52Speaker 00

  Yeah, Andoril is certainly working, working under this, um, under this banner, um.

• 2:00:57Danny Jones?

  And for people who don't know, what is Andoril?

• 2:00:59Speaker 00

  Andoril's a, uh, uh, I don't, would you even call them a startup at this point? They're a, they're a defense company.

• 2:01:05Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 2:01:05Speaker 00

  Um, they're operating under a very different model than, than the traditional defense companies. If I can say, traditional defense companies.

• 2:01:15Danny Jones?

  Is it some, uh, is, is the, is it similar to that company Y Combinator, whatever it's called?

• 2:01:19Speaker 00

  No, Y Combinator is a, is a, an incubator. So, they just get, they give funding for, uh, for startup ideas.

• 2:01:26Danny Jones?

  Got it.

• 2:01:26Speaker 00

  Um, but, uh, what Andoril does is, uh, they've taken a very different tack on, uh, creating defense, uh, defense products, right? So, instead of wait, waiting on what's called an RFP or like a request for proposal, um, uh, from the United States government, the United States government says, "Hey, we need a really cool drone that does X, Y, and Z." And then, let's say, traditional defense company like Boeing or Northrop Grumman will will bid on that, saying, hey, here's what we think we can do with that. They're basically saying, hey, we're going to make what we think you need in the future, and you can pay us for it.

• 2:02:09Speaker 00

  So essentially, trying to leverage their privatized speed and funding to create defense products that are more, that are easily able to be purchased by the United States government. And the idea is to speed up that process of procurement. Okay. Because as, you know, the United States, and this is, this is one of the things that I think is talked about quite a bit, and I've written, written some stuff about this for, for my newsletter, is that the procurement process is so slow that it is oftentimes really difficult for the United States to deal with things on the ground. A good example of this would be during the Global War on Terror.

• 2:02:54Speaker 00

  We had sort of this, this really recent past of Desert Storm. So Desert Storm was sometimes known as the, the very first space war. And the reason was, we used Geo, uh, Geo, we used, uh, what do you, what's Google Maps? You know? GPS? GPS, that's right. Okay. Yeah, so we used- Which is made by DARPA, right? Yeah, yeah, so we used GPS in order to, to locate various forces that were on the ground, and we used that for, for targeting, and we used it for command and control, to great effect. Annie Jacobson writes about this in her book, too. So it was the very first space war. As we went into the Global War on Terror, the thought was, we would be able to leverage

• 2:03:38Speaker 00

  this outsized technological advantage. I think in Annie Jacobson's book, The Pentagon's Brain, they talk about having a battlefield that can see and hear at the exact same time. Right. So we had these enormous technological capabilities, and we still got bogged down. This was a big part of her first platoon book as well, I think. I didn't read that one, but I love her work. Shout out to Annie Jacobson. I hear you're in Los Angeles. Let's hang out.

• 2:04:08Speaker 00

  But, you know, it was undone by IEDs. It was undone by, you know, a couple pounds of fertilizer and an off-the-shelf cellphone. And so, study after study was done on how do we?

• 2:04:21Danny Jones?

  Guerrilla warfare.

• 2:04:23Speaker 00

  Right. And this is fourth-generation warfare, right? This is insurgent warfare. And so, how do we get around these IEDs? And what you had at a certain point was you had the soldiers on the ground actually retrofitting their own vehicles with what they called hillbilly armor. And it was armoring that was going to protect them from the IEDs. And so, let's fast forward maybe four or five years into the global war on terror. We know that IEDs are constantly taking the lives of American servicemen. They're outfitting their own vehicles with technology to potentially help them survive these attacks. And then, five years later, the Department of Defense is able to give them the MRAP, which is armored specifically against IEDs.

• 2:05:08Speaker 00

  So, the procurement process is quite slow. And so, companies like Androl, companies like Palantir, are taking a bet that if they're able to sort of leverage this, one, private funding, and, two, the sort of Silicon Valley, let's look around corners and build for where the puck is going to be rather than where the puck is now, then we can potentially either win the wars of the future or stop them before they even start.

• 2:05:38Danny Jones?

  Right. If you have a lot of tentacles and a lot of arms out there basically testing shit that you would never even... Or people like even like coming up with theories, like this drone thing.

• 2:05:48Speaker 00

  Right.

• 2:05:49Danny Jones?

  Having thousands of drones that are worth, you know, less than $100,000 swarm these ships that are worth billions of dollars and potentially take them out.

• 2:05:56Speaker 00

  Well, and this is something that we're seeing...

• 2:05:57Danny Jones?

  That's a kind of a crazy theory.

• 2:05:58Speaker 00

  Yeah, this is something we're seeing in Ukraine, too. I mean, you know, one of the...

• 2:06:02Danny Jones?

  Did you see how much money we're spending on our new fleet of nuclear submarines?

• 2:06:06Speaker 00

  I have no idea. Probably a lot, though.

• 2:06:08Danny Jones?

  Can you find that, Steve? There's a, we talked, we, we probably looked at this a few months ago, but there's a, a new class, they're calling them the Columbia-class submarines, I believe. We, we had the, we had the Ohio's.

• 2:06:19Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:06:19Danny Jones?

  And now they're working on the Columbia submarines. And I think they cost like $2 billion each.

• 2:06:24Speaker 00

  Nuclear subs don't come cheap, from what I understand.

• 2:06:26Danny Jones?

  The new, okay, yeah, yeah. Total projected budget for the Columbia-class submarine is worth 109, oh, that was it? I thought it was more. For, so 109 billion for 12 subs.

• 2:06:35Speaker 00

  Wow. That's pretty remarkable.

• 2:06:39Danny Jones?

  Estimated, uh, the cost for the lead boat USS District of Columbia is estimated to be around $15.2 billion.

• 2:06:49Speaker 00

  See, this, this is exactly what I'm talking about, about exquisite systems. Obviously incredibly expensive. And, and you can see, you can see this concept of a credibility, uh, as it happened in Ukraine pretty massively, right? Ukraine, the Ukrainian defenses were one of the first armies to defeat a navy without having a navy, right? The Russian forces weren't able to, to completely cut off Odessa because they had so many unarmed vehicles or unmanned vehicles that were able to take out boats.

• 2:07:20Danny Jones?

  Oh, wow.

• 2:07:21Speaker 00

  Right? And so...

• 2:07:22Danny Jones?

  Was this stuff the US gave them?

• 2:07:24Speaker 00

  Uh, actually, no. So there's the, um, it's something that the, the US is, uh, I think currently looking at and learning from. Um, but the, uh, the forces on the ground, from what I understand, in Ukraine were really looking at, uh, what they could do natively. Like, what were their indigenous capabilities? And one of those indigenous capabilities was, uh, not only having a decent amount of drones around, but was, uh, through the, uh, the first-person view, uh, racing community. So there's like a drone racing community? Have you ever seen videos of that?

• 2:07:56Danny Jones?

  Oh, yeah. It's fucking nuts.

• 2:07:58Speaker 00

  It's insane. So they had these first-person view racers that were...

• 2:08:03Speaker 00

  Clearly fantastic at flying drones. And then all they needed to do was 3D print little brackets to make sure that they could hold explosive devices. And those became the, you know, the leading weapon and a new technological innovation that happened from the ground rather than from, you know, some bureaucratic environment speaking down to the ground.

• 2:08:27Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:08:27Speaker 00

  And so that's, that's how they were filling the innovation gap. So it's certainly something that the, the United States has started looking into, but it's also something that, that I think everybody is paying attention to.

• 2:08:37Danny Jones?

  There's also wacky, wild, sickening videos online.

• 2:08:40Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:08:41Danny Jones?

  About the, regarding people like, there, there's videos of drones like dropping bombs on random soldiers.

• 2:08:47Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:08:47Danny Jones?

  Hiding behind bunkers and stuff. I saw one yesterday, a couple of days ago of one, it was a, a first person view of the drone, like the front of the drone, and it rammed in front of a tank and nothing happened. But you can see the guys, there wasn't a tank, it was more like a Hummer or something like that.

• 2:09:02Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:09:02Danny Jones?

  And there was, because there was a windshield and you can see the Russian guys behind the windshield. And as soon as the drones started speeding up, heading towards the Humvee, they like got down like this, but then it backed up and nothing happened. And they tried to ram it again and nothing happened.

• 2:09:14Speaker 00

  There's also, you, you also see even hand, hand combat. Uh, I don't know if you've seen that video. I, I don't recommend anybody watch it because it's pretty gnarly, but um, there's a video of a, a Russian and Ukrainian soldier having a knife fight.

• 2:09:27Danny Jones?

  Oh, really?

• 2:09:27Speaker 00

  And you can actually hear them speaking to one another because they have, one has like um, a GoPro on. And so this, this footage was, was released, but if you want to talk about fifth generation warfare, that's what it is, right?

• 2:09:39Danny Jones?

  It's all of them combined.

• 2:09:40Speaker 00

  It's, it's all of the information space combined. As soon as I saw that, I was like, there is a reason I've seen this video so many times.

• 2:09:46Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:09:47Speaker 00

  In different areas. And that's because one, it works, the, the Russian guy won. It works so massively for the Russian point of view. It, it stimulates the Russian population. It gets more buy-in for the war effort. And there are these other, um, I have, I read something, I don't know if it's actively happening on the ground. I think it might've been a sort of notional thing that people were talking about. But one of the things, um, That as far as like active fifth generation warfare subversion that they're talking about is looking at how you can use the communication apparatuses that soldiers have on them, right? This is one of the very first wars where you can text back home. So the thought experiment- And record everything on a fucking GoPro.

• 2:10:33Speaker 00

  Exactly. So the thought experiment kind of goes like this. Let's say uh, you're texting with your mom. You're a soldier. Doesn't matter which war. Uh, I'm sure we'll have plenty to, to uh, choose from in the future. Um, but you're texting- Mind gummy? No, what is it? Magic mind gummies. Oh, sweet. Hey, magic mind. Shout out to magic mind. Shout out to magic mind. You should- Sponsor link below. Also sponsor, uh, sponsor my newsletter. This is not a psyop. Cause the world is getting weird and you don't need to. I love the gummies, man. They're tasty. Oh, that's good. Nice. Yeah. Between White Rabbit and, and um, Magic Mind and I'm reaching Nirvana. Um, it's incredible. So imagine you're texting back home, you know?

• 2:11:17Speaker 00

  Um, you're on the front lines or maybe you've just done a rotation. You've gone, gone back to a, a base. You're texting regularly with your mother, your mother or your girlfriend, whatever. Um, at a certain point, she says, you know, I actually don't believe in this war anymore. I want you to come home. Um, and uh, you know what? I saw a thing. This is how you surrender. Like, and if you do this, then you'll be able to surrender. You decide, you know what? My mom's right. My girlfriend's right. I'm gonna go surrender. Goes and surrenders only to find out that they were talking with an LLM that had scraped the uh, previous conversations with the mother or with the girlfriend. And it was just imitating that person.

• 2:12:03Speaker 00

  Totally possible with today's technology.

• 2:12:07Speaker 00

  Completely possible. Surrender. Right. And so this is, even China has a doctrine around this. They call it the three warfares doctrine. And it's a doctrine that's built around winning without fighting. And so the three warfares are psychological warfare, economic warfare, and then lawfare. Lawfare being using the laws of a country against itself for potential subversion, or doing things that are completely legal, but they have a subversive quality to them. Right. So, let's say, an example of the psychological operations from China.

• 2:12:49Speaker 00

  There was a rare earth metal processing plant in Texas. And a Facebook group was started to say, hey, we don't want this in our backyard. And there were fake news stories that were put out saying, you know, the radiation from this plant is causing, you know, children to be born with birth defects. Yeah. Real people got into this real group, you know, understanding there is this deep "not in my backyard" or NIMBYism that happens with a lot of American communities. All of the stories were fake, but people really did start to say,

• 2:13:30Speaker 00

  hey, we don't want this rare earth mineral processing plant in our backyard anymore. We think that it's a public health crisis. And so, there was no public health crisis, but the reaction was real. And the purpose of that was to make sure that rare earth mineral processing remained in China. Wow. It's really interesting. And so cost-effective. Totally, yeah. That's the real efficiency of it.

• 2:13:58Speaker 00

  And then, you know, an example of, you know, economics, right? Or, you know, of the three warfares. So China has this initiative called the Belt and Road Initiative. Oh, yeah. Have you talked with people? Fascinating. And for those who don't know, Belt and Road was all about uniting, I think it's like two thirds of the world into a single, you know, economic trade network.

• 2:14:27Danny Jones?

  Right. I think they have, I forget how many, but they built so many roads and ports in Africa. It's mind bending.

• 2:14:32Speaker 00

  Yeah, actually.

• 2:14:33Danny Jones?

  And a lot of those ports that they built can be converted into military bases.

• 2:14:37Speaker 00

  Dual use, yeah. Actually, while I was in Somalia as the ambassador to Liberland, I, so I was doing a food delivery, like an aid delivery out to some nomads that had been affected by cyclone that happened in the area, Cyclone Saggar. So Cyclone Saggar had blown through. We're delivering a couple of tons of food out there. And all of the kids who sort of came up to me through my translator, they were like, they were asking if I was Chinese. And they knew certain Chinese words for different gemstones. And I asked why that.

• 2:15:18Danny Jones?

  Asking if you were Chinese?

• 2:15:19Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, I guess they just hadn't seen somebody who's, I mean, I'm not.

• 2:15:22Danny Jones?

  They haven't seen a China, they have never seen a person from China.

• 2:15:24Speaker 00

  They knew Chinese gemstone words. And I was told that this was because there were Chinese mining companies out there. And so, you know, this is, this is a part of the expansion. In fact, I even met the, well, I met a guy who identified himself as the Chinese ambassador to Somaliland. I mean.

• 2:15:47Danny Jones?

  What did he look like?

• 2:15:48Speaker 00

  Well, he was clearly Chinese. But I, you know, I mentioned that I was the ambassador to Liberland. And I felt like, you know, we really had solidarity as, as being, you know, goofy ambassadors in the same place. But immediately, you know, he wanted to make deals about Liberland. And I'm like, I don't think you understand what Liberland is. And he's like, we're gonna make you the president one day. And I'm like, I, man, you just heard about it. And I just heard about it. So I don't think this deal's gonna go forward. But you do, you know, you do see deals, you know, a part of the Belt and Road initiative all over the world. In fact, recently. In Serbia, one of their projects collapsed, killing quite a few people.

• 2:16:33Speaker 00

  And it's led to the biggest demonstration since the fall of Yugoslavia in Serbia. You can see right now, I think, if you pull up the demonstrations, it's something like 500,000 people are demonstrating. Because of this collapse, but also because it shows the sort of internal corruption of political actors interacting with China or other transnational bodies in a manner that people say is corrupt.

• 2:17:03Danny Jones?

  Holy shit.

• 2:17:05Speaker 00

  It's pretty remarkable.

• 2:17:06Danny Jones?

  Serbia accused of using illegal sonic weapons against peaceful protests.

• 2:17:10Speaker 00

  Yeah, the video of this is pretty insane.

• 2:17:17Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:17:23Speaker 00

  Oh, that's the first time I've actually heard the sound of it.

• 2:17:26Danny Jones?

  That's crazy.

• 2:17:32Danny Jones?

  I've been going to protests for 30 years, and I've never seen anything like this. The sound was like a whiz. Okay.

• 2:17:39Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:17:41Speaker 00

  And you know, so part of this...

• 2:17:43Danny Jones?

  So this is where, so...

• 2:17:45Speaker 00

  This is Belgrade.

• 2:17:50Speaker 00

  And so...

• 2:17:50Danny Jones?

  Have you seen the videos of like some of the crowd control weapons being tested on people?

• 2:17:55Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's really distressing. And I think that, you know, there is some talk about...

• 2:18:03Danny Jones?

  Look at all those. What is this all about?

• 2:18:06Speaker 00

  So there was a collapse of, I want to say it was a bridge in a city called Novi Sad. Will you take a look at the bridge collapse?

• 2:18:17Danny Jones?

  So the idea with this crowd control stuff, these crowd control weapons, is they're not fatal, right? They can't kill you.

• 2:18:24Speaker 00

  Yeah, they're not fatal.

• 2:18:25Danny Jones?

  Right, but who knows what kind of fucking lingering down the line radiation effects it's gonna have?

• 2:18:29Speaker 00

  I think there might actually be something a little bit more pernicious about this kind of thing. And this is something that we've talked about a bit internally.

• 2:18:38Danny Jones?

  So what is this about, the bridge?

• 2:18:40Speaker 00

  Oh, that's Brazil. Yeah.

• 2:18:45Speaker 00

  Yeah, I would just say Serbia collapse.

• 2:18:49Speaker 00

  Or. It said Serbia in the title, right?

• 2:18:52Speaker 08

  Maybe it was like a mix.

• 2:18:54Speaker 00

  Yeah, maybe. Anyways. So, one of the things that I think is important about these sort of crowd control weapons too. And also, artificial intelligence, also cognitive security and cognitive capture, right? Is, and artificial intelligence, all of these things. What it essentially has the possibility of doing is creating a political environment where revolution is impossible, even peaceful revolution. And if you can disperse protesters nonviolently, if you can create. Where it's impossible. To have revolution, to have protests, right? You know, there are a lot of these pernicious technologies. So it's just to control the populace? Yeah. To control the people?

• 2:19:39Speaker 00

  Yeah, population control. And you also see this with. Population mind control. I think that, you know, one of the things that has become a concern to quite a few people, especially with the Chinese Belt and Road Initiative, is that there is this other concept that comes along with it, which is the Digital Silk Road. And so, the Digital Silk Road is, we're gonna give you all of these IT technologies that come along with Belt and Road Initiative technologies, or Belt and Road assets. And so, specifically in Serbia, there were quite a few, there was the development of what was called like a Safe Cities Initiative.

• 2:20:21Speaker 00

  And essentially, this was a mass surveillance net that was provided by the Chinese government.

• 2:20:47Speaker 07

  Para los grandes, para los chicos, para los bajos y los altos, los pacifistas, los valientes, para los optimistas y los pesimistas, los que valoran lo de adentro, para los que están lejos, los que no vende lejos, y los que no vende cerca, para los introvertidos y los extrovertidos, para los que piensan y los que hacen, para los que nos mostraron el camino. Coca-Cola, para todos.

• 2:21:23Speaker 00

  And so this is, and I believe that's actually illegal in Serbian law. And so what the bargain that China is seemingly making is, look, we want this economic infrastructure to be developed because then we are sort of the new champions of globalization where the US was previously. We're able to unify people into a single market, whereas the US was previously doing this by acting as the police for the global oceans. Yeah. But they also want to make sure that they're entrenching powers that will continue to work with them and continue to agree with them.

• 2:22:06Speaker 00

  And so by saying, hey, you want, you know, surveillance technology, do you want digital capabilities that you and your, you know, political party can specifically use, well then get on our team and we'll make sure to continue to entrench your power while also entrenching our own power. And this is, you know, this is legal, right? So this is that lawfare thing, this is that economic thing. So these are the three warfares. Even, so Australia at a certain point, they said, no, we're not gonna, we're not gonna take any more of these technologies, we're not going to work together with the Chinese because we believe that it is against our national interests, it's against our national security. Of course, they ended up getting massive sanctions because of that.

• 2:22:52Speaker 00

  As China has come up into being, you know, a global economic market, not only they're exporters, but they're also an enormous market for sales, right? So Australian companies want to go in there and use them as a market. But of course, this can be used as a cudgel when they are really powerful market. You know, in 2001, China got accession into the WTO or the World Trade Organization. And the bargain that the United States placed on this was that as they entered the free market, as they entered the globalized world, that essentially they would become more liberalized politically,

• 2:23:37Speaker 00

  that autocrats would have less and less ability to maintain control in China. But that didn't actually happen. In fact, they just got economically much stronger while also maintaining autocratic control. And so that's why they are able to expand this network throughout the world, continuing with the doctrine of the three warfares, but also never really going into direct kinetic conflict. Because direct kinetic conflict or direct, you know, aggressive conflict would not only risk their trade relationships, but it would also risk their internal security and their internal tranquility. So we have, you know, in the United States,

• 2:24:23Speaker 00

  Chinese companies and individuals purchasing land in and around, or not in, but around American military bases. As soon as we saw that, we put greater restrictions on that kind of thing.

• 2:24:36Danny Jones?

  They're also installing Huawei cell tower equipment, like within a couple of miles of military bases, or not military bases, but nuclear launch sites.

• 2:24:44Speaker 00

  That as well, yeah. And even policing. There are, or at least were, I think they've been hopefully rid it out now. But there were Chinese policing stations that were within American cities, where if somebody began to speak against the administration in China, they would be talked to. You can look that up.

• 2:25:09Danny Jones?

  How?

• 2:25:10Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah, check it out.

• 2:25:12Danny Jones?

  Chinese policing stations in the US?

• 2:25:14Speaker 00

  Yeah, they were shut down.

• 2:25:16Danny Jones?

  What the fuck?

• 2:25:17Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think if you look it up.

• 2:25:19Danny Jones?

  So if people publicly said something on like social media against China, they would be able to?

• 2:25:24Speaker 00

  Overseas police, uh, go to, uh, uh, Brookings. I, uh, the other one seems to be, uh, Catholic-y to you.

• 2:25:32Danny Jones?

  Yeah, right.

• 2:25:32Speaker 00

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:25:33Danny Jones?

  China's overseas police station is an imminent security threat.

• 2:25:36Speaker 00

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:25:37Danny Jones?

  Just keep scrolling, zoom in to the first paragraph. Between 2016 and 2022, four local Chinese public security bureaus reported establishing 102 oversee police service stations in 53 countries across North and South America, Europe, Africa, and Asia. Citing reports on these stations, uh, released by human rights NGO Safeguard Defenders, authorities in the United States, Canada, the UK, and the Netherlands, and 10 other countries, all launched investigations of these outposts concerning, concerns about the overseas policing stations were, okay, but what specifically were they doing?

• 2:26:13Speaker 00

  Um, so this, uh, from what I understood, they were, uh, policing diaspora. So even, even if somebody was an American citizen, but they're of Chinese descent, they were trying to police the, the diaspora to make sure that they weren't.

• 2:26:24Danny Jones?

  How do you police people, though, and how do you like not get like the whistle blown on you and get?

• 2:26:29Speaker 00

  Well, I think the whistle was eventually blown on them.

• 2:26:32Danny Jones?

  Like, that's crazy, it even lasted a few years.

• 2:26:34Speaker 00

  Right, yeah. And you know, this is, this is certainly something that, that I think is a, a, a continuing, uh, source of interest for, for the US where it's like, you know, we didn't realize that this would be a threat that would be happening. Now, this is, this is non-kinetic, it's not like they're-

• 2:26:51Danny Jones?

  Steve, can you find an example of what they were actually doing in that article? Sorry, go ahead.

• 2:26:55Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, they were not, um, uh, sorry, uh, anyway, I think I read this report one time. Um, you know, it's not like they're, they're blowing up weapons in the United States, but they are eliciting power. They're, they're using gray zone power in the United States without turning it into a kinetic conflict. And so that is also a version of fifth generation warfare.

• 2:27:16Danny Jones?

  But that also, what they were doing does, is not legal by the United States law. It's, it's illegal, so they weren't using our laws against us, they were straight violating laws.

• 2:27:24Speaker 00

  Violating it certainly, but, uh, and also I would imagine they didn't register as foreign actors, which is something that you, you have to do in the United States. So if you're, if you're operating on behalf of, of a foreign government, you have to register as a, a foreign agent somehow.

• 2:27:38Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:27:38Speaker 00

  Um, so, so yeah, like all of these things are-

• 2:27:41Danny Jones?

  Unless you're Israel.

• 2:27:43Speaker 00

  I, I-

• 2:27:45Speaker 00

  I don't study them. I just study UFOs.

• 2:27:50Speaker 00

  They sound great, um, but.

• 2:27:52Danny Jones?

  We don't want to get this podcast demonetized.

• 2:27:54Speaker 00

  I, I, I think, uh, what was, uh, talked with Julian about something that, that got him, got him demonetized for one of our episodes.

• 2:28:02Danny Jones?

  Something about Israel?

• 2:28:03Speaker 00

  I have no idea. It was, it wasn't something about Israel, but, but hey, we've gone, gone through China and Russia. So, you know, hopefully you can make a hundred thousand dollars an episode on this one. Just talk with tenant media. I'm sure they'd love to have you. Yeah.

• 2:28:17Danny Jones?

  I wish they would pay me.

• 2:28:18Speaker 00

  I mean, right?

• 2:28:18Danny Jones?

  I'd take a hundred, a thousand dollars per episode.

• 2:28:20Speaker 00

  But you don't need that with Magic Mind. You can come up with other profit-making ventures. Magic Mind.

• 2:28:28Danny Jones?

  Link below.

• 2:28:29Speaker 00

  Yeah. Um, I, I'm actually really interested the, um, in, in sort of like running all of these, uh, fifth generation warfare concepts together.

• 2:28:39Danny Jones?

  Did you find anything, Steven, by the way?

• 2:28:42Speaker 08

  Like what specifically they were doing?

• 2:28:43Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:28:44Speaker 08

  It's, it's very convoluted other than, so I, I have, I have a little bit of info.

• 2:28:49Danny Jones?

  Can you highlight it on there?

• 2:28:50Speaker 08

  What to expect and how to respond. No, I wasn't here.

• 2:28:53Danny Jones?

  Okay. Well, let me know when you find it.

• 2:28:54Speaker 08

  Information. Oh, okay. Information is also limited.

• 2:28:59Danny Jones?

  No way clear, uh, clear whose hands these stations is, if staff are paid. This is very, this is not.

• 2:29:07Speaker 08

  More information is needed.

• 2:29:08Speaker 00

  Yeah, I really should.

• 2:29:09Speaker 08

  The concern over these stations is warranted.

• 2:29:10Speaker 00

  Yeah. I really should have boned up more on those things, but.

• 2:29:13Danny Jones?

  I'm sure you can find it somewhere, Steve, if you really search.

• 2:29:15Speaker 00

  I remember.

• 2:29:15Danny Jones?

  Not on this article, but maybe on another one.

• 2:29:17Speaker 00

  I was speaking with one of the, the, the China analysts who was, who was talking about this and he was like, oh yeah, that's definitely a real thing. It's, it's, it's happening. But I, I mean, you know, this is, this is one of those things where it's like, you know, we have, we have a very permeable country. It's part of, it's part of like the benefits of the United States.

• 2:29:37Danny Jones?

  Right, right, exactly.

• 2:29:38Speaker 00

  You know, I, I've lived in Albania on and off for.

• 2:29:41Danny Jones?

  It makes us vulnerable.

• 2:29:42Speaker 00

  Like seven years and no point would anybody ever mistake me for Albanian, you know, within the country, but, but in as diverse a country as ours, you can just be American.

• 2:29:53Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:29:54Speaker 00

  Um, and we have a process for doing that. Uh, we have this open information space. And actually one of the reasons that.

• 2:30:00Danny Jones?

  Okay, here we go.

• 2:30:01Speaker 00

  I started.

• 2:30:02Danny Jones?

  Chinese policing stations in Europe are reportedly involving in monitoring Chinese disparate, okay, this is basically what we said.

• 2:30:08Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:30:08Speaker 08

  Yeah.

• 2:30:11Danny Jones?

  According to human rights groups like Safeguard Defender.

• 2:30:13Speaker 00

  Persuasion to return, so I've heard about this a bit, like that, that potentially anybody, somebody who's acting in dissident fashion could be persuaded to return to China, which obviously.

• 2:30:28Danny Jones?

  Oh, so they're policing Chinese people in the US or Europe, not just regular people?

• 2:30:32Speaker 00

  No, no, Chinese people, yeah.

• 2:30:34Danny Jones?

  Only former Chinese people, I see, I see.

• 2:30:37Speaker 00

  But also Chinese diaspora who are American citizens.

• 2:30:40Danny Jones?

  Ah, okay, I see, I thought you just meant they were doing this to anybody.

• 2:30:43Speaker 00

  No, they're not just like giving tickets to American people. That'd be really weird.

• 2:30:49Danny Jones?

  Get pulled over by a Chinese police car.

• 2:30:51Speaker 00

  I'm like, I don't, I don't speak Mandarin, sir. And yeah, man, I got a ticket on the way here from, from, you know, somebody working for the CCP, that sucks.

• 2:30:59Danny Jones?

  Oh my god, could you imagine?

• 2:31:00Speaker 00

  Yeah, but no.

• 2:31:01Danny Jones?

  We got away with it for 10 years.

• 2:31:02Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's specifically aimed at policing diaspora and minimizing external, external actors from sort of expressing dissent from the CCP. And, you know, as, as China becomes more powerful, they're, they're also able to, you know, to have more influence in, in other countries because the United States, you know, the bargain of, of what was called the Bretton Woods Accords, which were the sort of financial accords that ended World War II. It took the economies of, of Europe and also Japan and it dollarized them.

• 2:31:43Speaker 00

  So it established the currencies of, dominant currencies of Europe and also the currency of Japan and pegged it to the dollar to make sure that they could sort of economically return and build back after the devastation of World War II, well, World War I and World War II. There was an exchange for this too, and that was that the United States would then become the sort of police of the global ocean, right? But they wouldn't be putting their thumb on the scale for any one particular nation because a lot of the European conflicts were really over who got access to resources and who could control the market.

• 2:32:27Speaker 00

  If the United States was able to project power on both seas at the exact same time, the Atlantic and the Pacific. And establish that as a global marketplace, then globalization could go anywhere without anybody stepping on each other's toes. So we've had that for many, many years and it has brought a good deal of wealth to the United States, but it's also allowed everybody else to globalize. And for a brief period of time, from the 1940s up until the 1960s, we saw that sort of like American golden age, where somebody within a generation went from being, you know, close to the poverty line to being decently wealthy.

• 2:33:10Speaker 00

  Everybody had this, you know, belief in their future tense because they could see that they were becoming healthier, wealthier, and more secure as they went along, potentially like our grandparents. Like, I know that my, you know, my grandfather went from being like, you know, he was a refrigerator salesman and then my father became a judge. Like, so this was an enormous generational jump up. But progress started to slow. And progress started to slow due to the fact that America moved through this process of being a value-added manufacturing-based middle class to being a skills and knowledge-based middle class.

• 2:33:50Speaker 00

  And suddenly, we were able to export the labor that is required with manufacturing. We could come up with the ideas, but the labor would seek the point in the world that had the lowest price point. Right. So whenever you open an iPhone, you see "designed in California." You certainly don't see "made in California." And globalization allowed that to happen, so then you had a sort of hollowing out of the middle class, because now you really just need skills and knowledge-based workers and you need people who are, you know, very low-skilled workers or service workers. And so we don't have that robust middle class anymore.

• 2:34:30Speaker 00

  And it's like, there's, there's a, an exporting of those things to countries that the price point is simply cheaper. Right. And so... This same thing is now possible as we, as I'm looking at the sort of future of statecraft too, where it's like, at some point, we'll have people that are so wealthy that their country doesn't matter anymore. And they're just going to find the tax jurisdiction that will make the most sense for their finances. So taking that idea of citizenship or sovereignty as a service, they will be like, well, what do I actually get for my American citizenship? Or my, I don't know, Kitz and Nevis citizenship?

• 2:35:13Speaker 00

  And they'll say, well, I wanna go to a bunch of different countries. I want maybe decent healthcare and I want a certain amount of protection. Well, all of those things can kind of be provided by private companies at this point. Private companies are becoming so powerful that you'll see, you know, Facebook has housing. They even have school systems to, you know, I should say Meta. They have school systems to, you know, help the families that are working at Meta. They even have defense and security specifically for their employees. If you look at, you know, oil companies that are working in dangerous areas like the Niger River Delta, they've got private military companies that are working alongside them.

• 2:35:58Speaker 00

  It's not a far leap to say that in the future, it would be very possible that companies will become almost like techno-feudalist states. Yeah. Right? It's also not a far leap to say that in the future, the sort of sovereign class that are so wealthy can expatriate themselves to places where the tax jurisdiction is just so much better and the services they get are so much better that they are no longer Americans anymore. They're no longer British anymore. They're simply emancipated people that are enjoying better services than the rest of us. And this is something that I'm super curious about. Is this something Rand is concerned about?

• 2:36:42Speaker 00

  Not something Rand's concerned about. In fact, I think, I think I may be one of the only ones who's banging on about it at Rand.

• 2:36:50Danny Jones?

  Well, because because going back to what you're saying, maybe like certain individuals would be able to do this, but they couldn't make their companies transnational like this.

• 2:36:58Speaker 00

  No, no.

• 2:36:59Danny Jones?

  Because like, you know, I'm sure you followed some of that USAID shit that's been happening.

• 2:37:03Speaker 00

  Yeah, actually, I'd love to talk about that. I'm a little, I'm kind of read in on USAID.

• 2:37:07Danny Jones?

  Oh, really?

• 2:37:08Speaker 00

  Yeah, um, I actually may come at it from a very different perspective.

• 2:37:14Speaker 00

  So, yeah, because I've heard a lot about about USAID, and I've actually worked with USAID on projects before.

• 2:37:22Danny Jones?

  Yeah, that guy, Mike Benz, talks about it all the time. It's fascinating, the way he talks about it.

• 2:37:26Speaker 00

  Super, super interesting.

• 2:37:28Danny Jones?

  Yeah, and so he used to work for the State Department, I think.

• 2:37:30Speaker 00

  He would have, yeah.

• 2:37:31Danny Jones?

  He was an analyst for the State Department.

• 2:37:32Speaker 00

  Sounds right.

• 2:37:33Danny Jones?

  And one of the things I remember specifically, him saying was how he was leveraging,

• 2:37:38Danny Jones?

  leveraging companies like Facebook, for example, to maintain their monopolies overseas.

• 2:37:45Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:37:45Danny Jones?

  And being like, we're only going to let you have your monopoly overseas if you agree to censor X, Y, and Z.

• 2:37:50Speaker 00

  Sure.

• 2:37:50Danny Jones?

  All kinds of shit like this.

• 2:37:51Speaker 00

  Yeah, so here's, here's at least my take on it. And, you know, I worked in with USAID in a very different capacity than him. And so I was a Peace Corps volunteer, which is technically under the State Department. So, you know, I was, I was teaching English at an Albanian high school for two and a half years. And as a part of that, I got the opportunity to go out to village schools, really, really remote schools, and, you know, give English lessons out there sometimes. So, you know, there's, there's a lot of need out there. And I'd try and go do English classes as, in as far a field as I could.

• 2:38:33Speaker 00

  At a certain point, we had the ability to collaborate with a couple of the other NGOs, and say, and USAID, and then some of these other, other funds like the German Development Fund, which is called GIZ, and UNICEF. And the idea was...

• 2:38:50Speaker 00

  Well, we're gonna make a mobile library and basically we have a big van, got a bunch of books in the van. We drive to one of the 42 villages of Tripoya every single day. Try to hit two villages a day and then like once a month, you know, you get a English lesson and a book. And, you know, we help villagers, right? This was my interaction with USAID. It was getting a couple of dollars to put some books in a van and drive around to give books to kids, right? So when I-

• 2:39:23Danny Jones?

  Meanwhile, you're only making a hundred grand a day.

• 2:39:25Speaker 00

  What's that? Yeah, I'm making a hundred grand a day. I think, you know, what is the problem with China? I think they're doing great.

• 2:39:36Speaker 00

  It's gonna be really fun in the future.

• 2:39:39Danny Jones?

  You're doing a great job.

• 2:39:40Speaker 00

  Thank you.

• 2:39:42Speaker 00

  So that, like, my interaction with it was, like, we're giving books to kids.

• 2:39:48Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:39:48Speaker 00

  And, and we got some funding to, to make sure that that happened. And if you think that every single dollar that was going into USAID was these, like, malicious operations that are, are forcing governments to, to bend the will of the United States, it certainly wasn't my impression of working with USAID. However, and I also know a lot of people who've ended up working with USAID and, and, you know, they're, they're all looking for work right now.

• 2:40:22Speaker 00

  So LinkedIn is popping. Oh, wait, actually, hold on. I gotta tell you about this other, other great Chinese psychological operation.

• 2:40:29Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 2:40:30Speaker 00

  Let me, can we put a pin in USAID?

• 2:40:32Danny Jones?

  Yes, yes, yes, yes.

• 2:40:33Speaker 00

  This is a really fucking brilliant one.

• 2:40:35Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 2:40:35Speaker 00

  I just learned about it.

• 2:40:36Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 2:40:37Speaker 00

  Okay, so, um, obviously, a lot of the federal workforce has been, has been looking for work recently.

• 2:40:47Speaker 00

  China, and I think you can pull up a story about this from the AP. China has been, uh, starting consulting firms and looking to hire people who now don't have any federal work. Specifically-

• 2:41:00Danny Jones?

  Oh, shit.

• 2:41:01Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's kinda brilliant.

• 2:41:03Danny Jones?

  Where'd you hear about this?

• 2:41:04Speaker 00

  AP.

• 2:41:06Danny Jones?

  Really?

• 2:41:06Speaker 00

  Yeah, look it up.

• 2:41:08Danny Jones?

  Wow.

• 2:41:08Speaker 00

  It's, yeah. I mean.

• 2:41:10Danny Jones?

  So they're hiring people to work remotely?

• 2:41:12Speaker 08

  Oh my gosh. Look at that.

• 2:41:14Speaker 00

  Reuters too.

• 2:41:16Danny Jones?

  Exclusive secretive Chinese network tries to lure fired federal workers, research shows.

• 2:41:23Danny Jones?

  So now let's read the summary. Zoom in. Researcher identifies a network of fake consulting and headhunting firms.

• 2:41:32Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 2:41:33Danny Jones?

  Chinese embassy says Beijing respects data privacy and security. Firms list addresses that are empty lots and shell companies. Wow.

• 2:41:43Speaker 00

  So the, the bet that, that Beijing appears to be taking is that somebody who has been a federal worker for many years, spent a ton of time, uh, you know, living, working and breathing, uh, federal government is now not only out of the job, but also looking for a, a salary and some, some, uh,

• 2:42:05Speaker 00

  uh, professional stability that usually comes with federal workforce. And maybe, just maybe they might have a bit of a chip on their shoulder based upon being fired. So what that could result in is picking up some really good information about what the US federal government is up to.

• 2:42:25Speaker 00

  And again, you know, it's not illegal to hire people who without jobs. These appear to be, you know, fake consulting firms and fake headhunting companies.

• 2:42:35Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:42:35Speaker 00

  Um, but it's not a kinetic attack, right?

• 2:42:40Speaker 00

  Anyway, I just, I just remember that thing, but.

• 2:42:42Danny Jones?

  That's crazy.

• 2:42:42Speaker 00

  Isn't that amazing?

• 2:42:44Danny Jones?

  So if they, if they're hiring them, what would they be doing? Do they give them a job and a paycheck?

• 2:42:49Speaker 00

  I assume, yeah.

• 2:42:51Danny Jones?

  Is it just to make headlines and to create some sort of fucking internal dissent?

• 2:42:54Speaker 00

  Well, I think if it's made headlines that their, their operation isn't going so well.

• 2:43:00Speaker 00

  I, I think that if, uh, I mean, you know, if I was them, I would want to hire them and have them make projects that could potentially leverage their knowledge of the federal government.

• 2:43:10Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:43:10Speaker 00

  So that I now have a good deal of knowledge about the federal government.

• 2:43:13Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:43:13Speaker 00

  Um, so like I said, you know, there's a lot of people who've been fired from USAID. But anyway, so the USAID thing, I think people should understand a little bit about the modern history of USAID and how it changed, basically post-Reagan. Originally, USAID was created, I think it was 1961, by Kennedy. And the purpose of this was to not only, you know, distribute diplomatic aid, but to act as a branch of soft power on behalf of the United States State Department, right?

• 2:43:55Speaker 00

  I think that it is no secret that states use soft power in terms of, here's a stick, a carrot instead of a stick. Every nation does that. In fact, I've even done that on behalf of Liberland. Like, I distributed aid to Somali nomads that were affected by Cyclone Zaghar, because we were trying to, you know, get closer with the government of Somali land. Right. So, it's no secret that that happens. What happened during the Reagan administration was USAID changed from, "We are going to sort of implement different programs within countries,

• 2:44:39Speaker 00

  and we're going to develop and launch them in-house." It changed to becoming a more privatized venture, where USAID essentially becomes the pool of funds that private institutions and NGOs can requisition, provided that they are in line with whatever the initiatives of USAID are. So you have companies like, Chmonix is one of them, I think they're still around. What is Chmonix? They're an international development company. C-H-M-E-O-N-I.

• 2:45:12Speaker 00

  X, I think. But, and then you have smaller NGOs. And the bargain is basically like, you know, if you have, I don't know, I'll use Albania. But like, if you have an Albanian NGO that is roughly working on what USAID thinks is not only good for the country, but also good for US relations with the country, then you can get some funding from USAID. In fact, I've, I've worked on projects in, in Albania recently. Like, there's a, a video game development, uh, festival that happens there every year. And they get a little bit of money from the US Embassy to, uh, you know, stimulate the video game development economy in, in, um, uh, in Albania. Shout out to Game Jam Albania, it's a lot of fun.

• 2:45:56Speaker 00

  But, that's because private companies, private individuals can requisition funds from that, uh, from that organization, so long as that they're in line with the granting. But what this also does is, it opens it up to, uh, companies and even agencies that have less than, uh, magnanimous ideas about what they're going to do with that funding. So I think, what's the gentleman who, um, uh?

• 2:46:25Danny Jones?

  Mike Benz?

• 2:46:26Speaker 00

  That's him, yeah. So he was talking about, um, was it intelligence agencies sort of leveraging these funds to?

• 2:46:32Danny Jones?

  Yeah, the State Department.

• 2:46:33Speaker 00

  Yeah, to make sure that?

• 2:46:35Danny Jones?

  They censor stuff on, on the platform.

• 2:46:37Speaker 00

  Sure. And so, these are, these are private companies who are using these funds in ways that, uh, are, are not outwardly magnanimous. They actually look more like insidious control of a country.

• 2:46:50Danny Jones?

  Well, it's not necessarily, yeah, it's exactly, it's the State Department doing it.

• 2:46:53Speaker 00

  Mm-hmm. But this is also something that I think, I think is less top-down rotten core control than I've seen in the media. I think that there's, frankly, I think that there's a lot of good actors that, that have been funded by USAID. I mean, I've worked with, with USAID-funded projects before.

• 2:47:13Danny Jones?

  Didn't Dua Lipa get money from them for Albania?

• 2:47:15Speaker 00

  Did she? I have no idea.

• 2:47:17Danny Jones?

  Find the story.

• 2:47:18Speaker 00

  No way.

• 2:47:18Danny Jones?

  Type in Dua Lipa USAID Albania.

• 2:47:22Danny Jones?

  But apparently she got a bunch of money to inject some sort of Albanian dial some some to talk about Albania in a certain way.

• 2:47:30Speaker 00

  I mean, she is Albanian Albanian, so that would.

• 2:47:33Danny Jones?

  Well, she is Albanian, right? Did you type in USA Dua Lipa, British Albanian singer songwriter? Been involved in discussions about Albania, her relationships and this relationship to Kosovo in 2020. She faced backlash over tweeting a map representing greater Albania, which sparked controversy due to national implications.

• 2:47:49Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:47:50Danny Jones?

  But what does it say? Where does it come to the USAID stuff?

• 2:47:53Speaker 08

  Do I have to make it like Super Bowl?

• 2:47:55Speaker 00

  I don't know. They're censoring us.

• 2:47:58Danny Jones?

  That's gonna change anything, Steve.

• 2:47:59Speaker 00

  Sparks, yeah, the.

• 2:48:01Danny Jones?

  Anyways, Mike Ben said something about how USAID, oh, you know what it was?

• 2:48:06Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 2:48:07Danny Jones?

  She was.

• 2:48:10Danny Jones?

  One of these councils, what was it?

• 2:48:13Speaker 00

  Oh, was it like a cultural ambassador?

• 2:48:15Danny Jones?

  It was like it was like Council of Foreign Relations, I think it was, or one of those things like the CFR.

• 2:48:20Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 2:48:20Danny Jones?

  She was like awarded like the top fucking artist or something and she went ahead and like talked to this council. But apparently she was like involved, I don't know, you can't find anything, Steve?

• 2:48:32Speaker 08

  No.

• 2:48:32Speaker 00

  I mean, I'm a huge, huge Dua Lipa fan, but I haven't heard that heard this bit. I think I think one of the things too is. You know, one of the reasons that I think people are also rightfully looking to.

• 2:48:47Danny Jones?

  Type in Mike Ben's Dua Lipa USAID.

• 2:48:53Danny Jones?

  You'll find something.

• 2:48:55Speaker 00

  And then UFO.

• 2:48:58Danny Jones?

  And then Bigfoot.

• 2:48:59Speaker 00

  Yeah, Bigfoot. We haven't even talked about the Albanian Bigfoot connection.

• 2:49:04Speaker 00

  I think that one of the reasons that that people are also rightfully looking at USAID with with a great deal of criticism is. What is the extent of soft power, right?

• 2:49:16Speaker 00

  If you look at.

• 2:49:19Speaker 00

  If you look at indicators of where violent armed conflict are going to happen.

• 2:49:24Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:49:25Speaker 00

  One of the biggest indicators of that is low state-based institution. So some of the, you know, like, there's a lot of organizations, OSCE, you know, the EU, the UN, that are working on institution building in a country, right? And this could be anything from like making sure that there are regional town halls to making sure that minorities are represented in local governance, to making sure that like there are, like, there's equal representation of like different faiths in a country.

• 2:50:03Speaker 00

  Now, is helping a country building institutions that look not unlike Democratic American institutions, is that overstepping our bounds? I don't think so, because I think that democracy is a better bet than autocracy is. That's my point of view on it.

• 2:50:20Danny Jones?

  Well, when you're spending billions of dollars on it and your country's spiraling into debt and then the people don't see, the people don't get to vote where their tax money goes, let alone it's going to all these NGOs who are funding all this crazy, crazy, you know, subversive, ambiguous shit, like, then that gets to be a problem.

• 2:50:40Speaker 00

  So I think that, and I agree, like, and this is ultimately like one of those problems with taxation. Like, I wish every year I got a receipt for my taxes. Like, I bought, you know, like, one sixteen-hundredth of a Stinger missile. Awesome, I wish I like filled like twenty-seven potholes.

• 2:50:57Danny Jones?

  At least get a plaque.

• 2:50:58Speaker 00

  Yeah, right? You get a portion of the Stinger missile.

• 2:51:01Danny Jones?

  Okay, here it is. Dua Lipa and Taylor Swift, former US official Mike Benz claimed USAID used celebrities to destabilize governments.

• 2:51:08Speaker 00

  Wow, that's a big claim.

• 2:51:11Danny Jones?

  Benz claimed the USAID had trained musical artists, including Dua Lipa, Pussy Riot, and possibly Taylor Swift, to act as assets in spreading political narratives for statecraft purposes. He suggests that these efforts are part of a broader initiative to influence public opinion and destabilize.

• 2:51:29Danny Jones?

  Governments Ben said that celebrities who can be trained to spread desired messaging are actively recruited and used as network nodes. He cited NATO linked incentives NATO leak link initiatives and USAID backed music diplomacy. Uh, programs as key drivers behind the efforts.

• 2:51:50Speaker 00

  Yeah. So obviously there is, there is music diplomacy. There are, there's sports diplomacy. All of these things are like, especially in the international development world, things that, that people talk about, even food diplomacy. One example of food diplomacy is, is the fact that the Thai government subsidizes Thai restaurants in the United States. Like, that's why there's a lot of Thai restaurants around. That's, that's a legit thing.

• 2:52:11Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:52:11Speaker 00

  Um.

• 2:52:12Danny Jones?

  But Thai restaurants have to stabilize our government.

• 2:52:14Speaker 00

  They don't. Yes, far, yet, yet. We've got to.

• 2:52:18Danny Jones?

  I can see how that could be a slippery slope, though.

• 2:52:20Speaker 00

  Yeah. And, and so, uh, like, do I, do I worry about, uh, about, you know, um, uh,

• 2:52:30Speaker 00

  overusing the subversive capacity of the United States in other countries? Absolutely. Do I worry about, uh, you know, the, the US identifying too broad of a target base and saying, hey, we need to make everybody exactly like us? Absolutely. I totally agree with those things. But at the same time, I really,

• 2:52:58Speaker 00

  I like that there is an apparatus in the United States of giving aid. I like that there is a, an arm of our government that says, you know what? The one, the way that we want to interact with the world is by helping them at times in which they are struggling as a country.

• 2:53:19Danny Jones?

  Yeah, but it's not aid, right? What does it actually stand for?

• 2:53:22Speaker 00

  Uh, uh, international development, American international development. Is that right?

• 2:53:26Danny Jones?

  Right. Yeah, that sounds right.

• 2:53:27Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:53:28Danny Jones?

  International development.

• 2:53:29Speaker 00

  Yeah. International. I mean, look, I, I was driving around Albanian villages, giving books to kids. Like, i- i- if you can find some, like, mustache twisting, pernicious means in that.

• 2:53:43Speaker 00

  Good luck, um, but at the same time, like, I'm pissed off that there are these other more subversive, like, politically motivated actors that are using USAID dollars to potentially work against countries, because that means that everything is painted with the broad brush

• 2:54:05Danny Jones?

  Yeah, right.

• 2:54:05Speaker 00

  of, well, that's bullshit.

• 2:54:07Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:54:07Speaker 00

  Like, and, and also, uh, to, to your question about, um, uh, about like, do our tax, should our tax dollars go here? So, there is a real big benefit in helping to stabilize and advance the economy of a country, because then, when it descends into violent conflict, is less likely, right? There are countries in the world with less state development, with, with weaker institutions, with greater, um, disparity between the very wealthy and the very poor. Those are the places that wars start. Those are the places that we may end up having to go into.

• 2:54:47Danny Jones?

  Hmm.

• 2:54:47Speaker 00

  And so, if you want to pay for an education system, or to, you know, I mean, use the Peace Corps to, to go in and give English classes now, it means that maybe in 20 years, it'll be more robust when a geopolitical fluctuation happens, and there is a potential that they'll go into conflict, right? And so, paying now to help for, help develop institutions, may actually be a better investment, especially in a globalized world, and especially in a globalized world where oftentimes the United States has, has to use violent force in order to stabilize, or to nation build.

• 2:55:28Danny Jones?

  Hmm.

• 2:55:29Speaker 00

  By the way, I, for those listening at home, I did, I did quote buddy ears on both of those words.

• 2:55:34Danny Jones?

  Spoken like a true USAID employee.

• 2:55:36Speaker 00

  That's right. I was a Peace Corps volunteer. We're not employees.

• 2:55:41Danny Jones?

  So, what is?

• 2:55:42Speaker 00

  I'm just trying to get hired by a Chinese consulting factory.

• 2:55:46Danny Jones?

  That's next, bro.

• 2:55:47Speaker 00

  I know.

• 2:55:47Danny Jones?

  You got Rand on your resume now?

• 2:55:49Speaker 00

  That's right. I am open to work, guys, so, you know, I can look the other way.

• 2:55:54Danny Jones?

  So, so you, you're, you're, you're not actually working for Rand?

• 2:55:58Speaker 00

  No.

• 2:55:59Danny Jones?

  You're doing an educational thing there?

• 2:56:00Speaker 00

  Yeah, so they're one of the only think-takes that, that offers, uh, degrees as well. So, I'm, I'm a part of their, actually, their first class of, uh, national security students, so...

• 2:56:11Speaker 00

  So they have PhDs also.

• 2:56:13Danny Jones?

  Would they, would they consider offering you a job after this? Would you take it?

• 2:56:16Speaker 00

  I don't know. Um, it's really interesting work. And the, the stuff that you get to think about, the people that you get to work with are really cool. And you're, you're certainly, you know, you're on the cutting edge of, of all of this stuff and being able to do really long range research on all of these things. I don't necessarily know if my, if my role is to, to be in think tanks. I think what I'm hoping to do is I, I want to raise these conversations in the public more. I want to write books about, about this kind of stuff, about nation building, about, um, you know, the, the eccentricities of geopolitics. Um, and that's why I started, uh,

• 2:56:58Speaker 00

  uh, my newsletter, this is not a psyop, um, subscribe. And that's because I think that there is, there's a lack of, of easy public access to like what the, the thinking in these organizations is. You know, I spent like 10 years abroad seeing, uh, a lot of places that have been dismantled by American foreign policy. And that's a really heartbreaking thing to see. And it's one of the reasons that I wanted to go back and find out how these policies are made in the first place, to learn from kind of the epicenter of the American political mind.

• 2:57:40Speaker 00

  And now I feel like I can sort of speak from the authority of not only being on the ground in certain places, but also understanding how decisions are made. And also having a great network of researchers who are, are curious about these things at the same place. But I think that, I think that there is a lack of public conversations about this kind of stuff from both perspectives, from the perspective of what it feels like on the ground and also how the thinking is happening internally.

• 2:58:09Danny Jones?

  Yeah, this whole fifth generation warfare and like population mind control stuff is so is so strange. And it's so, it seems so like futuristic sci fi.

• 2:58:22Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:58:22Danny Jones?

  But like, it seems like it would be really easy to do in today's day and age with all like, just the media itself, like how crazy the news cycle is.

• 2:58:30Speaker 00

  I don't think it's that hard to do. Yeah, I mean, that's, that's the.

• 2:58:33Danny Jones?

  Like, did you see this new stuff with the, with the CIA director on this group chat with all these people trying to like?

• 2:58:39Speaker 00

  I've been following it.

• 2:58:40Danny Jones?

  Talking about their war plans in Ukraine or Yemen or something?

• 2:58:42Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:58:44Danny Jones?

  And there's a whole hearing over it with Tulsi Gabbard and the CIA director and they're saying, oh no, there was nothing declassified. It was totally normal for us to, to hash out these war plans on WhatsApp.

• 2:58:53Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:58:53Danny Jones?

  Group chat or whatever the fuck it was.

• 2:58:55Speaker 00

  Well, and then you, you see the, the sort of normalization of, of like a massive intelligence leak. That's, that's not a great thing.

• 2:59:04Danny Jones?

  We, we are gonna absolutely forget about this in two weeks.

• 2:59:06Speaker 00

  That's exactly right.

• 2:59:07Danny Jones?

  Something completely different.

• 2:59:08Speaker 00

  Yeah, and, and I think, you know, I guess in, in my, in my heart of hearts, I was like, that would be a great thing to do on purpose if it gave you some sort of strategic advantage.

• 2:59:21Danny Jones?

  Hmm.

• 2:59:22Speaker 00

  Um, to, to have this active leak that, that gave us some strategic advantage somewhere. Um, it doesn't appear that that's the case.

• 2:59:29Danny Jones?

  Mm hmm.

• 2:59:29Speaker 00

  Uh.

• 2:59:30Danny Jones?

  You would hope that these people are capable of playing 3D chess in that way, but I wonder sometimes if they are.

• 2:59:36Speaker 00

  I mean, I, I totally agree. I mean, I think that, that one of the, one of the things that I've noticed in terms of, of now kind of like knowing from the inside a little bit of how policy is made is it is so incredibly slow and politically costly to make a policy.

• 2:59:54Danny Jones?

  Hmm.

• 2:59:55Speaker 00

  If you look at the time that, uh, the, the, they were talking about starting the Manhattan Project all the way until we had a nuclear bomb. It was years before they even started doing it, even though everybody at the exact same time totally agreed. The American political apparatus moves incredibly slowly.

• 3:00:16Speaker 00

  And so you're looking for this point at which what's called a policy windows window opens up. So a policy window is the moment that the idea that you've been thinking about forever. Uh, aligns with the political interests of an elected leader and aligns with the needs of the population at the same time. But how do you find that? And how do you make somebody? How do you like have an elected leader who is just at the right point at the right time to implement a good idea? Or to implement a terrible idea? That's what the policy window is all about. And so like one of the things that I'm that I've been banging on a lot, uh, one of the

• 3:00:57Speaker 00

  things I've been banging on about in my, my own writing is, um, every year there is a, um, a national security, uh, strategy that's released, not every year, I think every administration. Um, then there's also a national defense strategy, two different strategies. One is DOD, one is White House. Right. And as I sort of started my journey into, to looking at, uh, information space defense, I was like, well, I should probably just like, look at the national security strategy and on national defense strategy, because clearly there's gotta be an information space defense strategy and security strategy. And there isn't any. We have an Arctic portion of that strategy. Arctic? Yeah, Arctic defense is big right now.

• 3:01:41Speaker 00

  Um, huge, uh, but we don't have any information space defense strategy. What is Arctic defense strategy? Um, so, uh, briefly with, um, uh, with climate change happening. Yeah. There's the potential that, um, there will be more, uh, there will be an opening of the Arctic ice that will allow, uh, uh, essentially a new domain of warfare in the Arctic. Uh, it, it opens up a trade route, uh, between Asia and Europe that I think is like 40% quicker. Wow. Yeah, actually this is really interesting. There's a, there's a, um, a war on the rocks article. Um, uh, I think it's called the icebreaker gap, but the icebreaker gap is pretty fascinating.

• 3:02:25Speaker 00

  It's like, um, so Russia has the, uh, biggest amount of icebreakers in the world. So these are, these are ships that can, I mean. Crush iceberg. Yeah, they, they crush ice so that you can create navigability between like Arctic spaces. I think that they have something like. Three hundred and fifty or so.

• 3:02:46Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 3:02:47Speaker 00

  We have three point five, like one that's only an icebreaker or can be retrofitted to an icebreaker. And so they're like, okay, well, we have this Arctic defense strategy, this Arctic security strategy that we're trying to develop and we're trying to figure out how this is going to affect American security. But we need icebreakers. And it's like, okay, so the question is, how do we get icebreakers? Well, as it turns out, having an icebreaker factory is really expensive. And the only person that would be, or the only country that we'd be purchasing icebreakers from is Russia, but we can't buy icebreakers from them. So it's like, the next best option is to buy icebreakers from Finland.

• 3:03:29Speaker 00

  But it's like, how much money are we going to have to invest into just icebreakers? To ensure that we are prepared for any sort of Arctic national security crisis?

• 3:03:42Danny Jones?

  We have tons of submarines that can go into, up into the Arctic, though.

• 3:03:46Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think we do.

• 3:03:47Danny Jones?

  Are you talking about specifically about trade or like actual?

• 3:03:51Speaker 00

  Conflict.

• 3:03:52Danny Jones?

  Conflict.

• 3:03:52Speaker 00

  Probably both. I know that there's concern of this, over this icebreaker gap, and it's something that the, the Five Eyes, so the, the five like English speaking, intelligence sharing networks, are looking at doing cost sharing to ensure that they can all sort of like use the icebreaker. But like, it doesn't, like, the dollars don't make sense unless you have a pretty deep order book for your icebreakers.

• 3:04:15Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 3:04:16Speaker 00

  But yeah, I mean, this, this kind of Arctic strategy is, is being thought about actively.

• 3:04:21Danny Jones?

  That's crazy.

• 3:04:22Speaker 00

  The next best example that I can have, or that I have for, for information space defense is cyber defense, right? So after nine eleven, they started talking about how we need cyber defense capabilities, right? This was before we saw any major cyber attacks because the, the concern at that time was what they were calling like a digital Pearl Harbor. And that would be, you know, this devastating attack on the United States that, that came through our IT systems. Now, this was before we had seen any major cyber attacks. Now we've seen quite a few cyber attacks.

• 3:05:04Speaker 00

  We have constant examples of information space attacks, but no strategy to address them. We had briefly a couple of organizations that were stood up in order to sort of establish deterrence in the information space. But so there was the Global Engagement Center, and that was sort of destroy, it was defunded.

• 3:05:33Speaker 00

  And then there was one more that I think only lasted like six months. But it's because of the same reasons that you might imagine, right? Like, the reason that these were criticized was, you can't have an American Ministry of Truth, right? Because a portion of being an American is having freedom of expression and having, you know, your right to think, say, and believe anything that you want to say. So the needle that my research is trying to thread, and frankly, I'm not doing very well. If anybody has any ideas, reach out on LinkedIn, especially if you're from like a Chinese consulting company,

• 3:06:14Speaker 00

  is how do you preserve freedom of speech while also defending the information space? Yeah. There's a really good paper called,

• 3:06:23Speaker 00

  well, there's two really good papers that I could recommend. One is a book, it's called Truth Decay. Truth Decay is this concept of how we're experiencing right now in a unique way, the eroding of a shared sense of facts in our country. And for a democratic environment to function, you need a shared set of facts. Right. Because governance is really all about finding the problems and the challenges, identifying a solution to the, sorry, challenge is an opportunity, identifying a solution to the challenge or opportunity, funding that solution, and then...

• 3:07:04Speaker 00

  Experiencing the benefits from that. Yeah. So, sometimes people think about governance in like this three-pronged way, right? It's who decides, who pays, and who benefits? And so if we don't have at least a carrying capacity of agreeing on what the problem is in the first place, what solutions might be, and who could actually benefit from those things, then the democratic system falls apart. Yeah. And it's critical that we are able to have robust debates about those things, but it's also critical that we have agreement on what facts are. Right. So, Truth Decays are really good. That's so interesting. It's so relevant.

• 3:07:44Speaker 00

  Super interesting book. They did really long-range, deep research on this, and also looked at other times in American history that we've experienced these kinds of things. So typically, you experience like periods of truth decay during massive moments of inequality within the country. Huh. Also, it's experienced when there are new modalities of sharing ideas. You know, this is nothing new. We've just created new ways to share ideas. If you think about it, like the printing press comes out, right? And then Europe is just like, "Well, I guess we have to kill each other for the next 500

• 3:08:26Speaker 00

  years." Like, wait a second. You believe a slightly different thing about the Bible? Right. I mean, the second most bought book after the Bible, after the printing press came out, do you know what it was? What? The Malice Malaphicarum, The Witch Hunting Manual. Really? And then suddenly, we got a bunch of witch hunts. Yeah. What year was this? Oh, look it up. No way. There's also a great AFI song called Malice Malaphicarum. It's pretty intense, bro. I knew you listened to AFI.

• 3:09:03Speaker 00

  I'm gonna go to emo night in St. Pete.

• 3:09:06Danny Jones?

  That's fucking hilarious.

• 3:09:07Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 3:09:07Danny Jones?

  The Malice Malafacarum book.

• 3:09:10Speaker 00

  The Hammer of Witches.

• 3:09:13Danny Jones?

  When was it published?

• 3:09:13Speaker 00

  1486.

• 3:09:15Danny Jones?

  1486, is it really the second most bought book?

• 3:09:18Speaker 00

  I believe so. Fact check me, I'm ready for it.

• 3:09:22Danny Jones?

  Wow, man.

• 3:09:23Speaker 00

  So, you know, this is, this is another moment of, of, suddenly we have the bar to share ideas is lowered significantly. And because of that, second most bought book. Harry Potter.

• 3:09:40Danny Jones?

  After the Bible, the second most bought book is often considered the Quran.

• 3:09:43Speaker 00

  I, I think specifically after the.

• 3:09:45Danny Jones?

  Well, it's a religious text.

• 3:09:46Speaker 00

  Yeah, after the invention of the printing press, I believe the second most printed and bought book was the Malice Malafacarum.

• 3:09:57Danny Jones?

  Yeah, alright.

• 3:09:58Speaker 00

  Anyway.

• 3:09:59Danny Jones?

  Anyways.

• 3:09:59Speaker 00

  Um, so yeah, like, these are, this is, like, this moment in history that we're living through.

• 3:10:06Speaker 00

  Things like it have happened again. I mean, it's like that great quote of like, you know, history doesn't always repeat itself, but it always rhymes. I agree, and that's like one of the reasons that I, I love studying geopolitics and history and seeing how these things go together. Because if nothing else, like, it, it gives me a, a way of feeling like we haven't completely departed from the map, that we're not, you know, in the middle of, of some forest with nowhere to go. By studying history and geopolitics and understanding the incentives behind things, it makes you realize that like, there's really nothing new under the sun, and that by studying how it's been dealt with in history, you can also see, maybe around the corner, to see how it could be dealt with now.

• 3:10:49Speaker 00

  I'm, just so, for the record, I'm in no way advocating for any sort of like restriction of free speech. But I'm also, I don't necessarily believe that, um, because most, most academics, when they talk about like how we need to deal with truth decay, is, uh, digital literacy education. We need to educate. People on digital literacy to like really fact check themselves. And I just

• 3:11:16Danny Jones?

  Like you're saying of like how well you are adapted to using social media and not being like Because I know a lot of older people that just are get scammed every single

• 3:11:28Speaker 00

  The Facebook moms are the biggest security threat in the United States.

• 3:11:32Danny Jones?

  You won a prize. Just give us your credit card information and we're going to send you this incredibly expensive gift. We just need you to pay the $7 shipping.

• 3:11:40Speaker 00

  That's right. I mean,

• 3:11:41Danny Jones?

  Meanwhile, you get hosed for $1,000 out of your checking account.

• 3:11:43Speaker 00

  It's a renaissance of Nigerian prince scams. But I mean, that's, that's what digital literacy education is. It's basically like, hey, make sure you fact check that and don't believe those crazy things. I frankly think, I mean, I'm from the dare generation.

• 3:11:57Danny Jones?

  Yeah, me too.

• 3:11:58Speaker 00

  Without revealing too much, it didn't work. You know, I, so I don't, I don't take that as an actual serious intervention to help truth decay. I just don't. I don't know what a serious intervention, you know, really looks like. It's something that I'm currently like struggling with and trying to, um, trying to identify and doing a lot of research on, um, but I know.

• 3:12:23Danny Jones?

  No, I mean, like I've had CIA officers on this show before who, one of them in particular, Andy Bustamante,

• 3:12:30Speaker 00

  Yeah, shout out.

• 3:12:31Danny Jones?

  We need a common enemy to unite the country.

• 3:12:33Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 3:12:35Danny Jones?

  We need some sort of common external devil to fight against to in order to get us back together. And that's, we don't have that. We also don't have, uh, we don't have a cohesive

• 3:12:48Danny Jones?

  national religion, like a lot of countries do. I'm not saying it's going to be a good thing if we do have that because I think religion is probably the cause of more, most more death and war than anything in the history of the world. But like, what, what else is there? Cause we are, we're not going down the right path.

• 3:13:02Speaker 00

  I, I think that's one of those things like, I don't know, to me that, that feels like, yeah, it was a solution in the, or it was a solution in the past. It is great when, you know, there is national unity and, and frankly, like one of the, one of the, the best examples of national unity that you can point to is the last, you know, major attack. I push back against this theory that we need to have some antagonist relationship in order to unify nationally. Because what's the option there? To gin up wars and enemies in order to unify us?

• 3:13:47Speaker 00

  I don't think that that's the answer. I think that that is.

• 3:13:51Danny Jones?

  What if, what if we could fake, pretend like we have enemies? And pretend like there's these big bad guys out there? Like in the public, we're portraying China and Russia as these big evil bad guys. But like behind closed doors, our diplomats are going over there being like,

• 3:14:04Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 3:14:04Danny Jones?

  Hey, man, we're just putting this in the news. Whereas we're still gonna do all these deals behind, behind their backs.

• 3:14:08Speaker 00

  Well, I think that, you know, this is something I think about a lot too is, you've read 1984, right?

• 3:14:13Danny Jones?

  Yes.

• 3:14:13Speaker 00

  Yeah, so, so one of the things in 1984, actually the Audible just did like a great audio play version of 1984. Yeah, if you really wanna like get freaked out, um, cause who doesn't? Go listen to that, it's great. But one of the main plot points in 1984 is, uh, the main character can never remember who they're at war with. It's either like Oceania or like Eurasia, right? And so, yeah, I mean, would that work? Sure. Is it ideal? My, I don't think so. I don't think it's, I don't think it's ideal to lie to a population in order to like, make sure that they're believing the same things.

• 3:14:57Speaker 00

  And frankly, I think that we're better than that.

• 3:14:59Danny Jones?

  I think the government does think that, though. I think the highest echelons of the government do, do believe that. I think they treat us as a parent-child relationship.

• 3:15:06Speaker 00

  Yeah, and I know that Andy talks about that too. You know, there's a, there's a great line in, uh, in a poem by, uh, the, the writer Kay Tempest, uh, who says something along the lines of, uh, "They treat us like idiots, but that's their problem. But when we behave like idiots, it becomes our problem."

• 3:15:25Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 3:15:26Speaker 00

  So, yeah, like, do people in power oftentimes infantilize the people that they, so that they represent? Certainly. But the... The institutions that we have put in place are there in order to at least give us the capability of pushing back. And I think, at least my belief is that, and I think Andy would disagree with me, but my belief is that, that we can and should trust the American population more than, than it seems like happens with our elected leaders. And I think this is ultimately kind of-

• 3:16:07Danny Jones?

  The American population?

• 3:16:09Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think that we should, we should trust individuals. I think that, I mean, I trust individuals more than organizations personally.

• 3:16:14Danny Jones?

  Yeah, for sure.

• 3:16:15Speaker 00

  You know? And I think that this kind of goes back to, I mean, this is, there's like, in any geopolitical book that you ever read, chapter two, 100% will always talk about like Hobbes versus Rousseau, right? So Thomas Hobbes, you know, man in a state of nature is lonely, nasty, brutish and short is his life, something like that, you know? He's real, real rough. But he essentially believes that, that we're naturally in a state of nature, you know, evil conniving and, and those appetites need to be constrained for the proper functioning of society.

• 3:16:56Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 3:16:57Speaker 00

  And that's constrained in, in his book Leviathan by the Leviathan. So we're giving up those freedoms in order to constrain our natural inclination towards violence and chaos. And then there's Rousseau who says that in a state of nature, man is naturally equal. He's, he's willing to cooperate and more tranquil. I think Bustamante's opinion here is more on the Hobbesian side of things where we need to use, we need to use societal controls to constrain the individual because if left unchecked, they're going to make decisions that are not only bad for themselves, but bad for society writ large.

• 3:17:42Speaker 00

  This is your sort of like parent child thing. I tend to trust- Individuals more and I think that that people really are reasonable actors when they're given proper information. I think that we've developed, we've developed an information space right now. Where we're all sort of invested in these zero sum politics. Where it's not enough that my side wins, but the other side has to lose at the same time. I don't think that's a fair broker of an information space. I don't know how to get that information space where people are treated like adults and transparency is, is the, you know, the letter of the day.

• 3:18:23Speaker 00

  I don't know how to get there, but I do trust individuals and I think that, that it doesn't benefit us. When we have a country that is predicated upon the primacy of the individual to make their own lives and their own communities better. To say that, well, the government needs to keep a lot of stuff from us because we can't be trusted with it.

• 3:18:46Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 3:18:47Speaker 00

  But that goes back to that transparency gap too, where it's like.

• 3:18:53Speaker 00

  The government is oftentimes transparent enough to make us not trust it, rather than.

• 3:18:57Danny Jones?

  Exactly.

• 3:18:58Speaker 00

  Giving us transparency so that we do trust it.

• 3:19:01Danny Jones?

  We don't know what's up or down anymore.

• 3:19:02Speaker 00

  Yeah, but you know what though? I also like, okay, so anytime I go to a country. And this happened like, I don't know.

• 3:19:09Danny Jones?

  By the way, hey, we got like, we gotta wrap it up in like five minutes.

• 3:19:11Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 3:19:12Danny Jones?

  Let's, let's, I gotta pick up my kids soon. We're like three and a half hours in.

• 3:19:15Speaker 00

  Oh shit. All right. Yeah. Cool. Um, I'm gonna get a bunch of offers from the Chinese consulate after this. This is awesome.

• 3:19:21Danny Jones?

  Finish your story.

• 3:19:22Speaker 00

  Yeah. Um, I, I, I think that like, um, I never trust a country when I get into the back of a cab and the cab driver is like, we love our political leader. It's like, no, you don't.

• 3:19:32Danny Jones?

  Right, right.

• 3:19:33Speaker 00

  Like.

• 3:19:33Danny Jones?

  I bet you that happens a lot in North Korea.

• 3:19:35Speaker 00

  I've never been in a North Korean cab before. Um.

• 3:19:38Danny Jones?

  I've heard stories.

• 3:19:39Speaker 00

  Have you? Oh, super cool. Um, no, I got in.

• 3:19:42Danny Jones?

  No, yeah, I knew this dude, this dude, Wally Green. He was a famous, yeah, he was a, like a big time, big shot ping pong player. And he went to some big tournament.

• 3:19:49Speaker 00

  Oh, I remember seeing a bit of that. Yeah.

• 3:19:51Danny Jones?

  Cab to go to, go to the tournament or whatever. And he was like, oh, our supreme leader invented the telephone. He, he is the best.

• 3:19:57Speaker 00

  Ping pong.

• 3:19:58Danny Jones?

  Everything, yeah, exactly.

• 3:19:59Speaker 00

  Ping pong player.

• 3:19:59Danny Jones?

  Actually, I think she did say he invented ping pong.

• 3:20:01Speaker 00

  That doesn't surprise me. Um, yeah, I mean, it's like, and, and I think that's kind of the part of the, the political game. We shouldn't trust our political leaders, right? We, we should, we should be constantly scrutinizing the things that they say. And like, there is no way that anybody agrees 100% not only with a political leader, but with every, with anybody else.

• 3:20:21Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 3:20:21Speaker 00

  I, my best friends, I like have differences of opinion with them. We have a unique capability of, of pushing back against political leadership in peaceful ways.

• 3:20:33Speaker 00

  That needs to be maintained, but it also needs to be maintained with a, a pretty clear information space that is hopefully free of manipulation by foreign actors. Because you asked me at the beginning of this, you know, what is the, what is the greatest vulnerability that we have in the United States? And, and obviously my, my research is, is focused on fifth generation warfare and the information space. But I think that the, the biggest vulnerability that we have is the gray matter, you know? It's the space between our ears. It's the ability for us to look at somebody else who is an American citizen and say that they're the enemy.

• 3:21:13Speaker 00

  Over somebody from a thousand miles away across the world who actually does mean us harm. And that's just because of the stories that we tell ourselves.

• 3:21:25Speaker 00

  I think that's the greatest vulnerability and I don't have an answer for it. I'm gonna keep doing public thinking about, about how we, how we create cognitive security in the United States and elsewhere. And if you wanna hear about that, um, check out my, uh, uh, check out my newsletter. This is not a psyop, uh, which I promise is 100% psyop free.

• 3:21:49Danny Jones?

  What is it on? Substack?

• 3:21:50Speaker 00

  It's on Beehive.

• 3:21:51Danny Jones?

  Beehive, okay.

• 3:21:52Speaker 00

  Beehive, yeah, yeah, I'll put.

• 3:21:53Danny Jones?

  I'll link it all below.

• 3:21:53Speaker 00

  Link below.

• 3:21:54Danny Jones?

  Send me the link, so I'll put it in there.

• 3:21:55Speaker 00

  And, uh, check out my book, You Are Not Here: Travels Through Countries That Don't Exist.

• 3:22:00Danny Jones?

  Hell, yeah, we got it back there somewhere on that show.

• 3:22:01Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, wait, what? Didn't, wasn't there a different wall back here previously?

• 3:22:07Danny Jones?

  Yeah, he scooted that one back in. I guess we're not ready for the new wall, yeah.

• 3:22:10Speaker 00

  Incredible.

• 3:22:10Danny Jones?

  We were gonna, we were gonna debut the new wall with you, but he decided not to at the last minute.

• 3:22:13Speaker 00

  That was a pretty cool wall. Yeah, I noticed the set been changing. Anyway, um, always a pleasure, Danny.

• 3:22:18Danny Jones?

  Thank you, Eric.

• 3:22:19Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 3:22:19Danny Jones?

  Been fucking fascinating.

• 3:22:20Speaker 00

  Let's, uh, let's, uh, I wanna debate back lover about cryptocurrency.

• 3:22:26Danny Jones?

  I'm sure you're gonna see Beck, aren't you?

• 3:22:27Speaker 00

  Uh, no, no, he's in New York.

• 3:22:30Danny Jones?

  Oh, you're not going out there?

• 3:22:31Speaker 00

  No, I'll go to Albania maybe before I go. I might go to New York, I don't know. I'm in Los Angeles. Um, yeah.

• 3:22:39Danny Jones?

  Alright, bro. Thanks again. This was fascinating shit.

• 3:22:40Speaker 00

  You bet.

• 3:22:41Danny Jones?

  Everything's linked below. Goodnight.

• 3:22:42Speaker 00

  Magic mine.

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