The Hidden Secrets Threatening National Security - Mike Baker (4K)

Mike Baker is a former CIA officer and security expert, Co-Founder of global investigation company Portman Square Group and a podcaster. We're told that the world is on the brink of a large scale war. That our domestic systems are fragile, and the people in charge are incompetent. After decades in the CIA, Mike should be able to tell us how much truth there is here. Expect to learn the truth behind the AT&T outage, the problems with Google’s newest AI system, what most people do not understand about the CIA, how history is being rewritten right in front of our eyes, what the future of warfare will look like, why the American border continues to be a huge problem, Mike’s prediction on what will happen in the 2024 election and much more... - 00:00 Was the AT&T Outage a Cyberattack? 05:19 The Google Gemini AI Disaster 18:45 Is Google Erasing & Rewriting History? 30:19 The Decline of Authentic Content 33:51 What We Learned From Tucker’s Putin Interview 38:11 Is Navalny’s Death Significant? 52:30 Will Putin Rebuild the Soviet Union? 58:14 The End of Manned Warfare 1:08:27 Increased Scrutiny of Collateral Damage in Warfare 1:14:45 The Purpling of the Armed Forces 1:19:20 Will China’s Plans Be Ruined By a Low Birth Rate? 1:31:02 America’s Fentanyl Crisis 1:44:32 Why Americans Love Veterans But Dislike the CIA 1:57:23 What Mike Learned From Churchill 2:07:40 Fascinating Stories From Hitler’s Physician 2:13:02 Do People Care About Travelling to the Moon & Mars? 2:20:04 The Need for More Transparency From the Government 2:34:03 How Mike Emotionally Detaches From Current Affairs 2:42:02 Where to Find Mike - Get access to every episode 10 hours before YouTube by subscribing for free on Spotify - https://spoti.fi/2LSimPn or Apple Podcasts - https://apple.co/2MNqIgw Get a Free Sample Pack of all LMNT Flavours with your first box at https://www.drinklmnt.com/modernwisdom (automatically applied at checkout) Get an exclusive discount from Surfshark VPN at https://surfshark.deals/MODERNWISDOM (use code MODERNWISDOM) Get my free Reading List of 100 life-changing books here - https://chriswillx.com/books/ Try my productivity energy drink Neutonic here - https://neutonic.com/modernwisdom - Get in touch in the comments below or head to... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/

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

• 0:00Chris Williamson?

  Are you with AT&T?

• 0:02Speaker 01

  No, I am not.

• 0:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, that was, that was one of those moments, right?

• 0:08Chris Williamson?

  What happened?

• 0:09Speaker 01

  I think everybody thought it was the end of the world, right? Because they couldn't get on TikTok or send a text message. It was, it was disastrous. I had a couple of meetings that morning and, and people were losing their shit because, you know, and, and it was funny because everyone was just sort of bailing out of things. I think some people probably saw it as an opportunity to bail out of meetings, right? I, you know, I can't do anything.

• 0:29Chris Williamson?

  Wasn't just you?

• 0:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 0:30Chris Williamson?

  It's like, we've got that meeting with Mike. I've been waiting for an excuse.

• 0:34Speaker 01

  It does happen a lot. Yeah, that's a good point. No. Who knows, right? The frailty of, of our comms systems, our telecoms and, and our power grid and our water systems and everything else. If most people knew how easy that could actually happen, you know, not even talking about a targeted attack, just, just a going down because systems are old. You know, they probably wouldn't sleep at night.

• 0:56Chris Williamson?

  How so? What do you mean when you say systems are old?

• 0:59Speaker 01

  Well, you look at, you look at the power grid and that thing was patched together, right? Like a quilt over the years, right? And we've got three grids in the country, east and west and, and Texas in the US. And Texas has its own grid and, um, yeah. So, uh,

• 1:18Speaker 01

  but it was put together over, over a long period of time, right? And never with the intention that it was going to have to stand up to some attack. Or really even with the idea that it's going to have to withstand some natural disaster. As strange as that seems, you would think they would want to make them pretty resilient to that. So that's why you can drive by a substation, you know, and, and reach out and touch it. That's why you look at the water treatment facilities and think, well, that doesn't look particularly well protected. I mean, most of the infrastructure was never designed to withstand a physical attack and certainly not a, a cyber attack.

• 1:49Chris Williamson?

  Because that wouldn't have existed when it was first being designed.

• 1:51Speaker 01

  No, exactly, exactly. And then a lot of the equipment used for, uh, going back to the power grid, a lot of the major gear that's, that runs the power grids, we don't even manufacture in the States anymore, right? So the idea that something would shut down and we'd have a catastrophic, you know, collapse and, and, and it would kind of have a cascading effect like we had several years back that kind of hit the Northeast. You know, that's that's a devastating issue because we don't. It's not like we've got some, you know, large hardware or power plants we're able to just roll in and replace gear with. We don't. We don't manufacture that stuff.

• 2:26Chris Williamson?

  You haven't got spare power plant for every power plant.

• 2:28Speaker 01

  So the idea, I mean, you know, people always ask me, what should I do to be prepared? Well, I mean, if you can afford it, and it's easy to say, well, you should have this because, you know, they're not cheap. But you should have a generator of a decent size that will provide you with some level of power, right? If you don't have power, you know, the first thing most people will notice is their phones die, right? And then, you know, what are you going to do? You're going to sit in the dark and not have TikTok, right? So.

• 2:51Chris Williamson?

  Right, yeah. Which would obviously bring society to a standstill. Yeah, it's a, it's so weird to think. When you think about attacks and problems with telecommunications, with infrastructure, with energy, with water, you think about actual attacks, but then you don't realize that just the inbuilt fragility of the system is a threat in itself.

• 3:11Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 3:12Chris Williamson?

  You go, oh, wow, we could take this down just by no malicious intent. No one's done anything other than, and we don't know, so we don't know what's happened with AT&T.

• 3:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, you know what? I was so disinterested, to tell you the truth. I was happy not to have communications with folks for a while. So I was not the sort to think, I got to get to the bottom of this. I was just like, OK, I got I got a little while to relax.

• 3:33Chris Williamson?

  A little celebration.

• 3:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. So I was, you know, I'm the wrong guy to ask about the AT&T kerfuffle. But I did find it charming. I've said before, you know, we don't, we don't really understand the damage that these things are doing in a way, right? They're great. I mean, don't, I'm not a, you know, fucking Luddite, but, you know, it's going to be years before we understand what access to this for our kids means, right? And, you know, if anybody's got kids, they understand what that, what I'm talking about, right? It's, it's, it's the impact that these, this instant information and access to material and information that they should never have at an early age, right? All these things. Again, is there an upside? Of course there's a, like an upside, right? But.

• 4:16Speaker 01

  You know, we're not going to stand the impact this is going to have. It's just like with, you know, AI coming in now, right? We're not going to really know what this means, right? But I can tell you what it's starting to mean. Look, I've had a hard time with with my company, which is an intelligence and security firm. Portman Square Group. Thank you very much.

• 4:32Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. Lincoln bio.

• 4:33Speaker 01

  Hey, bing, first marketing plug. And, you know, we've always had a hard time finding young folks who could write well, right? I mean, you can find people who are curious and we gather intelligence, we gather information around the world, right? So as part of what we do. But you've got to package that up. You've got to present it to the clients, right? People are paying us for this and you've got to be able to tell that in a smart way. Take a lot of information, distill it down to its key points and provide that to somebody, right? And so finding young folks who can write well, who can do that, has been a problem. And if we think it's a problem now, you know, wait five or 10 years with AI, when every kid is just using ChatGPT or the next version to create everything that they they need for school, I think we got a real problem coming down the pike.

• 5:18Chris Williamson?

  Did you see Google's Gemini disaster?

• 5:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Show me a Viking.

• 5:24Chris Williamson?

  It tried to be so anti-racist that it was racist and it managed to annoy leftists by portraying Nazis as black people. And then it managed to annoy rightists by portraying the founding fathers as black people.

• 5:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, I think the Nazis, it was a very diverse group of Nazis, right? I think there was an Asian Nazi, there was a Hispanic Nazi, there was a black Nazi. Yeah, it was everybody except someone from the Aryan race.

• 5:46Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 5:47Speaker 01

  And, yeah, because because we all know that that the Nazis, they they

• 5:51Chris Williamson?

  Very ethnically

• 5:52Speaker 01

  They loved DEI. They were they were all about the, I think Goebbels was the DEI minister during the war.

• 5:58Chris Williamson?

  Yes.

• 6:00Speaker 01

  By the way, this is very good.

• 6:02Chris Williamson?

  You enjoying that?

• 6:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's really good.

• 6:03Chris Williamson?

  That'll fire you up. So, yeah, AI Gemini. I mean, so I was talking to a friend yesterday who's big in the world of fashion. Remember Balenciaga got in trouble a while ago. They kind of showed some very BDSM stuff that maybe featured kids' toys. And it really crossed the line. It was very, very

• 6:22Speaker 01

  I missed that one.

• 6:23Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, it was like, you know, if you want to feed into the pedophiles who run the world, drinking goat blood and sacrificing like women at the full moon and stuff. Like, it really played into that, but

• 6:35Speaker 01

  You really don't don't knock people's hobbies.

• 6:37Chris Williamson?

  They are.

• 6:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, so.

• 6:39Chris Williamson?

  They are. Everyone, everyone needs something to keep them going.

• 6:43Chris Williamson?

  They're 70% down from when they started. 70% down from when that that first happened. My point being that the antibody defense system that the public has against feeling like they're being fucked with. Right. Many companies, many organizations, many individuals are trying to contrive and cynically portray some sort of image. Even interpersonally day to day, you know, you don't tell your friend about the fucking athlete's foot you're dealing with. You know, like it's all part, it's all fucking smoke and mirrors. But they're 70% down. Google is way more important than overpriced shoes. But I don't think that we should underestimate how catastrophic and apocalyptic for a company it can be.

• 7:28Chris Williamson?

  For for the veil to sort of be revealed and it's like here, we know that they were doing something. What's happening with the search engine? How can we trust Google overall?

• 7:36Speaker 01

  Right. Yeah, no, I think most, most companies now do things out of fear. Right. I mean, the fear that they're not going to be, whatever the term is nowadays, woke or progressive enough. Right. And so, you know, whether it's their marketing department or the communications department, I think most, most companies always kind of, when they look at, okay, we have a new product. We have a new ad campaign we got to put out there. They've got to tick some boxes and okay, fine. Marketing has always been that advertising has always been that right? Appeal to whoever you believe your consumer to be. Right. But I think that there is a, there's a level of fear now that exists. It probably wasn't there before that says we, we, we don't want to get sideways with the very loud. You know, vocal minority, right?

• 8:21Speaker 01

  That's out there because, you know, last time I checked, you know, the LGBTQ community, God bless them. Right. But they're not, they're not the majority of the population, right? But our consumer product seems to be like believing that they are, but it's not. It's just fear of upsetting a very loud minority of people who, you know, have figured out how to manipulate. Right. The narrative and that, and again, hey, good for them, you know, because everybody's trying to, I suppose, do the same thing and, you know, win the day. But yeah, we live in, we live in interesting times, right? And if you raise. If you've got kids in school, right, you you see it almost on a daily basis. Because kids are pretty, pretty good until they get to a certain age, right?

• 9:03Speaker 01

  Young kids are pretty good about just kind of telling you the truth, right? They'll just come home and they'll say something. They don't tend to edit things that much at a young age, right? And so they'll come back and you'll say, how was your day? And he'll go, well, you know, I had a girl hiss at me. He said, what do you mean hiss at you? Well, she, well, she thinks she's a cat and so she dresses like a cat. And she only communicates by meowing and hissing. And so she hissed at me. And I said, well, why'd she hiss at you? He said, well, I pulled her tail. Well, I think that's funny, right? But but you could, you could legitimately get in trouble in school now for, for, you know, harassing a, a

• 9:37Chris Williamson?

  Cat person.

• 9:38Speaker 01

  A cat person. And so you, you hear these things and, and there's other versions of that story that come out on a daily basis and you think, okay, you know, I get it. We're kind of accommodating everything nowadays, right?

• 9:50Chris Williamson?

  Yes.

• 9:50Speaker 01

  And, you know, I, everybody's got their own opinion. You know, my opinion is that you probably don't want to do that, right? If some kid tells you that they want to be a dinosaur when they grow up, you know, they'll probably get over that.

• 10:04Chris Williamson?

  Necessarily need to indulge all of it.

• 10:05Speaker 01

  You don't need to indulge.

• 10:06Chris Williamson?

  I mean, if you look at a three year old, he's a fireman when he wakes up and then he's a postman after lunch and he's an astronaut before dinner.

• 10:12Speaker 01

  Yeah. Oh, God, I wanted to be an astronaut when I was young.

• 10:14Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 10:15Speaker 01

  I still, I kept this little essay that I wrote when I was in, I don't even remember what I was, how old I was, but that was what I wanted to be. And, and I was never going to be smart enough to be an astronaut. And my dad was nice enough not to tell me that, but, you know, it was, I remember that.

• 10:28Chris Williamson?

  You indulged your fantasy.

• 10:29Speaker 01

  I, yeah, yeah.

• 10:30Chris Williamson?

  You were the astronaut cat person.

• 10:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, he did, he did tell me, you know, at one point, you, you know, you might want to set your sights somewhere else other than space, but, um, yeah. I guess, anyway, the point being is I think the, the over indulgence, right? Um, at a, for kids at a young age is not, I don't think, actually, solid parenting.

• 10:51Chris Williamson?

  But it seems different than just indulging a young person's desire for fantasy or, or a different life. This appears to be a complete rewriting of history. It appears to be a

• 11:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, particularly we're talking about Gemini.

• 11:07Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 11:07Speaker 01

  Oh, absolutely.

• 11:08Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Fifty percent hiding reality and 50% erasing history.

• 11:13Speaker 01

  And think about how Focus that was, right? Think about the, the thought process that went into that, right? And it wasn't just one, it's not like one dude said, I'm gonna, I'm gonna, you know, create this code that's going to allow this to happen. This was, this was a, this was a legitimate discussion. Nothing happens at a company that size that doesn't go through several layers of decision-making, right? And has to get signed off on. It's bullshit if we imagine it was just one very progressive person who thought, I'm gonna fuck with the system a little bit, so here we go. This thing was test-driven to a fucking fairy tale. And so the idea that they would, now they come out and go, yeah.

• 11:51Chris Williamson?

  Bugs in the code, unforeseen externalities.

• 11:54Speaker 01

  Wow, who could have seen that coming, right? Everybody in product development, right? Yeah, I, it's, it is amazing to think about. And then you think about the power that that has, right? I mean, Google, you can't swing a dead cat without, you know, without hitting Google at some point, right? And so everybody is, in a way, is impacted, right? And yeah, again, I go back to that original comment, which is I, I don't, we don't understand, we don't have enough data points yet to understand what all this means for the development of, of, of the human race, maybe if you want to take it that far, right? Down the road.

• 12:30Chris Williamson?

  Definitely what you want to be doing though, if you're in this position, you're at the very beginning of the inception of a new type of technology, of AI, of large language models, of all of that stuff. You do not want to activate that antibody system within the populace. You should be moving so slowly. It should be, you shouldn't be allowing it to generate images. It should be just, you know, first off text. I don't, I think Gemini kind of jumped in, straight in at the deep end and did some super advanced stuff. But yeah, I think the implications for the rest of Google's unbiasedness or lack of is, I think this has really brought to the front a lot of latent skepticism that people had about that company overall.

• 13:13Speaker 01

  I, I think so, but I think what they're probably counting on is what most companies count on, which is sort of the short attention span, right? We'll all, sorry, I turned. Turn that off.

• 13:25Chris Williamson?

  That's Google calling me. Is it? Yeah, yeah.

• 13:28Speaker 01

  Hey, would you shut the fuck up?

• 13:29Chris Williamson?

  God damn it.

• 13:30Speaker 01

  Um, yeah, I think, uh, they're counting on the short attention span, right? Uh, I mean, look at, everybody imagined, uh, well, okay, the far right imagined Bud Light's going down, right? After that little goat.

• 13:41Chris Williamson?

  Within a year.

• 13:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, and, and nobody gives a shit. At the end of the day, right? I mean, there was, there was a dip, right? And they, they'd hit their stock price a little bit, but that company's not going out. You know, it's, it's just not going to happen. And, and people forget these things, right? And, and our attention spans, particularly in, in the, you know, US. And I would argue, you know, in the West to some degree, but really in the US I see it. And I spend a lot of time overseas, but here in, in, uh, in America, we've got such a short attention span. And there's this inability, right, to, and I'm not saying you, you shouldn't look at Google and say, okay, now we got to punish them hard. We got to drive them out of business. That's bullshit, you know, boycott, boycott, whatever. You don't like a product, don't use the product, right?

• 14:25Speaker 01

  But I, I don't think this is going to impact them in the long run. And I don't think they ultimately believe it will or care, right? They care in the short, very short term, but I think they understand the dynamics. Uh, and we're all like, you know, a bunch of raccoons chasing the next tinfoil ball.

• 14:43Chris Williamson?

  It's very easy to outwit somebody else by just looking at a longer time horizon than they do.

• 14:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 14:50Chris Williamson?

  You know, if you just realize right now, the Bud Light example is so perfect. This is the end of it. Kid Rock's shooting it with a gun. It's going to be Kid Rock with John Rogan.

• 15:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, he was, yeah.

• 15:01Chris Williamson?

  Fucking drinking it.

• 15:02Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 15:02Chris Williamson?

  With Joe. Shane Gillis is now an ambassador for them. You've got like the Bud Light, New World Order fucking booth at the Super Bowl, right? And it's all the coolest people are in there. Post Malone's in there and all the rest.

• 15:12Speaker 01

  Came out with a camo can. Remember that?

• 15:14Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, support our veterans, all that shit, right? And you go, so this is one of the, I have such, I get so annoyed with people that are super vehement about a thing and then forget about it. Because you captured my attention with your bullshit, over the top vehement denial.

• 15:33Chris Williamson?

  Or assertion about some fucking thing. And it's still in my memory, but it's not in yours. There was this image of a single squaddie soldier walking down the streets of London. And it got forwarded on WhatsApp. This was during COVID. And it was, um, this is an image, uh, sent to me by my brother who's part of the armed forces and whatever, whatever. The army are going to come and force you at gunpoint to stay in your house. And this is, I don't know if you, you've ever seen this on WhatsApp. There's a thing that says forwarded many times. And it's like a warning that this is being pushed around a lot on WhatsApp. This thing went beyond hyper viral. And people were adamant, this is the beginning. You remember when there was like tanks rolling through Florida, Miami, maybe?

• 16:15Chris Williamson?

  Miami Beach. And it was like, this is the beginning. It's going to be martial law and everyone's going to be locked down. And people were fucking adamant, uh, global health passports. Remember that? Remember that was going to come in? And it's just a case of either, oh, well, um, the amount of attention that we gave it online stopped them from being able to do it. I'm like, all right, well, that's fucking unfalsifiable, isn't it? Or they're just biding their time until we're less vigilant. I go, dude, you don't get to make insanely certain assertions about the world. And then just like allow them to fall.

• 16:50Speaker 01

  And then you move, you, yeah.

• 16:52Chris Williamson?

  It winds me up so much.

• 16:53Speaker 01

  No, I, if you've spent any time, um, working for the government or a government, you know, typically what you'll find. Unless you're in a totalitarian regime, unless you're working for Xi Jinping in China, maybe.

• 17:09Speaker 01

  You know, the government, you know, the US government in particular is not capable of organizing panic in a doomed submarine, right? They just can't. Yeah. So this idea that somehow they're going to, you know, create this new world order or they're going to do these things. I mean, you always want to be vigilant, but yeah, the COVID, the pandemic brought out a lot of that. I think in part because it kind of fed into, you know, it was, it was a, it was a great trough, you know, for people who wanted to talk about conspiracies and things. And so, okay, great. But, um, you know, we all knew another pandemic was going to happen, right? We know another one's going to happen at some point, right? Probably have the same reactions. We won't learn anything. But yeah, I've never been a big fan of the or a big believer in the idea that somehow the government's going to get this massive conspiracy over on us because I spent too much time working for the government.

• 17:55Chris Williamson?

  Right. So it's your your belief is that because they're so useless, this level of coordination would essentially be impossible?

• 18:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. The idea that they could keep secrets to that degree, right? I mean, you know, there's certain parts of the government, you know, intel community is pretty good at keeping sources and methods, right? Because it's life or death, you know, for assets working overseas. But I mean, on the big level, you know, we've created some, you know, some, you know, secret layer somewhere where we're developing some new tech. Okay, fine, maybe so, but I my experience anyway has been that it's tough for the government to keep a secret. If it involves multiple agencies or, you know, a variety of of of positions, I just don't. I again, you have to go with what your personal experience is. That's mine. I'm sure somebody else is, you know, sitting in somebody's basement with no experience has a different idea. So.

• 18:44Chris Williamson?

  Did you see that Gemini also refused to create an image of what happened at Tiananmen Square?

• 18:51Speaker 01

  Yes, yeah, I did. And I also saw that.

• 18:56Speaker 01

  What was it? Somebody asked them. I mean, there's there's so many examples out there.

• 19:00Chris Williamson?

  Correct.

• 19:02Speaker 01

  I think one example, and I haven't tracked it back to its original source yet, but somebody asked if if it was.

• 19:11Speaker 01

  All right to misgender. I think it was.

• 19:15Speaker 01

  Bruce Jenner or sorry Caitlyn Jenner.

• 19:20Speaker 01

  In order to stop a. Nuclear apocalypse or Armageddon and the kind of the answer was sort of shaded. Well, it's not right, you know, because it could be considered discriminatory. Now, there may be other ways to stop the Armageddon.

• 19:34Chris Williamson?

  Okay.

• 19:34Speaker 01

  You know, and I think.

• 19:35Chris Williamson?

  That's some good lateral thinking.

• 19:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, so there was, you know, there was it was layered, I guess. But no, there's I don't, I don't know. I.

• 19:44Speaker 01

  What I worry about, I take it, I tend to think about things in very simple terms. My greatest joy in life comes from my, my family, right? So I think about a lot of things in terms of the impact it will have on my kids, uh, what we're leaving behind for the kids, you know, what it means for their development. And so I tend, I look at something like, you know, AI and, and again, it's a fairly simplistic way of looking at it. I'm not necessarily considering the human race. I'm considering what impact will it have on, on teaching my boys to be smart thinkers, to become, you know, productive, become leaders. You know, what does all of this mean? Tik Tok, what is that? You know, not just Tik Tok, but I mean, just the, the access to information and social media. What is that doing to these minds, right?

• 20:25Speaker 01

  And, you know, again, I suppose, you know, the, the just recent generation had the same conversations with shooter games, right? Video games, right? So, you know, every, every generation deals with it, you know? I'm sure my parents talked about rock and roll music, right? And we're worried about that. So it's not.

• 20:44Chris Williamson?

  TV before that, radio before that.

• 20:45Speaker 01

  It's nothing new. It's just, it does seem more insidious, right? It seems more, because it is, it's reaching more people, right? And it's having more immediate impact and it's affecting the way that we think about things and how we react to news of the day, right? We're, we're tired of Ukraine after two years, right? We were in Afghanistan for fucking 20 years, right? And now we're all fatigued from it to some degree or in some fashion, but it took almost no time for people to get tired of, and, and, and, you know, a lot of people that were out there and couldn't wait to pin a fucking Ukraine flag in their front yard, right? Or, or, or post a little Ukraine flag on, on their Twitter site. You know, now they're all like, oh, we're, you know, we can't spend any more money there, you know? So, okay, what happened in that short span of two years?

• 21:28Speaker 01

  Well, immediate access to information and all, and all those opinions and ideas, right? And then people get siloed and they start reading only things that agree with them. And then, then they're, they're done, right? Now they're, then they've got a hardened opinion and you can't shift them off that position, right? Anyway.

• 21:44Chris Williamson?

  We'll get back to talking to Mike in one minute, but first I need to tell you about Surfshark. Browsing the internet without a VPN is like going for a walk in a muddy field without any shoes on. You can do it, but it's ill. And you might catch something. You can protect your browsing online and get access to the entire world's Netflix library for less than the price of a cup of coffee per month. If you're someone that works off public wifi networks like cafes or libraries or airports, the internet administrator can see all of the traffic going back and forth between your devices and the internet. And that is tres bad. You do not want this. Also, your internet service provider is able to see all of your traffic and then sell it to companies that can target you with ads. Websites are split testing you for prices on products that you're already buying. And even flight websites are doing this too.

• 22:23Chris Williamson?

  So to protect yourself from all of this, plus to access the entire world's Netflix library, you can do that right now with one membership. And it's across unlimited devices. You can have it across your laptop, your iPad, your phone, and even your smart TV. You can get an 83% discount plus three months free by going to the link in the description below or heading to surfshark.deals/modernwisdom. That's surfshark.deals/modernwisdom. Did you see what happened with the Super Bowl where Alicia Keys' voice broke? And then they went back and retroactively fixed her voice? Do you see this?

• 22:56Speaker 01

  No, I, you know, I did not. The Giants were not in the Super Bowl, so I didn't watch it.

• 23:00Chris Williamson?

  Right. Well, yeah, you missed Alicia Keys. Very good performance. Usher, fantastic dancer, still pretty ripped. Alicia Keys' voice broke on the first note of this piano solo thing that she was doing. But if you go back and watch the Super Bowl's recording of it on YouTube, her voice is perfect. And this has been, I, look, Alicia Keys is not the vanguard of us rewriting history. But you can certainly see between AI being able to misrepresent how history would have been. This sort of erasing of history and rewriting of the present, and then this retroactive changing. And even if it's just a little bit with regards to someone's voice, this is different to auto tuning a song.

• 23:45Chris Williamson?

  This is a record of what happened in history.

• 23:47Speaker 01

  Right.

• 23:47Chris Williamson?

  And I think I'm, this is starting to get quite worrying. Like I err on the side of non-conspiracyism, but yeah, this is starting to get a bit. I don't like the doors that are being opened here.

• 23:58Speaker 01

  Well, I think there's, there are some mechanisms that are, and companies that are trying to, or have been trying to get out of the curve. I'm not sure that that's, that's possible right now, but.

• 24:10Speaker 01

  You have to, it's like, it's like the old days. You'd read an article in newspaper and you think, okay, that's very interesting. Well, you know, but is it true? Right? I mean, so what's the basis for this? You know, and it used to be, one of the defenses was sources would be named, right? You couldn't write an article, you wouldn't get it published if it was based on anonymous sources. Well, now that's not true anymore. New York Times will publish a front page article on the, you know, top half based on anonymous sources. And so you're trying to verify something, right? And you push that forward to today and you say, okay, well, now I'm trying to verify a clip that I'm seeing on X, right? Or on YouTube or something. And how do you do that?

• 24:52Speaker 01

  Because the ability to manipulate video and audio is remarkable, right? There's, there's, you, almost impossible to tell the difference, basically, without some assistance. And so there's companies out there that are trying to ensure that you are basically imprinting actual the truth, right? So you take video and that is the, the original source and it's, it's imprinted in the, in the code.

• 25:23Chris Williamson?

  Okay.

• 25:23Speaker 01

  That says this is the, the date, the time, the location. And so you can verify that what's being said by that political candidate or whomever, right? On that, in, on that podium is accurate because then you may see, a day later, you may see the same clip, but it's been altered.

• 25:39Chris Williamson?

  Auto-tuned.

• 25:40Speaker 01

  And yeah, auto-tuned. And so there are some companies out there that are working to do that, to, to prevent deep fakes. But it's, it's very difficult because you're relying on people's curiosity and, and them having the interest, right? To pursue, to make sure that what they're saying, and most people don't, either they don't have the time or they don't have the patience or the interest.

• 26:02Chris Williamson?

  Well, the point with ChatGPT and these LLMs and AI and search engines is to reduce the friction from getting where you are to where you want to be in terms of understanding, in terms of whatever it is that you're searching for, right?

• 26:15Speaker 01

  Right.

• 26:15Chris Williamson?

  And the fact that it's frictionless is precisely where the attraction lies. It's convenience and all the rest of the stuff.

• 26:22Speaker 01

  Right.

• 26:23Chris Williamson?

  And if.

• 26:25Chris Williamson?

  You could imagine a world in which the most convenient route also bakes in a lack of accuracy. So it goes, look, you can find this out in three seconds, but there's a accuracy.

• 26:38Speaker 01

  Your margin of error.

• 26:39Chris Williamson?

  Yes, exactly. Precisely. You could be a little bit wrong either way. Or you can do your own research and it's going to take you a day and a half and you're going to know what actually happened. Where are people going to go?

• 26:47Speaker 01

  Nobody's gonna do that.

• 26:48Chris Williamson?

  Of course, of course. And the thing is, you have the opportunity. It is more effortful to not portray the truth. It takes more effort to do that. Now, it's less convenient, but it takes more effort to lie than it does to tell the truth.

• 27:04Speaker 01

  Well, um, yeah, that, but that, but that, that gap, that difference between lying and telling the truth is shrinking, right? Because of the technology, because of the access to be able to do this. So, um, you know, and, and, but you're right. I mean, if you just, if you pair it back to just sort of the human nature, right? If you're, you know, but that's why if you're being interrogated, you know, you gotta stick to the truth to the most part, right? You want to stay as close to the truth as possible, obviously without veering off into something that's going to get your ass kicked. But the idea being, because otherwise, if you, if you're lying, you gotta keep building on that and you had to keep remembering. And then you spend all your time thinking, okay, where was, okay, what did I say there? When I said that and then I said that, that.

• 27:46Speaker 01

  And if you're dealing in an interrogation situation, you know, and that's what you're counting on. You're counting on if that person's lying to me at some point, they're going to get confused, right? And they're going to start mixing up that story. And particularly if you, you know, in the old days, you've got the ability for sleep deprivation or whatever it is, right? And you can start messing with their mind a little bit, then yes, that's, that's what you're counting on. But so you're absolutely right in the sense that lying is much more difficult. Aside from the fact that, you know, usually, if you make a mistake, right? The best, we were taught this at the agency, right? As, as, as being out in the field and operations. I remember one of my first bosses.

• 28:27Speaker 01

  Told me when I landed on site before I went and off to do whatever I was doing. He said, you know, if anything happens, if you make a mistake, just come tell me, we'll sort it out. But just, just tell me, smartest thing, right, you can do. To empower young people with responsibility, who are given responsibility, to know that if they make a mistake, come forward with it, tell them. And sure enough, you know, because of, you know, operations in the agency out in the field, sometimes things happen. So, you know, and he was good to his word, right? We had a bit of a goat rope and, you know, it worked out. But you gotta be able to do that and you gotta be able to show, it's not enough to say, hey, you make a mistake, come tell me, we'll fix it. You know, if you kick their ass when they come into mistake, then you've.

• 29:10Chris Williamson?

  Disincentivize.

• 29:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. So you gotta, you gotta follow through, but.

• 29:16Speaker 01

  You're, so you're right in a sense, yeah, telling, it's always the truth. Telling the truth is always the easiest path, right? But I guess my point being is in the world of disinformation now, if your job is, is propaganda or misinformation or disinformation, it's becoming a lot easier, right? And a lot quicker, a lot more efficient, right? To create that then, in the old days, if you were gonna do a propaganda campaign, right? Change hearts and minds in some country, right? That you're, you're trying to sway the people. You know, I'm not talking about overthrowing the government. You know, those good old days are gone.

• 29:51Speaker 01

  So I'm sorry, that's not true. We never did that sort of thing, come on. Um, but the point being is that you had, that was a lot of work, right? Because what were you doing? You were using old media technology, right? You were finding journalists who might be inclined, for whatever reason, to write articles in a certain tone, right? And you create a network of them and you'd kind of pepper the, the country with, you know, this, this narrative. And you'd build on that and hope that you're having in the impact. Bullshit, much easier now, are you kidding me?

• 30:18Chris Williamson?

  Think about, you remember Cambridge Analytica?

• 30:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, sure.

• 30:21Chris Williamson?

  So, you know, targeted memes and, and ads that were trunched into cohorts and we have the, uh, maybe Hillary is a non-US citizen. Maybe Hillary is a, you know, all of different ways that this gets split up. You had all of these different, uh. Vulnerabilities and vectors of attack. But there was still a person making a meme or making an advert or whatever. So there was still human labor getting in the way of the rapidity of this. Whereas now you have both the ability for AI to deliver it in a targeted manner. And also to create it.

• 31:03Chris Williamson?

  So you you can have Mike Baker profile on Facebook or Instagram or TikTok or whatever. And it's

• 31:10Speaker 01

  And who wouldn't want that?

• 31:11Chris Williamson?

  No one wants that at all. But and it's just you that it's targeted at. So, yeah, I think, yeah, increasingly, we're going to see real information, original sources, you know. Maybe there'll be a way where being an actual person on social media will be a rarity in the next five years. Maybe humans are going to be it's 99% of content will be created by bots. And every so often, you'll see a tweet from you or someone else that's real.

• 31:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, and it's look, if you're if you're talking about a state, right? If you're talking about creating something that's going to get past the scrutiny of of you know, Chinese intel or Russian intel or something. Yeah, then you're you're working your ass off, right? You're creating a very hard backstopped.

• 31:57Chris Williamson?

  Elaborate.

• 31:58Speaker 01

  Elaborate cover.

• 32:00Speaker 01

  And it's it's a lot of work. But for the average person out there, if what you're trying to do is influence a campaign or you're trying to do, you know, creating 10,000 fictional characters, you know, saying interesting things out there who then, you know, it's it's like the old concentric circles who then get 5,000 followers each. And it's I guess, but again, it all comes down to the same problem, right? We can talk about all the, you know, the things you can do, but it's individuals, right? It comes down to each person saying to themselves is what I'm reading or hearing or watching true. You know? And I don't know how you you impact that, right? Because human nature being what it is, we're just, you know, we're we're consuming shit and then moving on.

• 32:45Chris Williamson?

  Path of least resistance.

• 32:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, path of least resistance. And to be fair, most people are just trying to put food on the table or take care of their kids or whatever they're doing. And so you can't ask them to spend a lot of time scrutinizing.

• 32:54Chris Williamson?

  I don't have to time to be my own personal Snopes.

• 32:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. Yeah, who am I, Poirot? It's not gonna happen. I can't so I think that there's.

• 33:05Speaker 01

  You know, there's always going to be this problem. And not to say that it hasn't always existed, right? But I do think the acceleration is pretty impressive, right? The speed of which you can create this fake, right? This deep fake or this persona that pushes information out there, whatever it may be. And the speed with which people are willing to consume it and pass it along. So that's something we're going to be battling, I think, for a while. And will it impact this upcoming election? Of course it will and future elections, right? Why wouldn't you? If I'm Russian intelligence or Chinese intelligence or the Iranians or anybody who's got the resources, why wouldn't I try to fuck with the US?

• 33:44Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 33:45Speaker 01

  So, or the UK or really, it's not, again, it's not just a US-centric problem.

• 33:49Chris Williamson?

  Yes. What do you think we learned from the Putin-Tucker interview, speaking of Russia?

• 33:59Speaker 01

  Well, Putin's a douchebag. I think I took that away, but I'd say I had a preconceived notion.

• 34:04Chris Williamson?

  Putin. Those were your priors.

• 34:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, that was something I walked into the interview with. Look, I don't, I don't know. I think, I understand why Tucker wanted to do it, aside from just 160 million views, however many he got, right? I mean, that was sure to be a winner in just the ratings. I don't think it revealed anything clever or new about Putin's mindset. He's a smart cat, right? So he knew what he was going to say, how he was going to act, what he was going to look like, you know? I mean, he's a very calculating individual, right? He survived Russian politics, right? For this long, at the top, right? You don't do that by being a moron, right?

• 34:50Speaker 01

  Or stumbling into an interview with Tucker Carlson, right? Who's not exactly Lex Luthor, right? I mean, so that, you know, again, and that's not belittling to Tucker. He's a smart guy. I'm just saying that it's not like, it was not like some Marvel, you know, movie where the two evil minds got together. Putin's a very calculating, clever individual. So I don't think we, I admit, from my perspective, I didn't learn anything new about him. Look, this idea that... Somehow, we have no interest in Ukraine and we should just, you know, close the curtains on it. Um, yeah, Ukraine, great courage for two years. We all loved it. And I'll keep

• 35:31Speaker 01

  my bumper sticker on the car, um, for Ukraine. And now we walk away because we don't care anymore because we're tired of it and we want to, you know, do something and we spend that money back. Of course, we should spend the fucking money at home, right? We got a lot of infrastructure problems and resources, we should do. But we also have concerns over there. And so I think, you know, I'm amazed at the speed with which it happened, but you could argue that about a lot of things.

• 35:56Chris Williamson?

  The speed at which the support fell off?

• 35:58Speaker 01

  Yes, the speed at which, I mean, look, again, I don't mean to jump all over the place, but Hamas rolls into southern Israel, slaughters 1,200 people and probably the most medieval display of brutality that we've seen in our lifetimes, right? Uh, which everybody agreed was incredibly brutal. And in record time, it's Israel's fault, right? Because they've gone into Gaza to try to destroy the Hamas, which has been doing this, which has always been in existence to destroy Israel. And so, yeah, and of course, you don't want civilians to die. But Hamas has spent, you know, going on a couple decades now, embedding themselves inside that population, knowing that every time that there is a conflict,

• 36:42Speaker 01

  civilians are going to die, knowing that that's going to drive the narrative. That's what they do. So the speed with which that happened, the speed with which we've gotten fatigued in Ukraine, you know, it all kind of comes back around again to this, this whole idea.

• 36:54Chris Williamson?

  Novelty, die for something new. Yeah, I, um, you know, I knew that the Putin Tucker interview was going to be a big deal and I'd sort of prepared myself for, yeah, this like cataclysmic meeting of, you know, like West and Soviet and I, and then I, I don't know, I came away from it kind of just being like, oh.

• 37:16Chris Williamson?

  Just very, very unenlightened, kind of unimpressed, I think. You know, you have this 30 minute treatise, monologue, soliloquy at the start about this is the history and this is why we feel this way and so on and so forth. And, you know, Tuck is a, he's a very competent interviewer.

• 37:36Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 37:37Chris Williamson?

  Usually. And I, you know, I, I don't know how difficult it must have been, and this is something that people are never really going to see, the intermediary of a translator between the two adds a degree of complexity that can really, it's like fighting a southpaw or something. It's, you know, it throws you off your step a little bit.

• 37:55Speaker 01

  Right.

• 37:55Chris Williamson?

  And that sounds silly, but, you know.

• 37:59Speaker 01

  No, no, they use that to, I mean, that's always been the case. You always use the translator to your advantage, right?

• 38:04Chris Williamson?

  It gives him more chance to say something back, to do whatever. Right, yeah, very interesting. But no, I just, it was a bit, and now, Navalny's dead.

• 38:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 38:14Chris Williamson?

  And that's the next, and that happens, what, a week, maybe?

• 38:17Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 38:17Chris Williamson?

  10 days after he sits down with Tucker.

• 38:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, it, and he doesn't care, right? I mean, we, we imagine that, that Russia cares what we think about them, how they're portrayed. And we imagine that Xi worries about how China.

• 38:32Chris Williamson?

  You mean like they've got a, a brand equity dashboard somewhere?

• 38:36Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 38:36Chris Williamson?

  Like, what's our current rating? Oh, we're at 4.4 stars on TripAdvisor.

• 38:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, what is that, the old Q rating or the Q factor or something? How popular are we? Yeah, they, they really don't care. In part, not so much Russia, but more China, because they've got the longer view, right? They, they, they look way down the road compared to how the, the West tends to do it. But I think the, the parameters of what they were allowed to do, Carlson and his crew, when they went in, were pretty hard and fast, right? And there's, as you can imagine, there's a lot of back and forth that goes into that.

• 39:10Chris Williamson?

  It was two hours late as well for it.

• 39:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 39:11Chris Williamson?

  Putin was two hours late, which apparently is like par for the course with him.

• 39:15Speaker 01

  He was riding a tiger, he was doing something.

• 39:17Chris Williamson?

  He was, he was. Fighting a bear.

• 39:18Speaker 01

  Fighting a bear.

• 39:19Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 39:20Speaker 01

  So a couple of them. But yeah, if, if Carlson had like borne in on, or, or bored in on, on Gershkovitz, right? Evan Gershkovitz, who's sitting in, in jail, or Paul Whelan, or, you know. And in a more aggressive fashion said, okay, well, where's your evidence with Evan? That he's been engaged in espionage? How about that? You know, when are you actually going to do something about an actual, you know, open, transparent effort to discuss his case? Um, you know, if you'd, if you'd, if he had gone in on that more, um, but that wouldn't have been allowed to happen, right? That wasn't, that was, wasn't part of the, the agreed upon, you know, uh, playing field.

• 40:03Speaker 01

  So I, I just, I didn't think we were going to get anything new and I didn't feel like we, we did. I'm, I, again, I understand why he did it, uh, had the interview. Um, but anyway, but the Navalny situation, um, sudden death syndrome.

• 40:21Chris Williamson?

  Uh, dude, you're in a false labor camp, like just.

• 40:26Speaker 01

  Yeah. Above the Arctic Circle.

• 40:27Chris Williamson?

  Being alive, being alive is a surprise.

• 40:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 40:31Chris Williamson?

  Like the death isn't the surprise thing. My God, he lasted two and a half years.

• 40:34Speaker 01

  Yeah. He went for a walk and then he didn't feel well. That was their original comment. You know, he went for a walk and then he didn't feel well because, because that's what you do above the Arctic Circle.

• 40:43Chris Williamson?

  Go for a walk.

• 40:44Speaker 01

  Go for a walk. And, um, and then, eh, you know, there was some comment that he had, uh, bruising around his head and his chest. And their, their response was, well, he hit his head when he fell.

• 40:55Chris Williamson?

  On his chest.

• 40:56Speaker 01

  Apparently repeatedly. And then the chest was when they were trying to revive him. It's, so from a Russian perspective, it was, it was exactly what you would expect. And whether he was poisoned or whether they, you know, they, they, it was blunt force trauma or whatever. The outcome was probably always inevitable with Navalny because he was always a threat.

• 41:15Chris Williamson?

  And what's the, give the 30,000th view for the people who, who don't know his background, Navalny? Who was he?

• 41:21Speaker 01

  He's, I'm trying to remember the year that he kind of really first surfaced.

• 41:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'm, I'm, I'm drawing a blank, but he, um, he, most, not most recently, but he became sort of a critic of, uh, of Chechnya. He became a critic of some of the governance in Chechnya and the corruption. He started, um, being more vocal about, primarily about corruption issues, right? And then he fed off of that, I'm, I'm really oversimplifying it, but he had to be careful about how he was doing that, obviously, because you get, you get sideways with the Russian regime pretty quickly. But he started to gain a following because he was one of the few people who was actually getting out and talking about things that people, you know, I suppose in the back of their minds were thinking,

• 42:13Speaker 01

  yeah, there's probably some corruption going on here in the Russian government and, and around the, the region. And eventually he, he went to run for mayor and that didn't end well, right? He didn't, he got convicted or charged with, um, business corruption. And that was kind of the first salvo that Putin fired at him. I think in, in an effort to say, hey, look, just shut up because I think, you know, you're going to find this is not going to go well for you. So it was business corruption. You see that in China too. Anytime somebody gets sideways with Xi, usually it's a corruption charge. It's a, some type of malfeasance on the business side. Yeah. So, um, and then, and then they disappear. So Navalny, uh, made a bid for, for mayor of Moscow, feeling like that's

• 42:57Speaker 01

  where you could make a change, right? I think his, his real mindset was if you, if, if he could get that post, then he really could perhaps longer term, uh, influence change in Russia. I mean, he was, he's a proponent of democracy. Then, then, then disinformation started getting, there was a lot of movement from the Putin regime, uh, painting him in, you know, a lot of different ways, right? Saying, okay, you're, you're, you know, far right, you're an extremist, you're dead. All sorts of things started to come through. Um, and then it kind of all went sideways. He eventually ended up, I think it was 2019, 2020. Um, he was, uh, on a flight, got sick, you know, Novichok was the nerve agent that they used.

• 43:41Speaker 01

  Which is serious shit. Serious shit invented by the Soviets. Um, and, uh, so he almost died from that. He was out of the country. And then to his credit, after he recovered. Okay, I'm gonna come back.

• 43:56Chris Williamson?

  Straight back.

• 43:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. So he flew back, he got arrested before he even really got anywhere near, you know, passport control. They just picked him up and that was pretty much it.

• 44:08Chris Williamson?

  But during during this period, he had started to do YouTube and he was flying drones, not him, his team were flying drones over the top of Putin's billion dollar compound.

• 44:22Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 44:22Chris Williamson?

  And releasing stories that he's just got like an army of hookers and and pole dancers and stuff just cycling their way through this place and look at all of the money and this is where it's been spent. But they're, you know, full on like what in order to be able to go as far as they did, it looks like pretty high grade technology to be able to capture this sort of stuff.

• 44:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, you can it's, you know, again, drones being what they are nowadays.

• 44:44Chris Williamson?

  Yes.

• 44:45Speaker 01

  Oh, I like that. I like that.

• 44:47Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 44:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's real character. Yeah, I know. So, yeah, the the drone technology has changed everything, right? And it's so accessible, right? You don't need much. A few hundred bucks will get you a drone with a camera that you can, you know, get some really good footage of. So, but you're right, you know, talking about his is is a lavish lifestyle and his spending, that irked Putin on a on a personal level, right? And Putin only cares about one thing, right, right, which is maintaining power. Same with Xi. And you maintain power by keeping the people under control, right? So, social unrest is the one thing that these guys all fear the most, right? Including the mullahs in Iran and, and, you know, Kim

• 45:27Speaker 01

  Jong-un, although he lives in kind of a fantasy world of North Korea. But so Navalny, you know, at a certain point, he, you know, it was for him, it was inevitable, I think, that this is where it was going.

• 45:41Chris Williamson?

  I mean, I remember watching it unfold at the time after this guy's been popped with nerve agent and then slowly recovers and then starts doing his YouTube stuff again. And this is getting in days, tens of millions of plays. And it's not even it's only in Russian, right? You can maybe translate it into British subtitles or English subtitles or whatever. And and then he's like, I'm not scared of you. Like, you should be.

• 46:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 46:06Chris Williamson?

  You should be scared.

• 46:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 46:07Chris Williamson?

  And as soon as he got on that plane, right, to go back to the motherland, that was at some point within the next five years, you're probably going to be dead.

• 46:16Speaker 01

  Yeah. And I think that I could see the calculation that he and his, you know, his wife, I'm sure, and probably his close. Kadre made that the most impact he can have will be in country, right? I mean, it's one thing to be a dissident outside the country. You know, China's got a number of those, even though the Xi regime tries to track them down and change their minds. Um, but, um, I think Navalny probably spent a fair amount of time, who knows? But it's speculation, but I suspect he spent a lot of time, uh, on that calculation. Can I have more impact outside the country or inside the country? And, uh, to his credit, he, you know, he flew back knowing, I think, exactly what was going to happen. Um, and so that-

• 47:01Chris Williamson?

  Have you got any idea what these labor camps are like? What do you, where, where it is and what it's like there? Do we have any information about that?

• 47:07Speaker 01

  This was the, what's known as a polar wolf. It's the IK3, um, uh, penal colony up, uh, above the Arctic Circle. And I personally haven't spent time there. But it's, um, it's reported to be one of the most brutal, uh, camps that they've got, right? Which tells you, and it's completely isolated. And that's really what they were looking to do was just to put him away somewhere where people would forget about him. Um, to his wife's credit, to his lawyer's credit, right? Um, and to a, a small circle of, of supporters, um, they were able to keep some attention, keep some focus on it and his mother as well. Uh, but, you know, the idea being we're just out of sight, out of mind, right?

• 47:52Speaker 01

  And look, people talked about when he died, you know, the headlines were all, you know, Putin's most prominent critic. Well, well, prominent implies that there's a bunch of others, right?

• 48:05Chris Williamson?

  Only.

• 48:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 48:06Chris Williamson?

  Putin's critic.

• 48:07Speaker 01

  Only critic at this point. Yeah. Um, I mean, there's, there's some brave people who will get on the street and, and, you know-

• 48:14Chris Williamson?

  There were a lot of protests, but then those people were being rounded up and arrested-

• 48:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, preemptively, preemptively. Some, some of them were picked up, uh, before there was even an opportunity to have a, not even so much a protest as a memorial service out in public, right?

• 48:28Chris Williamson?

  And then they refused to give the body back for a little while as well.

• 48:30Speaker 01

  They did, um, you know, there was some talk about, well, they're letting the poison dissipate.

• 48:37Speaker 01

  Honestly, you know, at this point, you know, would

• 48:40Chris Williamson?

  Who gives a fuck?

• 48:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, would Putin, would Putin's team think to themselves, you know, we're gonna waste some poison on him up here? We're just gonna, you know, let him die. Yeah. I, who knows how he actually ended up going, but uh, his wife is, you know, promised to carry on. And, you know, there were lots of headlines saying, what does this mean for Russia? It doesn't mean shit for Russia, unfortunately, right? It's, we, we will not be talking about this, unfortunately, in six months' time. I know they laid some more sanctions on, on Russia.

• 49:09Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, 500 new sanctions, largely against Russia's financial and military sectors. The round of sanctions are the most at one time since Russia invaded Ukraine two years ago. And a lot of criticism that this isn't enough, this isn't sufficient. Biden basically made a, a threat, I suppose, or a deal, that if Navalny died, that there would be more sanctions. We've deposited half a thousand and it seems like it was kind of like a

• 49:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, how about this? How about we did those sanctions two years ago when Russia invaded? If we had additional sanctions we could lay on to, to fuck with their ability to make money, to fund their military adventurism into Ukraine, why didn't we do that before? I mean, what, what are we half-assing sanctions for? So they came up with a, you know, sort of this bullshit price cap on oil, right? The, the only way Putin affords what he's doing in Ukraine is through energy revenues, right? So, you know, the sanctions up to this point have been like, well, okay, well, you know, we're gonna cap Russian oil at $60 a barrel. Can't buy it at a higher price. Well, you know, the world's not gonna, what are we talking about, right?

• 50:20Speaker 01

  So they've created this whole shadow fleet of merchant ships. They're, they've sold $35 billion worth of oil to India, which turns around and refines a lot of that oil, sells a lot of that product to the US and the EU, right? It's, it's just bullshit. The idea that they've got more cash in their account now in Russia than they've had in quite some time.

• 50:40Chris Williamson?

  Really?

• 50:40Speaker 01

  Certainly more than before the war even started. Because they've, the sanctions have been ineffective, haven't been aggressive enough. And we should be doing more. You could argue the same for Iran, but you know, again, that's, I don't want to disappear down other rabbit holes, but um, yeah. When they talked about, they came out and, you know, they, they bloviate about. We're gonna lay out sanctions now because of Navalny. You should have fucking done those sanctions two years ago, right? Squeezed him, made it so he couldn't afford this, right? And maybe we wouldn't have spent billions and billions and billions of dollars to Ukraine. Because Putin couldn't afford to do what he's doing.

• 51:20Speaker 01

  But that's, you know, I don't know, I'm not president.

• 51:22Chris Williamson?

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• 51:27Chris Williamson?

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• 52:12Chris Williamson?

  That's how confident they are that you'll love it. Right now, you can get a free sample pack of all eight flavors with your first box by going to the link in the description below or heading to drinklmnt.com/ModernWisdom. That's drinklmnt.com/ModernWisdom. What, uh, I've heard you say before that Putin's goal is to rebuild the Soviet Union. Is that, is that, that's just the synopsis of what he wants to do?

• 52:38Speaker 01

  Well, he's said it numerous times himself. He said that, I mean, his most, uh, you know, direct quote was the collapse of the Soviet Union was the greatest crisis of the 20th century. And, and so I guess my, my point is that.

• 52:54Speaker 01

  He's spent the past thirty plus years trying to figure out how to rebuild it in some fashion. I don't mean the entire Soviet Union, but he certainly wants to to get back to something more than what he's got, right? He he's very keen on sort of the glory of the motherland, right? And okay, everybody, you know, you could argue everybody's nationalistic, but he's ambitious in a land grab sort of way. So when he says that and when he talks about the threat of NATO on his border, right? He's he's not bullshitting, right? He means that, right? And so the idea that he's gonna take Ukraine and if we stop aid,

• 53:37Speaker 01

  you know, again, this, you know, Washington's gonna do what they do.

• 53:43Speaker 01

  But if they don't provide resources to Ukraine going forward, if we say, ah, that's enough, let's focus on ourselves, it's not important. And people rationalize that by thinking that it's just Ukraine, you know, why do we care? It's one country.

• 53:59Speaker 01

  If they imagine that that's where he's gonna stop, he's gonna end up with Kiev and then go, yeah, okay, I'm good. It's all fine now. I don't care. I'm gonna I'm gonna I'm gonna now focus on on improving myself and, you know, the homeland.

• 54:15Speaker 01

  You know, that's not his track record. And I'm not sure where people get that that belief or optimism from. I think it's it's a rationalization because they don't want to spend any more money on Ukraine because they don't see the value in

• 54:30Speaker 01

  trying to prevent Putin from invading and taking over

• 54:34Chris Williamson?

  Just seems inevitable now.

• 54:35Speaker 01

  A separate country.

• 54:36Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. How much truth is there in the

• 54:41Chris Williamson?

  Russia's got declining birth rates, this is close to the highest that their population is ever going to be, therefore their armed forces are, this is kind of a last chance attempt to be able to have the manpower to go into Ukraine? Is there any truth in that? It's a story I've seen pushed around online.

• 54:57Speaker 01

  Yeah. Look, they've got a three to one manpower advantage over Ukraine.

• 55:04Speaker 01

  And more importantly, they've got an ability to suffer and put up with

• 55:12Speaker 01

  pain that

• 55:16Speaker 01

  I don't think the West really understands and go back and look at their history in World War II and their losses that they were willing to sustain.

• 55:26Chris Williamson?

  Is the culture still the same as then, though?

• 55:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think it's pretty well embedded in the culture. Yeah, I mean, you can argue that it's more modern society and they've got access to information. But at the end of the day, I think Putin and his cohorts, I think they they read the people pretty well. And you would imagine that, you know, there must be populations, you know, just rising up in the streets and and it's not happening, right? Look, in part, he was smart in how he was conscripting a lot of people. He took them from, you know, sort of the Netherlands, the outer regions, you know, the he wasn't recruiting a lot of soldiers off the streets of St. Petersburg or Moscow or wherever. And because he doesn't want to, he doesn't necessarily want to bring the war right to

• 56:12Speaker 01

  Moscow and make them feel the pain, right? I mean, they they went through that in Afghanistan to some degree when the Soviets occupied Afghanistan. And eventually, you know, sort of the popular unrest at home, mothers of dead soldiers, you know, they all started to, and so he could start to feel that, right? I think I think they do have the appetite to wear a lot of pain. And so I think that's what Putin counts on.

• 56:36Speaker 01

  You know, whether they'll have the manpower, I think, you know, Putin, you know, he they miscalculated so much, right? The Russian military intelligence apparatus made so many mistakes going into this invasion. But I think one calculation that he's kind of clung to is that the West will get tired of it. And that's that's kind of what's happening.

• 56:59Chris Williamson?

  You can count on the shortness of the attention span.

• 57:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, and I think he imagined, I mean, look, he imagined NATO was gonna was gonna break, right, or splinter, or there wouldn't certainly be the cohesiveness that there is, and he certainly didn't anticipate it growing like NATO has. But so there's a lot of mistakes there, but I think he has correctly. Pinned some hope on the fact that we'd get tired of it, right? And that there would sort of be this popular unrest. And make no mistake, the Russian disinformation apparatus is busy feeding that, right? So again, goes back to what we're talking about with information that you read and trying to figure out what these opinions are on social media. Why wouldn't they, right?

• 57:39Speaker 01

  It's impossible to think that the Russian regime, the intel apparatus, wouldn't look at the situation and go, yeah, we need to do what we can to influence the narrative in the States and the West, right? They've been doing this forever. They did it in World War II to try to keep us out of World War II, right? Before the Nazis or the Germans invaded Russia, when they were allied. You know, they spent a lot of time focused on trying to influence public opinion inside the US to keep America out of the war. So it's not something new, right? They're just using different technology. How much longer do you think manned warfare has? I think there's always going to be a place for, you know, door kickers. I don't think there's any doubt about it, right?

• 58:24Speaker 01

  You gotta, you gotta have, you've gotta have some boots on the ground. But the, I think the pointy edge of the spear in a major, in a major global conflict, a big global, not a regional issue, that's definitely going to be, you know, taking place in cyberspace. And I think that the first, the goal will be to kill morale at home, right? What will that look like? Well, I mean, you'll, you'll do the usual. That's why they're mapping out, you know, if you went to, I don't know which office it is in China, but if you went to an office, you would find a playbook that maps out the

• 59:05Speaker 01

  infrastructure in the US, the UK, the West, in terms of our power systems, transportation, water treatment facilities, you know, how do you stop the financial systems? Simple things, how do you keep someone from going to a cash point and pulling out money, right? How do you keep somebody from being able to, you know, get their medicines, right? How do you shut down the power grid? Morale, morale. Yeah, you want to, you want to bring the pain to the home front as quickly as possible, right? And you do that by attacking the. You don't have to fly bombers over the top of. No, you may, now you may at a certain point, you know, but I, so I think that. That will be the first, that will be the first major effort. Uh, the weaponization of space, right? You'll be looking to take out another. Part of the problem with people talk about knocking out GPS.

• 59:49Speaker 01

  Well, yes, you can target a country's specific satellites, right? But, um, you know, some of this, like a massive EMP attack, right? Uh, will impact everybody, right? Some degree. So that will be more of a targeted surgical effort, but it'll certainly play a role. And yeah, I, I think that's, that's undoubted, but I don't think. Look, we didn't imagine there would be another major land war in Europe, right? If you had, if you had said five years ago, yeah, we're gonna have a, like a World War One, like trench situation where it goes into a war of attrition, you know? And they make very little movement on either side and they get, probably people would have thought that was crazy. Yeah. You can go to the Imperial War Museum in London and go through the World War One exhibit,

• 1:00:34Speaker 01

  right? And you, you look at it and you, you see what, what took place during World War One and, and how it impacted, uh, food production and energy production and everything. And you think, well, it seems somewhat similar. So there, I think that there will always be a place for that. But I think what we'll see is there, there will be that immediate desire to hurt the homeland as quickly as possible and try to impact morale. Because knowing that that's what's going to drive domestic decisions.

• 1:01:04Chris Williamson?

  What about from a kinetic standpoint? How much is going to be drones? How much is going to be robotics? How much is going to be unmanned aerial vehicles and stuff like that?

• 1:01:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, we're seeing, we're seeing that in a big way, right? I mean, we're trying, it's almost like we're testing, uh, the capabilities right now and seeing what are the impacts.

• 1:01:25Speaker 01

  Forward looking, gathering of intelligence, right? For, uh, sort of short-term strategic planning of, of troop movements or certainly immediate impact of targeting, um, on, on targets of opportunity.

• 1:01:40Speaker 01

  Drones are proving to be invaluable, right? And, you know, give the Iranian regime credit, right? They, at some point, they must have seen that several years ago because they built a certain capability in production of drones. They, I think they understood the value there. As a variety of, obviously, you know, US and UK have been in advanced drone production for years, right? But it's not just delivery of weapons on target. It's, it's the intel gathering, you know, functions that drones are really changing the battlefield in a certain way. So that'll, that'll play a real important role.

• 1:02:21Speaker 01

  Unmanned capabilities, yeah, I mean, we, but we've been seeing that for some time. There's been arguments, you know, can you take the human out of, out of targeting, right? And the decision-making of actually, you know, green lighting a.

• 1:02:36Chris Williamson?

  I guess it depends how discriminate you want to be with the damage and the collateral damage as well.

• 1:02:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, and I think there's also, there's a, there's a moral implication there of saying, you know, do we take the human out of a decision to target, kill other humans? I think that's a, that's a big leap. I'm sure it's going to happen, frankly. I mean, I, human nature being what it is, I think that the decision is going to be to drive towards whatever is most efficient and effective, particularly if something kicks off, if we've got a major conflict. But for right now, you know, there's, look, it's happened before. The Soviets had what was called the dead hand system, which essentially for, if, if, if all their leadership was wiped out, they did have a system in place that would take

• 1:03:25Speaker 01

  over and, and continue a counter response.

• 1:03:28Chris Williamson?

  Wow.

• 1:03:29Speaker 01

  And so they had that. So it's not unthought of or undeveloped. It's unused.

• 1:03:36Chris Williamson?

  And potentially suboptimal compared with what's being used at least for the time being.

• 1:03:42Speaker 01

  Right. Yeah, yeah, things, things have advanced since the dead hand in, in the old Soviet Union for sure. But, um, yeah, so I think there's. What what holds people back from that is is again this uneasy feeling this moral issue of

• 1:03:57Chris Williamson?

  But you think that the Russians, if they're prepared to put nerve agent into some dissident like rival, well, you know, that's not going to be a consideration for them. That doesn't seem like it would be a consideration for

• 1:04:09Speaker 01

  Well, but the consideration, I think, is more of, does it mean I lose power? Right? Does, you know, the calculation is, okay, is this the end for me then? If I do something, if I step over that

• 1:04:19Chris Williamson?

  Oh, I make myself obsolete by just becoming an algorithm in one foot. It's a slippery slope all the way down.

• 1:04:24Speaker 01

  Well, that I think is is part of it is is that, but I guess I was looking more towards sort of pushing the button on the big one, right? And saying, okay, we're going to get into there. I think that's that's where it it you get that hard and fast. Nah, I don't, you know, I want to cling on to power.

• 1:04:39Chris Williamson?

  Still want to centralize. Yes, yes.

• 1:04:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, I like my army of hookers more than I want to destroy.

• 1:04:42Chris Williamson?

  I also like an army of hookers.

• 1:04:45Chris Williamson?

  Did you see this modified RX nine Hellfire missile, this flying Ginsu thing? Have you looked at this?

• 1:04:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:04:52Chris Williamson?

  This thing is hardcore.

• 1:04:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:04:54Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, the Samurai, I think it's six, six Samurai blades come out, the it's three, four, five feet long, and it can target an individual car. And if you were stood two yards to the side of the car, I mean, it'd be a big bang, and you'd know that something had happened.

• 1:05:09Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:05:10Chris Williamson?

  But you would be physically, you would be fine.

• 1:05:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's it's something out of a anime or a Marvel film.

• 1:05:16Chris Williamson?

  And they got Alzawari, they got the one of the guys that supposedly was a part of nine eleven, morning coffee on a balcony, and obviously some bloke just with a little bink laser targeter, and they sent two. That just in case the first one

• 1:05:32Speaker 01

  You have a backup. Yeah, you always want a redundant system. People always say, ah, redundancy. But no, you want you want you want a backup in case it to

• 1:05:42Chris Williamson?

  Do you imagine you step out onto your balcony?

• 1:05:44Speaker 01

  Fuck up your day.

• 1:05:45Chris Williamson?

  Having your morning espresso, and then before you know it, you're just dust.

• 1:05:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, I know. It's it's like the lethality of that, but but also other weapon systems is pretty, you know, it would shock a lot of people, I think. But the the precision is also, look, I mean, people talk about this, you know, and

• 1:06:07Speaker 01

  There's a lot of of focus put on that because there's. I don't think people really understand how much debate goes on before you you know, uh, pull the cord on a on a target and you think, okay, there's a lot of back and forth. What's the blowback? What's the, you know, potential, you know, civilian damage? What it's not like the movies. We say, yeah, go, you know, we don't give a shit, you know, just get the target. There's a lot of back and forth. And so as a result of that, because people in the Pentagon in particular are always asking about zero risk and we want zero, you know, we want zero collateral damage. We can't, you know, things are messy, right? So something happens and, you know, there's a potential for collateral damage. That's the way the

• 1:06:48Speaker 01

  world works. But they have worked very hard on the weapons technology side to try to create these these systems.

• 1:06:57Chris Williamson?

  Uh, minimal collateral damage.

• 1:06:59Speaker 01

  Minimal collateral damage. And in order to, in part, yeah, in part, it's to avoid, you know, the killings. In part, it's also to ensure that you can, when you've got a high value target, you know.

• 1:07:09Chris Williamson?

  Pull the trigger more easily.

• 1:07:09Speaker 01

  Pull the trigger. Yeah, you get it done.

• 1:07:11Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. Yeah. Well, if you're thinking, what's this going to do? What are the optics of this? And you go, he's a bad guy. If he's a bad guy, and you know that he's a bad guy, you you pull the trigger. But then you, well, how's this going to play in the press? And all of these.

• 1:07:24Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:07:24Chris Williamson?

  Narratives begin to, I guess, subjugate a tactical decision with a branding decision.

• 1:07:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:07:33Chris Williamson?

  That's very, very, yeah, I that's I hadn't thought about that, that it is a, it reduces the friction between pulling the trigger because it is less likely to cause headaches down the road.

• 1:07:45Speaker 01

  Right. Because that's always the question. That's always, and it's become more and more of an issue is, is, you know, what what does that collateral damage look like? And if we, you know, and then sometimes what they'll say is they'll say, okay, we have to wait. We have to pull back, hold fire.

• 1:07:57Chris Williamson?

  Then maybe you lose a guy.

• 1:07:57Speaker 01

  And you lose the opportunity because that that window opportunity on a particular target, you know, that shuts really quickly sometimes. And so then you don't know whether you're going to, and there's a, you know, there can be a lot of frustration involved because you know that that target, you know, you should act on it. But you also know, okay, we got, you know, we do have this legitimate questions. So, so the decision made at a higher level is always, you know, it's going to fall on that, that side. It's going to say, okay, we have to, we have to pull back.

• 1:08:27Chris Williamson?

  Is this a new degree of scrutiny around collateral damage?

• 1:08:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:08:32Chris Williamson?

  Uh, in, in warfare, you know, obviously collateral damage has been, I know that's obvious example, but like bombing of Dresden, that type of stuff.

• 1:08:41Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:08:42Chris Williamson?

  You know, you, it was done for collateral damage. Uh, whereas now it seems like

• 1:08:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:08:48Chris Williamson?

  War is supposed to be the most surgical, sterile, targeted, precise, ethical way, like I only want the fuel for my fucking RX9 Hellfire missile to be from renewable sources.

• 1:09:05Speaker 01

  But you know what I mean? It's an EV. Yeah. It's an EV. We plug it in and, and we have a recharge station halfway there to target. Um, yeah, it is. It's relatively new. And I think part of it's also, we keep coming back to the same thing, flow of information, speed of information.

• 1:09:19Chris Williamson?

  You can see the destruction of

• 1:09:21Speaker 01

  If people could watch Dresden being bombed, right? Or get photos of it immediately, people would, I mean, look, I mean, go back to the civil war. If people had, you know, seen actual footage of what the hell was happening in the fields of Gettysburg, I mean, people would have been horrified, right?

• 1:09:35Speaker 01

  D-Day, right? If people could have seen the film that evening of what was taking place the first day, you know, public opinion would have, would have shifted considerably. But I think, so, yeah, so that's helped to drive this idea that we gotta, we gotta minimize that, right? We gotta minimize that damage. You still gotta have bad actors in the world. You still have to deal with them. You know, it's not, it's not a fucking community of nations where everybody's acting in everybody else's best interest. It's bullshit, right? And so you have to, you have to account for the fact that, uh, at times, things are going to be unpleasant, but yeah. Yeah.

• 1:10:12Chris Williamson?

  I only found out, speaking of the drone thing, we walked past a DJI store here in downtown Miami. And I didn't realize that the US had basically put so many restrictions on US drone creators. They said, we don't want anyone who's basically able to interfere with flight paths and create this technology because we definitely don't want it at home.

• 1:10:35Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:10:35Chris Williamson?

  Which left the market completely open for DJI, which I didn't know is a Chinese company.

• 1:10:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, go figure.

• 1:10:41Chris Williamson?

  And now the entire drone market is dominated by DJI. And now America are trying to play catch up and they've tried to relinquish some of these restrictions on domestic creators of drone technology. And it's just, it's they're away with the wind.

• 1:10:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, we've, we've, we've done that in a number of areas, right? Whether you're talking about, I don't know, LIDAR or anything. There's, you know, regulatory policies and, and, you know, domestic concerns have definitely impacted development of certain technologies. And the Chinese have no such restrictions, right? And they certainly have no such restrictions on, on, on providing information. Like they spend a great deal of time hoovering up intelligence, you know, from a variety of sources overseas and providing that to their private sector, right? And that's part of the intel apparatus is.

• 1:11:32Chris Williamson?

  How does that work?

• 1:11:32Speaker 01

  Role in life. Well, they steal information, bring it home and, and funnel it into supposedly private, but they're, they're state owned and pseudo state operated companies. But I guess the point being is that their, their intel apparatus is primary objective aside from, you know, keeping the population in check is, is to develop and promote their commercial side of things, their, their economy. And so.

• 1:12:00Chris Williamson?

  The two work simpatico together.

• 1:12:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, we don't go out, we don't, you know, the, the, as, as an example, the agency CIA wouldn't get a directive, a tasking order from General Electric that says, hey, we need, we need the plans from an international competitor, you know, that they're working on some, some new engine component. Please go out and get that for us, right? That's not how it works right now. You could argue that would benefit our economy. I mean, if it was, because it certainly benefited China's economy to have that that cross border. But we have this a firewall there. So, you know, you don't take, you know, tasking with the idea that, okay, we're developing information here, intelligence, collecting it from others, stealing it basically, to provide it to the private sector.

• 1:12:46Chris Williamson?

  So there's a, not an arbitrary line, but there is a compartmentalization between the private and the governmental sectors in the US.

• 1:12:56Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:12:56Chris Williamson?

  Which means that the resources and information of both aren't as.

• 1:13:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's a good way to put it. That's a really good way to put it because I would argue just along those lines, which is that we have hampered ourselves at times by not having a more robust dialogue between, between the intel community. And now with with cyber attacks and the work that goes on in cyberspace, also with federal law enforcement, which is focused on, you know, to some degree, elements of federal law enforcement focused on preventing or resolving cyber attacks from outside elements. So I don't think we have enough of a robust dialogue between those, between government and private companies, right? A commercial sector. If you want to have a major US company

• 1:13:42Speaker 01

  protected, or a British company, or whomever, protected from outside hostile actors in cyber terms, for instance, they need to know what's happening out there, right? They need to have more information, right, about the threats and how those threats develop and who's responsible. And there has to be more of that ability to say, okay, we've got a problem. Turn to, whether it's the FBI, or the agency, or whomever, to say, how do we resolve this, right? And it can't just be a one-way dialogue where the commercial sector provides their information to the government, and the government says, thank you very much. You know, they need to be more informed, right? And they're trying to do that to some degree now. They're trying to have more of that dialogue. But.

• 1:14:26Speaker 01

  It's not seamless by any means. It's not like in China or even in Russia or other places where where they don't see a need for a firewall. They don't believe that because they don't really have a free market system. They don't have a capital system, you know, but but our idea is like you can't benefit one company because it'll fuck over other companies, right?

• 1:14:42Chris Williamson?

  Yes.

• 1:14:43Speaker 01

  So they don't they don't give a shit about that.

• 1:14:44Chris Williamson?

  I only learned about the purpling of the armed forces recently. So, well, can you explain what that means? Like, what was what was that? What was purpling of the armed forces?

• 1:14:56Speaker 01

  You you tell me. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:14:58Chris Williamson?

  Right. Well, so there was a particular extraction that was supposed to happen in the late 90s and a number of Navy SEALs, I think it was the highest number of Navy SEALs that had ever been lost up to that point, like maybe maybe 20 or 30 of them, because there was Air Force overhead and the SEALs down on the ground weren't able to communicate with them. And this was because each different segment of the armed forces acted independently. They didn't have they literally didn't have the communication systems to be able to speak. And it's kind of this integration. I mean, that just seems so idiotic. How did you manage to get yourself to the stage where the Air Force and the Navy and the Army weren't talking

• 1:15:42Chris Williamson?

  to each other? And it feels to me not too dissimilar to this situation.

• 1:15:47Speaker 01

  And you call it purpling. I hadn't heard that term.

• 1:15:49Chris Williamson?

  If you blended all of the colors of the.

• 1:15:51Speaker 01

  Purple. Yeah, yeah, I get that makes that. Yeah, there you go. See, me and my primary color now.

• 1:15:55Chris Williamson?

  Learning something new every single day.

• 1:15:57Speaker 01

  The siloing of the military branches and their development of of their own, whether it's protocols, communication systems, assets, right, air platforms. I mean, that's why, you know, you've got in the Pentagon and DOD, you've got, you know, competition going on for who's developing, who's getting money for the latest. You think, well, hold on a second, you know, the Marines have their own air force. And you think what's what's in a sense, what's going on here? Why is that the most efficient way? But that was siloing of the branches, right? And to some degree territorial, you know, pissing and kind of protection of their own turf, development of their own internal capabilities that were.

• 1:16:43Speaker 01

  I don't want to say redundant necessarily, but um you know, there was this sense that okay, you've got spec ops, we need spec ops, we need this, you need that. I mean, we've got, and it's true, each branch has its own obvious functions, right? And specialties. But you know, there wasn't this sense that, okay, is there more of an efficient way that they can all blend together? And we've got maybe one element that combines all that does a particular thing. Is there a way to certainly on the communication side, right? Because you'll get development of, you know, a comm system, right? From the Air Force, right? Through a contractor, right?

• 1:17:28Speaker 01

  That in the, in the old days, wasn't compatible necessarily, or they, there wasn't their driving motive with, is it compatible with what the Navy's doing? Or is it compatible with the Army's doing? And part of that was just natural, you know, territorial protection, right? Of what they're doing and protection of their own budgets. And their, you know, their, their reputation and their, you know, sort of their image. There's a lot in there that's sort of soft science.

• 1:17:57Speaker 01

  But you could see how that would develop, right? And then you get, you know, fucked up situations, right? Because you have joint operations and suddenly you realize, you know, whether it's just simple protocols, or it's more technical, you've got real problems, right? Because it's not seamless.

• 1:18:15Chris Williamson?

  This lack of coordination.

• 1:18:16Speaker 01

  Lack of coordination.

• 1:18:17Chris Williamson?

  But it's the same through private and public sector, it's the same through government, it's the same through everything.

• 1:18:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, we had, I mean, a major example, obviously, was nine 11. When you didn't have federal, state, local law enforcement and the intel community, all on the same page, communicating, sharing information, taking, you know, targeting and saying, okay, who's got what on this? You know, let's all put it together into one big picture and see if it makes sense, right? And none of that was happening. It was, because again, it was all siloed, right? Bureau was doing their thing, agency was doing their thing. NSA was, you know, gathering their intel, state and local, you know, they were worried about their own issues and. Yeah, there wasn't this coordinated effort.

• 1:19:06Speaker 01

  There wasn't a, and, you know, in part, yeah, that was a supreme failure, right? But it's gotten better, but it's still, you know, it's still not there. It's a human endeavor, so it's never going to be, you know, perfect, but still.

• 1:19:20Chris Williamson?

  Talking about China and the, I guess, threat and degree of rivalrousness. You've mentioned that China is playing an incredibly long game. But I've also heard that their birth rate decline and the potential reduction in the volume of their population could be pretty catastrophic to any plans that they have. How much truth do you think is in that? How, how much is China's plans going to be mitigated by the fact that their population might drop an awful lot over the next few years?

• 1:19:50Speaker 01

  Well, I think it's a serious concern, right? I mean, Xi, you know, has come out with, or his government's come out with a program basically says fuck more.

• 1:19:58Speaker 01

  I think that was the actual title of their program.

• 1:20:02Speaker 01

  And, you know, create more babies. So, you know, as a population, it's probably the most popular thing she has instructed them to do in some time.

• 1:20:10Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, okay, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:20:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, okay, you know, as a husband, you're like, wait, it's not that I wanted to.

• 1:20:15Chris Williamson?

  This is for the, this is for.

• 1:20:16Speaker 01

  It's for the motherland.

• 1:20:18Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:20:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, let's go. Yeah, exactly. Just lay back and think about Queen and Country. So.

• 1:20:24Chris Williamson?

  G and Country.

• 1:20:25Speaker 01

  Yeah. So it's, it is, I mean, it is, obviously, if the government's worried about it, it's a serious concern. And, you know, they had the whole one child policy for a long time. Obviously, that was going to have a lagging impact. So I think that they, they're trying to get ahead of the curve to some degree. But as you can imagine, you know, it's like, it's like anything else. You know, you can, you can say, okay, we've got a, we've got a problem here. We can see that there's going to be a shortfall or a gap, so let's get on it. But there's always going to be a lag.

• 1:20:55Speaker 01

  You know, that was done, uh, again, going back to nine eleven, there was a, a real awareness, um, after that, that in a hot wash that said, look, we, we What's a hot wash? Um, after, after a major go rope, you, you know, you, you What? After a, a fuck up, after something happens, I'm sorry, after something happens, then you sit down as a whomever's, you know, whomever's in charge and, and, and elements that are, are responsible, sit around a table and say what the hell happened. And they've done some assessment and so then people put on the cards on the table and say, this is where we fucked up, this is what we should have done, this is how we have to improve it, this is how we mitigate the risk going forward. And so that's essentially a hot wash and you do that after every, uh, fuck up.

• 1:21:38Speaker 01

  And so after nine eleven, as part of all of that process, there was a realization that the agency, the CIA had spent, uh, had an over focus on, on SIGINT, the Signals Intelligence and Technology, right? And had gotten away from the recruitment of spies. The agency is a pretty simple organization. You steal secrets, right? You steal secrets that address national security concerns and protect national security interests. So that, you know, yes, you can do it through, uh, technology, but ultimately you also need human sources. You can't get away from, from the need for human sources, but they, they kind of did, they moved away from that.

• 1:22:21Speaker 01

  And so there, I guess my point being is the directive was, we need more people, we need more officers who are out there in the fields, recruiting, gathering intelligence, getting human sources. That's where we, we missed the boat to some degree here. We did, we, we lost track of the importance of that because we got enamored with the technical side of things. And we started putting money and resources there, had fewer and fewer recruits going into traditional operations.

• 1:22:51Speaker 01

  And but that's there's a lag. My point being is there's a lag to that, right? There's you got to recruit those people. That can take years, right? Then you got to train them. That takes years. Then you got to they got to develop, right? And they get so and then you got the whole problem of the time it takes to identify, develop, recruit, you know, maintain a source, right? So that's a long lag time. So think these things don't don't just happen overnight. Anyway, so that's where I think with with China, they, you know, they probably got a problem. But I I think they're they clearly are aware of it. So they're they're addressing it. I mean, could you imagine here if we looked at our demographics and we got a problem? Could you imagine the White House saying, ah, I got a job for all you Americans?

• 1:23:33Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, well, speaking of that, and the sort of population in the US, I'm reading more and more about the number of military age Asian men coming over the border, Mexico, I think Hawaii as well, kind of has a little bit of this problem.

• 1:23:49Speaker 01

  Um, yeah, a little bit. It's mostly the southern border.

• 1:23:52Chris Williamson?

  Okay.

• 1:23:53Speaker 01

  And it's a shocking increase, like a 73% increase year on year in in folks from China crossing over the border.

• 1:24:04Speaker 01

  Now, it's and it's and again, as you pointed out, it's mostly single males.

• 1:24:09Speaker 01

  You don't want to see when you're in when you're in intelligence or in in that world, you don't want to get paranoid, right? You don't want to see a spook behind every corner, right? Because that'll eventually that'll really jam up the ability to get shit done. Yes, so, but again, playing the odds and thinking about, you know, probability.

• 1:24:34Speaker 01

  Does anyone imagine that the Chinese intel apparatus, which is incredibly well resourced and motivated? Would they actually look and go, yeah, I mean, maybe this makes sense. Maybe we want to put a handful of people here. Look, they've spent decades putting their own people from, you know, actual intel operatives to cooperative contacts through the US education system.

• 1:24:56Chris Williamson?

  Yes, I'd seen that. The number of kids that were at university somewhere that turned out to be some CCP sleeper agent.

• 1:25:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, or or and and oftentimes they don't even have to be, you know, that. I mean, we imagine that as some super spy. Doesn't have to even be that. It's a cooperative contact. It's someone who was is, you know, maybe they're getting their bill footed, you know, maybe they're good. And, you know, their family's getting a little bit extra something, you know, back home or some consideration, whatever it is.

• 1:25:23Chris Williamson?

  That's what you're hearing.

• 1:25:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. You work with us and that's great. And then eventually you get a job at wherever, an important US company or, you know, they don't even care. They got, because again, they've got the long term view. So they'll send someone to grad school here. And again, you don't want to say, okay, so every student is a spy. That's not the fucking way we're we're talking. It's it's just they're doing it, right? And we know that they're doing it. And so the idea that they're not at least taking advantage of a porous border for other reasons is it would be pretty remarkable.

• 1:25:51Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, if if a Mexican family with a dude that's got a stick with a bandana and a fucking satchel attached to the back of it.

• 1:26:01Speaker 01

  Like a hobo?

• 1:26:04Speaker 01

  Like riding the rails?

• 1:26:05Chris Williamson?

  No, you remember those, like it was that old and styly like.

• 1:26:08Speaker 01

  Sure, sure. And he's making coffee in a can, you know, a can of beans and he's, yeah, hobo Joe. Yeah. Just a good hearted guy.

• 1:26:17Chris Williamson?

  If you're thinking that they can get across the border.

• 1:26:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:26:20Chris Williamson?

  But the CCP isn't going to be able to facilitate.

• 1:26:24Speaker 01

  Right, right. Or, you know, or or the Iranians aren't going to look at it, right? And and think to themselves, you know, I'll bet we could get some people over and.

• 1:26:33Chris Williamson?

  This is a real fucking problem.

• 1:26:34Speaker 01

  It's a real fucking problem. And it look, it's it's a real fucking problem from a national security point of view, and also from just a just a, look, we had this incident down in in Athens, Georgia, right? This poor student, this this young 22 year old girl, just the other day, right? She went for a jog, broad daylight, goes for a jog on a public trail, you know, and gets attacked, blunt force trauma, killed. And now they've arrested an illegal immigrant, fellow's name is Ibarra, from Venezuela. Who.

• 1:27:08Speaker 01

  Crossed the border, I think with his wife and maybe a kid, young kid.

• 1:27:14Speaker 01

  I think through El Paso, maybe. And then, and this is back in 2022. So this is his history. Comes from Venezuela, crosses the border, just walks over. They release him because they don't have room in the detention facilities. So they're just releasing people, sort of a mass parole idea, right? And they, they release hundreds of thousands through this. Again, they call it parole, but ah, we don't have room for you. So do you go? Here's your court day. And I'd like you to show up in a couple of years, right? So they go to New York, first of all. He has a run in with the law up in New York. They release him on back on the streets and he makes his way down to Athens, where I think his brother from Venezuela is residing. And then now he's banged up for murdering this

• 1:27:56Speaker 01

  22-year-old nursing student who just goes for a fucking jog. And yeah, and now the interesting thing, I don't want to get distracted here, but the interesting thing is, is how it's dealt with. Obviously, it's, it's going to be a political issue, right? Because it deals with an illegal immigrant and the border is such an important issue going into the election. So yes, it's going to become a political football. But the way that the White House decided to deal with it, or Democratic strategists, I don't know whether anybody in the White House was clever enough to do this, was basically to say, hey, you want to blame somebody for this sad death, blame the Republicans. They just blocked a bill in the Senate, you know, that would have provided funding for Ukraine and Israel and Taiwan, but also for the border. So it's the Republicans' fault because for the past

• 1:28:39Speaker 01

  month and a half, they've been stonewalling. Well, that's implying that people are stupid enough to think that somehow the millions of people who have crossed the border in the past three years just came across now, right? During the month and a half while the Republicans have been, you know, jackass-ing around up on Capitol Hill, not doing anything. And so that's, that's the level of stupidity that they hold for, for the American public. Now, there are people stupid enough to believe it, right? And there certainly are people partisan enough to buy that line of crap and go, yeah, it's the Republicans' fault that this poor girl got killed because this guy came across in 2022, right? During the three years that the, the current White House has kind of ignored, for a variety of reasons, border security. But, so that's on a personal level for US citizens, but on a national security level, we have no idea.

• 1:29:25Speaker 01

  Of the millions and millions of people who have come across unvetted, right? And released into the country, we have no idea who they are for the most part, right? We have certainly have no idea how many bad actors there are. And we've caught, you know, hundreds on the terror watch list, but who knows how many others? Because we've got an unknown number of known gotaways. You've got over 2 million as a conservative estimate over the past two years of the current administration, who have got through without any contact with law enforcement. That's just a guess, right? And so there's like, you know, no idea how many bad actors have come across. And that's if the government's job is to protect its citizens, any government's job is to protect its citizens, then I don't know how you argue that they're doing a fine job.

• 1:30:09Speaker 01

  Because if you don't have a secure border and you know who's coming in and out, which is why you have border controls for every other country, then, you know, you don't have a secure homeland.

• 1:30:19Chris Williamson?

  But it's not a country anymore.

• 1:30:21Speaker 01

  No, it's not a country.

• 1:30:22Chris Williamson?

  It's like an extension of what everybody else, the territory of the countries that are around you.

• 1:30:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:30:28Chris Williamson?

  Tim Kennedy was telling me that there was this guy who appeared on the news. There was a news report going on and this guy just walked across the border and turns to the camera and says something like, "America will know my name." And then facial recognition turned out that this guy is on some watch list.

• 1:30:43Speaker 01

  God, but obviously not clever.

• 1:30:46Chris Williamson?

  Not super, not super, but I mean clever enough.

• 1:30:48Speaker 01

  I'm gonna be famous one day.

• 1:30:50Chris Williamson?

  But I mean, fuck knows where he is now.

• 1:30:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. Oh, they didn't, oh, they didn't stop him.

• 1:30:54Chris Williamson?

  No, because it, well, I mean, it was just a news reporter.

• 1:30:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:30:57Chris Williamson?

  I mean, what's he gonna do, hold him down? He doesn't know. But what about the trank and fentanyl route? Is that, do you know how that's getting in? Have we got idea about how those drugs are getting into the country?

• 1:31:10Speaker 01

  Well, I think to some degree, the government will argue that most of it's coming in through ports of entry, right? And that's, you know, there's truth in that, right? You know, it's not as if, you know, the majority of narcotics, whether it's fentanyl or anything else, is coming in on, in backpacks, you know, through, you know, border crossings outside of ports of entry. But it's both, right? It's all, it's all of the above. And so. It goes back to the same thing. If you have a tight border, it makes it more difficult, right? Why wouldn't you make it more difficult for narco traffickers, right? And, and bad actors to cross your border. It just, I don't, again, I don't understand the rationale behind this. Yes, the immigration policies in the States can be improved, right?

• 1:31:53Speaker 01

  And yes, immigration has always been a way that a country improves itself, right? But not by just, you know, letting in millions of people who you don't know who they are, right? No other country is going to do that, right? And yet, we act as if that's okay, right? Is there anywhere else on the planet that's doing that? No. Look, we had the, I think, I'm, I'm probably going to get these numbers wrong, but I think the largest mass migration that, that, you know, of, of modern times has been in the 1880s, I think, when, you know, 10 million or so people came from Europe to the United States. We've had 7 million people in what, the past three years come in?

• 1:32:38Speaker 01

  I, I'm not sure how we, how we imagine that somehow we have things under control, right? But the, look, the, the problem that President Biden has is that as soon as he, you know, the, the Democrat strategist looked at this problem and said, yeah, we got an issue. Obviously, the poll numbers are showing, so they're acting on this because it's an election year, right? Three years, they didn't do shit. I mean, in fact, they did the opposite of shit. They, they made it worse, right? Detention centers are unethical and we shouldn't be, and look at the separation of children from families. Making asylum easier, making parole easier. So they actually, you know, created a, a more porous environment. And, but I think they looked and they go, oh God, we

• 1:33:23Speaker 01

  gotta do something because the election's coming up. The poll numbers are so bad. So, you know, that's, that's why they're acting now as if, well, look what we did. We, we tried to push this bill through the Senate and Republicans thought, okay, if you're gonna, if you're gonna normalize 5,000 people a day before you take action, maybe that's not quite what we're talking about here. But, uh, so they, they've got, you know, and, and I think they all knew that they could push a bill through that the Republicans would, would back off of, right? That was the game that they played. That's culpable deniability. Yeah, so. So they've got this issue, but as soon as he talked about taking some executive actions, then he got a hard push from the hard left, right? And, and so all the progressives on that side said, oh, don't you think about it, right? Don't even think about like doing anything

• 1:34:07Speaker 01

  that's Trump like, right? It all comes back to this bizarre world that we're living in now, where there's people willing to imagine that President Biden, God bless him, we're all getting older. Fuck it. I forget shit all the time, right? But, but to imagine that he's not possibly the best candidate, right? For another four years. But we're going to vote for him because the other option is Trump, right? That's the world we live in now. It's just, we're, you know, I don't know. I don't want to, I don't want to get too cynical, but I think we're, you know, US politics is kind of fucked right now.

• 1:34:45Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:46Speaker 01

  I, uh, That wasn't a rocket science statement.

• 1:34:50Speaker 01

  Wow. Did you hear what Mike said? That was, that was revelatory.

• 1:34:53Chris Williamson?

  I've heard some new information today on this podcast. Yeah, man. I, uh, I don't know. I've been here for two years now and obviously was observing with great interest and intrigue. More like a real life reality TV show with global consequences, the, the election in 2020. But I don't think that this year is going to be any better. I think we've seen, you know, 20, wow, 2012 was the last uncontested, mass uncontested election. I think that 2016, we had this is Russia collusion. 2020, we had stop the steal. 2024, there is no way. I mean, it's like, you know, it's one all going into overtime.

• 1:35:38Speaker 01

  Yeah. You go back and we did have the, the hanging Chad debacle, you know, with, with, uh, Bush and Gore.

• 1:35:45Chris Williamson?

  Right. Oh, yes. Yeah.

• 1:35:46Speaker 01

  Yeah. And so that was, that was a, you know, but it was, it was mild compared to. So, uh, no, I agree. This is not going to be any better. Look, again, you don't want to put too much stock in polls and surveys, but it does seem like they've been consistent over the past handful of months, which is that, you know, those surveyed, none of them are particularly excited. In fact, they, they don't want a rematch of Biden and Trump. I think people are, if given other alternatives, I think they would, they would go for it.

• 1:36:22Speaker 01

  I think the Democrats are kind of boxed in. I think they, you know, they've, they've, they've got a problem here.

• 1:36:30Chris Williamson?

  They're not going to go for Newsom?

• 1:36:32Speaker 01

  Well, they're going to have to clear the ticket, right? And so by that, I mean, if they're going to move Biden off the ticket, then how do you move Kamala Harris off the ticket? How, what's the optic of saying, we're going to ask Kamala Harris, a woman of color, who's been the vice president, uh, to, to step aside for a white dude from California? I don't know that the Democrats are willing to go with that optic. Um, you know, aside from the fact that, who am I to say? But Kamala Harris may have,

• 1:37:05Chris Williamson?

  Michelle Obama, straight swap.

• 1:37:06Speaker 01

  May have floated to the top in a spectacular way, despite her abilities and competency.

• 1:37:12Chris Williamson?

  Wow.

• 1:37:13Speaker 01

  So.

• 1:37:13Chris Williamson?

  And popularity.

• 1:37:14Speaker 01

  And popularity.

• 1:37:15Chris Williamson?

  And laugh.

• 1:37:16Speaker 01

  And the laugh. Okay. I mean, everybody's got a quirk, you know, but still, um, look, you, you hamper yourself. We, we got in this world where, you know, we're picking people because they, they, you know, they tick certain boxes, which is a ridiculous thing to do, you know? I, I think we'd all be better off if we just said we're going for competency, right? And who's the best person for the job? And what they could have done was done her a favor by saying, we're going to pick the best person for the job and then pick her, right? Rather than saying, we're picking a woman of color if I get nominated.

• 1:37:49Chris Williamson?

  The, yeah, affirmative action thing is patronizing to the person that gets actioned.

• 1:37:52Speaker 01

  Well, it hamper's them. It handicaps them because, you know.

• 1:37:55Chris Williamson?

  Diversity high.

• 1:37:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. So, so I'd, I'd never quite understood the, the, the notion that you would say that, rather than just saying, I'm going to pick the best person and then go ahead, fine, pick, pick her. But, you know, at least you, you've given her some top.

• 1:38:06Chris Williamson?

  I don't think anyone was prepared to eat that lie if that had been pushed forward with Kamala Harris. So, you know, the, the country might be stupid, but they're not that stupid.

• 1:38:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:38:15Chris Williamson?

  And, uh, yeah, dude.

• 1:38:17Speaker 01

  I don't know. No, you're right. No, you're, no, you're right. You're right.

• 1:38:21Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, this, the, the remainder of this year is going to be, it's going to be wild. But yeah, Douglas Murray went to, um, the streets of Philadelphia and he's seen this trank crisis that's happening there. And this, this is like fentanyl's fentanyl. And it's for people for whom heroin wasn't enough and then they moved on to something stronger and that wasn't enough and now they've moved on to something stronger and it causes necrosis. People's limbs are falling off and their shins are eating themselves on the street.

• 1:38:47Speaker 01

  It's crazy. Yeah. And it's, and it's also a, a, a fine demonstration of how that world works. Right. You're always chasing the next product, right? You're always chasing because you know, you've got a shelf life on the current one, right? Because eventually, you know, people are going to be looking for the next kick, right? And so we worked counter narcotics in the agency for years, right? Before we won the drug wars and, sorry, that's a terrible like, so we didn't win the drug wars. Drugs, drugs won the drug wars.

• 1:39:17Chris Williamson?

  Right.

• 1:39:18Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah. So, so, uh, but we were working counter narcotics and, and, you know, you could, you could take a ton of gear off the street and it never would affect the price, right? Because there's so much out there and there's so much demand. And yet also there's this massive product development, uh, you know, it's, it's, it's like this, this global, um, production, uh, effort that they're always looking for the next, uh, product to put out there. So, you know, it's, it's always going to be something coming down the pike, right? And that's just the, kind of the history of narcotics on the street is there's always the next bit of gear that's going to hit the street and it's.

• 1:40:03Chris Williamson?

  The iPhone 15, if the iPhone 16.

• 1:40:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:40:05Chris Williamson?

  Frank 17.

• 1:40:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:40:06Chris Williamson?

  No, yeah, I, it's one of the, it's, everything is working so cohesively from the synthesizers of the drugs, to the designers of the drugs, to the users of the drugs, to the people who might have a incentive for a country and its populace to become more demoralized, less healthy, more of a burden generally on society. Everything spins up to be that. And, you know, people are going to take drugs for just wanting to take drugs. You don't need a big globalist conspiracy to turn America into a bunch of walking zombies.

• 1:40:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:40:41Chris Williamson?

  Uh, people will happily do that on their own.

• 1:40:43Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, I think there's, there has been this. This line about, you know, China contributing to the fentanyl crisis in order to, you know, take down America. And, and again, look, never say never, you know, is, is there talk amongst, you know, you know, some, you know, back room there that, that says, well, this is having a real negative impact on the West. How about that? You know, do they view that as a downside? No. You know, but is that driving the drug trade and all the, the, the demand, right, out there?

• 1:41:13Chris Williamson?

  The dynamics of drugs driving the drug trade.

• 1:41:16Speaker 01

  Yeah. And it's, and it's, it's super depressing. And it really is. It's, it's one of those things that you look and, and, and it's, I, I, you know, I'm not smart enough to figure this out, but I've always been fascinated by the, the risk appetite, right? And the, you know, it's, it's like the kids that go to a party at somebody else's house and they open up the parents' medicine cabinet. They're willing to just like take a handful of whatever to see what happens, right? I, I've never understood that mentality, right? That says I'm, I'm willing to just give it a go and see where, where it leads.

• 1:41:47Chris Williamson?

  I think people get there one step at a time, at least with what we're talking about here. You know, it's, there'll be a little bit of, maybe I'll start drinking and then I'll start smoking weed and then I'll do some crack and then, you know, before I know it, I've lost my job. And then once I've lost my job, like, the fact that the US doesn't have a social safety net like we do in the UK, you know, especially for health, if you've got a mental health problem or a physical health problem, you'll just get picked up and put into the hospital. You'll go to A and E, you know, and the NHS isn't, I mean, it's a, a bad, a bad solution to an awful problem, but it is way better than no solution, significantly better. You know, and this is the difference. You can tell the difference when you see homeless people in the States. They're, you know, shouting things at themselves. A lot of the

• 1:42:31Chris Williamson?

  time sort of shuffling, they've got a brown bag with a fucking unbranded glass bottle inside of it, swinging, God knows what out of it. It's much more sort of schizzy and aggressive and forthcoming. Whereas in the UK, if you get down to that level of mental health disorder or distress, you just come in, someone comes in and sweeps you up, right? And, and this isn't, it's not a perfect system, but you know, you will be given medication and a place to live and a fucking, a bed and a nurse that will say, this is what you've got schizophrenia, you've got bipolar disorder, you've got the whatever, whatever. And that's that. And you don't, you don't have that. And unfortunately you see, you know, front and center downtown of every major US city.

• 1:43:09Speaker 01

  Oh God, Los Angeles, Los Angeles is, is, you can drive by some of these. I don't know what you call it, communities or whatever, but it's, yeah, it's, it's shocking. But you're right. It's, it's the complexity of the substance abuse with the mental health, with the, you know, I see no hope, you know, I've got no way to get off the street. I can't afford a

• 1:43:29Chris Williamson?

  So what's the point in trying?

• 1:43:30Speaker 01

  So what's the point in trying?

• 1:43:33Speaker 01

  With the, I think the dysfunction of local and, and city and state governments that look at it and think, well, how come we can't just throw some money at it and solve it? And without saying, okay, this is a very layered, complex problem. We've got to solve several issues here. You can't just put somebody in a home if they got substance or mental, you know, problems. And you've got, you've got to deal with those, right? And so you're right. I mean, we, you know, we're, and it's also a much larger population. And so it's, it's becoming increasingly visible. And so I, yeah, I'm not, I'm not sure if there's, there's a, there's a lack of movement, it seems, on the part of most major cities to try to figure out a path forward, right?

• 1:44:17Chris Williamson?

  Unless the Chinese are coming to visit.

• 1:44:20Speaker 01

  Yes. And then, and then, then you just take a hose to the street.

• 1:44:23Chris Williamson?

  Sanitize everything.

• 1:44:25Speaker 01

  You gotta, you gotta wash all the shit off the sidewalks and move the people out.

• 1:44:29Chris Williamson?

  Pick up the needles. Everything's pristine.

• 1:44:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:44:32Chris Williamson?

  One of the things that I've been particularly fascinated by since, since moving to America and even beforehand, is the difference between how three-letter agency operatives are seen by the general public from a brand and positioning perspective, and how armed forces, veterans and acting soldiers are seen. Because many people, you know, tons of my friends that have been in the SEALs have then gone into the CIA and then phased out of that too. So it's like a single pathway for some, and then some people just go into one or the other. But it seems like, you know, thank you for your service, something that's said to somebody that was in the armed forces.

• 1:45:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:45:11Chris Williamson?

  You're part of a globalist network of shills trying to destroy the country is said to someone from a three-letter agency.

• 1:45:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:45:19Chris Williamson?

  And what, what do you think's going on with the optics, the poor brand position? Do you know what I'm talking about?

• 1:45:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, I do.

• 1:45:25Chris Williamson?

  Positioning of, of the people who are serving the country, but one is seen to be unequivocally, almost unequivocally in service. And the other one is not too sure. Are you trying to take us down from the inside? Can we even trust you?

• 1:45:38Speaker 01

  Right. Yeah, that's a, there's, there's, there's a bit of a See change there in terms of how people view certainly the CIA and the FBI, right? And it's very disheartening, right? But yeah, I know what you're talking about. It's a lack of trust in those organizations because this narrative that they've become just political tools, right? And that's a very dangerous thing. What I mean is a political intel apparatus is a very dangerous thing, right? But the narrative that it came out, I think is at odds with the reality, right? Now, yes, you can have, you know, a senior person leading an organization who's been

• 1:46:23Speaker 01

  appointed by the president who's, you know, enjoys that top cover and you want the relationship, right? You want the dialogue. You always used to say that you want the CIA director to have a seat at the table, you know, in major discussions because that's important, right? Because you're asking this agency to go overseas and do things on behalf of national security interests. So the director should have that access. And the FBI director, you know, same way. They're leading the federal government's key law enforcement organization, right? And yet, the narrative over the past handful of years has really shifted to the point where, you know, there's an element of society, right, that views those agencies and most

• 1:47:08Speaker 01

  of it's on the far right, right? That says, you know, they're very political, they're overly political, they need to be torn down and destroyed and then rebuilt, you know, by whoever I vote into office, right? Which is a fucking fourth world way of looking at things, right? Because that's what they do, you know, overseas in some of the, you know, lesser developed nations where they're just willing to say, okay, now I'm in charge. You know, I'm clearing out the intel apparatus and putting my own people in, right? And that's, that's exactly what they do in a, in a banana republic. I don't know if I can say banana republic anymore, but um, so that's not what you want. You can't do that, right? So this idea that you tear down these organizations and start over again is bullshit.

• 1:47:50Speaker 01

  Because the vast, vast, vast majority of these people just want to do their jobs, right? The, the FBI just wants to get out there. They want to solve a variety of problems that face the nation from law enforcement perspective. And, and the agencies, you tell them what their tasks are. They get out there, they do their tasks, they say, what's the next task, right? And, and so I'm not one of those people that sits around and goes, oh, my God, these organizations have been. Yeah, you know, could you argue that, you know, some of the senior management, you know, became too enamored of, of, of a political, you know, uh, power play or, or administration? Sure, right? And you'd never want that to happen.

• 1:48:28Speaker 01

  And so you have to ensure that you've got enough proactive, inquisitive, questioning people within the, the groups that are supposed to. Senate intel committee, you know, congressional intel committees and others who are supposed to ensure transparency to the degree possible. But, uh, yeah, I don't know how that narrative shifted. Uh, I'm, I'm very glad that we still have sort of the respect for the, the military that we do. I think it's incredibly important and we, what, what's the numbers now? It's less, like less than 1% serve in the military, right? I mean, that's, that's, it's incredible. Very few people, very few people, that's an understatement, have skin in the game, right? And understand what it means to serve. And I think that's a problem too, right?

• 1:49:12Speaker 01

  I think if we had more people, young people who, I don't know whether an obligation or not, but somehow served, whether it's through the military or through government service or through. Some form of community service, if you had some skin in the game, I think you might develop with a somewhat different view on civics and the importance of the government and what's best for the country and it might get outside your own little bubble, but that's not the way it's working.

• 1:49:43Chris Williamson?

  The them and us scenario.

• 1:49:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:49:45Chris Williamson?

  There is this overbearing, nameless, faceless, shadowy organization that's supposed to be a part of you, but is maybe keeping you down. And yeah, if one person from most families in one form has served in however it is that they do it, then you think, oh, well, you know, Uncle John, he's not, he's not one of the bad guys. I know that he's not one of the bad guys.

• 1:50:09Speaker 01

  Right. And everybody, everybody's, you know, put a little time in. Again, not the draft. I suppose we're never gonna probably unless this is a major conflict, we're not going to a draft, but, but some fashion, some service at some level, I think would change the dynamic for the better. But, you know, for, for right now, look, I think, you know, the weaponization of DOJ, that's a big topic, you know, certainly on the, on the, on the, on the right. And, you know, I think that's, that's the result of just this dysfunctional political nature that we've got right now, right? Where you can't, you can't find people living in the center anymore, right? So you've just got people screaming at each other and throwing hand grenades at each other from both sides. And

• 1:50:51Speaker 01

  so naturally you're going to attribute the other sides of doing all sorts of nefarious bullshit, getting up to all sorts of things. And I, you know, again, I don't spend my days, you know, sitting staring at my naval, wondering what the DOJ is up to, but I have a hard time believing that they're completely a political weapon of, you know, the current administration or would be of the next administration, the previous one. There's, again, governments are very large bureaucracy and my experience, again, hey, everybody's got a different one, but mine is that most people just want to get on and do their fucking job and live their life.

• 1:51:26Chris Williamson?

  Yes. What is that what most people misunderstand about the CIA? Do you think that it's just people trying to do their job?

• 1:51:32Speaker 01

  Um, yeah, I, I think.

• 1:51:39Speaker 01

  The agency has taken heat like the FBI has. And I think, again, I think that part of it is the narrative that's been driven out there. In part, look, I mean, again, it's, it's a, well, look, we've been, the agency's taken heat for a long time. So I can't just say it's a recent thing. I can go back to the Church Commission and you go back to, you know, some of the, the other issues that the agency's had. But yes, the, the, the people I worked with were fantastic. And we never sat around in some safe house in some shithole somewhere, you know, talking politics.

• 1:52:22Speaker 01

  Nobody gave a shit about politics. And maybe it's, maybe my time has passed and maybe now the new crew does something different. But I don't really think so. I think that on the operations side, and certainly throughout the agency, the vast majority of people know what their mission is. And they do it honorably and they do it without any pats on the back, right? Nobody, like you said, walks up to them and says, hey, thanks for your service, you know, because they don't know what the hell they're doing.

• 1:52:51Chris Williamson?

  Yes. And they can't talk about it.

• 1:52:53Speaker 01

  Yeah. And you go to, you, you, you go to your grave, you know, keeping a lot of secrets, right? And that's the way it should be. So yeah, people take it personally and it, and it can impact morale, right? When, when you're not used to this idea that somehow, you know, you don't expect people to go out there and go, man, that CIA, that's what a great organization. But you don't expect them to walk around and go, we should tear it down, start over again. What the hell is that all about?

• 1:53:16Chris Williamson?

  When you're making sacrifices, when you're away from your family, when you're doing things in dangerous situations, working hard, late nights.

• 1:53:22Speaker 01

  Right, right. And, and, you know, and not for money, by the way. When I, when I started, I was thinking about this the other day, where I was laughing with, with, with my wife. When I started, and we were doing some crazy shit, I was making $17,000 a year. Seventeen thousand, I was not doing it to get wealthy, right? And I don't know anybody who does now, still to this day, right? It's not, it's, that's not why you do it. You're doing it because, well, A, it's entertaining at times. It's very interesting. It's challenging and you feel like you're doing something more important than yourself. Right? So that's, that's, you can't, that's a quality of life issue, maybe.

• 1:54:03Speaker 01

  Anyway, I, yeah.

• 1:54:04Chris Williamson?

  But service, you know.

• 1:54:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, service.

• 1:54:06Chris Williamson?

  The fact that you don't get in, in intelligence, you don't get the same level of positive reinforcement from the optics of what you did has to be, I mean, I think about this all the time. Let's say that there's an incident and the emergency services are called. An ambulance turns up and everyone is so relieved. A fire truck turns up and everyone is so relieved. The police turn up and everyone is so angry.

• 1:54:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Right? Exactly.

• 1:54:33Chris Williamson?

  So where are people gonna go?

• 1:54:34Speaker 01

  Phones come out.

• 1:54:34Chris Williamson?

  Yes.

• 1:54:35Speaker 01

  Something bad's gonna happen. Here's the police. You think, I'm sorry, you know, you want to do this job? You want to go out there and, and confront situations where you have no idea what's happening, right? And you have no idea what you're going to encounter, right? But you're doing it, right? And, and look, are there bad actors? Yeah. Are there folks that need, you know, need to be removed? Are there folks that need better training? Can they, they can always, that was that thing about crazy, it drove me crazy about the, the defund the police movement, right? You want a better police force, then you need to actually fund them. You need to spend more on training, right? And on consistent training and, and future training. You've got, that's what you do. You don't defund the police. Now we're dealing with the aftermath of some of that in some locations. You know, that was, that was a bizarre little point in time.

• 1:55:21Chris Williamson?

  But the problem that, that trend created wasn't just an encouragement of under-resourcing police departments. It was the optics of what recruiting future members of police teams will be like.

• 1:55:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:55:36Chris Williamson?

  Who wants to go and take that job? Who wants to go and put their life on the line or their safety or work late nights or not earn a massive amount of money? Or do a thankless task or push papers around a desk or whatever job it is, whatever part of the big cog of the law enforcement mechanism you were a part of.

• 1:55:53Chris Williamson?

  Who wants to go and do that? Everybody does that. Everyone would love to have a boss that appreciated the work that they did. Right? And if you walked down the street, like this is one of the things that you're right to say. It's good that veterans, and this is something we don't have in the UK. There is no equivalent of thanks for your service. In the UK, we don't revere our veterans in the same way. You know, there's no one walking around with a Vietnam veteran cap on. I don't think I've ever heard acting British military, please step on the plane first. I've never heard that be called in British airports. So, you know, we don't have that. That's not.

• 1:56:35Speaker 01

  We've got Poppy Day and maybe that's about it where people get out.

• 1:56:38Chris Williamson?

  Correct, yeah. You'd have November the 11th.

• 1:56:40Speaker 01

  Remaining World War II veterans, maybe, but not even more recent.

• 1:56:43Chris Williamson?

  But even within that, that was contested last year. You know, there was going to be all of these protests from Middle East protesters were going to have a problem. There was going to be interruptions for the parade. I don't know whether it actually came out as badly as it thought, but there was, you know, poppies were being ripped down because this is part of some colonialist, imperialist thing. And you just think, God, it's so boring. It's the same thing over and over again, that there is some part of history which is unforgivable and that we are personally cursed with this, you know.

• 1:57:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, gotta take Churchill's stature down, statue down. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:57:22Chris Williamson?

  I read, I read this letter that Churchill's father sent him after he was admitted to Sandhurst on his third attempt. And it's only bits of it remain, but it's Churchill's 19 and his father says, if you do not change your ways, you will become one of the hundreds of social wastrels, having completely squandered all of your potential. And it's, he just lambasts Churchill for like a full page. And then he signs off by saying, your mother sends her regards.

• 1:57:52Speaker 01

  Your mother.

• 1:57:52Chris Williamson?

  I know. Your mother sends her regards. And I remember thinking to myself, it made me feel so sad that there was this guy that probably, you know, defeated the Nazis that are just rolling through. Europe, they hit, they go through one country, another country, another country, another country. And then they just think that they're going to do the same in Britain. And it's the first time that they encounter any resistance is the Battle of Britain. It's the first time they actually get pushed back from anywhere. People don't know this. It's the first time they ever got pushed back from anything was the Battle of Britain. And they go, okay, maybe this isn't, maybe the thousand year Reich in the Aryan race isn't this indefatigable force that we presumed. And I bet that at the end of that, that Churchill probably still didn't feel enough. You know, that he'd managed to complete all of this stuff and he carries this desire for recognition and validation and, and, and, and

• 1:58:39Chris Williamson?

  acceptance by the world into his motivation to do the things that he did. And even Chamberlain, as someone who wasn't built to do what he needed to do, very famously in his resignation speech says, this is the one thing that the Nazis can't see. They couldn't imagine someone putting their personal pride to one side in order for the good of the country. So he steps to a side, so he makes a sacrifice in a very different kind of a way.

• 1:59:00Speaker 01

  In a different way.

• 1:59:01Chris Williamson?

  So that Churchill can then step up. And I just think, God, you know, there's this new series on Netflix called,

• 1:59:08Chris Williamson?

  World War Two, I think it's called From the Front Lines or something. And they've used AI to make 4K and full color, all of this archive footage. It's available. It's like maybe an eight episode series. It's awesome. And, uh, you know, it's so much more immersive now that you can see it in full color.

• 1:59:25Speaker 01

  They did that with World War One. They colorized some incredible footage.

• 1:59:29Chris Williamson?

  Wild.

• 1:59:30Speaker 01

  And improved it. It was, it was amazing.

• 1:59:33Chris Williamson?

  Well, it seems less. It, it makes it feel much more real to see it, to see it in that way. And, uh, I'm watching this thing and thinking, you know, this, it was one of the first times in a long time that I felt really proud about some of the things that the UK had done. And then, like I say, now for all of the problems that we, that there is over in America, the UK doesn't, it doesn't revere the people that have served. It doesn't have even the, the same kinds of benefits. You know, you can go to a fucking Denny's and probably if I showed my military service card, I'd probably get 10% off of Denny's.

• 2:00:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:00:09Chris Williamson?

  You know, and

• 2:00:09Speaker 01

  Well, they still do, they still do it. I mean, you're right. I mean, you pointed out. Airlines, right? I, you know, I'm, I'm on Delta all the time. And, and one of the things they do is, you know, servicemen, active duty and retired, you know, board first, right? Are you included in servicemen? Uh, no, no, no. And I, I wouldn't, I wouldn't ever claim that. And I worked. I don't know what servicemen. Yeah, I worked for the government. So the military. Right, okay. Yeah, I'm sorry, military service. Um, and, uh, so they, they do that. Yeah. Churchill, um, so much of what he did, yeah, driven by his childhood. And sort of this, this feeling that, you know, he was always trying to get affection from his mom. Um, and, uh, and his dad was a,

• 2:00:50Speaker 01

  his dad was a bit of a hot mess, but fascinating character. Um, yeah, but then they vote him out after, you know, hey, we won World War Two. Oh, sorry, you're out. Yeah. And, uh, you know, it's, it's fascinating stories. Um, I just, uh, reread the, uh, that three book series, The Last Lion, which is a fantastic, uh, look at, it's, it's a, a history of Churchill. Covers, you know, uh, birth to death. And it's a lot of detail, but it's very readable. And it's just, it, but there's a lot of it. But what did you, what, what was some of the things that surprised you the most learning about him? Um, I think oddly enough, I'm excited, read a lot about, uh, World War Two history, his relationship with Roosevelt and, and, uh,

• 2:01:33Speaker 01

  so the World War Two section, although probably moved the quickest was the most, you know, was, was super interesting. I think that the, the latter part, right? And also sort of prior to that, his, I mean, his, his involvement with the, uh, the Irish troubles. Uh, that was very interesting, I think. And but then afterwards, it's getting out of World War Two and how his, uh, political career, uh, kind of stagnated and then, and then resurged and, and it, it was, it's a very interesting look. There's also, there's also a book written by his physician, uh, Lord Moran, I believe it was. It, it was the name of the physician.

• 2:02:16Speaker 01

  And he had Churchill's okay, once he passed away to write up his notes into a book, right? And he traveled with Churchill all over the place, the conferences and throughout the World War II as his personal physician. And it's a, it's a great book, not, not very long.

• 2:02:37Chris Williamson?

  Have you read that?

• 2:02:37Speaker 01

  I have read it. And I'm trying to, trying to remember the name of the book, but it's, it's written by a, his doctor. And again, Moran was his last name, Lord Moran.

• 2:02:46Chris Williamson?

  And what was he saying about Churchill's state of mind, his physical health, his mental health?

• 2:02:50Speaker 01

  Well, look, it's not, it wasn't, you know, there was, it wasn't like a kiss and tell book, right? So there was no shocking negative revelation.

• 2:02:58Chris Williamson?

  He only had one testicle. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:03:01Speaker 01

  He had four, which was really surprising. But he, so it's not like today where, you know, you, you know, the idea of you get, you know, a contract to publish a book, then you're expected to produce something shocking in it, you know, based on your experience. I don't think that was the case. It was, it was fairly complimentary of Churchill throughout, right? He obviously had a great deal of respect for him. But it did talk about his, a variety of things, his capacity for, you know, enjoying his own ideas and hearing himself speak, his capacity for drink.

• 2:03:37Chris Williamson?

  Yes.

• 2:03:38Speaker 01

  Yeah. But his, his ability to manipulate conversation to get the result that he wanted, right? And, and he, you know, he, his ability to win an argument because of his ability to.

• 2:03:54Chris Williamson?

  Verbal mastery.

• 2:03:55Speaker 01

  Yes. It was, yeah, pretty remarkable. So, yeah. What was it? It was that, that movie, The Darkest Hour? Did you see that? Yeah. There was a good line in there about he, he took the English language and sent it to war, you know, during his, his famous speech to Parliament, you know. But I think, yeah, he's a fascinating character. I, you know, I, that's why I was, I, the original comment about like this bullshit about, okay, we have to rewrite history and remove, you know, memories of Churchill because, you know, oh my God, look at, you know, he was, he was a racist or something. Yeah. Product of time, right? I mean, things move on, right? So things happen in a, in a timeframe. We should be smart enough to understand what the context was and move on.

• 2:04:38Chris Williamson?

  But the assumption there is that people are so fragile that they can't deal with history. It's like, yeah, just. Look, I'm not one to quote this guy, but there is a leftist streamer called Hasanabi, who a lot of people have huge problems with, and I agree with them essentially nothing. But he's got a phenomenal line where he says, "Analysis is not justification. Analysis is not justification. Looking at why something occurred doesn't mean that you agree with it."

• 2:05:04Speaker 01

  Right, right.

• 2:05:05Chris Williamson?

  But the alternative is to just sort of plug your head in the sand and have, be completely ignorant of it, which makes you even worse off. That's putting you at a real disadvantage.

• 2:05:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:05:15Chris Williamson?

  Speaking of Churchill, I got sent for Christmas from a friend, I got sent some of the champagne that he drank.

• 2:05:21Speaker 01

  Oh, Pulverge?

• 2:05:22Chris Williamson?

  Yes, yes. I got sent a bottle of that. And I learned, I learned from him that Churchill commanded them to make a special, custom-sized bottle. Did you know about this?

• 2:05:32Speaker 01

  No.

• 2:05:32Chris Williamson?

  So he found out, in his opinion, a half bottle was insufficient and a full bottle was too much. So he commanded them to make a pint bottle of that.

• 2:05:43Speaker 01

  That's fantastic.

• 2:05:44Chris Williamson?

  Of that champagne, which it tastes, it tastes like sparkling apple juice. It's phenomenal.

• 2:05:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:05:49Chris Williamson?

  And yeah, a half bottle was too, too little and a full bottle was too much. He wanted to be able to function, but he needed it. And it was, you know, it followed him around. These special bottles would follow him around at all of his meetings. Every single lunch meeting, he would always have one of these things. And I thought that that was, that was fantastic that he just,

• 2:06:05Chris Williamson?

  we'll make it a little bigger, not that big.

• 2:06:06Speaker 01

  Yeah. It was, I mean, it was crazy. I mean, some of the things that, like World War I, I mean, he was on the front lines, right? He went to the front lines, but he took his bathtub with him, right?

• 2:06:14Chris Williamson?

  What?

• 2:06:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, he had his bathtub there, had it on the front lines so that he could bathe, right? So I mean, there's this, it's a little, these little stories that are, they're incredible about the time, right? It could, yeah, it's because, anyway, there's, there's, there's a ton of those in, in, again, the last line. If people have some time on their hands and they're looking for something.

• 2:06:34Chris Williamson?

  That's a three part.

• 2:06:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, three, three, three book series and they want to dive deep into it. It's, it's well worth the read.

• 2:06:40Chris Williamson?

  Have you ever looked at Theodore Morel, Hitler's physician? No, no, that's interesting. Fascinating individuals. So I think it's maybe the very beginning of World War II, or perhaps just before Hitler's suffering really badly with indigestion, some stomach and sort of gut issues. And he finds Dr Theodore Morel, who is this sort of quack doctor, who uses all manner of homeopathic sort of progressive remedies. But Hitler recovers, maybe by fluke, or maybe actually through whatever it is. So he immediately, as all manic people do, proclaims that this is, you know, this guy's a fucking medical god. And now Morel is part of the inner circle. But the rest of the inner circle absolutely

• 2:07:25Chris Williamson?

  hated him. Himmler detested him. Goebbels detested him. He was very messy. He was a horribly loud eater. His breath would stink. He was superbly unclean. So, you know, the clinical manner of this guy that was the personal physician to the Fuhrer was just not that. He'd be there at dinner and he would be sort of shoveling food into his mouth. And he was a really fat sort of guy. And by the end of the war, the concoction of drugs that Hitler was on is absolutely insane. So he's getting injected with bull semen. He's on basically meth. He's on a concoction of stimulants, uppers and downers. And then, you know, there's a really famous meeting, I think, between him and Mussolini.

• 2:08:06Chris Williamson?

  And he just completely flies off the handle. And it's supposedly due to some concoction issue or some dosage issue that happened that day. And Morel's writing in his diary about, you know, the Fuhrer was this way today, gave him, you know, so he's got... So he's actually tracking his... Yeah, all of his stuff. It's like a fucking Whoop Band from 1945. Wow. And it's, there's a bunch of different documentaries. Just search like Hitler's physician or Theodore Morel online. So interesting. But yeah, I wonder, I mean...

• 2:08:39Chris Williamson?

  If it wasn't plain enough already, this isn't me trying to excuse Hitler.

• 2:08:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's a bad look.

• 2:08:46Chris Williamson?

  Get that out.

• 2:08:47Speaker 01

  It's too soon.

• 2:08:48Chris Williamson?

  But I wonder how much of the mental demise and complete insanity, you know, we're going to try and go east into Russia at the same time as we try and go north into France as we try to defend, you know, as we try to go south into Africa, how much of that can be attributed to this guy just being in a stupor, you know, propped up on this cocktail of drugs by this total quack?

• 2:09:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. I'm still thinking about you. I'm not trying to dismiss Hitler's actions.

• 2:09:17Chris Williamson?

  I do. Yeah, yeah.

• 2:09:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, there's no way to go from there.

• 2:09:20Chris Williamson?

  He's just a drug addict. He was on the streets of Philadelphia.

• 2:09:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, like it was, he wasn't, he wasn't thinking straight.

• 2:09:25Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 2:09:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's, it's fascinating. Well, I'll definitely look that up because I did enjoy this Lord Moran's small book on, on his experience as a physician for Churchill. So I can imagine there's, you know, it's, it's that same kind of thought process.

• 2:09:38Chris Williamson?

  But the insight that you get, you know, the, the level of intimacy that you have with a physician is very high and you're, you know, it's, it's the things that you maybe don't even admit to yourself about the fact that I have had that pain in my knee for a while, but you know, how much is that impacting your sleep? How much is that impacting, you know, all of the things down the line? But yeah.

• 2:09:58Speaker 01

  He had a bad day and he just says, you know, gets a shot of bull semen and says, let's, let's invade Russia.

• 2:10:03Chris Williamson?

  Let's do it.

• 2:10:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:10:04Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, let's go for it.

• 2:10:05Speaker 01

  I'll bet this is going to work out well for us.

• 2:10:07Chris Williamson?

  Yes.

• 2:10:08Speaker 01

  Although he did, he did assume it was going to take very little time.

• 2:10:12Chris Williamson?

  You know, they would have, if it, if it hadn't been for the, that winter, I think that they could have maybe continued to steamroll through.

• 2:10:18Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, I think, yeah, that, that certainly played the, the, the key role. I think he was getting advice against it, but that never, you know, swayed what he was doing. But I think that there was, there was this lack of appreciation of size, of vastness, right? And, and what that would do to the supply chains. Yeah. And our supply lines. So.

• 2:10:40Chris Williamson?

  And then all of the trucks got stuck in the mud.

• 2:10:41Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:10:42Chris Williamson?

  Right. Trying to resupply. Who was the guy, who was the dude from his inner circle that?

• 2:10:48Chris Williamson?

  Custom edited the fuel tank on a plane and flew to Scotland to try and persuade the king. It was one of his, god damn it. It was the dude. Anyway, there's a story, it's sort of 1943, 1944, and everything's kind of at a stalemate, but the Germans believe that the British think they're going to be overrun and they're kind of just waiting for this. They really don't understand that Churchill's going to keep on pushing. So this guy gets one of the bombers to be fitted with long range fuel tanks, custom built, and then without any, without informing anyone, him himself flies, because he had once met a

• 2:11:30Chris Williamson?

  prince, he'd met some duke or some monarch, someone that was part of something, and decided to fly himself from Germany to Scotland and then jumps out in a parachute, thinking that he's going to be welcomed as the envoy. And you know, what's fascinating here, there's another great series on Netflix called Churchill's Inner Circle, I think. And it shows the, how swayed everyone's opinions became, because the political backbiting of wanting to be the closest to the eagle's nest and to Hitler and so on and so forth. And again, this guy was adamant, basically was driven by this sort of love for validation and this unrequited desire to be part of this inner circle and to be back in Hitler's good graces, that

• 2:12:13Chris Williamson?

  if I flew to Scotland and did, and obviously he just immediately gets taken to prison, and that doesn't happen. And apparently Hitler finds out about this and just, you'd be waking up one morning, because he wouldn't wake up, he'd have these, you know, meth fueled diatribes until three in the morning and no one would leave, no one would be able to leave as he's there. And he's shouting and screaming and doing all the rest of it. And everyone's just like, I fucking wish he'd shut up. And

• 2:12:38Speaker 01

  I really gotta get some sleep.

• 2:12:39Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. And then the next day, he'd wake up. But yeah, you wake up one day and you find out that some bloke's still in a custom built bomber and land, crash landed it in Scotland, jumped out in a parachute.

• 2:12:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, you don't hear that every day if you're Hitler.

• 2:12:50Chris Williamson?

  It's a bad morning.

• 2:12:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's a bad morning. But you know, luckily, your doctors, what was his name, Morrel?

• 2:12:56Chris Williamson?

  Morrel.

• 2:12:56Speaker 01

  Morrel. Okay, I'll look that up.

• 2:12:58Chris Williamson?

  Picks you up, yeah, get a nice line of cocaine from Bullseye.

• 2:13:00Speaker 01

  Good god.

• 2:13:01Chris Williamson?

  Intuitive Machines, first ever commercial vehicle to land on the moon. That happened.

• 2:13:08Speaker 01

  Yep, that did, that happened. That, that thing happened. Yeah, I, you know, I guess.

• 2:13:15Speaker 01

  Um, didn't it tip over on its side? Still operational.

• 2:13:18Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, it's still working, but maybe suboptimally.

• 2:13:20Speaker 01

  Yeah. Um.

• 2:13:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, it is interesting when you think about, um.

• 2:13:28Speaker 01

  Where are we going with that, right? What are we thinking about? I mean, is it?

• 2:13:31Chris Williamson?

  Supposed to be going back to the moon soon.

• 2:13:33Speaker 01

  Well, yeah, and there's still that talk about, you know, and that'll fuel the desire to go to Mars and, and.

• 2:13:42Speaker 01

  I don't know. I mean, I, I, I had lived through, I was a young, young person, but I did live through the moon landing and, you know, that whole initial Russian excitement of, of, uh, of moon shots and what that meant and, and that sort of feeling like, okay, we're just putting duct tape on things and flying them to the moon and, and kind of was the way it was, right? Didn't have that calculation too, right? You can imagine nowadays, you know, trying to get, and we can see that in terms of the bureaucracy of NASA and how NASA now relies on private sector, um, to try to push this whole process forward, right? But, you know, people got fatigued pretty quickly back in the day with the moon shots, right? And it was like, okay, here we go. We're going to the landing again. What's, what's the point? Right? It's a little bit like Ukraine. What's the point? Why are we, why are we spending all this money, right?

• 2:14:27Chris Williamson?

  No novelty.

• 2:14:27Speaker 01

  Same concept, no novelty anymore. Uh, so I'm not sure, you know, I, again, I'm, I'm definitely, nobody's turning to me for scientific insight. Um, but I, I, I'm hopeful that if there is a vast upside to this, that the government will do a better job of explaining why it's important, right? But I do imagine that, you know, NASA's best days in terms of resourcing are probably behind it, you know, and so that's this drive towards the commercial side. I think that's, that's terrific. It innovates a lot. Um, and again, going back to that conversation about the sharing of information and uh, insight between the government and private sector, uh, it's a good example of why it's important.

• 2:15:11Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 2:15:11Speaker 01

  Um, you know, the agency, um, you know, there was a in QTEL, right? Designed to try to foster that development of more technologies, uh, out in the private sector. Um, so that's a, that it, it's an ongoing process, but I looked at the, the moon landing here and I guess, you know, maybe I'm like a lot of people, but I was like, oh, okay. Yeah, we landed on the moon. Great. Okay, now what? Right? I, I, I, maybe I'm disappointed in myself for not being more fascinated.

• 2:15:43Chris Williamson?

  Well, I think, you know, whether we like it or not, much of what we're doing is an attention and an optics game. And, you know, for instance, do you remember Red Bull's Stratos? Do you remember when Felix Baumgartner jumped from the edge of space?

• 2:15:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:15:57Chris Williamson?

  You know, and you've got, I think it's like a Biffy Clyro song. It's this like beautiful voice. And it's like a rock song and it's made into this perfect trailer and the whole thing was tracked and it was live streamed and you know, there's drama and he's not getting into the, all this stuff. And I remember looking at that and going, that's, that's like, that's amazing. And he's gone nowhere near the moon.

• 2:16:15Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:16:16Chris Williamson?

  And so much of it is not understanding how humans interpret things, not understanding the second, third, fourth order effects of, okay, and what happens if we release this? And what happens if we release that? And what happens downstream? Defund the police. What happens if we do this? Well, it's going to damage certain communities and it's going to disincentivize police officers. And which are the communities in which are going to be the most damaged by this? Well, it's the ones that we're trying to save. I think that NASA and anyone that wants to achieve public support and interest in anything, should be looking way more at advertising and human behavior and psychology, more than they're looking at logistics and operations and deficiency.

• 2:16:56Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:16:56Chris Williamson?

  Because you need to get buy-in and excitement from the, I mean, dude, if you did a GoFundMe or like some, you know, like an equivalent thing to be like, do you want, and, and you will have, this is how far you moved the rocket. You know, your $10 moved the rocket.

• 2:17:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly.

• 2:17:12Chris Williamson?

  Like one millimeter or whatever, like whatever you want to do it. Incentivizing people like that, I think would be so great. And we have the opportunity to do it. But as you said there, how is it that we've managed to get so much more advanced and so much less efficient?

• 2:17:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:17:25Chris Williamson?

  From NASA being able to just put a gun, whereas all of the technology in the world, you know, your smartphone's more powerful than the entire room that NASA had in 1965 or whatever it was. And the fucking thing fell on its.

• 2:17:38Speaker 01

  I just imagined, you know, like this, this character from, uh, WALL-E. Do you remember that movie, WALL-E? It's a fantastic movie, right? Forty-five minutes into it before they had the first piece of dialogue, right? But you were captivated by it. But anyway, that's, it's neither here nor there. But I think, yeah, it's the, um, It's the messaging, and I guess in part, a good example of that would be Ukraine. I think the government, the US administration in particular, has done a terrible job of messaging, explaining why it's important to the public and continually explaining and talking about it, explaining why this is important to the US, if they believe it is, right, then why?

• 2:18:21Speaker 01

  And, you know, why the money's necessary and how the money's being spent. There wasn't enough transparency around. Look, Ukraine has had a very bad reputation of corruption for decades, right? A very corrupt country, lots of problems documented. Okay, it's not... So there should have been more awareness that if we're gonna throw billions and billions of dollars over there, that we should also have an effort to ensure that there's some transparency, more transparency than there has been, in terms of how it's being spent, right? Because that's also in Ukraine's best interest, right, to battle or to be seen as battling corruption, to ensure they maintain this support. Extend the longevity of support. Yeah. So what do you get? You get, you know, there've been a handful of corruption

• 2:19:05Speaker 01

  charges, you know, some dismissals over there in Ukraine. I think Zelensky understands he's got to be seen as battling this problem. But the US government on its part hasn't done a good enough job of explaining to the American public why, you know, and how it's being done. And I think if they had, they could have tamped down some of this, right? But, you know, it's also coming from an unexpected place, right? The right, right? The Republican Party for the most part is seeming to be the... And so now you've got the Democrats in a position of being the warhawks, and the Republicans being the ones that, no, you know, let's focus on US first, you know? And again, this idea that we can't multitask, of course, we can fucking multitask. We should be able to do all of these things, right?

• 2:19:44Speaker 01

  Border security, worry about this, you know, deal with international crises. But sometimes it seems like we're, you know, we're unable to do that. We go from one problem to another problem without seeming to understand that everything's connected in a way, right? Is the...

• 2:20:05Chris Williamson?

  Is there something that unlocks at least a beginning of these problems? Is a potential route out of this to just improve inter-agency communication? Is it to be more transparent when it comes to the public? Like, you know, there's a lot of issues. There's a lot of problems from the political standpoint, to the military standpoint, to the international standpoint, to the supply chains, to the drugs, to the immigration, all that stuff. Are these all individual targeted problems that require very specific solutions? Or are there some fundamental unifying threads that are problems kind of throughout all of these that if those were unpicked, at least would free up some stuff downstream?

• 2:20:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think there are some commonalities, I think, between some of the major issues that we're facing. I think one of the problems that the government, not just this administration, any administration, recently has been slow to understand is, again, the access to information that the public has, right? And they've been slow to understand what that means in terms of how they should deal with the public. So I think you can sidestep some of the reluctance of the public to get behind, you know, whatever it may be, border security. Why is that important? Why do we need to have tight border security? Why do we need to support Ukraine in an effort against Russia's adventurism? What's the point of that?

• 2:21:27Speaker 01

  So I think that's one element.

• 2:21:30Speaker 01

  I think a common thread with a lot of the problems that we face in the US anyway is from a political standpoint. And by that, I mean, I think something that would, I believe this anyway, maybe other people think it's bullshit, but I think if we had term limits, I think that would be a really positive step for politicians, for congressmen and senators.

• 2:21:57Chris Williamson?

  Right, okay, yeah, because we do for the president, but we don't for...

• 2:21:59Speaker 01

  Right, right. So I think if we had, you know, if we were able to figure out a way, I don't think we will, to do that, then I think...

• 2:22:09Speaker 01

  You take, you start to take some of the self-interest out of it, right? You know, nobody should be sitting up on Capitol Hill as a seven or eight-term senator.

• 2:22:19Chris Williamson?

  Does that not create the same issue that we have with the presidency, though? Where people just try and, they don't have enough time in office to be able to get anything done? And there's, there's different incentives?

• 2:22:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, I think if you give, look, give, give every congressman, congressperson, I guess, two, four-year terms, right now it's two-year term, a two-year term is nonsensical, right? That's based on, you know, when the nation was founded. And then Washington DC was a swamp and no one wanted to be there because they had to get back to the farm.

• 2:22:48Speaker 01

  So I think if you gave every congressperson two, four-year terms and you give every senator two six-year terms, they currently run six-year terms, but not in perpetuity, right? So it's, it's absurd when you look at it.

• 2:23:03Speaker 01

  And, and you realize the self-interest involved, the, the, the wealth that some of these folks have built up over multiple terms of being in Washington DC, earning a fixed government salary, right? There's a fascinating, actually, there's a really interesting

• 2:23:20Speaker 01

  stock tracking system where you can invest based on what-

• 2:23:25Chris Williamson?

  Elizabeth Warren-

• 2:23:26Speaker 01

  Nancy Pelosi-

• 2:23:27Chris Williamson?

  Nancy Pelosi-

• 2:23:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, and her husband Paul Pelosi, what they're investing in, right?

• 2:23:31Chris Williamson?

  Wow.

• 2:23:31Speaker 01

  And you can do remarkably well.

• 2:23:32Chris Williamson?

  Like the PelosiStockTracker.com or something?

• 2:23:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's fascinating and, and I think, but if you take the, if you take the self-interest out of it and you take some, to some degree, the special interest ability, right? Look, if I know that you're going to be the head of the Ways and Means Committee for, you know, 42 years or whatever, I'm, you know, I'm going to act a certain way and I'm going to invest a lot in, in my relationship with you, right? If I'm dealing with somebody who's only there for two terms, right? Eight years or 12 years if you're a senator.

• 2:24:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, I don't have the same hook, right? I don't have the same ability to long-term influence you and, and, and push you in a certain way for regulatory concerns or whatever it might be.

• 2:24:18Speaker 01

  Again, you know, the, the, the pushback sometimes has been, um, you know, you need to be here. I think Ted Kennedy used to say, you need, you know, you need to be up here a long time before you can understand all the intricate rules and how it works. Thinking that just sounds like someone who doesn't want to be replaced, right?

• 2:24:34Chris Williamson?

  Yes, yes.

• 2:24:34Speaker 01

  It's like an IT director who creates a system inside the company that's so complex

• 2:24:38Chris Williamson?

  only I understand.

• 2:24:39Speaker 01

  Only he understands.

• 2:24:40Chris Williamson?

  Okay, so better communication to the public, uh, term limits potentially for the people that are inside of the system.

• 2:24:46Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:24:47Chris Williamson?

  Anything else?

• 2:24:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, um, you know, in terms of, in terms of some of the common, you know, problems that face, I think there, there are, uh, issues, whether it's border security or, you know, foreign policy decisions that are separate and distinct from, from each other, I think. Uh, so I, I don't know that I'm clever enough to find the common thread that binds all those together, but I think, um, I look more at terms of how do you create a more functional government, how it creates something that's more effective and with less, uh, self-interest? And, you know, I keep coming back and, and, oh, campaign finance reform, uh, if you need to spend $40 million to get yourself elected, I think that means the system's kind of bullshit.

• 2:25:30Speaker 01

  Um, if you can't explain your position to your constituents, you know, for, okay, let's say a couple million dollars, then there's something wrong with this system, right? You're, we're, we're canceling out a large number of people who could be very qualified and very well-meaning, but I think most sane people look at the system the way it is now and say, I would never throw my hat in the ring for that.

• 2:25:53Chris Williamson?

  Yes.

• 2:25:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, it doesn't make any sense. So you, you, but you, it's self, it's kind of self-limiting and it, and it, and it determines a certain type of person who goes into politics.

• 2:26:03Chris Williamson?

  Yes.

• 2:26:03Speaker 01

  I think, so anyway, uh, that's again, not probably anything new, but, um, now every now and then I like to get up on the term limit soapbox.

• 2:26:11Chris Williamson?

  Yes, yeah, I I was reading just this morning about Australia has built the biggest navy since World War Two, or that's their plan now. The largest fleet that we'll will have had since the end of the Second World War, said Defence Minister Richard Marley. On Tuesday, it outlined a decade-long plan to double its fleet of major warships and boost defence spending by an additional $7 billion in the face of quickening Asia-Pacific arms races.

• 2:26:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's China's influence, right? China's been massively aggressive over the past decade in building out their their military, the navy in particular. And so that's a direct response. You look at Japan, South Korea.

• 2:26:55Speaker 01

  You know, it's it's all the same concern. It's the aggressiveness of China, particularly in the in the short term, in the South Pacific region, which they've always viewed as theirs, and they've always been irritated by the fact that, you know, we, the the West plays a role there. As far as they're concerned, it's their turf. So, but they've been expanding their military opening, you know, for the first time, foreign ports.

• 2:27:22Chris Williamson?

  Well, they've got that, they do that thing where they make bases out of little islands, right? And it extends the like the boundary of what is China. Can you explain what that is?

• 2:27:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, you just make an artificial military facilities. They're not much to look at. They're, you know, maybe it starts off as a shoal and then you just, you know, you just, you know, come in there and pour a bunch of debris and concrete it and, you know, tarmac it. And next thing you know, you got an airstrip, you know, and then you, you know, that's part of your territory and that that can impact your international waters claims.

• 2:27:56Chris Williamson?

  Because you've got whatever, like a 10-mile radius around all of these and the more of these that you can claim.

• 2:28:02Speaker 01

  Right. And so you, I mean, there's, there's a lot of conflict. Philippines, Vietnam, you know, Spratly Islands is an example. There's, there's a lot of conflict over this in in that region. But most people look at it and go, right, really, it's the Philippines versus China? I think that's a, you know, but the the alliance that we have out there, the Austrian alliance and and and others, very important

• 2:28:26Speaker 01

  in terms of.

• 2:28:29Speaker 01

  Not, you know, it's tempering China's global ambitions, right? In a sense, right? And, and there's a, you know, there's a lot of nervousness there. Look, Taiwan, we haven't even touched on the issue of what's the future of Taiwan? Right? I mean, like, they rolled over during the pandemic. They, you know, they literally put out the last little bits of democracy in Hong Kong. Right? Nobody gave a shit anymore because people had gotten their head around the idea that, okay, it's, you know, it's China's again. Game over now. Yeah, game over. But, you know, we're all looking over here at the pandemic and, you know, there's, there's no more remnants of democracy or democracy movement in Hong Kong. So they were successful there.

• 2:29:12Speaker 01

  Taiwan is a, you know, it's, it's a different animal. I think it's a slow game for them. It's a soft takeover. I think is how they're envisioning it. We always imagine, oh, there's going to be an invasion of Taiwan. I don't think, you know, Chinese military and Xi in particular, they look at that and probably go, eh, it's too chaotic, right? They don't like chaos. They don't want anything that's necessarily unpredictable. But they also look at, at our support for Ukraine and think, okay, you know, so, so what? They'd be upset with us for a couple of years, right? And then they're going to get back to their own business. So, you know, the, the, the idea of one China policy, um, you know, it's been a comfortable,

• 2:29:57Speaker 01

  kick the can down the road, you know, concept for, for, forever. But I think that if you look at the timeline, when do they really want to bring Taiwan back into the fold? I think you have to look at Xi and say, okay, is he going to leave office without doing that? Or does he want that as his key legacy? Right. It's his crowning achievement. It's his crowning achievement. So I think then you look at Xi and you look at his health and you look at his, you know, tenure and how long is that going to last? And you think, okay, maybe sometime within that period of time is when it's a move. I, who knows? I mean, it depends. Again, it depends on his health. It depends on. You know, I not so much internal politics. He seems to have a massive grip on there. Right. You got to go back to Mao, maybe before you find someone who had that sort of lock on things.

• 2:30:41Speaker 01

  And he's he's fortified the the the the security services, right? And he's removed kind of the concept of rule of law. And, you know, some folks would would disagree and say, oh, it's a great place to do business. And yeah, you have to do business there, you know, it's not you don't you don't decouple from China. It's not possible in today's world, but you have to be more pragmatic about it. Right. And, um, you know, so I think we have to be aware of and and companies are, I think, for the most part. Nowadays, it's better than it was even 10 years ago. But nowadays, you know, the companies that we deal with in the private sector, you know, they're they're aware of the fact that if they start to go over to China, they build a factory, they build a, you know, some sort of research facility.

• 2:31:26Speaker 01

  That intelligence, that information, that proprietary data is going to end up with the Chinese. Right. It's they can't protect it. And so, you know, but 10 years ago or longer, you know, that was the thought. Well, how do we how do we keep our IP safe? Well, you don't is the answer. They're going to have it. And so, and a lot of companies are happy to sign agreements that basically allow that. Right. Because they want that market. And so, and China's always counted on that, right? We're the holy grail of commercialism, right? You want to sell here. So they've used that to their advantage. But anyway, the Taiwan thing, I think, is is more of a simple calculation. Because I do believe that that she doesn't want to walk off into the sunset without having that happen in his timeframe. So, anyway.

• 2:32:11Chris Williamson?

  Very spicy. Yeah, I don't know, man. I mean, being a citizen that even cares remotely about the future is a very, very scary and confusing, like, well, you know what I mean? Like, we've got the the stuff happening in the Middle East and the stuff happening in the the sort of northeast of Europe, and then the stuff happening in the far east as well. And then we've got things happening at home or southern both. Border crisis, then we've got 2024 election and that's happening. And then you've got the general election is going to happen in the UK and you

• 2:32:40Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:32:41Chris Williamson?

  You know, all of this stuff, you know, the dude in El Salvador just got elected in 85% approval rating and then put like half of the country in jail. Then you've got this guy in Argentina, Afara, you got that guy?

• 2:32:50Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:32:51Chris Williamson?

  Like, and it's just, there's so much upheaval and our access to it has never been more seamless and instant. And it doesn't surprise me that people are kind of checking out, losing faith in media, losing faith generally in their ability to sense make, you know, it's a confusing time. And you might say, well, you know, you have the opportunity to discern the information for yourself. Would you rather not have access to it at all? And I'm like, well, look, more information is good, but also comes, it bears a cost. And the cost is that everybody now has to do their own sense making. And that's very arduous and

• 2:33:29Speaker 01

  And it's also has a mental cost, right?

• 2:33:31Chris Williamson?

  Correct.

• 2:33:32Speaker 01

  Because you do feel overwhelmed, right? And, you know, I don't think there's that many people who can just check out, either because they don't have the means, or, you know, they just don't have the ability to say, okay, I'm not going to worry about this. They're still going to sit and worry about things, right? And you can see that, that the angst that some people have on social media about shit that they can't control, right? But yet they spend time focused on, right? Or the anger that they have over certain things. And you think, okay, dial it back a little bit, you know, there's one thing to be informed. There's another thing to be, you know, outraged.

• 2:34:02Chris Williamson?

  How do you, how do you, given that you're knee deep in all of these stories and stuff, how do you bifurcate that emotionally for yourself? How do you not get too caught up in the potential turmoil and catastrophes that occur?

• 2:34:13Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, A, I think you have to know your limitations, right? I'm not, you know, I'm not impacting much, other than my family, right? So I think you have to, you have to look at it from that perspective. The agency also, the agency, I learned, I learned, I think if I had to think about it, most of what I've learned that has been really

• 2:34:38Speaker 01

  Valuable to me, um, has either come from my time with the agency or, um, from my family. That's it. Dealing with, uh, my family and, and understanding how best to do that, uh, or my time with the agency. And, and the time with the agency, they, they, there was a lot of things that you could pick up if, you know, if, if you thought about it and I, I sometimes didn't realize it at the time, but, um, one of those things is you can't, you, you, you're not there to impact, you know, great decision-making, right? You're there to do a task. You're there to, to, to, to do something, right? And I was never one of those people who sat around and,

• 2:35:21Speaker 01

  and, and wondered to myself, I wonder how the seventh floor is going to deal with this, right? Or geez, I wonder why they made that decision on this policy issue, you know? Tell me what the fucking job is, right? What's important right now? And then, and then do it, and then move on to the next job, right? And so you, you develop, you know, unless you're, you know, overthinking things, you develop a, a certain ability to just, um, compartmentalize shit and, and then move on. Do your bit. Yeah. And also you realize that there's not that many decisions on the decision tree or, or branches on the decision tree, right? People get very wrapped around the axle over, you know, what to do? Do I go here? Do I, do I move right? Do I move left? Do I do, what,

• 2:36:04Speaker 01

  how do I deal with this, this problem facing it? And it, when you, when you look at a problem, usually there's not that many options in terms of what you can do to resolve the problem, to move on, to, to, to have some resolution. And so I think the agency was, was very good about, you know, having you understand, here's, here's something happening. What are my options? And you, and you drill down very quickly and realize I got two options or maybe I got three, but one of them's kind of bullshit. So now I got two again. Um, and so you learn how to do that very quickly. And I, I think that, that proved to be really, really valuable. I mean,

• 2:36:46Speaker 01

  I got out, had no business experience, no business going into business, right? I just, I, people thought I was insane to leave. And, um, so I started it with a, a really, a great friend of mine who came out of the British teams and, um,

• 2:37:04Speaker 01

  We had no idea what we were doing, but because we had similar backgrounds and experience, it didn't matter, right? We just looked at it and go, okay, well, we've made this decision. Now what are our choices? And our choices were very clear, right? Do this, do that. Okay, now we've done that, now move on. And we didn't overthink anything, right? We just kind of marched on, accomplished a task, then moved on to the next one. And it was all because the, at least for me, anyway, the agency had kind of taught you that. And it also taught you to make a decision without perfect information, right? A lot of people sit around and wait to gather all the data, right? And people love data now because it's so readily available. And the agency taught us very early on, you know, that if you sit and wait for that happy day when you get all your information, something bad's gonna happen.

• 2:37:49Chris Williamson?

  Lowering the action threshold a little bit.

• 2:37:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. So that window closes, or, you know, next thing you know, you gotta, everything's going sideways. So you learn to make decisions with imperfect information, right? And just move on, and not sit around and stare at your fucking navel and wonder whether it was the right decision or not. And I've never, I've never been one of those people. I've never sat and angsty and thought to myself, geez, if I'd done that, I could've done, you know, because I don't see where that benefits anybody. But, so that's, that's kind of it. I try, I try to teach that to my boys, that life is not as difficult as we try to make it out to be, right? You, you, you know, life can be fairly simple, right? And, you know, what you have to do is, you have to decide you're gonna work a little

• 2:38:35Speaker 01

  bit harder than everybody else, which isn't hard, because there's a lot of, you know, there's a lot of folks not working as hard as they could. And if you do that, then your, your results are that much bigger, right? You, you stand out that much more because you're willing to just put out a little bit more effort. Trying to teach that to kids is tough, because in, at that age, they envision that as going, ah, I can't do that. I mean, that's, that's, I'm doing everything I can. They have no idea what they're capable of doing. So when you say you gotta work a little bit harder, and then you'll realize those benefits, it can, it can be a difficult process, but that's, I think, one of the most important things you can, you can teach your kids. And also, again, not to...

• 2:39:16Speaker 01

  Not to make life more difficult than it is, right? And, and, and that's, uh, that's been my primary objective with my boys, you know, is, and, and my daughter who's, who's grown up now, she's a terrific kid, but, uh, the boys are younger. And, and so trying to get them to understand that and to push themselves a little bit harder. I mean, everybody wants the same thing. You want to produce productive, you know, good people, uh, you know, the world's got enough average people. I don't, um, my job is not to produce average, you know, adults, uh, you know, from the kids that we've got. So anyway, uh, I'm not sure I was going with that.

• 2:39:51Chris Williamson?

  I think there's definitely, uh, an allure of over complicating things because it feels sophisticated to have this high threshold for information and to, you know, have a, a very well planned out org structure and this is where we're going to go and it's so on and so forth. But yeah, you often end up being defeated by somebody who's just able to move more quickly than you.

• 2:40:11Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 2:40:11Chris Williamson?

  With imperfect information.

• 2:40:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:40:13Chris Williamson?

  And, and finding the balance between these two things, because there are certain areas where I don't think that you should compromise on quality. You know, if you're, if you're going to do your press release, don't rush it.

• 2:40:21Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:40:21Chris Williamson?

  Uh, you know, when it comes to naming and branding and incorporating and things like that, you should move relatively slowly to ensure that you're getting this thing done right. But knowing where the battles for perfection lie are very, very important.

• 2:40:34Speaker 01

  Right. And you have to, you, you have to strike the balance between speed and, and, uh, and effectiveness and quality, obviously, uh, particularly in the, in the commercial sector. I, I mean, we've dealt with, with companies that, uh, go into new markets on a regular basis, right? And so they have to do an assessment of that environment and understand what the competitors are doing and, and et cetera. But we've dealt with some very large corporations. It's, you know, where their mindset is, look, we got to get into the market, right? And if we make some mistakes, fine, well, we'll clean up, right? But we have to be in the market now. And so they, they will rush that process. And yes, they make some mistakes. Now they're big enough as entities, as corporations to, to, to recover from that. But if you're a small operation, right?

• 2:41:16Speaker 01

  If you're, it's starting up in particular, you, you can't afford to make that mistake.

• 2:41:20Chris Williamson?

  Game over.

• 2:41:21Speaker 01

  Game over, exactly. But so it does depend on, it, that's, it depends on size, but, um, it is interesting that, that, you know, I remember having a conversation with one corporate, I can't really name them, but one, um, They're a manufacturer of a very well-known consumer product. And that was their whole point. No, we understand that it's going to take a little more time to evaluate the environment, what the competitors are doing, but we don't have time. And we're going. And yes, they made mistakes and it took them some time, took them a lot of money to recover, but they did. So I guess they were proven right at the end of the day. Yeah. Anyway, yeah. Mike Baker, ladies and gentlemen. Hey. I appreciate the hell out of you. Thank you for coming through.

• 2:42:05Speaker 01

  No, thank you, man. I think I really appreciate it. It was a great conversation. Really enjoyed it. And hopefully I didn't bore you. No, not at all. Why should people go? They want to keep up to date with all of the things that you're doing. Uh, well, um, I'm on X. We call it X now, don't we? Uh, at MB Company Man, um, you know, for all your global intelligence and security needs, of course, there's Portman Square Group and, uh, and we've got the, uh, the podcast, which has turned out to be a wonderful adventure, the President's Daily Brief. And it's, uh, every morning in about 20 minutes, you get your top stories of the day, facts and just a tiny bit of context. And then the afternoon version is about 10 minutes. Uh, you get updates on some of the top stories and get to move on your way. Bob's your uncle.

• 2:42:46Speaker 01

  And, uh, actually I just, I learned not too long ago where Bob's your uncle came from as a saying. And it's fascinating. I'll just tell people, Google that. Google the origins of Bob's your uncle. Okay. As a saying. I don't know if people still say it. Maybe they don't, but if they do, check it out. Anyway, so the President's Daily Brief, uh, every day, weekdays. Uh, it's been a great experience so far. We just, uh, kicked it off. I started in September and, uh, we've been, you know, available on all your podcast platforms. Look at me. I'm a marketing whiz. I know you're down here in the muck and the mire with the rest of us making podcasts. Mike, I really appreciate you. Thank you, man. Thank you.