➡ The discussion revolves around the concept of ‘they’, which can refer to any group with shared priorities. It also touches on the topic of immigration and how it can change the makeup of a country, but emphasizes that it’s important not to stereotype or fear certain religious groups. The conversation also highlights the importance of understanding the difference between immigrants and refugees, and the need to uphold principles of religious freedom and innocence until proven guilty.

➡ The text discusses a shift in global politics, with countries moving towards nationalism, prioritizing their own interests over collective ones. This shift is seen in events like Brexit and the election of Trump, and is now evident in countries across the EU. The text suggests that this trend is not necessarily right-

wing, but rather a reaction to issues like the response to Covid-19 and economic challenges. It also discusses the difference between populism, which is about what’s popular at the time, and nationalism, which is about putting the nation first.

➡ Populism and nationalism can both be forms of democracy, depending on the ideals of the nation. However, if these ideologies are used to support dictators or communists, they are not democratic. Populism, which should represent popular opinion, can be manipulated in autocracies where there is no alternative. The United States has a history of covert influence, often fueling existing conflicts to create chaos and change. This is seen in the media’s influence on public opinion and in the CIA’s involvement in global revolutions. However, the term “color revolution” is not officially recognized in intelligence lexicon, despite its use in popular media and literature.

There are two types of people really in the world. There are the people who will stay and fight to create the thing that they want, and then there are people who will leave a conflict zone and let it figure itself out. When I look forward five years, I will have an eleven year old and a 16 year old. What’s our country gonna look like when they’re at those core developmental years? Andrew Bustamante is a former covert CIA intelligence officer, decorated military combat veteran, and successful fortune ten corporate advisor. After 20 years leading human and technical intelligence operations for corporate and government clients, Andrew founded everyday Spy.com Dot, the first ever online platform designed to teach elite spy skills to everyday people.

Andrew’s training content has been praised for its innovative, authentic and life changing impact. Most of these conversations that we have in society today are emotional. They’re not rational discussions. And there’s almost no amount of logic you could give that person that would get them to change their emotional state. Is that just natural, emergent? It’s because there’s lots of really solid science that demonstrates that you have to go emotional first. A lot of people would say that bitcoin was created by the CIA. There’s someone who believes everything is created by the CIA. But the idea that bitcoin will ever be fully accepted by a federal government, the probability is very, very low.

Are we having a world war three? Yes, I believe we are in the middle of World War three right now. What happens is people think World War three is gonna look like world War two. World War three is a war of what’s called. Alright, Andrew, I’ve been looking forward to this interview, watched a bunch of your interviews, really good stuff. And I want to get right into a question. I’ve watched a bunch of your interviews, obviously prepping for this, but even before that, and I like to read the comments and I like to see what people are saying in the comments.

And I’ve seen hundreds of people engaged in the comments that claim that you’re not truly ex CIA. That’s one of my favorite things to see in the comments are the people who think I’m still part of CIA. Like CIA is somehow so capable at being a government organization that they can like, seed me into society without disclosing my true affiliation. So two things. Have you ever been to the DMV? You’ve been to the DMV? Unfortunately, yes. Why do we think that the same government that manages the DMV as poorly as the DMV is managed, is somehow going to manage CIA so effectively that they can seed some influence agent into society.

It’s just. It’s ludicrous. But nevertheless, if you’re going to read the comments, you’re going to find a bunch of ludicrous stuff. I am not part of CIA. My separation paperwork confirms it. CIA itself confirms it. And I’ve been out since 2014. From 2014 to 2016, I was going through a cover rollback process so that they could actually disclose my true affiliation. And then from 2016 on, I’ve been able to claim my overt relationship with CIA. Yeah, so they’ve allowed you to. Correct. That’s one thing I think about then, is, like, how are you able to talk about all this stuff? Correct.

So, CIA has a very specific non disclosure, lifetime secrecy agreement that we take. And inside that secrecy agreement, it specifically outlines two types of things that cannot be talked about without CIA approval. And those have to do with sources. Operational sources and. And operational methods, meaning the sources and methods of active intelligence collection. Everything else falls outside of that secrecy agreement. So my diet, my exercise, my routine, how I was taught academically, the languages that I learned, all that stuff is outside of active operational sources and methods. So it’s really only like, 2% of what we do at CIA is truly secret for the rest of your life.

And even that 2% you can disclose with CIA’s permission. There’s just a process to go through that, and it probably depends on what your role is and what you’re exposed to. And lots of nuance, I’m guessing, inside there. Correct. Because some people do operations against terrorists, and they can talk about it all day long. That’s why there’s so many books out there by former officers who were engaged in the war on terror. But then there are some people who do very specific things. Sabotage against nuclear targets of high profile countries. Those people will never be able to disclose what they did.

Got it. Okay. Well, we got that out of the way. I want to get into a little bit of your background. I want to talk about. I’m really interested in what you’re doing now, like this everyday spy, and I’m interested in what I can learn from that. So I want to ask you some questions about that, but I want to start with some bigger topics and questions, starting with kind of how you got into that. But immigration, the populist right wing swing that we’re seeing all over the world, color revolutions. I want to talk about censorship, misinformation, malformation.

I have a lot of opinions and stuff to talk about there. Elon Musk, the election and World War Three, we’ll talk about bitcoin and some new technologies. We’re going to get into that earlier. And then, like I said, I want to get in some of your CI. Your spy stuff. So, a lot of stuff. We’ll see how much we can get through. But to kind of set the stage a little bit, you just said you were really with the CIA. Give us a little bit of your background. Like, how does that work? From the movies, they recruit people.

They find people that have these special skills that have a high aptitude, and they kind of come in and covertly seduce you in. I mean, I watched, like, the Edward Snowden movie. Is that how it happens? Is that how it happened for you? So, a lot of what you see in media is it’s popularized, right? It’s made to look cool and sexy and interesting when, in fact, clandestine operations are supposed to be clandestine. They’re supposed to be secret. If you want to keep something a secret, you don’t want it to ever be interesting. You don’t want it to ever be something that gathers attention.

You don’t ever want it to be attractive or sexy. Right. So the way that we are actually recruited is much more mundane for me. I was recruited through a website. I was applying to the Peace Corps after leaving the air force. And in that application process, a red screen popped up that basically said, hey, we know that you’re applying for this job, but we think that you may be qualified for other jobs in the us federal government. Are you willing to put your resume or your application on hold for 72 hours so that a recruiter can reach out to you? That’s how I was recruited.

My wife was recruited at a job fair. She was. My wife is also former CIA. She was trying to work for anybody but the CIA, but none of the other government agencies. Why anybody but the CIA? Because she was a social worker. She believed in, like, you know, protecting refugees, and she was very, very, very progressive in her thoughts. And she just assumed that CIA, because of the media, was this evil, evil entity. Right. But I’m just curious, though. I mean, she was looking at all these different jobs, peace Corps, etcetera, and she knew that the CIA was a potential, but she did not want that.

I mean, that was on her radar. Well, so my wife is very pragmatic. So everything that had a government pension, everything like health and human services, the post office, everything was on her list. Yeah. And she was coming out of, I think, six years of getting a JD, getting two master’s degrees, just career. A career college, university, student, and she was just looking for a stable, predictable job. She knew CIA was a stable, predictable job, just like she knew FBI was right, just like she knew NSA and NRO were. But she didn’t want to go into intelligence.

She wanted to go into something that was going to help society, not something that was going to hurt and take advantage of society. Do people aspire to be in the CIA and then go down that road and apply for it, or are they always kind of recruited like you were? Well, so the CIA is much bigger than people realize, right? It’s about 10,000 people strong. Of those 10,000 people, only about 2000 are actually undercover. So the other 8800 people at CIA are what’s known as overt officers. They’re logisticians, they’re analysts, they’re linguists, they’re people who create documentation.

There’s people who create. Everybody who creates an alias document. If you think about an alias passport, that passport is made of ink and paper and plastics and materials. All of those engineers who actually can create and fabricate that type of material, those are all overt employees. There’s no reason for them to be undercover, but they still have to be an expert in what they do. All the people who do are disguises. They’re all, almost all of them come from LA because they’re all former Hollywood makeup artists. Right. The people who put the secret pockets in your jackets and the secret pockets in your shoes and the secret pockets in your briefcase.

I mean, those are people who have worked with materials in the past, whether they be fashion designers or whether they be luggage designers, whatever else it might be. So you were recruited, I guess, what makes up a perfect CIA recruit? Or if you can say, why were you recruited specifically? So obviously you’re in the military. You said the air force, I think, or you told me that earlier. So they already kind of probably had access to your information. They kind of knew who you were. So were there certain things that they told you that why you thought they thought you were a good candidate or maybe that.

And what makes a good candidate for the CIA? Yeah. So I actually, I always wondered why they chose me until I became senior enough in my career that I started being a voice in choosing who came next. Right. And there’s a number of things that go hand in hand. First, you get a very robust personality test every job in CIA, they know what is the right personality to succeed in that job. So if you. But how would they have had that before you put your application in? That’s during the application process. Okay, so they. But somehow they flagged you before you took that well.

So, for me, they flagged me because they found me coming through an application process for another government organization that traveled overseas, took high risks, lived in places that were uncomfortable, and that I was ideologically driven. Right. So that’s how they found me. But that’s just one of many different recruitment avenues. Right. They found my wife at a job fair. How do you like at a job fair? They’re looking for a specific type of person. The thing to keep in mind is, I mean, CIA gets something to the tune of 75 to 80,000 applicants a year, and that’s not counting the thousands more that are actively recruited.

Of all of those people that are. That are sought out, only about 500 get accepted each year. So the process that takes them from being one of 80,000 to one of 500 is a vetting and assessment process so that they only ever hire people after they know with high fidelity that that person’s personality is going to be a good fit for a certain job, that that person’s intellectual aptitude is going to be capable of carrying out that job, that that person has certain ideological beliefs that make them loyal to a higher organization. Because if you think about it, CIA is an organization that is driven by ideology.

You’re not going to be able to lie, cheat, and steal your way through a 20 year career unless you truly believe you’re doing it for some higher purpose. So they need to make sure it’s not about recruit. They cast a wide net when they’re recruiting. It’s really through that assessment process that they find out who the best candidates will be. Right. And so then the best candidates are different depending on what job they’re being recruited for. Correct. Got it. So you may need to be a really good luggage manufacturer if you’re trying to get concealed departments in your bags.

Okay, got it. Now, you mentioned that the CIA is like an ideological institution. Why don’t you frame up for us what the CIA is? CIA is the central hub of intelligence collection and assessment for the executive branch, meaning the president, the head of the exec. The head executor of the United States has his own dedicated intelligence capacity in the CIA. And they’re called central intelligence because the other members of the intelligence community there, about 18 other agencies, all feed their raw intelligence into CIA. CIA then processes that raw intelligence into what’s called finished intelligence and then publishes that finished intelligence to the president.

In addition to working as a central repository for the entire intelligence community, CIA is also one of the only intelligence communities given the authority to collect what’s known as human intelligence, or HUMINT. HUMINT is when a person like me or you meets with another human being to steal that person’s secrets, either through elicitation, through a formal agreement, through some act of digital or technical collection, whatever else it might be. Most of the other agencies, like NSA or NRO, they’re collecting signals, or they’re collecting radio transmissions, or they’re actually picking up pieces of paper or using imagery from a satellite to glean intelligence.

Those are all different types of intelligence, different types of INT’s. But HUMINT, or human intelligence, is one of the most dangerous and most expensive types of intelligence to collect, which is why very few organizations get to execute. Yeah. And in that, you wouldn’t requ. You wouldn’t call the FBI an intelligence agency. They’re more like part of the Justice Department. Correct. Because they’re obviously doing person to person. Correct. Their law enforcement. While FBI does have an intelligence capability, their intelligence capability is what’s known as counterintelligence, meaning they’re combating intelligence officers from foreign countries who are trying to steal secrets from the united states.

The intelligence, as you would imagine, the intelligence capability of FBI is really focused on criminal investigations. It’s more of an investigatory or interrogation based intelligence collection, which is not clandestine in nature. You know, when you’re being interrogated, you know, when you’re being investigated, it’s a disclosure, whereas when you’re actually being collected upon clandestinely, you are not aware that her secrets are being collected. Got it. So it’s sort of like. I didn’t really understand it. So it’s a repository of all the collection information that’s collected and then sort of working for the executive branch. So the highest level of clearance, the president, the executive branch, et cetera.

You didn’t say it’s a government organization. No, I thought I did. It is a government organization. It is a guy. So it is a division. It is a part of the us government. It’s not under the executive branch? Under the executive branch, correct. Which is important to understand. And most people don’t recognize that there are three branches in government. Those three branches are supposed to have checks and balances over each other, but they’re also supposed to work independently. The CIA does not work for the american people. It does not work for the legislative branch. I don’t know why people think that it should, or people have the expectation that it’s there to support the american people.

The CIA is not there for the american people, the CIA is there for the president, for the matters of national security that command the executive’s attention. If you don’t like the executive, CIA doesn’t care. Their job is to support the executive. This is what happened with the Trump administration in 2016. When the CIA did not cooperate with the executive in 2016, the executive said, well, to hell with you. All of your funding, all of your utility, all of your value is here for me. So if you’re not going to listen to me, then I’m not going to use you.

And that’s why from 2016 to 2020, there was all this consternation between Donald Trump and CIA. What people are concerned about in the new election in 2024 is the same thing happening again. Even worse, now that Donald Trump has been convicted in New York, people are afraid that he’s going to somehow use the CIA under his executive privilege to essentially become a clearinghouse for working against his internal domestic opponents. Sort of like we’ve already seen, but that’s a whole other story. We’ll come back to that maybe a little bit later, but so it is a government organization.

I was going to ask you if it’s maybe somewhat of a rogue government institution, which you kind of already said it was in the instance. It wasn’t working directly with the executive in that example. No. So it’s there. It serves at the behest of the executive. It’s important to understand, and I want to make sure that I say this clearly. CIA has no rogue capabilities. It operates under a set of legislative authorities. Those legislative authorities are what controls it, keeps it in check and balance with the legislative and the judicial branches. Right, right. It can’t just do what it wants.

If it tries to do it at once, the legislative or the judicial branch will come after it when it chooses to not support the president. Meaning when senior executives at CIA are saying the president is a russian collaborator, what happened? There was no legislative or judicial impact there. The president just chose to not use CIA. That was his discretion, his direction. It wasn’t something the CIA did. They said, hey, you’re our executive, and we think that you’re a russian spy. And he said, I’m not going to use you. Then it’s the same thing that happens. If your plumber says, I don’t like the way you look at me and you’re like, all right, plumber, I’m not going to use you.

I’m going to go to some other plumber instead. But they still did work. They still did plumbing that example. The plumber just doesn’t come do work at my house, but in this case, the CIA was still doing work, or you use the plumber for the really shit jobs. And that’s essentially what CIA did from 2016 to 2020. Just kind of got put on the low level stuff. Got it. Nothing super important. All right, so let’s dig into some bigger issues now that we sort of set the stage on what the CIA is. And I want to kind of what I’m thinking maybe more surface level, and we get to the bigger ones.

I know a lot of the interviews that you’ve done have been World War three, so we’ll definitely get there, but I want to kind of see if we can build this up a little bit. There’s a lot of trends that I’m seeing happening in the world, and I think we can get to this. But back to the world War three, it seems like things are global at this point. So we’re not on an island. We’re not in a vacuum over here. So one of the first things I want to start with is immigration. And we have immigration, obviously, all around the world happening in a really big way.

And it started really in Europe, it seemed like. And now, obviously, it’s here in the United States, whatever, seven, 8 million people are coming across the borders. First thing I’d ask, and I’m sure this is an easy answer for you, but are you familiar with the cloud piven strategy? No. Oh, you’re not? No. Oh. Because that’s, like, all over tv in regards to immigration. So at Columbia, which is where most of the, you know, Obama went to school and a lot of Anthony Blinken went to school, et cetera, they had two professors there, Claude and Piven, and they created a strategy called the Claven strategy, and they taught it at Columbia.

And basically, the premise of the strategy that they taught to all of these leaders that were there, was that the way that you take down a capitalist system is to call their bluff and basically overwhelm the system. And so if we could just put as many people as we can onto welfare, we can just completely overwhelm the system and crash it down. So you see this being referenced a lot. You’re not familiar with this. I won’t ask you to dig too deeply into that, but let’s just talk about immigration. It seems like there’s certainly something going on that would overwhelm the system, if you will potentially change the voting base, potentially cause disruption in cities, things like that, I guess.

What is your take on that? Would you agree with that? So I would not agree with that. What I would say is, first to keep in mind that immigration is a uniquely democratic problem. Right. It’s a uniquely socialist, democratic opportunity. Most countries, they have the migration of people, but they don’t have a legal way of immigrating a person into that country. That’s why you have so many population issues happening across Asia. That’s why you have fiefdoms and warlords in Africa. Because if you’re from one country, you can’t just go to another country, and you certainly can’t go to that country and become a citizen of that country and then be taken care of by the welfare system of that country.

That’s something that really only exists between Europe and the United States because we are this blend of socialist democracy. But then on top of that, you have the fact that the United States is a melting pot. So ideologically, we were built on the backs of immigrants. Well, now and really since the 1970s, what we have found is that we don’t really want all immigrants. And that’s become this challenge that the United States fundamentally has to deal with. We want skilled immigrants. We don’t want unskilled immigrants. We want immigrants from countries that have ties to wealth. We don’t want poor immigrants.

We want immigrants that come in with education. We want to reject immigrants that don’t have education. Those pragmatic decisions fly in the face of our ideology. That’s not what we’re taught in elementary school. Right. So what we have is this question where we have to decide what we’re going to be when we grow up. Everything else about flooding the system and gerrymandering, and that’s all conspiracy talk. Like, are we trying to turn our country into something that it isn’t? No. We are very realistically struggling with how to get through adolescence. The United States is still a young country.

It’s a young government. It’s a young political experiment. Why do we think we have it figured out? Why would we expect that our president or the Congress or the Senate has it figured out? There’s no reason to believe that we’re like, we’re less than 300 years old. We’re an adolescent. This is middle school. Sweatpants walking to art class with an erection for the first time. Remember that? How fucking horrible middle school was? That’s where we are as a country right now. Yeah. Well, if we go back to, you said Europe, which is a lot older, obviously, and you already said they have the same problem with immigration going on over there, to your point, we need immigration, especially with population decline, immigration is more important than ever, but at the same point, it needs to be somewhat controlled.

You would think, especially because of being a welfare state, if it wasn’t a welfare state, sure, let everybody come make their way, but when you’re going to put everybody on the welfare state, it becomes a problem. But going back to Europe, for example, we’ve been seeing this going on for about a decade now, and we’ve seen the way it’s really changed a lot of countries, UK, Sweden, a lot of these, even France, which I think will get to a lot of this right wing swing that we’re seeing happening all over the world. It’s like a pendulum, right? We take things too far, people push them back the other way.

But a lot of this seemingly happened from maybe two standpoints, and I could be completely wrong. You know, feel free to obviously challenge us, but we had a lot of disruption in the Middle east, you know, the destruction of Syria, et cetera, under some NGO’s like open societies. And then they changed the sort of rules around immigration and sort of start flooding these people into these areas. So seemingly when you sort of destroy a place and send people up and then change the laws to accept them in, it seems a little more intentional than just random, number one.

And number two, I would just throw out. It would be also that, you know, per immigration policies, I mean, even the United States. But let’s focus on Europe for now. But these nations accept lots of immigrants. I believe the United States accepts more immigrants than any nation on earth, but at some point, like, it should be somewhat limited. So there’s. It’s a big messy. A big messy issue. But, like, are we trying to force as many. Not force, but really bait as many people in as possible? Or is it something being done a little bit more managed, I guess, is the way I’d look at it.

So I don’t think that for sure. I would agree that there’s a mismanagement in terms of immigration policy. It changes, it’s confusing, it’s inconsistent, it’s unpredictable. So I wouldn’t say for a second that we have immigration planned or effectively locked down. Right. But at the same time, I also wouldn’t say that there’s something nefarious about the process. I mean, just think about how complicated and difficult it would be to change the fate or the course or the political base of a country by bringing in an unknown large body of people. If anything, what I would say is it’s much easier to change the political base 500 other ways rather than letting in a bunch of strangers.

I think what’s happening is that when you look at, especially when you look at Europe, they are aspiring to try to live by their own ideals as well. And frankly speaking, they are worse at the ideals that surround freedom and democracy than we are here in the United States. France is a fantastic example. France does not have freedom of religion. If you’re muslim, you cannot wear a hijab. It’s illegal. And that’s why they have so many issues with fundamental Islam. Right. So here in the United States, we actually have freedom of religion. We have freedom of speech.

Here in the United States, there are some countries that don’t have freedom of speech as defined the way that we define it. And, you know, all across Europe, there’s still. We have to remember that Europe is a series of states, states meaning independent nations, not states like our United States. States are being independent nations that all have their own. Their own legal systems, and then they. They also voluntarily fall under a larger european legal system. So it’s quite complicated over there that to think that they are changing their population base in order to change their politics is just.

It’s a low probability, high complexity situation. It goes in the face of Occam’s razor, which demands that the simplest solution is obvious is oftentimes the answer. So it just doesn’t make sense to me to think that that would be the direction a country would go when it could find many easier, cheaper solutions for changing their political outlooks. You said a word that I’d like to dig into. You said that they, right? And so that’s the question. Like, who are they? Right. We get asked that question all the time. I speak about money and finance, macroeconomics and bitcoin, and so it’s always they.

They won’t allow that. They won’t give up control, right? So it’s like, who are they? So when you say they, you said that word. But I don’t look at this as, like a monolith. There’s, like, a lot of different interested parties in that. So you said, like, they wouldn’t do this. There’s easier ways. So who would you say are they then? Whoever. Whoever the fear, like, whoever people fear is in power. Whether people believe it’s a shadow government, or whether people believe it’s a conglomerate of executives, or whether people believe it’s just a bunch of invested politicians, they is often up to the beholder.

Right. Beauty lies in the eyes of the beholder. They is defined by the eyes of the beholder. What I find is funny. And what I try to encourage people to understand is they can be anybody as long as there’s a common set of shared priorities. You and I could be they if we were talking about entrepreneurs, because we have shared priorities as an entrepreneur. But we may not be they if we’re talking about the parents of five year olds. Because if you don’t have a five year old, then you’re not. Then you’re not part of they that I am.

Right. And you have a 15 year old. I don’t. So I have no idea what it’s like to raise a teenager. So I can’t. Yeah, but. But regardless, human beings, because of our survival instincts, doesn’t matter how much money we make, doesn’t matter how successful we are, doesn’t matter our age. We’re wired with these survival instincts that demand that everything around us be bucketed into one of two columns. It’s either friend or threat, right? Essentially. Non threat or threat. That’s how we see everything around us. If we don’t know for sure that it’s a non threat, guess what? We see it as a threat.

A threat. So we’re constantly trying to create this dichotomy around us of threat, non threat. That’s why. I mean, if you’ve got friends or if you have a wife or a girlfriend or a spouse or a boyfriend or whatever else, you will hear them. You will watch them be nice to somebody they don’t like. That is them responding to a threat. And then sometimes you’ll also watch them be mean to somebody they do care about. Well, that’s because they’re comfortable with that person as a non threat. Right. It’s just the way that we view the world cognitively so that we can figure out how to survive inside it.

Yeah, I know this is stuff you teach for your everyday spy, so I’m excited to get into some of that with you. Some of these mental frameworks that we can use, I think are so probably more important than ever that we learn some of these things. So I’m super excited to dig into some of that, but just kind of pushing on this a little bit. So back to who are they? We saw that we have, just over the weekend we had, the EU had all these different votes that went through, and we’re seeing this like massive, like, right wing swing, they call it whatever right and left even mean anymore.

At this point, Macron’s party in France got absolutely whooped. The Le Pen’s party beat them by double the votes. But really, this right wing swing seems to be a lot of it. It’s populism for lots of different areas, green movement for sure. But then immigration, I think, is one of those. So back to who are they? So there’s certainly a lot of people in these governments who want to bring in as many immigrants as they possibly can. And then there’s some people that don’t want the immigrants to continue. So that’s. Who are they? So I think it seems pretty evident that there are people who want this to happen.

They’re actively trying, like in some of these countries, like Poland, for example, they didn’t have it, and now they’re trying to force them to take the immigrants. Right. So there certainly they that want that. And back to the point of easier ways to change the government. Well, in the UK now, they have a, you know, a pro, you know, they’ve changed the government more to be, you know, muslim, if you will. And we’ve seen the same thing happen in United States. So it does work. And there. Are you talking about immigrants or refugees? Again? Immigrants are people who voluntarily try to go from one country to another country to belong to that country.

Refugees are groups of people that come from war torn countries who are brought, who are invited into neutral or friendly countries in order to reduce the stress and death count of foreign countries. Right. Well, back to the word ideologies. So it’s like, I think one thing that I see is like, maybe a mainstream narrative sort of wants to divide us on identity, identity politics, if you will. Right. Where it’s like, I don’t think we align on identities. Black, straight, whatever, it doesn’t matter. It’s more like based off of value. So it’s more like ideology versus geography.

So I think when you bring in a lot of Muslims, whether they came in because of immigration or migrants or whatever, like, they still share that ideology and it still changes the makeup of that people there. Meaning that incoming refugees from an islamic country would change the makeup of a non islamic country when they resettle there. Yeah. And that’s what we’re seeing. I would. I would definitely debate that. I would most certainly debate that because you’re talking about two. Two things that are important to understand. One, migrant populations from war torn countries, refugee populations are generally very small.

Right. Even if you’re talking about tens of thousands coming into a country with hundreds of millions, it’s very small in comparison. So, and then second to that, most migrant policies, like most of these refugees, aren’t put into places where there’s an existing diaspora of their own like minded people, they’re dropped into the middle of places that are almost conservative, of the natural home country because they’re supposed to. They’re supposed to assimilate into the country where they’re going. So, like here in the United States, most foreign refugees end up in the places in America nobody wants to go because it’s just a hard place to live.

Like the coldest parts of Michigan or Wisconsin. Right. They go to rural Pennsylvania. They go to Ohio and Kentucky. They go to Nebraska. It’s not like they go to New York, where they’re all dropped into a precinct that’s heavily islamic. Right. I think it’s important to understand this because we must resist the temptation for Islamophobia. There is nothing wrong with Islam. If anything, the fact that there are refugees coming from countries where there’s war and that war is in any way based on their religious beliefs. These are people coming to a country that has freedom of religion.

If we don’t hold to our respect and appreciation for freedom of religion, we’re transforming the ideology of the United States. We also have to remember that our rule of law says that people are innocent until proven guilty. So to assume that immigrants are coming here just because they’re islamic and then thinking that they’re fundamentally changing our ideology and that there’s some kind of strategy behind that, that’s intentional. Goes against this whole idea of what our principles are in terms of innocent until proven guilty and freedom of religion. I say that because you’re totally right. The mainstream, especially conservative mainstream, is being shaped to believe that there’s something dangerous or inherently wrong with Muslims.

There’s nothing further from the truth. You can’t trust fundamentalists, but you can’t trust a fundamentalist Mormon or a fundamentalist Christian. They’re just as dangerous as a fundamentalist Muslim. So don’t mistake the extremes with the primary thrust of any religion. And we become dangerously close to undermining our own principles as a country when we let the narrative of a media entity, which is the mainstream media, when we let them shape the way that we view information. Yeah, yeah. I’m certainly not trying to go towards Islamophobia or whatever. I’m just trying to. We’re trying to understand who are they and what’s happening around the world, and then we’ll bring it back to this potential world war three type of a thing.

And, you know, I think ideologies matter, but, yeah, certainly not against one. One party or another in regards to that. And of course, I’m for all about religious freedom. Okay, so then we have that now. Then we do have this right wing swing, if you will. And it’s not just in the US. And I really look at it as 2016 sort of being the start of this pendulum swinging back because we had Brexit, that happened. Trump got elected, Greece had their referendums, and so we really started seeing this momentum shift. But now, just like I said over this weekend in France, got just completely obliterated.

Macron just got completely stunned. Germany, Austria, all through the EU, we’re seeing that happen. And it certainly seems as, like I said, pendulum swinging back. Right? It’s like maybe it’s gone too far one way and it’s starting to swing back for right or wrong. It just, this seems to be what’s happening, which maybe just further continues to sort of separate and people start taking their sides. Yeah, I would, I would not categorize it as a right wing swing. I understand that the media category, I don’t like the right or left labels either, but. Yeah, but what it for sure is, is a nationalist.

Okay, swing, right? And nationalism here in the United States, we’re in a country where it’s. Okay, where it’s almost encouraged to be nationalistic because we are the United States of America. We’re one country made of 50 states. Right? So for here, if you’re, whether you’re kentuckian or whether you’re nebraskan or whether you’re floridian, you’re still american. So we pride ourselves on being unified, on being nationalist. In Europe, nationalism is kind of a naughty word because you’re part of the European Union. So you’ve got to be european before you’re French. You’ve got to be european before you’re Spanish.

You got to be european before you’re british. Well, what’s happened is, especially in the NATO countries, and especially since the invasion of Ukraine, NATO countries have realized that being european doesn’t always put your country’s best interests first. Right? And especially in Europe, where they’ve got this russian juggernaut that’s continuing to threaten, you know, Europe, their NATO is taking its orders from the United States, who’s geographically separated from Europe altogether, right? So all of a sudden, you see French and Germans and Polish and Lithuanians and Romanians asking themselves the question, like, wait a second, does Europe come first, or should Romania come first? Does Europe come first, or should Germany come first? And we’ve seen over the last two to three years countries coming out more and more disagreeing with the United States, disagreeing with the Biden administration disagreeing with the us influence in NATO and taking a different stance.

And that became this fertile ground for, like you said, a pendulum swing back towards nationalism, where now the French want to be french first and european second. As Americans, it’s kind of hard to disagree with them unless you’re in Texas. Yeah. Over here in Texas, you want to be a Texan first. Right. And then they have the right to secession. Yeah, they’ve retained that right. Yeah. So. But, yeah, I would exactly agree with that. And like I said, even going back to 2016, which is when Brexit said, hey, we don’t want to do that, or they did the Brexit to say, we don’t want to be part of that anymore.

And so to your point, right, and the EU is relatively new. You talk about the US being new, the EU is. I mean, what is the EU even? Right. And then when you look at it from a bunch of different angles, and then you look at it from, like, an economic standpoint, like Germany’s been carrying the. The economic engine of all of Europe, and then you have the pigs nations down south that can’t contribute. And so you can start to see a lot of reasons why they may not like that. Would you say, just so we’re kind of clear on terms for everybody listening, we talk about nationalistic.

Would you also consider that populist? And if so, how do you define those? Yeah, so populist is whatever is popular at the time. So populist movements can often be liberal or conservative. They’re just whatever’s popular at the time. I mean, look at Latin America. Latin America is right now going through a pink wave. They’re becoming more socialist, whereas what you’re seeing. Yeah, what you’re seeing in Europe is the opposite. They’re becoming more independent. Right? So pop. But they’re both populist movements because they’re popular and they’re gaining in momentum. Whereas nationalist very much means of the nation.

You put the nation first. The best way to think of that is we pledge allegiance to a flag, the flag of our country, always. Right. There are some countries in the world that have their national flag and their union flag flying side by side. We in the United States, we don’t do that. So when you put your country first, that’s nationalist, then there’s, of course, socialist or liberal movements. And those are when you put society first or the common good first. And I mean, Europe for a long time has been going down that road, and the United States has been trying to mimic Europe in a lot of their policies, in going down this socialist road, a big part of what changed.

I mean, I would argue that even more than 2016, what really changed the world’s attitude towards nationalism was the response to Covid-19. When Covid first hit, you saw a lot of countries not know how to respond. And then you saw the United States take some fairly decisive action. And then countries that seconded the United States then just replicated the us response. When they replicated the us response to Covid, they then replicated all the same economic problems that the United States caused with their response to Covid. So then you started seeing inflation worldwide. Then you started seeing globalization become challenging worldwide.

You saw supply chain challenges worldwide. You saw commerce come to a halt. You saw bureaucracy and stimulus all get out of control. That made people wonder, is it really right to just do what everybody says you should do for society? Especially as more and more science came out about COVID we started to understand more and more what it was. We started to understand the mistakes in the policies that we put in place in responding to Covid. And even still to this day, people don’t acknowledge that they made bad decisions about their policies about COVID Instead, they just moved on to the next distraction, which a very convenient distraction was Russia invading Ukraine.

All of a sudden, Covid wasn’t a headline anymore, right? That was really what shifted a lot of these things, because people started seeing maybe following the United States and just doing what the United States does isn’t in our best interest, and maybe being part of the larger collective isn’t in our best interest, because we’re hurting our own people in our own country and our own national economy in order to fit into this larger conglomerate that doesn’t actually help us, hurts us in many cases. That’s what Europe, I think, is waking up to. And unfortunately, the United States.

The United States has always been very good about not making itself dependent on anybody else. Now we’re seeing that we’re losing our ability to manipulate the rest of the world because the world is now waking up to the fact that they have been manipulated. They’ve been shaped under this american ideology for such a long time that now in the tech revolution and the information era that we’re in, people are discovering their own independent ideas again. And as much as we espouse independence as a country, we really only mean we want freedom and independence for Americans. The United States has no interest in freedom or independence for other countries.

We really only promise. And we’ve been exporting democracy for years. What are you talking about. Yeah, exactly. We’ve exported the dependency on the United States. We’re gonna get to that. We’re gonna get to that. We’re gonna get to that. But so, okay, so populism could be either nationalism or. Or socialism, just whatever’s popular, whereas nationalism is. But nationalism is also like America first or Germany first. But it could also be Germany first as a socialist or communist nation. Correct. Because it puts the nation. So it puts the nation first. But it’s. So there’s a lot of overlapping, I guess, if you will.

And that’s what’s wrong with all the isms, right? Yeah. I wrote a book called the Uncommunist Manifesto, and it was. It wasn’t a point by point rebuttal of the communist manifesto, but it was just the same basic four chapters that cover the same basic topics. But I think, written from a new lens, maybe if Marx was born today, he’d see the world differently. Maybe not. But one of the things, I have a diagram in the book, and I basically show all of politics being on one side, and so you sort of have everything on one side, and then you have whatever.

Fascism and socialism are on opposite ends, but they’re all collectivism. It’s all collectivism ideas. And then really, like, over here, I think then we have sort of, like, decentralized systems. I would put bitcoin over there. I put capitalism over there, which I think is an emergent system. It’s not politics. It’s like little kids in preschool are trading chips and crackers. This is what we do. Right, right. But anyway, all of those isms, they’re just different flavors of, like. Of a different thing. But. So going back to this. So then would you say that then populism would be.

And nationalism could both be like democracy? Yes, I would say both of those could be democracies, depending on whether or not the nationalist ideal is for democracy, like you see here in the United States. So if the nationalism wants a dictator or communist, then obviously it’s not democracy. I mean, that’s what you have. You have an incredible amount of nationalism in China for a centralized communist party. You have an incredible amount of nationalism in North Korea for what is essentially God ordained family of rulers. But they’re still nationalistic. They still put the country first and their system managing that country.

And that could also be populism then, too. The only reason that those autocracies are harder to claim populism, because there’s no. There is no alternative right. Like populism defines something, has to be popular. In order for something to be popular, that means it has to be transient, has changed, but there’s no change in autocracy. I’m just curious because these definitions, they’re hard, and I think they get misrepresented today. And back to my book, which I co wrote with Alex Fetzky, by the way, we opened the book with definitions. Before we even get to the book, let’s just get clear on the words that we’re going to use.

So I try to, like, try to define those. But I think about today and sort of like the governments that we have all throughout Europe that see this shift. Right? Shift, whatever they want to call it, in the media and even in the United States, they almost talk about populism as being a bad thing. But in a democracy, wouldn’t that be a good thing? Right. That’s the voice of the people are demonstrating or voicing what it is that they want when, when it’s executed in a way that’s informed and responsible. There’s nothing wrong with. Those are two key words.

But if it’s not informed and it’s not responsible, if it’s built on propaganda and empty promises, then you’re just feeding people sugar to get them to take action. It’s very different than when you force people to eat their spinach and see it for what it really is. Right. So the populism for the conservative nationalist bases that we’re seeing in Europe, that’s a lot of spinach and broccoli that Europeans are eating and realizing that they need to pick a different path. Whereas what we see here oftentimes in the United States, especially in these upcoming months, to the lead up of the election, with the hate ads and with the promises that are empty, like, that’s a lot of sugar that we’re about to start seeing.

Yeah, I’m going to come back to that. Responsible and informed decisions. We’re going to come back to that in a minute. But continuing down this path, then one of the things that I see, and being from the CIA, you know this way better than I do, but I want to talk about color revolutions. And China had put out, one of their senior advisors from some ministry or the other had put out a piece of document, and I think even President Xi had said that the US is behind most of these color revolutions. This report said there was at least 50 color revolutions, and I think the IR’s has claimed like seven of them, the rose revolution, the orange revolution, the Tulip revolution, the Arab Spring, et cetera, et cetera.

And then Mister Xi said, President Xi said that we should prevent just. This was just last year, he said this with Putin, that we should prevent external forces from instigating the color revolution. And so these things happen. It seems like the CIA has admitted to at least seven of the 50. China seems to think that the US is behind them. Whether that’s truth or not, sometimes whatever people’s perception is dangerous coming from the CIA, I guess. What’s your take on that? So you have to understand that covert influence, which is what we’re talking about here, the idea that there’s a revolution of any type and that there’s some effort to shape that revolution for some sort of outcome that’s influencing so, and then doing so without being caught would be covert influence.

One of the fundamental truths of COVID influence is that you don’t create something out of nothing. It’s too high risk. Stoked the flames. You have to stoke a flame that’s already there. Right? So there has to. Even if it’s just an ember, there has to be something already there. And then all you do is you add fuel to the fire. The United States has been an expert in covert influence long before we were even the United States, right, back when we were still just colonies. I’m sure this goes back to the beginning of empires. I mean, roman empire.

This goes back to Egypt, right? Ancient Egypt. Yeah. So the most efficient and most effective way to carry out covert influence is to find two sides that are already in conflict and then feed them both simultaneously. Because what’s going to happen is one of the two flames will gain popularity and it will grow on its own. You don’t have to be vested in one outcome or the other. You just have to be vested in the chaos and the change that’s guaranteed to come because of the outcome. So Arab Spring is a fantastic example. We didn’t need to have a specific outcome that we wanted.

We just needed to contribute to the narrative about the Arab Spring. And here’s what’s fascinating about the United States. We contribute to the narrative without it even being intentionally collected and derived from the us government, because our media is a profit oriented institution. Organization, right? So media is trying to make money as a business. Therefore, they will speak, like, passionately, alarmist phraseology, right. They will use words that instigate a response from their own user base. So now you’re actively feeding the fire. Just. If you just look at the headlines in Fox News and CNN, you are constantly seeing influence all the time.

Just media narrative, trying to get people to click. But that rhetoric just. It encourages more and more derision and division. That’s essentially what covert influence is. The only difference is covert influence is done through a covert manner so that the hands of the us government can’t be placed in there. So when you hear the CIA acknowledge that they were actively involved in however many of these, that means they’re acknowledging that they participated in those. One of the things that people don’t do, you know the purpose of the Green Berets? The US Army Green berets or special operations unit? Not specifically.

Most people don’t. The sole purpose of the Green berets is to raise guerrilla indigenous forces, to fight against the establishment. That’s what the Green Berets do. So we have an entire. And that’s open, that’s public information. So if you know that we have specially trained special operators in the US army whose exclusive job is to graze, is to raise guerrilla forces, are you surprised at all to hear that the CIA is also involved in every revolution around the world? I’m not surprised. There might be some people listening. I’ve been down to Costa Rica, and they have one of the planes that was being used in the Iran contra deal, and they’ve set it up as like a bar restaurant now.

And they have, like, the whole store, I guess one crashed in Costa Rica, and they have, like, the whole story and the plaque and everything in there. So I’m familiar with some of the. I don’t know if that was green Berets, but they were certainly training guerrilla insurgents on the ground. Right. Which they’ve done for a long time. But would you frame up what a color revolution is? I mean, there seems to be like a kind of like a predefined, like, definition of what a color revolution is. So, you know, it’s funny, because I actually, in the formal doctrine of intelligence, color revolution doesn’t exist.

To me, that’s a media term. To me, that’s a term that. That society has kind of hammered together on their own. We have covert influence. We have influence campaigns. We have the instigation of uprisings. We have, you know, feeding insurgent or guerrilla forces. We have lots of terminology, but color revolution is not one that exists in our lexicon. There’s been two books written about them. So Norm Eisen is the former ethics czar to President Obama. He wrote a book called the Democracy Playbook, preventing and reversing democratic backsliding. And in that, he basically laid out. So he’s sort of known as, like, the author of the Playbook of a color Revolution.

So he, and he wrote a book. He wrote a book. And then Michael McFaul, he served as US ambassador to Russia from 2012 to 2014. And he also wrote a book outlining what he did in Ukraine and what he calls a color revolution as well. So there’s been two books. And to your point, it’s not a lexicon in the CIA, but the two architects of it wrote a book. Both wrote their own books. And Michael McFaul, in his book, he says it’s a semi autocratic regime rather than a fully autocratic, an unpopular incumbent. Note blanket negative coverage of that person, like Trump, fake polls kind of a thing, a united and organized opposition.

So media, intel, community, Hollywood, whatever, right? An ability to quickly drive home the point that voting results were falsified. And so we see this in, like, Belarus, like, right? You see this. Enough independent media to inform citizens of false, falsified votes. And then finally, a political opposition capable of mobilizing tens of thousands of or more demonstrators. So that’s sort of like what they call the color revolution playbook, if you will. And so, you know, we see this, like I said in Belarus, we see this, like, happening all over, like, sow seeds of dissent. So people don’t know if they could trust what’s happening with the election, right? Have the media sort of, like, stoke the flames and whether this may be for profit or whatever, but, like, we get that going and then we kind of get, like, people unhappy on the street, whether it’s over immigration or rich, poor, whatever it is.

So that seems to be what these, these people have framed up, which is funny. It’s funny to me because, first of all, what is an ethics czar? That’s not a formal government title. Well, Obama created all the czars, right? So, like, he put czar. This is like the, it’s, this would be maybe what you’d call the deep state or the administrative state. But Obama appointed, was it 24, I don’t know, over a dozen czars over independent industries. And these were appointees by the executive branch. And so this is a President Obama appointed ethics czar, like Van Jones was Obama czar.

And Van Jones talks about something called the upside down, what is it, bottom up, top down, bottom up, inside out approach, which is basically sort of the same, you know, Van Jones, I’m sure. No. Oh, Van Jones is a political commentator. You see him all over CN, et cetera. But he was Obama czar at the time as well. And anybody that wants to can just go on YouTube, you can see Van Zone Van Jones talking about this, but he calls it a top down, bottom up, inside out approach. And what Van Jones said that we needed back when he was under Obama, back then, when Obama was preaching, you know, promising a fundamental transformation of America, Van Jones said we needed to top down, bottom up, inside out.

So the top down was, we need to change the government. We need to get our appointees in to the place of government. Two, bottom up is we have to take over the education system. If we can take over the education system, then we can bring people up with our ideology. And then finally, the inside out is we need to get the people so agitated in the middle that they’re begging for change. There’s dozens of YouTube videos of Van Jones preaching this, but it’s basically sort of the same playbook. So that’s what a czar is. That’s interesting.

So it’s an area I’m not familiar with. It smells a little conspiratorial to me, but that’s me not knowing the information. Well, this is so this is just for everybody listening. This is Norm Eisen. He was appointed by President Obama, and he wrote a book called the Democracy Playbook, preventing, reversing democratic blacksliding, backsliding, you know, with the. I’ve talked about, like, the World Economic Forum and Klaus Schwab. And I would typically say he wrote a book called the Great Reset. Just go read it. I don’t typically like to quote from it because it sounds kind of, like conspiratorial, but just read.

They put books out. Like, read their books. And then Michael McFaul also served as US ambassador. He wrote a book, like, just read their books. Norm Eisen, the Ethics czar, the one who wrote the playbook, he was also behind all of Trump’s indictments. As a matter of fact, he says in the book that he drafted ten articles of impeachment a month until he got Trump. So he was appointed by Obama. He wrote the playbook on, hey, here’s how you do it. And then he went and filed ten in his books, self admitted ten articles of impeachment a month until they got Trump.

And not to turn this into a us thing, I want to kind of get to this world war three thing, but these types of things are happening, and whether it’s a small faction or it’s some grand conspiracy, but these things just seem to continue to divide people a little bit more at some point, right? I guess the question I want to get into, because I want to get into kind of some of this, the election stuff. But the last part about putting a political opposition capable of mobilizing people seems to be a big piece of it.

Right? So I’m just curious. Your take, like, it was in 2015, was the first time we saw BLM happen, and that happened. I think it was from that Ferguson shooting, and then it quickly spread to, like, six different cities were, like, under fire going into that 2016 election, and then sort of seemed to, like, go away. And then 2020, we had, like, BLM and antifa, sort of, like, back, you know, protesting, burning down government buildings, etcetera. And then we haven’t really seen it. And now we’re seeing, like, now we’re seeing, like, college campuses and that type of thing.

I’m just curious, is that just coincidental in your mind, or do you think a lot of this, sort of, like, this political opposition that we’re seeing that happens on this four year period, is it someone around the elections, or you think that’s just more coincidental? I would say that when you look at that whole political playbook, that whole playbook that’s needed for a color revolution, all of those ingredients are always present. There’s always an unpopular incumbent. There’s always the ability to rally people behind a political cause. Those things always exist. It’s a matter of whether or not they reach a certain threshold, a critical mass where they can do anything about it.

I mean, you name it. Going all the way back to our childhood, there were always. All those elements have always been present. I think what we’re starting to see now is the democratization of information and the increasing willingness for people to get behind something they don’t understand just to have a cause at all. People being raised in a culture. I mean, we are a collectivist culture, and we’ve been pushing the collective narrative since 2004 ish. Now, it shouldn’t be a surprise when your average 18 to 27 year old, young professional or early careerist when they decide to line themselves up with a cause.

Right? What’s. I mean, we’re sports fans. We want to, like, wear our sports team’s jersey and root for, you know, root for our team, correct. So. So, I mean, Black Lives Matter is a. An organization. It’s an ideology that’s based in fact. Like, the justice system is all fucked up. Nobody debates that, right? It’s all fucked up. And it very clearly has empirical evidence that shows that the african american population bears the burden of that fucked up ness more than the caucasian or Latino or whatever other. Right. So there’s lots of empirical evidence that shows that BLM has a valid reason to be ideologically driven.

They’re not going to. They don’t go away. Just because they’re not active in a moment of high tension doesn’t mean that the cause is irrelevant anymore. And similarly, when another moment of tension presents itself and the cause presents itself, that shouldn’t mean that we think that it’s being driven by some political or government establishment, right? If anything, I think when you see how different the different BLM demonstrations have been, even from state to state, city to city, sometimes they get violent, sometimes they stay totally peaceful. It shows that there’s no centralized organizational hierarchy. It’s not like the Black Panthers.

Right? What you’re dealing with here is a true political movement that’s growing in momentum around a valid problem. It just so happens that it’s also happening at the same time as these moments of political tension, which makes sense because it’s a political issue. The same thing would happen if we were talking about abortion rights. My mom used to march in abortion rallies when I was, like, three years old. I have pictures of her, you know, promoting women’s rights and the right to abortion when I was, like, five years old, next to her, my five year old self, next to my single mom.

Like, it was. It’s kind of a fucked up picture. But my point is. My point is that, you see these things happen because the issues don’t ever get resolved. It’s just when the political tension brings it, when it reaches a certain threshold, people then take the time to leave work or go and demonstrate their ideology. Same thing’s happening right now with. With support for Palestinians. Dude, a year ago, nobody knew what a Palestinian was. Just like three years ago, nobody knew where Ukraine was. You just got a bunch of people who get behind a cause that they don’t understand because they can read about it on TikTok, and they go out and they march because they have nothing else better to do.

They’re not actually helping unless they are informed and responsible about what they’re trying to support. So going back to that, the informed and responsible decision, which I want to get to, because we’re going to talk about the rise of Internet communication and censorship. But in regards to that, you talk about what the green brays do. You talk about going back to the Egyptians, the Roman Empire. It’s pitting two groups of people against each other. Identity politics. It’s communism, right? It’s what Karl Marx talked about. It’s like, literally that. Like, let’s take the rich and the poor and put them against each other.

But now it’s the black and the white and the gay and the straight and et cetera, et cetera. One religion against the next, etcetera. So I think, I believe we’re both on the same page. I mean, this has been going on forever. That’s what you do. You pit two groups of people, and what you typically do, if you really wanted to seed, sow seeds of descent, is you would find a marginalized group. Right? Correct. A marginalized group. And it’s like, hey, you can’t get ahead because of x, y, z, right? You’re the wrong race, you’re the wrong culture, you’re the wrong religion, you’re the wrong sect, whatever it is.

And so you’re never going to get ahead, just like Karl Marx did to the poor. Like, you’re never going to get ahead. You don’t have any capital. All you have is your labor. That’s what he told them in the book. Right? And so you find that marginalized group, and maybe it was BLM because it was the flavor of the month, and then maybe it was antifa, and maybe now it’s the, the Palestinians or whatever. I mean, certainly plausible. So again, you’re talking about, you find. I don’t know who finds. What I’m saying is that marginalized groups always exist.

And what you’re talking about pitting people against, that’s human nature. I know. That’s not politics. That’s just the way human beings are. Right. I live on the north side of the street. You live on the south side of the street. We already have, like, disagreements. Just because I don’t. I know. Yeah. This is how we are. This is why we get pissed off when we put our garbage can out on the curb and somebody next door neighbor throws their garbage in our garbage can, and we’re like, that’s not your garbage can. Right? We’re ridiculous. They parked their car on my side, on my side of the street, even though we’re not using that spot.

Right. Human beings are ridiculous creatures. That’s just human nature. The whole idea of finding a marginalized group. Now you’re getting into intent, right? You’re getting into what we call the radicalization ladder. Because if you can find a marginalized group and validate that they’ve been marginalized, then you start them on a process of radicalization or a process of indoctrination that gets them to then assign a cause to their marginalization. That is a very different beast than your typical community organized group that says, hey, the problem is the justice system. Like BLM, the problem is the justice system.

They’re not saying the problem is the us constitution. Right. They’re saying the problem is the justice system. And here’s the evidence that shows that the problem is the justice system. Well, didn’t they say it’s systemic? Which would then say it’s based off the constitution. It’s systemic. Right. The country was a 1619 project. The whole country was founded off of racism. So everything that the country produced, including the constitution, is then thereby systemic. Right. Still a stretch, right. Saying something is systematic or systemic. I agree it’s a stretch, but that’s what they’re saying. They’re saying systemic. That’s what some group is saying.

Right? Again, it’s a wide playing field. Some groups are saying it’s systemic and based in the constitution. Other groups are saying it’s just based in the modern legal system. So you have this continuum of explanations, just like we do for everything else. The problem that you and I run into so often is that the voices that get shot, the voices that shout the loudest, are the voices at the two ends of the spectrum. The two extremes. Yeah, for sure. You said that we were a collectivist culture. So, like, humans are tribal. Right? Right. Like, we’re tribal.

Do you think that scales, though, I mean, are we really, or was America more like based off of, like, individual values and freedom? It’s a great question. It’s a great question. It’s an important one to understand because we were founded on independence. Meaning, like, if you. If you really think back, the first american pilgrims, we were not fleeing religious persecution. That’s. That’s not true. It’s a popular statement in. In, like, elementary school. But that’s not what the pilgrims were. The pilgrims were independent contractors. They were coming from a overpopulated Europe and they were being promised land in exchange for cultivating the land to create produce that could go back to Europe.

So everybody coming out here was coming back. I mean, essentially as an entrepreneur, that’s what the pilgrims were. That’s why they were willing to take that risk. It’s not that they were being persecuted religiously. Some people were part of a religious group that the Europeans looked down on, but it’s not like every pilgrim was being hunted to the end of their life. It was funded by the government, by the king at the time. Right? So that’s what we were founded on, is this idea of independence. Well, then, over time, as we won our independence from the kingdom and we became a society that had to fall under a common rule of law.

We were forced out of our kind of tribal, 13 colonies, and we became this unified country. If you recall, the whole reason we had a civil war was because people weren’t sure if they wanted to be unified from coast to coast. So we’ve watched over the last 300 years, 280 ish years, as our country has gone from being fiercely independent to now becoming a collective society that adheres to a set of rules and guidelines that are dictated by an administration, a government above us. And you’ve seen that happen in every element of your life. Like the days that your children go to school, the hours that they go to school is dictated by the government.

The holidays that you have to give your employees are dictated by the government. The health insurance that you’re required to provide, the registration requirements, the emission requirements for your car. I mean, all of this legislation is coming down and down and down. And that’s just. That’s breeding a collectivist society where we realize the benefits of adhering to the collective, and then we teach adherence to the next generation. And now we have children, like anybody with a child between the age of five and 16. You can look at those children and you can see they are so much less rebellious and less resistant and less independent thinking than we were when we were that age, because this generation has had to deal with the onslaught of technology and the mobile phone and mobile devices and the Internet of everything.

So you can see how collectivism isn’t. It’s not politically conspired. It’s required for the state to continue to create a consistent engine of economic power. The United States government wants, more than anything to remain the only superpower in the world. How do they do that? They do that by controlling their population and making their population as productive as possible. How do you make the population as productive as possible? You ensure that 80% of that population responds in a predictable manner, and then the remaining 20% can either be unpredictable or go on to become the people who generate the most economic success.

Yeah, I certainly agree with you that that is the role of the state. Murray Rothbard wrote the book the Anatomy of the state, and he framed that up perfectly. Right. The purpose of the state is to stay in the state and continue to grow, just like any business. The purpose of business is stay in business and always grow. The business and the state is no different. Of course, he’s. You know, I would agree with his view in that book, the Anatomy of State, which, for all the listeners, they should read that book, but there is no state.

There’s you and I, we’re individuals and then collectively we have shared common interests. If someone came in to kill us right now, you and I are certainly going to work together to defeat that person. But then, like, I might want to go surfing and you might want to go play tennis, right? And so we’re individuals first and then collectively we share things in common. I think the problem, and I’ll get your take on this, but in my opinion, there’s a saying about it, I forget, but it’s like with my family I’m a communist, with my city I’m like a socialist, but with my country I’m a libertarian.

So it doesn’t scale over time. So it’s like, I think to the point the state grows and continues to assign that. But to have one regime or a group of people 3000 miles away to tell my kid what time they have to go to school each day I think is just way too big. A lot of problems that we have. We’re trying to cram way too many people into one round or square hole when it doesn’t necessarily fit that way. And if we didn’t have to, if you didn’t have to manage people down to the Minutia detail, then you wouldn’t get a lot of that, I would say.

But what’s your opinion on that? I would say that that’s a big question that the world is asking itself right now. Right. We’re in a phase of global development where it’s a very open question, is democracy or autocracy the better solution? Because democracy, you’re right, does not scale well. It’s slow, it’s cumbersome, it’s prone to fits and bursts. It’s always prone to resistance. Whereas autocracy scales very well. Right. Autocracy, once it’s established, millions of people fall under it. And it’s very clear, black and white, clear rules, clear guidelines, which human beings like. Human beings like being told, here’s the left side, here’s the right side, you stay in the middle.

If you step out of the left or the right, here’s what will happen to you. Like we like that because it’s predictable. We may not like losing our freedom if we’ve tasted freedom, but most countries in the world have never tasted freedom. So to them it’s very free. Just to know what you can do, to not step out of bounds. We have to accept the fact that democracy as we understand it, as Americans, is propaganda. It’s been something that we’ve been raised in, we’ve been brought up in, we’ve been saturated in it. So, of course, we believe it’s the best thing.

How many failed democracies do you have to see in the world before you ask yourself the question, like, maybe the system isn’t perfect. Maybe in the United States we did something right the way that we implemented our democracy. And now, as a result of our, you know, collective melting potential, we’ve all grown up to accept democracy. Whereas in the Middle east, like in Iraq or Afghanistan, you can’t force democracy on a country that’s never had democracy. You can’t force democracy on a country that’s always been run by a monarch. Like in Thailand, you can’t force democracy on other countries.

And even more so, you can’t force them to alter their type of democracy when they create a hybrid. Right. Because most countries that are, quote unquote, successful democracies are actually hybrids of a monarchy or hybrids of, you know, fiefdom or hybrids of some sort of tribal collective like the UAE. But still, we seem to think that democracy is the end all, be all, when in fact, our version of democracy really only exists in the United States. Why do you think it’s been so successful then? I don’t think it’s been successful. I think the United States was original and at a time when there wasn’t a massive.

United States has not been successful. The United States version of democracy has not been successful. It has not been replicated. It has not been exported. You know what has been exported? Monarchy. You know what has been exported? Autocracy. So the. The United States version of representative republic has not been successful. It’s been a. It’s a case study inside the United States. We haven’t been able to export it. Yeah. Which. It hasn’t been replicable. Right, right. If you can’t replicate something, you’d have no proof of concept. Right. What you have is a country that was independent, that was originally colony, that then created its own independence, and has grown its own success, but nobody else has been able to replicate that success.

Yeah. Yeah. I would just point out that obviously the country was not set up as a democracy, was set up as a republic. And I think it’s a. I think the details, in the details, right. So, you know, back to the pilgrims, I think there’s two things that are true. I think, yes, people were sent over here as entrepreneurs on behalf of the king, and they were funded and they were to bring stuff back, but I think they were also fleeing for religious persecution. I think there was both. But to your point, they were sent over by the king.

So I agree with that. But when they came over, they set up a commune, right? And so they had the land and they divided equally, and everybody shared that land, and it completely failed. And part of what led to the first Thanksgiving was they decided, hey, this commune isn’t going to work. So everybody, you get your own plot of land, and if you want to sit on your land and sleep all day, that’s cool for you. I’m going to grow corn and I’ll do me. And all of a sudden, things flourished. And so really, you can’t have freedom without, like you said, informed, responsible decision.

I would say without personal responsibility, like, you have to have personal, you can’t have freedom without personal responsibility. And so Jordan Peterson frames this up. He does a lot of talk about the book of Exodus and using how the book of Exodus is really like a story and metaphor for life where the Israelites were led out of slavery. And he defines like a slave as somebody who just can’t think for themselves. Just tell me what to do. Like, I’ll just do it. And then they, they were on their way to the promised land, but they had to go to the desert first.

So things get worse before they get better. But the problem is when they got to the desert, that they were constantly bickering and fighting and they didn’t know what to do because they were slaves. Like, they didn’t know. And so it was like they said, let us just go back to Egypt and just be slaves. At least we had food. But then they set up a new form of government where each person had to be responsible and had this, like, hierarchical type of development, which is not really unlike what we did with a republic. And so I think, number one, like, you have to have people that take personal responsibility, and that’s very hard to export.

And you can’t just go give this a bunch of slaves or somebody that lives under some sort of regime that’s never had that before. I think, number one. So probably that entrepreneurial spirit that those people came with, that, like, we’ll figure it out. We’ll risk our life to, like, figure it out. Probably help that. And I think the other, the other part that Doctor Peterson talks about, I would agree, is then the country was founded on Judeo christian principles. And whether you’re a Christian or not, I don’t think it really matters in the sense of just understanding that Jesus said that the most important rules put your neighbor above yourself.

And so it’s like this spirit of self sacrifice of Jordan Peterson was like, at 04:00 a.m. when there’s a hurricane, someone goes and fixes the power line. If they go down like other countries, they don’t do that. And so, like, you had those two ingredients. I think that, in my opinion, sort of let this american experiment be so great. And of course, I agree with you. We haven’t been able to export it, but I think because that seed, like, wasn’t there. That’s kind of my opinion on that. No, I think it’s a solid opinion and it’s sound.

We don’t often recognize how much of the successful american experiment is based in our forefathers, because, frankly, our forefathers stand in harsh contradiction to a lot of what we say is required now. Right. It was only landowners that could vote. By limiting who could vote only to people who were landowners, you create a sense of built in responsibility. You couldn’t vote at all if you didn’t have a stake in the game, essentially. And this is a super contrarian take. Viewers, probably not going to like this, but I almost feel that maybe if you don’t pay taxes, you shouldn’t vote.

Like, I lived in a homeowners association just down the street, and I had to pay money, but we had tennis courts and a pool and all these things. It was nice. And I decided I didn’t want to live in there anymore. I didn’t like some of the rules. And now we, we live in an area with no homeowner association. I don’t pay those dues anymore, nor should I get to vote what they do over there anymore. And so maybe you don’t have to be a landowner, but, like, it’s incentive mechanisms, it’s skin in the game, as we call it, kind of a thing.

Right? And that’s how it started. Right, right. But then over time, because we have three different bodies, right? We have a legislative body, a judicial branch and an executive branch. They all change. Everything evolves. And now we’ve evolved to a place where the incentive mechanism isn’t really there. And even worse, the people who have more incentive don’t have more say. The people who have less incentive don’t have less say. We all have equal say. And then some people don’t exercise their right to say at all. So we end up in this very difficult place, which, again, going back to my comments about is the american experiment a success or not? When you say that the business’s job is to stay in business and grow is to grow, right? Stay alive and grow.

I don’t know that the United States is version of democracy is growing very well, especially not as we see european partners separating. We see middle eastern partners alienating. We see latin american partners going a different direction. Is that american ideal? Is that american business currently growing or is it currently shrinking? Is it stagnating? Well, it grew. And now I think to your point, it’s shrinking and growing. And this is something I talk a lot about cycles, and I love to look at cycles back to this like pendulum. And as much as the world changes, technology really driving it, but human nature stays the same.

And so we’re repeating these cycles. And so I look at this like 250 year cycle of this like, political revolution cycle, less like pendulum. So 250 years ago is the american revolution rejecting the central power. 250 years before that was the Protestant Reformation rejecting the central power of the church and state. And I think now we’ve seen the pendulum swing to centralization with the WEF, with the BIs, the IMF, the dollar homogeny, et cetera. But like it looks like the world’s like, rejecting it. That pendulum is about to swing back because we’ve just taken it too far.

And we’ll probably go back the other way. But we could certainly dig in more on there. But I want to get into this next part. You talked about informed, responsible decision. And so part of it kind of even just carrying on what we’re talking about, like having this voter base that doesn’t have skin in the game. And if they don’t have skin in the game, then maybe they’re not making informed, important decisions. And I think a lot of times without skin in the game. We’ll talk about bitcoin later. But I’ve told people just buy like $5 worth because once you put a little money there, like, you’ll just kind of get a little interested in it kind of a thing, right? And so, like, back to kind of paying taxes.

Like, you know, you’ll care more if you pay taxes, right, if you pay for land, and maybe you’d care enough to become informed. And I think, and this is not a whole conversation going on this rabbit hole, but like, I think somebody was floating the idea of, like, maybe we should make people take a test before they vote. Like, do you know, like, do you know the three branches of government? Do you know how the government works? Like, do you understand these social issues? Have you thought through, did you even read the voter manual? You know, a lot of times, like, you know, our county, they’ll send out the voting guide, and then they’ll give you the bill, and then they’ll give you the pro argument for it, and they give you the con argument for it, and then they give you the rebuttal to the pro right.

And at least, like, you could read that. But like, how many people have done that kind of a thing? So back to the informed, responsible decision making. But more specifically, we have the rise of the Internet. And I mentioned just now the Protestant Reformation. And really, if you look at the Protestant Reformation, you had the church and state that had sort of this monopoly and sort of this feudal system, if you will, dictatorship, if you will. But technology, 70 years before that was a new piece of technology called the printing press, which disseminated the Bible. And they read the Bible, said, wait a minute, you have not been telling us the truth.

Like, we don’t need you anymore. We have our own independent, decentralized path to God kind of a thing. And now we have sort of a saint. 500 years later, as the pendulum is swung back, we have the Internet that’s sort of done the same thing by disseminating information. And you mentioned earlier that the role of the state or the government is to stay in power and continue to grow. And you mentioned that they have to kind of control that narrative if they want to stay in power, and the Internet certainly undermines their ability to do that.

Have you read the book revolt of the public? No. So it was written by another CIA guy, Martin Gurry, and he was a CIA analyst. He was in the CIA and he wrote the book. And it’s basically the revolt of the public is basically talking about how the Internet has changed things. And he talks about the Arab Spring and a couple of different things that happened. But basically how the reason why central planning fails is the information problem. They don’t have enough information to manage all the masses like a market. And so the Internet has also caused that problem where like one leader, they just don’t have enough information.

Like the Internet sleuths can like, dig into all this data. And so he says that without being able to control that narrative, the edges, which are all the way around, will always replace the center anyway. So we have two things, I think. One, if we don’t have an informed, responsible decision making from the people, that’s a problem. So they need to have all the information, but at the same time, the state needs to be able to control the information if they want to stay in power. It seems like a tug of war there. Yeah, the state doesn’t need to control the information.

That’s the first place where just the narrative. They don’t need to control anything. Okay? Right. The state may have a vested interest in trying to shape the next step, but it shouldn’t have control. As soon as you’re part of a state that has control over that, you can’t trust the state anymore. Right. When the federal government looks at narrative, it’s important to understand that narrative is a word that’s thrown around in layman’s circles all the time. Narrative is a second step. The first step before narrative is called messaging. Without proper messaging, you can’t build a narrative.

So you have to have messaging first. If you think of it like the left side of the brain and the right side of the brain, your left, logical side of your brain, that is the narrative, but the right emotional side of your brain, that is the messaging. So you start with the messaging. You start with the messaging. Emotional with the emotional center of the brain, because you can get people to agree or disagree very quickly if you talk to them from a basis of emotion. And then once they buy in emotionally, guess what you can follow back with? You can follow back with whatever rational logic you need.

It’s how we buy things every day. We buy the thing that we want because we really like the way it looks. But then once we actually have it, then we’re like, oh, and it’s also really good for my posture, and it’s also really good for the house, and it’s really good to the environment. We have all these logical reasons why we support it. So what the government does, what any propaganda engine does, what any political campaign does, is they create a message or a series of messages that create an emotional attachment that then they can shape into a collective narrative.

That’s not just what the government does. That’s what advertising does, that’s what marketing does. That’s what your favorite tv show does. Again, we’re just following human nature. You don’t have to control information if you understand how to create a message and a narrative, because once you create the message in the narrative, you’ve got lifelong believers. The church has been doing it for a long time, and they don’t control anything about the Internet. Right. Well, they tried. They. I mean, back to the Protestant Reformation. They tried to control the information. Yeah. And when they couldn’t control the information more, they lost their place.

And I would. The church is still pretty powerful even though they lost the information, that. That information war. Right. But my point is, just trying to control the information is a losing game. It is, yeah. And what we have in our world is. Is an abundance of information. But information is not the same thing as intelligence. Information is not the same thing as wisdom. It’s just information. Right. So there’s just as much garbage that’s wrong as there is nuggets that are true. So what we’re finding, just like you’re saying, with that pendulum swing, people are going to have to choose what to consume and what not to consume.

And what’s sad is when responsible, attentive parties try to find good information, but only find garbage, or when they try to believe, they try to find the truth, but the algorithm that they’re stuck in only feeds them lies. That’s the part that’s so difficult, and that’s the part that people have to learn to adapt and overcome in the coming years. Because we live in a world now where technology moves. Technology has always moved faster than human evolution. The brain is an amazing machine, but this doesn’t evolve as quickly as technology evolves. So now technology is evolving to undermine our own neural processes by giving us convenient answers, knowing that our brain is going to accept convenient answers before our brain accepts difficult or challenging answers.

So, yes, they start with emotion first, and that’s why I’ve seen it. I didn’t put it into the words that you put it into, and it makes perfect sense. But most of these conversations that we have in society today are emotional. They’re not rational discussions. And trying to talk with anybody that has a different viewpoint is almost impossible because it’s always coming from an emotional standpoint, which you can’t argue with. Right. So that’s, I guess, is that. I guess the question I would ask then, is that why it’s emotional? Because they need to get the emotional ground before they try to get the rational ground? Or that’s just how it just naturally emerged.

I mean, somebody, if you want to talk about, you know, we’ll talk about vaccines, you want to talk about abortion, you want to talk about Paul, I mean, it’s all. It’s all emotional. There’s, like almost no logic behind it, and there’s almost no amount of logic you could give that person that would get them to change their emotional state. So, like I said, I guess the question is, is that just natural, emergent, or is it sort of. It seems like the rhetoric that we see from both sides on the media really appeals to that. Emotional. Absolutely.

It’s because there’s lots of really solid science that demonstrates that you have to go emotional first. So your left brain and your right brain are two hemispheres in your brain, right. But the processing speed of those two hemispheres is completely different. When information comes in through your five senses, whether it’s what you touch or what you see or what you smell or what you taste, when information comes in through your five senses, it’s simultaneously sent to both hemispheres of the brain, and then the two hemispheres of the brain process through that sensory information. But it’s a race.

It’s a race to see which left side or right side of the brain gets to the physiological center of the body first. Well, the logical side of your brain has, like, four steps that it has to go through. The emotional side of your brain has two steps that it has to go through. So nine times out of ten, your emotional brain wins the race to the physiological response that your body has. That’s why there are so many people who have anxiety. That’s why you and I have all been spooked by socks in the corner of our room.

And we think it’s a rat, right? Because our senses send a signal simultaneously to both sides of the brain. But one side of the brain processes faster and gives us a physiological response first. When you mistake that pair of socks in the corner for a rat and you startle, what do you do immediately after you startle? You settle, because you’re like, oh, it just sucks. The other side of your brain just caught up. Yeah. So the one side turned on your fear response, the other side caught up and turned off your fear response. Well, what happens in media, especially, is they only have one response, right? If you watch CNN, that’s what you watch.

If you watch Fox News, that’s what you watch. If you read the Wall Street Journal, that’s what you read. Everything else is just secondary. Right? It’s like your steak versus your broccoli or your potatoes on the side. So what ends up happening is every news outlet out there, just like every educational college, just like every good boss, just like every good advertiser or marketer, they’ve all learned that you just keep hitting that emotional response over and over again, and you never give people a chance to have the logical side catch up, because if you do that effectively, how is McDonald’s still in business? It’s a good question.

Everybody knows that shit’s unhealthy. Everybody knows that. Not everybody, apparently. They all know it. That’s what’s so fascinating. They all know it. But the messaging and the narrative has been so effective that emotionally, people don’t respond to it. So when they’re hungry, they emotionally react to buying something that’s comforting, even though they logically know it’s not going to feel good or be good for them in the long run. Yeah. And to the point that you’re making, I think, like the old problem that we had was how do we get enough information? And now today the problem is too much information as to how do we find good discernment, which I want to get into that with you, but going back to kind of getting back into the censorship thing, and I’m saying they need to control the narrative.

I think we’re saying the same thing, but from a different way. You’re saying they don’t have to control it, but they do control it, the information. Nobody has to control the information, the narrative, but you control the messaging. Then if they. And then, but you said they don’t have to control the information, they only have to control the narrative. And you also said that you can’t trust the state when they have control over the information. Correct. But yet we see with I believe, and maybe I’m captured by the emotional narrative, I believe that we see undeniable proof that the state, not just in the US, but Brazil, Australia, Ireland, basically the west, and of course China, they’ve always have, like the great firewall, etc.

Has control over the information. The United States does not have control over the information. I mean, I thought that Twitter files pretty much, I mean, it’s self, it’s self admitted. Just because the government is trying to involve itself, not trying to, did. Just because the government has meddled with information does not mean they control all information. It’s also important to understand that the vast majority of censorship that’s out there is coming from commercial organizations, not federal governments on behalf of the government. No, commercial organizations that are trying to survive against government regulation. So they take a more, a more conservative approach.

Right. They could avoid censorship and risk losing the entire company because of government policy. Would you risk your entire government? They’re caving to coercion. I mean, essentially they’re caving to the bureaucratic law of the land. Because at the end of the day, what’s a business supposed to do? Survive and grow. If you have to choose between surviving and growing or protecting the independent voices of the people on your platform, what are you going to pick? Surviving and growing. Because guess what? Your freedom of speech does not apply in the commercial world. Your freedom of speech is very specific.

It only applies to the federal government being able to persecute you because of what you say against the federal government, there is nothing that protects what you and I say to each other. If anything, if I say something hostile to you, you can actually take me to court and win because of my hostile words. I don’t even have to physically assault you. Right. You can take me to court for slander and win. And all that is, is words. So there is no freedom of speech between people. And, and the problem is, again, the message and the narrative that has gone out there is that we have protection of our speech individually.

That is not true. You have protection of your speech against federal prosecution or persecution when you speak out about the government. Only I could be sued for what I said about McDonald’s two minutes ago. Right? Yeah. Right. Yeah. And I agree with that. But back to the point. I mean, maybe that’s a little bit of semantics. These private corporations, Facebook, YouTube, et cetera, did work on behalf of the government. Maybe they weren’t forced to, but they dealt with the coercion. They were being forced. I would say that they responded to a threat that threatened the fundamentalist existence of their business.

You can’t fault a company. I can’t fault them. But it goes back to, you had said, can’t trust a state when they have control, which I was repeating, but he said they don’t have control, but they did. They exerted their coercive force, which they use corporations influence, which these corporations cave to. But influence is not control. Two different things. You know, if I, if I threaten to kill you and you do what I say, that’s still control over you. No, that’s, that’s influence. By definition, that’s influence. Control gives you no alternative. Influence gives you alternatives. Right.

If you hold my hand, but if force me to shoot somebody, that is control. If you tell me to shoot somebody or get shot myself, I still have a choice. Got it? So because the states only threatened to kill them if they didn’t censor, then you don’t consider to the statement, can’t trust them if they have control. You don’t consider that control even though they threatened to kill them if they didn’t do it. Now we’re getting into a very specific example. I don’t know the proof of. But what I’m saying here is if you, if you want, call it semantics or don’t call it semantics.

Right. It’s, it’s very important to use word specificity when you’re talking about things like control versus influence. Yeah, because we all want to control our kids, but we all know we can’t. The best we can do is influence them. Yeah. Right. You want to control your employees, but you can’t. The best you can do is influence them. And then we choose between motivational influence. Like, we’ll give you a bonus if you do a good job, or coercive influence. Coercive influence. You’re fired if you don’t do a job. But you’re still just trying to influence. And that’s what drives us crazy, is that we don’t have control.

The federal government is the same way. It tries to legislate and legislate and legislate to gain more and more influence through positive and negative repercussions and consequences. But at the end of the day, we still change our government. Right? So I guess I’m just curious because as we see this happening more and more and more. Australia now, they called for Elon Musk to be jailed because he wouldn’t take down a social media post about violence that happened. Brazil. They’re calling for Elon Musk’s jail. Globally. This new global online safety regulators network, censoring Australia, France, Ireland, South Africa.

I keep going on, and to the point that you’re making sure it’s coercive. I mean, they’re basically threatening. They’re trying to get him arrested. They’re not able to at this point. But kind of going back to the statement, back to you said earlier about an informed, responsible decision. I mean, like, we need to have free flowing information. I guess it’s sort of this, like. And it goes back to personal responsibility. Like, all of this falls apart if you don’t have the right ingredients. Right. And what you call personal responsibility, what we call that self respect in the intelligence community, the heart of everything, is self respect.

Do you respect yourself enough to inform yourself before you make a decision? Do you respect yourself enough to resist coercive influences against you? Do you respect yourself enough to eat right, exercise, sleep well, etcetera? Right. It is personal responsibility, but you have to respect yourself to have the responsibility. I gotcha. Bingo. Makes sense. And unfortunately, I think that we live in a world that does not have a lot of self respect. 100%. Yeah. You can see it. Yeah. We outsource our decisions. We outsource our responsibilities. We outsource everything to somebody else. We take diet pills instead of exercise.

Right. I know. We. We let. We let Twitter become our news source. Right? Everything. I think Twitter is a really good news source, but it’s dangerous like any other news source. If you don’t. Twitter is not a news source. I will say that so I’m blue in the face. Twitter is a social media outlet. What is social media? Media produced by a social user? That’s all it is. Can it carry a news story? Can a user share a news story? Yes, but Twitter is not a news source. Twitter does not journalistically vet or create anything original that goes out as a news piece that fits any requirements of journalism.

But plenty of those journalists are on Twitter. Plenty of those journalists are on Twitter. And there are plenty of independent journalists on Twitter. Right, but independent. But it’s. It’s still social media. Well, what creates momentum in social media? The social users. So an independent journalist creating a well balanced journalistic piece versus an alarmist journalist creating something that’s false but. But catchy. The social user basis is what determines whether or not this one or that one wins the race. Yeah. Right. So again, not a news source. You go. You go to the. You go to the front of BBC.

It doesn’t matter how popular an article is. The top headline is the top headline. Right? It’s not like it’s a social race of likes and downvotes that decides what you see on BBC or what you see on Wall Street Journal or what you see in the Times of India. Yeah, right. Yeah. Except for, like I said, all those sources are on there, though. And look, I mean, I’m on social media. Like, I get DM’s all day across all of them, and I’m sure you do as well. And I get all kinds of people send me all kinds of stuff, and I’m just like, man, this is just garbage.

Like, how could you even send this? And even people I know and I respect, and I’m like, come on, just look at this for a second, right? All the time. And I try to be very careful because I have a big reach and I’m like, one, even if I do think it’s true, it may not be worth me putting back out there, number one. So I have to think about that from one standpoint. But even two, it’s like, usually with just a couple of minutes of just, like, research, you could just kind of even. Or even just thinking through this, you could kind of realize if it’s true or not.

So I agree, there’s definitely a cesspool. But this kind of goes back to, do we have enough people to self respect themselves to take the time like I do to go through it? I respected the network. I respect the reach that I’ve built. And so I have to. I have to cultivate that properly. But I guess the question just going back to that informed, responsible decision making, we have to have people that are able to, to do that. But if they’re not given both sides of that argument, how can they achieve that? That’s a fantastic question.

Right? So we live in a world that unfortunately celebrates ignorance. And that’s not just the United States. One of my favorite, not to cut your, growing up in southern California, punk rock, and there’s an old punk rock band, no effects. And they said, how can democracy work when ignorance is celebrated? Exactly what you said, right? I mean, there’s so much truth to lyrics and music, right? Music is oftentimes the history book of the future, right? So we’re seeing that. We’re seeing that ignorance is celebrated. If you’re ignorant, you actually could live a happier life. Ignorance is bliss.

Oh my gosh, man. If you’re ignorant, then everything is new and interesting. If you’re ignorant, then you know, you’re always principled and everybody else is always the man, right? Like, it’s celebrated. And we see that from media and television and the kind of, even the books that we reference, right? Anybody can create a book on anything, anywhere, and they can post it to Amazon or call it an e book or get an ISBN number, and it’s a published book, whereas it used to be something important when you had a book, right, it was vetted, it was peer reviewed, et cetera, et cetera.

So my point with all that is the first step to being able to fix the problem is to recognize that we are all ignorant. To start, if you, if you feel like you’re not ignorant, you’re the problem. You’re the problem. You’re. You’re deeply ignorant. I know that I’m well educated. I know that I’m experienced. I know that I’m worldly, and I know I am ignorant about a lot of things. There were at least four questions you brought up today that I had no background in, right? I am fully ignorant in most of those things. And if that’s just in one conversation, if you and I had five conversations, how many more areas would I be ignorant? So you have to become acutely aware that you are ignorant, and then you have to become acutely aware that the people who are knowledgeable where you are ignorant have the advantage over you.

They can shape your knowledge, they can shape your opinions. They can shape your feelings using messaging and narrative, because you won’t even know that there’s an alternative. Once you have those two things in place, once you understand that you’re ignorant, and then you also understand that your ignorance creates a vulnerability that other people can exploit. Then you have, hopefully enough self respect to start chipping away and becoming less ignorant in different areas. I mean, you have said this at least a half dozen times. Read this book, look this up. Right? Take a look for yourself. You’ve said those words in our conversation.

That is giving people an opportunity to chip away at their ignorance and become a little bit more knowledgeable, even if they’re becoming more knowledgeable in something that is wrong, that you have to become more knowledgeable in a wrong thing to discover that it’s wrong. It’s just like what you were saying about your friends who send you articles, and you’re like, take 10 seconds to just read this thing. Yeah, but unfortunately, like, ignorance is celebrated and nobody is calling into attention. Like, nobody’s calling attention to it. No one is raising their hand and saying, I’m ignorant, and they’d like to fix that.

Yeah. Instead, everybody’s saying, I know, I know. I know for a fact. Irrefutable evidence. I know it’s true. We actually don’t. Information is not vetted. And you can find an answer that’s in line with your belief system anywhere that you want to on the Internet, unless you start to question your belief set and your sources on the Internet. Yeah. And that on the Internet, you can find anything within your belief system in the Internet. And so back to technology always changes things because changes a lot of things. The way we work, organize, and communicate. And, you know, when I was a kid, I’m older than you.

When I was a kid, like, we all listened to the same music and we all watched the same movies, and we, you know, like, we shared that commonality. And now today, the Internet has allowed us to go down to a million rabbit holes, if you will. And so just kind of thinking back to the government started as a small, decentralized government that didn’t have much control of your day to day lives, and now it’s gotten to this big monolith that wants to control what time your kids go to school. But as the government’s gotten bigger, with more control, the people have become more different.

Like, it’s like, it’s like we’ve gone like this almost, you know, which is sort of the premise of that book, the revolt of the public. And it’s just like this form of government we have today is just. It’s just not compatible with this changing world that we have with the Internet. But unless you disagree with that. No, I don’t disagree with that. I think that it’s the form of government. The form of government that we have is not compatible with where information is going, which is why you see the government struggling. And it’s one of the places that it first tries to exert itself is in the information space itself, because it’s like, oh, even the government knows that the problem with continuing to govern is the information.

So now it’s trying to find a way to stick to its promises of freedom of information, but also cultivate sources of information that are responsible. It’s hard to do that, especially when you layer in social media. If you recall, you and I used to find information in an encyclopedia in a library. Yeah. Think about how much effort had to go in. You had to know what you wanted to find. Yeah. Go to the library. Go to the encyclopedia. Look it up in the encyclopedia. And if you were like me, you would find two or three different encyclopedias and you would cross reference them.

Yeah. That’s like five steps. It required effort to get an answer. Now you sit down to take a shit. Yeah. And your social media feed feeds you the thing that you’re interested in from yesterday. Yeah. Like, the encyclopedia comes right to you, but it doesn’t come with four other sources. Right. If anything, once you stop for 3 seconds and look at that, now the algorithm knows to show you more like that. Yeah. It’s like looking at the wrong encyclopedia over and over again because you don’t realize there’s any other encyclopedia out there. The one thing I would say, the one good thing I’d say back to Twitter is so many times, and we have a problem in today’s culture where they just want to read the headline and they think they understand the article, but they didn’t read the article.

But if you take time to read the article, a lot of times you can see through the narrative and the opinion. But back to social media, so many times I’ve seen someone put something up on Twitter, I’m like, wow, that’s good. I never thought about that. Oh, my gosh. And now my whole brain is going that way. And then I start to read the comments, and it’s like, debunk, debunk, debunked. And I’m like, oh, I didn’t think about that. Right. And so that crowdsourced information is pretty powerful. I’ve caught myself more times than I can count.

Wow, that’s good. Oh, my gosh. I didn’t think, didn’t think, didn’t think, didn’t think. So I think that crowdsourced information is powerful, but I want to get to. I know we’re sort of. We’ve been going a long time here. I want to get to the big topic at hand that you talk about all the time and that most people probably care about, and that’s like world war three and civil war. Maybe they’re together, maybe they’re different. But I’ve kind of thought this through as it seems like it kind of makes sense to me where, you know, we see the world, the political systems are changing.

A lot of it seems to be from this mixing up of people. The governments are sort of responding by trying to control the flow of information. People are getting more divided than ever. And it’s not just the people that are getting divided. The global homogeny is getting divided. And now Russia and China are doing their own thing, but together. And the rise of the BRICs, and they want to do their own currency. And, like, back to the pendulum, the pendulum swinging. And so the rise of this world war three seems to be the big topic at hand.

And I’m somebody. I told you, I was born into an air force family. My dad’s a vet. My grandfather was a vet. I grew up under the Cold War, right? I mean, the Berlin Wall was still up when I was a kid, and so. But for the first time in my life, I’m like, dang, we could have a nuclear war. And in southern California, I’m probably a pretty hot target here. So are we having a world war three? There’s a long answer and a short answer. I’ll start with a short answer. The short answer is yes.

I believe we are in the middle of world War three right now. Already in the middle? Already in the middle. I think what people don’t recognize to go to the long answer is that war evolves, war changes, just like a virus, just like. Just like any one of us, right? At 35, you’re not the same person you were at 25, and you’re not the same person that you’re going to be at 55. What happens is people think World War three is going to look like World War two. I don’t know why people think that the generals fight the last war, but they think that.

But World War two didn’t look like World War one. Vietnam didn’t look like World War two. The Gulf War, the war on terror, didn’t look anything like the Vietnam War. Right? So why do we keep thinking that world War three is going to look like bombers and tanks and nuclear weapons? That’s not what World War three is. Going to look like World War three is a war doctrinally, meaning what’s taught in the army war schools and the air force war schools, not just in the United States, but across all the first world countries. World War three is a war of what’s called proxy war.

Proxy war is when rich countries fund conflicts in small countries. Also known as inter state war instead, or intra. Excuse me, intra state war. Rather than inter state war, interstate means two independent states invade and fight with each other. The closest thing we have that right now is Russia and Ukraine. But wouldn’t that be the textbook definition of a proxy war? It’s not a textbook definition because it’s a blend of the two. Here’s. Syria is a textbook definition. Right? Internal conflict led to a civil war that was funded by outside partners. United States funded one side, Russia funded the other side.

Right? Textbook Libya. Textbook. Got it. So because the US is using Ukraine as a proxy, but with Russia. And Russia did physically invade across the border. Right? So it’s a hybrid. But you’re exactly right. Like, what we’re seeing is that starting with the war in Afghanistan, we started to leave the world of interstate war where we invaded Afghanistan and we started to go into a world of proxy conflict. Yemen was a proxy conflict. Syria was a proxy conflict. Libya was a proxy conflict. And we continue to keep seeing them happen. And that’s just the United States.

When you look at China, when you look at Russia, when you look at Turkey, when you look at Saudi Arabia, there are even more. There are more, many, many more conflicts. There’s 112 conflict zones in the world right now, all being funded by external countries that are funding a conflict in a third world country against a competitor to their country. Just like we’re funding Ukraine, Russia and China are funding Russia. Right? Like that’s. You look at Israel right now. Israel’s struggling because the conflict was a very convenient proxy conflict against Iran, because Iran was funding Hezbollah, the United States was supporting Israel.

But now it’s gone out of control and now it’s starting to mutate into something different. Right? With Benny Gantz leaving the war cabinet, you’re even seeing Israel itself divided over how it’s going to handle itself in Gaza. So we have this again, this evolution, this transformation of the battlefield that will become the next version of the doctrine that we teach to our military generals of tomorrow. So I argue that world war three is already happening. World War three is a war of proxy conflict. And that proxy conflict is how rich countries can tell their populations we’re not at war.

And what is Biden telling us every day? We’re not at war. We’re not going to war. We’re not in a conflict to hell. Like, honestly. Of course we are. We are sending our weapons, our surplus to Ukraine. We are sending our advisors to Europe. We are sending our special operations to Asia to train on the shores of Indonesia and. And Thailand within striking distance of China. Of course, we are 100% in the middle of a global war of power and influence. Just because american soldiers aren’t dying yet doesn’t mean that they’re not going to die. As soon as China makes a move on Taiwan and the United States decides to send a frigging naval cruiser through the Taiwan Straits, we’re dangerously close to being part of a hot conflict again, because our government is sending a narrative that is in true.

That is not true. Right. We are absolutely in a conflict right now. It’s just a global macroeconomic conflict that can very easily be traced to physical conflict, if you understand the concept of proxies. I want to. Yeah, I want to dig into that. But I would just say real quickly, the Biden administration is telling us we’re not at war. Not at war, not at war. And everyone’s like, we’re at war. And this kind of goes back to the censorship piece and control in that narrative. Now, they could say there’s no storm going on, but someone on Twitter is like, I’m here right now.

Look, there’s a storm. And so it’s like. And then even more like, when you have a business partner that is caught embezzling or your wife cheats on you, like, that trust is gone. And, like, we’ve just seen dozens of examples of the government just flat out lying, just, like, completely exposed. And so back. The Biden example of this is that. But just, I think this morning I was looking at some headlines before we jumped on, and now a bunch of NATO countries are sending jets, and I believe the first f 16 actually did a strike on Russia.

So it’s a proxy war. Not a textbook example because Russia’s in, but we’re like, inches away from it being a hot war between the US and Russia. Correct. And that’s a major problem. Right. When you look at the policies about Ukraine are ridiculous policies. I understand strategically why there’s so much focus from the american administration on Ukraine, but the narrative doesn’t hold up. Defending Ukraine because Ukraine is a democracy is a flat out lie, if you want to be honest. Say we’re defending Ukraine because we’re looking for a way to bleed russian capabilities. We’re looking for a way to put pressure on the russian economy, not that it’s working.

We’re looking for a way to gain control over mineral resources that only exist in eastern Ukraine that have always been accessible to the us government but are no longer accessible because of Russia’s invasion. Let’s be honest, instead of trying to say that we’re protecting democracy when we’re not, Ukraine is not a democracy. At best, they were a developing, struggling democracy that was still extremely generous. Yeah. And that’s what it really was. And that’s what it’s been for since the beginning. Now, as we continue to escalate. And really the escalation started with the Brits allowing their missiles to be used across russian boundaries.

Now with Biden allowing missiles to strike in the Kharkiv region across russian boundaries. Now, that gives Putin a chance to say that any weapons that he launches from Russia can be used against non ukrainian targets. This is a. An escalating conflict that is unnecessary. It’s a stereotypical example of what’s called the security paradigm, where one country takes an action and then the other country has to escalate it by 5%, and then the next country escalates it by 5%. And you just have this constant saber rattling that gets us closer and closer to the cuban missile crisis.

Right. Well, didn’t they just send a tanker over to Cuba? Aircraft carrier or something? I think. And this is all part of a larger problem. Right. It’s breaking the rules of proxy conflict, which is escalating us more towards traditional conflict. And traditional conflict is bad for everybody. So I don’t know how this will end, but I know that I just. I flat out disagree with what we’re doing, and I can only hope that whatever our senior administrators are doing, they’re doing out of some sort of insight that they have that we as the american public does not have, because if they get us into a hot war with Russia, I don’t know what on earth would prevent China from immediately going after Taiwan.

I talked to doctor, General MacArthur, and he thinks, like, that’s just. That’s a foregone conclusion. Like, he doesn’t see that. I hate to put words in his mouth. You can go, anybody, go. Watch the interview I did with him. But I pitched that to him, and he’s like, that’s not how I see it at all. Like, Taiwan wants to go with China. Most of their country is pro China. Like that’s gonna happen. And there’s nothing the US going to do about it, but that’s his opinion. So I don’t want to go dig into deep and enforce that.

But just kind of going back to the situation at hand here, it was almost like, what did you think was gonna happen? Because if you’re gonna, you know, when Nancy Pelosi and, you know, Adam Schiff, whatever, they went over there just when the Ukraine started, they said, we are, we’re committed 100%. So what does that mean? Right? Because, like, that means you’re committed. The US is there 100% until Russia’s gone. But they have nuclear weapons. And if they’re going to die, like, if I’m in a corner and I’m about to die, why, that’s the whole point.

I have the nuclear weapons in the first place, right? So it’s like, if you’re going to push someone that far, far, that’s the end result. I just, so anyway, like I said when I framed it up, it’s like for the first time in my life, growing up under the Cold War, I’m like, wow, there’s actually a threat of nuclear war. And I’ve seen you make a, well, couple, couple videos have run with the headline like, leave here before 2030. Is that why you’re saying that? Absolutely. Yeah, I don’t. There are two types of people really in the world.

They’re the people who will stay and fight to create the thing that they want. And then there are people who will leave a conflict zone and let it figure itself out while they take care of higher priorities. I am the latter of the two. I am the kind of person that’s like the United States is. It’s fucked up right now. It’s messed up. It doesn’t know what it wants. The people are largely ignorant. The government is trying to encourage and keep people ignorant. And then you have this commercial overlay that’s capitalizing on the ignorance. So just like you and I were talking about incentivizing, everything about us is incentivized right now to keep us stupid and uninformed and irresponsible, which means lacking in self respect.

I have a five year old. Excuse me, I have a six year old now. I have a six year old and an eleven year old. When I look forward five years, I will have an eleven year old and a 16 year old. What’s our fucking country going to look like when they’re at those core developmental years and I, as their parent, am the one responsible for putting them in an environment where they can learn appropriately if I have to live here, I will find a way to live here and manage the appropriate self respect that they need to grow into contributing members of a future society.

But if I have a choice not to live here, why would I not exercise that choice? I’ve done my fighting for the United States. I’ve done my fighting with the Air Force. I’ve done my fighting with the CIA. I contributed to building part of what we have become, even though my hope for what we are right now was never what I fought for. But I’m not about to make my kids and my wife pay the penalty of staying here while they figure out what to do next. I can just as easily go to central America. I can just easily go to East Asia.

I can just as easily go to Latin America. I can go to the Middle east, and I can sit back and watch from a distance as the United States transmorphs into whatever it either into whatever becomes that I either appreciate or further insulate myself from. Right? I understand not every American has that choice. But what’s fascinating to me is if every American had that choice, I wonder what they would choose. I wonder how many would actually choose to stay in fights and try to transform a government that they know they can’t control. And how many would just say, fuck it, I’m out.

I’m going to go build my empire somewhere else and take care of my family and my people and do my thing somewhere else and watch and see what happens here, because this is not the country that my parents left me. This is not the country that I want for my kids. And I don’t know where this country’s going right now. So we’ll let it figure itself out. Yeah. Are you familiar with the story of the remnant? So there was a book written called Jacob’s Ladder. It’s like a hundred year old book that’s done really well. The story of the remnant are through the Old Testament of the Bible.

Many times the Israelites were driven out of their land and conquered by many, many times. And they’d come back and the remnant were the few people that came back and rebuilt the kingdom. Right? Rebuilt the temple, if you will. And so it’s kind of like, hey, we can leave and we’ll be the remnant. We can come back and build this thing as it was. But somehow we have to preserve that remnant to rebuild it. We need the seed or something like that. But I’m curious, that decision that you make, is it more. Is it. Is it more because you want a better environment for your kids to grow up? In.

I think that’s the case that you made. It’s not fair for your kids and your wife to have to go through that. Is it more so they could grow up in a better environment, or is it for their safety? It’s for opportunity. Okay. Opportunity more than safety. More than anything. Not safety so much. I mean, to be honest, most parts of the world are less safe than the United States. Right? Like, I know we as Americans think that that’s hard to believe, or Europeans think it’s hard to believe that they’re less safe than here in the United States.

But the truth is, in my experience traveling the world, the United States is one of the safest places you can be. But I didn’t know with, like, nuclear war or civil war or anything like that. Yeah. So, I mean, I’m not. I’m not worried about those. I think both nuclear and civil war are relatively low probability. The fact that their probability at all is frustrating. Yeah. But at least they’re low probability versus something like a police state or like a martial law. Right. Those are much higher probability than civil war or nuclear holocaust. But nevertheless, what I’m thinking when I talk about leaving the United States.

The United States is supposed to be the land of opportunity. That’s not what it’s become lately. It’s become a land of better opportunity than some places in the world. But there are other places in the world that just offer more opportunities than the United States, especially to people who have an entrepreneurial skill, a technical trade, any kind of advanced education. Right. You have opportunities in other parts of the world that are far superior than what you have here in the United States. So do I get it when a Mumbai doctor who can’t make more than $1,000 a month leaves Mumbai to come to the United States and drive a taxi for $2,000 a month, I get it.

He’s following his opportunity. But if you’re inside the United States and you’re a cyber analyst, you can do that anywhere in the world and get paid more to live in a nicer place with less stress. And there’s a solid chance that your primary client will still be an american company. So why would you stay here? Why would you stay in Ohio and do that? Why would you stay in Miami and do that? Why would you stay in. You name it and do that when you could go somewhere else? So, for me, especially when I layer on the additional level, not only can I be an entrepreneur somewhere else, not only can I be a contributing member to society somewhere else, not only can I be a content creator somewhere else.

But if I take my kids somewhere else, they get to learn a different language. They get to learn what it’s like to be an american citizen abroad. Guess what you are when you’re an american citizen abroad. You have tons of opportunity, more opportunity than you do when you’re an american citizen in the United States, because in the United States, you can only go to the school in which you’re districted. You can only get, you know, support on Monday through Friday, yada, yada, yada, yada, yada. Whereas an American in Romania can get basically anything done for $100.

Yeah, I have several in my sort of online entrepreneur, content creator, kind of course, creator, coach, et cetera, in that world. I know lots of people that have done that. And I was just at a conference this weekend, last weekend, and some of my friends, they live down in Columbia, and, I mean, the quality of life they have down there for a few thousand dollars a month is just unbelievable. And they mainly work in dollars. We’re international at this point, and that kind of goes back to the thesis of decentralization. Now that we have the Internet and we have the ability to take this with me anywhere I go, we can just go do what we do from anywhere.

And having a lower cost of living then allows for a higher quality of life. The Internet is really one of these things. The next thing, really three technologies. I call it the decentralized revolution that we’re in. And so the Internet is a piece of that. But then we have borderless, permissionless, decentralized money. So we have bitcoin now, and then we have AI, which is sort of centralizing because who controls the LLM? But at the same time, it allows me to maybe do the work of ten people or 100 people. So it’s also sort of decentralizing, if you will.

But a lot of people would say that bitcoin was created by the CIA. I’m sure you’ve probably heard that. Yeah, everybody thinks that some, everything. There’s someone who believes everything is created by the CIA, but I don’t. I don’t see that happening. And nowhere in my experience has that ever been a claim the CIA has made or even been assessed or assumed inside the hallways of Langley. Yeah, I think where that kind of picks up steam is because it uses encryption technology, which, you know, I’m guessing the NSA. Right. The military, like, has the encryption technology.

So you haven’t heard that before? No. So, I mean, I’ve heard it before, but it makes as much sense now as it does then? Yeah. Yeah. Do you have any views or opinions on having ability to kind of control your money outside of the state system? So, yes and no. So what I will say first is that the assumption that great encryption starts at CIA is a false assumption. The correct assumption is that some very specialized company out there creates outstanding encryption, and then CIA becomes the first investor. That’s the way it actually works. So bitcoin, or the role of the blockchain, is a fantastic technology that was created, and then everybody jumps on board, because what do you do whenever there’s a fantastic technology? You jump on board.

Blockchain is a fantastic technology. The idea of a decentralized currency is a fantastic technology, but it goes against the model of the state. So it makes total sense that decentralized currency would be adopted by individual citizens across the world. And there’s millions, tens of millions, billions, possibly bitcoin users. But the idea that bitcoin will ever be fully accepted by a federal government, the probability is very, very low because it stands in contrast to what federal governments want, which is controlled. They want control. They want predictability. They want to be able to make a little bit of money off of every transaction, because that’s what drives their gdp.

Decentralized currency takes away the government’s ability to make money off of every transaction. So even though the blockchain is there to show full accountability, the federal government would rather have the blockchain in their own currency. So it becomes this constant point of consternation where federal governments are going in the direction of cryptocurrency, which is good. Right? Cryptocurrency is something we should adopt. But what they’re doing is they’re going about it in a way where they’re developing their own cryptocurrencies and abandoning the market cryptocurrencies, which leaves the market cryptocurrencies in an uneven place. Yeah. The only thing I would say to that is what we saw in the United States, again, because we’re still somewhat of a republic with independent states.

We saw sort of how they dealt with marijuana, for example, and one state legalized it. Another state now states. And now Biden’s like, all right, screw it, we’ll just make it federal. And what we’ve seen now is about a half a dozen states have gone in and protected bitcoin under constitutional law. Now one state, the next state, now we have about six states. And then just, I think two weeks ago or three weeks ago, the US House passed a bill to protect the people’s rights to use and own bitcoin. And so it’s a pretty big step.

I agree. I think the other thing is that, you know, for better or worse, probably most likely worse, the lobbying industry, and, you know, they’re the ones that are sort of writing the laws. And the financial institutions now, Blackrock, etcetera, they’re making billions of dollars off of this asset. And so the chance of them seeing the government just make it illegal seems pretty slim at this point. Well, I’ve never said anything about the government making it illegal. Oh, yeah. I was saying they’re not going to adopt it as a mainstream. Oh, yeah, of course not. Yeah, no, of course.

I don’t think they’re going to outlaw it. I don’t think they’re going to make it illegal. Because at the end of the day, I mean, even they did make it illegal. It still exists. Right, exactly. But whether or not your bitcoin is or your cryptocurrency of anything outside of a government backed cryptocurrency, whether or not it will ever become something that you can literally use in the mainstream world to buy everything from milk and eggs to an Amazon order. Right. That. That is a. That is a point of question that I would say is not yet defined.

Yeah, I know. About time to wrap this thing up. We’ve gone a long time. I wanted to talk about some of your CIA spy stuff so we can get that plugged. I know you’re wearing your shirt, everyday spy, and I can just tell. It must be really good because I can just tell the way that you think through these problems, and obviously, you’re recruited by the CIA to help them with this. So maybe, like, tell us a little bit about, you know, why you created this. Was it to help people kind of, like, have some of these models to think with and, like, have better control over their life? Yeah, that’s exactly it.

So there’s a misnomer at CIA, and I think you even said it when we first started, that they go out and they find these gifted, talented people. Right. They go out and they find smart people. They go out and they find, like, that’s not how it works. Nobody is born with the skills that you need to be a spy. You don’t have them, right. You have to be taught them. What CIA has done is they have found a way of teaching pretty much anybody to learn the skills because they need a wide range of people. Right.

If you think about it, truly, in order for CIA to operate in an arab country against a female target. They need somebody who can blend into an arab country against a female target, which basically means they need an arab female. If you want to blend into an african country that’s predominantly dark skinned black individuals, then you need to send someone in who can blend in in asian countries, in latin american countries. If you want someone to make friends and steal secrets from somebody who is handicapped in some way, if you want to steal secrets from someone who’s autistic, you have to have people that can fit all of those roles, fit any operational role that you need.

Well, you’re not going to find Yale and Stanford graduates of all that different type of diversity. What you can find is any normal person who shows a certain level of cognitive ability that demonstrates that they can learn the skills fast. But here’s the thing. Cognitive ability means you can learn the skills fast. Lower cognitive ability does not mean you can’t learn the skills. It means you learn the skills slower. Okay, so CIA has learned that the trick to making spies, which is really the trick to making covert operators who can get magical, like, magnificent things done in short periods of time, the trick is just how you teach them.

Anybody can learn anything. It’s just a matter of how you teach them. So CIA is built on this educational framework of structured process and systematic training, a system that’s called educate exercise experience. When you follow those three e’s, when you teach somebody what to do, let them exercise what they just learned and then give them a real world scenario to experience what they just exercised, knowledge becomes permanent. So when I left CIA and I went into the everyday world and I started working at a pharmaceutical company, I was shocked because there are so many smart people in this company that couldn’t get shit done.

And I had no experience in pharmaceuticals at all, and I was able to pick up and learn what they were doing and what I was doing and how to make both their job and my job more efficient just by using the frameworks that CIA taught me. So it was during that process in the commercial world where it clicked, and I was like, if I can succeed in a matter of six months in a fortune seven company using spy skills, why couldn’t everybody use spy skills to succeed? If it’s just a matter of teaching people how to learn quickly, I can teach them that.

I can teach somebody that in an afternoon. And that’s where everyday spy came from. So skills for what, though? Skills just to learn and adapt. So it’s like, I mean, who’s, like, your ideal client? And what are you actually helping them achieve? Absolutely. So the most dangerous part of a spy’s life is an actual the operation. It’s everyday life. When you’re living an alias and you’re planning to carry out some dangerous covert operation. The dangerous covert operation part, you practice that a thousand times. It’s. It’s flawless. It’s everything else that’s dangerous. It’s signing the wrong receipt in the wrong name, it’s pulling the wrong credit card.

It’s driving your car the same way every time you go to work. It’s who you call on your phone. It’s forgetting that you can’t log into that email address using this phone. That’s the kind of stuff that screws us up. Yeah. So everyday life is the most dangerous part for spies. So the vast majority of our training goes into how to manage everyday life. Social situations, personal situations, professional situations, how to get ahead with your boss, how to gain trust, how to build a network, how to influence people, how to get what you want from people who don’t trust you, how to tell if someone’s lying to you.

These are the kind of skills that exist for us. The problems that exist for us in everyday life come from all those areas, right? Even how to get better sleep, how to have a stronger memory, how to maintain fitness when you don’t have a gym. All of these things are everyday problems that spies face in an operation all the time. They’re also problems everyday people face all the time. How to know what information to trust, how to know which information to reject. How to know when somebody has been corrupted against you. How to know when somebody is corruptible against somebody they believe in.

These are all super useful skills, from negotiation to persuasion for how to build a business, how to get a promotion, how to change career paths. Right? Like, there’s. There’s even. I’ve had the opportunity to work with people who are trying to save a marriage. I’ve had the opportunity to work with executives who are trying to reconnect with their children. Like, the skills are incredibly adaptable to everyday life because all the frameworks were built for us to succeed undercover in everyday life. Yeah, sounds great. I could see how that could be beneficial. I was thinking about when you’re talking about that, just that book never split the difference.

FBI hostage and negotiation techniques and, like, how powerful they are. And I’ve read it a couple times and I’ve listened to nuggets, but, like, I can’t really go apply that because I haven’t practiced it. Not only. Not only that, but life is very rarely a hostage negotiation. Right, right. Usually you don’t have your kids aren’t old enough yet. Generally speaking, somebody can always walk away. Yeah. In a true hostage negotiation, nobody can walk away. So that’s been the challenge that a lot of my predecessors have had, is how do you talk about. How do you apply interrogation techniques to everyday life? Yeah, it’s.

Everyday life is not an interrogation. How do you apply law enforcement techniques to everyday life? Everyday life is not a criminal act. Right. Everyday life is an intelligence operation all the time. Yeah. All right, well, I think we can wrap it up with that, actually. Let me. Let me ask you three rapid fire questions here. Give me your opinions on these. Julian Assange. Julian Assange. I don’t know why we’re all so afraid of him. I mean, WikiLeaks is what it is, but he was given the information, he tried to democratize information. He’s a wanted, hunted man for the sharing of secrets.

But, I mean, he didn’t break a law as a citizen of the land. Edward Snowden, the exact opposite. Edward Snowden was an american citizen who stole american secrets and sold them to american enemies and has been on the run ever since. He went about doing the right thing the wrong way. And he’s demonstrated by his partnership with all the adversarial countries against the United States that his alliance really has never been to the american people. It’s always been to Edward Snowden. What about Ross Ulbricht? I don’t know that name. The founder of the bitcoin platform Silk Road, who’s facing like, ten life sentences, but you don’t know.

So that’s fine. Okay, well, that’s it. I think we’ll wrap it up. A lot of good stuff there. The one big takeaway I have is just an informed and educated people. And we talked about the personal responsibility, so I just challenge everyone. Just like it starts with, I think you said, self respect, and self respect yourself enough. Respect yourself enough to go get informed and educated. And then the other thing I’d say is, take the time to learn both sides. That’s like, the key thing I think about. Anything else you want to leave last? Parting thoughts? No.

It’s been a pleasure to be here. Thanks so much for having me. It’s a really challenging and exciting conversation. I really like it when I get to have a conversation like this, because so often I get the same questions the same way, and this was not that cool. Thanks.
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