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π¨LIVE: Gen. Michael Flynn Talks World War, Trump, Biden, Russia & A.I.
Recorded: May 2, 2023 Duration: 4:47:57Space Recording
Full Transcription
Hey Mario, are you talking through your little face refreshing?
No, no, man.
Did you see Elon is jealous from what I have?
Yeah, but and this is the first time I've heard that it was $1,000.
I was making fun of you for it before.
And now that I know it's $1,000, I feel like I'm really going to give you a lot of shit
for this for a long time.
You're just jealous.
Yeah, I'm just jealous.
That's all this.
Just sending out the invites.
He's not jealous.
He's not a nerd, Mario.
No, you're telling me to get one for you, Sway, man.
I think he ended up with three by the time he left New York City.
Bro, I don't want one.
I don't want to look like a nerd.
You're a top P, yeah?
Proud, proud top P.
Dylan Paz.
I'm just sending out the invites.
For speakers requesting, we'll be bringing you up shortly.
Let's send out all the invites first.
I feel weird that we didn't do a space yesterday.
It's just not us.
Yeah, it was a little busy, though, because I mean, you spent a few days in New York City, you know, extremely productive.
That's not why, though, man.
It's because, hey, Brian, just sent you an invite via DM.
It's because, what's his name?
Danish, sorry, Danish couldn't, hadn't, couldn't make it, and we were busy.
And he was busy.
I'm like, hey, man, just take a day off.
So that's the, is all of us, everyone just burnt out.
But we'll do the big finance space, I think, tomorrow.
And we'll be doing it.
Brian, how are you?
Good, good.
How are you?
Good, good.
So today's space is a masterclass.
Just to explain how to get 20 million impressions per tweet.
and 100 tweets a day,
and how to reach half the world population per day.
So please give us the secret source.
How can everyone reach 20 million people a day?
It's up to down, left, right, A, B, select, start.
All right, let me try.
Up, down, left, right, A, B, B,
Select doesn't even exist on the keyboard, man.
I'm looking for select.
I'm like, I don't think this.
Yeah, you type it in.
Okay.
All right.
All right, Sarah, how are you?
Got John, David.
Let's talk.
Let me bring up Ben.
That was unexpected.
Benjamin, it was really pleasure to meet you yesterday.
I'm glad you came and saw me.
Benjamin, I appreciate you coming and seeing me over coffee as promised.
It was really, really a pleasure.
I never made you a promise.
I said I was going to be in New Jersey.
I just, I wasn't able to make it.
Now, so when I promise you can come speak in the next space
and suddenly you're up on stage, you know why.
Now, we'll be even then by the next space.
Oh, that's haram.
That's haram.
This is what happens to Ben when he deal with like these emotional guys.
Oh, I know, I know.
I know, I know his type.
Yeah.
You're trying.
Nobody knows this, but Mario is about 5-2.
So, I mean, this is why he doesn't like to meet people in person.
Hold on, 5-2 in centimeters, bro.
I'm not from your country that changes all metrics.
It's the size of an 8-year-old child, Mario.
154-7.
Oh man, he got a tweet.
He takes her, I love the message you sent in the WhatsApp group, Nick.
This fucking guy called Mario rocks up in my hotel room.
Sends a photo of me.
I got a tweet that one too.
Oh, you got it, man.
It's so funny.
What was with the virtual reality glasses when you're driving?
I'm old, right?
I don't know what all that is.
What was that about?
Young people don't know what it is here.
So don't worry.
It's just an air purifier.
So I live in Dubai and I've been really paranoid about the air quality here.
I don't know how it is in New York or like in the US in most cases it's pretty good.
But if you go to countries, you know, I used to travel a lot to China in back in the day during my e-commerce days.
I live in Dubai, and the air quality is really shit.
And the airplane, I used to travel every week.
In the airplane, apparently, they recycle the same air, so it's really bad quality.
So it's a headset, noise cancelling, so you can make calls as well.
Anyone that hasn't seen it, I'll just show it to you.
You can laugh.
You can make fun of me.
You've...
In this case, you have every white too.
You know what?
I forgot, Mario, right?
You're in Dubai.
I can now go there with the, I can even travel there on an Israeli coffee.
Exactly.
Maybe I'll come have, maybe I'll come have coffee with you.
Yeah, and I'll come and see you, yeah?
It's the same way you saw me.
Please come.
So I feel, so it's even.
Yeah.
But yeah, so like and it's got like a purifier at the front.
This is getting awkward now Mario.
It's like when you dump a chick and then she does.
I know, I do this.
I do this.
I do this a lot.
Like my team makes, Mario, you make a joke, but don't push it too far.
Then the joke gets lame.
So I'm pushing it too far.
But yeah, that mask, it filters the air for you.
I've just pinned it above for anyone that hasn't seen it.
Nick, if you want to ping Mr. Giuliani, it'll be great.
But yeah, the face mask.
filters the air for you.
So something I'll take pretty...
I obsess over health a bit too much
to an extent where everybody makes fun of me.
Mario, that is one hell of a contraption.
I'm not gonna tell you what I'm doing now
because you're gonna laugh at me even more.
Well, now you have.
Okay, so I'm just googling what contraption means.
A machine or device that appears strange or unnecessarily complicated
and awfully badly made or unsafe.
Yeah, it is definitely a contraption.
How do you not know what the contraption means?
What, do you speak five languages or something?
Four, bro. How many do you speak, huh? Nice jab. How many do you speak, Dath? What's your name, D'Av?
Well, I'm Jesse Feinberg, but I'm Jewish, so I speak sarcasm fluently.
In addition to English, Spanish, and if I was still seven years old in Hebrew school, then some Hebrew.
I can teach you Hebrew.
Anima de Belvrit, I'm Israel.
So Krasenstein.
So guys, guys, let's kick it off.
Nick, maybe while waiting for Mr. Giuliani to join,
you can give us a bit of an overview.
I know you've had a lot of interactions with him over the last couple of days.
Yeah, you're going to have to give a minute on that.
Just, um,
I'm getting a call.
cool,
cool,
no problem at all.
It's one of those calls.
all right,
Simon,
so maybe you can kick it off.
what's the panel today?
What are we going to be discussing with Mr.
Giuliani and then Mr.
Flynn?
What,
what type of questions are you going to have?
Yeah,
yeah.
So we got,
for the first segment,
we got,
Mayor Giuliani.
And then,
For the second segment, we have got General Flynn.
Sorry, I'm just reading the message as well.
Yeah, oh, good, okay.
Yeah, so Mr. Giuliani, we're just messaging him now to jump on.
In the meantime, yeah, so what type of questions you'd be asking Mr. Giuliani?
I mean, we had quite a few, a bit of a variety of questions.
Obviously, some of it was, what is he doing now?
The second thing was his position on the Trump-Dissantis'
GOP race, what his position is on the arrest of Trump and where that leaves us and whether,
you know, and then his connections to various things as well. So yeah, we had a wide range of
issues we were going to cover, but let's see what happens. In the meantime, I'm all waiting for him.
Brian, I saw you tweets about the offer that Tucker got from valutainment. Can you tell us more about
that?
Yeah, so I mean, it was an offer, but I'm guessing it was kind of more of like a way for value tainment to promote themselves.
I did it on the Megan Kelly podcast, and they offered him $100 million over five years and an equity position in the company.
They offered you make him president and allow him to have editorial, I guess, privileges for a podcast, shows, documentaries and movies.
Yeah.
Like I said, I don't think he's going to take it.
I don't think it's something that's actually he will seriously consider, but it was interesting.
Why don't you think it's serious?
Well, I don't know.
I don't think, I don't know a ton about value payment.
Maybe somebody else does, but...
Like, I think if he's going to go with that.
Patrick, but David, Patrick, but David, he's been on the show.
The guy made a lot of money in the insurance space.
So that's what I know about him.
He made a lot of money in the insurance space before getting into the media industry.
So he's sitting on a lot of capital.
Yeah, yeah.
I mean, it's definitely interesting.
I don't know if it's a fit for him.
But I guess we'll see.
He obviously hasn't replied.
Yet Megan Kelly was all about it, though.
So I guess that says something.
And what other news? Go ahead, Simon.
Yeah, we're in a day and age where we have people like Joe Rogan call her daddy podcast making 60 million, 100 million a clip.
So it's at this point. Tucker is so big that he could probably get that money just by starting his own type of thing and then signing with Spotify.
Yeah, so he's also got two offers. I think, um,
Oh, I think O'Anne gave him an offer, is that correct?
Does anyone know more about that?
I think it was Newsmax.
I don't think O'Anne did.
Okay, and what?
Okay, and what do you know about Newsmax's offer?
It was editorial control.
They'd be in charge of a primetime lineup, and as far as dollars goes, I don't know, but I'm sure it's significant.
It's certainly something that I would love to have.
But can't he, hold on, Slamad, didn't you do a tweet that he can't actually accept any offers now?
Because he's, you made some weird tweet where he said he's fired, but he's not fired.
So I deleted that tweet.
I wouldn't call that, me and Mario, I'd call that an accuracy tweet.
So essentially, he was fired, but what that means is it took him off broadcast, didn't let him.
And essentially, they took him off the email list and a few other things.
But they haven't officially let him go because they've not.
Because it seems like it was all last minute, they haven't actually negotiated his exit.
Hence why he's got this big lawyer who's negotiating,
if when or if it's even going to happen, some kind of exit.
They can tie him up for 18 months.
He has 18 months on his contract.
So they don't want him speak, and that's what they'll do.
But I think they'll come to some sort of agreement.
Yeah.
And it just came out, by the way, does anyone know about this?
So I just saw Rolling Stone.
I'll read out the headline.
Tucker Carlson makes weird sex comments in new leaked video.
I didn't see that one.
Media Matters published is another one.
Publish a new batch of behind-the-scenes video of the app.
ousted Fox News, so yeah, so does anyone know about this clip?
I haven't seen anything about it to know.
I did the clip, Mario.
Just so you guys not, I had a little thread with the three videos.
I dropped it on the, I dropped them on the Jumbotron up top.
It's just, it's absurd.
Media matters are the only people in the planet that would think this is a gotcha.
So I wrote like, breaking, man makes benign joke as if it's like some sort of big deal.
It's completely absurd.
It means nothing, but you can watch the videos.
They're short clips.
I did all three of them in a quick little comic, it's just, yeah,
I mean, is it,
Darth,
is it a legitimate video?
yeah,
they're legitimate,
but he's just making,
like,
he's making just a couple of jokes
as he's getting ready for a show.
It's like nothing significant.
It's because behind the scenes,
quite a lot of people who were adamant,
that it was a defense.
Yeah, exactly.
And you didn't wait for, yeah, but yeah, he didn't wait to verify it before he tweeted it.
You tweeted it like we're hoping that's going to be real.
The same way he tweeted that the scientist filed for his, filed for presidency.
That's not true.
Basically, you wouldn't.
And it's so dumb.
Like literally, you've basically got loads of newspaper reports reporting it.
You've got it officially coming from media matters, as he said.
And it's, so it is, I mean, if someone has faked it, they've conned everybody.
That's a totally different style.
And then you can say that for any video.
I mean, don't we are any video because how do you ever know anything?
If you were faking it to make him look bad, you do something worse than this.
He's talking to Pierce Morgan.
Exactly.
Look, look, but listen, listen, it does, not look.
Slayman does nothing but shit on mainstream media every day, and in most cases, rightly so.
But then he always uses them as a reference.
He's like, all right, Wall Street Journal said this.
It's because they know how to vet projects, not post something, and then pray to God that it's going to be authentic.
That's literally not what happened, though.
It was obviously, it was legit because we had the transcript.
We had this gotcha moment, which they were told they got on him, and it was so dumb.
And obviously Mario was like, oh, don't post it until someone from the mainstream media posted.
That's what happened.
And I was like, nah, bro.
Because they know they still, as much as your shit on them.
I'm like, had you verify it?
You're like, oh.
nothing just looks real and then you waited for i think is ean or someone to use that tool that you
never even heard of bro you had no process to verify anything look at the look at the videos i pinned
them up top you can look at all three of them in under yeah it's dumb like your whole argument
is dumb because the whole point is then does that mean you verify every single video like it doesn't
make sense it's not even you know from the context
Technically you're meant
technically you're meant to
No you're meant to verify
Every single video
Anything you post
Yes you do
This is what you're supposed to do
No no
No you don't though do you
Because you assume that there's
In certain aspects
When it's contextually
You know but when it's legitimate
Now like your point doesn't make sense
At all
Benjamin, what do you think of Sleighman's attacks on mainstream media, yet not even close to their vetting system?
He's like, you got to beat them before you start making fun of them.
But the point is, I'm not, if I'm actually publishing a new story where I'm the source of that information, then I will vet it.
I will do it properly and I wouldn't be doing mainstream media's like low-class behavior.
That's a context.
Yeah.
I was just going to, it's a completely separate topic, but I have to give Trump credit where credit is due, right?
He made a friend of mine's day come true.
We have a good friend, fathers from Israel, family friend.
Son is 35 years old, lives in the United States, has cerebral palsy, and his lifelong dream was to shake hands with Donald Trump.
So I think it was in New Hampshire a few days ago.
It was his 35th birthday.
And he went to the rally, I guess.
And this is first-handed from this is his father told me, so it's not lying.
And Donald Trump's security didn't want him shaking the gentleman's hand for security issues and stuff like that.
Donald Trump, and I have a picture of it, kind of pushed the security aside, shook his hand, gave him a signed autograph hat.
So, you know what? I'll give credit where credits do. That's very classy.
And it made that kid's day. That's all I wanted to say. I respect that a lot.
So just before you go to Doc, I do want to say, so Mr. Giuliani would be joining us in about 20 minutes.
I'll keep you all posted.
Nick is working on it in the background.
Doc, go ahead.
Mario, hi.
Nick, Suleiman, and my new friend, Benjamin, I just wanted everyone to know.
Yes.
I apologize for my presence and arguments with Ben in the last space.
We've since made up.
Yeah, we've made up.
Yeah, I'm glad, guys, yeah, exactly.
This is just, yeah, Doc, Ben, I love you both,
but this is what everyone's waiting for.
Everyone came here to know whether Doc,
no, no, ignore Mr. Giuliani and Mr. Flynn.
Everyone wants to know if David or Benjamin or Doc made up.
So I'm glad that this is the breaking news.
We've just to go into private practice.
I didn't have one other point.
I mean, really, the real question Marius asking is,
was it over a coffee?
That's what he's getting there.
Oh, but we're going into practice together.
So that's, we're going to take on the wall.
We're going to start a new Wall Street law firm.
So I want to, let's go back to just other news.
I want to kind of recap the news because it's been pretty crazy four days.
Hey, Marie, for me.
Go ahead.
Go ahead.
Go ahead.
Go ahead.
About Tucker and, oh, God, what's her name now?
The one that used to be at.
Value attainment?
No, no, no, no, no, no, the, Megan Kelly.
She's blanking them.
She is still suggesting, as of this morning, that Tucker could be going back to Fox,
and that, in her opinion, might be the best solution.
A couple people would have to be fired for that to happen,
and I think that is the best solution for...
How is that possible?
So what do we know so far?
Isn't it?
So I know we're just all speculating, but the common, I think most people agree that he was,
he had a clash with the Murdoch family.
And this is why he's no longer in the company or with other executives.
Is that what happened and he was let go or it could be more to it?
Megan's pointing at one executive, is a female who's, and someone may recall her name here
in the room.
I'm sure someone does.
who's really the hatchet woman behind the scenes.
Megan keeps inviting her on the program.
She did so today to hash over old times.
She says from her own experience there with the Murdox
and with the executives that she understands
what's being done to Tucker.
She's laughing about the Fox News leaks
that's coming from this woman and to...
media matters, which really, I believe with Sleighman, makes, makes Tucker look a lot better
and is certainly not going to pull away any of it, Tucker's former supporters, you know,
in lieu of a return back to Fox and whoever they're using to replace Tucker.
So I think it's an interesting dynamic.
They could both just say, hey, look, we're going to declare peace.
We have a contract.
Fox is going to honor the contract.
I don't think Tucker would need to make any sort of β
apologies and they could just continue on.
But whether or not, you're right, Mario,
whether or not that's tolerable to the Murdox
and they're what I believe,
are their effort, strong efforts to support
DeSantis as an alternative Republican candidate.
That still probably is going to be the straw
that breaks the count of fact.
I want,
I want to move away from Tucker Fulamai because I'm kind of sick of the story, guys.
I want to go to maybe Slamand you can give us first overview and anyone else could jump in.
I know that Brian you tweeted about it because you're all over my fucking feed.
I don't know how.
And Slaman, I know you tweeted about it because you did it on my account.
The Epstein story, there's more developments there.
I think there's more leaks of other people that have visited him, which I want to make clear, as Sarah said under my tweet.
Okay.
meeting Epstein, meeting a bad person
doesn't mean you were involved in bad things
could indicate
Oh good God, why did you say that
You know, I had to mute the notifications on that
It was so crazy
You know what, just really, really quick
Just Brian can probably a test for a day
Just so Brian could tell David
The reason why he's talking about your feed
Is because he has that blue check
Which gives him the Algo boost
So there you go
Yeah, I think it's more than a blue check man
I think I know he keeps blaming the
You got, oh, yeah.
No, you're not. I can't see a blue tick, man.
I'm so waiting for it. I can show you my receipt.
Imagine before you were playing tough guy and you don't want to get it, now you're waiting for it and then I want to give it to you.
It's going to be funny that I like too bad you've been rejected.
Just being honest here, David.
But Sarah, before we talk about your blue tick, Sarah, can you tell me you were speaking,
and then I do want to go to Slyman and Brian.
Just get a bit of more insight into what we know so far about the Epstein story,
and I know Sleman you've been going deep as well.
So Sarah, do you want to jump in before Slaman hugs the mic?
I was just saying that's simply my tweet under yours, my reply to you,
I think across the board it got some...
love and hate, I simply said that meeting Epstein does not mean that you knew what he was up to behind the scenes.
And he was a guy. He met a lot of people. A lot of people met him. He was rich and people wanted to be in his circle.
But it does not mean that everybody that met him knew.
I will concede that a CIA director should know who their meeting.
But were most of the meetings?
Not really hopeful.
He was charged in 2008 and 19.
Yes.
This is after his conviction.
And I've got to say, I'm not surprised whatsoever that the hood Barak was on that list.
I'm Israeli born, so don't accuse me of being anti-whatever.
it's disgusting. You know, you can make the argument, well, you know, there's nothing incriminating by meeting somebody like that.
I'm going to take the opposite approach. They knew what he was up to, and yet they chose to meet with him anyways.
It's in bad taste and it's disgusting. I'm sorry.
Can we like, guys, before we're digging to how disgusting it is, Slimeon, can you maybe kick it off and then Brian and whoever else kind of looked into it?
What the hell did Epstein do?
I'm listening to a documentary about it.
Some of it is just hard to believe.
Can you give us a quick overview for anyone that doesn't know?
Brian, do you want to go ahead and then I'll jump in.
Yeah, so I couldn't hear everybody.
I don't think I could hear Sarah, so I don't know exactly what she said.
Oh, good, not much context.
I think Sarah, the only point Sarah made is just about her reply to my tweet in terms of not every person that met Epstein.
It means that they were either involved or knew about his background.
Brian?
Yeah.
So you're asking about...
I'm asking, no, so my question to you is,
you did a long tweet about Epstein as well
that spammed my feed,
so I wanted you and then Slaman
to give us an overview about the Epstein story
and what we know so far.
It's kind of a general overview
because we are going to cover it in a future space.
Yeah, so actually that was Ed that did the tweak, but I read it so I can go over it a little bit. I might not know all the details. Yeah, so new details came out about
who he had meetings with after he came to his agreement with the feds in the child sex trafficking case.
He met with somebody that was connected to the Biden administration.
I forget the guy's name, but it was a list of several people that he met with and
I mean, there's no report to these people going to his island or anything.
Does that mean they're innocent?
Does that mean they're guilty?
I think that businessmen...
But guys, isn't it Slimeon?
Maybe you can also give context on this, but isn't unless you're lying that you researched it.
But from what I understood is that Epstein used...
And please correct me if I'm wrong, because this is pretty crazy allegations, and I'm still learning about this.
But he tricked people into sleeping with underage kids, so raping underage kids, and then filmed it and used it to blackmail them.
Am I completely off the mark, or is that part of the allegations?
I don't know. Do we have evidence of that?
It wouldn't surprise me one bit if that's what he...
Well, the other...
Powerful people.
So, I don't know.
I didn't see evidence of that, but I didn't read the entire story.
Right, but there's also, I believe, strong evidence that suggests that, you know,
another aspect of what he was doing, right, is videotaping them secretly with these young women
and using that for block mail.
He's just...
Oh, God.
Yeah, it...
Very, very poor taste for these people.
And these people knew of his conviction, right?
This is not like, oh, I didn't know.
I mean, the fact that you're hanging out with somebody like that,
look, there's an argument to be made that, you know,
you are what you associate with.
Let's just be very frank here.
So, I mean, just to clarify, like, there's two separate points.
So the first point is this.
You got a scenario where this guy, through Giselle Maxwell.
So Maxwell was basically almost like getting these people in.
And then, what's his name again?
Epstein was basically...
part of the actions that were occurring.
And the problem is this,
obviously there's high profile people
who are connected to this whole thing.
Now, it wasn't done unknown.
Like those people who were basically conducting
these actions were,
and, you know,
there's many people implicated,
such as the Clintons and,
you know,
various other, like,
famous people,
Prince Andrews,
another example.
Go Gates.
Yeah.
Bill Gates, Melinda Gates was totally against them hanging out from what I understand.
So, I mean, we can't just let that go.
If your wife is telling you not to hang out with him, maybe there's people out there that know what's going on.
And his response was, well, I regret those dinners, right?
There's the video of him, that's his just, you know, that's his answer.
I regret the dinner.
I mean, Ben, that's going to be the...
Yeah, just today.
That's going to...
Today or yesterday, Cindy McCain, they posted a video of Cindy McCain saying
everybody knew what he was doing, Epstein, but nobody was willing to do anything legally
to stop it.
It's like half your ones.
Also, it depends, like, who met him and where they met him, because when I look at
everybody in the list, I would...
Some of the names are surprising, so I wouldn't...
I just need to look at more information about what are the
basically claims of what level of meeting they had.
Was it like did they go to his island or was it separately
in like the United States where they may?
Most of them were at his townhouse, I believe.
If I'm if I'm not mistaken, right?
And I'm sorry I keep coming back to this.
This is a very famous photo, right?
Avehud Barak slipping into his townhouse
with his face covered up with a scarf and everything.
It just, it's, to me, it's very incriminating, right?
Go meet at, you know, a boardroom.
Go meet here there.
What the hell?
are you doing meeting in a location that allegations have been put forward that there's secret
videotaping and wiring and people are listening and is videotaping people having sex with underage
women in that townhouse? And these are intelligent people, right? We're not just talking about
somebody who could be easily fooled. You're talking about a former prime minister of Israel. You're
talking high, powerful, intelligent people, CIA people. Come on.
And his death is weird.
It's very weird.
Apparently the cameras didn't work and they found him hanging and the security guard wasn't there.
I know that.
I know that the tension is very real.
I wouldn't just call it weird.
It's more than that.
Well, I know that detention center relatively well, right?
So first of all, that's...
Hold on, hold on.
So you know it relatively well, Benjamin. Cool.
Yeah.
I do.
Absolutely.
From the inside is well, Benjamin?
Okay, just...
No, from the courtroom, right?
So that's primarily, it's a remand facility, right?
So you have to remember a couple things.
he's not going to be, so there it's more or less floors and ranges, he's not going to be somewhere where any other prisoner could get access to him, right?
He was there basically on what they call bad charges, so he's going to be in SEG and not only SEG, the segregation of the segregation, the notion that the cameras just happened to go down, there's redundant, and there's backup systems there, right? It just
It's ridiculous.
It's ridiculous.
I don't want to get...
I don't want to get to watch too,
where they were supposed to check on them every 15 minutes.
The whole thing was just...
Every...
So, yeah, and when they do checks there, right,
it's not just one guard that goes around
and looks in the cell, right?
So...
There's a little slot for the meal trace to go in.
So there's always going to be two guards per round.
There's going to be one standing by the gate and one that actually does the check.
The guy standing by the gate in case, well, if they need to open that slot and an inmate were to grab them and pull them in, there's a guard there to, you know, as his backup.
So just the notion that of all the years of that facility has been functioning, that it just happened, the cameras happen to go down at that at the exact same time.
The backup systems didn't go up.
And then the guard, the one guard fell asleep or something like that.
It's ridiculous.
It's absolutely ridiculous.
I think at this point, nobody's really claiming that that's all coincidental.
I think it's more or less universally accepted that he was murdered.
And this is one of those.
There's several examples where the government is just killing people and saying, like, we're calling you out.
We're going to do it right in front.
Well, why do you mean, so Daph Daph, how did you just said the government?
So what made you say it's the government that killed him?
Because there's a lot of wealthy people implicated in this.
Why did it become the government?
capacity.
the government.
And what I'm saying,
it could be somebody
in the government
or somebody with
pull with people
in the government to make it happen
because somebody had to be involved
to do it.
Oh, just someone,
oh, no,
someone with money.
Money can buy anything, man.
You don't have to be in the government.
My point,
my point is simply this.
This is one of many examples
where they do this sort of stuff
and rub your faces in it
where everybody universally knows
that this was obviously suspect and something was intentionally done.
And there's nothing we could do about it.
And there's no way we'll ever be able to prove it because there's enough to care.
And they just don't care.
And let's see.
And let's see, sorry, Simon, you said, unless the Clintons, you're implying the Clintons didn't, unless the Clintons are in the government.
So what evidence do you have to imply us the Clintons?
Well, he was meeting with the CIA chief after he was convicted and he was a known pedophile.
So, yeah, can't you assume that the CIA helped him out here?
I don't know what you're talking about, Doc.
I'm just saying Slaman implied that the Clintons killed him.
So I'm just curious, whatever this he got there.
All right, let's not pretend.
Clintons are like a very powerful elite, right?
In the United States, they were implicated in this.
And so, yeah, there is, I mean, there is that.
And there is more information about it as well.
But obviously, for the top of my head, I can't remember.
But we are doing a space on it, aren't we, Mario?
Yeah,
Yeah,
it's to be clear,
you just
avoided the fact
that you just
made a statement
with no
evidence at all
for someone
of the spot
rating.
the whole point
is I'm trying
to be careful
and there's a lot of,
there's a lot of names,
you know,
there's from Bill Gates,
I'm just looking
at the list here,
Prince,
whatever in you know,
Prince Andrew,
Alan Dershowitz,
Donald Trump,
who else is there?
There's a whole
Kevin Spacey,
Chris Tucker,
his list of connections,
yeah.
It's like hundreds of people.
It's,
Yeah, exactly.
So the last thing, Mario, just keep in mind, too, right, the autopsy report tells us a lot.
So his hyoid wound was broken, right?
So, yes, it can be broken during suicide, but that's more rare.
It's most common associated with death by manual strangulation.
And, yeah.
And Mr. Giuliani did cover the story.
Yes, talk to Nick about the story.
So when he joins, I'd love to ask him.
Nick, can we ask him about this, the Epstein story when he comes on?
Absolutely. I think he's the perfect person to talk about this, being that he was both the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York and the mayor of New York City.
So I think his insight...
Was he on the list in any way?
Was he on the Epstein?
The Epstein list.
I don't know that. I don't think so, that.
Just to give you an idea.
No, it doesn't look like he's there.
Mario, I was talking about Epstein's calendar that came out in the story of the Wall Street Journal.
A couple of days. I know. I know about the, yeah, no, but that had, yeah, about the ex-CIA chief
coming to him after he, he's no longer the CIA chief, to get advice on, apparently, to get
advice on, on, like, getting into the corporate world. Well, that's the reason he gave. So, yeah,
I'm aware of this. I was just putting Slaman on the spot for just being worse than mainstream
media. But Greg, I know you've covered the story as well, so maybe you can give us a bit more
context. Yeah, so I'd like to.
put this from the perspective of
the Catholic Church in Epstein.
I covered the abuse crisis
in the Catholic Church for some time.
And one of the big things that would tell you that people
are guilty is when they would move
around the priests and claim that they didn't know
anything about it. As I went
into the stories in Boston, one of the stories in
Philadelphia, and here in the diocese
of Wilmington and Delaware,
what I found was they would move around these priests
and cover for one another and they all had
evidence on one another
at the same time.
When I was looking into the Epstein calendar story, and you have the director now saying that he didn't know who Epstein was.
That is complete crap.
You don't get to make that excuse.
After 2008, when the gentleman has now been not just accused, but convicted, a registered sex offender, not say,
I'm going to trust you with my finances.
So I'm currently trying to get into this part of the story of,
why would somebody trust a known pedophile and sex offender
with their finances at the highest form of government?
So I've got a question for you, Greg.
So one thing I learned during the FTX saga, because we covered that extensively, is that people tend to follow other people.
Like, FTCS gained the trust of a couple of important people and then everyone else followed.
So if you see Epstein build relationships with two or three influential people, when you name drop these people, it dwarfs any allegation.
Like, oh, you know, Clinton is meeting him or Biden or Trump or whoever is meeting him.
He should be fine.
Do you think that could be the reason why they still met him despite the allegations?
I'm not saying it's right.
I'm just saying could it be the reason?
Could it be the reason it's possible?
But I'm going to ask you this question back.
So Sam Backman-Fried right now has been tart and feather in the public, right?
Would anybody go to Sam-Backman-Fried right now for crypto in order to reinvest in the current environment?
The answer should be no.
So therefore, why are you going to Epstein?
You're a pedophile.
Correct.
You've got to have something wrong with you yourself if you're going to get this type of help,
which is why these people that are on the calendar are getting exposed and there needs to be more investigation into it.
You're 100% correct.
Yeah, rule of dumb, don't sit down with convicted pedophiles.
It usually isn't a good look.
Yep.
Yep.
Yeah, and I think like to give you an example of like I'm nothing compared to the ex-CIA chief and I was invited to speak at an event in a few days.
I'm doing it as a favor to someone and I trust that person.
Literally a few hours ago, I'm telling the team, before you accept, just check who the other speakers are and I've canceled events if I don't like certain speakers.
That's me.
So when you're talking about the ex-CIA chief for these people that are significantly more influential and wealthier,
Yeah, it is reputational
It's odd that they would meet with someone
Like Epstein
I am going to bring up
Charles Charles I'm just going to bring you up in a bit
He did represent
He worked for Dershowitz when we were representing Epstein
That's going to be really interesting
I'll bring him up now.
By any other, any other,
what else do you have in your story, Greg, on Epstein?
What else can you tell us?
So just going in there,
obviously there's ties to the Obama administration
with the calendar story.
So I talked about that this week.
There's no hard evidence.
And so I'm looking at this from a perspective of,
was Epstein actually part of the CIA?
Was he part of the intelligence agency?
Because this man seemed like from when you've
take the web and put it together. It seemed like he had all the cover in order than not have to spend
his time in a jail cell, whining and dining. On top of that, like picture somebody like R. Kelly,
right, who's now in jail. We have individuals, like R. Kelly, had he gone to Epstein Island, he would
not be in a jail cell right now. But,
But because he wasn't with the right people he's in a jail cell, that doesn't make sense to me.
Where are people holding the abusers accountable that sex trafficked the woman, the very powerful people?
And so this calendar is just showing that perhaps this continued on after 2008 into 2014.
And it just furthers the need for media and alternative media to continue to apply pressure to the neck.
in order to get down to the bottom of it.
Greg, can you confirm that, to my recollection,
we know that when they executed the search warrant
on his house in Florida,
there were hidden cameras in all the rooms,
but didn't they also seize a substantial amount of,
of either hard drives or other media devices with video cards?
Yes, they did.
Okay.
Yes, they did.
We're never going to see that, obviously, but they didn't seize that.
Never going to see that.
Let's add to the story, though, that I just covered,
that the person working for Obama even stated that when she went to his town home in New York,
after the conviction, he had extremely young women who were likely underage according to her,
and he asked if it made her uncomfortable,
to be coming to the townhome where his aides were under the age of 18.
Now, this is after he was a convicted sex offender, this behavior continuing.
That's her testimony from the Obama administration.
I mean, just to add to that, Ryan Dawson knows a decent amount about this,
and he's being cancelled from everything.
So that would be interesting when we do the space.
Yeah.
A big thing here, guys, remember when Project Veritas leaked that ABC footage, this has been controlled in legacy media, so we do need alternative media for this.
And like we said, we're never going to see what's on those hard drives.
When something is government related, they do everything to cover it up.
Just like the FOIA for Seth Rich's hard drive, we're seeing the same thing here.
We're not going to get all the details.
They never want us to have the details.
Right.
Another thing that we'll be covering this week, we can touch on briefly now, is the collapse of First Republic.
Danish, we're meant to cover it yesterday, Danish will be leading it tomorrow.
To me, that's probably the most important, or one of the most important stories right now,
the risks to the banking sector and the concerns with commercial real estate.
I know you did a tweet about it as well, Sleman, or we did one together.
Brian, as well, you've talked about it.
I can give us a bit of context there while waiting for Mr. Giuliani.
Yeah, yeah, of course. So you had a scenario earlier in the week when basically saw the collapse of First Republic Bank. And I guess before I move into what that tweet was about, but basically the wider concern, well, one of the concerns of people, I was a concern and maybe not a concern, but is the fact that basically a lot of these regional banks are basically collapsing and all of this money and all of this power and all of this is being consolidated into the larger banks.
We're seeing a lot of out flaws, yeah.
And even JP Morgan, executive, I can't remember, who said that there is consolidation.
There is consolidation in the banking sector and is moving away from regional banks.
So I think we'll be the long-term damage we see from this that people are not talking about enough.
I know you were pretty vocal about it, Slayman.
So that's another...
Another topic that we'll be covering.
Yeah, yeah.
On top of that as well, you've got basically the share price is tumbling significantly.
Pack West drop by 30%.
Western Alliance 21%, Kikob 10%.
Yeah, so there is a major, major issue with the confidence of regional banking or banking and its entirety all across the country.
Yeah, you know, like I was talking on another space about it. And I think like a lot of it has to do with how fast the feedback loop is now in finances and, and how fast panic can spread on social media. So yeah, there's definitely systemic issues at play. But I think that the fact.
that this news spread so quickly on social media,
whether all of it's true or not,
there's panic that takes...
Brian, Brian, regulators,
you know how Credit Suisse mentioned Twitter
and how fast news moves?
They mentioned social media as a reason for their collapse,
they use as an excuse.
A few days ago, when no one's talking about it,
regulators down and sent me a screenshot.
I can't remember which regulator.
They referred to spaces and short sellers on Twitter spaces.
Yeah, I'm not sure if you saw that.
I believe that.
And also, like, the other thing is how quickly people can pull their money out of the bank.
You know, like, like 10, 15 years ago, you'd have to actually go down to the bank branch or at least...
call and wait on the phone, but now you can just log in your app on the smartphone and move money around in literally seconds.
So like the feedback loops really quick, so bank runs happen at the speed of light pretty much.
I think that has something to do with how fast these banks can go from being fine to basically going under.
Brian, that speeding up of the financial transactions is system-wide.
I mean, trades now happen in microseconds, you know, and big block trades.
So it's really, you know, spaces, in my opinion, is sort of leveling the playing field,
at least in terms of the information flow.
You know, I used to be a broker with Lehman.
for the fall. And, you know, we had real big advantages as brokers.
And we could trade on those advantages. And it was legal in effect. And things changed with the
internet, certainly. Yeah, no. And I don't think it's a negative for consumers. But I think
that it could become a negative when it
when it kind of leads to these panics.
But there's definitely systemic issues at play too,
and some of the banks are definitely being way too risky.
It's going to be interesting to see what happens.
I'm kind of of the mindset that we're not going to have this massive bank collapse,
but I guess we'll see.
And the regulators failed because all the signs were there.
Sorry, got your hand up?
Go ahead.
Yeah, hold on.
Before you jump in,
regulators, they did say there was a piece that came out,
and also someone could get a small context,
that they had concerns about a collapse of,
I can't remember which about whether it was Silicon Valley
or First Republic before it collapsed.
um and they i don't know if there's an investigation but something about them not acting on it um i can't
remember if i tweeted about it but we'll be covering it tomorrow i'm sorry go ahead sarah yeah you saw
that slime man you know which which story i'm talking about yeah yeah basically you tweeted about it
and basically um they knew about it in December the issues that are going to happen and you know in terms of the
you know in terms of the bank run that we had in terms of the deposits not being secured they knew about in
December and they did not do anything about it that was silicon valley right well well in terms of
the article it doesn't specifically talk about silicon valley but silicon value was the first
bank that fell yeah they were worried about their unhedge position against the increasing the rate
environment yeah
So Sarah, sorry.
Sarah, you could just jump in, Sarah.
You don't need three times to give you the mic,
otherwise you'll never speak.
I know.
I don't do that.
I try to, because I make fun of Doc, so I can't do it.
And she's not rude like you, Mario.
Sorry, go ahead, Sarah.
I know, Mario.
It's against the role to make fun of me.
Oh, my gosh.
Could somebody explain to me how this affects regular people, people that have their money in banks, people that may be going to buy a home and are looking for a home loan?
Is this just on a larger scale or will it eventually trickle down to the people, to regular people?
I'd love to try to take a crack at that, Mario, because I was covering this and talking to some people that were going to be appearing on my show this week.
This is horrible for the regular people, in my estimation, from what I'm seeing, for the fact that we got to talk about how we got here.
Inflation is not just the United States problem.
Inflation at this point is a worldwide problem from the pandemic.
It's a problem of the Federal Reserve...
printing money out of thin air under the Trump administration and again under the Biden administration,
$5 trillion. It's a problem with in America $31.4 trillion in debt so much so that the taxpayer money
barely covers the interest payments on the debt that we owe. The banks now are suffering the interest
rates being risen.
The treasury yields are becoming weaker.
And as a result, our purchasing power as an average middle class person in the United States is weakening.
I'm guessing that's happening throughout the world as well.
Happy to hear from people internationally on this point.
But what's going to end up happening is we have the warning signs we saw in 1929 of a Great Depression.
except it's even worse because a global depression at this point in time will not just tank America,
but will tank other countries as well.
And that's the reason why the Federal Reserve has personal offices in each of the six major banks here in the United States,
J.P. Morgan Chase, Bank of America, they have their people directly in those offices so they know the day of the day,
because at this point in time, digital currency is likely the future.
because that's the only thing it's going to have to push out the dollar bill,
because right now you got bricks looking for the wand.
Everybody's looking for what's hot, what's next.
because the dollar ain't it.
It's coming to an end.
So that's how it's going to affect you as a personal person.
Yeah, Greg, you've taken, I think you've gone a bit too far with this,
about the dollar coming to an end, et cetera,
is just too many, it's just a lot more complicated than this.
The numbers, there's nothing even close to the dollar.
There's been the narrative for years and years, like two decades.
Nothing even compares to the dollar is no alternative.
The only other alternative is euro.
It still represents a fraction of global reserves.
Right.
the concept of de-dollarization, while I think it will happen, it's just going to be, I don't
know if it's even going to be in our lifetime, and the dollar is still performing really well.
So this is based on the present, is there concerns?
Yes.
How does that impact as Sarah?
The most direct impact in terms of a bank failing, your money, as long as you have less than
$250K, is insured businesses or people that have more than $250,000 in one bank account
For now, unless they increase the insurance levels.
For now.
Have you seen the news about, obviously you know about it because you tweeted about it,
but I know the mainstream media outlet capitulated and becoming bankrupt.
Oh, Vice.
No one cares, bro.
Nicola, let's go ahead.
No people care, bro.
It's a liberal leftist media.
Obviously, people care.
You're tweeting so well.
Ask Brian if he cares.
I was actually, actually they came to our home and filmed us all day long and there's actually a show about us tweeting back in the day.
Vice News on HBO.
I was watching, Brian, I was watching it.
It was the lamest documentary just showing, Brian typing on the keyboard.
Like, yeah, we come up with tweets and we reply.
I'm like, ooh.
And I didn't finish it.
Yeah, I'll watch it afterwards.
Yeah, it's not too exciting.
But it's been a crazy, crazy fortnight.
You guys, Simon.
Brian, what's your thought on, sorry, it keeps muting and unmuting it?
Brian, what's your thoughts about Vice?
So basically a lot of people are happy that they've gone down.
Obviously, those who are against the mainstream media.
Or those who were against liberal leftist kind of like woke ideology?
So what's your thoughts on the collapse of?
I just think the whole media
landscape's changing left and right.
I mean,
I think Tucker leaving Fox News is going to be
massive. I think that
Vice isn't, I mean, it wasn't a hugely
popular outlet, but
it definitely is going to have repercussions.
But I think everything's just moving more towards online media
and away from television
and more towards independent journalism
rather than these big corporations controlling things.
Brian, don't you think this is another example of...
essentially a media outlet, whether it's, you know, mainstream media, or, for example, if it's
an entertainment industry, pushing a certain perspective which the masses just don't align with.
I don't know if you could say that. I think they had their viewers. I saw them on HBO mostly.
I know that they had like internet news on the website. I don't know where else. They did a lot of
of like odd stories like you know it wasn't it wasn't totally mainstream stuff so yeah i i don't
think that's a bad point that you're making there i i think that goes for pretty much all these
outlets i i think that the majority of it's just that people are not watching tv as much and people
are not following
some of this news as much either.
So I look for things changing in a big way in the media world over the next few years for sure.
I mean, the way I see it is you've got scenarios where Disney are failing significantly
because they're trying to propagate certain ideologies, which is fine, but obviously
is disproportionate.
And so you essentially got a scenario where people are boycotting these industries,
and then you've seen the capitulation of them.
Vice is a good example where they've basically been, they were start, when they got on the scene,
they were doing some excellent reporting, and then they lost their way,
and it's been very much liberal, leftist, woke,
ID. It's definitely changed. I mean, Tim Poole has started his career pretty much, I think, at Vice. So, and Tim Poole is definitely more to the right. So he's endorsed Trump for 24.
Yeah. So, yeah, like, I don't disagree that things have changed.
I don't know if I'd say that Disney is hurting right now.
I think that they're actually not doing too bad with their media empire.
Well, they fired their CEO. They fired the CEO and brought back the old guy, I forget his name, to bring the company back.
Bob Iger.
Right.
So, yeah, they definitely recognize they have an issue with the market.
Yeah, no, I know their streaming services doing pretty well. Parks, I think, probably aren't doing too bad either. But yeah, I think things are changing for sure. I think all around from all sides.
Well, by the way, I'd say, too, one of the interesting things about Vice going down is, although, you know, I guess from a conservative perspective, it's leftist content in a way, but.
There's also some really good and interesting content there.
So it's kind of odd what's happening because they have certain documentary stuff that has useful information that I think is of general interest.
And so that, I don't know, that thing's kind of befuddling me how it's gotten to the place it has.
I don't know that I fully understand it.
But as for the more general sense of things.
there is definitely going to be a movement away from network television.
And it's not...
All right, guys, so Jim, can you just...
I do want to jump in because, yeah, there will be a movement away from...
So I think this can of worms is not that interesting slayman.
I do want to start focusing on the guests that Jim brought.
So maybe, Jim, since you're speaking,
maybe you can introduce Lieutenant General Mike Flynn...
who's be coming on in six minutes.
Rudy Giuliani will be rescheduling for another day,
but Michael Flynn will be joining us.
Jim.
Yeah, so I think one of the things to remember about Michael Flynn
is that he's been involved in prior to his,
and I'll say what he did in the Obama and Trump administration,
but prior to that time,
he spent a lot of years in military intelligence,
He's been involved in some key things that have happened in how the United States engages around the world.
And so he has a very long history in that regard.
And so therefore, he's got a lot of interesting perspectives.
I know that a lot of people...
see him in a, you know, kind of being controversial or whatever, for whatever reason.
But the fact is he's very intelligent, very capable.
Barack Obama brought him in, I think, his DNI to Director of National Intelligence,
and then let him go after a while because he had some criticisms about the Obama administration.
But then...
Donald Trump brought him in. He supported Donald Trump in his run in 2016, eventually brought him in to the, into the administration there, and he's come in. So thanks, General Flynn.
And so there, and everyone knows about the issue of his early departure, how the FBI, Peter Struck in particular, came in and,
kind of snake some things in there which caused controversy but
General Flynn is tremendously capable
and influential important figure
in American Guards. Can I just say one thing? One in a second?
In a sec, just in a sec, Nicholas. General, I think it's the first time
joining us. So first I want to welcome you and then give the mic to slam an end to also do an intro
after Jim. But pleasure to have you for the first time, General.
Mr. Finn, you've got a mute bottom left corner.
Just click on the mic button.
Yeah, I got it.
I got it.
Okay, yeah, hey, really appreciate being here and ready to go.
Slaman.
Yeah, yeah, thanks for joining us.
I'm much appreciated.
So obviously, General Flynn's got a large history, as Jim said.
And then he was more recently appointed to the Trump administration that was short-lived.
And then after that, and more recently, you've been writing a book.
Is that right, General Flynn?
Yeah, we actually, I'm a writer of four books, actually, two bestsellers.
And the most one that I'm excited about,
The most recent one that I'm excited about is our Citizens Guide to Fifth Generation Warfare with Boone Cutler, a great friend of mine.
I know Boone's on here somewhere.
And we have another one that's about to come out.
So we did Session 1, Citizens Guide to Fifth Generation Warfare.
And session two is going to be a follow-on to that,
Citizen's Guide of Fifth Generation Warfare, Artificial Intelligence.
And I think it's going to be mind-blowing.
And, you know, there's been some great work.
Boone and I did some great work on it this past weekend to kind of get it to about 99% level.
And then we just got to package it up.
We hopefully will have it out in about a month.
So General, I want to kick it off with a very broad question.
Slam and Nick have got a lot of questions themselves.
But I want to talk about the world we live in today.
I look at myself as someone who is very naive.
I'm just going to mute your general,
and then you can unmute whenever you speak,
just because there's a bit of background noise on your hand.
So just press the button, the mic button before speaking.
So I was pretty naive, you know, just a couple of years ago, obviously, before the Ukraine war.
I thought with the world we live in today, the internationalization of the world, a risk of direct or indirect conflicts between any of the large militaries is extremely unlikely, close to impossible.
I did not expect what happened in Ukraine, I'm sure others did.
And it kind of came to a shock.
for me and for others.
And now we're seeing the tensions in China with Taiwan.
And people are talking.
We saw the leak just a few, a couple of years ago.
I can't remember what it was from Mike Minnehan,
a leak document regarding his concerns
between the conflict between the US and China.
So I want to get an update,
just kind of an insight from your end about
About the world we live in today, are we overreacting?
How concerned should we be?
What are the risks of any direct conflicts between any of the large superpowers?
We're talking about China, Russia and the US.
I've got a lot more questions about AI, but I want to start there if you're in mind, General.
You've got to unmute, bottom left, call, please.
Thanks.
Cool.
Thank you.
Yeah, so it's a big question, and I'll try to be as complete and brief as possible.
We're at a huge crossroads right now.
So when you say the world, I'm going to bring it to America first,
and then I'll talk about the, you know, sort of the globe and the global alliance that's formed,
formed, not forming, formed against America.
So America is at a place right now where...
We have, if we project ourselves to 2024 and we have the same outcome as 2020 and 22, then America, as we know it, is done.
And that's a big statement, but I am, you know, I am one to have studied world history, the rise and fall of nation states.
You know, we can talk about Athens. We can talk about Rome. We can talk about the, you know, the Byzantine Empire, if you want.
But we are meeting all of the indicators and warnings for the decline of a nation state.
like I've never seen in, and I never, ever thought that I would see in my lifetime.
And it is all, it's all down to,
who controls the levers of power in the United States of America.
And we can get into maybe questions.
We can get into the unrestricted nature of warfare
because it's, you know,
one of the most important unrestricted components of warfare
is economic warfare.
And if you haven't been paying attention,
there's another, you know, another mid-sized bank that collapsed
and we're having a consolidation system.
which is the phrase too big to fail.
We're having a consolidation here in the United States
to probably four banks.
And so if anybody that's on this that remembers
summer of 2008, or 2008,
summer of 2008,
only a few months later,
the entire financial system collapsed.
So we're in one of those places right now.
I'm not going to say that the financial system
is going to collapse,
but I will tell you that we are in a place where
financially, globally, we are shifting from and off of the U.S. dollar.
So without going through all of the, you know, the borders collapse in, you know, drug overdoses, crime on the streets, you know, a...
a two-party system where one of the parties is completely co-opted by a Marxist movement,
and the other party is lost in the woods, okay?
You know, I can address as many of those questions that I can get to.
But the other side is the globe, so the wars that you're talking about.
And, you know, we are now talking about, and the war in Ukraine didn't start a couple of, you know, years ago, or started in 2014.
Actually, if you go back to 1939, but it started for sure in 2014, the February of 2014, to be specific.
And in fact, February 28th, to be very specific, was right after the Sochi Olympics, was when the first time that Russia attacked the two Donbassas and the Crimea.
And that's been going on and festering.
It stopped.
It stopped after the Obama administration.
It just stopped.
And then it kicked back in when the Biden administration came in and now we are talking about the use of nuclear weapons, which should not be addressed at all.
They should never be on the table for this.
General Flynn, just to go on.
In your view, why did it stop during President Trump's administration, which is what you're alluding to?
Because of uncertainty in Putin's mind.
Okay, because of uncertainty in Putin's mind.
When you don't know what your, you know,
what the other side will potentially do,
then you have to check yourself and hold and see where things go.
They didn't leave the Donbassas.
They didn't leave Crimea.
They just didn't put any more pressure there.
And frankly, one of the things that Trump was able to do
was he kept NATO from this constant,
you know, idea of expanding, okay?
And, you know, I could go into the Partners for Peace Agreements.
Yeah, yeah. I've got a couple of questions on you for you on that.
Sorry, go ahead. Sorry, go ahead.
I was going to say about China, because that's just one piece of the world, okay?
Yeah.
China is the other side, and China is encroaching on things called air defense engagement zones,
air sea engagement zones.
So the sea lines of communication, the airlines of communication.
China has been pushing and pushing and pushing and talk about going up to the line and crossing the line
in and around the sea of Japan, the South China Sea, in that area around Taiwan.
Because it's not about, Taiwan is not about, you know, technology and chips, which everybody always read about, well, you know, Taiwan, you know, makes 75% of the world's chips.
That's all bullshit.
Taiwan is about that, that whole issue out there is about one China.
and it goes back to the days of Chiang Kai Czech and Mao Zedong where they they actually fought
together and then they had a breaking apart and and Mao made it his you know his life to say I am
not going to let you know Chiang Kai check get away with that and he did for that for his lifetime
and and there's only been really there's been six leaders since Mao in China where you now have
Xi for life but there's really only been four there's
There's really only only been four leaders.
Each one of those leaders has gotten stronger and stronger.
And in Jee's case, what he's done is he's made the Chinese economy.
Right now, it's probably the, you know, it's probably, it's still second,
but it's really close to being the strongest economy in the world.
And that, without firing a shot, without firing a shot,
China basically dominates the United States of America right now in many, many respects.
So, I've got...
Yeah, go ahead, Nick.
I'm going to, I've got, yeah, I'm going to geek out.
I've got so many questions.
Do you want to go first, Nick, and I'll go after you, or do you want me to go first?
Well, actually, you know what?
You go first.
You're probably the same question.
Real quick, Mario, can you look for what I just sent you in a message behind the scene there?
Thanks.
Sure, of course, I'll check it out.
General, I'm just going to ask you a question.
I'll check Jim's message.
Okay.
So you've touched on many points and many points of concern.
You've touched on AI, which we'll talk about in a bit.
You've touched on the risk of the de-dollarization risk that has been dominating the narrative in the finance world for the last few months.
The economic warfare and the concept of too big to fail, we talked about the Ukraine war and obviously the tensions in China.
The last point you talked about was Taiwan.
And you hinted at China catching up to the US and the risk of China becoming more powerful militarily than the U.S.,
How did that happen so quickly?
And is it really, is it genuinely close to the U.S.
outspends China and has been outspending China for so long?
Well, let me just say it like this.
If we outspend the next 10 countries on education combined.
And yet we're like number 30 in developed nations around the world in education,
in elementary and secondary education.
Okay.
So that that stat ought to tell you everything you want to know about the rise of the Chinese military
and the direction that the Chinese military has gone.
Between now, you know, between 2020 and 2030,
We're going to see a China that doesn't put aircraft carriers in the Persian Gulf.
They don't put aircraft carriers in the Med.
They don't put aircraft carriers in the Atlantic.
They put them out in the Pacific.
And so people will go, well, we have, you know, 10 aircraft carriers.
They're not all at sea, you know, all the time.
China right now, and I would say in the next two years, probably three years,
China will likely have three aircraft carriers, which is a big, big deal.
And then you put all the, you know, the corvettes and the destroyers and all the other types of air,
of naval craft.
In addition...
to submarines, the subsurface fleet,
and people, you know, the guys in the Navy or veterans will go,
well, they got diesel, yeah, they got a shitload of them.
And they also have, they're also developing
nuclear capabilities undersea.
So how do they get there so fast?
When you build something, in the United States, we'll build a great capability, okay?
We'll take 10 years.
The contractors will make it go 20 years because they can soak the taxpayers for money.
But we'll take 10, 15, 20 years.
I mean, there's all kinds of examples of that.
And we'll build a really top of the line supersonic capability that's extraordinary.
And what the Chinese do is they steal the blueprints and they go build it at a tenth of price in probably even that less time.
And they've done that in a few times.
few serious capabilities. And that's that's because of our own foolishness, honestly. It's our,
it's the problems that we have. And it's when you look at China, I mean, why wouldn't they do that, right?
We have to get smarter at what it is that we are doing as a nation.
And frankly, the last thing I'll tell you, just so I put this on the table, these endless wars that we are involved in and all these, you know, there's neo-cons meaning conservatives and there's neoliberals, meaning people on the left that love these endless wars.
Right.
And until we stop these endless wars, we're in this cycle that is a that is a tailspin heading downward to a massive crash.
And that crash could be the end of this country.
Yeah.
So that's what I want to do.
General Flynn about that issue.
Because you mentioned that China took over the world without lifting a weapon.
Now, a part of that reason is because of the US foreign policy, you know,
invading into many countries such as Iraq and basically, you know, foreign wars.
And China didn't have to go through that.
So essentially, isn't it, isn't it that it's the United States own the fact,
it's because of the military industrial complex that United States are in this situation in the first place?
Yeah, so a couple of things.
You know, so for those that remember or know, you know, that was an Eisenhower statement, right, Dwight D. Eisenhower.
He warned about the military industrial complex.
John F. Kennedy, before he was killed, he warned about the, really what I call the security state complex.
And specifically, he was warned about the CIA.
And now we have the censorship complex, right?
Which was really, I thought, Michael Schellenberger, who did some of the Twitter stuff,
did an extraordinary job, him and Taibi.
We've covered it all here very, very closely.
We've watched it also.
So I agree with you.
Those are super, super important.
So what we have done is our country, our bureaucracy,
the complexes that we just, that I just highlighted, they are all sort of in one level, in one
bin. And the longer we stay in a conflict, you know, like I tell guys, and I wrote an article
about this back in the early 2000s, okay, where I said that we have gotten, we get an A plus
for participating in wars, but we get an F for winning them.
And any crisis, you go back to 2000, whatever years, to go back to Sun Su.
Sun Su is one of the, he's really the original military theoretician.
And he says any war that doesn't,
you know, result in victory and instead results in a prolonged affair is a loser for that side
that prolongs that. You know, in Afghanistan, just to give you one example, one specific example,
in Afghanistan, we spent more money in Afghanistan than we spent on the reconstruction of Europe
after World War II in today's dollars. So, you know, the so-called Marshall Plan, right? The Marshall
Plan that rebuilt Europe after the total destruction of Europe,
We spent more money in Afghanistan and look at where we stand there, right?
Nowhere.
So we're in a, we're in a different place.
We're in an unprecedented place.
And everything that I'm talking about is all part of what we're on here tonight, really,
to talk about it, which is this idea of fifth generation warfare.
I mean, the Chinese have been masterful, masterful at infiltrating
every institution of our country, you know, and I don't know all the people that are on here,
whether some of you are from America or not, I'm assuming that most are.
But, you know, so when I say our country, I'm talking about America.
the United States of America.
So they have been masterful at that.
They have also been able to grow very rapidly,
very rapidly in the last 20, really two decades,
two and a half decades.
I mean, the Chinese right now,
I think for those that understand the Belt Road Initiative,
the Belt Road Initiative is now in 141 countries
on damn near every continent.
Okay, 141 countries,
the,
The extension of the Belt Road initiative, Chinese are touching 141 countries.
Roughly 80 to 85% of all major ports globally either are controlled by or have the Chinese
have some measure of control over 85% of the ports, the major ports around the world.
So...
They've been doing all this stuff for the last 25 years while we've been participating in a never-ending war in the Middle East and Central Asia, which I have a lot of.
a lot of experience in.
And you know,
it's,
and you can argue about,
you know,
what did you do when you needed,
when you could have done something?
Believe me,
we said a lot of things.
General Flynn,
just on that,
I mean,
isn't that the whole issue
that basically the US
spent so much money
on basically fighting
against farmers or people
who couldn't really,
in the entirety,
ever be a real threat
for the United States.
And while that was happening,
Russia and China
have basically become dominant.
Yeah. You know, anybody that wants to read about, you know, the, the overextension of the Macedonian Empire or Peter the Great or the Athenian Empire and the Roman Empire, if you want to go there, the Persian Empire, all of them.
One of the major indicators of all of their failures was, or their collapses,
was the overextension of their empires.
They overextended themselves.
And that overextension resulted in debt, heavy, heavy debt.
Athens is a great example of where America is, the end of Athens.
The end of the Athenian Empire is a great example.
It's not perfect, but it's a great example of where the American Empire is right now.
And just basically it's a, it's severe, severe debt, severe overreach on foreign policy and
foreign affairs and jaunts around the world to, to God knows, you know, for what reason,
to know, for no real objectives.
You know, and that's kind of where we are.
You know, if anybody on this, on this broadcast here can tell me what the objectives are of this
administration for Ukraine.
You know, the senile buffoon sitting in the White House, you know, and I'll call him out, you know.
He hasn't gotten up on a teleprompter somewhere and said, here are the top, here are the three objectives that we have that are, you know, vital national security interests of the United States of America to be involved in in this mess that we're involved in.
And to get off the stage on this point, and you have China cutting deals between the Saudis,
Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and the Islamic Republic of Iran.
And you also have the Chinese, looks like they're cutting a deal between Russia and Zelensky and Ukraine.
So is China the new leader of the peace movement, global peace movement?
It looks that way.
So General, you would attribute that to this, you know, because we've heard a lot about China and bricks.
That's been a huge topic that has come up here recently.
A lot of people, a lot more people using the yuan.
I know obviously Russia is now using the yuan to do a lot of the trade and actually surpassed the U.S.
dollar in trade for Russia.
And that just came out a few days ago.
But, I mean, how do you reverse this de-dollarization here?
I mean, is this something...
You believe that this is happening because of Joe Biden being in the White House and that's why it was accelerated?
Yeah, it's intentional.
Okay, so don't, you know, and you, you know, and I don't know a lot of you guys.
I'm not sure I know any of you, but I'm just, I get people that that give me this sort of surprised, you know, like they're surprised that this is happening.
Like, how can we be here?
How could this happen?
Yeah.
And this is very intentional.
There's nothing unintentional about what is happening to the United States of America right now.
So the de-dollarization, and I don't know if you guys have talked about this on previous of these,
but there's something called Executive Order 14067, okay?
Executive Order 14067, for those that are writing it down.
It is essentially the central bank digital currency.
That actually was signed by Biden in March of last year.
So a little over a year ago, it went into effect in December.
this past December, and they beta tested it with government organizations and some corporations.
So the idea of moving to a digital currency is not new.
It's been, you know, really the advent of cryptocurrency, but that's a, you know, there's a lot of nonsense there.
But this idea of a central bank digital currency where we move to a, to an, and I'm trying to get the right word, but like an equity based
an equity-based system, meaning everybody kind of has the same amount of money, everybody's
going to have the same amount of money, or the government is going to control your money
in an equitable way. That's what the Chinese do right now. The Chinese system, there
their social credit system is severe.
It's severe.
We're moving to that kind of a system.
So, again, read Executive Order 14067.
You'll understand what I'm talking about with Central Bank digital currency.
This isn't some Chinese thing.
This is the United States of America under this administration that's signed off on it,
and is moving us toward that.
So we are moving away from the U.S. dollar as the currency of choice for global trade
and global goods and services around the world to something different.
And it's going to look like what the Chinese currently have.
Very, very dangerous.
General, I want to shift just a little bit here because you did have an extensive military career.
You're 33 years in the U.S. Army, served as a director of the Defense Intelligence Agency.
And so Ukraine, I want to go to that a little bit.
We saw Pentagon papers that were released, that were leaked several weeks ago now,
that talked about the possible U.S. strategy and different intel that was being collected on
on the Russian advancements and, you know, what their plans were.
In general, what were your thoughts on those?
Do you think that they were real?
Russia seems to not even think that these were...
And on that point, just breaking news a few minutes ago, while the general speaking, Zelensky said that the White House told him nothing about the leaks.
So he had no communication from the White House on the leaks.
Just interesting, came out by the Washington Post a few minutes ago.
Yeah, interesting.
You know, and that doesn't surprise me, whoever said the Sule.
Sule, I guess you said that maybe.
But that doesn't surprise me that Zolensky's in the dark.
I mean, he's been in the dark from the beginning.
So, you know, I have to, I have not seen, well, I'm aware of those papers.
I have not read them.
And the reason why I haven't read them is because there's a whole bunch of reasons why.
Part of it is because, you know, if, because it's still classified information, you know, so,
and it's not a matter of me not talking about, you know, something that's, you know, that I,
that I can analyze and understand and talk about. It's just, I, I,
I want to be able to look at things as they are happening and not look, look at the bullshit that comes out on leaks or, or from, from, you know, fake media, you know, international fake media or very various.
And I say fake.
It's really just bias.
It's incredibly biased media.
Some of which, most of which actually is censored.
So, you know, what do I think is happening in Ukraine?
And I've been saying this from the beginning.
And I said it before.
This engagement started because you could tell that the engagement was going to start.
People can go to my website, general flin.com, and read all the articles that I've written about the war in Ukraine.
This is a, this should have never happened.
It should have never happened.
Number one, because it did happen, and here we are.
This is a losing fight for Ukraine.
It is a-
How would you resolve this?
Well, it's a winning, I was going to say it's a winning fight for the military industrial complex, which also includes the NATO military industrial complex.
So don't just think that, you know, the Beltway bandits around Washington, DC are the only military industrial complex.
NATO has a gigantic complex.
And the money just keeps flowing in and flowing in.
So as long as we prolong the conflict, you know, at the expense of civilians and, you know, the expense of people dying, sadly, tragically, then the...
the monopolies that control that and the people that control those levers of power,
whether they're presidents, prime ministers, you know, or dictators,
they just, they love having this.
They want to foment more war.
And fomenting war and keeping Russia as a boogeyman is good for, you know,
the war, the bank, the bank accounts, so to speak.
War is a racket.
So how do you, how do you end it?
The first thing that you have to do,
And China's already done it.
Okay?
China's already moved into a place where they've cut one of the largest economic and military deals between them and Russia.
And they called up Zelensky and said, basically, you know, and I'm paraphrasing.
But they basically said, you know,
What do you want to do?
You want to die a young man or do you want to get out of this?
And maybe you can go into exile in some condo on the beach of the eastern shore of Maryland,
or go live in Florida or something.
I mean, the Chinese are so smart about this.
And they've already done this.
So they've already done this.
They're going to solve this problem.
And I can tell you that the White House...
So the leaders of Ukraine and Russia have entered into conversations in Washington, D.C., you know, inside the White House and inside the State Department, they're actually welcoming that dialogue, okay, because China is trying to de-escalate.
the nature of the war, which could really, really potentially move toward nuclear war.
So general, on that point there, and I know there's a few other panelists that want to ask you questions, but...
First, just some numbers.
In terms of manufacturing of military equipment,
U.S. is obviously number one at $732 billion.
China at number two.
And that's not military spending.
That's manufacturing and export.
Yeah, but, you know, I hate to tell you,
let me stop here because I can go through all those numbers.
And I apologize, because I'm going to run out of time here, guys.
And so I want to, but I want to stop on that.
Don't compare, you know, you,
Don't compare how much spending to each country.
Compare what actually they do.
So like if you compared the United States of America to a bunch of guys in shower shoes and bathrobes on the mountains and deserts of Afghanistan, there's no comparison.
Yet we retreated under fire.
Okay. So, so, so always be careful of those people that go, well, these spend, you know, one billion and these guys only spend, you know, one dollar, you know, so we should be able to beat them. It has nothing to do with that. It has nothing to do with, you know, the old adage of, you know, give me 300 and I can defeat three million. It's, it really, it's, it's what the objectives are.
It's what the purpose is.
It's the nation's willingness, which has nothing to do with dollars.
It has nothing to do with the number of tanks.
You know, most people don't know that the Germans, at the end of World War II, in the last month of the war for the Germans, they produce more tanks than they produce at any other time.
during World War II.
Because we weren't bombing the tank factories.
We were bombing cities.
We were burning cities to the ground in Europe
at the end of World War II
because we got to the point where
this war is never going to end.
We wanted to end.
And so we burn the cities of Germany
instead of destroying their military arsenals.
And we dropped two atom bombs on Japan.
The first one, the Japanese didn't surrender
and weren't going to surrender after the first one.
So it took a second one.
So, you know, this business about
about money. It's all really, to me, it's about willpower. And God, the best example is the
Taliban defeating the, you know, the greatest, not just America, but I think there was 49 nations
that were organized at the end of that conflict that were all under the NATO umbrella. You know,
so, so, you know, I, what, where I'm at with war is, is we don't need war.
And if you're going to go to war, you know, I'm not against war.
I'm just against stupid wars.
And right now we have stupid wars.
And we haven't even really, you know, I didn't touch on what's happening in the Middle East right now.
Because what's happening in the Middle East is very, very dangerous.
So I've got to ask, I'm going to take the last question, General.
We do have Mr. Cutler on stage.
So once you jump off, General, Mr. Cutler, who helped you write the book.
We'll be asking more questions if he's okay with it.
Mr. Culler, thanks for joining, man.
Thanks for having me on.
Yeah.
General, last question for you because I know you have to jump off is you did talk about China, you talked about Russia, we talked about the risks of a world war or nuclear conflict.
And then you talked about AI as well, which is very concerning.
And there's been some news today about regulators looking at how to regulate AI.
What would you say is what worries you the most over the next 10 years?
And worries in terms of, I'm going to go extreme and say for humanity, because there's concerns with AI and with the conflicts, the Ukraine conflict and the tensions in China that that could escalate to a global war.
You're mute to general, just in case you didn't know.
Okay, there we go. Sorry.
Oh, good.
I was going to say, one, I really deeply appreciate being on here,
and I apologize just because of my own, you know, piss poor scheduling.
I'm going to have to jump off here in a little bit.
But you just asked probably one of the most important questions
that I've heard asked in a long, long time.
And, you know, the idea is, you know,
It's the things that we're not thinking about. So in 10 years, 20 years, 30 years, the things that we're not thinking about or what we get wrong today. So when we project something, we plan something and we say, well, we're going to plan on this happening. You know, we're going to plan on inflation going down or gas prices going down or war is stopping. You know, if what we plan doesn't happen and we don't,
We don't have a scenario to deal with that.
Then we're in serious trouble.
And so 10 years ago, we didn't plan to be where we are today, 10 years ago.
10 years ago was 2013.
And in 2013, Russia wasn't invading Ukraine.
You know, we were in Iraq and Afghanistan, obviously, and we were really, you know, not doing well.
But 10 years ago, we weren't thinking about kind of these unthinkable things.
And so now you're asking a question about the same thing.
So what are the unthinkable things?
And so I'm one of these people.
So as a, I'm against globalism.
Okay.
I'm against it.
if you were to ask me a set of ten questions, I'd probably fall somewhere left of center
in terms of my political ideology and how I think about things and, you know, how I think about
people and what their behavior is, which I don't really care about as long as you don't shove it
down my throat. But I do believe in, in, in,
in small government. I do believe in, you know, and I do believe in keeping prices down.
I mean, so all those kinds of things. But the unthinkable now where we're at, and this is why I'm
like, I'm adamant about, you know, don't be surprised. Like, why is this happening? Why would these
people want to destroy this beautiful country? Because that's what communism does. So the unthinkable
Unthinkable today, for most people, for many Americans, is that, well, America will never be a communist country.
It will never be a communist country.
Well, that's so why is that unthinkable?
And to me, that's not unthinkable.
My life, you know, my adult life, certainly my intelligence life and my life getting to the places where I ended up,
you know, even though, you know, I was, even though my time in the White House was short-lived
because of some, you know, just evil, but you don't get to those places because you're stupid.
You don't get to those places because you don't understand certain aspects of what is happening.
You know, you don't run an intelligence agency because, you know, you're kissing somebody's rear end.
I mean, sometimes it might happen, but it rarely does.
So what is the unthinkable?
The unthinkable is that America loses its shine.
It becomes second fiddle to a global alliance.
And I can tell you that, because one of you mentioned the bricks, bricks, right?
Well, the bricks right now is...
is you know brazil russia india china south africa but there are 10 other nations that are
i'm sorry i'm sorry there are 20 20 other nations that have expressed interest in joining the
bricks alliance 10 of those nations are as far as i'm concerned are already card carrying members
of the bricks alliance the bricks alliance alone is 47 percent of the global population
just the next 10 countries that I know are, you know, have joined and certainly are, they're not in the camp of what Joe Biden says about, well, the world is against Russia.
Well, the next 10 countries bring that number of global population up to just over, approximately over 70% of the global population.
So we have an alignment, a global alliance that has formed.
And the leader of that global alliance is China.
And the unthinkable when Barack Obama, as president, allowed the Chinese into the World Bank,
because the United States of America had to approve that.
And they allowed them into the world bank thinking that, oh, well, maybe we can, you know, like,
Like Kissinger, Nixon, all the way back and all through all presidents,
always say, well, if we just show them some more democracy,
they'll be Democrats, right?
Or they'll join the world of democracy.
That's not how it works, folks.
That's not how life works.
It's not how the world operates.
So the unthinkable is that the United States of America
becomes second fiddle or third fiddle,
and then an American form of socialism is,
begins to to seep in.
And as I sit here talking to you all tonight,
I mean, at some days I feel like,
some days I get up and I'm like ready to go to,
you know, I'm ready to charge and go get people
to become precinct volunteers or something, right?
But I, you know, and I do that.
But I am also trying to think strategically
and think and add in the idea of history
and how history can portend,
the future, we are looking at the next 10 years.
And in those next 10 years, at the end of it,
America could be essentially a quasi-communist nation led by an oligarch out of Washington,
D.C. that Boone and I call the Uniparty, right?
And that's not unthinkable to me anymore.
It's not.
Yeah.
You know, I mean, I could go on and on.
I do want to plug my website, general flin.com, for anybody that wants to go to it,
you can buy a signed copy of the 5th, 5th, GW, the fifth generation warfare book,
or you can go, or you can, you know, link yourself into Barnes & Noble.
I really want people, I want people to read it, and Boone will...
maybe Boone you can talk about how we're translating this into German, Hispanic, and I think French too coming up here very soon.
So look, guys, I'm sorry I got to split, but I really, really appreciate the great, great questions.
And I actually wouldn't mind doing this again.
Yeah, General, we do want to bring you back.
I will pin your book at the top as you jump off,
and I'll find a tweet and pin it at the top for people to go visit
and they can get a signed copy from your website.
So I'll put it in the nest for everybody.
Pleasure to have you.
Jim, thanks a lot for inviting the General.
And Boone, stay with us because we've got a lot of questions for you,
especially regarding the book and other things that we wanted to ask the General.
But Mr. Flynn, thanks a lot for joining us.
God bless. See you.
Bye bye.
Boone, just on what's been said so far, and I will go to the hands, there's a lot of hands
Did you want to add anything to what the general said before I asked my question?
Maybe I'll ask the last question I asked the general, is that with all the pointed
to concern that the general pointed to, and there's a lot of them, from Russia to China to
the risks of AI, what would you say is the risk that we should all be worried about in your opinion?
Well, I think it's kind of a, it's clumped together in a lot of ways because of, you know, this AI, and I'm going to call it a phenomenon at this time, because these, these Golem class AIs that are doing things that they're talking to each other, creating things people didn't tell them to create. And we really don't know where that whole situation lies. We can get deeper into that in just a moment. But for the most part,
People are just very, very unaware of, one, of how the world works.
You know, in America, I think we've been very sheltered.
We've been very comfortable.
We have, we've been very isolated.
There are very few Americans who actually go to different places and have to live the standard of living in those places and understand how governments work and understand how truly...
you know other people don't look at things through these rose-colored glasses like americans do and i
think that's a problem because as you know it's what do you mean what do you mean what do you mean
what do you mean americans look through rose-colored glasses
I mean, Americans are very caught up, and I'm not taking anything away from Americans.
I'm an American myself, obviously.
But Americans, and I think people in general, too, but especially in America right now,
I don't think most Americans really realize when they feel like their head is on the chopping block,
and they feel like, hey, everything's kind of crazy right now, but they don't understand why.
They just know that they feel a certain way, but they don't have the words for it.
And this is why, you know, primarily why General Flynn and I got together on these last two books within the Citizens God of Fid Generation Warfare is because there was a massive amount of confusion to how the work.
And what it really boiled down to was people don't understand how things really work, what forces are at play and what the intention of those forces are.
You know, Americans like, like you were talking about the, you know, what is unforeseeable?
What is the, what is the thing that is coming?
Well, Americans, you know, the people in your neighborhood, you know, the people you see it at the Denny's, you know, they're sitting there and they're enjoying their meal and they've got feelings for how things feel.
But they really don't understand that there is a mechanism at play that is changing the culture.
They know it's changing.
They don't like certain things.
They disagree with certain things.
They like to argue about certain things.
But they don't see that there's a plan in play.
And they don't see that there are entities that are specifically there.
I mean, they're professional revolutionaries within the Uniparty, you know, specifically, which is a Vanguard party, that are there for specific reasons to change the United States.
And even if they do understand that, they don't understand why.
They don't understand who.
They don't understand...
It's almost beyond our conception because of how things are taught in school, because how things are, our families have been comfortable for so long.
And this is a, this is a real problem.
So it's almost like America has to.
Brian, I'm just, yeah, there's just a lot of, man, I'm, good, Slaman, go ahead.
It's just, Boone, I'm just trying to say, you talk about Americans being comfortable,
rose-colored glasses, et cetera, but, but I'm just, I want to kind of dig into the,
the concerns that the general mentioned, for example, I'll push back on one in Slaman,
I'll give you the mic, and for the panelists, let's go to the panelists right after Sleman,
but for example, the general did mention about the NATO industrial complex,
military industrial complex,
First, Simon, do you agree with this concern that the military industrial complex goes beyond the US?
Because I know that Patrick does, I saw him give the 100% emoji.
What do you think, Simon?
Yeah, yeah.
I mean, when I was asking those questions, I thought he's in a...
So what?
I thought he said, I disagree and I wanted to...
So you think there is a military industrial complex beyond the US, NATO military industrial complex as well?
Of course, of course.
Okay, and why do you think that is?
So just look at the, even just from a very, very basic level rather than going complex,
just look at the level of...
of the, again, of the level of weaponry, the level of finances that are just coming from NATO
country, just specifically.
So let me give you numbers.
I don't know if it is true or not.
I have no idea.
I've never looked into it.
But let me give you some numbers before we go back to Boone.
Germany, so the US spent $732 billion.
I'm not talking about on their own military.
That's the manufacturing, how much they manufacture, based on chat GPT.
US, $732 billion.
that number one china's number two at 261 billion russia's number three at 65 billion okay
number four in terms of military equipment manufacturing is germany germany is at 11 billion
that's the biggest one in nato the top three in nato germany france and the uk
If you add them all up, it's below 30 billion.
The US alone is 732 billion.
So I think there could be a military industrial complex beyond the US, but it's just, it's minuscule.
Like, it's just so small to the US.
I don't know where you get your, I don't know where you get your information to make such a statement beyond that.
No, no, I agree with you.
No, no, listen, bro, again, the problem with you is you deal with absolutes.
So the issue is this, in terms of the military industrial complex being global, it is in terms of the level of impact it has, obviously the United States is basically the senior partner and the others are very, very much junior partners in this.
And even in little, like the United States is a senior partner and the other ones are like significantly junior partners.
And Boone, so I had a question on that for you.
And then I'm going to go to Patrick because I know he wants to talk about the specific issue as well.
For sure.
Yeah.
And it was more specific question.
So I'm kind of changed the question a little bit,
which is, so then I'll go back to Patrick.
But one thing General Flynn said,
and obviously I wasn't asking the question,
but we just ran out of time,
is he said that the reason why the U.S.,
the reason why nothing happened in Ukraine and Russia
were during Trump's time was that,
essentially he alluded to the fact that Putin was afraid of Trump
or what he would do.
But the way it was framed, it sounded like,
they were afraid because Trump's like a madman.
You just don't know if he's going to do something crazy.
So is it because he is a madman,
you don't know if he's going to do something crazy?
Or is it because he's a good negotiator?
He had good in the relations with these foreign nations leaders.
Like, what is it?
You're saying what is it about Trump that kept Putin in a box?
Yeah, yeah.
So is it that he was afraid this guy's a madman, he might just bombers.
Or is it that actually Trump was a good negotiator?
He had good relations with them.
And so therefore there was this kind of common understanding between the two.
Well, the appearances that they did have an understanding with each other,
that they did have some sort of dialogue.
They did have some sort of diplomacy, you know, personal diplomacy.
Yeah, that is the interpretation between what we saw.
But we also have to look at Trump as an individual.
He came in from outside.
I'm not adding to the question before you answer it.
But first, let's just ask, is that the case?
Because it wasn't Crimea annexed while Trump was president?
Well, where's what I'm saying?
I'm going to get back to answering the question that was asked.
And I think that the issue is that the relationship there is Putin got what he wanted when Trump
became president. And that was someone who was from outside, someone who did not have alliances
politically, that would have conversations. And at the same time, because he didn't have these
alliances in different places, he knew he could be held accountable in a way that other
presidents maybe would not, because simply put, he did not.
owe anybody anything.
So he could do what he want to do.
He is more independent and he could hold Putin accountable.
Now, everything else that you're going to throw at me, I'm going to still say under this one
umbrella is, I think, the truth and the facts of the situation.
He came from a place to where he didn't owe anybody and nobody owed him.
Therefore, he was the juggernaut.
And that juggernaut is willing to go deep.
Look what he did to Soleimani.
I mean, nobody has taken, has taken a hit like Iran took a hit when Trump hit
when Trump hit Soleimani.
I mean, this was a, this was a state leader.
He was a very respected man.
It's, it's normally not something that happens.
You know, we like to play, you know, so we like to play war with soldiers.
We don't actually like to go after state leaders.
So this is an issue.
So regardless of what buttons or what moves Putin was making, you know, having in your mind that this guy doesn't play by the normal rules causes hesitation.
And that hesitation was evident because as soon as Trump wasn't around, look what Putin did.
There was no more hesitation.
And let me just correct,
let me correct something else said.
So, yeah, Crimea was an accent.
Crimeo was an ex.
Let me, let me fix it, bro.
Before I press the remove, co-host,
about to press it, about to press.
Let me just say, bro.
So, Crimea, so chat, GPT kind of fucked me here.
Crimea was annex in 2014, obviously, under Obama.
Yeah, it was before.
It was before.
So it just illustrates the point again.
And now I've answered my question.
answered the question, which was, you know, how did Trump, how did Trump's presence keep Putin in a box?
Because Trump was not playing by all the rules that everybody else was playing. And
And again, obviously, I'll point to him hitting Soleimani.
That was a big deal.
When was the last time you saw something like that?
And they know who Trump is.
They know they're monitoring him.
They're all over him.
I mean, everybody's all over everybody in this digital age.
People know what's going on.
And that in and of itself is a tale tale sign.
That's the impact indicator that Putin wasn't going to play these games because
you knew what type of man Trump was.
And that's what's called leadership.
This is what we're missing.
This is what we're missing right now.
If tomorrow Trump was president again, if that happens again, you're going to see the bullshit
cease immediately.
Whether that's a great thing or whether that's a horrible thing, we don't know yet.
We do know it's going to be different and we do know the bullshit's going to cease because
this man, Trump...
does not play by the normal rules.
And where have the normal rules gotten us?
Right now it's gotten us in a world of hurt.
I mean, all over on all fronts.
We may lose everything if we don't get a strong leader that is America first in office.
So I just wanted to just say one thing.
So I get what you're saying, but I think the other side would say that the reason why Putin wasn't as much of a problem under Trump is that Trump pretty much gave Putin everything he wanted.
I see what you're saying.
And I'll even agree with you.
I mean, the moves that Trump made with NATO obviously benefited Putin.
You can't say it didn't.
But it also benefited the United States.
You see what I'm saying?
It didn't, it wasn't a one-dea, it wasn't a, it wasn't a one-way thing.
It tremendously benefited the United States.
So, so I mean, I think that depends what, how you view NATO and how you view the NATO alliance.
I, I, I.
I think it's something that you're going to have different arguments on both sides.
Yeah, but one thing, let me throw in here real quick.
One thing about the NATO under Trump is that Trump pressed NATO to spend more money on their defense.
Like he did...
Even though he certainly gave threatening tones about breaking up NATO,
what ended up happening is strengthening the NATO alliance.
In fact, I'm personally convinced, and I'm not an expert on this,
but I just observed these things, having been in government.
I'm of the opinion that Joe Biden could not have had during...
this run up in Ukraine, the kind of cooperation with NATO unless Trump had set the state.
Jim, on that point, just saying, a President Obama in 2014 called on NATO members to increase their defense spending to 2% of their GDP.
President Trump criticized NATO members for not spending enough on defense during his presidency and push for an increase in spending.
And Joe Biden did the same, emphasize the importance of NATO members meeting their defense spending commitments.
I have a question.
Are you reading from Chad Beach, GPD again?
No, no, I'm reading from an article.
Okay.
Well, hold on, did I say, hold on, Boon, before you take a jab at Chad, GPD, anything I said, that's incorrect, Boone.
I don't know.
What about you just...
Okay, so maybe respond to anything I said instead of responding to chat GPT or what the source is.
No, no, the reason I was asking for another issue that has to do with the Degeneration warfare,
but I'm not trying to get you off track or get your panties in a burn.
No, so the only point, yeah, the only point I wanted to make is that other presidents have also pushed for NATO.
And I've kind of pushing back on it.
But did it happen?
Yeah, and one thing to throw in there, Mario, I mean, yeah, you're right about Obama.
I don't recall Biden calling for that, but maybe he did.
But here's the point.
Trump threatened...
And by, made it clear by saying, hey, listen, we just need to maybe get away from NATO.
By the way, from a policy perspective, I think there's something very interesting and substantive about him having said that, whether he meant it substantively or not.
But what happened was the threat of pulling out of NATO made NATO members actually spend more money.
Like they did increase their spending.
Under Obama, that never happened because he wasn't strong about it.
And that happened in NATO members.
So in 2014, they did increase the defense spending and they did it.
I think it was a summit in Wales.
It was in Aberrith.
If I'm not mistaken.
It was in Aberrins, Mario.
Okay, so there's your, there's the correction to what you just said, Jim.
And it happened also, yeah, hold on, hold on, Piot.
In 2019, they did it as well, 2020.
But we're kind of moving off topic.
I want to kind of bring it to the point that Boone is making,
and I think what Slaman was pushing back on is,
how much of an impact will Trump have if he does become president on the war in Ukraine?
And maybe also we can move to the tensions in China, because those are pretty serious as well.
And before you jump in Piach, maybe Patrick, you could take that question first,
and then we'll go to Piotr because I know we tried to go to you a couple of times.
Patrick, Patrick, while you're answering as well, you can fact check Mario as well and chat GP2.
Go ahead, right.
You've got to be careful about just Mario with chat, GBT, because it does, it's been known to drink on Tuesday evenings and reads a lot of Wikipedia.
It's selective, yeah.
You're welcome.
I think it's just how you prompt it, and you ask for sources as well.
So I always ask for sources prompted the right way.
But I just fact-checked two things.
If you want to correct anything I said, Patrick, you're free to do so.
But I corrected two things that were said.
No, I've not jumped into chat DPD.
I'm a virgin. I have not gone there yet.
Okay, no problem.
But it's been a lifesaver because I can just fact-check things on the spot and ask for the source.
For example, when NATO increased spending, so I just gave a couple of years and exactly where the meeting happened.
But just going back to the question regarding the war in Ukraine and tensions in China, could we really see a change if Trump becomes president?
I think so. I really think so. I believe so because one of the problems, I mean, I don't want to get into the complicated geopolitics of it, but just on a, I like looking at the pure politics of it. And one of the problems with Washington right now is a severe lack of political leadership.
And there's a pushback by the establishment, not just in America, but globally against populist leaders.
And let's be honest, on the left and the right, have been shot down in various different ways through lawfare and other means.
And I think the establishment, the transnational establishment, the globalists, if you will, those people who make decisions for the country behind closed doors, they're terrified by the idea of populism.
Trump represents that in America, what a populist president or leader is able to do is to go and
negotiate on behalf of the country and to do so in the national interests of the country.
And what do you see time and time again is look at the U.S. right now, look at the U.S.
waging clearly a proxy war against Russia and Ukraine, leading NATO in that effort.
Okay.
Is that really in the American interest?
Now, look at Russia. What Russia is doing is that in the Russian national interest.
I would contend, and I would ask this to General Flynn as well, I'll put it to Boone afterwards,
but would you submit that Russia is actually acting in its national interest?
And would you then question or agree that the U.S. is actually acting in the national interests of the American people?
And I think this is an important question. And Germany is a good example, is what Germany doing and sort of falling in line with this whole reconfiguration of energy policy in Europe that has put it into a turmoil economic recession, skyrocketing fuel prices and utilities, German industry leaving the country because they can't afford to operate. Is that in the best interest?
of the German people is for the voters, for the electorate.
And we see a separation between the people and parliaments.
Parliamentary interests are one thing,
congressional interests or another.
And it's not just the military industrial complex.
This is like the military, Ray McGoverns got a good,
the Mickey Matt, the military industrial,
congressional, intelligence, media, academia think tank complex.
It's probably more accurate.
Right.
The same in Europe.
So we have this problem.
This is an international problem.
This is what I would call globalism.
And they confab at places like Davos to sort of instruct policy.
So I want to jump in because I think we're going slightly off topic, Patrick.
and I want to...
Can you let me finish...
Piotr...
No, no, not to be hostile, but I would like to wrap it up.
Okay, all right.
I would like to wrap it up.
Do you want to come in?
And let's have an orderly discussion.
Is that all right?
We are. We are.
All right.
Thank you.
Thank you, Pioter.
So I'm just illustrating the point,
doing a segue from what General Flynn was talking about
and the military industrial complex.
And so that's...
That's a point I would put forward.
So I think this is why Trump is important because he can override this.
Will he be allowed to do that?
We'll be allowed to negotiate with China directly to bring down tensions.
We'll be allowed to take office and make that happen.
It remains to be seen.
Okay.
David, I want to bring you in.
David, in terms of the same question to you, essentially, first of all, do you believe in this notion that Trump would be able to end the war?
Any thoughts on some of the world?
He might end the war, but for the side of Russia, that's what I believe in.
I mean, look back at Helsinki when he met with Putin behind closed doors.
What do you mean back before you finish, continue?
What do you mean on the side, Russia? And then please continue.
He's been pondering to Putin. He's been, he says, he respects Putin. He kisses Putin's ass.
I mean, come on. I mean, give me a break.
But David, this has been the narrative for years now, right?
And a lot of the...
We saw in the Twitter files is a lot of this stuff was debunked.
A lot of it was, you know, fake.
I'm not talking about the Russian hoax.
I'm not talking about the election part.
I'm just talking about his pandering to Putin.
I mean, look at Helsinki.
He met with Putin behind closed doors,
and even today, and we still don't know what was said between the two.
I mean, history shows his connection to Putin.
So, yeah, I don't...
But as we also know that the...
I won't jump in because, like, I actually live in the country and I come from the area.
Yeah, yeah, we'll come to you in a second, Piotter, we'll go to the second.
Let David...
I mean, if...
And...
Next after Dave Patrick, but, okay.
No, no, he's a...
No, you were, bro.
I was.
David had his hand up for, like, about an hour.
I mean, he's at his handle for an hour, bro.
And I do...
If we go and hand order,
Peota, if we go and hand order,
you're literally...
I'm going to go.
I'm going to go.
I do...
I do want to make one more important point that...
I remember back when I was Republican,
I remember Mitt Romney warned us against Russia.
And, you know,
and I can understand why Republicans are concerned about the spending.
But, I mean...
Russia, Putin, has no right to invade a sovereign country.
That's what this whole thing is about.
I mean, what gives them the right to invade Ukraine?
So, Nicholas, you want to jump in.
He's David Bacon, the argument that essentially
Trump could get a peace treaty, but it's going to be very much pro-Russia.
He didn't explain what that was, but I assume he means, like,
almost given a lot of Ukraine to Russia.
Go ahead, Nick.
Well, we hear all this talk that, you know, Trump and Putin were in cahoots.
Nobody could point to anything where Russia benefited or Russia gave Trump something.
So it's completely ludicrous.
And the foreign policy of the last 30 years by all the foreign policy experts has been a disaster for the United States.
the reason it's been a disaster is because you have all these globalists going around
thinking that imposing your will is the way to go on other countries
when China is quietly investing in other countries, tying them up in loans,
when they can't pay back those loans, they take over critical infrastructure,
Here in the United States, we're run by short-term thinkers that want to sit here and preach about democracy and freedom, and yet we silence our own people.
So this idea that Trump is in collusion with Russia, no, Trump handled foreign policy differently and he had a lot more success on the world stage than most previous administrations.
And that's evident by the results.
Russia...
invaded, took over Crimea under Obama.
He didn't do anything throughout the Trump administration.
Biden gets into office.
Biden withdraws from Afghanistan.
It's a complete debacle, and I'm not saying we should have stayed,
but it's a debacle of a withdrawal.
And sure enough, Putin says,
now I can take the Ukraine, because look at the feckless United States.
We have short-term thinkers, as China has the most sophisticated espionage operation in the entire world,
is infiltrated just about every major college campus and research institution.
And we sit here, play games in the United States, talking about Putin and Russia or Putin and Trump are in collusion,
with no evidence to back that up.
Ben, I want to bring you in. I want your thoughts, because I have no idea what your position is going to be,
which is a good thing, because it means you're not like the rest where you kind of know the position on everything.
Go ahead, Ben.
Well, I mean, look, I'm not a geopolitical expert.
I tend to think that for whatever reason, yes, if Donald Trump was still president or these events wouldn't be unfolding, right?
My question was to Boone.
So I've witnessed something which I never thought I would see.
I'm originally from Israel.
And I never thought I would see the day in modern history where Iran and Saudi Arabia had amending of the ties, right?
Because many years ago...
I remember it was just Saudi Arabia and Iran were sworn enemies, right?
I mean, it was always the king of Saudi Arabia was repetitively saying,
cut the head off the snake, and now China stepped in to fill that void
and, you know, sort of re-forging of the ties.
I wondered if you could comment on that.
And secondly...
So you're a vet. My question would be this. Could you not potentially see the logic?
Yes, okay, let's assume that it's clearly a proxy war between Ukraine and Russia.
But people with much higher security clearances than you or I have made the determination,
based on I would argue, empirical evidence, that Russia is not an ally, but an adversary of the U.S.
And by funding Ukraine, you are indeed inflicting catastrophic losses in terms of manpower, prestige, military might,
and ammunition and weaponry to the Russian army,
and you're not using up a single U.S. life.
It's only costing money.
I'm not saying I agree with that,
but could you see the logic in that
that actually would be a wise investment on part of the U.S.?
Thank you.
Well, I appreciate your question.
Hopefully I'll be able to answer.
I mean, guys, I got to give you a heads up.
I do have to leave in about 15 minutes, and I apologize for that, but I want to get this question down.
First of all, about the, you know, the effectiveness of arming Ukraine to fight Russia because Russia is our enemy.
Right.
I understand that logic and I understand why we believe Russia is our enemy, but I'm not, I'm not, I don't consistently want to, I can't consistently convince myself that Russia has to continue to be our enemy.
Now, this makes a lot of people who are our allies nervous.
And we have to balance that.
And I think that can be rebalanced.
And I think that was being rebalanced under Trump with him saying, you know what?
If you guys want to do all this, well, then you go pay for it.
You know, we'll pitch in a bit.
But we're going to also have some other conversations with people like Putin to see if we can relax this a little bit.
We don't have to keep up in the ante all the time.
And I think that's a good thing.
I don't think anybody could think that's a bad thing.
Now, when you're talking about, now we're talking about, we get into the effects on people, you know, Putin going into Ukraine.
Okay, now let's back up just a little bit.
If I, if you, anybody here, anybody here is the leader of Russia.
And you have intelligence.
You have a belief.
You have a reason to act because you think NATO is going to go into Ukraine and then be on your border, more on your border through Ukraine.
If the United States, okay, thought people were going to mass on our border and they are our enemy, we would attack.
Now, we want to talk about, you know, what's happening now.
Like Russia's doing this, Ukraine's doing this, the U.S. has to support X, Y, and Z.
But people really are not talking about why the whole thing occurred and does it have credence?
Now, it may or it may not, but let's have that conversation.
If we thought we were going to be masked on our borders, we would probably do something to protect ourselves.
And I think that's the position of Russia and of Putin.
They mass on the borders.
They attacked because of the fear that NATO was going to be inside Ukraine,
and that was going to be more firepower against them.
Okay, not making excuses for them, just talking about the situation.
So now we get into the situation, like you said.
Isn't it smart that we're helping Ukraine fight Russia?
Again, going backwards, at what point...
Do we have the ability to say, okay, Russia is our enemy, but do they have to stay there?
Can we not change that situation?
And I think that's what Trump was trying to do.
You're going to have to remind me what your first question was because...
Yeah, just in terms of China stepping into the role of some type of mediator between Saudi Arabia and Iran.
Smartest thing in the world.
Smartest thing in the world China could do right now.
Absolutely.
Absolutely.
The smartest thing in the world they could do is take the position as the global leader for peace.
And this is a game.
This is all game.
The United States played that game for a long time.
We've lost that role.
Hopefully we can get it back sometime.
Okay.
But that's the smartest thing China could do, but it is a strategic move.
It has nothing to do with benevolence.
It is about getting control.
No different than the United States did.
This is the game.
This is how the game is played.
Yeah, absolutely.
Very fair points.
Thank you very much for your time.
Thank you, sir.
So, John, I want to bring you in.
I mean, in terms of David's question, David's point was that essentially when it comes to the...
uh russian ukraine war the only reason why trump is even claiming that he could get a peace treaty is because he'll give hughan everything he wants yeah um i think there's this really stupid idea in
certain branches of the diplomatic arm in the United States that talking to your enemies is somehow a bad thing, right?
And that was a huge criticism of Trump's foreign policy.
So, well, he talks to dictators, he's meeting with dictators, he's warm.
It is the absolutely most foolish idea that you should just ignore your enemies, right?
Like, we need to maintain dialogue. It doesn't matter who with.
It doesn't legitimize them.
It's just a pragmatic approach to foreign policy.
So I think that the point that I think it was David,
and I say this with the utmost respect,
but I think it was a little bit of a trumpet of nothingness
because the idea of,
that Donald Trump was somehow in cahoots with Russia
was is unsubstantiated conjecture, right?
So I would, I'd be happy to talk more about this,
but honestly I know that we have a guest here
and you know, call me old fashioned,
but I'm like the treating with the right of hospitality.
So Boone, if I could ask you a question,
I would love if you can maybe lay some light on some of the work that you've done with General Flynn.
He raised the comparison to the Athenian Empire, which I think was a strong one.
He kind of suggested that the United States would require a massive correction to get it back on course.
What would you say that correction looks like in your mind?
It may be to some extent you can...
shed some light on what that would look like in general Flynn's mind and specifically say like the five to 10 year time span because I think he spoke a lot about the concrete short term steps but in terms of the longer time span what would that look like thank you no thank you and I'm happy to answer this now I will I'm going to warn everybody before I even get started I'm probably going to talk in a context and frame of reference that is it is probably not common
Because this is my wheelhouse. General Flynn and I, you know, when we work together, we work together basically in two different strata. You know, he's the three-star general who works from the, from the 50,000 foot view. And I'm the sergeant who was the psychological operations who works on the eye-to-eye view, you know, the touch level, the face-to-face level.
And so that's why the books are so popular and they resonate with so many people is because we combine both those things.
The Intel, the Sciop, the high level and the low level, we smashed it all together and basically started writing military manuals.
The average 19-year-old at Home Depot can read and understand and have a good grasp of what's happening in the world.
It also gives people the ability to develop language for the things they feel, but they don't understand.
So that's where that comes from.
And that's the relationship between myself and General Flynn.
And it came about this way because I was traveling in the country speaking mainly to veteran groups.
Veteran advocacy has been my space for the last 10 years.
And so I've been talking to veteran groups and traveling doing that.
And he's been talking to different groups.
And we found ourselves in a hallway one day talking about how no matter what we talk about, people are always pulling us aside with this level of confusion about what's happening around them, what's happening in their life, how their families are being torn apart, how they feel like their neighbors are really, you know, they don't talk to their neighbors.
And there's this infighting within the United States amongst people.
And both of us started talking about that and then came up the topic, well, what we're really talking about is the effects of fifth generation warfare.
And so when you ask me, you know, what can be done?
What should the focus be to get our country back on track?
The first thing that needs to be done is we need to start accepting the fact we are a nation state and we need to act like it.
We are a nation state.
We are one country that needs to act like one country.
We have parents who need to be able to be parents and not have their rights stripped away to the state.
And the state starts compelling parents or compelling children to be different beyond what that family has a vision for.
That's got to stop.
So you've got to get parents of the rights back.
You got to, we got to reinforce our borders, our election issues.
Okay, election issues got to be resolved.
Medical freedom has to be resolved.
You know, there's about six things that really have to be done immediately to where for us to even maintain a nation state.
One of the things that we're going to talk about a lot in session two of the guide, a session two of the guide, I'll just tell you guys, is how to fight AI. And we've come up with this comprehensive plan that people need to be aware of, this comprehensive, very comprehensively explaining what the issue is.
Because there is so much, it's AI-driven psychological program, foreign-born,
foreign-born AI-driven psychological programming.
Now, some people are going to think SIOP when I say psychological programming.
It's not.
It's different.
Sci-op is more about adjusting people's frame of reference.
It's about, you know, taking someone's attitude about a situation, changing their attitude
about a situation, therefore they will have different behavior.
But psychological programming goes down deep in the brainstem.
This is about changing the aspects people use to make decisions from the beginning.
It changes everything.
And there is so much of this that's happening in the United States.
I'm hearing it and I'm listening to it occur here.
I asked earlier, and excuse me, I forgot the gentleman's name, are you using chat GPT for that?
I wasn't a dig.
I wasn't trying to push.
I was actually trying to open up another line of communication to discuss an issue, an area that's not addressed.
Okay, yes, I understand you can use certain prompts to get the information you want, but that AI has decided what information it wants to put to the top to make sure you see.
And this is happening everywhere.
So if I was going to say, what do we need to do to focus on getting our country back?
One, we need to stop.
this foreign foreign-borne influence that's happening within our country by traditional means,
you know, by recruiting people, spies, all this other stuff, by agencies, NGOs,
you know, recruiting politicians to act and vote a certain way, lobbyists being used by foreign
powers, you know, all that needs to stop.
But also at the average, everyday street, main street level,
Everybody has to understand that there is so much manipulation that occurs through media, through social media, that really is degrading the level of the level of sovereignty of our country.
And this is an issue that simply is not being talked about because we're talking about all these other issues.
But these aren't the things that are tearing us apart.
The things that are tearing us apart is how people are being manipulated, how you have an avatar,
everybody here has an avatar, digital avatar of all their data points.
And someone is matching an AI to those data points in order to change your behavior,
to change the way you think, to change the way you see things.
And it's happening to all of us.
We say this over and over again, General Flynn and I.
We say your neighbor is not your enemy.
The people who think a little differently than you are not your enemy.
We don't need the polarization.
Polarization leads to tribalization.
Tribalization just goes all bad because at some point in time, it leads to killing.
And we talk about these things in the book.
And this is, if you ask me from my perspective, my frame of reference, my wheelhouse where I have worked, not just in this country, but in others.
And I know how to change a culture, the things you got to do to tweak it.
This is where my focus would be.
I would be focusing on these things, locking down the country, securing our borders physically and securing our borders digitally.
So this foreign-born AI cannot be coming through and manipulating our children,
manipulating different racial groups to create strife amongst each other.
This all has to stop.
So that's my, that's where I, that's where I come from.
Thank you for the question.
Like I said, I know I was going to come at it from an angle.
We probably haven't talked about.
So, Boone, I'm curious when you talk about shutting down that area, are you talking about
government action to shut things down like TikTok and that that's necessary.
And what are the implications of doing that for basic freedom, you know, and so forth?
What kind of explain upon that a little bit.
I'm curious your thought.
Here's my thought on that.
And I appreciate everybody giving me the time to talk.
Okay, we have a country that is governed by the Constitution.
The Constitution is for the American people and people who are here, residents.
Okay, there are some residents here who are not citizens also have some protections of the U.S. Constitution, who are physically within our borders.
The U.S. Constitution protects American citizens.
The U.S. Constitution does not protect some guy in Pakistan or some guy in China or some guy in North Korea or Iran wanting to express their opinions within our country for the purpose of psychological operations.
We would not allow that from inside the country, but we allow it from outside the country.
And if we did allow it from inside the country, then it would be American born and that's okay.
We can work out those issues.
But to be bombarded, for someone to say, oh, I'm worried about putting a digital, you know, super wall, firewall around the United States because it's going to restrict freedom of speech.
No, actually, it's going to create more freedom of speech of Americans and everybody else is left out.
They've got their own thing to do.
So, Boone, I just want to understand your point.
So in your digital firewall, you essentially do not receive any information from outside the United States.
Well, this is how it's going to have to be worked out.
Obviously, we're going to have to de-conflict it for commerce, things like this.
Communications, just between businesses, things like this.
But when we're talking about social media and the tricks that are put into social media, like, think about...
But won't you from that, won't you then be a very, very propaganded, a manipulated and controlled nation?
Let me give you an example.
You had, for example, Ukraine and Russia war, a lot of the things General Flynn is saying, a lot of the things you're saying.
is ideas that were basically unacceptable
to talk about it a couple of years ago in America
and it was actually alternative news sites
outside of America that were talking about,
for example, Ukraine being a proxy war
and the fact that money should be spent there.
Now you're able to talk about it.
But again, within America,
and within the West as well in the UK,
we essentially weren't allowed to talk about these things.
Or for example, that's an example.
So when you isolate yourself from the rest of the world
and don't want to hear any information
from anywhere outside the world,
you're essentially risking being manipulated and controlled
by basically whoever's in charge
of the media corporations in that country.
If that was what I was talking about, that would be true.
But that's not what I'm talking about.
What I'm talking about is actual, for lack of a better term, military operations.
Okay, in the old days, let me explain how it used to be.
In the old days, you would take a guy like me and a psychological operations unit,
and we would go into a country, and we would set up shop, and we would...
And we would immediately start identifying, okay, what are our goals and objectives,
identify key communicators, media sources, use key communicators, feed them messages,
to go to the media sources, broadcast it out.
This was a very physical game.
We had to go there to do that.
But it was a military operation.
Don't think it's not.
Now we have the ability for foreign powers to conduct military operations within the United States, and they're completely unchecked.
Completely unchecked.
I'm not talking about being able to get information from other countries.
I'm talking about stopping other countries from manipulating the people, the populace, the citizenry.
Because when guys like me go into foreign countries to work, we foment dissent to cause dissension to create civil wars.
But we've got to go there to do it.
You don't have to go there anymore.
Now it's 24 hours a day while people are in front of that little tiny screen.
Ops are being conducted.
military operations are being conducted on behalf of a foreign power.
So, Boone, how would you ensure that it happened?
Because essentially the argument you're making,
in the past, the way they counted these so-called foreign issues,
was basically surveillance on the American people themselves.
For example, Section 702, now you've got the Restrict Act,
basically saying essentially spying and surveillance on Americans
based on this idea of foreign adversaries.
So are you a proponent of that?
Great question. Here's what I think about the Restrict Act. The Restrict Act focuses on the United States citizen. I would not do that. I would focus on people who are creating AI systems.
AI system, an AI system has the ability to do numerous things.
And I don't know how deep you guys have gotten into this.
I've gotten real deep into it over the last few months in the writing of the book with General Flynn, How to Fight AI.
Originally, this is a good caveat, you guys should understand.
Originally, when we wrote session one, we realized there's, you know, there is this polarization, tribalization, dehumanization.
Okay, that is happening in the United States.
We're between right now the tribalization and dehumanization phase.
Well, the next phase is killing.
That's what happens.
And when certain military units go into other countries, we develop these phases to create an effect.
We know it happened in the Middle East.
Yeah, yeah.
Okay.
So if I can now take my hands off the wheel and do that digitally,
Okay, I'm going to do that.
Here's the problem with the Restrict Act.
It focuses a lot on the citizenry and what the citizenry may or may not do.
I'm not about that.
What I'm about, I'm answering your question.
What I'm about is making sure these AI systems are regulated.
The AI systems are regulated.
And there are, I think it's called the Al-Samari rules for AI.
And it's basically how to make this ethical, how to make this legal, how to make this for humanity, not against humanity.
These rules have already been written.
They've been written by the people who developed AI originally because they saw how this could go bad.
These same rules could be written, could be used as the guidelines for regulations and laws.
And it would not interfere with what you and me get to see and do.
It would change.
As a matter of fact, you and I would get more because we wouldn't be bombarded with all the southern manipulation.
Let's say that's so, but I can see how you could police the implementation of the rules within the jurisdiction of your borders.
But I don't see how you can police those rules in the same way you can't police the rules against genetic manipulation of embryos outside your borders.
So you're still open to this situation.
But wait, but wait.
If you regulate, let me add on to it, Boone.
If you regulate in the U.S., doesn't I give other countries the advantage?
No, no, no, no.
You're not getting what I'm saying.
I'm not saying regulate to the type of AI that can be developed.
I'm talking about regulating the type of AI that can be deployed.
And we're working on a very, very comprehensive...
Sorry, before, just to understand what you just said, not what's being developed, what's being deployed.
But my point stands, if you regulate what the US deploys, and let's say China doesn't have those same regulations and allows for the deployment of things that could get out of control in the future...
Doesn't that give them an edge?
We can go back to nuclear weapons.
Regulating what was developed in terms of weapons and mass destruction, not doing so would have given if U.S. stopped it and that's better for humanity.
Let me ask you this.
Would you allow Russia, China, North Korea, Iran?
Would you allow them to store their nuclear weapons in our country?
If your answer is no, then they cannot store or deploy their foreign-born,
AI-driven psychological programming throughout our country.
It's the same thing.
And as time goes on, and it will take a little bit,
and I'm glad we're having this conversation because people will think,
And I will give the moderators here, I will give you guys some very good reference material to distribute to this group.
And I hope you look at it because it really is the biggest thing.
It's the biggest thing we can get control of right now that will change the future.
And we can do it as people, as the citizenry.
Other things we may or may not have control of, but these really are not the close targets like this is.
And I know there are people listening to me right now going, oh, well, it's really not because I believe and I saw and I heard and all these things.
But are you up to date on the latest information?
How many of you have heard of Gollum Class AIs?
You know, these are big deals.
So what I'm talking about right now is from a frame of reference that is different.
But I'm posing this question to the group as an invitation to say,
We've got to figure this out.
I don't have the A answer all the time, most of the time, but not all the time.
I don't have the A answer.
But I do know that to get to the A answer, we have to stop our adversaries from deploying weapons on the American people inside of America.
What I mean to stop, AI tools, what do you mean stop AI tools?
We're not talking about something that can be imported through a ship.
I don't know how you stop an AI tool from being used in the US.
Let me sure it is.
I just don't understand how that can be done.
I don't know what Slyman is not speaking.
Maybe Slyman understands Slaman.
Can you understand what that means?
Because you've been pretty quiet
and I'm not understanding what that means.
In order to stop AI tools, AI systems in the United States, they each have to be assessed.
They have to be assessed on this Al-Samari guide, okay?
What is the intention for it?
Let me ask you this.
Why are you against what I'm saying?
I'm against, Alex, I'm against why I'm against what you're saying.
So the problem with what you're saying is your...
Same things which are right, kind of.
But then the problem is the way you're trying to deal with them is highly problematic.
Because your solution to these issues or some of the things what you're saying is essentially highly problematic.
Let me give you example.
You talked about, you know, you don't want people within the United States for infiltration to occur.
Well, guess what?
The world is so, let's just take it the United States.
It's so entrenched.
Foreign money is so entrenched in the United States.
The only way you can stop that from happen,
this propaganda you're talking about,
is mass surveillance.
So we know how this game works.
We know how it's worked in the past.
Essentially, what you're asking for
or what you're complaining about,
the solution of that is going to be mass surveillance,
extreme surveillance of the American people.
In terms of AI, what you're asking for,
in terms of extreme regulation,
In the regard that you're talking about, you're going to have a scenario where the U.S. falls back extremely in the development of the world, a development of AI.
Because what you're saying is develop it, but don't deploy it.
So there's all these issues, I think, when it comes to in real life, practical way, it's actually going to make the lives of Americans much worse.
You and I agree with, I agree with what you just said.
I agree with what you just said, but the context of my frame of reference and your frame of reference is different.
I also am totally against the surveillance of Americans, but that's what these AITs, AIs are doing.
And they're doing it on behalf of a foreign power.
So we have got to figure out.
how to manage this one way or another and it's got to happen fast but you can't take your hands
off the wheel there's no way we can take our hands off the wheel and i that's not coming from me
that's coming from me and all the major ai developers right now in the united states you saw
elin just came out and said hey we need a six month moratorium on any AI development because
there's some really bad things happening and there's a there's a there's a go out yeah i'll
provide the documentation for all this stuff there is there's a well
what do you call it when you everybody signs a petition there's a huge petition out there by all these
AI developers all these tech guys who are saying there are bad bad things happening the reason we're
having a disagreement right now is because we don't have the same frame of reference and we need to
keep having this conversation because this conversation is not about doing surveillance on americans
this conversation is about stopping the manipulation of americans that comes from foreign powers doing
surveillance on americans but
The problem is our own government is going to do the same shit to us.
I got that.
Exactly.
I totally got that.
And you know that if you look at the history of the last 20 years from September the 11th.
I know all about Prism, all this stuff.
I totally got you.
Totally got.
Bill Benny is a stud.
I love Bill Benny.
I love everything Bill Benny had to say and how he got screwed.
It was totally wrong.
I'm fully all over everything you're saying.
But just because we are afraid our own government will do it to us doesn't mean we should stop.
This is what I'm saying.
A 60% solution is better than no solution.
And let's get the 60% and then continue to improve it.
I think there's a way, I do, I truly believe there is a way that we can not only stop the surveillance of foreign powers in the United States for the sake of psychological programming.
We can also stop our own government from doing that.
But that comes legislative.
Why are you mixing censorship with AI?
They're very different things.
No, no.
What do we know?
Censorship is when you're censoring people,
not allowing them to access certain websites,
not allowing them to access certain information.
That's your thing.
Yeah, I know, man.
That's your frame of reference right now.
I want to have the same conversation with you.
I frame it a different way, maybe.
Please, sir.
Do you think that because China was ahead of the curve on these sort of problems, that is why China put up a sort of digital Chinese wall, firewall, and why they have so much surveillance on their population?
Right.
to protect them from foreign manipulation by AI and other systems.
And if that's the solution to it,
does that mean that we will all have to become effectively China
for our own populations in the future
in order to protect from other manipulation?
Good question.
My answer to the last part is no.
We're not going to become China.
The CCP has totally different goals.
There's a different ideology than the United States.
We do not have to fall to their ideology.
Right.
that China putting up their great wall around itself to stop the incursion of, I mean, because if they're doing it to us, we would do it to them.
And it's not just China that does it.
Russia does it. Iran does it.
I mean, a lot of countries do this.
But they're not the best countries.
They're not the best governing systems.
They've got it all screwed up.
The problem is if we don't, we protect our physical borders for a reason.
Nobody is thinking about the importance of our digital borders.
And I'm not saying, again, I'm not saying I'm right all the time.
A lot, but not all the time.
We have to decide and develop, okay, if one, okay, let's take China.
The people in China like Coca-Cola,
Well, if Americans like Coca-Cola, does that mean we're like China?
If China puts up a wall, wait, wait, let me finish.
If China puts up a digital wall and we do the same, does that mean we're like China?
In the sense that we're putting up a wall to protect our people,
in the sense that we're putting up a wall to stop other people from manipulating our people.
We're doing the same thing.
Look, China has reasons.
No, no, but, let me just, I make my point.
Sorry, Marri.
But, Boone, you're missing the point because what Okunji is essentially saying to you is,
The wall that you're talking about, so when China put their wall, you know what they did?
They never did mass surveillance.
They did extreme surveillance on their people.
I'm not saying we should do that.
You're inferring me.
I'm not saying what you do that.
The problem is, Boone, you know what?
You're making these points.
And then the result of these points is the things we're saying.
And you're saying, we're not making these points.
So, okay, tell us very concisely within two sentences, how you're going to build a digital wall wall.
whilst not doing surveillance on innocent Americans.
Register the AI systems.
Register the AI systems.
How does that achieve the goal?
I only had two sentences, man.
You can't do that to me.
How does that achieve the goal?
Because if it is an AI system,
now again, we're having a conversation that you will definitely see over the next year
The amount of information you get will change your frame of reference.
This is the first we're having this conversation by and large.
We're going to have to figure this out.
If a system is registered and it's in compliance with the ability to not fuck up humanity,
and there has to be rules for that.
If there's not foreign-born AI manipulation to create conditions within our country that support a foreign power, not the United States, a foreign power, that's a weapon.
That weapon needs to be identified and removed.
However that process occurs is what has to happen.
The weapon must be identified and removed from being deployed against U.S. people for the purpose of advancing our adversary's goals.
Right, Boone, thanks for coming.
We do really appreciate your time because I know you wanted to leave about a few minutes ago.
So yeah, I appreciate you coming and hopefully see you again sometime.
Thank you.
I appreciate the time and I'd love to come back.
You guys are spirited.
I love you.
I hope I didn't offend anybody.
Not at all.
You did great, Green.
Thank you so much.
I really appreciate you guys.
God bless you.
Have a good day.
Thanks, bro.
Thank you so much.
So yeah, thank you for that.
I thought you were going to jump in, Slave, man.
Yeah, yeah, I was just giving him.
Slaman just rubbish.
I thought there's a Mario Muted and then I guess he just, like usually, doesn't know what to do.
No, I didn't want to save you this time.
I'm always jumping to save you and you mess up.
I wanted to just show the silence when I don't jump in.
It's a nice thing.
My takeaway.
I do, Troy, I want to go back to Patrick and Troy on one point that the general said earlier.
And that's regarding the Chinese military.
There's been a lot of debates earlier on the actual strength of the Chinese military.
It just looks based on the reports we keep seeing that they're more advanced than we expected.
We saw one of the tests they did, I think it was for a ballistic missile that surprised U.S. military officials.
So, Patrick, is that a concern, in your opinion?
Is China really catching up to U.S. military might?
I don't think it's a concern. It's a concern for the U.S. if they're wanting to overextend their military footprint, which is what we're doing, building a whole sort of arc around the Pacific Rim with the new Ocas Agreement in northern Australia. China's position is, their orientation is defensive.
So, I mean, the United States is offensive.
We, and we have to not dilute ourselves in the West.
You know, the U.S., we have a military, it's an empire.
It's a global empire.
Look at how we've distributed our military forces around the world and hundreds and hundreds of installations.
Right.
and the amount of money we spend on it.
So look, if you speak to someone in Europe and you say, you know, how do you feel about Taiwan
absorbed or Taiwan being absorbed into China?
Is that a threat to you in Europe?
And of course, nine out of ten people, and people I know would say it doesn't really affect our life.
here in Europe. So, but if you ask that question in America, you'll get a much more of
reciferous response. And I believe that's just because America is much more propagandized,
uh, and for that issue. So Americans have a reflexive reaction to that.
as being a threat to democracy
because they've been told
to champion the freedom of the Taiwanese people.
So, Suck talk, I want to jump,
I want to go back to you,
but Stock Talk on that point,
and I know you have a different take,
the general earlier talked about
de-dollarization and we had another speaker I think it was Greg or someone else on stage that
did talk about de-dollarization as well and I push back because I know we talked about it in the
finance spaces that it's just too early to bring it up the numbers don't add up towards that
so I able to touch on that because I know that point triggers you and are we overestimating
China stock talk he is still showing us connecting for me Mario
Oh shit. Can anyone hear him or no? It's still connecting. Damn.
He loses a... That was a good question, too.
He loses a shit when someone brings up de-dollarization.
That was a great question. I was looking forward to that one, Mario.
Yeah, you'll see him swinging. I'll bring him back up now.
So while waiting for Stock Talk to come up, Troy, I'd want your take on this point as well as Stock Talk Connect.
Yeah, I'll let him do the deep dive, but I think I feel the same way.
Let's see if he's connected. Hold on. Let's see if he's connected. Stop talking there.
You hear me now?
Yeah, man. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Yeah, look, that's funny that you mentioned that that conversation triggers me because it does.
Look, I think there's the death of the dollar narrative is tremendously overblown.
I think the hyperbole lends itself to market volatility, really.
You go back.
into most financial crises in modern history.
These are the same narratives that arise every time.
You can go back to 2014.
There are headlines about, you know, Iran and Saudi Arabia and Brazil,
settling trades and alternative currencies.
And what we tend to do in these environments is we take these anecdotes
and we extrapolate them to some kind of like overarching danger to the dollar.
To really break it down, it doesn't require a tremendous amount of nuance.
It just requires one fundamental understanding.
And that is that historically and even in modern history,
economic and military relationships are inexorably linked.
And what people try to do when they're discussing China in the United States
is they try to isolate the economies and the militaries in a vacuum.
You can't do that.
So first I'll address the military point, which you brought up to Patrick earlier.
When people are comparing military might, what they tend to do is they do a rudimentary analysis where they think we're playing a chess game where we line up China's entire military.
We line up the United States entire military and the winner is a question of who's is bigger or has more aircraft carriers.
That's not how military influence works.
The reason the United States is indisputably the most powerful military power in the world.
And we can take nukes out of the conversation for the purposes of this, because obviously when you bring nukes into play, then all the rest of this just equates to zero.
And we all know the consequence of.
a nuclear catastrophe.
But if you take nukes out of the equation,
the reason the United States has military influence
is because it is the only expeditionary military in the world,
the only truly expeditionary military.
The United States is over 750 military bases
in over 80 countries, okay?
And what a lot of people say is, is they say,
they misperceive packs of defense agreement
as the United States exercising its will on smaller countries.
That's just simply not the case.
Anyone with even an ounce of logic would assume that regardless of its United States or whoever else,
in a community of countries, an international community of countries,
there will always be stronger countries.
Can I ask you?
There will always be stronger countries in an international community.
And as a product of that,
Just as simple logic, as a product of that, the smaller nations will be security compromised in perpetuity.
This is a fundamental thing to understand in order to like understand geopolitics in general.
There will always be weaker countries whose sovereignty is threatened at will by more powerful nations.
You're seeing this with Russia and Ukraine.
You've seen this historically with numerous examples.
Even the United States has exercised that influence.
And as a result of that relationship between stronger and less powerful countries militarily,
there will always have to be.
purveyors of international security.
This is an inevitability.
It will always be a big dog
who's providing defense to the rest of the world.
Now, to the extent that you think
the United States has done a poor job
as the world police,
that's a fair criticism to levy,
anecdotally speaking.
But it's important to understand that your criticisms in that context are criticisms of American administrations.
They are not criticisms of the United States as an entity.
And that distinction is super important because that's where all these false equivalencies with the Chinese government line.
We're making false equivalencies about the systems.
that are in the United States and the systems that are in China.
Okay.
The prevention of unilateral control in the United States government
is what makes it an appealing protector to these other countries.
The alternatives to be protected by an autocracy
and for the fate of the security fate of your nation
to be at the whims of a single person.
No one is going to take that gamble.
That is what has allowed the United States
to build the security blanket globally since World War II.
And that military influence produces de facto economic cooperation.
No country that is relying on a base with 4,000 Marines for their entire national defense
is going to wean off the dollar.
In what environment would that ever happen?
There is an unspoken de facto economic cooperation that is a product of military protection.
And that is where the United States influence comes.
The last sentence...
The reason that cannot be replicated is because in the modern geopolitical environment,
there is no scenario, none, in which nations, unless they were threatened directly,
would allow a Chinese or a Russian military base to be built.
And the United States already has that web.
And there are 80 countries that are dependent on the United States for defense.
So it's irreplaceable.
It's irreplicable, period.
Period.
So Stock Talk, the issue is, in terms of what you're saying, I mean, do you concede that it's not binary?
It's not just the U.S., the way you framed it, where the U.S. is there for defense for certain countries.
I mean, they're invading countries, aren't they?
They're basically destroying nations.
It's not simple as, or guess what?
I'm not saying the U.S. is a perfect track record.
That's not at all what I'm saying.
I'm not just, well, I wouldn't call it, I wouldn't just call it a track record stock.
Like, you look at the devastation in the Middle East.
I'm not minimizing the human consequence either.
I think you're missing a point.
I'm not defending the atrocities.
No, no, I'm not missing the point.
It's just, it's just that what you're doing and you're right in some aspects of what you're saying.
But you know, when you put a basically blankest statement and frame it as basically U.S.
putting troops there for defense purposes for certain countries like it.
some like in the context of that argument so i'm obviously not referring to the nations we invaded
i'm referring to the nations with which the united states has security packs which is 80 countries
around the world right those those nations obviously yeah the countries we invaded did not benefit
from u.s troops i'm not i would never make that argument but what i'm saying is is that
the military relationship the United States has with these countries
cannot be delinked from the economic cooperation that's a product of it.
That's the fundamental thing that people miss when they clamor for like a global one
or for the Chinese military to somehow become expeditionary.
How would the Chinese military even purport to become expeditionary?
Do you think anyone in Europe is going to let China open a military base?
You know, potentially, maybe some of the countries that they've issued toxic debt to in Africa might allow that a couple hundred Chinese troops.
Maybe geographically the countries that are extremely close to China may allow it just out of fear.
But outside of that, can they really build an international security blanket?
I don't know.
It seems impossible to me.
Stock Talk.
Can I ask you a question about that?
I'm sorry.
I was listening to the All In podcast a few weeks ago, and David Sacks made the point.
I think Chameh had said the same thing.
When it comes to an international yuan, like, once you, people don't realize the yuan is pegged to the dollar.
So once you depeg that,
I think that whole idea breaks down.
It was their opinion, too.
Do you agree with that?
Can you repeat that?
Yeah.
So people don't think about with a yuan as a replacement of the dollar for settlements that the yuan is right now pegged to the dollar.
Once you depeg it, then you've thrown the whole balance out.
That makes it almost impossible as well, potentially, in their opinion.
Yeah, I mean, you can make the argument that every currency is in theory pegged to the dollar indirectly.
But, I mean, again, now we're just talking about economic theory.
But the yuan specifically is.
I mean, that's the nature of the yuan right now.
Yeah, but that's more so a product of the economic relationship between the China and the United States, right?
Which, again...
We're so used sometimes when we're framing these arguments to the status quo that we assume it will be so in perpetuity, right?
This is the same argument, like when people talk about China's labor advantage, which inevitably, as China's per capita GDP grows, their labor advantage will be eroded, right?
So it's like there are things over time that will naturally alter the economic relationships between those countries.
And that may change China's currency priorities, right?
Like if you had asked people five years ago, was China interested in the one becoming...
an international reserve currency, they would have said absolutely not because, you know, China is actively and pretty publicly manipulated its currency for quite some time.
You know, so they didn't want that.
And the question may become, do they want that in the next 20 years?
You know, as their per capita GDP grows, they become a more mature consumer economy.
Will they eventually, you know, want that role?
Right?
I mean, this is the, when people talk about the Tina argument,
which is that there is no alternative argument,
which in my view is the best fundamental argument
for why the dollar will remain in power.
But they like to discount the Tina argument
because they say, you know, well, look,
there doesn't have to be a world reserve currency.
And my counter to that counter is the genies out of the bottle.
Right. Countries have publicly seen the enormous economic and military benefit of world reserve currency status for the United States in the last 20 years.
It's not a secret. And so, you know, the idea that the dollar's influence can wane without a sort of, I guess you call it a game of thrones for the currency crown, I don't think that you can get it without that.
I think so let me just bring in Greg so Greg um stock's argument is which I think is a fair argument his argument is that look the reason the dollar won't be de dollarized is essentially is because the United States has certain control over he gave example of 80 countries where they've got bases on and so they wouldn't even consider they wouldn't even fathom the possibility of moving away from the dollar Greg
Yeah, I think that he has a very Americanized view of this from the standpoint of we like to believe in the, there's a famous theory out there about the milkshake theory that the dollar is something that's just going to continue the funnel back.
The reason why I said what I said earlier and I was glad to hear General Flynn kind of take the same stance that I took.
I don't believe that we're seeing the same military strategy with currency around the world.
When I'm interviewing people like I have Mike Tremont, who is an economic advisor to the White House,
what I'm hearing now that these countries are banding together
in order to find a way forward for themselves where they do not need to rely on the dollar,
when we talk about bricks and everybody goes, oh, is this a conspiracy in all these countries?
But when you have a place like Mexico who's now interested in joining bricks,
when we have Saudi Arabia who control so much of the energy sector that's now working with China,
with Russia, when you have Turkey, India, some of the largest places in bricks,
and they're all saying, how can we destabilize the dollar?
Well, there's two things that we should pay attention to.
First, we have military troops that are moving over the South Korea because there's going to likely be a conflict with Taiwan and China.
Now, if we're looking at the alliance of bricks, we're looking at the meetings that Zia is having with Putin and everybody else.
This is all tied the currency.
I think I would agree with stock there that you cannot separate military with currency.
But here's where I believe it's naive.
What we're forgetting is the United States has been policing the world as the world's
policeman for so many decades.
And because of American exceptionalism, which I am an American proudly, but I will admit
that because of American exceptionalism, we sometimes forget that it has blowback.
It has consequences.
And right now we have a bunch of countries that are kind of militarizing up against the
dollar.
And so when I make a comment earlier and I say,
What do you mean by that?
What do you mean by that, Greg?
What do you mean about militarizing against the dollar? Can you explain specifically what they're doing?
Yes. So, I mean, there's plenty of reports that you could go to in Forbes. Foreign policy had a great article about it as well. There's plenty of people much more smarter from an economic standpoint. I'm a journalist.
No, no, no, no. But Greg, hold on. I want you to respond to this. But like, this is part of my argument. Like, what specifically is?
Because a lot of people cite headlines and articles when this narrative is made.
What specifically has this great Bricks alliance done?
What bills have they signed?
What treaties have they signed?
What legislation have they passed to any legitimate effect at all to indicate that there is some sort of global conspiracy to deed all arise?
Name one thing they've done.
One thing.
One singular action they've actually written in and signed.
One thing.
Name one.
I would simply look at the alliance as the thing.
What alliance?
What alliance?
Are you not aware of what Brick is?
Brick is not an alliance.
There's no piece of document.
Greg, I'm going to cut you off.
Hold on.
Sounds.
Hold on.
Sounds.
Do not cut me off.
You can chime in a second.
There's no document...
that has been signed by Brazil, India, China, that suggests anything that has been brought up in the last three months.
This is why I get so annoyed by this conversation because people are reading headlines.
Can I respond to that person?
And making opinions off of that.
There's nothing that's happened.
I'm sorry.
Yes, there is. Can I respond to that? Thank you.
Go for Brad, Greg.
So the biggest thing is right now, if you're listening to the conversations that are being reported, not the headlines, but actually listening to the devil and the details, the currency is based upon the resources right now, as many of us are talking about right now.
So when we're looking at, what is the agreements that are being in place?
It's what are the resources in China?
Where are the resources throughout the world
that will be used to destabilize currency
in order to empower the people that are working together?
The United States is not in that conversation right now.
So I believe that we're in a world changing moment.
We're at an impasse.
War is likely coming up pretty much.
pretty soon and as a result we'll see who's right on this conversation there may not be things
signed and documents but why are they all having meetings why are they all getting together somebody
explain that to me i'll come countries have met with each other in every environment ever and
will always continue to there'll always be headlines and conversations and closed doors but like i mean
are we really basing de-dollarization
Something that is so ingrained in the international economy
off of a couple of headlines and closed-door conversations
that produced nothing, not a single signed document, not one,
right Greg I mean we're it's it just blows my mind there's nothing there's no substance on the
other side of this argument if there was if there was an agreement that had been signed by
Brazil India China Russia and it said we're making a new currency we're switching to it by
2027 here's the steps I would be like whoa maybe there is a legitimate case that the
entire eastern side of the world will rally to do this but there isn't because
Because fundamentally, Indian China will never agree on that.
I would love to add a new point in the conversation if that's okay.
I see a lot of the same back and forth, but I think there's an additional consideration that's worthwhile, which is I don't think the Yuan can actually become an international currency or even the main one.
because I don't think China actually wanted to happen.
And so my high, I think the,
some of the literature around this suggests that obviously a lot of Chinese wealth
is concentrated in the hands of a small group of people.
And they have a ton of money,
but also some very illicit businesses.
But.
the difference between, I would say, Chinese wealthy businessmen versus American wealthy
businessmen is that American businessmen want to stay in America.
Chinese businessmen don't really want to stay in China.
So if you were to make it such that the Yuan became an international currency and they
could spend their many elsewhere, Chinese assets would actually...
this like totally collapse real estate because they just want to leave the country.
They want to make sure their children leave the country.
China doesn't actually allow their wealthy individuals sell their Yuan beyond a certain quota
in order to keep them there.
So if you want became an international currency that was exchangeable, China would be letting
all of their rich people out of their sort of like perverial cage.
And it would collapse their economy.
So it's actually not to their benefit.
Maybe Putin wants it, but China definitely does not want it.
Yeah.
And Brick doesn't work without India.
And like anyone with even the most basic cultural knowledge of India and China knows that that is never going to happen.
Never.
India and China might cooperate on a economically expedient level where it's mutually beneficial, and they have, and we'll continue to do that on a mutually beneficial basis.
The idea that India will ever sacrifice any competitive edge with China as a way to spite the United States, I think is ludicrous and beyond far-fetched.
So all source, I'll go and bring you in here.
So when it comes to the, the UN, obviously one of the things that Donald Trump ran on in 2016 was keeping China in check because they continue to devalue their currency.
And, you know, he was afraid that that was going to do damage to the U.S. economy and the U.S. dollar in general.
So are we still seeing things like that?
Or is this what you're talking about when they're trying to stabilize the currency?
currency now or what are your thoughts?
Yeah, so China is one of the main reasons why the dollar gains
strength is because China, I mean, China has one of the largest holdings of dollars.
I mean, people forget it was only last month.
that China, for the first time in its history, did its own trade, you know, Chinese-based international trade.
So trade inside of China.
First time last month, they did it more in the yuan than in the dollar.
It was like 48% of it was done in yuan, 46% of it was done in dollars, right?
I mean, so the Chinese need the dollar to control their currency because if they have a free flow of...
Currency, I mean, we all hit upon it. I mean, there would be a rush on the bank. I mean, look at what China has been doing recently, right? Just today or yesterday it was, where China basically now classifies economic data as state secret, right? They are making it harder and harder for people to look at the actual data of the Chinese economy, right? And people notice that, right? And so the yuan is not going to be
A, is it going to grow?
Of course.
But I think people forget also, and this is important to highlight.
So recently Argentina announced that they're going to start training with China and Yuan.
But what people forget is that the reason why the Argentinians actually benefited from this,
it allows the Argentinian government to keep more dollars because they need to keep the dollars
to strengthen their currency and their inflation, which right now is their currency is devaluating
too much and their inflation is out of control.
They want to keep the dollar.
So this deal benefited Argentina because it's like, okay, great, we can keep dollars
because that's what we need.
I mean, I think there's a legitimate argument to be made.
about the dollar as an international currency, if that's beneficial for the U.S. or not.
But it's so much more, the reasoning of the dollar is much more, in my opinion, than just military might.
I mean, it's far-fetched because of economic reasons that most countries understand that there's value in having the dollar as kind of this reserve currency.
And we never really talk about the cost.
that the dollar being an international currency, the reserve currency, has on American people.
There's also cost associated with that in economic terms.
But China economy, they're closing it more.
The data is becoming harder to track.
It's never going to be a free flow economy that's going to enable the one to be a dominant currency.
That's interesting point.
Troy, I want to bring you in here because I'm not sure if you've been able to speak on the space yet, but welcome back.
I've had you here before.
Troy, jump in.
Hey, thanks. Yeah, I just wanted to reiterate specifically a couple of those points.
I specifically wanted to talk about the American exceptionalism route as also American who, you know, I like our institutions, I like our country.
I know there's a lot going on, but, you know, I'm 100% for it.
But in the last...
14 years, we've seen a very specific alternative to the dollar emerge, and that's Bitcoin.
I don't, I know nobody knows who Satoshi is, and it's all, you know, still officially, you
You know, it's still a nonpartisan, non-political, you know, money of the future, so to speak.
But the Genesis coin specifically cited the 2008 banking crisis.
And I don't think that should be seen as a coincidence.
We've seen something, you know, put mass, you know, hundreds of billions.
And at one time I think it was a trillion dollar industry.
and it still didn't really come close at all to supplanting the U.S. dollar.
And to all sources point, I mean, yeah, we publish all of our numbers and we get, you know,
the presidents get ripped on and unemployment and GDP and all that's known to the percentage point.
And I just don't see a world where we're all passing around money that says backed by the full faith and credit of the People's Republic of China.
It just doesn't resonate with me.
And it's not just because I'm an American exceptionalist, and I think China's totalitarian.
It's specifically because of what we're seeing them do with their digital yuan and their Wiibo app and social credit scores where they're able to control people through the money.
And I know, you know, we have our own...
bugaboos about taxation and stuff like that, but there is no doubt about the U.S. and the status
of property rights by and large. We see a lot of unpopular people making a lot of money,
but they're allowed to do that because we are a capitalist system and we would be undermining
ourselves if we started
you know, making tech entrepreneurs disappear when they don't toe the line of the government.
So I don't see how we have, you know, we all get more connected and we're all on the UN or on some other nation's dollar,
where if we start saying things, you know, as Americans, we give up our sovereignty in that situation.
And if we're building an everything app or we're paying,
and posting all in the same application,
then that is just rife for, you know,
talking, talk about, you know, losing your freedom,
losing your freedom of speech, surveillance.
It's all very bad.
Nick, if I may, and I think one point I do want to just to answer to Greg
is we were having this conversation about breaks.
And I think stock hit the point, right? Bricks is not like in any way, shape, or form an official line.
This is just a grouping of nations that get together and talk, right? But if you're going to bring up the Briggs, the other organization that you have to bring up that is important also is the quad, right? You know, India, the United States, Japan, and Australia. And it's almost ironic is that.
The quad actually from like economic, humanitarian, medical research, etc., actually has signed a lot of treaties within the countries, right?
And there's kind of this, there's this concern that the quad is going to be viewed as a kind of a China, anti-China NATO, right, in the Pacific.
And the Chinese have heavily criticized the quad because of that because these countries have done military exercise together.
And so because of the concern that people have about the quad being this anti-China-NATO, where we actually see a lot of effort going through is in a lot of the economic and non-military treaties.
So I just think if people are going to continually bring up the bricks, we have to bring up the quad in other institutions that are, you know, that do not benefit this idea of de-dollarization or challenging the West.
Yeah, I mean, I just want to.
I'm sorry, who's that?
Go ahead.
It's Greg.
Just for quick,
just for quite,
just want to kind of pose this out to everybody.
So I don't mean to misinterpret my words.
I'm going to be clear.
I'm not saying that the one is the answer.
What I'm trying to say is that the framework of what I'm seeing in conversations,
when I'm reporting on this,
the framework is there where there are leaders that are definitely trying to figure out,
how do we get away from United States sanctions?
How do we get away from the power of the dollar?
And,
And with digital currency and credit systems, that's where I see that an alliance, if it's made and signed in the future, I get what everybody's saying.
I see that our future is very dangerous if we don't have conversation about it.
But the comments are all very valid.
But we need to have this conversation.
We can't think of the world in the typical version of the dollar because there are leaders right now trying to figure out.
But Greg, Greg, just in terms of what stock said, I mean, and correct me from wrong stock.
he's basically saying that even if you're talking about some kind of conglomerate between them in terms of a digital currency
just the specific makeup of these countries and he gave a very astute example of indian china
like how in what scenario would these countries merge together to create an alternative currency or even if it is digital
rather in basically which contends with the u.s dollar
And I would answer that with in a post-war society, you would see that.
And I'm concerned that that's where we're headed.
And that's kind of where I would go with this.
What do you mean by post-war society?
Yeah.
Right now, what's going to happen if the escalation in Taiwan, the United States gets involved?
I already have the sources telling me that we're loading our nuclear submarines towards South Korea,
we're moving our troops within the next three months over there.
There is a very big fear that there will be a war that the United States is involved in with China and Taiwan.
I believe that all this conversation,
it's all leading us towards a day
where we get towards central digital currencies.
Somebody is going to want to find out, you know, what's after that, right?
So a post-war society is what happens after that.
So are you saying that we're going to see a war in Taiwan
and that's going to result in basically the crippling of the United States
and only then will these countries have the cuts,
like the cuts batter basically essentially create an alliance
No, I think the alliance is already there.
I mean, we're seeing that.
There's countries that want to get involved now.
Saudi Arabia just wants to be involved.
I mean, Stalk just gave a really strong argument of why there's no real substantial alliance.
And I think it's very short-sighted.
You're not looking two years, three years, five years into the future.
I disagree.
But again, he's saying, yeah, that's like, you're talking about something that might happen and it may or may not happen.
Yeah, so, like, I, yeah, like, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm doing as hell, but I still can't tap, like, I just see you what you're doing is you're speculating, and then adding on, on top of it, a bit more speculation, and then a bit more of speculation, like, I'm used to Slayman doing this, but, uh,
Greg, I think it's just too far-fetched that we're going to have a war in Taiwan that's going to lead to CBDC and lead to other...
If there's a war in Taiwan that the U.S. is involved in, and then we're going to have a lot bigger concerns than a CBDC might be, Greg.
Cs are coming without any war.
It has nothing to do with the war. CBDC is just the evolution of a monetary system.
No, see, okay, people, okay, look, I know there's a lot of like,
money privacy concerns and those are legitimate okay but look cbc's are an inevitable collision of three things
one central banks two digitization and three currency okay those it's just a collision of those three trends right
Think about digitization.
Everything is becoming digitized or already has become digitized in the last 20 years, right?
We're even seeing another analogous event to this, which is the danger of the digitization of banking, right?
We're seeing that live, $40 billion in withdrawals from Silicon Valley Bank in one day.
I wouldn't have happened.
Can you,
since you're here,
since you're here,
man,
can you tell us what,
I know you've been covering it,
what,
can you tell us what happened
with First Republic
and the concerns
in the banking system right now?
We are going to cover it tomorrow.
We're going to do it,
we're going to do it yesterday,
but we rescheduled for tomorrow.
So it's going to be a big topic
we want to cover.
But let's just touch on it briefly now
as you prepare to wrap up the space.
I'll briefly just give my thoughts
on the First Republic deal.
Look, I mean,
this is,
Um, as Jamie Diamond said, the FDIC invited the deal.
J.P. Morgan didn't go looking for that deal.
Now, imagine because he was doing with the federal regulator, he wouldn't make that statement falsely.
You know, I don't think it's unreasonable to assume the FDIC approach JP Morgan.
Um, in terms of my opinion, I actually don't, I think most likely J.P. Morgan probably didn't have the best bit.
But regulators.
wanted J.P. Morgan to take the deal because it's a $400 billion market cap bank,
the biggest bank in the world by far.
And they knew, okay, even if we throw a little bit of garbage at J.P. Morgan
and force them to pick it up to prevent contagion, then, you know, at the very least,
it's not going to affect them, right?
And that was really what I think happened, probably behind closed doors.
The FDIC said, look,
We've already had three bank failures of a pretty sizable bank.
On a more general level, stock talk, because this is obviously we're kind of digress, but I'm curious.
How concerned are you?
I know we've always talked and we've been covering this heavily about a potential contagion.
Does that increase that risk?
How concerned should the average Joe listening to us right now be?
Look, I mean, my view on this is the exact same, Mario.
The first time I ever spoke on this was on your space as well when these events first started.
But, you know, my view is the same as it was, which is that,
In the first couple of weeks, maybe you can say few weeks, two to three weeks of this.
Again, I hate calling it a crisis because that just feels hyperbolic, but maybe it is a crisis.
I don't know.
We'll find out in the next eight months.
But this episode, right, in the two to three weeks immediately after this episode, you did see...
what was a short-term collapse in what I've been referring to in my tweets
and what I've been speaking about this as depositor confidence.
Okay.
You saw a brief lapse in depositor confidence, right?
as a result of the failure of Silicon Valley and this general fear that, hey, maybe the FDIC won't continue to just ensure all deposits.
And that fear and that deposit flight was, I mean, it was shown in the numbers, right?
That isn't an opinion.
You know, Bank of America saw 15 plus billion in inflows.
The other big banks saw tens of billions in inflows.
In fact, when First Republic first ran into issues, that's precisely the first solution that the big banks came up with.
I'm sure people remember that headline from just a little over a month ago when the big banks injected 30 billion of deposits into First Republic.
Basically, what had happened was people had been taking their money out of banks like First Republic, putting into the bigger banks because they thought it was safer.
And so to plug the hole, the bigger banks were just like, take your money back here.
Right.
And so that didn't work, clearly, right?
Because just three weeks later, First Republic
entered FDFC receivership.
So what has happened, what that exact series of events,
and this is just again, my view,
I'm not saying this part is not fact.
The outflows is fact, but this part is my opinion.
You know, what has happened is that crisis
in depositor confidence
has become a crisis in investor confidence.
It has evolved into a crisis in shareholder confidence.
Okay.
So what's happening now is happening more in the markets
than it is on people's banking apps or at tellers.
What's happening now is,
A short-term binary risk factor, a short-term binary risk factor has been introduced to regional banking shareholders.
You think about some of the entities that own these regional banking stocks.
I'm talking about the Swedish pension fund, owned three of these failed banks, like,
you know, some what should be, I should say, conservatively managed entities held shares in these regional banks because they were viewed as relatively safe, right?
They're a huge component of commercial lending, a huge component of residential lending, a huge component of lending, a huge component of lending in general.
And so people, you know, prior to this crisis, no one was sitting around thinking my money's not safe at a bank, right?
That doesn't just, that doesn't just come out of nowhere.
And so.
What happens is when you have a crisis into positive confidence, regulators can do things to reassure that, right?
They can do things like all these solutions that people were discussing for the last few months, like raising the FDIC limit.
By the way, I'm not advocating for any of these things.
I'm just listing actions that can be taken to reassure confidence, you know, limiting withdrawals, et cetera, et cetera, all of these options that were entertained.
Okay, but it's different when you have a crisis in shareholder confidence.
Because of this short-term binary risk for regional bank shareholders,
now these short-selling campaigns where the short-sellers are looking for vulnerable regional banks,
you know, as they should, but those short-selling campaigns,
fuel is being added to those fires because the people that are long those names
have now realized there's a sudden binary risk.
The people that own these regional bank names are not speculative investors.
They're not your FinTwit crowd who's buying, you know, Tesla and Apple and Microsoft.
I mean, some of them are, but, you know, they're not generally hyper speculative people.
There are people that are trying to own regional banking names.
You can think there's maybe a little bit more upside than the big four.
Now all of those people have to question their investment thesis.
So when the people who are long have...
shattered confidence and you have these short selling campaigns, you see equity routes.
Today you saw seven regional banks losing a quarter of their value intradate, seven.
That's fucking nuts.
Like I've traded stocks for a long time.
That doesn't happen very often.
So can I ask you a question about that?
Can I ask you a question about that?
So this is not a crisis and a positive confidence any longer.
It has evolved into crisis and shareholder confidence.
And regulators can't plug that.
Stop, can you hear Liza?
Because I have a question about that.
Because I think.
Stock, can you hear you hear you, Liza?
I don't think, I don't think he is Liza.
Yeah, I'll have to drop you down.
Darn.
You can drop it down and put me back up.
Yeah, sure.
So, I mean, we're about to end now anyway.
So we'll leave your question for the finance space, which we're going to have, I believe it's going to be either tomorrow or the day after.
So, and that'll be specifically about the issues that Stock Talk talked about.
And we'll go more into depth and there'll be some like people from both sides.
So the one thing I want to say is that if if, if, so I look at the United States as kind of a microcosm of what's going on.
And then, and then the big huge global picture of Brits.
If you have a total of $7.3.
Dollars held by foreign.
entities and you're saying that bricks is going to it's going to it is going to sort of you know
get rid of the dollar that that brings down the whole world economy so i i'm not quite sure how
that that that that equates so um also asked you want to come back on that because of his stock can't
hear what lies in
Yeah, sorry, Sumer, just to cut out for a little bit.
Can you just give me the quick overview of what she was asking for?
Yeah, yeah.
Her argument, I believe, is that when you've got so much money...
US money invested in foreign countries, isn't it?
No, so that's so like the China holds a huge amount of treasuries in US dollars and
and it depends on selling its goods to us. So if you're gonna if you're gonna
devalue the United States currency, you're actually devaluing the platform on
which your economy depends.
So foreign countries hold 7.4 trillion U.S. dollars in treasury securities as of January
2023.
So if they want to get together and, you know, take away the power of the U.S. dollar, fine.
But I feel like that that's.
shooting themselves in the foot.
So I'd like, no, yeah.
And Lisa, like I 100% agree with that.
And I brought this up earlier just a couple of minutes ago.
Like recently Argentina and China announced that they were no longer going to trade in dollars.
They were going to trade in yuan.
And what a lot of experts, unfortunately to talk to, one of the points was that the reasons why the Argentinians wanted to do this is because they wanted to keep dollars.
Because they're running into an issue of rampant inflation, rampant de-evaluation of the currency, and they need the dollar.
They need to keep those dollars to try to bring their currency back up.
Which is exactly why I don't think the BRICS, I agree with you, which is exactly why I don't think the BRICS community actually poses as big of a threat as we think it does.
And I think, again, I'm just going to say, if anybody's going to talk about breaks, you need to talk about the quad, which is India, Australia, Japan, and the United States, which China in many ways has labeled the anti-China NATO because they're, they actually, the quad has done, you know, those four countries have done multinational military exercises, right? And it's.
And there's a concern that these countries have,
specifically probably India,
are being perceived as this,
you know,
Quad being an anti-China-NATO,
that we're actually,
we see a lot of progress in their treaties,
etc.,
is actually in the economic and humanitarian area,
like our cultural exchange, right?
Much more agreements have been signed by the Quad.
Then probably what you can really look at at the Bricks.
And I think Stock talked about this earlier was,
you know,
you cannot talk about the bricks as this one unitary,
like,
you know, quote unquote alliance and completely ignore the incredible border tensions and
tensions, the strategic tensions that India and China have. India and China probably view each other
at least as, you know, the second or third order greatest threat to their own, you know,
geopolitical interests in the region. You know, they might shake a lot of hands. They might talk
and they have things that are mutually beneficial. But there's underlying tension between both
countries that just cannot simply be ignored. I agree 100%.
Yeah, so thanks guys for coming. I appreciate it.
Actually, Suleiman, do you mind if I speak to that last point for a second?
Yeah, go for it, Bon. Go for it.
Okay, in terms of China held the US treasuries, you'll notice that they've been trending that down over the last several years.
It's the same with their exports to the United States and imports from the United States.
They've been winding that down to diversifying the other places.
As far as Bricks and Quad are concerned, it's true.
Bricks is not a consolidated alliance.
It's more of an economic, de-multilateral deal thing.
Like NAPTA.
It's not a free trade zone.
The SCO is closer that, but I'm getting to the SCO.
It's important to note that when talking about the quad, especially India, that India is also the eye in Bricks, and they are an SEO member with Russia and China.
Because when speaking of India, a lot of people forget what the guiding principle of a strategic platform is, which is strategic neutrality.
They are literally playing all sides to their own benefit.
You cannot point at India in the quad and ignore that India is also in the SEO and in Bricks.
It's all I wanted to say.
It's just more food for thought than instead than something to expand upon.
Thank you.
Right, guys.
Thanks very much for tuning in.
We do appreciate it.
And like I said, we will be back tomorrow at 11 o'clock.
I do know some of the topics that will be coming up soon, so watch out for it.
One of them is what our Stock Talk talked about, which is the banking crisis.
The other one is that we will be talking about Epstein.
and the third topic that we were going to talk about,
which just slipped my mind,
but it's,
I think Tate will be doing it one.
Yeah,
exactly, yeah,
yeah,
yeah,
that's all you care about.
Of course,
he's the top,
he's the top G.
Yeah.
The reason you're on this stage is because of Tate.
People are starting to get proud of you now, Mario.
You finally realized you've had an epiphany.
You've realized my account.
My account is just hacked.
My account is hacked.
You're posting a lot of positive care content recently.
And, no, look, I'll give you credit.
I appreciate Nick and Slaman for covering the show today.
I'm jet lagged as hell after the trip to New York.
I haven't slept at all.
So I'm dead.
So, yeah, it'll be good to end the space.
We'll see you all tomorrow.
Oh, Spike is here.
Did you guys have a chat to Spike?
It's been a while.
We haven't had them on stage.
I wasn't here, so I'm not sure if Spike you chipped in earlier.
I didn't. I had been asked if I could join after nine, and I did. I didn't know that we were,
I guess it's wrapping up early. So, yeah, we're up and up in a good. All good. Good to have you,
by the way. Actually, I haven't had you in a while. I'd love to ask you a few questions before we wrap
up, Spike, because it's a bit of a while we're trying to bring you up. First, maybe Salman,
you want to kick it off with the first question? Because I've got a couple for Spike as well.
I mean, you go first and then I'll jump in.
Sure, Spike, we had a discussion earlier.
I want to kind of bring it back to the beginning of the space.
I asked a question to General Flynn.
And that was the...
He talked about the risks with China, the tensions there.
We talked about the Russia Wall and potentially becoming a nuclear conflict.
And then we talked about the AI risks,
which is something we cover very heavily in this space.
And we've done a few shows on.
Out of these three things, and of course we talked about the economy and...
Mr. Flynn called it, General Flynn called it, economic warfare.
Out of all these four points, which one concerns you most over the next five to ten years,
maybe even next couple of years, because we saw a few generals warned that there could be
conflict between the U.S. and China as early as 2025.
I don't want to be the fee monger here.
But out of these four points, which one concerns you the most?
In the immediate couple years, I would say economic collapse.
I think we have a glooming banking crisis that were already at the beginning of.
I think as soon as the FDIC said that they would only, from now on,
only bail out the so-called too big to fail or systemically important banks.
They send a clear signal to anyone with a deposit over $250,000 that was in one of those banks
that wasn't deemed too big to fail to pull their money out.
We're seeing that now.
I think that's exactly what just happened with...
with the bank, was at first federal, the bank that just got,
that sold to or bought by J.P. Morgan,
I think we're seeing the beginning of that.
And I think we're on the edge of the cycle
where the unsustainable boom and malinvestment
gives way to a major correction.
And I don't think there's a single thing
that any of the governing authorities
or the central banks who helped to create this
will have anything to be able to do to stop it.
So I think that's the most immediate thing.
I think that we're in saber-rattling season when it comes to Russia and to China.
We seem to have ebbs and flows to who's doing the saber-rattling and how much of it.
Usually it's around election cycles.
I don't think there's an immediate risk of conflict.
I could be wrong, but I think that when all or most of the parties involved,
there are at least two of the parties involved are nuclear powers.
I think that the rhetoric often gives way to reality.
I think we've seen that even in the conflict in Ukraine.
You've seen both sides only push to a certain point and not go further because they know that that would inevitably lead to a much worse and nuclear conflict.
So always a risk there, zero margin for error on it.
So it's always a present risk.
But I would say the biggest threat we have right now is the looming recession, which frankly is just a correction after years of essentially free money from the central banks and all the malinvestment that that created.
And you don't think that contagion, you know, we saw that the regulators are stepping in, not only in the US, but in Europe as well. You don't think that's enough because we don't have the same problems we had in 08. What makes you so pessimistic?
I think, again, as soon as they signaled that the moves that they were going to make were towards consolidating the bigger banks, even if it's at the expense of the smaller banks, that with each new action, those words, because they only said this about a month ago shortly after Silicon Valley Bank.
and signature banks failed, they made it clear that they were only going to be doing this for the larger banks,
even if it was at the expense of the smaller banks.
So you're worried about the consolidation among big banks, which is what Slaman was talking about earlier.
Well, I think the consolidation is just a natural reaction to the governing authorities, letting people know that they're going to make sure that the consolidation happens.
Well, that's going to equal bank runs for the smaller banks.
And there's, you know, up to a point, there's only so far that you can contain that.
especially as these numbers are coming in and we're seeing that the economy is receding,
we're heading towards a perfect storm of a really bad correction.
And when that correction happens,
you're going to see tens of millions of Americans lose all but everything.
And there's no indication that we're not going to see the same kind of massive corporate welfare bailouts
at the expense of the taxpayer and at the expense of people who are losing everything
that we saw back in 2008 and 2009.
I think we're looking at TARP with extra zeros added at the end.
And another thing I want to ask is, are you worried about, and that's a question that Tom, Tom, good to have you on stage.
But are you worried about the polarization that we're seeing in the U.S., like domestic issues and the inequality we're seeing in the U.S. as well, could be a bigger problem than all these geopolitical risks.
Is that something that concerns you?
Because I've never seen the country so divided.
Yeah, I mean, it's always a concerning thing.
And it's always bad when you see people fighting each other, especially when it's often over issues that may not even directly affect them.
I think that the Republicans and Democrats and their corporate media lapdogs had done a fantastic job of keeping us divided over hobby horse issues.
and to create this narrative that one half of the ruling class
is to blame for everything,
and only the other half of the ruling class
can save us from them.
And while both halves of the ruling class
continue to work together to run up massive amounts of debt,
to pay off the corporate sponsors that put them in office,
stick us with the bill, with it,
with interest and let it ruin our lives
while telling us that they've got everything under control.
And that's where the divisiveness comes from.
There's this Kabuki theater that happens in DC
and state capitals across the country
where these people pretend to be fighting each other.
They encourage us to fight each other as well.
But the bottom line is when it comes time
to raise that debt ceiling,
when it comes time to increase the amount of money,
they're running up in the names of people
that haven't even been born yet,
When it comes time to give massive corporate welfare to the people who actually put them in office, they work together in record time and we get screwed over for it.
So the divisiveness is a direct reaction to the, I guess, good cop, bad cop, divide and conquer routine that they're playing on us.
And they play it very well.
Slim End, did you want the mic before I ask more questions?
I don't want a hug.
No, no. I mean, specifically in terms of what you said, Spike, just slightly earlier, in terms of, I know you're right that the bank run looks like there's going to be bankruns on smaller banks.
Is it a concern is what I mentioned earlier, that essentially all of this has been, all the power in terms of the financial sector is being consolidated into a few banks and they're going to have way too much power.
Oh, absolutely.
We're seeing that already, man.
We're seeing that already, Slimeon.
It's not like something's going to happen.
It's already happening right now.
The numbers are showing massive apples.
Yeah, yeah.
They have huge power.
It's troubling.
No, no, for sure.
They have huge amount of power.
It's troubling.
It's very troubling.
And it's not happening as a result of the market.
It's not happening because these banks are just so darn great that the American people are
deciding on mass to move their money out of...
you know,
poorer performing banks
and put them into these banks.
It's happening as a direct result
of U.S.
government policy of saying,
we are going to use
taxpayer money
to bail out the biggest
and most powerful banks
and only them.
Even though it's the smaller banks
that are most at the risk of having these runs happen,
we're only going to bail out these banks
moving forward.
Which again, if you've got, you know,
$251,000 or you've got millions of dollars
in one of these non, the so-called
systemically unimportant banks,
then you'd be a fool not to pull your money out before it runs,
but that's what's causing the runs.
And yeah, we're going to talk a lot more about this in detail in the finance space, but just another question, if that's all right.
Sure, sure.
Aren't they essentially bailing out with the smaller banks anyway?
When they basically are covering deposits in an unlimited fashion, so above the $250,000, they're kind of bailing them out.
I mean, they're essentially bailing them.
I mean, not kind of.
They have, and are saying that they continue to bail them out.
Well, yeah, I mean, ultimately...
Before you say yes, Spike, Simon, I keep correcting you.
bailing out depositors is not the same as bailing out shareholders.
It's very important to make that distinction for the audience.
The FDIC insurance is for depositors,
people that put their money in the bank
and they expect that money to be safe.
It's not for shareholders.
So labeling the FDIC insurance is bailing out.
That's your corporate slant on it, but essentially...
No, hold on, but are you saying
a person that puts their money in the bank just to save it
is the same as a shareholder that invests in a bank
that takes the risk for a return?
Yeah, yeah, and I'll explain why.
That's ridiculous.
I'll explain why.
Let me explain why.
No, it's not ridiculous.
So let me explain why.
Because remember, you're not talking about the average person who's putting their money in.
You're talking about your nerdy friends or your rich friends who are basically got 250,000 pounds in bank accounts.
A lot of these guys have significant risk management and they're making that decision.
A lot of that's always linked to other things like loans and money.
these other kind of like, you know,
alliances they have with the bank in terms of networking and all these factors.
I don't remember that.
Let me finish my point, please.
Let me finish my point, Mario.
I know you try to back your people up.
So essentially, when one is at that level of financing,
and has that level of money and then decides to put it in, yes, that's their risk.
And it shouldn't be the average American who has to do it.
All right, okay, okay, look,
you're not running for office.
So stop saying something that sounds good
and stop saying I'm backing my people up.
Someone puts $500,000
is not connected to the executives in a bank.
Doesn't know how to do risk management for a bank.
Something that even analysts and experts
couldn't see the problems at Silicon Valley back.
Let me make my point.
Half a million pounds for someone working, someone that sold their house that works nine to five every day at a basic job, nothing to do with finance.
How the hell are they going to do risk management?
How are they going to understand the time, the risk that Silicon Valley Bank faced?
How's anyone that's not deep into finance?
First of all,
in no average American, right,
who has got half a million pounds in their account,
average savings of an American,
average American is $4,000 if I'm right.
So let's not pretend this is the average American.
This is your talk.
I never said average American.
Let's not put words in my mouth.
I never said average American.
I said half a million, you can't look at them.
Half a million of excess cash, bro.
You're going to be significantly wealthy.
Yeah, if someone that's wealthy doesn't mean someone that can analyze the balance sheets of a bank.
They're putting their money there for saving.
I'm not saying that the debate of whether they should be insured or not is a different discussion.
But I'm saying they're the same.
Hold on, hold on.
Let me, yeah, but you're changing.
Okay, don't avoid the question by changing the debate.
The point you made is someone, let me finish, bro, let me finish.
Someone that puts their money in the bank.
that wants it to be safe, correct?
Someone puts their money bank, generally they want it to be safe.
Is that fair statement?
Or you want to debate that one too?
Continue your argument.
I'm not going to say yes or no.
Someone that invests, put their money in the bank
versus someone that invests in shares,
buy stock or options or whatever in a bank.
They're different people.
They should be treated differently.
It's different levels of risk.
So why we could debate on what insurance we should offer?
When you put money in a bank, it's not that simple.
People put money in their bank.
There's interest on it.
There's other factors on it.
But let's be clear.
When you're putting, when you've got half a million pound of excess money and you've got that in the bank,
it's the reason why the deposit insurance increased to $250,000, it was much lower than that before.
And now you're looking at the lawmakers are asking, lawmakers just quickly, not arguing, just saying lawmakers are looking to increase it again, by the way.
Why should someone who is negligent?
Why is a negligent person being their money, when they've got half a million pounds being covered by somebody who can.
Look, I'm not saying it's a so slim man.
You're twisting it again.
I'm not saying it should be covered above 250K.
Now you're implying that I'm saying it should.
I'm just correcting you.
I'll ask you the questioning.
I'll give you the chance to change it.
Someone that has money in a bank should they be treated exactly the same as someone buying shares?
Someone that has more than 250K in the bank, should they be treated the same as someone that's buying stock in a bank?
Investing in a stock of bank expecting.
Okay, so someone that invests in a bank expects a return 10%, 20%, whatever.
They have the potential for massive upside return.
You're saying that's the same as someone putting their money in the bank and barely getting a tiny interest rate as a safe haven.
You're saying that they're saying that's ridiculous.
And I'm not sure I'm sure everybody on stage disagrees.
No, no, I've explained my argument.
So because what you're failing to understand is when people have got half a million pound of excess cash,
they have the ability to risk management, we know when they have that type of money,
they are basically going to these banks, they have in relationship with these banks,
they have issues like in terms of networking, they have issues in terms of getting cheaper loans.
It's not as simple as someone to just drop in half a million.
There is a number of connected issues to it.
Let me get, let me go, Rob, let me get a finance guy up.
Rob, if you want to come up, I know you might be busy or Slate for you,
but if you want to come up for a bit and just give a lesson to Slay, man,
because that's a crazy statement.
Why don't you give it?
Because you're not listening to me, man.
I'm just going to repeat the same stuff again and again.
Maybe if you hear a different voice, you'll be more receptive because it's not making sense.
I agree with you about the insurance.
That's a good debate.
I'm not saying that it should be insured above $250K.
That's the whole argument.
That a shareholder can't be the same.
Wait, wait, let me ask you a question.
Yeah, I'm going to move on after this.
Go ahead.
You just said, let's just clear.
You said you agree with me about the insurance being capital.
No, no, I don't agree.
I agree with you.
This is a good debate.
Like, I'm not saying I agree with your point.
I don't know the answer.
Whether it should be insured above 250K.
It's a lot more complicated than that.
Commit.
Commit to it.
So why are you arguing me when you haven't even got a position?
I'm not.
At least I'm not.
Okay, bro, bro, bro.
Yeah, now it's getting annoying.
I'm not arguing that.
My argument is, I have a position.
Someone that's a shareholder
should be treated differently
than someone's putting money in the bank.
That's what I'm debating.
You keep twisting it on where it should be insuring.
Like, Mario, why don't I have a position on that?
You're misunderstanding.
Let me explain.
So the whole argument started
because you...
got upset that I used the word bailout.
And I'm saying when it went from the,
because remember up to quarter of a million,
the insurance was,
they were covered by the insurance anyway.
And my argument,
my thesis was that they bailed out people above that amount.
You then got upset and you were like,
don't use the word bail out after.
basically form out argument.
No, I said, I just said, shareholders,
shareholder, so man, I'm just saying shareholder bailout
and deposit a bailout are two different things
and they should not be conflated.
I'm glad to use the word bail out there, bro.
I appreciate it.
You could use the word bail out.
You could use the word,
you're just saying they're different things.
I use the same word, but I said they're different
and you appreciate it.
Cool, right, Ben, thanks.
Sarah, I'll let you.
Just think how about that.
That does not make sense, bro.
Born Mario.
Tom, Tom, hold on, Tom, do you think,
someone that puts their money in the bank,
let me get your thoughts, Tom.
Someone that puts their money in the bank,
should they be treated exactly as the same
in terms of risk and risk exposure
as someone that invests in the stock market,
buys the stock of a bank in the expectation of a return?
Is that the same thing?
Well, first of all, let me just say,
I'm impressed how much you sound like me
once you get heated.
I'm also very jet lagged, so I was about saying yelling, but people tell me not to yell.
You know, the answer is what does the law require, right?
What are the regulations required?
You know, the answer is no.
Someone who has $250,000 or less in a bank, they're protected.
Those above that aren't.
In terms of the morality or kind of what the policy is,
certainly eliminating the...
the limit on the protection ends up benefiting people not, you know, on the, you know, just
the side of the poorhouse, but sophisticated businesses who should know better who have
millions of dollars in unsecured accounts. There's no way that there should be backstopping
for that. I mean, I would argue that insurance deposits generally are moral hazard and have
kind of, you know, distorted the banking system as it is.
So, you know, look, we've got government officials running, you know, this spike and I may differ on who's the blame and the greater narrative about how things are operating.
The reality is when things go south-south, so quickly, it's usually because the government's involved.
And they don't know what they're doing.
You know, we had looked at in 2009, right?
When was the last big thing?
2008?
reading in the Wall Street Journal. I said, you know, the banks got these big bailouts initially, right?
And I'm reading the Wall Street Journal and the banker chief said, well, we weren't given much choice.
And well, that's interesting. Let's figure out what went on. So we sued. You know, we couldn't get the information about how these decisions were made.
We finally got the information. And Paulson and company, they said, you know, you get these insider treasury folks saying we should bring in the nine biggest banks to talk about.
this and and the response from the top treasury official is well what are the nine biggest banks
and then they bring them in and they said you know by the way we're going to uh make capital
available to you tomorrow you're going to take it whether or not you like it and if you don't take
it uh you should know your regulators will require you to do so when they were forced to fill out
permission forms that were less sophisticated than permission forms i fill out for my children
And, you know, these are not market decisions.
The banking industry is so closely regulated, and their mega, their kind of their general investment strategy can only be blessed by the government.
And it was an investment strategy designed to support the,
destruction of our dollar and our economy through excessive spending.
And now we're all reaping the world wind.
And the same government is making decisions based on politics.
You know, Silicon Valley was only bailed out after a bunch of Democrats in California
called up the Biden administration.
And then they go after the bank in New York that Barney Frank was on.
Was that signature bank?
Because they didn't like that they were involved in crypto.
You know, this is all politics.
And going back to your earlier discussion about alternative currencies, I kind of laugh.
Alternative currencies run by what?
Who?
Gangsters?
So the group of gangsters outside the system of civilization, and I'm talking about the Chinese, are going to run a currency that people are going to rely upon.
That's never going to happen.
Now, the only way it might happen, or currencies that would be separate would emerge,
is that if the revolutionary left, which is now trying to destroy this country here,
by attacking all of our institutions, is successful.
And, you know, that's the danger to America.
It's not outsiders, but the insider threats that have decided that the rule of law and the Republican form of government
is, is, um, they're impatient with it and want to get over it to get to whatever
revolutionary goal they want. Um, so it's, God, God help us is all I can say. But we got
to recognize that no one really knows what they're doing in DC and, and if, you know,
when things don't make sense, it's usually just ugly politics. And, and that's what's going on
here. These, these guys and these, the FDIC, the SEC, and,
They don't know anything about regulation.
I mean, finance.
If they did, they wouldn't be in the government.
It's like having the post office regulate hospitals.
Sorry, Tom.
I thought you finished that.
Thanks for that.
Yeah, that's my thought.
No, no, we appreciate it.
I mean, Spike, obviously, Mario failed miserably.
So if you want to try and back him up, go ahead, bro.
So, first of all, I agree with Tom.
Anytime there's any major failure or crisis, government either created it or created the conditions to make it worse.
Or sometimes both. Sometimes they create it and then make sure it gets worse as well.
What you say, Spike, would you say, would you say government or just, I want to put it in not government, humans.
Government, bankers, everybody, just human greed.
Well, it starts at the top from government.
I mean, yes, it is humans, and government are humans.
But then the government gets...
But then the government...
But then the government, the bank is like an 08, the amount of corruption,
the amount of influenced bankers had on officials...
kind of you can I point to think it's worth them.
Post-tart bailouts in post-2008,
when we talk about banks, especially major banks,
they're basically an extension of government,
or you could argue that government's an extension of banks.
It's really a distinction looking for a need.
It really, we're talking about people who have too much power
and way too little accountability.
And the only way that you can get rid of them or replace them
is to find someone who can demagogue better than them.
government is just a uniquely bad way for people to organize.
That's why the governments that are the most successful and allow for the most prosperity
are the ones that govern the least possible and have as many safeguards and limitations put in place
to keep the impulses of people from using government to impose themselves even more on us.
And that's why we see some of the facts on the extent.
Just quickly is one other thing I wanted to share.
We had sued, I think, Ernacki.
Someone like that and folks can look it up.
Tell us what was the basis for some of your bailouts.
Tell us what the rules were you were following.
And the response back was, well, we don't really have any.
It was all ad hoc.
So when things really hit the fan...
We're, you know, Janet Yellen's going to be figuring out what the poll numbers say and they'll be talking to politicians and see what they're willing to bear in terms of spending our money either directly through taxpayer bailouts.
And they're never really bailouts, their takeovers or, you know, taxing us indirectly through the deposit insurance fund.
But there's no rhyme or reason to it other than reliably to expand government power and control
and advance whatever agenda they're trying to push.
And it's really ugly.
So that's why I don't think the markets have settled or trust has been, you know,
the market suggests that trust hasn't been established yet because they see that,
The emperor has no clothes.
And it's a transnational problem because they don't know anything in Europe either.
Yeah, well, that's how the cycle happens.
It's when people realize that there's nothing here.
We're sitting on top of a giant bubble, and that's when the massive correction happens,
and there's nothing that can really be done about it.
Government's always in a alternating between telling us everything is perfectly fine
because they've got it under control or telling us that everything's falling apart
because they don't have enough control.
But no matter whether things seem to be going well or seem to be going bad,
the answer is always they need more control.
Yeah, but of course, they can do something about it.
They can, for instance, agree to a moderate decrease in the debt.
$5 trillion.
It's way short of anything I would want,
but the fact that the political media complex opposes it tells you everything you need to know.
They start cutting taxes.
They start cutting government.
I mean, there are all sorts of ways to address the crisis and confidence caused by the out-of-control spending
and the subsidies through low-interest rates of this spending.
But, you know, that's not a solution of the political class and the left.
And this is a leftist approach, one to impose, with the support of too often corporate interests that, you know, pretend that low interest rates are, you know, or the goal of government irrespective of the inflationary effects of it.
I have an interesting economic question, but before that, Spike, I wanted you to answer that same question.
By the way, Slaman, just, I don't know if you forget, because you live in a delusional world.
Tom said, I'm correct in terms of not comparing, unless correct me if I'm wrong, Tom, but a shareholder that's buying stock versus someone that's putting their money in the bank are not the same.
It should not be treated the same.
It doesn't mean you should insure above 250K.
Don't conflate it.
But Spike, I want to get your thoughts on this particular point.
And then I want to ask you a question that's going to be really interesting regarding unemployment and the record low participation rate.
And that could lead...
So I'm a bit jet-lagged.
But I'll ask you the question right after you comment on the point that me and Slimeon
with budding heads on.
Sure, sure.
So here's how I'll put this.
My money that I have in the bank I know is insured up to a certain point, but I also
know that I'm going to get next to no return on it, if any.
It's just money that's liquid.
I'm going to gain little to nothing on it, but I know it's insured.
Same thing with any money I'd have like in a CD or something like that.
My money that I have in annuities, I know that it is privately insured that at the very least I won't lose my principle.
I may not gain anything, although there are some guaranteed like floors for gain over time.
But for the most part, I may not gain anything, but at least my principle is taking care of.
But I also know that the tradeoff is that if the market is doing really well, I'm not going to get the full amount of the gains that I would have gotten in, say, direct investing in stocks or in a mutual fund or commodities or something like that.
My money that I have invested directly in mutual funds,
in commodity stocks, anything like that,
crypto, any of these things that I have invested,
I know, and in fact was told if it was done
through an actual investment company or an advisor,
They make sure that you know that you could lose up to and including all of your principal.
You could walk away with $0.0.0 from your investment.
It's not likely, but it can certainly happen.
But the tradeoff there is that I get all the game that happens.
I get, so if I'm making, if my bets pay off, then I get, you know, pretty much I get all of the amount.
So, Spike, it's actually what you're saying is that this is a long way of saying that someone that invests money knows that there's a risk they could lose it all, but also get the upside potential.
Someone's putting their money in the bank.
Don't expect much of a return, but they expect it to be safe.
Is that a fair conclusion?
Yes, but here's the problem.
So what happened back in?
So hold on, hold on, hold on.
So what happened in March, what happened in March, because the limit right now is 250,000.
Anything over 250K, they don't cover.
What happened in the end of March after Signature Bank and Silicon Valley Bank bailed out, the authorities said that moving forward, they would only bail out depositors.
over 250,000 if they were a part of the too big to fail banks, the so-called systemically
important banks. Whereas if they're in one of these so-called lesser banks, which most people
have their money right now, if it's a problem, it's a huge problem. It is encouraging bank runs
because it's encouraging the largest depositors in these smaller banks to pull their money out.
This is a crazy. This is a
This is a crazy policy.
This is just mind-boggling to me.
Maybe it's something I don't understand, but to offer that insurance.
It's not crazy.
It's not crazy.
It is intended to consolidate wealth under the largest banks,
even if it triggers a bank crisis and a recession or leads or or hastens the arrival of a correction and a recession.
At the end of the day, the big banks will be bigger.
So if you look at it from that filter, it's not crazy.
They know exactly what they're doing.
I agree with what you said, but just for Mario,
because obviously you need to basically make it a lot more easy.
You did explain to him that.
that people who work for in government are also humans.
So Spike for Mario,
what you're saying is,
yes, when a person deposits money in the account,
they deposit it because they know it will be insured.
And that's up to $250,000.
But those who deposited above $250,000,
they did it with that risk
and therefore they were bailed out.
no that's not the
point
that's
quick
and let me
yeah push
push back
and also
I'll add
on to it
because he's
changing
should they
be treated
the same
should
last time
to move on
should a
shareholder
be treated
the same
as someone
that
a depositor
well
Well, they're not the same, so no.
But I will say this, as I've, as a, I guess, retired serial entrepreneur,
you reach a point where you have orders you have to fulfill
that are in the hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars.
So there's not a way to run a smaller, medium-sized business.
without having money deposited somewhere that is well over $250,000.
So, I mean, I would prefer that that kind of insuring happen in the market and outside of government.
I don't think that the FDIHC should be increasing that rate.
And I don't think that they should be, they certainly shouldn't be creating a two-tiered system where only the big banks get the additional deposit or bailout, but no one else does.
Um, but there is something to be said about the fact that, uh, just because you have more than 250,000 in the bank, no, you're not the average American. You're not a, a blue collar working class American unless you're in retirement age. Um, but you're also, I mean, you're, you're not necessarily the top point one percent fat cat. You're probably more than likely, especially if you're in a smaller community bank. You're probably a small business owner, uh, who's in a, uh, a, uh, a, uh, a, uh, a, a, uh,
a cash rich business and are having to constantly move around money.
But I would prefer that any ensuring of that happened through private needs,
whether it's some kind of additional fee I'm paying or something like that to ensure that money as well.
so just i want to but just before i ask a question i do i do want to move on to a separate point i don't know if you want to keep butchering the same point so man
no no i want i do want to butcher the same point uh since you took it i was gonna i was ready to close up about half an hour ago but then you brought it back in isn't it so now deal with it so spike uh you mentioned that um fdi i should not cover over 250 concisely if you can explain to me why
Well, first of all, I don't think that, and Tom mentioned this as well, having the government involved and using taxpayer money as a stopgap to bail out depositors or frankly to bail out banks, even if it's just the depositors of that bank leads to malinvestment by the banks.
That's part of the cycle that, that's part of the actions that enable these cycles of boom and busts.
Because the bottom line is, when the money's cheap,
when the bank, when the Fed is handing out money at, you know, adjusted for inflation at a negative
interest rate and they're just handing out money free and clear, you end up with banks like,
like Silicon Valley Bank that invest in things like mortgage back securities and other nonsense
that would make absolutely zero sense whatsoever for them to.
put that money into if they were actually having to underwrite their own losses, but because
they know, A, the money is free and B, they're going to get bailed out at least to an extent if they do
it, they go ahead and do it. But if there were some more accountability right off the bat, then,
you know, there would be less of this malinvestment. Ensuring that deposit amounts, increasing the
amount of deposits that are being bailed out, not by...
private insurers or through the banks underwriting themselves, but by the government, by the taxpayer,
ensures even more and worse malendestment in the future.
But then again, your argument is from the perspective of the banks, but then if your argument
is that the FDIC should not cover above 250, but then you're also saying that a deposit is different
and, you know, different to an investor, why are you then saying that they should risk their money?
I'm sorry, I'm not understanding.
Neither am I.
I'm not,
I don't know.
Do you understand the question,
Spike?
Yeah, yeah.
I want to be clear on what I'm saying.
The government should not be bailing out anymore.
You said you never understood.
It is what I'm saying.
Go ahead.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So imagine somebody deposits 300,000 pound into the bank account, right?
They're now, the insurance for the, it's not covered, right?
You're saying the reason why it shouldn't be covered is because and your whole overarching argument is anything above 250 shouldn't be covered.
And I agree with your arguments.
So it shouldn't be covered because essentially it'll give the bank's carte blanche to make significant risks at the tax pay's expense.
But it should not be, oh sorry.
The banks, hold on that, no, before you finish, no, on that point, the bank wouldn't, so if the depositors get insured, Slaman, it doesn't force, it doesn't mean the bank can take risks.
Because the bank, if the shareholders don't get bailed out and the bank takes too big of a risk, they get screwed.
Because if the depositor get bailed out, the executives have shares in the bank, and they're not going to get bailed out.
Their shares will get zeroed.
Does that make sense?
Yeah.
So depositors getting insured does not give a carte blanche to the executives.
Shareholders getting insured, shareholders getting bailed out, sorry, will give that carte blanche
because then the executives that hold shares and the investors don't give a shit because they're going to get bailed out anyway.
Does that make sense?
So I agree with the second point of what you said that bailing out the shareholders gives them carte blanche.
Making it clear that you will bail out the depositors still gives a little level of protection.
Exactly, but it's not as much.
It gives a little bit of production, but not as much as shareholders.
Not as much, but what it does do is it lets the, it leads to depositors being lulled into a sense of complacency
because they're not making sure that their money's in a sound bank.
Like, no one here is spending up until recently was spending much time looking at the house on their bank was.
I just want to be precise with your argument.
So you're saying that the reason why a depositor, their money should not be secure is because essentially when they deposit in that level of money,
they're being negligent in deposit in that high value in the bank that they're doing.
So hence the action is taking risk.
What's your argument for why a deposit is money should be at risk?
Right. So what I'm seeing is that the government should not be involved in this.
Because if the insurance was happening through the bank or through individual depositors,
now there's some accountability because you have underwriters involved.
You have the people themselves that are responsible for whatever the premium is,
making decisions on to make sure that their premium stays low.
You have some feedback that's helping stop some of this malinvestment from happening.
When the government is insuring it, they're just saying, hey, you're not paying anything additional for this.
You can make mistakes up to a point and we'll bail you out on it or bail your deposits out or whatever else.
What I'm saying is, the more you guys, guys, guys, guys, guys, the more of that malinvestment that you'll have.
I'm saying the government shouldn't be involved at all.
It certainly shouldn't be involved any more than it is.
All right, so Slaman, let's have this debate.
Look, it's, I know you like to win, but I think the quality of the space should be above eagles and who wins.
So I'll give you, you're the winner here, man, you got it right.
But I do want to crush you in another one.
By the way, I'm just joking. You got crushed.
Sam is here.
And look at Sam's bio.
Sam, by the way, Sam, welcome for the first time in the space.
Sam says he's a reformed...
Pleasure.
He's a reformed MSM mainstream media journalist.
So Sam, I like that.
Let me give you...
Just I'm going to unmute you.
It's like he swallowed it.
Just I'm muted you because I can hear you breathing.
Just because he's been through reformation,
don't be mutting him.
All right.
So me and Slayman,
like we're both critical of mainstream media.
Slyman more than I.
But we're both critical,
and obviously we're leading the whole
citizen journalism movement.
And...
I wanted to get...
Sorry?
I'm just kidding. I'm just kidding. Go ahead.
Ah, yeah, Slaman is...
It goes overboard.
Anything the media mentions,
he immediately doesn't want to believe it.
So, Sam, first, can you tell me more what you mean
when you say you're a reformed, mainstream media journalist?
Well, look, I guess I just got disillusioned and jaded with it
after being in the media for about 20 years
and seeing what I was doing.
And it just seemed to me like what we're doing is silly.
And at the time, I sort of...
I ended up losing a job, which is normal for most journalists.
You go through jobs like you go through, you know, through watches every couple of years.
You move on and go to something else.
But I just got to a point where I just don't want to work in this industry anymore.
It's just so tainted and it's so full of people who have got agendas.
And, you know, it's not about telling the truth and it's not about doing things.
the work of the people telling people what they need to know anymore.
It's about pushing agendas and pushing what you think people should know
and trying to make societal change and social engineering and all of this kind of stuff.
And I'd be very interested to know if that was your experience.
Just go ahead, Nick.
First, I want to say before you ask your question, Sam, where from a shirley are you from?
Because I feel like home right now with listening to your accent.
Do you really?
I'm in Tasmania.
Yeah, man. I'm from Melbourne.
Oh, Tasmania's not part of Australia, man.
What are you talking about?
Exactly.
You guys are the odd one out that you believe you're part of the country, but you don't know that you know.
Nick, go ahead.
Well, that's right.
When we get sick of you all, like during COVID, we just shut the borders.
We're quite happy with that.
And Nick, go ahead.
I just wanted to ask him because you were saying, you know, talking about mainstream media pushing a narrative and everything like that.
I can't really be relied on at this point.
How did it get to that point?
Why does it take people like...
you and I to come out and bust some of these stories wide open
that, you know, mainstream media,
that billions of dollars should have the resources to do.
Well, so it started with heaps of money, and there was lots of money being put into it,
and people could really had lots of time and lots of resources to go out there and tell the story properly,
but as it started to contract, and social media just went through it like a wrecking ball,
and there was less money, there was less advertisers, and there was less, you know,
resources being given to these journalists, so they've had to start to try and keep these audiences up.
So I think, you know, being at...
Creating news that was not just truthful, but that also got more people listening, got more people involved and got more people, you know, clicking and sharing and all of this garbage that it's all about now, started to overtake the desire to actually tell the truth and to actually help people...
um to take people places that they can't go and tell them things that they can't see and do all that kind of stuff
and so i don't know i'm i mean i know a lot of people have got you know big big um
I guess conspiracy theories is the word for it.
I hate that word,
but I don't think there was any coordinated attempt.
I think now it's being manipulated because it's so easy to manipulate.
But it was kind of a slow process where that kind of journalism,
that kind of clickbaity journalism started to take hold and become more popular and become...
a vital part of newsrooms. And so I've had more than one news director tell me that, you know,
when you do a news story, you want to make people feel something. Your first thing is making
people feel something. And that's garbage. You don't want to make people feel something or,
you know, make people change their behavior. You want to tell them the information. That's not our job.
Our job is not to change people's behavior. Our job is to give them the fact.
and if they want to go and change their behavior, that's great.
But this is not, and I think we've just kind of lost sight of what the whole idea of it was
because this necessity, this kind of necessitated, which is why I'm so excited about independent journalism.
Like, I think this is definitely the way forward.
And the fact that Mario is getting thousands and thousands of people into his spaces,
and you've got these independent news organizations, right?
that are both on the left and the right popping up all over the place and thriving.
I think for me is really exciting.
I've got a question for you, Sam.
We talk about mainstream media being flawed, et cetera.
And I agree with everything you said.
And you talked about independent journalists being the solution.
How does that solve the problem?
And let me tell you what I mean.
Okay.
Mainstream media is systematically flawed.
You've got the conflicts of interest with advertisers.
And you've got internal biases.
I wouldn't say all mainstream media is equal.
I've said this many times.
You can't put Fox and CNN the same basket as AP and Reuters.
Right.
But going back and even BBC, somewhere in the middle.
But to go back to the point, when you go to independent journalists,
who's making sure they're not biased, for example,
and who's making sure they're not, they're verifying their information,
what processes, what regulations in place?
Because we talk about free speech, I'm a believer in this,
but I'm kind of putting the supposed solution under a microscope
and seeing how it could go wrong.
Totally.
Because mainstream media wasn't 10, 20 years ago, wasn't what it is today.
Well, we've got to, as consumers of news and consumers of this information,
and people whose lives are so affected by what we're told on the news,
it's up to us to work out whether or not we think that we're getting our journalism from the right place.
And on my advice to anyone who is worried about whether or not they're getting or the whole story from the sliver of news that they're watching is to diversify and listen to as many as you can and listen to people whose opinions you don't agree with.
Because I think that, you know,
Having that diversity of thought coming in is something that can help you make these choices far more accurately and help you to make them far better informed decision about who you're going to spend your time with and who you're going to...
support monetarily and things like that.
Because essentially that's what it all is about.
These people are trying to make money and they don't have any essentially.
And I mean,
they're not,
hopefully that's not the driving factor behind them.
But in order to keep a newsroom running,
it's not free,
right?
And hopefully people will make informed decisions about who they subscribe to where they put their money and where they put their time.
And this, I think, is a way forward.
But, you know, it's up to people like yourself and people who've got a big platform.
And hopefully, you know, even Elon Musk is starting to push some of these principles of, you know,
trying to assess whether you're getting the right information and making your own, doing your own research about it.
And how often in the last few years of being told not to be your own research?
Through community notes, you mean like decentralizing the verification process
that are centralizing it and allowing it to fall prey to corruption?
Well, I suppose so.
I suppose that those sort of help, those sort of things help people make those choices.
but helping people understand what, I mean, if you've got, if you, uh, if you have a vast
array of opinions from different backgrounds, you'll be able to decide which ones are actually
starting to make sense far better than if you're just only listening to right wing news or you're
only listening to left wing news or you're only hearing what you want people to tell you, I suppose.
Press, what's just, um, two points on that, Sam, sorry, go ahead, um. Yeah, sure, go ahead. I, I, you know,
Sam's got a lot of good points he's raised and,
I think it's very interesting that for most of at least the modern Western world's history,
there were two professions that were seen as this reputable, journalists and actors.
Yeah.
And now we're, you know, in the last 50 or 60 years, they've obviously, it's kind of, whether the actors are seen as disreputable still or not, I guess we can argue about.
But certainly journalists have put themselves on a platform that is undeserved.
And it's pretty easy to figure out what the facts are.
Taxes went up this much.
These number of people came here.
Joe shot John and that Joe was arrested.
But Tom Tom, I would
The journalist, what they do is they want to intervene and mediate
our understanding of those facts.
And, you know, and that's where the agenda comes in and the dishonesty.
But Tom, I'm seeing people struggle to, there's people that, I know we call them crazy,
but the people that say the whole Ukraine war is fake and there is no war there and they put images of that and they believe that.
Now, I know we're looking, I'm going down extremes, but I'm saying even basic facts,
especially now with the AI and with deep fakes, there was a...
Why is that a problem?
I mean, you know, when you can't verify a fact, how is that not a problem?
When you don't know what the basic facts are that we can all agree on.
Yesterday there was a video of Tucker Carlson and everyone was debating whether it's real or not and no one could come to a conclusion.
And that's a video of Tucker Carlson saying certain things.
And that's still in the early days, deep fake.
So that's a concern that I have where basic facts, people are starting to struggle to be able to verify, let alone the interpretation.
Can I jump in there, Mario?
So I think if you are looking at a new story and it's saying that the war is fake,
but then that's not the only place you're looking.
You're looking at three or four other places that are all saying this happened in the war,
this happened in the war, this happened in the war.
Maybe you might start to question the one that's telling you something that's a bit wild
and go in and have a look, see if you can do some of your own back check.
But some, Sam, Sam, algorithm is like creating echo chambers in many ways.
Like people that are...
Like, I promise people that are conservative will just see,
I wanted to ask that question of Preston, I'll do it in a bit.
But people aren't, oh, he gave me 100%.
So Preston seems to agree is that when you're conservative,
all you see, or when you look at a few certain accounts
that fit your narrative, confirmation bias that is worse,
then all you do is see that information
and you don't get exposure to opposing views.
So algorithms make echo chambers more common.
I'm blessed.
I'm not going to add to your point that.
You mentioned community notes, and let's be clear, like, I know people are touting community notes as a solve-all, but community notes essentially become more right.
So before it was left-wing and now it's just become right-wing.
So now community notes is generally speaking more of a right-wing echo chamber.
Really? Really? Community notes is biased? No way. You sure?
Yeah.
I don't think community notes is a solution to any of this, but I mean, it's certainly something that can help.
But also, you've got to take yourself out of the algorithm.
Like, look at, look at, so get to go directly to the source.
Follow journalists directly who you trust.
And don't get everything you know from social media.
But follow, hold on, hold on.
Follow, follow, for two things you said that I will disagree.
Follow.
I was going to say follow.
Oh, sorry.
Go ahead.
I was going to say follow.
When he said, Sam, when he said follow journalists that you trust.
This is the definition of confirmation bias.
And then, no, not definition,
but this is pretty much confirmation bias.
And then the second one is,
don't trust social media.
What's the alternative?
There's nothing outside of social media.
You need to follow people that you need to follow people
that you can't agree with.
You need to follow.
But no one does this.
But Liza, no one, no one does that.
That's the problem.
But you know, but that's the point is that the reason why nobody can figure out where I am on the political spectrum is because if you go to my feed, you can't, you, you, you see people from both.
groups. And if you fundamentally disagree with somebody and you follow them, you wind up learning more about the other side. And that is how you get out of the echo chamber confirmation bias.
algorithm.
You have to
on top of that,
on top of that,
people you disagree.
People get mad at
well in terms of
don't follow social media.
I think,
I think in terms of
social media,
that's a huge problem.
I think what you said
before about mainstream media,
mainstream media has always
been a problem,
Mario.
Like,
you saw the war in Iraq,
which was 20 years ago
where they all lied about it.
So the mainstream media
propagating,
propaganda has always been the case.
The difference now is we have alternatives
through social media, we have citizen journals,
we have independent.
If even, but actually, I'd even say it was,
I'll take it back, Salman.
I'll take it back, Salman.
What I said earlier, a few decades ago,
it wasn't what it is today.
I actually take that back.
It's always been what it is today.
It's even been worse in the past.
I think, yeah, I would say it's been worse in the past,
and I agree with you, I think now we've got alternatives.
But I just don't, I'm worried these alternatives,
don't end up to be the right solution.
I just,
I just see a lot of flaws in them that need to be addressed,
and I think Twitter is doing a pretty good job in addressing it,
because they're,
with community notes,
at least they're trying or they're,
they're decentralizing it.
What they need to do is,
with community notes,
what they need to do is they need to have a balanced people on there
who are from a wide range.
I know they keep saying it's wide range,
but it's clear from the notes that are.
Yeah,
but how can they,
how can they,
when you say balance people,
okay,
bro,
look at the notes,
so just,
No, I agree with you, I agree with you, but when you say, okay, we need balanced people, okay, cool.
How do you get balanced people?
How do you determine someone's balanced?
No, no, so you get people from the left, you get people from the right.
Mario, what has happened to this particular space is case and point.
Early on, you had extremes.
You had people on the far right and the people on the far left.
And I think that as the space has evolved, you've gotten more and more people towards the middle.
And it's because you've sussed out who is crazy and who's not.
And I think that that is that because you're willing to have the discussion that that it sorts itself out in the long run.
Yeah, but we're talking about a space.
No, he just dropped out.
He messaged me now, I'm bringing him back up.
Yeah, Eliza, but this is a small space
where we have a manual team vetting each speaker,
listening to the speakers, putting notes.
There's so much work in the background.
And you don't think community notes will be doing that, bro.
That's even bigger.
It's impacting so many people.
But then Slaman, Slamant,
then what you just did is centralize it again
because people decide who's right, who's left.
And if it gets...
How does a person in their self right now
become a person on community notes?
I don't know, actually.
Do you know the process?
Yeah, you literally just click on a community note
and you can apply to be a community.
Yeah, true, true.
But I'm saying that Slamans,
your solution Slaman is that people have to pick
and choose who's on community notes.
You've again centralized it.
A central entity is picking and choosing.
You've just gone back to the same problem with centralization.
But the problem you have now is right now you have.
Yeah, I know.
I know.
I agree with your problem now.
I'm just saying your solution
is not the right solution because you've got,
we're trying to decentralize power.
The problem with Twitter files is that Twitter had, and social media platforms have power to censor speech as you spend more and more time on social media.
And community notes and what Elon's trying to do.
And that's why I would have been a lot more critical of Elon
if he wasn't a proponent of decentralization
because he would have, like who takes over after Elon?
And what if that person is significantly more biased or corrupt or whatever?
So with Elon doing things like community notes
and trying to decentralize and increasing transparency
is a step in the right direction.
But as soon as you go, no, we need a central entity to choose
who is part of community knows.
you've centralized it again.
Yeah, so I mean, I've just had a quick thought about this,
so I probably need to really think about this.
But my initial thought is that would be better
than doing it where it's right now, it's a propaganda machine.
So if you had somebody who chose,
and you could trust that person to choose a fair and balanced,
wide-ranging panel of people who engage in community notes,
I think that would be a better way going about it
because the level of how people,
how much people trust community notes, it's...
massive and the fact that it's so biased it's so right wing it's not and i think that's almost it's
almost as bad as it was before essentially for that reason uh yeah i don't all i know is that it's not
perfect just a step in the right direction anything that decentralizes power is a step in the
right direction well mario can i ask agreed mario can i ask a question of tom
Yeah, who's that?
So I think is that
Yeah, let Evan jump and I think it was jumping
And then we'll go to you, Sam, if you don't mind.
Okay, sorry, thanks.
That's right, man.
And you're from Tasmania, so I'm not a fan of Tasmania.
So Evan, go ahead.
I dare you.
Evan, was that you?
Who was speaking before Sam?
Okay, I'm not sure who was speaking.
That was actually made.
Oh, Mike.
Yeah, go ahead, Mike.
Yeah.
I was going to ask what your opinion was of Wikipedia
because the conversation that I'm hearing now
about decentralization and community notes
has an echo with sort of the original vision of Wikipedia
and then I think most folks on the panel here
are probably aware of how that ultimately ended up
turning out I don't know if if
you're sort of searching for a solution that approximates the early stages of Wikipedia
where you sort of had this decentralized,
communitarian, open access, anyone can be an editor,
and then it sort of became quite a captured platform.
Mike, Mike, this is such a good point.
Like this is because I'm deep into Web 3 to crypto as well.
And crypto is like blockchain is all about decentralization,
which theoretically makes a lot of sense.
But then what did we see?
for anyone in crypto knows that we saw centralization of funds within binance and ftx and ftx collapse
and we saw centralization of bitcoin miners so humans always tend to centralize very odd and so decentralization
as a concept is still an experiment we haven't really seen it succeed on a mass scale um so theoretically
makes a lot of sense but wikipedia is an example of how difficult it is to achieve and
And I don't have the answer.
But I've got a question for you, Mike.
I think the answer is folks have to be explicitly ideological in the way they handle these platforms.
I mean, conservatives have long said any organization, not explicitly conservative, becomes left wing over time.
And that's just the, you know, so you can't be neutral in matters of public policy and policy analysis.
Right.
And to pretend you are is dishonest.
You know, it's, you're being dishonest with yourself when you pretend you are.
And you're being dishonest with others when you tell others you are.
And that's where the media is, you know, that's why trust in the media is collapsed.
Because they pretended that they're neutral and fair when in fact they're not, they're advocates.
And, uh, you.
And that, you know, Wikipedia is a good example.
You know, they pretend, they started off neutral.
And I think that was the goal, you know, based on my understanding of the Founders' Vision.
But they weren't explicitly conservative.
It didn't have a commitment to the conservative values of free speech about matters of debate on public policy.
And they eventually became a tool of the left to target their enemies and suppress their opposition.
And I think, you know...
So to agree that Musk has tried to mitigate that on Twitter, it's very good.
As he admits, there's still a lot of work to be done.
But I would recommend he just be more vociferous and be more direct in terms of directing policy internally to make these commitments clear.
You know, figuring out ways to censor people while being committed to free speech, I think it's,
You know, that doesn't compute with me.
And I'm not quite sure how it's going to work out long term.
Mike, on just quickly, Simon, I'm just going to go to Mike and then I'll let you go to Tom quickly.
Mike, on that point, I've got a question for Mike and I've got a question for you, Tom.
Mike, my question to you is, okay, Wikipedia is obviously biased.
It has flaws, et cetera.
I don't know how biased.
I'm guessing it's more left.
I could be wrong.
I don't know.
But my question to use, would you trust?
Okay, so it is left.
So my question to use,
would you think, which ones would you trust more?
Wikipedia or CNN?
And I'm genuinely curious.
Okay.
Uh, that's a good question.
I would say, you know, this is sort of like, um, you know, making someone choose between two
flavors of ice cream they don't need, they don't like, but sort of as a matter of, you know,
the lesser evil, I would say Wikipedia because, uh, by force, they are, they are required
to hyperlink statements.
So when I know that something is, when something is on Wikipedia, uh,
the requirement of a citation for every factual assertion,
it's something that provides a more...
honest forensic map of how they got it wrong as opposed to the sort of dastardly rhetorical
underhanded slights that CNN and others have sort of professionalized. So I would still say
Wikipedia for that for that purpose. Although even with Wikipedia, I don't necessarily see it as a
left-wing, right-wing thing, even though obviously the skew is to the left. I mean, what you also have is this
this vast sort of national security state involvement, cleansing narratives essentially through
the State Department and other government-backed entities.
You know, what you really have is a sort of State Department press release co-signed by political
operatives on the neoliberal left and the neocon right.
Sure.
But you can still edit with individuals can edit Wikipedia.
It may get, it may get taken down shortly, but that that democratizes it a little bit.
I'm not saying it's not left wing, but you still have, there's still that element of it.
Right, but it's not just that it gets taken down right away. The pages also get locked.
So anything sensitive, anything that's breaking, anything that involves sensitive geopolitics
or certain matters, you don't even have...
you can't even enter, you know, which which is one of these things that as all the sort of
classic hallmarks of, of, of something that can't be right if it has to be censored so
aggressively to cut people out of talking about it. But as opposed to, right, no, that's true.
As opposed to CNN where you would need to, you know, be a staff writer or on the editorial board,
certainly that's true. But in a way, the fact that
you know, there is only partial access unless something's sensitive and then you get zero access,
uh, can lull people into a false sense of democracy, if you will.
So Tom, yeah, I just wanted to come back on what you said. And I get, you're coming from a
conservative perspective. So you're saying that they basically are using it as a tool to
propagate an agenda and you give Wikipedia as an example. But for me, I,
I just, for me, it's quite clear.
It's both sides do it.
It's just who has the power and ability to do it.
So as an example, I give the example of the community notes.
The community notes does appear to be more going towards the right wing perspective
and certain ideological positions.
Let me give you an example.
I just saw a couple of few community notes today, which were against Democrats.
And some of these opinions, like Democrats, Republicans,
have different opinions on issues.
And then it's given a Republican perspective of,
or on the other hand i saw one where it was an issue between palestan and israel
completely propagating the israeli position obviously there's an alternative to that
position but then you can just see the ideological positions of the right or establishment
positions permeating through the community notes tom your speaker's off tom you're muted tom
i think he's just ignoring you intentionally slam man i don't blame you tom
um i do want to i do want to go to sam because i say i know you were trying to speak earlier
Yeah, I just had a question for Tommy before when he was saying that, you know, journalists don't deserve to be in a place where they are.
I wanted to see whether he misspoke when he said that because I feel like journalists are entirely have earned the disdain that people have for them at the moment.
That was that was just, it was simple.
And I would go back to not all journalists are equal.
Like,
When I was looking into the Jeffrey Epstein story, it was a journalist,
and people have looked into it more than me, but from memory,
it was a journalist that kind of triggered the investigation,
that kind of expanded to...
to all the revelations and Epstein getting arrested.
It was a journalist that even said to others, he's like, hey, I will either, if the executives don't publish my story, I'm going to quit.
So there's still journalists and doing the right thing, going to war zones, doing the difficult things, doing themselves in danger to try to expose the truth.
So I do want to tip my hat to journalists.
I just think they're in a very corrupt system and they just fall prey to the system.
That's right.
And so apologies to the good journalists out there, but I guess I was talking to the generalization of, you know, where the average is, I suppose.
If I could jump in, I could give a real world example of the opposite.
Please do, Evan.
Yeah.
For those of you that don't know me, I was a Columbine survivor and
You know, this topic is very personal to me because I was wildly misquoted in Time Magazine
and I believe it was the December 1999 issue misquoted.
And at the time, I had no avenue to, you know, disqualify those claims of quotes that they said that I made.
And it really set off a 20-year...
narrative of school shootings being caused by bullying.
And we had bullying in schools and yada, yada, yada.
I can go on a whole other tangent on that.
But the fact is, back when Time magazine printed those quotes that I, that were claimed
that I said, they were not true.
And it did a lot of damage, I think, around the school shooting issue, around school
safety.
Because really what it did was it made people think that
excuse me, bullying is, or murder is second to bullying.
And that's why people, you know, said, oh, well,
we don't agree with murder,
but we understand what they did because they were picked on,
which was not true.
It was not true, the whole narrative that time set up.
And it was based on a few things,
but one was a quote that I had made.
And it was, and it's been false for 20 years.
And then there's a lie.
that has done irreparable damage in our,
in our society.
Yeah,
and I think we should all come up.
There's so many examples of,
you know, the Slamel was using the Iraq war as an example,
so I'm with you 100% there.
You know, we are getting close to wrapping up,
so we wanted to wrap up like three hours ago
and I need to get some sleep.
So we'll go to maybe,
I'd love to get maybe two new voices
on this particular point.
I wanna go to Chris and Moneyflow, Mel.
your thoughts on, you know, where journalism is today and what the, really what the solution is,
because it's really easy to criticize something, which is fine, but it's really difficult to find a
solution.
I think we're facing that now in a solution to where journalism is today.
Can we fix mainstream media, or is there a better alternative?
And, you know, we've talked a lot about citizen journalism here.
I don't. I'm not going to be able to go too deep down that rabbit hole. And I only do that because I try to isolate myself in a way where I'm not that exposed to everything that's going to be.
outside of what I can control or what I'm looking at from a price action perspective.
But I do just kind of want to add a little bit more from a trading perspective and what you see and where you have that journalism, where you have that news feed that comes in.
And I always see this.
Why are we down? What's the news? Why are we up? What's the news?
And just for those that have been in the game for a while, if you've ever traded around Tesla ER, isn't it coincidence that there's always like a fatality like two days before or there is a like huge drop Tesla because there's some kind of major headline to really
push it over the top and then, of course,
ER comes out and numbers are great
and how that can be kind of twisted.
And so just trying to tie that from a trader's perspective.
I know I have a few following that are traders.
I'm not sure if this is focused on them or not.
But just the impact that, of course, journalism can have
and, of course, the headline and how difficult it is
to also be a traitor and follow news
and balance out what should happen with what you think the headline should be driving.
It's such a,
it's such a balancing act.
So like,
I appreciate you bringing it to right to like.
Yeah.
Yeah,
in terms of what you're saying as well,
in terms of the community notes,
let me be clear.
I would just give them one example.
Left to be right.
But it's more deep than that.
And I guess people are not failing to understand it.
Even you could have a scenario where even the left and the right agree.
And that's why you need alternative journalists,
journalists who don't follow the mainstream media narrative
and give a different perspective.
The examples are at the beginning, Ukraine-Russia war.
Everyone was for it.
Even now, neocons from both sides are for it.
or you have the for example COVID
both sides before it or you have
for example certain issues that mentioned Israel,
Palestine. So a lot of these issues
they both sides people from the aisle
essentially agree to it. So when you have a community
note that just has left or right
again and that's why you need a wide range
and depth of people. So you will have
this issue with community notes when it doesn't have
that perspective as all. Chris any final
thoughts on this?
Yeah, and it's a great topic. And at first, I appreciate everything you guys have been doing. I've been following you guys for a while. And even Nick, following the work that's been phenomenal. And it's independent journalists that are doing the work and being much more nuanced and transparent with their reporting. But it's wild because you see in the 117th Congress that they even tried bringing up about like the journalism, the Competition and Preservation Act, which
That bill would have actually been a much more hindrance to independent journalists,
and it would allow media like CNN, New York Times, Washington Post, MSNBC,
that then collectively bargain with big tech platforms.
I mean, luckily, I think Elon's been doing a great job with Twitter,
but when you're still looking at meta and YouTube and Google, the influence that they have,
it is such a huge force that those platforms have to upbreak their own content,
especially when they're making for a profit.
It definitely silences those voices.
in that diversity and thought and nuance.
So I think it's as much as possible to try to do things like you guys are doing,
do what Nick's doing.
You have other great independent journalists like Jorge Ventura and many others
for them to continue to keep pushing our content and for us to be the voice
and share that as much as possible.
But it is.
It's tough because you do have the powers of be, unfortunately,
like even in Congress that they're trying to push, I mean, not right now,
but they were in the last session, I'm sure they could bring up again.
I like how, by the way, Simon, have you noticed that Chris didn't mention your name?
Sorry, Slime Man.
No, I'm just praising you, Chris.
That's what I mean.
Look, I actually want to give credit to Nick here,
and then I want to give a lot of credit to Slaman right after.
But Nick, I want to give him credit for being so strict as an independent journalist
in making sure, and we're going to be working together in a few days fully
in building something incredible, me, Nick Slaman and the rest of the team.
But in verifying information and avoiding click-baited things, and he said something to me.
He's like, Mario, there's a lot of things we could tweet to get clicks.
But as soon as you tweet something wrong, that could ruin your whole rep.
And reputation is a lot more important than clicks, a lot more valuable.
And I agree 100%.
Now, he said that differently in a lot less eloquent way, but he still made that point.
And I want to agree with Nick there.
Yeah.
Now, Slaman, in the meantime, on that same day, posted something false and refused to remove it.
So just shows the dichotomy.
No, look, Slaman, maybe I'll give you the mic as final quick words on this topic.
And I'll give you credit again for...
running such a great space and doing this for the last few days like I haven't been able to the only reason we're able to do daily spaces obviously is a lot of people to thank Jim brought Michael Flynn today Nick helped moderate and help with Giuliani who's becoming a different day but Slayman is the reason I'm able to do daily spaces despite lower quality at least they're daily Slayman any final words
Yeah, yeah, bro. I mean, I wouldn't say lower quality, much better quality. We haven't got you making like dopey points.
But in terms of the mainstream media point, it's important because you need this alternative perspective. You need this alternative media.
In terms of posting, of course, you have to authenticate. But I always, again, find it dumb when people make arguments that are not consistent.
So if you're going to basically say that you're going to verify a video, you should verify all videos.
And we know there's a different ways of verification. It isn't just...
for example putting it through softwares or wherever it may be so essentially the argument is this
whatever you do you do it consistently and consistently throughout and you do need the alternative
to mainstream media i think that's important i love i love you bro but like you just made
zero sense but i have a question for you um do you think independent journalists are a solution
to mainstream media of course but then the risk with independent journalists are and this is
my concern with people who are like on the right or
on the left.
Let's be clear.
Look, the aim of the game is this.
If you want to follow,
and I knew this when I was doing the taste of,
if you want a following,
you consistently,
consistently hold a specific position.
You'll get a huge following.
So, for example,
I posted certain stories that were against,
what I knew what a lot of my followers would like,
but I still posted those stories
because I didn't care that, you know,
I'm going to lose following because it's all about hitting the truth.
What I find with even independent journalists are,
they'll follow their narrative of their people
to continue with that following,
or they just haven't got the ability to just think outside the box.
Yeah, but Sam, yeah.
Go ahead, Nick.
Well, this is just one thing I was going to say here.
And I said this to you, Mario, the other day, if you remember,
where the mainstream media chases glamorous stories,
stories that have already gotten a lot of attention,
ones that are going to get them, you know,
they're going to get the ratings,
they're going to get a bunch of clicks and everything like that.
But what independent journalists do is,
We go and find the stories, right?
We're the ones that go and bust wide open these government cover-ups,
and I think East Palestine was a good idea.
That whole thing started on Twitter, right?
And then you have Fox News and, you know, all these mainstream outlets.
You know, this place is known all over the world now,
but it's not because the mainstream media did it.
It's because...
Twitter journalists did it.
So Nick, I want to...
But then, I mean, I did the same with here.
But the thing is, my question to you is, would you ever,
or have you ever published anything that isn't a position of the right?
Yes, I have posted multiple, or multiple videos now of me just absolutely shaming the Republican governor of Ohio when I was there.
Anything where you're praising, anything where you're praising people on the left?
Well, I mean, it depends on who you refer to.
But this is fine, no, no, but I take it back.
I take it back.
This is, I have a more important question.
Nick, I, I want to disagree with you completely.
You made it seem like independent journalists.
And I'm being objective here.
And again, I'm talking against myself,
because that's what we do.
We're an independent journalism network.
But independent journalists, go and break stories.
But mainstream media, just do this, whatever, for clicks.
Honestly, Nick, most independent journalists get the story that is trending and post about it or tweet about it or write about it.
They follow the clicks.
They follow the engagement and they don't follow what matters.
And mainstream media is no different.
I think everyone's following.
And this one I'm telling you, like, I don't think, I don't think independent journalism fixes the problem at least not yet unless.
Maybe a platform.
That's not right though.
Like look at Nick, Peter.
he did that Ohio story
Nick yeah but Nick and his exception
there's also look
Vice you hate vice
are you saying vice never did
yeah vice a crap but are you saying
they never and I'm not a big reader
of all this mainstream media
but he's saying
someone was talking about this in the previous space
vice never broke any stories that no one's talking about.
They went out and did investigations on things that was not on people's minds,
at least the old vice before it became too liberal.
Okay.
They uncovered as an example or basically made it public the Uyghur situation in China.
So this is a really good example.
And being objective, Sleiman, this is a mainstream media that is going bankrupt right now
that you despise and it is very biased according to you.
I can't comment because I don't read it much.
but it was very biased on Tate.
So it's very biased, yet even that one
did an investigative piece that was not on people's minds.
And there's many examples, like I went on CNN right now,
which I'm sure you despise as well.
And they've got a piece here, where is it?
I haven't read it, but the title is new documents
show how Sandra Day O'Connor helped George W. Bush
win the 2000 election.
It's not on anyone's mind right now.
It's not trending.
No one's talking about the 2000 election.
I know that there's a lot of doubts around elections in general, but then they looked
into the story. I know it's not the best example, but I just looked at something now.
But this is, but this is, but this is, but, but the Ugers in, sorry if I'm mispronouncing
it, if anyone listening, I was pronouncing it right.
Yeah, yeah, or you fucked it up last time. Weiger, sorry, yeah, the Uighurs in China, who
Who cares back then, yet Vice made people care?
Because they covered it.
And I'm not, he's praising Vice.
I'm praising that particular...
No, the point I'm making, there's those...
No, no, what I'm saying is there's exceptions on both sides.
You look at mainstream media, they do investigative pieces where they should be applauded, left and right.
Independent journalists do the same.
But I'm saying the majority of independent journalists and the majority of mainstream media chase clicks.
And Nick...
No, I don't agree.
So let me explain.
So what I'm saying is, I think vice is a good case study because Vice did and were rare in that they were doing some good journalism.
But then what did they do?
They fell into the same trap for the rest of the mainstream media corporate industry did.
Yes.
Yes.
And Simon, yes.
Yes.
Propaganda agents.
Let me ask you a question.
How do you determine and be honest, whenever we write a piece or we do a tweet, what's the metric you look at and we praise the tweet on?
That's you though, isn't it?
So for me,
Nick,
Nick,
let me go to Nick.
So for me on my page,
it's actually,
I'll be honest with you,
I never look at quick clicks.
For me,
it's always to create a position
and a narrative
and to basically refute
or rebuke certain ideas and positions
and to get,
tell people the truth.
Nick,
so my thread and took a Carlson
got like $70,000.
not great views, my thread on, you know, race issues in the UK, got minimal clicks, but it's there.
But you just use, you just exactly use the metric, even memorize the metric that I'm referring to.
Nick, be honest.
Do you tweet things that will get and that's not wrong. I do too. We all and anyone that says otherwise is
Most likely not surely lying because we all look at that little piece of thing that says views for a tweet for a video for whatever and we're chasing the same thing that mainstream media is chasing and that's clicks use and doing it for the views are two different things, but anyway, so I can't
Yeah, very good point, very good point.
But you get my point.
Like, the same thing for MESHMedia.
Looking at clicks or having people read it or time on an article or scroll through, right,
there's all these different metrics versus doing it for those metrics.
I don't accept that they do it just for views.
Like, they do it for propaganda.
So I'll give you another good example.
Like my article on tape that was published in a newspaper, it got millions of views within
a couple of days.
And then they still took it down because ideology was more important than clicks.
So essentially it's not just about clicks, it's ideology.
That's more important for the ministry media.
It's both.
I don't think ideology beats capitalism, but that's a different debate.
But I think it's both.
We've seen them tanking the movie industry with a lot of work movies and TV shows
and yet they're still consistently producing them and making use lots.
Bro, yes, I mean, I don't know.
Look, the first time I heard about this is,
one about, Slayman, Slaman,
Slaman, Simeon.
Can you stop making up shit, man?
Last time you said this in one of our spaces,
that bothered me, because I'm like,
you and Ian were saying it,
remember that?
And I was like, oh, interesting,
I never knew that.
that whole narrative of they're putting woke movies they're doing them even though they're
flopping and then we went through the number 10 and you're like the the films that are doing well
are non-woke movies and then we went through the top movies and none of them fit that description
remember when I did that the best big biggest box offices bring the movies up the problem is what
you're not understanding is what is work so you think walk is like having an LGBTQ character and
No, no, no, I asked you,
Semen, Semen, I asked you and Ian
to tell me if that castles woke or not.
You guys...
You asked Ian, but the point is,
when you look at it, for example,
there's many movies, for example,
there's movies now and a...
You can't stop being anecdotal.
Hey, do you do any studies?
You're being anecdotal again.
Do you studies.
How many movies do you do research?
What is the percentage?
What are the numbers?
I told you that last time.
Did you do any research since then?
Or you're still making the same point
without any numbers to back it up?
As an independent journalist, where's your evidence?
Where's your research?
One second, Mario.
One second, Mario.
You need to stop screaming, right?
I'm sleep deprived, Ross.
I'll be a bit more sensitive today.
Go ahead.
No, no, you're generally sensitive anyway.
There's no problem.
We allow it.
So essentially, look, the argument is this.
I accept that there's not overarching studies.
on this.
So I'm going to say that, of course.
But just, and I agree that what I'm saying is based on experience.
Obviously, I'll go back and look at the data, try and find a plethe.
There won't be no data because ain't nobody going to do these studies.
Then get your own data, bro.
Or just don't talk.
Because people do the propaganda.
But what we can do is we can list a number of movies that have flopped and is basically based on...
Walk ideas and basically...
There is actually data on this.
You guys are just shown.
A graph of woke versus non-voke movies.
And the data is explicit that the non-woke movies are actually more successful.
I'll DM it to you, Mario.
And...
Please do, Seb, and I like how you came in the data.
So Slaman, I like how you're putting a love heart.
You just said 30 seconds ago, Slaman, there is no data on this.
I've seen the data. It's just based on my observation.
Now you've seen the data.
The private presentation that was shared with me yesterday,
but I can share you the view for that breaks down the biggest movies of the last two years,
and the trend line is explicitly obvious.
Salaiman's right.
Is Avatar, so Nick, have a question for you, Nick.
Is Avatar woke in your opinion, Nick?
Avatar?
I don't watch movies.
I work too much.
Well, it is very much
and it's messaging,
right?
It's an environmentalist.
So is Evan a fair point.
Okay.
How about Avengers, Darth?
Is it woke?
I was,
I just got back on
after being gone,
putting the kids down
and you were ending early.
I was like,
no, no,
now you're talking
about media and stuff.
Avengers,
it's a little bit different
because those are just
kind of like action clicks
that don't really
contain much substance.
But believe it or not,
one of the main reasons
I was a lib
after I was indoctrinated
in college is
is I wrote papers about, I actually wrote a thesis about
negotiator readings of speculative fiction cinema,
particularly with respect to the American heteronormative,
capitalistic, you know, all that patriarchal society
and hegemonic influences.
So science fiction and action movies were one of the big things
that I actually did.
This is Slaman, I want to, because I know we're wrapping up.
All that stuff, my point.
All that has political messages.
Yeah, and answer to the question, Mario.
Avengers isn't a good example because it has, like, loads of superheroes movies.
But look specifically as superhero movies.
The ones that have female lead characters, flop.
The ones that have male lead characters, such as Spider-Man,
which had more defined gender roles, did well.
What was the reason Top Gun did so well?
What was the reason Topka did so well?
Don't know, man.
Because there was no cultural enrichment.
There was no cultural values.
It was just a movement.
I mean, there was a bit, though, wasn't it a call?
Like, did you see the pilots?
All right, guys, so Slamand, one thing I want to say, like, the point I'm making is I'm not saying.
No, no, let me answer the point because people always say about TopCon and it's actually in Accur.
So they're right, generally speaking about Top Gun, but actually if you look at it, there was, there was, if you look at the main pilots at the end, I think there was six main ones, if you look at the diversity of it, it didn't make up the real diversity of the United States.
So you're saying it was woke?
Yeah.
So I'm saying there are certain aspects of it that are work.
But it did, but it did very well, though.
No, no, no, no.
That's my, no, no, listen, listen.
So what I'm saying is I agree with Carl overall.
It was on work and hence why people loved it.
And a lot of people went to see it under the idea.
Like no one's even had this position that some of it is work.
So if you ask anyone about Top Gun, because it's all about perspective.
If you ask any about it about Top Gun, they're all like, it is in work.
Just like Call said.
And they all went to see it for that reason.
Some of it even to support this kind of idea.
But I'm saying that I still certain aspects that I still not work.
I just, I just, I just, I just, I just, I just, I just, I just, I just think there's too many factors.
Here's this.
Is this, I think it's, I mean, look, before, I want to move on from this, Darth, like the whole woke movies thing.
And now we went down that rabbit hole.
The point I was making that kind of led to this is that I think capitalism beats ideology.
And one example of this, I was just speaking to, yeah,
A Cabesi letter yesterday, one of the top finance accounts, he kicked out.
He was one of the first, if not the first to kick off the whole finance community on Twitter for a long time ago.
It's a great newsletter.
Great guy.
And we're talking how in finance, no one talks politics very, like,
very little care about politics and polarization.
Whenever we talk about finance,
it's all about numbers of where they make their money.
They don't care, the liberals, they're all on stage together.
No one cares, but as soon as we start talking politics,
a whole different story.
Which kind of implies that, yes, ideology plays a role slay, man.
I'm not saying it plays no role, but I'm saying...
making money capitalism is more people care about making money more than they care about ideology
but again like this is this is i'm not saying this is a fact i just feel that's the case i gave one
example but it's maybe good to do a whole i got it bro you disagree thanks for 20 thumbs down
but i'm saying it's worth another discussion another day jim
final quick word
Yeah I
Just back to independent journalism
Listen
You're never going to have
Journalism
That is not
Doesn't have some form of bias in it
What it makes journalism
Effective
is when it is done in an independent manner.
So, for example, you're going to read a lot of stuff
from Matt Taivie and Michael Schellenberger that's of the left.
They're men of the left.
But the reason that their independent journalism has been effective right now
is because in a sense people on the right,
you know,
when he wrote for Rolling Stone on the right.
But the reality is that he's,
he's going into what the story is
when it comes to Twitter files.
Yeah.
Glenn Greenwald, too,
how to throw in this.
Not on ideology,
but you are going to see the idea.
But they have,
but,
yes,
I agree,
but again,
they're following,
so they need to make money,
and they need subscribers.
They need impressions,
reach,
subscribers,
clicks, etc.
So I'm not saying
their intentions are wrong.
I'm just saying that the,
I'm just worried that the incentive model for independent journalists is not too different to mainstream media and it could end up with the same flaws.
I could be wrong and I hope I'm wrong because I'm leading the way.
Like we're trying to solve it ourselves, Jim.
Sorry, I'll give you the mic back.
But we're trying to solve it ourselves.
Nick is giving me a thumbs down,
but we're trying to be part of that solution.
We want independent journalists to be the solution.
I just think there's no system yet to allow for that.
Elon's doing a good job with Twitter,
removing censorship, decentralization,
decentralizing verification processes with community notes,
and we'll see what else comes.
And we're coming up with a plan as well with what we're doing, and I won't announce much, to try to solve the problem that mainstream media didn't solve and that independent journalists, I think, haven't solved yet.
And go to any, I can go to my thread right now and I can find a million freaking tweets and pieces of information that go viral that is blatantly false.
Just completely false, maybe it's seen by 10 million people.
Yeah, well, let me throw this in here.
The problems that you're pointing to have far more to do with where, particularly in the West,
cultures are right now.
It's not the journalistic style.
That's all shaking up.
By the way, we're about to have a major shakeup.
When Tucker Carlson comes out in an independent fashion, we're already seeing network news
in the United States, you know, starting to lose its grip.
that's going to change.
Right.
But I give you an historical example in the United States.
At the founding of this country,
the media were as acerbic and polarized and actually, you know, doing some pretty, I mean, the whole 1800 election between John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, I mean, was just a crap show.
It was, there was so many accusations, so many falsehoods thrown out, half-truths.
But yet, as a country, we had an independent nature that built up because the general foundation was of a certain sort.
I would say of a moral sort, and I think that was a big part of it, but it was also of a certain sort.
There was a belief in the principles of liberty laid out in the Constitution.
People really grasped that.
And so that bypassed.
all of the acerbic efforts taking place in all the competing newspapers.
So that's not fundamentally the problem.
It can be a problem, but it's not fundamentally the problem.
Fundamentally, the problem is...
having ways to express truth and to do work.
That's why I said the independent journalism thing
is actually going to grow,
and it's not because of ideology.
Ideologies will be there.
It's because of focus on stories that matter,
even if the bias tends to come out.
That's why Vice at one time was actually halfway decent to go to,
even if you gritted your teeth,
because there was interest in the organization
to find things out.
It's the finding things out and the desire to do that and the desire to do that in as
effective a way as possible that really matters.
Yeah, Jim, everything is said, I love you, but everything, I don't know, but it doesn't,
there's no solution there.
I agree with just.
The incentive, the biases are still there.
I don't know, Duff, I don't know what you agree with, but the bias is still there.
It's a human endeavor.
It's.
What does a human endeavor mean?
What do you mean by that?
Humans run mainstream media.
Humans do internet journalism.
I've said for years.
Six thousand.
Suleiman, let me make my points
since I was asked the question.
6,000 years of recorded human history proves the moral depravity of man.
Fundamentally, we all tend towards bad.
We have to work really hard to be good.
It requires discipline.
So, no, I think what I'm saying does matter.
What you need are people that are willing to do that.
So I'm saying, functionally, you need this.
approach that I'm talking about, but to make it work most effectively, you need people who
have the passion and desire as much as possible to do what's right. That's why a Michael
Schellenberger and a Matt Taichy...
I don't... I still don't think it's a solution, Duff. I don't know what is the... I don't think
people wanting to do the right thing is...
So, yeah, look, that's very broad.
I agree with what both of you were saying.
Just a couple final points on the media thing.
So, um, uh, mainstream media could actually make a comeback if they did this.
This is really the only thing.
Jim's right.
There's always going to be biased there.
But if, if the mainstream media was like the Daily Wire where they were open about their
political biases, right?
If every writer included their political affiliations and their political biases, then that,
would rebuild trust, otherwise there would never be any trust again.
So I think that's a big key because there's always going to be bias there.
But if you share that bias, if you make that bias obvious,
and like the Daily Wire says we're a conservative media organization.
If you know that going in, then you're able to look at what they report and you're able to take that into consideration.
The other thing with respect to independent media, I think,
independent media is obviously the future. The biggest problem right now isn't how it's set up or
how it's how it's distributed or delivered, but rather the age gap. So in 50 years from now,
all the people are going to be gone who need to have Fox News and CNN broadcasting on their TV. Right now, we don't
We don't have the ability to reach those people.
And one of the reasons why losing Tucker is so bad
isn't because Tucker was a voice of reason
or shared my views or anything like that.
He was the only person on anywhere on TV
that actually platformed independent journalists.
He would have on Savannah Hernandez
to talk about what she saw at Antifa rallies
or something like that.
So he would give them a platform
when nobody else in the mainstream would
and now that's exactly that's exactly what.
That's exactly what happened with me, Darth, and he's balancing.
He was the first person to call me one.
The only, I'm sure.
Was he the only one?
Hold on, Nick, Nick, was he the only one?
He was the first one, and then after that is what, you know,
it caused a plethora of others because they saw me on the show.
So just, but then again, but hold on, then again,
Darth you said that he's the only one that brings independent journalists,
and Nick just said he was the first, but many others did the same thing afterwards.
My point being, if it's not for Tucker, then nobody else wore as Nick would.
True, true, Nick. I'm just saying he blew it up. He maybe took charge. But again, Doctor, you said the statement. He's the only one that brings independent journalists. And you have an independent journalist on stage that they said, yes, he was the first. But then I came on other, on many other outlets. The only one who brings them into the fold. Other people may grab and latch onto them for ratings after it because they see that what they're reporting is getting views. But he's the only one who's going to bring them into the fold and start that process. That's what I meant.
Exactly.
Why the capitalist tendency is good in this regard because the seeking of the reason that Nick got any broader coverage from Tucker is because the rest of the media started in chunks obviously and not.
broadly, but they figured out
we better get this story out there because we're getting
one-uped on it. That's the power
of entrepreneurial media.
They all do that.
Capitalism is a solution,
but it's also part of the problem.
Mainstream media cares.
They might not cover a story because
the person like Pfizer is an advertiser.
That's capitalism. They take money from Pfizer.
But I got to tell you,
I got a wrap, I got a final words.
I have to wrap.
I have a problem with
The problem with saying that is because the corporatism out there that gives certain people, certain benefits if they fit the narrative, that's why you get that consolidation of power in various aspects of an economy, including in the media.
And that's been the main problem.
Independent journalism will eventually break from that because the platforms that people listen to are far bigger than the network platform right now.
Cool.
I think it's a great way to end it.
Jim, I appreciate it.
And I think it was a great space.
I am pretty dead.
So Sleeman and Nick, thanks for running the show.
And Jim, thanks for getting General Flynn.
Nick, thanks for getting Giuliani.
It was a great chatting to Giuliani today, Nick.
Very well done, man.
I just want to applaud you.
You did a great job getting Giuliani today.
So it's my favorite segment of the space.
Yeah, you're asshole.
All right.
Thanks, thanks, everyone.
And Dr. Gorka, good to see you again.
Bye, everyone.
