The Epstein Files Reveal Who the Government REALLY Works For | Andrew Bustamante x Tom Bilyeu

Jeffrey Epstein's story was never about sex. It was an illusion, like the dress some see as blue and others see as gold. Intelligence agencies exploit the same trick. They shape what you notice and distort what it means. Enter Kompromat, the art of collecting dirt to control the powerful. Today, former CIA officer Andrew Bustamante reveals how Epstein-style ops really work and why the truth is often too useful to reveal. Bustamante and I discuss how to minimize truth blindness without seeing lies in everything. Without further ado, I bring you Andrew Bustamante. At the international level, it seems like a pretty dark game is being played. And right now, the fact that you had Kash Patel come into being the new FBI director on the promise of one of the things, that hey, we're going to release these Epstein files. Now, the Epstein files to me seem like this is a key point of leverage. And I can't tell whether they're not releasing the files because in doing so, they will tip their hand to how they gain a whole lot of leverage, or if the people that they have leverage over already, there's just too many, too powerful, and it would be like um spilling all of your uh leverage in one sort of dump, and now you don't even have that leverage. I don't think you're reading it wrong, personally. So, secrets are leverage. What you know that somebody else doesn't know, 100% that's leverage. But secrets have kind of two dimensions on their graph of value. There's the intensity of the secret, right? That's one part of the graph, but then there's the timing of its release, the timing of when you make the secret public, so it's not secret anymore. What you're always trying to do is find the point where you get the highest level of intensity at the right time so that you can maximize the impact of releasing the secret. Epstein files, JFK files, UA UAP UFO files. All of those things where we only see partial releases, partial redactions, partial declassification, that's showing us that the government believes there's a moment of impact between the timing of that release and the and the intensity of that secret that gains them leverage for whatever they want to do next. It's not something they're doing to be nice. It's not something they're doing to pay us back. It's something that they're doing because they need that leverage for what comes next. Remember what the China spy balloon incident? Oh, yes. In the lead-up to the China spy balloon incident, nobody was talking about really much of anything. They They were talking about China, but they weren't talking about UFOs, and they weren't talking about China spying on the continental United States. They were talking about the threat of China overall. Then the balloon presented itself, and there were days, just a few days in advance, where they started talking about there's a UFO in the sky. There's a UAP. Nobody knows what it is. So, all the UFO people got really geared up, but the typical American was like, "Meh, more UFO sightings. We don't really believe in that." Then the [ __ ] hit that it was a spy balloon from China. And pictures started coming across, and that shit's over like Virginia. People are losing their [ __ ] minds, right? There was a reason that that was released. There's a reason that it wasn't released 2 days before, and it wasn't released 2 days after. It was released at that moment. And it was because the US needed the support of the American people before it launched F-6 or F-22s to shoot down this [ __ ] balloon over the coast of Virginia, knowing that shrapnel or debris might land on someone's house, right? They wanted to shoot it down over the ocean, but they needed to have insurance just in case they screwed it up or the winds changed or something, right? So, now we release it's a China spy balloon. It gives us a chance to show off our weaponry, highlight the threat of China, rally America around a new threat, and it gives us plausible deniability, so that if we do shoot down a balloon, and if something does fall on somebody's church, at least we're like, "Hey, we're protecting the homeland, you know, we're not a bad evil government." But then immediately after that, there were like three or four more balloons in the sky. What were all of those called? UFOs. And then, in the following weeks, all people were talking about was these these UFOs. Are they more balloons? We don't know. The government's only calling them UFOs and UAPs because there wasn't a reason to call them what they really were. Right? That's That's how the government plays leverage. How do I play my card now to get what I need in this like reliable period of time knowing that there's a there's a shelf life for the secret and there's a shelf life for the release. So, I'm off target with your Epstein files, but that's the same thing I'm seeing. The intensity doesn't match the timing to release the secrets yet. It could be that they're trying to cover up something that's embarrassing. It could also be they have something so good, now's not the right time to release it. Is it also possible, like when I look at the JFK files, that seems more like a dissipation of energy? Like we want to sort of drip and drab it out for a long time. Uh so that by the time you have everything, it's like, "Well, there's really nothing here." Because if there was really nothing there from the beginning, then it wouldn't have mattered released 40 years ago, why didn't they release it 40 years ago? And then, the Epstein files just it seems impossible that this is the one that you hide by hiding it now, you just seem complicit. So, it seems to me that there has to be something so damning in that file that they'll take the reputational hit for saying cuz they said, "We're going to release it." And now they're not. Correct. And that you're seeing that matrix play out right now. Let's use the JFK files as a comparison, right? If we had have if we would have released the details of the JFK file in the late '60s or early '70s, right? If that would have happened then, and there would have been signs that the FBI were tracking somebody who was already in relationship with the Soviets and there was this CIA Soviet police overlap. Like all the stuff that's been released in the recent tranches. If that would have come out then, it would have been a major issue. So, they didn't release it then. Instead, they release it now when the intensity level is much less. So, the timing is much less. So, just like you have times where you want to release stuff to gain leverage, maybe you want that leverage to negotiate, maybe you also want that leverage to to dissipate, to slow boil out. So, now it's like, "Oh, of course the Soviets were tracking the person." We've been hearing about it in conspiracy theories for decades. So, now the conspiracy theories are just being validated. So, what's the leverage we're gaining by releasing it now? The leverage that we're gaining is that the current president can say, "I released files that nobody else released. I made this publicly accessible when nobody else did." Right? The stuff that we're seeing in the JFK files was was absolutely intensely desired back then. But by releasing it now, we gain a different kind of leverage. So, with Epstein, my suspicion is that we're My suspicion is that people don't fully know how deeply tied he was to foreign governments, to foreign intelligence agencies, maybe even to American intelligence agencies. People don't know the extent. So, they're afraid to release what they have because if they find out more later on or if somebody else finds out more later on, it could be really bad. Especially in the current geopolitical arena that we're in now. Right? When when Putin is vying for power against Russia or Putin is vying for power against Trump, Netanyahu and Trump are close and far and close and far, and then you've got complete transformation in the Middle East between Saudi Arabia and Syria. Like the whole world is kind of a tinderbox right now. Nobody knows who's the next power broker. This is not the time when you want to say we know something only to find out 6 months from now that we didn't know it all. Right? For Russia to use that moment to to leverage to release classified files that are that are released on Reddit, let's say, that show that they knew something about Epstein that we didn't release to our own people. I'm obsessed with having a mental model that gives me predictive validity. Uh the more I read about history, the more I see things like COVID, Epstein, whatever, is my hypothesis becomes in a time of crisis, experts, the elites, they're going to use that as an opportunity not to respond to the crisis, but to leverage it to gain more power, more control. And I have a feeling looking at the Epstein file, and I'm not like a historian of this, but the mental model that I'm building is there going to be people on that list that this is going to cause problems for us. That's one level. Powerful people simply do not want the headache. Could also be that they have footage of them doing truly evil things. That obviously is going to be something they want to keep under wraps. But the other one that is might be the most interesting of them is simply I'm beginning to map that people that run the world are effectively immoral, and like you said, it's just leverage. And so there is a darkness to that that exists in the human soul that people in power know that exists in the human soul, and that they willingly use it to gain leverage, and that all of the even the power broker people come out of the woodwork, walk right into the honey trap. So, the analogy that I use is geopolitics, the narratives that we make at the international level, it's a magician. This is all sleight of hand. The line between good and evil runs through every human heart, and that you can get a distressing amount of people to do something that is evil, and then governments leverage that to wage uh what I think is economic warfare um to create the world that we see right now, where houses are out of reach and all that. But to me, all of this stuff is tied. I don't disagree that it's all tied. I also don't disagree that it's complicated. Cuz what you just laid out is not a simple model, right? It's a complicated model. I think both of those things have more truth and validity than they do misdirection or miscalculation, right? To simplify it all, however, what we learn at CIA is that everything is based on consequences and outcomes. There is no good and evil. There is no right and wrong. The average person struggles with that because from the time you're little, you're conditioned to believe in good and evil, right and wrong, right? You go to church to fight evil, to believe in good. There's hero super move or superhero movies about people who are heroes and people who are villains, right? Right and wrong, good and bad, these are these are things that are are man-made boundaries to help a developing brain learn social norms. That's why those things exist. The the church, the public school system, your your kitchen table, all of those things are are there to help reduce the complexities of life to something simple, something binary, black, white, good, bad, you know, pure, evil, hero, villain. We're always trying to unpack that. As we grow in experience and age, we have to unpack those things, we have to walk those things back. Some people are more gifted at walking those things back, which is why CIA does so much recruiting from people who are on the spectrum. say walking it back, you mean to step outside of the frame of morality. What we call it at the agency is moral flexibility. Not to step out of it, but to walk beside it. There's times when you want to get back into your morality, there's times when you want to step outside of that morality and adopt a different, more flexible version of morality to get to an end. to get to an outcome that benefits you, right? Because really what we're talking about at the end of the day is survival instinct. All human beings have an innate desire to survive. We don't live in an environment, we don't live in a world where our survival is threatened equally. When you are living in the suburbs of Chicago, you are not in a position of threat like somebody who lives on the outskirts of of Khartoum. Completely different levels of threat, but both individuals feel like survival is king. But to survive in the suburbs of Chicago, you might need to drive a BMW modern series, whatever, so that you get accepted socially. Outside of Khartoum, you might just need to, you know, know the right time to go to the market so you don't get a drone to drop a bomb on you right now, right? That's They're different levels of survivability, but the mindset is the same. I say that because what we see worldwide, what we see playing out in headlines is not that much different than what plays out in the boardroom or plays out in the bedroom even. People are constantly trying to survive when we have the opportunity to thrive. We have an opportunity to take calculated risks and grow exponentially. We have an opportunity to make significantly more money than we make right now. We have an opportunity to get more sleep, have better relationships. Everything could be better, especially in the first world, but we're locked in this mindset of, well, if I do that thing that's going to help me make more money, am I doing the right or the wrong thing? Am I being good or bad? Am I a hero or a villain? And because of that, we're constantly trapped in this model that doesn't actually serve us. So, CIA's job is to train its officers to step outside of that that less optimized model into a more optimized model that we call our outcomes. I just want to keep that guidepost. Four outcomes. That's interesting cuz it's so true at the level of the individual. I think there is something more terrifyingly pathological when you take it to the nation-state level because from the mental model that I've built, and please punch me in the mouth if this isn't true, but the mental model that I've built is that to pull that off, the government knows that you're trapped in your morality. The Colonel Jessup from A Few Good Men. And the government, playing the role of Colonel Jessup, is like, "Listen, so that you can live in that la-la land of your morality, I have to stand on a wall and kill people. And you need men like me to stand on this wall and kill people. And if I tell you that every now and then I have to turn inward and kill one of you to make sure that I can keep this charade going so that you can live that life, then that's what we're going to [ __ ] do." And when people in the morality frame look at the government in the way they actually behave, it it is a level of repugnance that is terrifying. Now, when people are in the moral frame and they look at their governments and they realize, "Oh my god, like to get to this end, you've been morally flexible in a way that I find abhorrent." Uh now there's like this massive cognitive dissonance. I'm going to lay out a scenario that's a little bit conspiracy theory. Okay. And I want to get a sense of whether I I don't need to know if you think or believe it to be true. I want to know if you think it fits within the framework of how governments actually act. Do you know the sinking of the Lusitania? No, I I mean, I do partially. The story is so awesome. Now, I'll try to mile marker the things where most historians will agree, and I'll try to point out where historians will be like, "Tom's out of his mind." Okay. Um not that I'm coming up with these theories though. These are definitely things that I've read from researchers and other historians. Okay. But, the the sinking of Lusitania was in 1915. This is a real communication internal memo that Winston Churchill wrote where he said, uh we need to find a way to attract neutral ships to our shores as a way of embroiling the US with Germany. Meaning, we want to get passenger ships here that aren't considered military vehicles, we want to get them shot and sunk. Because if America doesn't enter the war, you're uh England, that part of the um axis is going to end up losing. And so, we've got to find a way. And so, there that part it that communication exists. And the that what I just said is very close to verbatim. Okay. Then, you've got things that happened but are more questionable. So, what happened is the Lusitania was retrofitted to be able to carry munitions, explosives, etc. Okay? Why they did it, I won't comment on. They did it. Now, one of the reasons, this part is conspiracy that people put forward is that the State Department had reason to, financial reason, to want the US to enter the war, but they had to make it palatable to the American people. So, they're now working with Churchill who has stated in this communication that this is their plan. Uh so, the boat was retrofitted. We know that. Now, did the State Department start doing things like that or work with the DOD to start doing things like that um so that I mean, technically it would have been the British cuz it was a British ship, but that it gets retrofitted so they know that it sounds more like a military vehicle to the U-boats. That is an outcome. Why they did it is up for grabs. Uh another thing that we know happened is they said that this was a civilian ship and that there was no munitions on it. Well, decades after it gets sunk, they find that there were 6 million rounds. Mhm. M- million rounds of ammunition on the boat. So, they lied about that for a very long time. That we know happens, been verified. And then, here are a whole host of things that do end up happening, whether they were the intent of everything, again, this is up for grabs. The Germans knew that the British were probably up to something like this, trying to get a civilian vessel to trick a U-boat to get them to sink it, either by putting munitions on it or whatever. So, the German government took out ads in the US newspaper saying, "Hey, this is a thing. And just so you know, don't ride on these ships, especially if they're carrying munitions and they're going to a war zone, we have the right to sink them." And supposedly, the State Department stopped those ads from being run, except one got through and it ran. And guess what ships uh dates it ran next to? The Lusitania. So, right next to the Lusitania is an ad like in this regional newspaper put there by the German government saying, "Hey, these boats are being loaded with munitions. You've got to be careful. Like, if you ride one of these boats, likely to get sunk." Okay. Then, the Lusitania going across to England, they pull back. It was supposed to be escorted. They pulled the escort back. They steered it into a slightly new direction where the British Admiralty had intercepted German communications saying that there were U-boats in that area. And they told the captain of the Lusitania to slow down. So, you divert its course into an area where you know there's U-boats. Did you do it on purpose? Did they just get super unlucky? The chaperone ship was called back to shore. Did they do it on purpose? Was it unlucky? But, Lusitania ends up getting shot. All the munitions explode. Boat sinks. And 128 Americans are killed amongst the 1,200 total people that end up dying. The propaganda machinery goes nuts and says, you know, basically they've killed American troops and the sentiment in America goes from nobody wants to be in the war to now they're inflamed. Two years later we're in the war. Now you you can put that together of just it's just unlucky, man. War and these things happen and, you know, yes, Churchill was thinking about it, but he didn't I mean that was they weren't really doing it. Uh sure they lied about the munitions, but they were really just trying to sneak it over. Or was it Churchill goes, we can't lose. So put the munitions on and it either makes it and we get munitions or they sink it because we've had to retrofit the saying and it sounds like it and we drive it into the most dangerous area and now we get the thing that we want which is the US ends up becoming more likely to get into the war. And when I read that one, I was like, okay, admittedly, I don't I cannot see into the hearts of men. I only know the parts that we can prove. But you look at that and you go, man, this is really uncomfortable that leaders do think like that. Now, let's move away from the Lusitania and go to Sinwar. Israel-Palestine. And Sinwar goes, I'm going to take hostages. I'm not going to give them back. And now I've grabbed a hold of Israel and Israel keeps saying let go, let go, let go. And they're just punching me, Sinwar, in the face by killing Palestinians over and over and over. And I know if I let go, they'll stop punching me. But I'm not going to let go because I want them to punch me. And it's like, god damn dude. It's So this very distressing mental map that I'm building is uh there are again, I'm saying this because I'm trapped. I like being trapped here. Let me be very clear. I am trapped in a moral framework that says, yikes, this is really gross. Uh that leaders will sacrifice because maybe thank god America joined World War I. Maybe that is good and the world moved in a better direction. Yeah. Uh maybe it's good that Israel is standing up and defending itself. Maybe it's also horrible as [ __ ] And so, talk me off a ledge because the more I look at history and current affairs, the more I am just like, "Whoa." Like there are dead shark eyes in these power players as far as the eye can see. We'll get back to the show in a second, but first, let's talk about what's happening out there. Business is chaos right now. Trade wars, supply chain disasters, cash flow problems. If you can't adapt fast, you are finished. Complete visibility into everything is your key to survival, and that's exactly what NetSuite by Oracle delivers, and it's why over 41,000 businesses depend on it. NetSuite is the number one cloud ERP because it brings everything together in one place. Your accounting, your finances, your inventory, your HR, all of it connected. The AI in NetSuite handles all the repetitive tasks automatically, so your team can focus on what actually moves the needle. NetSuite shows you exactly what's stuck, what it's costing you, and how to fix it fast. If your revenue is at least seven figures, download the free ebook Navigating Global Trade, Three Insights for Leaders at netsuite.com/theory. Again, that's netsuite.com/theory. And now, let's get back to the show. Uh the ledge I'm going to try to talk you off of isn't a ledge of calculated intent because I think you're actually more right than you are wrong when you look at it and describe it the way you're describing it. Right? You're looking at the facts, assessing the facts, looking at the outcomes that would come as a result of those facts. There's a matrix in the middle that I'll introduce you to that I think is the only piece that that you have either not stated out loud or maybe you don't you're not aware of it yet. But otherwise, I I think you're more right than you are wrong. Yikes. Yikes is the right way to think about it. The ledge that I want to walk you back from is a a ledge of of feeling like you are at risk because of it. Because at the end of the day, you're also focused on your survival just like I'm focused on my survival. Because our our brains, our biological brains, the pink matter in our heads, hasn't evolved at the speed of the environments around us. So, we have AI and we have, you know, push-button banking and we have antibiotics. We have incredible technology around us that keeps us alive and helps us to thrive. But biologically, we're still cavemen. Like we haven't had the 10,000 years to like evolve our brains like we need so that we can actually see threats for what they really are. We still blow threats out of proportion. So, I I want to walk you back from the ledge of feeling like these calculations threaten you. And I want to emphasize why the calculations exist and how you can benefit from understanding them more than placing any kind of moral judgment or or living in your in your box, right? Your trap as you've called it. One of the amazing things about people is that people have something called mass psychosis, which means that as groups of people come together, their individuality starts to blend into a new norm, right? So, you by yourself, you can maintain your own beliefs and principles and ideas and moral guidepost, right? But as soon as we put you with somebody else, you start to blend in with them. It might only be 2% different from what you believe, but you start to become something else. The same thing happens when you start to bring family units together, or community units together, or employer units together. You've heard of a company culture. What is a company culture? It's a unique culture that the people who come into the company start to adopt. They might have believed in, you know, independence and innovation and disruption before, but now that they come into a company, now it's the company's brand of disruption and the company's brand of innovation, right? They They adopt a norm to belong to what they are are attaching themselves to, right? That's a type of psychosis, a type of of mental model that's adopted because they want to have a biased group of people that that they belong to. It's a cognitive bias, the in-group bias, right? As those groups get larger and larger, what do they become? They become countries, they become governments. So, going back to your Lusitania example, what was Churchill the most interested in? Protecting the lives of individuals in the UK or in Britain, or protecting the British government? What was he actually more afraid of happening? The destruction of lives or the destruction of the government? His job was to protect the government because as long as a government exists, then the ideology of a country exists. Individuals come and go, right? The US government isn't there to protect the American people. It's there to protect the American government, right? We take an oath when we join any kind of DOD, CIA organization. Anytime you join a national security organization, you take an oath that says, "To support and defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic." The Constitution is what defines what is the government. You don't take an oath to defend the American people. You take an oath to defend the Constitution. It's a very different thing. American people come and go. America looks very different now than it looked in 1955. Right? You can't defend the people cuz the people all have different opinions of that change, that evolve. Some people are educated, some people are less educated, some people are educated from the wrong schools, some people are educated from outdated schools. I mean, anybody who's spent a Thanksgiving with their grandparents knows thank God America isn't what those people grew up in anymore. But one day will be the grandparents. So, why do we think that our government is there to protect us? It's not. It's there to protect the way we live. It's there to protect the ideology of a country. So, Churchill understood that and he understood that there are actions that we can take that increase the probability of a favorable outcome that benefits us in this current conflict in a way that preserves the longevity of Britain. That's the matrix that I wanted to introduce you to, right? This idea there's a a second matrix or matrix that we use in Intel that talks about probability versus reliability. And the probability of an outcome and the reliability meaning the the the trustworthiness of the information that we're getting, right? Those two things together help us determine what actions we do take and what actions we don't take because we want to take an action that we have a high reliability, we highly believe that the probability is equally high, right? So, we have we have strong information that we deem to be true that this this action that we take will have a high probability result that benefits us. So, we want to take high probabilities of high reliability information. We don't want to take somebody one time said one thing and we were like, oh, that's that's an interesting nugget that gives us a high probability of success. That's not reliable. But when multiple people are saying something and it has a high probability of you know us giving us the outcome we want, then we take action. So the idea of retrofitting a civilian passenger ship and inviting more passenger ships into a region specifically in the hopes that that a mistake will happen or even better, a mistake doesn't happen like what happened here. The Lusitania wasn't a mistake. It was carrying ammunition. It was carrying weapons that supported a conflict. So the Germans weren't wrong in sinking it. Technically, right? But by controlling what we shared about it to the people, we were able to control what the people or Britain was able to control and the US was able to control how the population interpreted. Why did it matter? Because the population thinks through that lens of mass psychosis. Same thing with weapons of mass destruction in Gulf War. Right? Same thing with 9/11. 9/11 happened, we were all afraid of terrorists. India and Pakistan are at each other's throats right now for the same [ __ ] terrorists in Pakistan that are doing the same kind of [ __ ] they were doing before. Where was Osama bin Laden killed? Pakistan. Who was an ally to the United States during the war on terror? Pakistan. Who didn't give America the ability to fly in and kill Osama bin Laden? Pakistan. So we took that authority on our own. I say that because the the example that you have in World War I just plays out over and over again throughout the world of conflict. You look at what's happening right now with Hamas and Israel. I would argue that there's multiple reasons why Hamas is getting the outcome they want. Even though Israel's also getting certain outcomes that they want also. Now there's a leverage game because Hamas understands that if they capitulate Israel's not going to slow down. There's no reason for them to believe that Netanyahu is going to stop committing atrocities across Gaza if they give him his hostages. No reason to believe that. Same thing between Russia and uh and Zelenskyy in Ukraine. They're at a place now where they have more to gain by not cooperating than they have to gain by cooperating. That all of those situations to in their perspective increase the probability of favorable outcomes for their individual countries. Putin believes he will make Russia stronger. Netanyahu believes he will make Israel stronger. Hamas believes they will survive through this conflict and radicalize more Muslim Palestinian than ever before. Zelenskyy believes that he's going to somehow return 1991 borders to Ukraine, even though his own top generals tell me he won't. They're all doing it because they think like individuals because when you get a group of humans together, they start to become a new singular organism. And the organism in many cases is the is the government itself, its own entity. Um okay, so are there limits? So taking it back to Epstein, hey, I'm going to I'm not saying you, but I'm just saying they went and got pedophiles, presumably, allegedly, uh for a whole bunch of powerful people. And it's like if somebody had that similar view, like is it like, yeah, no limits. I don't like it, but there's no limits. It doesn't sound right to say there's no limits, but I'm using the word right and wrong. I'm trying to actually ask myself like And here's the rubric. Here's the Here's the scenario that's going on in my head with your question, right? Here is an American citizen standing right here, right? 33-year-old mother of a 18-month-old child. She lives in Wisconsin. She goes to work every day online trying to make her Etsy store work. And she's been married for 7 years and she's a positive, helpful, loved individual. American citizen. Here is a Pakistani citizen who's a scumbag who was raped as a child and who from that has become a pedophile because now he doesn't understand sex. So, his only understanding of sex is what was done to him. So, now he's a pedophile in Pakistan. Would I give him child porn to get secrets from him to keep her safe? I think I would. It keeps her safe. Would I kill him to keep her safe? I think I would. Because as long as he exists, he might pose a threat to her. And the world of reliability and probability that I was just telling you about that matrix, when we have high reliable information that there's a high probability that this guy is planning an attack that might harm her, what's my limit? Because her could be my mom. Her could be my wife. Her could be my daughter. And this is my moment to decide what I do to him. And I want to do to him what I would hope somebody would have done to protect my mom and what I hope somebody will do one day to protect my daughter. That's my calculation because I'm thinking through that lens of survivability. I need her to survive. This is the future of our country. This guy's already [ __ ] He's already a bad guy. We got to remember that we do horrible [ __ ] to bad people. Bad according to our moral definitions of right and wrong, good and bad. They're already intended to do harm to national security interests. If he wants to blow up some dude in India, not my problem. If he wants to rape some kid from Singapore, not my problem, right? She's my problem, not these other folks. That's the calculation that we work with and inside that calculation, what wouldn't I do to protect her? I don't think there's much. Take Israel-Palestine where obviously there's so much international outrage. In fact, there was just a murder as we're recording this of two Israeli embassy employees where the guy was screaming free Palestine. It's like, okay, well, from his perspective, if he's running that same calculus, then presumably he's like, yeah, what's the problem? If I'm able to draw attention to my cause and get more supporters so that we can defend ourselves, then all's fair, right? Uh take what's going on in South Africa. Um there's hundreds of years of injustice. And so, yes, we're going to kill a few white farmers and we're going to take their land back. [ __ ] them. Like, I've got to think about mine. Um as an international community, when it's not us fighting for us, but it's us fighting for a moral framework. Or is that delusion on my part? And Tom, you're being ridiculous. This is all leverage. This is just leverage. They put a bit of lipstick on it that they call moral framework, but this is really just leverage. How do we think about it internationally? Your morals are being defined for you. That's how you need to think about it. You haven't defined them for yourself. You weren't given the freedom or the flexibility to define them for yourself. You were put into a structured system, a structured school system, a structured educational system, a structured uh religious system, a structured professional system. Like you have been shaped. So, your morality has been shaped by the government that sits at the wheel. There was a time when it was morally repugnant to think that black people and white people were equal. That was shaped. And then it was changed. And now or people would still argue that there are there are plenty of racists out there who still think black people and white people aren't equal. But at a government level, it's been moved. The dial has been changed quite a bit, right? There was a time when we thought that it was a great idea to have children performing labor in the fields. Now we don't think it's such a great idea. There was a time when we thought it was better to keep women systematically underpaid. Now we're going through a transition where are we trying to systematically bring women up to the same pay scale as men based exclusively on their gender. So, what's morally acceptable changes over time. Why? Is it you that changes? No. It's the government that changes the levels of what is morally acceptable and not morally acceptable. Sometimes that comes through social reform, sometimes it's a marriage of social reform and political reform, sometimes it's nothing more than blind political ambition and people trying to make a career in politics and looking for a cause that they can stand behind, right? And a cause is going to take them to the top. They don't even believe in it themselves. They just want to get the benefit of it and they use it as leverage, right? That's the world that we live in. Russia, prior to invading Ukraine, believed the the surveys just came out recently. Russians believe that the most important thing was quality of life. That's what the average Russian believed in at a rate of like 65% of Russians polled. Prior to the invasion of Ukraine, for the first 18 months of Ukraine, they still majoritatively believed in that. But there was a there was an increasing belief that power and global power and the respect for their global power, that opinion also started to rise. So, now, 2 years plus later, Russians believe predominantly that the most important thing for them is the perception of global power, not quality of life. The the the contingent of Russians that care about quality of life is down like 25% compared to the group that wants to believe that global power is the most important thing. So, Putin's war in Ukraine and what the propaganda machine and what the um context for the the West versus East power struggle, all of that has shaped what is now a new level of moral priority for Russians themselves, right? The same thing is happening to Palestinians, the same thing is happening to Sunni Muslims all across the Middle East, the same thing is happening to Israelis, the same thing is happening in America, right? People, there is there's a bell curve of people who are still undecided, right? That's the majority of people, they're still undecided. They they hear arguments on both sides, but they generally keep their conclusions to themselves. And then you've got on the outside of the bell curve the two extremes. The one extreme that's very vocal in favor of whatever the action is, and the other extreme that's very vocal against what's happening. Right? Everything breaks out into the 80/20 rule. So, those are what we see the most. The dude who just shot two people coming out of a young diplomat's party, that dude was [ __ ] up. There are better ways to get a more effective outcome than that. But, that individual was an outlier. They weren't able to process or think through the better way to do it. Just like Luigi Mangione. He thought killing the CEO of United Healthcare was the best, most effective thing he could do to shed light on the the problems with American healthcare. Some would say he did a good job, and they still do. And other people say he didn't. A lot of people. So, that's it's what we're getting at is that this idea of morality is is given to you. Unless you take control of it yourself and say, "This is how it pertains to me." But, I'm reading a therefore, so your morality is given to you, it's not real, the stuff changes over time, therefore at the level of nation-state, you have one job, keep your nation safe. Be as morally flexible as you need to be. As it And I would say the same lesson applies to the individual. Right? The individual needs to understand your government is not there to protect you. American government is not there to keep us safe. It's not there to serve us, it's not there to keep us safe. It's there to serve itself, and as long as we serve within the confines of what it has dictated is beneficial for the American public as long as we follow those rules, pay our taxes, do things the way that they let us do things. Right? As long as that's what we do, they won't hinder us. They might even help us. But as soon as you try to go outside of that, things get much more difficult. Right? As soon as you try to live off the grid, things become difficult. As soon as you try to, you know, exercise whatever right you interpret as yours, but they think is is difficult. Like, just trying to take a pet from one country to another country becomes bureaucratically difficult. Whenever you run into that bureaucratic difficulty, what you're really running into is you are outside of the norm that the government has set in place to maximize and optimize its own survivability. Okay, so I've been thinking a lot about South Africa. As you apply that framework, did you see how Trump responded to uh the president of South Africa recently? I I read a little bit about it, but I didn't see it. gangster. So, um the there are definitely complexities. I'll give people a very quick primer. Uh there are multiple parties in South Africa, so it's not like the US where you just have two parties. There's a bunch, and they're competing for attention. So, there is a guy in their legislature, whatever they call it, parliament, whatever, um who represents a party that has 10% of the vote, and he is talking about uh slitting the throat of whiteness, direct quote, uh kill the boer, kill the farmer. So, the boers are the Dutch settlers that came over like in the 1600s. Um just openly calling for it. And he's saying, "Look, I'm not calling for the slaughter of white people as of right now." And they're like, uh you can understand why people would be very unnerved by that cuz yet. He's like, "Yeah, I can't promise that that someone won't in the future, myself or somebody else." They're like, "What is happening?" So, the president of South Africa sits down with the president uh Donald Trump, and Trump plays him a video of this guy saying all this crazy ass [ __ ] And um as an international community, I think people sort of sketch out of like, okay, hold on a second. We're denying people coming into our country as refugees from a whole lot of places where people are brown, but you've got these white farmers in South Africa who were a part of a very racist regime and apartheid, and you're giving them the status I mean clearly bad things are happening. Some farmers, people argue the number, some farmers have been attacked and murdered and their farms have been taken and as far as I know people have not gone to prison for that. Uh and this guy who controls 10% of the vote is saying, we're going to expropriate all their farms. So, we're going to I mean technically he's saying we're going to kill them and take their stuff and he's saying even the president's not going to be able to stop us. So, he's calling for all of their land to be given with no compensation whatsoever. And how do like how do you with this framework which I consider it I really worry when listening to you that you're just at ground truth and that there's you're not giving me any adornments to hide behind. Uh but with that unadorned just truth of how the human animal works, how do we think about it? Do we just go, well if they've got mineral rights then we're going to stand up under the pretense of helping but this is really about getting the mineral rights that we need and nothing else? Um or do we go, uh this is racist and we have to stop it and of course we're going to welcome farmers here. It would be nice if we stood by the ideological truths of America, right? And that we would identify racism as what it is, even if it's reverse racism, and that we would find some way to use our international wasta influence It's called wasta? Wasta is the Arabic word for influence, yeah. Uh we would use it to to drive the morally right thing to do in South Africa, right? It would be nice if that's how we thought of it. But in the world of limited resources, where American dollars, American hours, American attention is limited. We have to take into account that what's happening in South Africa, what are the probabilities that what happens there will directly impact the national security apparatus of the United States, our 33-year-old mother, right? How much of our time, attention, and money should go into this issue to keep her safe? I would argue that right now not much. And if there's mineral rights to be gained, that gives us a little bit of leverage that we can use to try to do what what does benefit us in the long run, right? Or maybe there's some other leverage that we should use instead. What that leverage is, I don't know yet. I can see an intelligence operation where this is our chance to start growing our own covert influence among the white population, play into their racism, to start building our informant pool, to start shaping the leaders that will come about when a racist conflict like reaches a precipice and it's black versus white inside South Africa, right? That's that's the intelligence way thinking about. Don't think about the problem today, think about the problem 10 years from now. And how do we set ourselves up to be in a position of power 10 years from now instead of right now, right? Because right now it's kind of out of our control. I would also say that reliability and probability this a zealot with 10% of the vote who's talking about, you know, waging war on white people may sound scary, but what are the actual probabilities he's going to have success? What are the probabilities that there isn't some already existing radical group that's not just going to assassinate that guy, right? And if they do, what are we going to do? If we start getting involved now, then we're going to set ourselves up for having to be involved if he is killed later on by some contingent of, you know, white elitist South Africans. Where if we just keep our distance now, it's their [ __ ] problem. They'll deal with it. Yeah. Okay, let's see how far this goes. According to Jay Bhattacharya, the new director of the NIH, they probably funded the gain of research gain of function research in the Wuhan lab, which is probably, according to Jay Bhattacharya, where COVID emanated from. And he's making it sound like that's a bad thing. But is it really a bad thing, according to this paradigm, if we could make a biological weapon that we could use to keep Americans safe? And should we surreptitiously run a an experiment on the entire world population to see how well this stuff works. Looking through the lens of right and wrong, everybody has their own opinion, right? But when it comes to long-term strategic benefit, the only reason chemical and biological weapons are wrong is because we have a treaty that says we won't we won't do that. In reality, there's lots of situations where we have treaties and people are still developing options. Look at the whole idea of weaponizing space, right? Look at the idea of a space force. There was a time when we didn't want to weaponize space at all. Then we developed a space force. Them days is over. Them days is over. We wanted Then we developed a space force, and now the whole world is talking about like, is it the Golden Dome, I think it's called now? Golden Dome, yeah. Which is the China's supposedly going to get their quantum computers off the ground by mining helium on the dark side of the moon. This is all probably conjecture, but still. But don't don't forget, China was a China launched a missile to destroy satellites to create debris in space, and what was that, 2001, 2003, something like that? Right? So, it's already been kind of proof of concept about weaponizing space has already taken place. I don't know why we would think that biological chemical weapons would be an exception, right? They're They're in use in Sudan for crying out loud. saying we're not doing it. I'm saying um Is it morally right or wrong? Yeah, it's not morally right or wrong. Like, I'm trying to find the edges of when we talk about moral flexibility. Remember, my goal in this is more for anybody listening than just for you, but I am trying to figure out how the world actually works, not how I want it to work, not how I think it ought to work, how it actually works. And every word out of your mouth, while it is sinking my stomach, feels like it has high predictive validity. And I just want to keep going and seeing like uh is that why COVID played out, potentially, allegedly, the way that it did? Because this was people going, "Yeah, but this could be really useful to us. And if we can uh get China to run the risk for us, we'll fund it, we'll have them do it, but they have to worry about whatever mess comes out of this, but we'll get the information that we need." There's a sinister assumption there, right? That we knew and were actively funding their efforts to create a biological weapon. Is it sinister according to this framework if we think that it might help save American lives in the long run? That's where I think the intersection really lies. If NIH was intentionally funding China's development of their own biological weapon to protect China, Mhm. that's some that's some sinister [ __ ] That's we're spending American dollars, American time, American money to help them create something that helps them. Yeah. That's that's wrong. That's wrong morally, that doesn't serve the outcome of a greater national security for the United States. Yeah. However, I can see a lot of scenarios in there where they were funding some kind of research, but they were told the research was different than what it really was. I can also see situations where they were funding research knowing that it was going into the biological development of a weapon, specifically because in parallel we were creating a counter to that weapon. Right? That is something that we very commonly do in the United States. We allow bad guys to do bad [ __ ] because we know they're doing bad [ __ ] and we can develop the counter as they're developing the offensive weapon. Right? That's how we can we can counter hypersonic missiles, or we can counter biological weapons, or we can counter uh trade imbalances in foreign countries, right? Because we let bad [ __ ] happen knowing that we have intel on the bad [ __ ] and we can build develop a counter now. So, there could have been any combination of the three of those that went into the development if COVID-19 was created intentionally to be a biological weapon. There's also plenty of situations where it was everybody was funding the development of a novel virus so that they could see how would we combat a novel virus? Well, we can't run simulations without having a novel virus that we created and maybe they even created one that they knew was weak so that they could run successful tests in a limited population with a contingency plan for in case that thing was artificially released or accidentally released. I don't believe that we have enough information to say COVID was developed with nefarious intent and tested on the world population. I don't believe that. I do think that there's enough evidence enough information to validate it, but whenever one finds themselves in a situation where they're squabbling over facts, I always say eject out of that and just run it as the thought experiment. Yes, because I'm trying to map global power. Mhm. How does the global power network, how do the men and women behind the scenes that truly wield power, what are they looking at, what moves are they making? Leverage was your first hypothesis. That makes a lot of sense to me cuz it maps to what I think about central banking and why they what I call they steal Mhm. just blindly uh because money is fake. That's going to catch people off guard, but just so I don't have to spend a ton of time explaining it, it really is true. Uh but because it's fake, then you can just print print print print print print. If you control debt and the money printer, you never have to worry about going broke. Everybody else does. Um you don't. So, that all maps to that, but I had never considered before that um something like what happened with COVID could have been intentional from a gain leverage perspective and that people are willing to sacrifice copious amounts of people if it protects the Constitution or whatever country it is that you work for. Uh so this is shockingly eye-opening. I don't want people to think that I I just want to do it. So anyway, as a thought experiment within that framework, um could you see a world in which power brokers go, all right, we're going to kill a few hundred thousand, maybe a million people with the vaccine, but we're going to understand how it works. I'm not saying they did, I'm just saying does that track in terms of the type of thing that somebody in that position would be like, yeah, maybe. Yes, I think it does for a few different reasons. China and the United States, at the time of COVID especially, were not in good terms. Right? This was the the Trump trade war was active. Trump was at a high point in his in his popularity. You know, China was trying to figure out what they were going to do next. So, for China, the idea of developing a chemical agent, whether it's a weapon or whether it's a defensive ploy or whether it's just a experiment for someone's PhD. Uh lots of reasons there why they would be exploring medicine, right? To try to differentiate themselves or make them a world broker at best and at worst with nefarious intent. It also makes sense for China to release said virus as a thought experiment. It makes sense to release it because China's biggest problem is excess population. China's biggest drag is an aging population that doesn't contribute and brings down the average per capita of the average productive individual. China knows they're not going to become the world superpower if they continue to carry a population in the billions. Right? There There are two times as many people who make up the employment base of China than there are total population in the United States. So, that means working-age laborers, there are 736 million in China working age, right? People looking for jobs. That's more than two times the entire population of the United States, children, elderly, working age. China knows that in order for them to have a per capita income that comes anywhere close to our per capita income, which is what's required to make a true middle class, they can't carry billions of people. So, it makes sense in a thought experiment for them to say, well, well, if we create something and it accidentally gets out, what is the probability that it's going to be devastating to our population? What's the probability that it might even be beneficial to our population? And that's what we saw happen with COVID-19. That doesn't necessarily mean that the United States supported the release or that the United States had anything to do with the release, but it makes sense as a thought experiment for China to say, if we develop it, we win. If we develop it and it leaks, we still win. And if we develop it and it leaks and it travels around the world, that would be the only place where we might lose, unless we're also the ones that have the vaccine for it, and then we win again. What I don't think anybody calculated was the fact that when COVID-19 spread, governments shut down. And when governments shut down, we all started to see that our that all of our line of logistical supply chain went through China. That's where COVID-19 really changed the world. It wasn't in the fact that it killed a bunch of old people and sick people. I know that a lot of people won't like that that I said that. COVID changed the world because it showed the entire [ __ ] world we had let China become the center of the hub and spoke model for the entire globe. And now, we've all since then, we've all been trying to fix that. We'll get back to the show in a moment, but first, let's talk about one of the most valuable advantages in content creation, speed. The faster you go from idea to edit, the more content you can win with. Opus Clip makes that instant. If you're building a brand or running a business, you already know content is not optional and you need a system. But, for a lot of creators, that system breaks at the editing stage. Opus Clip's AI-powered editor gives you pro-level video output without the bottlenecks, budget, or burnout. You can add branded intros, generate AI B-roll with one click, tweak captions, layout, voice-over, all without the tech overwhelm or a full production team. It's drag-and-drop simple, but powerful enough to keep your brand sharp across every platform. No more bottlenecks, just faster, better content. If you're ready to go from idea to upload without slowing down, go to the link in our show notes and give it a try for free right now. And now, let's get back to the show. You said earlier that this moment is a powder keg. What is going on? India-Pakistan, Russia-Ukraine, uh Israel-Gaza, um Saudi Arabia-China, yeah, absolutely. Iran, Middle East. Yeah, Iran hiding in the background. Uh what is happening? We have We are sitting at such an intensely interesting time in our history. And I am so happy that I get to be an adult watching it happen, right? Because in multiple data points, we are watching the decline of American supremacy. We're watching the dollar become less popular. We're watching American influence, uh international influence reduce itself. We're watching the rise of a new anti-Western power base, right? With the with the combination of China, Iran, uh Russia, and other Iranian, uh North Korean, and and Iranian counterparts all coming together to create a counterbalance to the West. What a fascinating time to be alive. It does not mean we have a pleasant few decades ahead of us. It doesn't mean that. Yeah. But it does mean that the world that you and I will see from our deathbed is going to be so different than the world that we see today and the world that we saw when we were brought into this world, right? How dare you? And that change I I change to be a necessary fact of life. Change a fact. Yeah. Change is something that that will happen and the people who succeed are the people who can adapt and evolve with that change the most effectively. So, essentially what we're seeing in my opinion essentially what we're seeing around the whole world is a question of whether democracy is truly what serves governments. You think that's what's driving? That's the question. Really? And you can see And here's why I say that. Most people would say that Donald Trump is a populist and or possibly authoritarian type of leader, right? I think even Donald Trump would say that he's somewhere in the mix, right? He is not a professional politician democratically elected through blah blah blah blah blah, right? He's a he's something else. We have literally watched the recent elections in Canada and Australia both elect far left-leaning leaders specifically because those leaders were anti-Trump and the populations of those countries in the moment were also anti-Trump. They didn't have high chances of winning. These are two strong American allies, Canada and Australia, right? They're part of the Five Eyes networks, the five countries that share all intelligence, right? And these these left-leaning leaders were elected exclusively in a final push because they were like, "We don't believe in Donald Trump." And their numbers soared and they were elected. So, now these countries are stuck with these leaders not because of their policies or their backgrounds or their histories of success, but because of their political stance against Donald Trump. Simultaneously, we see a leader in Romania, a leader in Portugal, we see continuing growth across We see Germany, we see these countries that are quote unquote democracies doing the opposite, voting in strong right-leaning authoritarian leaders specifically because they are pro-Trump, right? Germany's different because they dissolved their parliament, they dissolved their office of the chancellor, and then they couldn't come to a conclusion on the next chancellor, and then when they did come to a conclusion on the next chancellor, the parliament didn't endorse him and they had to go through a second round of voting. Germany's all [ __ ] up right now. And that's Germany, man. Mhm. One of the wealthiest state most stable strongest countries in Europe can't get their [ __ ] together. Portugal's had multiple prime ministers in the last 3 years. The UK only recently landed on a prime minister that they have let sit for longer than a year. Like, Europe is all [ __ ] up in the in for the same reasons, because the people can't decide. Do we want democracy, or do we want strongman leadership? Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia flourishing under strongman leadership. Russia having the best years of the last decade under strongman leadership. Really? You think this is the best they what? The best for them in the last 10 years. Really? I thought their economy was like getting hammered. Even as it's getting hammered now, it's still better than it was 5, 7, 10 years ago. They Yeah. Wow, I'm mis-mapping Russia. The war in Ukraine has created a wartime economy in Russia, and people are getting paid more, they're producing more, their economy isn't happy, but it's better than it's been, right? China is in the same place. China is struggling with their economy, but they have they have a collective enemy right now with the West. Mhm. So, uh especially with the terrorists that are happening right now, right? Every Chinese working age person is looking at the United States thinking, "You are an enemy of China, because you're taking away my job, you're shutting down my factory, you're making it hard for me to feed my kids. You're the enemy, you're the enemy, you're the" What's What's that person going to be in 2 years, 3 years, 4 years? If they're not a direct soldier, they're going to be somebody who's looking for ways to get into some military role that creates revenue from a wartime economy. You were for this during your Lusitania uh example. Governments have learned through the lens of history, wartime is a huge economic boost. The big concern that Europe has with Russia is that Russia's not going to stop after Ukraine, not because Russia actually has ambition beyond Ukraine, but because they can't they can't stop. Now that that engine has been developed, now that they're creating 1400 missiles, right? Why would they stop? Instead, they would find little small ways to keep the conflict going and further test NATO, right? That's what Europe is most concerned about. So, we live in this world where where this is not just happening in one or two pockets, it's happening everywhere, right? Do you think Putin is so incentivized to keep it going that the war just isn't going to end? So, I think Putin is incentivized to take what he wants in Ukraine. No reason for him to back out of Ukraine now. No reason for him to stop and even come close to accepting of Zelenskyy's terms because he's he is doing what intelligence officers do. He is systematically degrading the influence of Zelenskyy and trying to degrade the influence of Donald Trump. The difference being that Donald Trump knows how this game works, so he knows how to extricate himself from the degradation and save his own reputation, but Zelenskyy's [ __ ] Right? Zelenskyy once said, "I will never sit at the table with Putin." Now Zelenskyy's bitching about the fact that he went to a table and Putin didn't show up. Right? That makes Zelenskyy look like an an idiot. As if he doesn't do enough to make himself look like an idiot. That does not help. He has insisted on 1991 borders. His own like senior liaisons to for diplomacy around the world are saying that's an unreasonable expectation. So, what kind of leader is it when, you know, your your head of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in the United States is saying that the president's goals are unrealistic? It's It's a complete meltdown of any kind of reputation. Putin understands it. All Putin has to do is keep launching ammunition and flying drones. [ __ ] dude, this pisses me off. Zelensky launched a one of the largest drone strikes on Russia in advance of the May 9th celebration. The May 9th celebration is Russia's annual celebration to celebrate the end of World War II and the destruction of the Nazi party. Do you remember what his original terms were for invading Ukraine? Yeah. That they were still Nazi. So, somehow this country that's trying to make itself look like it's the victim literally attacks Moscow the eve of a celebration that's there to celebrate the defeat of the Nazi party. When the original reason Putin went into Ukraine was because he said they were Nazis there. Like, these are these are horrible strategic decisions made over and over again. If not by Zelensky, then by the the advisory board that he has he's taking information from, assuming that that advisory board is even trying to help Ukraine. So, my my point is Yeah, we have this incredible world that is a powder keg working around us. You have Trump in the Middle East to decide whether or not Sunni Islam is going to support the Palestinians or whether they're going to try to bring Israel to the table. You've got Netanyahu doing [ __ ] on his own that the world disagrees with, counting on America to back him up, but Trump is distancing him- distancing himself from Netanyahu. And that's before you start getting into the stuff like like the military. Pete Hegseth, our current Secretary of Defense has set only two priorities in motion for the entire DOD. Only two. One, protect the homeland. Do you know what the second priority is? Degrade China. That's it. Right, that is the memo directing all of DOD. Two priorities, nothing else. Defend the homeland which basically means put missiles on our shores and degrade China. Nothing else. Not degrade adversaries, not counter you know, political uh whatever dissidents or or influence from the East, none of that. It specifically says degrade and deter China. It's amazing. That is our world right now. Degrade China? With the DOD? Lots of different ways. I mean, some of it's denying their access to technology. Some of it is actively seeking areas to frustrate or waste their resources in third country locations, right? Countering their influence with the Belt and Road Initiative, countering their support to Iran or Russia or North Korea, right? Taking taking action with special forces in zones where you know Chinese interests are at play. Mhm. Um some of it is cyber attacks. Some of it is space-based assets. Some of it is um information warfare. Like there's lots of different ways that you can degrade. And I think what's happening is the United States is understanding that China is a major threat that no one has been calling China. They've been calling it Asia Pacific, Pacific Rim, the East Asia pivot is what what Obama called it, right? And that was 2008. It's 2025 right now. So we've been we've been sugarcoating this threat for a long time. But now Hexad is saying let's just call it what the [ __ ] it is. How serious do you think the threat of China is? When I look at Thucydides Trap, when I look at the realities of geopolitics, when I look at being in second place is a lot worse than being in first place, just like yeah, we've got to be looking there. When I look closer at the corporate espionage stuff, it's like it's actually pretty serious. When I look at that they're the hub and spoke of the entire world's manufacturing and you can't have an adversary who might become your rival uh sorry, a rival who might become your adversary, you can't have them control your drones when drones are how the war is going to be fought. Am I just being overly paranoid or is this really where we're headed? You're not being paranoid, you're being pragmatic right now. China is the single largest threat to the United States. If that's not an opinion, that's laid out in the Director of National Intelligence Intelligence Estimate, that's laid out by the Secretary of Defense, that's been communicated by by the president in multiple policies that have been set forth. Like it's not paranoia. There's a huge narrative bias that happens in media and other places where they try to reduce it and they try to soften it, right? They try to talk about decoupling, etc., etc. But they're our largest threat. And keep in mind that this same conversation is happening somewhere in China where that conversation is saying the same thing about us. Where they say the United States is the single largest threat to China, right? And the success of our people and the success of our long-term growth and success is being hampered and reduced by American influence and American activity. The fact that those two conversations are happening in both countries just goes to show where the future is truly headed. Right? And all the examples you say are exactly right. The The thing that has me the most kind of unnerved is that since about 2015, there have been multiple economists who have come out and said that the dollar is losing its influence as the central currency of the world, right? Not losing quickly necessarily, but there's absolutely a shift happening. When we then froze assets from Russia because of Russia's invasion of Ukraine I mean, that was like 300 billion dollars worth in assets. That was a huge signal to China that said, "Hey, if we're willing to do this to them, guess what we're willing to do to you." So now China started decoupling from us. China has its own issues that it's dealing with, but let's not like be coy. We have our own [ __ ] issues that we're dealing with, too. They have their economic issues, we have our economic issues. They have their real estate issues, we have our real estate issues. They have their whatever, we have our whatever. The difference is they have a [ __ ] ton of people and their primary target is like 150 miles off their southern shore, where our primary threats are thousands of miles away from us and it's going to take a whole hell of a lot of professional military organization to do anything against those threats. Imagine a world where Russia launches a limited campaign against Estonia, a NATO country, at the same time as China launches any kind of cyber attack or aggression against Taiwan. What's the United States going to do? What's NATO going to do? Are we going to act on Article 5 and go to Estonia's aid? Are we going to let Estonia defend itself for a little while to watch what happens? Are we going to rush to Taiwan to give Taiwan aid? Are we going to let Taiwan work on its own for a little bit to see what happens? Are we going to divide our forces and go in two different directions that have an entire continent between them? What are we going to do? This is what's happening at the boardroom tables in in Moscow and Beijing. Thoughts like this, conversations like this. Probability and reliability matrix. Do you see them as working in any sort of coordinated fashion in that way or you're just saying if China saw that Russia made that move that they might do something? I would say coordinated but not necessarily collaborative, right? Because what we're seeing is that the the cooperation that's growing between Russia, Iran, North Korea, um fundamentalist Islam, uh China, they're not agreeing on an ideology. They're not collaborating on ideas. When it's pragmatic, they're sending some of their advisers to go help the other country, like we're seeing with North Korean troops fighting in Russia, right? Um but we're also seeing China sending troops to fight, like mercenary troops to fight both for Ukraine and for Russia. You've got lots of opportunity for for countries to get involved in Sudan and Syria, where they can test their technology, they can test their tactics. Everybody understands, all of our adversaries understand the United States is is second to none when it comes to real-time war conflict experience. We know what it's like to get shot at in real-time. We know what it's like to run coordinated operations in real-time. NATO countries don't know how to do that. China doesn't really know how to do that. Russia has been learning it for the last almost 3 years, right? So, that's a very valuable skill to have, and that's a skill that everybody's very eager to develop. So, what I would say is because we see such pragmatic cooperation between them, I could see a phone call between Xi Jinping and and Putin where they say, "Hey, this is what I'm going to do on this day about if you see it happen and it benefits you, it'd be really helpful to me for you to do that thing, right? Or just giving you a heads-up, I'm not telling this to anybody else, but this is going to happen. Maybe it'll happen in July, right? And then they can plan and they can plan in separate silos to help keep uh compartmentation going, but for sure we are seeing that all of those countries are benefiting from the cooperation with each other in a collective push against Western power. The geopolitics, the strategy of this moment where we no longer feel like a hegemon is uh it's going to be interesting to see how it plays out. If we if I'm running the scenarios and I'm China, I realize that I'm in a stronger position now than I probably will be down the road. So, that's the part that that unnerves me is that excellent observation that people don't say enough. This is something that uh people have ridicule's a bit strong, but they think I'm off the mark by thinking that we need to bring some manufacturing back to the US, but it just seems self-evident. The one that I always focus on is drones. Right now, China just controls that. Uh rare earth minerals being actually processed, China's like 95%. Yeah. And the amount of the modern world that that controls. And there's something interesting going on with the conflation of we want to be good people uh and therefore we we don't want to do anything that would hurt China. And honestly, I don't want to do anything that would hurt China if we weren't in the scenario that we're in. But it's like you I think so much of the American psyche is built on certainly people my age is built on this idea that we won World War II. The Russians who? We won World War II. Uh we did it by the Japanese were dumb enough to strike Pearl Harbor and we just on a dime started making ships out of nowhere. And we feel like oh we can still do that cuz it's the American spirit not realizing no no no this is that was the American manufacturing pipeline that we just aimed at something else. We no longer have that pipeline. It's all been outsourced to China. China is anything but dumb. And so they understand we can make everything for everyone. That was the game plan. So is it just that China can print their way out of this better than we can? That they're more poised to uh they certainly don't mind depressing the value of the yuan. And if they just print print print print print to keep their economy going, yes they're um inflating but they've like you said they've got such a massive working population. That like yeah sorry guys over the next 5 years you're going to take a 25-30% hit. It is what it is. And uh I welcome you to come tell me your negative feelings. And uh we've got a nice camp for you. Yeah. Um so yeah I don't know what they're waiting for. I don't know if it's that um they don't want it either and that's just uh that's too messy and if we can just calmly take over the world then we will. And so that's strat number one. Um and maybe it is Trump is just a loose cannon enough. It's like nah we'll wait this out. Like to waiting 10 more years not a big deal for us. Uh and so, we're going to be obviously aggressively trying to build alliances with other countries because you're doing all this dumb [ __ ] with tariffs. And so, we're going to build alliances, free trade. Look at us, China, free trade. Who said anything different? Yep. Um man, it'll be interesting. But, my gut instinct is that's what's playing out, that they've got a long game in mind. They're willing to be patient. They want to get Trump out of office. They want to see if they can uh get the um real estate problem a bit more under wraps, uh build more alliances, beat the West in the trade game. And then, man, if if Trump's gambit doesn't work, I mean, look at it two ways. And and now I'll speak this directly to all the people that think I'm dumb for this position. Look at it this way. Uh Trump loses the trade war, and China continues to offer trade to the rest of the world. How is that good? Right. Whether you're Europe or the US, how's that help you exactly? Not not tracking that. Uh you get cheap [ __ ] I'll give you that, but China then becomes the number one power, and the only read I can have on that is they just go, "Yeah, to your point, I'm cool with the strongman thing. I'm tired of this democracy [ __ ] Like, I'm here for it. Let's go, China." But, otherwise, I'm just like, "What are you thinking?" Like, this is the away team. Mhm. Uh Yeah, that that's bananas. Alternatively, he wins, you may think he's Trump with the trade war. You may think he's a maniac, but if he can go in, uh destabilize things enough that he can rejigger everything so that we're in a better position and can afford And this is the part I don't think people understand economics well enough to understand what's really [ __ ] going on. When you've got China that can produce everything so cheaply, you can't afford to do your own manufacturing. You literally can't get people to do it. You can't get the entrepreneurs to build the factories. Building these [ __ ] factories is as as hell. Like, you you have to convince a lot of smart people to go, "Ooh, I can make a lot of money doing that." And with China driving the prices down, you can't. So, you literally can't bring the manufacturing back without becoming dictatorial. And so, now you're stuck. Like they they will literally boil your frog simply by going, "We now manufacture everything and [ __ ] you. Like we're going to go take Taiwan because Taiwan can't resist. You can't help them because uh sure, you you've got your crazy Lucky Palmer and all of his microwave technology and you could try to take down our uh our drones, but like we're we're going to hit you with so many waves of different things down to dudes with sticks if we have to. And we will just overwhelm you." Just like Russia is surviving the tech war in Ukraine. Mhm. Right? They're they're proving that concept is viable. That you can take a protracted approach and you can may at least maintain initial lines of demarcation just with a war of attrition, right? A rapid blitzkrieg style approach and then once you have the lines, it's only changed like between 1 and 3% since the start of the war. Right? With with all the technology and all the intelligence and all the money that's gone into that, Russia, isolated and abandoned for, you know, the better part of the first year, still maintained their lines of of attack, right? Plus or minus 3%. So, absolutely China's watching that. The only thing I would add to what you're saying um I live and my whole company lives to bring spy principles into everyday life, right? Sometimes it's everyday life principles that come into espionage and people don't realize that. One of the foundations for what informs national security policy is actually an economic concept called Porter's five five forces. So, Porter's five Porter's five forces, right? Porter's five forces is an economic principle that has to do with industry, right? And those five forces are that you've heard of them before most likely. There's buying power, selling power, the power of substitution, the power of new entrants, and the power of existing competition, right? These are the five powers that shape business. If you want to make more money or or if you want to start a business or if you want to grow your business, you're always looking for the balance of these five forces. Are you a buyer or a seller? Are you a competitor? Are you a new startup? Are you something else? Trump and all of his tariffs have to do with buying power. He knows that America buys the most [ __ ] at the highest premium that any one of the people who sell to us could sell to someone else, but they would sell and they'd get a smaller margin, and they would sell to a smaller audience that wouldn't have the same appetite. So, he's gambling on that. Big gamble, like you said, but he understands like, "Hey, selling to one American is the equivalent of selling to five different countries in South America." So, how long before someone says, "Fuck trying to to market, increase my marketing costs, increase my advertising costs, increase my shipping to sell to five different countries in Latin America, or I just accept whatever the demands are to lower my tariffs so I can work with the United States." That's the game for Trump. It's just like whenever you mark up the prices on your product and then you offer a special rebate, right? It's the same thing that he's doing. That's buyer's power. China is leaning into seller's power and new entrants. They're trying to offer everything at the lowest possible price cuz they're a very capable seller, and they're also trying to to outpace the United States by being a new a new alternative, a substitute or a new alternative for what the United States has. That's why they're trying to get involved in tech. That's why they're trying to get involved in so many other industries from electro- electric vehicles to telecommunications, etc. They're trying to say, "Hey, you don't only have to buy from America, world. You can also buy from us." Right? And there's a lot of the world that's saying yes to that. Right? Trade from Mexico down. Trade has increased by like 38% with China in the last 12 months. It has decreased by 24% with the United States. Right? So now, China is gaining more trade ground in South America and Central America, and the United States isn't keeping the same. The Ameri- America is losing its trade ground. Another thing that the Secretary of Defense is highlighting. Why is China so interested in gaining more trade with South America and Central America? Because that's going to allow more Chinese infrastructure, more Chinese presence. All of that can be flipped and dual-purposed into intelligence and military ambition. Because China has something called a state- run enterprise, right? Meaning the state runs the commercial business. So, they can put a military antenna on the back of a [ __ ] ice cream truck if they want to, because it's it's one in the same. Where here in the United States, we divide military from commercial. All right, we've got one more piece we've got to deal with. Where is Iran hiding in all of this? Um so much what's going on in the Middle East is proxy. Uh is China connected to Iran in any way? What's that game? So, Iran is a really interesting animal right now, because for about the last 20-ish years, it's survived on this idea of an axis of resistance, where it is the money maker, and it's a huge money maker. People don't realize Iran is the breadbasket of the of the Middle East. Everybody buys all their agricultural goods from Iran. It's green, it's lush, it's got active farms and agriculture. So, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, uh Bahrain, all of our American allies all buy they're all enemies to Iran but they have carve outs where they buy from Iran so they have fresh vegetables and produce, right? So Iran is the breadbasket and then it sends those funds to these um radicalized proxies to carry out Iranian interests abroad like Hamas and Hezbollah. Do Do they just want a caliphate? Like they want an Islamic state as far as the eye can see. Absolutely. It's It's called the Shia Crescent. What they want is the expansion of Shia belief and ideology throughout the Middle East with with Iran at the center of it. That's That's the concern that all of the Middle East that all the Sunni Muslims have is that Iran wants a Shia caliphate again, right? The larger thing that Iran is looking for is to become a sphere of influence that counters Western influence and they consider Saudi Arabia to be Western influence. So it's really a constant game between Iran and Saudi Arabia. When we talk about the United States being involved, that's just that's kind of like lip service. The United States isn't really involved in Iran. Iran doesn't wake up every day and think about the United States. They wake up every day and think about Saudi Arabia, right? That's their primary problem in their region. So they have all these proxies that they support and the proxies get confusing because the proxies have their own priorities. Hamas wants to counter uh Israel, Hezbollah wants to counter Israel, Houthis want their own independence. So there's all these different kind of split priorities among the proxies that Iran supports, but your original question is where does it fit into all this? Iran's actually on its heels right now. Hezbollah has been mostly dismantled, Hamas has been heavily dismantled. The Houthis somehow are the shining like silver badge right now for Iran. That's not a good sign, right? But Iran's own internal military capability is still largely unknown. They couldn't defend themselves well against the air strike that came from Israel, but we don't know how much they can actually organize and carry out their own IRGC efforts. And most people think the IRGC is very capable, the Iranian guard, right? So, we don't know what Iran actually can do. And Iran's in a position now where it might see benefit from cooperating with Trump on a nuclear deal because then that takes the heat off of them, allows them to gain more money, more power, more influence in the region, especially as Saudi Arabia is distracted with what's going on in Israel right now. Saudi Arabia has to protect Sunni Islam. And the biggest enemy against Sunni Islam right now is not Shia Islam, it's the [ __ ] Netanyahu war going on in Gaza. Interesting. So, Iran's in this great position where it's been hit hard, but no one's really looking at it right now. So, it could rebuild, refund those proxies, and never has there been a better time to refund proxies because Netanyahu's war against Gaza is radicalizing, could radicalize every Palestinian in existence, not to mention any Sunni Islam member who's outraged by the fact that that Israel's been allowed to do what it's doing, right? So, Iran knows that. So, all it needs is money and time, and it can rebuild more proxy forces. Woof. Do you know of any connection between China and Iran? There are a number of connections. Um China is getting most of its oil from Iran right now. Um Iran gets a lot of its technology from China. There's pragmatic relationships between the two. Not to mention that Iran understands that it needs to be aligned with some sort of first world or quickly developing country, and the only two options out there are the United States and China. And you can't really become an ally of the United States unless you follow American ideology. But anybody can be an ally with China as long as you're pragmatically collaborative or cooperative with their economy. So interesting, man. The US, the West is going to have to figure out if they're willing to defend their values or not. Correct. And decide what those values are because even Europe, even NATO can't [ __ ] agree right now. Mhm. Not not America to Europe, and most definitely not within Europe itself. Even like bastion European powers like Germany and Spain and Portugal and France can't get on the same [ __ ] page. Yeah. What do you think is pulling them apart? I think it's this question of how much do we adhere to democracy and how much do we adhere to that's interesting. I don't think it's purely that. I think that's a big part of it because How how has this come up? The world really does take its dance steps from the United States, right? So, when the United States has a healthy democracy, Mhm. when it's left-leaning, when it's uh focused on social issues, then the rest of the world focuses on the same kind of thing, right? If you recall, most of the world didn't take action on COVID until the United States took action on COVID. China did its own thing, but the Middle East and Europe really didn't take action until the United States took action. So, the world follows the US lead. When the US when the world started to see that the US was having its own internal conflicts, do we go far right or do we go far left? But, we've we've gotten away from this idea of center government. Boy, have we ever. Right? So, then Europe had to start asking themselves the same question. Do we go far right or do we go far left? Especially since far left leaders in Europe were staunchly opposed to far right leaders in the United States. But, Europe is heavily dependent on the United States, and they're waking up to that fact. Trump has helped Europe to understand, holy [ __ ] we have exported so much of our health and well-being to the United States. They they supply our weapons, they supply our medical technology, they supply our financial institutions, they supply everything. And now, if the United States just shut the door on Europe, Europe would be [ __ ] and they know that. Which is why you saw the previous German Chancellor start talking about, you know, Germany becoming the new center of NATO and decoupling from the United States and investing more in their own internal defense. But, you haven't actually seen good bad for us? I think it'd be good for us. Really? Here's the problem. When we came out of World War II, we had an attitude, which was appropriate at the time, that we had to dominate everything. We had to dominate our enemies and our allies because today's allies can can can turn into tomorrow's enemies, right? That's what happened basically from World War to World War or World War to World War II. Everybody thought Germany was defeated. And then all of a sudden it had a war machine going, right? Yeah. about a war building an engine for an economy. That's exactly what happened in Germany, right? So, the United States oppressed everyone economically, educationally, behaviorally. We made slave labor in Japan. That's why Japan has the work culture it has because coming out of World War II, America basically put every working-age Japanese person to like to work 12 hours a day, 6 days a week relentlessly. And now they have a culture where they're just they work all the time. That's all Americans American influence coming out of World War II. That strategy isn't working so well anymore. That strategy of oppressing your allies has just made our allies weak, which means if we want to if we want to support our allies, it really means we have to do it for them, which is what we're seeing in Ukraine, right? Poland sees that, they understand that. But Germany sees that and they're all thinking, "Holy [ __ ] if Russia actually does become more aggressive against Europe, how long before the United States can't support all of us?" Like there are 10 countries that are NATO countries that that are within striking distance of Russia. Mhm. If Russia attacks one, two, three of them at once, it's all coming from one country to one border. But for the United States and for the rest of NATO, there's different contingents in different countries and different bylaws and different weaponry that are all available and there's different priorities. How do you compare Estonia or Lithuania against, you know, Romania or or uh Poland? Who gets the priorities first? Who's more important? Who's of greater strategic significance? Who can actually handle enough airplanes to defend themselves, right? It's It's a nuts situation. And the old way of business of doing business doesn't work anymore. Not to mention the fact that our adversaries have learned from us. And they are doing something similar and hybrid of their own. That's what you see with China. China is now building commercial ports in Central and South America for commercial purposes. But they're also deep enough and industrial enough to take military grade hardware if it's ever needed. And who controls that port? Not the country where it was built, China, because they have a 100-year lease on the port. Like what they're doing in Panama or what they're doing in Brazil. Right? So now we have to sit there and wonder, is it really commercial use or is it just waiting to be at a flip of a switch, now it can take military ships? Yeah. Give Trump a report card in the first 120, 30 days, whatever it is. I think he's doing more for us than we give him credit for. Yeah. Yeah. I think he's doing more for America than America gives him credit for, and I think a lot of it's because Americans have been systematically made ignorant of what actually matters. What actually matters is not the words that come out of somebody's mouth. What actually matters is not whether or not they have like they like to look at themselves in the mirror or whether or not they change their mind or whether or not they sound foolish. That's not what actually matters in the person who leads a country. What actually matters is is that person willing and able to leverage the capabilities of your country to give you a better probability of success in the future. I think Donald Trump is doing that. He's testing it with tariffs. He's testing it with with his executive orders. He's testing it with new relationships. I mean, the fact that the the fact that the [ __ ] dude is meeting with Saudis and and using that meeting as a chance to show Netanyahu, hey, I'm willing to meet with the largest, strongest Sunnis in the region, of which are very upset with you, by the way, Netanyahu. And I'm after I meet with them, I'm going to take a trip over to meet with some folks in Iran about their nuclear capability that I might green light, even though I know it threatens you. Like, that's [ __ ] that Biden and and Obama would have never done. They'd be like, oh, we we can't do that, right? We We're so afraid of upsetting these the Jewish diaspora in the United States. Trump is like, well, let's see what actually happens. Let's see if this helps America. Well, let's see whether this hurts America, but someone's got to at least try it. Give it a grade. 85%. Solid B. All right. But what's cool about that is sometimes your B can turn into an A, but I've been a student and B's can turn into D's, too. Yeah. Ain't that the truth. Brother, this has been amazing. Where can people follow along with you? If you Anybody wants to find me, they can find me at Everyday Spy on any social media platform. I have my own YouTube channel and podcast. If you follow me at Andrew Bustamante, or if you look up the term Everyday Spy, you'll find your way to me pretty fast. You were killing it on YouTube, so Thanks, man. I hope that uh people find you there. And speaking of finding amazing channels, if you haven't already, be sure to subscribe. And until next time, my friends, be legendary. Take care. Peace. If you like this conversation, check out this episode to learn more. China has done something extraordinary. In just a few decades, they've lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty, mastered global manufacturing, and positioned themselves as a true superpower. But as they rise, the question for the West isn't just how do we compete?