General Robert Spalding, welcome to the show.

Great to be here.

It's honor to have you here. I've been kind of following your ex account for the past couple of years. And I love, I don't. Love may be the wrong word, but you always are posting thought provoking articles and thoughts that I don't think a lot of people think about. And, you know, it really, really, it, the stuff that you're putting out on there challenges anybody that's looking into what's going on. It challenges them to think and maybe not tie themselves so much to a particular party and or candidate. And I just, I really appreciate that because I don't think there are a whole lot of critical thinkers left in the world. At least it doesn't seem that way. It seems like everybody's just wanting to jump on a bandwagon and you see kind of both sides of the aisle here calling each other sheep. And the reality is, if you're not a critical thinker and you cannot call your own party or political candidates bullshit, then you just fall into the sheep category. And I think it's important that no matter how inconvenient the truth may be, it needs to come out. Corruption needs to be exposed, even if it inconveniences who you believe in.

And so I just wanted to say that I really appreciate that.

Thank you.

But I'm going to go ahead and read your introduction here, which is quite the intro. So. CEO of Sempri AI, globally recognized national security expert, United States Air Force brigadier general, retired former b two stealth bomber pilot. Former senior director of strategy at the National Security Council in the White House. Innovation while serving in the White House has led to a reset and national security and public policy regarding telecommunications in the United States as well as globally. Author of Stealth War, how China took over while America's elites slept, and war without rules. China's playbook for global domination. Received the Defense Superior Service Medal, Legion of Merit, Defense Meritorious Service Medal and joint service accommodation medal. Received Air Force Meritorious Service Medal with one oak leaf cluster, Air Force Combination medal with one oak leaf cluster, and Air Force achievement Medal with one oak leaf cluster. Fluent in Chinese Mandarin. Under general SPAL leadership, the 509th Operations Group, the national, the nation's only b two stealth bomber unit. Experienced unprecedented technological and operational advances. Served in senior positions of strategy and diplomacy within the Defense and State Department for more than 26 years. Senior fellow at Hudson Institute five g sixty technology commissioner with the Global Tech Security Commission, and I think that covers it.

Am I missing anything?

There's probably some things in there, but they don't really matter.

Wow. But never actually met a stealth bomber pilot, so.

There'S not very many of us.

Yeah, very cool. Very. I mean, that's not what we're here to talk about today, but I just. That is. That's really cool. I've never even seen a stealth bomber in person. It's.

Cause it's so stealthy.

Yeah, I guess that makes sense. Right. But, so I want to talk to you today a lot about 5g technology, what you're doing with your company. And I want to talk a lot about China and where you think they might have us cornered. Things we need to look out for, things that you just want the general population to be aware of. I'm just very interested in that subject. I've had a number of people on to talk about things we should be looking out for from the CCP. And like I said, been following you for a while now, and I love what you have to say. So I just want to get more in the weeds with, with what you know. But before we do that, I have a Patreon account. It's a subscription account. They are our top supporters. They've been with us here from the beginning, and, and they're the reason I get to sit here and do this and that you get to be here and educate all of us. So I give them an opportunity to ask a couple of questions, couple of good ones here. First one is from Gregory Lawton, and he wants to know, do you think China will attempt to take over Taiwan by force?

And if so, how?

Absolutely. They've been very clear they're going to do that. Xi Jinping has not minced words. You know, we're going to take back Taiwan. How? I think they're going to come by the air. The general notion is that they're going to use an amphibious landing. I think they will use elements of maritime forces, but I think that's going to be a massive air invasion. I think that is because you can go to unrestricted warfare. The document written by two People's Liberation army colonels. And it's a dissection in addition to a lot of other things, but it's a dissection of the Gulf War, the first Gulf War, and they really talk about the use of combined arms, particularly the air force, and how it was used. If you go back to that war, the air power was used to kind of kick down the door and then everybody flowed in. And I think they're going to do the same thing. Obviously, they have been studying us for a long time.

When do you think this is going to happen?

At any time, literally at any time, trying to predict. We just had Admiral Acalino come and testify in Congress. I think it was this week that they're going to be ready by 2027. I don't like to put a date on it because that implies that we can have insight into that. We really can't. It's going to happen on their timeline. And so what we have to look to are they capable? And I would say they're absolutely capable. The weaponry that they've raid on their side of the Taiwan Strait has been building for decades. So, I mean, think about it. They've been preparing for this invasion for decades, stockpiling weapons. And when you kind of war game that you can take those weapons and you can make Taiwan look like the surface of the moon and still have weapons left. So it's just the forces are overwhelming. It's 70 miles off their coast. They don't really care about the people. They just want the ground. So I just think that not calling a spade a spade is a problem. They're ready. They've said they're going to do it. And so now it's just, when are they going to do it?

And it's really, it's on their timeline.

Why is, why are they so interested in Taiwan?

It's, you know, the Chinese Communist Party. You know, within about nine days after they annexed what was called East Turkestan, they called Xinjiang. It's where the Uighurs live. They claim it was part of, traditionally part of chinese territory. It's part of the Chinese Communist Party's lore. Right? The restoration of the great chinese empire. And so they have built into this lore that Taiwan was always a part of China, and that's not true. And so it is something that they have basically concocted based on part of their platform. And they're a political party. And so that's what they have programmed the population to believe. I think when you look at it from strategically in the region, it does complicate our ability to defend Japan, defend Korea, defend the Philippines, because it, it basically, it cuts the first island chain in two when they occupy, that allows them to offset forces even farther from their shore. So I think it's strategic, Terry. But really, it's part of the lore that they've kind of created about themselves and about restoration of chinese hegemony.

Is that, why is that the reason that we as Americans should be so concerned is because if they take Taiwan, we won't be able to strategically defend Japan, Philippines, Thailand, the countries that you had just mentioned. Or would it be more towards the chip manufacturing that goes on there?

Well, I mean, some of the candidates have said chip manufacturing is the only thing that matters. Right. I think you got to go back to the end of World War two and the beginning of the cold War. What interest did we have in protecting western Europe? And I think the interest was in understanding that if we become the only society in the world that believes in liberty, then it makes it a lot harder for us to survive in that world. And so part of the cold war was really just saying, we're going to stand for a set of principles and values, and we're going to because we think that makes us safer in the end. And so you can take the approach that it's just the chips. There happens to be a lot of american citizens that are living in Taiwan. I think that part of what's going on there is, do we want to create a world that's beginning to slowly move towards China's direction, which is really authoritarianism and the right to basically subjugate a country of 23 million people? And there's a lot of complication in there. And originally, I was, we probably shouldn't fight over Taiwan.

But the more I thought about it and the more I really just. I believe very strongly that we cannot defend our republic and the ideals of the republic if we're willing to basically just look away from that kind of activity. The problem is, though, we can't fight, because if we fight, then it raises a specter of nuclear war. And there's no way of knowing, when you fight over Taiwan, where that goes, where that escalates to, do you protect Taipei and then lose Los Angeles? Is that something that we are willing to do? And I don't think that answer any American would say, yes, I'm willing to lose Los Angeles for Taipei.

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And so you kind of get into this situation where if you are not, if you're not proactively transmitting what you're liable to do, then it's liable to happen. And then at that point, you've kind of lost the advantage or lost the escalation advantage. What we did during the Cold War is we said if you come, if you invade Soviet Union, then it's going to be all out nuclear war and we're going to destroy you. And that kept the peace we haven't said that with regard to Taiwan, and there's no policy. I don't think anybody in Washington, DC, thinks that this should be the policy. And so therefore, the Chinese think that they have complete carte blanche to roll in there. And we've also done a very good job during the Cold War and after the cold war of preventing countries from getting nuclear weapons, particularly countries friendly to the United States. Obviously, countries hostile to the United States have been doing it, like North Korea, but countries friendly in the United States, like Ukraine, like Taiwan, we persuaded not to get nuclear weapons. And I think that's dangerous. And so we've kept them unarmed. We haven't extended our nuclear.

And brother, in other words, we haven't said the same thing to the Chinese that we said to the Soviet Union. And so therefore, we're inviting more. War will come, and it'll come at the time of China's choosing. And so I think what we're left with is, do we want to evacuate the island? Do we want to put Americans in harm's way for a Nio? To me, that the Berlin airlift becomes kind of the thing that I think about when I think about Taiwan, at least at this point, if we're not going to. If we're not going to have some kind of declaratory policy that says, just like we did for Western Europe, that we are going to, you know, unleash the full retaliatory capability of the United States onto China, then I think then war will come.

I wasn't planning on going down this road, but how advanced are China's weapons? And when we hear about. Let's start. Let's scratch that. Let's go. Nuclear war. We hear about it all the time with Putin and what's going on in Ukraine, and he's threatened it. There is so much more technology out there. Now. Do we. I mean, are they even close to the technology that we have? And. And, or is nuclear war still as much of a threat as it was? From what I understand, we have new technologies that don't like these laser technologies, these directed energy weapons. From what I understand, we're very close to having a dome over the United States that will interdict anything that's coming in. I mean, are you aware of any of this type of technology that we have, this new kind of new modern age weapons?

Okay, let's put it this way.

Okay?

It's you against a thousand bad guys. Thousand bad guys have all the ammunition in the world, don't have any training, and you've got 990 bullets and you're the best trained guy in the world. Somebody's going to get through that. So it's all about mass in the end. And that's what we're talking about here with China. The technology doesn't matter if we're Winchester and they've still got weapons, and that's what we're talking about. Like, we can have the best technology in the world, we can have a thousand to one kill ratio, but it's that thousand and one that's going to kill us. And that's the problem we face. It's just a pure numbers game, right? Nobody would say, I'm going to send an OdA team against a battalion, right? That would be crazy. And that's what we're talking here. It's just the numbers are overwhelming. Ships, planes, bombs, rockets, missiles. Just.

It is staggering of everything than we have.

Oh, my gosh, so much more. And you think about what we've been doing recently. We spent most, most our munitions to the Middle east and Ukraine. So, I mean, yes, they have so many more things. And so it doesn't matter how good you are if somebody has just overwhelming amounts of people and weapons and that's what the Chinese have and they're willing to spend them.

Makes a lot of sense. Moving on. I wanted to get into, I mean, China has. They seem a lot more strategic than we are. And some of the ways that I found that they seem to be taking the US, I want to just dive into some of those. Let's start with the cartels and the fentanyl crisis. They definitely seem to be behind the fentanyl crisis. They're sending in the chemicals, they're sending in chemists to train the cartels how to make the world's most deadliest fentanyl. They're moving on to the next drug. Fentanyl took, heroin. Now they're developing this drug, I believe it's called nidocin, and that's already started pumping through the border. How legitimate is that? Is it as strategic as I make it out to be? Or is that just cartels reaching out to China for the chemicals?

I mean, you have to take a step back and say, what did the chinese study? You know, who won the cold War? We did. How do we win the Cold War? It's really about unleashing the power of our society. And so what the communist party wanted to do was figure out how they harness that right, how to harness individual ambition for their own interests. And so if you can do that, if you can harness individual ambition to a certain set of interests, then you can unleash the creative capabilities of people, but still get the kind of outcome you want. So we don't have a fentanyl problem in China, do we? Because they know the people that are making money at selling these things are precursors and helping both the cartels and the triads out of Hong Kong. They can make all the money they want. They just can't allow any of it to seep into China or they'll end up dead. You know, the commas party will kill them. And so they know that. So the triads, the cartels and the Chinese, these people that are involved in it make money. And they have factories in China, and they create factories, you know, in Latin America and elsewhere, and move the drugs, and they move it, not just the United States, all over the world.

And it's a. It's a profit making. In Denver now, is the Chinese, is Xi Jinping personally sitting back and managing this? No. They recognize that if you can narrowly enable your people to get rich, but get rich in ways that support your interests, then you've unleashed the american model in a way. That's what they do. So there's all kinds of things that you can get rich at in China that are absolutely abhorrent and illegal here.

Wow. Wow. What about all the farmland within the US being bought by China or chinese companies? Is that.

Well, I think, again, there are multiple likely reasons for that. One is just if you have a lot of money in China and you want to have an escape route, transferring that money into some kind of real asset is very important. You don't want to keep it all liquid because that can be seized. So getting some kind of real property somewhere outside of China can be a way that you provide for resources if you have to escape. So a lot of the communist party do that, right? Because you can be in good favor at one time. And then very quickly, like we saw with Jack Ma, the founder of Alibaba, you can be out of favor, and then you have nothing. And so a lot of it, I believe, is getting assets outside of the country for themselves and their family members. Another is in the Communist Party. The way that they look at the, what's called the Hua chow or the. The expatriates that are outside the country, they look at them as a resource, just like a citizen lives within China. And so there may also be an interest, for instance, to build facilities within that are in strategic locations.

There might be an interest to be a part of the food supply to provide security. So there's a lot of things where your individual interests can align with the Chinese Communist Party interests. And that's why property can be purchased. It could also be for influence. And as I was telling you, we had Faraday Futures, which was an EV company that was building a factory outside in Ellis Air force Base. This was when I was still in uniform, where the mayor of Las Vegas comes to the wing commander at Nellis and says, hey, please don't say anything about this factory because I want to have jobs for Las Vegas citizens. So it can be a way to also influence local politicians, state politicians, federal politicians, about things that you want them to do. I'm going to go build something in your district so that I scratch your back, you scratch mine. Now, the asks are not going to be deliberate, like, obvious, support us. If we invade Taiwan, it's going to be more along the lines, these are our interests. And you scratch my back, I'll scratch yours. In the case of the sphere, day futures, okay?

Now, the Chinese Communist Party has built this advanced manufacturing facility right after one of our most strategic air bases in the United States, where you can start doing all kinds of intelligence collection and whatever. It can be a base for that. And so there's likely, there's no, like, one reason. I think people want one reason. There's no one reason. There's a multitude of reasons that come through the relationships that are created by investing in real assets or in companies here in the United States. And you may not even understand what all those opportunities and benefits may be. All you know is you've just created a tie. You've created a relationship that can be exploited at some time in the future. I mean, this is a well known intelligence technique, right? Gain an asset, cultivate that asset. You may not know where that's gonna go. You may be like somebody that maybe has an opportunity to rise to some level of prominence within a society, but you've got them. You've got a relationship, and over time, you figure out how you're gonna exploit that. And that's what they're so good at.

I mean, this is. Could you talk a little bit about how they would extract intelligence from a factory next to one of our most strategic air bases, right?

You're collecting signals intelligence. You've got people working there. So they're downtown in the casinos and the bars collecting humid. So you just think about all you've got. The people, you've got the technology, you've got the. You've got the geography to basically set up a set up, a perfect place to. I mean, a consulate in the United States or an embassy in the United States is the same type of thing. It is a resource to gather intelligence. That's why we shut down the consulate in Houston. So all the forms of intelligence, all the Int's, that's a base for that, for that capability.

I mean, when you talk about human and signal intelligence, I just. What kind of. I'm trying to make this more real. I understand it, but I can't explain it as well as you can. I don't think. What kind of intelligence could they be extracting from that air base? I want to make it more real for the everyday listener.

Um, you know, um, so first of all, it's off the departure end, so you get a real close look at the airplane and the underside of the airplane as they go over. And then with SIGInt, you're going to be able to collect information on transmission. Now, where you might be saying, hey, I'm not going to turn on something here on the base because I don't want to run it through tests because this is going on. So it basically begins to force you as the operator to change how you do things in order to prevent revealing certain things. Now, we already do a lot of these things already for overhead intelligence collection, but having somebody right next door is a whole, whole other effort. Like, for instance, when we would take the b two over to air shows. All of a sudden you've got an aircraft, like a helicopter, hovering right over in front of the v two. Now, what are they doing with that aircraft? Are you using radar to basically understand the characteristics of the airplane and how. How it uses that? It's hard to tell, but once you're within the fence line, there's all kinds of stuff that you can do that gives away secrets that we don't want to give away.

And then with the human intelligence piece, basically what they could do is create an asset, whether that's sex, exploitation, financial reasons. And then you have basically a plan.

Well, I mean, guys go out to the bar and they start talking about what they're doing on base. Yeah, right. And you basically just invited a whole host of people in that you don't know. You know, we were like, oh, well, they're just. They're just. They're just workers. Well, workers in China are assets of the chinese state by law. Right? So you're inviting people that are part of the intelligence apparatus because by virtue of the fact they're chinese. And what the chinese communist party will say, well, then you're being racist. No, you have to recognize that this is the way that they orient their society and the way that they use their citizens. They co opt their citizens, like you and me. Citizens, United States no longer serving the government. Well, in China, we are. Everybody is. And if you don't, then you find yourself, you know, in a bad space with the government. So you just have to understand that this is the way that their society is arranged, and this is the expectation.

You know, I think that this particular conversation is very relevant after the article that I saw you post on, on your ex account, where Trump was talking about being friends with Xi Jinping and allowing him to open car manufacturing plants within the United States. And the argument seemed to be, oh, well, this is going to bring american jobs in. But from what I understand, what the article said, according to the article, is that China has more industrial robots than anyone else in the world, which means there would be little to possibly no jobs for american workers. Is the robots take over basically the blue collar jobs on top of that. That also affects the chip war going on in Taiwan. But now we have the espionage piece as well. And so if you could go into kind of your thoughts on that.

Yeah, you can look at the Belt and Road initiative. Anytime that China builds a railroad, a bridge, a dam, any type of infrastructure, a factory, usually they bring in chinese workers to do that work, almost always. So, yeah, there may be some Americans getting jobs, but you're bringing in chinese, too. You are creating opportunities for them to collect espionage. More importantly, I think they are committed to providing for the chinese people, opportunities for the chinese people, even when they're outside of their borders. And so anything that they're doing, they're doing on the basis of, for the chinese people. So if you say, hey, I'm going to bring in a chinese facility into my country, then you have to be of the mindset that the chinese communist party wants it to benefit them. And so anything that you think you might gain out of it is going to end up being not what you think. It's not going to provide as many jobs as you think. It's not going to provide the benefits you think, but it will provide a benefit to them because they see these things in zero sum terms. Right. I will not do something that benefits you.

That doesn't also benefit me more. And that's the way you have to look at it. And I think it takes people, it's hard to recognize that you could orient a society this way until you take a step back and you understand that from the time you start kindergarten to the time you graduate university, you're taught a certain way of thinking. All your media, you know, all your social media, every single thing is wrapped around love and to love and cherish the party. And so you, while you have opportunities to advance your own interests within that framework, it's within a framework where everything that you do is for the party. And you know that. And so, I mean, that's what you're bringing in. When you bring in chinese factories with chinese people, they are there to harvest the benefits of America for China. Period. End of story. And themselves. And themselves. You have to add that in there because that's how they're able to be so creative in the way they do it. Because at the end of the day, the party doesn't tell them how to do it. They just tell them it's okay to do it.

And I'll give you some resources to do it, but you guys have to figure out how to. How to do it. If you make profit on it, great. Great for you, great for me. This is Huawei. Right? We have. Our model is different, right? We have the national security Agency. National Security Agency. Your tax dollar goes to the government. The government creates an NSA. NSA goes out and tries to figure out how to listen to things, right? In China, it's like, okay, well, we just. We'll build the infrastructure so that we. It's built into, you know, this business model. So instead of it just being a tax on the american people, it's actually also a profit center, right? If I. If I'm deploying all the infrastructure now, I'm not just spending money on a federal agency like the United States is. I'm actually making money while fulfilling the same mission. That's. That's the beauty of the model, right? I can make money in carrying out what I'm trying to do in terms of my political interests rather than just having to spend money to do it.

It's pretty.

It's brilliant.

It is. It is. How else are they doing this?

You name it. And I think unrestricted warfare does a good job of explaining it. Every single thing that we find to be common, everyday things can be turned into weapons that support their interests. I mean, we just talked about fentanyl. We've talked about infrastructure, electronics, you name it. It's all done in the service of two things. One, individual interest. But that has to be aligned with national interest. And if you create the incentive system, like, for instance, if you're giving a tax break for doing X versus Y, you're going to do X. And so, or if you're. If you're given more loans to do X versus Y, you're going to do X. And so I can. I can basically create incentives for you to get rich, but do it in ways that I can use the levers of the state to direct you in the ways that I want you to get rich like I want. I don't care how you get rich until I have. I see an interest in it, and then I'm. Then I'm going to basically, I'm going to align. So I just mentioned Jack Ma. Alibaba go out and build.

Alibaba get rich. Okay. I see now that some of this is actually creating a problem. In the case of Jack Ma, it's like you're kind of drawing attention away from the party, right? You're this very successful tech entrepreneur that has a somewhat kind of Silicon Valley ish feel, okay, we need to pull attention back to the party. Could Jack Ma, you're out of favor, and we're going to take over your company. This is the way that the party works. It's very capitalistic in a lot of sense, but it's capitalism tied to a single party state. And when you do it that way, it's just a completely separate way of doing business, of thinking about the world.

When it comes to the tech piece, which I think is probably where most of your knowledge lies, if I'm not mistaken. I would like to dive into TikTok. TikTok's hot in the media right now. It's been talked about for several years, how it's a ginormous spy apparatus, and a lot of people believe it is dubbing down the intelligence level of the US citizens. Can you elaborate on why that was invented, what they're doing with it, and why you're for the ban?

So I think, first of all, the bill that's going before the Senate's not technically a ban. It is a you must divest byteDance, which is the company that owns TikTok and owns the algorithms that are behind how TikTok does its thing. You have to divest of TikTok if you want it to stay, and if you don't, then it's banned. So I think the idea that it's just a ban, that's all anybody talks about, is obviously perpetuated by TikTok. I think you do know that the congressional lines were flooded as this was coming to vote. In fact, they took the phones off, off the air because they were overwhelmed by TikTok users calling Congress to say, don't vote for this bill. And that was all orchestrated by TikTok itself. And so what the Chinese Communist Party recognized in what Silicon Valley was building was this enormous influence machine. Right? You can influence people's perceptions, their behavior patterns. Silicon Valley has been doing this a long time. It's how you create a trillion dollar company like Amazon or Google. It's really about using the information you gather about people to then curate the content that brings them in line with what you want them to do.

What do you want them to do? You want them to be better consumers on your platform so you make more money. This is the business model of Silicon Valley. Well, the Chinese recognize, okay, I can make you not just a better consumer, I can make you a better person, a better citizen. And how is that? And they say this. They said, you know, bytedance, it's your job to make citizens to create content for citizens that make them better socialists, right? So ByteDance creates algorithms that power the TikTok platform. Okay, so how might the Chinese Communist Party take advantage of this? Now, 30% or more of young people get their news from TikTok. That's the platform they get their news from. So I'm less concerned about the intelligence collection. That's obviously a problem. But that's not where this is going. It's about creating a movement. It's about creating a community. A community, number one, that loves TikTok. But then, because it loves TikTok and it's on the platform, you know, often hours per day, then there's also things that you can begin to love, or at least not hate. And so it's a. It's a. It's an influence tool.

It's an influence tool. You, you know, you can, like, you sense this in your bones. Like, if you put one of these things in the hands of somebody, there is ways to slowly get them to do things. So he's just like, well, where's the evidence? Right? So another youtuber, Lau Y 86, puts the evidence right on those things. Like, here is message after message after message promoting some policy that the Chinese Communist Party wants different venues, different people, right? Because you have to take the message and you have to break it up into. Into the content that people want. What type of people do they want to see saying this message? What type of venue do they want them in? What type of, you know, what type of, you know, how do we frame that shot so that we get this segment of people, and then you do it a bunch over a bunch of segments. He's shown verbatim messages that are in TikTok, like somebody's reading the message, but it's different people, different places, different times. And so it really becomes a platform for you to do all kinds of things. And this is a thing that we never had prior to the Internet.

So I think it's well established that the Soviet Union had active measures programs, right, that they were trying to subvert the United States, people in the United States. But we didn't really give them purchase. Now, we've given the Chinese Communist Party not just purchase. They are basically plugged in to, what, 180 million people in the United States of a population of 330 million directly plugged into them. And do they love the constitution? Hell, no. That is their biggest fear, is that their people become aware, somehow sentient of the US constitution. And so in the same way that we made the world safe for democracy during the Cold War, they're making the world safe for the Chinese Communist Party by slowly eroding our value system, our belief system, in terms of what's right, what's proper, what's expected by a citizen of a country. And so that's the biggest thing. Now, you mentioned another. That is. That is, I think, equally a problem. And that is, you know, what happens to a person that stays on this platform from hours of a day? Well, they stop doing other things. Right. So just, if you look at productivity, you know, national productivity as a positive thing for your society, if I can get you to do this for hours and hours of a day, then I can, at the macro level, again, 170 million people out of 330 million, they're watching these things for hours of a day.

Your national productivity goes down. Okay? We say, well, where's the evidence of that? Well, they have the chinese language equivalent of TikTok called Douyin. Douyin. The kids get 40 minutes a day max. By law, no more shuts off.

That's the chinese version of.

Chinese version. Chinese version. By the way, TikTok itself is not allowed in China, so no, TikTok. You can't have Douyin, basically chinese language version of TikTok, but you can do it for 40 minutes a day. And when you interview those kids and you say, hey, what do you want to be when you grow up? The number one thing is, I want to be an astronaut. When you interview Americans on TikTok, the number one thing they want to be is an influencer. Right? So you're influencing people, their behavior patterns, you're reducing national productivity, and you're also taking an entire generation of people and saying this is the number one thing to be right, not an engineer, not a doctor. So it's a very powerful tool, and it's just basically taking the tools that Silicon Valley created and just tweaking them a little bit for not just economic benefit, but social and political benefit. It's really very basic. And I think anybody that's in Silicon Valley and understands why you want to get somebody like Facebook to 100, 200 million users and the power of that as a platform, or Google and the power of that as a platform, or Amazon and the power of that as a platform can understand a regime that's dedicated to the downfall of our constitutional republic using those same techniques and tactics and procedures to slowly get the american people to stop believing in what is unique about America.

Do you think this differs? I mean, is this more dangerous than what we're seeing on other social platforms like Instagram x, Facebook, Snapchat, YouTube? Is it? I mean, because the messaging that's coming from Silicon Valley, as we kind of discussed at breakfast, I mean, it's maybe just as toxic.

Well, so I've been thinking about this for a long time, and so you kind of take the framework. If you've read the federalist papers, by and large, the federalist papers argue for a republic because of national security, what we would call national security, basically. Alexander Hammerson, in quite a few of them argues that we need to come together as a federal republic because if we're separate, then we're going to be picked off one by one as states, as colonies, if you will. And so national security was heavily kind of the most, I think, important thing. There was other things, but primarily, how do we protect ourselves from England or any of these other monarchies that may want to take away our freedoms? We have to band together in order to do that. And so what are the things that we need to worry about? Well, in the constitution says we need an army, we need a navy, right? So we had powerful armies and we had powerful navies. There was no, like, we need a cybersecurity organization or, you know, we need a cyber command because there's no Internet, right. So at least as they could conceive of a threat to our individual political independence and sovereignty, it could only come by force of arms, right?

Somebody could come and occupy us and then take that away by force of arms. And that's why we have things like the second Amendment. But imagine if you could say, hey, I can slowly erode your political independence and sovereignty by beginning to change your mind through this medium called the Internet, how might we have conceived of the republic differently and instantiated it, not just in laws, but also in technology? And that's the thing that I think is a real problem. When Trump went to China, I can't remember who told him, but they basically said, hey, we're going to be number one in AI. We've got all our data, and we've got your data. You really can't compete with that because you can't really collect data as a government and drive all the resources of the state to become the most powerful country in artificial intelligence. So we're going to dominate the world that's coming and get in line, or don't. And we'll either keep you in, plugged in, or we'll cut you off. Those are powerful, powerful ideas, right? What the former head of Google China wrote the book AI superpower. What he says is, we want to become the Saudi Arabia of data.

What does that mean? Well, that's oil for AI engines. We want to be dominant in artificial intelligence. And by doing that, we can use all these tools, tools like Bytedance's algorithms, to begin to manipulate the world in ways that we want. And I think recognizing that, and recognizing that, certainly since 2007, when the iPhone came out, and then shortly thereafter, about a couple years later, when 4G network started, I found on a 3G network was trash. It was fun for a little bit, but then you really didn't get a good user experience. But when they had a 4g network and you really had broadband, a broadband cellular link, that you could connect that device, now I've got something that I can get you hooked on. I can create applications. I can get you. So now everybody just kind of stares at these things when that happened. This ability to bypass these two big oceans that protect us and these two friendly borders and go directly to the heart of american civilization, that's what we created. And all you have to do is look at, hey, here's how these big tech companies manipulate the narrative, manipulate your behavior to make money from you, right?

They're the 25% s and P 500, the most economically powerful companies ever, and most influential companies ever. And so the chinese communist party just takes that in, learns about it, and then begins to iterate on it, right? They've taken your technology, and then they've advanced it for their own interests in ways that.

What are you most worried about when it comes to the, to TikTok in China?

Well, I mean, just the ability to take the, take our population, to manipulate it, to manipulate it and manipulate it in ways that, number one, reduce national productivity, and, number two, get them to not appreciate the principles and values that are in our society. Right. Why is the constitution. Why the separation and powers? And so, getting back to that, what does it mean? It means the separation of powers really no longer exists. It's kind of a function of the 20th century, because now we've gone in the 20th century where the narrative has become so hard to get past. I'm not saying China created the narrative. You mentioned it yourself. These tech companies have a certain political ideology. Elon just said, hey, 99% of Twitter was basically donated to a single party. And as we've seen, that is starting to. That has basically crept into the tech companies. Well, and the Chinese Communist Party, to the fact that it actually benefits, is more than happy to use that as a tool to get its interests met. So, in a lot of ways, the way that they manipulate us is through these corporate and financial relationships, and that's tied right into the tech company relationships.

And so the fact that Apple wants to sell phones in China is a great piece of leverage for the Chinese Communist Party. Right. You want to be in China? Okay, well, this is what we want you to do. And so, you know, it is a way for. And I don't think. I'm not calling what's happened in this country kind of a movement towards what. Have you read cynical theories?

I have not.

It's a really good book. It kind of talks about the history of postmodern. Postmodernism and how theories like critical race theory and Dei have become, started out as more or less an ineffective critique of the western order, post enlightenment western order, kind of on the same line as Marxism, but became more than just a critique in universities and kind of like a sideshow to transition to more of an activist tone and kind of walks you through that starts in France and then kind of builds and builds and builds to where. And so when I was getting my PhD in university, I was starting to hear some of these things, but I really didn't understand kind of where it was going. And now it's fully matriculated throughout our university system, and then it's made because our students are coming out and they're coming into white collar jobs, a lot of them Silicon Valley software developers. Now, you've started to kind of build this throughout the framework of our society. And so if you look at China just as an influence engine, how the system works, the party gives narratives centrally, and that gets demonstrated, it gets sent down to the local level.

So you have then a pretty comprehensive, clear cut narrative that is the same across the country. And that's why, when you talk to a chinese person, they have certain responses to things like, what do you think about Taiwan? It's chinese territory, because that is part of that whole process. Well, if you take a step back and you say, okay, what's going on here in the United States? Effectively, we've created the same system. It's not a single party, authoritarian system. It's more of a. It's more of an ideology that escaped the university system, became embedded in the white collar class, and then became a patina over the entire architecture. And then as the Internet begins to grow, local media begins to lose value, be sold off, consolidated. So now you have basically five major legacy. We call them media companies. It's better to think of them more as propaganda companies that have a similar kind of narrative that spreads to the technology companies. Now you have a reinforcing kind of phenomenon where I just mentioned 99% of Twitter employees were donating to a single political party. If you look within the Beltway of Washington, DC, 94, 95% of people vote for a single political party.

You have the tech companies, you have the government agencies, you have the financial institutions, the very big ones that own probably 10% or more of the major media companies. So you're starting to see the system that is not the same in terms of who it benefits, a single political party, but more of a class of people it benefits. We've created more of a class based, centrally controlled narrative system that's very, very much like how the Chinese control their population. And also because these corporations have financial relationships with China, it's plugged into it, right? And so now you take a step back, and, like, if you're. You take a God's eye view of the planet and you see, okay, you know, you're creating narratives that are essentially acceptable in China and the United States. One's a democratic republic. The other is clearly an authoritarian system. How is that possible? Well, it's possible because they're connected, and they're connected, and they're essentially the mechanism by which you translate that narrative are the same. It's just who they're benefitting. In the case of China, chinese communist party. In the case of this, I would call it maybe the white collar class of the United States, and to the detriment of who in China, it's anybody that's not in the chinese communist party.

To America, it's anybody that's not in that white collar class, right. Or somebody within the white collar class that basically dissents to the narrative. And who is that here? That's the working class.

I mean, one of the arguments for the, the bill, about the TikTok bill is a lot of people are saying it's the patriarch 2.0. What do you have to say about that?

Okay, so first of all, I think the Patriot act was the worst thing that we've ever done as a country. Absolute worst thing. It goes back to that point about open data. You know, what Trump was told when he went to China? I think open data was the biggest destroyer of individual freedoms ever created. Right. And we created, you know, here. And I don't think that we recognized what we were doing, right. It was, we were basically getting rid of those two big oceans and two friendly borders as a way to protect ourselves in addition to our military and allowing this thing to be built right in plain sight right over us. And so, you know, I think that that right there is the, you know, that's the problem. The Patriot act. The Patriot act is what brought the US government into this, into this white collar, class based narrative control, right? Gave it, gave it purchase. You know, the fact that, you know, Obama repealed this, you know, anti propaganda law that we had on the books, that you weren't supposed to create propaganda. Well, you know, ostensibly, we're going to do it to kind of change the narrative for the terrorist threat.

But in reality, it's been used in other ways, I think, and I think everybody would agree with that. I mean, there's court cases in front of the Supreme Court talking about, you know, the government now kind of being in league with the tech companies. And this is a problem. It's a problem for a democracy because you have to have in a separation of powers, people talk about the fourth estate, the fourth estate being the press, right? So you have a judiciary, legislative and executive branch that don't really have dominance over each other. But then you also have a free press that's supposed to basically be the ones calling out the government for the things that are going wrong. And how many things have we found out that were being hidden from us over the years because of things like the New York Times? But if you can corporatize that and consolidate it, and you can tie it to a certain set of ideologies now, instead of the New York Times throwing potshots at the federal government because they dont trust them, like, what are they hiding? Theres something going on. Theyre like, if the government says something, they just repeat it, and that's where we've come to.

And I think that's the challenge. So the people that are saying that the TikTok divestment bill by dance divest of TikTok or TikTok would be banned, the people that are against that, I believe, are the ones that are promoting this ability to continue to have TikTok operating in the way that it wants to here in the United States. Now, who are those? Well, there's Jeff Yass, good guy that invested in TikTok, wants to keep his billions. He's obviously one of them that wants to keep tick tock around. And the Chinese Communist Party is not going to divest of what is a very good propaganda tool for the United front workgroup. So I think if this does pass the Senate, you're going to see it banned. And obviously, he doesn't want it banned. There's others that don't want it banned. So there's financial motive for them to say, hey, it's either, it's either government overreach or the government wants to use TikTok to spy on you. You know, I don't read that in any parts of the bill. That being said, patriotic, very bad, needs to go away, period.

Needs.

It just needs to go away. And I think I'll go one further. I think encryption, right, when we say, you know, free speech is a fundamental human right or the right to keep and bear arms right. The right to protect yourself, the right to private property, I think the right to encryption of your data should be characterized as a fundamental human right. And that's because the power of these tools to manipulate you without your consent is based on the ability for them to take data about you and data that you own and then turn around and characterize who you are as an individual, how you think, how you respond to stimulus and then begin to feed those things back to you, to manipulate you. And that's, that's why I think, you know, we have to be able, and we thought of encryption as the, you know, only the venue of the NSA or, you know, the federal government, they, they should have, you know, the ability to crypt things, but you as a, as a person shouldn't. I disagree with that. In fact, I think our constitutional republic is probably the best type of society that could accept a citizenry not just armed with weapons, but armed with the power of their own data to protect from outside influence, whether it be the government, whether it be a corporation, or whether it be a foreign power.

There's also an argument that talks about a lot of people are saying that this would basically infiltrate into supposed free speech platforms such as rumble and x. How would this bill affect those platforms?

It's very clear in the bill that it's tied to Bytedance, TikTok. Right. I don't see anything where it's going to go after any. It's really, really focused on ByteDance as a tool of the Chinese Communist Party, which it is. And we can get. The party has already said it. It's. Their words are there. And so, you know, it's. I don't know how else to do it other than to read the bill yourself and tell me how you get. And what would it be? It would be that Rumble was owned by the Chinese Communist Party, and then whoever owned that share of it would have to divest of it because they're a foreign power. Okay. I think that's great. So if you're the CEO of Rumble and you're telling me that you want to have the ability to sell over half your company to the Chinese because you want to make a bunch of money and you don't really carry what happens with it, and so therefore you're going to be against this bill. And I'm not saying that they are, but I'm just saying these are the types of arguments that you could make is I should be able to sell my company to the chinese communist party who would give me a lot of money if they get kicked out of TikTok and they need some other platform and they may do it in pieces, so it's not detectable.

But that's a problem. If you can find, if you can discover that, hey, ultimately the chinese communist party is behind, you know, what's going on on TikTok or, I mean, on, say, x or Facebook, then yes, those people need to divest of their shares. And that's what the bill says. If it's a. For, if it's, if it's related to a foreign power. So I don't, I don't know how you get that. The government, the US government is going to use that other than, you know, even if they got the Chinese to buy it for them, they would be in violation of the law. So.

Well, I think that people are getting that because that's what they're being told.

Well, of course, that's part of, that's part of the CEO of TikTok, you know, that's part of his plan and it's part of all the proxies plan is let's, let's make. Let's let's confuse the issue. Let's make it sound like this is government overreach because Americans hate government overreach, and everybody will lap it up. Look, I understand people like TikTok. You can like something and have it still be bad for your republic. And I think that gets into another matter, which is, do we really understand what our republic stands for anymore? Is that kind of just wilted away?

I feel like it's wilted away. On that note, let's take a quick break, and when we come back, we'll get into some five g, six g stuff. Here's the situation. You've got China, Russia, Ukraine, the border. The banks seem to be collapsing. Plus, the Chinese just negotiated with Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Brazil to drop the US dollar. And most Americans, including myself, feel that we're in a recession right now. But despite all the evidence, I can't tell you what's going to happen for sure.

Nobody can.

Yet.

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Can you go into a little more detail on what they're collecting and how this is affecting us?

Well, I think the best way to approach that is, how does somebody collect data about you? And the answer is, the software development kits for the applications that run on the devices have data about your device that they collect. Those developers collect. It's sold on the open market. Anybody can buy it. You can buy it. I can buy it. And then you can take that data, and you can look at it, and you can stare at it. You can get an intel analyst, or you can put do a massive learning model like chat, GPT, go over that data and begin to look at information. What does that look like? Well, it looks like when you look at data on a military base, for example, you can see when devices are at a certain location, what device is at a certain location. So you can start to see things like shift changes, and you can start to see generations. And so you start to get a good picture of the ops tempo and the daily behaviors going on at that base. But also you can watch that, and you can see, hey, this device was in this location, and this can be the Pentagon.

This can be a military base like Whiteman Air Force base, where I spent a lot of my career. It could be the White House. And then you can watch that device and watch what it does, and then that device will go home off into the same place every night. So now you can say, okay, well, who owns that home? Now you can start to tie a person to the device. Now you have the person. You have the device, and now you can begin to watch that. Where does that person go? It's a way to build a picture about what they do. And that's just for somebody that's not within a platform like TikTok. So that's just the data, the metadata that's collecting around that device. You can buy it. Anybody can buy it. And so that's information. But then if you're actually in the platform itself now, you can not only collect that information, you know exactly who it is. Not only that, you know the things that they begin, that they respond to. Right? So you can. You can get a good picture of the personality type of the person and the behavior patterns and the things that they like, and that can lead into where you bump and say, hey, I just happened to randomly bump into this person and, hey, how's it going, by the way?

You know what they like, you know, all the things they care about. You can strike up a conversation. This can be. End up developing into a friendship, and then that's how you become, you know, an asset. So it is. It is literally the best tool. So, I mean, when the Chinese Communist Party did this, it was actually, in my opinion, the most brilliant use of technology. Like, we talk about nuclear weapons being dangerous. Yeah, they're dangerous. They're destructive. But there is literally no weapon that's ever been created that's as dangerous in the context of what war is, which is a political act. Then you know, what Silicon Valley created, it is literally the most dangerous weapon known to mankind because it's subtle, and most people aren't. They're not. They don't understand the technology. They don't understand how it's used or how it can be used. Not just people don't understand it. Our own government doesn't understand it. Right? They're not. They're not. Our intelligence community doesn't have. Doesn't own Google, doesn't own Facebook. It doesn't own Twitter. I mean, it's tried to like, and we've seen that, particularly with the Twitter files that, hey, this is going on.

But it doesn't own those platforms. China owns those platforms. Right? So they become part of the fabric of western society, and then they become assets for the Chinese Communist Party, whether it's, you know, TikTok and then Bytedance owns TikTok. And Bytedance is a chinese company, or it's Facebook and you're able to get in and get, you know, exploit their information. So whether they're in, and I would, you know, that's, that's where if I was going to build the most effective war machine today, it would be the war machine that, you know, basically Silicon Valley built. And it's not, they don't consider it a war machine. But if war is a political act and, and you can, you can achieve political influence through this tool, then by nature can't that be viewed as a weapon of war? I mean, the way we used it in Kosovo, the b two was we used stealth bomber, 2000 pound jaw bombs to take out factories owned by other assets owned by the elite in Kosovo to get them to give up Milosevic. And within two weeks of us starting to do that, they did. And this is so literally in the Pentagon.

I'm sitting there in 2014 and I get this briefing and I start to look at this, I'm like, wait a second. This is going on in our society, this influence of our corporate sector and it's the same thing that we did in coastal, but I was doing it with 2000 pound bombs. They're just doing it. It's the way they do business. And you start to go around the government and as we did, like who knows about this? Who understands? Nobody because the businesses aren't going to talk to government. They're afraid to tell government what's going on. Then it gets announced to the public and affects their evaluation. You know, in some way torpedoes their business. So they don't want to share that information with the government. They want to cover it up, keep it quiet. This is going on across the United States. I mean, it's going on across every western society. This slow erosion of our industrial base, our capacity. So I mean, it's just, it is really, really effective to wage war in this way and you don't have to create a whole lot of risk around it.

Let's move into the, as green as it gets when it comes to the technology, I hear oftentimes that we should be concerned about it. What is it? I don't even know where to start, but I know you're the expert, so.

Please, first of all, one of the things that people talk about is it's going to create disease or start cancer. The spectrum, the frequency used are no different than 4g. So the radio part is not really what's different. Although they do have a segment of the spectrum that's up in the, you know, 24 to 40 GHz range, really high frequency by the way that stuff, that frequency is what, you know, when you get in the airport and somebody scans you, you know, it's the same type of frequency. It doesn't penetrate your body, okay? And so the carriers start to roll this stuff out very early and they realize, okay, it doesn't penetrate your body, which means if, if your hand is blocking the phone, the phone can't pick up a signal. And, oh, by the way, it goes about 100 yards. That's not good for user experience, right? So they abandon building out. So it's really not appropriate except for, like, very densely populated venues where they put up a lot of antennas and they can, they have a lot of people on their devices, so they need a lot of bandwidth. Otherwise it's not effective for use for cellular.

So it's not a technology in terms of the radio that's going to cause cancer because it's really not a different radio technology. The radio, the physics of the radio don't change the front end of the radio. You still have to have analog to digital and digital analog converters, and you still have to radiate radio energy. That stuff is all the same. What's different is all the components that makes that a network used to be all hardware. And what 5G is really driving all of those components that used to be a specific piece of equipment designed a particular way that goes at the base of a tower and more equipment throughout the network. Now, that's all software components. And so what it does allow you to run, particularly with technology called Openran or open Radio access network, allowed you to run that software on just a regular server. So now it takes away the kind of the physical properties of the network and puts it all, instantiates it all in software. That's the real evolution of 5G.

Okay?

So as we started in our company, we started to get into it like, okay, if you can, if you can take all that hardware, that things used to be spread out across the United States and you could collapse it, and it's all code, and code can be run on a server, then why are we creating vulnerability by spreading that code out in different geographic locations? Why not put it all together so that if something happens, it's still there, local, and so the network can run. So that to me, the real foundational difference between 5g, not the radio, it's a fact that the network itself is instantiated in software.

Okay? When you get into your company.

So if you're kind of thinking about, let's look at what happened in Maui, right? Big fire networks go down because pieces catch fire, you know, and you're not able to make calls. Let's look at Hurricane Katrina. This is really where, even though I started looking at this at the White House in 2017, it was really 2005. When I'm at Whiteman Air Force Base flying the b two as a major, and I look at Hurricane Katrina and the Louisiana National Guard. We fly c iraq to pick them up. They're in combat. We pull them out of combat, put them in jets, fly them back to New Orleans. They land, and they get out on the ground. They're like, I don't see a difference in where I just left, right? New Orleans is a war zone within just a couple of weeks. And you see how fast civil society can break down with the absence of services. Like, one of the key things that brings us together is communications. And if you start to think about our networks as being things that weren't meant to survive natural disaster, like a hurricane, like a fire, like in Nashville here it was two christmases ago, somebody takes an rv right outside the AT and T switching center, and what happens?

Cell service is down for weeks, single location. So a highly centralized system and this new technology is going from hardware that has to be placed like it is today to software, and say, okay, well, if I can bring all this into a single location, I can create a much more decentralized architecture. So now, instead of being able to hit one place and shut down Tennessee and surrounding states, I can still do that because we have a centralized architecture here. But if I can start to build attached devices to all these towers that are more decentralized and hardened, hardened against things like EMP and tamper and all the things that you would want to do, if I can do that, then I can start to create a network that survives all these things that we're concerned about, whether it be natural disasters or physical or cyber attacks. And so that's ultimately when I was at the White House, I got introduced to some technology that we were using in DoD to process radar data on aircraft. Very high performance, compute, very low swap, low size, weight and power so small enough to go on an aircraft, but was really, really powerful computer.

And at the time, I went to one of the senior technology leaders in DoD, I said, hey, what if we take this and apply it to our telecom problem? We've got this highly insecure, open, vulnerable technology. Why don't we take that and apply it to there? And so some of the things we were looking out there is like, how can we, can we encrypt the data without inducing any latency on the network. So super fast network, no latency. Can we encrypt the data, decrypt the data, so basically begin to secure it? That's where it started when I was still in uniform. And then I just said, okay, here's an opportunity for me to go out in the private sector and do something that's in line with my oath of office, but that is related to something I really like, which is technology. And so we took that as a starting point and then began to build and think about how do we take from a clean sheet of paper, how do we make resilient and secure infrastructure in the country? And quite frankly, the people that invested in the company, over $30 million invested to date to develop the technology didn't know what I was talking about when I said this.

They mostly invested on the basis of they trusted me and they understood the problem, at least of the way I articulated. Don't know how it's going to work, but we went and we set about to basically solve that problem. And that's what we've done in a little over five years. We've taken that idea, and we've created devices that you can insert into the network that make it EMP hardened. The first commercial cellular equipment ever to be able to survive and operate through an EMP. And it's been tested by federal agencies and passed. The first commercial equipment that can detect, if you try to open it up, cut a hole in it, right. Most of the stuff is, as, you know, military equipment. This is commercial gear that the thing will know if you try to open it up, you know, however you try to do that, that deploys autonomously. So the other thing that I realized is, if we're going to make this available to military people, I don't have time. You don't have time to set up comm gear. That often was the most frustrating thing for me is I've got three or four different systems I got to put together and get running.

And so one of the things that we found out about cellular equipment is very complicated setup. I can give you a radio and baseband unit and the core and hand it to you, and you could spend the rest of your natural born life and never get that thing to connect to device because it is that complicated in terms of the settings and everything else. And so there's an entire. There's an entire business in just building these networks for the carriers that the oems, you know, charge them for engineers after engineers after engineers, and you're like, why is this so complicated? Well, that's their business model, right? It's very complicated. Okay, so how do we take that? And this is really the hardest thing that we had to do. How do we take this very complicated system and make it so you can plug it in and it just works? What does that sound like to you? It sounds like a Wi Fi router that you buy on Amazon. Right. You cannot take cellular equipment today and plug it in like a wifi router that doesn't work and you have it connect to and operate your device.

Can't do that. So that's what we did. That was the hardest thing to do. And we finally finished that last year. So now we're starting to take it commercial, and within a few weeks, it'll be available for anybody to buy. And if you're sitting out somewhere and you don't have a cellular signal someplace, it's affordable enough that you can likely maybe get together with some of your neighbors and put something up. So that gives you cellular service. So now the reason that we don't have cellular service in rural communities or underserved urban communities is because the population density isn't such that the cost justifies investment in a very big tower, which costs millions of dollars. And so making that affordable, making it easy to deploy, making it resilient, making it secure. We did this for the military and we did it in partnership with the military, specifically the air force. But now it's available and it's going to kind of transform the way we grow the network and the way we grow capability.

So this is going to be, this started with the military project, then it went to the carriers, and now it's going to go. Now it's going to be available to consumers.

It's going to be available to, you know, it's not, our business model is not yet where I can just sell service. You know, that's not what we do. We're an infrastructure company, so we mostly help other companies provide this capability. But we are going to, we are going to allow people to purchase it, you know, directly. So, you know, it's, that's, that's our model. And we think that's the way to go because quite frankly, people need agency. And this, you know, if you're sitting around, you don't have cellular service. And, oh, by the way, it comes with a data center, right? Because you have to run all that software. So by design, you need a data center. And so now you can start to create your own mini Silicon Valley, right? In your own backyard is kind of like what we're going to enable.

What is the cost of that going to be?

Let's just say it's less than $5,000 a month to deploy one of these things somewhere.

And you will have cell service.

You'll have cell service, and you have a data center.

Does that mean you control all the data?

It means that you can control all your data, yeah. You'll be able to control your infrastructure.

When is this going to be available?

Within a. We're actually revamping our website right now, so I think probably four to six weeks.

Four to six weeks?

Yeah.

So when you say you can control your data, does that mean I'm able to protect my data from. Oh, shit.

Yep. Your data center. It's your network.

I'm getting one.

That's what a lot of people have told me they want. And so we've been very working very hard. So that's what's coming out now at the end of this year, that thing is pretty big, weighs about 300 pounds. When it's fully kitted out, in order to be able to get those prices, you're going to have to agree to, you're going to keep it powered on, plugged in, because we want to allow other customers to come onto it again with. To protect their own data and have privacy. And so that's our business model, is to basically have shared infrastructure, but instead of having more of a public network, now you have a private network that you own.

So. Okay, so now I'm really interested in this. So anybody. So how far is the range of.

This with the spectrum that we're using? It can vary by around 3 miles.

3 miles?

Yeah.

So you can have an entire neighborhood invest into this, right?

Yes.

Can you control who can access it?

Yeah, absolutely.

How do you do that?

Well, so you, you know how a Wi Fi network works, right? You give the people the username and password. In this case, you got to give them a sim. Right. Okay, so we allow you to basically create an eSIM, and then you. That you can just send that eSIM to a device that accepts an eSIM, and boom, you can have that service.

Is this basically you are your own carrier?

Yes.

You are your own verizon. You are your own at and t.

For your little piece of the world. Yes.

Wow, that's. Wow. Very interesting.

But we also want to enable, we have partners that are public carriers, so they want to grow their network and they want to provide. So if you are, for instance, a carrier customer and you partnered with us. And it's kind of expensive to deploy your infrastructure in places where you don't have a lot of people. This is a very cost effective way to do it. And then all of a sudden, hey, we've got the most coverage of any network in the world because you can do it where our goal is to partner not just domestic carriers, global carriers. So you have this ability to kind of extend your network organically.

That's incredible. Where do people find this? What's the website?

Semper AI.

Semper AI?

Yeah, Semper is actually an acronym. It stands for secure, EMP resistant edge. So it's not a word, it's an acronym. But Semper AI is our website.

Very, very interesting. Wow, that's. I mean, that could change everything. How long has that been in the making?

Over five years. It is hard to EMP harden a commercial cellular network. It's hard to create a data center that can detect if somebody drills a hole in it. And there's a lot of things that we've had to develop in order to be able to detect that. It's hard to get servers to operate at the extreme temperature ranges that cellular equipment is designed to operate. They're typically in air conditioned buildings. It's hard to then create the software that allows this thing to be completely automated so that you don't need to know anything about cellular equipment. You can just plug it in and connect. So these are all the technologies we had to, to build. In many ways, it's almost like the airplane that I flew, right. A very complicated machine that has all of these subsystems operating together to make this thing. It's not just so typically with a startup, you're creating a technology. We created technologies, plural, to come together in a systems of systems to make this work. It's kind of like what Steve Jobs did with the iPhone, but we did it on the infrastructure side. So consequently, what we found out in testing our nodes, we call them nodes because I haven't figured out a way to describe them other than that, that you could go to Best Buy and get a smartphone and that would be perfectly fine, survive and operate right through an EMP, not even a hiccup, but it couldn't connect to anything because that stuff was all taken out.

And so we took that same concept of a smartphone and basically put all the software in a hardened box and basically made it connect to the device. And now the next one that comes out, and this is really what's exciting, is it will go from what it is right now, which is 300 pound box to a 15 pound box the size of an Xbox, same capability. And that's really will be the kind of final instantiation of what we tried to, what we tried to create. The other thing that we did.

Hold on, is this is the thing that's got, I think you said four to six weeks. Is that the Xbox size?

No, no, that's gonna come later, towards the end of the year.

So will that be more personalized and not.

No, same thing. Same thing just means that. So it turns out that one of the big things that kills cellular equipment is flooding. Right. It's on the ground, gets flooded, goes out. Well, our goal here is a single four by eight solar panel mounted on your roof, connected to this thing, gives your cell, your network. So even if your house is flooded with water, your Internet's not going to go out. Right. And we can do this, you know, in the same manner. And so our goal is to create highly resilient, highly secure, decentralized architecture that supports our existing kind of cellular networks by interoperating with them. So you can basically have your cellular service continue to pay for it the way that you've always have, or you can have this very private, secure service. They coexist. That's really the secret of 5g. It allows you to do these things because it's all in software.

Will the Xbox size one that's coming out towards the end of the year, will that be the same pricing as the. Yes, it will be.

Yeah. Although our goal is really to drive the price down. Right?

Yeah.

And so how do you do that? You do it through volume. Right. And so as we, as we ramp up to full, full rate production, we want that price to. We want you to be able to acquire it, because ultimately the ability to have private, secure communications is very important, not just to the government, but also to people. So that's our goal, but, yeah.

So nobody will be able to track what you're doing.

If you have one of these, you're no longer on a public network. If you're using this, you're in a private network. It's like you're on your own Wi Fi, except instead of going to 100ft, it goes miles, and then you can start to string these things together and connect them. So one of the things that we've done is enable them to be connected to Starlink terminals. So one pops up over here, one pops up over here. They locate each other. And now you can make calls. Right. So it doesn't, it's not helpful when a Starlink terminal powered thing comes up over here and one comes up over here. They have ip addresses that they can't discover each other. So we've made them, we've made a whole other network about linking these things together. So as soon as they come online, you can make a call, you know, so obviously the military implications are, you know, unit brings it up. You need to be able to call that unit. So it needs to be able to, they need to be able to find each other really quick. That's part of the thing. So you can create a decentralized architecture that supports, again, supports the existing cellular networks and can act as an overlay or an extension of them.

That's our goal is really. So I think one of the things that it permits you to do is create this hybrid where you have these highly centralized public networks that are supported by decentralized capabilities. So now if you're a t mobile customer or at and T or Verizon customer, and this node is connected to your tower and service goes down like. So we were just doing a demo of this capability for the air force with Northrop out at Whiteman Air Force Base. And while we're doing the demo, somebody cut the fiber to the existing, existing base cellular infrastructure, right? So everybody's cell phone goes out, but ours keeps going, right? Because we haven't separated the brains of the radio from the radio itself. It's all self contained. So our stuff keeps right on trucking, doesn't ever stop. And so when you think about it from a military perspective, you can't have, I have a service disruption. I'm loading bombs on aircraft. I'm relying on this network to be able to do that stuff. So it's a very resilient, it's made for the battlefield type network, but now you have access to it. So if everybody else goes down, if you've got one of these things nearby, you're going to be able to communicate.

And really the space layer is how you're going to be able to get outside the local area. So if somebody's cut the fiber, however you were connected before, if you're connected via space link, then you can get out and you go. So the way that, as we were developing this, thinking about it, every time I watch a movie with my wife about some kind of Armageddon ish movie where society collapses, she's in tears at the end of the movie and she's like, and then I'm on Amazon buying a road atlas because how are we going to communicate with her? Kids. So intuitively, you start to recognize, and the federal government spent a lot of money hardening AM radio stations against things like EMP. But do you have an AM radio? I don't have an AM radio. I don't really know many people that have AM radios. And so we. And then we just did a nationwide alert on cell phones.

I mean, I do have an AM radio, but wouldn't it be destroyed if there was an EMP anyways?

Well, if it's plugged into the wall, yes.

Okay. If it's not, it wouldn't.

If it's not, if it's on battery, you know, it may or may not survive. It depends. It depends on which one you have. But the stations themselves have been hardened. The federal government paid to do that. But your cell phone works just fine. It just doesn't have anything to connect to and tell us. We finally give you something to basically make that connection. And then if you have an ability to get outside, you can not only communicate locally, you can call anybody within range of that radio locally. If your police forces are within range or fire or medical, you can do that. Or if you're not, you can use space to get out and make more distant calls. But over time, as you start to link all these things together, you start to grow this resiliency. And that's really our goal, is to really make not just the government mission go and be like, as you know, none of the stuff that you use in your day to day life works very well when you're on the battlefield. The infrastructure is not supportive of that. It's like LMR, some kind of radio that only talks to other radios like it.

What we wanted to create was an environment where you could bring in all these technologies and link them together. So that's one of the things that we're going to be doing for things like first responders. Remember the guy in Uvalde, chief of police, runs into the school shooting, leaves his two ray radio in the car, takes his smartphone. Well, because of the way we've designed these, we can start to bridge between those, those 5g network radios and the LMR. So that phone, he'd be able to call anybody on an LMR. And then you have agencies that are on, like, one brand development, like, they may be on Motorola and another one's on Harris, and they don't talk to each other. So we can bring them both in to have them talk to phones and talk to each other. So it's creating all of these new capabilities, like, for instance, we're going to demonstrate how you can make an LMR call from one base to another base. So say, like, Whiteman Air Force base has guys stationed out at Guam. They're going to be able to make an LMR call from Whiteman Air Force Base to Guam over the same architecture.

So it gives you all of this flexibility for the military. But in reality, what we want to do is have a dual use technology which supports the military, supports first responders, supports medical and financial, but also supports the citizenry in terms of having resilient communication. So then if the government needs to send out a nationwide alert, hey, we're getting ready to have an EMP attack. Stand by for further news. Like New York City did not too long ago, and the people are like, well, how are you going to send me notice my phone's not going to work? Now they can say, and your phone's going to work, just don't plug it into the wall. If it's plugged into the wall, then that zap's going to go right into your phone. So as long as it's unplugged, set it on a mag charger, you're fine.

Wow. So sorry. Like I said, I'm super grim with this technology. So I have a lot of questions, but so do what carriers are. Can I ask, what carriers are you guys partnering with?

I can't publicly divulge that yet.

Okay.

But what I can tell you is the things that we are doing are going to shock the industry. Let's just put it that way.

This is a public company.

No, it's still private. Still actually, we're still in fundraising mode. And yeah, it's been. I can tell you, it's been the hardest thing I've ever done in my life. It challenged me in so many ways that my military career never prepared me for. So I'm sure, I'm sure, I'm sure that you've seen have had similar things in your post podcast.

You're developing an entire 5g network. But I mean, if you don't mind me asking, how much of an investment are you guys needing?

So currently we're raising $10 million and that's really going to be to ramp up growth of the company.

So when we're talking about these protected networks that by the end of the year I'll be able to put on my roof. Is that exactly how protected am I? They can't tell my location, they don't have my advertising id, all the stuff which.

Let's just go back to what I was telling you about SDK data. If you basically log into Google and Facebook and all your accounts and you're allowing that data to go to them, then yeah, you're gonna have, you're gonna give away your stuff. But the other way that they can track you is through your IMSI, through identifying your mobile device through the network. So that's another way to basically track you is understanding your IMSI. So now you control that in a sense. So it's gonna be a lot harder for them to find that.

Okay, wow, that is a lot cooler than. I mean, that's just, that's amazing. I've one of the most innovative things I've heard of lately, so.

Well, and I think people have. The reason this hasn't been approached, I think is probably the big reason why we've struggled to raise money is because it's complicated, it's hard, and it's hard for people to understand what we're talking about because you see all these people that are advertising that they've created this black phone. Ultimately, when you connect to a public network, it's very hard to then maintain anonymity. When somebody else owns a network, it's a lot easier if you own the network. So obviously, federal government understands that. But I think the average person, the idea that you could own a piece of the infrastructure has never really been something that was possible prior to 5G. Again, software. So it really transformed the way that we can deploy these networks and make them available to people.

If I had this on my roof and I'm, can I call other carriers so I can call my friends that are on Verizon? Because I would imagine it's going to take a minute for this to spread. And it's very expensive. It's less than what I was anticipating, but it's still, I mean, it's going to be hard for the everyday american to afford 5000.

Yeah. And I think the, as I said, as we're shrinking it in our minds that this idea that you can't afford to build your own infrastructure, we're going to make it affordable and it's going to, over time, get more affordable and the way that what you can use it for. So you think about your phone. Before the Apple could create the App Store, you had to get it enough in the hands of enough people. One of the problems today in providing other types of capabilities, you know, automation, robotics, is really because we lack the ability to run those things in a local location. There's no infrastructure to support that. And by themselves. A single application does not make that infrastructure a worthwhile investment. In other words, if I'm just going to run this algorithm that runs on cameras that you've put on your property, for example, the service is not going to pay for that infrastructure. It's not going to be enough. But if you have the infrastructure now, I can start to layer these services on top of it. And that's really our business. It's really about providing that infrastructure to support all of these applications and use cases in a secure way so that they can actually be brought to market.

Wow, very interesting. I can't wait to see this roll out. When are whatever carriers you are working with, when are they going to adopt this type of technology?

So, I mean, it's already been approved by one, and now we're working on how do we price this right from their side, like we already know, but they have to figure out, like, what is, this is not something the carriers do, right? What I'm explaining is not something that they would normally do. And the attractiveness for them, obviously, is the government customer because the government needs. So, I mean, when you think about it, what are we doing? We're bringing the smartphone into the government customers so that they can take advantage of the economies of scale for the chipsets that run those things. They're already hardened. You can drop in water, you can throw them around, you can zap them with EMP. They take a beating and keep on going and start to get the military away from having to use these bespoke technologies they don't like and there aren't easy to use, they're hard to program, they don't talk to each other. That's the worst problem. And so we wanted to give that capability. How do you give that capability to the military? Well, you have to make it resilient and secure. That's the bottom line.

And then they can start now, you can go down to best buy, plug in your eSIM, and now you've got a secure connection with other technologies that get broadened. So other partners, for instance, allow us to do classified communications on this capability. It's not something we do, but our partners allow you to do that. And now all of a sudden, you create this capability that you can take on the battlefield and you can bring your infrastructure with you. And that's really what the small, the small backpackable one is. Put it in aircraft, put it in ship, put it on the vehicle, put it in your backpack, and now you can take your cell network and data center with you so that you can be completely independent from anything that's going on and as resilient and secure as you need. And, oh, by the way, if you get overrun, somebody grabs it, then they want to exploit it, they're going to get nothing. You know, they're going to get a brick because this thing's been designed to be lost in the battlefield.

Wow. Wow, man. That's, I would, I mean, and then there's, I mean, there's a, there's a lot of fear about an EMP attack power grid going down. I'd like to get into that with you here in a minute with, with what China's doing to our power grid, supposedly. But I mean, I would think all the carriers would and the government would want to subsidize us somehow. It's an EMP proof network, right?

I think so. There's a lot of misconceptions. Number one, the first one that we heard was, why don't I buy this? The cell phone won't survive. No, the smartphones actually survive quite well. At least every single one that we got out of best buy and tested survived. So that's not a, it really is about the size, it's really about the shielding that's already designed into them. So they're already, so that's not an argument. The other argument is, my God, this is going to cost millions and millions of dollars. No, it's not. In fact, you know, we just had, we just had a meeting with one, with one government representative and they almost came out of their chair when we told them how much it was going to cost because they're told that, you know, it's like the old adage of the gold plated toilet seat, you know, this thing's going to be, you know, lots and lots of money. No, it's not. It's really, and we've designed it to be commercial infrastructure so anybody can buy it. And because we feel strongly, I mean, this company, this semper believes in the constitution. It believes in our republic.

It believes the principles and values of, you know, our independent citizenry and believes in the need for communications as a life saving key component of a functioning society. And so, you know, we're on a mission and I think it does shock people a little bit. And the implications are. And so our hardest problem, I would say, as a company, is people just not believing that we've done it, you know, that we've built this thing and then they see it and they're like.

Oh, wow, that's, I'm intrigued. Let's take a quick break.

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Thank you for listening to the Shawn Ryan show. If you haven't already, please take a minute, head over to iTunes and leave the Sean Ryan show a review. We read every review that comes through and we really appreciate the support. Thank you. Let's get back to the show. All right, we're back from the break. We just had a quick conversation about. I have a question I think everybody would like to know. So to get, if you were to invest in getting this network on the roof of your home or the community, one that's coming out four to six weeks, to get the utmost, like, the most possible privacy you can get. I mean, I had mentioned, would you run a slick phone? No apps, just calls and texts.

Right. So, I mean, we, as you're starting to think about the architecture, invariably what you're creating is a local database. It's a local data center. The vulnerability in your device is based on the fact that you have data on your device. You have apps that run on your device. So, like when I was living in China, somebody gets my device, they plug something into it and they pull the data down. And so what you don't want to have is data on your device that somebody can hack. Because the device gets hacked, then the data is vulnerable. And so in our architecture, we felt that no data on the device is the most secure. And so the next iteration of what we will do is create this ability to have essentially a visual representation of your apps on your device, but no actual processing or storage. So you push a button and it opens an app in the node, not on your phone. So there's no data stored on your phone ever. There's very little software running on your device so that you know somebody. So if you just. And therefore, the device itself is not very expensive.

Right. It's, most of it goes in is all that processing power that's in it. So we get rid of that, get that off the device. So now you just throw it away. You know, if, you know, if something happens and, you know, somebody tries to get it, I'm going to exploit your device. No, you can't do that. It's. And so you think about from a battlefield perspective, if you're walking around your smartphone and you're fighting and you lose it, you don't want that thing to get exploited. And so in addition to having a tamper proof, you know, autonomous data center that zeroizes itself and can destroy subcomponents if needed, you want to have it tied to a device that you're using that doesn't have any data on it. And so somebody picks it up, they don't get anything. And that's. So we really believe that's the most secure architecture for doing things. The other thing that we did that's unique about us is we actually have. We run two networks. In any network there's what's called the control plane and the data plane. The data plane is kind of where all your interactions happen when you're on a video call that's all happening on the data plane, setting up that call, controlling the network, anything that's going on in terms of command and control of your network, that's the control plane.

So we've basically physically separated those two. That's part of our architecture. So the data plane can be encrypted. But in the control plane, the problem today on networks is that the control plane and the data plane run on the same path. So if you're running through overseas, you're running through whatever, whose ever equipment which they have the ability to basically interfere with that control plane. The opportunity we take that we put it in space, we take that ability to have access to the control plane out in our node. So that goes one path. It's not latency sensitive, meaning like when you're making a call, when you dial all this call setup, that's all your control plane once it gets connected to data plane. So the goal here is to really create this very, very secure, hardened, decentralized network that, you know. So the best analogy to kind of the way that we operationalize this is how we protect nuclear weapons. In nuclear weapons we have something called nuclear surety. And that means that in terms of personnel, the material and the procedures, we make sure that nuclear weapons are safe, secure and reliable. Well that's just concepts, right?

In terms of personnel, we want to make sure that anybody that touches weapon has been vetted. In terms of materiel, we want to make sure that the weapons are fail safe. In other words they can only, they have to be authorized for use by the proper authorizer. And then in procedures we want to make sure that two people are doing the authorizing. So these are principles we adopted into our company. So you want to make do a software update. Okay. It's got to take two people nodule of the tasks. One to approve first approved and the second one to, you know, approve that approval. And we think that's. So when you look at our history working with nuclear weapons, never been a detonation. And we've dropped, we've had airplane crashes where airplanes have fallen from, you know, 30,000ft weapons have fallen out, had not detonated. So we've had accidents, we've had spills, we had a silo blow up where the capsule went up and landed somewhere that didn't go off. So we designed very safe weapons, and then we applied these principles to how we operated to make them safe, secure and reliable. So we said, okay, if you want to think of a way to design something that is similar for what we believe to be the most dangerous weapon on the planet, which is not nuclear weapons, but the things that TikTok enables, and that's really your data.

So you think of highly enriched uranium, plutonium, as kind of the fuel of that nuclear weapon. We think of data as a fuel of artificial intelligence, which many would argue is the most dangerous thing on the planet for humans. And so we just took the same principles for how we make nuclear weapons safe, secure, and reliable and apply that to data and how we design these things. And so that's the way that. So everything that we think about is how do we ensure that only the person that has access to that data and has a reason to use it is the person that's able to. To use it? So, you know, just like I think Apple did, you know, in fighting the FBI and saying, hey, I'm not going to design a device that you can break into now people have broken into it. It's because an iPhone wasn't made tamper proof. Right? It was made. It was made encrypted, but it wasn't made tamper proof. We made our nodes tamper proof, so if you try to break into it, you're not going to get anything. But if they did, that's kind of the way that we.

That's an approach that we took to the infrastructure side of things. And then. And then by taking a device and making it, you know, not having any data storage on it, and then having these very secure nodes that communicate to each other via encryption. So it makes a very secure platform for protecting your data.

So how far could the device, once this rolls out, how far can the device be from the unit or the node?

Well, it depends on the power and depends on the frequency. But, you know, I think a good, you know, one to three to five, depending on the frequency and the power that you put out. Miles. Okay, we're not talking. We're not talking Wi Fi distances. We're talking. We're talking. We're talking, you know, long distances.

Okay, man. Very innovative and exciting stuff. I wasn't expecting that much. So, really, really neat. But moving forward, I want to get back into China a little bit. There's a lot of fear about the power grid and the EMP threat. I've had a couple of gentlemen on to discuss how China has infiltrated the power grid system, how we're not checking our transformers. And I want your opinion on how. I mean, how vulnerable are we in our power grid system?

I mean, extremely. We don't do the high power transformers. We don't build those. Very few of them, maybe 12%, maybe now, certainly less than 25% of them are not built in the United States. They take two to three years to build, like, the high power transformers, and most of them are built in China. And so, obviously, that's a vulnerability because it takes so long to be built. For example, if you're frying them, you're not getting that high power transformer back in less than years. Right? So you're talking about if you have a significant event, you're not down where here. If we have, you're familiar with a storm where the power goes out and they rush equipment. That's not what we're talking about here. We're talking about a wholesale disruption that lasts not days, not weeks, not months, but years because of how long it takes to build these things. The other thing that you found out, that you find out is that it used to be when the grid went down, as you start to bring the grid back up, you have to balance the loads on separate parts of the grid so it can come up.

And it used to be that engineers would get walkie talkies, and then they would communicate with each other, and they would manually adjust at each of these locations so that then they would work to get the grid to come back up. So what they did is automate all that. Right? And so this skill of using walkie talkies and manually adjusting the grid, it's no longer a skill that anybody's taught. And so we're depending on the networks to be up and operating, running software that automatically balances the grid. So if you use a grid and you lose the network, you basically, you can't bring it back up. Right? You got to get that network back up, that software operating before you can start to think it back, get it back up. And so that's another one. And then, of course, as we've seen recently with, I think it's Bolt Hurricane, that the Chinese are planting malware in things like Cisco routers, that's waiting for an opportunity to infiltrate ScaDA systems which control things like the grid. And that's going to be a problem for us. I think the thing is, and this is all from a kind of taking a view of national security and saying, what's more important?

And I think we began to think that fighting abroad and spending money on fighting abroad is more important than spending money here at home to make our society resilient and safe so that they could take an attack and continue to operate. And this is, you know, when I go back to that time in 2005 when Hurricane Katrina happened, I saw this was going on. I'm like, okay, what if this happens nationwide? And there's that book 1 second after. I think people have read about an EMP over the United States, and the threat's real. And it's not just China or Russia that have a lot of nuclear weapons. It's a country with one nuclear weapon, like North Korea, that can be a threat. So that creates an enormous vulnerability for the society. And obviously, we can't do anything about that. We're focused on communications. But I do think that if you lose a grid, but you're still able to communicate, you can reassure the population, you can start to create centers. Like, for instance, when we deploy node, we deploy an EMP hard generator. So if you do lose power, if the EMP does happen, the generator will continue to keep you going.

And so I think one of the things that people have used for resilience or for electricity have been these concepts of microgrids, right? So you have smaller capability. A lot of people have solar in their homes and generators. So to the extent that that survives, then you start to create and you can communicate, then you can start to bring back some semblance of civil society where people are more kind of self sustaining and they can begin to work together. And I think that the biggest thing if you lose the power grid is if you're able to still communicate. Government's still able to provide reassurance and hear distress calls, right? So they need to be able to respond to distress calls, whether it be first responders or medical. And you can make a financial transaction, which we would enable with our nodes, then you can start to, you can keep things going. And that's what our, that's really the concept here, is that it would. Yeah, it would be a huge inconvenience. But at the same time, I think we could keep. We could keep. If the society was able to kind of do some of the things that they're able to do now, and you're able to keep communication going, then you would be able to prevent a lot of that mass hysteria and things from happening.

But there is no doubt that the grid is vulnerable. Our water systems are vulnerable. There's just a report that just came out about hacking of water systems. We've seen people get in there and change the different chemicals that are going in. We saw that in Florida. People are shooting up substations and then you have the border issues. Who is here? What are they doing? All the chinese nationals, which I said are highly loyal to the Chinese Communist Party. So there's a lot of things that I think we've kind of taken our eyes off the ball and just in terms of making our own society safe, you know, even for myself, you know, being a b two pilot and having this most powerful weapon system in the world that carries nuclear weapons and just recognizing that my family's completely vulnerable, like, who's going to take care of them if we have all that war? When I used to go fly missions, who's going to do that for us? That's the thing where I think we've just completely, we lost track of what's important as a nation in terms of national security.

Yeah, it's. I mean, on a scale of one to five, how concerned are you about our power grid?

Oh, six.

That bad?

Yeah, it's.

I mean, is it literally as easy as just flipping a switch?

It is, yeah. If you've planted malware, yes, it's as easy as flipping a switch. And that's kind of the point, you know, and what I recognize, you know, like Kosovo, you know, we're taking out communications links with 2000 pound weapons from the b two that you weren't going to stop us. If we want to take out a target, we're going to take it out. But then I realized there's a whole other way and just own it. Either you build the technology for it, or you actually the service provider, which the Chinese have bought a bunch of grids around the world that they operate, turn it off. It's just kind of how for me, it crystallized that the things that I was doing, I mean, I could be the best of the best. And that was my commitment when I was in uniform to be the best of the best at doing, fulfilling my oath to support and defend the constitution, I could be the best of the best. I could go across the world, drop weapons, no problem anywhere that the president needed the weapons dropped. And then realizing that at any second somebody could turn the lights off.

And every single day, the chinese communist party was doing its damnedest to convert my kids to communism, slowly but surely. And our system was failing in that way. And so it really kind of brought home to me that we need to take a step back as a society and understand what's important, understand how we're vulnerable, and then begin to shore those things up. It's not just the border. It's not just our infrastructure. It's how our entire socioeconomic system is vulnerable. Because we kind of, I think after, when we won the cold war, we assumed that we were safe from everything. And instead of that being true, what was true was that, no, there are still people that are harbor ill will to the constitution, to our federal republic, and now they were just gonna, just going to pursue that and then pursue it with us helping them. And that's, that's, I think, the, the part that we, we completely lost. It is one thing for Churchill. Churchill came here after world War Two, and it was right outside St. Louis. He gave this thing called the Iron Curtain speech. He was iron curtain descending over Europe, and he was writing back and forth to Truman when he was coming to the United States, saying, talking about the speech that he's going to give.

And I think there was a sense of the threat that the Soviet Union could pose to our way of life then by people like Churchill and Truman and Eisenhower. And I think once that went away, once at the end of the cold war, I think we just assumed that our way of life was the way of life that everybody wanted. Well, no, there's others that have a different point of view and that have waited and planned and plotted and worked together with us, seemingly in friendship, but in reality, to get to the point where they can begin to turn the tide. And so I guess you could say the cold war never ended, or we're in the middle of cold war number two. But either way, I think, as opposed to where we were during the first cold war, which was at the end of the world War two, we were the only ones with an industrial base. And so we had to rebuild Europe. That was the Marshall plan. We rebuilt their economies, we rebuilt their industrial base. In conjunction with that, we help them build their civil society institutions. And now we find ourselves in this second cold war, and China owns the industrial base.

China has a belt and road initiative, and China is building the world in its image. And we don't own the industrial base. In fact, our drugs come from China. Our microelectronics come from, literally everything comes from China. And yet we're not, we don't have a sense, for whatever reason, I don't understand how vulnerable we really are as a nation.

I mean, why do you think they haven't made a, why haven't they struck yet?

So the reason, so there's a couple, during the first year of the Trump administration, Liu, he, who was the chief economic advisor to Xi Jinping. And Ambassador Lighthouser, who was the US trade representative, negotiated a trade deal. And this kind of gets to President Trump's comment about bringing chinese auto manufacturing plants here. So the same problem was going on with Japan in the eighties and nineties. And our us trade representer went over and negotiated with their economic person, and they created a deal that really was more bilaterally healthy for both sides. Japan's kicking our ass. We go there. And a lot of those trade agreements and relationships were made on the basis of, we have the only industrial base. We're going to give you an industrial base, but we want you to be a democracy so that we can make the world safe for, for democracies. And so Japan was a democracy. We're a democracy. We go to Japan and say, hey, this is not sustainable. You can't keep just basically raiding. So we have to create a more equitable trade arrangement around manufacturing and the Japanese as opposed to what happened in China. And I'll tell you here in a second what happened.

They said, okay. And so we have a great trading relationship with Japan, but that's on the basis of we both agree that kind of this democracy thing is important. Well, so in 2017, that's ambassador Lighthizer. In fact, before that, actually, it was early 2017 when I was still in Beijing as a defense attache, and I had just been hired to go to the White House. I asked to speak to Liu ha personally, and he declined. And he sent his assistant to talk to me. And I said, look, I said, here's what's coming. You guys have been doing this thing for a long time, and there's going to be a reset in the trading relationship. And if you do not reset, there's going to be a break, and that's not going to be good for you. Right? Because the reason you're successful is because you get our technology, talent, and capital, but that is on the basis of a shared, beneficial relationship, which we clearly do not have. And so after I had already left, you know, I got message back from the embassy that, hey, you know, Liu Hud apologized because he didn't meet with me because he didn't realize I was going to the White House.

So anyway, we go back there and go back to the White House. And when I was at the joint staff, we had been working on this problem as I worked for first Dempsey and then Dunford and advising them on China. And then we started to see these things. And so we, I worked with the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs, who worked with the chief staff of the air Force, and we created an office called the Office of Commercial and Economic Analysis. And that office, as I got back to the White House, I reached into the office. I said, hey, can you provide help to the US trade representative who was bringing this section 301 agreement or investigation? And so they did. And so they. So, and if you read the section 301 investigation, it tells you, you know, line and verse of what the Chinese are doing to our economy. Right? And it comes from. So they went out and they interviewed business people and all. It's all there. And so that's on the basis of that. Lighthizer created the tariffs. The same time this was going on, Lighthizer and Liu Ha started negotiating a trade deal.

Now we're doing the same thing that the US was doing with Japan back in the eighties and nineties. They negotiate this trade deal, and it's about 150 pages. Ambassador Lighthizer shook hands, and we think that we've basically kind of saved the relationship. Well, Liu Ha goes back home, goes to Xi Jinping. Xi Jinping basically tears up the agreement. Right? That's when it says we're gonna have a phase one and a phase two. No, he just tears up the agreement. At that point, China was basically saying, we're preparing for war. We are not going to have a mutually beneficial trading relationship with you knowing that the tariffs were going to come. And so at that point, we have started to, we had started to separate. So that was, that was late 2017, and that's just been going on ever since. And that's where we're at right now with regard to. With regard to trade and the economic and the financial relationship. Meanwhile, they're being much more controlling over their own companies with regard to allowing them to take investment from Wall street. So there's a separation coming. And that separation is not done because we recognize the threat to us so much as the Chinese Communist Party recognized that their ability to convince us to keep doing this had come to an end.

Okay, so why aren't they attacking. Why haven't they been attacking Taiwan prior? They hadn't been attacking Taiwan prior because they wanted the technology, talent, and capital from us to drive their economy. And they knew that same thing that happened to Russia when they invaded Ukraine. We cut them off financially, that we're going to do the same thing to the Chinese. Except the Chinese have been preparing for this. So the Belt and Road initiative last April, they brought in bankers from around the world, say, okay, I want you to emulate the sanctions that the United States put on Russia as an invasion of Ukraine and tell us how we get out from under that. Right. So. And there are historical approximations of what I'm telling you. A good book called the is the memoirs of ambassador, Ambassador Morgenthau. He's a us ambassador to Turkey prior to and at the start of world War one, and he's friends with the german ambassador. So the german ambassador confides in him in this memoir. It's a very small book, I think, highly recommend people read it. And he tells Ambassador Morgenthau, yeah, this is after the war starts. He's prior to the war.

So, yeah, the Kaiser called us all back, and we had a meeting, and they went around, the generals and the bankers and everybody around the room and the Kaiser, like, are we ready for war? Are we ready for war? You got the bankers. And the bankers said, no, we need to liquidate our assets. We need to separate ourselves so that when that happens, there's going to be a fall in the stock market. We're going to lose our value. We want to sell those assets and then go to war. So what the Chinese have been doing systematically since that trade agreement was torn up is basically securing themselves from any kind of economic or financial harm. Meanwhile, you can have all the money in the world, but if you don't produce your own drugs, you've got a problem. They've got the supply chain now. They're separating themselves economically and financially. And now the reasons that war has been prevented, which were all kind of voluntary on the part of China because they wanted to get our technology, talent, and capital are gone, right? They're mostly gone. Okay, so what's stopping them from attacking Taiwan? It's not, as we like to say in the military.

It's not because we're much better, because they have much more weapons. Like, way more weapons. They have the ability to take all of our space stuff down. Right now, if they take our space stuff down, we're completely blind in the region, right? We depend on space. They don't depend on space. We could take all their space assets down. They're in the region. It's their backyard. They can see, they can hear. So we're vulnerable there. And then just a massive amount of weapons. It's overwhelming. So we're in a bad place. And the only thing that was keeping us from actually going to war were the Chinese thought that they could get technology, talent, capital out of us. Now that they know that they can't, and they're getting less and less. Less and less money is being invested in China from America and other western countries, then that motivation to not go to war is no longer there. That's what is happening. We're getting closer and closer to war, and it'll happen. It'll happen at a timeline, I believe, when the United States is distracted, likely from some other. Could be Cuba, could be North Korea, could be.

I mean, we've already got Hamas in Israel, and we've got Russia, Ukraine, so we're already kind of distracted. I think it's going to be, you know, and being distracted is not just. It's just not that our attention is not focused there. Like, Centcom has forces, right? UCOM has forces, you know, so those forces that would be there in Indo Paycom to be ready, they're just not there because we don't have them.

Man. It seems. It seems to me like they've got us from pretty much every angle.

Checkmate. Checkmate. So, I mean, what do we have? What do we have remaining? Well, you know, we have each other, and we have our constitution, and.

I.

Think, you know, it's gonna. I feel like we're in for some hard times as a country, and I think if we stay true to our principles and values, I don't think we're gonna lose. I don't think the Chinese are gonna occupy us. They're gonna cause a lot of chaos. But as long as we keep our heads and we rebuild, I think we can get through it. It's only if we allow kind of what's been going on here, which is this terrible hyper partisanship, which, by the way, they're feeding because they benefit from it. And it's by valuing the principles that I think the founding fathers. I think they were right. They looked at nearly every other society that been in existence in human. With humankind up until that point, and I think they came up with a pretty good one. Now, they weren't sure it was going to work, but it has for 240 plus years. But what they couldn't anticipate is the Internet. And I think that's the part that we have to figure out a way to be able to cut through what is a very powerful controller of the narrative. Remember, I told you that Confucius actually has a really good lesson as analytics about the power of the narrative when he's asked, what's the first thing you'll do if you were emperor?

When he says, I would rectify the names, and what he means is what you say is what you think. And if I can get you to say something, you'll think that way. And that's really essentially what we're talking about here. Right. If I can control the way you speak, then I control the way you think, and I can start to create the type of society that has a patina of free speech. But in reality, people are watching what they say, and they're guarding themselves because they can be canceled or demonetized or whatever. This is the power of the First Amendment. This was why the founding fathers did it. And I think it was so brilliant when you take a step back. But again, there's no Internet.

Man. It's scary times. It is very scary times. You don't think they're going to occupy us?

I don't think they could. Right. I think that's where we're going. I think they can occupy our minds. They can occupy our hearts, and they already partially do. But I think there's something still, as Americans that we share is just. I think there's still a spark of that in us, and that is we do not go down without a fight. And even in our, even in our original kind of founding of the country, it wasn't everybody that fought. It's only a portion, in fact, kind of ashamed to say one of my direct ancestors was on the other side. And so there were, and the majority of people, I think, were on the other side, quite frankly, in the country, which is kind of what you. The feeling you get here. But I do think that there will be enough people that just will resist that. Obviously, we have the military and they're there to defend the country, but I don't think that the Chinese could successfully occupy the country. I do think that if this thing had, if we hadn't had that agreement where they just kind of caused a fracture in 2017 where the Chinese decided, hey, we can't do this, and we're going to prepare for war.

I think at that point, if we would have kept going, I think they can occupy our hearts and minds using this system that we created, this globalized financial, trade, and Internet controlled system that is very tightly linked together and which allows for global narrative to kind of establish and perpetuate itself. I think that is what's terrifying. Yeah. As we become more fragmented and more decentralized, then I think we. And more local. I think local is hugely important. You know, local resiliency communities that, you know, the community understands the constitution and is supportive of it. I think we have that, you know, still within our. Within our midst. And so whatever happens, I think we can still kind of recreate those conditions, at least, I'm hopeful we can. I mean, one of the things, one of the cool things that I think people don't recognize is when you go and live abroad, like when I went to live in China, it was very easy to find, to see a foreigner in China, right? If you didn't look like that, if you didn't speak like that, boom. And our kids would be, they were young and blonde and people would crowd around us.

But America, and you come here, you've got all of these different races and all of these different backgrounds. And for the most part, prior to kind of all these people that have come across the southern border recently, for the most part, they all came here for similar reasons, right? They were escaping oppression or whatever. They wanted opportunity. And nearly every friend I've ever had that whose family is like first generation, and they were born here and raised here. Their family teaches a very strong support of the country and the constitution. It's just kind of ingrained in them. And I think, you know, as I was saying, I think that's part of our. How our society continues to renew itself. We have immigrants that come in that appreciate they come from, or at least did come from disadvantage. They come in, they adopt our society, they adopt our language, they adopt these principles and values that our founding fathers believed were universal because they weren't all of the same type. Alexander Hamilton was different than somebody else that was in the leadership. So they were different backgrounds, but really believed in some fundamental human rights. Those people that come in which, you know, form the bedrock of our working class, I think, are the ones that then their kids go to school and become part of the white collar, white collar class.

I think that's how we renew as a society constantly. And that's the thing that's magical about us. We're all tied together by this single document that you can read, you can carry around in your pocket, and everybody understands, everybody knows what it means. I think that's hard to break if we stay true to it. But when it's all connected, it's all centralized, it's all kind of fed to you, and you're not willing to ask questions about what's fed to you then, yeah, that's easy. I've seen it. That's easy to break us down, divide us, make us hate each other. And that's exactly what I see going on.

Are you concerned about the collapse of the US dollar with Brics?

I am not concerned about the collapse of the US dollar in terms of, there would be a competing currency for the US dollar. And the reason is because it's not just our economy, it's really the strength of our society, at least right now. As long as the United States continues to be the United States, the dollar will continue to be the method of kind of the backstop of all trade. The chinese yuan would never do that. They're the second biggest economy. That's kind of a. Europe can't do that because they're not really a federal republic like we are. So we have a single monetary system. They have a single monetary system, but they also have different countries under that single monetary system which have their own unique cultures and societies. We have a fairly homogenous culture and society, although there are differences between the states, but ultimately, there's no place like the United States for a currency. So nobody would. So first of all, in order for the chinese yuan to become a reserve currency, they would have to allow the yuan to float. They would have to allow it to be freely traded. Today, the only entity in the world that can exchange the chinese yuan is the People's bank of China, right?

So anybody can freely trade the dollar, right? And the dollar has value in so much as the United States continues to exist as a sovereign nation. So I think at least the way the world is organized today, I don't see a single entity that would come up. And now if China was all of a sudden to become a democracy and the yuan was to float, then, yeah, I think you could see the yuan be the currency, the reserve currency, but not in the current instantiation. And the euro is not going to do it either. It requires, I think, a somewhat cohesive society supporting that currency. That really makes it attractive for, I mean, ultimately it's a trust in the United States as an institution to survive and thrive, more so than it is the power of China's economy. And the reason the Chinese won't allow the yuan to float, because as soon as you allow the yuan to float, then they can have a run on their banks. What do we got now? We got a bunch of money invested in China that everybody's trying to figure out how to pull out. And the Chinese don't let it.

They don't let it come out. And so as the economy in China tanks, if the yuan was free, and this is why they didn't do it, by the way. This is one of the things they did. In fact, in unrestricted warfare, they talk about one of their biggest terrorists are, are George Soros. Right? Because they say he orchestrated the asian financial, asian currency collapse and therefore he's a financial terrorist. And so one of the things that they wanted to make sure is that that couldn't happen to them. Right. You can't have a run on their banks because they weren't going to allow their currency to flow. Now, the mistake that we made, and I still don't understand why, is that we allowed that to be freely part of the IMF's basket of currencies. Right? Why it's not freely tradable. There's literally no other country on earth that's part of the international exchange. And you can't freely trade their currency. That's ridiculous that we would have allowed that, but we did. So I don't believe any of these things. The United States will cease to exist, functionally exist as a politically independent and sovereign entity prior to the dollar, people going off the dollar as a reserve currency.

Now there's other problems that come because we have the dollar as a reserve currency. One of them is if you have a strong dollar, it's hard to trade american goods abroad. So we actually pay a penalty in terms of manufacturing. And that's why, you know, it's incumbent upon us to have a policy, an industrial policy that allows, that compensates for that because otherwise all the manufacturing is going to leave the United States, which it for the most part has done. And so we have to basically compensate for that because having a strong dollar is not conducive to a good trading regime for you. And the other one obviously is we can't just keep printing money to pay the debt. I think getting our fiscal house in order. No, there was one caveat to that. And the caveat is if you are GDP, if your GDP, year over year, is growing faster, then you're printing, then you're accumulating debt, then you're able to absorb it. And your interest rates are low. Right? So as your interest rates rise, your GDP is not growing fast enough. And this is what's happening now, is the payments on the debt become more than you're actually spending in the federal budget.

And I think they've already gone past what the DoD annual budget is. We're paying more, I think, right now. And somebody has to check this on the annual debt because of the recent rise in interest rates, because of we printed all this money due to COVID, then we're paying for national security in the United States, which is crazy if you think about it, but that's the world. But if our economy is growing faster than that debt is growing, then we can sustain that almost indefinitely. But obviously, there's going to be a time when that comes down. So I think that's, we've kind of what we did is we lived off the fat that we had. So during the Cold War, we were organized right, we were structured right, we were postured right from a strategic perspective. And we, and, um, and that gained us all kinds of advantages, uh, in the world. And I think we just kind of just through the, you know, it's like, it's like, um, you know, you work out and you eat healthy and you rest and everything, and all of a sudden, one day you come home and like, I'm going to drink and I'm going to smoke, and I'm going to stop working out.

And that's what the United States did after the end of the cold War. Like, hey, I don't have to do it anymore. And that's now the bill is going to come due. But I think as we start to rebuild our manufacturing, as we start to rebuild our infrastructure, as we start to make ourselves more resilient and secure from outside attack, that will have a knock on effect. When we went to China originally and China entered the WTO, their economy was hugely, hugely under, underutilized, right? So they had all this latent labor and productivity that as soon as you threw some technology, talent, and capital, and it's like a fire, it blew up. Well, since the end of the cold war, we've basically accumulated the same what I would call latent productivity, because we haven't really been investing here in the United States. And I do believe as we start to invest in infrastructure and manufacturing and we start to stop sending technology, talent, and capital in China and we start to invest in our own communities, that you're going to see this latent productivity really take off. Right. And so I think that's the part that, and as a consequence, you're also going to see a strengthening of the working class.

It's going to be more healthy for them. They're going to be more hopeful, not hopeless. And I think you're going to start to see a lot of the things that this hyper partisanship kind of begin to decline. So I am optimistic of the future, but it requires us to actually look inward. It requires us to invest in our own people, invest in our own society, invest in our own communities, not invest everywhere else. We've done that for 30 years. We need to invest here and our people. During the cold war, we were sending people to college on free scholarships, and they were called education for national security. Right. We want you to become a scientist or an engineer, stuff like that. These are things that we were doing in the cold war. We built the national highway system. We poured money into science and technology, 2% of GDP, the space race, all these things we took advantage of for the last 30 years that we're going to have to start and we're going to have to rebuild.

Now, I hope that starts happening soon. It'd be real nice to see the government invest into our own country again. And, man, it's just. I hope you're right. Gives me some positivity that you're thinking, well, I pray.

Right? I pray. I pray every day that that's what's going to happen. I have to have faith. If you don't have faith, I don't know what you. What you do. Because we're in a very bad spot. We're in a very bad spot. We've been in bad spots before, but it does require that we look inward. We have to look inward, and we have to question the things that we're doing. And there is nothing wrong with any American standing up and say, this doesn't smell right, and that person should be celebrated. If they question the government, why are you doing this? And then, you know, then somebody comes, knocks on their door, and, you know, starts to investigate. That's not okay. Yeah, that's the kind of stuff that's going on that I think, you know, is really, really bad for our society. Yeah, we want to encourage dissent.

I'm with you 100%, but. Well, general, I just. What an honor to have you sitting here and very informative interview, and, man, I appreciate it. I wish you the best of luck, and I hope to see you again.

Thank you. Mike Carruthers shares little pieces of intel in interviews you can use to improve your life on the something you should know podcast. The next time you're looking for a job and have to write a cover letter, here's some advice from Skip Freeman, author of a book called Headhunter's hiring Secrets. Add a p's to the bottom of that cover letter. That can actually increase the chances of that letter being read by up to 75%. Some people actually glance down and read the p's. First, something you should know.

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