Ryan Mcbeth: Trump Isn’t Pro-Russia. The Real Problem Is Inside the Pentagon | DSH #1571

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People have asked me how this thing's going to end, Russia and Ukraine.

It's going to end one of two ways.

either Russia fails as a nation because they just physically can't keep up with the war.

Number two, there is some sort of peace plan put into place.

Russia doesn't get Crimea back, they don't get the Donbass back.

There's peacekeepers in Donbass, maybe for non-aligned nations, whatever.

That's the other way.

Some sort of negotiated settlement.

Ukraine doesn't get everything they want, and Russia doesn't get everything they want.

I actually believe that's the second option.

Okay, guys, third time's the charm.

We got Ryan.

Not many guests make it on three times, man.

So thank you.

Pour up a glass.

Outstanding.

So I absolutely love Rye whiskey.

Oh, wait, could you keep the mic closer?

And I hope you enjoy.

Cheers.

May you be in heaven, 10 minutes, for the devil knows you're dead.

Is this the bottle I got you the first time you came on, or is this a different brand?

It's the same brand.

I only drink this.

I drink ancient.

I remember you requested it.

I was like, what is that?

Okay, it it tastes really good it is deliciousness in a bottle and you can keep this thank you this is this is absolutely wonderful thank you

sure some guests would enjoy that so thank you it tastes really good i will say i love this smooth very smooth i wouldn't even need anything else no i mean i i put a rock in it just to make it a little bit cold but good i love this i love rye whiskey um new book obviously uh last republic that's uh why you're on another podron right yeah that's that's why i'm like traveling all throughout the southwest uh last republic was a book i wrote that imag

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Initially, they were thinking about doing that because the Mormons got kicked out of every place they ever went.

They just wanted to be left alone.

And so this book kind of imagines an alternate history where he actually did that.

And what happens 170 years later when they clash with America?

Well, that book's been out for about six months.

I started writing a sequel, and I have to research various areas.

So I drove, I flew into Arizona.

I researched Winslow, Arizona, which is going to be the site of the big battle in my next book.

And then I'm going to Las Vegas because I'm here with my brother.

Yeah.

And then I'm heading up to Salt Lake City to do a bunch of research, look into some archives and look at the Pioneer Museum where you can see.

I've been to the Pioneer Museum before.

That was 10 years ago, but it has all the artifacts from the Mormon Exodus.

The hand carts that they had.

You know, some of these guys,

they marched without shoes, either because they wore out their shoes or they wanted to save their shoes for a new life in Utah.

Wow.

You know, they marched through the snow barefoot.

Jeez.

Like it was,

if you read about the Mormon Exodus, it's actually pretty fascinating.

And people ask me, are you a Mormon?

Like, no, but I'm just their number one fan.

I asked you about her.

They, they, I'm, uh, you know, I've often said we would have a harder time

protecting America without the LDS church base in America.

Whoa.

And you want to know why now, don't you?

That's a hot take.

I want to know why.

Because so many LDS go away from mission.

So Latter-day Saints, they go away for a two-year mission.

Right.

and they go to a host country and they learn the language of that host country.

They live in that host country.

And when they come back, they have this language skill.

Now, they don't send them to Arab countries, Muslim, predominantly Muslim countries.

They don't do that.

They do send them to Hong Kong, so they learn Chinese and Russia.

So if you need to speak, if you need someone who speaks Bantu, odds are, there was an LDS

missionary who went to South Africa and learned the language and

he returned back home.

Wow.

And joined the army.

And so there is a unit in Utah.

I believe it's a Utah National Guard unit.

I believe it's an intelligence brigade.

I can't remember the darn nomenclature of the brigade.

But

they

we would have a harder time defending America if it wasn't for the Mormon church.

Interesting turkey.

Absolutely.

Very interesting turkey.

Their language, their

interrogator translators translators are so crucial to us understanding what is going on in other countries.

That is cool.

Well, first of all, I love that you actually go boots on the ground and are willing to fly places to do research.

That's really cool to me.

Yeah, absolutely.

I mean, that's kind of the neat part about writing in a way.

It's like I...

People trust me.

They give me $11

and they say, Ryan, tell me a story, but I want it to be cool.

And in order for it to be cool, like I need to get the details right.

One good example is in my novel, Winslow, Arizona is technically part of Deseret territory, that is enemy territory, occupied Deseret.

Now, remember that Eagle song, Take It Easy?

Yeah.

There's the line, standing on a corner in Winslow, Arizona.

Well,

so in this world, when I write this book,

I have to think, all right, did the Eagles still have that line in that song?

Maybe they did because

in this timeline, the United States goes goes to war with Deseret in 1931 over the construction of the Boulder Dam.

They do a horrible job.

It's the Depression.

They're fighting on territory they don't know.

The tank really hasn't been invented yet.

It's not really in service in the U.S.

Army.

Guys get lost in the desert.

Deseret hands their ass to the Americans, and they take most of northern Arizona, and that becomes Hellemon

province in my book.

And so that's, there's a question of when the Eagles create the song, take it easy.

Do they say Arizona sitting on the corner of Winslow, Arizona?

You're going deep.

And I decide, yes, they do, because their grandparents probably fought in 1931.

And there's a lot of Americans who don't view Hellemon Province as valid.

They view it as American territory that Deseret took.

Interesting.

So that's a thing to say during this battle.

Someone recalls that.

that song.

So you take the history part serious, but then you also incorporate like the fantasy.

Absolutely.

I mean, in my novel, Mitt Romney was president of Deseret.

Trump was actually a Democrat.

Wow.

And

he won two terms after Obama.

He was a Democrat.

And one huge problem that America had with Deseret was lost boys, which means that there were

in Deseret, polygamy is still a thing.

But

it's rare, like maybe 10% of all couples are polygamists.

It's just not practical in modern society.

Only the very very wealthy and the very rural have multiple, multiple wives.

But there is a problem with lost boys.

These are boys who can't get married.

And so what do these boys do?

Well, they cross the border into America to work illegally.

And Deseret's not sending their best.

They're sending the losers who couldn't get married.

And so Trump says, we're going to build a wall, and Deseret's going to pay for it.

Sounds similar, right?

Well, that's the neat part about writing an alternate history because you put in these little Easter eggs and people can go, hey, I remember.

But thank you for inviting me on to talk about this book, but I can talk about lots of other Intel stuff.

Yeah,

what's fascinating in your world lately?

I know you're constantly investigating all this stuff.

China just had a massive Victory Day parade.

It was a parade that they

used to celebrate their victory over Japan in 1945.

And we saw a lot of new Chinese equipment, some which might be Viz mods or visually modified equipment, meaning it isn't actually real, but they're making it look like it's real.

They marched really well.

I know a lot of people look at our military and they look at the parade that President Trump did for the Army's birthday, and their marching wasn't great.

The old guard, their marching was spot on because that's what they do.

Right.

Old guard, they march all the time.

Their marching was great.

Regular army, some are good.

Some are okay, but we spend all our time training.

And so when you look at China and these guys are marching in perfect step, you know, like, well, that's because they spent three months rehearsing that.

So what are they not doing during those other three months?

Training.

Doing

a lot of optics, you're saying it is a lot of optics.

Another thing I noticed was that a lot of the vehicles looked visually modified in the sense that they didn't have anchor points.

So on many military vehicles, you want to have these little cleats so you can tie down equipment, tie down pioneer gear, like picks, axes, shovels, extra equipment.

You would tie it off to a certain place.

So look at some of their equipment.

They didn't have those tie-downs.

So to me, that's an indicator of this isn't actually a ready piece of equipment.

This is something that they put into service just for this parade

dragon missile.

So they want everyone to think they appear.

with advanced technology, you're saying?

And I think they certainly do.

One interesting thing was

their new rifle was the QBZ-191, which kind of looks like a heck

of an HK

416.

Now, granted, there's only so many ways to make a rifle.

But they used to have this bullpup rifle called the QBZ-95.

That was the rifle that was made famous when they took over Taiwan.

We all looked and these guys had these bullpup rifles with a magazine in back.

And we all went, oh my God, China has this new rifle.

And, you know, I often said, like, it's almost like a goth phase.

Like, every country goes through a bullpup phase.

They think like, hey, a bullpup rifle would be great.

And then they try it out for 20 years and they go back to an HK 416 type, right?

A standard layout type.

What's interesting is that this was the first parade I've seen where every single person has a QBZ-191.

And they first fielded that in 2019.

The special forces started using it in 2023.

And now, granted, we're not seeing the units that don't have this rifle yet, but they were able to fill out at least a division's worth of people with this rifle.

So, hmm, okay.

So they made a lot of them.

Well, yeah, I mean, they have to make enough for an army of 2.2 million people.

Jeez, right?

That's how big their army is.

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Yeah, I mean, I'm including other military forces as well, or rocket forces, or cyber forces.

It was roughly 2.2.

I'm doing this off the top of my head, but

that's correct.

Do you see China as a big threat to America?

We will be at war with China in 2027 or 2028.

Really?

You're that convinced?

Yeah.

Why so?

What makes you so compelled?

Because Xi Jinping has literally said, we're going to invade China.

Oh, really?

Yeah, that's kind of how it works.

When a dictator says something, you believe them.

He's told his army to be ready by 2027 to invade China, which is their 100th anniversary of the founding of the Chinese Communist Party.

And the PLA, the People's Liberation Army,

is

a it's not the army of China.

You know,

oh, the Chinese army.

Well, they're not the Chinese army.

The People's Liberation Army is the army of the Communist Party in China.

And that's kind of why they have these weird names: PLA, People's Liberation Army, PLAGF, People's Liberation Army Ground Forces, PLAN, People's Liberation Army Navy, because the People's Liberation Army is the military wing of the party.

And they have a ground forces, a navy, an air force, a cyber force, a rocket force.

So

it's kind of interesting.

if you look at actual Chinese history, you look at the actual revolution in China, which was kind of put on hold for World War II and then it renewed afterwards.

When you look at that, it was actually very common for Chinese political parties to have armed wings.

And that, so it is, it is perfectly normal in Chinese culture to have an armed wing of the political party.

But China, I wake up and I go to sleep every day thinking about how we can rapidly and more

most efficiently kill Chinese soldiers entering Taiwan.

Holy crap.

That's your thought process.

That's when I wake up in the morning, I'm thinking, how can we kill Chinese?

And when I go to bed at night, I'm thinking, how can we kill Chinese soldiers as they come off the boat?

So you would never visit China?

Oh, I wouldn't be allowed to because I sold the security clearance.

I wouldn't be allowed to visit.

Wow.

It was tough enough going to Israel.

Yeah, that must have been a process, huh?

I mean, I have to get a briefing.

Because the Israelis are our friends, but

they're allies.

Depending Depending on who you talk to,

they're allies, but they're not necessarily our friends, right?

So I can tell you, like, you know, going to Israel, like you go with that, all right, I need to buy a second laptop.

I need to buy a second phone.

You didn't trust having your devices there?

No, not one bit.

Wow.

Not one bit.

I have a lot of respect for the Israeli military.

I have a lot of respect

for Israel, the country.

But

there is a level of, you know what, I know what your capabilities are.

And so I'm going to kind of go my own route

and

do what I need to do to protect myself.

What was your objective going there?

What were you trying to invest in?

So I was,

I have another job working for Newsmax, which is a, I'm not a conservative, but it's a conservative cable news channel.

And they sent me there to do two stories, one on the,

there was a rocket attack on some Drews children in the north.

This was by Hezbollah.

Hezbollah was firing rockets.

One went into the soccer field, killed 12 children playing soccer.

And I had another story about the 69th Hammer Squadron and what they did over Iran.

Because they flew for 12 days straight.

They flew to Iran.

They refueled a mid-air over northern Iraq, the Kurdish-controlled portion.

They dropped bombs on Iran, and they came back, and there wasn't a single casualty.

They didn't lose a single plane.

Holy crap.

And what they did was pretty darn amazing.

So that was kind of my mission.

We had, there was some other stuff.

Like I got a chance to cover.

So funny story.

I got a chance to cover a couple of stories.

I interviewed the Israeli president, who doesn't do anything.

He's kind of a figurehead, but I was able to ask one question.

And then President Netanyahu came to speak.

And I actually fell asleep.

I was so tired.

I was so exhausted.

Because

I like Newsmax.

They've always treated me well, even though I'm not a conservative.

They still treat me, you know, like

a valued contributor.

But they were working us like five in the morning, 11 at night.

You have to file.

They need to make money too.

They're not sending us there for a vacation.

They're there to work.

I had a number of Israelis say, like, Ryan, come, come, come and come and meet my family and come to shabbat and do this and do that and like damn i am working

right you know i'd love to meet your mom you know she hot

that was actually kind of the weird thing like i'm 50 years old i know i don't look it i'm 50 years old i was thinking like man maybe i'll meet there's got to be a lot of divorces from the war going on for two years there's got to be plenty of women my age who are single now Didn't see it.

I saw plenty of people who are like, are you?

Are you?

Yeah.

That's funny.

It's cool to see you have fans out there, though.

It is very, like, do you get recognized?

Internationally, I don't travel internationally enough, but definitely domestically.

Like, at airports, I'll get stopped.

Oh, you're very tall.

I'm tall.

I'm Asian with curly hair.

I'm definitely recognizable.

Yeah.

Not a lot of people look like me, but you have a pretty distinct.

I mean, I wear a hat.

You're probably walking around with whiskey hats.

A whiskey, a cigar hanging out of my mouth, right?

Sorry, you can't smoke here.

Yeah.

It's okay.

I'm Ryan Macbeth.

Yeah, I mean, I get recognized a lot, which is the first couple of times it was weird.

Yeah.

And I don't, I don't mind it.

Like now I'm at the point where I'll say to somebody, would you like a selfie?

Because I can tell they want to actually,

but they don't want to like be weird about it.

And I would say 99% of all

my interactions with fans have been positive.

At one time, a guy, like, I was coming out of the bathroom.

Yeah.

And this guy.

touched my shoulder and I turned and I grabbed my gun and it cleared leather.

I was ready to go.

Damn.

I mean, I've had Russians threaten me.

I've had other Americans threaten me, you know, and God knows the pro-Hamas people with their planning, right?

And the guy was like, no, I just saw you.

I wanted to.

And I look over and his family is over there.

The guy was at, I was at, I think I was seeing Oppenheimer.

Wow.

And like, I came out of the bathroom and the guy touched, like, don't touch someone.

Never.

That's weird.

Never.

That's weird.

No, there's, there's lines.

You don't, especially bathrooms a line for me.

Like, that's a weird spot to greet someone, especially at the urinal.

Yeah.

While you're eating, I feel like it's a little invasive at a restaurant, you know?

Yeah, I don't, I'm trying to think.

Have I been, I don't think I've ever been, no one's ever come up to me at a table at a restaurant, but at the airport, all the time.

Airport, for sure.

Airport, all the time.

Any haters ever come up to you?

I once had a guy chase me down Route 495 in a Honda Civic, a black Honda Civic that had been painted like hand-painted black with like brush paint and then written on it in white paint, U.S.

off-NATO borders.

So this guy

was driving down 495 from Washington, D.C., where I live.

Yeah.

And he's trying to cut me off and like trying to get me to stop.

And I have my gun out and I'm like, crap, I'm going to have to freaking get into a gun battle on 495, right?

So he recognized you or was it a road rage thing?

I don't know.

No, no, he recognized me or he was following me.

Wow.

Which has happened before.

Really?

Yeah.

Like I had a guy follow me around IKEA.

What?

Yeah.

I was at IKEA and this dude was like following me around IKEA.

Dude, that's wild.

At what point do you confront them for that?

You don't.

I don't think.

So, you know what's weird is occasionally you see like ultra-liberal people go like, you know, oh, you know, these gun owners, they don't want to come into the city because they're afraid of the homeless.

They're afraid of like.

When you choose to carry a gun, your very next motivation is never to use that weapon.

Right.

Ever.

So you don't even put yourself into situations.

So you don't confront anybody.

You can't, you walk away.

In the case of the guy on 485, I was, I got off on an exit.

I went right.

I had a Tesla at the time.

I just typed in the police station, the closest police station, went right there, guy pulled away.

Smart.

I'm not, I don't, look,

I pay, I think I pay $60 a month for USCCA, you know, the platinum plan.

Yeah.

That doesn't mean I want to use it.

Makes sense.

Yeah, especially in the state that you're in, and you could be the one that gets in trouble for using it.

You could be.

I mean, you have to be smart about it.

I mean, it's something that you use to

defend yourself if you ever have to, but you shouldn't go looking for it, right?

Yeah, for sure.

Never go looking for it.

And then Elon switched up.

Is that when you got rid of the Tesla?

I did get rid of the Tesla.

Did you watch that video?

I actually didn't.

So

I had a Tesla for the longest time, and I was in, I liked my Tesla.

So funny story.

I had a Ford Ranger, a Candy Apple Red Ford Ranger.

I was in the military.

I had that thing for since 1998.

When I

got to, when I started working at Accenture doing Intel stuff, doing the Intel software, I was a manager.

I'm like, crap, you know, I should probably get a bit.

I'm like taking out, taking people out to lunch, taking clients out and new employees in a 1998 Candy Apple Red,

you know, Ford Ranger extended cab with a tape deck, right?

Like, when I was a sergeant in the Army, it was a, it was a, it was great, right?

Because you couldn't get a fat chick in there.

You can only date skinny girls, right?

But, um, I guess you could put them in the bed.

But, um,

it's my old first sergeant said, if you can't pick them up, don't pick them up.

Good rule.

Good rule.

But, uh, I remember, uh, you know, I'm driving people to, to lunch, and it's like,

man, I need to get a better car.

So I bought a Tesla, but it was never me.

Like, it wasn't me.

I am a light truck guy.

Yeah.

And

so when

I had, when I was driving in Washington, D.C.,

and I have a D.C.

carry permit, someone, he started approaching my vehicle and I couldn't see his hands.

He started going, F.

Elon Musk, you know, as he's approaching me.

And my freaking gun comes out again.

And the light turns green and I just go.

But that's the best way to handle it.

Lights green, go.

And that's when I thought I need to get rid of this car.

there's too many crazy people.

Yeah.

Um, and who want to come after me, not because I'm Ryan Macbeth, but because I'm driving Tesla, they don't like Elon Musk.

You know what?

And the other thing that pissed me off, the B-pillar trim always kept popping out.

I had it fixed like twice and it just kept popping up.

Same old line.

Ford fixed this three years ago.

And so I went and I bought a Ford Ranger.

Yeah.

And I'm happy again.

I like my light truck.

I can carry plywood in it.

I still do carpentry.

Yeah, I'm an SUV guy myself.

I had a Tesla Model 3.

I'm too tall for it.

And it was never me.

And out here in Vegas, man, the battery would die in like two trips.

Really?

And then I'd have to charge it.

Yeah, because it's hot out.

The battery dies quicker.

I actually, I didn't know that.

I would figure here it'd be great.

You probably have solar on your house and all that.

I do have solar on the house, but

this is like one of the few places solar makes absolute sense.

Yeah, yeah, I think we made it back already.

Like, it's sunny all the time here.

Yeah.

You like living here, right?

I like it.

Summers are a little rough, you know.

I go to the East Coast in the summers, D.C.

and New York, film out there for a bit.

Do you actually take advantage of the casinos and the shows?

I go to the shows.

Yeah.

The casinos, food is pricey, so locals don't really go there.

Really?

Yeah, we eat off-strip.

So, do you know Jake Bro, the Ukraine guy?

No, is he out here?

Yeah, he's here.

I'm going to see him probably tonight.

We're going to dinner.

He's a Ukraine guy, like he's pro-Ukraine.

Bro, Ukraine, he has a whole show he does about Ukraine.

Here's what's going on in Ukraine.

He raised millions of dollars for Ukraine.

I'm actually trying to raise 100,000 for my 50th birthday.

Nice.

For what?

For non-lethal stuff.

Because I have a security clearance still, so I can't send lethal aid over.

I can't send money because you send money to an organization that's using lethal aid and it's like Azov and on a list.

You're screwed.

Wow.

So

my thing is non-lethal aid, we're talking about first aid kits, trucks, gasoline,

just stuff, stuff people need.

Respect.

We'll link your donation link in the video.

That's really kind of you.

I used to see the Ukraine stuff all over my social media.

Now I feel like it's all Israel.

On my feet, at least.

I don't know about yours.

I mean,

it's a horrible thing to say, but the lines in Ukraine are mostly static.

So there's really not much to report on.

Other than, hey, Ukraine is using this new kind of weapon.

I mean, I can talk about some of the drones that are coming out of Ukraine, some of the advances in AI, automated targeting.

But I think one of the issues with Israel is that it'll get clicks

and what makes money, right?

Because we're at the point now where people are, no one's in the middle.

You either think Israel's a genocidal monster or you think that Israel's just trying to defend itself.

There's really no one in the middle now.

That's true.

Everyone's chosen their side.

Everyone's chosen their side.

Yeah.

And for the most part, it seems like a lot of people have gone over to the terrorist side.

They've gone to the Palestine side, right?

On Twitter, at least, that's what I see.

I mean,

it's what's kind of interesting about the whole thing is that

when I first, when I went to Israel,

I used to have this idea, and General Petraeus had the same idea, which was we need to create a sons of Palestine,

which in Iraq, we created the Sons of Iraq, which were moderate Iraqis who were Sunni Muslim.

And we paid them $250 a month, and we gave them a rifle and two weeks of training and said, okay, go defend your country.

Go man this checkpoint.

Go find these terrorists and kill them.

Right?

Go take back your country.

I thought, why can't we do this with the Palestinians?

General Petraeus did the same thing.

And then when I went to Israel and I actually talked with some of the soldiers and I talked with some of the victims of October 7th, I went, oh,

I was wrong.

We can't do that.

Wow.

Because if we armed moderate Palestinians as soon as they were done killing Hezbollah or as soon as they were done killing Hamas, they would turn right and march right into Israel.

You think so?

Absolutely.

Wow.

Without a doubt.

Because Hamas is painted as the villain.

They're the villain.

There's no, you know,

there's no, there's no other better way to put that.

They're the villain.

When you look at, I mean, I saw a video where,

and it was actually one of Israel's mistakes.

Don't get me wrong.

Israel has made a lot of mistakes, and I've called them out on certain things.

That's why I like the way you report, too.

When they've made mistakes, I'm like, dude, you're screwing this up.

Don't do this.

You don't have blind allegiance towards one side.

I don't, but

speaking as a former Army sergeant, Army NCO, I can look at Israel and go, you're screwing this up because you're trying to do this on the cheap because you don't have professional non-commissioned officers.

And when I went to Israel, like everyone who was at brigade level and below, they were amazing.

Everyone at brigade level and above couldn't find their ass with a flashlight of map in a four-hour meeting.

Wow.

That is interesting, right?

So poor leadership.

I have never met a people so confident in their own incompetence.

It's just, it's absolutely like, how the hell are you guys a country?

I wonder how it got to that point where the leadership struggles like that.

I don't know.

I mean, I guess what I can think of is that for the most part, a lot of people who join the, so Israel is conscripted, right?

Everyone joins.

And if you are, if for the most part, people do their, it's almost three years now if you're male.

I think it's two years for female.

You do your, you do your time and you get the hell out.

Yeah.

And you go do something else.

And then you're a reservist until like each other 40 or 43 or 45.

I can't remember the exact number.

It depends on what you did.

Yeah.

So

for the most part, people do their two years and they get the hell out.

And then the next thing they do is they backpack all around like Asia and India and they come back and they start college.

Yeah.

Right.

And they start a business or they come to New York and open up a stereo shop.

Right.

Like they do like one of the,

they do that in order, essentially.

But what one thing nobody does is stay in.

So the people that stay in are either really good at it or they can't do anything else.

They don't have a plan B.

They don't have a plan B.

That makes sense.

And

if those people just kind of keep rising up.

Yeah.

And eventually they're at Brigadier General level and they're in command of the division.

They're in command of the theater.

Right.

And they're like, hey, we're going to have an NCV, a non-combatant casualty cutoff of 20.

We can kill 20 civilians in order to kill one bad guy.

In the U.S.

Army, we had an NCV of maybe five.

Really?

Five to one.

And

99% of the time it was zero.

If we were looking for Daddy El Baddy and there was one civilian with Daddy El Baddy, we couldn't kill Daddy El Baddy.

Wow.

And they're willing to go 20 to one in Israel?

At least one brigade was.

Holy crap.

Which is that a lot.

And that's where I think the big issues are that I see, at least on social media, when it's civilian casualties, right?

I mean, look, you

just because

one thing a lot of people don't seem to understand, they saw this with Ukraine, people said, oh my God, that's a war crime.

Like, actually, it's kind of not.

You are allowed to do that thing.

Because war is so foreign to so many people or they only know what they saw in Call of Duty,

they don't understand what is a war crime and what is not a war crime.

One good example is perfidy, where you can't wear the enemy's uniform or you can't feign surrender

in order to gain an advantage.

You can use deception.

Oh, you can't do that.

You can't do that.

You can use deception, but you can't use it.

Like a spy.

Yeah, or like

you can shout for someone like, yeah, over here, come over here.

We're friendly troops over here.

And then when the guy gets there, you're not friendly and you kill him.

You can do that, but you can't wear the enemy's uniform while you're doing it i never knew that that's actually really perfety yeah it's good to know or if you're surrendering you can't fake surrender and then whip out your guns and

you can't do that either it's perfect

so uh i saw just a couple of days ago there was a ukrainian who convinced a bunch of russians to come over him to him and he shot him and they said this is a war crime well

from the distance we're out viewing this thing from the drone, I can't tell who's wearing what camouflage because it's all just kind of green.

So, I don't know if this is perfidy or not, and I don't know what they're saying on the ground.

Interesting, you know, I don't know if the guy is claiming I'm surrendering, yeah, so it could have been anything.

It could be anything, and that's something if you're pro-Russia, you're gonna view it one way, if you're pro-Ukraine, you're gonna view it the other way.

You need to view it in the totality of the circumstance.

What was the war crime that Netanyahu was being tried for?

Because I saw that online, it was being tried for or wanted for.

Uh, you know, I actually don't know, but you can probably pick your poison

on that.

I'd actually have to think about that because I am not a lawyer and it would be like a Hague thing to say like, all right, you know, we are,

I guess, I guess, so here's kind of the funny thing.

One, one thing you could probably say is

Israel is displacing people.

which

that's necessarily a war crime, but I guess one component of genocide might be displacement of peoples.

However, like one of the things that I always kind of wondered about the conflict was if Israel was smart, what they should have done was open the border down at Khan Yunis at the Karem Shalom crossing, open all their crossings, let women and children into Israel, put them up in camps.

If you want to come in, come in through the crossing.

We're going to search you as you come in.

We're going to put you in a camp.

We're going to give you food.

We're going to give you water.

We're going to give you medical care.

We're going to set up a school for your kids.

And then we're going to walk north through Gaza and kill everybody who isn't dressed like us.

That would have been the smart thing to do.

Or ask

Egypt, open up your border at Rafah, Rafa crossing, let people in, build a camp.

Egypt wouldn't want that because they're terrified of the Palestinians.

They hate them.

Because they're associated with the Muslim Brotherhood.

The Muslim Brotherhood is this

not so nice terrorist organization inside of Egypt.

Oh, yeah.

Oh, oh my God, the Egyptians, they hate the Palestinians.

Wow.

I haven't looked into the Muslim Brotherhood, but that might be another rabbit hole I got to dive into.

They hate the Palestinians.

So ideally, we should have done that, but if Israel had done that, people would go, oh, my God, they're displacing the Palestinians from their land.

The reason that you see a lot of civilian casualties in this particular war is that this is the first time I can think of in modern dialogue.

Yeah, I think this is the first time I've ever seen a LISCO conflict, a large-scale combat operation,

where we didn't let people leave.

Now, Israel did let people like, all right, well, you can go from Gaza City down to Khan Yunus, and then we're going to have you go from Khan Yunis all the way back up to Gaza City.

They did that thing, but we didn't let them leave the area.

They're still in an area with tunnels, and tunnels are everywhere.

There's more tunnels underneath Gaza than there are a subway track in New York City.

Holy crap.

Between 350 and 450 miles.

And the number keeps changing every day as they find more stuff.

And are people escaping through those or what are they being?

making?

No, no, it's just that one of the reasons you see all these destroyed houses, it's two reasons.

The first is IEDs, improvised explosive devices.

So the bad guys, up to 70% of the houses in Gaza, have IEDs and stuff.

Holy crap.

So if you're an Israeli squad, you're like,

I'm not clearing that building.

Bring in the D9.

They bring in the bulldozer,

crash the house.

They don't chance it, yeah?

No, they don't chance it.

The other thing is tunnels.

There's so many tunnels underneath that when they find a tunnel and they put explosives in it and they collapse the tunnel, all the houses on top collapse as well.

Wow.

So, one of the issues that Israel has had is that

there's essentially two types of warfare: LISCO, large-scale combat operations,

state-on-state actions, like World War II, that's a LISCO thing.

And there is COIN, counter-insurgency.

That was Vietnam.

Try to win hearts and minds, get the people on your side, that kind of thing.

I think the reason the war in Gaza is kind of ending up the way it is is that Israel is trying to do something that's in the middle,

and so what they're ending up with is losses, unacceptable losses on the civilian side, and this general sense of like, we don't know what we're doing, and you don't know what you're doing because there is no doctrine for it.

There's no doctrine for this middle-of-the-road thing.

There's coin doctrine, there's counterinsurgency doctrine.

Jerry Petraeus wrote it.

I'll give Israel my copy.

Maybe they ought to follow it.

But if you're trying to do list go operations and there's still people inside the community,

you're going to kill a hell of a lot of people.

And that's where information warfare comes into play.

And then they blast it everywhere.

And now a lot of people are against them.

Well, Hamas knows that they can't win by force of arms.

Right.

Hamas is finished.

They are dead men.

Do you think so?

No, absolutely.

Wow.

They're dead men.

Israel will hunt them down until there's not a single man left.

That being said, the only way they can win, and I'm putting that in quotes, because there's no win.

There's lose and lose more.

I've said the same thing about Ukraine.

He was like, oh, you say Ukraine is going to win.

No.

Ukraine is going to lose and Russia is going to lose.

The question is who loses more?

You don't think Russia wins if they get the land they wanted?

No, I still consider it a loss because who's going to trade with them?

How do they get their economy back?

Because you have these oligarchs.

these Russian oligarchs who helped fund this war against Ukraine.

They're the ones paying the high taxes.

They're the ones getting hit with, I think it's a 21%, 22% inflation.

Jeez.

Gas prices in Israel are up to like

$1, $1.03 a liter, which might seem cheap to us, but a liter.

You have to do the conversion to rubles.

I don't know the conversion.

And it was once like 33 cents for a liter.

So going up like, God,

three times yeah all right two times three times that's a lot i'm actually and doing some research about that right now i'm looking at some of the uh because ukraine keeps striking russia oil facilities there's like 80 russian oil refineries um

and

my

theory is like every time they strike an oil refinery does the price of gas go up so i downloaded all the russian gas prices week by week trying to map every single strike i know that's what i do you're the only one that does that i i am the only one that does that.

You're right.

But then I have this intelligence packet.

You could leverage that to make money, I bet, somehow.

Well, yeah, I do.

I mean, I have my sub-stack.

It's only $5 a month.

And when you join my sub-stack, you get access to all these papers.

I just wrote a paper today.

Well, not today.

I mean, I wrote it two months ago, but I just released a video today that was the subject of a paper.

The video was about this paper that I did that was about all of the Russian efforts in Africa, in the Arctic, in the Middle East,

because Russia has some bases in the Middle East and they have bases in Africa.

They're expanding into the Arctic as global warming heats up and more areas melt and you have

Russian permafrost, like that part of Siberia becomes easier to mine.

You know, a lot of natural resources are going to be exposed.

And Russia is perfectly positioned to exploit those natural resources.

Interesting.

If they can find the funding to do it, because the funding is going to come to Russia.

Most of their oil extraction equipment is Western.

So, okay, they might win.

Let's say they do manage to capture Ukraine, which, if we're going by square kilometers gained every week, it'll be about seven years before they take all of it.

Damn, seven more years.

70.

Oh, 70.

70.

That's how slow Russia's.

But wars never last that long.

So that's.

There's a hundred years' war.

Really?

You know, okay.

Yeah, that was like in the medieval times, but yeah.

Modern wars, I mean, I guess.

No, they don't tend to last that long because

people have asked me how this thing's going to end, Russia and Ukraine.

And I've said that it's going to end one of two ways.

Either Russia fails as a nation because they just physically can't keep up with

the war.

They can't.

Yeah, with their own support, that probably wouldn't happen, though, right?

I don't think Trump supports Russia.

Boy.

What a statement right there.

Yeah, yeah.

Put that up.

Yeah, that's a good one.

There's a short for you right there.

I don't think Trump supports Russia.

Trump supports Russia, but there is a person, an Undersecretary of Defense for Policy.

His name is Elbridge Colby.

Look at the guy up.

Elbridge Colby looks like every guy who ever fired your dad.

All right.

But he happens to be the Undersecretary of Defense for Policy.

And this guy has a raging war boner for China, like bigger than mine.

And yeah.

That's hard to do.

That's hard to do.

And so that's why, like, remember a couple of months ago, we suddenly stopped all arms shipments to Ukraine.

And the president was like, what the hell do you do that for?

That was Elbridge Colby.

Oh.

He just took it on his own to just wow.

He had that authority to do it.

It's not that he hates Ukraine.

It's that he really hates China.

And to him, every single weapon system we send over to China is, or every single weapon system we send over to Ukraine is one less we can use against China.

That's one of the reasons.

Like, there's a lot of YouTubers doing all these videos about we're going to invade Venezuela.

Oh, my God.

Over Elbridge Colby's dead freaking body.

Are we invading Venezuela?

Yeah.

That would take so many resources, so many missiles that we just don't have.

Yeah, we got to save it for China.

We got to save it for China.

And we might, you know, we fired a hellfire at one Trendiagua fast boat, right?

A hellfire is $60,000.

Damn, just for one missile.

Yeah.

Holy crap.

I've often said, whenever you see someone firing a javelin anti-tank missile, I want you to imagine dropping a Ferrari from a building like in Ferris Bueller's Day off.

Holy crap.

Yeah.

That's not roughly how much it costs.

Okay, so that's the first way you could see ending Russia fails.

What was the second way?

So the first way, Russia fails as a nation.

They collapse, and you have a bunch of warlords fighting each other in Russia.

And that's how Ukraine gets back Crimea and the Donbass.

Number two is there is some sort of peace plan put into place.

Russia doesn't get Crimea back.

They don't get the Donbass back.

There's peacekeepers in Donbas, maybe for non-aligned nations like Myanmar, right, they can send troops or Brazil, they might send troops to be on the border.

And then you have like a, almost like the multinational force and observers in Israel and Egypt, where you have an A zone, a B zone, and a C zone, and you're allowed a thousand troops in the A zone and you know, 10,000 troops in the B zone, and the C zone is whatever.

That's the other way I see it anyway, some sort of negotiated settlement.

Ukraine doesn't get everything they want and Russia doesn't get everything they want.

I actually believe that second option is most likely.

I don't necessarily see Ukraine getting Crimea back unless Russia collapses.

It's just, it's, it's too, it's a bridge too far.

Yeah.

Uh, there is one narrow land strip going into Crimea.

It would have to be an amphibious operation.

Amphibious operations are hard.

And Ukraine just doesn't have the troops to make a breakthrough like that.

They are working on like robotic assault vehicles.

So, like, maybe they send them self-driving?

Yeah,

so

commanded by a person now.

So essentially there was just, I think back in December, there was a National Guard unit, Ukrainian National Guard unit, that sent these killer robots into a Russian position.

They were actually able to shoot and they captured people with a robot.

And they were guided by people with joystick controllers.

And

the robot would send data up to a drone that was hovering and that drone was acting as a relay station to holy crap signal so yeah they had an all-drone attack it was mainly uh

small wheeled drones using pks which are a machine gun a medium machine gun these drones were shooting guns yeah

wow i need to see a video of that yeah i can show you that's crazy so that's the future war right there uh well that and uh drone swarm so ukraine has already worked on drones where they have a spotter drone and they have two killers so it's a hunter hunter killer.

What?

Yeah.

And these, so you,

the, the, um, oh my god, it's a copy of the shit, the Ceph.

The Ceph drone already has a programming controller where you say, okay, I want you to fly to this area.

I want you to look for a tank.

If you can't find a tank, I want you to find an armored personnel carrier.

If you can't find an armored personnel carrier, try to find a command vehicle.

And so the drone is using AI pattern matching.

image recognition.

Wow.

Yeah.

That is no.

Oh, there's a tank.

Okay.

Now the next phase of that is you have a controller and you have two attack drones.

And these two attack drones are like, all right, what are we looking for?

And the controller goes, all right, well, we're going to try to find this thing.

If we can't find it, we find this thing.

And so the two attack drones hit their targets and the controller flies back and lands.

Diesels.

Is there a way to disable those at the moment?

No, the funny thing is that for the most part,

once you start an AI program, there's no...

You can't turn it off.

You can't turn it off.

Holy crap.

You can use something like a semaphore.

So you might show like a visual representation of a letter or a character, and that'll get on program.

And then when you see this other character, okay, off program.

And you need that to like...

Let's say you launch these drones from a certain location and they're supposed to come back to another location to land, but that location is compromised.

You might put panels there that spell out a letter.

So the thing reads that letter and goes, Oh, I have to go to the secondary site.

Because as soon as you put a radar, as soon as you put a radio on something, it can be jammed or it can be hacked.

Yeah, that's what I was wondering.

If someone was sending a drone to the U.S., could we disable it, I guess, remotely somehow with jamming or something?

It would.

So, like, are they launching the drone from the U.S.?

I guess they have to, right?

Because it'd be too far away if they launched it from somewhere else.

You could probably.

So, one of my big fears, I mean, I occasionally go down to Virginia Beach.

There's a girl I know down there.

Love the ladies.

Yeah, well,

it is absolutely amazing what I do.

Yes, I will drive four hours with that.

But although it's interesting is

every year, this girl's condo association tries to ban smoking in the building.

Oh, they don't like you there.

And, you know, I'm like, listen, if they succeed, sorry, we're done.

Cigars over a woman.

Absolutely.

And why do you think I drink so much?

I look at Norfolk.

Look, the port of Norfolk and Norfolk Naval Base, which is where we have most, I think, all of our carriers

on the East Coast,

it's right next to each other.

So who's to say you couldn't launch a shipping container drone attack?

against a bunch of aircraft carriers that are idling at the port.

Wow, we keep them all there.

I believe so, yeah.

That's it.

I think that's where all of our aircraft carriers are homeported.

I might be wrong.

I'm not really that much of a Navy guy.

That's Salmon Tigliano of

what's going on with shipping.

Should have him on the show.

He can talk about

whatever.

Not Navy, like Merchant Marine.

Huh.

Like when he was in the first Gulf War, he was on a ship called the Mercy, which was like a hospital ship.

We have two of them, the Mercy and the Comfort, but he knows all about plenty of his content.

There's hospital ships.

Yeah, we have hospital ships.

I mean, it's a literal, it is almost like a cruise liner, you know, but it has an operating theater inside of it.

It has a deck to land helicopters on.

Wow.

So you get medevaced onto the ship.

Onto the ship, and they'll work on you right there.

Oh, crap.

And you'll do your convalescence on the ship.

Absolutely.

Damn.

Yeah.

It's cool.

You know all this.

I got a fun question for you.

Okay.

You've studied a lot of wars, I bet.

I want to know which war is the most fascinating to you.

Which one have you spent the most time researching about?

Probably the Toyota War.

Toyota War.

So Libya invaded Chad at one point.

And

essentially, Libya under Muammar Gaddafi, they were invading Chad, and Libya was using all this Russian equipment and all this stuff.

And these soldiers in Chad, we offered help.

The French and the Americans offered help to the Chadians.

You know, what would you like?

You want anti-tank missiles?

You want this?

You want that?

And they're like, no, we just want pickup trucks and machine guns.

They knew how to repair toyota pickup trucks they they knew their way around medium machine guns uh

have you ever heard the term technical technical in what sense as in a machine gun truck oh no i haven't all right so uh this this actually started back in the term technical started back in somalia in uh the 1990s 1993 or so um

So essentially, these warlords would weld heavy machine guns to their pickup trucks.

And back back then, aid agencies who were bringing food aid into Somalia, they had to pay these warlords to escort them as security to where they're giving out their food.

And because you can't put down bribes to warlords on your expense sheet as, you know, and as a valid expense, you would put, they, you know, the people would put down technical payments.

So these trucks became technicals.

So I think one of the fascinating things was the Chadian Chad Army

who decided, like, you know what?

We can't use these tanks.

We can't use armored personnel carriers.

Our population is not educated enough to use these things, but we know pickup trucks.

We have plenty of shade tree mechanics.

We know how to use a heavy machine gun.

This is what we need.

You give us these things and we can win the fight.

They won with that setup.

Holy crap.

Look, I mean,

the Taliban used to use Toyota Hills pickup trucks.

Yeah, think of a Toyota

Tacoma.

Is it Tacoma?

It's a big car, yeah.

What's the smaller one?

There's the Tacoma and there's the Tundra.

So it's a Tacoma.

So it looks kind of like a Tacoma.

Weld a machine gun to the back.

You can put four to six Taliban on the back as dismounts.

So

I don't know how well you can see stuff, but like if

this is the enemy right here,

you know, you roll up, you roll up in your truck.

You dismount the infantry.

The infantry go around.

The truck fires its machine gun and suppresses a target.

The infantry come around.

They tell the truck to stop shooting and they assault through the objective.

Interesting.

So a truck with a heavy machine gun is actually a pretty good weapon, especially for

indigenous forces or forces who aren't that well trained.

You know, you're not learning complex mathematics or you don't have laser systems that can break down.

You got a truck.

You know how to fix that.

You go to Pep Boys.

Get a part.

Yeah.

And you got a machine gun and it's a bunch of brave dudes who can dismount and uh and assault through the objective.

Yeah.

Interesting.

I haven't heard about war.

My dad used to love war books.

He would read so many World War II books.

It was insane.

He probably read every single World War II book.

Well it's been over a hundred years since World War Two and we're still doing video games about it and stuff.

It's almost like we need to move on to something else.

But I think like for a lot of people that was They taught in history school, in history class growing up, so I think it kinda stuck with a lot of people.

Yeah, and you know, I think maybe it was the last good war, right?

The last war there was bad guys and there was good guys.

Yeah.

I mean, I kind of think Ukraine is kind of divided into good and bad as well, but you know, I also

I can see that there might have been an ideological purity

to fighting as the West against, I wouldn't say the West, it's fighting as the Allies against the Axis.

Yeah.

Because I mean, the Japanese are cutting people's heads off.

You're probably a bad guy.

No, it's a valid point.

Dropping poison gas on people?

Hmm.

Probably a bad guy.

And we did some messed up stuff.

Like, my God, if we lost the war against the japanese

world war everybody well i mean just think about it this way we probably would have been put up on war crimes charges for dropping incendiary you realize more people died from firebombing the japanese firebombing tokyo than roshima and nagasaki wow from firebombing well back then like we we are

we weren't that accurate when it came to dropping bombs, especially with like the jet stream and like you might be dropping 30,000 feet and you might have a bomb site that kind of can calculate where those bombs might fall under ideal conditions but there's wind and stuff like that right wasn't until we got lasers that we got good at more accurate more accurate so in japan like in the case of tokyo fire bombing we thought like well

we'll just drop a bunch of bombs on these rice paper houses and the wind should blow it toward the factory

you imagine doing that today

We didn't do that today.

If we lost, if we had lost against Japan, we would have been in trouble.

We would have been in trouble.

They would have been beheading dudes.

Yeah.

Without a doubt.

Wow.

See, the atomic bomb is what saved us, I guess, in a sense.

The atomic bomb is what saved us, but freaking conventional firebombing killed more Japanese than the atomic bombs.

Wow, that is nuts, isn't it?

Damn.

Well, Ryan, you're a fun guy to talk to.

I'd love to keep having you on whenever you're out here or when I'm in D.C.

Absolutely.

Has it been an hour?

Yeah.

Oh, my God.

An hour, man.

Yeah, 52 minutes.

Where could people find your book, find you, find your show?

Find my book.

Last Republic's on Amazon.

The new book, Laistruel Men, should be out by November.

Publishing process is crazy.

You got editing, and it's amazing.

I think it's published.

You read a book about 20 freaking times.

But you can find that at amazon.com or bunkerbranding.com, where you get a free sticker with it.

And here you're getting married.

I'm getting married in a month.

How do you feel about that?

I'm excited.

I've been with her for eight years, so she's the one, you know.

You've been married before, right?

Would be a horrible boss.

I've been married before.

Who the hell would marry this?

Like, seriously.

It's like, oh, honey, you need your medicine?

Let me finish my cigar first and I'll get you your medicine, okay?

That would be a horrible husband.

Don't ever marry me.

Seriously.

You would be an interesting husband, for sure.

But yeah, thanks for your time, man.

This was fun.

Thank you.

Thanks for the whiskey.

Cheers.

Cheers.

Nice.

I hope you guys are enjoying the show.

Please don't forget to like and subscribe.

It helps the show a lot with the algorithm.

Thank you.