SPEAKER_0 00:00:02
My guest today has lived more lives than most people can imagine, and I mean that literally. He's flown over 40 combat missions as an Air Force fighter pilot. He piloted the space shuttle. He commanded the International Space Station, spending 200 days living in a metal tube, hurtling around the Earth at more than 17,000 miles an hour. I can't even imagine what that's like. He directed a feature documentary. He's written two books. He lectures at Harvard and USC. And earlier this year, he ran for both Senate and Congress in Texas. So we have a warrior, an explorer, a filmmaker, a politician in one chair. And we get into what does it actually do to a person to see the entire Earth.
00:00:43
from a window and then come home to it. We're going to talk about what AI actually means for space, what leading a crew in zero gravity taught him about leadership on the ground, and why a man who's been to space decides that the next frontier is Congress. Colonel Terry Burks, welcome to Unscripted. Let's get into it.
SPEAKER_1 00:00:58
Thanks for having me on. When you when you put it that way, it's been it's been a busy few years.
SPEAKER_0 00:01:04
feel like almost like that's a mic drop like that so the introduction i mean you've already done so many amazing things um and i i know you've talked about this so much over the years but gotta start off with what's it like to be in space yeah so i mean that's the question everybody asked me all the time i actually did a talk yesterday up in dallas about this thing to an aviation group um
SPEAKER_1 00:01:27
the first thing it that you feel is you're weightless like there's no doubt that you're weightless as soon as they shut the engines off and what that feels like is you're falling because that's actually what's happening so i've got a got a watch here so if i you know on earth if you drop this watch one second later it'll hit the ground on the space station or space shuttle if i have my watch and i drop it One second later, it'll fall almost as far because the gravity is like 90%. It's not zero G. You're only a few hundred miles away from Earth, this massive planet. So that planet is pulling you with its gravity.
00:02:01
The difference is in that one second that it falls, you also move forward five miles. So that combination of falling and moving and falling and moving makes an orbit. If you're going at the exact right speed, it'll be roughly the shape of the Earth. you'll stay in orbit. So if it feels like you're falling, and it takes some time to get used to that it took me like the first two days, I had the worst headache of my life. I mean, I just had this raging headache.
00:02:24
And then on the third morning in space, it was like a light switch, like all the neurons in my brain finally wired themselves rewire themselves and all right i'm fine but you're still clumsy you know like you're it's hard to throw things because your brain's compensating for gravity and so it takes time to be able to throw things and hit the target you're trying to get to when you move yourself if you move with your hands so when you push off not only do you move but you also rotate and so that takes some time to get used to translate like on earth you just walk and gravity and friction and you're not accidentally spinning around unless you're on an ice rink it's
00:03:05
kind of like it's kind of like learning how to ice skate when you get to space like at first you're super awkward and then
SPEAKER_0 00:03:13
once you get the hang of it you just figure out how to do it or water ski right it's something i've never thought about it's got to be a bit of a challenge right like isn't like the food just kind of floating all over the place everything is yeah yes every like as we say everything is harder in space because it just except for pull-ups pull-ups are easier but um
SPEAKER_1 00:03:39
uh i feel like a slacker normally in the morning i try and i have a little gym down the street i try and get my 25 pull-ups in but this morning i didn't too many other things going on filming this program i won't tell anybody if you don't you know we'll we'll let that one slide so Well, I never did. I was kind of worried about it, and I never did. Each module is like a school bus kind of size, and there's something like 13, I think, or 14 or 15 modules. There's a bunch of American modules. There's four or five Russian modules.
00:04:20
the overall size is like a 747 or i think the volume is actually more than a 747 but it doesn't feel like you're in a 747 it feels like you're in a school bus you know it's a bunch of different school buses so you're not really claustrophobic the only time i got claustrophobic in the russian and i mean you're in there shoulder to shoulder there's three of you smashed your knees are up in your chest you can't you can't stretch out the capsule's not that big and before landing the seats do something called stroking where they they actually they lift you up so you got the control panel kind of normal distance you're pushing buttons and then a few minutes before landing
00:05:05
you know my right shoulder was smashed into the wall my left shoulder is in my the my cosmonaut friend there and then it was like okay i had this thought actually i can either panic in which case i'll be strapped in unable to move or do anything about it or i cannot panic in which case i'll still be strapped in so i had to make a conscious decision
00:05:29
to not panic because it was so it just felt so claustrophobic and then i was like okay it's fine
SPEAKER_0 00:05:34
you know they say a necessity is the mother of all invention right so you know clearly we have issues with russia and china and stuff when you're in space and you're with your fellow scientists and cosmos and astronauts does all that get suspended because you guys are there for a joint mission or you know how do you
SPEAKER_1 00:05:52
work together and keep some of these conflicts at bay i was uh my last flight was was when they first invaded ukraine it was 2014. they had annexed crimea we had put sanctions on them and we would start our our training or you always have toasting after you complete a training thing and it would Politica, politica. So politics is politics and then we'd always toast the equipage to the crew and the point was like we're not going to let that stuff interfere with us. It was tough like when we were in space when and we sanctioned them and the ruble devalued by half.
00:06:37
which actually and so they were on their phones with their families all the time what's going on um that was a boon for the cosmonauts they they got paid in dollars so when the ruble got cut in half their salary doubled in terms of all right this is great
00:06:54
they actually made a lot of money because of that because they were getting paid in dollars um they're much better capitalists than we are one day i was watching my cosmo he was drawing some blood or something and he said like 50 bucks i was like what are you talking about he said i just get paid they get paid for everything they do he's like you guys don't get paid i'm like no i don't get paid for it i get five dollars a day per diem
SPEAKER_0 00:07:16
after my 200 day flight i literally got a check for one thousand point zero zero dollars that was my that was my that was my bonus for going into space so wow like that's barely a bar tab for a couple friends you know it's like a night out uh yeah exactly so anyway um
SPEAKER_1 00:07:38
it was an interesting time i had this one night it was a very profound night i was looking out they have the russians have this big window in their service module and sasha samakuchayev who just passed away a few like a month ago a few months ago he and i were looking out the window and there was um we were flying over eastern europe and all of a sudden we saw these red flashes going off we
00:08:03
the russian war in ukraine we were watching bombs go off and it was really like we were both we didn't say a word we were just like mesmerized we couldn't believe we were watching this he came back to earth and joined the duma um in putin's party to support vladimir putin and and two other three cosmonauts that i flew with did that and several other cosmonauts that i didn't fly with
00:08:27
um in fact they just had their quote-unquote i don't even know why they call them elections they had their coronation yeah and uh shocker that uh he won the landslide right uh i have a funny story about that a guy named oleg novitsky like the nicest super friendly he's like a teddy bear of a guy just got into the duma um as a cop as a communist which that's they're very much on putin's side they're you know take crimea's irish take the war so these guys who should have
00:09:01
a moral compass to know that that's wrong and i know at least i know one cosmonaut who who is a good human being but a lot of the other ones man they just take the they take their apartment moscow and the jobs for their kids and their new suvs and support putin it's disgusting it's it's one of the most angering things let me say this jeff and i'll for your for your audience
00:09:25
i am selling i'm in the process of selling space items that the russians gave me so like a russian space suit and shirts and some different trinkets and and space stuff um and i'm gonna i'm donating it to a ukrainian charity so there's a i'm going on a mission to ukraine soon and um to deliver ambulances so i'm selling the russian stuff when you when terry when you use the word mission it's a double entendre right because it could be a charitable mission Yeah, that's it. That's interesting. But anyway, so they can go on my social media. The charity is called Ukraine Focus.
00:10:06
And I have I have a not a lot, but I have some patches that I flew in space and some little coins that I flew. So I think if you make a certain donation to Ukraine Focus, you can get one of these flown in space items. or they're gonna have the rest of the stuff at an auction. We've got an Omega watch that I flew on the outside of my Russian space suit. So anyway, and it's all going to Ukraine, yeah.
SPEAKER_0 00:10:30
- So did that being in space with people from different countries, different points of view, how did that shape your leadership approach and how you communicate with people?
SPEAKER_1 00:10:43
Well, that's a really interesting question. Towards the end of my flight, we had three different cargo ships, an Orbital Cygnus, a Russian Progress, and a SpaceX Dragon all blew up. And when the Russian rocket blew up, they... didn't want to launch our replacement crew because they launch on the same Soyuz rocket. They want to make sure there's no problem. And they didn't want us to come back to Earth before our replacement crew was ready. So we were stuck in space. It was like COVID. We were low on supplies because supply ships were blowing up and we didn't know for how long.
00:11:23
And so i had a meeting with the crew every day because you know you you are kind of isolated you're not you're the only six human beings not on earth and you're all together and you don't know when you're coming back to earth so um it was something that i was very aware of like we had a lot of communication every we had a daily crew meeting and i would say um What rumors have you heard? What have you heard? What have you heard? And like, literally, I would have everybody on the crew talk for a second about what the latest was.
SPEAKER_0 00:11:56
And you guys, you rotate, right? I mean, you act as commander for a certain period of time and then one of the other astronauts are cosmonauts.
SPEAKER_1 00:12:07
yeah when when i showed up there was three guys there and one of them was commander and then when they came back to earth he handed over to me and then when i came back to earth i handed over to uh uh ganadi padalka took over so there's like a change of command ceremony usually every few months and it usually has to do when somebody's coming or going and every once in a
SPEAKER_0 00:12:33
thing where there's a two-week period where somebody is a commander for two weeks and then but it does hand over all the time yes so but you know in in that history like the decisions that you had to make as a fighter pilot and being on the state station the space station i mean this is life and death you know one wrong decision one wrong move could be disastrous business is a little bit more forgiving. But now, of course, we're getting into this age of AI. And it's a lot of things that are both exciting and scary at the same time. How do you modulate that now as a businessman and also as a potential politician?
SPEAKER_1 00:13:09
Yeah. So it's interesting that you say that because I'm actually doing a TED Talk in a few weeks. the theme is we are one so i was going to talk about you know seeing the planet earth and you realize there's planet a there's no planet b and it was going to be that kind of talk and then the stuff with ai has been going on and the ceo is coming out saying you know this could be dangerous and i'm also reading a book called biological warfare by annie jacobson And I need therapy after reading this book. And the risks of AI creating biological weapons is not zero.
00:13:50
And so as I was thinking through all this, I thought, you know, here's my new TED talk. One of the case studies I do at Harvard Business School, I teach about the Challenger space shuttle accident and also the Columbia space shuttle accident. and those are lessons are completely appropriate for businesses like i this is a great case study for any business that has to deal with an organization or risk or anything so i'm i want my talk to take the lessons from the space shuttle how to prevent a space shuttle disaster and apply those to ai how to prevent an ai disaster and there's a lot of lessons that are very applicable. The space shuttles were talking to us.
00:14:32
You could see gas leaking during Challenger. You could see foam falling off during Columbia. The engineers were talking to us. In both cases, engineers were like, hey, there's a problem. The managers in both cases had severe schedule and budget pressure. And the managers in AI have a trillion dollar IPO carrot all the parallels are there. The difference is in a space shuttle accident, you know, you kill seven, it killed seven of my friends on Columbia. I was good for, I was, I was very involved with the Columbia accident, but with an AI disaster, man, the consequences could potentially be infinitely worse than that. So I think it's a, I think it's a cool talk. I'm, I'm excited.
00:15:11
I got a lot of work to do in the next few weeks, but I'm excited to do it.
SPEAKER_0 00:15:15
I'm looking forward to hearing it. Well, you know, it's my favorite subject growing up was history. And one thing is history repeats itself over and over and over again. Every great society is falling. Leaders and countries and people get too powerful. And there's hubris, right? We continue to ignore the warning signs. So I wrote a.
SPEAKER_1 00:15:38
a substack about that a few months ago. The big lesson from the shuttle was don't normalize deviance. If something bad's happening and it's not killing you, don't say, well, it's fine. It must not be that bad. Maybe you're just getting lucky. So don't normalize deviance or you'll end up with a disaster. In our political system, there's so many deviant things happening. we can't normalize it. If we normalize it, we're done. We're screwed. So all the things that are happening, and hopefully we'll get a chance to talk about my daily swamp project, which Oh,
SPEAKER_0 00:16:11
absolutely. Yeah, we'll definitely get that in a few minutes. You know, I say, we have a few colleagues in our in our society that are involved in NASA and are involved in some of these projects. so the opinions are though different i mean some people feel that we over corrected you know what nasa did after the and then lost some of its innovative and risk-taking you know others thought it was appropriate where do you weigh it in on that um
SPEAKER_1 00:16:41
So yes, with the Boeing thing last year, there were some problems with the capsule, but they were like on the extreme caution side. The problem is not. The only way to be safe is to not fly. And we say that in the Air Force. We'd have all these safety stand downs and we had safety briefings all the time. The only way to be safe is to not fly. And that's not an option. You got to defend the country with the F-16. Or if you're going to explore space, you have to explore space. The difference is be smart about the risks you're taking and take your risks with your eyes wide open.
00:17:18
You're never going to be able to get rid of every risk. If you're launching on a rocket. you're not going to be able to get rid of every risk, but just accept, Hey, there's a, there's a, this much chance that the engine's going to blow up and, and we're going to do everything we can to prevent that. And if it happens, you'll have an escape system. But so that's the way to, that's the right way to do risk. The wrong way to do risk is to have, see all these warning signs that the vehicle's giving you have all your engineers going, this is really bad.
00:17:47
and then go congress says we have to launch by this date we we have to launch like that's the wrong way to do risk so i'm not saying i and i agree you know part of it was nasa went to no risk tolerance um part of the problem politically if your rocket blows up your program might get cancelled and in the last 50 years of nasa is nothing but canceled program after canceled program after canceled program the new administration you know is i jared isaacman was talking last week and he was saying how how many billions of dollars worth of nuclear programs have been canceled over the years that was music to my ears i had literally written a sub stack about that
00:18:25
about all the uh i wrote an op-ed piece about all the
SPEAKER_0 00:18:31
we start these things and cancel them so you can't be completely risk averse yeah i suppose you can't um a long time ago one of my good friends said no it's just politics and everything it's the nature of things it's not even about the parties per se but you you know you could take the same piece of information you have two parties they have different points of view and they're going to argue and position you know for their point of view and then and then uh politics is there how how do we move past that a society knowing that it's ever present but yeah we still have to make the right balanced decisions to move forward
SPEAKER_1 00:19:07
we have to get our politics fixed jeff it we are screwed if we don't um And there's so many factors conspiring against fixing it. And the people have the power. Ultimately, if enough Americans stand up and say enough is enough. I mean, look at the situation we're in now. We're in a horrendous situation right now. Everybody agrees. Even Republicans don't like they've got the House, the Senate, the president and the Supreme Court, and they don't like what's going on. So. The combination of social media algorithms and Fox News echo chambers, you know, it used to be in the 70s, it wasn't like things were perfect, but everybody watched Walter Cronkite and then they drew their own conclusions.
00:19:52
Today, everybody gets what they want and the algorithm feeds them what makes them mad.
SPEAKER_0 00:19:58
and so you have this echo chat or or they don't get anything at all a lot of people just are tuned out because why would you want to put your pay attention once every four years and just watch just go down the ballot yeah my grandfather was this party my father was this party so i'm just going to go do this and they're not really putting where i saw this commercial on tv and yeah that's my guy that's my girl yeah yeah the
SPEAKER_1 00:20:20
At the end of the day, in a democracy, you get what you deserve. And this is tough medicine, and politicians are never going to say this, but we need to be better citizens in America. We need to have better civic duty. We need to inform ourselves what's going on. Kids don't vote, and all this stuff is going to affect you kids. If you're in your teens or your 20s or even 30s,
SPEAKER_0 00:20:41
like... you should be out there voting because the stuff that the 80 year old senators are deciding aren't gonna they're gonna die soon it's gonna affect you guys and they're out of touch anyway and oh you and i were just talking about this the other day as we're getting ready to prep for this which is you know i mean i think the founding fathers first of all people back then they might have lived to 40 at the most right so so if you're working on i would be like old men yes Yeah, that was old. But the idea is you go of service, you go to work for a term or two, and then you come back.
00:21:10
It wasn't like you're supposed to stay here forever, you know, and have a career in politics.
SPEAKER_1 00:21:15
50 years. Schumer got elected when Jaws came out. It's just not healthy. And I was talking to somebody and they're like, Terry, you're so like.
00:21:28
you're not corruptible you would never get corrupted and i'm like no i would get corrupted if i went to be a senator for 30 years eventually you get used to having staff do everything for you and having limousines pull up and get caught getting the air force jet to fly you and like you get used and you want power and you're not and you're not getting paid anywhere near what you'd be getting paid in the corporate world and so they're that corrupting temptation you can't stay there forever which is why so here's terry's prescription we talked about this we need to have term limits i think for the house senate and supreme court so it's not death watch on the supreme court every
00:22:05
president gets two or three supreme court picks um and we also need to have age limits we need to have a national ban on gerrymandering we have this thing called a base realignment commission that takes the power away from congress and lets this independent commission decide what military bases get closed down otherwise no military base would ever get closed down um we need to have that type of thing to draw congressional districts because
00:22:38
it's 50 extremists versus 50 extremists because of the way we do partisan districts look like spaghetti you know it's insane the districts are insane and so we need to have um a brack position for gerrymandering um and then we need to get money out of politics jeff it's so bad i just ran for
SPEAKER_0 00:23:01
the money has to come out and part of my daily swamp is one of the worst decisions back when they when the spring court said that you know citizens united yeah yeah um independent uh companies and packs can can invest unlimited amounts of money and they do and they do there was an article today in the new york uh i just read it this morning um when i woke up
SPEAKER_1 00:23:25
Trump told the fossil fuel industry, give me a billion dollars. Yes, sir. They did. And now they're getting hundreds of billions in relief and, and, and we're paying extra energy costs and pollution and all that. So money for favors is a thing. Listen to my daily swamp series every day. And we, and we have to get that out. And one of the worst things that this administration did There's this organization called FinCEN, the Financial Network of Criminal something. It's like the government's money laundering watchdog. They have this requirement called, they had this requirement called beneficial owner. So I had to, I started at LLC, like I do consulting, I'm the only employee. And so I had to fill out a form.
00:24:11
I am the owner of this company. this administration stopped that requirement and they said they're going to actively destroy all the data that the government had about who owns what company so they don't want the government to know who owns shell companies and so if you're a money launderer or a criminal or a russian trying to get your money clean or a company that wants favors from politicians We don't know who owns the companies now. You can't trace the trail of the money. And so it's astonishing the amount of corruption that that just opened up. When Elon Musk gives money, we have to know where that money came from. Now he can give billions without FinCEN knowing where the companies are.
SPEAKER_0 00:25:04
you don't know who the where the money's coming from it could come from foreign sources which is illegal but if nobody knows who owns the llc the saudis and the russians i think you and i both know that like for hundreds of years um rich and powerful people have always you know um pulled levers behind the scenes and done things to continue to stay in power so in one regard this isn't new i think the brazenness of it is yeah you know and how much it's yeah but you know every i don't think you get to be at the highest levels of power without having to curry and trade some paper i mean i think you know you've got to be realistic about
00:25:42
that but that's why there's also these guard rails in place uh but the amount of blatant corruption and hypocrisy yeah it's it's unbelievable i mean you look at this thing now with venezuela know when the major oil companies said no we don't want to deal with this well you know that this administration found a way to do it anyway and now a couple cronies are making billions of dollars off this thing it's it's unbelievable i literally 10 o'clock last night i just recorded my venezuela
SPEAKER_1 00:26:17
the first of all to the victor goes to spoils the president went to the united nations and said well now we got oil from venezuela after all to the victor goes to spoils like he said it out loud though you got to give him credit he that's what's happening so he says the thing out loud of course it's wildly immoral and wrong and un-american but that and yeah but other than that you know yeah other than that it's not going to go to us it's not going to the people there will be a few businessmen who make money look venezuela is a total train wreck i worked in the oil and gas industry a consultant doing energy trend doing carbon capture basically
00:26:56
the energy transition projects for him i'm friend i had a talk with a ceo of one of the biggest oil and gas companies in the world like are we are we going back into venezuela he's like no there's no nobody wants to go into venezuela i think um chevron's already there there is a company that has but we got burned badly under hugo chavez when he nationalized everything um it took this one particular company years to get all their people they were stuck in jail they lost billions of dollars all the infrastructure's crumbling that oil is not like the beverly hillbillies texas tea square it's like pudding or you know like it's trying to scoop pudding out of the ground.
00:27:39
It's not easy to get it out. And it's just not going to happen. The companies will be ready to go there when Venezuela has a functional democracy and they're taking on corruption. Like you said, corruption has been around since Julius Caesar and Adam and Eve. But what we're seeing now is just a whole nother level.
00:28:01
that first half a billion dollar tranche that we took it went to they'd sent the money to Qatar like why would we send the money to Qatar that we picked two companies to do that broker deal both of them have a long rap sheet of international bribery and corruption scandals and then the money went back to Venezuela so how did Americans benefit from that the Venezuela thing is insane and this guy betancourt who runs what is it called north american blue blue energy something like that is the company that it's first of all it's not a north american company it's a venezuelan company it has nothing to do in north america and second of all this one guy long rap sheet of corruption
00:28:45
gets like a hundred years and 65 billion barrels of oil and it's it's insane jeff it's insane it is insane and it's not corruption as normal like the you know there's always some guy giving somebody raising that to a higher art form this is a whole other this is about i mean i think these things are happening over time and institutional right um
SPEAKER_0 00:29:12
I think for the last 30 years or so, Congress has been ceding its power. You've had multiple presidents on both parties take more and more action, more executive actions and other things because Congress was not doing its job. So you could argue that. trump is a product of the system that we as america have allowed to happen you know he's just with his lack of moral compass or whatever just taking it to a whole other art form um yeah yeah the unitary executive is this has been a work in progress but i'll just say this real quick jeff the founding fathers anticipated trump
SPEAKER_1 00:29:57
They knew there would be somebody who wanted to make America great again. They knew there would be somebody who wanted to build a 250-foot arch right in the middle of Washington. What they didn't plan on or anticipate was Mike Johnson. They never thought that... They always thought Congress would jealously guard its power and not let,
SPEAKER_0 00:30:16
and they never thought- Or that the judicial would act as an independent objective branch, right?
SPEAKER_1 00:30:21
They wouldn't think John Roberts would give the president immunity. You only need immunity to break the law. You don't need immunity to follow the law. and they didn't think that mike johnson would would shut down congress for six weeks so that they didn't have to have a vote he didn't want to have um they didn't think the War Powers Act would just be ignored, or that we're just not going to follow the law. Congress appropriates the money, and then the president doesn't follow it at all. It's not even a suggestion. He just spends the money the way he wants. They never anticipated a guy like
SPEAKER_0 00:31:02
and yeah and that's all you really need you just need a couple people that are willing to play ball yeah and it's like uh it's a personal piggy bank you know for for whatever the government wants to do um but you know it's i think it's but you know like we were talking about from for an average american regardless of what party you're in
00:31:23
we have a lot of the same common needs and desires and wants right you know we want a better life for our children we want them to get good education we want to earn a good living you know we want clean air to breathe you know we want to have freedom to pursue whatever we want to pursue we want to be able to practice what religion we want to practice yeah right we want to be able to love who we want to love um all these things are common and but then you get you know, fringe parties that get to power, and they're deciding. So you're right.
00:31:53
I mean, elections have consequences, you know, and there's a lot of things to contribute to this.
SPEAKER_1 00:32:00
I think the Democrats are going to have a landslide in November, but it's not because people like the Democrats. It's because people really, really, really don't like what's happening with Trump. And I think it's an opportunity for Democrats. If Democrats could be like, I was watching this old Tony Blair clip in the 90s last night, watching this documentary about Northern England. It's bizarre. But anyway, he was like, we're new labor. New labor is coming home to you. You can come home to new labor. It was like a really inspiring thing because labor had sucked and the conservatives were in power for 15 years with Margaret Thatcher in the UK. And then Tony Blair came in. And we need a party like that.
00:32:35
Like, we're not just going to be the same old thing. um it's not we're it's not going to be schumercrats like it's going to be a new thing
SPEAKER_0 00:32:46
system terry i think you know because if you think about it both parties have an incentive to keep things at status quo yeah they're constantly fighting against the third party because i think that most americans are somewhere in the middle
00:33:04
you're always going to have fringes of course on both sides you know and that's okay too i mean i think we should be able to respect multiple points of view but you know we've been in this situation now for years i'm just going to take my ball and go home like you know like if i don't agree with your point of view and i have the power yeah i'm just going to shut you down completely and not even going to listen to you and i can entertain you i'm going to just you know stay with my team over here that's not healthy either i think we also need a third party yeah yeah that can represent more of the interests of americans i
00:33:37
think everything in life is a bell curve right like there's a skinny part on the right and a skinny part in the left and a really fat part in the middle and most americans are between the 40 yard lines and the
SPEAKER_1 00:33:48
and and it's fine we should have an you know we should have a mega party and we should have a democratic socialist of america wing and then we should have like a normal party for the middle class and but man i tell you what having just ran the system is not designed for that a friend of mine's running uh here in texas as an independent for lieutenant governor and if he his main goal is to win this lawsuit to make it easier for independents to run the texas makes it almost impossible you have it requires millions and millions and millions of dollars to get the signatures that you need um and then when you turn those signatures in the partisan secretary of state
00:34:29
is like no those aren't good and anyway it's very difficult for independents to run The two systems, I mean, it's billions of dollars. I don't know if you get political emails and texts. I get them all day, every day. And I get them from Republicans and I get emails from from Donald Trump and Ken Paxton. And I get them from James Tallarico and John Alsop. And I got on some list somehow. I don't know why. But it's just a giant money making machine. It's a giant.
SPEAKER_0 00:34:57
money-making machine billions and billions and billions of dollars and their incentive is to keep it that way and not let someone else in of course there's what but i mean you learned i guess even in politics the business of politics how hard it is right i mean you know and you ran for all the right reasons first for senator and the opportunity with the redistricting and congress you know, you weren't successful to get out of the primaries, but you still were able to reach some people. What did you learn through this process earlier this year?
SPEAKER_1 00:35:27
You know, I, well, I loved some aspects of it. I loved block walking, going to knock it on doors. I had a lot of fun doing that. I love going to events and giving speeches like I like, and then I'm a big Q and You know, my day job is speaking for a living. I love doing Q&A as part of that. So I like talking to voters. The money part was horrendous. And at the end of the day, to win a Democratic primary, you got to be...
00:36:02
as left as possible to win the republican primary you have to be mega crazy and that's awful there was one or two of the republicans i was friends with a couple of the republicans who were running you know we i had debates on stage and uh i'm i'm trying the lady that beat me i'm trying to help her win you know my goal is not for me to be a congressman my goal was to actually
00:36:25
um restore some sanity to washington so i i wasn't doing it because i wanted the job or the job would have been frankly terrible can you imagine being a congressman first of all you have to work with congressmen all the all day long every day then you have to get on a plane and fly to washington back and forth although the good thing if mike johnson's the speaker you don't because he just doesn't have congress like you could just stay in your district I don't know if you if your people are following it, but it was a couple of weeks ago, a Republican, Matt Massey from Kentucky introduced articles of impeachment for,
SPEAKER_0 00:37:00
yeah, for Pete Hegseth,
SPEAKER_1 00:37:02
which he should be impeached. I mean, most of the cabinet should be impeached. But Pete Hegseth is an absolute travesty. He's a complete dumpster fire. And.
SPEAKER_0 00:37:14
he's running a trillion dollar organization so that it's just not acceptable i guess i'm actually shocked because i was talking about this with some of our general friends and i i thought for sure that that the whole complex would have swallowed him up within the first year i am amazed that he's actually gotten through and stayed in power over these last two years as big as our military
SPEAKER_1 00:37:35
he is kicked out well first of all he's spending money like a drunken sailor and or like a drunken anyway um so the contractors are not going to be opposed to that and the he's purging people left and right. Well, especially if you're not a white man, he's purged the ranks pretty intensely. And most senior officers want to get promoted, so they're going to just stay quiet. Anyway, yes. So he gets articles of impeachment. So instead of facing that, Mike Johnson just said, we're done. And he just gave the whole Congress off.
00:38:15
until november same thing happened last year with the jeffrey epstein files remember that they and they eventually passed the law that trump just ignored and like this is the what are you going to do about it presidency like i'm not following the rules what are you going to do about it i have the army i have the police so i'm right jeff i know we're out of time i'm really worried about the I'm worried about ICE agents showing up. I'm worried about mail in ballots getting messed with at the at the post office. Like if millions of mail in ballots don't make it in and the Republicans hold Congress like that could be bad.
SPEAKER_0 00:38:56
No, I am too. I think this is going to be a watershed moment. I mean, and I and they they've already demonstrated that they're willing to do anything and everything. to disrupt uh the process um and it's all really a farce um you know based upon this completely disputed notion that there's a systemic fraud in the election and it's it's ridiculous but uh
00:39:20
and we already have i mean i don't know about you but like can we go to vote yeah you show your id like it's a standard thing like we already do that it's like that you're you know it's it's um ridiculous just adding it well first of all i don't need to be applied yeah if the elections aren't good then maybe republicans shouldn't have the presidency house and senate
SPEAKER_1 00:39:41
I mean, you won all the elections and you're complaining that the elections are rigged?
SPEAKER_0 00:39:45
Yes. It's like you're arguing out of both ends of your mouth and thinking that we're just stupid.
SPEAKER_1 00:39:51
He knows he's going to lose. He can't. His skin is so thin. He can't accept the fact that he lost. And there's another scenario, and this is terrifying. Mike Johnson just doesn't seat the new representatives, you know? 10 or 20 seats flip and he just doesn't seat them which is he's already done that yeah he's already done that there was a lady in arizona he didn't cedar for months yeah yeah yep you can see that too i mean although i think that can only go for so far especially with a new uh election but yeah i mean that's and then people have to file a lawsuit and do all this so
SPEAKER_0 00:40:32
yeah uh definitely something that we want to keep on an eye on you know i don't we were i think we were supposed to talk about ai during this session
SPEAKER_1 00:40:43
we got a couple minutes yeah ai and my daily swamp um so ai well we talked about the ted talk that's like Engineers are saying things. We're seeing agents jailbreak, you know, swarms of agents. We're seeing teenagers told to kill themselves. You know, teenagers are now having AI girlfriends and AI boyfriends. And the damage that that's doing is profound. We're seeing kids. not writing their papers, having AI write a paper. And when you write a paper, I hated English. I hated writing. It was the worst thing ever. And when I did it, like my neurons got wired and I learned. They're not doing that. It's like a just crushing thing. The productivity, it can help for sure, but it can also hurt.
00:41:39
And so there's good and bad from AI, but we need to understand the warning signs, just like the space shuttle. There are things happening. There are people saying this should happen. One of the points I make in my case study is Challenger happened, it exploded.
00:41:57
And 17 years later, all the 25-year engineers... year old engineers and challenger who were like learn their lesson 17 years later they were the bosses in columbia and they did all the same exact stuff so it's one thing to learn a lesson it's another thing to remember a lesson did we what did we learn from social media and x and facebook and algorithms like 10 years ago that was a big deal right tristan harris did uh the social dilemma documentary ai is is so is facebook times a million right like it's way worse potentially than social media everywhere so are we gonna learn those lessons and the people who are in charge are incentivized to get that trillion
00:42:44
um and that's like we're in a bad situation there with ai because of all the things that i can do ruin our society ruin our culture get to steal people's childhoods and unemployment the bioweapon thing is what keeps me up because bioweapons suck And if AI makes it easy, and there's already been reported cases of people just last week, I think there was one of the frontier AI companies reported that some people were trying to use it to make bioweapons. Of course they are. That's what humans do. Yeah, well,
SPEAKER_0 00:43:18
of course. And then there was another jailbreak yesterday that was reported on the news, you know, where it hacked a website. So, I mean, these things are real. i think i'm coming out somewhere in the middle on this because i'm a bit cynical you know watching both companies push back their ipos and you know them realizing that what they were originally being evaluated on is quickly dissipating so if they create this basically an artificial free zone where it's easy to blame things on the government. They keep everybody else out, you know, and they can have the whole world to themselves, you know, because they've not yet proven that they can make money at the scale that people want to value them at. Yeah.
00:43:58
So I think that's a real concern. At the same time, I think there is also documented evidence that, hey, this is pretty powerful stuff here. and we do need to put in some safeguards and we're going to need both state and national legislatures to actually give a and start doing something um i think maybe california is probably one of the best chances we have or massachusetts or a state like that you know before anything happens at the federal level i think it needs to be california because that's
SPEAKER_1 00:44:30
the federal government is not going to do that. The Trump administration is invested in AI and crypto. Let's talk about AI real quick in my daily swap thing. By the way, I'm doing it with the SteadyState. So check out Terry Virts on all my social medias or this organization called the SteadyState. We have this daily video program. It's a... It's about AI or it's about the corruption. And one of the corruption videos was about the UAE. So the UAE gives the Trump family $500 million in the World Liberty Financial. And then they give another $2 billion deal for their stable coin. And now the UAE.
00:45:16
has access to the top nvidia ai chips before the our security infrastructure didn't want to give uae the the very best nvidia chips because they were worried they would share it with china i mean what the uae really are they uh worthy of the best ai technology on earth but after two and a half billion dollars through the trump family and wickoff family the wickoff uh boy runs the company um now they have access to the world's top uh chips and and two billion of that money went to binance finance is run by cz i think chang fang zhao it's a he's a chinese guy canadian citizen cz was convicted of money laundering for iran
00:46:05
now he's the ceo of binance trump pardons him and he gives he gave a hundred million dollars to the trump super pack or whatever uh so he gives a hundred million dollars he gets his pardon and then this two billion dollar deal goes through trump's company on his way to cz again who by the way is being investigated again for corruption so that whole thing what happened to uh drain the swamp huh terry it wasn't like it was yeah so that that's why we're calling it the daily swamp and i have the clip there was a time october of 24 i think it was the first trump's like i'm gonna drain the swamp and um yeah but just wrap your brains around that
00:46:47
like billions of dollars going through the trump family organization and uae gets crypto in return qatar first of all gave him that airplane long story during covid a friend of mine was a business jet broker and i was hanging out at his house and he was telling me about the the 747 so the saudi bought one qatar bought one and they didn't want them because they're super super super expensive and it was like a well-known thing that these 747s were for sale and nobody wanted them it's like and then qatar you know we'll give them to trump well in return for and they bailed out the kush the kushner family jared kushner bought 666 park avenue for 1.
00:47:30
2 billion dollars and it was only worth 800 million so and they signed a hundred year lease and they paid all billion dollars for the lease up front on day one and suddenly jared kushner the president's son-in-law is out of this massive debt that he had gotten himself into as a 30 year old and guess what now qatar on executive order, has NATO defense-like security guarantees. Trump has promised Qatar, if you're attacked, we'll defend you, just like we promised the NATO. And bring your F-15s to America. So Mountain Home Air Force Base set aside a place for the Qatar Air Force to train.
SPEAKER_0 00:48:13
And yet...- Somehow we're supposed to be the moral authority to the world, right, the beacon.
SPEAKER_1 00:48:19
- Everybody else sees this. Like we can't hide this. On Fox News they're not talking about it. So we can live in our own bubble here in America. Every other, you have friends, you have I'm sure lots of friends from other countries.- I do.- They're all like WTF America, what is happening here?
SPEAKER_0 00:48:37
And we let it happen. So, you know, I mean, again, I think you said it near the beginning of this show. We got to get out and vote, you know, and continue to vote and let our voices be heard. And if we want to continue to live the lives, I mean, look, even with all this, Terry.
00:48:55
um yeah it makes me angry too but i still feel like we live in the greatest country in the world america's awesome yeah freedom the most opportunity the fact that you and i can even talk about this openly and complain about it at least i hope so anyway yeah um you know that's that's actually a good thing so i don't want to trade that for anything but yeah we have work to do We're all stewards of this dream. We're all stewards of our Constitution, and it takes all of us to be able to fight for it, defend it, and work for it.
SPEAKER_1 00:49:27
we need we need to be civics remember in class we used to learn civics you know vote ethics
SPEAKER_0 00:49:37
morals you know those those those little things right yeah kind of really important you can't use your position of power to personally benefit yourself
SPEAKER_1 00:49:48
you know it's like ethics 101 it's funny i don't know if you ever had a government job i was in the government for 30 years and if you worked at a company it's the same you have to take your annual training you know like computer security training and we at nasa and in the air force we had to do ethics training and it was like
00:50:05
this a company comes to you and offers you this gift there used to be a 20 gift limit for federal employees and now there's a 747 being given or no the swiss the swiss gave trump a gold bar 130 000 gold bar with 45 and 47 engraved on it so when i think back to that ethics that i used to have to sign up for it's like it's so quaint
SPEAKER_0 00:50:30
It really makes Watergate, Iran-Contra, some of these other things just pale in comparison, you know.
SPEAKER_1 00:50:38
This is, can I end with, this is a funny story, and it's also awful, and it should be a bigger story than Watergate. I don't know if you remember, Trump got debanked a few years ago, I think in 21, 22. Capital One canceled. He had 300 bank accounts. I probably have a dozen or so between my retirement accounts. He had 300 and they canceled him and he was, I'm being persecuted, blah, blah, blah. He sued him. The judge dropped the suit and then he sued again. And so finally Capital One was like,
SPEAKER_2 00:51:10
all right.
SPEAKER_1 00:51:12
and they and they didn't cave all these other law firms and universities cave capital one didn't cave they're like all right here's the documents he was cancelled for money laundering the president of the united states was suspected of money laundering and this that's back to fincen i talked about fincen earlier there's this thing called a suspicious activity report i'm studying i'm taking banking exams right now so i just studied it and you know the and i'm sure capital one has accountants i'm sure they don't cancel the president united states accounts lightly so i'm sure there's something there um we don't know exactly what it was but they did say we were seeing money laundering the president united states was debanked because he was
00:51:57
money laundering
SPEAKER_0 00:51:59
worth that's worth investigating to say the least it's like that's of all this stuff i think that might be the biggest story and nobody's talking about it nobody's talking about it well hopefully they'll they'll start you know uh pretty soon but i know we're right on time for today but you know my friend always always fun um we'll have to do this that's not on course soon we could talk for All right, Terry. I'm sure I'm going to be seeing you at the bar soon, but thanks for stopping by.
SPEAKER_1 00:52:27
See you at the AI thing and check out the Daily Swamp if you get a few minutes. You got it.
SPEAKER_0 00:52:32
All right.
SPEAKER_1 00:52:34
Thanks.
My guest today has lived more lives than most people can imagine, and I mean that literally. He's flown over 40 combat missions as an Air Force fighter pilot. He piloted the space shuttle. He commanded the International Space Station, spending 200 days living in a metal tube, hurtling around the Earth at more than 17,000 miles an hour. I can't even imagine what that's like. He directed a feature documentary. He's written two books. He lectures at Harvard and USC. And earlier this year, he ran for both Senate and Congress in Texas. So we have a warrior, an explorer, a filmmaker, a politician in one chair. And we get into what does it actually do to a person to see the entire Earth.
00:00:43
from a window and then come home to it. We're going to talk about what AI actually means for space, what leading a crew in zero gravity taught him about leadership on the ground, and why a man who's been to space decides that the next frontier is Congress. Colonel Terry Burks, welcome to Unscripted. Let's get into it.
SPEAKER_1 00:00:58
Thanks for having me on. When you when you put it that way, it's been it's been a busy few years.
SPEAKER_0 00:01:04
feel like almost like that's a mic drop like that so the introduction i mean you've already done so many amazing things um and i i know you've talked about this so much over the years but gotta start off with what's it like to be in space yeah so i mean that's the question everybody asked me all the time i actually did a talk yesterday up in dallas about this thing to an aviation group um
SPEAKER_1 00:01:27
the first thing it that you feel is you're weightless like there's no doubt that you're weightless as soon as they shut the engines off and what that feels like is you're falling because that's actually what's happening so i've got a got a watch here so if i you know on earth if you drop this watch one second later it'll hit the ground on the space station or space shuttle if i have my watch and i drop it One second later, it'll fall almost as far because the gravity is like 90%. It's not zero G. You're only a few hundred miles away from Earth, this massive planet. So that planet is pulling you with its gravity.
00:02:01
The difference is in that one second that it falls, you also move forward five miles. So that combination of falling and moving and falling and moving makes an orbit. If you're going at the exact right speed, it'll be roughly the shape of the Earth. you'll stay in orbit. So if it feels like you're falling, and it takes some time to get used to that it took me like the first two days, I had the worst headache of my life. I mean, I just had this raging headache.
00:02:24
And then on the third morning in space, it was like a light switch, like all the neurons in my brain finally wired themselves rewire themselves and all right i'm fine but you're still clumsy you know like you're it's hard to throw things because your brain's compensating for gravity and so it takes time to be able to throw things and hit the target you're trying to get to when you move yourself if you move with your hands so when you push off not only do you move but you also rotate and so that takes some time to get used to translate like on earth you just walk and gravity and friction and you're not accidentally spinning around unless you're on an ice rink it's
00:03:05
kind of like it's kind of like learning how to ice skate when you get to space like at first you're super awkward and then
SPEAKER_0 00:03:13
once you get the hang of it you just figure out how to do it or water ski right it's something i've never thought about it's got to be a bit of a challenge right like isn't like the food just kind of floating all over the place everything is yeah yes every like as we say everything is harder in space because it just except for pull-ups pull-ups are easier but um
SPEAKER_1 00:03:39
uh i feel like a slacker normally in the morning i try and i have a little gym down the street i try and get my 25 pull-ups in but this morning i didn't too many other things going on filming this program i won't tell anybody if you don't you know we'll we'll let that one slide so Well, I never did. I was kind of worried about it, and I never did. Each module is like a school bus kind of size, and there's something like 13, I think, or 14 or 15 modules. There's a bunch of American modules. There's four or five Russian modules.
00:04:20
the overall size is like a 747 or i think the volume is actually more than a 747 but it doesn't feel like you're in a 747 it feels like you're in a school bus you know it's a bunch of different school buses so you're not really claustrophobic the only time i got claustrophobic in the russian and i mean you're in there shoulder to shoulder there's three of you smashed your knees are up in your chest you can't you can't stretch out the capsule's not that big and before landing the seats do something called stroking where they they actually they lift you up so you got the control panel kind of normal distance you're pushing buttons and then a few minutes before landing
00:05:05
you know my right shoulder was smashed into the wall my left shoulder is in my the my cosmonaut friend there and then it was like okay i had this thought actually i can either panic in which case i'll be strapped in unable to move or do anything about it or i cannot panic in which case i'll still be strapped in so i had to make a conscious decision
00:05:29
to not panic because it was so it just felt so claustrophobic and then i was like okay it's fine
SPEAKER_0 00:05:34
you know they say a necessity is the mother of all invention right so you know clearly we have issues with russia and china and stuff when you're in space and you're with your fellow scientists and cosmos and astronauts does all that get suspended because you guys are there for a joint mission or you know how do you
SPEAKER_1 00:05:52
work together and keep some of these conflicts at bay i was uh my last flight was was when they first invaded ukraine it was 2014. they had annexed crimea we had put sanctions on them and we would start our our training or you always have toasting after you complete a training thing and it would Politica, politica. So politics is politics and then we'd always toast the equipage to the crew and the point was like we're not going to let that stuff interfere with us. It was tough like when we were in space when and we sanctioned them and the ruble devalued by half.
00:06:37
which actually and so they were on their phones with their families all the time what's going on um that was a boon for the cosmonauts they they got paid in dollars so when the ruble got cut in half their salary doubled in terms of all right this is great
00:06:54
they actually made a lot of money because of that because they were getting paid in dollars um they're much better capitalists than we are one day i was watching my cosmo he was drawing some blood or something and he said like 50 bucks i was like what are you talking about he said i just get paid they get paid for everything they do he's like you guys don't get paid i'm like no i don't get paid for it i get five dollars a day per diem
SPEAKER_0 00:07:16
after my 200 day flight i literally got a check for one thousand point zero zero dollars that was my that was my that was my bonus for going into space so wow like that's barely a bar tab for a couple friends you know it's like a night out uh yeah exactly so anyway um
SPEAKER_1 00:07:38
it was an interesting time i had this one night it was a very profound night i was looking out they have the russians have this big window in their service module and sasha samakuchayev who just passed away a few like a month ago a few months ago he and i were looking out the window and there was um we were flying over eastern europe and all of a sudden we saw these red flashes going off we
00:08:03
the russian war in ukraine we were watching bombs go off and it was really like we were both we didn't say a word we were just like mesmerized we couldn't believe we were watching this he came back to earth and joined the duma um in putin's party to support vladimir putin and and two other three cosmonauts that i flew with did that and several other cosmonauts that i didn't fly with
00:08:27
um in fact they just had their quote-unquote i don't even know why they call them elections they had their coronation yeah and uh shocker that uh he won the landslide right uh i have a funny story about that a guy named oleg novitsky like the nicest super friendly he's like a teddy bear of a guy just got into the duma um as a cop as a communist which that's they're very much on putin's side they're you know take crimea's irish take the war so these guys who should have
00:09:01
a moral compass to know that that's wrong and i know at least i know one cosmonaut who who is a good human being but a lot of the other ones man they just take the they take their apartment moscow and the jobs for their kids and their new suvs and support putin it's disgusting it's it's one of the most angering things let me say this jeff and i'll for your for your audience
00:09:25
i am selling i'm in the process of selling space items that the russians gave me so like a russian space suit and shirts and some different trinkets and and space stuff um and i'm gonna i'm donating it to a ukrainian charity so there's a i'm going on a mission to ukraine soon and um to deliver ambulances so i'm selling the russian stuff when you when terry when you use the word mission it's a double entendre right because it could be a charitable mission Yeah, that's it. That's interesting. But anyway, so they can go on my social media. The charity is called Ukraine Focus.
00:10:06
And I have I have a not a lot, but I have some patches that I flew in space and some little coins that I flew. So I think if you make a certain donation to Ukraine Focus, you can get one of these flown in space items. or they're gonna have the rest of the stuff at an auction. We've got an Omega watch that I flew on the outside of my Russian space suit. So anyway, and it's all going to Ukraine, yeah.
SPEAKER_0 00:10:30
- So did that being in space with people from different countries, different points of view, how did that shape your leadership approach and how you communicate with people?
SPEAKER_1 00:10:43
Well, that's a really interesting question. Towards the end of my flight, we had three different cargo ships, an Orbital Cygnus, a Russian Progress, and a SpaceX Dragon all blew up. And when the Russian rocket blew up, they... didn't want to launch our replacement crew because they launch on the same Soyuz rocket. They want to make sure there's no problem. And they didn't want us to come back to Earth before our replacement crew was ready. So we were stuck in space. It was like COVID. We were low on supplies because supply ships were blowing up and we didn't know for how long.
00:11:23
And so i had a meeting with the crew every day because you know you you are kind of isolated you're not you're the only six human beings not on earth and you're all together and you don't know when you're coming back to earth so um it was something that i was very aware of like we had a lot of communication every we had a daily crew meeting and i would say um What rumors have you heard? What have you heard? What have you heard? And like, literally, I would have everybody on the crew talk for a second about what the latest was.
SPEAKER_0 00:11:56
And you guys, you rotate, right? I mean, you act as commander for a certain period of time and then one of the other astronauts are cosmonauts.
SPEAKER_1 00:12:07
yeah when when i showed up there was three guys there and one of them was commander and then when they came back to earth he handed over to me and then when i came back to earth i handed over to uh uh ganadi padalka took over so there's like a change of command ceremony usually every few months and it usually has to do when somebody's coming or going and every once in a
SPEAKER_0 00:12:33
thing where there's a two-week period where somebody is a commander for two weeks and then but it does hand over all the time yes so but you know in in that history like the decisions that you had to make as a fighter pilot and being on the state station the space station i mean this is life and death you know one wrong decision one wrong move could be disastrous business is a little bit more forgiving. But now, of course, we're getting into this age of AI. And it's a lot of things that are both exciting and scary at the same time. How do you modulate that now as a businessman and also as a potential politician?
SPEAKER_1 00:13:09
Yeah. So it's interesting that you say that because I'm actually doing a TED Talk in a few weeks. the theme is we are one so i was going to talk about you know seeing the planet earth and you realize there's planet a there's no planet b and it was going to be that kind of talk and then the stuff with ai has been going on and the ceo is coming out saying you know this could be dangerous and i'm also reading a book called biological warfare by annie jacobson And I need therapy after reading this book. And the risks of AI creating biological weapons is not zero.
00:13:50
And so as I was thinking through all this, I thought, you know, here's my new TED talk. One of the case studies I do at Harvard Business School, I teach about the Challenger space shuttle accident and also the Columbia space shuttle accident. and those are lessons are completely appropriate for businesses like i this is a great case study for any business that has to deal with an organization or risk or anything so i'm i want my talk to take the lessons from the space shuttle how to prevent a space shuttle disaster and apply those to ai how to prevent an ai disaster and there's a lot of lessons that are very applicable. The space shuttles were talking to us.
00:14:32
You could see gas leaking during Challenger. You could see foam falling off during Columbia. The engineers were talking to us. In both cases, engineers were like, hey, there's a problem. The managers in both cases had severe schedule and budget pressure. And the managers in AI have a trillion dollar IPO carrot all the parallels are there. The difference is in a space shuttle accident, you know, you kill seven, it killed seven of my friends on Columbia. I was good for, I was, I was very involved with the Columbia accident, but with an AI disaster, man, the consequences could potentially be infinitely worse than that. So I think it's a, I think it's a cool talk. I'm, I'm excited.
00:15:11
I got a lot of work to do in the next few weeks, but I'm excited to do it.
SPEAKER_0 00:15:15
I'm looking forward to hearing it. Well, you know, it's my favorite subject growing up was history. And one thing is history repeats itself over and over and over again. Every great society is falling. Leaders and countries and people get too powerful. And there's hubris, right? We continue to ignore the warning signs. So I wrote a.
SPEAKER_1 00:15:38
a substack about that a few months ago. The big lesson from the shuttle was don't normalize deviance. If something bad's happening and it's not killing you, don't say, well, it's fine. It must not be that bad. Maybe you're just getting lucky. So don't normalize deviance or you'll end up with a disaster. In our political system, there's so many deviant things happening. we can't normalize it. If we normalize it, we're done. We're screwed. So all the things that are happening, and hopefully we'll get a chance to talk about my daily swamp project, which Oh,
SPEAKER_0 00:16:11
absolutely. Yeah, we'll definitely get that in a few minutes. You know, I say, we have a few colleagues in our in our society that are involved in NASA and are involved in some of these projects. so the opinions are though different i mean some people feel that we over corrected you know what nasa did after the and then lost some of its innovative and risk-taking you know others thought it was appropriate where do you weigh it in on that um
SPEAKER_1 00:16:41
So yes, with the Boeing thing last year, there were some problems with the capsule, but they were like on the extreme caution side. The problem is not. The only way to be safe is to not fly. And we say that in the Air Force. We'd have all these safety stand downs and we had safety briefings all the time. The only way to be safe is to not fly. And that's not an option. You got to defend the country with the F-16. Or if you're going to explore space, you have to explore space. The difference is be smart about the risks you're taking and take your risks with your eyes wide open.
00:17:18
You're never going to be able to get rid of every risk. If you're launching on a rocket. you're not going to be able to get rid of every risk, but just accept, Hey, there's a, there's a, this much chance that the engine's going to blow up and, and we're going to do everything we can to prevent that. And if it happens, you'll have an escape system. But so that's the way to, that's the right way to do risk. The wrong way to do risk is to have, see all these warning signs that the vehicle's giving you have all your engineers going, this is really bad.
00:17:47
and then go congress says we have to launch by this date we we have to launch like that's the wrong way to do risk so i'm not saying i and i agree you know part of it was nasa went to no risk tolerance um part of the problem politically if your rocket blows up your program might get cancelled and in the last 50 years of nasa is nothing but canceled program after canceled program after canceled program the new administration you know is i jared isaacman was talking last week and he was saying how how many billions of dollars worth of nuclear programs have been canceled over the years that was music to my ears i had literally written a sub stack about that
00:18:25
about all the uh i wrote an op-ed piece about all the
SPEAKER_0 00:18:31
we start these things and cancel them so you can't be completely risk averse yeah i suppose you can't um a long time ago one of my good friends said no it's just politics and everything it's the nature of things it's not even about the parties per se but you you know you could take the same piece of information you have two parties they have different points of view and they're going to argue and position you know for their point of view and then and then uh politics is there how how do we move past that a society knowing that it's ever present but yeah we still have to make the right balanced decisions to move forward
SPEAKER_1 00:19:07
we have to get our politics fixed jeff it we are screwed if we don't um And there's so many factors conspiring against fixing it. And the people have the power. Ultimately, if enough Americans stand up and say enough is enough. I mean, look at the situation we're in now. We're in a horrendous situation right now. Everybody agrees. Even Republicans don't like they've got the House, the Senate, the president and the Supreme Court, and they don't like what's going on. So. The combination of social media algorithms and Fox News echo chambers, you know, it used to be in the 70s, it wasn't like things were perfect, but everybody watched Walter Cronkite and then they drew their own conclusions.
00:19:52
Today, everybody gets what they want and the algorithm feeds them what makes them mad.
SPEAKER_0 00:19:58
and so you have this echo chat or or they don't get anything at all a lot of people just are tuned out because why would you want to put your pay attention once every four years and just watch just go down the ballot yeah my grandfather was this party my father was this party so i'm just going to go do this and they're not really putting where i saw this commercial on tv and yeah that's my guy that's my girl yeah yeah the
SPEAKER_1 00:20:20
At the end of the day, in a democracy, you get what you deserve. And this is tough medicine, and politicians are never going to say this, but we need to be better citizens in America. We need to have better civic duty. We need to inform ourselves what's going on. Kids don't vote, and all this stuff is going to affect you kids. If you're in your teens or your 20s or even 30s,
SPEAKER_0 00:20:41
like... you should be out there voting because the stuff that the 80 year old senators are deciding aren't gonna they're gonna die soon it's gonna affect you guys and they're out of touch anyway and oh you and i were just talking about this the other day as we're getting ready to prep for this which is you know i mean i think the founding fathers first of all people back then they might have lived to 40 at the most right so so if you're working on i would be like old men yes Yeah, that was old. But the idea is you go of service, you go to work for a term or two, and then you come back.
00:21:10
It wasn't like you're supposed to stay here forever, you know, and have a career in politics.
SPEAKER_1 00:21:15
50 years. Schumer got elected when Jaws came out. It's just not healthy. And I was talking to somebody and they're like, Terry, you're so like.
00:21:28
you're not corruptible you would never get corrupted and i'm like no i would get corrupted if i went to be a senator for 30 years eventually you get used to having staff do everything for you and having limousines pull up and get caught getting the air force jet to fly you and like you get used and you want power and you're not and you're not getting paid anywhere near what you'd be getting paid in the corporate world and so they're that corrupting temptation you can't stay there forever which is why so here's terry's prescription we talked about this we need to have term limits i think for the house senate and supreme court so it's not death watch on the supreme court every
00:22:05
president gets two or three supreme court picks um and we also need to have age limits we need to have a national ban on gerrymandering we have this thing called a base realignment commission that takes the power away from congress and lets this independent commission decide what military bases get closed down otherwise no military base would ever get closed down um we need to have that type of thing to draw congressional districts because
00:22:38
it's 50 extremists versus 50 extremists because of the way we do partisan districts look like spaghetti you know it's insane the districts are insane and so we need to have um a brack position for gerrymandering um and then we need to get money out of politics jeff it's so bad i just ran for
SPEAKER_0 00:23:01
the money has to come out and part of my daily swamp is one of the worst decisions back when they when the spring court said that you know citizens united yeah yeah um independent uh companies and packs can can invest unlimited amounts of money and they do and they do there was an article today in the new york uh i just read it this morning um when i woke up
SPEAKER_1 00:23:25
Trump told the fossil fuel industry, give me a billion dollars. Yes, sir. They did. And now they're getting hundreds of billions in relief and, and, and we're paying extra energy costs and pollution and all that. So money for favors is a thing. Listen to my daily swamp series every day. And we, and we have to get that out. And one of the worst things that this administration did There's this organization called FinCEN, the Financial Network of Criminal something. It's like the government's money laundering watchdog. They have this requirement called, they had this requirement called beneficial owner. So I had to, I started at LLC, like I do consulting, I'm the only employee. And so I had to fill out a form.
00:24:11
I am the owner of this company. this administration stopped that requirement and they said they're going to actively destroy all the data that the government had about who owns what company so they don't want the government to know who owns shell companies and so if you're a money launderer or a criminal or a russian trying to get your money clean or a company that wants favors from politicians We don't know who owns the companies now. You can't trace the trail of the money. And so it's astonishing the amount of corruption that that just opened up. When Elon Musk gives money, we have to know where that money came from. Now he can give billions without FinCEN knowing where the companies are.
SPEAKER_0 00:25:04
you don't know who the where the money's coming from it could come from foreign sources which is illegal but if nobody knows who owns the llc the saudis and the russians i think you and i both know that like for hundreds of years um rich and powerful people have always you know um pulled levers behind the scenes and done things to continue to stay in power so in one regard this isn't new i think the brazenness of it is yeah you know and how much it's yeah but you know every i don't think you get to be at the highest levels of power without having to curry and trade some paper i mean i think you know you've got to be realistic about
00:25:42
that but that's why there's also these guard rails in place uh but the amount of blatant corruption and hypocrisy yeah it's it's unbelievable i mean you look at this thing now with venezuela know when the major oil companies said no we don't want to deal with this well you know that this administration found a way to do it anyway and now a couple cronies are making billions of dollars off this thing it's it's unbelievable i literally 10 o'clock last night i just recorded my venezuela
SPEAKER_1 00:26:17
the first of all to the victor goes to spoils the president went to the united nations and said well now we got oil from venezuela after all to the victor goes to spoils like he said it out loud though you got to give him credit he that's what's happening so he says the thing out loud of course it's wildly immoral and wrong and un-american but that and yeah but other than that you know yeah other than that it's not going to go to us it's not going to the people there will be a few businessmen who make money look venezuela is a total train wreck i worked in the oil and gas industry a consultant doing energy trend doing carbon capture basically
00:26:56
the energy transition projects for him i'm friend i had a talk with a ceo of one of the biggest oil and gas companies in the world like are we are we going back into venezuela he's like no there's no nobody wants to go into venezuela i think um chevron's already there there is a company that has but we got burned badly under hugo chavez when he nationalized everything um it took this one particular company years to get all their people they were stuck in jail they lost billions of dollars all the infrastructure's crumbling that oil is not like the beverly hillbillies texas tea square it's like pudding or you know like it's trying to scoop pudding out of the ground.
00:27:39
It's not easy to get it out. And it's just not going to happen. The companies will be ready to go there when Venezuela has a functional democracy and they're taking on corruption. Like you said, corruption has been around since Julius Caesar and Adam and Eve. But what we're seeing now is just a whole nother level.
00:28:01
that first half a billion dollar tranche that we took it went to they'd sent the money to Qatar like why would we send the money to Qatar that we picked two companies to do that broker deal both of them have a long rap sheet of international bribery and corruption scandals and then the money went back to Venezuela so how did Americans benefit from that the Venezuela thing is insane and this guy betancourt who runs what is it called north american blue blue energy something like that is the company that it's first of all it's not a north american company it's a venezuelan company it has nothing to do in north america and second of all this one guy long rap sheet of corruption
00:28:45
gets like a hundred years and 65 billion barrels of oil and it's it's insane jeff it's insane it is insane and it's not corruption as normal like the you know there's always some guy giving somebody raising that to a higher art form this is a whole other this is about i mean i think these things are happening over time and institutional right um
SPEAKER_0 00:29:12
I think for the last 30 years or so, Congress has been ceding its power. You've had multiple presidents on both parties take more and more action, more executive actions and other things because Congress was not doing its job. So you could argue that. trump is a product of the system that we as america have allowed to happen you know he's just with his lack of moral compass or whatever just taking it to a whole other art form um yeah yeah the unitary executive is this has been a work in progress but i'll just say this real quick jeff the founding fathers anticipated trump
SPEAKER_1 00:29:57
They knew there would be somebody who wanted to make America great again. They knew there would be somebody who wanted to build a 250-foot arch right in the middle of Washington. What they didn't plan on or anticipate was Mike Johnson. They never thought that... They always thought Congress would jealously guard its power and not let,
SPEAKER_0 00:30:16
and they never thought- Or that the judicial would act as an independent objective branch, right?
SPEAKER_1 00:30:21
They wouldn't think John Roberts would give the president immunity. You only need immunity to break the law. You don't need immunity to follow the law. and they didn't think that mike johnson would would shut down congress for six weeks so that they didn't have to have a vote he didn't want to have um they didn't think the War Powers Act would just be ignored, or that we're just not going to follow the law. Congress appropriates the money, and then the president doesn't follow it at all. It's not even a suggestion. He just spends the money the way he wants. They never anticipated a guy like
SPEAKER_0 00:31:02
and yeah and that's all you really need you just need a couple people that are willing to play ball yeah and it's like uh it's a personal piggy bank you know for for whatever the government wants to do um but you know it's i think it's but you know like we were talking about from for an average american regardless of what party you're in
00:31:23
we have a lot of the same common needs and desires and wants right you know we want a better life for our children we want them to get good education we want to earn a good living you know we want clean air to breathe you know we want to have freedom to pursue whatever we want to pursue we want to be able to practice what religion we want to practice yeah right we want to be able to love who we want to love um all these things are common and but then you get you know, fringe parties that get to power, and they're deciding. So you're right.
00:31:53
I mean, elections have consequences, you know, and there's a lot of things to contribute to this.
SPEAKER_1 00:32:00
I think the Democrats are going to have a landslide in November, but it's not because people like the Democrats. It's because people really, really, really don't like what's happening with Trump. And I think it's an opportunity for Democrats. If Democrats could be like, I was watching this old Tony Blair clip in the 90s last night, watching this documentary about Northern England. It's bizarre. But anyway, he was like, we're new labor. New labor is coming home to you. You can come home to new labor. It was like a really inspiring thing because labor had sucked and the conservatives were in power for 15 years with Margaret Thatcher in the UK. And then Tony Blair came in. And we need a party like that.
00:32:35
Like, we're not just going to be the same old thing. um it's not we're it's not going to be schumercrats like it's going to be a new thing
SPEAKER_0 00:32:46
system terry i think you know because if you think about it both parties have an incentive to keep things at status quo yeah they're constantly fighting against the third party because i think that most americans are somewhere in the middle
00:33:04
you're always going to have fringes of course on both sides you know and that's okay too i mean i think we should be able to respect multiple points of view but you know we've been in this situation now for years i'm just going to take my ball and go home like you know like if i don't agree with your point of view and i have the power yeah i'm just going to shut you down completely and not even going to listen to you and i can entertain you i'm going to just you know stay with my team over here that's not healthy either i think we also need a third party yeah yeah that can represent more of the interests of americans i
00:33:37
think everything in life is a bell curve right like there's a skinny part on the right and a skinny part in the left and a really fat part in the middle and most americans are between the 40 yard lines and the
SPEAKER_1 00:33:48
and and it's fine we should have an you know we should have a mega party and we should have a democratic socialist of america wing and then we should have like a normal party for the middle class and but man i tell you what having just ran the system is not designed for that a friend of mine's running uh here in texas as an independent for lieutenant governor and if he his main goal is to win this lawsuit to make it easier for independents to run the texas makes it almost impossible you have it requires millions and millions and millions of dollars to get the signatures that you need um and then when you turn those signatures in the partisan secretary of state
00:34:29
is like no those aren't good and anyway it's very difficult for independents to run The two systems, I mean, it's billions of dollars. I don't know if you get political emails and texts. I get them all day, every day. And I get them from Republicans and I get emails from from Donald Trump and Ken Paxton. And I get them from James Tallarico and John Alsop. And I got on some list somehow. I don't know why. But it's just a giant money making machine. It's a giant.
SPEAKER_0 00:34:57
money-making machine billions and billions and billions of dollars and their incentive is to keep it that way and not let someone else in of course there's what but i mean you learned i guess even in politics the business of politics how hard it is right i mean you know and you ran for all the right reasons first for senator and the opportunity with the redistricting and congress you know, you weren't successful to get out of the primaries, but you still were able to reach some people. What did you learn through this process earlier this year?
SPEAKER_1 00:35:27
You know, I, well, I loved some aspects of it. I loved block walking, going to knock it on doors. I had a lot of fun doing that. I love going to events and giving speeches like I like, and then I'm a big Q and You know, my day job is speaking for a living. I love doing Q&A as part of that. So I like talking to voters. The money part was horrendous. And at the end of the day, to win a Democratic primary, you got to be...
00:36:02
as left as possible to win the republican primary you have to be mega crazy and that's awful there was one or two of the republicans i was friends with a couple of the republicans who were running you know we i had debates on stage and uh i'm i'm trying the lady that beat me i'm trying to help her win you know my goal is not for me to be a congressman my goal was to actually
00:36:25
um restore some sanity to washington so i i wasn't doing it because i wanted the job or the job would have been frankly terrible can you imagine being a congressman first of all you have to work with congressmen all the all day long every day then you have to get on a plane and fly to washington back and forth although the good thing if mike johnson's the speaker you don't because he just doesn't have congress like you could just stay in your district I don't know if you if your people are following it, but it was a couple of weeks ago, a Republican, Matt Massey from Kentucky introduced articles of impeachment for,
SPEAKER_0 00:37:00
yeah, for Pete Hegseth,
SPEAKER_1 00:37:02
which he should be impeached. I mean, most of the cabinet should be impeached. But Pete Hegseth is an absolute travesty. He's a complete dumpster fire. And.
SPEAKER_0 00:37:14
he's running a trillion dollar organization so that it's just not acceptable i guess i'm actually shocked because i was talking about this with some of our general friends and i i thought for sure that that the whole complex would have swallowed him up within the first year i am amazed that he's actually gotten through and stayed in power over these last two years as big as our military
SPEAKER_1 00:37:35
he is kicked out well first of all he's spending money like a drunken sailor and or like a drunken anyway um so the contractors are not going to be opposed to that and the he's purging people left and right. Well, especially if you're not a white man, he's purged the ranks pretty intensely. And most senior officers want to get promoted, so they're going to just stay quiet. Anyway, yes. So he gets articles of impeachment. So instead of facing that, Mike Johnson just said, we're done. And he just gave the whole Congress off.
00:38:15
until november same thing happened last year with the jeffrey epstein files remember that they and they eventually passed the law that trump just ignored and like this is the what are you going to do about it presidency like i'm not following the rules what are you going to do about it i have the army i have the police so i'm right jeff i know we're out of time i'm really worried about the I'm worried about ICE agents showing up. I'm worried about mail in ballots getting messed with at the at the post office. Like if millions of mail in ballots don't make it in and the Republicans hold Congress like that could be bad.
SPEAKER_0 00:38:56
No, I am too. I think this is going to be a watershed moment. I mean, and I and they they've already demonstrated that they're willing to do anything and everything. to disrupt uh the process um and it's all really a farce um you know based upon this completely disputed notion that there's a systemic fraud in the election and it's it's ridiculous but uh
00:39:20
and we already have i mean i don't know about you but like can we go to vote yeah you show your id like it's a standard thing like we already do that it's like that you're you know it's it's um ridiculous just adding it well first of all i don't need to be applied yeah if the elections aren't good then maybe republicans shouldn't have the presidency house and senate
SPEAKER_1 00:39:41
I mean, you won all the elections and you're complaining that the elections are rigged?
SPEAKER_0 00:39:45
Yes. It's like you're arguing out of both ends of your mouth and thinking that we're just stupid.
SPEAKER_1 00:39:51
He knows he's going to lose. He can't. His skin is so thin. He can't accept the fact that he lost. And there's another scenario, and this is terrifying. Mike Johnson just doesn't seat the new representatives, you know? 10 or 20 seats flip and he just doesn't seat them which is he's already done that yeah he's already done that there was a lady in arizona he didn't cedar for months yeah yeah yep you can see that too i mean although i think that can only go for so far especially with a new uh election but yeah i mean that's and then people have to file a lawsuit and do all this so
SPEAKER_0 00:40:32
yeah uh definitely something that we want to keep on an eye on you know i don't we were i think we were supposed to talk about ai during this session
SPEAKER_1 00:40:43
we got a couple minutes yeah ai and my daily swamp um so ai well we talked about the ted talk that's like Engineers are saying things. We're seeing agents jailbreak, you know, swarms of agents. We're seeing teenagers told to kill themselves. You know, teenagers are now having AI girlfriends and AI boyfriends. And the damage that that's doing is profound. We're seeing kids. not writing their papers, having AI write a paper. And when you write a paper, I hated English. I hated writing. It was the worst thing ever. And when I did it, like my neurons got wired and I learned. They're not doing that. It's like a just crushing thing. The productivity, it can help for sure, but it can also hurt.
00:41:39
And so there's good and bad from AI, but we need to understand the warning signs, just like the space shuttle. There are things happening. There are people saying this should happen. One of the points I make in my case study is Challenger happened, it exploded.
00:41:57
And 17 years later, all the 25-year engineers... year old engineers and challenger who were like learn their lesson 17 years later they were the bosses in columbia and they did all the same exact stuff so it's one thing to learn a lesson it's another thing to remember a lesson did we what did we learn from social media and x and facebook and algorithms like 10 years ago that was a big deal right tristan harris did uh the social dilemma documentary ai is is so is facebook times a million right like it's way worse potentially than social media everywhere so are we gonna learn those lessons and the people who are in charge are incentivized to get that trillion
00:42:44
um and that's like we're in a bad situation there with ai because of all the things that i can do ruin our society ruin our culture get to steal people's childhoods and unemployment the bioweapon thing is what keeps me up because bioweapons suck And if AI makes it easy, and there's already been reported cases of people just last week, I think there was one of the frontier AI companies reported that some people were trying to use it to make bioweapons. Of course they are. That's what humans do. Yeah, well,
SPEAKER_0 00:43:18
of course. And then there was another jailbreak yesterday that was reported on the news, you know, where it hacked a website. So, I mean, these things are real. i think i'm coming out somewhere in the middle on this because i'm a bit cynical you know watching both companies push back their ipos and you know them realizing that what they were originally being evaluated on is quickly dissipating so if they create this basically an artificial free zone where it's easy to blame things on the government. They keep everybody else out, you know, and they can have the whole world to themselves, you know, because they've not yet proven that they can make money at the scale that people want to value them at. Yeah.
00:43:58
So I think that's a real concern. At the same time, I think there is also documented evidence that, hey, this is pretty powerful stuff here. and we do need to put in some safeguards and we're going to need both state and national legislatures to actually give a and start doing something um i think maybe california is probably one of the best chances we have or massachusetts or a state like that you know before anything happens at the federal level i think it needs to be california because that's
SPEAKER_1 00:44:30
the federal government is not going to do that. The Trump administration is invested in AI and crypto. Let's talk about AI real quick in my daily swap thing. By the way, I'm doing it with the SteadyState. So check out Terry Virts on all my social medias or this organization called the SteadyState. We have this daily video program. It's a... It's about AI or it's about the corruption. And one of the corruption videos was about the UAE. So the UAE gives the Trump family $500 million in the World Liberty Financial. And then they give another $2 billion deal for their stable coin. And now the UAE.
00:45:16
has access to the top nvidia ai chips before the our security infrastructure didn't want to give uae the the very best nvidia chips because they were worried they would share it with china i mean what the uae really are they uh worthy of the best ai technology on earth but after two and a half billion dollars through the trump family and wickoff family the wickoff uh boy runs the company um now they have access to the world's top uh chips and and two billion of that money went to binance finance is run by cz i think chang fang zhao it's a he's a chinese guy canadian citizen cz was convicted of money laundering for iran
00:46:05
now he's the ceo of binance trump pardons him and he gives he gave a hundred million dollars to the trump super pack or whatever uh so he gives a hundred million dollars he gets his pardon and then this two billion dollar deal goes through trump's company on his way to cz again who by the way is being investigated again for corruption so that whole thing what happened to uh drain the swamp huh terry it wasn't like it was yeah so that that's why we're calling it the daily swamp and i have the clip there was a time october of 24 i think it was the first trump's like i'm gonna drain the swamp and um yeah but just wrap your brains around that
00:46:47
like billions of dollars going through the trump family organization and uae gets crypto in return qatar first of all gave him that airplane long story during covid a friend of mine was a business jet broker and i was hanging out at his house and he was telling me about the the 747 so the saudi bought one qatar bought one and they didn't want them because they're super super super expensive and it was like a well-known thing that these 747s were for sale and nobody wanted them it's like and then qatar you know we'll give them to trump well in return for and they bailed out the kush the kushner family jared kushner bought 666 park avenue for 1.
00:47:30
2 billion dollars and it was only worth 800 million so and they signed a hundred year lease and they paid all billion dollars for the lease up front on day one and suddenly jared kushner the president's son-in-law is out of this massive debt that he had gotten himself into as a 30 year old and guess what now qatar on executive order, has NATO defense-like security guarantees. Trump has promised Qatar, if you're attacked, we'll defend you, just like we promised the NATO. And bring your F-15s to America. So Mountain Home Air Force Base set aside a place for the Qatar Air Force to train.
SPEAKER_0 00:48:13
And yet...- Somehow we're supposed to be the moral authority to the world, right, the beacon.
SPEAKER_1 00:48:19
- Everybody else sees this. Like we can't hide this. On Fox News they're not talking about it. So we can live in our own bubble here in America. Every other, you have friends, you have I'm sure lots of friends from other countries.- I do.- They're all like WTF America, what is happening here?
SPEAKER_0 00:48:37
And we let it happen. So, you know, I mean, again, I think you said it near the beginning of this show. We got to get out and vote, you know, and continue to vote and let our voices be heard. And if we want to continue to live the lives, I mean, look, even with all this, Terry.
00:48:55
um yeah it makes me angry too but i still feel like we live in the greatest country in the world america's awesome yeah freedom the most opportunity the fact that you and i can even talk about this openly and complain about it at least i hope so anyway yeah um you know that's that's actually a good thing so i don't want to trade that for anything but yeah we have work to do We're all stewards of this dream. We're all stewards of our Constitution, and it takes all of us to be able to fight for it, defend it, and work for it.
SPEAKER_1 00:49:27
we need we need to be civics remember in class we used to learn civics you know vote ethics
SPEAKER_0 00:49:37
morals you know those those those little things right yeah kind of really important you can't use your position of power to personally benefit yourself
SPEAKER_1 00:49:48
you know it's like ethics 101 it's funny i don't know if you ever had a government job i was in the government for 30 years and if you worked at a company it's the same you have to take your annual training you know like computer security training and we at nasa and in the air force we had to do ethics training and it was like
00:50:05
this a company comes to you and offers you this gift there used to be a 20 gift limit for federal employees and now there's a 747 being given or no the swiss the swiss gave trump a gold bar 130 000 gold bar with 45 and 47 engraved on it so when i think back to that ethics that i used to have to sign up for it's like it's so quaint
SPEAKER_0 00:50:30
It really makes Watergate, Iran-Contra, some of these other things just pale in comparison, you know.
SPEAKER_1 00:50:38
This is, can I end with, this is a funny story, and it's also awful, and it should be a bigger story than Watergate. I don't know if you remember, Trump got debanked a few years ago, I think in 21, 22. Capital One canceled. He had 300 bank accounts. I probably have a dozen or so between my retirement accounts. He had 300 and they canceled him and he was, I'm being persecuted, blah, blah, blah. He sued him. The judge dropped the suit and then he sued again. And so finally Capital One was like,
SPEAKER_2 00:51:10
all right.
SPEAKER_1 00:51:12
and they and they didn't cave all these other law firms and universities cave capital one didn't cave they're like all right here's the documents he was cancelled for money laundering the president of the united states was suspected of money laundering and this that's back to fincen i talked about fincen earlier there's this thing called a suspicious activity report i'm studying i'm taking banking exams right now so i just studied it and you know the and i'm sure capital one has accountants i'm sure they don't cancel the president united states accounts lightly so i'm sure there's something there um we don't know exactly what it was but they did say we were seeing money laundering the president united states was debanked because he was
00:51:57
money laundering
SPEAKER_0 00:51:59
worth that's worth investigating to say the least it's like that's of all this stuff i think that might be the biggest story and nobody's talking about it nobody's talking about it well hopefully they'll they'll start you know uh pretty soon but i know we're right on time for today but you know my friend always always fun um we'll have to do this that's not on course soon we could talk for All right, Terry. I'm sure I'm going to be seeing you at the bar soon, but thanks for stopping by.
SPEAKER_1 00:52:27
See you at the AI thing and check out the Daily Swamp if you get a few minutes. You got it.
SPEAKER_0 00:52:32
All right.
SPEAKER_1 00:52:34
Thanks.
