Name: Joe Rogan Experience #1793 - Mike Baker
Uploaded: 2022-03-19T00:00:00.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #1793 - Mike Baker' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2022-03-19. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #1793 - Mike Baker' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2022-03-19. Transcript available.

Joe Rogan Experience #1793 - Mike Baker

Joe Rogan Podcast, check it out.
The Joe Rogan Experience.
Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day.
Mike Baker, are we fucked?
Mr. Rogan, we are fucked.
This is not good, right?
This is not good.
How much fun is this?
Every time we get together, there's some bullshit happening.
Yeah, every time the world is somewhat falling apart.
Yeah, yeah, well, it's good for business.
I didn't mean that, actually.
That's going to sound wrong.
No, no, that's what people expect me to say, I think.
Yeah, yeah, I think nobody really expected the potential for thermonuclear war
right after
two years of a pandemic.
I don't think anybody actually saw that coming.
Yeah, there's no break for the weary.
Yeah, exactly.
It comes out of it.
I did have a thought, which was, I talked to my daughter the other day.
She's just turned 28, and I thought, after I hung up, she was talking about it,
and she
was kind of basically saying, what the fuck, right?
And so people that age, if you think about those, the folks in that age group,
she was
born, you know, she was old enough to understand 9-11, right, in a sense, from
a child's perspective,
and then through the Iraq, Afghanistan, you know, bullshit, that whole time
with the war
on terrorism, a couple of recessions, global pandemic, now, you know,
approaching Cold
War 2.0, getting close to thermonuclear war, not that we are.
And the disastrous pullout of Afghanistan.
And Afghanistan, inflation, possibly leading to recession.
Seven dollars a gallon gas in California.
People of that age, not able to save money for a house, they must just be
thinking, what
the fuck?
Yeah.
Where's our, you know, big buildup?
Where's our, like, the 50s or the 80s, you know?
Well, it just seems so supremely incompetent.
Everything seems like whoever the grown-ups are that are running the show have
fucked up
so many different things.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, there's a lot to unpack there, isn't there, in that statement.
The Putin thing scares the shit out of me, though, because he's a, you know,
when it comes
to warlords, he's a legitimate warlord who is in charge of, I didn't know that
they had
more nukes than us.
I mean, I guess it's kind of a moot point, right, because everybody's got
enough to kill
everybody.
How many times over?
Yeah.
Isn't it something crazy, like 10 times over?
Yeah, they did the math, and it was in double digits.
It's not good.
It's not good, but it's, look, if you step back, everybody's thinking, okay,
how did this,
you know, how did this fucked up situation happen?
Well, it's been building, obviously, right?
I mean, we have, how much news coverage did we have of, well, they're adding
more troops
to the border with Ukraine.
I wonder what they're doing.
Could it be military exercises?
So there was a tremendous amount of speculation leading up to what the fuck is
going on, which
in a sense points to how lacking the intelligence is on Putin, on plans and
intentions, right?
And that's a heavy lift, right, to come up with that sort of intel, because
ideally you're
going to want a human source.
You know, you can gather intelligence from a variety of sources, but you really
want human
access, people who can tell you, you know what?
I had a meeting with him, and boy, I tell you what, he was pissed off, or this
is what
he said, or this is how he looked.
Without that, without knowing what plans and intentions are, or, you know,
being able to
gather intel on, say, the command staff, everybody was kind of speculating.
Will he, won't he?
What's he going to do?
Well, stepping back, if you look at what he's done, he's been pretty damn
consistent,
right, over the years, and so I guess, you know, in a part, a lot of it was
optimistic
thinking, okay, he just wants the eastern part of the country, he's just going
to go
in there and take that, because, you know, maybe he's already got it, he's
declared those
two republics legit, maybe that's all he wants, he's already taken Crimea, and
so I think that
was optimistic thinking, hoping that, you know, the guy's not going to lose his
shit and
go all the way through the country.
Well, that's what he's done, and in part, because, again, if you look at what
he did in
Chechnya, if you look at what he did helping Assad in Syria, if you look at
what he did
annex in Crimea, if you look at Georgia, Abkhazia, south of Sesia, every step
of the way, he's
been following in his mind, this stated desire that he's made very public over
the years,
to rebuild his sphere of influence, right?
So, in part, you could argue, we kind of miss the obvious, right?
We didn't see the obvious in front of us, because we were all kind of hoping
and mirroring
our values onto Putin, who doesn't deserve to have our values mirrored onto him,
because
we're thinking maybe he just wants a little bit, maybe he just tried to make a
point, maybe
he just wants them to sign a charter saying they won't be part of NATO.
So anyway, you know, my point being twofold, I guess.
We missed the boat on that, we missed it in part because we're always trying to
be optimistic
and trying to think, okay, well, maybe they think like we do, maybe there's a
rational
process there.
And then part of it is intel was lacking.
And when it comes to intel, when you're talking about like in-person intel, how
difficult is
that to get on a guy like Putin?
It's really tough.
I mean, you know, look, it's a very heavy lift, the higher they go up the food
chain,
because the smaller your pool of potential access points are, right?
So you know, you've got some mid-level person floating around, you know, a
government office
somewhere in some target country.
And you know, maybe you've got lots of options, okay, who do they socialize
with?
Right?
Who can I get access to?
Who might, you know, be next to them?
You know, do they have a driver?
Can I recruit the driver?
There's things like that.
Sometimes it's very simple, but Putin's had an increasingly small circle of
close advisors
and of people that he counts on and trusts.
And part of that may be, you know, the fact that that was accelerated through
the two-year
pandemic where he decidedly was shutting himself off because he was, you know,
paranoid like
a lot of people were about COVID.
Do you remember when there was a guy who suicide drove into Putin's car and
Putin wasn't in
it?
Yeah.
When was that?
That was-
A few years back?
Yeah.
Some guy, there was oncoming traffic and he timed it right when, there must
have been
someone communicating with him, letting him know where Putin's car is, but
Putin wasn't
even in it.
Yeah.
And turned right into oncoming traffic and used his car as a weapon and killed
the both
of them.
Yeah.
I think killed the both of them.
Yeah.
We'll get you to look up when that was.
You've seen the video though, right?
Yeah.
It was a while back though.
Four or five years maybe?
Yeah.
But he's, you know, people have been talking about, is he losing his shit?
You know, is he going crazy?
I don't think he's, I don't think it's any of that, right?
Well, he like gets on a table when he negotiates and talks to people.
He's like 40 feet away from them.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And that assessment was clear during the course of the pandemic.
He was isolating himself.
He was being, you know, very, very cautious.
But I mean, and so maybe that had something to do with it.
But anyway, point being is it's tough to, when you've got a small potential
well of targets
you can go after when you're talking about recruiting somebody who's got access
to a high priority
target.
That's, you know, that's probably one of the heaviest lifts we've got.
How do you get, like, how does someone get access to like a driver?
Do you use a girl?
Um.
Is that the best way to do it?
No, not really.
I mean, you know what, it's, cause what you're looking to do, this is not to
fall into like,
you know.
Spy talking.
Spy talking, recruitment 101.
But the movies and beach books and everything will have you believe that, you
know, the best
way to hook somebody to recruit somebody is, you know, blackmail or a honey
trap or something.
You know, usually you're working on something else.
You're not necessarily working on the ideology, but you don't want to start
from a negative
basis, right?
Because even in normal terms, in the best of circumstances, when somebody's
recruited to
spy on their country, to spy on their organization, whatever it may be, there's
a clock starts ticking,
you know, cause things start to decay, right?
The person starts to decay.
You're very wearing on a human, right?
And for a variety of reasons.
Um.
And so, you know that window is going to close at some point.
It may not end well.
So, you're trying to optimize that.
And if you start from a negative perspective, right?
If you, if you're, you've got someone cooperating with you because they're
blackmailing, they're
under the gun here and, and they hate you and they hate, you know, what they're
doing.
Right.
That's not what you're looking for.
You're looking for a more, and it sounds weird, but you're looking for a more
positive approach.
So, how do you do that?
Approach.
Like, how would you get a driver to be your buddy?
Well, um, it's a, okay, there's a, there's a recruitment process, a cycle that
you go through,
but, um, I hope everyone's taking notes.
Uh, but you, uh, first of all, you got to know what information you're looking
for, right?
Right.
So, that, that tasking gets set, you know, outside the, the building.
If you're talking about the agency or, or really any head intel service,
theoretically, the
administration of power is setting priority tasking.
So, they send over this and they say, "Hey, we need this.
This is a priority target for us, this information."
So, you look around, you go, "Okay, well, who's got access to the information?"
Um, all right, you build up that world, then you figure out who might be, you
know, accessible,
right?
Because maybe you, you're interested in, in, you know, a target here, but he
never leaves
the country, you know, it's a denied area.
And, uh, so then you find out who's got the, the access to the information, who
might be
accessible, why might they be minded to talk to you?
Can you create a scenario where you can get next to them?
Um, and then you're looking for points of leverage, right?
You're really looking, and that doesn't necessarily mean you're looking to find
a negative, right?
You're looking for something that drives them.
What makes it, are their kids the most important thing to them?
Right?
Do they, do they have a kid who, you know, needs medical attention?
Um, do they have a kid who they desperately want to send away to college, but
they don't
have the money?
You know, so you're looking for something like that, that may, again, it sounds
strange because
you're talking about recruiting somebody for espionage, but it, it, it's a
positive rather
than a negative.
And that creates then a longer shelf life in a sense for that asset, if that
makes sense.
It does make sense, but it would, I would imagine that when you're dealing with
someone
like say Kim Jong-un or Putin or, you know, some dictator, like they, they have
to be prepared
for things like this.
Right?
So they probably are very cautious on who gets into their inner circle.
Yeah.
And that's, and that's a counterintelligence issue.
Right?
So every, you know, every government out there, um, you know, they're worried
about that, that
very thing.
Right?
Right.
And so, I mean, look, and Putin, he was a KGB officer for 15 years.
Right?
Yeah.
Now, interestingly, going back to Putin, he, he served in East Germany, I think
for about
half a dozen years.
Uh, never really had an exposure to the West.
So that's also something when you, when you're talking about trying to assess
his mindset,
understand where he's coming from.
Part of it is, look, if he had, if he had been exposed to the West in a much
bigger way,
maybe he served in New York, you know, or he served in wherever, you know,
London, someplace
where he had more 