 It's my great pleasure to introduce this evening's lecturer, Dr. Karen Katowski is a retired U.S. Air Force Lieutenant Colonel whose assignments included duties as a Pentagon desk officer and various roles for the National Security Agency. After retiring, she became a noted critic of the U.S. involvement in Iraq. Katowski is known for her insider essays denouncing a corrupting political influence on military intelligence, especially leading up to the 2003 Iraq War. In 2012, she challenged incumbent Bob Goodlett in the Republican primary for Virginia's sixth district in the U.S. House of Representatives. She contributed to Ron Paul, A Life of Ideas, and Why Liberty, Personal Journeys Towards Peace and Freedom. She has been featured in several documentaries, including Why We Fight. She has written for LewRockwell.com since 2003 and her work has appeared in Salon and the American Conservative. Katowski has an M.A. in government from Harvard, an M.S. in science management from the University of Alaska, and a Ph.D. in world politics from the Catholic University of America. Her thesis was entitled Angola, a Case Study of the Implementation of the Reagan Doctrine. She's a founding member of veteran intelligence professionals for sanity. Dr. Katowski will speak to us on the Pentagon and me, Curiosity versus the State. Please welcome her. All right. Well, thank you. Thank you very much for that kind introduction. And I've got a speech here I'm going to give, and I just want to say, and I'm not kissing up here, but you guys are extremely intelligent looking. So I hope you enjoy what I have to say, but we will have time for lots of questions. So if there's something that I don't cover, which there will be a lot, just make a mental note and that's always the most fun at the end. So it was over 20 years ago in the summer of 2002 in the Pentagon when I really had my eyes open to the corrupt state and what it is about. It was a long journey, and since then I have discovered so much more about how the state functions, the extent of its impact, and its innate evil in many ways. Is it strange to use the word evil? For many years I did not use this term because honestly I thought cronyism and incompetence, lack of accountability, and the kind of people who tend to become involved in power systems like a government or its agencies, all just simply combined to produce the outcomes that we see, endless boutique wars and on-demand coups that destroy small countries and enrich certain sectors of business and banking, corruption of language and thought for those of us who are citizens of the Empire, along with the degradation of religion, culture, and of course our money. It's like there's a huge machine of state and it grinds up life and liberty on a daily basis. It's a depressing idea and it's not a new one. The Old and New Testaments are full of stories and examples of an all-consuming state, a structure for the exploitation of the many for the benefit of the few. In some ways the complaints of Marx were valid, but he narcissistically imagined it could be improved if only he were in charge. The 20th century brought us more dystopian observation and complaint. We have the depressing views of Orwell and Huxley, where an all-powerful state cannot be beaten back or changed. We have equally depressing views of the Malthusians, eugenicists, and statist environmentalists where math, biology, and politics merged together in a horrific way for purposes of denying both nature and God. For those who don't know my story, I spent 20 years in the United States Air Force and the last five of those years I was a political military affairs officer, a paper pusher in operations planning for the Air Force. Later I did much the same thing for the office of the Secretary of Defense. The best part of most jobs is the people that you meet. For me I met people I would never have met otherwise from all over, some of them who came from similar places as me and many who did not. One of the smartest guys that I knew was an F-16 pilot who did Air Force operations planning. His language was salty and hilarious. He probably wished he were flying every day instead of pushing paper and he was irreverent and honest. Most of the guys in that shop, which included pilots, navigators, logistics, com electronics officers, supply officers, all had great stories to tell. This guy wasn't big on telling stories, although he had some great ones. But it was for me his perspective that was enlightening. This guy needed and wanted very little from the system, except that one big thing which was to fly. His judgment and his analysis, the work he did for the Chief of Staff of the Air Force was top notch. He was one of the few people I ever met in the military who had no illusions and no fear. I cannot to this day remember his name, but I think the year or so that we sat next to each other was an important part of my development as a person. I was probably 38 years old then, still developing as a person. No illusions and no fear, what a concept that would be. I took what I knew and had learned and transferred to the Office of the Secretary of Defense Planning Directorate, focusing on Sub-Saharan Africa. I had been covering Sub-Saharan African operations in the Air Staff job and had written a small book the Air Force published on Air Operations in Africa. In the OSD level, the Office of Secretary of Defense level position, I did something similar. Well then I was looking at the African Crisis Response Initiative or ACRI. In that first study, I was looking at how physical and communication worlds work in that part of the world in Africa, from a U.S. perspective. Then in the second, I was able to see how military and foreign policy initiatives were done and their results. The physical world of radio waves and aircraft operations is rational, data-driven and scientific, not so for the world of government policy. I got to dig deep and in doing that found out that surprise, cover stories and public intentions are one thing, facts and practice, something very different, especially when you're looking at a government program. I also found that while many people believed the cover story and public intentions, a significant minority of people always understand more accurately what is being done and why. Now, this is who I was and what I knew when I was drafted into a different directorate of the Office of Secretary of Defense, the Near East South Asia Planning Office. It's a sister organization to where I was. This time I would be working North Africa policy side by side with new office mates who were working Saudi Arabia, the Gulf, Iraq and Iran. Now, I left out my early life where I grew up in a family that, as a matter of tradition, despised FDR. That's the half of the country that my people represented in the 1930s and 1940s. FDR was long gone when I was born and yet he remains a hero of the state. So as a child, there was a sense that some of us are aware of a different story about FDR. Why my people hated him was not really explained to me beyond his socialism. Maybe that was enough. But I think it was his authoritarianism and his sense of entitlement that bothered them. As a young person, my takeaway was that my people don't like tyranny. Think about how popular that idea is across our country. It's hugely popular. And think about how many in America disagree and actually seem to like tyranny. Back to my last Pentagon position. I had a new set of 05 and 06 Lieutenant Colonel and Colonel co-workers. And now my learning curve on political bull and state fakery was not so steep. From my own research and my many unsuspecting mentors, I mostly knew who I could trust to speak the truth and who was invested in the cover stories. I learned that for nearly a year before the second invasion of Iraq, long before the public propaganda about aluminum tubes, Saddam Hussein in 9-11, and WMD stockpiles in Iraq, we were logistically planning to invade Iraq. And unlike in the 1991 invasion, this time we would remove Saddam Hussein a year before, 2002, long before the invasion. I learned that the intelligence that I and my co-workers utilized did not support the media blitz that began in the late summer of 2002. A media campaign fully implemented not just by Pentagon political appointees, but by those in the CIA, the State Department, a large part of the Senate and the House, particularly Republicans in line with the objectives of the Republican president of the time. I noticed that there were certain double standards of the release of classified, even top secret material to the press. Some types of information would be presented to us inside the Pentagon, as intelligence, classified intelligence. And the very next day would be published verbatim on the front pages of the Washington Post and the New York Times, as if it were fact, and there was no interest at all by the Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld or Secretary of State or the Congress in identifying the leak. Much of this intelligence was not the result of measured intelligence analysis of a measured intelligence analysis process. And much of it was simply not true. Cherry-picked, unverified, or simply not yet proven to be false information. Those were simultaneously the criteria for both the classification of the information and the instant declassification overnight by leak to the front pages of the favored state media. It is not enough to, to quote Orwell, to repeat 2 plus 2 equals 5, you must believe it. In the summer of 2002, I began to write anonymous essays that would later be serially published by Colonel David Hackworth, Soldiers for the Truth website. I first contacted him with some samples of my black humor describing what I was seeing after the formation of the Office of Special Plans. And this Office of Special Plans, of course, has a special place in history, I guess, at least in my life. It was a handpicked group of political appointees and their civilian and military enablers who pumped out lies to support and popularize and shape a narrative for war that they were already committed to, but that was very unpopular among and counterintuitive to most Americans. Remember, we went to war in Afghanistan to kill Osama bin Laden and destroy Al-Qaeda precisely because as the Americans of the 9-11 era will remember, Osama did it and he was hiding in Afghanistan. This Afghan invasion was also a fantastic cover story for other things we can talk about later. But the problem for the neoconservatives was that they were obsessed with the regime change, not in Afghanistan, but in Iraq and five or six other countries in the region that threatened Israel's expansion. And of course, Afghanistan wasn't on that list. So to get the story, to get Americans on board with a new war, an additional war in Iraq based on 9-11 complicity and WMD, it faced an uphill battle. Many Americans already believed we were going after the key culture of 9-11. And what, now the government made a mistake? I mean, that's not a good selling strategy. George W. Bush, Bush 43, was already a barely elected president, was very well known for mis-underestimating, that's his word. And for being easily led by his crafty vice president, Dick Cheney, and Cheney's longtime pal, Don Rumsfeld. So the Pentagon, which owns the Defense Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency, National Imagery and Mapping Agency, which is now the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency. Among many other intelligence gathering agencies, needed to ensure the right story could be told. The Office of Special Plans was the Pentagon's propaganda clearing house, run by a handful of hand-picked ideologues. And working with like-minded colleagues and offices across several other agencies in DC and the National Security Council, with the vice president playing an important and unusual coordinating role. Here we had a number of unelected neoconservative appointees with the same value system, all dedicated to creating this war, to implement a plan that they themselves had effectively designed and lobbied for from think tanks in the years prior to 2002. And what could go wrong? This Pentagon office was formally, of course, disbanded shortly after the invasion of Iraq on March 23rd, 2003. Its job was done. I have to look up the invasion date to be sure I couldn't remember exactly. And it is fascinating that the brave browser, AI Summarizer, described it as follows. On March 23rd, 2003, the US launched a surprise military invasion of Iraq led by US Army General Tommy Franks under the code name Yada Yada, Operation Iraqi Freedom, et cetera. A surprise attack conducted after a year of Pentagon logistics planning, preparation and movement of forces. A surprise attack that was engineered and preceded by a domestic and global propaganda campaign designed to produce it. A surprise that echoed and foreshadowed every other US government propaganda campaign we have seen in recent history, meaning long, tedious, and persistent. And when I say US government here, I'm really talking about a handful of in place connected ideological elites who know better than 99.999% of the population. Most people who bought into the lies told by government, much as we have seen repeatedly since then, are those people who really haven't taken the three or four minutes it would have taken for them to seek out some remnant of truths, to silently ask themselves a simple question or two. Some government employees, especially intelligence professionals and those with experience in US war operations, did take the time to understand what was happening and to separate fact from fiction. Most went along with the state narrative without question and those who didn't were quietly replaced. We can wonder why more people didn't stand up and resist the war propaganda. And this question requires an examination not just of how the government convinces the population to obey and support it, but also of economics, human psychology, and how people feel about their government. It's worth looking at this because, especially with the COVID experience, which we saw people like Kamala Harris swear, and I believe she did swear, she would never take a shot of an untested genetic therapy if it came from the Trump administration, only to adamantly demand this lifesaving and effective vaccine be mandated once her political party was in charge. How people feel about their government is important. So this is kind of what I saw and learned and in expressing my personal frustration with the lies I was hearing, lies being credited to my place of employment, having the very credibility of the institution I was part of being used to convince millions of people of absolute lies in order to achieve other clear, but certainly unstated US government objectives. Well, it's because of that that I began later to be able to share my perspective at lourockwell.com and elsewhere, and because of that my voice was added to the growing, small but growing, public chorus that seeks limited government and peace and opposes empire. This chorus has a wonderful and bold and brave history, and today continues in a world where it reaches millions of people. Perhaps because of this we find ourselves and liberty itself targeted by the most powerful state in the history of the planet. When we're President Eisenhower, what, 63 years ago, identified somewhat vaguely in his farewell speech a military industrial, possibly congressional complex. Today we have CIA analyst Ray McGovern's Mickey Mat, military, industrial, congressional, intelligence, media, academia, think tank complex entered into the modern lexicon. And you can look it up, it's in the dictionary. It would appear that the state is growing and winning in terms of wars and really constant wars since World War II for the United States empire. We see endless shifting waves of state intervention abroad and at home. We see the US participation in global imperialism in the form of non-government organizations like the World Economic Forum, which work hand in hand with government organizations or non-government organizations, the IMF, WHO, NATO, to name only a few. The US-Western European Mickey Mat is very effective at bludgeoning whole states, industries and populations abroad, and it is just as capable of bludgeoning them domestically. War is war. Orwell's boot, stamping on a human face forever, an Aldous Huxley's prediction that people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think seem to have come true. And yet, we live today in the most free and liberty inspired era that has ever been. I shared a bit of my story and perhaps have painted a picture of our US government as a gray, shabby, statist empire in its final phases, which likely will continue to fade and struggle for survival on for only a few more generations. And maybe we may live to see this struggle, this end. Historically, those who studied the lifespans of empires agree that they do not end suddenly, or if they appear to, it is only because they were failing long before the actual end. So I'm open to the idea, and actually quite hopeful, that I will live to see the end of the US empire. It has been in decline since the Civil War. It was punctuated with Wilsonian and FDR spikes of ideology and tendencies until a kind of progressive statism and state dominance throughout society became the norm and the rule for both major parties in 95% of our elected leadership after November 1963. The US empire has gotten more bloated, more sick, and more insane in the past 60 years. That successful coup removing John F. Kennedy and instantly reversing his most dangerous policies from the state's perspective was the start of the coda to use a musical term for our song of empire. The big picture can be depressing, but it doesn't have to be. I want to spend the next few minutes talking about the role of curiosity in my own experience, and in the larger sense of how we live and thrive as people, as society, and even our government. It starts with the individual, and as Americans by birth or by choice, we have a culture that celebrates curiosity. It is exactly this fundamental trait that is shared by most and the most dangerous enemies of the state. Let's start with where curiosity is not encouraged. There have been several iconic events of my lifetime, the JFK assassination and its aftermath of Vietnam, the first time we fought in Afghanistan alongside a young bin Laden, the fall of the Soviet Union, the first invasion of Iraq back in 1990. One, I guess it was, the Clinton NATO wars in Yugoslavia, 9-11, second invasion of Afghanistan, second invasion of Iraq, and the Ukraine situation today. These are all things that we are curious about and should be curious about. And yet, we are never really encouraged to learn more about these events or to even ask questions about them. And these foreign policy-related activities are just a tiny slice of our modern history. We could look at key events and trends in pharmacology, in domestic policy, in education, in industry, in energy or environment, in food production, in regulatory trends, in banking and money, in technology and entertainment, in religion. Again, in each of these areas, while we admit knowledge and learning has been integral to the advantages and achievements, actual layman-style curiosity is politically and institutionally discouraged. Perhaps this represents the rise of the technocrat, the emergence of an expert class, which by definition cannot or should not be questioned by the less able, the less technocratic, the less expert. Perhaps it is the decline of the study of philosophy and the state-driven official discouragement of, as Ayn Rand might say, checking our premises. Many of you have read Etienne de la Botte's The Politics of Obedience, the Discourse of Voluntary Servitude. The young Etienne wonders why so many are so easily ruled, even to their detriment, by the few, and he explores the logic and the facts and comes up with some ageless ideas on how change can happen. You have studied modern anti-state ideas, decentralization, black and gray markets, how money dies, how societies shift or don't shift. Technology today, be it in communications, privacy and anonymity, finance, data, energy, war and peace, even free speech, forces us to think about the very things we should be thinking about, which is who has power, how and why, and do we submit to a ruler or a class or a movement, or are we ourselves the kings and queens, or a class and a movement to be recognized and reckoned with? Obviously, when it comes to curiosity, we're all born with it, and we very often learn to subdue and manage that native interest of how the world really works. Our endless whys are often met with no one knows, don't ask me anymore because I said so. Our desire to find out can be met with a story about how curiosity killed the cat. Modern society and the modern state discourages children and young people from exploration, adventure, and even small risk taking for good reason. Societies and systems are not interested in change, be it in the religious dogma, the power of the kingdom, the divisions in a feudal society. They can't abide citizens who are not afraid to ask real questions, to find out for themselves what is true. Imagine the terror felt by the powers that were at the invention of the printing press, at the endless proselytizing person to person of the early Christians, changing one mind at a time in a declining Roman empire. Today we have similar tools exponentially more powerful at our fingertips, and the state is right to be worried. And everything we are seeing today tells us that it is extremely worried. In fact, it is at war. The state's war on curiosity has two fronts, the input side, here's what you need to know and little else, and the output side, violators will be punished harshly, publicly, and viciously. Whether it's COVID, the latest war, criticism of a pet project of the state, the war's the same, the tactics are the same, and the objectives are the same. This war can be an easy win for the state if it succeeds in reducing the number and the impact of the curious. If the state can eliminate our native skills of curiosity, dehumanize us, isolate us from learning and debate, causes to be suspicious and fearful when we should be curious and exploratory, then it will win. Those dystopian perspectives I mentioned earlier, people who cannot move because of a boot on the face and cannot think because they have lost the skill of thinking speak to the inhuman, the inhumane, and the death of humanity. So to avoid that, we have to exercise the thing that makes us human that qualifies us as humane and constitutes humanity. We are all gifted with an amazing ability to learn, to retain knowledge, to think logically and abstractly, to understand the physical world directly, theoretically, and even emotionally. That's what it means to be human. Before I get to the list of important things I want to share, I want to share something that helped me think about my way of thinking and to really get curious. I think the reason people don't want to learn new things and question old things is because they don't want to be surprised and they also don't want to be wrong. I think we really have to celebrate being wrong when it happens and actually look for those opportunities. This, being wrong, happens to me all the time, but I have two examples that I think of often. The first was in late 1988 as the Soviet Union was coming apart and Eastern European satellite countries were gaining independence. I was taking a graduate class at Harvard on Eastern Europe as part of my government degree there and we had to write about the expected order of liberty in these countries, which one would be first to leave the Soviet Union and become a democracy and which would be last? So I wrote my analysis and I go with the most oppressed and least free country will depart first and the most free where citizens have it better than most other Eastern European countries would be the last to leave the Soviet sphere. I picked Romania first and Poland last. My order of liberty was 100% wrong and while I wasn't an expert on Eastern Europe by any means, chances are, since I was studying this at Harvard, I was probably in the top 5% of Americans who were thinking about and studying the history and politics of the region at the time. As it turned out, it wasn't what I knew that was wrong but it was my assumptions and to a degree my definitions. In getting it wrong, I became very curious about how I could be so wrong and what were my assumptions and how did I define things? Long after that class, I was still learning on this topic. The second example of a wrong prediction occurred around the same timeframe and this prediction related to what would happen to NATO after the Warsaw Pact dissolved. So I expected it would shrink. It would become less significant as its reason for being had largely evaporated. In fact, NATO immediately expanded its mission description and began to court new members from its former mortal enemies. And again, I was wrong because my assumptions about NATO, what it was, its purpose and focus were incorrect. And this time I noticed that my incorrect assumptions were absolutely based on the public story of NATO, the very same story people in the West generally accepted to be true. Why was that public story so wrong and yet so prevalent? These two examples may seem small and not very special but I think for me as a person interested in how the state works and foreign affairs and war, they were pivotal. My husband is a lifelong soccer coach and he's very competitive. And I've learned from him, half listening really, but I've learned from him that it's mostly the losing team that learns anything. The losing team demands to understand why and how while the winning team is satisfied with the what. The losing team gets to analyze, compare and ask uncomfortable questions. It gets to examine strategy, gather information from a variety of sources, integrate all this information and figure out what's really happening. On top of that, the losing team has to do this in an emotional space where they would probably rather cry, beat someone up or just quit. So I've chosen the concept of curiosity as a key to our battle with the state and its battle against everyone. It's not just okay to find out where our assumptions are partially incorrect or incomplete or even completely wrong. It's the first thing we should be looking at. It's not just okay to be on the losing side or in the minority. That's often the most educational place to be. We can develop our skills of curiosity just like any other skill and as we do this because we are humans, we will find out that it's extremely fun, intellectually stimulating and of course for the thrill seekers out there, it can be dangerous. It's also useful to others. When we learn, examine, question productively, make inferences, test theories, share and debate possibilities, research and compile, think, we are not only more able in general, we are better soldiers in the fight against centralized authoritarianism, totalitarianism, tyranny, dehumanization and death. By the way, the state, our rulers in whatever form or whichever era, it knows we are curious and the state seeks to shape and direct that curiosity. Bread and circuses, 2000 years ago as today and tomorrow is the go-to tactic to divert our incredible observational skills and analytical skills and powers of curiosity away from what the state is doing to us and for us in spite of us, the Mickey Mac, Mickey Mat, I always say that, which also touches on sports entertainment, gaming and gambling industries is heavily invested in having us feel like we're on the winning team. That's the team that doesn't have to assess its assumptions, its performance, its goals. It's the team that never has to ask an uncomfortable question or really examine its collective skill set. Who doesn't want to be on the winning team? If you're here today, you're already curious about how things work, how the economy works, how humans interact and behave, what the world is like every minute of every day. We are built to pursue understanding and in this regard we are also built for peace. I do not recommend that we approach our life and work with the goal of being a troublemaker. We should just seek to understand honestly and then simply be honest about it. Blurting out that the emperor has no clothes might work fine for a child or a jester but children and jesters are protected by their very role in society. It might be better to pose questions that can lead others to their own improved and more accurate assessments. Dilaboti suggests that people willingly become slaves because they value going along with others to feel safe with others or to simply feel safe intellectually. We cannot underestimate the value of feeling safe and I think our enemy the state understands this very well and we've seen repeatedly in the past decades all state-hyped hysteria hinges on an idea of safety suppressing and punishing curiosity by design. This seems always to result in greater state control and greater centralization. It is important for everyone but especially those of us with a greater interest in the state to be curious and to engender curiosity in others. Towards that end, here's some of the things I advise. And there are many articles and studies out there on how to be more curious. Our public schools of course create a huge market for this kind of adult therapy. How we can be more curious and more importantly, how do we inspire others to be more curious? And so I wanna mention four techniques and practices that can help. And I've mentioned one, be willing to be wrong. Embrace that possibility. Of course, we may feel we are not wrong but by overtly being willing to be wrong we set an example for others who in fact may be extremely wrong. And if I'm able to walk through an argument or a topic where I could be mistaken I'm allowing everyone else to feel okay doing the same. I haven't mentioned mass formation psychosis but many of you may have been thinking about it a little. Mass formation psychosis is a favorite weapon as it induces society and citizen to shut down curiosity about or investigation of a state or politically induced catastrophe. We are not to ask questions about 9-11 nor wonder if an assassination death or disappearance of a political leader, activist or witness to a state crime is anything other than bad luck. To counter this phenomenon we have to deal with the four main pillars that predispose a society to mass formation psychosis. And these include a lack of social bonds and connections a lack of sense making. Things don't seem to make sense. The other necessary components are free floating anxiety and free floating psychological discontent. When you break it down like this we can see why the mickey mat includes media, academia and think tanks. They can and often do play an outsized role in promoting social disconnection, senselessness, anxiety and discontent. When we are willing to be wrong we are giving ourselves and everyone else permission to also be wrong along with us. We are being people with people not isolating them. We are showing compassion, easing anxiety and we are seeking answers, seeking what is sensible, what is solid. To be willing to be wrong is courageous and in that it quells fear. Courageous comforting to the frightened and can allow them to start thinking logically again. Next thing, practice careful listening. I have a friend who when she's about to say something that's really important to her precedes it with now listen carefully. And I usually am not listening carefully because I don't practice this important skill as often as I should. And yet it is the ability to listen to hear with understanding that is purposely destroyed in a state or agenda fostered mass psychosis event. We saw this so vividly in the COVID response and the elevation of fear to a level that simply shut down any new learning. A person questioning any aspect of the government message of the moment was immediately attacked. Socially verbally punished called idiots and grandma killers and science deniers. The damage to relationships between people, families, communities and places of business everywhere and at every level has been almost permanent. Maybe it's not completely permanent but we have not healed yet. One of my brothers called me a threat to our mother repeatedly, potentially her murderer repeatedly because I did not agree with a certain Dr. Fauci before he changed his mind on something. This memory has caused me to wince every time he signs off of our weekly FaceTime group chats with I love you. I do not trust his judgment as I once did and I thought he was always the smart one in the family and thus I cannot trust my own judgment. This is exactly the desired impact of a state induced crisis and response cycle. The state is at war and this is the battlefield. So in this battlefield, the target of the state is our very relationships, our ability to trust each other, to listen to each other and to learn truth together. So listening is not just what we do for our benefit but we ought to model good listening for others and we illustrate good listening by asking good questions and so the third thing for me is to develop our ability to ask questions that inspire and reveal more questions. This is the scientific method for the most part. It's also the key to writing a good mystery novel. I'm often very sarcastic and highly critical of many aspects of our situation in this country. There is a place for all of that in getting people to think differently or getting others to ask a new question or reconsider an assumption but sarcasm and direct attacks work when the audience is already on board. We are cheerleading, we are speaking to our team but if we're trying to reach the other team, we are forced to listen and sometimes empathetically to try to see what their issues often emotional, what are their knowledge gaps and what are their principles? We could use the Iraq or Ukraine wars today as an example, COVID also works but let's look at Ukraine and consider guys like Senator Tom Cotton or Lindsey Graham. They're smart guys, I mean, you know, I think. They like the constitution, I presume. What kinds of questions about their position on killing Russians and Ukrainians would be most likely to cause them to learn something? We could call them stupid, misinformed, incompetent, profit seeking, corrupt warmongers and even if we can prove every bit of that, it's not gonna get their attention. It's better to find a place where you are respecting something that they believe is important and go from there. So I like these TikTok videos of a Texas trial lawyer, he's named Jefferson Fisher, probably nobody's ever heard of them. Here's a little shout out to Jefferson Fisher. He's gotten a bunch of them but he's got one on how to keep people from becoming defensive and shutting down using three key phrases and they are, I agree, I have learned and that's helpful to know. These terms communicate that you care for your audience, you're listening carefully and that you value their input. He uses these phrases as tools and they are tools in dealing with the Tom Cotton acolyte. We could all agree that with that person that the constitution is the law of the land. We can repeat back something that we have learned from that person, for example, the conflict in Ukraine is about justice for people who live there and anything that you have, that they've also said that is helpful to know or it's not only acknowledged but it opens up space for you to add a bit of your own new information, something that would be helpful for them to know. It's baby steps. But the fact is we are all needed to fight this battle of ideas and most of us need to stay out of jail or supermax to be most effective. Now some of y'all, maybe not, but most of us we need to build the numbers on our team and get the rest questioning themselves and each other. So helping people get out of their own intellectual way, easing their fear, communicating and listening in a way that calms them rather than panics them. All of this is important. The last tip I'd like to share tonight here is to make time in your lives to be intentionally curious. It's number eight on a list of 10 great habits of curious people and it says make time for curiosity. Curious people make time to be intentionally curious. Take one day a month to think forward three years to question your goals and assumptions. Are you doing things you shouldn't be doing? What else might you be looking into? We all need to think about being intentionally curious. It is an antidote to boredom, to anxiety, to panic. It puts us in control. It creates value and because we are human we're made for this. This is natural for humans. Now, if we are willing to be wrong and we listen carefully and we use communication methods that can help others to start thinking and we make time to hone our skills of discovery and try for a fun and curious and knowledge filled life. Well, what are we doing? We're creating a better army and really an unstoppable army to fight the state. I spent a third of my life in uniform and I've used some of the language of war in sharing what I think we all have to do and keep doing. And I believe the language of war and also ideas of peace are appropriate because the modern state sees people not just as livestock or bank collateral but as a dangerous enemy and a deadly threat. History, literature, even movies and music all inform us that the state more often than not is the most powerful destroyer of its own people. And if we accept that to be true we accept also the duty to resist the state, to weaken it and to continually help others to do the same. So that's my message to you. We are looking for clear and concise questions. No comments, no introductions, no anecdotes. Hi, thank you so much for speaking. I was just wondering since you obviously have experience having been on the national scale and foreign policy do you think that there is room for change? Like do you think we can see a significant change towards a more peaceful foreign policy on a national level? Or do you think we need to focus more on whatever the states or we as individuals can do to try to make an impact and help hopefully save lives? My experience is I would have to go with the latter on your question. I think it has to, individuals have to make a difference. You know, what I saw just my little example with the guys I work with, I had a bunch of, I had some guys, when I was looking at the office with special plans and how terrible some of the stuff was happening, it was wrong. It was wrong for us to do it. It was wrong to do that to the American people. It was a wrong war. I had guys that were madder than me about it. My co-workers, a couple had an army colonel, Navy captain, no, a Navy commander, that's one goer captain. And they were my co-workers, I'm sorry. And they were very mad and upset. In fact, I learned stuff from them because they would bring it up how upset they were. And yet, their solution was not to try to change it, probably because they knew it couldn't be, they couldn't. And what they did is they called their assignments officer, one in the Navy and one in the Army. And they said, get me out of here. And that's what happened. And they got a new assignment. They got out before they got tempted to change something and get fired. And these people all, I think they all had families, their kids are high school age, getting ready to go to college. You know, they don't wanna like lose their job. And also it's not just about Washington, about losing your job, retired military people go the next day into a civilian position or they go even better into like Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, you know, the revolving door. And these are very, not entrepreneurial jobs, but they're very good ways to make a lot of money. I mean, if you just like money and for the sake of money, you can do that. But they knew better, they knew that one person, two people, even 10 people, the ideology that grips the state, it really is not very tolerant of people with good ideas on how we might do something different, especially peace, because peace doesn't enrich them like war enriches them. And maybe they are entrepreneurs and I didn't know it, but yeah, it has to be the people. And of course, to some extent, even though our democracy, whatever you wanna call it, oh, I vote for somebody, I have a senator, I have a congressman, well, you probably do have a senator and a congressman, you can talk to them, but they do listen. Those guys are more likely to listen. And I think, I was talking to Lou at dinner, not too long ago, a couple months ago, they had a vote in the house and they said, let's pull the troops, let's bring troops back from Syria. They shouldn't be there, by noses, it wasn't even a large amount of 500 troops and of course they're guarding oil, whatever, but bring them back. And 50 Democrats and 50 Republicans, there was almost the exact same number of Democratic and Republican representatives, all said, yeah, hell yeah, let's do it. And then the other 300 Democrats and Republicans all said, oh no, can't do that, and that's what it is. But the very fact that there was a vote, the very fact that we know who voted yay and nay on that is a sign that what you think, what people think is important, it does trickle up a little bit, but if you think you can just make it change, the whole system is very sick. It's a sick system, I don't see where a savior of a particularly eloquent Liberty guy up there could make that kind of change. And they have many ways of destroying and silencing people. I mean, it's not just the ways you hear about or oh, the whistleblower has to have protection or he's got killed or whatever. They can shut down, you look at them cross-eyed and they'll make sure that you're not in a position to have that attitude spread around. So yeah, don't think that there's any solution up there. It's all from us. Okay, I went too long on that. I'll try to be more concise. Hi, so kind of building off that, assuming that we can actually affect change in our foreign policy without the complete dissolution of the United States, do you think our withdrawal should be a more immediate action of fully pulling out all of our military bases very quickly or do you think it needs to be more of a slower protracted process so we don't destabilize geopolitics? And also, within that new policy, would we still hold some of our defensive allies? Like, if China were to invade Taiwan, would you say that the U.S. should be involved in its defense as that would be, maybe could be seen as more of a defensive, but it wouldn't be the same as like some of the more hard line, not necessarily isolation, it's just more focused on just protecting the continental U.S. itself. Yeah, well, you got a lot in there. You got a lot in there. That's a lot. There's an assumption that our bases overseas have something to do with our defense and they don't, okay? So if you care about defense, you would actually go to the position of sooner, like now, yesterday, get them home, because at least if they're home, they're in a position to defend whatever that means. But we don't, as Americans, we don't hear that. We go, oh, we got a great military, it's in all these countries. Of course they don't actually, they've caught on to people don't want to hear how many countries they're in because that confuses them. Like what, what? And so they're trying to, they don't really emphasize that, but it's all called defense and they do emphasize that it is defense and yet it's none of it's defense. We had, I recall, and I'm sure you did too, a balloon floated over. And it didn't, okay. And then some of the stories that came out as a result of it is that don't worry, they do that all the time. Okay, that's fine. I don't care. And it wasn't a spy balloon and who cares, right? But it might have been something dangerous. You know, if you have a vivid, you know, imagination, you say, oh, that's really dangerous. Well, we don't have any, we do not, our military does not defend. It does not defend Americans abroad. It doesn't defend them at home. It doesn't defend our territorial borders. Doesn't defend our natural resources. I think the Pentagon is the number five largest polluter just on its own of, you know, carbon producer. So seriously, I mean, I don't know why the, I don't know why we don't get the environmental people to shut our Pentagon down for us. And that may be a strategy. I mean, that may be something we could do. But so we can't confuse those guys overseas. So my answer would be, yeah, we need to take them. I mean, it's not gonna destabilize because what they're doing over there is actually designed to destabilize. And you know, the government state has always used, my whole life that I've been paying attention to it, they've always, oh, it's stability is so important. Stability is so important. And then you look at the actual impact in the way we do business and the constant lies and dealing and back dealing and everything else that we do. And it's all geared towards instability. Even if we got a guy, it's our own guy up there. We keep the weapon of instability at any moments in case he decides to not do what we tell him. So that's not defense. And it's not in the interest of American people. And so yeah, they should come home immediately. And all these people say, oh, we'll look at Afghanistan. We brought him home and it was a disaster. Well, yeah, you know, when you play stupid games, you get stupid prizes. You know, I just don't, I don't know. Now you covered something else. Oh, Taiwan, we'll see. To me, that makes no sense. I, you know, and again, if let's say you wanted to have a big military and you brought him home and you, you know, had him as a defensive military, that would be the best thing we could do. If indeed China is a rising malicious global imperial looking power, which it is not right now. Okay, it's not. Not anybody long shot. It isn't. But let's just say in a neocon fantasy, it's going to be that someday. What best position should you have? Not go over near backyard and get stomped because that is what will happen and also cause a lot of damage. Just protect what's ours. I mean, you know, I don't, I don't know if we have a republic. I don't think we do. I think we're an empire. But I think the empire is failing. And so if we do go back to more simple Republican, smaller Republican type values, I don't think we need a biggest military. That's in my opinion. But certainly it should be defending. It should be working on that. And it can't, it cannot do it. It cannot do it. In fact, even the defensive, so-called defensive equipment we sent to Iran, I mean, well, Iran, pick your country, Ukraine, but even, you know, some of our defensive, you know, like the, what's a patriot, it's proof to be a disaster. It's not, it's not, it's not defending anybody, not even doing its job when we say here, go defend Ukraine. It doesn't work well. It's very expensive, too. A lot of resources could be, you know, better used. Obviously, in my opinion, they should be in private hands, those resources. But even if you're crazed out socialist, you know, you could still agree that those resources could be used somewhere in a better way. But I don't think I answered all of your questions because they had, like, five parts. Is it all right? Yeah, that's just a common argument. We are all out of time. Let's give here a final applause, please.