Retired Brigadier General Blaine Holt joins North Idaho Experience for a high-level, no-fluff conversation about Venezuela, Nicolás Maduro, narco-terrorism, cartel warfare, and global power shifts. Dave, Eric, and Blaine break down the geopolitical shockwaves of capturing an illegitimate leader tied to cartel operations—and what that means for China, Russia, Iran, Taiwan, Japan, and the future of global conflict.
This episode covers how cartels function as a global system, not just a criminal problem, connecting drug trafficking, money laundering, political corruption, and human trafficking into one massive underground economy. Blaine also explains how elite U.S. military units train for rapid operations, what a “cost imposition” strategy looks like, and why modern warfare is shifting toward autonomous weapons, advanced surveillance tech, and AI-driven battlefields.
We also dive into the risks of escalation with major powers, the fragility of modern financial systems, and the uncomfortable reality of surveillance, civil liberties, and national security. If you want one of the most wide-ranging conversations on Venezuela, cartels, and the next era of warfare, this is it.
TRANSCRIPT
Seth Horst: Hey, welcome to North Idaho experience in today’s episode, Dave, Eric, and myself sit down with a retired Brigadier General Blaine Holt. He is a local favorite. Today we’re going to talk about the details in the operation to snatch the illegitimate Venezuelan president and cartel boss, Nicolás Maduro.
We’re going to dive into a plethora of geopolitical info, including China, Japan, Russia, Taiwan. We also discuss the future of warfare, the faults in the US political system, and the ethics and tactics involved in destroying narco boats. Tune in. This was a wild episode. We covered a lot of topics. It was incredibly interesting.
Blaine is an absolute wealth of information in all geopolitical things. Also, check out his podcast called Dangerous Intellectuals. It’s on all podcast platforms and X. And please subscribe to our podcast, because North Idaho is really an example of freedom.
Maybe you don’t live here. Maybe you have no interest in living here. But the topics that we cover in this podcast really should be an example of a free state and how humans were meant to live.
So, maybe you can find some interest in that, at least, even if you’re not interested in moving to North Idaho or have any interest in this place. But if you are thinking about moving here, please reach out to our real estate team, North Idaho Experience. We specialize in helping conservative families find their freedom, right here in North Idaho.
Alright. On to the podcast.
(Show open)
Seth Horst: I just want to make sure, you know, yeah, just in the things we’re saying, yeah, are good.
Blaine Holt: I don’t want to be live yet until we get that approval.
Seth Horst: Oh, no, no. Yeah. It won’t be live. Live-Live. Easy day. Yeah. You give me the go-ahead and we’ll pull the trigger. But it’s going to take a couple of days of turnaround, so we should be fine.
Blaine Holt: You know what, I’m going to try to get a blanket clearance for us and a blanket clearance for Crypto Rich.
Seth Horst: That would be fantastic.
Blaine Holt: Because I’m on Crypto Rich all the time.
Seth Horst: That would be fantastic.
Eric Boardman: What is Crypto Rich?
Blaine Holt: Dude, you’ll love that. It’s a great podcast.
Eric Boardman: Oh, alright. I’ve got to hear it. I’ve got to listen to it now. I’m going to start listening to some of the other ones. They were neat.
Blaine Holt: Well, you’ve got to listen to mine!
Eric Boardman: Listen, I’ve never been crazy into like the alien stuff, but the last podcast got me going down a bit of a rabbit hole.
Blaine Holt: Have you listened to mine? With Steven Greer?
Eric Boardman: No, I have not, but it’s on my list now because I listened to your guys’ last one. I was like, all right.
Blaine Holt: I’m with Jonathan Gilliam tomorrow. Talking Maduro. Gilliam was Navy SEAL, FBI Air Marshal.
Eric Boardman: Dude.
Blaine Holt: And you want to talk about seeing a shady underbelly of shit. Jonathan has seen everything.
Eric Boardman: It’s so addictive. Once you start getting into that underbelly and you see a little bit, and you’re like, “I have to know more,” but I’m not sure I want to know more.
Dave Faller: Well, it’s because we’re constantly fed 50% bullshit and 50% reality, and so you always have questions.
Eric Boardman:You ever think, though, ignorance truly is bliss? Because you’ve got farmers out there that are just laboring 10, 12 hours, and they’re living until they’re 95 years old. And I’m probably going to get mid-’60s because I’m like, “No! I have to know. I got to go dig in. I have to know.” It generates long stress and cortisol.
Seth Horst: (Laughs) Hey, here’s to good whiskey, good friends, and good conversations.
Dave Faller: Well, let’s freaking start this off. If people don’t know, we’re sitting down. I woke up yesterday morning and texted these two guys, and I said, “Is it OK? We just kidnapped a president of another country. He’s now an American citizen for a little bit.” And then we called Blaine.
Seth Horst: We’re like, “This is perfect.” We’re like, “We know a guy that knows a guy that knows a bit about a bit.”
Dave Faller: Holy smokes!
Eric Boardman: Well, I’ve been jacked to get on a podcast with you for a while anyways, because I’ve missed the last couple.
Seth Horst: It’s always a good time. Obviously, we have a lot of questions in this whole world, here. But oh, man, I got theories too.
Dave Faller: I think there’s a lot. And if you’re just joining us, we have Brigadier General – former, retired – Brigadier General, Blaine Holt. And we’ve called you on here quite a few times. We have a lot of very fun podcasts with you. And any time there’s something major that goes on that we just don’t quite understand, we have a tendency to give you a call and offer you whiskey and see if we can hang out. So that’s great.
Eric Boardman: In hopes of getting accurate accounts and information –
Dave Faller:Yeah. So the reason we call this one is because, yeah, Maduro was just taken.
Blaine Holt: Yeah. Minding his own business, not doing anything.
Seth Horst: (Laughing) Yeah. Poor fella.
Eric Boardman: Abiding by all laws.
Dave Faller: I mean, we just went into another. I don’t know. I don’t know when this has ever happened outside of wartime. I mean, this is, I don’t know of any other.
Blaine Holt: There’s been a few. I mean, on this Maduro thing, I got nothing. (Laughs)
Eric Boardman: No. Yeah, right.
Dave Faller: Yeah. This is nutty. What is going on?
Seth Horst: It was a baller move on Trump’s part of just like, “Hey, you want to talk shit? Come here.”
Blaine Holt: Here’s – let’s just start with the tactical part of it. We’ll get to the “Should we have done this? Should we not have done this? Is it legal? Is it illegal? Where are we at?”
But if you just take the operation in itself, you’ve got probably about 800 variables that have to go completely, completely perfect. And even then, you know, there’s probably going to be something that doesn’t go well. Some hitch doesn’t work right. These units, Delta Force, 160th Night Stalkers, the 75th Ranger Regiment, they are the best.
They’re the varsity team. We don’t have better than them. And I have had the good fortune, when I flew C-17s of being the Airborne Mission Commander for the C-17 package with them.
If you recall recently, we’ve had people call in or write stories or write letters to the editor here, in the Coeur d’Alene Press about, “I saw C-17s over Happy Boeing 10 field and what’s going on?” And all of that. Well, that field, at times does participate in the training that gets those folks up to normal speed.
Now, Coeur d’Alene wasn’t part of this particular mission rehearsal or anything like that. But they consistently train for missions that are like that, which are the hardest missions you could possibly do.
So here’s a handful of you. “We’re all going to get shot up. We’re going to go in. We’re going to get this guy before he gets to his safe room. And we’re going to exfil, and everything’s going to go just perfect. By the way, there’s Iranian, Chinese, and Russian military systems there to kill everybody. And Hezbollah’s on the ground. The gang’s all there. What could go wrong?”
Seth Horst: The cojones on whoever. I mean, what’s a workup like this look like? How long does it take to plan something like this? How many moving parts?
Blaine Holt: The exercises, like the one I described, here at Coeur d’Alene, are the ones that keep them in a warm status. It keeps them in a certified status, so that if called upon: “Here’s the objective. This is your timing window. This is what the weather looks like. That’s for night vision goggles and all of that stuff. And this is our go, no-go criteria for this. And this is what we expect out of the mission.” Five, six days, maybe a week and a half.
Eric Boardman:Wow, that’s quick.
Blaine Holt: So, there’s a lot of staffing. The first thing this starts with is a bunch of lawyers that will sit around the Oval Office and go, “Well, I don’t know if we can do this.
Seth Horst: “Check out some case law.”
Blaine Holt: Well, yeah. I mean, you get into what I call the Joint Interagency Task Force, the Department of No. Which, it’s always safest for them to say, “Oh, no. No, we can’t do that.”
And eventually, the President, his leadership style is, “Don’t bring me nos. You bring me the legal way to say yes and how that’s going to be.”
In this case, it’s extremely clear-cut, although the detractors don’t want it to be clear-cut. We can talk about that in a second. In this case, you just go straight to the Constitution and you get your answer: Article II, Section 2 of the Constitution requires the chief, the Commander-in-Chief in his executive role to defend the people of the United States of America.
Well, this has been overlooked, because we’re losing – as you well know, Eric – the 70,000 Americans every year to drug overdose. Now, is this thing only about the drugs? Oh, Hell no. Oh, no, no, no, no, no. This is an onion. There are so many layers to this thing, and that’s where I come in. Oh, yeah. That’s why you called us. Bring it to me.
But the predicate is the drugs. You’re killing 70,000 Americans at any time I can come dispose of you.
Eric Boardman: It’s the leading cause of death in the United States for adults age 18 to 45.
Blaine Holt: It is. It’s reason enough, but that’s not what the President’s got going on here. A lot of people think this is against Maduro and against Venezuela. No. No, it’s not.
The war on the cartels is something very different. The war on the cartels represents every illicit activity in the entire planet, in the global commons, everything. So it’s what I call the “vascular system to all illegality.”
And what we’re talking about here is all the money laundering, all the shadow banking, all the private banking, all the bought-off politicians, and I’m not talking just Feds, local, county, Main Street, USA. That money goes everywhere. Organ harvesting, human trafficking, kids.
From Beijing to Davos to the City of London, those are the ones that are at the very, very top rafters, that if the President pushes on the cartels and he creates these cost impositions, like, “Oh, I see you lost another $120 million of oil, out of that boat. Oh, there goes another, air quotes, fishing boat that just went to the bottom of the ocean with friendly fishermen who were just trying to get back to the boat.”
Eric Boardman: With no lights and four 250-horse outboards on the back. Makes sense. Yeah. Totally makes sense.
Blaine Holt: We want to parse, “I’m feeding the guy a steady diet of rockets. I don’t know when to cut off the rockets.” And we’re going to parse that.
But this is for all the marbles. And it is what the President’s trying to do is to stop – I won’t call it World War III, because I think we’ve already had World War III and it’s been done – you could call this World War IV. We could all just argue history to the end of time.
But I think what the President’s doing is stopping World War Next. And that’s whatever you want it to be. But you guys can see financial storm clouds brewing. You don’t have to be a rocket genius to know that maybe silver streaking off at $80 an ounce isn’t a warning sign or a circuit breaker of some kind.
So in other words, with a financial place where this debt-based system Ponzi scheme is about to get to its End Game, what do they do? Like World War I and World War II, they have to have a villain. That villain’s name is “Putin”. He didn’t cause your economy to crash, Europe, or de-industrialize you because of climate change and all that other crap.
It was the Putin guy. And now, we’re trading missiles. The thing about these psychopaths, at those levels, they don’t care how many people die. If you don’t believe me, there’s already 2 million people dead in four years in Ukraine.
So, the president is taking, with this action, just an entirely risk-laden endeavor. He wrote it all down in the National Security Strategy, so he told everybody what he was going to do. And we’re going to be shifting the world into three competitive zones: “ARC”, America, Russia, China. Didn’t say Europe in that, did I? They’ve knocked the three legs of the European Transatlantic Alliance stool out: Security, prosperity, values. Where are the values? They’ve let themselves be invaded. They’re covered-up. We have to stop that, here. We have to reverse that here.
But what we’re looking at is the City of London banking consortiums that represents the trillions in wealth of all the puppet holders, from Rockefeller to Rothschilds and all of that, they’re the ones getting squeezed, here. They’re the ones that have relied on all of these things.
And the President does have about a five-tier strategy to go after ’em. He’s hitting them on the cartels. He’s hitting them in the financial markets. The dollar coming down to zero is not really working for them, right now. Printing more liquidity into the system, which the Fed is freaking out, and drilling our dollar even more, because they have no choice.
They’re backing them into a corner. They normally would take all their stolen money. They would throw it into assets.
“I’ll go buy real estate.” Nope, they blew that up like a bubble. I don’t have to tell you guys that.
“So I’ll go buy metals.” Sorry, it’s unobtainium. All there is is papers. You can buy paper contracts. Nobody will deliver on them because China and America and Russia all said, “We’re not selling. We’re not going to let anything out of our country.”
By the way, Venezuela is now going to play ball. They have some of the biggest silver reserves in the world. So, you can see that the whole thing is a big onion, but it all gets down to this op, and this op has to go perfectly. And I mean to the numbers. I have been in these exercises, and I have never seen it go that perfect. I’ve never seen it go that perfect.
Dave Faller: Why do you think this one was so good? Was it just one of those things that maybe almost the element of surprise to where who would ever go into a country and just steal a leader? Was there part of that? I mean, why was it so successful?
Blaine Holt: I mean, you’d have to get to George Washington’s testicular fortitude of crossing the Delaware River, killing people in the middle of the night on Christmas Day.
Dave Faller: It was Christmas, dude. Nobody expects some crazy guy to go across a frozen river.
Blaine Holt: But it’s like that. So let’s look at Maduro. Maduro is practicing OPSEC. He goes to bunker all the time. He’s down under there with his family. OK, so then the Chinese delegation is going to come visit and do a state visit, basically a well check of how their boy Maduro is doing, and the delegation goes, so Maduro, logical thinker, “Well, America’s not going to come roll me up while the Chinese are here because that’s going to create a big mess.”
And so, you’ve got the conditions set perfectly. The Moon angle is perfect for night vision goggles. It’s just looking really nice, which gets us all really nervous, because you’re like, “It’s too good. It’s too good. Something’s got to happen. Something really bad is going to happen.”
And so but then take a look at our overlay of technology. So F-22s come in. You’ve got jammers coming in. They blind the country. They’re spatially unaware. We take away their communications. We take away their ability to even tell the President he’s going to be under attack. We whack a couple here and there. There’s some bombs going off here and there. They can’t even make a phone call. Yeah.
And then there it is. They bust into the building. They cut down. They get him right before he’s going to go into a steel bunker. And they extract him. A couple of our guys got shot up. I think they’re both OK. And we didn’t lose a bird or anything.
Seth Horst: Do we know many casualties there were on the –?
Blaine Holt: On their side? Yeah.
Seth Horst: Unknown. You never know.
Blaine Holt: Somebody.
Eric Boardman: I mean. The exfil was so fast. They didn’t go check pulse.
Seth Horst: It’s like, you couldn’t fail. Imagine they tried it and failed. How bad that would look.
Blaine Holt: Well, look at the rescue attempt. This is what created Special Operations Command, by the way. This is what created JSOC. You had Desert One when we went to go rescue the hostages in Tehran. What an irony. Because here we are back to now we’re at the end of that game with those guys.
But we’re going to go rescue the hostages. And we didn’t have any joint doctrine. We didn’t fight well together. We didn’t have the right comms. The Marines couldn’t talk to the SEALs. The SEALs couldn’t talk to the Army.
You have C-130s in a dust storm backing into helicopters. It’s a damn disastrous Keystone Cops, as well as Jimmy Carter’s military. But look how fast. Look how fast.
And I have the answer to your question. The real answer to your question is in the past when you’ve had things like Kabul happen or other disasters, Benghazi and those types of things. In the Obama and Biden, Clinton, and even George W Bush administrations, you would see that the National Security Council suits never even held an eye medal in their hands suddenly become generals. They suddenly become oriented in the profession of arms. And they’re going to tell you how your war is going to go.
So they’re going to tell you, “No, no, no, no, no. I want you to come in on this axis. No, no, no, no, no.” And they basically just play the plastic soldiers. I don’t know what the hell they’re doing.
So what our President does and what his style is, is “Your objective is to get Maduro into that prison.”
“OK, that’s what you want?”
“That’s what I want. And I got your back.”
“And you’re not going to tell me how to do that?”
“No.”
Dave Faller: Why would he? He’s never been in that position.
Blaine Holt: But I’m telling you, this is where the politicians will get in and they’ll outthink you, 30 ways from Sunday and make the mission real damn dangerous. You’ll have tacticians on the ground who’ll go, “That’s going to get us killed!” It’s like, “These are the rules. You’re going to go do it!”
I was in Afghanistan when that sweetheart of a general, Stanley McChrystal, came out with the tactical directive. And the tactical directive was basically “Sit and take it. We’re going to win hearts and minds, here. We’re not really interested if you want to go take out the enemy.”
And it’s like, “I don’t think you really understood this war thing. Where did that go wrong in your upbringing? So we’re not the diplomat side. We’re actually the break things and kill them side. That’s what we do.”
And so, it’s so important to trust your military leadership, trust that they’re trained well. And those forces and the way that they train, it’s unconscionable. And to just trust them and say, “You have it. Go do this.” The oldest guy in the fight that night was 49 years old.
Eric Boardman: Yeah, that’s legit.
Blaine Holt: Now, that’s one badass chief. Dude.
Seth Horst: Dude.
Eric Boardman: Man, you said a couple of things that just make a lot of sense, and I just don’t think it’s unique to the military, right? But under these circumstances, you said these guys are out there staying warm. Like the time you get ready for the Super Bowl ain’t the week of the game, right? They have to be ready and prepped. And that way they do principle-based training.
So when it comes up, there’s so many factors you can’t prepare for. You can’t sit here and tabletop gameplan how many people are going to be there. You’ll have a pretty good idea. Your intel is going to be really, really good, but you can’t know. Those guys have to be ready to go, and they can’t go ask for permission. We saw that in circumstances like Uvalde, where they had to wait until they got permission from everybody above them in order to get their rules of engagement.
Yeah, absolutely. But when you trust them, and they are the best because they train really hard and they’re ready to go, and it’s like, “OK, we make a few tweaks. We do this.” And then you guys adapt on the fly. Good to go, right? And then send it. That’s so cool to see it work out like that.
Seth Horst: Do you know, back to the details, like how many boots on the ground roughly? I mean, it was obviously Delta Force, right?
Blaine Holt: Yeah, the elements of them, the Regiment. But my understanding, you’re looking at probably the actual ground guys of maybe 20 or less.
Eric Boardman: One of them is 49! Studs!
Blaine Holt: Actually, quite a few were up there. I mean, they had some graybeards. That’s the other hard part. Those guys, the way that they train, I don’t care if you’re 49. You’re one of those longevity dudes. You are a rock. And the other cool part is they’re the dudes, they’re the old graybeards packing the knowledge. So they’re going in there, and they have been shot up. They have been hit in Iraq and Afghanistan. They know when it looks like it’s about to turn to sh¡t, and “We’re going to leave.” These are the Papa Bears that they all trust and put their lives in their hands, and the Papa Bears go to war with them. And then the young ones, they perform flawlessly.
They would have performed flawlessly anyway, but they’re going to perform better, because their anxiety level is down because “Dad’s here.”
Eric Boardman: Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Everybody’s got those in their history. I think back, and I definitely had those where you’re like, “Hell, yeah, I’m glad that dude’s here.” They show up on scene, and you’re like, “Yeah, that’s cool.”
Dave Faller: So my next question to you, and I guess I was going to ask you, did Nike sponsor this whole thing? Because I saw Maduro in a Nike jumpsuit, and I’m certain that he was either naked or something. Did we bring one for him?
Blain Holt: I think we did.
Eric Boardman: Yeah, maybe we did.
Seth Horst: I don’t know if it’s AI anymore or not, but I saw him in an Origin hoodie, and Jocko was like, “Fvck, yeah, that’s my hoodie!”
Dave Faller: So question, when this stuff happened, I joked about it. I’m like, “Is this legal? Can we do this? What is all this stuff?” My biggest fear, and I think everybody’s biggest fear, is not Venezuela. I’m not afraid of Venezuela. They have nothing on us.
{EDIT}
But obviously now, you have Russia and China condemning this. We had China make a statement the other day that we need to release Maduro immediately. And while I think that our, and this is one thing that proves it, while I feel that our military is vastly superior, we had a conversation with you a long time ago, and we understand if we end up in war with Russia or China – and correct me if I’m wrong – I remember you saying that you feel like we’d win, but it would hurt.
Blaine Holt: Oh, it’d hurt real bad.
Dave Faller: It wouldn’t be something that we would want to do. So where does this put us on the spectrum, now with countries like that?
Blaine Holt: Aw, we’re in good shape.
Dave Faller: Alright.
Blaine Holt: Here’s why. You’ve got to read the National Security Strategy, and then an even more boring document. You’ve got to read the FSOC or the Financial Stability Oversight Council report that just came out a week after the National Security Strategy. The two books combined are the most seismic shift in American foreign policy in the last 100 years.
Seth Horst: Oh.
Blaine Holt: That’s a big statement. So think about the erasure of, oh, Bretton Woods? Gone. We’re not playing. So, what does that mean? What it means is that we are placing, now a premium on our hemisphere. We know that Russia, China, Iran, tentacles run deep in our hemisphere, because we haven’t minded the store.
We’ve been out abroad making trouble for Russia and China and other places. So, what we’re looking at, here is a world – it doesn’t mean we’re going to be allies with the Russians and the Chinese – we’re not. But what we are going to be is in zones of influence that make sense, and we’re going to check each other when that time might come, but we’re going to try to replace military interaction with a demilitarized foreign policy that’s based on commerce and gets out of the business of, “I’m going to tell you how to run your country now. I don’t like how you run your country. I’ll tell you how to run your country now.”
So, for right or wrong, it’s not a panacea. There’s no such thing in the world commons or foreign affairs that, “No, no, this is the one right answer, and every other answer is bad.” It’s to demilitarize and push us away from places where the financialists bet on both sides of the war, and they pit us against each other, and the winners are the defense industrial base. They’re certainly not our kids who do forever wars, and that there’s no word called victory involved in that.
So a lot of people now are screaming at the President going, “You’ve just signed Taiwan’s death warrant. Now they’re going to go pull the president of Taiwan out, and they’re going to play the same game.”
Dave Faller: Well, certainly from a game of Risk, I mean, I play Risk all the time. If I attacked him and he attacked me, I mean it’s like Russia did this to Ukraine. Now we’ve done something to Venezuela.
Blaine Holt: So yeah, I mean, I think there’s a lot of people on the surface level that would say that.
Eric Boardman: But we took it to another level. It was insane.
Seth Horst: Does this put everybody on notice? Like Mexico? All these other people are like, “Oh sh¡t, they could snatch me up in the middle of the night!”
Blaine Holt: It’s actually a very nice deterrent, because I can tell you there’s a lot of Russian generals and Chinese generals that are going, “Oh. I guess the last four years didn’t set them back as far as we thought.”
Dave Faller: Well, that’s the thing, too. Did you see that? So, Russia provided Venezuela with their Iron Dome, right? So, this has also got to be a strike to Russia, right, that they have this incredible security defense system, right? They were supposed to sink ships off the coast, right? That’s what we see in the news.
Blaine Holt: And what about the Chinese one too?
Dave Faller: I didn’t know about the Chinese one.
Blaine Holt: They didn’t work either. Amazing.
Seth Horst: Some 19-year-old autistic kid from Nebraska just hacked their sh¡t.
Blaine Holt: I’m not saying that I know this. I’m not saying that I know this. But what if – what if – I’m not saying that I know this – but what if those machines had kill switches inside of them and Beijing and Moscow turned them off?
Seth Horst: Ooooh.
Blaine Holt: Because what if there was a deal before the deal before the deal that was already cut?
Dave Faller: I hate all of this.
Seth Horst: I have to think, and I thought of that. I’m like, “They must have notified them!”
Blaine Holt: Oh, come on. The Chinese delegation showing up? Yeah. It’s too perfect!
Eric Boardman: For him to come out right then?
Blaine Holt: It’s too good. It’s just – so, here’s the deal.
Eric Boardman: We’ll condemn it. We’ll condemn it afterwards.
Seth Horst: I’m so confused.
Dave Faller: Oh, my. I’m so confused. If you’re watching this, this is why.
Eric Boardman: I love it.
Blaine Holt: What if you, so look at – I told you a little bit about the National Security Strategy. People ought to read that. OK.
So then, what if you’re like, “Look, China, we’re going to need you to get the Hell out of our hemisphere – and by the way, the United States, as well, because your PLA guys are here. They got to go, and infiltrators and spies and all of that. Let’s start the process. But you’re getting your Belt and Road crap out of South America. Don’t return Lula’s phone calls anymore, by the way.
“You’re going to do that because we know you’re in a real bad way, right now. The CCP is crumbling. It’s aging. And you’ve got no less than four factions vying to be the leader. We know that Xi Jinping is not the leader. He’s an ornamental leader.
“We know that Wang Yi is probably the guy who’s got the country in receivership. How do we know that? Well, do you think Witkoff shows up in Moscow to talk to Putin and then just magically Wang Yi from China is there at the exact same time? What are the odds of that?”
So the fun part about this is when your enemy is in trouble, step on the gas. And what we’re doing is we’re stepping on the gas. We’re going, “Ah, I see you’re in a bad way. Well, let me help.”
So when I hear people say, “Oh! They’re going to go take Taiwan!” Really? Well, how embarrassing would it be for the PLA, with their own people at home, if Taiwan missiles – that we don’t know what they look like, they’ve been kept secret from the United States – go hurling right on through the Three Gorges Dam, kill 600 million people overnight, and then they take out Zhongnanhai with the same missile systems, and all that artillery they got perched up on those ships coming across the straits, they just lay waste to them?
So, what does that look like, for the Chinese military? Because then, the people in China go, “Huh, I did not know this. Maybe now’s a good time.”
Seth Horst: But does that just take the nuke option right on the table there – or put it on the table?
Blaine Holt: Well, that’s another problem.
Seth Horst: You kill 600 million people.
That’s another problem, because nuclear surety in the Chinese military, if you recall, Xi Jinping purged most of his nuclear force’s commanders.
That’s one. Two, the corruption in the Chinese military runs really deep. So Zhang Youxia, the leader of the Chinese military, knows exactly what their readiness state is. These guys wouldn’t even buy marine steel for their Navy vessels! They’re rusting underneath the water, because they did kickbacks and pocketed the change. It’s a papier-mâché deal.
Dave Faller: So, you’re saying that a lot of those – Because I always know it’s either money or power, right?
Blaine Holt: Leverage.
Dave Faller: Right. And so it seems like with that that a lot of people have chosen to be a little more selfish with the money side of it.
Seth Horst: It’s that Temu steel they’re buying, man. That shit’s no good. Temu.
Dave Faller: So just so you know, I just got rid of my social media. So I have no apps. I have no Instagram, Facebook Messenger, Facebook on my phone anymore. And it’s crazy.
Blaine Holt: How are you feeling?
Dave Faller: Actually, really good. I find a lot more time in my day. Because even the stuff that we post, I have to go and ask Renée. I’m like, “Can you send it to me? I haven’t even seen the reels for today.” But yeah, so I – Anyways, random tangent, but I don’t see any of this stuff happening.
Seth Horst: Is there a world where we let China take Taiwan in return for us getting the oil reserves in Venezuela? Is this all about oil?
Blaine Holt: Now, I’ll say something that everybody who’s watching this will go, “He’s absolutely batsh¡t crazy.” There could be a situation where we let Taiwan take China.
Dave Faller: OK, so I’m going to agree with the whole batsh¡t crazy thing, right now.
Blaine Holt: So let’s think about this. I remember the Deputy Foreign Minister of China, who’s a very dear friend of mine, when she was what we would call the Ambassador-equivalent and she was to the UN in New York City.
It was her supposition that it’s not China that we have to worry about. It’s Taiwan that’s going to affect China. And the reason that’s so, is because the Chinese economy over the past 10 years has absolutely cratered. And it cratered way before that, because they’ve lied about everything. They’ve lied about their employment numbers. They’ve lied about everything.
They lie about their census. They don’t have 1.4 billion people! They’re also on population decline, right? They lie about all of it, and they lie for their people because the CCP that’s getting very old in tooth is terrified of their people, and their people can’t eat, and they’re out of work.
And Shanghai and the Tier One cities are becoming ghost towns. There’s no commerce. They still have factories, but it’s not like it was. A lot of the big capital is flowing out.
Now, look at it this way. You’re China. You’re a Chinese guy on the street. You’re in a protest group. You don’t care about the surveillance and the social credit score crap, anymore because there is no money on the street. You’re about to take over the CCP, or it’s going to fall under its own weight, or you’re getting a reformer.
What system looks good for Chinese people that seems to be working and making everybody really wealthy? And so, it’s about influence, and so could Taiwan, as a strong economic partner with Japan, right behind it, look like the beacon of light to go, “These guys are falling. What are we going to do?”
And I would argue, and I used to live as a kid in Hong Kong for five years, I would argue that the Chinese culture that’s going to come to the rescue of the Mainland will be an axis between Taiwan and Hong Kong.
Dave Faller: So would this have to do anything at all with, I believe it was 1985 when China came up with the One Child per family.
Seth Horst: They screwed themselves.
Dave Faller: It went until 2015, right? I mean I was just talking to a buddy about this today. I mean, if you did one person per family in one generation, you’ve cut your population in half. Well, if you had a billion people, you don’t have a billion people anymore.
Blaine Holt: No, they don’t. And in COVID, they lost a lot more, that they’re lying about. But the other part is take that screwball policy, that incompetent policy, because this is what China does. When China makes a mistake, it’s “Hold my beer” time. They’re not going to make a little mistake…They want mistakes at scale. So what did they do to their environment? 90% of Chinese water is unusable. What did they do to their land? They can’t grow enough food to feed themselves, because of the siltification of their soil. What did they do to their water management? They did this grandiose north-south water plan: “I know. We’ll take all the water that’s plentiful in the south, and we’ll just truck it to the north. And we’ll make this massive aquifer system that’ll cost a kajillion trillion dollars.” Or the Three Gorges Dam. They literally made the target that could kill the entire country. And it’s failing.
Dave Faller: It’s failing currently?
Blaine Holt: It is absolutely failing. You’ve heard of “tofu dregs”. They make everything pretty crappy. But it’s not necessarily engineering on the dam that’s so bad, as it is. They’re constantly letting it fill too high. So at 145 meters, you can’t go beyond that. They take it up above that. And so they overstress it.
So they’ve got cataclysmic problems. And that’s actually where you want them. So the only thing that I think, if you’re gonna see bombs fall on Taiwan, it’ll be because the military itself, Zhang Youxia is trying to create an impossible problem for the CCP. And then, he starts a war by himself, with no oversight from the civilian leadership and consigns the CCP to a war to propel himself and the military in charge of China.
Seth Horst: Where does Japan fall into this? I just read today that they have approved a $58 billion defense budget, which would put them now at number three in the world. Correct me if I’m wrong. And they have changed their whole policy on now not being, “We’re just here to protect ourselves. We’re going to push out into the world. And they’re allied with us.
Dave Faller: They haven’t done that since 1940.
Seth Horst: Right. It’s a big change. So what’s up with that?
Blaine Holt: You got German troops going to Poland, willingly. (Laughs) So, no, Japan is a key figure in all of this. The thing I worry about most with Japan is not that they’re not going to make intelligent investments with $58 billion, which would be the complete opposite that Germany’s doing with their $50 billion. “Hey, let’s go buy tanks.” “Oh, that’s smart.” [Not].
So, I’m worried that Japan is where it all starts, to start the financial dominoes of what’s going to be the next global financial crisis. The Japanese bond markets are insane. The rates, the long yields are streaking out of control. Nobody wants Japanese debt. They’re buying it themselves.
Dave Faller: Japan’s such a unique country, and feel free to correct me if I’m wrong. Maybe I just read a history book, but I know when I studied, like, the Pacific War and World War II, in 1945, Japan basically didn’t have a military after that point. I mean, it was a point where we came in, Okinawa and everything else, and we started basically supporting Japan and protecting them militarily, and they had a very, very small amount.
Well, when you take that amount of money and you instead have no military to invest it in and you invest it in technology, look what’s happened to Japan over the past 70 years. Their technology has been out of control, the stuff they’ve done, because they haven’t had a bloated defense budget that they’ve had to pay. So I’m interested – because I am a believer – that much of our technology has been uniquely brought over from Japan because of the fact that we spend so much on defense, and we have continued to defend Japan for forever, that they’ve been able to invest in this stuff and that we’ve reaped the reward of a lot of it. So does this change a lot for Japan if they start reinvesting into those things?
Blaine Holt: It does, but it doesn’t. They have put themselves into a demographic pickle that’s almost even worse than China’s. And that’s why they started opening up to allowing immigrants to come in, and now they’ve got severe immigration, non-assimilation issues that they are dealing with, and Japanese culture, traditionally is very insular.
And so you have that still amazing innovation and technology sits in Japan, and they’re very, very great allies to us. No question about it, they’re not going to do anything without the United States. And traditionally, they’ll have a lot of friction with the South Koreans. They don’t, they’ve set that aside because they understand “We’re not going to put the United States in an unnecessary pickle, here.” Same to some extent with South Korea that seems to be aligning with its new president more towards China, but that’s just a fever, that’ll run its course and go away.
Japan is a very, very big deal. It is the backstop to Taiwan’s security. Because from Japan, geographically, we can project power, we can replenish carrier groups, we have the logistics there, we have – it is absolutely irreplaceable.
So now in a nuclear contest – and by the way, the nuclear forces that are in the field in China last year got caught stealing the rocket fuel out of the rockets and using it to heat their food –
Seth Horst: That’s amazing.
Blaine Holt: Yeah. So, things aren’t good. So the point is, is that if you got to the very bad place, Japan doesn’t do very well, at all. But then neither does anybody because when one nuke goes off, they all model it out –
Dave Faller: It’s just a shitty scenario for anybody. For us to drop a first nuke, I would just be horrified, because there’s so many issues when that happens.
Blaine Holt: You’d be horrified for about 20 minutes.
Dave Faller: And then I wouldn’t be here?
Blaine Holt: Right!
Dave Faller: That’s the thing. Like, when you do stuff like that, we’re now entering something that as much as we can project, we don’t know. We don’t know what’s gonna happen. We’ve tested things, but we don’t know how it’s gonna go when something like that happens. I mean, it could be globally effective in hours. It could be, I mean –
Seth Horst: And maybe China’s used all their rocket fuel for cooking food.
Blaine Holt: They all model-out. The way it models – just not gonna get into anything classified – but the way it models is one nuke goes, everybody uses them. Everybody uses them. All those scenarios play out the same way.
Seth Horst: I think, well, is that when the aliens step in and just stop everything right there?
Blaine Holt: You know, you’d hope for that. My friend, Stephen Greer, if you’ll listen to my podcast, you can catch that episode where I interview Stephen Greer. Dangerous Intellectuals. He will tell you that, boy, we have mistreated some extraterrestrials over the years.
Seth Horst: Oh, no!
Blaine Holt: I don’t think there’s a lot of goodwill there.
Dave Faller: Blaine, is North Idaho a target?
Blaine Holt: No, no. But there’s this other thing in Spokanistan, called Fairchild Air Force Base, where I used to serve.
Dave Faller: Oh, perfect.
Seth Horst: Are we far enough away?
Blaine Holt: So I modeled that. It’s an interesting question, because you would assume –
Dave Faller: Because, there’s different size of nukes.
Blaine Holt: Yeah. Well, there is.
Seth Horst: I’m not going to put the biggest one on Spokanistan.
Blaine Holt: I assumed that Fairchild probably is targeted with an 800-kiloton weapon. OK.
Seth Horst: Sounds like a lot. Just saying.
Dave Faller: I’m like, I don’t know what that is. Is that Tannerite? Sounds like a lot.
Blaine Holt: It’s a lot.
Seth Horst: What was Hiroshima and Nagasaki?
Blaine Holt: Way less.
Seth Horst: Damn. Damn it.
Blaine Holt: We’re not – because we’re not even going to do this. We’re not going to do this. So the way the weather patterns look and the way that the plumes would work, we actually make it, in Coeur d’Alene.
But here’s the problem. You might wish you hadn’t, because the way that it works out is you’ll miss the gamma waves immediately and the blast, but you’re going to need to immediately have access to potassium iodide tablets within the first two hours.
Seth Horst: It’s in my medicine cabinet. Just saying.
Blaine Holt: You got to have two tablets within two hours.
Dave Faller: You got them?
Seth Horst: Yeah.
Blaine Holt: And then, you need to be on two a day for seven days. And then now, you’ve got to think about the rest of your life. And the rest of your life is, “Well, I’ve got a lot of contamination around here. So what’s my water situation? What’s my shelter situation? Do I have what it takes to go out and forage and stuff? So am I going to get sicker and sicker over time?”
Well, a lot of people will. So, what I tell folks is, “Look, start small. Start with, ‘How do I not die a very grisly, painful death?’ OK, we’ll get the pills. Start there.” Because thyroid cancer and sickness is real bitch.”
And then move to, “Well, what if we got one of these suits and saw if one of these masks could make it better for us? What if we had some water that we had in a certain place that would keep us sustained for a while?” And then, depending upon how those plumes would work, if you could go a couple of weeks, a few weeks, you might come out OK on the other side of that thing, that there will be some survivors.
It just will be – these are very macabre things to talk about. I just don’t see where that’s going to happen. I just don’t see where that’s going to happen.
Seth Horst: That’s a good thing.
Dave Faller: That is a good thing.
{Edit}
Eric Boardman: When you guys tabletop that, that’s what makes me nervous, right? If one sends one or there’s one nuke, then they all send them. That’s why I worry about zealots. The ability to pierce those that state-sponsored, right? And they send one in the name or under the…
Blaine Holt: There’s your danger.
Eric Boardman: Right, where it’s…
Blaine Holt: Dirty bomb.
Eric Boardman: Yeah, somebody figures that out and they do enough work on the front end to make it look like it’s state-sponsored.
Blaine Holt: False flag.
Eric Boardman: Absolutely.
Blaine Holt: That’s a big fear. That’s a big fear. And it’s a valid fear. These psychopaths in Europe, they want this war. They haven’t said one diplomatic thing about Russia.
Dave Faller: Man, that’s the crazy thing. You can’t recognize the enemy. I’ve thought about this with a Concealed Carry. What if I’m in Walmart and somebody pulls out a gun and starts shooting? And I end up shooting them, but then down the aisle, you see me with a gun shooting somebody. I get shot.
Seth Horst: That is 100% a consideration.
Dave Faller: Right? You don’t even know. I’ve thought about it. I’m like, I’m going to drop somebody and drop a gun.
Eric Boardman: I can’t believe there’s not more blue-on-blue when there’s active shooters, right? Just for that very reason, because everybody’s dressed differently. But that’s where I wonder. If there’s one nuke that goes off, there almost has to be a period of time because that’s immediate intel gathering where it’d be, “OK, is this legitimate?” Because the next one to do it –
Blaine Holt: We don’t do it that way. We’ll see them come over the pole and then we’ll respond. It’s “Use them or lose them”.
Eric Boardman: Right. And I get it, because you lose!
Blaine Holt: You can’t delay. Well, let me make it worse for you. Yeah.
Eric Boardman: Good, good. I appreciate that.
Dave Faller: Thank you!
Eric Boardman: Send it.
Blaine Holt: So now, let’s make them all hypersonic.
Dave Faller: Oh, yeah.
Blaine Holt: OK. So you had 25 minutes of response. Now do you understand why President Trump would like to own Greenland? Because, if you were able to put a hypersonic, nuclear-tipped missile on Greenland, the President has how much time to decide what to do? A minute? Two, three, four? What?
Eric Boardman: That’s crazy. So he’s just buying a minute. It’s wild.
Seth Horst: And, I mean, we have missile defense here, right?
Blaine Holt: Oh, yeah. We’ve got that! (Laughs)
Seth Horst: But it won’t stop hypersonic?
Blaine Holt: No.
Seth Horst: It’s crap, huh? OK…
Blaine Holt: We’ve got to work on that (laughs). OK. But here’s the cool part. We have stuff that the Russians know we have, and it deters them. So, we are behind in the hypersonics game. Are we behind in space? I don’t think so. Are we behind in other things? No.
But there’s a tenuous balance of power. So now, we’ve just talked about the big dangerous world. Now go back and read the National Security Strategy, and it’ll make a whole lot of damn sense to you, because what President Trump sees, what reasonable people, not Neocons, see, is we’re heading, as a society, to a place where we’re literally going to kill each other. And it’ll be over some stupid miscalculation or somebody’s jihad.
So what we’ve got to do is change the equation, completely. I mean, look at the Middle East “peace process”. All they’ve done is wash, rinse, repeat for the past, I don’t know, 80 years. And the only thing that happens is the Globalists get rich. That’s it. That’s all that happens.
So, what we want to move to is a demilitarized foreign policy. What we want to move to is, “Hey, raise a military, make it the sharpest stick you can, and have a great military, and let’s all just pray you never use it.” And when you come here to talk about your differences with Russia, why don’t we lead with, “Hey, shouldn’t we be doing a joint venture in that coal mine you’ve got there?”
Seth Horst: Trade.
Blaine Holt: Exactly.
Seth Horst: We could all prosper.
Blaine Holt: That’s where peace lies. And free trade that’s not crony capitalism, monopolistic trade, or, you know, “My name’s Rockefeller, I have to own all the oil in the world!”
It can’t be that. It has to be, you know, a lot of people are going to win here in this deal.
Seth Horst: Is that’s why we’re not there now, is because these puppeteers are up there and they’re making money no matter what happens”
Blaine Holt: Look at BlackRock: “We’re buying everything in sight.” Look at your real estate game. Look at your real estate game.
Seth Horst: I can safely say I have never sold a house to a Chinese national.
Blaine Holt: I appreciate that. I’ll tell you what. But if you get upside down in a house and a whole row of them do, or we have a downturn and people can’t make their house payments, BlackRock will swoop right in.
So the point is, you can’t allow these monopolies to exist. Well, why do they let them exist? There should be Antitrust action on these too-big-to-fail companies, and there should be capitalism. I’m guessing there’s one or two politicians on both sides of the aisle that are paid-off. Maybe one or two.
Dave Faller: Well, look at the 50-year mortgage that’s coming out. I’ll tell you what. I’ve told people straight-up. I don’t think that I can in good conscience. I’m out of business.
I don’t think I can in good conscience tell somebody, “Hey, you should buy a house with a 50-year mortgage.” I don’t think I can do it. I think I would turn around and say, “Hey, let’s look at dollar-for-dollar, and I think you should rent it.”
Seth Horst: Not if you plan on keeping it that whole time, right?
Dave Faller: Even that. 50 years, who does? Nobody does.
Seth Horst: Nobody does.
Blaine Holt: Right. Here’s what I was thinking. If you take the 50-year and you rent it out to somebody else, but the 50-year payment is so low that you can cash flow it.
Dave Faller: That makes sense, but I’m talking about for yourself.
Blaine Holt: I get it. I’m just thinking about my kids and what would I advise them to do or how to actually get a house.
Dave Faller: Right. Actually, people that are like, “I want this for myself.” I don’t think I could advise people. I don’t think I would have the good faith to turn around and say, “Hey, I think you should take out a 50-year mortgage.” Not that.
Blaine Holt: What you’d be better off doing, take a 15-year mortgage with a balloon payment on the back ass. Just take the 15, have a payment you can hack, and then throw the balloon on the back end of that and during the course of the loan.
Eric Boardman: You’re going to have to find other means to pay for this house. You’ll probably sell it before then anyway, right?
Blaine Holt: Oh, well, the young ones would. I mean, right now, I’m looking at once this house is built, that’s it, man. Done. It’s going into trust.
Seth Horst: I don’t say that anymore, but yeah, I get it. I don’t want to move again, but I’ll never say, “I just bought my house and it was second time.”
Blaine Holt: Every time I’ve said “never”, it’s not worked out.
Dave Faller: For the second time, I don’t have water. So, Paul, if you’re watching this, I would take a shower at your house tonight if I could. Oh, boy.
Seth Horst: OK, I have some questions about the future of warfare. I know we’re taking a little bit of a different turn here, but I was recently listening to a podcast with Palmer Luckey who owns Anduril, which is a… So Palmer Luckey… Yeah. He developed Oculus when he was like 17 or something.
Blaine Holt: Tell him I want a refund.
Seth Horst: He’s a billionaire now. He’s young and he’s like eccentric and seems like a pretty cool guy. I don’t know where his heart’s at. I’ve never met him. And now he owns Anduril, which is a defense contractor company and he’s building… Like he’s built cruise missiles that are a fraction of the parts of a current cruise missile, way cheaper, autonomous fighter jets, things like that. He’s built this helmet that is like a heads-up display so special forces guys can see the entire battlefield through their helmet, like crazy shit. Super cool dude. But I’m like, how’s this gonna change future warfare?
Blaine Holt: He’s taking warfare in a direction that it’s gonna naturally go. There is a technological path for warfare that we would not pin on a Palmer Luckey or, you know, Zuckerberg or Elon Musk or anybody. If you have adversaries in this world, you have to develop at the very highest level of technology that you can.
There are dangers. That’s why people will say, “Well, when are we gonna get pilots out of the airplanes forever?” It’s like, “Never. We’re never gonna do that.”
The reason is is because what if I could hack your airplane and turn it around and bomb you with your own airplane? So, there has to be safeguards in this. My concern, now, Palmer Luckey, the things that he is doing at Anduril, which are exceptional, is he’s negotiating with the government on contracts in what I find to be a very refreshing way. He’s doing acquisition what I think is the right way.
As I stand up my own company, Xeriant. Xeriant.com. That’s X-E-R-I-A-N-T. Yeah. But as we stand up these companies, that’s the model I think people should follow into. We don’t want to have monopolies in our supply chains. We don’t want to sell the government another widget after I made the super widget and I got the big contract. We want to keep innovation going. It’s a win-win.
It’s a win for the government, because we’ll keep brand new technology in your hands and at the same time, once we’ve given it to you, we’re onto the next thing. And that’s what he’s doing.
Some of the things that they’ve got under development make Star Wars look primitive. They’ve got sensor packages. Wild stuff. Sensor packages, drone suites, everything talking to everything. And I think that’s what he does really well is it doesn’t matter what he makes, it can talk to all of his stuff. But there’s some dangers, here. And the dangers are, now I’d like you to think about some of the AI whiz kids. Like, what’s his face? Let’s see. Chat GPT? [Sam Altman]. Lost me, doesn’t matter. Doesn’t matter. Anyway, now I can’t get sued.
The thing about some of these folks is they’re developing products that are absolutely going to have military applications and yet, they don’t know jack sh¡t about the profession of arms, diplomacy, foreign policy, macroeconomics, the geopolitical tectonic plates.
If you look at Alex Karp at Palantir, he just thinks it’s cool to do surveillance on every man, woman, and child. If you look at Larry Ellison at Oracle, he’ll just tell you, “Well, then don’t do bad things or think bad thoughts and you’ll just be fine.”
Constitution much? In other words, they’re free of the morality of what they’re developing and I find that reprehensible. And I think it’s extremely dangerous for us. So those are the kids that I would say are on their way to Skynet. Those are the kids that are on their way.
“Hey, look, we built a sentient computer. What could go wrong?” The computer doesn’t like you. That’s one problem.
Seth Horst: They’re not focused on the ethics of it, for sure. They’re nerds and they’re like, “We can do this. Let’s try it.”
Eric Boardman: Well, who can take it the furthest, the fastest?
Dave Faller: Even the fact that you know there’s a motivation to know that somebody’s going to develop it. So if you can be the first one, that’s exciting for people. It’s going to happen, regardless of whether they do it or somebody else does it. So who could be the first?
Blaine Holt: Here, in Coeur d’Alene, drive to every intersection and you’ll find a..?
Eric Boardman: Camera.
Blaine Holt: Exactly. And seven times over, you’ll find a license plate. Well, those are Flock products.
And then, on the Palantir side, now they’re getting into Gotham, which has the pre-policing modules. So how’d you like somebody to knock on the door and go, “Hey, the algorithm says you’re thinking about robbing a bank or you’re thinking about offing your wife?”
Set Horst: There was a movie about this.
Eric Boardman: ‘Minority Report’.
Set Horst: That’s it. Minority Report.
Dave Faller: They’re just statistics, OK? That’s it.
Blaine Holt: So then, Kamala Harris gets in and what happens?
Seth Horst: Because, crimes are solved really fast with things like Flock, right? If my child gets abducted and they catch this sh¡tbag in 30 minutes because of Flock, I love that. I wish there were a way to protect it. There should be a way to protect our privacy.
Blaine Holt: I don’t think there’s enough energy worked on that other side. I think there’s a lot of work done on “Let’s go find the Bad Guy,” and there’s so many honest applications of that.
Dave Faller: Well, that’s the thing. You just highlighted something that nobody on the planet wants to see happen: My kid being abducted. So you hide under that. You say, “We’re gonna put these out here so that everybody, if your kid gets abducted, we can do this.” But that’s not what the main point of the application is. It’s surveillance. It’s being able to watch people. But yes, everybody hides under that.
Seth Horst: I know. And I don’t know where I stand on this.
Dave Faller: But that same person that calls you out would say, “I don’t want my kid abducted.”
Blaine Holt: I don’t know where I stand on it either, Seth. What I want is people working on that. And I don’t see any work on that. I don’t see any… Who’s phone is that? Where the hell… My phone’s off. Where the Hell’s the ACLU?…Where the Hell are these people who used to stand up and say, “Oh, no, we’re for civil liberties?” Well, prove it!
Prove it. And get the politics out of this crap. We’re not. Republicans and Democrats. We’re Americans. Act like it. There’s a document. It’s called the Fourth Amendment. I’ve got rights. “Oh, well, yeah, but you were caught on camera.” It’s like, “You don’t have a right to film me.”
Seth Horst: Is there even a way to balance it? Is there a way to use that technology.
Blaine Holt: There has to be. Let’s ask Grok, right now.
Dave Faller: Blaine, let me ask you this. You were obviously in a very high level in the government, right? I mean, you’ve met presidents. You’ve been in a position to where you can make decisions that affect the entire nation, ultimately. Do you believe that there’s technology that you have not been made privy to?
Blaine Holt: Well, since the time that I’ve retired? Oh, absolutely.
Dave Faller: How about when you were in? Do you think there was anything out there? A few things. A few things. Absolutely a few things, but I had a really wonderful job. I was in a studies group, so the funny part was I got kicked out of the Air War College, but nobody really gets kicked out of the Air War College, so what they do is they move you to another part of the campus where the other cool kids are not. So Colonel Holt, with the pile of Misfit Toys over here.
But the Misfit Toys Project was really cool. It was doing the Futures Study for the Chief of Staff and the Secretary for 30 years out, on what… We did deep futures look into what… Where are all these technological strands going? What do we have? Where will that be? Will we be able to meet the adversary in say 2035, 2040?
And then four plausible combat scenarios where you could see Russia goes freak-out, China does this, or whatever. But along that path, we got to fly around and go meet a lot of really big-brain people about where things are going.
So you get to see a little leg about some of the things that I might not have been read on to, but what I can also say is, in a period of exponential technology, I’ve been retired now for 10 years, that curve has gone up so much. So the stuff that came online after I got out, I have talked to a Three-Star. We’re very dear friends. I’m going to have him on my podcast soon. Lieutenant General Steven Kwast.
Dave Faller: What’s your podcast by the way, so people know?
Blaine Holt: Dangerous Intellectuals. Thank you very much.
Dave Faller: We want to pump that. We love having you on here. So, we’re all about supporting it. Absolutely. So, come to DangerousIntellectuals.com and tomorrow you’ll see Jonathan Gilliam, our favorite SEAL and FBI agent, Air Marshal, Snake-Eater and we’re going to go through the Maduro drop.
Blaine Holt: But on the technology side, the things that Steven Kwast will tell you is they’ll just blow your mind. They’ll absolutely blow your mind. He’s the one that was on some video podcast where he was making a speech and he got everybody’s eyebrows raised. He said, “Shoot, right now today I could be in Australia in 10 minutes if I wanted to be.” And everybody’s like, “Wait, what?”
And I’m going, “Killer,” – his call sign’s “Killer”. And I’m like, “Killer, I don’t think you’re supposed to be talking about that!”
Dave Faller: OK, we’re going to Australia in February and it’s going to take us 15 hours. So, if you can help a brother out, 10 minutes would be a lot better. Seth has a little bit of anxiety.
Seth Horst: I don’t like flying!
Eric Boardman: How do you feel about teleporting?
Dave Faller: We’re going to fly for a total of like 21 hours.
Seth Horst: I’m sitting here, like I made a career out of flying and I don’t like flying.
Blaine Holt: Well, Killer and I had a really cool mission together. He was the Base Commander of Bagram in Afghanistan and with the F-15Es and I was the Base Commander up in Kyrgyzstan, just two countries to the north with my tanks, the KC-135. It’s an oldie but a goodie. We fly it here, at Fairchild.
And there I was. I’m over northern Afghanistan and I’ve got this brand-new-to-the-theater crew with me, who came in from the Nebraska Guard and, you know, they’re trying to follow all the procedures. They’re worried like Hell that the Colonel’s on board with them and “Oh, geez, I’ve got to show this guy that I know what I’m doing.”
And so, I’m sitting in the seat and all of a sudden, we hear this distress call from an F-15E and he goes, “Shell 8-7, shell 8-7, come up, this is Ranger 5-2.”
You know, and it’s like, “Oh, I know that voice. That’s Killer. He’s a One-Star General. But I didn’t tell the crew that.
And he goes, “You guys got to come to this, these coordinates right now, immediately, immediately. We’ve got troops in contact below that point. I need you to meet me with gas.” Now, he’s on our dance card to give him gas but like in an hour or two from now. And so, we’ve already got two F-15s behind us getting gas.
And so, I look at the pilot, the major from the Nebraska Guard and I go, “So, what are you going to do?” He goes, “Well, sir, I’ll coordinate with Pyramid, call the AWACS, I’ll go do this and I’ll make this phone call here, we’ll make a request –”
And I go, “No, you’re going to go there right now.” And he goes, “Sir, we can’t do that.”
And I go, “So, trivia question: Who owns a third of the tankers over Afghanistan, right now, at this moment?” And he goes, well, that’s you, sir.” And I go, “Uh-huh. Where do you think those calls will go? Including this one?”
And he goes, “Yes, sir.”
“Go there now.” And he’s like, “Ah, we’re breaking a lot of rules.” And I go, “I know. We’re going to break them.”
Dave Faller: I’m sorry, I’m still caught up and I’m cracking, I’m like crying over here and laughing. And so, 10 minutes to Australia. Come on.
Blaine Holt: So, he starts turning back. He starts turning back towards the point where we’re going to pick them up. We get rid of the other two customers. “Sorry, guys, got to go. See you another time.” And then, I know that the boom operator in the back, he’s from this guy’s unit and they know each other.
I know he’s going to be like, “Oh, Mommy and Daddy had a fight.” So, I run back there to kind of sit back with him in the boom pod area and I go – and he’s a staff sergeant – I go, “So, how are you doing?” And he goes, “Hi, sir. How are things?” And I go, “Well, they’re interesting. So, here’s what’s going to happen. We’re going to do things a little non-standard. We’re going to go to this area and one at 15E, he’s going to come in like a bat out of Hell. Now, you like people to come in at about 265 knots. He’s coming in at 500. And you would normally say, ‘Break away, break away, break away!’ and call a separation because that would be the safe thing to do.
“We’re not doing that. He’s going to come in here full afterburners, cut the power, he’s going to throw the landing gear out, the speed brakes, he’ll put his hands out if it stops him quicker. And then he’s going to come up and he’s going to pop onto the boom.
“Now, we’re only supposed to give him 14,000 pounds of gas. We’re going to give him 24. OK? Because he’s going to be bone dry. And, and then, he’s going to leave and go do something. That’s why he’s calling us. And he’s going to come back, even though he’s not supposed to. And we’re going to give him another 10,000 to send him home, because he won’t have any gas when he comes back.
And, he’s like, “OK.”
And so, just like I had told him, “ere comes Killer – General Kwast – screaming-in, speed brake comes out, the landing gear comes out, pops on.
Dave Faller: Did his hands come out?
Blaine Holt: No, that did not happen.
Dave Faller: I just want to know.
Blaine Holt: I want to be factual. I want to be factual. So, so he gets on the boom and he’s telling my boom operator and the pilot, he goes, “Oh my God, thank you guys for kind of bending things and being here for me,” and all that.
I go, “Hey, Killer, it’s Blaino.”
And he goes, “Dude.” And I go, “Dude.”
He goes, “I’m so glad it’s you.” And all the staff sergeants look down at the pilot and the F-15 Eagle and you see the stars on his shoulders. He’s like, “Oh my God!” And he’s telling the pilot on the intercom system, he goes, “This is a general we got back here.”
Dave Faller: He was flying?
Blaine Holt: Oh yeah. And then, you see on his wing, he’s got every bomb known to mankind on that wing. He’s a bomb truck, at this point. He is loaded for bear. He goes, “OK, dude, this is the setup. You got a FOB, you got like 10 of our Army guys. There’s 150 Taliban moving in on them right now and I’ve got them in the open air.” He goes, “So I’m gonna need a little bit more gas.”
I said, “You’re getting 24.” He goes, “Oh, that’s awesome!” And he goes, “Alright, and then I’m gonna rip away from here and can I come back?” And I go, “Yep, we got another 14 for you. And he goes, OK.”
Dave Faller: So, so then, bleeding a tanker dry.
Blaine Holt: Oh, no – plenty! So, so then he gets off and he rolls inverted. Also, not really copacetic. And we see the flames come out of the burners right in front of our eyes and he goes, zing, right on down. And, and then –
Seth Horst: The cool factor is really high right now!
Blaine Holt: So then, 15 minutes later, 15 minutes later, he’s right up in behind us.
Dave Faller: So I’m not gay, but I would like to meet this guy. (Everybody laughs)
Blaine Holt: And, so – he’s going to come to Coeur d’Alene. I’ll bring him up here.
Dave Faller: Oh yeah. That’s awesome. Alright. Get me and him in a hotel room where we’re fine.
Blaine Holt: So, so Killer comes up and the one thing that’s changed is his wing is completely empty. The clean wing. And I go, “How’d it go down there?” He goes, “Oh, that was so good!”
He goes, “It was so good.” He goes, our guys are going to sleep well tonight. I said, “That’s wonderful.”
And he said, “I need –” I said, “You’re getting 14.” He goes, “That’s all I need. I’m fine.” And so then, he goes back to Bagram.
I don’t really even, we’ve been to a lot of commanders conferences together, but I don’t even see him until he’s in the Pentagon. Now, he’s wearing three stars. I’m selected for my first star and I see him at Ground Zero, which is the center point of the Pentagon. We just bump into each other and it’s “Dude!” “Dude!”
And then he goes, “If you guys didn’t do that that day, you know what I was going to do?” I said, “I know. It’s a rental.”
He was going to go spank him anyway and then just take his happy parachute after ejection ans walk back to Bagram.
Eric Boardman: But is that rare for a general to be dropping bombs on people?
Blaine Holt: No, we want our wing commanders. We want our wing commanders flying. And some of those wing slots are general officer slots. And honestly, honestly, we’re going to return our Air Force to this.
Now, General Wilsbach, our new Chief of Staff, he wants more generals flying. And it’s not that he wants them flying to go prove, “Look, I’m still the man.” If you can’t do the mission, how do you know what it looks like with your kids? How do you know what they’re going through? How do you know what their training?
Dave Faller: So, this is the disassociation that we have in everything, from public safety, all the way up to the military, right? You have people that have forgotten or don’t know – you know, there’s a certain point where you can actually promote out of the technology to where you don’t know what to expect with what you have.
As a paramedic, as simple as that is, I’d have people telling me how to run my job. And I’m like, “You don’t even know the protocols that I have right now, you’ve never even utilized. Why are you telling me how to do these things when you have never done them?” You can promote out and things change so fast. So I love that. I think that’s actually great.
Eric Boardman: I think it’ll change the way that we promote in the military.
Blaine Holt: Well, we’re going to get rid of nepotism. We’re in the process of working on that.
Eric Boardman: Right. I’m looking forward to that. ‘Cause I’ve seen –
Blaine Holt: No more Bake Sale Colonels, right? “Oh, I ran the air show.” “OK, well, that’s just marvelous!”
Eric Boardman: You tested well and then you performed well on a board for one day, right?
Blaine Holt: Like, I get it. And it’s in the NCO Corps, too. And it needs to get changed.
Eric Boardman: Yes. Consistency of credibility, I think is important. Everybody needs to know that you are like the ground level.
Blaine Holt: We had shiny pockets when I was in Kyrgyzstan and, um, one of my favorite Four-Star generals, probably my favorite Four-Star General, Duncan McNabb. He was the Air Mobility Command Commander, all the big jets got them all. And he came out to see us, check up on the Blaino and he visited and so he came in and he had all his staff. We’re going through everything that we’re working on.
He’s like, “Well, you’re keeping General Patraeus happy. This is all fine. Good, Blaino. I’m excited. Everything’s going good here.”
So then, what does General McNabb do? General McNabb, I drive him in his car. I take him right out to a C-17. He gets into the left seat, straps that damn thing to his ass, as a Four-Star General and the Four-Star General is going to go fly a combat mission into Bagram. And he flies into Bagram and lands and then takes off.
Seth Horst: Hell, yeah.
Blaine Holt: That’s my Billy badass. I love that.
Eric Boardman: But all the guys, all the guys there, that are on base are looking at that going, “Yeah, that’s cool.”
Blaine Holt: Yeah. I wanted them all to see it. I brought as many people out to the bases, so that they could all tell the story. “I saw that damn Four-Star get up and fly that damned airplane.”
Dave Faller: Well, that’s the thing, right? You see, so many times, you see somebody that is up in the position that’s giving you orders and they can’t do what you do.
Blaine Holt: That’s right.
Dave Faller: So, when you can see somebody do it, there’s silence.
Blaine Holt: Yep. In Kyrgyzstan, for me, flying that mission every Saturday morning was like taking the edge off, because my problems were so significant on the base all week long that it was, “Oh, I can’t wait.” “So, to take the edge off, you’re going and flying a combat mission?”…
I had a revolution in Kyrgyzstan. I put that country back together again.
Dave Faller: Really?
Blaine Holt: Oh yeah. We had –
Dave Faller: I know where Kyrgyzstan is. I played with a game online.
Blaine Holt: We, we had, um, over the year that I was there, we had a massacre. We had a massacre in Ala-Too Square and basically, all the relationships that my team had put together to stay in Kyrgyzstan – because, they were trying to evict us, this corrupt regime – they had killed 70. They had 2,000 were injured. And then, I helped put the interim leader in power. And I put the country back up.
Seth Horst: How do you spelled Kyrgyzstan?
Blaine Holt: K-Y-R-G-Y-Z.
Seth Horst: Got it.
Eric Boardman: There’s a Z in there.
Dave Faller: I played this game where I have to type all 196 countries and you have to spell them out correctly. And I have 15 minutes to write all 90, 196 countries. I’ve been able to do that. It’s surrounded by a bunch of – it’s landlocked.
Seth Horst: It’s landlocked. It’s surrounded by a bunch of –
Blaine Holt: -stans.
Seth Horst: There’s no one that actually lives in it.
Dave Faller: South of Russia, off of Mongolia.
Blaine Holt: Do you know what? Do you know what? It’s a, it’s a gorgeous nation. And if I put you in Bishkek, you would go –
Seth Horst: Oh, I see Bishkek on here.
Blaine Holt: “Oh my gosh. It’s like Coeur d’Alene!”
Dave Faller: Really?
Blaine Holt: Oh, yeah.
Seth Horst: Get out of here.
Blaine Holt: Oh yeah. Oh no. They have, if he taken a walk in the Ala-Too Mountains, there’s nothing like it.
Seth Horst: There’s a big lake.
Blaine Holt: Oh yeah. That’s Lake Issyk Kul.
Eric Boardman: That’s cool.
Seth Horst: Yep. I think that’s where a lot of MMA fighters are coming from right now.
{Edit}
Dave Faller: So let me ask you a question. Going back to Maduro, since we’ll kind of go full circle, real quick. Now, I know there was talk about some association, I’ll just say that with the Trump administration and a few different things. But if you had Trump’s direct ear, and he said, “Blaine, I’m looking at taking Maduro, I’m going to kidnap him. I’m going to bring him back to the US.” Would you have advised him to do that?
Blaine Holt: Yes.
Eric Boardman: He said it in the last podcast. I listened to it yesterday and he forecast this. That was super interesting. Can I give a quick breakdown, because I’ve heard this – a couple of people say we just “kidnapped” the President of Venezuela. And that’s, that’s, but that’s what a lot of people are saying. That’s, that’s what they’re projecting.
Dave Faller: It’s a headline.
Eric Boardman: Yeah. But I look at it like this and you tell me where I’m jacked-up. Here’s the way my thought process goes. I told you, I kind of have a real strong feeling about cartels. Like, we talk about how we need people in political power to be altruistic and they actually need to think about the right thing.
The cartels are the exact opposite. They don’t care. It is all about money. They don’t care who they kill, who they hurt, who they murder or what countries they destroy or whatever. They don’t care.
This was not capturing Nicolás Maduro, the President of Venezuela. He was also the leader of the Cartel de los Soles, which is the Cartel of the Suns. That’s what it was. So he is an openly, openly the leader of the –
Blaine Holt: – and openly an illegitimate president. And this is the home of Dominion and Smartmatic.
Eric Boardman: Right.
Blaine Holt: So now, you’re getting to the number one reason that I would tell president Trump, “Go get his ass!”
Eric Boardman: Right.
Blaine Holt: Because we’re going to go ahead and bring all of that evidence out – which we are, by the way – I know that, from a special friend. And the other part is we’re going to then learn all about the Swamp and a lot of the people who make money by other ways. And this is so important for our country, in the upcoming Midterms. Don’t you think?
Dave Faller: That’s why the FBI was there, right?
Blaine Holt: Yes.
Eric Boardman: OK.
Dave Faller: So that was an interesting detail.
Eric Boardman: There’s so much talk about how, well, Venezuela is primarily cocaine and I could get into the fentanyl stuff where we were, but does anybody do cocaine anymore?
Dave Faller: Cocaine is legit. If you had pure cocaine, I’m good with that. That hasn’t been seen since the ’80s! Pure cocaine, dude, it’s a natural substance! (Everybody laughs).
Eric Boardman: But now it’s all the same. And the Cartel de los Soles is not just Venezuela. They kind of openly use their military for those reasons, but it also connects to Mexico.
Blaine Holt: Every illicit activity on the planet. Every bad thing. If you don’t find cocaine a problem, maybe you’ll find child-trafficking a problem. If that’s not a problem, maybe you’ll find organ-harvesting a problem. If that’s not a problem, maybe the shadow bankers and the folks who want to make you “Own nothing and be happy”, too.
Eric Boardman: Yeah. And I can’t not think that, at some point, we’re also looking at this going, “Yeah, Mexico, what’s up?” Like, this, this spans across multiple countries.
Blaine Holt: Aaaah. Did you not just see the look on her face today?
Eric Boardman: Oh, yeah.
Blaine Holt: She looks, she looks a little out of sorts!
Dave Faller: What, what border does Venezuela share with the US? None.
Eric Boardman: Right.
Dave Faller: It’s Mexico.
Eric Boardman: Right.
Dave Faller: So, there’s got to be some other –
Blaine Holt: It’s a Squeeze Play. It’s a total Squeeze Play. Petro in Colombia and a Sheinbaum in Mexico. And then, Nicaragua and Haiti have problems, right?
Dave Faller: And Cuba’s gonna fall. Mexico needs to get on our side, right now. They really, really do because they share our border and 90% of things come across that border.
Eric Boardman: That’s why I think this was such an advanced play. Like, you gotta go way deeper than –
Blaine Holt: It is. It is, its. It’s a very nice chess move. And look, when we first put the crowd-pleaser right off their shores, the Ford, they immediately – what happens in day three?
They call all of their shadowy friends around the world. And they scream bloody murder. We scoop out all that signals intelligence and we process it. And then you got these clowns over at MI6 in the UK. Oh, they’re a legitimate organization!
And they say, “We’re not going to share Intel with you anymore on the Caribbean.” Well, what about the Special relationship™? What happened, there? I thought we were buddies?
Dave Faller: Are we still using the Navajo for translation?
Blaine Holt: No, but I wish we were, I wish we were trustworthy. I’ll tell you what, we could use Kyrgyz. I learned Kyrgyz. That’s a It’s a bitch of a language!
Dave Faller: Kyrgyz? Where did that come from?
Blaine Holt: It’s Turkic. And then, when, and when the Soviets took over, they said, “You can keep your language, but we’re converting it to Cyrillic. So it looks like it’s Russian. It’s not Russian. It’s Turkic.
Eric Boardman: Whoa.
Blaine Holt: Yeah. It’s another fun fact for you.
Seth Horst: I can’t even speak Spanish.
Blaine Holt: So, General Petraeus, at the end of the whole thing, I asked General Petraeus, I said, “Let me stay another year. We’re making some progress, here.” He goes, “No, you went native.” And I go, “I didn’t go native.” “Boy, you’re never going to leave.”
Dave Faller: What’s your thoughts on Petraeus? Where is he now?
Blaine Holt: He’s good. He’s, uh, making a lot of money at KKR! And he’s doing well. When I was asking him this, I said, “Listen, sir, we’re making a lot of progress here. This is a very important, it’s a rough neighborhood. We got Iran, China, Afghanistan, come on.” And he was like, “There is Lawrence of Arabia, and there’s Blaino of Bishkek!”
Eric Boardman: You know, “If I leave here for a year, you’re never leaving.” Could I ask you a name from somebody that was at the Pentagon and just kind of gauge, based on your facial expression, what you thought of him?
Blaine Holt: What?
Eric Boardman: Milley.
Blaine Holt: Ugh (grimaces).
Eric Boardman: OK. Copy that. I was just, when we, when we go back to the military and the way I did a PSA with him, at one point in time and spent some time around him and it was, just had a certain…
Blaine Holt: The first time I met him, he was “Full Bird” Colonel Milley. Um, you know, let’s talk about the positives. He’s got a very high sense of self-esteem. (Everybody laughs).
Eric Boardman: I noticed that. Yeah.
Dave Faller: That’s what Seth says about me.
Eric Boardman: Even though he looked like a melted candle, I was very shocked at how, how highly he thought of himself.
Blaine Holt: He’s got a, he’s got a robust, robust appetite. For life.
Eric Boardman: Yeah. Checks out.
Dave Faller: Oh my God. OK, I was just curious from somebody else. So he knows who you’re talking about.
Blaine Holt: Oh yeah. I’m hoping that we see him in the media more often, in the coming days.
Eric Boardman: Oh, that’d be – well he was the Chairman of Joint Chiefs of Staff, so I had to go do something over and I was in Bangor.
Blaine Holt: Always a friend to the Chinese people. Yeah. You gotta, you gotta admire that.
Eric Boardman: Well, it’s a significant population. If you’re playing percentages, they might be lying about their population numbers, but yeah, I was just curious what your thoughts were. I’m hoping that the way the military is going, as –
Blaine Holt: I would love to see him in orange. Very good color for him.
Eric Boardman: Yeah, that checks out. I think it really would accent.
Dave Faller: Yeah. You know, actually in Phoenix, it’s pink. So they put you in bright pink.
Seth Horst: What’s up? That’s cool.
Dave Faller: I like that. I do. I like it. They put you out in the desert and they make you.
Blaine Holt: That could be a crime deterrent.
Dave Faller: Crack rocks. It’s pretty neat. Yeah, exactly. They put you in bright.
Seth Horst: Who’s the sheriff down there? Oh, gosh, I can’t remember.
Blaine Holt: Arapaho?
Eric Boardman: Is that it?
Seth Horst: Something like that.
Dave Faller: I can’t even remember the county. What county is it?
Eric Boardman: Joe. Joe.
Blaine Holt: Arpaio. He’s retired now. They ran his butt right out.
Dave Faller: What county is it?
Blaine Holt: Mesa.
Dave Faller: It’s not Mesa County.
Eric Boardman: No, it’s not.
Seth Horst: It’s, uh, it’s something.
Blaine Holt: You guys are all acting like we’re Arizonans!
Eric Boardman: I know. I love it!
Seth Horst: I mean, he was doing it right.
Dave Faller: It was like, “Hey, if our men and women in the military can sleep in tents out in 110 degrees, so can you. I know.
Eric Boardman: I’m going to go – I got to go back to this, because I really want to –
Dave Faller: Mariposa!
Eric Boardman: Mariposa County. [sic: Maricopa].
Seth Horst: Nicely done.
Eric Boardman: But I’m super curious what your take on this is, because I’m always concerned when we go, when we go remove somebody surgical, extremely impressive, but when we go remove somebody in the manner that we did, it creates this huge power vacuum, right?
And, I was listening to, um, a reporter down there and she’s talking about the four people that are in play to take that. That’s concerning, right? Like if, if there’s no plan in place, I’m sure there is, but what, where do you think that’s going?
Blaine Holt: So, Rubio kind of showed a little leg on this today. So, the Vice President, Delcy Rodríguez, thinks that she’s going to be now the new leader and be in charge forever.
But she’s been a little hostile towards us, as well. Not really a fan, more of a fan of Hezbollah, really. Um, and she loves Communism. You got to give her that. Um, so what I believe that has happened is, and I do know this, through some sources, is she is playing ball with us to an extent and that ball that she’s going to play and Rubio kind of laid it out today is:
“You’re the temporary leader. There are going to be elections. There’ll be elections soon. Venezuela will pick its leader and then you’re going to also deport all of the Hezbollah agents in your country, immediately. And by the way, we know who they are.”
And so, she’ll do that or then if she doesn’t want to do that, then the President will enact what he called last night, the “Second Wave”, which is, “OK, well, maybe, maybe you’d like to have a reunion with the guys. They’d love to come back and see ya.”
And so, I think it’s going to track that way. You’re going to see a little bit of chaos. I am seeing some signs in the population that they’re starting to form little militias and, and groups. And then, they got guns. And so, we’ll see how this is. It could be a little chaotic in the transition, but I think it’s going to go OK.
Seth Horst: Does that mean there’s a bunch of 18 year old Marines about to go get some?
Blaine Holt: They’re wanting to. They’re wanting to.
Seth Horst: Of course they are. They’re Marines!
Blaine Holt: One afternoon in Kyrgyzstan, I had 1,500 Marines protecting us, because they were transit guests, you know, world’s largest bed and breakfast. We had a, from the Revolution, we had a column of armored vehicles coming up to the gate and we didn’t know whether they were friendlies or, or foes. And so I put the Marines on the gate and opened up my armory and they were, man, they were – they were ready!
But at the last minute we found out, “Nope, nope, these are Revolutionaries. They’re good. We’re going to let them pass.” As soon as I said that, in a giant voice, you saw so many pissed-off young men. So I had to go out there and, you know, “It worked out well, Guys. Thank you for this. The Rec Center’s down here. We still have Call of Duty. They were wonderful. They were marvelous.
Eric Boardman: Well, that’s better to hear, ’cause that, and that is one thing with this administration. This would not have been a move where it’s just done to appease somebody in the public or just to make a scene. There’s going to be a plan and something structured.
Blaine Holt: There is an After Plan. I do know that. I do know that there is an, an, and it could get messy, on a tourniquet basis. “I see you chose unwisely. Now we got to do this to you.”
But I think they actually have thought through the elements of after the shock and awe piece, If you’ll recall Iraq, we did shock and awe and then we’re like…
Eric Boardman: “OK, what do we do with more hands?”
Blaine Holt: “Well, uh, that part of the plan’s done. So what do you got?”
Dave Faller: Maduro is in the US. He’s in custody of the US and he’s facing narco terrorism. Um, quite a few other charges. Yeah. Which I read today, based off of the United States international law could be a minimum of 20 years. Nothing about death penalty or anything else.
So him and Cilia, is it Cilia? Yeah. Cilia get sentenced to, let’s say life in prison in the US, how does that – what is the expected response from the global community on that?
Blaine Holt: Well, so the President’s detractors are going to say, “This is illegal. This constitutes an act of war. This is POW –”
Dave Faller: The liberals.
Blaine Holt: Well, the liberals, the liberals and the neocons.
Dave Faller: Gavin Newsom.
Blaine Holt: No, there’s a lot of Republicans going after the President on this, as well.
Dave Faller: I’m trying to get Gavin Newsom on this podcast, but I don’t think he’ll come.
Blaine Holt: Let’s just, let’s just take a moment.
Eric Boardman: I would love it.
Dave Faller: He would sit with his legs. Yes. I’d be like, “Please uncross your legs. It’s not manly.”
Blaine Holt: Actually, he’d be doing this, right now (imitates Newsom’s swaying movement).
Eric Boardman: Yeah. I love guns! I love guns!
Blaine Holt: Yeah. So, if we had to hold them, what, we did we hold Noriega, I think for like 20 years or something like that? Um, what I think is going to happen is this, is he’s going to disappear into some Witness Protection Program, after he gives up a whole lot of things, which he’s got.
Eric Boardman: Really?
Blaine Holt: That’s just one man’s opinion. I’m just speculating. I don’t know that, at all. Yeah. I’m just telling you he’s really valuable. Now, when we think about, um, could he commit Epstein suicide?
Eric Boardman: Oh, I don’t know.
Blaine Holt: Because –
Dave Faller: What do you mean “Epstein suicide”?
Blaine Holt: Well, there’s two types of suicides. There’s the “friendly suicide”, where I just kind of take my own life, right? And I, and then there’s the other kind. There’s the “Epstein suicide”, where I’m six foot five, and there’s no way I could physically hang myself in this room. And yet, I did it.
Eric Boardman: Yeah. In other circles, that might be called a “homicide”.
Blaine Holt: Well…
Eric Boardman: In other circles, right?
Blaine Holt: Everybody’s got a different opinion.
Dave Faller: I, I thought Epstein killed himself. So.
Eric Boardman: Well, I, I, I would tend to agree with you. I mean, when you look at where this guy came from.
Blaine Holt: He’s too valuable. Well, and we’re talking trillions of dollars.
Eric Boardman: He was a, he was a bus driver and a union guy. The dude’s negotiated before. He all of a sudden ended up Hugo Chávez’s like heir apparent. So the guy knows how to negotiate. So I would assume there’s still some of that in there. He’s not going to want to sit in prison.
Blaine Holt: You got to love the irony. You got to love the irony of replaying Al Pacino. When he’s like, “Come get me! Oh! come get me!”
That’s like, OK! Your wishes!
Eric Boardman: Hold my beer.
Blaine Holt: Meet the 160th sword.
Dave Faller: Yeah. What about your faith in the Attorney General?
Blaine Holt: I mean, let’s put it this way. Here, let me give you a fun fact. Let me give you a fun fact. Stats on arrests for this administration. President Trump: 1. Pam Bondi, 0.
Dave Faller: OK. So how’s Pam Bondi going to do with Maduro in custody?
Blaine Holt: I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know if Pam Bondi’s around.
Dave Faller: I’ve seen a lot of, I’ve seen a lot of stuff saying that she, “Yeah, they’re going to hold him accountable,” and everything else, but where are we going to go with this? Is he going to get time? Is he not going to get time?
Blaine Holt: Or do we do a military thing?
Dave Faller: I don’t know what that means.
Blaine Holt: You can make the argument that he’s not going to be tried for narco-terror. You can make the argument that he is an Enemy Combatant in killing Americans and his weapon was narcotics.
And so, you could sit there and say, “Article 2, Section 2, we’re not going to try him in a civilian court, so get lost, Southern District to New York, we’re taking him down to Gitmo and we’re going to properly try him as a prisoner of war.”
Eric Boardman: Well, Cartel de los Soles was designated as a terrorist organization.
Blaine Holt: I did see that. So, the President has some optionality, here. The problem at the bigger scope; is we can go round up all the evidence in the world and you see evidence from DOGE and everything else, the Somali thing being paraded out in front of you, but nobody’s perp-walked, and so, we’re either going to change-out the Department of Justice and fire Susie Wiles, or we’re not.
We’re going to do one or the other, but my advice, if I had the ear of the President, would be that the Midterm’s coming, and if you’re going to start the Season of Accountability, you better step on the gas now, because they’ll have you impeached by June of next year.
Eric Boardman: So, Trump listens to this podcast? Yeah. So that’s good. So you have his ear right now. Yeah, absolutely. He’s listening to everyone, honestly.
Blaine Holt: You can bet, as soon as this publishes, I will have it on his TRUTHSocial.
Dave Faller: Yeah, no, absolutely. He stops his day and he listens to North Idaho podcasts, so he’s always wanted to live here. Trump, if you’re looking to buy a home, I would like to be your guy.
Seth Horst: Mar-a-Lago, North Idaho.
Dave Faller: Have you golfed the floating greens?
Blaine Holt: Awfully beautiful.
Seth Horst: Have you? Yes or no?
Eric Boardman: Beautiful people, here. It’s the best green, ever.
Blaine Holt: Been to Shooters down in Rockford Bay? Best burgers ever.
Seth Horst: How do you feel about these narco-terrorists, or these drug-running boats getting just wiped off the face of the Earth?
Blaine Holt: Sight to behold, it’s beautiful. And then, they provide endless sources of leads for law enforcement. And why is that? Because every time that happens, some creep in the Swamp, whether they’re Dem or RINO, will come up and go, “You can’t do that! They’re fishermen!”
It’s like, “Oh, and how are you getting paid?”
Eric Boardman: I’m no expert, but I see the videos and I’m like, “That ain’t no f@cking fishing boat.”
Blaine Holt: Well, here’s the cool part. So we talked about technology that we’re in possession of. We know what’s on those boats. I bet. And it’s not a curious thing.
Dave Faller: What’s happening to the fish? Are they all just like getting really amped up or what’s up?
Seth Horst: He didn’t have a problem with them.
Blaine Holt: The fish get amped up.
Dave Faller: Can you imagine a whale ingesting cocaine? The b¡tch would be flying.
Seth Horst: There’s a movie about it. There was ‘Cocaine Bear’, the movie. It would be a ‘Cocaine Whale’.
Eric Boardman: I assume it would be very similar.
Seth Horst: Whale watching is fantastic in the Caribbean right now.
Eric Boardman: When we used to pump sanitaries overboard on the submarine, right, when we’d hear that.
Dave Faller: What’s that? Sanitaries.
Eric Boardman: Shit, right? So you’d pump that overboard and there would be fish and everything going crazy. You’d hear biologics behind the submarine. So I assume these drug boats, there’s a whole other contingent of fish that are like, “Woo!” You know?
Blaine Holt: You know you’re doing well when a sperm whale jumps over the Ford and just goes over the Ford.
Eric Boardman: That was legit!
Blaine Holt: That’s right. And F-18’s taking off at the same time. It’s like, “My kind of war, Brother!”
Seth Horst: Sidebar, Dave and I were not in the military, so you’re the only other guy that is or was in the military other than Eric. Are all submariners gay or is that just like?
Blaine Holt: So, that’s classified. I actually can’t talk about that.
Dave Faller: Eric has a beautiful wife. So she knows she’s got his first.
Eric Boardman: No, I’m not going to get into that. Not on this podcast. I respect Blaine too much. No, it’s good.
Seth Horst: What are they blowing these boats up with? Is it the Air Force? Who’s doing it?
Blaine Holt: Oh, in some cases, we’re actually using some weapons that are in their prototypical stages. So, we’ve got we’ve got robotics. We’ve got all kinds of things that could be getting hit from under the water. They could be getting hit from airborne autonomous vehicles. Sometimes, it’s just a plain old everyday garden variety missile. But in most cases we’re tagging them with missiles. We’re tagging them from very, very far away.
Eric Boardman: But they’re kinetic weapons.
Seth Horst: It’s making them – it’s clearly sending a message, right?
Blaine Holt: Oh yeah. And this is what it is. It’s about – so what those do, you go, “OK I hit a I hit a boat of cocaine.” What does it do? It creates a cost imposition that gets those billionaire oligarchs that are sitting in Venezuela, watching their holdings go up in smoke.
And then what do they do? They go right to their phones and right to their laptops, and they may as well just be communicating with our satellites, right overhead. And so, we ingest all that stuff and we find out who they’re talking to and who they’re bitching about and who they’re upset about.
Eric Boardman: What senator or what congressman they’re calling.
Blaine Holt: There. Bingo! Eric’s got it exactly right. So then, what they do is they go “Who’s that son of a b¡tch I paid for, who’s in DC, supposed to be watching my hiney?” And it’s like “Oh, I see you called Senator X.”
Eric Boardman: This is going to get into something – and I know geopolitical stuff is right in your wheelhouse – but I get frustrated, because I’m a firm believer that you know we’re civil servants, right? I think that if you’re running for office, it should be that way. And my concern with our current system, is that whatever your original intentions whatever altruistic intentions, whichever you went in there for, you owe so much return on investment, by the time you get elected that those are back-burner.
You spend your entire term trying to pay-off the people that got you into office, in the first place. And then, you see people like I’ll use one, for example. I’m not saying he’s into anything bad but you see the fight, right now between Shawn Ryan and Dan Crenshaw, because he’s asking him questions that I think are legitimate.
Blaine Holt: I do, too.
Eric Boardman: “Why are you making so much money now?” And that’s really frustrating from a voter’s perspective.
Blaine Holt: Why are you allowed to not participate in Obamacare? Why are you allowed to not take the shot? Why are your staffs allowed to not take the shot? Why is insider trading OK? Why is that all fine? Yes. And why won’t you police that? Here’s what bothers me.
First off we have to have some sort of structural reform. I personally would love to see term limits on these clowns, so they can’t get entrenched in DC – and on their staffers, and on their staffers – because, the staffers are even more powerful. But to be honest if you look at the entire Swamp – and I mean the Deep State, the cubicle-dwellers the DEI Warrior, who’s like, “I’m just going to take that and I’m going to let them.”
Eric Boardman: And it’s not R’s and D’s. No. It’s absolutely not.
Blaine Holt: It’s not. And so, what we have allowed DC to become is adrift in an ethics-free environment. And where I think we went wrong is for everybody outside of the military that Constitutional Oath is ornamental. And I think we ought to put teeth into it. And if you want to be in the service of our government that’s fine. Not only are you going to raise your hand and take that Oath, you’re going to sign. You’re going to sign a piece of paper that says you understand the Oath that you took. You’ve been trained in what those clauses mean. And you know what those things are. And then, we have a piece of paper, that if we need to prosecute your ass for violation of your Constitutional Oath, well then, we’ll just take you down on that. Because it’ll be the easiest thing in the world.
Eric Boardman: The Uniform Code of Congressional Justice. I don’t care what you call it.
Blaine Holt: It’s the same thing. But what it is is, I could take all these things and go, “You violated your covenant with this country. And to the people of the country. We are a self-governed nation. We haven’t been for a long time, because We the People have been asleep at the wheel. Asleep at the switch.
And so what I think is, you’re seeing the Awakening. You’re seeing a Revival. People are getting it. The scales are falling off, right now. I think we’re going to see a rise of citizen-servant leaders.
Eric Boardman: I hope so.
Blaine Holt: And I think I think what we’re going to see is, if we could get this accountability going then what you’re going to see is – if my dear friend, down in Texas, right now running for governor, Doc Pete Chambers. He’s a Green Beret, has no reason to run for Governor, he’s just he’s pissed-off. And he wants to do something good for Texas.
Eric Boardman: “I’m tired of complaining. I’m going to do something.”
Blaine Holt: “I’m going to do something. I’m not going to bitch. I’m going to go grab a shovel.” I have a friend we’ll get to hear his name, later on but he’s very seriously oriented around giving up a very profitable business investment career that he deserves, after his service to the military as a Vet. And he wants to come here and run for high office. Fine. Fine.
But here’s what we’re looking at is we need to have a wave of citizens that are like, “It’s not enough for me to say this is bullshit and I can see it. It’s what am I going to do about it?”
And that needs to be the movement. That needs to be what fires you up. That needs to be like, “Yeah, what am I going to do about it? What am I going to do about it?”
Eric Boardman: Well, I sit here and look at it from a basic business principle, because here’s Eric Boardman’s two-part plan to fix the country: Probably not legitimate, at all.
Blaine Holt: As this chart clearly shows.
Eric Boardman: Yes, as this clearly shows. But truly, what are we really – most people what they’re really voting on – you’re hoping you’re voting with your values and your heart and everything that makes you you and what you think the country what’s best for the country what you’re really voting for is where are your tax dollars going? Right?
I have a problem with somebody being able to vote themselves additional handouts.
Blaine Holt: And they do it all the time,
Eric Boardman: All the time. All the time. I would love to see a world where that weighs into whether or not you can vote.
Blaine Holt: Or when something makes absolutely no damn sense, no damn sense, then it should be investigated. So, case in point let’s, oh I don’t know let’s be controversial and stay here, in Idaho. Let’s go to that guy who’s the Chairman of the Senate Foreign Services Foreign Affairs Committee, Senator Jim Resch.
Blaine Holt: As the Chairman of that Committee, he is the one who could stop these $40 million per month payments to the Taliban.
Eric Boardman: Seems reasonable to me.
Blaine Holt: He won’t let that thing go to the floor.
Eric Boardman: See, and that’s the second point.
Blaine Holt: So, then what I’m asking is why? Why? What’s your reason? Never one given. And John Thune backs him up. And to me, it’s not a “Dem” – that’s why I keep saying on my social media posts, “There’s no aisle, Kids. Stop thinking there is!”
There’s no aisle. It’s We the People versus They the Swamp. That’s what this is.
Eric Boardman: Well that’s the second part of it is as a taxpayer I just look at it from a simple business perspective: I don’t think there should be any private campaign contributions when you’re running for office. I don’t think there should be any. Let’s say you’re running for governor or running for president, for Christ’s sake.
I’d gladly give you let’s say a million dollars a piece you campaign you manage your own budget but it is from us. That is a good return on investment because when they get elected and they’re paying those people back I’m going to pay it in spades.
Blaine Holt: I totally agree. And that’s when you’ll find them having their constitutional hearts open up. Yeah but my Freedom of Speech, because I got a PAC and it’s a 501(XV).
And you’re just like, “Oh, now you like the Constitution. Oh. Isn’t that interesting?”
Eric Boardman: Weird how that works. But that’s where I get so frustrated. It’s like, how do you get it. Like, there’s nobody that can look at Nancy Pelosi and not know she’s insider trading.
Dave Faller: What is her life expectancy? Are we done with her, in like five years?
Eric Boardman: She’s plastic, dude. I mean, what’s the half-life on plastic?
Seth Horst: She’s a lizard person I think is what they call them. She’s not human.
Blaine Holt: Yeah but is it the combo. Is she a lizard who takes adrenochrome? Or is it… So I mean, if you have the combo…?
Seth Horst: Do they all need to? I don’t know.
Blaine Holt: I don’t know, either.
Seth Horst: Yeah, I don’t know how Lizard Life works.
Eric Boardman: Oh my gosh.
Seth Horst: Now, we’re in a new place!
Seth Horst: I don’t know. Why would anyone want to do a job for that long? Like, just go retire.
Eric Boardman: Because it’s wildly lucrative.
Blaine Holt: Well, two reasons. There’s money in it. And if you leave, you can’t defend yourself.
Eric Boardman: That’s right.
Dave Faller: Well, look at Dan Crenshaw, like you just brought up. Yeah. Like there’s a weird thing, where people get to that position, where all of a sudden, they find themselves in a position of “Do I stay here?”
Blaine Holt: Wait a minute. What really cool Young Leaders program was Dan a part of, before he ran for Congress? Oh, yeah. The World Economic Forum. That one.
Eric Boardman: Oh, God damn it. please. Sh¡t. See, that is the thing that just bugs me, inherently about politics is you’re no longer getting true civil servants into politics. And I think Trump throws –
Blaine Holt: You’re not. You’re not. But that’s why it’s so incumbent to really push people towards, “Look, we got to have citizen-servant leaders. And if you’re at a place in your life, maybe you’ve exited your business. Maybe you’ve got a few years to spend on Team America, here.”
Everybody comes up to us and they’ll go, “Hey thank you for your service.” And it’s like, “Well, thank you – but let’s have some from you.”
Dave Faller: Well that’s a problem is that people lose an eye or their wife gets shot in the head and all of a sudden you kind of capitalize on the sympathy. And then, you find them in positions of power, when the truth is that they had nothing to do with where we are now.
Blaine Holt: That’s right. Well this is the thing. We go back to what Winston Churchill said: “You can always trust the Americans to do the right thing, after they’ve tried everything else.” And I really do think we’re at this point of inflection.
But I think the President can’t do all of this by himself. He can set the conditions. He can do the National Security Strategy. He can save us from World War Next. He can even probably take on the financialists and create a little space for us. But if we remain as Americans in the apathy that we have over the last 30 years – what did George W. Bush say after 9/11? “Go shopping, We’ll go take care of the rest?”
No. No. No! The Founders had intended for you to participate in this Republic. The Founders had intended for that. And so, if you don’t like the way things are going, it’s probably because you’re not participating.
Eric Boardman: And that’s where I’m going with voting. And I know that’s an outlandish claim and there’d have to be caveats to it. But if you’re not contributing to the system that pays for a lot of the things, then I don’t think – it’s like a citizen, versus just somebody that lives in the community. There’s a difference between the two.
Blaine Holt: Oh, you want the Roman way!
Eric Boardman: Well, I mean, potentially, but I absolutely think you should…
Blaine Holt: It’s the arc we’re on, anyway.
Eric Boardman: Yeah, but you should contribute to that system, so it’s not so self-serving and beneficial and that you’d actually seek out that ability, that honor to take part in that.
Blaine Holt: Here’s where I think most of the apathy sits. We’re going to wrap this up?
Dave Faller: No! I’m wondering if he’s writing a poem over there.
Seth Horst: I’m taking notes.
Dave Faller: Listen, Dave, I sent you a poem.
Seth Horst: I’m not writing a poem. Stop it. I’m not writing a poem.
Dave Faller: I thought you were writing a poem.
Seth Horst: I’m taking notes for the intro later, sorry.
Blaine Holt: Apathy sits at election integrity. If we think our elections are cooked and we’ve got machines that don’t vote for who we’re voting for, then we’re powerless. If you can’t vote your way out of the problems that you have, well…
Eric Boardman: Then, what do you have?
Blaine Holt: Then, we’re on our way to the Bad Place.
Eric Boardman: Well, Venezuela.
Blaine Holt: Well, what we would say in this country is, “The unpleasantness.” Oh, there’s a book that I would recommend. Another Idaho Boy wrote it. He’s a Special Forces guy. Down in Boise. His name is Clay Martin. Brilliant writer.
First off, he’s got an urban combat survival book out, that I think everybody should have on their shelf. But Clay wrote a book, and maybe we can get it into the links of the show. He wrote a book I just finished called ‘The Wrath of the Wendigo’. It’s a fiction book, but it’s projecting where we are in the United States right now, 10 years forward.
And it’s about, well, we didn’t fix it. America balkanized. We got to the Bad Place. And then, you’ll recognize all of the geography in it, because Idaho is the Redoubt. Idaho is where these Cascadian people are and how they’ve changed their lives and their culture, over not being Americans, anymore. And then, it takes this to its logical place, because the bad people, the Globalists, they were never really dealt with. And they’re the ones who won. And then, this is where the final act comes in.
But I found it to be a tremendous book to read, to go out there in the future and then look back.
Eric Boardman: Look at consequences.
Blaine Holt: Yeah, and look at consequences and then go, “OK, so we got to take this stuff seriously because this doesn’t go to a place I want to live.”
Eric Boardman: That sounds a lot like, I read a book by William Forreston called ‘One Second After’. And it was based in fiction, but there was a lot of truth that came out, like how close we were to some funky stuff.
Blaine Holt: So this is all about what’s happening in the headlines right now. You’ll see all the stories and you’ll go, “Oh, yeah, OK, this is where it was.
Eric Boardman: Cool, I’ll definitely check that out.
Dave Faller: So, to bring this full circle, right, to bring this full circle, now that Maduro is in US custody and he is going to be tried for narco-terrorism and a bunch of other things, what do you think we should expect next? What’s the next big headline?
Blaine Holt: The next big headline, I think, you’re going to see one or two headlines: You’re going to see another push in Venezuela, because they’re not playing ball. Or if they are playing ball, it’ll calm, a little bit and Cuba will do the freak-out. Those will be that possibility of our next headlines. OK.
The other one is 10 C-17s just showed up in Fairford, RAF Fairford, with the hot package on board, meaning all the Special Kids that I told you fly over here and do these exercises.
Dave Faller: Fairfield?
Blaine Holt: Fairford. Fairford. RAF base in the UK.
Dave Faller: Just checking. OK, cool.
Blaine Holt: They’re staging. And so I think, you know, it’s just speculation on my part, but I think that, as this revolution in Iran gets going – and we can call it a revolution now, not just protests – we may be putting a little thumb on the scale there.
Seth Horst: Wait, wait, wait. What am I missing in Iran? Is something going down recently? I’m out of the loop. I’m out of the loop.
Blaine Holt: They’re into day 10 of the people rising up. They now have over 50 cities that are basically on fire, including Tehran.
And as I shared with you guys, the mullahs have actually already scoped-out three different exile locations where they would go to if this bad thing happened to them. But the thing that I would say is, just like the case of Venezuela, we have to keep our head on a swivel on every main street in America, including here in Coeur d’Alene.
Why? Because they have, we’ve had four years of open borders and we’ve got terror groups all over the place. And so, do they throw a Hail Mary pass? I don’t know, but I think the next headlines you’re going to see relate to Iran.
Dave Faller: So, sleeper cells, we need to be concerned with and then, Venezuela or Iran are going to be the next headline.
Blaine Holt: I could be wrong, but I think that’s what it is.
Seth Horst: I honestly feel like places like Coeur d’Alene are even more of a target. Even though we don’t have a dense urban population, it’s like a beacon of freedom.
Blaine Holt: We are.
Seth Horst: You know what I mean? And if you can hit that –
Blaine Holt: Do you know what I find around the country? People think we’re so much freer here in Coeur d’Alene than we really are. I mean, we’re here, locally. We know our Mom and Pop issues. We know our Boss Hog stuff, here that goes on.
But really we are, Coeur d’Alene is absolutely, as I travel around the country, is like, “Oh, you’re in Coeur d’Alene. Oh, you guys. You guys have it all. You guys have it all. I mean, wow, Coeur d’Alene!”
And I love that we have that reputation. I think “Gundalane” adds a little bit to that mystique and lore. But then, what I would say is, as folks who get to live here in this beautiful county, we need to make good on that. We need to make sure that we play a part in that. We have to participate.
Seth Horst: We’re like the Sparta of the Roman Empire.
Blaine Holt: I am Sparta!
Dave Faller: After our previous conversation, don’t, I don’t want to go there. No, you are not cute!
Eric Boardman: Well, we’re definitely interested in that. And I absolutely think that if you’re coming out of the military, you’ll appreciate this: Preventative maintenance is always better than corrective maintenance.
Blaine Holt: Oh, there’s no question.
Eric Boardman: So, we’ve got a couple meetings set up this week for what we’re calling “Idaho Court Watch”, which is going to be a judicial watch, so that people can be educated, when they go vote for a judge. I think the surest way for a community to take a downturn is when you’ve got judges in power.
Blaine Holt: Damn straight.
Eric Boardman: That, “Generals didn’t fly for too long,” is the way I’d put it. Judges aren’t out there on the street.
Seth Horst: They should be doing ride-alongs.
Eric Boardman: Well, they should just at least be out there. It’s the same as being in a political position or probably, at some point, if it’s like a career general for the Pentagon, you lose touch.
Blaine Holt: In addition to ride-alongs, what I would like to see them do is go on [CPS] visits. I’d like to see them go, or whatever we call it here, Child Protective Services or whatever.
I would like to see them go on well checks. I want to see them do that. I want them to look into the damage that gets created from the bench, because they just went, “Oh, this is what we’ll do.”
Seth Horst: Yeah, go into a crack house, see how these kids are living. Yeah. Just smell it.
Eric Boardman: Blaine, do you want to hear something that’ll piss you off?
Blaine Holt: There’s a lot of things that’ll piss me off.
Eric Boardman: Oh, yeah. It’ll piss you off.
Blaine Holt: It won’t be hard.
Eric Boardman: We have a judge out here on child pornography cases or child molestation cases. They’re required to view the evidence before sentencing. We have a judge that won’t. He will not review what prosecutors and cops have had to look at and what victims have had to endure.
Blaine Holt: That’s called Dereliction of Duty. I mean, go to the big case. The big case is the laptop of Anthony Weiner. Was it 12 officers got to see it, nine took their lives?
Seth Horst: Strange.
Eric Boardman: Damn. I did not know that.
Seth Horst: I’ve heard that.
Blaine Holt: I have heard, through friends of mine who have directly been in contact with this, they haven’t seen the laptop, but they’re like, “Blaine, it’s so horrific.” They said you would not question why somebody took their life after what they saw in that thing.
Eric Boardman: Damn. Crazy.
Blaine Holt: There is Evil in this world. There’s perps and then there’s Evil.
Eric Boardman: Well, it’s easy to get frustrated, because we’re talking about big stuff and it’s so easy to get frustrated and feel like you can’t do anything and feel like there’s nothing – like, what’s your first step? Our first step is to make our community the best that we can possibly make it.
Blaine Holt: As resilient and cling to our values and not yield on those values. And when we see unfairness or injustice, we need to take our three minutes down at that microphone at the City Council or the County Commission.
Eric Boardman: Agreed.
Seth Horst: You got to do it.We talk about being the example. It’s kind of cliché to say that, but being the example for other communities, because we can’t affect change at the federal level, but we can affect change, here. We’ve seen it. We can do it. And then be that example for other communities. Let it spread.
Blaine Holt: Yeah, and you can’t be in this complacency box that all the bad stuff happens in D.C. It doesn’t happen at local and state levels. That’s crap. It does. That’s absolute crap. There are billions of dollars poured into this state to do very bad things. Right.
Eric Boardman: Yeah, stay on it. And hopefully that permeates down south and gets to Boise and then all of a sudden you’ve got a little bit more purchase.
Blaine Holt: You know, they’re very strange down there.
Eric Boardman: A little bit. They’re a lot different. This is crazy.
Seth Horst: That was cool. That was fantastic, sir. Thank you. We are pushing.
Blaine Holt: Always, my pleasure.
Eric Boardman: Good to meet you, finally! This was a good time.
Dave Faller: This is cool. Honestly, we appreciate it. This is such a huge thing to us, because this community, we talk about it all the time. Real estate is not something that we love to do, but it’s how we pay our bills. But this is our opportunity to actually have a lot of fun, get connected with people in the community, and having you on here is such a cool time.
Blaine Holt: It’s always a good time for me.
Dave Faller: We appreciate you more than you know, Blaine. Honestly.
Eric Boardman: Well, the people that listen to us thirst for knowledge, right? And you provide a lot that we just, we simply cannot, just from a different perspective. So I got a lot. I learned a lot today.
Seth Horst: Yeah, we can only talk about submarines so much, so it’s nice to have you out here and talk about it.
Blaine Holt: Well, I’m grateful. I’m grateful.
Blaine Holt: Pick it up tomorrow. Tomorrow I’ll be out with Jonathan Gilliam on Dangerous Intellectuals. And then, what I’m going to try to do is I’m going to start moving into, we’ve got a lot of underground scientists in our region, here. They’re doing some pretty kick-ass things with quantum physics and frequencies and things that are just, the things that you would be very interested in.
And so I’m going to start getting them on and having good discussions with them about what the Art of the Possible is. But there’s literally scientists in our area who won’t pop up with what they are and try to monetize what they have, because they’re worried they’ll take a bullet to the head.
Eric Boardman: Damn.
Seth Horst: Wow.
Blaine Holt: And that’s the level and the caliber of stuff that they’re working on.
Eric Boardman: Wow. It opened my eyes when I watched an Elon interview, after he’d been with DOGE and he was out doing what he was doing and he said, at some point I can’t keep doing this.
Blaine Holt: “They’re just going to kill me.”
Eric Boardman: That’s – exactly – and that’s him who was fearless going in. It was just a very real recognition on his part.
Blaine Holt: I went into a building here, an old shanty building on the Washington side, and it was one of the most state-of-the-art labs that you could find in this field. And I looked over and I saw one of the world’s leading physicists. I knew him from the Future Study that I’d done. I was like, “What’s he doing here? And it was like, whoa.
I felt like I was in the book of ‘Atlas Shrugged’. I was like, “Oh, I’m in Gault’s Gulch! Look at all these people. They’re doing really cool things. That’s the type of folks we’re going to bring in, as well.
Eric Boardman: Very cool. I’m excited to get into that one and obviously, I think a lot of the folks that endure us will get a lot out of that.
Seth Horst: Absolutely, yeah.
Dave Faller: Dangerous Intellectuals, if you’re following this, follow their podcast, as well. We appreciate you playing.
Eric Boardman: Yeah, thanks for the insight, man. Thanks.
Seth Horst: Really appreciate it. Thank you, brother. We know you’ll be back.
Blaine Holt: Absolutely.
Dave Faller: I think we’re going to have to make this more regular.
Seth Horst: We’ll supply the whiskey, sir.
Blaine Holt: That’s a fair deal.
Dave Faller: Yeah, perfect. Alright.
Blaine Holt: Thanks, guys.
Seth Horst: Later.
Eric Boardman: Cheers.
