Ex-CIA Officer: Scott Bessent Just Gave Putin One Hell of a Talking Point (w/ Marc Polymeropoulos)

Hey, everyone, it's me, Sam Stein, managing editor at the book and I'm jumping Mark Palmer upless, who is now. It's official. I'm in the cat's out of the bag, Mark. And I fought it. I fought it. I said, "I don't want this guy in the book, University of Mark." And Michael Weiss are joining our little family, and they have a new show. It's called "The Report in the Spy." Awesome new podcast. It's starting in the fall. We announced it today. Why don't you, like, let me see the floor for like a minute and you can kind of riff about what you're going to try to do with this show. Why people should subscribe and tune in. So, I mean, it's a show about the intersection of espionage and journalism, which actually is really similar because what do you do? You go around the world to report on topics. You have sources and you get really involved in this subject matter, you know, whether you cover the war in Syria or in Afghanistan or Iraq, people become passionate about it. And so it's, you know, both a journalist and a CIA case officer are practitioners. You know, we're not sitting in DC. We're not aren't sure quarterbacks. We're actually living the life. And so, Michael Weiss is a dear friend of mine. You know, we spent, you know, years in our friendship just shooting the shit, talking, and all of a sudden we're like, "Wait a second, like let's do a podcast on this." And when we approached you all, it was a really kind of neat, you know, meld of these ideas. But, you know, we have fun together. We laugh. We have each other relentlessly, you know, he's a, he's a, he's a New Yorker. I'm originally from New Jersey, although I'm a wild red sax fan, as you know, we'll talk about my love of heavy metal music and just make fun of Michael's hair all the time. And so it's, it's, it's going to be awesome. But I think people are going to love it because it's actually, they see us having fun. And, and we're also pretty smart on these subjects. So. Well, I wouldn't go that far. But yeah, you're having fun. No, and I would, I would like to think that reporters and spies are basically the same thing. But I'm not cool. Definitely not as cool as you. Spycraft is much harder and much more interesting than being a reporter. Just going to love. All right. All right. So let's talk about what's going on in the world. So the idea here is, and I'm sitting in for Michael because Michael's actually going to be doing Tim's pod. So I'll do my best to impression of him. But I kind of want to, I don't know shit like he does. And I want you to explain what's happening because basically right now, we have this G20 summit in Asheville, North Carolina. And the big sort of macro story, there's two. One is that Russia has been essentially like, let back into the club and, and, and, and Trump is totally fine with it. And it's very Trumpian that he's fine with us. And we can spend an hour going through the kind of psychology of why Trump just continuously causes up to, boom, we're not going to do that. The other one is this other story that's kind of roiling Europe, which is that Russia was behind this hybrid attack in August, in Germany. And can you just sort of unpack a little bit for people who have not been following that second story? What actually happened here? So a massive story because it, it almost was a mass casualty event. The Russian intelligence services and clearly the Germans have uncovered this now, probably with our help. But they tried to destroy an aircraft with a drone with explosive latent drone. And if only not for the heroic actions of a maintenance worker on the ground in the airport leapsick who spotted this, there could have been a tremendous loss of life. And then there were two other subsequent attacks or attempted attacks using explosive laden drones. And it was pretty obvious to all of us that this was going to be, you know, the Russians behind it. I mean, there's a, there's a long history of Russian attacks on this and we could, I could give you a list, friends of mine from my old world, you know, who are retired now have actually been cataloging this because the Russians have been doing, you know, evil shit all over the place in Europe. But this one was pretty brazen. And I think the Germans, again, with our help have uncovered that it was the Russian security services. And so what was expected and what did occur is that the German government actually said the Russians did it. So that's a good thing. But the problem that I think people have to understand is, you know, there has never been really sanctioned against the Russians for these things that we expected the Germans to do more. And all they said was, well, we're going to close the Russian consulate and bond. And we're going to close this cultural center in Berlin's bullshit. And, and, and you know what they didn't do? They didn't say we're going to give these tourist cruise missiles, which are really effective to the Ukrainians. And my contention has been all along that the only way to really deal with the threat of Russia is to help Ukrainians kill more Russians. People might be horrified, but I say it openly, that's what Russia will understand. And so now they've kind of gotten away once again with what was a terrorist attack, attempted terrorist attack in Europe. Maybe I'm, maybe I'm like naive and sort of missing the point, but this strikes me as insane, right? Like this is an attack on a NATO ally had it gone through and had there been casualties. Let's just paint the hypothetical had it gone through had there been casualties. What would have that meant? It would have meant Russia, and again, let's, let's, let's, when we talk about hybrid warfare, you use that term. And I think, and I have used it as well. I think we should stop using that. It's open warfare now. Hybrid warfare is when it's kind of a, it's, it's a, it's a step underneath kind of open kinetic exchanges, except this was a terrorist attack. This is not hybrid warfare. This is open warfare. And so if there had been five, 10, 15, 20 hundreds of Germans killed, I think there would have been a lot more political pressure on the government of Chancellor Merz to, to respond and other allies. And so, you know, I have a lot of contacts within the German National Service. I mean, that's a direct NATO attack, right? It is. That's a direct NATO attack. As I was talking to my contacts, this morning, who are German, and they're a little bit dismayed at the lack of the, the kind of the strong German response, they said very clearly, it's going to take people dying to have this become a more serious matter. Now why is that? Well, there's German elections. There's some domestic politics. German elections are coming up. The German right is ascending and within the coalition of the German government, there's some problems because the defense ministry is held by an individual who doesn't want to do this, does not want to hold Russian responsible. But it's, but Sam, you'll understand when I say this. This is going to sound familiar because there's a fear of what we call escalation with Russia, that somehow Russia, if we do something back, that Russia is going to what nuke Ukraine or something ridiculous. This paralyzed the Biden administration, to be honest, has certainly done the same, to some extent, for the Trump administration, but has absolutely, it's been endemic in Europe and Germany had a chance to get things right. And they missed it. And by not responding forcefully, it only encourages Russia to do more. And a really important point for the listeners here is a lot of people who travel around Europe who are what? American. There's certainly Americans could get caught up in this Russian kind of terrorist activity. And I think back to my time, a foreign discovery. I would Russia make this provocation though. Like why would Russia go into Germany and do this when they have so much else going on? I mean, they're obviously bogged down incredibly in Ukraine. It has gone, not gone according to plan. But what's the point here? So the Russian intelligence services, you know, as much as, you know, I've battled them throughout my career, they're not dumb. And they understand this is a perfect location to do this because they understand it's going to be a very divisive issue inside of Germany. So in some ways, they're testing, they're provoking, they're provoking, but the controversy in Germany right now is exactly what the Russians want. And so, you know, at the end of the day, they're very good. They've done it to us. Like the 2016 election interference, all the things they did, yeah, but there's a difference man. There's elections killing people. Right. Yeah. Killing people is like, and I guess I quibble with that idea. Like if, I don't know German politics. So again, I'm naive here, but like if you launch a terrorist attack and you kill a dozen Germans, like, I don't know, is that going to divide the German populace? Or is it going to unite them around saying, hey, fuck you, Boon. Well, you know, they're testing that was so far. Germany has been so weak in their response. They probably think they can get away with it. Now, you're right in the sense of they haven't crossed that threshold. One of these times, one of these attacks is going to kill a lot of people. Now, there have been small numbers of people they've gone after in Europe, munitions factories, lots of things that are dedicated to helping the Ukraine war effort. But Putin knows how to test and poke and prod and look, you know, there was one instance back in 2018 in the deserts of Syria in a place called Derazure, Syria is a place I served. I know it very well, in which the Wagner group, which is the Russian paramilitary forces attacked an element of the US delta force, that's the US Army's premier special operations unit. And General Mattis at the time ordered that delta basically annihilate, kill all the Russian paramilitaries and guess what happened in response, nothing. The Russians back down because the only thing you do with the bully, you got to punch them in their face and Europe hasn't learned that, Germany hasn't learned it, very dismaying. And of course, the Trump administration is not helping at all. This message is brought to you by Tempo Meals. Now, during the week, my schedule is pretty non-stop. And when I'm busy eating healthy, it's usually the first thing that slips and it slips often. That's why I've been loving Tempo. 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That's TempoMeals.com/BowarkTakes for 60% off your first box. jambamails.com/bullworktakes rules and restrictions may apply. But wait a second, on the Trump administration, there's so much love layers to unpack because you said it's very likely almost assured that the Germans uncovered this with the help of the US and tell, right? At the same time, we had that kind of mysterious visit John Radcliffe made to Moscow. And the reporting out of it was among the things that he pressed Putin on was to not attack NATO again, which again, again, well, now we know it's like, okay, you did that, don't do that again, but we assume that that might be it. And yet at the same time, Russia's representative obviously is in Asheville at the G20, which is, people understand this is kind of crazy, it's not clear at all what Russia gave up to get this type of incredible PR victory about being welcome back into the little community like this. But here they are. And Trump says, we, this is a Trump quote, we like getting along with everybody. One of the reasons that I'm so successful that I get along with everybody, except our allies. So what is, except our allies, by the way, except except the Ukrainians occasionally went to the inskis in the oval. So what is like the, again, it's so many layers, but what, how would you even describe what the U.S. Russia relation is, is it just, maybe it's on different courses, right? There's different tracks where different people are doing different things. So Sam, you nailed it. And it's because we don't have a foreign policy process, you know, ordinarily what happens in the U.S. government is you have the National Security Advisor, he will chair the National Security Council where there are offices that have responsibility over different regions. Those offices then will coordinate an overall U.S. policy objective with all the different agencies with CIA, with DOD, with State Department Department of Treasury commerce. And so there's a unified policy with a certain objective. This administration doesn't do that. You know, I think they sit around the oval and they write on a napkin what they want to do. And of course, there's whiplash. So you do have different parts of the government acting in different ways. I mean, the CIA, and this has been written about, you know, the New York Times has done some tremendous reporting on this, has been really integral in providing targeting assistance to the Ukrainians to kill Russians. Yet, you also have Trump then sending off, you know, the two worst envoys in the history of U.S. diplomacy, Jared Kushner and Steve Whitkopf, to botch everything having to do with peace talks and in essence, pressure the Ukrainians to make concessions. And so, and then you have Bessent at the G-twit. None of this makes sense. So, there is a overall kind of policy dysfunction, but this is across the board and other arenas as well. And so what this does is this confuses everybody. It confuses our allies. It confuses our adversaries. And it's because Trump just does things on a whim, and it's just a government that doesn't function properly. But the fact is CIA. My old, my old organization is helping the Ukrainians kill Russians while we are co-zying up at the G-twenty to the Russian, you know, you know, economic team, it just doesn't make any sense. Okay. But if you were like, let's, I'm kind of curious about this because if you were in the field right now and you work in on the Russia file, I mean, surely this complicates things, right? Because one day you go in with some directives and then wait a second. You know, another agency is doing it the exact opposite way. So like, can you get a little granular here like how would this, how would you go about your business in this climate? So, and this is, this is why my old job is a case officer, which was one of the greatest jobs I ever have. You know, when I was promoted to be a manager, I hated my life. But when I was a street case officer, that meant I was running agios. I mean, I was, you know, so that's, that's a, that's a Russian who betrayed. I would argue, but that didn't betray their country, betrayed their government to spy for the United States based on several factors. But often it is ideology, meaning that we're the good guys. America, and you know, I believed in this stuff is the bright shining city on the hill. That's the old JFK quote, and it's that we believe in political and economic liberalism, you know, religious freedoms. And so, so agents will spy for us because of that. So what do I do for an operational meeting on the streets of Moscow or somewhere with a Russian who's saying, hey, first of all, your president looks a little cozy with Putin. And you're all over the place in your policy like, and by the way, like, I don't trust anything. You know, you told me you're going to keep me safe and secure. And so the role of a case officer is really hard because the ideal part of this is that, hey, you're doing this for the right reasons and you're helping influence U.S. policy. All that, that's the stick I used all the time, it was true, but, but now I don't know how you do that. It's way harder now, and, and how about, even, how about as a case officer, too? What if I was there in a different capacity working with a friendly government with a government in Europe, working against the Russians, who all of a sudden is like, hey, what are you guys doing? You know, and so this dysfunction makes our mile jobs a case officer just incredibly difficult. I don't know how my friends in the field are doing this. It's going to be a lot of handholding with our agents. Do you think that the Germans muted response may have been less about their domestic politics and more about us pressing them to not escalate? So there is that question in that how far should Germany go forward leaning on this if they know the U.S. isn't going to back them? So we talk about invoking kind of the principles of NATO, collective defense treaties, but if the United States is not going to ever come to NATO's defense, maybe the German thinking is like, what's the, what, you know, why bother? Now, I heard something today, and this is kind of a piece of breaking news that I think is going to be really interesting in that, that, and this is my German context, said, the German response might have been muted today because there's more coming. And so there's so much more damning evidence that they might put forward in which they will have to rally the populace, and the Germans might be strong in this. But in some ways, I'm not sure if that's going to be the case, but Russia is going to keep going. So I guess we're going to wait for a mass casualty event. I mean, you really have to wait for people to die part of it. Yeah. Well, I'll just note that the right up of the G20 yesterday, yesterday being, sorry, two days ago, being Monday, we're recording on Wednesday. German Finance Minister Lars Klingbiel, I think I'm probably mispronouncing that, told reporters that he made clear that he would not pose for a group photo with the Russian finance minister, noting that such a photo has not taken place in recent years. Now that's a strong review. Oh, you got him. Oh, it's tough. Oh, Lars. Let's go. Come on, Lars. I mean, come on. Well, we could do this. You could give. Turn it down, Lars. You could give a tourist missile. That's a, that's a cruise missile fired from a German aircraft. No, no, Mark, Mark, not, not posing for the photo is strong enough, okay? That's not too crazy here. I want to, I want to play Scott Besson, who is at the, who was, it was interviewed today, this morning on Wednesday. I think he is in Asheville, G20, I might be mistaken about that. But this is what we're dealing with, because some people are like, well, they're posing up to, Trump's of course, posing up to Putin and their misdirection. But it's not just Trump. It's like that Scott Besson this morning is talking about the global energy crisis. And it's very clear what's causing it. The war on Iran is causing this current crisis. Scott, not, not according to Scott Besson, because Scott Besson has to make sure that Donald Trump is not mad at him. So who does he scapegoat? He scapegoats. He scapegoats the Ukrainians. Not even the Russians for starting the war on Ukraine. It's the Ukrainians for retaliating by hitting Russian oil depots or whatever. Let's place Scott Besson and then after that, Mark, I'll get your reaction. We are going through an energy shock right now due to both the war in Ukraine because Ukraine has decided that they want to blow up Russian energy assets and refine products. So that is creating upward price pressure on global basis and then the conflict in Iran. And the conflict in Iran will end and prices will come down. All right. I should take it back. He did mention Iran. Second. Not first. Okay. Wait a second. The first time when he's like, with the war, when he started saying the war in, I was like, Iran, right? No. No. Ukraine. So it's interesting. Brian Kilmead, who is interviewing him, actually is a huge supporter of the Ukrainian effort. And Kilmead did the same thing I did right there. If you looked at it, he went like this. So because where did that come from? But of course, where did that come from? I mean, you know, Besson, Besson, Besson the one who yesterday also talked about the malcontents or something. I mean, you know, this, this is some of the worst PR anytime he speaks. It's quite extraordinary. I think this is also someone who has sort of respected before he took this job. But ultimately, you know, they're, they're, again, it's, they throw stuff onto the wall, blaming this and blaming that, blaming the Ukrainians. I mean, it's just utterly ludicrous. And, you know, I think the one thing with this issue of the Russians being at the G20 is, you almost want to just get past this, this summit, you know, and nothing bad happening. I mean, it's always, when you have these international forums, it's just, you know, can we actually avoid some kind of catastrophe here? And so. I usually try to think you try to get some sort of concrete, you know, agreement or some, you know, global political advancement out of these summits. But this is the, this just seems like they're meaning for this sake of meeting. I mean, I don't really understand it. And I don't know why we did this. It just doesn't make any sense. And, you know, the, the problem though is that, you know, the outrage that we always feel, and, you know, everyone can comment on X like I do, like you do, like this is ridiculous, as it's disgusting. What are we doing? We said that about 400 different things. And so, you know, what else is, you know, in Trump will say something outrageous, you know, once again, but the idea of just, you know, that he wants to get along with everybody, certainly not getting along with his European allies. And so he seems to cozy up to our adversaries much more. All right. There's one other story I want to talk about, and then I'll let you go. In our, it deals with oil, it deals with allies, it deals with our credibility on the globe, and it's kind of like a bit of a shocker, as you read more about it, it's opaque and vague, and it feels shady. But what I'm talking about is this deal that we have struck. essentially to have a, I guess, a stake, a state stake in this Venezuelan oil company called North American Blue Energy Partners. So this happened over the weekend. It was announced I think late on Friday. In the countries of the deal, and I'm going to do my best, it's very vague. Again, like I said, it's opaque. I'm going to talk about the bullet points that Axios put together about this. So under this deal, Venezuela will receive about 16% to 40% of production, that depends on the field. And it will also get income taxes and whatever tax revenues come from this increased oil production in these fields. The U.S. will put in no money, but it will get a 35% equity stake and get 20% of the after tax oil at production costs. So about $30 a barrel. All right. So basically, we have contracted out through this company, North American Blue Energy Partners, oil production. And we're giving this guy Alejandro Bentacort Lopez, who runs that company, you know, the protection of the U.S. military, the guarantee that we will be there for him to help stand up this oil production in exchange for us basically getting 35% equity or $30 a barrel. And Bentacort is kind of a shady character. I mean, I'm, again, I'm reading from different outlets, but Al Jazeera says in 2021, the organized crime and corruption reporting project said Bentacort was involved in corruption and money laundering networks linked to the Venezuelan state. Over the past decades, he has faced money laundering investigations in the U.S., Spain, and Switzerland. He has been arrested twice in the UK following extradition requests from Switzerland and Spain overledged money laundering. So this seems like good old-fashioned colonialism to me. Imperialism is what I was going to say. Imperialism. Yeah. Oh, imperialism. Yeah, I think that's a better term. Imperialism. How does this, how does this work and is this safe? I don't feel like it's safe. I mean, look, we can all kind of try to pretend to be oil analysts now. I mean, I did the same thing. I'm trying, I'm trying to unscrew what this whole thing is, but it does smell. Something's not right here because essentially you have the same players from the Maduro regime who are involved. Delce Rodriguez, who's now the head of the country and this guy, Bentacort, who was completely corrupt before, part of that kind of oligarch class in Venezuela, but seems to have somehow convinced Marco Rubio and others that this is the way forward. And I look at this actually in two ways. One is you kind of wonder what Marco Rubio is doing here, because he was, I remember, I would testify in front of him when he was on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. He was the vice chair. He's very smart in foreign policy and he believed in human rights. He believed in economic and political freedoms, and especially in the Western Hemisphere. And now he's cutting these deal. Apparently he didn't believe. Apparently he didn't believe in that. Well, now it look, this is classic imperialism. It's weird. I mean, the idea of the Republicans are screaming about socialism and the Mamdani's the world, yet we are actually kind of running a command economy of our own is bizarre. But when it comes down to is Venezuela fine. But I think all eyes, and I mean this seriously, you know, have to be looking at the real big issue, which is Cuba here. And my friends and I have these really eclectic bunch of friends from my old life in South Florida. This is the Cuban exile expat community and they're looking at Venezuela and they're like, don't pull this shit on Cuba because you have to have human rights. You have to have political and economic freedom and whatever the hell is going on there is not. And one of the really interesting things, and I think you all have covered it too, is you saw some of the Cuban American representatives down in South Florida who originally looked at the Cuba, literally looked at this Venezuela deal and said, hey, what's going on here? They got some memo from the White House and now they're kind of praising it. But there's a lot of uncertainty in terms of those who care about the Western hemisphere like, what are we doing in Venezuela? This really smells. And let me go back to the notion I said before, America the bright shining city on the hill. I can sit here and it's been half an hour and tell you how our efforts in Western hemisphere, if done right, will bring political freedoms to Venezuela and Cuba, but we're not doing them right. And so now this just looks like regular old, imperialism. And so come on, what are we doing here? So I need to make a correction. There are other outlets that say the expected U.S. holdings will be 55 percent of the 17 oil fields, not 35 percent equity sticks. So it's even more than that. But I want to explore this idea, which is the risks involved. So I don't really understand from this deal exactly how much resources we're going to have to put on the ground in Venezuela. And maybe there are none, or maybe we just contract it out. But, you know, it's a fragile government, right? Like this is not, you know, this is not, you know, a steady, bedrock government. It was a socialist government, I'm a droid. It remains so now, I suppose they haven't had elections that we would qualify as free. And so, but like, you know, what kind of security risks are we looking at here? If you do enhance the U.S. footprint in order to get to these oil fields, in order to give this guy bento court the implied military protection that he needs in order to do these operations. Well, again, and kind of looking at this from kind of the macro level that what needs to happen is there has to be some type of security for U.S. companies to invest. No one's going to pour money billions in there with kind of this with a chaotic situation. And so, so in the one hand, perhaps this is all kind of a lot of nothing. This never happens because what companies are going to rush in there. But here's the other point. If, as well, let's say if there's a possibility, perhaps a strong one that a Democrat wins the White House in two years, all this shit's going away. There's no way they're going for this stuff because what we care about, we should care about the Republicans used to care about is human rights and political and economic freedoms in the Western hemisphere. In fact, that's something that really was the bedrock of the Republican party for a long time. So this idea of, you know, the U.S. being some kind of guarantor, you know, it's this is cooked up from strange, a strange office in the Pentagon. It's really weird. Nobody really understands it. But what is dismaying on this is that the, you know, the notion that we are going to try to change the situation on the ground for the betterment of the Venezuelan people. I actually still care about that stuff. Like, I, you know, I would love to see regime change in Cuba for the betterment of the Cuban people, for example. But we can't just do this imperialistic kind of land grab taught. I mean, Delci Rodriguez is a Cuban. There's a lot of people who think there was a Cuban agent. You know, the new head of Venezuela is actually a communist. Like, what are we doing? The Venezuelans are not any better. So, you know, to your point. No, no, to your point, it's democracy is not that's gone. I know. The first order of business here. There's a political story up right now about basically like what, what the hell is going on? We were supposed to get like the, there was a little bit of a fig leaf that when they went in and grabbed Maduro, well, we're going to transition towards a democratic rule. That clearly has not happened. Right. Now the opposition party in Venezuela is like, wait a second. What's actually happening here? Is Rodriguez just being put in this position? Essentially like a more applying? And by the way, Sam Trump doesn't give a shit about this. Like, you know, and I thought, I thought Rubia might, and that's the thing that's really weird and dismaying. And there's this art. Some Republican foreign policy types argue with me and say, no, this is a transition to eventual bullshit. This is just, you know, there's nothing is really changed in Venezuela. And so you better, and I'm telling you, you better not pull that shit in Cuba because the South Florida, you know, Cuban community ain't going to go for it. You know, it's funny because there's been other articles about how they're actually deporting some Cuban immigrants here to Africa. I don't really know if they're playing the long game strategically in the politics. To your point about democracy and not being at the forefront of any discussions, I, it's clearly not. And you might reference this, but the congressman who tweeted is Maria Elvira Salazar, who put up a tweet, initially he says, any oil deal with Venezuela's interim regime has an expiration date. The day President Trump leaves the White House, Venezuela's acting dictators just buying time. The regime has stolen American investments before and we'll go, we'll do it again the moment it can. Elastan deal can only be made with a democratically elected government that respects the rule of law. Text private property and is backed by strong democratic institutions, no democracy, no lasting deal period. Seems totally sensible to me. She then erased that and put up this treat. The US Venezuel oil deal is a great deal for you. That's amazing. The Venezuelan people for years trying to took advantage of Venezuela's weakness to buy its oil like deep discounts. Now America is stepping in an American investment influence off of Venezuela's path toward prosperity, stability, security. Delcy is the wrong person to make this deal with. We want, so she snuck a line in there. We want this deal to last 100 years. Only administration back by strong democratic institutions in the rule. She got a memo someone so many while it's called her something saying, uh, uh, uh, you're a guy. Marco, Marco, I'm, I'm, Marco called her. Marco, Marco's, Marco's keeping tabs. I, you know, the gig was up when, um, poor Maria Karina Machado, the Nobel Prize winner, uh, who had been struggling for the Venezuelan opposition, went into the White House and gave Trump her Nobel prize like literally was like, here you go. Thank you for being such a champion. And then they're, you know, after Maduro read and they're like, are you thinking about backing Machado to like, you know, maybe take over? They're like, no, yeah. I don't know. Sorry. This, this, this, uh, big things in my ear. It's the Nobel Prize. I can't hear you. That's like, no, it's embarrassing. I mean, so, you know, again, this is not, there's, this is a really bad look for the United States who had a history of kind of imperialist behavior in the Western hemisphere. We seem to be doing it again. What are we doing here? When you have kind kind of two countries Venezuelan Cuba who, you know, you would seem ripe. for just incredible political and economic change and we're not doing it. And there's something that really bothers me about this. - Yeah, I should. All right, man, well that was just a taste of what people are gonna get when they watch Bud. I'm like a poor substitute for Michael Wise, so it's gonna get much better than this. - You have much better hair than me. - Mark, your hair is better than Michael Wise. - He's good. He's got fine hair. It's just, you don't like how he's hair- - But he's doing a gel thing now. It's a little weird. He's slicking it back and it's all gross. Come on. - I'm not here to comment on Michael's appearances. He looks great to me. All right, Mark, Paul Meropoulos. Thank you, man. I appreciate I'm so excited to have you with the family. I think this is gonna be great. People should just check our YouTube page. It's gonna appear in due time, but in anticipation of it, hit subscribe to the YouTube page. You're gonna get your videos there. We're also gonna have it in all the feeds, Apple, Spotify, et cetera, et cetera. Just be on the lookout for it. And if you like this stuff, you could also get us on Substack. Subscribe to our Substack where all these things are posted anyway, support the mission, become a paying subscriber. We love you and appreciate for it. Mark, have a good one, man. I'll be in touch, okay? - Red Sox is gonna win the World Series. - I don't believe it, but I hope so. - There we go. - Thank you, Mark.