George Friedman
speaker
177 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Apr 2025
last heard Apr 2025
George Friedman’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsNo recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.
Appearances
And it was always odd that of the five eyes, the five intelligencies share everything, which is a very important entity. It's Britain, it's the United States, it's Canada, I guess they're still playing. It's Australia, it's New Zealand. It might be called the English-speaking world, but we wouldn't call it that. Yes.
Sometimes they laterally trust each other at that level more than they trust the upstairs and downstairs. So it's a very strange thing.
Well, the problem is the Department of Education was supposed to serve education. I don't know what it serves. Health and Human Services. The problem is not a CIA problem. The problem is that the federal government grew vast during World War II to manage it if needed to, grew vaster still by trying to micromanage America, And they're very good people in the government. It's not to question that.
And they did the same thing with CIA. It started as a very small organization called the OSS with a bunch of guys from Harvard and Yale swimming around. And it grew into a massive entity. And in that massive entity,
information is fragmented the key to since i was an analyst i'll say the key to the cia's analysis collection is nice but it's worth nothing until it's analyzed right what is it if the all the analysts can't see the information so for example i spotted the russians speaking to gutter and the americans speaking together well it was in your time so what the hell But can someone recognize it?
Well, when you're under such constraints of what you can see and what you can think and so on, you're just another federal agency. So it's not something unique. It's not a government. It couldn't govern anything. It doesn't.
it isn't even a conspiracy you couldn't organize one the problem the cia is the same thing as the problem with the other agencies and it's very easy to say you know if you want to say that this idiotic act was clearly planned by someone it had to be the cia now they're idiotic things planned by the cia also wonderful accomplishments
But conspiracy is a very hard thing to keep quiet, especially if you need a lot of people. So it's not a government, it's a federal bureaucracy, and it needs reforming. And reforming the CIA is going to be a very complicated thing because you have to maintain security. And firing a whole bunch of people, doing the Elon Musk routine, holy smoke. Can you imagine all the...
It's a very difficult thing to do. because your own population takes pride in being Roman. And our population doesn't take pride in being the dominant power in the world. There's something unique and wonderful, I'll say that, about the United States. I say that as an immigrant, you know, having known the other
We are the only nation that didn't take absolute pride in making war in Iraq and trying to make it an American colony. We're fighting the Russians. We are proud of our country and our country is large enough to hold our contentment. We're a continent. We're a vast continent in which we can live in peace and happiness.
And the World War I we didn't want to be in because we didn't want to be involved. And we didn't want to be in World War II.
And we really didn't want to be in the Cold War.
The fact is that I served in Germany and I didn't like it. I liked the Netherlands. That was fun. But Germany, no. But we stood at the Fulda Gap, we said. Well, I certainly didn't want to stand at the Fulda Gap. I didn't really care about the Germans much myself. I was happy to come home. So I think in the United States, the wish has always been that the Cold War be over.
That we could stop worrying about Belgium or the Congo. For God's sakes, Vietnam. Who cares? So I think unlike... We're not an empire. We're a republic. And an empire... Britain was an empire. It was a monarchy. And it's governed that way. Yes. But we take no pride. We took pride in winning World War II. Sure. But we took no pride in the Korean War. We took no pride in the Vietnam War.
The best we could say is we had to do it. and having all my children serving in the military, I can also say that my son was in the Air Force and so on and so forth, it was not a pleasant thing. So where in Britain being, you know, a general in the army who was a matter of pride or serving his private was, here it was a duty, but we'd much rather come home.
And so I don't think we'll have that problem. We have the ocean protecting us, the Atlantic and the Pacific. We have Canada. We should be nice to Canada. You know, it's a nice place. We have Mexico to the south. All right. We're a fortress. We don't need the rest of the world. Rome had to conquer the rest of the world. The Byzantine Empire had to conquer as much as it could.
We don't have to conquer anything. I don't think we'll have any trouble withdrawing our troops from the miserable third world countries we deployed them in. So if we had to, I think we're one of the few empires that really didn't want to be one. We did okay. But if my kids come home and they're well and they're healthy and they get decent careers, I'll be happy.
Showing 161–177 of 177 · page 9 of 9
← Previous