#1793 - Mike Baker

Mike Baker (0:04)

The Joe Rogan Experience.

Joe Rogan (0:12)

Mike Baker, are we fucked?

Mike Baker (0:15)

Mr. Rogan, we are fucked.

Joe Rogan (0:19)

This is not good.

Mike Baker (0:19)

How much fun is this? Every time we get together, there's some-

Joe Rogan (0:22)

It seems like-

Mike Baker (0:23)

Bullshit happening.

Joe Rogan (0:24)

Yeah, every time, the world is somewhat falling apart.

Mike Baker (0:28)

Yeah, yeah, well, it's good for business. I didn't mean that, actually. That's gonna sound wrong. No, no, that's what people expect me to say, I think.

Yeah, yeah, I think nobody really expected the potential for thermonuclear war right after two years of a pandemic. I don't think anybody actually saw that coming.

Joe Rogan (0:48)

Yeah, there was no break for the weary.

Mike Baker (0:50)

Yeah, exactly. Everybody comes out of it. I did have a thought, which was, I talked to my daughter the other day. She's just turned 28

And I thought after I hung up, she was talking about it. And she was kind of basically saying, what the fuck, right?

And so people that age, if you think about those, the folks in that age group, she was born, you know, she was old enough to understand 9-11, right? In a sense from a child's perspective. And then through the Iraq or the Iraq or Afghanistan, you know, bullshit, that whole time with the war on terrorism, a couple of recessions, global pandemic, now, you know, approaching Cold War 2.0, getting close to thermonuclear war, not that we are.

Joe Rogan (1:31)

And the disastrous pullout of Afghanistan.

Mike Baker (1:33)

And Afghanistan inflation possibly leading to recession.

Joe Rogan (1:38)

$7 a gallon gas in California.

Mike Baker (1:41)

People of that age, not able to save money for a house, they must just be thinking, what the fuck?

Where's our, you know, big build up? Where's our like the 50s or the 80s, you know?

Joe Rogan (1:52)

Well, it just seems so supremely incompetent. Everything seems like whoever the grownups are that are running the show have fucked up so many different things.

Mike Baker (2:02)

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, there's a lot. There's a lot to unpack there, isn't there? That statement.

Joe Rogan (2:08)

The Putin thing scares the shit out of me, though, because he's the, you know, when it comes to warlords, he's a legitimate warlord who is in charge of, I didn't know that they had more nukes than us. I mean, I guess it's kind of a moot point, right? Because everybody's got enough to kill everybody. How many times over?

Isn't it something crazy? Like 10 times over?

Mike Baker (2:36)

Yeah, they did the math and it was in double digits.

Joe Rogan (2:38)

It's not good.

Mike Baker (2:39)

It's not good.

But if you step back, everybody's thinking, okay, how did this fucked up situation happen? Well, it's been building, obviously, right? I mean, how much news coverage do we have of, well, they're adding more troops to the border with Ukraine. I wonder what they're doing. It could have been military exercises. So there was a tremendous amount of speculation leading up to what the fuck is going on, which in a sense points to how lacking the intelligence is on Putin, on plans and intentions, right? And that's a heavy lift, right, to come up with that sort of intel, because ideally you're going to want a human source. You can gather intelligence from a variety of sources, but you really want human access, people who can tell you, you know what, I had a meeting with him, and boy, I tell you what, he was pissed off, or this is what he said, or this is how he looked.

Without that, without knowing what plans and intentions are, or being able to gather intel on, say, the command staff, everybody was kind of speculating, will he, won't he? What's he going to do? Well, stepping back, if you look at what he's done, he's been pretty damn consistent over the years. And so I guess in a part, a lot of it was optimistic thinking, okay, he just wants the eastern part of the country, he's just going to go in there and take that, because maybe he's already got it, he's declared those two republics legit, maybe that's all he wants, he's already taken Crimea.

And so I think that was optimistic thinking, hoping that the guy's not going to lose his shit and go all the way through the country. Well that's what he's done. And in part, because again, if you look at what he did in Chechnya, if you look at what he did helping Assad in Syria, if you look at what he did annexing Crimea, if you look at Georgia, Abkhazia, south of Sessia, every step of the way, he's been following in his mind this stated desire that he's made very public over the years to rebuild his sphere of influence. So in part, you could argue we kind of missed the obvious. We didn't see the obvious in front of us because we were all kind of hoping and mirroring our values onto Putin, who doesn't deserve to have our values mirrored onto him, because we're thinking maybe he just wants a little bit. Maybe he's just trying to make a point. Maybe he just wants them to sign a charter saying they won't be part of NATO.