#464 – Dave Smith: Israel, Ukraine, Epstein, Mossad, Conspiracies & Antisemitism

The following is a conversation with Dave Smith, an outspoken and at times controversial anti-war libertarian, comedian, and podcast host. And now a quick few second mention of each sponsor. Check them out in the description. It's the best way to support this podcast. We got Call of Duty for Video Game Fun, Tax Network USA. for figuring out your tax problems. Notion for collaborating with your mates and integrating AI in the whole process. Shopify for selling stuff online and BetterHelp.

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and small businesses. I just did a really, really, really deep dive on theoretical computer science. I shouldn't say with who. One of the most brilliant people I've ever met. Super technical episodes. Super long episode. Anyway, P versus MP came out briefly. It's not their thing, but it is a thing I've thought about for many years. Of course.

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This episode is also brought to you by Shopify, a platform designed for anyone to sell anywhere with a great looking online store. I've recently returned to Nietzsche. And I wonder, what is the Nietzschean concept that explains the will of the entrepreneur? What is that? Is that trying to reach for power? Is it trying to reach for immortality? Is it trying to find the meaning of existence in the creative act?

There is something deeply creative, of course, to the entrepreneurial pursuit. It is fundamentally creative. It feels like pain. It feels like risk. It feels like chasing money. It feels like chasing impact or having a positive influence on people's lives. But when you're in it, and I think about Johnny Ive, when you're in it at your best, what you're doing is you're creating. That's probably what Nietzsche would say. It probably is the creative act is the drug.

the joy, the will that pulls at the entrepreneurial heart. Sign up for a $1 per month trial period at shopify.com. All lowercase, go to shopify.com slash flex to take your business to the next level today. This episode is also brought to you by BetterHelp, spelled H-E-L-P, help. Since we mentioned Nietzsche, I must go to maybe another intellect called Jung and the shadow, the archetype.

I wonder how much of our existence is trying to contend with the uniqueness of the person we see in the mirror and the bin society puts us in. There is something about especially the American spirit that resists categorization, the binning process. And in that tension, I think a lot of dark stuff could emerge. Resentment. regret, depression, the gap between expectation and reality. added with some neurotransmitter malfunctioning sprinkled on top.

Boy, is the human mind wonderful and a terrifying machine that can destroy itself. Anyway, Better Hope is a nice first step. to try to avert the coming storm. Check them out at betterhelp.com slash Lex and save on your first month. That's betterhelp.com slash Lex. This is the Lex Friedman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's Dave Smith. You are a longtime libertarian.

Perhaps an anarcho-capitalist? We can talk about that. Can you explain the different variants, flavors of libertarianism? Yeah, so there's almost like anything with left-wing schools of thought or right-wing schools of thought, there's many different camps. and different thinkers. And so within the kind of broader theme of libertarianism, there was a lot of influence from people like Ayn Rand. Milton Friedman, Thomas Sowell. Those were, I think, some of the more mainstream figures.

And then there's kind of like the Ron Paul brand of libertarianism, which is kind of distinct from that other camp where they're much more of an emphasis on foreign policy. All of them kind of fall into the radical minarche. points of view. And then there's Rothbardian. anarcho-capitalist. Then there's also like David Friedman, who's an anarcho-capitalist, but from a completely different perspective than Murray Rothbard. I would probably be most, I'm most closely like with the Rothbard.

school, which is very similar to Ron Paul, but even maybe a little bit further in that, you know, the very little bit of government that Ron Paul might support. You've been a big fan of Ron Paul. Can you explain what you admire about him? A big fan is an understatement. I think Ron Paul is like the greatest living American hero. I revere him on the level of the founding fathers, Thomas Jefferson or George Washington.

All of the major issues that he, he was correct in his understanding of them, his diagnosis of what caused these problems and his solutions. And in hindsight, there's just like. a million different examples of where almost everybody today would agree, even though his ideas were very controversial at the time, be like, oh my God, if we had just listened to Ron Paul about that, we'd be so much better off.

But I think there's something almost deeper than that about why Ron Paul inspires so much love from so many people is, okay, so number one. He was a champion of these views. for decades when there was no payoff for it at all, where he was just kind of alone in the woods. being, you know, they used to call him Dr. No.

because well he was a medical doctor and then he was he would be the lone no vote in congress like all the time like on the bills that the entire congress bipartisan agreement everything is and there's one vote against it you know and that he would be that guy. He clearly kept doing what he was doing simply because he believed it was right, not because there was any benefit for him. In fact, he dealt with a lot of headache.

for the views that he had. And then he was just a genuine person of integrity. You know, he's the only congressman who I've ever heard this about. And like DC insiders, people on the Hill will say this. He was the only congressman of my lifetime. who the lobbyists simply stopped visiting. He was the only one who they just stopped going to his office.

Because they were just like, there's just no getting through to this guy. He was just not playing politics like that. And he was, you know, you imagine what it must have been like from like the lobbyist perspective when they first tried to go there. You know, and they'd be like, all right, listen, we really need you to, you know, vote yes on this or that. And he was like, the Constitution doesn't authorize.

us to do that. And they're like, what? Like who, who in this town even talks like that? You know? And so there was just, he's also just, I've, I've met him. many times at this point and he is just genuinely he's like one of those guys who's just from like an older better generation just he's the sweetest guy but he's like uh but he's not a pushover. He was a tough guy in his day, and he was an athlete, and he was in the Air Force, and is married to the same woman for, I think, over 60 years.

At this point has like a big, beautiful family. He was a country doctor. He was a baby doctor who delivered thousands of babies. Like he's just, it is. He's like this kind of classic American figure. And, you know, I just think, you know, at the risk of falling into like hero worship or something like that. I do think he's a genuinely great man, and I think great men are to be revered.

Yeah, as you said, there's integrity there. Can you speak to the ideas that Ron Paul represents? Like you said, some of the things he's been right about. Maybe can you speak about the economics, the Fed, and maybe war and being anti-military intervention? Well, I think it all came from kind of the same central thesis. which is that the highest political value ought to be liberty.

And that the government, by its very nature, is an instrument of force and tyranny. And that therefore, the more government you have, the less liberty you have. I think he also was... He was way ahead of his time. in really calling out the corruption in D.C. And I think that's one of the things that's kind of, it's a common through line between the Federal Reserve and government spending and, of course, crazy war industry that our country has. So there's a lot of components to that.

Essentially, Ron Paul was talking about draining the swamp way before it was like this dominant mass message. And I think Ron Paul in many ways laid down. He laid the groundwork in his 2008 and 2012 presidential campaigns for- Not saying that he leads to Donald Trump, but he laid the groundwork for Donald Trump to be able to get up at the South Carolina Republican primary debate and look at Jeb Bush and say, your brother lied us into war.

And you know what I mean? And to have the Republicans agree with him. You know, these were a lot of the same people who had voted for George W. Bush twice and supported the war and even mocked. their liberal, you know, fellow countrymen for not being on board with it. And a lot of that was the work that Ron Paul did and people waking up to how messed up all these wars were.

And I think that at least from, there were a couple major things for me, okay, at the time. So I was like, I was a young man when I first found Ron Paul. I was in 2007 was when I first saw him and then started obsessively reading all of his books. And so I was young. I'm born in 83. So what did that mean? 23, 24 when I first found him. So I was a young guy. And at least for me at the time.

There were kind of two categories in my naive mind, where, okay, there were the liberals who supported big government at home, but were skeptical about you know, big government abroad. They're skeptical about wars. who said that they supported small government, limited government at home, but were always on the side of whatever the next war is. And at least for me, and I think for a lot of people of my generation, Ron Paul was the first guy.

who came along and said like, no, I'm for limited government here and abroad. And it was kind of like a portal. where you could access a different perspective on the world. And then once you saw that, you were like, wait, that's actually what makes sense. It doesn't make sense to like, what is it exactly that like all the Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush and even like Milton Friedman and guys like that and Thomas Sowell and it's like you want a.

constitutionally limited world empire. Like that's what you guys stand for. Cause that doesn't, that doesn't fit together at all. And so why is it that we took, we were taking this as a given. And then of course, the more you, you look into it, you realize that like, okay. Those two things do make sense together. And then also that kind of like the, in the initial wave of like the original progressives, you know, look.

people like Woodrow Wilson or FDR. These were people who were pushing big government at home and big government abroad. And that actually made much more sense as a cohesive worldview. And to oppose that would be... the Ron Paul worldview. And then the other thing for me, and this was actually, this was my introduction to Ron Paul. And this too, to me was like kind of a portal in a way it was, it was a way.

at least in my naive, not fully functioned brain or fully developed brain at 24 years old or whatever. It was a way for me to kind of get, like I tapped into something that was outside the empire. And I had heard a lot, you know, I was already against George W. Bush and I didn't like the war. I had already figured out, you know, I think this.

I think this war in Iraq is bullshit. And I think that we were lied into it. And so I kind of got that. And then there were there were liberals and left wingers who I knew. I grew up in New York City, so I was very familiar with the left wing perspective and who are critical of. of George W. Bush for fighting the war and signing the Patriot Act into law and things like that. But I had never really heard anybody break it down the way Ron Paul did.

when he was when he basically was like look There's a reason why these terrorists hate us. And it's not what they're telling you. They don't hate us for our freedom. It's not as if I remember the way Pat Buchanan put it, which I always loved was he goes, uh, he's a Dick Cheney makes it sound like Osama bin Laden.

stumbled on, like in the deserts of Afghanistan, he stumbled onto a copy of our Bill of Rights somewhere. And he was like, oh my God, they're free to look at this speedy trial. Are you kidding me? Like this is like, what is going on here? They can own guns. And their women can wear mini skirts. And that just made people so angry that they were ready to, you know, like suicide bomb themselves. And like, that makes no sense at all. And then Ron Paul was just like, no, look, here's the thing.

If we think we can just go around the world killing people, propping up dictatorships, putting our military bases in the Muslims holy land and not. engender hatred from that, then we do that at our own peril. And I thought that was, it was such an interesting kind of, you know, it had always been, I'm an eighties and nineties kid. And to me, it was always kind of a given that like America's number one.

We're the force for good in the world. And it was like an interesting introduction to the idea that there are people outside of that. who are dominated by that, who don't care for it very much. And that's what 9-11 was actually about. And for me, I was living in New York City. I was 18, I think, when 9-11 happened. And that was like the moment of my childhood. It was a huge thing to live through.

I mean, we were attacked. This seemed like something that could only happen in a history book that didn't happen to America in the nineties. 2001 was basically the nineties. Um, and, uh, And it was just like, oh, finally it clicked. It was like, that makes sense. It's the first time I had ever heard like an explanation and an understanding of this whole thing that we're involved in now from 9-11 to the terror wars that actually just made perfect sense.

Yeah, we should also say that there's some degree of truth that the battle is not just militaristic, it's also cultural. And then many of those parts of the world don't want... forced onto them. Right. But the way that George W. Bush and Dick Cheney and every right-wing host in America and Sean Hannity and Bill O'Reilly and like everybody, what they were saying is that they hate that we're free. Whereas it was much closer to saying like, they don't like us imposing on them.

Even like all the hardcore neocons, Bret Stephens, the New York Times, he wrote this piece on the 20th anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, so 2023, to cheerlead the war in Iraq. And he goes through the whole piece, and there's not one mention of the million people who died in the war. You know, he literally just goes, the piece is just... verse life for under the Shiite. parliamentary system that they have now. Which one's better? and i he's arguing this one's better therefore it was worth it

But there's like no mention. It's like, okay, but what about the 20 plus million people who were displaced? What about the million people who were killed? What about all the millions of people who were injured? What about the... tens of thousands of our soldiers who have blown their brains out in the aftermath of the thing. Like it's like so, so many times this true and with government policy in general.

the end result that they want. But you're like, yeah, but what about the process by which you get there and how much hatred, you know, could you, I mean, like I, you know, it's not that hard for me to like put myself in other people's shoes. And like, I have two little kids. And if anybody were to ever try to argue to me that they have to be the eggs that get broken to make some bigger omelet.

Like, it's OK. Like, you know, we're ultimately going to impose something on your society that's better than what you have right there. It sure does suck that your wife and kids got to be the one who get taken out. I mean, I'm as I'm just saying this to myself. And this is not real. This is just a thought experiment I'm making up. I'm already pretty close to being a terrorist.

Like my next thought is kind of like, well, okay, well, I hope you're going to like it when you watch your family die in front of you. Hopefully, even if that happened to me, I wouldn't go kill that guy's family. Maybe I'd just go after him or something. I could understand, and I think most people who have kids could understand, going to a level of the most evil, dark place you could imagine if anyone ever threatened or actually did something to your kid.

Yeah, we have to remember the thing that's difficult to measure that you just mentioned, which is the hate that's created by every bomb that's dropped. It was General McChrystal. who, you know, was the general running the war in Afghanistan. He wasn't like he wasn't Ron Paul. You know what I mean? Like he was a sir. Yes, sir. How do we fight and win this war general? And he's the one who coined the term insurgent man.

10 minus 2 equals 20. I was rereading about this the other day because Trump's been bombing the Houthis in Yemen. You know, it was like when, when we first, I think it was in, in at least in 2009 is when Obama really stepped up the drone campaign with the then secret drone bombing campaign. And the Yemen was one of the major theaters.

And even back then, when it really was just a, it was a war on terrorism, like the main targets were always Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula and their presence in Yemen. Even then, like so before the Saudis invaded, so like from 2009 through 2015, AQAP just kept growing. He was doing all these targeted bombing campaigns, and they call them targeted. 96% of the people are innocent who get killed, but they call them targeted drone bombings.

And they and Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula just kept getting bigger and bigger because, you know, it's like, yeah, every time you go in there, it's like, OK, you took out one target. And then you took out three little girls and, you know, a few, and every one of those little girls had brothers and uncles and fathers and, you know, and, and all of them just signed up to join the fight now.

You know, and Ron Paul was the first one who really made this click for me, but it's in a way, and I'm not like, I'm not a leftist. I'm not an egalitarian. I'm not a cultural relative. I'm not saying that all cultures are the same or that we all look at the world the same way. There's enormous differences between all of us. And I personally think some are better than others, but.

There are things that unite all of us. And in a weird way, I remember one time I was arguing with a Democrat guy on a S.E. Cup show. I used to be a contributor on her show. And we were arguing and it was after it was after a terrorist attack here in New York, a fairly minor one. It was like a guy like I think he hit someone with his car and then jumped out with a gun and then the cops lit him up and killed him. This is like back in 2017, I think.

He, he claimed to be ISIS inspired. I don't, I don't remember if there was like a direct connection or not, but they were at the time they were like, doesn't this mean we got to step up the war in Iraq or in Syria where ISIS is stronghold is. And I remember the guy saying to me. You know, I went off on how these wars have been disasters. And he goes, yeah, but Dave, what you're saying here is we're supposed to do nothing.

Like this just happened and now we're supposed to do nothing. And so like, even though this guy had a suit and tie on and we're in a cable news studio and we're in a first world country, we're in the United States of America and we're having the basic thing that he's saying. It's like, what do you say? You're saying we're not going to go kill some motherfuckers? You know, like, I mean, he was just putting it as like, do something, but what's something?

Something is dropping bombs on human beings, you know, when like, yeah, some innocent people are going to die, but okay. But it's the same thing. It's the same after 9-11. We're like, we got to go fucking invade some countries right now. That's the same impulse. It's like they killed some of our people. You think we're not going to show them who the real killers are? You think there's a chance that you could come here and that is like the most human.

instinct ever. It's like some other tribe just came in here and killed some people in our tribe. So what do you want to do about that? Well, I don't know. It's not going to take me too long to figure out. We're gonna go kill a bunch of people in their tribe. And I do think that like that is I think that's the major motivating factor for both sides of the Israel-Palestine conflict. I think that's the major motivator for both sides of the war on terror conflict. And it's like that's it.

In a way, when you look at it like that, there's something, even though it's so dark and tragic, there's something almost beautiful about it where you're like, oh, we're all caught in this same. cycle. Yeah, it's deeply human, the warring between tribes. But, you know, especially in the recent years, but more and more through human history, there's almost like a third party, which is this military industrial complex.

which is making money from the two tribes. So if you just have two tribes, one, I've been reading a lot about Genghis Khan. This is why Genghis Khan banned this. It was very common in Mongolia before Genghis Khan to steal people's wives. Like, you're my wife now. Right. And he realized that that creates a lot of conflict. Yeah, it sure does.

That seems natural and human, that kind of conflict. But whenever a third party rolls in and starts making money on the whole thing and then driving that forward, then the escalation of the conflict. It comes with this whole machine that makes de-escalation really difficult. Yeah. The military-industrial complex in America, it's so big.

and it's so sophisticated. So it's not just that there's you know there's this there's the intelligence agencies there's the weapons manufacturers then there's the like People in the media who are either directly or indirectly just parroting, you know what I mean? All of their talking points.

And so it's not just that you can kind of like, like you make money when there's a conflict, but you have this entire apparatus to like create the conflict and then create the public sentiment for that. And then we're. And it's interesting. We're in an interesting place because we're kind of in this like new frontier of now where shows like this can happen. And there's a lot of them and a lot of them are humongous like yours. But for so long.

This just didn't exist. And it was just like, oh, like for so long, it was the case that like the New York Times and NBC and CBS and ABC. And the Washington Post and the Associated Press, I guess, they could just move the nation. I mean, if they wanted to be like, hey, there is the idea that forget even like after 9-11. The idea that in 1990, 1991, that there was any organic movement from the American people going, you know, we really got to see about the Saddam Hussein guy.

You know, the dictator in Iraq is having a slant drilling dispute with the Amir of Kuwait. We really got to do something about that. Like that is not something that organically came from any, that was not like a few soccer moms hanging out, you know, watching their kids game being like, I really do think, I think in a couple of years, we're going to have to send these boys over to Iraq. Like that's not, they just, from the top down, were able to create this.

feeling that like, hey, there's a new Adolf Hitler on the rise over here in Iraq. We got to go see about this. There are these poor people in Kuwait. We have to do that. You know, like there's they were able to create this desire for war. Um, that was, it's really incredible when you think about it, because there's for, I think for the most part in human history, you would have had to have some type of plausible threat.

some type of plausible reality to convince people that we actually have to go to war um in order to deal with this whereas like You know, the idea that in 1991, the United States of America would feel threatened by Iraq was just ridiculous. And yet they were able to do it. Well, so to push back a little bit, throughout human history, there was also a thing, you look at the Roman Empire, where just the cultural values were different, where military conquest was seen as a good thing.

We just almost assume in the United States. War has been framed in the defensive sense, like where offensive war, we're not doing that anymore. You make a fair point. It's certainly true that throughout human history, there's been like...

empire building and wars of conquest and things like that. But I guess I'm just saying at least even there, you would have some type of cell of like why we're going to go take these resources and why that will be good for us. Whereas the idea that Kuwait just needed to be defended by the Americans seems so...

It seemed so hard to convince anybody, and yet they were able to do it. If you read neocon writing in the 90s, it was very interesting, because they would tell the truth a lot more. And they were... There was the Soviet Union had just collapsed. It was what Charles Krattenhammer dubbed the unipolar moment.

There was excitement, there was a feeling of invincibility, and also the neocons weren't in power after 92, really. I mean, they were in the George H.W. Bush administration, but after 92, they really weren't. So they're just writing at these think tanks. And it just didn't seem as, you know, like they weren't as guarded. There weren't like these accusations of you're a war criminal or something like that. But what he said, what Jonah Goldberg agreed with.

was that every, I think the statement was every 10 years or so, America's got to find a puny little country and put them up against the wall just to let the rest of the world know that we mean business. And that was actually their mentality. I'm sure there's people that agree with that. I happen to disagree with that. But the drums of war are beating a little bit over Taiwan and China.

More than a little bit, yeah. But there I can't even see a justification of a just war. What is the long-term benefit to society? if you do military intervention. Well, I also think this, and I've been saying this for a while, but I do think there is this like, there's like this empire mentality that Americans have got to shake off.

Like, as if it's even a question of whether we should allow it or not. Like, are we in a position to allow or not allow that? Why do we? It's almost like if you were. you know, like I, I don't, I hope China doesn't invade Taiwan. I hope Taiwan remains as free as possible. I hope China becomes free. I root for freedom and prosperity for everyone, you know, but I also root for like everybody to have a healthy marriage.

But if you were talking to me and you were like, hey, the guy down the street is cheating on his wife, I don't think we can allow that. I'd immediately be like, that's really not my place. And then on top of that, I also have no power. I have no authority over what they do in their marriage. Like I have to be concerned with my marriage. And the idea that like, imagine if there were the political will.

to invade Mexico. If DC decided we're taking Mexico City, that's gonna be part of America now. And we're taking it by force. And then China was like, we're not sure if we can allow that. I think immediately most Americans would be like, allow? How the fuck do you think you're gonna stop a- from taking Mexico City. What are you going to do, China? You're going to send your Navy ships over here to fight us off the coast of Mexico? Good luck with that.

And at least from my understanding, in almost all the war games that they've run, if we did militarily, even if it doesn't come to nuclear weapons being used, in which case the whole world gets blown up. But even if. We go to militarily try to stop China from invading Taiwan and no one, everyone agrees to not use nukes and we just fight a conventional war. We lose that war. I think what you said applies to a lot of the wars we've been involved in.

But China and Taiwan is a little bit different because... because of TSMC, because there's an economic dependence. If that was the concern, then the response would be, we need some type of Manhattan project. And I'm not supporting a government project here, but there would be, we need some type of Manhattan project to say, we're going to make these things here. We can't. And look.

I was running that experiment before saying, like, what if we all pinky promise not to use nuclear weapons or something like that? But that's not the reality of the situation. The more reality, look, even in Ukraine, everybody, the biggest talk. the biggest pushers of this policy and Joe Biden's policy to fund Ukraine. No one's suggesting we send in the 82nd air. Which is really the only thing that could repel the Russians right now and restore, you know, Ukrainian, the...

original sovereignty of the Ukrainian borders. But no one's suggesting we send in the 82nd Airborne because we all know, well, we can't have a direct war with Russia. That's the end of the world. And same thing with China. So, you know... I'm not saying microchips or whatever aren't important, but... We can find other ways to, Taiwan is not magical. Like we can produce these things in other places. No. So you have the humility to say that you don't really know much about the situation.

It sounds ridiculous to say, but there's something magical about not Taiwan, but TSMC. It's incredibly difficult to manage the supply chain. and manufacture at such a low cost that they are. And to add to that, China has been signaling about the one China policy. But you're absolutely right that you shouldn't be doing the Washington thing of...

beating the drums of war. It's completely the counterproductive thing. You should actually try to find partnerships with China, build friendships and cooperation. India's doing a good job of this. Build friendships. This is the 21st century. this Cold War thinking is going to be destructive to the economy, destructive to humanity, to the flourishing of the individual nations of the world. There's just nothing positive.

except making money for the military. Well, yeah, and it was totally destructive during the original Cold War, too, and almost led to nuclear war on a couple of different occasions. But look, I would just say, and I really. I'm no defender of the Chinese regime. I hate communism and fascism, whatever they are, some hybrid mix of the two. They're paying you, aren't they? Yeah, no, fuck them. I don't care.

By the way, a lot of people speculate online, but I'm not getting any of these checks, man, and I'd really like them to start coming in. But there's... Like, even when it's like China, you say China's asserting the one China policy, but the one China policy is the policy of the United States of America and has been for 50 years now. Right. So it's not, I think.

What's happening there a lot of times is that essentially, even though officially the one China policy is the policy of the United States of America, all of these American politicians and- you know, different figureheads across powerful centers in America are saying that China doesn't have the right... to go into Taiwan. And then China's in the position of being like, well, hey, wait a minute. No, that's not actually the policy. We maintain this one China policy, but we allow them.

to kind of do what they want to do. And, you know, the most obvious example of this was when Joe Biden actually said. Like, oh, we wouldn't allow that. And we would militarily intervene if they went into China. And then, and this was so bizarre, then the White House. came out to correct the president of the United States and say, no, the policy of the White House.

is the one China policy, which, look, I mean, again, I think the whole point of this is that the reason why whoever the hell was able to overrule Joe Biden and his administration, I don't know who that is. But the whole point is that if you say, and this is why there is some wisdom in America accepting the one China policy, is that if you tell...

that we recognize Taiwan's independence and that they're not a part of China, that might be the type of thing that would make China invade and say, no, we're not accepting that. And so at least right now, it's like kind of like, okay. Look, this is the reality. It's something that you run up against with the war in Ukraine a lot and with the situation in China and Taiwan. is that there are constraints.

It's not all just how would you like the world to be? How would you like it to work? Obviously, I think we would all like that bigger countries don't invade smaller countries and bigger countries don't bully smaller countries around. That is not the way of the world. We are a big country that is the biggest bully in the world. So we're in no position to let. But what we're kind of in the position is just like, you're like, hey, we'd sure love if you don't do that.

You know, you can do it and you can get away with it, but we would sure love it if you don't. And so the goal would be to do everything we can. to make sure that doesn't happen when vladimir putin starts talking about like hey if you keep pushing the idea of ukraine joining your military alliance i'm going to invade that country the goal there that or the move there would be to be like okay

We'll stop talking about that. Is there something else that we can agree on? You know, like, is there a way that you will promise you won't do anything to them? And okay, and we'll promise we won't bring them in our military. Like, that's the goal. You don't just go like, no, fuck you, we're doing it anyway.

over and over and over again until they do the thing. I think we got to this discussion from the military-industrial complex and military intervention and Ron Paul before that. If you could rewind a little bit. is there any amount, according to you and according to various flavors of libertarianism, is there any amount of military intervention? That's justified. That's okay. Um, well... I would say, okay, so...

At least to me, in terms of pure libertarian theory, or just in terms of what I think is right or wrong, there is such thing as a just war. The most obvious example of that would be you're invaded. by a military and fighting them off. So in that sense also, like even if you wanna, if you wanna. kind of isolate from everything else from all of the awful U.S.

policy toward Russia post Soviet Union to all of the, you know, NATO expansion and color coded revolutions and all of these things. If you want to. you know, Vladimir Putin invades Ukraine. I do think the Ukrainians have a right to fight and protect their land. Like there's an aggressive, there's an aggressor there and you have a right to defend yourself.

So certainly in that sense, I think the American Revolution was a just war. I think there are, you know, there can be just wars. In terms of pure libertarian theory, I think... Look, you never have a right to kill innocent people. That's never morally okay. Now, there could be a scenario, just like this is true in life in general, right? Like, there's lots of things that you don't have the right to do.

But you could come up with some scenario where you might be in a position where you have to do it because there were all of these extenuating circumstances, you know, like for, you know, you could think of something where like. You remember the, uh, the saw movies where they used to, you know, these crazy, like horror scenarios, but it's like, um, okay. So there's a person, you know, a evil bad guy has.

buried a key inside this person, and you have to kill that person in order to get the key, in order to unlock these 20 people to let them out of a cage. Now, look, you still don't have a right to kill people. It's horrible and wrong, and what you did there was still evil.

But if you were taken to trial over it, you could probably explain to a judge and a jury, be like, I know, but the situation I was in was either these 20 people were going to die or this one person was going to die. And under that situation, I chose to save the 20. So like. By perfect theory, no, you never have the right to kill innocent people. There could be a scenario where you were like, look, we had to take this military action and some innocent people did die.

And it's so tragic and awful that we had to do this, but we are certain that many more people would have died had we not done this. Now, in that case, I would look at that as like, um... Number one, it's much like killing the one person to save the 20. It's still wrong. It's still an immoral thing that you were forced into doing. It's not justified. I would say that the overwhelming onus

should have to be on you to demonstrate that you absolutely needed to do that. And that's how I feel about all these, these wars, you know, it's not like, um, you know, I think that like, let's just say like, if you could make. World War II, like... you could reduce it down to the simplest caricature.

of what World War II is and say, there's no Joseph Stalin. We're not even partnering with him. Like there was a good guy in Russia who we were partnering with and there's, and, and the British empire had never done anything wrong. They were just nothing but good guys. And of course, FDR was nothing but a good guy. And Hitler was even worse than the real Hitler. You know what I mean?

We had to go on this bombing campaign and we only got Nazis. We only killed the bad guys and we were able to take out the Third Reich. But one eight-year-old girl died. And you did this thing that stopped the whole world from falling into subjugation. So I think almost everybody would agree.

Jesus, man, you have to do that. Okay. This is, um, you have to do that because the whole world's going to be subjugated. There's nothing but good guys here. The Nazis are so evil. And there's one, I still would say.

that every single time World War II came up, we should all just be somber. And we should all just think about that little eight-year-old girl who died. And what a horrible thing it is that we had to do that, you know? And so, like, when there are these campaigns, we're like... you know, where tens of millions of people.

are killed. The fact that anybody's ever like spiking the football or this kind of like rah, rah, we were the good ones. And then also when you add in all those other complicated factors like that, this wasn't the scenario at all. But I do. So I guess essentially I'd say. No, you don't ever have a right to kill innocent people. It's never self-defense to be killing innocent people. I mean, short of like...

you know, some type of scenario where like, you know, if you're holding a baby and coming at me shooting and I shoot back at you and, okay, I was acting in self-defense and it happened to kill a baby. But I'm talking about like what the scenarios where you're dropping bombs on cities.

And the overwhelming onus should be on you to demonstrate that you absolutely have to do it. And that that should be the standard. Because there's so many other standards that I see thrown out that I just think make no moral sense at all. You know, people will argue about like... in Gaza, they'll argue about

to combatant ratio, which I like that to me, doesn't really, that's not what counts. That's not the measure that's important. And also no one knows what the numbers are. They are all just kind of like pretend to. And then the other thing will be that people, as someone just recently argued with me about, they'll say like, well, Hamas has to go. That's the starting point. Hamas has to go. And I'm like, no, I don't think you get to say that because the truth is that.

Look, you can make an argument that Hamas has to go, sure. You can make an argument that the Likudniks have to go. You can make an argument that Kim Jong-un has to go or that Xi has to go or that Putin has to go or that Zelensky has to go. Or certainly I would make an argument that Joe Biden had to go. But.

Just because a government has to go, that doesn't mean you could just go kill all their people. Yeah, that should not be the starting point, like the assumption, the axiom of the discussion. The question is... Is there no other option than doing it this way? It's like, okay, October 7th happened. We can all agree this was a horrific tragedy and an indefensible act of terrorism. Okay.

Is it guaranteed that another one of those is going to happen tomorrow? Or was this the biggest security failure in, you know, Israeli history? Okay, well, if it's the biggest security failure... Let's just say not even going down the inside job rabbit hole or anything like that, but just saying it's a giant security failure. Okay. Then put a bunch more men at that fence. First of all.

And now you got to talk about how can you achieve your goal while inflicting the minimum amount of devastation on innocent people. Let's talk about it since you brought it up. October 7th. So what exactly do you think about the October 7th attack by Hamas on Israel? um well i mean like what i just said that it was uh horrible and you know uh it's always by the same logic that i'm giving you now it's always

It's always evil to target innocent civilians. I don't believe civilians can be held responsible for the crimes of their government. This was, by the way, the Osama bin Laden logic. which I think would also be the logic of like Bill Clinton or George W. Bush or Barack Obama. But Osama bin Laden very explicitly said,

when he was asked like, well, are you just going to target like us military sites or are you targeting us civilians? It was an interview in the nineties before nine 11. Um, And he goes, no, civilians are fair game too, because you guys have regular elections. And you guys vote for your government and therefore you're responsible for the crimes that they commit. Now, I think...

That's the logic of a fanatic like Osama bin Laden. And that's not the logic that any of us should follow. It doesn't make any sense. And it's not true that people are responsible for the crimes of their government. I think that that same argument is used quite a bit by people on the pro-Israeli side when they say like, oh, they they had an election in 2005 and Hamas won a plurality. Therefore.

20 years later, they have no rights. I think that's insane. So, OK, so Hamas had no right to go after civilians. You know, it's horrible. And you see, you know, the. These, you know, teenagers being killed and the people, you know, you see the images of people who were who are held hostage for all this time. So it's like your heart breaks for those people. It's truly tragic. I do think.

that it was in many ways an indictment of so many different things, like October 7th happening was an indictment of the entire occupation slash siege of Gaza and the West Bank, for that matter. should have probably forever destroyed the legacy of benjamin netanyahu um who is you know i mean this isn't like george w bush I mean, he was on the job for almost a year when 9-11 happened, but it was still kind of new.

You know, like it was still kind of in his first year of being president. Benjamin Netanyahu was the longest serving prime minister in Israeli history and had explicitly been like, I'm the tough right winger who's going to be tough on these Palestinians.

Who's going to like move away from the idea of coming to a two state solution, because this is what we need to keep us safe. Like the justification is like, I'm going to be hard on these motherfuckers because that's because I know what it takes to keep us safe. And that culminates in the worst massacre in Israeli history.

And then, I mean, the other big one is that, I mean, and it's not like a, I wouldn't even say an open secret at this point. It's just out in the open that he had this strategy of propping up Hamas for years. And so he had this strategy of propping up Hamas, um, for. a myriad of reasons. But a major part of it was that, look, man, as long as there's terrorists in power there, there's never going to be any pressure on us to give the Palestinians a state because

He was allowing Qatar money to float. Insisting that Qatar money float to them. When the Qatar money dried up, sent the Mossad in to insist that it gets back to them. hundreds of millions of dollars, briefcases in cash. And he said in his own words, that the reason for doing this was to keep to his words were prop up him up.

bolster Hamas to keep them in power so that the West Bank and the Gazans were divided and that the international community as well as the liberal Jewish community in Israel wouldn't be able to put pressure on them to make a deal. But what are the options? So if he doesn't allow the money in, it also looks really bad for him.

Because if he's not allowing the money in, that means he's not allowing the quote-unquote aid in to help the Palestinians. Yeah, but Lex, I mean, the dynamic here, right, is from 2007 to... Today, Israel's had a full blockade around the country. They won't let potatoes in. They won't let sugar in. And the justification is because they're dual use. They can be used to make rockets as well as they can be used to feed starving children. We can't let that in because it's dual use. But cash to Hamas?

Does that not have dual usage? Like, is there, is there nothing else that they can? So yeah, it's like, yes, when you have a full blockade around the country. you take on certain responsibilities. And I think this is the essence of really the whole struggle here, which is very tough, I think, for the pro-Israel side to grapple with. But the bottom line is that

Israel hasn't occupied Palestine for like a few months after a war or even a couple of years after a war while they're figuring out what we're going to do with them. It's been over 60 years. We're talking about a one-week-long war or a day short of a week-long war in 1967. Israel's had control of them ever since. And much like in the same… way that like if you kidnap someone and you lock them in your basement and you don't feed them

You murdered that person. So in other words, stated differently. You're not allowed to kidnap people and lock them in your basement, but once you do... You take on a responsibility to feed those people. You know what I mean? Like you can't, you're not allowed to keep someone and not feed them. That is a worse charge than just keeping them. And so yet, anyway, I guess my point is.

The solution to that, if you go like, well, I'm a bad guy if I fund Tomas, I'm a bad guy if I don't let the aid in, was to let the reputable international aid organizations. Bring aid in to the people of Gaza. Don't have don't don't pressure the Qataris to send in briefcases full of cash. Allow. internationally recognized, reputable human rights organizations who are lining up trying to do it, stop turning them away and let them in. And this is just, it's so long past due.

I mean, I'm not defending Arab terrorism. I think it's a tragedy that the Arabs embraced terrorism. I don't think it's unique to them. And in fact, you know. I think it was the Zionist militias who introduced terrorism to that part of the world. But there was also like there look. Terrorism persists because it works. And this is true with state terrorism and with non-state terrorism. Terrorism has often worked for people. I think the thing...

Like early, I think early Yasser Arafat, I know was very influenced by, um, the Algerians who, you know, successfully kicked the French out at embracing terrorism and. It was almost like the major miscalculation of those Palestinian Arabs who did embrace terrorism was that this isn't the French.

This isn't the French hanging out in some colony with their home country back home, where maybe a few acts of violence could work enough to, you know, the liberal population back home is like, oh, I really didn't like the response to that terrorism. We killed so many people.

Forget it. This is too much of a headache. Let's get out of here. The Zionist settlers were there to stay. They weren't going anywhere. They weren't going back to Eastern Europe. You know what I mean? They weren't. They were just that. And so it's a tragedy that this whole thing.

went the way it did. But you always, whenever you're talking about a conflict like this, The person who has the or the party who has the power is the one who needs to make concessions, you know, and the it's just indefensible that the status quo of the Palestinian people having no right. being ruled by a government that they do not get to vote for or against. no right to do commerce with the outside world, no freedom of travel, no freedom of movement, no basic property rights.

You can be kicked out of your home at any time. No right to a fair trial. No right to a lawyer. No right to a jury of your peers. I mean, the fact that that has been the status quo since 1967. is just indefensible. And then in the context that that has been the status quo, I guess I'm just not, even though I'm against it. It's kind of like when you're just lecturing about the way in which they resist this. I think it's very tough to be on a strong moral footing.

Yeah, you have to really empathize with decades of suffering in the region. I suppose my question was grounded in how can the Israeli government, how can the world help the Palestinian people flourish? So you suggested allowing reputable aid organizations in. kind of almost patching. It's just helping humans who are suffering. But that's not how you have a nation flourish. You have to build up the infrastructure. You have to build up a culture of the education system.

democratic processes of electing and regular elections so that the people are represented and you have to form partnerships, friendships, normalization of relations. with the Arab world, with Israel. You can travel back and forth and lessen the chokehold. like the security chokehold that you could say is justified in a militaristic situation. But why is it a military situation? The question is, they're like, where do we go from here?

You know, we'll talk about Netanyahu some more. He is, you know, he's very criticized inside Israel as well. Yeah, for sure. Maybe less so after October 7th because, you know, again. In the same way you can empathize with the Palestinian people, you can empathize with Israelis. just like it is for Americans with 9-11 it touched some kind of primal thing of fear of like holy shit the same thing I said before like I could also very easily go if my if one of my kids was like at that rave

or something like that, and just got gunned down or kidnapped by, I could understand being like, level the whole goddamn place. And I'm sure I would feel that way if that was one of my kids, you know? um so yeah no that's that's exactly right i mean there's lots of examples in the world of uh you know like

France and Germany are right next to each other and Ireland and England are right next to each other. And they're just totally living in harmony right now. Like there is just no, the thought of them going to war is like. inconceivable right now not saying it could never happen in the future but it seemed it seems pretty hard to imagine and that being the case would have been very hard to imagine for a very long time you know like there i mean there's

some serious levels of brutality between those two societies. And even more directly involved, you know, Egypt and Israel went to war four times in a couple decades. They went to war. And then in the late seventies, they made a land for peace deal and they haven't been to war since, you know? And like, I do.

That is, you know, it's not like Egypt is you're not going to say they don't have an issue with radical Islam in Egypt. You know what I mean? Like, that's not the answer. It's just that they made a land for peace deal. And once there wasn't, you know, once that wasn't. That was solved. It was kind of easier to avoid the war. And I do like to think that there could be a solution to the Israel-Palestine question, but it's going to have to.

It's going to have to involve Israel taking their boot off of the Palestinians neck. And I know that that's scary. And I understand that there are like legitimate concerns about that. There's, um, it was a great. Thomas Jefferson quote about slavery, which was, We have the wolf by the tail, and we can neither afford to hold on to him nor risk letting him go. which is like you could see where that would have been like a real concern of people.

like right toward the end of slavery or, or, you know, whatever in the early 1800s or the first half of the 19th century, where you'd be like, okay, okay, okay. We recognize this is wrong now. We've had these millions of people enslaved for all these years. If we let them go, they're going to fucking kill us. And what are you saying? They're citizens now, meaning the Second Amendment applies to them? Meaning that the guy who I enslaved?

now can get a gun. You know what? And so, okay, there are the, but I think in hindsight, looking back at it, we would all just go. Yeah, but you can't enslave people. So like whatever risks come with the next phase of this, unfortunately, you know, like you're going to have to just deal with that. And, and. You have to start with abolishing slavery. And it is good to also remember in the hopeful message you send, at any day you can make a deal.

That's one of the frustrating things I had when I hosted a debate on Israel. It just felt hopeless. And a lot of people I talk to, it feels hopeless. I have a lot of, I maybe naively see a lot of possibilities of peace there. I see, for example, normalization of relations with Saudi Arabia and Israel, and then Saudi Arabia taking some ownership over Gaza. Something like that. Some interesting... were a big major player in that region. takes ownership and steps as the middleman.

Yeah, I agree with you, and you're 100% right that, and even before October 7th, I think many steps had been taken away from the peace process and the feeling of that. I mean, really, I think since the second intifada. is when the appetite for peace, I think, in Israel was greatly diminished. But to your point, I mean...

It's going to take really painful concessions on all sides in order to get there. And I think that the... personally i think and i don't know if i say this for the not necessarily like the arab world But at least the nation states, like their government. I think are pretty much there. Like Saudi Arabia and UAE and Jordan and Egypt. Like if the Israelis, they're almost like, look, these are American sock puppets.

you know, for the most part. Right. And so their, their thing is that like, okay, 100% of my population completely opposed to what Israel's doing to Palestine right now. And they just hate that Israel, that the nation was created at all, that all the Arabs were kicked out of what is, you know, very important land to them religiously. And, um... And so the governments there are like, look, we want to continue to have US tax dollars flooding in here.

We'd love to make a deal with Israel, but like, you gotta stop doing this to the Palestinians so my own people don't. you know, rise up against me. So I think as long as the Israelis were like, fine, we'll do a two state solution or something like that. I think Saudi Arabia couldn't wait. In fact, they proposed a two-state solution just a few years ago. I mean, they would love to be a part of that, normalize relations amongst the Palestinians.

Like, which again, I think this, I think this had been accepted multiple times, at least by their leadership. It's like, yeah, you're going to have to accept that. Like you lost in 48. You're going to have to accept that you lost in 47. You're going to have to accept that the state of Israel does exist. And you're going to have to accept that like the right of return is not going to literally mean that everybody can go back to where they were.

And what Israel's going to have to concede is that It was awfully fucked up that they kicked a lot of people out of their lap. Um, a land for people for a people without land was never true. That was just a slogan that made that felt good to avoid what you guys actually did. And the fact that it was inexcusable that you guys occupied these people for 60 years and that has to end immediately. I interviewed Douglas Murray recently.

He just wrote a book on Israel and Hamas called On Democracies and Death Calls. He makes what I think is a strong pro-Israel case, focusing on Hamas as an evil organization, evil for its corrupt leadership, who's essentially stealing money. from the Palestinian people and allocating the money that is there towards terrorist militaristic operations versus like building up Gaza.

can you steel man the case for and then against this perspective? Sort of centering, we've been talking about the people. centering around Hamas, which is like this extremist religious organization. The perspective being like they need to be, as you mentioned before, eliminated before any progress can be made. Okay, so if I were to steal man Douglas Murray's case, I would say... Well, I guess the case is, right, look, Hamas is a fanatical death cult, essentially, which I do think is a fair.

description of them. There is no question that they have pursued They have pursued a path. that was just devastating to their own people. And there's no question they have not. spent the resources they have on their priority has not been uplifting their own people. Their priority has been, I think, essentially. antagonizing Israel into this overreaction so that they can turn world opinion against Israel. I think they've been very effective at doing that.

And, and okay. Again, I think the argument would come back to something like, and the people kind of voted for this in 2005 and the people sure do. We sure do see a lot of people cheering when Hamas is doing some pretty horrific stuff. And so, Hey, you got that on one side and you have a kind of, uh, a country that's much more similar to Western societies on the other side. If we can just like linger on that steel man, what do you make of the celebrations?

in Gaza after October 7th? I think it's sickening and incredibly disturbing. I guess the way I look at it, I always and maybe there is a degree of like naivete to this, or perhaps it's just that I just don't want to allow myself to go down. a certain path because I think it leads to such dark outcomes. But I just always, I always try to be kind of like against the government for the people, against the powerful, sympathetic to the powerless.

I think that, look, it's sickening. You see big crowds cheering on, you know, people who have been, you know, with these people who have been in captivity for, I think, some of them for... over a year and a half. Nikki Haley and other Israeli politicians are signing the bombs before they're launched into Gaza. I found that sickening. I think there's all types. I think like mission accomplished.

banners and flying on jet. I think having Bob Hope specials at the end of the Persian Gulf War was sickening. I just think all of it is like... horrific. Um, I just, I look at it And I try to say to myself, okay, we had one 9-11. in this country. And we all like collectively, we lost our minds. as a society. We were ready to go bomb whoever the hell our politicians told us to bomb, and we didn't care how many people it killed. And we killed a lot more than Israel or Hamas has killed doing it.

I try to think to myself, okay, imagine being trapped in what is, you know, people can call it whatever they want to. I do think Pat Buchanan and these guys were right to call it a concentration camp. You're trapped in a five mile by 25 mile. area where you cannot leave.

You are stuck there. You don't have an airport because the Israelis bombed it. You don't have a seaport because they won't allow you. You have no access to trade with the outside world. And you're not suffering through a 9-11. You're suffering through. Your whole life is bad. The people in Gaza, their entire life has been being refugees. You know what I mean? Their entire life. There's generations of people have been in this status now. And so...

You know, if my society lost its mind after one 9-11, I just have a tough time like judging the people who came up in this environment. But there's no question it is. I mean, it's, you know, profoundly disturbing. But I wonder how much of the indoctrination has really made the software of their mind. Permanently anti. Yeah. Like extremify them. And that, you know, it doesn't justify anything, but.

it's more uh concerning for the prospects of peace well i'd say i get your point i get it's an interesting question that i don't i don't know if any of us know exactly the answer to but i would say that like um you know even after 80 years of the Soviet Union. There were real debates back then about the new communist man and whether the minds had been so warped of people that they would never even care about these things. liberty or national identity or independence.

And then yet at the end, it was all still there. You know, it was it was very repressed and it went underground and people weren't allowed to talk about it, but they all still had it. And in fact, I was just listening the other day to this Murray Rothbard speech. from like the early nineties. And he was talking about how there was something where there was like a, like a camera crew interviewed, like a Chinese family under, uh, um, like a real deal Chinese communism.

I believe it was before Mao Zedong died. They were just saying all this crazy shit to the camera. They were like, would you rather your sons are like... healthy and live good lives, or would you rather they suffer but be loyal obedience to the state? And they were like, we would rather they be obedient to the state and blah, blah, blah, and all these things. And Murray Rothbard was saying he saw this interview.

And he, uh, he, he was talking to his friend. He was like, oh my God, this is horrible. Like it's hopeless. These people's minds have been warped. And then he was talking to his friend who's like a China expert who had been there a lot. And he was like, no, they're not. That's what they say when the cameras are around. Soon as the cameras go like that. So anyway, I'm just making the point there that like, there, there is like.

Look, even in the situation with Israel and Gaza, specifically Gaza, not even the West Bank, when you could look at it, when the peace talks were going on, support for Hamas plummeted. When the peace talks fell apart, support for Hamas went way back up. You know, every time there's an aggressive military campaign, support for Hamas goes back up. So I just think that like.

I'm more hopeful than not that like you could get to a place where like, but it requires like you have to like, if you do understand. the Ron Paul point about blowback, the General McChrystal point about insurgent math. You just realize that it's like, you're like, you're...

You're fighting in a way that produces more of the thing that you're fighting. And so the first step is to stop doing that. Like your, your cure is making the patient more sick. So stop doing that. And then let's see if maybe we could heal. What about the case against the Douglas Murray case of the death cult? and that a fundamental part of this process, Hamas, needs to be eliminated. Well, first of all, I would just say that, and I'm not saying this as a fan of democracy.

um i'm not like a big believer in democracy i believe in liberty and i think uh democracy is often um Not in line with Liberty. The Chinese government paid you to say that as well? That was, that's literally all I had to get out. I get to say what I want the rest of the podcast, but just that I had. No, I'm, well, I don't.

Well, no, I mean, my beef with the Chinese government would not be that they don't hold regular elections. My beef with them would be that they silence speech, that they put people in camps and things like that, the surveillance, that stuff. I think, look. When you call Israel a democracy, which I guess is right in the title of his book, And full disclosure, I haven't read the book, but I have listened to some of his thoughts on this stuff.

I think you run up against a real problem, which is that the creation of the state of Israel, even though he tried to walk away from those comments as Norm Finkelstein called out Benny Morris for writing in his book 1948, which is a great book.

knew it was going to involve transfer. That was Benny Morris's words. Now, when Finkelstein was grilling him on this on your podcast, he kind of said like, yeah, but that doesn't mean ethnic cleansing. That could be voluntary transfer. You know what I mean? But the point is...

The Zionist settlers, and they spoke about this openly, they all knew they had a major problem, which is like, well, you can't create a Jewish state if it's like... 50, 50, which is, and in all of Israel, it was much less than 50, 50, but even in like. the Israeli portion of the partition recommendation, it was very close to 50-50. Now, you can't really have a Jewish state with a 50-50 voter base because...

Now you're just kind of in a breeding war for the next generation. And or, you know, like or like who turns out the vote any more than we could hope it would be the prospect right now of making America an official Republican state. or an official Democrat. Well, how are you going to do that, man? It's like 50-50 between the two. And so I think what Benny Morris was saying was that they always knew.

some of these Arabs are going to have to get moved out of here so that we could have more of something, which ultimately where they got to like an 80-20, which is pretty much what Israel's maintained the whole time. Now, Benny Morris could quarrel about whether that necessarily meant voluntary, but when it happened, it wasn't voluntary. Okay. So like when it actually happened in effect.

It involved a massive amount, something somewhere between 700 and 800,000 Arabs being forcefully evicted out of this area. Now. That's one thing. You know, a lot of nations are started on some things like that. I suppose if you just did that and then you were left with your 80-20 split and you go, but we have elections from here on out.

still seems like kind of gaming the democratic system a little bit. You know what I mean? Like, like if I just, if I just deported 80% of Democrats and then say, look, Republicans win every election, you might be like, yeah, dude, but you didn't exactly get there democratically. You got there through force.

But forget that. I'll let that one go and just say, I'll call you a democracy if you just kept being a democracy like that moving forward. The real problem is the occupation that starts in 1967 because. Look, when you've occupied an area since 1967,

You can't even really call it an occupation anymore. It's an annexation. You know, you took these lands. You have control that you are what the definition of the government is. And you could call Hamas the government all you want to, but they're not the sovereign. They're not the final decision makers. Israel's the final decision maker. Hamas does not meaningfully in any way decide the biggest questions about Gaza. I'm talking before this war, not even, you know, pre-October 7th.

And so the problem Israel has in order to call themselves a democracy is that there's somewhere between five and six million people. Less now, because they've killed a lot of them. But there's somewhere between 5 and 6 million people who live under Israeli control who do not have voting rights.

And I just, by any other like reasonable, commonly held standard of democracy, we would not call that a democracy. I mean, like I'm not, again, I'm not even saying this to try to be inflammatory or try to pick on the Israelis. There's things about Israeli society I like. I don't hate the people there. I'm Jewish. I love Jewish people. But the fact is...

That's not a democracy. That's an apartheid state. Like, and that's just, I'm not even trying to be inflammatory when I say this. It's just literally describing what's in front of you. If we in America right now said. Black people no longer get to vote and black people can only live in these few neighborhoods.

we don't get to call ourselves a democracy anymore then, you know? And like, I'm not even coming at this from a pro-democracy point of view. I'm just saying like, if your defense of them is like, well, we're a democracy, which seems to be the case so much. Well, no, you're really not. You're really not, as long as you got millions of people who have no say in their own government, like, then you're really not a democracy. And so...

Again, so you could frame it as democracy versus death cult was his language for Hamas. It's like, all right, you know, it's a little bit difficult to accuse another group of being a death cult when the group you're supporting has killed so many more people than that.

Now, I'm not saying that's the only metric, like there's other things that are factors too. But the fact is that like you have, I mean, I don't know to look over the numbers for the whole history of the conflict, but the amount killed. by the Israelis on the Palestinian side versus the amount killed by the Palestinians.

you know, killing more people, maybe more than that. I don't exactly, you know, I'd have to look at the numbers, but Israel's called far, far, far more Palestinians than Palestinians have ever killed Israelis. And so it just, it rings a little hollow to me to just call them a death cult. We're the democracy, even though there's millions of people who can't vote over who rules them. But they're the death cult. I mean, look, they kill people in a more primitive, barbaric way, I guess.

You could say, you know, there's something a little bit cleaner about like, you know, when it's done by a government and it's collateral damage and it was done with sophisticated weaponry, you know, okay. still innocent people on the end of those bombs absolutely but there there is i think a powerful ethical difference when uh you mentioned about the eight-year-old girl right

If you're in your stated goals of the war is to do everything you can to avoid the death of that girl versus saying, you know, we love death more than we love life. And Israelis, democracy or not, are... pro-life, for life. There's a little, I mean, okay, I don't... I don't 100% disagree with you, but I think if I would say like the degree to which that matters.

after somebody's been convicted and before sentencing sometimes the judge will allow them to give a statement and like if their statement is like i'm very sorry for what i did and i'm so sorry to the family and this or that or that like that might be like life without parole rather than the death penalty you know what i mean like it might make that bit of difference in that and if you get up there and you're like hey i'm happy for what i did screw the family blow that that might

make a judge who was going to give you life without parole, give you the death penalty or something like, it's like that type of margin around the edge. Let's say like you're a really bad guy and I want to kill you. And you're at home with a bunch of women and children. And I know there's women and children there. Like, I know for a fact that if I blow up this building, it's going to kill all those babies, you know?

What I would be charged with is murder in the first degree. And the fact that I went in there and said like, well, listen, hold on. It's a shame that I had to kill those babies. I really just wanted to kill that one guy. I wish the babies weren't there. And they'll be like, yeah, but you knew they were there.

and you did it anyway, you get murder in the first degree. Maybe it would make some little difference tinkering around with the sentencing at the end of it, but it doesn't like in kind change what the crime is there. And so... I just think at a certain point when you're if you're doing something like.

You know, look, I'll say maybe with a little bit of an edge, you know, let's say Barack Obama wants to drone bomb, you know, this place to kill a terrorist and he thinks he can do it without killing. does it, and then it ends up killing some innocent civilians.

That's one thing. But once you've done it over and over and over again, and every single time it kills innocent civilians, and then there's a wedding and you order a drone bomb strike on a wedding. Like, no, you murdered those people. That's murder in the first degree. Like I just don't. And so yes, like.

You know, like whether you say out loud, oh, it sure is a shame that we got to kill all these kids when you're doing it over and over and you know, the action you're taking is going to kill more kids. I just don't think it like it's, yeah, it's a little bit different, but really not that much.

It's still pretty much. And then also when you mix in with that, the fact that like, you know, I mean, if you go and I'm not taking an opinion on the word genocide, I don't even like to get into that conversation. I feel like it just derails it anyway. What Israel's doing, whether you think it's a genocide or not, it's certainly not what most people envision when they hear the word genocide. But-

You know, if you look at South Africa's case that they promoted at the International Court of Justice, the whole thing is just quotes from Israeli leaders. And I'm just saying, like, by the way, it's not like they're always saying.

Oh, it sure is a shame that we had to kill that eight-year-old girl. They like half the time they say that when they're talking to the international community. And then the other half the time, they seem to basically be saying there's no such thing as an innocent eight-year-old girl. And so I guess I just don't find that argument to be very compelling, especially when the thing has been going on for so long. There is some disagreement I have with you there.

I think the thing you're implying is whenever they state it, it's not quite genuine to some degree. It might be genuine by some people. I'm not saying it's necessarily not. I'm saying that... When there's a lot of people who are saying the opposite, it doesn't seem like it's consistently genuine from the entire Israeli leadership class. And that even if it is genuine, when some people say it, that's kind of not enough.

to get away from the fact that it's, you know, when Tucker was on Pierce Morgan, he said the thing, he goes, you know, I don't like my tax dollars being used to intentionally kill children. And a lot of people really objected to that word intentionally. because I think so many of the defenders of Israel

fall behind this, like, no, no, no, that's not intentional. We're just trying to kill Hamas. But again, like I said, we would never accept that standard in like a domestic murder case. It's like, no, like... The thing is that if you know there are kids there and you know they're going to die, then that's intent. I think I agree with you fundamentally because war is hell and that's why I'm against war. But there is a difference. So I think we're mixing in a lot of things.

I think you're fundamentally against war. And that's why to you, it really doesn't matter. It is murder. It's just murder. And we shouldn't do murder. And there's a lot of... democracies with colorful flags and that justify murder. because they're trying very hard not to kill civilians. And then when you say, you look at the reality,

of the Obama administration, the entirety of the war in Iraq and Afghanistan, you're murdering civilians. Yes, you're trying to kill bad guys, but you're murdering civilians. That said, on a ethical consideration on which kind of ideals, ideologies you can build a society after the war. One that even on the surface level states that the value of every life. of every civilian life is equal and high in value. That's a good society. That's the concern with extremist ideology that

that basically is very difficult to build a flourishing society on. But then the argument against that is the one you said, which is like, yeah, well, Hamas is really supported now because... of the war. Right. But by the way, I don't disagree with the first part of your statement there. I just don't think it's in conflict with what I'm stating. It's like, look, I understand.

first of all, that like there is a difference between the way you're going to say prosecute crime domestically within your own country and the way you can prosecute. crime or a war between two different countries, right? Like maybe it's not exactly the same. You don't have cops that you can just send in. You can't arrest somebody and put them on trial. It's not the same. So like, fine, you could say, but the point I'm making is more like.

I'm just saying how we would think about these things in a domestic setting. We're talking about like morality here and morality by its very nature is something that rises above. you know, the, um, it rises above logistics. It rises above like nationalities or governments or borders or any of those things like what's right or wrong. Like if it's, if it's

wrong to rape somebody in New Jersey. It's also wrong to rape somebody in Central Africa. And so I'm just saying you're committing the same act that we would consider murder in the first degree here. And then just to go one step further. Like part of the reasons why people have different attitudes about the way two nations fight, like what we think of as war versus what we think as like, say, like a policing issue, like we would never accept. the idea that like, you know, if, if, if.

whatever, the same, the logic that's used in wars, used in World War II, even used in Iraq and Afghanistan, especially used in the war in Gaza. If, if, you know, if there was a bad guy, even a guy who had done something like October 7th, you know, at which we have school shooters and things like that here, you know, if there was an active duty school shooter and he's in a school shooting people and we know he's already killed like 25 people, blow up the school.

Hey, he's using them as human shields. No, it's not our fault. You see, listen, those deaths, those deaths, Lex, while tragic, were the school shooter's fault. Because he used all these people as human shields. We would never for a goddamn second, if those were our kids in there, we'd never accept that excuse. What? Yeah, that guy was bad. You still had an obligation to do something else.

That was never accepted. Now that we may look at things differently in the context of a war, but also by the way, I'm not sure I completely do, but. Typically speaking, when people think of wars, they're thinking of this government versus this government, this military versus this military. That's not the situation here. You know, so like while Israel is saying, hey, they're using human shields, it's also like.

And that is true, I think, to some degree. I think the Israelis overplay it a little bit, but there have been, I think, clear instances where Hamas is using human shields. But... It's kind of a flip side. of a different point. And like the other point is like, oh, well, why aren't they using their army or their air force or their Navy? Oh, right. Cause they don't have any of those.

Oh, that's right. So you're fighting a war against a people that don't have a government because you've denied them their right to have one. And so that's that's the thing where I do think if you've occupied the place since 1967. You almost now take on an obligation that you kind of have to almost conduct this as a police.

matter. You know, you're not allowed to just, cause otherwise, cause now we are getting awfully close to the scenario that we just laid out. We're like, oh, there's a school shooter, blow up the school. It's difficult to have a discussion about ethics. when you're talking about war. Really, at the core of it, all war is immoral. Yeah, I mean, by its very definition, it's innocent people dying, almost always, right? It's difficult to pick which is the just war.

And even World War II, because of the complexities that you mentioned, is difficult. Because it's Stalin. Well, as my buddy Daryl Cooper demonstrated, I think we can have a reasonable civil discussion about these things without anybody blowing their lid. We can all just talk. No, but look, I mean, look, there's so many.

It's the third rail like nothing else. Really, World War II and the Civil Rights Movement, I think, are the third rails of American politics that if you have any type of view that is not the... the approved, authorized view of how these events went, you're in a lot of trouble. If you wanted to compare Hitler to Stalin's body count at that time. Stalin was already a genocidal maniac, and Hitler had not gone genocidal yet.

So there is a weird dynamic that now in hindsight, it looks a little bit better because you go, yeah, but he went so genocidal at the end there, you know, but like, that's a weird decision at the time to ally with, with Joseph Stalin. when he had already done the worst things that Joseph Stalin had done, or at least a lot of the worst things he had done. I guess there were a lot more in the war as well, but.

I was curious, though, you didn't mention Mao. Is that funding again? Because he did even worse than Stalin. Is that the second thing? I'm not sure that's... officially known. Do we actually know that Mao killed anybody? I mean, all right, I'll come, I'll stay. Here we go. I'm going to blow my funding. Bad guy, that Mao Zedong. Do not care for him. I think the Chinese government officially says,

that he was 70% correct. Is that true? They actually broke it down to that 70%? But the 30% was being the worst mass murderer in human history? That's such a communist thing to do. Yeah, we measured it. We measured it and perfectly scientifically figured it out. Since you mentioned Daryl Cooper, you're friends with him. Can you tell me about him and tell me about the whole saga about where he got attacked after the Tucker interview? Yeah, yeah. So, well, Daryl...

I was just a big fan. And still, I'm really just a big fan of him. We chatted a few times, and I interviewed him on my podcast, and I consider us friends. Martyr Maid Podcast is his show, and it's just phenomenal. I found out about him from my guy is Scott Horton, who is a very close friend of mine. And I think the best. the best person on war in the country. He's just a genius. He runs the Libertarian Institute, and he's also been the editor at antiwar.com for many years now. So he first...

told me about Daryl. And what I knew of Daryl was just that he did a podcast with Jocko. And so they did their show together. And I listened to a couple episodes of it and really enjoyed it. And then it was Scott who was like, dude, you got to check out his podcast martyr mate. It's like the best history podcast you got. And I ended up listening to his, uh, The first thing I listened to of his was that fear and loathing in the New Jerusalem.

He's done a few things on Twitter where he's kind of like shit posting and stuff like that. But when you listen to his work, like when he lays down, like I'm going to put together this, this thing, I'm going to take years. to put together like a long presentation on the history of this conflict or the history of this, he has like- the utmost responsibility in the way that he tells the story and the way he presents it. I cannot understand how anyone would listen to his work.

and come away with the feeling that this guy is any type of Jew hater or Nazi apologist or anything like that. It's just not who he is. What Daryl said on Tucker's show. was that he goes, you know, I'll say this to be provocative sometimes to kind of rib my buddy, Jocko, who's like Anglo-Saxon. So this kind of gets to him. He goes, and I'm being a bit hyperbolic when I say this, but I'll sometimes say that. Winston Churchill was the chief villain of World War II.

Now he didn't commit the most atrocities. He wasn't like the worst person there, but he was a guy who was hell bent on kind of this thing becoming what it ultimately became. Whereas like. it, this might've just been an invasion of Poland. This may not have been this whole cascade of like the worst thing that ever happened in human history. Now the retelling of that is always people go, he said Churchill was the chief villain of the war, but it's like.

No, not exactly. You know what I mean? He's making a point, and I think he's putting out right now a long series on World War II. He just put the prologue to it, which was excellent, by the way. And I really just have, you know, listen, if. After it's out, maybe I'll come back and regret saying this, but I don't think I will. I really have trust that Darrell will handle this responsibly. And in fact, I think that he might be, and not because he's like...

angle or what he's attempting to do. I think just that he's. going to tell the truth and the truth will take you where it takes you. I think he's actually going to probably serve a function of bringing a lot of those types kind of back to reality and bringing them back to being like, like he. If you think he's going to be excusing the atrocities of the Nazis in this thing, I just don't think you're going to be happy with the end product if that's what you are coming into it for.

Okay, one thing I want to say is I think calling Daryl a Nazi Nazi sympathizer is just wrong, and it does a lot of damage. I think he's... He has a lot of value to his podcast. I think we're like, there's several things to sort of make very clear. I think as a really interesting guy, I'm sure I'll talk to him in the future, but I just want to lay on the table that. I think what he's saying about Churchill is just dead wrong. I think legitimately that statement.

removing the trolling from it is a revisionist history statement that I think is wrong. The invasion of the Soviet Union would have happened no matter what. And possibly, which I'm actually learning a lot more, Stalin could have gone the other way as well. That was going to be a global war, no matter what. The role of Churchill we can debate. And I still don't think he was a main instigator of that expansion there.

There's a lot of historical documentation of that. Well, look, that's a fair debate to have. And it'd be interesting to see you two kind of talk about that. Or may not even debate it, but just like have a conversation about that. I think the broader point you're making is a lot of, I mean, there's. Just a lot of trivialization of the World War II that happens.

in the west uh in the united states especially and that's used by neocons by oh yeah by warmongers to sort of oh i constantly i mean i've never i don't think I've done a bunch of Israel-Palestine debates. I don't think I've ever done one where World War II wasn't invoked and where that wasn't like, well, I mean, look.

Dresden, Hiroshima and Nagasaki. So you're going to tell me it's not okay. And immediately just, if you just look at it like that, like, let's say the official narrative is 100% true in World War II. Let's even say. Every aspect of the official narrative is really true. Like the lesson of World War II is that we should have gone to war sooner, which is essentially, right? Like the...

dominant mainstream narrative that Chamberlain is the failure. That was the problem, the appeasement. Churchill was the solution. If only Chamberlain had been Churchill, or if only we had... gone to war with Germany and, you know, whatever in 1933, we would have just, it would have been better. Okay. Let's say all of that's true.

It still doesn't follow from that, that therefore in every situation, appeasement is wrong and aggression is good. It doesn't follow from that. That's the only lesson of history. And that now it's just okay to slaughter civilians. it's okay to go to total war against a civilian population because this one time it was necessary. And the idea that, Bobby Kennedy said this to me, again, somebody who I really do love and admire in many ways, and I'm glad he's the health secretary.

I remember him saying this, evoking the Nazis and making a comparison between Hamas and the Nazis. And you're like, dude, Hamas doesn't even control Gaza, really. The Nazis had most of Europe at one point. This is just not an apples-to-apples conversation. You can't even compare the two in terms of what type of menace or threat they are to the world. Sure, maybe if Hamas had a lot of power, they'd use it in a bad way. But like-

That's true with like some homeless guy on the street too, but he doesn't have that power. So like, what are we talking about here? And so the way I do think that the way the world war two narrative is weaponized. has been, even if World War II itself was necessary and just, the way that that's been weaponized over the years has led to just like countless catastrophes. And like, you know, and it's always, there's always, it's not just like...

You know, I mean, I guess it's just in some ways there might be something positive about the fact that everybody's always called Hitler if they're bad. You know what I mean? But we we make Hitler the. you know, the face of what is evil eternally or something. He really does play the role of the devil in our society in a strange way. Um, but there is like, you know,

Saddam was the next Hitler, and Gaddafi was the next Hitler, and Bashar al-Assad was the next Hitler. Trump. Trump is Hitler. Hamas is Hitler. Except the problem is that none of them are Hitler. None of them are even close. It's just totally different. Yeah, and the amount of power is really important. It matters how much destructive power you have within you, the capabilities. But every major superpower with nuclear weapons...

has the potential to be that destructive. It's just unproductive. And yet the only ones who ever have dropped them are us. I was arguing with one guy on a podcast, and he said that. He goes, you can't allow dictators to have nuclear weapons because they might use them. And I was like, but we are the only ones who ever used them. And he goes, ah, come on.

That's naive or something like, wait, what? Why shouldn't that be pointed out? And I don't know. I mean, I'd prefer Iran not get nuclear weapons. I, you know. I think we're pushing them to probably want to pursue that. And I also think there's been a lot of propaganda about the nuclear program in Iran. I know at least since the 90s, according to Netanyahu, they've been five years away.

Yeah, I think there's a lot of warmongering going on about all parts of the world, Iran especially. I have a lot of friends. In Iran, from Iran, it's one of the most beautiful cultures in the world, like this just superpower of intellect and culture. And it's really sad and disappointing that the regime... is basically suppressing that culture. Yeah. You have to always remember,

There's parts of the world where the people are beautiful and we don't get to see it because of the suppression, the lack of freedom. Yeah. No, absolutely. So all that said. There does seem to be a lot of hatred of Jews on X. Yeah. How much of it do you think is... actual hate of Jews and how much of it is just trolls and grifters. conspiracy nerds, just, you know, cosplaying.

As Nazis? It's really hard to tell. I mean, I don't know. I don't know how you even figure it out. And I think this is one of the problems with... outrage culture. It's kind of one of the unintended consequences of it is that now You just have no way of knowing who's saying this just to get a rise out of you or who really sincerely means it or who's some version of both.

Um, then there's also, it's like, there's so many weird dynamics because there's no question. Like I see it all the time. I mean, I see a level of like Jew hatred on Twitter that I've never seen before in my own replies and other people's things like it. That's interesting. Like, first off, you're like, okay. what's going on here interesting sociological phenomena yeah right you know um yeah concerning and troubling and all of that stuff

But then you also see people who will be asking completely legitimate questions or making completely legitimate points that are called anti-Semitic. And then that, I think, does not help the dynamic at all, because now you're almost like, oh, there's... Number one, you just kind of you make the word meaningless. You take away the disincentive for anybody else to actually be a Jew hater.

I mean, I think there's a lot going on. You know, one of the things is that for young white men in America today, they've lived through the years of real insane progressive wokeism. And so, you know, which is something like my, like I'm 42. It's just a different thing for me. Like I come from a different culture and a different time that is just simply was not the case.

that when I was a teenager or when I was in college or when I was in my early 20s, that the school, the faculty, the politicians, Hollywood, all of them embraced racialism. You know, they all said we're playing identity politics and it is okay to dice people up along these racial lines and have that first and foremost in your mind.

You know, and there is this weird feeling over this last year and now with Trump being reelected that like we snapped our fingers and wokeism went away or something like that. But these guys still came up in this. that like one of the, the dangerous elements of playing this game was like, well, you think you're going to play this? And that like young straight white men aren't going to start playing this game too. Why the hell would they not? Like, why, why would they just accept?

We'll just sit here while everybody else is allowed to have a racial identity and a grievance about it. And yet we'll be the one group you could just stomp all over us. We're the bad guys. And that's part of the reason why I always oppose.

The woke insanity. I mean, first and foremost, just because I think it's wrong. I think it's wrong to like be shitty to people based on their racial group. And that includes white people, too. But then also, you're like, you don't see that this is going to result in something bad. So there's there's that. But I mean, clearly, and what's weird to me is that

I guess it's because a lot of the people who are the most upset about the anti-Semitism also happen to be supporting Israel. Like, there's a big correlation between that. But clearly, it's a huge factor in this. Like, it's not a coincidence that all of this rose up while Israel is just conducting this brutal campaign with our weapons and money. And so I always think with these things, whether it's with Putin or with Al Qaeda or with whoever, and I'm not saying like the guy who posts like.

Jew Haiti stuff on Twitter is the same as them. I'm just saying in all of these situations, you always kind of got to separate like what are legitimate grievances? And what are like, okay, that's you're wrong on that. And you shouldn't be doing that. You know, like, so it's, it's pretty easy for me to like, if I listened to like the Putin interview with Tucker, I thought his whole 30 minute opening thing was like horrible.

stupid, especially when you're talking to Tucker Carlson. You know, this is like for an American audience. You know how much that does not resonate with Americans being like, we have a historic claim over another. Our entire society is founded on. We think that's bullshit.

Like, that's the entire history of our society. It's like, no, it doesn't matter. Sorry. Like, literally read the Declaration of Independence. It just refutes everything Vladimir Putin said in the first 30 minutes. Our view of the world is that God wants us to be free. And we get to overthrow governments if they're infringing on our rights. So that was stupid. But then when he's talking about like.

NATO enlargement and bringing Ukraine into the American military alliance. You're like, OK, he's got a legitimate point there. We would not allow one of our neighbors to be brought into China or Russia's military alliance. And so likewise. When it comes to those guys, I do think that like you almost look, it is, it is just. true. It is the case that America has fought many wars over the last seven years. a very influential role in us fighting those wars.

And, you know, these were, uh, this was like a scheme that was cooked up by the neoconservatives. and the Likudniks in Israel that we would go through this path. But this has been confirmed by four-star General Wesley Clark. He literally said it was a study paid for by the Israelis that we were going to topple seven countries in five years.

We didn't get there in five years, but we've been made attempts to topple all of those countries since then. You know, you see Trump's bombing the Houthis because. They're pissed off about Israel's treatment of the Palestinians. And so they're trying to shut down their straits or whatever. And it's like, so we're just bombing another group on behalf of Israel. And if you really are concerned about the rise of Jew hatred, I would say like, look, it's much like.

You know, sometimes people argue where, you know, the thing I said in the beginning about the terrorists don't hate us for our freedom. They hate us because we're over there. And people would say, that's just what Osama bin Laden said. He just says he hates us for our military, but he really just hates us because he's an Islamist and we're free people or whatever. And he'd be like, okay, well, even if that's what's in his heart, that sure is his recruiting shtick.

That sure is how he gets other people to blow themselves up. And so even if you want to say, which might very well be the case, that some of these people just hate Jews. And it wouldn't matter if Israel was at war with Gaza or not. It's like, OK, but that sure is their recruiting shtick. That sure is how they get other people to go look at what these Jews are doing in our foreign policy. So I would I don't know. There's a lot going on. I do think. I think racialism of all different.

and wrong. It always just leads to sloppy thinking and bad results. It's always kind of ugly. And then weirdly, it also always ends up hurting the person. Like it's not good for you. It's not good for your soul. So I don't like seeing that stuff. but then i also think you know like I was saying before about there's like this hierarchy of outrages that you got to have in order to think and act. You have to kind of put these together. You know, I just hear a little bit, it's something that I'm...

You know, despite being described as a self-hating Jew, I am really not. I love Jewish people. I love Jewish culture. I've benefited a lot from it. It's in many ways made me the person I am. And I think it's influenced some of the best parts of me. But there is like a whininess and a hysteria about this stuff that I think is just like not healthy. I think it's not good. I've told many Jewish friends and family this privately, but it's like.

I'm an American. This has been a wonderful country to be Jewish. Jews are doing exceptionally well in this country. We are 2% of the population or so, and we are thriving by any metric. If mean stuff on Twitter... is our great burden to bear. I don't think we should be talking about it like we're in the middle of Nazi Germany or something like that. So I do think people get hysterical about it. In a way that's completely not productive. But to me, I think...

I think of the Jew-hating nerds and trolls on Twitter as just the other side of the woke leftist. I kind of get that, yeah. It's almost like a response, like you were saying. It's just that the woke weren't censored. and the response to the woke was censored, and now that on X, they're less censored or not censored. You just get to see it. And they're both annoying. I agree with that. They don't really help the discussion on Israel. They don't help the discussion on anything. In fact, I...

One of the reasons I stay away from that discussion of Israel, which I think is nuanced and really complicated in the way that we've been discussing, in order to have an intellectual like exploration of ideas. You have to be able to misstep and try ideas for size. And if I'm going to be punished severely by these, I'm okay being criticized, but when they're... like low brain takes that are just lying about me. Like he gets a huge amount of engagement.

Just because you're like thinking out loud and reading history and it's just annoying. And by the way, I'm really interested about World War II, probably in the way that Dan Carlin and Daryl Cooper are interested. Because it's such an interesting... stage on which human nature was explored in all its forms, the geopolitics of it.

Everybody on that stage was complicated. Also, there's a lot of fascinating military tactics and strategy and military technology, plus the nuclear bomb, all of that. That's like a moment in human history. Listen, I love Genghis Khan, Roman Empire, Alexander the Great. Those are all interesting studies of human history of military tactics.

of brutality of human nature, all of that. That's why I want to be able to discuss that. It's fascinating that humans are able to do that kind of thing. What causes them to do it? What were the dynamics involved, the propaganda on all sides? Could it have been avoided or not? Plus Stalin is part of this picture. Yeah. It's like, what the fuck? What?

You don't get characters. After the nuclear bomb, you're just not going to get characters like that. You're not going to get a global war of that kind. It might be a different one, maybe a cyber war or maybe a war in space. But we're not going to get this kind of war ever again. That was the last, the biggest and the last.

global war we're gonna get so i want to be able to like mouth off and explore and yeah argue with daryl cooper bought churchill and say stupid shit in the process and daryl says stupid shit in the process too and like together come up to So anyway, the trolls on the left and the right just make everything worse. And it's annoying. No, I agree with that. And I'm sure I'm not without my own bias. in this because I like, but from my own self-interested perspective,

I'm not saying like this is the main reason to be annoyed with them or anything like that. But I, what I personally get is all types of like. self-hating Jew, Nazi apologist, all this literally just because I criticize the way Israel's conducting this war. So I think that's like insane. But then I also feel like. And I'm not, Liz, I want to be clear and disclaim this. I'm not saying this is the worst thing about people who are Jew haters on Twitter.

But just from a personal perspective, I'm like, guys, you are not helping me, man. Like, it's like, I'll get people in my comments who I think are trying to like catch my back who just don't know I'm Jewish. And they're like, I'll say something critical of Israel. And then someone will argue with me and they'll be like, oh, look, a Jew came in here to defend Israel. And I'm like, dude, first of all, do you.

You're like, literally, you might as well be working for Mossad. You literally make the entire, you make the movement who's criticizing Israel look terrible, dude. You are literally the enemy that they would like to have. And so it's, it, there's a very weird dynamic in the Israel Palestine conflict where all of.

There's so many of the loons on both sides who almost seem like they're secretly working for the other side. Like if you, when you see the Palestinian protests and they're chanting death to America and all this stuff, you're like. What are you doing? Are you trying to make people more sympathetic to Israel? Because that's if if Rabbi Shmuley was working for.

Adolf Hitler or something like that. It would all make perfect sense. You were like, Oh, I get it. You sent this guy out to make everyone hate Jewish people. And then like, it's just, there's just a very, and then with the, um, With the Jew-hating post, too, it just feeds right into the...

the opposition side of how to caricature. You know, it's like, oh, so their game is they'll smear everybody who's a critic of Israel as being a Jew hater. So your answer is to just really be a Jew hater. Like, all right. I don't think that's helping. So maybe this is a good time to ask for your advice because these folks are the reason why I'm hesitant. So I've interviewed several world leaders recently. It's looking likely that I'll interview Vladimir Putin.

and several other similar level major world leaders. I've previously interviewed Benjamin Netanyahu for an hour. One of the biggest regrets I have about that interview is it was only an hour. I realized that, I mean, I learned a lot. But I think he's a really important historical figure. And I think it's impossible to have an effective conversation with him that's shorter than three hours. It looks like he's interested now to do round two with me for three or more hours.

And I've personally, so this is a bit of a therapy session, but I've personally been leaning against doing it. And I hate that I'm leaning against doing it. Because the reason I'm leaning against doing it is because of the very people you're talking about. Because I just don't want them to, on either side. pro-israel pro it doesn't really matter but the chanting sheep of animal farm jew hating or otherwise just make your life

They follow you around everywhere and online and make it difficult to think. I think whenever I come across these crowds, the woke left... or the whatever you call the Jew haters, the woke right, let's call them, they just... decrease the quality of my thoughts for the rest of the day. I feel dumber. It's like Rogan talks about when he hears a bad comedian, he feels like nothing is funny anymore. This is what I feel like when I read their thoughts.

It's like, I can't, I'm going to go read a book now because I need to like recover my brain. It's a dangerous kind of poison to let in your mind because then you're like, It's like, hey, I can't be thinking about you when I'm doing what I want to do. Like, I can't be thinking about what your reaction to this is going to be. The way I always thought about it was like when I get like, you know, hate online, which I'm, you know, always get.

i look at it like this like i got um I got a great family and a great career. And I really love what I do. I make really good money at what I do. And I do shows all the time. I get crowds of people who love what I do. I get a lot of people who listen to my podcast who love what I do. And it's like, so if I get all that and then the price that comes along with that, is there some people who are talk shit online? It's like.

That's a very, that's a very good price to pay for all of this. Like it's just, and I just like. I just kind of made a decision at a certain point that it's like, I'm just going to accept that that's the price of business here. That's what it costs. And then, okay, fine. And then sometimes I try to have fun with it or mock them or whatever to go back. To me, now again, I can never tell you what to do because it's a very personal price.

that you have to pay. And it's a very weird psychological dynamic. I mean, it's just not, it's almost something like that we were not evolved to deal with. and is very artificial. And it's very, you know, like if you're, if there's a group of like thousands of people who hate your guts and are furious at you, we're almost like hardwired to be like, well, I'm going to be killed now. Like that's the next thing that happens.

you're not supposed to get to know what just someone in Arkansas thinks about you right now, you know, but so that's a very personal like decision to make, but I kind of feel like. Me and you have already made the decision that we're in the arena and we're going to deal with that price. And so I just, from my perspective, I'm like, yeah, but how could you turn down?

getting three hours with Netanyahu. Like that would just be so interesting. And I'm not even saying, you know, like I hate the guy, but I'm not saying you should interview him like you hate the guy, or I'm not saying you even have to like grill it. But just if you get three hours with somebody. Something interesting is going to be revealed there. There'll be a benefit to that. It'll be interesting to just see him talk that way. There's also something about, as we kind of saw with, with Trump.

doing the podcasts and even with JD Vance doing some of the podcasts, there is something really interesting about this format. the long form podcast. where it just gets people to let down their guard and reveal themselves a little bit more. Like, it's not just the time factor. Like, that's a big one. It's a huge, huge one. But it's like, there's something about, like, if me and you are just like...

If we were having this conversation right now, but in back of us was like a cable news, you know, background of red and blue and sparks and a ticker at the bottom of the show. And then you just start interviewing someone. It's just a different. thing whereas this you just kind of like fall into conversation mode and I'd be interested to see him fall into that Putin too like I just think it's great first of all thank you for the encouragement

But to push back on the complexity of it a little bit, I think everything you said about your life is also true about my life, except family. I want to have a family, you son of a bitch, you bragging. On the podcast side, I can have a lot of incredible conversations. Some of my favorites is talking to programmers or video game designers. Or to you about Netanyahu versus talking to a world leader is a very specific thing. And people don't understand that, for example, you and I can mouth off.

We can be super supportive of NetYahoo, super critical. in a way that you can't do in front of the guy. Yeah, that's true. If you want to reveal something about that person, there's a different skill involved there in order to reveal how they think. who they are as a human being. You have to, just like we said with Derek Cooper, you have to humanize the person to a degree in order to let their mind flourish in front of you in order for them to break.

let down the barriers that they've put up. And Benjamin Netanyahu has put up a lot of barriers. Internally in Israel, he gets attacked insanely. There's a Game of Thrones constantly going on. And this guy has maintained power for a very long time. So he's very good at putting up those barriers. Plus, you know, globally gets attacked a lot. So the task there is difficult. And so each one is a puzzle.

And you have to make a decision, do you want to take this on as a project, which might become a lifelong project because of the consequences? You don't need to. There's a calculation there. It's not so self-evident that there is a correct and incorrect answer. And I do think that we've probably all had things like certain type of ventures.

in life where you're like, all right, no, I don't want to do that. But then you have to have a moment and be like, well, why is it you don't want it? Oh, is it just because it's going to be a lot of work? Is it just because you're scared of it? Is it just because this and those typically are not good reasons to not do something like, you know what I mean? And then now there might be there is a reasonable, I think, point that you made in there where it's like.

It is a different game to interview a world leader. That is a very different thing. Like talking to some comedian about his thoughts on all this stuff. is a very different thing than talking to a world leader and especially one who's conducting a brutal war as you're talking to them you know like that's a

And I don't know exactly what the way to navigate that is. I agree with you. It's not just to be like hostile and be like, I've got you here for three hours. I'm going to grill the shit. It's like, yeah, probably not the best way to do it. There's probably to like. have a conversation to talk to the guy, probably try to get some important questions in, but also give him a chance to breathe and be a person.

I just, from my perspective, but again, it's a very personal thing. For me, I just do think that I, like, I'm going, I hope you do it. Because I'd love to see that podcast. Okay, well, see, this is why, part of the reason I asked you is because I get a Dave Smith endorsement. There you go. When this completely ruins you. At least there's another guy who thought there's a chance there might be a good idea.

Because I don't know. That's the cool thing about the things we do. You've been through a lot of battles. You walked into a lot of tough debates. And it's like... You don't know. This could be the conversation that, like, ends you. I know. Well, I'll say that. I think that's one of the things that I love about doing debates. And there is something about that. Where I do kind of feel this. like i'm a little bit of like an adrenaline junkie i mean not like really you know i don't like

skydive or do stuff like that. But like doing standup is kind of like, you know, there's always something about that. That's like, you're risking a lot by doing it. You're like, you feel alive, you know, like not, and not like the way you do when you first start, but there is something about that. And there's something about, well, first of all, I just kind of, I feel there's kind of two things. Like number one, I feel like I'm obligated.

And I wouldn't say this for you, but I think this is true for me. I think I'm obligated to do like at least several debates a year. Um, and I think that, I think that if I'm going to go on shows like your show and Rogan show and, and Tucker's show and, you know, Candace or whoever else, you know, Patrick, but David and Tim pool, and I go on these big shows for long form things.

And I'm sitting there and I'm being like, okay, it's like this, like, and this is, and I think it's like this and that, then if I'm going to do that, I kind of have an obligation to like test myself against someone being like, no, it's not like that. And then, you know, like. showing that i think i can stand up to these these kind of challenges so i feel like i'm kind of obligated but then i do like there is a feeling to it where you're like hey man like this is not

My career is not a joke. Like I got little kids. This is how I support them, you know? And like. I am kind of taking my career in my hands every time I go do one of these debates. Like if I just get smoked and this guy just totally beats me up, it's like. I don't know. I don't know. How are you? How's anyone going to look at me again after that? You'd be like, oh, you acted like you had such a good point. And then this guy just totally destroyed your point. So, but that then kind of.

motivates me to be like, okay, I gotta really be on point. I gotta really make sure I've done my homework. I gotta make sure my argument's really tight. I gotta think about this thing from all ends. And then on the other level, it's like... If someone can do that to me, then kind of that's the way the movie is supposed to end.

You know, like if you, if I, if there is some hole in my argument that I'm just not thinking of, and then someone else can point it out to me and I got no response to it, then I kind of deserve to be humiliated publicly for that. So, all right. I don't know. It's kind of exciting in a way. Because the movie ends at some point. Well, that's true.

Unless you and your genius friends can figure out how to, you know, give us eternal life or something. I don't think I want to live. I don't think I want to live forever. I think flirting with that idea too much. is dangerous, this kind of transhumanism kind of idea. It's not a good way of thinking. Of course, I do want to heal diseases. extend human life, especially high quality of human life. But yeah. If we could live, if we could be in like much better shape and much healthier and like.

life by a few decades, I think that would be great. But I agree with you. I think there's supposed to be an expiration date on it. I think we're supposed to... There's something about like... scarcity being a necessary component in a lot of different fields. You know what I mean? Where it's like the life itself.

Having a finite amount of time on it, I think, makes it more precious. Yeah, at the individual level and then at the societal level, it just does seem like death is the way you get new ideas. It's like people kind of solidify their ideas and are unwilling to change their mind. And the only way you get new ideas. Right. The next generation has to take them over. Yeah. You have to keep churning.

Israel, I got to ask you about this. Let's talk about Jeffrey Epstein. I recently got attacked because of a couple of conversations I had with Tim Dillon three and four years ago. I love Tim Dillon. He's hilarious. I love Tim, too. I've known Tim for many years. Love that guy. Yeah. I bring up Jeffrey Epstein often because there's a...

It's a fascinating study of evil to me, whichever angle you take on it. And I think they're partially the talk shit, but I showed some skepticism that he's connected to massage. So to me, there's three, and I've evolved on that since then. By the way, I'm not actually sure it's Mossad. It could be any intelligence agency. It could be CIA.

But I was wondering if you could educate me. I did a little research on this last night. I looked into it a little more. And then I saw that you said he's definitely Mossad. Well, I don't know if I'd say, I didn't say he was definitely Mossad. I don't know my exact, I mean, I made one kind of jokey post. As is the case with almost any intelligence operation.

Look, I don't want to like poo-poo anybody's hopes here because I guess like the JFK files just got released and supposedly the rest of the Epstein files are coming out. And there's a lot of there's a major yearning right now. to get to the end of the movie where we find out everything that happened. I think it's great that people have that desire, and I hope more and more does come out. I think the truth is that with any intelligence operations...

We're probably never going to know all of the details of exactly what happened. The funny thing about intelligence agencies, and I've been regularly accused of being CIA, FSB, or Mossad, depending on the group that's attacking me. But I think it's a fascinating topic, and it's very difficult to know somebody's intelligence. But if you have any nuance, I want to discuss the nuances.

Then the comment is going to be that guy for sure is Mossad. If we're talking about Mossad or so on. But yeah, that's one of the things I didn't know. And I saw the, what is it, Alex Acosta said that. basically mentioned that Epstein is intelligent. That to me is like, okay, that's a piece of evidence. That's a really valuable piece of evidence that he's intelligent. And that was very, not just intelligent, but a massage. Because before that, I thought it might be CIA.

And it's quite possible that he was working with elements of both. I mean, as I think is often the case. I also think that's something that people get a little bit wrong, like when they think like, okay, this guy was CIA or this guy was Mossad. And then there's also, I think there's the possibility that there are rogue elements within those organizations. Like this is not necessarily coming from the director or what, you know, I don't know, but you look at the guy.

career trajectory tracks is completely unexplainable outside of being connected to intelligence. It's not just the one or two people saying that he's intelligence. It's like- You have no experience and you're a teacher at Dalton, which is like this incredibly elite.

a New York City private school, and then all of a sudden you're at Bear Stearns, and within two years, you've made partner, and you're worth hundreds of millions of dollars, and nobody knows where you made your money from. This just doesn't happen. And then you're just inserted into this world with all of the most highest level political leaders and cultural figures and stuff. But the thing that's amazing about the Jeffrey Epstein story is that it's like...

The level of evil and the level of corruption that it exposes, no matter what the answer is, like no matter what the answer is, it's you're going to you're going to tell me that there was a. In our country that involved, I mean, listen, dude, if you had said this shit before it came out, this would have been the wildest conspiracy theories, but a pedophile ring that involves the most.

powerful people in the United States of America and in the world, to some degree, touching the royal family, the Clintons, like all these people. And that this was known and covered up and then allowed to continue. I mean, like the. There's a blackmail operation that relies on raping American children. And like, if this is. Uh, you know, whether it's CIA or Mossad doesn't make one less, you know, it's equally horrible. But then there's like these elements where like, you're like, okay, so.

When it, when he first got arrested. And then he was given a slap on the wrist, and then the prosecutor says, well, I was told by the intelligence community that he's intelligence and to go easy on him. It's like, okay, okay. And you didn't resign in disgust that day?

You know what I mean? Like, I don't think that's too much to ask for. You know, there was the ABC reporter who said that she had the whole story. She's on the hot mic saying she had the whole story. And then the network told her to squash it. It's like, and you stayed working there. Like that's, I'm sorry. Like I'm not asking for, I'm not saying like we're all imperfect and none of us are heroes, but like you're in a news network and you uncovered a-

child raping ring that implicated the most powerful people in our society. And your news network told you we will not run this story because of our relationship with the royal family. And you did not resign in disgust. that day and take this story to every single independent, independent, you know, outlet that would maybe publish it. I'm sorry. It's like the thing it's so damning.

to the entire apparatus that we did not see, at the very least, see mass resignations over this. Forget even, like, at the very least, expect that it would have been prosecuted and shut down. And then, you know, still to this day, you know, even it's like... And I think Tucker Carlson just said this recently, but like, and I guess it's a little bit of a weird area when you're filming people raping children, but.

Why is everyone talking about the flight logs and the files? Where are the tapes? This guy was clearly taping people to blackmail them. Where are those? I don't know what the legal process of this is, but like. Because I think technically it's child porn. So like, yeah, OK, you can't just like distribute it out and let everybody watch it. But isn't there a way that like somebody has to sit down and watch it and see who is implicated in this and see who would like.

I just don't. And there seems to be there's even I think there's a lot of LARPing with this administration going on right now on this topic. But does anybody really expect that we're actually going to get to the bottom of this? Because I don't. And that in itself just tells you what a sham this whole goddamn system is.

One of the things that's so amazing about the Jeffrey Epstein story, right? I mean, you have all of that. And then of course the end of it, which is just like, wait a minute. Wait, what? Hold on. He's in like the most secure, like prison. And then he gets. The cameras go out and the correctional officers don't fill out the log and he's found dead. I mean, it's the most like it's just.

But when you look at it in totality, there's just like no getting around the huge indictment it is of this entire like everything. And I mean. Even the Trump administration, when Pam Bondi goes, We're going to release all of this information. We've only redacted what needs to be redacted for national security. The meme. Like, why does anything need to be redacted for national security? Like, I'm sorry.

You're telling me there's a pedophile ring and we can't tell you everything about it for national security. Why would that be related to national security? I mean, there's just it's like and I do think there's something and it's very interesting because.

You know, like we talked briefly, was that on air before we were talking about Sam Harris kind of like criticized me a little bit for not having the credentials to talk about some of this stuff, which, you know, like I even said, okay, he's got a point. But it's like. One of the things that guys like Sam Harris will talk about a lot is that, look, we need trust in institutions.

And this is his big thing where he goes, you know, these people like Joe Rogan and Dave Smith are just tearing down the institutions. And while I recognize that's an issue. I also think we need trust in these institutions. Well, it's like, yeah, but what? Yeah, well, if you talk in that tone, then it means you're not being emotional and you're only being logical and rational, which is like, I actually don't think is appropriate when you're talking about a child rapist ring.

whatever um that's my take on it but it's like okay so where where are these institutions i'm supposed to trust man you're telling me there's a pedophile ring that is at least in some degree associated with national security like what And how could you possibly have this story? Like if you did care about.

trust in institutions, then you should be even louder than me talking about, like, you gotta tell the truth on this story. Otherwise, we'll never have trust in these institutions. I'm the same, actually. I believe in institutions. Like, I... I think they have... So this is where you and I probably disagree on the libertarian side. I think... I think institutions, if they're run efficiently, can... Who's the utopian now? That's right. I mean, there is a utopian notion to it, for sure.

But because it's very possible that bureaucracies always destroy the productivity and the effectiveness of institutions. It's possible. It's a Lord Atkin kind of power corrupt type deal. And it's, you're absolutely right. If you believe in institutions, you should be. You should want to release everything about Epstein. You should want to be transparent as much as possible.

But the one thing I'm, and it is very suspicious. So I'm more and more becoming convinced that there's some intelligence agency connected to it. But I also want to, like setting that aside, just comment on. One thing where, again, it's super entertaining, but people say about me that I came out of nowhere. And that's proof that I'm intelligent.

So first of all, there is a track record of where I came from, quote unquote. It's just people are too lazy. And there is something sexy about like just saying fucking Mossad. Oh, he's denying it. Fucking Mossad. Yeah. By the way, the Mossad thing is a new thing. It used to be FSB and CIA. What do I want to say about that? Oh yeah, I've been gradually growing in popularity over the past... doing interviews, lectures, podcasts, and they've been just, it's actually very gradual.

I don't know what else to say. There's something I know I've experienced this too, right? Like there's such a difference in perspective because like if somebody, like if somebody just found me. this guy's brand new and he's doing like all these shows but you're like yeah well i don't know dude not from my perspective i'm not brand new like dude i've been doing i've been doing stand-up comedy for 19 years and i've been podcasting for like 15 years and you're like

And then when it like starts taking off, everybody's like, oh, this guy just came out of nowhere. And you're like, I mean, all right, I wish. I wish I had been aware that it was all this quick. But look, a lot of this stuff with so much of this too, it's just laziness. and people searching for confirmation bias. and people searching for a simpler story because that's easier.

So if you're if they believe that Epstein was Mossad and there's a clip of you where you're like, I don't know about that. Then they go, see, he's Mossad, too. And now that fits perfectly into my little story. I don't know. The truth is that. it's quite possible that people just aren't convinced. However, given enough time, Tim Dillon is always right about everything. So eventually you'll have to admit that he got it right.

And, you know, not to say the cliche cheesy thing, but it is true that the comedians sometimes say the obvious thing. that people are a little resistant to say, it ends up being true. Now we just landed some more credibility to Tim Dillon. Insanity. Great. Now, I do want to comment on the there's. The other aspect of me that came out of nowhere, fine. But I do get to talk to world leaders, which I have to really admit, I don't understand why. So the experience I've had is...

You basically gain a reputation. Like I talked to a lot of scientists early on. You get a reputation like this is an interesting person to talk to. And that travels. And then... you get fans and world leaders are humans too like they listen to the stuff and sometimes it's their family that listen yeah oftentimes right like their kids it seems to be a big one and so and that's just how it happens and so you sent an email hey you want to talk

And then their team or them directly in several cases, they just respond, yeah. And that's it. It's as simple as that. And they're human beings. And I think a lot of them as human beings. but shitty journalists, I should say. And it's hard for them to know which is the good journalist. By good, there's the cynical view that they want.

They want somebody who's just going to spot propaganda that aligned with their propaganda. No, they just want a good faith person in front of them. And I should also say that no single world leader has told me which questions to ask. There's this meme about my conversation with Modi that's scripted.

Nope, there was zero oversight. I have full control. Well, it's also like there's, I mean, obviously one of the major dynamics, which is just like one of the... most interesting kind of themes in the world, I think right now, but it's particularly true in America, is that like the corporate media is just. and this whatever this is, which is so weird that we still all call them podcasts.

Cause that's just not the right name for them at all. And none of us have had an iPod in quite a long time. And like, I don't know. It's just such a, like the first thing person came up with it. It's a cast on an iPod. It's a podcast. We all still use that term, even though it's, but whatever these, these shows on the internet have the audience.

And so that's a big factor, just that it's like, oh, this is where you can go to the audience. And then I would say, and I don't know exactly, like I have no idea, I should say the motivations inside any individual's heads, but I would say like in the case of Vladimir Putin. is completely blacked out in American media.

And to the point that even RT has been blocked out, they never play any of his speeches. They never allow you to hear like, look, this is what this guy's perspective is. It's very interesting in the same way that. They kind of all flipped out when Osama bin Laden's letter to America went viral on TikTok. And, you know, then all the talks of banning TikTok increased and stuff.

So for him, say like when he did the Tucker interview, or if he does an interview with you, well, that's a way for him to do an end around and allow his perspective to be heard, which I personally think is like. obviously a good thing. Like if you're going to go in a war and we're kind of at a war with Russia right now, you should know what is the other guy's perspective is not that you should take it as gospel, but, and then from Netanyahu's perspective, I would imagine.

They, Israel has a lot of control in a lot of different areas, but they have been losing the. internet battle very, very badly. And it's a major problem for Israel. I mean, I don't know. I still think. I think in a very strange way, everybody seems to be underestimating how grave the implications of all of this are. But Israel, the view of Israel from the world is never going to be the same. what it was before. And the generational divide on it is so stark.

Like everybody, you know, 40 and under who very quickly, you know, the time goes by quickly, pretty soon. That's, you know, the 40 and over crowd gets aged out pretty quickly. And this is just go, it's never going to be the perception of Israel that my parents' generation had ever again because of this war. You know, I'm sure to some degree, at least Netanyahu is like. Feels like he has to try to get...

his perspective into that internet conversation area. And so I think a lot of different people, you know, obviously it was Donald Trump's it's in a way it's kind of shocking. And, and I guess. Kind of Bobby Kennedy, when he was running for president and Vivek Ramaswamy, when he was running for president, they kind of were doing some of it even before Donald Trump was. But it is kind of crazy in a way that it took this long.

for politicians to figure out that it's like, oh, well, I guess we got to go where the audience is. That's the point of doing shows. Right? I mean, like, would you rather do a show You know, like with a million people or with 10 million people. It's like, well, OK, you guys do CNN all the time. Why wouldn't you do Joe Rogan's podcast? It's just a bigger audience. And those people get to vote, too. You reminded me with Netanyahu that.

One of the goals I have with the podcast is to have the kind of conversation that a historian would find useful 20 years from now, which is... Tough to do because you're going to get punished for it. Because it's mostly I want to reveal as much information as possible without the signaling, without the, you just want to know who was this person. Yeah, no, I think that's exactly right. And I think this was kind of what Daryl was saying.

I think that the part of the awful thing of always using World War II as the next example for the next war is that it's almost like... You're never this is, you know, they hate us for our freedom or Vladimir Putin's just mad and he wants to reconstitute the Soviet Union. It's like you they always insist that we can never treat our enemies as people.

and be like, this is a real person with real grievances. And even they might be a fanatic also. Like, I'm not saying they're not, but it's just like, there are these. like human qualities to it and it's always like you know whatever even when they were going um before they did the uh obama and hillary clinton did the regime change war in libya

It was like all this propaganda. He's buying up Viagra to rape all the women and he's going to go genocide. This guy would have been in power for decades. You know what I mean? Like it hadn't done that. And it's just like, oh, it's like the way you're supposed to think about war. is almost like these people have been possessed by pure evil. They are monsters and there's no talking to them. There's no dealing with them. It's just simply this, but.

like a good example just this recent conflict with the houthis where you have the Houthis in Yemen, which Saudi Arabia invaded in 2015 with the full backing of the United States of America. The Houthis maintained power for eight years through that. They maintained power until the Saudis finally gave up.

And it was literally like the Saudis were just killing hundreds of thousands of people. And then the Houthis would like get like a drone off at one of their oil refineries or something like that. And eventually they were just doing enough damage that it was like, ah, shit. All right. This isn't worth it anymore. And so they end it.

And so anyway, you have this thing, you're like, okay, so if they did, if they went through a total war for eight years, what do you think? Trump sending a few tomahawk missiles over there is gonna... stop them from doing this. Okay. But then... They didn't do anything. And there's, according to all reporting on it, they didn't do anything during the ceasefire.

It was only once the ceasefire broke down that they went back to attacking ships again that were coming through. So you just see this thing where you're like, it's not saying right or wrong or who's good or bad. It's like, look. Sometimes there's a diplomatic solution and there's not a military solution.

And like, in this case, you're like, it just shows you, okay, if there was a ceasefire here, these guys will chill out. What do you want to do again? Do you want to go to total war with it? Cause like, okay, we could overthrow the Houthis. We, if the U S invades yet. He's like, does anyone here really have the appetite for another catastrophic war in the Middle East?

against the poorest country in the Middle East, you know, or we could pursue this diplomatic route, which seemed at least, I mean, I'm just saying based on the evidence that they weren't attacking ships during the ceasefire, seems like there could be a diplomatic solution here. And so there's just like a lot. And the problem is when you don't like.

If you make everybody monsters and they're not human beings, well, you can't do diplomacy with monsters. You can't negotiate with monsters, but you can with humans. And like, you know, I'm sure there are, you know, like to our earlier discussion, like maybe there are times where you're not, you shouldn't negotiate or you can't negotiate with humans, but it's better if you can. And we could use a lot more of that thinking.

Can we take that idea and move to the war in Ukraine? Sure. What do you think is the path for peace there? like infinitely preferable to what Biden was doing. You know, what puts Donald Trump, and I don't think everything he's done has been perfect. And I really did not like that mineral.

the deal that he was floating out for a while there. And I think maybe that might be the best thing that came out of that Oval Office thing is that maybe that, you know, Donald Trump was going to be very tough to do business like this. And it's like, yeah, we shouldn't be doing this business deal anyway. But.

And by the way, I don't think we should do it on a few. Number one, principally, I think it is kind of like bullying Ukraine out of resources. And from what I understand, they don't even have that many like fine minerals, but whatever. Well, look, if he was selling it to the Lenskias, that's kind of a security guarantee. you know because like hey if we're in business then if putin messes with you he's messing with us

But from my perspective, like that's the whole point is you don't want to get into the business of giving out security guarantees. I mean, this is a real, this is why George Washington was against entangling alliances. Like you give out war guarantees to too many places.

You might have to fight a lot more wars than you otherwise would have fought. And also like there's simply, we're in this weird position where America postures, like they're so tough, but really when it comes down to it, we're not going to war in Ukraine. There's no political will here. Try to convince the American people. We should send our boys together. Like, I understand you're from the region, but like for you, or you have roots from there, but like.

To the average American, the idea of going to war over whether Luhansk is ruled by Kiev or Moscow is just. They don't even know what Luhansk is. And if they met someone from there would probably just assume they were Russian. You know what I mean? And they might be, but whatever. I think the first step to a path to peace is that you have to want to get a path to peace.

So I think Trump's doing a good job in that. Do you think all three sides want peace from what you understand? Obviously, Trump legitimately, fully, with an urgency, wants peace. I think for sure Trump wants peace. I also think Putin wants to wrap the conflict up, and I think that Putin has been willing to deal.

for the entire lead up to the war and pretty much throughout the war. And there's been a lot of solid reporting on this. And I mean, the sources on it are pretty impeccable. The head of NATO. I always mess up his name, but he literally said that in late 2021, that Vladimir Putin actually sent a draft agreement.

And that his condition for not invading is like, I will not invade, but you have to put it in writing. Like he sent a draft treaty to them. You have to put in writing that Ukraine will not join NATO. And then Stoltenberg bragged. about how he said no. Because we won't let Vladimir Putin dictate to us whether we can expand NATO or not. And then he was bragging. He was like, and look what he got more NATO expansion, Finland and this and that. So look at that. It didn't even seem to notice like.

that wait a minute you're admitting that you could have just promised not to bring ukraine into nato and saved hundreds of thousands of lives seems like it would have been a much better deal It's going to be a much better deal than what Ukraine will ultimately end up getting. So I do think, I think also the Joe Biden's CIA director, who was a CIA director's whole four years, William Burns. Uh, when he was ambassador to Russia, he wrote the net means yet.

And in the memo, and again, this was dumped by Julian Assange, this wasn't for the public. This was just him writing to Condoleezza Rice to tell the secretary of state his assessment. And he said that his exact words were a decision Russia does not want to have to make. And this was the decision about whether to invade Ukraine or not.

And he was like, they say, if you keep pushing for Ukrainian entry into NATO, this could lead to a civil war and even worse. And in that situation, Russia would have to decide whether or not to intervene, a decision Russia does not want to have to make. So essentially, it's like, I think it's pretty clear from all sides that Putin didn't want it to come to this. And look, I mean, even after the coup in 2014. He took Crimea, but he didn't invade.

the country. He may have sent special forces in, but I mean, not the full-scale 2022 invasion. And even the civil war going all that, you know, he did, it seemed like he, I'm not defending the decision. I'm just saying it seemed like he reluctantly. debate. You know, what was it in 2014 or 15 when they had the plebiscites in Crimea and in the Donbass region and they voted to be independent? He didn't take them then.

I mean, he could have used that as a pretense for like, hey, they voted to be with us and he didn't. I think he wants to end the war. Zelensky, from everything he's said publicly, seems like he still feels like. I mean, I'm just taking them at his word here that it's like, well, no, look like we could end the war, but we got to end the war.

It seems like he's moved from his position being like, no, we have to reclaim all of our territory to now his position is kind of like, all right, maybe we don't reclaim all of it, but we got to be given some type of security guarantee. In the future. I think the problem with that is just again, like.

I don't mean to be cruel about this because like it sucks that there's little countries that are next to big countries that kind of get bullied around about them. But there also is a bit of an entitlement to demanding a security guarantee. Like what exactly do you mean? from America? What, that will go to war if you're invaded? Why do we owe that to anybody? Like, that's crazy. I'm sorry. You can just sign up to say that we'll go to war if anybody invades anybody.

I mean, I hope nobody invades anybody, but that I don't want us to get dragged into that. That's a recipe for always being at war, you know, and I don't think that's right for our country. So essentially, I think Trump and Putin want peace. And if that's the case, I think we'll ultimately get to an end of this war. So there's a lot of stuff to say here. Let's actually start at the beginning, at the foundation of this, I think, the thing that we left unsaid.

That's important to say is that Putin invaded Ukraine in February 24th, 2022. And I think he is, at least from my perspective, the person who started the war. You could talk about NATO expansion. You could talk about any other thing that led to it. You could start at the collapse of the Soviet Union. You can go all the way back as he did, a thousand years. The reality is, and this goes to our deep discussion about the morality of war. The guy that like pulls the trigger first.

non-accidentally and keeps pulling the trigger. That's the guy who's at fault. Oh, I agree. I'll say one standard. Like one standard for everybody. The standard that I laid out before is the same one I said. It's like, did you absolutely have to do that? You know, once you start killing people by the hundreds of thousands, it's like, was there any other option? Are you telling me like you absolutely had to do this?

And I don't think that's right. You know, my friend, Scott Horton, who I was talking to you about, who just totally brilliant guy, even in his book, there's a whole chapter of all the other options of what Vladimir Putin could do. So you're absolutely right. And there's a weird thing where like. Like if you say that the West provoked this conflict. That is a very different thing than saying that this conflict is, that this invasion was justified. And in the same way that like, you know, if you-

If you were at a bar and someone goes and spits in another guy's face and then he pulls out a gun and murders them right there, like he's not justified in doing that. That is not okay. You don't get to murder someone because they spit in your face.

If you were talking about like, why did he murder that guy? I'd be like, oh, because he walked up and spit in his face. That's why it happened. And that that is essentially my contention about this war. And it is I think it's just crystal clear that that's why it happened. Listen, it may be right or it may be wrong. If China or Russia ever... like backed a street put.

to overthrow the democratically elected government in Mexico and then install a pro-Chinese or a pro-Russian government and then started pumping arms into that conflict and then kept floating out the idea that they were going to bring them into their military alliance, DC would simply not allow that. You cannot do that. Any more than the Soviet Union could put nukes in Cuba. Like, sorry. That should be said that that's really Cold War 20th century and Yocon thinking, right?

It is the way the world works, but you're just still punished. I don't think outside of the neoconservatives, listen, whether you're talking about the neoconservatives or going way before any other group that has ever had control of U.S. foreign policy, going back to the. The Cold Warriors, the... Truman administration, the Eisenhower administration. I think you could take this back to Thomas Jefferson. This happened in 1801.

There is simply no way that they would allow a foreign great power to come bring our neighbor, overthrow their government, and then bring our neighbor into their military alliance. I think there's no great power that would ever tolerate that. First of all, we're in a post-nuclear world, right? So, meaning post... There's nuclear weapons. So the threat... of somebody being on your border is just not the same kind of threat when you're in nuclear power.

which is why you look at Finland. No, I think in some ways it's more of a threat in some ways. Well, Putin is not upset about Finland joining NATO nearly as much. I'm just saying to Vladimir Putin in his own words. What his issue always was, was the military hardware that comes along with NATO membership. So it's not just that you get into NATO, but then you get all that military hardware there. And he made a huge deal about the dual use rocket launchers in Poland.

which George W. Bush put there after 9-11. So I think all of those things are factors. I think Ukraine, the Crimea being their only year long warm water port, I think there's like several, you know, like elements to it. But I do think a huge part of it is that they're also the country's been invaded through Ukraine. uh, multiple times. And so there's just, yeah, it's, it's, he, I think very reasonably.

within the grading on a curve of how reasonable governments are. He saw that as a security threat. But we should make very clear, because the way that comes across, the full responsibility. of the invasion of Ukraine lays at the hands of Vladimir Putin. I completely agree with that. Vladimir Putin launched a war where, again, I don't know exactly what the numbers are. I've read a whole bunch of estimates, some that contradict each other, but the consensus seems to be it's at least...

In the hundreds of thousands, possibly well north of a million, if you're talking about the casualties on both sides. And Vladimir Putin launched a war that led to that. And he's responsible for that. That being said, you can also point out that the. Really what we're talking about here is the... George H.W. Bush administration, the Clintons. Bush again, Obama and then Trump.

And the people who were in charge of the foreign policy in those administrations, the same ones who gave us Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Somalia, Yemen, they were also in charge of our European foreign policy. And they had the most reckless. The most reckless policy of all. was their NATO policy and that they drove up to this.

conflict with Russia with nothing but off ramp after off ramp after off ramp and consciously decided that we're not going to take any of those. We're going to drive it all the way up to this point. And Thomas Friedman for the New York Times interviewed George Kennan in 1998. And this is George Kennan was the like the. Cold Warrior. He's credited as founding the containment strategy in the Cold War.

And he was talking about the first round of NATO expansion, which he and many other foreign policy graybeards opposed. And he was talking and he was like, this is the worst thing we could possibly do after the fall of the Soviet Union. to now say that we had this alliance in NATO that was an anti-Russian military alliance. And now that the Soviet Union isn't there anymore, and it's Boris Yeltsin's Russia, that now we're going to win.

expand NATO because of that. And he literally said in 1998, he goes, the people advocating that we expand NATO are going to continue advocating it and advocating it and advocating it. And then there will be a Russian reaction. And then they'll say, see, that's why we were right to expand NATO. But they'll get this completely wrong. i really have no idea what the timeline is going to look like i'm hoping sooner rather than later i think like um

I think Donald Trump would love nothing more than to have some type of like big spectacle of ending this war, some type of big press conference or some type of, you know what I mean? And so I'm sure. My guess would be that's where Trump's mind is, is how to do this in the best way that sells him the best. Already we're in a position where Donald Trump has.

put a lot of political capital chips into the middle of the table that I can end this war, you know, and he's going to look very, very bad if he can't. So he's very highly incentivized to get this thing done as quick as possible. And so hopefully that can happen soon. It would be great if it could happen in the next month. Yeah, people on both sides outside of Donald Trump are telling me that it's a process.

Yeah. There's a kind of implication that's going to take a while, which I really hate. I really love Donald Trump's urgency. Well, it's also terrible. There's something really awful. You know, look, innocent people dying in war at any time is terrible, but there is something profoundly awful. And I'm old enough now that I've seen this a few times happen.

I've lived through it a few times. I've read about it happening earlier, but it's like once you've kind of already decided the war's over and people still die, you know what I mean? There's something almost like sad or about that. Cause it's always like. come on you already know you know like when there'd be like a big you know there'd be like a bombing campaign in in uh in afghanistan like when we all already knew

We were a few months away from ending the war. You're like, you got to kill more people like on the way out. We already know we're leaving. We already know that because there's something, at least in the beginning, they could kind of hide behind this justification or.

They could be like, listen, we're going to overthrow the Taliban and we're going to install our new government. They're going to be a democracy. It's going really good. We have to do this in order to do this bigger project. But then by the end, you're like. We're not even pretending anymore that we're doing anything more positive. It's just someone dying in a senseless thing we never should have been in.

Well, in the spirit of that, that's why I traveled to Moscow and will travel to Moscow again in the near future to likely interview Vladimir Putin and hopefully travel back to Ukraine, which I did to... talk again with Volodymyr Zelensky or... with whoever the future president is. You'll be the only guy who's interviewed both of them, I think, during this war, right? And I have to say, the border crossing is getting increasingly more intense.

like yeah i went i went to canada last week and i didn't care for that so i'm sure primarily it's the nations of war as it was in ukraine and it's fucking it's like it's dangerous to do both it's also like i think something that um I think something that's a little bit foreign, no pun intended, to America is You know, we've fought in a lot of wars. over the last say 25 years.

you know 50 years whatever but all of them um including in a way the the world wars even in the 20th century like but it's been since 1812 that we fought one on our shore And none of the other ones, I mean, I guess Pearl Harbor, but even Pearl Harbor, that was a one-off and it was only kind, you know, it was America technically, but it wasn't mainland America, you know? And so we're fighting wars like...

But it's a very different thing for two neighboring countries to fight. And even though most of the fighting has been done on the Ukrainian side, not all of it, like there have, you know, there, I think there still are areas in Russia, like inside Russia's borders where there's action. And so it's just like. There's something so much more real about that.

That's not just like, you know, the words we're used to are we, we send a military that is a hundred thousand times more sophisticated than anything. It'll be meeting on the ground over to a third world country.

to go do that now as we've found out over the years there's still a lot of challenges to that even when your side has night vision goggles and the other one doesn't and your side can call in airstrikes and the other one can't and your side has all this sophisticated training and the other side's practicing on monkey bars still very hard to occupy a people and dominate them and defeat an insurgency. But that's very different.

than like two nation states on right next to each other on the border. Like there's just a real feeling of like. survival in that moment. And I do think that probably I don't understand this as well as you do, and probably you don't even understand it as well as maybe like an older generation of Russians and Ukrainians would. both Russia and Ukraine in their own ways got So absolutely.

fucked over in the 20th century multiple times in a way that Americans just, it is just too foreign to us to even understand anything like that. Like millions of people starving to death. being invaded, the entire nation collapsing, and the Russian government collapsed twice in 100 years. Right. That's, that's pretty like, that's traumatic. And we just simply have never been through anything like that. And so if you, when you have that kind of like.

trauma as a society and then there's a war on your border i'm sure there's a whole lot of different kind of feelings that we just can't relate to plus a history in both nations of super sophisticated and expansive intelligence agencies right right right yeah that's a very good point yeah You host a podcast called Part of the Problem. Yes. What have you learned through that whole process of interviewing some interesting people?

And are there topics you cover that make you sweat still to this day? It feels like going into the fire. What I've learned just from the podcast is that there is... There's an interesting relationship that you build with your audience. I travel a lot and I do shows a lot. I meet people who listen to the show. I've had this experience before. I kind of had this experience with you where me and you met once.

I think, before today. Me and you actually met on a very interesting night. I don't know if you remember this, but we were at... Before the Comedy Mothership was built, you came by a Joe Rogan and Friends show at the Vulture. Yeah. And it was while Joe was going through the shitstorm of cancel culture, and he was on the phone with Dana White and stuff in the back. It was a wild night. What a wild night, yeah. Then at the same time, right?

we just kind of met that one time and then we talked on the phone and now we're doing this show i kind of i know you already yeah like i already know you and it's not just that we have friends of friends but i've just like seen so much of your stuff that it's like i know who you are

And then it's weird because people come up to you and they're like that. It's like they know you. And I've had this experience. I had this experience with Joe. Like I knew him before I knew him. And so that was kind of like one of the things.

that I really learned from doing the podcast over the years was like how much that's actually a relationship. Like you actually have a relationship with your listeners and, and almost like in the same way, in the same way that like you know you can't lie to people like in your life you also can't lie to your like they're a relationship too like you can't lie to your your audience and that i think that there's

Like there's, there's often almost like kind of shortcuts that are presented before you, but there is a payoff to not taking the shortcuts and to like kind of doing it the way you want to do it. What do you think is the number of hours it takes? to form a relationship because I absolutely agree with you. First of all, I should say I'm a huge podcast fan.

I've listened to you as a guest and your own show a lot. So yeah, I think with you, I've already crossed the threshold of hours where I feel like we're friends. And I guess because you listen to me, it's the other way, which are like separate parallel dimensions. It's very weird. It's very strange in a way. It's very interesting. And it's also, there's something there, which is more your area of expertise than mine, but there's something there where like technology is playing this wild role.

Like we could have two, a two way friendship without actually having to meet each other, all facilitated by the machines that we built. It's very trippy. I think it's probably like. I'll say it's like 50 hours, maybe 20, 20 to 50 hour ranges when you're like, okay. It's kind of interesting in a way, right? Because like the, the thing before like. the Joe Rogan experience and what was like kind of the thing that made comedians big. The things before that used to be like

Letterman and Leno and Conan. Comedians would get a seven-minute set. on there. And even if you do great... like if you're just like you killed and someone watching is like i love that comedian that comedian's amazing first of all unless they were like on social media and then went and like shoot you out there was no um

There was no way to connect. It'd just be like, love that guy. Anyway, back to my life. And then maybe you'll remember him. And maybe when he's coming to town, you'd see, oh, that same guy I saw in Conan is going to be at the local comedy club or something, maybe. But then like Rogan became the main thing. And now they didn't just see you do seven minutes of standup. They sat and listened to you for three hours. So even let's just say even off that one.

off the one three-hour podcast, you come away knowing a lot more about that person. It's not like just a little taste. You know a lot about it. But there is, I probably would put the threshold at... 40 to 50 hours, like if you've consumed 40 to 50 hours of somebody, especially when they're doing what we do on these shows where you're just, you're speaking very, um. You're speaking in a very unguarded manner.

Uh, even though like, this is your show and, and you asked like a lot of questions, you don't know exactly where this is going to go. You know, you're, you're, uh, then, then you're seeing what I say and then go, huh? Okay. Well, let me ask something based off that. Let me make it.

point based off that we're both kind of like unguarded and when you consume somebody like that for for like 40 50 hours you do see into their soul i think there's almost no way there's no way to avoid that and and also I would say if they're not letting you see into their soul, you'll notice that.

And you know that about them. This is a guarded person. This was ultimately Kamala Harris's issue, right? And this is why she was probably, you know, correct not to do Rogan. Even though everyone looks back at that and says like, no, no, no, this was the big disaster of her campaign. It's like...

She was so guarded in every single interview that she ever did. She was always constantly not trying to let you see who she really was. And if she was going to try that on Rogan, that would have been so apparent. to everybody involved. So you've had a lot of intense conversations on JRE. What do you appreciate most about Joe as a human being, as a conversation partner? I can't overstate how

how much I love Joe and how much I admire him. Not as much as Ron Paul. Just let's be clear. There's like a hierarchy here. He's close, man. Holy shit. They're both like... You know, there's like very few. That means a lot. Well, there's Ron, like Ron Paul and Joe Rogan. I'd like our viewers are like my generals.

yeah like and i'm a soldier and those are my those are my guys like if if joe rogan pointed to some guy and said you got to go fight that guy right now i'd be like all right i gotta go fight that guy or what you know ron paul too i just think It's both very personally for me, you know, like Ron Paul, like introduced me to like a set of ideas that like changed my life and, and I'm just enormously grateful for that. Joe Rogan was like I was a huge Joe Rogan fan before the Joe Rogan experience

Like I'm an old school Joe Rogan head. I used to go on Joe Rogan.net. Websites used to end with that. Before Jerry, before like whatever it is. Before everything. I remember, I was a fan of his before he confronted Carlos Mencia. And the day he confronted Carlos Mencia, I watched the video on his website. It was like, oh shit, Joe Rogan called him out. Dude, this is the craziest thing ever.

And then, and then when I was a fan that like, when he started the podcast, I remember going, this is going to be bad. because he's going to be so good at this because he's got so much interesting to say And, um, I didn't realize it was going to be quite what it became, but I did think like, oh, this is going to be an awesome thing. And then, so there's like that. So like, I always really admired him and I was always a huge fan of his and then. He literally not only did he like change my life.

but he changed like all of my friends' lives. Like, it's like a very weird situation. Like he's like the, he's the Santa Claus of my world. Like he's literally just, and, and there was something like, I don't know, man, he's just. He's just a very genuine person, and he really derives a lot of pleasure out of the fact that he gets to help.

the people who he sees as like the good guys, like the guys worth helping. And I just think that's like such an unbelievable thing. You know, I had the first time Rogan had me on his podcast. was, I believe, in 2016. And I had like... I might have had like 5,000 followers or something like that. Like I was completely unknown.

It was like, I did nothing for him. It was just the fact that he heard me on Ari's show and he was like, oh, I like what this guy's got to say. I think this is cool. Like, let's talk about it. And, um... Yeah, I mean, he's just like, you know, again, he's just been such a great guy to me.

Um, and, and, and at every little angle, like everything, you know, you open for him, he takes care of you better than anybody else does. You'd work his club, his club pays better than anybody else does. He, you know, like just everything is always like. He's always great to the people who are around him. It's just hard to over, like, you know, again, I have a wife, I have two little kids.

Like he's put me in a situation where I can like provide a great life for them. And like, don't get me wrong. I mean, you know, like I did something with the opportunity. It's not like he just gave me, you know, like, it's like he gave me the opportunity and I did something with it.

But still, I mean, he didn't have to give me that opportunity. And I will always, I will go to my grave being enormously grateful for his friendship and his, um, his, you know, the platform that he's given me. And also just, he is like. And I try not to abuse this, but there's been like a few points like over the years where I was like, I really need advice on this. And I've gone to him and he's been like the absolute best.

At literally every single time I've followed it a few times, a few times I didn't follow his advice and I really regret not following his advice, but he was the absolute best like guy to be like, all right, let's talk about this.

Um, which, and the last thing I'll say is that it was freaking crazy. Is that cause I. He's like, you know, got more shit going on than anybody else in the world and is still very interested to take time out to like discuss some thing that I'm asking him about, which is.

a really, really great quality. Yeah. Always takes a phone call. Yeah. You're right about the advice. He's, uh, he's, his advice is spot on and it's, um, it's often the ones for me personally, uh, what's needed is like, yeah that he's really good at like making you feel like don't fucking worry about it just yeah just like move on it's the don't read the comments thing but generally yeah that's right yeah just like fuck it and there's he has a whole that whole vibe

effortless, but I think when you look at it seriously, especially in contrast with journalists, there's a fearlessness there. 100%. Like that not giving a fuck. I mean, he says it's because of fucking money or any of that. I don't think so. It's more than that.

I mean, I'm sure that's a component of it, but there's people who have that who still don't have this fearlessness. Most people who have money, a lot of money are actually become more scared. Yeah. Because they like the comfort of just like normal life. Because when you're... taking risks you're gonna pay for it even if you have money not just financially just like it's gonna it's gonna hurt it's gonna disturb your life it's gonna create turbulence yeah the guy is fearless and follows

Just his genuine curiosity. It's like an inspiration to me, friendships aside, just inspiration of how great of a conversationalist he is. He legitimately didn't give a fuck if he talks to any of the presidential candidates or not. If he... He'll just talk to friends just because he wants to. There's no clickbaitiness to it. There's no giving a shit above views.

I mean, during the COVID stuff, man, I mean, he was like interviewing Dr. McCullough and who's the other one? Malone, Dr. Malone and had Bobby Kennedy, all these people like at this time when it was like. So and he's had it with me before, too, like talking about Ukraine and Israel, like at the times when it's really white hot. You know what I mean? And like, there's this huge penalty on not going along with the regime's talking points. And he's like.

Like, it's really hard to overstate it. I mean, there used to be nothing like this. It used to be that if CNN and Fox News agreed, well, then that was it. That was the line now. And now we got the biggest show in the country will actually allow the other perspective on and allow people to like challenge the regime. I think it's been. historic. I think also there are shows, there are people that just are constantly conspiracy theorists.

which is fine also, but I sometimes feel that those lack genuineness. They kind of put themselves in a bin or everything. You question everything to a point where like, I don't know, I feel like you're not getting closer to the truth when you question everything. There is something that some people in the conspiracy world do, which is like...

they speak about something with certainty when they're really not certain about it. And it's fine to ask questions and it's fine to speculate about things, but you also have to... You just, it's true in general in life. You gotta be really careful about like presuming your conclusion. and then working backward from there. And then sometimes when you have one or like, it's just, it's a matter of being sloppy versus not being sloppy. And like, sometimes people, like I remember for a long time.

Back in the day in the 9-11 truth. movement, there was this one of the huge smoking guns that they would point to was that in the 90s, there was this one document, I'm blanking on the title of it, but it was from PNAC, the Project for a New American Century. And this was the think tank or one of the think tanks of the neoconservative. like all the big neoconservatives were involved in PNAC, from Dick Cheney to Rumsfeld, Richard Perle, David Worms, all the big neoconservatives.

And there was this one document where they basically, they were like, you know, they're- project for the new American century was how we're going to have hegemony for another hundred years. Now that we won the 20th century, how are we going to win the 21st century? And they were like, okay, well, here's what we want to do. We want to start multiple wars in the Middle East. And we want to like go like all the plans that they had. NATO expansion in Europe was a big part of it, too.

And then there was one line where they said, it's going to be tough to work up popular. support for these multiple wars we want to fight in the Middle East, short of another Pearl Harbor style event. And the 9-11 truthers would point to this and go, see? Clearly, they did it. They did 9-11. They even say in their own words here that they want another Pearl Harbor event so they can do this. And it's like, well, look, that doesn't actually prove anything. I mean, it's...

It might just be the case that. They were like, oh, we wouldn't get this without a pro. And then when 9-11 happened, they went, hey, we got our Pearl Harbor style event. And, you know, and even if you like that story of 9-11 was an inside job, you know, because it's kind of sexy and exciting and like, oh, my God, what a crazy world we're living in, if that's true. And I'm not even saying it's not true. I'm just saying if you're not sloppy and you're scrupulous, you go, that's not really evident.

It's it sounds like evidence. It's evidencey, you know, but it's not actually a piece of evidence because that doesn't in any way demonstrate that they actually were in on the thing. And there's just a lot of things like that. There's a lot of things I even see, like, because it's a very popular conspiracy theory online now that Israel did 9-11. And I'm like... I'm open. You know, what do you got?

What's the evidence? And they'll be like, well, did you see that Larry Silverstein took out a huge insurance policy on the World Trade Center? How did he know? And you're like. How did he know that the number one terrorist target in the world might need a big insurance policy on it? You realize that the same guys attempted to knock those towers down in 1993, right? And so there's just little things like that where like, if you're being sloppy and you already really want this conclusion.

I see where you could see these things as evidence. But if you're just being a little, if you're critically thinking about them, it's actually, it's not as strong a case as you think it is. And I, I like to, again, I'll speculate every now and again on things, but I like to take on something where I feel like I can prove this case.

Like, I really have enough evidence that I think I can prove this. I think I can prove that the neocons didn't invade Iraq because they were worried about weapons of mass destruction. And they actually had this agenda for at least a decade before the war broke out. You know, like... There's strong, tangible evidence for that.

Sometimes the constant conspiracy guys, not always, but sometimes they just get sloppy when it comes to actually analyzing how strong the case is. I mean, there's several psychological effects. I think there's a certain drug to the dogmatic certainty that you were mentioning. It really annoys me. That there's something about human psychology. Because I usually, when I say stuff, I usually.

show doubt and show the humility that I might not have the right answer. And I sometimes look at multiple perspectives. weakness and lack of intelligence often. It just sounds like when I even like listen back to people that do that kind of thing. Yeah. certainty sounds like intelligence to people. Like if you say something with a lot of certainty, it sounds like this is smart motherfucker.

And I hate that about myself, about human psyche, that that seems to be the case. Because then, like... dogmatists are going to be like the ones that are driving agenda. It is true. I've noticed that for a long time though. It's almost like in a weird way. It's kind of like a prerequisite.

for leadership in a way you kind of have to be certain about things but then there's a real problem with that which is that a lot of times you're just bullshitting or you're just or you're or you're not right you're not correct to be this certain about this it's at least debatable and you know so you always try and then the thing like i i feel like at least for me is which i try to do i'm sure i fail at that this a ton but you try to at least go like

You got to work on training your brain and you have to be conscious about it. And so you have to go like, hey, if there's something here that is confirming my bias. That I get that, you know, you start getting that little sense of pleasure of like, oh, great. Here's another point that proves the thing I want to be true. Then you have to like be.

10 times as, you know, like, uh, you know, uh, skeptical about this. You have to really examine this one and be like, okay, am I sure that this one, you know, cause sometimes you'll hear people even throw out things where it's like. Oh, I know you liked that because it was helping your case, but come on, think about this. This doesn't even make sense.

It's like, OK, I want to make this argument. And then everything that would support that just gets sucked in like a like a force of gravity or something. And you're like, yeah, but half of these are bad data points. I mean, like for me. There's something definitely about my brain that is attracted to conspiracy theories. So I'm very well aware.

that that gravitational pull is there well it's it's if nothing else it's a crazy story yeah it's like a movie so it's like oh that's crazy yeah every fucking yeah you don't need to work on i don't understand i don't that's one of the big mysteries of like our modern era is like, how the fuck did this guy get an island? this pedophile and got like smart, smart, like really smart people to like hang out with them. Yeah.

And what the fuck? And has anybody, I mean, obviously, Ghislaine, however you say her name, Ghislaine Maxwell, okay, she went to jail. It's like, is anybody else? has anybody has anybody anywhere been forced to resign i mean like just even like say like I don't know like at the FBI or something just for not like catching the thing sooner like even if you weren't in on it it's like no there's a real problem with the American system in and it's that that like

And I think this just went on for too long before, like, the American people just wouldn't put up with it anymore. And this is why trust in every institution and the corporate media and Congress and all of it is evaporated, is that it's like, is he just saying of all the people who sold the war in Iraq? got kicked out of polite society you know like i'm not even saying like oh they went to jail for war crimes for life but was just like yeah you can't

We're not looking to you for advice on the next war. Thanks. Go home. Like none of that. It's like all these like crazy things. Nobody goes down for it. I mean, like they freaking. They lied us into war after a war. They've bankrupted the country, damn near destroyed the dollar. They locked down the country on the basis of pseudoscience. Then, then lied through their teeth about what this vaccine would do as they were forcing it on people. And like, no one loses their job.

No one even gets in trouble over any of this. And look, in any area of life, business or a relationship or whatever. You cannot screw up that catastrophically and face no repercussions for it and think that your business or relationship isn't going to fail as a result of that.

There's been a lot of wake up calls and I think we're going to build a better society from it. Like better institution, I believe. I hope you're right. My, you know, more transparency, more like authenticity. I think also the Democratic Party has learned the lesson of like. You have to have candidates that do, I don't give a shit about podcasts, but do podcasts like things, meaning reveal themselves.

as human beings. I think it's one of the best things that happened in this last election. And I'm not saying like, I did think they were great, but I'm not saying that like any of the Trump podcasts were perfect or like maybe there'd be a better way that they could be done. But I will say that I always, I used to say this for a while. um like as of you know like the last few years but i'd be like so it's like so i'm i'm me

what I do, it's kind of expected that I'll probably like, I don't know. I get like, at least like maybe. 15, 10 to 15 times a year, I'll come do a show like this. like a long form show on a big platform where I'm going to, you know, like. my ideas will be poked and prodded and tested and there'll be pushback questions and they'll be there. Sometimes they're more, you know, adversarial. Sometimes they're more friendly, but like you're going to, and then yet.

Our standard for who is the commander in chief was like, you show up to these debates. that are like 90 minutes long with these really, really stupid questions and you give a 90 second answer to it or blah. And at least for the first time now, it does seem like, oh, the standard is kind of. You're going to have to do a long form show where you really have to have, you know, and, and that, that I think is long-term.

a real positive development, you know, like you, you just kind of know going forward, the Democrats, right. Which I think is kind of what you were saying, right. You can't run a Kamala Harris if she can't do a long-form interview. You gotta run somebody who's able to sit down and express themselves and have real, genuine thoughts, or at least try to convince people they have real, genuine thoughts, at least, you know? And that's very different in a way.

Then, you know, I look back at some like the most talented politicians of my lifetime, which I'd have to say the two were Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, just like the most talented traditional politicians. Trump's like the anti-politician, but like they were like the traditional. And just unbelievably, but they never had to do that.

It was just a different time. Bill Clinton had to walk up and like, you know, be like, oh, it's a beautiful baby. They go back and then play the sax and then have a couple of good answers to a small. I'm from a little town called Hope, you know, like that. That's not the game anymore. Now the game is like, can you sit down and actually.

you know, have some ideas in a long form. And I think that's so much better because it's so much more revealing of, you know, kind of like what we were saying before, you reveal a little bit. It's not 50 hours.

But in those three hours, you reveal a little bit of your soul. Yeah, and I think that process makes you actually a better person. I ultimately think that Barack Obama was a fascinating human being. And there was a choice made early on to be more... interviews be more behind the wall, I think. And that's a disservice because I think it's a skill to be an authentic person that you build. Yeah.

like to be able to allow yourself to be yourself like it's very possible that kamala harris is a fascinating person like yeah we just never gotten to meet her and i don't know if she has gotten to meet her by you know it's a practice thing to like Reveal yourself as a tricky... I think it's just good for the candidate. I think she, well, I think what she did, you know, I'm a critic. I don't think she's a good candidate, but what she did is pretty freaking incredible.

meaning like in that, to raise that much money in that short amount of time. I think it was a terrible thing for the democratic party to do. I think she's a terrible candidate, but still with the tools he got. Like use TikTok, use whatever. I'll say the fact that she came as close as she did to being president is pretty goddamn insane if you ask me. But yeah.

The Democrats are a mess. They're a mess like I've never seen a political party before. But that in itself is, I think, a very good thing. And what comes from here is there's a lot of possibilities now. And you know, there's never been like, I don't know who the person is. I don't see anyone out there that I could think of that would fill this role. But there's never been a more ripe time for someone.

to Donald Trump, the democratic party now, you know, like somebody to what Donald Trump did, people tend to forget this because now like. It's also because the accusation from the Democrats is that, you know, the Republican parties are all a bunch of Trump cultists or something like that. But like. I'm old enough to remember 2016. And what actually happened was that Donald Trump came in and just really resonated with the voters.

And the establishment of the Republican Party hated it. They were openly talking about. changing the rules at the Republican National Convention to deny him the nomination in 2016. What they were saying is that they were going to raise the number of delegates. required so high that nobody could hit it and then say, hey, since nobody hit it, we select Mitt Romney again and we're going to run Mitt Romney again. Like they were openly, openly conspiring.

to steal the thing from him. And eventually he just had so much support on the ground that they couldn't do it. Right now, someone could totally do that to the Democrats. But the thing is, it would have to be somebody outside of the three-letter agency control, because that's what everyone's rejecting right now. But if you were to actually sit there and go like... And even policies I don't necessarily agree with.

But there are a lot of policies that if it was actually like a pro labor working class party, you could you could, you know, Bernie Sanders showed you a little bit of what's possible. And this was from like an 80 year old socialist who didn't really have the balls to go through with it at the end of the day.

You know, like if somebody younger and a little bit more, um, more with the current zeitgeist, we're able to do that. That could happen. I mean, I legitimately think that AOC can develop into that candidate. She might not be there yet, but I think she can develop that. It could be out there. I don't know. I don't see AOC being the one to do it, but I could be wrong about that. She's got some qualities, unlike almost all the other ones you could think of. I just, you know.

I don't see I don't see anyone right now who I think could be that person. But. I never would have said, I mean, if you had asked me in 2014, who's going to come take over the Republican party, I never would have guessed Donald Trump was going to come do what he did. So it might be the person we're seeing who we're not even thinking of, or it might just be some unknown. You know, same with Obama was an unknown. I mean, obviously he had, he had.

very powerful people behind his presidential run. It's not like he was a true, just like grassroots guy, but he wasn't anyone we would have been necessarily thinking about. I mean, he gave that big speech at the 2004 DNC, but that was it.

That was the thing he was known for is he gave one great speech at the third. Besides that, he was a state senator and then a junior senator. No one was thinking he was going to be the next president. It could be like a Jon Stewart type character. Of course, I don't think he would ever. I honestly don't think a comedian will ever run, but I never thought.

trump would ever run so there is there is something about john stewart that is um he's, and obviously I disagree with him on a lot of stuff too, but he is an authentic person. And there's something about that that gives you a huge advantage, particularly in our current political climate. People are so sick of the phoniness. And, and the right to be, cause you could only, you know, so you can lie to some of the people, some of the time, like you can only lie so much.

Before eventually nobody wants to hear you in that phony voice telling the same phony lies anymore. And at least Jon Stewart is, I will say, I think he's, I think Jon Stewart is telling the truth the way he sees it. Like, I don't think he's necessarily right about a lot of things. He is right about a lot of things, but I think he's wrong about a lot of other things.

I just get the impression that he believes what he's saying. And there's something powerful about that. Especially when he's surrounded by people that disagree with him. He's still willing to say that. That takes a certain kind of courage. And be funny doing it. But he's not going to run. No, I don't think so. This is annoying. Nobody like.

You have to be fucking crazy to run. That is one of the real problems, you know? And then, like, people, like, attack Donald Trump for being, like, a narcissist. You have to be. Yeah, but who the hell else is going to ever do this? Yeah. All right. What gives you hope about this whole thing we got going on? America and human civilization. Okay, so this is not mine, but this is Gene Epstein, who is a really brilliant economist.

and a great guy. And he told me this once, and I just always loved it. And so I call it Epstein's case. Not that Epstein, different Epstein. Gene Epstein, no relation. I want to be clear on that, okay? This is Gene's, let's call it Gene's case for radical optimism. And the way he put it. was he goes, so imagine you were sitting around in 1845. And like, you're at the height of, you know, the slavery. And you were like, hey. In 20 years, slavery is going to be abolished across the way.

And like, if you told that to someone, they'd be like, dude, slavery has existed for all of human history. Slavery is, look around, it's not going anywhere. You'd have to be out of your mind to think we're 20 years away from abolishing slavery. And yet we were. I mean, it's just like the greatest thing in the history of the world. And unfortunately, America had to fight a bloody civil war to get there, but many other countries didn't. And they just walked away from what had been the status quo.

You know, and just stop doing it. And now, look, you can argue there's slavery by other names and things like that. And like, you know, to some degree, paying an income tax is some degree of slavery. But there is not. chattel slavery in the way that there used to be. And that is like an incredible advance for humanity. And then the other example he would give is he goes, he was talking about how at the beginning of the Reagan administration, like in 1981.

That the neocons, because when he was trying to have detente with Russia, the neocons were in the press being like, he just guaranteed another hundred years of Soviet dominance, you know? And if someone had just been to you, like, hey, listen. calm down in 10 years there won't be a soviet union

It's just been like, what are you like? Okay, nice idea, but you're out of your fucking mind. And yet that was true too. And so there is even when, you know, and you can see some dynamics, even in our politics today, where like. You know, three years ago... I was really concerned about whether they'd shut the whole thing down.

You know, like when it was during the COVID times and during times where it was like, everyone I knew was just getting strikes on all their channels. And if you just even wanted to like. How like there are people being vaccine injured. You'd like lose your YouTube channel, get people getting kicked off Twitter left and right.

And I just saw it and I was like, dude, the, the grasp is just getting tighter and tighter and tighter. The regime is not going to allow these alternative voices, you know, in here, and they're just getting too big and they're going to shut this whole thing down. And I'm going to have to figure out what I'm going to do. after that. And I was totally wrong.

It just, the trend totally went in the other direction and things are now at a point where it's like, I couldn't even imagine it. I never would have envisioned Elon Musk was going to get $44 billion together and buy Twitter. And then he was, you know, it's like, and so I just think that. If you kind of like zoom out, I think that the regime has lost their monopoly on propaganda. And this opens up enormous possibilities for what you know, I remember so vividly. And 2002...

9-11 happened in late 2001. We invaded Iraq in 2003. But all of 2002 was a massive propaganda campaign. just constantly laying down the blueprints for this war that we knew was George W. Bush was about to launch. And it was, you know, they have weapons of mass destruction. They were in on 9-11. They're friends with Al-Qaeda.

They're going to hand this weapon that they don't have off to the terrorists they're not friends with. And then they're going to nuke Kansas. And every right winger, by the way, this is also. Sorry for rambling a little here, but this is also one of the reasons why when the Jew haters will say things like, they'll be like, oh, look, all of the Jews support Israel, or 70% of the Jews vote this way, or 70% of the Jews support this way. It's like, listen. when the Palestine haters will say,

70% of Gazans support Hamas or whatever. It's like, okay, look, I remember a time in this country. I know I'm going back 20 years, but every right winger in this country was completely convinced. that we have to go invade Iraq because he has weapons of mass destruction and you're some type of leftist homo if you don't agree with that. That was the entire culture in this country. And it was the one thing that...

The New York Times and Bill O'Reilly and CNN and The Washington Post all agreed on. They were all on board selling this war. You could not do that today. They could not get away with that today. Because if they did.

How do you control this entire problem? You tell me, how do you control Joe Rogan and Tucker Carlson? You know, how do you get these guys to go? They're not going to go along with it. And in fact, they're almost definitely going to have people on their show who are just tearing it apart. And so I just look at that and I go like, yo, I mean, we're at a place now where we have this world of possibilities that would have seemed impossible just so recently. And so just thinking like all of that.

rambling stew, whatever all that was, that leaves me feeling very, very hopeful for the future. Yeah, there's a lot of social and political progress in that rambling stew over the decades and the centuries. For me, probably some of the technological progress is really exciting. Me personally, it just fills me with hope whenever I see the rockets go up. to clarify not the ones going into gaza the ones going into outer space i assume you had to clarify the epstein thing the epstein rule

And I have to clarify exactly which rockets. SpaceX and Blue Origin rockets. So taking humans out to space and yeah, for us to be among the stars, like it makes me feel like we're going to make it. Because the bleaker times throughout human history, you think, I mean, there's just a sense, you're right, during COVID, there's a sense of like, for many reasons, maybe just a simple psychological human reason, it felt like bleak.

Fuck. I don't think we, as a civilization, if we can't handle this pandemic from a policy perspective, from a human perspective, economic perspective, this is like pandemic light. There's going to be other bigger troubles coming our way. Yeah. And then now you have this kind of, again, the rockets are going up. It's like we, you know.

first of all we'll colonize space and other planets and we like we're an inventive motherfuckers we'll figure it out yeah and then certainly you know like for me um just personally because this is like really touched my life but um The innovations in medical technology are just stunts. My son had a congenital heart defect at open heart surgery when he was three days old. I mean, this is like something that 20 years ago.

I would have lost my child, you know, and he's fine. Just absolutely fine. Cause it's just amazing what these surgeons and cardiologists and, you know, neonatologists and all of them, what they do now is like goddamn magic. And so there was always something about that that would, it was almost like that inoculated me against ever having a sense of like. Well, I wish it was a previous time.

Cause like now, sorry, in a previous time I lose my kids. So I don't get whatever other challenges there are out here. Like I'll take that trade off where this baby survives and gets a shot at having a life. And there is a lot of that stuff is just kind of easy to take for granted.

And it's like, you know, when it touches your life, you don't take it for granted as much, but it's just like, no, it really is. There are miracles going on all over the place now that like everybody in human history did not have access to. All right, brother. It's great to finally meet a friend and have a conversation. Yeah, I really enjoyed this. And I can't wait to talk to you again, brother. Absolutely. Thanks for having me.

Thanks for listening to this conversation with Dave Smith. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now let me leave you with some words from Ron Paul. Real patriotism is a willingness to challenge the government when it's wrong. Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.