Ian Smith: $15,000 a Day Fines?! How One Gym Destroyed the COVID Narrative | DSH #1617

If you really take a look at like that whole propaganda system that brought you COVID, that same propaganda machine brought you the BLM movement, brought you the Ukrainian war, the conflict in Gaza.

All these levers were pulled. You get the mainstream media involved, all those sort of like the psychological things that were torturing people, like the death counters in the corner.

And then the major corporations were involved, and there were whole media campaigns out of nowhere, millions and billions of dollars being spent to convince you to stay at home.

And they're pulling all these emotional levers, and people fall for it and they get people to just believe whatever they're being told no matter what

all right guys fellow new jersey and we got ian smith here let's go baby what's up man jersey represent jersey represent how are you good man you've been there your whole life most of it most of it i'm in florida now i lived in arizona for a little bit but most of the 40 years i've been around oh so you moved to florida yeah moved to florida about two years ago because of all that covet stuff that happened with your gym um well

after all of it, I kind of just wanted to change.

You know, we made it through, thankfully.

And I had just had my son, and my mom lived in Florida, and I didn't really have anything holding me down anymore. So I decided to pick up and start over in Florida.
I mean, I don't blame you, man.

They did you dirty. Media attacking you.
You put in all your money into that gym and you couldn't even run it. Yeah.
Yeah.

It was an interesting couple of years to say the very least. And I'll always love Jersey, but the way that it's run,

going through all that, seeing not only myself, myself, but how people were treated during COVID and sort of their lives were disregarded, left a pretty sour taste in my mouth.

Was it the state attacking you? Was it the county? Was it the township? So we reopened about two months to the day that the original closures came around. You know, we closed down first.

We didn't want to, but we didn't really know enough to confidently stay open. You know, the last thing we wanted to do was hurt anybody.

But we were highly suspicious. So we reopened in May of 2020.
And first it was the

just the township itself, you know, and we were very open about it. You know, I went on Tucker Carlos in a week before we opened.
So everybody knew the governor knew we were going to open.

We were willing to negotiate. You know, we said, here's our terms.
Here's how we're opening. And we're going to keep people safe.
Let's talk about it. And nobody wanted to.
So we said, okay.

So it was originally the township and then it became the county. And then it eventually became pretty much 75% of the state's legal power at one time.
Yeah,

there's 12 attorney generals in the the state of New Jersey, if I'm correct. And,

you know, during sort of the height of the absurdity,

75% of them were assigned to, they were working our case. That's nuts because I'd imagine there was other gyms doing what you did.
Well, there was just other things in general, too.

I mean, there's still crime and actual things that they should be monitoring and tending to.

And they were focusing, you know, almost all of their attention on us. It seems like a negative ROI because they're not going to get any money out of you.
It did.

And that's, that's eventually sort of how we won.

We were, and there's still stuff ongoing, too. So it's

still? Yeah, there's still, you know, sort of unresolved state issues and stuff like that. It's come pretty much to a halt at this point,

which is how these legal battle work. You know, when you

come after you, they come at you really hard. I mean, there will be times where we get calls from our lawyers and they'd be like, you have court today.
And I'd be like, when?

And they'd be like, in an hour. What?

You know, but then when you go and the dust settles and you're going to to take legal action against the state

for some sort of remedy, you know, it's three months for this and six months for this. So yeah, there is still stuff going on.
But when I say one, I mean they backed off.

The goal for us was just to stay open. And everything that they did,

it was just shooting themselves in the foot over and over again to the point where there was a negative ROI.

No matter how hard they punished us, there was enough people behind us to support us that they just, they looked crazy, you know, because now we're two years into COVID and they're still fining us $15,000 a day and doing all these absurd things.

And everybody at that point was pretty much had moved on. And Governor Murphy still wouldn't, still wouldn't let it go.

So, you know, eventually they, that's when they started to back off because there was just, there was no support for what they were doing, you know, even among their own, really. 15K a day.

So that totaled into the millions, I don't know, yeah.

So what they did is that was a court order from a judge, you know, because there were no tangible punishments for violating the the governor's orders. Excuse me.

And

they got a court order, and that's where all the tangible punishments came from. And one of the punishments was a fine of $15,497.76 per day.
I think I got that number right.

It's like burned into my head. That's 100K a week.

Yeah. And we were a gym.
I mean, we were a gym who at the time wasn't charging anybody because when we reopened, we said, hey, we're just reopening. Oh, you didn't even charge a membership?

No, no, no, no, because, you know, as much as it was about the survival and, you know, about the idea that we do have a right to work and all these things, it was about the principle. You know,

we didn't open just because we wanted to make money. We opened because we have a right to do that, but everybody has a right to that.
And people have a right to come to the gym and be healthy.

So, yeah, so we didn't charge. We weren't charging for two years.
That's nuts. We ran off of donations and people bought apparel and stuff like that and were really good to us.
Yeah.

So they were trying to fine us $15,000 per day. They didn't take all of it.

They would have to go in front of the court each time and say, hey, here are the days.

Now we want to collect on them. So they did it a couple of times to the tune of like $200,000 plus.
Wow. Still a lot of money.
But yeah, they had the

reserve in there for several million.

That is nuts. Did they have judgment on you or they just had it like?

They got a judgment for the, you know, the 200 or so thousand that they just, and they took that money right from our bank account. Hold it.
They just hold it right out. That is nuts.

I can't believe that, dude. Yeah.
Yeah. It was, uh,

it opened my eyes to a lot of the issues that we have with government overreach sort of, you know, not just on the left, but on the right, because they weren't there to help us either.

Did Bradley Martin reach out to you when this was happening? Yeah, I spoke with Bradley a couple of times. There was, there was a lot of us gym owners.

You know, there were a lot of businesses all around the country who defied, you know, COVID. And in some places, they were, they met, they met, you know, they,

there was little resistance. There might have been no resistance.

You know, but gyms, there were a lot of gyms that really kind of were

on the forefront of that.

But we were all in different places, you know, so we couldn't really help each other beyond, you know, in California, what Bradley Martin was facing at his gym in L.A.

or what my buddy Lou, who owns Metroflex, who was another gym owner, was facing was different than what we were battling in New Jersey. Right.

For over there, it was the health department that was really kind of coming in. And the government would be using different government organizations to hurt them in different ways.

With us, we were tied up in the courts.

But yeah, yeah, we talked a couple of times on the phone.

I mean, if anything, it was just good to talk to somebody else who was kind of like, you know, it's people were very supportive, but it's good to talk to somebody who's really going through the same thing.

You know,

yeah, no, it basically is, man. Like calling each other and just like, what, dude, what do you, what are we going to do? And did you get fine today? Yeah, brainstorming.
Exactly.

And it was like, all right, man, keep your head up. Like, let me know if you need anything.
I'll, I'll repost your posts. And that's, that's really all we could do.

So i guess yeah the one benefit is you started a movement a social media movement right yeah it it happened sort of unexpectedly um you were pretty low-key before that yeah i just had a you know sort of a regular fitness instagram you know maybe a couple thousand followers um

and then i guess it was right message at the right time really you know i i put out that video a week before that we started or we were going to open and it was just sort of a me sitting in front of the camera saying, this is who we are.

This is what we're going to do. This is why we believe it's right.
And this is we're going to keep people safe

you know and on and a couple days later i got a phone call from tucker carlson and that kind of threw a big can of gas on the fire um you still have fox at the time right yeah yeah so he had me on the show um and that was

a huge initial surge of people and then As it went on, you know, people just had interest in the story.

You know, we wouldn't have been able to do what we did because there was a lot of other businesses who tried and sort of got stomped out.

We just had the social firepower behind us, you know, just a stroke of luck, you know, and I owe a lot of that for sure to that initial interview on Tucker Carlson. Nice.
Shout out to Tucker, man.

He makes a lot of really important stories. Yeah, yeah.

It's, you know, he's not always like the first to the story, but he's usually the one of the bigger names that reaches audiences sort of outside of the fringe.

You know, he reaches a lot more of a mainstream audience. And, you know, he did that.
And, you know, at the time, it was still wildly unpopular to

oppose COVID. And we were only two months in.
You know, that is early.

If you had an opinion about COVID that wasn't the official narrative, you were, you were a grandmother killer and you were, you know, you were a danger to society and all of these things.

So I give him a lot of credit for putting us on. Yeah, you were super early because it lasted two years, right? So, yeah, yeah.
And in places like Jersey, for sure. Yeah.
You know, not everywhere.

In all Jersey.

Most of the Democratic states, I noticed. Yeah.
It noticed a little longer in those. Yeah.
It became a political issue and it really wasn't.

It was a, you know, for us, it was an issue of right or wrong. Yeah.
You know, but we got it, certainly got more support from the right than the left.

But as time went on, that definitely changed, I think. Yeah.
So it caused you to be more outspoken about politics. And now you're really speaking out on all the corruption you see, right? Yeah.

You know,

on the back end of COVID, I ran for Congress and, you know, I found myself at the end of

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I just, uh,

I couldn't no longer turn a blind eye to what I was seeing, you know, because it became my life. You know, I wasn't really, I've always been aware of politics, but not

to the degree that I was.

You know, seeing it kind of from the inside, especially running for Congress, has just made me very outspoken. How eye-opening was that experience?

Because I'm assuming you're going against people that are raising a ton of money from camp owners and your kind of grassroots movement, right? Raising money from friends and family.

So you were, you felt like the underdog. Yeah.
So if

COVID didn't radicalize me to dislike the way our government is run, running for Congress definitely did. You know, it was just.
I came into it

certainly overestimating my own abilities. You know, we had this movement.
So it was like, oh, we can just transfer this right into running for Congress.

And the idea was, I know we're going to meet a lot of opposition, but I was able to shine a light on the injustices of COVID.

So potentially I can do the same thing, you know, in Congress and show people what it's like. And also, you know, just be a good example.

Because the reason, one of the reasons politics is so messed up is good people don't run

because it's a nasty world. It's hard.
It's a huge sacrifice. And,

you know, other than the satisfaction of a good job,

if you do it right, it's not a, you know, a massive career move or anything like that. Right.

These people make it that. But so I ran with that intention and I ran as a Republican and

faced tremendous opposition from the Republican Party.

Really? Because they had already had their guy that they wanted to run. You know, they're always an election cycle ahead or two.

And somebody was up to run and they would not support me, even though a huge amount of people did.

So we, that was our enemy. You know, we had to run against the Republican Party, you know, in the Republican primary.
And I just got to see

just kind of like the belly of the beast,

how much money really influences, you know, how these things work, you know, how the how the candidates even get in front of people in the first place.

The selection process, you know, it's just,

there's a lot of people behind the scenes that are making money fueling both sides.

You know, a lot of the political operatives and the campaign managers and stuff, they'll work for anybody.

They don't really have values.

They're happy to work with one guy and they'll run for the opposite team the next one. That's wild.

Yeah, which is crazy.

And I get it. It's a business, but maybe it shouldn't be.

Yeah, like if you're going to help someone, it shouldn't be the same party every election.

In my opinion,

if you want that to be your business as a, you know, a political consultant or whatever it is, then maybe you should just have some values that you always align with instead of

just going to the highest bidder because then that's, you know,

it incentivizes bad money to come into the situation. Right.
They value money over their

morals. Yeah.
Yeah. And that's, that goes for the politicians as well, but you see it when you run that there's so many people behind the scenes

who just, again, who influence even. You know, a lot of people don't,

they're not paying attention until it's time to go to the ballot box, you know, for the final vote. But there's a lot that happens along the way there.

Um, and people are, you know, the general public's not as in tune with that as they should be, but it's not really a super open process. You know,

the people that run the GOP and the DNC, they're, they want to get their guy through the primary and they're going to do that because they have far more money than any regular person does.

You know, we got outspent 10 to one. Holy shit.

You know, and that's most of the money that came from him was political money. Right.
You know, most of the money that came from me was regular donors.

Like, yeah, I called some, you know, I did some calls, the whole thing that you have to do. And you call people who donate frequently, but, you know, I didn't get any big checks

from any political lobbies or anything like that. And that's, that's what wins the elections at the end of the day.
Money's one part of it.

Plus the checks, who they're coming from, they have power in other areas other than money, too. Oh, yeah.
Yeah, yeah. Just the simple connections and stuff like that.

And just being able to walk into a meeting and get endorsed because you're the person that the party has chosen as you know their their guy who's running in the primary so that guy's getting 10 times the amount of air time as you and opportunities and you have to do that all yourself which is fine but it's like should everybody should have to be on a level playing field yeah it makes you really wonder how many of these positions are predetermined yeah yeah it it raises that question for anybody with common sense you know you start to you start to look at it as a big picture and you say that you know how organic is this really

so which is scary these people are running the country Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. And, and, you know, it attracts, it attracts a certain type of person for the most part.

There's a lot of people who go into politics and who do want to do good. Uh, most of them don't make it.
They don't, either they get in and they're sort of stopped at every corner

or, you know, they just, they can't break in. You know, it's, it's very hard.
They don't have the bankroll. The average person's not going to be able to sell finance.

The average person doesn't have the reach on social media and they don't have the access to the databases of voters with emails that they can blast and all that stuff.

So they make it very hard. And then the people that they do get in, they look for people who are very malleable, right? Who typically don't have success outside of politics.

You know, these aren't people that have are wildly successful in their own right. They haven't really built anything of their own.
They probably went to law school, which is an accomplishment.

And then they got into the political world and eventually they became an ideal candidate and they candidate and they put them in a couple of positions.

And then all of a sudden it's, yeah, we want you to be a congressman in New Jersey or whatever it is. uh and we're going to sort of back you and

you know you're just going to agree to the standard gop talking points you know and if you deviate from them then you're not our guy crazy man

and and the next time you run or when you get elected you know you might have different positions all of a sudden than what you ran on yeah you know it's all coming because now you have this debt to these people And these people get in these positions, these

wouldn't even call them weak. I think malleable is a better word.
Get into these positions, and it's hey, you know, now I'm congressman. Now I have this, this power, and now I kind of want to keep it.

I like this life.

So I'll lie a little bit and I'll vote the wrong way, even though I shouldn't, you know, and I'll turn my back on my voters because my voters didn't donate that much money to me anyway.

You know, you watch how some of these people talk to their voters when they have issues. You know, I remember watching a clip of Dan Crenshaw, right?

This was a couple years ago. And he sort of like snapped at this at this woman because she had a different opinion than him, you know, and that's your, that's your voter base.

And if you, if you snap at them, you'll never see you'll never see Dan Crenshaw snap at Halliburton, CEO, or Lockheed Martin, CEO. You know, they don't have that same attitude.

And you can just tell, you know, from stuff like that, from interactions where they can't deal with criticism that's well deserved.

But they'll, they'll never talk back to the CEOs or the lobbyists or anything like that because they know their place. Yep.
Follow the money. Man, I wonder how long it's been like this.

You know,

as far as I've been paying attention, you know, and I think it's just, I think it's continuing to get, you know, far worse. You know, this has been, and you talk to guys like,

you know, Nick Quentez. You had Nick Fuentes on.

And they have a lot more political knowledge of like the ins and outs and the details. So it has been going on for quite a long time, but you know, you can keep following it back.

Like this isn't anything new. And it's no different under Biden.
It's no different really under Trump. It's no different under Obama.
It wasn't really a whole lot different under Bush.

You know, a lot of the, a lot of the things that most Americans don't really want keep happening. You know, your dollar keeps getting less valuable.

You keep sending money overseas. You know, we keep winding up in these forever wars.
Our educational system continues to be in decline. People struggle every day with money.
We have a homeless issue.

We have a drug issue.

And these guys can't seem to solve it no matter who's in charge. You know, we've had all these issues for 20, 30, you know, or more years.

And they can always seem to get elected, but they can never seem, no matter how long they're in power, they can't seem to fix the system.

You know, one just breaks it and then one kind of breaks it in another way.

Makes you wonder if the government's even capable of fixing these issues or if we should just take more accountability as a community. I think that's absolutely part of it.
You know,

you can dislike the government all you want and you can disagree with what they want. But if you really, I think, want to change it, it starts, it absolutely starts with yourself off as an individual.

Yeah, I agree. You know, COVID really exposed how sort of reliant people are on outside forces, you know, from everything to where they get their paycheck to

how they run their lives, you know, and I think the more accountability you take for yourself, especially and then your family and your community, maybe focus that energy inward and then outward instead of always expecting people to fix the problems.

You know, like I said,

what I say, just drug issues. We have a drug issue, you know, in almost every community in America.
We can't expect the government to fix it entirely.

Even if you do have the right people, there's a certain amount of community aspect that has to come in and a cultural aspect that has to come in.

That's one of the things that drives me crazy about the abortion thing. You have people that are so against it.

And that's fine.

I'm not in support of abortion either. But maybe focus your time and energy

teaching people about why life is so valuable and getting into those communities and volunteering at your churches where there are efforts to

to show young women that that's not the best choice and that there are other options and that they can do this and that you know every child is a miracle you know so yeah we should have the government involved and we should have you know we should make sure the government's doing its job but we have to be doing ours as well and i think that's a huge part that a lot of people miss absolutely a lot of people just blame the government for everything yeah yeah and or they they want to celebrate every victory you know as as the government oh the government did this the government did that at the end of the day, we have so much control, honestly.

Like, obviously, there's going to be some scenarios where the government has a lot of influence on your life, but for the most part, I feel like no matter who's present, you and I will find a way to make some money or whatever.

You have to, you know,

you can be upset with the system, right? And

have your criticisms of it, but checking out of it entirely and just expecting it to

take care of you is not the way that you're going to fix it. Yeah.
You know, you've got to learn how to

thrive even under circumstances that may not be the best. Yeah.
And based off what you're saying right now, I don't even know if the government's fixable at this point.

You know what I mean? Like, if I'm being honest. No, it's, it's a,

it's a huge issue and it's an extremely complicated one. Um, and there's a lot of bad actors and there's a lot of

just bad information in general.

you know and it's very hard to kind of pinpoint where this is all coming from and you know where you could you know cut the proverbial head off of the you know the snake or whatever but it um

it's extremely complicated you know but i think the biggest step is for people to start you know stepping into that that place of power for themselves and taking responsibility for their own lives and and once you have better footing you know you're you're better able to uh to change or to to act on the world you know if you're you're dead broke um you know and you're living paycheck to paycheck you don't really have the bandwidth to to change the world around you.

You can barely, you know, provide for yourself. Um, and the same thing goes for your health or anything like that, right?

So, your advice for people watching would be: take care of yourself first, and then yeah, you have to, and, and, and sort of learn what's going on, um, you know, and understand that uh, politics is a very ugly and confusing place on purpose.

Yeah, you know, um, we were warned of this kind of stuff by our founding fathers. Um, you know, one of the biggest threats to democracy is stupidity,

You know, like,

and bad actors know that, you know,

you know, so maybe turn off like the garbage that you watch. And, you know, you can start with small stuff,

but strong, independent people are much harder to influence and control and manipulate than

weak, lazy, stupid ones. Right.
Because the pandemic wouldn't have worked if we were smarter. Yeah.
You know what I mean? If the average person was smart. Yeah.

Or if the average person was at least a little bit more skeptical. Right.
You know, at the very least, like, I don't consider myself, you know, wildly intelligent.

I think I'm fairly intelligent, but, you know, I'm skeptical. Yeah.

I'm skeptical of anybody and anything, not because I don't like those things, but because it serves my interest to doubt what you're saying before I believe you.

You know, if you told me that you had a million dollar business idea and all I had to do was sign on the dotted line, you know, I'd probably want to ask you some questions first.

And I probably would start from the position where I don't believe you and maybe work my way towards it instead of just accepting what you hear

and then having to like decondition yourself. You know, and it's all that stuff with the pandemic.
Like we saw it.

I remember very early, like in February and in January when you heard like the whispers of coronavirus. And I remember being kind of freaked out.

But it was like, okay, what is this? You know?

And through a series of questions,

I couldn't find the answer to where I should be scared for my life.

You know, and you apply that same sort of idea to anything. Anytime a politician talks, you should doubt what he says.
100%.

Especially in politics. Yeah, especially in politics.
And especially in the media, too. If you're, you know, you're watching your nightly news, which sure, you should watch the news.

You should be in touch, but you should at least question the stories that are being shown to you, you know, not just accept it.

That's how we wind up with, you know, I don't know if you remember the great toilet paper shortage of 2020. Crazy.
And it's like, man, people just didn't do any, like

everybody's so emotional and they'll just automatically jump onto something. That's a, you know, it's a big problem.
And I think you're seeing a lot of change in that regard.

I think people are starting to get a lot more

well-positioned for themselves and especially mentally sort of doubting things a lot more. I agree.
I don't think another pandemic would work at this point. No, no, it wouldn't.

You know, unless it were something that were actually, you know, actually harmful

instead of, you know, the flu.

But no, I don't think that it would because people learned that lesson. What they need to do now is apply that same lesson and see the other propaganda that's that they're now falling for.

That's where my head goes. It's like, all right, what's next? Because they tried that.
What's going to be the next iteration?

And it's always, you know, if you really take a look at like that, that whole propaganda system, like the system that brought you COVID, as an example, not to continue to harp on COVID, but

all these levers were pulled.

You know, you get the mainstream media involved, you know, you get all those sort of like the psychological things that were torturing people, like the death counters in the corner.

And then the major corporations were, you know, involved and there was whole media campaigns out of nowhere, millions and billions of dollars being spent to convince you to stay at home. Yeah.

And all of this. And they're pulling all these emotional levers.
And people fall for it. And some people didn't.
And, you know, the rest of the people finally understood what it was.

But that same propaganda machine brought you the blm movement that same propaganda machine brought you the ukrainian war that same propaganda machine has brought you the conflict in gaza it's the same it's the same levers being pulled and they're just they they pull at people's sort of heartstrings and they uh they find little emotional hooks and they get people to just believe whatever they're being told no matter what yup they're phenomenal at that yeah you got to give it to them honestly oh it's a beauty i mean they're they're it's excellent you know it's uh you have to give credit where it's due because it works uh it's a well-funded machine they've been you know uh mass media has been around and this stuff has been studied you know all of this has been studied by your government for years and years and years you know they understand the psychology behind what brings you the evening news um and the psychology behind what they teach your kids in school and the psychology behind you know social pressures and all of these things and they're just pulling different levers it's all this it's the same mechanism just you know it's a different flavor and a different sort of

emotional,

call it psychological warfare. Really, it's, you know, it's a PSYOP.
Yeah, they got it down to the T from the frequency of the music you listen to to the news to social media.

They are programming and controlling wherever they can, right? Yeah, I mean, it's, and it's in your hand all the time. It's in your, your phone.
Yep.

You know, your phone could be an amazing tool, but it can also be a weapon, you know, pointed directly at you. 100%.
You think what you're being shown on your algorithm is anything remotely organic,

you know, you've got a lot of

thinking to do. Yeah.
And my fear is as someone in alternative media is that they're going to really infiltrate that next. I think to a degree they certainly have.

We've already seen little glimpses of it with certain shows and stuff. Well, you know, podcasts started as

a very grassroots thing and it became very powerful overnight. Yeah.
You know, especially during... the last five years, you know, the

fact that people can get their voices out relatively quickly and people can have open discussions and you don't have to have media credentials and you don't have to

have some multi-million dollar studio. You know, you can just set up a camera and start talking.
You know, a lot of people started their podcast just zooming.

That very quickly sort of surpassed traditional media.

So they would absolutely jump on it. And I think that they have.
They do it politically. You look either the right or the left.
You look at a lot of these influencers on either side.

You know, and their podcasts have sponsors and stuff like that.

And hey, if you don't play the game that your political party wants you to and you don't sort of stay at least in line with what they want,

you won't monetize your podcast.

They'll shadow ban you. They'll do all sorts of things to sort of keep your voice down.

But it's super easy for them to set up a podcast that with hosts that they like. You know, the entire Daily Wire is that.
Yeah. You know, that's a pretty much.

They all look like organic podcasts, but that's like a multi-million dollar operation. I mean, it's probably more than that.
Eight figures a year. Yeah.
Yeah.

I'm, yeah, I'm sure I underestimated that. You know, so yeah, a lot of those seem very authentic and genuine, but, you know, it's coming from another big company.

And independent media, I think, is really, really important for people to...

to if you're going to do that to stay as independent as possible and you have to be financially you know able to provide for yourself outside of you know the traditional route, if you especially go with the political ones, it's tough, dude.

If I didn't have money coming into this, I honestly don't think I would have been able to pull it off. Well, it's time-consuming, you know, you put a lot of time and effort into it.

Um, you know, and you don't need to get rich podcasting and you know, exercising your free speech, but you do have to be able to provide for your family to some degree or another, you know.

So, it does, it makes it very, very hard to do. And I noticed that a lot because I got pulled into the conservative world.

Yeah, you know, for the better part of two years, I I was the golden boy of the of the GOP, you know, before I started speaking out against the vaccine. That was sort of my first breaking of rank,

you know, and then the Ukrainian war and whatever and all the other ones.

But, you know,

it's hard to

be in that world and to just like

just like politics itself, you know, you're not going to get an invitation to Turning Point USA where there's thousands and thousands of young people who could be exposed to your message if you're not in line with what Turning Point deems acceptable.

You know, so it's

interesting. I would say Daily Wire is worse than Turning Point, in my opinion.
Yeah, I would say so. Because Charlie did have a debate at the last.
I'll defend him here.

Charlie did have a debate at the last Student Action Summit event. It was Dave Smith versus some guy

Josh Hammer. Yeah, I saw parts of it.
So I'll give him that.

I will. Yeah.
And Turning Point as an organization, I believe that they have really good intentions in a lot of ways. And I've, I've been to their events and stuff like that.
Um,

and I appreciate at least having people of opposing views not be shunned, right? You know, at the very least, you know, you don't have to agree with them.

But, you know, I watched the debate between Nick Fuentes and Dinesh.

And I thought that was an exceptional example of how people with opposing ideas can come together in a productive way to have really important discussions about something that is extremely relevant to all of our lives, whether we, you know,

no matter how much you care or don't care about the Middle East, your money goes there.

And a lot of it does, you know, and I think that's an important discussion to be had. And so many opposing views can't.
It's all about just attacking each other.

And I think Dinesh and Nick did just a fantastic job of laying out their ideas in a way where the audience, because that's what it's about.

It's not about the two guys sitting across from the table, you know, debating.

It's about the people that are listening, the audience, hearing maybe new information, maybe hearing opposing viewpoints that they weren't aware of, and then

coming to a place where, at the very least, there's an understanding of why the other person feels this way. Right.

And at the same time, reciprocal, they understand why you feel this way. And there may be some common ground.
You know, there can be some common ground between two completely different, you know,

in that case, the pro-Israel and the and the anti-Israel position in terms of, you know, foreign aid and stuff like that.

And, you know, to both of their credit, Dinesh said afterwards that he agrees with Nick on a lot of things and he thinks that, you know, maybe that there shouldn't not be any U.S.

foreign aid, but that it should be much stricter in terms of, you know, what we get out of it as Americans and how it's used and things like that.

And I think something like that is what you need a lot more of. Yeah, that was a great debate.
Who would have thought Alex Jones would be a good moderator? Yeah. Yeah.

I was, you know, I was, I was very, very pleasantly surprised. Yeah.
Well done to those two gentlemen.

And the same thing goes with Dave Dave Smith at turning point, you know, and Charlie having him on.

Yeah, I thought Charlie was fair, honestly, as a moderator because obviously we know his stance on the Israel stuff, but he seemed to be pretty neutral on that debate. Yeah.
So respect for that.

Well, we're not going to get anywhere.

And you see this with the right and the left, especially, but you know, now a lot of these debates are happening on the right, within the right.

But we're not getting any closer to figuring out how to steer the ship with the way that the right and the left interact with each other. Because it's all about like scoring points.

And that has only driven the two sides further apart to the point where

you develop this extremism on both sides that is so absurd that it's a laughable position.

And that's not, you know, that's not what this country was founded on. This country wasn't founded on extremism.

It was founded on principles of justice and liberty liberty and focusing on our God-given rights. And obviously we have to protect that.
So there has to be some sort of rules and stuff like that. But

you don't have to have the government ban everything that you don't like

and have the government step in in every debate.

If more people could have discussions, even just on a personal level, like what Nick and Dinesh did, I think that a lot of the issues that we have would, at the very least, come from a full boil to you know maybe just some warm water yeah yeah there was a lot they agreed on like you said yeah where do you where do you stand on the whole foreign aid stuff what what do you think the best approach there moving forward is um

none of it none at all none of it until further notice um we have far too many issues of our own uh to be focusing on and um and also the way that the entire thing works right now is completely broken.

You know, if we're going to be helping other countries, which I'm not against, you know, if we really are the most prosperous great nation in the world,

first and foremost, we should actually be it. You know, we shouldn't be trailing in an education

at embarrassing levels. You know, we shouldn't have this embarrassing healthcare system.
We shouldn't have

the epidemic, the drug epidemics that we have, all this stuff.

So focus on ourselves first. And honestly, a lot of this stuff won't really take that long to clean up.
You know,

if

government started really putting an honest effort into fixing problems, I think the community outreach would be huge. And I think a lot of the problems would

be corrected very easily. And then, if you want to focus on foreign aid, then we can talk about how we disperse money around the world.

But there has to be certain expectations. And I agree with Dinesh on this.

If there's going to be money that gets sent, it's very clear what it's going to,

which in the case of the Middle East, it's not. And it's not just Israel, but Israel is probably the best example of we just send money and there's really no terms on what we what we get out of it

or how they use it.

And you see, again, especially with Israel, a lot of that money gets funneled right back into our political system in order to put people in office that are wildly pro-Israel, which isn't a, that should not be a super strong

front of the ticket position for any American politician. All of the American issues should be before that.
That should be very low on the list if you do feel that way.

And I think foreign aid, like I said, it just, it really needs to just kind of be completely halted and reworked. Yeah.

Scaled back tremendously and regulated and more carefully watched over so that the American people really understand what their money goes to. Because again, it's not just the Israel thing.

You know, the stuff that the USAID stuff found, it's absolutely absurd. You know, funding,

whatever it is, funding gender studies

in the mountains of Tibet or whatever, it's completely ludicrous. And everybody knows that that money is not really doing this.

So

I would kill the entire program until further notice and just revisit it after we get our stuff in order. Yeah.
All this stuff getting exposed.

Like I never liked paying taxes in the past, but it just made it even worse now, dude.

Like now I know it's for sure not going anywhere productive, which before I kind of thought about it, I guess, and I was like, I'm never seeing this again, but now it's even worse.

I think a lot of people are kind of coming to that same conclusion, whether or not they're very politically minded or not. You know,

it's not easy to

make it these days. And people are wondering why 40% of the money that they make is just going away.
And then, you know, no matter what it is, it's almost never a good thing.

And people are starting to realize that. Like, oh, I can't get ahead because I make $70,000 a year, but I only bring home 40, you know, and my community still sucks.
You know, my roads are still crap.

There's still crime in my neighborhood.

Where's all this money going? And then they, you know, they look to Congress and you see, oh, $400 billion goes here. And, you know, oh, we left weapons in Iraq or Afghanistan.

It was $13 trillion or billion dollars, whatever it is. And it just gets absurd to the point where it's like, even

somebody who really doesn't want to pay attention is forced to eventually. Absolutely.
I remember growing up, like making six figures a year was like the goal.

The first year I made six figures, I thought I was rich. Right.
Like I used to be I used to be rich. Yeah.
I mean, I, I, I had zero monetary concerns whatsoever.

You know, I didn't really even have to pay attention to what I was making because there was just enough. Right.
And within a couple of years,

that six figures didn't feel so comfortable anymore. And you factor in inflation?

Yeah. 100K a year, maybe when I was a kid, would be like $150 a year.
Yeah. Oh, absolutely.
Like something like that, you know? Yeah. And it's, it's everywhere.

And it's, it's, it, it touches people no matter what, whether you're buying a house, whether you're buying groceries, whether you're paying rent, uh, whether you're trying to get a new car.

I mean, like, most people pay like more than when I first got my car,

you know, I'm, I'm 30, I'm about to be 39. When I first got my car, like an expensive car payment was like 350 a month.
Damn, I wish.

You know, I remember like my, you know, like a buddy of mine got like a nice Acura at the time and it was like $3.50 a month. Like now you can't get a Honda Civic for $3.50 a month.

You know, so you can't eventually everybody's going to see it because it's just, you know, it's just everywhere. I just saw a Tucker interview.
Yeah, it's nuts, dude.

I forget who he was interviewing, but the guest said 78% of people don't pay their credit cards on time right now. Yeah.
Oh, it's when you start looking at those numbers, it's, you know.

It's clearly a bubble and there's clearly going to be a major correction at some point. You know, we saw it in 2008 with the the housing crisis.

You've seen it, it pops up in different ways. You know, there's probably another housing crisis on the horizon somewhere.
I'm no real estate expert, but

I can see it.

And the same thing with credit card. I mean, that's a really scary thing when almost 80% of the population is so financially strapped that they are just putting off their credit card.

I mean, I've never paid my credit card so late. Dude, the interest on that is nuts.
2% a month. Yeah.
Like that's 24% a year. I can't fathom that.
You know, but I wasn't.

Thankfully, I

learned that lesson early. I had one credit card one time when I was younger, and it was like $500 limit, and it took me forever to pay off.

And I learned my lesson, but the fact that 80% of the population is living within somewhere of that is pretty alarming. Man, middle class is going to be wiped out.

Yeah. And that's, you know, you saw that.

happening before, but COVID was a huge example of that, where the middle class just took the punishment on that.

And they handed out all that hush money for everybody to kind of shut up and be quiet and keep them distracted.

And then on the other side of it, you know, nobody really thought about all the money that they were spending.

You know, when Trump signed the CARES Act, that was trillions of dollars that we just injected into

like, of course your money's going to be,

you know, that's how it works.

But nobody thought of that at the time. And that was really, I think, a huge jump.
to squeezing the middle class like really hard.

You know, you had, I think it was a third of all the businesses that shut down never reopened nationally, something like that.

And small businesses, you know, that was, that was really where I got my start and, you know, where a lot of the compassion came from in the beginning, because I've been a small, or I was a small business owner my whole life.

You know, so I understood the benefit of having, you know, entrepreneurship in and around your community where people are finding ways to make money for themselves

and adding value to the community that's not corporatized.

And you see less and less and less of that.

And that's a bad thing. You know, when every store that you have for a choice to eat or shop or do this is all some big corporate structure, that money doesn't come back into your communities.

You know, you go to a local restaurant, a locally owned restaurant, and you go there and you buy food, you're putting money directly into your community.

That money doesn't go up the corporate ladder somewhere and pay stock dividends to somebody. That money pays the staff who all live in the community, who will all in turn spend money in the community.

It pays the owners, it provides jobs, all these things.

And then you get this corporate takeover where now most people work for corporations.

And that money, yeah, it goes into their pockets, you know, as a family, but they're going to shop at

a corporate grocery store and they eat at corporate restaurants and they, you know, they have their Netflix subscription. Like none of that money ever makes it right back into the community.

And I think that's one of the most important things with small business and entrepreneurship is the money stays local.

And that's how communities die, you know, when people stop spending money in their community and just, you know, it just all gets sort of siphoned out to shareholders and CEOs and corporate bonuses.

And, you know, they're not, they're not reinvesting into your, into your local New Jersey community. Nope.

You know, we certainly were and all the small businesses that we knew were. And that's why I go to farmers markets.
Yeah. Whatever city I'm in, I'll stop in, you know, support the local farmers.

Goes right back to what you said earlier, people taking personal responsibility.

You know, you have to go out of your way to support what you believe in you know it's much easier uh to stop at whole foods right here than it is to to drive 15 minutes to a farmer's market to get your stuff but you know

do you care where your dollar goes at the end of the day absolutely we got to vote with our dollars at this point because i don't think anything else is going to work right

uh no um you know i think that's a huge part of it yeah you know you you vote with your dollars and you really um

You vote with your time and your energy. You know, you support those people.
You go out to their events.

One of the reasons I love where I live, I live in St. Augustine.
Yeah. Um, and there's a lot of small business.
Um, it's a flourishing small business area.

And it's awesome because these people really care about the community and

they do events in the community and they give to charity in the community.

Um, so knowing that I buy my coffee shop or my coffee from the local coffee shop versus a Starbucks, it's still a $5 cup of coffee either way. Yeah.
You know,

I know that I'm voting with my dollars. I'm also voting with my time and my, you know, my energy because I'm there to support them.

When I go and tag them, you know, occasionally,

you know, I'm pointing to them and I'm doing the things that I can on a personal level to make sure that they succeed because they do the same for me. I love that.
Yeah. Yeah.

That's something that's been lost in major cities, unfortunately, that community aspect. Especially in major cities.
Especially. I would say that.
Yeah.

And it's, but it's something that's very reversible. Very, very reversible.

Yeah. I think we can reverse that for sure.
Ian, it's been cool, man. I know you got to get on Jake's show, but where can people find you? You can find me on Instagram and on X at Ian SmithFitness.

Awesome. Check them out, guys.
Thanks for coming on, man. Absolutely, brother.
My pleasure. See ya.

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