Dave Smith on how neocons wrecked the country

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Here the latest i mean it's a little weird for

me because you're a libertarian and in fact you could even wind up on a libertarian ticket at some point if not this cycle no but i'm just saying it could happen right so you're you're literally a libertarian and but for some reason we have the same instincts on almost everything I would say. There are a lot of people in conservative media who I always have felt like I had a lot in common with, and now I don't.
And it's not because I've gotten liberal. I've gotten way less liberal.
I see them as way more liberal. So what happened to conservative media? Not all of them.
I have a million friends in it. But a lot of the big names seem very liberal to me yeah i mean i think that it's kind of the same thing that happened to libertarians i think they're in washington dc and that's not where you're supposed to be no that's right and so the best like the best libertarian uh organization in the world is the Mises Institute.

And it's based in Auburn.

And they- Alabama.

Yeah.

And they specifically put it there because they like want no part of Washington, D.C.

And then you see all of the, you know, Cato and guys like that who are based out of D.C.

They get very corrupted.

And you can look at it.

It's like, it's the same thing.

We were just talking about Donahue calling out Chris Matthews backews back in the day you're having cocktail parties with the fed chairman but you're a libertarian you shouldn't be doing they're actually doing that yeah oh yeah yeah absolutely doing that and i think a lot of that's the same problem with the kind of conservatism inc or whatever they've been they've been corrupted and power is seductive and i'm sure you know that from like being in DC for so many years that you I'm not saying like you're kind of an anomaly think about all the people in Washington DC and how much all of them wanted to suck up to power almost right like what 90 something percent at least that's why they're there right and so it's a it's a difficult thing I didn't get that for some reason for so long.

I was living in the middle of it.

I don't know.

I'm not a super genius.

So I didn't realize how corrupt it was.

Everyone always said it was corrupt.

It felt like a really nice place to me.

I raised all my kids there.

But when you realize how corrupt it is, I mean, it's horrifying.

Yeah.

But that's also, I think there's something like the nature of conservatism or the conservative movement in America has always just been to lose, right? There it's like built into them. Like every generation just loses and then moves on to the next thing to lose.
I like the, the old, right. The, um, you know, Robert Taft, right.
Right. They, uh, they were largely in opposition to the to the new deal that was they were fighting back against the fdr's new deal we're in opposition to that and then you know you cut forward uh 20 years and and it's fdr democrats are the new republicans right ronald reagan it's like it's it's nobody would dare question the new deal and then of course there was a movement pushing back against the great society and yes and now of course no entitlements are like no one would ever dare question medicare and look just recently i saw uh donald trump who's not a traditional conservative but he did the most traditional conservative thing when he said uh he said when we get in there again we are gonna fix ob'm like, okay, right, right, right.
So that's where we're at now, right? It's no more repeal. You don't even hear Republicans talk about it anymore, right? So it's always like the next round of big government increases, the next round of centralized power in D.C.
They will put up a little fight. They will lose.
They will then a few years later accept this as something that we is is consensus amongst all of us but but you see we're against whatever the next thing is you know transing the kids or you know student loan bailouts we're against that now you know but they'll lose and then eventually accept that why why would you so that what does that suggest about them they don't it's this is a performance this is not sincere yeah i mean conservatives typically have played the role of being against consolidating power in dc right um but that's you know that's obviously that's going against the wind not with it and so it's almost like it almost seems like a professional wrestling thing where they're like they're the ones who are supposed to lose at the end of the day they kind of say the right thing never really mean it you know and then ultimately acquiesce i i have to say i was disgusted by the lack of fight in a lot of professional conservatives during covid like disgusted by it you know banning freedom of movement freedom of speech bodily autonomy like the whole thing was like so mind-blowing to me if this actually was the totalitarianism we've been worried about or talking pretending we're worried about for a long time it came and a lot of them didn't say anything about it but i was totally bewildered by the libertarian response which was also kind of silent i thought cato would be i don't know camped out in front of the white house or the cdc or like what what was that well it shows you i mean it's um well just and and because you use the word totalitarian and i think sometimes when you use that word it's it's perceived as like being somewhat hyperbolic but it's really like what else could describe lockdowns well that's what i mean that that is totalitarianism you had american citizens turning on their tv every morning to find out from their governor what they were allowed to do exactly like i mean the most you couldn't imagine like if the question was like can i have a funeral for my dad and they're like sorry no we've decided you can't you know i mean like the most intimate details yes liberties that we would all have taken for granted um and so okay to your point right not only did conservatives uh not fight against it i think the majority of them cheered it on or went along with it i noticed um and as the, you know, the point about libertarians, there are kind of like, there are these moments, and I know you experienced this a lot when you were on your Fox show, there are these moments where there's like a storm, where there's something like a white hot issue, you know? Yes. And it becomes very easy later after that passes to be on the right side of that.
Yes. on the right side of Iraq now.
You know what I mean? John McCain wrote in his memoir that Iraq was a mistake. So even John McCain could admit many years later.
But the thing is, that doesn't really matter as much as if you were opposed to it when it was happening. Because like in 2002, if you were like, hey, I don't think he has weapons of mass destruction.
You were, everybody knew that, well, that just means you're a queer basically, you know, and you hate your country and you're weak. And so, you know, there's little things, you know, the example I like to use a lot, because I remember you broadcasting through this, so you'll remember it well, but was when Donald Trump announced that he was going to pull out of syria and for like two weeks it was like the kurds remember we're abandoning the kurds but our allies the kurds like by the way if there's our ancient allies yes yes if there's one thing that has been consistent in american foreign policy in my lifetime is that we always screw over the kurds but for whatever they don't have a state i mean yeah i mean we uh george hW.
Bush encouraged them to rise up and overthrow Saddam Hussein and then went nah you know I thought about it again I don't think so they just slaughtered all I mean you know but why am I laughing it's such a consistent theme well it's not we're not laughing at the plight of the Kurds we're laughing at the hypocrisy of the media but for like two weeks if anyone said they wanted to you know they supported trump pulling out of syria it was like you're a bad person you hate the kurds by the way has anyone checked in on the kurds since then has the media ever talked about them again like it just it was totally just used in that moment and that's just a little example like that's not the big one but like like our historic enemies the houthis right yes man i remember growing up in la jolla in the 70s hearing about the houthis and my father said i just want you to grow strong and resolute so we can fight the houthi hordes your one purpose in life is to get strong enough to take on these houthis when the day comes and it will where these houthis challenge our freedom you must be prepared right it's it's so ridiculous but like look i remember so uh you it was either in, it might have been April or May of 2020, but I remember you covering on your show, and I also covered this on my podcast at the time, to a smaller audience, but you covering the lab leak. Yeah.
You were like, hey, this is a really like plausible theory of where, and in fact, it seems to make a lot more sense. Because already there was, it not that we had like um a conclusive case that you could take to court but there were like big pieces of information that were really narrative shattering well and they were also the bats weren't close enough to where the wet markets were also a wet market is a seafood market so why were they selling mammals in a seafood market just pangolins and bats and then there was a group of chinese researchers who in december in january of 2020 wrote this paper they said no we think this was a lab leak and then they all disappeared yeah that was on the internet and there were like four scientists from the lab that were hospitalized in november with covid like symptoms and you were like that's i don't know my eyebrow is raising is yours not But you know but at the time this was and i know you were aware of this this was a crazy controversial thing to say you were racist somehow it's more racist to think that the chinese had like a lab than to think they were like biting bat heads off or something like it's so bizarre but by the way Now, as I this to you now this is not controversial at all oh this isn't a white hot issue it was then but it's not now and so a lot of a lot of just what back to your original point about like the libertarians who failed on the job a lot of it is simply comes down to be a matter of courage it's just a matter of like hey when the issue that might make everyone hate you and all of the powerful people call you the worst names, which naturally human beings have a tendency to not want that.
We don't want to be ostracized. You don't want to be called these names.
Some people just kind of have this personality trait. And this isn't like whether you're on the left or right.
It's something that you have. It's something I have.
It's something Alex Berenson has. He's kind's kind of like i don't care i'll say it right now when it's going to get me called all it really is i remember about 15 years ago it was in july and i was in maine and i my kids were playing on the dock and it was like the happiest day you know it was like perfect bluebird day sound of laughter of children it was like just i was like oh i was in such a good mood and i was looking at my kids and sort of walking along and i stepped on a beehive and a whole swarm of bees flew up my shorts and just attacked me in my nether regions and i went in about no exaggeration 10 seconds from being placid and happy to being in agony and on fire and I jumped in the lake wrecked my cell phone that is the experience of these hysterical moments right all of a sudden it's like being stung by a swarm everybody's against you everybody's saying exactly the same thing you go from like placid happy calm clear thinking to totally unable to think clearly and on all these issues the day navalny died in, Russian custody, it's like we decide, of course, Putin killed him or whatever.
And to be able to see and think clearly in that moment, like that's the key right there when you're getting swarmed. You may have come to the obvious conclusion that the real debate is not between Republican and Democrat or socialist and capitalist, right, left.
The real battle is between people who are lying on purpose and people who are trying to tell you the truth. It's between good and evil.
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You go to tuckercarlson.com slashcom slash podcast our entire archive is there a lot of behind the scenes footage of what actually happens in this barn when only an iphone is running tucker carlson.com slash podcast you will not regret it who's the guy um who is the uh he was the science editor for the new york at Wade, Nicholas Wade. Nicholas Wade.
Right?

I mean, that guy was like nature and, you know,

like all of the biggest scientific publications

was the New York Times guy.

And it's like that, like that, you're done.

And they called him a racist.

Yeah, yeah.

And it's not just like, oh, you lose your job

or something like that.

Oh, yeah.

It's like we're going to smear you in the most vicious ways

to like all of these. And we're social creatures we're we naturally respond to that but but how does that happen well like you've watched this carefully how i mean it's speaking of bees it is the hive mind at work but it's it's so like perfectly and like with great discipline executed it's like in a space of four hours, the entire machine turns on one guy and destroys them.
Like how, what is that? You can see why people come up with conspiracies to explain that, right? Sure, yeah. And they are quite possibly right.
I mean, I don't know exactly what the conspiracy is, but it is quite possibly is one. But no dissent at all yeah but then i my thing is just that i do think and i think this is something i've benefited from i know this because i hear this back from my audience a lot that it's like oh when you were right on those issues when it really mattered you kind of gain credibility well that's and i also think that like you know let's say there's like um i don't know like a right wing or conservative uh um commentator who's telling you how you have to feel about the new storm right now it's like well just tell me how did you do on the last three storms you know like like were you were you telling dopes to get the vaccine were you telling everyone to be socially distanced or were you like on the right side of that? Where were you on Ukraine? You know, were you saying that like, oh, you know, like they can win or whatever the story is.
You know what I mean? And I do watch a lot of people who got everything consistently wrong. It's the same way as the neoconservatives, right? Like even if, I mean, I hate I hate them so much.
I, it's hard to speak about them like with any type of sense of fairness, but how do you listen? Let's just say you got six wars wrong and you were wrong about every single one. Like, let's just say you were for the war in Iraq and then you were for, you know, regime change in Afghanistan against the Taliban who did not attack us.
And then you were for overthrowing Gaddafi and then you were for overthrowing Assad. And then you were for backing the Saudi war in Yemen and like all these things.
And it's just nothing but disaster. Every one of them.
Okay. But then you're going to come out and confidently be like, and I'm for this next war.
And let me tell you why you have to be too. And you don't have like enough, just like, you don't feel humiliated enough that like you couldn't come out.
Even if you were for this, you'd be like, man, I really think we should fight this war, but I can't come out and say we should fight this war because the last six times I said it, it was nothing but a disaster. But the same people who were like, you see, Tucker, when we overthrow Saddam Hussein, democracy will sweep the region.
And you see, we're going to be greeted as liberators. We won't be fighting off a 20-year insurgency.
You see, they'll greet us as liberators because they love us. And then democracy will sweep the region.
And then Iran will lose influence in the region. And then Hezbollah will start being nice to Israel.
And like all these grand predictions and every last one of them, oh, it'll be paid for in oil. Do you remember all the things they used to say? I mean, it's, you know, it's a cakewalk.
it's a slam dunk that he has weapons of mass destruction. So every single one of these things you were wrong about, you get to now be the person advocating the next one? But you wouldn't ever allow that kind of behavior in your children.
Of course. You can't let a lie stand.
Kids lie, you catch them lying. And the whole point of the exercise is to get them to admit to your face, yes, I did this.
No, I won't do it again. Like that's an integral step, right? You have to go through that or else you don't improve as a person.
You become shittier as a person. Yeah, that's right.
And I would also, maybe this is me adding my libertarian bent to this, but I would also say that in the private sector, and I mean not like the crony connected to government private sector but like in true business you also don't get away with that stuff of course you can't just fail over and over again and then this only happens either in the government or in you know companies that are essentially the government but you know like live off no big government contracts or something like that um but yeah it's it's uh and it's it's the major problem is that look like at least there are problems with free markets and they're it's made up of human beings so there's always problems but there's at least like a cleansing mechanism there's like profit and loss yes if you lose too much you go out of business in in with government the the worse you do the more funding you get but so this If if the kids can't read we need a higher education i completely agree with you and for all i piss on libertarians and of course i was one for most of my life i'm gonna bring you back give me time no it's it's just interesting i think the reason i'm mad at libertarians is because i don't see a free market in the United States oh of course not yeah right and so I mean I look at green energy or the defense space and like there's that that bears no resemblance to a market at all well and and a lot of finance yes but I would also point out that like look there are just like with every group just like conservatives there within libertarians. Yes.
So just to point out, like the thing I said about the last five storms, if you go listen to what Ron Paul was saying throughout the entire COVID regime, he was perfect. Tom Woods, Lou Rockwell, Jeff Deist, like there's this group of libertarians who were great the entire time.
Well, I totally agree. I've never stopped loving Ron Paul.
So the difference between say ron paul the ron paulian libertarians which i would consider myself to be one of and say like the cato or groups like that is that uh those the the cato types tend to like almost have this academic discussion of what it would be like in a free market and then talk as if that's what we're living in right now but that you know i mean i was a fellow at cato so i remember this very well that organization that foundation 501c3 is run by an oligarch actually yeah it's run by charles coke that's right right so he kicked out the old head he brought in the new head and you sort of wonder if you're a libertarian it you can't you're not for the you're not for government power but you're also suspicious of oligarchs right aren't you well of course and particularly like say the same oligarch who's not only funding the cato institute but is also funding the republican party in general exactly and the the party who consistently is growing the size of government every bit as much as the democrats are i mean it's it's almost like, you know, it's almost, it's become a thing where if a Republican were to ever say, you know, say we need smaller government, or like Nikki Haley was talking about smaller government, you just roll your eye, because it never means anything. They've been talking about this forever.
There's never been one time, and there's been several times in my life where the Republicans have controlled the Congress and the White House.

Oh, yes.

Never once been a cut in spending. Of course.
Spending always goes up. There's been some cuts in top marginal tax rates.
Right. You know, not even drastic cuts, but yes, we'll have rich people pay less taxes.
There's never a cut in spending because that's a cut in the power of the federal government. And they're not for that.
And the if the guys who are funding that are also funding this libertarian institute to write policy paper for recommendations that are never going to be implemented anyway it's it does raise some eyebrows i i would say like look to to the bigger question of of you know libertarians in the side like like i've heard you say before, the US federal government is the biggest, most powerful government in the history of the world by far. There's not a close second.
It's a government that can snap its fingers and overthrow regimes anywhere in the world and does it regularly. And so that is, look, as the country is kind of spinning out of control and everything has just gotten more and more corrupt that's directly related to the fact that dc has gotten more and more powerful and this is to me like i've i've been saying this for a while it's not my original thought this is something hans herman hoppe said back in the 90s um where he he basically said that libertarians need to learn a conservative lesson and conservatives need to learn a libertarian lesson.
And what he meant by that was that libertarians basically need to learn that, okay, just because we might believe that the government ought to not bash someone over the head and lock them in a cage for doing something doesn't mean we have to celebrate it. You don't have to celebrate degeneracy.
You don't have to be on the side of that yes in fact a functioning society needs good family values and that's just like a fact now that doesn't we don't believe that should be enforced at the point of a gun but we that doesn't mean like you know like even if you think say like um whatever you think prostitution should be legal you could still have a feeling that it's horrible and yes represents a tragedy on all sides um and so that's like kind of the the conservative lesson that libertarians need to learn i think a lot of libertarians in the ron paul kind of school did learn that um and the lesson that i would say that conservatives or or trumpian populist types need to learn is that if donald trump's going to say drain swamp, it's like, okay, but what does that mean? What does that look like? How do you actually drain the swamp? And it's really actually very simple. It means cut government spending.
As long as Washington DC is the most powerful organization in the history of the world, and they're spending over $6 trillion a year, that is by definition a swamp. That's why more millionaires the suburbs outside of washington dc than anywhere else in the world they don't make anything except weapons you know what i mean that are purchased by the government it's i've never heard you talk about this before they don't even make them there right right i mean there's no there's not a single act of creation yeah in the entire dc the dmv as they call it right, no, and it's literally, not only are they not creating, but they're parasitic by nature.
Of course. They're taking Americans' money.
And this is, I mean, I think this is kind of the central source of why the country is spinning out of control and why we're so incredibly corrupt at every level is because there is this parasitic force in washington dc that's grown bigger and bigger and more i agree i absolutely agree with that and i i do think i saw it change i remember the moment it changed and it was the moment when the democratic party subverted the business the so-called business community which was always a kind of counterbalance against this because the idea was the government makes it actually harder for people to conduct business it stifles free markets and we're against that so the chamber of commerce and business roundtable were always sort of pushing back against the growth of government bill clinton changed that and he changed that by declaring a ceasefire between the democratic party and the rich and he did it during the tech boom i'll never forget this democrats were always saying and i thought you know i didn't agree with him but i sort of thought it was important for the purpose of balance to have this they would say they were suspicious of people with too much money that's too much power like what about the value of labor right you got the value of capital value of labor they're kind of in conflict with one another and we're on the side of labor all of a sudden bill clinton's like no there's nothing wrong with being you know making a billion dollars at 32 for creating an app you know running web van or e-toys or pets.com and doorknobs.com it was just everything it was just everything you could think of totally and it was so smart he did it for the purpose of fundraising and all of a sudden the democratic party became far richer than the republican party and all the formerly republican leafy suburbs around the country you know greenwich connecticut and mclean virginia they all went left actually it was brilliant and evil but its effect was to completely wreck the country because there was no counterbalance against power at all so once the government you know the people with the nuclear weapons and business the people with the largest bank accounts are aligned that leaves everybody else like who's defending them yeah and then you said something last night when we were having dinner that i thought was so interesting i was thinking about it after we left but you were talking about how like traditionally the rich people were in suits and ties yes right and then your uniform matters i mean that's why we have uniforms right and that's why the bus driver wears a uniform and your airline pilots have their stupid outfits and your your stewardesses are dressed up like they are because it says a lot about their role in your society and rich people used to spend a lot of money on clothes and the whole point of that was to say we're rich we're in a separate class and that comes with tons of advantages but it also comes with obligations no bless oblige was a thing and all of a sudden in the 90s you notice the richest people in america start dressing you know in like t-shirts and hoodies and like what's the message of that and the message of that is we're just like you which is another way of saying we have no obligation to anyone but ourselves actually we don't owe you anything and it comes out of this mindset that they do have and i know them of course well so i know that they feel this way that we're the we're the richest because we came up through this credentialing system that we claim is a meritocracy and we won we won all the prizes because we're superior it's it's something it's so fascinating this is why i don't like chess and why i prefer backgammon because backgammon has probably 30 or 40 percent of a luck element to it just like life right right just like life like Why didn't i get leukemia and die at five tons of five-year-olds do i don't know but i should be grateful for that so like i've been relatively successful in my stupid little category that's not all my doing like show some be magnanimous about it well this is why i was thinking about that because i think it's such a good point because there is something kind of counterintuitive to it where you'd be like oh but if they're dressing like the people then maybe they'd feel more connected to the people but in fact it's actually the opposite because it is it reminds me in a way this is what i was thinking about literally last night in my hotel i was thinking about you making this comment and it was reminding me of um when the lockdowns first started and um there there were all the celebrities would come on and be like,

we're all in this together.

And you're like, Ellen DeGeneres, you're in a mansion.

You're not in the same situation as a guy.

There's a guy out there who's got three kids and makes 60K a year.

And he was just deemed non-essential.

And he is like terrified about the future of how he's going to support his family.

And Ellen's sitting here and her message is, we're all in the ellen's sitting here and her message is we're all in the same boat man you know like we're all in the same i know one of my servants got covid and couldn't come in today so i only had a team of five you know and you're like so in a sense you're like while the message is we're all in this together and that kind of superficially sounds like a nice message it's actually the the worst message. A much better message would be to acknowledge that I'm not in the situation that you're in at all.
That for me, it's actually fine to be locked out. But if you're in the leadership class, you have, and I mean, I've been in it my whole life, I know.
You have a moral obligation to admit it. Yes.
Because once you admit it out loud, then you realize there are know massive benefits to it but there are also massive obligations to it they're shirking their duty that's right that's what they're actually doing and that's actually and that's actually the opposite of being noble that's it's it's fraudulent it's it's disgusting yes and it's it's a lie your your whole thing is based on a lie it's sam bankman freed of course right oh i just drive like a shitty little toyota it's like oh actually you're defrauding michelle obama goes to princeton for free yeah and he's been the ruling class her whole life yeah and she's still lecturing you about how she's a victim of racism hillary clinton exact same thing goes to wellesley spends her entire life in the ruling class and she's still whining about how she's discriminated against why are they doing that yeah and did you ever see um they'll have like pictures of uh um side by side but it'll be like pictures of like uh jimmy carter's house yeah and obama's house and it totally represents something about the like corroding of our soul that you're like we would allow people who call themselves public servants which of course is ridiculous they're not but but still they don't even have to pretend to keep up a facade of that like you get to live in this insane like mansion yeah off what because you were president and you get to cash in on that now you know white neighborhood you should be required to live in the hood if you're if you're barack obama and you if you're using that card you use that card you the only reason you got elected was because of your race you spent your entire eight years in flaming race hate in our country and then you go to martha's vineyard the whitest zip code in the world not allowed yeah you're not allowed to do that well it also i mean it did it did so much damage his inflaming racial hatred and and i'll say after, you know, Barack Obama's campaign in 2008, first of all, it was just leaving how you feel about the guy aside. It was an amazing campaign.
It was unlike anything that had ever been run before. It was genius.
Yes, it was totally brilliant. It was his...
Now, of course, it wasn't what they presented it as. It wasn't a grassroots campaign it was he was approved of by the powers that be he didn't he didn't just happen to as a junior senator get like a prime time speaking slot in 2004 where he gave that speech he wasn't even a senator yet was he a state senator still i i that's when i first met barack yeah yeah walking down the street smoking a cigarette in boston on my way to dinner at the palm i'll never forget it and i met him and jesse jackson jr they pulled over to say hi to me really i'd never heard his name and i covered politics for a living right and he gave the keynote at the end of that week that was sunday night he spoke on thursday and yeah he was not a u.s senator that was that was the campaign it was great it was absolutely so crazy okay it was clearly kind of orchestrated by some powerful people.
By the Pritzker family, of course. But listen, the speeches that he gave and much of the message, first off, I actually, there's probably a lot of things that I would have agreed with him that he was running on.
I agreed with a lot of things George W. Bush ran on in the year 2008.
Well, I'll tell you what I agreed with. He turned around and didn't govern like that at all.
Let's sort of like elect the black guy and get past the race stuff. I loved that.
Well, especially because that was his message. That was his message.
Like, let's get past the race stuff. I love that.
And even, and there was a broader, more unifying thing. I mean, I remember the, because he was such a powerful, you know, like public speaker.
I mean, he never really said anything, but it would still be beautiful. You know, like i remember in his uh acceptance speech at 2008 at the dnc we had this whole line where he was like uh he was like i love this country and so do you and so does john mccain the men and women who have fought for this country have been republicans and democrats and independents but they fought together and died together not defending a red america or a blue america the united states of amer.
And then it's like, oh, what? I mean, he didn't really say anything there, but it was beautifully put. I'm 100% for that.
Yeah, the message was great. And look, he also was very critical of the George W.
Bush administration's excesses. And I'm going to end the war in Iraq.
I'm going to reinstitute habeas corpus. We're going to end torture.
There were a lot of, he didn't do any of that. I mean, I guess he ended the war in Iraq eventually and then reinvaded the country because the ISIS fighters he was arming invaded the country.
But then I think essentially what happened, and it was around Obama's reelection campaign, this is where things really went off the rails in this country, was that he got in there and continued and expanded all the worst of the Bush policies. Oh, of course.
And so they almost had nothing to run on. And so they decided to pivot to a culture war instead.
And this was a decision, and again, I don't know exactly what the conspiracy is, but this decision was made from the top down, that I think it was a response to Obama's failures. It was a response to these movements like the tea party and occupy wall street which we're getting a little bit too close that's right a little bit too close to the target and all this you know i'm sure you've looked at this before but where there's these nexus charts and you can chart out like um how many times all the woke terms are used you know transgenderism all that and it's all like right around 2012 that it's all of a sudden like you know uh systemic racism goes from being mentioned like this many times throughout history to like shooting like the new york times and the washington post it's a very famous graph and i've used it many times and trying to explain this but that's exactly right like fight amongst yourselves yep and i think it was the finance it was the hangover from the financial crisis yeah well that was a huge part of it for sure um and also that obama's um you know like so in the year like from 2007 to 2010 um the the median net worth in america shrunk by like 40 yeah like people lost like 40 of american wealth was lost um and you know you can imagine especially now like having kids you know at the time i didn't have kids and i was young i was like whatever you know bad economy oh that sucks but you can appreciate now like oh what that would be like if you just lost 40 percent of your net worth and you got little kids like how destabilizing that is and obama's solution to this right the obama recovery was uh okay it was record high government spending and record low interest rates.
This was, right? This was the solution was, this is how we're going to save the economy. We're going to bring interest rates down to zero.
And so we're going to bring government spending higher than it's ever been before at that time. And so what, so you can say on paper, there's a little bit of a recovery here, but what really happens in that environment? You know, it's like all the politically connected people in washington dc they make more money and the speculators have a field day because now everybody in wall street's making more money because you have to invest now right because you're losing money if you just save and so this this ultimately is what built then they throw the culture war in there to like you said fight amongst yourselves and the result of that was donald trump the result of all of that was the condition for trump zero interest rates that had a greater i think negative effect on the country than any war we've ever fought it for one thing it just asset prices ballooned yeah i mean this is fake everyone knows what happens over time uh with free money the money becomes worth less and so there's a rush to assets and now you now you can't buy a house.
Right, that's right. And then the boom is always followed by the bust.
And so you have all of this malinvestment because the way it works, and this is where Austrian economics, which I heard you disparaged. No, I have never disparaged.
I'm just mad about the results. Don Jr.
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www.merchantspaymentscoalition.com But it's not a result of Austrian economics or libertarianism. It's a result of abandoning all of that right i agree so it's but look the the basic thing is that like interest rates are a price they're a price just like anything else it's the price of money of course the price of borrowing money and so just like every other price there's information given in these prices so if if steel becomes very very cheap that gives information to a businessman that like, we're producing a lot of steel very easily now.
If you wanted to do a project that requires a lot of steel, now's the time to do it because we're producing steel. Now, that works when you have real prices because, oh, there's a big production of steel.
So you can, but if the government just came in and said, you know, we have price controls and we insist that the price of steel is very, very cheap. What's going to happen is people are going to start building projects with steel and then realize we're out of steel pretty soon because it wasn't a real signal.
Exactly. So what happens when you, when you make interest rates zero for a decade, it's a signal for people to say, borrow money when they wouldn't have otherwise borrowed.
Like maybe you wouldn't borrow if rates were eight or 9 percent but at zero this is a good time to borrow this money but again it's a fake signal we're borrowing all this money so maybe i am a libertarian because i i got all kinds of advice from i'm not sophisticated at all with money but all kinds of advice borrow money it's free and i never did yes not one dollar yeah well it's a really bad bad idea. I feel like the amount of debt that people carry is the untold story in the United States.
Yeah. And I don't know why we're like in favor of the credit card companies or people who are getting rich from the, it's just bad.
Having a lot of debt is bad. I don't know why, that's like, if you say that, by the way, it's considered super radical, but like, why is that radical? Well, yeah, i think about the idea that we have all of these policies designed to get people to gamble their life savings like why would you're penalized for not carrying debt when i made money in not that long ago when i was like finally could pay off my the first thing i did was pay off my mortgage that's the first thing i did and my college roommate who's really much smarter than i am has has made a ton of money.
He's like, that's crazy. You have to pay, I forgot what it was, but like you lose the tax shield.
And it was like 18 grand. I had to pay $18,000 a year for the privilege of not being in debt to a bank.
Yeah. What? Yeah.
And that the system is like artificially designed to be that way. You know what I mean?'s like oh these are the tax laws that will encourage people and also wait you're you're penalizing me for not being in debt it's like that's who wrote these laws look i think about just think about what the income tax is they penalize you for working well no that's right to work the punishment is a fee the more the more productive you are the more punishment you get.
So let me ask you this question.

That's an Austrian economist.

Why the disparity between the tax on labor and the tax on capital?

Well, because that's the rules that the government made.

Well, let me say, right, because I think you're totally right about this, right?

That it's like, look, I've heard you talk about this before.

So like if the capital gains tax is 15%, but then someone working pays 30%. So like, what are you saying? We would rather people be- Exactly.
But so here's the next level to that. This is all I think that you're missing in that, because I think you're completely right in your critique of that.
But okay. So if we were, let's say to fix that disparity, there's basically two ways we could do that.
One would be to raise capital gains taxes up to 30%. Okay.
So the result of that would be that, I guess, we would disincentivize certain types of investment, maybe the government. Let's say it works out perfectly.
And these, we are able, you know, like the people on Wall Street don't have an army of tax lawyers and accountants who can get them out of this stuff as they always end up doing. So then D.C.
gets more money. So then the corrupt, most powerful government in the world gets a little bit more money.
They will then leverage that to borrow three times as much and just sell more. Of course, it will go.
It will go to politically connected cronies. Right'll be however let's say the other option to that is we could lower exactly individual taxes to 15 percent and now give every working uh family in this country a huge raise a huge raise that they would really appreciate so that's all i'm saying you're right about the discrepancy there and it's totally totally corrupt.
But it's like, what's the solution to that? Well, the solution is, look, if you tied them to – legislatively and just said, you know, they're going to be the same. The tax on capital will always be the same as the tax on labor.
Then the average person, which includes me. I don't have any investments.
I just work on my salary, right? So like most people, the average person would benefit from the lobbying power of Wall street right right so right so they're always gonna be the same but like all of a sudden i have an army of bank lobbyists and private equity lobbyists keeping my income taxes low yes look in theory i would love that idea it's just if the the answer there is to just like you know it's unbelievable to me that particularly like people like, you know, like Bernie Sanders types will say that they care so much about working people and they want to do whatever they can to help these working people.

And yet the biggest bill for working people is their federal income taxes.

Oh, I know.

And I mean, the IRS, I mean, I know stories from good friends of mine. They are ruthless.
I mean, they go back 20 years and ruin people. And this isn't just like, it's like people kind of have this idea that there's like economic issues over here and social issues over here as if they're different, but they're really not.
I mean, you go back 20 years on somebody and say, you know, a guy who's making 30 grand a year and they go back and maybe it's only just like, you know, a few thousand dollars a year that he owes, but they go back 20 years on you and say, a guy who's making 30 grand a year and they go back, and maybe it's only just like a few thousand dollars a year that he owes, but they go back 20 years on you and you owe three grand a year. And so now you owe $60,000.
You know what I mean? This is what leads to divorces, and people putting pistols in their mouth. Yeah, kids growing up without their dad around.
I mean, it's like these things are interconnected. And you see that just over the last few years with the price inflation inflation how bad it's been i mean like this this ruins people so why isn't that a news story i don't understand if everybody i mean and i will say you know because of my age and income i'm a little cut off but i try not to be cut off and people i talk to they all complain about grocery store prices yeah like a lot and they're shocking but i that.
Yeah. Well, I mean, I certainly talk about it a lot.
I think that there's, it's not, it's not in anybody's interest, I guess. Like it's not in any partisan interest to really talk about that because both parties are totally complicit.
Yeah. And so it's, you know, no matter who, you know, people, because we live in this weird, like two party system and everybody becomes partisans, especially in an election year.
And they're all just trying to kind of get their guy over and no one's really, you know, I mean, there are Trump supporters who like to talk about the inflation under Obama, but I don't really want to talk about it too much because it all started with the money that was being printed in 2020 that Donald Trump was championing the whole time actually and and and smearing Thomas Massey for for daring to say hey we should have a vote on this before we spend more money than we've ever spent when we're broker than we've ever been and he's and Trump of course bragging that it was the the biggest bill you know because it's so Trump he goes it's the biggest he goes a lot of other people had spending bills mine's the biggest spending bill you know and like look i'm not trying to you know there are trump is like the most entertaining uh character and he's hated by all of the right people and a lot of his instincts are correct and he was also framed for treason by his own intelligence agencies and so there's a lot of lot of Donald Trump that I can sympathize with and relate to his supporters. But the truth is that it was such a disaster to lock down the economy and to say, we're just going to print our way out of this was such a disaster.
I agree. And he totally got rolled by all the people around him and just did not have the wisdom or the courage to stand up to them.
And he kept Fauci on that task force through all of 2020. I mean, he just kept so many people who hated his guts around him.
And it's really, it was a tragedy. Nikki Haley, Mike Pompeo.
Mike Pence. Oh yeah, no, I agree.
I mean, all of them, you know, Mike Pence is a guy, he was in his sixties.s and if he were to go this is the guy who he was going to leave us as president of the united states it's mike pence there's something really there's something wrong with him yeah there's there's a lot wrong you can feel it i really appreciate you ruining his political career no it wasn't personal i mean i feel sorry for pence he's not comfortable with himself at all uh and that's the vibe the strong i've known him for over i've known him 25 years i know him since he got to washington um and he's got some talent and i don't think he's evil or anything but there's something really damaged and i always felt that he was put in there um he wouldn't be the first vp to be in this position but he was put in there by permanent dc to keep an eye on trump yeah obviously yeah but that's always how it works right like that's the same thing that happened with reagan and george hw bush being there you put in the guy of course we're gonna have our cia director nixon and gerald ford i mean this is like this is the oldest story there is so trump is coming to libertarian convention yeah so let me just ask at the outset you're you're involved in libertarian politics like actual party politics um would you ever be on the ticket you know so just for people who don't know it's kind of like inside baseball but so my there was kind of a civil war it's more inside baseball is too broad it's more like inside pickleball yes yes that is actually a really good thing. But in this very irrelevant corner where I have a lot of sway.
But so there was basically like a kind of civil war within the libertarian party over the last few years. And it was about a lot of the stuff that you were talking about at the beginning.
Like basically there was like, you know, as you know, because you covered it, there was what was called the Ron Paul revolution. Yeah.
And that's what I was i was one of the young people in that ron paul revolution that totally changed you know the way

i look at the world and i became obsessed with all of this stuff and so there were a bunch of us

and a lot of us had hoped that um rand paul was kind of gonna yes carry the mantle and continue

this this ron paul energy and now i'm not saying anything against rand paul i think he's one of the

best senator probably the best senator he was great during cobit grilling fauci and all that stuff but

Thank you. this this ron paul energy and now i'm not saying anything against ron paul i think he's one of the best senator probably the best senator he was great during covid grilling fauci and all that stuff but for whatever reason there's there's several it didn't work out that way and donald trump came in and stole the republican party and it stole i mean he won it but anyway so when that happened um there were a lot of us who were like kind of disappointed about ron paul and then the we had ron paul running in the republican party but then a lot of us started looking to the libertarian party like oh they were the third party candidate and they ran gary johnson and bill weld we were very disappointed with that campaign uh particularly with bill weld who's just horrible um sad defeated guy and and also just he was like a raytheon lobbyist who was like what are you doing total fraud Total fraud.
What's the point if we're going to have a third party and putting that guy up?

And then during 2020, the people who were running the Libertarian Party completely failed and didn't oppose the lockdowns.

And then started like virtue signaling during the Black Lives Matter riots about how we must be anti-racist.

For real?

Yeah, it was horrible. So basically, then there was uh group called the mises caucus uh that i joined i was led by this guy named michael heiss and uh angela mccardell who ultimately is she's currently the chair of the party and we basically went and took over the whole party we did for in the name of ron paulian's like if there's going to be a libertarian party it's going to to be represented by libertarians.
And so anyway, cutting to.

So once that happened, it was kind of my group who took over and they they wanted me to run for president on the libertarian ticket. And I was considering it for a while.
Ultimately, it just wasn't the right time for me. I got two little kids.
I got a lot going on in my career. It's like it just wasn't the right time for me.
But so to what you said angela mccardell pulled this off to her great credit that she's got donald trump coming and speaking at the libertarian uh national convention uh it looks like rfk jr when and where is this this is at the end of the month it's uh may may 24th through 26th i believe in washington in washington dc that was a decision made by the old guard we would not have had our convention in Washington DC do you know where it is in DC yeah it's at um like at some hotel I'd have to look it up yeah it's at some hotel in in DC um but anyway I mean RFK just challenged Donald Trump to debate him there which I don't think is going to happen but would be very interesting if it did happen and And so it is at least to me, it kind of represents the Libertarian Party, who is this third party, trying to engage in relevance of some sort and trying to at least look, obviously, we're not in a position. We're not going to win the White House or even win any Senate seats or anything like that.
But I do think the Libertarian Party could

effectively be used to put pressure, particularly on the Republicans, to be better and to not run like awful neocons and run better candidates. I certainly prefer the kind of America first strain of Republicans to the neoconservative strain.
And I think right now there is, well I mean there's kind of been a civil war

in the right half of America

since to the neoconservative strain. And I think right now there is, well, I mean, there's kind of been a civil war in the right half of America since Donald Trump came onto the scene.
But I don't even know if you'd call it a civil war because Donald Trump just won so dominantly. It's not like the Republicans were split between Jeb Bush and Donald Trump or something.
No, it was 95 to 5%. But particularly, and I know you've talked about this a lot since the war in Israel, or I should say the war in Gaza, or I don't even know if I should say the war, the attack of Gaza, whatever you call it.
I don't know if you can call it a war when one side doesn't have a military, but whatever you call that. Since that, you've seen this kind of divide grow where I think largely neoconservatism had been rejected in by the by the voters yes republican voters but when israel came up it's a little bit different and i don't know exactly well neoconservatism neoconservatism is like chicken pox like you think you defeat it and then when your defenses are down it comes back as shingles you're like oh crap they're democrats now jesus no it's true it just lays dormant it's always there and but when it comes back in its second iteration when it manifests again it is disabling and that's what we're watching like i if there's one thing i wanted to help do is get rid of that world view but it seems stronger than ever well i Well, I think you have done a lot.
I mean, I really do. Not really.
It's like everybody in the Republican party is completely on board with the idea that wars, non-essential wars, make America better or something. That's so nuts.
It's what's so wild to me about it is just after the 20 years of terror wars that have just been such a complete disaster that America would still be entering these conflicts that are very clearly wars of choice. I know they can make an argument like they were making the argument that Putin, if he takes Ukraine, is going to take Poland and then is going to take it, which is nothing he's ever said.
There's not one thing Putin's ever said that you could point to. In fact, when you interviewed him, he explicitly said if Poland attacks us, that's the only scenario.
He's got the largest country in the world. It's the biggest landmass on planet Earth.
It's incredibly complex to run. It's 20 percent Muslim.
They have all these sort of semi-autonomous zones. He wants more land.
I don't think he wants more land. No, look land no look he's always like insane it's been very and it's not just that he's said it but like almost everyone who was being honest has said it at the top levels of the american government as well as at nato as well his issue was ukrainian entry into nato that was always his issue and we kept pushing that and kept pushing that and that's what got him to react and even the head of nato himself strostenberg whatever said that vladimir putin said that if you just signed a deal put it in writing that ukraine won't join nato i won't invade and nato refused and so he invaded but is there a single news story even now that doesn't describe reflexively describe almost like it's like a block text in you know in the in the computer program the unprovoked invasion of ukraine right they always have to say that there's never been a more provoked invasion well i mean they did it on purpose they pushed russia to invade ukraine well let's just say i mean like let's say we had um like a fairly pro-american government in mexico that um and russia wanted to get them to do an economic deal with them and then we were trying to convince them not to do that economic deal but to do an economic deal with us and ultimately we convinced them that they're going to be in an economic partnership with us and so then russia came in and overthrew the democratically elected government and installed a pro-russian government and then that led to a civil war where 15 000 people died and like the pro-american side was you know what i mean like would you go we it was so unprovoked yeah and then and then russia said we're going to get mexico to join our defense alliance and we're going to put missiles in tijuana right oh and no by the way thatated out for years.
And in fact, in 2008, we had formally announced that Russia had formally announced that Mexico would be joining their military alliance. Then we went, I'm sorry for people out there.
You're right. It was a totally organic uprising made on revolution.
Victoria Nuland happened to be in the middle of handing out sandwiches. Don't let that, you know, like John McCain and they were going there a lot.
And like, it was soros backed ngos that were funded but whatever that's a it's totally organic movement you know um and so yeah no it was a a series of provocations very unnecessary ones and not just like not just ones that like libertarian doves like me or something like that were against but what George Kennan The cold warrior, right? The founder of the containment strategy what he said was a great piece with him and Thomas Friedman in the New York Times And I think it was in 1999 He laid it out right there when we first started the first round of NATO expansion And he said the people advocating this expansion are gonna keep advocating it until there's a Russian Response and then that response, they'll say, see, this is why we were right to expand NATO. Obama even made noises that suggested he understood what you just said.
Yes. Well, he refused to send weapons in.
Well, I know. I mean, he was, you know, he was there when the government, when Yanukovych was overthrown, but he wouldn't send the weapons in.
And then Trump ultimately did. And I think, you know, I think my, you know, like that was the big scandal about Ukraine gate, right.
Was that, uh, Donald Trump kind of did this, you know, kind of like a very Trumpian kind of gray area thing where he's like, you know, I'd really like you to investigate the Bidens. Maybe you don't get these weapons if you don't investigate the Bidens.
Now, the reason why that was so ridiculous to impeach him over was because it was totally legitimate to want to investigate what the Bidens were doing in there, by the way. Of course.
Very corrupt involvement in Ukraine. But that being said, what no one ever talked about in the story was that Trump caved.
Of course. Didn't get the Biden investigation and gave them the weapons.
And like that never, that was the other reason why the impeachment was so ridiculous because there's no quid pro quo when you don't get the biden investigation and gave them the weapons and like that never that was the other reason why the impeachment was so ridiculous because there's no prid uh quid pro quo when you don't get anything for anything you know what i mean like you could argue it was an attempted quid pro quo you know what i mean but he never got anything but he sent the weapons in and i do think part of this and this was the really you know effective the way that the intelligence agencies really won was that, because a lot of people would look at it like, okay, so the Russiagate was an attempted deep state coup. And essentially it was, I mean, Andrew McCabe admitted on 60 Minutes that they debated at the Justice Department invoking the 25th Amendment.
And then they ultimately settled on a special prosecutor. You know, I mean, like they were trying to overthrow the guy, but so on the surface, you could say, Oh, it failed.
It failed. But you know, in another sense, Donald Trump explicitly ran in 2016 on detente with Russia.
Like let's work with Russia. Let's work together to kill the terrorists.
We all don't like terrorists. Who cares about overthrowing Assad? That's not in our national interest.
Like we don't, who cares? So let's be friends with Russia. Let's get along with them.
And, and then when you're being called a Russian spy every day in on, on the news, and you know, then when he went to Helsinki and said, you know, I believe Putin, right. You know, I don't, I don't think he interfered in the 2016 elections, by the way, there's still never been a shred of evidence presented that he did.
They've got like one company that they claim had Russian IP addresses because no one can fake an IP address. You know, it's like the most ridiculous claimant who was once at a party with Putin or something like that.
They have nothing. And so Trump just said, yeah, I agree with him.
And they were like, so you don't trust your intelligence? You know, Everyone was freaking out so much that it got to a point where he couldn't have made a deal with Russia because if he had, that would have just been proof, right? Like imagine in that environment when Trump-Russia collusion was being said all day long, if Donald Trump had made some deal with Russia, it'd be like, see, proof he's a Russian puppet. And so Donald Trump, I think, went out of his way to prove what a Russian puppet he wasn't't it was like here's how much i'm not a russian puppet i'll send weapons into ukraine well and that happened on a bunch of different issues unfortunately but the problem i would say at this point is like the desire to go to war with russia has been pretty much the animating thought in our foreign policy um establishment for over 20 years so now we

actually have a hot war with Russia we are conducting a war against Russia using our proxy Ukraine totally destroyed Ukraine in the process we're losing that war so Ukraine's not gonna win that I can I don't see how we Ukraine rate's impossible.

So what happens when that becomes really obvious that all we've achieved is destroyed this country and killed a million of its young men and like how does the state department and the atlantic council and the aspen institute and joe scarborough and the whole sort of blob like, how do they respond to that? I mean, I'm sure, look, I mean, I think, basically, it's over, and I don't think anyone even, I mean, this latest round of funding is just, it's an election year, and Biden's trying to kick the can to not let this fall right now, you know what I mean? Be totally obvious. Also, it's easier to steal the money when it's out of the country.
Well, that that's for sure that's that's for sure i mean we have no idea where all this money has been going but we know ukraine is a totally trustworthy government um you know no corruption there um but i i think look i'm sure they will attempt to spin it in some way where if zelinski still controls like the western portion of ukraine they'll be like, he didn't lose the whole country and Putin would have been in Poland if we hadn't fought this. Of course, it'll all be completely ridiculous.
We could have avoided this war by just saying, we're not going to admit Ukraine into NATO and putting that in writing. We could have avoided this war.
This is not according to me, according to the head of NATO, we could have avoided this war by doing that. And these, whatever the number is, and who knows, you never know in the fog of war.
I mean, it's not until they really test the excess mortality rate that you know. No, that's right.
But it's clearly in hundreds of thousands. Oh, yeah.
I mean, they've got 50 year olds fighting for them at this point, so that tells you something. They're force conscripting men with Down syndrome.
Yes. Yes.
That means a lot.

That means all your boys are dead, essentially.

For sure.

And the ones who couldn't manage to flee.

And so, yeah, it's a total disaster.

The incredibly dark irony of it is that all the people cheering on Ukraine have just,

as John Mearsheimer said in 2014, which aged very well, unfortunately, said,

we're leading Ukraine down the primrose path.

Thank you. Ukraine have just, as John Mearsheimer said in 2014, which aged very well, unfortunately, said, we're leading Ukraine down the primrose path.
And that's what we did. You act like you're cheering them on, but you're leaving them to their demise.
And it didn't need to happen. It's terrible.
And I'm not absolving Putin of responsibility. He was certainly put backed into a corner, but there had to be another answer other than this.
I agree. It's just horrible.
But no, at the end of it, it'll be another disaster and the Hawks in DC will try to spin it as best they can and then they'll all get promoted and have better jobs. That seems to be the track record.
It does feel though that we're coming to the end of something something it's like this was the last effort to exert a certain form of american power abroad it failed does that make them desperate and crazy i feel like a loss in ukraine increases the chances we use tactical nukes against russia for example well i mean i hope wrong. Well, the thing is it decreases the chances that Russia uses them.
So there's that. I mean, you know, there's, Joe Biden always pretended that the war in Ukraine was a must win.
You know, like that we couldn't allow Vladimir Putin to win the war in Ukraine. But that's all just an act.
It doesn't, it's not, I'm just saying, however you feel about it, it's not actually vital to us survival, whether we, whether Russia controls Ukraine or not, that's just, that's absurd. But Vladimir Putin really believed it was a must win.
And that actually is a much more reasonable case that you can't lose a war on your border. That's a proxy war to, you know, even in the cold war, we never had, you know know we fought in vietnam but that's not on russia's border you know what i mean like that's right this is a whole different game and so the the to me the real fear from the very beginning was not that vladimir putin might win the real fear was that well what if the west wins like what if vladimir putin is humiliated right on his border and feels that his death is imminent because that's that's the time when nukes might fly absolutely and so in that sense you know it's quite possibly the better outcome i mean no nuclear war is always the better outcome um i do think and i i gotta say i think you're a huge part of this i i think that if you look at like, say, 2002, when the war drums were beating for Iraq,

there was just nothing like what we have today.

I mean, like the biggest shows in cable news, they were all for it.

They were all- I was for it.

Yes.

I was for it until I went to Iraq in 2003.

I immediately apologized, I would say, in my defense. What is it that, what about the trip made you change your mind? Oh, I was so shocked by the whole thing.
So the invasion was in March of 2003. And I mean, I was hosting a chat show, a debate show, Crossfire.
And actually, it's a true story. I was at lunch with my father.
father had lunch with my dad every week at the same table in this place and in this men's club in washington and we were sitting at the table i'll never forget this in the fall of 2003 and he goes when are you going to iraq and i was like i don't i don't know i don't think i mean i don't plan to go to ir to Iraq I've got a daily show I have to host he goes oh so you're a journalist and there's a war but you're not going to cover the war and I was like no I've got you know like four kids and a daily job he's like oh so but you just kind of kind of sit this one out and he like shamed me into it it's true story he was like so unimpressed that i wasn't going to see it and um i was like okay you're right i should go so i went i took leave of my show and went um for a couple weeks with some friends who were contractors defense contractors of all military guys a buddy of mine called kelly mccann and a bunch of bill frost all these really impressive uh contractors and we went to iraq and the first well the first thing that happens we got to kuwait we're going to fly in and the insurgency shot down a dhl plane coming into biop or you know the baghdad airport and so we couldn't fly in i was like so we've occupied the country now i went in december early december so that was i don't know nine months and we had at least unequivocal victory over saddam right he was hiding in fact he was captured in tukrit the day i got there so we had just won and we can't control the airport right so then we we drive in from kuwait immediately got like it was out of control people were shooting it was it was chaos it was full chaos and then we stayed outside the green zone for um in just this house that they had rented and one night i'm sitting on the roof on a sat phone trying to talk to my wife back in washington taking our dog to the vet and someone starts shooting at me

and then all these people start shooting at our house there's a gun battle at the house like what um do you have a gun when you're over there oh absolutely i must get fired for it actually amazingly um you were you were told to carry a gun it was so out of control when i was there that journalists and ngo workers or i don't know certainly me you had to go get a certification from the state i still have my badge it's hanging in my office right there that um you qualified with this it was an ak-47 well i actually had an ak-47 already not fully automatic but just my range so i knew how to operate it but yeah you're required to carry it that's how out of control it was so and then a buddy of mine got killed there a journalist was killed there a guy called mike kelly was a really great guy and um the bottom line was we're not good at colonialism yeah because we don't have the self-confidence we're not sort of bringing christianity and civilization There's no clearly defined goal for this. And we're bad at it.
And the armed forces is not designed to do that. And the effect was super obvious.
It was chaos. And the one thing I cannot deal with, and I hate, and I think all people hate instinctively, is chaos.
People can handle repression. They live under repressive regimes.
All through history they have. They can't handle chaos.
And we brought to iraq and i just thought this is the opposite of what a great power should be doing this is disgusting and i saw really really clearly that it would never get better and and i'll just add one more thing to this which i've never forgotten we went into the green zone one night and had dinner with some generals i did and this and i'd always sort of like my dad was the military i sort of respected the military i didn't realize how corrupt and disgusting and feminized the officer class was and politicized just repulsive people actually at the flag officer level so we're sitting at dinner and this general is telling me about i saw something really touching today i saw we had this female

officer um and she was killed her legs were blown off by an ied and her husband was there and uh he you know they've got three kids back in virginia but he held her hand as she died of this ultimate sacrifice for america and i was like what you're like celebrating this a girl got killed a mother i thought we fought wars to protect mothers and children first of all if you're sending girls to fight your wars you're disgusting yeah because you're violating the most basic agreement there is which is the man protects and in exchange for that the willingness to sacrifice his life he gets to be revered as a man it's at the head of the table and all the benefits of being a man and there are many but if you're sending your children 100 yeah if you're sending women to protect you if there's a home invasion at your house at three in the morning you're like honey i dealt with the last one go go defend us i hope that she leaves you and she will way. Yes.
So if you're sending women to defend you,

it's not a civilization worth defending.

That's how I feel.

Can you imagine, I mean,

going with the mother of your children

and going to war with them?

A mother gets her legs blown off

and you think that's a good thing.

And I lost control at the table with this guy

and said almost exactly what I think is.

It's disgusting.

And it's not because I don't think women

should be defending our country. Not because I don't love women.
It's because I do love women. i i don't think women should be defending our country not because i don't love women it's because i do love women they're above that we should we should be defending our women yeah i don't know how supporting women getting their legs exactly become the pro woman position exactly and this guy accused me of being like a woman hater or something here i've got a wife and three daughters who i revere who i would die for without thinking and i'm like i i hated him i don't think i've ever hated a man more than i hated this general i wish i remember his name um and the pio the fairly well-known sort of spokesman for the provisional authority dan senor was sitting at the table he was very offended by my behavior and but i was outraged and that rage has sort of never it's just exploded on you sorry but it's never left me and i really enjoyed it i came back to washington and i was like and i did an interview with the new york times i said i cannot believe i supported something like this is totally evil what we're doing and i've never moved from that position i lost all these friends for saying that whatever i'm not i don't want to talk about myself continue talking about myself but yeah you asked in that well because i've just i i've heard you say several times that your trip over there you know like turned you against the war but i would never like heard you really like say what specifically it was celebrating the death of a mother yeah and then getting mad at me because i don't i'm not going to celebrate the death of a mother what about her children and her husband like this is disgusting and it's it's it's so dark and horrible that we dress it up with ideology.
Well, the thing that's almost like- To make it palatable. Right.
Well, the thing that's almost more dark and horrible than just that is when you add on the fact that this was a small group of people who wanted this war going back into the 90s and that they used 9-11 as the excuse to you know what i mean be like oh yeah now we can go get our bonus war oh look at this right now we've got a blank check from the american people which they did that you tell us you say the word terrorist in point and we will support you bombing the crap and i knew it was even at the time and i i went over to the white house for something to see bush or cheney um or somebody i think i was seeing cheney whatever i was on the white house he's a really warm guy great guy and so i was there and it was like maybe the fall of 2002.

And they'd been talking about this Invader Rock stuff,

but I didn't take it seriously because I thought it was so crazy.

It was like a non sequitur.

It was like, it was just not connected

in any sense to 9-11, obviously.

And guys like, you know, paid liars like Steve Hayes

or someone would write these books like,

Al-Qaeda did it.

And I worked with Steve Hayes

and I was so embarrassed by that. It's like, he's dumb.
So he didn't know, but I just felt, I was like, this whole thing was like so nuts. So I never thought we were going to invade Iraq.
I never thought that. And I show up and I'm whatever, like having a cigarette on the lawn outside where all the, all the sticks are, all the standup guys, the TV cameras are.
And I run into Mike Allen. He's an old friend of mine, former Washington Post reporter, now runs Axios, a really nice person and has this like clarity of vision that I don't have because he isn't caught in the weeds on shit.
And I said, we're not really going to invade Iraq. He goes, of course we are.
And I said, how do you know that? He goes, well, because it's all the machinery is moving in that direction. Like if it's going to happen.
I was like, that can't really happen. He goes, oh no, that's going to happen.
He wasn't endorsing it.

He could just see that like,

if everyone starts talking about something,

like they will convince themselves that it's true and it will happen.

Like we should remember that.

Yeah.

Don't overthink things.

If something really obvious is happening,

it's happening.

Yeah.

Sometimes,

sometimes it's,

yeah,

sometimes it's almost too hard to accept.

Intellectuals, people like you. Yeah.
And to some extent me have a lot of trouble seeing that because we're like well actually no no the obvious is real yeah and it's almost like if you just if you like you know remove yourself like if you transcend the moment it's like yeah it's so of course this is happening. And there's, you know, what's unbelievable to me that really like what, what, what's woken me up about the warfare state is, you know, like how much it's all based on lies and that you see that there's only like a few and I, you call me an intellectual.
I'm really not an intellectual, you know, like I'm a, I'm a comedian likes to read No, no, but you think about why things have sure sure But I just mean that I'm not an expert in any of this stuff But you know, I just know enough To know that the supposed experts are completely full of shit Like all all I have to know is these four like narrative shattering things And so like like just a few of them are like look You could read and read and anyone can go read this. You'd find it's called a clean break, a new strategy for securing the realm.
It was a letter written by Richard Perle and David Wormser and a few other. Oh, I remember that became very powerful in the George W.
Bush administration. I knew all those guys.
So this was written in 1996 and it was not written to Bill Clinton. It was not written to Bob Dole, who was running for president that year.
It was written to Benjamin Netanyahu, who had just become the prime minister of Israel. And the clean break, the strategy was a break from this whole peace process nonsense that Yitzhak Rabin and them had agreed to.
And basically, it was like, well, look, it was the beginning laying down of what the Netanyahu doctrine was ultimately to be, which is culminated in a wild success, as you know. And so basically the idea was like, well, look, forget all of this, like this peace process where you focus on land exchanges and whose land belongs to who.
That's all kind of lame. And so what really you should do is reach out to the broader Arab world, kind of make arrangements with them so you don't have to go through this peace process.
And that starts with overthrowing Saddam Hussein. And like that's our first step here.
And then there's several other steps, but it's outlined why we want Saddam Hussein overthrown. And so then this was for Israel's interests.
We wanted this war in 1996. Now, by the way, there's other things.
I'm not like saying like Israel is 100% pulling the strings of the American government. I think a big part of the reason why the war ended up happening was also because George W.
Bush had a personal beef against Saddam Hussein and tried to have his father killed. But these neoconservatives then who get into, as soon as 9-11 and in the project for a new American Century, when they talked about how they wanted to fight wars on multiple fronts, they explicitly said they probably wouldn't be able to do that unless there was like another Pearl Harbor type event where there'd be enough popular support too.
Now, the 9-11 truthers, the Alex Jones guys, for a while, they would hang on that as evidence that, you know, whatever, Cheney did 9-11 or something like that were something elements within our government i think they're overplaying their hand there i don't actually think that but it certainly is evidence that they recognize what it was once it happened what do you think that now i should say what you already know which is we don't really know that much about 9-11 because so many documents remain classified yeah 23 years later why would that be there's no excuse for that they should every one of them should be released this afternoon they won't be so we can only speculate to some extent but like what should we be suspicious of the official explanation for 9-11 i think you should always be suspicious of of any government explanation for anything i mean like that that should always be your starting point like i'm not saying you should jump to a conclusion about what happened but and i think this is by the way this is my worldview that has served me very well uh over the last like i i kind of like i basically my podcast kind of took off and a big part of well a big part of that is like joe rogan and stuff like that but i've just kind of been consistently right on the biggest issues i have a good track record now yes like i was in real time like calling out how obviously trump was not a russian agent and and real time i was saying the hunter biden laptop was real and in real time i was against lockdowns from the very beginning and i was again and it's all because i just i operate from a worldview of recognizing the government as essentially a criminal gang yes they're basically the mafia who won and now they just rule you know what i mean and like so having taken out the real and much less benign actual mafia and that's also and that's part of the reason why they they don't like the mafia because you're a competing gang you're not allowed to be the gang they're worthy gang and so when you look at things through that frame, yes, they're all a bunch of liars and they're power brokers. And so, yeah, I don't trust anything they say.
I try to just go off what I know. So we don't know exactly what happened on 9-11.
We do know at this point that there was pretty high level Saudi involvement and that the Saudis have, that the government knew that and had no interest in punishing those people. And in fact, still wanted to continue doing business with them.
We do know that we were comfortable enough fighting on the same side as Al Qaeda in Libya, in Syria, and in Yemen. So it didn't seem like Al Qaeda, fighting Al Qaeda wasn't really the motivating force.
And like I said, we know that this group of neocons who hijacked the federal government wanted these wars and after 9-11 used that opportunity to get them. They used that

opportunity. But anyway, so the point I was making about not being an expert, but being able to

shatter this narrative, it's like- Wait, so just to be clear though, do you think it's possible

that people within the US government were aware this was going to happen before- Sure,'s possible yeah i mean you know i wouldn't put that past them it's kind of listen these are people who are and and i think this is one of the things that people have been waking up to a lot more recently and this has led to some wild conspiracies um some of which are not true some of which might be true um but people have been waking up more and more to recognizing like, who are these people? You know what I mean? Like these people who have like real power in our government, like who are these people? I mean, you know, you take someone like Hillary Clinton. So it's like, okay, so your husband is a rapist.
I mean, he's been accused of rape by multiple women, clearly a sexual predator.

You know, I mean, a man who even just the stuff we know confirmed.

This was a man who when he was a married president was like fucking a 20 year old intern in the White House, like a sexual predator.

You know what I mean?

And OK, your best friend, her husband also is a sexual predator who's sending naked pictures to underage girls like hey that's weird like how many it is how many people do you know who are married to a sexual predator whose best friend's also married to a sexual predator like i you know like i'm not even going i'm not saying what is that no you're like i'm not drawing any more a bigger's totally fair. Who are these people? And these are people who are like, you know, Bohemian Grove is real.
They're doing really weird stuff there. Jeffrey Epstein was real.
There was a like pedophile ring that a lot of the most powerful people were connected to, at least knew about, and didn't feel like blowing the whistle on it. These are people who are comfortable making decisions where babies will die, you know, like mass slaughter will happen and they can sleep at night.
And like, I'm not saying like a situation where either our babies are going to die or their babies are going to die. And there's a horrible decision, but I have to make this a decision where like, no, we're choosing this to happen.
And they're kind of okay with that. And you kind of wake up to like, so when you say like, is it possible that they'd kill Americans or be complicit in that? Like, yeah, of course, of course that's possible.
I don't have enough evidence to like prove that that's the case, but I can prove that they wanted these wars. And then when the opportunity to get them came, they lied through their fucking teeth in order to sell the wars look general wesley clark He said as i'm sure you you've seen is uh democracy now interview where he said that he saw the plans in late 2001 That it wasn't just that we were going into iraq But that we were also going to have regime change in syria and several other countries But then when they go to start the regime change in syria 2013 or whatever, they start in 2012.
But then they go, oh, we have to overthrow Assad because he's killing all of his own people. It's like, no, no, no, no, no.
You wanted to overthrow Assad over a decade ago. Don't give me this bullshit that this is some new plan now.
So I do know that they will lie through their teeth to the American people. This I know for certain, that they will lie through their teeth to the American people.
Like this, I know for certain that they will lie through their teeth to the American people to get enough public support for mass slaughter campaigns because they want those campaigns for completely different reasons. And again, like I said before, this isn't speculation.
They wrote this in their own words. One of the reasons they wanted to remake the Middle East in this way is because they thought it was in israel's interest and that to me is like just totally unacceptable as an american that you're first off you're lying to the people of this country and you're doing something with a foreign country's interest in mind that's just like so appalling that i think people should be like publicly hung for it but it's after a trial after a fair trial i mean it it's not america first i would say that it's kind of hard to it's kind of hard to reconcile what's interesting is it's so many people who talk about america first or whatever they're fully on board with this they attack anyone who's not i had a thoroughly bizarre experience the other day and maybe you can shed light on what it means because i don't fully understand it but i was doing uh rogan's podcast at your urging so thank you for that i had a great time i i loved the podcast yeah it was super super fun but you know it's very long it was like three hours long so and i can't stop talking so i'm right another thing and i'm going out of it all whatever you know and um at one point i just blurted out for like 15 seconds something i've thought about recently which is the use of the nuclear bombs they have been used in august of 1945 against hir and then Nagasaki.
Complex topic. A lot of it's not publicly well-known, okay? But just the bottom line fact that we dropped, particularly the bomb on Nagasaki, which was the Christian capital of Japan, by the way, that bomb was dropped on a church and killed, you know, three quarters of the Christians in the city, which bothers me as a Christian.
But leaving even that aside, it killed civilians. It wasn't dropped on a military base.
It was killed civilians. And like, I get why people did it, or maybe I don't get it.
But I think 80 years later, we can say, not something to brag about incinerating civilians. I don't care what the context is.
That's evil. That's all basically all I said.
Holy shit. Did I get attacked from attacked from the right and i thought and i don't even follow the attacks on me ever but i kept getting texts from people i can't believe you said that or people are mad at you for saying that and i thought of all the dumb cruel untrue things i have said over 30 years of just talking in public a lot of which i regret and i hope i've apologized for every bad thing i've said but i've said a lot of really things are impossible to defend that's what they attack me on yeah what is that well and just the fact like even as you're saying like again if you want to attack you on something like hey you supported the war in iraq oh shit like there's a thing like i really got this wrong and it was how is what a like twisted society i defended He didn't admit Rodney yeah i mean but guys all of the people who got all of these wars wrong don't receive as much outrage as you for saying after the war was won and by the way like if you know anything about it it was five star general dwight eisenhower was against the nuke he said it was unnecessary they were ready to negotiate a surrender we didn't need to do this inside but also there's just no but i didn't even get into the details of the of that specific thing on its face then exactly i was just the principle of using nuclear weapons against a civilian population you could construct in your mind a scenario where you could justify it i guess but it's still sort of in the cold light of day hard to defend incinerating civilians.
By the way, with incendiary bombs too, or conventional bombs as in Dresden, it's just bad. Why would that make people on the right so mad? What is that? So this is my kind of theory on it, is that if you'll kind of notice, World War II, which is a long time ago at this point, generates this enormous...
You know, you said the thing, I love when you said that, about how you could tell there's an infection because you touch it and people recoil. Yes.
You can tell something's infected there, right? Yes. And I could sit here all day long and talk about how we shouldn't have fought World War I, which we shouldn't have fought.
Yeah, that's for sure. That's for sure.
This will generate no controversy. I could say this all day long and go through how woodrow wilson was completely wrong to get us involved in yes and this was bullshit yes yeah nobody cares this will not i will not hear anything on twitter tomorrow about saying this i could talk about how vietnam was a complete disaster or also lied into that war and how many people died in it korea iraq all the, World War II is the one that is.
But what's so weird about that is clearly the most important, and we talked about this last night, the most important thing in your life is your marriage and your children. Yes.
So if I said to you, Dave Smith, I think you have a shitty marriage. You would be like, no, I don't actually.
I have a nice marriage. That wouldn't, like, you wouldn't be mad about that.
You'd be like, i don't think you really know i because you're not hiding anything right so like well so here's right well here's what it is right and like i want to be very clear just when i say this i'm if you're like trying to read between the lines here i'm not saying that the holocaust didn't happen or something like that it did happen and well yeah yes those. My family was involved in it.
It was one of the worst things that's ever happened. I agree.
But look, World War II is the origin story of the American empire. That's when we really became the world empire.
And it's the justification for the entire empire. It's why every single neocon, every single hawk goes back to World War II anytime there's a war, because that's what's used to justify every other war.
We stopped Hitler, okay? We'd all be speaking German if it wasn't for the American military. So how dare you question the next thing? That's why Stam Hussein was Hitler.
Milosevic was Hitler. Putin's Hitler.
Gaddafi's or Putin's Hitler. They're all Hitler.
I can't tell you how many people I've heard, and I've debated some of these people, defending Israel's attack on Gaza by going, well, we killed a lot of civilians in World War II. You know? So just like that, as if Hamas are the Nazis, it's anything comparable.
But the thing is that, so when you talk about World War II, you're only allowed to have the official narrative on it. And here it is.
We all know what it is, right? Who are you? Neville Chamberlain? You mean you don't want to go to war? You want to appease? That's the only lesson of history that you're allowed to learn is that appeasement doesn't work. Presumably, we should have started the war earlier, I guess, is the story.
By the way, you can never learn the lesson of history that sometimes pre preemptive wars don't work sometimes you know like ruthless power doesn't work maybe sometimes appeasement would be better than that you know it's like there's only one you know and so that's the lesson by the way same thing with putin everybody who if you didn't support the war i know you got called this i watched you get called this um you were never chamberlain for not wanting to back ukraine immediately in the war right it's the only lesson. Now, you can't look at World War II and say, hey, maybe Danzig was the lesson.
Maybe war guarantees were the lesson. I'm not even saying they are.
Maybe not. But objectively speaking, if we want to be honest about World War II, World War II is the worst thing that ever happened in the history of the world.
Yes, by definition. It's the worst thing that ever happened.
More people killed. Theust happened in the middle of it tens of millions of people died in european uh conflict brutal conflict on all sides destroyed the greatest continent yes now the right exactly now um okay if you want you know they say winners of wars write the history and man did the nazis and Imperial Japan make it really easy because they were so evil.
They were like, they say winners of wars write the history. And man, did the Nazis and Imperial Japan make it really easy.

Because they were so evil.

They were like caricatures of evil.

And they really were.

Now, it's a little more complicated than that because Stalin's army wasn't like high-fiving everybody on the way in to Germany.

They raped every woman in Germany.

Right.

I mean, it's like there's a lot of...

But any sane person, if you look back at World ii and you recognize the worst thing that ever happened you would try to say how could we have avoided this exactly what could we have done to not make this happen the lesson should be like oh my god we imposed versailles on the germans and insisted on humiliating them internationally and look at the backlash of this and then you know whatever there's all this a lot of it comes down to entering world war one and world war two was really an extension of that. But it's like the only lesson you're allowed to take away is this, but you know, I really liked the way you put it on Rogan and it was just kind of a quick aside, but look, it's just so evil on its face that I know human beings are amazing at doing mental gymnastics to justify anything.
I've been doing a lot of debates on the topic of Israel, and I've been watching this firsthand. You know, it's like you could watch videos every day on Twitter of babies, you know, like suffocating to death under building under rubble.
And like someone will justify that. Someone will say, well, actually, we need to do this because whatever.
All of Hamas must be destroyed. Why exactly? Why is it absolutely necessary? You're telling me Israel, the fortress of the world, can't just not drop the ball again? You know what I mean? There's not some other answer other than this.
And of course, America must fund it for reasons. But it's like, no, actually, that is just evil.
And the onus is on you to exhaust every single other option before doing it it's just interesting it's like i've done a lot of evil things in my life and i really regret it i think all of us are capable of evil i've never committed genocide or anything but i mean i've been pointlessly cruel or deceptive and you know and i'm ashamed of it so i'm not judging even harry truman for this but it but it's like, why is that so offensive?

And the other question I have, and maybe you've got insight into this, I don't know that much.

I've read a lot about World War II.

I'm not an expert.

But this worship of Churchill, I think is very odd.

There's a lot about Churchill I think that was impressive.

He's an erudite guy, fluid writer, had a kind of style that I like, used tobacco, which I love.

I mean, there's a lot about Churchill, right?

Thank you. there's a lot about churchill i think that was impressive erudite guy fluid writer um had a kind of style that i like used tobacco which i love i mean there's a lot about churchill right that's in the pro is cool for sure but here are the facts like he sold his country on a war using the idea that we must defend the territorial integrity of poland there are other reasons that was the main reason right poland okay maybe that's a reason then four years later he hands poland to the soviets after a bloodbath yes this country that we went to war on behalf of i'm handing it to a worse master a more totalitarian master or at least as bad yeah i mean

the only other one who or one of the only other two who rival right exactly that's right like i

don't know i guess you could say if hitler had won the war could he have then killed more people

than stuff i guess we'll never know but yeah still up there okay so that's a huge problem

that's a huge problem and kobe exactly you can debate who but clearly you don't care about

poland if you just handed it to stalin or clearly it didn't work you know or something there's like

Thank you. huge problem and Kobe exactly debate but clearly you don't care about Poland if you just handed it to Stalin or clearly it didn't work you know or something there's like there's a massive disconnect so that's the first fact the second fact is he was rejected by his own voters right after the war so they actually weren't still impressed by his leadership and the third fact is that war destroyed Britain and that country is a depressing husk right now I go there a lot unfortunately i don't want to go there it's the most depressing place i can imagine it's totally defeated in some deep spiritual sense and um it's embarrassing to go there so you destroy your country on behalf of poland and then you hand it to stalin like i don't those are the bottom line facts about Churchill.
There are a lot of other things to say about him, but those are the salient points. How could anybody think that's good? Well, you know, in Pat Buchanan.
Seriously, like what is that? 100%. You know, Pat Buchanan's book, Churchill, Hitler, and the Unnecessary War, the unnecessary war is in quotes, because that's not Pat Buchanan saying it.
It's a Churchill quote. That Churchill, after the war, said it was the most avoidable, unnecessary war afterward.
He took Britain from being the most powerful nation in the world to being totally defeated. They lost that war as much as anybody else did.
But look at it now. Yeah.
It's disgusting. By the way, there's so many ripple effects of this, too, because the whole situation with Israel-Palestine, this also a result of the british empire of course right and being driven out so there's so much uh to this but why defend it that's the way look i'm not even judging churchill i may have made similar decisions i right i've made so many bad decisions in my life i'm not even judging i'm just saying 80 years later when we can see clearly the aftermath how could you possibly defend that right and why.
And why would you want to? And also, I just, you know, like there's a reason. I mean, there's lots of reasons why America was so successful as a country.
But part of the reason really was the brilliance of our founding fathers and the system that they created. I mean, that's a huge part of it.
And there's like a, you know, it's like when they, George Washington's farewell address where he warns about entangling alliances. Yes.
And there was something really profound that they saw there. And this idea, and this is a real problem with like, it's like, why would we even want Ukraine and NATO? Why do we want to make war guarantees for countries that we have neither the resources nor the political will to actually defend in the case of a war? Nicely put.
You like first off we're broke we're 34 trillion dollars in debt we can't afford we can't afford our own wars let alone everybody else's we're literally it's it's so cartoonish we're borrowing money to think you know it's like if you were like if i was giving my sister money and my my cousin's money and all of them but i'm putting it on a credit card you know what i I mean? Like, I'm just, I don't have the money, but I'm, I'm such a great guy. I'm helping my whole family.
It's like, no, you're not in a position to do this. But they're not even our family.
Right. They're not even, right.
They're not even our family. I'm just helping some random guy.
Literally some junkie you met at Safeway. Yes.
That's a better analogy. That is a better analogy for Ukraine than my sister, to be honest.
Yes. And so like, it's just but then also at the same time like look war's horrible there's always some type of conflict going on in the world and it's awful but like are the question is like would you be willing or would you be willing to send your kids to go fight and die over between you know to determine whether you know the donbass region is ruled by kiev or moscow like is that important enough to you because to me it's a very easy answer which is no i would not be but would it be worth killing a million ukrainians yeah right right yes but i'll put a flag in my bio and support my politicians printing money to to send over them or i should say printing money to then buy from weapons companies weapons to then send over to them a mix of weapons and cash or whatever but yeah i mean like so to me it's like would you mind though not referring to them as weapons companies but defense manufacturers i'm sorry yes that's right the defense department the the defense manufacturer the intelligence community that's my favorite one the intel the community they're all just like gardening with each other and stuff you know so you you described yourself as a comic who likes to read yeah which i love let me ask you about about comedy so i went and had dinner with rogan last month and was not my world i had no idea that austin texas had become like the world capital of comedy yeah what's he made it the world capital of comedy.
So you described him as the modern Johnny Carson? 100%. So how does it work, the system now? It's like, well, I mean, Rogan, so he was doing the podcast in LA for many years.
That's when I first met him. He was living out in LA and he left, I think during the lockdown riots you know when California as you know very well is falling apart it's one of the great tragedies it really is yeah it's awful um and so he decided to take it down to Austin where they had kind of like opened up and it was flourishing and Austin is it's like um it's one of the last like great liberal cities in this country you know which is and and like I know a lot of people on the right who kind of have this attitude of like well screw them they voted in these policies and all that but i just think that is wrong that is the wrong attitude to have you need liberal cities and for to have a healthy country you kind of need that dynamic as much as you need beautiful country you know liberal cities are all that we have well of course right functioning liberal cities that's what i mean yeah yeah you need them to not be hell holes which many of them have turned into but so rogan it just started because there was something about you know just like the stars aligning you know in a very similar way to i i heard you talk about i think you were talking to me about um how look there's something to the fact that say you get fired from Fox News and it happens to be at this point where Elon Musk bought Twitter and everyone's there and you're protected there.
They're not going to ban you. And, you know, when Bill O'Reilly got fired from Fox News, there was nothing like that.
No, that's totally right. You go to a relevance.
that Rogan happened to kind of like come up as this internet world was

exploding and he's just such an interesting guy. It's such a genuine guy that his podcast just took off.
And he became kind of like in this situation where he, anybody who kind of comes on, or if you come on and you do well, it's just like the biggest

opportunity. And he's such a genuinely generous person that I think he loves that.
I think that's

his favorite thing of all of it. Out of owning the comedy club, the podcast, everything he does,

I see it in him. What he really loves, what really makes him happy is that he gets to kind of bring

all of his guys with him. And I know i know a lot of friends who joe has changed their lives you know like he's been it's the johnny carson thing it's i remember jerry seinfeld hearing him i don't know him but hearing him describe doing carson oh yeah and he said it was uh he said it was an experience like having kids where you go in one person and come out another person.
You know what I mean? Which is really is the experience of having kids, particularly that first kid, because you literally like, it's like you and your wife go to a hospital as a couple. And then you leave that hospital as like, we're mommy and daddy now.
And it's a really weird feeling. Like it's amazing.
You go in focused on your wife and you come out obsessed with the baby. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
and then your wife's like hobbling in the background and you're like just kidding kind of but anyway but uh it's but it's this amazing you know it's like um you know it's like you're on drugs basically like you're high when you first come out with a new baby you kind of can't believe it and you also you don't know what you're doing with the first one you know and you but you figure it out but anyway he said carson was like that like you go into nobody and then you come out and you're a somebody and it's kind of like that with rogan like it's just and and it's there's all these similar dynamics like he'll kind of go you know like he'll go like two hours and 15 minutes with some people and then he'll go like three and a half hours sometimes if he really likes the conversation and you never know as you know when you're in there you have no idea how long you actually went for or whatever but it's um and that like my experience with him was he heard me on a mutual friend of ours ari shafir's podcast who i love also hilarious that guy's talented he's so funny he's like and also just a great person and an insane person but but one of the best people I've ever known.

And so I was on his podcast and Rogan heard it. And he goes, I think this guy's awesome.
I want to have him on. And it was just like that.
Like he loved what I was saying. So he's like, oh, I want to make this guy like successful.
And it's just like amazing. And what happened to your life? Well, I started making money.
So that was, that was pretty nice. So it was that, it was kind of that simple.
It was, of that simple it was i mean it was like it wasn't exactly just that but immediately the like i was already doing my podcast and then immediately as soon as the first one with rogan was out my numbers like shot up like all of a sudden i had a big audience i went from having a tiny little audience like having a big audience and then every you know i've done it a lot of times. Every time you do it, your numbers shoot up,

your numbers shoot up.

And so like, yeah, it's just unbelievable.

And you know, one of the things about Rogan is,

and I gotta say, and I really mean this,

I think you have this quality too.

And I kind of knew this about you.

Like I've watched you for many years at this point.

I watched you, I mean a little bit when you were on Crossfire, but I watched your show on MSNBC a lot lot and then i always watched you're the only you're the only one the msnbc one that might be true that's not true for fox that's not true at all for fox but you might be right about msnbc it was me i was i had msnbc on all day long um for whatever reason i kind of just to like piss me off for most of the time but also getting off on a tangent msnbc was a very different thing back then it was so

that is so night and day i know to today i mean you just can't even it was so much smarter and more thoughtful there was still a lot of propaganda to it there was still a lot of bullshit um i think you've gotten better over the years yeah for sure but as a network they got so much worse i mean like But Morning Joe used to be like you and Pat Buchanan and Rachel Maddow.

Oh, yeah.

And that's kind of and i mean it's become like every single host has the same opinions as the last hour precisely there's not same. Now, occasionally, there'll be a guy like, what's his name? I'm blanking on his name, who just got canned because he was pro-Palestinian.
Oh, exactly. Right? So occasionally, you'll have one guy who has a different opinion, and then, oh, he's out pretty quickly, right? My favorite part of MSNBC is all the black people on the air have exactly the same opinions, too.
It's like, what's the point of diversity if everyone went to Princeton and is a neoliberal? Well, there's nothing more. They got to get some rappers on MSNBC.
They would never be allowed. Right, right.
But there's something about being ideologically possessed that's very unpleasant. You know what I mean? And there's something, one of the things that was great about your show on fox news is that like you would on many key issues have a completely different opinion than everybody else at fox news oh yeah and it'd be kind of crazy to watch the whole news day not that i watched the whole news day but i knew what their guys take were and everybody is like yeah we got to go attack uh you know assad because he just gassed his people and then like you would like come on at 8 p.m and by the way, I remember because I was doing this show with Essie Cup at the time.
I worked for CNN very briefly as like a contributor. And I remember having it was the first week after the gas attack.
Now, this was poison gas against his own people. But now this was before the OPCw whistleblowers had like come out and said so i

didn't like have any like evidence i could feel it didn't have well i mean you just look at it and you go okay so so you're telling me that this is we're in 2018 now 2017 2018 um assad has been fighting a civil war since 2012 uh fighting for his survival fighting to not go out like gaddafi like to not get sodomized.

100%.

Donald Trump announces that we're pulling it. He announces that you won.
You're going to live. You're not going to be sodomized to death by a mob, right? And then Assad decides a week and a half later, I'm going to do the one thing that would turn international opinion around

to keep me at risk of being sodomized.

He's like right away on the face of it.

Like, no, I don't think so.

And like the onus is on you.

But anyway, but everyone else at Fox News the whole day would be saying that.

And then you'd have something different to say.

There's something incredibly boring about someone.

You just tell me, don't even tell me the name, but it's an MSNBC host, someone someone who hosts the show you could pick the name in your head and i'll tell you their opinion on everything climate change it's an existential crisis and we have to well you know racism well we have to confront systemic racism we have to we need a conversation about race like a real conversation i was like really i'd love to yeah yeah exactly right i don you want that. Well, that's right.
And it's just so boring. So boring.
Anyway, where I was getting at that. But also, can I just also say soul destroying? Yes.
Like what you were saying earlier, I thought was so right on about repeating lies is such an offense against you. Like where's your self-respect? Have you no dignity? Yeah.
Like, are you just like an animal who can be, you you know hit with a shock collar and forced to perform tricks like don't and there's something dude there's something it's like a universal law where you kind of um like the way i think jordan peterson said it was like uh you get to choose your suffering you don't get to choose no suffering exactly you get to choose your suffering and this is true across everything like we you could sit down and have a fat piece of cheesecake or you could jump on the treadmill the cheesecake feels awesome yes the treadmill fucking sucks yes you know what i mean yes but you're paying a price you're just kind of choosing and by i'm not saying you should never sit back and have cheesecake like sometimes you got to do that but it's like you're choosing your suffering like i'm and there's this choice where i'm going to choose to suffer up front now so that I have some benefit later. And it's always kind of

that dynamic. And when you lie to yourself, it's like, okay, you're choosing this kind of short

term. This lie will have whatever positive effects it'll have.
This person might believe I'm a little

bit cooler than I really am or whatever, but there's a long term, there's never not a cost.

You can never get away from that without paying some type of price it's just so degrading yeah and it's interesting and all the the people with self-respect have are gone they've been purged yeah but then there's also okay so part of that price too and this is what i was getting at which the thing that you and Rogan have in common is that so many of those hosts And I don't know all of them You know, I've done a lot of shows at Fox News met a lot of people over there And I did a lot of shows at CNN when I was working there And so I met a lot of those guys. I've never I was one time in the MSNBC studios and just met a few of the people there but they're like so many of them are them are totally phony.
Like they're just not, I mean, I've had things where like I've gone and grabbed beers with people after like a show at Fox news, like after doing Kennedy or doing gut or something like that. And I, one time there was a green beret, I won't name him, but he's a, he was a green beret who served a couple tours in Afghanistan.
And he was on, when we were on the show, he was talking about, you know, how supporting the surge. I think I can't remember this years ago.
I think it was Trump's first surge. And then we go out for beers afterward.
And he was like, listen, there is no army over there that we've been building up. There's nothing.
They'll fold in a day. And he goes, let me tell you.
And he would tell me about like the, you know, he goes, dude, we would give them give them uh you know like some machine guns we'd go out on a mission come back they used them to rob everybody in the village there's no afghan army that we're building up the taliban will run right through them there's like oh well why didn't you just tell everybody that you know what i mean like why did you totally lie when we were on tv and it's just there's a lot of people who do that and you can smell that you can smell that on them though like even if you don't know that over time people kind of know people kind of know like oh these guys are and there is something having watched you for a long time and now having met you um and this is joe rogan too you are exactly the same person off camera that you are i hope so and there's no now with both there might be something you'd say off camera that you wouldn't say on camera, but there's nothing you're saying on camera that you don't believe. I would never do that.
And so that's like, I think that is- You don't have to say everything you think. You cannot lie.
Right. Right.
Exactly. And you never say everything you think.
I don't think you should, actually, because I have a lot of dumb opinions, too, or that are just rooted in meanness or irritation or mocking people's appearances which I have a weakness for don't don't do that I know well you're a comic I'm gonna keep doing it I get I get your point but I'm I have no intention of stopping that but there is something that I think is part of um what I love so much about Joe and I think part of what why he has blown up and been so successful is that you know because people ask me all the time they'll be like what's joe rogan like you know and i'll be like you already know you already know what he's like and you know this because you went and hung out he's exactly that guy totally exactly the same guy obviously you know i love that that works i love i'm thrilled by his success and yes the money too i'm not that interested in money but i understand that like unless something is a real business it won't continue right and so i love how successful he's been because it means it's just inspiration everyone else yes right if you're an honest person you can actually make a good living being an honest person how great is that yeah well that's that's awesome no that's right and that that is the part and i don't like i'm not the biggest fan but that is the stuff where iron round was really correct about the idea that like no like kind of there is this connection between like uh which she would call selfishness which i don't think is the right word for it but like but there is something between like like success and the humans are weird psychological creatures. Sometimes you can have the desire to not succeed, to not outshine somebody else, you know? And, but actually you're doing a much better thing.
If you like succeed, if you're great at something and then you're like an inspiration to others to be. Well, sure.
Rogan gets rich because he's brave and honest. How is that bad? Yeah.
No, that's right. I mean, you see all these other people getting rich because they're craven and dishonest.
Yeah. And that's very demoralizing, actually.
Well, and also, I mean, there's so many things to be down about in our country, particularly right now. Like, our country is not in a very good place.
No, it's not. And like, I got a and two little kids and i put on a very strong face for them like in front of them i'm never like worried about anything that's right no matter what it is and that's just the way it's like don't buy gold in front of your wife do that secretly i mean she sees the bars but the point is that yeah but i'm very but you know the truth is like between me and you and the millions of people on the internet like i'm terrified about the future of our country.
I'm very, very concerned about it. And there's a lot of like, look, I mean, obviously, we're in $34 trillion of debt.
We can never stop fighting these wars. We've turned world opinion completely against us.
We have the worst political and social and racial divides of my lifetime. The culture is more insane than any time in my lifetime I mean the fact that we're debating over whether five-year-old boys can transition to be girl the fact that that's even a real thing and it's not a joke that wouldn't work because everyone goes that's too absurd to be funny you know what I mean like I mean that's just like a sign in itself but there is also something else going on and it's much bigger than me.
And I don't understand it. And I don't pretend to understand it, but we are living through some type of major paradigm shift and where lies are being exposed quicker and people are being exposed more than ever and honesty and integrity are being rewarded in certain ways.
And that's like like i kind of have to cling on to that because there's so much to be you know to feel despair over but there's something really positive about this i couldn't agree more propaganda is not working the same way it was do you find i just i've had this conversation i this i ask everyone i have dinner with this question which is do you find in the midst of all of this sadness and chaos and decline um rapid decline that your personal relationships are deeper and more fulfilling oh yeah totally i mean for me you do feel that oh yeah i mean there's no question about it for me i mean i've like my i have little kids i've my oldest is five so i've just in the last few years you know started like having kids so Yes, and I have little kids. My oldest is five.
So I've just, in the last few years, started having kids. So yes, and I have great friends.
And through this weird internet world where we are, I've kind of cultivated a really great audience of a lot of really cool people. Yes.
And yeah, I think that there's... So you think you're relating to people in a deeper way than you did, say or six ten years ago i think 100 percent um yes it's also it's been there's been a big period for me kind of growing up you know i had a very like prolonged adolescence kind of i was a stand-up comedian yes living a degenerate life for many years and then i settled down and got married and had kids um so that's just aside from the craziness of the world i think whenever you go through that you're just living in a better way how blessed are you though very very very very because that's like your i mean that's your fortress against in that protects you from everything else exactly because it well it's and it's just um you know it's it's whatever you're you know this is the thing that was kind of i know you sent me uh when i tweeted something about this but we're like when you don't have god whatever's next highest in line becomes yes back to your god and there is something about um i did not have god or family and my own family you know i had family members who i love but i didn't have my own family and my whole life i kind of like i was like a 90s kid i grew up in i was born in 1983 i grew up in the 90s um none of us nobody i knew was religious yes nobody i and we we did not have um you know like all of the traditions that many previous generations grew up with where they're like god country chivalry these things you wear this uncomfortable outfit here because that's what's expected of you around other people when you go to church you know you strap on these boots it was like no we just grew up in blue jeans and sneakers and the point of life was kind of like to get through school to go play you know what i mean when you were when i was a teenager it was like to like smoke pot or you know like try to get laid or something you know what i mean like it was all just kind of like revolved around what's fun and it wasn't until i uh got married and when we had my first kid and i found god um also at that same time that i'd been living a totally different life where my life is kind of centered around this purpose that there's meaning to it and it's not really about me and whether i'm having fun like i still like to have fun sometimes but it's like what that's really not that important like what's really important is that like i'm being a great husband to my wife i'm being a great father to my kids and ironically some degree you just find much deeper uh much deeper happiness it's when you're not living just for happiness no we were talking about this off camera i really wish this had been on camera because it was so interesting what you were saying, but you didn't grow up in a conventional two-parent household.
No. Right.
No, my parents got divorced when I was three. That's young.
Yeah. So you grew up in a single-parent household, but you seem to have kind of figured out the formula so well.
And I said, well, how that how did you well i mean look it's a mix of a few things um my mother was a really great mother so i only had one parent but i did have a really good parent and she did instill a lot of you know like good values in me um and i don't mean if that kind of contradicts what i just said before like she did instill good values in me even though we didn't have kind of like you know god or anything like that um and it was something that was just instinctually in me when i when i first had kids that i just wanted to give them that and the other major fact there is that my wife is just like the best person i've ever met and she was i got very lucky again and just met a really great yes and that is uh there is nothing better than being in a great marriage and i would imagine i've never experienced it but nothing worse than being i think that's exactly i think it's like burning to death yeah the people i know who i've known people like that who are like with a really crazy chick and they can't even think straight because they're in agony all the time yeah it's horrible but it's just it's just interesting i think maybe i'm very distressed by the number of kids growing up in single parent households i grew up in a single parent household when i was a kid so i'm not judging anybody yeah yeah but it's in retrospect i think well maybe if you grew up that way as you did and i did you don't take things for granted and you're more you're more intentional in the way you structure your own family. Because you said to me off air, you're like, I wanted this.
Yeah. And I also just have the attitude that like, well, I think that, and I blame the baby boomers for almost all of our problems.
I do too. And I don't, obviously, when you speak about a group that big, I'm painting with a broad brush.
Of course. There are exceptions to this rule.
you know i love my mother very much and she's a good person um but as a generation they just ruined everything and they're totally selfish yes um completely but jeff dice who i love this guy is so brilliant um but he uh he said he gave a speech about it and he was going through the things of like all of the slogans of the baby boomers and how self-serving they all were like it was like don't trust anyone over 30 until they got into their 30s you know and then it was like and then like you watch it all the way through uh like covid it's like we got to do everything we can to protect the baby boomer generation yes yes it went from don't trust anyone over 30 to being like screw your childhood i don't want to get this get this. Keep your hands off my Medicare, by the way.
You know, like everything. But one of the major things that they changed about the culture was like normalizing casual divorce.
As if that should just kind of be an option. Like, I'm just not feeling it anymore.
So like, we can get divorced. And like, there's no sense of like, no, no, no, no, no.'m there are accepted there are cases where there's an abusive spouse or something like that but generally speaking the idea like you took an oath before god and everyone you love and then brought children into this world i know that is that is your obligation i know and that's that's like my attitude toward marriage is that it's like listen me and my wife um we've we've faced some hurdles in our marriage like things in the outside world that have happened um and i think we've done a very good job of them we've had that serious issue like we had major health concerns with one of our kids um and got through that we've had been through lockdowns and been through you know all this stuff and there's more ahead there's a lot more ahead but one thing that is uh for certain is that that's it yeah it's us for the rest of this like this is we're living this life together now and to me that's what being married is well if you're if you're not that you're not really if you're trapped you'll make do by the way that sounds grim but it's not grim i've never i mean i have the same kind of marriage i've had a happy marriage for 33 years one of the reasons is that this is what we're doing.
Yeah, that's right. And I grew up with divorce.
I remember as a child, my brother, my only brother feels that we would talk about this when our kids like, fuck adults, like fuck them. Yeah.
Having kids and then getting divorced, you can go find yourself in France. Fuck you.
I knew, and I knew people in my, listen, in my parents' generation, there were so many people like that. So many people I know.
Oh yeah. And totally fucked up the kids and did it cause like, right, like I gotta be happy.
As if somehow that's a noble thing of like, I gotta be happy. But they'd never turned out happy.
No, cause you have, cause the key to real happiness, I mean, there's different ways to measure happiness or like whatever. Again, like, you know, there's someone training for a marathon and there's someone sitting having a bag of potato chips and in the moment the guy having the bag of potato chips might be happier than the guy training for the marathon but like ultimately who's going to feel better about themselves is going to be you know what i mean so like there's um but we you have obligations you have obligations and responsibilities yeah and if you don't fulfill those you're not going to find long but also take the long view like the neighborhood i grew up in had all kinds of rich divorced moms and every one of them was crazy and unhappy every single one of them and you wonder where that i thought in the year since like where are they now you know what i mean living in some condo in scottsdale with parkinson's unvisited by their kids like it you'd get old and die in the end and when you do i'm gonna i really hope i'm surrounded by all my girls and my son and like yeah oh he was such a good guy like yeah that's all that matters that's how i feel about it you know what i mean and they like talk about you at dinner when you're gone oh i miss him you don't want people i've seen people die who mistreated their children i've lived it actually it's like fuck that person you know what I mean yeah I don't want that well and also look I mean that kind of um the the absence of having that feeling or the the baby boomers kind of not feeling that way it's kind of like I mean look what it's what it's led to I mean you know it's very easy for um you know uh say popular conservative you know pundits to kind of dunk on college kids and stuff like that which is like fun and i i've enjoyed videos of where you know like ben shapiro is like destroying 19 year old in some college campus and you know it's like uh you know he's she's like you know some some trans kid or something like that and is like well i'm you know, it's like, you know, he's she's like, you know, some some trans kid or something like that.
And is like, well, I'm you know, I was born a boy, but why can't I live as a woman? And he's like, why can't you live as a cat? And it was like, ah, it's like, ah, the intellectual prowess of destroying this. And like, yes, OK, that is stupid.
That kid was an idiot. But you also kind of like peel a little bit deeper.
And you're like, so what was this kid's situation really? Because you're talking to a 19-year-old. You know what I mean? And let me guess, came from a broken home.
I'm trying not to pound the table here because I agree with you so strongly. Was medicated, I bet.
You know, like as a young kid. And is staring down the barrel of a grim life.
Yes. Has no conceivable path toward like independence and fuck.
Toward what you have and what you grew up with. Which is that's all that really matters.
And you're in charge of the society, by the way. You're in charge of the society.
You've influenced in the society. You're in the privileged class.
And there's no shame in that, by the way. Yes.
But it does carry with it the obligation to see that the next generation has a decent shot. And you haven't done that.
You've wasted it all on foreign adventurism and your stupid economic ideas. And this is the result.
And you will take no responsibility for it. It's like, oh, stupid kids.
No, your job is to create another generation of smart kids. And then they mock them.
They're like, oh, well, maybe if you don't have your avocado toast and your lattes, then you'd be able to buy a house or something. And you're like, look, okay, it is true.
You're making me mad. I totally agree.
Look, it's true that this generation is in many ways softer and more privileged and part of that's because they they grew up with technological wealth that previous generations never had it's also partly because their parents never instilled like values in them to care about kind of more than just avocado toast but the fact is that baby boomers could go to college and get a summer job and pay for their college. And then if they didn't go to college, they could go to high school and then go wait online and get a job where you could support a wife and kids off of that job.
And that was the way of the world previously that my grandfather worked in factories his whole life and his wife didn't work. And that was that.
And he a house he sent kids to college he had two cars like they had a nice life and these kids today come out with six figures of debt and are getting a job at you know starbucks and houses are going for like 600 grand for you know what i mean for that same humble house that my my grandfather had and and the baby boomers all got rich by the value of their house just going up. And it seems like not a one of them ever went, hey, but aren't we kind of like pulling up the ladder on the helicopter here? Like if my house is like skyrocketing in value, that's nice for me.
I got a HELOC and I got like some money coming in now that I can invest in the market that's going up and make this income coming in but what about the next generation how are they ever going to buy a house they don't care like no one seemed to care about they don't care i'm trying not to interrupt your wonderful description with amens uh and hosannas but i just i so strongly agree with what you're saying and i have a bunch of kids they're all actually thriving i would say inside um they're all good people clear thinking they love each other most important um but i'm around a lot of college age kids like a lot like way more than most people my age i'm 54 and i don't think they're soft at all. I'm not talking to my kids.
I mean, they're friends or, you know, I'm around it a lot. They're hard-edged, actually.
They know how, I mean, they may be wrong, they may be confused, but they're actually pretty tough in a way, and they're pretty angry, and they sort of get what's going on, and have deep sympathy for them deep deep they've been completely screwed over by the people and they don't have any power even if you're a 19 year old columbia kid like i may not agree with your slogans or down with white people whatever i will of course i hate that i am a white person but i do sort of like think whose fault is that it's the people who run everything it's your your stupid boomer parents yep it's the administrators at the school it's our politicians i mean i'm sorry to blame society for the crimes of young people but actually society does deserve the blame and the leaders of the society deserve the blame yeah 100 that's not a liberal perspective that's a conservative perspective i care about the next generation that's how if you don't care about how your grandchildren are going to live here how are you conservative what are you conserving you're not at all you're just a freaking grifter shut up right and like what has and this is why you know when uh um we when you were on my podcast we set the uh the internet on fire by uh because. And they were like, I completely agree with you.
You're not allowed to have that. I said he was one of the great villains of the 20th century.
Well, he was a gatekeeper for sure. Well, right.
I mean, people started, they were like, whoa, do that stall it in Mao Zedong? And I'm like, okay, fine. He was third.
But the point is, okay, there were like five ahead of him. Okay, fine.
But I think part of this is that a lot of the kind of conservatism, Inc.

people who criticized us for saying that, and they're kind of like, well, how would

you, this was the guy who was the most prominent member of the conservative movement.

And it's like, okay, and so what exactly was conserved in his movement?

What, like, just explain, was it the constitution?

Was it what? Classical liberal values? I couldn't agree more. was it the constitution was it what classical liberal values was it religion was it tradition was it the definition of a woman like what exactly was the big conservative i mean like like i'll give you something we still we still have some gun rights okay you know like i don't know but like you lost everything you lost the united states of america and part of the reason a major reason why is because the whole national review um like takeover of the conservative movement was to drive out all of the all of the non-interventionists all of them all of the isolationists i watched it demonize them as racist every single time it happened and the weird yeah i don't even i'm holding back um no because that's like I would you know I was adjacent to that world my entire life and I and I watched it um happen and you know I knew Bill Buckley and he was perfectly nice to me I you know didn't hate him or anything but it was very charming and very smart I guess you know I was playing the wasp you know it was all a pose it was completely fake and the only people who sort of bought it are people who didn't know any better and right that was like upper class or something fake accent weird homoerotic stuff and it was like all just kind of sad actually i thought that was always my view of it because it was he was posing um but you know i think he had good qualities i love sailing so i kind of you know i'm with him on that um but in the end you judge the tree by its fruits and the fruits are just absolutely rotten and so i think it's important to be honest about that well i think the fruits were a transformation of the right wing in america from being the old right um which was really i mean they were fairly isolationist um but certainly non-interventionist i mean like you know robert taft was the one who didn't want us to be in nato i mean this was like the old and they they were big on like um immigration controls sound money and not getting involved in wars these were the people who opposed war one in world war ii they didn't want american involvement in these wars right right? And the effect of Bill Buckley was to transform what became the conservative movement into being cold warriors.
That what we do is we go everywhere around the world looking for a war to fight. So in other words, the people who really loved America, not the idea, but the physical reality of America and her people, the people who actually live here and their homes and their little towns and their dumb little jobs and all the stuff that makes up a civilization at scale the people who cared about that somehow became anti-american right and the people who would lecture you about how america is an idea it doesn't really matter who lives here what those people are for america i mean it's like a complete inversion of reality actually and so again it's nothing personal against bill buckley who i you know play the played a mean harpsichord but um sorry not to be catty but uh you know but like that's a lie yeah the people who care about actual america are the people whose side i'm on and i care about actual america not because'm a good person.
I'm really not an especially good person because I got a lot of children who live here. That's what I care about.
And like, because look, this was a really great country. And I mean, there are still a lot of great things about it, but it's deteriorating.
And why, you know, why should we be for that? And, you know the one of the crazy things about america is that there is kind of this uh this idea that we are the united states of america and have been this whole time whereas there's really been like several revolutions yeah in the country and and you know what look i mean i i think the george double george w bush years and the war on terrorism was a revolution of sorts in the country that's where i grew up a kid in the 90s we are not the same country as we were in the 1990s in the pre-war on terror there were before the patriot act in the department of homeland security and the tsa i mean the experience at an airport is a different thing we are a different country than we were before that i think covid has changed changed everything, you know, that, but even before that, I mean, you know, as you've talked about a lot, like the, in the wake of world war two, the creation of the CIA, this was a revolution in the country where it's, it changed who's running the government. And we think of the position of president of the United States of America being the same position that like, you know, that Woodrow Wilson occupied or something like that.
And it's not, it's a totally different position. Donald Trump did not have the same job FDR had.
They were very, very different. Not even close.
And so there is, when people say, oh, you love America, it's like, yes, I love this country. I don't like the direction the government's going in.
I don't care for these new powers. And the Bush thing, I have to say, I could feel it at the very beginning i knew him before he became president i did not want to vote for him um and didn't i just didn't vote i did vote from the second time because you always get caught up in the other guy and i knew carrie and i just thought carrie was not impressive at all so i voted for for bush but you know i see bush still i had a meal with him not that long ago and talk about a defeated sad guy actually bitter insecure you know given to lecturing everyone around him about what a great president he was and i thought you know that really is no but that's the fruit of the tree right of like if you've had a successful successful life if you've done've had a successful life, if you've fulfilled your obligation and done the right thing, you're not lecturing people about what a great person you are at all.
Are you? No, I don't think so. No, that's failure, actually.
And like, I mean, just- He knows. I mean, yeah, come on.
He knows. To try to spin the George W.
Bush years as anything other than like an absolute failure.

I know.

I mean, dude, you celebrated mission accomplished and then we stayed in the war for 20 years.

I know.

Just a disaster and left the country.

And I mean, look, not only was it all completely unnecessary.

I mean, we had like the special ops response to Al Qaeda cells in Afghanistan in late 2001. Totally justify that.
Of course. We had an opportunity to trap Osama bin Laden and Tora Bora in late 2001.
And they, I believe, intentionally let him go so they could continue these wars. But fighting the decision.
Do you think do you think that's what happened? Yeah. Yeah.
And there's I highly recommend to anybody. Scott Horton uh wrote a book called enough already which is like a masterpiece a history of all the terror wars and it seems seems overwhelmingly likely that they already had their eye on iraq and that they knew that if they captured osama bin laden it'd be very difficult to sell another war because we got the guy if that's really true i mean that's that's unspeakably evil yeah well look it was a it was you know you can read like through the details of it but there were a bunch of they knew he was in tora borra and they were requesting i remember that and they were and they didn't give it to him you know like it's it certainly seems to be what it looks like and then it was a decision that we're going to co.
Then it was a decision that we're going to overthrow the Taliban and fight a regime change war there, and then go fight the regime change war in Iraq. And I mean, look, like you said, judge them by their fruit.
I mean, the results of George W. Bush's wars were, there were trillions of dollars wasted, hundreds of thousands of people in these countries died, and our bravest young men blowing their brains out by the tens of thousands.
I know. Those are the tangible results of what happened.
And it's not even like we sacrificed that so that these countries are much better places to live. They're actually worse than they were much worse yeah so there you go

you know so great administration okay so let me end on this question um because that's so depressing what you just said because it's true yeah it is true and no one was ever punished for it and in fact rewarded they were all rewarded for it name the three things that give you hope outside of your own family in America right now?

Okay, so, well, the first one was kind of what I was touching on before that there is this, there is like a seismic shift in the way people are being exposed. The part of the reason, and I know you've, you've talked about this a lot and I think explained it very well, but what you you're seeing out of the establishment what you see out of MSNBC when they talk about Donald Trump or when they talk about you for that matter is not a Ruling class that is confident that they have power.
No, they are they are like, you know, a Cockroach that's trapped. You know what? I mean that little as a yes, you know, like and there's a reason for that and there's a reason why they're so hysterical and it's because for the first time in certainly in my lifetime and well beyond that the um the monopoly over the control of information has truly been broken and that you watch this during covid where i mean like you and joe rogan had a huge impact on the nation during COVID because you were like the two biggest people with the biggest audiences completely exposing how insane the whole narrative was and how insane all of the COVID restrictions were.
And eventually it got to a point where people just weren't taking it anymore. They weren't listening to Fauci.
And like, yeah, we'd never had anything like that before. We never had like someone like Joe Rogan or someone like you doing this show where, you know, like in the run-up to say in 2002, the run-up to the war in Iraq, there was just no one like that who was like blowing the whistle with tens of millions of people listening to them and explaining how this is all lies.
We have that now. And they're freaking out about that.
And this is really why all the attempts at tech censorship happened since 2016, because they've recognized that. Like, oh, Donald Trump can tweet his way to the White House.
He doesn't even have to go through us. So we better control Twitter and YouTube and Facebook and all of these, Google and all of this.
And even in their attempts to control it, they've never been as good as they were at controlling when there were just three networks and just right a few big newspapers and now i think elon musk really threw a wrench in their plans by buying twitter and so that so i'm very encouraged about that um i'm very encouraged about the fact that you know their people are kind of have access to the truth in a way that they never did before i think that i think ideas are powerful and i think that all governments rely propaganda. It doesn't work without that.
And there's something in that that's really encouraging, in a way. It's like, oh, they have to convince us before they can just do it.
Okay, there's two things that are seemingly contradictory, but they're not. Number one, democracy is an illusion.

It doesn't really exist. You don't really ever have democracy.
Oh, we get to vote in presidential elections. Even assuming all the votes are counted in the right way or something like that, it's like, yeah, you get to vote when these two parties, these private entities decide who the candidate is, and then you can pick between the two of them.
You know what I mean? That that's not really democracy. But in another sense, there's always democracy.
And every nation, no matter how, whether they have free and fair elections or not, there's always like, there has to at least be tacit acceptance by the people. And if there's not, you know, if there's 500,000 people out in the streets screaming at a dictator about how they want policy X, that dictator is like, i've been considering it and we will be implementing policy x you know what i mean like it's because at the end of the day there's way more of you than there are totally right and so when you can spread ideas we have a fighting shot i think um so that's very encouraging to me i think there's also been um a huge move away from u.s hegemony internationally which is both very scary um but is also i think necessary i think that the american america spiraling as a country i think started with us getting off of the gold standard once government could print as much money as they want to they make people rich for just trading in paper being politically connected and you and you're not earning anything to become rich and it's devastating.
And then I think the unipolar moment was the worst thing that ever happened to America. You need counterbalance.
Winning is often losing. And so you need...
I want to see it happen in the best way possible. I think it's very bad in some ways for our country if we're not the world reserve currency anymore, but it's ultimately the solution.
Like it's no good of us being the way, the fact that we can just export paper and then maintain our standard of living isn't the right way. I hope it's a smooth transition, but like I do think there's something positive in the fact that that's all changing.
So I think all of those things make me happy. I don't know, did I hit three in there? Yeah three yeah you did and let me just just ask you follow up on one losing our privilege our unique privilege as the holder of the world's reserve currency i mean i that's going to happen of course it's in progress the ukraine war accelerated it yes um but i haven't looked at the upside of that at all and i it's inevitable, so it would be nice to know what the upside is.

Well, I mean, if you think about...

Look, all the stuff that...

So we got this privilege after World War II, right?

The Bretton Woods Agreement.

Yes.

And a lot of the stuff where you talk about our soul as a country being destroyed, it

happened in large part as a result of that.

Yes.

Because we didn't have to earn our place in the world anymore.

We could just export paper.

You're right.

I'm going to go was that? And they were like, no, no, no, I just saw you did this whole like you had this whole space program and you fought a war in vietnam and you just started all these entitlement programs you know it does seem like you've been printing a lot of money i think we'll take our gold and then nixon was like this was an attack against the u.s dollar it's like what do you mean we had a contract and they were like live up to your end of the contract but once we were once there was no moretense, then we could just print money like crazy. Then you have everybody in Wall Street getting rich in the 80s.
You have the tech boom in the 90s. And so I'm just saying, I think that I don't know that it's been great for our country to beat the world reserve currency.
I think it's been great for the military industrial complex. I think it's been great for Wall Street.
I don't think it's been good for our soul and so if i handed you a billion dollars unearned do you think it would improve your life no i think it would probably destroy my life you know because

because what do you you know if you actually start thinking that through so then i go like okay so

all right fine so initially okay i could buy a bunch of cool stuff that's great we all know

that's not really what matters anyway but it'll for a moment you know feel really it'll distract

you for sure for sure right and then it's like okay so what am i going to do for my family now

Thank you. That's great.
We all know that's not really what matters anyway, but it'll for a moment, you know, feel really nice distract you Yeah, for sure. Right.
And then it's like, okay So what am I gonna do for my family now? Like my obviously my kids my wife are my responsibility But then like okay what I got a brother. I got a sister I guess I got to hand them a bunch of money too, you know, my brother's like just coming out of grad school It's like I'm gonna hand him a huge and just take away all of his drive to like go make it on his own now am i gonna give him nothing and be a brother who has a billion dollars and gives him nothing i mean that's not an option either i don't know this things get like way more complicated very quickly where you're like no actually that's not the right answer and also it's not as if i have like the respect from my family now like oh my god you're taking care of all this you were handed.
You were handed a billion dollars. You didn't earn anything.
You didn't create anything. It's like, no, that's not.
You're no longer the man in your house. Yeah, you don't actually want that.
I want to have a nice house because I work to get my family a nice house, you know? So yeah, no, I wouldn't want that. I don't know how, I don't know.
You're one of the rare people. I just share all the same instincts.
So I don't quite know how that happened.

But thank you.

I love that.

Dude, thank you so much.

I've really, really enjoyed being out here.

Me too.

Dave Smith, thanks.

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