Dave Smith on how neocons wrecked the country - 05-16-2024
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 Right. So 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, like what happened to conservative media?
Not all of them. I have a million friends in it. But like 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 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, DC. And then you see all of the, you know, Cato and guys like that who are based out of DC, they get very corrupted and they, and you can look at it. It's like, it's the same thing. We were just talking about Donahue calling out Chris Matthews back in the day. They'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. Actually 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. You 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, I didn't realize how corrupt it was.
Everyone always said it was corrupt. It felt like a really nice place to me. Raised all my kids there and. 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, the nature of conservatism or the conservative movement in America has always just been to lose. It's like, built into them. Like every generation just loses and then moves on to the next thing to lose. Like the old right, the Robert Taft right, they were largely in opposition to the new deal. That was, they were fighting back against SDR's new deal.
We're in opposition to that. And then you cut forward 20 years and it's FDR, Democrats are the new Republicans. Right. Ronald Reagan, it's, nobody would dare question the new deal. And then, of course, there was a movement pushing back against the great society.
Yes. And now, of course, no, entitlements are like, no one would ever dare question Medicare. Look, just recently I saw Donald Trump, who's not a traditional conservative, but he did the most traditional conservative thing when he said, he said, when we get in there again, we are going to fix Obamacare. And I'm like, okay, all right, so that's where we're at now, right? It's no more repeal, and 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 DC, they will put up a little fight. They will lose. They will then a few years later accept this as something that we is consensus amongst all of us. But, but you see, we're against whatever the next thing is, you know, transiting the kids or, you know, student loan bailouts.
We're against that now, you know, but they'll lose and then eventually accept. 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. 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, and then ultimately acquiesce. 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, the whole thing was, like, so mind blowing to me. 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 was that? Well, it shows you. I mean, it's, well, just, and because you use the word totalitarian, and I think sometimes when you use that word, it's perceived as, like, being somewhat hyperbolic. But it's really, like, what else could describe lockdowns? Well, that's what I thought.
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. Well, exactly like, I mean, the most, you couldn't imagine. Like, 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. And so, okay, to your point, right. Not only did conservatives not fight against it, I think the majority of them cheered it on or went along with it. I noticed.
And as far 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, and it becomes very easy later after that passes to be on the right side of that. Like, everyone's 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 didn't, 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, 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 you're, and so, you know, there's, 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 I'm, 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 our ancient allies.
Yeah. 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 state. I mean. Yeah, I mean, we.
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. Just slaughtered all. I mean, you know, but why am I laughing? It's.
Well, no, it's. Well, it's consistent theme. Well, it's that we're not laughing. Plight of the curse. 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 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 seventies, 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. Got to a smaller audience, but you covering the lab leak, 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's not that we had, like, a conclusive case that you could take to court, but there were, like, big pieces of information that were really narrative shattering. Well, and there were also. The bats weren't close enough to where the wet market was. 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 and January of 2020, wrote this paper said, no, we think this was a lab leak. And then they all disappeared. 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 raising? 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 bath heads off or something like, it's so bizarre.
But by the way, now, as I say this to you now, this is not controversial at all. This isn't a white hot issue. It was then, but it's not now. And so 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.
Yes. He's kind of like, I don't care. I'll say it right now when it's going to get me called all, well, it really, I remember about 15 years ago, it was in July and I was in Maine and 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. 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 custody, 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. It's between honesty and falsehood. And we hope we are on the former side. That's why we created this network, the Tucker Carlson network, and we invite you to subscribe to it. You go to tuckercarlson.com 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 Tuckercarlson.com podcast, you will not regret it. Who is the guy? Who is the. He was the science editor for the New York Times at Wade Nicholas.
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 call the question.
Yeah, yeah. It's not just like, oh, you lose your job or something like that. It's like you. We're going to smear you in the most vicious ways to, like, all of these. And we're social creatures where 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 with great discipline executed. It's like in a space of 4 hours, the entire machine turns on one guy and destroys him. Like, how? What is.
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 quite possibly is one, but no dissent at all.
Yeah. But then my thing is just that I do think, and I think this is something I've benefited from. I know this cause 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 right. And I also think that, like, you know, let's say there's like, I don't know, like a right wing or conservative 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? Like, it's. And, and I do watch a lot of people who go, like, got everything consistently wrong. It's the same way as the neoconservatives, right?
Like, even if, I mean, I hate them so much, 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 gonna 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? Very well?
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. 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 a, 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, 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.
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. But, yeah. And it's, the major problem is that, look, like at least there are problems with free markets and 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 with government. The worse you do, the more funding you get. But, so this is, 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 it back. Give me time.
No, 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 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 are different camps within libertarians. 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, he was perfect.
Tom Woods, Lou Rockwell, Jeff Dice, 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, like the 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 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, 501 C three, is run by an oligarch. Actually, it's run by Charles Koch. Right. So he kicked out the old head, he brought in the new head. And you sort of wonder if you're a libertarian, you can't, 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 party who consistently is growing the size of government every bit as much as the Democrats are.
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 eyes 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 not. Spending always goes up. There's been some cuts in top marginal tax rates. Right. You know, not even drastic cuts, but they're, 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 so 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 does raise some eyebrows, I would say, like, look to the bigger question of libertarians and the side, 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 as the country is kind of spinning out of control and everything has just gotten more and more corrupt.
The, that's directly related to the fact that DC has gotten more and more powerful. And this is, to me, like, I've been saying this for a while. It's not my original thought. This is something Hans Hermann Hopper said back in the nineties where 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. In fact, a functioning society needs good family values. And that's just like, a fact.
We don't believe that should be enforced at the point of a gun. But that doesn't mean, like, you know, like even if you think, say, like whatever you think prostitution should be legal, you could still have a feeling that it's hard, horrible, and represents a tragedy on all sides. And so that's like kind of the conservative lesson that libertarians need to learn. I think a lot of libertarians in the Ron Paul kind of school did learn that. And the lesson that I would say that conservatives or trumpian populist types need to learn is that if Donald Trump's going to say, drain the swamp, it's like, okay, but what does that mean?
Like, 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 live in 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 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.
Well, 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 what 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, that's grown bigger and bigger and more powerful. I absolutely agree with that. And I do think I saw it change. I remember the moment it changed, and it was the moment when the Democratic Party subverted 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 them, 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. There'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 etoys or pets.com, everything you could think of. Totally. And it was so smart. And he did it for the purpose of fundraising.
And all of a sudden. And 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. Well, your uniform matters. I mean, that's why we have uniforms. Right? That's why the bus driver wears a uniform and your airline pilots have their stupid outfits and your stewardesses are dressed up like they are because it.
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.
Noblesse oblige was a thing. And all of a sudden, in the nineties, you notice the richest people in America start dressing 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 as 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% 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.
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 when the lockdowns first started and there were all those 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. There's a guy out there, there who's got three kids and makes sixty k 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 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 worst message.
A much better message would be to acknowledge exactly that I'm not in the situation that you're in at all. That, for me, it's actually fine to be. 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 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 the opposite of being noble. That'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. Oh, I just drive like a shitty little Toyota. It's like, oh, actually, you're defrauding Michelle Obama, goes to Princeton for free, and has 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.
You ever see, they'll have, like, pictures of side by side, but it'll be, like, pictures of, like, Jimmy Carter's house and Obama's house. And that 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 off what? Because you were president, and you get to cash in on that now, in a 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 inflaming race hate in our country, and then you go to Martha's vineyard, the whitest zip code in the world. Not allowed.
You're not allowed to do that. Well, it also, I mean, it did, it did so much damage, his inflaming racial hatred. And I'll say after, you know, Barack Obama's campaign in 2008 there, 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.
Genius. Yes, it was totally brilliant. It was his. Now, of course, it wasn't what they presented it as. It wasn't like a grassroots campaign.
It was. He was approved of by the powers that, of course, he didn't just happen to, as a junior senator, get like a primetime speaking slot in 2004 where he gave that speech. He wasn't even a senator yet, was he a state senator still? That's when I first met Barack Obama, 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 Junior. They pulled over to say hi to me. 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 us senator. That was the campaign.
It was great. It was absolutely crazy. So it was clearly kind of orchestrated, even powerful, 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 2000. I'll tell you what I agree with. You 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. Let's get past the race. I love that. And even, and there was a broader, more unifying thing.
I mean, I remember. Cause he was such a powerful public speaker. I mean, he never really said anything, but it would still be beautiful, you know? Yes, I remember in his acceptance speech at 2008 at the DNC, we had this whole line where he was like, 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 America. And then it's like, oh, what? I mean, he didn't really say anything there, but, you know, but it was beautifully put. I'm 100% for that. Yeah, the message was great and 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. 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, how many times all the woke terms are used, transgenderism, all that. And it's all, like, right around 2012. It's all sudden, like, you know, systemic racism goes from being mentioned like, this many times throughout history to, like, shooting at, like, the New York Times and Washington.
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. I think it was the finance. It was the hangover from.
From the financial crisis. Yeah, well, that was a huge part of it, for sure. And also that Obama's, you know, like, so in the year, like, from 2007 to 2010, the median net worth in America shrunk by, like, 40%. People lost. Like, 40% of american wealth was lost.
And you can imagine, especially now, having kids at the time, I didn't have kids, and I was young. I was like, whatever, bad economy, that sucks. But you can appreciate now what that would be like if you just lost 40% of your net worth and you got little kids. How destabilizing that is. And Obama's solution to this, the Obama recovery, was okay.
It was record high government spending and record low interest rates. This was the solution. This is how we're going to save the economy. We're going to bring interest rates down to zero and we're going to bring government spending higher than it's ever been before at that time. So you can say on paper there's a little bit of a recovery here, but what really happens in that environment, 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 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. For one thing, it just asset prices ballooned. I mean, this is fake. Everyone knows what happens over time with free money.
The money becomes worth less. And so there's a rush to assets, and now you can't buy a house, right? That's right. And then, and then the boom is always followed by the bust. And so you have all of this mal investment because the way it works, and this is where austrian economics, which I disparage.
No, I have never disparaged. I'm just mad about the results. Results. But it's not a result of austrian economics or libertarianism. It's a result of abandoning all agree.
Right? So it's, but look, 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, hey, 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 buy. But if the government just came in and said, 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. No, I agree. 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%, 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 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 $1.
Yeah, well, it's a really 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 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, that's considered super radical, but, like, I don't. 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 penalize 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 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. 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? That it'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?
Yes. Like, that's law. Like, I think about. Just think about what the industry, income taxes, they penalize you for working. Well, that's crime.
To work. The punishment is a fee. The more productive you are, the more punishment you get. So let me ask you this question, as an austrian economic economist. Why the disparity between the tax on labor and the tax on capital?
Well, because that's the rules that the government made, 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, 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. 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, like, your, your critique of that.
But, okay, so if we were, let's say, to fix that, that disparity, there's basically two ways we could do that. One would be to raise capital gains taxes up 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 we are able, 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 DC 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 debt. It will go to politically connected cronies. Right.
It'll be, however, let's say the other option to that is we could lower individual taxes to 15% and now give every working family in this country a huge raise. A huge raise. So that's all I'm saying. You're right about the discrepancy there, and it's totally corrupt. But it's like, what, what's the solution to that?
Well, the solution is, look, if you tied them legislatively and just said 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 they're always going to 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 answer there is to just like, 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. And I mean, the IR's. I mean, I know stories from good friends of mine.
They are ruthless. I mean, they go back 20 years, 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 you owed three grand a year, and so now you owe $60,000. Oh, yeah.
You know what I mean? This is what leads to divorces, suicides, putting pistols in their mouth. Yeah. You know, 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, how bad it's been. I mean, like, 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, like, a lot, and they're shocking. But I never hear anybody say that. Yeah. 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's Donald Trump was championing the whole time, actually, and smearing Thomas Massey 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 biggest bill, you know, because it's so Trump, because it's the biggest, because 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 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 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 guy, he was in his sixties, and if he were to go, this is the guy who, he was going to leave us as president of the United States.
Mike Pence. There's something. There's something wrong with him. Yeah, there's a lot wrong with him. 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. 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. 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. 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, 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 going to have our CIA director, 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 involved in libertarian politics, like actual politics, party politics. 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 what 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.
In 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. Cause you covered it. There was what was called the Ron Paul revolution.
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 Rand Paul was kind of gonna carry the mantle and continue this. This Ron Paul energy.
And 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 COVID grilling Fauci and all that stuff. But for whatever reason, 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, there were a lot of us who were, like, kind of disappointed about Rand Paul, and then we had Ron Paul running in the republican party, but then a lot of us started looking to the libertarian party.
Oh, they were the third party candidate, and they ran Gary Johnson and Bill Weld. We were very disappointed with that campaign, particularly with Bill Weld, who was just horrible, sad, defeated guy. And also just, he was like a raytheon lobbyist who was like, what are you doing over there? Total fraud. What's the point if we're gonna 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 this group called the Mises Caucus that I joined. I was led by this guy named Michael Heiss and Angela McCardle, who ultimately is. She's currently the chair of the party.
And we basically went and took over the whole party in the name of Ron Pauly. And it's like, if there's going to be a libertarian party, it's going to be represented by liberty libertarians. And so, anyway, cutting to. So once that happened, it was kind of my group who took over and 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 now 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 National Convention, it looks like RFK, junior speaker one. When and where is this at the end of the month? It's May, May 24 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, like at some hotel. I'd have to look it up.
But, yeah, it's at some hotel in DC. 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 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 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.
You know, it's not like the Republicans were split between Jeb Bush and Donald Trump or something like. No, like 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 by the voters, republican voters.
But when Israel came up, it's a little bit different. I don't know exactly. Well, neoconservatism is like chicken pox. Like, you think you defeat it, and then when your defenses are down, it comes back as shingles. Like, oh, crap, they're democrats now.
Jesus. 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 worldview, but it seems stronger than ever. Well, I think you have done a lot. I mean, I really. Not really.
I mean, it's like everybody, 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, 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 mean, 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, 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 simply said, if Poland attacks us, that's the only scenario I. 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% muslim.
They have all these sort of semi autonomous zones throughout the country. He wants more land. I don't think he wants more land. No, look, he's always 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, Strohsenberg, 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, I mean, like, let's say we had a fairly pro american government in Mexico 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 getting, you know what I mean? Like, would you go? It was so unprovoked. Yeah.
And then Russia said, we're going to get Mexico to join our defense alliance and we're going to put missiles in Tijuana. In Tijuana, right. And no, by the way, that had been floated out for years. And in fact, in 2008, we had formally announced that, that Russia had formally announced that Mexico would be joining their military alliance. Then we went, I'm sorry for people.
You're right. It was a totally organic uprising. Maid 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, yeah, sure, it was Soros backed NGO's that were funded, but whatever, that's a, it was totally organic movement, you know. And so, yeah, no, it was a series of provocations, very unnecessary ones. And not just like, not just ones that 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 going to keep advocating it until theres a russian response. And then when there's 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 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, you. 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 worst, 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 prid, 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't, 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. 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. Who cares? So let's be friends with Russia. Let's get along with them.
And then when you're being called a russian spy every day on the news, you know, then when he went to Helsinki and said, you know, I believe Putin, 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 claim, 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, 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.
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 the desire to go to war with Russia has been pretty much the animating thought in our foreign policy 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 going to win that.
I can. I don't see how Ukraine rates 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.
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's for sure. 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. You know, there's no corruption there.
But I think, look, I'm sure they will attempt to spin it in some way where if Zelensky 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 gonna 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. No, that's right.
But it's clearly in hundreds of thousands. I mean, they've got 50 year olds fighting for them at this point, so that tells you something. They're forced conscripting men with down syndrome. Yes. That means a lot.
That means all your boys are dead, essentially, for sure. And the ones who couldn't, you know, managed to flee. And so, yeah, it's a total disaster. The, like, incredibly dark irony of it is that all the people, like cheering on Ukraine have, just, as John Mearsheimer said in 2014, which aged very well, unfortunately, said we were leading Ukraine down the primrose path, and that's what we did. You actually 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. I agree. I agree. You know, it's just horrible. But I know 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. 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 I'm 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, but that's all just an act. 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. You know, even in the Cold War, we never had you know, we fought in Vietnam, but that's not on Russia's border.
You know what I mean? Like, that's. This is a whole different game. And so 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 board order 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. I do think. And I got to say, I think you're a huge part of this. 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. The biggest shows in cable news. The big. They were all for it. They were all.
I was for it. Yes. Well, I was for it until I went to Iraq in 22,003. I immediately apologized. I would say in my defense.
Yeah, what. 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 zero three.
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, had lunch with my dad every week at the same table in this place and 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 plan to go 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 four kids and a daily job. He's like, oh, so. But you just kind of sit this one out. And he, like, shamed me into it.
That's true story. He was, like, so unimpressed that I wasn't going to see it. And I was like, okay, you're right. I should go. So I went.
I took leave of my show and went 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 contractors. And we went to Iraq, and the first thing that happens, we got to Kuwait. We were going to fly in and the insurgency shot down a DHL plane coming into biop or 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 Tikrit 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. In this. 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. What, do you have a gun when you're over there? Oh, absolutely. I must have fired for it, actually. Amazingly, 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 Department. I still have my badge. It's hanging in my office right there that you qualified with. This was an AK 47. Well, I actually had an AK 47 already.
Not fully automatic, but just my range. I knew how to operate it. But yet you were required to carry it. That's how out of control it was. 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 the bottom line was, we're not good at colonialism 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 oppression of regimes all through history. They have. They can't handle chaos. And we brought chaos 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 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 I had always sort of liked that 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 and she was killed. Her legs were blown off by an IED, and her husband was there and 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 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 and sit at the head of the table. And all the benefits of being a man, and there are many. But if you're your children, 100%, 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, by the 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 up with the mother of your children, mother going to war with 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. 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. 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. So here I've got a wife and three daughters who I reviewed Veer, who I would die for without thinking. And I'm like, 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.
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, but I was outraged. And that rage has sort of never just exploded on you. Sorry, but it's never left. I really enjoyed it.
I came to Washington and I was like. And I did an interview with the New York Times. I said, I cannot believe I supported something. 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 myself. But, yeah, you didn't.
Well, because I've just. I've heard you say several times that your trip over there, you know, like, turns you against the war, but I 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 gonna 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 that. 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 nineties and that they used 911 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 crowd.
And I knew it was bullshit even at the time. And I went over to the White House for something, to see Bush or cheney or somebody. I think I was seeing Cheney, whatever. I was on the White House. He's a really warm guy.
Great guy.
I was there, and it was like, maybe the fall of 2002, and they'd been talking about senved veda 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 911, obviously. And guys like, you know, paid liars like Steve Hayes or someone write these books like, al Qaeda did it.
And I work 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 so nuts. So I never thought we were gonna 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 stand up guys, the tv cameras are. And I run into Mike Allen, he's an old friend of mine from a Washington Post reporter, now runs axios and really nice person and has this, like, clarity of vision that I don't have because he hasn't caught in the weeds on shit. And I said, we're not really going to invade Rock. 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 if everyone starts talking about something, they will convince themselves that it's true and it will happen. We should remember that. Don't overthink things. If something really obvious is happening, it's happening. Yeah, sometimes.
Yeah, sometimes it's almost too hard to accept intellectuals, people like you, 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 it's so obvious. Exactly. Of course this is happening.
And there's, you know, what's unbelievable to me that really, like, 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 who likes to read.
No, no, but you think about why things happen. 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 anyone can go read this.
You'll find it's called a clean break, a new strategy for securing the realm. It was a letter written by Richard Pearl and David Worms. Are and a few other neo became very powerful in the George W. Bush. I knew all those guys.
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 Yahoo.
Doctrine was ultimately to be, which has 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, 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 911 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 a new, another Pearl harbor type event where there'd be enough popular support too. Now the 911 truthers, the Alex Jones guys, for a while, they would hang on that as evidence that, you know, whatever Cheney did, 911 or something like that or something elements within our government, I think they're over playing 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 911 because so many documents remain classified 23 years later. And 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 911? Speaker one, I think you should always be suspicious 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 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.
Like, I was in real time, like, calling out how obviously Trump was not a russian agent. And in 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.
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, that's also, and that's part of the reason why they, they don't like the Mafia. Cause you're a competing gang. You're not allowed to be the gang here. We're the gang.
And so when you look at things through that frame, yes, they're all a bunch of liars and they're, 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 911. 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 911 used that opportunity to get them 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 do you, 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?
I. Sure. Absolutely. That'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 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, some of which are not true, some of which might be true, 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, okay, your best friend, her husband also is a sexual predator who's sending naked pictures to underage girls. Like, hey, that's weird. 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, what?
I. You know, like, I'm not even good. What is that? No, you're like, I'm not drawing any more. 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 gonna die or their babies are gonna die, and there's a horrible. 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've seen, his 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 started in 2012, but then they go, oh, we have to overthrow Assad because, you know, he's killing all of his own people. It's like, 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 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, 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 after a trial, after a fair trial. I mean, it's not America first. I would say that it's kind of hard to. It's kind of hard to let go of square that circle. But what's interesting is that 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 Rogan's podcast at your urging, so thank you for that. I had a great time. I loved the podcast.
Yeah, it was super, super fun. But, you know, it's very long. It was like 3 hours long, so. And I can't stop talking. So.
All right. Another thing. And I'm going on about whatever, you know. And at one point, I just blurted out for, like, 15 seconds something I thought about recently, which is the use of the nuclear bombs. They have been used in August of 1945 against Hiroshima and then Nagasaki.
Complex topic. A lot of it's not publicly. Well, known. Okay. But just the bottom line fact that we dropped this particularly bomb on Nagasaki, which was the christian capital of Japan, by the way, that bomb was dropped on a church and killed three quarters of the christians in the city, which bothers me as a Christian.
But leaving even that aside, it killed civilians, wasn't dropped on a military base. It was killed. 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 the right? And I thought, and I don't even follow the attacks of 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 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, sure. Like, there's a thing, like, I really got this wrong. And it was, how is what a, like, twisted society. I defended Mitt Rodney when he ran.
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 five star General Dwight Eisenhower was against the new necessary where they were ready to negotiate a surrender. We didn't need to do this. It's like. But also.
There's just no but. I didn't even get into the details of the. No, no, you were sitting wrong on its face. Exactly. I was just.
The principle of using nuclear weapons against the 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, or. It's just bad. Why would that make people on the right so mad? What is that? So this is my, my kind of theory on it is that if you, you'll kind of notice World War two, 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.
Yes. Recoil. Yes. 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 one and which we shouldn't have fought. That's generate no controversy. I could say this all day long and go through how Woodrow Wilson was completely wrong to get us involved in World War one. And this.
You know what I mean? He 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 of that. World War two is the one that is. But what's so weird about that is clearly the most important.
And we talked about, so 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, 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 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 yes, those people are dead. My family was involved in it.
One of the worst things that ever happened. I agree. But look, World War two 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 two anytime there's a war, because that's what's used to. 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 Sam Hussein was Hitler, Milosevic was Hitler, 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 who are defending Israel's attack on Gaza by going, well, we killed a lot of civilians in world War two, 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 two, 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. But every. By the way, you can never learn the lesson of history that sometimes, like, 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. You were never chamberlain for not wanting to back Ukraine immediately in the war. Right? It's the only lesson in history now.
You can't look at World War two 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 two, World War two is the worst thing that ever happened in the history of the world.
Yes. By definition, the worst thing that ever happened. More people killed. The Holocaust happened in the middle of it. Tens of millions of people died in european conflict.
Brutal conflict on all sides. Destroyed the greatest continent. Yes. Now, right. Exactly.
Now, okay. If you want, you know, they say winners of wars, right? The history. And, man, did the Nazis and imperial Japan make it really easy because they were so evil. They were like.
They were like caricatures of evil, you know, and they really were. Now, it's a little more complicated than that. Cause 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 War two 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. Whatever. There's all this. A lot of it comes down to entering World War one, and World War two was really the exact. 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? Like, 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? Like, 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.
But 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's like, why can't. 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 Two.
I'm not an expert, but, like, this worship of Churchill, I think, is very odd. There's a lot about Churchill, I think, that was impressive. 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. That's in the procurement. It's 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, 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.
And Kobe 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, 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 so 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 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 a, in Pat Buchanan, seriously, like, 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, there's so many, like, ripple effects of this, too, because they also, you know, the whole situation with Israel, Palestine, this is also a result of the british empire being defeated. Right. And being driven out. So there's so much to this, but why defend it?
That's the way, look, I'm not even judging Churchill. I may have made similar decisions. 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? 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.
There was something really profound that they saw there. And this, 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? Look, I mean, like, first off, we're broke. We're $34 trillion in debt.
We can't afford our own wars, let alone everybody else's. We're literally, it's so cartoonish. We're borrowing money. You know, it's like if you were, like, if I was giving my sister money and my cousin's money and all of them, but I'm putting it on a credit card. You know what I mean?
Like, 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. They're not even our family.
Right. They're not even our family. 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.
Yes. And so, like, it's just totally absurd. But then also, at the same time, like, look, wars 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 Donbas region is ruled by Kiev or Moscow. Like, is that important enough to you? Because to me is 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 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, 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 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 described yourself as a comic who likes to read. Yeah. Let me ask you about comedy. So 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? He made it the world capital of comedy. So you described him as the Johnny, the modern Johnny Carson. 100%.
So, like, 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 slash riots, you know, when California, as you know very well, is falling apart, which is one of the great tragedies. It really is.
It's awful. 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, it's one of the last, like, great liberal cities in this country, you know, which is. 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 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, functioning liberal cities.
That's what I mean. Yeah. Yeah. You need them to not be hellholes, 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 heard you talk about. I think you were talking to me about 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 turned it into pretty amazing, 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. Rogan happened to kind of, like, come up as this Internet world was exploding, and he's just such an interesting guy, 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, you know, it's just like the biggest opportunity and he's such a genuinely, like, 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. Like, 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, you 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. I remember Jerry Seinfeld hearing him. I don't know him, but hearing him described doing Carson.
Oh, yeah. And he said it was a, 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, 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, wild. We're mommy and daddy now. Really weird feeling, like, 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, yeah, just kidding. Kind of. But anyway, but, uh, it's, but it's this amazing, you know, it's like, 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, then you come out and you're a somebody. And it's kind of like that with Rogan. Like, it's just, and it's.
There's all these similar dynamics. Like, he'll kind of go, you know, like, he'll go like 2 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. No. Or whatever.
But it's. 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 telling us he's so funny. He's like. And also just a great person and an insane person, 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. It's just, like, amazing.
And what happened to your life? Well, I started making money, so that was, that was pretty. So it was that. It was kind 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, that'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, your show on MSNBC a lot, and then I always watched.
You're the only. You're the only one. The MSNBC one. That might be true. It's not truly fox.
That's not true at all for Fox. But you. You might be right about MSNBC. It was me. I was.
I had Ms NBC on all day long for whatever reason. 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 night and day.
I know 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. I think you've gotten better over the years.
Yeah, sure. But as a network, they got so much worse. I mean, like, but morning Joe used to be like, you and Pat Buchanan. Oh, yeah. And Rachel Maddow.
Oh, yeah. And Dylan Ratigan even. Totally. I kind of watched Dylan Radigan. Yeah.
Had something to say. Sometimes completely. 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 one era now. Occasionally there'll be the 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.
My favorite part of MSNBC is all the black people on the air have exactly the same opinions, too. What's the point of diversity if everyone went to Princeton and is a neoliberal? Well, there's nothing. There's nothing more. They could get some rappers on MSNBC.
They would never be allowed. Right, right. Because. But there's something about, um, like, being ideologically possessed that's very unpleasant. You know what I mean?
Like, 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. Yeah. And it'd be kind of crazy to watch the whole Newsday. 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, you know, Assad, because he just gassed his other people. And then, like, you would, like, come on at 08:00 p.m. And by the way, I remember because I was doing this show with Se 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 is before the OPCW whistleblowers had, like, come out and say, so. I didn't, like, have any, like, evidence. I could feel it. Well, I mean, you just look at it and you go, okay, so you're telling me that this is.
We're in 2018 now? 2017. 2018. Assad has been fighting a civil war since 2012, fighting for his survival, fighting to not go out like Gaddafi, like, to not get sodomized. Donald Trump announces that we're pulling out.
He announces that you won. You're gonna live. You're not gonna be sodomized to death by a mob. Right? Okay.
And then Assad decides a week and a half later, I'm gonna do the one thing that would turn international opinion around to keep me at risk of being sodomized 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.
Yeah, 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 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. Blah, blah, blah. You know, racism. Well, we have to confront systemic racism.
We have to go conversation about race. I always think. Really? I'd love to. Yeah.
Yeah, exactly right. I don't think you want that. Well, that's right. And it's. And no, and it's just so boring.
So boring that you. Anyway, where I was. 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? Like, are you just like an animal who can be, 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, like the way I think Jordan Peterson said it was like, you get to choose your suffering. You don't get to choose no suffering. 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, it does. You know what I mean? Yes. But you're paying a price. You're just kind of choosing.
But 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 upfront 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. You know, this lie will have whatever positive effects it'll have. Exactly. Right. 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. So degrading. And that's the price. So degrading.
Like, how could. And it's interesting. And all the people with self respect 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 totally phony. 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 cute or something like that. And 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 surgeon. 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, we would give them, 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.
It's like, oh, 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, 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 Bobby, there might be something you'd say off camera that you wouldn't say on camera, but there's nothing you're saying, but there's nothing you're saying on camera or that you don't believe.
I was like, 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 they're just rooted in meanness or irritation or mocking people's appearances, which I have a weakness for. Don't.
Don't do that. If I know you're a compliment. I get your point, but I'm not. No intention of stopping that. But there is something that I think is part of 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. You already know what he's like. And you know this because you went and hung out.
He's exactly that guy. Oh, totally. Exactly the same guy. You know, I love that that works. I love, I'm thrilled by his success.
And yes, the money, too. 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 to 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 awesome.
No, that's right. And that is the part. And I don't, like, I'm not the biggest fan, but that is the stuff where Ayn Rand was really correct about. Oh, I agree. The idea that, like.
No, like, kind of there is this connection between, like, what she would call selfishness, which I don't think is the right word for it, but, like. But there is something between, like, success and that 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. Logan gets rich because he's brave and honest. How is that bad? Yeah. I mean, you see all these other people getting rich because they're craven and dishonest.
And that's very demoralizing, actually. Well, and also, I mean, there's so much, there's so many things to be down about in our, our country, particularly right now. Like, our country is not in a very good place. Like, I, you know, I'm like, I got a wife and two little kids, and I put up, 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.
She sees the bars. But the point is that. 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 culture. Very, very concerned about it.
And there's a lot of, like, you know, look, I mean, obviously, like, we're in. 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 girls, 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 even be funny. You know what I mean? That's just 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.
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, I kind of have to clang 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 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, 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 great friends. And through this weird Internet world where we are, I've kind of cultivated, like, a really great audience of a lot of really cool people.
Yes. And, yeah, I think that there's, you know. So you think you're relating to people in a deeper way than you did, say, five or 610 years ago. I think, 100%. 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. So that's just aside from the craziness of the world, I think whenever you go through this that you're just living in a better way. Wester, you, though, very, very, very.
Because that's like your. I mean, that's your fortress against. In. That protects you from everything else. Exactly.
Cause it's. Well, it's. And it's just, you know, it's whatever you're. You know, this is the thing that was kind of. I know you sent me when I tweeted something about this, but where, like, when you don't have God, whatever's next highest in line becomes affect your God.
And there is something about I did not have God or family and my own family. You know, I had family members who I loved, but I have my own family. And my whole life, I kind of, like, I was like, a nineties kid. I grew up in. I was born in 1983.
I grew up in the nineties. None of us, nobody I knew was religious. Nobody. And we did not have, you know, like, all of the traditions that many previous generations grew up with, whether, 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. Around what's fun. And it wasn't until I got married and when we had my first kid and I found God 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, that's really not that important.
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, to some degree, you just find much deeper happiness when you're not living. 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.
She 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 did you know that? How did you. Well, I mean, look, it's a mix of a few things.
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 good values in me. And I don't mean if that kind of contradicts what I just said before, like, she did instill good values in me. We didn't have kind of like, you know, God or anything. Right.
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 girl. And that is a.
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 really crazy chick and they can't even think straight cuz they're in agony all the time. Yeah. You know, 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. Yeah.
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. I'm I don't. Obviously, when you speak in about a group that big, I'm painting, with a broader exceptions to this role.
And I, you know, I love my mother very much, and she's a good person, but as a generation, they just ruined everything. And they're totally selfish. Yes, completely. Jeff Dice, who I love, this guy is so brilliant, but 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 thirties, and then it was like.
And you watch it all the way through. Like, COVID, it's like, we got to do everything we can to protect the baby from our generation. Yes. It went from don't trust anyone over 30 to being like, screw your childhood. I don't want to get this.
Keep your hands off my medicare, by the way. You know, like, all. Everything, it's. And. But one of the major things that they changed about the culture was, like, normalizing casual divorce.
Yeah. 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.
Like, look, I'm. There are exceptions. There are cases where there's no use of 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, 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, we've. We've faced some hurdles in our marriage. Like, things in the outside world that have happened, of course.
And I think we've done a very good job of them. We've had serious issues. Like, we had major health concerns with one of our kids and got through that. We've had been through lockdowns and been through, you know, and there's more ahead. There's a lot more ahead.
But one thing that is 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. 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. 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 never turned out happy. No, because you have. Cause. 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 want to die. You have obligations and responsibilities, 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 they. I thought in the years 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, oh, he was such a good guy. Like, yeah, that's all that matters 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. Lived it.
Actually, fuck that person. You know what I mean? Yeah, I don't want that. And also, look, I mean, that kind of the absence of having that feeling or the baby boomers kind of not feeling that way, it's kind of like. I mean, look what it's led to.
I mean, you know, it's very easy for, you know, say, popular, conservative, you know, pundits to kind of dunk on college kids and stuff like that, which is like, fun. And 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, 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, it's like, ah, the intellectual prowess of destroying this.
And like, yes, okay, 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.
I agree with you so strongly. Was medicated, I bet. You know, like, as a young and staring down the barrel of a grim life. Yes. Has no conceivable path toward, like, independence and fucking toward what you have and what you grew up with, which is that's all that really.
And you're in charge of the society, by the way. You're in charge of the study 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's like, oh, stupid kids. No, your job is to create another generation of smart kids. And then they wise kids and they mock them.
They're like, oh, well, maybe, maybe if you don't have your avocado toast and your latte, 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 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, okay? 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. This might, you know, like.
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 owned 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, you know what I mean? For that same humble house that my grandfather had. And the baby boomers all got rich by the value of their house. Just going to Greenwich, 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.
They don't care. And I'm trying not to interrupt your wonderful description with amens and hosannas, but I just so strongly agree with what you're saying. And I have a bunch of kids. They're all actually thriving. I would say inside, they're all good people, clear thinking they love each other, most important.
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. Right? They know how. I mean, they're.
They may be wrong, they may be confused, but they're. They're actually pretty tough in a way, and they're pretty angry, and they sort of get what's going on. And I have deep sympathy for them. Deep, deep. They've been completely screwed over by the people, and they don't 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. 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. Yeah. 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 concern. 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.
The Internet on fire by, uh. Because I trashed Bill Buckley. Like, I completely agree. I said he was one of the greatest great villains of the 20th century. Well, he was a gatekeeper, for sure.
I mean, people started like, what about Stalin and Mao Saitong? And I'm like, okay, fine, he was third. But the point. The point is, okay, there were, like, five ahead of him. Okay, fine.
But he was. But I think part of this is that, you know, 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. You know, this was the guy who was the most prominent member of the conservative movement. And it's like, okay, and so, like, what exactly was conserved in his movement?
What? Like, just explain. 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 a big conservative? I mean, like, like, I'll give you something. 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, like, takeover of the conservative movement was to drive out all of the. All of the non interventionists, all of the isolationists.
I watched demonize them as racist every single time happen. And the weird. Yeah, don't even. I'm holding back like, I would, you know, I was adjacent to that world my entire life, and I. And I watched it happen.
And, you know, I knew Bill Buckley, and he was perfectly nice to me. You know, didn't hate him or anything, but it was very charming and very smart. 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 or people didn't know any better, and that was, like, upper class or something, fake accent, weird homoerotic stuff. And it was like, all just kind of sad, actually. I thought. I thought that was always my view of it, because it was. Was he was posing, but, you know, I think he had good qualities.
I love sailing, so I kind of, you know, I'm with him on that. 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.
Which was really, I mean, they were fairly isolationist, but certainly non interventionist. I mean, like, you know, Robert Taft was the one who didn't want us to be a NATO. I mean, this was like the old. And they were big on, like, immigration controls, sound money, and not getting involved in wars. These were the people who opposed World War one and World War two.
They didn't want american involvement in these wars. Right. And this. The effect of Bill Buckley was to transform what became a 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, and the people who would lecture you about how America is an idea, and 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. Yeah. And so, again, it's nothing personal against Bill Buckley, who I, you know, played that. Played a mean harpsichord, but not to be catty, 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 I'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 it's. 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, one of the crazy things about America is that there is kind of this. This idea that we are the United States of America and have been this whole time, whereas there's really been, like, several revolutions in the country. And you know what? Look, I mean, I think the George, double George W. Bush years, the war on terrorism, was a revolution of sorts in the country.
I grew up a kid in the nineties. We are not the same country as we were in the 1990s in the pre war on terror, before the Patriot act and 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 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 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 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. Totally agree. 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 and didn't.
I just didn't vote. I did vote for him the second time because you always get caught up in the other guy. And I knew Kerry, and I just thought Kerry was not impressive at all. So I voted for Bush. But I see Bush still.
I had a meal with him not that long ago. And talk about a defeated, sad guy, actually bitter, insecure, given to lecturing everyone around him about what a great president he was. And I thought, that really is. No, but that's the fruit of the tree. If you've had a successful life, if.
If you've done the things that, you know, if you've fulfilled your obligation and done the right thing, you're not lecturing people about what a great person you are, right at all, are you? No, I don't think so. No, that's failure. And, like, I mean, just. He knows.
I mean, yeah, come on. To try to spin the George W. Bush years as anything other than, like, an absolute failure. I mean, you know, dude, you celebrated, mission accomplished. And then we stayed in the war for 20 years just a disaster and left the country.
And, I mean, look, not only was it all completely unnecessary, I mean, like, we had, like, the special ops response to al Qaeda cells in Afghanistan in late 2001, totally justified that we had an opportunity to trap Osama bin Laden and Tora Bora in late 2001, and they, I believe, intentionally let them go so they could continue these wars. But fighting the decision, do you think that's what happened? Yeah. Yeah. And there's.
I highly recommend to anybody, Scott Horton wrote a book called enough already, which is like a masterpiece 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 Bora and they were requesting. I remember that. 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 cobble 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, 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'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 like, you know, cockroach that's trapped. You know what I mean? Riddle is, 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 way well beyond that, 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. Like, we 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 recognize 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, you know, YouTube and Facebook and all of these at Google and all of this. And even in their attempts to control it, it's net.
They've never been as good as they were at controlling when there were just three networks and 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. 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 on 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, they have to convince us huge before they can just do it. You know, like every.
Okay, there's two things that are seemingly contradictory, but they're not number one, democracy is an illusion. It doesn't really exist. Yes. You don't really ever have democracy. You know, oh, we get to vote in presidential elections.
Like, 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'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, of course. 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, you know, I've been considering it, and we will be implementing policy x. You know what I mean? Like, because at the end of the day, there's way more of you than there are of him. Totally.
Right. And so when you can spread ideas, we have a fighting shot. I think so. That's very encouraging to me. I think there's also been a huge move away from us hegemony internationally, which is both very scary, 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 and paper, being politically connected, and you're not earning anything to become rich. And it's devastating. Yes. And then I think the unipolar moment was the worst thing that ever happened to America.
Right. You need counterbalance. Winning is often losing. Right. And so you need.
I don't. 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.
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?
Yeah, you did. And let me just ask you to follow up on one, losing our privilege, our unique privilege as the holder of the world's reserve currency. I mean, it's going to happen. Of course it's in progress. The Ukraine war accelerated it.
Yes, but I haven't looked at the upside of that at all, and I think 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.
We got this privilege after World War two, right? The Bretton Wood agreement, 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, you know, because we didn't have to earn our place in the world anymore. We could just export paper. And, of course, we immediately started cheating. And this is why Nixon took us off the gold standard.
It's not that, you know, Nixon went off the gold standard. It's that the french called his bluff. We were saying, we'll exchange dollars for $35 an ounce, and they went, okay, we'll take our gold. And we were like, oh, wait, I'm sorry. What 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 goals. And then Nixon was like, let's just run an attack against the US dollars. Like, what do you mean? We had a contract. And they were, like, living up to your end of the contract.
But once we were. Once there was no more pretense, then we could just print money like crazy. Then you have everybody in Wall street getting rich. In the eighties, you have the tech boom. In the nineties.
This is all. And so I'm just saying, I think that. I don't know that it's been great for our country to be the world reserve currency. I think it's been great for the military industrial complex. I think it's 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 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. It'll.
For a moment, you know, feel really. It'll 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. 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, am I going to hand him a huge and just take away all of his drive to, like, go make it on his own now, am I going to give him nothing and be a brother who has a billion dollars and gives him nothing? That's not an option either.
I don't know. 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 of us. You were handed a billion dollars.
You didn't earn anything. You didn't create anything. It's like, no, that's not. 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. Exactly. 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 with all the same instincts. So. Yeah. I don't quite know how that happened, but.
Well, thank you. That was a. I love that dude. Thank you so much. I've really, really enjoyed being out here.
Me too. Dave Smith. Thanks.
They, like, worship power. They, like, grew up wanting to be part of the club. And the only effect, you know, Teddy Roosevelt right there, he. He was like, an actual populace because he grew up in that world, and he's like, actually, you all kind of suck in. There's nothing that you have that I want.
You know what I mean? I'd rather be in North Dakota hunting. And that was his superpower. And I have to say Trump has some of that.
