Dave Smith and Joe Rogan critique NATO’s 2008 Georgia-Russia war and 2014 Ukraine coup, citing warnings from Gates, Perry, and a CIA memo by Bill Burns. They expose Western hypocrisy in prolonging Ukraine’s conflict—Fiona Hill’s report implicates Boris Johnson—and question escalation risks, including Nord Stream sabotage and Taiwan’s potential flashpoint. Smith links foreign policy failures to systemic decay, like the Prussian education model, while Rogan praises Jon Jones’ combat sports dominance but pivots to absurd wrestling lore, ending with a joke: "This podcast is over." [Automatically generated summary]
Because I remember, you know, you talking about this over the last couple years, like, we're going to do this, and it's going to be like this, and then, like, it's cool to see it materialize.
Now, I'm in the position where I was talking to Adam about it, because he's trying to find me a weekend, and then I was like, oh, I'm free this weekend, and he's like, you know, I offered that to Schultz, but let me see, and then I have to be like, You know, you don't want to book Andrew Schultz, man.
He harasses the staff and stuff.
So, like, you know, I just have to lie about my friends.
Yeah, and one of the things that's cool about it, and I think a lot of this is because it's your club, that there's just...
There's just this thing in you where you're like, you can be fearless here.
You know this is like, to borrow a safe space to be a comedian.
Go for it.
And it's almost because it's your club, and you know the crowd knows that, they know that they're coming for comedy here.
And it's just great, because that's one of the things that's, especially in cities across America now, in terms of regular showcase clubs, it's different when you go out and headline, because that's kind of like your crowd coming.
But just random spots and stuff, that's a lot of comics that's kind of in the back of their mind.
Like, oh man, is there going to be someone here who's looking to get offended at something I'm saying?
I remember I had a bit about this on my hour that I put out in 2017 and it was just like right when Donald Trump you know like first came into office but I remember like working out stuff at clubs in New York City and if you started a premise About Donald Trump, you could feel the tension in the room where people are being like, you better not like him.
Like, you better get to the point where you're against him.
And there was an anti-Trump protest and I was watching this guy and this guy this fucking stereotypical liberal progressive white guy was walking down the street and he was He was chanting out, Donald Trump!
KKK! Racist, sexist, anti-gay!
Donald Trump!
And then he saw this black couple walking towards him, and he starts going, Black Lives Matter!
I think it's anxiety, and I think it's panic, and I think no one can understand, even you and I who perform live in front of strangers all the time, we would never be able to understand the kind of pressure I mean, he went out of his way to say that he was going to have a black woman.
Like, it was a thing that he wanted to do.
It was like they had these diversity and inclusivity checkpoints that they had to reach.
Which is also just a really shitty thing to do to her.
It's like a really profoundly selfish thing, if you think about it.
Because if you wanted, say, you wanted to make Kamala Harris your vice president because, you know, you want a woman of color in there or whatever, the thing to do would be to say, I'm going to find the absolute best, most qualified person, and then pick her.
But if you do that, that would be more generous toward her.
Because then it makes it look at least like she was the best person for the job.
Whereas if you say, I'm going to make sure I pick a black woman, now you get all the brownie points for how woke you are.
But now you kind of undermine her as like, well, she's the best black woman I could find.
It's very similar in some ways to affirmative action, right?
And affirmative action, in my opinion, is you're addressing a problem without addressing the root of the problem.
The root of the problem is why are so many people of color disenfranchised?
Why are so many people who grow up in neighborhoods Where there's rampant crime and violence, and why haven't they fixed those fucking neighborhoods?
They're dumping so much money into all these problems overseas, we have systemic problems in America that never get addressed.
And this is like generations it takes to fix these problems.
It's like a long-term strategy.
But I've always said this.
If you want to make America the best, what would be the best way to do that?
Well, you want less losers, right?
So what's the best way to have fewer losers?
To give more people opportunities.
So who are the people that have the least opportunities?
The people who are in the most fucked places.
Those are you can fix that there's ways you could you could dump tons of money and resources into inner cities into these problem areas with law enforcement with with community centers places where people could go where they have like things to do and people can train them and in whether it's athletics or Different jobs and different and show them and mentor them.
That's all That's not like prohibitively impossible.
You're not saying like they all deserve their own nuclear power plant.
You know what I'm saying?
It's like what you're saying is totally doable.
And that's the way to fix all these problems of disparity because People that grow up in wealthy communities where everyone is sort of trying to achieve things, there's a vibe of those places, and so many of those people from those places wind up succeeding.
Yeah, I think it's—a lot of it, I think, also is that there's a very kind of, like, shallow narrative about what it is that keeps people in these areas down, and so it's kind of like, you know, it's just a Well, it's racism or it's systemic racism.
Just these kind of terms that aren't specific.
It's like, wait, what is actually happening here?
And so much of the problem is that, like, the kind of culture and family units have just been destroyed.
Like, they've been decimated.
And then it's like, you can pump money into, like, the public schools there, which we do.
We spend a lot of money on public schools, and they're still crappy schools, and the results are still bad.
And if you're not, like, you know, even back in, and there's a lot of, like, Walter Williams and Thomas Sowell, who are both, like, two black conservative really brilliant thinkers, they both wrote a lot about this, how, like, in the 40s, Even during, there was, you know, segregation in the South and there was like a whole bunch of horrible policies.
But even back then, you know, you could walk around Harlem with no threat of like violence or anything like that and family units were together.
I believe the black legitimacy rate was higher than the white legitimacy rate at the time.
And there were a lot of policies that came in that really destroyed like the family unit.
Yeah, well, getting the political will up to do it is something.
But, I mean, you even see it even with this, you know, we got like 100,000 ODs a year now, and so much of it is driven by the fact that people are getting fentanyl and shit that they don't even know that's not supposed to have fentanyl in it because it's in black markets.
And Joe Biden is absolutely...
I mean, it's hard to hate him so much now because he's so old and senile.
It's hard to even hold him responsible.
But his career, he was probably the worst person on this issue.
Joe Biden, since the 80s, was pushing ramp-ups in the war on drugs.
He challenged Ronald Reagan from the right, partnered up with Strom Thurmond, and was criticizing Reagan for being too soft.
The whole just war on drugs thing is such a strange issue because logically everyone knows that when you legalize things, and certainly when you decriminalize things, you get a giant drop in violent crime, you get a giant drop in addiction.
It's so counterintuitive, but people are so terrified because drugs have been so devastating.
Because I think that if we did legalize all drugs and it happened quickly, you're going to have more overdoses.
You're going to have more deaths.
You're going to have more addicts.
You're just going to because there's going to be more access.
Apparently, because there's so many states where marijuana is still illegal, most of the illegal weed is actually being grown on state land by the cartels.
He wrote a book called Hidden War, and he came on the podcast to discuss it.
He actually was a game warden and wanted to have a job checking fishing licenses and stuff, doing game warden stuff.
And he detailed it in the book how they found this creek that had been diverted and dried up.
And they thought maybe a farmer had done this, or some obstruction, and they traced it to this grow-up that was in the middle of the forest.
And his unit became like a tactical unit, because they were having gunfights with cartel members.
Instead of it being like Game Warden, now it became like a DEA type situation where you're running into these public land grow-ops where these guys, they take this area and they level it and they grow weed there and these guys were camping there.
He said, poor kids are just as bright as white kids.
And you're like, oh my god.
Jesus, the Freudian slips.
Like, ah, it's like you just, but it's just also like, you know, in the same way that if any of us had like, you know, our 85 year old grandpa at the table, every now and then if they say some things, you're going to roll your eyes, you're almost like, yeah, you can't expect him to be with the times on this.
You're like, just stop making Biden talk about this stuff.
He's not with the...
But the fact that he has to not only do that, but has to be with the latest woke insanity?
I didn't think, I thought they were going to replace him as the nominee at the last minute in 2020. I was shocked he did that, and I was sure he'd be a one-term president.
And I'm still now not even convinced he's going to be the nominee in 2024. But the more time goes on, I guess they're actually doing this.
And his speech, his announcement speech last week, he spoke for over an hour.
I mean, it was really fantastic.
I don't agree with everything the guy says, but the major theme of his speech was that there is this unholy alliance of big business and big government, and they're working together to screw over the American people.
What they did, I mean, in the book, I mean, I don't want to paraphrase, I want to make sure I'm accurate about this, but they tested vaccines on foster kids, including babies.
Like, when you read what they did during the pandemic and...
It's spooky fucking shit.
Also, the application of AZT as a treatment.
That AZT was a chemotherapy medication that was killing people quicker than cancer.
It's scary stuff, man.
When he talks about Arthur Ashe and Arthur Ashe taking AZT and dying very quickly afterwards and that Arthur Ashe didn't even have any symptoms before he got on medication.
Well, I think one of the things that a lot of people have woken up to this over the last few years with all of the COVID insanity, and I think a lot of people have woken up to this over, say, the last 20 years of all the disastrous wars in the Middle East, is that it's very...
It's very easy for them to just be like, oh, look, we have consensus amongst the expert class.
You know, like we have consensus amongst the scientists that this is we need lockdowns and then we need these vaccine mandates and we need all of this and all the science.
This is the science.
The scientists agree.
But then once you actually like look into it a little bit, you realize that it's like, no, it's not that there's consensus amongst the scientists.
It's that any scientist that doesn't agree with the consensus gets kicked out.
They all get excommunicated and silenced.
And then, oh, it's this completely corrupt group that is very involved with this money-making machine.
And you're like, oh, there's such perverse incentives here.
And people realize this when, after time, it just gets demonstrated that what they were saying is wrong.
No one can argue anymore that if you get the COVID vaccine, you can't get or transmit COVID. No one's arguing that anymore because you can't keep up that lie anymore.
Well, dude, me and you were talking about this stuff.
It seems like not really that long ago, right?
That we were having some conversations where there'd be these clips of what we were saying, and it would be like, look at this COVID misinformation.
And now you're like, uh-huh.
Let's look back at that.
The World Health Organization is now saying that the vaccine shouldn't be given to kids.
And the thing you said that was so controversial that Fauci had to comment on it was you were like, you know, for young people, I don't know if I'd really tell you to take this vaccine.
Just be really healthy.
Eat really well, exercise, get a lot of sunlight.
That was your dangerous misinformation that you were spreading.
Let's put that up against...
And at the same time, Fauci was saying, if you get the vaccine, you're not going to get COVID. You can't transmit it.
You're like, so who's spreading misinformation there?
The woman, I'm blanking on her name, but she was on the task force, the original task force in 2020. She's the lady who's always there at the podium with Trump and Fauci.
Yes, yes.
She said, in like a kind of diplomatic way, But she was like, now, she goes, I always knew that it wouldn't prevent transmission, and I felt that we overreached when we were making that claim.
And you're like, overreached?
Lady, all of the policies that you put into place were built around that idea.
The whole idea of vaccine mandates and vaccine passports and all of this, this was all predicated on the idea that it wasn't just your choice, right?
It wasn't just like, oh, you're choosing for your own health risk, that you were protecting other people.
That was the whole idea that the whole thing was based on.
If that's not true, then there was no justification for this.
And millions of people lost their jobs over this.
Not to mention just the amount of people who were just disenfranchised in major cities across the country.
You couldn't go to a restaurant or couldn't go to a basketball game or whatever.
Which may seem less important than the ones who lost their job, but it's still fucked up.
It's all fucked up because it was also incentivizing people to go along with something that they might not have wanted to do.
And then when you see the amount of people that got damaged because of that, both financially, physically, vaccine injuries, ostracized from their communities, how many marriages broke up, how many friendships broke up.
I know a lot of people.
That were skeptical about the COVID vaccine and they were shamed by their friends and they lost contact with those people.
I mean, it's really like it's something to look back on it now a few years later and just like how crazy it was that we did this like the lockdowns that you were just like people were at home watching TV to find out from their governor holding a daily press conference telling you what you're allowed to do today.
That was reality.
And if you think about it from like a mental health point of view, what could be worse?
Then to just be like, okay, listen, I want you to stay home.
I don't want you to see your friends.
I don't want you to go out to a game.
I want you to stay home and be terrified of a floating abstraction that can come get you at any point.
And on top of that, you're probably also going to be terrified about your economic security, your financial future, all of this stuff.
It's the worst thing you could do for people.
So yeah, like you said, for people who are on the edge already, that's...
Yeah, and I do think, like, I'm not—my personal view is that I think, like, I think for the people at the very top, like, I really do think there should be criminal charges.
I think we should have Nuremberg-type trials for what people did.
I think it's one of the greatest crimes perpetrated on the American people by the government— Especially if we funded the research that caused it in the first place.
Which we did.
I mean, they can argue, no, we were funding other gain-of-function research at that same lab.
But, come on, man.
We were funding the lab where this virus almost certainly came from.
But just saying, at the top level, I think people should be prosecuted.
Fauci should be prosecuted, at least for lying to Congress, if nothing else.
But then for other people, I'm not saying everyone who supported the lockdown should go to jail or something.
We have to forgive people.
But I do think there should be some process where some type of reconciliation, but I don't think people should forget Like, I don't think people, like the thing you were just saying about Arnold Schwarzenegger and stuff like that and all that.
Don't forget what these guys were willing to jump on board with.
Like, they pushed it pretty far and these guys were completely on board.
Like, is it really that unthinkable to say if they were like, hey, we're going to round up the unvaccinated and put them into camps, take them away from their family, you know?
If people don't know the reference in the NDAA Act, forget which year it was, 2011, I think.
There was this provision that said that under the auspice of the war on terror, that the government can detain an American citizen and hold them indefinitely with no charges if they decide.
That you are in some way connected to some type of group.
And Obama signed it into law, but he put a signing statement on the bill and said, I do not plan on invoking this privilege and we do not plan on detaining anyone.
But you're like, but that's not enough to veto the bill?
Like, yes, this bill does technically repeal the Bill of Rights.
Now, with the son, who was like 14 or 15, they came back and killed him a few weeks after they killed the father.
Now, I believe they claim he was not the target of the drone strike, like that he was just collateral damage.
Still, I would argue, should be illegal.
But also, most people don't buy that because it just seems very obvious that they were trying to take him out.
But the Anwar Alaki guy...
Certainly had been radicalized and I think had sworn allegiance to Al-Qaeda.
But he's still an American citizen.
And the rules are, if you're an American citizen, are you have to be charged with a crime, and then you get a lawyer in a suit, and a judge in a robe, and 12 people who are like pooled randomly, and they decide if you're guilty of a crime.
And by the way, they can, he was in Yemen at the time, but they can charge you and have a trial, and if you don't show up to it, they still, you know what I mean, like convict you of it.
But there's a whole process.
You don't just have the president drop a sky robot on you because he says you're guilty of these crimes.
And, you know, it's funny when people will still talk about Obama, but scandal-free administration, you know?
What was his biggest scandal?
He wore a tan suit or something, and you're like, how about them murdering American citizens without charges?
There was one report that came out about that that I think said somewhere in the neighborhood of like 95% of the people killed in drones were collateral damage, were not the targets of the drones.
People like to think of these things as they call them precision strikes.
They're not surgical strikes.
They're bombs that blow shit up.
You know what I mean?
And yeah, a lot of innocent people die.
And then out of those, it's even higher than that because what they're counting as the target of the strikes just means you were put on a list, which does not always mean that you were actually a terrorist because what happens is a lot of times they're working with these groups on the ground.
They kind of bribe them to rat out who's a terrorist.
But a lot of times those groups are just giving you like their enemy.
You know what I mean?
Like someone they want to get killed, or they're just coming up with names because they want you to keep bribing them.
The whole thing was such a clusterfuck, man.
And some of it is still going on to this day, although now we've decided to flirt with an even much more dangerous nuclear war.
But yeah, and even the drone bombings weren't the worst of what Obama did.
You know, the worst of what he did was overthrowing Muammar Gaddafi in Libya, funding the anti-Assad rebels and starting a civil war in Syria, funding the Saudis and giving them the green light and refueling their fighter jets so they could genocide the people of Yemen for eight freaking years.
So he wasn't as good at the end as he was at the beginning.
But if you go listen to his...
It's nonsense.
It's mostly just like gooey nothingness.
But if you listen to his speech at the 2008 Democratic National Convention, his official acceptance speech, it's just like...
It's a master class on public speaking.
He would just say these things, even when they were, like, meaningless.
But he would, like, I remember...
I'm trying to think if I can remember.
He has this thing where he's like, he's like, I love this country, and so do you, and so does John McCain.
The men and women who have fought and died in our armed forces have been Democrats and Republicans and independents, but they did not die defending a red America or a blue America.
They died defending the United States of America.
It's like...
But the way he would deliver it, it really just tugs at your insides and makes you like, god damn.
And then after a little while, you walk away and you're like, wait, but what did he say?
You're like, oh, there was nothing.
It wasn't like, you know.
He did say some good things when he ran, though.
He ran on some really good policies like ending the wars and closing Guantanamo Bay and repealing the Patriot Act and restoring the rule of law and ending torture and all.
The shame is he did none of it.
And I think that's, like, I go back and forth.
You could pick, like, any president, really, of my lifetime.
You'd be like, who ruined the 21st century for America?
You could certainly make an argument for George W. Bush and Dick Cheney.
But there's something about Obama.
I think I put probably more blame than anyone else on him.
Because he was supposed to be the response.
And like, that's the way this system of government is supposed to work, or so they say.
It's like, well, we have these democratic processes, you know, so you can, you know, if you're upset with these guys, you can kick the bums out and vote for these guys.
And obviously, we all know it's like, then they narrow it down to two teams, and those two teams happen to have the same policy when it comes to, you know, the military-industrial complex or the banking-industrial complex or the pharmaceutical-industrial complex.
They're all on the same side.
So that's how the uniparty works.
Like, no matter who you vote in, they're all supposed to be.
But the country was so furious with George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, who handed him two disastrous failed wars and the worst financial crisis in 100 years.
And they were so furious with them that they voted the most opposite thing they could.
You know, this junior senator, constitutional lawyer, brilliant, articulate, you know, everything that was the opposite of George W. Bush.
And he was supposed to be the answer.
And then he got in and just continued the Bush administration.
It might as well have been the third and fourth term of George W. Bush.
If you really were friends with him, if you could have a couple of drinks, maybe spark up a joint and talk to that guy, if he really trusted you and knew you were never going to tell anybody, I bet he could tell you some shit.
I'm more of like a believer in what Putin has said about this.
When he talks about how he's been through three different presidents and they all have these plans.
And he goes and they get into office and people that are dressed in a suit like mine come and sit them down and tell them how everything works.
If you think about...
How much access to the real understanding of how the government works is ever going to be given to a junior senator who's running for president?
I bet very little.
I bet very little.
I bet there's no speeches.
I bet there's no conversation about it.
I think once you get in, once you're in the Pentagon, Once you're in the Oval Office, once you're meeting with these people and you realize, like, holy shit.
And then you realize this machine behind you that's pushing all the buttons and you're a spokesperson for this machine.
I think this might be why they hated Trump so much because I think that speech just didn't work on him.
There's this story, and I don't know if this is true or not, but it sounds so true.
I think it was in Bob Woodward's book.
I can't remember where it was, but this may not be true, but it just sounds so true that I guess after Trump won the election and he goes to Camp David, I think this is still while he was president-elect.
It might have been right after he got in.
I'm not sure.
But I guess he goes and he's at this CIA-like thing, and they said that he came in, and there's a wall where For agents who died in the line of duty.
And they said Trump just walks in and stands right in front of it, which is crazy disrespectful to do.
And he just starts talking to the room about how tremendous his victory was.
He just gets there and he's like, everyone said we were going to lose, but we won big and we won both.
I don't know if that really happened, but it so sounds like that really happened.
And you can just imagine all these CIA agents just like, we got to get rid of this guy.
But what you said about the stuff, like the speech they get...
I'm not sure if that is, like, what happened with that because I have heard that, like, his brother said he started drinking again or something like that.
So I don't know the details of that story exactly.
If I was working on uncovering CIA corruption, Not just working on undercover and CIA corruption, but you were embedded with these soldiers and they got comfortable with you.
Yeah.
And then you printed all the things that they said.
But what's very interesting about that is that it was a really good...
It was a really important story because it makes you recognize that, like, wow, even these, like, very high-ranking generals are talking shit about the president.
Like, this fucking asshole doesn't know what he's doing.
But so McChrystal, before that interview, he went...
To the media, because Obama, I guess, gave him the surge he wanted, but he put an end date on it.
He was like, but our troops will be out by this date.
And that pissed him off.
And so he went to the media and told them that, you know, he said, I haven't had any contact with the president and we haven't been talking since this and that.
And then the media was like, put all this pressure on Obama.
Like, you're not even talking to your guy over there in Afghanistan?
And basically kind of tied his hands politically.
So that he kind of just had to continue the war.
And there's a lot of stuff like that that happens.
And with Trump, I mean, it was reported that they lied to him about the number of troops in Syria.
And when he said he wanted to pull the troops out, they lied to him and said there were far less than there actually were.
But, like, so many of the Trump haters will talk about, like, you know, undermining our democracy and he incited an insurrection against, like, this democratic republic or whatever.
But then you'll see things like, look, this just came out within the last week and a half or so, that we now know that it was...
It was Blinkett, the current Secretary of State, before he came in, who requested that the CIA put together this letter that said there were 50 intelligence experts who had determined that the Hunter Biden laptop had all the earmarks of Russian disinformation, you know, just to help Joe Biden win.
Now, forget even the fact that the intelligence agencies are interfering in an election.
They're doing it to undermine who was the current president of the United States of America.
It's like when people say that people are losing trust in these institutions, it's like, well, yes, but it's because they've found out what the institutions are doing.
It's like if your wife found out that you're cheating all over her and you're like, well, this is a problem because she's losing trust in me.
It's like, well, yeah, but she shouldn't trust you because she found out what you're doing.
Because when you have any kind of a position like that where you have just insane power over information and policy and what gets done and no one No one is managing it from outside of it that's saying, hey, what are you doing?
No, that's the Constitution.
You can't do that.
Don't do that.
There's no, like, oversight where there's someone who is completely objective is...
Loyal only to the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and lays out, like, the rules.
These are the fucking rules for America.
Like, you can't operate outside of these rules just because you want your guy to win.
That's un-American.
That's as un-American as anything else that you could be prosecuted for that we get.
Think about what Assange did, what they're trying to get after.
What's more un-American?
Lying to the American people or exposing the American people to information that has been hidden from them, that's deeply disturbing, that would change their opinion on things.
We're a wild, fucking amazing experiment in self-government.
But we gotta stick to the fucking rules.
And if you get people in power and no one is able to stop them from not sticking to the rules, and then when they do violate the law, there's no consequences.
We forgot what it is to be American.
It's not good for them, it's not good for us, it's not good for any of us.
You know, it's kind of like what you were talking about with the CIA getting so much power that it just becomes so corrupted.
And I think a lot of the story of America and how we've just become so degraded is really kind of goes back to the collapse of the Soviet Union and the fact that what Charles Krauttenhammer called the unipolar moment.
That in the 90s it was like, oh, for the first time ever...
That's it.
America is the lone superpower.
And this really is like what all of those guys said, like all the neoconservatives, like the Project for a New American Century and those guys.
They were like, this is our moment.
We can do whatever we want.
We are the sole power in the world.
And what they wanted to do was a lot of really awful things.
But...
It almost created so much power and so much hubris that they just think they can get away with everything.
Like, there's no limit on what they can do.
And it turns out that actually you're not gods.
You're just people.
And all of this carefully, perfect, like, okay, well, this is what we'll do, and then this is what's going to happen.
You know, we'll overthrow Saddam Hussein, and then democracy will sweep the region.
And it's like, no, it's actually not going to work out that way.
And to me, that's the whole story of the war in Ukraine right now, too.
It was all like, we've got this perfect plan that we'll just keep expanding NATO and we'll just keep interfering.
We'll have these color-coded revolutions.
We'll take over more and more and we will be the dominant force.
And it's like, yeah, well, there's consequences to that.
It doesn't just work as perfectly as you planned it out.
You know, Donald Trump can say that, and I would say, I think his rhetoric has been much better on this than Joe Biden's, and at least he's talking about negotiating.
Does the president have that kind of power, where the president could go in and say, I want to meet with Putin, I want to organize a negotiation, I want to end this right now?
Yeah, I think I think that's that's what he was saying.
And it does seem like there's a lot of truth to that.
I also one of the things that makes me skeptical about how great Trump would be on this, that Trump wasn't very good on this issue while he was in.
I mean, Trump was the one who sent the weapons into Ukraine.
This is, you know, when he got impeached, it was famously over the Ukraine gate thing was he said he was they said it was a quid pro quo where he was holding up the weapons, putting pressure on Zelensky to investigate the Bidens.
But the part of that story that doesn't get talked about that much is that then he caved and he gave them the weapons.
And this was a major this was a major reason, I think, why this war ended up happening.
And what they said at the time was that they were sending in the weapons to to deter the Russians.
And so either they're really bad at deterrence, or it actually was a provocation, because it certainly didn't deter Vladimir Putin from going in.
And I think that, and Trump also got us out of the INF Treaty.
He also, like, he was not good.
In fact, I think he was trying to prove how much he wasn't a Russian agent.
You know what I mean?
That he was kind of like being more hawkish toward Russia.
It certainly couldn't be any worse than what the plan is right now.
And, you know, to your point that you made, because I know last time I was on the show, I talked a lot about this, like, kind of the cause of this war in Ukraine.
And I put a lot of blame on American foreign policy, and it went super viral.
And I heard back from some people who disagreed.
But the funny thing about it is that it's not...
Like, when I was talking about, like, NATO expansion and how much of a provocation this was to the Russians, when you were talking about, like, the good people in government, it's not like it's just...
Kooks or, you know, crazy libertarians like me.
It was not just like Ron Paul and Noam Chomsky and Pat Buchanan, like the outsiders who were all against NATO expansion.
But the list of people within the government, within the national security apparatus who completely opposed NATO expansion is really impressive and long.
There's a lot of, like, really wise people within the government who were completely against NATO expansion in the 90s when it first started.
At least three Secretaries of Defense, Robert McNamara, Robert Gates, George W. Bush and Barack Obama's Secretary of Defense, William Perry, who was Bill Clinton's Secretary of Defense and the Secretary of Defense at the time.
They all opposed it in like the strongest possible language and all explicitly for the reason that this will provoke a conflict with Russia.
George Kennan, who was the founder of the containment strategy, the old school cold warrior.
There's this great interview he gave with Thomas Friedman from The New York Times.
You can find it online.
And it's in the 90s when they're doing the first round of NATO expansion.
And he is, like, furious.
Like, his anger comes through the page when you're reading it.
Because he's like, what are you guys doing?
We won the Cold War.
We won.
And now you're picking a fight with Russia.
And this isn't Vladimir Putin's Russia.
This is Boris Yeltsin, you know?
And he's like, these aren't the Soviets.
These aren't the communists.
These are the heroes who overthrew them.
Why are we picking a fight with them?
And he was a cold warrior.
He was like, you're throwing away my life's work.
And he said...
And this was a really crazy prediction, really ominous.
He said, the people who are advocating expanding NATO are going to continue advocating expanding it and expanding it and expanding it.
And then there will be a Russian reaction.
And then when there's the Russian reaction, they're going to say, see, that's proof that we have to keep expanding it.
And damn, if he wasn't right.
If he wasn't right about that.
Oh, but one more little detail on this, because this is really interesting.
So, in 2008, in February of 2008, there was a private cable that the current CIA head, Burns, Bill Burns, who's currently the head of the CIA. At the time, he was the ambassador to Russia.
And so he sent a private message to Condoleezza Rice, who was the Secretary of State at the time.
The only reason we know about this is because of the heroic Julian Assange.
Dumped this.
So this was not for the public.
This is like what they were saying to each other.
And this memo was titled, Nyet means nyet.
And it was about Ukrainian entry into NATO, because this had been floated out for a while.
Yeah, there you go.
Basically, the whole piece is the current CIA director telling Condoleezza Rice that this...
He says, Ukraine and Georgia's NATO aspirations not only touch a raw nerve in Russia, they engender serious concerns about the consequences for stability in the region.
Not only does Russia perceive encirclement and efforts to undermine Russia's influence in the region, but it also fears unpredictable and uncontrolled consequences, which would seriously affect Russian security interests.
Experts tell us that Russia is particularly worried that the strong divisions in Ukraine over NATO membership, with much of the ethnic Russian community against membership, could lead to a major split involving violence or, at worst, civil war.
In that eventuality, Russia would have to decide whether to intervene, a decision Russia does not want to have to face.
Now, there's another memo that comes out later that year where he says, and it's a really interesting thing, where he goes, he said, Ukrainian entry into NATO is the brightest of all red lines.
And Burns says to Condoleezza Rice, again, not to the American public, just to let the Secretary of State know, like, this is what I'm saying.
He goes, I've spoken to everyone over here.
He goes, from the craziest right-wingers to Putin's sharpest liberal critics.
And it is unanimous to a man.
They all agree that Ukrainian entry into NATO is the brightest of red lines.
That this is a direct threat to Russia.
You cannot do this.
In the same way Jack Kennedy was saying, you cannot put missiles in Cuba.
You cannot bring Ukraine into your military alliance.
That was Putin's position.
Then this is what they were telling him.
And three months after that memo that we were just reading, so this was in February, they had the Bucharest Summit where NATO announced that Georgia and Ukraine were coming into NATO. And this is what...
It's like our ambassador to Russia told our Secretary of State, do not do this.
And then they went...
We're just announcing that we're going to do it.
And three months after that was the war in Georgia.
Because they announced Georgia and Ukraine were coming in.
And then Georgia got ballsy because they felt like they had the backing of the West.
And they attacked a breakaway province, South Ossetia.
And they had Russian peacekeepers there.
And Vladimir Putin responded.
That was like the first, like, real response.
And he went to war with Georgia over that.
And then, you know, like the stuff we talked about last time is when in 2014...
When there was the coup, backed by the West, in Ukraine.
You know, what I like about these segments, too, is people can argue like this, because I know there are people arguing with me.
The last time I was here, if you remember, we played the video of Gideon Rose just bragging about this.
And he was like, dude, it's not me.
That's the CIA director's words.
That's the editor of Foreign Affairs magazine saying this.
This is what people in the government were saying.
And...
One more note that I'll say is that Bill Clinton's Secretary of Defense, he wrote about this in 2015. So this is after the coup in Ukraine, the Maidan Revolution, and after Putin took Crimea.
And he basically said that, like, this is all my fault.
And that his biggest regret was that he didn't resign over NATO expansion.
I think he said his biggest regret was that he didn't do everything he could to stop it and that he didn't ultimately resign over it because this was destined to be the future.
People will say, I know people will argue with me on this and they'll say, but NATO is just a defensive alliance, so why should Vladimir Putin care if we expand this defensive alliance?
And it's like, yeah, it's a defensive alliance except for all the times it's not.
You know, except for all the times it fights aggressive wars like in Serbia or Libya or Afghanistan.
Other than that, I guess, they claim it's a defensive alliance.
But from Vladimir Putin's perspective, this isn't a defensive voluntary alliance.
This is the European wing of the American empire, the most war-hungry country in the world.
Who's started seven wars in the last 20 years and slaughtered millions of people.
Like, from his perspective, when you put dual-use rocket launchers in Poland, that's not like...
We're just trying the official reason is we're just trying to make sure that Iran can't nuke Europe with the nukes that they don't have.
But from Putin's perspective, he's like, no, you're trying to cut down on the time it would take for a nuclear weapon to hit Moscow.
And so, like, again, it's not that Putin's a good guy because he's not.
It's not that he's justified in invading Ukraine.
He's not.
And all the stories of like horrible shit that you've heard that he's done there.
He's probably done a lot of them.
But man, it's just that all these guys, these same dumb neocons who had this policy to remake the Middle East.
They're the same ones who also had the policy to expand NATO all the way to Russia's border.
And man, was this just the dumbest, most reckless policy ever that's now put us in a position where we are closer to a risk of World War III and nuclear war than we've ever been in my life.
And for what?
For what?
To make sure that the Donbass region is ruled by Kiev rather than Moscow?
You know what I didn't consider until this all broke out?
When I started looking at the borders of Russia, you know, when people are explaining why this is so important and why control of Crimea and why control of all these places is so important, once you look at what used to be the Soviet Union, you realize, like, oh, there's all these countries that are connected to them.
People can just invade anywhere.
The United States has a very unique position in the world.
The North America's position in the world, just where we are, separated by oceans.
Yeah, but I think Russia's put a lot into that stuff also.
So I don't know.
You know, I don't know.
I mean, Putin claims like he's developed like all of these crazy, you know what I mean, things over the last few years.
That that's really what...
That basically he said that once NATO kept expanding so much that they left him no choice but to develop faster and crazier missiles and different technologies.
And it's just like, you know, it's weird because I've heard a lot of people...
I've heard people on this show and on lots of other shows say that the big concern they have is Vladimir Putin winning the war, taking all of Ukraine, or just keeping the parts that he wants or something like that, and that then he might be like, oh, hey, I can get away with it.
I'll take Poland or whatever.
That to me seems very far-fetched, like he's having enough trouble just taking Ukraine.
I really doubt he's moving on Poland next, but it's like, okay, I understand kind of in theory where that concern is, but what about the concern if he loses?
What if he's humiliated on his own border and Russia is completely destroyed and humiliated?
What if he's attacked within Russia?
What if he's convinced that he's done and he's going to be overthrown or he's going to die?
To me, that's actually the most dangerous scenario because really nobody's probably going to launch the first nuclear strike unless they're already convinced they're dead anyway.
You know what I mean?
And then it's like, all right, you're going to take me out, I'm bringing you with me, type deal.
And to me, that's the biggest concern.
What you want to find here is like an off-ramp where everyone can save face a little bit.
You know what I mean?
Like, everyone can go home and tell their own people, like, we did the job, you know?
Like a justification somehow.
And it really, it's got to involve, like, negotiating some type of compromise.
Well, that's why it's so crazy because you'll hear people like Lindsey Graham and idiots like that will talk about if Putin's overthrown, almost like it's a given that things are better than.
Even if it didn't go to a failed state like Libya, how do you know it's not just a far worse right-wing dictator who comes up and takes over?
You know what I mean?
If there's one thing we've learned from the 20th and 21st centuries, it's like sometimes you can overthrow a government and it can be much worse than the one that you overthrow.
You know, governments were overthrown after World War I in Russia and Germany.
But isn't it amazing that that's taken place so many times and yet we still have this idea that overthrowing them or getting rid of our enemy is that's the solution to the problem.
It fueled a lot of, if you, the 9-11 conspiracy guys, like even some of the kooky guys, it fueled a lot of them because it was basically this, it was a think tank It's founding signatories were like the Bush administration.
It was all the neocons in the 90s who were out.
So it was Robert Kagan and, you know, like Bill Kristol and Dick Cheney and, you know, like all the Paul Wolfowitz, all the kind of like neocons who ended up taking power in George W. Bush's administration.
And they laid out their plans for what they wanted to do.
And one of their plans involved overthrowing Saddam Hussein in Iraq and And fighting multiple wars and NATO expansion in Europe.
And so the 9-11 conspiracy theorists would jump on this and go, aha, this is why they brought the towers down, just so they could get the war in Iraq that they always wanted.
Whereas I think the simpler explanation was just like, they took advantage of the opportunity when it came and realized they could get what they wanted.
But regardless, there's no debate.
They're on record.
They wanted it back in the 90s.
And So basically what it's about, it's what the title is.
It's a project for a new American century.
And they're like, hey, we're in the 90s here.
The Soviet Union has fallen.
The 20th century was the century of America.
And now what's our plan for the next century?
What's the plan for the new American century?
And they actually say in one of the most famous policy papers, it's really something to say, is they go, look, We have no real threat to our vital interests right now.
There are no real threats to America, our dominance right now.
And so what we need to do is fight wars in multiple theaters.
So we need to go and now show our dominance to the rest of the world.
And so they're actually saying, if you read between the lines, not that much.
They're like, we don't need to fight a war, but let's go fight them.
Let's go fight him anyway.
And this is what happens.
They won.
Like all the wise people in government who were opposed to them lost.
And all the dumb George W. Bushes and Joe Bidens won.
And it's also, it's all out there, and you're not hearing it.
You know, and this is, the fact that journalists aren't, like, putting this in everyone's face, that this very information that you're giving out today...
So I said, well, did they find some information connecting Saddam to Al-Qaeda?
He said, no, no.
He says, there's nothing new that way.
They've just made the decision to go to war with Iraq.
He said, I guess it's like we don't know what to do about terrorists, but We've got a good military and we can take down governments.
And he said, I guess if the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem has to look like a nail.
So I came back to see him a few weeks later, and by that time we were bombing in Afghanistan.
I said, are we still going to war with Iraq?
And he said, oh, it's worse than that.
He said, he reached over on his desk, he picked up a piece of paper, and he said, I just got this down from upstairs, meeting the Secretary of Defense office today, and he said, this is a memo that describes how we're going to take out seven countries in five years, starting with Iraq, and then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and finishing off Iran.
As we fought all of these wars, no one went, but this is exactly what I heard Mr. Four Star General tell me was your plan.
And you've never come to the American people and said this is my plan.
You're just like...
And what's really interesting about it, right, is it just reveals the way propaganda works because...
If you think about it, we start fighting the war in Afghanistan.
We're in the war in Afghanistan by late 2001. It's not until 2003 we're in Iraq, right?
And then it's not until 2010 that we're in Libya.
2012, we're in Syria, you know?
And then in Yemen, then in all the...
And it's like...
Each time, they had their own little propaganda story for why we had to go into this war now.
And you're like, no, motherfucker, this was always planned.
You decided in 2001 you were doing this.
So don't tell me this is because Gaddafi is about to go genocidal, or because Saddam has weapons of mass destruction, or because Bashar al-Assad is killing his own people.
It's like, no, no, no, no.
This is just your latest little excuse now for the war that you already wanted to do.
And that's how this shit really works, man.
It's like they decide they want to fight these wars.
Then they make up a bullshit excuse that they tell the American people.
Then these weapon companies rake in hundreds of billions of dollars in profits and babies get slaughtered.
That's what really happens.
Like, innocent men, women, and children die, get exploded to death, starve to death, get displaced.
By the way, that's the essence of my point with the whole thing in Ukraine, too, is that it's like, I'm not...
Because people go like, oh, you're spreading Russian propaganda.
Like, my loyalty is to Vladimir Putin or something like that.
Ridiculous.
But it's like, no.
Can you at least, even if you support the war in Ukraine, let's say you're like, we have to continue this proxy war of choice in Ukraine.
We have to fund Ukraine all the way to the end.
Fine.
Can you at least acknowledge that our politicians are the biggest hypocrites in the fucking world when they say things like, Vladimir Putin's a war criminal?
Vladimir Putin invaded a sovereign nation.
Come on, man.
Did you ever see, by the way, and again, it's pretty entertaining to me, but Vladimir Putin, he gave two speeches, I think, when he first invaded in 2022, but he did one where he ran down the list of presidents.
He did one where he was, like, he needled Bill Clinton for his war in Serbia.
And he was like, he goes, well, there's an ethnic minority being oppressed, so we have to go to war, right, Bill Clinton?
And then he goes, we gotta check out about weapons of mass destruction, right, George W. Bush?
And then, like, kind of, like, went down the list.
And the point he's essentially making, and he's kind of right about it, and he's like, you have no leg to stand on to tell me that I can't do this.
I can't violate international law.
You guys sure can, so why the hell can't I? And that doesn't mean he's justified in doing it.
It means like really none of them are justified.
But the level of hypocrisy that America thinks we're in any position to lecture anyone about war.
But isn't it fascinating that as long as the people are in a place that we don't have a lot of familiarity with, and as long as the people speak a language that we don't understand and we can't read, It seems like less is going on in some strange way.
Like if the United States did what it did to any of these other countries, it did to England.
Well, and the crazy thing is that, you know, there's a major...
push from the Biden administration.
Glenn Greenwald just did a video on this the other day.
It's really fantastic.
But this has been a major push from the Biden administration since he first, but even before he took office, just after the election in 2020, that this is their new thing is like a domestic war on terrorism, that the big threat that they're worried about is domestic terrorism, which is a very loose definition.
And it's very creepy that the same people who pushed for these wars in the Middle East are now the ones saying, oh yeah, and we need to, and they're calling it the same thing.
They're saying, we need to bring what we had over there right here.
They're calling you domestic terrorists.
It's the Department of Homeland Security that was created in the name of the War on Terrorism.
This is now going to focus on, you know, this problem we have here at home, which is like...
Again, it's just like the fact, like what you were saying, like, okay, if they did this to England or if they did this to Chicago or whatever, it would be so much more blatant to us, you know, but it's like, oh, they do it to Iraq or they do it to Somalia.
That just doesn't seem quite as real.
But you're like, but those people who were okay doing that there...
Don't be so comfortable that they won't do that to you, too.
It's like if there was someone who had attacked kids, and then you were like, yeah, but they did that over in a different neighborhood.
I'm letting them babysit my kids today.
I mean, you know, I know it was a different neighborhood where they spoke a different language, but that person's comfortable killing kids.
Like, I don't think you want them anywhere around your kids.
And like, that's kind of what we've got with these people in our government.
Like, they're comfortable making decisions where innocent people die and die by the millions.
Like, if you add up the death toll of all the wars, it's in the millions.
It's really interesting what the public perception of Tucker Carlson is, or particularly how polarizing he is to people, that it's almost like you're there describing a different person than he actually is.
I think he was the most interesting person in cable news, the most thoughtful, most intelligent.
He was really...
I don't agree with him on anything.
On my...
On my podcast, we used to do a segment.
I had just done it so many times that we started joking about it being a segment that we called Contra Carlson.
Because I was just disagreeing with him.
He had all these economic ideas that I completely disagree with.
And I disagree with a lot of stuff he said.
But he was like...
Such, like, the lone voice in, like, really the corporate press, who was completely opposed to the military-industrial complex, completely opposed to big pharma and all of the COVID insanity, was really good on, like, speaking up about a lot of really important issues.
Issues that you would think, like, a good leftist Would at least appreciate that he's good on that issue, you know?
And some of them did.
He's the guy who's having Glenn Greenwald on his show.
You know what I mean?
He's the guy who's having Aaron Matei and Jimmy Dore.
He would be completely against the Republican Party, was viciously critical of the Republican Party, hates the Republican establishment.
I've seen so many people be like, he bought into Trump's claims that the election was stolen, and I'm like, I don't know, dude, do you watch him?
Because I watch his show, and that's actually not true.
He took a lot of heat from this from right-wingers that immediately following the election of 2020, He really aggressively called out Trump's lawyers, Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell, I think was the other one, because they were making claims about the Dominion voting machines, that they flipped millions of votes.
And Tucker Carlson went on his show and he goes, okay, if this is true, it's the biggest story in the history of the United States of America.
So what evidence do you have?
And he's like, we have reached out privately to Trump's lawyers.
We've gotten nothing in return.
So to be clear, they're making this claim and providing nothing to back it up.
He really was like, no, no.
Now, what he has said later is they'll be like, they'll pull quotes and be like, yeah, but he referred to 2020 as a scam.
Or something like that.
And it's like, yeah, but you don't watch his show.
So you don't get that, like, what he was saying was, yeah, the Dominion vote flipping thing is bullshit.
No one's ever provided any evidence of that.
But the fact that big tech and the intelligence agencies work together to undermine the Hunter Biden story to get Joe Biden across the finish line is bullshit.
Like, you know what I mean?
That's a scam.
And that's a completely reasonable position to take.
Again, it's just, you know, like, look at this, dude.
Don Lemon is out at CNN, right?
I promise you, whoever replaces Don Lemon has the same exact views as Don Lemon and the same exact views of everybody else at CNN. And that's not true for Tucker Carlson.
Like, at least there was a guy out there who, like, would disagree with the rest of the people in his network, disagree with both political parties.
I mean, if I was a person in a position of power and a wild card like Tucker Carlson got released from Fox News and maybe Rumble makes a deal with him or something like that, do you have any fucking idea how big that would be?
It could make that app, it could make that platform.
I mean, if Tucker Carlson goes over there, it would be worth it for them to invest a considerable amount of money.
But if I was Fox News, that's the last thing I would want.
So I would make sure that we have him locked up to For the entire term of some contract, some no-compete, and pay him off.
You'd be better off just giving him the same amount of money he made when he was on the air.
Yes, I was surprised, although in hindsight, one of those things where I was surprised right away, and then two days later, I'm like, how was he ever even there?
But what's crazy to me is that so many progressives have...
It's like Invasion of the Body Snatchers or something.
It's like, is this the real you, man?
Have you just been replaced with an NPC? The 8 p.m.
hour at Fox News is saying the CIA killed Kennedy.
That's not interesting to you?
I'm not saying you have to agree with him on everything, but that's different than Bill O'Reilly.
This is a different world we're living in now.
This is something.
Yeah, it just seems like kind of surreal now looking back at it almost, but Bill O'Reilly did leave and he went and started a podcast or something, I think.
Is it when people get together in these echo chambers and they reinforce each other's ideas to the point where anybody that opposes that is just the enemy?
Is it just some tribal thing that just automatically happens when people are allowed to gather in large groups like they do on social media?
I think that certainly plays a role, a major role.
I think that there's also like, I think the thing kind of came unglued, like the establishment kind of came unglued.
I think the George W. Bush administration, the wars and the financial crisis, Really set into motion like a bad, dangerous thing.
Where it almost like...
I think there was like an effort to distract away from...
Like I think there were powerful people who wanted to distract away from how much the powerful people had fucked over the country.
And then there was kind of like this effort to pit people against each other.
And then I think it was very easy for people to fall into that and just get very, very tribal and very, very isolated.
I also think there was like this knee jerk reaction from journalists to not confront their own obvious failure.
Like, in that they hadn't really been reporting on the things that actually, you know what I mean?
Like, imagine there was this, like, ticking time bomb, like the subprime mortgage, you know, crisis, and you were just oblivious to it.
And you've been reporting on all these stories, and you weren't reporting on the time bomb that was about to blow up on the working class in America.
So now what do you report on?
Racism!
The problem is that this other guy is lying to you.
And when Trump got elected, which I think very much was a reaction to a lot of that stuff, I think that then it was like that's when it really all fell apart because the media, it was so obvious that this guy who you were telling everyone, Well, this guy can't possibly win and no one cares about what he has to say.
And then tens of millions of people did care about what he had to say and voted for him.
It was like their failure was that much more exposed.
And so they just had to snap into like other explanations for what happened here.
No, it's not that we failed on the job for 30 years.
It's that Russia and racism and misinformation and like all of this stuff.
But I do think in a lot of ways it was a concerted effort.
You ever see that cartoon?
It's like a banker in his corner office and outside his window is all the Occupy Wall Street people protesting and he's on the phone and he says, introduce them to identity politics.
You know?
Like, I don't know if it went down exactly that way, but I think that cartoon's getting at something.
I think a lot of the private interests that own our government are pretty competent, actually.
You know, I think the government works in very sloppy ways, but if you look at it from the perspective of, say, like, you know, Lockheed Martin and Pfizer and companies making, you know, Hundreds of billions of dollars in profits.
They're actually working very well.
The system's working very well toward that end.
And I just don't think it was completely organic that after we had these disastrous wars and a financial crisis and after you had the Tea Party and the Occupy Wall Street movement that all of a sudden on some grassroots level we were like, we need to have a national conversation about chicks with dicks.
I don't think that just happened.
You know what I mean?
I don't think that's like, every day that's what we've got to talk about now.
Yuri Bezmenov gave a speech describing exactly America in 2023, describing how Russia had eroded, the Soviet Union had eroded all of our institutions and gotten in there and implanted ideas of Marxism and reinforced these ideas and that this was...
It's undoubtedly going to lead to the demise of America.
And there's definitely a lot of things that kind of happened exactly like he said they would happen.
And it's kind of evolved.
It's not really...
Traditional Marxism is kind of dead.
No one's really advocating for...
Government ownership of the means of production.
It's more now it's just kind of like it's really like corporate control of government with this weird like what they call cultural Marxism which I don't like the term because it means different things to so many different people but the idea that like Marx had this economic view that everything all of human history was a class struggle between like the oppressor class and the oppressed class And if you applied that to cultural issues,
it describes wokeism to a T. That everything can be reduced to white, black, straight, gay, cis, trans, men, women.
It's like everything is the oppressor class versus the oppressed, which is such a shallow, stupid way of analyzing anything.
There's so much more.
To reality than that simplistic way of looking at things.
But it's so attractive to people, which is really fascinating.
And that was what Yuri had described in the speech and how it would become, how it would captivate people.
Here's an interesting thing about something like that.
Even though we're saying everything he described seems to be happening right now.
He describes wokeism to a T. He described what's happening in this country to a T. I still have an impulse, an undeniable impulse to reject it.
Like, no, they didn't do that.
No, they're not that smart.
No, that's not what happened.
There's a part of me, for whatever weird reason, and I think everybody has this part of that, that doesn't want to believe that something's happening while it's happening.
There's a thing that's going on right now because we're so accustomed to being able to do what we do.
We're so accustomed to be able to drive to work and do this and hang out with your family and go out with your friends.
We're so accustomed to this.
We don't imagine a world despite all of the evidence of history.
You could go see the Colosseum in Rome.
You could go see the Acropolis in the Parthenon.
You can go see all of these great empires that no longer exist.
There's just stone structures where these people used to rule the fucking world.
But in our mind, that was then.
And right now, everything's amazing.
And we're perfect.
And if we could just get a trans president, we could fucking solve this.
We believe in the moment.
We can't look at the vast amount of data that shows us the same patterns of behavior that humans are exhibiting right now.
Have led to disastrous consequences in the collapse of civilization.
There's, like, all of this stuff right around you, but if you try to zoom out, and you try your best to be disinterested and just analyze, and you go, okay, so where are we right now at the United States of America?
So we are a republic that turned into an empire, got expanded all over the world, something I think 700-something bases in 135 different countries, trying to rule the entire world.
Through the process of doing that, we've spent ourselves $30 trillion into debt, and now we see massive cultural decay into just like decadence.
I'm just at the age, my daughter is four, my son is one, and I'm just at the age now where I'm starting to hear some of the words that I say coming back out, and you're like, ah.
It's so funny because you have like this life, right, where you're like, so you're like with your wife when you're just a couple before you have kids and you're just a couple.
You know, you say whatever you want.
And then even when you have little babies, it's like it's just not even a thing.
And I'm like, babe, I'm going to be honest with you.
Very low percentage chance that that works out well.
And the other one is what you said, where you're just like, okay, let them understand it's just a word, but also let them know, okay, look, there's time and places where you can't use these words.
And you know what's so crazy about that first war in Iraq?
Is that, because I remember I was a little kid, a very little kid.
I was born in 83, so I was, you know, eight.
When we first fought that war, but I remember being aware of it.
I remember seeing the speech when George H.W. Bush announced we were going.
And they, the whole, like, all those same neocons who later went to Project for a New American Century, they were all in the George H.W. Bush administration, and then they went into his son's administration.
And they all said...
That they had conquered Vietnam syndrome, as they called it.
You see, from their perspective, the country had this terrible Vietnam syndrome after Vietnam, meaning that people didn't really want to fight wars.
They had this attitude that, like, we shouldn't fight wars because they can be really bad.
But see, now, George H.W. Bush, this hero, he conquered that because they showed how easy the war was.
Look, we fought a war now.
It's so easy because America is so powerful.
We just stormed right in there.
Minimal loss of life on our side.
Very few casualties on the American side.
Toppled it right in there.
You know, let Saddam Hussein stay in power.
But easy peasy, that war is over.
And Joe, 30 years later, we still have a military presence in Iraq.
That's how easy that war was, is that all of these years later, and the war continued through Clinton, not technically a war, but a full blockade of the country, bombing campaigns, massive sanctions, tons of people dying.
I don't know exactly how much.
The UN had a study...
Which I think is bullshit.
But they said 500,000 children had died from starvation and malnutrition during the sanction campaign in the 90s.
I don't exactly remember, but I saw someone make an argument for why their estimations were wrong and the study wasn't right.
Anyway, he was arguing, and it seemed pretty compelling.
It seems like, oh, that actually sounds right, that they were counting the wrong way, kind of.
So it probably wasn't 500,000, but maybe it was 100,000, whatever.
It was like children just starving due to this blockade.
And it was also one of the main things that really pissed off Osama bin Laden, radicalized him against America.
It was one of his stated grievances in his declaration of war on America because we kept the bases in Saudi Arabia to enforce the blockade around Iraq.
And he was like, okay, so you have your bases in our holy land to starve other Muslims to death?
And that pissed off a lot of people over there.
But yeah, that war, man...
That war, which they sold it as like, look what an easy victory it was, in many ways really locked us into a war for decades.
It's hard to even believe or wrap your head around.
It's hard to even think that in a society where we have the technology that me and you are sitting in this room and we're also speaking to millions of people and we'll...
You know, go to a shop and buy something and get lunch and then we'll go do comedy tonight and someone will be like, oh, great, thank you very much.
It's like a civilized society that we still just have mass murder sprees where we just agree like we haven't figured out a different way to settle these disputes.
It's hard to actually believe.
It's hard.
Certainly for me, I don't think anyone's completely capable who hasn't seen it, and certainly that applies to me, of really understanding what that is.
But it's bad, and it's just like, I don't know.
I can't believe more people aren't just...
Fiona Hill, I think I talked about this last time I was on, but Fiona Hill, again, this is in Foreign Affairs magazine, not like...
Not like Ron Paul Weekly.
You know what I mean?
Like, I think Ron Paul's the greatest hero ever, but I'm saying this isn't like what the kooky libertarians say, like me.
This is like Fiona Hill in Foreign Affairs magazine.
She was the one who reported that they had a peace deal worked out.
Basically, you know, in pencil, not in pen.
But like, in principle, they had a peace deal worked out.
And that Boris Johnson, as a representative of the West, went over there and convinced Zelensky not to negotiate.
Not to negotiate.
Don't you give them one inch.
It's like they want, and this is what it seems like for real.
It seems like they want this war.
They want to prolong it to bleed the Russians dry.
That's their plan.
And you're like, Jesus, man.
But why wouldn't they be that evil?
I mean, why wouldn't they be that evil when they're that evil everywhere else?
When you're going about your day just hanging out in New York and fucking visiting your favorite coffee shop, it's hard to believe that you're a part of that.
I guess it's like after a while, one of the things that helps me understand this is you look at people and their track record.
We have a very short...
Attention span, you know, as a country.
But it's like, when you look at, so one of the absolute best people on the war in Russia and Ukraine, people really want to learn about this stuff, is John Mearsheimer, who is the dean of the realist school of foreign policy.
He's like a world-renowned scholar.
This guy is not, again, not a non-interventionist libertarian like me, just like a scholar who's like, talks about foreign policy and stuff.
And he's written and spoken extensively about Ukraine-Russia.
And he was one of the big opponents of this whole policy.
And meanwhile, so after the government was overthrown, the one that Gideon Rose was so happy about when we stole Ukraine away, we stole Robin from Batman, Victoria Nuland and Gideon Rose and all of those people who were pushing for this policy, they all said, this is wonderful.
Ukraine is choosing to join the liberal world order, and they're choosing democracy and hope, and everything's going to be wonderful for them.
Their country's going to flourish.
And John Mearsheimer said, and his quote was, it was in a lecture he gave in 2015, he said, America is leading Ukraine down the primrose path.
And which I didn't understand what that means exactly, but it sounds real good.
But what it means basically is like, we're leading you down this beautiful path that ends in your demise.
And then basically, we were encouraging them to play tough with the Russians.
And it's like, don't worry, you got America's got your back.
You know, it's like you, it's like you convincing some dude who doesn't know how to fight, like, go fight this guy.
Because, like, I got your back.
And they're like, oh, okay, well, Joe Rogan's a black belt.
He's got my back.
I'll go fucking fight this guy.
And then when you fight the guy, you're like, well, I'm not going to, like, jump in the fight with you.
But, like, I'll yell instructions to you while you're in the fight.
You're like, throw him in an arm bar.
And they're like, what's an arm bar?
You know, I'm like, just kidding.
So we, like, led them down this path.
And so, like, okay, maybe you don't agree, but, like, whose prediction was better?
John Mearsheimer's?
Or, you know...
Gideon Rose.
Who predicted what was happening here better?
The guy who said this was going to be disaster for Ukraine, or the guy who said, yay, we're stealing Robin away.
Ha ha, we distracted you, Putin, with the Olympics.
Like, oh, that distraction didn't work very well.
Um...
And so it's just like, it's horrible, like, but that's kind of, that's one of the things that, you know, one of the things that's so interesting about this war, too, is like, when people will defend it, I almost want to ask people, so why, if this war is so necessary, or it's so necessary for us to arm them, why shouldn't we intervene militarily?
Why isn't America's military going into Ukraine?
Why aren't we invading Russia?
Why aren't we at least occupying Ukraine and forcing?
We certainly have the conventional forces to force Russia's army out of there, no problem.
So why aren't we doing that?
And the reason we're not doing that is because everyone knows, oh, we can't do that, because that's nuclear war.
That's nuclear war in a certainty.
So you're like, okay, so that's nuclear war.
So that's off the table.
Biden's not even suggesting that.
But so then what does it go from like a certainty of nuclear war to what's the risk of nuclear war if we're just fighting a proxy war and giving them hundreds of billions of dollars and pledging till the end that will drive Russia out?
Well, the risk doesn't go to zero.
You know what I mean?
It goes to something maybe less, but it's still something.
He literally said, I mean, literally, but he basically said, he said, you put these missiles in Cuba, I will blow up the world.
I'm treating this as a preemptive nuclear strike on America if you do that.
Get those missiles the hell off of Cuba.
And I think most people go, Thank you.
Yeah, that's reasonable.
You know, like, it's kind of reasonable to say we cannot tolerate Soviet nuclear warheads pointed at us from a little island a few miles off our coast.
That's just, like, can't be.
And, like, look, we have a Monroe Doctrine.
Monroe Doctrine says that America does not tolerate any faraway power coming in and interfering in our realm of influence, okay?
And essentially what Vladimir Putin has been saying for years I don't want you interfering in my biggest neighbor right here.
You know, a lot of people kind of were criticizing the guy and they were kind of saying like, well, look, this guy's no Ed Snowden.
I mean, he didn't like take this to Glenn Greenwald at The Guardian.
To have him vet through it and properly disclose it.
He's like bragging to friends on a Discord server or whatever.
Essentially, that seems right to me.
That does kind of seem like what happened.
But, again, that's not the interesting story here.
The interesting story isn't like what this guy's deal was or what his motives were.
The story is like, oh, the government's lying to you again.
And also that it's they have this information that they claim is so vital that it's so horrible.
He leaked it.
And yet you're so reckless with it that, you know, it's like it's funny.
I remember Glenn Greenwald making this point when people would talk about like people were at the national security apparatus or whatever would be talking about how how reckless it is that Snowden just like gave all of this information out.
And you're like, well, then weren't you pretty reckless, too?
Because if this information is so vital, you didn't even know it was gone.
They didn't even know it was gone until The Guardian published it.
And then they were like, oh...
I guess this guy took all of our documents.
What did the documents say?
Well, just right before that, one of the other real interesting thing is that they came out, so a couple days after the leak first was getting reported, the Reuters had a piece, an article, where they had three high-level U.S. officials Under anonymity, said that, you'll never believe this, Joe, it had all the hallmarks of Russian disinformation.
And so isn't it just amazing that they'll go, and then like two days later, they completely gave up on that and went, let's just smear the kid who did it.
You know, like, forget all that stuff.
There were some interesting revelations from the documents.
Things like, evidently, there are NATO and U.S. military embedded in Ukraine, like, assisting them, basically, which is pretty dangerous.
One document dated 23 March refers to the presence of a small number of Western Special Forces operating inside Ukraine without specifying their activities or location.
The UK has the largest contingent, 50, followed by Latvia, 17, France, 15, and the US, 14, the Netherlands, 1. Western governments typically refrain from commenting on such sensitive matters, but this detail is likely to be seized upon by Moscow.
Which has in recent months argued that it is not just confronting Ukraine, but NATO as well.
I think when Putin ultimately decided to invade Ukraine last year, I think basically what he concluded...
Was that they did it.
They brought Ukraine into NATO. Even though Ukraine is not an official NATO country, at this point they backed the coup that overthrew the democratically elected government under Yanukovych.
They poured weapons into the country and they were doing joint training exercises with NATO and the Ukrainian military.
And I think Vladimir Putin was basically like, we told them this was our brightest of red lines and they crossed it.
And I got to do something.
Now, I'm not saying he should have done this.
There's other things he could have done.
There's lots of things.
I mean, I don't know exactly.
You get creative.
But he could have cut off all natural gas to Europe.
He could have dropped a nuke in the ocean.
I mean, he could have done something before he did this, you know?
But he basically concluded that Ukraine is de facto a member of NATO. And if you look at the way we're responding to this whole thing, he's kind of right.
I mean, like, we're backing them all the way because they were invaded.
That's what we're supposed to do to a NATO country, you know?
And so this is bad that this comes out.
Although, I gotta say, I'm surprised to some degree how much, you know, they've...
I mean, if the Nord Stream bombing didn't, you know, like, do it, I don't know if just, like, some special forces being embedded there is gonna, like, you know, create some big escalation.
Well, look, dude, I mean, there's been in the last year- Because, you know, Trump predicted that Germany, if they don't take steps to stop this, they're going to be completely dependent upon Russian oil.
And it was one of those things where people were making fun of him at the time.
I don't know if I completely agree with Trump on that, but there's no question that— But they are dependent upon it now, right, because of the Nord Stream pipeline blowing up?
Well, not anymore.
It doesn't exist anymore.
But I think that there's a lot of people were—a lot of very powerful people were very against the Nord Stream pipeline.
I have a different view of it.
I think it was great.
You think it was great?
Yes.
Why?
Because the worst thing that's ever happened in the history of the world was Germany and Russia going to war.
In World War II, something like 30 million people died just in that conflict.
It's like the worst thing that's ever happened in the history of the world.
And so for them to be interconnected and interdependent, which is how I would see it, trading, you know, like where goods cross borders, armies don't have to, that old saying, I think it would have been a good thing for them to be together.
Oh, look, now you're directly incentivized to not be enemies because you want the cheap natural gas and they want your money for their cheap natural gas.
There's a big view from the neoconservatives and the neoliberals, the kind of establishment, that this is the scariest thing.
The scariest thing is that Germany and Russia align.
And I don't know exactly if this is true, but some people, like, I'm blanking on the guy's name, the guy who founded Stratford, Friedman.
I believe is his name.
He basically said that this is the centerpiece of American foreign policy since World War II. That like the whole idea of NATO is to like keep Germany in and Russia out.
And that their biggest fear is that Germany and Russia would...
Unite against us, and that could be the only thing that could really challenge American power, is like the ingenuity of Germany with the manpower and natural resources of Russia.
So there's a lot of people who have been against this from the very beginning.
There are a lot of Jewish people in the neoconservative movement.
And this is part of the reason why they're very, very pro-Israel.
It's also part of the reason...
And I'll say somewhat understandably, while German independence is a big concern to them, they still live with that kind of like, this is the great fear that Germany will rise again one day.
And like, oh, if they're connected with Russia like this, ooh, they're not under the EU's thumb and NATO's thumb anymore.
Now they could possibly go in a different direction.
So for years, there were a lot of people who were against this.
Now, when Russia invaded Ukraine, they did turn off the pipe.
Germany was boycotting.
So they weren't using any of the gas from the pipe.
However, they've also adopted all of these crazy climate policies and completely destroyed a lot of their own internal energy sources.
They've denuclearized and all that stuff.
And so I think the concern was that going into winter, what if there is pressure on them to decide to turn these pipes on?
And that this might be, then Germany might start, you know, siding with Russia, or at least if they're getting their natural gas from Russia, they're not going to be so harsh on Russia, and they're not going to be so willing to play ball with the EU. And there's already, you know, like a history of this, like what I was talking about before at the Bucharest Summit in 2008, when they announced Ukraine was going into, would Eventually joined NATO. It was Merkel was really against it.
They got that in over her wishes.
So they're already a little concerned that, like, maybe Germany is not quite as anti-Russia as we are.
And so going into the winter, I think they were concerned there was going to be a strain on power in Germany, and they might be tempted to turn that pipeline back on.
And so they made sure it's, as Victoria Nuland said, a hunk of metal at the bottom of the sea.
Well, I mean, I remember sometimes you can just kind of like, you know, you can just look at these things logically.
Like I remember in 2017 is when I was still a contributor on Essie Cup Show and she was at CNN. And the big story came out that Assad had gassed his own people.
And I remember right away, and this is before any of those OCPW whistleblowers came out or anything like that, but just right away, I remember the day after, being on TV and just being like, I don't think he did this.
And they're like, how can you say that?
Everyone's saying he did this.
And you're like, well, look at it.
It's like two weeks ago, Trump announced that we're leaving Syria.
Like we're withdrawing from Syria.
He won after this five year bloody civil war where he's been fighting for his life to not be Muammar Gaddafi.
He has just announced that he won.
And so now you're telling me for no strategic military advantage, he just did the one thing that will keep this war going and maybe end up like Muammar Gaddafi?
That doesn't make any sense.
I'm not buying this.
And then it did kind of come out as these whistleblowers were like, yeah, it didn't come from the sky.
It came from the ground and it was done in, you know, rebel controlled territory.
And like, this does not look like it was Assad.
But I remember when they first...
It was like the same thing when they first...
We think Russia blew up their own pipeline.
But why?
Why would they?
So you're telling me Vladimir Putin just took away the option that Germany might cave this winter and want to buy his natural gas again?
Why would he do that?
And then, of course, it comes out later like, no, that's not what it was.
It was probably British intelligence or some U.S. allied group, if not directly us.
And so, yeah, that's pretty crazy.
It's pretty hard to look at that and still feel like we're just the good guys in this war.
And again, when I say we, just for everyone, disclaimer for this entire...
Like those great Eminem lyrics.
I'm all for America.
Fuck the government.
When I say America did this or America's wrong, I'm not talking about you or your daddy or your hometown or anything like that.
I'm just talking about, like, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush and Barack Obama and Dick Cheney and Donald Trump and, you know, all of them.
It's so wild when you, if you looked at us from outside of us, and you looked at the human race and these patterns that repeat themselves over and over again, you would wonder, like, why aren't they seeing these patterns?
Like, why don't they recognize when these things are happening, as they've happened to so many civilizations before?
Like, what is it about watching everything erode before your eyes that's not shocking enough to wake people up to what's happening?
Well, sometimes I think there's kind of like a pattern and there's big forces at play that are hard for individuals to get a hold of, you know?
Like, there's kind of this thing where there's like...
Governments are power centers and they're just...
It's not just like...
In the same way every business kind of wants to get bigger, wants to have more profit, You want to have more listeners to your podcast.
You just kind of want more.
But the government isn't in the market.
It's not like, oh, I have to provide something of value in order to get more people voluntarily to listen to my show or come to my business or something like that.
They're in the game of take things.
They're in the game of force.
You pay your taxes or you go to jail.
The government is a monopoly on legal aggression, like on force.
And so governments, it's almost impossible to stop them from just getting bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger.
And the bigger they get, the more corrupt things get and the more power they have.
And it's almost like this cycle where if a government is limited, then the country is prosperous because they have more freedom.
And then the more prosperous they are, The more the government has – that they can leech off of.
And then the government gets bigger and bigger and bigger.
And it's almost like I don't know what can happen to stop that cycle, you know?
The thing that makes me optimistic is that they really rely on propaganda.
Like, they really need the propaganda, and they know it, you know?
They know they can't just, like, roll out the vaccine mandates without a huge propaganda campaign.
They gotta convince you and then try to get away with their tyrannical policies.
And I do think that the propaganda is being undermined more than ever.
I was 18 when 9-11 happened, and I was living in Prospect Heights, which is, like, it's...
Flatbush Avenue kind of runs down to the Manhattan Bridge and the Brooklyn Bridge is down there too.
It's like a couple miles away from the World Trade Center.
And I remember we got out of school.
I think I was a senior in high school.
And we got out of school and I remember walking to my house and looking down Flatbush Avenue.
So this has been a couple hours now since the towers came down.
And seeing people covered head to toe in soot.
They walked over the Brooklyn Bridge and just came home because there's no subways running or nothing.
So they're just walking, just like, oh, that guy got caught in the middle of it.
And it was a crazy feeling in the city.
The whole thing was insane.
It seemed impossible.
No one could ever hit us.
This is America in the 90s.
I mean, it wasn't the 90s, but it was still the 90s until 9-11.
You know what I mean?
And you were like, this is impossible.
This couldn't happen.
And I remember when George W. Bush came and gave that speech on the megaphone.
And it was almost perfect in his simplistic way, where he goes, I want you to know We hear you in Washington, D.C. And pretty soon, the people who knock down these towers, they're going to hear you too.
You know, but it was just like, that's kind of how it is when you're hurt and you feel like you got hit and they killed our people.
Well, we're going to fucking kill your people, motherfucker.
But then you kind of realized, and this is what like Ron Paul taught me, is it's like, yeah, okay, you know that impulse that you just had?
Exactly.
That's what they feel.
So it's like the same way that you went, you kill us, motherfucker?
We're going to kill your fucking people.
We go, that's it.
That's the same exact thing that the fucking terrorists are feeling.
That's the same thing their side's feeling.
That we're like, oh yeah, you come here and bomb our fucking village?
We're going to kill your fucking people, you know?
And it's kind of like, that's the whole fucking cycle.
It's like...
I don't know.
It's like, you know, I remember literally saying this when I was arguing with Essie Cupp and them on our show, where they'd be like an attack.
Even like the littler ones, I remember there was one where like a New York guy, some Muslim guy in New York, like hit people with his car, and he was like, said he was part of ISIS or something.
I don't even know how connected he was.
And they're all like, well, don't we have to do something about this?
I mean, don't we have to go bomb, you know, Syria or do something about this and you're like, right.
You just got hit and now you feel like we have to do something.
And isn't it wild that during this most chaotic of times in our history, if we think about the future of the world, we think about the possibility of war.
It's escalated.
And...
We have the craziest situation as a president and a vice president.
The thing is wild.
Like, the only options we have, from the right or the left, we're like, what the fuck?
This is it?
Like, this is all that's left?
It's like going to the supermarket during the pandemic and there's nothing on the shelves.
And come on, it's also like you kind of just miss...
Just don't get it twisted.
Again, it's like what I try to say with the Ukraine thing.
It's like, look, if the people who didn't have anything to say over what happened in Yemen over the last seven years are really upset about the humanitarian crisis in Ukraine, it's like...
Just don't be a fucking mark.
See what's going on here.
I'm not saying you can't be upset over the humanitarian crisis in Ukraine, but I'm just saying recognize what they are doing.
They don't really care about the humanitarian crisis.
They're using this.
They're manipulating you.
And in the same sense, the people who are all for big tech, look, you may really hate if there's a neo-Nazi or something like that on Twitter or something.
Okay, I get it.
I get why you hate that.
But understand why they hate it.
They don't hate it because of that.
Like, they don't care about that.
They got no problem sending weapons to the neo-Nazis in Ukraine, which, by the way, we haven't touched on that, but there's some real-deal ones in there.
But my point is, it's not that they hate neo-Nazis.
They hate dissidents, okay?
So you might find one example of a dissident who we all agree is a real bad guy, or something like that.
But they're not shutting down people for that.
They're shutting down Alex Berenson for making data-driven arguments about why the COVID policies are wrong.
No, it's actually much more than that because then they, like, they...
It's like 1% is directly funded by the state, and then they also take money from local groups that have collected taxpayer money and stuff like that.
So it's actually more...
Crystal Ball did a thing on their show kind of breaking this down.
So it's actually, in reality, it's more than 1%.
But regardless, they take taxpayer-funded money, so I think there's nothing wrong with labeling them that.
And if taxpayers are forced to fund any amount of a news organization, and then that news organization is going to turn around and say, like, we won't report on the Hunter Biden laptop, or we won't do this, or we won't, you know, their stuff during COVID was just god-awful.
I have no problem with them having a little label there, especially one that pisses them off.
Again, so this is from an Instagram account that is popular.
What they show is like an edited video.
I don't know how accurate all this is though.
unidentified
China know exactly when someone isn't paying attention.
These headbands measure each student's level of concentration.
The information is then directly sent to the teacher's computer and to parents.
Classrooms have robots that analyze students' health and engagement levels.
Students wear uniforms with chips that track their locations.
There are even surveillance cameras that monitor how often students check their phones or yawn during classes.
But schools say it wasn't hard for them getting parental consent to enroll kids into what is one of the world's largest experiments in AI education, a program that's supposed to boost students' grades while also feeding powerful algorithms.
I'm always a little bit skeptical of some of these things because you're kind of like, okay, is this just like one random school is doing it this way in China and it's like a little experiment?
Because I have heard people say that...
I've heard people who run businesses in China.
I heard a podcast with this one guy.
Who lived there, or still lives there, in China.
And he was like, I don't know what everyone's talking about with this credit, social credit score.
He goes, I've never heard of it.
It's never affected me.
I don't have a social credit score.
You know, and I almost like wonder, like, sometimes we do get a lot of propaganda about China, because there's also a whole bunch of people, like, who are real hawkish toward them.
So I always try to kind of be skeptical of some of this.
No doubt, the CCP is really creepy.
You know what I mean?
And they're definitely like an authoritarian, fucked up government.
If they institute that nationwide, first of all, the problem would be it would work.
And kids would get way better.
Because you'd make them work.
You'd force them.
You'd hold them accountable.
There wouldn't be any hiding.
It worked for that.
It would also be terrible for getting people to recognize that figures of authority should be questioned.
Yeah.
rules.
Yeah.
Which I think part of going through school is learning that different people are more or less effective at communicating, that you want to pay attention to them more or less, There's an education you're getting in a shitty class, believe it or not.
You're getting an education on what happens in a shitty class, about how much you hate it and how much it sucks and how stupid your teacher is and how disinterested they are in the subject that they're teaching you and how they expect total compliance and they don't understand human emotions and the way people think and behave.
That's an education, too.
Like, going through bad schools gave me a great view on what some adults are potentially like.
And if that kid doesn't have a strong figure at home, if that kid doesn't have someone at home that's kind and generous and works hard and is very engaged in them with their life, Then they think that that's what adults are like.
Yeah, I want my kids to develop, like, discipline and a work ethic, and I want, like, all of that stuff, but I don't want them to do it because the robot's watching them.
I want them to live and be a human, and then be convinced that, like, oh, it's really awesome to develop these things, because life's better that way.
But there's also something that we have to take into consideration, that there's a wide spectrum of things that people are interested in, and oftentimes when kids are bored in class, their imagination is running wild, And they'll start thinking about what they want to do with their life.
They'll start thinking about things through boredom.
You know the history of school, where it comes from?
The term school?
It comes from Prussia.
The Prussian system is what we adopted in America.
The Prussians were the geographical and cultural precursor to the Nazis.
And the reason they did it was because they had this problem that their conscripted armies would not fight.
Like they'd get out there and they'd draft these people into an army and tell them to go to war and they'd like piss themselves and run away.
And they were like, what are we going to do about this?
And so they were like, we got to get them at a young age and really like indoctrinate them toward like being subservient to the state.
And Horace Mann, who's considered, you know, the godfather of education in America...
He literally said, I think it was in the late 1800s, he literally said, we're adopting the Prussian model.
And he was like, but, you know, surely if this model can be used to support, like, Prussian, you know, like authoritarianism, it can also be used to support republicanism of America, you know, and like, oh, support the great republic.
And it's literally, I mean, that is the first thing they would do at schools is like, have you pledge allegiance to your government, you know?
And that's why I do think it's interesting when a lot of these...
You know, like right-winger types today, they'll be like, oh my god, they're propagandizing these kids in school.
And I will grant that I do find the latest insane gender sexualization of kids to be particularly troubling.
It's not like it's a new thing that they're propagandizing kids in school.
In fact, that's kind of what the whole thing was set up for.
And it's like, it's, you know, like my kids are like, I got little kids, but like, even just from like, Like, my four-year-old, man, it's just like the state of these little kids.
They're so magical and amazing.
And all they want, like, they have this amazing passion for life that's built into them.
All my four-year-old ever wants to do is ask me why.
Like, that's all she wants to do is understand how things work.
She wants me to explain them to her.
She wants to help.
You know what I mean?
Like, everything you can think of, she wants to do a little task and then say, I helped.
You know, like mom baked muffins and I helped.
I stirred.
Like, they want so badly to know things and participate in the adult world.
And then we're like, oh, okay, well, what we're going to do with you for the next 14 years is send you to go sit in a row of desks and memorize and regurgitate information that an authority figure hands to you.
It's just horrible.
You're like, that's the best we could come up with?
Do you ever hear that, I've always loved this quote so much, but someone asked Jerry Seinfeld, or they were like, when you were a kid, were you like the funny one in your group of friends?
And he went, we were all funny, and then everyone else got jobs.
There is something to that, man.
What do you mean?
We were all hilarious.
I just kept being hilarious.
They all decided to stop at some point.
I don't think everyone could be an artist.
There are some people who are wired for different things.
There are some people who are like...
This dude's a chemist, or this dude's a computer programmer, and he was made to be that.
He had a real propensity toward that.
But I think there's no question a lot of people have that squashed.
Well, if you're young and you're listening to this, keep that in mind.
I remember Jordan Peterson said once, I think it might have been On With You.
I can't remember.
Maybe it wasn't.
But he said something about people who are in a job that they hate or in a career that they hate, and they'll think about, well, I can't leave and pursue something else because what about all the risks of doing that?
And you're like, yeah, what about the risks of not doing that?
What about the risks of doing something that makes you miserable for the rest of your life?
Because that seems like a risk worth considering, you know?
I was really lucky in having no stability when I was young, which doesn't make sense, if you think about it, because you want to provide your children with as much stability as possible.
But I was really lucky that I didn't, because I didn't believe in, like, normal systems.
Like, I didn't believe in them.
They seemed alien to me.
Like, the idea of getting a job in an office was like, So crazy, I never even considered it.
I've never had an office job ever.
Even when I had other jobs, I took these weird alternative jobs.
Like, I did construction or I drove limos.
I did stuff that, like, anybody could do.
Like, you didn't need...
There's no barrier to entry.
Like, it was...
Working in an office to me seemed like madness.
Like to sit in...
I for sure have ADHD or whatever the fuck it is.
But it works for regular life.
Like if you have just a life you enjoy, it's actually beneficial.
But this idea of sitting and doing a job all day that I was completely unemotionally attached to, not creatively attached to, I couldn't do it.
But if I had to do some stuff for money that I knew was temporary, I could do that.
No, I'm well aware of it in myself, too, where there'll be things sometimes that like something like even like shopping, like clothes shopping or something like that, if it's like going slow, I'm like, I've never been so miserable in my entire life.
I don't know why this is so excruciatingly painful.
I was very fortunate that I was, from high school age to the time I started doing stand-up, I didn't party at all, very, very rarely, because I was competing.
So because of that, I was always scared to lose, and I was always scared that I would lose because I had gotten drunk and then I was hungover.
He's the GOAT. I mean, if you're gonna have a GOAT, I don't think you can argue that John's not THE GOAT. I think the argument really is, who are the greats?
Because it's so subjective if Nurmagomedov was better than John Jones.
It's so...
What do you like?
Did you like Ron Chavity?
Did you like total dominance?
Because in total dominance, Nurmagomedov is the GOAT. Total dominance, man.
Just smashes everybody.
Nobody had a chance.
Do you understand how crazy it is to watch a guy storm through an entire division with masters like Justin Gaethje, a master of destruction.
No one has a chance.
Conor McGregor, master of destruction.
No one has a chance.
This motherfucker, he gets everybody.
There's an argument that he's the GOAT. There's an argument that Mighty Mouse is the greatest expression of martial arts in the history of combat sports.
I went behind Mighty Mouse once when he was backstage at the UFC, and I just grabbed him to hug him, just to play, just to play.
He's my friend.
I go to hug him, and he turns and just to fuck with me, hits me in the body, touches me, the most gentle touch, with two knees so fast that I couldn't believe they actually moved that quickly.
When he hit Cejudo with those knees to the body, I remember watching that going, I don't think I've ever seen anybody land a knee to the body more precisely.
It's a shame that he left the UFC when he did and didn't get, like, the third fight with Cejudo, a rubber match there, I think would have been so huge.
You know what I mean?
Like, I feel like he never got the fight that had, like, that type of height behind him.
I believe you're correct.
Hardcore fans knew.
They were like, yo, this guy's unbelievable.
Unbelievable.
But I think he just didn't quite have the moment.
There was also talk of him moving up and fighting TJ Dillashaw, and I think there was a contractual dispute or something like that didn't happen.
But it's a shame that he didn't get one of those, like, Huge moments because even when he beats a hood of the first time He wasn't like that big of a name yet, right?
Like people didn't know like who that was whereas like the by the third fight.
It would have been like a huge thing, you know And then GSP also is in the conversation.
He's got to have an argument Yeah, he's in the conversation for sure the dominance of the welterweight division And the fact that he beat everyone he ever faced and came back and won the middleweight title after a leave, that's hard to not consider him there.
And we had never seen him in a dogfight before at that point.
You were like, sometimes there are these guys, I remember thinking the same thing with Israel Adesanya when he fought Kelvin Gaslam, whereas all we had seen from him was just like dominating everybody.
And so there's something, there's kind of a question mark A little bit with that where you don't know, you know, some people like when the going gets tough, kind of like look for a way out.
And I remember, if you remember in that fight in the fourth round, Kelvin fucked him up in that fourth round.
He really hurt him and he was busted up.
And you remember before the fifth round starts is that he looks at him and he's like, I'm prepared to die for this.
He rocks him in a very similar manner to when he finishes him off in the second fight.
Imagine if that had taken place and the referee had stood in and gave him a standing eight count.
Pajeda is a monster.
He recovers quickly.
He can get cracked, and there's some speculation that some of that has to do with the fact that he's cutting so much weight.
Michael Bisping, I believe there was a few other fighters.
Oh, I think it was Sugar Sean O'Malley.
We're talking about this insane weight cut that this guy makes to get down to 185 pounds and the fact that that could affect his ability to absorb punishment.
Very possibly.
But imagine a scenario where he gets rocked like that, but then you give him eight whole seconds to recover.
And the referee's doing like one, two, three.
They don't want him to lose, right?
And so they give him this little ability to recover and he survives and then he winds up.
Winning and knocking out pay it or knocking out Adesanya in this spectacular fashion hits him with this monster left hook But that's the thing about that guy.
That's what's so terrifying about fighting him And that's why is he so special that he's like I can figure this motherfucker out Well, I you also got a look at it like you know There's like a winner versus loser mentality to that.
And I remember thinking of this going into that last fight where like, look, you could look at it and say, I was fighting my best fight and he still got me.
You know what I mean?
Or you could look at that and go, I had this guy.
I was winning that fight until the fifth round.
You know what I mean?
The thing is, there's zero margin for error when you fight that dude.
Well, in that fight, he looked really good before it and Corey Sanhagen destroyed his knee.
Destroyed his knee in that exchange.
His knee was fucked up, man.
And so from that, he goes and wins that fight.
He wins that decision.
And now he's got fucked up shoulders.
His shoulders are so bad.
And he got surgery on him, but they basically said, like, you're not gonna be able to fight again.
Like, they just won't hold up.
Like, it's been too much damage.
And that's what I'm worried about when I hear people having a catastrophic shoulder injury and then saying, I'm gonna get back in there as quickly as possible.
Like, huh.
You know, be careful.
Shoulder injuries, they're just like, they're a tough one.
Knee, back.
I mean, when people recover from like, Aljamain Sterling recovers from a neck surgery where they replace one of his discs with an artificial disc and goes on to retain the title.
You know, it's weird, like, when you see people...
I remember this from, like, basketball, like, in, like, high school and shit, where there'd be someone who, like, their shoulder popped out, like, they dislocated their shoulder, and then that just happens to them.
Then that's just a thing that, like, regularly...
Like, not, like, all the time, but you always, like, know it could happen again.
This is the thing I want to recommend for shoulder health if people are interested in this.
There's a product that I have no affiliation with other than I bought it.
It's called Crossover Symmetry.
And it's these bands.
And they come in various weights.
And you put them on a post or you can hang them on the wall or whatever.
You do a series of exercises, whether it's pulling them upwards or pulling them across, pulling them this way and that way.
And it's all shoulder strengthening.
And it really can help people.
And it really can prevent injuries, too, if you do it on a regular basis, if you stick to it.
You gotta think of your shoulders as something that you're protecting.
You're not just building it up.
You should protect the joint.
That's what Knees Over Toes guy is really interested in.
His whole thing is about strengthening all the muscles around your knee.
And strengthening the muscles around your shoulders is so important too.
And so often when people are training in a thing, Whether it's jujitsu or Muay Thai or anything, you're only training doing that thing.
And that thing can strengthen you, and it certainly will.
But it would benefit you to doing things to prevent injuries and strengthening joints and strengthening the tissue around vulnerable areas in your body, whether it's your neck or your shoulders or your knees.
Oh, can I just say the one thing that I wanted to say for you is that my favorite wrestling storyline ever was during the first Iraq war that we were just talking about, Sergeant Slaughter defected and became a pro-Iraqi.