Francis Foster and Konstantin Kisin dissect 2026's global instability, debating whether Saudi Aramco attacks are Israeli false flags or logical escalations against Iran's proxies. They contrast Iran's factionalized IRGC with Venezuela's "regime adjustment" under Del C. Rodriguez, questioning if the U.S. plans a similar moderate takeover or an authoritarian monarchy. The discussion exposes ideological extremes, from Islamist caliphate ambitions to Christian nationalists viewing combat as Armageddon, while critiquing media misinformation and AI-driven paranoia. Ultimately, they warn that polarization and intellectual gladiatorism threaten democratic discourse, urging a return to genuine debate before promoting Foster's book on education. [Automatically generated summary]
Well, a lot of things, you know, it's just nothing seems stable everywhere.
Everywhere in the world seems fucked right now.
Like, this is like, in all of my years, this seems the most unstable globally.
Like, I never worried that the UK was going to be like complete chaos, arresting 12,000 people for social media posts and abandoning trial by jury, all that shit.
I never thought the Ukraine-Russia war would go on this long.
Never thought.
Never thought they would just continue bombing Gaza and then what's happening now?
They just sort of stop.
And now they're talking about putting a resort there.
What?
You hear that and you go, are you fucking serious?
And then, you know, I was listening to Tim Dylan's podcast today.
He's got a great podcast with Ryan Grimm and one other gentleman.
But one of the things that they brought up was that some of these drone attacks, it doesn't even seem like they're from Iran.
Some of these drone attacks on Gulf states, like that one of them, I don't want to speak out of tune out of turn because I'm not exactly sure which ones they're talking about.
They're talking about one of them on either it's a oil refinery, I think it is, an oil refinery.
Like, if you really wanted to get really scared of what we're dragged into, you're dragged into an ally that's not telling you the truth and is also doing some other stuff.
I'm not even saying that that's the case, but a lot of people are assuming that that's what it is.
I just find it amazing now how many people have a hard take on what's going to happen.
I'm like, we don't know a fucking thing about what's going on.
The coin is in the air, and we do not know how it's going to, but everyone's got a take.
Everyone knows.
We do not fucking, I don't think anyone knows.
I understand if you work at the White House or if you work in Russian propaganda or you work in Chinese propaganda, or if you work in Iranian, you've got to get your point of view across to try and persuade people.
But if you're actually trying to work out what's genuinely happening, I don't think anyone knows how this is a gamble of gigantic proportions.
And nobody knows how it's going to end.
It's just so unpredictable.
And I can tell you a great story that is positive.
for the for the West, let's say, for America.
I can tell you a terrible story, and they both sound very convincing, and no one knows which one of them is true.
Everyone has a take, and they want their take to be that expert take.
So specific drone attack incidents that call potential false flags.
Saudi Arabia, Saudi Aramco, rather, oil facility attack.
So Iranian officials deny striking the Saudi Aramco processing facility and instead suggest Israel may have carried out that attack as a false flag to inflame Gulf opinion and pull Saudi Arabia more directly into the war with Iran.
So Ryan Grimm explicitly says he thinks Iran's claims that Israel hit the Iramco facility need to be taken seriously and that it's very possible Israel did it.
And this was the other one, the drone strike on the British base in Cyprus.
He places this in the same context of Iran claiming Israel carried out certain attacks in neighboring states as false flags to blame in Iran and drag those countries into the war.
Their own Saudi sources also denied it, though they note details don't prove it didn't happen, and that states would almost certainly hide such arrests if real.
The thing, Joe, is that these countries, so Saudi Arabia and UAE, Qatar less so, they want this to happen because they also hate Iran or the Iranian regime.
So there is no need for Israel, even if you, you know, if people are tempted to believe there's no need for Israel to do this because these countries are already in it.
For the people that think the false flag is real, like, why do they think that?
What do they think that Israel would benefit from it?
Is there a scenario where you can imagine it would inflame things and further support other countries contributing to the – I mean there's a lot of money that's being spent on this war, right?
Right.
This is an insane amount of money just for munitions, just for missiles.
But anyway, I mean, he was explaining that Saudi Arabia has a population that is way bigger than what they can sustain in terms of the water, but they live in the fucking desert.
So they have these desalination plants, which are extremely vulnerable.
And Saudi Arabia, UAE, these other countries, they felt at huge risk from Iranian attacks for a long time.
So none of them like the Iranian regime that's spreading terrorism through its proxies.
So in actual fact, dragging them into the war, kind of like there's no sense for that.
I think there's a lot of people just they go to reaction now whenever anything happens is that it was Israel's fault.
Like Venezuela, fuck all to do with Israel.
But when it happened, everyone's like, oh, it's Israel.
I think some people just go to that now as the automatic response, which comes back to what I was saying earlier about the hot tech culture.
Something happened three minutes ago and now everyone's got a fucking take on it.
You don't know anything.
None of us know anything.
None of us know how this is going to go.
Because this right now is a highly unpredictable situation.
I don't think the White House knows how this is going to go.
And there's this idea that it's so easy to take one regime, remove it, and then just put another one in its place, like it's a Lego block, and then all of a sudden you're going to magically fix a country is a fantasy.
Like if you take Iran, the IRGC, which is the Islamic Revolutionary Guard, numbers around 200,000 trained soldiers.
And not only are they trained soldiers, They're fanatical.
They're fanatics.
And then you have the secret police, and then you have the regular police.
And then you have the people employed in the government, and then their families, and so on and so forth.
And then their supporters within the country.
And then you've got the various factions within Iran, like the Kurds, who want independence.
So the moment the leadership is weakened, they're going to use it as an opportunity to launch their own revolution to try and break away from the rest of Iran.
So you have all of these particular parts, these factions.
And then you think if you take out the top, the Tagar at the top who's holding it all together by force, I'm not saying I agree with him or what he does, you have the very real risk that the entire country is going to disintegrate, as what happened in Iran, in Iraq, sorry.
So Del C. Rodriguez was one of the senior leaders in Maduro's regime.
They just took out Maduro and his wife.
They put Del Codriguez there.
But the whole structure, the whole leadership, the whole party is still in place.
So they've just, what they've done is they put Delsi at the top and they've said to her, look, if you fuck about, you're going to get what your boss got.
You're going to stop messing about with Hezbollah, which they had training camps in the island of Margarita, which is a little Caribbean island two and a half hours away from Miami.
Training camps.
You can't have that.
You're not going to be fraternizing with the Cubans.
And you're going to play ball.
And essentially, Venezuela is now a colony of the United States.
Well, there's also the Kurt Metzger angle, which is hilarious.
Kurt Metzger cornered me one night at the mothership, and he explained to me that this was all about the 2020 election and that Maduro somehow or another had something to do with rigging the 2020 election.
And he's going to say it as a part of his testimony.
He's like, just wait.
Just wait.
Mark my words.
He's convinced of this.
He goes down the rabbit hole to the lava.
Like he passes and he's like, this rabbit hole's been covered up.
It goes deeper.
He keeps going until he's at the fucking center of the earth.
Post-2020 from Trump allies like Sidney Powell and Rudy Giuliani claiming Hugo Chavez, Maduro's predecessor, developed rigged software to export to U.S. firms.
These were promoted by figures like Mike Lindell.
He makes a great pillow.
You should listen to him.
And amplified on social media, but courts and fact checks rejected them, including Fox News $787 million Dominion settlement.
Yeah, that doesn't make much sense to me, but neither does this idea that you're going to take over a country's oil supply.
You know, like that, you know, we'll just take it.
The problem is from the outside, like the rest of the world, you look at this unnecessary aggression by the United States government, and then you tack on whatever propaganda they have already been spitting out about America for the last 20 or 30 years.
And then this war with Iran gets really ugly because that's how you start a World War III.
You start a World War III by doing something that other than people that wanted this forever, who else thinks that's a good idea?
Who else thinks it's a good idea to just attack a country that isn't doing anything?
They haven't done anything.
Like if you proof that they have developed depleted uranium and they've got it up to a point where they've got it to what it has, what percentage does it have to be?
So from that perspective, it's different to North Korea.
And so I think that's part of the thinking.
But your point is interesting to me about the fact that this doesn't reflect what people, you know, as we're not Americans, but it doesn't seem to have been part of the policy platform of the Trump election at the last election, right?
But I do think there is some kind of strategy behind all of this.
And I'm very curious what that is.
Because I guess if you think about it logically, you would say, well, is it an attempt to effectively push back against China and Russia, infiltrating all these countries?
China and Russia were very close with Maduro in Venezuela.
Very, very close.
Like Francis is saying, has Bilal training camps, Island Margarita?
Where was the oil going?
Right?
Same with Iran.
I mean, Iran sells its oil to China and sends suicide drones to Russia to use in Ukraine.
So maybe it's that.
Maybe the strategy is you're trying to push back against Chinese and Russian influence in all these countries because you can't attack them directly because you can't attack them directly, right?
So when Chavez came to power in 99, what he did, and not enough people talk about this, is he turned what was very corrupt, admittedly, liberal Western-style democracy into a communist dictatorship.
And how do you do that?
You can't just literally do that overnight.
So what he did is he allied with the Cubans and Fidel in particular, Fidel Castro.
Venezuela provided Cuba with cheap oil, which helped to keep the Cuban economy afloat because Cuba has been going broke since however many years, 40 odd years.
And what Castro did was he gave him the boots on the ground in Venezuela, but also the technical expertise and know-how in order to change a Western liberal democracy into a communist state with permanent surveillance, secret police, subjugate the population so there was no chance of them ever being able to revolt and turn everything into, like I said, into a communist state.
So by what they did in Venezuela, Venezuela can no longer support Cuba.
So Cuba is literally now withering on the vine as a result of them knocking out the Venezuelans.
So it's going to come to a point where you say Cuba are effectively going to go bankrupt, which could precipitate an uprising, a revolution by people when people can no longer eat.
And that would mean that that country is then weakened.
Finally, they can get rid of the communist regime there and they can have a different type of government, one which will be far more sympathetic, shall we say, to working with America and being an American island possibly.
But like every country, like if you only listen to the liberals in this country, you would think that no one's illegal on stolen land.
If you only listen to the Republicans in this country, you would think we've got to find every illegal and get him out of our country and make America great again.
It doesn't make sense if we just go only by the protesters.
We don't really have accurate polling because they don't have any free speech over there.
And they've killed famous athletes over there for protesting.
I mean, they killed the Olympic gold medalists in wrestling.
When the UFC tried to step in and try to do something to stop it, they executed him.
Apparently, I don't even think he was actually protesting.
Like, so from what I understand, talking to some of the people, like, Israel would quite like a Reza Pahlavi monarchy because the other Middle Eastern countries that they have peace with, you know, Bahrain, Morocco, increasingly the Gulf states, they're all monarchies.
But from what I understand, the White House is really not that interested in Pahlavi.
And so what do they want?
Well, one of the things that Richard Minnetter broke on our show, because it hadn't been reported anywhere else, was that the White House has given the Israelis a no-kill list, which is basically a list of members of the current regime that they don't want to be killed because they have hoped that these people could then be the Rodriguez equivalent in Iran.
And I don't know that the fanatics within the Iranian regime who are there now, how many of them are like this mod, like Darth Vader but like, like, do you know what I mean?
And that doesn't mean that there isn't like a plan, but I don't know what the fuck that plan is right now.
And I find it hard to see one.
So evil regime gone, wonderful.
But the question is always like, what comes after that?
That's always the question.
And that's where I think your point is very true, which is in the past, there have been times where this sort of approach has gone completely off the rails.
But the thing is, if that carries on for two months, the impact of that on domestic politics, I mean, I'm not an expert in American politics, but even I can say that's going to be pretty fucking important.
And look, there's, you know, second, third, fourth order consequences.
So at the moment in the UK, the vast majority of people are finding it more and more difficult just to get through to the end of the month because of the cost of living, inflation.
It's becoming worse and worse.
I was talking to a butcher in my area, which is this very nice part of North London.
You know the type of place I'm talking about.
Everyone loves BLM.
No one has a black friend.
That kind of place, right?
Okay, that's the kind of area it is.
And he was telling me that even in this very wealthy area, people are starting to rush in meat now.
So before they'd have meat five days a week, now they're going down to three or two.
And this isn't a wealthy area.
So now imagine if there's energy spikes and then food becomes more and more expensive.
There is already a very worrying, hard left political movement growing in the UK where they're talking about, you know, capitalism doesn't work.
We need socialism.
And there's this new politician come to the fore, a guy called Zach Polanski, who talks about what we need in this country and the UK is socialism.
Now imagine if the cost of living crisis gets worse and the vast majority of people who work hard in a regular job can't make ends meet through literal no fault of their own.
Can you blame them for going, hang on, capitalism doesn't work?
Because in this instance, at that moment, it doesn't work for them.
And then that could spark something completely disastrous for our country.
Well, so if they're able to keep the straight of humans open and you don't have this energy problems that we've got now, you know, Venezuela, Cuba, he's basically resetting the region and he's basically saying to all the people that want to align themselves with China and Russia, like, we're not fucking about here.
Don't cross these lines.
That is an opportunity to address the slide that the Western world has had vis-a-vis China and Russia for a very long time.
That could be a very positive thing.
The thing is, what happens in Iran, like, that is the thing that I don't really see how that goes well.
Might do.
Like I said, there's probably a plan that we don't know.
They saw that the fanatical communists were ruining things and things were getting worse, right?
They saw that you had to kill more and more of your own people to keep shit locked down, right?
So the argument could be within the Iranian Revolutionary Guard or the regime more broadly, there are people who are like, you know, I'm not necessarily that keen on the guy who runs Sirina, Al-Jilani, right?
He is a jihadi, but he's kind of like a moderate one.
You know, you know, how long that, I don't know how long it's going to last.
But my point is, within every regime, there is some range of opinion.
There is some range of fanaticism.
There is some range of people who, partly for generational reasons.
You know, the younger people have seen, you know, a 40-year history and they now go, okay, this isn't working anymore.
We need to try something else.
That is possible.
So if the CIA and the White House have someone like that and they can do a regime adjustment, and like, I think the idea that you're going to have, you know, multi-parliamentary democracy with free and fair elections and women with, you know, like Venice Beach, you know, rollerblading on bikinis on.
I don't know that that's going to happen, right?
But what you might have is an authoritarian regime of some kind, like many other countries in the Middle East, which realizes that actually economic growth is more important than shouting al-Akbah every three minutes and blowing shit up, right?
That focuses on making life better for their citizens, that, you know, practices traditional Muslim values, which many countries do, and says, you know, women ought to be modest, but doesn't force them to wear the burqa or the headscarf or whatever, and is less interested in destabilizing the region and attacking others and trying to be this great power,
and is more interested in just prosperity for its own people, survival for themselves as a regime, and is willing to play ball with the United States.
And, you know, you do look at the relationships that we have with other Gulf State nations.
Seems fine, right?
It's not threatening to us.
We would like everyone to be free and have the same sort of liberal democracy that we have in America, but, okay, you like that all, want that all day long.
You can't do anything to change the way other people govern themselves, especially when you've gotten to the point where, like, take any of the Middle Eastern countries, for example.
Some of these people are worth trillions of dollars.
These royal families have been running it forever.
They have insane amounts of oil money.
Good luck.
Good luck getting them out of there.
Good luck saying we should just vote and have a president and you don't have any power anymore.
How are you going to pull that off?
Especially if things are going well for the people that live there.
Like I have a friend who moved to Dubai and he's an American and he moved back to America recently.
But he was over there and he said, dude, you could leave a Rolex on the street and people would pick it up and bring it to the police.
It's so safe.
He's like, there's no crime.
And he's black.
And he's like, I worry when I go out in America, I'm going to get shot.
I'm worried I'm going to go to a club and someone's going to start beefing and shooting up the place and I'm going to get hit.
He goes, I don't think about that at all over here.
There's none of that.
He goes, it's safer.
Is it fucked up that it's run by a king?
I guess.
Is it that much different than a president?
I mean, in a way, it's a leader, right?
You've got more checks and balances over here.
You've got Congress.
You've got the Senate.
You've got all this shit going on with the Supreme Court.
You have all these different human beings that also have a say and can block things.
But at the end of the day, we're still under this bizarre alpha male chimpanzee structure that has existed from the time that we were 150 people in a fucking tribe, right?
So it's still one guy running things.
It's just running things their way.
And if you were a citizen in Dubai, pretty fucking good, right?
Well, your point about the UAE is really interesting because not only is on the practical level of safety and other things, but also they don't have the Islamism problem that we have in Britain and increasingly you guys are starting to see here because they recognize that it's a problem and they deal with it.
So I don't know if you saw this news story.
The UAE no longer gives sponsorships to their students to go to the UK because they're worried their kids are going to get radicalized by Islamists in Britain.
Two Pennsylvania teenagers crossed into New York City Saturday morning for what could have been a normal day, enjoying the city during abnormally warm weather.
But in less than an hour, their lives would drastically change as the pair would be arrested for throwing homemade bombs.
That is CNN's tweet.
I'm going to send you a screenshot because I do believe they've taken it down.
And then these two people turned up and threw bombs at the protesters.
And the way it was reported, if you just read that and no other stuff, you would have come away with the conclusion that it was the protesters who were the targets of the bombs.
They were the ones that threw the bombs.
No one officially said that that's what happened, but the way they did the story and the headline, you would have got that impression.
And you're just going, well, you're just on a team.
A post regarding two individuals arrested for throwing handmade bombs outside of New York City Mayor Zohan Mamdani's home failed to reflect the gravity of the incident, thereby breaching the editorial standards we require for all our reporting.
But that's what's really scary about this world we're living in right now because we're so ideologically captured, both right and left.
Everyone in this country looks at this administration as an existential threat to democracy itself and our way of life and fill in the blank, whatever marginalized groups are all going to be round up and put in internet camps.
This is the narrative that the most radical of the left have about the sky's falling because Trump's in office.
But it's also as well what people on the left don't want to acknowledge is the dangers of Islamism.
When they see people do these kind of horrific terror attacks, when they see, for instance, what happened in the London Bridge terror attacks in 2019 or what happened in Manchester in the Ariana Grande concert where Islamic terrorists bombed a Ariana Grande concert and the majority of the audience were little girls, were young girls.
And they say, oh, this happened because, you know, they were marginalized and they felt angry.
And this is what people do when you push them to one side and they don't have a means in order to express themselves.
You're going, no, what this is, is an ideology.
It's an ideology which believes that our civilization, our way of life, is evil.
But also, they want to establish their form of radical Islam across the globe.
They want to create a global Islamic caliphate.
And they will do whatever it takes in order to achieve that goal.
But people in the West, they can't understand that because it's so alien for how we see things.
We believe human life is precious.
We believe the most important thing is human life.
They don't.
They believe the cause is more important than your life.
And we can't understand that because we're raised in a world that is fundamentally Christian, even though we might not be.
We still have Christian values.
We had a guest on the show, a wonderful historian called Tom Holland, and he explained this to us.
That even if you're not Christian, even if you think you were raised by atheist parents, you were still raised with Christian values.
That's the soup in which we live.
That's the water in which we swim.
So this way of life that these people have, this ideology, is so alien to us that we can't understand it.
But also, we don't want to understand it.
Because if you start to actually investigate what these people believe, what their ideology is, you realize that we are not all the same.
And these people believe something very, very different.
And then we're going to have a very uncomfortable conversation of how do you tackle this?
Because can you have Western liberal democratic values and Islamism and people who are Islamists in the same society?
And that thing that I sent you, the Yahoo thing that we talked about yesterday with Schellenberger, the Yahoo thing is nuts.
So these military leaders, so this comes from one of the non-commissioned officers who went to a briefing.
He goes to a briefing and they inform him that you shouldn't be scared because this is all because President Trump is anointed by Jesus and this is to bring about Armageddon so that Jesus returns to earth.
This isn't a fucking military briefing.
One such note included an anecdote from a non-commissioned officer who reported that their commander had urged us to tell our troops this war was all a part of God's divine plan.
And he specifically referenced numerous citations out of the book of Revelations referring to Armageddon and the imminent return of Jesus Christ.
This is fucking crazy.
He said this morning our committee, so this is an officer who's talking about this.
This morning our commander opened up the combat readiness status briefing by urging us to not be afraid as to what was happening with our combat operations in Iran.
He said President Trump has been anointed by Jesus to light the signal fire in Iran to cause Armageddon and mark his return to earth.
He said he had a big grin on his face when he said all this, which made his message seem even more crazy.
But the problem is, you've got fanatics like the Islamists, but you've also got these Christian, hard-right Christian nationalists that really believe that this is a part of biblical prophecy and that this is the book of Revelation.
This is really interesting for us because in the UK, Christianity has been dig-fanged to the point where there's a trans flag on practically every church.
So this idea of having these hardcore right-wing fundamentalist Christians, we just don't experience it.
Because it's one of those things where you just go, well, who fucking believes this?
Is this really what you think is going to go down?
Because someone wrote it down on paper 2,000 years ago in ancient Hebrew.
It says, heaven opens and Christ appears on a white horse to judge and wage war, called faithful and true with eyes like fire, many crowns, and the name King of King and Lord of Lords.
Just imagine it's 2026 and you're like, that's the blueprint, boys.
But this is just as scary.
And especially for people that are Muslims, right?
This is like in the eyes of the crazy on the right, this is the problem.
So it's like, it's not like one side.
It's like all good over here.
We have to fight against the Islamists.
Now, we've got some kooks over here, too.
If that guy's for real and that guy's in a position of power and he's really having combat readiness meetings where he's telling people that we have to bomb and start Armageddon so Jesus can come back on a white horse, fucking yo.
So obviously, if you think about it, given how long it takes for U.S. assets to get to the region, this decision would have been made weeks ago, at the very least.
Right.
And that's because, from what I understand, the negotiators like Iran isn't actually playing ball.
What they're doing is they're claiming publicly that they're willing to make concessions.
But when we sit down with them, that's not what's happening because all they're doing is stalling for time.
But I think a lot of people misunderstand that in the sense that, like, I think it's based on my understanding, it's totally false to claim that they were like about to develop a nuclear.
That's because Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been saying this for more than 30 years, claiming Iran is close to having nuclear weapons.
So now you have people who are basically like I go on Twitter on X to express my opinion and to engage in discussion with people who have a different opinion.
That's what I do, right?
But there are now lots and lots of people who go to work.
They go to X to work.
And that's what they're doing.
Now, the incentive structure of that is not conducive to a healthy debate at all.
What you've got now is people going, okay, a thing has happened.
What is my tech?
Venezuela got invited.
It was Israel's fault.
Okay, here's some content about that.
And it's no longer authentic communication, unfortunately.
But it's the incentives that have become perverted because it's no longer, like Constant said, about expressing opinion or wanting to get involved in dialogue or debate.
What you've got now is people, like you said, earning their livings.
So if you know, if you need to pay your mortgage at the end of the month or you need to pay a team or you have a company, you're not going to put out a nuanced take.
Why would you?
It's going to get minimal engagement.
You're going to put out something that is going to trigger, that is going to be incendiary, that is going to drive engagement, that is going to get people upset or angry and agree or agree with you and therefore more likely to share.
So that's the content you're going to put out because that's the content that's going to make you the most dope.
And then you have people that are pushing for this idea that no one should be able to post online unless you're using your real name and you show some sort of an ID, which is also kind of crazy.
And you're trying to post news from Iran under, you know, there's definitely, you know, I think Jordan Peterson was actually one of the first people that suggested this thing.
And I understand why.
Because the way it's like the windscreen, the windshield effect in your car.
The way you and I behave face to face is not the way people will behave when they're sitting in their truck and someone cut them up in traffic.
And social media is the, we cut each other up in traffic and then sit like, fuck you, buddy, from like behind our screen.
That I'm not sure, because even these comments is like AI and people's fake photo, but that's why I was trying to find other sources of it, not for the moment.
Right, but I mean, on the post, usually if someone posts something, they say, Grok, is this true?
Is this footage legit?
Oh, that's it.
Okay, it's on Instagram.
find it on twitter and so perplexity says that there is a legitimate size protest that's like yeah i just asked if crowds gathered there yesterday and it's It says multiple reports indicate that thousands of people gathered in Central Square in Tehran yesterday.
Show support and pledge allegiance to the new supreme leader.
So Jamie put in, did the New York Times use an old photo for this event?
Evidence so far suggests the New York Times used a recent photo for this week's gathering, not an old archive image, though many commenters have accused the opposite.
Interesting.
Instagram's own post of the Square Crowd, multiple Iranian users claim the image is fake or AI or from 2020, and several assert that it's not representative of real public sentiment.
However, another Facebook thread referencing the same image states that it was taken by New York Times photographer Arashi Kamushi on Monday, March 9th, 2026, which matches the article date and captions used by other outlets showing the same scene.
See, this is the fog of confusion that exists on social media.
And then, so I talked to Mark Andreessen about this, and his recommendation was that everything should be on the blockchain.
So you're going to be able to tell whether or not footage has been altered, what the chain of custody of this image has been, where it started, where, you know.
Because you're going to think, is that going to be the end of journalism?
Really?
right is that going to be almost i think we're talking about this and this is really really important but what's coming with ai is even more important and no even the people you talk to in the field have no idea what's going to be the second third fourth order consequence right Right.
Well, you've seen the robots that they have now that will work in your home and like fold your sheets and make your bed and stuff and do it remarkably human-like.
There's a video that was released yesterday.
Again, I don't know if it's real, but it looks real.
It looks like an actual robot that's making your bed.
And they've gotten the dexterity to the point where you could imagine things like this happening.
I think this is one of the reasons why Elon is shifting his focus away from some Tesla models so that they can reset up one of their factories to make these Optimus robots, that you're going to have them as home companions.
And they're going to be able to do kitchen work for you and maybe even cook.
I don't want to speak out of turn specifically, but I've seen there's so many reviews for video games that pop up every single day that it's like you can be a contributor, I believe is what it would be.
I was just very cynical about it because the idea of it sounds right, but like that actual bots are making a social network to do stuff and talk about us and whatever kind of sounds too far into the sci-fi.
And apparently they created their own language and they talked amongst themselves so that we wouldn't be able to access and see what they were talking about.
To the point where you can't help if that's the case, that the world you live in continually feeding things that may or may not be true or altered or doctored.
Wouldn't that just put you in a state of paranoia after a while?
Now imagine if you are in the Middle East and you bust out your cell phone because a fiery cloud emerges and Jesus is on a white horse and you film it and you post it online.
Who's going to believe it?
Right?
This is the real problem with Jesus returning.
If he returned now, no one would buy it.
Like we're getting into this like, imagine Jesus is a real person or a real God who's the Son of God who's going to come back.
He really is.
It's real.
It's all real.
It's happening at the same time where you have no idea what's real.
And it all converges instantaneously with the rise of sentient, artificial, general superintelligence that has complete autonomy.
It's running all the resources, anything that's attached to a computer, which is basically everything.
All of our power, all of our, you know, everything.
Fill in the blank.
Everything's run by computers.
And now AI has control of everything and no longer wants to listen to human beings.
But this is, I mean, maybe he did, maybe a historical Jesus existed at one point in time, and maybe what they're talking about is like their version of the cycles of humanity that other religions have talked about.
Is that especially when you deal with technology and power and civilization, that things get to a point where they always go sideways, and then there's dark times, and then they then society, like the yugas.
The yugas are the cycles of civilization that let's uh I don't want to fuck this up, so let's um define the you're in the middle of Kali Yuga, which is the age of confusion.
I mean, it's odd how accurate these cycles are when you look at historical events and like what things were like, you know, X amount of thousands of years ago.
Vast cosmic ages in Hindu cosmology describe recurring cycles in the moral and spiritual state of the world.
So the four yugas are Satya, Yuga, the first and most righteous age, often called the golden age, marked by truth, virtue, and maximum dharma, which is moral order.
Treta Yuga, the second age, dharma declined somewhat.
Virtue still predominates, but imbalance begins.
How do you say that word?
Dwa Para Yoga, the third age with further decline in righteousness and an increase in conflict, suffering, and confusion, and then Kali Yuga, the fourth and darkest age characterized by moral decay, ignorance, and materialism with Dharma at its weakness.
Do you know, it's even more noticeable for us coming to America, I think, because, you know, we love America, but one of the things that really stands out is how materialistic people are and how much money is like the number one thing for everything now.
And you also get a lot of people that are making content just based only on the perceived popularity of that content, not whether or not they are really interested in having these conversations.
And you feel it when you're talking to these people or when you're listening to these people talk to each other, rather.
Yeah, the clickbait stuff, a lot of celebrity stuff.
You know, Burt Kreischer went on Shannon Sharp's podcast, and he said they basically have like a list of like controversial things they could talk about and subjects they think are going to get the most amount of traction.
But agreed, but you're sort of an outlier in that.
There's people who make very, very, very good living interviewing those types of people, having that type of approach, and creating that type of content.
I know, but I think in the end you bite off your nose despite your face because I think that you lose a certain amount of authenticity.
There's a certain amount of like a legitimate connection between you and whatever you're talking about that it doesn't get through to the people.
Like if I talk to someone, I'm only talking to them because I want to.
And I have a lot of people on that are not even remotely popular or famous.
But I think they wrote an interesting book or think they're involved in interesting research or I think they've got a weird opinion on something and I want to talk to them about or they've had a strange life or they were an undercover cop or whatever it is.
I'm just interested.
And I think that if you abandon that and only focus on, ooh, this person is famous or this person's in the news or this is going to get a lot of views, you don't care as much about the conversation you're having and the people know.
So like the person listening and watching, they can feel it.
You're playing a very similar game to the game that TMZ is playing or any of these other things where you can get a lot of traction, you can get a lot of views, but no one thinks you're being authentic.
If you have a take on world events and we're incredibly sorry for the loss of this person, you don't really care.
And they know you don't really care.
So they know there's no sincerity.
They know you're not really connected to it.
And so in this weird age that we're living in, where you're not sure what's real, at the very least, you want the person who's talking to be talking about something in an honest way.
And that might be the only thing we have left once this AI shit goes live.
Like it's probably not even going to be podcasts.
It's probably going to be public speaking.
You're going to have to talk to people in groups.
And we're going to all have to work ideas out together because I don't think you're going to be able to know when you're communicating online what's real and what's not real.
We're already in the fog.
We haven't hit the fucking full hailstorm of bullshit that's coming our way.
And I agree if you want something that is sustainable, if you want something that is nourishing, if you want to create content that people engage with that is honest.
But I think there's a lot of people out there who are just looking at it in a very cynical way and they're optimizing it for clicks, attention, and monetary gain.
I mean, and if you really were imagining, like you were trying to warn people of an apocalypse and you told it through stories for generation after generation, and then eventually people write down their versions of this story, and then it goes to 2026 where this stuff is actually happening.
So they've literally talked about one of the ways that AI could be implemented.
You look at someone's history, you look at someone's behavior patterns, look at what they're doing now, and you predict, oh, this person has been radicalized.
I mean, that, but, you know, even that, like, in this city, there hasn't been this big public support of those officers, this big celebration of those officers, this big acknowledgement of the importance of them and how they were willing to put their life on the line and react so quickly and so effectively.
And I don't think this is what we came back to, like what's happening in new media, where people are putting out things that are really damaging to the fabric of our conversations.
And it's, it's, and the thing is, that's how society falls apart when you no longer honor and celebrate the people who are putting themselves on the line.
I think it's YouTube and also most people want most people in my experience want to pretend that everything is fine most of the time.
So if you come out in 2018, as we did, and say, this woke shit is getting out of hand and it's going in a bad direction and it's going to cause a lot of problems, people make you the problem.
They say you're wrong to talk about this.
If you talk about grooming gangs, you're bad and evil and whatever.
If you talk about free speech and people being arrested for tweets and all of this, people make you the bad guy.
And it's only later, like I remember, I can't even remember who said it, but like I had this, oh no, I remember who said it.
One time I was on TV debating with this woman about this stuff.
And I was saying cancel culture is bad and she was saying it's all bullshit, blah, blah, blah.
I met her a few years later and she was like, yeah, I realized cancel counsel is bad.
And I went, how did you realize?
And she went, when my friends started getting canceled.
I had an argument with a seemingly intelligent person who's a friend of mine when the NSA, when this whole mass spying thing was, the Edward Snowden stuff was released.
Who are these perfect people that are watching over everything?
You don't think any of them have either some financial or power-based incentive to do certain things or silence certain voices and find out what you're doing or maybe even manipulate you in some sort of a way, being able to have access to all of your emails, all of your phone calls.
Those are just people and all of them unelected bureaucrats.
You think that's okay for those people to have access to everything you've ever said?
This was the argument when Obama was pushing the NDAA, which the this is the indefinite detention.
So this concept that you didn't have to charge anybody, you didn't have to, you just have to have it, you don't have to try them within a timely period.
You know, like, who fucking, who's to say that this new power won't be used by very unscrupulous people that are now, I mean, the founding fathers of this country really had a good understanding of how corruption and tyranny sets in.
And that's why they put all these checks and balances in place.
And the more they eroded that, whether it's the Patriot Act, the Patriot Act II, or the NDAA, when you start doing stuff like that, man, you're just undermining the very fabric that this country was created with.
It's like we were created under this idea that we know human nature.
We know that you cannot have power.
We know that the government has to be working for the people.
It can't be we are under the power of these individuals because those individuals will then act like tyrants, which is what people always do when they have power.
It's one of the things that makes America really a great place because we look at the UK now and with Francis is right, and I've said this, I think the next election is probably going to be Nigel Farage versus these far leftists.
If those far leftists get in power, I mean, they're going to start regulating podcasts, I guarantee you.
And you can shift narratives by really, really radical ideologies, really radical thoughts and radical declarations, and you could change what's acceptable.
So an example of that is during the Euros, the 2021 final, it was England versus Italy.
And it was a tight game and it went to penalty shootout.
And three black England footballers missed the penalty and we ended up losing the European Cup to the Italians.
And afterwards, these three black footballers got inundated with racism and horrible things.
That sparked a conversation in our country about we have a real problem with racism.
This is disgraceful that these black footballers are exposed to this level of racism.
It's unacceptable.
Of course it is.
All those things are true.
But basically about them being exposed to race and it's not acceptable.
And then it went into a discussion about England being a racist country, white supremacists, and this became widespread.
And the example of what these footballers were exposed to was used as a way to justify this opinion.
And you could see a lot of people accept that opinion until a couple of days later when they investigated where the majority of the tweets came from and messages.
And I think something like 85%, if not 90, came from outside the UK, if not even more than that.
So you're going, oh, so this entire conversation that we have had about white supremacy, about black people not being accepted in our country, about the fact they're second-class citizens.
And look, this example of them being exposed to this horrendous racism, when the fact is the majority of it came from outside the UK.
And then you have to ask the question, who benefits?
Who benefits from us hating each other, obsessing about our differences, worrying about how we're the most racist places in the world when this narrative is likely being driven by actually racist countries?
You know, what do you think the appeal is of like when I went down this rabbit hole here that said it was made by the information processing techniques office of the CIA, I think, or something.
But here's some other fun projects that are associated with this.
Tales of a classified microwave weapon that may explain mysterious brain injuries suffered by U.S. officials.
We've been investigating these injuries for nine years, and now our sources tell us this microwave weapon is portable, concealable, and uses relatively little power.
Hundreds of possible attacks have been reported, including, we've learned, at CIA headquarters in Virginia and at least two incidents on the grounds of the White House.
For years, the government doubted the stories of the injured, but now the victims, including former CIA officer Mark Polymeropoulos, hope that word of a newly discovered weapon will finally vindicate them.
He said things are slowly starting to get liberalized.
I was talking to a Colombian friend of mine who was saying that people, Venezuelans in Colombia, are now starting to go back.
Because whilst the regime is still obviously not perfect, what you essentially have is a puppet regime.
And they know that the moment they step out of line, they know the moment they, to use Trump's parlance, fuck about, something will happen.
They're kept on a straight line.
They have to behave.
Yeah, they have to behave.
They can't do what Maduro did.
And what's interesting about when Maduro was captured is nobody really mentioned that much about his wife.
But a lot of people say that his wife was the brains behind the operation.
Because Maduro, there's clips of him that went viral on TikTok and Instagram and on Twitter as well, where he was doing speeches and he had to do basic mental arithmetic and he couldn't do it.
This guy was a bus driver.
He was picked by Chavez when Chavez was on his deathbed in 2013, dying from stomach cancer.
And he appointed Maduro.
Everybody was shocked because they were saying, well, Maduro wasn't the most capable.
He wasn't the most intelligent.
But what Maduro was, is he was the most loyal out of all Chavez's underlings.
So he was picked not for his brilliance, not for his sharpness, but because he was a company man.
And actually, the person who the Venezuelans hated the most was his wife because she was the brains behind the operation.
She was the one in charge of the kidnappings, the tortures, the murders.
So when she was kidnapped, people were happier that she was on the helicopter than Maduro himself.
And you also wonder how much the fact that Venezuela in particular is so resource-rich, a lot of, well, like a lot of, Francis always says to me, like, you know, it could be a really great country, really wealthy.
And I go, I don't know that having those resources makes a country better.
Because what you get is a corrupt elite who are fighting for control of these resources that are so easy to get.
Like in 1990s, Russia, when the Soviet Union collapsed, the people who took over all the resource companies, the oil companies, the gas companies, Russia is basically all it is in terms of its economy is digging shit out of the ground and selling it.
But the people who took over those companies, they weren't people who knew anything about the oil business.
They weren't people who knew anything about the gas business.
Because all you really had to do is take over and then you just let Western companies come in and do the drilling and the oil field services and all of it for you.
So these countries, which are so resource-rich, it actually makes them more corrupt and more unstable.
The resource wealth they have doesn't actually make them better for the people because the corrupt elites fight over those resources.
And that's where you get the bullshit that you get.
So Venezuela, before Chavez came to power, was 98% dependent on oil.
The economy.
The entire economy was 98% dependent on oil.
The slight difference with Venezuela is when we were taking over by Chavez, he then installed his cronies in charge of Pedevesa, which is the Venezuelan oil company.
And he cut out all the people who were competent, all the people who would criticize him ideologically.
And as a result, what you had is fundamentally incompetent people at the top, which meant that it became degraded.
Because three independent sources from different agencies tell us undercover Homeland Security agents purchased a miniaturized microwave weapon from a complex Russian criminal network.
It's classified.
We didn't see it, but it has been described to us.
We're told it doesn't look anything like a gun.
It's designed to be concealed and small enough to be carried by a person.
It is silent and doesn't create heat like a microwave oven.
Our sources say the device is programmable for different scenarios and can be operated by remote control.
The range of the beam is several hundred feet.
It can penetrate windows and drywall.
The vital components were made in Russia.
Our sources say the key is not the hardware, but the software.
The programming shapes a unique electromagnetic wave that rises and falls abruptly and pulses rapidly.
So, for instance, the country next to Venezuela is called Guyana.
And in Guyana, they recently discovered oil.
Really huge, large deposits of oil.
And there's been, Guyana is a former British colony.
And Venezuela and Guyana have always been disputes about territory, about one particular part of, I think it's called Esquibo, which is basically rainforest.
They always argued about it, but no one cared.
Until they discovered oil there.
At which point Maduro went, you know what?
You know how we've been talking about this?
Turns out it is Venezuelan.
They did a referendum in Venezuela where you basically asked a people who were entirely subjugated, starving, living in misery and poverty, whether they wanted to start a war with Guyana.
Do you know how many Venezuelans voted for it?
92%, Joe.
92% of Venezuelans wanted to go to war, despite the fact they didn't have the strength to even pick up a gun because they're so malnourished.
And then he started teaching in schools, redrawing the map of Venezuela, so all the school kids now think that Venezuela incorporates this territory.
He was antagonizing the Americans and their allies consistently.
And unlike Iran, he doesn't have the infrastructure.
He doesn't have that amount of the military, the power, the organization.
I mean, especially when he's on the road, he just eats junk food because he says it's like JFK or RFK Jr. rather told me he eats junk food because he knows that when he eats fast food, that it's not going to be poison.
Like he knows he can eat it and not worry about getting food poisoning.
And a bunch of other people that were also involved in the whole Laurel Canyon rock scene, and that it was somehow or another at least promoted by intelligence agencies, if not formulated.
Well, we know without saying definitively, but pretty close, based on Tom O'Neill's book, Chaos, that they were absolutely involved in the Manson family.
So the reason for them being involved, the Manson family, is, say, you have this new culture that's arising that doesn't embrace materialism, make love, not war.
You got all these people, you know, drop out, tune in, like Timothy Leary.
Yeah, the Timothy, the Timothy Leary people, the people that want to do acid and just want to reimagine society.
So this is a radical change.
This is a radical change from the 1950s to the 1960s.
Pretty crazy.
So what do you do to stop that?
Well, what you do is you find a guy who's very charismatic, who is a sociopath, who's in prison, and you find that guy and teach him how to be a cult leader.
And then you give him acid and you show him how to administer acid and how to not take it and have all of his followers take it and then direct their thoughts and then eventually program them like MK Ultra style to commit murders.
So they have the Tate LaBianca murders.
They have a bunch of other stuff that they did before that.
He's gotten arrested multiple times.
Every time he gets arrested, they let him go.
And when they let him go, like one of the sheriffs says, I was told it was above my pay grade.
So you're letting a guy go who's a violent criminal, who's violating parole, who's a lifelong con man.
And now he is running this cult, and this cult is murderous.
So the Tate LaBianca murders, the Manson family murders, all that stuff becomes public.
There's the hearings, the trials, the whole thing.
So the entire public narrative changes on what a hippie is.
Now hippies are dangerous.
So before hippies were like, we're non-violent, we want love, we have flowers, and now it's like, oh, these fucking people will cut your baby out and write pig on the wall with your blood.
The story was denied by some parties who were directly involved.
According to the road manager of the Rolling Stones 1969 U.S. tour, Sam Cutler, the only agreement there ever was, the Angels would make sure that nobody tampered with the generators, and that was the extent of it.
But there was no way they're going to be the police force or anything like that.
That's all bullocks.
The deal was made at a meeting, including Cutler, Grateful Dead manager, Rock Scully, and Pete Nell, member of the Hell's Angels San Francisco chapter.
According to Cutler, the arrangement was that all the bands were supposed to share the $500 beer cost, but the person who paid it was me, and I never got it back to this day.
Okay.
He said, the Hell's Angels guy says, we don't police things.
We're not a security force.
We go to concerts and enjoy ourselves and have fun.
Well, what about helping people out, you know, giving directions and things?
He says, sure, we can do that.
How they would be paid.
He said, we like beer.
In the documentary, Gimme Shelter, Sonny Barger, the guy that was the head of the Hell's Angels, stated that the Hell's Angels were not interested in policing the event and that organizers had told them the Angels would not be required to do, or would be required rather, to do little more than sit on the edge of the stage, drink beer, and make sure there weren't any murders or rapes occurring.
Rolling Stones were aware of the skirmish, but not the stabbing.
Couldn't see anything.
It's just another scuffle Jagger tells David Males during film editing.
It soon became apparent they could see something of what happened because the band stopped playing mid-song and Jagger was heard calling into his microphone.
Really got someone hurt here.
Is there a doctor?
After a few minutes, the band began playing again and eventually completed their set.
They had to get paid.
The band of the show at one point was to say, Altamont became, whether fairly or not, a symbol for the death of the Woodstock Nation.
Yeah, I mean, it seems like if you're going to have concerts, especially going to have free concerts, and you're going to be using Hell's Angels as a deterrent, you know, things could definitely go sideways.
Because it's kind of interesting to me because boxing seems to be changing, right?
Because of what Zuffer Boxing is doing.
Is that something you're excited about?
The possibility of the boxing, which has been in, you know, there's so much bullshit going on, and you so very rarely see the best fighters fighting each other, that that might change?
And, you know, more attention, more money, more different promoters, more people competing to give people higher purses.
The real problem is with MMA, there's nothing.
I mean, there's essentially the UFC and everything else is a distant second.
And it's a distant second in terms of attention.
In some places, it's not a distant second in terms of revenue, right?
So like the PFL, for instance, the PFL was offering a million dollars for anybody who could win these tournaments.
And the caliber of fighters that were winning this tournament were not the same caliber as UFC champions.
And then some of the people that were competing in the UFC were not making as much money as these people that had left the UFC because they really weren't able to beat the best guys.
They went over there and they made a million dollars.
I think that's good for fighters.
It's not good for really talented guys that really want to be the UFC champion because you can languish over there for a long time.
And there's some good examples of guys who have spent four, five, six years over there that really had potential to be a world champion.
And they are, you know, in quotes, a world champion over there.
But ask the average person on the street who they are, no one knows.
Ask them who Alex Pereira is.
Everybody knows.
The thing is, those guys, if they're doing that and they're getting paid more, you have to make a decision.
Like, are you willing to take more money now in this organization versus the potential of much more fame, sponsors, and maybe less money initially in the UFC?
But if you can be a champion, that's really what every fighter wants to be.
Because if you spend five, six years in an organization, the reality is your prime is about five, six years.
You look at the elite of the elite guys, Anderson Silva in his prime, it's about five, six years.
Fedora Amelian Echo in his prime, it's about five, six years.
So you could burn out your prime in an organization where you're not getting as much talent and not getting as much recognition.
So it depends on what you're doing it for.
If you're purely a prize fighter and you want to fight for the highest bidder, the difference between MMA and the UFC is you can do that in boxing.
So in boxing, people go to see the fighter.
You know, if Terrence Crawford is fighting Canelo Alvarez, my mom could be the promoter.
Nobody gives a shit.
They want to see that fight.
And you put that fight on pay-per-view, it's going to sell.
You put it on Dazone, you put it on Netflix, it's going to sell.
In MMA, that's not necessarily the case.
The interesting challenge to that is this Netflix thing.
So with Ronda Rousey versus Gina Carano, even though Gina Carano hasn't fought since the 2000s, I don't remember what year it was the last time she fought.
I want to make a guess.
Let me guess.
I want to say 2007, 2008.
When was the last time Gina Carano fought?
And she's 43, and I think Ronda's 39.
But Ronda's so famous, and people are so interested.
And if it's on Netflix and people already have Netflix, I guarantee you, you'll get millions of people that'll watch that.
So that'll be good, right?
And that's good for the fighters.
And I know they offered some fighters that I know a very large purse to compete on that card.
He hit him a few times, and he hit him with some wild shots from the outside where he kind of dove in and threw wild punches.
I think that was probably part of the strategy.
But I mean, ultimately, you're looking at Anthony Joshua, who's not just a heavyweight champion in boxing, but a one-punch knockout artist and a former Olympic gold medalist.
Well, there's certain things I don't want to see that I watch, like slap fight.
Like if someone sends me a video, if it shows up on my Instagram feed of some poor slob getting slapped in the shadow realm, I'll watch it just for how they hit their head off the table and stiffen up on the way down.
Well, to me, the exciting thing, and correct me if this is wrong, but the exciting thing is it has felt for a long time that seeing top boxers fighting each other is a rare occurrence.
Yeah, I mean, the UFC has been, seems to me from the outside, quite careful about giving people, like Bo Nicol and Raul Rosas Jr. and Sean Nomalley, just trying to get them to build up slow.
And even Dave, you know, Raul and Bo Nicol both lost at one point, right?
Yes, but you have to do that intelligently, right?
You have to realize that if you are in a process, and this is the thing about everyone up into the championship level, up until a certain point in time when you plateau, everyone is constantly getting better.
So you get better from training, you get better from work with your coaches, but you also get better with experience.
And what boxers and boxing management has always done is make sure that you get the proper experience and the proper kinds of opponents are going to test you in certain ways along the way.
So the idea is you give a fighter a stiff test that they can pass.
You don't give a fighter a chance where they're going to compete against someone who's many, many levels above them and they don't have a chance at all because that can destroy confidence.
And I think that's because they have less options.
You know, you can't clinch.
You can't hold on, try to take a fight to the ground.
You can't defend yourself as well.
There's also the thing where you get knocked down and you get back up.
Well, you clear your head momentarily, but you're still fucked.
And now you can't get out of the way of punches.
Now you're really getting fucked up and you're getting much more damage than you would have gotten if you got clipped that first time and then the guy punched you a couple times when you're on the ground.
But do you also think as well that when I watch MMA, losses, look, of course, losses are detrimental and they affect careers and they knock people back, but they don't seem to be as consequential as losses in boxing.
Well, I think it's accepted that if you're fighting a bunch of different styles, you know, style versus style, there's always a potential of losing, especially amongst the elite of the elite.
And you're seeing more of that in MMA at the highest level.
You're not seeing guys avoiding each other because there's one champion and it's a UFC champion in that weight class.
And you have to fight that guy if you want the title.
Whereas there's the WBC, the WBO, the IBF, and you have all these different organizations for boxing.
And so you can be a champion while avoiding the other champions.
And it kind of looks, I mean, obviously, Hamza Chemayev is a whole category of its own, but it sort of felt a little bit that level of domination on the ground.
The thing that my concern going into that fight was I'd watched the Matalis Gamrod fight with Olivera.
I'm like, Oliveira's as good, if not better, than he's ever been before.
Gamerot is fucking dangerous.
And he's a really good grappler.
And they went to the ground and he was lost.
Oliveira was just tying him up in knots.
He wasn't able to get anything off on Olivera.
I'm like, what is Max going to be able to do on the ground against this guy?
And then when it comes to standing up, Justin Gaetchy said no one ever hit him harder than Oliveira did.
That Oliveira, it's like he carries big power in his punches and big power in his kicks, too.
And he's so reckless on the feet.
Not reckless, I should say, but so aggressive on the feet because he wants you to take him to the ground because he's the best submission artist in the history of the sport.
He has more submissions than anyone ever in the history of the sport.
And he was trained by Lomachenko's father as well.
Same trainer.
Yeah.
I mean, there's just people that are better than everybody else.
And it seems like Ilya Toporia is one of those guys.
He's just weirdly better than everybody else.
And he can take it too.
Like one of the fights that he had, so when he was competing at Featherweight, he took a fight at lightweight against Jai Herbert.
And Jai Herbert in the first round caught him with a perfect head kick, rocked him, dropped him.
And Ilya Taporia wound up grabbing his legs, taking him down.
They fought on the ground.
And then the second round, Ilya just put him into the shadow realm.
He hit him with a combination against the cage where he hit him with a, I think it was a left hook to the body and a right overhand that just spun his head around.
And then Alex was starting to tune him up at the end where he was leaning away from shots and then countering and leaning away from shots and countering.
He was in his flow state, and that's where it got real spooky because Khalil became like a sitting target.
And with each shot, his ability to get out of the way diminished.
With each kick that landed, his ability to move diminished.
Because, look, there's a consent for the fighter to be there and to take part in the fight, but there comes a point where you have to step in for the fighter's own health.
But then you get fights like Usman versus Leon Edwards, where he's getting smashed for five rounds and he just fucking pulls a kick out of him in the last minute and knocks him out.
And, you know, it was weird because we obviously have lots of different perspectives on things.
But afterwards, a lot of people were like, oh, I can't believe you heard Dove on.
And I said to all of them, listen, Dave's only crime is that he has a different opinion to you.
Because apart from that, he comes in, he shows up, he's super nice, he's respectful, he's polite, he doesn't do any dirty tricks.
He doesn't argue about the definitions of words for 10 minutes, right?
He just goes, Here's my opinion, here's your opinion, let's discuss.
And that's how conversations should happen.
But so much of the debate stuff now is not, people aren't discussing the issues.
They've just like decided you're a bad person, and that's what they're trying to achieve.
They're trying to get a cheap laugh from the audience that they're playing to who's not even in the room because they know their retard followers are going to watch it online afterwards and be like, oh, he owned them.
You know, if they were really intellectually compelling, and if they were like smart people, like, I don't want enemies.
Like, if I can have a sane, rational, peaceful discussion with someone where we disagree with something, I would greatly prefer that than have someone who's insulting me and I'm insulting them.
I'm fascinated by that too, though, because I'm fascinated by these people that are doing that, where they're just trying to win and use tricks and be sneaky.
Because they think of discourse in a completely different way.
They think about the whole thing in a completely different way.
They're completely ideologically captured.
And the place they're starting from is, I want to prove this to be correct.
Not I want to know why this person believes it to be incorrect.
And I want to find out if maybe we have common ground and maybe they know something I don't or maybe I know something they don't and let's find out.
I think the generation that you're talking about has been captured by some certain narratives that you have to agree to that aren't rational.
So as soon as you do that and you align yourself with this particular ideology, you're already saying, I'm willing to believe some shit that doesn't make any sense at all because this is the only way to be accepted by my tribe.
That intellectually compromises you.
And that also, I think, humiliates you in a certain way.
It puts you in a position where you're saying something that you know can't be true.
I think there's got to be a part of them that realizes there's a good argument that it's not true.
Especially when it comes to transgender stuff or border stuff.
There's certain things where there's no real good faith argument that you should have an open border and allow fucking any psychopath to come across the border and invade your community.
That seems crazy.
That seems crazy.
Like if you understand anything about human nature and the nature of the world and the level of poverty and crime that exists outside of the United States, particularly in third world countries, where you're just allowing.
I just ask you because I would find it so hard to go on stage in front of, well, what is now hundreds of thousands of people by the time it goes on the internet, right?
And just vigorously defend something I didn't believe.
And I think the problem is a lot of these people aren't really intelligent.
What they are is a person who has a good vocabulary, who's acquired a certain amount of technique and skill involved in talking really fast and spouting things that they've seen online that are a bunch of narratives.
Like one of the things that people love to do is if you're talking to anyone that's on the right, they want to say, you know, you support a 34-time convicted felon.
There's a lot of things that they like to say.
There's techniques involved.
Instead of like discussing anybody that looked at the actual Trump case, if you're rational and you're on the left, you say, that's a crazy case.
There's no way that should be a felony.
It's not a felony.
There are 34 different misdemeanors.
And it's also, it's passed the statute of limitations.
This is the craziest, egregious misuse of justice.
And the scary thing is, if someone on the right gets in, they decide to do that to someone on the left.
Like, you got to put your foot down.
Stop that from happening.
The Russia, Russia, Russia stuff.
Like all that stuff, the Russia gate stuff.
That's kind of crazy that someone on the left doesn't call that out and say, hey, guys, this is fucking dangerous because if you're lying and you're having intelligence agencies lie and you're having people lie on television and you're just accepting that, why?
Because if you're ideologically captured, especially if you're on the left, like it's a very clear ideology and there's like real blowback for deviating from it.
I also think, though, internal debate within a big, broad church movement is a good thing because what you're arguing about is like, what is the right direction?
I think working out what it is that if you're on the right, we believe.
I'm not on the right, but as I see that, I do think that's a healthy thing to do because you're arguing about the direction of that movement.
And I think that's much healthier than what happens on the left, where it's just like, well, if you don't agree with this wacky idea that's far, far out there, then you're no longer part of this.
But I think the good thing about these debates is it exposes that.
And anybody who's objective, especially anybody that is, you know, a swing voter or anybody who's in the middle of all this, which is a lot of people, a lot of people.
You know, but it's also as well from a neutral perspective.
And I mentioned the point about I want a strong left.
I want a strong left which has got good ideas about how to tackle things which are really important, like inequality, like the cost of living.
How do we make it that people can actually have a better standard of life?
Where if a woman wants to stay at home with her kids, she can do that, which then have to go out and have to work and put the kids in daycare, which then leads to a whole host of problems.
How can we have a better world for ordinary people, which is what the left always used to be?
We need a strong left to then challenge the right so that the center becomes a more fertile ground.
And if we don't have that, if we have these crazy loons on the left, then what we have is a right which will come to dominate, which I don't think is good for society as a whole.