Dave Smith critiques Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick's alleged tariff trading and Epstein denials while debating AI governance efficiency. He condemns masked ICE agents and the "Greater Israel Project," arguing that current foreign policy contradicts Trump's 2024 war-ending promises. Smith refutes bot accusations against his following, supports Elon Musk's Twitter acquisition for authentic discourse, and urges Thomas Massie to run for president to halt the Iran conflict and expose the Epstein cover-up. [Automatically generated summary]
So, Dave, you were telling me right before the show that you are now retiring because you got an impromptu phone call and bet hundreds of millions of dollars on oil prices going down.
Elder Lutnick announced the sale of the stake in the firm and other investors, Supreme Court on Friday invalidated many of Trump's tariffs.
The president said, Okay, Castor did not consider the product, which has existed for years.
It was humming trade on Wall Street's Trump first-term tariff push, but decided against it after weighing the political sensitivities.
According to a senior banker familiar with this matter, a Cantor spokesman said the salesman erroneously believed the firm was likely to greenlight the business.
Okay, I'm missing this.
I'm not exactly sure what they're saying here.
This is just the legality of tariffs or discussing that.
Did you see that there was these San Francisco tech guys, and they got trapped in their Waymo because a homeless guy started attacking the Waymo and yelling at them, why are you paying robots?
But another one, a Waymo, a gal got in, and there's a fucking homeless guy in the trunk because apparently the last person, when they left their Waymo, they opened the trunk to get their luggage out, and they never closed it.
So the homeless guy hopped into their fucking Waymo and closed the house.
The main claim is that Cantor Fitzgerald, Howard Luttnick's former firm now chaired by his son, stood to profit by buying tariff refund rights that only became valuable if Trump's tariffs were overturned.
But the firm insists it ultimately did not execute those trades.
What critics say happened?
Investigators and reporters, reporting notably by Wired, described Cantor Fitzgerald exploring a business where it would buy the rights to future tariff refunds from importers for about 20 to 30 cents on the dollar.
Internal materials cited in those reports suggested Cantor had capacity to trade several hundred million dollars of these refund rights and had already facilitated at least one trade of around $10 million in rights under the IEEPA tariffs.
The idea was that if courts later struck down the tariffs, the government would have to refund duties and Cantor or its clients would collect the full refund while the original importers only kept a small upfront payment.
It says internal materials cited in those reports suggested Cantor had capacity to trade and had already facilitated at least one trade of around $10 million in rights.
What Cantor and Luttnick's side say, Cantor Fitzgerald has publicly stated that while some salespeople explored, I like that in quotes, brokering tariff refund rates in 2025, the firm never executed any transactions or taken any position on tariff refund claims, calling contrary reports false.
Follow-up recording has echoed that Cantor considered products tied to the Supreme Court tariff ruling, but ultimately backed off in part because of the political optics.
Duh.
Fuck it, that's a big duh.
Around Lutnick's government job.
Latest coverage is no public evidence that Cantor actually booked profits from this strategy, though the investigations in Congress are ongoing and focus on whether there was any attempted or potential profiteer.
Are you more interested in the ethics conflicts of interest or the nuts and bolts of how the secondary tariff refund market works financially?
I mean, if which is probably going to happen, but the Democrats take the House and the Senate in the midterm elections this year, I mean, that'll just be the next two years of politics.
I mean, look, in his first term, they impeached him twice for absolute bullshit.
So they'll go after him for anything.
But I have a feeling now there's probably a lot more for them to investigate and work on stuff like this and the meme coin stuff and whatever business deal.
You know, I don't have the details at the top of my mind, but I do know that they said at one point that Jared Kushner would not be involved in this administration at all because he does so much business over there.
And it's just like, so they were like, oh, no, no, no, he won't.
But now he totally is.
Him and Witkoff are like the lead negotiators in this, too.
So there's a lot of meat on the bone for Democrats to make big political theater out of for the next two years.
I mean, when we look at the insider trading in Congress, when you look at all these slimy deals that get made with NGOs, you look at every, it's like everything's dirty.
There was a while, like, where so many post officers went so crazy and started shooting people that they started calling it going postal, but it never just went away.
I mean, he fought like the whole, like, I think when he started was like BJ Penn era of lightweight, and then he fought into like Anthony Pettis was the champion.
No, I mean, that's a real tough one, but there's nothing.
Well, I guess like professional football, there's a similar aspect to where like you're not just, I mean, look, you can go to the hospital from basketball.
You know, you can get hurt and get a bad injury.
But the NFL or the UFC, you kind of like, you know, every time you go into it, like there's a very reasonable chance you're leaving here on a stretcher to go to the hospital.
But particularly with MMA, it's the most unforgiving sport where like you, you're one mistake, one mistake away from like, you know, like if LeBron James misses a wide open layup, he runs back on defense and tries to, you know, get a block or something on the next play.
Which was like, it's an interesting thing how much, you know, like, well, first off, like getting knocked out cold like that, and you know better than me, but like that does a number to your body.
Like that's not psychologically.
Well, psychologically.
And also, I think physically.
And then also just like the confidence that that gave Leon Edwards going into the next fight just changes everything now.
I remember seeing that with, I felt like you could watch that when Dustin Poirier fought Connor McGregor the second time.
Like, you know, McGregor had knocked him out years earlier.
And you could kind of see, you know, like you could see Dustin.
I'm not saying like he was nervous or anything.
He's like one of the greatest fighters ever, but you could kind of just see like he gets in there and he starts and he takes a couple shots from Connor and he's still there, you know, and then he lands a couple shots and you could see like in that first round, like his confidence growing.
Like you almost got to get that out of your head.
That it's like, yeah, yeah, yeah, that guy beat you that back then, but you're a different guy now.
And, you know, we also saw a few leg breaks, right?
We saw the Anderson Silva one.
We saw the Chris Wideman one.
There's been a few leg breaks from guys just full power leg kicking the thigh.
And then someone just lifts up their knee a little bit and takes it on the right where the shin bone meets the kneecap is where they like to catch it.
And boy, I've seen way too many of those.
I've seen a bunch in person, but because of the internet, I've seen dozens and dozens of small promotions where a guy throws that kick wrong really hard and the guy checks it and his fucking foot just wraps around the leg and you see it dangling there.
You're like, oh, no.
I've seen him recognize the thing.
Like that injury is so recognizable.
Like I've seen it so many times now.
I see it.
I just go, oh, it's going to wrap around the calf.
And he had an amazing ability, even very early in his career, which was like kind of, it was really unique.
Like, because even like on his first fight ever, if you watch his first fight in the UFC against like Brimmage, I think the guy's name is.
And he was relatively unknown at the time.
But dude, the place is going nut.
He already had made so much kind of like street cred for himself.
And then the Irish thing, like the Irish were really, really into it.
But from the very first fight, he would always create these moments where it's like, dude, this is going to be the biggest spectacle that you, my opponent, has ever been in in their career.
Like, I'm going to get you mad with shit talking.
I'm going to get the fans so excited because he's completely comfortable there.
Like, I'm not sure if you're really comfortable here.
And even with Aldo, who had been the entire division, literally when they started the division, they started him as champion.
He didn't even win it.
He came in because they absolved the WEC.
So he was the entire featherweight division, had just dominated everyone, and he even created such a moment that like Aldo was like, he was the boogeyman.
So I went with Louis J. Gomez, my good friend, hilarious comedian.
And me and him went to some Irish bar to watch.
Like we just happened to be in Midtown Manhattan and we were like, oh, the fights are coming on.
Oh, they're playing it at this bar.
It was just like an Irish pub.
And dude, I mean, it wasn't even that big of a bar.
They must have, I mean, it was shoulder to shoulder Irish people losing their fucking minds.
Like it was the, it was the most fun environment to watch a fight in because they're just at, I mean, they're just like, but all that singing and chanting.
It seemed like everyone had an Irish flag with them.
By the way, I was going to say that Douglas Murray's big knock on me when he wrote his op-ed in the New York Post was he goes, you know, Dave goes on Joe Rogan and he talks about foreign policy like he's an expert, but I bet he wouldn't go in there and talk MMA with him because then Joe would recognize he's not an expert.
think he's a brilliant man but i was very disappointed with uh you've never been I'm very, very disappointed with that sort of strategy, that you shouldn't be talking about these things that are factual.
But even more disappointed with that notion, the notion that you would never talk about MMA with me.
You think we would.
First of all, I don't think I argue about MMA with anybody.
Well, you know, it was a weird, a weird thing during that show was because it's a weird, I don't know, there's like weird incentives built into like all of this.
Well, also, from my perspective, I was a little disappointed with it because I kind of thought, I was like, oh, this could be like a really cool thing.
And it had been literally, which I don't think I'm saying anything that is like betraying confidence here, but the only thing that was ever said to me, I remember you called me and you were like, what do you think about doing this?
And I think I said yes before you could finish answering the question.
Yes, absolutely.
Let's do that.
And then you told me that he had said, hey, he really doesn't want this to devolve into like a food fight.
And if you're a human being and you recognize that there are human beings that are subjected to that government, just like you're subjected to ICE, you're subjected to Homeland Security.
You're subjected to the cops.
If you're a civilian, you have to listen to these orders.
So if you're living in Gaza and you're a child or you're a woman and you live, you're not Hamas.
Okay.
And the idea that you're responsible for October 7th, even if you're one of the people that cheered in the street, boy, don't you think you kind of have to cheer in the street if everybody else is cheering the street?
If you're fucking in terror for your life and you have to like keep your safety intact, like you got to kind of go along with whatever everybody else is doing.
I'm not saying that's good, but when you look at how that place is leveled, I mean, the most recent videos that I've seen were still like a few months old.
And so instead, you pivot to arguing against this guy rather than against the issue.
Well, I think that I can't remember if this was in the letter to America or this was in his declaration of war against America, but Osama bin Laden literally said that civilians are fair targets because you guys have elections and you vote for these politicians and they're the ones who conduct these wars that slaughter innocent Muslims.
So like just saying, it's the logic of Osama bin Laden to say that civilians are responsible for what.
And in Gaza, like they don't even really have a government.
Hamas is not a government.
They don't have regular elections.
They had one election back in 05 or 06 or whatever it was, which Hamas did not even win majorities of.
They won on pluralities.
You know what I mean?
And so the idea that you're holding these people responsible for Hamas just doesn't make any sense.
And just on a very basic human level, you just kind of go, and I'm not like an egalitarian.
I'm not saying all people are equal or all cultures are equal or anything like that.
But on a very basic human level, like those are real people too.
And when a mother is like pulling her six-year-old dead body out of the rubble, that's the same exact experience as if your wife was pulling your six-year-old out of there.
Like that same thing is happening to her.
And once you even just admit that, it does just change the calculation.
It changes the calculation to be like, okay, look, the onus is on you to demonstrate that this is absolutely necessary.
Like there is no other option than to do it this way.
And that makes defending most wars very difficult.
Not all of them, you know, but most wars are very difficult to defend if you just run it through that filter of like, is there any other option other than this?
Have you exhausted everything else?
And then, of course, in the case with Israel and Palestine, you go, oh, you never even tried to just give them their independence?
You've never tried to just let them out from this occupation and see if maybe that will improve things?
Immigration and customs enforcement officers were deployed at airports across the United States on Monday.
So I, of course, you know, you get on social media, somebody sends you something, and somebody sent me something.
I'm not sure it was true.
But it was like, look at the difference between the lines at the airport before ICE was there and after ICE was there, and tell me that only 10 million illegal aliens got in.
They're like, what is the real?
We were talking about this last night.
Like, what's the real number?
What is the real number of illegals in the United States?
Well, I remember the numbers being like during the Biden administration where they'd be like, it was something like last month there were 700,000 border apprehensions.
And you're like, well, geez, then how many were just floating?
And you'd see those big caravans coming in and stuff.
I mean, look, it's a huge, that still is a huge scandal.
And as much as I have really been really criticizing Trump and the Trump administration since last summer, you know, he's done a good job in securing the border.
That is the one thing that you kind of got to give him.
Supposedly, this is the book that got Donald Trump on the immigration issue.
At least I've heard Ann Coulter say that before.
Maybe that's right.
Maybe that's not right.
But yeah, I mean, look, it's like, it's also a particularly, it's a profound act of treachery for a government to do that to its own country.
Like to allow that and really facilitate that to happen against the will of the domestic population.
Like if you were to, I've tried to look this up before.
I was trying to figure this out because I did a big immigration debate last year or maybe the year before.
And I was trying, you can't even get numbers on what the polling on open borders is because no one even asked the question in polling because it's like they asked like, do you think immigration policy should be less restrictive or more restrictive?
Because the number of people who support open borders, it's like maybe 1% of the country supports that.
It's as unified an issue as anyone could have.
No, you can't just have the border wide open.
And so to do that to the American people against their will, like you, you drastically change the country in a way that is not really, it's not easy to just undo.
I mean, as we've seen, right, Donald Trump backed off of mass deportations almost immediately because big business doesn't want it.
And then because, look, like the level of violence that you'd need to just physically deport 50 million people is going to be something that the American people just aren't going to put up with.
I mean, you even see in Minnesota.
And rightfully so.
I completely understand it.
But you see, like, you know, I saw one thing.
I saw that Trump had asked the ICE agents who were going to the airports to not wear their masks.
And I was like, is that even a, that's even an option?
But at the same time, you know, there is a balancing act there.
And, you know, a lot of people, like a lot of right-wingers, will say, hey, look, if you're, you know, if you came here illegally, then that's a crime.
You're here illegally.
That's the law.
And hey, I get that argument.
But also, the supreme law of the land is the Constitution of the United States of America.
And I've seen a ton of videos where there were masked ICE agents not even identifying themselves, going up to people, telling them that you have to answer my questions.
You don't have an option to walk away, which is like not true.
That was my take on it: is that you can't accept people that are masked, that don't have any paperwork, that don't have a warrant on the streets in militarized situations.
Because if they're using it for this, which you agree to, that opens up the door for them to use it because you won't take your vaccine or because you did this or did that or whatever the fuck it is.
If a different person gets in power, maybe they're going to use it for something you don't support.
It's just not something you're supposed to accept.
Something that someone told me that is, this is a very credible source that I cannot reveal what the source is.
But they told me that there are people in this country, and not just a few, but many, many that are affiliated with terrorist organizations, directly affiliated, but they've applied for asylum.
And because they've applied for asylum, you can't deport them until they go through the entire process.
I think he's got a fair point there with suicidal empathy in terms of the idea of like that we that we cannot say on some level that it's like, no, look, we have a desire to preserve our society and we want to do what's bad.
And we don't have to, out of some feeling of guilt, turn our country into something worse than what it otherwise would be.
So I think he's got a point there.
I think, and look, I'm not a big fan of Gad.
He literally just, him and like Sam Harris and a few others, they literally just trash me all the time and refuse to engage on a single thing I've said.
So like it'll just he calls me Wikipedia Dave on Twitter.
I think it's a little bit different with the Mossad thing.
But I also think that the big component that I think all of those guys are missing is that we also create more enemies with our foreign policy.
And that's not to say that, like, you know, they always kind of caricature my position on this.
Like, I'm not saying Islam is all peaceful and there are no problems in the Islamic world or anything like that.
In fact, I don't think any religion has truly always been peaceful.
But, you know, for guys like, say, like Sam Harris, who these kind of like pretend intellectuals who have spent, he spent his entire career talking about how violent and irrational the Muslims are and how you can't even draw a cartoon of Muhammad or Muslims want to do violent stuff.
And like, hey, fair enough.
That's bullshit.
And we should all say like, if you want to be over here in the West, our values are free speech and you cannot kill people for cartoons.
But then like none of them ever also go, hey, you know, murdering an Ayatollah might be dangerous during Ramadan.
Like that is, you know, that is not just a political figure to Shiite Muslims.
That is a, so at the same time, it's like, okay, I'm fine with saying, okay, you don't want to have suicidal empathy.
My buddy Keith Knight, who's brilliant, works over at the Libertarian Institute.
He had, I forget what he said, but he said something like, okay, I don't want to have suicidal empathy.
Let's also not have homicidal empathy, you know?
And so like, maybe it also is, like, as we were tying into that whole conversation with, no, I'm okay, thanks.
With the whole thing about the kids and women in Gaza, it's like, it's also the fact that if you just view slaughtering Muslim children in the Middle East and in Northern Africa as like just an acceptable political price, you know, that's just collateral damage.
And unfortunately, that happens when we pursue this policy.
You're going to deal with more and more of that.
And the combination of both, Joe, like the combination of having open borders, having all these people get in and continuing the war on terrorism and slaughtering people in these numbers must be the most insane combination ever.
The idea that you'd be like, we're going to, you know, we're going to just make an entire generation of Muslims hate us because so many of them have seen what we've done to their countries.
And also, we'll welcome all of them in with no checks and we can't get rid of them when they come here.
I should clarify this because he's apparently talked about me again recently on Bill Maher.
We didn't not talk because it was his idea.
It was me.
He wanted to do a podcast with me.
He wanted to do like a COVID wrap-up, like to go over everything that happened, all the mistakes that were made and his position, my position, because that's where we kind of separated.
He was very pro-vaccine.
I said, I won't do that until you talk to Brett Weinstein, that you need to talk to Brett.
Like, Brett, you disparaged him publicly.
I think you said things that weren't correct.
You called him a conspiracy theorist and you said you wouldn't platform him because it's dangerous.
I don't believe that's true.
I believe the problem is that Sam was incorrect about both the effectiveness and the safety of the COVID vaccines.
Brett was correct.
And Brett didn't insult Sam.
Sam insulted Brett.
I mean, Brett said things about Sam since, but it was Sam.
And I said, look, you got to talk to him first.
You can't just talk to me, you know, especially because he's an actual evolutionary biologist.
Like, he understands these things.
He knows what he's talking about.
He's had multiple conversations with high-level vaccinologists and all these different people that worked on the RNA vaccines.
Like, he was correct.
We all know that now.
We know that all the things that he was talking about, whether it's masking doesn't work, social distancing, the lockdowns, all the above.
We are taught, for example, to regard Gaddafi in a certain way.
But if you look into what happened in his country while he was the leader, you look into the fact that every person is given a house at a certain age.
You look at the fact that everybody's education and health care is free.
You look at if somebody showed a particular talent for something that required further education overseas, all of the costs of that were paid for by the government.
Now, these are all things put in place by the same country's leader that we're told is evil and corrupt.
Well, also, like, what even is the plan with boots on the ground?
Like, what are you talking about here?
You're gonna, I know.
You're gonna take an island?
It goes, okay, well, then you're gonna be a target.
You're gonna be target practice as long as the Iranian regime is still standing.
And if you're talking about militarily occupying the country, like we did with Iraq or Afghanistan or something like that, this is a huge country with 92 million people.
How many soldiers do you think you need to occupy that country?
At least half a million?
And probably you can't do it with that.
So what are you talking about here?
And so you're saying, are we going to start a draft for the least popular war going in in American history?
Well, they called it Vietnam syndrome that the American people had, which is that we didn't want to fight a war again after that.
From their perspective, that's a syndrome.
And it's really something.
They think, by the way, Ben Shapiro used this same line called, he said, Trump finally broke Iraq war syndrome.
Because they think, see, from Ben Shapiro's perspective, the illness is after you lie the American people into a war and slaughter a million people.
The illness isn't that.
You might look at that as the bad part, but the bad part is that these annoying Americans have this tendency to not want to do that again after that.
But he claims Trump has broken Iraq war syndrome.
Of course, there's really no evidence with support of the American people that that has changed at all.
And, you know, George H.W. Bush was said to have defeated Vietnam war syndrome in Panama and in Iraq because they were relatively easy, you know, bloodless on the American side or very, very limited, you know, injuries and deaths.
And they, you know, they weren't like quagmires that went on forever or whatever.
But, of course, after the Persian Gulf War in 92, we went on to be bombing Iraq for ever since, essentially.
You know, I mean, for 30 straight years after that, we were still at war with that country.
When was the last time anybody called you up and said, Dave, first of all, when's the last time you ever picked up the phone if you didn't know who was calling?
And then when you do answer, when was the last time you said yes to a poll?
And so what they're doing here is that they're filtering who they consider to be MAGA and who they consider to be MAGA are the people who still say they support Donald Trump.
But 100% of the people who don't support this war stopped supporting Donald Trump over it.
Well, Trump himself has said, which literally this would be like considered an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory if anyone else had said it.
But Donald Trump has openly talked about many times how the Edelsons give him all this money and they come by every day and all they have is another demand on behalf of Israel.
Donald Trump also, very early in his political career, got in trouble with the Israel lobby and then immediately pivoted to blaming, to winning their favor back over by saying he would tear up the JCPOA, the Iran deal that Obama got us into.
And it looks to me, you know, there's speculation aside, who knows exactly what control they have over the guy.
But it looks to me that after Venezuela and when there were these big street protests and riots against the regime and Iran there, that they convinced Trump, and this is what Joe Kent, his director of counterterrorism, has said too, that they essentially convinced him that this would be the time you could do it swiftly, surgically remove the regime, and the people would rise up and overthrow it.
And this is what Donald Trump said when he launched this war.
He said, this is a regime change, and I'm calling on the great people of Iran to rise up.
And they did.
They rose up by at least the hundreds of thousands they were out in Tehran in defense of the regime chanting death to America.
Because it turns out, when you kill 165 little girls, that doesn't make a country go, we love you.
He was convicted of that, whatever that means in a mullah-run court.
So I'm not saying that's right at all.
But I will say this, right?
Donald Trump, when he launched this war, and there's been a whole lot of just false claims that have been made, but he said specifically that they killed 32,000 protesters.
There has not been a shred of evidence presented to back up this claim.
Now, I'm not saying it's not true.
I'm not putting it past this government that they would do that.
And they've acknowledged that a lot of people have died.
I think they, I think the last I had seen was that I know they were saying the government of Iran is before the Ayatollah was killed.
They were saying it was something like 3,000 people had died.
But then the CIA, at least there was a piece in the Washington, excuse me, in the Wall Street Journal where they had said, and this was like a week and a half into it, that they estimated like 6,500 or something like that.
If that's the case, but we're talking also here, Joe, about like NED-funded U.S.-based NGOs who are really around hawks, you know?
And so, and I'm just saying, like, look, the claim, the claim here is that around, you know, I saw a bunch of the Zionists online when this was first coming out back in January.
They were like, oh, my God, they've already killed half as many people as died in Gaza in just a couple days.
And you're like, right, that's a pretty, that's a hell of a claim, right?
I mean, like, if you, just from following wars all these years, if you started carpet bombing Tehran, Vietnam style, carpet bombing Tehran, after two days, that's the type of death toll you'd be looking at.
Not only that, in the past, our agencies, our intelligence agencies, have engaged in nefarious practices where we have conscripted certain people to go and light things on fire and blow things up and create these events.
And for every right-winger to go, yeah, whatever, dude.
Got what you deserve.
So all my point is about this, looking at this in the Iranian regime, it's just not clear.
Like, what are you actually accusing them of?
Are you saying that somebody was trying to overthrow the government and the government mowed them down?
Are you saying that they lined up protesters and shot them all in the back of the head simply for voicing their opinion?
Like, none of this is made clear, but when the war drums are beating, no one even cares to like ask these questions.
It's just like, yep, they killed their own people.
And then if you notice with this war, much like with Venezuela, and almost like with all of them, they just keep giving you, like, they throw like 15 justifications at it.
You know, and you're like, wait, which one is the reason we're fighting this?
Because I saw all of them like to play the humanitarian card and go, we're doing this, you know, for these oppressed people.
We want them to rise up.
They've been living under this brutal regime.
And you're like, okay, two things.
Like, number one, that is simply just not how U.S. foreign policy works.
We don't fight wars on humanitarian grounds.
You know what I mean?
Like, we're partners with some of the most brutal authoritarians in the world.
And we've, and in the case of like Israel, we've been funding their destruction of Gaza for the last two and a half years.
Like, it's, and, and so, like, that's not really what's motivating this here.
And then, number two, Donald Trump even just the other day said he'll be partners with the new Ayatollah and run the Strait of Hormuz together.
It doesn't seem like if he's not really negotiating with this guy, if that's not true, and if he's just putting this out there in the public as a negotiation ploy, what a cluster fuck.
Because you're dealing with people that don't mind dying.
They believe, I mean, these are very religious people.
They're fanatical.
They believe they're going to go to heaven.
They believe they're martyrs and they're fighting for Allah.
And the thing is that a lot of people, you know, I've spent a long time at this point being against this war because this war has been telegraphed since the Bush administration wanted to do this shit.
And at least for like 15 years, I've been publicly opposing this war.
And one of the reasons why so many of us oppose this, and it's a shitty way to be vindicated, but is that, look, Iran is just not like any of the other opponents in the global war on terrorism.
It's a different beast entirely.
And you've seen this already, only three weeks in.
We never dealt with any of this with any of the other countries.
You know what I mean?
We had what the Pentagon calls escalation dominance in all of those other wars, which is all essentially like, it's just like, meaning like, if you do this, we do this.
If you do that, like, we're prepared for everything.
It's kind of like escalation dominance is a lot like, you know, like in jiu-jitsu, where you see really high-level guys who basically put you in a position where you can make one of two choices in either way.
You know, like, okay, you can give me your back and I'll choke you, or you can push off me and I'll armbar you.
And whatever option you have, I'm going to get you.
We don't have that with Iran.
And Pentagon's been open about this since at least 2007.
And the fact is that, as we're already seeing, they can target ships in the Strait of Hormuz.
They can target our assets, our bases, our embassies in the region.
They can target our allies.
And this is a big problem.
And so, like, it seems like Donald Trump got into this thinking it would be like Venezuela.
It would be quick and bloodless and easy and he could claim victory.
Now that it's not gone that way, it seems like he's kind of scrambling for what the off-ramp is here.
Now, at least I give Donald Trump, as angry as I am with him, like at least it is true that he's looking for an off-ramp, it seems like.
And he did this with the 12-day war, right?
Like he started the war, he saw an off-ramp, and he took it.
The problem here really is that this war changed the calculation from the Iranian perspective.
And that much is clear so far.
You know, after 9-11, all the countries in the Middle East and North Africa, all the ones, essentially they all waved the white flag, all of them.
Saddam Hussein welcomed UN inspectors in.
He was trying to do anything he could to not meet the fate that he ultimately met.
Gaddafi denuclearized, got rid of chemical weapons.
Basharl Assad got rid of all his chemical weapons.
Like they were all just like, we don't want it with you, you know.
And Iran was very much the same way.
They got into the JCPOA.
They allowed an inspections regime in to come look at their nuclear facilities, all of that.
And even up to the 12-day war, when we dropped the bunker buster, and Israel bombed a whole bunch of regime targets, they still, in their response, called ahead, made sure there'd be no U.S. troops there.
They hit the side of a little base there.
And then they kind of went like, they gave Trump an off-ramp because they didn't want it.
You know, they didn't want it.
They don't want to die like Muammar Gaddafi.
They don't want to have their country destroyed.
So for self-preservation reasons, they showed restraint.
The calculation this time, clearly already from the Iranians, was that we can't do that again.
We have to give you a bloody nose and a black eye.
We have to make this cost as much as possible for you.
Otherwise, you guys will just be back here in another five months doing it again.
And so now we're in this situation where we're already in a quagmire.
It's already like over a dozen Americans have died.
I think a couple hundred wounded at this point.
Israel isn't given real numbers on what's going on there, but there's some pretty substantial damage.
And definitely some Israelis have died.
And I'm sure thousands of Iranians have died at this point.
It's cost, I mean, Pete Heggs has just asked for $200 billion.
I don't know if it'll get up to costing that much, but this thing is certainly already in the tens of billions.
If you consider munition, military movements, and then just the damage to embassies and bases and stuff like that.
I mean, this thing is already a disaster.
And so now it's not like Venezuela where Donald Trump could just stop and declare victory and even say, look how great it's working out.
Now, is Venezuela really working out that great?
I don't know.
You know, we took one guy away.
The regime's still in place.
The people haven't been liberated, but whatever, he can claim that.
This now, the problem here is that, okay, number one, Donald Trump's not really in a situation where if he just quit right now, how is he really going to say, look how wonderful this is?
It's like, I don't know, dude, this cost a lot already.
And it doesn't seem like there's any clear, like, what did we get out of this?
And look, I mean, it's not, again, this isn't like a conspiracy theory.
The guys all tell you this in their own words.
Benjamin Netanyahu was asked point blank a few months back what he thought of the Greater Israel Project.
And he said, it's very near and dear to my heart.
Like, this is the point of denying the Palestinians a state for all these years.
You can't let the Palestinians have a state because then how are you going to take that all over someday?
That's all supposed to be part of Israel.
And the U.S. ambassador, the U.S. ambassador, not the Israeli ambassador, the U.S. ambassador to Israel is on record saying that God promised Iraq to Benjamin Netanyahu and that God promised Lebanon and Saudi Arabia and the West Bank and parts of Syria and all of this is greater Israel.
That is it.
By the way, Sam Harris, where are you out on that?
Where are the new atheists when you could finally use them for something?
Hey, that's pretty crazy.
Is that how we do politics?
We work on this ridiculous religious superstition that somehow when God said Israel in Genesis, he was referring to the state that was created that they named after that passage.
This would literally be on the level, Joe, is if I named my son Jesus Christ and then I told you, you have to worship my son.
And so, you know, look, I mean, the idea here that America, after just 25 years of catastrophic failures, launching wars of choice, wars of aggression, lying the American people into it, just slaughtering millions of people and like bankrupting this country and really severely degrading the country with these wars.
The idea that we would jump into another war of choice for Israel is just too like this is too crazy, man.
And especially when it's the administration that really ran on and promised that we want to get out of this, out of this game of fighting stupid wars in the Middle East.
Well, especially considering the fact that, well, like, even if there are some things about Donald Trump that maybe you don't like, but the other guys are saying we want to keep fighting forever wars, and this guy is saying we should stop doing that.
That's enough to go, well, then he's better than you on net.
And don't get me wrong.
I mean, I endorsed Donald Trump in 24.
You know, people give me shit for this.
Some people like that.
Some people give me shit for it.
But I do, I kind of view it like this.
Like, and I really, I will say, maybe I'm a little biased here because I love you, but I don't think I'm being biased.
I really think you played an enormous role in kind of like standing up to the progressive democratic establishment and their narrative over the last decade or so.
And it's really hard to kind of overstate how crazy they were, how much of a threat to this country they were.
And so for anybody who wants to give shit to anyone who voted for Donald Trump, it's like, hey, man, the alternative was the party who bragged about, first off, insane woke shit, like poisoning the minds of children in a really grotesque and abusive way.
They gave us open borders, flooding the country with people.
They gave us all types of COVID tyranny based on pseudoscience.
They gave us the most reckless foreign policy in American history, which was this proxy war on Russia's border.
And they were pretending the president wasn't senile when he clearly was.
Then they, in the fourth quarter, threw up a cackling retard who was not democratically picked in any process.
And so, sorry, like it, it does make sense that a lot of people went, okay, we're going to go back with this other guy.
Also, there was an interesting dynamic happening in 24 where, okay, this wasn't, you know, Donald Trump, they had actually tried to throw him in jail, maybe even tried to murder him.
We never really got any answers on that one.
He now had Bobby Kennedy with him.
He now had Tulsi Gabbard with him.
He now had, you know what I mean?
Even JD Vance, like a lot of these people who were supposedly much more non-interventionist, there was reason to hope that maybe it wouldn't end up here.
But anyway, I guess my thing is that you played such a huge role in this.
And I, to a lesser extent, played a role in standing up against a lot of that progressive insanity over the last 10 years.
And I just feel like after 24, you know, this coalition came together where Donald Trump, for the first time ever, wins the popular vote, wins every single swing state, and really more remarkably, won the youth and the culture.
Like Donald Trump went from being like the cultural pariah to being the guy like John Jones is doing the dance at the front.
And it was just, it was, and that whole coalition has been destroyed over this war.
And now he's going to hand the country right back over to these Democrats who we've been fighting so hard, all for what?
All for a war that Netanyahu wanted against a country that, dude, by the way, the justification for the 12-day war was bullshit.
They weren't trying to make nuclear weapons.
They were trying to negotiate.
Yes, well, that's right.
But then, all, and I want to, you know, he said some nice things about me when he was on here the other day with you.
So I will say some nice things about Constantine Kassen, who I, despite our disagreements, I really like that guy a lot.
But he is, I could be wrong, I could be missing someone.
He's the only guy I've seen who supported the 12-day war, but is really skeptical about this.
And I've seen so many people, it's unbelievable, dude.
Like they, they just, so like the 12-day war comes for the first 48 hours of it, they're like, dude, Israel's doing this on its own.
All they want is for you to stay out of it.
Then like the third day, they're like, all right, they do need some help shooting down the missiles that are coming back toward them, but whatever.
This is just defensive.
You know what I mean?
Like you don't have to get involved.
Then it's like the next day, like, all right, we don't, we don't have bunker busters, so we do need you to drop the bunker busters.
But then their whole like defense of the 12-day war was like, look, no Americans died.
It didn't cost us a lot.
It didn't turn into this disaster.
And now we're at the, okay, well, fine, all of that happened, but it's still a good thing.
Constantine was the one guy I saw who was like, no, I supported that one, but I am not getting on board with this one.
Like where it just becomes like an insult thing or you know I debated Alex Behrens or it's kind of embarrassing in hindsight, but like, I don't know, it gets me really angry when the guy's calling me a Holocaust denier or something like that.
And so like as soon as someone goes like, oh, I want to be vicious, you're like, oh, you want to be vicious?
Because I'm pretty good at being vicious.
So like I could do that.
And you're probably not used to hearing this type of vicious shit that like comics say to each other.
But one of the things that I really appreciated about Francis and Constantin was when I went to do their show, it was just like it was genuinely a good faith conversation.
And they weren't trying, they weren't trying to like win the point or get a clip that they could go, we destroyed Dave.
And then once they do that, I'm like, okay, well, then I'm not trying to do that either, man.
Like, let's talk about this shit.
That's always what I'd rather do.
But the thing that's, I guess the thing that's really interesting about this moment is that because the kind of corporate media propaganda apparatus has been completely destroyed, and because the internet and social media and podcasts are where people go now for, you know, conversations and debates and news and all this stuff, they're kind of like, they're like, they're running without a propaganda apparatus.
You know, like Israel just Israel in the last two and a half years is down like 50 points in the polls, like in terms of American approval.
They've just been, it's a drastic change.
Like I've never seen on any issue over the last few years.
And look, one of the things I really respect about him is when I did his show, he literally starts it by going, he goes, you know, almost all these debates I see you in, like, you're kind of debating issues, and then people just debate your character.
This is what I will say about his position on this, which I think is kind of interesting.
So, number one, when I was on Piers Morgan with him right after Venezuela happened, and he was his position, I don't want to mischaracterize it, but I think this is pretty accurate, was he was like, look, a lot of people are comparing Venezuela to Iraq or Libya or Syria, but like that is a different region, a different culture, a different religion.
And so, really, what we should be comparing this to is other interventions in Latin America and South America.
And, you know, I didn't completely agree with that.
I was like, actually, I think there are some lessons you could learn from other wars that we've been in that might apply here.
But I was like, okay, fair enough.
Hey, let's look at other interventions in Central and South America because we've got a long list of really disastrous ones.
Like, if you want to look at Guatemala or Nicaragua or, you know, Cuba, Mexico, a whole bunch.
But then, when this war in Iran starts, I don't see him going the equal opposite of that, going, hey, now that we're at war with Iran, we have to judge this by Iraq and Afghanistan and Libya and Syria, because you know what I'm saying?
Like, that would be the flip side to the other position.
And so I don't see that.
The other thing is that when he's arguing with me about, because I was arguing that, you know, that the Israel lobby and the Israeli government were a huge part of why we fought the war in Iraq.
And his big point that he stuck to, a lot of the Hawks stick to this, is that Ariel Sharon was actually, who was the sitting prime minister at the time, he was actually against the war in Iraq.
Now, that's not exactly true.
He wanted George W. Bush to invade Iran first, not Iraq.
And then when he got assurances that Iran would be next, he got on board.
You could go look at Sharon's speech.
He gave a speech, I think it was in August of 2002, to the Knesset.
And it's all about how Iraq is the biggest threat.
They have weapons of mass destruction.
The Mossad was cranking out all types of BS intelligence about the nuclear weapons that he could detonate in 15 minutes or whatever.
It was all nonsense.
But if you're going to say that that is evidence that Israel was not pushing us into this because the sitting prime minister at the time didn't like this war, okay, but again, then how does the current sitting prime minister of Israel feel about this war in Iran?
Because he's fighting it with us.
And he said after it started that this is the culmination of his entire life's work.
He has been trying to lie our government into this war for my entire lifetime.
Coming here, he testified how many times in front of our conversation testified with the cartoon of a war.
If you're not listening to his podcast and you want a rational but hilarious take on all the fucking madness that's going on with not just this war, but the Epstein Files, his episode, The Epstein Files, I hardly ever tweet about other people's podcasts, but I hardly ever tweet.
But I posted it.
I'm like, this is one of the best podcasts about anything ever.
His ability, Tim's ability to like rant, it like isn't like a hilarious rant that is laced with excellent points, but it's just hilarious the whole time.
I remember when I first met Tim in New York back before he moved out to LA after that.
But when I first met him in New York, and he was, I think, like he was a green stand-up.
I think he hadn't been doing it for that long.
But I remember just like being on podcasts with him and just being like, yo, this dude is going to be a fucking superstar.
Like, it was just like his ranting, like ability, like he would go off on things where you just find yourself like, like, you almost have a moment where you forget you're on the show with him.
I said, how are you running this organization seven hours after this guy got popped?
She goes, a lot of people speculate, but it's Neuro's energy and focus mints.
I go, really?
She said, yeah, Neuro Energy and Focus is powered by natural green tea, caffeine, L-thenanine for calm, focus, and vitamin B12, and B6 for I mean, whatever they're paying him, they should pay him more.
He's a real good undercover, but every now and then you see it come out.
Every now and then you see like, like I remember, and this is back when he was young and he was broke at the time, but Tim was always kind of a snob, even when he was broke.
Like it was always kind of, and I went, I forget what it was, but I was like, I was like, oh, we could get food from this restaurant.
And he goes, from there, I go, yeah, they got good food.
No, it wouldn't work either because they're so trained.
It's like if you get a dog and that dog has been, maybe a, yeah, a cat might be a better example.
Like, if you've never had a litter box in the house and the cat's been pissing all over the carpet, you are always going to have that cat piss on the carpet.
That's what that cat does.
You're not going to fix him.
If your entire life you've been spitting out nonsense from a teleprompter and now all of a sudden you have to be yourself, you've been functioning in a world of executives and producers where everybody goes over every little thing you say and do.
You 100% read things you know aren't true, or at least partially actually.
Well, this is, but Joe, talk about completely missing the point, right?
It's just fundamentally missing it.
Is that they go, they actually go, okay.
So all of these people have left, you know, watching cable news in troves.
And now they, a lot of people listen to podcasts.
They'll listen to you or Theo Vaughn or whoever it might be.
And a huge reason, right, why people, a huge reason why you've been number one for so long now is because however anyone feels about you, you're authentic.
It's very hard to deny that.
You know, one of the biggest questions I get when people like meet me, if I do like meet and greet after shows or something, it's, what's Joe Rogan like?
Is a question I get all the time because we're buddies and I've been on the show a lot a lot of times and people love you.
And they'll go, what's Joe Rogan like?
And I always tell them the same thing.
I go, you already know.
You know, like you already know who he is.
He's that guy.
And then offstage, he's that guy.
You know what I mean?
Like that's who he is.
And people like that.
People like that.
Whatever you think about Theo Vaughn, he's telling, he's authentic.
And because you guys in the corporate media are all professional liars and have lied to the American people about the last 17 crises, you know, they don't trust you anymore.
And so then their reaction to that is you go, well, what if we pretended to be podcasters?
No, you dummy.
That's the whole thing.
This is just proving further how inauthentic you are.
Dude, they all, this was to me, despite the fact that I, you know, and people give me shit about voting for Donald Trump and they could say, I should have known better and whatever.
I was a huge critic of him in his first term and I'm a huge critic of him in his second term.
But the best thing about Donald Trump winning in 24, and I did predict this right.
I'm not always the best with predictions.
I'm pretty good on issues, I think, but I'm not great at predictions.
They're tough.
But the best thing about Donald Trump winning was that the corporate media finally admitted it.
They had been pretending for so long.
I remember we used to joke about, I remember coming on like a few years ago, and we would joke about how Brian Stelter would always, whenever he talked about you, he would always kind of go like the fringe Joe Rogan.
Like as if he's the mainstream and you're the fringe, as if the numbers aren't readily available to all of us that we could be like, your show has like 200,000 listening and his has 20 million.
So how is he the fringe and you're the mainstream?
The dumb part of that statement was, you already had me, you fucking idiots.
You just lost your mind.
I'm not right and I'm not left.
So I think both of them suck.
And I think the adherence to the ideologies that the left supports or the right supports is out of their fucking.
You've got to be out of your fucking mind.
Whether it's these crackpot Christian nationalists that think that this whole war is a way to get Jesus to return on a white horse.
Do you see those guys that were talking during the readiness fucking meeting?
I think that's nuts too.
I think the woke shit and all the chaos of the fucking last four years of having a completely open border and the justifications of all these things, that's nuts too.
I'm not on either buddy's side, anyone's not that much.
But I think that the Democrats aren't ever going to get someone like me because I'm not with either or.
I'm not with either or.
I'm with whoever fucking makes sense and no one makes sense.
Until AI comes along.
I think they're going to do a really good job.
President Perplexity is going to run this country fairly and balanced.
Well, this is something that I'm encouraged by: is that I think what you just said there, I really do believe that you speak for super majorities of the American people.
And that's why, even though Donald Trump has shattered his coalition by lying us into this stupid war on behalf of a foreign country, that coalition is still ripe for someone else to pick it up and run with it.
And that's kind of what I'm hoping.
I hope Thomas Massey runs for president.
I think, by the way, they're doing a big money bomb for Thomas Massey on March 30th.
And I think him winning re-election in Congress is like the most important political election in the country right now because he's done nothing wrong except actually stand up for America first and for all the stuff that Donald Trump and Tulsi Gabbard and all these people ran on.
And he's gotten the Israel lobby and the Edelsons, but I repeat myself, have been pouring millions of dollars into his race to try to unseat him for the crime of not going along with the Epstein cover-up and not going along with another stupid war and having some like fiscal sanity.
Well, if that's like I don't know, like my position is always like, if you're saying, if not supporting covering up the Epstein files or not supporting a stupid war of choice, a war of aggression on behalf of Israel, means I'm not MAGA, then okay, I'm not MAGA, I don't, I'm not attached to the the, the.
Here's the thing like, first of all, America is great, make America greater I'm down but make America great again.
And then it becomes a movement of a bunch of fucking dorks, because a lot of them are dorks, a lot of them, these really weird, fucking uninteresting, unintelligent people that have got something they cling to, and there's a lot of people that are just real, genuine patriots and they're all lumped into this one group and you got to accept the dorks too.
Fuck that.
Like the concept of making America great is a great idea.
But as soon as you have a fucking team and you allow anybody to join up, you don't even have tryouts for your team.
So you've got a bunch of fucking dipshits that are running around spouting out opinions and you have to go along with them because they're MAGA.
And then you've got bots online that are probably from fucking Indonesia or Russia or wherever.
And they're pretending they're MAGA and they're saying crazy shit.
So that's a part of MAGA too.
You've fucked up by becoming a part of a group.
Whether it's a Republican group, a Democrat group, a MAGA group, a fucking woke group, whatever it is, you fucked up by being in a group.
But when they get in a group, man, they're the worst things in the world.
And that's why it should be about the issues.
It should be about your principles and what you believe in.
And you should be like, look, I've said many nice things about Tulsi Gabbard over the years, and I was extremely critical of her since last summer into now, because I think she's lying us into a war, which is the war that she was always opposed to.
So last summer, so Tulsi Gabbard had given her, as the Director of National Intelligence does every year, they give their annual threat assessment.
And then she testified before Congress about it.
And she, it was very clear in her annual threat assessment that Iran was not attempting to build nuclear weapons, that they had not yet made the political decision to attempt to build nuclear weapons, let alone like are actually going for it.
And she testified before Congress saying the same thing.
And then after negotiating, while they were negotiating, Israel sneak attacks them.
Then she had some post where she goes, Iran could be weeks or months away from nuclear weapons, which was total bullshit.
So if they're enriching uranium up to 60% and they just have to enrich it further for the ability to use it in nuclear weapons, that is a couple weeks away.
And then I think there were a couple Israeli attacks, and then they went up to enriching at 60%.
But so the reason we knew they were enriching up to 60% is because they were still members of the JCPOA with an inspections regime who was going in there and saying they're enriching up to 60%.
And if you're in a position like she's in, where you've got that guy breathing down your neck and you're forced to make a statement, you've got to tread very carefully on this tight rope that you're walking.
If ultimately it is his responsibility to determine what's an imminent threat and what is not, I would imagine that she gets access to most of the same classified information that he does as the director of national intelligence.
And also in his first term, I'll never forget this fucking conversation that he had with Steve Hilton because I think it was one of the first times since I remember where I've seen a president say, and Steve Hilton, by the way, I've been friends with him for 12 or 13 years.
Met him and his family in Maui on the beach when my daughter's really young and his kids are really young.
They became friends.
We've hung out together on vacation together.
He's a sweetheart of a guy.
I love that guy.
And when he was interviewing Trump, Trump said that there is a military-industrial complex and these guys want to go to war.
Because also, even Eisenhower, when he coined the term, it was in his farewell address to the nation.
He was literally like, this is my last stop, and then I'm leaving.
Trump was just in the middle of his presidency.
And he goes, all of them want war.
They all want me to be in war all the time.
If it was up to them, we'd always be at war.
And I do, you know, now, look, that was great.
I thought actually the one to me that was even crazier was if you remember when Bill O'Reilly was interviewing him and he's talking about Vladimir Putin.
And he goes, he's like, oh, well, you won't, you know, at the time, Donald Trump, which he had run on, he was trying, he was saying we should have détente with Russia.
He goes, like, why do we, you know, we have all the nuclear weapons.
Yeah, he goes, he goes, Putin's a killer.
You want to have a detente with a killer?
And he goes, we got a lot of killers too.
And then he goes, whoa, whoa, whoa, what do you mean we got a lot of killers too?
And he goes, what was Iraq?
What was that?
We got a lot of killers on our side too.
And then Bill O'Reilly's like, well, I mean, Iraq was a mistake.
Well, I think this is kind of, I think, one of the main reasons why the establishment revolted against Trump the way they did.
There's something very scary to the powers that be about a guy who, like, by his very nature, like, I don't even think he's capable of not letting things slip.
And that, you know, was a big thing that people really didn't like about him.
Very interesting to me is that so many of the never Trumpers have come to define his presidency.
Like if you, if you remember back in 2016, the war hawk kind of Israel firster Republican crowd, the neocons and all them, they hated Donald Trump, hated him with a passion.
Ben Shapiro was a never Trumper.
He said because of his deeply held principles, he could never support Donald Trump.
Mark Levin was a never Trumper.
All of National Review, all of them.
And now they are the biggest Trump supporters ever, as kind of he's blown up the coalition that got him elected.
There's not one thing that they ever say that makes them look better.
They get in these silly fucking, they just feel like they're going to make some stupid fucking statement and then refute a couple of people and don't understand the crowd reaction when you've got thousands of people tweeting against you now.
Thousands just attacking you, destroying you, posting memes, posting videos.
They busted this fucking warehouse had cell phones all rigged up for YouTube views where people would just hire a company and say, hey, you know, part of the problems, I get enough views.
I'd really like to blow the fuck up and get to number one.
There was a guy, I can't remember his name, but just like the other day, some guy, he works for Fox News, and he came out and had a whole post about me.
And he goes, he goes, Dave Smith's account is clearly botted by foreign.
And I'm almost like when he said that, I was almost kind of like, there's a weird thing.
Like, I know I've never paid for anything, but like, I don't know, you know what I mean?
Like what someone else might have done or something like that.
But I asked him, but I replied to him and I go, wait, what evidence do you have of this?
And then his post was that he said, because I had 900,000 followers on Twitter, but I'm playing Laugh Boston this weekend.
But I was like, look, man, I sold out all the shows last year, hoping to do the same this year.
But I go, that is any, like, I just know the industry of stand-up comedy pretty well.
And I was like, anybody who you're saying would be selling more than that, so what, selling out big theaters or selling out a stadium or something like that?
All the people who do that have more followers than me.
So like, he's not even right about the ratio of it or whatever.
But then I kind of like, I grilled him on it a bit more because, listen, I'm kind of like you, like when you were talking about suing CNN back in the day for slandering you, like, I'm never actually going to do it, but I don't mind saying it.
You know what I mean?
So like, so I tagged Fox News and I go, hey, Fox News, shouldn't you have some evidence if you're going to make a claim?
Like, I'm clearly botted by foreign influence or whatever.
If you look at, you know, we brought up this up a million times, but there was an FBI, former FBI analyst who analyzed Twitter before the purchase, and it was his take that as much as 80% might be artificial.
Now, this is back then, before Elon purchased it.
I think they've taken some steps to try to ensure one of the things is you have to, you could go to the person's page.
Yeah, well, and you have to kind of engage in this.
And I'm not saying you have to be on Twitter or something like that, but I'm just saying, like, if you want to, you know, I would love very much to get to a place where like, you'd be like, hey, let's all agree that we're not on board with the bigotry stuff.
And I mean this, like, whether it's against white men or whether it's against black men or whether it's against Jews or whether it's against Muslims or whatever.
And I see a whole lot of all of that.
And I'd love to move past that.
I also would like, like, I wish there was a way that like Mark Levin and Tucker Carlson could have like a cool conversation.
You know what I mean?
And not like, not like be like, well, look, it's like.
He goes, no, because you're like so, he said, because I don't debate such intellectually dishonest people or something like that, which I thought was a weird criticism of me.
Like, you could say I'm wrong, but I do believe the shit I say.
Yeah, I don't think you're in the, I don't think in any demonstration of any, I don't think there's a single moment that I could point to that I think that you've been intellectually dishonest.
And this to me, I actually think is very interesting.
But I don't know if you remember this.
But on this show, Ben was on years ago.
And this is years before October 7th or anything like that.
But he was saying, he was talking about Israel, his defense for Israel.
And you go, that's interesting.
Would you ever debate someone who's a critic of Israel?
And just generically, not about a specific person.
And he goes, absolutely.
I'd be happy to do that.
And the thing about guys like that is that, particularly with Ben Shapiro, for the last two and a half years, his number one issue, Israel, has been the number one topic of conversation.
And in that time, Israel's support has been bleeding.
I mean, just like to a level you couldn't have imagined.
You couldn't have imagined two and a half years ago to go, this will be a pro-Palestinian country.
That was unthinkable.
And it's become that.
And forget me.
There's way better people than me.
But Ben Shapiro debated no one.
He never once had a conversation with a competent critic of Israel.
And that, listen, people saw that.
People noticed that.
And so I kind of in a weird way feel like it's like, hey, dude, I don't care if you do the debate with me or not.
I wish, I don't think we ever can.
I wish there would be a world where we could have a good faith conversation, like a guy with me and Ben Shapiro.
But he refused to do it with anyone.
Anyway, so while you're smearing everybody who's a critic of Israel, you're not willing to like, you, listen, there are some people who don't debate, but he branded himself as the debate guy.
If you're saying that this is the reason why you won't do it, that sounds crazy because wouldn't you want to debate someone who's intellectually dishonest?
Because it would be so easy to refute them with facts.
Well, that was kind of my thing with the Douglas Murray thing, too, where it was like at a certain point, you're like, dude, you can't just say you're an expert and I'm not an expert.
Demonstrate that.
If that's the case, then it should be easy for you to just shop me up in front of the world right now.
And you could see the tremor in his eyes, like, oh, shit.
Like, they don't want to give up that ground because they're playing a very different game.
And the game is not, let's be intellectually honest about what we think is going on and what we think is good and bad about what's going on versus I'm trying to win.
This Rod Rousey card, they got Francis fighting Philip Linz.
Philip Linz, who was a light heavyweight in the UFC, and the UFC cut him, and he's fighting the scariest heavyweight who's ever walked the face of the earth.
A guy that's that much of a destroyer that learns how to take backs and strangle people too and control you from the back and blast you unconscious like he did with that dude in the PFL in his last fight took his back and just blasted him into the netherworld.
Yeah, but when he's in the UFC, he's going to be a fucking problem.
Olympic gold medalist, elite wrestler, moves like a cat, 250 pounds, young, super dedicated, and just recently learned striking and is fucking people up with his hands.
I just saw one of his recent fights where He's finishing a double leg before he realized he knocked the guy out, it seemed like he KOs him with a left hook, and he's so fast that as the guy's collapsing on the way down, he shoots a double, connects, takes him to the ground while he's unconscious.
And I apparently, according to this orthopedic surgeon that I went to back in the day, before I realized that stem cells could fix it, this guy was convincing me that I had to have surgery.
And one of the things he said, you know that your shoulder's been dislocated.
I'm just going to sit down and talk about how many times I've been camorrid, how many times I've been fucking arm blocked, how many times I've been caught in a triangle, how many times, you know, posting on the ground, I've jostled my shoulder.
The good news is there have been no fracture or ligament injury.
That's great.
Oh, that's Pahumpa.
Said that.
So from that, we have great expectations for his return, but the exact time frame is still unknown.
He still needs a lot of physiotherapy.
Start moving his arm.
Wow, then he can go back to light training and then hard training.
Bro, we got to get that guy down to fucking the CPI in, you know, the Cellular Performance Institute that the UFC uses.
Now, I'm not saying whether this is Paramount's mistake or the UFC's mistake or whatever, but just like the basics of business to me go, so you just had a loyal customer who's very happy to pay for every pay-per-view.
And I'm just not now.
Like this just on some level, now I understand it's because Paramount gave them a whole bunch of money, but on some level, I go, number one, I go, but how is this good for business if the customer no longer has to pay for a thing that I was happily paying for?
First of all, Paramount, the idea of doing this and investing $7 billion into the UFC over the next few years, the positive that they're going to get from that with loyal new customers is massive.
Yeah, they made a lot of wives of hardcore fans happy.
I'm sure for that, you're like, I don't have to buy these pay-per-views anymore.
They're like, you know, they get the Paramount shows and they don't have to do that.
All right, fair enough.
I guess it's just in some ways, I guess, and I don't really have much of a mind for business, but in some ways, there's just a thing where it's like, we've always done it this way.
Yeah, but I also, I'm with you because I remember you used to say this back in the day all the time, but I am like a purist fan in MMA in the sense that like all of that is like, I don't care.
Like people like, oh, it's boring.
You're like, it's the most exciting sport in the world on its worst day.
Even in a fight that's a bad fight.
Because if you remember the Frank Meir Krokop is a good example of this, where it was just a boring fight the entire fight.
And then there's a spectacular knockout at the end of it.
And even if that doesn't end up happening, you're always watching like that could happen at any moment.
But then again, when you are dealing with special talents and great, great fighters like Justin, who this is probably his last opportunity to fight for the title.
I want that under the perfect conditions.
I want that to be in an arena where it's 72 degrees and air-conditioned.
I don't want it to be outside.
I don't want there to be any additional stress or distractions because you're warming up at the White House.
Like, what do you have?
Tents with mats on them and these guys are going to be slipping around in puddles of sweat.
It's just, I don't like, I like the idea that it's like this big celebration of the UFC, that the president loves the UFC so much, he wants to do it at the White House.
But in practice, I don't like it at all because you've got two world titles.
You know, you've got the interim heavyweight world title, and then you've got this world title with Justin and Ilya at 55.
I don't like it.
I want those to be at the T-Mobile.
I want those to be at the Madison Square Garden Arena.
I want those to be somewhere dope.
The TD Garden in Boston.
Put it in a fucking real arena where it's air-conditioned, damn it.
These are amazing fights.
I don't want anybody fighting when it's 100 degrees outside.
Yeah, well, the thing is that, and we were talking about this last night, if you so if you land a nutshot and it's it's accidental, as it almost always is, you know what I mean?
You're trying to throw an inside leg kick and it's a little close.
Yeah, there was that one referee who confirmed that it was the Sacramento Kings versus the Lakers, which was like a series that was like notoriously like everyone was like, yo, it was crazy.
They didn't call any of these fouls on the Lakers and they called all these fouls.
And then a ref came out and was like, oh, yeah, yeah, that's what we were.
And it does kind of make sense because it was the Shaq and Kobe Lakers.