Patrick Bet-David sits down with journalist Glenn Greenwald for a hard-hitting discussion on Venezuela’s boat strikes, alleged CIA plots to overthrow Nicolás Maduro, and the political implications of Trump’s meeting with Brazilian President Lula da Silva.
------
Ⓜ️ MINNECT WITH GLENN GREENWALD: https://bit.ly/49oNLqY
🎙️ FOLLOW THE PODCAST ON SPOTIFY: https://bit.ly/4g57zR2
🎙️ FOLLOW THE PODCAST ON ITUNES: https://bit.ly/4g1bXAh
🎙️ FOLLOW THE PODCAST ON ALL PLATFORMS: https://bit.ly/4eXQl6A
Ⓜ️ CONNECT ON MINNECT: https://bit.ly/4kSVkso
Ⓜ️ PBD PODCAST CIRCLES: https://bit.ly/4mAWQAP
🥃 BOARDROOM CIGAR LOUNGE: https://bit.ly/4pzLEXj
🍋 ZEST IT FORWARD: https://bit.ly/4kJ71lc
📕 PBD'S BOOK "THE ACADEMY": https://bit.ly/41rtEV4
👔 BET-DAVID CONSULTING: https://bit.ly/4lzQph2
📺 JOIN THE CHANNEL: https://bit.ly/4g5C6Or
💬 TEXT US: Text “PODCAST” to 310-340-1132 to get the latest updates in real-time!
TIME STAMPS:
00:00 - Intro
01:30 - Who is the next Edward Snowden or Julian Assange?
11:00 - Would Snowden return to America if pardoned?
18:00 - Inside Trump's 2.0 Cabinet.
25:30 - What's the next big story to be leaked?
1:07:23 - Is interventionism good?
1:30:15 - Trump vs Venezuela & Maduro.
1:43:00 - Bari Weiss & CBS mega deal.
1:58:40 - Lula da Silve & Trump.
SUBSCRIBE TO:
@VALUETAINMENT
@ValuetainmentComedy
@theunusualsuspectspodcast
@HerTakePod
@bizdocpodcast
ABOUT US:
Patrick Bet-David is the founder and CEO of Valuetainment Media. He is the author of the #1 Wall Street Journal Bestseller “Your Next Five Moves” (Simon & Schuster) and a father of 2 boys and 2 girls. He currently resides in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida.
Did you ever think you would make it on something second chase sweet discovery?
No, this life miss on me.
Adam, what's your family?
The future looks bright.
Handshake is better than anything I ever saw.
It's right here.
You are a one-on-one?
My son's right there.
I don't think I've ever said this before.
Glenn Greenwald in the house.
How you doing?
How you doing?
Good to be here.
Good to be back.
Yes, except this time it's just you and I.
We don't have the whole crew.
I was saying I missed the whole crew.
Just so you know, he misses you guys.
Absolutely.
I'm going to do like a 24-hour binge on the crew, just so I thought they're going to be here.
Okay, so how are you feeling with everything that's going on right now?
I guess maybe the one question to ask is, I got a lot of things I want to talk to you about.
I want to know what's going on with Brazil because Lula just met with Trump in Malaysia, if I'm not mistaken.
And then, you know, Lula says, you know, looks like something good's going to happen.
Venezuela, you got Maduro coming out saying what he's saying.
Petro is doing what he's doing in Colombia.
Argentina Malay got the votes that he got.
So I'm curious what you think about that.
Palantir with Peter Thiel, you know, what he wants to do with surveillance and the Antichrist series that he did.
David Ellison with Skydance and, you know, how he took a, you know, small company into now buying up all these other companies.
That Ellison family's becoming a household name.
But maybe let's start off with the following.
So for you, you were, at least for me, the way I found out about you was in 2013 when you flew out, I think, in Hong Kong and you did your Snowden meeting with them conversation, you know, the whistleblowing.
Since Snowden Assange, a lot of things have happened to give birth to the next Snowden and Assange to come out, right?
You got Epstein.
We can find out a lot about that.
You got Biden's camp.
We had to wait till Twitter files to learn about that.
You have a lot of different things that's happened.
Why do you think we haven't had a Snowden and Assange since Snowden and Assange?
Such a good question.
I think when there was this spade of whistleblowers, and, you know, I think Julian Assange is probably one of the most visionary people of the last 50 years in terms of his understanding before anyone else's that in the age of the internet and with digital, with everything being maintained in a digitalized form, that the great leaks, the way we're going to find out the big stories about what power centers are doing would be through mass digital leaks.
I think people forget, you know, when there was this Pentagon Papers leak in the early 1970s, where Daniel Allsberg discovered the government was systematically lying to the American people about the Vietnam War, and Daniel Allsberg was working on the inside of that, was originally in favor of the Vietnam War, came to really understand it was a lie, and he wanted to leak.
You know, there was this big, massive internal study that the Pentagon did about Vietnam called the Pentagon Papers, where it basically concluded everything they were telling the public was a lie.
They were telling the public we're about to win.
Internally, they knew the best they could hope for was a stalemate and likely they were going to lose no matter what they did.
You know, you had tens of thousands of American soldiers dying, hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese, Vietnamese being killed.
And he decided very bravely to leak this to the New York Times and the Washington Post because he felt like he couldn't live with himself if he concealed the truth.
And his big challenge at the time was how do you take 40,000 pages and deliver them to the New York Times and Washington without getting caught?
You know, he literally went to the pharmacy and with a big bag of nickels and used the Photostat machine.
And Julian understood that now that everything's digitalized, everything could be transported and sent in a matter of minutes with great ease.
And that was the future of reporting and leaks and set up a system to make it capable of being done with anonymity.
And that's what led to so many of the leaking stories that led to Snowden and other ones like it.
And it was visionary.
And that's why they wanted to set about how to destroy Julian Assange.
And one of the things that started happening was, and this was under the Obama administration, is the Obama administration was far more aggressive in trying to destroy this process, destroy journalism, destroy sources than anyone else.
They took this 1917 law called the Espionage Act, which was actually introduced by Woodrow Wilson to justify the imprisonment of people speaking out against U.S. participation in World War I.
And it was an incredibly draconian law.
It was intended to be that way.
And it was never really used before against leakers, against people in Washington leaking classified information to journalists, which happens literally every day.
And the Obama administration got obsessed with destroying leakers.
You know, you had Chelsea Manning, who was an Army private in Iraq.
She discovered hundreds of thousands of pages showing war crimes of the U.S. in Iraq and Afghanistan, sent it to WikiLeaks in a matter of about six seconds.
That was, you know, part of Juliana's theory.
And it was all done.
She had no more access to classified information.
She got caught.
She was out of the military.
No more ever a threat.
She had no more access to classified information.
They didn't just imprison her.
They imprisoned her in the harshest possible conditions.
I visited her in Fort Leavenworth, which is in Kansas.
I mean, it was not a joke.
Same with Snowden.
You know, Snowden leaked to us, got, you know, he didn't get caught, but he came forward and identified himself as the leaker because he felt he wanted to explain himself.
And they charged him with, you know, massive felonies under the Espionage Act.
And the question was, why?
You know, even if you think what he did was wrong, why do you need to put him in prison for the next 50 years?
He has no, he can't, has no longer any access to classified information.
And it was very obvious they were trying to create this climate of fear where anyone thinking about maybe I'm going to be the next Edward Snowden or be the next Julian Assange had to understand that if they did so, they weren't going to just go to prison.
They were going to have their lives completely destroyed.
I mean, look what they did to Julian Assange.
You know, they tried to break him physically, emotionally, psychologically.
And I think that's become a major reason why.
Do you think when a whistleblower is doing it, don't you think Snowden and Assange, and you're going to know this better than I would.
Don't you think they know, like, if I do this, my life's going to change?
We've all seen the movies.
We've all seen the documentaries.
Don't you think they're sitting there saying, I know if I release this, I feel like they're typically not money-driven.
It's crusade-driven.
It's correcting an injustice.
They feel the world needs to know this.
And they kind of know you're going to suffer the consequences of doing this, right?
So wouldn't that be like the DNA of the next whistleblower to come out saying, I know I'm going to get in trouble anyways?
Yeah, it's a good point.
It's for me, it's what makes people like that so admirable.
I mean, think about what Snowden had in his hands.
He could have sold that to Russia or China or any U.S. adversary and lived, you know, the rest of his life extremely rich.
He didn't do that.
He brought it to American journalists.
And when he brought it to us, he said, be extremely careful.
Don't publish anything that might be, you know, he was a very conservative whistleblower in that sense.
Julian, too, Julian was very cautious in terms of how they released, especially the first years of release.
They would redact everything.
They would withhold things.
They tried to work with the State Department to get State Department input.
At the same time, of course, they understood they were sacrificing their liberty for a cause.
For me, that's what makes them so noble.
I don't, though, think they anticipated that their lives would be completely destroyed.
You think so?
They knew it was a chance.
I mean, I remember what, as a matter of fact, I'll just tell you quickly when I was with Snowden in Hong Kong and I hadn't met him before.
I didn't know much about him.
And I got to know him.
And I really became convinced that he was exactly who he said he was, that his motives were authentic.
Sometimes with these people, they're like a little crazy.
They're disillusioned.
They're like, you know, on the margins of society.
They're disgruntled.
He wasn't any of those things.
It was almost like he was so pure.
That's the picture, right?
Is that the hotel room picture?
We went back and visited him.
That's myself and my husband David.
That's Laura Poitras, who directed Citizen IV, which one, The Oscar, about the work we were doing.
And then there's Snowden.
So that's about a year after the scene from the film.
If you go up into the right-hand corner there, that's myself and Snowden.
I think that's on the second or third day of being in Hong Kong where we were going over the files.
That was all from Laura Poitras filming.
So I became very convinced of the authenticity of his motives.
And it's a great point because we would ask him, you know, what's your plan for getting out of here?
Like the idea was we were going to start publishing while we were there.
We had to start publishing as quickly as possible for a lot of reasons.
And we were in Hong Kong.
And the question was, how are you going to get out of here?
And he said, you know what?
He didn't want to involve us in that because he knew if we were involved in his escape plan, we could then be criminally charged with aiding and abetting a fugitive or crimes like that.
But he didn't really have a plan.
He didn't really care.
And the whole time I was working with him and becoming more and more respectful and admiring of what he had done, he's 29 years old.
He has a beautiful girlfriend, his high school sweetheart, making a lot of money, has a great future ahead of him, sacrificed it all because out of conviction, he really believed it was wrong for Americans not to know what the government was doing to the internet.
Not obviously the details of it, that's fine.
Keep that classified, the methods that you spy on people.
But just the fact that they had converted the internet into this weapon, unprecedented weapon of surveillance and coercion and monitoring, the fact that he just couldn't live with himself like Daniel Allsberg unless he came forward, for me, it was so admirable.
But the whole time, as I got to know him better, as we bonded, because you go through something like that with someone, you really, we didn't know if the CIA was going to barge in the door.
It was very high tension, the Chinese.
You know, there was a dark cloud hanging over us the whole time, which is I knew that at some point we were going to leave or he was going to get apprehended.
And the next time I would see him would be on television where he would be wearing an orange jumpsuit and shackles, ready to go to some high security, national security dungeon.
And he was ready for that.
So you are right.
He knew that was a great possibility.
And the reason why they hate Snowden so much is because that didn't happen to him.
He got away.
He was, I mean, but by a lot of luck, but he ended up getting asylum in Russia.
He can't leave Russia, but I don't know if you've been to Russia, but Russia is, you know, a beautiful country rich in history and literature and culture and architecture and all sorts of, you know, fascinating things.
But he didn't choose to live in Russia.
So it's a punishment, but it's not the same as being in prison.
And he's considered a hero around the world, wrote a best-selling book.
That's what they're so enraged by is that he did have the potential to inspire people just in terms of how he got away.
You think if either one of them ever got pardoned, they'd come back to the States?
Yeah, I mean, Snowden has often said he would come back.
You know, Snowden's American.
His wife is American.
He doesn't want his kids growing up in Russia.
They have two small children now.
That was not his choice.
They trapped him there.
He's always said he would come back to Russia.
I think the question is, I mean, back to the U.S., the question is, you know, how could he do that?
Would he be safe?
You know, he is enemy number one.
I'm saying in theory, he wants to, how that would work, what that would look like.
That's a lot.
But we're not really close to that yet.
What would be the selling point?
Like, especially to the government.
The government fears, no matter who the government is, whoever's the next administration, left or right, they fear a whistleblower.
They fear the market knowing what's going on.
They fear, even when, remember when the Waltz signal messages that was going on in the meeting and that was leaked?
No president wants that to be leaked.
It's a form of a embarrassment.
Like you don't have control of your leadership team to leak information to you.
Why would a president, sitting president, pardon Snowden or Assange?
I'll give you the reason.
First of all, in the transition when after Trump was declared the loser of the 2020 election, but before he left office, so, you know, that December, that November 6th to January 20th period, I was working very hard to try and convince Trump.
That was the perfect time.
He came extremely close to the Trump.
That was the perfect time.
He came an inch away.
Patrick, he came an inch away.
I'll tell you what happened.
As you probably recall, that was when January 6th happened.
And after January 6th, it wasn't just Democrats, but also the Republicans who started an impeachment proceeding against Trump II.
And the question was, why are you impeaching a president who's two weeks from being on his way out the door?
And the reason was, is a lot of the Republicans, the establishment types, the ones who are loyal to the security state, were petrified that Trump would do certain things on his way out.
They were petrified he was going to declassify JFK files, Martin Luther King files, other files that he was promising to declassify.
They were also really worried he was going to pardon, particularly Snowden.
Assange was on the agenda.
He never really got close to Assange.
And a bunch of Republican senators made clear to him, if you pardon Edward Snowden, we're going to let this impeachment proceeding go through and we're going to convict you.
They had a kind of sword of Damocles hanging over his head.
Republicans or Democrats?
Republican senators, you know, sort of the Mitch McConnell crowd, Tom Cotton, the main person leading, because he had a lot of people he trusted in his ear urging him to pardon Snowden, people like Matt Gates and Rand Paul, people who are very close to him, kind of more privacy-oriented people, because this is a thing that people forget.
Trump hated these agencies.
Remember, these agencies spied on Trump's campaign.
The NSA, the FBI, they spied on his campaign in 2016.
He was at war with the CIA.
He was at war with the deep state.
Trump, before Trump ever got into politics, he was one of the people I remember very well when we did the Snowden reporting.
He said, Snowden's a traitor, hang him, execute him.
But then once Trump understood what these agencies really were, the abuses that they're capable of, that they inflict this on the American people, that he himself was victimized by it.
He had a kind of soft spot in his heart for what Snowden did.
He wanted to pardon Snowden and he got so close to doing it.
The reason he didn't.
How does so close mean?
Defined so close.
And by the way, I knew what was going on because I was very involved in kind of lobbying the Trump administration, working with them.
But you don't have to take my word for it.
After Trump left office, he did an interview with Candace Owens.
I think maybe like six weeks, eight weeks after he left office.
And she was very much an advocate for pardoning Snowden Assange.
She said to him, why wouldn't you pardon Edward Snowden?
This is somebody who exposed the very agencies that victimized you that blew the whistle on the abuses that they aimed at you.
And he said, I came extremely close to pardoning one of them.
Not so close to the other.
I knew it was Snowden.
And he just said, at the end of the day, there were people on one side saying he was a great guy who deserved it.
Other people saying he was a bad guy.
It was Mike Pompeo, principally, who was the CI director.
Wasn't Mike Pompeo the same guy that wanted to kill Snowden or the 2017.
Yeah, there was a, yeah, he, he, and yeah, he, he was, he wanted to assassinate Julian Assange.
I mean, that guy's a maniac.
He was one of the worst people.
One of the worst people in the first Trump administration was Mike Pompeo, responsible for a lot of the worst parts of the first Trump administration.
Would you put him as a Dick Cheney Jr.
type?
I mean, that was Trump's, the first administration, Trump really, and they'll tell you this.
You know, Trump had never been in Washington before.
Washington is a cesspool.
You know, all of Washington is built to make sure that democracy doesn't matter.
You have Democrats, Republican presidents come and go.
And the idea is it can't matter.
So they know how to manipulate.
I mean, Obama came in.
You know, he was in politics for about four seconds.
Suddenly, he's the commander-in-chief.
They manipulated him in about three days.
You know, he came in vowing to undo all these Bush-Shaney programs, the war on terror.
And they sent in guys from Princeton, you know, special forces guys, guys with big medals on their chest.
And they were like, sir, if you eliminate this program, you will have a terrorist attack.
It will be on your hands, almost threatening.
They know how to control the government.
You know, the election.
And so Trump in that first term really didn't know how Washington worked.
He ended up having a lot of people in his administration there to sabotage what he was doing, not to advance it.
And that was the big difference between the first and second term.
It's almost as if he's had eight years of experience to finally get to the point that he knows everybody, which now essentially, let's say this is his third term.
It's not.
It's a second term that he now knows.
He's full of shit.
He's 50-50.
That guy's bot.
That guy's honest.
That guy's driven by Israel.
That guy's driven by war.
That guy's driven by this.
He finally has a little bit of a sense where everybody's at.
Would you agree with that?
Oh, yeah.
And beyond that, I would say that one of the things that I wasn't, you know, there were so many things that made me hate the media more than ever in the first Trump term.
Among the leading causes was that you had people in the Trump administration openly sabotaging his policies, the policies on which he ran, the policies that caused Americans to vote for him.
We're supposed to have civilian control in the United States, meaning it's not generals that dictate our country.
There's a lot of countries, as you all know, where the military dictates everything.
That's not our country.
We have civilian rule, a commander-in-chief, a civilian elected official is in charge of the military.
Fundamental how the United States works.
You had generals, you know, like General Kelly, General Mattis, H.R. McMaster, who were openly telling the media, Trump's giving us this order to withdraw from Syria.
Trump's giving this order to do this, and we're not doing it.
We're manipulating him.
And they were celebrated for that by the media.
Oh, these are the adults in the room.
In other words, you had these unelected military officials there to do the bidding of the deep state and the establishment, undermining the elected president.
And a lot of people inside the Trump administration were there to sabotage, not to advance what he was doing.
Everyone I talked to in that interim period between when he left in 2020 and then was re-elected in 2024 and closed the Trump world, their number one mission was how do we prevent that mistake?
How do we foster a culture of loyalty so that people who work for Trump, whether they agree with him or not?
I mean, Marco Rubio, I'm not convinced he agrees with Trump's vision of foreign policy.
His whole life has been kind of a neoconservative vision, but they created a culture where everyone understands that you're there to carry out Trump's wishes and orders and policies.
And if you don't, you're gone.
And that's, for me, the big difference between the first and second administration is Trump learned how Washington works.
How much of that is Susie Wiles protecting it?
How much of that is the fact that she is knowing everybody and is telling Trump, hey, we can't do that again.
You can't be too forgiving with this guy.
We got to move on with that guy.
How much is her protecting him versus if not her, then who is it?
Oh, yeah, she's super smart.
I mean, but you know, the thing is, at the end of the day, whenever you have power and you look at the history of power centers throughout history, you have infiltration and snakes worming their way in.
People just understand, you know, people know how to flatter Trump, how to talk to Trump, how to convince Trump.
Susie Wiles is an incredibly smart and ruthless operator.
But Susie Wiles has been around for a long time.
You know, she was a big lobbyist.
Her lobbying friend did work for Cotter, for foreign governments, for major corporations.
She's not some anti-establishment rebel outsider, but Trump trusts her.
And I think she sees her job as protecting Trump.
And she's very good at that.
So that is part of it.
But I also think you have people like Stephen Miller, who is loyal to the death to Trump.
Would you put him at number one?
Most biggest loyalist?
Yes, I think so.
Who's top three, in your opinion?
Definitely Stephen Miller.
I think he's very comfortable with Howard Litkoff, who's the commerce secretary, who's he's known, you know, these kind of people he's known forever.
No, no, the commerce secretary, Howard Luttnick.
Lutnick.
Howard Luttnick.
I'm mixing him with Steve Witten.
Steve Loff.
You know, that's like a billionaire, real estate guy.
Understand each other, similar life.
New York came up.
Yeah.
Very transactional.
Who is the least?
If those are the top, who are the least?
Well, I think he gets rid of the least.
Is there anybody there that right now, you're like, if things flipped in 2027, 2028, they would turn on Trump on a heartbeat.
I think Rubio would turn on Trump on a heartbeat.
Rubio is very, you know, Rubio wants to be president.
And right now it's in Rubio's interest to Rubio is probably the most powerful person in the administration, at least in foreign policy, probably Stephen Miller in domestic policy.
Ahead of Vance?
Yes.
I mean, you know, Rubio is running the State Department and being the national security advisor.
He joked about it one time in an interview.
I'm working two jobs right now.
Yeah.
I don't know if you remember that or not when he joked about it.
No, no, yeah.
I mean, the last person to do that was Henry Kissinger.
Yeah.
There's no more powerful foreign policy advisor in American history than Henry Kissinger.
You saw Trump edified Rubio about a week and a half ago.
He said, look, I don't know.
I think some are saying that Rubio may be better than Kissinger was.
He's kind of Kissinger leaked.
Kissinger was famous for leaking.
Do you remember that one?
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
So he's trying to, he's doing his part of being a kinkmaker as well and trying to see who's going to run 2028.
But you're saying Rubio could flip, huh?
You think Rubio could turn on him?
I don't think Rubio is a true believer in the America First agenda in the way that J.D. Vance, I think, is.
You think JD is more than Rubio is?
Depending on how you define America First, you know, it's, you know, when Trump bombed Iran, the idea was America First is whatever Trump says it is, right?
Trump's the creator of the America First movement, the leader of it, the person who brought it into public consciousness.
So there are no principles separate and apart from Trump's decision.
I don't believe this.
I think it's a very, that's a cult of personality.
That's not a political movement.
Political movement is based on principles.
So if you look at the principles on which America First is based, I think how the true believers understood what differentiated America First movement from prior Republican orthodoxy, I believe J.D. Vance is as convicted of a true believer as anybody in the administration, certainly far more than Marco Ruby.
Just let's take Ukraine, for example, which for me is kind of a flashpoint.
Obviously, Israel is the main one.
We can talk about that if you want, but I have a lot to say on that, obviously.
But let's look at Ukraine, which people are less emotional about.
Traditionally, the Republican position is go destroy Russia.
Russia's our enemy.
Who's ever on enemy, we go to war against, you know, fund American allies till the end.
Lots of Republicans.
It got attributed to Biden because that was Biden's policy too.
And the Democrats were super obsessed with Ukraine.
You go to any like liberal blue district in the United States and you see nothing but Ukrainian flags still.
It became kind of a religion, almost like replacing the LGBT flag.
Pans, it was, absolutely, it was.
Fully.
Bizarre.
Bizarre, fully.
Bizarre.
But a lot of Republicans were fully on board with that as well, just because that's a standard, let's say, neocon, war-mongering, kind of interventionist mindset that has driven both parties since the end of the since the start of the Cold War, but even then the end.
And one of the planks of America First was, no, we have to stop wasting all our resources on foreign wars that don't affect the lives of American citizens.
Like, who gives a shit who rules various provinces in eastern Ukraine?
That's not something that affects the forgotten man in Ohio or Pennsylvania.
That's a waste of money that's going to Raytheon's pocket and who knows what kind of oligarchs in Kiev.
And that's the kind of wasteful war that Maga and America First was created to oppose.
And that's why Trump has been so contemptuous of this war.
Marco Rubio has been a loud, vocal supporter of funding the war in Ukraine, whereas J.D. Vance from the start has been highly skeptical.
So that to me, I just one example illustrative of, I think, what differentiates those two and why I think J.D. Vance is a much more faithful adherent to the America First agenda than, say, Marco Rubio.
It's not even closed.
So you prefer JD?
On those issues, yes.
Even in that, even in that chat, remember in that chat that leaked about the Waltz chat about bombing Yemen?
Yep.
JD was pushing back.
He was saying, this doesn't seem like something we need to do right now.
Why don't we wait a couple months?
What's the urgency?
I remember that.
And then once it happened, he was like, yeah, kill them.
But that's just how it is.
Second guessing himself is maybe the first second guessing is the true who he is.
And then second step is I'm going to be loyalist and get in line.
Yeah.
I mean, once he hears, no, Trump wants this.
Steve Miller said, you know, Trump, this is decided.
Trump wants this.
Then he gets on board because that's how you survive.
And you keep influence and power.
But his first reactions was, wait a minute, why are we doing this?
Same with Tulsi.
That was her reaction too.
I think Tulsi is a more faithful adherent to the America First agenda than a lot of the people surrounding Trump.
So, okay, so I got it.
I got how much time we got, Rob.
Can you tell Matteo to text me by when I have to finish?
Because we got a lot of things I want to go through with this.
So, okay, let's go with the conversation about whistleblower.
Let's go past that one.
If there were, because I have my own list, I'm curious what yours is.
If there were five areas that are the most important for Americans to know, and there is somebody that's on the tipping point of being a whistleblower that needs to be inspired, what would be five departments,
areas of knowledge that somebody has access to information that was like, you know, the Afghanistan, the things that Snowden and Assange had, Hillary Clinton, all that stuff that came out.
What would be the five areas for a whistleblower with access to information if they're inspired and they're willing to go through the challenges that goes through for them to blow the whistle?
I would start with the Epstein files.
Number one.
Only because it's a window into how corrupted and how deceitful our global elite is.
You know, right now there's a huge scandal in the UK because a lot of stuff is emerging despite the Trump administration's concealment of these files with Prince Andrew, that he was far closer to Epstein than he had to claim, that his relationship extended far beyond the date he did.
So there's a lot untold in there.
I'm not saying the issue of, you know, who was with Jeffrey Epstein for whatever reasons in and of itself is the most important thing.
But I think the reasons why two consecutive governments have hidden those files, first Biden administration and now Trump, reveals a lot about how just global elites function in general.
So that's, I would, I just think it would be something that would enable Americans to understand the true depths of the decadence inside global elite culture.
So that's number one.
Number two, I would say there's a lot of questions about where all that money went that we sent to Ukraine.
There's a lot of, I think, massive, I mean, Ukraine was always known as the most corrupt place in Europe before this war started.
Lots of evidence about how there's no, you know, Rand Paul tried to introduce an amendment saying before any more money goes to Ukraine, we just should have an audit of where it's going.
And he got accused of being a Russian agent.
The bipartisan Senate rejected that.
I'd love to have an audit of where that money has gone.
Billions and billions and billions.
There's a lot about the U.S.-Israeli relationship, including the fact that we tried to get Israel to do a whole bunch of things, both Biden and Trump.
They basically stuck their middle finger up at us and we swallowed it.
Like, why?
And towards the end.
Which area?
Be specific.
Well, I mean, there's just, you know, there's a case that just came out yesterday where in 2022, the Israelis shot in the head an American journalist in the West Bank.
Very, you know, respected American journalist.
She had covered that region for a long time.
And the Israelis first denied it and said, no, it was, it wasn't us.
And then it turned out it was absolutely them.
They admitted it.
They said it was unintentional.
The military investigators for the United States who investigated it concluded that the Israelis did it on purpose, that they knew that she was a journalist, that they knew who she was, and they shot her in the head because of that.
And high-level Biden State Department officials overrode that and said, no, we cannot publish this.
We're going to come out and say that it was unintentional.
Yeah, her name is Abu Just if you type U.S. journalist, yeah, it's her.
I just keep her name escapes me.
It's yeah, Shireen Abu Akla.
There was just an article there.
You see the brother of journalist Shireen Akla shot dead by the Israel army.
No, what do you think?
What I want to know is the higher up of Biden's administration that said we can't talk about it.
Blanket.
Who's a lifelong Israel supporter?
He's Jewish.
He grew up in circles where you're taught to love Israel.
Your duty is to support Israel, to defend Israel.
I think the more lights shown on that relationship.
Also, even in terms of the West Bank, Trump said, under no circumstances will Israel annex the West Bank, but Israel is annexing the West Bank.
Our policy for decades has been it's extremely harmful to American interests for Israel to annex the West Bank because the more of the settlements expand, the less likely it is for a two-state solution.
Without a two-state solution, our interests in the region are jeopardized.
Israel doesn't care.
They just keep ignoring us.
They just go back to Reagan and Bush 41 were enraged that Israel is expanding settlements and they just do it anyway.
So why, why?
Why does that happen?
Why is this tiny little country who we finance, who we support, who we arm, who we protect?
Can you do me a favor?
And by the way, so far I have three of them.
And I want to get to the fourth one, but let's stay on this because we'll get to the fourth and the fifth.
Try to give me the argument from somebody who would be disagreeing with you, but from a noble side, and then give the argument from your side, which is noble.
You're a straight-up guy.
But try to give both arguments.
Not from the standpoint of, I think they're evil.
I think they're this.
I think they're that.
Try to give both sides of the argument.
Why do you think that is?
Okay.
So the argument as to why we do so much for this country.
By the way, in a region that, I mean, oil is important there, but Israel doesn't have oil.
Israel, you know, is in the Mediterranean.
It doesn't, it's not a very geostrategically vital location for the United States.
The argument, though, is that by having a ally in the region with whom we work very closely militarily, technologically, economically, it's almost like a forward operating base.
They're like an arm of the American military that does our dirty work for us in the Middle East so that we don't have to go to war in the Middle East.
We rely on Israel.
They give us technology that is helpful.
Their tech sector is very, very advanced.
They do develop weapons.
They develop surveillance technology that's among the best in the world that sometimes we don't even develop.
They share it with us.
So we get benefits from protecting them, from arming them, from financing them.
And it's the only democracy in the region and we benefit for some reason for having democracy in that region.
That's the argument is that we get benefits from it.
It's not just a one-way street, that for all the money we give them, all the arms, all the sacrificing of soft power and global standing that we incur to protect them, we get benefits the other way.
The reason that's not true is because, as I just got done saying, I mean, look at how many times Israel has done exactly the things we insist are the things that harm us and our interests in the region.
You go back so many years back to the 80s, really.
Let's say the 80s, the position of the Reagan administration, the Bush 41 administration was your continuous refusal to enter into a two-state solution, your permission to settlers to keep expanding in the West Bank is destroying a two-state solution.
And our problem in the Middle East, the reason why so many people in the region hate us, the reason there's so much anti-Americanism, the reason why things like 9-11 happen is because so many Arabs and Muslims hate us in the region.
And the reason they hate us principally is because they know that we are the ones giving you the weapons to kill Palestinians and Muslims in the West Bank in Gaza.
And we need a peace there, but you're preventing a peace and you're harming.
And David Petraeus, lots of generals have said our biggest problem in the Middle East comes from Israel's refusal to stop these settlements.
And they, even though they're dependent on us, even though they need our money, even though we can, they just, they just refuse.
On top of that, when we did this noted in reporting, we provide Israel with more raw data, including about American citizens, than any other country in the world.
We give them, we just hand them huge amounts of our surveillance.
In response, on the list of greatest threats to foreign threats to surveillance, Israel is the number one greatest adversary that spies on us with the most efficacy, with the least amount of limits.
We publish these articles showing that.
So we're financing this country.
We're financing this country.
We're arming them.
We're doing everything for them.
And in return, they pursue policies that directly harm our interests in very serious ways.
And they spy on us constantly.
They spy on us all the time.
I mean, the AIPAC has gotten caught working with Pentagon officials to steal extremely sensitive secrets that they pass to Israel.
The Pentagon officials were convicted for that.
The AIPAC got their case dismissed under strange circumstances.
You had Jonathan Pollard, who was spying on the U.S. government from inside the U.S. government, handing it to Israel, became a hero in Israel.
They shoot Americans.
They kill Americans.
There are Americans dying in their detention facilities.
Where is this allyship?
How are we benefiting from Israel?
You look at the UN, and the UN is, you know, nothing.
People talk about the UN like it's some Marxist organization.
It's just a collection of the governments around the world.
You know, the governments around the world appoint the representatives.
They go vote the way the government wants.
That's all it is.
We're constantly isolated in the world to protect Israel.
Who would be your second?
So say you don't have Israel.
Say you stop Israel and all the intel, I think you would agree that Mossad is one of the best intel agencies in the world.
So what happens, say we both say we're done, forget about the relationship.
It's done.
America and Israel no longer have a relationship, no longer exchanging of intel, no longer of given intel to us in the Middle East.
Pretty chaotic area.
Who's our second partner?
Well, we have a lot of very close allies in that region.
I mean, we have a gigantic military base in Qatar.
Have you been to Doha?
Like you go to Doha and not just the Emiratis, I mean, we, the thing is, first of all, I'm not even saying cut off our relations with Israel.
Why do we have to finance them?
Why do we have to send billions of dollars every year to them?
Many billions more.
Maybe it's in exchange for, you know, you said it earlier.
They don't have, like, if it was, if we're dealing with Qatari, if we're dealing with some of these other guys, they already have plenty of money.
These guys already have oil.
They have resources.
You said they don't have resources, right?
Their resources is what?
Business.
I don't even know where they get their money from.
But what they don't have, but the thing is, is like these countries with whom we're allied in the Middle East, and Trump loves them, by the way, like the Saudis, the Emiratis, the Viktaris, the Jordanians, Trump loves them for a lot of reasons.
The problem with them, that they have endless amounts of money because of oil.
And they've turned their societies into, you know, you visit those countries and the infrastructure and the architecture is far more advanced.
The streets are than the United States.
The streets are cleaner.
The airports work better.
Everything is more advanced.
But it relies on extreme levels of repression.
They're dictatorships, very brutal dictatorships.
Who do you trust more?
Well, but I mean, so I'm just saying that what they need that they don't have is military protection, surveillance technology.
We do that, we're crucial to their security.
We are like, in fact, when there is Qatar's security or Israel's security?
We're crucial to Qatar's security.
We're crucial to Saudi security.
We're crucial.
Can I give you how I see this?
Yes.
I grew up in Iran and I was born on Mehrebi Shishom, October 1878.
Another kid was born a month after me.
We grew up like this.
That kid, good kid, good family.
Both parents are doctors.
They did very well.
One is a doctor.
The mother was an accountant.
Brilliant.
Very good families.
And as we were coming up, I knew I wasn't going to get anything from my parents.
They didn't have money.
They just brought me to America.
My dad was a worker, 99-cent store in Inglewood, California.
My mother was, she's never worked for as long as I've known her, you know, homemaker.
We came here.
Why did you come, though?
Like, what was the reason?
Khomeini died six weeks later.
We escaped.
June 3rd, 89, when he died, we escaped six weeks later.
But I'm saying, why?
Why did you, if you weren't, you know, like kind of one of those oligarchical families under the Shawadi, a Christian family?
We're a Christian family.
My mom didn't feel safe.
I was about to turn 12.
She didn't want me to serve the military in Iran and she said, we got to leave.
My dad agreed.
We went to Germany refugee camp Erlang in Nuremberg, 18 months, and we came here November 28, 1990.
But here's where I'm going.
That kid grew up.
The parents built a good business.
The kid knew the parents had to give the business eventually to the kid.
And the kid's like, listen, you guys better take care of my business because it's mine.
Do you understand what I'm saying?
So it's almost like an entitled kid because they only had one kid.
Right.
Do you know that's the reason why I don't believe you should ever have anything less than three kids?
I think you should have three kids because if it's only one, guess how they feel?
They own you.
And I do think there's an element of Israel that it's the only child in the Middle East.
U.S. made that mistake by having the only child in the Middle East.
I don't know if this is making sense to point out maybe.
No, I understand the point.
The point I'm trying to say is like you negotiated this, America.
You put yourself in this situation.
And I think what Trump is trying to do, which maybe none of these other guys previous to him have done, correct me if I'm wrong, this is your world, is when you have an only child, you don't have a choice.
You kind of got to figure it out or else go raise two other kids that match your values and principles and pin them against each other.
Meaning, if you see what Trump is doing with Canada, he pushes Mexico or he pushes China, he pushes Russia, he puts sanctions on Russia.
You better not do the oil deal.
The couple, the biggest oil companies in China that buy oil, they're like, we're suspending it because of sanctions.
And then he's able to pin them against each other, but he's trying to find somebody else to pin against Israel, to hold Israel accountable.
And I think he's doing that in the way he did with Qatar when he's like, why'd you shoot up that place?
You better come out and apologize.
I think that phone call was made.
Do you think that phone call was made?
When he said you better apologize to the partnership?
For sure.
No, he was enraged.
He was enraged.
The part where I'm going to is I think they handed him, you have one child in the Middle East, go make it work.
And there's a community of people saying, screw Israel, screw the screwdriver.
You can't.
It's the only child.
Wait till you build a couple other children, then let them compete against you.
I totally get that theory.
It's coherent and it makes sense.
And I think there's some truth to it as well.
Except after the 1967 war and then the 1973 Yom Kippur war, Nixon was the first to change these policies.
He became very close to the Arab world or closer.
And then obviously we have had an extremely close relationship with the Saudis for decades, even after 9-11, when they were by far the country most involved or certainly with the greatest proximity to the hijackers.
George Bush helped the Saudis who were in the country get out.
He continued to have a very close, you know, the Bush family has been very close to the Saudis for a long time.
They're oil people.
They have a close relationship.
But one of the things that we did is, and I think this is when you count how much we do for Israel, this often doesn't get counted is we don't just give huge amounts of money to Israel.
We also prop up a regime in Egypt that goes back to Anwar Sadat and then Mubarak and now Sisi.
And we prop up the Jordanian royal family as well to keep not just stability in those countries, but also to keep them at bay and not hostile toward Israel.
We do have other allies in the region.
And I think one of the things Trump is wanting to do, and I think you're right about this, is he wants to expand the scope of American alliances in the region, but he also wants to foster normalization with Israel.
But I think that's fine.
So the way I process it is with business.
And I'll explain it to you from my perspective.
Again, pushback when I'm given this perspective.
I'm very comfortable with it.
Is when at the beginning I had an insurance carrier, I'm running an insurance company.
I only had one insurance carrier.
I didn't have four.
I didn't have five.
I only had one.
And the one that I had was AIG, American General.
And I'm coming up.
I'm a newer company.
They tell me what they want to do.
I can't push back.
You have no leverage.
I don't have any other carriers.
So then I go get a third, a fourth, a fifth, a sixth, to seventh.
Finally, it normalizes where the negotiation is even.
But guess what?
I never wanted to lose them because they've been a decent ally to me and we both needed each other when we got started.
I think that's the right way of diplomacy on what he's doing.
I think for him to sit there and say, because if I sit there and I think about you have the best intel, I want access to that intel.
Nobody else does a good enough of a job as intel as you in the Middle East.
I think that's very valuable to me.
How can I use that intel?
Now, don't get me wrong.
When the argument comes back around and it's your number one is Epstein.
You know what my number one is?
What do you think my number one is?
What is your number one?
What do you think my number one is?
I want you to take a wild guess.
I'm at a loss.
I don't tell you.
It's Epstein.
Oh, and so we're in agreement.
I thought that Epstein's my number one.
All right, so yeah, we have been going.
I do believe they've been using blackmail to get information and that info was being sent to Israel.
I do believe all of that stuff is.
But this is what I'm saying.
It's like, if you take this idealistic view of Israel, they give us all this intel.
They're like incredibly.
You make a better argument.
The thing is that the Israelis don't have any sense of loyalty to the United States.
The intel they pass to us is often shit.
It's deceitful.
It's manipulated to get us to do what they want.
It's filled with falsehoods.
And this is the style.
I'm not saying just the Israelis do.
This is not uniquely evil.
This is how the Intel world operates.
We try and manipulate other countries by saying, oh, look what we have here.
You know, it's what the steel dossier was about, right?
That's part of that world is deliberate disinformation and lying.
The Israelis aren't, the Israelis care about Israel.
They are not loyal to the United States, which is fine.
We are America first.
We should be.
But I think there's a lot more unnatural loyalty to Israel than certainly Israel has to us.
And I think it's important not to overlook the reality that many of the most important people in the United States, the people who wield the greatest power, the people who have the most money, the people who are most indispensable to many power centers are people who have at least as much loyalty to Israel as to the United States, if not more so.
You can't ignore that as part of the relationship.
There's a manipulative aspect to it.
I disagree.
I don't know.
No, I know.
I'm just saying that has to be part of the formula.
But where I'm going with this is I, so I'm sitting there and I'm watching all the criticism that Trump is getting, but I'm also watching what he's doing behind the scenes.
I'm also seeing how he's trying to put Netanyahu in his place.
And I also see that Netanyahu thinks he can do anything he wants to do with America.
Probably he could have done with other presidents in the past, but he's having a hard time with this one guy that's coming in.
And this one guy that's coming in is a little bit tougher candidate for him because he has a thing that none of the guys previous to him had.
He is so unpredictable.
He can't control him.
Which is why I think above all else, the establishment was so had such animosity toward Trump.
Exactly what you just said.
He's unpredictable.
And I love that.
And what the establishment wants is Hillary Clinton and Kamal Harris, people who just are going to be very controlled.
Let me quickly add, though.
On the one hand, I understand what you're saying.
And of course, there has been these stories leaked that, oh, there's this tension between Netanyahu and Trump.
But if you look at the actual behavior, you know, Trump in 2024, he went and spoke before this organization when Miriam Idelson, who's his biggest donor, Elon Musk.
Elon Musk.
Yeah.
And Trump said, you know, not only we're going to make U.S. great again and we're going to make Israel great again.
That was part of his promise.
He also talked about how in his first term, the people who visited him most were Sheldon and Miriam Idelson.
He said that in a speech at, I think it was the Republican Jewish Coalition.
No, I think he said that in a different, but I think he said it at the US.
I don't know where it was, but it was, I remember the speech that he would call, he would come and say, you realize I'm the president.
I'm coming to the White House.
What are you talking about?
And then he would come.
And he would say, you know, these are American citizens, like, right?
Scare quotes.
And they would come in and they would only want stuff for Israel.
That's what Trump says.
You're right.
That's the speech.
You're right.
Yeah.
Yes.
And Trump said that they would come in and they would say, I want this for Israel.
And Trump would give it to them.
And then like a week later, they'd call back and they're like, now I want this.
And he'd be like, give me a couple weeks.
I'll do more for Israel.
But I just can't.
But he talked about how much he served Israel throughout his.
And, you know, I think one of the things that is important to remember is that when Trump was running in 2024, he needed to win to stay out of prison.
Had Trump not won that 2024 election, he would be in prison for life.
And he was willing to do whatever he had to, the way most people would.
And one of the people he needed most was Mary Middlesex and not just her.
You know, Bill Ackman and lots of other big, big donors who care most about Israel.
I do think Netanyahu understands.
Like the White House released that humiliating picture of Netanyahu holding the phone with his, while Trump was holding the phone, Netanyahu was on the phone with the Amir of Qadr, reading a script or an apology, right?
Like a deliberate attempt to show what the dynamic in the relationship really is.
Do you think that was an act or do you think he really had to call Qatar and say what he said?
When I see the United States or the Trump administration cutting off aid to Israel when they do things that we don't want, then I will, yeah, I mean, look at that picture.
I mean, look at that.
That's an act though.
Do you really think in that position who had leverage?
I think, this is the thing.
This is what I think has changed is that I think Trump loves, I mean, if you think about Trump and what he loves most, even the aesthetic of like the Saudi, you know, this like flamboyant opulence, right?
I think Trump loves Cotter, the Emirates, and Saudis genuinely, at least as much as he loves Israel.
In fact, I think he's infinitely more comfortable in Dubai than he is in Jerusalem.
Is that a bad thing?
No, no, it's a good thing.
Anything that places Israel more in its place, in its proper place, is a good thing to me.
These are terrible countries.
I mean, these are hardcore, you know, savage dictatorships, but I'm not, I don't think the United States should go around the world trying to do this more pro-America, you think, between those three?
Who do you think is more pro-America and more an ally between those three names you said?
Probably the Emiratis.
And then?
The Saudis.
You put Israel last.
Oh, you mean in terms of like ally towards U.S.?
Like who between those three, Emiratis, you know, Saudis, Israel, who do you put more?
It's all transactional at the end of the day, right?
None of them have loyalty to the U.S. more, though.
Who do you trust more that at the end of the day, if their back's against the wall, they're going to side with us?
I think the minute it's in any of their interests to go to China.
You don't put one above the other, Glenn.
You're not a fearless guy.
No, I'm not trying to evade the question.
I don't think it makes sense.
You're not a fearful guy.
I don't think it's Israel, if that's what you're talking about.
So what do you think it is, though?
Who do you think is a terrible thing?
I think probably within the DNA of all these countries, the most pro-U.S.
sentiment is with the Saudis.
That's been a deeper, long-term just because the relationship between the two is so critical, and the Saudis really need the United States to stay in power.
Perfect.
So who needs U.S. the least between those three?
So you're saying Israel, Emiratis, not Cotter.
Put Cotter there as well.
Who do you think needs the U.S. the least?
I think right now Israel needs the U.S. the most.
I agree.
That I think is true.
I agree.
No, that I agree.
But who needs it the least?
I mean, it could be at this point, you know, those oil, all three oil companies have China, have India, have other countries they could deal with.
Do you not think Trump knows that leverage?
If the guy, the king of leverage of presidents we've ever had is not George Bush, is not Obama, is not senior, it's not maybe senior because he had some experience on the CIA side.
It's probably not Reagan.
This guy understands leverage.
Yes, but yes, and there is leverage of the American president when it comes to Israel for sure.
And I think Trump does know that.
At the same time, you think that any president, including Trump, could put Israel in its place, could cut Israel off in any meaningful way, could threaten Israel without repercussions?
No, no, no.
He would be destroyed.
It's the same way I think if you run for president as a 100% anti-Israel, I don't think that's the wise move.
Not saying that.
No, no, no.
Forget about the elections.
Trump doesn't care about the elections.
Presumably he's done, right?
In 2020.
think is real ask the question again do i think israel but no no let's let's Let's say Trump really put the genuine clamps down on Israel, like withheld military aid, withheld economic aid, didn't protect them at the UN the way we've been doing any of the things we do with Israel because he's angry at NYU, punishing Netanyahu.
The hell that would rain down on Donald Trump from all of these power centers that control media, that control politics, that control Wall Street, that control Silicon Valley would be immense.
It would be a shitstorm of the highest proportions.
I see it in a different way.
And the way I see it is the following.
What else can you do to this guy at this point?
What else?
Media?
What are you going to bring?
You're going to bring up Kara McDougal?
What are you going to bring up?
You're going to bring up Stormy?
What are you going to bring up with him?
You're going to bring up a Trump stake?
You're going to bring up Trump bankruptcies?
You're going to bring up the mug shot?
What else are you going to do to this?
We've had presidents who had their head blown.
And where I'm going with, they've tried to do the same thing, too.
What I'm trying to say is the following.
There's a difference between the notion of, you know, like, for example, we're going to do a funny skit for one of our channels and say, you know, we'd like to thank our sponsors today.
We believe we're the only company in the world that's gotten sponsored from Qatar as well as Israel.
Congratulations, Qatar.
We want to kind of do that to say, hey, thank you, Qatar, for the $7,000.
And thank you, Israel.
APAC.
We are thankful for you, some of you guys.
But the part is there is the noise of social media.
They're funded by Qatar.
They're funded by Israel.
They're from Israel.
Okay.
That was one of the main reasons why I stopped taking sponsorship money.
I just wanted everybody to know we're just going to drive our own business.
Now, would I come back and take money from some businesses that I support and I have equity in?
Yes, because I have equity in the company.
But we're like, nothing.
How long ago was it we took sponsorship money from it?
What would you say that timeline is?
At least two years, I would think.
I think it's exactly right around the October 7th.
I don't want any more money to be given to us, right?
But there is the noise that's like, oh, Israel controls Trump.
I don't think that's the case.
I think the way I see it is he truly knows who Israel is.
He knows Israel's the only child.
And he knows, you know, Trump had five kids and he knows how to steer the pot.
I mean, one time, Don Jr.
is in his mid to late 30s and they ask him, they say, so, you know, you know, you must be really proud of Don and your kids.
He says, well, we'll see.
I mean, he's still young.
He's my baby, and we'll see how he's going to do, but still young.
Well, hopefully, he likes that.
He likes the, we'll see what they're going to do.
We'll see, you know, where, and then he wants, yeah, you know what?
They're great allies.
They're this, but then we'll see.
But then, so I think he's playing the game of pinning people against each other to get the best results and the best deals for himself because that's what you do in real estate.
I get it, but at the same time, and I think if you will talk to anybody in Washington, which I know you do, and you're, you know, a very kind of pragmatic business man type of person who looks at things in terms of leverage and power, you cannot underestimate the power of the Israel lobby.
And the power of the Israel lobby is not, I know, I'm not saying you don't, but it's not the power.
Their power is not, oh, we run some negative ads against you.
That's not their power.
They destroy people.
They, they, you know, Trump has not just himself, who he cares about a lot, but his family, his friends, his associate, his business interests.
You know, after the Jews went through the Holocaust, they see everything in an existential way.
I agree.
And can you blame them, by the way?
No.
I mean, I grew up, you know, invested in this.
I understand, you know, I grew up in a very Jewish community.
The Jewish community.
Your family considered them the most paranoid community in the world.
Yes.
Yes.
Which I don't necessarily think is, you know, we're 80 years out of the Holocaust.
A lot has changed since then.
But, you know, victimhood mentality is something that stays with you.
It is a victimhood mentality.
And people get a lot of ego benefits from victimhood.
It's the currency in our culture.
It's so funny.
It's true.
It's true.
But yes, they, so that is very much part of the Israel and the Jewish mindset, whether for psychological reasons, valid reasons, pragmatic reasons, tactical ones, whatever.
But for that reason, they don't fuck around.
Like this is, they're not a joke.
And anyone who understands anything about them understands that they are not to be trifled with.
Yeah, and you know, it's so funny.
You know what I just Googled?
Andy Grove, who is, I don't know if you know Andy Grove is.
Andy Grove is, just pull up his Wikipedia.
I want to read him who he is.
He is known as Hungarian American businessman engineer who served as the CEO of Intel Corporation.
He escaped the Hungarian People's Republic during the 1956 revolution at the age of 20.
He is known as the greatest CEO in that era.
Everybody wanted to duplicate this guy.
died almost 10 years ago.
Time magazine 1997 called him the man of the year.
He wrote a book called Only the Paranoid Survive.
And I just asked Chad GPT, was he Jewish?
He is a Jewish family from Hungary.
He wrote a book.
Oh, I could have told you that without Chat GPT.
Can you go to Only the Paranoid Survive?
Only the Paranoid Survive book that's Andy Grove, the title, Only the Paranoid Survive.
So I see that because for me, I relate to that from the Middle Eastern kid, Christian guy growing up in Iran.
Dude, we were very paranoid.
We're like, hey, you have no idea.
That was 40 years ago, not even 40 years ago, 89, whatever 89 is, right?
36 years ago.
So I relate to that.
I relate to the paranoid side, but I also relate to America's making a mistake, having an only child in the Middle East.
And I think Trump's trying to get three or four kids to pin them all against each other.
And that's why he's going to keep them on us.
And I love that strategy.
I absolutely love that strategy.
Until he had that, he can't fully go like this on Israel.
The moment he had that, he's like, boom, boom, boom, boom.
And I think it's still Israel is the favorite child.
It's still that's the case.
But the favorite child is kind of like, whoa, what's going on?
I think people are maybe realizing, you know, I'm starting to get a lot of papa lately.
I hope you're right.
I want to believe that too.
I understand what you're saying.
I see the same things.
I'll believe it when the U.S. actually takes concrete steps, not leaks to Axios or the politico, you know, that there's tension between Trump and Netanyahu.
There was a lot of that around the negotiations over Iran, and I think that ended up being a ruse.
You don't think there's tension between the two?
Yeah, I'm sure there was tension between Obama and Netanyahu.
And one of the last things Obama did on the way out is sign a $40 billion aid deal to guarantee Israel $3.8 billion automatically every year from the U.S. Treasury on top of whatever.
I don't think Obama's Trump, though.
I don't think Obama's Trump.
I think the difference is, you know, I think Trump is a boss of bosses.
I think Obama's a great speaker and a great community organizer and a great politician.
I don't, Obama, nobody looks at Obama and says he's a boss.
Nobody.
There's a difference mentality here.
And again, by the way, I could fully be wrong because of who comes after Trump.
But also, just not to defend Obama, since it's the last thing personally I want to defend, but one of the things he did on his way out, and you know, he's on his way out, but okay, was he did sign that $40 billion deal, which is still in the plaque, this memorandum of understanding with Israel, you know, $3.8 billion every year, automatically on top of the $20, $25, $30 billion we give them every time they want to start a war, plus the money we give to Egypt and Jordan, which is mostly for Israel, all the other expenses.
Obama did that.
But then also on the way out, there was a Security Council resolution to condemn Israel for its occupation of the West Bank, which the U.N. wanted to declare illegal.
The U.S. has always vetoed any anti-Israel resolution.
Obama refused to use his veto power, didn't vote for it, but abstained.
And that's what allowed the resolution in the Security Council to pass.
So that was a pretty— I have an opinion on that, though.
My opinion on that is Obama never liked Israel.
His middle name is Hussein.
Obama's never been an Israel fan.
Trump has been in business with Jews his entire life in New York.
Trump understands Jews better than Obama understands Jews.
Obama hates Jews, not hates Jews.
Obama's not a, let me use a different phrase.
Israel is not in the top 20 of its favorite countries in the world.
Obama.
I don't think Obama wakes up in the morning saying, oh my God, I love the people in Israel.
I love what they're doing.
No, but the money flowed.
The money flowed under Obama.
The weapons flowed over under Obama.
You said something very powerful.
You said something very powerful at the beginning of it that we don't know all the conversations.
You said something about the fact that, you know, when you were on the inside trying to help Snowden get pardoned, and then you talked about the camp that came out and said, you know, the McConnells and, you know, all these other guys saying, hey, if you do, we're going to make sure we continue this.
So who knows why he did that because what threats he had.
But that's my point.
I think Trump, if Trump were to take meaningful steps against Israel, I think the amount of threats and punishments and attacks that would be unleashed would be almost impossible to overstate.
And I understand what you're saying.
Look, they've thrown everything at Trump.
Not from the Israel lobby.
Yeah, but I don't think, I don't think you do.
I don't think he's trying to.
I don't think what you think is success is the same thing as what Trump thinks is success.
What is success?
In my opinion, it's making sure Israel's no longer the only child in the Middle East.
But toward what end?
Well, towards having a couple other alternatives that get along with it.
So that we can reduce age so that we don't have to give them all the weapons so we don't have to defend them all the time.
So we can steer a little bit of competition and a little bit of a, you know, literally, like, for example, you say that the money.
Okay, let me go back to the business side as well.
Say you're writing $50 million of insurance every year, okay?
And you have this one carrier that has okay products, not the best products, but they have a very good reputation in the marketplace.
And you don't want the marketplace to say, Patrick B. David lost contract with AIG.
Why did he lose contract?
Let me investigate it, right?
So guess what?
You give that company $2 million of business.
What's $2 million of business?
Nothing.
But you give it to them for them to be happy with the quality.
That's called strategy.
That's called...
But what do we need Israel for?
The Saudis, the Emiratis, the Qataris, the Bahrainis, the Jordanians, they would happily sell their oil to us.
No, it's not just that, buddy.
What else?
Why do we need Israel?
I think you need them for the intel.
To me, it's purely the intel.
Intel about whom?
Are you kidding me?
Who is their neighbor?
Who are they right next to?
Where are they in the middle of?
I think there's a benefit to having a good relationship with Israel.
I think there's a benefit of having a good relationship with Qatar.
I think there's a benefit with having a good relation with Saudi.
I think there's a benefit with having a good relationship with.
I think the relationship with Israel on the net is more harmful to the United States than it is beneficial.
We have, you know, the one thing I know, you know, I spent three years of my life reading through it, is the capacity of the U.S. intelligence agency, the NSA, how much eyes and ears we have on every part of the world.
We don't need Israel to spy on us.
How do we spy on us?
How do we have it in the Middle East?
We have the gigantic, again, we prop up the Egyptian and the Jordanians.
They do whatever we tell us.
We have the gigantic military base in the middle of Qatar.
You think they're as effective as Mossad?
I don't think that the Mossad, the Mossad isn't there to pass us good information.
The Mossad is there to give us information it wants us to have to provoke actions that are favorable to Israel.
By the way, I don't disagree that they're going to give us the best information because they're going to be Israel first.
I fully believe that Israel is Israel first.
But Israel sits there and says, we kind of need America to be able to stay here and do our things.
And I think that leverage can be used.
It can be, but there's also a hugely powerful Israel lobby that I think has control and a stranglehold over American politics.
And I hope you're right that Trump is trying to get out of this.
You know what the problem is?
I hope you're right.
I really do.
You know what the problem is?
Here's what the problem is.
And by the way, I can't tell you how much I appreciate the fact that you can have this conversation.
And I don't even know if we're disagreeing, by the way.
I don't even know if the disagreement is that I'm taking a position, you're taking a position.
Where I'm going long term is the idea of, no, they're the enemy, they're this, they're that, and blah, blah, blah.
I can't change my position because of this.
And then, no, Because of this, without Israel, we can't do this.
We have to do this.
No, how about let's kind of go here a little bit.
By the way, in my opinion, you know what's the hardest place to be?
You know what's the toughest place to be?
Not here or here.
You're here, you have friends.
If you're here, you have friends and allies.
You ain't got friends when you're here.
Yeah, exactly.
And when you're trying to be here, they're like, well, let me tell you, he's on that side.
No, no, well, let me tell you he's on this side.
I was a kid growing up.
You know what they used to tell me?
My mother said would say, he's a bed David.
He's an Assyrian.
And my father said would say, he's a Bohosian.
He's an Armenian.
I'm like, screw both of you.
The only ones I care about is my mom, my dad, my sister.
I don't play this politics.
I'm here.
And it took a couple decades for people to realize, well, he was kind of fair.
You know, he's kind of fair with being.
So I think, I think.
Well, to be clear, like, if you talk about it morally and ethically, I do think what Israel has done in Gaza is one of the worst crimes, certainly of this century.
So I don't want to pretend that I'm nuanced about that.
However, I think when we're talking about U.S. policy toward other countries, toward the region, you have to be analytical about it.
It's not driven by self-righteous moralism.
This is better for content, by the way, if you think about it.
Yeah, this is very effective for content.
This is not.
No, exactly.
Exactly.
If you and I were to scream at each other about Israel and its morality in Gaza, it would, you know, you would, oh, look, they got into the screening badge.
But I think this is much more sublimative, much more important, much more.
I trust that he's doing business.
I trust he's looking at this as a business deal.
And the only thing is, when I sold my, and I hope he does this, you know, when you leave and you're trying to put certain rules and guidelines in place to make sure some of this stuff doesn't repeat itself, we're going to see if he's going to be able to pull that off because that's the real trick.
And that's why I say, I hope you're right.
But at the end of the day, I also think among all the other things Trump's weighing, and I think your analysis of his view of the Middle East is exactly right.
He's also weighing, and he'd be stupid not to, the things that the pro-Israel lobby could do to him and to things he cares about if he were really to take action against Israel.
That has to be in his mind.
He'd be crazy not to be.
You can say, oh, he's been through everything.
Trump is a, Trump is self-interested.
He's human.
And he has, you know, kids and their businesses and his grandkids and things he cares about.
And anyone who cares about things is vulnerable.
Yeah.
And by the way, I think anybody who cares about anything is also better for society.
For sure.
I think anybody who has nothing to lose is horrible for society.
When you have kids, like I tell my kids, man, be friends with other kids who have things to lose.
You want to befriend kids who have nothing.
And let me tell you, when I was 16 years old, I probably wasn't the best kid to be friends with.
Right.
Because I was in a very bad place.
I had nothing to lose.
So I understood a lot of parents and my friends that would say, don't befriend Patrick because I had nothing to lose.
I was in a reckless place.
I joined the army.
That saved me.
Then I got out.
I had dreams.
I had a vision.
Then I had something to lose.
Then I stayed locked in.
I stopped hanging out with the friends that were going to destroy my life.
Some of them went to jail.
Some of them died.
Some of them went away, like literally deported.
And somehow I made it.
But because I think it is good to have things to lose.
I think it is good to have.
That's why God created a certain situation when we have kids.
You look at the world in a different way.
I think that's healthy.
Totally.
I should think that's healthy versus the other side.
Okay.
So let's go back to it.
Number one is Epstein.
We're on the same page.
Ukraine, U.S., Israel, what's four and five?
That you would like to see a whistleblower come.
By the way, what a long episode.
I don't even know how the hell you're going to cut this square.
Good luck.
So what would you say four and five is?
You get into Israel and it's very hard to get out of them.
But we're out of it now.
I would love to see a whistleblower inside the CIA to come forward and talk about the things that agency in particular is doing.
And then obviously I would love another NSA whistleblower as well, because I think that spying, you know, Snowden was, what is it, 12 years ago now?
I want to know who they're spying on, how they're using that spying, whether there's, I know they're spying domestically, but exactly on whom.
Okay.
Interventionists and non-interventionists.
Okay.
The argument for both sides, right?
When you think about, hey, I'm an interventionist, I'm a non-interventionist.
What is the benefit?
of either?
Like if you were to say this is why people become interventionists, this is why they make the argument of non-interventionists, what would you say it is?
I'm, to be perfectly honest, after everything I've lived through, and I guess my adult child, you know, my adult life in terms of political perception is formed by 9-11 and its aftermath.
It's very hard for me to make a case for interventionism, either from the perspective of benefiting the United States or benefiting the countries in which we're intervening.
I think everybody ends off worse except for a tiny little sliver of military industrial complex, the U.S. intelligence community, the government, global elites.
I think those who benefits from this constant globalistic effort to try and interfere in the world, intervene in the world.
I could make a lot of arguments for why.
I think Venezuela is a good case now where, you know, this war is being sold on all the standard grounds.
Oh, Maduro is uniquely evil and, you know, he's going to pass WMD to the United States and kill us, but not WMD, but drugs.
You know, it's all the same, same rationale.
And then, you know, of course, we could go in and take out Maduro.
It wouldn't be that hard if we want to fight a war.
We did in Panama.
It would be harder than that, but we could still do it, of course, kill thousands of Venezuelans.
And then at the end of the day, we're going to impose this puppet regime.
We're going to be responsible for it.
We're going to fund it.
We're going to fund all the overflow of instability and civil war and migration problems that are going to happen all throughout the region, including probably for the United States.
And so, you know, you can say, oh, look, we got rid of Saddam and we're so happy because he was a bad guy, which he is.
But look at all the harm it did for the United States.
Oh, we got rid of Maduro.
No one thinks he's a good guy.
But all the problems that it's going to get going to.
And, you know, at the end of the day, I think the main reason why Trump won, and one of the things I think Zoran Mandani did that was so good that I knew early on he was going to be a very effective candidate before people knew is after Trump won, he went on into the street.
He went into the neighborhoods where there was the biggest swing toward Trump in New York.
New York had mostly every community swung toward Trump as opposed to prior elections.
And these were working class, multiracial neighborhoods.
And all he did was go and interview people on camera and say, who did you vote for Trump?
Why?
And they would say, I'm really, you know, our communities are falling apart and I'm sick of how much money we're sending to Ukraine, into Israel, into all these wars.
Also, immigration was a big deal.
Why are these people coming to the country illegally getting more than our neighborhood?
And he shaped his campaign around that.
And that, I think, was the biggest appeal of Donald Trump was our elite class cares about everything except you and your family and your community.
We spend money on all these other globalistic ventures, on all these wars and all these other countries that have nothing to do with your lives.
We should instead put America first.
We should put Americans first.
His speech about in the inaugural justice out, the forgotten man, who is that?
Those are the working class people in Pennsylvania and Ohio and Wisconsin where everything has been deindustrialized and the cities that are falling apart.
And so this interventionism is a nice word for war, is, I think, one of the things that is most destroying the United States and our future security and our welfare.
I just went to Malaysia last month, not a, I mean, where Trump is now or was a couple of days ago, not a particularly like country, a country that's not particularly known for its great prosperity.
You can find prosperity in a lot of other countries.
It's a Muslim-majority country.
You go there to Kala Lumpur or wherever, and you look at the infrastructure, the airports, the road, everything is better than most American cities.
Why is that?
Why is a country like Malaysia capable of having cleaner cities, well, better organized cities?
It's not, it's a democracy.
I mean, not a perfect democracy, but it's democracy.
It's not like it's not Saudi Arabia.
And the reason is, is because we use our resources for everything except what's happening inside of our country and our communities and our people.
And I think that's the message above all else that resonated for people with Trump.
And I want that message to be fully embraced finally.
And I think stopping unnecessary intervention is a key way to do that.
Okay, so let me ask you.
So you'll hear a lot of times people say, Wait, you know, the so you're saying you're a non-interventionist yourself.
Completely.
Okay.
So was George Washington, right?
So was Ron Paul.
So was Thomas Jefferson, a lot of these guys, right?
Okay.
And at that time when that was going on, maybe the argument somebody will make is 1776 is different than 2025.
Okay, let me pose this question.
How do you, as a non-interventionist, make it while your top five other enemies are all intervening?
How do you play offense or defense against them as a non-interventionist?
When was the last war China had?
Do you know?
I don't think they have the same wars as we have.
I don't think they fight the way you and I fight.
But I'm saying, like, when was the last time they had a war?
Five years ago, COVID.
I think they started that.
Okay.
They intervened.
That's intervening.
Okay.
I mean, war in its classical sense in the sense that I mean, let me just make the point.
You can obviously COVID is it was 1979.
They had a one-month border war with Vietnam, a one-month border war with Vietnam.
That was 45 years ago.
Okay.
Okay.
We fought, you couldn't count how many wars we've had, interventions, wars, invasions, bombings that we've done of many other countries.
And you look at China, I don't mean politically.
We talk about Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Emiratis in a favorable sense, even though they're as repressive as anybody, including China.
You look at China, they have their cities are magnificent.
They're shocking in terms of their innovation.
They're building bridges, their engineering feats.
And they release videos saying this is what happens when you don't spend $2 billion trying to occupy Afghanistan in order to leave and have the Taliban march back in.
I'm not saying China, it's not the defense of China.
I know China, I understand China's aggression, but they don't fight wars.
They don't occupy countries.
They don't do regime change in other countries.
They're not overthrowing other countries.
You know, Brazil, where I live, is now China is the biggest trading partner with Brazil, replacing the United States.
The only thing China cares about, if you're in Brazil and you say Taiwan is an independent country or Hong Kong should be free, they get angry and will retaliate.
Anything else you do, they don't give the slightest shit about what Brazil does.
Your internal governance, I don't care what kind of government it has.
It's not their business.
I know that.
Because I see China and what it functions.
I see what they get angry about and what they don't.
We fully know why they do.
You think they buy land all around the world for no reason?
You think they're not trying to intervene and protect themselves long term?
Yes, yes, they are.
They're trying to protect themselves.
Exactly.
And nobody, or basically nobody, is opposed to American wars or intervention designed to protect ourselves.
If there's some country that's going to attack us, that's threatening to attack us.
We're not trying to, nobody's against going to war with that country.
That's a war of self-defense.
Everybody is in favor of that.
Or a country of taxiers about to attack you.
You go to war.
That's not what's happening with these countries that we're involved in wars with.
Hamas isn't attacking the United States.
Russia is not attacking the United States.
Maduro is not attacking the United States.
These are basically using interventions and wars and bombing campaigns as a tool to achieve some other end.
And eventually a state in constant war, a warlike state, is going to collapse.
History demonstrates that.
You can benefit for a while.
There's obviously benefits.
I agree there as well.
I'm not like, for example, I'm not for 780 military bases or whatever the numbers we have right now.
I don't know what the number is right now, Rob, if you want to pull it up.
I'm not for all of that.
But I think to be 100% non-interventionist while other countries are, the only way I would agree with 100% interventionist.
Glenn is 750 now.
The only way I would agree with interventionist is if we produce everything, we don't buy from anyone.
We don't sell to anyone.
And it's 100% internally, and nobody relies on us, and we don't rely on anybody.
But that's like you say to people, why do we care about how Taiwan is governed?
Why do we care about the extent of a base?
We need the chips from the US.
Okay, right.
So desperately, we need the chips.
Precisely.
Which is a good reason why Taiwan is geostrategically important to us.
You're going to tell me we don't have the United States of America with Silicon Valley with our manufacturing capabilities.
We don't have the ability to produce chips ourselves.
We just haven't made it a priority.
Trump started.
He started with the 50-50 deal.
He tried to negotiate with Taiwan and they said no.
There's some vibe.
There's some vibe.
I don't think that we're going to build all here.
Exactly.
So let's assume, though, that we are able to do that, which of course we should do.
Why do we rely on Taiwan for processing chips?
It makes no sense.
Why do we have a supply chain that goes through China?
Why can't we have that for ourselves?
But let's assume we are no longer dependent on Taiwan for these chips.
We have American factories, American workers producing American chips as we should with our ingenuity and technological know-how and our resources.
Once that happens, should we go to war with China over Taiwan?
No, I don't think you can have an ally without having an enemy.
I don't think you can have an enemy without having an ally.
I think it's impossible.
I think whenever you have allies, you have enemies because somebody's not happy with that person.
And now that you create an alliance with that person, the other person's an enemy of yours.
So you have to have a, you automatically put yourself in a position to intervene.
Which is where you get back to Washington Jefferson, who warned against things like enduring alliances.
You know, have no animosity toward other countries, enduring animosities, but also no enduring alliances, that we take care of our own country.
We trade with other countries.
We have good relationships with other countries, but we don't have these enduring alliances where their enemies become our own.
But it's listen, you know, it's into deep, buddy.
Clem, we are so into deep that for us to want to now be non-interventionists, it is so too late to do it because of what our history is and what we've done.
You would need to be an intervention, non-interventionist for 100 years, wait till everybody else dies off to forget that we used to intervene and everything, and then we're true interventionists.
To become an interventionist is like, it's such a, you know what it's like?
It's like, you know, you know, Miss Venezuela, what is your dream?
I want to see world peace.
Oh my God.
Miss South Carolina, what would you like?
That one was fully confused.
I don't even know if she knows what she said herself, Miss South Carolina, 20 years ago.
But world peace, good luck.
It's not that, but it's not like our entire history has been one of interventionism.
It was essentially, obviously, World War II was a war that everybody in the United States, for the most part, not everybody, but agreed was a just war.
But then after that, that's when the security state got created.
That's when Eisenhower warned of the emerging military-industrial complex.
And then from there, it grew with Vietnam.
From there, it grew with the Cold War and the Reaganiers.
And then after 9-11, it grew even further.
This is not an inevitability in the American experience.
We can, I'm not saying we're going to, you know, have this Miss Venezuela.
Oh, I want world peace.
That's not real.
That's not human relations.
But there are a lot of countries that are doing extremely well that don't have 750 military bases around the world that don't debate every year which of the four countries now should we bomb this year.
It is not something that can't be changed.
Trump ran on a platform of radically transforming our country in that way.
But it is truly probably the toughest thing to accomplish to do that.
But also, I think the most important, because as long as we continue to be this.
It's the toughest to accomplish.
You know what's the toughest to accomplish?
So if you ever notice when you ask people where you're from, they say El Salvador.
And, you know, like the other day, we're at this restaurant and my wife now, where are you from?
I'm Salvador.
Oh, wow.
Okay, cool.
She says, yeah, I know.
Most people, when they think about Salvador, they think about gangs and all this stuff.
MS-13.
I bought my first car by my own money from an MS-13 leader, Mara Sabatrucha, from San Bernardino Valley in L.A.
But, hey, what's your last name?
Gambino.
Go ahead.
Try to clean up that last name of yours.
What do you guys do?
I'm a pastor.
Yeah, we'd like to bring up our next today.
He's going to read, teach us out of Corinthians.
Pastor Gambino.
Hello.
You know, I'd like to start off with a prayer.
You're a member of that church.
You're sitting there saying, babe, did he just say the guy's name is Gambino?
Yeah.
And he's got a strong Italian accent.
Yeah.
Babe, let me Google this guy, babe.
How does this guy, you're going to go on.
We are so into deep.
It's a little defeatist, though.
I didn't say defeatist.
I don't mean by defeatist.
What I'm saying to you is I think we can work on de-hassling and getting out of the way of a lot of things that's going on.
I think we have our hands in way too many things in everyone's business.
I think it's like a friend that's trying to solve every one of his friends' marriages.
Dude, relax.
But if one of the cousins, she's getting beat up by her husband and she's got black eyes every other week, you see.
You don't think that's why we intervene, though?
You don't think you don't believe we intervene to go help the poor and oppressed peoples of the world be liberated, do you?
No, I mean, I've had the guy, Perkins, on a couple of times.
You know, he wrote the book called The Economic Hitman, right?
John Perkins.
I don't know if you've read his book.
No.
Yeah, he wrote a book called Economic Confessions of an Economic Hitman.
You know what he used to do?
He used to go to countries.
You actually would like talking to this guy.
He used to go to countries and he would sit down and he would say, hey, we're going to come here.
We're going to put a few billion hours here.
We're going to make it a massive announcement and it's going to be great and we're going to create jobs.
Then after about 10 years, you're not going to be able to pay it off.
We're going to get some minerals from you or whatever resources we need from you.
And you're going to say nothing.
And we're going to do that.
And if you don't, we're going to kill you.
That's what this guy did for a living.
Yeah, that's the reality.
This is why, but this is why nothing drives me more insane.
You know, we just talked about the U.S. close relationship with the Saudis and the Emiratis and the Egyptians.
And we, you know, we don't just embrace dictatorships.
We actually sometimes overthrow democratic governments and install dictatorships.
We did that to Iran.
We did that to Iran.
And it's one of the reasons why the people in that country hate us.
I'm not trying to explain your own country to you, but you know that I've heard you say that before and you're absolutely right.
Lots of, I mean, there's anti-American resent in Brazil.
We did the same thing.
We overthrew their government in 1964, put a military dictatorship in place for 21 years.
Obviously, when people think of the United States and Brazil, they remember that.
It's true.
Every, you know, every continent, every country.
And so this is the reality.
So the one thing that drives me crazy is when it's time to go to a war, hey, we need to go fight in Ukraine because we want to come save democracy and fight authoritarianism.
That was the, we're going to go liberate the Iraqi, the Iraqi people.
Now in Venezuela, we're going to go liberate the Venezuelan people.
This is why we go interfere in other countries.
That's the real politic of it.
The pretext is: we're going to go help and liberate the people of the world.
This is fairy tale bullshit.
We don't care if a country is dictatorial.
Well, I agree.
I agree that this is happening, and I'm not for this.
I agree.
I agree that this is, I had them on a couple times.
I agree.
I don't call for it.
I don't agree with it.
But at the same time, the job of being a journalist, the job of being a businessman, podcaster, the job of being a mother, the job of being a director of CIA, the job of running NSA or president, they all look at the lens, and they all have a different lens on.
All have a different lens on.
For sure.
Oh, and each one of them sees nobility in their jobs.
And each one of them sees nobility in what they're doing, which, by the way, you ought to be proud of the job that you've chosen.
Now, this job isn't for everybody.
It's not.
You know why that job isn't for everybody?
You know what I love about the fact that Trump said, I'm probably not going to go to heaven no matter what I do.
Yeah, I love that too.
You know why I love that?
I love it because it's honest to me.
I love it because it's like, look, man, do you know what things I've done?
Do you know what things I've done?
If God allows me in heaven, I want to ask him, what were you thinking?
Not just his president, in his private life, in his personal life, in his business life.
I love Trump for that.
I love that.
I love that because to me, it's a form of honest.
I don't know.
You know what my favorite Trump thing is?
I don't know if you remember this, but when Trump first got elected president, Bill O'Reilly interviewed him as part of the Super Bowl show in 2017.
And Bill O'Reilly was pressing him quite aggressively and angrily on his fondness or desire to have better relations with Putin.
And Bill O'Reilly said, What is it with you in Russia?
Putin is a killer.
And Trump said, Huh, you think we're so innocent?
You don't think we have our killers?
It's like Bill O'Reilly's on the air for 30 years, you know, the most rated show on Bill.
And he doesn't know this.
It's not part of his thinking.
You know, if you don't know that, you don't understand anything about the world.
You believe that fairy tale if that's what shapes your worldview.
So I, but here's the thing: if that were helping Americans, if that were redounding to the benefit of the American people, I think you could have a debate about it.
The problem is it's redounding to the benefit basically of everybody except the American people.
You look at the lives of the American people, you look at their economic security.
You don't say that.
Just look at the reality of life in the United States.
The working class is disappearing.
The middle class is disappearing.
You can't have a family without both parents working.
This is horrible.
Clennam, Clenn, let's do this.
By the way, quick shout out to Rob.
He found that clip.
So if you want to play this video, come back to this.
I respect Putin.
I do respect him.
Why?
Well, I respect a lot of people, but that doesn't mean I'm going to get along with him.
He's a leader of his country.
I say it's better to get along with Russia than not.
And if Russia helps us in the fight against ISIS, which is a major fight and Islamic terrorism all over the world, major fight.
That's a good thing.
Will I get along with him?
I have no idea.
He's a killer.
Putin's a killer.
A lot of killers.
I got a lot of killers.
Well, you think our country's so innocent?
You think our country's so innocent?
I don't know of any government leaders that are killing people.
Pause it right there.
But going back to what you said, you said something very interesting.
You said, you know, most of these things that we do, it doesn't benefit the American people.
It benefits all the other people, right?
And I said, you can't say something like that.
And he said, look, what's going on with Middle America, right?
I think you were going talking about how financially where we are right now.
I can take this problem and link it to this, but maybe there is no correlation between this and this.
I would link the middle class to listen, there's a website called 1971.
I am sure you've seen this, where everything of American problems links back to 1971 economically.
Single mothers, finances, middle America collapsing, the debt market all of a sudden skyrockets.
Us no longer building three-bedroom homes.
All we want to build is four-bedroom homes.
We no longer build small starter homes.
All of these things that you go through, what happened?
We got off the gold standard.
We are reckless in our debt today, all across not only individuals, companies, stock market, the government.
So if you link those two, I get that.
Why did we get off the gold standard?
I mean, obviously, it created a ton of wealth for us, but holy shit, where they would we be able to fund our wars without that?
Here's the thing.
That's the reason.
Isn't that a good thing?
Yes.
No, I'm saying, but that's part of it's a little too monocausal for me only because there are other countries that have not decimated their working and middle class and that are in fact making progress toward bringing people out of poverty and to bring more prosperity for their people.
This is not inevitable.
These are the byproduct of choices that we're making.
And at the end of the day, the only metric, maybe not the only metric, but the primary metric of whether a political class is succeeding or failing is how much it is benefiting the people whom they're supposed to be serving.
It may be idealistic or theoretical, but it's also true.
And if you, I mean, you know, I'm American.
I've lived here, you know, most of my life.
I grew up here.
I look at how things were in the 70s and 80s, and things are just worse now in every way.
The country looks worse.
Like physically, it looks worse.
Families are worse.
Literacy is worse.
People are less educated.
People have less of an economic future.
The idea, I think the idea that you can't raise up family without having two incomes and ball parents having to work out of the house is absolutely devastating.
And that's 1971.
We got off the gold standard.
When we got off the gold standard, we started.
Hey, trust us.
I'm just saying that's monocausal.
I'm saying that we could, even with that, there's a lot more we could be doing better.
And I think using our resources.
This is massive, though.
This is massive because this opened up the recklessness spending.
And we kept saying, hey, don't worry about it.
Another bailout, another bailout.
Like, you think we're not going to be bailing out?
When do you think we're going to stop bailing out?
Do you think the bailing out concept is going to stop?
You think this is it with bailing out?
We're bailing out Wall Street or some psychic industry where, you know, and the wars are, I was never for it.
I'm not.
Let them go out of business.
That's part of capitalism.
But that goes back to this move.
Nixon did a lot of things right, but Nixon is the reason why China is as big as it is today.
Nixon opened up a lot of stuff.
Some could give a lot of credit to that, but we could have gone to a different place.
Nixon is, you know, he was.
I don't know if you, sure, you read a lot on Nixon.
For sure.
But to me, Nixon was a complicated character with a very complicated character.
But look, so let me let me go to Venezuela Maduro.
So what do you think we do?
Maduro comes out.
I don't know if you have the clip rock.
One of the clips, Maduro comes out.
I want peace, peace.
And, you know, whether he's being sarcastic or not, 90% I'm thinking he's being sarcastic.
Please, please don't do anything.
I want peace.
I want, you've seen this clip, I'm assuming, right?
Yes, right here.
Go ahead, Rob.
Not war, not worm.
Just peace.
Forever, forever, forever.
Peace forever.
No crazy worm.
No a la guerra loca.
No crazy.
No crazy guar.
No crazy worm.
Please, please, please.
Yes, peace.
Peace forever.
Peace forever.
Victory forever.
Depeats.
Victory forever.
Depeats.
Eto sellama linguaje tarsaniyo.
I'm going to pause it.
So you've seen this.
Yes.
What do you think about it?
I don't think he wants war with the United States.
Why would he?
I mean, he's maybe a little tongue-in-cheek in terms of how he's saying it.
His English is not exactly great.
He's reading, but I'm saying, of course, he doesn't want war with the United States.
Why would he want a war with the United States?
He doesn't want the United States bombing and invading Venezuela.
Would you?
Look what happened to Noriega.
Look what happened to Gaddafi.
Look what happened to Saddam Hussein.
No one in the right mind would want that.
And the thing is, you know, we were talking before about people in the United States who are inculcated from birth to love Israel.
I grew up in this area.
You know, there was a huge Cuban community, still is.
Those people never learned English because they were only here temporarily in their minds because they thought once the United States got rid of Cuba, they were going back.
They wanted this government to get rid of Cuba for them.
Marco Rubio emerges out of this.
Lots of people emerge out of it.
They're very focused on the Caribbean and Latin America.
They think the United States has to go and fix that region.
If you look at fentanyl, which by far is the worst drug entering the United States that kills the most people, it doesn't come from Venezuela.
Nobody ever talked about Venezuela as the source of fentanyl.
It was China and Mexico.
The Trump campaign was talking about bombing the cartels in Mexico.
It doesn't come from Venezuela.
Cocaine, in some minority sense, I think it's 7% or 9%, according to government reports, passes through Venezuela, has to do with Venezuela, but it really comes from Colombia.
And Colombia has been governed until a couple of years ago by right-wing governments that were close to U.S. allies.
It's the first liberal president they've had ever.
Yeah, first left-wing president.
Yeah.
So, I mean, Trump's now saying, oh, it's his fault.
Colombia has been the source of drugs forever, all that iconography about Pablo Esquire and the Colombians and what.
This is a pretext.
This is not, if you want to stop the flow of drugs, you have to close the borders, deal with the Mexican cartels.
It has nothing to do with Venezuela.
It's the WMD of the war.
They want to change Maduro because they want a public government in Venezuela.
But it's not going to be that easy.
We've been trying in Cuba for seven decades to bring down that government.
We've used all our might militarily, economically.
We've suffocated that island like we're suffocating Venezuela.
You know, you can go and change the government of Venezuela if you want, but what is Venezuela doing to the United States?
We closed the border.
Trump did succeed in doing that.
There's no influx or basically no influx anymore across the southern border.
So the argument is not they're sending drug cartels or immigrants to enter our country.
And if you look at everything that has been said about fentanyl, which is what's killing people, it's not cocaine, it's fentanyl.
It doesn't come from Venezuela.
This is a disconnect.
If you want to solve fentanyl, changing the government of Venezuela is irrelevant.
And even if you did change the government of Venezuela, do you know the kind of instability you're going to have there?
You think the drug cartels are going to disappear?
Like I said, we controlled Colombia for decades with our alliance with the right-wing governments.
It didn't stop the, we helped in a civil war.
You can't destroy the flow of drugs.
The drug war doesn't work.
What you have to do is, why is there so much demand in the United States for drugs?
That is one crucial part of the equation.
Why is there so much demand for that?
Why is there?
Yes.
Why in the United States?
Why do so many Americans get addicted to drugs, use drugs, want drugs?
Why is there such a big market in the United States for drugs?
Yeah, but I don't think there's a demand for it.
I think you create those customers.
How do you think you do it?
Oh, so you're going to go back to war on drugs with the U.S. government being involved?
No, the war on drugs is the war on drugs is a failed model, and that's what the war on Venezuela would be, right?
We're going to use our military.
We're bombing drug ships.
This does not work.
Drugs are too easy to smuggle.
Drugs are too easy to, and the profit is too big to destroy it with military.
You have to eliminate the demand for it.
That's the way to stop the war on drugs.
So you're saying leave it.
You're saying leave Venezuela alone.
You're saying let Maduro do whatever he's doing.
I think if you look at the, if I were to say, here's a list of the top 50 things that are creating problems for American, the American people on our way.
I'm going to put Venezuela in the top 50.
Venezuela, I mean, it's like to me, like, who's going to, which warlord, which warlord is going to run, is going to run, you know, East.
Venezuela will sell oil to us.
Well, they'll happily sell oil to us.
We don't buy oil from them because we sanction them.
They'll sell their, of course, they'll sell their oil to us.
Trump said that Maduro offered everything.
He said, here, here's oil, here's mineral rights, here's whatever you want.
Marco Rubio's lifelong obsession is changing the governments of the region that his family comes from.
That's a big part of it.
Venezuela is not a threat to the United States.
There are bad people who come from Venezuela.
We've closed the borders.
We're deporting them.
That's, of course, part of what we should be doing.
That's what Trump ran on and is doing.
We don't need to go to war with Venezuela, kill thousands of people, create instability and civil war there for years to come that we're then responsible for.
So I understand for you as a non-interventionist that you would take that position.
It's not a principle.
It's a pragmatic view.
Yeah, but I understand what you're saying.
But also, how many Venezuelans do we have living here?
1 million?
What's the number?
How many people do we have living in the States that escape Venezuela?
The number could be 1 million for what is the number?
903,150.
So what percentage of those would go back if Venezuela became, you know, ran under a different regime than Maduro?
I don't think you agree that Maduro is a good leader for Venezuela.
But it's not my role to choose Venezuela's leaders.
So if Maduro, if Venezuela stays like Cuba for the next 40 years, to you, it's like, it's not my business.
It's their problem.
Yeah.
I mean, yeah.
I haven't even been to Venezuela.
Have you been to Venezuela?
I've not been to Venezuela.
How are you going to choose their leaders?
I've been to a lot of people.
Yeah, I live in Latin America.
I've been all around.
You've been all over.
Yeah, but I've been to Venezuela.
How am I going to choose their leader for them?
No, it's not about that.
To me, it's, again, this goes back to that.
That's why I went interventionist, non-interventionist.
And I brought this up.
This goes back to a potential future crisis that could happen.
That a leader has to sit there and say, is this in the top 20 worst things that can happen to us 10, 20 years from now?
If there is more, Colombia was a conservative country for many, many years, and then all of a sudden they're flipping now.
They have that petrol guy that said, like this.
Did you see what he said?
Like this.
Yeah.
Okay.
So you think that's okay for him to do that?
You think it's okay for somebody to say something like that and then he's friends with those guys?
Yeah, but like I said, Colombia was ruled for decades, for the longest I remember, by a U.S., close U.S. ally that did what we wanted, basically a puppet government.
We had a military base in Colombia.
We helped them fight that war, that civil war against FARC and other drug militias.
You think it reduced the supply of drugs in the United States?
It did not.
It did not.
And like also, you can look at Venezuela.
Okay, well, Venezuela be a future problem in 20 years.
Do you think if we go in, remove Maduro, I'm not saying he's popular among his people, but he has huge numbers of very, very armed followers.
I've got to shadow beat him.
Fair enough.
51, 59%, whatever the number is 60% to 40%.
Still, you're talking about millions of armed people loyal to Venezuela.
And even if they don't like Maduro, it's not like everybody loves the United States coming in and intervening and invading.
It's like, oh, the Iraqis are going to welcome us as liberators, right?
That was the theory that proved not to be true.
Not because people love Saddam, but because people don't like the United States coming in.
We're going to go in and we're going to kill a bunch of, we're going to lose, you know, even in Panama, we lost hundreds of soldiers who died, American soldiers.
Venezuela is a much harder, bigger country, more armed.
It's going to be a lot harder.
But then once you remove Maduro and you prop up this regime, now you're responsible for this regime, responsible for propping it up, this government, and you're going to have civil war.
You're going to have civil conflict for the longest time.
It's going to spill over into neighboring countries, including Brazil, into the United States.
We're going to take refugees.
We're going to take whomever.
That's also going to create massive problems.
It's not like we're going to surgically remove Maduro, put him into a U.S. prison or kill him, and then everything just, you know, democracy and peace and love flourishes in it as well.
We're going to be responsible for that country.
You go in and you break it and now you own it.
That's what Colin Powell said about Iraq.
And it was true about Iraq.
Why are we going to take on the Venezuelan people have every right to hate Maduro?
I don't contest that at all.
We're not going to help.
We're not there to help.
That's not our goal.
Even if it were, we can't help.
We don't understand these other countries.
Every country has a, you know, you know how long it took me to feel comfortable even talking about Brazilian politics?
Like at least a decade of living there.
And even then, I realized like it's never going to be in my DNA the way the U.S. is.
You know, like I'm always going to understand the U.S. the best.
Every country is very complicated.
You can't just go in and move the pieces around like chess pieces from Foggy Bottom in the State Department and think you're going to succeed.
I don't disagree.
However, the job of a guy running the greatest country in the world is to identify future threats that could potentially happen that's brewing in different places.
What is that threat?
They don't have nukes.
Yeah, I don't think it's that threat that, you know, the traditional threat that we're looking at with Russia or somebody else.
I don't think it's Iran that, you know, you're doing what you're doing there.
But I do think it's something that it's right next to us.
It's a neighbor.
It's close to us.
It's still on this side.
Here's Petro, by the way, from Colombia saying, I'm sure you've seen this as well.
Go ahead, Rob.
Okay, so the translation is not there, but what he says is, if not, we get rid of Trump, is what he says.
How do you think U.S. should react to something like this?
Nothing?
Just kind of let it be the president of Colombia saying something like that.
We'll get rid of Trump.
It's Colombia.
You know, it's like this chants in Iran, death to America.
Okay, they chant death to America.
Is Iran going to invade the United States?
Is Iran going to bomb the United States?
No.
These are words.
Also, Trump has trash-talked the Colombian leader quite a bit as well.
Death, saying we'll kill him?
No, he said we'll get rid of Trump.
But yes, Trump did say, you know, he's a drug.
What did he call him?
He's a leader of a drug gang or he's a drug trafficker.
And if he doesn't...
His background?
Petro's background?
Yeah.
Here's the thing.
At some point, first of all, there's a lot of countries in this world that hate the United States.
And political leaders benefit domestically by talking about the United States, by railing against the United States.
We're the strongest country in the world.
We have to have the security to know that people can talk all they want.
You know, it's like if you're the biggest, you know, strongest person, you don't get upset when he's an illegal drug leader strongly.
I mean, this is a threat as well.
I mean, coming from Trump, it's intended to be a threat.
It is a threat.
So these leaders, you know, have a, there's people in their country who want to see their leader standing up, you know, when, when, uh, when Trump says something like that, these are words.
Colombia is not a threat to the United States.
Venezuela is not a threat to the United States.
And wars should be resolved, reserved for, I believed in the American, like I was very associated with the left, you know, my whole career.
And then Trump comes and starts talking about the evils of the deep state and America first and how these wars are all wasteful.
And he runs against Bush-Shaney foreign policy and Reagan economics and the bipartisan swamp.
And this is music to my ears.
And I'm hoping it's true.
I want to believe in this.
I think that was the potential of Trump and still is.
These kind of wars, like bombing Yemen, going around, you know, feeding Ukraine weapons, regime change in Venezuela.
These were all the things we were told that we would be expected that would end.
Okay, so journalism.
Let's talk about Barry Weiss.
Barry Weiss just got, I want to say, I don't know if it's finalized yet or not, but $150 million deal.
It's finalized.
$150 million deal with CBS.
And I even think she called Brett Baer $150 million deal, editor-in-chief role, acquisition position Weiss as the top editorial voice at CBS News, overseeing a historic program like 60 Minutes, CBS Sunday Morning.
She reports directly to Paramount Skydance, David Ellison, which we brought up briefly earlier.
And this is a, she had, I think she has a 140,000 members at the time, paying 10 bucks a month.
So you got $1.4 million, give or take, times $12, say $20 million business, $18 million business.
I think it's $15 million.
$15 million business on recurring membership base, which the valuation she probably got is higher because the cost is probably not going to be that much.
What do you think about what happened with her, the success story, and her going to CBS?
So first of all, I know Barry.
Anyone who knows Barry will say what I'm about to say, which is she's an extremely charming, nice person, like interpersonally, impossible not to like Barry Weiss.
Same with her wife, Nellie, like just great people.
I'm also a huge proponent of independent media.
I like when independent media succeeds.
I like when it grows and thrives.
I think more competition, the better.
No issue at all.
Barry Weiss can get $800 million if she can find somebody to give it to her for the free press.
Don't care about that at all.
What I care about is the following.
We're talking about David Ellison.
It's really Larry Ellison who's behind all this.
Larry Ellison is either the richest or second richest person in the world, depending on his neon's fluctuations and net worth.
Larry Ellison, he has one main political cause, and that's Israel.
He's an American citizen.
He's the single largest donor, private donor to the IDF.
I don't know why it's legal for an American citizen to donate money to a foreign army.
I don't even know why it's legal for an American citizen to go fight in a foreign army.
A lot of Americans go fight in the IDF.
He donates to the IDF.
How much does he give to the IDF?
He gave, you know, just on one night, he gave $20 million.
It's, you know, over the years.
You know, in the scheme of his wealth, like direct to IDF.
It's called Friends of the IDF.
It's for people to donate money.
They provide services to the IDF, you know, like new this for the IDF, new housing, new benefits for the soldiers, whatever.
But yeah, it's supplementing and funding the IDF.
Like, why not do that?
He's an American citizen.
Why not do that for American soldiers?
But he's choosing to do it for Israeli soldiers.
Whatever.
That's not my issue.
I didn't know this.
But in his mind, he could say, I pay billions of dollars into the U.S. military through taxes.
He may say that.
Still, American veterans are not doing that well.
But still, okay.
In 2017, Ellison made a record-breaking single donation of $16.6 million to the friends of the IDF.
I did not know that.
So he's donating money directly.
2014, $10 more million dollars.
Okay, so he's the single largest donor to the IDF.
But beyond that, you know, he's a major, major, major fanatical supporter of Israel, even though he's an American citizen and the country that gave him his wealth is not Israel, but the United States, whatever.
But that is his cause.
Right at the moment, the public opinion polls are showing an unraveling of support for Israel in the United States, unlike anything I certainly ever anticipated or expected to see in my lifetime, especially with the younger generation.
I know you had Nick Funtes on your show.
I think I interviewed him like a week before or after he was on your show.
He was just on Tucker Carlson's, kind of representative of not everybody, but kind of under 30 conservatives who, for the first time are questioning Israel.
It's a big threat.
As we talked about, Israel needs the U.S.
And they look at public opinion polls where there's an unraveling of support for Israel and major conservative influencers, not just people on the left, which has been a case for a while, but major conservative influencers and politicians are now saying, why are we giving all this money back?
This is a, they're panicking over this.
Larry Ellison, at exactly that point, goes and buys CBS News, one of the most storied news outlets and brands in the United States history.
Not a lot of people watching these days, but still has that imprimatur.
But also Paramount, which is a major entertainment.
Massive purchase, $8 billion, massive.
Take somebody who has never run a newsroom, never even been a reporter.
Barry Weiss is an opinion colonist.
She's worked on the opinion page of the Washington Post, New York Times, which I love opinion journalism.
I do opinion journalism.
I have a lot of respect for it, but it's not really, I wouldn't expect anyone to make me the editor-in-chief of CBS.
And I think I have a lot more accomplishments in just hardcore journalism than Barry.
I think she would say that too.
But still, I would consider myself unqualified.
A major reason, obviously, why is because she's fanatically pro-Israel and that aligns perfectly with the Ellison agenda.
Is Barry fanatically Jewish herself?
Barry's totally Jewish and her main cause is Israel.
I didn't know that.
Oh, Barry is.
You wind Barry up and she spells pro-Israel propaganda.
You know, she grew up in an Orthodox Jewish household.
She, you know, is she's not Orthodox now.
She's married to a woman, obviously, but she's still very Jewish, very pro-Israel.
The free press pro-Israel, too.
That's part of what David Ellison likes about her.
By the way, it wasn't like Israel was owned previously by Palestinians or Muslims.
It was owned by Sherry Redstone, who also was Jewish, the heir to the daughter of Summer Redstone, who was also very pro-Israel.
In fact, Sherry Redstone, the previous owner of Paramount CBS, said the reason she decided to sell Paramount and CBS is because after October 7th, she lost interest in journalism and she only wants to devote herself to Israel.
So it's not exactly like it was a hotbed of Palestinian activism before, but now they're taking over that.
He also wants to buy Warner Brothers, which owns Discovery and CNN.
So CNN could also be under the control of David Ellison.
And in this deal that Trump engineered, Larry Ellison is one of the major players in the consortium that just took over TikTok.
Even though nobody watches CBS, obviously huge numbers of people get their news from TikTok.
TikTok installed a former IDF soldier as the content moderator for all matters Israel.
Literally, she's a woman.
She's an American woman, but she went to Israel, made a leah to Israel, and then fought in the IDF.
What does she do?
She's 28 years old.
But what is her job?
She's the content moderator in charge of all questions, Israel and anti-Semitism, which, of course, anti-Semitism means criticizing Israel.
You can TikTok IDF.
I think, is that her?
Yeah, I think that's her.
She was fighting in the IDF.
There you go.
TikTok appoints ex-Israeli soldier as new hate speech manager.
Go a little bit lower, Rob.
Mendel, go to the quote.
Let's see what the quote says about right now.
We'll be tasked with formulating a TikTok six speech by October 7.
Relevant legislative and regulative framework, monetary trends, particularly those related to anti-Semitic TikTok's appointment at his extra Erica Mendel previously worked with the U.S. Department of Under Ambassador Deborah Lipsand.
Who was the envoy of anti-Semitism for Biden?
So she's a little bit.
She's 28.
She's making $400,000 a year at TikTok.
The reason TikTok hired her is because the ADL demanded it.
The ADL was a major advocating shutting down TikTok.
But you know, this is so important about TikTok.
Trump was the one who originally proposed shutting TikTok.
The argument was because of the influence of China.
It went nowhere.
It didn't get anywhere near the votes.
No one wanted to close TikTok.
The only reason why the TikTok ban ended up succeeding, Biden White House got on board with it, was after October 7th, Democrats became convinced that a major reason why American young people were turning against Israel was because there was too much pro-Palestinian content permitted on TikTok.
The sponsors of the TikTok ban will say that's the reason it finally passed.
Biden got behind it.
The ADL demanded TikTok be closed or forced to sale to it.
So they forced a sale to it and it ended up in the hands of Larry Ellison, who now controls CBS, now controls, is about to control CNN and also TikTok along with others.
Has this former IDF soldier as the censorship czar, as Mint Press calls it, pretty much what it is.
She's 28, making $400,000 a year in the IDF.
Can you go Google her name and see where school she went to?
Erica Mendel.
Mindel, Mindel, Mindel, just as a way of what school should she go to Zoom in?
University of Michigan.
16 as a Republican Party's job.
And a master's from John Hopkins.
You know, decent schools for sure.
But that's not why she got, that's not why the ADL demanded TikTok put her in charge of censorship.
And then there you go.
Do you think she's there?
I know she, of course.
She's there too.
After graduation from the University of Michigan, Mindell moved to Israel and served as an instructor with the IDF.
And she has lots of videos of her talking about the centrality of Israel in her life.
She served under Deborah Lipstadt as a special envoy to monitor and combat anti-Semitism.
I mean, this is, she's young.
She's only 28.
This is all she's ever done.
So this happened May of this year.
This is pre, well, they probably already knew who was going to own the 80% because they kept the 20% for ByteDance, right?
They said ByteDance gets to keep 20% non-board member.
They don't have any kind of influence, but they get to keep 20% of the equity at a $14 billion valuation, if I'm not mistaken.
And the idea always was, like I said, the impetus.
The original impetus was China.
That was the argument.
That's not why it passed.
It passed because of the concern that TikTok was owing too much pro-Palestinian content.
Young Americans are feeding on it, turning against Israel.
Obviously, Trump was going to, he wanted it to be controlled by Trump allies, but also obviously people who are, and it just so happens to be with Larry Ellison.
This is what concerns me.
You have a map.
Why should it even be illegal for one person to control CBS News, CBS, Entertainment, Paramount, Warner Brothers, CNN, and TikTok?
That's a lot of information and media centralization in the hands of a single person with a very pronounced agenda that's in favor of a foreign country, not the United States.
But, okay, it's legal.
I'm sure there's lawyers who cleared it, whatever.
But nonetheless, it's, I hope, a basis for a lot of concern that exactly at the time that this pro-Israel bipartisan contention is unraveling, you have a fanatical donor to the IDF, a foreign military, in control of these media outlets now, and then elevate somebody, Barry Weiss, whose entire life is about defending Israel.
So instead of a Larry Ellison owning it, who would you rather own these outlets?
It's free enterprise, right?
If they want to come out, I don't think there's a monopoly law on this because, you know, he would be one of five or six.
I think he becomes overnight the number one media power player in the world.
I put him at number one.
I put him at number one.
And by the way.
Maybe with Rupert Murdoch, but probably he's leaping, leapfrogging his head.
I put him ahead of him.
Now, don't get me wrong.
Murdoch has Wall Street.
He has a lot of good assets that they bought over the years as well.
But Murdoch doesn't have Ellison type of money.
He does not.
Ellison has the type of money to buy small countries if he wanted to.
Exactly.
There's only a couple people that have that kind of money.
Yeah.
So, okay.
So the concern here is maybe he's sitting there and saying, look, how are you fighting against Soros?
This is how I'm fighting against Soros.
Why are you not happy about it, Glenn?
If I don't do anything, what are other people going to be doing?
Soros is going up there buying all this other assets.
Soros is going out to giving money to a bunch of different people.
Soros is going out there agitating people.
You want me to just sit on the sidelines and not do anything with the money that I have?
What's wrong with it?
What would you say?
First of all, these are not, he's not a counterweight to Soros in the sense that he's some right-wing ideologue.
Larry Ellison was a very, like most Silicon Valley, very good relations with the Obama administration.
You know, Elon too.
A lot of these guys have had very good relationship with Democratic Party over the years, Trump included.
It's not that they're right-wing ideologues.
It's that there's two questions.
You know, I founded a media outlet, The Intercept, and it was funded by a billionaire, Pierre Midiar, who was the founder of eBay and eventually the owner of PayPal as well.
So when you have a billionaire in control of media outlets, which, you know, that's just going to buy media outlets.
People, it's not going to be, you know, labor syndicates, going to be billionaires.
The question is, are they going to interfere?
Do they have a hardcore political agenda that is causing them to buy it?
And will they interfere?
And I think, you know, like I said, Sherry Redstone previously owned Paramount and NCVS, and yet 60 Minutes caused a lot of controversy when they published, they did some investigative journalism about the atrocities in Gaza.
It upset them, but it was still done.
The concern, and I think it's a very valid one, you know, Larry Ellison is, I think, 82 years old, so you're kind of at the end of your life.
You want to use your money, you know, you bottle the plane.
He's a pilot.
I think he's going to live close to 100.
I think he's a young 80 to 82.
Insane what he looks like.
And yeah, no, credit to him for that.
But, you know, still, he's in the last stage of his life.
He's uncancelable, obviously.
And, you know, you want to leave your mark on the world.
And I think, you know, if your main cause is Israel and you see the United States, the country on which Israel depends, turning against Israel, you're going to do what you can to reverse that trend.
And one of the ways you do that is by buying the sources of information and making sure that it's no longer a permissive font for anti-Israel viewpoints.
Yeah, I mean, this Pierre guy, who was where is he from?
He's from Iran.
He's an Islamic faith background of many Iranians.
Pierre on Idiar.
He left Iran when you did.
He left Iran when he was like six, I think.
He moved to France.
Got it.
Yeah.
Very cool.
Yeah.
So, okay, this him right here.
Is he a billionaire or is he a billionaire?
Yes.
Net worth of 8.7 billion.
Yeah, man, compared to Ellison, he's struggling financially.
There you see.
In 2013, he announced he would create a and finance first look media journalism vendor to include Glen Greenwald Laura, Poitiers, and Jerry Mascal.
He made good on his word.
I never heard from Pierre about, you know, I used to, Pierre became a fanatical anti-Trump hater, a Russia gate believer.
I was one of the leading voices knowing that Russia Gate was bullshit.
I wrote every day about how Russia Gate is horrible.
He started financing Never Trump organizations like Bill Crystal and the Bulwark.
I attacked those groups every day that he was financing.
He was kind of like the U.S. funding both sides of a civil war.
Never once heard from him not to do that.
Never had any problem with him.
Really kept to his word that he would stay out of our editorial process.
Credit to him for doing that.
But that's the exception and not the rule.
Got it.
Okay.
Let's do a last story here before we wrap up with Brazil.
They meet, Rob, if you can pull up the clip, they meet in Malaysia, Trump and Lula.
And, you know, Trump was somewhat complimentary until one question was asked, and he told that one reporter, none of your business, where she said, are you guys going to talk about Maduro?
Not Maduro.
I'm sorry.
Are you guys going to talk about Bolsonaro, previous president?
He says, none of your business.
I think right there at the bottom, Rob, that's the one.
Go up a little bit more.
Is that the one that, how many days ago?
Is that October 25th?
Is he talking about Bolsonaro?
No.
So they met together.
Now, you know, Brazil has a guy that I would say, some may say more powerful than Lula is, Alejandro de Moraes, who comes out and kind of figures out who can beat Bolsonaro, goes back, Operation Car Wash, who reported on it many times.
The few hundred million dollars of money that was stolen, a couple billionaires, I think, went to jail, couple guys that were worth $10, $20 billion.
One guy was worth a couple billion dollars and brings him out.
They beat Bolsonaro.
Bolsonaro is now in very, you know, dying.
Going to prison.
Yeah, going to prison.
What do you think about this relationship with Lulan Trump today?
And they're saying something's going to happen.
We're going to get a deal done.
All right.
So a couple things.
One thing is, regardless of what you think of Lula's politics, he's a generational political talent.
Kind of like you can say that of Obama.
I mean, he's been around for a long time.
He was hated when he first ran.
Brazil was not a left-wing country.
I've never met a person with more visceral charisma than Lua.
The first time I ever interviewed him, after five minutes, I was like entranced.
I was like, wait a minute, you can't, that's not your role here.
That's what you do.
I had to fight against it.
He's incredibly personally charming, like insane, you know, and he, and it's real.
He comes from like a genuine background of poverty.
You know, nine, he was one of nine kids.
He worked in a factory, lost a finger, the whole iconography.
He's a, he's, he's not to be underestimated in terms of his interpersonal skills.
And he charmed Trump.
Trump didn't like Lua because Trump loves Bolsonaro.
He was, you know, Lua was putting him in prison.
Trump, Lua was a left-wing figure.
After one phone call with Lua, Trump totally changed tune.
And is saying like, yeah, he's a really nice guy.
He goes and met with him and the whole tone changes.
The thing is, Lua is not in charge of the country.
Lua is a puppet.
He's a symbol.
There's a center-right faction, kind of like a never-Trump faction.
It would be like if, you know, it would be like if Kamala won, a lot of the people who would be running foreign policy would be neocons.
You know, it wouldn't be like anything left-wing.
And you have Alexandra Marais.
He's a center-right figure.
It got appointed by a center-right president, not by the left, who's in charge of the country, censoring people, imprisoning political opponents of Lua's.
Lua is, you know, acquiescing to it.
He's fine with it.
But that's, Lula's not where the power resides.
Lula is the only person who, Lula was in prison.
And the Supreme Court let Lula out of prison.
They used my reporting as a pretext, but the real reason they let him out is because they wanted Bolsonaro gone.
And there was only one person in the country who had a chance to beat Bolsonaro, and it was Lua.
They had to invalidate his conviction to do so, let him out of prison.
That's what they did.
The thing is, is that Brazil is a very important country, geostrategically, has tons of oil, has tons of minerals, and Trump wants those.
Trump also, as I said, Brazil has moved toward China.
Brazil is always, it's in our hemisphere.
It's the Monroe Doctrine.
We control Latin America.
Brazil has moved toward China.
Brazil is a founding member of BRICS, which Trump hates and sees a threat.
And also they're imprisoning Bolsonaro in a way that Trump identifies with.
He looks at Bolsonaro and sees him as a victim of the same kind of law affair that victimized Trump.
And they're censoring a lot of people on the right, including people who there's a lot of ties between MAGA World and the Brazilian right, between Bolsonaro Disha.
So you have people in the State Department, in the White House who hate Lula and Marais.
And so they've imposed sanctions on Brazil, tariffs on Brazil that were kind of punitive, but also I think it was because of BRICS.
But also they sanctioned Alejandro de Marais and his wife as human rights violators.
And so the question is, is the U.S. really going to follow through with this antagonism toward Brazil or is this going to just all get resolved?
Lua wants to resolve it.
He's running for re-election next year, needs to resolve it.
These tariffs can harm Brazil's economy, already are.
And I think Lua's putting on offensive.
What do you think Trump's going to ask for?
I think they want Brazil to move away from China, to move more toward the United States in terms of commerce and trade.
Lua is a very shrewd political.
Here's the thing.
On the one hand, Lua was alive and not just alive, but politically active in the 60s when the U.S. overthrew their democratically elected center-left government and imposed a right-wing military dictatorship.
And the entire Brazilian left, you know, views that as the worst thing that ever happened to Brazilian history and blames the United States for it for not unreasonable reasons.
So Lua naturally has an instinct toward resisting U.S. involvement, resisting U.S. interference in the country.
You know, that's why when there were tariffs, what really helped Lua is he raised this like nationalistic flag.
Like Brazilians determined Brazil.
Who cares what Trump says about our, we're going to let our justice system go against Bolsonaro.
He adopted this very nationalistic posture, which helped them politically.
On the other hand, he's always had very good relationships with the U.S., very close to the Obama administration.
Obama loved him.
Biden loved him.
The CIA went to Brazil.
I said something extremely complimentary to him the first time.
He said, basically.
You're the greatest politician of our generation, something like that.
Because when Lua left the presidency after being terminated out of office in 2010, his approval rating was like 86%.
Brazil, those two terms under Lua, Brazil exploded economically, past the UK as the sixth largest economy.
Not necessarily because of Lua, but you know, you're the president, you get credit.
Also introduced some really interesting social benefits.
Like it's called Bolsonelia.
The poorest people get a monthly payment, but only if they prove their kids are going to school every day.
Like they have to get vaccinated, they have to go to the doctor.
You know, the mothers have like an obligation in order to get the money.
It's not just a free handout.
And, you know, even kind of like neoliberals praise this kind of social program because it's not just a handout.
It's forcing citizens to demonstrate responsibility, but it helped lift people out of poverty.
So yeah, Obama went and said, this is the guy who is the greatest politician on the planet figured out exactly.
And so the U.S. has always done business with Brazil.
Very close relationship, despite all this anti-American rhetoric.
So I think Lula is going to, you know, he's going to get these tariffs gone.
He's going to give Trump what he wants in combination with Charming Trump.
The question is, I think Trump's just not very worked up over Brazil.
Like, it kind of bores him, is the sense I get.
There are a lot of people I know very well at very high levels of the Trump administration who are fanatical about the abuses in Brazil and want U.S. power applied to stop it.
I just don't know if Trump is going to override that, if he's going to care enough, if he's going to just delegate it to Marco Rubio and Scott Bessed and let them try and figure it out without, you know, I don't know what's going to happen, but I know Lua is going to absolutely do everything possible.
It's funny when Lua meets with Trump, it's barely noticed in the U.S.
It's like headline news in Brazil for the entire week because it's such a crucial part of the relationship Brazil for the U.S. is absolutely especially those two.
If Lula meets with Biden, who cares?
Lula meets with Trump.
So the question, I'm actually really curious to know what the asks are going to be in exchange to make the tariff relationship better.
I'm actually very curious.
They have minerals, like, you know, vital minerals.
Do you think anything's going to be, you got to let Leave Bolsonaro out?
You think anything's going to be with that?
Because everybody knows Alejandro de Moraz is running Brazil.
Everybody knows he's the most powerful guy.
And he's crazy.
He doesn't care about.
Oh, I mean, he'll sacrifice the whole country to continue his crusade.
So who cares what you agree with, Lula?
Alessandra is not going away.
How old is Alexandra?
63?
64 years ago?
Yeah, he's young, healthy.
Yeah, yeah.
How old is he?
He's, yeah, he's maybe in his late 50s.
Oh, my God.
Yeah, 56.
Yeah.
56 years old.
This guy's good.
He was just appointed five years ago.
Yeah, I mean, six years ago.
There's a story of how it was conflicted because at one point, some people are like, well, I think he's good.
I don't know.
And then, boom, he comes out of nowhere.
And then now they got the control of Supreme Court.
I don't even know what the numbers.
80%, they got control of the Supreme.
They own majority of Congress, majority of, you know, Senate.
And even Lula, but again, this is not a left-ling faction running Brazil.
This is a center-right faction, but the kind that hates Bolsonaro in the way that that center-right faction hated Trump.
What's the guy's name that they can always be bought?
He's on the middle and he can flip either side if they give him something.
What's that party called in Brazil?
Well, it's a central.
It's like the faction central.
Who is the main guy?
Campos?
Who's the guy at the top?
The guy that's at the top of that party.
What's the political party called?
Well, Central is composed of many like Union Brazil, PSDB.
Can you go to it, Rob?
PMDD.
I don't know who you mean by like the main party, not Liberal Party, Workers' Party.
No, Brazil Union, Union Brazil is part of the Central, is part of the Central.
You know, they have like a Speaker of the House and a president of the Senate who are both pretty transactional, part of the Centro.
Central runs the Congress.
Oh, they're very true.
Gilberto Cassab.
That's what I was talking about.
Can you click on that?
Yeah.
Gilberto Cassaba is like a deal maker that, depending on which political party, he typically ends up becoming the final decision maker.
The PSD is like the center-left party.
It's not really a center-right party.
It's a center-left party.
I wouldn't put it that way, but yes, he's a very important, powerful figure.
But what I want to say is like Bolsonaro's, Lua's vice president is Geraldo Alphman, who was the former mayor of Sao Paulo, ran against Lua, was part of this center-right party, kind of like the Republicans and Democrats.
It would be like if Biden chose Paul Ryan as his vice president.
It's an establishment union against the Bolsonaro movement, and that's who really is in control of the center-right.
What's happening to Bolsonaro?
I think he's going to go to prison.
I think Trump's going to, I don't think Trump is willing to sacrifice everything in the Brazil-U.S.
relationship to save Bolsonaro.
I think Bolsonaro is going to go to prison.
You're kidding me.
Bolsonaro is, by the way, he is extremely ill.
You know, he in 2018, when he was running for president, he got stabbed, came very close to dying.
His entire intestinal system was cut up.
He's very physically ailing, psychologically ailing.
I think he's going to go to prison.
And I don't think Trump's going to save him.
Trump probably, maybe Trump.
I mean, of course, Trump could.
He has to.
And what I mean by has to is not like I'm coming from an emotional place.
What I'm saying is he has to is Bolsonaro's camp, everywhere you go that there's a Trump event, they're everywhere.
They're everywhere.
And they're very much supportive and good to Trump.
Totally.
No, the Brazilian right.
But let me.
Nicolas Fejeria, you got Eduardo, you got absolutely.
They love Trump.
But let me ask you this.
Just be honest.
Like, I know you will be.
Let's say you're in a foreign country and the political class wants you imprisoned.
And Trump says, yeah, I like that guy.
You're friends with Trump.
You know that Trump likes you.
But the political class is saying, hey, Trump, let's do deals.
All these deals here.
Money, money, geostrategic advantage, advantage over China.
Forget that guy.
He's old.
We need to send him to prison.
Do you trust Trump?
Do you feel like 100% you're not going to prison because Trump's going to stand in your defense?
Or do you think you're going to be possibly thrown to the wayside?
I think it all depends on what and who he needs for the next phase and who has been very loyal to him.
He'll protect the guys that have been very loyal to him.
And what I mean by this is, even if you think about some of the guys, because he's very, like we talked about earlier, the unpredictable side, I put him 50-50, but I would be, if I was him trying to do the deal, the deal for me would be, I would do X, Y, Z. You have to leave Bolsonaro out.
Here's why.
If Bolsonaro is sick, as you say he is, who cares if you let him out?
He's not going to be able to compete with you anyways.
And the reason why I would trust that, that he would do that, is because I do think in 2036, Nicolas is going to run.
And if he is around, because they really, he gets a lot of threats.
If he's around, do you know what kind of views Nicolas gets when he gets out there and talks on Instagram?
You know what I'm saying?
Yeah.
I mean, it's mega.
I mean, he did one video that single-handedly tanked Lula's approval rating about this proposed tax on this system.
His video has got 350.
No, Nicolas is incredibly.
He's a superstar in terms of social media.
The way I see it is, I see it as him protecting Bolsonaro, knowing his health is not going to allow him to run, is indirectly helping Nicolas because Nicolas is going to come out and play the role of a flag carrier and the Bolsonaro camp is going to go to him.
I think this guy's once in a generation.
No, no, unquestionably.
Unquestionably.
But his political talent is not going to be a good idea.
Maybe he's even better than Lula, by the way.
No, I mean, it's different.
I mean, but like, no, he, and he's very shrewd, very shrewd, very smart.
But the thing is, just quickly, I'm not saying Bolsonaro is terminal.
I just want to be clear.
Like, I think part of why he's so ill is because of the psychological stress that he's about to go to prison.
I think a lot of the Bolsonaro movement wants him to run in 2026, and polls show he definitely would have a good chance.
That's why they're not going to let him run.
That's precisely why.
I think they would easily, right now he's declared ineligible to run for the next eight years.
He was already declared ineligible for you, found guilty of attempting a coup.
But I think he would obviously trade, all right, let me at least serve prison term at home or not go to prison in exchange for not running.
They do have a pretty formidable guy who's sort of one foot in Bolsonaro movement, one foot in the center right.
He's the governor of Sao Paulo.
Tarcisio Fredos, who could defeat Lula, was about to be 80.
So there are people who could defeat Lula besides Bolsonaro, but Bolsonaro would by far be the biggest political threat.
I just last time I, when I heard Lula with Trump, Trump seemed a little bored with Brazil is how I would put it.
Could be.
There's a lot on his plate, obviously.
Yeah, and what you're saying with him putting it on as, hey, you go, Rubio, you handle it, you do that.
But again, you said something about a lot of these guys that come here who are maybe born here, but their families escaped Cuba or Venezuela, whatever.
To them, they have an affinity.
I'm from Iran, so I'd like to see Iran be free for me to take my kids over there.
And I see that as, you know, of course, it's natural.
It's very natural.
I totally get that.
And balancing that out, you still, as the individual, have to be America first.
Yes.
It's like, look, I get it.
I understand the nostalgia.
I understand emotion.
I understand.
The members of your grandpa, grandma, all this stuff.
But guess what, man?
You're here.
This is your country.
This is number one.
This is where you're benefiting from.
This is the country to which you owe loyalty.
I fully get that argument.
Glenn, I'm glad we did it just you and I too.
Yeah, it was great.
I really enjoyed it.
It was fun.
We've never had this.
It was typically the.
Not that I wouldn't love any and the gang being here, but Adam.
Next time we'll do it as a crew because they really enjoyed last time as well.
And Glenn, folks, if you're watching this, Rob, do we have this in the comment below?
I'll put it in.
If we can, follow his sub stack, follow his videos on Rumble.
I think I see your stuff on YouTube as well now.
Yeah, we put the Rumble Show, segments of the Rumble Show on YouTube that are doing well.
So yeah, we put those on YouTube as well.
Is there anything you're working on right now that you want to share with the audience?
