James and Dave Smith celebrate their podcast's growth while analyzing Tulsi Gabbard's attack on Hillary Clinton as a pivotal political move. They debate whether the U.S. faces civil or world war amidst financial insolvency, with Dave outlining strict conditions for voting Trump, including 10% military cuts and troop withdrawals from Afghanistan. The hosts critique media narratives labeling Gabbard a Russian asset, question the logic of undeclared wars in Syria, and settle a semantic debate on whether tacos are sandwiches. Ultimately, they argue that voting remains a necessary choice between lesser evils within a flawed statist system rather than an act of violence. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Brand New Merch Drop00:05:48
Fill her up.
You are listening to the Gas Digital Network.
Hey guys, before we start today's show, I want to remind you that we have some brand new merch for part of the problem, a limited time only shirt.
It's available at podcastmerch.com.
It's awesome.
It's the state as the mafia.
Go grab yours right now.
You can get them for pre-order at podcastmerch.com.
I'm going to donate 10% of the profits to the Mises Institute.
So you'll be helping out the show.
You'll be helping out the Mises Institute, and you're going to get a kick-ass shirt.
So go to podcastmerch.com.
Order yours today.
All right, let's start the show.
We need to roll back the state.
We spy on all of our own citizens.
Our prisons are flooded with nonviolent drug offenders.
If you want to know who America's next enemy is, look at who we're funding right now.
Every single one of these problems are a result of government being way too big.
You're listening to part of the problem on the Gas Digital Network.
Here's your host, James Smith.
Hallelujah, every booty.
Welcome to a brand new episode of Part of the Problem.
You already know who this is.
The most consistent motherfucker you know.
The voice and soul of Liberty.
The big picture, Dave Smith.
And of course, I'm joined, as always, by the King of the Cocks, the Sultan of the Sandwiches.
Not bad.
Robbie the Fire Bernstein.
I like that one.
Just right in the moment.
Didn't even plan it.
It's just I gave myself three.
I was like, fuck, I need one more for you.
There we go.
So what are you going to do over the weekend to prep for the 500th?
Monday's a big day.
Monday's the 500th.
I think so.
Fuck.
All right.
We're going to do a live episode celebrating the 500th, but in classic part of the problem fashion, it's going to be like seven or eight episodes after the 500th episode.
So we're just going to celebrate it late.
But still trying to plan that out.
Okay.
Monday is the 500th episode.
Hmm.
All right.
Gonna figure out something.
Let's all get some tuxes, go out for haircuts.
Maybe that's what I'm saying.
We'll get like a big old wedding cake.
We should do that.
We should do like, remember what sitcoms used to do?
Like they would just have an episode where it flashes back to other episodes and just that thing.
And me and you will just sit here and like intro it and be like, remember the first time Trump bombed Syria and just cut back to me like, you fucking maniac.
Why are you bombing Syria?
You said you weren't going to bomb Syria.
You fucking know this shit.
You big stupid orange asshole.
The fuck are you doing?
And that was the first time Rob took his hat off on air.
The fans did not react well.
Ooh, man.
Okay.
I'm going to have to give this some thought.
I'll be honest, I thought it was Friday.
Didn't realize it was Monday.
I think it's Monday.
Am I wrong?
I think we're at $4.99.
Is this episode $499?
Holy shh.
We're on the eve of the 500th.
You know what's a that's really fucking crazy.
And sometimes things like this work out.
Like it just, you know, we've all had these little moments in life where you'll just kind of happen to be having, I don't know, like you have a conversation about something and then you see that thing on television the next day or you then and probably it's because you you notice the connection.
You know what I mean?
Or someone like tells you, you know, you've been pronouncing a word wrong and then you see that word everywhere the next day.
But it's weird because, yeah, you're right.
This is $4.99.
So I was just, me and you, we're just...
I'm going to start putting them out like $499A, $499B.
You know what?
That's a good idea.
$499.
Let's just stretch it out like that.
And then it'll just jump to 507.
Yeah, with no celebration.
So we were just next door here at the Gas Digital Studios.
There's like the way it's laid out is there's like, there's studio A, studio B with a control room in the middle.
Then there's like the big outside kind of lounge area and a kitchen.
And then next door, you have to walk down a patio and there's like the office where we were just over there with me and Rob and Mike Ford, who some of you guys, like some real hardcore fans, might know from back in the day on Hammer Fisting when Lewis used to do it with Chris Tinkle and Vic.
And Mike Ford was on.
And we were just having this whole long conversation about like back in the day and where we were back then.
And when he used to come, this got to be like six, seven years ago at least.
No, more than that.
Fuck.
God damn.
Because Lewis's kid is seven years old.
And this was definitely before Lewis had a kid.
This is before Beatrice was pregnant.
So this has got to be like nine years ago.
Lewis's kid is seven years old.
Yeah.
Well, he's going to be seven in December.
Man.
He's six, but he's six and, you know.
What do you say at that age?
What would you describe your age if you're six, but you're going to be seven in two months?
Six and three quarters.
Six and three quarters.
Six and seven eighths.
That was a big deal when you're six.
When you're about to be seven, if someone just went, well, you're six, you'd be like, six?
Talk to me like that, you fucking asshole.
Six and seven eighths.
But yeah, so this has got to be eight, nine years ago.
And he was just kind of talking about where me and Lewis were at and where he was at and what we were doing.
And it's really kind of crazy.
And this is before we ever did part of the problem.
So my guess was this is, yeah, I mean, I guess we're talking 2010, probably, around that time, 2010, 2011.
And he's just talking about how, you know, recording out of Lewis's apartment hammer fisting episodes with his dog running around yapping and doing comedy sets down at these, you know, local clubs and stuff like that.
Reflecting On The Journey00:04:03
And it is, it's hard to not come up on episode 500 and take a moment to kind of look back and be like, wow, you know, this has been a really interesting journey.
It's been really fun.
It's there's been a lot of moments that I'll think about for the rest of my life.
And I really do.
Of all the things I've done in my career, growing part of the problem is really, you know, that's the one that I look at the most.
It's the thing I care about the most, the project I care about the most.
And the one that's really the most meaningful to me.
The fact that this podcast really started as my therapy.
Like I just had all these ideas in my head.
I was reading about a lot of this shit, obsessing over all this different stuff.
And I just needed to get it out of my system.
Like I needed to rant about it.
And it would almost be like, yeah, I don't care if 10 people are listening, but I'm going to fucking rant all about this and like break this down.
And I think what I'm saying makes sense.
Like, does it make sense to anybody else?
And then to be coming up on 500 episodes later and to have, you know, I mean, at this point, just millions and millions of downloads over the years.
And to, you know, to know that it's really, it has touched other people.
You know, and I get, I mean, I get messages all the time from people.
And I don't get a chance to read every one of them.
And I definitely don't get a chance to respond to every one of them.
I try to sometimes, but just know that a lot of you guys who have sent me messages that I haven't responded to, I have read a lot, a lot more than I respond to.
That's just the nature of the game when you get a lot of messages.
It's hard to respond to everyone, but you can read more than you can write back to.
And it all means a lot to me.
I really appreciate it.
And I really see myself in this game and this whole world as just kind of a messenger.
Like I read other people's really interesting ideas and then I tried to like relay those to other people.
So believe me, for any of you guys who are like, holy shit, you know, you put this that way and it really like made sense to me.
It's like, I'm the same as you.
I'm just like, yeah, this really made sense to me too.
And that's why I'm like, hey, doesn't this make sense?
Because someone else said it and it made sense to me.
But it's really cool that I get to do this.
And I really, I'm fucking really grateful for everybody who's listened to the show.
I'm really grateful to you, Rob, for being my partner in this and helping me do it.
I'm grateful to Brian for fucking all the work he does that makes it so the show sounds good and looks good and gets off on time and to Lewis and Ralph and everybody, but most of all, to all the people who listen.
Because let's get real, I could replace you guys.
But if we don't have an audience, then there's nothing going on here at all.
I mean, what's the problem?
If it was like the entire audience came together and was like, we're leaving.
If Rob doesn't leave, he's gone before you can sit back down.
Okay.
I'm just kidding.
Rob's irreplaceable.
But seriously, if you push my hand, I'll get rid of him.
I'll just pick one of these random people in here.
Anyway, I love all of you guys.
And that's really fucking crazy.
It's crazy coming off that conversation because I wasn't even thinking about the 500th episode.
But I was just thinking about my fucking career in general.
And like, how, goddamn, we were just recording podcasts out of Lewis's fucking shitty apartment.
And, you know, the stand-up comedy was just kind of, you know, I mean, it was fun, but like, wasn't really like paying the bills or doing anything.
And now just that, you know, I'm a father and a husband supporting my girls off this crazy career that we've built up.
And I don't know.
It's really something.
Anyway, didn't plan on starting the show with that emotional treasury.
Now, if you guys give me five, I'm going to go cry outside for a little bit.
I'm going to go cry and call my wife.
Love you, baby.
So, how's your day been going?
That was fine, man.
You know, just plugging away, eating some sandwiches, getting ready for the show.
I would have guessed.
There wasn't much to get ready for today.
I didn't really have much on my mind.
We're going to the part of the problem, the inner circle.
Emotional Opening Statement00:15:21
And you know why?
Why not?
For episode 499, why would I not go to those good people?
I got to try to, maybe I'll try to get like a real good guest in for episode 500.
I'll start working on that immediately.
All right.
You know, that's going to be me, everybody.
Guys, we got him.
Man, I didn't want to mention this on Friday.
I put some feelers out there.
We got him.
We haven't been able to get him in for enough Wednesday guest series.
So finally, we made an exception and we're working with him on a Monday.
All right.
Well, we're going to talk to the people who have made this show what it is, which is, of course, you, the listeners, but more specifically, the contributing listeners, because those are the ones who help us keep the lights on around here.
The only thing that I wanted to mention before we get into it, and I haven't even had a chance to look yet at what people, I asked them anything you guys want to ask us for today's show.
And I haven't had a chance to look, so I'm counting on you guys to not let me down.
But the first thing that is on my mind was Tulsi Gabbard going hard in the paint versus Hillary Clinton.
Now, if there's one thing that we have learned in politics over the last four years, it's that, no, you know, scratch that.
Over the last 11 years, if there's one thing we've learned, there is no better political opponent than Hillary Clinton.
If you want to go against somebody, she is the person to go against.
Hillary Clinton, let's keep this in mind, okay?
In 2008 was the heir apparent.
She was chosen to be the Democratic nominee.
And obviously, the Democratic nominee was going to win.
John McCain wasn't going to be fucking president.
That was, you know, coming off eight years of George W. Bush.
It was pretty safe to say we're going Democrat after that.
I don't know if you remember.
W didn't go so good.
Couple wars he got us into that we couldn't get out of.
All of the reasons that he promised that we needed to go to this war all turned out to be bullshit.
Everything about how he said it was going to go turned out to be wrong.
He was fucking seen flying over Katrina, eating a hot dog while people were fucking drowning.
And to top it all off, an already unpopular president then left us with the worst financial recession, financial crisis, worst recession since the 30s.
So it wasn't good.
And whoever ran against him was going to win.
And here came Hillary Clinton, who, of course, was the nominee.
And she goes, look, I'm McClinton.
I'm bringing you back to the Clintons.
How do you like that peace and prosperity versus this war and recession?
Which one do you guys want to pick?
More war and recession or peace and prosperity?
Seems like a fucking slam dunk of a victory.
And no one serious was challenging her.
No one's serious.
John Edwards, who was never really had a shot of fucking winning.
Then they had these other people who were running in 2008 who were absolute jokes, who no one thought could possibly be president.
You know, people like Joe Biden.
This gets like 1% of the vote.
No one's fucking voting for Joe Biden to be president in 2008 or 2020.
So that's, you know, it was a joke.
And then her biggest competition ended up being this junior senator who had like a year and a half of experience when he started campaigning.
He was basically like months out of being a state senator in Chicago named Barack Hussein Obama.
So obviously that guy's not going to beat her.
Except he did.
He fucking wrecked her shit because Hillary Clinton sucks.
Not only is she evil and corrupt, but she's just bad at this.
She's bad at politics.
That plain and simple.
But then Hillary Clinton goes and, you know, she's able to leverage her delegates into a Secretary of State position, goes and does that, has a disastrous run as secretary of state, you know, ends up destroying Libya and putting all her emails on a private server and getting herself into all this trouble.
But she goes and gets that job out of it.
But then she comes back and it's like, okay, well, now she's the heir apparent in 2016.
And the only thing running against her is a fucking completely unknown to anyone who's not a political insider, fucking 75-year-old socialist Jew.
So obviously, Hillary Clinton with ease will beat this guy.
Nope.
Ends up giving her a run for her money.
She actually needs the DNC to intervene and basically rig the whole fucking thing and cheat for her to get through it.
She barely, barely limps by, once again, a 75-year-old socialist Jew.
That's how bad Hillary Clinton is at politics.
But she's going to be president because after limping by that guy, she's running against a complete ignoramus fucking reality TV star who's who's a walking cartoon, who has put his foot in his mouth at every last turn, and there's just no chance that he could possibly win.
It's Donald Trump, the matchup that you can beat in your sleep.
And oh yeah, she loses.
She loses to that guy.
I'm just saying, if you're going to have a political rival, Hillary Clinton is as good as you could possibly ask for.
Because she's just like the embodiment of everything that people hate about politics.
Usually when people hate things, you know, people tend to hate politicians.
It's one of the few things we have going for us.
If you ask somebody, you know, just randomly, what do you think about politicians?
Do you think they're like really good, trustworthy, honest people?
Your average person is going to shoot you a negative.
They're going to say, no, I think, generally speaking, they're kind of lying crooks.
But they tend to like their representative or their local guy.
Like, they make an exception for their one guy.
And this is why you have people like, you have someone like Bill Clinton, who's like very charismatic and he's up there, you know, like playing the sacks on MTV.
And he's like, I smoked marijuana, but I did not in hell.
You know, and they're like, yeah, that guy's cool.
We'll go with him because he at least puts like a, you know, like a pleasant mask over the sleazy politician.
Or then even someone like George W. Bush, you know, kind of have his like, I'm just a down hum, you know, I'm a humble Texan.
I love my God and my guns and my blah, blah, blah.
And then, you know, conservatives can kind of look at him and be like, yeah, this guy seems like an honest guy.
He's not from some corrupt, you know, oil family who's in bed with the Saudis.
He's a good guy.
And then Barack Obama, this like charismatic smooth guy.
Hillary Clinton's just like, nah, none of that.
Just naked, corrupt politician right here to nag you.
We're going to win Iowa.
And we're going to win.
You're like, ah, she's just the worst.
And it's the perfect rival to have.
So Hillary Clinton, which she just, I think, oftentimes just can't help herself.
Hillary Clinton, by the way, I think made the alt-right what it is.
You remember when she named them?
No.
She gave a speech about the alt-right in 2016 and was like, Donald Trump is representing this sinister group called the alt-right.
And then she talked about the basket of deplorables and gave this whole speech.
And that basically made every regular person go, all right, I'll listen to what they have to say.
I mean, if you think they're evil, I probably like them.
So anyway, Hillary Clinton now, probably the best thing that Tulsi Gabbard could have possibly hoped for.
Hillary Clinton said that basically implied that Tulsi Gabbard was a Russian asset.
And Tulsi Gabbard responded today, just this is coming in two hours ago.
Tulsi Gabbard said, great exclamation point.
Thank you at Hillary Clinton.
So tagged her, went right at her.
You, the queen of warmongering, embodiment of corruption, and personification of the rot that has sickened the Democratic Party for so long, have finally come out from behind the curtain.
From the day I announced my candidacy, there has been a, and continues, this is a thread.
There has been a concerted campaign to destroy my reputation.
We wondered who was behind it and why.
Now we know it was always you.
Through your proxies and powerful allies in the corporate media and war machine, afraid of the threat I pose.
It's now clear that the primary is between you and me.
Don't cowardly hide behind your proxies.
Join the race directly.
Go, Tulsi.
Fire.
Fire response.
Excellent politics.
10 out of 10, Tulsi.
10 out of 10.
Now, it's a shame that this is coming so late in the game.
And now, I know what you're thinking.
The election isn't for another year, so it's not that late in the game, but it would have been nice to get this out a little bit earlier.
And it would have really, really been nice if this had come before the last debate because they would have had to ask her a question about this.
And Tulsi hasn't qualified yet for the next debate.
But still, hopefully this can get her a little bit of a little bit of steam going.
But this is, and I'll tell you, it seems to me that Tulsi's better at that than she is at the debate aspect.
And it's unfortunate.
It's just the era that we live in.
We're not exactly a country of readers, even reading tweets.
We're a visual people, 2019 Americans.
And you have to be able to bring this type of energy at the debates.
But that was, I thought, the best thing I've seen from her.
I thought it was really smart politics to, you know, you have to tell a story in anything, not just in politics, in life in general.
You have to be able to tell a story.
This is true in like promoting any type of event.
You have to be able to tell a story.
And if the story is, this was all Hillary Clinton, you're the one behind the scenes calling her out, I think is very interesting.
And I got to say that, you know, there have been people speculating that Hillary Clinton might enter the race.
And I don't think it's actually the craziest idea.
There's an interesting dynamic in the Democratic primary process right now, which is that nobody there can win.
I don't think she can either.
No, I don't know that she can.
But not only that, it would just be so boring.
I really don't want to have to comment on another Hillary Clinton Trump race.
I got to disagree with you on the second one.
I agree with the first one, but I think it would be, oh, the rematch, it would be great.
It would be great.
To watch Hillary Clinton go down in flames again to Donald Trump, it would be wonderful.
But there isn't, here's the thing, right?
If you're Hillary Clinton, look, 2008 was her year to win.
She blew it.
She couldn't run again in 2012 because it was against Obama.
She couldn't do that.
Then 2016, it was too late.
It was already too late.
2020 is ridiculous.
All right, if the economy doesn't crash and burn, what does she run on?
Hey, you didn't build that wall.
We're no safer.
Healthcare is not better.
Here's what happens, right?
Here's how Hillary Clinton runs.
Here's the justification.
So what you have right now is Joe Biden collapsing into himself.
The Ukraine thing is going to be the nail in the coffin, but already just been a disaster.
Bernie Sanders, old, has a heart attack.
He can't fucking be the guy.
Nobody else can put together more than 6% of the vote.
Elizabeth Warren is the eventual nominee, and she cannot win.
She cannot win against Donald Trump.
All you need is one stumble out of Elizabeth Warren before Hillary Clinton goes, you know what?
I didn't want to do this.
Wink wink.
I didn't want to do this, but there's nobody else to take the reins.
I beat him before.
I can beat him again.
I got more votes than him.
I got millions more votes than him.
And it never even would have been close if it wasn't for that Russian interference.
Now it's time for me to get what was always rightfully mine.
That's the Hillary Clinton justification for why she would run again.
And then it would just be the entire election would be, you only won the last one because you cheated and so I'm back.
All right.
Yeah.
She goes, I already, and she said this recently.
She said this last week in an interview.
She said, I already beat him once.
And yeah, maybe we should have a rematch.
So the thing is, basically, I won.
You cheated.
You're not even the legitimate president to begin with.
I am.
Now let's go.
Throw in a thing about women.
As obnoxious as ever.
I guess she hasn't lost a touch.
Yes, exactly.
Comes back nasty, obnoxious.
As revolting as everything else about Hillary Clinton.
But let me tell you something about Hillary Clinton.
That bitch wants power.
If there is any path toward getting that power, she will go.
She will go hard for it.
She will give it every opportunity.
So I wouldn't, but if, you know, anyway, so there's a chance she might come in.
This is what Tulsi has to do.
Here's the thing, though, that Tulsi has to have this energy.
You kind of have to have this energy, not just with Hillary Clinton.
Hillary Clinton is, I believe, 75, 76.
That's what I would guess.
Yeah.
She's old, but they're all pretty old, except Tulsi.
But what I would guess, anyway, what I was saying is, Tulsi has to have this energy with everybody, you know?
Like, she's got to have it with everybody.
I mean, you, you know, it's she went 71.
Okay, a little bit younger than I thought.
So, so Tulsi, you know, she went after Kamala Harris and destroyed her on that.
But as I made the point before on the podcast, I mean, you know, if you want to go after Kamala Harris, that's all fine and good.
And I think that's a great thing to do.
But Joe Biden was the author of the crime bill.
I mean, he was the author of the legislation that ramped up the war on drugs.
You want to talk about the war on drugs?
He's the guy.
He's the guy who voted for the war in Iraq.
I mean, you got to go after all these people, you know, and you have to treat them like the Hillary Clinton.
Hillary Clinton just makes it a lot easier.
But I thought that was fucking awesome.
I thought that was actually the best, the best thing I've seen from Tulsi Gabbard so far in the campaign.
So hopefully she keeps going.
You got to mention that Hillary Clinton is playing the card that she's a Russian agent.
Wasn't that coming out?
Oh, that's what I said.
Yeah, that's what it started with.
That Hillary Clinton basically implied that she was a Russian asset.
Doesn't that right away just tell you like, oh, they clearly made that up against Trump?
Like, it almost seems so ridiculous when they come out and try and play that card again.
The Russia Collusion Card00:04:58
And the idea that you could say this, and this is what Tulsi, what we always thought from the very beginning was the ultimate armor that Tulsi has around her, is that you would think, well, the fact that she's served, that she's served multiple tours in combat zones, seen some real action, you know, like she was in a medical unit in Iraq during like real bad times in Iraq.
I mean, she saw like some real shit, you know, like really, you know, by your whole status logic, like this has got to be ultimate person number one, served her country.
There is nothing a status likes more than someone who's willing to die for their country.
So that's, you would think she would get, and then she's also like a woman of color.
So she gets like these kind of like these protections around her.
And if you can just smear her as a Russian agent, I mean, wow, you could really, so basically anyone who disagrees with you.
And then the obvious thing that really, you know, the thing that's the most interesting about Tulsi Gabbard campaign to me, and I made this point on the last episode when we were doing debate recap, but this is what's got to really, you have to hit this point home and you have to hit it in a way that connects with people.
But just for us, like the people listening to this show, for us who may know this thing already, but it's still worth it to go over it.
It's like, just understand that if Tulsi Gabbard was Tulsi Gabbard in every single way, except her foreign policy, the establishment would love her.
There'd be nothing not to love.
Nothing.
If she just didn't have the foreign policy she has, it would just be like, oh, okay, yeah.
I mean, you know, the truth is that they'd be like, yeah, she's a little bit too honest and doesn't stick to the script.
But they'd be like, yeah, she's great.
Oh, this woman of color who's served in the military, a Democratic Congresswoman, absolutely great.
So the only reason why she's smeared this way is because she goes, no, we shouldn't be fighting these wars.
I'm against this whole program of the warfare state of the military industrial complex.
And that's enough to decide that, oh, you must be a Russian agent.
That's the only explanation for that.
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Put your money on Reyes.
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All right.
Let's get back anyway.
So yeah, it is.
It is.
Oh, some, okay.
Look at that.
Michael Heiss, the head of the Mises caucus, not the king of the caucs, but he is technically.
He works for me.
It's cool.
I like the guy.
It's like one of those things where there's a parliament, but then there's like a king.
It's like Rob lets him kind of run the day-to-day operations.
But if Rob feels like stepping down at any time, he could just, you know, suspend his.
I'm just in it for the taxes and the cake.
Hypothetical Global Conflicts00:11:50
That's right.
You always have been.
But he just sent me an article that said Tulsi Gabbard says country should move to decriminalize drugs like cocaine and heroin.
So hey, look at that.
That sounds like a good weekend.
Tulsi Gabbard, kicking ass.
Okay.
So there you go.
All right.
Let's go check out.
Let's check in, I should say, with the part of the problem inner circle and see what they've got for us.
Because I asked them, I said anything you guys want us to talk about today.
And we'll see what they said.
All right.
Derek, I only do first names.
I don't do last names when I'm reading the comments.
So your anonymity is safe with us.
There's a million Derek's in the world.
No one needs to know that you're the one trying to violently overthrow the government.
All right, Derek, what do you think the possibility of a major war that is actually a major threat to the average person in the USA, like a civil war or another world war happening in our lifetimes?
Hmm.
Well, that's hard to say what is the possibility.
I mean, like giving it a number, you know, I don't know.
I don't know.
Like, do it like the weather report.
24.
43% chance.
Yes.
No, I mean, it's hard.
It's very hard to say.
It's hard to put an actual number.
You know, the possibility is not 90%, and it's not 0%.
I don't know exactly where it falls in between there.
But I would just say that, you know, in the 20th century, twice, there were world wars.
I mean, just slaughters of people by the tens of millions.
And these weren't like a genetically different creature from us.
These were people, just like we're people.
This isn't something that happened in backward third world countries.
These were the advanced countries of the world went to war with each other.
Now, that type of war ain't going to happen again because there's just too many superpowers who have nukes.
You know, there's like too many of those.
What I fear more is some type of like martial law, police state, shit like that.
And I think that it's quite possible.
Look, I like to think that it's not going to happen, but we're certainly flirting around with the possibility of it, and we should stop doing all of that.
So, you know, get out of these goddamn wars and stop militarizing the police and militarizing the government so much.
That would be my idea, but I don't really know.
I don't know what the odds are.
But if you look at, say, like, I'm not saying there's a probability that we're going to have a civil war in this country.
I don't think that's the case.
However, if you were to judge the probability of a civil war in this country now as compared to 20 years ago, yeah, it's a lot higher now than it was there.
People don't realize, but it's like all this stuff that's just like kind of fun and games, like turn on CNN and then turn on Fox News and look, they're going back and forth with each other.
This is a risky game to play.
It's a very dangerous game to play.
Pitting races against each other, pitting Democrat versus Republican, red state versus blue states against each other.
This is a dangerous game.
Like historically, what human beings do when there's tribal conflict is they fight.
And that's, you know, something that we should all be concerned about.
I mean, I don't know, Rob, what do you think?
You have a civil war brewing within yourself every day.
What kind of sandwich are we going to get?
Well, I was just trying to crunch the odds.
There's a lot of variables.
So I figure we're alive for another 70 years and we haven't seen a major war in how many?
Well, what do you consider major?
Well, he said World War II or a Civil War.
So let's go with World War II as the last major war to fall into this criteria of if you just looked at it like cycles, how many hundred years is the, do we go as a planet without a major war?
Well, okay, if you're going that level of war, so you had the Civil War in 1861, it started over by 1865, the First World War and what we entered in 1918, I want to say.
And then the Second World War, 1942.
Well, those are the two.
We entered.
World War I and World War II are real close.
But then again, World War II was also a very, you know, like a lot of people.
No, but his question was specifically major, like a World War II level war or civil war.
Now, let me ask you this.
What do you think's more likely?
A civil war or a world war?
I would think civil war because with all the nukes, I don't think any country, like you can't really, unless they decide that they're going to play it like a video game, but the video game is people dying, shooting guns at each other.
And hey, we're all going to shove the nukes.
I don't really get how you really fight like a global scale war.
Like, how do you go to war with China?
All right, but we just won't use the nukes.
That's not going to happen.
Well, that's always like when people would say it was one of the arguments for tariffs where they I've heard people like the protectionist crowd make this argument before where they're like, well, China builds all of our steel.
And then what happens if we got to fight a war with China?
And they have all of our steel.
It's like, we have H-bombs.
What are we going to, how much steel do you think is coming into this war?
Like, we're not going to fucking invade China on a choo-choo train.
We're fucking going to fucking launch some fucking bombs from like Turkey or wherever the fuck we're keeping them that's closest.
And fuck like that's that.
So let's look at it this way.
I think the only way you end up having to go to war is if a regime somehow needs to go to war in order to protect no one's going to war now for like imperial.
We're not going to war with China to conquer China and take shit from them because everyone's going to lose powers.
That's what I'm saying.
That's never going to happen.
The only reason you'd ever, I guess, nuke another country is because he basically went suicidal or you felt so threatened.
Well, look, there have been some close calls, right?
I think Kennedy and Khrushchev like had some close calls.
But if we're going empirically, the only time a nuclear weapon has ever been dropped was America dropping.
That was before we had a monopoly on it.
Yeah, exactly.
And nobody else had nukes.
As soon as the Russians got nukes, there's never been a nuke used again.
And of course, there's been more and more countries that have developed nuclear weapons, but they've never been used since that happened.
And I guess you'd have to think that the mutually assured destruction is the reason for that.
Because at this point, you go, yeah, probably it doesn't seem like China wants to get into a military conflict with the United States of America and vice versa and with Russia.
The whole thing can be said as well.
It seems like now it's being played on geostrategic political levels.
And so I would say it's probably more likely for a civil war because a country goes bankrupt and all of a sudden people are starving.
They're like, hey, fuck this.
Well, look, if you were.
Yes, I would agree with you.
The civil war seems far more likely.
If you look at the state of America right now, the fact that we are, it's not even just that we're going bankrupt.
We are bankrupt.
We are, you know, the term the zombie banks when they say the banks that are insolvent.
So they're basically these zombie banks.
Like the idea is that they're dead, but they're still kind of walking around like acting.
We're a zombie country.
We're broke, but we're just pretending we're not.
And we're still able to get this influx of credit.
People are still taking our dollars.
We're still printing a lot of them.
So we're a zombie country, but we are bankrupt.
And when that bankruptcy does hit, which is inevitable, it might be two years from now.
It might be two months from now.
It might be 20 years from now.
But when this bankruptcy hits and we realize what we are, that's going to be a very, very difficult time.
That's going to be like a real hardship in this country, unlike what we've seen before.
Like none of us have seen, none of us.
And nobody who's listening to this podcast who's from America has actually seen true political chaos before.
We've always seen some degree of stability.
Now, there are some people, like Michael Malice is from the Soviet Union.
Some people like that actually did grow up around true chaos before.
But we haven't seen that.
And what we've got coming up is not only the bankruptcy, but then you have the entitlements going belly up as well.
There's the Medicare and Medicaid, which is so funny, these Democrats debating Medicare for all.
And none of them will even talk about it.
Not only will they not talk about the fact that Medicare is insolvent and then it loses money every single year and we have no plan for how to pay for this over the next 20 years, but they're like, expand it.
Expand it to everyone at all ages.
Like, okay.
But so all this is going to happen.
People aren't going to be able to retire.
There's going to be a lot of, it's quite possible there's going to be some hard times coming up in this country.
And you add onto that the fact that the country is more bitterly divided than at any point in my lifetime.
Probably that's the more likely route.
Let's hope that doesn't happen.
I don't know.
We also have different factors going in.
You know, we have technological developments.
And there's, and that really is, I don't say that lightly.
Like there really is, you know, there's a, I've heard it explained by people much smarter than here would be the best example.
We suddenly have shale oil in this country.
I mean, not shale.
We got the what's the shit they're pulling out of the ground?
Fracking.
Fracking.
We got fracking, and now we got a shit ton of oil.
And so we've been able to keep oil prices down, which has probably kept us out of a recession.
Like, who the fuck knows what they're going to come up with next?
That's going to, like, even with the government stealing a lot of wealth out of the system, actually at least kept us like on an even keel.
Yeah, well, look, I heard one guy describe it this way before, but he said that if you look at the best cell phone in the year 2000, just like some Nokia phone or something like that.
And then you look at today's best smartphone, the smartphone is like 100,000 times more powerful than that Nokia phone was.
And then you got to think that in 20 years, what you're going to have is something 100,000 times more powerful than this smartphone in front of you.
And it's very hard for us to even imagine what that would be.
And then he actually argued that it'll be less than 20 years because the things start moving like faster and faster.
So there are going to be some technological innovations in the next 20 years that are very hard for people like me and you to predict or understand.
And maybe they are capable of actually creating so much wealth and so much prosperity that they can save us and alleviate these problems.
That would be really great.
So hopefully that's the answer.
But I would be lying if I said I didn't worry about both of those things.
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All right, let's get back into the show.
All right.
Cody asks, what would it take for you to vote for Trump?
Oh, can I answer that?
Sure, you can.
Just put up Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren.
It's going to be the first time in my life I actually show up and vote.
Really?
Yeah.
Social, like I've always said, don't vote against somebody.
That's always been my take.
Don't vote against somebody.
Make them earn your vote.
Otherwise, they don't have to count it.
But that's just a level of socialism that's a threat.
And I have to show up and be like, nope, not that.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, I get where you're coming from.
Unfortunately, you live in New York and your vote does.
Well, it's worth it.
Yeah.
But it's worthless.
Not only is it worthless.
Literally, if you go buy a sandwich and share half of your sandwich.
Hear me out.
I know this sounds crazy.
Share half of your sandwich with a homeless person that day.
You will do more to help humanity than showing up and voting for Trump in New York.
He has zero percent chance.
Hold on a second.
I'm registering Connecticut and that does even less.
Oh, wow.
And you would think those.
But how crazy is that?
He ought to be actually traveling back to Connecticut to vote.
But the idea that even there's so many of these people, right?
Like, this is what's so crazy about some of these, like, the wealthy, like, left-leaning people who would vote for a Bernie or an Elizabeth Warren.
And you're like, do you motherfuckers even realize?
I know.
It's all fun and games when you're just like, hey, I get to have money and then I get to like feel good about myself too.
But you're actually voting in people who are like running on straight up, like, you know, I don't know what you want to call it, but quasi-socialist, you know, platforms.
It's like, it's not going to work out well.
Look, for me, I'm not a big believer in voting.
I don't.
All of this stuff that I've ever talked about, whether it's with the Libertarian Party or anything involved in politics, I really believe that the political process can be utilized to spread ideas.
I believe in that.
And in many ways, I'm a product of that, you know, of the Ron Paul movement.
So that's kind of what I think.
The idea of actually voting, particularly for someone who lives in New York, I mean, it's very hard to say, you know, maybe if New York got into some hypothetical fantasy world, got into swing state territory, then you could kind of convince somebody that it means something to go vote.
But what it would take for me to vote for Donald Trump, it's look, it's, it's almost like I could go, let me answer this in two parts.
One, I could go in like, because either way, this is a hypothetical, but let me say, in the past, when Donald Trump first got elected, if I had seen any real indication that he wasn't just another fucking president, that he wasn't just another guy who was going to keep this whole system going, I would have considered it.
I was never opposed.
Listen, I despise Hillary Clinton so much that somebody running against her who was a credible threat to beat her was, I wanted to be able to vote for him.
I thought he just said too many things that were disqualifying.
For me, it was really the stuff where he was like, you know, we'll torture their families and bomb the crap out of ISIS and all this stuff.
I was like, I don't trust that this guy's actually going to keep his word on any of the good stuff.
If Donald Trump had gotten in and had really, like, not just said some good things, but actually done a lot of them, if he had really started pulling troops out of Afghanistan, he didn't.
He sent more there.
He sent more troops just recently to Saudi Arabia.
He moved 50 troops like south in Syria.
That doesn't mean anything to me.
But if he had really started pulling troops out, actually cut some spending.
I mean, saying anything that crazy.
If he had cut spending by 10% and pulled the troops out by 20% and just been like, we are going in this direction.
We are going in the direction of cutting spending, cutting our military presence, getting our house in order.
Okay.
I think he'd probably have my vote.
That's how fucking, that's how much Stockholm syndrome I have.
How beaten and fucking fucked up I am by the current statist order.
If he was just giving something like that, I'd maybe consider it.
But the truth is, in reality, Donald Trump is sending more troops to fight these wars and signing off on more spending than we had under Obama.
That doesn't do it for me.
So what could he do now?
Tomorrow's always a new day, man.
What would it take?
How about here's one thing?
End the war in Afghanistan.
It's the easiest fucking one to do.
How can anyone argue with you?
You know, in these, with Syria, they'll be like, oh, what about our allies?
And what about this?
And we haven't quite beat all of ISIS yet.
In Afghanistan, he could just go, guys, if you didn't get it done by now with 150,000 troops, we're out of here.
That's it.
You got kids in this war who are the same age as the war.
We're getting out.
Sorry.
Longest war in American history.
And who's the enemy?
Oh, yeah.
You can't tell me either.
Okay, we're out.
That's it.
Something.
Just the tax cuts aren't enough for me.
It's not enough.
So I don't know.
It's hard to answer a hypothetical, like, what could he do?
I mean, I'm sure there are things he could do that would make me want to vote for him, but I just don't, you know, I don't know.
Yeah, his enemies are bad.
They're really, really bad.
But it's also hard to like predict any of these.
I don't know.
Imagine like just, I'll get lectured to you so much more with those idiots in office.
And then just advance like these socialist policies even a little bit.
No, I know.
The question is, what can they really get passed?
If they really get careful, and then there's actually like other things that are kind of weird in politics.
And I'm not counting on this, but look, just take one example, okay?
When Obama was in office, gun sales were all record highs because the perception is that Obama's going to try to take your guns.
So people are buying guns left and right.
So you actually get more guns out onto the streets, which from my perspective is a very good thing.
Okay.
So then when Trump comes in, they go back down.
People kind of put their guard down.
Now, I actually think there is a better chance when Trump's talking about these gun control measures, he could probably get it through more likely than Obama could.
Because Obama trying to pass some like strict gun control measures will be met with fierce opposition.
Like this socialist trying to take our guns.
But when Trump does it, about half those people who are these socialists are trying to take their guns are completely nullified by the kind of like, they're like, well, Trump must know what he's doing.
So we'll get, you know, in the same way that Obama could ramp up the wars in a way that a Republican would have gotten way more heat for if he had done it.
You know, like, so if you're going to have someone like Donald Trump just continue to increase the size and scope of government, or you're going to have Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren do it, it's possible.
I'm not saying this is the case, but it's possible that at least when they do it, we can actually have a debate between socialism and capitalism, you know?
In many ways, not that it would ever be better for the country, but in many ways, I felt like it would be better for us, for people who care about liberty, if Hillary Clinton had won, because at least we could continue to point to the big government Democrats.
And this is why you have, you know, like it just makes the narrative a little bit easier.
So I just don't know.
I don't know.
It scares the shit out of me, the idea that Elizabeth Warren could be president.
Let's get real.
Bernie Sanders ain't going to be president.
But it scares the shit out of me and Elizabeth Warren presidency, but I have a tough time believing she's going to get in either.
I don't know.
It's all very complicated and it's hard.
It's hard for me to say.
But yeah, I don't know.
My thing has always been like this.
You want to get me to vote for you?
You got to inspire me with something.
I'm taking time out of my day.
Now I'm going to take time away from my daughter, away from my wife, to go to go cast a vote in a state that I already know where it's going to go.
I already know.
I'm just wasting my time.
All right, give me something.
As a total theoretical, total theoretical.
Trump ran on the platform, hey, I'm going to build you guys a wall every time he tries to get funding for the wall, which essentially the American people voted him in for.
He can't do it, right?
Let's say Elizabeth Warren, her primary thing is, hey, I'm going to get you guys Medicare for all.
What are the chances she gets that through Senate?
Like Obama managed to pull off his health care overhaul and it seemed like there wasn't a chance that we were going to have like the government health care.
It just didn't seem like that was very likely from what I remember.
What do you think the chances are?
Well, let's just go with, what do you think the chances are Elizabeth Warren can get passed through, you know, the budget for it.
It really depends on if she takes the Senate, too.
Yeah.
I mean, that's really what it's all about.
So I always think that if you're trying to increase the size and scope of government, you have a decent chance of getting it through, particularly if you have a mandate from the people.
Now, you can say, and I know a lot of people would argue that building a wall is increasing the size and scope of government, but really it's like let's just get real.
All the people who are for big government and will openly say they're for big government don't want the wall.
And why is that?
Because they want more and more people to come in who are going to vote for more and more big government.
And this is kind of like that's where the entire media class, the Democratic establishment, all of those guys are clearly against it.
And the Republican establishment is basically for it.
But I'm saying, but the healthcare thing, you know, if you got a Democratic, a Democratic majority in the House and Senate, I think they can get it through.
Because you're going to have the entire media on their side.
They're going to frame the question as, you know, do you want people to die or do you care about people?
And it's going to be a huge power grab.
I mean, look, when you talk about pure socialism, pure true socialism, but if you still look it up in the dictionary, the definition of socialism will in some way say, you know, state ownership of the means of production.
And nobody is actually running on state ownership of the means of production.
Like nobody is saying the government should take over all the means of production tomorrow.
They're not like, you know, nobody's running on Soviet style, Cuban style, Venezuela.
Maybe Venezuela is even a bit shy of that, but nobody's running on, you know, the Mao, Stalin, Castro socialism right now.
But they're kind of like, well, we call ourselves Democratic socialists and we just think nobody should be, you know, too poor to live and, you know, the AOC type stuff.
But understand what you're talking about if you're talking about Medicare for all.
Healthcare is about a sixth, maybe a fifth of the entire economy.
You're talking about the government taking over that much of the economy in one swell, in one foul swoop.
In one swoop, taking over a sixth of the economy, adding $30 trillion, nearly doubling the federal budget.
How much else do they need to take over then just to make sure that that part continues to operate?
That's right.
So there's something about, it's a huge power grab.
And if you actually won and got the votes on that, I think that'd be very alluring.
The other thing that's interesting about the wall is that it's not that immediate of a good.
It's more of a preventative good and it doesn't feel good.
Like in other words, healthcare, at least there's a feel-good story of, well, we're going to be helping the sick.
This is a little bit of a, well, we have to do something mean, and we get that it's mean, but we have to do it.
And the incentives aren't there.
I mean, there's a lot of incentives for the government to take that much power.
The people in power get that much more power.
Maybe it doesn't help government.
The wall doesn't help government.
It doesn't help them at all.
I mean, okay, maybe.
I mean, maybe you could say you build up some like DHS funding.
Maybe.
I don't even know.
I think there might be more funding in just having no wall and keeping the fucking, you know, like this whole system going.
But if you're talking about what you have is basically the Democrats are like, we're importing voters, both in the present and future.
So they're pretty incentivized to keep that going because that gives them more power.
And then the big corporate interests are like, yeah, well, there's cheap labor flooding over the border.
I mean, why would we want to not have that?
So I just don't really see there being, you know, most of the incentives seem to be lined up against it.
Okay.
Next question.
Sam says, are they going a little too far and being a little blatantly obvious with their agenda when they call Tulsi a Russian asset?
But how do you check Hillary, et cetera, on this when the media is all controlled by the establishment?
Well, I got to say, my instinct would be, yes, they are going too far, but we'll see.
We'll see what that actually means, Sam.
And truthfully speaking, I think you could almost sum up the major theme of the last three years, maybe even the last six years in America as they're going too far.
They're overextending themselves.
You know, Robert Murphy made this video years ago.
I talked about this when I was on the Tom Woods show a couple weeks ago.
Robert Murphy made this video that was really funny and kind of like entertaining.
And it was a few years ago and it was titled My Message to the Elites.
And this is years ago.
So I don't exactly, you know, I may not do this complete justice, but more or less what Bob Murphy, he made a video just Bob Murphy talking to the elites.
And he goes, he was like, hey, let me just say, great job.
You guys, incredible.
Everything's great.
I mean, you took over the money supply.
You took over education.
You took over the media.
Like, you've got everything.
You've got this whole thing under control.
You guys have been making money, you know, hand over fist.
You've just done it.
Great.
You've completely duped the people.
You guys have done it.
Congratulations.
However, there's one little problem.
There's one little problem.
And it's kind of this internet thing.
You've really allowed people to start communicating without the gatekeepers.
People are spreading these ideas that are very anti-elitist.
People are starting to find information themselves.
They can Google anything they want to.
They can get all of this information.
You've really got a little weakness here.
You know, like this, this could be a real problem for you.
Overplaying The Hand00:04:31
And anyway, go find the video if you can.
I'm not exactly doing it justice, but that was more or less his message.
And I think one of the bigger themes over the last few years in America is that that's been exposed more and more.
This is why you have populist uprisings on both the left and the right.
People are more and more seeing through the system.
They're getting their information not from the people who you were supposed to get your information from.
You know, they're not just going to CNN and these places for their information.
They're getting it from all over the place.
We're one small little part in that much, much bigger picture.
And I think that's part of the reason why you see the establishment overplaying their hand, freaking out.
They're freaking out.
You're not supposed to.
This is the whole fake news thing.
Oh my God, we've got this fucking epidemic of fake news on the internet.
Oh, you're a Russian bot.
You're a Russian asset.
They're freaking out because it's like, you're not supposed to be able to hear this side of the story.
That's not allowed.
We decided a long time ago.
You're not allowed.
Those people aren't allowed to be in.
And they're worried about that because they know when you're sitting on an empire of lies, truth is treason.
And if somebody's speaking the truth, that's a real problem.
You got to get that treacherous dog.
So I agree.
I think to me, it seems like, yeah, calling Tulsi a Russian asset would seem like, yeah, you are wildly overplaying your hand here.
It's going to be obvious that you guys are all full of shit.
And it's not like these are just random, you know, it's not like BuzzFeed is saying Tulsi Gabbard's a Russian asset.
You're talking about CNN, the New York Times, and the last Democratic nominee, the people who are supposed to be the pillars, you know?
They're saying it.
So I agree with you.
It seems like they're overplaying their hand.
But how do you actually know that until you see how people react?
You know, I thought they were overplaying their hand with the with the Mueller investigation thing, but that's all over and it seems like they've moved on to a new thing.
Now we're just talking impeachment.
Doesn't seem like there's some big, there's not, this is the thing that you have to remember, right?
It's easy to say something like, let's take the example I just used with the Trump-Russia collusion, right?
So it's easy for people who live in our world, in our bubble, because we're all in our own bubbles, right?
So in our bubble, what do we talk about?
Me and Rob will be like, wow, where are those mass apologies?
You know, where's the, you guys got this completely wrong.
And people like me and you, Rob, we might go, so the media just completely discredited themselves.
That's it.
And then it's almost easy to jump to the conclusion and go, you're done.
You're fucking finished.
I mean, you said, you said for three years, Trump-Russia collusion.
There's this big conspiracy.
You had nothing.
It was all bullshit.
So you're fucking exposed.
That's it.
But somebody who fucking lived through the whole Iraq invasion, I don't know.
I mean, they straight up said Saddam has weapons of mass destruction and he's working with al-Qaeda and they got us to launch a war.
You think the fucking Trump-Russia collusion thing was damaging.
You're talking about we launched a war.
There's fucking hundreds of thousands of dead people, thousands of our own people, trillions of dollars bled from our fucking treasury.
And where are all the people who sold that war on their bullshit lies?
Pretty much all got cushy jobs.
You'll still see them come back.
You'll still see Bill Crystal on the news, Max Boot on the news, John Bolton on the news in the different positions.
John Bolton was the national security advisor.
I mean, you know, these guys, they just keep kind of moving forward.
So I'm not so sure it's obvious they've overplayed their hands.
It's amazing how effective propaganda can be.
All right, let's run through a few more of these.
All right.
Tulsi, Hillary, yes, we talked about that.
Jonathan asks, is it possible to tour Gas Digital Studios?
No.
No, it is not.
I don't know.
Is it possible to tour Gas Digital Studios?
Hit up Brian if you're in New York.
Maybe Brian will give you a nice tour of Gas Digital Network.
Sometimes when we do Skanks here, we'll have fans come to the studio and sit in.
So you could reach out to Brian.
Maybe he'll have you in.
Nick says, Skanks New Year's Eve at the store.
See it on Lewis's site.
Is A Gyro A Sandwich00:03:22
When does it go on sale?
Pre-sale for problem children.
Yeah, we're doing it, but I don't know when it goes on sale.
I'm sorry.
I don't have that information.
But yeah, Legion of Skanks New Year's Eve at the comedy.
Are you guys doing a live Legion of Skanks and a comedy show?
Yeah.
Same thing we always do at the comedy store.
It'll be fun.
Do a New Year's Eve party, all that good stuff.
Pretty darn cool.
Yeah, excited.
Always, always have fun out in LA.
The Creek was fun last year.
The New Year's thing.
Oh, yeah.
That was a great time.
That was a good time.
Yeah, that's right.
That was fucking.
Yeah, I forgot about that one.
I had literally just had a kid.
That's like all a blur to me.
But yeah, that's right.
We did a whole, what do we do?
Like a stand-up show and a party or something like that.
I think there was just a bunch of live podcasts.
I remember getting up on the stand-up show.
It was a lot of fun.
I did some weird SDR show.
Oh, yeah, and then we did Skanks up to the stage.
Yeah, it was all just creepy.
I don't know.
It was a lot of fun.
Yeah.
Well, won't be at the Creek this year.
Yeah.
I can tell you that much.
The store must have fun back rooms to do blowing.
Oh, yeah.
It's all basically the store is all a back room to do blowing, the whole thing.
There's no even stages in there.
Everyone hit up Lewis that he should book me for the live show.
Do we got a lot of part of the problem fans out there?
I promise I can get you on the live show.
Harass Lewis.
This is unnecessary.
If you want to come back to LA, you will do a spot on the live show.
I promise.
All right.
Christian writes, we're still wondering if a gyro and a taco are sandwiches.
Well, obviously, I will defer to you on that, Rob Bernstein.
Let's go one at a time.
Is a gyro a sandwich?
No.
Is a taco a sandwich?
No, get the hell out of here.
Yeah.
They're just not sandwiches.
I don't even want to give the analysis.
It's this stupid question.
I'm sickening and embarrassed that you would try and classify these things as sandwiches.
Do you have no respect for food or categories or classifications?
That French cuisine can be different than the Italian cuisine.
That a plate of noodles goes with meatballs, but you can still eat meatballs and a sandwich.
And those are two different items.
They're both delicious.
But why is it that it's not a sandwich?
Which one?
I don't know, like a gyro.
Why isn't that a sandwich?
It's bread wrapped around meat.
All right.
Here's why it's not a sandwich.
No, listen, I say a hot dog is not a sandwich, but I have no justification for that.
So go ahead.
Okay, because at least a hot dog constitutes two pieces of bread, although connected by one piece, but it's bread.
A taco is not bread.
It's tortilla chips.
If I glue tortilla chips together, am I eating a sandwich all of a sudden?
Okay, fair enough.
You know, like it's not, there's no bread.
There's no bread.
It's a soft.
The soft shell taco.
Okay, if you had a soft shell taco that was made of wonder bread, you got a weird fucking sandwich there, but go eat a taco.
That's not a taco anymore.
You're trying to say, hey, I got a sandwich taco.
You're getting a little defensive.
You're a fucking idiot.
You're going to roll up wonder bread.
I'm very upset by this.
So get out of here.
Taco is clearly not a sandwich.
I wanted to say the connecting, right?
The connecting.
But it's not a bad thing.
The problem is like a hero sometimes.
You'll just slice it so it's still connected on one side.
And that's a sandwich.
Yes.
You're using bread to make a sandwich.
That's a sandwich.
You can't use a wrap to make a sandwich.
It's not bread.
Now it might be a flour and water product, like matzah, but when I take two pieces of matzah, I'm not eating a sandwich.
That's not bread.
You need bread for a sandwich.
Get the fuck out of here with your tacos and wraps.
I'm going to chew it up and make a good point.
Declaring War On Assad00:06:32
All right, Zach says Clapper's Orwellian comment.
I did see that.
That was really quite something.
James Clapper accused the Trump administration of lying to an Orwellian extent, which itself was the most Orwellian thing ever, where you have James Clapper, the guy who testified to Congress that the NSA was not spying on American citizens, is saying that the Trump administration's lies are just getting dangerous.
I don't know what else to say.
How do you even add a comment to that?
What do you even say about that?
That's 2019 America.
That James Clapper will go, I'm getting concerned about Trump's lies.
And the entire media class goes, wow, that's really, well, James Clapper's worried about his lies.
Oh, okay.
Okay.
How many of Trump's people have gone to jail for lying to the FBI or lying to Congress?
But you actually, and they've lied about inconsequential things.
Some things that you don't even know for sure if they're lies.
He said he did send an email he didn't send or said he didn't send an email that he did send, got a date wrong.
I don't really know that he was lying.
I just know that he got the information wrong.
But when James Clapper told you the NSA was not involved in mass bulk data collection, there's no way he just got that wrong.
He was lying.
And he was lying about something very consequential and something that is in fact illegal.
I mean, if you, you know, think that the Constitution is the law of the land and the Fourth Amendment is in the Constitution, then yeah, that is illegal.
So he, I mean, if any of these people should be in jail, he should.
So yeah, well, he's concerned about the lies.
Well, that's, I guess we got to take that very seriously.
It's, I don't know, man.
It's really something.
All right.
Josh.
Josh asks about the U.S. Turkey ceasefire in Syria and whether or not it really means anything.
Have you read about this at all?
You gotta think so Turkey.
Yes, I read about this.
They worked it out pretty quickly.
After all that, hey, hoopla, all the Kurds are going to die.
How dare you abandon our partners?
It's tragic that a couple Kurds died.
I'm not saying, hey, it's inconsequential, but it's not quite the slaughtering that they said would definitely happen.
Yeah, there was basically one big offensive, and it's not even that clear how big it was exactly, but there was one Turkish offensive, and then the Kurds went and allied up with Assad, and then Trump sent a letter to the Turks that was basically like, listen, don't do anything here.
We're going to make things very bad for you if you do.
And they've agreed to a temporary ceasefire.
Now, if you might not oblige.
Yeah, maybe not.
Oh, so maybe we should go to war with the Kurds.
No, listen, we'll see.
There are ceasefires in war zones all the time, and they don't actually end up in like a lasting peace.
Who knows?
Syria is a goddamn mess.
And it's particularly a goddamn mess because the U.S. in 2011 started funding the uprisings and funding the radicals who were trying to overthrow Assad for this master plan of overthrowing, toppling another secular dictator over there.
Okay, this was a bad move, and who knows if everything's going to work out okay, but the ceasefire is better than not having the ceasefire.
And hopefully it's enough time that they can make a deal and they can come to a resolution.
We'll see.
Also, if the Kurds decide to hold Fort, then I guess they still come out ahead for having partnered with us at some point and having all the military gear that they have.
So you can't really fault us.
Possibly.
Possibly.
We will see.
All right.
Zach wrote the House voting to rebuke Trump wanting to pull out of northern Syria with a straight face after never voting to authorize military force there in the first place.
Yeah, that is pretty funny.
I don't know if that actually went through.
I saw there was talk about the House voting to rebuke Trump for pulling out of Syria.
Isn't that, again, there's something fucking Orwellian and just freaky.
The idea that the Congress would be angry at the president for pulling out of a war that the Congress never declared to begin with, when the Congress is the only ones who can declare war, you know, theoretically, according to the Constitution.
Yeah, it's really something.
They don't have the balls to just declare war.
And if they did, then they certainly could blame the president for just pulling out if we hadn't won.
But again, the problem is, as Rand Paul laid out perfectly, who are you going to declare war against?
Who do you want to declare war against?
Assad?
Well, if that's the case, we kind of already lost that war.
And really?
You want to declare war against Assad?
I mean, had we overthrown Assad in 2012 or 2013, ISIS would have taken Damascus.
You would have had the Islamic State would have been taking, they would have had half of Iraq and all of Syria if you had been successful in overthrowing Assad.
So, no, I don't think we're going to declare war on Assad.
And the whole justification for declaring war on Assad was that he gassed his own people.
And that whole line of thinking has pretty much fallen apart.
Now, none of them will admit that that's fallen apart.
But, you know, if you notice that even my good old pal Essie Cup, when arguing for war in Syria these days, isn't saying Assad's gassing his own people, and that's why he gassed his own people.
That's why we need to go in there.
They've all kind of just let that talking point slide because it was bullshit from the beginning.
And there's been no evidence to corroborate it since it's come out.
And in fact, all of the evidence seems to point against that, like what we said to begin with, that it never happened.
So they're not going to declare war against Assad.
Well, who are you going to declare war against?
You want to declare war against the free Syrian army?
I mean, that was our ally throughout this whole war.
We've been funding that.
You're going to declare war against the moderate rebels?
Okay.
Well, fine.
I mean, those are the guys who John McCain went over there and said we should fight, who Obama was bragging about how we're working with the moderate rebels.
Who do you want to declare war against?
The Kurds?
I mean, that's the reason why we're there.
That's the whole tragedy of us pulling out as the Kurds.
We can't declare war against them.
Or do we want to declare war against Turkey, our NATO ally, who we're sworn to defend?
So I'm pretty sure if we were to declare war on Turkey, then we have to go to war with ourselves because we have to fight a war with anyone who declares a war on a NATO ally.
So what do you want to do here?
What group do you want to declare a war on?
You want to declare a war on Russia?
Who To Declare War Against00:03:21
Okay.
They've been in Syria as well.
You know, the problem is between the two of us, we have 90% of the world's nuclear weapons.
So that might be a pretty difficult war.
Do we really want to go into a nuclear war over the Kurds?
How much support do you think there's going to be for that in the general public?
Or maybe we want to declare war on Iran.
So do you want to declare war on Iran and say we're going to embark after this nearly 20 years of war, the longest wars in American history?
We're now going to start by far the hardest war out of any of these.
Something that'll be twice, maybe three, four times as bloody as Iraq.
You really want to do that?
So that's it.
So the Congress doesn't have the balls to declare war anywhere, but they will say, well, you can't move 50 troops out of one part of Syria.
Hey, can I get off topic for a second?
Sure.
I thought of some new insight into this hot dog sandwich debate.
Sure, go back to that.
I figured you had more on that.
Breaking news.
Yeah, okay.
I might want to change my opinion on the hot dog.
Holy shit, here we go.
So is it a sandwich or not?
I have a question for you.
Can you think of one sandwich that doesn't require first clarifying what kind of sand?
There's no sandwich.
You always have to.
What sandwich?
There's no standard sandwich.
You have to say, hey, I want a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.
I want a tuna fish sandwich.
I want a roast beef sandwich.
Every single time you use the word sandwich, you have to classify what kind of sandwich it is beforehand.
Otherwise, what exactly are you referring to?
When it comes to a hot dog, it's just a hot dog.
It doesn't require any further clarification about that's just not proper usage because no one said it.
If people said, hey, I want a hot dog sandwich, but now here's the biggest problem.
If you tell me you want a hot dog sandwich, do you think I'm handing you a hot dog?
Or do you think I'm handing you now a sliced hot dog on two flat pieces of bread?
But if you say, I want a hot dog, nobody's just handing you a hot dog.
No, they're handing you a hot dog within a bunch part of the experience.
Right.
But if you told me you wanted a hot dog sandwich, I'd be like, wait, so you don't want it on a bun?
That would be my question.
Yes.
All right.
Fair enough.
So you're just saying in common.
I'm saying I'm taking a new linguistic argument.
And now you might say, well, what about a fish taco?
You classify anything that goes into a taco.
The difference is it's not bread.
So you might be able to, listen, I need to further analyze this, but you might be able to make a linguistic argument that what constitutes a sandwich.
I just want to take one more question, and then I want you to come back to this.
Oh, of course.
Yeah, and the troop forces were never pulled down.
But about this sandwich thing, man.
All right, I don't know.
It's true of heroes, too.
Like, you got a meatball hero.
Can I tell you this?
And I'm not satisfied with my answer.
Okay.
And this is why Michael Malice is a genius, and this is such a great question.
But here is my answer at the end of it.
Is a hot dog a sandwich?
No, it's not.
But I can't really justify the reason why it's not.
But it's just not.
And you're a goddamn savage if you think it is.
But it's not a sandwich.
It's a hot dog.
I got nothing.
I got nothing else to really justify my answer.
And listen, that doesn't help me sleep at night.
So I'm giving you a linguistic thing that I still think it's pretty weak.
I'll be honest.
I'm not.
Yeah, let me flesh it out.
But okay.
All right, go ahead.
Go ahead and flesh it out.
You have all the time in the world.
You have all the time in the world.
Defending Content Choices00:05:36
All right.
Let's get through another question or two before we call this 499th an episode.
Okay, Chris, is Rob's case of AIDS terminal or does he have the Michael Jackson black kind?
I think we have to live and live and learn on that one.
I don't know.
I mean, I think it seems like the Magic Johnson AIDS.
I mean, I got it from sleeping with Magic Johnson.
So it's almost certainly the Magic Johnson AIDS.
That's, I mean, I don't know if you can get a different kind of AIDS from Magic Johnson.
Let me tell you, that guy can still plug you pretty good for his age.
He's been keeping shape all these years.
I believe it.
All right, let's get another one.
Mark, did you listen to the Milo episode of Skeptic Tank?
I have not listened to it yet, so I can't really comment on that.
I will.
I will make sure I check that out.
I'm interested to hear those guys together.
I think that'd be really sounds like a great podcast.
Jonathan said, Lewis getting destroyed by Nicole.
Oh, God.
He's really baiting you with the word destroyed in there.
Yeah.
Well, I think those were her words.
Oh, okay.
All right.
I don't.
Do we really have to?
I've tried to stay out of this.
All right.
Let me just say, say very lightly without.
We're just going to get pulled in.
We're going to end up on with postings and call outs.
Look, I'll just say this, right?
I've, in the world that I'm in, whether it's in comedy and podcasting and the political world, any of this stuff, you kind of, you have to realize that people, it's just a reality, however you feel about it, that people see things differently.
And there are some people out there who, like, you might hear someone make an argument and be like, that is so obviously a great argument.
Like, that's the best thing I've ever fucking heard.
You might see some comedian and be like, that's the funniest guy.
Like, what a fucking great bit.
And then there'll be someone else who looks at both of those same two things and isn't moved by them.
And that's just kind of the way it is.
And there, you know, this, this chick might have her fans and some people who look at what she's doing and being like, oh yeah, she destroyed him.
I'd say for me personally, I'm not like, you know, I'm not a big YouTuber, although you could watch this video on YouTube.
But I, to me, if anybody ever titles their own video, I destroyed this person, that is like the height of douchebaggery.
Like if I ever, if I titled my own video, like after I debated Ben Burgess or after I debated Nick Sarwalk, if I titled my own video, like on my channel, Dave Smith destroys Nick Sarwalk, I'd be like, what a fucking douchey thing to do.
Now, if somebody else wants to take a clip of it and be like, Nick Sarwalk destroyed, fine, but for me to do that myself, and I understand this is like what gets clicks and things like that, but that's just how I look at it.
But other people look at it a different way.
I'll say this.
This is my only comment on the situation because I just think this thing is dumb and should be over and went on way too long.
You can't really fuck with us.
We like you can't really own us to our fans or destroy us or do anything like that because we're just in a different space.
We're in a different game.
I don't, we don't make cut up, flashy YouTube videos that are a few minutes long to try to get some point across or something like that.
What we do, me and Lewis and Jay and Rob and all of us, we don't, you don't follow us.
You don't listen to us because you saw us do six minutes of stand-up on a late night show.
You don't follow us because you saw a flashy four-minute YouTube video that we did.
I do every week, what is it on part of the problem, four and a half hours on Legion of Skangs, another two.
So about six and a half hours.
Between everything I do, you know, with other appearances and stuff like that, I probably give you about seven, seven and a half hours a week of content.
You know me.
If you're a follower of mine, if you listen to my shit, you know me.
There's nothing anybody's going to say or expose about me that you'll be like, oh shit, we don't know.
You listen to me for seven hours a week.
Like, that's, you know, me.
You can't put out seven hours of unedited content every week without people figuring out who you are.
They figure out every like kind of nuance of you and how you think.
So the fans that we have, the people who listen to our shows, they know who we are.
And the idea that you're going to like embarrass Lewis, I mean, Lewis has handed you the most embarrassing things about him.
Lewis doesn't hide his shortcomings from his fans.
He bathes in them.
We all do.
You know, and like, so that's, you know, we do what we do and you do what you do.
Best of luck to you.
There are some people who like that.
There are some people who like what we do.
And that's how this whole thing should wrap up and end.
But, you know, it's been entertaining.
I think it's, I think it's run its course.
Voting As An Act Of Violence00:04:04
That would be my guess.
All right.
This is all Tulsa going after Hillary.
People ask about Rand Paul's heated appearance on Kennedy.
I haven't seen it.
I can't find the video anywhere.
I've heard a few people have talked to me about this.
I guess Rand Paul and Kennedy got into it.
I don't know what it's about.
I'm going in.
Rand Paul's out there being feisty.
He sure is.
He sure is.
I don't know.
I wish I tried to find it earlier and I couldn't.
We need a Kentucky gig.
Is a cheesesteak a sandwich, Rob?
This is the last question.
We'll let you answer this.
Is a cheesesteak a sandwich?
That seems like an easy one.
Yeah.
I had your first, me and you went to get your first ever Philly cheesesteak.
Yeah.
We should get a Kentucky gig.
We should go to that gun show, drink some bourbon, meet Rand Paul, make a whole adventure out of it.
All of that does sound pretty awesome to me.
Oh, by the way, did you know?
I didn't even know.
So we just talked about it.
There was a Kentucky gun show, and then we were like, I bet you could drink bourbon there, blah, blah.
It's put on by like a bourbon company.
So it's not only can you drink bourbon there.
It's an asshole if you don't drink bourbon there.
Dude.
Drink a whole bunch of bourbon, go start handling those guns.
Why we line up a gig at the bourbon drinking gun show?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Let's do it.
That's an enthusiastic gig right here.
I'll ask this question.
This will be the last one that we do because I do get this from Ancaps a lot, but I don't.
Okay, so Andrew asks, is voting an act of violence?
And I say absolutely not.
Absolutely not.
I don't like when this is a thing that a lot of like anarcho-capitalists will say, and I think it's kind of stupid, the idea that voting.
So basically, I guess the argument is that if you're voting, then you're endorsing the status system, that you're kind of consenting to it in that sense.
And therefore, you're, you know, basically you're voting for someone to come in who's going to be violent, who's going to initiate force.
So is the act of voting the initiating force?
And I would just say, absolutely not.
Like, of course not.
I thought Walter Block, the economist from the Mises Institute, I thought he dealt with this the best, but he had his whole thing about overseer goody, overseer baddie.
I don't know if you've heard this, but he was like, let's say you were like In a concentration camp in Nazi Germany, and there's one like overseer who beats you 10 times a day, and there's one who only beats you five times a day, and you get to vote, and you pick the one who only beats you five times a day.
Are you now consenting to being held in this concentration camp?
And I think the answer is obviously no.
I mean, if you had a choice to leave the concentration camp, you would leave.
But if you're only given the choice between someone who beats the crap out of you more than the other one, you can't be held responsible for, you know, like, I mean, it's like, I don't know, there's just a lot of analogies or, you know, examples you could go to for this.
But like, if you like kidnap some chick and hold her in your basement and you're like, do you want me to rape you five times today or only one time?
And she goes, one time.
You can't be like, well, she consented.
That's it.
She's basically in on this raping.
It's like, no, you have, you, you can vote to try to get out of the situation you're in or to pick the best option.
I don't, I don't think there's anything that then is consenting to the system.
And it's certainly not an act of violence.
I don't believe in that.
Now, you could argue, even very consistent with that, not saying that voting in itself is an act of violence, but you could argue that if you're voting for the more rapings or if you're voting for the more and more government, that in some way that is consent to the system, that I'd be okay with, but it's not the actual act of voting.
In that sense, it would be voting to increase the subjugation.
So sure, that I think I don't even know.
I'd have to flesh that out, just like Rob has to do with the sandwich argument.
But I think that maybe could be considered an act of violence, but not voting by itself.
Like, come on, you can't tell me that somebody who's an anarchist who voted for Ron Paul is consenting to the system.
The whole point of that vote was a fuck this system vote.
Okay.
All right.
That's our show for today.
Grab Your Limited Shirts00:00:50
Episode 499.
And Monday we will be back with episode 499B.
All right.
Thanks for listening, everybody.
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