May 16, 2024 - The Tucker Carlson Show
02:21:38
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| I mean, it's a little weird for me because you're a libertarian, and in fact, you could even wind up on a libertarian ticket at some point, if not this cycle. | ||
| No, but I'm just saying it could happen, right? | ||
| So you're literally a libertarian. | ||
| But for some reason, we have the same instincts on almost everything, I would say. | ||
| There are a lot of people in... | ||
| Conservative media, who I always have felt like I had a lot in common with, and now I don't. | ||
| And it's not because I've gotten liberal. | ||
| I've gotten way less liberal. | ||
| I see them as way more liberal. | ||
| So what happened to conservative media? | ||
| Not all of them. | ||
| I have a million friends in it. | ||
| But a lot of the big names seem very liberal to me. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| I mean, I think that it's kind of the same thing that happened to libertarians. | ||
| I think they're in Washington, D.C. And that's not where you're supposed to be. | ||
| No, that's right. | ||
| And so the best libertarian organization in the world is the Mises Institute. | ||
| And it's based in Auburn. | ||
| Alabama. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| And they specifically put it there because they want no part of Washington, D.C. And then you see... | ||
| All of the Cato and guys like that who are based out of D.C., they get very corrupted. | ||
| And you can look at it. | ||
| It's the same thing. | ||
| We were just talking about Donahue calling out Chris Matthews back in the day. | ||
| They're having cocktail parties with the Fed chairman. | ||
| Wait, you're a libertarian. | ||
| You shouldn't be doing that. | ||
| They're actually doing that? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| Actually doing that. | ||
| And I think a lot of that's the same problem with the kind of conservatism, Inc. | ||
| Or whatever. | ||
| They've been corrupted. | ||
| And power is seductive. | ||
| And I'm sure you know that from being in D.C. for so many years. | ||
| I'm not saying you're kind of an anomaly. | ||
| Think about all the people in Washington, D.C. and how much all of them wanted to suck up to power. | ||
| Almost, right? | ||
| Like, what, 90-something percent? | ||
| At least. | ||
| That's why they're there. | ||
|
unidentified
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Right. | |
| And so it's a difficult thing to... | ||
| I didn't get that for some reason for so long. | ||
| I was living in the middle of it. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I'm not a super genius. | ||
| So I didn't... | ||
| I didn't realize how corrupt it was. | ||
| Everyone always said it was corrupt. | ||
| It felt like a really nice place to me. | ||
| I raised all my kids there. | ||
| But when you realize how corrupt it is, I mean, it's horrifying. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But that's also, I think there's something like the nature of conservatism or the conservative movement in America has always just been to lose. | ||
| It's like built into them. | ||
| Like every generation just loses and then moves on to the next thing to lose. | ||
| I like the, the old, right. | ||
| The, um, you know, Robert Taft, right. | ||
| Right. | ||
| They, uh, they were largely in opposition to the new deal. | ||
| That was, they were fighting back against the SDR is new deal. | ||
| We're in opposition to that. | ||
| And then, you know, you cut forward 20 years and it's... | ||
| FDR Democrats are the new Republicans, right? | ||
| Ronald Reagan. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Nobody would dare question the New Deal. | ||
| And then, of course, there was a movement pushing back against the great society. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And now, of course, entitlements are like no one would ever dare question Medicare. | ||
| Look, just recently, I saw Donald Trump, who's not a traditional conservative, but he did the most traditional conservative thing when he said, when we get in there again, we are going to fix Obamacare. | ||
| And I'm like, okay, right, right, right. | ||
| So that's where we're at now, right? | ||
| It's no more repeal. | ||
| You don't even hear Republicans talk about it anymore, right? | ||
| So it's always like the next round of big government increases, the next round of centralized power in D.C. They will put up a little fight. | ||
| They will lose. | ||
| They will then a few years later accept this as something that is consensus amongst all of us. | ||
| But you see, we're against... | ||
| Whatever the next thing is, you know, transing the kids or, you know, student loan bailouts. | ||
| We're against that now, you know, but they'll lose and then eventually accept that. | ||
| But why would you, so that, what does that suggest about them? | ||
| They don't, it's, this is a performance. | ||
| This is not sincere. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, conservatives typically have played the role of being against consolidating power in DC. Right. | ||
| But that's, you know, that's. | ||
| Obviously, that's going against the wind, not with it. | ||
| And so it almost seems like a professional wrestling thing where they're the ones who are supposed to lose at the end of the day. | ||
| They kind of say the right thing, never really mean it, and then ultimately acquiesce. | ||
| I have to say I was disgusted by the lack of fight in a lot of professional conservatives during COVID, like disgusted by it. | ||
| You know, banning freedom of movement, freedom of speech, bodily autonomy. | ||
| The whole thing was so mind-blowing to me. | ||
| This actually was the totalitarianism we've been worried about or talking, pretending we're worried about for a long time. | ||
| It came, and a lot of them didn't say anything about it. | ||
| But I was totally bewildered by the libertarian response, which was also kind of silent. | ||
| I thought Cato would be... | ||
| I don't know, camped out in front of the White House or the CDC? What was that? | ||
| Well, it shows you. | ||
| Because you use the word totalitarian, and I think sometimes when you use that word, it's perceived as being somewhat hyperbolic. | ||
| What else could describe lockdowns? | ||
| Well, that's what I thought. | ||
| That is totalitarianism. | ||
| You had American citizens. | ||
| Turning on their TV every morning to find out from their governor what they were allowed to do today. | ||
|
unidentified
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Well, exactly. | |
| Like, I mean, the most, you couldn't imagine, like, the question was like, can I have a funeral for my dad? | ||
| And they're like, sorry, no, we've decided you can't. | ||
| You know, I mean, like, the most intimate details. | ||
| Yes! | ||
| Liberties that we would all have taken for granted. | ||
| And so, okay, to your point, right, not only did conservatives not fight against it, I think. | ||
| The majority of them cheered it on or went along with it. | ||
| I noticed. | ||
| And as far as the, you know, the point about libertarians, there are kind of like, there are these moments, and I know you experienced this a lot when you were on your Fox show, there are these moments where there's like a storm, where there's something like a white hot issue, you know? | ||
| And it becomes very easy later after that passes to be on the right side of that. | ||
| Everyone's on the right side of Iraq. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| John McCain wrote in his memoir that Iraq was a mistake. | ||
| So even John McCain could admit many years later. | ||
| But the thing is, that doesn't really matter as much as if you were opposed to it when it was happening. | ||
| Because in 2002, if you were like, hey, I don't think he has weapons of mass destruction, everybody knew that, well, that just means you're a queer, basically. | ||
| And you hate your country, and you're weak, and you're... | ||
| And so, you know, there's little things. | ||
| You know the example I like to use a lot? | ||
| Because I remember you broadcasting through this, so you'll remember it well. | ||
| But it was when Donald Trump announced that he was going to pull out of Syria. | ||
| And for like two weeks, it was like, the Kurds! | ||
| Remember? | ||
| We're abandoning the Kurds! | ||
| But our allies, the Kurds! | ||
| By the way, if there's one... | ||
| Our ancient allies, the Kurds. | ||
| Yes, yes. | ||
| If there's one thing that has been consistent in American foreign policy in my lifetime is that we always screw over the Kurds. | ||
| But for whatever, whatever... | ||
| They don't have a state, of course! | ||
| I mean, yeah, I mean, we... | ||
| George H.W. Bush encouraged them to rise up and overthrow Saddam Hussein. | ||
| And they went, nah, you know, I thought about it again. | ||
| I don't think so. | ||
| Saddam Hussein just slaughtered all of them. | ||
| Why am I laughing? | ||
| It's such a consistent theme. | ||
| Well, we're not laughing at the plight of the Kurds. | ||
| We're laughing at the hypocrisy of the media. | ||
| But for like two weeks, if anyone said they wanted to, you know, they supported. | ||
| Trump pulling out of Syria. | ||
| It was like, you're a bad person. | ||
| You hate the Kurds. | ||
| By the way, has anyone checked in on the Kurds since then? | ||
| Has the media ever talked about them again? | ||
| It was totally just used in that moment. | ||
| And that's just a little example. | ||
| That's not the big one. | ||
| Like our historic enemies, the Houthis. | ||
| Right, yes. | ||
| Man, I remember growing up in La Jolla in the 70s hearing about the Houthis and my father said, I just want you to grow strong and resolute so we can fight the Houthi hordes. | ||
| Your one purpose in life is to get strong enough to take on these Houthis when the day comes, and it will, where the These Houthis challenge our freedom. | ||
| You must be prepared. | ||
| Right, it's so ridiculous. | ||
| But like, look, I remember, so you, it was either in, it might have been April or May of 2020, but I remember you covering on your show, and I also covered this on my podcast at the time, got to a smaller audience, but you covering the lab leak. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| And you were like, hey, this is a really like... | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And in fact, it seems to make a lot more sense. | ||
| Because already, it's not that we had a conclusive case that you could take to court, but there were big pieces of information that were really narrative-shattering. | ||
| The bats weren't close enough to where the wet markets were. | ||
| Well, also, a wet market is a seafood market, so why were they selling mammals in a seafood market, pangolins and bats? | ||
| And then there was a group of Chinese researchers. | ||
| Who in December and January of 2020 wrote this paper and said, no, we think this was a lab leak. | ||
| And then they all disappeared. | ||
| That was on the internet. | ||
| And there were like four scientists from the lab that were hospitalized in November with COVID-like symptoms. | ||
| And you were like, that's, I don't know, my eyebrow is raising. | ||
| Is yours not raising? | ||
| But at the time, this was, and I know you were aware of this, this was a crazy controversial thing to say. | ||
| You were. | ||
| Racist? | ||
| Somehow it's more racist to think that the Chinese had a lab than to think they were biting bat heads off or something. | ||
| It's so bizarre. | ||
| By the way, now, as I say this to you now, this is not controversial at all. | ||
| This isn't a white hot issue. | ||
| It was then, but it's not now. | ||
| And so a lot of just what, back to your original point about the libertarians who failed on the job. | ||
| A lot of it simply comes down to be a matter of courage. | ||
| It's just a matter of like, hey, when the issue that might make everyone hate you and all of the powerful people call you the worst names, which naturally human beings have a tendency to not want that. | ||
| We don't want to be ostracized. | ||
| You don't want to be called these names. | ||
| Some people just kind of have this personality trait. | ||
| And this isn't like whether you're on the left or right. | ||
| It's something that you have. | ||
| It's something I have. | ||
| It's something Alex Berenson has. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yes. | |
| He's kind of like, I don't care. | ||
| I'll say it right now when it's going to get me called all of these names. | ||
| Well, it really is. | ||
| I remember about 15 years ago, it was in July, and I was in Maine, and my kids were playing on the dock, and it was like the happiest day. | ||
| You know, it was like perfect bluebird day, sound of laughter of children. | ||
| It was like just, I was like, oh, I was in such a good mood. | ||
| And I was looking at my kids and sort of walking along, and I stepped on a beehive, and a whole swarm of bees flew up my shorts. | ||
| And just attacked me in my nether regions. | ||
| And I went in about, no exaggeration, 10 seconds from being placid and happy to being in agony and on fire. | ||
| And I jumped in the lake, wrecked my cell phone. | ||
| That is the experience of these hysterical moments. | ||
| Right. | ||
| All of a sudden, it's like being stung by a swarm. | ||
| Everybody's against you. | ||
| Everybody's saying exactly the same thing. | ||
| You go from like placid, happy, calm, clear thinking to totally unable to think clearly. | ||
| And on all these issues, the day Navalny died in Russian custody, it's like we decide, of course, Putin killed him or whatever. | ||
| And to be able to see and think clearly in that moment, like that's the key right there when you're getting swarmed. | ||
| You may have come to the obvious conclusion that the real debate is not between Republican and Democrat or socialist and capitalist, right, left. | ||
| The real battle is between people who are lying on purpose and people who are trying to tell you the truth. | ||
| It's between good and evil. | ||
| It's between honesty and falsehood. | ||
| And we hope we are on the former side. | ||
| That's why we created this network, the Tucker Carlson Network. | ||
| And we invite you to subscribe to it. | ||
| You go to tuckercarlson.com slash podcast. | ||
| Our entire archive is there. | ||
| A lot of behind-the-scenes footage of what actually happens in this barn when only an iPhone is running. | ||
| tuckercarlson.com slash podcast. | ||
| You will not regret it. | ||
| Who is the guy who is the He was the science editor for the New York Times at Wade. | ||
| Nicholas Wade, right? | ||
| I mean, that guy was like nature and, you know, like all of the biggest scientific publications was the New York Times guy. | ||
| And it's like that. | ||
| Like that, you're done. | ||
| And they called him a racist. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| They called him a racist. | ||
| It's not just like, oh, you lose your job or something like that. | ||
|
unidentified
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Oh, yeah. | |
| It's like, we're going to smear you in the most vicious ways. | ||
| And we're social creatures. | ||
| We naturally respond to that. | ||
| But how does that happen? | ||
| Like, you've watched this carefully. | ||
| How, I mean, it's speaking of bees, it is the hive mind at work, but it's so like perfectly and with great discipline executed. | ||
| It's like in a space of four hours, the entire machine turns on one guy and destroys them. | ||
| You can see why people come up with conspiracies to explain that, right? | ||
| Sure, yeah. | ||
| And they are quite possibly right. | ||
| I mean, I don't know exactly what the conspiracy is, but it quite possibly is one. | ||
| But no dissent at all. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| But then my thing is just that I do think, and I think this is something I've benefited from. | ||
| I know this because I hear this back from my audience a lot, that it's like, oh, when you were right on those issues, when it really mattered, you kind of gain credibility. | ||
| Well, that's right. | ||
| And I also think that like, you know, let's say there's like, I don't know, like a right wing or conservative commentator who's... | ||
| Telling you how you have to feel about the new storm right now. | ||
| It's like, well, just tell me, how did you do on the last three storms? | ||
| You know, like, were you telling dopes to get the vaccine? | ||
| Were you telling everyone to be socially distanced? | ||
| Or were you, like, on the right side of that? | ||
| Where were you on Ukraine? | ||
| You know, were you saying that, like, oh, you know, like, they can win! | ||
| Or whatever the story is. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| Like, it's... | ||
| I do watch a lot of people who got everything consistently wrong. | ||
| It's the same way as the neoconservatives, right? | ||
| I mean, I hate them so much. | ||
| It's hard to speak about them with any type of sense of fairness. | ||
| But how do you... | ||
| Listen, let's just say you got six wars wrong. | ||
| And you were wrong about every single one. | ||
| Let's just say you were for the war in Iraq and then you were for regime change in Afghanistan against the Taliban who did not attack us. | ||
| And then you were for overthrowing Gaddafi and then you were for overthrowing Assad and then you were for backing the Saudi war in Yemen and all these things and it's just nothing but disaster. | ||
| Every one of them. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| But then you're going to come out and confidently be like, and I'm for this next war. | ||
| And let me tell you why you have to be too. | ||
| And you don't have like enough just You don't feel humiliated enough that you couldn't come out. | ||
| Even if you were for this, you'd be like, man, I really think we should fight this war, but I can't come out and say we should fight this war because the last six times I said it, it was nothing but a disaster. | ||
| But the same people who were like, you see, Tucker, when we overthrow Saddam Hussein, democracy will sweep the region. | ||
| And you see, we're going to be greeted as liberators. | ||
| We won't be fighting off a 20-year insurgency, you see. | ||
| They'll greet us as liberators because they love us. | ||
| And then democracy will sweep the region. | ||
| And then Iran will lose influence in the region. | ||
| And then Hezbollah will start being nice to Israel. | ||
| And all these grand predictions. | ||
| And every last one of them, oh, it'll be paid for in oil. | ||
| Do you remember all the things they used to say? | ||
|
unidentified
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Oh, very well. | |
| I mean, it's a cakewalk. | ||
| It's a slam dunk that he has weapons of mass destruction. | ||
| So every single one of these things you were wrong about, you get to now be the person advocating the next one? | ||
| But you wouldn't ever allow that kind of behavior in your children. | ||
|
unidentified
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Of course. | |
| You can't let a lie stand. | ||
| Kids lie. | ||
| You catch them lying. | ||
| And the whole point of the exercise is to get them to admit to your face, yes, I did this. | ||
| No, I won't do it again. | ||
| That's an integral step, right? | ||
| You have to go through that or else you don't improve as a person. | ||
| You become shittier as a person. | ||
| Yeah, that's right. | ||
| And I would also, maybe this is me adding my libertarian bent to this, but I would also say that in the... | ||
| Private sector, and I mean not like the crony connected to government private sector, but like in true business, you also don't get away with that stuff. | ||
| Of course not. | ||
| You can't just fail over and over again and then move up. | ||
| This only happens either in the government or in companies that are essentially the government, but live off no big government contracts or something like that. | ||
| But yeah, and it's the major problem is that... | ||
| Look, at least there are problems with free markets. | ||
| It's made up of human beings, so there's always problems. | ||
| But there's at least a cleansing mechanism. | ||
| There's profit and loss. | ||
| If you lose too much, you go out of business. | ||
| With government, the worse you do, the more funding you get. | ||
| If the kids can't read, we need a higher education budget. | ||
| I completely agree with you. | ||
| And for all I piss on libertarians, and of course I was one for most of my life. | ||
| I'm going to bring you back. | ||
| Give me time. | ||
| No, it's just interesting. | ||
| I think the reason I'm mad at libertarians is because I don't see a free market in the United States. | ||
| Oh, of course not. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And so, I mean, I look at green energy or the defense space. | ||
| And that bears no resemblance to a market at all. | ||
| And a lot of- And finance? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| But I would also point out that, look, there are, just like with every group, just like conservatives, there are different camps within libertarians. | ||
| So just to point out, the thing I said about the last five storms, if you go listen to what- Ron Paul was saying throughout the entire COVID regime, he was perfect. | ||
| Tom Woods, Lou Rockwell, Jeff Deist. | ||
| There's this group of libertarians who were great the entire time. | ||
| Well, I totally agree. | ||
| I've never stopped loving Ron Paul. | ||
| So the difference between, say, the Ron Paulian libertarians, which I would consider myself to be one of, and, say, the Cato or groups like that, is that the Cato types tend to... | ||
| Almost have this academic discussion of what it would be like in a free market, and then talk as if that's what we're living in right now. | ||
| But that, you know, I mean, I was a fellow at Cato, so I remember this very well. | ||
| That organization, that foundation, 501c3, is run by an oligarch, actually. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's run by Charles Koch. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| Right? | ||
| So he kicked out the old head, he brought in the new head, and you sort of wonder if you're a libertarian. | ||
| You're not for government power, but you're also suspicious of oligarchs, right? | ||
| Aren't you? | ||
| Well, of course, and particularly, say, the same oligarch who's not only funding the Cato Institute, but is also funding the Republican Party in general. | ||
| Well, exactly. | ||
| And the party who consistently is growing the size of government every bit as much as the Democrats are. | ||
| I've noticed. | ||
| It's become a thing where if a Republican were to ever say, You know, say we need smaller government or like Nikki Haley was talking about smaller government. | ||
| You just roll your eye because it never means anything. | ||
| They've been talking about this forever. | ||
| There's never been one time and there's been several times in my life where the Republicans have controlled the Congress and the White House. | ||
|
unidentified
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Oh, yes. | |
| Never once been a cut in spending. | ||
| Of course not. | ||
| Spending always goes up. | ||
| There's been some... | ||
| Cuts in top marginal tax rates. | ||
| Not even drastic cuts, but yes, we'll have rich people pay less taxes. | ||
| There's never a cut in spending, because that's a cut in the power of the federal government, and they're not for that. | ||
| And so if the guys who are funding that are also funding this... | ||
| Libertarian Institute to write policy paper for recommendations that are never going to be implemented anyway. | ||
| It does raise some eyebrows. | ||
| I would say, look, to the bigger question of libertarians in the side, like I've heard you say before, the US federal government is the biggest, most powerful government in the history of the world by far. | ||
| There's not a close second. | ||
| It's a government that can snap its fingers and overthrow regimes anywhere in the world and does it regularly. | ||
| And so that is, look, as the country is kind of spinning out of control and everything has just gotten more and more corrupt, that's directly related to the fact that DC has gotten more and more powerful. | ||
| And this is, to me, like I've been saying this for a while. | ||
| It's not my original thought. | ||
| This is something Hans-Hermann Hoppe said back in the 90s where he basically said that libertarians need to learn a conservative lesson and conservatives need to learn a libertarian And what he meant by that was that libertarians basically need to learn that, okay, just because we might believe that the government ought to not bash someone over the head and lock them in a cage for doing something, doesn't mean we have to celebrate it. | ||
| You don't have to celebrate degeneracy. | ||
| You don't have to be on the side of that. | ||
| In fact, a functioning society needs good family values, and that's just a fact. | ||
| We don't believe that should be enforced at the point of a gun, but that doesn't mean even if you think, say, whatever, you think prostitution should be legal, you could still have a feeling that it's horrible and represents a tragedy on all sides. | ||
| And so that's like kind of the conservative lesson that libertarians need to learn. | ||
| I think a lot of libertarians in the Ron Paul kind of school did learn that. | ||
| And the lesson that I would say that conservatives or Trumpian populist types need to learn is that if Donald Trump's going to say drain the swamp, it's like, okay, but what does that mean? | ||
| Like, what does that look like? | ||
| How do you actually drain the swamp? | ||
| And it's really actually very simple. | ||
| It means cut government spending. | ||
| As long as Washington, D.C. is the most powerful organization in the history of the world, and they're spending over $6 trillion a year, that is by definition a swamp. | ||
| That's why more millionaires live in the suburbs outside of Washington, D.C. than anywhere else in the world. | ||
| They don't make anything except weapons, you know what I mean, that are purchased by the government. | ||
| I've heard you talk about this before. | ||
| Well, they don't even make them there. | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| I mean, there's not a single act of creation in the entire D.C., the DMV, as they call it. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Well, no, and it's literally, not only are they not creating, but they're parasitic by nature. | ||
| They're taking Americans' money. | ||
| And I think this is kind of the central source of why the country is spinning out of control and why we're so incredibly corrupt at every level is because There is this parasitic force in Washington, D.C. that's grown bigger and bigger and more powerful. | ||
| I absolutely agree with that. | ||
| And I do think I saw it change. | ||
| I remember the moment it changed. | ||
| And it was the moment when the Democratic Party subverted the so-called business community, which was always a kind of counterbalance against this, because the idea was the government makes it actually harder for people to conduct business. | ||
| It stifles free markets and we're against that. | ||
| So the Chamber of Commerce and Business Roundtable were always sort of pushing back against the growth of government. | ||
| Bill Clinton changed that. | ||
| And he changed that by declaring a ceasefire between the Democratic Party and the rich. | ||
| And he did it during the tech boom. | ||
| I'll never forget this. | ||
| Democrats were always saying, and I thought, you know, I didn't agree with him, but I sort of thought it was important for the purpose of balance to have this. | ||
| They would say they were suspicious of people with too much money. | ||
| That's too much power. | ||
| Like, what about the value of labor? | ||
| You got the value of capital, the value of labor. | ||
| They're kind of in conflict with one another, and we're on the side of labor. | ||
| All of a sudden, Bill Clinton's like, no, there's nothing wrong with being, you know, making a billion dollars at 32 for creating an app, you know, running Webvan or E-Toys or Pets.com. | ||
| Doorknobs.com. | ||
| It was just everything you could think of. | ||
| Totally! | ||
| And it was so smart. | ||
| He did it for the purpose of fundraising, and all of a sudden the Democratic Party became far richer than the Republican Party, and all the formerly Republican leafy suburbs around the country, you know, Greenwich, Connecticut, and McLean, Virginia, they all went left, actually. | ||
| It was brilliant and evil, but its effect was to completely wreck the country because there was no counterbalance against power. | ||
| At all. | ||
| So once the government, you know, the people with the nuclear weapons and business, the people with the largest bank accounts are aligned, that leaves everybody else like, who's defending them? | ||
| Yeah, and then you said something last night when we were having dinner that I thought was so interesting. | ||
| I was thinking about it after we left, but you were talking about how, like, traditionally the rich people were in suits and ties. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Right? | ||
| Well, your uniform matters. | ||
| I mean, that's why we have uniforms. | ||
| That's why the bus driver wears a uniform and your airline pilots have their stupid outfits and your stewardesses are dressed up like they are because it says a lot about their role in your society. | ||
| And rich people used to spend a lot of money on clothes. | ||
| And the whole point of that was to say, we're rich. | ||
| We're in a separate class. | ||
| And that comes with tons of advantages, but it also comes with obligations. | ||
| Noblesse oblige was a thing. | ||
| And all of a sudden in the 90s, you notice the richest people in America start dressing. | ||
| You know, and like t-shirts and hoodies and like, what's the message of that? | ||
| And the message of that is we're just like you, which is another way of saying we have no obligation to anyone but ourselves, actually. | ||
| We don't owe you anything. | ||
| And it comes out of this mindset that they do have, and I know them, of course, well, so I know that they feel this way, that we're the richest because... | ||
| We came up through this credentialing system that we claim is a meritocracy and we won. | ||
| We won all the prizes because we're superior. | ||
| It's so fascinating. | ||
| This is why I don't like chess and why I prefer backgammon because backgammon has probably 30 or 40% of a luck element to it, just like life. | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| Just like life. | ||
| Like, why didn't I get leukemia and die at five? | ||
| Tons of five-year-olds do. | ||
| I don't know, but I should be grateful for that. | ||
| So, like, I've been... | ||
| I'm relatively successful in my stupid little category. | ||
| That's not all my doing. | ||
| Like, show some, be magnanimous about it. | ||
| Well, this is why I was thinking about that, because I think it's such a good point, because there is something kind of counterintuitive to it, where you'd be like, oh, but if they're dressing like the people, then maybe they'd feel more connected to the people. | ||
|
unidentified
|
No! | |
| But in fact, it's actually the opposite, because it is, it reminds me in a way, this is what I was thinking about literally last night in my hotel, I was thinking about you making this comment, and it was reminding me of when the lockdowns first started, and There were all the celebrities would come on and be like, we're all in this together. | ||
| And you're like, Ellen DeGeneres, you're in a mansion. | ||
| You're not in the same situation. | ||
| There's a guy out there who's got three kids and makes 60K a year, and he was just deemed non-essential. | ||
| And he is like... | ||
| Terrified about the future of how he's going to support his family. | ||
| And Ellen's sitting here, and her message is, we're all in the same boat, man. | ||
| You know? | ||
| Like, we're all in the same. | ||
| I know. | ||
| One of my servants got COVID and couldn't come in today, so I only had a team of five, you know? | ||
| And you're like... | ||
| So, in a sense, you're like, while the message is, we're all in this together... | ||
| And that kind of superficially sounds like a nice message. | ||
| It's actually the worst message. | ||
| A much better message would be to acknowledge that I'm not in the situation that you're in at all. | ||
| That for me, it's actually fine to be locked out. | ||
| But if you're in the leadership class, you have... | ||
| I mean, I've been in it my whole life. | ||
| I know. | ||
| You have a moral obligation to admit it. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Because once you admit it out loud... | ||
| Then you realize there are massive benefits to it, but there are also massive obligations to it. | ||
| They're shirking their duty. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| That's what they're actually doing. | ||
| And that's actually the opposite of being noble. | ||
| It's fraudulent. | ||
| It's disgusting. | ||
| Yes, and it's a lie. | ||
| Your whole thing is based on a lie. | ||
| It's Sam Bankman freed. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Of course. | |
| Oh, I just drive like a shitty little Toyota. | ||
| It's like, oh, actually, you're defrauding millions of people. | ||
| Michelle Obama goes to Princeton for free and has been the ruling class her whole life. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And she's still lecturing you about how she's a victim of racism. | ||
| Hillary Clinton, exact same thing. | ||
| Goes to Wellesley, spends her entire life in the ruling class, and she's still whining about how she's discriminated against. | ||
| Why are they doing that? | ||
| Did you ever see... | ||
| They'll have pictures of side-by-side, but it'll be pictures of... | ||
| Jimmy Carter's house and Obama's house. | ||
| And it totally represents something about the corroding of our soul. | ||
| That we would allow people who call themselves public servants, which of course is ridiculous, they're not. | ||
| But still, they don't even have to pretend to keep up a facade of that. | ||
| You get to live in this insane mansion? | ||
| Off what? | ||
| Because you were president and you get to cash in on that now? | ||
| In a white neighborhood, you should be required to live in the hood if you're Barack Obama. | ||
| If you're using that card. | ||
| You use that card. | ||
| The only reason you got elected was because of your race. | ||
| You spent your entire eight years inflaming race hate in our country, and then you go to Martha's Vineyard, the whitest zip code in the world? | ||
| Not allowed. | ||
| You're not allowed to do that. | ||
| Well, it also, I mean, it did so much damage, his inflaming racial hatred. | ||
| And I'll say after, you know, Barack Obama's campaign in 2008, first of all, it was just leaving how you feel about the guy aside. | ||
| It was an amazing campaign. | ||
| It was unlike anything that had ever been run before. | ||
| It was genius. | ||
| Yes, it was totally brilliant. | ||
| It was his... | ||
| Now, of course, it wasn't what they presented it as. | ||
| It wasn't like a grassroots campaign. | ||
| He was... | ||
| Approved of by the powers that be. | ||
| Of course. | ||
| He didn't just happen to as a junior senator get like a primetime speaking slot in 2004 where he gave that speech. | ||
| He wasn't even a senator yet. | ||
| Was he a state senator still at the time? | ||
| That's when I first met Barack Obama. | ||
| Walking down the street smoking a cigarette in Boston on my way to dinner at the Palm. | ||
| I'll never forget it. | ||
| And I met him and Jesse Jackson Jr. They pulled over to say hi to me. | ||
| Really? | ||
| I'd never heard his name. | ||
| And I covered politics for a living. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And he gave the keynote at the end of that week. | ||
| That was Sunday night. | ||
| He spoke on Thursday. | ||
| And he was not a U.S. Senator. | ||
| That was the campaign. | ||
| It was great. | ||
| It was absolutely crazy. | ||
| So it was clearly kind of orchestrated by some powerful people. | ||
| By the Pritzker family, of course. | ||
| Listen, the speeches that he gave and much of the message. | ||
| First off, I actually, there's probably a lot of things that I would have agreed with him that he was running on. | ||
| I agreed with a lot of things George W. Bush ran on in the year 2008. Well, I'll tell you what I agreed with. | ||
| He turned around and didn't govern like that at all. | ||
| Let's sort of like elect the black guy and get past the race stuff. | ||
| I loved that. | ||
| Well, especially because that was his message. | ||
| That was his message. | ||
| Let's get past the race stuff. | ||
| I love that. | ||
| And there was a broader, more unifying thing. | ||
| I mean, I remember, because he was such a... | ||
| Powerful, you know, like, public speaker. | ||
| I mean, he never really said anything, but it would still be beautiful. | ||
| Yes! | ||
| I remember in his acceptance speech in 2008 at the DNC, we had this whole line where he was like, he was like, I love this country, and so do you, and so does John McCain. | ||
| The men and women who have fought for this country have been Republicans and Democrats and independents, but they fought together and died together, not defending a red America or a blue America, the United States of America. | ||
| And then it's like, oh, I mean, he didn't really say anything there, but it was beautifully put. | ||
| I'm 100% for that. | ||
| Yeah, the message was great. | ||
| It was a great message. | ||
| And look, he also was very critical of the George W. Bush administration's excesses. | ||
| And I'm going to end the war in Iraq. | ||
| I'm going to reinstitute habeas corpus. | ||
| We're going to end torture. | ||
| There were a lot of... | ||
| He didn't do any of that. | ||
| I mean, I guess he ended the war in Iraq eventually and then reinvaded the country because the ISIS fighters he was arming invaded the country. | ||
| But... | ||
| But then, I think essentially what happened, and it was around Obama's re-election campaign, this is where things really went off the rails in this country, was that he got in there and continued and expanded all the worst of the Bush policies. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, of course. | |
| And so they almost had nothing to run on, and so they decided to pivot to a culture war instead. | ||
| And this was a decision, and again, I don't know exactly what the conspiracy is, but this decision was made from the top down. | ||
| That I think it was a response to, Obama's failures. | ||
| It was a response to these movements like the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street, which were getting a little bit too close. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| A little bit too close to the target. | ||
| I'm sure you've looked at this before, but where there's these nexus charts, and you can chart out how many times all the woke terms are used, transgenderism, all that. | ||
| And it's all right around 2012. It's all of a sudden like, you know... | ||
| Systemic racism goes from being mentioned this many times throughout history to shooting the New York Times and the Washington Post. | ||
| It's a very famous graph, and I've used it many times in trying to explain this, but that's exactly right. | ||
| Fight amongst yourselves. | ||
| I think it was the hangover from the financial crisis. | ||
| Yeah, well, that was a huge part of it, for sure. | ||
| And also that Obama's... | ||
| In the year from 2007 to 2010, the median net worth, In America shrunk by like 40%. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Like people lost like 40% of American wealth was lost. | ||
| And you know, you can imagine, especially now like having kids, you know, at the time I didn't have kids and I was young. | ||
| I was like, whatever, you know, bad economy. | ||
| Oh, that sucks. | ||
| But you can appreciate now like, oh, what that would be like if you just lost 40% of your net worth and you got little kids, like how destabilizing that is. | ||
| And Obama's solution to this, right? | ||
| The Obama recovery. | ||
| Okay, it was record high government spending and record low interest rates. | ||
| This was the solution. | ||
| This is how we're going to save the economy. | ||
| We're going to bring interest rates down to zero, and we're going to bring government spending higher than it's ever been before at that time. | ||
| So you can say on paper there's a little bit of a recovery here, but what really happens in that environment? | ||
| You know, it's like all the politically connected people in Washington, D.C., they make more money, and the speculators have a field day because now everybody in Wall Street's making more money because you have to invest now, right? | ||
| Because you're losing money if you just save. | ||
| And so this ultimately is what built. | ||
| Then they throw the culture war in there to, like you said, fight amongst yourselves. | ||
| And the result of that was Donald Trump. | ||
| The result of all of that was the condition for Trump. | ||
| Zero interest rates, that had a greater, I think, negative effect on the country than any war we've ever fought. | ||
| For one thing, asset prices ballooned. | ||
| I mean, this is fake. | ||
| Everyone knows what happens over time. | ||
| With free money, the money becomes worth less. | ||
| And so there's a rush to assets, and now you can't buy a house. | ||
| Right. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| And then the boom is always followed by the bust. | ||
| And so you have all of this malinvestment. | ||
| Because the way it works, and this is where Austrian economics, which I've heard you disparaged. | ||
| No, I have never disparaged. | ||
| I'm just mad about the results. | ||
| But it's not a result of... | ||
| Austrian economics or libertarianism, it's a result of abandoning all of that. | ||
| I agree. | ||
| But look, the basic thing is that interest rates are a price. | ||
| They're a price just like anything else. | ||
| It's the price of money. | ||
| Of course. | ||
| It's the price of borrowing money. | ||
| And so just like every other price, there's information given in these prices. | ||
| So if steel becomes very, very cheap, that gives information to a businessman that like, hey... | ||
| We're producing a lot of steel very easily now. | ||
| If you wanted to do a project that requires a lot of steel, now's the time to do it because we're producing steel. | ||
| Now, that works when you have real prices because, oh, there's a big production of steel. | ||
| But if the government just came in and said, you know, we have price controls and we insist that the price of steel is very, very cheap, what's going to happen is people are going to start building projects with steel and then realize we're out of steel. | ||
| Pretty soon, because it wasn't a real signal. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| No, I agree. | ||
| So what happens when you make interest rates zero for a decade, it's a signal for people to, say, borrow money when they wouldn't have otherwise borrowed. | ||
| Like, maybe you wouldn't borrow if rates were 8% or 9%, but at zero, this is a good time to borrow this money. | ||
| But again, it's a fake signal. | ||
| We're borrowing all this money and building things. | ||
| So maybe I am a libertarian, because I got all kinds of advice from, I'm not sophisticated at all with money. | ||
| But all kinds of advice. | ||
| Borrow money, it's free. | ||
| And I never did. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Not one dollar. | ||
| Yeah, well, it's a really bad idea. | ||
| I feel like the amount of debt that people carry is the untold story in the United States. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And I don't know why we're in favor of the credit card companies or people who are getting rich from that. | ||
| It's just bad. | ||
| Having a lot of debt is bad. | ||
| I don't know why. | ||
| If you say that, by the way, it's considered super radical, but why is that radical? | ||
| Well, yeah. | ||
| Think about the idea that we have all of these policies designed to get people to gamble their life savings. | ||
| You're penalized for not carrying debt. | ||
| When I made money not that long ago, when I finally could pay off my... | ||
| The first thing I did was pay off my mortgage. | ||
| That's the first thing I did. | ||
| And my college roommate, who's really much smarter than I am, has made a ton of money. | ||
| He's like, that's crazy. | ||
| You have to pay, I forgot what it was, but you lose the tax shield. | ||
| And it was like $18,000. | ||
| I had to pay $18,000 a year for the privilege of not being in debt to a bank. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| What? | ||
| Yeah, and the system is like... | ||
| It's artificially designed to be that way. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| That it's like, oh, these are the tax laws that will encourage people. | ||
| Wait, you're penalizing me for not being in debt? | ||
| Who wrote these laws? | ||
| Just think about what the income tax is. | ||
| They penalize you for working. | ||
| It's a crime to work. | ||
| The punishment is a fee. | ||
| The more productive you are, the more punishment you get. | ||
| So let me ask you this question as an Austrian economist. | ||
| Why the disparity between The tax on labor and the tax on capital. | ||
| Well, because that's the rules that the government made. | ||
| Well, let me say, right, because I think you're totally right about this, right? | ||
| That it's like, look, I've heard you talk about this before. | ||
| So, like, if the capital gains tax is 15%, but then someone working pays 30%, so, like, what are you saying? | ||
| We would rather people be... | ||
| Exactly! | ||
| But, so here's the next level to that. | ||
| This is all I think that you're missing in that, because I think you're completely right in your critique of that. | ||
| But, okay, so... | ||
| If we were, let's say, to fix that disparity, there's basically two ways we could do that. | ||
| One would be to raise capital gains taxes up to 30%, okay? | ||
| So the result of that would be that I guess we would disincentivize certain types of investment, maybe the government. | ||
| Let's say it works out perfectly and we are able, you know, like the people on Wall Street don't have an army of tax lawyers and accountants who can get them out of this stuff as they always end up doing. | ||
| So then DC gets more money. | ||
| So then the corrupt, most powerful government in the world gets a little bit more money. | ||
| They will then leverage that to borrow three times as much and just sell us with more debt. | ||
| Of course. | ||
| It will go to politically connected cronies, right? | ||
| However, let's say the other option to that is we could lower individual taxes to 15% and now give every working family in this country a huge raise. | ||
| Well, that's what I would be for, strongly. | ||
| So that's all I'm saying. | ||
| You're right about the discrepancy there, and it's totally corrupt. | ||
| But it's like, what's the solution to that? | ||
| Well, the solution is, look, if you tied them legislatively and just said, you know, they're going to be the same. | ||
| The tax on capital will always be the same as the tax on labor. | ||
| Then the average person, which includes me, I don't have any investments. | ||
| I just work on my salary, right? | ||
| So like most people. | ||
| The average person would benefit from the lobbying power of Wall Street. | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| So they're always going to be the same, but all of a sudden I have an army of bank lobbyists and private equity lobbyists keeping my income taxes low. | ||
| Yes, look, in theory, I would love that idea. | ||
| It's just, the answer there is to just like, you know, it's unbelievable to me that particularly people like Bernie Sanders types will say, That they care so much about working people and they want to do whatever they can to help these working people and yet the biggest bill For working people is their federal income taxes. | ||
| And I mean, the IRS, I mean, I know stories from good friends of mine. | ||
| They are ruthless. | ||
| I mean, they go back 20 years and ruin people. | ||
| And this isn't just like, it's like people kind of have this idea that there's like economic issues over here and social issues over here as if they're different, but they're really not. | ||
| I mean, you go back 20 years on somebody and say, you know, a guy who's making 30 grand a year and they go back and maybe it's only just like. | ||
| You know, a few thousand dollars a year that he owes, but they go back 20 years on you, and you owe three grand a year, and so now you owe $60,000. | ||
| Oh, yeah, with interest. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| This is what leads to divorces, and people putting pistols in their mouth. | ||
| Yeah, you know, kids growing up without their dad around. | ||
| I mean, it's like these things are interconnected, and you see that just over the last few years with the price inflation, how bad it's been. | ||
| I mean, like, this ruins people. | ||
| So why isn't that a news story? | ||
| I don't understand if... | ||
| And I will say, because of my age and income, I'm a little cut off. | ||
| But I try not to be cut off. | ||
| And people I talk to, they all complain about grocery store prices. | ||
| Like a lot. | ||
| And they're shocking. | ||
| But I never hear anybody say that in the media. | ||
| Yeah, well, I mean, I certainly talk about it a lot. | ||
| I think that there's... | ||
| It's not... | ||
| It's not in anybody's interest, I guess. | ||
| It's not in any partisan interest to really talk about that, because both parties are totally complicit. | ||
| And so no matter who, people, because we live in this weird two-party system, and everybody becomes partisans, especially in an election year, and they're all just trying to kind of get their guy over, and no one's really... | ||
| I mean, there are Trump supporters who like to talk about the inflation under Obama. | ||
| I don't really want to talk about it too much because it all started with the money that was being printed in 2020 that Donald Trump was championing the whole time. | ||
| And smearing Thomas Massey for daring to say, hey, we should have a vote on this before we spend more money than we've ever spent when we're broker than we've ever been. | ||
| And Trump, of course, bragging that it was the... | ||
| The biggest bill? | ||
| You know, because it's so Trump. | ||
| He goes, it's the biggest. | ||
| He goes, a lot of other people have spending bills. | ||
| Mine's the biggest spending bill, you know? | ||
| And like, look, I'm not trying to, you know, there are, Trump is like the most entertaining character and he's hated by all of the right people and a lot of his instincts are correct and he was also framed for treason by his own intelligence agencies and so there's a lot of Donald Trump that I... I can sympathize with and relate to his supporters. | ||
| But the truth is that it was such a disaster. | ||
| To lock down the economy and to say we're just going to print our way out of this was such a disaster. | ||
| I agree. | ||
| And he totally got rolled by all the people around him and just did not have the wisdom or the courage to stand up to them. | ||
| And he kept Fauci on that task force through all of 2020. I mean, he just kept so many people who hated his guts around him. | ||
| And it's really, it was a tragedy. | ||
| Nikki Haley, Mike Pompeo. | ||
| Mike Pence. | ||
| No, I agree. | ||
| I mean, all of them. | ||
| You know, Mike Pence is a guy, he was in his 60s. | ||
| And if he were to go, this is the guy who he was going to leave us as President of the United States. | ||
| It's Mike Pence. | ||
| There's something wrong with him. | ||
| Yeah, there's a lot wrong with him. | ||
| You can feel it. | ||
| I really appreciate you ruining his political career. | ||
| No, it wasn't personal. | ||
| I mean, I feel sorry for Pence. | ||
| He's not comfortable with himself at all. | ||
| And that's the vibe, the strong. | ||
| I've known him for 25 years. | ||
| I've known him since he got to Washington. | ||
| And he's got some talent, and I don't think he's evil or anything, but there's something really damaged. | ||
| And I always felt that he was put in there. | ||
| He wouldn't be the first VP to be in this position, but he was put in there by permanent DC to keep an eye on Trump, obviously. | ||
| But that's always how it works, right? | ||
| That's the same thing that happened with Reagan and George H.W. Bush being there. | ||
| You put in the guy. | ||
| Of course. | ||
| We're going to have our CIA director be your vice president. | ||
| Nixon and Gerald Ford. | ||
| I mean, this is the oldest story there is. | ||
| So Trump is coming to the Libertarian Convention. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So let me just ask at the outset, you're involved in Libertarian politics, like actual party politics. | ||
| Would you ever be on the ticket? | ||
| You know, so just for people who don't know, it's kind of like inside baseball, but so my... | ||
|
unidentified
|
There was kind of a civil war. | |
| Inside baseball is too broad. | ||
| It's more like inside pickleball. | ||
| Yes, yes. | ||
| That is actually a really good thing. | ||
| But in this very irrelevant corner where I have a lot of sway. | ||
| So there was basically like a kind of civil war within the Libertarian Party over the last few years. | ||
| And it was about a lot of the stuff that you were talking about at the beginning. | ||
| Basically, there was like, as you know, because you covered it, there was what was called the Ron Paul Revolution. | ||
| And that's what I was. | ||
| I was one of the young Yes. | ||
| Ron Paul revolution that totally changed the way I look at the world, and I became obsessed with all of this stuff. | ||
| And so there were a bunch of us, and a lot of us had hoped that Rand Paul was kind of going to carry the mantle and continue this Ron Paul energy. | ||
| Now, I'm not saying anything against Rand Paul. | ||
| I think he's one of the best senators, probably the best senator. | ||
| He was great during COVID, grilling Fauci and all that stuff. | ||
| But for whatever reason, there's several. | ||
| It didn't work. | ||
| out that way. | ||
| And Donald Trump came in and stole the Republican Party and stole. | ||
| I mean, he won it. | ||
| But anyway, so when that happened, there were a lot of us who were kind of disappointed about Ron Paul. | ||
| And then we had Ron Paul running in the Republican Party, but then a lot of us started looking to the Libertarian Party. | ||
| Like, oh, they were the third party candidate and they ran Gary Johnson and Bill Weld. | ||
| We were very disappointed with that campaign, particularly with Bill Weld, who's just horrible. | ||
| Sad, defeated guy. | ||
| And also, he was like a Raytheon lobbyist who was like, what are you doing over here? | ||
| What's the point if we're going to have a third party in putting that guy up? | ||
| And then, during 2020, the people who were running the Libertarian Party... | ||
| Completely failed and didn't oppose the lockdowns and then started like virtue signaling during the Black Lives Matter riots about how we must be anti-racist. | ||
| For real? | ||
| Yeah, it was horrible. | ||
| So basically then there was this group called the Mises Caucus that I joined. | ||
| I was led by this guy named Michael Heiss. | ||
| And Angela McArdle, who ultimately is, she's currently the chair of the party. | ||
| And we basically went and took over the whole party. | ||
| In the name of Ron Paulians, like, if there's going to be a Libertarian party, it's going to be represented by Libertarians. | ||
| And so, anyway, cutting to, so once that happened, it was kind of my group who took over. | ||
| And they wanted me to run for president on the Libertarian ticket. | ||
| And I was considering it for a while. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Ultimately... | |
| It just wasn't the right time for me. | ||
| I got two little kids. | ||
| I got a lot going on in my career. | ||
| It just wasn't the right time for me. | ||
| So now, to what you said, Angela McArdle pulled this off to her great credit that she's got Donald Trump coming and speaking at the Libertarian National Convention. | ||
| It looks like RFK Jr. is also coming. | ||
| When and where is this? | ||
| This is at the end of the month. | ||
| It's May 24th through 26th, I believe. | ||
| In Washington? | ||
| In Washington, D.C. That was a decision made by the old guard. | ||
| We would not have had our convention in Washington, D.C. Do you know where it is in D.C.? Yeah, it's at some hotel. | ||
| I'd have to look it up. | ||
| Yeah, it's at some hotel in D.C. But anyway, I mean, RFK just challenged Donald Trump to debate him there, which I don't think is going to happen, but would be very interesting if it did happen. | ||
| And so it is, at least to me, it kind of represents the Libertarian Party, who is this third party, trying to engage In relevance of some sort and trying to at least... | ||
| Look, obviously, we're not in a position. | ||
| We're not going to win the White House or even win any Senate seats or anything like that. | ||
| But I do think the Libertarian Party could effectively be used to put pressure, particularly on the Republicans, to be better and to not run awful neocons and run better candidates. | ||
| I certainly... | ||
| I prefer the kind of America first strain of Republicans to the neoconservative strain. | ||
| And I think right now there is, well, I mean, there's kind of been a civil war in the right half of America since Donald Trump came onto the scene. | ||
| But I don't even know if you'd call it a civil war because Donald Trump just won so dominantly. | ||
| You know, it's not like the Republicans were split between Jeb Bush and Donald Trump or something. | ||
| No, like it was 95 to 5%. | ||
| But particularly, and I know you've talked about this a lot since, The war in Israel, or I should say the war in Gaza, or I don't even know if I should say the war, the attack of Gaza, whatever you call it. | ||
| I don't know if you can call it a war when one side doesn't have a military, but whatever you call that. | ||
| Since that, you've seen this kind of divide grow where I think largely neoconservatism had been rejected by the voters, the Republican voters. | ||
| But when Israel came up, it's a little bit different. | ||
| I don't know exactly. | ||
| Well, neoconservatism is like chicken pox. | ||
| Like, you think you defeat it, and then when your defenses are down, it comes back as shingles. | ||
| You're like, oh, crap, they're Democrats now? | ||
| Jesus! | ||
|
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No, but it's true! | |
| How does that come? | ||
| It just lays dormant. | ||
| It's always there. | ||
| But when it comes back in its second iteration, when it manifests again, it is disabling. | ||
| And that's what we're watching. | ||
| Like, if there's one thing I wanted to help do is get rid of that worldview, but it seems stronger than ever. | ||
| Well, I think you have done a lot. | ||
| I mean, I really do. | ||
| Not really. | ||
| I mean, it's like everybody in the Republican Party is completely on board with the idea that wars, non-essential wars make America better or something. | ||
| That's so nuts. | ||
| What's so wild to me about it is just after the 20 years of terror wars. | ||
| That have just been such a complete disaster that America would still be entering these conflicts that are very clearly wars of choice. | ||
| I mean, I know they can make an argument like they were making the argument that Putin, if he takes Ukraine, is going to take Poland and then is going to take, which is nothing he's ever said. | ||
| There's not one thing Putin's ever said that you could point to. | ||
| In fact, when you interviewed him, he explicitly said, if Poland attacks us, that's the only scenario. | ||
| He's got the largest country in the world. | ||
| It's the biggest landmass on planet Earth. | ||
| It's incredibly complex to run. | ||
| It's 20% Muslim. | ||
| They have all these sort of semi-autonomous zones. | ||
| He wants more land? | ||
| I don't think he wants more land. | ||
| No, look, he's always said... | ||
| It's like insane. | ||
| It's been very... | ||
| And it's not just that he's said it, but like... | ||
| Almost everyone who was being honest has said it. | ||
| At the top levels of the American government, as well as at NATO, his issue was Ukrainian entry into NATO. That was always his issue. | ||
| And we kept pushing that and kept pushing that, and that's what got him to react. | ||
| And even the head of NATO himself, Strosenberg, whatever, said that Vladimir Putin said that if you just signed a deal, put it in writing, that Ukraine won't join NATO, I won't invade. | ||
| And NATO refused. | ||
| And so he invaded. | ||
| But is there a single news story even now that doesn't describe, reflexively describe, almost like it's like a block text in the computer program, the unprovoked invasion of Ukraine? | ||
|
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Right. | |
| They always have to say that. | ||
| There's never been a more provoked invasion. | ||
| Well, I mean, yeah. | ||
| They did it on purpose. | ||
| They pushed Russia to invade Ukraine. | ||
| Well, let's just say, I mean, like, let's say we had, like, a fairly pro-American government in Mexico. | ||
| And Russia wanted to get them to do an economic deal with them. | ||
| And then we were trying to convince them not to do that economic deal, but to do an economic deal with us. | ||
| And ultimately, we convinced them that they're going to be in an economic partnership with us. | ||
| And so then Russia came in and overthrew the democratically elected government and installed a pro-Russian government. | ||
| And then that led to a civil war where 15,000 people died and the pro-American side was getting... | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| Would you go... | ||
| It was so unprovoked. | ||
| And then... | ||
| Russia said, we're going to get Mexico to join our defense alliance and we're going to put missiles in Tijuana. | ||
| Oh, and no, by the way, that had been floated out for years. | ||
| And in fact, in 2008, we had formally announced that Russia had formally announced that Mexico would be joining their military alliance. | ||
| Then we went... | ||
| I'm sorry for people out there. | ||
| You're right. | ||
| It was a totally organic uprising made on revolution. | ||
| Victoria Nuland happened to be in the middle of handing out sandwiches. | ||
| Don't let that... | ||
| You know, like John McCain and they were going there a lot. | ||
| And like... | ||
| Yeah, sure, it was Soros-backed NGOs that were funded, but whatever. | ||
| It was a totally organic movement. | ||
| And so, yeah, no, it was a series of provocations, very unnecessary ones, and not just ones that libertarian doves like me or something like that were against, but George Kennan. | ||
| The Cold Warrior, right? | ||
| Of course. | ||
| The founder of the containment strategy. | ||
| What he said, which is a great piece with him and Thomas Friedman in the New York Times, and I think it was in 1999, he laid it out right there when we first started the first round of NATO expansion. | ||
| And he said the people advocating this expansion are going to keep advocating it until there's a Russian response. | ||
| And then when there's that response, they'll say, see, this is why we were right to expand NATO. But that's all wrong. | ||
| Obama even made... | ||
| Noises that suggested he understood what you just said. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Well, he refused to send weapons in. | ||
| Well, I know. | ||
| I mean, he was, you know, he was there when the government, when Yanukovych was overthrown, but he wouldn't send the weapons in. | ||
| And then Trump ultimately did. | ||
| And I think, you know, I think my, you know, like that was the big scandal about Ukraine gate, right? | ||
| Was that Donald Trump kind of did this. | ||
| You know, kind of like a very Trumpian, kind of gray area thing where he's like, you know, I'd really like you to investigate the Bidens. | ||
| Maybe you don't get these weapons if you don't investigate the Bidens. | ||
| Now, the reason why that was so ridiculous to impeach him over was because it was totally legitimate to want to investigate what the Bidens were doing in there. | ||
| Of course. | ||
| Very corrupt involvement in Ukraine. | ||
| But that being said, what no one ever talked about in the story was that Trump caved. | ||
| Of course. | ||
| Didn't get the Biden investigation and gave them the weapons. | ||
| That was the other reason why the impeachment was so ridiculous because there's no quid pro quo when you don't get anything for anything. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| You could argue it was an attempted quid pro quo. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| But he never got anything. | ||
| But he sent the weapons in. | ||
| And I do think part of this, and this was the really effective, the way that the intelligence agencies really won, was that, because a lot of people would look at it like, okay, so The Russiagate was an attempted deep state coup. | ||
| And essentially it was, I mean, Andrew McCabe admitted on 60 Minutes that they debated at the Justice Department invoking the 25th Amendment. | ||
| And then they ultimately settled on a special prosecutor. | ||
| You know, I mean, like they were trying to overthrow the guy. | ||
| But so on the surface, you could say, oh, it failed. | ||
| It failed. | ||
| But, you know, in another sense... | ||
| Donald Trump explicitly ran in 2016 on detente with Russia. | ||
| Let's work with Russia. | ||
| Let's work together to kill the terrorists. | ||
| We all don't like terrorists. | ||
| Who cares about overthrowing Assad? | ||
| That's not in our national interest. | ||
| Who cares? | ||
| So let's be friends with Russia. | ||
| Let's get along with them. | ||
| And then, when you're being called a Russian spy every day on the news, and then when he went to Helsinki and said, you know, I believe Putin. | ||
| You know, I don't... | ||
| I don't think he interfered in the 2016 elections. | ||
| By the way, there's still never been a shred of evidence presented that he did. | ||
| They've got like one company that they claim had Russian IP addresses because no one can fake an IP address. | ||
| You know, it's like the most ridiculous claimant who was once at a party with Putin or something like that. | ||
| They have nothing. | ||
| And so Trump just said, yeah, I agree with him. | ||
| And they were like, so you don't trust your intelligence? | ||
| You know, everyone was freaking out so much that it got to a point where he couldn't have made a deal with Russia because if he had, That would have just been proof, right? | ||
| Like, imagine in that environment, when Trump-Russia collusion was being said all day long, if Donald Trump had made some deal with Russia. | ||
| It would have been like, see? | ||
|
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Proof. | |
| He's a Russian puppet. | ||
| And so, Donald Trump, I think, went out of his way to prove what a Russian puppet he wasn't. | ||
| It was like, here's how much I'm not a Russian puppet. | ||
| I'll send weapons into Ukraine. | ||
| Well, and that happened on a bunch of different issues, unfortunately. | ||
| But the problem, I would say, at this point is... | ||
| The desire to go to war with Russia has been pretty much the animating thought in our foreign policy establishment for over 20 years. | ||
| So now we actually have a hot war with Russia. | ||
| We are conducting a war against Russia using our proxy Ukraine, totally destroyed Ukraine in the process. | ||
| We're losing that war. | ||
| So Ukraine's not going to win. | ||
| I don't see how we Ukraine. | ||
| It's impossible. | ||
| So what happens? | ||
| When that becomes really obvious that all we've achieved is destroyed this country and killed a million of its young men. | ||
| And like, how does the State Department and the Atlantic Council and the Aspen Institute and Joe Scarborough and the whole sort of blob, like how do they respond to that? | ||
| I mean, I'm sure, I mean, I think basically it's over and I don't think anyone even, I mean, this latest round of funding is just, it's an election year and Biden's trying to kick the can to not. | ||
| Let this fall right now. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| Be totally obvious. | ||
| Also, it's easier to steal the money when it's out of the country. | ||
| Well, that's for sure. | ||
| That's for sure. | ||
| I mean, we have no idea where all this money has been going, but we know Ukraine is a totally trustworthy government. | ||
| You know, there's no corruption there. | ||
| But I think, look, I'm sure they will attempt to spin it in some way where if Zelensky still controls, like, the western portion of Ukraine, they'll be like, He didn't lose the whole country and Putin would have been in Poland if we hadn't fought this war. | ||
| Of course, it would all be completely ridiculous. | ||
| We could have avoided this war by just... | ||
| By just saying we're not going to admit Ukraine into NATO and putting that in writing, we could have avoided this war. | ||
| This is not according to me. | ||
| According to the head of NATO, we could have avoided this war by doing that. | ||
| And whatever the number is, and who knows, you never know in the fog of war. | ||
| I mean, it's not until they really test the excess mortality rate. | ||
| No, that's right. | ||
| But it's clearly in hundreds of thousands. | ||
|
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Oh, yeah. | |
| I mean, they've got 50-year-olds fighting for them at this point. | ||
| So that tells you something. | ||
| They're force-conscripting men with Down syndrome. | ||
| Yes, yes. | ||
| That means... | ||
| That means all your boys are dead, essentially. | ||
| For sure. | ||
| And the ones who couldn't manage to flee. | ||
| And so, yeah, it's a total disaster. | ||
| The incredibly dark irony of it is that all the people cheering on Ukraine have just, as John Mearsheimer said in 2014, which aged very well, unfortunately, said, we're leading Ukraine down the primrose path. | ||
| And that's what we did. | ||
| You act like you're cheering them on, but you're leaving them to their demise. | ||
| And it didn't need to happen. | ||
| It's terrible. | ||
| And I'm not absolving Putin of responsibility. | ||
| He was certainly put, backed into a corner, but there had to be another answer other than this. | ||
|
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I agree. | |
| You know, it's just horrible. | ||
| But no, at the end of it, it'll be another disaster. | ||
| And the Hawks in D.C. will try to spin it as best they can, and then they'll all get promoted and have better jobs. | ||
| That seems to be the track record. | ||
| It does feel, though, that we're coming to the end of something. | ||
| It's like this was the last effort to exert a certain form of American power abroad. | ||
| It failed. | ||
| Does that make them desperate and crazy? | ||
| I feel like a loss in Ukraine increases the chances we use tactical nukes against Russia. | ||
| For example. | ||
| Well, I mean... | ||
| I hope I'm wrong. | ||
| Well, the thing is, it decreases the chances that Russia uses them, so there's that. | ||
| I mean, you know, there's... | ||
| Joe Biden always pretended that the war in Ukraine was a must-win, you know, like that we couldn't allow Vladimir Putin to win the war, but that's all just an act. | ||
| It doesn't... | ||
| It's not... | ||
| I'm just saying, however you feel about it, it's not actually vital to U.S. survival. | ||
| Whether Russia controls Ukraine or not. | ||
| That's absurd. | ||
| But Vladimir Putin really believed it was a must-win. | ||
| And that actually is a much more reasonable case. | ||
| That you can't lose a war on your border. | ||
| That's a proxy war. | ||
| Even in the Cold War, we never fought in Vietnam, but that's not on Russia's border. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| This is a whole different game. | ||
| And so to me, the real fear from the very beginning was not that Vladimir Putin might win. | ||
| The real fear was that, well, what if the West wins? | ||
| Like, what if Vladimir Putin is humiliated right on his border and feels that his death is imminent? | ||
| Because that's the time. | ||
| time when nukes might fly. | ||
| And so in that sense, you know, it's quite possibly the better outcome. | ||
| I mean, no nuclear war is always the better outcome. | ||
| I do think, and I got to say, I think you're a huge part of this. | ||
| I think that if you look at like, say, 2002, when the war drums were beating for Iraq, there was just nothing like what we have today. | ||
| I mean, the biggest shows in cable news, they were all for it. | ||
| I was for it. | ||
| I was for it until I went to Iraq in 2003. I immediately apologized, I would say, in my defense. | ||
| What about the trip made you change your mind? | ||
| Oh, I was so shocked by the whole thing. | ||
| So the invasion was in March of 2003. And I mean, I was hosting a chat show, a debate show, Crossfire. | ||
| And actually, it's a true story. | ||
| I was at lunch with my father. | ||
| I had lunch with my dad every week at the same table in this place, in this men's club in Washington. | ||
| And we were sitting at the table, I'll never forget this, in the fall of 2003. And he goes, when are you going to Iraq? | ||
| And I was like, I don't know. | ||
| I don't plan to go to Iraq. | ||
| I've got a daily show I have to host. | ||
| He goes, oh, so you're a journalist and there's a war, but you're not going to cover the war? | ||
| And I was like, no, I've got four kids and a daily job. | ||
| He's like, oh, but you just kind of sit this one out. | ||
| And he shamed me into it. | ||
| It's a true story. | ||
| He was so unimpressed that I wasn't going. | ||
| To see it. | ||
| And I was like, okay, you're right. | ||
| I should go. | ||
| So I went. | ||
| I took leave of my show and went for a couple weeks with some friends who were contractors, defense contractors, all military guys. | ||
| A buddy of mine called Kelly McCann and a bunch of Bill Frost. | ||
| All these really impressive contractors. | ||
| And we went to Iraq. | ||
| And the first thing that happens, we got to Kuwait. | ||
| We were going to fly in. | ||
| And the insurgency shot down a DHL plane. | ||
| Coming into Bayop, you know, the Baghdad airport. | ||
| And so we couldn't fly in. | ||
| I was like, so we've occupied the country now. | ||
| I went in December, early December. | ||
| So that was, I don't know, nine months. | ||
| And we had at least unequivocal victory over Saddam, right? | ||
| He was hiding. | ||
| In fact, he was captured in Tikrit the day I got there. | ||
| So we had just won. | ||
| And we can't control the airport. | ||
|
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Right. | |
| So then we drive in from Kuwait immediately. | ||
| It was out of control. | ||
| People were shooting. | ||
| It was chaos. | ||
| It was full chaos. | ||
| And then we stayed outside the green zone in just this house that they had rented. | ||
| And one night, I'm sitting on the roof on a sat phone trying to talk to my wife back in Washington, taking our dog to the vet. | ||
| And someone starts shooting at me. | ||
| And then all these people start shooting at our house. | ||
| There's a gun battle at the house. | ||
| I'm like, what? | ||
| Do you have a gun when you're over there? | ||
| Oh, absolutely. | ||
| I must get fired for it. | ||
| Actually, amazingly, you were told to carry a gun. | ||
| It was so out of control when I was there that journalists and NGO workers, or I don't know, certainly me, you had to go get a certification from the state department. | ||
| I still have my badge. | ||
| It's hanging in my office right there. | ||
| You qualified with this. | ||
| It was an AK-47. | ||
| Well, I actually had an AK-47 already, not fully automatic, but just in my range. | ||
| I knew how to operate it. | ||
| But yeah, you're required to carry it. | ||
| That's how out of control it was. | ||
| And then a buddy of mine got killed there. | ||
| A journalist was killed there. | ||
| A guy called Mike Kelly was a really great guy. | ||
| And the bottom line was, we're not good at colonialism because we don't have the self-confidence. | ||
| We're not sort of bringing Christianity and civilization. | ||
| There's no clearly defined goal for this. | ||
| And we're bad at it. | ||
| And the armed forces is not designed to do that. | ||
| And the effect was super obvious. | ||
| It was chaos. | ||
| And the one thing I cannot deal with, and I hate, and I think all people hate instinctively, is chaos. | ||
| People can handle repression. | ||
| They live under repressive regimes. | ||
| You know, all through history they have. | ||
| They can't handle chaos. | ||
| And we brought chaos to Iraq. | ||
| And I just thought, this is the opposite of what a great power should be doing. | ||
| This is disgusting. | ||
| And I saw really, really clearly that it would never get better. | ||
| And I'll just add one more thing to this, which I've never forgotten. | ||
| We went into the green zone one night and had dinner with some generals. | ||
| I did. | ||
| And I'd always sort of liked my dad was in the military. | ||
| I sort of respected the military. | ||
| I didn't realize how corrupt and disgusting and feminized the officer class was and politicized. | ||
| Just repulsive people, actually, at the flag officer level. | ||
| So we're sitting at dinner, and this general is telling me about, oh, I saw something really touching today. | ||
| I saw we had this female officer. | ||
| And she was killed. | ||
| Her legs were blown off by an IED. And her husband was there. | ||
| And he, you know, they've got three kids back in Virginia, but he held her hand as she died of this ultimate sacrifice for America. | ||
| And I was like, what? | ||
| You're like celebrating this? | ||
| A girl got killed? | ||
| A mother? | ||
| I thought we fought wars to protect mothers and children. | ||
| First of all, if you're sending girls to fight your wars, you're disgusting. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Because you're violating the most basic agreement there is. | ||
| Which is the man protects. | ||
| And in exchange for that, the willingness to sacrifice his life, he gets to be revered as a man and sit at the head of the table. | ||
| And all the benefits of being a man, and there are many. | ||
| And your woman will bear your children for you. | ||
|
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100%. | |
| If you're sending women to protect you, if there's a home invasion at your house at 3 in the morning, and you're like, honey, I dealt with the last one. | ||
| Go defend us. | ||
| I hope that she leaves you. | ||
| And she will, by the way. | ||
| So if you're sending women to defend you, It's not a civilization worth defending. | ||
| That's how I feel. | ||
| Can you imagine, I mean, going with the mother of your children and going to war with them? | ||
| A mother gets her legs blown off and you think that's a good thing? | ||
| And I lost control at the table with this guy and said almost exactly what I think is disgusting. | ||
| And it's not because I don't think women should... | ||
| Be defending our country, not because I don't love women, it's because I do love women. | ||
| They're above that. | ||
| We should be defending our women. | ||
| Yeah, I don't know how supporting women getting their legs blown off has become the pro-woman position. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| And this guy accused me of being like a woman hater or something. | ||
| Here I've got a wife and three daughters who I revere, who I would die for without thinking. | ||
| And I'm like, I hated him. | ||
| I don't think I've ever hated a man more than I hated this general. | ||
| I wish I remember his name. | ||
| And the PIO, the fairly well-known sort of spokesman for the provisional authority, Dan Senor, was sitting at the table. | ||
| He was very offended by my behavior. | ||
| But I was outraged. | ||
| And that rage has sort of never, it's just exploded on you. | ||
| Sorry. | ||
| But it's never left me. | ||
| No, I really enjoyed it. | ||
| I came back to Washington and I was like, and I did an interview with the New York Times. | ||
| I said, I cannot believe I supported something. | ||
| This is totally evil, what we're doing. | ||
| And I've never moved from that position. | ||
| I lost all these friends for saying that. | ||
| Whatever. | ||
| I don't want to talk about myself. | ||
| Continue talking about myself. | ||
| But yeah, you asked. | ||
| Because I've heard you say several times that your trip over there turned you against the war. | ||
| But I never heard you really say what specifically it was. | ||
| Celebrating the death of a mother? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And then getting mad at me because I'm not going to celebrate the death of a mother. | ||
| What about her children and her husband? | ||
| This is disgusting. | ||
| And it's so dark and horrible. | ||
|
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That we dress it up with ideology to make it palatable. | |
| Right. | ||
| Well, the thing that's almost more dark and horrible than just that is when you add on the fact that this was a small group of people who wanted this war going back into the 90s and that they used 9-11 as the excuse. | ||
| To, you know what I mean? | ||
| Be like, oh yeah, now we can go get our bonus war. | ||
| Oh, look at this. | ||
| Right now, we've got a blank check from the American people, which they did, that you tell us, you say the word terrorist in point, and we will support you bombing the crap out of them. | ||
| And I knew it was bullshit, even at the time. | ||
| And I went over to the White House for something to see Bush or Cheney. | ||
| Or somebody. | ||
| I think I was seeing Cheney. | ||
| Whatever. | ||
| I was on the White House grounds. | ||
| He's a really warm guy. | ||
| Great guy. | ||
| And so I was there and it was like maybe the fall of 2002. And they'd been talking about this Invader Rock stuff, but I didn't take it seriously because I thought it was so crazy. | ||
| It was like a non sequitur. | ||
| It was like... | ||
| It was just not connected in any sense to 9-11, obviously. | ||
| And guys like, you know, paid liars like Steve Hayes or someone would write these books like, Al-Qaeda did it! | ||
| And I worked with Steve Hayes and I was so embarrassed by that. | ||
| It's like, he's dumb, so he didn't know. | ||
| But I just felt, I was like, this whole thing was like so nuts. | ||
| So I never thought we were going to invade Iraq. | ||
| I never thought that. | ||
| And I show up and I'm, whatever, like having a cigarette on the lawn outside where all the sticks are, all the stand-up guys, the TV cameras are. | ||
| And I run into Mike Allen. | ||
| He's an old friend of mine, former Washington Post reporter, now runs Axios, a really nice person, and has this clarity of vision that I don't have because he isn't caught in the weeds on shit. | ||
| And I said, we're not really going to invade Iraq. | ||
| He goes, of course we are. | ||
| And I said, how do you know that? | ||
| He goes, well, because all the machinery is moving in that direction. | ||
| It's going to happen. | ||
| I was like, that can't really happen. | ||
| He goes, oh, no, that's going to happen. | ||
| He wasn't endorsing it. | ||
| He could just see that if everyone starts talking about something, they will convince themselves that it's true and it will happen. | ||
| Like, we should remember that. | ||
| Don't overthink things. | ||
| If something really obvious is happening, it's happening. | ||
| Yeah, sometimes it's almost too hard to accept that it's happening. | ||
| Intellectuals, people like you, and to some extent me, have a lot of trouble seeing that. | ||
| Because we're like, well, actually... | ||
| No, no, the obvious is real. | ||
| Yeah, and it's almost like if you just, if you like, you know... | ||
| Remove yourself. | ||
| Like, if you transcend the moment, it's like, yeah, it's so obvious. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Like, of course this is happening. | ||
| And there's, you know, what's unbelievable to me that really, like, what's woken me up about the warfare state is... | ||
| You know, like how much it's all based on lies. | ||
| And that you see that there's only like a few. | ||
| And you call me an intellectual. | ||
| I'm really not an intellectual. | ||
| You know, like I'm a comedian who likes to read. | ||
| No, no, but you think about why things happen. | ||
| Sure, sure. | ||
| But I just mean that I'm not an expert in any of this stuff. | ||
| But I just know enough to know that the supposed experts are completely full of shit. | ||
| Like all I have to know is these four like narrative shattering things. | ||
| And so like just a few of them are like, look. | ||
| You could read, and anyone can go read this, you'll find it's called A Clean Break, A New Strategy for Securing the Realm. | ||
| It was a letter written by Richard Perle and David Wormser and a few other neo-conservatives. | ||
| Oh, I remember this. | ||
| It became very powerful in the George W. Bush administration. | ||
| I knew all those guys, yeah. | ||
| So this was written in 1996, and it was not written to Bill Clinton. | ||
| It was not written to Bob Dole, who was running for president that year. | ||
| It was written to Benjamin Netanyahu, who had just become the prime minister of Israel. | ||
| And the clean break... | ||
| The strategy was a break from this whole peace process nonsense that Yitzhak Rabin and them had... | ||
| Agreed to. | ||
| And basically it was like, well, look, it was the beginning laying down of what the Netanyahu doctrine was ultimately to be, which has culminated in a wild success, as you know. | ||
| And so basically the idea was like, well, look, forget all of this peace process where you focus on land exchanges and whose land belongs to who. | ||
| That's all kind of lame. | ||
| And so what really you should do is reach out to the broader Arab world. | ||
| Kind of make arrangements with them so you don't have to go through this peace process. | ||
| And that starts with overthrowing Saddam Hussein. | ||
| And that's our first step here. | ||
| And then there's several other steps, but it's outlined why we want Saddam Hussein overthrown. | ||
| And so then this was for Israel's interests. | ||
| We wanted this war in 1996. Now, by the way, there's other things. | ||
| I'm not saying Israel is 100% pulling the strings of the American government. | ||
| I think a big part of the reason why the war ended up happening was also because George W. Bush had a personal beef against Saddam Hussein and tried to have his father killed. | ||
| But these neoconservatives then, as soon as 9-11, in the Project for a New American Century, when they talked about how they wanted to fight wars on multiple fronts, they explicitly said they probably wouldn't be able to do that unless there was another Pearl Harbor. | ||
| Now, the 9-11 truthers, the Alex Jones guys, for a while, they would hang on that as evidence that, you know, whatever, Cheney did 9-11 or something like that were elements within our government. | ||
| I think they're overplaying their hand there. | ||
| I don't actually think that. | ||
| But it certainly is evidence that they recognize what it was once it happened. | ||
| Now, I should say what you already know, which is... | ||
| We don't really know that much about 9-11 because so many documents remain classified 23 years later. | ||
| And why would that be? | ||
| There's no excuse for that. | ||
| Every one of them should be released this afternoon. | ||
| They won't be. | ||
| So we can only speculate to some extent, but should we be suspicious of the official? | ||
| Explanation for 9-11? | ||
| I think you should always be suspicious of any government explanation for anything. | ||
| That should always be your starting point. | ||
| I'm not saying you should jump to a conclusion about what happened. | ||
| By the way, this is my worldview that has served me very well. | ||
| I basically... | ||
| My podcast kind of took off, and a big part of that is Joe Rogan and stuff like that, but I've just kind of been consistently right on the biggest issues. | ||
| I have a good track record now. | ||
| I was in real time calling out how obviously Trump was not a Russian agent, and in real time I was saying the Hunter Biden laptop was real, and in real time I was against lockdowns from the very beginning, and it's all because I operate from a worldview of recognizing the government as essentially a criminal gang. | ||
| They're basically the mafia. | ||
| Who won and now they just rule. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| Having taken out the real and much less benign actual mafia. | ||
| And that's part of the reason why they don't like the mafia because you're a competing gang. | ||
| You're not allowed to be the gang. | ||
| We're the gang. | ||
| And so when you look at things through that frame, yes, they're all a bunch of liars and they're power brokers. | ||
| And so, yeah, I don't trust anything they say. | ||
| I try to just go off what I know. | ||
| So we don't know exactly what happened on 9-11. | ||
| We do know at this point that there was pretty high-level Saudi involvement and that the Saudis have – that the government knew that and had no interest in punishing those people and, in fact, still wanted to continue doing business with them. | ||
| We do know that we were comfortable enough fighting on the same side as al-Qaeda in Libya, in Syria, and in Yemen. | ||
| So it didn't seem like al-Qaeda – fighting al-Qaeda wasn't really the motivating force. | ||
| And like I said, we know that this group of neocons who hijacked the federal government wanted these wars and after 9-11 used that opportunity to get them. | ||
| They used that opportunity. | ||
| But anyway, so the point I was making about not being an expert but being able to shatter this narrative, it's like... | ||
| Wait, so do you, just to be clear though, do you think it's possible that people within the US government were aware this was going to happen before it did? | ||
| Sure, absolutely that's possible, yeah. | ||
| I mean, you know, I wouldn't put that past them. | ||
| It's kind of... | ||
| Listen, these are people who are... | ||
| And I think this is one of the things that people have been waking up to a lot more recently. | ||
| And this has led to some wild conspiracies, some of which are not true, some of which might be true. | ||
| But people have been waking up more and more to recognizing, like, who are these people? | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| Like, these people who have, like, real power in our government, like, who are these people? | ||
| I mean, you know, you take someone like Hillary Clinton. | ||
| So it's like, okay, so your husband is a rapist? | ||
| I mean, he's been accused of rape by multiple women, clearly a sexual predator. | ||
| You know, I mean, a man who, even just the stuff we know confirmed, this was a man who, when he was a married president, was like... | ||
| Fucking a 20-year-old intern in the White House, like a sexual predator, you know what I mean? | ||
| And okay, your best friend, her husband also is a sexual predator who's sending naked pictures to underage girls. | ||
| Like, hey, that's weird. | ||
|
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|
It is weird. | |
| How many people do you know who are married to a sexual predator whose best friend's also married to a sexual predator? | ||
| You know, like, I'm not even going... | ||
| What is that? | ||
| I'm not drawing a bigger conclusion, but you're like, who are these people? | ||
| And these are people who are like, you know, Bohemian Grove is real. | ||
| They're doing really weird stuff there. | ||
| Jeffrey Epstein was real. | ||
| There was a pedophile ring that a lot of the most powerful people were connected to, at least knew about, and didn't feel like blowing the whistle on it. | ||
| These are people who are comfortable making decisions where babies will die. | ||
| Mass slaughter will happen and they can sleep at night. | ||
| And like, I'm not saying like a situation where either our babies are going to die or their babies are going to die and there's a horrible decision, but I have to make this. | ||
| A decision where like, no, we're choosing this to happen and they're kind of okay with that. | ||
| And you kind of wake up to like, so when you say like, is it possible that they'd kill Americans or be complicit in that? | ||
| Like, yeah, of course. | ||
| Of course that's possible. | ||
| I don't have enough evidence to like prove that that's the case, but I can prove. | ||
| That they wanted these wars, and then when the opportunity to get them came, they lied through their fucking teeth in order to sell the wars. | ||
| Look, General Wesley Clark, he said, as I'm sure you've seen, his Democracy Now! | ||
| interview, where he said that he saw the plans in late 2001, that it wasn't just that we were going into Iraq, but that we were also going to have regime change in Syria and several other countries. | ||
| But then, when they go to start the regime change in Syria, 2013 or whatever, Well, they started in 2012. But then they go, oh, we have to overthrow Assad because, you know, he's killing all of his own people. | ||
| It's like, no, no, no, no, no. | ||
| You wanted to overthrow Assad over a decade ago. | ||
| Don't give me this bullshit that this is some new plan now. | ||
| So I do know that they will lie through their teeth to the American people. | ||
| Like this I know for certain, that they will lie through their teeth to the American people to get enough public support for mass slaughter campaigns because they want those campaigns for completely different reasons. | ||
| And again, like I said, This isn't speculation. | ||
| They wrote this in their own words. | ||
| One of the reasons they wanted to remake the Middle East in this way is because they thought it was in Israel's interest. | ||
| And that, to me, is just totally unacceptable as an American. | ||
| First off, you're lying to the people of this country, and you're doing something with a foreign country's interest in mind. | ||
| That's just so appalling that I think people should be like... | ||
| Publicly hung for it. | ||
| After a trial. | ||
| After a fair trial. | ||
| I mean, it's not America First, I would say that. | ||
|
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It's kind of hard to reconcile. | |
| What's interesting is that so many people who talk about America First or whatever, they're fully on board with this. | ||
| They attack anyone who's not. | ||
| I had a thoroughly bizarre experience the other day, and maybe you can shed light on what it means because I don't fully understand it, but I was doing Rogan's podcast. | ||
| At your urging. | ||
| So thank you for that. | ||
| I had a great time. | ||
| I loved the podcast. | ||
| Yeah, it was super, super fun. | ||
| But, you know, it was very long. | ||
| It was like three hours long. | ||
| And I can't stop talking. | ||
| So I'm like, all right, another thing. | ||
| And I'm going out of it all. | ||
| Whatever, you know. | ||
| And at one point, I just blurted out for like 15 seconds something I thought about recently, which is the use of the nuclear bombs. | ||
| They have been used in August of 1945 against Hiroshima and then Nagasaki. | ||
| Complex topic. | ||
| A lot of it's not publicly well-known, okay? | ||
| But just the bottom-line fact that we dropped, particularly the bomb on Nagasaki, which was the Christian capital of Japan, by the way, that bomb was dropped on a church and killed, you know, three-quarters of the Christians in the city, which bothers me as a Christian. | ||
| But leaving even that aside, it killed civilians. | ||
| It wasn't dropped on a military base. | ||
| It was killed civilians. | ||
| And, like, I get why people did it, or maybe I don't get it, but... | ||
| I think 80 years later we can say not something to brag about incinerating civilians. | ||
| I don't care what the context is. | ||
| That's evil. | ||
| That's basically all I said. | ||
| Holy shit. | ||
| Did I get attacked from the right? | ||
| And I thought, and I don't even follow the attacks on me ever, but I kept getting texts from people. | ||
| I can't believe you said that or people are mad at you for saying that. | ||
| And I thought of all the dumb, cruel, untrue things I have said over 30 years of just talking in public. | ||
| A lot of which I regret and I hope I've apologized for every bad thing I've said, but I've said a lot of really things are impossible to defend. | ||
| That's what they attack me on? | ||
|
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Yeah. | |
| What is that? | ||
| Well, and just the fact, like, even as you're saying, like, again, if you want to attack you on something, like, hey, you supported the war in Iraq. | ||
| Oh, shit! | ||
| Like, there's a thing, like, I really got this wrong, and it was, how is, what a, like, twisted society we live in. | ||
| I defended Mitt Rodney when he ran. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, but guys, all of the people who got all of these wars wrong don't receive as much outrage as you for saying after the war was won. | ||
| And by the way, like, if you know anything about it, it was a five-star general. | ||
| Dwight Eisenhower was against the nuclear. | ||
| He said it was unnecessary. | ||
| They were ready to negotiate a surrender. | ||
| We didn't need to do this. | ||
| But also, there's just something... | ||
| No, but I didn't even get into the details of that specific thing. | ||
| No, no, you were just saying it's wrong on its face. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| I was just... | ||
| The principle of using nuclear weapons against a civilian population, you could construct in your mind a scenario where you could justify it, I guess. | ||
| But it's still sort of, in the cold light of day, hard to defend incinerating civilians. | ||
| By the way, with incendiary bombs, too, or... | ||
| Conventional bomb says in Dresden. | ||
| It's just bad. | ||
| Why would that make people on the right so mad? | ||
| What is that? | ||
| So this is my kind of theory on it, is that you'll kind of notice, World War II, which is a long time ago at this point, generates... | ||
| This enormous, you know, you said the thing, I love when you said that, about how you could tell there's an infection because you touch it and people recoil. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| You can tell something's infected there, right? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And I could sit here all day long and talk about how we shouldn't have fought World War I, which we shouldn't have fought. | ||
| Yeah, that's for sure. | ||
| This will generate no controversy. | ||
| I could say this all day long and go through how Woodrow Wilson was completely wrong to get us involved in World War I. The Lusitania was bullshit. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Nobody cares. | ||
| I will not hear anything on Twitter tomorrow about saying this. | ||
| I could talk about how Vietnam was a complete disaster or also lied into that war and how many people died in it. | ||
| Korea, Iraq, all of that. | ||
| World War II is the one that is... | ||
| But what's so weird about that is clearly the most important, and we talked about this last night, the most important thing in your life is your marriage and your children. | ||
|
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Yes. | |
| So if I said to you, Dave Smith, I think you have a shitty marriage, you would be like, no, I don't actually. | ||
| I have a nice marriage. | ||
| You wouldn't be mad about that. | ||
| You'd be like, I don't think you really know. | ||
| Because you're not hiding anything. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So here's the thing. | ||
| Well, here's what it is, right? | ||
| And I want to be very clear just when I say this. | ||
| If you're trying to read between the lines here, I'm not saying that the Holocaust didn't happen or something like that. | ||
| It did happen. | ||
| Yeah, all those people died. | ||
| Yes, those people are dead. | ||
| My family was involved in it. | ||
| It was one of the worst things that's ever happened in the world. | ||
| I agree. | ||
| But look, World War II is the origin story of the American Empire. | ||
| That's when we really became the world empire. | ||
| And it's the justification. | ||
| For the entire empire. | ||
| It's why every single neocon, every single hawk goes back to World War II anytime there's a war because that's what's used to justify every other war. | ||
| We stopped Hitler, okay? | ||
| We'd all be speaking German if it wasn't for the American military. | ||
| So how dare you question the next thing? | ||
| That's why Stam Hussein was Hitler. | ||
| Milosevic was Hitler. | ||
| Putin's Hitler. | ||
| They're all Hitler. | ||
| I can't tell you how many people I've heard. | ||
| And I've debated some of these people defending Israel's attack on Gaza by going, well, we killed a lot of civilians in World War II. You know? | ||
| So just like that, as if Hamas are the Nazis. | ||
| It's anything comparable. | ||
| But the thing is that, so when you talk about World War II, you're only allowed to have the official narrative on it. | ||
| And here it is. | ||
| We all know what it is, right? | ||
| Who are you, Neville Chamberlain? | ||
| You mean you don't want to go to war? | ||
| You want to appease? | ||
| That's the only lesson of history that you're allowed to learn, is that appeasement doesn't work. | ||
| Presumably we should have started the war earlier, I guess, is the story. | ||
| But every... | ||
| By the way, you can never learn the lesson of history that sometimes like preemptive wars don't work. | ||
| Sometimes, you know, like ruthless power doesn't work. | ||
| Maybe sometimes appeasement would be better than that, you know? | ||
| It's like there's only one, you know, and so that's the lesson. | ||
| By the way, same thing with Putin. | ||
| Everybody who, if you didn't support the war, I know you got called this. | ||
| I watched you get called this. | ||
| You were never Chamberlain for not wanting to back Ukraine immediately in the war, right? | ||
| It's the only lesson in history. | ||
| Now, you can't look at World War II and say, hey, maybe Danzig was the lesson. | ||
| Maybe war guarantees were the lesson. | ||
| I'm not even saying they are. | ||
| Maybe not. | ||
| But objectively speaking, if we want to be honest about World War II, World War II is the worst thing that ever happened in the history of the world. | ||
| Yes, by definition. | ||
| It's the worst thing that ever happened. | ||
| More people killed. | ||
| The Holocaust happened in the middle of it. | ||
| Tens of millions of people died in European conflict. | ||
| Brutal conflict on all sides. | ||
| It destroyed the greatest continent. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Right, exactly. | ||
|
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Okay. | |
| They say winners of wars write the history and man, did the Nazis and Imperial Japan make it really easy. | ||
| Because they were so evil. | ||
| They were like caricatures of evil. | ||
| And they really were. | ||
| Now, it's a little more complicated than that because Stalin's army wasn't like high-fiving everybody on the way in to Germany. | ||
| They raped every woman in Germany. | ||
| Right. | ||
| I mean, it's like there's a lot of... | ||
| But any sane person... | ||
| If you look back at World War II and you recognize the worst thing that ever happened, you would try to say, how could we have avoided this? | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| What could we have done to not make this happen? | ||
| The lesson should be like, oh my God, we imposed Versailles on the Germans and insisted on humiliating them internationally and look at the backlash of this. | ||
| Whatever. | ||
| There's all this. | ||
| A lot of it comes down to entering World War I and World War II was really an extension of that. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| But it's like the only lesson you're allowed to take away is this. | ||
| But I really liked the way you put it on Rogan and it was just kind of a quick aside. | ||
| But look, it's just so evil on its face that I know human beings are amazing at doing mental gymnastics to justify anything. | ||
| I've been doing a lot of debates on the topic of Israel and I've been watching this firsthand. | ||
| It's like you could watch videos every day on Twitter of babies. | ||
| You know, like, suffocating to death under rubble. | ||
| And, like, someone will justify that. | ||
| Someone will say, well, actually, we need to do this because whatever. | ||
| All of Hamas must be destroyed. | ||
| Why exactly? | ||
| Like, why is it absolutely necessary? | ||
| You're telling me Israel, the fortress of the world, can't just not drop the ball again? | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| Like, there's not some other answer other than this. | ||
| And, of course, America must fund it for reasons. | ||
| But it's like, no, actually. | ||
| That is just evil. | ||
| And the onus is on you to exhaust every single other option before doing that. | ||
| But it's just interesting. | ||
| It's like, I've done a lot of evil things in my life, and I really regret it. | ||
| I think all of us are capable of evil. | ||
| I've never committed genocide or anything, but I mean, I've been pointlessly cruel or deceptive, and I'm ashamed of it. | ||
| So I'm not judging even Harry Truman for this, but it's like, why is that so offensive? | ||
| And the other question I have, and maybe you've got insight into this. | ||
| I don't know that much. | ||
| I've read a lot about World War II. I'm not an expert. | ||
| But this worship of Churchill, I think, is very odd. | ||
| There's a lot about Churchill, I think, that was impressive. | ||
| Erudite guy, fluid writer, had a kind of style that I like, used tobacco, which I love. | ||
| I mean, there's a lot about Churchill, right? | ||
| That's in the pro-common. | ||
| It's cool, for sure. | ||
| But here are the facts. | ||
| He sold his country on a war. | ||
| Using the idea that we must defend the territorial integrity of Poland. | ||
| There are other reasons. | ||
| That was the main reason, right? | ||
| Poland. | ||
| Okay, maybe that's a reason. | ||
| Then, four years later, he hands Poland to the Soviets. | ||
| After a bloodbath. | ||
| Yes! | ||
| This country that we went to war on behalf of, I'm handing it to a worse master, a more totalitarian master, or at least as bad. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, the only other one who... | ||
| Or one of the only other two who rival. | ||
| Right, exactly. | ||
| I guess you could say if Hitler had won the war, could he have then killed more people than Stalin? | ||
| I guess we'll never know. | ||
| But yeah, still up there. | ||
| Okay, so that's a huge problem. | ||
| That's a huge problem. | ||
| Jordan and Kobe. | ||
|
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|
Exactly. | |
| You could debate. | ||
| But clearly you don't care about Poland if you just handed it to Stalin. | ||
| Or clearly it didn't work. | ||
| Or something. | ||
| There's a massive disconnect. | ||
| That's the first fact. | ||
| The second fact is... | ||
| He was rejected by his own voters right after the war. | ||
| So they actually weren't so impressed by his leadership. | ||
| And the third fact is that war destroyed Britain. | ||
| And that country is a depressing husk right now. | ||
| I go there a lot. | ||
| Unfortunately, I don't want to go there. | ||
| It's the most depressing place I can imagine. | ||
| It's totally defeated in some deep spiritual sense. | ||
| And it's embarrassing to go there. | ||
| So you destroy your country on behalf of Poland, and then you hand it to Stalin. | ||
| Those are the bottom line facts about Churchill. | ||
| There are a lot of other things to say about him, but those are the salient points. | ||
|
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How could anybody think that's good? | |
| Seriously, what is that? | ||
| Pat Buchanan's book, Churchill, Hitler, and the Unnecessary War, the unnecessary war is in quotes, because that's not Pat Buchanan saying it. | ||
| It's a Churchill quote. | ||
| That Churchill, after the war, said it was the most avoidable, unnecessary war afterward. | ||
| He took Britain from being the most powerful nation in the world to being totally defeated. | ||
| They lost that war as much as anybody else did. | ||
| But look at it now! | ||
| It's disgusting! | ||
| By the way, there's so many ripple effects of this, too, because the whole situation with Israel-Palestine, this is also a result of the British Empire being defeated and being driven out. | ||
| So there's so much to this. | ||
| But why defend it? | ||
| Look, I'm not even judging Churchill. | ||
| I may have made similar decisions. | ||
| I've made so many bad decisions in my life. | ||
| I'm not even judging. | ||
| I'm just saying, 80 years later, when we can see clearly the aftermath, how could you possibly defend that? | ||
| And why would you want to? | ||
| And also, there's a reason. | ||
| I mean, there's lots of reasons why America was so successful as a country. | ||
| Part of the reason really was the brilliance of our founding fathers and the system that they created. | ||
| I mean, that's a huge part of it. | ||
| And there's like a, you know, it's like when they, George Washington's farewell address where he warns about entangling alliances. | ||
| And there was something really profound that they saw there. | ||
| And this idea, and this is a real problem with like, it's like, why would we even want Ukraine and NATO? Why do we want to make war guarantees for countries that we have neither the resources nor the political will? | ||
| To actually defend in the case of a war. | ||
| Nicely put! | ||
| First off, we're broke. | ||
| We're $34 trillion in debt. | ||
| We can't afford our own wars, let alone everybody else's. | ||
| It's so cartoonish. | ||
| We're borrowing money. | ||
| It's like if I was giving my sister money and my cousin's money and all of them, but I'm putting it on a credit card. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| I don't have the money. | ||
| But I'm such a great guy. | ||
| I'm helping my whole family. | ||
| It's like, no, you're not in a position to do this. | ||
| But they're not even our family. | ||
| Right, they're not even our family. | ||
| I'm just helping some random guy. | ||
| Literally some junkie you met at Safeway. | ||
| Yes, that's a better analogy for Ukraine than my sister, to be honest. | ||
| And so it's just totally absurd. | ||
| But then also at the same time, look, war's horrible. | ||
| There's always some type of conflict going on in the world and it's awful. | ||
| But the question... | ||
| Would you be willing, or would you be willing to send your kids to go fight and die to determine whether... | ||
| You know, the Donbass region is ruled by Kiev or Moscow. | ||
| Like, is that important enough to you? | ||
| Because to me, it's a very easy answer. | ||
| Which is, no, I would not be. | ||
| But would it be worth killing a million Ukrainians? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Right, right, yes. | ||
| But I'll put a flag in my bio and support my politicians printing money to send over to them. | ||
| Or I should say, printing money to then buy from weapons companies weapons to then send over to them a mix of weapons and cash or whatever. | ||
| But yeah, I mean, like, so to me, it's like... | ||
| Would you mind, though, Not referring to them as weapons companies, but defense manufacturers? | ||
|
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|
I'm sorry. | |
| Yes, that's right. | ||
| The Defense Department, the Defense Manufacturers, the Intelligence Community. | ||
| That's my favorite one. | ||
| The community. | ||
| They're all just like gardening with each other and stuff, you know? | ||
| So you described yourself as a comic who likes to read. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Which I love. | ||
| Let me ask you about comedy. | ||
| So I went and had dinner with Rogan last month and was not my world. | ||
| I had no idea. | ||
| That Austin, Texas had become the world capital of comedy? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| He made it the world capital of comedy. | ||
| So you described him as the modern Johnny Carson? | ||
| 100%. | ||
| So how does it work, the system now? | ||
| It's like... | ||
| Well, I mean, Rogan... | ||
| So he was doing the podcast in L.A. for many years. | ||
| That's when I first met him. | ||
| He was living out in L.A. And he left, I think, during the lockdown slash riots. | ||
| You know, when California, as you know very well, is... | ||
| Fallen apart. | ||
| It's one of the great tragedies. | ||
| It really is. | ||
| It's awful. | ||
| And so he decided to take it down to Austin where they had kind of like opened up and it was flourishing. | ||
| And Austin is, it's like, it's one of the last like great liberal cities. | ||
| In this country, you know, which is, and like I know a lot of people on the right who kind of have this attitude of like, well, screw them. | ||
| They voted in these policies and all that. | ||
| But I just think that is wrong. | ||
| That is the wrong attitude to have. | ||
| You need liberal cities. | ||
| And to have a healthy country, you kind of need that dynamic. | ||
| As much as you need beautiful country, you know what I mean? | ||
| Well, liberal cities are all that we have. | ||
| Well, of course, right. | ||
| But functioning liberal cities. | ||
| That's what I mean. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| You need them to not be. | ||
| Hell holes, which many of them have turned into. | ||
| But so Rogan, it just started because there was something about, you know, just like the stars aligning, you know, in a very similar way to I heard you talk about, I think you were talking to me about how, look, there's something to the fact that say you get fired from Fox News and it happens to be at this point where Elon Musk bought. | ||
| Yeah, it was pretty amazing. | ||
| And everyone's there, and you're protected there. | ||
| They're not going to ban you. | ||
| And, you know, when Bill O'Reilly got fired from Fox News, there was nothing like that there. | ||
| No, that's totally right. | ||
| You go to a relevance. | ||
| Rogan happened to kind of, like, come up as this internet world was exploding, and he's just such an interesting guy, such a genuine guy, that his podcast just took off. | ||
| And he became kind of, like, in this situation where... | ||
| Anybody who kind of comes on, or if you come on and you do well, it's just like the biggest opportunity. | ||
| And he's such a genuinely generous person that I think he loves that. | ||
| I think that's his favorite thing of all of it. | ||
| Out of owning the comedy club, the podcast, everything he does, I see it in him. | ||
| What he really loves, what really makes him happy is that he gets to kind of bring all of his guys with him. | ||
| And I know a lot of friends who... | ||
| Joe has changed their lives. | ||
| It's the Johnny Carson thing. | ||
| I remember Jerry Seinfeld hearing him, I don't know him, but hearing him describe doing Carson. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, yeah. | |
| And he said it was an experience like having kids where you go in one person and come out another person. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| Which really is the experience of having kids. | ||
| Particularly that first kid. | ||
| Because you literally, it's like you and your wife go to a hospital as a couple. | ||
| And then you leave that hospital as like, we're mommy and daddy now, and it's a really weird feeling. | ||
| You go in focused on your wife, and you come out obsessed with the baby. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| And then your wife's like hobbling in the background, and you're like, yeah, I'm kidding. | ||
| Kind of. | ||
| But anyway, but it's this amazing, you know, it's like... | ||
| You know, it's like you're on drugs, basically. | ||
| Like, you're high when you first come out with a new baby. | ||
| You kind of can't believe it. | ||
| And you don't know what you're doing with the first one, you know, but you figure it out. | ||
| But anyway, he said Carson was like that. | ||
| Like, you go in a nobody. | ||
| And then you come out and you're a somebody. | ||
| And it's kind of like that with Rogan. | ||
| Like, it's just... | ||
| And there's all these similar dynamics. | ||
| Like, he'll kind of go... | ||
| You know, like, he'll go, like, two hours and 15 minutes with some people, and then he'll go, like, three and a half hours sometimes if he really likes the conversation, and you never know. | ||
| As you know, when you're in there, you have no idea how long you actually went for or whatever, but it's, and that, like, my experience with him was he heard me on a mutual friend of ours, Ari Shafir's podcast, who I love, also a hilarious comedian. | ||
| That guy's talented. | ||
| He's so funny. | ||
| He's, like, and also just a great person, and an insane person, but one of the best people I've ever known. | ||
| And so I was on his podcast and Rogan heard it. | ||
| And he goes, I think this guy's awesome. | ||
| I want to have him on. | ||
| And it was just like that. | ||
| He loved what I was saying. | ||
| So he's like, oh, I want to make this guy successful. | ||
| And it's just amazing. | ||
| And what happened to your life? | ||
| Well, I started making money. | ||
| So that was pretty nice. | ||
| So it was kind of that simple. | ||
| I mean, it wasn't exactly just that, but... | ||
| Immediately, I was already doing my podcast, and then immediately, as soon as the first one with Rogan was out, my numbers shot up. | ||
| All of a sudden, I had a big audience. | ||
| I went from having a tiny little audience to having a big audience. | ||
| I've done it a lot of times. | ||
| Every time you do it, your numbers shoot up, your numbers shoot up. | ||
| That's just unbelievable. | ||
| One of the things about Rogan is... | ||
| And I gotta say, and I really mean this, I think you have this quality too. | ||
| And I kind of knew this about you. | ||
| Like I've watched you for many years at this point. | ||
| I've watched you, I mean a little bit when you were on Crossfire, but I watched your show on MSNBC a lot. | ||
| And then I always watched you on Fox. | ||
| You're the only one. | ||
| The MSNBC one that might be true. | ||
| That's not true for Fox. | ||
| That's not true at all for Fox, but you might be right about MSNBC. It was me. | ||
| I had MSNBC on all day long for whatever reason. | ||
| Kind of just to like piss me off for most of the time. | ||
| But also, Getting off on a tangent. | ||
| MSNBC was a very different thing back then. | ||
| It was so different. | ||
| That is so night and day. | ||
| I know. | ||
| Today. | ||
| I mean, you just can't even... | ||
| It was so much smarter and more thoughtful. | ||
| There was still a lot of propaganda to it. | ||
| There was still a lot of bullshit. | ||
| I think you've gotten better over the years since then. | ||
| Yeah, for sure. | ||
| But as a network, they got so much worse. | ||
| I mean, like... | ||
| But Morning Joe used to be like... | ||
| Like you and Pat Buchanan. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, yeah. | |
| And Rachel Maddow. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| And Dylan Radigan even. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Totally. | |
| I kind of like Dylan Radigan. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, I had something to say sometimes. | ||
| Completely. | ||
| And I mean, it's become, like, every single host has the same opinions as the last hour. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Precisely. | |
| There's not one area. | ||
| Now, occasionally, there'll be a guy like, what's his name? | ||
| I'm blanking on his name, who just got canned. | ||
| Because he was pro-Palestinian. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, exactly. | |
| So occasionally, you'll have one guy who has a different opinion, and then, oh, he's out pretty quickly. | ||
| My favorite part of MSNBC is all the black people on the air have exactly the same opinions, too. | ||
| It's like, what's the point of diversity if everyone went to Princeton and is a neoliberal? | ||
| Well, there's nothing more... | ||
| They've got to get some rappers on MSNBC. They would never be allowed. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right, right. | |
| But there's something about being ideologically possessed that's very unpleasant. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| Like, and there's something, one of the things that was great about your show on Fox News is that, like, you would, on many key issues, have a completely different opinion than everybody else at Fox News. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| And it'd be kind of crazy to watch the whole Newsday. | ||
| Not that I watched the whole Newsday, but I knew what their guys take were. | ||
| And everybody is like, yeah, we got to go attack, you know, Assad, because he just gassed his own people. | ||
| And then, like, you would, like, come on at 8 p.m. | ||
| And by the way, I remember, because I was doing this show with Essie Cup at the time. | ||
| I worked for CNN very briefly as, like, a contributor. | ||
| And I remember having... | ||
| It was the first week after the gas attack. | ||
| The gas attack! | ||
| Now, this was... | ||
| Poison gas against his own people! | ||
| But now, this was before the OPCW whistleblowers had, like, come out. | ||
| So I didn't, like, have any, like, evidence. | ||
| I could feel it. | ||
| Well, I mean, you just look at it and you go, okay, so you're telling me that this is... | ||
| We're in 2018 now? | ||
| 2017? | ||
| 2018? | ||
| Assad has been fighting a civil war since 2012. Fighting for his survival. | ||
| Fighting to not go out like Gaddafi. | ||
| To not get sodomized to death. | ||
| Donald Trump announces that we're pulling out. | ||
| He announces that you won. | ||
| You're going to live. | ||
| You're not going to be sodomized to death by a mob, right? | ||
| And then Assad decides a week and a half later, I'm going to do the one thing. | ||
| That would turn international opinion around to keep me at risk of being sodomized. | ||
| He's just like right away on the face of it. | ||
| Like, no, I don't think so. | ||
| And like the onus is on you. | ||
| But anyway, but everyone else at Fox News the whole day would be saying that and then you'd have something different to say. | ||
| There's something incredibly boring about someone. | ||
| You just tell me, don't even tell me the name, but it's an MSNBC host, someone who hosts the show. | ||
| You could pick the name in your head and I'll tell you their opinion on everything. | ||
| Climate change. | ||
| It's an existential crisis. | ||
| And we have to, blah, blah, blah. | ||
| You know, racism. | ||
| Well, we have to confront systemic racism. | ||
| We need to have a conversation about race. | ||
| Like a real conversation. | ||
| I would say, really? | ||
| I'd love to. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| Right. | ||
| I don't think you want that. | ||
| Well, that's right. | ||
| And it's just so boring. | ||
| So boring. | ||
| Anyway, where I was getting at that. | ||
| But also, can I just also say soul-destroying? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Like what you were saying earlier, I thought was so right on. | ||
| About repeating lies is such an offense against you. | ||
| Where's your self-respect? | ||
| Have you no dignity? | ||
| Are you just an animal who can be hit with a shock collar and forced to perform tricks? | ||
| It's like a universal law where you kind of, like the way I think Jordan Peterson said it, you get to choose your suffering. | ||
| You don't get to choose no suffering, but you get to choose your suffering. | ||
| And this is true across everything. | ||
| Sit down and have a fat piece of cheesecake, or you could jump on the treadmill. | ||
| The cheesecake feels awesome. | ||
| The treadmill fucking sucks. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| But... | ||
| You're paying a price. | ||
| You're just kind of choosing. | ||
| I'm not saying you should never sit back and have cheesecake. | ||
| Sometimes you've got to do that. | ||
| But it's like you're choosing your suffering. | ||
| And there's this choice where I'm going to choose to suffer up front now so that I have some benefit later. | ||
| And it's always kind of that dynamic. | ||
| And when you lie to yourself, it's like, okay, you're choosing this kind of short-term. | ||
| You know, this lie will have whatever positive effects it'll have. | ||
| This person might believe I'm a little bit cooler than I really am or whatever. | ||
| But there's never not a cost. | ||
| You can never get away from that without paying some type of price. | ||
| It's just so degrading. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| And that's the price. | ||
| It's so degrading. | ||
| And it's interesting. | ||
| And all the people with self-respect are gone. | ||
| They've been purged. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But then there's also, okay, so part of that price too, and this is what I was getting at, the thing that you and Rogan have in common, is that so many of those hosts, and I don't know all of them. | ||
| I've done a lot of shows at Fox News. | ||
| Met a lot of people over there. | ||
| And I did a lot of shows at CNN when I was working there. | ||
| And so I met a lot of those guys. | ||
| I've never... | ||
| I was one time in the MSNBC studios and just met a few of the people there. | ||
| But they're like... | ||
| So many of them are totally phony. | ||
| They're just not... | ||
| I mean, I've had things where... | ||
| Like, I've gone and grabbed beers with people after a show at Fox News. | ||
| Like, after doing Kennedy or doing Cutting Gold or something like that. | ||
| And at one time, there was a Green Beret. | ||
| I won't name him. | ||
| But he was at Green Beret who served a couple tours in Afghanistan. | ||
| And when we were on the show, he was talking about supporting the surge. | ||
| I think I can't remember. | ||
| It was years ago. | ||
| I think it was Trump's first surge. | ||
| And then we go out for beers afterward. | ||
| And he was like, listen, there is no army over there that we've been building up. | ||
| There's nothing. | ||
| They'll fold in a day. | ||
| And he goes, let me tell you. | ||
| And he would tell me about, like, the, you know, he goes, dude, we would give them, you know, like, some machine guns. | ||
| We'd go out on a mission, come back. | ||
| They used them to rob everybody in the village. | ||
| There's no Afghan army that we're building up. | ||
| The Taliban will run right through them. | ||
| And I was like, oh, why didn't you just tell everybody that? | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| Like, why did you totally lie when we were on TV? And it's just, there's a lot of people who do that. | ||
| And you can smell that. | ||
| You can smell that on them, though. | ||
| Like, even if you don't know that, over time, People kind of know. | ||
| People kind of know, like, oh, these guys are... | ||
| And there is something, having watched you for a long time and now having met you, and this is Joe Rogan too, you are exactly the same person off camera that you are on camera. | ||
| I hope so. | ||
| Now, with both of you, there might be something you'd say off camera that you wouldn't say on camera, but there's nothing you're saying on camera that you don't believe. | ||
| I would never do that. | ||
| And so that's like, I think that is... | ||
| You don't have to say everything you think, you cannot lie. | ||
| Right, right, exactly. | ||
| And you never say everything you think. | ||
| I don't think you should, actually, because I have a lot of dumb opinions, too, that are just rooted in meanness or irritation or mocking people's appearances, which I have a weakness for. | ||
| Don't do that. | ||
| I know. | ||
| Well, you're a comic, so you... | ||
| I'm going to keep doing it. | ||
| I get your point, but I have no intention of stopping that. | ||
| But there is something that I think is part of what I love so much about Joe and I think part of why he has blown up and been so successful is that, you know, because people ask me all the time, they'll be like, what's Joe... | ||
| And I'll be like, you already know. | ||
| You already know what he's like. | ||
| And you know this because you went and hung out. | ||
| He's exactly that guy. | ||
| He's exactly the same guy. | ||
| I love that that works. | ||
| I'm thrilled by his success. | ||
| And yes, the money too. | ||
| I'm not that interested in money, but I understand that unless something is a real business, it won't continue. | ||
| And so I love how successful he's been because it means... | ||
| It's just inspiration to everyone else. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Right? | ||
| If you're an honest person, you can actually make a good living being an honest person? | ||
| How great is that? | ||
| Yeah, well, that's like- I mean, it's awesome! | ||
| No, that's right. | ||
| And that is the part, and I don't, like, I'm not the biggest fan, but that is the stuff where Iron Round was really correct about that. | ||
| Oh, I agree. | ||
| The idea that, like, no, like, kind of, there is this connection between, like, what she would call selfishness, which I don't think is the right word for it. | ||
| No. | ||
| But there is something between, like, success. | ||
| And humans are weird psychological creatures. | ||
| Sometimes you can have the desire to not succeed, to not outshine somebody else, you know? | ||
| But actually, you're doing a much better thing if you, like, succeed, if you're great at something, and then you're, like, an inspiration to others to be great also. | ||
| Well, sure, if Rogan gets rich because he's brave and honest, how is that bad? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, you see all these other people getting rich because they're craven and dishonest. | ||
| And that's very demoralizing, actually. | ||
| Well, and also, there's so many things to be down about. | ||
| In our country, particularly right now, our country is not in a very good place. | ||
| No, it's not. | ||
| I got a wife and two little kids, and I put on a very strong face for them. | ||
| In front of them, I'm never worried about anything, no matter what it is. | ||
| Don't buy gold in front of your wife. | ||
| Do that secretly. | ||
| She sees the bars. | ||
| But the truth is, between me and you and the millions of people on the internet, I'm terrified about the future of our country. | ||
| I'm very, very concerned about it. | ||
| We're in $34 trillion of debt. | ||
| We can never stop fighting these wars. | ||
| We've turned world opinion completely against us. | ||
| We have the worst political and social and racial divides of my lifetime. | ||
| The culture is more insane than any time in my lifetime. | ||
| I mean, the fact that we're debating over whether five-year-old boys can transition to be girls. | ||
| The fact that that's even... | ||
| A real thing. | ||
| And it's not a joke that wouldn't work because everyone goes, that's too absurd to even be funny. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| I mean, that's just like a sign in itself. | ||
| But there is also something else going on. | ||
| And it's much bigger than me and I don't understand it. | ||
| I don't pretend to understand it. | ||
| But we are living through some type of major paradigm shift. | ||
| And where lies are being exposed quicker. | ||
| And people are being exposed more than ever. | ||
| And honesty and integrity are being rewarded in certain ways. | ||
| And that's like, I kind of have to cling on to that because there's so much to be, you know, to feel despair over. | ||
| But there's something really positive about this. | ||
| I couldn't agree more. | ||
| Propaganda is not working the same way it was. | ||
| Do you find, I just, I've had this conversation, I ask everyone I have dinner with this question, which is, do you find in the midst of all of this sadness and chaos and decline, Rapid decline. | ||
| That your personal relationships are deeper and more fulfilling. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| Totally. | ||
| I mean, for me... | ||
| You do feel that. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| I mean, there's no question about it for me. | ||
| I mean, I have little kids. | ||
| My oldest is five. | ||
| So I've just, in the last few years, started having kids. | ||
| So, yes. | ||
| And I have great friends. | ||
| And through this weird internet world where we are, I've kind of cultivated like a... | ||
| Really great audience of a lot of really cool people. | ||
| So you think you're relating to people in a deeper way than you did, say, five or six, ten years ago? | ||
| I think 100%. | ||
| It's been a big period for me kind of growing up. | ||
| I had a very prolonged adolescence kind of. | ||
| I was a stand-up comedian, kind of living a degenerate life for many years, and then I settled down and got married and had kids. | ||
| So that's just, aside from the craziness of the world, I think whenever you go through that, you're just living in a better way. | ||
| How blessed are you, though? | ||
| Very, very, very. | ||
| Because that's like your, I mean, that's your fortress against, that protects you from everything else. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Because it, well, and it's just, you know, it's whatever your, you know, this is the thing that was kind of, I know you sent me when I tweeted something about this, but where like when you don't have God, whatever's next highest in line becomes, Yes. | ||
| And affect your God. | ||
| And there is something about, I did not have God or family, my own family. | ||
| You know, I had family members who I love, but I didn't have my own family. | ||
| And my whole life, I kind of, like, I was like a 90s kid. | ||
| I grew up in, I was born in 1983. I grew up in the 90s. | ||
| None of us, nobody I knew was religious. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Nobody, and we did not have, you know, like all of the traditions that many previous. | ||
| Generations grew up with, like God, country, chivalry, these things. | ||
| You wear this uncomfortable outfit here because that's what's expected of you around other people when you go to church. | ||
| You strap on these boots. | ||
| It was like, no, we just grew up in blue jeans and sneakers. | ||
| And the point of life was kind of like to get through school to go play. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| When I was a teenager, it was like to like... | ||
| smoke pot or, you know, like try to get laid or something. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| Like it was all just kind of like revolved around what's fun. | ||
| And it wasn't until I got married and when we had my first kid and I found God also at that same time that I'd been living a totally different life where my life is kind of centered around this purpose that there's meaning to it. | ||
| And it's not really about me and whether I'm having fun. | ||
| Like I still like to have fun sometimes, but it's like what that's really not that important. | ||
| Like what's really important is that like I'm being a great husband to my wife. | ||
| I'm being a great father to my kids. | ||
| And ironically, to some degree, you just find much deeper happiness when you're not living just for happiness. | ||
| We were talking about this off camera. | ||
| I really wish this had been on camera because it was so interesting what you were saying. | ||
| But you didn't grow up in a conventional two-parent household. | ||
| No. | ||
| Right. | ||
| No, my parents got divorced when I was three. | ||
| That's young. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So you grew up in a single-parent household, but you seem to have... | ||
| Kind of figured out the formula so well, and I said, well, how did you know that? | ||
| How did you? | ||
| Well, I mean, it's a mix of a few things. | ||
| My mother was a really great mother, so I only had one parent, but I did have a really good parent, and she did instill a lot of good values in me. | ||
| And I don't mean if that kind of contradicts what I just said before. | ||
| She did instill good values in me, even though we didn't have God or anything like that. | ||
| It was something that was just instinctually in me when I first had kids, that I just wanted to give them that. | ||
| And the other major fact there is that my wife is just like the best person I've ever met. | ||
| And I got very lucky, again, and just met a really great girl. | ||
| And there is nothing better than being in a great marriage. | ||
| And I would imagine, I've never experienced it, but nothing worse than being in a really bad one. | ||
| I think it's like burning to death. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| The people I know who... | ||
| I've known people like that who are like with a really crazy chick and you're just like, my God. | ||
| They can't even think straight because they're in agony all the time. | ||
| Yeah, it's horrible. | ||
| But it's just interesting. | ||
| I think maybe I'm very distressed by the number of kids growing up in single-parent households. | ||
| I grew up in a single-parent household when I was a kid, so I'm not judging anybody. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| But it's... | ||
| In retrospect, I think, well, maybe if you grew up that way as you did and I did. | ||
| You don't take things for granted. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| And you're more intentional in the way you structure your own family. | ||
| Because you said to me off air, you're like, I wanted this. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And I also just have the attitude that like, well, I think that, and I blame the baby boomers for almost all of our problems. | ||
| I do too. | ||
| And I don't, obviously when you speak about a group that big, I'm painting with a broad brush. | ||
| There are exceptions to this rule. | ||
| Of course. | ||
| And I love my mother very much and she's a good person. | ||
| But as a generation, they just ruined everything. | ||
| And they're totally selfish. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Jeff Dice, who I love this guy, he's so brilliant. | ||
| But he gave a speech about it and he was going through the things of all of the slogans of the baby boomers and how self-serving they all were. | ||
| It was like, don't trust anyone over 30 until they... | ||
| Got into their 30s, you know, and then it was like, and then like you watch it all the way through like COVID. It's like, we got to do everything we can to protect the baby of our generation. | ||
| Old people are the most important. | ||
| Yes, it went from don't trust anyone over 30 to being like, screw your childhood. | ||
| I don't want to get this. | ||
| Keep your hands off my Medicare, by the way. | ||
| You know, like everything. | ||
| But one of the major things that they changed about the culture was like normalizing casual divorce. | ||
| As if that should just kind of be an option. | ||
| Like, I'm just not feeling it anymore. | ||
| So, like, we can get divorced. | ||
| And, like, there's no sense of, like, no, no, no, no, no. | ||
| Like, look, there are exceptions. | ||
| There are cases where there's an abusive spouse or something like that. | ||
| But generally speaking, the idea, like, you took an oath before God and everyone you love and then brought children into this world. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I know. | |
| That is your obligation. | ||
| I know. | ||
| And that's, like, my attitude toward marriage is that it's, like, listen, me and my wife. | ||
| We've faced some hurdles in our marriage, like things in the outside world that have happened. | ||
| And I think we've done a very good job of them. | ||
| We've had serious issues. | ||
| We had major health concerns with one of our kids and got through that. | ||
| We've been through lockdowns and been through all this stuff. | ||
| And there's more ahead? | ||
| There's a lot more ahead. | ||
| But one thing that is for certain is that that's it. | ||
| It's us. | ||
| For the rest of this. | ||
| We're living this life together now. | ||
| And to me, that's what being married is. | ||
| If you're not that, you're not really married. | ||
| If you're trapped, you'll make do, by the way. | ||
| That sounds grim, but it's not grim. | ||
| I've never... | ||
| I mean, I have the same kind of marriage. | ||
| I've had a happy marriage for 33 years. | ||
| One of the reasons is that this is what we're doing. | ||
| Yeah, that's right. | ||
| And I grew up with divorce. | ||
| I remember as a child, my only brother feels that we would talk about this when our kids were like, fuck. | ||
| Adults. | ||
| Like, fuck them. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Having kids and then getting divorced so you can go find yourself in France? | ||
| Fuck you. | ||
| I knew, and I knew people in my, in my, listen, in my parents' generation, there were so many people like that. | ||
| So many people I know. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| And totally fucked up the kids and did it because, like, right, like, I gotta be happy as if somehow that's a noble thing of, like, I gotta be happy. | ||
| But they never turned out happy. | ||
| No, because you have, because. | ||
| Because the key to real happiness, I mean, there's different ways to measure happiness or, like, whatever. | ||
| Again, like, you know, there's someone training for a marathon, and there's someone sitting having a bag of potato chips, and in the moment, the guy having the bag of potato chips might be happier than the guy training for the marathon, but, like, ultimately, who's going to feel better about themselves is going to be, you know what I mean? | ||
| So, like, there's, um, but... | ||
| How do you want to die? | ||
| You have obligations and responsibilities, and if you don't fulfill those, you're not going to find long-term happiness. | ||
| But also take the long view, like, The neighborhood I grew up in had all kinds of rich divorced moms, and every one of them was crazy and unhappy. | ||
| Every single one of them. | ||
| And you wonder where they, I thought, in the years since, like, where are they now? | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| Living in some condo in Scottsdale with Parkinson's unvisited by their kids. | ||
| Like, you'd get old and die in the end, and when you do, I'm gonna... | ||
| I really hope I'm surrounded by all my girls and my son and like, oh, he was such a good guy. | ||
| Yeah, that's all that matters. | ||
| That's how I feel about it. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| And they like talk about you at dinner when you're gone. | ||
| Oh, I miss him. | ||
| You don't want people, I've seen people die who mistreated their children. | ||
| I've lived it actually. | ||
| It's like, fuck that person. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| I don't want that. | ||
| And also look, I mean that kind of the absence of having that feeling or the baby boomers kind of not Feeling that way. | ||
| It's kind of like, I mean, look what it's led to. | ||
| I mean, you know, it's very easy for, you know, say popular conservative, you know, pundits to kind of dunk on college kids and stuff like that, which is like fun. | ||
| I've enjoyed videos of where, you know, like Ben Shapiro is like destroying 19 year old in some college campus. | ||
| And, you know, it's like, you know, she's like, you know, some. | ||
| Trans kid or something like that and is like, well, I was born a boy, but why can't I live as a woman? | ||
| And he's like, why can't you live as a cat? | ||
| And it was like, ah! | ||
| And it's like, ah, the intellectual prowess of destroying this kid. | ||
| And like, yes, okay, that is stupid. | ||
| That kid was an idiot. | ||
| But you also kind of like... | ||
| Peel a little bit deeper, and you're like, so what was this kid's situation, really? | ||
| Because you're talking to a 19-year-old. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| And let me guess. | ||
| Came from a broken home. | ||
| I'm trying not to pound the table here, because I agree with you so strongly. | ||
| Was medicated, I bet. | ||
| You know, like as a young kid. | ||
| And is staring down the barrel of a grim life. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| Has no conceivable path toward, like, independence. | ||
| Toward what you have and what you grew up with. | ||
| Which is, that's all that really matters. | ||
| And you're in charge of the society, by the way. | ||
| You're in charge of the society. | ||
| You have influence in the society. | ||
| You're in the privileged class. | ||
| And there's no shame in that, by the way. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| But it does carry with it the obligation to see that the next generation has a decent shot. | ||
| And you haven't done that. | ||
| You've wasted it all on foreign adventurism and your stupid economic ideas. | ||
| And this is the result. | ||
| And you will take no responsibility for it. | ||
| It's like, oh, stupid kids. | ||
| No, your job is to create another generation of smart. | ||
| Kids. | ||
| Wise kids. | ||
| And they mock them. | ||
| They're like, oh, well, maybe if you don't have your avocado toast and your lattes, then you'd be able to buy a house or something. | ||
| And you're like, look. | ||
| Okay, it is true. | ||
| You're making me mad! | ||
| I totally agree. | ||
| Look, it's true that this generation is in many ways softer and more privileged, and part of that's because they grew up with technological wealth that previous generations never had. | ||
| It's also partly because their parents never instilled values in them to care about more than just avocado toast, but the fact is that baby boomers could go to college and get a summer job. | ||
| And pay for their college, okay? | ||
| And then, if they didn't go to college, they could go to high school and then go wait online and get a job where you could support a wife and kids off of that job. | ||
| And that was the way of the world previously, that my grandfather worked in factories his whole life, and his wife didn't work. | ||
| And that was that. | ||
| And he owned a house, he sent kids to college, he had two cars, like they had a nice life. | ||
| And these kids today come out with six figures of debt. | ||
| And are getting a job at Starbucks. | ||
| And houses are going for like $600,000. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| For that same humble house that my grandfather had. | ||
| And the baby boomers all got rich by the value of their house just going up. | ||
| I couldn't agree more. | ||
| And it seems like not a one of them ever went... | ||
| Hey, but aren't we kind of pulling up the ladder on the helicopter here? | ||
| If my house is skyrocketing in value, that's nice for me. | ||
| I got a HELOC and I got some money coming in now that I can invest in the market that's going up and make this income coming in. | ||
| But what about the next generation? | ||
| How are they ever going to buy a house? | ||
| They don't care. | ||
| No one seemed to care about that. | ||
| They don't care. | ||
| I'm trying not to interrupt your wonderful description with amens and hosannas, but I just so strongly agree with what you're saying. | ||
| And I have a bunch of kids. | ||
| They're all actually thriving, I would say, inside. | ||
| They're all good people, clear thinking, they love each other, most important. | ||
| But I'm around a lot of college-aged kids, like a lot, like way more than most people my age. | ||
| I'm 54, and I don't think they're soft at all. | ||
| I'm not talking to my kids. | ||
| I mean, they're friends, or, you know, I'm around it a lot. | ||
| They're hard-edged, actually. | ||
| Right. | ||
| They know how, I mean, they may be wrong, they may be confused, but they're actually pretty tough in a way, and they're pretty angry, and they sort of get what's going on, and I have deep sympathy for them. | ||
| Deep. | ||
| They've been completely screwed over by the people. | ||
| They don't have any power. | ||
| Even if you're a 19-year-old Columbia kid, I may not agree with your slogans or down with white people or whatever. | ||
| Of course, I hate that. | ||
| I am a white person. | ||
| But I do sort of think, whose fault is that? | ||
| It's the people who run everything. | ||
| It's your stupid boomer parents. | ||
| It's the administrators at the school. | ||
| It's our politicians. | ||
| I mean, I'm sorry to blame society for the crimes of young people, but actually, society does deserve the blame, and the leaders of the society deserve the blame. | ||
| Yeah, 100%. | ||
| That's not a liberal perspective. | ||
| That's a conservative perspective. | ||
| I care about the next generation. | ||
| If you don't care about how your grandchildren are going to live here, how are you conservative? | ||
| What are you conserving? | ||
| You're not at all. | ||
| You're just a freaking grifter. | ||
| Shut up! | ||
| And this is why when you were on my podcast, we set the internet on fire because I trashed Bill Buckley. | ||
| I completely agree with you. | ||
| I said he was one of the great villains of the 20th century. | ||
| Well, he was a gatekeeper, for sure. | ||
| I mean, people started, they were like, wow, did that stall it in Mao Zedong? | ||
| And I'm like, okay, fine. | ||
| He was third. | ||
| But the point is, okay, there were like five ahead of him. | ||
| Okay, fine. | ||
| But I think... | ||
| Part of this is that, you know, a lot of the kind of conservatism, Inc. | ||
| people who criticized us for saying that, and they're kind of like, well, how would you, you know, this was the guy who was the most prominent member of the conservative movement. | ||
| And it's like, okay, and so, like, what exactly was conserved in his movement? | ||
| What, like, just explain, was it the Constitution? | ||
| Was it what? | ||
| Classical liberal values? | ||
| Was it religion? | ||
| Was it tradition? | ||
| Was it the definition of a woman? | ||
| Like, what exactly was the big conservative win here? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Shut up! | |
| Shut up! | ||
| I mean, like, I'll give you something. | ||
| We still have some gun rights, okay? | ||
| You know, like, I don't know, but, like, you lost everything. | ||
| You lost the United States of America. | ||
| And part of the reason, a major reason why, is because the whole National Review, like, takeover of the conservative movement was to drive out all of the... | ||
| All of the non-interventionists. | ||
| All of the isolationists. | ||
| I watched it happen. | ||
| Demonize them as racist. | ||
| Every single time. | ||
| I watched it happen. | ||
| And the weird... | ||
| Yeah, I don't even... | ||
| I'm holding back. | ||
| No, because that's like... | ||
| I was adjacent to that world my entire life and I watched it happen. | ||
| And I knew Bill Buckley and he was perfectly nice to me. | ||
| I didn't hate him or anything. | ||
| It was very charming and very smart. | ||
| I guess. | ||
| I was playing the wasp. | ||
| You know, it was all a pose. | ||
| It was completely fake. | ||
| And the only people who sort of bought it are people who didn't know any better and thought that was like upper class or something. | ||
| Fake accent. | ||
| Weird homoerotic stuff. | ||
| And it was like all just kind of sad, actually. | ||
| I thought that was always my view of it because he was posing. | ||
| But, you know, I think he had good qualities. | ||
| I love sailing, so I kind of, you know, I'm with him on that. | ||
| But in the end, you judge the tree by its fruits. | ||
| And the fruits are just absolutely rotten. | ||
| And so I think it's important to be honest about that. | ||
| Well, I think the fruits were a transformation of the right wing in America from being the old right, which was really, I mean, they were fairly isolationist, but certainly non-interventionist. | ||
| I mean, like, you know, Robert Taft was the one who didn't want us to be in NATO. I mean, this was like the old, and they were big on like... | ||
| Immigration controls, sound money, and not getting involved in wars. | ||
| These were the people who opposed World War I and World War II. They didn't want American involvement in these wars, right? | ||
| And the effect of Bill Buckley was to transform what became the conservative movement into being Cold Warriors. | ||
| That what we do is we go everywhere around the world looking for a war to fight. | ||
| So, in other words, the people who really loved America, not the idea, but the physical reality of America and her people. | ||
| The people who actually live here and their homes and their little towns and their dumb little jobs and all the stuff that makes up a civilization at scale, the people who cared about that somehow became anti-American? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| And the people who would lecture you about how America is an idea, it doesn't really matter who lives here. | ||
| What? | ||
| Those people are for America? | ||
| I mean, it's like a complete inversion of reality, actually. | ||
| So again, it's nothing personal against Bill Buckley, who played a mean harpsichord. | ||
| Sorry not to be catty. | ||
|
unidentified
|
But that's a lie. | |
| The people who care about... | ||
| Actual America are the people whose side I'm on. | ||
| And I care about actual America not because I'm a good person. | ||
| I'm really not an especially good person because I got a lot of children who live here. | ||
| That's what I care about. | ||
| And like, because it's, look, this was a really great country. | ||
| And I mean, there are still a lot of great things about it, but it's deteriorating. | ||
| And why, you know, why should we be for that? | ||
| And, you know, one of the crazy things about America is that there is kind of this... | ||
| I think the George double... | ||
| George W. Bush years in the war on terrorism was a revolution of sorts in the country. | ||
| I grew up a kid in the 90s. | ||
| We are not the same country as we were in the 1990s. | ||
| In the pre-war on terror, before the Patriot Act, in the Department of Homeland Security, in the TSA. I mean, the experience at an airport is a different thing. | ||
| We are a different country than we were before that. | ||
| I think COVID has changed everything. | ||
| But even before that, I mean, as you've talked about a lot, In the wake of World War II, the creation of the CIA. This was a revolution in the country where it changed who's running the government. | ||
| And we think of the position of President of the United States of America being the same position that Woodrow Wilson occupied or something like that. | ||
| And it's not. | ||
| It's a totally different position. | ||
| Donald Trump did not have the same job FDR had. | ||
| They were very, very different. | ||
| Not even close. | ||
| When people say, oh, you love America, it's like, yes, I love this country. | ||
| I don't like the direction the government's going in. | ||
| I don't care for these new powers. | ||
| And the Bush thing, I have to say, I could feel it at the very beginning. | ||
| I knew him before he became president. | ||
| I did not want to vote for him and didn't. | ||
| I just didn't vote. | ||
| I did vote for him the second time because you always get caught up in the other guy. | ||
| And I knew Kerry and I just thought Kerry was not impressive at all. | ||
| So I voted for Bush. | ||
| But I see Bush still. | ||
| I had a meal with him not that long ago and talk about a defeated, sad guy, actually. | ||
| Bitter, insecure, you know, given to lecturing everyone around him about what a great president he was. | ||
| And I thought, you know, that really is, no, but that's the fruit of the tree, kind of. | ||
| Like, if you've had a successful life, if you've done the things that you, you know, if you've... | ||
| Fulfilled your obligation and done the right thing. | ||
| You're not lecturing people about what a great person you are. | ||
| Right. | ||
| At all. | ||
| Are you? | ||
| No, I don't think so. | ||
| No, that's failure, actually. | ||
| And like, I mean, just... | ||
| He knows. | ||
| I mean, yeah, come on. | ||
| He knows. | ||
| To try to spin the George W. Bush years as anything other than like an absolute failure. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I know. | |
| I mean, you know, dude, you celebrated mission accomplished. | ||
| And then we stayed in the war for 20 years. | ||
| You know, just a disaster and left the country. | ||
| And I mean, look, not only was it all completely unnecessary. | ||
| I mean, like we had like the special ops response to Al Qaeda cells in Afghanistan in late 2001. Totally justify that. | ||
| We had an opportunity to trap Osama bin Laden and Tora Bora in late 2001. And they, I believe, intentionally let him go so they could continue these wars. | ||
| But fighting the decision... | ||
| Do you think that's what happened? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And there's... | ||
| I highly recommend to anybody... | ||
| Scott Horton wrote a book called Enough Already, which is like a masterpiece, a history of all the terror wars. | ||
| And it seems overwhelmingly likely that they already had their eye on Iraq and that they knew that if they captured Osama bin Laden, it'd be very difficult to sell another war. | ||
| Because we got the guy. | ||
| If that's really true, I mean, that's unspeakably evil. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, look, you can read through the details of it, but there were a bunch of... | ||
| They knew he was in Tora Bora, and they were requesting backup. | ||
| I remember that. | ||
| And they didn't give it to him. | ||
| It certainly seems to be what it looks like. | ||
| And then it was a decision that we're going to cobble. | ||
| Then it was a decision that we're going to... | ||
| Overthrow the Taliban and fight a regime change war there and then go fight the regime change war in Iraq. | ||
| And I mean, look, like you said, judge them by their fruit. | ||
| I mean, the results of George W. Bush's wars were there were trillions of dollars wasted, hundreds of thousands of people in these countries died, and our bravest young men blowing their brains out by the tens of thousands. | ||
| I know. | ||
| Those are the tangible results. | ||
| Of what happened. | ||
| And it's not even like we sacrificed that so that these countries are much better places to live. | ||
| They're actually worse than they were. | ||
| Much worse. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| So there you go. | ||
| You know, so great administration. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| So let me end on this question because that's so depressing what you just said because it's true. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It is true. | ||
| And no one was ever punished for it. | ||
| Rewarded. | ||
| They were all rewarded for it. | ||
| Name the three things that give you hope outside of your own family in America right now. | ||
| Okay, so, well, the first one was kind of what I was touching on before, that there is this, there is like a seismic shift in the way people are being exposed. | ||
| The part of the reason, and I know you've talked about this a lot, and I think explained it very well, but... | ||
| What you're seeing out of the establishment, what you see out of MSNBC when they talk about Donald Trump, or when they talk about you, for that matter, is not a ruling class that is confident that they have power. | ||
| They are like a cockroach that's trapped. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| And there's a reason for that. | ||
| And there's a reason why they're so hysterical. | ||
| And it's because for the first time, certainly in my lifetime and well beyond that, the monopoly over the control of information has truly been broken. | ||
| And that you watch this during COVID, where, I mean, like, you and Joe Rogan had a huge impact on the nation during COVID. Because you were like the two biggest people with the biggest audiences. | ||
| Completely exposing how insane the whole narrative was and how insane all of the COVID restrictions were. | ||
| And eventually it got to a point where people just weren't taking it anymore. | ||
| They weren't listening to Fauci. | ||
| We never had anything like that before. | ||
| We never had someone like Joe Rogan or someone like you doing this show where in the run-up to, say, in 2002, the run-up to the war in Iraq, there was just no one like that who was blowing the whistle with... | ||
| Tens of millions of people listening to them and explaining how this is all lies. | ||
| We have that now. | ||
| And they're freaking out about that. | ||
| And this is really why all the attempts at tech censorship happened since 2016, because they've recognized that. | ||
| Like, oh, Donald Trump can tweet his way to the White House. | ||
| He doesn't even have to go through us. | ||
| So we better control Twitter and, you know, YouTube and Facebook and all of these, Google and all of this. | ||
| And even in their attempts to control it... | ||
| They've never been as good as they were at controlling when there were just three networks and just a few big newspapers. | ||
| And now, I think Elon Musk really threw a wrench in their plans by buying Twitter. | ||
| So I'm very encouraged about that. | ||
| I'm very encouraged about the fact that people have access to the truth in a way that they never did before. | ||
| I think ideas are powerful, and I think that all governments rely on propaganda. | ||
| It doesn't work without that. | ||
| And there's something in that that's really It's like, oh, they have to convince us before they can just do it. | ||
| Okay, there's two things that are seemingly contradictory, but they're not. | ||
| Number one, democracy is an illusion. | ||
| It doesn't really exist. | ||
| You don't really ever have democracy. | ||
| Of course not. | ||
| Oh, we get to vote in presidential elections. | ||
| Even assuming all the votes are counted in the right way or something like that, it's like, yeah, you get to vote when these two parties, these private entities, decide who the candidate is, and then you can pick between the two of them. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| That's not really democracy. | ||
| But in another sense, there's always democracy. | ||
| And every nation, no matter how... | ||
| Whether they have free and fair elections or not, there has to at least be tacit acceptance by the people. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Of course. | |
| And if there's 500,000 people out in the streets screaming at a dictator about how they want policy X, that dictator is like, you know, I've been considering it and we will be implementing policy X. You know what I mean? | ||
| Because at the end of the day, there's way more of you than there are of him. | ||
| It's totally right. | ||
| And so when you can spread ideas, we have a fighting shot, I think. | ||
| So that's very encouraging to me. | ||
| I think there's also been a huge move away from U.S. hegemony internationally, which is both very scary, but is also, I think, necessary. | ||
| I think that America spiraling as a country, I think, started with us getting off of the gold standard. | ||
| Once government could print as much money as they want to, they make people rich for just trading in paper or being politically connected, and you're not... | ||
| Earning anything to become rich and it's devastating. | ||
| And then I think the unipolar moment was the worst thing that ever happened to America. | ||
| You need counterbalance. | ||
| Winning is often losing. | ||
| And so you need... | ||
| I want to see it happen in the best way possible. | ||
| I think it... | ||
| It's very bad in some ways for our country if we're not the world reserve currency anymore, but it's ultimately the solution. | ||
| It's no good of us being the way. | ||
| The fact that we can just export paper and then maintain our standard of living isn't the right way. | ||
| I hope it's a smooth transition, but I do think there's something positive in the fact that that's all changing. | ||
| So I think all of those things make me happy. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Did I hit three in there? | ||
| Yeah, you did. | ||
| Let me just ask you to follow up on one. | ||
| Losing our privilege, our unique privilege, as the holder of the world's reserve currency, I mean, that's going to happen. | ||
| Of course, it's in progress. | ||
| The Ukraine war accelerated it. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| But I haven't looked at the upside of that at all, and I think it's inevitable, so it would be nice to know what the upside is. | ||
| Well, I mean, if you think about... | ||
| Look, all the stuff that... | ||
| So we got this privilege after World War II, right? | ||
| The Bretton Woods Agreement. | ||
| A lot of the stuff where you talk about our soul as a country being destroyed, it happened in large part as a result of that. | ||
| Because we didn't have to earn our place in the world anymore. | ||
| We could just export paper. | ||
| And of course, we immediately started cheating. | ||
| And this is why Nixon took us off the gold standard. | ||
| It's not that Nixon went off the gold standard. | ||
| It's that the French called his bluff. | ||
| We were saying, we'll exchange dollars for $35 an ounce. | ||
| And they went, okay, we'll take our gold. | ||
| And we were like, oh, wait, I'm sorry, what was that? | ||
| And they were like, no, no, no, I just saw you did this whole, like, you had this whole space program and you fought a war in Vietnam and you just started all these entitlement programs. | ||
| You know, it does seem like you've been printing a lot of money. | ||
| I think we'll take our gold. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And then Nixon was like, this was an attack against the U.S. dollar. | |
| It's like, what do you mean? | ||
| We had a contract. | ||
| And they were like, live up to your end of the contract. | ||
| But once there was no more pretense... | ||
| Then we could just print money like crazy. | ||
| Then you have everybody in Wall Street getting rich in the 80s. | ||
| You have the tech boom in the 90s. | ||
| I mean, this is all... | ||
| And so I'm just saying, I think that... | ||
| I don't know that it's been great for our country to beat the world reserve currency. | ||
| I think it's been great for the military-industrial complex. | ||
| I think it's been great for Wall Street. | ||
| I don't think it's been good for our soul. | ||
| And so... | ||
| If I handed you a billion dollars unearned, do you think it would improve your life? | ||
| No, I think it would probably destroy my life. | ||
| Of course it would. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You know? | |
| Because what do you... | ||
| You know, if you actually start thinking that through, So then I go like, okay, so, all right, fine. | ||
| So initially, okay, I could buy a bunch of cool stuff. | ||
| That's great. | ||
| We all know that's not really what matters anyway, but it'll, for a moment, you know, feel really nice. | ||
| It'll distract you, for sure. | ||
| Yeah, for sure, right? | ||
| And then it's like, okay, so what am I going to do for my family now? | ||
| Like, obviously, my kids and my wife are my responsibility, but then like, okay, I got a brother, I got a sister, I guess I got to hand them a bunch of money too. | ||
| You know, my brother's like just coming out of grad school. | ||
| It's like, am I going to hand him a huge and just take away all of his drive to go make it on his own now? | ||
| Am I going to give him nothing and be a brother who has a billion dollars and gives him nothing? | ||
| That's not an option either. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Things get way more complicated very quickly where you're like, no, actually, that's not the right answer. | ||
| And also, it's not as if I have the respect. | ||
| From my family now, like, oh my god, you're taking care of all of us. | ||
| You were handed a billion dollars. | ||
| You didn't earn anything. | ||
| You didn't create anything. | ||
| You're no longer the man in your house. | ||
| Yeah, you don't actually want that. | ||
| I want to have a nice house because I work to get my family a nice house. | ||
| So yeah. | ||
| No, I wouldn't want that. | ||
| I don't know how... | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| You're one of the rare people. | ||
| I just share all the same instincts. | ||
| I don't quite know how that happened. | ||
| Well, thank you. | ||
| I love that. | ||
| Dude, thank you so much. | ||
| I've really, really enjoyed being out here. | ||
| Me too. | ||
| Dave Smith, thanks. | ||
|
unidentified
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They like worship power. | |
| They like grew up wanting to be part of the club and the only effect, you know, Teddy Roosevelt right there he he was Like an actual populist because he grew up in that world and he's like actually you all kind of suck and there's nothing that you have that I want You know what I mean? | ||
| I'd rather be in North Dakota hunting and that was his superpower. |
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