Dave Smith：以色列、哈马斯、乌克兰、俄罗斯、阴谋论与反犹主义｜Lex Fridman Podcast #464

#464

All the people who sold the war in Iraq, they lied us into war after a war. They've bankrupted the country, damn near destroyed the dollar, and no one loses their job. No one even gets in trouble over any of this.

If you make everybody into monsters and they're not human beings, well, you can't do diplomacy with monsters. You can't make a deal. You can't negotiate with monsters, but you can with humans. Maybe there are times when you shouldn't negotiate, or you can't negotiate, with humans, but it's better if you can. We could use a lot more of that thinking.

Donald Trump has put a lot of political capital—chips into the middle of the table—on “I can end this war,” and he's going to look very, very bad if he can't. So he's very highly incentivized to get this thing done as quickly as possible.

You're fighting in a way that produces more of the thing that you're fighting. The first step is to stop doing that. Your cure is making the patient more sick, so stop doing that, and then let's see if maybe we can heal.

Where are the tapes? Why is everyone talking about the flight logs and the files? Where are the tapes? This guy was clearly taping people to blackmail them. Why does anything need to be redacted for national security? I'm sorry, you're telling me there's a pedophile ring and we can't tell you everything about it for national security? Why would that be related to national security?

The following is a conversation with Dave Smith, an outspoken and at times controversial anti-war libertarian, comedian, and podcast host. This is the Lex Fridman podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's Dave Smith.

You are a longtime libertarian, perhaps an anarcho-capitalist. We can talk about that. Can you explain the different variants, the different flavors of libertarianism, and where you stand among those variants?

#464

There are many different camps and thinkers, just like with left-wing or right-wing schools of thought. Within the broader theme of libertarianism, there was a lot of influence from people like Ayn Rand, Milton Friedman, and Thomas Sowell. Those were some of the more mainstream figures.

Then there's the Ron Paul brand of libertarianism, which is distinct from that other camp, where there's much more of an emphasis on foreign policy. All of them fall into the radical-minarchist point of view. Then there's the Rothbardian anarcho-capitalist school. There's also David Friedman, who's an anarcho-capitalist but comes from a completely different perspective than Murray Rothbard.

I'm most closely aligned with the Rothbard school, which is very similar to Ron Paul, but maybe even a little bit further in that the very little bit of government that Ron Paul might support, I wouldn't support.

You've been a big fan of Ron Paul. Can you explain what you admire about him?

#464

“Big fan” is an understatement. I think Ron Paul is the greatest living American hero. I revere him on the level of the Founding Fathers—Thomas Jefferson or George Washington.

Number 1, on all of the major issues, he was correct in his understanding of them, his diagnosis of what caused these problems, and his solutions. In hindsight, there are a million different examples where almost everybody today would agree, even though his ideas were very controversial at the time, and say, “Oh my God, if we had just listened to Ron Paul about that, we'd be so much better off.”

But I think there's something almost deeper than that about why Ron Paul inspires so much love from so many people. He was a champion of these views for decades when there was no payoff for them at all. He was alone in the woods, being called “Dr. No” because he was a medical doctor and would be the lone no vote in Congress all the time—on bills where the entire Congress had bipartisan agreement, and there was 1 vote against them.

He clearly kept doing what he was doing simply because he believed it was right, not because there was any benefit for him. In fact, he dealt with a lot of headaches for the views that he had.

He's the only congressman I've ever heard this about—and DC insiders, people on the Hill, will say this. He was the only congressman of my lifetime whom the lobbyists simply stopped visiting. They just stopped going to his office because they were like, “There's no getting through to this guy.” He was not playing politics like that.

You can imagine what it must have been like from the lobbyist's perspective when they first tried to go there. They'd say, “All right, listen, we really need you to vote yes on this or that.” And he was like, “The Constitution doesn't authorize us to do that.” And they're like, “What? Who in this town even talks like that?”

He's also just—I’ve met him many times at this point—and he's genuinely one of those guys who's from an older, better generation. He's the sweetest guy, but he's not a pushover. He was a tough guy in his day, he was an athlete, and he was in the Air Force. He's been married to the same woman for, I think, over 60 years at this point and has a big, beautiful family.

He was a country doctor. He was a baby doctor who delivered thousands of babies. He's this classic American figure. At the risk of falling into hero worship or something like that, I do think he's a genuinely great man, and I think great men are to be revered.

As you said, there's integrity there. Can you speak to the ideas that Ron Paul represents? He says some of the things he's been right about. Can you speak about the economics, the Fed, and maybe war and being anti-military intervention?

#464

It all came from the same central thesis, which is that the highest political value ought to be liberty, and that the government, by its very nature, is an instrument of force and tyranny. Therefore, the more government you have, the less liberty you have.

He was way ahead of his time in really calling out the corruption in DC. That's one of the common throughlines between the Federal Reserve, government spending, and, of course, this crazy war industry that our country has.

There are a lot of components to that, but essentially Ron Paul was talking about draining the swamp way before it was this dominant mass message. In many ways, he laid the groundwork in his 2008 and 2012 presidential campaigns—not that he led to Donald Trump, but he laid the groundwork for Donald Trump to be able to get up at the South Carolina Republican primary debate, look at Jeb Bush, and say, “Your brother lied us into war.”

To have the Republicans agree with him was significant. These were many of the same people who had voted for George W. Bush twice and supported the war, and even mocked their liberal fellow countrymen for not being on board with it. A lot of that was the work that Ron Paul did, and people waking up to how messed up all these wars were.

At the time, I was a young man when I first found Ron Paul. It was 2007 when I first saw him, and then I started obsessively reading all of his books. I was born in ’83, so that means I was 23 or 24 when I first encountered him.

For me at the time, there were 2 categories in my naive mind. There were the liberals who supported big government at home but were skeptical about big government abroad, or skeptical about wars. Then there were the conservatives who said they supported small government, limited government, at home, but were always on the side of whatever the next war was.

At least for me, and I think for a lot of people of my generation, Ron Paul was the first guy who came along and said, “No, I'm for limited government here and abroad.” It was a portal where you could access a different perspective on the world. Once you saw that, you were like, “Wait, that's actually what makes sense.”

It doesn't make sense to ask what it is exactly that Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush, and even Milton Friedman and Thomas Sowell and guys like that stand for. You want a constitutionally limited world empire? That's what you guys stand for? Because that doesn't fit together at all.

Why did we take this as a given? Then, of course, the more you look into it, you realize that those 2 things do make sense together. The original progressives—people like Woodrow Wilson or FDR—were pushing big government at home and big government abroad, and that actually made much more sense as a cohesive worldview. To oppose that would be the Ron Paul worldview.

The other thing for me—and this was actually my introduction to Ron Paul—was, too, a portal in a way. It was a way, at least in my naive, not fully developed brain at 24 years old or whatever.

It was a way for me to tap into something that was outside the empire. I had already heard a lot. I was already against George W. Bush, and I didn't like the war. I had already figured out that the war in Iraq was bullshit and that we were lied into it.

There were liberals and left-wingers I knew—I grew up in New York City, so I was very familiar with the left-wing perspective—who were critical of George W. Bush for fighting the war and signing the PATRIOT Act into law. But I had never really heard anybody break it down the way Ron Paul did when he basically said, "Look, there's a reason why these terrorists hate us, and it's not what they're telling you. They don't hate us for our freedom."

As I remember, the way Pat Buchanan put it, which I always loved, was: "Dick Cheney makes it sound like Osama bin Laden stumbled onto a copy of our Bill of Rights somewhere in the deserts of Afghanistan, and he was like, 'Oh my God, they're free. Look at this: speedy trial? Are you kidding me? This is like, what is going on here? They can own guns, and their women can wear miniskirts.'" That made people so angry that they were ready to suicide-bomb themselves? That makes no sense at all.

Then Ron Paul was just like, "No, look, here's the thing. If we think we can just go around the world killing people, propping up dictatorships, putting our military bases in the Muslim holy land, and not engender hatred from that, then we do that at our own peril." It was such an interesting idea. I’m an ’80s and ’90s kid, and to me it had always been a given that America was number one, that we were the force for good in the world. It was an interesting introduction to the idea that there are people outside of that who are dominated by it and don't care for it very much, and that that's what 9/11 was actually about.

For me, I was living in New York City. I was 18, I think, when 9/11 happened, and that was the moment of my childhood. It was a huge thing to live through. We were attacked. This seemed like something that could only happen in a history book. That didn't happen to America in the 1900s. 2001 was basically the 1900s.

It was like, "Oh, finally, it clicked." It was the first time I had ever heard an explanation and an understanding of this whole thing that we're involved in now—from 9/11 to the terror wars—that actually just made perfect sense.

Yeah. We should also say that there's some degree of truth that the battle is not just militaristic; it's also cultural. Many of those parts of the world don't want other people's values forced onto them, right? But the way that George W. Bush and Dick Cheney and every right-wing host in America—Sean Hannity, Bill O'Reilly, everybody—framed it was that they hate that we're free, whereas it was much closer to saying that they don't like us imposing on them.

Even all the hardcore neocons—Bret Stephens of The New York Times wrote this piece on the 20th anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, in 2023, to cheerlead the war in Iraq—and he goes through the whole piece without mentioning the 1 million people who died in the war. The piece is literally just measuring life under Saddam Hussein versus life under the Shiite parliamentary system they have now. Which one's better? He's arguing that this one's better, therefore it was worth it.

But there's no mention of the 20-plus million people who were displaced, the 1 million people who were killed, or all the millions of people who were injured. There’s no mention of the tens of thousands of our soldiers who have blown their brains out in the aftermath of the thing. So many times, this is true with government policy in general. People talk about the end result that they want, but you're like, "Yeah, but what about the process by which you get there? How much hatred could you create?"

It's not that hard for me to put myself in other people's shoes. I have 2 little kids and a wife, and if anybody were ever to try to argue to me that they have to be the eggs that get broken to make some bigger omelet—it's okay, we're ultimately going to impose something on your society that's better than what you have—it sure does suck that your wife and kids have to be the ones who get taken out.

I'm just saying this to myself, and this is not real. This is just a thought experiment I'm making up. I'm already pretty close to being a terrorist. My next thought is, "Well, okay, I hope you're going to like it when you watch your family die in front of you."

Now, hopefully, even if that happened to me, I wouldn't go kill that guy's family. Maybe I'd just go after him or something. But I could understand—and I think most people who have kids could understand—going to the most evil, dark place you could imagine if something ever threatened or actually did something to your kids.

Yeah. We have to remember the thing that's difficult to measure that you just mentioned: the hate that's created by every bomb that's dropped.

#464

It was General McChrystal who was the general running the war in Afghanistan. He wasn't Ron Paul, you know what I mean? He was a "sir, yes sir; how do we fight and win this war, General?" kind of guy. And he's the one who coined the term "insurgent math": 10 minus 2 equals 20.

I was rereading about this the other day because Trump has been bombing the Houthis in Yemen. When we first—I think it was in 2009, when Obama really stepped up the drone campaign, with the then-secret drone-bombing campaign—Yemen was one of the major theaters. Even back then, when it really was just a war on terrorism, the main targets were always al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula and its presence in Yemen.

Even before the Saudis invaded, from 2009 through 2015, AQAP just kept growing. It was doing all these targeted bombing campaigns. They call them targeted. Ninety-six percent of the people who get killed are innocent, but they call them targeted drone bombings.

Every time you go in there, you take out 1 target and then take out 3 little girls. Every one of those little girls had brothers and uncles and fathers, and all of them just signed up to join the fight now because of that.

Ron Paul was the first one who really made this click for me. In a way—and I'm not a leftist, I'm not an egalitarian, and I'm not a cultural relativist—I'm not saying that all cultures are the same or that we all look at the world the same way. There are enormous differences between all of us, and I personally think some are better than others. But there are things that unite all of us.

I remember one time I was arguing with a Democrat guy on an S.E. Cupp show. I used to be a contributor on her show. It was after a terrorist attack here in New York, a fairly minor one. It was a guy—I think he hit someone with his car, then jumped out with a gun, and the cops lit him up and killed him. This was back in 2017, I think, and he claimed to be ISIS-inspired. I don't remember if there was a direct connection or not, but at the time they were like, "Doesn't this mean we have to step up the war in Iraq or in Syria, where ISIS's stronghold is?"

I remember the guy saying to me, "Yeah, yeah, but Dave, what you're saying here is we're supposed to do nothing. This just happened, and now we're supposed to do nothing?" I had gone off on how these wars had been disastrous. Even though this guy had a suit and tie on, and we're in a cable news studio in a first-world country—in the United States of America—the basic thing that he's saying is, "What do you say? You're saying we're not going to go kill some motherfuckers?"

He was just putting it as "Do something," but what's something? Something is dropping bombs on human beings. Some innocent people are going to die, but it's the same thing after 9/11, where we had to go fucking invade some countries right now. That's the same impulse. It's like, they killed some of our people. You think we're not going to show them who the real killers are? Do you think there's a chance that you could come here?

That is the most human instinct ever. Some other tribe just came in here and killed some people in our tribe. So what do you want to do about that? Well, I don't know. It's not going to take me too long to figure out. We're going to go kill a bunch of people in their tribe.

I do think that's the major motivating factor for both sides of the Israel-Palestine conflict. I think that's the major motivator for both sides of the war-on-terror conflict. In a way, when you look at it like that, there's something—even though it's so dark and tragic—almost beautiful about it, where you're like, "Oh, we're all caught in this same cycle."

Yeah.

It’s deeply human—the warring between tribes. But especially in recent years, and more and more throughout human history, there’s almost like a third party, which is this military-industrial complex making money from the two tribes.

So, if you just have two tribes, I’ve been reading a lot about Genghis Khan. This is why Genghis Khan banned this: it was very common in Mongolia before Genghis Khan to steal people’s wives—“You’re my wife now,” right? And he realized that creates a lot of conflict.

#464

Yeah, it sure does. That seems natural and human, that kind of conflict. But whenever a third party rolls in and starts making money on the whole thing, driving it forward, the escalation of the conflict comes with this whole machine that makes de-escalation really difficult.

The military-industrial complex in America is so big and so sophisticated. It’s not just that there are the intelligence agencies and the weapons manufacturers, and then there are the people in the media who are either directly or indirectly parroting all of their talking points. It’s not just that you make money when there’s a conflict; you have this entire apparatus to create the conflict and then create the public sentiment for that.

And we’re in an interesting place because we’re kind of in this new frontier now, where shows like this can happen, and there are a lot of them, and a lot of them are humongous, like yours. But for so long, this just didn’t exist.

For so long, it was the case that The New York Times, NBC, CBS, ABC, The Washington Post, and The Associated Press, I guess, could just move the nation. I mean, if they wanted to be like, “Hey, there is”—forget even after 9/11—the idea that in 1990 or 1991 there was any organic movement from the American people going, “You know, we really got to see about this Saddam Hussein guy. The dictator in Iraq is having a slant-drilling dispute with the emir of Kuwait. We really got to do something about that.”

That is not something that organically came from anyone. That was not a few soccer moms hanging out, watching their kids’ game, being like, “I really do think that in a couple years we’re going to have to send these boys over to Iraq to go—” That’s not it. They were just, from the top down, able to create this feeling that, “Hey, there’s a new Adolf Hitler on the rise over here in Iraq. We’ve got to go see about this. There are these poor people in Kuwait. We have to do that.” They were able to create this desire for war.

It’s really incredible when you think about it, because for most of human history, I think you would have had to have some type of plausible threat, some type of plausible reality, to convince people that we actually have to go to war in order to deal with this. Whereas the idea that in 1991 the United States of America would feel threatened by Iraq was just ridiculous, and yet they were able to do it.

Well, to push back a little bit, throughout human history there was also a thing—you look at the Roman Empire—where the cultural values were just different, and military conquest was seen as a good thing. We almost just assume in the United States that war has been framed in the defensive sense, where offensive war—we’re not doing that anymore.

#464

You make a fair point. It’s certainly true that throughout human history there have been overt empire-building and wars of conquest and things like that. But I guess I’m just saying that at least even there, you would have some type of sell for why we’re going to go take these resources and why that will be good for us, whereas the idea that Kuwait just needed to be defended by the Americans seems so hard to convince anybody, and yet they were able to do it.

If you read neocon writing in the ’90s, it was very interesting because they would tell the truth a lot more. I think the Soviet Union had just collapsed; it was what Charles Krauthammer dubbed the unipolar moment. There was a lot of excitement, a feeling of invincibility, and the neocons weren’t in power anymore after ’92, really.

I mean, they were in the George H.W. Bush administration, but after ’92 they really weren’t. So they were just writing at these think tanks, and it didn’t seem like they were as guarded. There weren’t these accusations of, “You’re a war criminal,” or something like that.

But what he said, what Jonah Goldberg agreed with, was that every 10 years or so America’s got to find a puny little country and put them up against the wall just to let the rest of the world know that we mean business. That was actually their mentality. I’m sure there are people who agree with that; I happen to disagree with it. But the drums of war are beating a little bit over Taiwan and China.

More than a little bit. Yeah. But there, I can’t even see a justification for a just war. What is the long-term benefit to society if you do military intervention?

#464

I also think this, and I’ve been saying this for a while, but I do think there is this empire mentality that Americans have got to shake off—as if it’s even a question of whether we should allow it or not. Are we in a position to allow or not allow that? Why do we have this? I hope China doesn't invade Taiwan. I hope Taiwan remains as free as possible. I hope China becomes free. I root for freedom and prosperity for everyone, you know, but I also root for everybody to have a healthy marriage.

It’s almost like if you were talking to me and you were like, “Hey, the guy down the street is cheating on his wife. I don’t think we can allow this.” I’d immediately be like, “That’s really not my place.” And on top of that, I also have no power or authority over what they do in their marriage. I have to be concerned with my marriage.

And the idea that—imagine if there were the political will to invade Mexico, if D.C. decided, “We’re taking Mexico City. That’s going to be part of America now, and we’re taking it by force,” and then China was like, “We’re not sure if we can allow this.” I think immediately most Americans would be like, “Allow? How the fuck do you think you’re going to stop us from taking Mexico City? What are you going to do, China? You’re going to send your navy ships over here to fight us off the coast of Mexico? Good luck with that.”

At least from my understanding, in almost all the war games that they’ve run, if we did militarily—even if it doesn’t come to nuclear weapons being used, in which case the whole world gets blown up—but even if we go militarily try to stop China from invading Taiwan, everyone agrees not to use nukes, and we just fight a conventional war, we lose that war every time.

I think what you said applies to a lot of the wars we’ve been involved in. But China and Taiwan are a little bit different because of TSMC, right? Because there’s an economic dependence.

#464

If that were the concern, then the response would be: We need some type of Manhattan Project. I’m not supporting a government project here, but there would be: We need some type of Manhattan Project to say, “We’re going to make these things here.” We can’t.

And look, I was running that experiment before, saying, “What if we all pinky-promise not to use nuclear weapons or something like that?” But that’s not the reality of the situation.

More realistically, look, even in Ukraine, everybody—the biggest hawks, the biggest pushers of this policy and Joe Biden’s policy to fund Ukraine—no one’s suggesting we send in the 82nd Airborne.

No, which is really the only thing that could repel the Russians right now and restore the original sovereignty of the Ukrainian borders. But no one’s suggesting we send in the 82nd Airborne because we all know we can’t have a direct war with Russia. That’s the end of the world.

And same thing with China. I’m not saying microchips or whatever aren’t important, but we can find other ways. Taiwan is not magical. We can produce these things in other places.

No. So, you have the humility to say that you don’t really know much about the situation. It sounds ridiculous to say, but there’s something magical about not Taiwan, but TSMC. It’s incredibly difficult to manage the supply chain and manufacture at such a low cost, as they do.

And to add to that, China has been signaling about the one-China policy. But you’re absolutely right that you shouldn’t be doing the Washington thing of beating the drums of war. That’s completely counterproductive.

You should actually try to find partnerships with China, build friendships and cooperation, like India is doing a good job of this. Build friendships. This 21st-century conflict, this Cold War thinking, is going to be destructive to the economy, destructive to humanity, and destructive to the flourishing of the individual nations of the world. There’s just nothing positive except making money for the military industry.

#464

Well, yeah. And it was totally destructive during the original Cold War, too, and almost led to nuclear war on a couple of different occasions. But look, I would just say—and I’m really—I’m no defender of the Chinese regime. I hate communism and/or fascism, whatever they are—some hybrid mix of the two.

They’re paying you, aren’t they?

#464

No, fuck them. I don't care. By the way, I get a lot of people speculating online, but I am not getting any of these checks, man. I'd really like them to start coming in.

Even when it's China, you say China is asserting the One China policy, but the One China policy is the policy of the United States of America and has been for 50 years now, right? I think what's happening there a lot of the time is that, essentially, even though officially the One China policy is the policy of the United States of America, all of these American politicians and different figureheads across powerful centers in America are saying that China doesn't have the right to go into Taiwan. Then China is in the position of being like, "Well, hey, wait a minute. No, that's not actually the policy. We maintain this One China policy, but we allow them to kind of do what they want to do."

The most obvious example of this was when Joe Biden actually said, "Oh, we wouldn't allow that, and we would militarily intervene if they went into Taiwan." Then, and this was so bizarre, the White House, whoever that was, came out to correct the president of the United States and said, "No, the policy of the White House is the One China policy."

Which, look, again, I think the whole point of this is that the reason why whoever the hell was able to overrule Joe Biden in his administration—I don't know who that is—but the whole point is that if you tell China that we recognize Taiwan's independence and that it's not part of China, that might be the type of thing that would make China invade and say, "No, we're not accepting that."

At least right now, it's like, okay, here's—look, this is the reality. It's something that you run up against a lot with the war in Ukraine and with the situation in China and Taiwan: There are constraints placed on us by reality. It's not all just about how you'd like the world to be or how you'd like it to work.

Obviously, I think we would all like it if bigger countries didn't invade smaller countries and didn't bully smaller countries around. That is not the way of the world. We are a big country that is the biggest bully in the world, so we're in no position to lecture. But what we're in the position to say is, "Hey, we'd sure love it if you don't do that." You can do it and get away with it, but we'd sure love it if you don't.

When Vladimir Putin starts talking about, "Hey, if you keep pushing the idea of Ukraine joining your military alliance, I'm going to invade that country," the goal there—or the move there—would be to be like, "Okay, we'll stop talking about that. Is there something else that we can agree on? Is there a way that you will promise you won't do anything to them, and we'll promise we won't bring them into our military?" That's the goal. You don't just go, "No, fuck you, we're doing it anyway," over and over and over again until they do the thing.

I think we got to this discussion from the military-industrial complex and military intervention, and Ron Paul before that. If you could rewind a little, is there any amount of military intervention that's justified? According to you and according to various flavors of libertarianism, is there any amount that's okay?

#464

Well, I would say, at least to me, in terms of pure libertarian theory or just in terms of what I think is right or wrong, there is such a thing as a just war. The most obvious example of that would be that you're invaded by a military and fighting them off.

In that sense, even if you want to isolate it from everything else—from all of the awful U.S. policy toward Russia post-Soviet Union to all of the NATO expansion and color revolutions and all of these things—and just look at Vladimir Putin invading Ukraine, I do think the Ukrainians have a right to fight and protect their land. There's an aggressor there, and you have a right to defend yourself.

Certainly, in that sense, I think the American Revolution was a just war. There can be just wars in terms of pure libertarian theory. I think I would say that you never have a right to kill innocent people. That's never morally okay.

There could be a scenario—just like this is true in life in general—where there are lots of things that you don't have the right to do, but you could come up with some scenario where you might be in a position where you have to do it because there were all of these extenuating circumstances. You could think of something where—you remember the Saw movies, where they used to have these crazy horror scenarios? Okay, so an evil bad guy has buried a key inside this person, and you have to kill that person in order to get the key, in order to unlock these 20 people to let them out of a cage.

Now, look, you still don't have a right to kill people. It's horrible and wrong, and what you did there was still evil. But if you were taken to trial over it, you could probably explain to a judge and a jury, "I know, but the situation I was in was either these 20 people were going to die or this one person was going to die, and under that situation, I chose to save the 20."

So, in other words, in pure theory, no, you never have the right to kill innocent people. There could be a scenario where you were like, "Look, we had to take this military action, and some innocent people did die. It's so tragic and awful that we had to do this, but we are certain that many more people would have died had we not done this."

In that case, I would look at it as, number one, much like killing the one person to save the 20, it's still wrong. It's still an immoral thing that you were forced into doing. It's not justified. I would say that the overwhelming onus should have to be on you to demonstrate that you absolutely needed to do that. That's how I feel about all these wars.

Let's just say that you could reduce World War II down to the simplest caricature of what World War II is and say there's no Joseph Stalin. We're not even partnering with him. There's a good guy in Russia whom we were partnering with, the British Empire had never done anything wrong, they were just nothing but good guys, and of course FDR was nothing but a good guy. Hitler was even worse than the real Hitler, you know what I mean?

In order to stop them, we had to go on this bombing campaign. We only got Nazis, we only killed the bad guys, and we were able to take out the Third Reich. But one 8-year-old girl died. You did this thing that stopped the whole world from falling into subjugation.

I think almost everybody would agree, "Jesus, man, you have to do that." This is—you have to do that because the whole world is going to be subjugated. There's nothing but good guys here. The Nazis are so evil.

I still would say that every single time World War II came up, we should all just be somber, and we should all just think about that little 8-year-old girl who died and what a horrible thing it is that we had to do that. When there are these campaigns where tens of millions of people are killed, the fact that anybody is ever spiking the football or doing this kind of rah-rah, "We were the good ones," is awful. Then you add in all those other complicated factors, like the fact that this wasn't the scenario at all.

Essentially, I'd say no, you don't ever have a right to kill innocent people. It's never self-defense to be killing innocent people. I mean, short of some type of scenario where, if you're holding a baby and coming at me shooting, and I shoot back at you and it happens to kill a baby, I was acting in self-defense. I'm talking about scenarios where you're dropping bombs on cities.

It's never justified, and the overwhelming onus should be on you to demonstrate that you absolutely have to do it. That should be the standard, because there are so many other standards that I see thrown out that I just think make no moral sense at all.

People will argue about, in Gaza, the civilian-to-combatant ratio, which, to me, doesn't really—that's not what counts. That's not the measure that's important. Also, no one knows what the numbers are. They all pretend to.

The other thing is that people—as someone just recently argued with me about—will say, "Well, Hamas has to go. That's the starting point. Hamas has to go." And I'm like, "No, I don't think you get to say that."

Because the truth is that, look, you can make an argument that Hamas has to go. Sure. You can make an argument that the Likudniks have to go. You can make an argument that Kim Jong-un has to go, or that Xi has to go, or that Putin has to go, or that Zelensky has to go. Certainly, I would make an argument that Joe Biden had to go.

But just because a government has to go, that doesn't mean you can just go kill all their people. That should not be the starting point—the assumption, the axiom of the discussion. The question is: Is there no other option than doing it this way? It's like, okay, October 7 happened.

We can all agree this was a horrific tragedy and an indefensible act of terrorism. Can we say it's guaranteed that another one of those is going to happen tomorrow? Or was this the biggest security failure in Israeli history?

Okay, well, if it's the biggest security failure, let's just say—not even going down the inside-job rabbit hole or anything like that, but just saying it's a giant security failure—then put a bunch more men at that fence, first of all. And now you've got to talk about how you can achieve your goal while inflicting the minimum amount of devastation on innocent people.

Let's talk about it. You brought it up: October 7th. So, what exactly do you think about the October 7th attack by Hamas on Israel?

#464

What I just said: it was horrible, and by the same logic that I'm giving you now, it's always evil to target innocent civilians. I don't believe civilians can be held responsible for the crimes of their government.

This was, by the way, the Osama bin Laden logic, which I think would also be the logic of Bill Clinton or George W. Bush or Barack Obama. But Osama bin Laden very explicitly said, when he was asked, “Well, are you just going to target US military sites, or are you targeting US civilians?” It was an interview in the 1990s, before 9/11. He said, “No, civilians are fair game, too, because you guys have regular elections and you guys vote for your government, and therefore you're responsible for the crimes that they commit.”

I think that's the logic of a fanatic like Osama bin Laden, and that's not the logic that any of us should follow. It doesn't make any sense, and it's not true that people are responsible for the crimes of their government.

I think that same argument is used quite a bit by people on the pro-Israel side when they say, “They had an election in 2005 and Hamas won a plurality; therefore, 20 years later, they have no rights.” I think that's insane.

So, Hamas had no right to go after civilians. It's horrible. You see these teenagers being killed, and you see the images of people who were held hostage for all this time. Your heart breaks for those people. It's truly tragic.

I do think that it was, in many ways, an indictment of so many different things. October 7th happening was an indictment of the entire occupation and siege of Gaza and the West Bank, for that matter.

I think it should have probably forever destroyed the legacy of Benjamin Netanyahu, who—this isn't like George W. Bush, who was on the job for almost a year when 9/11 happened, but it was still kind of new. It was still kind of in his first year of being president. Benjamin Netanyahu was the longest-serving prime minister in Israeli history and had explicitly been like, “I'm the tough right-winger who's going to be tough on these Palestinians, who's going to move away from the idea of coming to a two-state solution, because this is what we need to keep us safe.”

The justification was, “I'm going to be hard on these motherfuckers, because I know what it takes to keep us safe.” That culminates in the worst massacre in Israeli history.

The other big one is that it's not even an open secret at this point. It's just out in the open: he had this strategy of propping up Hamas for years. He had this strategy of propping up Hamas for a myriad of reasons, but a major part of it was, “Look, as long as there are terrorists in power there, there's never going to be any pressure on us to give the Palestinians a state. Because, look, are you telling me I've got to negotiate with them?”

He was allowing Qatari money to flow, insisting that Qatari money flow to them. When the Qatari money dried up, he sent the Mossad in to insist that it get back to them—hundreds of millions of dollars in briefcases of cash.

He said in his own words that the reason for doing this was to, in his words, prop up Hamas, bolster Hamas, and keep them in power so that the West Bank and the Gazans were divided, and so that the international community, as well as the liberal Jewish community in Israel, wouldn't be able to put pressure on them to make a deal.

But what are the options? If he doesn't allow the money in, it also looks really bad for him, because if he's not allowing the money in, that means he's not allowing the quote-unquote aid in to help the Palestinians.

#464

Yeah. But, Lex, the dynamic here is that from to today, Israel's had a full blockade around the country. They won't let potatoes in. They won't let sugar in. The justification is that they're dual-use: they can be used to make rockets, as well as to feed starving children. So, we can't let that in because it's dual-use.

But cash to Hamas—does that not have dual usage? Is there nothing else that they can do?

When you have a full blockade around the country, you take on certain responsibilities. I think this is the essence of the whole struggle here, which is very tough, I think, for the pro-Israel side to grapple with.

The bottom line is that Israel hasn't occupied Palestine for just a few months after a war, or even a couple of years after a war while they're figuring out what they're going to do with them. It's been over 60 years. We're talking about a one-week-long war, or a day short of a week-long war, in 1967. Israel's had control of them ever since.

Much in the same way that if you kidnap someone, lock them in your basement, and don't feed them, you murder that person—in other words, you're not allowed to kidnap people and lock them in your basement, but once you do, you take on a responsibility to feed those people. You know what I mean? You can't keep someone and not feed them. That is a worse charge than just keeping them.

Anyway, I guess my point is, if you go, “Well, I'm a bad guy if I fund Hamas. I'm a bad guy if I don't let the aid in,” the solution was to let reputable international aid organizations bring aid in to the people of Gaza.

Don't pressure the Qataris to send in briefcases full of cash. Allow internationally recognized, reputable human rights organizations, who are lining up and trying to do it, to come in. Stop turning them away and let them in. This is so long past due.

I'm not defending Arab terrorism. I think it's a tragedy that the Arabs embraced terrorism. I don't think it's unique to them. In fact, I think it was the Zionist militias who introduced terrorism to that part of the world.

But terrorism persists because it works. This is true with state terrorism and with non-state terrorism. Terrorism has often worked for people.

Early Yasser Arafat, I think, was very influenced by the Algerians, who successfully kicked the French out by embracing terrorism. The major miscalculation of those Palestinian Arabs who did embrace terrorism was that this isn't the French.

This isn't the French hanging out in some colony with their home country back home, where maybe a few acts of violence could work enough that the liberal population back home is like, “I really didn't like the response to that terrorism. We killed so many people. Forget it. This is too much of a headache. Let's get out of here.”

The Zionist settlers were there to stay. They weren't going anywhere. They weren't going back to Eastern Europe. They were just there.

It's a tragedy that this whole thing went the way it did. But whenever you're talking about a conflict like this, the person who has the power—or the party who has the power—is the one who needs to make concessions.

It's indefensible that the status quo of the Palestinian people having no rights—literally no rights—being ruled by a government that they do not get to vote for or against, with no right to do commerce with the outside world, no freedom of travel, no freedom of movement, and no basic property rights—you can be kicked out of your home at any time, with no right to a fair trial, no right to a lawyer, and no right to a jury of your peers—has been the status quo since 1967. That's just indefensible.

In the context that that has been the status quo, even though I'm against it, when you're just lecturing about the way in which they resist this, I think it's very tough to be on a strong moral footing.

Yeah. You have to really empathize with the decades of suffering in the region. I suppose my question was grounded in: How can the Israeli government, how can the world, help the Palestinian people flourish?

So, you suggested allowing reputable aid organizations in, but that's kind of almost patching.

#464

Yeah. Just helping humans who are suffering, but that's not how you have a nation flourish. You have to build up the infrastructure. You have to build up a culture, the education system, the democratic processes of electing and regular elections so that the people are represented.

You have to form partnerships, friendships, and normalization of relations with the Arab world and with Israel.

You can travel back and forth and lessen the chokehold—the security chokehold—that you could say is justified in a militaristic situation.

But why is it a military situation? The question is: Where do we go from here? We'll talk about Netanyahu some more. He is very criticized inside Israel as well.

#464

Yeah, for sure. Maybe less so after October 7, because, again, in the same way you can empathize with the Palestinian people, you can empathize with Israelis. October 7 touched some kind of primal thing of fear, just like 9/11 did for Americans. And the same thing I said before: I could also very easily go, if one of my kids was at that rave or something like that and just got gunned down or kidnapped, I could understand being like, “Level the whole goddamn place.” And I'm sure I would feel that way if that was one of my kids.

No, that's exactly right. I mean, there are lots of examples in the world. France and Germany are right next to each other, and Ireland and England are right next to each other, and they're just totally living in harmony right now. The thought of them going to war is inconceivable right now. I'm not saying it could never happen in the future, but it seems pretty hard to imagine. That being the case would have been very hard to imagine for a very long time.

There were some serious levels of brutality between those two societies. And even more directly, Egypt and Israel went to war 4 times in a couple of decades. They went to war, and then in the late 1970s they made a land-for-peace deal, and they haven't been to war since. I do at least try to hold out that it's not like Egypt—you’re not going to say they don't have an issue with radical Islam in Egypt, you know what I mean? That's not the answer. It's just that they made a land-for-peace deal, and once that was solved, it was kind of easier to avoid the war.

And I do like to think that there could be a solution to the Israel-Palestine question, but it's going to have to involve Israel taking its boot off the Palestinians' necks. I know that's scary, and I understand that there are legitimate concerns about that. There was a great Thomas Jefferson quote about slavery, which was, “We have the wolf by the ears, and we can neither afford to hold on to him nor risk letting him go.”

You could see where that would have been a real concern of people right toward the end of slavery, or in the early 1800s, or the first half of the 19th century, where you'd be like, “Okay, okay, we recognize this is wrong now, but we've had these millions of people enslaved for all these years. If we let them go, they're going to fucking kill us. And what are you saying? They're citizens now, meaning the Second Amendment applies to them, meaning the guy who I enslaved can now get a gun.”

But I think in hindsight, looking back at it, we would all just go, “Yeah, but you can't enslave people.” So whatever risks come with the next phase of this, unfortunately, you're going to have to just deal with that and move. You have to start with abolishing slavery.

And it is good to also remember, in the hopeful message you send, that any day you can make a deal. That's one of the frustrating things I had when I hosted a debate on Israel: It just felt hopeless, and a lot of people I talked to felt hopeless. But I maybe naively see a lot of possibilities for peace there. I see, for example, normalization of relations between Saudi Arabia and Israel, and then Saudi Arabia taking some ownership over Gaza. Something like that—some interesting arrangement where a big, major player in that region takes ownership and steps in as the middleman.

#464

Yeah, I agree with you, and you're 100% right that, even before October 7, I think many steps had been taken away from the peace process and the feeling of that. Really, I think it was since the Second Intifada that the appetite for peace in Israel was greatly diminished.

But to your point, it's going to take really painful concessions on all sides in order to get there. Personally, I don't know if I say this for the Arab world, but at least the nation-states—their governments—I think are pretty much there. Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Jordan, and Egypt—their governments are almost like, “Look, these are American sock puppets, for the most part,” right?

So their thing is, “Okay, 100% of my population is completely opposed to what Israel is doing to Palestine right now, and they just hate that Israel—the nation—was created at all, that all the Arabs were kicked out of what is very important land to them religiously.” The governments there are like, “Look, we want to continue to have U.S. tax dollars flooding in here, and we'd love to make a deal with Israel, but you have to stop doing this to the Palestinians so my own people don't rise up against me.”

So I think as long as the Israelis were like, “Fine, we'll do a two-state solution or something like that,” I think Saudi Arabia couldn't wait to broker it. In fact, they proposed a two-state solution just a few years ago. They would love to be a part of that and normalize relations. Among the Palestinians, I think this has been accepted multiple times, at least by their leadership. It's like, yeah, you're going to have to accept that you lost in 1948. You're going to have to accept that you lost in 1947. You're going to have to accept that the state of Israel does exist. And you're going to have to accept that the right of return is not literally going to mean that everybody can go back to where they were.

What Israel is going to have to concede is that it was awfully fucked up that they kicked a lot of people out of their land, and that the whole “a land without a people for a people without a land” was never true. That was just a slogan that felt good to avoid what you guys actually did. And the fact that you occupied these people for 60 years was inexcusable, and that has to end immediately.

I interviewed Douglas Murray recently. He just wrote a book on Israel and Hamas called On Democracies and Death Cults. He makes what I think is a strong pro-Israel case, focusing on Hamas as an evil organization—evil for its corrupt leadership, which is essentially stealing money from the Palestinian people and allocating the money that is there toward terrorist, militaristic operations, versus building up Gaza.

Can you steelman the case for and then against this perspective, centering around Hamas, which is this extremist religious organization? The perspective is that they need to be eliminated, as you mentioned before, before any progress can be made.

#464

Okay. So, if I were to steelman Douglas Murray's case, I would say, well, I guess the case is: Hamas is a fanatical death cult, essentially, which I do think is a fair description of them. There is no question that they have pursued a path that was just devastating to their own people, and there's no question they have not spent the resources they have—their priority has not been uplifting their own people. Their priority has been, I think, essentially antagonizing Israel into this overreaction so that they can turn world opinion against Israel. I think they've been very effective at doing that.

Again, I think the argument would come back to something like: The people kind of voted for this in 2006, and the people sure do see a lot of people cheering when Hamas is doing some pretty horrific stuff. So, hey, you have that on one side, and you have a country that's much more similar to Western societies on the other side.

If we can just linger on that steelman, what do you make of the celebrations in Gaza after October 7?

#464

I think it's sickening and incredibly disturbing. I guess the way I look at it—I always, and maybe there is a degree of naivety to this, or perhaps it's just that I don't want to allow myself to go down a certain path because I think it leads to such dark outcomes—but I always try to be against the government for the people, against the powerful, sympathetic to the powerless.

I think that, look, it's sickening. You see big crowds cheering on these people who have been in captivity for, I think, some of them, over a year and a half. I also thought when Nikki Haley and other pro-Israel politicians were signing the bombs before they were launched into Gaza, I found that sickening. I think all types of mission-accomplished banners and flying on jets—I mean, I think all of it is horrific.

I think having Bob Hope specials at the end of the Persian Gulf War was sickening. I just think all of it is horrific. I look at it and I try to say to myself, “Okay, we had one 9/11 in this country, and we all collectively lost our minds as a society. We were ready to go bomb whoever the hell our politicians told us to bomb, and we didn't care how many people it killed. And we killed a lot more than Israel or Hamas has killed doing it.”

Imagine being trapped in what is it? People can call it whatever they want to. I do think Pat Buchanan and these guys were right to call it a concentration camp. You're trapped in a 5-mile-by-25-mile area where you cannot leave. You are stuck there. You don't have an airport because the Israelis bombed it. You don't have a seaport because they won't allow you. You have no access to trade with the outside world, and you're not suffering through one 9/11. You're suffering through 1000 9/11s.

The people in Gaza—their entire life has been being refugees. You know what I mean? There are generations of people who have been in this status now. And so, if my society lost its mind after one 9/11, I just have a tough time judging the people who grew up in this environment. But there's no question it is profoundly disturbing.

But I wonder how much of the indoctrination has really made the software of their minds permanently anti-peace. Yeah, does it extremify them in that? It doesn't justify anything, but it's more concerning for the prospects of peace.

#464

Well, I'd say I get your point. I guess it's an interesting question that I don't know if any of us know exactly the answer to, but I would say that even after, what was it, 70 years of the Soviet Union, there were real debates back then about the New Soviet Man and whether people's minds had been so warped that they would never even want or care about things like liberty, national identity, or independence. And yet, at the end, it was all still there.

It was very repressed and went underground, and people weren't allowed to talk about it, but they all still had it. In fact, I was just listening the other day to this Murray Rothbard speech from the early '90s, and he was talking about how a camera crew had interviewed a Chinese family under real-deal Chinese communism. I believe it was before Mao Zedong died, and they were saying all this crazy shit to the camera.

They asked them, "Would you rather your sons be healthy and live good lives, or would you rather they suffer but be loyal and obedient to the state?" They said, "We would rather they be obedient to the state," and all these things. Murray Rothbard was saying he saw this interview and was talking to his friend. He said, "Oh my God, this is horrible. It's hopeless. These people's minds have been warped."

Then he was talking to his friend, who was a China expert who had been there a lot, and his friend said, "No, they're not. That's what they say when the cameras are around." As soon as the cameras go off, they're not.

So anyway, I'm just making the point that even in the situation with Israel and Gaza—specifically Gaza, not even the West Bank—you can look at it and see that when the peace talks were going on, support for Hamas plummeted. When the peace talks fell apart, support for Hamas went way back up. Every time there's an aggressive military campaign, support for Hamas goes back up.

I just think I'm more hopeful than not that you could get to a place where you could have peace. But it requires you to understand the Ron Paul point about blowback and General McChrystal's point about insurgent math. You just realize that you're fighting in a way that produces more of the thing that you're fighting. The first step is to stop doing that. Your cure is making the patient sicker. So stop doing that, and then let's see if maybe we could heal.

What about the Douglas Murray case of the death cult, and that a fundamental part of this process is that Hamas needs to be eliminated?

#464

Well, I mean, first of all, I would just say that—and I'm not saying this as a fan of democracy—I'm not a big believer in democracy. I believe in liberty, and I think democracy is often not in line with liberty.

The Chinese government paid you to say that as well, or they—

#464

That was literally all I had to get out. But I get to say what I want for the rest of the podcast, but just that I had to—well, no. I mean, my beef with the Chinese government would not be that they don't hold regular elections. My beef with them would be that they silence speech, that they put people in camps, and things like that—the surveillance, that stuff.

When you call Israel a democracy, which I guess is right in the title of his book—full disclosure, I haven't read the book, but I have listened to some of his thoughts on this stuff—I think you run up against a real problem. The creation of the state of Israel, even though he tried to walk away from those comments, as Norman Finkelstein called out Benny Morris for writing in his book 1948: A History of the First Arab-Israeli War, which is a great book, his words were, "The Zionist project always knew it was going to involve transfer." That was Benny Morris's wording.

When Finkelstein was grilling him on this on your podcast, he kind of said, "Yeah, but that doesn't mean ethnic cleansing. That could be voluntary transfer," or, you know what I mean. But the point is, the Zionist settlers—and they spoke about this openly—all knew they had a major problem: You can't create a Jewish state if it's 50/50, which in all of Israel it was much less than 50/50. But even in the Israeli portion of the partition recommendation, it was very close to 50/50.

You can't really have a Jewish state with a 50/50 voter base, because now you're just kind of in a breeding war for the next generation over who turns out the vote. It's like the prospect right now of making America an official Republican state or an official Democratic state. How are you going to do that, man? It's 50/50 between the two.

I think what Benny Morris was saying was that they always knew some of these Arabs were going to have to get moved out of there so that they could have more of something, which ultimately got them to an 80/20 split. That's pretty much what Israel has maintained the whole time.

Now, Benny Morris could quarrel about whether that necessarily meant voluntary transfer, but when it happened, it wasn't voluntary. When it actually happened, in effect, it involved somewhere between 700,000 and 800,000 Arabs being forcibly evicted from that area.

That's one thing. A lot of nations are started on things like that. I suppose if you just did that and then were left with your 80/20 split and said, "But we have elections from here on out," I guess you could claim it's a democracy. It still seems like you're gaming the democratic system a little bit. If I just deported 80% of Democrats and then said, "Look, Republicans win every election," you might be like, "Yeah, dude, but you didn't exactly get there democratically. You got there through force." But forget that. I'll let that one go and just say I'll call you a democracy if you just keep being a democracy like that moving forward.

The real problem is the occupation that starts in 1967. When you've occupied an area since 1967, you can't even really call it an occupation anymore. It's an annexation. You took these lands and have control; you are, by definition, the government. You can call Hamas the government all you want, but they're not the sovereigns. They're not the final decision-makers. Israel is the final decision-maker.

Hamas does not meaningfully, in any way, decide the biggest questions about Gaza. I'm talking before this war, before October 7. The problem Israel has, in order to call itself a democracy, is that there are somewhere between 5 million and 6 million people—fewer now because they've killed a lot of them—who live under Israeli control and do not have voting rights.

By any other reasonable, commonly held standard of democracy, we would not call that a democracy. I'm not saying this to try to be inflammatory or to pick on the Israelis. There are things about Israeli society I like. I don't hate the people there. I'm Jewish. I love Jewish people. But the fact is that that's not a democracy. That's an apartheid state.

I'm not even trying to be inflammatory when I say this. It's just literally describing what's in front of you. If we in America right now said Black people no longer get to vote and could only live in these few neighborhoods, we wouldn't get to call ourselves a democracy anymore.

I'm not even coming at this from a pro-democracy point of view. I'm just saying that if your defense of them is, "We're a democracy," which seems to be the case so much, well, no, you're really not. As long as you have millions of people who have no say in their own government, you're really not a democracy.

So again, you could frame it as democracy versus death cult, which was his language for Hamas. It's a little bit difficult to accuse another group of being a death cult when the group you're supporting has killed so many more people than them.

I'm not saying that's the only metric. There are other factors, too. But the fact is that—I don't know the numbers for the whole history of the conflict, and I'd have to look at them—the amount killed by the Israelis on the Palestinian side versus the amount killed by the Palestinians is 20 to 1 in Israel's favor, with Israel killing more people, maybe more than that. I'd have to look at the numbers, but Israel has killed far, far, far more Palestinians than Palestinians have ever killed Israelis.

So it rings a little hollow to me to just call them a death cult while saying, "We're the democracy," even though there are millions of people who can't vote over who rules them, but they're the death cult. Look, they kill people in a more primitive, barbaric way, I guess you could say. There's something a little bit cleaner about when it's done by a government, when it's collateral damage, and when it's done with sophisticated weaponry. Still, there are innocent people on the end of those bombs, absolutely.

But there is, I think, a powerful ethical difference when you mention the 8-year-old girl, right? If your stated goals of the war are to do everything you can to avoid the death of that girl, versus saying, "We love death more than we love life."

#464

And Israelis—democracies—are pro-life, for life. I don't 100% disagree with you, but I think I would say the degree to which that matters is this: At a murder trial, after somebody's been convicted and before sentencing, sometimes the judge will allow them to give a statement. If their statement is, “I'm very sorry for what I did, and I'm so sorry to the family,” that might mean life without parole rather than the death penalty. You know what I mean? It might make that bit of difference in the sentencing.

If you get up there and you're like, “Hey, I'm happy with what I did. Screw the family,” that might make a judge who was going to give you life without parole give you the death penalty or something. It's that type of margin around the edge. Let's say you're a really bad guy and I want to kill you, and you're at home with a bunch of women and children. I know for a fact that if I blow up this building, it's going to kill all those babies. What I would be charged with is murder in the first degree.

The fact that I went in there and said, “Well, listen, hold on. It's a shame that I had to kill those babies. I really just wanted to kill that one guy. I wish the babies weren't there,” and they say, “Yeah, but you knew they were there and you did it anyway,” gets you murder in the first degree. Maybe it would make some little difference tinkering around with the sentencing at the end of it, but it doesn't, in kind, change what the crime is. And so, yes, whether you say out loud, “Oh, it sure is a shame that we got to kill all these kids,” when you're doing it over and over and you know the action you're taking is going to kill more kids, I just don't think it's that different. It's a little bit different, but really not that much. It's still pretty much murder.

And also, when you mix in with that the fact that if you go—and I'm not taking an opinion on the word “genocide.” I don't even like to get into that conversation. I feel like it just derails it anyway. What Israel is doing, whether you think it's a genocide or not, is certainly not what most people envision when they hear the word “genocide.” But if you look at the case South Africa presented at the International Court of Justice, the whole thing is just quotes from Israeli leaders.

And I'm just saying, it's not like they're always saying, “Oh, it sure is a shame that we had to kill that 8-year-old girl.” Half the time they say that when they're talking to the international community, and the other half of the time they seem to basically be saying, “There's no such thing as an innocent 8-year-old girl.” I just don't find that argument to be very compelling, especially when the thing has been going on for so long.

There is some disagreement I have with you there. I think what you're implying is that whenever they state it, it's not quite genuine, to some degree. I'm not saying it might be genuine for some people. I'm not saying it's necessarily not. I'm saying that when a lot of people are saying the opposite, it doesn't seem to be consistently genuine from the entire Israeli leadership class.

And even if it's genuine when some people say it, that's not enough to get away from the fact that Tucker Carlson, when he was on Piers Morgan, said, “I don't like my tax dollars being used to intentionally kill children.” A lot of people really objected to that word, “intentionally,” because so many of the defenders of Israel fall back on this: “No, no, that's not intentional. We're just trying to kill Hamas.” But again, we would never accept that standard in a domestic murder case. If you know there are kids there and you know they're going to die, then that's intent.

#464

I think I agree with you fundamentally because war is hell, and that's why I'm against war, but there is a difference. I think we're mixing in a lot of things. I think you're fundamentally against war, and that's why, to you, it really doesn't matter. It is murder. It's just murder, and we shouldn't do murder.

There are a lot of democracies with colorful flags that justify murder because they're trying very hard not to kill civilians. And when you look at the reality of the Obama administration, the entirety of the war in Iraq and Afghanistan, you're murdering civilians. Yes, you're trying to kill bad guys, but you're murdering civilians. That said, on an ethical consideration, in terms of which kinds of ideals or ideologies you can build a society on after the war, one that even on the surface level states that the value of every civilian life is equal and high in value—that's a good society. That's the concern with extremist ideology, that it's very difficult to build a flourishing society on. But the argument against that is the one you said, which is like, “Yeah, well, Hamas is really supported now because of the war.” Right.

By the way, I don't disagree with the first part of your statement there. I just don't think it's in conflict with what I'm stating. I understand, first of all, that there is a difference between the way you're going to prosecute crime domestically within your own country and the way you can prosecute crime in a war between 2 different countries. Maybe it's not exactly the same. You don't have cops that you can just send in. You can't arrest somebody and put them on trial. It's not the same.

But the point I'm making is more like I'm just saying how we would think about these things in a domestic setting. We're talking about morality here, and morality by its very nature rises above logistics. It rises above nationalities or governments or borders or any of those things. What's right or wrong? If it's wrong to rape somebody in New Jersey, it's also wrong to rape somebody in Central Africa. It doesn't matter. You're committing the same act that we would consider murder in the first degree here.

#464

And just to go one step further, I think part of the reason why people have different attitudes about the way 2 nations fight—what we think of as war versus what we think of as, say, a policing issue—is that we would never accept the idea that the same logic that's used in wars, used in World War II, even used in Iraq and Afghanistan, and especially used in the war in Gaza, would be used here.

If there was a bad guy, even a guy who had done something like October 7, which we have school shooters and things like that here, if there was an active school shooter and he's in a school shooting people, and we know he's already killed 25 people, we wouldn't blow up the school and say, “He's using them as human shields. No, it's not our fault.” You see, listen, those deaths, Lex, while tragic, were the school shooter's fault because he used all these people as human shields. We would never, for a goddamn second, if those were our kids in there, accept that excuse. That guy was bad, but you still had an obligation to do something else. We would never accept that.

Now, we may look at things differently in the context of a war, but by the way, I'm not sure I completely do. Typically speaking, when people think of wars, they're thinking of this government versus this government, this military versus this military. That's not the situation here. While Israel is saying, “Hey, they're using human shields,” and that is true to some degree—I think the Israelis overplay it a little bit—there have been clear instances where Hamas is using human shields.

But it's kind of the flip side of a different point. The other point is, “Why aren't they using their army or their air force or their navy?” Oh, right, because they don't have any of those. So you're fighting a war against a people that don't have a government because you've denied them their right to have one. That's the thing where I do think if you've occupied the place since 1967, you almost take on an obligation that you have to conduct this as a police matter. You're not allowed to just—because otherwise, we just laid out the logic: “Oh, there's a school shooter. Blow up the school.”

It's difficult to have a discussion about ethics when you're talking about war. It's really at the core of it: All war is immoral.

Yeah. I mean, by its very definition, it's innocent people dying almost always, right? It's difficult to pick which is the just war. Even World War II, because of the complexities that you mentioned, is difficult.

Yeah. Because it's Stalin.

#464

Well, as my buddy Darryl Cooper demonstrated, I think we can have a reasonable, civil discussion about these things without anybody blowing their lid.

We can all just talk. But look, World War II is just the third rail like nothing else. I really think World War II and the civil rights movement are the third rails of American politics: if you have any type of view that is not the approved, authorized view of how these events went, you're in a lot of trouble.

If you wanted to compare Hitler to Stalin's body count at that time, Stalin was already a genocidal maniac and Hitler had not gone genocidal yet. So there is a weird dynamic there. In hindsight, it looks a little bit better because you go, “Yeah, yeah, but he went so genocidal at the end there.” But that's a weird decision at the time, to ally with Joseph Stalin, when he had already done the worst things that Joseph Stalin had done, or at least a lot of the worst things he had done. I guess there were a lot more in the war as well.

But it's curious, though: you didn't mention Mao. It's that funding again, because he did even worse than Stalin. I'm not sure that's officially known.

Do we actually know that Mao killed anybody?

#464

I mean, all right, I'll say it. Here we go. I'm going to blow my funding. Bad guy that Mao is, I do not care for him.

I think the Chinese government officially says they have an actual percentage: that he was 70% correct. Is that true?

They actually broke it down to 70%?

#464

But the other 30% was being the worst mass murderer in human history. That's such a communist thing to do.

Yeah, we measured it and perfectly scientifically figured it out.

Since you mentioned Darryl Cooper, you're friends with him. Can you tell me about him and tell me about the whole saga of where he got attacked after the Tucker interview?

#464

Yeah. So Darryl, I was just a big fan and still am. I'm really just a big fan of him. We've chatted a few times, and I interviewed him on my podcast; I consider us friends. MartyrMade is his show, and it's just phenomenal.

I found out about him from my guy, Scott Horton, who's a very close friend of mine and, I think, the best person on war in the country. He's a genius. He runs the Libertarian Institute, and he's also been the editor at Antiwar.com for many years now.

He first told me about Darryl. What I knew of Darryl was just that he did a podcast with Jocko, so they did their show together. I listened to a couple episodes of it and really enjoyed it. Then Scott was like, “Dude, you've got to check out his podcast, MartyrMade. It's the best history podcast you've got.”

The first thing I listened to of his was “Fear and Loathing in the New Jerusalem.” He's done a few things on Twitter where he's shitposting and stuff like that, but when you listen to his work, when he lays down, “I'm going to put together this thing. I'm going to take years to put together a long presentation on the history of this conflict or the history of this,” he has the utmost responsibility in the way that he tells the story and the way he presents it.

I cannot understand how anyone would listen to his work and come away with the feeling that this guy is any type of Jew hater or Nazi apologist or anything like that. It's just not who he is.

What Darryl said on Tucker's show was, “I'll say this to be provocative sometimes, to rile my buddy Jocko, who's Anglo-Saxon, so this kind of gets to him.” He goes, “I'm being a bit hyperbolic when I say this, but I'll sometimes say that Winston Churchill was the chief villain of World War II.”

Now, he didn't commit the most atrocities. He wasn't the worst person there, but he was a guy who was hell-bent on this thing becoming what it ultimately became, whereas it might have just been an invasion of Poland. This may not have been this whole cascade of the worst thing that ever happened in human history.

The retelling of that is always people go, “He said Churchill was the chief villain of the war.” But it's like, “No, not exactly.” He's making a point. I think he's putting out right now a long series on World War II. He just put the prologue to it out, which was excellent, by the way.

I really have trust that Darryl will handle this responsibly. And not because this is his angle or what he's attempting to do. I think he's going to tell the truth, and the truth will take you where it takes you.

I think he's actually going to probably serve a function of bringing a lot of those types back to reality. If you think he's going to be excusing the atrocities of the Nazis in this thing, I just don't think you're going to be happy with the end product if that's what you're coming into it for.

Okay. One thing I want to say is, I think calling Darryl a Nazi sympathizer is just wrong, and it does a lot of damage. I think his podcast has a lot of value. There are several things to make very clear. I think he's a really interesting guy, and I'm sure I'll talk to him in the future, but I just want to lay on the table that what he's saying about Churchill is just dead wrong. I think, legitimately, that statement—removing the trolling from it—is a revisionist-history statement that I think is wrong.

The invasion of the Soviet Union would have happened no matter what. And possibly—I'm actually learning a lot more about this—Stalin could have gone the other way as well. That was going to be a global war no matter what. The role of Churchill we can debate, and I still don't think he was a main instigator of that expansion. There's a lot of historical documentation of that.

#464

Well, look, that's a fair debate to have, and it'd be interesting to see you two talk about that, or maybe not even debate it, but just have a conversation about that. I think the broader point you're making is that there's a lot of trivialization of World War II that happens in the West, in the United States especially. That's used by neocons and warmongers.

I don't think I've done a bunch of Israel–Palestine debates. I don't think I've ever done one where World War II wasn't invoked and where that wasn't the, “Well, I mean, Dresden, Hiroshima, Nagasaki—you're going to tell me it's not okay?” And immediately, if you just look at it like that, let's say the official narrative is 100% true in World War II. Let's even say every aspect of the official narrative is really true. The lesson of World War II is that we should have gone to war sooner, which is essentially the dominant mainstream narrative: Chamberlain is the failure. That was the problem, the appeasement. Churchill was the solution.

If only Chamberlain had been Churchill, or if only we had gone to war with Germany in 1933, it would have been better. Let's say all of that's true. It still doesn't follow from that that, therefore, in every situation, appeasement is wrong and aggression is good. It doesn't follow from that that that's the only lesson of history, and that now it's just okay to slaughter civilians. It's okay to go to total war against a civilian population because this one time it was necessary.

Bobby Kennedy said this to me—again, somebody whom I really do love and admire in many ways, and I'm glad he's the health secretary. I remember him invoking the Nazis and making a comparison between Hamas and the Nazis. You're like, “Dude, Hamas doesn't even control Gaza, really. The Nazis had most of Europe at one point. This is just not an apples-to-apples conversation. You can't even compare the two in terms of what type of menace or threat they are to the world.”

Sure, maybe if Hamas had a lot of power, they'd use it in a bad way, but that's true of some homeless guy on the street, too. But he doesn't have that power. So what are we talking about here?

The way I do think the World War II narrative is weaponized—even if World War II itself was necessary and just—the way that's been weaponized over the years has led to countless catastrophes. It's always there. I mean, I guess in some ways there might be something positive about the fact that everybody's always called Hitler if they're bad. But because we make Hitler the face of what is evil eternally, or something, he really does play the role of the devil in our society in a strange way.

Saddam was the next Hitler, Gaddafi was the next Hitler, and Bashar al-Assad was the next Hitler. Trump is Hitler. Hamas is Hitler. Except the problem is that none of them are Hitler. None of them are even close. It's just totally different.

Yeah. The amount of power is really important. It matters how much destructive power you have within you, with the capabilities. Every major superpower with nuclear weapons has the potential to be that destructive. It's just unproductive.

#464

And yet the only ones who have ever dropped them are us. Yeah. I was arguing with one guy on a podcast, and he said, “You can't allow dictators to have nuclear weapons because they might use them.” And I said, “But we are the only ones who ever used them.” He goes, “Ah, come on.”

“That’s naive,” or something like, “Wait, what? Why shouldn’t that be pointed out?” I don’t know. I’d prefer Iran not get nuclear weapons. I think we’re pushing them to probably want to pursue that. I also think there’s been a lot of propaganda about the nuclear program in Iran. I know, at least since the ’90s, according to Netanyahu, they’ve been 5 years away.

Yeah. I think there’s a lot of warmongering going on about all parts of the world, Iran especially.

#464

I have a lot of friends in Iran, from Iran. It’s one of the most beautiful cultures in the world—a superpower of intellect and culture—and it’s really sad and disappointing that the regime is basically suppressing that culture.

You have to always remember there are parts of the world where the people are beautiful, and we don’t get to see it because of the suppression, the lack of freedom.

#464

Yeah, no, absolutely.

So, all that said, there does seem to be a lot of hatred of Jews on X. How much of it do you think is actual hatred of Jews, and how much of it is just trolls, grifters, and conspiracy nerds cosplaying as Nazis?

#464

It’s really hard to tell. I don’t know how you even figure it out. I think this is one of the problems with outrage culture. One of the unintended consequences is that now you just have no way of knowing who’s saying this just to get a rise out of you, who really sincerely means it, or who’s some version of both.

There are so many weird dynamics because there’s no question—I see it all the time. I see a level of Jew hatred on Twitter that I’ve never seen before in my own replies and in other people’s things. It’s interesting; first off, you’re like, “Okay, so what’s going on here?” It’s an interesting sociological phenomenon.

It’s concerning and troubling and all of that stuff, but then you also see people who will be asking completely legitimate questions or making completely legitimate points that are called antisemitic. I think that does not help the dynamic at all, because now you’re almost like, “Oh, there’s—number 1, you just make the word meaningless. You take away the disincentive for anybody else to actually be a Jew hater.” I think there’s a lot going on.

One of the things is that, for young white men in America today, they’ve lived through the years of real, insane progressive wokeism. I’m 42; it’s just a different thing for me. I come from a different culture and a different time. It simply was not the case that when I was a teenager, when I was in college, or when I was in my early 20s, the school, the faculty, the politicians, and Hollywood—all of them—embraced racialism.

They all said, “We’re playing identity politics, and it is okay to dice people up along these racial lines and have that first and foremost in your mind.” There is this weird feeling over this last year, and now with Trump being reelected, that we snapped our fingers and wokeism went away or something like that. But these guys still came up in this era.

It was always the case that one of the dangerous elements of playing this game was: Hey, you think you’re going to play this game and young, straight, white men aren’t going to start playing it too? Why the hell would they not? Why would they just accept, “We’ll just sit here while everybody else is allowed to have a racial identity and a grievance about it, and yet we’ll be the one group who—you can just stomp all over us. We’re the bad guys”?

That’s part of the reason why I always opposed the woke insanity. First and foremost, I think it’s wrong. I think it’s wrong to be shitty to people based on their racial group, and that includes white people too. But then also, you’re like, “You don’t see that this is going to result in something bad?” So there’s that.

What’s weird to me is that I guess it’s because a lot of the people who are the most upset about the antisemitism also happen to be supporting Israel. There’s a big correlation between that. But clearly, it’s a huge factor in this. It’s not a coincidence that all of this rose up while Israel is just conducting this brutal campaign with our weapons and money.

I always think with these things, whether it’s Putin, al-Qaeda, or whoever—and I’m not saying the guy who posts Jew-hating stuff on Twitter is the same as them—I’m just saying, in all of these situations, you always have to separate: What are legitimate grievances, and what are, “Okay, you’re wrong on that, and you shouldn’t be doing that”?

It’s pretty easy for me. If I listen to Putin’s interview with Tucker, I thought his whole 30-minute opening thing was horrible and kind of stupid, especially when you’re talking to Tucker Carlson. This is for an American audience. You know how much that does not resonate with Americans, being like, “We have a historic claim over another…” Our entire society is founded on thinking that’s bullshit. It’s like, no, it doesn’t matter. Sorry.

Literally, read the Declaration of Independence. It just refutes everything Vladimir Putin said in the first 30 minutes. Our view of the world is that God wants us to be free, and we get to overthrow governments if they’re infringing on our rights. So that was stupid.

But when he’s talking about NATO enlargement and bringing Ukraine into the American military alliance, you’re like, “Okay, he’s got a legitimate point there.” We would not allow one of our neighbors to be brought into China’s or Russia’s military alliance. Likewise, when it comes to those guys, I do think that it is just true.

America has fought many wars over the last seven years, with Israel playing a very influential role in us fighting those wars. This was a scheme cooked up by the neoconservatives and the Likudniks in Israel, that we would go through this. But this has been confirmed by 4-star general Wesley Clark. He literally said it was a study paid for by the Israelis that we were going to topple 7 countries in 5 years, and we didn’t get there in 5 years, but we’ve made attempts to topple all of those countries since then.

Trump’s bombing the Houthis because they’re pissed off about Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians, and so they’re trying to shut down the straits or whatever. So we’re just bombing another group on behalf of Israel.

If you really are concerned about the rise of Jew hatred, I would say, “Look, it’s much like…” Sometimes people would argue that the thing I said in the beginning—that the terrorists don’t hate us for our freedom; they hate us because we’re over there—is just what Osama bin Laden says. He says he hates us for our military, but he really just hates us because he’s an Islamist and we’re free people or whatever.

I’d be like, “Okay, well, even if that’s what’s in his heart, that sure is his recruiting stick. That sure is how he gets other people to blow themselves up.” Even if you want to say—which might very well be the case—that some of these people just hate Jews and it wouldn’t matter if Israel was at war with Gaza or not, it’s like, “Okay, but that sure is their recruiting stick. That sure is how they get other people to go, ‘Look at what these Jews are doing in our foreign policy.’”

I don’t know. There’s a lot going on. I do think racialism of all different forms is stupid and wrong. It always just leads to sloppy thinking and bad results. It’s always ugly. Weirdly, it also always ends up hurting the person. It’s not good for you. It’s not good for your soul.

I don’t like seeing that stuff. But I also think, like I was saying before, there’s this hierarchy of outrages that you have to have in order to think and act. You have to put these together.

Despite being described as a self-hating Jew, I am really not. I love Jewish people. I love Jewish culture. I’ve benefited a lot from it. It’s, in many ways, made me the person I am, and I think it’s influenced some of the best parts of me.

But there is a whininess and a hysteria about this stuff that I think is just not healthy. I think it’s not good. I’ve told many Jewish friends and family this privately. The way I look at it is: I’m an American. This has been a wonderful country to be Jewish.

Jews are doing exceptionally well in this country. We’re 2% of the population or so, and we are thriving by any metric. If mean stuff on Twitter is our great burden to bear, I don’t think we should be talking about it like we’re in the middle of Nazi Germany or something like that.

I do think people get hysterical about it in a way that’s completely not productive. To me, I think of the Jew-hating nerds and trolls on Twitter as just the other side of the woke.

I kind of get that. Yeah, it’s almost like a response, like you were saying. It’s just that the woke weren’t censored, and the response to the woke was censored. Now that on X they’re less censored—or not censored—you just get to see it, and they’re both annoying.

#464

Yeah, I agree with that. They don’t really help the discussion on Israel. They don’t help the discussion on anything.

#464

In fact, one of the reasons I stay away from that discussion of Israel, which I think is nuanced and really complicated in the way that we've been discussing, is that in order to have an intellectual exploration of ideas, you have to be able to misstep and try ideas for size. I'm okay being criticized, but when it's low-brain takes that are just lying about me en masse, it's annoying. I get a huge amount of engagement just because I'm thinking out loud and reading history, and it's just annoying.

By the way, I'm really interested in World War II, probably in the way that Dan Carlin and Daryl Cooper are interested, because it's such an interesting stage on which human nature was explored in all its forms. There's the geopolitics of it. Everybody on that stage was complicated. There's also a lot of fascinating military tactics and strategy, military technology, plus the nuclear bomb.

All of that is a moment in human history. Listen, I love Genghis Khan, the Roman Empire, Alexander the Great. Those are all interesting studies of human history, military tactics, brutality, human nature—all of that. That's why I want to be able to discuss that. It's fascinating that humans are able to do that kind of thing.

What causes them to do it? What were the dynamics involved? The propaganda on all sides—could it have been avoided or not? Plus, Stalin is part of this picture. It's like, what the fuck? You don't get characters like that.

You're not going to get a global war of that kind. It might be a different one, maybe a cyber war or maybe a war in space, but we're not going to get this kind of war ever again. That was the biggest and the last global war we're going to get. So I want to be able to mouth off and explore and, yeah, argue with Daryl Cooper, B. Churchill, and say stupid shit in the process. Daryl says stupid shit in the process, too. So anyway, the trolls on the left and the right just make everything worse, and it's annoying.

No, I agree with that. And I'm sure I'm not without my own bias in this because, from my own self-interested perspective—I'm not saying this is the main reason to be annoyed with them or anything like that—but what I personally get is all types of “self-hating Jew,” “Nazi apologist,” all this, literally just because I criticize the way Israel's conducting this war. I think that's insane.

But I also feel like—and I want to be clear and disclaim this—I'm not saying this is the worst thing about people who are Jew-haters on Twitter, but just from a personal perspective, I'm like, “Guys, you are not helping me, man.” I'll get people in my comments who I think are trying to have my back, who just don't know I'm Jewish. Then I'll say something critical of Israel, and someone will argue with me and say, “Oh, look, a Jew came in here to defend Israel.”

First of all, do you understand that you're literally—you might as well be working for Mossad. You literally make the entire movement that's criticizing Israel look terrible, dude. You are literally the enemy that they would like to have. And so there's a very weird dynamic in the Israel-Palestine conflict where so many of the loons on both sides almost seem like they're secretly working for the other side.

When you see the Palestinian protests and they're chanting “Death to America” and all this stuff, you're like, “What are you doing? Are you trying to make people more sympathetic to Israel?” Because that's the effect. If Rabbi Shmuley were working for Adolf Hitler or something like that, it would all make perfect sense. You'd be like, “Oh, I get it. You sent this guy out to make everyone hate Jewish people.”

And then with the Jew-hating posts, too, it just feeds right into the opposition side's caricature. It's like, “Oh, so their game is they'll smear everybody who's a critic of Israel as being a Jew-hater. So your answer is to just really be a Jew-hater? All right, I don't think that's helping.”

So maybe this is a good time to ask for your advice, because these folks are the reason why I'm hesitant. I've interviewed several world leaders recently. It's looking likely that I'll interview Vladimir Putin and several other similar-level major world leaders. I've previously interviewed Benjamin Netanyahu for an hour.

One of the biggest regrets I have about that interview is that it was only an hour. I realized that I've learned a lot, but I think he's a really important historical figure, and I think it's impossible to have an effective conversation with him that's shorter than 3 hours. So it looks like he's interested now in doing round 2 with me for 3 or more hours.

And I've personally—so this is a bit of a therapy session—but I've personally been leaning against doing it. I hate that I'm leaning against doing it, because the reason I'm leaning against doing it is the very people you're talking about. I just don't want them, on either side—pro-Israel, pro-Palestine, it doesn't really matter—the chanting sheep of Animal Farm, Jew-hating or otherwise, to make your life difficult.

They follow you around everywhere online and make it difficult to think. I think whenever I come across these crowds, the woke left or whatever you call the Jew-haters, the woke right, let's call them, they just decrease the quality of my thoughts for the rest of the day. I feel dumber. Rogan talks about when he hears a bad comedian, he feels like nothing is funny anymore. This is what I feel like when I read their thoughts. I can't—I'm going to go read a book now because I need to recover.

#464

Well, it's a dangerous kind of poison to let into your mind, because then you're like, “Hey, I can't be thinking about you when I'm doing what I want to do. I can't be thinking about what your reaction to this is going to be.”

The way I always thought about it was, when I'd get hate online—which I'm always getting—I look at it like this: I've got a great family and a great career, and I really love what I do. I make really good money at what I do, and I do shows all the time. I get crowds of people who love what I do. I get a lot of people who listen to my podcast who love what I do.

And it's like, if I get all that and then the price that comes along with it is that there are some people who talk shit online, that's a very good price to pay for all of this. I just made a decision at a certain point that I'm going to accept that that's the price of doing business here. That's what it costs, and then, okay, fine. Sometimes I try to have fun with it or mock them or whatever, go back at them.

But again, I can never tell you what to do, because this is a very personal price that you have to pay, and it's a very weird psychological dynamic. It's not something that we were evolved to deal with; it's very artificial. If there's a group of thousands of people who hate your guts and are furious at you, we're almost hardwired to be like, “Well, I'm going to be killed now. That's the next thing that happens.” You're not supposed to get to know what someone in Arkansas thinks about you right now, you know?

So that's a very personal decision to make, but I kind of feel like guys like me and you have already made the decision that we're in the arena and we're going to deal with that price. From my perspective, I'm like, “Yeah, but how could you turn down getting 3 hours with Netanyahu?” That would just be so interesting. I'm not even saying I hate the guy, but I'm not saying you should interview him like you hate the guy, and I'm not saying you even have to grill him. But if you get 3 hours with somebody, something interesting is going to be revealed there.

There'll be a benefit to that. It'll be interesting to just see him talk that way. There's also something about, as we kind of saw with Trump doing the podcasts and even with J.D. Vance doing some of the podcasts, there is something really interesting about this format—the long-form podcast—where it just gets people to let down their guard and reveal themselves a little bit more. It's not just the time factor. That's a huge one.

But there's something about—if you and I were having this conversation right now, but behind us was a cable-news background of red and blue and sparks, with a ticker at the bottom of the show, and then you just start interviewing someone, it's just a different thing. Whereas this, you just fall into conversation mode. I'd be interested to see him fall into that. Putin, too. I just think it's great.

First of all, thank you for the encouragement. But to push back on the complexity a little bit, I think everything you said about your life is also true about my life, except for the family part. I want to have a family, you son of a bitch. You're bragging.

On the podcast side, I could have a lot of incredible conversations. Some of my favorite conversations are talking to programmers or video game designers, or talking to you about Netanyahu, versus talking to a world leader. It's a very specific thing, and people don't understand that. For example, you and I can mouth off. We can be super supportive of Netanyahu or super critical in a way that you can't do in front of the guy.

#464

Yeah, you can't. If you want to reveal something about that person, there's a different skill involved in order to reveal how they think and who they are as a human being. You have to, just like we said with Darryl Cooper, humanize the person to a degree in order to let their mind flourish in front of you, in order for them to break and let down the barriers that they've put up.

Benjamin Netanyahu has put up a lot of barriers. Internally, in Israel, he gets attacked insanely; there's a Game of Thrones constantly going on, and this guy has maintained power for a very long time, so he's very good at putting up those barriers. Plus, globally, he gets attacked a lot, so the task there is difficult.

Each one is a puzzle, and you have to make a decision: do you want to take this on as a project, which might become a lifelong project because of the consequences? You don't need to. There's a calculation there. I'm not saying it's so self-evident that there is a correct and incorrect answer.

I do think that we've probably all had things like certain types of ventures in life where you're like, "All right, no, I don't want to do that." But then you have to have a moment and be like, "Why is it you don't want to? Is it just because it's going to be a lot of work? Is it just because you're scared of it? Is it just because of this?" And those typically are not good reasons not to do something, you know what I mean?

There might be a reasonable point that you made in there, where it's like, when it is a different game to interview a world leader. That is a very different thing from talking to some comedian about his thoughts on all this stuff. It's a very different thing than talking to a world leader, and especially one who's conducting a brutal war as you're talking to them. That's a very difficult thing, and I don't know exactly what the way to navigate that is.

I agree with you: it's not just to be hostile and be like, "I've got you here for 3 hours. I'm going to grill the shit out of you." That's probably not the best way to do it. There's probably a way to have a conversation, to talk to the guy, probably try to get some important questions in, but also give him a chance to breathe and be a person. That's just from my perspective, but again, it's a very personal thing for me. I do think that—I hope you do it, because I'd love to see that podcast.

Okay. Well, see, this is part of the reason I asked you, because I get a Dave Smith endorsement on this, so that when this completely ruins me, at least there's another guy who thought there was a chance it might be a good idea, because I don't know.

The cool thing about the things we do is that you've been through a lot of battles. You've walked into a lot of tough debates, and you don't know—this could be the conversation that ends you.

#464

I know. Well, I'll say that's one of the things that I love about doing debates. There is something about that where I do kind of feel this—I'm a little bit of an adrenaline junkie. Not really; I don't skydive or do stuff like that, but doing stand-up is kind of like that. There's always something about it where you're risking a lot by doing it. You feel alive—not the way you do when you first start, but there is something about that.

There are kind of 2 things. Number 1, I feel like I'm obligated, and I wouldn't say this for you, but I think this is true for me. I think I'm obligated to do at least several debates a year. If I'm going to go on shows like your show and Rogan's show and Tucker's show, and Candace or whoever else, Patrick Bet-David and Tim Pool, and I go on these big shows for long-form things and I'm sitting there saying, "Okay, it's like this, and I think it's like this and that," then if I'm going to do that, I kind of have an obligation to test myself against someone saying, "No, it's not like that," and then show that I think I can stand up to these kinds of challenges.

So I feel like I'm obligated, but then there is a feeling to it where you're like, "Hey, man, my career is not a joke. I've got little kids. This is how I support them, and I am kind of taking my career in my hands every time I go do one of these debates. If I just get smoked and this guy totally beats me up, how is anyone going to look at me again after that?" You'd be like, "Ah, you acted like you had such a good point, and then this guy just totally destroyed your point."

But that kind of motivates me to be like, "Okay, I've got to really be on point. I've got to really make sure I've done my homework. I've got to make sure my argument is really tight. I've got to think about this thing from all ends." On the other level, if someone can do that to me, then that's kind of the way the movie is supposed to end.

If there is some hole in my argument that I'm just not thinking of and someone else can point it out to me, and I have no response to it, then I kind of deserve to be humiliated publicly for that. So, all right. I don't know. That's kind of exciting in a way, because the movie ends at some point.

Well, that's true. Unless you and your genius friends can figure out how to give us eternal life or something.

#464

I don't think I want to live forever. I think flirting with that idea too much is dangerous. This kind of transhumanism idea is not a good way of thinking. Of course, I do want to heal diseases and extend human life, especially the quality of human life.

But if we could be in much better shape and much healthier, and extend life by a few decades, I think that would be great. But I agree with you: I think there's supposed to be an expiration date on it. I think there's something about scarcity being a necessary component in a lot of different fields, where life itself having a finite amount of time on it makes it more precious.

Yeah. At the individual level, and then at the societal level, it just does seem like death is the way you get new ideas. It's like people kind of solidify their ideas and are unwilling to change their mind. The only way you get new ideas, right, is the next generation has to take them over.

#464

Yeah. You have to keep turning.

All right. Speaking of the trolls and Israel, I've got to ask you about this. Let's talk about Jeffrey Epstein. I recently got attacked because of a couple of conversations I had with Tim Dillon 3 or 4 years ago.

#464

I love Tim Dillon. He's hilarious.

I love Tim, too. I've known Tim for many years. Love that guy. I bring up Jeffrey Epstein often because there's a fascinating study of evil to me, whichever angle you take on it. I think, partially, they talk shit, but I showed some skepticism that he's connected to Mossad.

To me, there are 3 possibilities, and I've evolved on that since then. By the way, I'm not actually sure it's Mossad; it could be any intelligence agency. It could be the CIA. But I was wondering if you could educate me. I did a little research on this last night. I looked into it a little more, and then I saw that you said he's definitely Mossad.

#464

Well, I don't know if I said he was definitely Mossad. I don't know my exact wording. I made 1 kind of jokey post, as is the case with almost any intelligence operation.

Look, I don't want to pooh-pooh anybody's hopes here, because I guess the JFK files just got released and supposedly the rest of the Epstein files are coming out, and there's a major yearning right now to get to the end of the movie where we find out everything that happened. I think it's great that people have that desire, and I hope more and more comes out. I think the truth is that with any intelligence operation, we're probably never going to know all of the details of exactly what happened.

The funny thing about intelligence agencies is that I've been regularly accused of being CIA, FSB, or Mossad, depending on the group that's attacking me. I think it's a fascinating topic, and it's very difficult to know somebody's intelligence affiliation. But if you have any nuance and I want to discuss the nuances, then the comment is going to be, "That guy for sure is Mossad," if we're talking about Mossad, or so on.

Yeah, that's one of the things I didn't know. I saw that Alex Acosta said that Epstein was intelligence. To me, that's like, okay, that's a piece of evidence. That's a really valuable piece of evidence that he's intelligence. And that was very—not just intelligence, but Mossad, because before that I thought it might be the CIA, because that's what I kind of heard. I think it's quite possible that he was working with elements of both.

I also think that's something that people get a little bit wrong when they think, "Okay, this guy was CIA, or this guy was Mossad." I think there's also the possibility that there are rogue elements within those organizations. This is not necessarily coming from the director or whatever. I don't know, but you look at the guy—the way his career trajectory tracks is completely unexplainable outside of being connected to intelligence. It's not just 1 or 2 people saying that he's intelligence.

It's like, dude, the idea that you have no experience and you're a teacher at Dalton, which is this incredibly elite New York City private school, and then all of a sudden you're at Bear Stearns. Within 2 years, you've made partner and you're worth hundreds of millions of dollars, and nobody knows where you made your money from. This just doesn't happen. Then you're inserted into this world with all of the highest-level political leaders and cultural figures and so on.

But the thing that's amazing about the Jeffrey Epstein story is the level of evil and corruption that it exposes. No matter what the answer is, you're going to tell me that there was a pedophile ring in our country that involved—I mean, listen, dude, if you had said this shit before it came out, this would have been the wildest conspiracy theory—but a pedophile ring that involved the most powerful people in the United States of America and, to some degree, the world, touching the Royal Family, the Clintons, and all these people, and that this was known and covered up and then allowed to continue.

I mean, there's a blackmail operation that relies on raping American children. Whether it's the CIA or Mossad doesn't make it any less horrible; it's equally horrible. But then there are these elements where you're like, okay, when he first got arrested, he was given a slap on the wrist, and then the prosecutor says, “Well, I was told by the intelligence community that he's intelligence and to go easy on him.” It's like, okay, okay—and you didn't resign in disgust that day? I don't think that's too much to ask for.

There was the ABC reporter who said that she had the whole story. She was on a hot mic saying she had the whole story, and then the network told her to squash it. It's like, and you stayed working there? I'm sorry, I'm not saying we're all imperfect and none of us are heroes, but you're in a news network and you uncovered a child-raping ring that implicated the most powerful people in our society. Your news network told you, “We will not run this story because of our relationship with the Royal Family,” and you did not resign in disgust that day and take this story to every single independent outlet that would maybe publish it?

I'm sorry, but it's so damning to the entire apparatus that we did not, at the very least, see mass resignations over this. Forget even expecting that it would have been prosecuted and shut down. To this day, even—I think Tucker Carlson just said this recently—but I guess it's a little bit of a weird area when you're filming people raping children. Where are the tapes? Why is everyone talking about the flight logs and the files? Where are the tapes?

I don't know what the legal process is, because I think technically it's child pornography, so you can't just distribute it and let everybody watch it. But isn't there a way that somebody has to sit down and watch it, see who is implicated in this, and see who— I just don't understand. There also seems to be a lot of lying with this administration going on right now on this topic. Does anybody really expect that we're actually going to get to the bottom of this? Because I don't. And that in itself tells you what a sham this whole goddamn system is.

One of the things that's so amazing about the Jeffrey Epstein story is that you have all of that, and then, of course, the end of it is just like, wait a minute—what? Hold on. He's in the most secure prison, then the cameras go out, the correctional officers don't fill out the log, and he's found dead. I mean, it's the most—it's just—when you look at it in totality, there's no getting around the huge indictment it is of this entire system, of everything.

And even the fact that the Trump administration, when Pam Bondi goes, “We're going to release all of this information. We've only redacted what needs to be redacted for national security”—why does anything need to be redacted for national security? I'm sorry, you're telling me there's a pedophile ring and we can't tell you everything about it for national security? Why would that be related to national security?

I do think there's something very interesting here because, as we talked briefly—I don't know if that was on air—we were talking about how Sam Harris criticized me a little bit for not having the credentials to talk about some of this stuff. I even said, “Okay, he's got a point.” But one of the things that guys like Sam Harris talk about a lot is that we need trust in institutions. This is his big thing: these people like Joe Rogan and Dave Smith are just tearing down the institutions.

While I recognize that's an issue, I also think we need trust in these institutions. Sam Harris, well, if you talk in that tone, it means you're not being emotional and you're only being logical and rational, which I actually don't think is appropriate when you're talking about a child-raping ring. But whatever—that's my take on it. Where are these institutions I'm supposed to trust, man? You're telling me there's a pedophile ring that is at least, to some degree, associated with national security. What the fuck?

And how could you possibly have this story? If you did care about trust in institutions, then you should be even louder than me, talking about how you have to tell the truth on this story. Otherwise, we'll never have trust in these institutions.

I'm the same, actually. I believe in institutions. This is where you and I probably disagree on the libertarian side. I think institutions, if they're run efficiently, can—

#464

Right, who's the utopian now?

That's right. I mean, there is a utopian notion to it for sure, but it's very possible that bureaucracies always destroy the productivity and effectiveness of institutions. It's possible. It's a Lord Acton kind of “power corrupts” type of deal.

You're absolutely right. If you believe in institutions, you should want to release everything about Epstein. You should want to be as transparent as possible.

Yeah. But the one thing I'm—and it is very suspicious—so I'm more and more becoming convinced that there's some intelligence agency connected to it. But I also want to, setting that aside, comment on one thing: again, it's super entertaining, but people say about me that I came out of nowhere, and that's proof that I'm intelligence.

First of all, there is a track record of where I came from, quote unquote. It's just that people are too lazy, and there is something sexy about saying, “Fucking Mossad. Oh, he's denying it—fucking Mossad.” By the way, the Mossad thing is new. It used to be the FSB and the CIA.

I've been gradually growing in popularity over the past 10 years. I've been doing interviews, lectures, and podcasts, and it's actually been very gradual. There's something—I know I've experienced this too, right? There's such a difference in perspective. If somebody just found me and they just found out who I am and they go, “This guy's brand new and he's doing all these shows,” you're like, “Yeah, well, not from my perspective. I've been doing stand-up comedy for 19 years and I've been podcasting for 15 years.” Then, when it starts taking off, everybody's like, “This guy just came out of nowhere,” and you're like, “I mean, all right. I wish I had been aware that it was all this quick.”

But a lot of this stuff is just laziness, people searching for confirmation bias, and people searching for a simpler story because that's easier. If they believe that Epstein was Mossad and there's a clip of you where you're like, “I don't know about that,” then they go, “See, he's Mossad too.” Now that fits perfectly into my little story.

I don't know. The truth is that it's quite possible that people just aren't convinced. However, given enough time, Tim Dillon is always right about everything, so eventually you'll have to admit that he got it right. Not to say the cliché, cheesy thing, but it is true that comedians sometimes say the obvious thing that people are a little resistant to say, and it ends up being true.

Now, we just landed some more credibility to Tim Dillon's insanity. Great. I do want to comment on the other aspect of me that came out of nowhere. Fine, but I do get to talk to world leaders, which I have to really admit I don't understand why.

The experience I've had is that you basically gain a reputation. I talked to a lot of scientists early on, and you get a reputation that this is an interesting person to talk to, and that travels. Then, over time, you get fans, and world leaders are humans too. They listen to the stuff, and sometimes it's their family that listens.

Yeah, oftentimes, right? Their kids, it seems to be a big one.

And so that's just how it happens. You send an email: “Hey, do you want to talk?” And then their team, or them directly in several cases, just responds.

And that's it. It's as simple as that. They're human beings, and I think a lot of them, as human beings, are exhausted by journalists—by shitty journalists, I should say. It's hard for them to know which journalists are good.

The cynical view is that they want somebody who's just going to spell out propaganda aligned with their propaganda. No, they just want a good-faith person in front of them.

I should also say that no single world leader has told me which questions to ask. There's this meme about my conversation with Modi that's like, “Scripted.” Nope. There was zero oversight. I have full control.

#464

Well, there's also one of the major dynamics, which is one of the most interesting themes in the world right now, but it's particularly true in America: corporate media is just shrinking and shrinking and shrinking.

And these—whatever this is—shows on the internet have the audience. It's so weird that we still all call them podcasts, because that's just not the right name for them at all. None of us have had an iPod in quite a long time.

The first person who came up with it thought, “It's a cast on an iPod—it's a podcast,” and we all still use that term, even though it's a terrible name. But whatever, these shows on the internet have the audience, and that's a big factor. It's like, “Oh, this is where you can go to the audience.”

I don't know exactly—I have no idea, I should say—the motivations inside any individual's head. But I would say, in the case of Vladimir Putin, he is completely blacked out in American media, to the point that even RT has been blocked out. They never play any of his speeches. They never allow you to hear, “Look, this is what this guy's perspective is.”

It's very interesting, in the same way that they kind of all flipped out when Osama bin Laden's Letter to the American People went viral on TikTok. Then all the talk of banning TikTok increased and stuff.

For him, when he did the Tucker interview, or if he does an interview with you, that's a way for him to do an end run and allow his perspective to be heard, which I personally think is obviously a good thing. If you're going to go to war—and we're kind of at war with Russia right now—you should know what the other guy's perspective is. Not that you should take it as gospel, but you should know it.

From Netanyahu's perspective, I would imagine Israel has a lot of control in a lot of different areas, but they have been losing the internet battle very, very badly, and it's a major problem for Israel. I still think, in a very strange way, everybody seems to be underestimating how grave the implications of all of this are.

The view of Israel from the world is never going to be the same as it was before. The generational divide on it is so stark. Everybody 40 and under—and time goes by quickly, so pretty soon the 40-and-over crowd gets aged out—this is just never going to be the perception of Israel that my parents' generation had, ever again, because of this war.

I'm sure, to some degree at least, Netanyahu feels like he has to try to get his perspective into that internet conversation. I think a lot of different people are realizing this. Obviously, it was Donald Trump. In a way, it's kind of shocking, and I guess Bobby Kennedy, when he was running for president, and Vivek Ramaswamy, when he was running for president, were doing some of it even before Donald Trump was.

It's kind of crazy that it took this long for politicians to figure out, “Oh, well, I guess we have to go where the audience is.” That's the point of doing shows, right? Would you rather do a show with 1 million people or with 10 million people? It's like, “Well, okay, you guys do CNN all the time. Why wouldn't you do Joe Rogan's podcast?” It's just a bigger audience, and those people get to vote, too.

You reminded me, with Netanyahu, that one of the goals I have with the podcast is to have the kind of conversation that a historian would find useful 20 years from now, which is tough to do because you're going to get punished for it. I mostly want to reveal as much information as possible without the signaling, without the—well, you just want to know: Who was this person?

#464

No, I think that's exactly right. I think this was kind of what Darryl was saying. The awful thing about always using World War II as the next example for the next war is that it's almost like you're never allowed to treat your enemies as people and say, “This is a real person with real grievances.” They might be a fanatic also. I'm not saying they're not, but there are human qualities to it.

Even when Obama and Hillary Clinton were going to do the regime-change war in Libya, it was all this propaganda: “He's buying up Viagra to rape all the women, and he's going to commit genocide.” This guy had been in power for decades. You know what I mean? He hadn't done that.

The way you're supposed to think about war is almost like these people have been possessed by pure evil. They are monsters, and there's no talking to them. There's no dealing with them. There's no negotiating with them. It's simply this.

A good example is this recent conflict with the Houthis. The Houthis in Yemen were invaded by Saudi Arabia in 2015, with the full backing of the United States of America. The Houthis maintained power for 8 years through that. They maintained power until the Saudis finally gave up.

It was literally like the Saudis were just killing hundreds of thousands of people, and then the Houthis would get a drone off at one of their oil refineries or something like that. Eventually, they were doing enough damage that the Saudis were like, “Ah, shit. All right, this isn't worth it anymore.” And so they ended it.

You have this thing where you're like, “Okay, if they went through a total war for 8 years, what do you think Trump sending a few Tomahawk missiles over there is going to do to stop them from doing this?” But then they didn't do anything during the ceasefire, according to all reporting on it. It was only once the ceasefire broke down that they went back to attacking ships again that were coming through.

You see this thing where you're like, it's not saying who's right or wrong, or who's good or bad. It's like, look, sometimes there's a diplomatic solution and there's not a military solution. In this case, it just shows you that if there was a ceasefire, these guys would chill out.

What do you want to do again? Do you want to go to total war with them? We could overthrow the Houthis, but if the U.S. invades Yemen, that's kind of what it would take. Does anyone here really have the appetite for another catastrophic war in the Middle East against the poorest country in the Middle East?

Or we could pursue this diplomatic route, which seemed—I'm just saying, based on the evidence that they weren't attacking ships during the ceasefire—it seems like there could be a diplomatic solution here.

The problem is, if you make everybody monsters and they're not human beings, you can't do diplomacy with monsters. You can't make a deal. You can't negotiate with monsters, but you can with humans. I'm sure there are times where you shouldn't or can't negotiate with humans, but it's better if you can, and we could use a lot more of that thinking.

Can we take that idea and move to the war in Ukraine? Sure. What do you think is the path for peace there?

#464

Well, I think what Trump is pursuing is infinitely preferable to what Biden was doing. With Donald Trump—and I don't think everything he's done has been perfect—I really did not like that mineral deal he was floating for a while there.

I think maybe the best thing that came out of that Oval Office thing is that maybe Donald Trump goes, “It's going to be very tough to do business like this.” And it's like, yeah, we shouldn't be doing this business deal anyway.

By the way, I don't think we should do it, for a few reasons. Number one, principally, I think it is kind of like bullying Ukraine out of its resources. From what I understand, they don't even have that many rare-earth minerals, but whatever.

It's also like, well, look, if he was selling it to Zelensky as kind of a security guarantee—“Hey, if we're in business, then if Putin messes with you, he's messing with us”—from my perspective, that's the whole point. You don't want to get into the business of giving out security guarantees.

This is why George Washington was against entangling alliances. If you give out war guarantees to too many places, you might have to fight a lot more wars than you otherwise would have fought.

And also, we're in this weird position where America postures like it's so tough, but when it comes down to it, we're not going to war in Ukraine. There's no political will here. I'm sorry, try to convince the American people that we should send our boys to war. I understand you're from the region, or you have roots from there, but to the average American, the idea of going to war over whether Luhansk is ruled by Kyiv or Moscow is just—they don't even know what Luhansk is, and if they met someone from there, they would probably assume that person was Russian. You know what I mean? They might be, but whatever.

I think the first step on a path to peace is that you have to want to get to a path to peace. So, I think Trump's doing a good job in that. Do you think all 3 sides want peace, from what you understand?

#464

Obviously, Trump legitimately, fully, and with urgency wants peace. I think for sure Trump wants peace. I also think Putin wants to wrap the conflict up, and I think Putin has been willing to deal for the entire lead-up to the war and pretty much throughout the war. There's been a lot of solid reporting on this, and the sources are pretty impeccable.

The head of NATO, Stoltenberg—I always mess up his name—but he literally said that in late 2021, Vladimir Putin actually sent a draft agreement to NATO. His condition for not invading was, "I will not invade, but you have to put it in writing." He sent a draft treaty to them: You have to put in writing that Ukraine will not join NATO.

Then Stoltenberg bragged about how he said no because, "We won't let Vladimir Putin dictate to us whether we can expand NATO or not." He was bragging, "And look what he got: more NATO expansion—Finland and this and that." So, look at that. He didn't even seem to notice: "Wait a minute. You're admitting that you could have just promised not to bring Ukraine into NATO and saved hundreds of thousands of lives. Seems like it would have been a much better deal." It's going to be a much better deal than what Ukraine will ultimately end up getting.

I also think Joe Biden's CIA director, who was CIA director for all 4 years, William Burns—when he was ambassador to Russia, he wrote the "Nyet Means Nyet" memo. Again, this was dumped by Julian Assange. This wasn't for the public. This was just him writing to Condoleezza Rice, the secretary of state, to tell her his assessment.

He said that his exact words were, "A decision Russia does not want to have to make." This was the decision about whether to invade Ukraine or not. He said, "If you keep pushing for Ukrainian entry into NATO, this could lead to a civil war and even worse. And in that situation, Russia would have to decide whether or not to intervene—a decision Russia does not want to have to make."

So, essentially, I think it's pretty clear from all sides that Putin didn't want it to come to this. Look, even after the coup in 2014, he took Crimea, but he didn't invade the country. He may have sent special forces in, but not the full-scale 2022 invasion. And even during the civil war, it seemed like he acted reluctantly.

In 2014 or 2015, when they had the plebiscites in Crimea and in the Donbas region and voted to be independent, he didn't take them then. He could have used that as a pretext, like, "Hey, they voted to be with us," and he didn't. I think he wants to end the war.

Zelensky, from everything he's said publicly, seems like he still feels—I mean, I'm just taking him at his word here—that we could end the war, but we have to end the war. It seems like he's moved from his position being, "No, we have to reclaim all of our territory," to now his position being, "All right, maybe we don't reclaim all of it, but we have to be given some type of security guarantee in the future."

I think the problem with that is, again, I don't mean to be cruel about this, because it sucks that little countries next to big countries kind of get bullied around. But there also is a bit of an entitlement to demanding a security guarantee. What exactly do you mean from America? What, that we'll go to war if you're invaded? Why do we owe that to anybody? That's crazy. I'm sorry, you could just sign up to say that we'll go to war if anybody invades anybody. I hope nobody invades anybody, but I don't want us to get dragged into that. That's a recipe for always being at war, and I don't think that's right for our country.

So, essentially, I think Trump and Putin want peace. If that's the case, I think we'll ultimately get to an end of this war.

So, there's a lot of stuff to say here. Let's actually start at the beginning, at the foundation of this. I think the thing that we left unsaid that's important to say is that Putin invaded Ukraine on February 24th, 2022. And I think he is, at least from my perspective, the person who started the war. You could talk about NATO expansion, you could talk about anything else that led to it, you could start at the collapse of the Soviet Union, or you can go all the way back, as he did, 1,000 years.

The reality is—and this goes to our deep discussion about the morality of war—that no matter the reasons, the guy who pulls the trigger first, non-accidentally, and keeps pulling the trigger, that's the guy who's at fault.

#464

Oh, I agree. I'll say one standard for everybody. The standard that I laid out before is the same one I said: Did you absolutely have to do that? Once you start killing people by the hundreds of thousands, it's like, was there any other option? Are you telling me you absolutely had to do this?

My friend Scott Horton, who I was talking to you about, is a totally brilliant guy. Even in his book, there's a whole chapter on all the other options Vladimir Putin could have taken. So, you're absolutely right.

There's a weird thing where people say that if you say the West provoked this conflict, that is a very different thing than saying that this invasion was justified. In the same way, if you were at a bar and someone went and spit in another guy's face, and then he pulled out a gun and murdered him right there, he's not justified in doing that. That's not okay. You don't get to murder someone because they spit in your face.

But if you were talking about why he murdered that guy, I'd be like, "Because he walked up and spit in his face. That's why it happened." That is essentially my contention about this war, and I think it's crystal clear that that's why it happened.

Listen, it may be right or it may be wrong. But if China or Russia ever backed a street putsch to overthrow the democratically elected government in Mexico, then installed a pro-Chinese or pro-Russian government, started pumping arms into that conflict, and kept floating out the idea that they were going to bring Mexico into their military alliance, Washington, D.C., would simply not allow that. You cannot do that any more than the Soviet Union could put nuclear weapons in Cuba.

Sorry, but that should be said: that's really Cold War, 20th-century neocon thinking, right?

#464

It is the way the world works, but you should still punish that. I don't think, outside of the neoconservatives—I mean, whether you're talking about the neoconservatives or going way before the neocons—any other group that has ever had control of U.S. foreign policy, going back to the Cold War years, the Truman administration, and the Eisenhower administration, would disagree. I think you could take this back to Thomas Jefferson.

If this happened in 1801, there is simply no way that they would allow a foreign great power to come invade our neighbor, overthrow its government, and then bring our neighbor into its military alliance. I think there's no great power that would ever tolerate that.

First of all, we're in a post-nuclear world, right? Meaning, there are nuclear weapons. So, the threat of somebody being on your border is just not the same kind of threat when you're a nuclear power, which is why you look at Finland.

#464

No, I think in some ways it's more of a threat. In some ways.

Well, Putin is not upset about Finland joining NATO nearly as much.

#464

Look, I'm just saying, to Vladimir Putin, in his own words, what his issue always was was the military hardware that comes along with NATO membership. It's not just that you get into NATO; then you get all that military hardware there. He made a huge deal about the dual-use rocket launchers in Poland, which George W. Bush put there after 9/11.

So, I think all of those things are factors. I think Crimea being Ukraine's only year-round warm-water port is one of several elements to it. But I do think a huge part of it is that the country has been invaded through Ukraine multiple times. Within the grading on a curve of how reasonable governments are, I think he very reasonably saw that as a security threat.

But we should make very clear, because of the way that comes across, that the full responsibility for the invasion of Ukraine lies in the hands of Vladimir Putin.

#464

Sure, I completely agree with that. Vladimir Putin launched a war. Again, I don't know exactly what the numbers are. I've read a whole bunch of estimates, some that contradict each other, but the consensus seems to be that it's at least in the hundreds of thousands, possibly well north of 1 million, if you're talking about the casualties on both sides.

And Vladimir Putin launched a war that led to that, and he's responsible for that. That being said, you can also point out that what we're really talking about here is the George H.W. Bush administration, the Clintons, Bush again, Obama, and then Trump, and the people who were in charge of foreign policy in those administrations. The same ones who gave us Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Somalia, and Yemen were also in charge of our European foreign policy.

Their most reckless policy of all was their NATO policy. They drove up to this conflict with Russia with nothing but off-ramp after off-ramp after off-ramp, and consciously decided, "We're not going to take any of those. We're going to drive it all the way up to this point."

Thomas Friedman of The New York Times interviewed George Kennan in 1998. George Kennan was the Cold Warrior. He's credited with founding the containment strategy in the Cold War, and he was talking about the first round of NATO expansion, which he and many other foreign-policy graybeards opposed.

He said, "This is the worst thing we could possibly do after the fall of the Soviet Union: to now say that we had this alliance in NATO that was an anti-Russian military alliance, and now that the Soviet Union isn't there anymore and it's Boris Yeltsin's Russia, we're going to expand NATO because of that." He literally said in 1998, "The people advocating that we expand NATO are going to continue advocating it and advocating it and advocating it, and then there will be a Russian reaction, and then they'll say, 'See, that's why we were right to expand NATO,' but they'll get this completely wrong."

When do you think a deal is reached?

#464

I really have no idea what the timeline is going to look like. I'm hoping sooner rather than later. I think Donald Trump would love nothing more than to have some type of big spectacle of ending this war, some type of big press conference, or some type of—you know what I mean?

I'm sure, if I had to guess, that's where Trump's mind is: how to do this in the best way that sells him the best. But I think already we're in a position where Donald Trump has put a lot of political capital chips into the middle of the table that he can end this war, and he's going to look very, very bad if he can't. So, he's highly incentivized to get this thing done as quickly as possible. Hopefully that can happen soon. It would be great if it could happen in the next month.

People on both sides, outside of Donald Trump, were telling me that it's a process. There's a kind of implication that it's going to take a while, which I really hate. I really love Donald Trump's urgency.

#464

Well, it's also terrible. Look, when innocent people are dying in war at any time, it's terrible, but there is something profoundly awful—and I'm old enough now that I've seen this happen a few times, or I've lived through it a few times. I've read about it happening earlier, but once you've already decided the war is over and people still die, there's something almost sadder about that, because it's always like, "Come on, you already know."

When there'd be a big bombing campaign in Afghanistan, when we already knew we were a few months away from ending the war, you're like, "Ah, you've got to kill more people on the way out? We already know we're leaving." At least in the beginning, they could kind of hide behind this justification. They could be like, "Listen, we're going to overthrow the Taliban and install our new government. They're going to be a democracy. It's going really well. We have to do this in order to do this bigger project."

But then by the end, you're like, "We're not even pretending anymore that we're doing anything more positive." It's just someone dying in a senseless thing we never should have been in.

In the spirit of that, that's why I traveled to Moscow, and I'll travel to Moscow again in the near future to likely interview Vladimir Putin, and hopefully travel back to Ukraine, which I did, to talk again with Volodymyr Zelenskyy or with whoever the future president is.

#464

You'll be the only guy who's interviewed both of them, I think.

Yeah, during this war, right? I have to say, the border crossing is getting increasingly more intense. I went to Canada last week, and I didn't care for that.

#464

So I'm sure, primarily, it's a nation at war, as it was in Ukraine, and it's fucking—as dangerous as it is to do both.

It's also, I think, something that's a little bit foreign—no pun intended—to America. We've fought in a lot of wars over the last, say, 25 years, 50 years, whatever. But all of them, including, in a way, the World Wars, even in the 20th century, it's been since 1812 that we fought one on our shores.

None of the other ones—I guess Pearl Harbor, but even Pearl Harbor, that was a one-off, and it was only kind of America technically. It wasn't mainland America. We're fighting wars halfway across the world, but there's a very different thing for 2 neighboring countries to fight.

Even though most of the fighting's been done on the Ukrainian side—not all of it—there have been, and I think there still are, areas in Russia, inside Russia's borders, where there's action. There's something so much more real about that.

The wars we're used to are that we send a military that's 100,000 times more sophisticated than anything it will be meeting on the ground over to a Third World country to go do that. Now, as we've found out over the years, there's still a lot of challenges to that. Even when your side has night-vision goggles and the other one doesn't, your side can call in airstrikes and the other one can't, and your side has all the sophisticated training while the other side is practicing on monkey bars, it's still very hard to occupy a people, dominate them, and defeat an insurgency.

But that's very different from 2 nation-states right next to each other on the border. There's just a real feeling of survival in that moment. I do think that probably—I don't understand this as well as you do, and probably you don't even understand it as well as maybe an older generation of Russians and Ukrainians would—but there's also something about how both Russia and Ukraine, in their own ways, got so absolutely fucked over in the 20th century multiple times, in a way that Americans just—it is too foreign to us to even understand anything like that.

Millions of people starving to death, being invaded, the entire nation collapsing. The Russian government collapsed twice in 100 years, right? That's pretty traumatic, and we simply have never been through anything like that. If you have that kind of trauma as a society and then there's a war on your border, I'm sure there are a whole lot of different kinds of feelings that we just can't relate to.

Plus a history in both nations of super-sophisticated and expansive intelligence agencies.

#464

Right. Yeah, that's a very good point.

You host a podcast called Part of the Problem. What have you learned through that whole process of interviewing some interesting people? Are there topics you cover that make you sweat still to this day? Does it feel like going into the fire?

#464

What I've learned just from the podcast is that there's an interesting relationship that you build with your audience. I travel a lot and I do shows a lot, so I meet people who listen to the show.

I had this experience with you. You and I met once, I think, before today. We met on a very interesting night. It was before the Comedy Mothership was built. You came by a Joe Rogan and Friends show at The Vulcan. It was while Joe was going through the shitstorm of cancel culture, and he was on the phone with Dana White and stuff in the back. It was a wild night.

What a wild night. Yeah.

#464

But even though we just met that one time, and then we talked on the phone, and now we're doing the show, I kind of know you already. I already know you, and it's not just that we have friends of friends. I've seen so much of your stuff that I know who you are.

Then it's weird, because people come up to you and it's like they know you. I've had this experience with Joe. I knew him before I knew him. That was one of the things that I really learned from doing the podcast over the years: how much that's actually a relationship. You actually have a relationship with your listeners.

In the same way that you can't lie to people in your life, you also can't lie to your audience. It's a relationship, too. There are often shortcuts that are presented before you, but there is a payoff to not taking the shortcuts and to doing it the way you want to do it.

What do you think is the number of hours it takes to form a relationship? Because I absolutely agree with you.

#464

First of all, I should say I'm a huge podcast fan. I've listened to you as a guest and listened to your own show a lot. So, yeah, with you, I think I've already crossed the threshold of hours where I feel like we're friends one way, and I guess because you listen to me, it's the other way, which are like separate parallels. It's very weird. It's very strange in a way.

It's very interesting, and there's something there which is more your area of expertise than mine: technology is playing this wild role. We could have a two-way friendship without actually having to meet each other, all facilitated by the machines that we built. It's very trippy. I think it's probably 50 hours—maybe the 20-to-50-hour range—when you're like, "Okay, it's kind of interesting in a way," right?

Because The Joe Rogan Experience was kind of the thing that made comedians big. The things before that used to be Letterman, Leno, and Conan. Comedians would get a 7-minute set on there, and even if you did great—if you just killed and someone watching was like, "I love that comedy. That comedian's amazing"—unless they were on social media and then went and searched you, there was no way to connect. It would just be like, "Love that guy. Anyway, back to my life." Maybe you'll remember him, and maybe when he was coming to town, you'd see, "Oh, that same guy I saw on Conan is going to be at the local comedy club," or something. Maybe.

But then Rogan became the main thing. Now they didn't just see you do 7 minutes of stand-up; they sat and listened to you for 3 hours. So, even just off that 1 3-hour podcast, you come away knowing a lot more about that person. It's not just a little taste. You know a lot about them. But I would probably put the threshold at 40 to 50 hours. If you've consumed 40 to 50 hours of somebody, especially when they're doing what we do on these shows, where you're speaking in a very unguarded manner, you do see into their soul.

Even though this is your show and you ask a lot of questions, you don't know exactly where this is going to go. You're seeing what I say and then going, "Huh, okay. Well, let me ask something based on that. Let me make a point based on that." We're both kind of unguarded. When you consume somebody like that for 40 or 50 hours, you see into their soul. I think there's almost no way to avoid that.

And I would say if they're not letting you see into their soul, you'll notice that and you'll know that about them: "This is a guarded person." This was ultimately Kamala Harris's issue, right? This is why she was probably correct not to do Rogan, even though everyone looks back at that and says, "No, no, no. This was the big disaster of her campaign." It's like, I don't know. She was so guarded in every single interview that she ever did. She was always constantly not trying to let you see who she really was. If she was going to try that on Rogan, that would have been so apparent to everybody involved.

So, you've had a lot of intense conversations on JRE. What do you appreciate most about Joe as a human being, as a conversation partner?

#464

I can't overstate how much I love Joe and how much I admire him. Not as much as Ron Paul—just let's be clear. There's a hierarchy here. He's close, man. They're both, like, very few. That means a lot coming from me. There's Ron Paul and Joe Rogan. Those are my generals, and I'm a soldier. Those are my guys. If Joe Rogan pointed to some guy and said, "You've got to go fight that guy right now," I'd be like, "All right, I've got to go fight that guy." Ron Paul too.

I just think it's both very personal for me. Ron Paul introduced me to a set of ideas that changed my life, and I'm enormously grateful for that. Joe Rogan—I was a huge Joe Rogan fan before The Joe Rogan Experience. I'm an old-school Joe Rogan head. I used to go on JoeRogan.net, before websites used to end in .net. I remember I was a fan of his before he confronted Carlos Mencia. The day he confronted Carlos Mencia, I watched the video on his website and was like, "Oh, shit, Joe Rogan called him out, dude. This is the craziest thing ever."

When he started the podcast, I remember thinking, "This is going to be big because he's going to be so good at this. He's got so much interesting shit to say." I didn't realize it was going to be quite what it became, but I did think, "Oh, this is going to be an awesome thing." So, there's that. I always really admired him, and I was always a huge fan of his.

Then he literally not only changed my life, but he changed all of my friends' lives. It's a very weird situation. He's the Santa Claus of my world. He's literally just a very genuine person, and he really derives a lot of pleasure from the fact that he gets to help the people who he sees as the good guys, the guys worth helping. I just think that's such an unbelievable thing.

The first time Rogan had me on his podcast was, I believe, in 2016, and I might have had 5,000 followers or something like that. I was really completely unknown. He heard me on Ari's show and was like, "Oh, I like what this guy's got to say. I think this is cool. Let's talk about it." He didn't get anything out of it. He's just been such a great guy to me.

At every little angle—everything—you open for him, he takes care of you better than anybody else does. You work his club, and his club pays better than anybody else does. Everything is always great to the people who are around him. Again, it's hard to overstate it. I have a wife and 2 little kids. He's put me in a situation where I can provide a great life for them.

Don't get me wrong, I did something with the opportunity. It's not like he just gave me something. He gave me the opportunity, and I did something with it. But he didn't have to give me that opportunity. I will go to my grave being enormously grateful for his friendship, the platform that he's given me, and also just—I've tried not to abuse this—but there have been a few points over the years where I really needed advice on something, and I've gone to him. He's been the absolute best every single time.

I've followed it a few times. A few times I didn't follow his advice, and I really regret not following his advice. But he was the absolute best guy to be like, "All right, let's talk about this." The last thing I'll say is that it's freaking crazy because he's got more shit going on than anybody else in the world and is still very interested in taking time out to discuss something I'm asking him about. That's a really great quality.

Yeah. Always takes a phone call. Yeah, you're right about the advice. His advice is spot-on, and often what I personally need is that he's been through so many fires.

#464

Yeah.

He's really good at making you feel like, "Don't fucking worry about it. Just move on."

#464

It's the "don't read the comments" thing, but generally—

Yeah, that's right. Yeah, just like, "Fuck it." And he has that whole vibe, which kind of looks effortless. But I think when you look at it seriously, especially in contrast with journalists, there's a fearlessness there.

#464

100%. That not giving a fuck—I mean, he says it's because of fuck-you money or any of that. I don't think so. I think it's more than that. I'm sure that's a component of it, but there are people who have that and still don't have that fearlessness.

Most people who have a lot of money actually become more scared because they like the comfort of normal life. When you're taking risks, you're going to pay for it, even if you have money. Not just financially—it's going to hurt, it's going to disturb your life, and it's going to create turbulence.

The guy is fearless and follows just his genuine curiosity. It's an inspiration to me, friendships aside, just an inspiration because of how great of a conversationalist he is. He legitimately doesn't give a fuck if he talks to any of the presidential candidates or not. He'll just talk to friends because he wants to. There's no clickbaitiness to it. There's no giving a shit about what people think of you.

During the COVID stuff, he was interviewing Dr. McCullough and Dr. Malone, and he had Bobby Kennedy. All these people, at a time when it was so—there was this huge penalty on not going along with the regime's talking points. He's had me on before, too, talking about Ukraine and Israel, at times when it's really white-hot, you know what I mean? It's really hard to overstate it. There used to be nothing like this. It used to be that if CNN and Fox News agreed, well, then that was it.

That was the line. Now we’ve got the biggest show in the country actually allowing the other perspective on and allowing people to challenge the regime. I think it’s historic.

I think there are also shows and people who are just constantly conspiracy theorists, which is fine, but I sometimes feel that those lack genuineness. They kind of put themselves in a bin where you question everything to the point where I don’t know if you’re getting closer to the truth.

There’s something that some people in the conspiracy world do, which is speak about something with certainty when they’re really not certain about it. It’s fine to ask questions, and it’s fine to speculate about things, but you also have to be really careful about presuming your conclusion and then working backward from there.

Sometimes it’s just a matter of being sloppy versus not being sloppy. I remember for a long time, back in the day in the 9/11 truth movement, one of the huge smoking guns they would point to was this one document from the 1990s. I’m blanking on the title of it, but it was from PNAC, the Project for the New American Century.

That was the think tank, or one of the think tanks, of the neoconservatives. All the big neoconservatives were involved in PNAC, from Dick Cheney to Rumsfeld to Richard Perle and David Wurmser—all the big neocons.

There was this one document where they basically said, “The Project for the New American Century is about how we’re going to have hegemony for another 100 years, now that we won the 20th century. How are we going to win the 21st century?” They said, “Here’s what we want to do. We want to start multiple wars in the Middle East,” and they laid out all the plans they had. NATO expansion in Europe was a big part of it, too.

Then there was one line where they said, “It’s going to be tough to drum up popular support for these multiple wars we want to fight in the Middle East, short of another Pearl Harbor-style event.” The 9/11 truthers would point to this and go, “See? Clearly they did it. They did 9/11. They even say in their own words here that they want another Pearl Harbor event so they can do this.”

It’s like, well, look, that doesn’t actually prove anything. It might just be the case that they were like, “Oh, we wouldn’t get this without a Pearl Harbor.” Then, when 9/11 happened, they went, “Hey, we got our Pearl Harbor-style event.”

Even if you like the story that 9/11 was an inside job, because it’s kind of sexy and exciting—“Oh my God, what a crazy world we’re living in if that’s true”—I’m not even saying it’s not true. I’m just saying that if you’re not sloppy and you’re scrupulous, you go, “That’s not really evidence.”

It sounds like evidence. It’s evidence-esque, but it’s not actually a piece of evidence, because that doesn’t in any way demonstrate that they were in on the thing. There are a lot of things like that.

There’s a popular conspiracy theory online now that Israel did 9/11. I’m like, “I’m open. What do you have? What’s the evidence?” They’ll say, “Did you see that Larry Silverstein took out a huge insurance policy on the World Trade Center? How did he know?”

You’re like, “How did he know that the number-one terrorist target in the world might need a big insurance policy on it? You realize that the same guys attempted to knock those towers down in 1993, right?” There are little things like that where, if you’re being sloppy and you already really want this conclusion, I see where you could view them as evidence.

But if you’re critically thinking about them, it’s not as strong a case as you think it is. I like to speculate every now and again on things, but I like to take on something where I feel like I can prove the case, where I really have enough evidence that I think I can prove it.

I think I can prove that the neocons didn’t invade Iraq because they were worried about weapons of mass destruction. They actually had this agenda for at least a decade before the war broke out. There’s strong, tangible evidence for that.

Sometimes the constant conspiracy guys—not always, but sometimes—just get sloppy when it comes to actually analyzing how strong the case is.

There are several psychological effects. I think there’s a certain drug to the dogmatic certainty that you were mentioning. It really annoys me that there’s something about human psychology where I usually show doubt, show the humility that I might not have the right answer, and sometimes look at multiple perspectives, and that’s seen as weakness and lack of intelligence.

When I listen back to people who do that kind of thing, that certainty sounds like intelligence to people. If you say something with a lot of certainty, it sounds like, “This is a smart motherfucker.” I hate that about myself and about the human psyche, that that seems to be the case, because then the dumb dogmatists are going to be the ones driving the agenda.

#464

It is true. I’ve noticed that for a long time, though. It’s almost like, in a weird way, it’s a prerequisite for leadership. You kind of have to be certain about things. But there’s a real problem with that, which is that a lot of times you’re just bullshitting, or you’re not right. You’re not correct to be this certain about something. It’s at least debatable.

You always try to—at least for me, what I try to do, and I’m sure I fail at this a ton—you have to work on training your brain, and you have to be conscious about it. You have to go, “Hey, if there’s something here that is confirming my bias, and you start getting that little sense of pleasure of, ‘Oh, great, here’s another point that proves the thing I want to be true,’ then you have to be ten times as skeptical about this.”

You have to really examine it and be like, “Okay, am I sure about this?” Sometimes you’ll hear people throw out things where it’s like, “Oh, I know you liked that because it was helping your case, but come on. Think about this. This doesn’t even make sense.”

It’s like, “Okay, I want to make this argument,” and then everything that would support it gets sucked in like a force of gravity. You’re like, “Yeah, but half of these are bad data points.”

For me, there’s something definitely about my brain that’s attracted to conspiracy theories, so I’m very well aware that the gravitational pull is there.

#464

Well, if nothing else, it’s a crazy story. It’s like a movie, so it’s crazy.

Yeah. We don’t need to work on Epstein. I don’t understand. That’s one of the big mysteries of our modern era: how the fuck did this guy, this pedophile, get an island and get smart—really smart—people to hang out with him?

Yeah, and what the fuck? Has anybody—I mean, obviously Ghislaine Maxwell went to jail. Has anybody else anywhere been forced to resign? Say, at the FBI, just for not catching the thing sooner, even if you weren’t in on it?

There’s a real problem with the American system, and I think this just went on for too long before the American people wouldn’t put up with it anymore. This is why trust in every institution—the corporate media, Congress, all of it—has evaporated.

Of all the people who sold the war in Iraq, no one so much as got kicked out of polite society. I’m not even saying they went to jail for war crimes for life, but it should have been like, “You can’t—we’re not looking to you for advice on the next war. Thanks. Go home.” None of that happened.

It’s all these crazy things. Nobody goes down for it. They lied us into war after war. They’ve bankrupted the country, damn near destroyed the dollar, locked down the country on the basis of pseudoscience, and then lied through their teeth about what the vaccine would do as they were forcing it on people. No one loses their job. No one even gets in trouble over any of this.

And look, in any area of life, whether it’s a business, a relationship, or whatever, you cannot screw up that catastrophically, face no repercussions for it, and think that your business or relationship isn’t going to fail as a result.

I think ultimately there have been a lot of wake-up calls, and I think we’re going to build a better society from it.

#464

Better institutions.

I believe—I hope you’re right—with more transparency and more authenticity. I think the Democratic Party has also learned the lesson that you have to have candidates who do—I don’t give a shit about podcasts—but do podcast-like things, meaning reveal themselves as human beings.

I think it’s one of the best things that happened in this last election. I’m not saying they were great, and I’m not saying that any of the Trump podcasts were perfect or that there might not be a better way to do them.

#464

But I will say that I used to say this for a while, over the last few years. I’d be like, “So I’m me, and for me to do what I do, it’s kind of expected that I’ll probably come do at least 10 to 15 shows a year like this—a long-form show on a big platform where my ideas will be poked and prodded and tested. There’ll be pushback questions. Sometimes they’re more adversarial; sometimes they’re more friendly.”

And yet our standard for who is the commander-in-chief was that you show up to these debates that are 90 minutes long with these really, really stupid questions, and you give a 90-second answer to them, or blah. At least for the first time now, it does seem like, “Oh, the standard is kind of that you’re going to have to do a long-form show where you really have to have real, genuine thoughts.”

And that, I think, is, long-term, a real positive development. You just kind of know going forward, the Democrats, right—which I think is kind of what you were saying, right? You can’t run a Kamala Harris if she can’t do a long-form interview. You’ve got to run somebody who’s able to sit down and express themselves and have real, genuine thoughts, or at least try to convince people they have real, genuine thoughts.

That’s very different, in a way, from when I look back at some of the most talented politicians of my lifetime. I’d have to say the two were Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, just the most talented traditional politicians. Trump’s the anti-politician, but they were traditional and just unbelievably talented. They never had to do that. It was just a different time.

Bill Clinton had to walk up and be like, “Oh, it’s a beautiful baby I have here,” and then go back and play the sax, and then have a couple of good answers to a small town: “I’m from a little town called Hope.” That’s not the game anymore. Now the game is: Can you sit down and actually have some ideas in a long form?

And I think that’s so much better because it’s so much more revealing of what we were saying before. You reveal a little bit. It’s not 50 hours, but in those 3 hours, you reveal a little bit of your soul.

Yeah. And I think that process makes you actually a better person. I ultimately think that Barack Obama was a fascinating human being. There was a choice made early on to do fewer interviews and be more behind the wall, I think.

#464

And that’s a disservice, because I think it’s a skill to be an authentic person that you build.

Yeah. To be able to allow yourself to be yourself.

#464

It’s very possible that Kamala Harris is a fascinating person. I’ve just never gotten to meet her, and I don’t know if she’s gotten the chance to meet her by— It’s a practice thing to reveal yourself. It’s a tricky thing.

I think it’s just good for the candidate. I think she—well, I think what she did was pretty freaking incredible, meaning that she raised that much money in that short amount of time. I think it was a terrible thing for the Democratic Party to do. I think she’s a terrible candidate.

Still, with the tools you’ve got, use TikTok, use whatever. I’ll say the fact that she came as close as she did to being president is pretty goddamn insane, if you ask me. But yeah, the Democrats are a mess. They’re a mess like I’ve never seen a political party before.

But that in itself is a very good thing. What comes from here is that there are a lot of possibilities now. I don’t know who the person is. I don’t see anyone out there who I could think of that would fill this role. But there’s never been a more ripe time for someone to Donald Trump the Democratic Party—to do what Donald Trump did.

People tend to forget this because now the accusation from the Democrats is that the Republican Party is full of Trump cultists or something like that. But I’m old enough to remember 2016, and what actually happened was that Donald Trump came in and really resonated with the voters, and the establishment of the Republican Party hated it.

They were openly talking about changing the rules at the Republican National Convention to deny him the nomination in 2016. What they were saying is that they were going to raise the number of delegates required so high that nobody could hit it, and then say, “Hey, since nobody hit it, we select Mitt Romney again, and we’re going to run Mitt Romney again.”

They were openly conspiring to steal the thing from him, and eventually he just had so much support on the ground that they couldn’t do it. Right now, someone could totally do that to the Democrats.

But the thing is, it would have to be somebody outside of three-letter-agency control, because that’s what everyone’s rejecting right now. There are a lot of policies that I don’t necessarily agree with, but if it was actually a pro-labor, working-class party, you could do it. Bernie Sanders showed you a little bit of what’s possible.

And this was from an 80-year-old socialist who didn’t really have the balls to go through with it at the end of the day. If somebody younger and a little bit more in line with the current zeitgeist were able to do that, it could happen.

I legitimately think that AOC can develop into that candidate. She might not be there yet, but I think she can develop into that. It could be out there. It could be—I don’t know. I don’t see AOC being the one to do it, but I could be wrong about that. She’s got some qualities unlike almost all the other ones you could think of.

I just don’t see anyone right now who I think could be that person. But I never would have said—if you had asked me in 2014 who was going to come take over the Republican Party, I never would have guessed Donald Trump was going to come do what he did. So it might be the person we’re seeing who we’re not even thinking of, or it might just be some unknown.

Same with Obama. He was an unknown. Obviously, he had very powerful people behind his presidential run. It’s not like he was truly just a grassroots guy, but he wasn’t anyone we would have necessarily been thinking about. He gave that big speech at the 2004 DNC, but that was it. That was the thing he was known for: He gave one great speech. Besides that, he was a state senator and then a junior senator. No one was thinking he was going to be the next president.

He could be a Jon Stewart-type character. Of course, I don’t think he would ever run. I honestly don’t think a comedian will ever run, but I never thought Trump would ever run. There is something about Jon Stewart that is— Obviously, I disagree with him on a lot of stuff, too, but he is an authentic person. There’s something about that that gives you a huge advantage, particularly in our current political climate.

People are so sick of the phoniness. You can lie to some of the people some of the time, but you can only lie so much before eventually nobody wants to hear you in that phony voice telling the same phony lies anymore. At least Jon Stewart is, I will say, telling the truth the way he sees it. I don’t think he’s necessarily right about a lot of things. He is right about a lot of things, but I think he’s wrong about a lot of other things.

I just get the impression that he believes what he’s saying, and there’s something powerful about that, especially when he’s surrounded by people who disagree with him. He’s still willing to say it.

Yeah. That takes a certain kind of courage.

Yeah, and be funny doing it. But he’s not going to run.

No, I don’t think so. This is annoying.

#464

No, nobody wants to. You have to be fucking crazy to run. That is one of the real problems. And then people attack Donald Trump for being a narcissist and stuff.

Yeah, but who the hell else is going to ever do this?

All right. What gives you hope about this whole thing we’ve got going on? America and human civilization?

#464

Okay. So this is not mine, but this is from Gene Epstein, who’s a really brilliant economist and a great guy. He told me this once, and I just always loved it. I call it Epstein’s case—not that Epstein, Gene Epstein, no relation. I want to be clear on that. Let’s call it Gene’s case for radical optimism.

The way he put it was, he goes, “Imagine you were sitting around in 1845, and you’re at the height of slavery, and you were like, ‘Hey, in 20 years, slavery is going to be abolished across the West.’” If you told that to someone, they’d be like, “Dude, slavery has existed for all of human history. Slavery is—look around. It’s not going anywhere. You’d have to be out of your mind to think we’re 20 years away from abolishing slavery.”

And yet we were. It’s just like the greatest thing in the history of the world. Unfortunately, America had to fight a bloody civil war to get there, but many other countries didn’t. They just walked away from what had been the status quo forever and stopped doing it.

Now, look, you can argue there’s slavery by other names and things like that. To some degree, paying income taxes is some degree of slavery, but there is not chattel slavery in the way that there used to be.

#464

And that is an incredible advance for humanity. The other example he would give is that, at the beginning of the Reagan administration, in 1981, when Reagan was trying to have détente with Russia, the neocons were in the press saying, “He just guaranteed another 100 years of Soviet dominance.” If someone had said to you, “Hey, listen, calm down. In 10 years, there won’t be a Soviet Union,” you would have been like, “What? You’re out of your fucking mind.” And yet that was true too.

Even when you can see certain dynamics in our politics today, three years ago I was really concerned about whether they’d shut the whole thing down. During the COVID times, everyone I knew was getting strikes on all their channels. If you even wanted to talk about how there were people being vaccine-injured, you’d lose your YouTube channel, with people getting kicked off Twitter left and right.

I saw it and thought, “Dude, the grasp is just getting tighter and tighter and tighter. The regime is not going to allow these alternative voices in here. They’re getting too big, and they’re going to shut this whole thing down. I’m going to have to figure out what I’m going to do after that.” I was totally wrong. The trend went completely in the other direction, and things are now at a point where I couldn’t even imagine it.

I never would have envisioned Elon Musk getting $44 billion together and buying Twitter. So I think that if you zoom out, the regime has lost its monopoly on propaganda, and this opens up enormous possibilities. I remember so vividly 2002. Now, you know, 9/11 happened in late 2001, and we invaded Iraq in 2003, but all of 2002 was a massive propaganda campaign, constantly laying down the blueprints for this war that we knew George W. Bush was about to launch.

It was: They have weapons of mass destruction. They were in on 9/11. They’re friends with al-Qaeda. They’re going to hand this weapon that they don’t have off to the terrorists they’re not friends with, and then they’re going to nuke Kansas.

This is also one of the reasons why, when the Jew haters say things like, “Oh, look, all of the Jews support Israel,” or, “70% of the Jews vote this way,” or, “70% of the Jews support this,” I don’t like blaming people. Even when the Palestine haters say, “70% of Gazans support Hamas,” or whatever, it’s like, okay, look, I remember a time in this country—I know I’m going back 20 years—when every right-winger in this country was completely convinced that we had to go invade Iraq because Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. You were some type of leftist homo if you didn’t agree with that. That was the entire culture in this country.

It was the one thing that The New York Times, Bill O’Reilly, CNN, and The Washington Post all agreed on. They were all on board selling this war. You could not do that today. They could not get away with that today because, if they did, how do you control this entire propaganda program? You tell me. How do you control Joe Rogan and Tucker Carlson? How do you get these guys to go along with it? They’re not going to go along with it. In fact, they’re almost definitely going to have people on their shows who are just tearing it apart.

I look at that and think, “Yo, we’re at a place now where we have this world of possibilities that would have seemed impossible so recently.” Thinking about all of that rambling stew, whatever all that was, leaves me feeling very hopeful for the future.

Yeah, there’s a lot of social and political progress in that rambling stew over the decades and the centuries. For me, probably some of the technological progress is really exciting. Personally, it fills me with hope whenever I see the rockets go up—to clarify, not the ones going into Gaza, the ones going into outer space.

#464

I assume you had to clarify the Epstein thing, the Epstein drive.

I have to clarify exactly which rockets: SpaceX and Blue Origin rockets. So, taking humans out to space and, for us to be among the stars, it makes me feel like we’re going to make it. Because during the bleaker times throughout human history, there’s a sense—you’re right, during COVID, there was a sense of, for many reasons, maybe just a simple psychological human reason, that it felt bleak. I thought, “Fuck, I don’t think we as a civilization are going to make it. If we can’t handle this pandemic from a policy perspective, from a human perspective, from an economic perspective, this is pandemic-lite. There are going to be other, bigger troubles coming our way.”

#464

Yeah. And now you have this again: the rockets are going up. It’s like, first of all, we’ll colonize space and other planets. We’re inventive motherfuckers. We’ll figure it out.

And then certainly, for me, just personally, because this has really touched my life, the innovations in medical technology are just stunning. My son had a congenital heart defect and open-heart surgery when he was 3 days old. I mean, this is something that 20 years ago I would have lost my child, and he’s fine—absolutely fine—because it’s just amazing what these surgeons and cardiologists, neonatologists, and all of them do now. It’s goddamn magic.

There was always something about that that almost inoculated me against ever having a sense of, “I wish it was a previous time,” because in a previous time I would have lost my kid. I don’t care what other challenges there are out here. I’ll take that trade-off where this baby survives and gets a shot at having a life.

A lot of that stuff is just easy to take for granted, and when it touches your life, you don’t take it for granted. It’s just like, no, it really is. There are miracles going on all over the place now that everybody in human history did not have access to.

All right, brother. It’s great to finally meet a friend and have a conversation.

#464

Yeah, I really enjoyed this, and I can’t wait to talk to you again, brother.

Absolutely.

#464

Thanks for having me.

Thanks for listening to this conversation with Dave Smith. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, let me leave you with some words from Ron Paul. Real patriotism is a willingness to challenge the government when it's wrong. Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.