On The Brink of Revolution - How Elites Could Collapse America If We're Not Careful | Dave Smith

Dave Smith welcome to the show oh thank you so much for having me it is a pleasure uh as I was saying you become a part of my sensemaking apparatus and so getting a chance to sit down with people uh that have helped me think through some tough issues is always a lot of fun so thanks for taking the time well thank you I appreciate it and like I told you before it's a it's a bad comment on the State of Affairs when I'm the one making sense but I do appreciate that that's hilarious uh

let me ask when you were talking to Tucker Carlson you said that you were terrified for the future of our nation what exactly are you worried about well I mean what you know I got two little kids so that's what really makes me scared if I if I was still like single and childless I think I'd be much more just like oh this is a fun ride let's see where this ends but I I don't feel that way the uh now that I'm just an old nervous dad um look I mean there's a mix of

a lot of things I guess uh that that all seem to be kind of happening at once so you have first off the um the financial cliff that were rapidly driving off uh is is pretty terrifying um there you know it's not just the $35 trillion in debt or the fact that um that interest on the debt is now overtaking the budget but when you really start to get into like the derivatives and how much actual debt there is how the dollar being the world Reserve currency has kind of been propping up this whole thing

and that if those dollars you know if forget even those dollars being returned but if we can't just continue to export pieces of paper uh how much you know our whole economic system is built off of that is scary but then at the same time you also have um this kind of like really intense um cultural divide I think that cultural and race and sex relations and things like this are just simply much worse in this country than they have been in my life and you know I'm 40 in my life I think they're they're

certainly at their worst and then on top of that as if all of that wasn't enough you have these constant um this kind of open flirtation uh by the ruling class with some type of like real creepy um technological Neo fascism I mean the the stuff about like a central bank digital currency and um you know all of this kind of like you will own nothing and be happy and you know that like the the worst of the clips that come out of like wef forums which I I understand aren't exactly you know guaranteed to

be the law of the land anytime soon but it's still enough to be kind of creeped out by that all of this happening with the rise of AI and how advanced the kind of um uh the spying apparatus of the federal government has become you know with all of that I think there's more than a little bit to be concerned about oh and I didn't mention World War I uh yeah that one how how real do you think that is like is that are we actually flirting with World War III or is that just the

sort of um skull and bones that we're meant to avoid well there's a um was uh uh Jason Stapleton was a very bright guy he once said and I really liked he said never uh never bet all your chips on the end of the world because you're only going to be right once and when you are it won't matter uh so I'm not saying you know that this is that we're going to be in in a world war hopefully we're not I do I am and I'm somebody who kind of focuses on the corruption of

the ruling class for you know a a lot more of my life than the average person does but I have been absolutely stunned by the recklessness of the the policy of the Biden Administration since the war in in Ukraine broke out like there is there seems to be no considering uh of the possibility that like we are risking so much for such an unspecified goal um you know Victory whatever for that means exactly uh for Ukraine and the fact that even over the last uh couple months now I mean there's been more and more signals

I guess for more than just a couple months these signals that the regime in DC will support Ukraine's striking inside of Russia and then even supporting as the war moves inside of Russia's borders and this is simply unlike anything even in the Cold War and if you know your cold war history like we actually play came pretty close to nuclear war on a couple of occasions and it was only through Communications at the highest levels that we were able to avoid that and these days they openly brag that they're not communicating at all and so

I I I just I think it's so crazy to be involved in a proxy war on Russia's border um and now I'm not saying it's we're going to all die in a nuclear war but the fact that we would even tolerate upping the the risk of that for no strategic Advantage whatsoever is been pretty wild to see so what's your thesis on that so I tend to assume that while I may have wildly Divergent values from the people in power I don't think them stupid so is it that they're dumb or is there an agenda

that we're unaware of that makes them say uh hey don't worry we're not going to move NATO an inch East Ops uh we just keep marching East like nine minutes after making that statement I I mean I you know I guess it it'd be comforting to kind of believe that no there is some real wisdom there and they actually have a plan and know better um I I got to say I think that at least amongst the political class this is more or less how I see it right so amongst the political class I think

what you have for the most part as you may have noticed is like the same generation of politicians as when I was a kid for the most part I mean I know just had to swap Biden out they had to swap Biden out for Camala Harris but you know Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer and Joe Biden who's the president of the United States presumably um they are all kind of came up during the unipolar moment um maybe maybe they came up a little before that but then they were really all in power in that moment

and I'm referring to was what Charles crammer called the unipolar moment after the the Soviet Union collapse and I think that being in this moment was unlike anything else in human history a truly like a one dominant Global Empire with a you know military and technological capabilities unlike anything that any country had ever had and there was essentially no there was no counter force and so they were kind of allowed to do whatever they wanted to or they were able to do whatever they wanted to and I do think that this bred a very unimpressive

group of political leaders uh it it's breathtaking if you go back and listen to political speeches that were given by Eisenhower or Jack Kennedy and just think about how much not only how much smarter those guys were but how much smarter they presumed Their audience the American people were and listen to you know political speeches from today it's like I mean just watching the Democratic National Convention over the last few days it's unbelievable how dumb the whole thing is forget whether you lean left or right and this is true for the Republicans too whether you

lean left or right everything has gotten so freaking dumb and the more I look at this I'm like no I don't think these politicians have some master plan I don't think that behind the scenes Camala Harris is like a a genius or Joe Biden is a genius and they have some plan I think they are really unimpressive they're they're essentially the the old saying of born on third base and felt like you hit a triple like they feel like they built this the greatest power in the history of the world when they didn't they just

inherited it and then who who you have who's really pulling the strings are essentially big business interests and they are very smart but they're very smart and motivated at making money and so like you know if you're like all that talk about NATO expansion I mean that was a if you were just somebody in a weapons company who's trying to figure out how to make more profits and you're like listen we're going to fund these think tanks that advocate for NATO expansion and then we're going to Lobby these politicians to get this NATO expansion well

it was a great deal for you you got to sell weapons to like a much much bigger Market than you would have before so I think there is like a an intelligent plan going on but it's not you know not one that's like on behalf of the American people do you think that this is all ultimately just a question of money no not entirely uh no one thing is ever completely the answer so I mean I think money I think business explains a lot explains a lot of it um no but there is there's ideology

at work also um and certainly I think that like the the neoconservatives I think certainly had an ideology about what what should be done in the uh after the collapse of the Soviet Union and how we should have as they called it a project for a New American Century I think there there were there are True Believers in that group and I'm you know I I I don't know exactly with some of the other stuff you know like my my gut not that I I know this for sure I can't read people's minds but my

gut is that a lot of the Progressive Democrats the Democratic Elite type don't really believe in a lot of the ideology that they espouse I mean I I don't believe that Joe Biden is really concerned about trans issues or something like that I just I don't buy that I don't think anybody who's 80 is really like I just I don't buy that they're really concerned about trans issues um but I do think that there are like neoconservatives who really believe their hawkish foreign policy View and I do think that there are there are people in

DC you know like human beings are a weird species it's it if all of your incentives dictate that you believe something most of the times human beings aren't just going Mah I'll be evil and act out my incentives even though I know they're wrong we have a tremendous capacity to like convince ourselves that the thing that's good for us is actually the correct move so I'm sure there are some people in DC who really believe in like you know some peace through strength or we got to go you know confront Iran or something like that

I you know I'm sure there were people who really believed that uh if if we toppled Saddam Hussein democracy would sweep the region people can convince themselves of all types of nonsense I have a a theory that is it'll be interesting to hear what you think so um I think that when you view this all through the lens of power like the will to power like n's Will To Power it all starts making sense um when you look at it through the lens of money it actually makes less sense there's clearly money involved but I

think money through the lens of again the will to power that somebody can use that money to be in control that makes sense uh so what it looks like to me even when I look at Russia is um having I'm old enough to remember the height of the Cold War I remember one of my neighbors asking me if I thought we were all going to die from a nuclear blast I was uh a kid perfectly timed for the movie Red Dawn where it isn't specifically Russia but that's obviously what it's meant to be they just

paratrooper in uh take over a town I used to have a recurring nightmare about Red Dawn actually happening um and so I think uh when I play out the following scenario a a lot of things make sense you have uh the Old Guard still in in control they lived through all of that they knew what that was it felt like an unbel believably jubilant moment when we tore down the Berlin Wall the Soviet Union collapses uh it just felt like man this is America really the ideal of freedom and capitalism has won over communism and

tyranny this is uh a fantastic moment unipolar let's make the most of being the only Power uh and we are the good guys and so let's go do what good guys do and and bring democracy to the rest of the world now where that starts to read is like okay this is really just the the cover story for my Will To Power that gets cloudy like you said some people probably convince themselves of it other people may be purely cynical it almost doesn't matter it's okay we won we are now going to um use our

influence we clearly will pitch it as benevolent and then it becomes a question of okay if if that's what doing and this is the old war and now we're pushing NATO up closer to Russia if we're having PTSD essentially of when there really was parity between us and Russia economically um I get why they want to keep Russia weak somehow some way they're they don't realize that when you topple a regime it seems almost universally that something worse comes into power but when I run that thought experiment everything I see clicks into place do you

think there's anything missing in that assessment well I you know again I don't think it's necessarily one or the other I mean I think the will to power is certainly um a major factor and and human psychology of course is a is a factor with all people and and powerful people don't escape that and there have been like some studies on this done and stuff of like the drug that is power and human beings are you know genetically hard wired to desire power and status and all of these things and and I've even seen it

like uh just in my little bit of experience in like the corporate media it's it's amazing how much these people are driven by the fact that you know they they got a phone call from a senator and they're going to be at a cocktail party with the FED chairman and like there little like status things like that mean a lot to people and I'm sure everybody listening could think of examples of that just with regular people they know you know like within their little company or where whatever um I I would say though that I

think along with so I don't disagree with anything you said but I think along with that there was um you know so if you if you go back and read bill Buckley from like in in the 50s there even back then he was writing in like in right after World War II about how look we essentially the conservative movement it probably wasn't called that yet but essentially the conservative movement he was like look we believe in limited government and you know the Constitution and being a normal country the problem is we have the Soviet Union

and because we have the Soviet Union we have to all be cold Warriors right now he actually said we have to embrace a totalitarian dictatorship in our own Shores in order to fight off you can go look this up in order to fight off the totalitarian dictatorship abroad we have to create our own military-industrial complex is essentially his argument and this was the entire justification for this gigantic um Honeypot I mean not just NATO but like the entire military-industrial complex budget the justification was NATO and is soon I'm sorry the justification was the Soviet Union

and as soon as the Soviet Union collapses I think there is this Collective freak out from a whole bunch of people who now have to justify their job I I mean like what you know like even just the existence of NATO didn't make sense anymore once the Soviet Union collapsed they were an organization to defend against Soviet aggression well there's no more Soviet Union and for the you know there there were lots of people um some liberals and some conservatives and some like even in positions of power or influence who were like oh okay great

the Soviet Union fell so now we can have a big cut in defense spending I mean this was the justification for how high it was and now we can return to being a normal country there was a lot of talk of a peace dividend uh you can read this in the uh the neoconservative writing in the 9s where they were all like very concerned about this that they're like oh man like even up to like 96 when Bob Dole was running and they're all uh they're all kind of writing like oh man like there's this

there's such an appetite in America to worry about our own issues like whatever we don't have to worry about running the whole world now we can like kind of focus on issues that we have here at home and when there is that type of uh environment I do think it makes you find a lot of people going oh well look Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait okay this is a huge thing we have to go because if that's a huge thing then all of a sudden Your Existence is Justified again and so I I just do think

there is also like a a money element to it however that plays out psychologically that it's like oh there's the you know there is a thing where you see this all over the place I mean if there's if if there's a whole like movement to let's say or different organizations um to combat racism well what do you do when America becomes a much less racist country than it used to be do you go all right boys time to close up shop we're all done here or do you just turn up the hysteria and go well

we found five more incidences of racism even though they all turn out to be hoaxes or exaggerated or something like that and so I think that's kind of what happened with the military industrial complex with NATO with all of this it's like their reason for existing disappeared and then they were like well we got to replace that with something else and much like with the racism stuff the less of it that there organically is the more you have to embellish and the crazier you have to become because you have to you know it's like oh

so this NASCAR guy got a noose hung in his driveway you're like wait that doesn't seem plausible it's like well I don't know we got to find something because no one's really fighting about this stuff and so I think a lot of that is what happened after the fall of the Soviet Union that's uh that's very interesting a lot of Confluence um I want to go back to what you were saying about Bill Buckley there's something interesting there the impulse to rule the world is something that I find um I find myself constantly wanting to

push back people who I think trust themselves too much what do you make of the impulse that and I I I never know what name to give this the elites the anointed class whatever we need a a better name for um the sort of psychological organizing principle that they all fall under but it's the sense of the nanny State there are some people that are smart this is what I think is their operating system there are some people that are smart there are some people that are dumb we are the smart people we have to

protect the dumb people there's certainly an amount of arrogance there it isn't just um we want to help it's we're Superior and I don't want to have to deal with your dumb ideas so sh little boy be quiet and just do as you're told um but what do you make of the fact that these incredibly intelligent people can say we need a dictatorship on our own Shores well it was uh to to be clear not a dictatorship but he said a a totalitarian bureaucracy was uh was his term so but um better I mean honestly

you know with with Bill Buckley um I mean the guy did work for the CIA and then supposedly left and then came out and said this stuff so I'm like I'm certainly open to the possibility that that was just a CIA operation to like keep the whole thing going um in in terms of broad like to your broader question yeah I mean I think this is kind of why the Lord of the Rings was such a you know a br uh example of this is that it's like it's even for people who really want to

destroy the ring of power it's tough once you get a hold of it I once you get a hold of it I mean come on like I mean if you could remake the world in your image wouldn't your image be better than you know than anyone else's and it's very easy to rationalize that away and to go well if I don't do this someone else is going to do it and they'll do it much worse I mean I I hear that rationalization constantly when defending the American Empire that's like well I mean hey if we

didn't do it China would do it so therefore whatever we're it's better it's got to be better with us than with them and you know it's very easy to to feel that way and it's very rare this is why George Washington is like uh you know revered because it's very rare when there are people who even and Washington had a lot of flaws but he could have been a king and he chose not to be and that in itself is so rare that people are like whoa that's incredible the idea that someone would have turned

down power that they could have had and perhaps it's true that almost any country in the position that the United States of America was in the 90s would have probably done the same thing that if you had this opportunity to to rule the world who's really going to turn that down and or at least it would be the rarest of of men who would turn that down because they were like no listen this isn't it's not the right thing to do and it's not in our long-term interest so yeah I think I think the the

desire to rule the world is something that's existed for a long time and there's there's no question I mean look you don't really even have to um read between the lines too much to look just you know listen to anything in the G7 Summits or the wef or something like that it's like yeah they're all talking about ruling the world I mean they're all they're talking about what temperature it should be outside in a hundred years and how they're going to legislate what the what the temperature can be in the year you know uh whatever

the year 100 years from now or whatever and so it's uh it it's pretty I mean they're talking about global regulations I mean what is this rules for the entire world to follow it's clearly they animating you know like the animating uh characteristic there is a desire for global domination there is a revolution happening in nutrition it lets you eat like a fitness model save time like a CEO and enjoy meals like a food critic it's called Factor every week you get to choose from 35 different meals and over 60 add-ons we're talking restaurant quality

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days here's an exclusive offer for impact Theory listeners get 15% off with code impact at huel.com that's hu huel.com and use code impact for 15% off and why is it a bad idea if they really have the right answers why is one Global government a bad idea well number one because they don't have the right answers and look I mean even if you even if they did um I mean that if you were to set up a one world government well all it takes is one government going bad now and the entire world is ruined

you know and so this is the the the like decentralization of power and Liberty go hand in hand and you you really never have one without the other and the idea that even if you were to put the most perfect angels in ter in in charge of the world it's like the old Lord Atkin you know concept that power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely and so the idea that any group of men are capable of ruling the world and not being corrupted is at best highly unlikely at worst completely impossible and in

the event that they are corrupted if you have one uh world government then you're in the you're in the nightmare scenario which is that everybody lives under a totalitarian regime all right so during the Cold War when we actually had two opposing forces uh it did not feel safe in fact I would say it certainly for Americans uh it has felt way safer in a unipolar moment but I've heard you say that unipolarity is the problem uh is that only true because there are so many people that are not Americans or is the unipolar moment

actually bad for Americans ourselves well I think it's very I mean it's very bad for the American people broadly speaking it's probably been very good for Washington DC and for you know giant corporations who are connected to Washington DC um and and I think there is some truth to the fact that there it there was a danger the danger of nuclear war um was higher in the Cold War than immediately after the Soviet Union fell I think now because of these awful policies and backing Ukraine we've we've brought that risk back um so that's not

good the the thing is that that what the unipolar moment allowed was for America to go on a a type of global adventurism that that they would not have been able to get away with um beforehand there's a reason why we didn't do anything like the terror Wars before the Soviet Union collapsed because there there was a counterweight to us there was a counterbalance to some degree and so what you see after the Soviet Union collapses is like this tremendous expansion in American Warfare in American spending and debt and money Printing and all of this

stuff and I think that that has been very bad for the nation it's been very bad for the people in general and so that's that's what I meant by saying that the unipolar moment was kind of a disaster for the American people um that doesn't mean that the cold war is good there were terrible things that happened during the Cold War um but you know if you just look at say like in a 20year period roughly speaking a little more than 20 years the fact that America's fought a war in Afghanistan in Iraq um in

Libya in Syria in Somalia in Yemen and in Niger and Pakistan with the Drone bomb campaigns I mean there simply just wasn't any there wasn't anything quite like that during the Cold War even with Vietnam and the war in Korea and stuff like that it wasn't like just war war war war war war war in a 20-year period with this many people dying and this much money wasted and this much of a region of the world totally destabilized and I don't think you would have that in a non unipolar world so that I think has

been the real disaster of all of this and how do you see us getting out of um the unipolar moment obviously for us there there would be a potential economic defeat that goes hand inand with that so if it's bad for us but the solution is potentially worse than the disease what do we do about that well I mean we're the way we actually are getting out of it is that we are you know kind of uh spending ourselves into debt while pissing off a lot of the rest of the world and now they're starting

to Ally with each other so that's what's actually playing out this is probably the least responsible way to end the unipolar moment but I guess what I would just say is like kind of the message of optimism in all of this is that what that moment allowed America to become and it's not just that moment I mean there's several other major factors um being Go Nixon taking us off the gold standard is a huge one that we're were now we were also like perfectly positioned it was like 20 years after we went off the gold

standard the Soviet Union collapses so now not only are we the world Empire but we also have this fiat currency machine where we can just print up as much money as we want to um really nothing to kind of check government excess um but I don't think you know like I uh I think that both logically we we can kind of deduce this from the best economic thinkers and also just empirically you can look at the 20th and even the 251st century and kind of see that like what actually creates wealth is um free markets

cooperation voluntary trade and what the government class is is parasitic in nature they take from produ of people by force or by the threat of force and they uh redistribute that money to people who aren't producing and I'm not saying that like I'm not saying like when I'm not even thinking like these lazy bums on welfare I'm thinking like these billionaires on welfare um but the the idea that like drastic Cuts in government spending or something like that or like a drastic reduction in the power of Washington DC over the rest of the world I

don't think that would really hurt um Americans I mean obviously the transition might be a a bit wild and that's never the best thing but ultimately I think that on the other side of that is that the the American Empire is a a weight on the back of the American taxpayer and so ultimately I think that if that were to be greatly reduced there would be a huge Improvement in the Liberty and the prosperity of regular people in this country which is I think what we should all care about a lot more than you know

those poor weapons manufacturers uh so when you lay out that vision for what we're doing now that's taking us in the wrong direction I don't see a way to reverse that pain and suffering so um do you see any way for us to get of our debt spiral uh get out of our addiction to spending money we don't have by printing uh to not need the wars to keep GDP pumped Skyhigh so that we can justify the amount of money that we're pumping into the system um do you see a realistic way to reverse that

or because this is how it feels to me I am watching something that plays out in a really predictable debt cycle that Ray Delio tracks and it's it's I I don't want to be defeatist but it does feel a bit like the Emoji where you sit back with your popcorn and you just watch what unfolds because I don't see a way to pump the brakes yeah I mean I I certainly get your point and I I have that feeling at times as well I think like one of the things that really keeps me encouraged is

that all of this stuff like as with all government authoritarian policies all relies on propaganda um it's very important to the powers that be that they are able to propagandize their citizenry and convince them of things that are not true to be true in order to justify whatever the government policy is and one of the things that we are living through right now that we're kind of participating in right now um is that we live in a whole new world now where the state's Monopoly on the control of information has been broken really for the

first time and there are shows now like yours that that have a huge audience way way bigger than what a lot of the corporate media Outlets uh are getting these days and that the the propaganda can totally be challenged this is something that's just very different than in the past and so that gives me a a lot of optimism as far as the actual system um you know look related to my first point people are so much more aware of how corrupt the system is now than they've ever been before people are so much more

aware of the deep State and the dishonesty of the corporate media and how much Wars are started based off lies um to the point that everything is almost questioned now and that leads to other problems but I think uh in in total the the positives outweigh the negatives and so how does the whole thing how does this unsustainable thing get unraveled I don't know exactly but I would say that there's you know using the example of the Soviet Union I mean there was a big powerful government that controlled half of Europe and chunks of the

rest of the world and the whole thing was gone and not too many experts predicted 10 15 years before the collapse of the Soviet Union that it would be gone at by the early 90s and so it is you know I think that the the future always holds um uh I wouldn't say unlimited possibilities but certainly many more possibilities than any of us are smart enough to foresee and that I don't think it's that crazy that you would have some type of radical transformation in the United States of America I mean we've already had a

radical transformation in this country just in the last 30 years this is a much different country than what I grew up in in the 90s and I think that we're living through some pretty incredible times there's a massive um Awakening and realignment happening right now and so I do I I like to stay optimistic that we could see something like a a radical decentralization of power in this country um and something that could make it a much a much better Freer place okay interesting I definitely want to hear about the uh decentralization what you mean

about that I know a little bit about your background as a Libertarian uh but first I want to address what I'll consider the elephant in the room so if you're most worried about World War III the thing I'm most worried about is that the debt cycle that we're in is is man it as close to inevitable as you're going to get and I forget the exact percentage but it's like 84% of the time it ends in War uh because what for people that um aren't paying attention a lot to economics the debt Cycle Works something

like this uh usually you just had a war and because you just had a war all the debt is wiped off the table and um everybody starts over the table's turned over and people start building up from scratch now people don't have a lot but they also don't have a lot of debt and so now you get into this accumulation phase and it becomes the the party time and people start bringing on debt uh they discovered that they can print money especially if you're the reserve currency like we are where you can literally uh spread

your losses internationally uh through uh inflation you're just adding money to the money supply we don't have to get super deep on that right now but um you keep building up that debt bubble you keep bringing on debt both personally at the governmental level at the corporate level and it gets to the point where we are right now where even just servicing the interest on the debt becomes next to impossible so you are in a situation where you have two options before you you can hyperinflate your currency because to make good on your debts you

will have to you you literally even if you taxed everybody at 100% you would not be able to meet your obligations so you either have to hyperinflate the currency or you have to default and the only option that you have out of those historically speaking is war and so it can be a revolution or it can be uh a World War I 2 three and when I look at the numbers that America is putting up on the board I'm like you have an inevitability that you have to deal with so when I hear an idea

like hey we decentralize this I don't know yet if I love that idea or hate it I'll have to hear more about it but we have to deal with the debt like there must be a debt Jubilee in here somehow and so you'll hear people say that maybe the closest saying to the debt Jubilee is going to be AI that Ai and Robotics they basically are like an untapped continent that we suddenly discover hey and it's effectively Free Labor it's complicated as to why that would work but it would work um but barring that I

don't see a happy path out of this what what do you see yeah okay so first I would just point out that look in in 1971 as I mentioned Richard Nixon getting us off the gold standard that was a a default I mean that's they they painted it in you know a different way but that's 100% what that was is that we had said hey World here that was the Brett Wood's agreement right was that will be the world uh the world Reserve you can Peg your currency to the dollar and you can redeem your

dollar anytime you want uh $35 an ounce per an ounce of gold and then when the French wanted to come redeem it Nixon was like no no we're not giving it to you we don't have it it was a big giant default they just spun it as like the French are trying to undermine dollar stability or something like that but it was like yeah but this was the deal that they were allowed to do it and anyway so we certainly um I I'd say that a couple things on that um number one I think default

is the best answer so I think you're essentially right that you either have default or you have um hyperinflation default or inflation and at this point with the level of debt we have it would be hyperinflation um default is not all sunshine and but it's a lot better than hyperinflation and it's a lot better than starting a war to get yourself out of it the thing that does encourage me a little bit is that you know oftentimes you'll hear the political class talk about how divided we are and that's certainly true but they talk about

how awful it is that we're so divided um the whoever their candidate is is always supposed to be a uniter um they also talk about the problems with fake news and all this stuff and I think what's there there's an admission of truth that's buried underneath there which is that it it would be really really hard for them to recreate say 2002 um in in 2002 for people who are uh old enough to remember as I am um there was a steady War beat uh a steady War drums beat for the war in Iraq we

didn't invade till 2003 but all of 2002 was spent laying the groundw so that you would have to be crazy to not know that Saddam Hussein had nuclear weapons and he was in on 911 and he's about to pass these nuclear weapons off you know he's about to pass the weapons he doesn't have off to the terrorists he's not really friends with and they're going to Nuke Kansas this is just a matter of time literally the Vice President Dick Cheney say it's just a matter of time it's not a matter of if it's a matter

of when they and they got large enough levels of support for the war in Iraq that they were able to pull it off and back then the New York Times was selling it CNN was selling it Fox News was selling it I mean they just all powerful sources of information all got behind this war push and of course there was a tremendous um as there is now but even a stronger push to demonize anybody who was critical of the war if you weren't with George W bush you were with the terrorists they could not pull

anything like that off today and I think that's why they're so upset that we're uh you know that we're uh not unified because when the time comes if you really want to sell a war what you're going to need is a massive propaganda campaign and you're going to need to get at least a large enough percentage of your population behind your war that you feel comfortable enacting the policy and today we have Joe Rogan and Tucker Carlson and like all of these people who are like way way bigger than the entire propaganda apparatus itself and

they if they were trying to lie us into war again those guys would be the first ones exposing it on their show and so that does give me a little sense of hope that I don't know how easy it would be for them to pull off the you know leading us into a next War based off lies um now that doesn't mean it's impossible and they couldn't do it and there wouldn't be some type of ba based on that assumption do you think if we had a uh covid V2 that we wouldn't be lied into

submission with that I think it would be much harder to do it again than it was the the first time um you know they they tried to float out another round of lockdowns like kind of late into Co and it was just like thoroughly you know they do these things where they put out like trial balloons you know they'll be like articles about like well you know Joe Biden is considering a national vaccine passport and then like everybody's up in arms and they're like no no we weren't going to do that no problem like they're

always testing the waters uh this happens a lot and I think that again it's not that it's impossible um but it would be much much harder to do covid again than it was the first time because a you know a a not insignificant percentage of the population now recognizes that they were duped and and now Al doesn't trust any of the people who sold that to them um so I think it it's not impossible but it would certainly be a lot harder okay so um if we were going to get across this Chasm somehow we

unwind the debt in some way that hopefully isn't wildly traumatic um talk to me about what does decentralized power look like I'm assuming your answer will come from a Libertarian framework so if you you can give me the um the rubric by which you're coming to the conclusion of why this is better uh I would love to understand that yeah sure well I mean it's look I I think it's very consistent with kind of the founding documents of the United States of America and with like the the basic premise being that man ought to be

free and that government is an instrument of force and if government is to exist its only legitimate function is the protection of of Liberty um decentralization it could be on a spectrum I mean it it could mean um secession and a national divorce of of some sort in the most extreme form but it also could just mean strong federalism something that is still enshrined in the Constitution but we do not have at all anymore in this country but the you know there's um I think there's a thing some lawyer told me this once but they

said that on the bar if uh if there's a multiple choice and the answer is the 10th Amendment they say that's always wrong like you never pick the 10th Amendment if that's the answer because that's just never how things actually work but we do have an amendment to the Constitution that says hey like anything not expressly given to the federal government here doesn't belong to them then that's for the states and for the people and I think that particularly when you have such strong cultural divisions in the country that you're going to be like the

a that okay we're going to have an election every four years and then whoever wins rules over you so if my team wins then you know whatever it's rural Alabama rules over Portland OR or Portland rules over rural Alabama well that makes no sense on any level and that's certainly not a recipe for Liberty and so which much better is to just accept that hey there are many different cultures in this country and that they they should not get to impose their Wills on others it's really if you think about it right the same it's

just the logical conclusion of what I was saying before in in opposing One World Government I mean if you're not for one world government and you go well no we have to have more competition well then why shouldn't we just have a little bit more and a little bit more and ultimately I think that the more kind of decentralized power is the more likely you are to have a free prosperous Society it's not it's not a coincidence that the United States of America was such a successful country and the model that it was started off

of was being these United States like they're they're all together in a union but there's all of these different little States um that all have their own constitutions and I think particularly today as as you've seen over the 20th century but really drastically in the 21st century the a lot of the problems we're facing are the centralization of power in Washington DC and what the antidote for that would be a decentralization of power it's really interesting there's a story about Robert E Lee uh originally not wanting to join the Confederate Army uh he was considering

going to the um North and he ultimately was like I'm just more loyal to my state than I am to my country and I thought whoa that's not something that you would hear a lot of today um so heard understand that um out of curiosity where do you think like is 50 states and a geographic region as big as the United States is that the right subdivision or would you want to and and I'm talking not in theory in practice in practice would you want to see that subdivided farther much farther yeah I mean I

think I I think um certainly like 300 plus million people under one government is just way too many people um so I you know so again I know you're asking me not in theory but in theory I'd like to see it divided as small down as it could possibly go I'd be happy to see it divided down to Neighborhood blocks um in practice I would support anything moving in that direction however there's you know there's also um there there's if we're talking in practice then there's also the reality that like okay the feds might crack

down on you so you want to do this in an intelligent way where you're not going to like you know have your community invaded and and dominated and brought back into the larger poity um but but I do think that any of those uh types of um any of those types of divisions are good I think that if uh it's probably not anytime soon going to come in the form of secession but anything where uh Texas just takes a little bit more power for Texas to regulate themselves than the federal government or you know or

California or whoever I think that's a step in the right direction the business world is changing at light speed Market shifts AI Revolution Rising Global tension a lot of businesses are struggling to keep up but some are also thriving so what are the ones that are thriving doing they're using net site by Oracle over 38,000 forward-thinking businesses use it to turn rapid change into fuel for growth with netw Suite you get one source of Truth real time insights and closed books in days not weeks so if you're serious about turning uncertainty into opportunity netw Suite

is the tool to do it speaking of opportunity download the CFOs guide to Ai and machine learning at netsuite.com SL Theory the guide is free to you at nets.com Theory that's nets.com [Music] Theory um there's a book called infomocracy uh and it contemplates a world that's kind of like bology I don't know if you know bology but bology Sharina voson is a guy that talks about something called the network State I man you you will have a very strong reaction to him I think you'll like him um but you definitely should look him up at

at a minimum anyway this book uh the uh infomocracy Toys was some of the same ideas of B's idea of the network state where people really self-organize they form essentially governments his thing is that it's not necessarily geographically uh that people will Orient around it will be around a value system where they connect to each other over the network um but even if you take that to be Geographic but at hyper fragments like you were saying down into the neighborhood that's what this book contemplates it's a fiction book but it did give me a Sci-Fi

glimpse into what a hyper uh decentralized world would look like and if I'm honest it seemed just unbearably burdensome to have to worry about what's legal and not legal a block away from you and so even if you're just like walking to a mall which doesn't happen to be on your block uh you might have to pass through three different you know block States and I was just like oh my God like that seems like an absolute nightmare now I have tried to wrap my head around uh and you're you have not said the word

Anarchist so I don't want to paint you with this brush but I've tried to wrap my head around some um uh Anarchist principles from talking with Michael malice and it's one of those where I get it at the idea stage but I am left asking looking at socities as like a what we see is is the result of many civilizations cities states countries everything going through a long-term evolutionary process and they all seem to end in roughly the same place and I'm just curious why don't we see large scale um truly libertine groupings is there

something about it that doesn't scale well I mean okay so just to at the end there I mean I I wouldn't be arguing for libertine uh groupings much as uh just for libertarian groupings which there isn't differ yeah yeah I mean libertine usually comes with a connotation of more like free love uh and that type of stuff but so I would I would say this so um first Michael M's a very good friend of mine and I do essentially agree with him that I do I think that the ultimate goal should be a voluntary society

and if you think about how essentially your your interactions with everybody in your life every type of business interaction and personal every business relationship every personal relationship you have in your life down to the very very complex ones are all completely voluntary except for your relationship with criminals and the government criminals and the government are the only relationships that you'll ever have in your life where it is literally at the threat of violence you are forced to do something you're going to do something because they will throw you in jail if you don't do it

they will ruin your life if you don't do it they will shut down your business if you don't do it and then of course if you happen to be unfortunate enough to interact with like criminals and they pull out a gun and say give me your wallet that's also uh you know a relationship predicated on Force everything else is voluntary this podcast right now we have is a voluntary reaction you know your people reached out to my people and we set it up we're across the United States of America right now there's also a voluntary

relationship with our internet providers with the people who we bought our our microphones and computers and all of this stuff with all of this and it's pretty complex um and there really does not seem to be any obvious reason to me why I mean we all certainly recognize that our relationships with criminals are unnecessary and the goal should be to have as little of them as possible and it's not self-evident to me why but the government must be this Monopoly of force and that all the services like all of these incredibly complex Services um from

you know like whatever I don't even know what half of the technology I have in front of me is here because other people who I trust told me what to buy and I bought it and they set it up for me but there's a lot of complexities to all of this yet the services of say you know an elementary school and a road and your defense agency that has to be based off a violent Monopoly but all of these other services can be done voluntarily so I I think that it's uh an artificial distinction without

a real justification for those Services um being delivered in that way and then on top of that I would say that you know look you could um you could certainly write uh a novel about how scary it and I haven't read that book so I don't I'm not like commenting directly on it but you could write a story about how scary and awful and and burdensome it would be to have like a different you know um uh you know like every every little neighborhood having their own government I could also write you a pretty scary

novel about what it would be like to live under a government you know and there's and and history has lots of pretty scary examples of living under governments and how bad they can get I would say that we live let's say in the United States of America obviously there's this is Under the Umbrella of the federal government but there are different laws across uh every state has lots of different laws I'm not tremendously worried about that as I travel from state to state um it would not make sense for it to be designed in a

way that you were like in a ton of trouble just for entering New Jersey but then when you got back into New York everything was okay and I don't think there's much reason to believe that if there were instead of 50 states let's just start with going to 150 states that that problem would get much worse right now we can go through the United States of America and it's pretty well accepted you know what I mean like that you you're kind of allowed to do the similar type thing that you're allowed to do and then

for other issues there might be some questions like am I allowed to you know make a right on red here or whatever um but I I think that even traveling um between different uh Nations has become largely more of a hassle in the last 50 years than it ever was previously and that's been because of the centralization of power and the growth of those governments making it more difficult to leave and come in so I I just think that both in theory and in terms of like you know the the Practical reality you're going to

be better off with more decentralization now that doesn't mean that there's no scenario in which Anarchy could be bad or decentralization could be bad but I think that the likelihood of it going bad is way lower than the likelihood of uh of centralized power going bad which has happened a lot more often uh I certainly agree that centralized power can and will go bad there's no doubt about that um what I'm trying to figure out is is libertarianism the worst of the systems uh except for everything else you the worst system except for everything else

or is uh democracy the worst system except for everything else because when I look at history history is a a John mimer stamped parade of real politique and you don't have to read many books about the Mongols before you realize oh dear lord there are people that will come through your village and they will rape and kill and just take everything from you and so thinking of this as an evolutionary inevitability it seems like we are always going to end with centralized power where we make the tradeoff for I'm going to give up a ton

of freedom in exchange for security and once I make that trade that slowly over time the government oif it takes too much you end up in the debt cycle which we've already talked about like that feels like what I know about humans that that is the inevitable Loop that we will always live in and so it makes libertarianism anarchism to me feel like a thought experiment that yeah if I could program out some of the human tendency where a a typically strong guy with uh just sociopathic tendencies uh he's going to come take your [

__ ] and all of a sudden you're going to be like well I don't want that to happen again and we find ourselves back here well okay so I probably would have agreed with you um before uh guns were widely available but I do think that that changes that equation entirely and once you've got something like the United States of America where you have even with uh these large centralized governments even with them you have something I don't know if anyone exactly knows something like 400 million guns in the country and if you could imagine

you know if we're talking about libertarianism or even Anarchy here if you could imagine abolishing all gun laws tomorrow you're going to have a lot more uh guns at on the street and this makes this makes um self-defense much more um of a tenable idea like like much more like oh it's not that there would be these communities who are entirely vulnerable to a bigger stronger guy coming in and taking all their stuff they would actually be able to defend themselves in terms of like uh look do things inevitably lead to centralized power into giant

powerful governments look there's a strong argument to look around and say well hey that's the situation we're in now but I would I I'm I'm a little hesitant to just buy into these inevitability arguments I I mean again you know I Ed the Soviet Union as as an example before um where it certainly seemed inevitable that the Soviet Union would exist forever and you know that it wasn't and you know my a good friend of mine Gene ebstein who's a brilliant Economist he would always use the example um of uh of slavery and where he

was like you know if you were sitting around in 1845 at the height of slavery and you were to say hey in the next 20 years slavery is going to be totally abolished in the west people would think you were insane I mean that literally would have made no sense people have been like listen this is inevitable this has this institution has been with Humanity for all of its history it is the way of the world there is no way all of these people are going to give up on their free labor and yet miraculously

but it really did happen and you know okay yes obviously there was a Civil War in the United States of America most other Western countries didn't require a Civil War in order to abolish slavery it's it's debatable maybe we didn't need to have one either um but the fact is that the the institution of slavery was abolished and again people could argue that it was transferred into other forms or whatever but still I'm just saying for the that that really awful thing went away and didn't come back um at least for a while and so

I I just I'm a little bit hesitant to to buy into this like well it's just inevitable um the the truth is that the United States of America was the largest experiment in free markets and in individual liberty in the history of the world and that doesn't mean it wasn't a perfectly free market country ever and it wasn't a perfectly libertarian country ever but there if you look at the period of time between like the uh um the end of the Civil War and say the woodro Wilson Administration so from 1865 to 1910 or something

like that you had this giant country in the United States of America that had no income tax no Central Bank no Federal Regulation to speak of um the total spending from the federal government was like 2% of the national income or something like that I mean it was by today's standards would be the most radical Bare Bones government you know like you could you couldn't even imagine if someone proposed today to just be like okay year one we're going to abolish every single Department that we have here we're you know I mean like there none

of this stuff existed um and in that time of like Radical by today's standards radical lafair capitalism we built up the the most powerful country that the world had ever seen it was the the largest rise the lot and life of the average person that had ever been seen in world history two levels of what would what would have been perceived as magical levels of prosperity just a couple of generations before that and so look it's it's very hard the the primary reason I think it's very hard to get from here to there is that

there's so much concentrated power who benefit off the status quo and they would lose their power if they were to you know if we were to embrace libertarianism um but it's just so it's like it's kind of been done before we have way more technological advances at our disposal now than we did then and I think nothing's inevitable and so it's worth continuing to try to push for that I I agree that um nothing is inevitable that things are actually I don't agree that nothing is inevitable I do agree that you should approach the world

as if nothing is inevitable um but I also agree that looking at history it's it's going to offer you something because you have tens of thousands of years of these tests being run and you can see at least for recorded history roughly what they look like and um I don't see societies going libertarian uh at scale again I maybe it works when you're small but there's a question to be asked and answered which is why do people tend to form larger and larger societies now again I'm not even saying that's good but here's my thinking

on why this happens so to me when I look at Society it is the answer to the question of what do weak men want uh for two reasons one they either want to choose to be weak so they can focus on something else so they don't want to have to develop their physical prowess to be a Spartan to constantly think of being ready for war so I won't even use weak as a perjorative they just don't want to spend their time doing that right like I don't consider myself War ready uh so I there are

other things I want to do and the other would be to specialize right so I want to specialize but that means that I need to be in a larger group so other people can do their specialization and hopefully I can get really really Niche and do something that I really enjoy so we just see that over and over and over okay so uh maybe not inevitable but it's certainly something that we see people forming into so now to I guess really make this concrete and I actually don't know how you're going to answer this question

so this is a very very s sincere question if you look at something like Israel Gaza and what's going on there um if I were to go and pull the um Palestinians aside and be like all right here's what you have to do you've got to band together you've got to have one Vision you've got to get everybody on the same team you guys have to decide what you're going to do whether it's war or peace like this has to be a really galvanized uh energy and effort it is not going to be um a

bunch of like hyper fragmented groups that they're going to have a way harder time I'm going to want to give them one narrative uh some mythology that pulls them together uh a single aim something that we can build towards metrics that we can count and so all of those are centralizing forces and that's one I'd be very curious if you think a Libertarian approach there would be more effective so okay so it's an interesting question I would just say that there's a there's and this is uh a point that Frederick bosot made um in in

his work um but there I I just want to be careful to not kind of conflate society and the state or groups of people and the government because there is a major difference there and so I do think essentially that you are right that we we um we bind ourselves together in groups so that we can specialize and so that we can be more prosperous I mean that's a big part of how Prosperity happens is that you stop you know you become more and more specialized and then you trade with other people who specialize and

obviously like you know if we just go to like way back to the state of nature if you have to hunt your own food and build your own furniture and knit your own clothes you're doing everything not very well and it's taking a lot of time to get it all done but if you're just like an awesome Hunter and somebody else is really awesome at at knitting clothes it's much more beneficial for you guys to trade that type of um that type of like kind of coming together is heavily incentivized uh because it makes you

all more uh prosperous and can be done voluntarily but in terms of like the government being much more powerful that isn't something that I and I think this is something that people have a tendency to look back on you know Murray rothbart is like a really brilliant his historian an economist he he wrote a lot about this but people tend it's like we tend to tell ourselves stories and one of the stories will often be that if something was one way before and then it became this way we go well we all decided to make

it this way and that's kind of the way the story is told you you can particularly see this uh when progressives argue about why we have a regulatory state or why why we have an EPA or why we have all of this they'll they kind of tell you stories like they'll be like well we used to not have one and then it was a disaster and so now we have one because we know it was a disaster with that one but if you actually look at the actual history of almost any of these things it's

not 100% true but it's like 99.9% true if you look at how a government regulation came to be it is almost never the case that all of the people stood up and just demanded that the government come in and regulate this bad business business man who is doing something bad to them what it is almost every single time is that special interests from within that sector Lobby to the government in order to get them into the business of regulating that sector usually to make it harder for their competition or to give them some type of

competitive Advantage um it's it's not the case that like you know um whatever the all types of different examples you can look at this uh throughout history and so I would just I would be careful from telling the story that in any way way we decided to have a more centralized government or something like that that wasn't a decision made from the people and there's really fascinating history uh about this but believe me John D Rockefeller and JP Morgan did a lot more deciding about having strong centralized government than like the American people at some

point just deciding that they they wanted that and obviously there's it's a little more complicated than that like people were propagandas there were groups of people who were calling for more government but really in terms of what actually moved the needle in these cases it's like but as you know today you know what Goldman Sachs wants the government to do believe it or not has a little bit more influence than like what me or you might want the government to do as far as um you know talking about the situation in Gaza I do get

your point yeah there in many ways it would be better if we could get everybody on the same page at least in terms of strategy um to just be like hey listen okay I know you want to resist here's the smart way to resist like the way you're resisting is not helping you guys at all so maybe this way would be a lot smarter you know there there's a a fair point to that I would just say that is that is that achievable at all well number one part of the reason why you would want

that is because they're currently under attack you know and and so that changes the calculation that's not necessarily something you would want at in peace time everyone to be acting exactly the same way you'd kind of want people to be pursuing their own interests but regardless it's like the question really comes down to like if that is desirable is it achievable and what's the best path to achieve that because currently Hamas is like the gang with the most power there and they're pretty into enforcing their will on other people and even that doesn't seem to

be working out very well it's not like Hamas ever really had control of the Gaza Strip they they're kind of like a gang they'd kill the people who were in their way or whatever but I just don't know that you know and even when um you know even when the Palestinians were trying to play ball more um it it was never you'd have some who wanted to negotiate you'd have some who wanted to fire off rockets and you know I don't know whether it's possible at all to kind of get everyone to buy into one

strategy but I don't see any evidence that forcing them to do it is going to work better yeah it's interesting uh you definitely want the consent of the Govern this is where all of this stuff really starts to break down for me the reason the exploration is interesting is I look at America uh I share a lot of the deep concerns that you have I look at a couple things one the nature of the human mind as manipulatable and I look at the nature of um the cycle that a government mental body runs through and

how it tends to either uh aify and it just becomes so rigid that it breaks or it becomes so corrupt that it becomes like a gigantic cancer that can't do the things that it's actually meant to do um and I think obsessively because I actually by my nature I'm optimistic and it's interesting people that have followed me for a long time feel like I I gobbled an entire Pharmacy of black pills uh because as I Orient myself to uh basically I succeeded in the system so the system worked extraordinarily well for me and when covid

kicked off and I suddenly needed to orient myself to help people that I because I didn't understand money printing so I thought oh my God all these people that I've just been working side by side with in the inner cities they're about to get absolutely demolished because they don't understand money they don't know how to save uh they don't understand entrepreneurship so they're really going to get brutalized by this and um I started learning about Finance so that I could help them and because I know how to make money but I never understood investing money

or the nature of money and it felt like somebody lifted up a curtain and I got to see behind the curtain to see how the world really works and so uh the largely the focus of the show has become that because if you don't understand how the world actually works then you're the mark and in trying not to be the Mark I'm trying to figure out which of these things make sense in theory and which of these things makes sense in practice because I would very much like to find myself in a situation where we

can uh because it isn't a 100% of the time that you have the debt problem that we have that you end up with Bloodshed so there there is some narrow window that we can go through where we can unwind this in a more sensible path uh but I want to find out what those real strategies are um yeah so that's why exploring the edge cases whether that's what's happening in Ukraine what's the real nature of that uh whether it's what we're doing with the debt what's the real nature of money Printing and all that whether

it's what's going on in Gaza um libertarianism not something that I um have a great degree of understanding in but while I understand the principles I worry that in in a fight maybe is the right way to think about in a time of Peace yeah like when you have a high functioning country and you want to subdivide it even more like I get that I'd rather see that happen like stronger states rights than suddenly Texas isn't a part of the us and you know there's some crisis and bloodshed over that um that seems like a

a pretty horrible outcome um knowing the weird year that we're in right now uh what what do you see in the near-term moving forward does the 2024 election go well uh is it is there literal Bloodshed I mean we had an attempted assassination on a former president what do you see in the near term man there a good question and it is tough this is a tough one to predict because it's so unlike anything I've ever seen and even literally just uh on my way uh here before we recorded this show I just watched RFK

drop out and and endorse Donald Trump and so there's right away there's another like kind of X Factor that I wasn't you know I guess I've been thinking a little bit over the last couple weeks but I certainly wasn't taking that into account a month ago um and uh especially after just you know as we're recording this it's just yesterday was the last day of the Democratic National Convention and this whole convention was like unlike anything I've ever seen before and so we're kind of running through a real a very interesting test in how propaganda

works and how the Machine Works um there's something really fascinating about this to me that I don't know that I completely understand you know I'm uh the to some degree outside of political tribalism this is something that I get both criticized for and complimented for I'm not sure if I deserve either but I'm not a partisan at all I'm not even a partisan to the libertarian party and I'm a member of them but I just don't sometimes I'll support people not in the libertarian party because I think partisanship is stupid um but but there is

as somebody who never really uh never supported Donald Trump certainly never supported Joe Biden or Hillary Clinton or any of those people it's it's kind of wild to watch where there's been a lot of people one of the major criticisms um from Democrats of like Maga people is that they're a cult like that you're just you know you're just blindly following Donald Trump no matter what he does and there is at least a kernel of Truth to that accur ation I mean Trump kind of has a cult-like following and people really do love Donald Trump

and i' I've certainly found myself on the other end of some angry Trump supporters when I've criticized Donald Trump for something I don't think he did a good job in and they will they do defend him with a blind loyalty at least a lot of them do that is off-putting to me however I must say I find the cult of the Democrats to be like a thousand times crezy there's something so much creepier to me about woring a machine over woring an individual and the way that they're able to like pull Joe Biden out and

put Camala Harris in and there's not one person in the United States of America who's like now I I can't support her could have supported Joe Biden but can't support Camala Harris like that person does not exist and they count on that they just totally know that's true Joe six weeks ago these people would have given that reaction to Joe Biden th this week Joe Biden speaks on Monday and it's like he get out of here old man and no one even cares no one even cares say what you will about the Trump supporters try

pulling him out and putting someone else in they'd be like nope we liked that guy we don't like this next guy and you'd have a even if they got another good Republican who Maga kind of likes if you pulled Donald Trump out and put someone else in you'd be like I don't know are they going to get % of Donald Trump's voters to vote from maybe 60% but there'd be tens of millions of people who would like wouldn't go along with that on the Democratic side it's like there's no one it's just the machine if

they had not if they had picked Gavin Newsome instead of her the exact same reaction would have been there for Gavin Newsome if they and and there's something really so anyway I'm getting away from your question but my point is I'm almost watching this like a sci science experiment at this point I'm like how [ __ ] can they actually do this can they actually take someone who none of you liked who we all would have agreed six weeks ago we all would have agreed pretty unimpressive person but now she's a rock star she's a

beacon of of Joy she's a phenomenon and all of these things it's like wow can they actually make that happen um and then you know I I just think there's major questions over whether Donald Trump would be allowed to to get into the White House again I mean are we really having free and fair elections you know according to YouTube yes and I'm not allowed to question that but you know what's what's rattling in between my ears I I don't know I don't know if that's true and there I mean look this I'm not trying

to say anything that I don't know and for people who do follow my stuff I'm not like a conspiracy cook um I don't just like jump on conspiracies if I don't have solid evidence that they're true but everything we do know about that last assassination tempt is pretty wild and pretty you know enough to scratch your head and go wait a minute what what like I mean of all the the targets if you're if you're a in the Secret Service of all of the different people Donald Trump has to be the number one who you're

like listen this guy is the most likely to deal with this type of thing and you know that the entire establishment has been stoking hatred for this guy and that half of the country hates his free guts with a passion and not like in the same way that like yeah there's a lot of people who hate Joe Biden but no one on that side kind of feels like if Joe Biden was gone then the problem's gone just like no one feels that way about Camala Harris right now no one thinks if she's gone then the

problem is gone everyone knows that there's just another one of her waiting right behind her but on the other side they do at least seem to have the attitude that like this guy is the problem and if he were just gone we wouldn't have this problem anymore that is essentially the CNN MSNBC narrative that democracy is about to be obliterated all because of one guy and if he just wasn't there we would this would all be fine and and so in that environment you're telling me that this kid is on videotape scoping out the roof

for over an hour before he gets up there and then he's allowed to get up 130 yards away from the former president and have a direct shot while people on the ground are screaming that man's got a gun and like and the president isn't rushed off State and again just coupling that with all the other things they've done to this guy I'll just say it's it's just starting to look like what it's what it looks like and so will they try again yeah maybe I don't know maybe they will or or maybe something else crazy

happened so it the long of the short is there's just so many variables this time I have no clue I my gut tells me that the whole Camala Harris thing is astroturfed and fake and that if there was a real Fair election today I think Donald Trump beats her but I could be wrong about that and in some ways maybe we'll never find out because I don't know I don't know that there's going to be a free and fair election now when you say that it's fake in what way just that the um the the

Beast the machine the blah whatever you want to call it of the mainstream media is so behind her and so so painting her so perfectly asking no real questions uh that people just like word I have my shortcut I know what to do I know how to vote yeah I mean I think there's like there's no question that there is like tremendous relief amongst people who uh are are democratic voters because they were kind of being forced into this weird emperor's new close game for a while where they had to you know pretend that they

didn't see what was right in front of their face um the the crowd reaction by the way at the uh at the DNC when Biden spoke was weird they kind of had a weird reaction to and these are like Rah cheerleader events you know and as he's speaking you could feel the tension amongst the crowd because it's just like a reminder it's such a crazy reminder to them it's like hey yeah remember remember last month when you had to pretend you didn't see a problem with this guy as like he is he gets up there

and he's not he's not even like somebody at a nursing home he's like the guy at the nursing home who's not doing very good like he's not even doing good for a nursing home I mean it's really something um and so I think there's relief amongst people but I don't know man I me look I don't really know what the answer to this is I can tell you that they keep coming into me I I've gotten like 30 to 40 text messages about Camala Harris since she's been the nominee and I don't i' I've only

I donated to tulsey gabs campaign is the only time I've ever donated to a Democrat ever I don't even know how they get my number but there's I know that there was something uh there there was $90 million that was immediately was was held back from Biden then immediately released into Camala Harris's campaign after that uh after his resignation or whatever exactly that was and that she's and then since then she's raised I think over a hundred million more and the they say a lot of it's come from small donors clearly a lot of it's

come from big donors and then I've seen some of these like investigative reporting going around saying like ah there's a lot of people who are on these small donor lists who claim they never donated anything to her I don't know I I just I I I can tell you that I feel when these propaganda waves come on and we're in the middle of a big propaganda wave and it's almost like it you know like okay you know when the war in Ukraine first broke out and how every single person would say provoked like Hillary Clinton

and Joe Biden and the everybody every powerful person when they talked about it they always start with the word unprovoked Vladimir Putin LED an unprovoked invasion of Ukraine and after a while you're like why do you have to keep saying that like it's almost like your own guilty conscience in some weird way like you have to say that because otherwise we might all learn that it was you know it's like um I I the example I like to use is like it it's it's like if you came outside and there were like some of the

kids in your neighborhood and like a dog bit one of them and you were like oh what happened and they were like okay well we weren't throwing rocks at the dog and then the dog bit us so we were just right here not throwing rocks at the dog and then this dog just bit us and and we were just hanging out not throwing rocks at it and like by the fifth time you're like I think you were throwing rocks at this dog like why do you keep saying that and in the same sense it's like

they have to keep telling you how much energy she has and how much everybody loves you it's just very clearly like you're trying to will this narrative into existence to what degree they'll be able to do that I I don't know I'm kind of surprised they've been able to do it to the degree they have already man I think it's going to work uh I think it's going to work extraordinarily well this is uh if you've ever heard Eric Weinstein talk about the idea of kayfabe and how uh if you consider yourself tribally a Democrat

you are having a hard time when it was Biden because it was just so obvious I remember like you I I'm not on a side I just want to know who's gonna lead the country to the goals that I think are um going to lead to human flourishing that's my shtick uh and I was at the debate uh for RFK where Trump and Biden were off on their actual debate stage and then he had hired a space so I'm there it was legitimately depressing it was just boring they were like Biden clearly just wasn't uh

wasn't capable and you hadn't heard all of the people going oh my God this is obvious now so I'm just like I cannot believe that they're going to be saying that this guy was fine like this is bananas to me and then RFK at least had substance uh which was interesting but the the whole thing of it was um this mading sense of being inside of uh The Truman Show and sure I'm just an extra but it's like I'm so aware that I'm a part of a TV show that I'm just like God so then

when everyone flipped on him the way the speed with which the veracity the language I was like this was planned ahead of time like it had to be it was just all too similar and I'm sure you have seen the Super Cuts of like this is bad for our democracy this is bad for our democracy or this is a threat to our democracy over and over and over and over and over and over and over all the same exact words it it's it is a exploitation of the fact that humans are tribal they are manipulatable

they want to be manipulated they want to believe like just give me the words I need to say because I already I'm prescribed to being a democrat or republican or whatever so they they want you to give them the way to beat somebody in a debate and once they have their words which is why the mainstream media just repeats like simple phrases over and over and over so it's like you have them oh and here's just a stupid statistic something that rhymes is like 70% more likely to be believed to be true and anything you

repeat goes up dramatically in perception of truth even when people know it's a lie if they've simply heard it over and over and over there's this process in the brain called myelination so you make a stronger connection memory with that thing so that it's calorically easier to remember that untrue thing and that creating that super highway creates the sense of like oh yeah yeah this is true it it is it is people's lyic systems being knowingly hijacked but they're and this is the worst part they're giving them the thing they want which is please just

tell me what to say to uh my mother-in-law who thinks that she loves Trump and I just need to tell her that k is better I just give me give me the talking points and so it it works so well especially if you can capture the energy that was the thing that I thought was very impressive was the ads were dope uh the music was awesome it felt upbeat energetic like they just really leaned into all the youth and vigor that had been drained out by Biden it's crazy but I think it'll work well it's

okay so there's a lot that's really interesting there and particularly just like the way that propaganda works and this is what I was was kind of alluding to before but the the they study this stuff and are really really good at it and there's a reason why because it's very effective I would also say that there is even outside of politics right and this is why I'm somewhat sympathetic to people who fall for this stuff because there is you know for all of us don't know anything about the vast majority of things and in order

for us to survive we as as we were talking about before we get into specialization and with that comes expertise and with that comes trusting experts and I certainly do this constantly you know I mean like there's whatever it's like I like I'm not handy at all um but you know my hot water heater broke down the other day and I I do realize when the water isn't hot anymore and then you call your hot water heater guy and they're like well you need a new hot water heater and I'm like yeah it looks like

I need a new one like I don't know maybe I don't need a new one but he told me I did and I have to trust him and I do this Con with my mechanic with my you know like with my plumber there's a million different people I'm just kind of trusting and they have the expertise so I defer to them and so I understand where and even in those fields too you know we all have this uh this this type of thing where like if you just learn something and then someone asks you about

it a few days later you might present it as if you just know that even though you just found it out like a few few days before cuz we all kind of have our own narcissistic you know thing and like you're kind of like oh I like to sound like I know what I'm talking about or whatever and so when it comes to politics most people have a lot of other things to worry about and God bless them you know thank God everybody doesn't obsess over Politics the way I do because we would all starve

to death if we did and um you know it's good that other people are focusing on making food um but you know you turn on CNN and a guy in a suit who's an expert is talking to another guy in a suit who's an expert and it feels a lot better for you to just remember what they said and then go say that to your friend and now you kind of sound like you know something about it so there's that aspect of it too just regular human being just how we are with everything except this

one area happens to be particularly corrupt and filled with Liars but so the flip side I would just say to what you were talking about before which is again what's so fascinating about being alive today is that so you have this um so say there's the tactic right of repeating things over and over again and before say the internet you might not have even noticed it like even someone paying attention you may not have noticed that like they're saying the same exact thing in the same you know Michael malice uh who you mentioned earlier he

was the first one to point out to me I thought it was a really uh great observation he goes uh this was back when Joe Rogan was getting uh viciously attacked over taking Ivor mechon and he goes notice how they they all say horse dewormer there's like 5,000 things that ior mechon does they picked this one and every single one of them will say it over and over again horsey warmer hor horsey warmer horsey warmer it's like they they drill home this one thing you know what I mean but now so in the 90s if

you were just watching CNN all day you just kind of leave and you're just like oh horsey warmer huh you know but now you see a compil on the internet and it's almost like their own weapon gets turned on them because now you can use it to unprogram someone and go yo what are the odds that they're all saying the exact same thing I mean I was just talking about it the other day it's amazing you watch Bill Clinton uh one of the best public speakers you know in in the last 30 years in American

politics in the last 50 years in American politics and he's up there and in the middle of this this Bill Clinton speech he just goes and Mala Harris brings joy and you're like oh what a shocker that you picked the same word what a weird coincidence that you had the exact same word you also thought Joy you know but so and then I'm sorry I'll wrap on this but one of the things that is interesting to me if if you kind of zoom out a little bit is like okay so the George W Bush Administration

lied us into war in Iraq and they like the case for this is undeniable they knew Saddam hin did not have weapons of mass destruction the neocons and his administration had been trying to fight this war since well before 911 they knew he wasn't involved in 911 they even wrote in a project for a New American Century that they would need another Pearl Harbor type event in order to get the wars in the Middle East that they wanted so they they just lied through their teeth now what were the consequences of that I mean aside

from the war and the hundreds of thousands of dead people and the trillions of dollars wasted and all of that the the consequences were enorm I mean like the you have conservatives today who have no trust for the FBI and the CIA and the military that that was Unthinkable 20 years ago that you'd be in this situation and so a lot of these government lies especially on massive issues they have they have slowly and then all at once eroded trust and you know I remember cuz I was I was totally against the lockdowns at the

beginning of covid you know I had easy priors to be against the lockdowns I'm a Libertarian and I think government's corrupt and people ought to be free so it was pretty easy to be against the lockdowns from my perspective but I remember getting so much push back from people about how dangerous this was to not before lockdowns and when it really when the floodgates really started opening and people really started listening to me about it was when the Black lives matter protests happened and the entire media flipped on a dime and said no no no

now you can go outside now you can go outside it's okay cuz you're protest testing racism and it was like however you feel about George Floyd however you feel about black lives matter however you feel about Co that's [ __ ] you know what I mean like it's [ __ ] that because of science yesterday you had to stay inside but today you can go protest racism you know and so there is this thing where the more desperate they get with the propaganda it can also backfire now and so that's the that's the thing that's

really fun to me it's like yeah this is why I'm not as convinced as you that it's going to work it's like yeah maybe maybe it will but there's a whole lot more people aware of propaganda now and especially with the internet it just gives you this tool it's like now like the son who's on to all this stuff can go talk to his mother and father and be like you know they're playing you oh and by the way here on my phone here's a clip of them all saying the exact same thing you see

what they're doing to you and so I just think we have a fighting shot to beat this thing in a way we never did before yeah I'll agree with that very wholeheartedly which is why I do my podcast like you I think people do respond to ideas I just think that it the the political Machinery is probably right you're really all pitching to The Independents you're pitching to the small group of people who will actually take in new information and make a new decision I am just terrified by the number of people that either are

manipulated and don't realize they're being manipulated or the people who actually want to be manipulated which is a very fascinating thing there's a an old 80s song by the Ure rhythmics uh and the line is some people um want to abuse you and some people want to be abused and I always thought whoa that is dark but nonetheless true all right man I have to ask now that I have you on in particular um help me think through Israel Gaza um what I really want to understand are the base assumption that drive your thinking so

I've watched a lot of debates on this and what I find is people don't argue at the level of Base assumption and so they end up um take Norm finlin when he was on Lex with uh Destiny and what was driving me crazy as a viewer was Norm said uh Israel shouldn't exist the state of Israel should not exist and every word out of his mouth after that is simply in line with that and so if you don't go okay well if if it just ought not EX ex then the only thing that we should

be talking about is either me trying to convince you that it ought to exist or us talking about what we do with the fact that it exists and we have to in his Paradigm unwind it but of course they don't they just go back and forth about what deal was offered when and all that and it's like Norman's been very clear his base assumption is it should not exist so as you somebody who's not partisan as you think through what this very complicated conundrum is what what are the I mean handful I would assume of

Base assumptions that you have that guide your thinking well I guess my starting point is more that um that people have rights or that people ought to have rights and it's immoral to violate the natural rights of human beings and that includes you know the the right to live your life uh to own property to um not be killed or or you know uh injured or things like that unless you're initiating violence against somebody else so that is kind of my starting point for all matters political is like self- ownership private property rights and the

non-aggression principle and so that's what I that's how I try to judge all of these conflicts including um the the one in between Israel and the Palestinians I do not agree with uh Norman finlin on on that I I don't remember that part where he actually said Israel shouldn't exist um it was a long debate though uh but I would I I do agree though that let's say the way Israel was founded was was illegitimate and immoral I think that Norman finlin and I you know he's a very uh left-wing um I think socialist type

and I'm a like hardcore La Fair libertarian and so I do think while we you know and and I've learned a lot from him and he has like en encyclopedic memory of every UN resolution that's ever been passed on the subject and it's is very impressive um but I do think that there's probably some fundamental disagreements there and so in a sense you know I would say look even if you want to say what the Europeans did to the Native Americans was horrible and was illegitimate at the time that it was done my conclusion from

that would not be there for the United States of America shouldn't exist and we should all go back to Europe or something like that it's like I don't think that's right I think the fact that um injustices have happened in the past it shouldn't warrant injustices uh happening in the present or in the future however I would say that to the extent that there are Native Americans still around which there still are some uh they ought to have their full rights protected and so I would also uh like why say in Israel I don't think

it's practical um or morally correct that Israel should cease to exist and all the Jews living there should like go back to Europe or something like that but I do think it should at least be acknowledged that the way Israel founded the country involved violating a lot of Palestinians natural rights and at this point you got to stop doing that and you got to allow them to have their natural rights and and that that means either a one-state or a two-state solution um I'm kind of open to either although I personally tend to to lean

toward a two-state solution okay um that certainly all makes sense to uh me as somebody who's on the outside of this and that I haven't studied it nearly as much as you um what is the push back from people who are being sincere not [ __ ] push back um well I mean I guess I I do generally speaking find that the the pro-israeli side of the argument typically relies on a double standard in terms of the value of Palestinian life versus the value of Israeli life and I do think they they tend to rely

on a kind of very one-sided rewriting of the history uh um which is you know I mean again I'm not I'm I'm I'm trying really here to take on the best argument and not take on the worst argument but I mean I'm I'm just saying that like in I mean I've been in debates where people have presented it as like Israel never did anything wrong and the Palestinians were always just the aggressors and Israel was always just defending themselves I think that probably the best version of the uh the other argument is that um well

Israel has to do whatever they have to do to defeat Hamas and they it's it's horrible that they have to kill these innocent people uh along the way but if they don't then more innocent people will die as a result of that I think it's Pro or and and you know they have to get the hostages back and they have to have a full surrender from Hamas the I just that's kind of the best argument I could think back and I think it's a very flawed one and the you know I think that um there's

certainly no guarantee that more people would die if Hamas is short of uh being completely annihilated uh I don't think as all the intelligence reports seem to indicate it's it's possible for Israel to um completely eliminate Hamas short of killing every man woman and child in Gaza and um and I think that this type of uh military campaign is is likely to produce a lot more Hamas or Hamas like groups okay uh is this a moral uh framework that you use to assess the conflict yes I mean there's there's a there's a practical component to

it as well but yes I would say primarily it's a moral component okay and uh when you go into the Practical component what framework do you use is it like real politique is it diplomacy what's the framework I mean I I think that the framework would be um what's best for the United States of America America what's best for Israel and what's best for Palestine um with primarily what's best for the United States of America being my my primary concern what is our interest in this well um you know there's in in actuality our interest

is that um number one there are the same interests that support all of these wars like War um there are people who are ideologically um very like on a foundational level who are in very powerful positions believe that protecting Israel um and protecting Israel's interest is the most important thing that the United States of America can do um and I think there are also do they give reasons for that because so um I'm I'm not so new to this that I don't have um you know understanding of basically what's going on but the one thing

that I have not spent any time researching is um other than that this is a very longstanding Ally and I certain hey if we've told somebody we're going to do something we should do it that to me is um going back to this is a moral thing if you tell a friend that I hey I would if XYZ thing happened I will show up for you and you don't show up that's bad from my moral calculus um well I mean unless you're telling a friend you're going to do something really really immoral then maybe it's

better to break your word than to do that immoral thing well I would hope that you just never offer to do something immoral and that sort of part of The Pact because then we can tease it apart right so you're taking a moral lens on this and so that it makes it very easy to start asking those questions I will give the US that um it's just understood if you're doing something that's immoral we're not going to back you um so I think these are teas out able things so for now I'll say uh the

moral lens is the right lens that the US is not going to do something they think is immoral but this is an ally that they have made a promise to they don't yet feel that um we've gone uh so far past whatever Gray Zone that this is obviously immoral because I think the Biden Administration even is hedging their language please tone it down please don't do this like they're they're saying those things so I don't want to um pretend they're not so I get it it's going to be super gray it's not you know just

a super clear-cut line but anyway that um moral framing they are there to help an ally who they don't believe has gone too far if you will but what I don't understand is um and I just don't understand what is the historical relation between the US and Israel that has brought us together so closely is it just that it's the only democracy uh western style democracy in the Middle East well that is certainly what a lot of people say um that it's the the only democracy in the region and so we have to support them

um there's I've heard people make arguments that we have a lot of common enemies and therefore that's why we have to support them um I've heard people make arguments that you know there's uh they're a good trading partner and uh we you know our militaries help each other and things like that again I just think um I think all of these arguments are very very flawed um and that's not out of any like hatred of Israel as a country or certainly of a hatred of Jewish people or anything like that but I do just think

that there's uh I think all of those arguments are wrong I think essentially Israel is not a democracy um they they're you kind of I mean are a democracy inside Israel proper um however you know they've had control of Gaza and the West Bank since 1967 and none of those people have any voting rights or any rights whatsoever for that matter and I just don't think you know I mean maybe you could get away with that for like a few years after a war you occupy an area and then turn it over to them being

independent but if you've kept an area to totally controlled for you know since 1967 and none of those people have any voting rights at all I I don't know how you can consider yourself a true democracy I think the the term apartheid state makes a lot more sense okay and do you believe the narrative that Israel does not want to be controlling that area they would rather be hands off I know I think it was back in 2005 they withdrew and it's like hey cool you guys do your thing we're just protecting the Border does

that narrative just ring completely false yeah I mean you know like I think if you don't want to be occupying an area then you know well they're sure going about it all wrong if they really don't want to be occupying that area and you know the the pull out in in 2005 is totally um let's just say what actually happened there is much different than the way it's spun by a lot of pro-israeli people and it is true that they ended the military occupation and they um and they ended the settlements in Gaza there something

I I'd have to double check the numbers on this but if you go check it's something like 8,000 people uh that they pulled out of those settlements and then in the next year they put like 15,000 in the West Bank and they then you you can read about this in their own writing where they essentially said that they were like well the whole you know the whole purpose of this is to freeze the peace process because now we can say hey look we gave them their own State here in Gaza and this way we can

keep building up in the West Bank it's if you if you uh go go uh search um uh smotrich uh Google smotrich and um uh for Malahide as he said what we're doing here is essentially putting the peace process in for Malahide and yes it's true that since 20 5 Israel has not technically militarily occupied Gaza as they had from 1967 to 2005 as they do from 1967 to this day in the West Bank but they put a total blockade around the country and they they control who and what goes in and out they control

the airspace the sea space I guess there is no airspace anymore because they don't have an airport um they they control how far you the you can fish off the coast of Gaza I mean they have they have the thing under complete control it's as Sheldon Richmond uh put it where he said it's as if the prison guards all left the prison and surrounded the prison and then they said look we freed everybody but that's not really freeing everybody that's just imprisoning them without there being guards in the prison and so no I don't think

there there has been a ton of deals on the the table over the years to give the West Bank and Gaza some degree of autonomy and the pro-israeli side will say well it's these the Arabs just always keep turning down the deals and we offered them all these deals and they keep turning them down but at the end of the day you don't really even need a partner to stop occupying a place you could just stop occupying them and so I don't I don't buy into it at all that they really sure do hate that

they have to do this but they've just had to do this for over 50 years do you think that the Israelis believe that um the Palestinians are a security threat sure yeah yeah no AB absolutely and and the I mean you know when you say the Israelis there are obviously like you know we're collectivizing here and there's there's people in the you know there's the the war cabinet and some mom are not all the same people um I think it's I think it's pretty uh it it's probably widely believed and for good reason that there

are legitimate security uh concerns terrorism is something Israel's been dealing with um since its Inception essentially okay um the base assumption that I run about why the uh the right-wing Coalition that Netanyahu represents uh wants wants to put it on from Malahide wants to sponsor homos wants to make sure that they stayed in power long enough maybe he even turned a blind eye my thinking won't change whether he turned a blind eye or was completely um taken off course but that he Because he believes that they're a security threat of significant enough proportion that they

have to be um dealt with in some way that um that drives all the things now the policy might be a terrible policy but if I'm right about the underlying base assumption I at least then understand meaning I can rearticulate their decision-making process not that I agree with it but that I can rearticulate their decision-making process do you think there's anything else um underlying that that keeps them wanting to blockade so they're not the prison guards aren't in the prison but they're still standing outside the prison so um okay so there are these hard right-

wiers in Israel a couple clicks to the right of Benjamin Netanyahu who he's now Allied himself with um a lot of this is because he had he had lost all the liberals so badly that he kind of had to Ally with some of the more far right-wing uh parties their constituencies which are a minority to be sure in Israel they I I think are largely motivated by religious uh belief beliefs and they believe that Judea and Samaria as they call it is supposed to be part of Israel um and there's a lot of their holy

sites and stuff are in there so I think those guys are largely motivated by wanting the West Bank by wanting the West Bank to be part of Israel and of course Netanyahu did show up to the UN a couple weeks before uh October 7th with a map of Israel that included the West Bank and Gaza all is Israel but they certainly don't care about Gaza as much they really care about the West Bank that's why the settlements continue um to this day in the West Bank and so I don't think exactly that they're first and

foremost motivated by the security concern although the security concern is there and it is real I mean it's not as if there aren't Arab terrorists who are trying to kill Israelis Benjamin Netanyahu I've always thought is more motivated by um by kind of not that it's a religious thing with him but that it's more like a legacy thing that if he gets the West Bank is part of Israel then he goes down as the next great Israeli Prime Minister and and all of that stuff now I'm not saying the security concerns don't play into this

but the truth is that Benjamin Netanyahu up till October 7th at least in his rhetoric was almost always downplaying the threat of Hamas we can control the height of the flame was what he bragged to his other uh you know concent members there um uh or his other lud party members in the knesset and so I don't know I you know I'm sure it's true for certainly for a lot of the Israeli people that is a major concern of theirs and understandably so I mean these are people who you know lived through the second in

tiata the many of them lived through October 7th you could understand where their concern would be uh security issues um th this was also the concern of many of the people who were opposed to abolitionism uh in in the United States of America many of the people who didn't want to abolish slavery said that they had real security concerns that if you freed all these slaves all these people you've been enslaving for so long they were going to try to kill you if you gave them their freedom and I can also understand why they had

those concerns you know like those are legitimate concerns the thing is that you just go like in the it's an old Thomas Jefferson quote right which he said I always butcher this I bring it up a lot too but where he said uh we have the wolf by the ear and we can neither afford to hold on to it nor to safely let it go and that was him talking about the slavery dilemma it's like well what are we going to do we going to make them all citizens and then they have second amendment rights

you're telling me these people we were just enslaving can go buy a gun now they're going to come kill all of us and you could understand where that's a legitimate concern but any decent person looking back at that now also recognizes that you're going yeah but you can't enslave people you know so I do think there are security concerns on the Israeli side and I think even legitimate ones the thing is that you just you can't hold the wolf by the ear forever and at a certain point you got to just pull the bandaid off

and say like okay we're not going to be in the business of occupying other people anymore yeah it's interesting and look everything is so different and I fully understand that but given what happened in Japan and uh Germany in World War II the fact that even with all of the horrendous atrocities um we were able to help rebuild and then get the hell out so um look there's geography concerns I was asking about that I don't know about the get the hell out part but we did help uh rebuild think we still got tro feel

like we I think we still got troops we have anything you would consider an occupying force in Japan no I'm not suggesting uh it's it's an occupying Force exactly but uh I'll just say that the military presence in in Germany and Japan the get the hell out part comes a lot later than the uh the rebuild part is all I'm saying but no I'm not I'm not really taking is yeah that that that'll open a can of worms that unfortunately I know we don't have time for but the the one last thing that I want

to map your uh base assumptions around is the argument that you're going to hear a lot is the um lack of moral equivalence between what happened on October 7th which is a barbaric Act of terrorism uh versus a military response to a Barb barbaric Act of terrorism plus them um having hostages uh does that make sense to you does that ring Hollow is it yes that's the right way to think about it but the response is just disproportionate or how do you think of that no I mean I so I understand it and it does

make some degree of sense to me but I think it's the wrong way to think about things and I think that on a you know on a human level there sometimes more advanced societies and more advanced governments what they end up doing with is they they institutionalize things um and they they make things much more advanced and less primitive and barbaric and so it's very easy to see you know say like if you're you know if if you're driving around in Mexico and this is kind of a famous thing in Mexico right that if you

get pulled over by a cop you can often just throw him a few bucks and they'll leave you alone and it's very easy for us to look at that and go like look at the corruption down there you know and clearly it is a much more corrupt system it's a much more nakedly corrupt system um our corruption comes in different forms now if you get pulled over by a cop in the United States of America probably don't try giving them money that that's almost certainly not going to work that's just not the way our corruption

works because our corruption isn't primitive and barbaric our corruption is more like um the prison guard Union will Lobby to keep mandatory minimums for marijuana now that's a much more sophisticated form of corruption that doesn't feel quite as gross and primitive but it's on a much more enormous scale and the result of it is that people's lives are ruined over something that is clearly very very corrupt every bit as corrupt as paying off aop to leave you alone and you can argue much more corrupt and so on a human level I understand where someone breaks

out of their cage and comes out to like just rip apart any person that they come across that feels a lot different than like someone pushing a button and sending a missile into a building that kills 40 people even if that guy only killed 15 people it still seems much more primitive and corrupt and there's not nothing to that like you know if you if you had to go out to lunch with like an IDF pilot or a Hamas terrorist you'd probably pick the IDF pilot like that's a more civilized person who is kind of

doing a job and can probably compartmentalize that and not be a monster at home whereas I'd imagine that Hamas terrorist is probably unable to compartmentalize that and is probably a nightmare to live around or to go to lunch with however the fact that this terrorism if you will is so much more sophisticated and so much more systematized does not really remove from what it what it is and you know as somebody like I have two little children um I think that most people out there who have kids or maybe have nieces and nephews or like

some kids you you know if somebody were to kill your kid I I I don't know that it would be like it would be of much uh relief to you to find out that like don't worry it was just collateral damage in a strike don't worry we just we knew your kid was in that building but we knew a bad guy was also in that building and so we decided to blow up the whole building you know bro on the other side of that it's still the same thing that happened to you like the same

crime is the same crime that happened to you and so there is this kind of tendency for us to even like even to look at things like terrorism verse collateral damage you know what do you call it here look if if there if there was a really bad guy um and he was a murderer and he went into a a school and you know he's using them as human Shields or whatever you know and he's hiding behind all these kids and then the local police department came in and just blew up the school and killed

all the kids and the we wouldn't sit here and go like well that's collateral damage and hey it's on this guy because he was using a human Shields we'd be outraged at the local police department and we would be like you guys are a bunch of monsters who just murdered all of these children now I understand for practicality reasons things are a little bit different when you're dealing with conflicts within you know a police Force's jurisdiction than within different territories but in terms of the moral act like if you're on the other side of that

if you for a second put yourself in the Palestinian shoes you can understand where that's just like a totally unacceptable thing to say to them like no it's terrorism when anyone breaks out a Gaza and kills people in Israel but we can absolutely decimate Gaza and you'll just have to accept that that's that's just Collateral Damage I think that's an unreasonable thing to ask a group of people to accept um I get why it's unreasonable to ask the group of people to accept it and I think that you have accurately identified that um not only

will it just be totally meaningless to them whatever weird distinction you're trying to make you're also going to create more people that will hate you and they will come and kill you later and so from that perspective it's just a god- awful strategy uh and I know that you heard um Coleman Hughes address this on Joe Rogan but I found his argument pretty compelling which is that um this is actually Hamas is very intelligent you can think what you want but it is a an unbelievably effective strategy to turn the Western World against Israel to

um be willing to let your people die to not want them to leave because you know they're going to be bombed to have specifically done this to court a response and that you want the footage of um the women and children just being slaughtered endlessly um that's a that's a really smart strategy and if we go well we're just going to let him get away with it because we're afraid to kill them and to have this footage and quite frankly just to do such a horrible thing um then they can you know Peck us to

death forever coming over and doing these pot shots killing a hundred here a thousand there 500 here um it would really be the perfect get out of jail free card and I don't see how you can let that stand yeah but yeah but I mean I I I think there's a there's a false binary being created there because it's not a choice between doing what Israel is doing and just letting them get away with it I mean it's like look after not look this is this is the TR this is true with all terrorism with

all asymmetric Warfare in general that they're always trying to to prod you into an overreaction because that's the whole game right like Osama Bin Laden didn't think he could take down the United States of America by knocking down the Twin Towers but he did think he could get us to invade Afghanistan and bankrupt ourselves just like they had done with the Soviet Union and so okay so the answer then is to not invade Afghanistan and bankrupt yourself but that doesn't mean you couldn't have done the special ops uh attacks that took out 90 plus percent

of the al-Qaeda bases which is what we did immediately after 911 by Christmas of 2001 almost all of al-Qaeda in uh Afghanistan had been destroyed we then invaded the country and decided we were going to fight a regime change war against the Taliban which went on for another catastrophic 20 years so the look before Netanyahu the Israel always dealt with their terrorism problem with targeted assassinations special ops things of that nature they never dealt with it as just a problem for the regular old military to go in and just totally decimate the place and so

look nobody's suggesting that you shouldn't find and target the people who were directly involved in October 7th no one suggesting you shouldn't do everything you can do to get the hostages out but if the game from Hamas was that which I think it was I think Coleman's correct about that was that we're going to provoke Israel into this overreaction that will turn World opinion against them well then they certainly didn't have to do it in this Reckless of a way and and who knows how many of their own hostages Israel's killed I mean they admit

to a few but who really knows when you see these cities destroyed what who's really accounting for where all the hostages were um I think that again it's it's not a choice between oh we do absolutely nothing and let let him get away with that or we level the place um the truth is there were a lot of different possibilities for how Israel could have responded to this and almost all of them would have been a much better idea than what they've done so is your base assumption that uh keeping with the things that Netanyahu

has said himself that have come out that um he wanted this frozen piece he wanted a moment to be able to get rid of them that really it was just this attack happened to meet a threshold where it was like okay now we can do the real gloves off and get to what we really want which is just the the total um decimation of Gaza itself you know my my best understanding of the situation is that netanyahu's plan for propping up Hamas was that um he would thwart the creation of a Palestinian State and it

would kill the peace process and then he could embark on negotiating with the other Arab countries without ever having to make a deal with the Palestinians and he essentially felt like that was working and he in his own words Hamas was the the fire which whose flame they could control the height of I don't think October 7th was part of the plan I think it has totally decimated his legacy and he knows that and now he's in this desperate game of number one trying to be you know it's like it's not like 911 that happened

like on George W Bush's first year you know like he's the longest serving prime minister in Israeli history and it just happened at the end this is his like and he's the guy who took the hard approach that we're gonna thwart a Palestinian State and we're going to prop up Hamas and all of this stuff I think he realizes he's politically done after this and so now he's searching for some type of Victory and he also knows that as soon as the war's over he's over and so he's kind of got to keep the thing

going so I don't necessarily think it's as as like he wanted this war all along I think he had awful Reckless policies that ultimately culminated in October 7th and is now in a politically impossible situation and seems to be you know as uh as John mimer has pointed out seems to be almost um in some type of like psychotic self-destructive spree here there that he's unable to like pull himself back in from and how do you make sense of the fact that the um that Hamas won't give back the hostages oh I mean I I

think that it's as easy as um look the part of it is is what you and Coleman were just saying that they they see this as a victory they think that they're turning World opinion against Israel and they are they're not wrong about that um and then also I think part of it is that that is that's the leverage that they have so they're trying I mean there's been all types of like negotiations going on and there there's been some of them that are probably the fault of Hamas some are the fault of the Israelis

some are the fault of the Americans but Hamas just uh the other day it was reported said they would work out a deal to return the hostages but they didn't agree to Israel's terms so I think they do see this as their last bargaining chip which it kind of is and they're trying to get the best deal they can brother this is a much bigger conversation I know that we are out of time uh hopefully this is the first of many thank you for walking me through through um all of the base assumptions I think

it is a super uh helpful way to really map somebody's thinking uh where can people follow along with you oh um uh part of the problem.com is uh where my show streams if you want to support us you can you can go over there and then it's of course YouTube and Spotify and all the other places that you can uh you can get internet shows um and comic Dave Smith if you want to come see me out on the road uh that's my website I love it all right anybody that's deeply invested in the Israel

Hamas Palestine uh drama please forgive that I know we are just scratching the surface and there's much more complexity that we did not get into I do not consider this a full full exploration uh but did want to start the conversation with Dave so thank you guys uh for sticking with us this far and hopefully there will be a part two at some point in the future all right if you haven't already be sure to subscribe everybody and until next time my friends be legendary take care peace if you like this conversation check out this

episode to learn more first of all to answer your question directly destabilizing the United States would be very difficult because at the end of the day the US is a we are a strong unifying culture when we are attacked it supersedes all other things that's that we saw that with 911 we saw it in the Vietnam