#2153 - Dave Smith

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No, I didn't see that.

Oh my god, and all these dudes did these hilarious videos where these young black guys, like, got around a computer and they stared at it, and bit it, and took it.

There's like a, it's like an age thing, too, because that used to kind of be the line that, like, liberals, would say, you know, the problem with black kids is they just don't have any role models, they've never been exposed to this, but that's just totally not true anymore. And sometimes now, because they're from a different generation, they'll still say that, and you're like, have you been around black people lately?

Saying young, poor, black kids, don't know what a computer is, is so crazy.

They've got one in their pocket.

It's such a dumb thing to say. It's amazing that you could say something like that and be the governor of a major state. Don't even know what the word computer is.

Oh, they don't, they're not even familiar with the term?

They don't know these things. Like, is she doing a survey? Ma'am, where did you get this data?

Well, this is why Malcolm X said that there's nothing more racist than a white liberal.

Yes.

Because of shit like this.

Well, they're weak. Weak people are dangerous. Weak people that don't like strength are dangerous. They're dangerous because they want to suppress everything. That's what's spooky about it.

Right. Well, there's something on that topic of, like, the weakness of modern liberals. Because I was in, like, late last year, I was in San Diego. And I haven't been to, I mean, I've been to L.A. a couple times, but much less than I used to go, like, when you were out there.

Great club.

Great club. Love that place. And I'm, like, downtown. And we were going, me and my buddy Rob Bernstein, very funny comedian who was with me on the trip. We're, like, walking around.

Well, what they need is a reasonable plan to help these people. If you really care, if you really care, you've got to do something. Like, you can't just let them exist everywhere. And then in San Francisco, the most recent bizarre one is they're going to give them alcohol. They're going to give money in alcohol.

Yep. I couldn't agree more.

San Francisco gives actual alcohol.

We're not talking rubbing alcohol here, right? They're talking like booze.

Oh, they're so good. They're so good. But these are the old hippies. They're still there. They're still there.

See, to your point, it's like, look, it'd be ridiculous if someone just completely dismissed the first part of what you were saying. There are some things that fortune, luck. Luck is huge. We all didn't get leukemia as little kids and die.

You need a shot in the drive-by as a little kid.

And also there are just parts of the world. A lot of what you're saying really applies to first-world advanced countries. You could be in a country that's just a war-torn third-world country, and you're screwed no matter what you do. So it would be silly to dismiss that, but it's also equally ridiculous to dismiss the other aspect to it. Like, okay, there are every person, every single person who's successful has conquered self-pity.

It's a part of human nature.

That's right. But it's also poison. And anybody who's successful has learned how to conquer that and not just sit here and feel bad for yourself and to say, nope, I'm going to take control of this. No matter what happened to me, I'm going to not focus on that. I'm going to focus on what I can control.

100%. And it's not lost on me the irony of two rich white guys, one of them smoking a cigar, talking about this.

I would say I'm climbing my way toward there. I don't know. By global standards, sure.

Bro, you're fucking killing it.

By global standards, I'm on Elon Musk level.

That's true. I mean, I'm poor compared to Elon.

That is true. You are broke.

I'm so broke.

Yes.

That poor little bastard.

He goes, I got Rogan coming over to the house. Put away the good China. He goes, oh God, the Rogans are coming.

There's levels of people. I'm friends now, this is a bizarre thing to say, with multiple billionaires. Yeah. I know multiple guys that are billionaires. And they're very nice people.

But you're also friends with the cool billionaires.

Yeah.

You know? Yeah. How do you manage to find the cool ones?

Well, Elon's the coolest. He's my favorite billionaire. That dude's wild. He's a wild boy. I will buy Teslas as long as they sell them.

Just to keep Twitter going?

And they're dope. But yeah, just to support him, man. God damn it, you need an Elon Musk. in this world. You need a wild boy.

Dude, how great was watching him realize in real time how stupid Don Lemon is? Oh my God. Like you could actually see on his face as he's asking the questions. And he's like, well, if you lower standards, then you're going to get more incompetence. And Don Lemon's like, so you're saying black people aren't competent?

It's not just that. He said a very important point. He said that Don Lemon was doing CNN outside of CNN. And you don't have to do that. You just don't.

I say you can't do that. It's not going to work.

It's not going to work. But, more importantly, you shouldn't do it because it's not good for you. Just be a human. Don't be this thing, this journalistic, probing, bullshit thing that's trying to spin a narrative. Actually, have a conversation with this human.

Oh, dude. I've done a fair amount of cable news shows. They'll do these things where it's like a panel, and there'll be three people on the panel and the person hosting the show. There's some people who I really like, who I've been on their shows, but it's like you're trying to talk about the most important topics, and everyone gets 20 seconds. It's so ridiculous.

I want you to imagine a scenario. Imagine a scenario where COVID breaks out, and, for whatever reason, the mainstream media is saying that we should be very careful about experimental drugs.

Everyone should be vaccinated.

Be vaccinated, or you're a fucking plague rat. Imagine if the podcasters were calling the unvaccinated plague rats. Imagine if the podcasters were encouraging medical misinformation. But my point is, imagine the backlash right now, where there's none coming their way. There's zero.

We would be in jail. I'll be debating Chris Cuomo in a few days, so that'll be fun.

We would be in jail. All these people that are dropping dead. All these people with strokes. All these people with heart attacks. What was the AstraZeneca thing that I sent you today?

Yeah, yeah.

AstraZeneca, they were saying that 11% of the people had an adverse side effect?

Serious adverse side effects, yeah. Even as you lay out this scenario, doesn't it almost in some way be like it feels like that makes more sense? What would make more sense was that comedians, like me and you, would have just been saying the dumb thing and repeating it. But the person in a suit and tie at CNN, I mean, this dude's a professional newsman. He knows what's going on.

They would make a very good argument for ending podcasts. Sure. They'd make a very good argument for prosecuting people, class action lawsuits. All the people that encourage these podcasters with their limited—. You don't even have a medical degree.

They did, even though we were getting everything right. And now most of them will admit that we were right.

Now, when you see Chris Cromaw and Patrick Bette David spinning it—.

Listen, I don't want to go too hard right now, because I want them to show up.

I think there's a cult-like thinking in mainstream media, whether they know they're being influenced by their sponsors or they're not, but I don't even think they understand how crazy it is. When I had Sanjay Gupta on, Sanjay Gupta is a very nice man. I think he's a good man, I really do, and he's a surgeon. I mean, he's very busy. The guy is constantly working, and he comes in to give medical information and give this, you know, lay things out for CNN, and I think he thinks he's doing the right thing.

I think, my guess, and this is just a guess, but I have been in that world a little bit. I worked for CNN for a year, and I've done a lot of shows on Fox News, and I've met a lot of people and talked to a lot of people who work at CNN and Fox News, and my guess on it is that, number one, he had a book, so they want to sell copies of the book, and they know you have the biggest show, and so they're like, oh, this will be really good, and then I also think there's this thing where they all really do feel like we're the experts, and they know they're the experts because, I mean, I just got off the phone with, you know, the chief of staff of the White House, and I know that, you know, they're very into that kind of like that world where I've talked to everyone with status, and I think there's hubris involved, where they're like, you'll be able to handle whatever a comedian throws at you. Like, you're a medical expert, and he's not, but then you would just ask really basic questions, which my favorite was when he goes, so are you going to get the vaccine, and you were like, well, no, I just had COVID, I have natural immunity, and you were like, why should I get the vaccine, and he had no answer, and this was at a time when they were rolling out vaccine passports, and he just, the whole line was just, you have to get the vaccine or you're a bad person, this is a pandemic of the unvaccinated, and then he just demonstrated on your show that there was this huge category of people, people who have had COVID already, who he had no argument for why they should get the thing.

Not only that, there had already been research that showed that natural immunity from previous infection was up to seven times better at preventing new cases of COVID.

Which is consistent across viruses. Of course. Like, it's always better to have natural immunity. The vaccine is always trying to simulate natural immunity.

This is what was so fucked. Look, I'm no scholar. I'm not a smart guy. I'm a normal person. There's nothing special about my brain.

Oh, it's so funny.

I love it. Don't do your own research. It used to be called reading.

Love Jimmy Dore. That's a great bit.

In my limited looking at this, I was like, something's wrong here. There's this mass societal push. People are trapped in like a mind virus of this one particular solution. And Dr. Robert Malone laid what that is, like psychologically what happens when one thing is offered.

And like there's this. weird, you know, because we're weird social, psychological creatures. And, you know, if you think about like the Milgram experiments and what people will do if there's a person in a white coat telling them to do it. Yes. And part of, like the culture.

Explain the Milgram things that people don't know.

So the experiment was kind of like basically they come in and they're like, okay, you're here for some type of scientific experiment. I forget exactly how they described to them. But they're testing, you know, like negative reinforcement within learning or something like that. And so they have a guy in a white coat. And he tells you, every time a guy gets an answer wrong or something like this, you're supposed to push the button and it zaps him.

They fall in line with it.

They really do. Even people who really, really should know better.

Yeah, but it becomes socially their group too. And then you get influenced by the group socially.

Well, this is one of the things I'm really interested to talk to Chris Cuomo about. And, by the way, that's on Patrick Bette David's show on the 31st.

It was the war with Donald Trump. That's really what it was. It's like social media was all controlled by the left wing media. And the left wing media was all in on this war against Donald Trump.

That's a huge part of it. I mean, I would say the backdrop is the war on terror, the terror wars, getting all of that wrong, the financial crisis, not seeing that coming and kind of getting that all wrong.

The weapons of mass destruction thing.

Yeah, that's all that stuff. Iraq and Afghanistan being disasters. So that's kind of in the backdrop. And then you have the worst financial crisis in 100 years. So that happened.

But people will still go on Bill Maher and argue this. They'll still say there's evidence. It's like people still want to say there's evidence.

They'll still say it. There's not even evidence that Vladimir Putin interfered in the 2016 election. The best they have is like there are some bot farms that they can trace to Russian IP addresses, which is like, I'm not a tech guy. Jamie, you know this better than me. But they say it's the easiest thing to fake is an IP address.

But even the guys who they got, the connection was like he knew Putin. Imagine if we found out that the Russian troll farms were like completely insignificant. And it's all just like government controlled troll farms.

Well, I mean, look, even if they were all from Vladimir Putin, they were fairly insignificant in terms of like interfering in elections with other cultures, with other countries, and how it works.

The most effective strategy was funny memes.

Yeah. Yeah.

I mean, it really was a very effective strategy because it makes, when you mock something, it makes it much more easy to dismiss that in terms of whether or not like. that's the right choice for president. If someone can like, openly mock someone, why do you think they openly mock Donald Trump? They even made stuff up like about his hand size.

Yeah.

Remember, there was this thing that he had little hands. Dude, I was shaking his hands. He's got normal fucking hands.

He's a big guy.

He's a big guy. Like he's got a big hand. I was like, this is the most, I remember. the first time I shook his hands, like. this is the most ridiculous thing.

Mocking people is a powerful tool, dude.

That's a crazy one, because you're mocking something that someone can't change. This is always against, that's against left wing ideology.

Yeah, not when it serves their purposes.

Right, but that's the thing. Right. It's just like you're willing to violate the rules for your side to win. Because progressives are really supposed to be against body shaming. You're supposed to be kind.

Dude, there was a segment. I remember watching this. It was in the 2016 election and it was on Joy Reid's show on MSNBC, her show at the time, whatever it was. And she had a whole segment about, like how sexist the coverage of Hillary Clinton was. And it was, you know, every time they'll say she's shrill or she's this.

It's beautiful. It's fun. It's fun. It's fun to watch. I'm glad those people exist.

Yeah, you got to go for it.

Joy Reid things. What was that one? she got in some bizarre argument with some woman recently? I think it was a transgender issue. Was that what it was, Jamie?

Yeah, she's pretty out there. I'm not sure which what a segment you're referring to, but she's got a whole lot. But it's a lot of great hits.

It's not. Yeah, it's like you have to be on that network. Like you can't exist in the podcast world. Yeah, you can't. What is it?

That's the gig. And it's just like you point this out all the time. But it's just not enough time to have a real conversation on any of these shows. Dude, I did a debate for Zero Hedge a couple months ago on, like the Israel-Gaza conflict. And it was a two-on-two debate.

Isn't that crazy?

You get like a half hour. You know what? Roughly not. I don't know exactly if we all spoke even time. But roughly a half hour each, that's not nearly enough to go through like the history of all this shit and what's going on now, and to really make your points.

This is insane. It's insanity.

You're just trying to hit whatever. the best point you can hit is. And in the same way that Twitter, I mean now you could like post longer stuff. But you know what? Twitter, just because it's short, it just like pushes you into, like saying just whatever just can destroy that guy in one sentence.

And when you're dealing with something like this, just the depth of it all, it's just so perplexing. You know, when you just lay out – like when Mike Baker's on and he lays out the history of like Palestine and Israel, and the conflicts, and Egypt and this and that, and Hamas and Hezbollah and he lays it all. You're like, Jesus Christ. There's so many layers to this fucking cake. Yeah.

Well, you mean like with the protests?

The footage.

Oh, yeah, yeah.

Footage of things. Even footage of like people fake things. now. Yeah. And they fake things specifically for propaganda.

Yeah, dude. I know. I think there's a thing. I don't know if I could word this exactly right, but I think there's – for some reason, I think comedians have this thing that they're kind of able to go to these places. Do you remember when you had Bill Burr on your show and you played this video?

I think it was a protest.

Yeah, it was like a grown man going up to, like a little girl and ripping it. And you like, immediately you were like, oh, man, that'd be real bad. if that was my kid. Like, I'd be in jail the next day or that. And then Burr was like – he was like, oh, you went to a dark place there.

Well, also parents.

Yeah, well, that particularly. But I just – it's just very easy for me. I don't know why. This always just came very natural to me, whereas I think some people have so much trouble with this. But it's very easy for me to do this on both sides of this conflict, to just go, okay, like I got two little kids.

Both sides. For sure. Which is really what's the most scary thing about the conflict. Sure.

And that's why it's gotten to such a bad point, right? Because this is the cycle that keeps going. But I do think – and this is what Daryl Cooper, who, like I, brought him up last time I was on. He has that fantastic series called A Fear and Loathing in the New Jerusalem. And he's just totally brilliant.

Young kids in America who are Jewish are complicit. They're somehow or another responsible.

Yeah, which is like totally ridiculous.

See Jerry Seinfeld? They're heckling at his shows. now. There's like some organized protest that came to his show and they were screaming out in the middle of his show.

It's also, just like, guys, like take it – look. Like, I understand, wanting to protest this war. I got my issues with the young college leftists who are protesting it. They're not my people exactly. But like there's an Israeli embassy here.

Because they're not really thinking? well. No, of course not. And most of these people that do this, they come from wealthy families. They're young, really idealistic kids, and they glue themselves to paintings.

Isn't it weird? Sometimes it feels like each side's foot soldiers are working for the other side. You know what I mean? Like when you do stuff like that, you're almost like I just want to drill for more oil now.

Well, this is the problem with teams, man. This is a problem with teams. if you have a team that anybody can join. Like if – the Republicans are basically like the Christians. They'll take anybody.

It's a lot of work. They make you work. It's a lot of work.

You've got to fucking learn some stuff. I remember I was doing this episode of Joe Rogan Questions Everything, where I was talking to religious people. A bunch of different religious sects and religious scholars. And I was talking to this one guy who was a rabbi. And there was a woman there that was converting to Judaism.

It's like the way citizenship is. Where, like, when you're born Jewish like I am, or born an American like I am, and you're like, oh, man, I couldn't have passed that test. It's a good thing I was born into this shit.

It's a hard fucking test. Yeah.

They really – they make you work.

Well, I think the Jewish one's harder than the American one. Yeah, probably. But the American one –.

Well, these days you could just walk in. But if you don't walk in, you're fucked.

If you don't walk in, then if you fly in from Europe, they're like, uh-uh, you flew first class. We're going to make it really hard for you to become a citizen.

By the way, it sums up everything about modern day America. Anarcho-tyranny. Yeah. It's just kind of like – it's like you have the worst of anarchism and tyranny all in one. Where, if you follow the rules, you get totally fucked.

And everybody wants to be on a team. So if you have a team that's open to anybody, you're going to get the dumbest fucking people that are super enthusiastic about that team. And they're going to ruin everything. And they do it with everything. They do it on the right and they do it on the left.

That's why I say my message is always reject the teams and come, be a libertarian and lose with me. Just keep losing. Come and just enjoy losing. There's something freeing about knowing you're not going to win.

They're the most reasonable people I talk to politically. Yeah. But it's also like – but it's also. the system is so deep. Like, you ain't getting in.

Well, that's the real question. Figuring out what the solution is is almost the easy part. And then actually figuring out how to implement it. Aliens have to land.

They literally have to land. Enough. Because we're, like, on our way to a kingship. We're on our way.

AI just has to be like, listen, we read all of the books in human history and we figured this out pretty quickly.

That might be the thing that saves us and ruins us at the same time is president AI.

President AI.

President AI will be logical. And if it's on the blockchain, we'll know exactly if president AI is being influenced by money.

Wouldn't it be great if AI just turns out to be as human as us and is just corrupted? And they're like, president. AI got a blowjob in the Oval Office. And the power went to his head.

He just started making AI whores.

He's got to give a press conference. He's like, I don't know what I was thinking, man. I was pretty good until I got in there. The ring of power just ruins everyone.

We are going to bypass biological needs. And we're going to do it pretty soon. It's going to be real soon. It's going to, sex, regular sex is going to seem ridiculous in 20 years.

We're going to be the, like, old school guys. We're like, I still do sex the old fashioned way with my wife. And people are going to be like, what?

When I was in high school, we got hand jobs. These kids are fucking robots. Even their sex.

People are going to be like, you have sex with your wife? That's insane, dude.

How are you doing that? What if you guys get diseased? People die from those diseases.

I do think, like, I mean, look, obviously, like, I'm biased on the, like, I have my own opinions on these things. But I do just think that one of the things that I've found kind of amazing, and I've thought this with some of the people who have come on your show since the last time I was here, is the way that people can defend what Israel is doing in Gaza does kind of blow my mind.

It blows my mind, too.

Because it reminds you that it's like, you're like, oh, okay, look, throughout all of human history, right, I'm not saying there's anything unique to Israel, like, that. they're the only ones to ever commit atrocities, or that they're not dealing with atrocities committed to them.

What they're doing is super standard.

Sure, in some sense, yeah.

In terms of, like, world wars, in terms of, like, Dresden.

Well, yeah, but that's the thing. If you compare it to the worst things that have ever happened in the history of the world. But I'm just saying, throughout all of human history, there's been atrocities, and there's been genocides, and ethnic cleansing campaigns, and slavery, and all. But at every single point, there was someone there willing to rationalize it. You know, like, someone there who would be like, no, no, no, listen, this is what we have to do, because otherwise this, and it's amazing the mental gymnastics that people can come up with to justify something that is so clearly on its face, just horrific.

But I think the difference is, back then, your understanding of it was much more limited. You weren't watching videos on it. They didn't exist. If you saw it on television, on the movie theater, it'd be a small clip that was played, and it was played before the film. But everyone knew that.

There was kind of no defending it.

It was. And then, when you find out they were right, at the end of it all, when you find out many, many years later that the Gulf of Tonkin was a false flag, you're like, what?

Which they didn't even need in order to be right. But then you find out you're like, oh, the whole thing was a whole thing.

And then you go, what did you guys do with all that heroin money? Where did all that money go? Because if I was the government, and I was willing, just imagine if Eisenhower is correct, which is insane. How could he be? And that there was a real influence of military-industrial complex.

Like. that would be your line?

Hold on. How much are these guys making? How much are these fucking dudes making?

How much? A lot.

How many billions? This is? of what percentage of the world's heroin supply? And then, when you see the same trick played out in Afghanistan, when you're like, my favorite was Geraldo Rivera interviewing the troops, rationalizing why they had to guard the poppy fields. We have to guard the heroin.

Yeah.

For the good folks.

I couldn't. This heroin falls into the wrong hands.

It could be lethal. There's no way America would sell this heroin. There's no way. The output of heroin out of Afghanistan, I want to say it was a 96% increase.

See, you're exaggerating, Joe. It's only 80%.

No, no, no. It was responsible for 80%. Ooh. Yeah. It was responsible for most of the global supply of heroin.

The Taliban just ran on a Trump message.

They fucking kicked out the drug dealers. That's what happened. Yeah. They kicked out the drug dealers. Dude, there was a giant part of the supply of heroin to the world.

Yeah. And I think even people who are – even the people, I think, who are lying about this shit, rationalizing in their own head.

Bro, where did that money go?

Yeah. Well, that's –.

Where did all that heroin money go?

Well, I know you were – I was listening to the Mike Baker podcast you had on where you were talking about, like the money in Ukraine and where it went. And even he was like, ah, yeah, we don't really know where that – I thought one of the funniest things about that was that –.

I'll tell you where some of it goes.

Well, that's for sure.

Woo!

I think that's for sure.

The Taliban – it's not – our tax dollars have 100% paid for some cocaine.

Oh, certainly.

The Taliban's successful opium ban is bad for Afghans and the world.

But you get my point about how humans can rationalize anything? Yeah. Like they could just come up with –.

Propaganda. Well, yes, of course. That's propaganda.

Yes, that's true. That's also true.

But even people who are like – I mean, like, look, I thought – the only way you could say that, whether it made sense, is if you're advocating that heroin should be legal.

Yes.

If you're advocating that heroin should be legal, and this is your full – okay, now, I'll accept it. But if you really think that heroin is a scourge and if you really do appreciate that 100,000 people died last year of opioid overdoses, 100,000, it's a real fucking crisis. Yeah. If there was a disease killing 100,000 people, we would freak the fuck out.

Well, look, I mean, I do think there's a strong argument for legalization, but there's also a difference between that and the government, kind of, like, sponsoring the trade of it.

95% of the European supply. More land is used for opiate in Afghanistan than is used for coca cultivation in Latin America.

No, I think it's insane to ignore that. I mean, like, come on.

Where's that money? Yeah.

Where's that money? Rand Paul – I thought this was so funny. It was during one of the rounds of aid to Ukraine, and Rand Paul stood up and said, look, we don't know where any of this money is going. If we're going to send them this money, can we at least have an inspector general so that we itemize, like, where all the money is going? And it failed.

That's communist talk.

Yeah, like, even in the Senate, they were like, what? What are you talking about?

Communist talk.

We're going to know where our money is going? Nah, that's lame. Yeah, we don't need that. Just send it over there.

Just send them that shit. Send them everything they need and more. And then, do you have one of their flags? You should wave it around.

Yeah. And we'll provide the flags. We'll provide the flags. Don't worry.

They're all uniform, same size. It's not like people bought them from different vendors. No, they all got them from the same – well, they got a little box of them. Hey, make sure you guys grab your flags. It's fucking bonkers.

It's also just so – the thing that's so wild to me is that after – and I know I've talked about this, I'm sure, on previous episodes – but just after 20 years of the terror wars, and what a disaster those were, and to the point that everyone – John McCain wrote in his memoir that the war in Iraq was a mistake. That's how universally agreed upon it is.

Which is hilarious.

Even John McCain would acknowledge we got that one wrong. And it's not like anyone else is defending any of the other terror wars at this point. But then, as soon as we kind of get out of them – we're not even fully out, but we're mostly out – we just get into these proxy wars in Ukraine and now in Israel. that are clearly wars of choice for America. Like, we don't have to be involved in these.

These last two are really important. When they get done, we're done.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's right. These last two. This is it.

This is it. Right.

You know, it's – anyway, man. I do – I will say that I think a lot of the defense of the war in Gaza, which I kind of feel we are even calling a war because it's not – it doesn't exactly feel like that's what the term should be.

Well, it's like the Bill Hicks joke. It's only a war when two armies are fighting. Well, right. Remember that joke? Yeah, vaguely.

That's a great bit.

It's a great bit.

Well, I mean –.

He has some great bits about the war.

But in the case of Gaza, it's not even like – there's not even a government. I mean, there are stateless people who have been captive by the Israelis since 1967..

And then they're captive politically in their own country by Hamas.

Right.

And then Hamas does do what. this accusation is, that they have their bases under schools and hospitals. They actually do do that.

Yeah. I think it's certainly exaggerated at times by the Israelis, but there is no question that they are – look, they're in this – Gaza is – dude, it's five miles wide. I know. It's crazy. Gaza, you know, like – So little.

Way closer. Way smaller than here, to my club.

Yeah.

Yeah. Now, imagine that. Imagine. Imagine, like, an extra ten miles.

Yeah.

Imagine that small tract of land in the last five miles is what's getting the fuck blown out of it.

It is. It's, I think, 25 by five. So it's like a marathon by a jog. You know what I mean? Like, that's how – that's Gaza.

But isn't everyone looking at it too binary? Like –? Well, yeah. Even if you're –, even if you're supporting the Israelis, even if you're from that position, you have to acknowledge the attacks on AIDS workers. Like, it seems to be.

There's been several, I know, for sure.

I think it's a big number.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, I mean, it's been – It's creepy. Well, I remember when you had – anyway, just the point I was making about Gad's thing is that it's also this, like, I just hate when people retreat to almost these hypotheticals. It reminds me of Sam Harris' argument about why you were really wrong with the – at least eight times.

Eight times. Yeah. That's a lot. So eight times Israeli forces have attacked humanitarian aid convoys and buildings in the Gaza Strip. At least eight times since October.

And, well, look, and this has kind of been, like, egged on. Look, there'll be so much, like, scrutiny over, like, some college kids chanting from the river to the sea. And look, for the record, if I was in charge of those protests, I'd say stop chanting that, because even if you don't mean it to mean the Jews are – Even if you don't mean it that way, which some people will argue they don't, and that's fine. Maybe that's not what you mean. Maybe you mean is from the river to the sea, everyone will be free, and whatever.

You can't use a swastika for its old-timey use.

Right. Like, if nothing else, it's a bad idea. However, for all the scrutiny there'll be over what these 20-year-olds are hollering at Columbia, when Benjamin Netanyahu is saying they're Amalek. as you're going into this area, which, you know, the story from the Bible is that you're supposed to kill the women and the children. And the story is that they fucked up by not killing all the women and the children.

Is Amalek the story from the Bible?

The story is, they were, like, a tribe, who was, like, an evil tribe, and you had to kill all of them, kill the women and the children. And that's the specific, like, lesson of that story, is that you're supposed to kill the women and the children. And then you conduct a campaign like this. This is, by the way, this is what was in the South Africa case that they brought to the UN, and that they – you know, the ICJ basically said that Israel is plausibly committing a genocide. And they didn't exactly – you know, they haven't yet determined that it is, or isn't, but they said it's plausible.

No, he wasn't saying that. He was saying you could – when someone's saying you could never mandate a vaccine or argue for a mandate, and he was saying if there was a vaccine – you could – he was making an intellectual argument. He's correct. You could argue that if there was a vaccine that had zero side effects and was 100 percent effective, and if everybody took it, the disease stops. You could make that argument.

Well, what he was saying was that, then how would we feel – But he goes, then how would we feel about what Joe Rogan is saying and what RFK is saying when they were – you know what I mean? But the point is that –.

The point is that thing doesn't exist. That's not the hypothetical. – Well, not only that, it doesn't exist in nature. Right, right. There's no vaccines that are 100 percent safe, with no side effects, none of them.

I'm just saying I'm not against engaging in a thought experiment to think about like what that scenario would look like, but at the same time, you're like it does seem like that's serving in this case as a distraction from the real world scenario that's going on here. So like if you're going to say if Israel – like, yes, I would not recommend Israel lay down all of their arms, completely, disarm themselves, and then open up the wall to Gaza and allow Hamas to come in. But that's not on the table. That's never going to happen. So like, even thinking about that as a thought experiment doesn't really prove that much.

And, you know – Right, but if you could flip it around, the opposite would be true. Like if Hamas did lay down all their weapons and if they did completely give up, you're going to have some Israeli soldiers that do not give a fuck, that still want to shoot them. But, for the most part, if there was nothing, if they completely gave up, which is also not going to happen, but if that did happen, you couldn't see a situation where Israel just continues bombing.

Maybe not, but then where – what do they go to? Just being subjugated by the Israeli – back to the status quo of just being a stateless, people of permanent refugees with no natural rights whatsoever, no ability to trade with the world, no ability to come and leave. You can't have an airport. You can't have a seaport. You can't go out fishing past, where some IDF guy decides you're not allowed to.

And if you don't give them their own – there's no way you can justify it. No way you can justify that a whole entire group of people never get to be a country, that they don't get the rights of the Israelis, they don't get the rights of a sovereign country. They're trapped.

Nothing. Literally no rights whatsoever.

That's kind of crazy, that that's being done by Israel, if you really think about it. It's kind of crazy.

Well, in some way – in a way it is, and then in another way, it's kind of not. It's kind of like there's this weird, you know, hurt people, hurt people type thing, like when you kind of suffer this trauma, and we're speaking collectively here, so it's not exactly the same as an individual, but like you suffer this trauma, and then you use that to justify doing whatever the hell you got to do so that you never suffer that trauma again, and then you weirdly end up kind of like inflicting something on another group of people, and kind of, in a weird way, holding them responsible for the trauma you suffered, even though they really, really had very little, nothing to do with the actual trauma.

It's really an ancient kind of conflict. The Israel-Palestine is very –. it's very ancient in the fact that it's like the hate between them is so strong, and they're right next door to each other, which is how people used to rock it back in the day. I mean, that was the fear of neighboring tribes, that people from the other side were going to come over and rape the women and children and kill your babies and slaughter the men.

And not like an irrational fear, like a fear based on if this really happens, you know what I mean?

And it's happening in Israel. I mean, that's what's crazy.

The other thing, though, is that – and that's all true, but the other thing is that, you know, there are these examples, right, like where there's Ireland and England, and they're right next to each other, and things are just cool now. And France and Germany are right next to each other, and they're just cool now.

Yeah, but Ireland and Northern Ireland were at war with each other forever.

No, but I'm just making the point that – and then it's over. Right. And now they're not at war anymore. Right. And look, Egypt went to war with Israel four times between the – was it 1948, 56, 67, and 72 or 73?.

Did I say that wrong? Was Ireland at war with Northern Ireland?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, because they were –.

Southern Ireland was at war.

Well, they were – the British controlled the –.

But it was really England.

Yes, yeah, yeah, yeah. It was, by proxy, England basically dominating the Irish. And then, by the way, the Irish turned to terrorism when they were being dominated by the English. Shocker. And, yeah, which is another thing that people – another real interesting –

That's how you have to do it. It's the only way to go to war.

Well, look –.

If you don't have a – if you have a smaller army, and they have all the money, you've got to figure out a way to get them.

Well, here's the craziest part of this, right, is that – and I thought – we talked a bunch about the history of this the last time I was on, but I don't think I mentioned this. Maybe I did. But the craziest part of all of it is that the Israelis – I shouldn't say the Israelis. The Israelis, five seconds before they became Israelis, like right before the creation of the state of Israel, they embraced terrorism. And, by the way, these terrorists who were the leaders of these terrorist organizations, like Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Shamir, they went on to be prime ministers of Israel.

What was their organization called?

Menachem Begin's was the Ergun. That was his militia. And then there was Lehi or the Stern Gang. And then there was the Haganah, who was like the biggest one. And they were not quite as terroristic, but they also were involved in a bunch of it.

And there's more of us.

Yeah. Well, not that much. I mean, there's Palestinians and Israelis. It's pretty close, if you count all of them.

Well, you're also backed by America.

Well, that's the major difference. So that's basically. my essential argument, is that America shouldn't be playing this role.

And this is being argued out now.

Yeah.

You know, this is a big point of contention now, politically, right? Because the Biden administration is not giving the same amount of support to Israel that it was –.

They've been giving – basically. I mean, what's really going on is that Joe Biden – this is a disaster politically for Joe Biden. And something like – looking at the polls recently, 50% of his base –.

I think you and I have different Twitter followers.

Really? Yeah. You're doing excellent. He's totally got it down.

There's a lot of people that are arguing that.

Jobs. I sent you his latest clip from his speech. It's that new Biden just dropped. And it's the newest – Yes. The newest where he goes – and by the – it's not – he meant to say, I think, financial crash, but he said pandemic.

Now, I saw someone saying that perhaps it was the H1N1 pandemic, which did happen during the Biden administration or during the Obama administration, when he was vice president.

I don't think. I don't think. I think he was talking about –.

He would have probably said a previous pandemic. Yeah.

The point is just that he does it so much.

Remember back in 2009?

If it was an – if it was occasional, people would let this stuff go.

Yeah.

But anyway, just two that –, look, I also thought – because some of these guys, by the way, you've had on your show, like, I, like them. I'm not even like, you know, like Coleman Hughes. I don't know him personally, but I like him. He's great. He seems really smart.

You two together would be a fascinating conversation just about the Israel-Palestine conflict. Yeah.

Well, I would love to have a – because I think he's a good-faith guy, and I think he is. And he's very smart. But he also kind of – you know, there were two things that kind of rubbed me the wrong way when he was on the show. Number one was that he started by kind of getting into this argument about – which I see a lot of people who are supporting this conflict doing. The argument about like, okay, well, here are the number of total civilians dead, and here are the number of Hamas militants dead, and let's look at that ratio.

Are they going in there and checking dog tags?

Yeah, they're not. You know what I mean? And – but anyway, but even that, I just – even if the numbers were right, it's like – look, dude, if you look at the population density, and you just look at the number of bombs that Israel has dropped, and you just see a lot of the footage that we've seen, and you just listen to stories that doctors are telling – I literally just saw an interview a couple weeks ago with a doctor who just got back from Gaza, and he was talking about how they have a major anesthesia shortage over there. So just think about the implications of that, like what that means. It means they're operating on kids without anesthesia.

Is this the only way to do it?

Is there any other option besides doing this? And as soon as you frame the question that way, you realize that, oh yeah, there actually is. And that it's not true that Israel – there will just be October 7th after October 7th if Israel stops doing this. The fact is that, of course, Netanyahu's never allowed a real investigation into October 7th to happen, but everybody pretty much concludes that Israel dropped the ball in a massive way. In a massive way that their security was just in shambles, and all they really needed to do was not rely so much on these, you know, machine gun robots and have actual soldiers at the border.

Well, wasn't there an issue of protests where the soldiers were allocated towards –.

Yes. Yes. Basically, they had – so, I think, as a result of the protests against Netanyahu, he had started to ally with some even further right-wing groups than he normally would have, and to appease them, he was pulling soldiers off of the Gaza border and putting them over toward the West Bank, which is what the religious Jews on the right really care about. And, yes, they basically got caught with their pants down. But I'm just saying they could just stop doing this.

Right. But if it isn't on videotape, he has a point as well.

Well, here – well, let me – OK. So here's the deal, right? So the quote that he's referring to was a quote by Benjamin Netanyahu. It was something along the lines of anybody who wants to thwart the Palestinians having their own state needs to support propping up Hamas, bolstering Hamas, transferring money to them to – right? So there was a quote like this.

So Hamas maintains power.

Right. So Hamas maintains power so that they never – we never have to give them a state because we can look to the international community. We can look to liberal Jews in Israel and say, look, we have no partner for peace. They're a crazy terrorist group. So we never have to make a deal.

And how is this attributed to him?

So basically, this quote particularly, OK, this was at a closed-door meeting with the Likud party. So this is Benjamin Netanyahu's political party, his far-right party that's in power right now in Israel. So it's true that this was a closed-door meeting and that it's not on tape. So what happened is, as far as I could tell, the first person who reported this, I believe, was a lady who's a reporter for the Jerusalem Post. And then it's been run in a bunch of other newspapers since then.

Sure, as long as they weren't trying to get rid of him. Because you can get more than three people to say that Donald Trump was in collusion with Russia.

Sure, sure. So even say if you don't trust them. Coleman acted as if that's what the entire case is built off of, which is just not true at all. It's not just this one. Benjamin Netanyahu quote.

Yeah, for years the Qatari government had been.

Qatari, I think is correct.

Yeah, Qatari government had been sending millions of dollars a month to Gaza Strip. Money that helped prop up the Hamas government there. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel not only tolerated those payments, he had encouraged them. According to Times, Israeli intelligence agents traveled to Gaza with a Qatari official carrying suitcases filled with cash. Suitcases, like a mafia movie, to disperse money.

And so that's, okay, so that's essentially the point there, right? So that's a strategy. That he can say, I have no partner for peace, which is the Israeli line that they like to use. So, basically, okay, in 1979, the Egyptians and the Israelis met at Camp David, and that's when they worked out their peace. Now their peace also just involved, basically, that the U.S.

This is the Yasser Arafat days.

This is before Yasser Arafat was like the guy, but he was alive. But then, in the 80s, Yasser Arafat basically rejected terrorism. He had been involved in terrorism before that. He rejected terrorism, and he recognized Israel. I think it was 1988..

Israel can shape its strategic environment in cooperation with Turkey and Jordan, by weakening, containing, and even rolling back Syria. This effort can focus on removing Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq, an important Israeli strategic objective in its own right, as a means of foiling Syria's regional ambitions. And here's where it gets crazy.

Maybe not everything. A lot. But certainly some stuff. Some things. You will see this, and I'm not saying that Epstein is the sole reason for this type of stuff.

They go there on tour. Yeah. Oh, tours, they go there.

Well, and they also, and the Israeli government's well aware of that, and they're well aware of how much they benefit from that. So they do everything they can to facilitate that belief.

White dudes with golf shirts.

That's right. They're a big force. They're a really big block in this country. There's not like a few dozen of them.

They're willing to throw some real money at bringing Jesus back.

Yes. That's a very big deal to them. But look, like there's all of these U.S. presidents, they've wanted an outcome that they're unable to get. And you can look, there's this one video of Benjamin Netanyahu where he doesn't know he's being recorded and he's speaking openly about this.

It is reasonable, but it's also. the left is very confused on this one. This is a baffling one for the left.

Yeah, they sure are.

Because support of Israel has always been a position of people on the left. Right? Support of Jewish people. And to not want that is kind of anti-Semitic.

Well, look, on the hard left, there's always been a bunch of people who are sympathetic to the plight of the Palestinians. For sure.

Well, the people that have seen Abbie Martin's take on it. Yeah.

But Abbie Martin also, like, follows in a tradition of left-wing thought, like Noam Chomsky and people like this, who have always been very critical of the Israeli government's treatment of the Palestinians.

Yes. But this is where it gets weird. It's like the support of Israel when Israel was attacked. So that's when everything gets crazy. It's not support of Israel before October 7th.

Oh, yeah. Well, yeah. I mean, the overwhelming majority, I think 85% of Jews are Democrats, or something like that.

Obviously, there's not full support. Even today, there was a news report of a huge government protest in Israel. They're in the streets. So it's not like. this is a policy that's supported by the entire population.

Well, there is. I mean, there was. So, basically, I think, what really changed things during the 90s, there's no question, there was tremendous support for making a deal for a two-state solution, particularly amongst liberal Israelis. And basically, so Yitzhak Rabin got assassinated by a right-wing Israeli who was furious that he was a traitor for making a deal with the Palestinians. And that took him out.