Joe Rogan Experience #2299 - Dave Smith

Joe Rogan 0:00 (drumbeats) Joe Rogan podcast, check it out.

Dave Smith 0:04 The Joe Rogan Experience.

Narrator 0:06 (instrumental music plays) Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night, all day. (instrumental music plays) Joe Rogan, Joe Rogan, Joe Rogan. Joe Rogan Experience. Joe Rogan, Joe Rogan, Joe Rogan. Edward Smith, good to see you again, sir.

Dave Smith 0:15 Good to see you too, man.

Joe Rogan 0:16 Good to see you again in these times of trouble-

Dave Smith 0:18 (laughs)

Joe Rogan 0:19 ... and chaos.

Dave Smith 0:20 W- wild, wild times.

Joe Rogan 0:22 Where leftists are lighting Teslas on fire and putting swastikas on them. (laughs)

Dave Smith 0:27 (laughs) And that's, and that's the calmest they've been in years.

Joe Rogan 0:30 (coughs)

Dave Smith 0:30 This is actually, for them, probably the best.

Joe Rogan 0:32 It's so weird how these people are so easy to wind up and get them to do what you want them to do. Just put a narrative out there, "You're a good person if you go do this," and they just go run out and fucking cause chaos.

Dave Smith 0:43 And it's the most... I mean, look, it's not like as much chaos as, say, like, uh, the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020 or something, but the one about the Tes- It's like you're destroying electric cars.

Joe Rogan 0:55 Which are mostly owned by liberals.

Dave Smith 0:56 Yeah, like, but th- But I thought you've been telling me for so long that this is gonna save the world. Like, the importance on going green was that we're all gonna die unless we do it. And now you're taking the most successful, uh, electric car company and trying to destroy them?

Joe Rogan 1:11 (laughs)

Dave Smith 1:11 Because... For the crime of pointing out that maybe the $7 trillion that our federal government's spending has a wee bit of corruption in it? You know? (laughs) Like, maybe we could cut some of that. It's so... I don't know, it's so... On every level, it's just so surreal. Um-

Joe Rogan 1:26 It is surreal. It feels fake. It does. It, it genuinely feels like we're living in some sort of a stupid movie. (laughs)

Dave Smith 1:34 Yeah. Man, it makes you wonder. It makes you wonder how controlled the whole thing is, you know? And I don't know, I don't know, but there is a... Do you remember? I think I sent it to you at the time, um, but there was a... Like, four years ago, there was a Time Magazine piece about the 2020 election. It was, like, a real long article, um, about- It was something... Like, the title was something like, "How the Shadow Government," (laughs) like, "Stole..." I, I... It wasn't exactly that, but it was like, basically went through the real conspiracy of 2020. And they're writing it from the pro-conspiracy point of view, but they're r- r- Forget anything about, like, ballots or any of that stuff, which I don't... You know, even when you interviewed Trump, he didn't really have a good answer for that.

Joe Rogan 2:17 Yeah.

Dave Smith 2:17 You know? He's like, "It's, it was stolen." And you're like, "Well, how do you know it was stolen?" He's like, "It was stolen." You know?

Joe Rogan 2:21 "I have the information."

Dave Smith 2:23 Yeah. But the... But what we- we do know, like, the real conspiracy in broad daylight, that they just totally, like, tanked the economy, overhaul-

Joe Rogan 2:31 (laughs)

Dave Smith 2:31 Yeah, that's it. The Secret History of the Shadow Campaign That Saved the 2020 Election.

Joe Rogan 2:37 Saved.

Dave Smith 2:37 And they go deep into, like, admitting so much about, like, the censorship on social media, um, the- the support of the riots and the protests. And what's amazing about it is it really is incredible, their ability to turn on and turn off the protest machine. Like-

Joe Rogan 2:56 Well, it's just money.

Dave Smith 2:57 Yeah, yeah.

Joe Rogan 2:58 It's just money. There's a lot of people out there that have nothing to do. They're a bunch of... We were talking about it the other day. I was like, "If I was 21 years old and someone said, 'Hey, they're gonna pay you $400 to go to a Kamala Harris rally,' would you go?" I'm like, "Fuck yeah."

Dave Smith 3:11 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 3:11 "I'd go. I'd hold that sign up. I'd probably vote for her."

Dave Smith 3:14 When I was 21, you had me at $400.

Joe Rogan 3:16 Yes.

Dave Smith 3:16 The conversation was over.

Joe Rogan 3:17 It's over.

Dave Smith 3:17 I was like, "$400?"

Joe Rogan 3:19 I heard you get $1,000 to go protest for Tesla.

Dave Smith 3:22 Yeah. Can I sneak in both of those? Can we do one-

Joe Rogan 3:25 Yeah, $1,400 in a day, dude.

Dave Smith 3:27 (laughs)

Joe Rogan 3:27 Nice.

Dave Smith 3:28 Yeah, I was... I mean, I was thrilled when I was 25 to make, like, 75 bucks at the comic strip or something like that.

Joe Rogan 3:34 Yeah.

Dave Smith 3:34 So, yeah, the- the... But also, it's a... You know, it's like... And this, that's kind of like the whole CIA deep state game, is it's always moving around the margins, you know? Like, if you... If there's, um... 'Cause, like, when I... You know, uh, on the show, I've talked about a bunch, like the Maidan Revolution in Ukraine.

Joe Rogan 3:51 Mm-hmm.

Dave Smith 3:52 And when I, when I'd say, like, "This was a US-backed coup against a democratically elected president," the response I'd get from people who disagreed with it would always be like, "Oh, you're denying the agency of the Ukrainian people? 'Cause, like, look at these pictures. There's all these Ukrainian people in the streets." And you're like, "Well, yeah. But the US poured $100 million into that street protest. Like, you think that made a difference a little bit, you know?" And so, like, it's not that there weren't real people there.

Joe Rogan 4:19 Sure.

Dave Smith 4:19 But man, you wanna keep a protest going through the Ukrainian winter, and then all of a sudden you get $100 million, and now you got heat lamps and celebrities and concerts and th- And then you keep the whole thing going until the democratically-elected president has to flee for his fucking life. And then what are you supposed to look at that? "Oh, that was just an organic revolution." Like, no the fucking wasn't. You know? This is DC overthrowing Putin's neighbor. And, you know, they don't like that detail 'cause then it fucks up the whole unprovoked narrative.

Joe Rogan 4:51 Yeah, people don't like that detail. They don't like the detail that there's many layers of subterfuge interexchanging with each other. There's just so much money and so much influence, and they're so good at it. They've been doing it for so long that they can get Time Magazine to write an article saying how it's good.

Dave Smith 5:09 Yeah, it's great.

Joe Rogan 5:09 It's good that we saved the 2020 election. (laughs)

Dave Smith 5:13 And that's... And by the way, I love, um, uh... I know your, your podcast with, uh, Mike Benz was phenomenal. That dude's great. I love him.

Joe Rogan 5:21 He's phenomenal. I've done a few of them now.

Dave Smith 5:22 Yeah, he's, he's great. But I'll tell you, I already, I knew all that, uh... He's right (laughs) about all that USAID stuff, and I'll tell you, uh, that was the whole thing.

Joe Rogan 5:30 Yeah.

Dave Smith 5:30 It's, uh, Scott Horton's book, Provoked, which is, like, the best book that's been written on the, the history of the buildup to the war in Ukraine. And it was... It's all in there, dude, if you want, and it's all footnoted. But it's like, yeah, they're the ones pumping all this money in. And then they make it out, like when you, when you try to cut it, they're like, "Oh, no, we were just helping some kids get on a school bus over here, and overthrowing the democratically-elected government in Ukraine."

Joe Rogan 5:53 (laughs)

Dave Smith 5:53 "You know, like we did, we did all of that." (laughs) But...

Joe Rogan 5:56 Well, that's the beautiful thing about USAID, you know? It's like they had the money to do all this stuff. There's the money to do essentially whatever they want all over the world. And the way Mike Benz describes it as the...... stuff that's too dirty for the CIA.

Dave Smith 6:10 Yeah, yeah. Well, and, and so they can have plausible deniability too.

Joe Rogan 6:14 Yeah.

Dave Smith 6:14 'Cause like, what are you talking about?

Joe Rogan 6:15 Non-government organization.

Dave Smith 6:15 Yeah, there you go. That's total, right?

Joe Rogan 6:17 Not us.

Dave Smith 6:17 Yeah, exactly. It's like in the name.

Joe Rogan 6:19 (laughs)

Dave Smith 6:20 It's like, they might as well call it. They're like, "We're not the CIA."

Joe Rogan 6:22 The good guys.

Dave Smith 6:23 "We're just George Soros's NGO, not the CIA at all. Totally removed." Um, but also the, the thing is that, you know, when you look at like the actual money, 'cause sometimes they'll, they'll kinda point out that ... They're like, "Oh, this is a very small percentage of the budget." And it's like, yeah-

Joe Rogan 6:39 It's a tiny amount of money.

Dave Smith 6:40 This is ... Well, right. It's a small percentage of our budget.

Joe Rogan 6:42 Just a few billion dollars. Yeah.

Dave Smith 6:44 But our budget, I mean, the, I know the entire GDP of Russia is like $2 trillion, the entire economy. And I don't know what Ukraine is, but smaller than that. And we spend like between six and $7 trillion a year, just our government. So when you're talking about flooding in $100 million, flooding in a few billion, I think like it's like five or $6 billion since '91 we put into Ukraine. That may not sound like that much money in the context of America, the biggest economy, or the second-biggest economy in the world, but politically in a small country like Ukraine, that moves mountains. That changes the entire landscape, when the world empire is pumping that type of money in.

Joe Rogan 7:26 What do you think the world looks like though if the United States doesn't do that? So if the United States doesn't in ... This is like the Mike Baker perspective, right?

Dave Smith 7:36 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 7:37 Like if the United States doesn't make friends with these dictators, if the United States doesn't put people who are sympathetic to our causes in power, China does, Russia does, it looks very bad for America all over the world, things get dangerous.

Dave Smith 7:52 It's almost, almost always the, uh, war hawks rely on an unfalsifiable counterfactual, you know? So it's like, "Oh, but if we didn't do this and we ran the counterfactual, it would be this crazy other scenario that's somehow even worse than this."

Joe Rogan 8:09 Right.

Dave Smith 8:10 Now, the problem with that from my perspective is number one, the, the factual scenario is, um, like something like four to five million dead civilians over the last 25 years, entire nations destroyed, $8 trillion depleted from the US Treasury, tens of thousands of our bravest young men blowing their brains out. So you know, if you're relying on this unfalsifiable counterfactual, but it would've been worse if we hadn't fought a war in Iraq and Afghanistan and Syria and Libya and Somalia and Yemen and all these places over the last years, it ... Okay. I'd say the onus is on you to really have to demonstrate that and not just assert that, that it would be worse if we hadn't done this. But also like, you know, we are going broke doing it. Like we're $36 trillion in debt. We can't even afford it. And the idea that if we were to get out of the game of being the world empire, then like China would go, "Okay, great. Now we get to destroy ourselves." And i- it just seems completely, um, it seems extremely unlikely that that would be the case. And also, you know, it's like people act like, okay, if we weren't doing this in Ukraine, then Vladimir Putin could do whatever he wanted to. Or if we weren't doing this, then China could do whatever they wanted to. But they've got adversaries all around them too, who are richer than them, maybe not in China's case, but certainly in Putin's case, richer than them, are opposed to them. There's an ... All of Western Europe is not just a pushover.

Dave Smith 9:40 Uh, China has Japan and South Korea and they've, they've got their own, you know ... The, the truth is that there's, nobody has the power that the US government has to do this shit. It's only, like we're the ones who can do this. And it would just be a better world if we just didn't. Like you just can't convince me that like, if, if we just hadn't had fought the terror wars, like which was totally a possibility, we could have, we had, um, the, the whole war on terrorism could have been over by Christmas of 2001 with sp- the special ops taking out the Al-Qaeda cells. They could have trapped Osama bin Laden in Tora Bora when they had him there and they let him escape into, uh, uh, into Pakistan because, you know, if you, if you weren't-

Joe Rogan 10:22 Why, why do you think they did that?

Dave Smith 10:23 'Cause they already had their eye on Baghdad and you know, if Osama bin Laden is caught, you don't get your bonus war.

Joe Rogan 10:29 Ugh.

Dave Smith 10:30 You know what I mean? He's got ... The whole, the whole, um, war propaganda for invading Afghanistan, it wasn't everyone remembers WMDs, but it wasn't just that claim. It was the claim which Dick Cheney and George W. Bush and all the Neocons pushed real hard, was that he was in on 9/11. Now this totally fell apart 'cause it was never true and they knew it wasn't true. But the claim was he's got these weapons and he could hand them off to the terrorists and then, you know, what was the Condoleezza Rice, uh, line, was like, "We don't want the warning to be in the form of a mushroom cloud." Or something like that.

Joe Rogan 11:04 Yeah.

Dave Smith 11:04 Like the, the fear was they're gonna nuke Kansas or whatever as soon as, as soon as Saddam Hussein gives the weapons he doesn't have to the terrorists he's not friends with. Um, but if they caught Osama bin Laden, I think that would have, uh, that would have destroyed the, the whole seven wars in five years strategy.

Joe Rogan 11:21 It's the Wesley Clark strategy. Yeah.

Dave Smith 11:23 Ooh. You wanna hear something else on the Wesley Clark thing?

Joe Rogan 11:25 Yeah.

Dave Smith 11:25 This is new. Um, so, uh, Piers Morgan, say what you will about him, he hosted a debate-

Joe Rogan 11:33 (laughs)

Dave Smith 11:33 ... between ... Which I love doing the show, without trashing it. But, uh, it's, it's a circus. But, uh-

Joe Rogan 11:37 It is a circus.

Dave Smith 11:38 Yes. Um-

Joe Rogan 11:39 I think he's very smart.

Dave Smith 11:40 Oh, he's a genius, dude. I mean he's-

Joe Rogan 11:42 That, that circus is, uh, fucking a lot of people lining up. (laughs)

Dave Smith 11:45 Dude, he is, he figured out, and I, you gotta give him so much credit 'cause he's probably the only one from like the old guard of corporate media-

Joe Rogan 11:54 Yes.

Dave Smith 11:55 ... who figured it out. He went, "Okay, I see where we are."... I see what's going on, and I know what people want to see happen.

Joe Rogan 12:01 Well, Tucker figured it out too, but in a different way.

Dave Smith 12:03 No, Tucker, Tucker is actually... Yes, Tucker is the one who really figured it out.

Joe Rogan 12:05 Tucker is basically doing this kind of a show.

Dave Smith 12:07 Yes. Yeah. No, I think-

Joe Rogan 12:08 He's basically doing long-form podcasts-

Dave Smith 12:10 Well, look-

Joe Rogan 12:11 ... but with people who sucked Obama's dick.

Dave Smith 12:13 (laughs) Sometimes.

Joe Rogan 12:14 And other, and other various experts.

Dave Smith 12:15 And other guests.

Joe Rogan 12:16 And other really, really-

Dave Smith 12:16 It's not only that.

Joe Rogan 12:17 ... yeah, really amazing people.

Dave Smith 12:18 Maybe 10% of the coverage is about who sucked Obama's dick.

Joe Rogan 12:21 Did you see that physician who was on the other day, that was talking about all the cancer rises?

Dave Smith 12:25 Yeah. Yeah.

Joe Rogan 12:25 They're seeing cancer-

Dave Smith 12:26 I didn't watch the whole thing, but I saw a few clips from it. It's very, very interesting.

Joe Rogan 12:30 Fucking crazy. They're seeing pancreatic cancer in kids, little kids, which is just unheard of. He was saying that in all of his career, he had never seen pancreatic cancer in a child before.

Dave Smith 12:43 Right.

Joe Rogan 12:43 And now, now they're seeing it.

Dave Smith 12:44 Well, they, I mean, they used to call, uh, type 2 diabetes "adult onset diabetes."

Joe Rogan 12:49 Right.

Dave Smith 12:49 'Cause it was like, "The kids don't get it."

Joe Rogan 12:51 Right.

Dave Smith 12:51 It was, like, unheard of.

Joe Rogan 12:52 Right.

Dave Smith 12:52 And now it's, like, all over the place.

Joe Rogan 12:55 Right.

Dave Smith 12:55 I saw that thing, I saw it 'cause you, uh, posted it. But the, uh, Kalee Means.

Joe Rogan 13:00 Yes. Wasn't that fucking amazing?

Dave Smith 13:00 Things were so great. Oh, so great, dude.

Joe Rogan 13:02 Wasn't it fucking amazing? It's just amazing that they're arguing against this.

Dave Smith 13:09 Well, there's, like, no argument. And, like, I'm far from... I, I don't really understand the shit that well. But you go, okay, it's crazy that Bobby Kennedy is overhauling this whole thing and cutting all this. And you're going, "Okay, okay. We spend more on health than any other nation in the world by far."

Joe Rogan 13:26 And we're sicker.

Dave Smith 13:27 "And we're the sickest."

Joe Rogan 13:28 Yeah.

Dave Smith 13:28 You're telling me there shouldn't ... And, and your position here, the en- it just, like, exposes that the entire media, it's like your, your position here is to get in between the regime and any threat to the regime.

Joe Rogan 13:41 Well, it's also radical change, and radical change causes controversy, and controversy-

Dave Smith 13:46 Sure.

Joe Rogan 13:46 ... is what they sell.

Dave Smith 13:47 Yeah, yeah.

Joe Rogan 13:48 Right? So the media is going to sell that, and they're going to sell it on an, on the angle of, "This is creating all sorts of problems. All sorts of people are losing their jobs. Budgets are getting cut, people are getting fired. They're out on the street." It's that. Like that, that's just what they, they have to do that. That is what-

Dave Smith 14:04 (sighs)

Joe Rogan 14:04 ... if you're doing television media, newsprint media, subscription media, that's part of your job.

Dave Smith 14:12 Well, but you could also get huge ratings by covering the controversy that is, "We spend more money and have the worst outcomes."

Joe Rogan 14:18 Can't do it. Can't do it, 'cause you get too much money from the pharmaceutical companies-

Dave Smith 14:20 Well, that's right. But that's the point. That's right.

Joe Rogan 14:22 ... which is also, Kalee Means pointed that out.

Dave Smith 14:24 Right. And, and I mean, look, if the, if the media was just driven by ratings, they'd be doing shows on Jeffrey Epstein every day.

Joe Rogan 14:31 Every day. Yeah, exactly.

Dave Smith 14:32 I mean, 'cause they would... You'd be the number one show in cable news. You could go, "I'm gonna talk about no other topic." Give me the, the 8:00 PM hour on MSNBC or CNN or Fox News or whatever, and I'll say, "I'm just gonna make my show about Jeffrey Epstein." That's the... Every single day, that's all we're doing. I guarantee you I'd have the number one show in cable news.

Joe Rogan 14:51 Right.

Dave Smith 14:52 More people would wanna watch that.

Joe Rogan 14:53 The Candace Owens Show. (laughs) It's on YouTube.

Dave Smith 14:55 Yeah, that's right. And it's doing better numbers than any of the shows on cable news.

Joe Rogan 14:59 (laughs) It's, it's phenomenal. It's, it's like they created a monster with her. When they, when they fired her from The Daily Wire, they created a monster.

Dave Smith 15:07 Yeah, they sure did.

Joe Rogan 15:08 She can't be stopped.

Dave Smith 15:09 (laughs) Yeah. Oh, no, no, no. There's no stopping Candace Owens at this point.

Joe Rogan 15:11 Because she's hitting all the fucking third rails that no one wants to touch.

Dave Smith 15:15 B-

Joe Rogan 15:15 She's got a six-hour presentation on how Bridget Macron is a man.

Dave Smith 15:19 (laughs) I know.

Joe Rogan 15:20 It's fucking six hours plus long. It's-

Dave Smith 15:23 I like... I don't know, I don't know if she's even kinda right about that.

Joe Rogan 15:25 I think she's right.

Dave Smith 15:26 But she's got a lot of shit to say on it.

Joe Rogan 15:28 B- bro, she would be getting sued right now instead of trying... They're trying to bribe her. Instead of trying to give her money to shut the fuck up-

Dave Smith 15:36 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 15:36 ... they would sue her.

Dave Smith 15:37 Yeah, no, you're probably right about that.

Joe Rogan 15:39 I don't know if they are suing her. Are they, have they tried to file anything? They probably have. They probably filed some bullshit lawsuits too.

Dave Smith 15:45 I'm sure, I'm sure she's dealing with several.

Joe Rogan 15:47 But I'm pretty sure she's right. I don't know. I might be wrong.

Dave Smith 15:52 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 15:52 I think she's right. The whole thing stinks. And what stinks way worse than that giant distraction is that the number one opponent for Macron just got sentenced to four years in jail and barred from political life for five years.

Dave Smith 16:06 And the front-runner, not just the number one opponent-

Joe Rogan 16:08 Yeah, the front-runner.

Dave Smith 16:08 ... the one who's winning.

Joe Rogan 16:09 Winning.

Dave Smith 16:09 Yeah. Yeah, it's-

Joe Rogan 16:10 It's fucking crazy. It's what they try to do to Trump, plus.

Dave Smith 16:15 Yeah. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. No, they were able to take it further.

Joe Rogan 16:18 Yeah.

Dave Smith 16:18 And then we'll see if there's the backlash the same way there was when they tried to do that to Trump. And it's just so... It's like the, um, the... There's some propaganda that's, like, almost too... It can't be successful propaganda. Like, saying Saddam Hussein has weapons of mass destruction and is in bed with terrorists, that's good propaganda right there.

Joe Rogan 16:38 Right.

Dave Smith 16:38 You know, right after 9/11, you could totally convince the average American that, "Okay, well, we can't let that stand. You know, in a post-9/11 world, we can't allow some Arab dictator to have nuclear weapons, and he's friends with the terrorists, and he's in on 9/11." Okay, we got... But to say the propaganda is democracy is on the ballot while you're trying to arrest your, your opponent because he's winning in the polls. (laughs)

Joe Rogan 17:04 Yeah.

Dave Smith 17:04 Like, that's just too, like, it's too ridiculous. It's too on its face.

Joe Rogan 17:08 It's not only that. You have to say what you're arresting him for.

Dave Smith 17:11 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 17:11 And then when people look at it, and you're like, "Wait, Mar-a-Lago's worth how much?"

Dave Smith 17:15 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 17:15 Hold on, hold on, hold on. 34 what? Bookkeeping errors? They're misdemeanors? How... Where's the felony? There's no felony?

Dave Smith 17:21 And you're saying-

Joe Rogan 17:22 Isn't it past the statute of limitations? It is.

Dave Smith 17:24 An- and it's a felony?

Joe Rogan 17:25 But he's a felon.

Dave Smith 17:25 And nobody's ever been tried on this char- this is a novel-

Joe Rogan 17:29 Yeah.

Dave Smith 17:29 ... like, like, charge, where it would be a misdemeanor, but you've ramped it up to a felony.

Joe Rogan 17:33 Both of them are novel.

Dave Smith 17:33 And there's no victim.

Joe Rogan 17:34 The real estate thing too.

Dave Smith 17:35 And there's no victim involved. The banks themselves-

Joe Rogan 17:37 No victim.

Dave Smith 17:37 ... are telling you-

Joe Rogan 17:38 Right.

Dave Smith 17:38 ... "Oh, we were happy to do business with Donald Trump. We'd do business with him again."

Joe Rogan 17:40 And we got paid.

Dave Smith 17:40 Yeah, yeah, it's-

Joe Rogan 17:41 We, we got our money back. There's no victims at all. And it's what every real estate agent does.

Dave Smith 17:47 Yeah, yeah.

Joe Rogan 17:47 Every real estate salesman, every real estate investor.

Dave Smith 17:52 Yeah, it's true. Right.

Joe Rogan 17:52 They overvalue their properties. And your property is essentially only worth what people are willing to pay for it.

Dave Smith 17:57 Yeah. Look, I mean, it's so ob- it was so obvious that they were just weaponizing the, the legal system to go after him.

Joe Rogan 18:03 But they did it so crazy. Like, they, they tried to say Mar-a-Lago was only worth 18 million.

Dave Smith 18:08 Yeah, it's (laughs) the, the whole thing is-

Joe Rogan 18:09 It's like, dude, I would buy it.

Dave Smith 18:11 (laughs)

Joe Rogan 18:11 Right away. If someone told me you could get Mar-a-Lago for 18 million, I'd call my accountant right now, I'd go-

Dave Smith 18:17 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 18:17 ... "Don't lose this. Jump on this."

Dave Smith 18:19 Dude, we do some banner podcasts-

Joe Rogan 18:21 Wire-

Dave Smith 18:21 ... from Mar-a-Lago. (laughs)

Joe Rogan 18:21 ... wire money.

Dave Smith 18:22 Yeah. (laughs)

Joe Rogan 18:23 Wire the money, I'm moving to Florida. (laughs)

Dave Smith 18:26 Just bring down Austin. You're good. Everybody, take out-

Joe Rogan 18:29 I'd have to have the call with Jamey, and he'd be like, "Fuck." (laughs)

Dave Smith 18:31 Yeah. But you go, you thought-

Joe Rogan 18:33 We're moving to Florida, bitch. I'm going back to Florida.

Dave Smith 18:35 You thought you had some uncomfortable summers here.

Joe Rogan 18:37 Do a lot of golfing. Getting ready. Lot of golfing for you. I lived in Florida for a while. I go back- A lot of golfing? All right. I like- I like go- I like some parts of Florida. Florida's fun.

Dave Smith 18:45 Well, I don't think, uh, I don't think Trump's selling, and I don't think you're getting it for 18 million. So.

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Dave Smith 20:02 Yeah, it's the, just-

Joe Rogan 20:03 (laughs)

Dave Smith 20:03 ... don't, don't leave your kids unattended-

Joe Rogan 20:04 No.

Dave Smith 20:04 ... but yeah, sure.

Joe Rogan 20:05 No, no, no, no, no.

Dave Smith 20:06 Oh. Or-

Joe Rogan 20:06 Give your kids a gun.

Dave Smith 20:07 So let me, all right-

Joe Rogan 20:08 (laughs)

Dave Smith 20:08 ... let me tell you 'cause I forgot what I was saying. So, okay, so Piers Morgan hosts a debate between Scott Horton and, uh, Wesley Clark.

Joe Rogan 20:17 Oh, interesting.

Dave Smith 20:17 And so in this debate, one of the most interesting things, Wesley Clark just very casually said this, but it's a fr- it's like breaking news. Um, but he said... So everybody... I, I assume we played it like a bunch of times on the show before, but Wesley Clark's a four-star general. He was the head of NATO and he told Amy Goodman on Democracy Now that he saw in late 2001 the, what has become known as the five, uh, seven wars in five years. That the plan from the neocons in the government was that we were gonna overthrow all these governments in the region, um, in the next f- uh, five years. Now, this plan obviously didn't end up happening in five years, but it's... Literally he names seven countries and there's one to go. And that one, by the way, happens to be the one that Donald Trump is flirting with a war with right now, Iran.

Joe Rogan 21:04 By the way-

Dave Smith 21:04 All the rest of them have happened.

Joe Rogan 21:05 ... Israeli news reported today that a strike on Iran is imminent.

Dave Smith 21:09 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 21:09 Did you see that?

Dave Smith 21:09 Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. No, there's... I mean, the, we're, it's... We're very clearly moving toward this war, yet another catastrophic war. But so Wesley Clark gets asked about this in the debate and he goes, "Oh, it actually goes back much further than that." He goes, "I first saw the plans in 1991 and it came from Paul Wolfowitz." Okay? So he goes, "Paul Wolfowitz had these plans in 1991 and he took them to Brent Scowcroft, who was, uh, George H.W. Bush's national security advisor." So he takes them to them and according to Wesley Clark, again, this, my source on this is a four-star general, he says that Scowcroft went, "We'll look at this after the election." '92 is the election year, they lose, Bill Clinton comes in and he goes, "And the plan kinda got killed." And then he said it was revived later in a study paid for by the Israelis. And that this was done, um, that Richard Perle was really the one who brought it back to life, and that it was explicitly done because this is what they thought was necessary to protect Israel. And like as I've mentioned to you before, now I don't know exactly what study he's referring to, um, but he said, that's what he said. But I do know, as I've mentioned before on this, that anybody can go read, uh, The Clean Break. Um, you could Google it right now. It's, uh, A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm, which was a letter written by the guy he mentioned, Richard Perle and David Wormser to Benjamin Netanyahu in 1996. It was his first year when he came in as prime minister. And the whole thing is basically, the clean break is a break from the peace process, a break from Oslo, because e- essentially Bill Clinton had gotten Yitzhak Rabin and, uh, and, uh, Arafat to agree to like start this two-state solution process that should be loosely based around '67 borders. You gotta finally give these Palestinians a state. You've been occupying them since 1967. You gotta finally take your boot off their neck. And the clean break strategy was to go, "Listen, we gotta get away from this whole idea of a Palestinian state and giving them land." And basically the thinking, the Yitzhak Rabin old school thinking on this, l- loosely speaking, it's, it's a little more complicated, but basically they were like, "Look, we've been occupying the Palestinians for, for decades and decades now. The, the broader Arab world hates us over our treatment of the Palestinians. And so what you gotta do is you have to make peace with the Palestinians so that you can get along with all these Arab states around you." That was kind of the thinking. And the clean break strategy was like, "No, no, no, no. We're gonna reverse that. Instead of making peace with the Palestinians so that we get along with the Arab states s- surrounding us, what we're gonna do is we're gonna overthrow all of those states so we never have to make peace with the Palestinians, so we never have to have a two-state solution. What we'll just do is we'll go overthrow all of these governments." Of course, Israel can't go overthrow all of these governments, but the US can. And so after ni- they had these plans in, in, according to Wesley Clark in '91. We know about The Clean Break memo in '96. But after 9/11, that's when-... by a terrible twist of fate and all this shit, the Neocons are in power. They're in George W. Bush's, but there is no Brent Scowcroft, there is no H.W., there is nobody with, like, a little bit of wisdom at the top. It's Dick Cheney at the top, and then his sidekick, George W. Bush. And they go, "So now we're gonna mo- move to get this."

Joe Rogan 24:30 Do you remember when Dick Cheney was in the bunker and B- W. wasn't?

Dave Smith 24:33 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 24:33 That's when we knew what was up.

Dave Smith 24:34 Yeah. Yeah. That'll tell, that'll tell you something.

Joe Rogan 24:36 We, we were informed that he was in the bunker, which is so crazy. Like, why would you say where the guy everyone's trying to kill is hiding?

Dave Smith 24:44 Yep. Yep.

Joe Rogan 24:44 Are y- are you that confident in your bunker? And where's this bunker?

Dave Smith 24:47 (laughs)

Joe Rogan 24:47 What does it look like?

Dave Smith 24:48 Yeah. Yeah. (laughs)

Joe Rogan 24:48 Can I get a fucking MTV Cribs tour of this bunker?

Dave Smith 24:52 (laughs)

Joe Rogan 24:52 (laughs) What, what's going on with the bunker?

Dave Smith 24:55 And, look, man, and then just ... And, and you could see now where there's, like, so much, um ... There, there's such a rise in people being so fed up with, with this stuff. But the idea that we're now ... I mean, look, just even, uh, with those, this whole SignalGate shit that just happened-

Joe Rogan 25:13 Yeah.

Dave Smith 25:13 And it's like, the real scandal there isn't even ... I mean, I, I do think that Mike Walt should be fired over this. It's, I mean, it's a crazy screw-up and it's totally embarrassing and-

Joe Rogan 25:24 How do you ... D- how do you do that? I mean, I don't understand how you do that. It doesn't make any sense to me. So, it's-

Dave Smith 25:31 Did you see his interview?

Joe Rogan 25:32 But it, it is a Signal chat between high-level government officials with classified information that's being discussed about war plans.

Dave Smith 25:43 They would claim it's not classified, but it was information about an imminent attack that's about to take place.

Joe Rogan 25:48 How's that not class-

Dave Smith 25:48 It seems like it would have to be.

Joe Rogan 25:49 How's that not classified?

Dave Smith 25:49 Yeah. How is that not top secret?

Joe Rogan 25:50 If that's not classified, somebody else should get fired.

Dave Smith 25:52 Yeah. Yeah.

Joe Rogan 25:52 But the, at the end of the day, you have, uh, I believe there was 18 people in that chat. Is that correct?

Dave Smith 25:58 Uh, it's something probably around there, yeah.

Joe Rogan 25:59 Yeah. Um, and no one goes over those things before you start addressing this information? If Jamie and I were talking shit-

Dave Smith 26:08 (laughs)

Joe Rogan 26:09 ... about someone and we decided to do it on Signal, like, I would make sure that I didn't accidentally include my mom. (laughs)

Dave Smith 26:17 Yeah, right?

Joe Rogan 26:18 Or, or (laughs) or a fucking reporter I know, or-

Dave Smith 26:21 Or worse, like, it, it-

Joe Rogan 26:23 Or, or Trump himself, whoopsies.

Dave Smith 26:24 Or, or like, your enemy.

Joe Rogan 26:25 Yeah.

Dave Smith 26:25 Like, the person who hates you the most.

Joe Rogan 26:27 How could you even have that guy in your contact list? Like, what's going on?

Dave Smith 26:30 Well ... And also, I, like, like you said-

Joe Rogan 26:32 How do you accidentally include someone?

Dave Smith 26:34 And the chat is ... I mean, this is, you can't overstate it. Short of the President of the United States, it's the most senior positions.

Joe Rogan 26:41 Right.

Dave Smith 26:41 It's, you have-

Joe Rogan 26:42 How do you not have someone-

Dave Smith 26:42 Your CIA director-

Joe Rogan 26:43 ... going over the list-

Dave Smith 26:45 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 26:45 ... before you go live?

Dave Smith 26:46 It's un- it's unbelievable. But I will say that, like, that ... A- and, and perhaps there's another element. I mean, I don't know. I, you know, I don't exactly know. I, I know in Trump's first term, the efforts from his own government to sabotage him were profound and obvious-

Joe Rogan 27:02 They were recording him.

Dave Smith 27:03 Yeah. I mean, they were, they were framing him for being a Russian spy.

Joe Rogan 27:06 Yeah.

Dave Smith 27:06 His own intelligence agencies. And so when you have a conversation like this get leaked to the most anti-Trump, you know, propagandist at The Atlantic, it does raise some questions, like-

Joe Rogan 27:17 Big questions.

Dave Smith 27:18 ... was this done intentionally, was it not?

Joe Rogan 27:20 Whoopsies.

Dave Smith 27:20 Um, yeah. It's, and, and I don't know if you saw, but, uh, Waltz was ... He did Laura Ingraham Show, um, like, the, a couple days after it came out. And I mean, his answers were just ridiculous.

Joe Rogan 27:32 What'd he say?

Dave Smith 27:34 Like ... It was like, um ... She was like, uh, "So was this a staffer who messed up? Was someone ..." And he goes, "No, no, no. You know I take full responsibility. Um, but it was, you know, I'm sure a lot of people have a contact with the wrong number saved in the contact," or something like that.

Joe Rogan 27:46 Yeah, but you don't include that.

Dave Smith 27:48 Yeah, but also, every-

Joe Rogan 27:49 Every time I get a new phone, one of the things I do is I go, "Oh, wow, look at all the dead people on my phone."

Dave Smith 27:55 (laughs) Right.

Joe Rogan 27:56 I have a lot of dead people in my phone.

Dave Smith 27:57 Yeah, it's depressing. Yeah.

Joe Rogan 27:58 It's so sad. But I have a lot of friends that I look through my contact list, I'm like, "Fuck, he's gone. Oh, fuck, he's gone." It's, you know, like ... And I have to make the decision, do I delete them from my contact list? Generally, I don't. I like seeing their names.

Dave Smith 28:11 Yeah, I know what you- it's weird.

Joe Rogan 28:12 I have an old message from a, an old boss of mine. I keep the phone just 'cause it's got the voicemail on it.

Dave Smith 28:19 Yeah. No, I get that.

Joe Rogan 28:20 You know what I mean?

Dave Smith 28:20 Yeah. Yeah.

Joe Rogan 28:21 It's like, you keep things that you don't need. I have contacts for people that are not just dead, but people that are dead to me. You know what I mean? Like, why, why do I have them in there?

Dave Smith 28:32 Sure. Sure.

Joe Rogan 28:32 I don't, I don't talk to that guy anymore. Like ... But you don't add them to a fucking chat list. That doesn't make any sense.

Dave Smith 28:38 Well, right. And also, and he was claiming, like, the idea of ... Which I'm sure has happened to all of us before, where, like, maybe you're taking down someone's number and you enter it wrong. So, like, but that wouldn't-

Joe Rogan 28:48 No. No, no, no, no, no, no.

Dave Smith 28:49 You wouldn't happen to hit The Atlantic journalist guy's number.

Joe Rogan 28:52 No, no, no, no, no. No, he was ... He had to be in contact with that guy.

Dave Smith 28:55 Well, he claims he's never been in contact with him, he's never met him, he's never had a conversation with him-

Joe Rogan 28:58 So how did he include him in the chat?

Dave Smith 28:59 Then they found ... By the way, then they found pictures of them together at, like, different events. So he's already lying.

Joe Rogan 29:03 Oh, so it's like the Epstein deal. (laughs)

Dave Smith 29:04 Yeah, he's already lying. It's not ... But I will say, like, that ... And it's like with a lot of these things, um, it ... You know, there was like a, which I've, we've talked about before on the show, but there's the leaked Victoria Nuland phone call where she's, um, deciding who the new government in Ukraine will be.

Joe Rogan 29:22 Right. I've heard that. Yeah.

Dave Smith 29:22 Like, right around the time. Okay. And then at one point, she's furious at the European Union for not, like, moving in faster, and she goes, uh ... At one point she goes, you know, "Fuck the European Union. We'll just do it ourselves."

Joe Rogan 29:34 Let's listen. We should play that recording.

Dave Smith 29:35 Sure.

Joe Rogan 29:35 'Cause it's so crazy, people should hear it.

Dave Smith 29:37 But it ... But the point is that the, um, the scandal became that she said, "Fuck the EU."

Joe Rogan 29:42 (laughs)

Dave Smith 29:42 And you're like, no, no, no, dude. That's not the scandal here. That's not ... And they're like, "Isn't this undiplomatic of her, saying fuck the European Union?"

Joe Rogan 29:48 (gasps)

Dave Smith 29:48 Like, that's the least of what's interesting about this.

Joe Rogan 29:51 Isn't it interesting that Congresspeople swear now?

Dave Smith 29:54 It's very bizarre.

Joe Rogan 29:55 Everybody's swearing.

Dave Smith 29:56 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 29:56 Everyone's like, "Fuck this," calling people retards. It's great. (laughs)

Dave Smith 29:59 Well, it's, it is a ... It's like they lost ... They were trying to play that, like, Donald Trump's, like, down here, and we're the digger-

Joe Rogan 30:06 Yeah.

Dave Smith 30:06 And then that didn't work, so they were like-

Joe Rogan 30:07 Yeah.

Dave Smith 30:07 ... "I guess we'll just try to be like him too now."

Joe Rogan 30:10 They're like, "Fuck Elon Musk! Yeah!"

Dave Smith 30:11 (laughs)

Joe Rogan 30:12 Everybody's excited again. It's interesting. They're, they're adopting podcast language is what it is.

Dave Smith 30:17 Yes. But it's, um ... I don't think it's gonna be successful for them, because what they're not adopting is the authenticity of it, and it comes off as kinda like, um ... It goes, "Oh, now you're doing this?"

Joe Rogan 30:28 Right.

Dave Smith 30:28 "Like, after all these years of pretending-"... you were all formal and-

Joe Rogan 30:31 (laughs)

Dave Smith 30:31 ... everything was about decorum.

Joe Rogan 30:33 (laughs)

Dave Smith 30:33 And how Donald Trump was an embar- he wasn't presidential enough. And now you're like, "Oh, so you never really believed any of that shit." It's like, it's like them trying to turn on the woke stuff. It's like, it just doesn't... It's too long.

Joe Rogan 30:43 Right.

Dave Smith 30:43 It, you, you were so married to this for too long.

Joe Rogan 30:46 You, you gave up your authenticity for too long.

Dave Smith 30:50 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 30:50 And n- where n- It's like a Chris Cuomo type deal.

Dave Smith 30:52 It's, it's, yes. It's like Chris Cuomo.

Joe Rogan 30:54 You know what I mean? Like, I, I get-

Dave Smith 30:55 It's, uh, Elizabeth Warren drinking the beer.

Joe Rogan 30:57 Right.

Dave Smith 30:57 But, like, not doing it right. You know, putting, like, her whole mouth-

Joe Rogan 30:59 Yeah.

Dave Smith 30:59 ... over a bottle of beer.

Joe Rogan 31:01 I get, I want people to get better, right? So if you were a propagandist and then you're like, "You know what? This is bullshit." But there's examples of those people out there that are legitimate. You know?

Dave Smith 31:10 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 31:10 And then there's al- also people that realize, like, "Oh, well, that job is over. I can't do that anymore. Now I have to be something different. Let me try to be authentic."

Dave Smith 31:19 Yes. And, but you can... People can read that, man. They can tell.

Joe Rogan 31:21 They can't, but you're also-

Dave Smith 31:22 They can tell the difference.

Joe Rogan 31:22 ... never gonna fully be authentic. You're always gonna hold something back. You're always gonna, you're gonna say things because you want people to think of you a certain way, rather than, (sighs) "Okay, this is uncomfortable, but this is how I think."

Dave Smith 31:35 Yeah. Yeah.

Joe Rogan 31:35 Yeah.

Dave Smith 31:35 No, that's right. Oh, but so, so anyway, just on the Signal thing, though. Again, like the real scandal here is not that they, whatever, either intentionally or were just so incompetent that they, they added this journalist to it and it got leaked. Like the real scandal is, like, when you look through the chat. And that it's like, what are we... Just what are we doing here? We're bombing another country in the Middle East. We're bombing the poorest country in the Middle East.

Joe Rogan 32:01 Yemen.

Dave Smith 32:01 By the way, Yemen.

Joe Rogan 32:02 Which has been bombed forever.

Dave Smith 32:03 Oh my God. On behalf of Israel, because they're standing up against this fucking brutal war in Gaza right now. And so we're gonna bomb these guys again. And then you have like... I gotta say, man, like I was disgusted by Tulsi Gabbard's response. There's someone who I've, you know, said a lot of nice things about over the years and who I really supported as being the, the DNI. But like, literally, only, JD Vance is the only one who offers the mildest pushback and goes like, "Hey guys, uh, this is kind of a mistake and it's kind of everything against what Donald Trump ran on. And by the way, like, i- i- it's like such an insignificant amount of our trade that even goes through this area. It's really Europe's problem, not ours, and... But I'll go along with it if you guys want to, if you guys say." And then they literally say on the thing, they go, "We've, we've tracked the missile guy," as they call him. This is the target they've, they're trying to take out. They go, "We've tracked him to his girlfriend's apartment building. And so we'll level the apartment building." And then Tulsi Gabbard's just like, "Job well done, team." Everybody's cheering it on. There's not like... Nobody, nobody even has the thought to go like, you know, like any, "Is there a way we could do this without like murdering an, an entire apartment building's worth of people here? Is there a way? Man, this is a lot." Like, it's like, did none, did none of you guys even kind of believe in God? Are none of you even scared that maybe God exists and that like, "Jesus Christ, what are we doing here?" There's none of that. There's not a feeling of that. There's not a sense of like, "We're..." And, and, you know, I know I've talked about this before on the show. But we go- the whole history of, of the war in Yemen, going all the way back to Obama's first term. I mean, what we've done to this country, the poorest country in the Middle East. I mean, there, it was a goddamn genocide that happened in Yemen. I mean, it was... The drone bomb campaign from Obama was bad enough. But the Saudi invasion and the blockade and the war on the civilian population. You know, hundreds of thousands of people died. Hundreds of thousands of cases of like cholera and these other like really very easily preventable and treatable diseases that they just, babies were just dying of, because they had a full blockade around the country. Our NA- the US Navy fucking enforcing the blockade. The US, uh, fucking refueling the Saudi fighter jets and backing them the whole war there. And the idea that we think what launch in a couple Tomahawks is gonna break the Houthis after they went through all that shit? There's no chance. Like it's not... You're just killing people for no strategic benefit. It, there's, the only thing that would actually, like we could overthrow the Houthis if we wanted to invade the country. What the US military could do that. But like short of that, the idea that this is-

Joe Rogan 34:38 But you have to do, that's like a big public thing, which is bombing somehow or another, especially drone bombing, sort of like is in the ether.

Dave Smith 34:46 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 34:46 You know what I mean?

Dave Smith 34:47 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 34:47 It's almost abstract.

Dave Smith 34:48 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 34:48 Like you don't... Like if we sent a, a, a tier one team to go take this dude out, that would be front page news. That would be like an act of war. That would be like a thing, we're declaring war on this country. We've invaded their land with actual boots on the ground. It's different. For some weird reason, like you're allowed to use flying robots remote controlled by drone operators who, by the way, have some of the weirdest fucking PSD, PTSD rather.

Dave Smith 35:17 Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Joe Rogan 35:17 These people are all fucked up for a long time because they watch these folks, 'cause they're, they're watching these folk- They know the people around. They get to know, they watch them for days. They see them hug their kids and then they get that fucking call and...

Dave Smith 35:31 And you don't get any of the, uh... And I don't know. I mean, I'm just kind of speculating here. I'm no, no psychologist.

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Dave Smith 36:57 But there's something I think where w-Like, if you're in the fight, if you're in the action, you know, you, it, it ... Like, a lot of different, you know, primal things are gonna kick up. Like you're ... You know, as all the troops say, and I've talked to a whole lot of 'em, it's almost unanimous to a man that they always say, "The thing you're fighting for once you get there is your brother next to you."

Joe Rogan 37:17 Right.

Dave Smith 37:17 Like, it's not even ... It's like, forget the-

Joe Rogan 37:19 Right.

Dave Smith 37:19 ... mission or whatever.

Joe Rogan 37:20 Right.

Dave Smith 37:20 It's like, you fuck ... This is your guy, right here.

Joe Rogan 37:22 Right.

Dave Smith 37:22 And you guys are going in to make sure your buddy doesn't get his leg blown off or whatever. But when you don't, you don't have any of that, there aren't bullets whizzing at you, there's not your friend next to you, there's not this like sense of like, I had to do what I had to do in this situation. When you're just watching it on a moni- from a safe distance-

Joe Rogan 37:38 Yeah.

Dave Smith 37:38 ... I think there's some way that that fucks you up on a whole different level.

Joe Rogan 37:41 It's got to. It's gotta haunt your dreams. It has to. There's no other way. I mean, you, you see a, a man holding his child and swinging her around in his arms, and then you know you're gonna blow that man and that kid to smithereens.

Dave Smith 37:52 Yeah. Okay.

Joe Rogan 37:53 And you have to because the kids are near the dad and we gotta kill that guy. That guy's a bad guy.

Dave Smith 37:57 Yeah, when you got orders, you know?

Joe Rogan 37:58 Yeah.

Dave Smith 37:58 Like, that's, um-

Joe Rogan 37:59 And a whole apartment building, like what we talkin', like thousands of people?

Dave Smith 38:02 But there's-

Joe Rogan 38:03 What are we talking about? To get to this guy?

Dave Smith 38:06 Well, you know, there's a, a clip-

Joe Rogan 38:07 Mushroom cloud? Boom.

Dave Smith 38:08 Yeah. Well, there's, there's a clip that, uh, Tim Pool got like a, a real short interview with Donald Trump during the campaign. Like, he ... I think he was the first one, but it wasn't like a long form podcast. Like, it was, he was the first podcaster, but they did like 20 minutes or something like that.

Joe Rogan 38:23 Mm-hmm.

Dave Smith 38:23 But he did get this one clip outta Donald Trump on that thing where Donald Trump is, is, uh, eviscerating Joe Biden for bombing the Houthis for the same exact reason, because they were firing on shipping lanes. And Donald Trump's like, "What type of idiot is Joe Biden?" I mean these guys, their answer for everything is to drop bombs on it. Pick up a phone. Diplomacy can work here. Like, you don't have to do this. And the, the fact is that, um, there were, during the ceasefire, which Trump's envoy negotiated, uh, which has fallen apart now, but during the ceasefire, there were no Houthi attacks on the shipping lanes. Like, they've stopped them. And then when the ceasefire fell apart, they picked 'em back up again. Now, feel however you feel about that, th- I'm just saying, there is a diplomatic solution here, right? Like they w- they are willing to like, if there's a ceasefire, they will stop these attacks. But there's not a military solution short of invading the country and having yet another catastrophic war in the Middle East. And it's like, so which one of those do you wanna pick, America First crowd? I mean, like Donald Trump was, Donald Trump was explicitly elected for this reason as a repudiation of the foreign policy of the last 30 years.

Joe Rogan 39:39 Right.

Dave Smith 39:39 That we're like done with this.

Joe Rogan 39:41 Right.

Dave Smith 39:41 We wanna put America first. And as you can see, even J.D. Vance and then a little bit Pete Hegseth, their only issue ... You know, it's never the innocent people being killed. You know, for a bunch of Christians, I just, it's kinda weird that that never comes up. Um, but their, their issue is, "Oh, this is us bailing out Europe," because Europe actually relies more on these, these shipping lanes than the United States does by orders of magnitude. And, but even that, that is part of the America First thing that Donald Trump totally ran against. Like, why is it that we have to foot the bill for everybody else's defense? That makes no sense. We're broke. Our, our country is in bad shape. We need those resources here.

Joe Rogan 40:18 What is, what is the justification for these bombings? What is the public justification?

Dave Smith 40:22 Uh, that the Houthis, uh, have attacked a few US, uh, cargo ships and, um, that there's, um, you know, that they're i- international trade, th- they don't have a right to disrupt international trade in this way. Um, which is like o- okay. It's, it's true. I mean, the, the thing that I've seen the most is like that people will go, "Well, we can't just turn a blind eye to this aggression by the Houthis." But I also do think, and, and I don't even blame people for this because it's nobody, you know, in the corporate media or e- ever talked about any of this stuff, or very rarely talked about it, never really told the story, but it's like, yeah, if you're just coming into the story now, I could see where you might think the Houthis are the aggressors. But if you're rewinding the tape from this-

Joe Rogan 41:04 Right.

Dave Smith 41:04 ... there is just no debate about it.

Joe Rogan 41:06 Right.

Dave Smith 41:06 I mean, there's no question that we, we literally started, um, you know, in, it was in 2009 when Obama started up with the drone bombing, the then secret, uh, drone bombing, uh, campaign. And Yemen was one of the major theaters. You know, this was, um, where, if you remember, 'cause they were, it was like the biggest scandal of the Obama administration. Also not talked about much in the media, but was talked about on a lot of podcasts, was that Anwar Awlaki and his like 14 or 15-year-old son, these two American citizens, were both killed by drone bombs in Yemen. And this was, caused a bit of an outrage among some people 'cause you're like, "Hey, you know, you really can't murder American citizens who have never been charged of a crime. You can't just say, "Oh, I just ... You know, forget that whole Bill of Rights thing. They're on my list." And by the way, the kid was not Al-Qaeda affiliated or anything, and they claimed that that wasn't intentional, but it sure seemed like it was. Um, but so Obama had a drone ... You know, he was fighting at the time Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula had like a presence in Yemen. So he's drone bombing these, these Al-Qaeda sites. They're, I think the estimates were something like 95 to 96% of the people who died were not the targets.

Joe Rogan 42:20 Right.

Dave Smith 42:20 So just killing a whole bunch of innocent people. And then as always happens, uh, in these situations, Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula just grew stronger and stronger and stronger, uh, because this is, you know, it's insurgent math like-

Joe Rogan 42:33 Yeah.

Dave Smith 42:33 ... General McChrystal said. You know, you kill a bunch of innocent people and then, you know, you kill one little girl and she had three brothers and a father and two uncles, and they all join up Al-Qaeda now 'cause like fuck you.

Joe Rogan 42:44 Yeah.

Dave Smith 42:44 They're gonna get you back for that shit.

Joe Rogan 42:45 Everyone's radicalized.

Dave Smith 42:46 Yes. So, so they were doing this drone bomb campaign over there. It's completely failing, and Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula is just getting stronger and stronger. At the same time, Obama kinda bribed off the dictator of Yemen at the time, uh, this guy, uh, Saleh.And he was like, "Listen, if you let us do our fucking drone bombing campaigns in here, we'll give you a whole bunch of weapons and, and money." And so he took the deal and then he used those weapons to go attack this group, the Houthis. And then he also started losing to them, like even with the US weapons, the Houthis were fucking him up. And then little by little, the Houthis like kinda took over the whole country. And then in, uh ... Now, the Houthis are also enemies with Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. Like these are radical Sunnis, Al-Qaeda, versus radical Shiites, the, the Houthis. So they're fucking enemies and they're fighting a civil war while all this is going on. And then Saudi Arabia decided to invade in, in early 2015 and it ... In 2015, and you can, you could look this up if you, uh, Google Obama, uh, to placate the Saudis. Eh, these are literally what the Obama officials told, uh, th- told the New York Times. I believe it was The New York Times. Um, they told them that literally this is why... So Obama stabbed the Houthis in the back, took Saudi Arabia's side, took Al-Qaeda's side, started fighting on the, started using the, f- fighting in a civil war against the Houthis, which is, you know, in effect, taking Al-Qaeda's side in that war. And so the Saudis invade the country. Now Obama said essentially that because the Saudis are like an important trading partner, um, and they were pissed off at us at the time. Uh, they were very upset about the war in Iraq. The Saudis were the ones in the region who were against it the whole time 'cause they knew. They were like, "You're just gonna give Baghdad to Iran," basically, and this, and that's their big enemy, is Iran. And then they were also really pissed off 'cause Obama did the one decent thing he did in his administration, was he worked out that deal with Iran, the same goddamn thing that Trump tore up and is now demanding they get back into some type of nuclear deal. Um, but so in order to placate the Saudis, Obama goes, "Okay, we'll back your, your war here." And like I said, full blockade around the country, um, refueling their military jets.

Joe Rogan 45:00 Quiet support for Saudis entangles US in Yemen. This is, uh ...

Dave Smith 45:09 Yep.

Joe Rogan 45:09 Here it is. Obama, in an awkward twist, becomes Saudi Arabia's defender. Wow.

Dave Smith 45:16 And it is, uh ... It is hard to overstate how brutal the Saudis were in this war. I mean, like, you know, it's ... You can think of Gaza, something not, uh, too unsimilar to that. But you're talking like a full blockade around the cou- this was the poorest country in the Middle East before any of this. Full blockade around the country. The Saudis were bombing. They were bombing their agriculture. They were bombing their, like, wheat silos. They were bombing their irrigation ditches. There ... Just like a total war on the civilian population all the way from 2015 into 2021 when it essentially ended in like an Afghanistan style, "I guess we give up." Like, it was just eventually the Saudis ... I think the Houthis ... You know, one of the things that's really interesting that happened this whole time, like you were talking about, the drone wars. So back in 2009, th- first of all, it was secret. The drone program wasn't ... Everyone knew it. There had been good reporting on it, but the way they got the good reporting was like people found the drones in Yemen, you know, and they'd take like little, you know, grainy cellphone pictures and be like, "Look, this is a US drone." So there's clearly ... But actually, the, um, uh, Obama's press secretary, it's not ... Goddammit, not Jay Carney, his first press secretary. Um, hmm, I'm blanking on his name. But he admitted this on NBC News. It was like a really amazing e- But he ad- like, uh, was talking about th- how the drone program ... This is years later, like 2012. He's at NBC News now, and he was talking about how when he used to get questions about the drone program, he wasn't allowed to, he wasn't allowed to even acknowledge that it was real. Th- so he would just sit there ... Yeah, yeah, yeah, Robert Gibbs. I apologize. I should've remembered that.

Joe Rogan 46:58 "I was told not to even acknowledge the drone program."

Dave Smith 47:01 There's video of this.

Joe Rogan 47:02 "When I went through the process of becoming press secretary, one of the first things they told me was, 'You're not even to acknowledge the drone program. You're not even to discuss that it exists,' said former White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs on Up with Chris Hayes Sunday."

Dave Smith 47:17 So now think about ... Okay. By the way, there is video of this. It wasn't, you know ... I don't know if it's in this article or not, but it, it ... I mean, that was essentially the point. But the thing in the video that's so funny is they, they all are laughing about it. Like, they're talking about like what kind of what a funny thing it is, like, "Imagine being in the position where you can't admit that a real thing's real and journalists are asking you questions." And he said, 'cause i- uh, it is kinda funny in a weird way, but that's like you'd think a newsman would, that wouldn't be the number one thing. Oh, here. Yeah, yeah, yeah. This is it.

Joe Rogan 47:44 Hold on. Let me, uh ... press on.

Narrator 47:48 I certainly think there are aspects of that program, uh, (clears throat) that are and will remain, uh, highly sensitive and very secret, but, but let me give you a, an example here, Chris. When I went through the process of becoming press secretary, one of the things, one of the first things they told me was, "You're not even to acknowledge the drone program."

Dave Smith 48:07 Hmm.

Narrator 48:07 "You're not even to discuss that it exists."

Joe Rogan 48:10 Wow.

Narrator 48:10 And so I would get a question like that and literally I, I couldn't tell you what major asked because once I figured out it was about the drone program- (laughs)

48:18 (laughs)

48:18 ... I realized I'm not supposed to talk about it.

Dave Smith 48:20 Wow.

Narrator 48:20 And, but here's what's inherently crazy about that proposition. You're being asked a question based on reporting of a program that exists.

48:30 (laughs)

48:30 Right? So you're the official government spokesperson-

Joe Rogan 48:33 Exactly.

Narrator 48:33 ... acting as if entire program-

Dave Smith 49:12 ... whenever you see anyone over the last, like say, eight years, on MSNBC or CNN, talking about, "A threat to democracy and the free press," and all this, shut the fuck up. You hired that guy. The guy who's sitting there telling you... Like, when it comes to the issu-... Forget whether you're for the war or against the war. It's a secret war. You're not e-... Forget democracy, the people aren't even allowed to have an opinion on this.

Joe Rogan 49:36 You're not even... As the White House Press Secretary, you're not even allowed to acknowledge it.

Dave Smith 49:43 And, and like, why not? Like, I mean, it's just, it's not as if they were like, "Well, if Al-Qaeda knows that we're coming for them, then something is compromised." It's just like, oh yeah, Obama ran as the peace candidate. He collected a Nobel Peace Prize before he had done anything, and he didn't particularly wanna tell people that he had just started this new campaign of just murdering whoever he wanted to for whatever reason he wanted to. And, you know, one of the things that's interesting about the technology of it, and I remember people much smarter than me predicting this at the time, um... I guess I never really appreciated like exactly the, the timetable of all of it. But it went in 2009, which he's talking about 2009, eh, a few years later there. It went from like, oh, the US has this new technology where we can use drones in war, to all of a sudden now, in 2025, you're sitting around and everybody ha-... Like, this is just part of war now, you know? Literally the-

Joe Rogan 50:35 Yeah.

Dave Smith 50:35 ... the, even the Houthis, I mean, they don't have the capabilities we have, but they have drone bombs. And that's part of how they were able to get the Saudis to finally back out is like, they could hit some of their oil fields with their drone bombs, and it was enough of a pain in the ass for the Saudis to be like, "All right," like, call it quits. Yeah. And so, they ended that war in, in '21. But now these Houthis have been in charge of Yemen the whole time since. You know, in the same way that it was like, we fought this whole war to get the Taliban out of Afghanistan. We just lost. Like, they just still run the whole place. And so these guys are still there. They have gone through the, what was the worst humanitarian crisis in the world from 2015 to 2021. Um, they've survived all of that and they're still there. And now they see the same goddamn thing happening in Gaza, then they're the one... Again, I'm not... Like, this is their stated thing. I'm not saying like, they're all great people or something, but they're going like, "No, fuck that. We're standing up for the people in Gaza." And so they were like, "As long as all of you guys are supporting Israel, just slaughtering all these people, then we're gonna start, you know, like trying to shut down these shipping lanes." Which they don't really have the capacity to do, but they can hit some cargo ships and hit some military ships.

Joe Rogan 51:44 How does this ever settle? How does this ever relax? Like, when you look at what happened in Gaza, and you think about the tensions that existed before October 7th, and then this happens, and then Go-... Th- then the At-... The Israeli attack happens. Like, how does anything come to a peaceful resolution at this point?

Dave Smith 52:05 Well, it looks really bad at the moment right now, you know? And like, what I always like to say, which I, you know, is like 50% just me telling myself something to feel better about the situation, but then 50% like, it is kind of, you know... Like, you, look, you could go around the world right now and like, England is right next to, um... I- is right next to Ireland, and everybody's just cool there right now. And that would have seemed like impossible, you know?

Joe Rogan 52:32 Right.

Dave Smith 52:32 And like, France and Germany, and Fr-... You know what I mean?

Joe Rogan 52:35 Right.

Dave Smith 52:35 Like, there are all these countries where like there was a time where it just seemed imposs-... And, you know, that was Egypt and Israel. So Egypt and Israel went to war four times in the first, uh, 20 something years of the existence of the state of Israel. They just kept going to war and war and war against each other. And then in the late '70s, they made a deal, and it was like a land for peace swap.

Joe Rogan 52:57 But isn't it part of the problem that Palestine is not a state? Like...

Dave Smith 53:01 Oh that's, yeah, that's like the whole problem.

Joe Rogan 53:02 That's the whole thing is-

Dave Smith 53:03 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 53:03 ... like you, you can never come to peace if you never even l- acknowledge they exist.

Dave Smith 53:08 Yeah. That, well, they've had... So Israel, Israel, uh, took control of what, what are known as the occupied territories, they took control of Gaza and the West Bank in 1967. And it's one thing, uh, like, I'm not like saying it's ever justified, but like, it's one thing to like occupy an area for a few months after a war as you're going through the process of turning it over to the, you know, like to themselves, or it maybe even a few years. But like, we're going into like 60 years of complete Israeli control over these people. And, and under Israeli control, they have n- zero rights. Zero rights whatsoever. I mean, like, they don't have the freedom of movement, they don't have freedom to trade with the outside world, they don't have voting rights, they don't have the right of due process. Uh, they get, they get... If literally i- to this day, like in the West Bank, where there's like all these big Israeli settlements, 'cause the Israelis are just constantly slowly stealing more of the Palestinians' land, they... If like an Israeli settler in the West Bank, in the same jurisdiction, gets in a dispute with a Palestinian there, the Israeli citiz-... He's a citizen of Israel, he has rights. He goes to a trial. The fucking, the Palestinian goes in front of a military trial, if he's lucky enough to get that. They have something like a 99% conviction rate. You're just totally fucked. Like, and this, and, and then... Look, a lot of people will point to like, look, like there's, there's been terrorism on the Arab side toward the Israelis b- going back many years. But like, I think you're essentially right. You can't expect a group of people who ha-... To just be subjugated for eternity and not... Th- nobody's gonna try to violently fight back. And of course, when they non-violently try to fight back, that gets squashed too. That gets met with violence.

Joe Rogan 54:58 And then the wildest thing, Trump comes along and says, "We're gonna take it."

Dave Smith 55:01 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 55:01 "We're gonna take it. We're gonna turn it into the Mediterranean of the Middle East."

Dave Smith 55:05 It's such a...

Joe Rogan 55:06 (laughs)

Dave Smith 55:06 Man, it's such a... I really just... And I'll say, listen, I know... Like the last time I was on was on election night and I, I, look, I supported Donald Trump in this last election. I think Donald Trump was like a necessary...... force. Uh, Donald Trump is a once-in-a-century type of figure. Um, and-

Joe Rogan 55:26 If that.

Dave Smith 55:26 Yeah. I mean, there was just... Nobody was positioned to do the things that Donald Trump did, and there were, like, enormous positives that came out of him winning this election. I mean, Donald Trump landed a devastating blow on the Republican establishment in 2016 when he won the primary. And he landed a devastating blow against the Democratic establishment by winning the presidency this year. And he, like, destroyed the corporate media, like, in a way that nobody else could have done. And all of those things are, like, incredible achievements, you know? But there is this, like, kinda tragedy with Donald Trump too, where it's like, he's the one guy who was able to do all of this. And I will say, there were just... There were hopes that it was like, "Hey, he may be, this time around, oh man, he's got Bobby Kennedy there. He's got Tulsi Gabbard there. He's got, like, all... Okay-"

Joe Rogan 56:17 Right.

Dave Smith 56:17 "... this is like a whole different thing."

Joe Rogan 56:18 I'm gonna stop that war in one day.

Dave Smith 56:19 Yes. Right. He's g- he's here to end the wars. Also, like, he had been burned by the system now-

Joe Rogan 56:24 Yeah.

Dave Smith 56:24 ... in a whole... It's not just that they called him a Russian traitor or whatever. It's like, they tried to throw him in jail. They tried to murder him. Uh, okay. This is maybe-

Joe Rogan 56:33 Somebody did.

Dave Smith 56:33 Oh, no. Yeah. No, no, no. I'm sorry.

Joe Rogan 56:34 Somebody did.

Dave Smith 56:34 That was totally, totally happens-

Joe Rogan 56:35 He had five phones.

Dave Smith 56:37 Dude, a lot of times, as we all know-

Joe Rogan 56:38 Professionally scrubbed apartment.

Dave Smith 56:39 Yes, yes. That happens all the time, Joe. Many times, presidential candidates, the front runner to be president once again, former presidents, a sniper gets a clean shot 130 yards away from them.

Joe Rogan 56:48 Especially-

Dave Smith 56:48 That's a very common thing.

Joe Rogan 56:49 ... a guy who was in a Black Rock commercial just a couple of years ago.

Dave Smith 56:51 And that's... And a lot of those guys were in Black Rock commercials once, Joe. This is a... These are normal-

Joe Rogan 56:55 It's normal.

Dave Smith 56:56 ... things that happen to normal people.

Joe Rogan 56:57 Super normal.

Dave Smith 56:57 It's part of everyday politics. But hey. But so, a lot of this made people think, like, "Oh, maybe..." But I will say, already into Trump's presidency, it's just a lot has... It's like, "Ah, shit." Now, I, I guess I gotta be happy with the things that he did, but the idea that he's really figured this out or he's really onto something or he's learned a lot, or he's got... The guy is out there. He's saying we should primary Thomas Massie and throwing his support behind Lindsey Graham. I mean, come on. Like, "Mr. President."

Joe Rogan 57:24 What is Thomas Massie doing that's pissing him off?

Dave Smith 57:27 Oh, he didn't vote for the freaking spending bill. He, he voted against the CR because it increased spending and was increasing the debt, and it was refunding all of the programs that Doge had recommended be cut. So he was like, "No, I'm not voting for this." And Trump was like, "Well, I'm gonna need you to vote for it." And he was like, "No."

Joe Rogan 57:43 Oh.

Dave Smith 57:43 And that's it. That's his crime. The same thing, same reason Trump hated him in 2020, 'cause he wouldn't vote for the, uh, the $2 trillion COVID spending bill. 'Cause he was like, "What? You're telling me 'cause the country's locked down, that means we have to bail out every giant corporation around the country?" Like, "No. I'm not supporting this." And then Trump sent all his people to go, you know, "He's betraying America First," or whatever. And this is, once Trump gets in it, he just wants, like, you know, the next win. Um, but, you know, the, the real problem here is, like, the i-...

Dave Smith 58:13 Look, the idea that we are going to go and f- and ethnically cleanse, like, finish the job of ethnically cleansing the Palestinians out of Gaza on behalf of Israel? It's like, what... First of all, what do you think... What do you think the reaction to that's gonna be? What do you think... What do you think that's gonna do to our country here? You know, it's like, I feel, um... It's like I, I see a lot of people who, uh, get very upset about what they, they call the rise of antisemitism. Um, which certainly, you know, according to my Twitter feed is, is real.

Joe Rogan 58:47 It's real.

Dave Smith 58:47 And is... There's a lot of people-

Joe Rogan 58:49 Do you think it's r-... Well, is it a rise, or is it the ability to express it now been unlocked? Or is it-

Dave Smith 58:57 I don't know.

Joe Rogan 58:57 ... both?

Dave Smith 58:58 I don't know. Maybe both. You know, I, I have a tough time kinda figuring out exactly what it is. It's also, um... There's, there's a troll aspect to it. You know, there's, there's... When you make one thing the thing that you're not allowed to say and the thing that's gonna get a rise out of everybody, there's... Thi- this has been true and it's been building for, for many years. Um, kind of the alt-right back in the day was kinda the first, you know, version of this. But where you could be some guy just at, on your computer. You could be a 15-year-old on, on your phone or whatever, and you could get, you know, the New York Times senior editor to be like, "Aargh. (grumbling) Look at this outrage." You know, and just, the ability to provoke that reaction out-

Joe Rogan 59:42 Right.

Dave Smith 59:42 ... of somebody is... That's fun.

Joe Rogan 59:44 Shit-festing.

Dave Smith 59:45 Yes. That's f-... And for... You're, you're handing this person who has no power, like, some real kind of power.

Joe Rogan 59:51 Right.

Dave Smith 59:52 I also think that, um, young... For young men today, particularly, like, young, straight, white men, I think it's kinda hard, like, for me and you, to even understand the world they grew up in. It's very different than the world we grew u-... Like, they grew up in this woke era. And okay, now it's kinda like that's receded and wokeism has been defeated. But they grew up in a time where racialism was accepted by every powerful institution. Just against them.

Joe Rogan 1:00:23 Right.

Dave Smith 1:00:23 You know? Like, it was totally fine to demonize straight, white men at your high school, at your college, in your movies, in your TV shows, uh, your politicians, celebrities, everybody. It was just... And that does, like... It unlocks a certain thing that we kinda all had a gentleman's agreement to not unlock. Like, we're just not really gonna do that, you know? We don't wanna be, like, racialists. And so that's... I think that's a component to it too. But there's also no question that it's... You know, it's exploded since Israel's launched this war on Gaza.

Joe Rogan 1:00:56 Yeah.

Dave Smith 1:00:57 And-

Joe Rogan 1:00:57 And it's exploded on the left, which you never heard anti-Jewish sentiment in public spaces before. You really never saw that on campuses. You know, if Israel did something, you may see a protest, but it was gen-... Generally, it was organic. These don't seem organic. They seem very funded, and they're very disruptive. And you know, some universities experienced vandalism and fires and crazy shit and people being threatened and doxxed. You know, it's, um, it's different.... it's, it's, it's a different level of it than I think we've ever seen before. And it's kind of, it's, it's created a giant divide on the left, right? Because on the left you have a lot of people that are, uh, their whole life they've been in support of Israel. Right? And now all the sudden there's these free Palestine people that are also on the left. So you have this divide on the left.

Dave Smith 1:01:51 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:01:51 You know?

Dave Smith 1:01:51 Right. And, and, and there was... That divide goes back a lo- like, there, there were leftist divides over the Israel-Palestine question going back really to, like, 1967-

Joe Rogan 1:02:01 Mm-hmm.

Dave Smith 1:02:01 ... um, where most of the, um, the kind of like, uh, the, the Black Power movement people, like the Black Panthers, the Nation of Islam, those guys, they all sided with the Palestinians 'cause they all saw it as, like, an extension of, like, yeah that's the whole, you know, we're against, um, this kind of, like, racist, colonizing-

Joe Rogan 1:02:21 Right.

Dave Smith 1:02:21 ... you know, like, force. Um, and then of course there were a lot of influential Jewish people on the left who were like, "No, not in... In this case we're okay with it." Uh, "But you sh- you guys sure are right about all that civil rights stuff, but, like, eh, I don't know. Let's not look at it... Let's not look over there." Um, a- but so a lot of that has kinda reemerged. Now I do also... You know, I don't know, um, like I've talked to a, I talked to one kid who was, like, a grad student in, at Columbia which was really, like, the center of so many of these protests, and he's Jewish. And I was like, uh, I was like, "So what's it like there?" And he was like, "Ah, they're annoying and they're loud and, like, some of their, their, their chants are, like, real kinda weird. Like I don't really know what they mean by it." And I was like, uh, "Well do you ever feel, like, threatened or..." And he's like, "No. No, it's not. Like, it's fine. They'll just chant as you walk by." And then I do know also that they, um, they had at least one time, they had like a Seder service which... 'Cause they got, like, Jewish people in those protest movements too. Um, and so they o- over last Passover, it was a year ago, they had like a Seder service with the Jews, uh, like, in there too. So I also don't, I don't know, like, what percentage of them are, like, just against the war and seeing pictures of dead babies and stuff like that, what percentage of them are actually, you know, like, harbor resentment toward Jewish people. Like it's, it's kinda hard to, to measure. But I would just say that, like, in... Almost in a very similar way to, like, what I was talking about with the, the drone war against Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. It just made them stronger.

Joe Rogan 1:03:50 Right.

Dave Smith 1:03:50 You know, it's like, hey, if you wanna see less Al-Qaeda, maybe stop having the American military kill innocent civilians in their land, because that seems to be fueling them, and at the same time for the people who are so concerned about the rise of anti-Semitism, you're like, okay, well it has exploded since Israel's been doing this to Gaza, right? So, like, maybe the US shouldn't be funding and arming the whole goddamn conflict 'cause that does seem to, like, at least give those people a giant talking point to latch onto. Maybe we shouldn't have a system where, like, our political class is not allowed to criticize a foreign government. The, and, and, and a foreign government that's gotten us into, like, seven wars, or at least played a large role in getting us into those wars explicitly. I'm not, like, alleging some secret conspiracy.

Joe Rogan 1:04:38 Yeah. That's...

Dave Smith 1:04:38 I'm saying like Benjamin Netanyahu is John McCain.

Joe Rogan 1:04:41 Right.

Dave Smith 1:04:41 Like he's ver- he's, he's been telling us Iran has a nuke... He's been telling us they're five years away from a nuke since I was seven. Literally he's been saying Iran is five years away from a nuke the entire time. And he, he came over here, he testified before Congress in 2002 that we... As a regional expert, that if we were to overthrow Saddam Hussein, democracy would sweep the region and there'd be all these positive reverberations. And then he goes, "And you also gotta overthrow the regime in Iran, and you also gotta overthrow Muammar Gaddafi," and, like, every single one of these things, uh, we... Not Iran yet, still pushing for that, but we went and overthrew Saddam Hussein, we went and overthrew Muammar Gaddafi, and I don't know what swept the region, but it wasn't democracy.

Joe Rogan 1:05:21 No, I remember w- in the early 2000s when I realized there's two fighting factions of Islam. I was like, "What?"

Dave Smith 1:05:29 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:05:30 And that Saddam Hussein had actually kept that from boiling over-

Dave Smith 1:05:34 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:05:35 ... because he was in control.

Dave Smith 1:05:36 Yeah. No, it's... I remember learning it too right around the same time. You're like-

Joe Rogan 1:05:39 I was like wait a minute.

Dave Smith 1:05:39 ... "You're telling me there are Shahs and Shins over there?"

Joe Rogan 1:05:41 "They fight against each other? Like what do they..." Do you know the difference between Sunni and Shiite?

Dave Smith 1:05:47 Uh, I mean, I know that they're different sects of Islam but, like, in terms of, like, the religion itself I...

Joe Rogan 1:05:51 Is it like the Catholics versus the Protestants?

Dave Smith 1:05:53 Yeah, I think it's something-

Joe Rogan 1:05:54 Is, is that kinda the deal?

Dave Smith 1:05:54 ... something like that. Like it's always the people with the, like, most minor interpretations of their holy book differences who, like, go to war the most aggressively.

Joe Rogan 1:06:02 (laughs) Right.

Dave Smith 1:06:02 You know what I mean? Like it's like-

Joe Rogan 1:06:03 Like the Catholics-

Dave Smith 1:06:03 ... yeah, Catholics and the Protestants.

Joe Rogan 1:06:05 ... and the Protestants are...

Dave Smith 1:06:05 Or, you know, like you agree-

Joe Rogan 1:06:06 Fucking crazy.

Dave Smith 1:06:07 ... on 95% of this religion, but, like, whatever. Um...

Joe Rogan 1:06:09 If you didn't know about that conflict, you would never believe it's real. Like Christians going to war with other Christians, like different sects.

Dave Smith 1:06:16 But-

Joe Rogan 1:06:16 Like brutal, horrible wars.

Dave Smith 1:06:18 Especially when you could, like, read about Jesus and you'd be like, "This doesn't seem to be what he's saying at all, man."

Joe Rogan 1:06:23 Yeah.

Dave Smith 1:06:23 Like...

Joe Rogan 1:06:23 Who's at the helm of this fucking battleship?

Dave Smith 1:06:26 It's un- it's unbelievable to me that any... And I'm not claiming to be any type of religious expert and I'm not a Christian, but it is unbelievable to me that anybody could be a Christian and could then, like, somehow do the mental gymnastics and rationalization to be like, "And that's why you gotta support every war. That's why we gotta fight every single one of these wars 'cause, you know, just like that guy Jesus told us."

Joe Rogan 1:06:50 (laughs)

Dave Smith 1:06:50 "Slaughter women and babies." You're like, seems like the opposite of his message from my humble understanding of it.

Joe Rogan 1:06:57 So the argument to that, if you wanna take the argument, would be like you have to do that to protect everyone here.

Dave Smith 1:07:02 Yeah. I mean, right.

Joe Rogan 1:07:03 That's the argument, right?

Dave Smith 1:07:04 Right. Like we have to go to war with Iran, a country that doesn't have nuclear weapons or an air force capable of delivering them here.

Joe Rogan 1:07:12 And it's so convenient that they're evil, so convenient that they torture students and they, they execute Olympic gold medalists in wrestling because they protested against the government. It's so convenient.

Dave Smith 1:07:24 Well, it's also, like, uh, you know, there's evil shit going on all over the world.

Joe Rogan 1:07:29 Oh, yeah.

Dave Smith 1:07:29 And it's terrible that there is, but isn't it interesting how, like, the next war... You know, like, I was, um...I was in... I, I did a debate, uh, at Princeton University, um, a, a few months back, um, against Josh Hammer, who's a, is a editor at Newsweek. And we did like an Oxford-style debate on whether the US should support Israel. And, you know, one of the things he said to me... So I was talking about like all this stuff, like the clean break strategy and the seven countries in five years, and he was like, "Oh, the war in Libya, that was a totally separate thing. Like that was, that was like a liberal interventionist war." And I was like, "Well, it sure is a coincidence that it was one of the seven countries." You know what I mean? Like what a wild coincidence.

Joe Rogan 1:08:13 Kinda crazy.

Dave Smith 1:08:13 That we, the, the government we decided to overthrow was the exact government that four-star General Wesley Clark told me we were planning on overthrowing way before any of these claims about how Gaddafi w- And they made all these bullshit claims.

Joe Rogan 1:08:25 The Libya one is wild.

Dave Smith 1:08:26 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:08:26 The Libya one's wild when you see how good of a leader he wa-... He was obviously an evil dictator, no questions about it.

Dave Smith 1:08:33 An eccentric fellow.

Joe Rogan 1:08:34 Yeah, definitely a piece of shit. However, for the people that lived there, they got no-interest loans, they, they had incredible infrastructure, their economy's doing well. They were at peace.

Dave Smith 1:08:46 I think it was one of the richest countries in Africa, which is-

Joe Rogan 1:08:49 Ugh.

Dave Smith 1:08:49 ... you know, grading on a curve. But still.

Joe Rogan 1:08:52 Then a few years later, after we invade, it... Or we helped people, we, we assisted, it becomes a failed state and they have slave auctions on YouTube.

Dave Smith 1:09:01 Yeah. That's right.

Joe Rogan 1:09:02 Now I've heard it's recovered somewhat.

Dave Smith 1:09:04 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:09:04 I hear people reach out from Libya and tell me that Tripoli's actually not bad now.

Dave Smith 1:09:08 Is doing better-

Joe Rogan 1:09:09 Yeah.

Dave Smith 1:09:09 ... than it was. But also... And, and the other, uh, part of this is that this was a huge contributing factor to the migrant crisis in Europe. You know, like all these things-

Joe Rogan 1:09:19 Right.

Dave Smith 1:09:19 ... do have like these domino effects-

Joe Rogan 1:09:21 Right.

Dave Smith 1:09:21 ... whereas... So then Gaddafi also was kinda like not allowing that to happen.

Joe Rogan 1:09:25 Mm-hmm.

Dave Smith 1:09:25 And then you had these huge numbers of refugees pouring into Europe. Then you see the rise of-

Joe Rogan 1:09:29 But not just pour in, but it seems like they're, they're wanting them to pour in.

Dave Smith 1:09:34 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:09:34 It seem... I mean, this is where it gets really strange. You know, I, I had a conversation with someone about this that didn't understand it, and we were, we were going over civil unrest and the, how... What... The use of civil unrest. One of the things that civil unrest does do really well is it makes people want to have measures to stop civil unrest that ultimately erode liberties.

Dave Smith 1:09:56 Yep. Yep.

Joe Rogan 1:09:56 It's a really good strategy. So if you want to, uh, take away people's guns, take away right to protest, take... One of the best things to do is to release as many criminals as you can and flood your ci- your city with violence and crime. Um, the more violence and crime you have, the more people will be freaked out. The more people who are freaked out-

Dave Smith 1:10:14 Right.

Joe Rogan 1:10:14 ... the more likely they are to give in to new measures of control.

Dave Smith 1:10:17 That's exactly right.

Joe Rogan 1:10:19 Yeah.

Dave Smith 1:10:19 Exactly. And that-

Joe Rogan 1:10:19 And you could do that worldwide. You could do that world-

Dave Smith 1:10:21 Well, you could watch it.

Joe Rogan 1:10:21 But also, let's talk about Europe, okay? In particular, let's talk about Germany. Le- let's just talk about the UK. What have they been doing besides letting in i- immense numbers of migrants? One thing they've been doing is arresting people for Facebook posts. They're arresting people for stepping outta line.

Dave Smith 1:10:39 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:10:39 So they're moving closer and closer to totalitarianism. And if you look at the numbers of people, you know, um, that have been arrested for just Face... One, one of 'em was... Someone just got arrested, pulled out of his house, two o'clock in the morning, for a Facebook post saying that he didn't like the Palestinian flag. I mean, this is wild stuff. It's wild stuff.

Dave Smith 1:11:02 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:11:02 And thousands of arrests, not just... Have you ever seen Konstantin Kisin talking to someone about this and he was explaining-

Dave Smith 1:11:08 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:11:08 Yeah. He was explaining like Russia imprisoned 400 people for m- posts on social media. That's crazy, right? How many do you think the UK did? And he's like, "Oh, I have no idea." And it was like, "4,000." And he's like, "What?"

Dave Smith 1:11:20 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:11:20 Thousands of people are getting arrested in the UK and you, you're only seeing some of them. You're seeing the people that are filming it at the time who have the wherewithal to grab a cellphone. There's a lot of people that-

Dave Smith 1:11:33 Yeah, and they-

Joe Rogan 1:11:33 ... just been by themselves that just got scooped up.

Dave Smith 1:11:36 What was it? Is, uh... I think it was 60 Minutes did a piece where they had like three lawyers, um, that were sitting there and they were kinda like asking 'em like, "So would this post be okay? Would this be okay?"

Joe Rogan 1:11:46 Right.

Dave Smith 1:11:46 "Could I say something?"

Joe Rogan 1:11:48 Right.

Dave Smith 1:11:48 And they're like, "Well, posting it is actually much worse than just saying it." And s- I mean, like it is really creepy. And-

Joe Rogan 1:11:53 It's really creepy.

Dave Smith 1:11:54 And... But you're so right. You're so spot on about this kind of like, this, this like one-two punch of like destabilization and then government coming in with a solution.

Joe Rogan 1:12:04 Yeah.

Dave Smith 1:12:04 It's a... Harry Brown, uh, who was a... He's, he's, uh, deceased now, but he's a brilliant, uh, uh, guy. Um, he was like, uh... He ran for president on the Libertarian Party in '96 and 2000. But he used to, uh, he used to say, "The, uh, the government, uh, breaks your leg and then offers you a crutch."

Joe Rogan 1:12:24 Hmm.

Dave Smith 1:12:25 And then like, they convince you to