Joe Rogan Experience #2370 - Dave Smith

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

0:04 The Joe Rogan Experience.

0:06 Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night, all day. (rock music plays) How what is it to be Dave Smith? (laughs)

Dave Smith 0:14 (laughs) It's a little bit weird.

Joe Rogan 0:15 (laughs)

Dave Smith 0:16 It's weirder to be Joe Rogan.

Joe Rogan 0:18 (laughs) You think?

Dave Smith 0:19 Yeah, it's gotta be.

Joe Rogan 0:21 It's weird. It's weird to be any person in the public eye. But, uh, in this time, it's particularly weird. If you're, like, one of the only people, I mean, the media is so bizarrely compromised. It's so weird when you watch these narratives spin, both on the left and on the right. And, like, is anybody fucking rational? Is anybody looking at th- and there's so few that a comedian, like yourself, just rises to the top of the heap.

Dave Smith 0:54 (laughs) Well, it's funny, dude, because ... So, like, uh, since the last time, uh, I was on, th- this has been kind of, like, the knock on me in a way now.

Joe Rogan 1:02 Is that a comedian?

Dave Smith 1:03 That was, "You're just a comedian."

Joe Rogan 1:04 You're my-

Dave Smith 1:04 This guy's not an expert."

Joe Rogan 1:05 ... emotional support comedian.

Dave Smith 1:06 That's right. (laughs) Yes, that's right.

Joe Rogan 1:08 Have you ever been-

Dave Smith 1:09 (laughs) It feels weird.

Joe Rogan 1:10 ... an emotional support comedian?

Dave Smith 1:11 It feels weird doing this without Doug, to be honest.

Joe Rogan 1:14 Aw.

Dave Smith 1:14 It seems kinda wrong. But th- that's been, like, the ... Essentially, that's, like, the knock is, like, "Yeah, but you're, you're acting like you're an expert, but you're just some comedian." And it's like, no, that's the point. That's always been the point. Like, yes, I'm just a comedian. I'm not an expert. And, and still, being not an expert, hand me your favorite war hawk and I will tear them to shreds, 'cause it's actually not that hard. And, like, these people aren't really experts either.

Joe Rogan 1:41 Well, al- also the problem with that is these people that are talking about these things are talking about people not being experts while they're not experts.

Dave Smith 1:49 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:51 There's, you know ... What, does Doug have a degree in English?

Dave Smith 1:54 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:54 Right, okay. His ... Sam Harris is a neuroscientist.

Dave Smith 1:58 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 1:58 You know, there's all these different people who have, you know, expertise in one area that is pretty much outside geopolitical, you know, world politics and international relations and chaos and war and the military-industrial complex. And, like, these are very, very complex, sophisticated, nuanced discussions that you have to have when you're talking about these things, 'cause there's so many different factors at play. There's so much money. There's so much bullshit in terms of, like, what's the truth, what's the narrative, who's pushing the narrative, who's being paid to push the narrative, which is really weird. There's so many of these fucking online influencers that I don't even think are really human beings that have, like, prominent accounts.

Dave Smith 2:41 Yep. Yep. But then there's also ... It's, it's a convenient kind of way to dismiss somebody-

Joe Rogan 2:47 Of course.

Dave Smith 2:48 ... because-

Joe Rogan 2:48 Instead of addressing the facts.

Dave Smith 2:49 Well, I thought it was ... This just, I thought, was really funny to me, was that, so like a few days after the last time, uh, after, me and, and Douglas Murray debated on the show, he went on Bill Maher's show. And so it's like after having this whole thing, the whole 45-

Joe Rogan 3:04 Yeah.

Dave Smith 3:04 ... minutes opening the show about how, "You comedians don't know what you're talking about," says don't know what you're talk- while he's smearing two people who he's never heard of and doesn't even know what they do or whatever, but not the best way to make a, an appeal to expertise. But no one ... He doesn't have a problem with Bill Maher doing it 'cause he agrees with him. So the issue isn't really being an expert verse being a comedian. You know, Konstantin Koszin went on this whole thing about expertise and all of this, and it's like, he, he also started as a comedian. Why, why all the sudden does this standard only apply to me and only when I'm talking about Israel? It never, it never-

Joe Rogan 3:38 Yeah.

Dave Smith 3:38 ... applied to me when I was talking about COVID. It never applied to me when they agreed with me on stuff.

Joe Rogan 3:43 Right.

Dave Smith 3:43 They would just go, "Look, Dave breaking it down." But now there's this one topic that one guy is not allowed to not be an expert on (laughs) , and it happens to be this one topic that the entire, like, population is turning on. I shouldn't say the entire, but, like-

Joe Rogan 3:56 Well, it's super obvious-

Dave Smith 3:57 ... huge numbers.

Joe Rogan 3:58 ... when someone attacks, like, what you do professionally verse, verses what you're actually saying.

Dave Smith 4:04 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 4:04 Yeah.

Dave Smith 4:04 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 4:04 Why not just dispute what he's saying instead of, like, this appeal to authority?

Dave Smith 4:11 Right.

Joe Rogan 4:11 Like, "You're not a, you're not an expert."

Dave Smith 4:13 But also, you know, to a- to ask that question is to answer that question.

Joe Rogan 4:17 Bro, you can only ask me a few things in life that I can give you, like, definitive answers on.

Dave Smith 4:23 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 4:23 And even then, I w- I might have to refer to expert. Like, if you wanna ask me about judo, which I've been d- doing jujitsu for f- since '90 ... I think I started in '97, somewhere around then, '96 maybe. I don't know shit about judo.

Dave Smith 4:41 Right.

Joe Rogan 4:42 I know how to do a few hip tosses, but when someone is doing something, I, I don't even know what it's called. If I go hara goshi-

Dave Smith 4:48 Right. Right.

Joe Rogan 4:48 ... I might get it wrong 'cause hara goshi might be legs on the outside versus leg on the inside. Wrestling, I gotta defer to DC, you know?

Dave Smith 4:57 Right. Right.

Joe Rogan 4:57 So even in martial arts, I'm not totally an expert.

Dave Smith 5:02 Yeah. And then there might be somebody who is, like, totally an expert, like, uh, like say, uh, you know, a, a wrestler who went to the Olympics.

Joe Rogan 5:09 Right.

Dave Smith 5:09 And with, like, a total expert, or a coach or something like that, total expert in wrestling, and they could still get something about MMA completely off-

Joe Rogan 5:15 Or jujitsu.

Dave Smith 5:16 ... right, because it's like-

Joe Rogan 5:17 It happened in the last fight, in the last UFC card. D- Daniel Cormier didn't know about the dead orchard, so he thought this person was fine 'cause they had two arms-

Dave Smith 5:27 Right.

Joe Rogan 5:27 ... in while they're caught in a triangle. I go, "No, this is a real submission. This is fucking dangerous."

Dave Smith 5:32 Right.

Joe Rogan 5:32 Like, there's this guy, Nathan Orchard, who figured out how to do a triangle with two arms in, and it's replicable. A lot of guys do it now. And I think it was a lady at the last UFC had it. And I was like, "Oh, shit." And Daniel didn't know it yet. There's a couple other things, like the buggy choke. If you don't know about jujitsu and you see a guy who's on his back and he's getting smothered, but all of a sudden he reaches under with his leg and I'm going, "Oh! Oh! Oh!" and you don't know what's going on, like, that's a fucking choke, like a-

Dave Smith 5:59 Right.

Joe Rogan 5:59 ... really dangerous one. Tie ruotolo gets you in that, you're Fucksville.You know, there's guys... So it's like, there's l- areas of expertise, even in areas that I'm an expert in, that I have to call on other people. Like, this is a stupid argument. Like, what are the facts? Does that submission work? Is that genocide?

Dave Smith 6:19 Right.

Joe Rogan 6:19 Like, what, what is... You know, what's going on?

Dave Smith 6:21 (laughs) Right.

Joe Rogan 6:21 Uh, were you funding Hamas? Is, is Hezbollah a proxy of Iran? Did Iran get our, the money to do this when Biden released the funds? Because th- what, what... What, who's, who's allowed to be an expert on all these things?

Dave Smith 6:36 Yeah. And then, of course, there are... Then there are things like, say, um, say like, uh, "Do you s- do you support lockdowns?" And like, in order to have, say, an expert opinion on this policy, it's like, okay, well... You'd be like... They'd say, "We're following the science." You know, so in other words, they have an epidemiologist or something like that who's arguing lockdowns will, will cut down on the transmission of the virus. Forget they turned out to be wrong but, leaving that aside, you're like, okay, but are they also an economist? Are they also a, a specialist-

Joe Rogan 7:06 Sociologist.

Dave Smith 7:07 ... a sociologist, a specialist in childhood development-

Joe Rogan 7:09 Right.

Dave Smith 7:09 ... who would tell you what closing the schools... Oh, who's the person who has expertise in every single one of those fields? Doesn't exist. There isn't an expert in all of those fields. You know what I mean?

Joe Rogan 7:18 But that was the problem with that time because that time everyone was so fearful, and the news was pushing fear, and it was clearly a narrative. I forget who it was, but some, some health official was being interviewed recently, and he said that during 2020, that Anthony, uh, Fauci said to him, "The problem is Americans aren't scared enough," which is crazy to say.

Dave Smith 7:40 Yep.

Joe Rogan 7:40 It's a wild thing to say, that your goal is to make people more fearful, so you're trying to put out a narrative that makes people more fearful, which, by the way, fucks with your immune system in a gigantic way. Not good at all-

Dave Smith 7:54 Right.

Joe Rogan 7:54 ... to be scared. I don't know how any people got really, really, really sick from COVID because when they got it, they freaked the fuck out and they couldn't sleep and they thought they were gonna die and they were riddled with anxiety, and that makes you attack people around you, and then you look for a solution. And when these trusted institutions, which up until five fucking years ago, I was a... 100% on board with, with everything, with vaccines, with every medical innovation other than psychiatric medications which I think are pretty much over-prescribed, I... All the sudden, y- everyone's like hoping these people have the answers. So, anybody who's going, "But, but there's this guy, Jay Bhattacharya, you know, he's also an expert." No, no, fuck you.

Dave Smith 8:35 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 8:35 Fuck you. It's like an anti-science, trust the science, COVID-denier, vaccine-denier... It just became this fearful res- because everybody just responded to the fucking media, because everybody's too tuned in to all of this negative shit, man, all day long.

Dave Smith 8:53 Well, you have to scare people. You know, if you wanna, if you wanna implement like a tyrannical policy, you almost-

Joe Rogan 8:58 You have to scare people.

Dave Smith 8:59 ... always have to scare people.

Joe Rogan 8:59 Always.

Dave Smith 8:59 I mean, that's... Now-

Joe Rogan 9:00 It's the only way, if it-

Dave Smith 9:01 Now... Yeah. Now, everyone knows, right, like you just said, like, being, uh, terrified is not good for your health. Th- on a human level, we also all know that it's not good for good decision-making. You know?

Joe Rogan 9:11 Yeah. No.

Dave Smith 9:11 But it is excellent for, "I will turn my brain off and give the authority to you-

Joe Rogan 9:17 Yes.

Dave Smith 9:17 ... to go do..." I mean, look, it was, uh, um, right after 9/11, if you... You know, people forget about this but like, the level to which Dick Cheney and George W. Bush used to fearmonger. Uh, Dick Cheney, the Vice President of the United States of America, who was a bit more than just your average vice president, he said, "It's not a matter of if, but when, there will be another 9/11 attack." They built the... They were trying to tell the American people, right after 9/11, to be in a constant state of fear, w-

Joe Rogan 9:46 Do you remember the COVID warnings, where they had colors? Or-

Dave Smith 9:50 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 9:50 ... excuse me, the war-

Dave Smith 9:51 The, the t- the, uh...

Joe Rogan 9:52 ... the terror warning, where they had colors?

Dave Smith 9:53 The s- the threat level or whatever.

Joe Rogan 9:55 Yeah, colors.

Dave Smith 9:56 Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then, one day, they'd be like, "It's up to yellow."

Joe Rogan 9:58 Yeah.

Dave Smith 9:58 And then... And, and I mean, we were really still traumatized from 9/11.

Joe Rogan 10:02 Yeah.

Dave Smith 10:02 But the thing about it is, is that they knew what they wanted to do.

Joe Rogan 10:06 Yeah.

Dave Smith 10:06 They knew the, the policy they wanted to start embarking on. And it was the mix of, "They hate u-" the big lie, which was, "They hate us for our freedom," which was like really the big lie after 9/11, was like... 'Cause, 'cause the American people very organically wanted to know what the beef was. Like, 9/11 happened, you know, everybody was like, "Yo, why do they hate us?"

Joe Rogan 10:25 Right.

Dave Smith 10:26 "What's this beef about?" And their answer was, "They hate you for your freedom. And by the way, this is gonna happen again. So, be terrified. Second off, understand that they're so irrational that their beef with you is that, like, your grandma can go to the grocery store." So, what do you do with that other than say what the American people said, which is, "George W. Bush, you have a blank check to go attack whoever you want to, and we'll support you."

Joe Rogan 10:50 Yeah, I remember feeling that way. I remember feeling that way. Right? I remember feeling, "It's up to these fucking guys, these hard-nosed generals and military leaders that are... These are the guys that are gonna protect us now. We gotta put all our faith in them. This shit is real and it's going on." But I had no idea. This is... So, 2001, I wasn't that much of a conspiracy theorist. I was into UFOs. I was into Bigfoot. I was into stupid shit.

Dave Smith 11:17 (laughs)

Joe Rogan 11:18 You know, I was into fun, stupid shit.

Dave Smith 11:19 Right, right.

Joe Rogan 11:20 And, you know, me and Eddie Bravo would get high and watch space documentaries and freak out about aliens. You know, the... Stupid shit. But then the Patriot Act came along and I was like, "Okay, what the fuck is this?" Like, what does, what does indefinite detention mean? When they signed the NDAA, like what... Wait a minute, what are you talking about? What is the, the MUNT?

Dave Smith 11:42 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 11:42 What, it rhymes with cunt? That, the act that Obama passed in 2015 that allowed them to use censorship... or excuse me, propaganda on American citizens?

Dave Smith 11:50 Yeah, yeah.

Joe Rogan 11:51 SMICMUNT, is that what it was?

Dave Smith 11:51 Uh-huh, something like that, yep. Something like-

Joe Rogan 11:53 It's like, okay, what... At what point in time do I start getting really fucking suspicious?

Dave Smith 11:59 Yep, yep.

Joe Rogan 12:00 You know, I, I had read one book a long time ago that really fucked me up, this book called Best Evidence, about the Kennedy assassination, and unfortunately, I read it right before I went on stage. I was just-I was by myself. I was in Philadelphia, and I was headlining, and this was like when I was just starting to headline, right? And so, uh, had a show Thursday, killed, everything's great, went back to my hotel room-

Dave Smith 12:24 (laughs)

Joe Rogan 12:24 ... nothing to do, read this fucking book for like six hours, freaked the fuck out. Showed up at this show like ashed face, like, "Oh my God, they killed the president." Like I had never even considered that before that book.

Dave Smith 12:36 Right.

Joe Rogan 12:36 I never even thought that there's like secret government agencies that plot against the president. Like th- I thought, "That's the fucking man and everybody works together." And Lee Harvey Oswald was a nut and he fucking shot him, and I'm like, "Oh my God." And I bombed. I fucking bombed and I apologized to the staff.

Dave Smith 12:53 You-

Joe Rogan 12:53 I apologized to the manager, I go, "Listen, I- I fucked up and I read this book right before I got here and it really fucked me up." It's done that before, man. I've had-

Dave Smith 13:01 And you need... When you have your mind blown like that, you need time after that before you make it funny.

Joe Rogan 13:07 Oh, always.

Dave Smith 13:07 Like it takes, it takes time to like then almost come back to it a few months later.

Joe Rogan 13:11 You should never engage in that kind of stuff like right before you go on stage. It's terrible.

Dave Smith 13:15 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 13:15 Anything real and ominous and ter- So I had a second show and it went great.

Dave Smith 13:19 (laughs)

Joe Rogan 13:19 But I was like, "Okay, I can't ever do that again." But that started me. But that was just peripheral. It was just the- the JFK thing. I th- I was only interested in that. I didn't get into Nixon, I didn't get into Vietnam, I didn't get into any of that stuff. But September 11th, 2001, i- in the beginning it was wonderful. After the attack, everyone was so friendly. It's terrible that this thing happened, it's terrible that these people died. But it made me think, like we need, every now and then, we need to get bitch slapped. You know, it's like when you see people like getting in people's faces for like waving an American flag, "Fuck you fascist f-" A bitch slap every now and then, like that guy might go, "Fuck 'em, what was I doing? I just ran up to that veteran and I got in his face because I wanna impress my lesbian girlfriend, like-"

Dave Smith 14:08 (laughs)

Joe Rogan 14:08 "... fuck is wrong with me? I don't know how to fight. And now I got a concussion and this guy bitch slapped me, it's on TikTok. Fuck."

Dave Smith 14:15 Th-

Joe Rogan 14:15 You know, like you need that sometimes just as like a course reset. And I felt like as a country, we had been doing shady shit all around the world forever, and there's real war happening everywhere but we're super lucky 'cause we're separated by oceans and not t- too much has really happened here. Oh my God, this is real. And everybody had an American flag on their fucking car. And when I was in New York City afterwards, we were filming Fear Factor one day, and everyone was so cool. And firemen were rockstars.

Dave Smith 14:42 Yep.

Joe Rogan 14:43 Cops were rockstars. Everybody was thanking them, everybody was thanking them for their service. It was cra- We hung out with these firemen in front of this bar, me and the- the Fear Factor crew. These guys were fucking... It's like I was hanging out with Brad Pitt. It was nuts. Everybody was so thankful. Where'd that go?

Dave Smith 15:00 Yeah, I was there. Uh, I was in New York City, uh, on 9/11, and um, I remember... So I was in- in Brooklyn, like only a few miles from the World Trade Center, and like-

Joe Rogan 15:12 Did you physically see it?

Dave Smith 15:14 No. I saw... So, I remember seeing, you know, I think... So I, when I got out of school, I was in high school, I was a senior in high school, and we- we got out. One of the girls like forged a note, uh, and said it was from our parents or something like that. I forget exactly how it went, but we got out. And it was like I was friends with the security guard. I used to buy weed from him.

Joe Rogan 15:34 (laughs)

Dave Smith 15:34 It was a different time. Uh, but yeah, it was a different time. Pre-9/11 we were just all hanging out, buying weed from security guards at schools.

Joe Rogan 15:41 (laughs)

Dave Smith 15:41 Um, but so he let us out. So I remember we c- I'm pretty sure when we came to Flatbush Ave we saw like, it was, there was smoke in the air. But both the towers had- had fallen by the time we got out.

Joe Rogan 15:50 Wow.

Dave Smith 15:50 But there were people. So the subways had been out for a while, and where I was, I was like on Flatbush Avenue, if- if anyone knows Brooklyn, it's like Flatbush and 7th Avenue. So this is like, it's kind of a straight shoot down to the Manhattan Bridge and then the Brooklyn Bridge is- is down there too. But the Brooklyn Bridge you can walk over. And so at this point already, people who were down in the financial district had just decided to walk back to Brooklyn 'cause they realized they weren't gonna get a cab or get on the subway. And so you'd see just like one guy in a suit and tie covered in soot, head to toe, like walking up-

Joe Rogan 16:21 Jesus.

Dave Smith 16:21 ... like, "Oh, he must have just been down there and- and walked up." And, but I remember, now this was in Brooklyn, but even there it was very busy. But, uh, people were stopping and asking each other. People who you would pass on the street but never talk to, were stopping and asking everyone, "How's your family? Everyone okay?"

Joe Rogan 16:38 Yeah.

Dave Smith 16:38 "All right? Are you fine?" Like there was this like community spirit that you just didn't, you don't typically get in New York City, 'cause there's just too many people, you can't talk to everybody.

Joe Rogan 16:46 Yeah.

Dave Smith 16:46 Um, but that- that part of it was kind of beautiful. And then of course governments do what they do and immediately manipulated that into launching wars that they wanted from before 9/11-

Joe Rogan 16:57 Yeah.

Dave Smith 16:57 ... that had absolutely nothing to do with- with 9/11.

Joe Rogan 16:59 Yeah.

Dave Smith 16:59 Um, which is, you know-

Joe Rogan 17:01 Also the Patriot Act was a bunch of shit they had tried to pass-

Dave Smith 17:03 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 17:04 ... a- a- a- for a while, for years. And everyone's like, "What are you fucking crazy?" No.

Dave Smith 17:08 Well this is the thing, and I guess maybe it's partly like my age, because I was 18 at the time and this is like my coming of age, you know, time.

Joe Rogan 17:15 Right.

Dave Smith 17:15 But I will never stop being furious about all of that shit. And this is like still to this day I'm sure you- you see it when I'm on podcasts with you and uh, doing debates and stuff. But I'm so angry over the war in Iraq and- and the subsequent wars in, you know-

Joe Rogan 17:29 Yeah.

Dave Smith 17:29 ... Libya and Syria and Somalia and Yemen and all of 'em. But specifically because, like all these guys, the neoconservatives, the- the N-word that I'm not supposed to bring up, even though by the way, Douglas Murray wrote a book called Neoconservatism: Why We Need It. But when I say the word neoconservative, um, be careful what you're watering here or something like that.

Joe Rogan 17:50 Is that what they say?

Dave Smith 17:51 They, uh-

Joe Rogan 17:52 I didn't know that this was an issue. That you- you- you can't discuss neoconservatism?

Dave Smith 17:56 Well that's Douglas said when I was on with him, he said, "Ah, the N-word."

Joe Rogan 18:00 Oh.

Dave Smith 18:00 Uh, when I brought it up.

Joe Rogan 18:01 Oh. Oh.

Dave Smith 18:01 And then said I'm- I'm watering something because I mentioned Wolfowitz, uh, you know...

Joe Rogan 18:05 Oh well, okay, so that's anti-Semitism...

Dave Smith 18:06 Right. Right.

Joe Rogan 18:06 ... which he's leaning into. Well that's kind of ridiculous.

Dave Smith 18:08 Yes.

Joe Rogan 18:09 You're talking about something incredibly important.

Dave Smith 18:11 Well, the-

Joe Rogan 18:11 Like, the neoconservatism, why- why would that be a thing that you can't discuss?

Dave Smith 18:17 Well it's-

Joe Rogan 18:17 That sounds crazy.

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Dave Smith 19:45 Well, I mean, I'd say the answer is that those guys got into power. They really hijacked American foreign policy after 9/11 'cause they happened to all be in power in the Bush administration, and then 9/11 happened on their watch. And, but if you go back and read the shit they read, and I will never stop talking about this 'cause it's just-

Joe Rogan 20:03 Yeah.

Dave Smith 20:03 ... too goddamn crazy. But if you read all of these guys, the guys who were in the George W. Bush administration, I mean like, the signators on the Project for a New American Century, which was their think tank, the PNAC as it's called, were like, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz and, and, uh, Fife and Richard Perle and David Wormser and li- the whole group who took over the government were all... And they wrote explicitly in the Project for a New American Century that they were like, "Look. Okay, the Soviet Union is collapsed. We are, for the first time in human history, like the lone superpower in the world, so what we should do right now is fight multiple wars. Because no one threatens us, and so therefore we should fight multiple wars to... Right now we have an opportunity to remake the world, overthrow the old Soviet sock puppet states, install our own states there, and guarantee, as the name says, the new American century of dominance, the 21st century."

Joe Rogan 20:59 Mm-hmm.

Dave Smith 20:59 And they specifically said they wanna overthrow Saddam Hussein.

Joe Rogan 21:02 Yeah.

Dave Smith 21:02 And then they specifically said in... And now this is something that the 9/11 truthers really held onto. I'm not sure, I think they might be overplaying their hand a little bit here, but they say, there's one document in the Project for a New American Century, you can find it online, where they straight up say, they go, "Now look, this is what we wanna do, but we're unlikely to get mass American support for it short of another Pearl Harbor-type event." And so a lot of people, like Alex Jones and a lot of the 9/11 truthers would point to this phrase and go, "See, this is the proof that they knew they needed another Pearl Harbor, so they planned their own Pearl Harbor." Now, that is not necessarily true. It doesn't necessarily prove that, but it certainly does change the way you think about their mind state when they sit there watching the towers get attacked and they all, at the very least, they all went, "We got it."

Joe Rogan 21:54 You know Alex Jones predicted 9/11 in July?

Dave Smith 21:58 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 21:59 He pr-

Dave Smith 21:59 But that's not quite as a, that's not quite as unique as I think some people think it is.

Joe Rogan 22:03 Really?

Dave Smith 22:04 Well like, people, so like-

Joe Rogan 22:05 You ever hear how he said it?

Dave Smith 22:07 Yeah, I've heard, I've heard the clip. It was pretty good. I mean, I'm, I'm not like taking anything away from that. He was right, but there were a bunch of people who predicted it. Ron Paul, uh, himself predicted it perfectly.

Joe Rogan 22:15 Did he predict planes into the towers?

Dave Smith 22:18 Let's just say, no I don't know about that. That is pretty impress- but at the same time, you know, the-

Joe Rogan 22:23 But n- but planes had never flown into towers before.

Dave Smith 22:25 That's true, but the World Trade Center was attacked by Al-Qaeda guys in '93.

Joe Rogan 22:29 Right, in '96. It's in a Biggie song.

Dave Smith 22:31 Yeah, that's right. That's right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Adrienne Apaluchi has the funniest joke about that.

Joe Rogan 22:35 Was it '93? I think it was '93.

Dave Smith 22:35 I believe so. Do you ever hear Adrienne's joke about that?

Joe Rogan 22:37 No. No.

Dave Smith 22:38 Does she get... Ah, I don't wanna butcher it on your show, but Adrienne Apaluchi is a hilarious comedian.

Joe Rogan 22:42 She's so funny.

Dave Smith 22:42 But she had a joke about how, you know, in that song, uh, where Biggie goes, "Time to get paid, blow up like the World Trade."

Joe Rogan 22:48 Right.

Dave Smith 22:48 But they bleep World Trade now, and then her bit is how they didn't bleep it. Like he was talking about the first one...

Joe Rogan 22:54 Right.

Dave Smith 22:54 ... but they bleep it 'cause of the second, you know-

Joe Rogan 22:55 Yeah.

Dave Smith 22:55 ... 'cause the towers came down. But then her bit is just like, you go like, "That wasn't enough of a tragedy to make it bleeped." (laughs) It was like a funny, it's like only a few people died. Like, it was cool. But then when a lot of people die they were... She's a phenomenal joke writer.

Joe Rogan 23:07 Well it was a different time. Back then they would've never bleeped anything. They didn't bleep the N-word. They didn't bleep anything. You know?

Dave Smith 23:14 Yeah. It was, it was, uh, the Wild West.

Joe Rogan 23:16 Well, it's weird when you hear about... So, I don't know if I fully buy into any of this, but, as a caveat before I get rolling. But, uh, when people discuss the intelligence agencies and their role in hip hop, especially gangster rap. Like I remember the very first time I listened to NWA and uh, I think I told Ice Cube when he was here. I was on a fucking StairMaster (laughs) in Revere, Massachusetts and I was listening to Fuck Tha Police.

Dave Smith 23:48 (laughs)

Joe Rogan 23:48 It was like, "Fuck Tha Police, coming straight from the underground." I was like, "What is this? This is cr-" It was a cassette Walkman, or maybe it was a CD but it was probably a cassette Walkman. And I was like doing, getting my cardio in.

Dave Smith 24:00 They were better for working out. They didn't skip.

Joe Rogan 24:02 The, those, they got good with the CD after a while.

Dave Smith 24:05 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 24:05 It didn't skip. But you had to set it on, you had to set it on the treadmill to hit that like shock mode thing.

Dave Smith 24:08 And you had to hit that like shock mode thing.

Joe Rogan 24:11 Right, right, right, right, right.

Dave Smith 24:11 And then that would eat your battery so quickly though.

Joe Rogan 24:13 (laughs)

Dave Smith 24:13 Like you'd get three songs in and be like, "All right." You have to go to the gym with like spare batteries in your-

Joe Rogan 24:18 Still to me it was so insane that I could carry music with me to the gym. Like that's incredible.

Dave Smith 24:23 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 24:23 Because you'd go to the gym and it'd be like the worst Poison song playing, no disrespect to Poison, or something like, "God, I can't get into this. I'm trying to get pumped here, man. This is fucking-"

Dave Smith 24:33 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 24:33 "... bullshit music." Like someone's in charge of the, you know, the, the station that they pick on the radio.

Dave Smith 24:38 Dude, I-

Joe Rogan 24:38 Just to be able to carry it, but at that moment of hearing that music...I was like, "This is the cr- this is celebrating crime and murder? Like, this is nuts." And murdering prostitutes, and like, wh- this is crazy that this is, like, a major record label put this out. And I was only 21, and I was, you know, I was just sitting there going, "I can't even believe this is real." And then I got really into it, like I was really into Ice Cube, really into Ice-T. I'd listen to that when I was delivering newspapers. It was like gangster rap was, like, a completely different thing. So then cut to when people start digging into it, like intelligence agencies have had... There's a weird book on intelligence agencies and their role in rock and roll music in the 1960s. The movie about, uh, well, the book about Laurel Canyon, what is it? Strange things...

Narrator 25:29 Something like that.

Joe Rogan 25:29 It's very interesting. I don't know if I buy it. Eddie Bravo's all in on it.

Dave Smith 25:33 (laughs)

Joe Rogan 25:33 I don't know if I buy it, but there's a lot of, like, weird connections to the intelligence community and music, particularly hip hop, and particularly gangster rap. And if you wanna get really dark you would say, if you wanted to fill your private prisons up, what better way than to have very popular music encouraging prisons, or excuse me, encouraging crime, encouraging out- outright celebrating crime and violence. That way you fill your prisons up and you also keep people scared so you can give them more laws and more rules and crack down and make them easier to placate, easier to get them to fall in line and do what you need them to do.

Dave Smith 26:16 Yeah, and s- and support massive, uh, police buildups-

Joe Rogan 26:19 Mm-hmm.

Dave Smith 26:20 ... and massive, you know, like, militarization of the police and all this stuff.

Joe Rogan 26:23 Yeah.

Dave Smith 26:23 And I don't know, you know, I've, I've heard a little bit about that. I really don't know. I know Ice Cube has talked about it before, like talked about-

Joe Rogan 26:29 Mm-hmm.

Dave Smith 26:29 ... how, like, there is undeniably this influence. It does, there are some things about it that seem crazy, but I do know that, and I don't even think this is a controversial thing to say, I think this is just, like, fact at this point, that it was the Reagan administration who did traffic in cocaine to the United States of America while they were ramping up the war on drugs. So, like, they're bringing in-

Joe Rogan 26:51 100%

Dave Smith 26:51 ... to, in their effort to help the Contras or whatever, they're going like, "Okay, well these guys are, are drug dealers, so if we move these drugs in we can get these money shipments to them." And then you're sitting in the, they're, they're creating the conditions for the crack epidemic-

Joe Rogan 27:06 Yes.

Dave Smith 27:06 ... to explode, and then they catch one guy with a few rocks on him and they're throwing him in jail for decades. It's like just that alone, just that one piece of information, you'd almost, i- if you're, like, in a sane world you'd go, like, "Oh, so the people had a revolution and overthrew that government and publicly hung all the politicians involved-"

Joe Rogan 27:25 Nope.

Dave Smith 27:25 "... and then we started over from new?" And you're like, "No."

Joe Rogan 27:27 Just say no.

Dave Smith 27:28 No, they lionized that guy.

Joe Rogan 27:29 Yeah.

Dave Smith 27:29 Th- still for decades afterwards the Republicans at the RNC you bring up Reagan and they go, "Our hero, Ronald Reagan." Like, the fact that that isn't enough to go, "Well, this guy should be remembered, like, as a monster."

Joe Rogan 27:42 Do you think they tell Reagan that they're selling crack in the hood?

Dave Smith 27:45 I don't know.

Joe Rogan 27:45 I don't think they do. I do not think-

Dave Smith 27:47 I-

Joe Rogan 27:47 I don't thi- do not think the intelligence agencies let that information that far up the chain to a guy who was only in there for four years, four years to get reelected.

Dave Smith 27:55 Fair enough.

Joe Rogan 27:55 U- not a chance.

Dave Smith 27:56 But George H.W. Bush definitely knew.

Joe Rogan 27:58 Fuck yeah, he knew.

Dave Smith 27:59 (laughs) That guy knew for sure.

Joe Rogan 28:00 That guy knew. He fuck, he fucking signed the docket. (laughs)

Dave Smith 28:02 That guy was all over that. Yeah.

Joe Rogan 28:04 He was all over, he was the head of the CIA.

Dave Smith 28:06 He was their guy.

Joe Rogan 28:07 Yeah.

Dave Smith 28:07 He was the head of the CIA.

Joe Rogan 28:08 He was their guy.

Dave Smith 28:08 Moved in. Right, so you know, but e- but again, also you get to a certain point when you're president, I think this applies to Donald Trump in a lot of ways too, where it's like, it's your responsibility. Like, if you didn't know, then that's your responsibility for not knowing.

Joe Rogan 28:21 I d- I don't think you have an access. I do not. I do not think in cases like that you have access. I think l- if they're doing something like selling crack in the hood and using the money to fund the Contras, there is no fucking way you could ever kosherize that. So I don't think you ever let the president know. I think this is all Black funded. I don't think, I think there's layers and layers and layers of bureaucracy before you can get to any real data and information. If you wanna talk about people that are doing operations in Nicaragua, you've got things going on in Iran, you've gotta pay attention to Russia, this is happening, y- that's happening there, there's not a fucking chance he knows they're selling crack to pay for an army. I just don't-

Dave Smith 29:07 Y- yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Joe Rogan 29:07 I just don't think they might tell him.

Dave Smith 29:08 Look, you might be right about that.

Joe Rogan 29:09 Because why would they assume that he'd go along with it?

Dave Smith 29:11 Or tell him...

Joe Rogan 29:12 They'd be like, "This is not a normal thing to do. I, I came into this office thinking... I'm an actor."

Dave Smith 29:17 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 29:17 "I'm Ronald Reagan. I came into this office thinking I'm gonna be a good American and we're gonna get back to basics and hard work and trickle down economics. And you're telling me you're selling crack? Hey, fuck you."

Dave Smith 29:27 (laughs)

Joe Rogan 29:27 "You're going to jail." You know what I'm saying?

Dave Smith 29:29 Well, yeah. Well-

Joe Rogan 29:30 Because he can't... That's how Nixon got caught. So Nixon didn't organize Watergate.

Dave Smith 29:35 That's right.

Joe Rogan 29:35 He tried to cover it up.

Dave Smith 29:36 Yep.

Joe Rogan 29:36 That's how he got caught. And they would do the same thing with Reagan.

Dave Smith 29:39 Yeah, well it's, it-

Joe Rogan 29:40 Do you wanna become clean about all the crack selling?

Dave Smith 29:42 Well-

Joe Rogan 29:42 Do you really?

Dave Smith 29:42 Right, well they, they could present it to them after it's a fait accompli and then be like, "So what do you want to do now?" Which is, uh, what happened with Nixon, right? So it's like-

Joe Rogan 29:49 Right.

Dave Smith 29:49 "... Look, this is gonna look really, really bad. Good luck explaining this."

Joe Rogan 29:53 Right.

Dave Smith 29:53 So he helps them cover it up and then you go, "Now we got you."

Joe Rogan 29:56 We got you, bitch.

Dave Smith 29:56 Now you might as well-

Joe Rogan 29:57 Yeah.

Dave Smith 29:57 ... have been in on planning it-

Joe Rogan 29:58 Yeah.

Dave Smith 29:58 ... 'cause you helped us cover it up. And-

Joe Rogan 29:59 And the whole thing was set up by the government.

Dave Smith 30:02 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 30:02 That's what's really crazy is intelligence agencies set up Watergate, they, they operated it. Bob Woodward was an intelligence agent before he was ever a reporter. That was his first gig. Tucker Carlson told me that-

Dave Smith 30:13 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 30:13 ... it blew my fucking mind. He's like, "What rookie reporter for their first gig, their first story, gets you're gonna take down the most popular president in US history?"

Dave Smith 30:24 Yeah. That's-

Joe Rogan 30:25 He had won by the biggest margin.

Dave Smith 30:26 In 49 states.

Joe Rogan 30:28 Yeah.

Dave Smith 30:28 He's ju- a dominant reele- the American people had spoken, they supported this guy and then, right, Bob Woodward, some 20-something-year-old reporter, he gets the biggest story in American history-

Joe Rogan 30:38 Right.

Dave Smith 30:38 He happened to just come out of Naval intelligence-

Joe Rogan 30:41 Did I-

Dave Smith 30:41 ... in a weird coincidence. (laughs)

Joe Rogan 30:42 Did I tell you what Bill Murray told me?

Dave Smith 30:44 No.

Joe Rogan 30:44 So Bill Murray was on the podcast and he was talking about B- Bob Woodward's m- movie.

Dave Smith 30:49 Yes, I-

Joe Rogan 30:49 The book he wrote, w- what, it, was it, uh, what was it called?

Dave Smith 30:53 Well, he's written a lot at this point.

Joe Rogan 30:54 But, but the one about Belushi. What was it called? It was all-

Dave Smith 30:57 I don't... I've never read that.

Joe Rogan 30:58 It was, uh, Wired.

Dave Smith 30:59 Okay.

Joe Rogan 30:59 Wired. Okay. It was just about Belushi being fucking crazy drug addict. He goes, "That's not my friend." He goes, "That's not how he was." He goes like, "That was kind of an act. He was a little bit of a lightweight. Like, if he had like two, three drinks, he was drunk." Like, he goes, "I think he did that speed ball, I think that's the first time he ever did it and died. It's not that he'd never done drugs before, but he wasn't this guy. So this was all fiction." So he read the first five pages of this, "Oh my God, they framed Nixon."

Dave Smith 31:28 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 31:30 Isn't that crazy?

Dave Smith 31:31 That's interesting. I know-

Joe Rogan 31:31 He goes like, "This guy wrote about my friend in such a distorted, untruthful way. Now I have to think about what he discovered with Nixon."

Dave Smith 31:40 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 31:40 'Cause now I know who, what kind of person this is.

Dave Smith 31:42 Yeah. I, my, uh, uh, good friend, who I mentioned quite a bit, but Scott Horton, who is, uh, the, I think the best foreign policy voice in the United States of America. And he's written, he wrote the best book on the Terror Wars called Enough Already and the best book on the war in Ukraine called Provoked. But so while, so Bob Woodward's latest book came out, and I remember, he told me about this. But so he just happened to be writing his book on Ukraine when he saw this new Bob Woodward book came out, and they had a quote in it, I believe it was a Sergey Lavrov quote, who's like Putin's, you know, right-hand man. And Scott said he's reading it and he goes, "This quote's all wrong." He goes, "The, the actual quote..." Like I was j- he was just researching this for his book. And he goes, "The quote means the exact opposite of what he's claiming it means here. Like see how he left out this part? He wasn't referring to this, he was referring to that." And then he just, I remember he just told me, he goes like, "So for the record, like, you can just never trust anything Bob Woodward says (laughs) because he'll take this quote and just get it com- mangle it c- to the point where it, he's presenting it as if it means 180 degrees opposite of what the quote actually meant." And so yeah, there's a lot of stuff like that.

Joe Rogan 32:45 Wow.

Dave Smith 32:45 And then that guy is like-

Joe Rogan 32:46 You know, would you have ever imagined-

Dave Smith 32:46 ... the historian of record.

Joe Rogan 32:48 Would you have ever imagined that? When all the years when I was growing up, that guy was like a hero.

Dave Smith 32:53 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 32:54 He was like a journalistic hero. Like-

Dave Smith 32:55 Well, and he's how we know, he's how you know that in that moment, Dick Cheney turned to George W. Bush and said, "Mr. President, I think we need to..." And then you're like, "Oh." But he just makes shit up.

Joe Rogan 33:05 Oh, God. Like, w- when I was a kid, you know, they made a movie about him, All The President's Men.

Dave Smith 33:14 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 33:14 It's a movie. What, who plays Bob Woodward? What movie star plays Bob Woodward, which one of them? Robert Redford. Was it Robert Redford-

Dave Smith 33:22 Also Redford.

Joe Rogan 33:22 ... or was it the other guy? Who's, who else was in that movie with him? Who played Bernstein? Oh, uh, Robert, but Dustin Hoffman. Dustin Hoffman. But with, with Robert Redford- That's right, that's right. Robert Redford's Woodward. Yeah. So imagine that. You're, uh, you're Bob Woodward, you bullshit everybody and then you get to watch Robert Redford, the most handsome man alive-

Dave Smith 33:40 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 33:40 ... play a movie. Like, "Outstanding. Look how good looking I am."

Dave Smith 33:43 And th-

Joe Rogan 33:44 "Look at me kicking ass for America." Like... (laughs)

Dave Smith 33:46 (laughs) But also, just think about how much they could get. I remember, I don't know, what, I, I was in school and I remember hearing like my history teacher talking to another teacher. And this was when Bill Clinton was, uh, getting in trouble for Monica Lewinsky, so I was like in, in middle school or whatever. And I remember hearing them talk and one of them said to the other one, he goes, "Oh, so what do you think about the impeachment?" Or something. And I remember my history teacher, who I thought was a pretty smart guy, and he goes, "Well, you know, they're treating him like he's Nixon, but he's not Nixon." And essentially what that meant, like what he was saying was like, "Well, Nixon is the most corrupt president who ever lived."

Joe Rogan 34:27 Right, right.

Dave Smith 34:27 "Bill Clinton just got caught cheating on his wife. Like, that's not as big a deal as being the most corrupt." But, um, they just made that like the thing that everybody knows. Like, "Well, we did have this one corrupt president, but the system works."

Joe Rogan 34:38 It worked.

Dave Smith 34:38 That's the lesson. The system works and it got him out of there.

Joe Rogan 34:40 Before the internet.

Dave Smith 34:41 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 34:41 Before the internet, it works.

Dave Smith 34:42 Well-

Joe Rogan 34:42 I think it's like very hard to make that same system work the same way now.

Dave Smith 34:45 No, I completely agree. I mean to say that the narrative that everybody accepted-

Joe Rogan 34:48 Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Dave Smith 34:49 ... was like, "Oh, but the system works." Like, "It figured out that he was corrupt."

Joe Rogan 34:52 Oh, right. Right, right, right.

Dave Smith 34:52 "They had him step down, they got him out of there." When really the answer is much more like, "The intelligence agencies, uh, took over the United States of America in a hostile coup against John F. Kennedy." And then Nixon comes in l- like a few years later and is like essentially taken over as well, but they get the American people to believe that like what that was, was a corrupt president being ousted.

Joe Rogan 35:17 This episode is brought to you by ZipRecruiter. There is such a thing as having too many options to choose from, like when you're scrolling on the TV trying to find something to watch or have you been to one of those ice cream shops where they have hundreds of different toppings to choose from? It's overwhelming. The same thing can happen when you're hiring and you get inundated with applications. Well, it's time to stop stressing and use ZipRecruiter instead. Their innovative resume database can help you find and connect with the best people for your role. Try it for free now at ziprecruiter.com/rogen. What makes ZipRecruiter's resume database so special is the advanced filtering feature. You can use it to hone in on exactly what you're looking for from the hundreds of thousands of resumes that are uploaded monthly to the site. And when you find a potential candidate, you can unlock their contact info instantly. Skip the candidate overload, streamline your hiring with ZipRecruiter. See why four out of five employers who post on ZipRecruiter get a quality candidate within the first day. Just go to this exclusive web address, ziprecruiter.com/rogen. Again, right now, try it for free. Again, that's ziprecruiter.com/rogen. ZipRecruiter, the smartest way to hire. Well, it's also easy to frame Nixon that way because he's ugly.

Dave Smith 36:45 Right?

Joe Rogan 36:45 (laughs)

Dave Smith 36:45 He's not a good looking guy and it was just after Kennedy. Look, when Muhammad Ali retired, Larry Holmes couldn't get any love.

Joe Rogan 36:55 ... couldn't get any love. And one of the reasons why Larry Holmes, who's one of the best heavyweight champions of all time, couldn't get any love is 'cause he beat the fuck out of Muhammad Ali. And everybody was sad and-

Dave Smith 37:05 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 37:05 ... everybody hated him because of that. And you just... You're, you're never... Like, if you're Nixon and you're following JFK who got shot in the fucking head... We lost, we got assassinate, uh, uh, someone assassinated the greatest president of all time, this good-looking guy who was gonna really change things and didn't believe in secrecy and was talking to the American people like, "We have hope and dreams. He wants to put us on the moon." And he got shot in the head, now we got this ugly fuck?

Dave Smith 37:32 (laughs) Well, there was LBJ in between there at least.

Joe Rogan 37:35 I know.

Dave Smith 37:35 But, yes. No, I mean-

Joe Rogan 37:36 A little bit, but-

Dave Smith 37:37 Well, I think also in hindsight, he just... His, hi- he, it's not... He wasn't that good-looking. He also came off as kind of an evil figure.

Joe Rogan 37:44 Well, I was gonna say he's also very authoritarian.

Dave Smith 37:47 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 37:47 You know? Which is... Unfortunately, when you have a society where you do have ubiquitous crime, you do need some kind of an authoritarian leadership. Not saying you need tyranny, not saying you need a dictator, but you need fucking laws and you need rule of law. And sometimes those people come off very harsh and very uncaring and unloving, and, you know, the total opposite for, like, the reason why people voted for Jimmy Carter, I think. 'Cause Jimmy Carter represented, like a, like a genuinely sweet, good guy.

Dave Smith 38:23 Right.

Joe Rogan 38:24 But, like, look how... That presidency was a disaster 'cause they were all working against him, for sure. And on top of that, it's, like, hard to... Like, you kinda, gotta be a bit of a hard ass if you wanna run the world. But the way Nixon did it, we're still suffering through that today. That motherfucker, he, he's partially responsible for that sweeping Schedule 1 Act of 1970. When they did that and they made everything illegal, everything Schedule 1, including things that are 100% medicinal, like marijuana, all that fucked up society and they did it specifically to target the antiwar movement and to target the Civil Rights Movement, specifically. So, it's not like Nixon was the best. He, he-

Dave Smith 39:07 Oh, no. Oh, uh-

Joe Rogan 39:07 What he did was fucking horrible.

Dave Smith 39:09 D- Nixon had a lot of policy failures. And, and I would put the number one... And I completely agree with you. I mean, launching the war on drugs was a disaster, but taking us off the gold standard was one of the worst policy decisions-

Joe Rogan 39:21 Terrible.

Dave Smith 39:21 ... in the history of the United States of America.

Joe Rogan 39:23 Terrible.

Dave Smith 39:23 I... That is... We're, we're... So many of the problems we face now is because of that. And people could say... Like, I've heard Pat Buchanan defend, uh, Nixon on this before. Pat Buchanan was in the Nixon Administration. He was a speechwriter for him. Um, and he was like, "Well, look what we were gonna do at that point." And so he was basically saying... 'Cause what happened was, essentially... So you had, like, the, um, the Bretton Woods agreement, which started, uh, started after World War II. Or actually, I'm sorry, it started at the very end of World War II. It was in 1944 where they had the Bretton Woods agreement where they could kind of see where World War II was going. And it was basically like, "Okay, well, the... All of Europe is destroyed and a lot of Asia is destroyed." Or not yet, I guess, this is '44, but it was getting there. And the... And America had, you know, at least on the homeland, hadn't really been touched. And we had, like, wild amount of the world's gold. And so the deal was essentially that, like, we will peg the dollar to gold at $35 an ounce. Everyone else can peg their currency to the dollar, and then the dollars are, uh, refundable. You know, you can get, uh, an ounce for $35. And so that, you know, was... Whatever. There w- there were problems with the Bretton Woods agreement, but that was what stood from after World War II into... So, from 1944 to 1973 or 1971 when he took us off the gold standard. And so essentially what happened was through the '60s, we started cheating, and it became very obvious to the world that we were... Like, you know, the 1960s, you're like... You have the Great Society, so we created Medicare and, and Medicaid. And, um, they... We went to the moon and we were fighting the war in Vietnam, and we were just printing money for all of this, which is, you know, what we still do to this day. But, so essentially the Europeans started looking at us and they were like, "I don't think you got enough gold to cover all these dollars that you're printing around."

Joe Rogan 41:18 Wasn't that thing where they were gonna, like, do an audit of Fort Knox that-

Dave Smith 41:23 Well-

Joe Rogan 41:23 ... we never heard about?

Dave Smith 41:24 Well, what I know is that... I'm pretty sure it was the French. Might have been the British too, but it was definitely the French. And the French, uh, basically called our bluff. And they just went, "Uh, okay. We'll take gold. You know, we got all these dollars. We'll take gold. We get an ounce for every 35, uh, dollars that we have, and we have quite a lot." And that's when Nixon went, "No." (laughs) Like, no. He just basically defaulted in front of the entire world, and he said he's temporarily suspending the convertibility of dollars into gold. And they framed it as like, you know, the, the French are attacking the stability of the dollar. Really, all they were doing was calling us on our agreement.

Joe Rogan 42:04 (laughs)

Dave Smith 42:04 We were... We owed it to 'em. And-

Joe Rogan 42:05 We're like, "We got so much gold, bro."

Dave Smith 42:07 So, Pat Buchanan says, defending his boy, Richard Nixon, he goes, "Well, what were we gonna do at that point? Let 'em clean us out of all of our gold and just not be the dominant power?" But I think the retort to that is, "Yeah." Like, that's what you should have done, because the decision to go off of the gold standard essentially just said, "Well, now there's no more even pretend limits on government." You know, this is why Ron Paul, who... Happy birthday to the greatest living American hero.

Joe Rogan 42:35 How old is he now?

Dave Smith 42:35 Just turned, just turned 90. Um, and, uh-

Joe Rogan 42:38 Wow.

Dave Smith 42:38 ... I was just at his, uh, birthday party a few weeks ago. And-

Joe Rogan 42:40 Damn, you-

Dave Smith 42:41 He was-

Joe Rogan 42:41 Look at you partying with Ron Paul.

Dave Smith 42:42 Party... Dude, that dude throws it down. No, I'm just kidding. (laughs) It was, it was very nice though to see him. Tulsi Gabbard was there, which was cool. Um, but, so, so essentially, right? That was the last restraint on government, is that at least... Even then, even under Bretton Woods when we're cheating, at least there's some feeling of like, "Well, don't cheat too bad."

Joe Rogan 43:02 Right.

Dave Smith 43:02 'Cause they could maybe try to, you know, like-

Joe Rogan 43:04 Count the gold.

Dave Smith 43:04 Right, exactly.

Joe Rogan 43:06 Yeah.

Dave Smith 43:06 But after that, it was off to the races. And this is why, this is why, why Ron Paul ran for Congress, was when Richard Nixon took us off the gold standard. And then he was like, "This is gonna lead to big government, this is gonna be the era of big government." So he was gonna run to try to stop that. And, um, he was completely right. You know? This is w- what has really destroyed everything, is that there's just no ... And it's a big part of the reason why I'm so angry about all these wars too, 'cause it's all related. Um, you know, the Federal Reserve was created in 1913. Or the Federal Reserve Act was signed into law by Woodrow Wilson in 1913. And then in 1914, I think is when it actually got up and running. And in 1914 is when the income tax was passed, also signed into law by Woodrow Wilson. And three years later is World War I. You know? Like three years la- or American entry into World War I. So it's like this is the, the banking system and the tax system are very like interrelated with the warfare state. Like you need this stuff in order to fight wars. And you know, even just over the, whatever it's, over the last 25 years, we've spent close to $10 trillion on wars. You know? And they don't, they, they didn't tax the American people for that, 'cause they know they couldn't tax us enough to pay. (laughs) We would put an end to it. If they tried to raise everybody's taxes enough to come up with $10 trillion 'cause we wanna go fight regime change wars all over the Middle East, the American people would've been like, "No, we're not doing that." But they didn't do that. They kept taxes where they were. I think they even cut some rates during those years, top rates. Um, and then they borrowed the rest, and that's, they still couldn't borrow enough, so they just print the money. And then essentially what happens is that the price of everything just goes up and up and up. And the, the, you just put more money into the system and then people start looking around and going like, "Geez, why is the price of housing and healthcare and energy and childcare-"

Joe Rogan 44:59 Yeah.

Dave Smith 44:59 "... totally unaffordable?" And the answer is 'cause you're paying for the war in Iraq. And nobody thinks about it like that, but that's really what's going on. They can't ... So for all the young people who are coming out of college now and they're like, "I'm 150 grand in debt. I have a gender studies major degree," or whatever, you know, maybe something better than that, but they got an English degree or something and they're working at DoorDash and the average house is going for 600 grand and they're like, "What am I possibly gonna do?" It's like the reason why these kids are all demanding socialism, at least on the left, is 'cause like what else are you gonna do? Like how do you even ... But the reason why that is the case is because your government decided to spend trillions of dollars on blowing up brown countries and in some cases then rebuilding them to blow them up again. This is, this is the actual cost of the thing. And I feel like it's, um, th- almost nobody outside of like the Ron Paul Libertarians, the Austrian economics guys, almost nobody else ever makes this connection. That it's like this is the, the deal. You can't be a world empire without having a central bank that can print money for you, 'cause otherwise it just doesn't work. Resources are finite and you'll run out of 'em. And so you can't do that without having this monetary system, but the cost of this monetary system is that prices always go up and up and up and up and that rigs the entire economy against the working class and the middle class in favor of the rich. It's just the way it is. When, when the value of assets is going up and up and up and up, that's great if you own stuff. That's great if you own stuff and you're selling it. If, if you got a billion dollars in the bank, inflation is your best friend. But if you're on a fixed income or you're a working class person, it just destroys you. And then, and everybody who's working class knows this just from living through the last five years. But you know, your grocery prices go up 30%, that is, you know, that's, that's ... You know, people have this idea that there's like economic issues over here and then there's like social issues over here or there's foreign policy over here, but it's, (laughs) it's all one thing. You know, the prices of groceries go up by 30% and families get destroyed. Men swallow pistols, kids grow up without fathers. Like that's the cost of this shit. And, um, that's what we're living through now and what we'll continue to live through as long as we have a government that it spends way beyond our means. Like, uh, Dr. Ron Paul used to say, "When you spend beyond your means, you're destined to live beneath your means."

Joe Rogan 47:27 Mm. And we have an economy that's built around doing the exact same thing it's always done. Right?

Dave Smith 47:34 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 47:34 And if you think about the amount of money, just, just w- like just in shuttering USAID, how ... Like think about the amount of money, whether you agree with USAID or not, the amount of money that was being pumped through that system, like to all sorts of weird places.

Dave Smith 47:54 Yep.

Joe Rogan 47:54 Right? There's the, when the Department of Energy gave out 39 or n- $93 billion in loans in the months between Biden losing or Kamala losing rather-

Dave Smith 48:05 Right.

Joe Rogan 48:06 ... and Trump taking office. Like where's that ... There's so many of these instances of m- uh, insane amounts of money just being allocated while we're $39 trillion in debt. It's like it, it's so unmanageable and yet it just keeps marching on and people are upset if you try to pull a Band-Aid off. Like the idea of shuttering some of these government organizations, all you hear about is people are gonna die, people are gonna starve, this is gonna happen, that's gonna happen. Like are you fucking sure?

Dave Smith 48:34 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 48:35 Are you sure that this isn't a giant money sucking scam that's been going on that does some good?

Dave Smith 48:41 Yeah. Well there's a hu-

Joe Rogan 48:41 'Cause that's most of it, right?

Dave Smith 48:43 Yeah. Well like, uh, number w- yeah, if you, if you go, hey, I think ... Which by the way, no one in Congress, I mean short of like Thomas Massie maybe, maybe Rand Paul, but like no one else in Congress is even like suggesting an idea so, so radical. But if I were to throw out the radical idea that we should go back to pre-pandemic level spending, so go all the way back to the crazy year of 2019 when it was anarchy or whatever-That was just, they'll all tell you the world's gonna end if we do that.

Narrator 49:12 Yeah.

Dave Smith 49:12 And even when they're making up these absolutely ridiculous, you know, claims about how many people are gonna die if you cut government spending, which is all just totally absurd. Um, but then they never seem to go like, "Well, how many people are gonna die if I keep letting DC have all these war-making powers?"

Narrator 49:28 Right. Right.

Dave Smith 49:28 How many, how many people are gonna die if the president is able to fund a proxy war whenever he wants to? And I mean, look at this shit, dude. I took, I took so much, uh, you know, whatever. I'm not... But I, I took a lot of heat for the stuff I said on, on the show here a few years ago about the war in Ukraine. And look at it now, dude. Look at even... And I don't think they're about to end the thing. I think they're, which we could talk about, but I think they're putting poison pills in these negotiations already. That's what it looks like to me. But literally, the deal that I was talking to you about, whatever it was, three years ago, when I was saying on the show that they had a deal worked out, a peace deal worked out in the first few months of the war in '22, and Boris Johnson went and killed the peace deal on behalf of the West to make sure this war kept going.

Narrator 50:13 (laughs)

Dave Smith 50:13 But the deal that was, that was in pencil, not pen, that, that Boris Johnson killed, was essentially, um, recognition of, uh, the annexation of Crimea. Uh, it was, at the time, it wasn't a annexation of the Donbas region. It was like independence for the Donbas region. And then the agreement that the rest of Ukraine would not join NATO. That was the deal that they had worked out. And look at where we are now. Now the deal that they're even talking about, even as Donald Trump goes, "There's gonna be some land swaps and all this." Okay, well, what's he talk... The deal right now that is the best case scenario that, that we're hoping we could get is that Vladimir Putin obviously keeps Crimea, keeps the entire Donbas region, gets a corridor from the south into Crimea, and the rest of Ukraine doesn't join NATO. So we have the same deal, just a little bit more in the Russians' favor, three years later with hundreds of thousands of people having died in that process.

Narrator 51:11 (laughs)

Dave Smith 51:11 Just to get back to not as good a deal as they had in '22.

Narrator 51:16 Oh.

Dave Smith 51:16 And so, you know...

Narrator 51:17 And if they don't sign that.

Dave Smith 51:19 It'll keep going, which I think it's probably going to. Um-

Narrator 51:22 They, they're enlisting people as old as 60 now.

Dave Smith 51:25 Yeah. And they have been for a, like, a full year at least.

Narrator 51:28 (laughs)

Dave Smith 51:28 They're throwing people up there. And the thing that's really changed, the reason why the, like, the Europeans and Zelenskyy and, and... They're at least pretending to come to the negotiation table right now, um, which they don't say, but this is, this is the truth, is that support for the war amongst Ukrainians has collapsed. I mean, not like gone down by a few points. It's collapsed. There was just a, a piece in this the other day, it was, uh, Gallup, I believe. They sa- they had a, a, their latest poll, super majorities of the Ukrainian people, 70% around, want an immediate end to the, uh, war with negotiations on land swap, like with...

Narrator 52:08 (laughs)

Dave Smith 52:08 Like, "Let's settle it however we gotta settle it." They don't... I remember for the first two years of the thing, everybody who I argued with about the war in Ukraine, their talking point would always be, "The Ukrainian people wanna fight. And who are you, Dave, to tell them that they don't have a right to defend themselves?" And then I would respond by saying like, "Yes, it's true the Ukrainian people wanna fight, but like, might that have something to do with the blank check that they've received from the world and the backup of the entire world?" You know, it's, it's just, it's a different proposition to go like, "Do you wanna fight if Jon Jones is at your back and goes, 'I got your back, dude, let's go fuck these guys up?'"

Narrator 52:44 (laughs)

Dave Smith 52:44 You're like, "Hell yeah, I wanna fight." But then Jon Jones leaves. I might be like, "Ah, let's talk about this." You know? Like, but so that, but that would... But now the Ukrainian people don't wanna fight. And by the way, I never believed any of that 'cause I don't, you know, I have my own libertarian views on things. And I'm like, if you're telling me that people wanna fight, like, well, why do you got to conscript an army then? You know, like if they wanna fight so bad, why you gotta put a gun to their head and force them to the front line. Like, you could-

Narrator 53:08 Kidnap people.

Dave Smith 53:08 Yeah, you could just make it a voluntary force and then we'll find out real quick who wants to fight. But the, the point is now that even the Ukrainians don't wanna fight over this stuff anymore.

Narrator 53:17 Right.

Dave Smith 53:17 So there's just no justification for it. Um, so now they move to, to phase B, which is essentially to pretend like they're negotiating, but putting all types of poison pills in the deal so that you know the other side won't take it. This is what they did with Iran too. Uh, this is why we, we got into that 12-day war, as they're calling it now. Um, but, you know, it's like you put things into the... I already saw, I was just reading the other day, uh, it was on Axios. There's, uh, um, reports that they, uh, Zelenskyy and, and the Europeans are like open to land swaps as long as there's, as the, in their words, in the Axios piece, Article 5 like security guarantees. So in other words, the rest of Ukraine's in NATO, which is the thing that caused the whole conflict to begin with.

Narrator 54:07 Oh God.

Dave Smith 54:08 So like, yeah. And you know, I-

Narrator 54:09 That's what that means, Article 5?

Dave Smith 54:11 Article 5 is, uh, the article in, in NATO, in the NATO agreement that says that like, it, it says that like if one of the countries is attacked, like all the countries have to join together to help it. It doesn't exactly say you gotta go to war over it, but it's like you have to help in the effort if they're attacked. So essentially-

Narrator 54:27 Ugh.

Dave Smith 54:27 ... that's what they're trying to ask now, which is, but if you think about it, right, it's designed to incentivize Putin to keep the war going. Because if you're telling Vladimir Putin, let's just say, which it's not exactly clear that he would even take the deal that I just laid out before, but there was another, it's been reported that he wa- it was being signaled that he might be open to that deal. I get the Donbas region. You know, he's got still, um, like the Donbas region is Donetsk and, and Luhansk. And in Luhansk, I think as of right now, I think the Russians control like 75% of it. They got all of Donetsk. They got most of Luhansk. But there's still Ukrainians controlling part of it. And then he's controlling part of these territories in the south. So this is what Trump means when he says the land swaps, meaning essentially you get out of the Donbas region, give me that, and I'll give you back-You know, the- the-

Joe Rogan 55:15 Yeah.

Dave Smith 55:16 ... land swaps are Putin taking what he wants and leaving you the rest. But a m- if you're gonna tell Vladimir Putin, who fought this entire war over Ukrainian entry into NATO being his red line, basically in the middle of the, or not in the middle of the w- as the war is potentially wrapping up, you're gonna tell him, "Hey, whatever territory you don't take here will be a part of NATO." Well, what does that incentivize him to do?

Joe Rogan 55:39 (sighs)

Dave Smith 55:39 Take more of it then. Then why the- why would you stop and give the rest of it up? And it does seem to me like that's, that is clearly, at least from the Europeans, that is clearly the motivation of all of this, is to, is to present something. It's- it's, you know, they do have their chess war moves, and so you present something that you know the other side can't agree to, and then when they don't agree to it, you go, "Look, we tried to negotiate-"

Joe Rogan 56:02 Yeah.

Dave Smith 56:02 "... and he just wouldn't take us up on this." And so what can you do?

Joe Rogan 56:05 Oh, God. You know, another problem with these conflicts and war in general is that people always wanna pretend that there's one side that's good and one side that's bad. You know? And obviously Putin's the bad guy, right? Because they started the war, they started killing people in Ukraine, but there's so many factors that are going on. And then there's also the long history of corruption that Ukraine has always had.

Dave Smith 56:35 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 56:35 And then there's also the weird deals that they were making with the Biden family f- to control all the different... It was, it, it was natural gas and there's i- ins- in- incredible supplies of rare earth minerals.

Dave Smith 56:50 Right.

Joe Rogan 56:50 It's like really valuable, valuable territory. You know, there's this incentive to create some sort of, uh, there was, th- th- they were gonna try to s- like, I think part of the plan was like, get off of Russian power and make Ukrainian power, like, central, and then whatever they were making over there, the amount of power, I forget what the number was they said, but it's like trillions of dollars in natural gas, minerals, all these different things, and we're supposed to pretend that that's not also a part of the motivation? Like, didn't even Trump say something about a deal that they were doing with Ukraine that in- involved-

Dave Smith 57:33 Yeah, he got-

Joe Rogan 57:33 ... um-

Dave Smith 57:33 ... sucked into this talk about the rare earth minerals stuff and, you know, it's Donald Trump. It's like his weakness 'cause he, it, you know, there's a lotta great things about-

Joe Rogan 57:41 Making deals.

Dave Smith 57:41 Yeah, there's a lot of great things about coming from a business background, but then there's like, the weakness of it is that he's always attracted by like, like, "Hey, Gaza could be beachfront property."

Joe Rogan 57:50 (laughs)

Dave Smith 57:50 You know, and he's like, "Ooh." And you can just see him, like, come alive-

Joe Rogan 57:53 "Let's buy Greenland."

Dave Smith 57:53 ... with these ideas.

Joe Rogan 57:54 Yeah.

Dave Smith 57:54 Yeah, it's, it's always this stuff, but then the problem is that, you know... And look, I've been very harsh on Donald Trump over the last few months, but I think he deserves it and I think this administration is failing on so many levels so profoundly, especially given the opportunity that they had. But, you know, I heard him the other day. He called into a- a Fox News show and it was, he was t- like, telling the story of the war in Ukraine and it's like, it just seems like he's tell- like, it seems like you learned this on a TV show. Like, can we get some books in your diet?

Joe Rogan 58:27 (laughs)

Dave Smith 58:27 Like p- you know what I mean? Like, it's like, this is...

Joe Rogan 58:29 Yeah.

Dave Smith 58:30 We really need someone here who's read a book about this 'cause he kind of had an idea of what he was talking about, but then he got it completely wrong. So he goes... He's trying to tell the story and he's talking about the corruption of the Bidens in Ukraine and you're like, "Okay, yes, that is true." But like, there's a whole story here that I don't think you're really understanding 'cause he goes, he goes, "Look, this goes back to 2014." And so I'm watching this and I got like, so excited for a minute.

Joe Rogan 58:53 He's talking about the coup.

Dave Smith 58:53 Like I was, I was like, "Yes! Yes, it does go back to 2014. Thank you, Donald Trump." And then he goes, "It goes back to 2014." When Putin took Crimea and Obama let him have it. He just let him have it. Never would have happened on my watch, but Obama gave Putin Ukraine. And you're like, "No, dude. That's not... Just go back two months earlier in that same year." The problem wasn't that Obama gave Putin Ukraine. The problem was that Obama took Ukraine away from Vladimir Putin. As I've played on your show and you played with Tulsi Gabbard, the Director of National Intelligence has sat right here where I'm sitting and watched Gideon Rose explain to Stephen Colbert exactly what we're doing here. R- Russia, as- as Gideon Rose, the editor of Foreign Affairs Magazine said, "Russia is Batman."

Joe Rogan 59:40 Yeah.

Dave Smith 59:40 Ukraine is Robin. We're stealing Robin away from Batman.

Joe Rogan 59:44 Yeah.

Dave Smith 59:44 That's what the Maidan Revolution was. That's why the USAID and the NED poured $100 million into this street protest, right? And so they overthrew the government and then a bunch of the, uh, former, um, Ukrainian prime ministers started floating out that we should tear up the Sevastopol lease in Crimea 'cause, you know, this is, uh, Russia's only year-long warm water naval port. They've always had it. This was their agreement. They had like a 50-year lease or something like that. But after the West backed a coup that overthrew the government and put in a pro-Western government, they started talking big like, "Well, maybe we'll tear up that lease." And we we- and so Vladimir Putin went, "No. I'll just take it." And that was like... So anyway, so he goes back to that, doesn't go back a few months earlier and then misses the entire point. That no... So 'cause like the point is that it's not just like me being like, "Oh, I wish Donald Trump was into the same books I'm into," or something like that. The point is that when you don't get that piece of the chapter, then you miss what's happening right now. So when you're talking about like, these... Essentially what Donald Trump was saying, the way he was trying to sell it to Zelenskyy was like, "Look, do this rare earth minerals deal with us. And this is kind of like a security guarantee. It's not exactly a security guarantee, but if we're in business with you and then Putin's trying to fuck up our business, hey, he's picking a fight with us too." But the whole point is that that's exactly what caused this whole catastrophe. Vladimir Putin and the entire Russian elite have been crystal clear about this, that they go, "Look, we can tolerate..."... a neutral Ukraine. We could tolerate NATO up to Ukraine, Ukraine is neutral, and then there's Russia. We cannot tolerate Ukraine being a, a part of America's military alliance. That's a step too far. But every time we try to let them be neutral, neutral seems like it's never good enough and that never actually works. So if you're gonna come in here and say neutral is not good enough, they're gonna be part of the West, then we're gonna say, "Actually, we'll take them as part of Russia instead." Now he also believes, as he al- says all the time, which I just think is goofy and, and un-American, but he also believes that like, yeah, they're not really a real country and they're kinda historically ours anyway. And, you know, he's got his own views on that. But that's not what the war was about. And everybody, you know, and, and when I was here with, when I, which I was very excited to do 'cause I'm, you know, a weird romantic and have a, a, you know, a dash of autism or something like that. But what I was real excited 'cause me and Douglas Murray were gonna debate this issue.

Joe Rogan 1:02:12 Right.

Dave Smith 1:02:12 And I remember when he first goes, he goes, "The war had nothing to do with Ukrainian entry into NATO." And I was like, "Okay, well let me just hit you with two points real quick. Number one, the head of the CIA (laughs) you know, during all the years of Joe Biden when he was the, uh, the ambassador to Russia, he wrote the nyet means yet memo. He literally said that this was all what it was all about, and that Russia didn't wanna do this, but they would if we kept pushing Ukrainian entry into NATO and we did keep pushing it." And then I, I said the other one was Stoltenberg, who is not anymore, but was the head of, uh, NATO while this was happening and he said that Vladimir Putin sent them, in writing, a draft treaty. That all you have to do is put in writing that you will never bring Ukraine into NATO and I won't invade. And then he bragged that "We said no," and then he invaded. Um, but so I said this to Douglas Murray and I was kinda curious, like I was like, "What's, what's his response to this gonna be?" Like what is he gonna say back to... Maybe he's got something I've never heard before that I'm gonna have to be like, "Oh shit, I gotta consider that." And his response was, "A libertarian quoting the CIA, I see." And you're like, wait, so that's your pivot is to I'm a hypocrite somehow? Which isn't even hypocrisy. Like yes, I think the CIA should be abolished. I also think it's relevant when the head of the CIA admits what the war was all about. I don't see that much-

Joe Rogan 1:03:27 Do you think the CIA totally should be abolished? Don't you think we should kinda pay attention to what the fuck is going on in the world? Giving a r- a real-life perspective, not a utopian perspective-

Dave Smith 1:03:36 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:03:36 ... but a real-life perspective. There's terrorist groups all over the world plotting shit. It's probably a good idea.

Dave Smith 1:03:42 Yeah. So what the CIA was originally like conceived of, like essentially being a newspaper for the president, like being like, "Hey, we get all the real intelligence and we give it to you here."

Joe Rogan 1:03:54 Yes.

Dave Smith 1:03:54 Yes. I 100% think there's room for intelligence gathering. But what the CIA became is a paramilitary organization that starts wars and overthrows democratically elected governments all around the world. That-

Joe Rogan 1:04:06 And occasionally sells coke in the hood.

Dave Smith 1:04:08 And occasionally when they're bored.

Joe Rogan 1:04:10 (laughs)

Dave Smith 1:04:10 There's, and when there's, and maybe like on like a Tuesday, like a three-day weekend and then on Tuesday, maybe move some crack into Los Angeles. No, that, I mean just should, i- I mean it's, it's a, a disgrace to a professed free society. I mean its, its... Look, like when, which we've also played on the show before, but when, uh, when Chuck Schumer was on with Rachel Maddow, which is one of the most amazing moments in the history of like corporate media because what, what's amazing about it if you watch like the full thing is that Rachel Maddow's asking him questions and he's giving his Chuck Schumer, you know, political answers to all of them. However you feel about him, it's like they have their spiel. But then she breaks from script and she, she preemptively apologizes to him. She goes, "Hey, I'm sorry to just throw this on you right now." This is, uh, it's, it w- it was in I believe January. It was either December of '16 or January '17. So Donald Trump has beat Hillary Clinton but he's not president yet. He's president-elect. Um, and so she goes, "Sorry to, to, you know, throw you off, put you on the spot, but Donald Trump just tweeted this." So she's reading a tweet that he just tweeted live on air to the, the Senate majority leader, um, or minority leader at the time. So she, she reads him the tweet that's him, you know, trashing the CIA or something like that and then Chuck Schumer just gives like his organic response. There was no script prepared for this. He wasn't planned on being asked this question. She just goes, "Look, here's Donald Trump talking about the CIA." And Chuck Schumer goes, he goes, "Pfff, I mean, Donald Trump, you wanna go at the intelligence agencies?" And his exact phrase was, "They have seven ways till Sunday to get back at you."

Joe Rogan 1:05:47 Yeah.

Dave Smith 1:05:48 So good l-... So in other... And by the way, Rachel Maddow in this moment does not say, "Pause the tape. What did you just say?"

Joe Rogan 1:05:55 Right.

Dave Smith 1:05:56 Like the most powerful Democrat in the Senate just admitted we don't live in a democracy. Just admitted that this whole thing's an illusion. That the President of the United States is not the president of the United States. All our talk about democracy being on the ballot, democracy has been gone for a long time if it ever existed. You just straight up said that the duly elected commander in chief and chief executive of the United States of America ain't really the one who's in charge 'cause you better not insult the CIA, who work for you ostensibly or supposedly I should say. You know? And so like that's-

Joe Rogan 1:06:29 Or they'll get you.

Dave Smith 1:06:30 Or they'll get you or they'll ruin you and by the way, they did.

Joe Rogan 1:06:33 Yeah.

Dave Smith 1:06:33 Didn't they? And this is the stuff which is very interesting that Tulsi is, uh, releasing now, um, which I, I don't know whether... You know, I'm kind of past the point of like it's hard to take, it's hard to take a lot of things about Donald Trump seriously to me at this point. You know, um, flaking on all, all types of... The, you know, the Epstein stuff and, um, just a lot of, you know, kinda core things where like... So Donald Trump, at least according to him, they stole the election. You know I was thinking about this the other day 'cause he was talking about, in the same thing that I'm talking about when he called into Fox News, he was talking about the Ukraine war. He said at one point, he goes uh-He goes, "The war never woulda happened if I was president," which Putin threw him a bone and backed him up on that the other day-

Joe Rogan 1:07:18 Right.

Dave Smith 1:07:18 ... and said the war wouldn't have happened if Trump was president.

Joe Rogan 1:07:20 That doesn't...

Dave Smith 1:07:20 Yeah, just saying what-

Joe Rogan 1:07:21 Yeah.

Dave Smith 1:07:22 Just saying what... You know, he, he's smart enough to know-

Joe Rogan 1:07:24 Of course, it's a nice thing to say. The guy likes being complimented.

Dave Smith 1:07:27 And he, and Putin's smart enough to know that, like-

Joe Rogan 1:07:29 Yes.

Dave Smith 1:07:29 ... this is how you negotiate with Donald Trump.

Joe Rogan 1:07:30 Of course.

Dave Smith 1:07:30 Yes, yes. Never would have ever-

Joe Rogan 1:07:32 The war would have never started with you-

Dave Smith 1:07:33 (laughs) Yeah, right.

Joe Rogan 1:07:34 ... my friend.

Dave Smith 1:07:35 So, but wait, so that's kind of a silly-

Joe Rogan 1:07:37 (laughs)

Dave Smith 1:07:37 ... point, but aside from that, the, so Donald Trump goes, um, the, he goes, "It never woulda happened if I was president." Then he takes it a step further than what he normally says, and he goes, "It wouldn't have even happened if anyone else was president. If we had just had a regular president, this war never woulda happened. It's only because Joe Biden, the worst president in the history of America was president, that that's why this happened." But then I'm sitting there as I listen to that and I go, "Yeah, but dude, didn't you... You told me that they cheated. Like, you didn't really lose the election in 2020. That's b-... You, you've stuck to that story now for many years. So you're saying they cheated. You're making a similar claim here. They overthrew democracy, they installed Joe Biden, and a war where hundreds of thousands, maybe well over a million people have died happened because they cheated the election. Okay, so I'm gonna need to know who they is, and I'm gonna need to know when we're gonna see them perp walked." Like-

Joe Rogan 1:08:33 Right.

Dave Smith 1:08:33 ... you're the president now. You got your whole... But all of us on some level don't really think they're gonna start arresting people over the stolen election of 2020. And, you know, they're-

Joe Rogan 1:08:44 I don't think they have any evidence.

Dave Smith 1:08:45 Yeah, no, that's right. I don't, I, I completely agree. Now I'm-

Joe Rogan 1:08:47 I think there's a lot of speculation and there's a lot of consideration about mail-in ballots.

Dave Smith 1:08:52 Yes.

Joe Rogan 1:08:52 There's, there's a lot of shenanigans. There's a, there's a good record of shenanigans, and there's, there's the reality of any kind of electronics can be hacked.

Dave Smith 1:09:01 No, I, so I agree with all of that. I'm just saying, like, once you've made these statements and your administration-

Joe Rogan 1:09:06 Yeah, he didn't have an answer.

Dave Smith 1:09:06 ... was in... No, I remember.

Joe Rogan 1:09:07 Yeah.

Dave Smith 1:09:07 It was one of the most interesting parts of your, uh, your podcast with him was, like, when you asked him about that, it was like, he really didn't have anything-

Joe Rogan 1:09:14 Yes.

Dave Smith 1:09:14 ... to back it up.

Joe Rogan 1:09:15 If that was you or if that was me, I mean, if there was a, some reason why I knew that they did something, and I, I could give you all the facts, I would have that ready for anybody.

Dave Smith 1:09:24 Of course.

Joe Rogan 1:09:24 Because I was, uh, you're... For four fucking years, they've been telling him he's crazy for questioning the election.

Dave Smith 1:09:30 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:09:31 So after four years, I'd have a fucking tight 10 minutes-

Dave Smith 1:09:35 Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:09:35 ... on the election where I could just rattle off at you and rock your world with it. Like, this is, these are the facts, Jack.

Dave Smith 1:09:41 Well, there's also, there's a big difference between, you know, speculating and asking some questions and being like, "I'm not sure I believe the official story of, of this." And there's a difference between then being, as a president of the United States, going, "This is what happened."

Joe Rogan 1:09:55 Right.

Dave Smith 1:09:55 Like, "This was..." And if you're gonna say that, then you gotta give me your theory.

Joe Rogan 1:09:59 Right.

Dave Smith 1:09:59 Like, really lay it out for me.

Joe Rogan 1:10:00 Yeah.

Dave Smith 1:10:00 Like is, and, and he never had that part. But I will say, um, they, they kind of pivoted off the Epstein thing into Russiagate, which seemed to be, you know, like, designed that there was this, um, this tremendous desire, it's the whole reason Donald Trump's political existence is a thing, is that people are furious about the swamp. They're furious about how corrupt our government is and the, the profound crimes that the government has committed against the American people, and they want justice for that. And so they pivoted off of Epstein after promising to deliver something on that, and then went, "Okay, well how about Russiagate now?" So now they're... But I will say, Tulsi Gabbard released a bunch of new documents, and there were some pretty interesting ones there. Um, it wasn't like she just released new stuff where it was like, "Oh, we already knew all this." Like, there was new stuff in there that we didn't really already know. And she referred it over to the Justice Department. She said in her press conference that, "We have proof that Obama committed treason." And they've at least sent it to the Justice Department, and from what I understand, there is a grand jury being assembled or something like that. So I don't know. I still, in, in the deepest part of my soul go, "There's no way. There's no way they're actually gonna try to prosecute Obama and Brennan and Clapper and Comey." But...

Joe Rogan 1:11:19 The FBI raided John Bolton's house today.

Dave Smith 1:11:22 Yes, I think that's unrelated. Um, but that is an interesting (laughs) story also.

Joe Rogan 1:11:26 Right, it's... I mean, it seems like they're doing wild shit. Uh, uh, but if they did that with Obama, what was the actual treason? Like, what did, what is she stating is treason?

Dave Smith 1:11:36 Well, so, um, now I don't think... She said treason. I don't think legally that's technically right. Um, but I've, uh, someone might correct me on that. Maybe it's sedition or something. I, I, I don't know. I mean, like, I think treason, I think John Brennan did commit