Transcript of #2500 - Scott Horton New

Joe Rogan Podcast, check it out. The Joe Rogan Experience. Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night. All day. Do I sound okay? Check, check, check. This is my normal complaint volume.

One of those one ear on, one ear off guys.

Yeah, my right ear hurts a lot from years of this, and so I usually just leave it off.

There's a volume adjuster thing too, so if it's too loud, you can turn it up or turn it down.

You sound good. No, it's just I have a pain in my right ear, so I try not to antagonize it.

And thank you very much for the gift, ladies and gentlemen. Scott Horton gave me a professorial pipe. And like I was saying, Metzger uses a pipe now because of you. Like, he—

I love that guy.

He's the best.

He's so funny. He's such a nut. When he comes into the room, he just blows the room away. Yeah, he's just a force in there. It's incredible.

He's a giant dude, so he like hovers over you like, oh, you didn't know?

You don't know about this?

And then he just hits you with 15 conspiracies in a row, rapid fire. So good. Yeah, with no breaks in between them. So thanks for doing this, man.

Yeah, thanks for having me.

We have a great mutual friend in Dave Smith. He recommends you highly. Yeah, so I'm glad we could finally do this. I wish there was more going on in the world right now we could talk about though. It seems like we just have to go back over Vietnam or something. Yeah, some of the old stuff back when we didn't know any better.

It's kind of a mess.

Yeah, I've seen you argue on television like a thousand times. Do you enjoy like that Piers Morgan type chaos?

No. Yeah. In fact, I just got back from England. I got invited to do the Oxford debate, which I lost, on Ukraine. But then I invited myself on Piers Morgan Live as long as I was in town.

And I say you lost the debate. Is that because the people voted that were in the audience?

Yeah.

All those people with Ukraine flags.

Well, they didn't have Ukraine flags that time. I think someone showed an old picture or something. But yeah, same crowd. So what happened was, yeah, when they leave, they either leave through the yes door or the no door. And the yeses had it, which was unbelievable to me. But not that I did my very best job. Well, but on, on Piers Morgan, I was trying to get myself just an interview so I could just talk to him about some things. And instead they just prefer that format where you got to mix it up with a guy, which I can do that too, you know.

Yeah, the interview thing is way better. The thing that he does, though, is really good for engagement. He's very smart. Like, Piers has done— he's mastered it. He's taken the Jerry Springer type format and thrown it into the world of politics and any other social issue that's going on.

Yeah, but it is too, like, years ago, the guy from Antiwar.com can't be on TV, but we can be on his show. He doesn't care. He's cool with it. I mean, I guess same thing here.

Yeah, it's—

that is a big change from how things used to be. We just had this whole separate conversation going on below the higher one where he has reach, you know, up and down the chain, I guess, is a way to put it.

Is he on TV TV or is it just—

no, but he just has massive—

yeah, massive viewership.

So it counts, I guess.

TV TV is actually a hindrance now because the only way people watch TV TV is clips that someone takes and puts on X or YouTube. That's it.

Or they just see it accidentally. It's just on. It happens to be on when they're in the room or whatever.

What a fucking dying market. Like, imagine if you're in broadcast television right now and you're just thinking like, where am I? What am I doing? Yeah, like, this is a bad format. You have to break for commercials every 7 minutes. No conversation could ever get into depth. There's executives in your ear telling you what to say and what not to say. They'll edit out anything that they think is like controversial, that's going to fuck with their sponsors or fuck with the government or fuck with whatever their narrative is.

It's just everything's changed. When I first started doing podcasting, it was the archives of the interviews from my radio show, and it was so important to me that I'm on the radio because that's real legitimacy. That means somebody hired you, somebody thought you were good enough to be there, whereas podcasting, any jerk can do from his basement and it just doesn't count. And then that just became not true, and I kind of clung on to my radio show. I actually gave up my last radio show on KPFK in Los Angeles last year. I mean, where it didn't matter anymore anyway, and podcasting is completely changed the entire market.

Do you know how many people were listening to you actually on the radio before you quit?

I think it's like probably high thousands, but not 10,000, you know? KPFK in LA. Isn't that crazy? It's the most powerful FM transmitter west of the Mississippi River. It's grandfathered in at 115,000 watts. But it's— but the thing is about it too, and it's always been like this, the programming on there is so inconsistent. That you're listening to Latina Lesbians one hour, and then you're listening to crystal worship, and then you're listening to hard-hitting news, and then you're listening to leftist union organizing, or then just whatever, you know what I mean? But it's just, there's no real rhyme or reason to it, so it's hard to follow, you know?

What kind of a channel is it?

Oh, it's, you know, left of the dial, 90.7 FM, so it's comparable to KUT type. It's not actual public radio, but it's no commercials, all donations.

And oh wow.

Yeah, I mean, they were good.

Regular radio show. That's no commercials and it's not public. Yeah, that's interesting.

Yeah, it's like, um, I don't know if co-op still exists here in Austin.

Cooperative must have made a lot of money from that. You must be so rich from doing that. Yeah, leftist radio with no No ads at all, just donations. Boy, you must be raking it in.

No, they never did pay me, but I looked at it like they let me be on there for 14, 15 years or something. And, you know, like even when I was writing my book about the Russia-Ukraine stuff, I would do my radio show once a week and I was able to still cover what was going on in Palestine and in a way that I felt like you know, you know, something meaningful that I can do even though my attention was completely diverted elsewhere. I still got all my guys from the Libertarian Institute and Antiwar.com, and I can interview them once a week. And then when I left KPFK, I got some response. They're like, "Oh no, where are you going?" kind of thing. So I mean, some people were caring for it at the time.

Did you let them know, "Hey, I have a podcast. You could see them all.

All these episodes will be archived." Yeah, I kind of always let them know that, you know, I've done 6,200-something interviews since 2003.

Good Lord.

On my various shows. So I always try to remind people to go check the archives if they want for the full dose of that stuff.

Before we get into any of these subjects, like, how did you get into this?

Um, well, you know, in the '90s I was, you know, when I was younger, I was much more of like a New World Order, uh, truther type. And, um, but then I basically dropped all that. I grew out of that.

How do you define New World Order truther type?

Like, okay, well, I mean, the New World Order conspiracy was that American foreign policy ultimately is about building a one-world federal government under the United Nations that would ultimately dominate the United States, the John Birch Society sort of idea of how— and I really like those guys, and I believed that for a long time, really through Clinton and even into the beginning of W. Bush, but then I could— I finally realized with the way that the Iraq War was prosecuted that this is not about building up the UN Security Council. We got the National Security Council and Cheney and his neocons, and they have their own separate policy that just disproves that sort of New World Order theory. And the American— and in fact, so what H.W. Bush meant by that was just the era of the American Empire with no one to stop us this time, was all. It was never to build up the UN as the world government. It was to build up Washington, D.C. as the world government, and of course, They've been failing and flailing at trying to establish that ever since.

Yeah. So the conspiracy was that the United Nations would be the government of the entire Earth. Right. And that all other governments would somehow or another give up their power to the United Nations. For what reason?

'Cause they're all in on it together in secret, whatever. That's the point, is it ain't right. It's not true.

—well, my question would be like—

—too many people would have to— exactly, too many people have to sacrifice the power they do have to somebody else when they don't have to. And money.

That's the other thing. I mean, as soon as you lose power, then you lose access to insane amounts of wealth.

Yeah, so we don't want, you know— obviously, it's the ultimate nightmare would be that you would have some kind of one-world government and then some kind of totalitarian regime take power with a monopoly on nukes and a monopoly on police power. And, you know, but that's just a nightmare for centuries from now. I mean, that's just not going to happen anytime soon at all. That's not what it's—

You don't think there's any push towards centralizing things in that regard? Like, wasn't the World Health Organization trying to push for something where the entire world would have to respond to their pandemic rules?

Jetzt nur du, dein Podcast und eine leckere Auszeit. Ab zu Aldi Nord. Für 2,99 bringst du deine Mittagspause mit Sushi ins Rollen. Mm, lecker. Und für 1,99 gönnst du dir danach noch eine kleine Eiszeit. Bei Aldi Nord findest du immer das Passende. Klingt gut? Dann probier die Snacktime Sushi Box ab 205 Gramm für nur 2,99 oder Mookie Sandwich Eis je 8 Stück für nur 1,99 Das ist Gutes für alle zum Aldi-Preis. Jetzt in deiner Filiale. Aldi. Gutes für alle. Well, look, so yes, there's always, you know, the widening and deepening of the international law as much as they can. At the end of the day, there is no actual world state to enforce that law other than just the United States of America. But there is no one world army, one world police force to enforce these things. It's all about coercing and cajoling governments to go along. And which goes to show, I mean, this is the whole thing about when they talk about, you know, what H.W. Bush meant when he talked about the New World Order is the same thing that Joe Biden meant when he would say the liberal rules-based international order of just doing what America says, right?

That's what it is. You know, it's a pseudo empire. It's not exactly the, the same kind of empires and colonialism that we've had in the past, but it's sort of a neo-colonialism where if we can overthrow your government with some money, then we'll do that. A little bit of CIA help, we'll do that. And if we have to— Arm the rebels. If we have to bomb your capital city, we'll go for that if we think so. Yeah. And it does go back really to the Wolfowitz Doctrine, you know, of various degrees. But this is a reference to right after the first Gulf War, Paul Wolfowitz at that time was the Deputy Secretary of Defense for Policy, and him and a couple other neocons, Scooter Libby and Zalmay Khalilzad, they wrote up this document called the Defense Plan and Guidance, and it was saying this is going to be, you know, the posture for the post-Cold War era and the post-first Iraq War, Gulf War era. And what it said was we're going to be the most dominant power on every continent anywhere in the world, and we're not even going to tolerate any other nation or alliance or group of nations anywhere to try to join together to balance against us.

We will be dominant everywhere and we'll never let anyone get that far ahead, or at least we're going to try to construct an order where our power is essentially permanent and they don't even try it. And so that's what they've been trying to do with expanding our footprint in the Middle East, expanding our footprint into Eastern Europe, and of course, you know, working hard at least on building their alliances and tightening them and arming their alliances in Eastern Asia. And it's, you know, under the theory that if it's not us, it'll be somebody else and it'll be so much worse, so we have to stay and dominate everything forever. But of course, you look at the debt and just see, well, we can't afford it, so I don't know how anybody else can, but we certainly cannot afford to keep doing this.

Right. And if you look at Wolfowitz, if you see— pull up an image of Paul Wolfowitz, he looks exactly like the kind of guy you would expect to make something like the Wolfowitz Doctrine.

Right. And by the way, they did rewrite it because it was a scandal. It was leaked to the New York Times, and so they went back and rewrote it, and they just said, well, we'll bring our friends, you know, from the international institutions along too.

That picture right there where your cursor is, right below, right there. No, to the right of that. That one.

Yeah, there you go. Look at that.

That looks like— that completely looks like the type of guy that would do something like that.

So listen, there's a book about the neoconservatives by Jacob Hillbrun called They Knew They Were Right, which is of course, right? Like, yeah, these guys who have no idea what they're doing, really, you know.

That's hilarious. Let's try this.

Yeah, fit right on my little head.

Like I said, you can fuck with the volume on that little knob and turn it up and down. So this was a— this one of the things that when Coleman Hughes and our buddy Dave Smith got into it with was about whether you remember when they brought up this 7 countries thing that, you know, and he was saying that there was no real proof that that exists, that he didn't actually read it. He was told that we were gonna go into 7 countries. But, you know, I was talking to Dave about this the other day. He's like, I— if you just look at the fact that we did everything on that list except Iran, every single one of them, took place, except Iran. Like, he's like, I really want to go and do that debate again, and I can't get Coleman to sit down with me.

Yeah, you know, yes, for people who are interested in the subject, you know, long term, there's no mystery about the connection between the neoconservatives' doctrines and then the activities that the W administration engaged in, you know, subsequent. I mean, what happened was, you have, you know, Andrew Coburn, the great journalist Andrew Coburn, says that the neoconservatives are a cross between the Israel lobby and the military-industrial complex. The fighter bomber salesmen needed eggheads to justify their policies, and the neoconservatives wanted to support Israel, wanted to support American hegemony, and so took all the military-industrial complex money to build their think tanks, to create their consensus, to build their policy. You know, their own kind of thousand little Council on Foreign Relations is to get what they want. And then when, you know, the 7 countries thing is—

So what we're talking about, just to clarify, is Wesley Clark was given— well, he was on some television show. I forget what the show was.

Do you remember? There's 2 different statements. One of them I know was with Amy Goodman from Democracy Now! That's right. Democracy Now! And basically what he's talking about is, you know, he says that a general, or I'm sorry, a military officer of some rank told then-retired but still with access former General Wesley Clark, who had been the Supreme Allied Commander of NATO forces in Europe under Bill Clinton, did the Kosovo War, so very prominent 4-star general. And he said, the way he told the story was he told him, hey, you know, they're planning for a war with Iraq. And he said, Iraq, why? And the guy said, I don't know. And then the second part of the story was he came back a week later or something, and the same guy said, there's this memo that has the 7 countries, and they say they want to take them all in 5 years. So they, meaning the office of the Secretary of Defense. So that's Donald Rumsfeld, who's not a neoconservative. He's his own separate thing here. He's the Secretary of Defense. But all of his guys, all of his most important guys are neoconservatives. So the Deputy Secretary of Defense is Paul Wolfowitz.

The Deputy Secretary of Defense for Intelligence is Stephen Cambone. The Deputy Secretary of Defense for Policy is Douglas Feith. And then under him is Abram Shulsky and Bill Lutey and all of these guys, Michael Rubin and others who were all working on this project. To get us into Iraq. And this is the neoconservative network of power. You got Scooter Libby and David Wormser would travel around from State to Defense to the Vice President's office, but you got Scooter Libby and John Hannah in the Vice President's office. You got Zalmay Khalilzad and Elliott Abrams on the National Security Council, Robert Joseph and Stephen Hadley and Eric Edelman. All of these guys were already the network of guys who agreed with this policy going back through the 1990s. It was what they had founded the Project for a New American Century on. And so what they're saying is we should not tolerate any— and remember the time, this was the stated doctrine. We will not tolerate the existence of any Middle Eastern regime that supports terrorism and supports terrorism can mean anything, right? Like Abu Nidal died in Iraq before the war even started and was a washed up old terrorist from a previous day.

But like, that's good enough. Got mujahideen, he called commie terrorists who've worked for us ever since, but at that time was a good enough excuse to invade Iraq. They would invoke that. And so they made up that doctrine.

The Mujahideen were in Iraq as well as Afghanistan?

Well, this is a particular sect of Mujahideen Kooks who are Iranian communist cultists who were— had left Iran and gone to work for Saddam Hussein and then were, you know, he supported them. They had nothing to do with anti-American terrorism at that time except committing it when they had worked for Iran previously during the Iranian Revolution. But by the time we invaded Iraq, Donald Rumsfeld inherited them and they've worked for America and Israel ever since then. They have a base in Albania now. In other words though, this wasn't al-Qaeda. This was not any real excuse. They would just invoke the doctrine of fighting terrorism in order to check off this list of all of these governments that they didn't like. Coincidentally and incidentally and very importantly, of course, is this was really in many cases Israel's list of enemies where if it was say Colin Powell, which is what people thought they were voting for in the year 2000, by the way. Well, I don't know about this W. Bush, but at least Colin Powell will be up there. We can trust him. They all said if it had been up to him, we would have done a two-state solution in Palestine and solved that issue and then we would have had probably the most limited of wars against Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan and that would have been it.

The rest of it would have been police and and/or special forces action. There would have been no invasion of Iraq, which he did lie us into that war and he's responsible for that, but that was not his policy. That was the policy that came out of the vice president's office and this neoconservative set, and it's really as Dave Smith correctly says, it's all based on the Clean Break Doctrine, which David Wurmser and Richard Perle— oh, I neglected to mention Richard Perle and his friends on the Defense Policy Board, but Perle and David Wurmser had written up this policy paper called A Clean Break in 1996. And they wrote it for Netanyahu when he was first prime minister the first time back then. And what it said was, instead of going along with the Oslo peace process and making a deal with the Palestinians, we should just forget all that and just— we'll have peace through a position of strength and total dominance over our neighbors. And so, but the problem, of course, is we— and of course, meaning continue to devour Palestine, what's left, the 22% of what's left of historic Palestine in the West Bank and Gaza.

But the The problem is we have Hezbollah on our northern border, and Hezbollah is backed by Iran by way of Syria. So if you just picture the Middle East, you know, if you want, you can throw up a map and just kind of show there's this arc of power from Tehran in Iran through Syria and to Hezbollah, this Shiite militia in southern Lebanon. Now, Saddam Hussein was the Sunni roadblock in that arc of power. But these guys are stupid, the neoconservatives. They're stupid as they are arrogant and certain in their policy. And they believed in this harebrained scheme, essentially, that the Jordanians and the Turks would be dominant in the new Saddam Hussein-less Iraq. And that even though it's a supermajority Shiite Arab country, those Shiites, they just love being told what to do by either— their original plan was the Hashemite king, the cousin of the King of Jordan, and then they threw that out, and it was the guy who sold them this line that this was possible in the first place, an Iraqi exile you might remember from that time, Ahmed Chalabi, the head of the Iraqi National Congress. They said, well, we'll just make him the guy instead, which ended up not happening.

But that was their plan, and they said the new Shiite-dominated Iraq will then— the religious leaders in Iraq will then force Hezbollah to stop being friends with Iran and start being friends with Israel instead. And they'll even build an oil pipeline to Haifa or reopen the old British oil pipeline to Haifa, Israel. And they were sold this bill of goods and they really believed it. And so— and you can find this on my website, ScottHorton.org. I have A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm. And then the companion piece is called Coping with Crumbling States: A Balance of Power Strategy for the Levant. They're both by David Wormser, signed off on by Richard Perle. And then they wrote a book where Wormser wrote the book and Richard Perle wrote the foreword. It's called Tyranny's Ally. America's Failure to Remove Saddam Hussein. Get that? America is the ally of Saddam just because we won't launch a war to regime change. And they're right in the title. And then based on the same harebrained scheme. And what's funny about this is this guy David Wormser now tries to defend himself. And he did an interview on a podcast not too long ago with this born-again Christian about September 11th and stuff.

And but he talked about this and he's like, yeah, no, that's still right. They'll do whatever the Hashemites tell them to do. Those Shiites, they just worship and revere anyone who claims to have the blood of the prophet. But if that was true, as Dave Smith pointed out, well, then how come you can't just call the King of Jordan right now and ask him to ask the Ayatollah to knock it off? Call him and ask, have him ask Hezbollah to stop being friends with Iran. Why couldn't they have just done that this whole time? Why do you have to have a regime change in Baghdad before you can make this magic wish come true? And the whole thing is completely stupid. And the Shiites do revere some of the lineage of the family of the Prophet Muhammad. And but one, it's not a magic spell of hypnosis and total control over them. And two, that has nothing to do with the Hashemites, who are Sunnis and a whole separate line and are the British sock puppet kings of Jordan who used to rule Iraq back 70 years ago or something, but have no purchase there whatsoever.

And of course, what happened— just real quick— what happened then in the war was they just empowered Iran. They didn't empower Jordan and Turkey and America and Israel over the Iraqis. They just gave Iran even more power than they ever had before. When it was all meant to screw them over, it blew up in the Americans' face.

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I mean, the amount of money that was generated— how much money did we spend on the Iraq War?

Oh, I mean, on Iraq alone, at least $5 or $7 trillion. I think it was probably $10 trillion for the whole terror war.

So let's stop and think about that. Yeah. $5 or $10 trillion. Let's just say $5. Let's be nice. Yeah. Where's that money going? How many defense contractors were deeply enriched by that? How many defense contractors are involved in, you know, lobbyists, policy, influencing change, influencing certain actions, and why would they do that? Why would they do that? Why would they push a harebrained scheme? Is it because of stupidity, or is it because they don't give a fuck what the excuse is? Both. Let's get the party started. I think— Let's get some missiles.

Let's get some new planes. Yeah. Okay, so boom, boom. But okay, so we can see right in front of us right here where Netanyahu convinced Trump this would be easy, and then it wasn't. I think that's the same thing here. Iraq was supposed to be easy, and it was easy after all, right? You send the Marines to take Baghdad, they could take it. The 3rd Infantry Division and the Marines were done regime-changing the place in what, 5 weeks? But then it was a matter of occupying the place and the whole thing devolving into civil war and all that. And I think Well, I'll put it to you like this. In the clean break, it might be in Coping with Crumbling States, but it might even— yeah, I think it's in Coping with Crumbling States, which is the same thing. Are we back? Sorry about that.

We had that stupid glitch again. Did we get a new computer? I've done everything. Even— yeah, I've talked to the company. They don't know what's going on. Motherfuckers. Crazy. Firmware.

Anyway. I'm sorry. Let me—

Can I ask you this? Yeah, sure.

On the stupidity or the plan? I think, look, Plan A is, "It'll be fine," and then Plan B is, "Well, at least we can make some money and push this thing on and let both sides fight and weaken each other," and these kinds of attitudes, for sure. But that's the point.

Did they genuinely think that this plan would work, or was this plan just a feasible excuse to talk them into getting the party started?

I have one good argument in your favor there, for sure, which would be Senator Joe Joe Biden, at the time, insisted that we break Iraq into 3. Our greatest president? Yeah, right there with the worst, that we draw these lines and essentially enforce ethnic cleansing or sectarian cleansing and create 3 sort of mini states within Iraq. And, you know, Antony Blinken was his right-hand man then. And I mean, that's who these guys are, is, you know, very very much Israel first, Israel instead types. There is something before the Clean Break called the Oded Yanon Plan from, I believe, 1981, which is a real riot to read. It's this Israeli strategist. And the premise of the thing is that the Soviet Union is certain to conquer the entire planet. Talk about one world government. We're about to have one world communism run out of Moscow and poor little Israel is going to be all alone out here. "So we have no choice but to smash every near Arab state into as many warring tribal pieces as we possibly can to weaken all of them relative to us as this desperate strategy." Of course, the Soviet Union didn't exist anymore at all by the end of the decade, but that was the premise for the thing.

And there's— oh, and here's what I was going to say before the glitch was there is a statement in, I think it's in Coping with Crumbling States, where he kind of says, "Yeah, you know, these states are pretty artificial." And without the Ba'athist construct in Iraq and Syria, you would have these smaller tribal-based type units. So then, in other words, if you can't have a completely compliant sock puppet there, might as well make them fight and destroy their countries. And that certainly happened in the case of Iraq, certainly happened in the case of Syria under Obama as well, where they just said, look, if we can't get the al-Qaeda guys to sack Damascus and get rid of Assad, at least we can just destroy the place.

Do you think there's a parallel in when we first went into Iraq, like Desert Storm? It was very easy, right? Relatively minimal loss of American lives, and I think everybody got a little cocky.

Oh yeah, that absolutely was part of that. Just like what we just saw with Venezuela. That's what I was— it was so easy. And I mean, people asked me right after Venezuela, so what do you think this means for Iran? And I was like, bad news. Right? Like, nobody thinks we're going to go in there and kidnap the Ayatollah. But if you can put eyeballs on him, you can put a bomb on his head.

Well, they killed him. Yeah, that's all you got to do. And that didn't even help. Of course not. It's like, yeah. Is it true that whenever they've been negotiating with someone, Israel kills them?

I think that happened at least a couple of times early in the war. Yeah. I mean, that was what they said. In fact, was it— I forget if it was Vance or Trump who said, well, we can't say— I think it was Trump said, we can't say who we're negotiating with because they'll get killed. And like, you're supposed to think that What, like hardliners in Iran will kill them for trying to negotiate? But no, this is the Israelis will kill them.

You know, that is wild. Yeah, that's wild. It's wild that it's true. One of the things that's not talked about at all since Iran, rarely talked about, is Ukraine. Yeah, it's so strange how that kind of just left people's consciousness. It's like they now just concentrating entirely on this Iran thing. And the Ukraine thing is fascinating too, because it was one of the few wars that I saw leftist support. It was very interesting. It was like kind of right after they put the masks and the syringes down from their profiles, then it was Ukraine flags.

Metzger had a joke about that. Did he? Like, yeah, he starts off like, hey, invading Ukraine is bad. Can't we all agree on that? Like, he really gives him like, he like leans on Can't we all agree that it's bad? And he's like, but it was a cure for COVID. You gotta admit. Yeah. And it was, they just switched from night to day on that. And then, yeah, the other thing, and look, a big part of that is Putin is a great stand-in for Trump. If you're an angry liberal, something, you got to be angry at something. And he represents— now we're the common turn and the Russians are the more conservative Christian force. And so like, if not that Trump's a Christian, but you know what I mean, and they're anti-right everything, that the Russians are the right, not that the Ukrainians are the left, but whatever. And Russia is obviously the much larger country and the one that invaded, that crossed the border first here, and they are the aggressor in the war. So it's, as far as the narrative goes, it's easy to justify sticking up for those plucky defenders, which is, I was actually surprised, but I shouldn't have been, right?

When I went to Oxford and lost that debate, was that was who was, it wasn't, not that they were leftist, but they're liberals, progressive type college kids. And they're just totally on the side of Ukraine. And in fact, the question of the debate was, this house would rather go to war with Russia than lose Ukraine. And I thought that was just the most ludicrous thing in the whole world. That's not even debatable. They've got H-bombs. 7,000 of them. We're not having a war with Russia. I don't even know what you're talking about. This— and then I should have made my case better because they did not like me or my case at all. They were so just staunchly for Ukraine that they were willing to support that, that they think that Britain should get into a war with Russia over the Donbas, which is just absurd. But I take responsibility for not framing my argument well enough. I just thought the question was so ridiculous in the first place, I would barely have to make my case. I just thought I'll just make an H-bomb joke and that'll be the end of that. You know, I said, haven't you ever seen Threads?

Have you ever seen Threads? It's like the British version of The Day After where Margaret Thatcher gets them nuked in a— No, it's a movie. Yeah. Remember The Day After from 1983 with Steve Guttenberg? Yeah. So this is the Russians' version from the same timeframe. And, and I was like, haven't y'all seen Threads? Which of course they haven't. They're a bunch of little kids.

Well, they probably think it's that social media app.

Yeah, right.

The Instagram one. Yeah, exactly. We should talk about like how this whole thing got started in Ukraine, because most Americans don't even realize that the United States kind of overthrew the government there. Yeah, absolutely.

Twice in 10 years. Yeah. In the Orange Revolution of 2004 and in 2014. And in fact, you know, George Soros bragged that he had really influenced the vote toward the pro-Russian candidate in 1994. You know, back 10 years before that, he bragged about that in an interview with The New Yorker, Connie Brook in The New Yorker magazine. He said, like real estate investment trusts, I make it happen with my investments, you know. And so, yeah. And look, I mean, Russia and Ukraine have a long and difficult history, but the long and the short of it for our purposes is that they wanted out at the end of the Soviet Union. And in fact, even embarrassingly for the Republicans, George Bush Senior and his government even intended the USSR to stay together. They wanted not communism, but they wanted Russia to be able to hang on to Belarus and Ukraine and at least some of the stans. And but what happened was really the Russians under Boris Yeltsin overthrew the Soviet Union, the most powerful member of the Soviet Union overthrew what was left of it. And it was actually in the aftermath of a hardline commie coup in August of 1991, which failed.

And so it was Boris Yeltsin who saved the day, but then ended up doing his own coup basically, and just destroying what was left of the USSR and kicking Mikhail Gorbachev out.

So— So why did the United States get involved in Ukraine? And why did they stage a coup?

Well, so it's been a contest for dominance there ever since, right? And so back to the Wolfowitz Doctrine, and they talked about this in Rebuilding America's Defenses, the PNAC strategy document from the 1990s, 1998, I guess. And I believe in the Defense Plan and Guidance that he wrote in 1992, Wolfowitz, that we got to expand NATO into Eastern Europe. And this is— the debate at the time was whether to include Russia or not. But— and in fact, in the '90s, there were some people who opposed expansion altogether. But then there was another school of thought that just said, well, we'll expand, but we'll bring the Russians in, but then they never did. And so they ended up expanding the military alliance up to Russia's border in a threatening manner and in a way that did not include them at all. And they had alternatives, like the Partnership for Peace. And before that, what we still have, the OSCE, the Organization for Security or— yeah, Security and Cooperation in Europe, where those had been brought up as alternatives to NATO. Where NATO would be more political. This is what James Baker under H.W. Bush and Warren Christopher under Bill Clinton had promised the Russians, that we're going to make NATO a political organization and we're going to have as a security organization, it'll be the OSCE or the PFP, which will include you guys, which was not true.

They're basically, you know, never really meant to live up to those promises. It's not a perfect analogy, but imagine if America lost the Cold War from all the spending in the 1980s, and then the Soviets had come to dominate Western Europe, and then they started moving into the Caribbean, and then they started overthrowing the government in Canada when they voted wrong. And this is— Ukraine is Russia's Canada, right? Kazakhstan's their Mexico. Ukraine's their Canada. It's their most important neighboring state other than maybe Belarus, but same difference here. And so—

That narrative gets lost here. Yes, it does. But it's weird because it's so obvious when you lay it out like that and when you look at the agreement that was made at the fall of the Soviet Union that they wouldn't push arms closer to the border of Russia, and yet they consistently did that. Absolutely.

And by the way, so let's talk about that for just a second because people dispute that and say it's not true, but it is true. In fact, H.W. Bush gave the first promise to Gorbachev in Malta in December of 1989 that if you let the Eastern European Warsaw Pact states go, not the Soviet republics, but the Warsaw Pact states, if you let them go, we promise not to take advantage. Like, full stop. That's it. 100%. And then from there, and, and I cover all this in my book Provoked, and I, it's even overkill on the research because I wasn't sure where to stop. So it's all there for you, where it wasn't just on February 9th, it was all of these meetings over the course of months where the Americans, the British, and especially the Germans, but with the Americans standing right there in many cases too— affirmed to the Russians, the Soviets, and then the Russians over and over again that we are not coming, we are not going to integrate Poland, we are not going to integrate Hungary, then Czechoslovakia, which hadn't split apart yet, and we have no intention of doing that.

And that came from Hans-Dietrich Genscher, the foreign minister of Great Britain, as well as Helmut Kohl, the Chancellor, Margaret Thatcher and John Major, the Prime Ministers of England, and Douglas Hurd, their Foreign Minister, and even François Mitterrand, the President of France, and along with George Bush's government over and over again promised them that we're not going to do this. And then they just went ahead anyway. And the Clintons, you know, went along with it too. And in fact, in the Clinton years, one of the major proponents of NATO expansion was a guy named Strobe Talbot, who originally opposed it. And by the way, so when all of the— anybody in that era, whenever they— on America's side or on the West side, whenever they opposed this, it was always for one reason. There was no variety of reasons. There's always one reason. This is an unnecessary provocation against the Russians. These are our friends who just overthrew the communists for us. So why would we pick a fight with them? Why would we disrespect them? We should be doing everything we can to integrate them into the West, into Europe, into everything. And this is totally unnecessarily antagonistic.

That was the one and only reason. And it was brought up by a lot of people, including famously George Kennan, who had coined the containment policy against the Soviet Union in the 1940s. Kennedy had been ambassador to Moscow, and he was the one who said, "We gotta contain communism." Well, now he's saying, "We should not be trying to contain Russia when they didn't do anything." He said, in fact, in an interview in the New York Times in 1998, Kennan said, and he was the most highly respected Russia expert out of all of the old so-called foreign policy great bears, and he told Thomas Friedman in the New York Times, he goes, "I'll tell you exactly what's gonna happen here, okay? We're gonna expand." NATO right up close to Russia, and we're going to get a negative reaction from the Russians. And then as soon as we do, all of the people who are now telling us that'll never happen, don't worry about it, will then say, "Aha, see, that's how the Russians are. That's why we have to do this," which is exactly what they say now. See, the Russians are coming. That's why we need NATO more than ever before.

When it was building up NATO more than ever before was what created this antagonistic relationship in the first place. And then And I should specify, I am from Austin, Texas. I don't have any connection to Russia whatsoever. I don't give a damn about Russia whatsoever. This has nothing to do with favoring their side of the story or whatever. This is like, whatever. What can I say? I reluctantly admit that, and I'm not saying this is a good enough reason for war, but I'm saying that this is true, essentially, that in his declaration of war, when Putin said that basically we tried independence, we tried letting Ukraine be an independent country. But it turns out that no, it just became a colony of the United States of America. It's totally controlled by America. So, well, but we're just not going to stand for that. You know, so we're going to intervene, we're going to do what we have to do, at least to mitigate that. If America is still going to control Kiev, then at the very least, we're going to control the Donbass and the south— southeastern coast here. And so I'm not saying that's a good enough reason to do what he did, but I'm saying that was essentially true, that America had almost like it was a British colony, just had total sock puppets in charge of that country.

In fact, there's a clip that I quote extensively. It's one of the only block quotes in my book because I got rid of almost all of them for space, but I think I have the block quote of Victoria Nuland testifying. That's Robert Kagan's wife, very important neoconservative, worked in Dick Cheney's office in the W. Bush years and everything, helped cause all of this problem, and she goes on and on describing the level of what can you call the infiltration, essentially, of the Ukrainian government by the United States. She says, "We have our people, State Department people and whoever, working at every level of the Ukrainian government, throughout their police services, throughout their military, throughout their judicial branch, throughout, you know, and out in the provinces and everywhere. We're doing everything we can to control everything that's going on in that country." And, you know, the WikiLeaks are very beneficial on this story because they show where the Americans understand clearly— by the Americans, I mean Washington, the State Department, whatever, these guys— that they know good and well that Ukraine is deeply divided, especially politically, on questions like whether they should join the NATO alliance or whether they'd rather be closer to Russia, try to split the difference and stay out of it or anything like that.

And so they say, "Well, so we just have to push then. We'll just have to spend tens of millions of dollars on massive propaganda." propaganda campaigns, and we'll just have to make sure to support the candidates that support us and our wishes. And essentially, it's America. You know, the book is called— sorry, I keep mentioning the book— it's How Washington Provoked, How Washington Started the New Cold War with Russia and the Catastrophe in Ukraine. I'm not blaming on Kiev, I'm blaming it on essentially Bush Senior through Joe Biden, that they, all of them, had such a ham-handed Russia policy that it led to this.

It's just fascinating that this perspective is not being discussed or wasn't being discussed when it was in the news every day. When people were talking about Russia and Ukraine, it was always that Russia had done this horrible thing and attacked Ukraine, which was horrible. Of course. But no one gave any background. No one really talked about and made the comparison to imagine if the Soviet Union or Russia rather took over Canada. Right. Or was proxying Canada. Yeah, exactly.

Or if they went back at all, they would go, well, this all started when Russia seized Crimea. But of course, they seized Crimea as a direct reaction to America overthrowing the government in the so-called Revolution of Dignity in February 2014. And so then it's a complicated mess, but Crimea happened after that, but they just want to start history at places where it's the most convenient for them.

And there's also the control of Ukraine is also connected to resources, right? I mean, there's immense amounts of minerals, natural gas, there's trillions of dollars of that stuff there that, and this also connects Burisma to the Biden administration, right? Yes.

So, like, I would not buy anyone arguing that these minerals or these resources are somehow crucial for the United States of America, for the American people, for our betterment or anything like that. Only as Ross Perot called them, the special interests. Interests, right? Chevron wants that oil, and Cargill and Archer Daniels Midland and Monsanto have investments in those grains. And so this is about them, but that isn't necessarily us. You look at, you know, whatever benefit they have to our GNP or GDP is negligible, certainly not worth starting a war or anything like that. These are all the free riders. These are, you know, the excuse makers for this kind of policy. Essentially, I think what it really is, is just trying to keep Russia weak and off balance as much as possible. And, you know, like there's this really important RAND Corporation study that was published in 2019. So the RAND Corporation is a Pentagon-sponsored think tank, but it's out in Santa Barbara. They put it in California so it would be somehow a little bit less political, a little insulated from East Coast stuff, and be able to come up with their thing.

But that's basically who they are. So of all the think tanks, they're like the most directly connected to the Pentagon itself. And they came up with this thing, it's called extending Russia. And by extending Russia, they mean overextending them. In other words, how to provoke them into overextending themselves. Like during the Cold War. Right, exactly. So cause small trouble for them in as many places as we can, just to bog them down with expenses and commitments. So we want to, at that time, the pipeline wasn't complete yet. So we want to intervene with sanctions, whatever we can to disrupt the Nord Stream pipeline. They said, maybe we could try to overthrow the government of Belarus again, which they actually did in 2020. They had done it before in 2005 and 2001, failed all 3 times, which if they did that, boy, that might lead right to a nuclear war right there, man. You don't want to succeed in, especially a bloody, if it turned bloody, a coup in Belarus, my God. But anyway, then they said, we could increase weapons to the jihadists in Syria. We could try to overthrow the government of Kazakhstan. We could increase support for the Ukrainian military.

And what's interesting about this, so in other words, see how they're saying, do all these things to essentially agitate the Russians, to keep them off balance, to keep them bogged down, to keep them spending money they can't afford to spend, right? But then all throughout it, they have all these disclaimers where they say, don't listen to us. If you do this, it'd be terrible. Like if you overthrow the government of Belarus, the Russians might just invade it immediately and station nuclear weapons there to make the point, right? If we support the jihadists in Syria, they could break out of the Idlib province and sack Damascus, and then we'd have an al-Qaeda government in Damascus, which is, of course, exactly what happened at the end of 2014. They said we could increase support for the— what was then the ongoing civil war that had broken out after the revolution in 2014, We could increase support for Ukrainian side of that, or the Kiev side of that war. But then that could provoke the Russians into a full-scale invasion of the country, which would of course be terrible for Belarus— I mean, for Ukraine, and terrible for the United States.

A massive expense for us, a humiliation for as far as our international standing and prestige, and of course, untold chaos for the people of Ukraine. And so, We better be real careful about pursuing these policies. And then I swear, you look at how Biden ran things and it was like he got that memo just without any of the disclaimers. And they just went ahead and did all of these things. And in fact, they were doing, they were messing around. It was actually the last year of Trump that they tried to overthrow Belarus. So that was independent of Biden's wishes. That was already going on. And then they were messing around in Kazakhstan in January of '22, right on the eve of war, right when You might have hoped that the entire pressure in Washington was to try to figure out a way to avoid war, to prevent this from breaking out. What kind of deal might we have to make with Putin to try to prevent him from invading Ukraine, as they're threatening to do, and were building up their forces in preparation for it? And then what do they do? They support an armed insurrection in Kazakhstan, which is— that's the big one, right on Russia's southern border there.

Out of all the 'Stans, it's the most important one. Which is just madness. And it goes to show that that's essentially what they're up to when it comes to that is just, if we can't overthrow Putin, we're going to still weaken him, hem him in, surround him, agitate him, and force him to make commitments. And of course, this is why the war's been going on for 4 years. America could tell Kyiv under Biden or under Trump that, look, you guys are just going to have to compromise here. Obviously, you've lost all of Luhansk and most of Donetsk, at least half of Zaporizhzhia and Kherson. And so just make a deal, figure it out, and we're not supporting you anymore. Instead, what they say, remember they said over and over again, we want to inflict a strategic defeat on Russia. Russia might win the war, or, but no, we promise they won't. But yeah, but if it takes a long time, good. And in fact, I have a collection of quotes in the book where politicians and pundits and all these people would say, and maybe they still say this, "We're getting such a good bang for our buck in Ukraine because just think about it, Russian soldiers are dying, but American soldiers are not.

So all we got to do is we just give them money and then they go fight." And then sometimes they wouldn't even make any reference to the Ukrainian soldiers at all, hundreds of thousands of whom have been killed, hundreds of thousands of whom have been horrifically maimed, a major part of this country completely destroyed, huge segments of their population fleeing the country as refugees, many of whom to never come home again, right? The total destabilization of their culture and society in every way. But you can tune into Fox News or, hell, the Democrats too, talking about, or maybe worse, that, "Oh, but we're getting such a good bang for our buck because we're killing Russians. We're sending them home in body bags. We're sending them home in coffins." We're even killing their generals in the field, but none of our guys are dying. Heh heh heh. As though the Ukrainians don't matter at all. And that's the way they think of it. This is inflicting costs on the Russians. Joe Biden would say it over and over again. It's almost like the Underpants Gnomes thing with the first you steal the underpants, then question mark, question mark, question mark, and then profit.

Not really sure. I don't know what that is. Oh, on South Park, the poor— I think it's Butters. The Underpants Gnomes are stealing his underwear and they're trying to explain how this is supposed to work. And they don't really have it worked out what they're going to do with the underpants, but they're sure they're going to make a lot of money in the end. And that's the same kind of thing here where they skip the step about, well, is this really weakening Vladimir Putin's regime? Or maybe it's strengthening his regime? Is it, you know, increasing American power and influence in the region? Or in fact, we're shown as sort of a paper tiger ourselves, and we've done more than, you know, you could have imagined to push Russia towards China and toward the rest of Eurasia. You know, Joe Biden is essentially deliberately trying to prevent them from being part of European civilization and to emphasize their turn to the East. That seems to me to be a terrible mistake, you know, and I think part of it is part of the longer-term Cold War with China too. And there, you hear them talk about this, Joe, they'll say, you know, essentially, Russia's friends with China.

So there's two things we can do there. And this is what I think Trump would prefer to do, would be just make friends with Russia and pull them away from China. Maybe he's already decided it's too late for that, or he doesn't know how. And then the other side was no, lure Russia into Eastern Europe, bog them down so they're no use to China. You know, weaken their power, inflict on them this strategic defeat in Ukraine, so that then they won't be be as useful to China in our Cold War with them, or worse. And which I think is stupid and didn't work. I think that was the, the choice that Joe Biden made, and I think it was totally wrong because it just strengthened the relationship between Russia and China. The Russians have a huge new pipeline that they opened— well, not that new, about 12 years ago— that they opened to China, and they keep adding to it. So they're able to sell all the hydrocarbons they want, and the Chinese will burn every hydrocarbon you got. So You know, they really don't need Europe. You know, Joe Biden kicked them out and basically solidified their economic break with Europe, totally unnecessarily, but in a way that didn't really hurt Russia.

And the blowing up of the Nord Stream pipeline was a part of this. This was to disconnect their oil supply or the natural gas supply to Europe.

Yeah. In fact, more specifically, right, it was to to make this break between, to solidify the break between Germany and Russia. So the previous German chancellor, Angela Merkel, she had this project she called Eurasian Home. And what she was trying to do was balance American and Russian interests in Europe. And then they were closing down all their nuclear stuff, all the green movement, you know, environmental stuff, they closed down all their nuclear in Germany. And then the idea was, don't worry, we're going to import all this clean burning CH4 from, the Russians. And then, but to the Americans, this is the worst thing that could happen, would be an alliance or this strengthening any, any part of any strengthening relationship or budding relationship between the Germans and the Russians. Because with, you know, German manufacturing power and Russian raw materials, and both of their at least potential military strength, that if they have an alliance and dominate Eastern Europe, they can keep everybody else out. And so I think that has always been the British and the American fear there. And, you know, there's— here in Austin, there's that sort of corporate CIA, Stratfor, run by this guy George Friedman.

What is it? Stratfor. It stands for Strategic Forecasting. They do dirty tricks. Yeah, it's here in Austin. Oh, no. They do some dirty tricks, but I think they mostly, like, do, like, you know, pseudo-CIA briefings for corporations and stuff, let them know what's going on in the world, that kind of thing. Mostly. Their emails got leaked on WikiLeaks.org years ago, and you know, they're involved— they're close with some of these color-coded revolutionaries. And anyway, I don't know them or anything, but their leader is a guy named George Friedman. And I'll give him credit, I know he opposed Iraq War II in 2003 because I heard him on the radio back then. But I mean, I'm not vouching for the guy as like a good guy or whatever, but just to say he's sort of like a realist school foreign policy analyst type, not too ideological or anything like that. And he gave a speech years ago where he says, and this is the key words, primordial fear. This is the primordial fear of American, you know, imperial policy planners, is that you would have an alliance between the Germans and the Russians. And so anything that we can do to prevent that will do.

Now, I don't know exactly who blew up that pipeline, but I'm sure they had at least the support of the United States. Seymour Hersh has it that it was American military guys who did it, which I think, I don't know. And then there's a whole cover story about this yacht, and then there's 6 different versions of who rented this yacht and whether it was used and whether it was robots or whether it was divers or whatever. And it's all meant to confuse. And but—

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Seymour Hersh, what did he say happened? He said that it was miners based out of Pensacola, Florida, meaning not pickaxe miners or children, but meaning divers that go down and disable sea mines, that that was their expertise. Those were the guys that they sent to do it. And that was in— I think he did that in the London Review books or something like that. Is that disputed? Yeah, and including by people who blame the Ukrainians and people who blame, I don't know, like Polish or I guess Polish groups or whatever. They had all these different investigations that all led different directions. I know Jeremy, I think Jeremy Scahill had one version of it and then James Bamford, who I really respect, he's the guy that wrote all the books about the National Security Agency over the years. And he had it that it was the Ukrainians and they used robots to do it. And he's, you know, sussed that out through documents and stuff and decided that that must have been what had happened. And, you know, there's— so I don't know, there's 6 different versions of it. And I have— I'm not choosing which is the favorite here, but I think it clearly was in America's interest.

And of course, Joe Biden and Victoria Nuland have both sort of cheekily said, we're not going to let this proceed. And if they do, we're We will do whatever it takes to stop it. And so evidently they did. And you can see how they would consider that to be, you know, what they would be trying to prevent would be this strengthened relationship between Germany and Russia.

Where's all that natural gas going now? Is it just pouring right into the ocean?

Well, eventually they capped it, but I think it was the biggest release of methane into the atmosphere ever. It was a huge thing. It was a massive— if you were a liberal progressive Democrat environmentalist, type, that ought to be like the most offensive thing you ever heard of. Yeah, it's way worse than cow burps.

Oh yeah, they're worried about cow burps.

Yeah, it's centuries worth of cow burps. Centuries worth. Jesus.

So the Kazakhstan, Kazakhstan thing I never heard of. I hadn't heard a peep about that. I had no idea that we were meddling in Kazakhstan.

Yeah, it was one of those where, much like what just happened in Iran in January, where there's protest over some economic policy. I think in that case, they had cut the gas ration or something like that. And it's a country that's divided by ethnicity. Those borders are in all the wrong places and whatever. So you have sort of the ruling caste and the people on the outs and whatever. So you had a big protest movement, and then all of a sudden, there's armed gangs of guys killing cops, seizing police stations, trying to seize airports and this kind of thing. And then what happened was the Russians invaded. They sent regular troops across. They were asked by the government there to come and intervene. They sent troops, they crushed the insurrection. And then it was funny because Antony Blinken said, "Oh, there's a lesson. When the Russians come, they don't ever want to leave." And then the next day they turned around and left. And then they invaded Ukraine. They haven't left there since.

But— So who were these insurrectionists?

I don't know. I mean, I think presumably they worked for the CIA and probably the Turks or something, you know, I don't know. Just mercs. Yeah, them too. Yeah.

And so this whole thing was just what you were saying earlier, just to try to get Russia to be spread as thin as possible, spend as much money as possible, cause as many problems in as many places as possible. Yeah.

And in fact, the same George Friedman from Stratfor, I think it's in that same speech, or maybe a different one, where he says, yeah, when Iran is doing a little bit better, you hit them. When Russia's doing better, you hit them. When China's achieving a thing or two, you hit them. You do whatever you can to always be effing with everybody all the time in order to, you know, that's how to press your advantage, which I think is totally just short-sighted. It's high time preference, you know, sort of government thinking, right? That like, Well, if we can get away with this now, we should, without really thinking about the long-term consequence. In fact, that was one of the things that failed to impress at Oxford that I brought up that I thought was crucial that is in my book is Strobe Talbot, Bill Clinton's guy who originally opposed NATO expansion and then later championed it. In 2018, when it was the middle of the war, the civil war, so-called, with America supporting Kiev and the Russians supporting the so-called rebels on the other side. A New York Times reporter named Keith Gessen went and interviewed Strobe Talbot.

And it just kind of went without saying that like, clearly what is going on here is the project of NATO expansion has sort of blown up and caused all these problems. You know, what are we going to do? And what do you think now, pal? I forgot exactly what he phrased it, but it's sort of, you know, what do you have to say for yourself, Strobe? Nope. And so Strobe Talbott says, "Well, listen." He goes, "When you're in power, you have one job, and that is to pursue your nation's national interests. And if you don't do that, well, then you won't be in power very long." So that was what we had to do. But then he says, "Now, maybe should we have had a higher, wiser conception of our national interest?" Maybe. In other words, at the time, what they were thinking is, we want Lockheed dollars and we want Polish votes for 1996, Illinois's crucial swing state, right? So— or was, I don't know if it still is. So that's why we got to do this, because it's in America's national interest that Bill Clinton get reelected and we all get to keep our jobs.

So we're going to— we're going to make these promises to these people and pursue this policy for our narrow interests as rulers of the empire. But then, if he had had a higher, wiser conception of America's national interest, he might have thought, wow, are we scheduling a military conflict with Russia for the next century? Maybe we shouldn't do that. Maybe we should look at it like actually nothing in the world is more important than America continuing to get along with the Russians. And again, when the communists are long gone, So whatever problem you have with these guys, it ain't Stalinism and it ain't evangelical Marxism at the point of a rifle, right? I mean, this is just— whatever it is, we can deal with it. And so no, they chose the lower, dumber conception of America's national interest instead of the higher, wiser one, and they blew it, you know?

Is there anyone that's ever made the argument to you, like where you've had these debates, where you have a utopian perspective on international relations and that this libertarian ideology of staying out of people's business, staying out of the— What you'll do if you don't fuck with the Russians, you don't keep them spending, you don't keep them stretched out, they'll just amass more and more power and then they'll start to try to take over what was traditionally the Soviet Union, what was originally the Soviet Union.

Yeah. It just so happens, right? America never leaves anybody alone, so we just don't have a controlled experiment, right? We're constantly provoking, and everything that we see them do is clearly a reaction. It's just like when we talk about terrorism. Again, I'm not in any way justifying it, but I'm just saying, we have so much intervention preceding the terrorism, you have to be able to attribute that. Yes. But now, so how would things be otherwise? For example, if H.W. Bush had just said, okay, well, Well, we won the Cold War. Pat Buchanan's right. Let's just come home, and had brought the empire home from Europe. Then what would happen is the Germans would have reunified, and then they would have joined into a new European Union army with the British and the French and probably the Poles, and then it would have been on them to keep the peace between each other, to police the smaller countries in their region, and hopefully strike a long-term security partnership with the new red, white, and blue Republican Russians. And, you know, if people want to say, but in fact, the other side in that debate at Oxford, Daniel Fried said, "Yeah, but it was Poland wanted to join our alliance.

It's not like we made them. They wanted to." But the thing is, yeah, they might have reason to fear Russia based on old things. But the question is, why are we obligated to be the guarantor of their independence? It's too far from here. And it's something that we're no good at. We only cause problems, and something that the other European states, who are all Western Christian capitalist democracies and friends of ours, that they can all work together and solve on their own. I mean, when Germany reunified, it's not like the commies were taking over. It was the West that was dominant in the new Germany, right? These are our pals. There's no reason in the world that America should have had to have— well, for example, like a big part part of the horrible war in the Balkans was because of a contest for power between America and Germany over who's going to be dominant in the former Yugoslavia. We should just let the Germans have it. I mean, not have it and kill everybody or whatever, but God, it could hardly have been worse than what America helped to cause there by trying to compete with the Germans for dominance in a land that's quite literally 6,000 miles from here.

But is the fear from the American side that if you let other countries consolidate power, if you let them grow in influence without fucking with them and keeping them spread out like we're doing with Russia, yeah, that they'll eventually get stronger and then they'll become a real problem. I mean, they keep them weak, keep them distracted, keep them engaged in this Ukraine conflict and Kazakhstan and anything else you can cook up. Yeah, and that keeps them down.

Well, it's like this: when it was the Cold War against the commie Soviet Union, I was a kid and it's— I'm not an expert on all of that history. I think there were real questions about the dangers of world communism at that time, where at least I'd be willing to hear you out. But since the end of the Cold War, no, there's just no justification for it because as Bill Hicks would say, right, like, just spin the globe, man. There's no countries out there, right? Every power in Europe is our friend and no threat to us and mean us no harm whatsoever. There are no powers in Egypt— I mean, pardon me, in Africa that count at all, except for Egypt, which is our friend. India will be a power in 100 years from now. China is a rising power, but we've been their friends for 50 years, even when they were still communist. Nixon went and made friends with them in the early 1970s. And then the Soviet Union— yeah.

But aren't they constantly infiltrating our different universities and people?

Well, I ain't endorsing that. You can keep them out.

But, but Chinese infiltration is kind of crazy, like what they're, what they're doing in America. It's like, if you're saying they're our friends, you know, the mayor of Arcadia just got busted. She was a communist spy. She's a fucking mayor of a city in California.

I'm putting that on the FBI counterintelligence division. That should have never been allowed to happen in the first place. Um, and no, I don't mean that they're totally benign, but look, worst case scenario China invades or just surrounds and forcibly reintegrates Taiwan, that doesn't mean they're going to invade Korea. It doesn't mean they're going to invade Japan or Australia or have the appetite to want to do that. I think China is already a pretty overextended empire, and it's very poor in many parts of it. And they have something— is it 14 or 15 neighbors that they got to deal with already? You know, their greatest ambition is to build build this, um, uh, you know what, highway and, and, and fiber optics and whatever from Shanghai to Lisbon, right? This— what do they call it? The— why am I forgetting the name of the damn thing? The, the great, uh, the, the great new highway they're trying to build all the way across Eurasia. Um, they can't do that by intimidating everyone and lording it over everyone. They gotta cut through Tajikistan You know, these are wild lands. They gotta make deals the whole way across if they're gonna do that.

If you know, they're, and if you look at the way they're building their empire so far, it's all just briefcases, you know? Right. Government-backed businesses making deals and buying up resources and stuff. But I really don't think that Xi Jinping is looking at George W. Bush and Barack Obama and Donald Trump and Joe Biden and going, yeah, that's what I wanna do for my country blow my own brains out trying to take over the whole rest of the planet Earth.

Well, you know, you know, just to point to what you're saying, it's like China's not invading anybody. They're not. They're not doing what we're doing.

And I'm not saying they're nice guys or whatever, but they don't rule us, and they're no threat to North America. They have no need to pick a fight with us. People say, oh, you got all your microchip factories on Taiwan. Well, then move them to Austin. We've had Advanced Micro Devices here for 30 years or whatever, 35 years, maybe more than that. They can build that stuff here.

They can, but they tried. It's very difficult to think about what they've got going on in Taiwan. The reason why Taiwan is the head of it is that they're far more advanced than anybody else in the world at doing it. Bring them. Yeah, you would have to. That's a lot.

I thought you were going to say it was something special about the saltwater over there or something.

No, no, no, no. They're just way ahead of of everybody else. I mean, in fact, didn't Samsung try to do a chip manufacturing plant in Texas? And I think their yields were so poor— I don't know what the actual story with that is, so I'm speaking way over my pay scale here— but I think what it is, is you have to have like certain tolerances when you're creating these chips, and they weren't achieving what they were trying to achieve. —despite spending an enormous amount of money. So it's not as simple as build a plant, the schematics are there, you just crank out chips. Like, apparently these chips are super complicated to make.

Sure. Not worth having a war over.

You have an excuse to get— No, not worth— I'm not saying it's worth having a war over. But I'm just saying that this idea, just move them to Austin, I don't think it's that easy. I think chip manufacturing is one of the most complex technological challenges in 2026?

Yeah, I don't know. I mean, we've had— I don't know what all AMD does here, but I'm pretty sure that them and Samsung and others have all the facilities they need here to do whatever they want.

I don't think that's quite true. Or they should be able to. They maybe could with enough resources and time and maybe stole all the the fucking eggheads from Taiwan and bring them over here, all the geniuses that have figured out how to make chips. Maybe, maybe they wouldn't let them. But what happened with the Samsung chip factory? It's never been fully open and it's not done yet. Oh, okay. But what was— there was—

I used to be a rent-a-cop at some pretty fancy factories here, you know, back 25 years ago. Oh yeah?

Yeah, what kind of factories?

I think it would have been AMD or— and/or Samsung. So pretty fancy, like, chip fabrication and stuff like that.

Well, let's ask Perplexity. Let's ask—

and I did have a job being a rent-a-cop because you skate parking garages at work and do my homework at work.

It was great. Yeah, easy job for the most part, right? Just free time. Let's ask Perplexity, why are all the Why are so many chip manufacturers in Taiwan? Because I'm pretty sure there's something about the advancements they've made in chip manufacturing that no one's been able to replicate. Otherwise, it doesn't make sense that China wouldn't just make their own. Yeah. Like, they're right there.

I read this thing not long ago about how, like, with the China's AI stuff, they figured out how to write their program where they need much less computing power to do the same kind of effort. In the way that they did it. So they just found their own workaround.

Yeah, I mean, so they also— there's a lot of espionage going on too. Yeah, probably. A lot of the world's chip manufacturers is in Taiwan because the island deliberately built a specialized ecosystem around contract chip fabrication foundries, then compounded that early lead with huge investment, dense clustering of suppliers and talent, and strong government support over several decades. So early strategic bet on manufacturing. Starting in the 1980s, Taiwan chose to focus on precision manufacturing, fabricating chips for others instead of trying to build its own big consumer tech brands. And then their dominance and scale. Yeah. Founded in '87, now the world's leading contract— TSMC, the leading contract chip manufacturer, produces over half of the world's advanced semiconductors and more than 90% of the most cutting-edge nodes. Because of advanced fabs— because advanced fabs cost tens of billions of dollars and must run near full capacity to be profitable, only a few players can keep up. And Taiwan's leader kept pulling ahead as others dropped out. See, that's what I'm talking about. Like, I don't think it's easy. I thought the thing was that no customers is what kept popping up. What is that? No, there are no customers.

I mean, the thing is, at the same time, huge problem delays because there's no one to buy them.

Why not? I don't know. Huh. Yeah. I mean, when it comes to capacity, then it's a lot.

Probably. We got Samsung and Dell and AMD and IBM here. I mean, seems like they can invest their own money and build their own whatever they need to. Right. Right.

But just read what they said there about the amount of money that's involved in keeping it running. Like, I think they're so— I think the idea about Taiwan, and again, this is not really my area of expertise. Not that I have any, but that they're so far ahead that this process that they bet on early on, that they've got their manufacturing to this point where they've already invested this enormous amount of money and the money— and they have to keep them running constantly. I don't think it's simple. I don't think it's like car manufacturing.

And then by no customers, you mean that essentially everybody who needs these chips is already getting them from Taiwan and there's not much more demand than that?

Well, not necessarily. It could just mean that they already have contracts, that they don't need them because they've already, you know, made commitments to Taiwan chip manufacturers.

On the other hand, if Beijing is a military threat to Taiwan and these people would rather not be under the rule of Beijing and the Communist Party, then there's a pretty big incentive for them to move to Texas.

There is, but again, what I'm saying is I don't think it's a simple step. I think, I don't think it's just like move here. I think it's an enormous investment. Investment in capital, like beyond normal things. And then I think to keep them running is an insane commitment. It's very difficult. And again, if Samsung doesn't have any— if right now they don't have any customers, didn't they have an issue with yields though? Wasn't there an issue with, uh, chips being made to standard? I think there was something else on top of that. I tried typing that in I didn't see anything, but they're trying to get to 2-nanometer production. They started on trials, and then there's rumors about why they have not moved into mass production, and that's all these articles are saying. Hmm.

Well, the Pentagon budget is a trillion and a half this year. Let's just cut all that. Then we'll have plenty of capital freed up to—

Well, that's cute. They're not going to do that. Who needs a world empire?

Hey, look, one of the lessons of the war in Iran is the empire's good for nothing it anyway. We have H-bombs that are enough to deter anyone from attacking us, but America's military empire in the Middle East is completely bankrupt, right? That whole thing was a hollow bluff, and the Iranians just called it, and we lost. I mean, our bases have been evacuated. They keep coming out. I know, I think you talked about this on your show, right? How they were covering up the satellite photos. They weren't letting Americans have access to the satellite photos, and you could get them online, whatever other countries had And then you've had the New York Times, and I hate to cite CNN, but it was a well-sourced story where they got all these great satellite photos and went and showed how the Iranians reached out and touched 18 bases from Erbil in northern Iraq all the way down to Muscat in Oman and took out all radar stations and pitted our runways, hit refueling tankers and AWACS radar planes and took out the entire— not the entire, but a huge percentage of the overlapping radars for the missile defense systems over there.

Yeah. Left our allies in Saudi, Qatar, UAE, Bahrain wide open. You know, our naval Fifth Fleet station at Bahrain is destroyed and offline. I read this thing said the Qataris— our main airbase in the Middle East, the headquarters of Central Command and our main airbase at Qatar— the Qataris made a deal with Iran. Please stop hitting us. And they promised to not allow America to fly any sorties out of Qatar, our main airbase, during that war. And so as Justin Logan from the Cato Institute said, well, what good is a military base that you can't fight a war from? You know, it's just like that— I know you've seen this, right? That, that old meme that says, well, if Iran doesn't want trouble with us, how come they put their country so close to all our military bases? And it has all the, the map of all our bases in the region. But the thing is The thing is, what Donald Trump, I guess, didn't understand was that those were a tripwire that were essentially— we were making our own guys hostages of Iran to prevent war. Those bases were preventing war, because it should have been out of the question that we would attack Iran, because all those bases would be up for grabs against them.

So how do—

how are they so poorly defended? That's what I don't understand. Like, how is it so easy for Iran to attack these bases? And did they have any foreknowledge of this? Did they understand? Oh yeah.

So why they were so poorly defended, that's got to be political decision-making among the brass, right? About like, well, we don't want to admit that we need these fortifications in the first place, maybe, or just the other general said don't, so we don't want to fight with him about it for office politics reasons or what.

Like, I don't know. It's just not a gross underestimation? It's not a gross underestimation?

Well, it can't be because listen, And I'll tell you, man, in January of 2007, the chiefs took W. Bush down to the tank in the basement of the Pentagon, and they told him, look, we'll do your Iraq surge where we increase the war in Iraq, but we really don't want to go to Iran. And they told him the reason why not is because the Iranians have escalation dominance, or at least we won't have it. That I shouldn't have said. That was overstated. Getting it. We will not have escalation dominance there. And that means that, you know, as a Pentagon term for, if we're going to get into a fight, we don't want to fight at all unless we know we're going to control every stage of that conflict. And in the case of, say, invading Iraq, there's nothing Saddam Hussein can do about it, right? As Paul Wolfowitz said, Iraq is doable. In the case of Iran, they have, most importantly of all, a short and medium-range missile force that we cannot defend from. Now, we can defend from it some. We have our Patriot missiles and our other type of interceptors, but they can pour on volume that there is no magic Star Wars shield that can protect from.

And we had at that time more than 100,000 guys in Iraq, 50,000 in Afghanistan, and then plus still, as we still do, tens of thousands, Air Force and Army in Kuwait, Air Force and Army in Saudi Arabia, Air Force in Qatar, Navy at Bahrain, I guess Air Force and Army in, in UAE. And I didn't know in Oman, but yeah, of course, in Oman they had, you know, some naval presence there as well. So, and they knew then that all of that stuff will be up for grabs, and then the Strait of Hormuz will also be at risk. And in fact, it's true. At antiwar.com, you can find in the archives there, I wrote an article in August of 2005 called "Who's Behind the Coming War with Iran?" And I say in there, they can close the strait and they can inflict economic damage, drive the cost of a barrel of oil up above $200 a barrel and all of that. So there were people a lot smarter than me who were writing about that at the time that I was interviewing on my show at the time. Who were just saying, look, we can start a war with Iran, but we don't really have a good way to finish one.

And so, and we talk about the nuclear program and how unnecessary all this was in a sec too, but point being that you want to do a regime change, as you just said, you kill the Ayatollah, it doesn't do any good. They have a new Ayatollah. You can kill the whole ruling council that appoints the Ayatollah, but then they'll just appoint a new ruling council. So then you can dump in the 82nd Airborne Division, but they can't occupy and control Tehran. There's no good land route to invade the country. They have two massive mountain ranges.

And one of the most preposterous narratives was like getting the people to rise. Oh, yeah.

We're going to arm up some Kurds.

Yeah. Well, not just the Kurds. They were trying to get just the Iranian civilians. Yeah. With no arms. Yep.

And they'll talk about arming the Kurds and arming the Balochis, which I don't know if there are other factions, but that seems to be a direct reference to groups like Jundallah, who the Obama and the Obama administration and the Israelis both backed about 15 years ago, who were bin Ladenite head choppers, suicide bomber guys. They were no different from al-Qaeda or ISIS. John Bolton on Piers Morgan, the same show that I was on, was saying, "Yeah, we could arm up the Baluchis." Stuff is crazy. I actually wrote in that article at that time, the neocons daydream that if we just start the war, then the people will rise up and create a new pro-American government there, but that's crazy to bet on that. There's no reason to believe that. And so, and there's video of me in 2010 warning the same thing. And I'm not claiming any great insight. I didn't go to college, man. I just, you know, I'm interested in this stuff. And I, you know, have a show where I was interviewing all these experts about it at the time. And it was just complete consensus. Everybody knew they can reach out.

And boy, over 20 years, I must have said this 1,000 times. They can not only hit all of our military stuff in Iraq and Kuwait and Bahrain and Qatar, etc., Saudi, etc. But a trillion dollars of economic targets all up and down that Gulf, which is exactly what they did. They hit refineries, they hit chemical plants, they hit not just at the Strait of Hormuz, they hit American oil tankers up near Kuwait just to show that like, we pwned this entire thing now. So back to my original point when I got on this tangent was that America's conventional military empire is bankrupt. Donald Trump just blew his big bluff. That we're the big player in the region. We're actually not in the region. We're here. The region is over there. And the entire, you know, threat of our dominance over there is basically called— I mean, obviously, we still have aircraft carriers and planes and bombs and even nukes and all that. But can the leaders in Bahrain, in Qatar, and UAE and Saudi rely on America to defend them? Right? Or they got to come up with their own different policy now.

Haven't we also used up like two-thirds of our Patriot missile supply?

Oh yes, I don't know the exact percentages, but a lot. And they're admitting now that the Iranians still have 70-75% of all their missiles and launchers. All that stuff about we decimated everything they had was all just—

They're admitting that? Who's admitting that?

Government officials talking to the New York Times and the Washington Post in the last 3 days. Yeah. Oh, I hadn't heard that. 70-75%, they got all their launchers, all their missiles. They dug out missiles that had been buried They refurbished some and finished some that were on the assembly line. That was what they told the Post. They were finishing some that had been on the assembly line that they went ahead and restarted up again.

And don't they have some crazy, like, missile elevator system where they're, they're buried deep underground?

And I don't know how it works exactly, but yeah, they— and even they have apparently, like, the factories are buried deep underground as well and just dispersed throughout the country.

And so they've been preparing for something like this for a long time. Yeah. And so these bases that we had, are all of them non-functional? All the ones that have been hit?

I don't think so. I don't know the exact extent of that, but as far as their usefulness over the long term, they might as well have just been abandoned at this point.

Let's see, like, what the conventional news says.

Yeah, like New York Times and CNN have two big profiles on this. I don't know off the top of my head better stuff than that. The CNN with one— oh, NBC also had one within. The CNN and the NBC are within the last couple of weeks.

The New York Times is about 6 weeks One of the things that disturbed me to no end, and we talked about this a couple of times on the podcast, was there was one of the guys who was over there who attended a briefing, and they were told that this is bringing about Armageddon and that Trump was anointed by Jesus Christ and that this war in Iran was going to cause Jesus to return. And that this was actually being told to a bunch of military people that were having a war debriefing. Man. And then the guy had a— whoever this officer was that was talking about this said that the guy had a giant smile on his face when he was telling this, which made it all the more creepy.

Oh, good. The end of the world. Nobody wants to die alone, right, Joe?

But they were saying that they— that there's a faction in the military that is these religious fundamentalists that actually believe that it's bringing about Jesus's return. So look, there's a guy named, um, Commander claimed Trump was anointed by Jesus to cause Armageddon to justify Iran strikes.

So there's a guy named Mikey Weinstein. This is—

look at that. Let's just go over this real quick. This is so crazy because this— go up to the top, please, right there. So no, with the title, so it's where it says who it was. So it's a military commander told a group of noncommissioned officers that President Donald Trump, anointed by Jesus to light the signal fire in Iran to cause Armageddon and mark his return to earth.

Yeah. And then that's Mikey Weinstein right there at the Military Religious Freedom Foundation. He was, I believe he was an Air Force officer, maybe he was an Army officer, and then He created this group to advocate against this kind of stuff in the military. And it's been a long time since I spoke to him, but he was saying to me years ago that it's especially in the highest ranks of the Air Force, the highest ranks of the Air Force. They really believe this stuff. It is time to bring on the apocalypse, and it's a good thing that they are the ones in charge of the nukes so that they can use them according to the divine plan and this kind of thing. It is scary stuff. People need to know this.

Go back to that, please, because there's one quote that's below that. This is, uh, This is so fascinating. He urged us to tell our troops that this was all part of God's divine plan, and he specifically referenced numerous citations out of the Book of Revelation referring to Armageddon and the imminent return of Jesus Christ. Can you imagine if you're over there, you already think the war is sketchy, like, why the fuck are we doing this? And then this guy comes down, you're like, oh my God, we're cooked.

This is a big part of how they justified Iraq. I mean, there's so many Protestant ministers out there who told their people that this is the Bible, get it, Middle East. Year 2000, sorta-ish. "This is how you're going to get raptured up to heaven in your body, and all you have to do is support this aggressive war, and all this magic stuff is going to come true." And in fact, this is why there's such a massive crash in evangelical support for Israel and these kind of foreign policies now, is because people just don't believe that anymore, because that's what the Left Behind series at Walmart said 25 years ago, and then it never happened. It didn't come true. Speaking of the one world government and all this Where's Satan? Where's the deal? Instead, it's just Obama and Trump, you know?

So how do you think we got talked into this Iran thing? Because J.D. Vance, very against it. A lot of people, Tulsi Gabbard, very against it. So what the fuck happened?

I think that Netanyahu essentially, you know, all this talk about four-dimensional chess and whatever. I think what it is, is it's just checkers, right? Netanyahu goes, "Listen, for Iran to have a civilian nuclear program, come on, that's just cover for really a weapons program. It's just a stage in a weapons program. We know eventually they're going to make nukes and then they're going to attack Israel with them. We also know that, and you already said that you're not going to let them have nukes." 'Well, having a nuclear program at all is having nukes. Same difference. And you already agreed to that, right?' 'Right.' 'Okay. Well, and they won't give up enrichment. So what do we do? We gotta attack.' It's just like Obama's red line on the fake chemical weapons scare in Syria there, that once you agree to this thing, now it's written in stone, and now, like, we got you on this technicality. Double jump. You already agreed with the stupid things I said, and so now you have to do the thing that I said. And then Trump goes, 'Okay.' And then, plus, on top of that, just the flattery. And like, you know, honestly, this is the most obvious thing.

Back when he was on Twitter in his first term, I used to tweet at him and I would say, "Wealth, strength, gold, get out of Afghanistan, height, power," and like, just tell him like things that he likes, right? With "get out of Afghanistan" in the middle. And so, this is what Netanyahu does is he goes, "Listen, you're greater than Abraham Lincoln. You're greater than George Washington. You're a world historical figure. You're sure to go to heaven now." You're like, if FDR had done the right thing and invaded Germany in 1935 and prevented that whole thing from ever happening.

Well, you're just guessing that this is how he talked to him, right? Well, kinda, but— Wouldn't it be awesome to just fly along?

'Cause he repeats a lot of it. Oh, it would. It would be great. But he repeats so much of it back that I think that, like, yeah, you could pretty much tell this is what they're saying to him. And then this is what he's responding is, Obama wasn't man enough to do it. George Bush wasn't man enough to do it. He knows what has to be done. He's willing to do it, and he's ill-informed enough to believe that it makes any sense, that if you just bomb their nuclear program, that somehow it'll go away. If you just hit them hard enough, then eventually they'll just do what you say. It doesn't work like that. It oftentimes does not work like that, and with these guys, they've made it clear that we're not making bombs, but we absolutely reserve our right to enrich uranium for peaceful purposes, and we will suffer your airstrikes. We will not give up that right. And so that's it. And they've been completely clear about that this entire time. But Netanyahu convinced them, right? This is why he also believed that the Strait of Hormuz was not at risk, because Netanyahu convinced him, once we hit them, once you kill the Ayatollah, the whole thing's going to fall apart.

There'll be no one too close to Strait of Hormuz, because we'll have already won by then.

But what do you think happens if Iran does get nuclear weapons?

Probably the other states in the region will. You know, Darryl Cooper, who's my partner on our show Provoked, and I know good friend of yours— I love Darryl. He is so great. He's awesome. And he was pointing out— that guy gets—

boy, does he get fucking misrepresented.

Oh, he does. Oh my God, he does.

Oh my God, heroic guy, man. Very fucking smart. And if you listen to Fear and Loathing in the New Jerusalem, Anybody who listens to that and thinks that guy's anti-Semitic is fucking crazy. Yeah, no. You're crazy. All that stuff is just a smear. It's so balanced.

Out of context, yeah.

It's so balanced and so objective and, you know, his perspective on it and just people take that one thing that he said about, fuck, Churchill. The thing that he said about Churchill being the real villain. He's being provocative. Right? And what he's trying to say is that Churchill, by imposing those embargoes, essentially was starving them and was keeping resources from getting to Germany, and he forced Hitler's hand to do what he did. It's not excusing him. It's not like saying Hitler wasn't a fucking evil cunt. It's not like saying Hitler's a good guy, but Winston Churchill's the bad guy. Somebody's saying it all. But he was saying Winston Churchill, also a bad guy. Right. Also wanted to attack Soviet Union right after they were done with the war.

And he was actually, he even introduced the subject by saying to Tucker that, you know, I like to pick on my friend Jocko, who's very WASPy, and I like to pick on him and joke with him that, you know, Churchill was the real bad guy. Exactly. Because he wouldn't accept you know, peace for an answer. He had to finish the regime change no matter what, even if it took America doing it for him and whatever. And then his point about— he never even finished the point about the people starving in the camps. He was totally taken out of context to mean that the only people who died in the Holocaust, all that happened was the Germans didn't care enough to feed them well enough or something. But that was not what he was saying at all. He was essentially arguing that even if you were some kind of German apologist, 'Even you would have to admit that every single soul they took possession of, they took responsibility for. And if people are starving to death by the millions in their camps, then nobody could deny that.' Right? And then he didn't even discuss the rest of the Holocaust.

His point had nothing to do with, like, trying to diminish the rest of it or discount the rest of it or anything like that. He was just saying, you know, arguing even the devil's advocate would have to admit that so much of the case on the face of it. And then there, he was segueing right into a point about Gaza and how the Israelis— Gaza's not a country. Gaza is an Indian reservation. They were already whooped and conquered and besieged. And so, you take control of people like that, then you're responsible to make sure that they're fed and that they're not starving to death in this, you know, under your captivity, which was the point that he was making. So, it ended up being you know, half of a thing in jest and half explained about Churchill, and then a point about the war in the East that was totally, and I think in some cases honestly misinterpreted. But what's dishonest is people pretending like he didn't explain himself on the record over and over and over clarifying what he meant by all that stuff.

And that's the problem with video clips. Clips. Clips are a real problem because you lose the context of the entire conversation. You get one person's point where they might be steelmanning something else, or they might be like trying to be provocative or whatever it is. But to me, it's always very fascinating that this one war is beyond debate. Like there's no room for any discussions of what might be true, what might not be true. I I don't think there's a single fucking moment in human history where we have gotten a completely objective, 100% accurate representation of why the war started, what were the factors, what were the motivations. We could go all the way back to Smedley Butler and Smedley Butler's War Is a Racket, which I always point out because here's a guy in 1933 that was realizing— he was a major general realizing at the end of his tenure, like, holy shit, what did I do? I thought that I was doing this to make the world safer, and really I was making it better for bankers, better for all these interests to go in and control resources or do whatever the fuck they were actually doing.

And you can talk about that, but if you get into discussions about World War II and anything involving the Nazis, anything involving the Holocaust, anything— all of a sudden anti-Semitic gets thrown around. All of a sudden, you're a bad person.

Yeah, as he says, it's a huge part of our civic religion, basically. You know, we're like George Washington and even Abraham Lincoln and all that stuff is too long ago, where it's really Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower are the founding fathers of the American Empire, and their great project, the Greatest Generation and all of those things. That was, you know, that's how we know that that's who we are. I mean, my grandfather was in that war. And my great uncle was, you know, death marched by the Japanese in that war and stuff like that. A lot of people have connections to that. As Bill Kristol and his friends would say, this is how you build national greatness. You need big projects that we can all do together, and World War II is the biggest project of all. So it's the kind of thing that people don't really want to question.

It's also, we should point out, that they were bankrolling Smedley Butler, trying to get him to overthrow the fucking government. Right, and he refused to do it.

Yeah. Yeah, they marched up Capitol Hill with the documents and showed them.

Yeah, they were trying to get him to throw a military coup on the United States government and take it over. Yep.

I mean, you thought FDR was bad. These guys wanted to overthrow him. He wasn't, you know, isn't that crazy? Wrong faction, I guess. But look, I'm not an expert on, and I've only read a few books about the Second World War, and you'd have to read hundreds to really know what you're talking about on that one. But I can tell you —Agreed. —Pat Buchanan's great book, Churchill, Hitler, and the Unnecessary War, that Pat knew that everybody was going to try to smear him and everyone was going to attack him and nobody wanted to hear his version of how this all happened. So he only quotes the highest level, most credentialed English historians from Cambridge and Oxford. And so he's not relying on the German point of view whatsoever. He's quoting only these English historians saying, here's how Well, the idiot Neville Chamberlain and Winston Churchill essentially fumbled into this war, screwed up and got us into this war that was way worse than we ever could have hoped. They ended up turning Poland over to the commies at the end anyway, and all of that. And it really honestly is— what I think it is, is a decent take on World War II without all that religiosity that you're referring to there, and just take a cold look at it.

You know, like they say, W. Bush, he's the Winston Churchill of the 21st century. And I'm like, you know what, maybe that's right. And maybe Winston Churchill was really just the George W. Bush of the 20th century. It's just you're supposed to never admit that. Who's Winston Churchill's Dick Cheney? Oh yeah, that's a good question.

I don't know. Dick Cheney, that was— boy, that guy, he had no pulse for a while. Yeah. You know, is that not in the Bible or something?

No. Yeah, should be.

Fucking guy who once wore who, uh, is giving no-bid contracts to the company that he was the fucking CEO of. Yeah, where they're going over there and fixing for billions of dollars shit that we blew up, and this guy doesn't even have a pulse.

I know, that's really weird. Heart. He lived so long too, like only the good die young kind of thing.

I mean, how many people dropped dead after COVID of heart attacks that were young and healthy? This fucking guy, keep on trucking. Remember when he shot his friend in the face and his friend apologized?

Yeah.

Yep. He fucking— they were doing, which is one of the most very— I'd say it's one of the hardest to argue in support of type of hunts. It's called a canned hunt. Do you know what it is? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, so what it is, they just release— Like in Gaza. Ah, very similar. They just— well, this is, you know, birds. They just released these birds from a cage, literally, and they fly, and then they shoot them out of the sky. And even then, he blasts his friend. And then he would— drinking and hunting. Well, yeah, allegedly. So he wouldn't do any interviews or anything, wouldn't talk to anybody for like 24 hours. And so he had to sober up, or, you know, allegedly, or whatever. And then his friend was like, oh, minor misunderstanding, got a few pellets in my face. What the fuck?

I'm very sorry if this reflected negatively on the vice president. That's how gangster. My fault for putting my face there. Isn't that amazing?

No lawsuit, no nothing. Your friend shoots you in the face, no worries.

And what angle exactly did he get shot that he was okay after that?

Well, you— the thing about it is it's birdshot.

It was just birdshot, yeah.

And if you— birdshot spreads, right? And depending upon the distance and how far he was away from him, he could have just got clipped with a couple— most likely that's what's happened, because I think he was 70. You know, if you're 70, you get shot in the face with a shotgun, usually that's a wrap. Crap. Yeah. So I think he just got clipped with a couple of pellets and, you know, yeah, he probably should have just shut the fuck up and not reported it, right? I don't know how it even got out.

He must have had to go to the hospital.

Yeah, you see, I fucked up, I dropped my gun and it went off.

Oh yeah, yeah, you don't— the vice president shot me. I mean, don't tell the newspaper I said that.

If that was my friend, you know, I would probably say let it go, let's figure this out. You have to go to the fucking press.

Yeah, come on, bro. There's a guy who's hammered, killed and wounded a lot of people, that's for sure. Mostly vicariously, but not always.

Well, I mean, there's a special place in hell. He's there already. It's just so weird that that worked, you know, just all of it. The no-bid contracts, the, the fact that he was essentially running— and he— remember when he was in a bunker and Bush was running around? He's in a bunker somewhere. Like, why is he in a bunker? Like, what do— what the fuck? That whole war was so weird.

It was to pretend that there's a threat, that there was an ongoing threat when there wasn't.

I had a bit about it in my act, is like that the elites really have no idea how dumb people are, and the only way to find out how dumb people are is make a dumb guy president. And that, that's what they did. And then when we went into a war with Iran— or with Iraq, rather— like, how did we— how do we justify that? And they bought that? What the fuck? And then the bit was like, he won again? Right, yeah, he got reelected on that, yeah. And then I go, there's someone sitting in the back of the room going, I think we can go dumber. That was the idea of the bit, is that this is the only way to find out how dumb we are.

Like that Kurt Vonnegut story, Harrison Bergeron, where there's like the ruling elite, but the president, I think the president in the movie is Tim Curry or something, just a total, like, buffoon. And they just— the real power is all behind the throne running things.

Well, my favorite movie about that is Dr. Strangelove, because it's like— because it's kind of humorous. And, you know, it's— but the whole thing is like, oh my god, I think when you see this Pete Hexis thing with these guys are talking about this, and this commander is saying that it's all to bring about Armageddon, it's— this is right out of Dr. Strangelove. Yeah.

Oh, you can tell, and this is one of the most dispiriting things, right, is when you can tell a lot of times when these people are talking that, wow, they're— he's really not lying. He really thinks that that stupid lie is true, and he's telling us what he thinks is true. Like, it's, you know, depending on their tone and the way they explain it, he is sometimes— like, even with Donald Trump, like, it's possible he's even talked himself or allowed himself to be talked into believing that they really were making nuclear weapons and that then they were gonna use them on us. I mean, that might just be the dumbest lie and he knows it.

Right, but if they did have nuclear weapons, it would be a giant problem, 'cause the Iranian government, just look what they've done to their people, executed protesters, they've done some wild shit.

Nah, I don't know.

You don't think that's a big deal, what they've done to their protesters?

In fact, that's where we got off on Martyr Made there a minute ago, was because on our show he was saying right now through their conventional power, and especially because W. Bush gave their best friends Baghdad, Iran is by far the dominant power in the region, conventionally speaking, other than us. If they rush to an atom bomb, say, to somehow deter us, which I don't think that would work, I think we just attack them if they really did it, we just attack them again. But if they did somehow get an atomic bomb, well, then that would then incentivize authorize all of the other powers, I mean, or other states on the GCC there, Saudi and Qatar and Bahrain and UAE, to get their own nukes. And at that point, Iran's entire strategic advantage is canceled because now they got nukes too. And so now nobody has a strategic advantage.

Right, but then, but no one can do to them what happened to them now if they had nukes. Maybe. Like, this was the argument for Ukraine not disarming.

But that would include them, that would include them being able to deliver them to the United States as well. Well. And I think— see, it's like this. Here's how it worked, okay? The Iranians, they're members of the Non-Proliferation Treaty going way back. They had a safeguarded civilian nuclear program where the IAEA could verify they're not diverting their nuclear material.

How could they verify this? They have their bases all underground.

I mean— No, no, no, because all that stuff was open and declared and safeguarded by the IAEA. So they're enriching at two major facilities at Fordow and Natanz. Months, and then they followed the uranium from womb to tomb, from the mine through the conversion process—

Right, but how much uranium do they have of this? I mean, how much of it could be done in secrecy?

It was very robust up until last June. Essentially, they were proving the negative there. Can I pause you there?

Yeah. Because they didn't know that the Iranians had the capacity to— they sent one 4,000 kilometers, right? The Diego García attack. Oh, the— yeah, the missile. So those missiles had a far greater range than anything that they had declared.

Actually, not quite, because— well, first of all, that's— the missile stuff is totally separate from their safeguards agreement with the IAEA. They have nothing to do with that. But as far as the missiles, the only limit on their missile range previously was a political limit, and it was the—

Oh, it wasn't capability? That's right.

So they had—

So it wasn't that they stated that all we have is this?

They only previously, but then in October of, I'm pretty sure it was last October in the aftermath of the June war. And so then in October of '25, the Ayatollah announced, we're lifting our limit on the range of our missiles. And they said that publicly that they were doing that. And so, and that was as a result again of this provocation of the war last June. —so that's still separate from the nuclear stuff, though, but go ahead.

It was—I'm sorry, so it wasn't a capability thing. It was just an agreement.

Although they don't have the capability to launch a 3-stage intercontinental ballistic missile to the United States of America. They can hit Israel, but they can do that with an intermediate-range missile. But if they're cooperating with China, and China has that capability—because Bill Clinton gave it to them, yeah. Yikes. Jesus, why did he do that? I love this story. Sorry, for the money. If you remember the scandal of '96 and all the Chinese money in his campaign in '96, they spent all their money hyping, or all the media attention hyping up Charlie Tri and Johnny Chung, who were like low-level fundraisers who didn't have anything to do with anything. And then they framed an entirely innocent Taiwanese scientist named Wen Ho Lee, and the evil FBI persecuted poor Wen Ho Lee. It was this huge distraction from what really happen, which was this Chinese-Indonesian billionaire named Riady, who was directly tied to Chinese intelligence. He got his guy, John Wong, appointed to the Commerce Department, where he was put in charge of licensing missile technology transfers to China. And they took that authority away from State and Defense and gave it to Commerce. And then John Wong was the guy who got to rubber stamp those missile technology transfer.

So then Hughes Aircraft and Loral Corporation then sent their very best three-stage rocket technology to China. Oh geez. Because it's cheaper to have them launch the satellites, you know. So they were not, I don't think, able to deliver hydrogen bombs to the United States before that. And they were able to because, I mean, and for a few hundred thousand dollars or maybe a couple of million dollars or whatever, they were able to buy this from Bill Clinton. Jesus Christ. I know, crazy. But no, you're right, that I mean, look, could China— could Iran with Chinese help or whatever someday be able to deliver a warhead here? Yes. However, the much better solution to that certainly would have been— I know we can't go back, but certainly would have been just normalizing relations with Iran and just dealing with them. The reality was Iran's position was not that they were racing to a nuke. Their position was they had this safeguarded program. Where again, the IAEA is essentially proving the negative. We know where all their uranium is. It's right where it's supposed to be, and they haven't taken it and diverted it yet. We know how much they're enriching, and we know where it all goes.

And so, there— so then Israel would say, America, they're making nukes. If they have a nuclear program at all, this is the same during W. Bush, during Obama. This is true under Olmert, as well as under Netanyahu, who's been in charge almost the entire time since Obama. Iran, and the policy was from the Israelis, America, bomb them. They got a civilian program, and you know, that's just cover for they're going to make nukes someday, and they're going to use them on us. So just go ahead and let's get them now. Then America would say, no, we're not doing that. This is under W. Bush, again, under Obama, under Trump 1 and under Biden. No, we're not going to just start a war. But we will warn the Iranians, don't you break out and try to make a nuke now, because if you do, then we will attack you and we'll bomb your Manhattan Project before you can complete it and before you can get an atom bomb. We'll see you then. And then the Iranians would say, we're not making nukes, so don't attack us. And then the heavy implication was, if you attack us, then we might make nukes.

So they had a latent deterrent, right? A half-assed nuclear weapons deterrent. They proved that they had mastered the fuel cycle, that they could enrich uranium if they wanted to up to weapons grade. They never did, but they said— they were essentially saying, "We have a revolver in one pocket and bullets in the other. Let's not escalate this." And that could have and should have stood, except this is what— this is the answer to your question about how did they get us into this? 'Cause Netanyahu convinced Trump Trump to change that line and to adopt the Israeli line, that for them to have a civilian nuclear program at all is equivalent to the exact same thing as them making nuclear weapons, and we're just not going to allow that.

So how much understanding do we have of their capabilities, and how do we have that understanding? Like, how much do we know about their enrichment program? How much do we know about whether or not they're capable of making a weapon 'Cause haven't they stated recently that they are capable of making a nuclear weapon? Well— Do you think that's bluster? I think that was not a threat.

I think what— in fact, if I know the statement that you're talking about, they were saying, "Look, we're not making nukes, and the proof that we're not is the fact that we know how to, we could, and we're still not, and you can see all this time." They mastered the fuel cycle back in 2006. Once you— okay, so it's like this, and they have been set back on this. They got their facility blown up last June. But, essentially, you have, remember yellow cake? Don't drop that shit. You have that refined yellow cake, is refined uranium ore, then you convert that to uranium hexafluoride gas, and that's the stuff that you inject into the centrifuges. Then you have what's called a cascade of centrifuges, a whole bunch of them all connected together with tubes, and then you spin the uranium hexafluoride gas in the centrifuges, and you spin the U-238, which is heavier, out and away from the 235, which is the sweet stuff. And the more you enrich it, then the more capable it is of being used for nukes. Well, that's one way to put it. But so they would— they need like 3.6% U-235 for their electricity program.

They need 20% U-235 for targets for their medical isotope reactors, for like cancer treatment radiation, or like that radioactive dye that they put in people for— to see your circulatory system and stuff. But then to make weapons-grade uranium, you need typically above 90% pure uranium-235. In any case, once you spin it through the centrifuges to whatever stage of purity, then you gotta convert it back into a metal again, whether you're gonna make fuel rods or whether you're gonna try to make a bomb warhead out of it. So under the Obama deal of 2015, the JCPOA, it was really just an extra layer on top of the Nonproliferation Treaty and on top of the safeguards agreement that we already had. But the way that was worked out was, a big part of it was that they would scale back their capability to enrich by shutting down, I think it was two-thirds of their centrifuges at Natanz, and then at Fordow, they would change it from a production facility to just a research facility. And then whatever stockpile of uranium they came up with would be transferred out of the country to Russia, and they would turn it into fuel rods and send it back.

That way, they have no stockpile that they could just quickly reintroduce into the centrifuges and enrich to a higher grade. They'd have to basically start at nothing again. And so, under the theory and the way the scientists worked it out, that if they withdrew from the treaty, kicked the inspectors out of the country, and said, "We are now making atom bombs," it would take them a year to enrich enough uranium at weapons-grade to make one bomb out of it. Then on top of that, you have to have the actual experts who know how to machine it into the exact specifications, as in how to detonate it and everything else. And the, the simpler the nuke, the harder it is to deliver. So typically, like, the Hiroshima bomb was a gun-type nuke where you just shoot one uranium pit into the other one, which they didn't even test. The Trinity test was the Nagasaki bomb, basically. They knew it would work, but it was essentially a very heavy bomb and very difficult to deliver, and virtually all miniaturized implosion bombs in the world that can ever be married to a missile, they're virtually all made out of plutonium, and they don't have a plutonium route to the bomb because under the Obama deal, they poured concrete into the ARAK, that's A-R-A-K, which was supposed to be a heavy water reactor, which can produce weapons-grade plutonium as waste.

They poured concrete into that thing and shut it down completely before it was even open. Their reactor that they do have operating is at Bushehr, and it's a light water reactor, which means that it is possible for it to produce weapons-grade plutonium as waste, but it's much more difficult. They would have to shut it off all the time to harvest the stuff out of there and all of that. Under inspections, they can't do that. That. So this is all monitored. This is all monitored. It's like if you had a gun shop and you have an ATF cop sitting at the bar stool— well, unless he was Fast and Furious smuggling your guns to cartels, but assuming not that, but like assuming he was just a regular cop— like, you can't accuse me of selling illegal laser rifles from my gun shop when I've got a cop sitting right here. And that's the deal here, is they've got inspectors throughout the place. And then what happened was So we had that perfect Mexican standoff, right? Where Israel's saying, "Bomb them, they're making nukes." We say, "No, we won't bomb them, but we will if they do." And them saying, "Don't bomb us 'cause we're not." Then Trump called their bluff last June.

Really Netanyahu did, and then Trump jumped in the thing. And they really did set their nuclear program back quite a bit. Now, I don't think there's any proof that they destroyed the centrifuges at Natanz and Fordow. They're deep underground, under granite, and very hard to get at. That. But they got the elevator shafts and they got the air shafts. And they— if anybody was working down there, they were buried alive. The Iranians were incentivized to move giant boulders in front of the doors to protect them from missiles and attack and stuff like that. But so, um, all the reporting is that the Natanz and Fordow facilities are essentially just frozen right now. There's nothing going on there. There's open-source reporting from last November, and then there was a report of a— in the newspaper just 2 weeks ago, or maybe 3, based on classified information that there is nothing going on there. They—

you know what my deep concern is? Okay, no one said what you said to the president.

Yeah, see, that's right.

Not only that, you're right, that the people, these elected officials and these appointed officials that get into positions around him, they don't know this, right?

Which is crazy, dude. I'll tell you what, that New York Times article— did you read that one where where Netanyahu came and they sat across from each other at the table like this instead of Trump sitting at the head of the table, and Netanyahu gave him the whole presentation about how easy the war would be. So as soon as he left, then they said everyone else at the table said, "Don't listen to him, boss. He's blowing smoke, man, that this is going to be so easy." Now, they didn't really tell him, "Don't do it," but they told him, "Don't trust Netanyahu and that it'll be a snap the way that he promises," and all all that. But then, and look, it's Maggie Haberman and them at the New York Times. I mean, it seemed like a very well-reported story from, you know, the principals are talking to her about this stuff.

Well, this is what Joe Kennedy said as well, right?

Yeah. So they go around the table and Rubio has his say, the vice president has his say, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and whoever, but none, as you just said, none of them say what I just said. Right. And it really is is it's like 4 or 5 dudes in a room who may or may not know very much about this, really, and talking about it, and none of them man enough to say, like, "Mr. President, permission to speak freely here, sir.

Don't make this mistake, buddy." But my fear is that they don't know as much as you know about it.

I think they probably don't. Which is wild. I've been at this for a long time.

But that is wild. That is really crazy that you'd be in a position of making these decisions decisions without having this understanding of the fact that they're not even really capable right now of making nuclear weapons.

If any of them were capable of really knowing about it like this, it would be Rubio or Vance, or hell, Caine too, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He— all of these guys should have been able to say to the president, this is an illusory threat, sir. Wasn't Vance not there?

Wasn't Vance not there while this was going on?

He was not there for the Netanyahu part, but then he came in later, which were what— he was in Azerbaijan preparing for the war, right, was where he was, is why he was late.

Wasn't Azerbaijan— didn't they have some sort of a peace agreement with Armenia, um, at the time? And, oh, I don't know, both of them.

Oh, I don't know, I had missed that then. You're right then. I think—

I didn't know that he visited both of them, and that's one of the reasons why he couldn't come back. Okay.

Because I assume he was in Azerbaijan as preparation for the war with Iran.

If you visit Azerbaijan, you have to visit Armenia, otherwise it would cause some sort of an international conflict, right?

Yeah, because we support the hereditary dictatorship in Azerbaijan, because they help us run the oil pipelines west instead of north through Russia.

But it was also because they had made some sort of a peace agreement, correct? Didn't Azerbaijan and Armenia make a—

I don't know. Possibly. I mean, they're fighting over, or the contest was over whether Armenia is going to open this corridor across Armenia to an Azerbaijani— or could you— an Azeri enclave on the Turkish border.

Okay, France met in Baku. JD Vance and, uh, how do you say his name, Aliyev, uh, met in Baku to discuss the implementation of historic August 8th White House peace summit and reaffirmed their shared commitment to regional peace, security, and prosperity. Leaders signed the U.S.-Azerbaijan Strategic Partnership Charter which will strengthen bilateral relations between our countries. The United States remains committed to working with Azerbaijan to unlock the great potential of the South Caucasus region. So it was a peace summit. And so he met with Azerbaijan and he also had to meet with Armenia as well. This is February 10th. So this is right before the war. Okay. So yeah.

I guess I thought he was like just tipping them off. No. We're on your southern border in a week or two.

I'm pretty sure that the reason for this of this was that he had to meet with both of them, so he could not be there. So if I was J.D. Vance and I knew, or rather, if I was Netanyahu and I knew that J.D. Vance was really not into this war and didn't want to be a part of it at all, I would probably try to—

Time it for then, yeah.

What a good time, you can't even come back.

Yeah, that makes sense.

What does it say? Ah, the gathering had been deliberately small to guard against leaks. Other top cabinet secretaries had no idea it was happening, also absent was Vice President J.D. Vance, who was in Azerbaijan, and the meeting had been scheduled on such short notice that he was unable to make it back in time. Now, if I was Netanyahu and I knew that J.D. Vance was going to be in Azerbaijan.

You know, I don't really, you know, try to spend too much time on the symbolism of things, you know, leave that to the symbol-minded, right?

As Carlin would say. Symbol-minded? Yeah.

But like, isn't it meaningful that this is the Situation Room? The president's supposed to sit at the head of the table. Instead, Netanyahu sat there and Trump sat here opposite him and let him run the thing as an equal instead of—

Why do you think that is? Why do you think they have that kind of influence? I don't know.

I really don't know. I mean, they've been friends for a very long time. All the speculation about him being compromised, I mean, it's very possible, but unknowable really, Netanyahu would do that. I mean, he brought up Monica Lewinsky to Bill Clinton.

Did he?

Oh yeah. You know we're tapping your phone, homeboy. We got you on tape. You better let Jonathan Pollard out of prison. And then Bill Clinton refused to do it because George Tenet and the whole top tier of the CIA were going to resign over it if he did it. So he didn't do it. It was Trump that let Pollard out. And now Pollard is running to the right of Netanyahu. He's now announced that he's running for the Knesset over there. Over there.

So the reason why the Monica Lewinsky scandal went public? No, cuz no, no, I don't think so. Netanyahu said to have offered Lewinsky tapes for Pollard. Oh, they had tapes? What do you mean, they had like recordings? So what are you wearing?

It may have been after the scandal had broken, but they had him on tape with her because the only tapes were her on the phone with Linda Tripp that Linda Tripp had recorded, but they had him on the phone with her.

I forgot her name.

You know, the story is the first time Bill Clinton met Netanyahu in 1996, they were in the room for half an hour or something, and when they came out, Clinton was just completely exasperated and says, "Who the eff does this guy think he is? Who's the superpower and who's the client state?" Because Netanyahu had just told him like, "Look here, butler, here's your orders," for half an hour, just barked commands at Bill Clinton in a way that he was just like, "I can't believe this guy." Wow. It's hard to feel sorry for him. In fact, here's one too. Barack Obama was caught on a hot mic. This is the only time I've ever been sympathetic with Barack Obama. He was caught on a hot mic talking to the President of France. And he goes, "Oh man, you think you hate him. I gotta deal with him every day." And that was about Netanyahu?

About Netanyahu. Well, wasn't there an issue with JFK and Israel over their ability to acquire nuclear weapons? Weapons.

Yes. So he was demanding inspections of Dimona, their nuclear facility there.

To this day, they don't officially have nuclear weapons.

Correct. And the reason for that is because it's illegal for America to give aid to a nuclear weapons state that refuses to sign the Non-Proliferation Treaty. And so— and they don't want to do that. In fact, they did proliferate nuclear weapons to South Africa, who gave them up before the change after apartheid. Side. But if they openly possess nuclear weapons, then I mean, hell, it should already be illegal because everybody already knows. But the Glenn-Symington Law says that you can't give military aid to a nuclear weapons state that won't sign the NPT. That's America's treaty that we forced the whole world to accept and which, by the way, is in terrible jeopardy now, right? Because, you know, Saddam Hussein goes, "Look, my hands are up. I got nothing." They invaded him anyway. The North Koreans armed up with nukes. The Libyans said, "Well, look, we have some centrifuge material, but we have no operational program, but you can have our junk." They killed him. And then the Iranians said, "Look, we can make nukes, but we're not making nukes, so leave us alone already," and then we kill them. So America is the great destroyer of America's Non-Proliferation Treaty that we foisted on the world, by which the non-nuclear weapons state promised— the non-nuclear weapons states promised never to get them, and the nuclear weapons states promised never to share them.

So— and that's all in jeopardy now. That may not even exist anymore. The Poles are talking about getting their own nukes now because of Trump's pivot away from Europe in the middle of a war that America helped cause over there.

There. Jesus. So Israel officially doesn't have nukes.

Officially they don't, but everybody knows that they have at least 200. And in fact, I have that personally from Mordechai Vanunu, who is the Israeli whistleblower who went to prison. They kidnapped him in a honey trap plot, I think in England or in Italy. With chicks? With chicks. Yeah, yeah, yeah. They went to get him laid and they kidnapped him and they held him in solitary confinement for like 25 years or something. But he gave the whole story to the Sunday Times, the London Times, and they published it back in, I'm going to say '86. And then what happened was he was on Twitter. He may still be on Twitter. But I had an anecdote from Daniel Ellsberg, the great whistleblower of the Pentagon Papers and who was a friend of mine for a long time. He died a couple of years ago now, but he had an anecdote about Venunu. Vanunu that turned out was incorrect, but I asked Vanunu, "Is this correct?" And then he said, "No, it's just like I told the Sunday Times back then." And that was that they had 200 atom bombs by the time that he squealed on them.

And we know from Grant F. Smith's research, he got this through some FOIA documents. He's from the Institute for Research Middle Eastern Policy, really great researcher on this. And he showed that they had at least been researching hydrogen bombs, the big ones. Although there's no proof that they ever actually made H-bombs, and I don't think it's been reported that they've made them, but they at least were looking into how to.

Geez. And this was part of the conflict that JFK had with Israel.

Yes. And trying to register what was then, I think, the American Jewish Council, I believe, is what it was called, the predecessor to AIPAC, as a foreign— as foreign agents. And then they dissolved it and created AIPAC instead, I guess, is the long and the short of that, how they got around that. And there are people, you know, and it was, you know, I don't know, man, honestly, like I told you, I was more of a conspiracy theorist in the '90s, but I never did all read into JFK because there's just 100 books about it and 100 different theories. And I'm just not sure if LBJ hired French hitmen to do it, or if the Israelis got James Jesus Angleton to do it, or if Alan Wallace got some Cubans to do it, or what the hell, right? Like, I don't know. And so I really get, you know, I'm, uh, I don't, I don't think I ever really could figure it out. So, well, no one really, I just kind of leave that one alone. But Oliver Stone, there are a lot of people with motive. Yeah, you know what's funny about that? And I think he even admitted this at one point, man.

You watch the whole movie JFK— oh God— you watch the whole movie JFK and I'm sorry, man.

No worries. It's just Dr Pepper. I like a little stains on this table. There you go. It makes it live.

In the edit later, we'll just clip to Joe and back.

No, we'll just show the Dr Pepper. Why Dr Pepper? Why are you so into Dr Pepper? I should tell everybody, he brought a whole cooler filled with Dr Pepper.

I gotta have Dr Pepper, man, for my work here. Um, no, the, um, the, uh, you watch the whole movie JFK, right? It's got every theory under the sun in there. And then as soon as it's over, it says, "Produced by Arnan Milchan," who was an Israeli spy and who helped Benjamin Netanyahu steal krytrons, which are an essential part of these nuclear triggers for their weapons. That's who produced the movie. And so then someone asked Oliver Stone, like, "Hey, man, an Israeli spy produced your movie where you point the finger at everyone except maybe the Israelis. What's about that?" He's like, "Wow, you're right." I forgot exactly how he says it, but he acknowledges that, you know what, like, it could have been even that my own film was part of what put on there.

Well, especially when you consider the fact that his own film was made in what, the '90s?

Yeah, it came out in like '91, I think. Right. '90, '91.

So, back then, he probably didn't know as much as he knows now.

Right, yeah, probably never even heard the angle that it would have been the Israelis. But of course, you know, LBJ was very close to the Zionists and even had a Mossad agent for a girlfriend. I'm sorry, I forget her name, but one of his mistresses was a Mossad agent. And then he completely reversed all those policies as soon as he was in power. But of course, same thing with Vietnam. He reversed, well, or at least released any skepticism about Vietnam and said, let's go ahead and escalate there and all that. So like I say, that one's, it's too muddy for me to try to wade through and figure out exactly who pulled the trigger on that one.

The not-so-secret life of Matilda— is that how you say her name? Matilda Krim. That was his Israeli spy girlfriend. Yeah, I believe that's her. She looks like a dirty—

good old Phil Weiss. I love that guy. He's a great guy. That's a mondo— Weiss.net is a great website for anti-Zionist—

the no daylight policy, the US alignment with the Israeli government. So obviously today, in Trump's deference to Netanyahu was born under Matilda Crim's dear friend Lyndon Johnson. In the feverish weeks surrounding the 1967 war, Crim, who had once emigrated to Israel, and her husband Arthur, a leading fundraiser, were continually at Johnson's side and advised him on what to say publicly. I mean, you gotta give it up to a country the size of Rhode Island that has that kind of fucking pull.

They got their priorities straight, that's for sure.

Kind of amazing that they've been doing that this since the '60s and before. Yep.

I mean, I mean, they threatened Harry Truman. They bribed him and they also threatened him. They sent his— his daughter's memoir says the Zionists sent letter bombs to the White House, and they'd stop at nothing to get their state. Truman? Yeah. Wow. And they paid for his reelection too. In fact, there's a great scholar named John B. Judis, J-U-D-I-S, and he wrote a book about this. What a knock for his name. Yeah, it kind of— if you mispronounce it, you know. He actually also wrote— as long as I'm talking about him, he wrote a great article for Foreign Affairs in 1995 about the neoconservatives called "From Trotskyism to Anachronism," and it was about how now that the Cold War is over, who needs these crazy hawks anymore, right? And then these are the guys who took us— who launched the Iraq War a few years later 7 years later or whatever, he was saying they're a spent force, they should be by now, because they had been Trotskyite communists and then had moved to the right for the militarism and stuff. But he wrote a book about how Truman did this, and I think that was part of it, was this intimidation campaign.

And it was his own daughter that in her book, in her memoir, said that they sent letter bombs to the White House to intimidate. And they also paid for his election. This was carrot and stick kind of a thing. And then, yeah, look, if you ran the Israeli Foreign Ministry, you only have one priority in the world that outranks every other priority by a million billion, and that is your relationship with the United States of America. How friendly is the president? How friendly is the Senate? What do we got to do to make sure that everything stays in line? It's everything to them.

So let me ask you this. How— what do you think happens with Iran now? Like, how does this play out? Out, if you had to speculate?

Well, I'll tell you that, first of all, they're more likely to go ahead and try to break out and make an atom bomb now than ever before, although I'm not necessarily predicting that. I think, you know, Trump has proven, by calling their bluff on their latent deterrent, he has proven he's willing to bomb them. If they really break out and try to make a nuclear weapon, it's almost impossible that they could do that without us knowing, and then this president, and I think the next one too, would be willing to go back to war over cover it. As Barack Obama promised, he would absolutely launch a war against Iran if they broke out and tried to make an atom bomb. And, you know, he did an interview with Jeffrey Goldberg in The Atlantic called "As President, I Don't Bluff," where he's essentially begging Jeffrey Goldberg to tell Netanyahu and them, "I really, really mean it. If they try to make a nuke, I will bomb them, but just let me try to solve this another way." So I think That promise stands. This is the same as W. Bush, same as Obama, same as Biden, and I think that will continue to last into the next presidency.

If the Iranians are smart, what they'll do is they'll hold the same posture they've had, which is, "We're not giving up enrichment. We're not giving up our capability to make a bomb one day, but we're never going to call it that, and just don't do this to us anymore," and try to bet on the fact that Trump's only got 3 years left and the next presidents won't be so belligerent. And they won't call the bluff and go ahead and launch another war unless they break out and try to make a nuke. And as Darrell was saying, they're so much more powerful than all their neighbors conventionally, they really have no need to make a nuclear bomb. And they can, I think, successfully deter Israel even with their conventional missile force. And we saw them just absolutely blast the crap out of Tel Aviv.

Yeah. Very underreported, right? Right?

And I think, you know, they should not have killed the conservative old Ayatollah, right? And they kill him and apparently like the new Ayatollah, his son, they killed his mother and sister and, or mother and wife and baby. I mean, that's the new Ayatollah over there is, you know, he's got to be more radical than his father. He's got to be angrier at us than his father ever was.

—So what is the pathway to resolution?

—Well, this is— it's so unfortunate because honestly, you know, whatever, maybe some genius at some think tank has a better idea, but I really think that the thing to do is just quit. The thing to do is for America to just come home, for Trump to say, "Look, I won." —Cut their losses. —Yeah, but we don't really need these bases over there. The American people don't need to dominate the Middle East. We're not worried about the Soviet Union invading Iran and dominating the Gulf anymore, so forget the Carter Doctrine. Doctrine. Let's just come home. And I think if we do that, we bring all of our ships home, all of our planes, all of our bases, close them all up and come home. Then that shifts the entire burden onto Iran, that they still have to deal with the rest of Eurasia. We're not the one dependent on their hydrocarbon exports. Everybody else is. So are they going to now levy a tax to get through the Strait of Hormuz? Absolutely. But too bad, shouldn't have started this war then. Nothing we can do about that now, Willie Nelson said, you know. The way going forward is, and by the way, in Panama, they tax ships going through the isthmus there, through the Panama Canal.

The Indonesians, I believe it is, tax people going through some of the bottlenecks in the Indies. And so it's not entirely unheard of that the dominant power there is going to levy a fee on people coming in and out of there. Again, too late, too bad. I mean, America already— we had exactly what Marco Rubio says he wants now, we had on February 27th, and then they launched this war on the 28th, which by the way was the anniversary of the Waco raid. This is a pretty ugly time to start an aggressive war. And in fact, as long as I'm on that, and I know you know this, but it's really worth dwelling on, that they killed not just one, but two girls' schools. In their initial assault. They killed in one building, they killed 173 or 174, almost all little girls. And then in the other one was 20 more. And with that was an experimental new Lockheed missile that fires tungsten pellets out the front before it detonates or as it detonates in a creative new way to cut people to shreds. And the thing is about that is as there's this great media critic named Adam Johnson who pointed out this is equivalent to the Oklahoma City bombing, which, you know, for young people, Oklahoma was 9/11 before 9/11, right?

It was massive. And never mind, it was a bunch of FBI informants who did it and got away with it. That's another interview, Joe. But, but it was—

that is another interview, and that's a deep one.

Yeah, it is. And just the— I'm here for you, buddy. Yeah. But they kill 167 people, were killed in that thing, and it was just the ugliest damn thing, and it included like 20 kids in the daycare there, right? That was the COVID of Newsweek, was a firefighter holding a dead baby. So worst thing, the most traumatic thing for this country, and in the heartland of Oklahoma City and all that. Well, that's what America did to Iran, only the entire building full of kids, all 167 of them, a few teachers, but virtually all of them, little girls, girls. And another school down the street too, or relatively nearby, where they— at the volleyball game, where they killed even more. So now think about the Pearl Harbor attack, which Donald Trump himself compared it to Pearl Harbor, out of context, but still, it was a sneak surprise attack in the middle of negotiations on behalf of a foreign country over a lie, and then they killed a bunch of kids. It's like, imagine if at Pearl Harbor, if our story of Pearl Harbor, was that they sank all our heroes and drowned them down in their ships, in the hulls, stuck in their hulls down there.

But also, they wiped out schools full of 180 little girls, the children of those sailors who drowned at Pearl Harbor. Oh, and also they killed FDR that same day too. Oh, and also as a Catholic country, and he's also the Pope. Imagine how we would react to that. Imagine what our story of Pearl Harbor to this day would be. I'll tell you what our story of World War II would be. It would be that we kept nuking them till they were all dead, is what our story of World War II would be if that's how they had done us at Pearl Harbor. It's just somehow we just don't really think of it in that context, but we should. If that had happened to us, Again, just like we did a little on Ukraine there and the way America just absolutely pushes their luck. If Russia overthrew the government of Canada twice in 10 years because they kept voting wrong, we would invade Canada and nuke Moscow. And in fact, when you bring up the analogy, it's completely absurd, right? How ridiculous is it that the Russians would dare try to overthrow the regime in Ottawa, that they would dare threaten to try to kick us out of our bases in Alaska or any of these kinds of things?

Things, that they would go to war with the people of Vancouver who refused to accept the new coup junta. It's comic book crazy. They wouldn't dare. But we do that to them. You know? And we act like, as Dr. Paul said, if we go around the world killing people like this, bombing people like this, and we think that we can just get away with it and not have to suffer the blowback, then we do that at our own peril. And he was speaking for the government as a member of Congress at the time, that we're putting the American people in danger. By acting this way. It's completely crazy. Remember the Shiite fatwa that the old Ayatollah, the Ayatollah before last, last, Khomeini put on Salman Rushdie, the author of the book The Satanic Verses, where people have tried to kill him numerous times, including got his eyeball in one case. We've had a real problem with Bin Ladenite jihadi terrorism over the time. We have not had the Shiites. We have not had the Ayatollah Sistani in Iraq or the Ayatollah Khamenei declare that all good believers should attack the West now. They could do that.

That's the kind of fire that we're playing with. It's extremely dangerous. I mean, bin Laden didn't even really have a religious rank. He was just a rich guy who he had earned respect because he was wounded in battle and stuff. He had money and influence. Influence. But if the Ayatollah Sistani put out a full jihad, which I'm not saying he would do that, I don't have any real reason to believe that he would go that far, but he's been willing to stand up to the United States numerous times, especially during the war in the last couple of wars over there. And remember what happened the night that they started this war on February 28th, the next day on Saturday the 29th, or was it— I think it was Friday was the 28th, and it was like late in the night they started the war. And then Saturday, I believe, was the 29th, and an American immigrant from Sierra Leone, here in Austin, took an AR-15, put on a shirt with the Ayatollah and an Iranian flag on it. I didn't even know they had Shiites in Sierra Leone, Joe, but I guess they do. And he went down to 6th Street and he shot 18 people, killed 3 and wounded 15 people in an immediate blowback terrorist attack.

Call it backdraft. I coined the phrase in my book that if blowback means long-term consequences from secret foreign policies that the American people then don't understand and are left up to false explanations or left susceptible to false explanations, well then backdraft terrorism is when the when the consequences of your overt foreign policies just blow up right in your face. And, you know, frankly, like those 3 people were crucified for Israel, for their sins, and 15 more wounded. And I don't know how terribly wounded. For all I know, people are still in the hospital over that thing. And that was an immediate blowback terrorist attack from this war, just right away. And it's the kind of danger that our government continues to put us in through these interventions over there. At some point, all those sort of hypotheticals about, "Yeah, but what if Russia took over the world?" or "What if China did it, if it wasn't us or whatever?" Those have got to just kind of fall away by the wayside. There's no real reason to fear that in the first place. But also, who in the hell are we to stop it at this point?

Right? Another South Park reference. When Cartman is so scared by the Chinese display at the Olympics ceremony, he gets all paranoid that China's coming for us. So he recruits Butters to come with him to fight and keep all the Chinese away. And then over and over again throughout the episode, Butters keeps like closing his eyes and shooting some guy accidentally in the dick, just over and over again. And then by the end of the episode, Cartman says, you know what, just forget it, okay? If that's the best you can do, Butters, let's just stop. We're just going around— we're— this is not working, our intervention. It's just not.

What do you predict is gonna happen with Iran?

I don't know. I'm really worried. I mean, I mean, I try not to take Trump too seriously when he's, you know, or too literally when he's being hyperbolic, but he has threatened to nuke them over and over again, including just the other day. He said, "The country's going to have a glow around it, you know, when I'm done with them," or whatever. Do you really think he would do that? I mean, I— no, no, I don't. I'm not predicting that, but I think it's symbolic, right, of his frustration. He absolutely just should not have done this. And now he has no good way out of it. Right? He could just declare victory and it would be fine by me. In fact, there was a story in the Jerusalem Post, the end of April, I think, I think it was like April 28th, about how Trump ordered the intelligence agencies to do an estimate about what would happen if I just walked away. Right? And then they're looking into it. Well, just how bad will Iran exploit the new vacuum that we've created and the power and influence that we're handing to them, how bad will it really be?

Because he has no options to fix it. He just doesn't. You want a regime change in Tehran, you can drop a hydrogen bomb on the capital city and kill 10 million people and then claim the desolation is peace, or you can just forget it. And like, man, you know what? We're all tough and badass enough to kill all these people. We should be tough enough to admit when we screwed up then. Look at Afghanistan. We stayed for 20 because Washington couldn't admit that we can't win this war. There's only one way to tame the Pashtuns, and that is kill them all, and we're not willing to do that. So what are we doing? We're just losing slowly. And then what they do, they finally admitted it. They finally just said, "Fine, I guess we lost," and left. That's what we got to do here, but sooner is better.

Do you think that it's possible that this war will go on to the end of his regime, and then whoever comes into power in 2028 then gets out. God, I hope not.

I can't imagine what's gonna happen if this thing keeps on for 3 years, you know. This is a real flaw in our system, quite frankly, is like, if we had a parliament, we could just vote no confidence in this guy and put a new guy in there whose fault this isn't and try to get him to resolve it. Instead, all we can do is wait 3 years, wait for him to keel over of a heart attack, or wait for his own cabinet to overthrow him in the name of him being, you know, too demented to continue, which is not going to happen. That 25th Amendment, they always invoked that like they could do a coup against him for being a Russian agent or whatever back in his first term. They can't do that.

But if they didn't do it with Biden.

Yeah, if they didn't do it with Biden, he would have to be completely off his rocker and to a degree where his own cabinet is going to agree to overthrow him, which I just think is virtually impossible. So the good news is that he just flip-flops on anything. He just changes his mind about anything. In fact, when he announced the ceasefire. He said, "We're going to negotiate based on Iran's 11-point proposal." Like, okay, man, fine. Go from unconditional surrender to surrendering unconditionally, call it whatever you want. And he is good at that. You could call that a gift if you want to, politically, that he can just pretend like, "Yeah, no, I meant to do that." So what is the holdup?

What are they disagreeing on?

Well, he's got to deal with Netanyahu, right? The Master Blaster thing from Thunderdome. On his back shouting in his ear what he's got to do and what he's got to not do. In the 60 Minutes interview, he tells Major Garrett that, you know, we're not done, the war's not over until we get that uranium. And Garrett says, "Well, how are we gonna get it?" He says, "Trump promised me he wants to get it. He's going to get it." And of course, they have this— ever since they announced the ceasefire, The Israelis immediately escalated their bombing campaign in Lebanon just to destroy the ceasefire. This is what prompted Tucker Carlson to say that Trump has clearly been somehow enslaved by Netanyahu, that he's willing to put up with that. As Bill Clinton said, again, who's the superpower and who's the client state? Right. How is it we have a ceasefire deal and then you can come and veto it like this and then not be chastised and not told to get back in your corner, we're handling this. And I really just don't know the answer to that. Some people speculate that it's blackmail or it's just the bribery or he's just into it.

That he just, you know, he wants to be great. He wants to have a legacy. This is— I really should study more about this, but this is a part of libertarian economic theory called public choice theory, which is kind of a clunky name, but it just means that the public choices are still made by private individuals and they're acting based on what's good for them. Rather than what's good for the country. Like Strobe Talbot, we need those Lockheed dollars. We need those Polish votes. So we do a policy that ultimately is bad for the country, even though it's good for the Democrats at the time. And same thing here. What's good for the country is to just come home. But, and you can hear this just built in. People don't even question it. It's just built in, of course, to every single discussion about this. How are we going to do this in a way that it looks good enough for Trump that he's willing to accept his defeat here? Here, right? How can we spin it for him? How big of a gold medal do we have to give him? How big of a ticker tape parade do we have to give him?

How firm of a pat on the back and a congratulations do we have to give him for him to decide that it's okay to come home otherwise and without looking like too much of a jerk himself for what he's done here? And then, and having to live with it for 3 years, the aftermath of however it works out with Iran Iran newly dominant. And so, again, Bush put Iran up two pegs in Baghdad. Obama put them up two pegs by building the caliphate and then helping them destroy it again. And then, of course, al-Qaeda rules Damascus now, so that's a big hit against them. But what Donald Trump has done with this war is about at least equivalent to what W. Bush did in terms of enhancing Iranian power in the region. It's like the guy in the football game grabs the ball and then runs the wrong direction and scores the goal for the other team. You really think it's that bad? Oh, it's absolutely.

I mean, America, look, before— Despite the destruction of their nuclear— Absolutely.

Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. Because I mean, it's just as simple as this, right? On February 27th, the Gulf was open for business and the illusion of American conventional air and naval power kept it that way and nobody questioned it. It. It's America's dominated order. Yes, Iran has Iraq and they have Hezbollah in southern Lebanon, but hell, we even got Sunnis ruling in Damascus now. And so the GCC, and including Jordan and Turkey and Israel, this is America's empire in the Middle East. On February 29th, 30th— I mean, well, nope, sorry, there is no, uh, one leap year— on March 1st, 2nd, 3rd this year, all that was over. Over. I mean, Darryl Cooper again is, you know, we do this show Provoked every Friday night, and he said, listen, I'm hearing from my friends in the Pentagon. This was one week into the war. He goes, I'm here for my friends. This war is not going well. They're hitting all our bases. They've killed a couple of our guys, and they're hitting our runways and hitting our radars and hitting our planes. And we knew it then, right then, just— and I'm sorry, man, it's just true, told you so.

For 20 years 'all of our assets in the Gulf are up for grabs. They can reach out and touch us there, and there ain't a damn thing that we can do about it,' you know? And it just absolutely is true.

Scott, you're a real bummer, but thank you.

It's a lot of fun, innit?

Talking to me? It is. It's, uh, it's good to get your perspective, and I really wish someone had had your perspective before this all got started, at least an understanding of the ability to enrich the uranium and turn it into an actual weapon. But thank you very much. Tell everybody about your shows, where people could find them, where people could find you.

Absolutely. So I do The Scott Horton Show, which is my interview show, and Provoked with Darryl Cooper. And, um, where can people get those? Here on the YouTubes and on Spotify and all those things. And then I have I'm the editorial director of antiwar.com. I'm the director of the Libertarian Institute. That's libertarianinstitute.org. And for the deep, deep dive and the deep background on all this stuff, I have the Scott Horton Academy of Foreign Policy and Freedom at scotthortonacademy.com. And oh, you know what? I have them here if I can just show my books real quick. If I can find the zipper on this thing. Got these for you here. Got Fool's Errand on Afghanistan, Enough Already on the War on Terrorism, and Provoked on Russia and Ukraine.

Boy, those are some fat-ass books, dude. You do a lot of work.

I do. I have a lot of jobs. I work real hard on this stuff, um, and these have been very well received. You know, I'm, uh, I basically My job is— I was inspired by Bill Hicks like this. When I was a young kid, there's a great interview of Bill Hicks on Raw Time, which was the heavy metal show on the Access Channel here in town. And it was probably not too long before he died. And this is, of course, the days before the internet and everything, where he talks about the importance of seeing people get up there and tell the truth and not be afraid to tell the truth and set the example for other people. People. And, you know, at that time it was like to have a guy like him, a comedian, able to tell the truth on a platform where other people could hear it was just so exciting to even— it was like just breaking through this, this, you know, impenetrable force field. And then he was just saying, he says, wow, well, if that guy can do it, well, then maybe I can do it, and I'll get up there and I'll say what I think is true too.

And then that kind of deal. And so I've been more or less following that same path since Sí.

Well, thank you for all this because the amount of work that's involved in putting together these books and all the interviews and all the podcasts you've done, for most people to occupy their mind with the kind of information that's in yours, it's got to be very troubling. It's probably not so much fun. And it's also very important for people like me who haven't done that work to have access to it, to get an understanding of it. So thank Thank you. Cool.

Thank you very much for having me.

It's been great. We'll do it again, Scott. All right, bye everybody.