Coleman Hughes

(upbeat music) - Coleman Hughes, how are you, sir? - Yes, I'm good. - How are you, man? Thank you so much for coming in. - Yeah, my pleasure. You came on my podcast. I feel it's only fair to repay the favor. - That's right. Well, Coleman's podcast, by the way, if anyone is unfamiliar, is conversations with Coleman. Coleman's also an author, political commentator, musician, you do a lot of stuff. And as you were referring, I did your podcasts about, I think it was like right a year ago. - I think so. - I believe it was in October. It was right after Charlie got killed. I remember it was like a few weeks after that. So I think that would have been in October. - Okay. - Right? - Or was it after the, it was right after you got killed or? - A few weeks, I think like a few weeks after you got killed. I mean, I remember down at the point 'cause we were talking about whether it was gonna be a live show or a remote. And it was like, my whole team was going through, like we have a new security protocol for hat. You know what I mean? Like it was like a right at a hot time. - Yeah. - Not anyway, just saying that to place the date of it. - I think it's, it might be, it's within my top three most listened episodes of all time. - Wow. - And it had people come up to me on the street or people recognize me and say, you know, I love your episode, Dave Smith. And some of those people thought, thought like I agreed with me. Some of those people agreed with you. And then some of them said, you actually both made a lot of good points. So if that feedback is any indication, I think it means, hopefully we did something good and rare for the discourse in our line of work. - Yeah, that actually, like I, man, and I wanna say this with being like two self-congratulatory or self-important or something like that. But that means a lot to me. I've had a very similar reaction. Yeah, it was one of the biggest shows I did in 2025 for Shore and I did a lot of big shows that year. It also, I was, I said this on trigonometry. I did that show a few days ago. And I think Constantine just did your show as well, right? So I was talking to those guys and I did say, 'cause I had you guys both kind of in the same week. And of 2025, both those shows to me were like ones that stood out. Like two of my favorite shows that I did of the year where it was, I don't know, it was just used, I mean, you started the very beginning of our podcast. For anyway, I encourage people to go listen to that one if you're starting with part two, do part one and part two. But you started it by going, look, I've seen a lot of guys debate you who like, you're talking about issues and they're kind of going at you. I'm not doing that. We're doing issues. We're gonna like really get into this. And I just really appreciated the spirit of that. And I think that, and that'll be, I'll do my best to return the favor here, you know, today of course. Also, as you kind of got it there, there is just something to someone. It seems like today, it's a little bit of a weird thing. Like, if you, you know, there's these old clips back in, I don't know, I wanna say like back in like 2012 or something like that of like Tucker Carlson and Rachel Maddow, you know, arguing in a friendly manner on MSNBC. A few years later, that was kind of like unthinkable that they would even be in the same room. Same with Ben Shapiro and Tucker Carlson. Like a few years ago, you could have seen them kind of being fronted. Now it's like, and while tensions are up so high, I do tend to think, again, I don't want to put too much importance on me and you having a conversation. But I do think for like someone broadly speaking in your camp and someone broadly speaking in my camp to be able to say, hey, let's do a long form thing. Let's go through these issues. Let's, you know, at least try to press your perspective up against mine and see where the chips fall. It does seem to me that like someone definitely should be doing that. And there's not too many. I don't think it's it besides me and you who are gonna do this. - Right. Yeah, yeah, I totally agree with that. - Totally. - All right, also I do feel a little bit compelled to say, maybe before we get into, there's so much stuff to get into, but before we get into it, I do feel a little bit compelled to say in a weird way, there are also lots of areas that we really profoundly agree on. - Yeah. - That probably won't be the focus of today's show, but I have to feel like that's worth mentioning up top. - When I hear you talking about American politics from a libertarian perspective, I'm usually there with you like 75% of the time. - Yeah, well I know that I've seen some of your stuff you've done a lot maybe about as much as anyone of say like popular young political commentators to spread the work of Thomas Sol, who is one of my greatest influences. And I think it's like a generational genius, who is like I can't overstate it. Like if I think literally if you're going to talk about politics or write about politics for a living, Thomas Sol is like required reading. You shouldn't even be. This is my non-libertarian view. You should not be allowed in the room. - Devoured him in college. That sounded weird, Paws. I devoured his writing in college. And he actually, there was a Thomas Sol conference, one in his honor at Stanford at the Hoover Institution like about a year ago, and I went and I spoke, and I've written a lot of essays about Sol, and they intentionally did the concert like right where he lives. And he's such a rakeless that he didn't even come. Like he's Connellisa Rice was there to honor him, Clarence Thomas, who is his friend, Victor Davis Hansen, who is his close friend. They were all there to honor him and he just wasn't bothered to show me. Like okay, maybe he had a health issue or something, but he's pretty old these days. - He's very old these days. But he's also so famously reclusive that I just, you know, this guy never comes out. He's the number one question I've gotten on my podcast the past six years, when you're getting so along. I've tried, I've reached out through friends that I've gone on camping trips with him, and he doesn't respond, he's just one of one. But I think he had to be that level of stubborn in order to argue the way he was arguing back in the 1970s. - Yeah, 'cause he had. - People have come around to his argument, he's become famous in our circles, but in the 1970s, it was like him and basically him. I mean, there's Milton Friedman of course, but there was like, - But he also went into the cultural stuff in a different way than Milton Friedman ever did, you know? So like, yeah, I mean, economically, I guess there was Friedman there, and obviously Walter Williams did a lot of great work too. But you're right, I mean, it's a very small group, a very small group, and it is crazy, at least with say like, say center right to right, like the right half of America. Someone like, even as you say it like you, and Victor Davis Hansen, and whoever, like I'm sure Barry Weiss, and lots of people like this would probably speak of Thomas Sol with absolutely nothing but admiration. And also, if I brought him up in a circle of Tom Woods and Ron Paul and Pat Buchanan, and every single one of them would go, yeah, that Thomas Sol man, he's brilliant, like his contributions were just like invaluable. And so anyway, I don't, I do think that says something, very few people kind of could be regarded in both those camps, as like great thinkers and great men. The other thing is, of course, I think probably at least in the beginning part of your career, what you've been most famous for, is kind of somebody standing up against the woke insanity of our time, which again is something I just completely agree with. And I think is, I do, I said this to Constantine the other day too, there is no matter how much we disagree on issues of war and peace and issues of foreign influence and we'll get into all these things. And I do find these topics to be so important. But there is, I guess it is to me, for me personally, I guess it's like, there's like foreign policy, but there's also like, say, wokeness and COVID, where anybody who's like was really good on either of those issues, I do at least to some degree view as like a brother in arms who was fighting the good fight. I have young children, to me, this is not a game. This is like whether my kids are gonna be growing up in insane society, and I'm somewhat grateful to all the people who stood up against that. So anyway, I do wanna say on those issues, I think I think we actually probably have a lot of overlap in a different world where Israel got along with their neighbors more or something like that and we weren't involved in these wars. Maybe it would be like me and you are on the same camp fighting against other cooks who, yeah, maybe we will be in a few years now as they're coming back in a power. - Yeah, no, I agree with you about the woke stuff and maybe we could do another podcast about that. It's your show, your topic, so happy to talk about whatever. - We could talk about that a bit. In fact, I did wanna a bit talk about 'cause of course, we got midterms coming up next week. And so with the forecast B and that a lot of the wokes are gonna come back into power or woke 2.0 or maybe some version of whatever. So maybe we will spend some time in that. But let's start with the Iran War 'cause we talked a year ago and one of the things we spoke a bunch about was the 12-day war, which of course I should say, the June 2025 12-day war at this point, just so everybody is clear on, you know what I say, the 12-day war I'm talking about, the very short, less than two week bombing campaign between the Israelis and the Americans last June. Since then, there's been another war and we're still involved in this war. So I briefly kinda give my overview of it and then I'm curious your thoughts on this because there's been a whole 'nother war. When we were on the show last time, I did say at one point that I forget my exact words, but I did say like, this baby might be at halftime, something along those lines. We might be at halftime here, which again, I said might be, not that it was a foregone conclusion, seems like that was correct. So in this new war now, this is a bit different. This has been, this was from the very beginning launched as a regime change war Donald Trump announced on the opening of the war that that's the goal here. regime is going and he also demanded total surrender. And then said he did tell the people, he didn't exactly just say people rise up. He said, "Take shelter for the night, but the government's going to be in the hands of the people." So, there were other clear war aims like getting rid of the missile program, their support for Hezbollah ending that, ending the nuclear program at all. That was the original zero enrichment standard. The nuclear dust as Donald Trump likes to call it, which I do not think is actually a scientific term, but referring to the enriched uranium, the gas and the metal that's left over there. And then, did I miss a major war aim there? Anyway, those war aims, none of them have been achieved. The new problem now has come up, which is the Strait of Hermos. Of course in the week of the memorandum of understanding the Trump administration, and this is a little, it's been so schizophrenic that I, but I want to just make the point. In the week of the memorandum of understanding, they walked away from all of the war goals, all of the original negotiating hard lines. You know, Donald Trump, for a week, was a nuclear, everyone gets to enrich some uranium. I mean, come on. What are we going to say? They can't have a civilian nuclear program, missiles. We got Saudi Arabia's got missiles. They got to have some missiles. The first line of the memorandum of understanding, or the second line, included Lebanon, meaning, we've walked away from they're not going to support Hezbollah. As Marco Rubio has said over and over again, now the war is all about the Strait of Hermos, which wasn't a problem before the war. All the original aims have been, you know, abandoned. This new aim is now what we're struggling to achieve. This is not the 12-day war. It's probably already has a price tag and the hundreds of billions of dollars kind of hard to calculate, but we could get into that. Americans have died. Iranian children have died all of this. So I guess, listen, I want to give you all the time in the world and all the room to answer and give your thoughts on this. But from my perspective, I'm curious what your thoughts on this war are, whether you can defend this one in a way that you could defend the 12-day war. And I'm curious if maybe, because clearly from my perspective, there'd at least be something here to say, the non-interventionists had a point. You know, the people arguing against going down this path really did have a point because what a disaster and against the will of the people and it's obviously clearly having disastrous effects on the administration. So what are your thoughts? Sure. So I think I fully agree with you that non-interventionists have a point and I'll tell you exactly what point I think they have and I've always thought this. But first, I think it is important to separate the 12-day war from this war. I think they're separate, not only in their objectives, they're separate in their causes too. Because when you said we were at halftime, you might be tempted to give yourself credit for a good prediction and I get that, but at the same time, Iran's economy not collapsed in December and run away inflation and all these things that we didn't really control. Probably the first domino doesn't fall on this regime change war, right? So not all of that was predictable from the POV of the 12-day war. This regime change war, I've always felt, while it does, you know, if we could buy a weaker Iran for no American lives and a very cheap price, it would be in our interests. So in that sense, it's directionally in our interests, but will the American people tolerate a war simply to weaken a regime that wants to ultimately destroy us? My view on that was the answer is no, the American people won't see that trade as worth the price. Even if the pro is in the direction of our interests, the cons are too big. Now, if we could get regime change in Iran and get a friendly regime, let's say a regime that was at minimum not chanting death to America and not wanting our destruction as a matter of their ideology, that would be worth paying some price for. I don't know exactly what price, but it would be worth military intervention for. As it stands right now, and this is the point that the interventionists, I think, you know, I think the interventionists, since the anti-interventionists, since Vietnam, have had the point that we overestimate our own ability to accomplish these things. And the ability to accomplish it is, should must be part of any analysis, right? So, if we could have accomplished Vietnam like South Korea, then maybe it would have been worth it, but we didn't. And we went on and on and on much longer than we knew we were likely to fail. So you can separate the goal from your likelihood of actually achieving the goal. The goal might be worthy, but if you're very unlikely to achieve it or delusional about your chances of achieving it, that's the legitimate critique that the anti-interventionists almost always have, at least in the past 60 years or so. So does that make sense, is it? Yeah, well, okay. So I agree. And I think I kind of almost said this when I brought up, like I wasn't trying to overbrage of bringing up halftime, because I said maybe we're at halftime, and then I did prep as well. I said, not that it was like written in stone that we had to be at halftime. And in fact, as I, which I think maybe is just in the spirit of being charitable, I admitted this to Coleman too. Innocent. Excuse me, I'm sorry. I admitted this to the constant in too. Oh, you're Coleman. Sorry about that. I did know that. That look, essentially, the big warning about the 12-day war from people like me, the point that we were making, which I guess now has been demonstrated, although every analyst knew this was true, was just that Iran has these options. Iran could do this what they've done now. They could have done that after the 12-day war. They essentially, in a way, Trump called their bluff and it turned out they were bluffing. They were not going to do something big. In fact, at least the old Ayatollah was going to call ahead, give your warning strike, give Trump the off-ramp. So the concern was that risk, essentially from my conception, not saying you'd agree with this, but you played Russian Roulette in one, you know, it didn't go off. So yeah, you could have gotten away and stopped there. So I'll certainly agree with that. And it could have, look, whatever you find, whatever damage was done to the nuclear facilities, whatever was benefited from the 12-day war. Yes, I guess they could have gotten away and stopped there. However, it's a little bit more complicated than that because, you know, once you empower a president to do this thing once, they are more likely to do it a second time. And of course, all of the people involved, as we were arguing last time, you know, for our partner in this war, the Israelis. Their goal here wasn't just to degrade the nuclear capabilities of the country. Their goal always was some type of regime collapse. And so that's also sticky. But I want to get into all of this. But there's a couple of things you said there that I just want to touch on. So look, there's something about, it's an important point to make and to separate the two things out. Well, you said the aim of a war versus the logistical reality of whether you can pull this war off. But you'd have to admit that after being separated, those things must be reused back together. Because if you have no capability of achieving something and you put your boys and harms away in the attempt to, like, there is something immoral about that. So in other words, dude, the Wall Street Journal, and I can't remember, man, double check me on this internet, it might have been the day before the war was launched, but it was certainly the week of the war being launched. They had reported top Pentagon officials telling Donald Trump that our interceptors are dangerously low for this mission. You know what I'm saying? So while I get your point of separating the two, there's also in area where you go, this is like criminally negligent to have not known this or to, to be on the record saying no one could have foreseen the straight of her most being closed or something like that. I would also add that in this war very clearly, and I don't really think you're going to deny this all the, please tell me if you, if I'm wrong, Trump is clearly lying to the American people. This is, this is fundamentally, and it is a, it is a wapper, greater than anything Bush or Obama ever told to get into war. The current lie is that Iran was two weeks away from a deliverable nuclear weapon and they were going to destroy the world. It started with Israel, then it went to LA and Sanfa, by the way, he got a raw deal where people were saying he was telling them to nuke LA. That's not what he was saying. He was saying they would have, they would have already nuke LA. He was just telling the biggest lie in the 21st century to get us into a war, keep us in a war. He wasn't inviting the nuclear attack. Just for my perspective, I think it was an exaggeration because whether they were two weeks away or not, and I'll grant that they, let's just say they definitely were not two weeks away. So that's a lie. Okay, so then there's, there's no reason to enrich uranium to 60% other than to get a bomb. Right. I think that's true. Yeah, it's definitely true. You could enrich it. You could enrich it to negotiate back down. Okay, but what's the threat you're using in the negotiation? That you could potentially break out. Yes. What's the potential? The potential is the bomb. Right. So in a negotiation, if I, if I have a knife of, of, of, whatever, of, of, foot away from your neck, he said, well, he hasn't moved his arm yet. He hasn't actually shown me. He wants to cut me. Well, what's the threat of having the knife out, having 60% in rich uranium is the equivalent of pulling a knife out of your pocket, right? And this is, this is the point I tried to make on the podcast last time, which is literally in the entire history of nuclear proliferation. There are zero examples of countries enriching that many kilograms of uranium to 60 and then stopping and not getting a bomb. There are zero examples of it, right? So reading Iran's overall goal of getting a nuclear bomb as a commitment, whether it happens in two weeks or two years or five years, that is accurate. Now saying we have intelligence that says they're sprinting now, that's a lie. But he's saying the second part that's a lie. Yeah, and I'm with you on that. So once you know that you have a regime that wants to destroy America, they would like to destroy America, right? If you're saying we shouldn't use military force to prevent that nuclear goal, then you're essentially saying we should never use the military to prevent any possible regime from getting a nuke. Okay. Is that you? Let me follow me. Yes, I follow, but I completely disagree. So there's so much here. So I'm really glad. Okay. Two different things. Let's just separate them. We got all the time in the world. So let's do both of them. Not all the time in the world. I mean, you could talk for 12 hours, but we have time. Okay. So first things first, you're not objecting to it. Again, even if you want to say it's an exaggeration, I mean, well, yeah, that's another euphemism for a lie. The claim he's making is that he's also adding in that they killed 100,000 protesters at this point. He is blatantly lying. None of this is true. And this isn't even like, and we can get into all of this in a little bit, but this isn't even like weapons of mass destruction or something. It's not even like they had a group that formed this consensus amongst the foreign policy establishment. Nobody believes this. Nobody's pumping out this lies. Nobody, like it's just Donald Trump saying it. So my point anyway, just being, look, that even you are conceding this is a lie to support this war. You kind of have to support a commander in chief who's lying us into it. And so I don't know, I don't see how you can kind of get away from that. There's no intelligent person who's going to defend the war, which you're not like, you're certainly an intelligent person. You're not really defending the war. But nobody can really say this is a lie. This is a lie. I defend the 12th day war. For sure. Right. Right. Okay. This one. Let's get into the nuclear program stuff. Okay. Hold on. Okay. So do that. But then let's do it. Okay. But to understand Iran's general intention of getting a nuclear weapon, that is a major load bearing fact in all of our decisions toward that country. Okay. Again, like to, to belabor this analogy, it would be a lie if I said this person is going to stab me in the next two seconds. That let's say that's a lie. But they have pulled out a knife. They've pulled out a knife and they're giving me that look and they say, one of these days, I'm going to kill you. Okay. So they, I don't, it is a lie in that scenario to say that they're swinging at me right now. Right. But it isn't a lie to understand this as an adversary that wants to destroy you, that you should use force and pay a cost to prevent from getting the ultimate weapon. Okay. So to be clear, I also disagree with the second part. Let's do that. But what Trump saying is a lie. That's just not true. And nobody can say it. So he was not saying the, I want the Iranians to know he was saying that. He was saying that. I'm saying what, what popular liberal commentators pretended he was saying is not what he was saying, but he was lying the country into war, which is still pretty bad. Not quite as bad as inviting your own city to be nuked. Okay. Let's go to the nuclear program now, because this is a, you said this in the first time we are together. I don't know that I had the best response for it. But again, a lot of this, I've thought about some of these arguments and I come back to, with most of the stuff we disagree on, either I think maybe we're talking past each other or maybe, I don't know, maybe I just fundamentally disagree. When you say no one else has ever gone up to 60%, and not developed a nuclear weapon, that is a correct factual statement. It's also true that there are other nuclear threshold states of Brazil, Japan, South Korea. So there are, there are the nuclear thresholds, but you're right. Nobody's in rich. Nuclear threshold state. What does that refer to? Meaning that they have, they have a nuclear program. Oh, sure. They've developed that, they've demonstrated they can master the fuel cycle. They're in rich, they're rich in uranium. They're compliant with the non-proliferation treaty, but they don't have a weapons program, right? And look, there is part of this. And when I say nuclear threshold state, they don't enrich to 60%. Correct. Correct. But so the reason that term is used is because, no, for, listen, Japan, yes, they might, this is a, they have a energy program, but they are also absolutely letting it be known. Hey, we have mastered the fuel cycle. No, they're not enriching up to 60%. But anyway, so you make the correct statement that they've enriched up to 60% where no one else has done that until breaking out for a bomb, but it seems like you almost fit it. You leave it there. What is the implied actual argument there? So yes, they went up to a level, no one else, I'm saying that doesn't prove anything. Is that they've announced their long-term intention to get a nuclear bomb? No, they had it. They've said they're not going to get a nuclear bomb. No, no, no, what I'm saying, you could say whatever you want to enrich is to announce effectively de facto, to announce your intention to get a nuclear bomb. I don't agree with that. Now, let me ask you a question. What other purpose is 60% enriched uranium for? Again, like I said, to negotiate it away. It's either to threaten it, negotiation only works if at some level, you either are willing to go through with a threat or you want everyone to think you're willing to go through the threat. Or you're saying, yeah, okay, so you're saying you just know that they're bluffing. No, what I'm saying is this. Well, let me ask you a question, just to your whole world view. Why didn't they go up to 90? Why didn't they break out to weapons grade? Why did they stay at 60? If you have a long-term goal to get a nuke, one you do it matters a great deal. Okay. It might not make sense to swing the knife right now. It might make more sense to buy my time and swing it at a time my opponent is weaker. Or maybe look, okay, just for people to know this, right? So if anybody doesn't have this information, right? So just keep the timeline in your mind here. Donald Trump tears up the JCPOA, shouldn't say people say tears up. He exits the JCPOA in 2018, okay? There's still IEA inspections going on this whole time, up till 2025. It's not till 2021, after the Israeli attack on Natansk, that the Iranian start breaking out and enriching. So just to be clear for everyone here, it's 2018 to 2020, it's three years, they sit without going up to 60%. So the Trump Biden switch was at that time too, which may have been part of their calculus. Yes. Quite possibly. But it's saying what, but it's three. It's right at that time. It's three years. Yeah, quite possibly. It's three years before they start enriching up to 60%. That's in 2021. It's then four more years that they sit at 60%. So now they're also negotiating this entire time. They're negotiating. And in fact, a bunch of it, there's been reporting on a bunch of different orders offers that were made. I think probably the best one, Tree Deparcy, had a great article on this. But I think the best one was Ageneva, which would have been, even after the 12-day war, okay? But before this war, where they essentially got the deal that was made was offered, was back to three point, whatever, enrich uranium for, you know, what you need for just the civilian energy program, not even the medical stuff, down to three point, whatever, percent enrich uranium and deluding the rest of their stockpile is what the Iranians had officially offered. And the American demand was zero enrichment, and this is what set this whole thing off. But I'm saying you're sitting here and saying that they went up to 60%. Number four, it can be concluded by the laws of logic that they were going to go up to 90. And I'm saying, no, they had just by every other example of nuclear development ever. No, but it's not really. There's not really other examples of that. I mean, I don't know. You always taught us nuclear countries. But there's one that went up to 60, but there's, they were once in a deal that kept them down to three point, whatever, they offered to get back into a deal that keeps them down to three point, whatever. The one thing they wouldn't agree to was what the Israelis insisted, which was the poison pill that they abolished their entire civilian nuclear program. We all knew that wasn't going to be accepted. And I don't know. I just don't see exactly what your claim is that because they went up to 60, therefore what is that proof of? If someone whips out a knife and they're threatening you, they might also have other goals. They might also want your money. But if you're playing with all the marbles, and every other time you've seen this situation, it indicates a desire to get a nuke, then it is in the American interest to prevent them getting that nuke. It is very much in our interest. Right? That's my argument. Well, so I agree that it's, look, by the way, we would probably totally disagree on what we should do in order to achieve this. But I agree it's in the American interest. I think it's in the human interest, probably, you never know exactly how things are going to work out, but probably it's in the human interest for a round to not get a nuclear weapon. But again, we're sitting in a situation where, again, this is the, the intelligence since 2007, and the CIA didn't just find this, but they put out the report that the Iranians have abandoned nuclear ambitions. They're not trying to get a nuclear weapon. The Mossad even conceded that they agreed with that at the time the year of, after we discovered their nuclear program in 2003 and engaged them on it. Sure, sure. Fine, fine. They were not disclosing that. Okay, so just if we could do this one for it, we can get into that too. But just this one first, yes, they went up to 60%. But from all indications, they were willing to come back to the table and negotiate. And instead, we insisted on this ridiculous demand that I got to say seems like was only stuck in there by people who wanted this to fall apart and wanted the war, that they don't have a nuclear program at all. If you wanted to avoid them having a nuclear weapon, then why wouldn't you want IAEA inspections that could guarantee they were going to be back down at three points on it? Guarantees a little bit too strong of a word, but certainly give you a lot more oversight than you otherwise would have had. I don't get the argument that because they went up to 60, therefore it's inevitable that like everyone else, they're going nuclear. If they, again, like. Like I said, if they wanted to, they could have already done it. I know, but no, here's the thing. If you have a goal, like I said, it doesn't mean you're going to go for it right now, right? There's all sorts of reasons why you might want to wait for a different American president. You might want to wait for the geostrategic balance of the world to shift a little bit more in your favor. You might want to, as North Korea did, you might want to wait till you have basically a kill switch, a bunch of missiles pointed at a soul that can't be defended so that you know you have insurance in the case of a breakout, right? So there's all sorts of reasons why you could have a goal, but not execute it right now. Now when it comes to IEA inspections and this kind of thing, my argument would be that the history of the CIA and MI6 being almost totally surprised by the nuclear programs of other countries, their history of failure on this point is pretty bad. That's a good point. That's a fair point. Yeah. They thought the Soviet Union was five years behind where it was. They thought China was behind where it was in the 1960s. They didn't learn about South Africa's nukes for 14 years until South Africa just came forward and say, "Hey CIA, we've had seven fully operational nukes." I'm sorry. I just have a spoiler to it. It's not. I'd agree with actually what you're saying at this point. It's just so funny that because all everyone knows about the CIA is then starting illegal wars and killing people and all this horrible things. But just so you guys know, they're also really, really bad at intelligence. I'm sorry. You've got to be honest. It's all relative. I guess. No, but you're right. They didn't see the collapse of the Soviet Union coming. I mean, yes. There's a lot of mess. Isn't the logical deduction from this, at least one potential deduction, that waiting until Iran makes the decision is not a rational policy if you agree we should prevent them getting a nuke. Because when they make the decision, there is far less than 100% guarantee that our intelligence will even know about it. All right, guys. 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And not only did super power reduce their price down to just $199, but for a limited time, our listeners can get an additional $20 off with the promo code problem. Head to superpower.com and use the promo code problem at checkout for $20 off your membership. All right, let's get back into the show. Well, the thing about the reason why it's a real apples to orange comparison here is that we didn't have international inspectors at the nuclear facilities in any of these countries that you're talking about. So we weren't having real updates like me and you can sit here and be like, they're at 60% enriched uranium because I can read an IAEA report where they just inspected all of the labs know exactly where they are. It's around. IAEA had said they were out of compliance over and over and over again throughout the late 20. What are you talking about? Okay, I can finish. I finished your sentence before I said IAEA has censored Iran in the past like five, six years, several different times. Yeah. Yeah, but it's always again, but then it's always guys are fucking with us essentially. Yeah, but have you actually like read the conclusions of the reports because I have. And they're like, yes, there are, there have been issues with it. There was one particularly right. There's the big one that the Hawks love to bring up, right? There was the one and again, double check me on this because I want to say it was 21. It might have been in 22, but there was one where they came and they had found that you might have read about that. In fact, you probably have heard this that they found that there were some trace particles where the uranium was spun up to like 80% or something like that. And then they had this whole thing, you know, where they're like, look, the Iranians gave us this reason. We're saying this right. They're very hard on them. They come back the next month have this intense round of inspections and then release this whole new report and they go, look, the Iranians are claiming that this was unintentional and spun out here. And that is very plausible. But then I'm sure, after that, there was another censure by them by the IEEA, IEEA, right? I don't believe so. I believe that was the last one. I could be wrong. What year was that? This, I believe. Double check me out. I think it was 22. No, there was, there was one after that. Was that okay? I'm, I'm pretty sure. The bottom line, dude, is that the conclusion always of all of this was that Iran has not made the political decision to start developing a nuclear weapon. That's exactly what Tulsi Gabbard said in her threat annual assessment. They, a couple months before the 25 June 12, they walked in. You bring this up a lot, but you, you, you, you don't mention what Tulsi Gabbard said in the next two sentences, which is that the taboo on getting a nuke in Iran is gone and they have enriched so much uranium, it's unprecedented for a non nuclear country. That's what she said. But that's a fact. But that's, but that doesn't imply anything. But that doesn't imply what you think it implies. Okay. What do you mean by that? All she's saying is that they've enriched up to 60%. That's what that means. Yes, they've enriched higher. That's another people have. That's unprecedented. Yes. Other non nuclear states have not, other non nuclear armed states have not enriched. But that's like saying, people who don't want to stab you, they almost never bring out a knife and wave it around. But these guys are bringing out a knife and waving it around. Oh, not really. They haven't made the political decision to stab you yet. Having to run at you. They haven't made the decision to run at you. I just think it's a long way. How long are you willing to wait? This is actually given that your intelligence agencies have a horrible track record of seeing the moment where they try to run forward. Okay. But just, okay, there's a few things in here, Coleman, that I just, first of all, the example of pulling out a knife and having a civilian nuclear program are just apples to oranges. One is aggression and the other one isn't. And if you talk about 60% isn't a civilian nuclear program. That's a weapons nuclear program. No, it's not. Yes, it is. Can you make a nuclear weapon out of 60%? No, but you do. I think, actually, technically, you need to cross that threshold to go to 90. Right. But in order, okay, the only people who have ever gone that far are the ones that get weapons. Again, you're just making the statement over. I agree with it. It's a factually correct statement, but there's an implication that there's an argument attached to that. What is the argument attached to that? The argument attached to that is when they, if you're trying to model the world, you're trying to predict the world, right? You think like a beijen or whatever, okay? You see someone behaving a certain way. You say, okay, when other people have behaved this way, what has that signaled about their intentions? Well, in every single case, when someone enriches to 60%, they're going to get a bomb. Yeah. So you follow me. You're taking one simple data point and drawing this broad conclusion out of that. You're leaving out the fact that if you want to use your analogy, the guy pulling out the knife is also screaming, I'll put the knife away. If you just stop fucking with me, if you just stop threatening me, I will put this knife away. I've put it away before you, by the way, you murdered the guy who's touching my right shoulder and the guy who's touching my left shoulder and you've been threatening to murder me for a lot of years. You know, you're omitting a lot of things here. The bottom line here, Coleman, is that the intelligence said they haven't made the political decision to get a nuclear weapon yet. If they wanted to break out to 90% weapons grade uranium and start the process of building a bomb, they'd have to either, at the time, this before 12 they were. They would have had to either kick the inspectors out or do it with them still there where the IAEA would have announced it to the world. We had more than enough time if they had decided to break out to have that information. If I don't agree with this, it has been consensus amongst every single US president of my lifetime, including Barack Obama, the one who got into the JCPOA, and in fact, this was his big selling point that he would yell to the Israel lobby and all the hawks who hated him while he was doing it. He said, "If Iran ever broke out, I will go to war with Iran to stop them from getting a nuclear weapon." Iran always kind of knew that if they did that, we'd be here now. They were coming to the table to make a deal. If you really don't want a nuclear Iran, you didn't have to sneak attack them in the middle of negotiations. Maybe we're talking about each other again. No, I don't think we're talking past each other. I think I understand what you're saying. Is there anything Iran could do? If you can see that when they make the political decision hypothetically to go for a nuke, there's far less than 100% chance that we will know about it or that MI6 will know about it because we've missed half of those in history. out anyone knowing? I don't see how that falls. I've never heard anyone make that argument. Like, perhaps they screw with the inspectors. Again, I'll say this. Is there any behavior? Despite the best critiques of Douglas Murray against me, I do admit when I'm not an expert and like, maybe that is the case, I've read about this relentlessly. I've never heard one expert even insinuate that it would be possible for them to break out to weapons grade, develop deliverable nuclear weapons while under IAEA inspections without them knowing about it. I think the crux of our disagreement is at some-- But is that the kind you're making? No, not necessarily, not necessarily. But the crux of our disagreement is that for you, you would have to see something more. You don't consider enriching to 60% solid evidence of a goal to acquire a nuclear weapon. Just to be clear, it's not happening in a vacuum. It's with all these other factors. If you could become convinced that, you know what? The Iranians, they're going for a bomb. It might not be today, it might not be tomorrow. But they're strategy, their geostrategic strategy includes a strong actual goal to get a bomb. And they might deceive us to get this, they're going to pull out all the stops to do it as cleverly as possible. But I'm pretty convinced they're going to get a bomb. If you became convinced of that, then you would feel that military intervention targeted to the nuclear program was justified. No, I am not saying that at all. No, I'm not saying that we should. No, I don't think them developing a nuclear weapon would be-- but let me just be very clear, Carol. It's-- I would not support that war. I would not call-- I wouldn't think the people are as full as shit, I guess, who are supporting it, because they at least have a case, because in your hypothetical, they are working toward a nuclear bomb. And you've become convinced of this. And I become-- OK, but again, I just really do want to harp on the point, because I think it's a very important one to make. I am operating under the assumption, and I think I'm right about this, that it is impossible for the Iranians to break out to weapons grade enrichment, develop a deliverable nuclear bomb while under IAEA inspections. They'd have to kick the inspectors out. And so we would have this big warning, this big indication that they've stopped complying. So that does make a really big difference toward this hypothetical. But in this hypothetical, no. I don't think, again, if we may have had some bad intelligence on this, and you're right about the bad intelligence. But it's not as if we didn't know that Mao Zeytong was attempting to get nuclear weapons, or that-- No, no, no, no, no, no, no, I'm agreeing with that. One is accrucial, but-- Sure, sure. But I'm just saying, like, Mao Zeytong, Joseph Stalin, Kim Jong-il, it was under Il. Yes, Kim Jong-il. I mean, amongst the worst madmen in history have developed nuclear weapons and had them, I don't think that's good. I'm against that. I'm for doing whatever you can do, short of a war to stop that. I'm for doing a lot of things to stop that. I should, let me walk that back. But no, I don't think you launch a war of aggression, a war of choice over that. That is not in line with my conception of adjustment. We might have a semantic disagreement here, because I'm not necessarily saying launch a war. I'm saying use military force to prevent it, like blowing up a nuclear facility, assassinating a top scientist, something like that. We would consider that a nuclear war if anyone did it to us, and I consider that an act of war. OK, so you're against the use of military force to prevent Iran getting a new period. Yes, correct. Oh, OK, I misunderstood some things you said earlier. No, I wasn't arguing they weren't there. I'm arguing that's not the scenario anyway. No, no, if you're asking me hypothetical, if you're asking me the hypothetical, no, I still wouldn't be for a war in that. If you haven't been attacked, it's not a just war. And that, you know, so many development. When you're the only country in the history of the world, we shouldn't use our military and any capacity to enforce nuclear non-proliferation, in particular among the countries that have declared themselves to be enemies of us. I think that just let them all get nukes. It's not a matter of just let them all get nukes. And in fact, I think the use of American force has done much more to incentivize nuclear proliferation than it's done to limit it. But no, I think comment for the only country who's ever used nuclear weapons in a war in partnership with a country who secretly has nuclear weapons and is not a member of the non-proliferation treaty to go around the world attacking launching wars of aggression against people for-- again, not on the path to-- but in your hypothetical, on the path to getting nuclear weapons, no, I just don't endorse anything about that system. So if the people in charge of America agreed with you, they would try to get some kind of Iran deal. But they would understand that they're completely toothless if Iran decides I'm out of the deal. I'm going to get a nuke because Dave Smith is president. He's against-- which wouldn't be bad on every issue. But Dave Smith is president. We turn around some things. He's said that we're never going to use military force to prevent anyone getting a nuke. We're not launching the laws of aggression. So we're just going to pull out of this and-- Maybe not, you know. If I do find myself president of the United States from America-- I probably wouldn't advertise that exactly the way you've said. I feel a little bit more comfortable saying it. You wouldn't say it out loud. OK. I don't know that it would be wise to advertise it that way. That's interesting. Why wouldn't it be wise? So why wouldn't it be wise? Because you want them to think you might use military force, right? Well, listen, again, you're right. Well, why wouldn't it be wise? Well, because in that situation, perhaps I would, I don't know. We're in a weird hypothetical territory now. Can we get back to the real world of Iran? The war we launched over them, not getting nuclear weapons. We can, but I'm trying to understand your position. I don't think-- Would you or wouldn't you authorize force if you really believe they were about to get a bomb? I've just said you'd been very clear about it. No, I was-- I'm being kind of talking about how I wouldn't-- as president advertise, you can do whatever you want. I won't use force. I don't think that I think-- But it's interesting that you look-- Well, come on. Let me just say it's not-- No, you realize it's interesting, because you're admitting that it behooves us to be perceived as willing to use force. No, I'm not. I'm saying in some scenario, it hypothetically could. No, America has been using a whole lot of force over the last 25 years, Coleman, as I'm sure you're quite aware. And I don't think we've done anything to solve these problems. But look, again, we could spend some more time on why I don't think it's theoretically justified to launch wars of aggression over a country developing a weapon that we have. But I just want to stick here a little bit more to the real world stuff that we're arguing of over the, say, the 12-day war, the nuclear program, and all these thoughts. I want to move on, because I've got a bunch more topics that I want to head. Do you not-- I guess I don't know. You have the 12-day war. There's this threat with whatever-- however you perceive them going up to 60%. Maybe let me ask you a question like this. If it were the case, let's say we could have gotten back into a JCPOA-style deal, right? Let's say that, which by a whole lot of reporting, that is the case that this was offered. And what was insisted on by the Americans was 0% enrichment. And I'm sure you've write a bunch about this. This is, again, not really disputed. This is Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, New York Times. This is literally what the negotiations right before the 12-day war, and right before this current war were about. If it is the case, as I think is fairly strong argument, there is. But if it is the case that Iran would have gotten into a JCPOA deal, let's say it's not even your favorite JCPOA deal. Let's even say there were some sunset provisions that you think were a little bit too weak or whatever. But they were willing to dilute the enriched uranium. They were willing to bring it down to 3.35% or whatever it is for nuclear power needs. If you could have gotten that, right? And that was on the table. And instead, we've chosen multiple war, or whatever, where in the situation we're in. Wouldn't you acknowledge that it would be highly preferable to be in a deal like that? You take off your big concern off the table. Yes, I can't prove against the counterfactual that they will ever in the future try to break out. But you brought down what you claim the immediate threat is. And I don't know, you didn't have to kill little girls for it. So there's death on both sides of the equation here. My answer to you is that it's a difficult call. And it's a difficult call because allowing Iran to get into that deal. And let's assume in the hypothetical, like they comply with the deal. They comply with the inspections as they mostly did during the Obama deal. And it frees up billions and billions and billions of dollars, which they then pour into their terror proxies. It's right after that deal that Hezbollah balloons its amount of missiles stored in homes and villages and pointed at Israel. You would have to weigh the threat of Iran's nuclear weapon against the threat of giving it a ton of money to pour into its terror proxies all over the Middle East and destabilize other countries and pursue its regional ambitions. And it's not obvious to me what the right choice is there because they're both destabilizing. And neither one of them is really like pro stability and peace fully. They both have a cost. I don't mean that it was not-- You follow me, right? I follow your point. But you don't think looking at this war right now We'll see you in the next video. lived through the JCPOA with Obama. However, you felt about it. According to all reports, they were complying until Donald Trump got out of it. You don't think like that situation in Iran was enormously preferable to this situation in Iran. It's kind of like wait and see because there might be weapons pointed at Israel from Southern Lebanon. That's, well, this, okay, but the wrinkle in this is that this goes back to North Korea, the North Korean example. The reason that Bush couldn't do shit or, you know, kind of wisely, I guess, chose not to do shit about North Korea developing a bomb is that they had so many missiles pointed at Seoul that they could have rained. They could have killed tens of thousands of people in Seoul in a day. Right. So the missiles create a shield by which you can develop nuclear weapons. That's right. So if Iran is allowed just tons of free cash to develop those kinds of shields, it's not an obvious choice to me, which one is preferable because you might just be, you might just be playing into a long term plan that's going to end like North Korea. And at any given moment in the plan, a deal seems preferable because there's no war right now. And then bam, before you know, it's too late, the frog boiling in water, the North Korean example, it's not hypothetical like it had even in the North Korean example, they develop the nukes, but it's not like, I don't know, it's not a war broke out or something like that. I mean, they're continuing to oppress their own people as they were before they had nuclear weapons. But like, I don't know if there's, it seems to me like a pretty overwhelming onus when you have a disaster like a war where literally already thousands of people, you know, school kids are dying, Americans are dying hundreds of billions of dollars of the global economy, just being disrupted to just say, oh, we could get back in a deal like we had before. But that might lead to these other negative problems. I don't know. It just seems to me like the overwhelming onus. If you want to take this type of intervention is on you to demonstrate it with something more than that. I'm also, it's just, that sounds like more of Israel's problem than our problem to be completely honest. Sure. I think that's, I think these decisions are complicated because the, you, the consequences of inaction don't show up and they don't show up for years, in years, in years. And then they show up all at once. And then you say, well, shit, why didn't we do something 20 years ago when the problem was much less threatening? I mean, that's the, the, the strange and sad irony about foreign policy is that if you deal with a problem when it's not a threat, everyone says, well, what the, what the hell are you doing over reacting to this tiny threat is what, but if you wait for it to become a huge threat, then suddenly the cost of action is so high that anti war folks are going to have a point with the, with the consequences of your choice to act, right? It's going to be a huge war. And the enemy is now so strong that they can impose huge humanitarian costs on various countries if you try to. So this is, I would caution against, like, it seems like in your mind, this is like an easy decision. And in my mind, it's not an easy decision. I agree with that analysis. Yeah. I think it's an easy decision. But the dumbest, dumbest foreign policy decision in American history, but do you follow my point about the consequences of inaction? I follow. I just, I, listen, I follow it once and I get it. It's, again, it's painting a hypothetical. I think that there's, if it makes sense, there's much more of a danger in my mind in using this vague hypothetical of like, yeah, but in other words, it's very neo-conservative logic. I mean, I don't mean that just as an insult. I mean, like, literally, this is what they wrote in the project for a new American century. Was that what you got to do? You know, the famous line is put a small country up against the wall and beat the crap out of them every few years just to let everybody else know we mean business. Like they would openly say we got to fight a war against the country. We know poses no threat to us with a wink and a nod. Yeah, I have not. No, no, I'm not saying you say that, but with a wink and a nod, because they'll always say that the country poses a threat to us when it's time to fight the war because in theory, they could get much bigger and then they could, like, I follow the point. I think it's a recipe for, um, permanent war to, to think that, well, it, because anytime anyone paints a picture of how threatening this next country is, then we have a recipe to start a war and then also what ends up happening is it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy as every, as all the war hawks start threatening this country more and more, they become more and more belligerent and then that's more and more proof that look, we do need to go take these guys out. So no, I think it's a much more, um, I think there's a reason why after like all of these wars are going desasterously so much more often than they're not. Um, and I think that to launch another regime change war in the Middle East after seven in a war have been catastrophes and to pretend that you couldn't see the consequence of this. When everybody, Coleman, you've been in the world talking about these issues for so low, you didn't see the consequence. Everyone's been talking about the consequences of this war for, for 25 years. Everybody knew that this was a possibility that could happen. Yeah, he launched the dumbest war and he lied. He lied for 25 years. Huh? The consequences of which were Iran? Iran. Okay. Okay. Okay. I'm saying that for 25 years. I'm saying that, uh, uh, I'm referencing the fact that immediately after 9/11 Iran was put on the the axis of evil and that the conversation about this war has been happening this whole time. So honestly, I don't, man, I really, really don't want this to come off the wrong way. Um, because I really do, I like you and respect you. Uh, honestly, I think that I do follow what you're saying. I think you're unbelievably good at making these arguments. It does almost seem to me like it's like you're working from your conclusion to defend this like some hat like that's the best argument we can come up with. But the reality of the situation here is that, why do you say that? Because look, I just mean this, right? And I don't mean in a sense, I'm not saying that you're being bad faith. I'm saying that we've launched, this is the seventh of like six regime change operations in the region. Every last one of them has been a catastrophe. Hundreds of thousands of people dead, trillions of dollars wasted against the will of the entire American public or most of the American public, he just launched this war. It's also turned into another disaster and he's lying us into it. You, you're not even disagreeing with me with all of this, but yet you won't just connect it to the obvious conclusion here, which is that, yeah, this is kind of an easy decision. We should not have done this. Obviously, we've, we've put ourselves in a terrible position. And even by your own stated intentions here, Iran is more likely to break out for a nuclear with a more radical government. And they're being transformed into, I think, a legitimate global power with their control history. I think part of the disconnect between you and me is that I think more about the good results, which have come, which have been secured through military force in the past in certain cases, and also the results of inaction. And I think people in the anti war camp don't think enough about that because there's a scene and unseen phenomenon where what you see, you see, yeah, well, you see the costs of, we all see the cost of war as we should. And we see it more and more in the age of first television with Vietnam and now social media. But we don't really see or grok the consequences of inaction, right? So first of all, if you want to talk about the great moral victories of humanity that have been achieved through war, many are wars of choice, by the way, the existence of America secured through the American Revolution, very bloody war, the end of the enslavement of, you know, sailors by the Barbary pirates, war of choice, end of slavery in the confederacy secured through a war. You know, the existence of the country of South Korea secured through a war of choice, the end of civil war and Liberia secured through a war of choice. And so there, the reason I can't just be anti war like, okay, I see a war, I'm immediately against it is because I understand that great, oh, I didn't even mention the end of Nazism and Imperial Japanese rule over Asia, right? Did you not? I guess I just, I guess I just counted that. I don't listen before you mentioned that, okay, rather big data point. So, but the great moral victories, which have had enormously good consequences for the human race, have been secured through the willingness to use military force in the right situations. And the key is discernment. I wish our leaders were much more discerning. And this is where I agree with you. Our leaders have been, has shown consistent poor, very far from perfect discernment in terms of which wars are worth fighting and which wars are not, which wars are winnable and which wars are not. But the anti war position implies that really the smartest thing for a person to do is to just, if you see a war, you're just against it. I think that's the wrong, that's the wrong orientation as far as I'm concerned towards the use of force. And that's a big part of the disagreement. Sure, okay. I think that is a big part of the disagreement. I don't think, I think it's a misrepresentation to say certainly that my position, maybe it is the position of some, but certainly not my position is that if you see a war, you're against it. And in fact, like the example you gave of the American Revolution, I think is a pretty easy war to support. And not necessarily supporting the decision of, I mean, who knows? I don't know, there's a lot of people were against it. Sure, sure, their arguments weren't crazy. That is very Trump. A lot of people say it's not good. Let's just pay it a little bit more taxes. Well, look, I mean, look, no, I'm I'm not even saying there's a debate, there's always a debate to whether you should just pay a little bit more taxes or fight a war to not pay those taxes. And I mean, really, I think the only moral conclusion from that is that it ought to be the decision of those people who are really at risk their lives, whether they want to fight for that or not, much like in the same case of any invading army. It's like, yeah, you could seed your country, but I think when you have an invading army and you're repelling an invading army, it's a much more clean, cut moral dynamic than obviously when you're, you know, attacking a country. All right, guys, let's take a moment and thank our sponsor for today's show, brand new sponsor who were thrilled to have on board, which is ghost bed, ghost bed is engineered to help reduce the reason sleep gets interrupted. It's designed to relieve pressure, help regulate temperature and support your body. It has cooling technology. Get this built into every mattress and it's made in the USA, which doesn't that make us all feel better. He just sent me a ghost bed mattress and I put it in my guest room of my house. It is a delight. Let me tell you, I'm trying to start fights with my wife so I can get kicked into the guest room to sleep on this then. She's not taking the bait so far. She's really difficult to start it, but anyway, the ghost bed is great. That's the point. Ghostbed.com/Problem and they are offering our audience an extra 10% off. This is their lowest price of the season with ghost beds, 101 night sleep trial. You can try it at home because the real test of a mattress is how you feel in the morning. So, if you are out there, if you're waking up sore or tired or just feeling like you're not getting the most out of your mattress, check out ghost bed. They are offering you an extra 10% off when you go to ghostbed.com/Problem and use the promo code problem, ghostbed.com/Problem, promo code problem for 10% off. All right. Let's go back into the show. Okay. Let's talk a little bit about Israel because I'm a loose track of time when we're in these things, but we've got an hour. We haven't talked that much about Israel and that is almost an hour and that would be against the laws of podcasting. That's right. If we didn't talk about that, so let me ask you, when it comes to the Israeli involvement in all of this, look, man, obviously this is like one of the major topics of politics over the last three plus years, the kind of, you know, I don't even know exactly how to describe it. You know, there are probably a lot of different terms that would be, like people will say, I think a lot of people in your circles talk about the rise of anti-Semitism, a lot of people in my circle will probably talk about the collapsing support of the state of Israel. But there's no question that this, the political awareness of this topic has exploded over the last few years. That's come with a lot of negatives. I think a lot of positives too. But it seems like you have a real, like you have a real gripe with the narrative that like Israel is dragging America into war that these are wars on behalf of Israel. This is something that you've kind of, you know, been pushing back a lot when your debates with me with Glenn Greenwald and other shows that you've done. So with the war here, I'm kind of wondering exactly what your position is because this one is a little bit unique, like particularly the 12-day-and-this-current war that we're in that this isn't really like, you know, we can go back through Iraq and do all that in a little bit. But like this isn't like, oh, the neo-conservatives formed, you know, kind of like took over these apparatuses and had these think tanks and formed this consensus over this information. And this is a war we're launching with Israel. This is a war that Benjamin Netanyahu and Donald Trump are launching together, according to the New York Times, Benjamin Netanyahu is really the one who kind of pushed him over the edge toward it. Of course, there's those statements of Marco Rubio we can get into all of that about because I don't actually think that's right. And I think some on my side are jumping on that in the wrong way. But I guess I'm kind of asking what is your thought here because it's like that is really influence and involvement here is undeniable. So like, what is your position on that angle? If I gave you the movie of how I think it went down broadly, it starts with Donald Trump hating Iran for many, many decades being old enough to remember the hostage crisis for starters. It continues with Donald Trump's probably strong and potentially accurate belief that the Iranians tried to kill him as if we believe the New York grand jury, which found that Asif Merchant was an Iranian agent, but to be clear, you're not talking about Butler, though, just to be clear, because everyone thinks you're talking about Butler, it's not Butler. Yeah. I just want to make that clear because it's one of these things when everyone anyone talks about it. I don't want to be misunderstood. Yeah. Okay. But by the way, I'm sorry. I don't know. Please don't lose your train of thought there. I apologize for interrupting. It's not clear. I think I should make that Trump is aware of that distinction. I've heard Trump say a few things where it seems like he might actually have been convinced that it was the Butler one, but anyway, I'm not sure if that's true, but I think it was worth pointing out. Please. So the movie, it starts with him hating Iran for all the reasons you would expect an American from, you know, 70s and 80s formative years. For the same reason, he still still thinks like cats is like a, still talks about cats, the musical. Like that's where he is. That's his era. He thinks they tried to kill him. He may be right about that. He is famously vindictive. And then Netanyahu, everyone from Netanyahu to, to MBS is who, it's in their interests obviously to have an Iran war. They say, you know, we encourage you where we're, we have your back. We think now is a good time. Trump decides for his own reasons, okay, giving everything I'm seeing. This seems like a great chance to strike down a regime which I hate for both personal and I guess his own political, not in the bad sense of the word, reasons, right, that this, the existence of this, this regime is not in the American interest. We, you know, you can go through the list of how many times they've plotted terror attacks in America and Europe and all over the world. So let's get rid of these guys. That's the basic picture that I think happened. Now if you zoom in on, you do what the anti-Israel people do and just don't play the whole movie but play the part where Trump's talking to Netanyahu. And like you also don't play the part where he had the same conversation with MBS and half the other, you know, Sunni monarchs that hate Iran and view Iran as an existential threat to them. We say, oh, Netanyahu manipulated him into it. No, I'm sorry. This is nonsense, unless I see actual direct evidence of Trump being blackmailed, I will continue to model Donald Trump the way I have been modeling him since he came on the political scene in 2015, which is this motherfucker is so shameless. You couldn't even blackmail him if you wanted to. First of all, because he would just say, yeah, release the tape of me peeing on the blah, blah, blah. I'm the greatest pedophile. That's everything. Yeah. I can shoot someone on a fifth avenue and you motherfuckers would still vote for me. He can't be, he can't be, he can't be blackmailed. He's famous. He has the highest problem. I'm going to say this if it's wrong, somebody just, I assume he has the highest churn rate in the history of any white house because he fires everyone who says something. He doesn't want to hear. He must. I don't know. I've seen that stat up. But he must have. In other words, if he were annoyed by some quote unquote Israel lobby person talking his ear off about how he had to go to war in Iran and he didn't like it, he would say, get the fuck out of my office. This is annoying to me, right? So my conclusion from the evidence is that Trump thought the Iran war, the regime change war was a good idea. He thought the moment was right. He thought he had strong allies at his back that were not only aligned with the overall goal, but also at this moment, right, with this being the correct moment. And so he pulled the trigger with Israel, with Israel as an ally. But there's no, there's, you notice there's no like manipulation in my story. There's no, there's no this. There's no puppet tearing. There's no. Whatever. It's you. And I totally get why Americans are like, fuck Trump. This motherfucker chose to increase my gas prices for a year for a war with an, with that's unlikely to succeed. I'll say lower than 50% chance of succeeding. 25% chance of succeeding. Totally makes sense to me while you say, you know what? I'm voting for the other party, I'm voting for the party that's going to bring down my gas prices. I never have, I never have an issue with a person that had that view. But then to say, okay, to go the further step and say, ah Netanyahu manipulated him into it. I mean, I just don't see this as a fair reading of the evidence at all. And it's such a classic, reflexive knee jerk thing to do with Israel. I don't know why people do it. And it makes, it frankly makes people who do that just look like they have a kind of delusional like out to get Israel, Israeli puppeteering the world kind of a view. Hmm. Okay. Man, there's a lot there. And I find that really interesting. You know, I got to say, I don't know that we're that far apart on the substance of this. By the way, as you say that, I also just can't completely outside the realm of how either of us feel about this, just purely putting our political analysts hats on. I can't believe that this is actually Donald Trump's fourth quarter pitch going into the midterms. Like I'm not exaggerating. His pitch is what you just said. Yeah, I made this decision that made your bills more expensive, but they're going to come way down soon. And you're just like, however you feel about the war, just being looking at politics, you go, man, that is death. That is a terrible sales pitch, you know, but all Also, as weird a guy as he is, it's so antithetical to the whole spirit of the Maga pitch. That was, at the very beginning, that was like, it's not about the world, it's about you, and no one cares about you. Hey, Rust Belt, you've been suffering, and these globalists only care about like whatever. But anyway, back to the substance or what you just said. 'Cause it's very interesting. I do kind of agree with you that I think, I think, essentially really to me and my reading of this here, I think it's to say like, you know, Donald that Netanyahu manipulated Donald Trump or tricked Donald Trump or something like that. I mean, I think according to the reporting, it does seem like Netanyahu was instrumental in like being one of the people in Donald Trump's ears, one of the major ones who was like kind of going, this'll work. You know, if we do this, this'll work. We could do Venezuela all over again. You're gonna get a big success out of this. Donald Trump, they won't have time. Look, I got my intelligence guy here who also thinks the same thing. Now, Coleman, this is a bit of speculation, if I want to be completely fair here, but this is a bit of speculation on my part. It's very hard for me to believe that Netanyahu and the head of Mossad actually thought there was a very high likelihood that they would be able to decapitate this regime. It is possible I'm wrong about that and that it was like kind of wishful thinking on their part or bad intelligence. My intelligence classic, I think. There no more common mistake than for military intelligence to be too optimistic. It is certainly, like I was saying, I'm saying it's possible and it certainly is not against the laws of logic. And if you wanna ask me of the years of reading about war hawks, is hubris a possible explanation for this? More than possible, it's almost, it's almost default. I don't know if I, in this particular situation, I have a very tough time imagining that the people who specialize in this could not have foreseen at least the likelihood of this incredibly predictable result coming out of it. So I guess there is, I do think it's-- Why is this the one war that couldn't be explained by hubris? No, I'm not saying this is the one war that couldn't be explained by hubris. What I'm saying is that after us living through the regime changes in Iraq, in Libya, in Afghanistan, in Yemen, in Somalia, in knowing the dynamics with Iran, you would have, for anybody to not know that going into this war, there is a high likelihood that you will not get a regime change without a ground for something that has probably never been achieved before military history. There is a high likelihood that they will be able to, if not, the popular term has closed the strait of Hormuz. But what's actually going on is they can touch the strait of Hormuz, which then makes it very difficult to ensure cargo ships going through and very difficult to get civilians to go through, and that they could touch our bases, which we have all throughout the region, like all of these things were so incredibly predictable. This is, again, it is true that I think a lot of Nehokans really believed Iraq would be a cakewalk, and it wasn't. It turned into an eight-year brutal civil war where over a million people died. But I really have a tough time believing that the Israelis couldn't see this coming. Why? All that, because it's so predictable by every single person who's talked about this for the last 25 years. Literally, maybe I'd slam in these circles for a little bit too long, but everyone who's opposed this war. You're thinking like Dave Smith. I mean, you're just thinking like Dave Smith, the anti-war libertarian, who is always super in touch with and assuming that military adventures are gonna be a failure. The way that security establishments tend to think is generally to overestimate their own abilities. That's why-- I'm not disagreeing with that generally. I'm talking about that very specific-- Because I'm talking about events who think that way. Because, I mean, after living-- Or at least the security. I mean, I guess just after living through all of these obvious examples, to not at least have indexed a proportional chance that it could go the way that-- Again, just to be-- Hold on, let me just make this point. I'm not just saying like, hey, this is what Dave Smith-- this is what I read in Ron Paul or Murray Rothbard's book or this is what Scott Horton believes. I'm talking about this is what the Pentagon warned George W. Bush about. This is what, as I mentioned earlier, the Wall Street Journal I reported just a couple days before this war, that top military Pentagon officials were warning Trump about. This is not-- like I'm saying, I find it hard to believe, as, of course, we've had confirmed from Joe Kent. That, obviously, there were people who were like saying, like, yo, this is a real threat to do this. But regardless, to your point, I know I'm always trying, almost to agree with you more than disagree with you on this specific point. But please continue. We're disagreeing about degree, though. Because to me, it's never surprising when you have military guys that overestimate the ability of their own army. It's almost a systematic bias that security states tend to have. The fact that you say there are so many obvious examples, well, what does that imply? To me, that implies that the first half of the obvious examples weren't enough to warn them from the second half of the obvious examples. So why would this be the time that suddenly they all wise up and were super conservative and risk averse? And this is not the nature of security establishments that there's always a contingent that is generally overestimating their abilities. And there's usually another contingent that's like warning, right? And the truth is none of them know. They're all making various levels of educated guesses and there's inherent uncertainty. So when you see a leak in the Wall Street Journal saying, there is this Pentagon guy that was warning again. Well, there's always someone warning against it. Sure. But if the warning is, yeah, but we give people who get the warnings correct and who are basing their opinions on reality, anyone who has a high batting average across the board should be respected more. Sure. OK. These predictions are inherently difficult. Who predicted-- did anyone predict that weakening Hezbollah would topple the Assad regime? I certainly didn't. Did you predict that? No. Yeah. So it was like, these things are unpredictable. Sometimes they go one way. Sometimes they go totally-- OK, again, I don't disagree with that statement, but I just don't think that contradicts what I was saying. But let's drill down a little bit more here. So like, but still, on your point, I don't think that if you want to frame it as like Donald Trump was tricked or manipulated, I mean, in a sense, these are things that we're almost psychoanalyzing people when we do this. We're guessing to like what-- you know, like, obviously, if you have somebody, whatever, if you're lobbying me to have a certain guest on my show, Dave, you should really have this guy on. And I end up having him on my show. We could sit here kind of debating forever, like, did you persuade me? Or like, did I-- Persuasion and tricking are two different things. Everyone knows what they are. OK, fair enough, fair enough. But I'm saying, even without the variable of the distinction between persuasion and trick, even between trick implying something dishonest, where persuasion just being like, you made a case why I should have this guy on, and I agreed with you. How much of that was me deciding that I agreed with the case you were making? How much of that was your persuasion over me is a difficult thing to quantify in any scenario. I give-- I just say, I guess Donald Trump gets no excuse. He should know all of this stuff. He's more than well aware of who the Israelis are and what their intentions are here. Like, I just don't think-- I think there's something that serves to excuse what Donald Trump's done away by framing it as-- he was purely manipulated into this where I think-- That's what I was saying. I think we probably agree on that. What I do think there is evidence of-- and this is what Joe Kent specifically alleged. And this is really the only thing that Joe Kent alleged that like he knows from his work, at least that I found to be a bombshell, is that it was Netanyahu, who persuaded-- I wouldn't say tricked, debatable. How do you want to look at it? Persuaded Donald Trump to adopt the Zero Enrichment. Is it debatable based on the evidence? Is there evidence of a trick? There is evidence. Is that just an assumption? No, the evidence-- I'm trying to say this in the most careful way. I think it is reasonable, given the evidence that we have to speculate about what that might have been. We don't know, for sure, either way. I think it's reasonable to point out that it was very easy-- look, like in the same way I was saying, it was very easy to know how this war would go. It was very easy to know that the Iranians would not agree to zero percent enrichment at a complete abolishing of all of their civilian nuclear program. Did Israel stick that in there? So it's the poison pill so that we end up blowing up negotiations? I think they wanted negotiations blowing up. I think the problem with the stories is they only work if everyone else involved is like a low IQ idiot. No, I don't think that's true. And I think you're speculating just as much when you presume that the intentions of all of these people are noble. No, no, I'm speculating based on the evidence that exists. There's no-- until there's evidence of a trick, in other words, until there's someone said, you know, I was in the room. And I saw Netanyahu. I heard Netanyahu confer with the head of IDF intelligence. And they said, you know, this Iran war is probably-- the regime change is not going to work. But we're going to tell Donald Trump it's going to work. And we know it's basically impossible. But we're going to tell him, we're going to beef him up, and we're going to pump him up, because we think the result will be in our interests. That would be evidence, like leaks. People leak things all the time, right? Do we have a leak like that? I mean, so it's not equally speculative. Mine is based on the evidence that actually exists. Yeah, but I'm not-- This is based on an assumption that there could be a trick somewhere. No, no, no, no. It's not based on an assumption. I'm literally saying that I find it very hard to believe that the Israelis would have been convinced with high likelihood that this plan-- this very unlikely plan will work. Now, you could say that is speculation. But if you're saying, no, I believe they were convinced it would work, you're also speculating on what their motivations were. All we know is that they told Donald Trump. that it would work. That's all we know. Anyone speculating on their motivations is equally speculating. You or me. Oh, I see what you mean. So you should just think they could have been lying and we don't know that they were saying. Right. We don't know. And it does seem like it lines up with a lot of their interest. Let me ask you that because this is, I think, maybe gets more to the heart of the issue. And this was when I read the, um, you wrote an article after your, your conversation with Glenn Reenwald kind of reflecting on your conversations with me and, and him. I think that they're, okay, so at one point you kind of say, as you did, uh, just a few moments ago, you kind of go, well, look, why are people doing this? Like why are people speculating that Netanyahu tricked Donald Trump that the Israelis are pulling the string here or something like that? And when you're going, look, the evidence here really is that like, yeah, Benjamin Netanyahu is one of the players here. He's conducting this war with Trump, but there's also the Saudis, there's also the other Gulf states, there's also Donald Trump's feelings about this situation. And you're saying it's kind of unfair to frame it this way. And it's, it's, like, people are kind of kooky to be framing it as, as this. Yeah. But it just, okay. But it seems like there's a lot that's omitted there that I just, and, and particularly because you're you, you're kind of the, um, the, the rational atheists, like, let's lower the temperature here and like examine this guy. Look, when you see something like on the broader question of like the Israel lobby or Israeli influence over America, when you have, like if we didn't have this, and I set this as the standard, it would be kind of like the president of the United States of America openly says that his biggest donor, the Israeli woman, technically, I think Palestinian, she was born in 46, I believe before the state of Israel was created, but the woman born over there, he openly says that her, she said her number one issue is Israel, that that's all she cares about, that she comes to see him all the time over Israel and he pretty much gives her whatever he wants. Her late husband, who is also the biggest donor in Republican politics, has openly stated that his greatest regret in life was that he didn't wear the IDF uniform. He wore the American military uniform and his greatest accomplishment in life is that his son wears the IDF uniform. The president of the United States has openly saying this. Now, Coleman, I know we see, we sit on different sides of these camps and all the different things, but like brother, you got to admit, that's kind of a smoking gun, man, that like the. Smoking gun that Trump is making decisions that they want him to? No, a smoking gun that there is an intolerable situation going on here, where an influence from a far, dude, the fact that the biggest donor, so this guy, they're loyalty is a foreign nation. You don't see a problem with that? What you're saying right now is that Trump is making decisions on that basis. No, I'm not saying that. I'm not saying that. Donors can have whatever beliefs they want. I care if the president is being influenced and making his decisions for a foreign country. So you're so. Hold on, hold on. So when you go back to Trump, one, everyone goes, "Jesus Christ, this Trump guy, you can't stop talking about how much he loves Putin." And maybe we think Putin has something on him. And we spent years in this country trying to explain the genuinely, like sometimes hard to explain for an American, given that Russia is like our historical enemy, like the things that he would say, right? And now you have, you know, everyone whose pro-Ukraine is obviously like super upset at Trump over his break with Zelensky, the things he says about Zelensky. And for years we had this discourse about how Putin must be manipulating him. And I just thought this was totally ridiculous. Me too. And you thought this was ridiculous. And I know we see eye-to-eye on that. And so for me, I'm just applying the same, the same way I think, to Trump and Netanyahu. Obviously Netanyahu is not some master whisperer that's manipulating him. You can disagree with Trump's support of Israel. That's a problem with that disagreement. But the idea that he is somehow being manipulated by his donors after winning the second. He doesn't need his donor. He has lots of other donors too, you know, like so. It's the biggest one, though. Okay, but he has lots of donors. I've never seen anyone alleged that the other donors who have other interests are manipulating him. The Saudis can come out in a New York Times article where the headline is like, "Head of Saudi Arabia tells Trump to bomb Iran." And everyone just snooze, nothing to see there. But oh, maybe Netanyahu is in his ear. It's like, it's literally a headline in the Saudis. And nobody thinks the Saudis are to blame, right? Nobody thinks the Saudis are manipulating him. It's only Israel. So for me, what's really weird is that like, why does someone like you, who can so clearly see through this type of BS argument on every other front, suddenly give it like. You're like, by no means the most extreme version of this argument, but you give it more credence than you would in any other situation. Well, let me say this. I was. And people can go back and check my track record on this, though. All the podcasts are still up. I was, man, like, rushigate was my number one issue for years on this show. And I mean, it was just every day, like, that was what we did on the show, just tearing apart, though, because it was, dude, it was such an extraordinary claim being made by the entire halls of power against the sitting president of the United States. Like, it's like, if your claim is true, this is the biggest story in American history. Your claim is that a hostile foreign power overthrew our democracy and installed their agent, you know, like, this, and it was so clearly bullshit going, if man, if they had what they have on Israeli influence on America, that would have been quite a different story. If Donald Trump had been out there going, dude, my biggest donors donate to me just because they love Russia, and I give them everything they want. They come every day asking for it, and I move the Capitol for them, and I support them doing this. And I swear, that is a apples to oranges completely different story in the Capitol for them. He literally said that. Yes. He literally said that for who? I think it was for Sheldon that he said that he said that he kept demanding it every single day. I mean, dude, it is crazy. Look, I'll say this. Okay. Look, if you, if you go back and like the memoirs of Trump making that decision, he has all kinds of people in his ear, but this goes to my earlier point, telling, if you're a president and people say, hey, do this, you don't have to do it and Trump and Trump uniquely, almost uniquely, to a degree that like is exceptional, given his extremely strange personality, is the type where if he really doesn't want to do it, he tells people to fuck off and fires them. I guess. So it's always a little hard for the evidence of people who care about Israel, like Jewish Americans who care about Israel and our around Trump. The evidence of them wanting something and saying they wanted is not equal to evidence that Trump is being manipulated. Okay, but even leaving aside the, let's, you know, the distinction between whether there's pressure put on him or manipulation or something they just want and they'll just give him money for that. This is, I remember, honestly, and this is, this is almost why, man, when you say like, you can see through all this other stuff, why do you see it like this on this one, right? I remember I had this argument that you would totally be on my side of this argument. But I remember getting this argument with this feminist girl, it's like 15 years ago. I really liked her. She's a nice girl. Her politics were just awful. But we were getting this argument at a comedy club, not far from here, is this old club called Eastville, New York. It's right down the block there. And it's like the front of it is a full window. So we're just looking onto the, onto the street of the East Village on a summer night and we're at the bar having this argument. And she's trying to convince me that we live in a rape culture. And I'm literally just like pointing out the window while girls with their ass is hanging out or walking by us on the street. And I'm going like, you know, but that, you know, now, I don't know. Now, then I said, I remember her, I said, we live in a slut culture, you know, we're at a comedy club. It's being funny or whatever. And then we started out, and immediately when I said we live in a slut culture, she goes, how do you even prove that? What does it even mean to be in a slut culture? What's the, and I go, yeah, exactly. That's my point about all your thing. Like what does it mean? We live in a rape culture. So like, when you're having these conversations, Coleman, I don't know what to say. It's so overwhelming, man. This is why I don't like dismiss this, whereas I did dismiss, rush a gate almost every, and I don't honestly understand why an atheist like you can't see this. Almost everyone in power, dude, has like this religious type devotion to a foreign nation. It is weird, man. And I honestly almost just like when I'm pointing to the feminist, like look at the ass outside, how are you going to tell me we live in a rape culture when you can see that there? You're like, Coleman, you see so much of our political class kissing their wall and crying. You see people from the state department saying openly saying America is the greatest country in the world. Well, except Israel, of course, we love Israel. You have Haka B and Cruz talking about how God gave all of this land to Israel. And as I just mentioned, forget whether it had any influence on Trump at all for a second. Miriam Adelson is the number one donor to Republican politics. And he says his greatest regret in life is that he wore our countries uniform rather than another. Like you don't see something outrageous here, nothing at all of this is right. It's exactly what the Russian people said is that evidence is overwhelming. He met, he took a meeting with him and a, you know, they said, you're number one. Hold on, hold on. Hold on, hold on. Right. So at the end of the day, you have to look at the evidence on this issue. Now, in my view, I gave this example last time, there's tons of examples like this. One is that there are so many examples from the past 30 years where Israel wanted X and America was just like, no. And something that was like really in Israel's interests, for example, relatively easy for America to provide. And we just said. No. For example, not recognizing Israel sovereignty over the Golan Heights for decades and decades and decades. It would have taken any single president, one flick of a pen. The Israel lobby definitely wanted them to. And president after president after president after president just said, no, moving the embassy to Jerusalem. Every single president since Bill Clinton just said, no, every six months. No, every six months. Again, really symbolically important to the Israelis. America's American presidents have no problem resisting it. Until Trump decides he wants to do it. Right. And again, I maintain that that was his decision. He was he was not bought and paid for in any sense. Right. Like that, that's just not a good model of Trump's mind or personality. And so another example I gave on on our podcast last time is a story from Condoleezza Rice, where Bush is about to give a big speech in 2002. And he's about to like endorse theoretically the idea of a Palestinian state. And the Israelis are freaking out about this. They're like, hold on, hold on, hold on. And they call Condoleezza Rice and they say, okay, fine, fine, fine. If he's going to give the speech, if we can't, you know, if you're not going to, you know, kill the speech, just add one word to it. Instead of saying Palestine, saying new Palestine, that's all we're asking. And Condoleezza Rice goes, what are you talking about? No, I'm telling you, this speech is like fuck off. Like click. And he gives the speech the way it was written. It wasn't even thought in her mind to like bend to this supposedly massive pressure. And yet we're supposed to believe that the lobby that couldn't even change one word of a Bush speech that like basically no American would have noticed the difference. Somehow can get us into all of these wars and can manipulate the president on all sorts of other decisions. They asked Bush to bomb the Syrian nuclear reactor in 2007. And Dick Cheney even wanted to do it for his own reasons. And Bush was like, no. So if you include all the data points in 2007, you said no. Many, many such cases. But the point is, if you look at only the cases where US president has decided, okay, this thing that Israel wants, I think I also want. If you look only at those cases and exclude all the other data points, you're like, man, we're always just doing whatever Israel wants. But you're literally excluding all of the data points that would refute. In fact, I would argue you guys aren't you're supposed to falsify a thesis, right? Like in science, you're supposed to be like, okay, I think this thing might be true. Let me look for all the data that falsifies it. I would argue that none of the Israel lobby people have ever done that like a scientist. Look for the data that might falsify your thesis before you come to a conclusion, because there are some deep underlying assumptions there that are motivating this line of argument, not a unbiased look at the data. I think that you're, I think you might be guilty here of straw manning what the thesis is. And then thinking that you're disproving that. And I think you did this in your article about me in Glenn too, where you lay out the all powerful Israel lobby. But like that was never the claim to begin with the claim wasn't they always get their way. For example, right? If somebody were to say you were to broadly look at my life and say, my wife has a huge influence on me that would undeniably be a correct statement. She's more influence on me than any human. Well, whatever, but very quickly, very quickly. You just said the people who are in this country have a religious devotion to Israel. Hold on one second. Exactly. Let me just do one thing to, yes, let me, I'll explain that. I'm happy to explain that further. I mean, literally I'm talking about half of them who say God gave all of this land to Benjamin. But I'm not straw manning your heart then. I'm, what I'm referring to with that is that people go and cry at their wall. They say God gave them this land. They say those who bless Israel are blessed. This is a religious devotion to something that let me just get back to the point I'm making. If I were to say to you, my wife has enormous influence over me. And then you were to point out examples of where my wife asked me to do something and I didn't do it as simple as your wife asked you to send a letter one day. And you just didn't send that. They are for we can kind of conclude that she doesn't have this enormous influence over you. This is bad methodology Coleman. This is fallacious thinking. It does not prove the fact that you don't always get your way or that there might be one time when I didn't listen to my wife doesn't prove anything. And that's not a scientific examination of how much influence in organization or a broad loosely. Let me just let me just finish this point. I promise I'll give you all the time in the world to respond. The even the examples you chose. That's a really bad analogy, Dave. Well, hold on one second. Now you can make this point at the end, but I don't think it is a bad analogy. The fact that somebody somebody could have enormous influence over somebody else. And there still could be examples where that influence wasn't, I don't know, taken or used or wasn't effective. There, there is, excuse me, I'm sorry, I kind of broke up my train of thought here. Okay, they're the idea here. I'm sorry here. You can go ahead and come back to me. You can jump in. Sorry. If my fiance asked me, Hey, go get me a cup of water. Like literally today, my fiance is sick. She woke up with like a throat thing. She said, Hey, can you go downstairs, get me a cup of tea? Of course, baby. Yeah. You know why? Sam. Obviously, I would do that. Obviously, I would do that because it's something that is in her interest. It's like doesn't cost me very much. Has there ever been a small request that you've said no to from your wife, though? Could I find example? Could I find an example of something where like she was like, Hey, can I get a glass of water and for whatever reason, we're like making a joke about it. There's something. Why would I say I can't do it right now? Well, maybe there's a reason. I don't know. I would there be a reason I couldn't get her a glass of water if she's like running out the door. You have to go to work. I don't know. Something is coming up. There could be some other reason. You wouldn't conclude from one. By the way, let me just finish the example. The news were examples where the Israel lobby ultimately got their way. And it was acknowledged by the president. No, but now it was without the name asking for it for 30 years. And one president does it? You throw out the data of the 30 years of the lack of influence. But then ultimately choosing to do it is evidence of the influence. This is, heads I win, tails you lose. No, it's not. No, no, no, no, no, it's not. If an organization lobbies for something for decades and gets their way, then I don't know. You don't conclude from that that they have no influence. And I don't think you'd conclude from that that I don't know. It's proof of their not. It's like, yeah, for 30 years, they were working toward this and then they achieved it. I'm just pointing out that the examples you used were examples where they got the policy they wanted and the president who gave it to them credited. The Israel lobby for getting them. There were several examples you're ignoring. Well, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. I'm just pointing out that you happen to choose these even in your examples. The point I'm making is having some examples that go against this doesn't prove anything. We're saying this is a lobby that has a lot of influence. Nobody's saying they're, they're all controlling or they always get their way. Okay. So the problem with this thesis is that it treats any example of the United States and Israel, pursuing a common objective as evidence of the lobby, quote, getting its way, right? So is it possible in your worldview? Could you admit that it's possible that a United States president does something because he or she thinks it's in the United States interest and it also happens to be something that Israel wants. Sure. Okay. So then how do you, if that's possible, then not every data point of the lobby got this is evidence of the lobby's influence, right? That's absolutely true. I think the error that you're making here, right? Is that just because you can't quantify that doesn't mean we assume it's zero. I think this is the area. I don't know. Let me just, let me, let me, let me, all, all lobbies have some power. Yeah, but that's not, yeah, I think you're kind of missing my point. If this is kind of how we, what we were debating about Benjamin Netanyahu, testifying ahead of the authorization of military force, you know, if Coca-Cola, let's say, put a billboard in Times Square and they pay $10 million for a big billboard that says Coca-Cola on it. And then Coca-Cola is doing a ton of business. But look, it's hard for us to exactly quantify how much business that $10 million billboard produced for Coca-Cola. We do, we can in a messesion kind of sense, we can deduce from the action reasonably speaking from the performative action. We could deduce that Coca-Cola felt that this was going to be worth more than $10 million in revenue. Like that, that's their expectation going into it because logically we could say they wouldn't be, they're not in the business of charity. They wouldn't be paying this unless they thought this was worth some amount of value. It's going to be kind of impossible for us to quantify how many people bought a Coke off of that billboard and probably no one will tell you, I bought a Coca-Cola today because there's a big billboard up in Times Square. We do not conclude from that, that therefore that billboard was completely ineffective and had nothing to do with anyone buying a Coke. When you look around and you see that, the biggest donor only cares about Israel. So much of the political class is devoted to Israel that there's all this influence. And then you notice, Israel's the number one recipient of foreign aid. Israel has an unconditional relationship with America unlike other relationships. The more reasonable conclusion in this thing, I think I'm being perfectly scientific here. It's just we don't have a way to quantify this exactly. The more reasonable conclusion of the Coke billboard is that, yeah, it is probably driving some business. That's why they're doing this. The more reasonable conclusion, I'll finish written two seconds. The more reasonable conclusion of the Adelson's giving hundreds of millions of dollars to Trump. Netanyahu coming over here and meeting with him seven times to push him toward the decision of invading the more reasonable position, is that they're in this for a reason. They're not investing all their money in time and they certainly at least perceive it's going to move the needle. That's not me saying the Jews control all of society. These are different claims. I'm also not dismissing it as like, no, it's very, very weird. And I would argue intolerable that so many people in power are loyal to a foreign country. When you say they're loyal to a foreign country, I mean, they're not loyal to a foreign country. Like who? What do you call saying a man? Let me say this. So even John Meersheimer, the father of the Israel lobby, if you read his book, the father of the book, by the way, not the actual lobby for people not familiar. Obviously. To you, even, even he says, like until the 90s, he saw no, no contradiction between supporting Israel. There was no mystery to explain because Israel was perceived by the US security state as a Cold War ally. And so we spent a whole bunch of money helping them, you know, helping them build their military, selling them weapons. As we did very in line with Cold War farm bill. Yeah. So Meersheimer's whole question is like, okay, why have we still supported them after the Cold War? And then he has his own thesis, which relate, which is what you're saying. But I think another thing you have to a very plausible alternative to that is that all of Israel's enemies are loudly talking about how they want to wipe America off the map ultimately. And that sort of probably gets under the skin of the US security state. We say, well, there's one country over here that not only do they not have a problem with us, they, you know, they're a flawed, they're a flawed liberal democracy. Like America has been throughout pretty much its entire history and arguably still today. And then it's surrounded by jihadists who literally write in all of their manifestos. Once Israel gone, we're going for America. And the world needs to be ruled by this literalist reading of Islam that would make the American experiment vanish off the map. Now obviously that's not going to happen. But when all of Israel's enemies are loudly saying this, obviously that influences a certain sense in the US security establishment. Well, you know, this country seems to be more or less aligned with our interests. And so obviously it makes sense to do things that are aligned with that country as in conflict with its enemies. And you don't need a special mysterious explanation of a lobby to explain that. Obviously the lobby believes it's buying something when it pays for money. I think you also have to keep the actual power of lobbying in general relative to the rest of the democratic political process in proportion. Like the Israel lobby has spent far less money lobbying Congress, spent like a tiny fraction in the 2000s lobbying Congress compared to say the smoking lobby and the smoking lobby, which outspend the measuring, where do you get those numbers? Because I've heard you say it before open secrets dot org. But what are you measuring as the Israel lobby? And how do you measure this budget? Exactly. There's there's dollars spent lobbying Congress, but coming directly from APAC or from other organizations, not just APAC, APAC, J street, all them. Okay. And they have again, if you're measuring your mind, let me, sorry, sorry, sorry, go ahead. They spent like 100th of what the tobacco lobby spent in that decade, right? The decade with all the wars of Afghanistan or Iraq, all the wars that are supposedly influenced by the Israel lobby and even the tobacco lobby didn't get what they want. They didn't get, you know, that was the decade when like smoke like all of America became smoke free. Thank God. Now we're just fat. Yeah. And we do zins. Um, but the point I'm making simply is that you have to keep the power of lobbying in general and perspective. When people donate a bunch of money to a lobby, I think for them, it feels like donating to a charity of a cause they care about and they hope that it does influence the world. Obviously they do or else they wouldn't be spending that money. But that is not the same as claiming that the lobby has a huge effect on the whole political democratic political process itself. Alright, guys, let's take a moment and think our sponsor for today's show, which is cove pure great company with a great product. 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That's covepure.com/problem COVEPURRE.com/problem for $250 off, but only for a limited time. Well, I don't know. I mean, you're again, I think what we've come to is that it's impossible to exactly quantify how much influence these things have. Again, the reason I'm asking these numbers is because I really do think the devil's going to be in the details here of how exactly you're defining the Israel lobby and what you're talking about here. Because the way John Meersheimer and Stephen Walt are defining it, I mean, you're telling me you might look at how much they've lobbied Congress. I have a broader budget of all these. Well, okay, let me say definition is super over. I think this is important. I read their book and the way that they define the Israel lobby, I would be a part of the Israel lobby, but like why I'm not I'm not I'm literally an American. I'm actually like a heritage American. That's the free press thing probably is what would get you there. Why though? Well, do you not think Barry Weiss kind of is pretty pro Israel? I mean, yeah, but why does that make you a part of the lobby? Here's the thing. American citizens have their opinions on all sorts of things around the world. I have super strong opinions like you and I have this in common. Super strong anti-communist opinions. Oh, yeah. If God forbid, like war breaks out between South Korea and North Korea, I know what side I'm on like period. I have a I would have a really strong feeling in that case for one side of a conflict. I would not be part of the fricking South Korea lobby and fuck you if you said so. I'm an American citizen. I can have the right to my own opinions and I can feel strongly about foreign conflicts because of which side I think is better for the world. It doesn't make me part of the lobby. I could even join a magazine who shares that perspective and write about it. And again, fuck you if you tell me I'm a lobbyist unless I am taking money from someone. So it's a totally circular definition of the lobby that writes out of existence any American that felt strongly about the issue without being paid for. And it's really annoying to talk about the issue with all of this $7,000, $7,000. I'm sorry. I see I see a flawed secular, a flawed liberal democracy in the Middle East surrounded by jihadists of the same ideology that did 9/11. I know which side I'm on as an American. Okay, that's it. Okay, look at it. The ones who did not agree. Would you agree? It's an analytical problem with Mirchheimer that he defines. Let me let me I think what you're making is an American that feels strongly about the issue. Okay, so let me first of all, I really understand the point you're making. I think it's very reasonable and I want to I'm directly answer this. But by the way, we and you really should start the South Korea lobby. No one's in on that yet, dude, that's our next project. No one saw us becoming best friends and starting a lobby together. Okay, no one had that on their bingo card. Let me say this. I remember I mentioned this when I debated Alan Dershwitz, but I do think this story kind of this this illustrates it for me. It's direct answer. I promise to what you're saying. So there was this episode of Pierce Morgan and John Mirchheimer's on. This is one of the things. Say whatever you will about Pierce Morgan. It is man, it's such a product of capitalism. And I say that as with as the highest possible compliment. Yes, it is true. People say it's the Jerry spring or of whatever, but it really is giving people what they want. But here's the crazy thing is that then they'll be weird moments like in between all of the craziness, then all of the sudden, there's just like Benny Morris debating like sort of you're like, wait a minute, he just set up like a really kind of amazing. That one kind of flopped, but there have been some other ones that were really good. So anyway, so he has this one show. So it's it's John Mirchheimer and then Alan Dershwitz. But they're not on together. Pierce is interviewing Mirchheimer and then he's interviewing Dershwitz afterward. So before as Pierce often does, before he switches over to the interview with Dershwitz now, he asks Mirchheimer a question about Dershwitz. He goes, you know, it just came out that Epstein and Dershwitz, I think, had been emailing trying to like discredit the Israel lobby. So that was the topic, I guess they asked. And then you know, Mirchheimer just dismisses him in exactly the way you're saying. He goes, well, he's a part of the Israel lobby. So like, of course, that's going to be his opinion. And he's not going to like the book, the Israel lobby, blah, blah. So then Alan Dershwitz comes on and he goes, Hey, kind of what you said, right? Because excuse me, like, I'm an American. I'm not a lobbyist. I'm not working for any lobby. And it's totally unfair to just say, Oh, you're a member of the Israel lobby. Like, I'm an American citizen. I have the right to have whatever opinions I have about whatever issues. And I will say, as he said that, as you just said that, my initial reaction was, yeah, he's got a fair point. That is a really fair point, man. Because what the fuck? Like, I'm allowed to have the And no one does it on the other side. - No one says, "Zoran Mamdani, you're part of the Palestine lobby." And if they didn't-- - Everyone does it on the other side. - Everyone says he's the Palestine lobby. - They call him an Islamist who's pro-Hamas. - Okay, that's different. - It's still-- - No, that's a different accusation. - And I have a different problem with it. - Okay, but I gotta finish this story 'cause the big punchline's coming next. - Go ahead, go ahead. - And this is my defense of the why it is a useful term. Israel lobby. So the next episode of Pierce Morgan that Alan Dershowitz is on, and this is, people can check the timestamps, and I'm not exaggerating at all, man. Go roll the clip. It's like maybe a month, two months later. Alan Dershowitz comes on to announce that Alan Dershowitz is leaving the Democratic Party because they've gone anti-Israel. And even though he agrees with them on all the other issues, and he's still a Democrat, and if there was an option to be a domestic Democrat and a foreign policy Republican, he would, but there's no option, and his priority is Israel. And so he's gonna go down with the-- Now, I'm just saying, Coleman, it is you are making a reasonable point. You are making a point. Just 'cause you work at the free price. If someone switched parties 'cause of Palestine, would you say that that makes them part of a foreign lobby? No. But let me just, well, let me try to, maybe I can kind of explain it here. It's like, there is, and there isn't this with Palestine, which is why it's not in Apple's to Apple's comparison. As I was telling you, man, there is, it's not like, it's throughout the-- In a whole bunch of Michigan voters, literally like vote not present in a primary because of Palestine. Oh yeah, no, I'm not saying that an issue can't affect why someone has an opinion. But what you have here is a situation. It's also a little bit different when like, you know, I don't know, Palestinians are getting slaughtered and that's kind of the beef there. And I'm not saying Jews didn't, Israelis didn't get slaughtered on October 7th, but anyway, whatever, let me just finish the point here I'm making. When you have so many people within the powerful class who literally in their own words are like devoted to this foreign nation, this is different than a lobbying group that's lobbying for big steel or big pharma or the dentist lobby. And by the way, fuck all those guys too. But it is different when the issue is a foreign nation. And you have all of these people. When you have someone whose number one issue is a foreign nation, this does end up serving as kind of like a fifth column. If you've got a bunch of people here. If you Ukrainian Americans number one issue where you Korean, would you call them part of the Ukraine lobby? If they were just like, you know. - No, I probably wouldn't. - The Ukrainian butcher who makes his money, you know, in Ukraine village in New York. And he's like, you know what, Trump lost me. I was a Republican Trump lost me on Ukraine. I'm a Democrat now. Would you say he's part of the Ukrainian lobby? - I would not use the term, the Ukrainian lobby. I would say that if he has, because it's not a thing that there's a reason why it's a useful term with it. - The reason why it's a useful term. - Let me put this one. - Lobby means money paying for things in politics. It's meaningless outside of that. Because people have strong feelings about politics and they're allowed to. It could be religious, it could be foreign policy. It could be your philosophy, doesn't matter. You're allowed to have strong feelings. The importance of the word lobbying is that it signals the influence of money on our politics. Otherwise, the word lobby is meaningless. - Okay, I get your point. So then if you think Israel first or something like that is a better term, we need to have a term for people who, and by the way, to your point about it, - It is a better term. - Hold on, hold on. - It's a fair term. - Okay fine, fine. Fair enough. But then that's what, right, okay. Then I guess I wouldn't particularly argue with that. But I will say that if there is a Ukrainian whose loyalty or number one priority was Ukraine, I don't think they should be around influence or power. They have a right, I guess, supposed to vote the way that they want to vote. But like, no, I do think that is in the same way that Kennedy had to make his big speech about his loyalty not being to the Vatican and it being to the United States of America. I mean, Coleman, again, I know you never exactly address this, but - Okay, but loyalty. - But again, it's Sheldon Ailes, is this what? - Loyalty is smuggling something in here that doesn't need to be here in here. The word loyalty, I'm not sure exactly what you mean by it, but if a Ukrainian American, a second gen Ukrainian American citizen were to come to me and say, you know, honestly, my big issue in life is Ukraine. And this is the issue I switch party for. I'm a single issue voter as many people are. And this is my issue. I would say, okay, I would have questions. I would be like, you know, what I would ask them, like, okay, do you think American interests and Ukrainian interests are always aligned? Or do you think like, what's your overall philosophy? I'd have questions. I think it's an interesting perspective. But they would tell me a story of who they are and what their values are. And I would never in a million years think to accuse them of not being loyal to this country because they think in their political worldview, we ought to stand strongly for Ukraine against Russia. It's a total, it could, in certain cases, obviously, it comes from a religious belief. If you're an evangelical Christian as an American, you might be super strongly attached to Israel as a result of your religion. That doesn't make you a part of any lobby. That makes you a human being with a worldview that stems from whatever premises it stems from. - Right, okay, no, I see your point. When Sheldon Adelson says, as an old man reflecting on his life at this point, that his greatest regret in life was that he wore the US military uniform and not the IDF uniform. And his greatest joy in life is that his son doesn't wear the US military uniform, but he does wear the IDF uniform. - Can I define that as loyalty to a foreign country? Is that a reasonable description of that? - Loyalty to a foreign country would be like, he's like spying on us for them. - I mean, isn't that in effect what he's doing if that's his outlook on the world working for them? - This is really, I mean, it's weird. I don't like it. - All right, at least grant me that. I was thinking I'd get a little bit more on this of an olive bridge. Come and it's an intolerable, insane dynamic that of course everybody's gonna be against. - It would be disloyalty if America was at war with Israel. And he said, you know, I'd rather fight against that. - No, it would be treason. - Hold on, hold on, hold on. - If we were at war with the treason. - Yeah, the treason and loyalty are tightly attacking. - Yes, sure, sure, but it's literally the same concept. - Yes, yes, yes, but one is definition of loyalty. - Hold on, can I give you an example? - I'll give you an example. - Hold on, hold on, hold on, okay. - No, no, one is the legal version of loyalty. - There's lots of ways you can be disloyal. - If you treason is a specific way. - If you had a guy from Finland who said, I really wanna go like, I'm a dual citizen or whatever and join the Finnish army because they're threatened by Russia, I'd be like, okay, but he didn't wanna join the American army, I'd be like, okay. We're not at war with Finland. If you chose America over Finland, then I'd be like, get the fuck out of this country. What the fuck is wrong with you? - So I do feel like we're seeing the naked ass in the window and we're arguing over whether there's rape culture. The guy said he would rather wear a foreign uniform than this one. That is disloyalty to your country. It's not treason, but like, come on, man. I think we can be reasonable. And by the way, this is not my number one concern, but it is my number seven concern or whatever. I am a Jewish person who doesn't like the rise of people not liking Jews and I just don't even, even from like, and maybe this would. Maybe this would be something that known at the comedy seller podcast or you guys would agree like to there because there are some reasonable takes on this topic, but like even from your perspective, when you go, man, that's gonna lead to a lot of people like really being suspicious about this whole thing. I mean, I can understand where you don't like jumping on conspiracy theories. But like, you could also recognize like, man, that's gonna be fertile ground. - Yeah, that kind of a comment, of course. It's a totally fertile ground. But what I would say is like, I, the idea of fighting, like, going to fight a war in another country is not necessarily a bad thing. - Oh, I agree with that. Theoretically, yeah. - George Orwell left the UK to go fight the Spanish Civil War. - I would even, 'cause in his mind, the same enemies of the Spanish Civil War were gonna be the UK's enemies. And it's like, I don't have a problem with that. It's a very different-- - I have a problem if our, if our countries are beefing like militarily and you choose the other side, that's what you would mean by disloyalty. - I know, but the comment, and I promise you, let's be precise with these things. - I know, but we are being precise here. He didn't say, look, it is something, say there's some country being invaded and you went to go join the army to repel the invasion. You could certainly, that could be a very noble thing to go do. But it's a very different thing to make the statement, I'm gonna go join these people because I believe in this fight, or I even really care about these people, to go, like, it's a, my shame is that I wore the American militarily before. - Yeah, that's crazy. - And I really said, I'm taking your word. If he said shame, that's crazy. - Is it the first time you're saying that? - Natalie, could you just do me a favor just 'cause I don't want it. Can you just pull up Sheldon, Adelson, IDF uniform? 'Cause I don't want to actually misrepresent what he said here. But I do think, now obviously, I would ass say, and I'm sure this one, I don't think you're gonna give me any pushback on it all. It's my guess, but you tell me whether I'm right or not. You see someone like Mike Huckabee, who literally will say, and I could not believe, he actually said this out loud to Tucker Carlson, also kind of a shocking international incident because it has been, I believe even with Trump, but it's been the official US policy for both of our entire lifetimes, mine a little longer than yours. We're against the settlements on the West Bank. We're broadly in favor of a two-state solution. We're not like, we're not LaCoude party members officially in the US government. - And it shouldn't be. - Right, thank you, I agree. - Absolutely. - But Mike Huckabee just went out and just said like, no, no, no, this is a religious issue to him that he believes. First of all, I found it shocking because here, give us one second on that thing. Let me just wrap this up. I found it shocking because it seems to me on this side of the enlightenment and modern politics, even someone when people are clearly motivated by religion politically. A pro-life, let's say, is a good example of that, right? Like even a pro-life or typically, You would kind of be taking a back if you saw a podcast where there was a debate and the pro lifeer came on it and he went, God says so, that's taken a back. Well, I just mean you'd be surprised that someone, I know a lot of people like that. No, no, no, I'm sorry. Let me be clear about what I'm saying. You wouldn't be surprised for someone to have that view. You'd be surprised if that's what Stephen Crowder brought to a debate. Sure. You'd be like, Oh, shoot, dude. I thought you were going to argue because typically even someone like Stephen Crowder would argue we can detect a fetal heartbeat at six weeks. We can detect this. They'll make some type of secular scientific argument, even though they may be informed by a religious one because kind of the rules of a secular society are, well, I can't assume you have the same religious views as me. So if I make an argument that this is what God wants, you could just say, well, I don't believe in your God or whatever. But my point is, wouldn't you agree that anybody making decisions based on what they believe God gave someone should be nowhere near positions of power or public policy? Yeah. I mean, I, I'm an atheist like I would, I would, if someone's pitch was like, here's my policy platform and it comes from my holy book, whether that's the Bible or the crown, that person's not going to get my vote. Yeah. Absolutely not. And is, and I'm sure you would object to the, which is not like all of it. And again, maybe difficult to quantify the percentage, but like there, there is certainly a lot of religion tied up with support for Israel, as you alluded to earlier, you know, evangelical beliefs about end times, obviously Jewish beliefs about God giving all of Judea and Samaria to them. Because I'm sure we're in common ground, like rejecting that, that it's totally, it's totally ridiculous to claim some supernatural property right. 100%. Okay. There's no, I don't, I think there's probably no God. It might be nice if there were, but I don't think there is one. I don't think anyone knows about it. And also all of Israel's enemies are steeped in the language of God and, and 100% and their own version of it. And the part of the problem with all of the religious beliefs is that it's very difficult to negotiate with them because a secular belief could admit of trade-offs and okay, can I give you half of what you want and you give me half of what I want. But if it's religious, if it's a mandate, if it's a sacred mandate from God, then it can't be compromised upon. And so different, it becomes just difficult to live, to live with competing religions, you know, claiming the same thing. No, I agree. And I, to be clear, I do believe in God. I'm not an atheist, but I still, I think you can believe in God and still hold all of these points to be true, which like just a little bit of humility of going like, okay, but this is a realm that it involves faith. We don't know for sure and for certain. And, you know, to your point, it is, I don't know, man, when someone, and this is true on both sides of that conflict, obviously. But when someone does have the view that like, which I know I'm sure you saw, there was this video going super viral of this like pretty young Israeli girl talking about how all of them should be moved out of paradise and all this. Again, there's people who say these things on all sides of it. I never want to like go after, I always try to keep my criticism to like those in power or those who are corrupt, I'm not trying to go after just like regular people. But like you said, it is very difficult when people, if you really do have a view that like God gave us this land and all these people are just like, it's his will that we get them all out of the way. Then yeah, what are you going to be slowed down by little, you know, matters of like the particular, you can give me half of God's will. Right. I'll settle for half of God's will. Just so we don't have conflict or just so there's not more suffering. Yeah. And then I would also argue and I, I'd be curious to your kind of thoughts on this. But I think there's, you know, the line of like where religion begins and where it ends is a little bit murky, you know, it claims something like the Nazis were atheists but like, I don't know, dude, it's pretty religious to me. If you really look at it, you had your own God and your own blasphemy and your own everything. It's just kind of a state religion. Same with like kind of the woke kids, like it really is kind of a religion, you know what I mean, that you can't and there is a problem and I almost think this is from my perspective removed from whether or not you believe in God. It's just like when your arguments aren't derived at from any logical foundation, shit, how the fuck do you? When it's purely just like this is my religious view, it's much more challenging to argue people out of it. Religious beliefs, including those about the afterlife can be particularly problematic because if you really believe you're supposed to die for some reason, then it, again, it makes you really difficult to live in society with in a secular democracy. That's part of the problem with jihadists, you know? Yeah, yeah. No, all of a sudden I agree. Like, dogma is the problem and there's dogma, there's secular dogma, there's religious dogma and they're each dangerous like to different degrees based on what those actual dogmas are. Yeah. Well, I agree with that. I wonder because there's, you know, I don't know if we're going to have time to get to all the things I wanted to, man, because it is funny too with me and you like last time. It is like, I remember thinking we did 90 minutes. I know me too. I literally left that like going, which is a very interesting thing for another time. The way that doing kind of blocking, mechs, mechs with your perception of time is a very interesting thing. All right, guys, let's take a moment and think our sponsor for today's show, which is Quince. I love this company. Very happy that they're on board. I've bought a bunch of articles of clothing from them and I love all the stuff that I've gotten. I've got a bunch of my style. They've got great stuff, kind of casual, yet formal, the type of stuff that you could wear out to, you know, to on a date with the wife, but you could also wear to work. They have staples like 100% Mongolian cashmere sweaters and they're starting at just $60. 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Obviously, there's an election in Israel that just have them, which I don't know that we even have any results on exactly the results. Next week, I think it's going to be a good night for the Democrats. What's your feeling? Probably. I don't know anything more than the predictors and the polymarket does, you know? Do you think I wonder this from your perspective? Because like I said, we're both, there's something I've been thinking a lot about particularly and I don't know. I'm not as familiar with you on like COVID stuff, but I know where you are on the woke-ism stuff. And it seems to me there was a big, okay, so there was this kind of, you know, we're talking about woken sanity. I don't know how to describe it other than like a mass cultural psychosis, you know, where just really crazy ideas took over that are, you know, it spoke to so many different failures throughout academia and the fact that any of the stuff wasn't checked. You know, like that some college professor didn't just win a debate against a critical theorist and shut this shit down 30 years ago is crazy, but it's this big thing that kind of swept the culture. It's kind of now looking at it in hindsight. It's kind of amazing to even see where the culture was like in 2016, 2017. It does seem like there was, to some degree, it was culturally defeated or at least rolled back perhaps. It's the issues like trans and kids and stuff like this does not seem to be being pushed as much in the forefront. I think there was a real effort that I think the podcast to stand people are somewhat a part of who stood up against this crazy shit. Yeah. And now I do really see a really direct correlation to like Donald Trump launching this war, kind of ruining his moment over this and handing power back to the Democrats. Now, do you think because, and I want you, like I'm curious your thoughts on all of this, but particularly it seems to me that given your whole worldview, even our whole disagreements, you wouldn't necessarily have to disagree with me at all that like you're not really defending this second war after the 12 day war. It's clearly very unpopular and clearly hurting them in the midterms. Do you think the cost of this to some degree has been like we're going to give these Democrats power again and see what woke 2.0 is or any thoughts on any of that? Yes. I think very simply, if you make a choice that increases gas prices for months and months and months, that is probably the reason why you're going down in the polls. It's not that complicated. It's usually the pump and the pocketbook. That's what screwed over Biden. I think in a lot of ways, when the inflation starts, people start losing their minds. It's not, you talk about that a lot in your podcast, but it's not necessarily what the elites talk about all the time, but it is what the typical person cares about. If I thought regime change was likely to succeed, I'd have a very different attitude. I think it's unlikely to succeed. So again, likelihood of success is like that's a big thing for me. Sure. So in other words, if it was, sorry, correct me if I'm wrong, but to restate what you're saying. If we were going to, like if there was a reasonable chance that, what do you say? I don't know. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. Fancy fall. Sorry. My rodeos work. But if a better regime, if I'm going to say, I'm going to say, I'm going to say, I'm going something, you know, dramatically, a dramatic improvement where it comes to Iran that led more stability in the region, led to less tensions between Southern Lebanon and Israel. It's just like a better thing. It's not just for Israel's interest, but for America's interest. If the price of that, we're handing the country back over to woke Democrats, like I'm wondering, like even for you, that must be like a major calculation of like, geez, what are they going to do with that power? How good is this new regime going to be? Like I don't think it's something as well. You have a calculation in your mind, but man, that's a tough one. When you say handing the country back to woke Democrats, I feel like you're living a house and maybe the Senate. Maybe the top spin on that, yeah. Sure. Yeah. Some political power, a lot of power of the purse strings, and some power and impeachment power. Yeah. A lot of power back to them. Two years of Republican White House and then a Democratic Congress, which basically means not that much is going to happen by way of legislation, which from a libertarian perspective is not necessarily a bad thing. And the government just can't do much. It's hard when the government's this big. It's kind of hard, you know, but yeah, I get you going. But I think, obviously, if there were a chance of success, I think it could be so important for the Middle East for the world that it would probably be worth that price. I just don't think there's a high chance of success at this point. So then with the conclusion, be it wasn't worth it and that was, yeah, in retrospect. But like I said, my view on foreign policy is that like most things are not obvious. I think that's a different. Sure. Between us, you tend to have like a really clear like, this was obvious, this was not. And sometimes that's true. But a lot of times things aren't obvious. Like, like, you know, I took the example of the Assad regime falling, like very few people saw that coming. Oh, it's not always obvious what's going to come. I mean, that, that I think is for sure. But I wonder if you have, you know, because this is, I don't know, at least my perspective on this. And maybe this is somewhat biased by my perspective. But I wonder if you, if you agree with this at all. But look, man, I think obviously you think I'm getting a lot of things wrong that I don't, you know, and I think I'm getting them right. We have disagreements here. But overwhelmingly, it's like, look, man, like support for this is just really, really low. I mean, support for, for Israel has cratered support for Trump has cratered and support for this war in Iran has always been really low. And whereas it does seem amongst at least the majority, so many of these arguments were one, you know, like the argument against Wilkins County, the arguments against COVID tyranny, like these, these became popular issues. And I wonder if I'm sure I'd imagine from your position, you see people like mom Donnie and these guys and you're not a big fan of this direction that we're going in. And don't you think kind of like in this battle against those guys, this is kind of really hurt the side who's against them? Yeah, right now, right at this moment, it has, it has hurt, but sorry, I was going to, what was your question? Uh, do you think that the, you know, like the given that this war hasn't worked out and that it's a low likely heard that like in hindsight is what essentially what we've done is we've given the woke new life and we're going to see what that means. I wouldn't necessarily want to always be weighing foreign policy against moment-to-moment popularity, but yeah, in this moment, the, the trade was a bad one for Republican electoral prospects. And I didn't vote for Trump. Yeah. I sat out the last election because I felt both options were subpar. But look, I don't, I don't base my views on what's popular. I base my views on what I think is right. And, um, and I think you two, you do two because you're a Ron Paul supporter and he's never won a popularity context. And so, you know, the fact that Israel is unpopular, I can tell you a story about why and you can tell me a story about why and maybe we'll mostly agree, maybe not. But ultimately, I'm okay being in the minority in my opinion, whatever that is. I mean, the difference with wokeness is that it was never actually popular. One of the woke ideas were actually ever beyond maybe 15 or 20% popular, but the elites made it seem that way and were able to successfully intimidate and quiet through the threat of cancellation, the rest of the country. And so that, the back of that broke when people started just one by one from the inside out to, to quote a title of a book, I like, you know, people got the courage to speak out and then the whole back of the thing breaks, right? What has happened with Trump, I think is actually a sincere dip in popularity because the prices are high. I think, um, and he hasn't won the war, yeah. And it, and it's looking like less and less likely as with each passing day that he's going to be able to achieve this objective. And the thing about war is that if you pay all the costs up front, but all, all the wins, all the moral wins, the financial wins, if they're there, they all come only with 100% victory. So that's the situation. Yeah. No, I don't, I don't, I don't completely disagree with that analysis. Um, all right. Before we get out of here, um, I'll, there'll be a final question and then we can wrap this up. I'm curious. I like asking people who live in New York this. I lived in New York, uh, my entire life up until 2020, but I've been gone now for, you know, six years, um, what is your impression of how the city's changed since Mamdani's been here? And that could be culturally or policy wise, um, I, I lived in New York city since 2014. It's amazing to me that it's been 12 years, uh, when, when I got to the city, I, for me, I'm a two issue voter as a New York, as a New Yorker. My issues are cost of living and crime or, you know, the polite euphemism for it, which is public safety. Right. Those are the things that actually affect me as a New York. I honestly don't give a single fuck what the mayor of New York thinks about foreign policy one way or the other. I thought it was brilliant when Mamdani on the campaign trail was like all, all the other mayors were like, Oh, I'm going to visit Israel and he was like, dude, I'm going to visit Brooklyn. What an own goal. I mean, it was, it was brilliant and also the former went at him with that attack was just like, yeah. But then he made an idiot of himself by being like, I'm going to arrest Netanyahu as the mayor, like, the mayor, fuck, like, are you, sounds good when you say it. Sounds good when you say it, but obviously it was a lie that he didn't care about, but it was brilliant. And he should maybe genuinely go with that. They all, all local politicians should, in my view, but my issues are cost of living and public safety. And those issues were good in getting better between 2014 and like 2020, 2021, they got incredibly just much worse. I was, you know, I was like trying to buy a pepper spray and like all the shit, like I was scary. Yeah, yeah. No city really felt it was. It was zombie town. And I stayed in New York during all of COVID, the entire time. And with atoms, it began to get better. Like by 2023 and 24, it was better not only in terms of crime statistics, but also in terms of how the subway feels, right, right, and how, and my understanding now is it's continued to get a little better under Mamdani, like assaults are up, but like murders and all that stuff is down. My worry with Mamdani was because he was associated with defund the police, anti police policies and politics. And because he's, okay, a democratic socialist with probably Marxist sympathies to put it mildly. Yeah. That he would have a bias towards not letting capitalists build, not letting landlords profit and building a bunch of public housing and believing that the government can solve the affordability problem, doubling down on rent control and all the other policies that have proven disastrous and destructive in so many cities around the world. And I would talk to my friends about this and they would say, well, look, I'm 30 years old. I'm 30 years old. I can't afford a house. Like I have affordability problems. Why don't we try something new? Like Mamdani is preaching something new, and I wanted to grab them by the collar and say, socialism is not new. It's 170 years old, but almost it's been tried for, there's like data on socialist policies going back 100 years in European cities including right control. The only conclusion is that empiricism, I guess, doesn't matter because there's so much data. If there was ever an experiment, we would run, like you couldn't imagine, we have an East and West Germany, a North and South Korea, we have the like the best case studies. Yeah, yeah. And so that was my worry is that crime would go up, but he kept, he kept Tish as police commissioner. It seems like he moderated a lot. And so to be honest, I haven't seen any thing seriously worth worrying about yet. And I'm like a big fan of not being alarmist just because he doesn't have my politics, doesn't mean he can't be a good mayor. Yeah, yeah. No, I agree. I think that's a good attitude. And also sometimes how you can't really be a complete communist from the mayor's office anyway. Yeah, totally. I think he's compromised, which I like. There you go. Look, I'll just say this, dude, and I really mean this very sincerely, when you do things like this, particularly in the landscape that we're in right now, I haven't found this the other day when I did Constantin's show, me and him were texting the other day joking about this, but like, dude, man, it's like his audience hates me so much, man, and my audience hates him so much, just, you know, there's an end look, man, like, maybe there's some room for that. People are supposed to get angry sometimes and be mad at each other. Whenever you do something like this, we do it. You put it out there that everyone gets to have their opinion on it, you know, and whatever it is, people can have their opinion on what the first conversation we had was what this conversation was. I just want to say like from my perspective very sincerely, I just really enjoyed both of them. I really appreciate you for doing both of them. I think again, without being too self-congratulatory, I think there's value in us like kind of having this and continuing this and I hope we can do it again in the future. Right back at you, man. I don't expect to persuade your audience of my point of view, but I commend you for at least hearing me out with an open mind and your listeners for hearing me out with an open mind because it's a perspective. I think they only get the most extreme version of that perspective and that's what social media does. So to have a good faith debate and conversation, I think it is important. Maybe we're flattering ourselves, but it is important, I think. Yeah. I'd like to think so too. There's something about narrator. I guess it was. It was. It was important. The whole world's going to be going. Cheers. Thank you so much, brother. Thanks, everyone, for listening. Have a good one. Peace.